Call it Qi, call it Chi or call it Energy: whatever you want to call it, energy healing is a popular subject these days. Some swear by it, some debunk it and some hard sell it, but everyone seems to talk about it and many people dabble in it. A few even learn how to make it work.
My first introduction to energy healing that worked was in 2004, when I was in Bali. Every day when I walked from my guesthouse to the internet cafe, I passed a shop with a big sign outside that said, “Spiritual Healing.” There was an attention grabbing poster outside that showed the energy meridians as they’ve been mapped out in Traditional Chinese Medicine. As I hobbled past the shop each day, feeling depressed because my back was giving me trouble, my first thought was, “Bullshit.” It wasn’t that I didn’t believe it could work, it was because I firmly believed that any healer who hung out a shingle in a prominent location was a fake or incompetent. I still believe that – sort of.
Fortunately, one day I decided to set my prejudices aside and give the healer a try. The first three sessions could be explained away as having a basis in the physical sciences as we know them, but on the fourth session, I not only felt the healer draw negative energy out of my body, I saw it. That led me on a quest to find out how energy healing worked.
It’s a long story and one I want to tell at a later date, but after taking a series of classes, I learned how to do energy healing myself. For awhile, I was on a roll, but with all that’s transpired in the past 5 years, I seem to have lost my mojo. Why?
I think I’ve identified two reasons why energy healing might not work:
- Lack of focus: I came to this conclusion originally after learning a set of rituals or protocols that worked, but that I didn’t fully believe in. Healers in different cultures follow different sets of rituals, too, but come up with similar results. What the successful ones seem to have in common is focus when they’re working.
- Pride: That’s pride, not ego. “I want to save the world” is an egotistical statement, but that’s more or less what motivates healers to learn their craft. When you watch the video below, notice what happens when the second healer falls victim to pride and shows off his skills. They work, but they do harm instead of good.
I’m not going to argue my case for believing energy healing works. I’m convinced of it from personal experience. I know it doesn’t work, too and that’s what’s most interesting to me. I don’t buy the line that you have to be a “spiritual” person for it to work. I’m no more or less spiritual than a wart hog, but it worked for me. I believe it worked for me because, unlike most wart hogs, I’m able to focus my mind and energy occasionally on something besides food and sex.
I’d love to hear your take on energy healing. Just do me a favour: don’t tell me it can’t work. I won’t believe you, so you’ll be wasting your breath.
One of our greatest human conceits amongst countless others is the contention that “only humans are capable of feeling empathy or compassion.” Anybody who has a pet dog knows that is nonsense, but now even science is coming to the party. Recent studies have proven pretty decisively that mice may be better “Christians” than we are. In one study, an uncaged rat went out of its way to free a caged rat and had to spend a considerable amount of time and effort to figure out a way to open its cage. Not only that, but it chose to engage in this act of compassion despite the enticement of freely available chocolate, which apparently rats love. To make matters even more interesting, it released its captive before it ate the chocolate and freely shared it with the other rat after releasing it. (Sources: 
Some animals kill other animals, just like we do, but they don’t tend to torture them or slaughter them unnecessarily. They’re hungry, they kill and they eat. Foxes didn’t invent bizarre torture chambers like these cages for battery hens, for instance. Humans came up with that idea.
