Enter the World of Enegy Healing 

The very core of OnBelay is healing. Healing is a restoration of balance: mental, emotional, physical  and spiritual. The focus of the Onbelay website reflects areas in our lives that often become unbalanced, resulting in various problems such as alcohol or drug abuse, mental health challenges such as anxiety and depression, conflicts in relationships at work, at home, with our partners or children and in our personal lives and concerns with beliefs about our view of the world that are no longer working for us. 

Being raised in the West, our natural inclination, education, training and experience has been to rely on our cognitive abilities. Thinking that is logical, rational problem solving and goal setting have been at the center of our experience with the world around us and we are addicted to our beliefs. The logical, rational approach serves us well, up to a point.  My rational training often ran into conflict with a part of my mind that wasn't always rational, but was very creative and intuitive, often irrational.  Initially I thought I had to act in one way or the other and that my logical thoughts were preferred over thoughts that were considered by many to be off the wall. The part of my mind that focused on emotions, dreams, music, art and the concepts of God and the unconscious, the universe.  I often felt conflicted by two different “Minds”, each of which seemed determined to control me and required that I choose one way or the other. Which part was in charge? The logical/rational part or the emotional part? An Aha moment came when I realized that the best solution was to encourage the two parts to cooperate in exploring new ideas and new paths. Little did I realize what a challenge that would be.  I had fed the logical, rational brain but I knew something was missing and that led me to the intuitive brain.  That path of discovery eventually led me to Vibrational Energy.  Let me explain:

When exploring energy healing, It is essential that we set aside the ego’s need to be in control. even the need to understand,    Energy works best if we let our intuition and the Universe (spirituality/god and science in the form of energy) be the guide.  Saves a lot of wear and tear on the old brain cells.  And please set aside that part of you that wants to reject new ideas, that doesn’t want to change, your disbelief, as you search further. I fully undertand that there is a part of you that will want to deny, disagree, and outright refuse some of what follows. I often have to set aside my Western left brain thinking myself.  It's hard to give up or change old beliefs, and this stuff is definitely out there! I discovered that everything I wanted was on the other side of a door marked fear. Fear was on this side. Once I had found the door, asked for the door to be opened, and stepped through the door, fear was gone and new adventures, insights, realities became known. (Joseph Campbell called this the hero’s journey. We all are presented with the opportunity, but not all choose to take on the challenge).

Coming out of the Christian faith, words such as such as God, Soul, even Spirituality have been confusing. Personally, I prefer to use the word vibrational energy in place of spirituality.  While similar, spiritual has connotations to religion that, for many, limits the meaning and intent of the word.  Often spiritual has been defined as woo woo.  And woo woo has been defined as poppycock.  Poppycock has been defined as you're an idiot if you believe that nonsense.  That is a very old and out-of-date belief. Times have changed, information about our long accepted understanding of reality has changed drastically. Science and Spirituality have merged to open new worlds of possibility and given us an opportunity to redefine what is real from what is only opinion (belief) of what is true.  In a phrase, much of this new information just blows my mind! It is so out-there to be almost impossible to get my head around. A new Universe is made available if one is willing to seek/knock/ask.

 People who are engaged in exploring quantum physics (Einstein country) operate on a mental and conceptual level way beyond my capabilities to truly comprehend the extent, let alone the workings, of quantum mechanics.  Energy Healing has explored today’s theories and discovered  a very old science of healing medicine that is being re-discovered by the new science of quantum physics.  The problem of this new science as it was in the old science, is that many of  the discoveries are difficult to measure (prove scientifically) with the  instruments we have available today.  Just as there was a time when we thought the world was flat, that hell existed somewhere in the middle of the planet and heaven was a place the other side of clouds. When Science introduced the truth, because it could be measured, it replaced opinion and belief that were difficult or impossible to measure.  Today Newtonian physics are being replaced by Einstein’s theory of relativity. The ability to create telephones, X-ray machines, airplanes and most everything we consider obvious today became possible when the technology to create it was discovered.  Simply stated, the idea originated in the right hemisphere of the brain and the left hemisphere figured out how to get 'er done.  Around four, maybe five hundred years ago, western civilization decided that the left brain was better than the right because the left brain gave us things that were measurable while the right brain gave us everything that wasn't. How do you measure love, color, music?  You can know it, but can’t measure it.

Energy healing today is based on what is being learned from quantum physics.  It is no more woo woo than the idea that the world is round not flat.  Yet the majority of folks still hold on to old beliefs.  For good reason, they work most of the time, they're comfortable because the people around us hold onto the similar beliefs, and they help us determine who is a member of our tribe and who is not.

Full disclosure, or at least a good part of it: My continuing journey to being an Energy Healer began very early in my life - as your journey began at an early time in your life. It has only come from introspection and hindsight that I recognized that it has been a long journey. My awareness of a significant change in how I approached the helping profession came early in my career as a therapist with my clients who were survivors of combat trauma, alcohol/drug abuse, depression and anxiety. The accepted approach was to explore the problem of the client, gather information in detail, go into deeper and more personal detail and then develop a treatment plan. That is still the accepted practice. My problem was primarily focused on the requirement of having the person explore and re-explore their trauma by retelling the story. Two things were a concern. First, I felt that the process was re-traumatizing the person by exploring selective memories that, by the very nature of conscious memories are incomplete, distorted, arbitrary and often not very helpful in either understanding or healing. As I listened to a person’s story, I didn’t want to focus on the trauma/drama, the diagnosis, I wanted to focus, and help the person focus on learning from and healing from the past and building or creating a new present and future.There is a prayer called the Serenity Prayer that is very useful:

God grant me the serenity to accept the Things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can, and

Wisdom to know the difference.

So, we need wisdom, courage and discernment. That last part has been the kicker! Most of us seem to spend way too much time and energy on things we have no control over. And we’re often lack the courage to confront our problems enough to take action for fear of the repercussions.

I also have some core laws of the universe that I have borrowed and made my own. The longest of those is: People always do the best they can in every situation with the resources they have available. Looking at the serenity prayer I came to realize that the only part of the prayer that can be changed are the client’s resources that are available. I focus on what resources the client presents often without even realizing they have resources, or that they can be made available.

I was given the opportunity to listen to the founders of a communication theory that was, at least in part, representative of the work of Milton Erickson MD. Richard Bandler and John Grinder called their approach Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) . They had studied people who were considered to be excellent communicators because they were known to influence and effect change in their audience. John and Richard paid attention to very specific qualities the communicators presented. They listened to the language that was used by the communicators (sometimes, it is possible, I choose to) and how language impacted people’s definition of a reality that wasn’t actually true ( I never do anything right, I always fail). Reality was based on opinions that were formed, in part, by the language used to describe it. John and Richard also focused on very elegant body language especially how the face and the body reacted to different “States” (Such as anger, fear, joy, love etc). They noticed, as others had before and after them, that there were both obvious and subtle but consistent physical reactions to whichever state was being experienced. There’s a lot more to their discoveries but for sake of this story, that’s a good start. Now on to how they put their discoveries to work.

One of the things that they identified is that our eye movements reflect our thinking process. There is a visual movement that appears to locate a past visualization, “what did X look like?” that creates an image of an object in the future, “What might X look like in the future” (X being whatever question is being asked). Another movement is auditory (hearing) part: “What did the X conversation sound like? What might it sound like in the future?”. There is a feeling movement: “What did you feel when X occurred? How do you feel now?. Finally there is an eye movement that appears to represent an internal conversation (you are talking to yourself about what you might want to share) and there is a related eye movement that responds by moving to the area that reflects how you feel about sharing and eye movement between those two parts as they come to an agreement. phew.

To explain: After an initial discussion about why they came today, I can ask the person if they remember an experience X that bothered them. I can ask them if they can see themselves in that situation. If they can, I then ask them to step into that X experience and give me a signal when they have gotten a picture of X, I then place an “Anchor”(having gotten permission to do so, a touch on a wrist, shoulder, elbow or knee, and ask them to step into X and run it like a movie. I ask them what they see, hear, feel, touch that helps them remember X. When they are done I ask the client to come back to the room and bring their feelings with them.

That’s part I. I don’t know what X is and I discovered with NLP that I didn’t need to know. I didn’t need to ask the client to relive the experience consciously or share the detail with me. They knew what they experienced, and that was the important part.

Part II: I ask the client what resources (emotions, strengths, memories of other resources are needed to help with X that would not change the outcome of X but would help them deal (whatever that means) with it and to remember an experience that they had (the resource) that would help them. When they have identified a memory, I ask them to step into that memory and run it like a movie) and I anchor that resource. If needed we go in for more resources until there are enough to handle X

Part III: I touch the difficult anchor spot and add the resource anchor spot and notice what occurs.

When the process was done there was a visible difference in the State of the person. That learning experience changed me as a therapist. Dr Erickson also used Teaching Tales in his practice. Stories that are spoken to the sub-conscious of the client like our children’s fairy tales do. The process was healing, energizing, hopeful and focused on helping the client change in positive ways.

I have sought to add resources to my view of working with people who are stuck. NLP was a start that has led me to exploring the use of alternatives healing resources such as smell (essential oils), crystals (without crystals our lives world be very different and not nearly as rich as it is), music, art. language and many more.

Full disclosure: EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization) has found a place in the Medical Mental Health model as it uses a method and involves a dialectic process and finger movements that is easy to teach and use. It is also effective, just not as elegant)

We live in a world largely created by our beliefs and many of our beliefs are not true, they're only opinions.  Opinions are open to change.  If you're ready to consider different ways of looking at things,  contact OnBelay.