It is well known that our behaviors stem from the lessons we came to learn in this lifetime. My own emotional wounding and recovery using various methodologies provided key insights on my path to peace and tranquility.
My mother was a liar. What a gift! She would say what she thought people wanted to hear. This behavior – which I perceived as not telling the truth – had such a strong impact on me I was driven to learn how to stay true to myself and speak my truth. I developed COURAGEOUS INTEGRITY: I am true to myself no matter what the risk. What a delightful experience of freedom comes with this behavior for me!
In 1988 I finished my Bachelor of Arts degree with an interdisciplinary concentration titled, A Physiological Approach to Learning and Emotions. I completed two independent studies. First, I taught The Art of Listening in conjunction with Awareness Through the Body, taught by one of my professors. [I learned listening skills in the 1970’s from the peer-counseling organization, Re-evaluation Co-counseling (RC)]. Second, I learned Applied Kinesiology, taught by the Touch For Health Foundation. I learned to use an electromagnetic bio-feedback response in the body to create personalized behavioral or nutritional programs. To learn these modalities, I had to experience the information through my body or kinesthetic sense.
In RC (Re-evaluation Co-counseling), the emphasis is on feeling and releasing old emotions (as the client) and listening without interrupting the client’s focus on releasing their emotions (as the counselor). I had not had a good cry for two years when I started these classes in the early 70’s In fact, my life force was extremely shut down. I had very little access to my purpose in life. Energetically what is called the soul set in energy healing work(above the thymus) had a large hole in it. I was working for little more than minimum wage and could not seem to get promoted. I had no close relationships, except for an affair that was meeting an unmet need from childhood to be loved. My physical body was getting yeast infections regularly, from a large dose of penicillin that I took so that I could keep my tonsils from being inflamed for taking them out. And, I also had migraine headaches caused from high blood pressure and the high doses of birth control pills.
Once I started crying and I could think more clearly, my life began to get better. I became very good at distinguishing and releasing my emotions. Instead of being humiliated for being emotional as I was growing up, I was being honored by RC teachers and classmates for my skill of working with mine, and their emotions. After just a year of this RC process, I changed what I did for work, reestablished my relationships with my sister and other women, cleared up my thinking about loving myself, and ended the affair.
When I began teaching RC, I noticed how people are stopped by each other when they are trying to be with their feelings. What I learned was that the one-on-one counseling structure did not have strong enough boundaries. Other people’s stories and feelings remind us of our own, so we want to interrupt and talk about them. To counteract this tendency I instructed the counselor/listener to not say anything as the client told her story. They were to just observe the tone of voice, the facial expression, the eye contact and the posture of the client. I was told by many of the students that this exercise was the most challenging that I ever gave them.
Another emotional methodology I developed was based on being able to listen well enough to a person to distinguish a chronic negative emotion describing how they felt about themselves, and then to contradict it with a positive supportive emotion with enthusiasm! This balances the energy and allows the human body to release old blocked emotions by crying, laughing, sweating, shaking, yawning, and so forth.
Through this work I became a respected counselor. I have thousands of hours giving and receiving counseling in the past 30 years. What this has done for my personal healing is to make me actually aware of the energy of an emotion as it wells up in my body, increases, and dissipates. This awareness allows my Thinking and Reasoning energy to be more clear so I can re-evaluate the events that had such an emotional charge. Once this is done, I am ready to again be in the present moment of my Divine Will energy to take a risk or an action on something that seemed too hard before.
As I began my private practice, I was sure that my clients were being blessed by the loving energy that I had to offer. I believed love was the way to healing everything. I also used applied kinesiology, or muscle testing as it is often called. Then came my wounded healer’s journey, or some say the dark night of the soul. Even though I had all these excellent emotional and muscle testing skills, I was still not able to get to the root cause of my own migraine headaches. And now I had excess bleeding from the uterus with my periods, as well.
I consulted a naturopathic doctor, an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, several kinds of massage practitioners, a couple of homeopathic doctors, an internist, and was referred to a cardiologist, and then to a gynecologist. None of these practices seemed to help, so I started to experiment on my own. I stood in the middle of a health food store and asked my own body/mind what I needed by muscle testing my own body. By this time I could use my own fingers of one hand to do the muscle testing (Applied Kinesiology) . You apply pressure from one finger onto another. In this way I was led to a section of the store, to a shelf, and to a supplement on that shelf. It was Bone Meal. The FDA was warning people not to use bone meal because of the sprays on the grass that the cows might be eating. Besides, bone meal is cheap! I did not discuss my findings or what I intended to take with anyone. I needed to trust myself, which required being able to distinguish my own truth separate from anyone else’s desire to help or their best guess on what I should do.
I muscle tested how much to take and for how long to take it. After a while I began to feel better, but I was still searching for something more. I had a list of bulk herbs, which I decided to muscle test, by using the vibrations of the word from the list to see if my body would respond to anything. To my surprise I got one called periwinkle. The list read periwinkle ‘not for culinary use’. I ordered a pound, put it into capsules, and took most of the pound before I was guided that I had had enough. I could not find references for its use. So I was on my own again, to trust my own guidance and be my own support. This began my path to physical health. The final healing and cessation of all symptoms occurred at Barbara Brennan School of Healing, when an energy healer dealt with the underlying second chakra (energy center for uterus) issues. This experience of trusting myself, trusting what the body told me, installed a strong character trait of "COURAGEOUS INTEGRITY" which still remains the basis of my work.
Four years later a friend asked me for a healing session. She had had 11 breast tumors removed; half of them were malignant. As I did the healing I was told through my auditory guidance that she needed periwinkle. I gave her what I had left. She found references to it in a book she had in her personal library. Periwinkle: for breast cancer, lymphatic cancer, leukemia.
Shortly after getting this information on periwinkle, I was given an article written by Kathy Keeton, actress and wife of the owner of "Penthouse" magazine. This article told how she was given the herb periwinkle for her breast cancer. My father died of lymphatic cancer at the age of 58 years old. Did I save myself from cancer? I think so!
My experiences and training have allowed me to distinguish the emotions of any situation whether in my own body, or in the energy field of my client half way across the world, or in a collective group energy that I connect with in my own community. Being able to distinguish emotional energy is important to living a life of truth and COURAGEOUS INTEGRITY. I am grateful for my joyful chuckle at my human situation and the understanding of how to work with the emotional body and the physical body of blocked energy. I feel well-prepared spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically and academically to share my insights and experience in whatever arena I am called to in my practice.
It was an amazing experience! I thought I was going to learn new techniques that I could use in my holistic health practice. To my surprise it was also a life changing gift and blessing to have the opportunity to learn and to be in the presence of Barbara Brennan.
During the four years at the school, what she calls my high sense perception or clairvoyant skills grew stronger. Before I started the school I only had some sense of the mystery of feeling the energy around the spine of people that had injured themselves. And of course, I had done muscle testing for over ten years by that time, which takes a kinesthetic sensitivity. By the end I could feel, see, and hear the energy.
Each year we where given more skills to learn about the energy that makes up body, mind, soul and spirit. We went to school five times a year for a week each time. At school the staff did demonstrations working with the energy, which we followed up with practicing on each other. Barbara worked with us for a morning or an afternoon session each week. We also had time with her for meditations the first day of the week and the last day of the week, which included the whole student body and staff.
Approximately 200 people went through the school with me over the four years. The school gave us a choice as to whether we where ready to move on to the next year. Some of the time we were with our entire group, and other times we were in smaller groups of ten with two staff people. This varied from year to year.
We where given written assignments each week that were handed in to a staff person before class. We used Barbara’s books as one of our five or so textbooks for each of the first two years. One of the most useful assignments to me was that we wrote a one-page paper each week on “Who am I?” The last year we where asked to write a longer paper on some aspect of energy work. We also had to take good care of our psychological selves by having two counseling sessions a month during the school year. All of this in addition to the healings we got and gave!
I enjoyed the position of being one of the co-leaders of my classmates. We had Friday night dancing and art projects to organize among other things. I made connections with people of like mind from all over the world. That contributed to my confidence about the energy work. We got to practice giving and getting healings anywhere in the world.
I am so grateful and feel so blessed to have been able to follow my calling to the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. My life is better for it. I am certain that I am more than my physical body/mind. I am clear there are beings that are of a higher vibration around me. And I have the personal power to create a world of loving kindness where all people know the connection of all animate and inanimate beings.