If your ego gets inflated, a family member can usually deflate it for you, and that can be a good thing, but not always.

Sibling rivalry can have benefits, like reminding one another to mind your manners, to sit up straight at the dinner table, don’t chew with your mouth open, don’t pick your nose in public, and so on. The reminders aren’t always delivered in a compassionate, or diplomatic way. Often, it’s more like a boot camp drill sergeant in your face. I’m grateful for many things I gained from my family the way a soldier might be thankful for a tough drill sergeant after seeing some action on a battlefield, but some of the stuff family can dish out doesn’t do much good. 

Being rejected by friends or family for going after your dreams or following a calling can be difficult. You cope with it as best you can, but at some point, you may recognize you aren’t going to change their mind, and they aren’t going to change yours, and if it gets unpleasant enough you may have to go separate ways. It happens. 

For a while, I became overly sensitive to rejection and didn’t want to be particularly open with my family about what I was learning. At the same time, the energy and healing phenomenon kept getting stronger, and testimonials reminded me that the work was worth doing. It also told me that for whatever reason, not everyone would be open to it, or even to the idea that I was one of the people capable of doing it. 

One of Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements is “Don’t take anything personally.” Most of us roll through life feeding on approval, avoiding rejection, looking for our niche, where we can shine and get more approval. We are trained from infancy to be liked. Taking things personally is part of the ordinary dance of life. However, Don Miguel Ruiz had an out-of-the-ordinary experience that he knew would not be accepted or understood by many and he knew the experience was elusive and he wanted to write down reminders so he wouldn’t forget his awakening. His teachings were to help others who might at some time have similar experiences and might like some guidance on how to manage the effects of these experiences on their relationships and how to grow or more easily evolve into a heightened awareness of life that reveals a much more expansive and wondrous worldview. Taking things personally can keep us from reaching that expansive worldview.

At some point, I had to accept that what I was doing was beyond ordinary and that my old life was no longer an option. Once you start down the yellow brick road, there’s no turning back and if somewhere along the way the apple trees start throwing apples at you, don’t take it personally. It’s what they do. 

Becoming sensitive to subtle energy included sensitivity to emotional, mental, and physical energies, including all the variations of pain. Once you become sensitive to pain in that way you tend to act to reduce the amount of pain in the world rather than add to it. Stepping away from social interactions that have a negative or even painful effect on you is a way to reduce, rather than add to the amount of pain in the world. 

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Not often, but sometimes there’s an unusual kind of pain associated with healing work. I found it odd that working on the etheric level can cause discomfort or even acute pain on the physical body of the person I am working on. Normally it's like a weight or burden is being lifted, but sometimes it’s like removing porcupine quills or something like that. 

Picture a healer moving their hands near a person, not touching them, and yet these effects are taking place within their body. They may feel a beam of energy coming from the healer’s hands, and the beam of energy may be a tightly focused or a wide-sweeping beam of energy. Often the feeling of the energy is the dominant sensation. Other times, like when the healing energy comes up against resistant energy in the body, or the aura there can be a sensation of a discordant vibration in a particular location in the body. A buzz or thrumming feeling is not unusual. When I come across one of these discordant vibrations, I sometimes stop and hold my hands steady until the vibration ceases. It’s similar to muting the strings of a guitar. You touch the vibrating guitar string with your finger, and it stops vibrating. In healing work you bring the energy in your hand in contact with the undesired vibration in the aura or the body of the person you are working on and the vibration eventually stops. It can happen quickly, or it may take several seconds. 

Another phenomenon you can run into is the feeling of prickly energy. It can feel like little sparks of energy that can cause your hand to tingle. This is not beneficial energy. It can cause pain in your hand, and over time it can build up to create feelings of arthritis in the fingers and hands of the healer. It can be particularly acute in the knuckles of the fingers. This is so-called dirty energy. It needs to be washed off your hands right away to avoid absorbing it into your body. 

Things that can be used to dissolve and wash away the dirty energy include saltwater, witch hazel, rubbing alcohol, and other strong alcohols like vodka or moonshine. These can be put into a spray bottle and sprayed on your hands during a healing session as soon as you get the dirty energy on you. Since witch hazel and rubbing alcohol have strong odors, you may prefer to use salt water, or vodka, or moonshine. You may detect a slight aroma from them, but typically they aren’t objectionable.  

When you run into a dense field of dirty energy, you can feel it right away on your hands and will need to wash it off as you go. Here’s where a spray bottle is convenient. 

If you are using a technique that pulls the dirty energy out of a persons' body, which can produce very rapid results, and the person has a lot of dirty energy in them, it can cause discomfort or even sharp pain if you do it aggressively. What might be considered normal sweeping of energy through other parts of the body could be too aggressive when it comes to a part of the body that is sensitive and heavily compromised with dirty energy. 

Several patients with advanced cancer that I’ve worked on had inordinate amounts of non-beneficial energy in the affected parts of their body and removing it caused discomfort or pain. This doesn’t always happen, but it helps to be aware of when it does and to slow down, use less energy, and slower sweeping motions. Although it will take longer to do the work, it will minimize the discomfort. This doesn’t only happen with cancer patients. Any acute illness could have similar responses to healing work.

A couple of incidents come to mind. The first was an impromptu session that came up at a social gathering. A man in his mid to late thirties was telling a few of us that he was diagnosed with cancer in his organs of elimination and it sounded very harsh. I mentioned my healing work and offered to do what I could to help. I sat about three feet in front of him, and one or two people nearby watched as I pulled ‘dirty, or non-beneficial energy’ out of his abdominal region and we could see him wince with pain as I very gently worked on his spleen chakra. I slowed way down and took it very easy, but I felt for sure this was a case that called for a lot of work, like numerous sessions per day for many days or even weeks.  But all I was a visitor to the area and could only aim for providing a modicum of relief.

In another case where there was pain associated with removing non-beneficial energy, I was working on a young woman who had gotten into trouble with drugs and the law. As I worked on removing undesirable energies from her abdomen, and the area of her spleen chakra, in particular, she winced with pain. I apologized and slowed down, but continued to make great strides in one long session. The young woman’s mother and a friend were in the room watching and at one point I looked up at the young woman’s face and saw that she’d changed, she looked younger, healthier, even a little innocent and I remarked on the change and turned to her mother as I asked if she could see it too and as I looked at her I saw the mother was crying and nodding her head yes. It was a dramatic session. Here’s what the young woman wrote about it:

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“Steve, 

You really made a difference in my life. The work Steve does is amazing. He has such good energy and he took a lot of pain and hurt out of my body. Steve works and puts his whole heart into his energy work. Nobody has ever touched my life like that, ever. I lost weight overnight after getting energy work. I was a drug addict for 5 years and had been sent to prison and my body was totally messed up. He helped me to let go of old baggage and took all the bad stuff away. Steve is a miracle sent from God and if you let him work on you I can tell you, you won’t be sorry. Just wanted to say thank you, Steve.

Sincerely, 

MST”

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I’m a little overwhelmed by that testimonial. It’s always an honor when someone allows themselves to be open and vulnerable enough to allow me to do this work. Just letting your shields down can be a big deal, and I believe it may be the most important part of this work. I sometimes get a thing or two right and seem to have some natural ability as a healer at times, but I’m no saint, and being put on a pedestal usually leads to falling off a pedestal. I’d rather not.

The point I want to make clear is that some healing techniques can cause discomfort even though you are not touching the person. This is a testament to the effectiveness of the methods. It should give you an idea of how powerful they are, and that if you become a powerful healer you need to use the techniques responsibly, with care and compassion. Soften the way you are using the techniques if they are causing too much discomfort, or use a different technique, but don’t stop the healing work altogether. 

Study, learn, practice, and repeat. If you study the books I’ve recommended (and others), and learn from a variety of sources, and practice healing on several hundred cases, you should have a pretty good idea of not only what techniques work rapidly, but what techniques may be much gentler and more suitable for some situations, and what techniques aren’t much help at all. 

You can also use techniques that minimize the tendency for unwanted energy to get on your hands. The question might then become are you avoiding the healing work that needs to be done? I’ve spoken with several who have dabbled in healing work who avoid dirty energy like the plague. I have to wonder if the techniques they use could be more effective if they included cleaning out dirty energy. A doctor who didn’t remove dirt from an open wound wouldn’t be very good. 

Cleaning out dirty energy helps to minimize or even eliminates the potential for a healing crisis. The healing crisis is where a condition can suddenly get worse when healing work is done before it gets better. It’s a common occurrence. 

Clearing out undesirable energies is another tool that’s good to have in your toolbox.

~ S