Healing as G-d’s Love

Healing as G-d’s Love

It began as a typical craniosacral session–my client lying quietly on the massage table. But as I placed my hands under her occiput and sacrum, she suddenly burst into tears. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. These are tears of joy. “Morning and afternoon, morning and afternoon….I have asked G-d to show me His Love.”  She lifted her arms heavenward, exuberant. “And now, I feel His Love!” She turned toward me. “I think your mission as a healer is to connect people to G-d!” she said. I was a bit stunned. Her advice rang true and was even exciting but…I had to travel halfway around the world, from Israel to Seattle, to learn my mission? Could no one in Israel tell me? Yet I learned in that session what underlies all things. When we remove peoples’ physical and emotional blocks, all that’s left is G-d–and His love with which He created and sustains us and the world. Stages of Healing We as healers see this happening in stages. First the body releases tension and feels more relaxed. Falsehoods and fears fall away and the wonder of who we are is revealed and comes alive and is true for us. And then…the opening to natural connection with the spiritual world. (You can read more at Do Angels Heal). Healing Session Over This wonder in our clients’ shining faces signals us that the session is over–that we have reached maximum and prescribed healing for that day.  Brandon Bays calls it the moment of Shining Eyes–when the healing session is complete. To me, it’s like the client drops the black cloud and takes up the rainbow.

The client drops the black cloud and takes up the rainbow.

The Veil Brigitte Stzab, Family Constellations teacher, once asked me, “Don’t you feel the veil [between the physical and spiritual worlds] is getting thinner?” To be perfectly honest…I’m an Aquarius. What veil? I often feel like I walk around Up There like someone strolling through a garden. And that’s why it’s important for me to lend a hand to others who need to be Up There too.

Do Our Ancestors Still Love Us?

Do Our Ancestors Still Love Us?

Have you ever really thought about your ancestors? Grandparents–yes, but how about their grandparents, and their grandparents, back through the generations?

They are waiting for us–to do good in the world, to correct their misdeeds, to bring holiness and salvation to our entire family structure. In Family Constellations, we meet these souls and bring love and flowing gratitude naturally into our systems.

But did you know you can see or contact these ancestors in a Craniosacral Energy Healing or Guided Healing session? Here’s how it works:

You remember from Do Angels Heal? that angels often show up in the Craniosacral treatment room in order to help their loved one or witness their healing. These angels, as we saw, may be ancestors.

“Miriam” and “Yocheved”

Sometimes they come to deliver messages that they are embarrassed to say in person. Example: “Yocheved,” a student in one of my Craniosacral Energy Healing workshops, practiced on her partner “Miriam.” Now Miriam and her husband had been among the first Jews let out of Russia. When they arrived in Israel, they did not know if they would ever see their birth families again. However, perestroika happened and all their immediate family members were eventually reunited in Israel.

Yocheved did not know this story. Yet during the practice, Yocheved began to smile softly. Later she told Miriam: Your parents were in the room. I saw their hair but couldn’t see their faces. But I knew who they were. They want you to know how proud they are of you that you brought them and your entire family to Israel!

Feeling this appreciation was apparently very important to MIriam’s healing, but for whatever reason the message would not have been either delivered or accepted in real life. Miriam’s parents’ souls chose to have an emissary deliver the message during a Craniosacral healing session.

Who Visits?

Ancestors as well as significant others often show up during Guided Healing sessions (in person, by phone, or google-chat/hangouts). We described in Energy Healing: Is It Kosher? a recently deceased beloved grandmother, “Granny,” whose neshama (soul) would hover around the ceiling and give answers to long-sought questions that troubled my client. Normally it is the deceased mother’s mother’s neshama who comes to help but it can be any significant other, dead or alive. Frequent visitors to female clients are neshamot (souls) of mother or siblings; old boyfriends, still living; or deceased fathers–all asking forgiveness or volunteering love and appreciation that they failed to convey in real life.

Volunteers

The volunteerism is often astounding. We learn in Chana Luk’s Ohr HaEmuna healing to invite a troubling neshama in the room in order to fix some wrong between that neshama and the client. But here, in Guided Healing sessions, we deal only with neshamot who have already entered the room to help us, or who step forward from a group to help us when we ask for a volunteer. Sometimes so many neshamot are standing in line ready to help that their messages fill a one or two-hour session!

Neshamot & Their Personalities

Another astounding piece is how the neshamot communicate to us in their pre-death fashion.  The neshama of an impatient or suspicious person may communicate with us abruptly or in a withholding way until they trust us.

Yet their true love and concern, even of a suspicious person, will often come through in the end.  One such suspicious neshama was always present but rarely forthcoming without our initiating a lot of questions. Such encounters felt slow and unjoyous. Suddenly, one day, when we had not turned to her for a long time, we asked a question and she replied, in her still less-than-welcoming but nevertheless now-interested manner, “I was waiting for you to ask that!”  Of course she could have volunteered the information like a “normal” neshama, but that was not her way!

Channeling through One Individual for the Good of All

Which highlights how much the neshamot are waiting to help us and enthusiastically welcome our participation. In many families, my client is the only one who is willing to listen and so the ancestors must do all of the family’s helping and problem-resolution through that one individual.

Getting Stuck

Sometimes we have a question and no one is there to help or answer. We ask if we should proceed and, if yes, we ask, Is anyone available to answer this question?

Gradually we will see a scene of 3 or 4 rows of participants like in the old game shows on TV. Usually we will see a volunteer’s hand raised in the back row. Although it is not entirely necessary to know, we try to identify the neshama. Then we ask the question and proceed as normal.

Healing before Mashiach

What is the result of all this communication with neshamot? The first thing you notice is a feeling of peace, well-being, and liveliness in the client’s face. They know without a shadow of doubt with whom they have been in contact and know they have help from Shamayim (Heavens). Their slights and insults and neglect and other wrongs they have received in this lifetime have been forgiven through the visits of penitent and caring souls–and the true underlying love and endearment have been expressed in ways meaningful to the client. Their life has been set right.

So some neshamot come to seek forgiveness or to express love or to set things right. Others come to advise us of our current path (see Measuring Healing) or decision-making forks in the road. Still others, like “Granny,” offer repositories of past knowledge.  All these activities, and more, are necessary in these days preceding the Mashiach for us to heal, and heal well, with love and gratitude.

We have the power to change our family’s past and future. The ancestors’ hands are tied, so to speak, as they are no longer living in this world. All they can do is guide and advise. This they are more than willing to do–if only they can find among us living–someone who is willing to listen.

 

 

Jewish Family Constellations: Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh l’Zeh

Jewish Family Constellations: Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh l’Zeh

In the non-Jewish world, Family Constellations are beautifully linear. You stand in an orderly lineup of one generation behind the another. You don’t speak unless told what to say. You wait for the facilitator to tell you what to do next. And if the facilitator says you feel something and you disagree, you do NOT argue. Very Yekkishe (Yiddish for German-orderliness)–everyone in his “platz” (place).

This is as it should be, as Bert Hellinger and my other Family Constellations teachers have largely been German. Even when Hellinger facilitates Family Constellations in Israel for Holocaust survivors (Rachel Weeping for her Children), everyone seems to obediently follow the script.

Linear vs Exploded View

Trouble is, when a Jew facilitates Family Constellations for Jews, the fake orderliness blows apart. And no one prepares you….

Trouble is, when a Jew facilitates Family Constellations for Jews, the fake orderliness blows apart. And no one prepares you….

Take my first time student-facilitating a Family Constellation for “Leah”–my class’s only other Jew. Here’s Leah’s Father– stooped and crumpled on the floor, loosely surrounded by a mess of family members. Across the room, Leah’s Mother and all her line are livid about something and strewn about in a disheveled mass. Leah’s screaming that I should not work on the mother’s side of the family, but the father’s side. There’s no calm anywhere and no obvious direction to turn. I look up helplessly at my teacher.

“I don’t know where to go with this,” I admit.

“Sit down,” she replies. It was the only merciful thing to do. She takes over and later invites me to sit by her in front of the class.  “Any questions?” she asks me.

“Yes,” I said. Everyone in my Seattle Family Constellations class knew I was going back to Israel, so I was frank. “For those of us who are going to do a lot of Jewish Family Constellations, are they different from normal–I mean non-Jewish–Constellations?”

“Yes,” she said. “Every Family Constellation I have facilitated for “Leah” has taken 2 1/2 hours [a “normal” Family Constellation takes half that time]. In an Irish Family Constellation,” she continued, “The father would just leave. In the Jewish Family Constellations, they don’t leave each other. They just get entangled.”

In the Jewish Family Constellations, they don’t leave each other. They just get entangled.

Kol Yisrael Areivim

That was the key. That’s why things are SO complicated in Jewish Family Constellations. Kol Yisrael areivim zeh l’zeh. Each Jew is responsible for each other.

Now you may argue that you know of a Jewish family in which the father left the family. But Family Constellations show an entirely different picture of a Jewish family’s norm.

Connecting Independently to the Spiritual World

Family Constellations highlight another difference between Jews and the “normal” world: we connect independently to the spiritual world. (I include, as Jews, conversion students who are not yet Jewish.) You see, in my Seattle class, we were taught to stand close to the rep who needs to say something, and we will feel what needs to be said.  We then tell the representative what to say.

When I tell this to my Jewish Family Constellation participants here in Israel, they get indignant. Here are excerpts from a letter I wrote to my teacher, in which I am curious how Jewish Family Constellations differ from “normal” constellations and what this tells us about ourselves as Jews:

Wind-Up Toy

First, I hardly have to do any facilitating. I don’t even open with a warm-up exercise to open their hearts, like your ringing your crystal bowl.  I just say something like, “Let’s see what’s in X’s heart. X, how do you feel now? and How would you like to feel by the end of this constellation?” and let things roll. Everybody in the Family Constellation automatically knows exactly what to do–even if it is their first time seeing a Constellation. They know what to speak–and, amazingly, they come up with the same statements that we have learned from you–on their own! If I suggest a statement that doesn’t resonate with their situation, they will express their disagreement LOUD and CLEAR. And then they come up with a deadly accurate statement that I could never have come up with. When I tell them I was taught that the facilitator had to come up with the “statements,” they look at me like I’m crazy and ask loudly, “Why?!” They already know exactly what to say and don’t want someone interfering with their abilities to reveal the truth.
All I have to do is set up the constellation like some wind-up toy and sit back and watch. Of course sometimes I add people or suggest a break-through somewhere. But when I do, I tell people why I am doing it as if we are all learning general principles (which we are).
And so my facilitating Jewish constellations is a little more relaxed than facilitating in Learning Circle.  Even when, like a few weeks ago, I had to facilitate a constellation not only in Hebrew/English but also French! Things just seem to take their course to a very powerful, moving, and loving place.

Relating to Grandparents & Great-Grandparents

A second difference is the Jewish Client’s strong connection to relatives further back. I recently facilitated a Family Constellation for the Whole Health Forum outside Jerusalem. We did a beautifully linear constellation. Each representative going back 4 generations, plus the Homeland, had all made peace with each other in turn, including the Client’s representative.  All looked well when I invited the Client to take her place in the Constellation. We had 10 minutes left. I was starting to feel relaxed because the conference had only given me an hour and 15 minutes to work and, as you know, this is half the time we really need, and it really looked like we were going to make the deadline!
Suddenly the Client became hostile. She would not even LOOK at her Mom’s rep, with whom her rep had already made peace. Something went unexpectedly wrong. But what?
I thought quickly–something is out of alignment. “Do you have anything to tell your grandmother?” I asked the Client. Boy, did she! She could not deal with her Mom until she had stepped back a generation and given her grandmother a piece of her mind!  We even had to let her communicate with her great-grandmother for a moment. Fortunately, things were worked out and, with about 3 minutes left in the session, the Client completed a beautiful constellation with her Mom’s rep.

Cousins Three-Times Removed

A third difference is how far from the direct family line we Jews are emotionally connected. Last week I facilitated my own constellation. The Family Constellation showed that I was influenced by relatives in a “side” line whom I never knew about: my great-grandmother’s siblings who had apparently lost children in the Holocaust. Not only was I unaware that my great-grandmother had siblings, but I didn’t know we had lost relatives in the Holocaust. The word Holocaust was never mentioned in my home growing up and as far as I knew, we were an intact family: both my mother’s parents were US-born; both my father’s parents grew up in the US; and all their siblings were in the US. I had never suspected anything among my great-grandparents’ forgotten siblings.
When you debriefed my facilitating X’s constellation last fall, I began to understand how all Jews are responsible for each other. I am only now, through facilitating constellations here in Israel, able to see some of the extent of this responsibility.
What happens when a Family Constellation turns “entangled” into “loving and responsive”? Just a few minutes after our post-constellation ice cream party, I became aware of people standing behind me for the first time. Not just anyone, but a large and continuously supportive family. This took me by surprise because I had done 6 constellations already and although I have felt more grateful after the first constellation, the others had not affected me in any positive way.  Maybe they brought up more anger and feelings of being misunderstood–but that’s about all.
Now before last week’s constellation, whenever I would think of my family, I would want to grab an emotional crash helmet. In my family of birth, I never knew when I was going to be attacked for being who I am. I never knew when most of my family would make up some narrative about me instead of seeing the precious gold I was mining in this lifetime of connection. Once I felt the strength and power of the amazing family and ancestors that now back me, I realized how marginalized my family had always seemed to me. Sort of like a washed out sidewalk-chalk-portrait after a rain….and it was all I could do to try to get them to help me sometimes, only to watch their backs as they ran away from anything I needed them for. Now, power, power, power is all I feel from them!
I am curious about who these perished people were. Yes, we had dealt with some of those who perished in the pogroms in a constellation with you this past fall–but there were more people who had experienced pogroms and of course the Holocaust who made their presence known last week. I am willing to love them also and call them my own–now that I know they exist somewhere. I don’t feel lost looking for someone I don’t know anymore!
What is open now is more willingness to heal in any direction possible.  I hope to delve deeper into what it means to be a healed person and, more importantly for the Jewish people, what it means to be a healed Jew.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Masks, Angels, & Homeopathy

Masks, Angels, & Homeopathy

When we first bought Lizzie–a beautiful chocolate brown Alpine goat–she was so skittish that you couldn’t get near her. She would run away and jump onto something high or hide behind the hayfeeder.

That is, until she met Eera, our homeopathic veterinarian. You see, in our section of Israel, many goats get abscesses. Lizzie did too. My landlady, from whom I had bought Lizzie, said airily, “Just wave your hand and the energy will break up the abscess.”  I did what I could, being an energy healer, but nothing worked. For 9 months, the abscess got bigger and bigger. Finally, a vet visited for another reason, saw Lizzie, and said the abscess was very dangerous. Eera said simply, “I know what to do for the abscess.”

“How much do you charge for lancing an abscess?” I asked.

“Let’s first see the abscess,” she replied quietly.

“No, I don’t want to begin until I know your price,” I said. I didn’t want to have any misunderstanding about why I was hiring her.

She refused to tell me her price for lancing. “Let’s just see,” she said, leaving me and entering the pen. I lingered behind to lock the gate after us.

A moment later, she returned to me, triumphant.  “Ein tzorech–there’s no need!” she said.

“There’s no need for what?” I asked.

“There’s no need to lance the abscess. It’s opened on its own.”  Sure enough, the abscess was open and draining.

“What? Did you do anything to her?” I asked, in disbelief. There had not been time to catch Lizzie, much less treat the abscess, in the short time it had taken to latch the gate.

“No, it opened on its own,” she replied.

“Eera, that abscess hasn’t healed in 9 months. In fact, it has only gotten worse and worse. You mean to tell me that all you did was walk into the pen and the abscess opened on its own?”

Tamid kacha–it’s always like that.”

Tamid kacha?” I asked. I was confused.

“Yes.”

I began to understand why Eera did not have a set price for lancing abscesses. It was because she never had to.

“Eera,” I begged her. “How does that work?”

Lo yadat sheh al kateif kol rofeh yosheiv mal’ach?” she asked. Didn’t you know that on the shoulder of every doctor sits an angel?

I was stunned. But that was only the beginning. Eera gave Lizzie a constitutional remedy to strengthen her immune system. It didn’t, in the end, totally prevent more abscesses, but it did fix something else….

After a few days, Lizzie was no longer nervous Nellie. She was totally relaxed, sensuous, always approaching me with her face tilted up at an angle so I could give her a facial massage. She then took a full-body massage–up to 40 minutes long–every day. She had turned into a pussy cat.

Eera came for a follow-up a few days later.  “Eera,” I said, “Something has happened to Lizzie. She’s not crazy anymore.”

“Yes,” she replied. “I came to see her a few days ago, and I looked around and couldn’t find Lizzie!” she joked.

“But Eera, what happened?”

“That old behavior–that was just a mask,” she explained. “The remedy lifted the mask and now we can see who she was all along.”

Healing and the Coming of Mashiach

Healing and the Coming of Mashiach

Q: In the frum (Jewishly observant) world, everyone talks about waiting and wanting Mashiach (the Jewish messiah) to come. You’re the first person to tell me about people healing before that happens and specific people being called on to heal others in the days preceding Mashiach. What is this based on?

 

A: I first started noticing this when I heard a Shabbat drash (lecture) at a Bet Chabad in Baltimore in 1999 or 2000 from a rabbi visiting from Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel). He said that as Mashiach approaches, we will be gifted with more and more powers.

As Mashiach approaches, we will be gifted with more and more powers.

It is clear to Israeli frum healers that the world is changing. Some of us healers are getting unsolicited information about the political situation in Eretz Yisrael–not in the form of governmental issues but about the Land crying out for her people.

We are getting unsolicited information…about the Land crying out for her people.

We are getting information about what is safe and what is not safe. Some of us are getting the same type of information as the great mekubalim!  Information can come to us spontaneously even about the future, which a Jew is not allowed to ask about. Even in the US, this was happening to me. Once I taught my mother to muscle test in order to find the nutrients that would save my husband from a dire situation with Lyme disease, she was able to muscle test with me on many issues. The muscle testing would sometimes spontaneously turn into a vision–sort of like a movie–of a past life in which I could see the actors clearly and repeat verbatim conversations between significant others and could see what had happened and how the thoughts in that event continued to affect my family today.

So when I asked Mom to help me determine, in the spring of 2000, which month would be good for me to take my young children to Eretz Yisrael for the first time, we got that we should not go that summer. I asked about September. We got a no again. Then the information came to me that the reason we should not go in September is because there would be a war. I got very frightened and called my rabbi–a Sefardi who by the way could see things in my house over the phone–and told him that I had gotten information about the future, which was asur (forbidden), but that I hadn’t intentionally asked about the future and what to do about something I had begun innocently enough and had turned into something asur. Now back in 2000 no one thought that there would be any war in Eretz Yisrael–the last war had been in 1973. My rabbi said it was OK and that the “war” was between the Ashkenazi and Sefardi Jews and that when he has to go to Eretz Yisrael he only stays a few days because he can’t enjoy the tension there. Well, I spent 6 months wondering how I could be so inaccurate as to get that war was coming to Eretz Yisrael while my rabbi had explained it away as only Jewish-group tension. Comes Rosh Hashana that September and the Intifada breaks out! I called my rabbi to ask what happened and he said simply, “We call you ‘bul’ [bull’s eye].” I began to realize there was something seriously wrong with our religious leadership because I, a “poor handmaiden,” could see and do things that they couldn’t or didn’t want to–things needed for our people’s own development and safety.

When I compare notes with my former healing teacher in Efrat, we are seeing the same thing–Arabs leaving, abandoning their villages and fruit trees. People in Eretz Yisrael who are connected to their hearts and to nature are preparing for the great influx of Jews who will leave their homes in chutz la’aretz (outside of Israel) and flood to Eretz Yisrael.

I look at my daughter’s friends here in Eretz Yisrael and they all want to go into healing of some sort or another. They all want to serve.

And healing itself has changed in the last 20 years. In those days, I had learned from Carolyn Lee Tubman–a very talented herbalist, muscle tester, and ghost buster in Maryland–how to test for potentially allergenic foods for my small children. How we muscle tested 20 years ago was clumsy and difficult. The patient had to hold the item in one hand and stretch out the other arm. Then the practitioner had to push down on the stretched-out arm and determine whether the muscles were stronger with or without the item. Today, we can just think of the item and feel a slight change in our own body, hands, or even thoughts. With that may come a new flood of healing information above and beyond the yes/no answers that muscle testing yields. Clearly from the Treasury of Unearned Gifts.

I heard from Chana Bracha Siegelbaum, the head of Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin and an amazing Torah teacher and healer herself, that in the days of Mashiach, we will all be healed, and that the Bet HaMikdash (holy Temple in Jerusalem) itself will serve to heal people.

In the days of Mashiach, we will all be healed, and…the Bet HaMikdash itself will serve to heal people.

What we are going through now is a type of healing whose purpose has not been relayed to us by our clergy.  Approaching the times of Mashiach is a little like approaching the Bet HaMikdash. As Rabbi Shimshon Refael Hirsch says, the reason that the Cohein Gadol (High Priest) could wear shatnas (forbidden mixture of linen and wool) in the Bet HaMikdash is that, in the world of intense perfection of Hashem (G-d), all contradictions are melted. Similarly, as we approached Har Sinai (Mount Sinai) so many centuries ago, all the people were healed–as it says, they all heard…and saw….  Why is this happening? Why can you now heal 7 or more generations back in your ancestral line, which no one else until you were born could clear?

What it took me until the age of 58 to do in the healing world, my daughter could do with ease at the tender age of 19. She is even more powerful now at the age of 22. 

What it took me until the age of 58 to do in the healing world, my daughter could do with ease at the tender age of 19.

Healers in the non-frum world are saying that the consciousness of the world is changing and, according to my Seattle Family Constellations teacher, this is making it easier to do healing. The “pathways” are already laid down and well-trodden, she says.

One reiki master I met in Hawaii rattled off the four stages of people with higher consciousness–stages that are well known to the non-frum healing world. The second stage that one goes through is “Healer.” This all makes sense now, as I have been strongly pulled to do this healing stuff–which is WAY far away from what I wanted to do with my life (to create a seminary to teach teachers how to teach Torah through hands-on nature). Nature-Torah education is really what I thought Hashem had wanted me to do with my life–and I have had to put this all on brutal hold while I traipse around the world gathering ways to heal people.

I and my healing colleagues in Israel are seeing much that is channeling us in the same direction. The people need to be healed. The Land needs to be populated with her beloved holy children.

The people need to be healed. The Land needs to be populated with her beloved holy children.

There are major shifts in world climate and population dislocation that are already happening because of the future Healing to come.

There is no doubt that you are part of this–an honored part of this generation that will lead (who knows when?) to the coming and celebrating of Mashiach. You are not one of the people who are waiting for Mashiach. You are bringing him. That is your task (among many others–including motherhood). You are not being given anything that you can’t handle. Your simcha (joy) will lie in choosing Life–the Life that Hashem is asking you to live and spread.