Energy Healing vs Faith Healing

ETA 2 June, 2020: Since surrendering my life to Jesus Christ during the Covid-19 lockdown, I have had a rethink on this subject matter.

Have you ever wondered what Jesus meant when he said ‘All these things and more shall ye be able to do also?’ I especially started wondering this once I discovered I had the gift of healing. So far I have yet to cure my first blind person… never mind raising people from the dead!

My healing crisis happened shortly after the birth of my second child. I was 27 and not far off my first divorce, as well as my first Saturn return. My world came tumbling down around me. The last thing I needed at this point in time was a crisis of faith but that is exactly what happened and not long after, I left the church after being an active member for just over a decade.

Once I began the healing journey in earnest, I started questioning… well, everything. I had been told that anything ‘New Age’ was of the devil… and if that was the case, I became hellbent on letting New Age seduce me because I felt badly betrayed by the church and that point in my life, I hadn’t learned to differentiate between church (people) and God (truth). My inner locus of control was pretty weak in psychological terms.

The one inner reality I was not willing to part with was Jesus himself. I knew him and loved him but I felt that the church had fucked up his message so badly that I couldn’t possibly identify as a Christian any more.

As I started reading about the chakras, the aura and energy healing in books by Barbara Ann Brennan, Caroline Myss and Deepak Chopra in the late 90’s, I wasn’t afraid of experimenting. I got lucky too because one of my fellow physiotherapy students at Karolinska was a Reiki healer who wanted to start practicing and asked me to be her guinea pig. Together with her, I was able to verify objectively that what I sensed was actually real. I had the experience of having my third eyed opened during a treatment she gave me. Later, we arranged a meditation circle with some other students. It was quite the experience!

My friend told us to meditate for 30 minutes and she instructed us to not rely on a timing device but to simply set the intent to open our eyes at the same time, after exactly 30 minutes. Not only was this part of the experiment successful, my friend had also arranged a surprise for me. She sent me an energy ball at the start of the meditation session, without me knowing about it. However, as I sat there with my eyes closed in meditation, I felt a ‘blob’ of energy very clearly pass through my body and it was completely unlike anything I had experienced before. After the session, I turned to her with a look of delighted surprise on my face and asked her ‘What was that?’ My friend started giggling and said ‘That was an energy ball – you can create those with your mind and send them to people!’

Huh! Well, if she could do it so could I, I quickly decided, though I, at that point in time had no previous training in any energy healing modality. But how? And what did I wish to transmit this way? I gave it some serious thought and decided that the next time we meditated, I would transfer the feeling of Holy Spirit descending – something I was familiar with from church. It feels like a powerful wave of energy that comes in at the top of the head and illuminates the whole being (although I struggle to describe it with words).

I told her nothing of my intent, nor did I tell her about my experience of the Holy Spirit. At the next meditation session, it was only she and I. A few minutes in, I opened up to receive Holy Spirit and then simply asked for/willed this energy experience to be transmitted to my friend. Again, we opened our eyes after exactly 30 minutes (without a timer) and my friend looked at me, almost shocked, ‘Lisa, what the hell was that?! It felt like my head was going to explode!’ Yes, an explosion of light is exactly how it feels… and then some!

It was my turn to giggle with delight when I told her what I had done.

So, yes, it could be argued that it is all just energy and our intent alone decides how it flows and that energy healing is nothing but the result of setting the intent and directing energy to flow a certain way. Yet I knew then and still know that this is far too simplistic a view of energy healing in relationship with faith.

In the Bible it is often stressed that as our faith is, it will be done to us.

Before my healing crisis, I only had one experience of a faith-based healing miracle and it feels almost silly to say that it concerned a blister on my toe. But the blister was huge and threatened to prevent me from continuing my travels and I was on my own in a foreign country – quite nervous about the whole situation… when I suddenly remembered to have faith and pray. I was sitting in a train carriage, with nobody else around, so I was able to relax as I put the foot on my lap and prayed over it. When I opened my eyes, the blister which had covered pretty much the whole top of my big toe, was gone without a trace and I was able to continue on a journey, which turned out to have an impact on the rest of my life. I look back and believe that I was healed because a) I prayed with faith and b) it was God’s will for me to continue the journey.

The second healing miracle I experienced was also faith-based and this one happened after I had separated from my first husband. I was a young mother with two toddlers and most of the people in my circle of friends also had little ones. All except one, a lovely young lady who wanted nothing more than to be a mother but wasn’t able to conceive due to complications after radiation treatment. As we sat around her dining room table (it was her birthday!) and everyone was chatting away about their babies, I could tell that my friend was getting increasingly upset although she did a good job of hiding it.

Before I knew what was happening, I heard myself saying the words ‘Would you like some healing for this?.’ She couldn’t get me away from the others to receive the healing fast enough! We left the others chatting away and as I walked into the other room, I quietly thought to myself, ‘Now what?’ because I had no idea what I was supposed to do. But again, I stepped out on faith, knowing that the Holy Spirit had spoken through me. We sat down on a sofa, I placed my right hand on her shoulder and put my left hand in the air, asking the Holy Spirit to come with healing in the name of Jesus Christ…

…and you know what I said about the explosion of light earlier? It was there but times a thousand and every time I remember this, my eyes well up with tears of gratitude because it was the most beautiful experience of my life. Wave upon wave of not only light but heat descended on us until our faces were streaming with tears of joy and wonder.

About five weeks later, my friend phoned me up. ‘Lisa, you’ll never guess what! I’m pregnant!’ I remember going for a walk in the forest after this phone call and not feeling my feet. What was real and what was a dream? How could God be so good to allow me to experience grace and healing on this magnitude – I truly had done nothing to deserve it!

You might think this would be enough to bring me back to the fold and if it weren’t for my energy healing experiments it might have, but I needed the freedom to explore and try to understand why and how these things happened. I wasn’t happy with the church’s lack of explanation when it came to the reality of the energy body which I had come to know as a factual reality at this point in time.

About a year and half after this healing miracle, I moved to the UK and was able to study spiritual healing, Western Reiki and Jikiden Reiki, along with Bach Flower Therapy. I know that Reiki and other energy healing modalities work. Spiritual healing is really only another energy healing modality these days, though it may have started out differently. Faith is not needed – it is supposed to (and does to a certain degree) work anyway. But I have yet to witness a single miracle on the scale I described above, with the healing that happened through simple prayer and faith in the healing power of God.

So I struggle with which way to take my own healing work. The thing with faith healing is that it’s not something you can offer ‘on tap’ or for payment. It could never be part of my ‘professional services.’ And I need to earn a living. I also don’t need to look like a wacky cook in the public eye but it’s probably too late for that now, anyway.

I’m writing this because in 2016, my focus word for the year was ‘integrity’ and I was feeling dissonance between what my mind thought I should be saying about healing and what I truly felt deep down in my heart. I have shared my heart in this post.

Below is a reading I did on the two main healing modalities of interest to me now. I used the Intuitive Two Choices Tarot Spread.

The bottom three cards speak of where I’m at on my journey to become a healer. The 8 of Cups, Knight of Cups and Queen of Pentacles together speak of a desire to level up and to bring the Holy Grail the Knight of Cups is carrying out into the world to be administered by the grounded and practical hands of the Queen of Pentacles.

To the left are three cards speaking of my Jikiden Reiki work. I’m still a novice (Page of Cups) and feel I need more wisdom and guidance (High Priestess) in order to understand what I’m doing here… the 7 of Pentacles, of course, speaks of a need for patience. Even having the level 2 (Okuden) certificate, I can’t expect to be an expert Reiki healer until I have done many more treatments. I also see the ‘little Lisa’ here (Page of Cups) looking for guidance from within, seeking some kind of system or mystery tradition that will make me look less like a crazy person in the eyes of the world. What I seek is the validation of the High Priestess so that people will come to me in that capacity… but in reality, it will take a very long time before I will feel like that on the Jikiden Reiki Path. It is a foreign system with foreign symbols that I love but do not fully comprehend and therefore I may always feel like I need to buy a clue.

To the right are the three cards speaking of my journey with faith healing. Death signifies how the ego must die completely and the King of Swords is my intellect putting up a mighty fight on behalf of the ego. But when the ego dies, I will finally feel at home (10 of Cups).

I pulled a card from the Majors only Pictorial Key Tarot for the spiritual theme/lesson and got Judgment – If you were here at the time, you would note the lack of surprise on my face when this card showed up. Of course. This is about my calling.

Not long after my healing crisis, the palms of my hands started heating up. At age 27, I went to see a pastor at the church I used to go to ask for guidance about this because I had no clue what was happening to me and why I felt so drawn to put my hands on people when the heat started. He told me, without hesitation, that I had the gift of healing… but he also said ‘You are not ready to start using it.’

I know now how right he was. I had to learn everything the hard way first in order for my intellect and ego-mind to be satisfied.

In the end, I can only refer to what has been real in my own life and that is that the power of the name of Jesus heals when nothing else works. And no, my ego still doesn’t like it. I’m 46 and still doing a battle with my ego. To surrender is surely to lose all credibility in the eyes of the world. That is why I choose to do this battle in the open now… It is the only way to end it! I’m not here to help those who look for a slick solution. I’m here to do the bidding of the One God.

I pulled a final card from the Archangel Raphael Healing Oracle and got ‘Yes!,’ which is about trusting my feelings in this matter… but it’s not the words on the card that draw my attention… it’s the image of the infant Jesus. The miracle of his birth lead to many other miracles and what everybody else does or thinks of faith healing is no concern of mine if I wish to experience more of the same… and I do. I really do.

Blessed Be!

Lisa Frideborg

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