— All healing is self-healing. Any medicines you take or procedures you undergo are meant to aid your own body in its return to health. If you take ibuprofen for a sprained ankle, it doesn’t heal the damaged tissue; instead, it reduces the inflammation and limits your pain, which aids your body’s ability to heal. If you take an antibiotic, it kills the bacteria that made you sick, but then your own body has to take over and restore balance between the microbes in your body and heal any damage to tissue that occurred as a result of the infection. If you have surgery to remove a tumor, your body has to heal the affected organ(s) and knit the skin back together at the site of the incision. If you get a bone set to heal a fracture, your body has to create new bone at the site of the break.
Although Eastern, holistic, and alternative methods differ in approach, it’s just as true that they are designed to aid your body’s natural process of healing. You might take ginger and turmeric instead of ibuprofen to reduce the inflammation in that sprained ankle, but your body still has to regenerate the cells to heal that tissue. You may receive acupuncture to rebalance energies in your body, take supplements to boost your immune system, or receive Reiki after surgery, and they all may help your healing—that is, they will aid your body as it carries out the healing on a cellular level.
Your body is a wondrous healing machine. It is regenerative and reparative. When we are ill or injured, we have many methods we can turn to for aid. Since our body and energy body are so entwined, what can we do on an energetic level to aid our physical body in this process? This is the purpose of Healing Rays. It helps you draw upon the regenerative aspect of your sacral chakra and the soothing aspect of your heart chakra to support your body’s natural healing abilities. Healing Rays is not energy medicine. There are many forms of energy medicine, and I encourage you to find an energy healer to complement your other medical care if you have a health issue. Notice I say “complement”; it is my belief that energy medicine, holistic treatments, and alternative medical treatments should be used in combination with conventional medicine in most cases. Of course, there are ailments that may be entirely treated through energy, holistic, or alternative means. Most of the time, you will benefit from finding the right combination of both, and Healing Rays is not meant to replace any of it. Now that
I have that disclaimer out of the way and you understand what Healing Rays is not, we can talk about what it is. For one thing, women are often particularly good at this healing tool because it draws upon our sacral and heart chakras, part of our feminine pathway. As you know, our sacral chakra, among other things, is procreative energy. It’s the energy of creativity, of creation, in all its forms, including the reproductive energy that creates and nurtures life. In this aspect it is the energy linked to new cell creation, cellular regeneration, and cellular repair. It is through these cellular functions that new skin cells are regenerated to heal a cut, a bone fracture is reknit, or damaged tissue is repaired.
The heart chakra is our balance point and generates an energy that helps pull all aspects of our mind and body back into balance. Many illnesses are caused by an imbalance within our system, an imbalance between the microbes in our body, our hormones, our endocrines, or our digestive enzymes. Healing is very often about returning balance to our system. The heart chakra is also our center of nurturing, soothing, and calming energy. These energies support our ability to heal by reducing our stress levels, as a high amount of stress hormones can inhibit healing.
With Healing Rays, we are combining the regenerative energies of our sacral chakra with the balancing, soothing, and nurturing energies of our heart chakra. To some extent, many of us do this instinctively when we are sick. If you get a cold and you cocoon yourself with some warm soup, your favorite book, and a bath, you are creating a nest-like energy that allows you to go inward and supports your healing process. You may be naturally bringing forth your sacral and heart energies in this case (and this is a memory you can use to bring forth these energies again in the activation steps).
With Healing Rays, we are doing this in a more deliberate fashion and are adding the palm chakras to direct healing more specifically. Located in the palms of both hands, these chakras are part of the larger secondary chakra network in various chakra systems. The palm chakras are another energy center that appears in many mappings around the world and is linked with healing. Reiki, faith healing, and Healing Touch are all examples of healing modalities that draw upon the palm centers. In Healing Rays, we will use the palm chakras to direct the energies you generate in your sacral and heart to the part of your body most in need of healing. You may not need or wish to do this, in which case you can simply generate the sacral and heart-healing energies without directing them and allow them to fill your entire body.
Besides using Healing Rays to support physical healing, you can also use it to support emotional healing, by noticing where you feel a particular challenging emotion such as anger, fear, or shame in your body. We will talk more about this in the Using Healing Rays section of this chapter. Of course just as Healing Rays is meant to augment, not replace, physical medical care, it also is meant to augment, not replace, mental health care or counseling. Healing Rays is also not meant to be a healing Empowerment for you to use on others— others—like all the Empowerments in this book, it is designed to empower you in your everyday life and growth. Using it is part of reclaiming the vast reserves of natural powers and energetic abilities you have at your disposal…
