Sunday, 11 December 2011

Of Connections, Reconnections and Play with Energy


The other day my friend Richard Bolstad posted this youtube link on that great social connector Facebook. 


The video is of an Indonesian energy healer whose touch is so powerful that not only does the patient respond with uncontrollable involuntary movements, but others in the room respond as well. Later the man demonstrated the ability to use qi (or “chi”) energy to set a piece of newspaper on fire. Filmed for SkyThree TV, it appeared that the camera crew, at least, found him to be pretty genuine. The clip has had more than 481,000 views, which in the youtube universe is quite a lot.

Of course when you view a clip on youtube, youtube gives you a selection of other clips on a similar theme that it thinks you might like. So I clicked onto a couple, and I found this one



In this video, Mark D. Meurs demonstrates a very simple exercise anyone can do to play with qi energy with their hands. Now I’ve been doing this one for years—nobody taught me how, I just discovered it on my own—and I was delighted to discover someone else played with energy like this. (Try it!) I was also caught by the background music Mark used in the clip because it sounded Hawaiian (slack key guitar), so I clicked into Mark’s website and discovered he’s based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, but he used to live in Hawaii, and that’s where he first studied Chinese medicine, qi gong, and Reiki .

Now I haven’t been to Chaing Mai (yet), but I grew up with Hawaii not exactly as a second home, but I lived there some of the time when I was growing up, and my parents retired to Hawaii, so I’ve been back and forth to the islands quite a lot. I spent several months in Hawaii when my mother was terminally ill in 2004, and it was then that I first discovered Reiki, although I didn’t actually train in Reiki until I returned to New Zealand after my mother’s death.

In spite of the training (1st and 2nd degree), I’ve never touted myself as a Reiki practitioner. I believe in the power of energy healing, but Reiki just never resonated with me, and although I feel capable of using it to alleviate my own minor ailments—sometimes—I’m not convinced of my ability to make any discernible difference in anyone else’s health with it. What’s more, the secrecy and power symbols and all that just seemed a little too hokey for my grounded Capricornian sensibilities.

Anyway, Mark calls what he does now “Reintegrative Healing”, which apparently comes out of the "Reconnective Healing" stable. So I googled that, and discovered the “doyen” of Reconnective Healing seems to be a man named Eric Pearl. I’d never heard of him before, but his website (http://www.thereconnection.com) touts him as “the world’s leading authority in energy healing and beyond,” and he’s clearly a bit of a showman, doing the rounds of American talk shows and doing stage shows and the like, and I'm not so into that. I like books, though, so when I discovered he’s written a book, The Reconnection, I first jumped over to Amazon to see what folks said about it. The reviews at Amazon were all pretty good, so I clicked into my local Hutt Library—isn’t the internet wonderful?!— and I put the book on request.

I finished reading Pearl’s book yesterday, but more about that, and Eric Pearl’s reconnection energy movement, in another post.

You know the ad on tv for ancestory.com? The one where the guy says “So I followed this little leaf, and it lead me to another little leaf...” That’s what it seems like these connections are all about. Richard’s video link lead me to Mark Meur’s video, and the Hawaiian music in that made me click into his website, and my brain connected “Hawaii” and “Reiki” and “qi gong”, and also tallied in “Chiang Mai,” and that made me look for new connections on a healing energy theme. Now I’ve read Eric Pearl’s book, and it makes me think maybe it’s time for me to reopen the casebook on this energy healing stuff. I wonder why I didn’t discover his book back in 2004/2005 when I was exploring energy healing —after all the book is ©2001—but maybe this is just the universe working in mysterious ways. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to read it until now. Maybe this really is about reconnections. (And then again, says my earthy Capricornian internal reality checker, maybe it isn’t.) Anyway...

There’s one final connection to note in this story. Richard Bolstad, who posted the link mentioned on the top of this page, does an annual week-long course in Chiang Mai in qi gong and spirituality (along with partner Julia Kurusheva) every year[i]. I found out about it while browsing the net three or four years ago, long before I did my nlp training with Richard, and have been thinking about going ever since. Maybe this is the universe giving me a little nudge about putting it on the agenda for 2012.

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