Your Hands Can Heal You: Pranic Healing Energy Remedies to Boost Vitality and Speed Recovery from Common Health Problems - Softcover

Co, Master Stephen; Robins M.D., Eric B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743243056 ISBN 13: 9780743243056

Publisher: Atria Books, 2004

Synopsis

The first fully illustrated, commercially published guide to the energy medicine technique of Pranic Healing, written by a medical doctor and master healer for the everyday person.

What if the secret to good health lies not in surgery or medication but in the palm of your very own hand? Incredibly, your hands can heal you—with the “energy medicine” of Pranic Healing. The word prana denotes the body's own natural, vital, self-healing energy. This book will teach you the many ways in which you can incorporate safe, effective Pranic Healing techniques into your daily life to heal physical, psychological, and emotional problems and stay well.

In Your Hands Can Heal You, you'll find easy-to-learn methods to generate energy, including non-touch hand movements; the basic tenets of energetic hygiene; full-body breathing; and brief meditations. With the expert training and guidance of Stephen Co, you'll learn how to conquer a wide range of disorders, including:

-headaches
-backaches
-irritable bowel syndrome
-arthritis
-insomnia
-hypertension
-congestion
-menstrual cramps
-depression

With step-by-step instructions, line drawings, and real-life stories of medical recovery, this revolutionary health reference can provide you with all the help you need to help yourself—with your own two hands.

About this title

About the Author:

Master Stephen Co, a personal student of Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui, is one of only four Master Pranic Healers in the world, and the World Pranic Healing Organization's Senior Instructor responsible for teaching throughout the United States. Over the last ten years, Master Co has averaged 100 free, open-to-the-public presentations and instructional classes per year and has taught thousands of people in the United States, Mexico, and the Philippines. He was the first licensee of Pranic Healing outside the Philippines.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: You're Wired For Healing -- Your Energetic Anatomy

"During one of his healing sessions, Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui was working on a person who was a heavy drinker, though the person did not offer this information before the healing. Grandmaster Choa found a significant imbalance in this man's energy body -- specifically in his liver -- and told him that he should see a physician as soon as possible. The man went to the doctor and had a blood test, but the results indicated that his liver was fine. He received no medical treatment. Several months later, however, he developed severe pain in his liver. Tests at that time showed that he had hepatitis. We tell this story to students to demonstrate that we have an energetic anatomy just as we have a physical anatomy, and to illustrate that illnesses manifest in your energy body (also called your energetic anatomy) before they appear in the physical body."

-- Master Stephen Co

Your body already heals itself. You may take antibiotics to combat infections, dose yourself with aspirin to reduce pain, get a cast on a broken wrist, or even have your appendix removed by a surgeon, but drugs and medical procedures themselves don't "heal" you. They reduce inflammation, battle bacteria, or in the case of a cast or operation, make proper healing possible. But your body heals itself. And it does it magnificently. Through some process that we don't fully understand, your body has the amazing, innate ability to repair itself.

Medical science can explain the neurological and biochemical responses involved in healing a cut finger: The nerves carry the pain message to your brain to indicate a problem; white blood cells rush to the area to combat dirt or germs; platelets clot the blood and begin forming a scab; and the skin cells grow back underneath the scab. But medical science does not know how the body knows how to do this, and it doesn't know what force powers this healing process.

We know intuitively that there must be a consciousness behind this self-healing ability, one that knows how to work in the same way that our body knows how to breathe without our having to command our lungs to inhale and exhale. We have a storehouse of energy that our body uses for healing. Otherwise, white blood cells wouldn't be able to multiply and carry away infection and inflammation from the site of a cut. Skin cells wouldn't be able to repair and create new tissue. Traditional medical thinking holds that both this healing process and the energy used in it are beyond our willful control. But what if you could consciously control this supposedly unconscious self-healing process? What if you could learn to harness the most vital component in that process, the healing energy that your body uses to repair itself? What if you could learn to increase and direct that healing energy to improve your general well-being and relieve specific health problems?

This book will give you that ability.

Harnessing Your Healing Energy

Through a series of step-by-step, easy-to-learn, simple-to-perform exercises, you will learn to harness your body's healing energy, the force that is known as chi to the Chinese, mana to the Polynesians, and prana throughout India. You will learn an entire system of self-healing that uses as its framework the principles of one of the most comprehensive, effective forms of energy medicine, called Pranic Healing.

Energy Medicine

Energy medicine is a broad category of alternative healing methods that utilize universal life force as their primary healing modality. Although some energy medicine is used as an alternative to allopathic, or Western, medicine, most methods are now used as a complement to care given by medical doctors and other traditional treatments. We strongly recommend that you use Pranic Healing only as an adjunct to your physician's care.

In energy medicine, good health results from having the right amount of this energy flowing smoothly through the body, while health problems or ailments result from a deficiency or blockage of this energy. Energy medicine typically includes some method of increasing or stimulating the amount of life force in the body to facilitate healing. Some systems advocate drawing in the energy from a source outside the body; others teach practitioners to build up their own vital force and then use that for healing. Some incorporate self-healing; others do not. Acupuncture, chi kung, Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, and Pranic Healing are just several examples of energy medicine.

Acupuncture is probably the most well-known energy medicine system today. In acupuncture, fine needles are inserted into a patient's body at certain points, along energy channels called meridians (see "Your Energetic Anatomy" below for more on meridians). These needles unblock the flow of life force, or chi, through the meridians, and thus balance the body's energy and facilitate healing. Occasionally, the acupuncturist gently rotates the needles or even sends a very low-grade electrical current through them to accelerate the healing process.

chi kung (literal translation: "energy work") stems from the same Oriental philosophical base as acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, and internal Chinese martial arts, such as tai chi. It consists of a variety of life force-generating exercises and practices that date back thousands of years. There are many different types of chi kung, but in general, chi kung practitioners perform a prescribed set of breathing routines and physical exercises over a period of years to enable them to build up the chi in their own bodies. They then project that energy into the body of the patient to bring about healing. You'll learn a different, more effective way to generate energy that is unique to Pranic Healing.

Reiki is a Japanese hands-on energy-channeling system believed to have its origins in the esoteric practices of Tibetan monks. Reiki practitioners must be "attuned" to the universal healing energy by a Reiki master, after which they are able to draw in this life force and allow it to flow through them into the body of a person in need of healing. There are three levels of Reiki training: first degree, second degree, and third degree, or Reiki master.

Therapeutic Touch is a method of energy healing incorporating techniques from traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and laying on of hands. It was developed in the 1970s by a nurse, Delores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N., at New York University School of Nursing, and Dora Kunz, a healer and author, and is comparable to first-degree Reiki. A Therapeutic Touch practitioner does not actually touch the patient but passes his hands lightly over the patient's body to detect and then "unruffle" -- in Therapeutic Touch terminology -- energetic blockages. The practitioner then directs energy into the patient to assist healing.

Pranic Healing

Pranic Healing was created by a Chinese-Filipino spiritual teacher and energy master named Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui, who spent years researching the root teachings of esoteric systems such as yoga, chi kung, Kaballah (an ancient Jewish mystical-spiritual tradition), and many others in order to create a simple, practical, effective, "optimum" energy healing system that anyone could learn and use.

In his teens Grandmaster Choa was already an accomplished student of yoga and various meditation and spiritual systems. In his twenties, he continued intensive study of higher-level esoteric practices, with a particular focus on the use of vital life force for healing. He concluded that healing, at its most basic, consists of cleansing and energizing -- that is, cleaning away dirty or blocked life force from the aura and replenishing the aura with fresh energy. Next, Grandmaster Choa, who by this time had also established himself as a businessman and engineer, applied a rigorous scientific approach to his inquiries. He set up a number of healing clinics in the Philippines to test the effectiveness of laying on of hands, chi kung, and other energy healing systems. Each patient who came in received a particular type of energetic treatment, and the results -- or lack of results -- of that particular treatment for that specific ailment were recorded. Grandmaster Choa also had highly skilled healers with heightened sensitivity -- people with the ability to see vital life force in the body -- observe the patients before and after treatment, so that he could detail the exact energetic effect of each system. These experiments were overseen by nurses and other medical professionals, as well.

These healing clinics continued for years, with Grandmaster Choa constantly testing and refining methods of cleaning out dirty energy and increasing the supply of healing energy. Finally, in 1987, Grandmaster Choa published his first book and held his first workshop in the Philippines to introduce Pranic Healing, a "best of the best" system of very specific instructions and sequences for cleansing and energizing particular parts of the body to achieve rapid healing. The system spread to the United States in 1990 and is now practiced worldwide.

Pranic Healing Compared with Other Types of Energy Medicine

Pranic Healing is a more comprehensive and treatment-specific form of energy medicine than the two more contemporary systems, Reiki and Therapeutic Touch, and it is simpler to learn and easier to apply than the ancient, formal Chinese systems acupuncture and chi kung. Additionally, Pranic Healing includes teachings rarely found in other energy medicine systems, such as the detailed use of colored pranas and the practice of energetic hygiene.

Like Reiki and Therapeutic Touch, Pranic Healing teaches practitioners to feel for disturbances in the aura. But the Pranic Healing version of this tactile technique, called scanning, is more explicit and precise. For instance, Pranic Healing teaches several simple exercises that help students open and sensitize the chakras, or power centers, in the palms of their hands. This enables pranic healers to detect both congestion, an energetic blockage, and depletion, an energetic deficiency, as they move their hands over the body of a patient. Pranic Healing also includes two other hands-on techniques: sweeping, which is manually cleaning away congestion or dirty energy, and energizing, which is supplementing areas of pranic insufficiency. Reiki has no comparable sweeping technique, while Therapeutic Touch's unruffling is similar to but not as effective as sweeping. Unruffling resembles what is called in Pranic Healing distributive sweeping, or using the hands to move energy gently from one area to another. But Pranic Healing's sweeping provides more focused, complete removal of energetic congestion, primarily because pranic healers can use several types of hand motions in sweeping, depending on the location and "stubbornness" of the energetic blockage.

Energizing is much more detailed in Pranic Healing than in either Reiki or Therapeutic Touch, though it is still simple to learn. Both Reiki and Therapeutic Touch practitioners channel energy into the body of the patient, and there is some rudimentary targeting of the energy to areas where the patient has discomfort, or where the practitioner feels an energetic disturbance. In Pranic Healing, though, for each specific health problem there is a specific sequence for cleaning and energizing particular parts of the body and particular chakras so that the prana is utilized to maximum healing effect.

While it is based upon some of the tenets that underpin both acupuncture and chi kung, Pranic Healing is easier to learn and use. As in acupuncture, Pranic Healing works with the meridians, but unlike acupuncture Pranic Healing concentrates on only the largest meridians, along which the major chakras lie. Hundreds of other, smaller meridians criss-cross the body, but by performing focused energy work on the large meridians, which feed the others, pranic healers can achieve more effective results in a much shorter period of time. And of course, pranic healers, unlike acupuncturists, needn't study for years to learn the location and path of those smaller meridians and which organs and parts of the body they energize.

There are numerous chi kung schools and thus many types of chi kung healing techniques. chi kung routines, or "sets" of physical and breathing exercises, were developed by Chinese monks centuries ago to supplement their spiritual development and martial arts training, and also to facilitate physical healing. The biggest differences between chi kung and Pranic Healing lie in their energy-generation philosophies and the length of time needed to become proficient in the practice. chi kung relies on internal generation of energy, which means that students learn techniques to help them build up and store energy within their body. They then tap this surplus for meditation, spiritual development, fighting, and healing. Pranic Healing, by contrast, is an external-generation system. Students are taught powerful techniques that enable them to draw in energy from outside the body and then project it into areas of deficiency for healing. Thus, pranic healers don't have to worry about their energy battery "running down." Pranic healers also don't have to spend years learning and practicing complex physical exercises and breathing patterns to build up the level of internal energy needed to heal effectively.

Finally, missing from nearly all other energy medicine systems are two cornerstones of Pranic Healing: the methodical use of colored pranas, which focus and greatly accelerate the healing process, and energetic hygiene, or rules and practices for avoiding energetic contamination and keeping the practitioner's personal energy tank clean and full.

Your Energetic Anatomy

Pranic Healing teaches that illness and health problems result from disturbances to the flow of prana through a network of power centers, passageways, and energy fields that interpenetrate the physical body called the energetic anatomy. Your energetic anatomy, also called your energy body, or simply, your aura, is a three-dimensional cloud of prana that begins inside your physical body and emanates outward in all directions to form a rough outline around your body. The energetic anatomy has five basic components:

1. The chakras, the body's power centers or transformers that take in and distribute prana.
2. The meridians, the body's energy channels that transfer prana to and from the chakras and nearby organs and parts of the body.
3. The inner aura, an inner shell of prana that begins inside the body and extends about 5 inches out from the body in a healthy adult.
4. The outer aura, an outer shell of prana that also begins inside the body and extends up to several feet beyond the inner aura in a healthy adult. The outer aura holds in the body's energy.
5. The health aura, an aggregation of 2-foot-long rays or ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743243056
• ISBN 13: 9780743243056
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320