Experience, Theory, Projection and Intuitive Healing

The following post summarizes ongoing questions and discussions based on many years of intuitive healing, plus teaching and coaching others to develop their own intuitive healing abilities and careers. With the energies intensifying on this planet, many more people find themselves empathing others’ symptoms or increasing their intuitive awareness of others’ health issues. I’ve received a relatively high influx of clients lately wondering if they also are called to offer Medical Intuitive services, but they don’t know where to begin. This is not a comprehensive article, but rather a list of general guidelines, tips and stumbling blocks.

1. Your own healing challenges and experiences both do and do not matter.

On the one hand, your victory over various personal health challenges can become a source of inspiration to your clients — a template of what’s possible. Overcoming “impossible” diagnoses through non-traditional methods offers anecdotal “proof” of an individual’s power to alter pain, symptoms, biology, physicality, and even DNA.

I have personally experienced instantaneous, near-instantaneous and even long-term “miraculous” healings enough to know — to the core of my being — that I can overcome absurd odds and bend reality to my will. I’ve also walked with and witnessed both clients and students who’ve shifted internal patterns, visualized and/or energetically altered their physical and inner terrain and outer lives enough that dire diagnoses “mysteriously” disappear during follow-up tests. I’ve watched symptoms evaporate or become highly conditional, occurring only within the presence of old, worn-out patterns. Having personal confidence, personal experience and personal understanding of the power of mind, emotions, energy, spirit and belief to create healing are all valuable things to bring to the intuitive healing table.

They matter. At least to you, and they might even matter to your clients.

Here’s the tricky part, though, which differentiates someone who can heal themselves and someone who can effectively help others to heal themselves: in working with others, it helps to hold that vision of all their personal power and healing potential while also meeting people wherever they are. Someone in extreme pain who has relegated themselves to the status of victim ultimately does not care how you feel or think or what you personally experienced; they care about their own, personal, lived experience. If they cannot grasp whatever you’d love to share, or if they don’t aspire to your life circumstances (despite how much you happen to love your life), then your experience doesn’t feel relevant or helpful to them.

If you talk too much about your own perfect health or your own dramatic recovery, people will dismiss your experience as “exceptional” or “well, that’s just you,” or else avoid you so that they don’t need to explain how little they want to be you. Helping people recognize their own potential involves actually getting to know these people — as individual beings with individual preferences, rather than just “another you” waiting for liberation.

2. “Health,” “freedom,” and “happiness” mean vastly different things to different people.

With all the emphasis on “Oneness” and “Unity consciousness,” people like to assume that everyone wants the same things. Indeed, in broad strokes, most people do want some version of health, freedom and happiness; however, the individual details and definitions of these things vary. A lot. Enormously, in fact. I cannot stress enough just how differently people define what they do or do not want. Truly, one person’s heaven is another’s hell. I know this not just by guessing or theorizing, but through thirteen years of conversations with thousands of individuals while I questioned and listened and gave them tools for self discovery. People do not all aspire to the same standards or expectations. People value different things, and the priorities of those values make a huge difference in how or if they will recognize, accept and embody health, freedom and happiness.

One of the greatest challenges for would be healers or Medical Intuitive’s is taking care not to project your own definitions and expectations onto your client. Not everyone values the physical over the emotional. Not everyone wants to become a body builder or a world class athlete. Some people not only don’t aspire to such things, but actually look down upon them as a waste of time and energy. Some people will gladly accept some ill physical health as a means to avoid an emotional confrontation that would end their marriage or career. Some people live by an unconscious set of Catch-22 rules that work against full healing, because they can’t imagine how one set of circumstances can blend with another set into a cohesive reality. Some people know exactly what their soul cries out to do, but lack courage or permission to take their leap of faith. On a soul level, some people are here to experience self-sacrifice and quiet service this time around, while others are here to release their creativity in dramatic, visible ways.

Most people with chronic health issues lack clarity of what they really want and haven’t given themselves permission to act upon those preferences even if they discover them. All of these things and more can factor into healing, even though a “simple” shift could produce “perfect” physical results.

3. The body never betrays the soul. The body is the soul’s devoted lover, willing to sacrifice itself — even to the point of death — in order to encourage true soul healing and expression.

Individual diagnoses and physical “cures” matter less than soul satisfaction. I see this time and again, when people go through with traditional procedures only to have another health crisis replace the “cured” one. Without altering the pattern, even spontaneous healing derived from the mental plane can result in a return of symptoms or (often) an even bigger problem. It’s not unlike in the Bible when Jesus talks about being careful when you cast out demons:

“When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order.

Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation.” (Matthew 12: 43-45)

Clearing the underlying pattern — the root cause — of the physical condition ensures real healing instead of the mere appearance of healing. As Carl Jung said, “When a situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” Not everyone incarnates to live an easy, peasy, non-dramatic life. Many people incarnate to heal old wounds, to rework old patterns, and/or to integrate long fragmented versions of themselves. Intuitive healing — as opposed to just being a human x-ray, diagnostic and switch-flipping machine — honors the complex interplay between all the parts of someone’s being, especially the soul.

4. Some “disabilities” enable other abilities.

David and I watched “Frida” last night and were struck, along with others, by how much the beauty, poignancy and power of Frida Kahlo’s art stemmed from her own intense and chronic pain. Milton’s blindness encouraged him to summon Archangel Raphael as muse and poet of Paradise Lost. A long history exists of blind seers or of Faery Doctors struck blind in one eye, which enables them to see the Otherworld and the energies and beings affecting someone’s health. The “Whispering Witches of Poland,” credited with thousands of successful cures, list specific restrictions to which they’ve agreed in order to be able to offer the kind of healing they do. Would anyone have felt so inspired by Helen Keller without her blindness and deafness? To what degree did Beethoven’s hearing loss inspire his music? Or Van Gogh’s madness inspire his art? Without an extended illness, the lawyer Matisse would never have begun painting. The list goes on and on ….

This paradox of disabilities triggering other abilities deserves careful consideration, because if the soul deeply longs to express whatever ability the disability triggers or creates time/permission for, then a physical healing might mean no real healing. Helping people to locate those deepest desires and give themselves permission to express them in some way opens the possibility that they no longer require symptoms as a means of permission. In some cases, though, especially with regard to vision, the lack of “normal” eyesight facilitates vastly enhanced vision of another sort. When we help people to recognize both their strengths and longings — and we help them to create space for these strengths and longings to play out without hurting those around them, then we make huge strides in reducing the “need” for “disabilities.” Sometimes those disabilities remain as differences, and if the person experiences far more soul satisfaction and lives more authentically and generously, then who are we to judge them for “not healing”?

5. Learn to love characters and to speak in symbols, stories, myths, poetry, and paradox.

English majors, visionaries, poets and journalists can hone their natural skills as storytellers and artists to help others rewrite their own story and re-create their own symbolic picture of themselves. Story and symbol speak directly to the subconscious parts of us that create our experience of reality. They are incredibly powerful and effective, and both universal and individual.

Although you can take classes in Medical Intuition, studying “The Humanities” very much supports working with humans. When we read a book or watch a well-done play or film, we appreciate complex characters. We get bored by “flat” or “one-dimensional” characters because something in us knows better. On the soul level, we abhor such lazy stereotypes and limitations. We consider pieces “masterful” if they can make us empathize with villains or love the unlovable. For some reason, what we appreciate in literature and film, we often judge or dismiss in real people. The Ancient Greeks knew the power of catharsis from theater, but our culture makes most people recoil from imperfection. Bizarrely enough, our culture also celebrates mediocrity and rejects excellence.

Yep, culture in the 21st century gets people coming and going! It judges people for being too health focused and successful just as much as it judges people for being weak and dependent. Perhaps even more so. Basically, our culture honors the collective experience or the selfish narcissist, while harshly judging anyone attempting to live authentically, with recognition and acceptance of both light and dark. Effective Medical Intuitive work helps people through the Dark Night of the Soul as much as it celebrates the Peak Mountain Top Experiences. In recognizing, nurturing and honoring the soul, intuitive healing helps people real-ize that “I’m just being human” can mean something extraordinarily powerful, creative, satisfying and good.