Healing with the Goddess

Excerpted from
Essential Psychic Healing: A Complete Guide to Healing Yourself, Healing Others and Healing the Earth
By Diane Stein

Healing with the GoddessThe healing that I do for others has always been based upon my own healing journey. What works for me in my own growth I develop into techniques to use in healing sessions and ultimately to teach other healers. The techniques that prove successful continue, and by using them in varied situations they evolve into healing tools with basically predictable results. Techniques developed by others or learned from reading about them take on new form and I adapt them for best results, often changing others' methods drastically. I combine methods and frequently use more than one technique at a time, sometimes several in one healing session as I work very selectively.

My own healing process began in 1983 and is ongoing today. I started it by dedicating myself to the Goddess at Candlemas and choosing Wicca and Goddess Spirituality as my life path. I opened to the Goddess for the first time as a religion and lifestyle, replacing the intellectualism I had viewed it with for the previous five years. When I finally made the connection between Wicca, healing, and psychic ability, my life changed in ways I could not have dreamed of. I accepted my growing psychic awareness as part of the package and welcomed it as part of my life. I frantically sought information on what it meant and how to use it. I began to explore and study Wicca. For the first time, I started to meditate, to learn visualization and ritual, work with crystals, and to study the folk remedies that I was beginning to be aware of.

In June 1983, a Tree of Life meditation from Star-hawk's The Spiral Dame (Harper and Row, 1979) became a kundalini opening experience, my first. I saw and felt myself as the living, growing tree and the colors of the chakras rushed through me from roots to leaves. The same day I received laying on of hands energy briefly for the first time from a woman friend. I felt it move through me in the same way as the colors had and with intense heat. The energy on my hand and arm completely and immediately healed a painful hairline fracture in my palm, and as soon as I felt it I knew I had to learn to do it, that healing from that moment on would be my life.

That day was preparing me for what I afterwards termed a walk-in, though I had no name for it at the time. In bed in the middle of the night a few weeks later, in a state somewhere between sleep and waking but very alert, I felt and watched vivid green and red ocean waves move through my body. They were beautifully formed, like the ocean breakers in a Japanese painting, and intensely hot like the energy that had healed my hand. I perceived them as stunningly beautiful and was not afraid. Then I felt and saw myself hovering above my body, detached from it while being in it at the same time. An aura of bright white mist enveloped that hovering self, took her completely away, and a different "mc" returned and settled into my body on the bed. There was a discussion with someone I couldn't see about just how to enter and several readjustments before it was done. From that time of soul exchange, I felt that I was someone else, and my former self, though present, seemed moved to the background, watching but no longer active. All my perceptions were greatly different in every disconcerting way.

Every aspect of my life immediately and often frighteningly changed. I had difficulty functioning in my body for the next few weeks, had trouble remaining upright to walk at first and difficulty in remembering how to do many formerly automatic actions. I couldn't remember the route driving to work that I had taken every day for the past three years or how to fit the key into the car ignition. Those first few days of driving were definitely scary, too. What made it more difficult was that I didn't understand why I was having so much trouble doing these things, or why I was even doing most of them. I quickly became a strict vegetarian, eating rice and fresh vegetables, and drinking herb teas. I who had always kept a complete diet of meat and donuts. I left my high stress, emotionally destructive office job within days, after being caught meditating on working time, and started my first published book. The Kwan Yin Book of Changes (ret it led A Women's I Ching, The Crossing Press, 1985), two days later. I broke contact with my even more destructive parents and family within the next few months.

That August I went to my first Michigan Women's Music Festival, though I had been out as a lesbian for many years. Abandoned at the gate by the women I had traveled with, I was there all alone, with little in the way of warm clothing or camping equipment. I had never been camping before; it was cold and raining, and there was no indoor shelter.

Unable to manage my dyslexia and agoraphobia in that situation, yet thrilled by the festival itself, I ended up camping at the HART (Differently Abled Resource Team) community sleeping tent. There I received a thorough education in disability awareness and positive self-image from the women, and I began to know my own abilities and disabilities.

I attended my first workshops on women's healing - on herbs and meditation. Goddess ritual, and crystal healing. I discovered women's music and crafts, women's culture, and knew I belonged. There was no turning back. In just a few weeks I had become someone very different from who I had thought I was. The old self and old life were irrevocably gone, and the new life, totally unknown, was just beginning. When I returned from the festival, my apartment of twelve years no longer felt like I lived there, and my agoraphobia was gone.

The following summer, having completed Kwan Yin and looking for a publisher, I moved. I took a job out of state that proved too exploitative to tolerate, and I returned home destitute, my savings gone. I was all but homeless for three months and on welfare. I experienced extreme poverty and solitude for the next several years. Refusing to return to office work where the new computers gave me chronic migraines and seizures, I waitressed but made little money at it. I was on Food Stamps for several years, while sometimes also working two jobs for fourteen hours a day. When the survival issues eased and books became my source of money, the next steps in healing began.

I had to come to terms with my physical limits first, to understand and validate myself within those limits and then to overcome and heal them. I was in chronic neck and back pain with a curvature of the spine, and frustrated by dyslexia - neurological disabilities that manifested as a lack of directional sense, with poor spatial ability, poor physical balance, clumsiness, and a confused sense that things were never in the same place twice. I lived in a state of chronic stress, hyper-nervousness, anxiety and fear, poor self-image, close to the surface rage, and

Frequent debilitating panic. I was exhausted for no obvious reason. I had devastating migraines during which I thought I was dying and wished to die. I began to lose my reading ability, as my vision focusing muscles failed, and I began to realize that I had been severely battered and emotionally abused by both parents and my sister as a child and into adulthood. Emotional abuse along with sexual harassment had continued with many male bosses.

When an attempt at a much wanted relationship failed miserably, I knew that I needed healing that was not available from any doctor. I had to find it for myself. I began with herbs, crystals, and Reiki I. I started receiving monthly massages, and finally was able to have optometric vision therapy, which corrects reading disabilities, balance, and short-term memory. A friend learned neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and wanted someone to practice on. I volunteered and experienced extensive NLP sessions twice weekly (or a year, opening up all the buried issues of my miserable childhood. I examined every incident of battering all the way back to diapers and even in the womb. I then entered two years of bartered nontraditional Gestalt therapy with a woman who was also a psychic healer.

I moved from Pittsburgh lo Florida. On my own again and very alone in a new place, I worked at healing depression and rage. I gained my Reiki II and III degrees, and learned to work with spirit guides and spirit guide teams from the Earth and other planets. After a few weeks of using Machaelle Small Wright's MAP (from the book, MAP: The Co-Creative White Brotherhood Medical Assistance Program. Perelandra Publications, 1990), my curved back began to straighten. It normalized completely and dramatically over a period of a few months. I learned deeper meditation that led to chakra healing, inner child work, past life regression and release, uncording, soul retrieval, karmic release, and the ongoing art of emotional healing. I received help from others I felt drawn to as often as possible, but did much more of the process alone. Every forgotten and half episode of emotional and physical pain in my life surfaced again and again to be viewed and then relinquished, and the process seemed to go on forever. Then the past lives started. I learned to feel emotions fully instead of denying them until they exploded into rage.

I completely healed my spinal curvature and greatly relieved a newer, lower back injury, healed many of the neurological problems, the adrenal exhaustion, and all of the migraines and seizures, plus an infected uterus and large fibroid tumors. I combined the psychic techniques with massage, herbs, homeopathy, crystals and gemstones, flower essences, and Reiki. The years of poverty dissolved as well. I no longer live in pain, fear, misery or anger, and I want to be here - a very new feeling.

Along the way I learned what worked and what didn't, and began using the things that helped me to help others. I participated in two-and-a-half years of healing work with AIDS patients, a year with a woman who had breast cancer, many sessions with incest and multiple personality disorder survivors, as well as healings with women for countless other emotional and physical diseases. The techniques in this book (and my previous books) come directly from that learning.

The strongest thread through the whole process was Reiki. While the techniques in this book do not require Reiki training, I recommend it strongly for all healers. The 1995 release of my book, Essential Reiki (The Crossing Press), has gone a long way toward making this healing system available to all who choose to learn it. When I train a psychic healer I begin by giving her Reiki training, as it is a basic framework for all psychic healing and laying on of hands touch healing methods. The attunements also open the receiver to her psychic abilities and connect her with her spirit guides and healing guides. By the time a healer has received the Reiki Third Degree, most of the methods in this book have been opened to her, if she frequently uses the healing for herself or others. Without Reiki, women's psychic abilities open, too, but not so quickly, naturally, or easily.

After Reiki training, healing ability developed most fully by experience. No matter how much information a woman receives, it is doing (he healing sessions that make the healer. There is no substitute for doing the work, and every healing is a learning session for both parties. Once I give a student Reiki, I ask her to do healing on others, coaching her through the sessions as she needs it and helping her to define what she perceives. Within a few healings, she has learned how to access her spirit guides and how to gain nonphysical level healing information. After many healing sessions the information comes easily and is easily understandable.

Connection with healing guides and the ability to work with them is the central skill new healers must learn. Reiki opens this connection quickly and reliably, though it is not the only way to develop it. I sincerely recommend Reiki training, all three degrees If possible, to every serious psychic healer.

Psychic healing is not medicine nor is it in any way accepted by the standard medical system, yet it offers profound answers in the quest for wellness and the healing of diseases both physical and emotional/mental/spiritual. The modern medical system focuses its "cures" on the dense physical body only, while psychic healing looks to nonphysical levels for the sources of disease. Medicine cures by suppressing symptoms while healing works by addressing and releasing the non-body causes of illness. In finding the emotional, mental, and spiritual sources of disease and thus healing the whole person, illness is finally released from the physical body. Symptoms disappear and the disease is healed, but healed on more than dense body levels.

Medicine has until very recently denied the existence of anything but the body. It is now slowly opening to the idea that mind and body are connected, but only very slowly. When patriarchal medicine stole its basis from witches, midwives, healers, and shamans of the pre-inquisition, pre-Christian female past, it turned its back on the nonphysical totally and irrevocably. Women's healing - state of the art medicine in every culture before the male takeover - has always honored the body's nonphysical Medicine without the feminine psychic has become a cold and mechanical bodyshop of isolated human parts. Drugs with dangerous, noxious side-effects and too many unnecessary surgeries and amputations are modern medicine's invasive and mechanical answers to pain and illness.