Energy healing: honoring the initiation

I had a dream last night about one of the most significant teachers in my life, who has been a pioneer in the field of energy healing. All I remember of the dream is that my teacher was very close, and telling me that I should always honor and love myself, because I am doing worthy work in the world.

It was one of those dreams that was very vivid and where I bolted up in bed, and the clock read 1:11, or 2:22, or 3:33, or 4:44.

Let’s go back in time to 1992.

I had gone on a ski vacation in some absurdly cold resort in Canada.

En route, my then-girlfriend and I stopped in Montreal, at a famous church where hundreds of paralytics had prayed, relinquished their crutches, and, the story goes, gotten up and walked. There is a room in the back – it’s called Saint Joseph’s Oratory of Mount Royal – where you can see thousands of crutches. Pope John Paul II apparently declared the miracles to be real.

I stood in that room, inside the church, and asked to be shown a miracle. At the time, I didn’t believe in much of anything. I was working as a Wall Street lawyer, in the Corporate Department of Davis Polk & Wardwell. Sleep deprivation was taking its toll, and I was finding my way in first year of law practice. I stood in St. Joseph’s Oratory and asked to be shown what had moved all these people to give up their crutches and arise whole.

Many had cried in that room, apprehending Spirit, but my tears were that I could not feel.

From the church I headed to a bookstore, still questioning that I had asked a question to the cosmos and returned with emptiness. This wasn’t the Great Emptiness of nirvana, but a more shallow one, a feeling that nothing was resolved; and even then I was hungry and ready to depart for lunch; when all of this sudden, this book, Hands of Light by Barbara Ann Brennan, literally fell off the bookshelf into my hands.

I was immediately captivated by the detailed pictorial representations of what Barbara saw in people’s energy fields. The miracles and healings that were spoken of in religious traditions were represented in her system of thought, which blended psychotherapy, an active form of therapeutic work called Core Energetics, Barbara’s personal mystical experiences with her “spirit guides” and angels, invocation of scriptural traditions about human spiritual centers (such as “chakras” or wheels of energy), a bit of anatomy and physiology, and, interpretations of how disease manifested as information in what she called the Human Energy Field (or HEF – the acronym has a more scientific resonance than “aura”).

I sensed that this was some kind of missing link between science and religion, between objective and subjective reality, between psychotherapy and spirituality, between medicine and indigenous systems of knowing – a revolutionary discovery to be fanned and disseminated and commented upon and mined — and, as well for me, a missing link between the more analytical side of being and the emotional, intuitive side that was waiting to be birthed. Already, I had gone “on pilgrimage,” as it were, from law school to business school to a clerkship with a federal judge, to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in a quest to find something that would balance the intensely logical (and one-sided) experience of my judicial clerkship, which was a foray (as I perceived it) into mind without sufficient acknowledgement of the heart.

This discovery of the power of our “hands of light” fueled a new dimension to this quest.

(I still have dreams about my clerkship – the “Temple of Justice” (as I named it in the collection of stories that got me accepted to the Workshop) apparently is not just an experience on my CV and boon from making law review; it is an allegory, an archetypical moment, a defining stage along the journey. It is one of Dante’s circles but not of hell, quite – another realm of consciousness, or perhaps in my recurring dream, an alternate reality version of Planet Vulcan. But of course you can walk into the federal court in New York and it is just 3D that, too.)

I went to one of Barbara’s introductory lectures. What she did astonished me. She read people from the audience so profoundly and accurately and I had never seen anyone pull information from the ethers, as it seemed – but even more transformatively, she seemed able to teach others how to deploy the gift within themselves that mirrored the amazing abilities she had. At the break, I wandered into the wrong side room, and somehow stood in front of her (as in the dream). She was relaxing and recuperating, and so I respected her space and did not engage her with the thousand questions that went through my analytical mind – but something was transmitted, and there was a feeling of closeness and connection.

I ended up studying with Barbara for the next four years in her energy healing program.

That was the pivot point of my career.

From that, flowed teaching of healthcare law and bioethics; the books on law, medicine and healing; the invitation to a faculty position at Harvard Medical School and much more.

Today, when I say “health care lawyer,” many people say “huh?” or wonder whether it has something to do with insurance or with suing people for malpractice.

The answer is something far richer and deeper. I explain that health care law essentially involves legal work for those in the healthcare industry – those these days I say “health and wellness” as wellness, wholeness, and healing are broader than medical care, and my work moves from surgery centers and mobile medical apps to integrative care centers and individual practitioners of the healing arts. But at the core of this work is my encounter with the crutches in the back of that church; the book that fell into my hands; and the transformational four years at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, which ignited a passion for seeing and feeling and sensing in a way I had never known, but which somehow seemed to pull back the curtain of existence, and take me into a much deeper and more multidimensional awareness that somehow links every moment with the divine.

As healthcare moves increasingly from brick-and-mortar to virtual, mobile, online, and soon, wearable technology, we dwell at this interface of accelerating scientific progress and expanding consciousness. This is the place where laws still shape the rules of healing, and where practicing law is a doorway into integrating multisensory and multimodal experience into professional as well as personal life.