Energy Healing Methods

A deeper dive

Many people new to energy healing want to know more about the healing methods that I practice, so I have provided more full descriptions here as well as links to other resources. The better we understand subtle energies that surround and interpenetrate us, the more empowered we become to live our best lives without so much interference and difficulty.

Core Shamanism

Michael Harner, PhD, an American anthropologist who studied indigenous tribes throughout the world starting in the 1950s, began to teach American students what he called Core Shamanism—the beliefs and healing methods that he found similar amongst these indigenous peoples of the world (https://www.shamanism.org/). The term Indigenous peoples is typically used to describe those cultural groups who are still in contact with their traditional ways of living and understanding the world. These ways are characterized by living in harmony with nature and living in collectivistic or tribal societies. They see everything in the world as alive and interpenetrated with vital life force energy and they have relationships with all the Middle World Spirits of the Animals, the Plants, the Rocks, the Earth, the Wind, the Fire, the Water, the Ancestors, as well as the Upper World Spirits that we know of as angels, Ascended Masters, and deities. The term Shaman is borrowed from the Tungus tribe in Siberia and is often interpreted as “One who sees in the dark” or “One who heals from the Heart”.

Many people have a mistaken belief that these practices are occultic, satanic, or demonic. This is a hold over view that originated during the centuries of domination by organized religions in which the sentiment was, "convert or die". Any indigenous practices that carried power and united the original peoples of a place to stand up against the invaders were demonized, and the penalty was often death. The Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials are well known examples of these violent methods that dominated society with fear rather than the love taught by the originators of these religions. The energy healing methods that I have been taught are loving, gentle, life-giving, and the results bring about freedom, joy, and vibrant health. These methods release people from the constrictions of fear, lies, trauma, and shame; therefore, they are obviously inspired and energized by Divine Love, Light, and Truth.

Extraction Explained More Fully

Simply put, extraction is the art of removing energies that are causing harm. These harmful energies can impact your beliefs, self esteem, identity, relationships, and health.

Once they are extracted, then your life force can flow freely and you can connect to your True Self more easily. You can see the Truth of a given situation or person and how you ought to respond. You can live with more authenticity and joy.

There are many common forms of energies that don’t belong.

Criticism and rejection: Many people have negative beliefs and emotions that are still alive in their energy fields that had been sent by early caregivers, coaches, teachers, school kids, and society. I knew a man whose father told him that he would never amount to anything. This man’s life was affected in all areas by this energy that became more than just words spoken by his father, it acted like a curse holding him back from success, happiness, and abundance.

Inherited beliefs. The traumas and beliefs of our ancestors that were still active in their lives while on their deathbed can influence the descendants through the Ancestral Field. Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D., discovered that the grandchildren of holocaust survivors had genetic markers of PTSD despite the fact that they had never experienced trauma themselves (https://onbeing.org/programs/rachel-yehuda-how-trauma-and-resilience-cross-generations-nov2017/.) In addition, we absorb the fears and beliefs of our ancestors through listening to family members while we are growing up. A mother’s repetitive thoughts and feelings will get absorbed into the child while her baby is developing within her . For example, my own mother had an intense fear of being fat, even though she weighed around 100 pounds. As I was developing in her womb, she thought and felt multiple times a day, “I am fat.” And the result was that I was born feeling fat and fearing that no one would love me if I'm fat, despite the fact the I was never fat either.

Past life Karma. One interpretation of Karma from the Joseph Communications books (https://thejosephcommunications.co.uk) are the unresolved issues from our past lives. When our souls enter this earth plane and connect to our bodies, our past unresolved experiences settle around us like a woven tapestry, restricting our ability to live freely and coloring the way we perceive ourselves in relation to our loved ones and environment. Past-life Karma can inhibit us from living the lives we had planned before we incarnated. Resolving and clearing these energies can allow us to get back on our life path.

Societal and cultural beliefs: There is a Collective Field of Humanity that is filled with all the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and experiences from all the people who have ever lived, and it is mostly set to negative at this time. It affects us until we deliberately do something to reduce its impact on us (https://www.youtube.com/@TheJosephCommunications). Called pernicious programming by David Grand (Brainspotting, https://brainspotting.com), societal and cultural beliefs can act like restricting energies that impact a person’s freedom and happiness. A couple of examples still operating in the United States are “women must be thin and beautiful to be loveable” and “men who cry are sissies and should be shamed”. These can be treated as fields of energy and information and can be dismissed from your energy field.

Curse unraveling: Professional curses; ill wishes, rejection, and hatred sent by others; and self rejection can restrict people in profound ways. My teacher, Betsy Bergstrom (https://www.spirit-wise.com), has developed an effective way to remove these energies. Many people will say, “I'm not affected by curses because I don’t believe them” and Betsy Bergstrom responds, “Well, our ancestors did.” She teaches that cursing was the common way of doing business for most of our ancestors. For example, if they wanted their business rivals to fail, they could hire someone to curse the rivals. We may think that these curses should have dissipated upon the death of the cursed person or family. However, oftentimes part of the curse would have included phrases like, “I curse them until the 10th generation” or “forever and always”, and then these energies land on the descendants and get passed along generation after generation.

Curses can also take the form of words spoken with power even when the speaker isn’t aware of the power imbuing their speech. For example, Betsy tells the story of a woman who had applied for the role of supervisor that had become vacant. When the job was given to a co-worker, she was heard to say, “No one will get a leg up on me.” And very soon after, the co-worker fell down the stairs and broke his leg. A second person was given the supervisor role and then he seriously injured his leg. After that, no one else wanted to get promoted and risk getting injured so she was given the supervisor's position.

We can even curse ourselves. For example, a person may experience herself as blocked from love, and when we look into her energy field, we discover that after that heartbreak in high school, she said, “I will never let myself love again.” This decision acts like a curse, restricting the heart and her ability to love.

Once the curse energies have been removed, then the flow of Life can flow again. Good luck can be restored. Love can be experienced again. Creativity and success are possible.

Heart-centered compassionate depossession: Developed and taught by Betsy Bergstrom, Compassionate depossession is a sacred and beautiful art of helping disembodied souls who are stuck on this side of the Veil to transition to the other side. The most common beings that we find attached to our embodied clients are ancestors or family members, many of whom died before they were ready and stayed on this side with the intention to help their families or try to finish unfinished business. Other times, we find humans who were afraid that they might end up in the “bad place” or who feel too much shame to do a life review and so they did not go with the Beings of Light who came to help them cross over. One of the consequences of the presence of disembodied souls with the embodied human is that their emotional and physical state at the time of their death continues to emanate from them. Those who are embodied can feel these emanations which can result in (a) symptoms that have no medical cause, (b) beliefs and feelings that don’t make sense but feel real, and/or (c) sensing a voice of disapproval when engaging in actions that aren't in alignment with that disembodied soul. In an interview with Christina Pratt, Betsy discusses her healing methods. You can listen to it here: https://whyshamanismnow.com/guests/bergstrom-betsy/

A story that Michael Harner shares in his book, Cave and cosmos: Shamanic encounters with another reality, is about a man who suddenly started behaving differently after returning home from a lengthy stay in the hospital. He started drinking alcohol, eating foods he didn’t used to like, and being aggressive to his family. His wife almost left him and as a last resort, he contacted Harner for help. Harner discovered that a soul whose body had died in the hospital didn’t cross over but instead had found this man who was unconscious at the time. The presence of this man’s spirit had a profound impact on the living man but once the soul had crossed over, the living man recovered his former peaceful, sober self.

Empowerment Explained More Fully

Once harmful energies are removed, then there is the possibility for fresh energies to pour in from Source as well as to arise from your own Soul to empower you to create a life worth living—with new beliefs, thoughts, perceptions, and abilities.

Here are a few simple examples of Empowerment that you can do.

--Invite Golden Angelic Light to flow into you and fill every cell of your body and every aspect of your being.

--You can invite the frequency of joy or peace to surround you.

--You can invite Golden White Divine Light to fill you up and wash away the fatigue and stress of your day.

--You can connect to your True Self via your heart center and allow your True Self to expand more fully within you.

Compassionate spirit allies: We are not alone. There are many benevolent Beings of Light who want to help us, such as angels, deities, saints, beloved ancestors, Ascended Masters, and spirits of nature (like power animals and sacred plants who offer their medicines). We can attune to these loving and highly evolved beings, and they will offer love, guidance, protection, and wisdom. One of their purposes in our lives is to guide us remember our True Selves so that we can live our Soul’s purpose for this lifetime.

Soul retrieval: This is an ancient practice of recovering parts of your Self that have split off during your childhood during experiences of trauma, upset, shock, unsafety, or shame. Other aspects of Soul energy can be locked away because of vows taken in this or other lifetimes. For example, if you've had past lives as a member of a religious order, you may have taken vows of poverty and servitude. Or you may have pledged your heart, mind, life, and soul to a deity or religion that you no longer believe in. These soul parts carry a lot of life force energy and may also contain creative abilities that the current version of yourself does not have access to. When your current self feels safer after the Extraction of harmful energies and release of old vows, then we can retrieve the lost soul parts and offer them healing or resolution of the trauma that created them. Then they can integrate back into your current self, restoring lost abilities and soul energy. When I experienced my first soul retrieval, a 5-year-old soul part, I found myself singing and dancing and feeling joy as if I were a happy child again. This part of me was rescued from the there-and-then of the trauma and was brought forward into the here-and-now so that she could find safety, reconnect to life, and discover trust and love again. Soul Retrieval overlaps with parts work and inner child healing work, which I incorporate into soul retrieval.

Power animal retrieval: Also known as totem animal retrieval, this is an ancient practice of connecting to elevated and benevolent Spirits of Nature who offer support for our embodied journeys on this earth. These power animals offer relationship, protection, sacred medicine, guidance, and their unique qualities.

Attunement Explained More Fully

Environments: We are affected by the energies of people, places, and ambient sounds. You may have experienced this yourself when you are in the "bad" part of a city where violence and poverty are common. You might have felt agitated, unsafe, or unwell. Compare that to sitting in a cathedral where people go to be contemplative and prayerful. Or sitting in a beautiful place in nature. The more aware we become of how we feel in different environments, then we can be more deliberate about creating a harmonious and enriching environment to live and work in.

Fields of energy and information: The collective field of humanity is the repository of all the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of everyone who has ever lived (this idea has been described extensively by Carl Jung, Rupert Sheldrake PhD, the HeartMath Institute, and in the Joseph Communications books). We are simultaneously affected by the Field and are also contributing to it by our moment to moment intentions, thoughts, feelings, and projections. What are we feeding the field? And what are we tuning in to? Think about how you feel after a rousing debate about politics. Or conversely, how you feel after listening to a conversation between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu (see The Book of Joy). A couple of years ago I experienced a fascinating example of this. For a few days in a row, I noticed that when I sat down quietly to write or meditate, I had a strong urge to bang my head against the table and flap my arms about. I wondered, what on earth was going on? After reflecting on the previous 3 weeks, I realized that I had been studying autism and was steeped in the field of energy and information of those who suffer from autism. Once I cleared that field from around me, I felt my usual sense of peace and calm.

Elevated vibrations: One method of attunement is to deliberately invite in and resonate with elevated vibrations such as joy, love, peace, and compassion. Imagine tuning into the spiritual version of a music station that plays the kind of music that uplifts your spirit rather than music that depresses or agitates you. When you attune to Compassionate Beings of Light, then you can more easily develop those qualities that they have and receive direct guidance and advice from them. For example, if you want to expand your healing abilities, you might decide to attune to the Master Healer Jesus or to Archangel Raphael. Or if you need more confidence, you can attune to the Spirit of Lion and feel his power and grace. Or if you want to feel grounded and expanded at the same time, you might attune to the Redwood Tree.

Your own True Self: The most important being to attune to is your own True Self. This is the aspect of yourself that exists beyond the personality self that you are this lifetime. This has been referred to as your Higher Self, your Oversoul, the truth of who you really are, or your immortal soul. Some believe that your True Self decided to incarnate by pouring a portion of itself into your embodied self. Your True Self can guide you and offers love and support throughout your lifetime. Your True Self had ideas and plans for this lifetime that you might not remember. There are so many stories told by people who had near death experiences in which they were told to go back because they hadn't done what they came here to do (see websites like https://www.iands.org/). And they were reminded of these plans and returned to fulfill them.