by Abby Wynne
Also in the Made Easy series
The Akashic Records
Animal Communication
Astrology
Chakras
Connecting with the Angels
Connecting with the Fairies
Crystals
Discovering Your Past Lives
Feng Shui
Goddess Wisdom
Lucid Dreaming
Meditation
Mediumship
Mindfulness
NLP
Numerology
Qabalah
Reiki
Self-Hypnosis
Shamanism
Tantra
Tarot
First published and distributed in the United Kingdom by:
Hay House UK Ltd, Astley House, 33 Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3JQ
Tel: +44 (0)20 3675 2450; Fax: +44 (0)20 3675 2451
www.hayhouse.co.uk
Published and distributed in the United States of America by:
Hay House Inc., PO Box 5100, Carlsbad, CA 92018-5100
Tel: (1) 760 431 7695 or (800) 654 5126
Fax: (1) 760 431 6948 or (800) 650 5115
www.hayhouse.com
Published and distributed in Australia by:
Hay House Australia Ltd, 18/36 Ralph St, Alexandria NSW 2015
Tel: (61) 2 9669 4299; Fax: (61) 2 9669 4144
www.hayhouse.com.au
Published and distributed in India by:
Hay House Publishers India, Muskaan Complex, Plot No.3, B-2,
Vasant Kunj, New Delhi 110 070
Tel: (91) 11 4176 1620; Fax: (91) 11 4176 1630; www.hayhouse.co.in
Distributed in Canada by:
Raincoast Books, 2440 Viking Way, Richmond, B.C. V6V 1N2
Tel: (1) 604 448 7100; Fax: (1) 604 270 7161; www.raincoast.com
Text © Abby Wynne, 2015
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise be copied for public or private use, other than for ‘fair use’ as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews, without prior written permission of the publisher.
The information given in this book should not be treated as a substitute for professional medical advice; always consult a medical practitioner. Any use of information in this book is at the reader’s discretion and risk. Neither the author nor the publisher can be held responsible for any loss, claim or damage arising out of the use, or misuse, of the suggestions made, the failure to take medical advice or for any material on third-party websites.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book was previously published under the title Energy Healing (Hay House
Basics series); ISBN: 978-1-78180-475-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78817-254-7
eBook ISBN 978-1-78817-272-1
Interior illustrations © istockphoto.com
To my family for always being there for me, even if they didn’t know exactly where I was.
Contents
List of exercises
Introduction
PART I: What is energy healing?
Chapter 1: Intuition as a sixth sense
The definition of healing
What is energy?
What is healing energy and how does it work?
How can Energy Healing help me?
Different established Energy Healing modalities
Choosing a practitioner
What to expect during a formal healing session
My personal introduction to Energy Healing
Why I believe you can heal yourself without formal training
Chapter 2: Getting started
Be authentic in your work
Become congruent
How to use the exercises in this book
The mechanics of Energy Healing
Why people don’t heal
What is blocking your healing process?
The power of intention
The power of permission
The power of receiving
Healing can get worse before it gets better
Going into process
Look after yourself during healing
PART II: The principles of energy healing
Chapter 3: Centring
Creating a space of love
Reconnecting to your body
Listening for a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’
Connecting to your heart
Tuning in and disconnecting from the energy around you
Chapter 4: Grounding
Why do we need to ground ourselves?
Deeper grounding
Quick ways to ground yourself
Grounding yourself to shift a bad attitude
Where to next?
Chapter 5: Expanding
Drawing down the energy of healing
Working with different types of high-vibrational light
Connecting to a source of unconditional love and light
Working with gratitude as a healing energy
Sending love and light to friends and family
The healing ball of light
How do you feel?
PART III: Taking it further
Chapter 6: Creating more space for your Self
Getting ‘big’ can protect you from danger
Healing and your family system
Energy Healing for the office
Raising the vibration in your home
Energy Healing on a ‘needs’ basis
Chapter 7: Energy Healing as a spiritual practice
What is a spiritual practice?
We live in a community, not in isolation
Having a spiritual practice reminds us of who we are
How to create your own daily spiritual practice
Bringing all the pieces together
Clearing as a spiritual practice
Clearing around specific events or situations
Taking back your energies as a daily spiritual practice
Centring, grounding and expanding as a spiritual practice
Mindfulness and Energy Healing as a spiritual practice
Fire up your daily practice with intention
Other ideas for a mindful Energy Healing practice
Breathing as a spiritual practice
Who are you when you are your best, healed self?
Become responsible for your energy!
Resources
Asking for help
Choosing a therapy
Further reading
How I can help you
About the author
Join the Hay House Family
List of exercises
Remembering who you really are
Taking time out for healing
Setting your intention
Learning to give permission
Opening to receive Energy Healing
Being in a space of love
Becoming centred in your body
Listening for a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ (intuition reconnection)
Connecting with your heart centre
Creating a power bubble of protection
Grounding yourself with the help of a tree
Achieving deeper grounding
Grounding with the Earth
Grounding in the crystal cave
Heart-to-Earth grounding
Grounding intention for the mornings
Healing with high-vibrational energy
Connecting to unconditional love for healing
Practising gratitude
/> Sending love and light
Creating a healing ball of light
Focusing your awareness
Working with your energy to avoid comfort-eating
Healing your family system
Creating a healed space for your desk
Healing at the end of the working day
Raising the vibration of a room
Clearing your energy field
Clearing your energy field of a situation or group of people
Retrieving energy
Mindful relaxation
Using intention and healing as spiritual practices
Opening up to beauty
Introduction
I hung up the phone. I knew I had done the right thing. That I had stood up for myself. I was gentle and loving, and he had said sorry, but still I felt the hurt in my chest. I felt the pain in my heart, as if Michael had stuck a knife in, deep in, past the bone and right into the core of me. My ears heard the apology, my brain accepted the apology, but my heart, well, my heart hurt. There was no other way around it. And the hurt stayed there, for hours, days and weeks. And when the sharpness of it eventually wore off, I felt hollow inside, like a part of my heart had died, was switched off, or somehow had left me.’
We have all had experiences where we’ve been deeply hurt, and usually we understand why. We think about what happened and try to make sense of it. We may even forgive the person for hurting us, but sometimes we still feel the pain even months after the incident occurred. It’s as if we are ready to move on in our minds, but some part of us still holds on to the pain and doesn’t want to let it go. The pace of our world makes us put that part of us away so we can ‘move on’ with our lives. When we do that, we often leave part of ourselves behind, leaving us with emptiness inside. No matter how much we may want to, we cannot think our way out of this type of occurrence.
There is much more to the world than meets the eye. Humans, for example, can’t hear dog whistles but we know that dogs can. So logically we understand that sounds exist beyond our hearing range. Similarly, there are colours that our eyes are not able to see, textures so fine we cannot tell them apart and tastes that are way out of range of our taste buds. (Probably just as well!) We understand rationally that our physical body is limited and can only process information within a certain range. Therefore, logically, we can also say there is more information out there than we are able to process. To handle this we label everything, so we can categorize it, and we file it away under ‘known’ or ‘unknown’.
People are also not able to process everything that does fall into our range of perception. There’s a famous psychology experiment in which two teams pass a baseball to each other. One team wears white shirts, the other black. You have to count the number of times the white team passes the ball to each other. As you focus and concentrate on the white team, you don’t see that a man in a gorilla suit comes in, runs around the players, waves and then leaves. Because you are so focused on counting passes, your brain doesn’t notice the gorilla at all. Focused awareness. What you focus on most of the time is what you are aware of. So we actually miss out on a lot of things that are going on!
We can choose what we want to experience, and we can also fine-tune our concentration to block out what we don’t want to experience, just like shutting down that part of us that is in emotional pain. We can block unpleasant feelings or sensations, or the knowingness in ourselves that something is wrong. We learn to ignore things that don’t make sense to our brains, like the man inside the gorilla suit, or the pain in our heart that remains months after a break-up.
Sometimes though, we can’t ignore these things because they grow too big, too painful. They take over, forcing us to pay them attention. And when we do, that’s when the healing begins.
Chapter 1
Intuition as a sixth sense
‘We were house hunting. We saw so many places! Some of them felt great, but there was one in particular, that felt, well, I don’t know how to explain it. Like something bad had happened there. Darkness, nastiness, I didn’t understand it. I just knew that I couldn’t live there, that something must have happened there that was terrible. I could almost taste it.’
Have you ever had a feeling that something happened in a place before you got there? That the energy of it lingered on long after the incident? Like being invited to your friend’s house for dinner, arriving at the door, and even though they greet you with a warm welcome, it feels as if they’ve just been fighting, and that you have walked into an argument that was quickly ended? Or someone telling you they are feeling ‘fine’ when you can sense that something is wrong, and they are not fine? This happens when you use your senses to pick up the information behind the scenes, the information that is only accessible by your intuition. As you allow yourself to experience these occurrences, the more open you become to them and the sharper your intuition will be. As you become more intuitive, you will find yourself ‘reading’ the information that is all around you, information that cannot be processed by your logical brain.
‘I was upset to be called in to see my manager. I immediately felt that I had done something wrong, and I became nervous. As it got closer to the time of the meeting, I felt a knot in my stomach, and I began to tremble. I was afraid I was going to get fired. I’m usually afraid I’m going to get fired… Anyway, I went to his office and stood outside the door. I cleared my mind, preparing for whatever I was going to meet. A wave of peace came over me. I suddenly felt that everything was going to be OK. The knot in my stomach loosened. I knocked and entered, and there he was with a big smile on his face, congratulating me for a job well done.’
When we read information, our brain puts our own explanation on to it, and sometimes we get it wrong. If we have fears or worries, we can put these in the way and miss what is actually going on. Being worried about job security is a fear that some of us hold deeply, and it’s very understandable. In the example above, Shirley was connecting with her fears about job security instead of connecting with her intuition. Once she was able to clear her mind of her own thoughts, she could connect with what was really there, which was, in fact, something quite the opposite of what she had imagined.
‘I was drifting off to sleep, it had been a long day, and I was feeling good. Images of what had happened during the day floated through my mind’s eye, as I relaxed. Then completely out of context, I saw an image of my dad. I felt like something was wrong, and I woke up with a jolt. I picked up my phone and there was a text from my mum: “Come quickly, dad’s not well.”’
Sometimes we are like antennae. When we are relaxed and have no agenda for our thoughts we let go of our logical mind, and of our labels, and we tune in to the energies that are around us and experience them for what they are. When this happens, we can learn something we didn’t know before we found out about it with our brain.
Maybe you can relate to some of these examples – where things don’t make logical sense, but where we get a feeling about something, and we are proven correct even though we do not have a way to explain it. These things happen to everyone, all the time, like knowing your mother is about to phone you before she does, or having a feeling you’re going to bump into someone on a particular day, and you do.
We can remain shut down to our intuition, or we can open up and experience the synchronicity of life. We can talk about it, learn about it, work with it and flow with it. This is what Energy Healing is about – acknowledging what is going on right now all around us, inside us and outside of us, even if we don’t have a logical explanation for it. Healing is about recognizing what is, and meeting it as it is, instead of using our thoughts to turn it into something else. When we learn to release our thoughts about it and allow ourselves to feel it and accept it, we enable it to move past us, and allow it to change us. We are enriched by the experience of it, and we become better people because of it.
The definition of healing
I have many clients in my healing room opening
their sessions with ‘This may sound weird but…’ and I agree it does sound weird, but the true definition of the word ‘weird’, is supernatural, not logical. In all of our richness, our beauty, our pain, our madness, we are of the earth and yet we are psychic, multidimensional, multilayered, complex beings of light. You may have felt this. A big expanse of freedom, happiness, light and love, when all in the world is good and everything is beautiful.
Most often though, you have not felt this because we hide our weirdness so that we fit into our culture. We wear a mask, a costume, a smile and go into the world trying to please people; to be good, to work hard, to contribute as is expected of us. We shrink from our full capacity. We disconnect from our weirdness, from our intuition, from our pain and sadly, from our pleasure too. We become less than we actually are, and we go into survival mode.
When I tell my clients that actually it’s not weird, crazy or rare but common, and many, many people feel this way, that it’s actually very normal, they relax. They feel seen, heard and accepted and gradually safe and able to let go of the mask. They open up and expand, and then they begin to remember who they really are.
* * *
Exercise: remembering who you really are
Breathe. Ask yourself this question – who am I?
Close your eyes and focus on your breath, on your breathing.
Feel your body slowing down as you breathe, consciously slow down your breath and become more aware of your body.
You can hear your heartbeat – are you your heartbeat?
What are your thoughts doing?
Can you slow down your mind so that you can be here, with yourself, in the room right now?
Ask yourself – am I my thoughts?
Who am I?
Just be with this question, and if you can, visualize your masks, your protections from life around you.
Are they you?
Do you recognize yourself without them?
Does it feel safe to do this? What would it be like to allow them to fall away?
Breathe. Tell yourself ‘It’s OK. I am safe.’