Case Study: Healing by Draining Energy

Monday, October 1st, 2012

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I always think of draining someone’s energy as an attack, as something a malicious spirit or gross-feeling person does. Turns out, it’s important for healing techniques, too.

I recently did a healing session for a completely non-magickal friend. Normal healing techniques: Provide energy in a signature designed to aid her recovery, focused on the injured tissue. But she’d never even worked with energy, and the healing energy overloaded her.

Half an hour after the session, she became lightheaded and nauseous, experienced vertigo, and her face started to tingle. The tingle reminded me of the feeling of energy, and the lightheadedness made me think of grounding. I connected to her, and found the healing energy had totally overflowed the source of the healing (in her head), and was overflowing into her head and torso, overwhelming her.

First, the long-term fix: I connected to the ethereal software driving the healing, and had it cut its effect in half. (Later, I added some instructions to modulate the amount of energy based on how much the person is absorbing).

Then, the short-term fix: I drained the healing energy from her head, stomach, and face. Each time, I just opened connections between her and me, let the energy flow from her to me. (Energy flows from high-pressure to low-pressure, so I didn’t have to do anything beyond opening the connection). Then I released the energy from my body so I could drain more from hers. The amount of energy was noticeable but not troublesome to me. I only stopped when I felt the energy stop flowing through my draining connection.

She felt noticeably better within seconds, and all the way better in a few minutes. The shift was dramatic, and noticeable just from watching her.

And so, I’ll add draining-for-grounding to my list of healing techniques.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Case Study: Energy for Happiness

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

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I want to share another new technique I’m excited about. Like heating myself, this simply worked my first try, and it’s pretty useful.

This technique makes me happy. Literally, that’s what it does: I was feeling kind of down for a few days, so I used magick to make myself happy. I can’t teach you the technique because it involves a lot of things we haven’t discussed yet, but I can tell you the gist of it, and the results.

The Details

I was in a funk for a few days. Not a serious depression, but definitely going in that direction: I was unhappy for no particular reason, didn’t want to work, just stayed home most of the time. And as you know, thinking, “I’m going to be happy now” doesn’t help.

I was thinking about the mental posture work I was doing: I’d connect to areas of my mind, adjust their state, then get comfortable holding my mind in that new state. Could I do something similar to the parts of my mind causing the depression, to put them into a new state?

It turns out, you can. And I did. I connected to those areas causing the depression and turned off that mental process (using the same mental muscles I’d been using to learn the mental postures). I felt non-unhappy within seconds. I was surprised that I didn’t actually feel happy, but it makes sense: I’d only disabled the things causing the unhappiness, but hadn’t yet enabled anything to actually cause happiness.

So I asked those mental muscles to put those areas into a happy state, and it worked again. I got cheerful, but that wasn’t all. I’d only expected to be more cheerful as I thought the same thoughts, but instead, my whole perspective changed. I focused on different things (opportunities and potential connections to new friends, rather than my worries from before). And when I thought about the same events, I interpreted them differently — the friend who cancelled lunch isn’t avoiding me, she’s just busy and needs support. I wasn’t thinking or trying to change my perspective like this, it just happened on its own, but it was dramatic, and reminded me of how some people describe their first days on antidepressants.

An hour later, I’d become accustomed to the new happy state. In my notes, I describe myself as “still non-unhappy, a bit happy even,” but not “actively happy.” So I tested it: I turned off the effect, and within seconds, my funk started to return. Then I quickly turned the effect back on, and felt happy again. (By the way, this is how they verify that psychiatric drugs are working when they can’t do a proper placebo control: They verify that the patient’s mood goes up and down as they administer or remove the treatment.)

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Heating My Body with Energy

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

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You’ve probably heard that magickal energy can make your hands feel warm. Maybe you’ve even experienced it yourself. I certainly have. But I’ve only recently had success heating my whole body on a cold day.  I’m pretty excited about it, and I want to tell you what happened, and why it’s significant.

Living in San Francisco, I walk a lot. One evening, was meeting some friends about a half-hour away, and left my jacket behind because it had been warm during the day. Well, the evening was cold, and I would have gone back from a coat, except I got a psychic intuition that I should just keep going. This seemed like a good chance to test that intuition — if it was wrong, I’d be a little cold, but nothing serious — so I decided to go with it.

A few blocks later, I was starting to get cold, but got another intuition to keep going. “Guess psychic needs some more work,” I thought, then decided to see if I could do something about the temperature. I’d just awakened new mental muscles for energy healing and other effects in the body. Most of the time, it takes a few tries and some training before I learn to use new mental muscles well enough to get good results. But sometimes, particularly when you’ve awakened all the mental muscles for certain task, they simply know how to do things. And this day, I got lucky.

I engaged all my mental muscles (new and old) for working with the body, and asked them to increase my body temperature. I don’t recall the exact phrasing, but as long as your intent is clear, exact phrasing usually doesn’t matter with mental muscles. I’d tried this a year ago and gotten little more than a tingling in my hands. So, I kept walking, expecting nothing, still thinking my psychic intuitions were just off. (I mention that because there’s an idea that magick only works if you expect it to work, which is inaccurate in my experience.)

Within a few minutes, my torso and arms felt warmer. Nothing big, but clear and noticeable, and enough to get me exploring. I asked the mental muscles to add my hands to the effect, and it worked. Then I asked them to sink the new signature into the deeper layers, past energy and closer to cells. This causes a larger, faster result in energy healing, and it worked here, too: I changed from simply not feeling as cold to actually feeling warm, and my hands felt warm when I touched them to my stomach and face.

I kept this up for the remaining 20 minutes of the walk, then the entire 30 minutes walking home. Both times, by the end of it, my arms were feeling uncomfortably hot, like I wanted to roll up my sleeves. I’ve done the effect a few times since then, and I can regulate it so I’m at a comfortable temperature, but it was just so neat getting such a large result that I wanted to keep feeling the excessive heat and enjoy my success at magick more than I wanted my arms to be physically comfortable.

Why I’m Excited

Eliminating the need for a coat is much less useful than eliminating pain. So why does this result excite me more than many of the healing sessions I’ve written about?

First, it was a clear, near-instant result, much more obvious than most healing techniques. And it’s easier for me to say it’s not placebo — I’ve been hypnotized to make my arm feel warm, and it was nowhere near as noticeable as this. Like most of you, I occasionally doubt my magick, and this result is really nice for reassuring myself. Also, it’s a nice confirmation that my psychic intuitions are working.

Second, the effect hardly required any energy. The point wasn’t to swamp my body with magick energy. Instead, the point was to shift the signature of my cells, presumably to trigger them to burn more glucose and generate more energy. This is perfectly in line with what I would expect from my model of healing: The significant part of the healing result comes from changing the signature, not from supplying lots of magickal energy. So it’s a nice confirmation of that model. The way the effect intensified when I sunk the signature into the deeper layers (closer to cells) is also perfectly in line with that model.

And third, because the effect just worked. It didn’t take a month of debugging. I know that developing a technique through debugging is a sign that you’re developing as a mage, but sometimes, it’s just exciting to have a quick, easy win with a new effect that works the first time you try it.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Case Study: Distance Energy Healing for a Spine

Friday, June 15th, 2012

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On Tuesday, I told you how excited I am about two successful distance healing sessions, and gave you Lisa’s report on her knee. Today, I want to share her report the other healing — a spinal injury.

Prior to Healing Session

Lisa injured her back lifting an overweight patient (she’s a nurse, remember), and waited 3 days before asking me to heal her, hoping it would get better with rest. While her pain did change throughout the day — worse when she woke up, less bad after stretching and moving — the pain levels were the same from day to day. Here’s her report of waking up on the third day:

I woke up with sharp, pulsing pains radiating down the anterior, lateral and posterior sides of my left leg and experienced simultaneously a deep, constant pain in my left buttock which radiated to my groin. I was lying on my left side and was unable to roll over to the right. My left hip and thigh wouldn’t flex. With effort, I could wiggle the toes on my left foot; so I grabbed my left knee and threw my left leg over the right and rolled out of bed. I was nauseated from the pain. I hobbled to the kitchen, took two Aleve and one Ibuprofen and applied an ice pack to my lower back for 30 minutes.   I had to go to work. I couldn’t call in sick… we have to call in 3 hours before our shift starts. It was already too late to call in. I felt better after icing my back; I hoped I prevented the muscles from going into a spasm. But when I bent down to pull on my pants, I screamed. I had to lie down on the bed and put my legs up in the air.  It took four tries to get my pants on.

After stretching and getting moving, the pain decreased, as it had on each day since the injury. She went into work, was very careful about lifting and posture that day, then had me heal her when she got home.

Note: I’ve lightly edited Lisa’s reports for readability, but no content changes.

24 Hours After Healing

I worked with Lisa before she went to bed. Here’s her report of her condition the next morning:

Pain in the left buttock was typically an 8/10, but this morning it was a 5/10.  Range of motion increased, too. I was able to put my pants on while standing up, with a minimum of screaming. Hooray! Shooting pains still occurred down the left leg, three sides, but not as frequently. In order to get into the car I still had to pick up my left leg and place it inside, but I was no longer nauseated or sweaty. I continued taking 2 Aleve each morning, and one at night, and applying ice 30 minutes on followed by heat for 20 minutes while awake.

The last sentence is a great example of what I typically recommend: Continue doing your normal treatments, such as painkillers and ice, even after the session. The more things you can do to help yourself, the better.

The Next 24 Hours

Here’s Lisa’s report on the second day following the session:

Pain down the lateral and posterior sides of my left leg decreased in intensity. Pain on the anterior side still the same.  I was able to touch my toes with a 5/10-7/10 pain.  Before, I couldn’t roll over, but now, with conscious direction of my muscles, I can roll from laying on my back to my right side (still experiencing 8/10 pain while doing so, but could now roll over without using my hands to pull my left leg across my body).

Summary

After experiencing no change in her condition for the 3 days prior to healing, Lisa experienced a slow but steady improvement following the session, which has continued in the weeks since then. We’re pretty happy with the results.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Case Study: Distance Energy Healing for a Knee

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

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Even after I had experience with in-person energy healing, I had trouble doing energy healing at distance. There’s a bunch of extra steps to doing it at distance, and I couldn’t handle them all while also driving the technique. Healers who channel ethereal software don’t have this problem — the software handles those details — but if you want to do techniques beyond what your ethereal software can handle, distance work is fairly complicated.

So I’m excited with some recent results from working with Lisa’s knee and back at distance. Both worked well from halfway across the country*. I’m going to tell you about her knee today, and her back later.

*At this range, distance shouldn’t matter anymore, so the techniques should generalize to work at any distance. Also, I want to mention: I’m not cherry-picking the 2 best results from a dozen failures. These are the only 2 distance sessions I’ve tried in the past several months.

The technique is essentially the same as what I used on my own knee while walking, using more complex connections to handle the distance. The key is that, rather than building energy in my own body and trying to send it, I instead adjusted the energy her own body produces. This eliminated a lot of the loss of power I’d experienced in previous attempts, and seems to be working well, several weeks after the session.

Here’s Lisa’s report on her injury and the post-healing improvements, in her own words (lightly edited for readability):

As an RN, I work 12.5-hour shifts on my feet, walking on concrete most of the time. One Saturday, I tweaked my right knee at work and by the time I got home, my knee was warm, slightly swollen and ached. I iced it for 20 minutes, took 2 Aleve and went to bed with my knee wrapped in an ice pack. Normally, that remedy effectively reduces the pain. Not this time. The pain was much worse in the morning.

Mike has worked on my knee before with great results, so I called and asked him to do a healing. He performed a healing session in the evening after I got off work, and almost immediately my pain dropped from an 8/10 to a 3/10. I iced my knee per usual and went to bed.

The next morning I was surprised that the aching was nearly gone. I had good movement forward and backward, and I could do a partial squat without pain. My knee was still very sensitive to any movements that put a rotational stress on the joint or activities like jogging, so I avoided those.

It has been two weeks since Mike performed the healing and I have regained a greater range of pain free movement. I can now get into a full squat for a short period of time and jog a short distance without the fear of reinjuring my knee. Even with this increased activity, my pain rarely exceeds a 3/10, and when it does, I can treat it with ice and aleve.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Case Study: Energy Healing for My Knee (April 2012)

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

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Two weeks ago, I didn’t see a curb, and dropped an extra 4-6 inches onto a straight knee. The next day, that knee was sore as I walked. (3/10 on the pain scale). After a healing technique, the pain stopped within seconds.

The result was useful but not genuinely amazing. But the speed and thoroughness of results has me excited: In the past, I’ve had to sit down, keep the knee stationary, then rest for 5-10 minutes while the healing energy set in before I’d feel better. This time, using a new technique, I got instant results while I walked. And the new approach should apply to other healing techniques too, which is particularly exciting.

The Results

While walking 4 blocks from my apartment to the train station, my knee started hurting. The pain was continuous as I walked, but worse when I had weight on the knee. It was bearable but unpleasant, and would have caused me to cut out some activities that day. It showed no signs of stopping, either while I was considering how much walking I had planed that day, or while I was preparing for the healing session.

I did the healing technique in about a minute, as I walked another half-block. I’ll go into the details in the next section.

Within a few seconds of completing the healing technique, the pain stopped — from a 3/10 to a 0/10. If my foot landed at an odd angle as I stepped, there was a minor twinge (2/10) for a split-second, but it felt more like an awareness that my knee was weak than a serious ache. And as long as I stepped normally, with my foot pointing straight ahead, there was zero pain.

I consider this twinge a feature, not a bug: It’s important to get feedback from your body about how it’s weak, and I avoid energy intended to numb because, if it works, it can lead the person to injure themselves worse. I was glad for the feedback on how to step properly. Interestingly, before the healing technique, when my knee was continuously sore, I didn’t notice anything different about different ways of stepping — it all felt uniformly bad.

I walked at my normal pace, paying attention to the orientation of my foot, for another two blocks to the train station, then down two flights of stairs, still without pain. After sitting for the 20-minute train ride, the twinges from stepping at an odd angle had stopped, and I walked another mile without any pain.

In the two weeks since this happened, I’ve walked 3-5 miles a day without pain (normal for me), and gone dancing twice for 3 hours each, again without pain. No idea how long the pain would have lasted without the healing technique, but it stopped abruptly and didn’t come back. I’ll call that a success.

The New Technique

Note: This healing technique is at the edge of what I can do, so I don’t have all the building blocks written up yet. Take this description as an example of advanced direct magick, rather than a how-to guide.

I connected to my knee and checked the signatures of my muscles, tendons, ligaments and cartilage. Most of the signatures looked normal, but the cartilage looked inflamed.

I set up a network of connections throughout the cartilage. If you don’t do this, you’ll wind up applying the healing energy only to one small area of the injury, and the other parts will continue hurting.

Then I figured out the right signature for the healing technique. This is complex, and probably requires its own series, but after looking at enough healthy and injured tissue, it just becomes obvious. Note that this step is not required if you’re using ethereal software, but I wanted to use a technique that my ethereal software doesn’t know, so I had to do a few extra steps.

I created a small pool of energy in that healing signature. This is different than building up energy, because (1) I connected the pool to my core, where power flows into my body, so it would be continuously powered, and (2) I set up stable ethereal structures to hold the pool, and made them so they would only produce energy in the right signature. This was a new step, and simplifies the process of delivering the healing energy to all the different points in the tissue.

Then I followed the paths from the tissue’s energy layer down toward the actual cells. This is something that’s foreign to most energy healers, but I find it’s critical to producing good results. The closer you get to cells, the more dramatically you can affect what those cells are doing. In my terminology, it goes: Energy, State, Physical Gateway*, then the next stage (which I haven’t named yet). When I started healing work, I only worked with the energy layer, and people only experienced minor numbing. As I got down into state and physical gateway, the effects have set in faster and more dramatically. This time, I went past physical gateway, which I think is the key change that caused the instant results.

*Yes, the names are bad. “State” doesn’t really conjure up any metaphors. Mea culpa. I’ll figure out a proper naming scheme at some point.

By the way, this isn’t as simple as imagining your connections going deep into your cells. That might communicate your intent to your mental muscles, but it doesn’t show them how to accomplish that goal, which in my experience, they need. At each step on the path from energy to cells, there’s a change in the quality of the pathways: They become smaller and more intricate, with a signature that’s harder to work with. I had to develop better sensory connections, and practice a lot, before my mental muscles knew how to work with those paths.

With the connection network and the energy pool in place, I pushed the new energy signature through the physical gateway for all the different points in the network, then connected all the paths together, and that was the healing. In total, it took about a minute. After that, my knee felt better within seconds — about the time to walk one step.

Why Not Focus on the Intent?

Sometimes, I remember questions from readers as I’m writing posts. This time, it was, “Why not just focus on my intent to heal my knee, and let my mental muscles and ethereal software handle the details?”

I have 3 answers to this:

First, I’ve tried that in the past: For an injury I’d worked with a dozen times, I tried just connecting to it and saying “Heal” in my head, intently. I fully expected it to work, and was surprised when it didn’t. But, indeed, that technique was ineffective. Immediately after, I did a technique similar to the one in this post, doubting myself all the way through, but it worked great. (This is one reason I’m pretty sure these healing results aren’t just placebo: The effectiveness has very little to do with my expectations, and everything to do with the actual technique I use.)

Second, here’s my model for why focused intent is ineffective: My mental muscles don’t innately know how to do this type of healing technique any more than my physical muscles innately know how to do a backflip. I had to step through the process and train them first, which is what I did here.

Third, I don’t know of any ethereal software that does healing techniques like this. Sure, my software has a command to “heal my knee,” but when I give it that command, it implements a simpler, less effective set of changes than I did here, acting at State layer, rather than going through Physical Gateway. That’s why I mean by “the ethereal software doesn’t know this technique.” At this point, I could theoretically reprogram it with this technique, but only after first working through the technique myself.

So, that’s why I didn’t just focus on my intent to heal: It hasn’t worked in the past, and I don’t think I have the right tools to make it work this time. But stepping through a complex procedure works well, and it will hopefully let me generalize this technique to other healings. Which is the real point of this write-up, and why I’m excited about the results.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.