>Self healing

>For years, I used to pity people who were into self-help books (which meant most of America). Until Betty Shine happened.

There I was browsing for more than an hour at Sankars Book Stall when my eye picked out her book, Mind Magic. Maybe it was the jacket blurb. Maybe it was my age – I had just turned 30. Maybe it’s a bit of all this, but the fact is it was a fortunate accident.

The next few days stretched my mind. Shine says that we are energy beings first. Without our energy counterpart of the physical body, we would not be here at this moment. But stress causes energy blockages in the physical system causing distress and disease. The underlying reasoning: Don’t underestimate the power of your mind. If it can create an atom bomb, it can also create great art. It makes waves – of love, compassion and understanding – and it heals.

Shine was a medium (she died two years ago). She not only existed in this dimension, she could also interact with ‘dead’ people in the next dimension so that she could pass on their messages to loved ones telling them not to grieve. They came to her to prove they had survived ‘death’ and were happy in their new world.

The healing powers of the mind drew me more than anything else. I wanted to heal and be healed, physically and soulfully. I have tried healing my father’s dislocated knee – though it’s yet to be healed completely, the pain has receded to a large extent. Now he heals himself. The process is simple: Visualise your palm as a magnet that takes away negative energies. You place your palm on the place of pain for a while and move it away, taking with it all the negative energy that was embedded within the body. It’s a process that demands faith.

If it’s about healing people living away from you, you could still work the magic through visualisation. You could send loving thoughts to the person even without that person’s knowledge. And the best way to heal yourself is to go to bed blessing your friends, enemies and strangers.

As Betty Shine puts it, to be happy, one can never afford to lose the child within. A child is innocent and has faith and allows things to happen. We are all born with this talent, and it takes the child within to find and nurture it.

I am now on to Brian Weiss, another new-age healer who talks the same way Shine did. Only, he talks about how our past, present and futures are running concurrently. What we do today could influence our past and future. I am chewing this over. I’ll let you know what I find out.