Edited Transcript of Dean Ramsden’s introductory lecture to the 2009-11 Diploma Course in
Relational Energy Healing, in Tokyo, Japan
November 20, 2009
“Welcome, everyone, to the first day of the three-year Diploma Course. I want to start with an overview of what we are going to be studying: why we want to study this material, and how helpful I believe it can be to you, and for use with your clients. While on the surface this is a program about learning advanced healing skills, it is also a program to speed up your personal and spiritual growth. I, personally, never wanted to become a healer. Originally I was only interested in personal and spiritual growth, and I wandered in to energy healing as a way to enhance my health. After many years of meditation, and doing martial arts, yoga, and Qi Gong, I stumbled into energy healing, and eventually became a professional healer, and taught at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing (BBSH). And, what I discovered was that, whether or not the student at the healing school was there to learn to be a healer, or they were there for personal growth, that running energy healing techniques through their bodies sped up the person’s evolution. And this morning I’ll present a brief overview of the chakra system, and why I believe why this is so: energy healing enhances spiritual growth.
In addition to personal growth this work enhances and improves our personal relationships, as well as our business relationships. And one of the distinctions I’ll make between the kind of energy healing we do here in contrast to other forms of energy healing work, is the importance of relationships in our lives. Also, one of the ways in which energy healing enhances our growth is that it awakens in us the desire to be of service to others: to help others.
One of the many definitions of being a healer is someone who helps another person heal; but in that definition every healthy adult is a healer. Every healthy adult naturally wants to help people less fortunate than themselves. But the most important thing that comes out of this kind of work is a deeper connection – or recognition – of who you are as a person: your spiritual identity, as well as your everyday personality. So, built into our study over the next few years is not just exploring the chakras, but how the chakras create consciousness, how they reflect – or build – consciousness inside us.
In order to learn this material we do have to have certain fundamentals in place, and I want to talk about these fundamentals and why they are important. Traditionally, a healing class begins with basics of how to perceive energy and how to run energy. And by the word “energy” I mean life force: the life force inside us that is both our biological functioning and is also an expression of our consciousness. Usually when I use the word “energy” I’m referring to prana: an all-encompassing term referring to our bio-energy that is also an expression of our consciousness. You can also call it Qi, or Ki, or one of lots of different names, but it is bio-energy, or the energy of our life force.
Prior to working up and through the chakra system as an advanced healing system, we have to start with the fundamentals of how to make contact with – and manage – prana. So, each week (of the Diploma Course) will be a combination of lecture, of energy-developing practices, as well as hands-on healing practice. Now, we have (students with) various skill levels in this group, but even so these exercises will be practiced throughout the year to help build your stamina. You will be quite surprised at how fast your perception and your stamina (to run prana) will grow: it’s like going to the gym and working out a muscle … the more you practice, the faster it grows.
There is one thing I want to point out during this course of study. The trick is not to judge yourself as being less than someone else, and to really work on your own unique way of both perceiving and running energy. The subject of the critical voice inside us will come up a lot during our course, but I want to start out by saying that this “voice” is one of the biggest enemies of learning to be a psychic. It’s natural for us to want to emulate, to copy somebody else (usually the teacher) but in psychic work this works against you because everyone is a little different. My desire as a teacher is to show you various ways you can attain the technique, but for you to then integrate it into yourself, and make it your own. The way I do my energy healings is a reflection of my own personalty, and of my own choices in life. I want your energy healings to be a reflection of your own uniqueness and personal choices.
So we are going to begin this course by getting in touch with our personal energetic boundary, and different ways to flow (and direct) prana around your system, around your energetic body. Our fundamental assumption in this course is that you are a being of consciousness: that you are a spirit being that also happens to be wearing a physical body, and is not separate from that physical body. It’s not that the energy body emanates from the physical body, but that the physical body exists within the energy body. Also, this is not the first time you have “worn” a body; as spirit beings you have existed in previous lifetimes, sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman. In the later part of the course we will look not only at the relationships you have with your family, and with people close to you, but also with the connections you have to previous lives, and integrate that work into the course.
Let’s go over some more of the framework of our study together, and which might be different from other Western energy healing systems. In the early part of the Twentieth Century Western energy healing was bound up with Spiritualism, with Theosophy, and hence reflected the values and the beliefs of these teachings. Many of the books of psychic healing are based on that paradigm; are based on an objective reality, as well as from ideas coming out of India, teaching many of the old Yogic concepts. Then, we entered the Sixties, the Seventies, and the Eighties – the Baby Boomer generation – and there was a marked shift in the teaching of Western energy healing work
In that time period popular psychology really came into its own, and psychological concepts like that of the unconscious became part of everyday language. In addition, a lot of people came here, to Asia, and studied under various spiritual teachers, to eventually import these ideas into the West. There was a big influx of Asian thought from the Sixties onwards. So, the blending of energy healing and psychology (which has always been in place) has moved through various shifts throughout the last hundred years. But currently there is a shift in Western energy healing as psychology itself goes into a new level, to integrate a lot of new and modern ideas, and discoveries. We now know a lot more about developmental psychology: about how we, as human beings, grow through various stages of development, where one stage builds upon the success – or failure – of the previous stage. A modern day approach to the chakra system is working with these power centers as holding the operating system of each of those developmental stages.
So, rather than go straight to the highest stage of development, in order to try and help or heal someone, we now know that high stage rests on earlier material, or the earlier childhood experience of an individual. To help someone heal, we don’t want to simply heal – or charge – a chakra, we want to help them develop any place (within their personal development) where they have not yet navigated successfully. And, although we don’t do psychotherapy with our clients we still use the same principles of psychotherapy. However you use this material in your lives, either as healers or with family, with friends, or in a business setting, the focus is not to become a therapist but to use psychotherapy skills (and insights) in an artful and helpful way.
When you use relational energy healing skills with your clients, it is not simply a case of surgery – of working on a person’s energy field – but it is knowing that the client is also affected by who you are … by the healer’s consciousness. There’s a direct transmission of your consciousness to the client’s consciousness whenever you do a healing with them. I’ll go over the wiring of this, of how it functions in a structural way when we look at Auric Anatomy: how everything comes together in the energy field.
On the path of any spiritual seeker the resonance effect (where my auric field affects yours) is very important. One of the things that fascinated me on my own spiritual search was learning how information could be transmitted from one human being to another, not just through words, but through presence: the quality of the teacher’s energy system impacting another person. Before I studied with the Barbara Brennan (BBSH) system I was the student of a wonderful Chinese Qi Gong and Tai Chi Chuan Master, Dr T.K. Shih. At the beginning of his Qi Therapist training course he taught me a very curious idea: that the attitude of the student towards the teacher is very important, in that the student consciously makes herself receptive to what the teacher has to give. I later realized that this concept was not about promoting servitude or respect, but that he was referring to the energetic mechanism of resonance: the teacher downloading information into the student. We are often more impacted by the presence and the consciousness of the teacher (whoever it is we are studying with at the time) than by the actual verbal information that they may pass on to us. My teacher demonstrated that transmission, as we learned various techniques and moving meditations in order (for him) to pass on Qi Healing to us. Much of this is non-verbal, and he told us, “The function of a good teacher is give the whole teaching, the whole vibrational seed of the teaching to the student, and then wait for the student to unpack it over time.”
We can gain more life experience, or more consciousness from others by tuning into them, rather than by just listening to what they say. I remember my studies with my first spiritual healing teacher, Rev. Rosalyn L. Bruyere, where I would leave her classes intellectually confused but nevertheless very expanded, and inspired. And, hopefully, you will also leave these classes expanded and inspired, as well as gaining lots of information for the mind. You can, of course, practice this resonance skill if you go to any high-level spiritual teacher, such as the Dalai Lama, or my own teacher Rosalyn Bruyere, and you can just sit in their energy field and allow it to download into your system, hopefully without much rational distraction. The reason resonance functions is that we are not just one Operating System, or just one chakra that is trying to make sense of the world: we have multiple chakras that are taking in multiple dimensions of awareness.
In addition to my studies in spiritual healing I also came across a bodywork re-education process called the Alexander Technique. The Alexander Technique (originally designed to work with efficient use of posture for actors and performers) gave me the same insight as my Qi Gong Master, in that to do this particular body therapy the practitioner makes a shift inside themselves first, before even touching the client. With Alexander Technique the idea is to communicate an internal shift in the client’s body, but first by modeling it inside the practitioner’s body. I realized that this is what occurs in a really good healing: it’s not that I fix you, it’s that I model inside my energy system a shift that is helpful to you, and (that this) may evoke personal growth in you.
So, this is an old, old technology … that my consciousness affects you, and your consciousness affects me. We are related, we are connected. And, to help you heal, to help you be a clearer person, a stronger person, I (as relational energy healer) have to be able to run the energy consciousness you need through my system while expanding (or offering) that energy consciousness into your system. This is why I call my approach Relational Energy Healing, because it is moving away from a purely surgical approach, where the healer works on the client; here, we want a relational flow between client and the healer. There are some problems to a purely surgical paradigm in an energy healing where I take on the role of expert, and you take on the role of patient. In Relational Energy Healing you are not there to fix someone else; you are there to help them “unpack” themselves, and become the best person they can be.
Everyone comes to a teacher, or to a healer, as potential: like the acorn is a potential of the oak tree. What we are doing is helping them open their “acorn”, so it starts to sprout, and grow. And, as we all know, this is how human beings develop, how they grow: through other people helping them, mothering them, fathering them … supporting their growth in a relationship and in a community. We don’t grow isolated, and alone.
The three-year Diploma Course is an incubator for you to, first of all, experience this process for yourself, experience and learn about the different growth stages. And then to be able to hold it for another person, and become an “incubator” for someone else. And by “growth” I don’t mean to imply that you are an child and that you are going to become a grown-up … but that you are going to “unpack” your own version of relational work. Everyone in this room is a competent adult. We’ve all had success in our lives. What we are going to do is start breaking down the process of growth and learn how to enhance it, to learn how it functions. Because, as well as the resonance transmission of consciousness to consciousness it is also helpful to know exactly where in a system it is going wrong … where to tweak it, to improve it, to make it run better.
When we study the seven major chakras (as well as some other important ones that we deal with) it’s not so much to gain mental or intellectual information, but to study how that chakra (when functioning well) enhances our lives. Each chakra has an optimal functioning: when it is working really well it produces similar or predictable effects (or results) in all of us. Also, whenever a chakra is damaged, whenever a chakra doesn’t develop correctly, there are predictable results. Thirdly, when a chakra is traumatized, when an event from the outside world significant affects our consciousness system, there are predictable results that we can study. So, those are our three categories when we study the chakras: the healthy chakra, the unhealthy or underdeveloped chakra, and the traumatized chakra.
In the weekend workshop we just did here in Tokyo, on the first two chakras, I talked about how we are not given an instruction manual to life: to running our energetic consciousness system. It’s as though we grow up in a rural area and someone places us in the cockpit of an aircraft, and asks us to take off. We see the instruments and we think we know about flying, but we’re lost: we don’t know how it operates.
So, this Diploma Course is one attempt to give us all a manual to how our energetic consciousness system works; where all the controls are, and what happens when things go wrong. Once we know how things work, and how to make a change, we can start to navigate, we can start to “fly” our lives in a certain direction, rather than just (metaphorically) sit there, and just stare at the instruments.
The last thing to mention (in our overview of the Diploma Course) is the importance of chakra cords: our energetic connections to others. The resonance effect, of which I talked about earlier, this way in which we download information and life experience from others … there’s a mechanism to that. This mechanism is the chakra cord connections. When we make a conscious connection (or even an unconscious one) with another we can share their experience, we share in their life force, and we start exchanging agendas and ideas. It’s somewhat like an internet connection, and how your computer can connect to other users.
In other words, if you and I have a conversation we extend chakra cords: me to you, you to me, and there is an exchange, a flow of consciousness through those chakra cords. This exchange is something we all do very naturally, and similar to how your mobile phone works, connecting you to your mother or father: there is a connection from your phone to theirs. Chakra cords are the energetic connection to other people.
And just as each chakra has a certain functioning in our energy consciousness system, there are many different forms of chakra cords and meanings behind these cords, that we can study with great effect. There are healthy contact or relational cords, where the relationship is clear, and is a mutual exchange of energy. There are transitional (it doesn’t form a permanent relationship with you) or “curious” cords, extended when someone wants something from you. We will also explore invasive cords: these are connections that want to override your boundary, and want to draw energy from you, or manipulate and invade your system. This is an important area of study, because we are constantly swimming in relationships where people want something from us, or even where people want to steal energy from us. We will study chakra cords in depth, including heritage, DNA or family connection cords. In our family connections we are wired into other family members, extending into the past (and the future). The heritage or DNA cord is like your genetic imprint: it connects you back into your family past. And when we have children ourselves they partake of our heritage cord to them, and we pass on our family issues to them.
The study of cords is very important for relational work because once we understand how they function they make many of the events that happen to us much more clear, and also show us how to change things. We can’t change what we do unless we know what is exactly happening. Until we understand the functioning of a mechanism we can’t effect a change in that functioning. We study these energetic connections so we can improve, tweak, and evolve our consciousness system. And it will make certain issues we deal with in life quite obvious once you understand about the energetics of relationship. We will be breaking this all down, so – as healers – we can make good use of this information.
I’ll close by saying how much I love this material; because it is so practical as a healing skill, and because you can make helpful adjustments to your life, and to the lives of your clients. It’s a very practical skill set. I look forward to hearing how you adapt and use these skills and these insights, in your own lives, or (for you) as healers.”
© 2013 by Dean Ramsden. All rights reserved.
