"To the question How long do I have? every genetic testing prediction ultimately returns some variant on the same answer: Not long."
-Richard Powers
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The Sheriff (who teaches at a med school) wrote in raking me over the coals for saying that docs have primarily dollar signs in their eyes (yesterday post), claiming that many are dewy-eyed young'uns who merely truly want to help others. Well, (although in my personal opinion the best way to help anybody is to leave them alone) she's probably right. It was an unfair blanket statement! I wasn't myself, I was a bit under the weather, had the sniffles (no not Avian sniffles nor Swine sniffles, don't slam me in an interment camp please bro) when I wrote that stupid post (I should have qualified it the way Byron Katie does, something like "It's true - but only all the time." AHAHAHA! (I would be slapping my thighs now if cats had thighs)
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I should write sometime about Pranic Healing. That's another stealth alternative healing thing. I say stealth because it doesn't seem to have the internet presence of Matrix Energetics. And for sure, the PH teaching seminars do nowhere near the box office of ME. I mean ME packs 5 to 6 hundreds butts-in-seats, filling a large hotel ballroom, every single time dozen times a year depending who/how you count, while the many PH classes I attended (admittedly 5 years back or so) would have a few handfuls of students. So in terms of marketing it's no contest. Richard is just that much more charismatic than Stephen Co (the main USA-based Pranic Healing teacher, at least back in the day when I did it).
But what is Pranic Healing in the first place? Well in many ways it is just another minor variant of the usual energy healing thing, like Quantum Touch, Reiki, etc. In fact many PH attendees were already Reiki "Masters" (Reiki's pioneering use of this term Master for anybody who shelled out sufficient seminar bux was a brilliant stroke of marketing but has resulted in Masters littering the ground knee-deep like an autum leaf pile).
For some reason I was bedazzled enough by PH that I took their training in the following sub-disciplines:
- Basic Pranic Healing
- Color Pranic Healing
- Advanced Pranic Healing
- Crystal Pranic Healing
- Emotional Pranic Healing
- Psychic Self-Defense
- Arhatic Yoga
The best was the first two: Basic and Color. For anybody who already knows some form of energy healing they might be redundant, but I found it to be a good generally workable system that covers all the more or less universal basics that everybody, all these systems, seem to pretty much agree on. The various competing systems do their marketing differentiation more in the esoteric upper reaches. These two first courses were generic and good in that sense.
The rest of the courses got increasingly nutso-New-Agey (from my limited Neanderthal perspective) and I finally drifted away. It gets more and more churchy, borderline cultish, as you get more into it. Though I mean that only in the intellectual sense, the material per se. Operationally nobody ever threw me in a van or drove me to a weekend retreat to repeatedly sing "When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin' Along" til I broke.
As far as actual healing, I never witnessed anything very dramatic. Usual faith-healing "Doesn't it feel better now?" type of stuff. However, I have found it very effective for SELF healing, particularly of headaches and joint/bone/tendon types of muscular-skeletal injuries.
Co was alright. What finally put me off them for good was the Arhatic Yoga course, taught by their grand Poobah Himself, GRANDMASTER Choa Kok-Sui. I felt the guy was overly pompous. But maybe he really was (now deceased) some kind of super universal meta-master, who the hell knows. But I didn't like the vibe at all. That's when it really began to feel churchy (but that's just me).
Anyway, I do reach for the Pranic Healing basic method as the first item in my alt.med toolkit whenever I need to fix something on myself. That or G-Jo which I've already covered. But I don't use all the salt and special holy water spray bottle and all the goopy PH protocol. I just brush with basic energy and basic color palette.