Personal Background
If you read Richard Gerber MD's 'Vibrational Medicine' you will find that proper scientific experimentation, working on the growth of barley seeds and the functioning of enzymes in test tubes, has shown that healing works - no chance of human suggestibility or placebo effect on a barley seed! But the question will always remain - how do people get into healing? What makes this attribute develop in particular individuals? It is my firm belief that everyone has the potential to heal. As someone who uses computers a lot, I can offer you a computer-based analogy:
Think of yourself as a computer with an operating system. We all come factory-fresh, squeaky clean, wired ready for awareness and full use of all our faculties. We do use them, as children - kids are very aware of auras when young. But we aren't stand-alone systems. We function in networks over which all kinds of software pass and we also have people around us who install stuff. Over the years, as we grow up and make our way in the world, we get to installing our own choice of software, not all of which is useful or compatible. Ever been in that situation where you bought a computer magazine with loads of programs on the cover CD-ROM and ran the installs for a game, only to see your system slow to a snail's pace, with icons, menus and options disappearing, because the install has messed up all the internal settings? That's what happens to many people. They still have all the options, only they are buried in a sub-menu somewhere or the software needs repair. That's what living in modern society does to you - it screws up your internal settings.
There are two ways you can start to get out of this. This is the best way - you can run a clean sweep of your setup, deleting from your hard drive all unnecessary files and applications, slimming down your system, installing virus checkers, defragmenting your hard drive, loading the latest drivers for all your peripherals. This is a crude analogy of what meditation and what Buddhists call 'right living' can do for you. It's also true that sometimes your system can have an almighty crash in the middle of using some inappropriate software which, though it puts the computer partly out of action for a while, has the merit of accidentally wiping out some of the stuff which was causing the problem in the first place. So, putting it back in people terms, a painful life crisis can have the merit of making us more open to new possibilities. I had started fitfully on the first, had the second, and am trying my best to keep up the first. Though I still get software problems, living in the same world as everyone else, I find I am bouncing back better than before and I believe my awareness of some important things has grown.
Hope that helps!
I graduated from Bristol University in 1975 with a B.Sc (Hons) in Psychology. It was a very experimentally-based course. I won't lay claim to being the world's most diligent student, but having had plenty of exposure to the conventional view of how body and mind work, I was left vaguely but deeply unsatisfied. I took a year out to work as a nursing assistant with what was described at the time as 'severely subnormal disturbed adult males', This naturally put many things which I had learned on my degree course in a much more real-world perspective. After this I travelled in Italy for three months before returning to the UK.
I then trained as a teacher on a one-year PGCE course. I moved to South London where I taught children with a range of behavioural, emotional, and physical problems, first in special schools, then as a tutor working with children out of school. By this time I was playing bass guitar in bands around London and had decided to move into music more via writing and recording. I was also growing interested in spiritual matters. In 1987 when working with a teenage boy dying of cancer, I met a healer for the first time and was very moved by what he did for this young man.
Not so long afterwards, after a time of intense crisis for me, which involved the breakup of a relationship and being forced to move house after falling foul of a gang of drug dealers on the housing estate where I lived, I found that I too could give healing. I had begun attending a development circle run by a local medium. In the middle of a meditation I felt powerful energy running right up my spine and into my hands and felt impelled to put my hands onto a mother and son attending who had also been through a severe crisis.
After this, wanting to understand what had happened to me, I went to healing development classes at the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain in Belgrave Square, central London. I had by this time met my wife. We had a son in 1990. Family life (I have three stepchildren, now grown up) and trying to forge a career around music took up a lot of my time and effort, especially as my son was diagnosed with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder at the age of 4 and proved to need lots of time and support. I still gave healing whenever I could, but this side of me remained a little dormant.
While still in London I was working as a musician and college lecturer, writing, recording and teaching studio techniques. In 1999 we moved to the Isle of Wight where I have been working as a freelance in music production. In a quieter, more calm environment I have been able to devote increasing time to developing this side of myself in the last four years.
In 2001 I decided to take the Level I and II 'attunements' of the Japanese healing art of Reiki. Though this entitled me to become a proper Reiki practitioner, I wanted to take my time and develop further. Through practice, further work with a range of teachers and meditation exercises, and an increasing involvement (in the last year I have led healing meditation groups and workshops) I have now come to a point where I can use a range of techniques and understandings in my work and I now feel it is right to make the healing I can give available on a much wider basis. I'm calling what I do 'Energy Healing' because I believe it is an appropriate, positive, helpful label, as used by one of the most thoughtful teachers and writers on this area, Ruth White.
I am a practitioner member of the UK Reiki Federation.
If you're interested, why not visit my music website?