Physician Heal Thyself!

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Some time ago I conducted an Energy Healing Workshop at Michigan State University. The workshop was sold out, with people in attendance from many walks of life. One of those participants was a young woman in medical school. She was there because she had an acute pain in her colon that had persisted for many months. She had been to see conventional doctors. She had pursued  every alternative therapy she could find. Nothing had worked. This workshop, she said, was her last hope.

I had her lay on a table with the first group of participants to be worked on. There were many tables filling the large room with three to four people per table working on the person now laying on the table. Every hour we’d rotate and a new person would lay on the table while the person who had just been worked on joined the group working on the new person.

This young woman was very attractive but considerably overweight. I showed the people in her group where to put their hands on her body to facilitate the release of her repressed trauma. I had one person put a hand on top of her liver, the other under her liver. I had another person put their hands on the soles of her feet and the third person put one hand on her forehead and the other under the back of her head. I told them it wouldn’t take long for her to “pop.” I’d be back as soon as she did.

Sure enough, her repressed trauma popped up quickly.Within minutes, she curled on her side and started sobbing. I came over and led her through the trauma. She was an infant of nine months laying in her crib. Her father came over and stood above her. At this point, she tried to turn away from the experience, forget it, and go unconscious. Her fear was palpable to all of us. Her whole body shook with terror. I told her not to run away. That it was time to face what happened long ago in her life. She was safe. It was a different time and her father was nowhere in sight. Now was the time to face her ghost and free herself from its hold over her. With that guidance, a huge scream ripped out of her. It was followed by deep sobs of pain and agony. She kicked and pounded the table with her fists. Her legs and arms vibrated and shook uncontrollably. Her clothes were soaking wet as if she’d been caught in a rainstorm. Time passed. Eventually the tempest stopped, the tears ended and she became peaceful, silent, still.

When she came around and opened her eyes I asked her what she had experienced. She confided that her father had sexually abused her.

I asked her how her colon was feeling. A surprised look came on her face as she focussed on her body. “It’s gone!” she said. “The pain’s gone!”

It never came back.

The workshop was held on a Saturday. The next Tuesday I ran into her at a food coop in East Lansing. She was in the back of the store when I entered. Seconds after I entered she came running up the aisle toward me, a big smile on her face.

“I felt your energy as soon as you walked in,” she said excitedly. “I can’t believe what’s happened to me since the workshop! I’ve lost twelve pounds without trying. I haven’t changed my diet at all.”

“That’s because you released what happened to you when you where 9 months old. You no longer need all that baby fat. It’s melting away.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” she said. “You’ve changed my life.”

She gave me a big hug and went back to shopping. I would see her one more time.

(To be continued.)

 

Unfinished Grief

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Some years ago a woman came to see me when I was working on clients in E. Lansing, MI. I remember her as a kind and sensitive woman. She was walking slowly, somewhat stooped, her face knitted in pain. I asked her what brought her in to see me. She replied that her lower back had been bothering her for a long time and she hoped that I could bring her some relief.

“That’s not why you’re here,” I said. Shocked, her eyes opened wide while she stared at me in disbelief.

“What are you saying?” she said.

“You’re here for your mother. You never grieved when she died, did you?”

“No,” she admitted. “I didn’t. I was busy taking care of everyone else. What’s that got to do with my back?”

“Let’s find out. Why don’t you lay down on the table and we’ll get started. Your mother is here with us, by the way.”

She lay down on the table. I put one hand under the base of her skull, the other under the base of her spine. The energy started flowing into her immediately. It was a gentle, comforting, loving, feminine energy. The woman started crying softly as soon as that energy entered her body.

“This energy is coming from your mother,” I told her. “She’s here to help you through your grief.”

With those words the woman’s tears turned to sobs. Her body shook as the heavy grieving began. An hour later it was done. She was peaceful now, her body completely relaxed.

When she got up she had another surprise. She took a few steps, a strange, questioning look on her face. She bent over, moved side to side, testing her back. All her discomfort and pain had disappeared. She walked out of the treatment room, standing straight, shoulders back, smiling broadly, her face lit up, pain and grief free.

I never saw her again. I didn’t need to.

 

 

 

The Strange Case of Steven and the Pyramids

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past life healing

Pyramids at Giza

One of my clients in Austin was a delightful young lady named Kris. Kris had a boyfriend named Steven with whom she was at wits end. So for his birthday, Kris decided to buy him a  session with me. Kris told me that what she wanted from Steven’s session  was threefold. First, she wanted him to stop being unfaithful to her. His one night stands with other women were killing her. Second, she wanted him to stop doing drugs. And third, she wanted him to stop tending bar and get a “real” job. In her mind, her requests were nothing exceptional.

“Why not just dump the guy and move on?” I asked. “It would be cheaper and she wouldn’t have to expect me to perform miracles. I’m good, but my name isn’t Jesus or Buddha.”

Kris wouldn’t hear of it. She was hung up on the guy and couldn’t let go. We all know love is irrational. Co-dependency is worse.

I sighed. Lucky Steven, lucky me. This wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. Steven showed up at the scheduled time for his appointment and promptly told me that he thought what I did was bunk and the only reason he had come was that he didn’t want to waste Kris’s money. I told him I’d do my best to make sure he got his money’s worth. This sure wasn’t shaping up to be a productive hour. He had as much called me a charlatan and I was fast coming to the opinion that he was a shutdown moron.

“Well, we might as well get started,” I said. “Why don’t you take off your shoes and lay down on the table?”

When Steven lay down on healing table I put one hand under the base of his skull and the other under the base of his spine. Bright  red healing energy flew out of my hands and into Stevens’ central nervous system. At first, Steven got very peaceful. A few moments passed this way then his face lost all color and turned grey. He started to moan, limbs shaking and trembling. Soon his moans turned into involuntary screams and deep sobs. An ancient pool of sorrow and hidden agony had burst through it’s containment walls.  Steven sobbed without stopping for an hour. The more he sobbed the colder he became. He asked for a blanket. It was the middle of a Texas summer, and even with the air conditioner on, it wasn’t that cool in the office. The cold was coming out of him. It was ancient frozen energy that was thawing. I got him a wool blanket, knowing it wouldn’t do much good. He wrapped himself in it, but the shivering continued unabated and got worse. Finally, his sobs stopped but the shivering continued. The session ended a few minutes later.

It took Steven some time before he was able to sit up. When he finally did,  he was shivering from the cold, the blanket wrapped tightly around him, his face still grey.

“Tell me about your experience,” I asked him.

“It was a long, long time ago. I was back in the time of building the pyramids in Egypt. I was a slave in a long line of slaves. There were overseers everywhere to make sure no one slacked off. They pulled the woman in front of me out of the line and whipped her until she bled to death. I couldn’t do anything to save her or show any emotion, because if I did they would have killed me too. That woman was my wife. I can still hear her screams.”

Steven shook more, fighting back the tears.

“What you released today, you carried in your soul for nearly three millenia. That’s a long time to carry such a terrible trauma.  You’ve been dragging that around for many lifetimes. Now you’re free.”

Steven did not reply. He was numb and exhausted from his experience. He left a few minutes later.

I never saw him again.

A few months later a mutual friend of Kris and Steven’s came in for a session.

“Did you hear what happened to Steven after you worked on him?” she asked.

“No,” I said. ” I’ve never seen Steven since that day and I haven’t heard from Kris.”

“Steven couldn’t figure out how you did that to him so he decided you had put LSD on your palms and that it had gotten into his body and made him hallucinate.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard that one. It would take someone who does a lot of drugs to come up with that explanation.”

“There’s more. He quit his job after you worked on him. He stopped doing drugs and got a sales job with IBM. He’s doing really well.”

“Amazing.”

“He’s also engaged.”

“To Kris? It’s what she wanted.”

“No. To someone he met at IBM.”

“Kris got everything she wanted out of that session for Steven, except she didn’t get him. She must be heartbroken.”

“She took it pretty bad at first. But she’ll get over it,” said her friend.”She’s dating a new guy now.”

As long as that trauma lay smoldering in Steven’s soul it exerted a powerful influence over his life.  Because of that trauma he had come to following conclusions in his subconscious:

1. Don’t love or commit yourself to anyone. If you do, they will die.

2. Don’t be seen or they  might come after you.

3. Life is pain.

Steven wouldn’t commit to Kris. He worked in bar where it was dark. It was safer that way. He did drugs to mask the deep pain at the core of his being. When he relived and released the ancient trauma that had deeply wounded him all those governing beliefs fell away and he was free to live a normal life again. He was eligible for happiness, at last.

“Most men,” wrote Thoreau, ” live lives of quiet desperation.”   Does happiness keep eluding you?

 

 

Carlos and the Inquisition

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past life healing

Inquisition Torture

I first met Carlos when he came to a past life healing workshop I was conducting at the University of Illinois in Champagne, IL. He was a thin, mild mannered man in his early thirties from South America. During my past life healing workshops everyone gets on a healing table for an hour and is worked on by two to three other workshop participants. I show the people working on the subject on the table where to place their hands on the person on the table. The hand positioning is critical. It’s determined by where I perceive the subject’s emotional blocks to be buried in their body. Everyone has a different pattern. The people working on the healing subject blast those areas with the healing energy I open them to at the beginning of workshop. When the person on the table reaches the point where buried, repressed, and hidden material begins to emerge, it’s time for me to come over and guide them through the releasing process.

When Carlos’s time came to get on the past life healing table his repressed emotional material surfaced quickly. Within a few minutes, his body became rigid. Soon he was screaming and cursing at tops of his longs. By this time, I was working with him as a distant lifetime rose to the surface. In that lifetime, Carlos was a priest during the Inquisition. He was accused of heresy by the Church, tortured and racked. He would not confess to heresy because he had not committed the “crime” the Church had accused him of. His torturers  castrated him, hoping to force his confession. He never confessed. He died in a pool of blood swearing eternal revenge on the perpetrators of this horrible crime.

After he went through reliving the experience and releasing the rage and anger he had held in his cells and organs, his body lost its rigidity. He became calm and peaceful. When the past life healing session concluded and Carlos had come back to normal consciousness, he told me that three years ago he been operated on for testicular cancer and lost one of his testicles.

The past had repeated itself because Carlos had never let go of the rage and anger from his experience during the Inquisition. The body may die but the energy and unresolved emotion of that lifetime remains in the soul until it is raised to consciousness, faced, re-experienced and released. That’s universal law.

There are several similarities in past life healing experiences between Carlos and  MK’s in my last blog post. Both had cancer in their reproductive organs in this life that was the result of past life trauma. MK was lucky. We got to her’s in time. Maybe, if Carlos had come to a workshop three or four years earlier we could have saved him from losing a testicle. The important thing is that in both cases we were able to find the cause of their traumas and release it from their body and their soul. They were both free of their past and able to go forward to greater success and happiness in their lives. That’s the advantage of past life healing.

Carlos felt tremendously different immediately after his session on the table. He couldn’t believe how light, free and happy he felt. He asked if he could invite his wife to come to the workshop after lunch. He felt she could benefit from the experience as much as he did. I said, of course. Bring her.

While Carlos was slim his wife was overweight. She had a problem controlling her appetite. She felt she always had to eat or she would starve. When she got on the table a past life surfaced quickly. She found herself in a lifetime as a young child in an Indian village in the Andes. The tribe didn’t have enough food and she starved to death as a young girl. As she relived that life she broke into sobs. Her whole body shock. She got very hot and her clothing was soaked as if she had been caught in a rainstorm. When her past life healing session was completed, she felt much lighter.

A month later Carlos and his wife called my office. Carlos’s wife said she no longer felt the need to eat all the time and had lost twenty pounds in a month without trying. They were both much happier and their relationship had never been better.

Healing the hidden past is a key part of the transformative journey. There is no real journey without past life healing. If you don’t heal the past, it will repeat itself until you do. An unresolved past is a chain that ties you to an endless cycle of frustration, unhappiness and powerlessness. When you release the past and experience past life healing, you open the door to a deeper connection with your soul. That connection is who you really are. It is the source of your creative power. Life is far easier and rewarding when your mind and and soul are linked together than when they are not. Sadly, most people do not have that connection. The key to developing the mind/soul connection is in releasing the repressed emotions from the past. Repressed emotion is an interference pattern that sharply limits your growth. When are you going to clear yours?

 

Healing Stories – Past Life Healing

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past life healing

WW 2 German Soldiers

I received a phone call one afternoon from MK, the wife of the Whole Foods CEO.

“Alan,” she said, “I’ve just been diagnosed with cervical cancer.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I replied.

“I need to make an appointment to see you. I know you’ll heal me.”

“You know I’ll give it 150 percent, MK,” I told her. “But I can’t guarantee results.”

When MK came in to my office a few days later I had her lay down on my table. I began by placing one hand under the base of her spine and the other under the base of her skull. The energy began flowing out of my hands immediately. MK became  very relaxed. As she relaxed the energy coming out of my hands turned a bright red. Meanwhile, MK’s face turned gray and her whole body became agitated. Soon she began shaking her head back and forth and moaning, “I can’t see! I can’t see!”

The energy pouring out of me grew hotter. MK grew more agitated, her legs forcefully kicking the table. A moment passed, then she started screaming in German, a language she does not  know. It was Helmut this and Helmut that. This went on for approximately forty-five minutes. All that time, she continued screaming in German, kicking the table and twisting her body.

At this point  the energy flowing through me changed from a bright red to a soft gold. A moment later, MK stopped screaming and kicking. She became very peaceful, her breath rising and falling slowly. Soon it was time to end the session. I withdrew my hands and waited for her to come back to normal consciousness.

When she did the first thing she said was,”Why did you stop? I was out of my body floating in golden light. I have never felt so light, peaceful and safe.”

“It was time,” I said. “You completed what you needed to release. Do you remember what you were screaming about in German?”

“It was my last life,” sighed MK. “It was World War 2. I was married to a German general. When he came back after the war ended he said he had hated killing the Jews he was ordered to shoot. When he said that I confessed to him what I did during the war.”

“What was that?”

“I used my status as a General’s wife to get Jews out of the country. When I told him that he went crazy. He beat me up,  raped me,  ripped out my eyes and left me to die. That’s how my life ended.”

“How do you feel now?”

“Wonderful. Much lighter. I had no idea I was carrying that nightmare inside me. You healed me.”

“We won’t know for sure until you go back to the Dr. and get tested.”

MK called me back two weeks later to tell me that her cervical cancer was gone.

There is often a direct connection between what happened in another lifetime and what happens in this one. Past life trauma often manifests in illness, dysfunctional relationships and limiting circumstances. If we do not bring up to consciousness the trauma hidden in the depths or our soul, those hidden events will continue to control us, limit us and affect our health until we do. The past controls the present and the future until we face and release it. In Mk’s case, her repressed rage at what had happened to her  caused her cancer. Thankfully, MK faced her painful past, relived the trauma, released her rage and went free. The cancer never returned.

 

 

Energy Healing – My Friend Bob

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healing energyI first met Bob when he came to a healing energy workshop in Austin that I was producing for my mentor, Eleanor Moore. He was sitting at the back of the main sanctuary of the Unity Church in Austin after the day long workshop had ended. As I walked by him he waved his arm and motioned me over. I went over  and he said somewhat hesitantly that he needed energy healing and wanted to work with me on a regular basis. That’s how our long friendship began.

Bob had grown up in a highly dysfunctional family in Hawaii. When he was ten, his mother, who was an alcoholic, told him that he was so ugly so woman would ever want him. Bob fled the islands and his family when he was sixteen and joined the Merchant Marine.

When we met, he was fifty years old and a third mate in the Merchant Marine. In all his years at sea, he hadn’t made much progress in his career. He told me that he lived in Houston and that his wife had left him during his last sea voyage. Sadly, he had returned home to a house  emptied of all furniture. She had cleaned out their bank accounts and moved back to Michigan where she was from. She had left him a note on the kitchen counter. “I’m tired of being married to you,” she wrote. “You’re too ugly to put up with.”

Echoes from his childhood burned in his brain. The childhood wounding by his mother  roared back to life. He was alone, destitute except for the check from his recent voyage, and sinking into a deep pool of shame and despair.

Bob started coming up to Austin from Houston on a weekly basis for energy healing sessions. He would get a motel room and we’d do a healing energy session Monday through Fridays, until he went out to sea again. Usually, when we finished each healing energy session, he’d feel like he was on fire. That was due to the red healing energy I channelled into him. The red healing energy was burning away the darkness and pain inside him. Usually an hour after each healing energy session Bob would start shaking all over as the healing energy moved deeper into his system. He learned over time that when that happened he had better be safely back in his hotel room. When the shaking started he’d collapse on his bed and fall asleep for a couple hours.

Over time, his life began to change. First, he was promoted to Second Mate. The next voyage he was promoted to First Mate. Then he was made Captain. Soon he was recognized as the best Captain in his company and given all the best voyages. His income soared. Bob was feeling much better about himself.

It was at this point that his union asked him to go to Congress to lobby Congressmen and Senators for them. Bob was very hesitant to commit to do this. He was a painfully shy man. I told him he was ready and it would be a great opportunity for him. Bob took a deep breath and went. He had a great time, enjoying his meetings with Senators and Congressmen.

When he got back I suggested he come to my monthly healing energy workshops for my clients. In those healing energy workshops he would get worked on and learn to work on others. Bob was sceptical but I convinced him to give it a try. What happened was amazing.

All the women there took to him immediately. They all wanted to work on him and when they felt the healing energy coming out of him, they all wanted him to work on them. When he was away at sea for a few months and couldn’t attend the workshops those women missed him mightily.

The vicious imprinting that his alcoholic mother had put into his subconscious mind had lost its power and authority over him. Bob had come into his own.

When Bob retired he moved to a little town on the California Nevada border. We kept in touch occasionally in those years. The last time I saw Bob was in the late 1990’s when I went up to visit him. I hadn’t heard from him in some time so recently I tried to contact him. His phone was disconnected. Fearing the worst, I searched the internet for him. My fears were confirmed. Bob had passed away in December 2007. I lost a good friend and the world lost a good man. Rest in Peace Bob. I will not forget you.

Healing Stories – Long Distance Healing

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long distance healing

Big Ben, Parliament Building, London UK

This is a story about long distance healing. The ironic thing is that I had to go a long distance, from Palo Alto, CA to London, UK to do this particular long distance healing. My purpose in going to London was to see my fiance, who was doing a semester abroad. At the time, doing any healing energy work, let alone long distance healing of any kind was the furthest thing from my mind.

My fiancee was staying with a family in London. Peter and Natalie were kind and open. They had a lovely twelve year old daughter named Jo. When I arrived, they promptly invited me to dinner. After dinner I asked Peter if he had a headache. He was a little taken aback.

“How did you know that?” he asked.

“I see it,” I replied.

“You see it?” he asked incredulously.

“It’s in your energy field. Would you like me to get rid of it for you?”

“O.K.,” he said dubiously.

I didn’t move and continued talking with the rest of the family. A minute later I asked Peter how his headache was?

“It’s gone,” he answered, clearly shocked that something had actually happened.

“How’s your energy level?” I asked him.

“Great!” he answered.

Unfortunately, I had overdone it. Peter had so much energy that night that he was up to four in the morning.  Nevertheless, Peter’s story spread through the neighborhood like a wildfire. I was besieged by many of their friends and neighbors wanting my help. Everyone had tons of questions.

A few days later, my fiancee and I were scheduled to visit Bath for a couple of days. The morning of our departure, their daughter Jo came down with the flu. The family was crestfallen. Jo was supposed to leave the next morning for her class trip. It was the highlight of the school year. She had been looking forward to the trip to the seashore all year and had been hoarding all her babysitting money so she’d be able to go. Now it looked like she wasn’t going to be able to join her class at all. Peter and Natalie pleaded with me to heal her. I was exhausted from working on everyone in the neighborhood so I told them I would work on Jo that evening from Bath after I recharged my energies. I just had nothing to give at the moment.

“How can you heal her from Bath?” a crestfallen Peter asked.

“The same way I healed your headache,” I answered. “Long distance healing is very effective.”

That night my fiancee was very tired and didn’t want to go out for dinner. So I found a Chinese restaurant and sat down by myself to order dinner. The restaurant was not very crowded. After the waitress took my order I decided it was time to work on Jo. I started blasting her with pink energy via long distance healing. While I sent the long distance healing energy I saw a vision of her in my mind’s eye. In my vision Jo sat up and said, “That’s enough! That’s enough!” I stopped sending the long distance healing energy. Jo lay down and went immediately back to sleep.

After dinner I went back to the Bed and Breakfast where we were staying and told my fiancee what had happened with my long distance healing of Jo. Two days later we returned to London. When we reached Peter and Natalie’s house, only Natalie was home. We told her about Bath, then I told her what had happened when I sent the long distance healing energy to Jo. She went white as a ghost, got up and went into kitchen.

When she returned, she told us that Jo had woken up the next day perfectly fine.  They packed her things and drove her down to seashore to join her class.

A few days later I returned to California.

A couple of weeks passed. My fiance was in her room at Peter and Natalie’s studying for final exams. It was a warm day in late May and her window was wide open. Natalie was in the backyard taking in the laundry and talking to her neighbor.

My fiance couldn’t help but overhear their conversation.

“I was sitting with Jo in her bedroom the night she had the flu. She had fallen into a deep sleep when all of a sudden she sat straight up and screamed “That’s enough!”

“She didn’t!”, said the neighbor. “What do you think she was screaming about?”

“I don’t know. But she screamed it twice.”

“What happened next?” the neighbor asked.

“Nothing. She went straight back to sleep. When she woke in the morning she was perfectly fine.”

“Well, isn’t that the damnedest thing,” said the neighbor. “Did it have anything to do with that bloke who was here from the states? He was all anyone talked about for days.”

Natalie folded a bedsheet. “Don’t know,” she answered tersely.

My fiance smiled as the truth finally came out and promptly wrote me a letter.

 

 

 

 

Healing Stories

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energy healing

Energy Healing and Grandpa Max

After helping people bring their lives into balance in a career spanning three decades I have a huge collection of energy healing stories. This one is about my grandfather Max. Some years ago I received a call from my mother telling me that if I wanted to see my grandfather before he died I’d better come home to Boston right away. I dropped everything, got on a plane in Austin where I was then living, and rushed home. The next day we went to the nursing home to see my grandpa. When we got there he was by himself in a wheel chair sitting by a wall in the activities room, sleeping. I had never seen my grandfather like that. He had always been an animated, energetic man who loved life. To see him like that, a shell of himself was heartbreaking.

The Prayer

I grabbed the wheel chair and took him to his room. I sat in front of him and took his hands in mine. The back of his hands were swollen with blood. More shock. I took a deep breath to center myself, then began sending energy healing from my hands into his. I watched as his energy field filled up with bands of bright gold and pink energy. He opened his eyes and smiled, happy to see me. I kept up the energy healing for twenty five minutes. At the end of that time I said a prayer for my grandfather. “Dear Lord, let my grandfather have quality of life for what time remains to him and when his time comes, let him go easily and peacefully.”

Energy Healing Transformation

My mother and I then put my grandpa in his bed and covered him with a blanket. He went to sleep immediately. The next day, Sunday, we came back. Joining us were my brother, my uncle and my cousin. The evidence of the energy healing was very apparent. My grandpa was fully alive and animated. His eyes were bright, he told jokes, and the swelling on the back of his hands had gone down seventy- five percent. When it was time to go and we were all leaving, my grandpa called me back. I went over to him and leaned down. He whispered in my ear how much he loved me.

The Answer

I went back to Austin the next day. On Tuesday afternoon my mother called. My grandfather had gone into a coma and died early that afternoon. The energy healing had done its job. eGod had answered my prayer. My grandfather had quality of life in the short time that remained to him and when it was his time he went easily and peacefully. He was ninety seven. It was years ago, but I still miss him and always will.

Passing It On

I told my grandpa’s energy healing story to client of mine in Los Angeles as we were driving to see her husband who had been in intensive care for months in LA County Hospital. The doctors were baffled and unable to diagnose what was wrong with him. My client was sure he had been poisoned by ruthless business competitors. After I was done working on him, she asked if I wouldn’t mind waiting outside for a few minutes. “Not at all, ” I replied. “Take your time.”

She came out of his room twenty minutes later, tears streaming down her face. “I said the prayer for my husband that you said for your grandfather Max,” she told me as we drove away.

Her husband passed peacefully later that night. His long ordeal was over.

Sharing

Stories are powerful things. Never be afraid to share them. You never know the impact they may have and the good they can do when you share them. Energy healing is a powerful instrument of transformation.

The Lobster in the Pot Keeps Boiling

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Jimmy Carter

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

The New York Times published a piece by Jimmy Carter a couple of days ago about how America has abandoned its role as the global champion of human rights. I have reprinted that article in its entirety rather than summarize it because it is that important. The America of today bears little resemblence to the country we all grew up in.

What do you think of the remarks of ex President  JimmyCarter? Please comment.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/opinion/americas-shameful-human-rights-record.html?_r=2

THE United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.

While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.

The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Recent legislation has made legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or “associated forces,” a broad, vague power that can be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress (the law is currently being blocked by a federal judge). This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration.

In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications. Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.

Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable. After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone. We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.

These policies clearly affect American foreign policy. Top intelligence and military officials, as well as rights defenders in targeted areas, affirm that the great escalation in drone attacks has turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations, aroused civilian populations against us and permitted repressive governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic behavior.

Meanwhile, the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, now houses 169 prisoners. About half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom. American authorities have revealed that, in order to obtain confessions, some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers. Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defense by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of “national security.” Most of the other prisoners have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either.

At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.

As concerned citizens, we must persuade Washington to reverse course and regain moral leadership according to international human rights norms that we had officially adopted as our own and cherished throughout the years.

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, is the founder of the Carter Center and the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

Drones Are in Your Neighborhood

/in /by

Drones Over America

The Drones Are Here

The drones are here, and those drones are being deployed in the skies over America. In my last post I suggested that America is like a lobster in a pot of boiling water and every so often the cooks/crooks who run this country turn up the heat a few more degrees. That is certainly happening now.

Shortly before the end of 2011 the Senate passed the NDAA which Obama signed into law. The NDAA declared that America is a battlefield and every American citizen is a potential enemy combatant who can be detained indefinitely with no recourse to an attorney or a trial. Shortly after that lovely piece of legislation was passed Congress and Obama followed with an encore performance, passing and signing into law the FAA Reauthorization Act which calls for 30,000 drones in the skies over America by 2020. Then in March 2012 Obama signed an executive order giving him broad powers to declare martial law in peacetime and take over complete control of the country’s infrastructure: farms, water supplies, reservoirs, factories, power plants etc.

Does this sound like a democratic country to you where the Constitution and Bill of Rights are followed and enforced or does it remind you of something more sinister?

In any event, the flight of the drones has begun. The following information on the drone invasion comes from Simon Black of www.sovereignman.com:

  • 64 current drone bases are spread across the country, and are operated by various service branches: Army, Navy, Air Force and Special Operations Command
  • 12 current locations are housing Predator and Reaper UAS, which can be armed 
  • The scope of missions to be performed at these locations is not clear and remains classified 
  • California and Texas, the two most populous states, host the largest concentration of bases, 10 and 6, respectively. There are also 22 extra bases planned in these two states
  • A Pentagon report identifies 110 potential new sites; located in 39 states, as well as in Guam and Puerto Rico
  • The Department of Defense (DoD) and the military currently have 88 “active certificates of authorization” (COAs) at various locations around the country that permit them to fly UASs outside of restricted military zones

Most Americans are not aware this is happening. The mainstream media will most likely not report it and if they did how many people would really care?