The Miraculous Achievements of Bodywork: How Touch Can Provide Healing for the Mind, Body, and Spirit

By Ronan M. Kisch

Why do some people miraculously turn around after suffering from life threatening illnesses, emotional trauma, and spiritual despair?

Dr. Ronan Kisch has documented twenty-seven bodywork/massage therapists whose clientsdespite grave medical prognoses or life traumahad unusual, if not miraculous recoveries after having bodywork with these practitioners. Who are these practitioners that have had these successes? What transpired in their sessions that allowed for such miraculous events? What is it that you could do to create these possibilities for yourself and others? Dr. Kisch, who brought to light the psycho-behavioral aspects confronting bodywork practitioners in Beyond Technique: The Hidden Dimensions of Bodywork, now examines the spiritual domain of bodywork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450298070

Ronan M. Kisch

Ronan M. Kisch, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and bodywork educator in private practice in Dayton, Ohio. He received his doctorate degree from the University of Kentucky where he was an NIMH Trainee at the Department of Medical Behavioral Science. He received post doctoral training at The Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. Dr. Kisch is a Certified Neuro-Emotional Technique (NET) Practitioner, a Nationally Certified Bodyworker, a Trager® practitioner, and he holds a certificate from The Santa Barbara Graduate Institute in Somatic Psychology. He has served as a counseling specialist at Kent State University and as a health psychologist in Dayton’s Miami Valley and Sycamore Hospitals.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Part I Prelude

Chapter 1 The Quest

Chapter 2 Miracles

Chapter 3 The Wisdom of Bodyworks

Chapter 4 Overture

Part II The Play

Act I Fortuitous/Chance Motivation

Chapter 5 Glorious Mysteries

Chapter 6 Always, Always, Always … Always Open with a Prayer

Chapter 7 Doing My Part

Chapter 8 Divine Appointment

Act II Intuitive Inspiration

Chapter 9 Almost Makes Me Cry

Chapter 10 In Attendance

Chapter 11 The Universe Works

Chapter 12 Walking This Hill

Chapter 13 That Miracle Happened to Me, Too

Chapter 14 Bring a Healing Spirit Into the World

Chapter 15 Miracles Happen Every Day

Act III Inspirational Encounter with A Bodywork Professional

Chapter 16 This Is Going to Work

Chapter 17 Ask For Guidance From God

Chapter 18 Be the Dalai Lama

Chapter 19 The Smile and Laughter Were Miraculous

Chapter 20 Just Do Nothing

Chapter 21 More Than One Way to Get to Cleveland, Ohio

Chapter 22 I Saw The Tunnel

Chapter 23 Believe in the Power of Miracles

Chapter 24 Remember This Bliss

Act IV Remarkable Recovery Resulting from Bodywork Intervention

Chapter 25 An Instrument of Healing

Chapter 26 A New Direction

Chapter 27 God, Thank You Man

Chapter 28 Feel Better After Giving

Chapter 29 Nature’s Way

Chapter 30 Dance With the Deepest Love

Chapter 31 Let’s Try

Part III Finalé

Chapter 32 Wisdom Revisited

Chapter 33 The Other Science

Chapter 34 Working From Spirit And Soul

Chapter 35 Conclusion

Appendix A Client Expectations

Appendix B Practitioner Expectations

Bibliography

FOREWORD

WHAT IS A MIRACLE?

The eminent British biologist Gregory Bateson once said that A miracle is a materialist’s idea of how to escape from his materialism. That is to say, miracles are the back-door explanations for events occurring outside the commonly accepted laws of natural processes. In two words, miracles are commonly viewed as Divine interventions, the hand of the Creator dramatically interceding in the normal operations of his (or her) creation. When an occurrence defies the logical analysis of presently known facts, we label it a miracle, a unique, inexplicable―and capricious―act of God.

For me there are two major problems with this view of things. The first is philosophical, and it thoroughly permeates our notions of the relationships between self, world and our concept of the Divine. Underlying this view is a fundamental separation of nature and her Creator, between the unfolding of nature as originally set in motion and the arbitrary and temporary fiat of a Supreme Being. This separation manifests itself in many variations of our primary assumptions about the relationships between humanity and the cosmos―separations between matter and spirit, between body and soul, between objective and subjective knowledge, between the physical and the Divine. These separations lie at the heart of the dark night of the modern Western psyche―the alienation from nature and from one another, the spiritual confusions and the hubristic assumption that matter can be manipulated to serve all human needs. These separations have driven a firm wedge between ourselves and the world we inhabit, between what is known and important aspects of all that remains to be discovered, between our collective actions and the health of our environment, between mind and soul, between post-enlightenment dawn of the modern scientific era and earlier primitive cultures. And so we wait for miracles to set things right.

The second major problem with the natural/miraculous dichotomy is not philosophical but scientific. To deem an event a miracle outside the bounds of natural law presumes that we have in fact a comprehensive grasp of what those laws are. Again Gregory Bateson: Science has never proven anything, and All knowledge is provisional. The next new discovery can set all prior assumptions on their head, which has occurred repeatedly in the history of science. Science can never be more than a general consensus about the nature of things based upon what mutually agreed-upon data is currently available. What the scientific community collectively agrees upon would fill all of the technical libraries of the world. What is not yet known would fill all of the rest of the buildings in the world.

A tamer, more scientifically manageable name for a miracle is anomaly. All too typically anomalies are simply brushed aside because they do not fit accepted wisdom and expected outcomes. Well, there is nothing more unscientific than the out-of-hand dismissal of an anomaly. All scientific breakthroughs have come to pass through the careful examination of currently inexplicable anomalies. And the daily observation of healing anomalies is the effective bodyworker’s milieu.

These reflections lead me to the book that you have in your hands, Ronan Kisch’s The Miraculous Achievements of Bodywork: How Touch Can Provide Healing for the Mind, Body, and Spirit, an anecdotal collection―and yes, all knowledge begins anecdotally―of remarkable resolutions of conditions that have failed to respond to conventional treatment. Anomalies. The effective bodyworker’s studio is a laboratory like no other, where the mysteries of the intersection between consciousness and physiology are the prevailing assumptions. Much of the subtext of these anecdotes, in my view, has to do with the heightened awareness of and conscious movement of energies in our bodies.

Now with energy we have landed on a loaded word in a long-standing debate. Many mainstream medical authorities want to insist that there is no such thing as energy medicine, that healing is all about repairing, eliminating or replacing faulty mechanisms and the pharmaceutical tweaking of biochemistry. On the other hand, the physicists―those probers into the ultimate nature of matter―have been telling us since the 1920s that there is nothing in the universe but energy, swirling, vibrating, congealing, transmuting, compounding, interpenetrating, endlessly restless energy, energy whose complex interactions continually reinforce coherent relationships and which also provide constant opportunities for―analogies. It is within this ambiguity of stable coherence and novel occurrences that the practitioners’ experiences described in this book arise.

For me there are three basic principles from which all anomalous, miraculous healings unfold:

1) Self-awareness. Until we more fully and consciously inhabit our own flesh we cannot have an accurate picture of who and what we actually are. As a matter of fact, unless we more fully and consciously inhabit our flesh we do not have a clear picture of the world at large. There is no unambiguous distinction between proprioception (our physical sense of ourselves) and exteroception (the objective apprehension of the world around us.) This hard and fast distinction between my perceptions of self and my perception of the rest of the world is at the core of our increasing alienation from that world. I would go so far as to posit that there is only proprioception, our sensory connections to self. The only things my nervous system is in direct contact with are my tissues; my world view is built upon inferences from my tissues’ responses to my surroundings. My body is my antenna, and any distortions or elisions in my perceptions of it lead inexorably to a distorted world, because my bodily responses are my source of my sense of that world.

2) Self-regulation. I have at my disposal thousands of parameters of self-regulating control mechanisms, from beliefs to feeling states to behaviors on every conceivable level. These cannot be effectively accessed and appropriately used without expanding self-awareness.

3) Successful adaptation. If I can become more sensitized to my tissues’ responses to the world, and if I can discover and utilize my own capacities for self-regulation, I can open a wider and wider repertoire of constructive choices―choices in diet, activities, beliefs, relationships―that better serve my adaptations to constantly shifting situations within myself and around me.

Once again, Bateson: All knowledge is deeply subjective. I have no way of knowing anything apart from my conscious relations to my organism that is doing the knowing. Heightened sensory awareness, and a heightened sense of how to interpret the information it feeds me, is absolutely critical to the management of my own being and the impact I am having on my surroundings. The fundamental mystery and miracle, for which there is no meaningful scientific theory, is the emergence of self-reflective consciousness and its active interface with the stuff of which I am made―its basic nature, its history and its possibilities. This interface is the domain of bodywork, and the unifying principle of all modalities is the expanding of personal awareness of the dimensions of the self and its relations to the world around it.

This is the miracle which Ronan Kisch addresses―the expansion of sensory consciousness and its fusion with the physical realities that are the fabric of our lives. This cannot be learned from a book; it must be directly experienced in the body. Touch and movement are the most direct avenues for approaching this expansion and this fusion. When they occur, they open dimensions of developmental possibilities that are otherwise unimaginable and inaccessible. This is why the people in this book underwent such dramatic positive changes in their symptoms and their lives. Effective bodyworkers introduced them to the miracle that is themselves.

Deane Juhan

August 14, 2009

Orinda, California

Preface

PREFACE

There are all kinds of people. This is as true for bodyworkers as it is for clients. Some may welcome spirituality or a prayer before a session and feel blessed; others may find this practice intrusive, imposing, offensive, or unacceptable. Some may not be able to separate a spiritual prayer from religious belief. Others may be more universal in their spiritual acceptance. Yet others may believe prayers or intentions for the highest good are meaningless.

This book is not about religion. It is about understanding and spirituality and the realm of bodywork. It explores how humanity can draw from its strengths and reach toward its full potential. It involves the mechanism of identity achievement—encountering an obstacle and grappling through the issues of that obstacle to arrive at a solution to which one can commit one’s self.

Discovering difference is intellectually easier than it is to recognize similarity. In trying times it is more comfortable to turn to those who are similar and target, alienate, blame, or attack those who are different. The front pages of our newspapers are replete with examples of those of one faction or faith fighting or waging war with those of another. Even within the same group, people who practice in one fashion may wage intolerance or hostility with those who practice in another.

One’s orthodoxy might be religious or scientific. It might make an individual unavailable or unprepared to open to the possibility of another. Identity achievement is not about denying one’s own truth by superimposing others’ expectations on one’s self. Nor is it about insisting that others conform to one’s own sense of truth. It is about comfortably coming to grip with one’s own truth and tolerantly being able to relate to others.

Jesus Christ paid the ultimate price for not conforming to the mainstream, the popular mind, and the standard practice of his time. When we finally come to clarify our own individuation, no matter how loving or accepting this might be, this will not always be acceptable to some others. If one is dependent upon external acceptance for self-confirmation, whether one attains it or not, the self will be lost. Hopefully we can find ways of both maintaining our own sense of individuality and respect for others.

Through life experiences, though they may not always be pleasant, many develop a sense of clarity regarding their identity. Self-respect and self-confidence are achieved as one gains the courage to be one in word and deed with that identity. Whether one lies on the table or works over it, the hallmark of integrity is respecting and supporting one’s self and the other for who and where that client is in her or his development. You may not receive the most therapeutic session if you are the client on the table and your practitioner is intolerant or non-respectful of your integrity. Likewise, you may not be able to give the session that you envision if the client is internally rejecting you for who or what you are.

Frequently in the course of my clients’ therapy, they disparagingly tell me that they surely should be healed or ought to have it all together by now given their age. For those clients who berate themselves for not being healed or having it altogether yet, I suggest that it is not time that heals all wounds, but what we do over time that may heal our wounds. Furthermore, we not only have an age; but, a developmental stage. We are perpetually going through developmental stages. At each stage we may be faced by perennial issues that need to be reexamined. Each developmental stage may call for us to reexamine our identity, beliefs, values, our sense of what our life’s journey is about, and what we need to do to maintain our integrity in it. At the different stages of our development, we look through different eyes that have resulted from life’s experiences—our wisdom to date. In the reexamination, we may come to new conclusions and develop a new sense of identity. This process continues until the end of our lives. I believe this is the process of self-definition and living the good life. Neither self-reproach nor blame is appropriate or helpful. Unlike problem-solving they are disempowering. As you engage in this endeavor of identity achievement I hope you appreciate yourself for your efforts. This self-appreciation is the stuff of which self-esteem is made.

In the process of writing this book, I have changed. This change, from time to time, came with stress and anxiety. I had to grapple with my beliefs about spirituality, religion, science, and God. I had to wrestle with my beliefs about miracles. I had to confront my own anxiety. I struggled with the implications of changing the way I conduct my practice. I enlisted my wife, friends, and colleagues in discussion. I will consider this book successful if you find yourself grappling to clarify or fine tune your personal, spiritual, religious, scientific, or professional identity. I am less concerned with the specific conclusions that are derived. I certainly hope that healing is offered and received in opening to the spirit of Love.

The journey of writing this book and exploring my own values was not an easy or quick one for me. I started the process with the arrogant thought, One year, maybe two―one or two years and I will have this project wrapped up. A decade later, I am completing the writing of this preface. My journey is still underway. It would therefore be understandable if the journey is not quick or easy for you.

The Miraculous Achievements of Bodywork is in no way meant to be diagnostic or prescriptive. The content of this book is not intended to replace any treatment you may be receiving. We have to make educated decisions about our well-being because everyone is different. Talk with your health care practitioner before making changes. I trust if you have difficulty with your own quest you will not hesitate to enlist appropriate support and guidance in finding or accepting your resolutions to Life’s perennial questions.

Writing this material presented a dilemma for me. Different people learn differently. From the earliest of times knowledge was communicated by telling stories―indigenous peoples, the holy books of the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and Greek mythologies. Many people learn by hearing stories and so I incorporate storytelling in my work. Other people learn by identification or comparison. And, so I have included my own story in this book. Yet, others learn by intellectual exploration and discussion. This book also contains intellectual examination of themes of bodywork, science, and spirituality. Then there are those who learn by experience. By using different styles in this writing, I have attempted not to leave anyone out. Please feel free to honor your own style by beginning the book where it most makes sense to you and by going to what feels right next. Or, start at the beginning and read to the end.

My wish is that this material helps you in your life-defining journey. I hope The Miraculous Achievements of Bodywork allows both your bodywork and life to become deeper and more meaningful.

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As I wrote this book, listening to the stories of these practitioners―their works and their personal lives―I felt as if I was connecting with these bodyworkers’ souls. Transcribing their stories activated my sensory motor cortex as if I were doing hands-on bodywork with each of them. I felt the weight and wave patterns of these miracle-conscious bodyworkers’ lives. Reading their stories and rereading them, it was as if their unfolding lives were becoming alive within me. As much as my spirit was reaching out to capture some unique aspect of them, they were reaching back and touching me. From our meeting, I am both changed and eternally grateful.

As I proofread the pages of this book, I read my thoughts and often failed to see what was written or miswritten on the printed pages. Consequently I am extending my gratitude to Ann Sharp, Linda Edwards, Marylin Rainey, Nancy Eichhorn, Mary Stuart, and my wife Elizabeth for helping to make my written words flow.

For all of those who work from a place of love, spirit, and soul whose impetus may neither be recognized, understood, nor appreciated―thank you.

Part I Prelude

Part I

PRELUDE

1

The Quest

During the night of September 10, 2001 I was in bed with my wife, Elizabeth, in a hypnagogic state, half awake half asleep, when I heard a horrific explosion and sensed evil was tearing the fabric of reality—injecting venom from the dark other side. Fully awake, I was struck with a sense of impending disaster. I turned to Elizabeth and asked, Did you hear that? She said, No, I didn’t hear anything. I bolted out of bed and searched the house for intruders. All the doors were locked and the windows closed. I went outside to the front yard to see if I could see or hear anything in the neighborhood. All was quiet. I came back to bed and told Elizabeth about the horrific explosion and the intense feeling of evil and impending doom. This experience was unlike anything that had ever happened to me.

The next morning my step-daughter, Valerie, called from Atlanta, Turn on the TV! Turn on the TV, she repeated. I turned on the television and there saw the video of a jet smashing into the World Trade Tower. Minutes later there was the second jet flying into the other tower. One jet flying into the tower could have been an unimaginable accident. There being two such accidents was beyond belief. This was an attack.

I was hard pressed to fathom how anyone could knowingly murder so many innocent civilians and simultaneously create trauma and suffering in countless others, suffering that would rage on and ripple with time, instigating yet more trauma and tragedy. This was beyond my comprehension. In the back of my mind, there was also the issue of my experience the night before. I had never encountered such a phenomenon and I did not know how to go about coming to grips with or understanding it. The contents and intensity of my state of being on September 10, 2001 were alien to me. On September 11, 2001 they appeared to be prophetic.

That something in my unconscious could have predicted such an event was beyond my belief, nor could I believe this was a genuine premonition. I have been a skeptic of such experiences since childhood. I understood the laws of cause and effect before I could read. As a child, I intuitively knew there was no such thing as Santa Claus. I knew that Santa Claus was either part of a mechanism to control children’s behavior or a ploy for marketing toys. Likewise, I knew there was no such thing as God. After all, if there was a God, a man in the sky with a long white robe, and a long beard who was supposedly all knowing, all powerful, and ever present, and if he was really guiding the actions of humanity for the good—could there have been anything such as crime, murder, the Holocaust, or world wars?

As I matured I believed that my skepticism was what gave me an edge as a student and as a psychologist. Left-brain objectivity detached from prejudice or bias was my major tool for approaching life and clients. I disbelieved what appeared to be obvious on the surface and instead searched for what was significant though latent. But this experience of evil on September 11, 2001 and several other fortuitous events began my broaching life and questioning in a new and different direction. Three of these events also involved death.

When I first arrived in Dayton, Ohio I worked in a hospital as a health psychologist. There, I was told by several nurses not to be surprised if I saw patients after their death. They explained that these people might have had unfinished business and, before moving on, they would often return to share final messages. I never saw any ghosts in the hospital halls; but, over the years I did hear of such sightings from anxiety-ridden or embarrassed patients. Did I believe these stories? Let’s say I filed this information away as hospital folk lore and kept it for future reference.

I had cause to remember this hospital folk lore on the day after my mother died. I was on my way to Covenant House, where my mother died, to pick up her belongings. It was dusk as I was traveling on I–75 in Dayton when I saw a shooting star which had a northwestern trajectory over the nursing home. It was the first shooting star that I had seen in the state of Ohio. The hospital lore came back to me and I wondered, is this my mother sending me a message? Could this be her on the other side letting me know that she is okay? To the best of my knowledge, my mother would have been a skeptic, too. But, I just had to wonder because of the coincidence of the event and the timing.

The night of the day I buried my mother, my wife Elizabeth and I were again driving when a second shooting star crossed our path―is she knocking on her disbelieving son’s door again? This time it felt like a different message. She was not letting me know that she was all right. I had a sense that my mother was telling her anxious youngest son that she was now privy to a greater picture and that I could calm my neurotic anxieties. I would be all right. This was just an awareness. I did not necessarily believe it. But, this marked the first limbic chink in my scientific armor.

In March, a year and a half later, my step-son Eric died. He was tragically killed along with his fiancé and her mother by a drunk driver. Jennifer, my step-daughter, and her husband had flown into town from Atlanta to spend the night with us before the funeral the following day. I was on my way to the grocery store with my son-in-law when there, just around the corner, on a snowy night, in the middle of the road, appeared a white dove. It was not doing anything. It was just standing in the middle of the road. Well, I’ve never seen a bird at night before, let alone a white dove. Maybe this was a hallucination. I turned to my son-in-law and asked, Do you see that white dove? In his characteristic Southern style he said in amazement, Yeah, Dude! I could not help but to believe that Eric was sending me a message. He was blessing my marriage to his mother and expressing his appreciation for my taking care of her. I have never seen a bird at night since.

Two years later my father died. The night I buried him I had a very unusual dream. I saw a figure ascending a ladder into the heavens. As the figure went higher, an opening in the clouds formed, like the aperture of a lens opening. Then figures, ancestral figures, came out from behind the clouds like a celestial greeting committee. The figure then rose into the opening and it, the opening, and the other figures disappeared. I have been trained in science. I had not had celestial dreams. (At least, I didn’t have celestial dreams until that night.) I instantly woke and turned to tell Elizabeth what I had just dreamed. She was awake and sitting up in bed. After I told her of my experience she said, That’s what I just saw. That has never happened before, or since.

There were three other events that further opened the door to an alternative mode of perception, understanding, and belief. These had nothing to do with death. These, however, were not events that happened to me. They were stories that I recorded in my first book, Beyond Technique: The Hidden Dimensions of Bodywork. As a student of Milton Trager’s technique of psychophysical reeducation, at trainings I would routinely hear massage therapists talking about their work experiences with clients. Many of these experiences were puzzling, troubling, and even traumatizing for them. They related to the psychosocial aspects of their relationships with their clients. I decided that I would write a book to help them understand some of these psychological phenomena that arise as part of working with people.

I hoped the book would normalize some of the troubling experiences they encountered, help them to grow personally and professionally, and help prepare them for future unexpected occurrences. Three of these stories involved unexpected events which preceded phenomenal outcomes. These occurrences did not follow the customary laws of cause and effect. What happened in these stories can be called unusual, extraordinary, or even miraculous.

The first of these stories involved a woman named Margaret. Margaret was in a car accident that left her with chronic pain from whiplash. Because of her own traumatic experience and her emotionally vulnerable personality she feared doing neck work with her clients. At a training she was asked to perform a neck lift.¹ Margaret, after suffering a dozen years of cervical² pain herself from an auto accident, was terrified to perform the neck lift lest she inflict damage or pain on another or be rejected by her client. Margaret was serendipitously paired up with a man approximately her own age. When it came time to do the neck lift, Margaret froze. She was so bound up in wanting to be acceptable, not making a mistake, and not inflicting pain on another that she could not respond. Instead, she timidly worked with her partner’s neck. Margaret continues the story:

Without being aware of what was going on inside of me, my partner said, You can lift more. I told him, I’m afraid I’ll hurt you. Then I heard him say, I am confident in you! You will do fine." That freaked me out! Whether no one had ever said that to me before or I was just unable to accept it, I don’t know, but I had never heard that before. I never had anyone confident in me about anything. I not only heard what he said, I took in both his words and his feeling of confidence. I was really touched by this. My self-confidence was boosted by the confidence he felt in me. My muscular holding and tension released. Suddenly, I was aware of feeling the sensations of this man’s neck resting in my hands. It was as if someone had suddenly turned on an electric switch. I suddenly could feel the flexibility of his muscles as they arched in my cupped hands and I watched his head tilt back. I could feel the weight; I could feel the skin. I continued to lift his neck muscles, reaching the full extent of their range. Then I just stopped lifting. I not only understood how to do the technique safely, but I had found the confidence to perform it.³

Margaret explains that this occurrence was not the end of her story. After returning home, her first client was a thirty year old woman who suffered from spina bifida⁴. She had three malformed vertebrae in her neck, causing pinched nerves and chronic pain. Again, Margaret’s panic of failure returned and she felt immobilized. But, so did her memory of the man at the training and his confidence in her and her experience of that confidence. I was doing it again! Margaret performed the neck lift and her client’s chronic shoulder pain disappeared. Margaret concluded after the session, that not only did her client’s deep ingrained look of gloom turn into a broad, beaming smile, but she had been deeply touched by the session and was no longer the same.

The second story was that of Sherry. Sherry suffered from cancer when she was 26. She said that she was ignorant about her condition. A woman prayed for me. I had no pain, no discomfort. A scar was the only physical aftermath of surgery, but she perpetually lived with the anxiety of recurrence. Sherry devoted her career to working with clients she could identify with—young, hospitalized, cancer patients in excruciating pain. She chose to do polarity therapy⁵ bodywork with terminally ill patients. Sherry was frequently able to help her patients with their pain, but, was dismayed that they seemed to die faster. She then told the story of Dory.

Dory was the closest to her age of all the patients with whom she worked. Dory, a woman with metastatic colon cancer, had just returned from an operation. Her surgeons were so sure that she would not survive that they had left a surgical wire protruding through her abdomen. Her condition was expected to deteriorate rapidly. She was in constant pain—clutching for her meds every few hours. Dory asked Sherry if there was anything she could do to remove her from her body.

Sherry had a particularly strong identification with her patient Dory because of the similarity in their ages. Dory was in extreme pain and her death was imminent. When Dory asked Sherry if there was anything Sherry could do to remove her from her body, Sherry replied, Yes. Sherry was aware of a procedure that would shift focus out of a person’s body, but it hastened death. As Sherry explains:

I was prepared to work with Dory. But the first thing I did was to knock over a coffee table with drinking water on it. That’s not me. I was extremely embarrassed. After cleaning up the mess, I gathered myself together to begin again. Kaboom! Just as I started there was a tremendous clap of lightning that came down outside of the window. Dory and I laughed together over being startled by the thunder. I began again. Kaboom! There was no storm outside and no storm in sight. It was as if someone was sending a metaphysical sign. We agreed to stop. After that, I continued to work with Dory in a gentle manner to help manage her pain.⁶

To her doctors’ disbelief and bewilderment Dory lived for another four months. Sherry described the time as a romantic passage for Dory and her husband during which they were able to part without agony.

The third story involved Patricia, a practitioner who also experienced an extraordinary shift in her client. Patricia, an earnest, gentle woman had been in practice for fifteen years without ever having a terminal cancer patient. Georgia, a sixty-seven year old woman with breast cancer, came to her and told Patricia that she wanted to beat her cancer. Yet, in spite of Patricia’s coaxing, Georgia was unwilling to explore the emotional stress issues in her life. Patricia did everything she could to try to help her client—to no avail. After Georgia’s death, Patricia said, No more cancer patients. That is when her friend Gina came in wearing a wig.

Gina had a rare form of ovarian cancer that had spread all over her inside … to everywhere. She hadn’t eaten anything for three weeks. Patricia tells what happened in the session:

Well, here she was in my office … so sick … and I had no idea what to do for her. She was in a lot of pain. I asked her, Where do you hurt the most? She said, "Over my liver. I just had a CT scan⁷. They were trying to see if the chemotherapy had done anything, but, it hasn’t. Now I have cysts in my liver, like about a dozen or so. So … I sat down beside the table, and put one hand underneath her liver and one hand on top of it, and I started to pray … silently. I said, God, why are you doing this to me again? You know I don’t do well with this. I didn’t do well with the last one. I want to help her though, Lord, she’s my friend. And I just sat there holding her liver between my hands. I just said to God, Well just help me to be with her Lord, and help me to know what to say."⁸

By the time Patricia was through with her prayer, the two women were crying. Patricia