A Healer's Handbook: Channeling the Light of Yogananda and Christ

By Mary Kretzmann

A Guidebook for Spiritual Healing

For those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the nature and practice of spiritual and energy healing, A Healer’s Handbook offers a multitude of case studies of healings effected through attunement to a Higher Power.

Mary Kretzmann—director of the Ananda Healing Prayer Ministry for nearly thirty years—has guided many around the world in healing techniques such as prayers and affrmations, visualizations, and more. Her work has included “laying on of hands” sessions, drawn from the teachings of the great spiritual master Paramhansa Yogananda and of Jesus Christ. This book chronicles Mary’s in-depth experience and insights.

Many cases of instantaneous and near-instantaneous physical healing have occurred in her sessions. In addition, the principles and techniques revealed in this book have worked cures of deep emotional wounds. Many people have told the author, “One session with you helped me more than years of therapy.” Prospective and veteran healers, and those who seek hope and help for personal healing, will find inspiration and instruction from Mary’s accounts.

Mary Kretzmann teaches locally at The Expanding Light Retreat in Northern California, and travels internationally, sharing Yogananda’s teachings on energy healing. She is the author of Divine Will Healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crystal Clarity Publishers
• Release date: Jul 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781565895706

Mary Kretzmann

Mary Kretzmann has practiced and taught the healing methods of Paramhansa Yogananda for many years. She is currently writing another book sharing many inspiring stories of healing and transformation that have occurred over the years. This new book, combined with Divine Will Healing, is used in a training course for aspiring healing practitioners.   Mary moved to Ananda Village at age twenty-three with her husband, Timothy Kretzmann. They embraced the spiritual life, and raised their three children with these spiritual ideals. You can read about how to apply these ideals in your own family life, in her free online book, Finding God in Your Family.    Mary teaches online, and at the Expanding Light Retreat, and “on the road.” These classes feature Paramhansa Yogananda’s techniques for physical, mental, and spiritual healing.

Book preview

Chapter One

Empathy

People often ask me how to get started in laying-on-of-hands healing. It is purifying for the aspiring healer to first do prayers at a distance for others, often without receiving any outward feedback from the patient. The healer thus comes to rely more deeply on the role of God’s grace in the process, and may even intuit when the prayer has been answered. The healer learns to focus on the various changes while feeling the healing energy flowing through their hands, and their whole being. For instance, sometimes the healing energy may feel like a wave of the vital energy of springtime, or alternatively, as a wave of compassionate and comforting love. Praying selflessly allows the healer to grow in spiritual healing strength and wisdom, without the danger of ego fascination. As Paramhansa Yogananda said, Just heal and forget. Say ‘God is the Healer!’

I encourage aspiring healers to join the Ananda Healing Prayer Ministry. Praying for others is a selfless and purifying divine service. The Ananda Healing Prayer Ministry receives hundreds of prayer requests a month that come in from all over the world, and we have a prayer team of over 750 people who help us in praying for these requests. Please join us; you will be gaining invaluable healing prayer experience while you study along in this book. You can learn more at ananda.org/prayers/.

My Journey

My journey into spiritual healing is just one story — one facet on a vast prism with the one Light shining through it. You will have your own story and we all learn from each other. Over the years, I have benefitted from reading books by other spiritual healers, some of whom were devotionally inclined while others one might more properly refer to as energy healers. But on the deepest level, all of these healers were united in their profound compassion and empathy for the healing needs of others. I found it helpful to read their experiences, while yet remaining mindful of the principles of my own spiritual path, the Ananda path of Self-realization.

This steadfastness to the mystical knowledge given through this path held me in good stead, for on more than one occasion some very gifted healers have come to me seeking advice. Even though I was less experienced in many ways, I was able to be of service to them because of my understanding of Yogananda’s teachings on healing. I will go into this more deeply in the following chapter, titled The Healing Technique.

The Aspiring Midwife

Originally, I never aspired to be a healer but rather a home-birth midwife. This was during the 1970s, when such a career was illegal in the United States, but I wanted to do it anyway. I recognized that homebirth, under the care of a well-trained midwife, was a very healthy option for mother and baby in a normal pregnancy and birth. So much happens during pregnancy; it is a crucial time to lay a healthy foundation for the baby’s body, mind, and soul. I understood the importance of creating an aura of care around the pregnant mother and baby, and the birth process itself.

I studied midwifery independently, took some college courses, and apprenticed with an intelligent and intuitive midwife. Over a period of a few years, while also raising my own young children, I assisted at twenty-five homebirths, and delivered one baby myself when the midwife was delayed. Those twenty-five births also represent many long hours assisting the laboring woman. My focus during those long nights was totally on her needs, not my own.

Later on, that midwifery training of giving strength and comfort during the intensity of labor held me in good stead. Sometimes during deep healing sessions powerful memories from past lives were brought to the surface to be healed. Just like a labor coach, I had to be a rock of strength for the patient until the storm had passed. It was uncanny how for several intense minutes in those sessions it felt similar to labor coaching, while the person’s hidden, painful memory was unveiled and released.

Of course, every healer does not need to first be a midwife! But hopefully there is a thread of compassion and helpfulness running through the experiences of the aspiring healer’s life. The foundation of preparation for healing training should include a natural urge to give, not to get; for as Jesus said, It is more blessed to give than to receive. Paramhansa Yogananda said it this way, The instrument is blessed by what flows through it.

My midwifery training also gave me some direct, preliminary experience in hands-on healing and prayer. During my early twenties I was in nursing school for almost two years, and I got a job in a hospital in order to gain practical experience. I worked the evening shift, from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., as a nurse’s aide on the OB/GYN floor.

I realized that some of the patients felt alone and afraid, especially as their evenings wore on into the night. I could sense it when I first entered a patient’s room in my normal course of duties. When I felt this, I would linger a moment to see if the patient wanted to talk. Many times they opened up in the quiet of the night, and told me their fears as they faced the new circumstances of their lives, be it an illness, or perhaps a baby for a single teen mother.

I often offered a back rub, which was a normal thing for a nurse’s aide to do. Time and again, as I rubbed the center of a woman’s back, I could sense how to best pray with her in a natural way, from the center of her religious or spiritual feeling rather than my own. Mind you, I was a young devotee living in the Bible belt, so I had to put my own approach aside. They would remark how comforted they felt by the prayer and back rub, and were deeply grateful. The inner strength they gained was transformative and lasted for the remainder of their stay in the hospital.

I moved to Ananda at age twenty-three and studied Yogananda’s teachings more deeply, I then realized in retrospect that during the backrubs it was when the palm of my hand was over the woman’s heart chakra that I received that intuitive understanding on how to best pray with each woman.

Pray Like a Mother for Her Sick Child

Paramhansa Yogananda said to learn to pray for others the way a mother would pray for her sick child. A mother always wants her child to recover, even if it takes a miracle. But even more than that, if things are very dire and a miracle is not forthcoming, the mother will finally surrender, and eventually find peace, because she wants no more suffering for her child. We want peace and happiness for our children, preferably here with us. But if that cannot be, then the mother is comforted that her child is at peace in the freedom of the astral world. And the grieving mother should be comforted knowing that prayers will help the soul of her child very much, for the soul lives on, and love is eternal. Yogananda’s powerful statement to pray that way challenges us to shake the heavens with a prayer demand on behalf of others, and then leave the final results to God.

Thy Will Be Done

Thy will be done. People often repeat these words in passive surrender as though there is nothing that can be done. But remember, Jesus spoke these words after he first had made a prayer demand to the Heavenly Father, saying, Lord, let this cup pass from me, but nevertheless not my will, but Thine be done.

The omniscient Christ knew the events that were about to unfold, and yet in his humanity, he was praying that if they could be avoided, then please make it so. In the same way, we should make our prayer demands clear to God; let them resound in the heavens, and then, in that fullness, let the results rest in God’s peace that passeth understanding. Our job is to shake the heavens and then rest in God’s everlasting arms.

Cleft Palate Healed in the Womb

I participated in an unusual healing experience in my early days at Ananda Village. A single woman moved into my vicinity and told me that she was newly pregnant. She had a source of family income, so at least she could provide for the child. However, she knew that even with this income, a single mom wasn’t ideal for the child. And she wanted to do everything in her power to nurture her unborn baby. She asked me if I would do weekly healing sessions with her. She wanted me to focus the healing energy primarily on the baby, not on herself. I met with her throughout her pregnancy and did laying-on-of-hands on her growing abdomen for about thirty minutes per session. The woman had a lovely spiritual nature and the time passed sweetly, sometimes followed by quiet conversation.

She had a hospital birth in a nearby city. When I visited her at home later on, she told me the most unusual story. Mary, look! My baby girl was born with an already repaired cleft palate and lip! The doctor says he has never seen or heard of anything like this, but he says it is a perfectly done, surgical repair!

I could see a faded scar on her baby girl’s lip, as though the repair itself had been done months ago. Cleft palate/lip birth defects occur in the first trimester of pregnancy. It is beautiful that this single mom intuited that her baby needed special healing prayers so early in her pregnancy. God works in mysterious ways. This young woman believed those weekly healing sessions healed her baby in the womb.

I was younger then, and less experienced, and I wondered why would God heal the baby in that way? Why not make the cleft palate disappear altogether as though it had never been? Why would the baby have a scar at all? However, the mother had none of these concerns. She simply felt great gratitude for how God had worked in their lives.

Now, in writing this all these years later, I feel that the mother and baby must have had the karma to experience the cleft palate/lip journey, but the expression of this karma was mitigated to almost nothing by the time the baby was born. Only a faint scar remained. It was as though the karma had only touched them with a gentle tap of a feather. I find it moving to recall this story, and the beautiful mother who listened to her inner heart and asked for those healing sessions.

Empathy for Others

Swami Kriyananda said empathy for others’ needs is a hallmark trait of a healer. Of course, if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t embrace a vocation in healing. However, in addition to that natural caring, some people are drawn to handson healing as a fascinating career change because it is energy work, and thus more attractive than other forms of service. While such an approach may be understandable, this focus on potential fulfillment places the emphasis on the healer, rather than compassion for recipients who will come in the future. It is fine, of course, to seek a career change and one should choose something that is of interest. But I am making a subtle but very important point, so I will clarify further by saying that the emphasis of one’s motivation in pursuing service in spiritual healing should arise from empathy for others.

In cases where the aspiring healer is seeking a career change, it may be best to start with something practical, like massage or acupressure, and gradually add more subtle healing energy techniques to one’s treatment sessions. Your experience will grow with practice. Pray before your client comes through the door, and ask God’s energy to flow through your hands as you practice your chosen healing art. In this way you are involved in the healing arts, but within a grounded structure. Over time you will have increased your understanding of the energy flowing through your hands, as well as a growing intuition of how to help each individual. Having a healing structure allows you to serve many people and thus gain a varied and valuable life experience. It takes the pressure off of you having to come right out of the gate, so to speak, as a hands-on spiritual healer.

Some healers may feel a natural calling to the vocation of hands-on healing that arises out of a response to the needs of those around them. Some gifted healers may show signs of it in childhood, such as their healing of pets or injured birds, and so on. Other healers may find it awakening once they have embarked on the spiritual path. Every journey is unique. Some gifted healers choose to serve quietly on a donation basis (or for free) as a form of divine service, while others make a full-time vocation of healing. There is no hard and fast rule, and as energy work has become more common, there are now many who charge a set fee for their time and effort. Both of these paths to healing service are valid, and the teachings and stories in this book are meant to serve anyone who is interested in spiritual healing.

How to Anticipate the Needs of Others

Paramhansa Yogananda said that the best way to develop empathy for others is to make it a practice every day to anticipate the need of another person, and to fulfill it. To anticipate means that you sense their need, even without them speaking of it. When this happens, your attention has shifted away from yourself and toward the person. This shift is expansive for your soul and gets you out of your ego. It is very good training simply to be helpful to others in general ways, not waiting only until someone comes to you as a client or patient.

This practice can be very simple, such as offering a cool drink of water on a hot day. Or it can mean anticipating a more serious need when a person is in a crisis. Perhaps they need a comforting conversation, or help with some difficult task. Do you naturally feel drawn to helping others in these ways, with no thought of yourself? That is the essence of healing. The hands-on part is simply applying this principle on a subtler energy level.

This quality of deep empathy also plays out in the healing-at-a-distance prayers I mentioned earlier. Over the years, as I have prayed for others, I might sense that a chakra needed more healing energy and divine love to open up. This would often help the person to let go of old pains from the past. Or I could feel that the person needed help in a more general way to become receptive to the healing prayers. This kind of insight is a gradual, natural outgrowth when our attention is directed toward the needs of others.

Early Days in Healing

Even before I was directing the Ananda Healing Prayer Ministry, I would lead informal healing prayer gatherings in my home. It developed rather organically; I would invite a few people to my home and we would pray for anyone in need. As time went on we were meeting each week, just three or four of us in my living room. One day we were praying for the wife of a man who was visiting Ananda. He said that she was emotionally troubled because they had a very sick infant who needed a liver transplant. I recall feeling a healing blessing go through me. I knew in my heart that the mother would have a breakthrough, but since the group was so informal, I felt it unlikely that I would ever know the details. However, as it happened, many months later, I did hear back from the husband. He told me that his wife had been blessed with a remarkable recovery ever since the time we had prayed for her. Even though her child was still suffering serious difficulties from his liver transplant, she now had the inner strength to deal with the challenges that life was presenting to her.

Healing Shirley’s Neck

This story happened very early in my days of serving as director of the Ananda Healing Prayer Ministry. I had just prayed for my Reiki initiation to be revoked so that I might serve only as a healing channel of my line of Gurus. I didn’t want to muddy the waters. I go into that story more deeply later on in this book. What happened with Shirley seemed like a divine response that I had made the right choice in giving up my Reiki initiations in order to serve more clearly as a healer on this Ananda spiritual path.

I’d known Shirley for a few years and she