Holding in the Light – Healing Energy
January 7, 2025 § 1 Comment
In my last post, I questioned whether holding someone in the light does more than jusst make the people who do it feel better. But I do think it could do more; I think it could sometimes actually project healing energy to the recipient. I have seen this work. But it needs more shaping than we give it when we simply ask the meeting to hold someone in the light. In my experience, it needs two things: a shared method and focus.
I get these recommendations from my experience as a teacher of Silva Mind Control in the 1970s. Mind Control is a sinister-sounding name for a rather benign and potentially beneficial self-help program that teaches some deepening exercises and a number of techniques for improving everyday life. But to our point, the course also provides extensive training in spiritual healing. I should rather say Mind Control “taught” me these things, since that was fifty years ago and I’m not sure what the program is like these days.
The course offered a coherent mindset and a set of psycho-spiritual tools for healing that I have seen perform near miracles. Rarely, but really. I believe in its basic approach, which I’ve adapted in the recommendations below.
Shared method
Unless you have someone among you truly possesses the gift of spiritual healing, healing at a distance seems to need everybody doing the same thing, and that thing needs effective discipline behind it. The discipline involves two things: deepening, and a mindform. And they both benefit from practice.
Deepening
I believe it is nearly impossible for most of us to heal someone effectively at a distance without working from an altered state of consciousness. Thus one would be tempted to ask for holding someone in the light during meeting for worship, since then we are all already in the depths, and when a group enters a deeper consciousness together, then things can really happen. But that’s not our way of worship. However, usually we have just finished worshipping when this request comes up, so a little time to sink back down into some meaningful silence would help.
Mindforms
Mindforms are mental images given a formal shape and powered by emotional energy. Here’s an adaptation of how Mind Control does this:
You imagine yourself in a place that empowers you for healing, an environment that both energizes you and has in it the “tools” you use to heal. In this case, we’re talking about light, so presumably you need some light source. You also imagine some way to send that light out toward the recipient. And you can also imagine some spiritual ally or allies, helpers in the work. Or not.
The idea is to dedicate a meditation to discovering what this environment is, what your “tools” are, and what “allies” you might have. You just sit and wait until images come to the fore in your mind that are vivid enough to feel like they have some sustaining value. A little like your discernment of vocal ministry.
Then you enter this environment, take up your tools, greet any allies, and get to work. You could enter this spiritual space while the person who closed meeting for worship is asking for any joys and concerns, or however your meeting does this.
So this exercise could be a dance floor on which you dance with Christ, whose hands are full of light. It might be the Pool of Bethsaida in the fifth chapter of the gospel of John, a pool of light into which you “baptize” the recipient. It could be a garden with a gardener and fruit that is full of light. It could be a laboratory with a laser and animated charts of the human anatomy. It will be whatever has been revealed to you.
My ally—don’t laugh, he’s done some amazing things—is Santa Claus; not the roly-poly commercial figure, but a robust man in his late forties modeled on the character in L. Frank Baum’s book The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (yes, the L. Frank Baum of Wizard of Oz fame). Santa gives me a wrapped gift and inside is whatever I need to do the healing.
As you repeatedly return to the environment that has been revealed to you, it gets more comfortable, you sink more quickly, it reveals to you more options. It becomes a place of energy and joy.
Focus
This work needs more than the bare information we usually get in meeting. A full name and a specific location—city and state—are the bare minimum required, according to Mind Control. More information is better, like the recipient’s relationship to the petitioner and some distinctive personal traits, maybe whatever ails them.
And the petitioner can serve as a channel. She or he is often our only real connection to the recipient. I imagine pouring energy through the petitioner to the recipient, or storing it inside the petitioner like a battery waiting to discharge on their next contact.
And if you know the recipient yourself, then you can really focus. You picture them in their environment or in a place that you often share, trying to bring their person, their face, their clothing, the way they move and talk, all the details you can, into bright focus. Then, zap! Do whatever has been revealed to you.
Through the Flaming Sword 
My late mother would sometimes have my sister call me when she had an angina attack and ask me to pray. I would do it and she would be better in a few minutes. Didn’t use all the technique you describe. However, I’m not aware of my healing prayers having that effect on anyone other than her.