Holding in the Light – Meetings for Healing
January 9, 2025 § 1 Comment
Usually, when we’re asked to hold someone in the light, it’s in the midst of some other situation, very often just after meeting for worship, and we devote no real time or attention to the practice. This is why I feel it’s mostly an outward form whose only value is the shared sympathy it evokes in the gathering. This is no small thing, but it’s not a serious attempt at healing or even comforting the person held. For real attempts at healing, we need a dedicated meeting for healing.
I know that Friends with deeper commitment to the gift of healing than mine, and with broader and more current study and experience, hold meetings for healing among Friends. I’ve never attended one, so I don’t know what these other models are. But I’m sure that other approaches could be at least as effective as the one I describe below. But this is what I know can work—not often, to be honest, but sometimes.
I mentioned my training in Silva Mind Control in previous posts in this series. As a teacher, I used to lead programs for graduates of the course in which healing circles figured regularly and prominently. That practice might offer a model for our own meetings for healing.
The Mind Control practice was an energy circle. We sat in a tight circle holding hands. If we were working on someone in the group, they sat in the middle. The leader would guide a meditation in which we used the deepening technique Mind Control taught and then visualized energy—light—moving from us out of our right hands into the person next to us, and on around the circle, and back into us through our left hand from the person on our left. It was like a spiritual cyclotron, which is a physics particle accelerator that uses two “D”-shaped magnets to spin electrons around in a circle.
At some point, the leader would ask us to all visualize the energy curving up to an apex above the center of the circle and then either funneling down on the person in the middle or out to whomever we were working on at a distance. If the latter, then we called up whatever visual images of the recipient we have, either in memory or in imagination.
It was that simple, all of it easily adapted to Quaker faith and practice. First, deepening, however you do that. Then calling up the Light within. Then cycling the energy—the Light—in the circle until a “clerk” senses that the circle and the energy/light are ready. Then focusing the “beam” on the recipient and holding it there until the “clerk” feels the work is done.
Whatever the “therapeutic” results for the recipient, the practice builds strong bonds between the participants. The energy is often palpable, beautiful, even thrilling, with compassion and desire for healing rising within in wonderful waves. This emotional energy is perhaps where the healing actually draws its power, rather than the exercise of imagination.
Through the Flaming Sword 
Northside Friends in Chicago has public files on their (currently inactive) Meetings for Healing.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1a96O2qQMQkzmYoK8mJ9aG0GnoMgBdfly