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.
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.
Holding in the Light—Ritual magic and an empty form?
January 6, 2025 § 2 Comments
In the largely post-Christian liberal Quaker milieu that is my religious home, the most common form of “prayer” is “holding someone in the light.” In this practice, we are not asking God or Christ or some other spirit to do something. We are projecting a grace-conferring energy.
Does it confer any blessing on the recipient—does it work? And does it even confer any blessing on those who do the holding?
Until recently, I have felt that this practice is a form without any real power, because it is rote. It is a ritualistic formula that almost always lacks enough focus to carry even the meager energy that ritual magic pretends to. For we are using it like ritual magic.
Honest ritual magic, like the Catholic mass, needs lots of elements to be effective. It should engage all the senses: incense, the taste of the host, the genuflections, the singing and ritual language in communication, the light of stained glass windows and the shape of magical symbols. And it needs a focus, a place to put the attention. And it needs an ideology, a theology that gives meaning, shapes the focus, and holds all the elements together in ritually semantic coherence.
And even then, ritual magic almost never delivers. How can we expect any more from just asking the meeting to hold someone in the light?
Well, at the very least, it brings the meeting into some form of communion. It binds the meeting to the petitioner and it binds us all together, if only for the moment, and if only rather weakly.
A while ago, some vocal ministry about this came to me in worship, and I posted it in this blog. I have since converted that message into a poem:
There is within us each a Light,
a Light that comforts us and heals.
It can drive away the shadows and
illuminate our way.
When we hold someone in that Light,
we act from the Light within us
and we give answer to their cries:
we stand beside them
in solidarity with their suffering;
we say, “You are not alone.
The Holy Spirit is here with you,
and so in Spirit are we.
With our spirits we offer hope and faith;
with tender hearts we offer love;
with our words we render audible
prayers that fly to their home.”
Holding in the Light
August 4, 2024 § Leave a comment
There is within each of us a Light,
a Light that can comfort us and heal us,
that can drive away the shadows
and illuminate the way forward.
When we hold someone in that Light,
we act in our own Light
and we give answer to their Light;
we stand beside them,
we stand in solidarity with their suffering;
and we say, “You are not alone.
We are here with you.
The Holy Spirit is here with you.
And together we offer hope, faith, and love.”
Through the Flaming Sword 