Places that Heal

Great Stupa of Dharmakaya from Flickr Creative Commons, some rights reserved by trickofthelight

As my client Janice reclined on my table, she exhaled a lovely “Aaaahhh” – a signal that she was already going into an alpha state – even before I touched her. This scenario replays many times a day in my office. Now, you might think that Janice was simply glad to be relaxing, that she was already expecting the benefits of her bodywork/energy session and you would be right. But I feel that she was also receiving healing just from being in the resonant field of the space. After working in the same office now for twelve years, I think the healing frequencies in my space have strengthened from every session I’ve done.

Have you ever noticed a special feel in certain places? One of my favorites is the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya at the Shambala Mountain Center. Nestled on the side of a hill in the Rocky Mountains, this place feels to me like a cosmic antenna. During my rare visits, I love to spend at least a few minutes meditating inside the Stupa, soaking up the vibes.

Cathedrals, sacred Native American Sites, temples from various religious traditions have a similar feel – one that has been created from prayers, consciousness, intention over many years. Research even supports what many feel about these places. In “The Field – The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe,” Lynn McTaggart describes in great detail the influence that sacred spaces can have on Random Event Generators. Statistically significant studies show that machines designed to produce a plus or minus sign at random will consistently veer off their predictable pattern of 50% plus and 50% minus when they’re placed in sacred sites.

These days, I do some of my energy healing sessions at home. While working with people from around the world, time constraints sometimes make it necessary to schedule at odd hours, so I do these in my library. I’ve made a conscious decision to reserve this room for my remote energy sessions because I’ve created and maintain the resonant field there.

Is it possible to create a resonant field anywhere? Of course! By setting my intention, I can do my healing work anywhere, at any time. But I prefer, when I can, to do it in one of these two spaces. I let the space help me. And like Janice showed me, the space was already working for her!

What do you notice about sacred places? Have you felt healing, peace of mind or a shift in consciousness from being in one of these places? I’d love to hear of your experiences.

Love,

Cathy

©CathyUlrich and LargeSelf, 2012

Ah yes, time!

One of my favorite blogs here on WordPress is elisacashiola.com. It’s entitled “The blog of a placement designer…” Elisa is a Feng Shui master as well as many other things.

I’ve been wanting to write a blog about allowing time for healing to take place. Just like Elisa says here, we often expect alternative healing to happen immediately. I’ve seen clients come to me after they’ve tried medical interventions that  failed. They want immediate results, otherwise, they don’t think the energy healing worked. The truth is that, while some results are immediate, the more common way energy healing works is that it, too takes time. I laugh when people seem to expect to be cured in one session and often say: “I’m good, but I’m not THAT good!” Your body needs the time to do the work and we may need to address more that one layer before we’re done.

Just like prayer, just like growing a garden, we set our intention, provide strong harmonizing rhythms and the body then needs time to do the rest. An analogy that I learned years ago from my Religious Science Practitioner training was this: it’s like planting seeds in a garden and then digging them up a few days later to see if they’re sprouting. In doing so, you kill the seedlings and have to start over. So do, or receive your energy work, know that it’s working and give it the space and time it needs to create balance and change!

Love,

Cathy

Through the Eyes of the Divine

This weekend, I was blessed to read Gina V’s wonderful blog posting “Walk the Talk,” In it Gina shares a story of how she shifted her perspective of her mother by choosing to look at her through God’s eyes. By changing her viewpoint, she was able to let go of old judgements and stories and simply love her mom as she was. Their relationship became richer and easier after that spark of enlightenment.

Recently, I did a healing session with Jade (not her real name). A wonderful and beautiful healer herself, Jade was having problems with recurring dark spots on her face. She had a sense that there was something bigger going on in her subconscious, but couldn’t quite put her finger on it and wanted my help to see about uncovering any buried treasure that could be the root cause for the spots.

While setting the intention of shedding light on Jade’s issue, I began a physical scan of her body. As I moved my left hand through her field from her head towards her feet, I felt a strong pull and a sense of heat over her heart. Then as I moved my hand away from her body, the heat became stronger.

It seems that many emotional or physical traumas, especially those that are not fully resolved, tend to stay somehow fixed in our energy field, kind-of like a rock in a stream. The stream moves around the rock, but that rock impedes the stream’s flow. And, somewhat like the rings of a tree, those “energy lesions” seem to travel with us, the older ones being further from the body and the more recent ones, closer. So it’s possible to estimate when something may have occurred in a person’s life that is still present and, perhaps, even the root cause of the physical manifestation. I don’t usually know what the trauma was, but I can estimate when. The client fills in the details. Then, by harmonizing that lesion at the place where it’s stuck in the field, it can move and be resolved.

As I was scanning Jade, I said: “I’m finding an imbalance in your heart and it seems to have started when you were about six or seven years old. Any sense about what that might have been?”

Jade began crying softly. “It was when my parents divorced and my father remarried. My step-mother was really mean to me. At the time I couldn’t understand why my Dad did that.” She said: “God, Cathy, I’ve forgiven them, and I thought I had resolved this years ago, but you’re right, it’s still there!”

Jade shared how this time in her life had molded and shaped her way of viewing herself. As a child, she took on the challenges of her family and it affected her ability to fully love herself. And as much as she had worked, released, forgiven, loved, there was a piece that had been buried, waiting to be moved. We both agreed that this was, most likely the root cause of the dark spots on her face.

As, I gently pulled my hands through Jade’s field, smoothing and harmonizing the lesion, we both felt the heaviness lift. Her tears of sadness turned to tears of joy and we both laughed as the field changed.

At the conclusion of our session, I left Jade with a final suggestion – something to play with and to reinforce our process. “Jade,” I said, “How about when you look at yourself in the mirror, look at yourself through the Divine’s eyes?”

“I love that!” she said. “I look at so many things and people through the Divine’s eyes, just not myself!”

What if enlightenment is really about looking at this life through the eyes of the Divine? Even looking at those who challenge, even looking at ourselves through those eyes? I invite you to try it today and let me know how it goes.

Love,

Cathy

©CathyUlrich and LargeSelf, 2012

Piano Tuning

I saw my client, Ricky, yesterday. It had been several years since I had heard from her. When she called to schedule, she said she had been dealing with a headache for ten days straight.

As I looked at her in standing, I could feel the sadness emanating from her body and the posture that she displayed confirmed my suspicions – depressed sternum, rounded shoulders, shallow breath. “Have you been stressed recently?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be.

“You could say that,” she said, but didn’t offer more. My sense was not to pry, so I invited her to lie down on the table as I set to work.

“Ricky, I’ve been doing a new form of energy work that I’ve developed since I last saw you. I think it might help you. Would that be O.K.?” I thought she would be open to my suggestion, and she quickly consented.

I settled onto my rolling stool at end of the table and gently cradled her heels in my hands. Her abdomen heaved as she suppressed sobs, and tears rolled down the sides of her face into her ears. I disengaged for a moment and gave her a tissue, then went back to holding her feet. As the wave of sadness lifted, I went to her head to do some bodywork on her neck, head and jaw.

“So does taking all this crap away from me make you sick?” she queried.

“No,” I answered. “I’m not taking your energy or giving you mine. All I’m doing is balancing the energy that you already have.”

Ricky thought for a moment, then smiled in understanding. “You’re just tuning my piano, right?”

“Right.” When she left, her countenance was different, her headache was gone, and I had a sense that she would have more resources to be in her life. Many times, we can tune our own piano through mediation, prayer, Divine Openings, consciously raising our vibration. But other times, like Ricky found out yesterday, we can use some help. For me, it was a blessing to be able to do that for her…

May your piano be tuned to perfection!

Love,

Cathy

©CathyUlrich and LargeSelf, 2012

Harmony Equals Health – Part Two

“We may look at disease as such out-of-tune behavior of one or another of our organs of the body. When a strong harmonizing rhythm is applied to it, the interference pattern of waves, which is the organ, may start beating in tune again. This may be the principle of psychic healing.” Itzak Bentov, from Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness

In Harmony Equals Health – Part One, I talked about harmonic resonance – that natural state where all of the oscillating fields in a system are in-phase. Today, I want to share my views on how energy healing can help to restore the balance of those oscillating systems when they get out of phase.

Harmonic oscillating systems have a natural tendency. They want to remain in harmony . The interlocking fields of all of the oscillators in our bodies will normally stay aligned.  But they can get out of balance when they are exposed to some kind of disturbance such as chronic stress, injury, emotional trauma – anything that interacts with our field of resonance. A big one is suppressed emotions.

When emotions are not fully felt, they tend to go into the resonant field of the body and, over time, they create a focus of disturbance that can even spread to neighboring fields in the body. When that focus of disturbance is removed – say in the example of unfelt emotions being recognized and experienced – the body will want to return to it’s natural state of harmonic resonance. However, if the disturbance has been long-standing or severe enough, the body may need help.  That’s where vibrational therapies come in.

How does vibrational healing help restore harmonic resonance? Well, there’s a very cool phenomenon called Rhythm Entrainment – the basis for Physical (and I daresay emotional) Energy Healing. It goes something like this: even when the natural frequency of similar oscillators isn’t exactly the same, nature seems to find it more efficient to direct them to line up. Fireflies will blink of and off in unison, electronic circuits will oscillate together, picking one frequency to lock onto – usually the fastest one. Rhythm entrainment is the natural tendency to conserve energy in oscillators of similar frequencies by lining them up.

I like to think of my Energy Healing as a strong harmonizing rhythm that entrains my client’s oscillating fields to return to their natural state of balance. I’m not sending them “energy” or taking away “bad energy” but I am introducing a set of healing frequencies that reminds that body how to return to its natural state of health. Really, it’s just information that guides the body back to what it already knows.

Have you ever given or received a vibrational healing? What have you experienced? I invite you to share your comments and questions.

Cathy

©CathyUlrich and LargeSelf, 2012

Harmony Equals Health – Part One

In an earlier post (Do You Resonate?), I talked about fundamental resonance – that is, when two oscillating structures have the same natural frequency, it takes very little energy to influence them to vibrate together. In today’s post, I want to talk about another kind of resonance that I think is much more commonly seen with living organisms.

Harmonic resonance happens when the natural frequencies of oscillators are proportional to each other. In the diagram below, you can see how this works. The top string is vibrating at it’s fundamental frequency where the second string is vibrating at a harmonic frequency two times that of the fundamental frequency. Then three times, four times and so on. This drawing actually represents what are called harmonic nodes. When you pluck the string in the very center, it will vibrate at it’s fundamental frequency, but when you pluck it a fourth of it’s length from the end, it will vibrate two times faster.

Photo courtesy Flickr Creative Commons. Some rights reserved by Ethan Hein

If you have separate structures that vibrate proportionately to each other, they are said to be in harmony. Music is one of easiest ways to appreciate harmonic resonance. Most of us can easily tell when one instrument in a band is out of tune with the other instruments. So, for our purposes right now, just think of structures being in tune with each other as a harmonized system.

But what does this have to do with the body and energy healing? Well, we have many different kinds of oscillators in our bodies. And the natural frequencies of these oscillators go from relatively slow to very fast. As a general rule, the smaller the structure, the faster it oscillates. Here’s a list of just a few of these oscillators:

• The whole human body 7.5 – 8 cycles per second
• Breath – 12 breaths per minute
• Heart – 70 beats per minute
• Cell – 10³ Cycles per second
• Molecule – 10⁹ Cycles per second
• Atom – 10¹⁵ Cycles per second
• Atomic Nucleus – 10²² Cycles per second

So here’s a very simplified theory about harmonic resonance in the body: When oscillators vibrate in harmony with each other – basically in phase – the system tends to cruise along in a state of natural health. When they get out of phase, the body can eventually manifest illness. Events that can produce disharmony are physical trauma, surgeries, emotional trauma, chronic stress, and substance abuse among many others.

The good news is the body wants to be healthy and it wants to maintain its normal harmonic rhythms. And when it does get out of balance, given the right kinds of information, it can return to a state of harmony. I think we often know when we’re out of balance and I think that the more we become aware of the factors that influence harmonic resonance – either for good or bad – we can avert physical illness before it manifests outwardly.

Please share a comment about some event in your life that took you out of Harmony. What did you do to get it back?

In Harmony Equals Health, Part Two – I’ll be talking more about the ways that powerful healing frequencies like those provided through Divine Openings Healing can help to restore vibrational harmony in the body.

Best,

Cathy

©CathyUlrich and LargeSelf, 2012

Do You Resonate?

Anything that vibrates (an oscillator) has a natural frequency. A vibration is basically a wave of energy – like a sine wave – and the speed that the wave changes direction from up to down through a full cycle is its frequency. Here’s the key: when the natural frequencies of oscillators are the same, it’s easy to transfer energy between them.

If you have two guitars sitting in the same room and they’re tuned alike, when you pluck, say, the A string on one, the A string on the other guitar will vibrate. This is called acoustic resonance. The energy of the sound wave generated by the first guitar travels through the air, contacts the second guitar and since both strings are tuned to the same natural frequency, the second one will vibrate too.

Another kind of resonance – mechanical resonance – shows up in many ways. When you push a child on a swing, if you time your push in phase with the swing, they will go higher – that’s because of the natural resonance of the pendulum. Breaking a crystal glass by exposing it to a specific sound pitch, the natural resonance of the glass, is another. And engineers have to pay strict attention to the natural resonance of buildings and bridges as part of their design process. If they don’t the structure they have designed can shatter – just like the glass – if it happens to be exposed to its natural resonant frequency from outside forces such as wind or earthquakes.

So how does it feel when you resonate with someone? How does it feel when you’re resisting them? And can you adjust your frequency (like that of the guitar) to resonate with someone better when you’re trying to understand them?

Cathy

©Cathy Ulrich and LargeSelf, 2012

Energy: It’s All About Vibration!

I love the old Beach Boys song “Good Vibrations.”  While enjoying the catchy tune and the fun lyrics, have you ever really thought about what “good vibrations” means? I think, intuitively, we all have a pretty good idea.

Often on a subconscious level, we get a sense about someone – whether they’re happy, trustworthy, having a bad day, etc. How do we do that? I think we’re picking up their vibration.

Humans emit electromagnetic frequencies. Just like a radio transmitter, we all produce specific frequencies that make us unique. It’s our own energy signature. And this signature is an average of all the vibrations from our skin all the way down to the subatomic particles in our bodies. Since everything vibrates, our signature is literally comprised of the vibrations of our organs, cells, molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. And again, each of these vibrating structures has its own specific frequency.

The frequencies of the kidneys are different from those of the liver. The frequencies of kidney cells are different from those of brain cells. The frequency of a carbon atom is different from that of a hydrogen atom. And the frequency of an electron is different from that of a proton. It’s like a language that determines the shape, size and property of that particular thing.

Our thoughts and feelings produce electromagnetic frequencies too – they vibrate. So when someone is happy, they produce a very different frequency than someone who is sad or angry. Not only can we pick up body language and facial expressions, we will literally feel the vibration of emotion coming from another person. So the next time you’re picking up “Good Vibrations” from someone, stop, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and allow yourself to soak up the feeling. It’s quite palpable and it’s a good way to fine-tune your vibration receptors. And doing this actually sharpens your vibrations to do healing later.

I’ll be talking in later blogs about how our vibrations can lead to health or illness and I’ll be discussing how my particular discipline, Energy Healing, interacts with the vibrations of the body to encourage it to balance – which outpictures as health.

Best,

Cathy

©Cathy Ulrich and LargeSelf, 2012

What is Energy Healing?

I think there are many misconceptions about what has popularly been labelled “Energy Healing.” While it has been around for a long time, very few people understand what is actually happening during and after a healing. Often attributed to great masters, saints and spiritual leaders, Energy Healing has now become more of a mainstream practice where nurses, massage therapists and specialists in energy work treat clients regularly.

For some, an energy session feels relaxing, but nothing more.  For others, it can be quite profound with seemingly miraculous cures for serious illness and disease. I have even witnessed structural changes from my own Energy Healing work.

In this blog, I’m going to post articles about some of the things we know about the science of Energy Healing, and my understanding of how energy therapies work. I’ll also review recent books and movies on the topic. And I’ll be telling stories of some of my sessions using Divine Openings Healing.

Next: It’s all about Vibration

©CathyUlrich and LargeSelf, 2012

Welcome to the Large Self!

Wow! The first of many posts…I have created this site to share my thoughts about and experiences with physical and energy healing accumulated over almost thirty years.

I have worked in hospital settings, Sportsmedicine and Orthopedic clinics (including owning one in Florida) and Nursing Homes. And for the past seventeen years, I’ve operated a small, private clinic where I do a variety of manual therapies including Rolfing, Craniosacral Therapy, Myofascial Release, Visceral Manipulation, Therapeutic laser and Energy Therapies.

So who might be interested in following this blog? I think anyone who is interested in Energy Therapies, Energy Medicine, Alternative Healing or just about anyone wanting to know more about our wonderful bodies and even the nature of reality.

I’ve always wanted to blog about the many and varied stories and experiences that I have had in the course of working with clients. So, here it starts…The first thread that I’ll be discussing is: “What is Energy Healing?”

Welcome! And Stay tuned!

©Cathy Ulrich and LargeSelf, 2012