I walked around the Miami hotel ballroom, carefully picking my way among the six-foot banquet tables, fitted with sheets to become makeshift massage tables, each one holding a prone second-year student of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing (BBSH). Next to each platform stood a second student preparing to perform a practice healing. The date was June 2003 and then I was the Class Dean of the second year of BBSH. It was my responsibility to coordinate student training and verify their progress, before they graduated into the third of four years of training in Brennan Healing Science. The large room was almost silent except for a few whispered conversations between students. My teaching staff stood around the edges of the one hundred and fifty student body, waiting to assist or intervene in the healing if necessary. Over in one corner, a small booth of Japanese interpreters huddled, taking a break from the exhausting work translating lectures for their Japanese-speaking students. I smiled as I passed by them, and approached my AV staff member, motioning him to start the New Age music heralding the beginning of this practice healing segment.
“OK, everyone,” I said, quietly into my lapel microphone, “It’s time to take your place at the foot of your client: we’re about to begin.”
This was my last day of work at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, as well as the final day for these students prior to the school summer break. I was confident in my decision to leave BBSH. I’d been at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing for fourteen years, first becoming a student in 1988, and progressing to take over a Class Dean position in 1994. When I was hired I inherited no written curriculum, no trained staff, and each school week was preceded by a mad dash to the photocopier to provide students with their study and homework material. By 2003 everything was streamlined: there was a form for everything, and thick student workbooks housed whatever the student needed for their studies. The teaching staff was a wonderful, highly-trained body of committed healers. All was well. While I was only one of many contributors to the process the school’s evolution still gave me an abiding sense of satisfaction.
The energy in the hotel ballroom began to settle, as student healers slipped into their BBSH-trained mode of “grounding”; a jargon word at BBSH, that referred to the student forcing a connection into the earth, one of several Barbara Brennan exercises borrowed from the founder’s Core Energetics background. As I moved between the massage tables at the end of the ballroom I could see some “clients” already moving slightly, squirming, aware of something in their bodies. But it was still early; this was probably going to be an emotive session for many of the students. It was the final Brennan Astral Healing.
Brennan Healing Science’s Astral Healing is a curious technique. “It’s the kind of healing that, even though you have to teach it, you don’t really want to receive one yourself!”, quipped one of my teachers earlier that week. This particular healing skill, although a requirement in the four-year curiculum, was often found to be of little use in a real world private practice. For many years I had wanted to evolve this skill from its origins in the encounter group world of the Sixties to the less-melodramatic Nineties. “Basically, it’s “Ground-And-Pound!” another of my colleagues had told me, grinning. “You sink into the earth, put your hands on the client, and pump prana into the client until something gives. The client emotes, or thrashes around to shake off the energy, and the healer thinks something has been accomplished.” My friend had paused, and shook her head. “But, you know, ultimately I don’t find this technique very healing. My concern is that it re-activates trauma in the body, while healing is supposed to remove trauma. All the Brennan Astral Healing seems to do is provide a cathartic experience. It leaves the client discharged and drained, and the healer feeling like an old-style exorcist. We really should change it.”
I had refusing to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. “I agree with your point of view. But I still think it is a good training technique for beginner healers. It just needs to be used with precision and focus later on in their learning process. When I do Astral work in my private healing practice it’s usually non-expressive, non-dramatic. My client’s don’t thrash around on the table. It’s a precision technique: more like surgery, and less like a wrestling match.” I then pushed on with my argument. “Look, if we could work with the students for yet another year we could show them evolved Astral work, move it into a surgical direction rather than a cathartic one. Unfortunately, as we know, the student leaves for the third year and begins a totally different set of skills. It’s a shame we can’t add a fifth year to the BBSH program. But that won’t happen: BBSH is already so expensive.”
The Barbara Brennan School of Healing teaches a four-year program in Brennan Healing Science, and is promoted as a vocational training course for energy healers. It combines Barbara Brennan’s therapeutic views along with large elements of the spiritualist Pathwork Guide material, and marries it all together using a variety of energy healing techniques. The school runs five classes a year in three locations: the United States, Europe, and in Japan. Students join up initially inspired by Barbara Brennan’s book, “Hands Of Light”, and in spite of the annual US$5,000 tuition. Most students have to pay travel and hotel costs, in addition to the required psychotherapy sessions, bumping the total cost to around US$10,000 each year.
Our conversation then shifted to the several attempts that had been made to change the situation over the years, all of which had failed. As an administrator I understood that you can’t always get what you want, whether it is the right thing to do, or not. After all, ultimately I was hired to do a job in a business. And the Barbara Brennan School of Healing was most assuredly run as a successful multimillion dollar business.
As my last Astral Healing hit the half-way mark, students had begun to squirm, moan, or shake on their tables. Their healers had quickly moved into position, and dutifully started extracting stagnant prana from their client’s auric field. Luckily, most of the students were not powerful enough to do any damage to their client’s energy field during this process, but problems might occur once the group field amassed a significant charge. As this group field increased, so would the potential for strong astral forces to ground through one or more receptive healers. Just like in an electric storm, a bolt of lightning would shoot down into the earth, creating damage. My job was to keep a watchful eye out for problems.
I did not need to be concerned on this day, however, as the students were doing a fine job. Astral work is a challenging profession, because you are simultaneously dealing with the emotional impact of the astral world running through you while also you support a different reaction in your client. Astral energy is the energy of human emotional content and the spirit world. The Barbara Brennan School teachers like to tell you they clearly differentiate between the purity of the “Spiritual Realm” and the messy Astral world, but in my entire career i have experienced no such practical distinction. Consciousness is energy (Prana), and our human labels don’t change the reality of that which flows through us. The real trick is to be able to handle what you come into contact with, and not be overwhelmed and lose yourself.
Right now, towards the end of this healing, a few clients were getting perilously close to being flooded with feelings that threatened to overwhelm their sense of self. I quickly approached a dark-haired middle-aged American woman who was shaking uncontrollably, her healer desperately trying to clear an energy blockage from the spine. The triage technique, in these cases of shaking, is to stabilize the client’s Muladhara chakra, and make sure she had enough safety in the physical world to integrate whatever was running through her system. Sure enough, I found her Muladhara cords were pulling up and away from the ground. I shifted into deepening my own connection to the earth and then started to astrally reattach her grounding cords. The student healer looked over at me from her position at the head of the table, and I told her what I was doing. This was just not a rescue mission; it was a training opportunity for the student healer.
Once the chakra cords were back in place the client relaxed and let out a sigh of relief. I nodded to the healer to continue her extraction work, while I moved back out into the room. I looked around, scanning for any more Astral world challenges, but my wonderful teaching team were taking care of everything. It seemed like this final healing would be over without major incident, for which I was grateful. I again bent my head towards my lapel microphone. “You have ten more minutes to complete this healing, and then we’ll take a short break”
An hour later my class was over, and the teaching week had been adjourned. Goodbyes had been said, and students were reluctantly making their way towards the door, hugging each other. They would return to this room in a few months, but these were my final moments. I looked around for the last time, and my heart felt good. I closed my eyes and bowed my head in service to all that I had been a part of over the years. I was grateful for my career, and for the wild, wild ride. I’d made great friends and worked with fabulous colleagues and students alike. “Thank you”, I said out loud, to the unseen spirits. As I turned on my heals and headed out of the door, I could hear a drum beating, somewhere in the hotel lobby. The student’s celebration of the end of their week, tapped out with a Native American beat, was symbolic of my own ritual completion. I was done.
