Barking Shaman (Wintersong) on Consent and "Sending Healing Energy"

[qos]

I found this essay on the ethics of "sending healing energy" without consent fascinating. I hadn't thought about the possible implications for people whose energy systems have been changed due to the kind of spirit work they do.


I'd love to hear what other people think about this, and what their experiences have been with receiving energy they have not consented to.

Comments

[wyldlingspirit.livejournal.com]

I've always agreed with this 100%. I never try a distance healing on anyone unless they specifically ask me to do it. Sometimes it's the wrong thing to do and can cause more damage, not necessarily to the person's health (although it can) but to their energy overall. They may have lessons to learn that they won't be able to if the illness just "goes away." I don't hesitate to light candles and pray for their well-being. The concept of well-being is quite broad enough to cover all the bases here, I think.

[watcher457.livejournal.com]

I never give energy to someone without their consent. Never. The only exception to that is if I'm truly worried about someone dear to me, I will talk to my Boss or the angels about it to ask for advice on what it is I can do. I do not consider myself a strong enough healer to safely put energy on someone, and as Wintersong said, it can cause damage. Everyone is different.

When someone does request energy, I do it in one of two ways. I either work with my guides to create a energetic satchel to give to them to be used however their guides or guardians or health sees fit, or I ask a guide if they would be so kind as to see what they could do. Usually, it's either Archangel Raphael for healing, Archangel Michael for protection, or Anubis for guidance, depending on where I'm feeling drawn and what the problem is. But I don't do this unsolicited.

[rainstardragon.livejournal.com]

I agree. This is why I ask permission first. And even with their conscious permission, I still ask that no harm be done and that if what I am doing is not appropriate, that what the person actually needs be what they receive instead. This applies to any of the energy forms that I work with, and even when I am just lighting a candle for them at the kamidana. Kamisama knows better than I do what the person needs since it is not always someone that I work intimately with. I've begun working with Sarutahiko more extensively during my healing work, and working in general, which seems to have a beneficial effect since as "the leader of all earthly kami" going by Yamamoto's teachings through Barrish sensei, he has a better idea of what's needed or who to suggest.

In Reiki training, I was taught that we NEVER just push the energy into someone. We can ask that it surround them and be there to be accessed if it is in that person's good, but it also is to be allowed to go elsewhere if that person does not need that or might be harmed by it. I've heard the same in other methods that I've learned.

As to receiving energy that I've not consented to, I can't remember very many times. I've been told that I act as a transmitter, so whatever I'm sent eventually gets passed on. That said though, I often seem to run on a deficit of energy the past several years due to certain stressors that have happened in my life the past 11 years. So most sent energy is welcomed if it's beneficial to me. Bars and places where a great deal of people gather I tend to avoid though as I easily get overwhelmed (and I don't really need beer glazed lust energy yet since my mate still lives on the other side of the world and neither of us wants to bring any one else's energy into the mix to mess up our mutual dreams).

I can, however, recall one particular instance where an older gentleman routinely would show up on my doorstep looking for his sister and then eventually tried to court me. I don't mind talking to people. I don't mind getting them out of the cold when it's snowing. I DO mind being assumed to be Christian just because I happen to have a nativity scene in the house and am a minister. I DO mind when people try to set up an energy exchange without my being comfortable enough with them for that to happen. I sure as hell mind when they start breaking house rules such as drinking in my home in front of the kids or smoking indoors, or working their energy so far into MY space that it required backup from my brother and his wife to gentle coax him out to another house without triggering his PTSD. And I sure as heck minded the energetic cleanup afterward which was so bad that I had actually considered ordering some sacred sand from Tsubaki shrine to help restablish "purity" here after my own purifications. There is a point where consent ends even when consent is given for someone to be somewhere both energetically and physically, and I think it varies by situation and person.

[queenofhalves]

[if it's not obvious, i got hung up on the "distance healing" part of the original article, which is mostly what i talk about below. i ended up writing something more organized in my journal.]

for the most part, i think the consent issue is paranoia. most people don't have the focus or strength to change another person's energy body against their will, especially from a distance. their godself will either accept the energy or turn it aside without the need for conscious knowledge (or the direction of the ego).

this is less true if the sender of the energy is highly trained or the receiver is highly sensitive but totally untrained. anyone with a lick of psychic training will have appropriate filters in place to deal with the misguided intentions of their loved ones from a distance. inappropriately sent healing energy (not involving physical touch) is much less dangerous than the psychic vampirism of the needy, poorly-boundaried people that all of us encounter in our everyday lives -- it's that daily psychic assault that sensitive people should be most worried about, not others' unasked-for love.

i do not ask permission to pray for someone else's well-being. that's a message sent from godself to godself, and i trust the wisdom of both individual's selves in using that energy. i would ask before getting a group together to intensively raise energy for someone, and i would ask before doing work for a peer that has specific intent. any kind of touch requires consent, and the intent should be made clear beforehand -- although i do not get specific consent for reiki, as in my experience, it cannot be pushed -- it is offered and either rejected or accepted by the recipient's godself. anyone who says that "reiki" was pushed is experiencing a different kind of energy work, probably the healer's personal energy.

to be honest, though, i think most people who worry about getting consent before they pray for someone are giving themselves far too much credit. it takes a great deal of discipline and practice to be able to send strong, focused energy, and it's hard to get to that point without getting an idea of one's own strength.

all that being said, the linked article is useful for that rare individual who is a powerful healer and thinks they are the gods' gift to the suffering. that sort of person needs to hear that touch always requires explicit consent, and it's a betrayal to begin touch with one intention and then change it.

i do, however, dislike the climate of hypersensitivity and (in my opinion) disconnection with reality that comes with worrying about the negative effects of healing prayer. in the case of the particular writer, i think the problem is less the energy sent by others than the fact that his filters and boundaries are very weak. in two of the cases he mentions, physical touch in a situation where one's guard might be dropped was involved, and i think he has a right to be angry about the therapist and friend doing work that wasn't asked for. but the thing about not being able to deal with healing energy sent by facebook friends? that's a sign of poor boundaries, and i don't think it's reasonable to call an inability to deal with others' good wishes a "violation." that's an abdication of responsibility for one's own health, and my suspicion is that it's the result of unbalanced psychic training that emphasizes sensitivity over stability and strength. seriously, can you really go around telling people, "don't think at me!"?

A response

[wintersong tashlin (from livejournal.com)]

Thank you for your thoughtful comments on my essay. I'd like to address two particular places where I feel like we may be miscommunication.

First off, I absolutely do not think that people should be required to gain consent for prayer, and if you read the comments on barkingshaman.com, you'll see that there have been some interesting issues brought up on the disconnect and difference between prayer and magic. For some people they are one and the same and not for others. I'm a visible member of the pagan community, many of my facebook friends are quite skilled magicians, so when they do magic or send focused energy it's a very different thing than asking the blessing/intervention of the gods and or universe.

Aside from that, I have had little person issue with distance work. I live in a shielded house and for the most part have relatively solid personal shields and filters. However, this article is not for me personally, it addresses a broader community issue, and one that transcends internal pagan demographics, especially when our community members work magic on family or friends who are not pagan or magic users.

Re: A response

[queenofhalves]

i'm glad to hear we're in agreement on the distinction between prayer and more focused magickal work. it was not clear to me from the original post. the phrase "sending healing energy," to me, potentially includes prayer. you mention that this article is more for others than for you. it might be helpful for the audience to specifically describe healing practices that don't require explicit consent rather than broadly condemning all unsolicited energy. negative statements that would seem to include, say, my mother praying desperately that i'm not going to get sick and die, hurt pagan credibility. my mother has a very different take on the world than i do and probably a different ideal vision for my life, but we're in relationship, and part of relationship is dealing with our energy exchange in healthy ways. it's my responsibility to set boundaries with the energy she sends. the last thing the pagan community needs is a bunch of young people going to their non-pagan families and telling them their healing prayers are violating them, which i think is one way the original post could be interpreted. (prayers for their pagan children's conversion to another religion, of course, would be another matter.)

in general, i would like to see more discussion in the pagan community about the responsibility of the individual to set boundaries. for example: spirit workers need a good energetic immune system, and may need to be explicit with others about who can touch them and when. when going to a healer of any kind, if the healer doesn't initiate a thorough conversation about expectations for the session, the client should initiate it (or if the omission is egregious enough, s/he should leave). if something doesn't feel right in a healing session, the client should tell the healer to back off, and any healer who grumbles about that doesn't deserve a repeat client. even if the work is difficult but necessary, the client always gets to choose the timing and the right facilitator for the job.

i'm a professional massage therapist, and although i ask clients a lot of questions before and sometimes during sessions to continuously establish consent, many clients are quite passive and expect me to read their minds or to know their bodies better than they do. it's hard to facilitate healing without the other person's active participation, including boundary-setting. i do my best to teach clients to be better clients so that they can get more out of various healing modalities, but many are not aware that receiving healing is a skill, so communicating about the issue takes time (and i don't want to suggest to people that they're "bad clients"!).

i also wanted to remark on your comment that it is well-known that healing energy can make cancer worse. i wonder if that belief is influenced by the widely held myth among massage practitioners that massage can spread cancer through the body. according to recent research, massage cannot spread cancer, and a flood of studies have demonstrated that massage effectively reduces cancer patients' anxiety, pain, nausea, and fatigue (massive bibliography here). you mentioned in your article that there is no separation between the energetic and physical bodies, and i agree -- but that means that giving a massage always involves offering healing energy. if there are any detrimental effects from massaging cancer patients, it's clear from the statistics that the beneficial effects outweigh them.

i still know therapists who won't work on cancer patients because of this apparently common sense belief. admittedly, it's wise to have special training to do the work, but because therapists themselves have been turning cancer patients away, some patients have been deprived of an incredibly useful healing modality, and that's a shame.

Re: A response

[wintersong tashlin (from livejournal.com)]

I'm actually working on a piece on prayer in paganism, since "Invoking Consent" has raised the issue in a variety of ways. Including that several people have brought up the phrase "sending healing energy" as pagan-code for "I'm praying for you" which, because of baggage from folks milk religion, many people may not feel comfortable saying or having said to them.

I agree %100 that the last thing our community needs is young folk and newbies telling their families that they can't pray for them. Ugh, that would be ugly from a community and a personal perspective. Because my magic, my spirit work, and my devotional practices are distinct, as they are for most of the folks in my personal community, I sometimes forget that the same isn't the case in all traditions and practices. I will make sure to remember this in the future.

In my experience most spirit workers and other people who have known energetic atypicalities are very good at discussing them with healers they choose to go to. I have a broken C7 vertebra (spinal process avulsion) and severe Tourette Syndrome. Massage therapy is super useful to me, but I have to explain my limitations and needs in detail before seeing a new massage therapist. It's the same thing.

However, I've been at pagan events where people will just walk up to you (sometimes from behind) and start puttin' energy in. Often they don't ask or say "I'm going to do this now, as they start doing it." I've also had this happen with massage. Because I have so much muscle soreness from my tics, I often rub the back of my neck (where the break is) and people have walked up behind me and started rubbing my shoulders without discussion. And yes, this has included professionals who NEVER would have behaved that way at work.

I do think that in much of the pagan demographic, it is more socially acceptable for me to (politely) tell the person rubbing my shoulders to stop, than the person putting energy in me, who will sometimes refuse to stop saying "well if you body doesn't need it it just won't work, so I don't need to stop." By that point, I'll have slammed up internal shields far in excess of my regular shielding, but that isn't the point. If I shoot someone who attacks me on the street (I carry a .45), they aren't blameless for attacking me simply because I could defend myself. After all, not everyone carries a pistol, and not everyone in the pagan community has intensive magical training.

As to the cancer thing, that has far more to do with feeding rouge cells energy. The energy workers I know who work with cancers primarily use destructive/death energy. "Energetic Chemo" one called it. And use positive, healthy energy specifically to shore up body systems not effected by the cancer, which requires extensive discussion of the client's current medical situation, rather than just putting in energy and hoping it only goes to the body systems not reproducing out of control. I do know at least one massage therapist who works on cancer patients, although I know that he has an exceptionally long discussion ahead of time about their medical condition.

It is a shame that folks are turning away patients. I have a friend who does hospice care massage therapy, and finds it very rewarding, but a huge percent of therapists don't want to do that work either.

[oakmouse]

Um, no. That's not what I said, or at best it's only a disconnected fragment of a much longer and more detailed conversation. Please edit to reflect that!

If you must send energy without the explicit permission of the intended recipient, whether received directly from them or from a third party who you know has the authority to pass on a general permission, IME the only ethical way to do so is to send the energy to the gods and ask that it only reach the intended recipient if that is in keeping with both the will of the gods and the will of the intended recipient.

And even with permission, I never send the energy with a defined goal, only to be used for whatever purpose is most appropriate, and with the caveat that the recipient be protected from any unintended harm or ill effect.

However, as a general rule, I just don't send energy without explicit permission, and when I do have permission I ask questions and engage in meditation, prayer, and discernment to figure out what is appropriate. The exceptions are extremely rare.

[shadowandstar.livejournal.com]

IME the only ethical way to do so is to send the energy to the gods and ask that it only reach the intended recipient if that is in keeping with both the will of the gods and the will of the intended recipient.

Ack. That's what I was trying to say, but evidently I either didn't express myself clearly or missed a key detail. I've deleted that passage from the entry, since the main purpose of posting the article was to promote discussion.

[oakmouse]

Thank you!

I'm debating an essay on all of this. We'll see if I actually post it here or put it on my own LJ.

[makhsihed.livejournal.com]

I have a friend with really awful PTSD, and for a long time she was kind of functional. She got a reiki treatment once, and the person doing the work on her said something about how there was a really stubborn blockage. My friend got an unpleasant feeling in her stomach, and suggested that the reiki practitioner leave it alone, maybe it was there for a reason. The reiki practitioner said "no, I can get it", and eventually got the blockage out.

Turns out the blockage was holding back her more serious traumatic memories. Possibly it would have dissolved slowly and gradually over time, releasing the trauma in a more manageable way; but instead the blockage was removed all at once, and it's been a long, long road recovering.

I have another friend who has all sorts of blocks on her system. She tried out a cleansing exercise once, and it went pretty badly, because the blocks were all things she'd subconsciously put in place to dam up her chronic pain issues. Your typical practitioner might try to heal her fractures, get her more rooted in her body, etc; but she has some serious chronic pain medical problems, and that would be counterproductive.

Once I allowed (and this is consent, but) someone to do modern Western reiki on me (as opposed to traditional Japanese reiki, which I've also had done, and it caused me no issues); they were trying to help my shoulder pain, I think. It was extremely uncomfortable to the point of pain; after trying to wait it out, I finally had the person stop. It left me with a serious headache for the next several days that I couldn't get rid of, and the shoulder pain was if anything worse than it had been before.

[makhsihed.livejournal.com]

Note that the above examples are actually "energy work with consent that went poorly" rather than examples of receiving energy without consent... but I think they illustrate potential problems of energy healing.

It continually frustrates me when I run across people saying "oh, method X or energy type Y can't possibly hurt anyone" (people say this about reiki all the time and it's utterly ignorant and sometimes harmfully so).

[oakmouse]

*nods* I allowed a classmate who was a trained Mahikari practitioner do a "healing" on my back pain once upon a time, and her work produced a blinding headache that sidelined me for the rest of the day and continued in lesser form for several days beyond that. It also didn't help my back. When I told her about it she insisted that that couldn't happen. Well, yes, it can; it did. The enrgy she put into me persisted until I removed it piece by piece, a slow and difficult process.

IME any energy worker or healer who says "this can't happen" is actually saying "I refuse to believe I can do or did harm".

[makhsihed.livejournal.com]

This indeed.

In my opinion, if your healing technique can't possibly harm anyone, then I doubt it can actually heal anyone either.

[oakmouse]

LOL! Agreed, in that this has been my experience too --- on both sides of the equation.

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

Because I am in a place where I feel some bitterness towards my Christian upbringing, I would assume Christians are more likely to use boundary-disrespecting prayer/energy than others. That essay gave me a more balanced perspective. It's a personality flaw, not a religious flaw, as it is obviously found outside of Christianity, too.

[labelleizzy.livejournal.com]

Thank you for linking this. The discussion and comments have been thought provoking, and I haven't intentionally thought about Magickal Ethics in a very long time.

"Ground, Center and SHIELD, dammit!" where people forget the *shield* part or never learned to... and the bit about people needing to respect energetic boundaries just as much as (or more than they) respect physical boundaries.

I don't know if I have been guilty of sending healing energy without consent. My usual practice is to offer to light a candle, and with that, I send a prayer and loving thoughts.

Thanks

[wintersong tashlin (from livejournal.com)]

Thanks for reading "Invoking Consent" I'm thrilled that folks are thinking and talking about the subject. I do think that the sending of remote energies as a rule is not nearly as big an issue as people at gatherings and circles (I teach at several large non-denominational events) just "doing" energy work on folks without consent and the culture in our community that can put social pressure on folks to assent to energy or energy work from relative strangers.

Re: Thanks

[shadowandstar.livejournal.com]

Thank you for dropping by and taking part in the discussion.

My Response

[(Anonymous)]

Unless I am asked to intervene I don't.
Friends and relatives of all paths respect this.
It's not my place to assume that someone needs my assistance.
I will offer it, but I always receive permission before.

TO not receive permission, to me, is the same as nosing through someones personal effects.

Also, without permission that person isn't aware you are trying to help and therefore can't open themselves up to receive "help" with a positive attitude.

Please help to decide if I should buy this website

[(Anonymous)]

Hi everyone!, maybe I am posting it at a wrong place, I just see that people have alive discussion here.
I am looking for someone with an experience of MAKING MONEY with
AMAZON AFFILIATE WEBSITE? I made some cash with ITUNES before but not much. My friend has suggested to get a ebay coupon website at 999webdesign.com (here is URL if you are lazy to type it, [url=http://999webdesign.com/]direct link - "BUSINESS FOR SALE")[/url] - I hope it can work! It looks like they are making good MONEY MAKING SITES. please share your opinion and experience? I was not able to find a good looking
FREE AFFILIATE WEBSITE and 999webdesign.com sounds promicing. Thank you so much!

http://myshoppo.ru/televizor-samsung.html телевизоры самсунг 2017 цены

[(Anonymous)]

http://myshoppo.ru/televizor-samsung.html телевизоры самсунг 2017 цены

Добрый день

[(Anonymous)]

Привет всем!

нашел через nigma по запросу "buk7510-55al" http://prom-electric.ru/media/BUK7510-55AL.pdf .
M810-07200610A. ATS22D47S6U, CIMRG7C20220B, EI-P7012-300H
Всего хорошего!