When we are physically ill or out of balance, western medicine addresses the body with a standard protocol of solutions. Brilliant and amazing as some of this work is, there are times when it may provide no relief.
Tested methods of physical therapy, such as chiropractic, massage and acupuncture, can also be extremely useful, but there are other modalities that elude scientific research and go a step beyond. These are the unseen modalities.
Such philosophies of healing exist in many forms—Reiki is perhaps the most familiar—and the opportunities are seemingly endless.
WLT stepped outside the box to explore the practices and philosophy of three healers working in Los Angeles.
Heal the Body for Answers to the Mind
When I met with Chantal Benedict, prior to having me lie on a crystal healing bed for a quantum skeletal realignment, she guided me to ask my body three questions: “What do you need from me? How do you serve me? What do you need from me to set you free?” She calls this “soul work.”
“On the bed we are bringing you back to Source, then I come in and align the skeletal system,” she explained. “The body is open and ready to return to wellness. I use color and light frequencies, which move over the top of the body and cleanse your chakras; and the crystal healing bed plays an integral role in allowing the energy to come through. It takes you into a deep, relaxed state.”
Asked how she discovered her work, she said, “I was blessed with my modality following a visit to John of God, [followed by] a year and a half of prayers.” She decided to call it quantum skeletal alignment because, “When I touch the skeletal system, the bones literally vibrate underneath my fingers. I am working in the quantum field and I am recalibrating the energy and cellular memory from what it is holding onto. There is this disconnection from the body being well, so when I go into that field, I am returning the body to wellness.”
Working in tandem with the client, in conjunction with strong visualization and prayer requests, Benedict strives to reconnect the body to Source, to feeling both perfect and complete. This work has been particularly helpful in working with vets, and she is very involved with the
In order to continue the healing in everyday life, Benedict suggests sitting in a quiet space and asking the body questions, especially if it is in pain. Repeat the three questions she suggested prior to lying on the crystal bed to find or renew your soul’s purpose.
Spiritual Harmony through Reiki
Reiki master Alexandra Juliani, M.A., practices what is sometimes called the Usui Shiko Ryoho method, passed on by 20th-century Buddhist monk Mikao Usui, who allegedly drew from several sources to develop the Reiki system of using prana, or life force, to “heal with the hands.”
The Usui teachings include teaching people how to heal themselves, and with her 25 years of experience, Juliani is both a teacher and director at the American Reiki Academy in L.A.
Juliani incorporates other esoteric modalities in her work: clairaudient channeling, crystal healing, Vedic healing, chanting and creative visualization. She also works with the cerebrospinal fluid, sensing flows in the body and where the energy is blocked. “We are moving our hands along a grid,” she explained. “It is combined with intuition for work on the sacrum and the spine.”
So is Reiki just for illness? “The majority of those I see do not have physical ailments,” Juliani said. “People on their spiritual paths seek Reiki to open up. I work on their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies. I usually have them lie on a massage table, and I use a light touch through a sequence on the front and back of the body.”
Juliani uses her intuition as a guide. “My hands find what is going on,” she said, “even if the patient doesn’t tell me. I am a conduit of energy so it is not coming from me. The energy is channeled, coming in from the universe through the crown chakra and causing whatever is going on in them, including negative emotions and energy, to be transmuted into light. That’s a nice thing about Reiki, that the negative energy is not transferred to the healer; it is changed into light.”
The Gift of Reconnection
Dr. Eric Pearl had been a chiropractor for 12 years when he received what he describes as his gift—Reconnective Healing—which works by interacting with the unseen, including a spectrum of frequencies that contain energy, light and information.
“My patients started having very unusual responses and experiences one day,” he explained. “When I hovered over one part of their body with my hand, they would feel my hand touching multiple parts of their body, such as the shoulders, head and arms. Their muscles started going into involuntary responses, their fingers moved up and down, their arms jumped.”
Pearl’s clients reported seeing colors they had never seen, and after their sessions, experiencing poltergeist type occurrences in their homes, including the television turning on and off by itself, and garage doors opening and closing on their own.
In the Reconnective Healing process, the person being treated “receives nonverbal information into their body,” Pearl explained. “Energy is vibrating at different speeds, depending upon what part of the body it is. The different speeds are transmitted at different levels, and communicated in a certain way. Our energy healing technique has been helping us find our balance, the way a good set of training wheels helps a child discover a sense of balance.”
Pearl’s healings are not one-off events, he explained; they happen so instantaneously that they seem to be outside the constraints of time. Additionally, he said it is so comprehensive that people don’t have to make return visits.
Seeing the effect of this extra modality in his chiropractic work and perceiving that it’s something everyone can learn how to do, Pearl began to teach others. But more than teaching, he sees it as “ sharing a transmission of the energy, light and information, and then showing them how to work with it.” He loves the work because for him it is clean, clear and grounded.
Healer, Heal Thyself
There’s no easy path to wellness; it takes dedication and perseverance.
“We are a drive-through society that thinks that we can just order up a pill and get better,” Benedict said. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Juliani agreed. “Some people expect to go to a healer, have them touch them and everything will go away. Healing is co-creative. People must also take care of themselves.”
It starts with the healer. The more Benedict remembers to be true to herself and take care of her own body on a daily basis, she said, the more she is able to help others. If she is not working at healing others, a “piece of me dies off every day.” Each individual has unique gifts to be used, and “the more connected we get, and listen to our soul and what our soul purpose is, the better life we get to experience and the more joy we feel.”
Juliani is a meditator, and also receives a consistent schedule of bodywork—chiropractic, massage, acupuncture or the like—to replenish herself.
These choices are a testament to Pearl’s belief that, “When we start healing others and teaching how to heal, we make better decisions and choices.” Since the healer’s world is a reflection of who that healer is, healers, like physicians, must take time to heal themselves.
Photo of Alexandra by Angelique Myrick
This article is a part of the June/July 2015 Healing Arts issue of Whole Life Times.