Guest guest Posted February 21, 2004 Report Share Posted February 21, 2004 DISTANT HEALING This is based on the work of Elizabeth Targ, MD, a pioneer in the research of distant healing and a gifted healer equally at home in the worlds of science and spirituality. What is distant healing? Distant healing encompasses a broad range of healing practices, many of which are based in ancient spiritual traditions. Virtually all major religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, endorse and encourage the use of distant healing among their adherents. Two of the most common distant healing practices are offering prayers for those who are ill and using forms of meditation where the practitioner holds a compassionate intention to relieve the suffering of another. Some practices focus on curing a very specific disease state while others emphasize creating a compassionate environment that can have a healing effect. Virtually all distant healing practices are concerned with alleviating the suffering and increasing the well being of others. How does distant healing work? Different approaches to distant healing are rooted in very different worldviews and cosmologies and consequently there are numerous perspectives on how distant healing works. Common to virtually all perspectives is the belief that a person's focused intention can have a nonlocal effect, that is, the healing intention of one person can have a positive effect on another who is at a distance. Specific explanations of how the healing effect occurs are based largely on the worldview of the healer. Some healers hold worldviews where God can intervene in a powerful way to alter physical reality, in which case it is God's action that brings about healing. Other healers hold worldviews where all reality is understood as being intimately interconnected and where mind and consciousness can have nonlocal effects. For these healers, it is the power of mind or consciousness itself that brings about a healing effect through the nonlocal transfer of either energy or information. What kind of conditions can be treated by distant healing? Depending on their orientation, distant healers answer this question in different ways: Most distant healers come from a spiritual rather than a medical perspective and often don't use medical terminology to describe a particular condition or disease state. Consequently, they often do not claim to heal specific medical conditions, simply because that's not the model they operate within. Distant healers who focus primarily on creating a compassionate environment that facilitates a person's overall healing process would describe their approach as being beneficial in assisting in the healing of a particular disease state, but their focus is not to "treat" a specific condition but to rebalance the overall system so healing can occur - often in collaboration with other therapies. Distant healers who focus on healing or curing specific disease states do not generally single out particular types of conditions as being more responsive to distant healing treatment. Scientific research projects have studied the effect of distant healing on a numerous disease states, including heart disease, AIDS, cancer, bacterial infections and recovery from surgery. There is currently no consensus regarding which conditions are most responsive to distant healing, but a majority of the research indicates that distant healing, when used with other therapies, does enhance the healing process across a broad range of disease states. What will my doctor think of distant healing? More and more, members of the medical community are opening to the beliefs and practices of their patients. The best advice is to choose a practitioner with whom one feels trust and confidence in their abilities to help the patient heal. If this requires that the physician maintain a similar belief system, this can be one of the questions one asks when choosing a provider. Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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