Alchemy & Healing: Interfusion Festival
Why would a partially paralyzed woman who is missing part of her brain and may never be more than just an “ok” dancer give up other hobbies, live with sleep deficits, and take precious time away from her family to dance? That woman is me, and I do it because every so often, there is a dance night that transports me beyond my usual perception of time and space and breaks open something in me that might otherwise stay dormant, asleep, and untapped. When that happens, I am acutely aware of my connection to something much more vast, more intelligent, and more profound than myself. It was a spontaneous dance experience like this that served as the pivotal moment for me in understanding how to unlock healing from the inside out.
When I describe my mystical experiences during dance to other dancers and athletes, many look at me blankly, never having experienced such a thing. These are usually the ones relying solely on willpower and a rational/linear/analytical approach for their athletic progress: just one more rep! Go harder, longer! But others nod knowingly. Having a mystical experience during athletics is more common than most people think.
Athletics as a portal to holy mystical experience has been reported across traditions and through time. It involves surrender, the ability to bring elements of meditation to the sport, and most importantly, an “alchemical” orientation. Most people know the term alchemy in terms of turning a base metal into gold. But in ancient healing traditions from multiple cultures around the world, alchemy refers to an inner process whereby we transform ourselves from one state to a profoundly different one through inner focus. It is a skill that we can learn and improve, just like a dance sequence or golf stroke.
While many conventional approaches to meditation emphasize calming down, alchemy emphasizes utilizing whatever elevated state we may be in (stress, fear, anger, worry, exercising, etc.) as the biochemical, electromagnetic basis for peak performance, peak athletics, unusual or unexpected healing, or accessing mystical consciousness. Initially my primary interest in alchemy centered exclusively on healing. There are thousands of years of oral history citing a mystical/alchemical basis for unexpected healing. Such instances have been referred to by phrases such as Rapid Wound Healing, The Chemistry of Immortality, and Vaporizing Terminal Illness (see my book Unlocking the Heart of Healing for exact references, stories, and examples).
My passion for healing through alchemy was ignited because 24 disease processes I experienced responded to neither conventional nor holistic medicine. My husband and I own two healing arts centers. One is in the high-profile Medical Pavilion at Howard County General Hospital/Johns Hopkins Medicine and clients fly in and Skype from around the country to work with me. I have worked in the healing arts world since 1995 and have a Masters degree in Acupuncture, am Board Certified as a clinical hypnotherapist, and am certified as a Qigong teacher. Despite having received the absolute best of both conventional and holistic care, my health had continued to decline. At a certain point I acknowledged that every medical and holistic approach I was using involved casting around outside of myself for the solution. I became interested in unlocking inner resources for healing: engaging what I now call our Inner Molecules of Medicine, literally to save my life.
Life has a funny way of affirming what we are up to when we are “in the pocket.” Just like an epic in the pocket dance leaves us feeling like, “Holy shit! I can’t believe that just happened!” so too when our life’s work is trued up with something greater than ourselves and in the pocket, synchronicities or miracles often occur that affirm the direction. It was a mystical experience while salsa dancing that unlocked abilities that I didn’t know I had that caused me to realize that an alchemical approach to healing that awakened dormant inner resources was my last untapped possibility. (Story told in full in Unlocking the Heart of Healing.)
To understand my experience and to figure out whether a mystical experience that unlocked latent inner resources was repeatable, I poured through the writings of religious mystics, mind-body healers, Olympic athletes, and experts on spontaneous healing, looking for clues. I scoured Pubmed and other science-based publications for cutting-edge mind-body research. It became obvious to me that mind and body were only parts of a healing equation. For extraordinary outcomes rooted in alchemy, the heart could not be excluded. Inspired by my dance experience and enlightened by my research, I developed a heart-mind-body, alchemy-based meditation that I call a Feeling Mantra. To my amazement, after just a few weeks of Feeling Mantra meditation, my health began to improve. Regaining movement that is not supposed to be available when part of the brain is missing was only one of the diagnoses and disease processes that minimized, reversed, or disappeared. It was not long before my technique was put to the ultimate test.
When 5 shards of 400 degree glass lodged in my eye after a glass cooking dish exploded in my hand, I was tempted in every cell in my body to hook into intense panic and dread. People have lost an eye from lesser injuries than mine. But I knew the tremendous power of alchemy, so *using* the adrenaline inherent to the shocking injury, I accessed my Feeling Mantra. The result, like my spontaneous dance experience, was an altered state where my body became capable of things not available in a normal state of consciousness. Only this time, rather than accidentally, through a very conscious practice I unlocked a level of healing that my doctors considered impossible. Once the shards were removed, my ER doctor remarked, “This is the strangest thing I have ever seen. From what you’ve gone through, your eye should be red, irritated, bloodshot, and with many lesions across the cornea. Instead, I can’t tell which eye it was without looking at your chart. It’s as if your eye healed instantly as each shard was removed.” Because I had unlocked the mysterious power of Rapid Wound Healing and thereby changed what was possible for my body, it had.
Word gets around when “impossible” things become possible and now clients seek my help with challenges as diverse as chronic or terminal illness, elite athletes wanting to improve their performance, and corporate owners and presidents seeking peak performance. For every one of my unique students and clients, the *single most* valuable tool for healing, peak performance, and transformative change is the same: The Feeling Mantra.
How to develop and use a Feeling Mantra is the content for my upcoming Interfusion Festival class Unlock Healing. Transformative tools are never learned best through didactic, bullet-point learning, but rather experientially, vibrationally, and within a matrix of spirit. If you are interested in unlocking healing, peak performance, peak athletics, or a mystical experience, come to my upcoming class Unlock Healing on February 10th at 4pm and I will teach you how. Learn to use a Feeling Mantra and change your life.
Unlock Healing is part of The Interfusion Festival in Alexandria, Virginia spanning February 10th-13th 2017. For more information and to purchase your ticket, see www.interfusionfestival.com
