Quest Magazine

Printed in the Summer 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: FourEagles, Russell, "The Oneida Fire Ceremony" Quest 104.3 (Summer 2016): pg. 116-121

A Native American Healing Ritual

By Russell FourEagles

When we were taking a break from gathering herbs to eat a sandwich, my grandma would tell me stories and legends. This is one of them:

When the Creator made man and woman, he made us perfect. As he looked us over, he made a little void in between our lungs, our backbone, and our heart. He thought about what he should do with this void.

“I know,” he thought, “I will create a little ‘heart box’ in that void for everyone. The heart box will be the source of a person’s love for other people and for me, the Creator, and it will also be the place for people to store their traumas and heavy emotions for a few days, until they are ready to give them to me.”

However, the Creator created the heart box before he blew life into us. After we were alive, guess what we did first as a speaking species? We started whining: “We need light so we can see, and dark so we can sleep; we need to know what is food and what do we do when we are thirsty, and how do we stay warm when it’s cold, and what is medicine and what poison, and where do we find shelter and for crumb sake where is the Home Depot?”

The Creator said, “Listen, all of you. This is very important, so pay attention: you are my children and I love you, and so I give you free will. You have the power to choose between positive and negative; let no one take that away from you, as I will not. But I advise you to concentrate on the positive and give the negative to me.”

As the Creator soon found, though, once we put stuff into our heart box it almost takes dynamite to get it out. It’s our junk and we are going to hang on to it at all cost, no matter what it does to us.

We humans tend to hang on to too much baggage such as anger, guilt, and pain. We tend to keep inside the hurts and sorrows from losses of family and friends. We also hang onto other life losses such as money and material things. That little place the Creator gave us to store our hurts was meant to be used for just a short while, until we were ready to let them go. But instead, we stuff our heart boxes with more and more hurts and traumas until we learn from our life’s lessons or die. We may often carry this baggage for many lifetimes if we don’t learn to let it go.

The heart box is like any other box. If it becomes too full, it breaks. Let’s say you and your spouse each come home with a one-pound sack of potatoes. You put your potatoes into a one-pound box and it becomes full. Then your spouse wants to put his bag of potatoes in the box, as well. So he, being a guy, forces the potatoes into the box, causing the sides to crack. You don’t want the box to break, so your spouse runs to the garage and returns with some boards, nails, and a hammer. He then proceeds to reinforce the sides of the box. And hey, guess what happens! You really can put two pounds of potatoes in a one-pound box. The problem is that the potatoes get mashed up in the process.

Now trying to keep too many potatoes in too small a space is just like what happens when we store more and more things in the heart box. Eventually everything gets mashed. That’s what we do to ourselves in the process.

It just so happens that the closest organ to the heart box is the heart. The heart pumps blood to our lungs and throughout our bodies. If the heart box swells too much, the pump can’t work and the lungs can’t move. This causes us to have difficulty breathing. Have you ever noticed that, when you experience a sudden trauma, such as witnessing an accident or a relationship breakup, the first thing that happens is that you have trouble breathing and your heart physically hurts? And that then, after a short while, you can catch your breath and the pain in your heart goes away?

What has happened is that, at first, the addition of the new trauma has caused the heart box to swell, so that it presses uncomfortably against the heart and lungs. But then, in an unconscious ability the Creator gave us, we have stolen energy from our own cells to build a wall around our heart box, just as the man reinforced the potato box so that it could hold more potatoes. Reinforced by the stolen energy, the swelling of the heart box is reduced, and the heart box returns to a size small enough for the heart to pump without hurting and the lungs to breathe easily again. Essentially this process allows us to compact more and more negative things, whatever they may be, into our heart boxes (the world’s first trash compactors).

For the most part, we men start with our shoulders and then move to our lower backs to steal energy to contain the things we put in our heart boxes, or it can happen in reverse order. Women seem to steal their energy from the Mother’s Cross, those lines drawn from the base of the skull to just above the bra line and from the center of the shoulder blade to the center of the other shoulder blade.

The problem is that when we draw on our cellular energy to reinforce our heart boxes, we weaken our cells. Weakening our cells weakens our aura as a whole and makes it easier for disease, weakened bones, weakened immune systems, and weakened emotional states to take hold in our bodies. I think everyone knows about the heart box, but most people don’t realize that the tightness they feel within their chest is from it.

One good way to unload our heart boxes is through the Oneida fire ceremony. The ceremony’s main function is for us to give all our painful memories and traumas to the Creator. We do this through writing things down and offering them up in prayer. This ritual helps us to heal and get stronger.

In the process, we uncover ever and ever deeper old hurts. You can think of the heart box and its memories as being like a pile of CDs (or, if you want to date yourself, 45-rpm records) all stacked up. As we give our painful memories to the Creator, we are, in essence, removing these recordings. This, in turn, uncovers other and older records of memories that slowly creep upward into our subconscious minds and then filter into consciousness. Often after a fire ceremony our emotions are quite intense, and it is the uncovering of these old records that causes the intensity. After all, such records are of painful memories that we have intentionally covered over, sometimes for many years, in order not to deal with them. When they finally come up, the feelings can last a week or more. If you don’t believe it, just try it. And as those old thoughts and memories emerge, write them down and make them the basis of your next ceremony.

If you write things down in the fire ceremony, complete the ritual, and they still come back again, don’t worry. It just means that you have stored those memories in your heart box more than one time.

Once a sixty-three-year-old woman came to me for healing. She didn’t know me, so on the first healing I explained the fire ceremony to her and mentioned that she had old stuff she needed to let go of because it did no good for her to hang on to it. I never mentioned what the old stuff was because I didn’t want to scare her on the first visit. By her third healing, she had done sixteen fire ceremonies. The day of her third healing, afterward she dutifully went home and did her seventeenth. About 9:30 p.m. she called, crying, and said, “This one thing always comes back no matter how many times I burn the damn thing.”

I could hear the tears falling as we talked. I said to her, “This is about your being raped when you were fifteen, isn’t it?”

For a second there was no crying — no sound at all, in fact, from the phone — just stunned silence. “How on earth did you know that?” she asked.

“I’ve known since day one, but I felt you didn’t trust me enough at the time to confide in me. But I think you trust me now, so I brought it up.”

“Why won’t it go away?”

“Well,” I answered, using my above analogy, “our heart boxes are a lot like the old juke boxes with the 45 rpm records all stacked up neat. The little arm would come down, pick up a record, play it, and then pick up the next one and play it, and so on. Let’s say you are the lady filling the juke box and you just love Elvis.”

“How did you know that . . . ahh. . . never mind.”

I continued, “So you take Elvis records and put one in every other record slot. What happens? You keep hearing Elvis over and over again. Now equate this process to the heart box. You do a fire ceremony and burn up the big E, and what shows up for the next fire ceremony? Of course, the big E plays over and over until you get to the bottom record.”

“But why would I put him in there so much?” the woman asked.

“Okay, here we go for a short lesson in history. You were raped when you were fifteen, and it took some time to get over. But by sixteen you had healed a bit, and you met this really nice boy. He asked you out, and what is the first thing you do? You take out that rape — that record — you had buried, and you look at it. Then you place it on top of the pile of records, so that now, not only is it on top of the pile, it is also still down at the bottom from where you pulled it out. But you don’t want it to be on top, so you go out and find some minor traumas to put over it so that you can’t see it again. You may even have to make minor arguments with friends or family, because they are easier to take than the real pain you are burying.

“Things are flowing fairly smoothly for you, and then you break up with your boyfriend. What do you do now? Why, you pull the rape out yet again and place it on top to see if you were damaged goods and if the rape was the reason why the breakup happened. But of course it wasn’t, so again you bury it.

“Then, later, you are out of school and meet the man you are going to marry. The first thing you do is look at the rape again to see if you are worthy. The answer is, of course you are. You did nothing wrong as a kid; you had no control over a vile, wounded pedophile. But by now, you have stacked that rape up in your heart box maybe twenty times from looking at it at different stages of your life. However, to get rid of it, you need only to keep on doing the fire ceremony. Keep sending the rape to the Creator and, I promise, when you get down to the bottom record of it, it will be gone. So keep on keeping on.”

I received a phone call from the woman about a week later.

“It took twenty-three fire ceremonies, but it is really gone! Thank you, thank you, thank you. I can’t say it enough.”

She was a very happy girl when she got past her memory of that rape, I must say. It has been ten years since this lady had to do that many fire ceremonies. But she is still doing them for other things, and she told me she wished she had learned of this ceremony when she was thirty.

My personal belief is that each person is a healer of sorts. It is much like baseball. Everyone in the world can pick up a ball and throw it, even though not everyone is Babe Ruth. Likewise, everyone can participate in their own healing. If people would give their attention to the fire ceremony and let go of the things that bother them, it would be much easier for them to be healthier and happier.

For example, when a loved one passes away, hold onto the love and the good memories. But be sure to give all your pain of the crossing to the Creator, or God, or whatever you call your higher power. When you hold the pain in your heart box, it weakens your body, your entire immune system, and your aura.

I am sure that almost every person in the world knows by now what an aura is. But some people don’t know that our auras are made of the projections of the energy around each and every cell in our bodies, not unlike the light that fiber-optic lamps project. As I said, the Creator gave us the ability to draw energy from our own cells to reinforce the heart box walls. When that energy is lost, you lose the protection of the energy field or aura around you, and you get sick.

This is not to say that the Creator’s intention was for us to overload our heart boxes in the manner that we all often do. But at the same time, we shouldn’t feel guilty about having done so. Again, when the Creator made us, he made us perfect as we are. If we remember that we are perfect as we are, then we are not so inclined to judge against ourselves.

The Traditional Ceremony

As I have explained, I discovered that the most important aid to healing ourselves is the Oneida fire ceremony, which involves writing down your prayers and burning the paper so that your prayers ascend to the Creator. My grandmother passed down to me the following version of the fire ceremony:

“In the days of my grandmother’s grandmother,” said Gram, “there was no paper to write on, so the people had to gather the materials they needed for a ceremony from the woods. First they gathered pieces of birch bark and thinned them down to two or three layers to make the bark pliable enough to fold. Then they found mineral stones to grind into powder and mix with elk or buffalo fat for paint. With this mixture, they painted symbols, pictographs, or petroglyphs on the birch bark to represent what they wanted or what they needed to let go of. In the swamps where the black spruce grew, they would harvest its small, fine, red roots and weave them into red cloth to wrap the ceremonial birch bark in. They gathered nettles and soft maple bark. They boiled the bark to make a purple dye for the cordage made from the nettle. The cordage was used to tie off the red cloth. Of course, they used tobacco, the medicine that is essential to every native ceremony. It was placed inside the painted birch bark paper after a prayer was made. The paper was then folded up and wrapped in the red cloth and tied up with the purple cord before burning.

“So you can see that it took a lot of work to prepare for the fire ceremony in the old days. Now that we have pen and paper, it is easy to take this important ceremony for granted. Today, we only have to be department-store hunters and gatherers. When it took weeks or more to prepare for a fire ceremony, people held it in much higher esteem, as we still should.”

Grandma asked, “Do you remember how I showed you to breathe?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Well, remember to tell your clients to breathe into the Earth Mother, like I showed you.”

Here is what Gram taught me: Essentially, you are bringing the energy up your arms. As you inhale, raise your arms and draw the energy from your fingertips to let it flow into your central core. At the same time, use your mind to push the energy down through your core, out the bottom of your feet, and into the earth.

Then, as you exhale, the Earth Mother removes the negative energy, or whatever you want to let go of, and sends good energy back to fill you up, which instantly relieves any tension. She sends positive energy to replace the negative because she always works to achieve a balance. This simple exercise will help you stay in balance, and if you are in balance, you will find that everything in life becomes easier.

Breathing into the earth can be done in any position: standing, sitting, or lying down. As you use your breath, imagine it as a valve. As you breathe into your lungs, the air pushes the negative out and down. As you breathe out, the air and energy come up and out your lungs, drawing new energy from the Earth Mother. It may be helpful to imagine the breath as a yellow line of energy, much like the graphic lines used to point out movement in a football instant replay on TV. I find that image works well for many people.

“You can’t take the air out of a balloon without the balloon getting smaller,” said Gram. “The Creator set it up so that when the Earth Mother takes the negative, she always replaces it with positive so that we don’t die.”

“Grandma,” I said, “what if I can’t do this healing stuff, or I don’t want to, when I get big?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You can and you will. Just remember all the things I teach you and know that the Creator is the one who does the healing by sending you his energy. All you do is pass it on.”

My Version of the Ceremony

This ceremony is a forgiveness ceremony. It is about forgiving yourself, others, situations, and other things that have hurt you in your life. Gram freely gave the ceremony to me, and it is in this faith that I give it to you. No one should charge to help people do this ceremony. You will lose the spirit of the ceremony if you charge, and let no one charge you. With that said, here goes:

1. The first thing you have to do is ask God — or the Creator, or whatever you happen to call your Higher Power — to help you forgive yourself. You do this by writing requests to him on paper.

This process includes asking God to help you forgive yourself for situations in which you had no control, such as your place of birth, what your life was like as you grew up, parental breakups or deaths in the family, and so on. We need to do this, because, on a deep, subconscious level, we hold ourselves accountable for these things. We are a great species for blaming ourselves. Say our grandpa passes away. We say things like, “Jeez, if I had only stopped by last night, maybe he would still be here” Or, “If I had called, then I would have known something was wrong.” I am here to tell you that, as it is said, no man knows the day, hour, or minute of his passing. But when the Creator wants us home, it’s our time. When the second hand gets back to twelve, it’s over, and there is nothing in the universe that can stop it. Therefore there is no reason to blame yourself; death just is, plain and simple.

So now, think back on your own life. What has hurt you today over which you had absolutely no control? Then think about yesterday, last week, last year, and so on, and list as many things as you can think of that you could not possibly have changed. Don’t worry if you miss something; this is not a one-shot ceremony. I recently did my sixty-first fire ceremony with a group of vets from the Minneapolis Veterans Administration. Most think they got more out of the ceremony than they had in a week of therapy.

2. Next ask God to help you forgive yourself for situations in which you did have some control and did not act according to your highest light. We say things we don’t mean, and though they may feel good at the time, guess whose heart box they end up in?

However, even when we do not act according to our highest light, it is because we are in fact human — with our human emotions, reason, and frailties — and that is OK, because the Creator made us this way and loves us. And again, because of the way we are wired, we tend to hold these things against ourselves. But carrying a load that doesn’t belong to us does not lead to healing, so we need to let go of the things over which we did have control as well as the things over which we didn’t, when holding on no longer helps us with our highest good. Situations in which we have control could be our own relationship breakups, arguments with loved ones, and letting alcohol cloud our judgment.

I find that usually we hold onto the junk for dear life rather than give it up. I’m not sure if this is because we don’t know how easy it is to get rid of old hurts, pains, and traumas, or if it is just inherent human greed. Most of us fight against greed, but some embrace it — even when what they’re clinging to is harmful to them.

3. Now ask God to help you forgive places, situations, and other people that have hurt you. The more we hold onto our hurt over these things, the more energy we use that we could be using for our healing. Again, think back to today, yesterday, the day before that, and so on. Think of as many negative things as you can to release, because the more you can let go of, the more you strengthen your energy field, which is your protection.

Don’t be afraid to thank the Creator in advance for answering your prayer, and be specific in your wording of what you want (for example, freedom from resentment, health, spiritual healing, and so on). If it is good for you, the Creator will usually provide.

4. As you talk to the Creator, thanking him for helping you in this process of forgiveness, hold your tobacco up and put your prayers into it. Then put the tobacco holding your prayers into the middle of the paper on which you have written your needs, and crumple the paper around the tobacco. That way, your words enclose the tobacco, and, when you burn it, the smoke carries them right to the Creator.

5. Wrap this bundle of paper and tobacco in a piece of red cotton cloth that is six to seven inches square (or whatever size feels right). This is the way my grandmother taught me. It is so that God the Creator knows you are serious. Tie the cloth with a purple strip of cloth, string, or yarn. Tie it with four knots. Purple is the color of healing. The four knots represent the Four Grandfathers, who are the Creator’s spirit helpers. They watch the north, east, south, and west.

6. Throw the healing bundle into a hot, friendly fire so that you can see the smoke taking the words to the Creator. A hot, friendly fire is one where the wood has burned down to coals. I use the fire pit outside my house. On days when I don’t have time to build a fire, I use a two-pound coffee can. I poke holes in the side of the can near the bottom with a can opener that my dad used to open beer with (a “church key,” for those of you old enough to remember). I then place four or five pieces of Match Light charcoal in the can and light them. Next I fill out my writing for the ceremony, and by the time I’m finished and have my bundle made, the charcoal is white hot; all I have to do is drop the bundle in. I sometimes don’t have the patience I should have, and I think this way of doing the ceremony would be helpful to those of you who are like me.

Don’t be surprised if, a short while after the fire ceremony, you notice yourself feeling weepy, angry, sad, elated, happy, or any number of other emotions. As you peel the layers off of old memories that you had hidden from yourself deep in the unconscious, the old wounds start to float up into consciousness again, and you begin feeling the emotions that you have covered for such a long time. So keep a little notebook to write about things as they come up. It will be the basis for your next fire ceremony. Soon you will have plenty of material for the next one. I have noticed that this pattern has recurred with my clients over and over, time and again, during the last forty-five years.

The fire ceremony is not a thing to fear. Instead it is a way to overcome fear. It is also a way to enrich your present life by ridding it of past-life issues — issues that we carry from life to life until we deal with them, because they won’t go away on their own. The fire ceremony cleans out your heart box, giving you a much greater opportunity to achieve a healthy mind, soul, and body.

I heard of a man who did our ceremony and is now charging people to do it for them. That’s a nice thought, but the only one who can truly cleanse the heart box is oneself. I can help people pull negative stuff out, but it will never stay out unless they do the fire ceremony for themselves. Otherwise the issue they’re trying to get rid of will be back in a matter of hours, or four days at most, and that is only if the facilitator knows about wrapping the client in a cocoon of light after a healing is over.

We can’t be lazy people; we have to do the work ourselves if we want to heal. Don’t waste money on people who claim they can do something they can’t. There is no magic pill that fixes anything without work on our part. The Creator gave us the tools to work with — let’s use them. The fire ceremony is not hard to do. If you can’t do it by the end of the book, come see me and I will show you!

As I have said, my gram taught me that Oneida breathing is an important tool to use with the fire ceremony to balance the emotions, help ground us, and convert negative energy to positive. It is to be done four times a day with four repetitions each time, if you so choose. Here is a quick account of how to do it:

Stand with both feet on the floor and inhale deeply through your nose. Visualize your negative energy going down your body, out your feet, and into the ground. Then exhale through your mouth and visualize positive energy coming up from the earth, through your feet, and into the rest of your being. Upon inhaling, you send your negative energy to the Earth Mother; upon your exhale, she replaces the negative with new, positive energy.

Russell FourEagles is a Native American spiritual healer with over forty years of experience. He has performed over 45,000 healings around the world. He operates the Soaring Eagles Wellness Center in Spooner, Wisconsin, and speaks at Native American gatherings across the country. This article is excerpted from his book The Making of a Healer: Teachings of My Oneida Grandmother (Quest Books, 2014).

Printed in the Summer 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: FourEagles, Russell, "The Oneida Fire Ceremony" Quest 104.3 (Summer 2016): pg. 116-121

By Arlene Gay Levine

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

                                                              •Rumi

Crawling in the sand toward the ocean, a toddler cuts her knee on a shell. A teenage boy’s heart breaks when the object of his admiration refuses a first date. Deep depression grips an older scientist whose grant application, probably his most important and perhaps his last, is denied. Nations grieve at the news of the latest incident of violence. What do all of these and a myriad of other hurtful situations have in common? They are all wounds of one sort or another. Whether to the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual vehicle, some injury, harm, damage, distress or offense has occurred and now requires the exact opposite: healing.

What does it mean to heal? In Old English the word was hælan (to make whole, sound, and well), and from the same etymological root arise the adjectives hale and, most interestingly, holy. So how do we accomplish this transformation from suffering human to fully integrated individual, awake to our Higher Self? In essence, each of us needs to become a shaman, one who, through some personal crisis, has learned to translate their pain into the power to heal themselves and others.

We must start right where we are, in the now, which is the sacred ground of the present. What thoughts are we thinking? They become the language we use to describe ourselves, and what we believe to be our reality. These words then create our character and eventually, for better or worse, write the story of our life. When the narrative hinges on faulty information, it requires editing, literally conscious restructuring, to allow the truth to shine through.

As an example, let us take our injured toddler, who while having fun at the beach, cut her knee open on a shell. Bleeding and frightened, she starts to cry. If her guardian is healthy and whole in spirit, she will pick the child up and comfort her, wiping away the blood and fear with soothing hand and comforting expressions. However, suppose this person is carrying unresolved wounds from long ago.

Perhaps she will grab and scold the child. “How stupid and careless you are. Look what you have done!” Now this false thought planted in the child’s mind will surface next time an accident occurs; she will use these terms on herself. A pattern of self-hate has formed instead of a paradigm of compassion and forgiveness for one’s mistakes.

Words are tools; they work in invisible ways to create visible results. Fortunately, we can learn to direct this cause and effect process. By tuning into our Inner Teacher, who ushers us into the bridal chamber of our hearts, where all opposites are transcended, we take what can be a weapon and transform it into the salve. We need to examine and revise our belief systems. This will connect us with both the roots of our resistance to growth and the unlimited energy of our true potential.

The writer James Moffett believed that the fundamental aim of education and living is spiritual growth. He said, “Writing is hauling in a long line from the depths to find out what things are strung on it.” Take some personal time and be willing to do just that. Have a notebook and pen ready. Make yourself comfortable, close your eyes, and center yourself with a few deep letting-go breaths. When you have connected to the silent place within, sense yourself safely transported to the place where memory takes you.

Spend as much time as you need reviewing scenes filled with colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures. When you feel ready, open your eyes, and create a chart with three headings: People, Places, and Things. Under each category, begin listing associations that occurred from your visit to the past. Flow on without stopping to question or analyze any of your responses.

Now appraise each list as if you were mining for gold. When the entry you are intuitively encouraged to explore jumps out at you, you will have excavated your golden nugget. Write it in the center of a circle in the middle of a clean page in capital letters. You may wish to take a few more deep breaths as an aid to enter the moment with mindful awareness. Concentrate on your nugget, and as ideas about what you have written emerge, draw a line from the circle, letting each idea branch off and trigger a new thought or memory. Use no more than a few words to write it down. Return to the golden nugget for fresh inspiration and repeat this process until your page is full.

Take time to study the treasure map you have created. Hopefully, your nugget word has helped you unearth many connections that over the years you forgot or unconsciously repressed. For you as a child, they may have been too painful to handle. Use the map as a guide to what must be released, reclaimed, or revised in your current life. If you need to dig deeper for this information, do an “interview” with your person, place, or thing. Record your questions and the responses. Review them carefully for succinct clues to where healing still needs to occur in your life.

It is beneficial to do the Treasure Map meditation at least several times for optimal results. Repetition will provide a smoother journey to territory that requires exploration. Each time, move closer to the beauty of who you really are. Revising the story of your life can change you and the world you inhabit in powerful and positive ways. In fact, the treasure you will discover is the birth of the Light where there once was a wound.

The Journey

A day begins; there are no promises.
Maybe the sun will shine, or not.
No one can be sure who is around that corner
or what news this next call might bring.

Seasons arrive like clockwork but how
they will turn out is a mystery. Still . . .
One day we will slip from our bodies
and slide into the Light; this we know.

Perhaps to rouse from sleep and put aside
the fear that hunts our hearts,
we could live each day
as if the Light was already ours.

Listen: The heart hears a deeper truth
than the head. Even the loneliest
one is never alone on
the winding journey home.

                                 â€•Arlene Gay Levine

Author, poet, and educator, Arlene Gay Levine, M.A., is a graduate of New York University. Her poetry has found a home in many venues, and new work will appear in the anthology Earth Blessings (Viva Editions, 2016). She is the creator and facilitator of Logos Therapy, a transformational writing process from which the Treasure Map meditation in this article is adapted. Her website is www.arlenegaylevine.com/. “The Journey” was originally published in Serenity Prayers (Andrews McMeel, 2009).

Printed in the Summer 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Amao, Albert, "Kabbalistic Methods of Treatment" Quest 104.3 (Summer 2016): pg. 124-127

By Albert Amao, Ph.D.

One system of healing without medicine comes from the Kabbalah, an esoteric tradition originally found in Judaism. Paul Foster Case (1884–1954) was the founder of the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), an American offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late nineteenth-century occult order whose members included S.L. MacGregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, and William Butler Yeats. Case wrote extensively on Kabbalah, esoteric Tarot, alchemy, and Rosicrucianism.

Case delineated a system of healing through sound, color, and meditation on the Tarot keys. The principle behind this system is that sound and color are vibrations, each operating at different rates; thus each color and sound is associated with different parts of the body according to their astrological correspondences. Once the part of the body is identified, one meditates on the corresponding Tarot key utilizing the associated sound and color.

Unfortunately, very little information can be disclosed about this method because these teachings are restricted to BOTA affiliates, who are bound by oath not to reveal them publicly. (People who want information about BOTA’s teachings should visit its website, www.bota.org.) Indeed Case is not well-known because most of his writings are imparted solely by correspondence lessons to BOTA members.

Israel Regardie (1907–85) was the leader of the American revival of the Golden Dawn. Despite the opposition of members, Regardie was not reluctant to publish the rituals and writings of this order, which had been entrusted to him under severe oaths of secrecy, under the title The Golden Dawn. Regardie also wrote extensively on the early pioneers of the New Thought movement and was knowledgeable about mind healing and suggestive therapies, as we can see from his book The Romance of Metaphysics, published in 1946.

In 1932 Regardie, who was a psychotherapist, published The Art of True Healing, which is part of his book Foundations of Practical Magic, based on the teachings of the Golden Dawn. The kind of therapeutic treatment he describes can be seen as a form of energy medicine.

This method is based on the Kabbalistic Tree of the sefirot (stages of emanation of the life power or Cosmic Consciousness; singular sefirah), also known as the Tree of Life. The technique makes use of rhythmic breathing, meditation, and visualization of the sefirot of the Middle Pillar of the Tree. The Middle Pillar corresponds to the spinal column, where the seven chakras, or psychic energy centers, are supposedly located. Meditation on and visualization of the chakras activate the flow of the universal life force through these psychic centers. This in turn releases negative emotions trapped in the body. This technique also utilizes the visualization of color and the use of sound to stimulate the energy centers of the body, and, finally, includes prayer and the use of religious mantras. Regardie describes the principle behind his method:

Within every man and woman is a force which directs and controls the entire course of life. Properly used, it can heal every affliction and ailment to which mankind is heir. Every single religion affirms this fact. All forms of mental or spiritual healing, no matter under what name they travel, promise the same thing. Even psychoanalysis employs this power, though indirectly, using the now popular word libido. (Regardie, 1; italics Regardie’s) 

This is a departure from the concept of healing that Regardie portrayed in The Romance of Metaphysics. At that time he flirted intellectually with New Thought and believed that illness arose from a negative frame of mind. Now sickness was seen as arising from the depletion and incorrect use of the life force energy. Regardie said that a lack of proper breathing and a failure to understand the fact that we are surrounded by the life force is the reason we become ill. Nevertheless, this theory can be seen as complementary to New Thought, since we direct this life force by means of our thoughts and emotions. Regardie further states:

In the ambient atmosphere surrounding us and pervading the structure of each minute body-cell is a spiritual force. This force is omnipresent and infinite. It is present in the most infinitesimal object as it is in the most proportion-staggering nebula or island universe. It is this force which is life itself. (Regardie, 1)

The root of this concept is found in the Hindu school of philosophy known as Vedanta, with which Regardie was well acquainted. Vedanta holds that there is one indestructible substance pervading the whole universe, from the remotest star to the most minuscule atomic particle. Regardie equates this universal life force, known in the yogic philosophy as prana, with God. “This Spiritual force constitutes man’s higher self; it is his link with God in man. Every cell in the body should be soaked with its universal energy.” Disease, Regardie concluded, is fundamentally due to a depletion of the life force.

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Each circle represents one of the sefirot or principles. The five sefirot on the Middle Pillar are connected (from the top) to the crown chakra; the throat chakra; the chakra at the solar plexus; the chakra at the genitals; and the chakra at the feet. The side columns represent the polarity of positive (white) and negative (black). The Hebrew letters bet (left) and yod (right) stand for the names of the two pillars in front of Solomon’s Temple, Boaz and Jachin (1 Kings 7:21).

According to Regardie, the ordinary individual puts up so much resistance to the free flow of this universal energy in his body that he becomes tired and ill. Regardie contends that man has “surrounded himself with a crystallized shell of prejudices and ill-conceived fantasies,” which act as a shield preventing the free flow of the life force. Therefore, man should practice honest self-examination of his value system. Regardie also recommends conscious relaxation as a preliminary step, then loosening up the neuromuscular tensions of the body to the degree that all the cells and muscles are brought within the scope of awareness.

Regardie lays out two basic principles for well-being. First, we should consciously realize that we live in this vast spiritual reservoir of life force energy. Second, we should employ regulated or rhythmic breathing, similar to the breathing exercises of yoga, in order to vitalize the body.

These ideas accord with Hermetic and yogic philosophies, which hold that the entire universe is a living organism and moves according to an immutable of law of rhythm and cycle. Therefore rhythmic breathing keeps our bodies in a healthy condition. In every breath, we inhale prana, the life force that vitalizes the body and mind. Regardie argues that an inability to grasp this principle is the reason for the failure of many mental and spiritual healing systems.

Regardie further recommends meditation on the psychospiritual centers that are located along the spinal cord. These centers of energy are known in yogic philosophy as chakras and in the Kabbalah as the sefirot of the Middle Pillar (which is associated with the spinal column). They are vortices of energy through which the life force flows. Although the yogic philosophy says there are seven of these centers, Regardie uses only five.

Regardie recommends concentrating the mind on these centers. Then one should intone and vibrate the names of God associated with them in the Kabbalah: Eheieh, Jehovah Elohim, Jehovan Elohim va-Daas, Shaddai El Chai, and Adonai ha-Aretz (going from top to down). “Finally, each centre is to be visualised as having a particular colour and shape. Slowly they become stimulated into functioning each according to its own nature, pouring forth a stream of highly spiritualized energy and power into the body and mind” (Regardie, 4). At this point the individual can direct the resulting spiritual power to heal various ailments and diseases of both a psychological and a physical nature.

This energy can also be transmitted by the laying on of hands. Thus Regardie, like Franz Anton Mesmer, founder of mesmerism, believes in the transmission of energy from one person to another. Moreover, Regardie believes that healing energy can be sent telepathically to another person who is miles away. This is known as absent treatment or distant healing.

Like Case, who said that the subconscious is the propulsive factor in the individual, Regardie argues that this method of healing can cure even psychogenic eruptions, because the “currents of force arise from the deepest strata of the unconscious, where these psychoneuroses have their origin and where the [sic] lock up the nervous energy, preventing spontaneous and free expression of the psyche,” thus impeding health (Regardie, 8). Unlike Christian Science, which prohibits its members from receiving medical assistance, Regardie does not exclude the use of a physician:

Where organic disease is the problem to be attacked, the procedure to be followed is slightly different. (One should still be under the care of a competent physician). In this instance a considerably stronger current of force is required such as will dissolve the lesion and be sufficient to set in motion those systemic and metabolic activities to construct new tissue and cellular structure. To fulfill these conditions in an ideal sense a second person may be requisite so that his vitality added to that of the sufferer may overcome the condition. (Regardie, 8)

As with any kind of healing, conventional or unconventional, the participation of the individual is extremely important. For a successful treatment with this method, the patient has to be totally receptive and must maintain an attitude of acceptance toward the incoming force.

Regardie recommends prayer or contemplation as the final step of his healing method, because they also activate these psychospiritual centers. Indeed, most genuine esoteric schools and religious organizations strongly advocate meditation and prayer as means of attaining a higher state of mind as well as of stimulating emotional fervor toward the awakening of the spiritual centers. From time immemorial, mystics have given such injunctions as “Inflame thyself in praying.” Ceremonial rituals can also be used to awaken the inner mechanism of healing.

Regardie contends that his system of treatment can be used not only for healing but also for solving a variety of problems in life, such as enhancing human potential, eliminating negative aspects of our personalities, improving relationships, and resolving marital difficulties.

SOURCE MATERIAL

Israel Regardie, The Art of True Healing, in Regardie, Foundations of Practical Magic (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, U.K.: Aquarian Press, 1979); www.hermetics.org/pdf/TheArtofTrueHealing.pdf; accessed March 14, 2016.

Albert Amao, Ph.D., is a clinical hypnotherapist and holistic counselor. His books include Beyond Conventional Wisdom and The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. This article is adapted from his book Healing without Medicine: From Pioneers to Modern Practice (Quest Books, 2014). Reprinted with permission.

Printed in the Summer 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Boyd, Tim, "President’s Diary" Quest 104.3 (Summer 2016): pg. 130-131

Shortly after the close of our convention at Adyar in January, it was off to Australia for their annual convention. The site for the event rotates

Tim and Lily Boyd with Linda Oliveira (left), president of the Australian Section

among the various centers in the country. This year it was in Perth, on the far west side of the continent. This was my first time in Australia, and it gave me some perspective on the size of the country when I met so many Australians who, like me, were coming to Perth for the first time. I sometimes forget that Australia is not just a country, but a continent.

The Australian Section is one of the more active and organized sections in the TS world. The theme for this year’s gathering was “Today’s World Problems: Insights from the Wisdom Tradition” and was held on the beautiful campus of the University of Western Australia, right on the Swan River. During our time there, the members from the host branch in Perth brought the whole group out for a tour of the city that ended with tea at their building.

From Australia it was back to the U.S. for a total of eight days before leaving for a much-anticipated visit to Brazil. For the past several years in February, at the time of the massive national celebration of Carnaval, a group of Brazilian Young Theosophists (YTs) have held a multiday get-together at the Instituto Teosófica outside of Brasília. At last year’s meeting of the TS General Council I made the point that whenever I visit a national section I would like to have a separate meeting with young members only. In Italy, Finland, the Netherlands, India, and Singapore we had such meetings. When the Brazilian YTs heard this, they did two things: first, they invited me to attend their annual gathering; second, they made it an international YT meeting. Members from around the world were invited. Because the cost of international travel for young members can be prohibitive, we asked our national sections to help when possible. The result was a group of 75 YTs, predominantly from Brazil, but also coming from Italy, the Netherlands, England, Mexico, Spain, and Argentina.

As you might expect, it was a high-energy program that spanned day and night. One of the beauties of the meeting was that every aspect of it was planned and executed by the young members—everything from the daily schedule to picking up participants at the airport. Because it is not every day that the international president visits Brazil, a number of “older” members wanted to attend the program. This created a minor problem. The YTs were not trying to discriminate against us old ones, but everyone knew that open enrollment would change the character and intent of the meeting. A solution was found by scheduling me to speak on a couple of evenings at the branch in Brasília.

The meeting was a huge success. In addition to talks and panels, there was music, campfires, tree planting, and swimming in some of the more than thirty waterfalls that dot the land of the Instituto. Friendships were formed that will last into the future. The group decided that they will do it again next year. Get ready.

From Brasília it was on to Rio de Janeiro. With its setting of mountains, ocean, and beaches, it is arguably one of the most beautiful cities on earth. During our brief visit we kept a busy schedule with public and members’ meetings at the local branch, a radio interview with TS member and radio personality Fernando Mansur, and meetings with local members.

Tim and Lily Boyd (at center)at a public talk in São Paulo

Next on the tour was São Paulo—a huge city of 20 million people and Brazil’s economic hub. The TS has a little oasis at its Pitagoras (Pythagoras) Theosophical Institute in the downtown area. It is a lovely site, with multiple meeting areas, office, and a courtyard garden. On the evening we arrived I gave a talk to around 100 members from the area. Immediately following the talk, we got into the car to travel to the Raja Center outside of the city. Just to give you some idea about the scale of a city of 20 million people: it took almost two hours just to get out of the city.

The next three days were spent at the Raja Center in the countryside on the outskirts of town. The center is named for past TS international president and author C. Jinarajadasa (Brother Raja), who felt that he had a special past-life connection with Brazil. The center is a gated compound of several acres with a meeting hall, library, dining area, and dormitories. About fifty members attended the program on the TS’s Three Objects. While there, I was told that I am the chair of its board of directors. The things you learn when you travel . . .

We arrived back in the U.S. in time for our TSA board of directors’ meeting. Twice a year, in February and July, the board meets for three and a half days to go over the TSA’s business and to plan for the future. Immediately following the close of the TSA board meeting, the Theosophical Order of Service (TOS) board meeting begins. Our TOS-USA president, Nancy Secrest, currently also wears the hat of TOS international secretary. She is a busy lady these days.

At the end of February I attended an art exhibit in Chicago at the Stony Island Art Bank (reviewed in Quest, spring 2016). The show was titled “Intention to Know: The Thought Forms of Annie Besant.” The curator for the show was Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev—the same person who put together last year’s Istanbul Biennial show, “SaltWater,” which also gave prime consideration to the Thought Forms paintings.

In March it was off to Mexico and Argentina. In Mexico I participated in the first North American meeting of the Inter-American Federation. It was held in the small city of Cholula. The city rests in the shadow of the active volcano Popocatépetl. Members came from a number of countries—Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Honduras, Puerto Rico, the U.S., and a couple more that I am forgetting. It was a high-energy meeting, whose theme was “Applying the Principles of the Ageless Wisdom.”

Next stop: Buenos Aires, Argentina—for one day. In Buenos Aires we had not scheduled an official meeting. The local members got together at the building the TS owns just outside of downtown. I had a chance to talk informally with the members. It was an active conversation with plenty of give-and-take. It was also good to see again the group of members who had come to Adyar for this year’s convention.

The next morning we were on the plane, the one flight a day that comes and goes to San Rafael. Back in the 1970s there was a movement in the TS in Argentina to build a Theosophical center—a community. There was a strong group in San Rafael which found and acquired a several acre plot of land in 1980. San Rafael is in a semiarid location, and at the time the property was purchased there was a grand total of three trees on the land. Today there are hundreds. TS member and civil engineer Juan Carlos Palmeri helped design a plan of construction that included five long buildings in the pattern of a star. To date four have been constructed, which include two dormitories, a meeting hall and quiet space, and a building for dining.

The occasion for our visit was the third annual Luso-Hispanic (Portuguese-Hispanic) meeting. About seventy-five members from countries all over Latin America attended. Actually, I had participated in the first one at the Instituto in Brasília in 2013. The visit began with an interview for the local TV station, then an evening public talk at the local university. The next few days involved meetings of all types—lectures, meetings with heads of sections, one on one meetings, and, of course, some sightseeing.

Back in the U.S., the kids from the Prairie School of DuPage did a follow-up presentation on the health of Perkins Pond on the Olcott property. For those of you who are reading this diary for the first time, or who have a short memory, the Prairie School is an alternative schooling project that began in 2011. When I first came in as TSA president, members of the fledgling school approached me about possibly setting up shop with us. Their nature-based system, the core values of the school, and their educational rigor made the choice something of a no-brainer. Both teachers and kids love and know every inch of our forty-two acre campus. Since coming to Olcott, they had observed that the health of our Perkins Pond was not ideal and had set up a project to test the waters and study it. Last year they gave a presentation setting out some suggestions for remediation. This year they came back with a conclusive follow-up study. Before, they had identified several possible causes for the decline in the pond’s health. This time their year-long study narrowed it down to one cause—geese. It turns out that the lovely and very scenic presence of Canada geese is altering the chemical balance of the pond because of “goose poop.” The solution? Plant tall grasses and other nitrogen-fixing plants around the pond. Geese are wary of tall plants, where they cannot see possible predators like coyotes hiding.

We’ll keep you posted.

Tim Boyd