The Spiritual Dimension of Therapeutic Touch

Dora Kunz, Dolores Krieger

• Publisher: Bear & Company
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781591438618
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

Explores the extraordinary technique that put authentic healing into the hands of health care providers • Examines the relationship between expanded levels of consciousness and the healing process • Contains healing exercises for treating common ailments such as stomachaches and back pain, and practices for managing chronic stress • Based on transcribed audiotapes of lectures by medical intuitive Dora Kunz (1904-1999), with commentary by Dolores Krieger Since 1972 Therapeutic Touch has been taught in hospitals and at universities to tens of thousands of health care professionals. The Spiritual Dimension of Therapeutic Touch provides an intimate glimpse into the life work of Dora Kunz (1904-1999), medical intuitive and fifth-generation clairvoyant, who used her gifts to reach out to others in her capacity as healer and teacher. During their years of research and healing practice together, Dolores Krieger and her mentor, Dora Kunz, found illness to be caused by specific subtle energy imbalances. The Spiritual Dimension of Therapeutic Touch teaches how to rebalance the body's energy through touch, visualization, and a spiritual acceptance of life's inevitable cycle. These exercises can be used both to heal physical pain and to achieve mental and spiritual peace. The authors also examine the important interconnected relationship between healer and patient. The book includes never-before-transcribed lectures by Dora Kunz, with commentary from Dolores Krieger, exploring expanded levels of consciousness as they relate to the healing process.

Section V:

CLINICAL APPLICATIONS OF THERAPEUTIC TOUCH

Introductory Comments

The sensitivity of the Therapeutic Touch therapist improves as a consequence of persevering at the practice of the assessment, fostering her awareness of the finer levels of consciousness of the healee. As all the levels of consciousness interpenetrate, the heightened sensitivity of the TT therapist enables her to become aware of the “whole person” who is the healee. She perceives a sense of his totality during the assessment or during the reassessment at the end of the session when the TT process has made her awareness more acute. With this increased sensitivity, the therapist very frequently gains a sharper insight into what it is about the healee that is out of balance, and she may have an intuition about the cause of the problem as well. The progression is not additive, but it is multifactored. It happens unobtrusively and—most frequently—very quickly.

In the TT practice of sustained centering the therapist focuses her attention on her heart chakra, where she becomes aware of a sense of profound peace and stillness. Over time she begins to realize that these signs of inner quietude are symbolic signals of her connection to the inner self. Upon that recognition, she allows that sense of stillness to pervade her fields of consciousness, and she uses those gentle, tranquil handmaidens of order as the medium through which she projects healing energies to the healee. Once she can maintain that state of consciousness for even a short while—two minutes, as Dora recommends, is a good rule of thumb in the beginning—she can permit it to touch her life, allowing it to become conscious in her acts of daily living. Then her field of consciousness gets into the “habit” and she may find, as many others have, that it enables her to transmit a sense of stability, equanimity, and even a hint of grace and presence to others who are in fear, confusion, or inner turmoil.

Such an ability is particularly helpful when a person is working with frightened children, people in panic, many psychotics, particularly those who are schizophrenic, and also persons who are in final transition. One gets the sense that it is the inner self at work, and it is working with the unstable person at a profound transverbal level, inner self to inner self. As a result of such experiences an underlying spiritual quality makes itself known to the therapist while she is working with the Therapeutic Touch process.

Dora makes a point of suggesting ways of overcoming base emotions, such as fear, anger, and resentment, because their effect on the fields of consciousness is that of blocking the fine energy pathways the inner self engages to act through the life activities of the therapist.

As noted in the introductory comments to Section III, certain bodily systems are more sensitive to the TT process than are others. One of these is the genitourinary system in both males and females. However, only certain organs of the endocrine system demonstrate that sensitivity. The adrenal glands, physiologically located on the top of the kidneys, are extremely sensitive to Therapeutic Touch. In fact, when a TT therapist—even one who is a novice—passes her hand chakra through the vital-energy field overlying the adrenals of a healee who is very depleted of prana, she will feel a decided shift in subtle energy flow. The adrenals seem to “slurp” up the prana flowing from the therapist’s hand chakras. It is not unusual that very rapidly thereafter the healee will report a sense of increased vitality. In fact this can be so reliably done to increase the energy level of the healee that a tried and true assertion of those who teach Therapeutic Touch is, “. . . if you don’t pick up any significant cues during the TT assessment, give energy to the area of the adrenals anyway. It will only be helpful to the healee, even if you do not understand why.”

At this time we do not know just why this happens so invariably and so rapidly. As a rationale one thinks of the quickening effects of epinephrine—the major hormone secreted by the adrenals—on the musculature and the circulatory systems of the body. Although over forty doctoral dissertations, more than twenty postdoctoral researches, and innumerable clinical studies on Therapeutic Touch have been completed at this writing, no one has tackled this interesting question on these expeditious and effective clinical correlates of the Therapeutic Touch process.

One of the major effects of epinephrine is on blood pressure, and one of the highly reliable effects of Therapeutic Touch is the reduction of high blood pressure readings. Interestingly, this is done using the visualization of “the healing blue,” generally thought of as royal blue, while doing Therapeutic Touch with a person who has high blood pressure. The protocol for doing this was developed by Dora and me during the early days of TT, when we were trying to determine the parameters of the Therapeutic Touch process. We did a series of pilot studies on the effect of TT on hypertension, using as experimental subjects a convenient sample of a dozen women between the ages of sixty and seventy-five years who had been medically diagnosed as being hypertensive. All of these women demonstrated a diastolic reading (the bottom number of the blood pressure ratio) of over 100 and a systolic reading of over 200, each person acting as her own control in a simple pre-post design. The study period was for five consecutive days, with each healee receiving one TT session each day. After having her blood pressure taken and recorded by a nurse who was not otherwise involved in the study, each subject was given Therapeutic Touch by a TT therapist for twenty to twenty-five minutes. During this time the TT therapist visualized the healing blue color permeating through the healee while she did Therapeutic Touch. At the end of the TT session, the blood pressure reading of the healee was again recorded. The healee rested for about ten minutes post-treatment and then returned home. Healees continued whatever medication and dietary regime they had been on previous to the study.

The results occurred more quickly and were sustained longer than we had anticipated. After one session, the systolic readings were under 200 for all healees. They ranged from 178 to 150, with an average systolic of 164. The diastolic readings were all under 100, ranging from 90 to 72, with an average diastolic reading of 80. The readings were maintained at that level throughout the five days of the study. We repeated the study, with similar results, and since then many others have replicated our study so that the findings have attained an impressive reliability. It is because of this reliability that the use of the projection of color in appropriate instances has become a part of standard Therapeutic Touch treatment.

As was mentioned, the findings of this study exceeded our expectations. While Dora could directly perceive the effects of the projection of color on the vital-energy and psychodynamic fields, I had to perceive this—and other ways of using subtle energies that we later included in the TT process—in ways that were very different from Dora’s incredible abilities. Luckily for me, I have a good intuition. As I learned ways of studying it to learn how to gauge its reliability, it helped my understanding of the TT process considerably. However, my learning about the healing properties of color and how to use them during the healing interaction was more pragmatic.

One day, while giving a talk on healing in a cathedral, I noticed sunlight playing through the old stained glass windows and bathing the congregation in various colors of light. The thought occurred to me that I might be able to experience the effect of the different colors by sitting in the tinted light of the beams. Intrigued with the idea, I returned and spent over an hour one afternoon sitting in various pews, centering my consciousness, and then being mindful of any changes in consciousness that occurred. The result was very interesting: I could detect a distinct, though subtle, change in mood as I experienced the differently colored light beams. The shaft of colored light that had the most pronounced effect was the blue that beamed through the stained glass depicting the Virgin Mary. The next most effective shaft of colored light was yellow, but I felt it differently. Whereas the blue was soothing, comforting, relaxing, even tranquilizing in its effect, the yellow light was more arousing, invigorating, and stimulating. I carried on these studies of colored light for some months and I found that I could replicate in my mind the colors instilled in me when I was in the cathedral, even when I was not in the glow of the light. I also found that I could visualize these colors and project them to a healee during TT sessions for specific effects. I discussed these findings with Dora, Dora continued her own studies of color, and the use of color in our TT sessions quickly caught on (see Krieger, Accepting Your Power to Heal, p. 60, for more on our explorations regarding the use of color visualization in TT).

We have been very effective in using the healing blue to calm, sedate, or slow down imbalanced subtle energies. The blue that was chosen was that of the light that filtered down through the stained glass representation of the robes of the Virgin Mary. This particular blue was so effective that it aroused my interest in tracing its use. With the help of a friend who was an artist, we found that it has been associated with the Virgin Mary, or the Mother of the World, since earliest times, and that the tradition was perpetuated through the medieval art guilds to modern times.

Besides blue and yellow, we have added the visualization and projection of light green, rose, violet, orange, and clear light to our TT repertoire (see Krieger, Therapeutic Touch Inner Workbook, p. 130, for a more detailed account of the situations for which these colors are used). We have found that it is not the projection of the colors themselves that makes a significant difference in the vital-energy flow, but that visualizing colors helps the way the therapist thinks or evokes a particular psychological mood.

Dora encouraged personal experimentation. She gave us the freedom to think deeply and to imagine freely, but she expected of her students the same self-discipline she demanded of herself and, therefore, she held the line at sheer fantasy, uncontrolled emotional outbursts, or blatant exaggeration. However, she had an incredible and contagious sense of humor that saw both her patients and her students through many difficult situations.

One result of this casual environment had amusing consequences. It concerns a very simple way we had of naming TT techniques as we developed them. When we passed our hands through a healee’s vital-energy field during an assessment, we could feel sensations that felt like heat or cold. Often as we worked with the healee, the sensations of heat would increase. That gave rise to the use of the saying “He’s cooked!” to describe a healee who has had enough projection of healing energies. Under certain conditions, a vital-energy field that is in a state of imbalance feels rough, as though it has uneven, wavy ruffles. So when we cleared a healee’s field of that condition, we called it “unruffling.”

Several early students experimented with the projection of various colors. One of our findings was that it was possible to teach oneself to hold more than one color in mind at the same time and project that combination to the healee. This led Mikey—then a mere medical resident, but now a distinguished specialist in emergency pediatric medicine—to exercise both his fine sensibilities and a roguish sense of humor to come up with a novel classification, “Think plaid!” So, besides the ordinary strangenesses that TT therapists are heir to, we “think plaid,” find “ruffles” in the seemingly empty space around people, and we “cook” our patients!

The Context of Wholeness

I WANT TO BEGIN BY REMINDING YOU that centering—the conscious withdrawal of your focus to your heart—is at the core of Therapeutic Touch. It is here that you can become consciously aware of the peace and stillness that characterize the link with the inner self. If, even for a few minutes daily, you can draw upon this and identify with that peace and quiet, you will be opening yourself to the source of your healing energy to a greater degree, without being distracted by undisciplined feelings. Then whatever you become aware of—Therapeutic Touch, your activities of daily life—will be filtered through a concentrated atmosphere of peace and stillness. You will also project that peace and healing to your patients.

It is more important for you to center your consciousness when you are preparing to heal than to tell patients, “I love you,” and hug them. The patients are disturbed; they have pain; they do not know their future; and they are afraid. If we discipline ourselves—and it is a discipline—...

Table of contents

• Cover Image
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• List of Exercises
• An Introduction to Dora Kunz and to Therapeutic Touch
• Section I: Consciousness and Healing
• Section II: The Context of Therapeutic Touch
• Section III: The Nature of Therapeutic Touch
• Section IV: Chakras and the Therapeutic Touch Process
• Section V: Clinical Applications of Therapeutic Touch
• Section VI: Questions and Answers
• Section VII: The Angelic Kingdom and Humanity
• Afterword
• Therapeutic Touch Resources
• Footnotes
• References
• Index
• About The Authors
• About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
• Copyright & Permissions