Adventures of a Student Healer

I thought it might interest you to hear about a strange series of coincidences that taught me some important lessons about spiritual healing.

It started early one Sunday morning, near the end of May, when I went out to get groceries. I usually drive to the grocery store, but I also bring one of those folding shopping carts in the trunk of my car. My townhouse condominium is a bit far from my parking spot, so I bring the cart to take groceries from my car to my house. The cart was very old and battered and was already missing a few of the horizontal wires that form the sides of the cart. The cart also wobbled when it rolled because the wheels were so off kilter. It worked well enough from my parking spot to my house, but I wouldn't want to have to use it if I walked to the store and had to bring the groceries home on foot.

When I got to the grocery store, I noticed that new shopping carts like mine were on display in a prominent location where they hadn't been before. In fact, I had never noticed a prominent display of carts like that at any grocery store ever. I didn't think anything unusual of it at the time. I finished my shopping and took my groceries home. As I was wheeling the cart full of groceries from my car to my house, I heard the tinkling sound of one of the metal wires that form the sides of the cart bouncing on the ground. The wire had fallen out. None of the wires had fallen out for years. I didn't think anything unusual of it, but I put the wire securely back in place with my leatherman pocket tool and brought the groceries into my house.

The next week, as I was going out to my car to go to the grocery store, I heard the same tinkling sound as the week before. The same wire fell out again. The cart was completely empty, there was no reason whatsoever for that to happen. "Okay," I thought to whomever was listening, "I understand. It's time for a new cart. No problem." At the grocery store I bought a new cart, it was the last one left on display.

This was an interesting coincidence, my old cart started falling apart just when the grocery store has a prominent display of new ones. The next step in this strange series of coincidences was when things started to go wrong.

Later that week, while doing my usual three times a week workout of calisthenics and weight training, my shoulder began to hurt. I had had an occasional slight ache on and off there for many months but I just avoided the exercise that seemed to cause it. The other exercises never seemed to make it worse. Until now. Over the next two days the pain got worse and worse. I tried ibuprofen but it didn't seem to help. I had some pain killers left over from my last root canal four and a half years ago. Fortunately they kept me going until I was able to go to the doctor the next day. Otherwise, I would have gone to the emergency room in the middle of the night. It hurt that much.

The doctor told me I was doing pretty much the right thing, rest the shoulder and continue using the sling I had been using. He gave me a new prescription for the same pain killers. He also told me to keep taking the ibuprofen even if I didn't notice it working. The injury was too severe for the ibuprofen to eliminate the pain like it might on a simple sore muscle, but it would reduce the inflammation and the recovery would be faster. Even if the pain seemed to be getting worse, it would still be less than without taking the ibuprofen.

This lesson about how ibuprofen works taught me something important about spiritual healing.

In addition to the ibuprofen and pain killers, I had been using a spiritual healing technique that I had learned at a Spiritualist church. Spiritualist do not believe spiritual healing is a substitute for mainstream medicine. We believe in using it in conjunction with mainstream medicine. I've been told by people whom I've given healing to that it has helped with various conditions including depression, cold symptoms, breathing difficulty, and others. I had used it successfully on myself before for sore muscles. However in this case it seemed that just like with the ibuprofen, it didn't miraculously cure the injury. I knew that a miracle was unlikely but one always hopes and when hopes are not realized, disappointment inevitably follows.

However, just like with the ibuprofen, spiritual healing treatments should be continued even if they don't seem to work right away. While it is impossible to predict the outcome for any particular case, spiritual healing is believed to be able to decrease the severity of symptoms and reduce the amount of time needed for healing. I knew all of these things from the classes I had taken at church, but now that I had had this experience myself, and I realized that it was also true with mainstream medicines like ibuprofen, I really understood it in a much deeper way.

A few hours after the doctor's appointment, I felt much better. I didn't need the pain killers any more. This totally astonished me since I had been so uncomfortable previously. I wondered if the pain went away so suddenly because of the cumulative effect of the spiritual healing I had done.

There was also another possibility. Some people believe that sometimes an illness is intended to teach the sufferer a lesson. There are even healing techniques that use psychology based on the belief that once the lesson is learned, there is no longer a need for the disease and healing will then occur spontaneously. I never really believed this before, but now I wondered if that was why the pain went away so soon after I understood this lesson.

There was one more thing I understood more clearly from this experience. During the most painful period of the injury, after a session of self healing, while I did not necessarily feel relief from pain, I did experience some relief from suffering. Pain is a sensation. Suffering is an attitude. Constant pain can really wear you down, but after a session of self healing I had a much more positive attitude even though I was disappointed that the pain remained. I was interested in doing things rather than lying in bed feeling sorry for myself.

A person's psychological outlook can help or hinder healing. Stress can cause disease. A positive attitude can help in recovery. I knew all of this from the classes I took at church but now I really experienced how spiritual healing can improve one's psychological outlook when suffering from pain and in that way facilitate healing. I had a much deeper understanding of this phenomena from the experience.

This effect also helped me when I used spiritual healing during the long wait in the doctor's office and at the pharmacy getting my prescription filled. There are many trials associated with medical conditions and spiritual healing helped me to get through them with a better attitude.

What does all this have to do with the shopping cart? Well, a couple of days later it was grocery day again. My arm didn't hurt if I was careful about how I used it, and I was gradually regaining a full range of motion. However, I still couldn't drive my car because it had a manual transmission. I walked to the grocery store and took my new shopping cart.

As I walked to the store I wondered about these coincidences. How come my old cart started falling apart just when the store had a display of new ones? How come I got the new cart just before a minor ache I'd had for months turned into a serious injury and I couldn't drive and really needed a properly working cart? I thought it must be a sign telling me to look deeper into the meaning of this injury. Was the injury planned? Were there more lessons in it I needed to learn? Was there anything else unusual about the injury? I realized there was one more thing that was coincidental. About a year earlier I had started going to the Spiritualist church that I currently attended. Since then, I had been going to the class in spiritual healing at the church. On the same Sunday that my old cart started falling apart, I was asked, if starting a few weeks later, I would like to be one of the healers who does laying-on-of-hands during the Sunday services. I agreed to do it.

Here was another coincidence: just before I was going to be a healer in the church services, I was given this "advanced course" that taught me so much about spiritual healing by experiencing those things for myself.