Who Is The Healer?
The Locus of Healing In Energy Psychotherapy

Asha Clinton, MSW, PhD

From my perspective, Larry Nims presents the most interesting and provocative assertions about why the energy psychotherapies work (see his workbook, the Be Set Free Fast Training Manual). Completely bypassing physical explanations, he says that it is the subconscious that does the healing, and that we can ally ourselves and our clients with their subconscious? through muscle testing and the thorough removal of reversals.

My experience has been that he is absolutely correct, although I will call it the unconscious here, since I came of age in the Jungian tradition. When I muscle test a client, saying, "Unconscious of John, you are willing to heal John of the memory of his mother's death," someone or something usually answers yes. Then when I test, "You are willing to do this with Instant BSSF (or, as things have developed, with Larry's permission, Instant Matrix)," again, something may answer no. "You are willing to do this with Seemorg Matrix Work." Someone may answer yes.

Having used muscle testing for a number of years now, and having heard various innovators in energy psychotherapy say they are muscle testing either the body or the subconscious, I have become curious about who or what is responding to our muscle testing. Since I am not enlivened by explanations regarding the physics of energy psychology, I've gone back to Jung, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism to answer this question for myself. Perhaps such an answer will be of interest to you as well.

To begin with, it is posited in Hinduism and Sufism that there are two basic forms of the Divine. The first, which the Hindus call Brahman, is the Deity which is coextensive with the universe, which is the universe and which, dwelling everywhere, is everything. It consists of all the possible qualities, attributes, things, and beings. It is the totality.

The second, which the Hindus call Atman, is the spark of the Divine, which can be found at the center of each human being. Microcosm to the Brahman's macrocosm, the Atman has the same contents as the Brahman, an interesting paradox, to say the least.

Jung, whose thinking was influenced by both Hinduism and Buddhism, described two different levels of the unconscious: the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious. In the collective unconscious, he placed all the archetypes that have arisen as humanity has evolved (see C.G. Jung, Two Essays in Analytic Psychology). Some of these archetypes are anthropomorphic forms, which contain the perfect totality of qualities inherent in a certain way of being, like Kali or Shiva in Hinduism, or the Christ in Christianity. They exemplify groups of related qualities, which are both Divine and human. The Divine level of these qualities is whole and perfect whereas the human... well, you all know about human imperfection.

The Witch archetype, for example, who wants power more than anything else, who controls, manipulates, casts spells, and destroys connection with other people and with oneself, also contains creativity, insight, intuition, and esoteric qualities such as clairvoyance and psychic ability, and as such, is a channel to the Divine (see Ann and Barry Ulanov, The Witch and the Clown). The King archetype rules, either benevolently or not, stands above others, and has a strong Divine connection. And we all know the Inner Child.

Other kinds of archetypes are the perfection of relational patterns, for example, the family, marriage, the mother-daughter relationship, the corporate hierarchy. Still others are states of being which are not necessarily anthropomorphized: peace, war, death, birth, spiritual union, and the like (see Anthony Stevens, Archetypes).

Jung believed that all the psychological material we develop unknowingly as we live our lives is located in the personal unconscious. Furthermore, he showed-- and this is clear from the experiences of many Jungian analysands, myself included-- that although any archetype may sleep unawakened throughout a person's lifetime, an individual's life experience may awaken an archetype into activity. For example, the experience of a harshly judgmental, critical, and blaming mother will not only awaken the Judge archetype into activity in a boy's psyche; that Judge archetype will constellate in its negative form, as harshly judging, critical, and blaming. Then, analysis may move it into consciousness. In fact, this is what happens in a great many Jungian analyses.

Jung felt that the Self is the most all-encompassing of the archetypes. It contains all the other archetypes, he said, and is the center and circumference of the psyche. He added that it rules the entire psyche, whereas the ego rules only the conscious mind (see Jung, Psychological Types).

He spoke of its vastness the way mystics speak of the Divine. He was, of course, speaking about the Atman, the Divine essence that resides within every human being and is capable of joining with the Brahman during mystical experiences, epiphanies, prayer, meditation, spiritual practice, and for some lucky souls, in everyday life. It is that part of us which is sublime.

If we add these not-so-disparate pieces from Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism and Jung to the energy psychotherapies, we come to a wonderful conclusion: When we muscle test our clients or ourselves, we are asking the Atman, the Self, the Higher Self-- whatever name we wish to give this-- to respond to us and, ultimately, to do the healing. It follows from this, of course, that it is the Self, i.e., God, who is the inner healer.

Some of you may question this, believing that it is the body that we are muscle testing, but this belief arises from the fallacy that the body is somehow separate from the psyche and the spirit. This tripartite division-- body, psyche, spirit-- is a cultural construct which is only some hundreds of years old in the West, and which does not even enter thinking in most other traditions of wisdom. We could call it a form of culturally conceptualized dissociation, and not be far from the truth.

It amazes me that, when we muscle test, we are talking to God, and God is answering!! One of my spiritual teachers once told me that the full definition of prayer is talking to God-- creating connection and dialogue with God through language. With muscle testing, George Goodheart discovered a modern form of prayer which included a way for God to answer us in a manner we could somewhat understand(see George Goodheart, Applied Kinesiology 1975 Workshop Procedure Manual).

Most important, God is the real healer in each of us. The religious precedents for this are multiple, of course. They are expressed in the symbolism of both Christ's and the Buddha's healing people, in Divine healing in many traditions, and in the cross-culturally ubiquitous definition of various forms of healing as aspects of religion or mysticism. Perhaps the energy that energy psychotherapists are so interested in and that many practitioners feel coursing through their client's bodies as they do TFT. EFT, TAT, BSFF, or Seemorg Matrix Work is, in fact, Divine energy. I do not doubt this for a minute.

What are the implications of this for the energy psychotherapies? The first grows out of the nature of the archetypes and how they are given life by the experience of individuals. If, for example, a small child is sexually abused by her father, the archetype of the father that develops in her personal unconscious has a pedophilic element, a selfish one, a using one, an uncaring one, and more, depending on her father's qualities as they are expressed in his relationship with her and with other family members. This suggests that the Divine whole takes in, develops and/or contains negative elements which require transformation, that the Divine desires transformation and growth just as many human beings do. Since the unconscious almost always answers yes when we ask, through muscle testing, whether it will help us heal a particular issue, it seems to me that the Divine wants to heal Itself as well as us, or at least the parts of It that reside in human beings.

This means, in turn, that the energy psychotherapies need to develop protocols for clearing and transforming the archetypes themselves. These offer the best opportunity for healing some of our more damaged clients. I have been hard at work for some months now on the Matrix version.

Moreover, once we have the agreement of the Atman that healing is to take place, it is quite possible that no modality or technique at all is needed as long as the conscious mind believes that the Atman has the power to heal the person in which it resides. Larry Nims' Instant BSFF comes close to this in that, once reversals have been cleared, all that is required for healing is the saying of a single word, the "healing word" that the client has chosen. Having used Instant Matrix with a number of clients who are children, I was confronted with the fact that words like "Fudgey" (one boy's teddy bear) and "Leonardo DiCaprio" (a teenage girl's choice) worked as well as adult choices such as "Perfect Healing", "Bevy of blondes", and "TGIF". Furthermore, in developing the Matrix version of Instant BSFF, I have treated myself just by taking a deep breath; no healing word was necessary.

This suggests that the agreement of the conscious mind and the Self that healing will now occur, along with the conscious mind's faith that the unconscious can, in fact, heal, may be all that is necessary on the part of the client. I would add that the therapist's belief that the Atman can heal in this way, coupled with her intentionality that it do so, are probably what is needed on the part of the therapist.

Having said all this, I must return to the sad fact that we live in a world that is filled with doubt, skepticism, disbelief, bitterness, lack of faith and hope, and that many of us and most of our clients share these qualities to some degree. This makes the energy protocols, with their tapping, holding, points, and energy centers, our explanations of the physics involved, very valuable; for many people, they are easier to believe in than a bit of muscle testing and reversal clearing followed by a big and obvious change. I have had at least one client who would not do Tapas Fleming's elegant TAT, where the only obvious processing is the holding of a few acupressure points and Chakra centers. Frightened, he said it was voodoo because it worked so simply and well.

Furthermore, this way of thinking about energy psychotherapy suggests that, with many clients, the first thing to treat may be precisely the doubt, skepticism, disbelief, bitterness, lack of faith and hope that make it necessary to use longer rather than shorter clearing protocols, that these, by themselves, are reversals as primary as those that TFT, EFT, BSFF, and Seemorg Matrix Work already focus on.

Whether they use the healing menus like those offered by modalities like Holographic Repatterning and sing some of their clients to health, whether they exhort them to tap, hold, breathe, or say healing words, the energy psychotherapies all rely on the unconscious to provide the healing; and the unconscious we ultimately rely on is God.

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