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A Healer's Journey to Intuitive Knowing

The Heart of Therapeutic Touch

Published by Bear & Company
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

About The Book

An investigation of the inner experience and self-awakening of a healer during and after an energy healing session

• Explores the energetic flow, intuitive knowing, and sustained state of grounded centeredness that occur for a healer during the process of healing

• Reveals how healing transforms the healer and how that transformation may elicit more profound and radical healing results

• Examines how the healer establishes communication between her own inner self and that of the person requesting healing

In this, her final book, respected Therapeutic Touch cofounder Dolores Krieger explores the energetic flow, intuitive knowing, and grounded centeredness that occur for a healer during a healing session. She shows how, as healers access their inner energies of compassion and intention, they are often led through a personal spiritual transformation or a self-awakening.

Krieger explains the fundamentals of the energy healing process and how the healer establishes communication between her own Inner Self and that of the person receiving healing--reminding the patient of his or her own self-healing ability. Sharing case histories from Therapeutic Touch therapists as well as results from scientific studies on Therapeutic Touch, Krieger reveals how intuition and experiential knowing are key to the healing process. She also examines the practice of compassion as power with compassion acting as the catalyst for an entire cascade of hormonal, chemical, and energetic responses in the healer, which she embodies and then offers to the person in need.

Krieger reveals how healing transforms the healer and how that transformation may elicit more profound and radical healing results.

Excerpt

From Chapter 4. Energy Healing as a Humanization of Energy

A sustained state of centered consciousness, unusual in our hurry-up time, is the focal point around which the practice of Therapeutic Touch revolves and the grounded source from which it gains its power. Through experience, we come to realize that Therapeutic Touch is an opportunity to touch another level of consciousness, a new path of self-realization of our ability to compassionately help those in need. We enter an inner journey toward what we are in the depth of our being. As has been stated, this understanding comes with the conscious liaison with the healer’s Inner Self. If the healer is doing Therapeutic Touch correctly, she will not be personally attached to the outcome of the interaction, for she is calling upon a source other than her self-willed persona.

Experientially Acknowledging the Friendly Inner Self

The consistent practice of sustained centering sensitizes the therapist to a recognition of the subtle world of the nonphysical. Very frequently the TT therapist, in an effort to understand this new perspective, will intensify her inner work, such as adopting the practice of meditation. Self-search practices reinforce her growing relationship with her most enduring Self. As this affinity ripens, Inner Self becomes a trusted ally, a friend, teacher, and reliable guide; and the therapist’s healing practice becomes more focused and coherent. This indicates a significant shift in perception that sensitizes her to higher orders of self, which now begin to act in her daily life.

What the healer is trying to do is reach beyond the usual locked-in viewpoint of things-as-they-are, and attempt to align with the more unrestrained perspective of her Inner Self. Now it becomes a different kind of intelligence one pursues, a perception beyond the six basic physical senses; it becomes a transpersonal healing as she becomes more acutely aware of the deep inner work to which she now has access, fulfilled and potentiated by her own Inner Self. In this deep-seated stretch to actualize personal potential for insightful and creative healing in the service of those in need, she perceives for herself the opportunity for significant transformative change, as that change is reflected in the quality of her healing interactions and also in her own life events.

This state often becomes noticeable to the TT therapist as she initially finds herself consciously aware of the need to help someone who is ill or injured, and then intentionally engages her sense of compassion-in-action to offer a healing session with that person. The therapist often begins to realize that change in her life events seem to be accelerating. Less obvious to the therapist herself--although it may be noticeable to others--is that she, too, has been going through a fine-tuned but transforming change.

Sometimes it is possible to catch a glimpse of the Inner Self by becoming aware of one’s own mood. In our culture, we often think of mood as a descriptor of one’s attitude, disposition, or temperament; however, mood is also a deep feeling, a state of mind dominated by a particular emotion. Feelings may be experienced as amorphous, undeveloped, and ill-defined. However, with diligence one can tease back sensations and capture some sense of its content. Most frequently this information will settle back into the unconscious, but with perseverance and sensitivity it can be coaxed to conscious awareness. It is then that the healer can begin to realize the extent of the reach of her own mindset, whose perspective is now so closely aligned with her Inner Self.

Intuition offers insight into the linkage one has with her Inner Self. Intuition has been a singular, incisive factor in my own life. In trying to understand its processes, my observation is that, like a muscle that one exercises, the potency of intuition increases with use and, although intuition thrives on uncontrived spontaneity, its accuracy sharpens under the lens of objective analysis. To test it, I simply follow its prompts every time (except twice in my lifetime, for which I later kicked myself very hard). . . .

Since the evidence of a subtle reflection of the healer’s Inner Self becomes clarified through a committed, sustained centering of consciousness--and such a proposition is supported by events occurring in the everyday happenings of her daily life, I urge that such occurrence be encouraged to go one step further. We recognize that the healee also has an Inner Self. During the healing session the therapist is encouraged to act as though this is an accepted reality. In other words, the suggestion is that during the healing interaction, as the healer feels herself deeply centered and in touch with her Inner Self, she brings the energy of intentionality into play and aligns them purposefully in an attempt to communicate mind-to-mind with the Inner Self of the healee. From this more impersonal stance she can reflect and, perhaps open up for the healee a glimpse or an impression of his own Inner Self.

How one fully engages this mindful act is difficult to describe, but the basic steps involve at least two factors. The healer needs a reliable sense of that inner connection as this experience plays through her consciousness, and second--and most necessarily--she needs the ability to translate that comprehension into a clear communication, mind-to-mind, with what she perceives to be a similar state of consciousness in the healee. The operative words in these instructions are “a clear communication.” The actual process is much like what occurs during mental telepathy; however, intentionality is called upon to make it an acutely conscious experience. During the mind-to-mind communication the healer may offer a direct, nonverbal message to the Inner Self of the client. Ultimately, this mind-to-mind communication depends on the willingness of the healee to engage; we have learned that this silent permission from the field of the healee may come more from his heart, his own experience of sentience, rather than from his conscious mind.

About The Author

Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N. (1921-2019) was the author of The Therapeutic Touch, Accepting Your Power to Heal, and Therapeutic Touch Inner Workbook and was a professor emerita of nursing science at New York University.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Bear & Company (August 1, 2021)
  • Length: 272 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781591433934

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Raves and Reviews

“We were deeply honored when we received a draft of A Healer’s Journey to Intuitive Knowing along with a note from Dolores Krieger. It brings intuition and consciousness into the stages of the healing process, and we recommend it highly.”

– DONNA EDEN and DAVID FEINSTEIN, Ph.D., coauthors of Energy Medicine

“Dolores Krieger, a visionary and healer, has gifted us a compelling, wise, and profound book. The clarity and fierceness of her writing invites us to take steps to access deeper levels of our interiority and spirituality and to develop our intuitive capacities.”

– BARBARA DOSSEY, Ph.D., R.N., coauthor of Holistic Nursing

“This work invites an awakening to the depth of our shared humanity; entices us to pay attention to subtle, as well as non-subtle, phenomena; and engages in some of Krieger’s favorite phenomena, such as synchronicity, serendipity, and even miracles. Even though nursing is the origin of Therapeutic Touch and Krieger’s beginning work, this text is not only for nurses. This work moves to embrace, invite, and include all healers in numerous disciplines--any and all energy lightworkers involved in concepts and practices of holism, wholeness, energy medicine, energy healing, nonphysical distant healing, and so on. This writing is guided by the energy of love and a conscious intentionality to serve as an agent of healing--of wholeness. A great addition to any healer’s library.”

– Jean Watson, Ph.D., R.N., founder and director of the Watson Caring Science Institute

“In this final offering from Dolores Krieger, her journey from discovery to deepening to actual wisdom is generously shared. A Healer’s Journey to Intuitive Knowing is the distillation of more than five decades of exploration, practice, and teaching of Therapeutic Touch. Beyond method and technique, she traces the flow of healing back to its source--compassion and the ever responsive Inner Self--and speaks to the essence of healing and self-knowledge. Over time the great teachers like Dolores seem to grow in their simplicity. In this book she offers a guidance that begins with consciousness and ends with that same consciousness magnified by an intuitive knowing born from the compassionate commitment to heal. This is a necessary book for anyone drawn to healing and the deepening self-awareness it demands.”

– Tim Boyd, international president of the Theosophical Society Adyar

“Dolores Krieger provides us with insights into the intricacies of energetic healing, which the general public often finds difficult to comprehend. In great detail and in layman’s terms she manages to dissect the anatomy of a healer and of energetic healing in a way I have not come across before in my 25-year career.”

– Tjitze de Jong, author of Energetic Cellular Healing and Cancer

“It is amazing and encouraging that the founders of Therapeutic Touch (TT) successfully carved a path to work alongside mainstream medicine and managed to spread their network throughout America and beyond. Their many healing stories--addressing physical, mental, and emotional issues--support my own clinical research findings that professional standards of training ensure safe and highly effective holistic healing that can be delivered in less than half an hour. Dolores’s book is a wonderful testament to the dedication of TT healers, whose fine work improves people’s lives--and, along the way, their own, too.”

– Sandy Edwards, author of Spiritual Healing in Hospitals and Clinics

“The emphasis on resonance, frequencies, and the practitioner’s ability to go into a state of stability and regulation relates powerfully to some of the newer body-based healing modalities, such as Somatic Experiencing. The body-mind state of the practitioner is paramount in these practices, as it is here in this wonderful book. Dolores’s Therapeutic Touch approach draws on elements of physical and subtle realities that empower the healing process that arises within the relationship of two people--the healer and the healed.”

– Nancy J. Napier, LMFT, author of Sacred Practices for Conscious Living

"A Healer's Journey to Intuitive Knowing: The Heart of Therapeutic Touch is a thoughtful discussion of the alternative medicine treatment of therapeutic touch. Chapters discuss harnessing the power of compassion, as well as 'healing-at-a-distance,' a practice that can be congruent with quarantine or other restrictions required by the COVID-19 pandemic. A thoughtful guide drawing upon case histories as well as scientific studies, A Healer's Journey to Intuitive Knowing is a welcome contribution to Metaphysical Studies and Alternative Medicine collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that this book is also available in a Kindle edition ($13.99)."

– Mary Cowper, Midwest Book Review

"This book inspires one to explore the subtle energies around us, search for meaning, and find the wisdom that lives within the deeper reaches of one's inner Self. Dr. Krieger believed that TT would continue to evolve in order to meet the needs of high-tech future. At the close of her book, she says, 'In my ninety-seventh year, I am confident that the future of consciousness of Therapeutic Touch is in very capable hands.'"

– Marilyn Johnston-Svoboda, Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America

"A Healer's Journey to Inuitive Knowing would be great for any student of hands on healing, from the new Reiki student to the master of cranial sacral healing to the experienced massage therapist. Anyone who would like to take their healing practice to a new level will benefit from reading this book. This book will not only improve your abilities to channel healing energies, it will also contribute to your own spiritual growth and transformation."

– PJ Spur, Musing Mystical

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