Sacred Journeys: On Compassion and Evolution with Therapeutic Touch

AS OUR CONSCIOUSNESS EXPANDS, WE CAN DEEPEN INTO COMPASSION, AND FROM THERE, INTO SELF AWARENESS

The Therapeutic Touch® community is dedicating the first week of May this year to drawing awareness to its healing techniques (see https://www.therapeutictouch.net for events). This technique, affectionately referred to as TT, requires no attunements or prior knowledge or experience. TT is based on the premise that healing is an innate healing potential using intention and the hands to clear and balance energy fields. What is so appealing is how gently it adapts itself as a teaching tool to a diverse audience. Co-founded by Dolores Krieger and Dora Kunz in the 1960s, Therapeutic Touch is a technique that does not necessarily require touching. Its three principles are: a willingness to help or heal, compassion, non-attachment to outcome.

One of the jewels of the Ottawa Valley region is my friend Pat. She has boundless energy and puts it all in the service of good. When she was exposed to Therapeutic Touch decades ago, she loved it so much she became a recognized teacher and later a board member. Her commitment to TT not only brought me into the fold, it has helped to shape our community. Being a rural gal, she understands that if you offer a Level One workshop and six people turn up, you run the class. After ten such offerings over a few years, there are now 60 people within our TT community, where once there were none.

Pat has reached out and taught folks from her Sunday school classes, farmers, teachers, hunters, nurses, those who wanted to heal themselves, those who started out thinking it was bunk. Once they learned how to practice Therapeutic Touch, they offered sessions to friends and family, and soon there was a variety of individuals sharing an understanding that everything is made of energy, and that it can be moved around to our benefit. Therapeutic Touch is definitely part of a quiet grassroots revolution that is shifting the foundations of our new world.

Last night was our local monthly Therapeutic Touch practice night, where practitioners both give and receive treatments. Afterward, we deepened our awareness as practitioners by sharing how we experienced energy moving, what we felt called to do, and how it felt to receive TT. Learning from each other is an important part of expanding our practice, by learning to recognize how the energy turns up for each other.

At this gathering, Pat was sharing the insights that came from a quorum of practitioners who had been invited in 2010 to work with Dr. Krieger in Montana, to delve deeply into how healing emerges. Their ongoing findings, which became the ‘Montana Dialogues’, revealed that TT is evolving as the practitioners themselves deepen their relationship with their inner selves. Likewise, such a reflective practice deepens the experience of compassion for both the practitioner and the receiver, increasing the healing momentum.

Take a moment right now and ground or centre yourself, the way you usually do. Now, with ‘soft’ eyes, invite yourself to ground in compassion and see what changes. For me I find the energy is immediately larger, and almost hums.

Dolores Krieger, now 95 years old and running huge workshops, suggested that a key element to the changing flow of TT is engagement of compassion: “Compassion from the depth of the inner self results in the release of an inner vibration which sets up a silent mantra and alters the subtle energies. Compassion is a necessary state of consciousness for a practitioner to facilitate healing.”

Perhaps what was most exciting for the quorum was discovering that TT, originally created as a means of exploring healing touch 50 years ago, is evolving and teaching the practitioners and the receivers through the energy practice itself.  They were able to identify seven stages of consciousness, reflecting the inner experiences of a practitioner as they work the energy.
“Compassion sculpts the pranic flow of the energy which, over time, refashions the field and expresses itself through the therapists as compassionate healing.” (per Dr. Dolores Krieger).

In part, this deepening of TT comes naturally from our own social evolution over the last 50 years. We are in a world where  we can be exposed to evolved teachings and beliefs from around the world, which once were only for the initiated.  We can climb to the top seats of the Dome in Toronto to listen to the infectious wisdom of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, curl up with a quantum physics lecture on our tablets at the cottage, and be able to converse intelligently with friends about these experiences. Through dialogue we can share and deepen our new understandings, and through self reflection we can move through more expanding spirals of awareness.

As our minds open to possibilities, our consciousness expands. As our consciousness expands, we can deepen into compassion, and from there, into self awareness. Imagine what we, as a collective, will be able to clear or energize within our environment, as we become increasingly adept at dancing with energy.