By Amanda Moreno

It’s amazing how pain travels. How it flows through the body. Amazing how you can feel the way the energy channels through the muscles and ligaments, through the soft tissues, even when your knowledge of anatomy leaves much to be desired — as mine most certainly does.

Photo by Eric Francis.

While massaging or embracing someone else, I’m becoming increasingly fascinated with how I can feel where the other person is holding pain. How muscles have contracted in different ways, seemingly permanently. How entire passages have been rewired to compensate for an injury or trauma.

I got a signal from my hands probably two years ago that clued me into the fact that I’m capable of doing “energy healing,” but haven’t really found a specific modality I connect with. Nothing’s really presented itself. I realized recently, however, that like so many things in my life it seems like this part of my path will consist of experiential learning. As a teacher has said: “you just have to give yourself permission…to remember.”

And that all sounds fine and dandy. The “permission” approach has definitely opened doors (gaping, glimmering/threatening gateways, really) for me before. But when it comes to the body I feel like…I need to know more. About anatomy. About neurology. These are languages that are totally foreign to me, and I don’t think that a strictly intuitive approach cuts it.

I suppose I’ve had the same apprehension when it comes to working with the psyche in regression work. In that case I’ve mostly moved through the fear of causing harm by completing my trainings and practicing and submitting to the fact that I’m a life-long learner — that mastering my craft is an endeavor that probably won’t end. I did not, however, know where to start with the energetic healing touch stuff.

But then I started listening to my hands. They don’t only tell me about holding patterns and physiological traumas, they communicate a channel of understanding straight to my heart. I can feel the anger, or the grief, and I can feel this incredible surge of love flowing through my hands and my soul to the wounded parts.

I’m very early on in this part of my journey, and am therefore really only working with a few people. Ok, right now it’s really just one person, and then a few times when friends in pain have allowed me to touch their wounded parts or “lean into” them. But I’ve been amazed at the impulses and images that come through when I’m moving my hands around someone’s body, or when I’m aware that someone is in pain and listen for the sounds the pain is making. Impulses like the urge to whisper to the body part, up close and personal, “It’s OK, you’re loved, thank you for supporting him.” Or a knowing that that upper thigh just needs to be held and nurtured — coddled, almost — shown that it’s safe to let go, and then helping the other parts to remember how to move without pain.

A week or so ago, I reached an experiential understanding of how working with muscles and patterns that have become habitual — areas of the body that are taking the brunt or preparing for the worst — can result in some pretty strong emotions. It’s not really that I didn’t know that it could happen. But because I’m choosing this more intuitive approach (granted, I am reading about different approaches, too, and have training in body trauma when it comes to my regression work, and lord knows that depth psychology is rife with explorations on the psyche-soma connection), I’m not necessarily thinking through the outcomes. Ah, experiential learning.

I’m also aware that this part of the journey really began when I started learning how to heal myself. A while back, I began having experiences where I’d be working with my guides and would suddenly be aware that energy work was happening far beyond what I’d anticipated, and that physical/energetic/emotional/spiritual patterns were being released. Paying attention to what was happening — even when I didn’t have the words to articulate it — has prompted incredible growth.

The world is so full of traditions that teach us how to heal in ways that are foreign to our modern paradigm. I have so much respect for unbroken lineages that stress a rigid and structured set of initiations and set path of apprenticing. I wonder sometimes if I’m being, at best, somehow superficial; or at worst, flat-out destructive by experimenting on my own — by taking pieces of knowledge and tools that make sense to me and blending them with others.

But I also know that the world’s healing systems do seem to be, at best, transforming and, at worst, breaking down and becoming lost. And there’s no denying the simple mandate that comes from feeling such pure compassion and love coming through when I’m practicing this work — a mandate that tells me to continue. To keep letting it flow. And to remain open and in my integrity. Hopefully some good can come of that. In the mean time…I’ll be taking baby steps with the energy work!