Publishers note: oops, didn’t click Publish…Sorry readers and Brad!

LESSON THIRTY-EIGHT: “Time For A Change?”

Inter-dimensional changing room, go in one way come out in different reality.

NOTE: I just finished re-reading this entire “LESSON” and because it is from a slightly different direction, I wondered if it should really be included in the series …and, further, as a chapter in the forthcoming book. I received a definitive “Yes” to both questions.

“Merely” making positive changes in our lives is no answer if we cannot SUSTAIN the changes. Whether it is getting rid of addiction – and in what I am including as “being addicted” is eating, thinking and exercise habits that keep us out of the range of weight within which we say or think we want to be. We all engage in behavior that, if we’re honest about it, could and should be changed, but are “stuck in” or “addicted” to the way we are.

I challenge anybody who sees the need to make changes, but finds it impossible to do so, to read the paper which was sent to me just this morning. I’ll send it (or the link) to anyone who requests it. It is long (about 30 pages), but, to me, it thoroughly explains why some of us can’t even keep the simplest and easiest of the resolutions we make and with which we never seem able to follow through, whether the resolution is of the New Years variety or otherwise.

Here’s just one paragraph to give you a taste of what the writer of the paper has to say:

“Many of my clients have spent thousands of dollars and countless hours on various self-help programs with little effect. What this says is that for most people the problem isn’t a lack of commitment to making changes, but the inability to SUSTAIN them. Moreover, even if things improve for awhile, the results are short-lived.

“This is not just another self-help method. Instead it is a paradigm-shift approach that allows individuals to recreate themselves by eliminating limiting beliefs that cause them to behave in self-defeating, self-destructive ways that limits their ability to change permanently.”

This is why your prayers are ineffective.

I’ll come back to this “paper” in just a bit; as most of you know, I continually rail against what I refer to as “faithless and ineffective prayer,” but truthfully, what I’m really saying, is that what passes for “prayer” isn’t …according to my definition of the word. I also rail against “decrees” and “affirmations” because, for all the hope they give they often don’t provide effective (by which I mean SUSTAINED) change except in a very small percentage of the people who engage in the practice. I spent over twenty-five marvelous years in close association and friendship with a psychiatrist who, when he felt that patients who had been involved in whatever particular brand of therapy he happened to be applying in a particular situation were ready for it, he would tell them that he had this “kook” layman friend who believed that the cause of many mental/emotional problems was spiritual and would they be willing to talk to me.

After he witnessed a few “miracles” in some people he had been treating for many years, he got very serious about learning what I knew about prayer and how to apply it. I’ll never forget the time when he decided to have free “healing” sessions at the beach resort complex that he and his wife owned and their daughter operated.

I visited my doctor he gave me a prescription, we all agreed that was OK, so I died.

After about the fourth week-end session, during a session in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, a woman who could barely sit up and could barely breathe – she probably weighed 80 lbs and was in her mid-sixties and had been told by her physicians that there was no hope; she was dying from lung cancer.

Her neighbor who had been healed of “terminal” brain cancer just a few weeks previously had invited her and her husband, who told us that this was “his last hope.” He also said that he wouldn’t have believed it possible to have this kind of healing if it weren’t for the neighbor who they both knew quite well and who, of course, had been healed. She had not been able to even walk for six months and the couple knew she was dying – and they saw her walking in front of their home in a small town just north of Salem, Oregon and he had rushed out the front door to ask her what had happened – she told them and asked them if they would like to attend a healing session.

We had started the session Friday night just in an open discussion format – about fifteen people were present. There had been an interesting interaction between the woman dying of lung cancer and her husband …arguing in front of us because she didn’t want to travel to their home in Winterhaven, California – just across the border from Yuma Arizona, where they had spent their winters each year for over ten years. Her reason was that she’d be “too far away from her doctors.”

The psychiatrist, an M.D. himself, said: “Wait a minute, didn’t your doctor tell you that there was nothing more the medical profession could do and that you just had a few months, at best, to live? I’m a psychiatrist and my training involves getting people to look at the real reasons they do anything; does wanting to stay close to a doctor, who has assured you that you are going to die, make any sense to you? What I’m saying to you is, perhaps you’d like to begin looking at the real reason you are resisting making the trip, resisting your husband and in fact are resisting being healed.”

We've prepared your room, you can die now...if you want to.

The psychiatrist had, up to that night, left all the interaction up to me, even if they were his patients which this woman was not. It was a relief for me to see him finally get involved at a whole new level …but I was certainly not prepared for the leap of faith he would take the following day:

As already stated, the woman was resisting; it was about 2:00 p.m., Saturday afternoon, the sun was reflecting off the Pacific and shining brightly through the large “picture” window of this rather expansive, nicely decorated “beach house.”

The “good” doctor finally said: “We’ve talked enough – you’ve admitted the real problem and you say that you are willing to stop resisting. I’m a doctor; do you have any faith in what I say?”

“Well, yes,” she stammered, “especially after hearing all the stories everyone has told and our neighbor here, who a couple of months ago was almost dead and look at her now.”

He stood up and told her to stand up with him. She struggled to her feet: “Listen to me, I’m about to tell you something that I have never said to another human being in my life. I’ve always left this kind of stuff up to this guy,” jerking his thumb in my direction. “You may find this hard to believe, but I already see it and know it is true, so you can just believe it because I am already seeing it. You are healed. Take a deep breath because the cancer is gone and start walking around the room.”

Well...are you in or out?

She did as instructed and finally exclaimed, “I am healed – look everyone I can breathe I can walk!”

He then instructed her to go out on the beach and walk in the sand, because we had other work to do and she had already taken up too much of our time. He said this while grinning lovingly at her. She said, “I don’t care, I’m alive, I am fully healed” …she then looked over at her husband, saying: “And I’m ready to go wherever you want to go; I’m sorry I’ve been such a poop and that I’ve been so resistant to you and everything you want to do lately, I love you,” …that loving exchange, including her husband’s response, caused a bunch of wet faces in all of us, but none more so than in my psychiatrist friend.

This little old lady, weighing 80 lbs walked out onto the deck and down the steps onto the beach looking as spry as a teenager. Her face which had been pale, drawn and gray – was now full of color and vitality and purpose.

The story surrounding her life for the next three years during which I was still involved on occasion with her and her husband was very involved and exciting …but the fact is her health and vitality was SUSTAINED!

How did her healing come about? Let’s look at the dynamics – we all had the agreed perception that she was indeed sick and dying. The physical reality was overwhelming …including the diagnosis of a reputed oncologist at the huge University of Oregon Medical Complex and the clear MRI picture of the cancer raging in her lungs; and what we could see with our own eyes. Besides being ravaged by the cancer in her lungs, the chemotherapy seemed to have created even more problems for her than the cancer.

Now we all had the shared perception accompanied by the physical evidence that she needed to be fixed …we could also see with our eyes – a new “reality” – she was healed, completely and dramatically.

If you can think with me here, for a moment: The son-in-law of the neighbor who had invited the woman with lung cancer had asked if he could accompany the psychiatrist and me as we walked and “prayed” together on the beach that morning at six a.m. – he discovered and shared with the rest of the group that our “praying” was of the sort he had never before witnessed.

An aside: He now travels around the world explaining how he is a “recovering Catholic” and how he learned to get past the mental blocks from a life time of traditions instilled in him by his parents and he overcame this “handicap” by learning how to pray in the same way a certain psychiatrist in Oregon prays – he tells the story of how his mother-in-law was healed of brain cancer and jokingly how he was healed of religion. I once heard him share with a large group that the one who first opened him up to a life of “healing service” for others was a Catholic priest. How he got to the point of being able to help others receive healing, he said, he got from learning how to pray. “How you think about God will not change anything or anybody, learning the way to funnel the power of God is what will make a difference,” he said.

Now you know what to do when you see this scene.

Now then,  I mentioned receiving a “paper”, this morning is from a very successful Internet entrepreneur who has provided some insights that I have not seen before. What excites me about this particular “paper” is that it explains some of the dynamics we experienced, even though the “methodology” for getting there is different. Send me an email if you want to know more: brad@spiritualhealingsource.com.

Now then, if you’re wondering about the kind of “praying” that brought about healing from lung cancer …it really is rather simple. The psychiatrist was walking about fifty feet closer to the water line than I and while you couldn’t hear him because of the noise of the surf and wind, you could see the movement of his arms …he was punching the air with his fists. When we were finished with our walk and sitting in a booth at a local coffee shop, the woman’s son-in-law asked what we had been doing out there:

“When I asked if I could go pray with you guys, I figured we were going to sit or kneel down somewhere and ask God for whatever; instead I’m watching you two walking a mile apart from each other,” then looking at the psychiatrist, he said, “and you were punching at the air …what was that all about?”

“Oh,” says the ‘good doctor,’ “I was demanding to see the removal of that lung cancer and I said I wasn’t going to quit demanding until I saw it.”

“…and did you see it?

“Not yet, but I was assured that I will.”

When we got back together at the beach house to resume our session he told the story in such humorous fashion, animatedly demonstrating the punching of the air he was describing and admitting his surprise, that he had us all laughing. “This changed my life,” he said, you don’t pray to get, you pray to get your brain past whatever is in the way of receiving what is already there.”

That’s it for now.

b

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