Lockdown Enlightenment: New Developments In Distant Healing
Healer and Cranial Osteopath, Meg McDonald shares her experience of distant healing during the pandemic restrictions.
When Lockdown came in March 2020 we all had the rug pulled from under our feet.
I have run a busy cranial osteopathy practice since 1992. I have also been a qualified healer since 2004 and in the last few years I have started teaching Healing with my alma mater The College of Healing in Malvern.
Before Lockdown my work had been predominantly hands-on cranial osteopathy appointments, with some healing in the mix. My status as a tutor had encouraged me to become a bit bolder with suggesting Healing as an option for patients who were bringing issues that were clearly more emotional or existential than physical. I had also started to book in a few more people for distant healing sessions.
I have always treated a lot of children at my practice and as they get older we often run into difficulties with finding times they can come for appointments amidst increasingly busy schedules in and out of school.
One of my patients is a teenager with autism. They don’t like being touched and this, coupled with all the scheduling difficulties, led us to consider distant healing as another way of supporting them without all the logistical difficulties.
I started to suggest this to other families with older children and my diary was slowly becoming peppered with distant healing sessions amongst the face-to-face appointments.
Then Lockdown arrived. With distant healing already established I had the confidence to suggest to all my stranded osteopathy patients that perhaps they could give it a try. A surprising number of them said yes.
So there I was in my spare room at home, suddenly running a diary full of distant healing appointments.
Many of those appointments were for people who normally had treatment for physical symptoms, so instead of tuning into auras and chakras I started to envisage people lying down on my treatment table. I put my hands on their etheric feet and on their etheric heads. The information I received through my hands was the same as I would get in a normal clinic session. The responses I felt during the treatment were the same as in a normal hands-on session.
What really amazed me was the feedback.
I would email my patients about their session and what I had noticed: “I found a lot of tension in your legs and pelvis as if you had been crouching down for some time”, “you seemed unusually tired today”, “your sinuses seem very congested”. At first I was very nervous – what if they said they had no idea what I was talking about? Time after time they would respond by saying “yes I have been cleaning out my kitchen cupboards (crouching)”, “yes I have had hay fever this week”. They would also report improvements in their symptoms and were keen to continue.
Another thing I learned is that you can’t decide to keep a distant healing session focussed purely on the physical body.
One of my patients, whom I normally saw face-to-face, started having distant healing sessions with me. As I tuned in I saw a person who was half normal and half skeleton! Clearly this was not a literal image.
Since I knew this person quite well I was able to share my findings that all might not be well on the emotional level. They confirmed that this was so and this led us to a do a very deep piece of work over a few months, whilst continuing with support for their physical issues.
I am now back to working in a clinic but I continue to have a day’s worth of distant healing appointments every week. These are the aforementioned older school children, people self-isolating, plus people who are friends and relatives of my local patients who have been recommended to me but live in other parts of the country.
Things to consider when offering distant healing:
Time management – I have always found distant healing work to be more intense and demanding than face to face work. Don’t underestimate how long it takes – I find I need just as much time for both approaches.
Feedback – with distant healing this is really crucial. How do you want to provide feedback? I tend to use email. Wording of feedback needs to be given careful thought and people may then have questions that need answering, so this all should be factored in when considering this way of working.
New clients – If I am working with someone new then I will have a longer first consultation, which is often on Skype, Zoom or Facetime. I take a history, we chat and I explain how distant healing works. Then I end the on-screen connection and send healing. I have found that I need to be really clear about the structure of the whole process: how long I will be sending healing for, how will I communicate with them, what do they need to do during a session, how will they receive feedback, how do they pay for the session? This is usually a very new experience. Nobody I work with has had any problems with distant healing but there has been confusion around the practicalities, so I try and cover all the bases with new patients.
Payment – I will email an invoice at the same time as I send feedback for each session and people pay me by bank transfer or PayPal.
I have learned so much about this way of working during 2020 and it continues to develop. I am so grateful to my patients for being open to trying distant healing.
Some of my healing colleagues are also acupuncturists and they have started looking into distant treatments. Early reports are that they are indeed able to pick up information at a distance.
Perhaps this is a developing field of work and there are other practitioners out there who would consider exploring its potential by using distant healing skills combined with the senses developed through their other disciplines. I find it is a strand of positivity that helps support both myself and my patients in these trying times.
Meg McDonald
BA(Hons), BSc Ost, ACOH
Biography:
Meg works at the Nailsworth Natural Health Clinic in the South Cotswolds area of Gloucestershire www.nailsworthnaturalhealth.co.uk
She is a tutor on the Practitioner Course at the College of Healing www.collegeofhealing.org
