Seeing Healing

Last month, I brought home from my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah reception three plants wrapped in foil. Since our apartment is small, I left them on the balcony. I thought it would be a good way to let Nature take care of the plants and not to have to worry much about them.

After a few days, I noticed their leaves were drying out in the summer sun. No amount of water seemed to help. After a few more days, I realized the foil was directing the sun’s rays onto the plants and burning them to death. I brought them in, took the foil off, and saw they were completely drenched in water. I cut off all the scorched leaves and found a place for each little plant around the house.

Then it occurred to me that I should give them some healing.

They were really in sorry shape. My youngest daughter wanted a small pot for an art project and texted me at work, “The plants are dead anyway,” she said.

I am a healer and philosopher. Energy work has transformed and continues daily to transform my life. But there is something intimidating for me about offering healing to a plant. It feels like such a clear litmus test of whether loving energy is flowing. Either it thrives, or it dies.

It would break my heart to see the plants die. It wouldn’t just be their lives lost; it would be magic itself.

We see energy with our mind’s eye. We work it with our imagination. We feel it viscerally with our senses. But we rarely intuit it with the same ease and clarity as the material world. It is more like a dream than a physical event. It is more like a painting than a digital photo. It is steeped in the language of subjectivity and context.

For those of us who commune with it daily, it is real. It is essence itself. Yet we cannot prove it in quite the same way as facts in our everyday world. And we, too, sometimes call it into doubt.

Why should my prayers matter? How could the work of my mind’s eye have any effect on these leaves before me? How could the love that I feel flowing through my heart and my fingertips reach them? Why should it matter at all? And if I myself have so many doubts, how could my love—even if some love is real—be effective and worthy?

I like to harness all of that doubt and transmute it. After all, doubt is just more energy rushing to get the job done. Once we see it and connect with it, we can direct it toward healing.

I like to imagine our prayers, the work of our mind’s eye, as opening channels—channels of communication, channels for energy to flow, channels that connect higher sources of love to our lives right here.

Why should it matter? Why should it work? Why should it be like this at all?

Imagine you are in a crowded room at a party. You find two friends who’ve never met and decide to introduce them. They go on to have a wonderful conversation. Each has powerful information to share with the other. They may even continue the relationship beyond the party. Their lives are changed forever.

Does connection matter?

It matters. But why does mind matter? Why does the connection we make with our minds matter? Why is our intention so powerful? How can it move energy? How can it facilitate the flowing of love? How can work with the clarity of a dream, the precision of impressionist art, the subjectivity of taste, change our lives? How can energy be the essence of our world?

Our best science tells us that matter stands in relation to energy and the speed of light. It tells us that at the quantum level, what we can say about the location and behavior of particles is affected by the act of measurement. It tells us that space and time curve in ways far beyond what our senses perceive or Newton described. It tells us that roughly 95% of our universe consists of dark matter and dark energy that we have never observed directly and still do not fully understand.

In short, science itself reminds us that reality is stranger, less obvious, and less completely understood than our everyday notions of “science” and “reason” sometimes suggest. To me, that leaves room for curiosity about the kinds of realities that spiritual traditions and healers have described for ages.

So, who is crazy? Who is backwards?

I look at my plants now growing new leaves, beginning to thrive. I feel them beaming love back at me. I retrace with my mind’s eye those channels of love that bring healing to them and to me.

And I listen to my guides. My spirit guides. Those voices of inspiration from beyond. Those who reach us only when we allow the channels of communication to be open. When we make the choice for connection.

And I say, this is the truth I choose to live.