Hello everybody,

Some familymembers of mine have stifness or pain in certain areas for several years.
I would like to help them and train the ability to bring warmth through my hands on the specific area and maybe heal or relieve the pain somewhat.
I have meditation experience and have the concentration level of the 3th vipassana jhana, for what I know after reading MCTB and getting feedback from the forummembers.
Have some of you trained in this ability? And do you have a technique for developing this ability? Are there any dangers in developing this ability that I should know of?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

Metta,
John Power

PS: if I posted this in the wrong section, then please put it in the right section.

Yes. Steps to follow.

- Put your hands on the area.
- Don't try. Don't make any effort at all to heal. Don't be serious about it. Don't make a big deal of it. You're not their saviour, you're not special, you're not a magician. Get rid of all those desires for admiration and approval. Very important step.
- Get in tune with the patient as he is right now. Whatever he is experiencing, allow and encourage him to have more of that experience. eg. you notice he is stiff and not relaxing, so your internal talk might be "that's good, lots of stiffness, can't relax, can never relax, this will never work, good, that's right".
- Be prepared to alter your approach as the patient changes in his experience.

To do the third step requires that you be open enough to know what's going on inside the patient (without having to ask). I don't know how this is developed, but if you can do that you should be able to help fix the pain and stiffness, and probably quite quickly.

In case this is just something that works for me only (and not you), I'd be interested to hear how you go.

Dancing works great for this~!!!!

Thank you for your comment!

So you are not focusing on the hands? Just be with the experience of the patient (If I can do that)?

Yes, if you can sense what the internal experience is, go with that. It's like noting practice, but you note about the patient's experience, not your own. So it might be like "angry... wow, really angry... do you want to be more angry? Maybe less? No definitely more... ok now the anger seems to be fading...opps, there it is again in full force". No judgement. And don't try to direct them to feel better, just whatever happens.

If you can't feel the other person in this way, go with things you can see or feel. eg. "hunched over....really hunched...protecting the heart area....uncomfortable..." and so on.

In a way this is a bit like the NLP technique of mirroring, but more advanced.

I don't focus on the hands. I have tried that technique but it took very strong concentration and I only managed to get it working a few times.

I did it to my brother and he said that it felt really warm, but it could just be because I grapped his wrist tight. He has a infection in his wrist. But a few minutes after that I had really cold hands, so I just focussed gently on my hands and they became warm.

Infected wrist?? ok.

Why did you grip tight? Sounds like you were trying to make something happen.

What was the outcome? Any change in range of movement, swelling, redness, pain, stiffness, function?

Well, I meant pain in the wrist joints. It is a difficulty with translation from my own language to english, in dutch there is just one word and in all the cases it means the same, but in english this is different.
Anyway, I didn't grip his wrist tight on purpose, but I wanted to touch his whole wrist with my hand. Next time I will pay attention on this.
The outcome was that his wrist felt warm. The next day in the morning the pangs in his wrists were gone. But we have to wait because one day it goes better than other days and this could just be a good day.

My experience is that a good outcome will be immediately apparent. But you're right to wait to see whether the improvement will last. If for example the symptoms were typically present 3 days out of every week, then a week without any symptoms would be fairly indicative that something has changed.

I meant to say earlier that the patient needs to be energetically "open" to you. People open to you in direct proportion to how relaxed, happy and present you are. Meditation can't make you happy, but it can create presence. Happiness comes from receiving attention from others (ie. relationships, friendships).