I’d like to give examples of the differences, similarities, and blending of psychic and spiritual healing mechanisms. There are rough generalities, serious cautions, and peripheral lessons to be explored within the following stories.

Tom worked as a heavy equipment operator and developed back problems. A front end loader with solid rubber tires gives no cushioning while crossing rocks and ruts at a land fill site, especially when driven at its top speed of 25mph as often as possible. So Tom ended up with a compressed disc which required surgery, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

One day in the late 1980s Tom understood psychically that there was to be a terrible accident somewhere at the landfill. Being the foreman of the Highway Department he could assign jobs as needed. He assigned himself a job which allowed him to stay close to the main building where there tended to be more people. A garbage truck came in. After dumping its load there was still a piece of plastic hanging from the upraised tail gate. The clam shell type tail gates of those trucks had a large tab on each side, pointing downward. It’s purpose was to fit into a slot in the body of the truck to assist in alignment as it closed.

The hanging piece of plastic wouldn’t have caused any particular problem but one of the guys jumped up to dislodge it anyway. He missed and slipped. When he fell he ended up laying across the slot in the body of the truck. Tom saw the closing tail gate, saw the man slip as he jumped to grab the plastic, and turned his front end loader, racing toward them. Tom’s plan was to get the bucket underneath the tail gate to stop it from closing, saving the mans’ life.

Racing isn’t really the right word here. The Highway Department, in its vast wisdom, was reluctant to replace the air filters on their equipment as often as needed. Under normal circumstances the garbage would be dropped off and hauled or pushed over to “Mt. Trashmore”, the joke name given to the artificial hill built of that garbage. The garbage was then covered with ashes from the coal-fired Russell Station power plant in Greece, New York. The dust from coal ash is very toxic to anyone who has to breathe it. It also clogs air filters far too often to suit the Highway Department’s budget.

Tom turned the loader toward the truck and floored it. The engine moaned from lack of air and could not accelerate quickly enough. The tail gate came down on the man, crushing his back and killing him.

Jumping out of the bucket loader Tom ran yelling to the driver of the truck who had realized the situation and was lifting the tail gate. The crushed man fell to the ground. Tom sent the driver away to call for help then applied mouth to mouth resuscitation which got the man breathing again.

Unless you’ve been in a similar situation of desiring to heal someone and have experienced hearing, sensing, or perceiving in some manner that you were to stop what you are doing, or that you did not have permission, then you’ll have to trust me about what Tom said about the situation. There are events in life which, for spiritual reasons typically beyond our understanding, simply have to be. There may be a range of things that are spiritually ok and a range of things which we simply don’t have permission to change. For this man that included: it was spiritually correct and acceptable for him to die that day; it was also spiritually correct and fully acceptable for Tom to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation to save his life, after which he would live on as a paraplegic; it was not spiritually correct for Tom to heal the damage from the football sized hole in his crushed back. Tom did not have permission, and he knew he did not have that permission.

However, Tom, in his human compassion couldn’t accept this man, a friend of his, living life being paralyzed from the waist down. Tom looked at his friend and thought, “I know something that will work.” Tom was typically very clever during emergency situations. He had sent the driver of the truck away to get help specifically so he could be alone and undisturbed with the man.

He laid down next to the man and simply loved him. Those were Tom’s words as he told us about it. He simply loved him. This was a purely from-the-heart loving of one of God’s creatures to another who was in trauma. While it was selfish on Tom’s part to act from his human compassion rather than from spiritual permission, it was also intensely loving.

The ambulance arrived and the man was taken to the hospital. Later that evening at home Tom began experiencing pain in his back, very intense pain. It helps to realize here that Tom’s pain tolerance was extreme. A pain level of 10 for an average person would be a 2-3 for him. I’ve seen him turn white from the pain of carrying a small tray of food across a cafeteria. I’ve seen him pass out momentarily while seated at dinner, all the while carrying on a deep level of conversation, never wincing, and still making jokes. It was difficult to grasp how he could do that.

The pain that evening became intense enough that he made some phone calls, not to complain but to inquire of friends about what was happening. The explanation was that because there was no spiritual permission for the healing, no spiritual energy coming through him from above for the man’s back to be repaired, or put back in place, or rebuilt, the energy for all of that had to come from Tom himself.

We are not accustomed to hearing of such things but parts of Tom’s backbone, the physical material of it, were energetically disolved then used to provide the energy to rebuild the injured man’s crushed back.

There were MRIs, repeated doctor visits, and surgeries for Tom. One of the doctors, seeing the missing material, asked if he had been crippled all of his life. Tom’s answer, “No sir, I was a national caliber athlete for many years.”

“That’s impossible,” was the doctor’s reply.

I have to say here, even though he was my very close friend and I admired him greatly, this is not to venerate Tom, not to make him a hero in any way. I’m writing this to tell you what happened, what’s possible, and the lessons which many you may well need to know some day.

Tom’s first MRI was also the most focused and detailed MRI ever performed at that time. Magnetic Resonance Imaging was fairly new and the machines not as sophisticated as today. However, the detail was excellent if the subject could hold very, very still. Tom went into the machine as the technicians and nurses began their work. After a few minutes they slid him back out while a very worried nurse was calling out, “Mr. Sawyer, Mr. Sawyer, are you ok?”

His response was, “Well, you told me not to move.”

Here’s what happened. After his NDE Tom had gained the ability to immediately go into what is often called the ‘breathless state’ of meditation. To him it was simple, just go. To those of us who tried to learn from him it was completely opaque. We had no idea where to go or how. As of this writing we still don’t.

So Tom was either not breathing or breathing so slowly that it was undetectable. Either way whenever doctors saw those MRIs they were surprised at the detail shown.

Now back to the story of the man. Tom went to visit him in the hospital after a few days. He was a little disappointed to learn that no one else had come to visit their friend and co-worker. Tom passed the time gently. Asking questions like, how are you doing? Are they taking care of you, ok? Do you need anything? Can I bring you anything? Then Tom asked the one thing he really wanted to know, “Can you wiggle your toes?”

Tom couldn’t hold his tears as he told the story. The story of how the man easily wiggled his toes under the sheet saying, “Sure, see?” Tom stood while telling me this story. He was in intense pain. He was emotionally moved that the man was healed, and he was deeply aware that he had stolen the man’s karma.

As Tom told it the man’s life path was to be killed or paralyzed in that accident. If he died that would be fine, no problem. But, if he had lived on in a paralyzed state he would have been the perfect candidate for experimenting with the early advances of bio-mechanical devices, attempting to restore movement to paralyzed limbs. He was still young; very physically strong; he had a high pain tolerance; an endlessly cheerful attitude; and was slightly mentally challenged. He was basically alone in the world, meaning he had no family or close relatives that could possibly complicate the experiments he would have willingly been subjected to.

He would have been an excellent subject for developing those early devices and thereby helping thousands of others in similar situations. That was the future which Tom stole from him.

The following is a continuation of the story. It begins two years after the accident at the Highway Department. Tom enjoyed taking people on tours of Niagara Falls and often did so. He had said that waterfalls are often spiritual places and that Niagara Falls, especially Goat Island, were wonderful. During one particular tour, two years into what would become a ten year marathon of back pain, he noticed a young woman sitting on the grass with an entourage accompanying her. He noticed that she was being attended to, he actually wondered if she might be a princess from somewhere, and felt the inclination to stop over. But with people waiting for him he walked on by, more focused upon giving a tour than in responding to any intuitive curiosity he had about her.

Now we move up another eight years. It’s 1997. A group of us are traveling with Tom to Germany to see a woman we’ve heard about named Mother Meera. We heard she did something called darshan. We didn’t know what a darshan was and actually had very little information about her but traveled to Germany basically on a friend’s suggestion and a hunch. We were a trusting group.

Darshan is described as “an opportunity or occasion of seeing a holy person or the image of a deity.” This was an occasion that had to be scheduled in advance. It was held in her home in a small town in Germany. At that time it was suggested that people attend four evenings in a row. Being a fairly large group and with no lodging in the small town, we traveled by bus from our hotel to her house. Due to the length of the bus ride we had decided to only attend two evenings of darshan then spend some time doing the usual touristy things.

On the first evening of darshan, a Thursday, approximately two hundred people were packed into her small house. Packed is the proper word here. Some were in chairs or jammed onto couches. Many more sat on the floor with their backs against the walls. The majority sat on the floor with nothing to lean against but each other. There were even people sitting in the doorways between rooms, requiring others to step over them to get to into the main room to have darshan.

As darshan began Mother Meera sat in a chair in the main room of the house. Six or eight people lined up in front of her, kneeling with heads bowed. One by one they would scooch along to present themselves in front of her. She spoke not a word but held an intense meditative silence the entire time. As each would arrive in front of her they would bow their heads. She would then place her hands on their heads for a moment. As she removed her hands they would raise their heads to make brief eye contact with her. When she lowered her eyes their turn was done and they would go back to their ‘seats’ to wait until everyone else was finished. The entire process took several hours.

When Tom’s turn to get in line came he was struggling with back pain. He managed to scoot forward on his knees and lowered his head as far as he possibly could. One of her attendants stepped over and gently placed his hand on Tom’s head to indicate that it would be more respectful if he would lower it a bit more. The simple weight of the man’s hand was more than Tom could hold up and his head went lower.

As Mother Meera pulled her hands away for Tom to make eye contact he was stuck in that position and could not lift his head nor rise in any way. The same attendant who had lowered Tom’s head immediately recognized the difficulty and helped him to stand up, as did another attendant. It was a minor disturbance overall but enough that Tom was embarrassed to have interrupted the evening for other people. He therefore decided not to attend the second evening’s darshan. He decided to be satisfied with staying on the bus as the rest of us went in.

But that’s not the way it went. One of her attendants came out to meet the bus and asked to talk with Tom. He spoke briefly saying that he understood his problem and apologized for not realizing it last night. He offered Tom a chair to sit in while awaiting his turn and said Tom could go absolutely last so as not to interrupt anyone else, in case he had a problem again. We were all surprised to find that Tom agreed to this. He said later that it was not because of the arrangements being offered but because of something in the man’s voice. It was something in the man’s voice itself, rather than in his words, that moved Tom to agree to attend darshan that night.

Tom went in and indeed went last. I was sitting just around the corner in a hallway off the main room where I could not see any of the blessings but could see people walking in and out as darshan was going on. Tom was given a chair and seated in the main room. I only saw him as he walked in and out. On the way out he looked different than I had ever seen him before. I followed him out to the courtyard where he picked up his shoes, as we all had to be shoeless in the house. He then stood off to the side until the courtyard was empty other than myself. He squatted slightly to put his shoes on the ground. Then, stretching his arms high above his head, he began bending at the waist until he reached the ground, with knees still straight, and put his shoes on.

I know this doesn’t sound like much. It’s simply someone putting their shoes on. But he hadn’t been able to do that for the past ten years. Because of his back problem he embarrassingly had had to ask his wife Elaine to put his shoes on for him. Standing there in the courtyard his back gave him no problem at all. A month or so afterward he picked up his grand daughter and carried her on his shoulders, for a quarter of a mile to her school.

Here’s Tom’s explanation of what happened. He accepted the use of the chair as he waited for his turn at darshan. As he sat he decided that if she truly is someone special he ought to forget about his attitude of, “Oh poor me, my poor back hurts.” He needed to get into an honestly meditative state of receptivity, no matter what his back felt like. After everyone else had gone he knelt in front of her as best he could. The moment the very first hair on Tom’s head touched Mother Meera’s palm they instantaneously had what he termed as ‘super-luminal telepathic communication.’ The only other time he had experienced this was while facing The Light during his NDE.

That first experience with super-luminal telepathic communication was while he was physically dead, in a highly purified spiritual state, and face to face with The Light.

Yet here it was happening with Mother Meera. He never said much about their communication, only that she had asked him if he needed help. When he stood up from his kneeling position he simply rocked back onto his toes and stood up ‘like an ice skater’ as he thought at the time. His back was almost completely healed.

It had been a purely spiritual healing. It didn’t come from her herself, not from her psychology, not from her personal desire, not from her personal or physical energy. Simply stated she was able to be a very clear lens for spiritual energy to pass through. She was the facilitator of that. She was able to focus spiritual, healing energy as it shone through her to where it needed to go.

Tom’s healing of his friend with the crushed back at the Highway Department was a purely psychic healing. The healing experience with Mother Meera was purely spiritual.

Why did the two of them have such a high level form of communication, super-luminal telepathic communication? This goes back to a conversation we had with Tom about avatars. According to Tom there are never less than five spiritual avatars on Earth at any time, there may well be more. We understood an avatar to be a person who was an embodiment or physical incarnation of the Light. He named Mother Meera and His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as avatars. When we asked if he was one he got a goofy grin on his face and turned away. Later on when asked again if he was a spiritual avatar his answer was, “Not on a daily basis, but functionally yes.”

Remember the paragraph about him taking people on tours of Niagara Falls and seeing the young woman with an entourage? He realized after his healing that the young woman was Mother Meera. Because he wasn’t listening to his intuitive impulse to walk over to meet her he lived with his back pain for eight additional years before meeting her again. There are people who will say ‘ well, it wasn’t meant to be’ and ‘everything is perfect as it is’ and all of that. But his comment about seeing her and not walking over to her was to ask an important question, “Are you listening?”

We all too easily get caught up in what we want, what we’re doing, what needs to be finished first, I’ll get to it later, and a thousand other excuses for not following that small inner voice of spiritual intuition. Tom didn’t listen when he knew not to heal his friend’s back, and he paid the price. He didn’t listen again when he had the opportunity to meet Mother Meera at Niagara Falls and continued to pay the price. But thankfully, he did listen when something in her attendant’s voice convinced him to go in that second evening.

Tom was fortunate to have met Mother Meera at all. Most of the time the outcomes are not so dramatic. A later spiritual healing is not something that can be counted on when making the choice to not listen.

There are less dramatic, more common examples of the difference between psychic and spiritual healing.

Listening to our small, quiet inner voice can be a great teacher.

My experiences:

I forget now whether it was my first or second time attending the spiritual conference in Geneseo, NY. I was asked to be a healer at the Friday night candlelight healing service. I was honored to be asked but kind of surprised because I had no idea what to do. I said yes because it looked like they needed someone so I asked a couple questions and took my place behind one of the chairs that had been set up. I was told to just ‘give energy’ to whoever came to sit in the chair and watched other people moving their hands around in a somewhat poetic / artistic way. So I did too.

It turned out to be fun. I enjoyed the experience of the first person who sat in the chair. I found I didn’t have to watch the other healers to see how to move my hands. It flowed along very naturally and came to what seemed to be a satisfying end all on its own. The person thanked me and seemed pleased.

The second person who sat in the chair was also fun but it was a relief when it came to an end. They also thanked me and seemed to enjoy it themselves. The third person took a little work on my part to get it to feel like the first two but it seemed to be ok for the person in the chair. I was hoping I was done by then but a fourth person came, then a fifth. Each of those thanked me politely but didn’t seem very impressed.

By this time I didn’t want anyone else to come sit in the chair. I just wanted to curl up on the floor in a fetal position until I felt better. I was dried up inside. I felt like a hundred year old raisin. None of the other healers looked like they felt that way at all. They were still remarkably cheerful.

The service ended with everyone going outside to stand in a circle and sing songs while holding hands. That seemed to help a lot. I was feeling refilled by that simple human connection. Someone told me later that I had used my own energy to do the healing and instead should have ‘opened myself to spirit’ and let the energy come through from above. At the time I thought they were nuts. I thought it was only saints and prophets who could do that.

So that was my first experience with doing a psychic healing, using my own energy and having to pay a price. Some years later I had a clear experience of spiritual healing. I was attending a group meditation when a woman whom I knew walked in with a cast on her arm from her elbow to the palm of her hand. I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye and my head snapped to look at it. All I wanted was to get my hands on it, entirely without knowing why.

I didn’t want to make a show of, “Hey, look at me. I’m a big healer and I’ll fix your wrist!” But I was hoping to get a chance. I casually let people take their seats. It turned out to be very natural and unobtrusive for me to sit right next to the woman on the side of her cast.

I gently asked, “So what happened here?” She told me she had had an operation on the base of her thumb and that it was going to be ok. People were still settling in, talking and visiting with each other, so I asked if I could do a little healing for her and she accepted.

I put my hands near the base of her thumb, roughly an inch or so above the cast, and quieted myself. I was surprised to perceive that I was glowing slightly in my heart region. It was a pinkish, reddish glow that flowed down my arms to my hands. As that intensified I noticed a column of white light forming above my head. These were surprising to me but not uncomfortable in any way.

I found that as I relaxed into it they intensified even more with the white column getting anywhere from 3-4 feet high and 3-4 inches in diameter. As the white column increased in size the redness of my heart, arms, and hands also increased.

The other people were talking, laughing, and carrying on as friends do who get together every week. A couple of times I wished they would be quiet for me. When my attention was distracted in that way the intensity of the colors decreased, noticing that I ignored them and refocused myself. The colors then would become intense once again.

At one point the woman said emphatically, “It feels like there’s electricity in my bones!” That stopped all the talking and everyone turned to look. One of them said, “What do you do?” I understood they meant what form of healing modality do I practice? Not wanting to draw attention to begin with I answered with what I did for my employment, “I’m a mechanic.”

They all turned away and began talking again, more quietly than before. I wanted to explain what was happening but somehow it didn’t come to be. At some point the intensity of the lights quietly faded, I sat back in my chair, and the official meditation time began.

I realized later that I had been inadvertently clever with my answer to them. Yes, I was employed as a mechanic, but I also wasn’t following any defined healing protocol. I was simply following the mechanics of a spiritual healing which are to make yourself available, be clear, and allow what happens to flow. There was receptivity on the part of the woman, there was an outward-loving intention on my part, and spirituality provided the energy.