Five Great Healers Speak Here

Author(s): Nancy, Esmond Gardner
Publisher: Theosophical Publishing House

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INTRODUCTION Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N.
Healing is one of the most humane of human acts. Historically, the ability to heal has been regarded in most cultures as a Divine gift from God, the bestower of life, to a few who were dedicated to a holy way, and in the past the role of healer and priest were one. Today, however, one of the signs of our times is an unprecedented proliferation of modes of healing and an unexpected significant increase in the number of persons who want to learn to heal. However, most of these modalities are oriented towards self-healing and most of the people learning them do so from a deep-seated need to become personally healed, or whole (from the Middle English derivative of the verb to heal: haelen, to make whole), for this is an age marked by a pandemic of stress-related illnesses that spin off from the daily uncertainties of contemporary existence on our planet.
The book we have before us, however, is concerned with persons who play the role of healer not for their own healing but for the healing of others. Yet paradoxically most persons who play the role of healer will readily agree to two acknowledgements: that the first person they heal is, indeed, themselves, and that in the final analysis one must admit that it is the healee, the patient, who heals her/himself. One might say that the healer acts as a human support system which therapeutically bolsters the ill person's depleted energy, energy that is called by various names in different cultures. To the Chinese it is the ch'i, to the Egyptian it is known as the