Sick way to make money from misery
Spiritual healing group accused of exploiting the desperately ill
THIS was a question I’ve never been asked before.
“Where are you vibrating from?”
It came at a workshop given by a group promoting something called Tao calligraphy which, so far as I can tell, means writing Chinese letters or even just tracing their outlines in the air with your hand while chanting mantras such as “I forgive you, please forgive me.”
“It’s a direct connection to higher spiritual frequencies,” says the website of “World renowned healer and transformational leader” Zhi Gang Sha.
He’s known by his followers as Dr and Master Zhi Gang Sha, Master Sha for short.
Or Master Charlatan for long, unless he actually believes the guff he’s selling, despite it having zero scientific credibility.
This lot don’t hold back when it comes to making outlandish claims.
The website of the Master Sha Tao Centre in London has a video with a woman explaining how she had breast cancer which spread to her liver.
Then she discovered Tao calligraphy and now she says “It’s clear, I’m healthy”.
Other testimonials carry the headlines “back pain disappeared”, “brain disease improved” and “menstrual pain gone”.
Relationship and money problems can apparently be sorted too. Dr Sha
boasts of having carried out 400,000 healings through 5,000 healers worldwide, so I joined the London centre for a workshop called Free Yourself From Your Pain to find out some more.
The host was Mayur Shah, a “certified master teacher” and the director of Universal Soul Service Limited, the company promoting Master Sha’s organisation in the UK.
The session began with some deep breathing to “allow yourself to receive all the positive frequency and vibration”.
A key theme that developed was forgiveness, and that included forgiving wrongs in past lives.
Shah spoke of his chronic knee pain which he diagnosed as being caused by an angry Viking from a past life, a case of “quantum entanglement at the soul level”. Obviously.
He explained that thanks to Tao forgiveness the pain vanished.
Without the proper spiritual treatment, he warned you could suffer not just year after year but “lifetime after lifetime” with cells vibrating at the wrong frequency and leading to inflammations, cysts and even tumours. According to Shah, your cells should be at the frequency of love, forgiveness and gratitude, which is around 500.
Five hundred what, I wondered, but he didn’t say. If you’re vibrating at around 50 you’re in trouble because this is the frequency of guilt and fear. You can spend a lot of money on this stuff, if you’re so inclined.
The workshop cost £58 and the 23 of us attending were also encouraged to buy spiritual blessings, with prices varying according to their power.
The price for a one-hour personal consultation at the London centre is around £300.
A one-day healing course with Master Sha himself is £710.
There are framed calligraphy prints that he’s signed such as the Da Chang Sheng to “increase your financial wealth”, which will decrease your bank balance by £1,200. Master Sha is based in Canada. Neither he nor the London centre replied to my emails.
Michael Marshall, project director of the quack-busting Good Thinking Society, condemned the so-called teaching as “simply irresponsible”. “Perhaps Master Sha and his team genuinely believe they can heal conditions like cancer but it is clear that their supposed healing techniques are not remotely based in reality,” he said.
‘‘ His knee pain was caused by an angry Viking from a past life