Don’t Panic, It’s Pranic
Drawing from life energy to heal traumas and other real-life miracles
W hen I took on the responsibility of becoming a
Manila Bulletin Lifestyle columnist, I tried as much as possible to brush up on expectations of the journalist—unbiased reporting, thorough research that looks at as many angles as possible, breaking new stories that have yet to be told. I would like to start today’s entry by apologizing, for should that, too, have been what you were expecting of me—I have failed you. Much of my writing has been a first person narrative; the spewing out of opinions, the rehashing of things that have been written about before, but from the author’s perspective. Today will be no different, as I tell you about the latest installment of my “Curiosity Filled the Hat” journey. It will be no different, perhaps, than the last New Age-y sort of piece you read about healing and energy, or whatever it is “those kids these days” are into now. Unless, of course, what I have to tell you different.
And in many senses, Pranic Healing is quite unlike anything I’ve ever encountered before—a modern practice based on ancient principles of cleaning and energizing the chakras, or energy vortexes of life and vitality, in the subtle body. But before I lose you by launching into an explanation using a language that I myself am still grasping, let me rewind a little bit.
THE HEALING TOUCH
In a catch-up session with a fellow half-Swiss half-Filipina girlfriend, we stumbled onto the topic of healing. I had expressed that I was fascinated with different forms of it—from touch to music, and shared a story about an experience with my life coach (hi Coach Pia!) in which a simple placement of her hand somewhere near the small of my back had released a furiously toxic archive of decade- old pent up trauma. The palpability of the peace I had felt from that day forward would not let me forget that therapy worked in a way that I had refused to give it credit for prior. My friend then told me about a lengthy conversation she had had on a flight in from Zurich, seated next to an Arab queen, who was en route to Manila “because the global headquarters for Pranic Healing is located in Makati.” I had no idea that this practice, being adapted so progressively around the world was actually born in our backyard. At the time of this particular conversation, the man responsible, Master Choa Kok Sui, may have still been alive.
He was a Chinese-Filipino chemical engineer and successful businessman, but it was his work and research in esoteric sciences that led to the authoring of 20 books (published in over 30 languages), and the sprouting up of branches of centers teaching his findings in 80 countries as of this writing. The modern founder of Pranic Healing and Arhatic Yoga pored through literature and traveled the globe researching life energy (known also as chi or ki, driving principles behind things like tai
chi or reiki), documenting and developing what would eventually become protocol for any individual interested in becoming a healer.
I wanted to know more because I was super curious about energy, and headed to the Institute of Inner Studies, the same headquarters the Queen had referred to. Here I immersed myself in their weekend Basic Pranic Healing workshop.
What will you learn? The basics of how to heal people, the identifying of chakras, the methods of scanning someone’s aura—which later evolves into more advanced classes at the institute that delve into Psychotherapy, or how to prevent negative people from affecting you, or even studies on religions like Christianity and Buddhism and their hidden teachings. What did I learn? That I am doubtful and a skeptic, an over-thinker, and a lover of drastic improvement. I wanted to do something crazy, see something that would completely blow my mind, like levitate a classmate. I wanted to give a blind person sight, maybe. And what did I get? Nothing of the sort. But this is not the place or the practice for showmanship or my brand of arrogance. This is a place that I learned to tune into fine lines of energy launching out of every living being. In a conversation with Jon, I heard my summary of the workshop experience oscillating between things like, “I didn’t really feel anything,” and “But there was definitely something there.”
DEFINING ‘THERE’
Subtleties. It has been a week since my introduction to Pranic Healing, and while I’m still not curing cancer, I’m sticking by my rather flimsy description of there defi- nitely being “something there.” Perhaps most profoundly in the experience of doing a very straightforward non-secular “Meditation on Twin Hearts for Peace and Illumination,” which consists of basic warm up exercises and listening to Master Choa lead you to visualizing peace via a CD. Sounds completely underwhelming when I put it that way, I know. But there’s been a shift in my life of the most positive nature, and that’s what drives me to say that in this day and age of exaggeration and extremes, I am upset at what beauty and truth we could be missing because we’re looking for the flash boom bang, the big reveal, the spectacle.
The real miracles are seemingly much more subtle than that. They’re in the way
Bien removes the aches and pains in his elders’ bodies, and the gratitude he feels in being able to help in whatever small way. How Aldrich found Pranic Healing at the age of 18 and found it to be his lifeline out of depression borne of being an overachiever. You find it in the stories of girls like Hengameh, a young architect who is visiting Manila in the midst of acquiring her Ph.D., her studies revolving around how principles she has learned through Pranic Healing and Arhatic Yoga are consistent with scientific studies done against the backdrop of color and energy in architecture, and the effects they have on humans—in health, relationships, and financial success. Or Ali, who refused to believe Hengameh. Perhaps his grandmother, who still has the scan of where doctors found a tumor, as well as the scan of where doctor’s lost the tumor pre-surgery, will attest to Ali’s full growth from skeptic into a successful healer. They’re all under 30 years old, and have used the things they’ve learned in Pranic Healing on everything from school exams to finding a friend’s house by scanning unit numbers, to attracting “one hundred thousand dollars when you only targeted one thousand dollars” in terms of business success.
‘What did I learn? That I am doubtful and a skeptic, an overthinker, and a lover of drastic
improvement.’
Have a whirl. The Institute for Inner Studies has free healing sessions from 3 to 6 p.m. every Thursday, for anyone that has physical ailments big and small; a free orientation course the same day from 6 to 7 p.m., and a group meditation session from 7 to 8 p.m. www. globalpranichealing.com