Idyllwild Town Crier, September 28, 2006

By Marshall Smith
Staff Reporter

Editor's note: Staff Reporter Marshall Smith attended both the Saturday seminar and two healing sessions, and is writing this article from his experience.

Licensed psychotherapist and recently arrived full-time Hill resident Steven Morrison brought a quartet of healing practitioners to the Caine Learning Center on Sept. 16 and 17 for a group presentation about certain alternative healing modalities, with emphasis on the healing of chronic physical or emotional illnesses, to be followed by individual healing sessions for interested attendees.

Appointments for the lightly advertised Progressive Healers Network were sold out in advance of the Saturday start date. Because of increased interest and demand for individual sessions, extra appointments were added on Sunday, Sept. 17 to accommodate demand.

Morrison's goal was to book 25 private appointments, a full schedule for this first foray, and thereby gauge demand for future workshops. By end of day Sunday, 34 people had booked individual sessions, each seeing two practitioners for a total of 68 sessions. Morrison plans a future encore of the four healers.

I attended two of the added sessions on Sunday. Sessions cost $25 for 20 minutes with each of two healers.

Morrison facilitated the Saturday introductory session where about 40 attendees listened to each presenter discuss what healing modalities each practiced, what exactly is meant by "alternative medicine" and how they arrived at their present vocations.

A word about what comes up when one thinks of "alternative healing." Noted author and lecturer Depak Chopra stresses that the mind/body/spirit connection is essential to effective healing. The individual in need of healing can and should be an active participant in their own healing process, and that, through suggestions and positive mental healing images a patient sends to their own disease-challenged body, lasting and effective curing is enhanced.

Each of Morrison's practitioners echoed that position ~ that they themselves did not "do" the healing. They created the space, the permission for the individual to let go of or surrender the illness or emotional weight at the root of the illness. But they emphasized that healing requires partnership ~ first and most importantly, the patient in partnership with his or her own body, and with a healing practitioner. Partnerships assist patients in taking responsibility to embrace their health potential and let go of their attachment ~ sometimes anger, judgment and fear-based attachment ~ to being ill.

Morrison and his group told the audience that abandoning one's healing to a doctor and taking no role or responsibility in the process, can be a recipe for less than optimum healing.

The four healers ~Steve Vorel, Sandra Acosta, Jasmine Dickens, and Elizabeth Aleccia ~ each arrived at their present vocations from very different paths.

Vorel, formerly a fast-paced executive at a young age, developed chronic fatigue syndrome, passing out without warning, losing memory and reading comprehension. Frightened and troubled both about his career loss, and medical condition in which doctors could provide little assistance, he returned to his family home in New York.

Out of frustration, he started swinging away with an ax on an old dead tree. As he swung, anger, screams, frustration grew and he continued, as he recounts, "for almost eight hours." When he had exhausted his rage at his medical condition, (his)"chronic fatigue syndrome was gone in one day." He realized that "the further aprt one's preception of how the world should be, and how it is, the more stress a person will have." And, as with the other practitioners, Vorel admonishes that stress creates illness.

After his eight-hour chopping purge, he began an investigative journey with Shamans in Ecuador and Peru, and other alternative teachers, and now practices as a certified regression therapist, master teacher of a trademarked practice called Zenith Omega ~ a healing technique "using light and colour to release energy blocks from the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual body, thus restoring each individual to a higher state of potential and beingness, leading to a deeper experience of love," according to the Web site www.zenithomega.com/what_is_zenith.htm

Acosta, an El Salvador native, studied a form of body work with Maori natives (indigenous people of New Zealand), that like many tribal and eastern approaches, restores energetic healing impulses by removing physical blocks that can build up in muscular/skeletal and lymph and fluid systems that can impede free circulation of those electrical (chi) healing impulses.

I had consultations with the two remaining healers ~ one with Dickens, a practitioner of spiritual alchemy, pranic healing and reiki whose vocation is devoted, like her compatriots, to removing blockages of the free flow of vial life enchancing "chi" that promotes healing.

Dickens rebalanced my body's system of energetic flow, and worked, as she told me, to remove blocks between several of my chakras (body areas, from Hindu and other oriental cultures, that ascend from the base of the spine to the top of the head). Dickens said my strongest chakra ~ anahata or heart/lung ~ is related to love, equilibrium and well-being, and I should use it to integrate other chakra areas that don't function as well, positioning the light of that "devotion, love, compassion and healing" chakra throughout other areas of my body.

I also saw Aleccia, a self-described clairvoyant ans psychic who sees energies and spirits, feels their presence and communicates with them telepathically. She was my first choice, since, when I attended the Saturday presentation, I was accompanied by a scientist/engineer friend who, although not skeptical of healing practitioners per se, stiffened when he heard Aleccia describe her particular practice. I, on the other hand, felt she was very down to earth, and since I had never seen a clairvoyant, thought she would be interesting.

And, as it turns out, from Aleccia I heard what I feel I needed to hear in order to move myself forward at this point in my life. Without detailing who and what she saw (my spirit companions), suffice it to say that I came away feeling strong and protected, that what Aleccia told me resonated strongly with deliberations I have had for several years about my particular path from this point forward, with whatever duties I may have for the remainder of my life and to whom, and even a timetable suggested by my "guides" for accomplishing these various projects and responsibilities ~ all this without my having described to Aleccia my dilemmas, possible projects or deliberations.

Renate Caine, one of the owners of the Caine Center that studies brain functionality, commented, "I thought they (the healing practitioners) were exceptional young people. I know the real article when I see it. They were so right about the need for each of us to take responsibility for his own life, and healing. It's not something another, a doctor, gives you. As each of them said, healing is our own process for which we must take responsibility. A healer doesn't do it for you ~ he or she creates or holds a space of permission in which we, the individuals, initiate our own healing processes."

Morrison commenced Monday, Sept 25 with weekly "Spiritual Workouts" at Skye at Night from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Morrison anticipates the Workouts will be "a time and a place to practice how contemporary, nonreligious, religion-friendly, universally spiritual concepts apply to our day-to-day lives."

Marshall Smith can be reached at marshall@towncrier.com