Healing Prayer

Why do some people seem to have a magic touch when it comes to healing? Is there something they do that the rest of us can learn from to be better healers? Is there some hint of how to be more effective when we pray for the healing of another person?

Healing always involves positive intentions. A healer must have a profoundly sincere quality of loving compassion or kindness towards others. There are various techniques to provide healing, but no matter what the approach, the most successful healers seem to agree that healing is best accomplished by “getting out of the way”, surrendering to an omnipresent healing force. Such healers frame their intention in the form of a request - “please may this person be healed” - and then step back.

In studies conducted by American psychiatrist Elizabeth Targ, healers that were most successful in getting results with AIDS patients in her studies during the 1990's were “channelers” who moved aside, shedding their personal ego to consciously allow a greater force to take over. Something beyond their conscious thought would carry out the healing for them. Targ found that not a single healer believed that she or he was the source of the healing. She described it as “the healer feeling a sense or condition enshrouding him, as if a blind had been drawn over his normal alert mind. In its place he experiences the presence of a new personality – one with an entirely new character – which imbues him with a super-feeling of confidence and power.”

In thinking about how to use this to send a better healing prayer I recall the words of Matthew 7:7

“Ask, and it will be given to you;

seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.”

and those of Mark 11:24

“Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer,

believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”

So when we pray we need only ask for healing, then get out of the way, and let the larger force of creation take over.