Hands-On Healing

After a 45-year career in conventional medicine, Pat Fleury began studying with Hopi, Navajo, and Paiute shamans and healers—who dubbed her Wind Song Spirit—and exploring energy-based healing paths.

“I wanted to blend the ‘laying on of hands’ from the ancient ones with the latest scientific research—that’s quantum physics,” says Fleury, who founded the Houston-based Touch of Healing Institute in 2003.

Courses at THI merge elements of acupressure, Native American spirituality, Hindu metaphysics, Emotional Freedom Techniques, energy psychology, and other modalities coalescing around the idea that electromagnetic currents flow through and around our bodies and that blockages in these currents make us sick.

“Some clients never tell me what hurts them,” Fleury says. But as her hands trace their meridians and auric fields and she employs what she calls “high sense perception” to detect blockages, “their bodies do.”

Believing that we can heal ourselves by assessing and managing our electromagnetic fields, Fleury nonetheless doesn’t criticize mainstream medicine. Many medical doctors take THI courses, she says, and they “are surprised at how easy it is to blend their scientific training with energy healing. The MD raises his high sense perception and takes the time to blend his lab findings with this inner knowing.”

Ancient doctors, Fleury says, “would put their hands on the pain and ask patients what was going on in their lives. Once you start asking those kinds of questions and touching the pain, healings just happen.”

Your Healing Touch

Five Practices to Try Yourself

Relieve a headache
“When children have headaches, what’s the first thing their mothers do?” Fleury asks. “They put their hands on the children’s foreheads. They’re checking for fevers, but there’s a secondary effect: That’s the region of the sixth chakra, so this touch gives the gift of love and compassion that opens the blockage in the head.” Another headache-easing tactic she recommends is to press the joined tips of the thumb, index, and middle fingers of the hands to each temple, then visualize “a blue laser line running back and forth between the temples to break up the blockage.”

Reduce back pain
“Lower-back pain often means that the hip joints are not balanced,” Fleury says. Standing with hands on hips and knees bent slightly, “state your intent. Say, ‘I need to come into balance.’ Build energy in your hands. Hold your hips. As they start to realize that they’re out of alignment, the process of balancing and harmony comes into the body.” As the hips realign themselves, “you can actually feel the movement, these little tingles down your legs. Afterward, you’ll notice that your walk is different because you’re back in balance.”

Ease menstrual pain
Menstrual cramps signify “that your hormonal system is off,” Fleury says, “so the first thing I’d wonder about is whether there’s enough magnesium in the body. But we also need to ask—and this gets into energy psychology—what is it about you that hurts so much?” Addressing the first two chakras, place both hands on the lower abdomen. Mentally “go inside the body, inside your higher self, and ask: How am I shutting myself off that I am in such pain? This question goes into your subconscious mind and frees up the emotions that hold those muscles so tight.”

Calm fear and anxiety
For emotional issues such as fear, Fleury utilizes the heart meridian, an energetic power line believed to run from the tip of the pinkie finger through the hand and up the arm to the heart, “which is the bridge between the body and the brain.” With two or three fingers of one hand, tap repeatedly between the pinkie and wrist—the soft “karate-chop place”—of the opposite hand while focusing on the emotional problem and saying aloud, “I’m willing to let it go.” Literally tapping into the heart meridian “is like stirring a big old kettle” to loosen its contents and release steam, Fleury explains. “You can do it anywhere—even in your car when you’re stuck in traffic.”

Power up a prayer
To augment many types of healing, Fleury recommends a cleansing technique that she learned from indigenous elders: First, place aromatic plant matter such as cedar or sage into a vessel. Fleury uses sage and an abalone shell. Set the plant matter alight: “That’s the fire element, which represents the passion to make changes in our lives. The plant is a living spirit, something that had a life, which it sacrificed for us. Smell its essence. Hold the smoke near your nose. That’s the air element, which goes up in spirals. The angels take the prayers in the smoke and deliver those prayers to the footstool of God.”