My workshops on
Energy Healing at Pantheacon were simultaneously great successes and great
frustrations.  I’d done it for
several years, the numbers slowly growing.  Then, in 2008, the turnout more than filled a room, leaving
me space about the size of a kitchen table top in which to stand and speak.  Any hope of actually enabling people to
do exercises was nothing but wishful thinking.   So for 2009 I asked for and received two rooms and two
workshops, both larger rooms than 2008, the first for beginning energy work,
the second for intermediate energy work. 

Again, the
Beginning section over-flowed. Over 150 got in, I would guess. I heard later
that about as many people were turned away because the room was full as managed
to get in.  There was (barely)
enough room for everyone to pair up and perform exercises from seeing and
feeling the energy to feeling how it differed on another person’s body, often
discovering old injuries and the like in the process. 

Only one person
out of them all reported he could not see the energy.  Unfortunately, in a crowd that size there was no chance to
work more with him, and even if I had, I have found that seeing and feeling
energy seems to fall along a Bell Curve. 
Some people always have, some learn pretty easily (me, for example) and
some, try as they may, cannot.  Anyway,
the size of the crowd prevented exploring the issue more with him.

The Intermediate
Healing workshop was on the last day, when most attendees had left, and the
room was merely pretty full.  There
was no room for people to practice what they saw, but there was room enough for
some demonstrations. 

Clearly the
demand for learning such practices in our community is very large.

The experience
has led me to wonder about how we can make learning that is not easily
transmitted through books, and best learned experientially, available in a
society of mostly solitary individuals. 
(Here, again, is diZerega’s pro-coven rap!)

Covens and their
equivalents in other Pagan traditions enable this kind of learning and mutual
aid.  So would a healing circle
established just for this work, but setting one up requires people with
experience, and it takes a while for the group to get coordinated and
experienced enough for the circle to really begin working.  A coven supplies that framework more
than would a group of people who simply come together to explore this
modality.  Covens, the best of them
anyway, already have the tight-knittedness and experience with raising and
directing power that will contribute to the effectiveness of this work.

I am coming to
the conclusion that the beginning teachings can be to any size group, if we
give up hope for much individual attention from the presenter.  All that is really needed is enough
space and a decent sound system because the kinds of experiences needed to show
this stuff is real and interesting can be achieved for most people in dyads,
even among strangers.  Maybe they
will give me a really big room next year!?  That is the good news.

The not so good
news is that “mass production” pretty much stops there.  To really start doing much beyond
working with sprains, tension, and the like requires the kind of immersion that
only groups can provide for most of us. 
With enough space a convention such as Pantheacon can give people the
initial steps to this experience, but only the initial steps.  (For example, because it’s in a hotel
we also cannot use incense or fire, and water is impractical.)

A “New Age”
model of a weekend workshop would sort of work, but only if the participants
continued to meet together and practice what they learned.  It takes people time to develop their
energy channels and learn what these methods really feel like.  This practice is experiential, not
intellectual.  As my major teacher
in such things told us long ago, “I could teach you everything I know that I can
put into words in a weekend.  And
it would be useless.” 

I think a basic acquaintance with this kind of healing is valuable over and above its utility as a means of encouraging better health.  It also gives people experiential and repeatable knowledge that there are dimensions to our reality that we live in an interconnected world at far more subtle levels than secular Western modernity is willing to acknowledge.  It can play a major role in freeing our society from the nihilistic trance of modernity.

But how can this
knowledge be best imparted?  It’s
frustrating.  Maybe some reader has
some ideas to share.