The Circle of Hands Program grew from the clinical experience of healers belonging to the Healing Hands Network in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota (see article in IJHC May 2003). These healers have worked on hundreds of people, many of the clients showing remarkable success in overcoming their illnesses. 

People seek healers because they are suffering. Either no medical help is available or they seek support in partnership with their medical services. They come with cancers, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS -- Lou Gherig's Disease), fibromylgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, Parkinson's, diabetes, Crone's disease (ulcerative colitis), or extended pain due to accidents, injury or surgery.

Much public education is needed to close the gap between experience and reality. The experience is that healing can mean less pain, better sleep, and more loved shared. The reality is most of the public is ignorant about the benefits healing can bring.

Often when people are suffering, their loved ones want to help. Clients will bring family members or friends with them when they come to see a healer. We encourage this because society knows little about how healing can promote health or extend life. We want to educate as many people as we can. Often it is appropriate and desirable for family members and friends to put their hands on the ill person. They want to offer support and love. The healing we do is easy to learn, so we tell family members that they can receive "on the job training." The recruited family people feel tingling, pain, vibrations, heat and many other sensations in their hands as they offer healing to the family member they accompany. They come away with a new understanding of healing and new tools to help their loved one deal with pain. We find it very rewarding when people come back and report that they eased the pain of their loved one, or helped them sleep at night.

The Healing Hands Network was founded in 2000 to build a global community of healers who will benefit all who are interested in recovery. The mission of the Network is to connect people in need with healers, so together their partnership can facilitate the recovery of injury and disease.

The members of the Network believe the following:

A) At the heart of healing is a generous spirit. Service to others is a source of dignity, meaning and joy in our lives.

B) Healing is a partnership between the person putting their hands on, the person being treated, all health practitioners involved, supportive and prayerful family and friends, and the Higher Power who forms our universe.

The tasks of the Healing Hands Network include:

A) Building a network of healers of many modalities who understand and support the energy dynamics of the healing Wave.

B) Promoting and advertising the necessity of healing within supportive partnerships.

C) Participating in research that reflects the benefits gained through complementary/ alternative healing approaches, with credible documentation.

D) Educating the health practitioners and institutions about healing traditions and practices, both old and new that bring about healthier bodies. 



NEED

Dr. Greg Plotnicoff, past Medical Director of the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota said, "I feel it is painful to see family members sitting at the bedside of their suffering family members, feeling powerless while they either watch the monitors or watch Gilligan's island on TV. Three Heart Balancing™, so easy to teach, would give them a way to connect with their loved ones." *

The need for the Circle of Hands Program is great. Families are left to advocate for members who are ill, wanting to do their best to facilitate treatments, and yet, too often stand helplessly by - not knowing how to emotionally connect with the ill ones.

Teaching Three Heart Balancing™ gives family members and friends a sense of empowerment. This power has not been available up to now because there is little public awareness of how healing can save or promote life.

Everyone knows what it means to go to a hairdresser, but only a few know what it means to go to a healer. Most TV shows depict healing as a weird, dark tribal custom from another culture. While Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia depend on healers as well as medical help, in the United States, few people know what getting a healing or going to a healer means. It is far outside their cultural experience to believe that each person could possibly learn healing and help each other.

Medical treatments are expensive; especially treatments of major diseases like cancer. When clients come into a healing practice, we expect they will deplete their financial resources before their treatment is complete. The Healing Hands Network has a large group of volunteers to work on these people, and a policy that professional members give volunteer service to a certain number of people who are unable to pay.

Often families are isolated and have a long distance to drive for medical or healing services. The long drive can be taxing on someone suffering from a major disease. The Healing Hands Network trains family members and friends, not insisting that they learn the whole theory, but just sharing enough time and experience to let them know healing works, providing loving support for all the people involved.

The Healing Hands Network has a 75% success rate (by anecdotal assessments) with people receiving its services. This is encouraging us to promote greater awareness of our program.

As part of the Circle of Hands Program, the Healing Hands Network is planning an extensive education campaign for family members, health professionals and the public. The plan is four-fold:

Whenever we take on treatment of a person with cancer, our professionals know that the person is likely to run out of funds before they receive a clear scan. Circle of Hands training will enable us to extend the resources needed to treat this draining, life threatening disease.

History

For over 10 years, healers trained by the author, one of the founders of the Healing Hands Network, have included family members and friends in the healing of people who have come for services. Often people who seek healing come alone. But when their disease is extensive, serious, life threatening or life debilitating, family members and friends are directly affected. They come, wanting information, wanting hope, and wanting any tool that can possibly work to promote health.

The first formally organized Circle of Hands Program began in the summer of 2000, focused on a family trying to help heal a man of ALS. Chuck Meyers lived in Chipperwa Falls, Wisconsin, a two and a half-hour drive to St. Paul. Confined to a wheel chair, Chuck suffered severe back and leg pain. He had no upper body strength and could not feed himself. He could still talk and use the computer when we first saw him. Although he badly wanted a miracle, his hope was to find any possible increase in functioning.

His family mourned losing a person whom used to be a vital, strong man to a disease that he acquired less than two years previously.

Jaentra brought 3 others healers with her to Chipperwa Falls. Chuck's family and friends gathered sixteen people in all. Jaentra asked the folks to put their hands on Chuck, at specific places on his body for a specific amount of time every day.

Jaentra brought two massage tables with her. On one table lay Chuck, supervised by two of the healers, while a group of his friends worked on him. The supervising healers worked with each person, making sure they were comfortable with the touch and understood the directions. They asked each person what they were feeling in their hands and explained what those feelings might mean.

The author and the other healer used the second table to give a healing to each volunteer family and friend. The group from the main table was rotated out, given healing on the second table and then rotated back to Chuck's table.

All of us suffer from small and great aches and pains we take for granted. These include headaches, old back injuries, shoulder, arm or wrist pain, difficulty breathing, menstrual cramps, swelling or inflammations. People received a significant reduction in their suffering/ complaints. Most had all of their symptoms resolved. These healings give the volunteers a basis for believing they could make a difference in Chuck's life.

This particular family group shared a Christian faith. Although faith can move mountains, I have seen mountains move through sheer persistence and love. The group prayed together and asked God's blessings on their work.

The group committed to working on Chuck in pairs, five days out of seven. Jaentra gave supervision weekly through Chuck's wife, Rita, encouraging the group to share love in the form of healing with Chuck. Chuck gained strength enough to move himself in and out of his wheel chair. That strength held for 2 months. Then his ALS marched on, but slowly.

Three months later Chuck died suddenly. Usually people suffering from ALS hang on for years in pain, unable to do anything to affect their illness. Chuck maintained his strength, but lost it all two days before his death. Even though the healing did not produce the miracle Chuck was hoping for, he still maintained a quality of life far beyond his expectations.

His family and friends told me at the visitation that without the healings they shared with Chuck, they never would have been able to let him go to God gracefully. His son Charles told me that he and his father had not been close for years -until the healing gave them the time and context to share and re-connect. The closeness and commitment of his family and friends gave dignity and merit to Chuck's life in his final days. The healing made his passing easier.

Healing helps create intimacy, love and a sweetness in spite of the suffering and degeneration a person's body may feel. Also, healing can empower a family and friend network by allowing them the participation in creating and promoting health.

Jean Davis had stage four ovarian cancer, meaning that it was invasive and had spread outside the place in the body where it had originated. Living in Paynesville meant a long drive to the Cities for healing. Since the treatment protocol for cancer is to be worked on twice a week, the family and friends of Jean decided to learn. This group developed a structured Circle of Hands similar to that of Chuck Meyers' family. Jean is worked on twice a week, maintaining her strength, and is watching her cancer shrink slowly over the last four monthssince she has been in the Circle of Hands. Again, the group shares hope and love as they experience empowerment.

The Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota sponsored the teaching of Three Heart Balancing™ by the author in 1999-2000. Nurses, a few doctors, a psychologist, and chaplains took the training. Since the initial training in 2000, chaplains have offered Three Heart Balancing™ with and during their chaplaincy services at Fairview-University Hospital. The chaplains come face to face with family need for support, good choices and empowerment. When a patient and family have responded well to receiving healing, the chaplain shares short instructions with family members on how to work on the patient so they can help while they sit with the patient in the hospital.

The Healing Hands Network designed a brochure describing the Circle of Hands Program. Chiropractors, physicians, parish nurses, pastoral chaplains distribute these to people with illnesses and their families.

Circle of Hands includes a minimum of 3-4 people and a maximum of 20 people. Training this number requires a between 2 and 4 healers.

We charge family and friends on a sliding fee scale. (They determine the amount they can afford, between $25.00 and full price. Often, after fighting a long illness, families are strapped financially. As a non-profit, part of our mission is to offer this program regardless of the resources the family

To date, over 3,000 people have learned the mechanics of how to place their hands on an ill person to help ease pain, reduce discomfort, and promote health and well being.

  

  

Letter 1.

My life changed after I heard Jaentra's voice on the radio describing the benefits of 3 heart balanced healing. After having 4 major blows to my health in the year 2000, I knew I must take action.

After learning the techniques of 3 heart balancing, my life was filled with those that needed healing and I found a peace I had never known before. And it showed me more about life from those who were so close to losing theirs.

[Case 1.} It filled my heart when Mary's 2 daughters willingly learned the techniques needed to help heal their mother. They continued even when I wasn't there. Mary's legs were free from pain; she was able to stop her pain meds giving comfort and peace to her family.

[Case 2.} The doctors said Barbara Jo's leukemia meds weren't working and she couldn't eat. 3 Heart balancing with her son and daughter-in-law helped her regain her appetite and she asked to go home from the hospital. Later, at her bedside at home before her passing, the 3 heart balancing created a glorious site: about 15 family members were instantly by her bedside laying hands on. Even though Barbara Jo's eyes were shut, she knew we were there and feel our love. When I left when was relaxed and sleeping. The family members knew they had helped Barbara Jo in her journey.

The 3 heart balancing has shown many others as well as myself the friendships, peace and healings that come from extending the Healing Hands to others.

I fell it is a pleasure to assist others in the knowledge of the 3 heart balancing so they can bring loving healing to their family members.

Respectfully,

Helengrace W. Bauer


Letter 2.

To the Healing Hands Network:

I am writing in recognition of the need for Healing Hands to be available to all who need it, regardless of ability to pay.

I have been involved with two people over the past three years who have been had their lives turned upside down by cancer. Curing this time I have also been privileged to learn the technique of Three Heart Balancing, and have been able to use it to help both of these people deal with their illness.

I have found that not only does it work to enable the body to heal itself, if possible, but is also give a sense of people to those for whom healing is not possible.

[Case 3.} When, Lorraine, on of the two people with whom I was privileged to work, became terminal, and I use that to describe the time when we realized that healing was not when God had planned for her, Three Heart Balancing became a source of comfort for her. I believe it also helped to manage her pain, as she was able to maintain with very little pain medication.

For her family, Three Heart Balancing was also a comfort as they witnessed the peace that was evident in Lorraine's face during and after the sessions. It was also possible for the family members to receive sessions to allow them to cope with the stress of having a family member who is terminally ill, and to help them deal with the grief of losing a loved one.

It is my belief that practices like Three Hart Balancing can be extremely beneficial to all people, but especially to those witnessing a person they love balling a terminal disease. I considered it a privilege to work with these people, and to learn from them about life and death.

Sincerely,

Dana Spates 


Letter 3.

Dear Jaentra,

I understand you are applying for a grant that would enable you to help more people in their time of need. I also understand you are writing an article about Circle of Hands.

When my husband was diagnosed with ALS, the doctors could do nothing for him. Thanks to Healing Hands, we had hope and many days of lessened pain. You traveled 100 miles to come to our home to teach out family and friends to do Hands On. Thanks to you, our family and friends came to our home on a daily basis to give 'hands on' treatment. Each time it not only helped with the pain but also give him a welcomed feeling of well being.

The disease did eventually win, but I'll always remember the help and hope you gave us.

The very best to you,

Rita Meyers 


Three Heart Balancing™ is described in Jaentra GreenGardener. The wave brings us happiness, IJHC 2003, 3-2, 1-8.


Contact:
Jaentra Green Gardener
49 West Winona St.
St. Paul, MN 55107
651-290-2880
http://www.healinghandsnetwork.org/

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