Healing hands

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Do the techniques of spiritual and motivational healers really have an effect or are they all dishonest, money-grabbing quacks? Melissa Sleiman investigates.

It was perhaps not the most encouraging message that I received at the start of my journey towards enlightenment. I had requested an interview with a trainer of Global NLP [Neuro Linguistics Programme] Training, an international institute that promises to give people a set of psychological tools to improve one's life. But I soon found out they were trying to dupe potential clients by claiming to come to Dubai.

Steve Cocks, the co-owner of Global NLP Training, had enthusiastically responded to my e-mail, and asked me to call him. It all sounded great, until I scrolled down and saw what the institute's other co-owner, Nicole Schneider, had written to him.

"Wanna do anything with this [interview request]?," Schneider had asked Cocks. "We could continue to pretend to go to Dubai, in the hopes we'll get press out of it. And convince the Dubai people to fly and meet us in Amsterdam?" Cocks had forgotten to delete this part.

Perhaps he realised his error, because, not surprisingly, I never did get hold of Cocks on the phone. I planned to ask him about the NLP training promise that one will become better at business dealings, overcome phobias and empower themselves by taking a course.

Nor did I get to ask about the early bird fee of US$2200 to become an NLP Practitioner in Dubai. And shortly afterwards, the link to the huge Dubai workshop announcement was taken off the website, although the page is still directly accessible.

While NLP might focus mostly on motivational training, it seems to come under the same umbrella as spiritual healing, in that both techniques promise to improve your life by overcoming your fears and emotional issues, and both use techniques we can't directly see.

So is it really all lies and deception when it comes to this kind of ‘healing'? I decided to find out more from other such practitioners. One such man is Shri Akhilesh, a ‘transformational leader' and Reiki Master who resides in India but frequently travels around the world to pass on his knowledge.

Cosmic Rhythm, a spiritual retreat centre for transformation, organises workshops in Dubai with Akhilesh. These cover Reiki, relationships, enlightenment and anger management, and include past life and transformation workshops. Pupils learn techniques to apply the techniques on themselves and also get a taste of the experience as well.

When I meet Akhilesh in one of his relatives' homes, he greets me with a very firm handshake. There is a welcoming smile on his gentle face and his eyes appear to be twinkling.

For someone who claims to be able to emotionally and spiritually heal people, it's perhaps not surprising that he exudes an incredible sense of calm.

At the core of his healing program is Reiki, a spiritual practice that originated from ancient Tibet and was revived over a century ago in Japan by Dr. Mikao Usui.

"The origin of illness is often emotional, which blocks the energy flow in parts of the body," explains Akhilesh, who has taught the technique to over 5,000 people. "Reiki uses positive energy from the cosmos, which is everywhere around you, to wash them away."

He shows me a PowerPoint presentation on a television. The slides show images of stressed out people, who have become physically ill because of their competitive work and hurried lifestyle.

Drawings of a physical, energy and mental body show that there is much more going on around us than is visible to the eye.

According to Akhilesh, we have an energy body surrounding us, which is directly linked to the physical body. A series of aura photos pops up on the screen. A dog and a child are both surrounded by a red glow - a sign that they possess high energy levels.

They are followed by newspaper clippings reporting on cases where Reiki Masters were able to remove a patient's cyst and have helped alleviate pain of cancer patients.

"There was a Japanese researcher who put water under the microscope and studied its crystals in various circumstances," says Akhilesh.

"He talked to the water about love and the soul, and he saw the crystals started to resemble diamond pendants. But when he put on chaotic, heavy metal music, the crystals looked depressed, like an oil spill. So just imagine what such things would do to us considering our bodies are made up of 70 per cent water."

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