Your energy, your health

Good health and emotional wellbeing begin in your bioplasmic energy field. Daleena Samara chats with Pranic healing master, Deva Somasundaran, to find out more about prana, the energy of life.

Gossip comes easily to most of us. To sit over a cuppa and rip apart the woman next door can be pleasurable, even for those who wouldn't care to admit it. But what if your gossip eventually leaves you with an ulcer, gastritis or painful rheumatoid arthritis? Backstabbing that woman wouldn't be as delightful, would it?

Negative thought patterns can cause physical ailments - if you don't believe this statement, visit the Pranic Healing Foundation down Moor Road in Wellawatte and have a chat with the Managing Trustee Deva Somasundaran.

Once an engineer and now a proponent of pranic healing in Sri Lanka, Mr. Somasundaran will tell you what yogis and rishis have long known - the human being is an energy entity, and the state of one's health is largely a result of one's thoughts and choices.

Mr. Somasundaran has devoted his life to teaching, promoting and practising pranic healing, a non-touch and drug-free energy healing system created by the late Master Choa Kok Sui, a Chinese Filipino who devoted his life to the study of ancient Indian and other native healing practices.

Based on the premise that diseases first appear as disruptions in the prana (life energy) field before manifesting as ailments in the physical body and that the body has the capacity to heal itself, pranic healing manipulates life energies to achieve physical and emotional health and to accelerate healing. The system accesses the pure energies from external sources such as the sun, water and trees, and deposits them into the individual via the chakras, identified by yogic sciences as the body's natural receivers, storehouses and distributors of prana. Using specific techniques, it purifies and activates the chakras thereby restoring in the individual, a healthy energetic balance. Psychological, emotional and physical imbalances can be addressed through pranic healing.

"The ability to work with prana is available to all," says Deva Somasundaran. "However, it remains latent in many. Anyone can learn and practise pranic healing."

A former engineer and now a fulltime pranic healer, Mr Somasundaran established the foundation in 1997, having mastered pranic healing in India and having witnessed its success on patients. Over the years, he has trained about 600 pranic healers at the foundation, many of them professionals and business executives.

He also runs a pranic healing clinic that is open to the public every weekday, where, he and a dozen other pranic healers, graduates of the foundation, offer healing services to the public for a small fee.

A visit to Mr. Somasundaran revealed malfunctions in my own bio-energetic field. Being in healing and in general knowing where in my body I have energetic imbalances, I was pleased when Mr. Somasundaran scanned my aura and pointed out the exact spots that needed attention. Bad habits such as going to bed much too late and eating too-hot curries and day to day stress were the causes of the imbalances.

Standing a yard away from me, he scanned my energy field, and detected areas in which the energy was either depleted or congested. A short treatment left me feeling lighter and brighter and with renewed vitality. Because the effects of the treatment would continue over the next few hours, I was advised to refrain from bathing for at least seven hours. A course of regular treatments was recommended for permanent healing. I was told that minor ailments such as backache would require half a dozen regular treatments whilst serious ailments like cancer would take more frequent daily treatments over months.

The foundation has had numerous success stories since it opened. Their written endorsements are filed with Mr. Somasundaran. Mr Silva (not his real name), a government servant, for example, has written a thank you letter for a healing. He went to the centre when Western medicine was unable to cure chronic lower back pain often accompanied by high fever. He had consulted a doctor and had been admitted to hospital. He visited the pranic healing centre in 2006 and was cured after just two healing sessions.

Another patient, Ms Gunetilleke, came to the clinic suffering from cervical spondylosis, sinusitis and lower back pain. After two weeks of treatment, she was completely free of all pain.

Similarly, Ms Rupesinghe, arrived at the clinic with chronic headache, memory loss and general unfitness. She was completely cured after just a few treatments.

Mr. Somasundaran stresses that pranic healing should not be seen as a substitute for conventional medicine. "We never tell students to stop taking medicine given by other practitioners. We tell them that pranic healing complements their medicine."

He adds that many express concern about the spiritual affiliations of pranic healing. They want to know whether it is affiliated to any particular country or religion.

Pranic healing is not a religion - it is universal, he says. Buddhist monks and Christian priests as well as lay people from all walks of life and religions rank among his students. "Students range from accountants and doctors to ayurvedic physicians and those who are spiritually active," says Mr. Somasundaran.

As with most energy healing practices, state of mind determines how well a patient will respond to a treatment. The more sceptical the individual, the less effective the healing. Thus patients are advised to attend healing sessions with an open mind.

"I encourage them to be natural and observe how and what they feel," he adds. "If they notice an improvement, they could return for a full course of treatment."

The most common ailments appear to be migraine, urine infection, asthma, arthritis and frozen shoulder, says Mr. Somasundaran. Whilst many of these problems can be caused by environmental pollution and stress, they are also caused by emotional and psychological problems that the individual is experiencing - for example, the stress faced by young men and women who have just entered university and executives caught up in office politics or marital discord at home. Stress can contaminate the chakra at the solar plexus, blocking the flow of pure mental energy and causing energetic imbalances there and in the surrounding areas such as the stomach, liver and spleen. The chakra at the solar plexus is believed to generate energy that fuels one's mental functioning, i.e. their intellect, courage, drive and temperament.

And what about the energetic dynamics of gossip?

When spreading nasty rumours about someone, you conduct a psychic attack on the individual you are gossiping about. Your thoughts emanate as nasty energetic shards that damage that person's auric or energy field. The stronger the person is energetically, the less impact your words will have, and the stronger you are energetically, the more powerful will be your destructive thought-waves.

Individuals who have developed a sensitivity towards their energetic body to a very high extent will psychically perceive these thoughts as energy entities that hover around you. As you project a thought, you also fill your own auric field with its quality. Futher, your thoughts create a psychic radiatory field which carries the quality of your thoughts and emotions 'in the air'. This hangs around in the environment around you. Thus a negative thought will contaminate your environment, your own auric field and that of your listeners.

The more you feed that thought-form with gossip, the larger and more damaging it will become. It could get into your physical system and give you and others migraine or ailments like asthma and ulcers. And then there are the laws of karma to contend with, too. What you sow, you reap.

So the next time you feel tempted to backstab, hold your breath and count to 10. Don't do it. You'll be all the more healthier for it.