Article: October 2004

Your Hands Can Heal You
The EDGE Interview with Stephen Co
by Tim Miejan
Stephen Co wasn't familiar with the Sanskrit word "Prana," or the Chinese term "Chi" or the Old Testament usage of "Ruah," all referring to the invisible bio-energy or vital energy that keeps the body alive and maintains a state of good health. He was an electrical engineer by trade and was hardly a student of subtle energy. That all changed in 1998 when his wife had a serious fall and broke her hip.

"I always tell people I didn't get into Pranic Healing by choice, it was out of desperation," Co said in a phone interview with The EDGE.

The doctor said it would be at least 14 weeks before his wife would be able to put any weight on her hip because the fracture was a serious one. Co, whose work took him back and forth to the United States, said he began pondering ways to speed up the healing process. He thought three and a half months was much too long to wait for the bone to heal.

"I attended this class called Pranic Healing -- pranic meaning energy, energy healing, from an Asian man who originated the process that was being taught. So, I took the class and learned it, worked on my wife three times a day -- and I remember that in one month and one week, she started running. I was really surprised, because, being an engineer, I was very skeptical.

"In Pranic Healing, we don't touch. So everything, the movement of the hand, everything was off the body and it all had to do with breathwork, with visualization, and things like that. The whole time, I did not feel a single thing in my hands. I just basically followed the steps like a cookbook. It was actually later on when I realized that was the beauty of the whole technique, that you follow a set of protocols or recipes for different problems and different ailments, and the body has a tendency to respond to these different protocols of energy work. So in one month and one week, she was running."

Co, a senior disciple and student of Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui, the founder of Pranic Healing, will offer a free introductory lecture and two-day intensive training seminar October 22-23, explaining and instructing the public in how to use what is described as "a simple, yet powerful and effective system of no-touch energy healing." Park Productions will present Master Stephen Co and "Your Hands Can Heal You," featuring the Master Choa Kok Sui Pranic Healing® Intensive at Embassy Suites Hotel, 2800 American Blvd. W., Bloomington. A free evening lecture will take place at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 22. The two-day Intensive Training will be from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 23-24. Registration is $295 by October 8, $325 by Oct. 22, and $350 at the door on Oct. 23. Tickets are available in Minneapolis at Present Moment Books [(612) 824-3157 or 1 (800) 378-3245)], by phone or online at TicketsWest at 1 (800) 992-8499 or www.ticketswest.com (service charges apply), or by mail with checks payable to Park Productions, P.O. Box 55266, Portland, OR 97238. For more details, visit www.yourhandscanhealyou.com. It includes a downloadable brochure as well as a clip from CBS News. Brochures also are available by calling (503) 299-4450.

Co, who usually is called Master Co, referring the fact that he is a teacher, shared more on his first experience with Pranic Healing and on his upcoming visit to the Twin Cities to teach the same process that he learned.

Before you started doing the healing on her, did your wife have any kind of surgery or anything?
Master Co: The only thing was that the doctor put her on traction, they pulled the leg down because of the broken hip to even out the bones, and then from there it was basically the healing of the body.

Did you have a sense that it really worked until then, or were you just hopeful?
Master Co: We were seeing some results, because at first she'd been in so much pain that she couldn't even move an inch or so. Then, like the next day, "Oh, wow! She could move it another three inches." And every time we go to the doctor, they're saying, "Wow, it is healing beautifully, so it must be her age." (Laughter.) Why bother telling a doctor then, who is not really open to it, what we were doing? We just tell him, "OK, that's good." We want to get the validation.

See, one thing that's very important to us is always to have it validated to make sure that the results we are seeing are not only in our heads. We were seeing improvement incrementally over a period of a month, and I remember distinctly what took place after one month and a week.

I remember saying at that time, "You know, why don't you try going from here to there a little faster?" And she ran, and I was really shocked. It shocked the heck out of her, too.

How did your wife respond to the Pranic Healing at first? Was she hesitant to have you help her out? Did she think it was going to work?
Master Co: She wasn't sure. I was very fortunate that she was very sensitive, so when I put my hand about a foot away from her fracture, she could feel a weight.

I said, "Really?"

So she could feel the weight, like something pushing on it, so that helped me out as far as feedback, because other than that, I didn't feel a single thing.

What exactly is Pranic Healing?
Master Co: Pranic Healing comes from the word "prana," which is the Sanskrit word for "Chi," or life force energy. The process was synthesized by my teacher, Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui, who now leads an organization that is in more than 81 countries. My work represents the United States branch.

Basically Pranic Healing is using life force or healing energy to promote the body's ability to heal itself. It presupposes that the body knows how to heal itself, and we know that. When I talk to doctors at hospitals, such as Kaiser Permanente Hospital and Cedar Sinai here in L.A., they did not dispute the fact the body heals itself. However, what people don't realize is that when the body heals itself, it consumes life force. So if you give the body the right amount of life force in the right areas, the body has a tendency to speed up that healing much faster than what normally it could do by itself. That's the premise behind healing.

So you're adding life force to the area that needs the healing.
Master Co: Exactly. But, if you want to be more specific, Pranic Healing is divided into two main techniques. One is cleansing, the other one is energizing.

Think to yourself about this: If it's a matter of just not enough energy to heal quickly, what about all the energy in the environment? People should be able to absorb it and heal themselves. So there must be something that is happening within the body that's preventing that life force from going in. That's why, in Pranic Healing, before we give people the energy to different parts of the body, we spend anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of the time removing energy blockages, what we call stripping or cleansing. And just with that part of the cleansing portion, most of the time people are able to experience easily 50 to 75 percent relief, whether they work on themselves or somebody performs Pranic Healing on them.

What causes those energy blocks?
Master Co: It could come from negative emotions. Actually that's about 80 or 90 percent of it right there. It comes from when people get stressed and get angry.

In your body, there are different energy centers. We work with 11 major centers, or charkas. As we know, these energy centers or chakras correspond to different physical organs. If one or more of these energy centers get clogged or blocked, it's just like a nostril that gets clogged up. You can't breathe. If a chakra, or an energy center, cannot breathe, it cannot release the stale or blocked energy, and it cannot also absorb fresh energy from the environment. Therefore, the organ it corresponds to would not be able to get the corresponding amount of life force, so the body deteriorates.

So using acupuncture as an example, it's opening up the channel of the energy.
Master Co: Absolutely. You know, I remember Eric B. Robins, M.D., my co-author for the book, saying that he looks at Pranic Healing, which he uses at the hospital, as acupuncture without needles. Without needles and without touch, just with proper breathing, you are able to unclog a channel, unclog an energy center and apply the necessary Chi or life force to it, when necessary.

Many of our readers have heard of like Therapeutic Touch, Reiki, and Chi Gung. Is Pranic Healing similar to those forms of energy healing?
Master Co: The only similarity within Pranic Healing of all the ones you've mentioned is there's a transference of energy. After that, everything else is different.

People often ask me that question. Let's just use Reiki as an example. I've probably had more than 500 Reiki Masters come through my classes through the years and I always ask them, "What do you feel, because you're the expert on this?" The biggest difference they saw, is that in Reiki they do not do cleansing. They believe that the energy will flow to where it needs to. However, in Pranic Healing we believe that strategic areas of the body control strategic organs, so with properly cleansing, you speed up the absorption of energy.

In Pranic Healing, we also emphasize what is called "healer hygiene" or "etheric hygiene." When healers heal other people, they have a tendency to absorb and eventually have the problem of the people they worked on. In Pranic Healing, if they follow the stringent instructions, that doesn't happen. So we go through a big set of self-cleansing exercises, self-protection exercises and breathing exercises to prevent that from happening. Not only do healers appreciate that, we've also taught that to nurses and doctors and even church people, and they notice that since they've practiced that technique, they don't absorb the pain and the problems of the patients anymore.

Another big difference is that in Pranic Healing we use colors. We visualize certain colors that the body absorbs to speed up the healing process. In Reiki and other modalities, they usually don't use colors. A very simple example is when a person is constipated, energetically the navel chakra, the energy center by the belly button, does not produce enough orange energy. With proper breathing exercises and focusing on that color, through your mind and through your hands to that navel area, within a few minutes the person will be running to the bathroom. What you are doing is using the colors that your body normally manufactures and processes to speed up the healing process.

Why did you make the decision to become a teacher of healing?
Master Co: The choice was made for me. (Laughter.) After I worked on my wife, I started working on more people. And I asked Grandmaster Choa, "Hey, do you think people will be open to this in the United States?"

He said, "Yeah, go teach."

So I came out. I wasn't really serious about it. I just said, "OK, I'll give it a try." I started healing people and then I said, "OK, we'll put together a class." So we invited a church to see if they would be interested in hosting us. I didn't really expect much of it. They said yes, so that's where we started. That was in 1990 and we're still teaching.

I've read that your teacher, Grandmaster Choa, has said that everyone has the innate ability to heal and relieve pain.
Master Co: Absolutely.

Why don't we all know this?
Master Co: Oh, we do know it, subconsciously. If you think about it, when you cut yourself, when something happens to you that's not too severe, you'll notice that if you don't do anything, the body will heal itself. It's just that a lot of people don't really know that this is a process that can be duplicated.

If you really think about it, when a child hurts a hand or shoulder or something, they go to mommy and say, "Mommy kiss my hand or kiss my shoulder" to make it better, and if you remember, it generally made it better, because when the mother kisses the hand there's lots of love, and love is a form of energy. Or let's say you burn yourself, and then you blow on your hand. True, the breath has a cooling effect, but out of your breath comes energy.

So, people have hints and ideas that there is some healing technique, but what we do is put it together into a system. As long as you can understand and follow simple instructions and do the breathing exercises, anybody can heal.

I was talking to Dr. Robins and he said that it was understood that the body heals itself, but it was implied throughout medical school to do healing properly, you will need drugs and surgery to intervene. So when he was working in the hospital, and using drugs and surgery to the max, some patients started to suffer. That's why he started to study healing. He tried hypnotherapy and other forms of therapy, just to be able to help his patients, and then he stumbled onto Pranic Healing.

He said, "OK, I'll try it on my patients in the hospital." And when he started noting results, that's when he called us to attend a class formally. So that's how we came together. Eventually we talked about it and he said he wanted to share his expertise as a medical doctor to validate what Pranic Healing can do. That's where the book Your Hands Can Heal You came from.

In terms of self-healing, what is required to be able to do this?
Master Co: What we try to do in Pranic Healing is match the session or the energetic treatment with a physical problem. For example, perhaps we are called to give the body lots of energy. Maybe a person has lots of fatigue, and because of that fatigue, different parts of their body are aching and it manifests as arthritis. What we try to do is teach patients Tibetan breathing exercises that will literally, within five minutes, give them so much more energy. Now, if it's just that a person has arthritis or a topical problem, then we teach certain techniques on how to remove the blockage using their hands, how to use visualization to see the energy coming in through their body and flowing into the area, making it stronger. The whole time this is being done, all the person really has to do is to focus on the technique and where to apply the technique. Self-healing is actually pretty easy.

You're not actually healing a person, but you're actually teaching them to heal themselves.
Master Co: Absolutely. You know, if you really think about it, healing always is being done by the body itself. We are just facilitators. Energy comes from everywhere. It comes from God, higher sources, from the environment and all we need to do is to just let that energy flow smoothly through the body and the body knows what to do with it.

If everybody understood this ability of self-healing, how would it change the health care system here in America?
Master Co: If the ones who are already sick really understood it deeply, they would realize that they could help themselves and stop relying so much on other people, and their health should improve. As far as everybody else, there should be fewer visits to the hospital, fewer problems with minor aches and pains. When it's more severe, then, as we always do in Pranic Healing, you ask the help of a medical doctor. We take the integrative approach.

Just to clarify, in Pranic Healing we realize there is not just one factor when it comes to healing. There are actually seven factors involved in healing. I'll just go through them very quickly:

1. The receptivity of the patient or the subject is very, very important. There are people who have a vested interest in staying sick. Either they get more attention or they're being funded, getting paid by the insurance company, to stay sick. So when you work with these people, no matter what you do, they don't want to get well. So that's a factor.

2. The second factor is how good the healer is, and whether the healer is thorough when you're healing yourself or when people are healing you. If they're thorough and they do the job well, there is a higher probability of healing.

3. The third factor to consider is how severe the problem is. The more severe the problem, the more energy is required and the more sessions are required.

4. The fourth factor is the age of the patient. The younger the person, everything else being equal, the faster their body will absorb energy. However, we've been able to circumvent this by having the patient do Tibetan breathing exercises that make their energy centers and their energy channels mimic that of a younger person. When that happens, we are amazed that the person's body starts healing like that of a younger person.

5. The next factor to be considered is the environment. If a person wants to quit smoking (which can be achieved using energy) but if everybody at home and at work smokes, the probability of that person quitting is a lot less. Or if a person has severe back pain and his job requires that he carry heavy objects most of the day, the healing is not going to work. If a person gets a lot of infections and the home is not sanitized, I don't care how good you are at healing. He or she is not going to get well.

6. Consider the emotional/mental factor. When people harbor a lot of resentment and anger, they're almost impossible to heal. Anger and resentment really clog and block the heart and solar plexus charkas. You can clean them up and move the blockage, and temporarily the person will feel better. Within a few minutes, they get blocked again. If there's no inner change or transformation on their part, it's almost impossible to heal. Some people are very negative, and the energy does not penetrate deeply into their body and there is not much healing. Your chakras have not only physical functions, but psychological functions. When you say somebody has a big heart, you don't mean that they have heart-enlargement problem, what you mean is they have a generous heart. When the heart chakra is not being generous with love and all these other things, it gets clogged, and the physical heart will become affected. Emotions definitely play a big role, but they're not the only factor. Unfortunately most people think that emotions are the only factor. We do not agree.

7. The last factor to consider is karma. There are people that no matter what you do, they're not meant to get well at that time. So, what we do with those people is we teach them how to do service. We teach them to give money to charity. We teach them to give their time towards community service and help other people who are suffering. As they do that, they generate good karma to help other people, which invokes blessings for themselves.

And it can transform their healing by doing that.
Master Co: In many ways. Their attitude changes, and karmically, they're entitled to get well.

I understand that your Pranic Healing course is very experiential. What can a person expect to experience during the course?
Master Co: First, we expect them to be able to practice with a partner. We talk about the principles and we experiment with this, letting them feel the energy. We have them work in pairs, and then after that we drill them in exercises. We start with the 10 most common problems people have -- anything from abdominal discomfort to anxiety, to chest pain, to sinusitis, arthritis, and so on -- and we'll let them work on each other so they experience what we can do. Then we get volunteers who have pains and discomforts and we demonstrate on them in class. We want to make sure that the person experiences rather than just has theoretical learning.

What will participants be able to do at the end of the class?
Master Co: If the person practices and if the person they're working with is willing and receptive, the student just coming out of class should be able to make someone who has headaches, slight back pain, aching joints, feel better within half an hour.
We had an unusual case that doesn't happen all the time. One of the students had a person come to her with severe emphysema. The subject worked in a cement factory for 30 years with no mask. The doctor gave her three months to live because the lungs looked like bones when they X-rayed her. So the student followed the technique on respiratory system, not expecting anything, and the lady started coughing violently, I mean literally phlegm and cement mixed together were coming out of her nose and her mouth. And after about the third session, she went back to the doctor and he said the lungs were clear.

The interesting part of the whole thing is, the student just took the class the week before. The key is, if we just learn how to follow simple instructions, the body knows how to heal itself. Just give it what it needs.

And like you said, there are other factors. That woman was probably highly receptive to what was going on and there were other factors that helped out.
Master Co: Well, desperate patients heal quickly, because in their mind they don't sit there and doubt you and complain. They just say, "OK, whatever needs to be worked on." They're open to it, so that makes a big difference.

What was the most incredible thing you've seen during a healing session?
Master Co: I've seen one where the lady was 72 years old with a 90 percent heart blockage, and the doctors said, "We have to do surgery. But, because of your age there's a 20 percent chance of survival." I mean those are not good odds. So, they ask for healing. We did what we could. We said, "We'll do our best and let's see what happens." And that's always the attitude that we tell the students. You do your best, you do your job, let's see what happens.

Four days later, just before I went on my book tour last year, they went to the hospital again to do the angiogram just to check to see how everything was before surgery, and the blockage was gone. I was really surprised.

One of the testimonials in the book was from a lady who was completely blind in one eye. She came in and said she really didn't believe anything could be done, but give it a try. I said, "Well, I've never done this before." In the back of mind I was thinking, if she's already blind in that eye, I can't make it any blinder, so what do I have to lose? So we did the protocol for eye problems and eye techniques and I said, "OK, let's see what happens." Forty-five minutes later, she could see out of that eye.

I always tell my students, "Look, as often as this happens to me, it still shocks the heck out of me." It's just amazing how the body can heal itself if you just simply apply the proper techniques. I've seen that happen to many of our students who have practiced it. This healing ability should not be just for a few elite. It should be available for everyone.

Are you finding that some doctors come to your course?
Master Co: We have a lot of doctors and nurses attending the course. In fact, I remember I was talking to one of the doctors last week who attended a class.

I said, "You know, it's interesting about therapeutic touch, Healing Touch, and Reiki, as these are very popular with nurses, but I noticed that Pranic Healing has a tendency to be popular with doctors."

And she said, "It's probably because doctors don't like to touch."

I said, "Really, that's interesting!"

We also have a lot of engineers take the class. That's the interesting part. We have a lot of people who are very technical seem to get drawn to Pranic Healing. What they usually say is what I experienced: Pranic Healing is very pragmatic. It's step by step. There's a protocol. It does not rely on blind faith, and we basically say, "This is the condition of the body. This is what you do. This is the effect you're supposed to expect." And people can understand that process, and I think that's probably how medical doctor thinks, too.

Your Grandmaster mentioned in the introduction of your book that as we heal ourselves, we heal the world. Can you explain what he meant by that?
Master Co: Yes. I'm sure you've read the micro is reflected in the macro, and vice versa. We are part of a big, big being called the planet Earth. We are like cells to a big, big person. Whatever we do affects other people. We are swimming in this so-called planetary energy field, so when we heal ourselves, when we correct our thought process, when we try to be more positive, when we try to be more loving, we might not think it affects other people, but it really does.

As we try to do things to have an inner transformation, inner change, it has ripples that affect other people. For example, you will notice that when you walk in with a more positive attitude and you don't listen to people's negative thoughts, eventually those other people seem to be transformed little by little, because what we do reverberates through our energy field and affects other people. Now, could you imagine if more people were to do meditation, to do self-healing, practice compassion and heal other people? As this spreads quickly, it has a compounding affect. So, literally, as we change ourselves on a small scale, we are actually creating a change in the bigger scale. That's the change in consciousness. That's my interpretation of what my teacher says.

As the Dalai Lama says, "World peace through inner peace."

Tim Miejan is editor of The EDGE. Contact him at (651) 578-8969, toll-free 1 (888) 776-7616 or e-mail editor@edgenews.com
Copyright © 2004 Tim Miejan

Oct 2004