From Faith Healing to Spirit Energy:
A Journey of Self-Healing

By Megan Woolever

As an infant I was miraculously healed of a debilitating illness. As a result, I have spent my life trying to understand that mystery and the energy behind it. I spent years in church, seminary and meditation trying to figure out this thing called "spirit" or "energy" from which healing seems to arise, regardless of culture, religion or belief. What I have discovered is that healing is a universal gift of which we are all recipients. You don't have to be a spiritual master to heal. All you need is an open mind, curiosity, and dedication to the process. This is my healing story.

I was introduced to faith healing at an early age. With only a few months under my belt, recurring fevers and infections became a constant source of worry in my small but determined life. The doctors said it was my bladder, a faulty valve, a defect. Surgery was recommended.

My Pentecostal Christian family didn't like the sound of that. They figured their faith was bigger than my tiny bladder. They laid their hands on me and prayed. I never had that operation. And although my family jokes that I've never met a bathroom I didn't like, my bladder to this day works just fine.

When you grow up hearing a miracle story that involves you, you tend to take for granted the power we all have inside of us to heal. However, the only context I had for understanding this healing energy was through the Pentecostals, and the "moving of the Holy Spirit." So healing energy became a Christian God, and, more specifically, a kind of God who had lots of rules. I became obsessed with doing things right. Honoring the gift of healing I had been given by showing my obedience.

But true gifts don't come with strings attached. You don't owe anyone anything for them. They just are. Somehow, deep down inside, I knew what I felt was real and that anyone could feel it too, if they just opened up to it.

However, the primary place I felt a connection to this healing spirit was at church, particularly through the laying on of hands. Standing in the middle of a group of people with their hands laid on you in prayer, and whose focused intention is your well being, sent waves of powerful energy through my body and often brought me to tears. So for years I tried to rationalize the rules and obey them.

Yet privately, I began to experiment with ways to access this power outside of the supervision of church. I spent a lot of time sitting on the roof of my house watching the stars, or in the branches of my favorite tree singing softly to it. Many a night I lay in bed and using my "imagination" I visualized ways in which I could make things different in my life. I used my feelings to put myself in specific scenarios and then gave myself the power to direct and change them. My dream life became vivid.

Often on long car trips with my family I would leave the car, and in my minds eye live other lives, simply by putting on a walkman and losing myself in the music. Somewhere in the space between the notes, I found the gateways to other realms. So real were those journeys, in fact, that I became quite adept at manipulating my dreams. The lines between waking-life dreams and dreamtime dreams were often fuzzy.

Growing up sensitive in a society that idealized characters like Rambo and James Bond, meant I placed a lot more value in my visualized worlds than in the one I was presented with. I always felt that somehow I had been misplaced. I had been meant for the world in which art and music and literature were the voice of god, yet these were the very things that my church told me were wrong, secular, heathen. I spent my teenage years perplexed.

Why did my heart soar at the sound of Ravel's Bolero? How could deep awe and reverence engulf me at the sight of Rodin's sculptures? These were emotions reserved for a church service! It made no sense to me.

As much as I wanted to remain connected to the spirit that I felt at church, my growing dis-ease with the politics of religion urged me to explore. I began to cultivate friendships with people that I respected, regardless of their religious affiliation.

I chose the Episcopal church for the next leg of my journey, chiefly based on their open attitude towards women in the church and homosexuality. Their sense of ritual and ceremony fed my artistic nature and their warm embrace of my individualism made me feel at home.

However, although there were fewer rules in the Episcopal world, it felt like they were still acting as if Jesus was the only way through which people found truth, and I had grown increasingly suspicious about that. So I enrolled in Seminary, determined to understand this dynamic.

In Seminary I realized that although I greatly respected the life and teachings of Jesus, I no longer felt an allegiance to only him. Looking back, I realize my allegiance had always been to the Spirit, the fire, the light inside of me, rather than to an entity or group.

I became fascinated with the idea that the Christian religion was a deliberately constructed system. I learned that back in the days of the early church, there were many different ways through which people accessed light or spirit. However, a specific group of men hundreds of years ago decided that they knew which ways were "right" and which ways were "wrong," and they put a label on it and called it Christianity. I dove into the world of women's studies and universalism.

By the end of seminary I had spent so much time in libraries, debates and lecture halls that I felt I had successfully exorcised myself of all of the legalism of my youth. However, along with it went most of the original spirituality that I had felt as well. In order to arrive at a more logical and rational statement of my beliefs, I did away with every shred of mystery and intuition from which I had previously operated. At least I thought I had.

I spent the next seven years or so wrestling with this freedom. Without a spiritual connection to guide me, I took matters into my own hands, and tried to figure out my personal ethic from a place of logic and rational mind. I jumped on the dot-com bandwagon and sold myself to corporate America. I lived for all of the things that I had previously denied myself. However, I also began to choose relationships where I felt like I was needed or where I could help. This quickly led to imbalance in my life.

After a couple of abusive relationships, resulting in a near death experience, I found that in the middle of all my pain and attempts to prove the religion of my youth wrong, there was a part of me that was still gently whispering about things larger than myself. It was that same pillar of light, centered in my heart, which no amount of self-loathing, codependence or despair could destroy.

I began my healing journey through yoga. The energy centers in my body began to wake up and talk to me. I began to discern emotional centers in my body that held different feelings and different messages. I began to learn about my chakras. I went on yoga retreats. I was hungry to learn more about this energy in my body that felt so similar to my Pentecostal experience, and yet held none of the baggage. I studied Celtic Shamanism. This led me to Reiki, literally translated as "spirit energy."

Eventually, I enrolled in a Zen Shiatsu massage program to learn more about the meridians, the energy lines of the body. I also received my first Reiki attunement. That's when the fun began.

I realized that the spirit energy that I had been experiencing my whole life, initially through the laying on of hands and prayer, was not owned or even invented by the Pentecostals. In fact, it wasn't even Christian, per se. It was universal, available to anyone and everyone interested.

I began to heal the deep wounds that I had accumulated. And through my own healing I began to learn how to hold space for others to heal. I realized that all along I had been a healer. The desire to help others find the healing light within them had been so strong in me that I had taken on relationship after relationship with people that needed to heal their own deep wounds in an attempt to help them heal. Once that piece fell into place I found the key I had been looking for.

My proper role, my calling, was as a teacher of self-healing. Having begun to acknowledge and heal my own doubts, fears and wounds, I could support and validate that journey in others. And the way in which I needed to do that was not through fixing people, but through gently supporting their unique process of self-discovery and empowerment.

I have always seen the best in people. That is my gift. I look for their soul's purpose, the divine blueprint of who they are apart from the wounds that layer upon them. I hold space for their lessons, the parts of them that have come into this life to be healed, so that they can fully express their soul.

My healing journey has included a lot of hands on training, many realms of spiritual study and divination, and many systems of healing. I now realize that the term "faith healer" is not a bad thing at all. What is faith? At its core, I believe, it is the focused intention of thought used to manifest. The key is to be open to whatever shows up. And if we do have faith, really believe that our thoughts have the power to create our reality, we can focus that faith on our ability to heal ourselves, and activate that core of healing light, that gift, latent inside of each of us.

Recently, I have become an arm-chair physicist. Books on quantum physics and altered states of consciousness clutter my house. I am troubled by the thought that science has become the religion of our times. If it can't be categorized and measured, then it is not "real." And yet it seems like every day there are new discoveries, new information that challenges that model. Books like the "Tao of Physics" and movies like "What the bleep do we know?" speak to a world where science and faith are not enemies, but simply two different ways of talking about the same thing. Manifestation.

Through my experience of hypnotherapy, energy work and intuitive guidance, I have found that the power of the mind, when guided by the divine blueprint of the soul, and integrated with the energy of the body, can transform lives. You do not need to be a spiritual master to transform your life. All you need is an open mind, curiosity, and dedication to the process. Healing is not a place at which we arrive. It is the process of living our life aware of our potential power and truth, listening to our wise and loving self, our Intuition, and daring to believe that we can effect a change in our lives through opening to our birthright, our spirit energy.