The Mechanics

Be sure to read The Details below or this won’t work.

Feeling Healing starts with a quick set-up, called Rubbing Up. Take the flat of your hand and rub it up across your forehead from the eyebrows to the hairline.

Three phases follow. During all three phases you look straight ahead and rub your hands together without stopping.  Point your hands away from your body, not fingertips toward opposite wrist.

In Phase 1 you close your eyes and take one medium breath in, and then out.

In Phase 2 you open your eyes and blink them continuously while you take one medium breath in, then out.

In Phase 3 your eyes are open, not blinking, and you take one quick, shallow, easy breath in and out.

Now, stop rubbing your hands together and sit quietly for a few moments — 5-10 seconds, or even more.  Feel what’s happening inside.  This is important.  I have found that if I rush right into activity, the release doesn’t go as deep.  Patience, Grasshopper!

The Details

Rubbing up tells your nervous system what to focus on for the next 5 minutes or so. So before you rub up, think of the feeling you’d like to disappear. Make sure that it’s not just a thought, that you’re actually having the feeling. This takes a few seconds. Don’t over-think.

Rubbing up is great because it means that while you’re doing the rest of the process you don’t have to worry about remembering what you want to heal. Just forget it. Your nervous system remembers.

Feeling Healing is a little like rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time, except you’ve got three things driving you crazy instead of two: hands, breath and eyes.

Practice it slowly a few times before you start applying it to feelings. And don’t worry if you mess it up. Nothing bad will happen.

How to Practice

[Feel free to skip this section if you’re exceptionally coordinated 🙂 ]  Start by doing the elements in pairs. Rub your hands together while practicing the breaths. Remember that there are two types of breath — medium, and quick-shallow — and that the medium one is done twice. You’ll probably find this pretty easy.

Then practice the three eye phases while doing the three breaths. This will also probably be pretty easy, but do it anyway, because when you bring in the hands it can get tricky. Blink as fast as you comfortably can, but don’t try to set a speed record.

Now:  start rubbing your hands together; then close your eyes; then do the medium breath, in and out. Continuing to rub your hands, open your eyes and start blinking. AFTER you’ve started blinking take another medium breath, in and out. Let your eyes stop blinking, THEN do a quick, shallow breath, in-out.

You’re done.

Most people have the hardest time with the blinking phase.  You can spend as long as you need to on this while you’re practicing, and you can do it as slow as you like.  You don’t have to do all three phases all the time while you’re practicing.

Tips

See Handy Chart in the blue bar for a handy chart that lays it all out in a grid.

This is so easy that people often want to complicate it, usually by taking more quick-shallow breaths at the end, because they think, “I CAN’T be done so soon; I better keep going.” Don’t bother!

It is important, however, to breathe at the right point, which is only after you’ve got the hands and the eyes correct for the phase you’re in.

Feeling Healing works on only one feeling at a time.  Often we have more than one feeling about a situation, event or person.  Say you’re angry at somebody and you clear that feeling, but you still don’t feel great.  Feel into yourself.  You may discover that you’re also frustrated, or anxious, or shocked, or really anything at all. You won’t know until you look.

So, realize that you may need to go through several layers of feeling to get yourself back on an even keel. Also, sometimes two feelings are almost the same, but not quite.  You could feel lonely in one layer, and then abandoned in the next.  It seems like they should be the same thing, but sometimes they’re not.

How it Works

Nobody really knows how this works, except to say in the most general terms that the hands have at least three levels of the nervous system in them, plus a whole raft of acupuncture points, and both the breathing and the eyes are intimately hard-wired into the most primal recesses of the brain. My guess is that the amygdala, a primitive and essential structure in the brain, is being massaged in a way that makes it feel comfortable enough to let go of survival-related emotions.

Feedback

Please leave a comment if anything’s not clear.  I’m happy to answer your questions, and my goal is to get this explained so clearly that nobody will need to ask a question.

Also, if you want to share your results, you can leave a comment here or in Testimonials.