Infinite Grace: Where the Worlds of Science and Spiritual Healing Meet by Diane Goldner

From the Publisher

This complete review of the field of spiritual healing, from its historical aspects to the modern integration of physics and energy medicine, presents numerous case histories and medical studies as well as tips for healing or choosing a healer.

Publishers Weekly

On assignment for a magazine, Goldner got to know four prominent subtle energy healersRosalyn Bruyere, Barbara Brennan, Jason Shulman and Amy Skezaswho have earned recognition in alternative health circles for their successful treatment of heart disease and cancer, and for their life-extending ministering to AIDS patients. She studied their methodology and techniques, reviewed the results andafter benefiting from successful treatments for her migraines and mental outlookconverted from a skeptical investigator to an unconditionally enthusiastic advocate of spiritual healing. Her reservations about the profit motivations of these healers cast a small shadow on her tribute, however. All of her subjects appear to be adept at business and operate lucrative four-year training programs that graduate hundreds of practitioners a yearone leader reputedly nets more than a million dollars annually. Although establishing the legitimacy of auric healing in the mainstream medical community is Goldners foremost concern, her logic is hard to follow. For example, when she intersperses excerpts from interviews with scientists and secondary sources to set up a comparison between electromagnetic frequencies and the love frequencies used for healing, the arguments are discontinuous. She is on the mark, however, when she quotes quantum physicist Max Planck, who wrote that science progresses funeral by funeral, and cites some of the great scientific discoveries that were first condemned and later accepted, long before they were ever proven. Statistical graphs not seen by PW. (May)

What People Are Saying

Mehmet Oz
I love Infinite Grace. . . .[Diane Goldner] has done society a good deed with this book.
—author, Healing From the Heart

Christiane Northrup
Infinite Grace is absolutely wonderful. Reading it filled me with hope, awe and gratitude. It's a roadmap to the unknown and unrecognized power within us all.
—Christiane Northrup, M.D.Author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

Nicholas Cimorelli
This work is particularly inspired. Reading it I felt I was actually embraced with Grace. I have a feeling that Diane Goldner has really been sent to us as a messenger.
—Nicholas Cimorelli, Host of Health Action, WBAI-NY

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Chapter One

    Initiation

    NORMALLY, DR. JONATHAN KRAMER, a radiologist at the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, began his day at 8 A.M. and often worked for the next ten hours without a break. But December 2, 1996, was no ordinary day. Kramer, thirty-eight, was about to face his own mortality.

    Kramer was a classic "type A." Lean and athletic, with short brown hair and a friendly open face, he had a take-charge manner that inspired confidence. He was an achiever, although you couldn't locate the quality any one place on his five foot, ten inch frame. It was perhaps best expressed in his effortless motion. He thrived on pushing himself as hard as he could. And although he worried about things, he thought of himself as leading a charmed life.

    He had been a clinical instructor in radiology at Harvard Medical School until he left Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston in 1993 to go into private practice at Berkshire. When he wasn't competing in a triathalon or tearing up the basketball court, he wrote scholarly papers for publications such as The American Journal of Neuroradiology and Stroke, contributed to radiology textbooks, and taught continuing medical education classes at Harvard. Getting married two years earlier to Maria, a psychotherapist, had hardly slowed his pace. The birth of their daughter, Raphaela, in 1995, only made him feel more urgent about providing for his new family.

    Kramer thought of the radiology department as the nerve center of the hospital. Likeclockwork, when a patient had a problem, doctors ordered pictures of the brain, the heart, the spine, the legs, the stomach, the lungs, wherever the trouble seemed to be. The internists and other specialists worked with the patients, but it was radiologists like Kramer who typically made the diagnosis. He spent his days doing delicate invasive procedures like angiograms and mylograms. He always took the sickest patients, the ones most at risk for complications. Kramer liked that kind of challenge. The other doctors were just as happy to let him have them.

    Working hard came naturally to Kramer, the son of a neurologist father and a mother who had survived the Holocaust to become an executive secretary who took shorthand in six languages. He had graduated from Downstate Medical School, in Brooklyn, New York, in 1982 and had done his residency and fellowship at Downstate Medical Center. The center's doctors treated so many gunshot wounds and poor people deprived of regular medical care that European governments sent up-and-coming army doctors there to train in battlefield medicine. The physicians there saw everything. And they learned fast. Kramer loved it. He could not have dreamed of a better place to earn his stripes.

    But now he had the disquieting feeling that he was about to face a different kind of challenge. For the last few days he had not felt well. It wasn't anything dramatic. On Saturday he had gone for a four-mile run. When he got home his heart was beating fast, and it was still beating fast the next day. An elevated heart rate was not normal in a man his age—or for that matter, any age. His appetite hadn't been so great, either. During Thanksgiving dinner, his father-in-law had asked if something was wrong. Kramer usually ate more than anyone else.

    Kramer lived with Maria and Raphaela in an old colonial house with lots of doors and windows at the end of a dead-end dirt road in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the kind of house Kramer had always dreamed of owning. It was in the center of town, but it was on two-thirds of an acre of wooded land. It was just five minutes from Berkshire where Kramer worked. From the windows of the hospital, he could even see the Taconic and Berkshire mountains off in the distance. He did not want anything to upset this beautiful life he had worked so hard to create.

    By midmorning Kramer couldn't stand the suspense. Something was very wrong; he wanted to know what. He had had a physical on Monday, but the internist couldn't find anything. All his tests had come back normal except for the sedimentation rate of his red blood cells, which was elevated. But that didn't mean much; the sedimentation rate could be raised by almost anything, including arthritis. Tomorrow he faced an appointment with an infectious disease doctor. Working in a hospital, Kramer could have picked up tuberculosis or the Epstein-Barr virus. He knew the doctor would need chest X-rays. So he ordered his own.

    When the processor spit the film out, he and the technologist saw it at the same time: a white mass next to the heart, between the heart and the root of the lung vessels on the right side. He watched the technologist's jaw drop. "Oh God," Kramer thought. But then he had a second thought: "Thank God." Something about his life was going to have to give now. He'd known for a long time that he needed to make some kind of change.

    A few hours later, the oncologist diagnosed Kramer with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Working with radiation might have caused it, which was a frightening thought—the very thing Kramer had always feared. Yet if you had to have cancer, Hodgkin's disease was one of the most treatable.

    The next morning, tests confirmed the diagnosis: Kramer's cancer had reached Stage 3B. His oncologist told him the odds were 75 percent in his favor. That also meant, Kramer realized, that he had a 25 percent chance of dying. He started chemotherapy almost immediately. Altogether he would get twelve rounds of ABVD (adriamycin bleomycin vinblastine dacarbazine), an aggressive blast of poison to be injected every two weeks. But it was no guarantee. He still might die.

    On January 6, after his second shot of chemo, just a month after his diagnosis, Kramer flew to Los Angeles with Maria and Raphaela to see the Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere, one of the most powerful spiritual healers in the West. Some might dismiss the trip as a desperate effort by a man facing death. After all, haven't terminally ill patients been seeking miracles for centuries? But Rosalyn Bruyere was not peddling miracles.

    With auburn hair, a big aura, and a big sense of humor, Bruyere is literally and metaphorically larger than life. Born just after the end of World War II, Bruyere knows more about the anatomy of the human aura than almost anyone practicing energy healing today, at least in the West. In more than thirty years of practice, she has laid hands on thousands of people suffering from everything from cataracts and arthritis to cancer and AIDS. She also is a scholar and practitioner of the esoteric teachings of nearly every faith, including the religions of ancient Egypt, Hinduism, various Native American tribes, the Bonpo of Tibet, and Christianity.

    Bruyere, the founder of the Healing Light Center Church in Los Angeles, keeps a low profile, but she has quietly treated some of the top stars in Hollywood, including Cher, Barbra Streisand, James Coburn, Frank Zappa, director Martin Scorsese, and, at the very end of his life, Sammy Davis, Jr. When Ellen Burstyn needed someone to teach her hands-on healing for the movie Resurrection, she turned to Bruyere, who acted as a technical adviser on the film. Bruyere has also been called on to counsel children abused by a satanic cult; to help, unofficially, in police work; and to use her clairvoyance to locate bombs when Los Angeles hosted the Olympic games.

    Stories of Bruyere's healing prowess are legion. I myself have seen her separate the fused spinal vertebrae of a young minister when doctors urged surgery, release the pain of a student's rectal surgery and the underlying childhood sexual abuse that Bruyere believed caused the pain, and elicit a long-repressed childhood incident in a young man merely because of the way the pattern of his aura shifted during a lecture. Students study with her for years without consistently getting the same effects in their own healing practices.

    "An everyday healing for Rosalyn is mind-blowing for everyone else," says Deborah East Keir, a registered nurse who has studied with Bruyere for more than a dozen years. Yet Bruyere never promises or predicts an outcome. She advises clients to follow their doctors' orders, urges them to have necessary surgeries, and never claims healing is a panacea for all physical ailments. Students of hers are no different from the rest of us. They have open heart surgery and hysterectomies. Bruyere herself sometimes limps from an arthritic hip. "On a good day," she likes to say, "you get a healing."

    Bruyere has influenced most of the healers in the United States, including many of the nurses who have studied Healing Touch, one school of energy healing. Even Barbara Brennan, who runs the largest school for "healing science," briefly studied with Bruyere and teaches the techniques she learned from her. Recognition of her gift crosses color lines and nationalities. The Sioux and the Hopi consider Bruyere a medicine woman. And the Bonpo, a pre-Buddhist Tibetan group, regard her as the living embodiment of a 4,000-year-old prophecy. Unlike some other American teachers, Bruyere has never trademarked or labeled her techniques, which derive from ancient traditions; she believes that anyone can channel the techniques and that these techniques cannot be owned by any one person.

    Bruyere has been poked and wired and tested and quizzed by scientists at UCLA and at the Menninger Clinic, where biofeedback was developed. Nobody has definitively measured subtle energy, what the Chinese call chi, or life force. But when Bruyere works on patients, she sometimes has voltage surges in the electrical potential on her skin that scientists cannot explain. Her brain wave pattern is typically theta, the pattern associated with a deep sleep state, but one that is also found in long-time meditators, yogis, and healers. "She lives and walks around in the dream world," says Nancy Needham, a healer in New Hampshire and an elder in Bruyere's church.

    Such laurels would mean nothing to Kramer's by-the-book colleagues at Harvard and Berkshire Medical. In 1997, Dr. Andrew Weil launched the program for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where Bruyere now guest lectures on energy anatomy each year. A handful of pioneering hospitals, including the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Stoney Brook in New York also have begun to offer energy healing and spiritual counseling in integrative and complementary care programs. But for a mainstream doctor or scientist at most hospitals to talk about "subtle" or "spiritual" or "bio" energy still is a little like being back in Galileo's day and suggesting that the Earth revolved around the sun. You could lose your funding, your job, and your reputation—the modern version of excommunication. Kramer knew this as well as anyone else. But he also felt that there was something to this chi.

    In his first year of medical school, Kramer had gone to the annual American Medical Students Association meeting in Denver. On a whim, he had signed up for an afternoon course on healing through prayer. At the time he had a compound fracture in his finger from a basketball injury. The doctors had told him he needed surgery, but they had said the best he could hope for was 50 percent use of the finger. The healer who spoke at this lecture, Hank Kowalsky, offered to help. He put a hand on Kramer's shoulder while six or so devout Christians gathered around and prayed to Jesus, which made Kramer a little uneasy. He had been raised in the Jewish faith, and had not previously had any direct experiences of other religions.

    "He did his thing for about ten minutes," recalls Kramer. "Within seven or eight seconds of these people doing their prayers, I felt heat in my finger. It went to the base of the finger, but didn't go up my arm." Kramer attributed these effects to hypnosis or suggestion. But the feeling persisted the next day, and the day after. And, strangely, his finger healed completely—without an operation.

    In his senior year of medical school, after a fellowship at the world-renowned Queens Square Neurological Institute in London, he met up with a cousin who taught him about chakras (energy vortices that run perpendicular to the spine and, according to Hindu tradition, that take in information and energy from the environment). Then he tried a chakra exercise with a friend; she keeled over from the force and started crying. When he heard about Bruyere in 1991, he decided to attend a workshop she gave in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

    At first, Kramer felt like an intruder. Bruyere's group was composed overwhelmingly of women; more than a few seemed angry at men. But he was mesmerized by Bruyere's view of how physical illnesses were connected to emotional, mental, and spiritual issues. These were things he had never read about in any medical book. Yet they had a compelling logic.

    Ever since, he had taken an intensive course with Bruyere once or twice a year. As a doctor, he longed to see someone jump off the table after a healing session and throw away their crutches. That never happened while he was in class. But he had seen Bruyere shrink Kaposi's sarcoma lesions right before his eyes. He had also seen her help a registered nurse with multiple personality disorder integrate her personality fragments over several years, at one point even watching Bruyere perform an exorcism in which she danced with a snake-like energy she released. And he had watched Bruyere work on a man so riddled with cancer that doctors had advised the man's wife to make the funeral arrangements. The next day the man looked infinitely better, and the following year and the year after that, he was very much alive. Kramer knew Bruyere was the real thing even if he didn't understand, as a scientist, exactly how chi worked.

    At the same time, a part of him held back. He was just curious. Experimenting. Watching. Waiting. Once, while Bruyere was channeling "Master Chang," who she claims is a 4,000-year-old Bonpo leader, Kramer asked about his career. "He said I could practice healing by focusing a healing intention or prayer on the patient whose film I was reading," Kramer recalls. "He suggested twenty minutes a day, two minutes a patient, ten patients a day." Kramer never really did it.

    But he did occasionally use subtle energy. When he did angiograms, he always prayed, asking for his hands to be guided. He had done 1,200 angiograms on people's heads and only had one complication, when he was supervising a fellow in training. The average doctor had a 1.5 percent complication rate, or 18 in 1,200. "I really haven't had any," says Kramer. "I consider that unusual. I thank my guides."

    Strangely, during that early channeling, Master Chang predicted that in four and a half years, Kramer's life would change. That was in May 1992, exactly four and a half years before Kramer was diagnosed with cancer. A friend reminded him of Master Chang's words just six months before the diagnosis by sending him a tape of the channeling.

    So he didn't totally believe. But he felt there was something to it. Either way, he was up against the wall. He had nothing to lose.

    Bruyere's Healing Light Center Church in Sierra Madre, California, is at the edge of the desert foothills that rise above Los Angeles. The garden apartment complex blends in with the leafy suburban surroundings. It was built in the 1920s to house a tuberculosis sanitarium and rests on a former Native American healing ground. On Easter Sunday Bruyere delivers a sermon in the inner courtyard. And late in the quiet of a summer afternoon, you can literally hear the vines grow; they sometimes stretch twelve inches in a single Southern California day. The spot was carefully chosen by Bruyere, who is ever conscious of the energy not only of people, but of places, things, and situations.

    Bruyere's small but cozy healing room is decorated with Egyptian papyrus scrolls and figurines, books on Native American and Egyptian religion and art, and pictures of friends and family, including Cher, the actress, and Cher's mother. But it is the massage table in the center of the room that is the focal point. Bruyere usually keeps a stuffed leopard on the table, which she uses underneath clients' knees to make them more comfortable.

    Bruyere, who travels around the United States and Germany to teach healing, doesn't see many patients any more. But she makes sure to maintain a small practice to keep her hands in, and her skills growing. She doesn't believe in being strictly an academic, a healer emeritus.

    Kramer arrived late in the afternoon with Maria and Raphaela. He was tightly wound. Raphaela, sitting with Maria, quickly began to amuse herself with some of Bruyere's invaluable sacred objects—toys to her. Bruyere, a doting grandmother to her own grandkids, didn't mind. Her attention was on Kramer. The actual work would be easy. She had done it thousands of times. But she also knew that the real issues weren't physical. On some level, so did Kramer.

    "This is pretty big stuff when your body tells you that your job is killing you in a very specific way," says Bruyere. "You're pretty much going to have to deal with all your core assumptions." She sees body, mind, and soul as inextricably linked. She saw the tumor as a message from Kramer's soul.

    When Bruyere put her hands on his chest and his abdomen, the energy field around her fingers extended deep into Kramer's body. Kramer had never felt the tumor growing inside him. But now it was as if Bruyere had electrified it. He experienced a tugging sensation, a localized tightness where the mass was, with the sensation radiating up the right side of his neck. With these "energy fingers," Bruyere says she could feel the energy of the tumor, get acquainted with it, and bring it up to the same energy state as the rest of his body, thus transforming it.

    "All tumors feel alike," she says. "They're slightly hot, slightly confused, slightly aggressive. They're extraordinarily quiet. If I was going to use the word noise, it would be `electronically,' where there's some static. You feel you're holding something that doesn't belong here." Visually, she says she could see "a black hole" in his chest.

    The cancer was speaking very specifically, lodged next to his heart. "It was the result of doing a practice his heart wasn't in. That's why it affected his heart," she says. "He was full of his own biases and his own notions of reality, many of which didn't serve him very well."

    As Bruyere ran chi into the tumor, Kramer talked about his longings and his frustration, as if the tumor was holding these pieces of his consciousness. "I think this is about my career," he would say. "Ah ha," Bruyere would answer, as she continued to run energy into his system, raising the energy state of the cancer cells as she did. "I was thinking of getting out of radiology. But I'm so stubborn," he added. She listened. She didn't set the agenda, but she went with him wherever he needed to go.

    "I should have learned this lesson a long time ago," Kramer said. He had been toying with energy healing for years, thinking it was real but keeping his distance, afraid to do something that his colleagues would think was foolish and compromise his standard of living. He was afraid to follow his own heart. And Bruyere answered, "You're right. You're stubborn." She allowed him to voice all his fears and anxieties, his guilt and his shame, going all the way back into his childhood.

    "The cancer is going to be done with you much sooner than you're done with it," she told him. Hearing those words for him was like drinking in joy. His whole body relaxed. For the first time since the diagnosis, he felt confidant that he would survive. Bruyere had worked with so many cases of cancer, Kramer felt he could trust her opinion. Plus, when Bruyere channeled energy, she included an energy that can only be described as love. It touched him at a level that chemotherapy could never reach.

    Each day, for a week, Kramer came back. They often had the same conversation, or variations of it. They talked about how he was diagnosing illnesses but was powerless to make a difference in the patients' outcomes. He did not have direct contact with the patients. Even if he did, in many cases there was not much a medical doctor could do for them. In the brain, where he often worked, there are not many things a Western physician can fix.

    Bruyere could see that his absolute faith in science and medicine was being shattered. He had devoted his life to medicine. But the radiation from his job very likely had helped cause his cancer. Now medicine couldn't necessarily save his life. And deep down he had never felt completely fulfilled by technological medicine, although he had reached the top of his profession.

    At times, he cried. "I was petrified. I was scared beyond description," he says. "It was the tension breaking. I was relieved that she was working on me. I had faith in her. I had been studying with her for five years, almost six years."

    As Bruyere charged Kramer's aura—using subtle energies scientists have yet to measure directly—she also engaged in a dialogue with the tumor. She says that in the beginning it's the same conversation with every tumor. "The conversation is like this: What are you doing here? Why did you come? Is there something you want to tell us? How can we help you? And what that tumor says back is, `I belong here. I need to be here. I'm serving a purpose.'"

    "You assure [the tumor cells] that it's not true," Bruyere continues. "You say, `You're lost. You don't belong here.' It's actually a very strange kind of conversation," she admits. "I do it so automatically, I've never given it much thought. But it is strange, isn't it?"

    Bruyere then "told" the tumor telepathically that it was time to change. She ran a high frequency of subtle energy into the tumor cells, higher than they could tolerate. The tumor cells then transformed into healthy cells or were otherwise consumed by the body, she says.

    At the same time, Bruyere claims, she brought the subtle frequencies of the chemotherapy and the tumor "closer" and made them more "attractive" to each other—to make the chemo "smarter" and more efficient. "I think chemotherapy is pretty much a proven technology," she says. "My biggest fear for Jonathan was that his biological system would somehow get the idea that medicine had betrayed him and that medicine was now dangerous. And I didn't want him to have that in there. I thought that was too dangerous a message for his body to carry."

    On the last day, she also talked to Kramer and Maria about their marriage. She could see the strain the cancer was putting on them. The level of fear Kramer was facing and the level of change he would have to go through before he emerged in a new psychic space were going to continue to stress the marriage, she warned them. She told Maria that she needed to take care of herself if the marriage was going to survive, advising, "As a partner, you have to pretend you are just as sick, and get just as much support." And she counseled them both, "Try to stay connected in sweetness."

    After returning to Pittsfield, Kramer had his first follow-up X-ray on January 15, 1997, less than a month into his six-month course of chemotherapy. The tumor was gone. He had had just two shots of chemotherapy. He says every oncologist he has talked to—and he has talked to at least a half-dozen—has said it was a very rapid response.

    As a doctor, he confesses, it was hard to believe. Typically, people who have a six-month course of chemotherapy have a follow-up CAT scan in three months. "They like to see some kind of response [to chemo] after three months," Kramer says. "Mostly after six months, it's gone."

    Kramer, however, was not leaving anything to chance. He finished his chemotherapy, losing his hair temporarily. Even so, he says, part of him did not want the chemotherapy treatments to end; he was terrified the cancer might come back. Occasionally, he felt the tugging sensation where the mass had been and worried that the tumor had returned. Bruyere assured him it was just scar tissue. Laying hands on him, she put an energy "cushion" around the scar. He has not felt it since.

    Without double-blind studies there is no way to prove what effect Bruyere's treatment had, says Kramer. "Who knows what saved my life. Was it Rosalyn or chemo? All I know is it was an extraordinarily quick response. But," he admits, "I'm certain Rosalyn had a big hand in this."

    Kramer says he feels the tumor has played an important role, putting him on the right path, and helping him to become more whole. He was forced to leave his radiology practice because continued exposure to radiation could stimulate a recurrence of lymphoma. Yet he has not stood still.

    Five months after completing chemotherapy, Kramer flew to Los Angeles to attend a practicum, taught by Bruyere, on healing terminally ill patients. On the plane Kramer was called on by the airline personnel to minister to a fellow passenger. The passenger, a former professional football player, then in his sixties, appeared to be in cardiac distress. Kramer worried that the man was going "to code"—have a heart attack. The passenger's pulse was 140 beats a minute, compared to the 70 beats a minute it should have been. His blood pressure was markedly elevated, too. He had discomfort in his chest. He also had a personal and family history of heart disease.

    Kramer gave the man a nitroglycerin pill from the airplane's emergency medical kit. Instead of putting it under his tongue, the man swallowed it and refused to take another. Without medicine, Kramer could only watch the man's condition, helplessly. A half hour passed without any change in the man's vital signs. Then Kramer had an idea. He put his hand on the man's heart and ran chi into it. Within ten minutes, the man's heart rate had dropped to 92 beats per minute and his blood pressure went from 186/130 to 150/108 millimeters of mercury.

    "The scientist in me says, `I don't know what to think of this,'" Kramer says. "But," he adds, "there's a good chance I prevented him from having a cardiac arrest."

    Kramer still doesn't know exactly what's next. Somehow, he wants to marry his skills as a medical doctor and an energy healer. But he doesn't know yet how that will look. He still has questions. "I want to be as good at energy healing as I am at radiology," he says. "I want to understand it scientifically, too."

    Kramer is far from alone. More and more people, including doctors, want to understand chi. "Sometime in the next 100 years, subtle energy will be the basis of medicine," predicts Bruyere. "It will be where people start from, before they learn about physical anatomy or biochemistry. Some people think energy is a metaphor. But it's real. It connects all the dots."

    Leading scientists are beginning to believe what healers and mystics have always said: the forces of mind and spirit are as real as gravity and atomic power. Yet this mysterious energy that most people can't touch or see still makes a lot of people nervous. The implications, after all, are enormous. If subtle energy and consciousness are as powerful as recent research and the experiences of people like Dr. Kramer suggest, the world will never be the same again. Love, it turns out, may be one of the most powerful physical forces in the universe.