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Page 264
Spiritual Practice
How does one learn to do spiritual healing? I recommend taking up a spiritual practice that has quieting the mind as its goal. The purpose of learning to stop one's thoughts, and turn one's attention away from physical sensations, is to cultivate an awareness of a greater consciousness, and create a receptivity in oneself for it to manifest.
A spiritual practice for healing should help a person learn how to be fully present in a peaceful, timeless state of awareness. That state of being brings an individual an experience of our interconnectedness, so the practice inherently nurtures a willingness to help people, and a reverence for mind-to-mind connections.
Stay with your spiritual practice, and read books written by other spiritual healers to give you confidence that healing is really possible. Spiritual healers whose writings have encouraged me include: Joel Goldsmith, Larry LeShan, Agnes Sanford, Kathryn Kuhlman, Murdo MacDonald-Bayne, Edgar Cayce, Edgar Jackson, Harry Edwards, Malcolm Southwood, and Gordon Turner. Authors Sally Hammond, Hans Holzer, and Harold Sherman have also written books about spiritual healing that I found interesting. One of our goals in writing this book is to show that we are all able to be instruments of healing. It is part of our natural heritage. It's part of what Patanjali, as well as Jesus and other spiritual masters, were trying to teach us.
Spiritual practice is not an intellectual exercise, although any focused activity, including intense thinking, can transport one's mind to a nonlocal, unself-conscious, timeless state of awareness. A spiritual practice is any process that trains people to shift their focus of attention away from past experiences and worries, future fears, and current thoughts or sensations to an ever-present state of just being. A healer obviously isn't in that state all the time  rather, healers know how to get there. When you are able to focus your attention on the here and now, you will have a thoughtless, peaceful mind. You will be at ease with yourself, as well as with others who come for healing. The other part of being a healer is simply caring enough to want to help.

 
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