Book summary “Your hands can heal you”: summary

Introduction

You often suffer from persistent physical pain, emotional stress, and fatigue that conventional medicine struggles to resolve. Stephen Co and Eric Robins present Pranic Healing as a scientific energy medicine system that treats the human body by manipulating invisible life force.

You can use your hands to manipulate the invisible bio-energetic anatomy, remove emotional and physical congestion, and accelerate self-healing.

The book explains your energetic anatomy, the influence of the unconscious mind on physical health, and precise techniques to clear dirty energy. You learn how to apply colored pranas, maintain energetic hygiene, and connect physical vitality with spiritual growth.

The book answers several key questions:

• What is your invisible energetic anatomy?
• How do emotions create physical illness?
• How do you scan and clean your aura?
• What causes your personal energy depletion?
• How do you accelerate your natural healing?

1. Your Energetic Anatomy

The human body possesses an energetic anatomy of chakras, meridians, and auras that acts as a template for physical health.

Pranic Healing differentiates itself from other energy medicines through external energy generation and specific cleaning techniques. Unlike internal energy generation systems like chi kung, Pranic Healing teaches practitioners to draw energy from external sources such as air, sun, and earth. It also incorporates precise scanning, sweeping of dirty energy, energizing, colored pranas, and energetic hygiene. Grandmaster Choa published his first book and held his first workshop in the Philippines in 1987. Pranic Healing spread to the United States in 1990.

Illnesses appear in the human energy body before they physically manifest. The energetic anatomy acts as a mold or template for the physical body. A disturbance, blockage, or imbalance in the energy body precedes physical symptoms, and treating problems at the energetic level heals the physical body. Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui detected a liver energy imbalance in a heavy drinker who had normal blood test results, and several months later the man developed severe hepatitis.

The Energy Body Template

The energetic anatomy consists of chakras, meridians, and three concentric auras. The energy field is composed of eleven major chakras which act as power transformers, meridians which serve as energy channels, an inner aura extending about five inches out, an outer aura extending up to several feet, and a health aura made of two-foot-long rays radiating from body pores. There are 11 major chakras in the energetic anatomy. There are 14 total major power centers including front and back aspects of the heart, solar plexus, and spleen. The inner aura extension in a healthy adult is 5 inches. The health aura features 2-foot-long rays.

Self-healing operates on basic principles where energy flow creates health and disturbances cause disease. Health is maintained when energy flows properly and the aura is clean. Disease results from congestion or depletion. Furthermore, energy follows thought, the body moves toward homeostasis, and physical ailments are often rooted in stored negative thoughts and emotions.

Prana Sources and Hand Sensitivity

Prana is absorbed from three main sources and varies in vibration frequency. Living things absorb air prana through respiration, ground prana through feet and soil, and solar prana through sunlight. Higher-frequency prana is finer and used for spiritual development and delicate healing, while lower-frequency prana increases physical power. Clear clean water can be left in the sun for 24 hours to obtain solar prana.

Practitioners can detect their own prana by sensitizing their hand chakras through specific physical movements and breathing. A simple exercise involving tongue placement, deep breathing, wrist rolls, hand openers, and arm shakes opens the hand chakras to feel energy resistance or tingling between the palms.

• Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth just behind the hard palate and keep it there throughout.
• Take four slow, deep breaths, breathing in and out all the way down to the bottom of your lungs through your nose.
• Extend arms straight out at shoulder height and roll hands at the wrists 10 times in both directions in small circles.
• Open and close your hands vigorously 10 times.
• Bring fists up near your shoulders with the back of your hands facing away, snap arms down flicking fingers open at the bottom, and back up 10 times quickly.
• Extend hands in front with palms about 3 inches apart and press the thumb of each hand into the center of the opposite palm.
• Hold elbows close to the waist with forearms parallel to the ground, palms facing each other about 3 inches apart, close eyes, and focus lightly on palm centers for about 30 seconds.
• Move arms in and out a few inches from each other in slow motion without meeting for about 30 seconds to sense resistance, heat, or buzzing.

2. The True Nature of Your Mind

The unconscious mind protects you by clamping down muscles and suppressing painful emotions, which generates functional disorders and energy blockages.

Seventy percent of visits to primary care physicians involve functional disorders. Tests reveal no virus, bacteria, or structural abnormality, yet you suffer real pain. The unconscious mind suppresses painful thoughts and emotions to protect you, creating a functional boundary that restricts prana flow and causes illness. Ninety-two percent of prostatitis cases have no associated infection according to urological studies.

A 37-year-old man had chronic prostatitis for 17 years with no associated infection. After one session using direct clearing methods to address pent-up anger toward his abusive mother, he became symptom-free.

Neuropeptides act as biochemical messengers of emotion, providing a physiological link between the mind and every cell. Dr. Candace Pert discovered that these messenger molecules carry commands from the brain and match specific receptors on cells throughout the immune, endocrine, and autonomic nervous systems. These molecules form a psychosomatic communication network.

The unconscious mind regulates involuntary bodily functions, stores memories and emotions, controls prana flow, and strives to protect you from harm. It manages heartbeat and blood flow, archives history, distributes prana through the energy body, and uses suppression to shield you from emotional pain.

Functional Disorders and Emotions

The unconscious mind protects you from trauma by clamping down on smooth or striated muscles, causing localized hypoxia and pain. This constricts muscles to prevent painful memories or negative emotions like anger from surfacing. Dr. John Sarno treats chronic back and limb pain by recognizing it as Tension Myofascial Syndrome, rejecting the idea that anatomical defects like slipped discs are the primary cause of pain. Forty to 50 percent of middle-aged people with no back pain have a slipped disk on an MRI scan. Dr. John Sarno achieved an 88 percent cure rate and 10 percent much improved rate among 20,000 chronic pain patients without surgery.

Conscious denial methods fail to yield lasting results. Communicating properly with the unconscious mind through direct and indirect clearing achieves true integration. Denying, diverting, and distracting are conscious attempts to fight an unconscious problem, increasing resistance. Direct clearing methods use nonjudgmental awareness to starve a blockage of energy. Indirect methods like pranic breathing or meditation provide healthful benefits that gradually clear emotional blockages. A patient with high blood pressure, asthma, and migraines lowered her blood pressure from her lifetime minimum of 170/95 down to 146/78 simply through self-awareness and acceptance of her negative emotions.

Clearing Negative Emotions

You can resolve chronic physical symptoms and eliminate emotional blockages by engaging your unconscious mind through structured self-awareness and higher-level thinking.

A male patient suffering from colitis and lower back pain used self-awareness to identify anger toward his wife during a dinner party, acknowledged the feeling without acting out, and resolved his chronic physical symptoms.

You can perform the self-awareness exercise for 10 to 20 minutes to clear negative emotions and limiting beliefs:

• Sit in a comfortable chair. You should be relaxed, and the room can be darkened. You don’t want to be so relaxed or the room so dim that you fall asleep, however.
• Close your eyes. Take eight deep breaths in order to relax further. Breathe slowly and deeply into your lungs.
• Begin by relaxing your body, one part at a time, working from toes to head or head to toes, noting each part for a few seconds and saying silently that it is completely relaxed while breathing in relaxation and breathing out tension.
• In this quiet state, notice what you are feeling and where in your body you feel it by conducting an internal scan of your entire body for about 5 minutes.
• Put your awareness on the particular area or pain of a specific ailment and gradually move your awareness deeper into the discomfort.
• Be still, and notice what you are feeling nonjudgmentally without making guesses or conclusions.
• Keep your awareness on any resistance, increased emotion, pain, or heightened anxiety as long as it is not too uncomfortable, maintaining smooth and deep breathing.
• To end the session, thank your unconscious mind for its help, open your eyes, and slowly stretch before you get up and move around.

A man with a harsh inner critic used higher-level thinking questions during a 15 to 20 minute session to discover that the critic originated from a childhood memory 50 years prior and aimed to keep him humble after a period of arrogance. You can engage the unconscious mind in a structured dialogue using four starter questions:

• Begin with the same first three steps used in Exercise 3-A: sit comfortably, breathe deeply, and relax your body one part at a time.
• Place your awareness on your health problem and its symptoms objectively and without anxiety, blame, or judgment.
• Silently form a question using one of the starter questions or your own derived question, such as asking what the problem is an example of or why it is occurring.
• Consciously hold the question for a few seconds, relax, let it go, and return to a state of awareness while waiting for a verbal, visual, tactile, or symbolic answer.
• Continue the dialogue with follow-up questions moving closer to the emotional root cause, asking why muscles are clamping down or what limiting beliefs were formed.
• Place light, nonjudgmental awareness on the uncovered emotion, trauma, or memory, feel the truth of it, and let it go.
• Keep probing with additional questions until you get an answer or feel yourself tiring.
• Thank your unconscious mind, open your eyes, and slowly stretch before moving around.

3. The Six Steps to Self-Healing

Pranic Breathing, aura scanning, and local sweeping form the core physical methodology required to clear dirty prana and restore energetic balance.

Pranic Breathing

Normal breathing is shallow and only adequate for baseline survival, whereas diaphragmatic or pranic breathing fills the entire lungs to generate the quantity and quality of prana needed for healing. The lungs are divided into thirds: clavicular breathing uses the top third, intercostal breathing uses the top and middle parts, and diaphragmatic or pranic breathing expands the abdomen and lowers the diaphragm to fill all three parts of the lungs, facilitating better waste removal and cardiovascular oxygenation. Human lungs contain 50 to 80 million alveoli and draw an average of 12 breaths per minute, with blood flow rates varying from 1/10 of a liter per minute in the upper third to 1 to 1.5 liters per minute in the lower third.

Pranic breathing delivers major physiological and energetic benefits by stimulating lymphatic drainage, improving oxygenation, and enlarging the spiritual cord. The downward and upward movement of the diaphragm creates negative intrathoracic pressure that pumps lymph fluid from the abdomen into the chest. Additionally, breath retention acts as a bellows effect to concentrate and distribute prana while cleaning and expanding the spiritual cord. M.R. from Los Angeles stopped severe anxiety attacks and expensive therapy by learning pranic breathing, which instantly resolved stress responses.

Practicing specific rhythmic breathing sequences with breath retention multiplies energy generation and calms the mind. By combining slow nasal breathing with specific counts for inhalation, holding, exhalation, and holding again, you can significantly increase your vital energy output and reduce pulse rates using methods like the 7-1-7-1 or 6-3-6-3 rhythm and retention sequence:

• Place your tongue on your palate and keep it there throughout the exercise.
• Exhale through your mouth until your lungs are comfortably empty.
• With your mouth closed, breathe in slowly and silently through your nose, filling the lungs from top to bottom while the abdomen pushes outward.
• Pause for a moment for full retention.
• Slowly begin your controlled exhale, emptying the lungs from bottom to top.
• Pause for a moment for empty retention, then begin another inhalation.

Scanning and Sweeping Fundamentals

General scanning is a tactile technique that allows you to feel the contours, depth, and cleanliness of the aura by sensitizing the palm chakras. By performing hand sensitivity warm-ups, establishing intent, and focusing awareness on the palm chakras while maintaining a relaxed posture, anyone can learn to detect the inner aura, which typically extends about 5 inches from a healthy adult body after 15 minutes a day of daily practice for about two weeks. J. D. Thomas, a fourteen-year-old student, correctly diagnosed a woman's bladder infection through aura scanning during his first clinic day.

Sweeping is the physical method of ensuring energetic cleanliness by manually removing dirty energy from the aura, which is vital because effective energy healing relies on 75 to 80 percent cleaning before any energizing. In Pranic Healing, the body must be clean of impurities and dirty prana to allow divine energy or soul life to flow smoothly. Just as electricity passes easily through high-grade wire with few impurities, prana flows smoothly through a clean energy body at an optimum ratio of sweeping to energizing of 4 or 5 to 1. Pam D. from Los Angeles used general and localized sweeping to remove tired energy from her eyes and pain from her feet, knees, and lower back after long days on concrete stage floors.

Local sweeping targets specific body parts, joints, or chakras using one hand with either a dog-paddle motion or a counterclockwise twisting motion to remove deep congestion. Eric B. Robins, M.D., used local sweeping on a patient's pelvis to remove thick congested energy over her sex chakra, completely stopping severe bladder tumor bleeding within five minutes. Higher-level energy manipulation requires strict safeguards, including disposing of dirty energy into a saline disposal unit containing 6 to 8 ounces of salt in a quart of water and sterilizing the arms and hands with alcohol to prevent contamination.

4. Energizing and Colored Pranas

External energizing using the water pump technique and colored pranas allows you to safely revitalize depleted areas and accelerate physical healing.

External generation is more efficient than internal generation because internal systems run down personal energy batteries. The water pump technique combines pranic breathing, the chakral technique, and divine invocation to safely draw external prana from the air, sun, and ground without depleting your personal energy. You keep your projecting hand 4 to 6 inches away from the target.

Dr. Eric B. Robins treated a bladder cancer patient experiencing severe lower back pain and spasms due to herniated disks. After scanning and sweeping the depleted lower back and basic chakra, Dr. Robins energized the area until he felt spring-like resistance, and the patient reported the pain diminishing, leading to an 18-month period during which her back pain did not return.

Freshly projected prana is highly fluid and must be stabilized immediately after energizing to ensure it remains where it was directed. You can stabilize the prana by following these practices:

• Form an intent that the prana stay in place and say "stabilize" three times.
• Visualize painting the area or chakra with light blue.
• Imagine dipping the projecting hand into a can of light blue paint and making three gentle passes over the area.

The Water Pump Technique

You can perform the water pump technique by following a specific sequence of steps:

• Begin with standard warm-up.
• Scan aura, front and back, to determine level and location of disruption.
• Sweep and clean any congested areas or chakras.
• Reinforce intent to draw in prana through receiving hand and beam it out of projecting hand.
• Put hands in proper water pump position.
• Place awareness lightly on hand chakras.
• Begin pranic breathing, and project prana into the area.
• Visualize a bright circle of light on the target, if desired.
• Reinforce and drive in prana with clockwise rotation of projecting hand.
• Scan periodically as you energize.
• Energize until feeling a slight repulsion, area feels level, intuitive stop, or reaching 5 to 7 breath cycles for simple problems and 10 cycles for difficult problems.

Colored Pranas and Safety Rules

Using colored pranas allows for faster and more efficient healing than white prana by concentrating specific vibrational frequencies directly required by the health problem. Particle size determines vibrational rate and refinement, where red has the largest particles and lowest vibration, while electric violet has the tiniest particles and highest vibration. Dr. Eric B. Robins treated a chemotherapy patient with severe diarrhea and dehydration whose veins had collapsed. Unable to place an IV, he energized the patient's arm with red prana for 90 seconds because red causes dilation, causing a large vein to pop up and avoiding minor surgery.

Colored pranas are far more potent than white prana and require strict safety protocols:

• Always project a pastel ring of color with a white center rather than a solid shade.
• Make a conscious effort with intent to project a color one shade lighter than needed.
• Never mix violet or electric violet with red, yellow, or orange.
• Do not use orange on the abdomen if diarrhea is present.
• Do not use colors on children, infants, or pregnant women.
• Do not mix red and yellow, as dirty red and yellow are energy colors of cancer.
• Treat delicate areas such as the head, heart, spleen, throat, and solar plexus with milder pranas like white, green, blue, and violet only.

Certain delicate physical areas and vital centers must never be directly energized with prana to prevent severe bodily harm or dangerous physiological spikes. Direct energizing can overstimulate organs or raise blood pressure dangerously. The meng mein and spleen chakra control blood pressure, and the front heart chakra is too delicate for direct treatment.

5. Energetic Hygiene and Spiritual Growth

Diligent energetic hygiene, cord cutting, and meditation protect your personal energy tank and link physical health with spiritual development.

Energetic Hygiene and Cord Cutting

Energetic hygiene is the practice of keeping your personal energy tank clean and full despite living in an energetically contaminated world. Living things absorb fresh prana while discharging dirty prana back into the surroundings.

Master Stephen Co used cord-cutting to help his older daughter Genevie overcome anxiety and attachment to her mother on her first day of kindergarten, allowing her to walk into school without tears.

You can cut energetic cords attached to people or situations that evoke strong emotions to prevent contamination:

• Put your hands in the slightly cupped general sweeping position. Place one hand above and slightly in front of your head and place the other hand down at your side but curving slightly inward toward your body. It will be as if you were holding a large ball in front of you. Most people put their dominant or energizing hand at the top.
• Imagine beams of light projecting from your fingertips long enough to sweep across the front of your body.
• Now sweep down with your top hand while sweeping up from below with your other hand. You can dip your knees in order to sweep across your legs in front. Imagine that you are gathering together all these cords, from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head, that are connected to various parts of your energy aura.
• Pull them together into one bundle in front of your front solar plexus chakra. You should be able to feel them as your hands get about 8 to 12 inches apart. Then grasp the cords in the hand that swept up from below.
• Cut through the cords forcefully with a brisk karate chop motion with your dominant or top hand. You may wish to visualize the edge of your hand as a sharp serrated knife. Make three cuts close to your body at the front solar plexus. Then clear the cords away, throwing them off to the side. If you have salt water handy, throw them into salt water. If not, just use the green-flame-in-a-bucket visualization.
• Visualize a picture of your back. Make it one-third real-life size for ease.
• Place one hand above your visualized head and one hand below your visualized feet.
• Sweep and gather the cords into a bundle at your back solar plexus chakra in the same manner, then cut them with three sharp motions. Throw them into the same bundle.
• Now be aware of your crown, and project violet or electric violet prana for about five seconds into the bundle of cords to neutralize them.

Meditation and Spiritual Service

The Meditation on Twin Hearts opens the heart and crown chakras to draw down high-quality divine energy, purging the energy body and promoting physical, mental, and spiritual healing.

Valarie Anderson, a 38-year-old mother facing a stressful divorce and high-pressure career, used daily Pranic Healing meditations to find inner peace, clarity, and a better-paying position without mental pollutants.

Engaging in service and good works is a necessary counterpart to drawing in prana, fulfilling the natural law of giving and receiving to prevent energetic congestion. Just as breathing requires both inhalation and exhalation, utilizing spiritual energy without giving back creates congestion.

Lindsay Hirsch-Adlam found profound personal and energetic growth through participating in a homeless feeding program called Feed Your Soul.

10 Key Ideas

1. The human body possesses an invisible energetic anatomy of chakras, meridians, and auras that acts as a template for physical health and reveals illnesses before they manifest physically.
2. The unconscious mind protects you by clamping down muscles and suppressing painful emotions, which generates functional disorders and energy blockages.
3. You can resolve chronic physical symptoms and eliminate emotional blockages by engaging your unconscious mind through structured self-awareness and higher-level thinking.
4. Diaphragmatic pranic breathing fills the entire lungs to generate the quantity and quality of prana needed for healing while stimulating lymphatic drainage.
5. General scanning allows you to feel the contours and cleanliness of the aura by sensitizing the palm chakras after a short period of daily practice.
6. Local sweeping is the physical method of manually removing dirty energy from specific body parts, joints, or chakras to ensure energetic cleanliness.
7. External energizing using the water pump technique and colored pranas allows you to safely revitalize depleted areas without depleting your personal energy.
8. Colored pranas concentrate specific vibrational frequencies directly required by health problems and require strict safety protocols and pastel rings of color.
9. Energetic hygiene and cord cutting are the practices of keeping your personal energy tank clean and full despite living in an energetically contaminated world.
10. The Meditation on Twin Hearts opens the heart and crown chakras to draw down high-quality divine energy, purging the energy body and promoting physical and spiritual healing.