Chemo and the Chakras

A High Cost for Healing

If you have witnessed or experienced the suffering caused by chemotherapy, you know the horror of a treatment that all but kills, even as it saves. Among other challenges, with chemotherapy the immune system can become so fully depleted that it can’t fight against its own pathogens. Yet, without chemotherapy, called “chemo,” for short, loved ones would no longer be with us. There wouldn’t be the same number of survivors reading these words. We can only feel grateful. But I am sure that in 50 years we will look back at chemo as a barbaric act. Given the suffering the treatment entails, it is upon us to find ways to ease its side effects where we can.

I’m an “energy healer” with almost two decades of experience with modalities such as One Light Healing Touch, Reiki, and sound healing with crystal singing bowls. I’ve worked with clients who have come through the ravages of chemotherapy. And radiation.

I’ve seen a consistent and surprising need in chemotherapy and radiation survivors: their chakras need a pranic reboot.

Chakras and the Energy Body

Chakras are vortexes of life-force energy (also called prana ) in our bodies. They are offshoots of a central channel that runs up and down the center of our bodies. This channel is sometimes called the central channel or shushuma (where kundalini travels up and down as well). The entire system, as taught by the Hindu tradition, makes up an important part of our energy body.

Teachers of spiritual healing generally focus on the dominant seven chakras. The first is at the base of the spine, up to the seventh, at the crown of the head. The purpose of spiritual healing is almost always to help the chakras be more full of prana and less of personal suffering causing “energy blocks.” Without life force prana energy we die, so the more infused we are of prana, the more healthy and vibrant we are.

Restoring Pranic Energy

A sobering find of my experience with chemotherapy and radiation patients is that the amount of prana left in their chakras is down to wisps. A great gift to help them is to “relight” the chakras with prana so that it can flow abundantly. In so doing, the pranic energy begins to spread out through organs and permeate bodily systems, bringing with it a revjuvenating life force.

My most intimate and first experience facilitating such a healing with a cancer survivor happened when working with a close family member. My ex-husband, Daniel, had acute myeloid leukemia. He had been through three harrowing rounds of chemotherapy to enable him to have a stem cell transplant using his own stem cells. After arriving home after the stem cell transplant,  it was clear to me that he was too weak for a healing. Not only was he exceptionally frail. He was also suffering from withdrawing cold turkey from morphine that had been given for the pain caused by dental complications. His body was spent and every ounce of energy he had was being used to keep himself stable during the drug withdrawal.

Re-lighting the Chakras

Within about 15 days of his final hospital release date I felt he was strong enough for receiving the energy of a healing. I entered the healing state that enabled my clairvoyant intuition to be the clearest. It quickly became apparent that the healing would be about his chakras. I started using the singing bowls and getting into the still point so that healing can happen. The best way that I can describe what I saw is that a giant candelabra with candles of prana came to light each chakra to replenish them.

This “chemo healing” was simple and powerful. I have seen the exact same healing happen in other cancer survivors that I have worked with. Once the chakras are “relit,” there is a renewed sense of harmony and flow in the body. One wonders how slow recovery would be without such a replenishing.

Restoring Harmony to the Body

Daniel says that, “As a leukemia patient I’ve spent months in the hospital being treated with powerful chemicals and drugs, feeling my body become shrunken and foreign. I’m grateful for what the oncologists have done for me. But it was the sound/energy healings that restored me mentally and emotionally to my body and to my sense of harmony with myself.”

Mitchell L. Gaynor, M.D. is an oncologist and the author of The Healing Power of Sound. He writes that “The crystal singing bowls demonstrate the truly manifold possibilities for healing through vibratory sound. Our body-mind systems are ‘retuned’ by the bowl sounds, and the effects can be physical, psychological, spiritual, or all three at once.”

Surely it is time for trained sound healers and energy workers to be a standard and recognized part of the recovery process for oncology patients. Not to mention being part of the team for earlier stages of treatment.

–Annie B. Bond

By Annie Bond, founder of The Divine Mother Modality and the HeartMind Healing School