A Story about the impact of Group Healing

After experiencing personal healing by directed energy, Lynne McTaggart wanted to research the effects of group healing intention. So she organized a group of 100 people into groups of either, with most complete strangers to each other. Someone in each group then presented a physical or emotional condition to be the focus for the group’s intention. This, in her words, is what happened:

“Each group would form a circle, hold hands, and send healing thoughts in unison to that group member, holding the intention for ten minutes, the length of time that we’d used in our large experiments, largely because it seemed to be the maximum time that untrained people could hold a focused thought.

I instructed the audience in “Powering Up”, a program that I’d created after distilling the most common practices of intention “masters” – master healers, Qigong masters, and Buddhist monks – and synthesizing them with conditions that have worked best in mind-over-matter studies carried out in a laboratory. This technique began with a little breathing exercise, then a visualization, and an exercise in compassion to help people get into a focused, energized, heartfelt state.

All the members of each group were to hold hands in a circle, or place the person being targeted in the circle’s center, with the other group members placing a hand on him or her like the spokes of a wheel. I had no idea which configuration was preferable, but it seemed important to maintain an unbroken physical connection between each member of the group.

“This is just another experiment of sorts,” I told everyone just before we started, although what I didn’t tell them was that they were on a maiden voyage and I was basically making up the route as I went along. “Any outcome you experience is acceptable.”

We turned on music we’d used for our large experiments and observed as the groups seemed to connect well and deeply. Before they left that evening, we asked the target people to be prepared to describe their experience and their current mental, emotional and physical state the following morning.

“Don’t invent any improvement that isn’t there,” I said.

Sunday morning, I asked those who’d received the intention to come forward and report how they felt. A group of about ten people lined up at the front of the room, and we handed each of them the microphone in turn.

One of the targe women, who had suffered from insomnia with night sweats, had enjoyed her first good night’s sleep in years. Another woman with severe leg pain reported that her pain had increased during the session the day before, but that it had diminished so much after her group intention that she had the least pain she could remember having in nine years. A chronic migraine sufferer said that when she woke up her headache was gone. Another attendee’s terrible stomachache and irritable bowel syndrome had vanished. A woman who suffered from depression felt it had lifted. The stories continued in this vein for an hour.

I was completely shocked. The lame may as well have been walking. For all that I disparage woo-woo, the biggest woo-woo was occurring right in front of me.”

Lynne McTaggart, from “The Power of Eight: Harnessing the Miraculous Energies of a Small Group to Heal Others, Your Life, and the World “

See also:

LISN_circles, about groups

Small group effectiveness