Eight years ago I walked into a healing session with Serge Benhayon. I had no idea what to expect. It would end up being an experience that was inspiring and yet underwhelming in equal measure.
In the waiting room, there was a poster of that famous poem titled “Footprints” hanging on the wall. Next to it was another picture that had a quote from Plato that read, “As you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you attempt to cure the body without the soul.”
Those are the things I remember looking at whilst I waited. It was very still. The highway was not far away, and yet I remember no sound. There was no music, and no magazines in the rack suffice for one of his own books on the table.
It was a difficult read.
I put it down and waited.
We went in for the session. We talked for a while. He let me speak without interruption. We proceeded to the massage table, whereupon he placed his hands upon my lower back and over my kidneys and stood very still.
That was it.
Time passed… there were no fireworks, no epiphany, no great revelations, no visions, no angels, no past lives revealed, or futures told. I did, however, feel quite relaxed. I have heard others report the same. I did not want it to end.
Looking back, I wish I had spoken less, and allowed more time to be spent on the table. If I regret anything in life, it is that I was not more present with what was offered me in that moment.
At some point during the session, Serge asked if I could feel the slight dip in my lower back – and in particular one side more than the other.
To my surprise I said, “Yes, it is subtle, but it is there,” although I could feel no more than that.
“Those are your kidneys, and they are the source of your life force,” he replied. “Your kidneys are contracted, and thus why you are so exhausted. That part of your back should feel swollen and full, not tight, and dipped in like that. That is why you get lower back pain, because the muscles in that area are held tight and contracted, as a result of your kidneys being the same. Because there is also an imbalance between the two, one side pulls more than the other – thus the back pain.”
Had I just been offered revelation, or the words of a fool?
Only time would tell. I walked out of that session and felt disconcertingly balanced and still. The back pain was gone.
I went straight for an iced coffee on my way home. I may have even asked for a double shot to throw in the mix. I did not register how that affected me.
Two or three years passed before I booked in another session. In the meantime, I started turning up to more of his courses, making changes to my diet and sleeping patterns – in short looking after myself with more care. I also started reading his books, and pondering especially on his religious teachings. The lords of form, the astral plane, the seemingly bizarre way he presented the world of energy – all laid out in his first book – “The Way It Is.”
Was it true, or was this guy a fraud? His views on healing were certainly unique, as was his explanation of evil.
I do not deny I had my moments of doubt, but I was sufficiently trusting enough of the man since I had first met him that I was prepared to put into practice into my own life what he presented. I wished to find out for myself, for I have never been a man of faith or hope. Such are the tenets of a fool.
Thank God I did, for after that second session, I would never be able to doubt ever again the fact of what he presents, especially what he presents with regard to healing.
Just before I had my second session with Serge Benhayon I was in pain. That was not the reason for my booking. After all, it took at that stage 3 or 4 months to get a session, and my latest back spasm only occurred in the days before hand. My left leg felt shorter than the right leg, and it was agony just to walk. I could not bend over to do up my own shoelaces.
I was experienced enough to know my hips were out. In the past, I had gone to chiropractors and a special sports physiotherapist who was widely acclaimed, both of whom had performed violent manipulations to bring my bones back into alignment. And it used to work – for a while.
Serge Benhayon took one look at me, and said, “How are you?”
I replied that I was in a lot of back pain.
He said, “I can tell. Let us get you straight on the table and get that fixed for you before we start.”
Now Serge Benhayon will tell you he does not claim to heal anything on a physical level. He is not a medical practitioner. Don’t go to him for that sort of healing. He never makes such promises, and given his explanation of what true healing is, I understand why. That, however, is another discussion for another time.
In this instance, he simply put one finger on each of my hips, did a small anticlockwise movement with his fingers, and I felt my hips adjust of their own accord.
The pain was gone.
Now that is a miracle. Take it as you will.
For the rest of the session he placed his hands on my kidneys and my heart. This time, my whole kidneys felt swollen like big berries. My whole body fired up with a deep warmth that flooded through my veins. It travelled up my spine and through my neck. My cranial plates started to shift and soften, and my whole body started to expand.
And my feet! I could feel the bottoms of my feet! It was the warmth of coming home. It was a depth of feeling of such beauty-full embodied warmth, that I never wanted it to leave. I felt held.
That is what the energy that Serge Benhayon refers to as fire feels like in the body. It is very real, very tangible, and noticeable to one who is truly open to feeling life.
And I could not believe that I could feel my kidneys!
You can feel your kidneys!!! That is a fact!
I walked out of that session feeling, for want of a better word… complete. I have no other word for it. The feeling lasted about a week, or maybe it was only a day. I cannot exactly remember. What I do know is that it dissipated gradually, after which the exhaustion soon returned – but less so.
Every year I put into practice the simple tenets I learned from observing and listening to Serge Benhayon the exhaustion got less. And so did the back pain – as did my ability increase to feel when my kidneys were swollen and full, or hard and shrivelled.
I was healing, and my body was rejuvenating. I know that makes no sense. I was after all in my late 30s. I should have been ageing, with the body getting stiffer and slower. That was what was happening to rest of the men all around me that I knew.
As I write this now, it is eight years later since I had that first session back in 2008, and five years since that second session in 2011. I am now 42 years old. The back pain has gone – pretty much completely. It is no longer a regular occurrence.
Did I mention also that I rarely if ever get exhausted any more?
Perhaps I should also mention that my knees have largely recovered. Back in 2011, I feared I would need knee surgery. It was painful to bend over, and I avoided running and jumping, for I could feel the damage on the cartilage to my knees from years of abuse from high level sport. Today, some 5 years later, it is nothing for me to sprint up a set of stairs again. Of course, I would not be so silly to suggest I could run for 6km. Some damage cannot physically be undone. But to me, it is a miracle that I have the flexibility I now do.
Now I know, that does not make sense. It defies logic. Cartilage does not recover. Knees do not restore themselves without medical intervention.
Perhaps I should also mention that for the most part of the day, I can permanently feel my kidneys. They often feel like swollen grapefruit that have been warmed by the rays of the sun, and when they don’t, I know something is up with the way I am living.
There is much more to this story – perhaps to be shared another time. I do not profess that the only reason for the dissipation of my back pain was those two sessions. Esoteric Healing does not work that way, and there have been a whole series of lifestyle choices I have made that form part of the esoteric way of living that have lead to this life of vitality I now experience.
I will however stand by the fact that in those sessions, my back pain was taken away completely, my hips straightened, and my natural vitality restored, blessing me with the opportunity to feel what my body could be like if I made different choices. That cannot and should not be denied.
That being said, I do not wish to glorify that point, even though many would say “why not” – for to do so would offer the illusion that esoteric healing is about curing physical conditions, as the media has made it out to be.
It is nothing to do with such, and I have known people whose physical conditions have seemingly become worse after a session – although one cannot relate it directly to the techniques performed. How a man using the gentle pressure of two fingers rotated anti-clockwise can re-align your hips defies scientific understanding. Equally, how someone can experience physical symptoms that seemingly get worse after a session in which one does no more than gently rest their hands upon your body also defies reason.
If one understands true healing however, then none of this this comes as a surprise. If healing is truly about returning to the fact of our divine origins, as Serge Benhayon presents, then our relationship with illness and disease takes on a new meaning. It is more of a clearing of ill energy – and as such an opportunity to renounce the way we have been living, than it is a punishment or hindrance.
Esoteric healing is not attached to such physical outcomes. Rather, it is about inspiring us to connect to the divinity of our own origins, to offer us the opportunity to recognise the energy of the Soul, to experience its universal warmth and harmonious impulse, and to know beyond measure that we are so much more than this physical body we pretend to be.
This is a very tangible fact that can be easily felt.
This was the greatest gift I received from Serge Benhayon. I am of course grateful for all the physical changes that occurred in those sessions. But I am most grateful for the fact that I got to feel the glorious fire of my kidneys, and the immense vitality on offer, should I choose to honour what I undoubtedly felt that day – a feeling that is these days more often a reality of the way I live every day.
One may then ask – why did I not feel my kidneys in the same way in the first session? Was that session a dud? That in itself is the subject of another blog, suffice to say that both sessions were equal in what they offered. Before that first session, I was not living in a way, nor treating my body in such a way that enabled me to be so energetically aware. Four years later, I had built a body that was so tender, and so sensitive, that I was able to feel so much more. In short I was no longer hardened in body, nor in mind, and as such, open to feeling life on a much grander scale.
The truth is all of us have this innate ability to feel and discern energy, or this 6th sense as it is often referred to. There is also a direct relationship between the way we treat our physical body, and our ability to hone and develop this level of sensitivity. That in itself is one of the core tenets of life that Serge Benhayon presents, and explains largely why some people respond so deeply to Esoteric Healing, and others claim to feel nothing.
Such words of course may make no sense to the person who believes that life is no more than the summation of our physical years, who believes that our understanding of life is limited to the experience of our 5 senses.
Such words will mean little to the intellect that demands that something be replicated in the confines of a test tube before it is allowed to be considered or embraced as a way of living life.
If that is the way you choose to understand life, then I will happily leave you to your own devices, free to ponder on life from such parameters. What I will not do is allow my own understanding of life to be diminished by the supposed authority of the skeptic, or old school materialist who wishes to assume that all must live life from the safe confines of such reductionism.
For I will tell you from embodied experience that life can be experienced otherwise, and that you are capable of feeling the same. I will tell you that life exists beyond the mere limits of physicality, that consciousness is all around us in its various forms. I do not tell you this from faith, or from what I have read, but rather from what I have lived and seen and felt and observed.
As I have shared – you can feel your kidneys. You can feel the energy known as fire. You can feel the very tips of the hair upon your head, even though they are by all accounts void of any live nerve cells.
It does, however, require a certain discipline to be able to do so – a certain diet, a certain way of movement, a certain willingness to open up to feeling life in its entirety. Often that means being willing to feel things we don’t want to feel.
And therein lies the answer to why the typical esoteric student is so dedicated to living such a clean lifestyle – is so dedicated to eating the way they do, to getting proper sleep, to creating a body that is not just gentle, but delicate, precious, and tender.
For it is only through the construction of such a body that the truth of all things can be felt. It is only through the body that the fact of energy can be understood. It is only through the body that we can get to know the fact of God’s true light.
