The word healer, to me, is a catch-all term, much like the word God.

If you go back and look at its origins in action you will find story-tellers, music-makers, artists, herbalists, gardeners anyone in the community or tribe whose intent was to have healing energy move through them. From generation to generation different people of different lineages of different societal functions would take on the role of simply being available for the needs of others. We are all healers at one time or another and can be healers up to always in our lives if we so choose.

Anyone who uses all that he or she has in the moment to project an energy that has an effect on others for the good is a healer. Without identifying it as such, most forms of schooling for acting or comedy or performance, for example, sharpen the ability of a person to receive, embody and project energy, and this is all in the realm of heart-consciousness.

I studied the Meisner Technique of acting for about three years. For about six months we trained with an exercise called The Repetition Game. Two people sit facing each other, about four feet apart. One of them begins with a word or a short sentence. The other repeats what he hears, then his partner repeats what she hears from him and they go back and forth like in a tennis game. The layering on of more and more complex observations follows listening and answering, as a base.

At the core of the game, however, is learning to tune-in to the emotional life of your partner. By doing so you allow yourself to be affected moment-to-moment. What you see on stage or screen is a steady stream of moments of connection between two people. That mirroring is a form of healing for members of the audience who need it. What they see is not so much individuals, but where they connect. They join them in that connection, and through it, have an experience of union or wholeness.

Our greatest artists end up working primarily with energy. As an example, lets use the Beatles. If you really listen to their music youll find that as they progressed in their career, they moved further away from literal, linear and coherent word pictures and more into gibberish and music that broke the mold of convention. Think She Came In Through the Bathroom Window.

Their art is communicating through word metaphors projected through the filter of pure emotion. The brilliance of what they do is that the same song affects each person who hears it individually. Do the Beatles know how and why they are affecting each person whom their song touches? Of course not, but something Universal and symbolic clearly comes through them to touch others specifically. From within their connection with the Muse, they beckon us to join them.

This is the language of the heart. To experience it in action, all you have to do is pick up and listen to a recording of something that is meaningful to you. The power of that moment of energy that was projected transcends the fact that its on vinyl, tape or in digits. It even transcends time because your experience of it is as real as when you first heard it. Something that lived inside the person doing the recording touched and continues to touch -- something living inside you. And odds are, it touches you in some ways it doesnt touch others, yet it brings you to an experience of wholeness.

Is that not the essence of healing? Something that lives inside the recipient is touched by something that comes through the giver in the form of a therapy, procedure, treatment, medicine, or as simple as a word, sound or touch. Its all about connection, and heart-consciousness both drives and utilizes that connection.

No one actually does the healing of another. At our best all we can do is be vehicles that allow healing energy in some form to pass through us. But theres another aspect of heart-consciousness that deeply affects any expression of healing-intent.

The heart, through the information it receives and transmits, does not recognize separation. It interprets what comes in and what goes out as part of the same thing. There is a space between where healing intent meets the need for healing and it is a place that both people (energies) enter and coalesce. Heart-consciousness asks of us to enter the Sacred Room of Healing together. And for the healer that means they can receive the benefits of healing as well.

The fact remains when you incorporate the power of heart-consciousness into what you do, everything that comes through you gets supercharged. In that respect, living in a state of heart-consciousness turns anyone into an effective vehicle for healing.