Welcome back to Unit 5 of the Modern Order of Essenes course! If you are new to the course, it starts out here with Unit 1.
Congratulations! In the past four units, you have studied and practiced the material of the Introductory level of the Modern Order of Essenes.
(Well, I hope you have – if not, go straight back to Unit 1 and start practicing!)
This is a huge achievement, and you really deserve to pat yourself on the back for pulling through!
After all, it’s not just about the practice itself, but also about establishing new habits, maybe about giving up a few minutes each day which you had been using for other stuff before, about sticking it out even if the going gets tough (or boring), and about dealing with the effects which the MOE practice has on yourself.
Well done! 🙂
So… in this unit, we’re plunging headfirst into the next level, which is the Apprentice grade. As you will see, this grade contains quite a bit more material than the introductory lessons – and we’ll finally start out with what feels like “real” healing practices in the next few units… 😉
Coursework
- To Practice – Essene Healing Breath: Step 3
Step 3 of the Essene Healing Breath is about extending your breathing. It should be practiced as part of the full sequence, i.e. first a cleansing/banishing ritual, then steps 1, 2, 3, and finally the withdrawal:
Online Version (Section “Phase One: Step Three – Extend your breathing”)
PDF Version (Section “Phase One: Step Three – Extend your breathing” on page 18/19) - To Practice – Blessing Walk up to Step 3
Your second task in this unit is to continue practicing the Blessing Walk up to Step 3, just as you did in the second half of the previous unit.
Online Version (only Step 1, 2 and 3)
PDF Version (only Step 1, 2 and 3, on pages 11 and 12) - To Study – Overview of the Apprentice grade
The material helpfully lists an overview of the techniques and the work of the Apprentice grade, which you should read during this unit:
Online Version (only the section starting with “The following techniques are introduced in the Apprentice Grade.” down to and including “Essene Applied Kinesiology” – the rest will be covered elsewhere.)
PDF Version (“Introductory Apprentice Lecture” on page 24 and top of page 25. “Preparation for Attunement” will be part of another unit.) - To Study – “Healing Philosophy of the Modern Essenes”
Study this section carefully. You don’t have to agree with everything in it, but you should contemplate it and, ideally, come up with your own ideas and your own opinion, even if it’s tentative:
Online Version (only section “Healing Philosophy of the Modern Essenes” – everything from “Essene Healing Paradigm” downwards will be covered elsewhere)
PDF Version (Section “Healing Philosophy of the Modern Essenes”, page 27) - To Practice – Empower your Healing Hands
During this lesson, you should start to empower your Healing Hands in the morning. How you do this is explained in detail in the material:
Online Version (only the sections for empowering your Healing Hands, i.e. up to and including “Empowering Your Healing Hands, Step Three” – the rest is part of later units)
PDF Version (pages 31, 32 and the top of page 33, up to and including “Empowering Your Healing Hands, Step Three” – the rest is part of later units)
Reflection Question
While you do the work of Unit 5, take some time to reflect on the following question:
What is spiritual healing?
Meditation Topics
If you need fodder for your discursive meditations beyond what you have found in this unit’s texts, the following topics should give you something to work with:
- On which levels can healing take place?
- What are the differences and similarities between healing on different levels?
- Are there any other areas of healing which the text doesn’t list?
- How has healing worked in your life so far?
- Where has healing not been possible for you, and why?
- Can everything be healed?
- What would it take to heal everything?
- What are the effects of restricting your breathing?
- What are the effects of expanding your breathing?
- What role do the hands have in healing?
- What are the effects of male forces or energies in healing?
- What are the effects of female forces or energies in healing?
- How could you use the elements in healing?
- In which ways do the elements differ in healing?
And if you have enough ideas on your own and don’t need any from this list, that’s even better!
Commentary
Blessing Walk – The Work of this Unit
As we introduced Step 3 of the Blessing Walk only a measly week ago, during this unit you will simply continue with the Blessing Walk as before, i.e. up to Step 3. The next step will only be introduced in the next unit.
We’ve got plenty of time for this, and the Blessing Walk is very much about practice, about setting habits, and about automating the practice. I.e. you’ll lose nothing at all if you leisurely continue as before for this fortnight – and there are plenty of other things to do as we enter the Apprentice grade! 😉
Healing Philosophy of the Modern Essenes
This text is worth close study and contemplation. If you practice discursive meditation and have the time for it, it would also lend itself extremely well to a few meditation sessions (just sayin’…).
As I wrote above, you are not expected to agree with all of it (or with any of it, for that matter), and you are most certainly not expected to just learn it by heart and parrot it.
Instead, try to apply these ideas to your own life, compare them to your experiences – and then come up with your own thoughts about these topics.
You don’t have to end the unit with a full-blown healing philosophy of your own, but at least do your best to come up with some tentative ideas about how healing works on different levels, and/or to figure out where and why you agree/disagree with the text.
General Notes about the Apprentice Study Material
The Apprentice texts are a bit weirdly formatted in certain places, and sometimes it’s hard to spot where one section ends and a completely different part begins. It also doesn’t help that the online version and the pdf aren’t necessarily formatted in the same order and style. 😉
I’ve done my best to make it clear in the instructions which part you should read in each unit. If you can’t make sense of the coursework instructions, though, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments!
Healing Hands
Finally – the first inkling of a “real” healing modality awaits you in this unit! 😉
The explanations in the text should be pretty clear, I hope. If you use the online version and need some graphic help, there are some drawings in another part of the material which illustrate the symbols (you don’t have to read all of this text yet, it’s basically a repetition of the Healing Hands material and will as such be part of a later unit). If you use the pdf version, the images are helpfully included in the text.
What you should do (well, ideally) is to empower your Healing Hands early in the mornings.
Even more ideally, this should be done after you have established a protective sphere (MOE style), a Sphere of Protection or other protected space around you. But if you shouldn’t have the time to do a protective ritual in the mornings, just empower your Healing Hands and do the protective ritual later.
(I hope you do still practice a protective ritual, btw. It’s not listed anymore among the practices, since I wanted to keep them somewhat concise – that doesn’t mean it’s no longer important, though!)
As for the Healing Hands, empowering them is only the very first step. The actual healing work is still a few units out (sorry! 😉 ). I.e. for the next few units, you will continue to empower your Healing Hands, but not actually do anything with them yet. There are three reasons for this:
First, the groundwork you lay now in empowering them over a few weeks will greatly benefit your Healing Hands practice later.
Secondly, in the meantime, we will practice other things which will also help you to lay a solid basis for your upcoming Healing Hands practice, especially by clearing energetic blockages.
And thirdly (and very mundanely), there are some practices which require a certain amount of time (similar to building up the Blessing Walk), and I needed the space for them in the lessons and thus decided to push the next steps of the Healing Hands further out. 😉
Hence the next few units will cover other things. Still, during this Unit 5, you should make it a habit to empower your Healing Hands in the morning, and continue with this practice until we pick up the Healing Hands again later.
It might feel a bit frustrating to just empower your Healing Hands for a few weeks, but not do anything with them yet (especially as the next few paragraphs of the same material would conveniently teach you how to apply them and finally start healing! 😉 ) – but trust me on this.
The continued practice will establish the necessary energy flows, which means that a. your later practice will (quite literally) flow a lot more smoothly, and b. your energetic and physical bodies will be much better prepared for handling the energy flows later.
Further Resources
I already pointed you towards John Gilbert’s audio files in Unit 1. As you proceed with Step 3 of the Blessing Walk, you can come back to the audio file with the name “Walk.mp3” if you are so inclined.
Walk.mp3 covers the Blessing Walk, but all steps of it. I.e. you can either listen through all of it right away to get a feeling for where we’ll be heading, or you can simply stop the audio for now when it moves on to the next step of the Blessing Walk, and then listen further as we proceed.
In the zip file of the audios, there is also a file called “breath.mp3”. This file covers Steps 2 to 6 of the Healing Breathing Meditation, narrated by John Gilbert.
About the first four minutes and 15 seconds of it contain Step 2 and 3, i.e. the steps you practice in this unit. You can of course listen through the whole file now, but stop practicing at around this time. There’s no point in overdoing it and knocking yourself out, and we’ll get to all the other steps later anyway…
The file AE-L1.mp3 contains instructions for empowering the Healing Hands (up to about minute 6:45).
Note that this audio explains certain (smallish) details slightly different than the written text, but both version should work fine.
My bigger issue with it comes further on in the audio file, especially in the remarks about ethics, and also some comments about “teaching clients”. I’ll have more to say about those parts in a later unit. For now, if you should decide to listen through the whole file and not just the first few minutes about empowering your Healing Hands, please keep in mind that some of what John Gilbert says here might be well-intended, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing to do. 😉
Finally, there is our own comment section from Unit 4 to read, if you shouldn’t already have done so. Not that many comments yet, but again some interesting experiences in them.
Outlook
Unit 6 will go live on Sunday, April 27th, 2025.
Until then, I’m looking forward to your comments and your feedback. 🙂
Ridgely says
A quick question: I seem to recall looking over the PDF instructions this morning, that it says somewhere to imagine the triangle all being blue, not just the lines. I that correct?I mean, a solid blue triangle as opposed to a blue triangle with your flesh colored palms in the middle?
Regine says
Hi Ridgely,
I have to admit I haven’t read the pdf in all detail, but only skimmed it to find the relevant parts (and since it’s confession time anyway: I’ve also only skimmed some parts of the audio files, and listened only to some of them in detail when I came across stuff I felt I needed to check out… 😉 ).
But looking it up, yep, you are right, the pdf files specify it as such, it seems, even though the images in the file show just a line, not a solid figure. I wonder when and especially why that slipped into the text… 🙂
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it matters, as long as you draw the line roughly in the right place. Thus I’d encourage you to try both and see what works better for you. (And to then report back to the others, of course!)
In general, the coloured symbols are a tool to connect you to the Healing Hands energies and to get them flowing in the right way. Once the energy flows are solidly established within you (i.e. after a certain amount of practice), it will become a lot easier to draw on the MOE energies even if you haven’t empowered and activated your Healing Hands by the books, and then details like the colour of the symbols aren’t that important anymore. At the beginning, though, it’s a lot easier to tap into the right energies by doing the coloured symbols – but again, whether the middle is coloured or see-through won’t make a difference in general, methinks, at most an individual one for some people.
Hope this helps,
Regine
Paedrig says
So I’ve kind of disappeared from the comments section since unit one. Apologies. I’ve found my life getting incredibly busy, as a number of critical issues and things I needed to do have suddenly been demanding my attention pretty urgently. A side effect of the my healing process, perhaps?
I wish I could say I’ve been diligent with keeping up with the required work, but the truth is I’ve had a thousand distractions, none of which qualify as excuses – when I do actually sit and determine to do the practices, I find it doesnt even take that long.
The healing walk is the practice I’ve been most remiss about – I’m not in an area where you can walk down the street, as the speed limits about 45 mph, and I really had no time to go drive to park to encounter amyone. I tried to bless people in the grocery store, but then I’d get distracted from the chore I was trying to run. The second step of the blessing walk made things easier – I have woods behind my home I love to walk in, and there’s lots of critters to bless in there. I think with the third step I’ll redouble my efforts to make this a daily practice.
I found that I struggled to bless people without using the verbal blessimgs, but had no such problem directing wordless blessings towards nonhumans. Perhaps I just presume people would struggle with accepting a nonverbal blessing, plus theres the whole issue of consenting to a blessing – hence why the wording is always an offering of a blessing.
The healing breath practice has become a daily morning practice. At first all I was able to manage was the protection sphere each morning – but let me tell you, that alone made a difference in my day and my mood. I had previously been doing the full sphere of protection ritual, which in my opinion is rather long and involved, and I struggled to make a daily practice of that. The much simpler protection sphere is very quick and easy, and so became something I can start and end each day with. This alone helped ease a lot of my general anxiety about life.
I was able to add the first step of the healing breath in, and have succeeded in doing this at least once, sometimes twice daily. Its had excellent results, and I would say its even been instrumental in keeping a cool head as I navigate the increasingly stormy seas of my life. My general anxiety levels have gone down, as have other negative energies – resentment, bitterness, fears, all have decreased, leaving a sense of peaceful acceptance towards my life.
I look forward to the next steps. I dont know if I quite feel like I’ve done the initiate grade as best I could, but intend to move forward into the apprenticeship. I’ll be activating my healing hands as with healing breath practice – I’m already doing that consistently, may as well build on that.
Thanks again for doing this, and I intend to redouble my efforts to do the practices daily and stay involved with this community.
Regine says
Hi Paedrig,
Welcome back, and thanks for checking in again.
So that’s to say life has been asking you to confirm that you really mean it about the MOE (“Are you sure about it? Nah, I know you think you’re sure, but are you really sure?”) – and you’ve answered with a clear “yes”, by continuing the work and giving it the best you could. That’s awesome! 🙂
Don’t sweat it about encountering people during your Blessing Walk for now. Practicing it in the woods is fine if it’s the best you can do. (And besides, it’ll give you a daily walk in the woods, which is a blessing in itself!)
What I would suggest, though, is that you keep trying it while you’re among people, e.g. during grocery shopping. Over time, it will become easier to do it “on the side” and still focus on your chores.
About the verbal vs. non-verbal blessings for humans: If you feel so inclined, you could journal or otherwise approach this hang-up and figure out why it makes a difference to you. If nothing else, you’d gain a few insights about yourself which might be helpful – and maybe things will dissolve once you shine a spotlight on them!
Also, I should very much hope that you don’t bless plants or animals without their consent either! 😉 This is half-kidding, btw. The energy (warmth, love, light) you radiate out from your heart aren’t to be forced on others, but are just an offer, too. With a bit of practice, you might encounter beings who/which won’t take you up on them, either only on certain occasions, or in general. Some animals or plants can be as grumpy, busy, or otherwise occupied as humans can be – or at least these animals and plants can feel this way to us while they have their own reasons for not wanting to receive a blessing, or not wanting to connect with us.
All that is a long-winded way to say: If consent is an issue if you send non-verbal blessings to humans, it will also be an issue if you send them to other critters.
I’m very glad to hear the Healing Breath and the protective sphere are having such profound effects on your life, that’s awesome! 🙂 Simply proceed with the next phases of the Healing Breath at your own pace. There is no need to rush, and you have established a solid daily practice there whose effects will build up over time even if it should take you longer to get to some later stages.
(I also have to admit that I’m not regularly performing the Healing Breath anymore. I practiced it when I first studied the MOE, and I can appreciate its benefits, but it just never rang with me the way some other meditative practices do. So I’m doing them instead, and the MOE work seems to work just as well for me. There probably is no one-size-fits-all in this area – thus it’s very interesting to hear that you are having such wonderful effects from the Healing Breath!)
Overall, to me it sounds as if you’ve established a solid practice for yourself, even if you feel you could have done more – and yep, you should definitely move forward into the apprenticeship and start empowring your Healing Hands.
Again, thanks for sharing, and I hope you’ll continue to post about your experiences or questions,
Regine
Janus says
Hi Regine,
I am still following the course but also lagging a little behind, in particularly around the Healing Breath. But I will persevere all the way until the end and excited to start the Healing Hands exercise!
My challenge is staying consistent especially when there are disruptions from routine in my life, such as holidays. I had a 2 week streak or so with SOP and daily discursive meditation and then a break while on holiday this week. First world problems, I suppose 😉 I am still doing the blessing walks as much as I can and it does definitely lighten the mood and make me feel more peaceful and present than usual.
Regine says
Hi Janus,
Thanks for checking in! I’m glad to hear you’re still on board. That’s great – congratulations!
First world problems – or simply human problems… 😉
Don’t sweat it about the Healing Breath. Just advance in your own time, that’s fine. Also, in Unit 6, there will be no new step of the Healing Breath, i.e. you’ll have a chance to catch up a bit. (Again, if not, that’s fine, too. The effects of these practices build up over time.)
Simply continue to do the best you can. These practices are beneficial even if we aren’t perfect! 🙂
Regine