Heart Healing Workshop with Paul Barbaro

Yesterday I went to an event called ‘Heart Healing Workshop with Paul Barbaro,’ at the Center for Creative Living in San Jose. Paul Barbaro is an enthusiastic man with a passion for healing and making a difference in the world. He has created his own energy healing modality and wants to spread it far and wide via his books and web site Healing Angle Guides His latest book “Heart to Heart Healing: When You Care Enough to Make a Difference in the Health of a Loved One” is available on Amazon. His technique seems to be aimed primarily at chronic pain management and relief. I make no claims to full understand his process, I am simply giving my impressions from attending the workshop.

I showed up at 1 pm for the workshop and discovered that it had actually started at 10 am, 1 pm was the hands-on demonstration. That wasn’t made clear from the MeetUp notice, so I had to make do without his introduction and explanations. His technique appears to descend from the long line of energy healing modalities where pain and other problems are caused by a disruption of energy flow though the body, and, especially in the case of chronic pain, these disruption can have taken place far in the past. Therefore, truly healing the pain requires finding and dealing with these originating events. He didn’t say how that was done during the time when I was there, or maybe it just wasn’t clear to me. (I looked on his web site and it doesn’t explain it there, either. Presumably, you need to buy his books or take the full training course.) In my view, his technique owes a lot to modalities like Reiki, ThetaHealing, and Reference Point Therapy. In conversation, he made no bones about having scoured the web and incorporating and any information he found that seemed appropriate. His goal, he says, is to make healing as simple and straight forward as possible.

About 10-15 people were there when I arrived. Paul started with a “Healing Circle” and then moved on to letting individuals work in pairs or threesomes (two healers on one client). I didn’t come with any particular issues to work on, so I was just open to whatever might happen.

In the Healing Circle we all formed a circle, facing counterclockwise, and placed both our hands on the person in front of us while Paul read, and we repeated, a series of affirmations. Later, we broke into the duos and trios and did a similar “laying on of hands.” In the individual groups, there weren’t any affirmations. At least not out loud. Perhaps I was supposed to be thinking affirmations, but I didn’t. Nobody said anything about it, and the idea didn’t occur to me at the time. I have been trained in a number of energy healing techniques, and so I tend to fall back into the familiar and think about energy flowing to or through the other person while doing this kind of thing. I’m not sure if that’s what he intended, but that’s where I went. In the individual sessions, we traded places periodically. I didn’t notice how long we went, but the whole workshop took about two hours.

Paul’s instructions at this point were brief, he seemed to be saying that you just place your hands in the proper places and let what happens, happen. Perhaps there is more to it than that, and if I had been there earlier I would know that. To me, this, approach resembles Dr. Eric Pearl’s “Reconnective Healing,” where you are encouraged to let go of being goal- and process-oriented, and let the “energy” work through you and guide you as it will. We were told to expect to feel heat in our hands, as the process took hold, I didn’t, but several of the practitioners did. I usually feel heat in my hands when doing this kind of work, but not this time. I did find that my upper body was uncomfortably warm by the time we were done.

I didn’t feel noticeably different afterwards, and nobody in my hearing said anything either. I didn’t make a point of asking, or doing any kind of survey, so I have no real idea what other people got out of it. Paul sold out all the copies of his book that he brought, so, clearly, many people were inspired by what they experienced. This is not too surprising for I tend to be low key about these things.

In conversation afterwards, Paul expressed a commitment to spread healing to as many people as possible. I admire that. He acknowledged the need to raise the tone of our society, and the practical impossibility of one person, no matter how fast he worked, to personally treat a significant portion of the population. He wants people to spread his Heart Healing to as far as possible, to as many people as possible. Group settings are best, he says, and he encourages everyone to freely share his technique. This is in sharp contrast to many other methods who restrict practitioners and teachers to those specifically trained by the organization. (It is my personal feeling that this organizational model is breaking down, as it’s becoming more and more obvious that these techniques are more of a state of mind, an intention, an allowing, than a specific, learned skill.)

I tried to contact Paul, for his input on this article, but, as of today, he has not responded.

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This is the latest installment in, what I hope to be, a series of posts about local events that deal with alternative healing. I’m in the process of visiting essentially, random events on MeetUp.com that look interesting in order to find out what’s out there, educate myself in different traditions, to meet people, and become known in my local healing community.