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Energy Healing:  A Contemplative Practice

5/27/2026

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Originally published in the Newsletter of The Contemplative Society in November 2025.
https://www.contemplative.org/post/energy-healing-a-contemplative-practice
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 Energy Healing: A Contemplative Practice 
​             Nov 3, 2025
           By Leslie Sandra Black.
(All photos courtesy of Leslie Sandra Black)
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Fr Thomas Keating taught “Divine Therapy” through “opening to the Presence and Action of God within”.  His core contemplative practice is Centering Prayer; mine is Energy Healing.   As a contemplative method, energy healing helps us connect with the present moment and encourages transformation. With mindful intention, practitioners can support holistic wellness and spiritual growth, following the modelling of Jesus.   Let’s reflect on a couple of sessions.

A high school teacher suffered a head injury during automotives class.  Seven years later, after many physical therapy sessions, he was referred to me for Energy Healing to address his pain, stress, and depression. He had been mentally unable to teach and had been through several family tragedies. Peter’s strong Christian faith inspired hope for Divine Healing.

Before Peter arrived, I did my daily Integral 3-Body Practice, followed by a Centering Prayer sit. I ensured I was well-grounded in my body and with Earth.  After hearing his story and his hopes, I led him through conscious breathing to release distraction and bring us both Present in our Heart Chakras.  The Heart is the access point in our bodies to the Light of Christ – where compassion and unconditional love reside. 
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This Heart Chakra silk painting in my Healing Room serves as a reminder to stay in Presence in the Heart, letting go of the chattering of the cognitive rational mind.  After Peter relaxed on my massage table, I told him my intention for the session was to be a vessel of Divine Love and Light.  I saw the Light of who Peter truly is, despite his experiences of pain, imbalance, and inner challenges.  Peter stated his intention to “allow the Light and Love of Source to flow into and through me in the ways that are for my Greatest Good”, fostering both safety and openness.

Dropping into contemplative consciousness, I used the sensitivity of my hands to discover several distortions in his energy field. His emotional layer seemed thick and heavy. The lower body felt cold.  His crown chakra felt as if it was reaching beyond his head. I allowed the Healing Light to flow through my Heart and down through my arms and hands like rivers of living waters, for the laying-on-of-hands.  Gently placing my hands on his feet, then his hips, I allowed the Divine healing energy to clear the energetic debris that was blocking flow.  There was a back-and-forth flow of clearing and filling as I gently touched his shins, thighs, belly, and heart areas.  I encouraged Peter to notice the sensations in his body, rather than thinking — because “energy flows where attention goes”.  We both felt aching, burning, sharpness, and pain arise, and release then relax. My hands stayed long on his Heart, and dense energies cleared out.  With blessed oil I then anointed his brow, crown, and neck, addressing his spiritual layers.  I gave Peter selfcare energy tools to integrate and stabilize our session: a grounding meditation; and a Heart expansion meditation.

A week later Peter returned, reporting that his body “felt really different”, his back felt better, and he was seeing “weird” colors in the clouds. Additionally, he demonstrated that his left foot, previously misaligned since a bicycle accident at age seven, had shifted to its proper position.

After preparation steps into contemplative consciousness, I followed Divine Guidance.  Immediately my hands focused on his Heart chakra and we both felt sensation of a bubble moving from back to front of his chest, followed by a sensation of unravelling.  In Healing ministry, we use the neutral language of “energetic debris” for such releases. We welcomed emotions that arose, allowing them to be seen, heard, felt, and expressed… and then breathed through them.  With my assistance holding unconditional love through my Heart, these old stuck emotions then released. 
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Peter reported a new lightness in his chest “as if old grief had melted away”.  I focused sustained touch on each vertebra in his neck, giving particular attention to the 1st and 2nd vertebrae, which hold up the skull.  Peter felt pain arise and dissolve.  We experienced much unwinding, releasing, filling, and settling at each vertebra.   Peter told me his neck felt longer.  As I tuned into the energy of Peter’s crown chakra, it felt as if I pulled an object, shaped like the horizontal of a car hood, out of his energy field.   Then we felt waves of sublime energy swoosh into his crown and down through his body. Peter was amazed by his felt and visual experiences — and felt spacey as he sat up.  I coached him into being well-grounded before driving home.

The next day Peter’s wife called me exclaiming that he was like a new person.  His life energy was fully back!  Later, Peter told me he now felt excited about life and that he sensed he was “unstoppable”.  He was now having restorative sleep every night and felt invigorated.  He reported that both his church and work community wer in awe of this huge shift – and several asked how he had found his BLISS and this apparent awakening.  These physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual shifts appeared to be sustained and well-integrated for Peter.  He returned to teaching full-time.  

Peter and I had some further healing sessions where I continued to see the Divine Light that he truly is.  He was able to be deeply present in states of “no mind”.  Peter shifted into greater self-acceptance, and he moved deeper into trusting Divine Love and entered the experiencing of life beyond separation consciousness.  

When we are being the space of allowance, our True Self leads us perfectly through the precise healing and transformation for which we are ready.  I know that Peter’s path might also lead into Realization of Oneness with his True Self coming home to embody in the here and now.  There are infinite possibilities available to us on this contemplative path of energy healing.  We are deeply blessed by the modelling, and ongoing guidance, of Master Jesus.
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Leslie Sandra Black is a long-time member of The Contemplative Society. For over 30 years she has been a Transformational Coach & Energy Healer, transmitting embodied, heart-centered energy to facilitate people in healing and in awakening to their own True Self. She was initiated as a Healer through a powerful Presence of Divine Light — and was called to teach hundreds of multi-day workshops to train and mentor other energy healers. Leslie also creates and facilitates contemplative workshops and retreats on energetic self-care, self-healing, and embodiment.
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Journey to Tribal Villages  -- Inspirations from India #4                               February 12, 2017

5/19/2017

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​ A warm Namaste to you from the sunny heat of south India – where the daytime sun never stops shining … I hope your 2017 flows with ease and grace.
The next stage of my pilgrimage took me out of ashrams and into worlds that very few westerners or middle class people enter.  I flew into the state of Andra Pradesh, with friends from Luxembourg who run a fund-raising NGO called DIGNITY.  There we met with the leaders of a partner NGO -- Centre for World Solidarity headquartered in Hyderabad -- and received updates about the projects that Dignity finances for struggling rural tribal communities in the mountains.  While based in the small mountain town of Paderu, we daily made long trips through windy roads into isolated tribal communities.  The scenery was breath-taking high in the mountains: we passed an ancient Buddhist shrine in the rocks, rice paddies, green treed areas, tiny traditional villages, herds of sheep on the roads, many goats and cows grazing roadside… and monkeys!
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​Each day we traveled with local field workers from a partner NGO. To see the results of their interventions which include: ensuring safe water; teaching organic sustainable agriculture; encouraging crops and animals that feed the village; help with establishing local marketing; linking tribal villagers with basic federal government programs; and encouraging the development of agricultural co-operatives within and between the tribal villages. 

Although my five years of living in an indigenous community in northern Canada gave me some foundation for my experiences in these villages, still everything was so new and astonishing to me.  Each evening I found myself incapable of processing the day – my mind just couldn’t deal with all the unfamiliar stimuli nor the sense of stepping into another time dimension. Upon entering most of the villages we were treated as royalty: water poured over our feet; given bouquets of flowers; Pooja anointing of rice & turmeric on our foreheads; crowns sewn of leaves; drumming and dancing.  How to handle this?   Images that are imprinted in my consciousness include: extremely simple, crowded housing where families sleep together on one mat; pride & joy in the faces of those who showed us grain and bean samples of successful crops; concave bellies in villages where the rice paddies didn’t get enough rain; women carrying water from the river; chickens & goats living amongst all the human activity; palpable sense of despair in some villages; women carrying heavy loads of cabbages on their heads from field to truck; an elderly woman pumping hard to show us the well was dry; women pounding rice with heavy wooden posts throughout our meeting; beautiful babies, shy small children staring at us with big eyes; men standing in Paderu market looking very nervous to sell their crops of ginger root and amala nuts; children and teens living in residential schools segregated by gender in larger villages, learning a contemporary lifestyle.  I had so many wonderings to hold within myself.
In Tamil Nadu state we visited Women’s Empowerment Trust (WE Trust) NGO and their projects.  As the city of Thiruchirappalli expands, large farm lands are sold for development.  Women who are farm la bourers are then left with nothing.  WE Trust trains these women to make organic compost, grow vegetable gardens for their own family and for income, raise goats and chickens… all in a co-operative manner supporting each other. The women I met were literally shining with a sense of creatively working with the land and animals -- and successfully earning income.  They share their knowledge of organic compost and gardening with others and also have supported Tsunami .  Dignity also funds these projects.  To learn more or contribute to Dignity’s work:  Dignity.lu
AND I got food poisoning from a simple meal out… knowing it as I finished eating.  It was intense enough that I spent many days in bed with constant pain, staying close to toilet, bottled water, and homeopathic remedies. The Gift in this is that the headaches and body aches prevented mental processing and I had no appetite or energy – so all I could do was meditate, pray, say my mantras, breathe consciously, take naps.  Day & night for several days… No distractions!  When else would I be so present round the clock?  Once my body slowly settled and my life force bubbled back, I could feel that I had busted through another ceiling on my journey of heart awakening. 
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A week after my return to health, this is the big INSIGHT that came through:  When I was daily bombarded with so much stimuli that shocked me, knocked me off my inner balance, and overwhelmed my awareness… my place of inner alignment hit its edge. I couldn’t digest the contradictions, the time warp, and my relationship with these people.  I think I moved into duality of “me” and “them” as a way of coping with the despair and pain that my awareness picked up.  That became separation … distancing from my Heart.  And so I stopped seeing the Divinity, the Light in them.  Hmmm… doing that literally makes me sick.   Can you feel that?  One tribal women’s gathering gave me the name LAKSHMI (the name of a powerful Hindu goddess), along with placing a huge mala of roses around my neck as people do with statues of deities.  While confusing to me at the time, I now see that it was a call back to knowing my own Divine Self and to calling these awesome women to see the Divine in each of their own Selves!  I share this inner journey in the hope that some of you might might find it inspiring on your path.  If not, just know that this sabbatical in India is indeed a pilgrimage for me…


Henri is with me now and we are at Saccidananda Ashram resting, meditating, exploring local villages, and engaging with a fascinating spiritual Teacher.  We enjoyed part of the local Hindu celebration of Thaiapoosum at the recent full moon, and we are loving the Hindu expressions of Divinity everywhere!
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I was delighted to be invited to a lavish Hindu wedding ceremony!!   WOW!!!!
Sending you much Love & Light from my Heart!
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Sri Lalita Mahila Samajam and ShantiGiri Ashram -- INSPIRATIONS FROM INDIA #3                                       JANUARY 20th, 2017

5/19/2017

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Namaste Dear Friend!
In the village of Thirueengoimalai, Tamil Nadu state, on the banks of the sacred river Cauvery, there is a truly rare and remarkable place I’d love you to know about! 
As with all the religions, Hinduism is patriarchal, yet there is a beautiful space held and honoured for the Divine Mother as well as many goddesses. This land is such a place. AND the contemporary expression of that makes my Heart sing with joy as I glimpse possibilities of what can be created in Divine Flow!
Sri Lalita Mahila Samajam is a society, service agency, orphanage, and school geared to change the life trajectories of women and girls.  It is completely run by Hindu nuns (yoginis) with women functioning as poojaris (priests) in their temple!  I was told this was a new and unique model… inspired by the great modern Swami Sivananda who teaches that women are the Shaktihs of the world! 
I attended a beautiful Pooja ceremony in their colourful bright spacious temple space at the school… overflowing with flowers, lighted oil lamps, incense, bells ringing, chanting, and colourful kavi robes of the Poojaris (--orange representing the fire of purification).   ​
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​The school for 150 children (orphans or from very poor families) is bright, colorful, tidy, and full of light and joyfulness.  The high-school & college prep is for girls only -- to give them a break out of the sexism & poverty cycles.  They learn yoga, spiritual practices, dance, and academics… all paid for by the samajam community and international private donations.  I am truly inspired by this model and the beautiful way they are running it, based on deep spiritual teachings and practice! Here is their website if you are interested… (www.srilalitamahilasamajam.org)

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For over two weeks in January I am staying in a breath-takingly beautiful natural environment in northern Kerala at Shanti Giri Ashram.   Enjoy these images I captured of food plants and other beauty on this tropical land!

​A quote from AMMA:
“ Nature is nothing but God’s visible form, which we can see and experience through our senses. Indeed, by loving and serving Nature, we are worshipping God directly.”
Here is a video I created exploring the land at this retreat-center-in-development, called  ShantiGiri Ashram.  Its focus is heart-centered Presence, living in harmony with Earth, with Gaia.
​Hope you enjoy this January dive with me into the natural world in southern India!
I have many more adventures and delights ahead to share with you…
Much Love & Light to you in 2017!
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INSPIRATIONS FROM INDIA #2:  Saccidinanda Ashram  -- January 4, 2017

5/12/2017

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Happy New Year – I wish you a fabulous new year overflowing with joy and peace!
I trust you have been enjoying this special time of year….
I’ve been spending Christmas week and New Years at Saccidanda Ashram … also known as Shantivanam (forest of peace)!  Saccidanda means “Being, Consciousness, Bliss” – Yes! The Holy Trinity!  Don’t you love that?  And I AM experiencing all of that!
After Amritapuri I spent 3 days with a family in Changanacherry in Kerala.  Besides learning how to cook some of the local meals, enjoying papayas, bananas and vegetables from their garden, my friend and I were taken on tours of the wider area… nature reserves, churches that integrate many aspects of local culture and beliefs, and a medieval-style austere ashram.   Kerala is fascinating and beautiful… I am really enjoying my experience of it.

Some photos here to give a taste of the unique Saccidananda Ashram… this living experiment of integrating Hinduism and Christianity at the core mystical level.  The key concept is: God is already in you.  You ARE that Divine Presence.  The life of this place about accessing the “cave of the Heart” through silence, meditation, prayer, chanting, symbols, ritual, and gentle community.

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And here is a 7 minute video about this peaceful, nurturing place that has been my home in the state of Tamil Nadu this while.  ​
​Also some photos of awesome Hindu temples in nearby Tiruchirappally.  Srirangam Temple (14th century), dedicated to Vishnu is the largest active Hindu temple in the world.  People live within it… as do female elephants!
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​Jambuisvara Temple (2nd century) is dedicated to Siva and focuses on the element of water.
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​As my pilgrimage in India continues I will do my best to send out videos, emails, photos.
May your every day of 2017 be a celebration!
AUM NAMAHA SHIVAYA (God be with you)!
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AMRITAPURI ASHRAM:  Inspirations from India newsletter   --      December 18, 2016

5/12/2017

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​ Namaste Dear Friends!
I’ve been in India for 2 weeks now… and am having a fabulous time with so many “firsts” for me in each day!  Amritapuri Ashram is truly beyond description… as is Amma herself!  And thousands of people from many parts of the world are here to be touched by her Presence & transformed by her teachings & spiritual practices. “Inspirational” is a word that falls far short of my experience of the Ashram, as well as the immense Being of Light and Compassion who is the center and essence of it all.  AMRITA means “Divine Bliss” or “Ambrosia”.  Here’s more about the Ashram: http://www.amritapuri.org/ashram
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To get a glimpse of the incredible service projects, institutions, and other schools and programs that Amma has created and manages in India and beyond, you might want to check out another website about “Embracing the World”:  http://www.embracingtheworld.org/
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Twice I received “Darshan” from Amma, a hug and blessing for which people line up for hours to receive.  It was beautiful and impactful for me.  She also gave me (at my request) a personal mantra to use as part of my ongoing spiritual practice.  My mantra (in Sanskrit) is perfect for me and I find it very grounding and centering to use silently throughout my day.  I also took a 2-day retreat/workshop learning Amma’s “I AM” meditation practice (Integrated Amrita Meditation).  I find this practice to be of a high vibration: expansive, nourishing, and a beautiful way to begin each morning.  It includes some yoga asanas, pranayama (conscious breathing patterns), visualizations, chants, and several energetic processes.  You may find that someone in your local community teaches it. 

 The Ashram is located on a peninsula between the Arabian Sea and the Kerala Backwaters… so water on both sides of the Ashram. It is such a beautiful tropical locale!  Twice a week, during sunset, Amma leads deep guided and silent meditation on the ocean beach under the palm trees… how idyllic!  And then answers questions with a translator.  The unique foot bridge was built by the Ashram to go over the backwaters to the closest village. Some of Amma’s educational and health care institutions are located in the village.



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The rhythm of the Ashram life also includes many sacred ceremonies with lots of oil lamps, flowers, chanting, prayer, ritual and blessed food.  There are also evening "Bajans", singing devotional chants with accompaniment by tabla, harmonium, cymbals, and powerful voices... with words in Sanskrit, Malayalam, and translations displayed in English.  Ashram guests are expected to perform "seva" or service... my seva was pricing shawls for sale during international tours... as a fundraising for Embracing the World programs.  Meals are always an adventure... and the food was delicious and healthy.   I would love to spend a longer time there in the future.  Truly an awesomely wonderful place and experience.  I feel very blessed and full and expect to be integrating the experience for a long time!
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One of my favourite explorations is of the Amritapuri Ayurvedic Hospital near the Ashram… a university training in Ayurvedic Medicine as well as a hospital and outpatient clinic.  I went for a consultation about my long-time “leaky eye” concern -- and was amazed by how well I was diagnosed.  I went daily for 2 Ayurvedic treatment procedures for my eyes… which involved lots of therapeutic oils, face & eye massage, and some unique sinus purging techniques.  Unbelievably nurturing and relaxing!  And for incredibly low cost in Canadian dollars!  I feel deeply blessed indeed!  Amma’s goal is to have this hospital show the potency of ancient Ayurvedic medicine for the modern world…  I am very impressed with this!
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 On December 13th, I was interviewed (from my room at the Ashram) on LOVE YOUR LIFE SHOW.  Between India and Peru the interview had lots of technical challenges and therefore the video is of poor quality.  Too bad as it was a fun lively interview.  I posted it below if you want to check it out... the last third of it is fairly clear....
As my pilgrimage in India continues I will send out videos, emails, photos as I am able!
AUM NAMAHA SHIVAYA (God be with you) --- AND Merry Christmas!
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From An Ashram in India -- Interview on Love Your Life Show (38 minutes -- quality is poor due to unstable internet at location)

11/29/2016

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Introducing...Love letters from EARTH and HEAVEN

9/26/2016

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This one hour interview gives an introduction to my recorded class:
 LOVE LETTERS FROM EARTH & HEAVEN  
-- a  
5 session (of 2-hours each) recorded video and/or audio class.
Visit the class description page now!
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Video interview: Heart Awakening and Light Language

8/17/2016

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​I was in a lively video interview on July 12, 2016 with Beverley Buckley on her LOVE YOUR LIFE SHOW – produced out of South Africa.  In this hour-long interview I discuss Heart Awakening, lead a Heart Awakening Guided Meditation connecting 3 Divine Hearts, and give Light Language Transmissions, all as I was guided by Source.  I invite you to take some relaxed time to tune in to this recording – and receive the beautiful loving energies that poured through me!
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