Heart Work
A conversation with Barbara Brennan
by Sydney L. Murray

Introduction
Many years ago, on a rainy Friday night, I was sitting in a large room at the Open Center in New York City, listening to Barbara Brennan speak of her work with human energy fields. Her work affirms much of what I've felt and experienced throughout my life: that we are energy and we are surrounded by the energy of nature which supports us and feeds us. Brennan is an amazing woman whom I admire for her passion and perseverance in providing her work to a sometimes weary world.

SLM: I wonder how you transformed yourself from astrophysicist at NASA to a
healer and energy worker?

BB: It was a fairly natural progression, primarily due to the fact that from my training in
physics, I had learned to look at the world as a scientist. When I started seeing auras and energy fields throughout the body and around it, I automatically observed the phenomena from this scientific perspective. And since the phenomena repeated itself, which is one of the basic elements of scientific research, it made sense to ask myself if the information I was getting from the energy fields phenomenon was useful. I learned quite early not to ask if it was real. I learned to ask if it was useful, because it was so controversial.

SLM: Were you aware of your healing abilities as a child?

BB: I never really thought about healing. I thought of energy fields, I thought everyone was aware of them. I grew up on a farm in a very natural setting, in a very simple family. I did think about healing as I was growing up. My mother's sisters were in a church that believed in healing and I remember hearing about it. But it was my mother's faith in the divine which had a great effect upon me. It wasn't anything that was pointed out as unusual, it was simply there, part of everyday life. The spiritual world exists and healing exists, that's normal. For example, my mother came from a large family of twelve children and had two sisters who were twins, and one of them was deaf. Her hearing was healed by a faith healer. But that was pretty much it, most of my life was focused on work and study, a normal country childhood.

SLM: For over twenty-five years you have researched and explored the human
energy field. How has people's perception of energy work evolved?

BB: The public's view of energy work is tremendously different than it was when I first started. Nobody knew what an aura was or knew about energy healing. There was no exposure to it. I lived in a spiritual community for nine years and I was considered very
strange, and this was in a center that actually talked about these things. They lived by spiritual principals, but didn't actually work directly with them. There was a way that the simple nature of the human energy consciousness field was denied. I don't know how to say this correctly because it was also a center that worked with bioenergetics and the leaders knew about auras. But there was still denial. For example, in terms of channeling how people view spiritual things, we speak about visions or dreams. Now that's very different than saying, "I see this angel or this guide standing next to me and I am conversing with him right now". This relationship is as real to me as the one I'm having with you, another human being. There are many different levels to this energy work.

So the basic, simplest work (that relates to energy healing) is acupuncture. It is also the most accepted. Right now all over the country there are Centers for Alternative Medicine (CAM) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But taking it as far as I do and communicating with spiritual beings and traveling in spiritual worlds is quite another thing. So there's an entire spectrum of this kind of information but the very basic work is being accepted. Most people know about acupuncture and have some information on it.

SLM: So what is the human energy field?

BB: It's a subtle energy consciousness field and I'm saying energy consciousness on
purpose because the energy is directly and always correlated to an aspect of consciousness. You can't separate them. That's the one thing that I understood as a scientist that still isn't quite understood in the general public. We always think of energy as a thing, rather than as ourselves. I am energy consciousness, my physical body runs with this subtle energy consciousness: it is me. It is not a thing out there like electricity. That's the first concept one needs to learn about the auric or human energy field. The next is that it exists before physical body and it holds the structure in which the physical body grows. These are two very major concepts.

In terms of how it looks, that energy consciousness is penetrated all the way through the body and wraps around and exists in every cell and within everything inside of the cell. It looks like lines of light that flow through all of the organs and around all of the organs. Essentially, if you look at the energy body, you see the person, but only as energy. There are different frequency bands or levels that are associated with different states of consciousness, or different aspects of our life experiences, or the consciousness of our life experiences.

SLM: Could I clear my own energy fields?

BB: Yes, to perceive them, to work with them, to clear them. And it's also very helpful to have help from someone else. Because on the subject of healing, when we are out of balance and have been for a long time it begins to feel natural, so working with another
human being or healer will allow us to feel the true balance as natural. If you have a chronic condition that you've been dealing with for a long time, what happens is that you live your life around that condition and accommodate your life around it and this state becomes natural. A lot of healing with people with chronic disorders is about going into those areas that you've lived around and clearing them in order to achieve balance and harmony.

SML: What happens in an energy healing? Does the energy come from
the person or a higher source?

BB: Both. From the Western perspective we (energy healers) can look at ourselves as transformers and channelers. That's why its called channeling, we take in energy. One
of the major trainings for a healer is learning how to regulate his/her own body and be able to carry a strong current. In other words, a channeler must be able to regulate not only the energy one channels in terms of frequency, color, and direction of flow, but also be able to regulate the amount of energy flowing through them. So a great deal of the training is self-regulation and that's the hardest part of this technique. Once you know how to regulate the energy flowing through your body, then the other techniques become very easy. Learning regulation is the most difficult thing. And of course, since it's energy consciousness, it's not just running a current through you: it's energy consciousness, which includes your own personal state of being.

We live in a realm of natural energy that comes from everywhere: the earth, the center of the earth, the sky, the air. As a planet, we absorb, circulate and transform that energy and send it out. As healers, we receive it with humility and let it go forth from us.
It is such a privilege to do this work. Yet, we work with a lot of difficult situations, illness, pain and tragedy. And at the same time we are a bridge. We live in both the spiritual and material worlds. My latest channeling is walking in both worlds and discovering how to do that as we deal with the ecstasy of spiritual experience while
we are simultaneously helping people go through their agony. One must be with that person, which means touching that agony, not processing it. You can't separate yourself while you're doing a healing. To be with the person, you must be in that agony without being overcome by it.

It is quite a challenge and a privilege. Empathy is very important. For example, if a client is in terror and fear, the healer holds love and courage and yet still sits in that fear and terror with the person. It amazes me that so many people either ignore or are unaware of this divine energy or essential nature of ourselves. There have been different times in history and different cultures that don't and haven't ignored it. We happen to live in a culture that has erased our heritage of this information, or delegated it, tucked away this knowledge into esoteric studies. It is held by secret societies, or in religious traditions and relegated to a few. This happened in our culture, but that's not true in all cultures. Here in the Western World we are so focused on the material aspects of life and our culture is based on scientific thought with the hard sciences as a major sustaining foundation. There has been an up-welling from people all over the world to once again offer this knowledge. One of the amazing things that has happened in my school is that more than one third of the students are from another country. We actually have 46 countries represented in a class of 600. In our first class we had an international healing. I called off the names of the countries of each student, and we honored and recognized these countries. One by one the students stood up and represented their countries by bringing healing to that country and to the world, from their own unique perspective. At the end of this exercise everyone sang their national anthems all at the same time It was exquisite. I thought it may sound strange with everyone singing different songs, but it wasn't, it really sounded like a chorus.

SLM: Tell me about your upcoming workshop.

BB: We have created a new workshop. Sherry Pae, R.N., is giving this Scripps workshop with me. She's been an intensive care nurse for 25 years and has also trained nurses and operated complementary care centers of her own. She's going to work with the physiological perspective and I'm going to work with the auric perspective of the heart and the heart chakra. So what we're doing is building bridges and dealing with the human heart's role in history, as well as our own personal lives and its unique placement in the energy field and the implications surrounding that. We will explore the heart as a doorway to spiritual realms and learn how to balance love and will. Sherry is going to focus on the physiology of the heart and how that relates to the personal experience
of your heart and your heart's function in your life, in terms of loving and centering and living a heart-full life. The heart is a doorway to unique aspects of the self and to a different level of self understanding in terms of the interface between the spiritual and
material worlds. We will look at the structure of the field, in the levels beneath the field, the level of (one's) intentionality and core essence and how they relate to this field.

I believe, and I think, it is going to come out soon, although, I don't have all of the information based on physics yet, about reverse magnetic spins and what that creates in the field as the heart chakra is opened. There are some interesting zero point fields in the heart chakra that can help us change our concept of our limitations and this imaginary wall that we have put between the spiritual and material worlds. In learning to walk in both the spiritual and material worlds, we must immediately deal with death. Because that's where we draw the line: between death in the physical, and life in the spiritual. In order to do that we must deal with our own limited concepts of what life and death are.

The thing that I am most interested in is the boundary, the interface, between the spiritual and material worlds and finding new paradigms to experience that interface. It becomes life-life rather than life-death and in doing that we can experience life as a continuum and learn to walk in both the spiritual and material worlds while honoring both.

Consider this for example: In the material world we have been raised to plan ahead and set goals and learn how to do a step by step process to get to that goal. In the spiritual world things don't happen until the moment, in the now. In the spiritual world there is no past and no future. And to create an interface between our linear experience of the physical world and the spiritual world of "now" moments, I believe that is the challenge. You can see it everywhere. All of the systems that we have created are being challenged. And the reason they're all being challenged is they no longer serve our health and our basic humanity. Humanity is challenged to move to a higher level of self care and self acceptance of the whole self.

The changes in our world are bigger than any which have ever occurred on earth. I think it's very interesting that our incoming government wants everything to be bipartisan.
I keep getting this tremendous channeling, and this is pretty far in the future because I realize this is pretty politically incorrect. (smiles) We will have nations of individuals based on the essence of the individual rather than nations held by geographical boundaries. Look at our traditions and how traditions which were once very important culturally to protect individuals, maintained separation.

All of the challenges that humanity is faced with start with the individual. Whatever problems you may be concerned with, the first thing you must do is find out how you hold it on a personal level. Consider the possibilities if every human being did that; consider the tremendous changes that would occur on earth. Once you start this process, there is no going back, and it expands out around you spherically and reaches those closest to you. They change and they do this process and it occurs in ever expanding circles around each individual. I've seen this happen over and over. And of course the power increases with each individual that's added to that central vibrating force, increasing the amount of light coming out. It's an exponential curve versus a linear one.

Heyoan [her spiritual guide] has said the major difficulty that human beings have is the belief, the unhealthy belief, that separation promotes and supports life. That is simply not true. It's communion that creates and supports life, and the process of creation is not based on the tension of opposites, but is based on the confluence of creative individuals coming together in communion. That is where humanity is moving.