In the months before I sought out Rosalyn Bruyere, the phlebitis
attacks began to come with disturbing frequency. The vein surgeon
wanted to strip my veins, but the blood specialist wanted to give
me stronger drugs and said that surgery wouldn't help because the
clots would form in different veins.
I called a friend, Dr. Andrew Weil, whom I'd met long before he became
America's favorite proponent of natural healing. "I can't live
like this," I told him. After listening to my history, he thought
for a time. "You should see Rosalyn Bruyere." He said he'd
brought her to the University of Arizona's Program in Integrative
Medicine to teach his research fellows how to work with energy. While
there, she'd cured Weil of a nasty sinus infection that wouldn't respond
to any other treatment. "I bet she can help you."
Without knowing anything more, I drove out to see her. I'd lived
in Los Angeles most of my life but never heard of Sierra Madre. I
had to take five freeways and when I finally arrived, I thought I
was on the set of the movie, "Pleasantville." The streets
were lined with storybook homes from a Fifties sitcom. Many had American
flags flying or banners depicting sunflowers, a birthday cake, a rainbow,
blue birds or happy faces saying "Have a nice day." The
apartment compound where Rosalyn lives was designed by Irving Gill,
the legendary California architect who created a network of cottages
- all cubes and arches - connected by paths that wind around oak and
orange trees.
I walked to a door marked "Healing Light Center Church."
After a few moments, Rosalyn Bruyere appeared: a large, striking woman
in her fifties with flowing auburn hair, green eyes and dangling earrings
with silver stars. Her face was warm and welcoming and conveyed imperturbable
assurance. Walking with a slight limp, she led me to her treatment
cottage and there, in the heart of this white-bread Fifties town,
was a shrine to Egypt. The ceiling was painted bright blue and the
room was filled with Egyptian statues, pyramids, papyruses and stuffed
toy leopards. She asked me to lie on her treatment table and before
I said anything, she placed her hand on the spot in my right calf
where I'd had the most violent phlebitis attack. "You have an
energy block here." She frowned. "Oh, my. Your circulation
is blocked from the foot clear up to the pelvis." She said she
was sending energy into my leg to clear the block.
Now, I've had Reiki and acupressure - different forms of hands-on
therapy - but I've never felt anything like this. Something was pulsing,
vibrating on my skin. Was she holding an electric device to my leg?
"What is that?" I asked.
"Energy." She held up her palm and I could see the skin
beating, pulsing outward. "There's energy in everything that's
alive," she said. "I'm drawing that energy and running it
through your system, directing it where it will help you."
Whatever she was "drawing," whatever was pulsing through
her hand, my leg seemed to crave it, to drink it in the way a thirsty
animal laps up water. When I left her compound, I felt so elated I
could barely sit still in the car. It was as if I was driving through
an illuminated world: every tree, every building seemed a breath-taking
work of art. Even the cars jammed on the freeway flowed in graceful
colored swirls.
For the next few months, I returned to Sierra Madre and after five
treatments, the phlebitis disappeared. My veins receded and my leg
had shrunk in circumference. I stopped taking blood thinners, against
my internist's advice, and in the two years that have elapsed, I have
not had a single attack.
What am I to make of this? I'm an observer, a note-taker with a skeptical,
ironic mind and I'm also a seeker willing to put the mind on hold
and plunge into strange waters. I felt certain Rosalyn had healed
my phlebitis. But was it the "energy" that came through
her hands? Was it the power of suggestion, or could it have been a
case of spontaneous healing, as many doctors would suggest? Was it
the placebo effect, the body's most powerful demonstration of its
ability to heal itself regardless of whether it's receiving antibiotics
or sugar water?
Whenever I see my internist, he looks at my chart with puzzlement.
"Why do you think your phlebitis went away?" he asks.
"I went to see an energy healer."
He sighs and rolls his eyes. Please. Spare me.
* * *
"Nobody wakes up one day and says, `I want to be a weirdo,'"
Rosalyn Bruyere says. We're sitting in front of the cottage she shares
with her partner, Ken Weintrub, whom she met when she was studying
karate and he was her sensei. He's as slim as Rosalyn is ample. He
sits in a chair, puffing a cigar, spotting her as she lifts barbells
with 135-pound weights. "This is how I keep my bones strong,"
she says, puffing between words.
After she completes her set, we move to her treatment cottage and
sit down among the stuffed leopards. On the mantle is a picture of
Cher. Although she doesn't speak about it, Rosalyn has treated many
stars including Barbra Streisand, Cher, James Coburn and the director
Martin Scorsese. She's participated in research studies on energy
transmission at U.C.L.A., the Menninger Clinic and currently at the
Kennedy Krieger Institute, a hospital affiliated with Johns Hopkins
University, which is testing the benefit of energy healing on brain-damaged
children. While none of the studies has yielded conclusive results,
many medical schools are pursuing further tests. Rosalyn has also
been an advisor to the National Institutes of Health for a workshop
on "Unconventional Medicine Practices."
She's certainly unconventional. When she speaks about her life, she
can be as funny as a stand-up comic. She says she had clairvoyant
abilities as a child. "I did real well on multiple choice tests."
A mischievous smile. "I didn't have to study because the correct
letters would sparkle." Her mother was sixteen and unmarried
when Rosalyn was born, so she was raised by her grandmother, who was
only 33, and her great grandmother, Nana, who encouraged her to try
to see "the lights around people and plants."
By the time Rosalyn was seven, she'd learned the hazards of seeing
too much. When a man developed a crush on her mother, Rosalyn says
she saw "a gorgeous fuchsia light shoot out of him and into her.
When I asked my mother, `What was that light that came out of Uncle
Paul and went into you?' Whack! I got slapped."
Not long afterward, Nana's husband died and she reported to the family
that she was having conversations with him. "They put her in
the hospital and gave her electroshock treatment," Rosalyn says.
"I learned what happened if you saw lights and talked to dead
people."
She stopped having those experiences and tried to make herself like
other girls in California. She rode motorcycles, talked on the phone
late at night and enrolled at Monterey Junior College, then dropped
out to get married and had two sons. When her marriage broke up, she
worked as a checker in a supermarket. She was yanked back to the paranormal
when her sons started seeing "fuzzy colors" around people.
Rosalyn started seeing the same kind of lights and colors she'd seen
as a child and thought she was losing her mind. A neighbor told her
she was seeing auras--the light which, according to many mystics and
healers, emanates from every person but which I've never been able
to see.
"This was thirty years ago," Rosalyn says, "before
we had New Age bookstores and yoga and meditation classes everywhere."
The neighbor took her to a spiritualist church in Hollywood, which
taught that people don't die but move to another dimension where it's
possible to communicate with them. The spiritualists also did hands-on
healing, and Rosalyn found that when she touched people who were sick,
"their pain left and sometimes the disease left."
She began to pore over anatomy charts and medical books. "I
was teaching myself, one patient at a time," she says. She studied
with Hopi and Sioux medicine men and did research on Egyptian and
Hindu healing traditions. One of her first mentors was Bill Gray,
a celebrated healer who weighed 400 pounds. He'd developed stomach
cancer when Rosalyn met him and he trained her by having her work
on him. Rosalyn says Gray had what felt like an "electrical current"
in his hands, which few healers have. After he died, Rosalyn discovered
she owned it as well.
In her early years as a healer, people came to Rosalyn as a last
resort. "Doctors had been mean or careless and I was determined
to prove them wrong, to do what medicine hadn't been able to do,"
she says. One patient, Harry, had ankylosing spondylitis which had
caused his joints to become fused together. Doctors told him he'd
never walk again. He was combative and ornery and complained that
Rosalyn didn't know what she was doing. But after three months of
treatment, he moved from a wheelchair to a walker, then to a cane,
and after ten months, he threw the cane away.
Years later, a radiologist from Massachusetts, Dr. Jonathan Kramer,
diagnosed himself with Hodgkin disease. He'd taken classes with Rosalyn
and after two sessions of chemotherapy--in what was supposed to be
a six-month course--he flew to California for a week of treatments
with Rosalyn. When he returned, prepared to undergo more chemo, he
took an x-ray and found that the large tumor in his chest was gone.
"It disappeared completely. That's extraordinary in medical literature,"
he says. "I'm still a scientist and it's hard for me to say that
Rosalyn did that, because I'd also had chemo and done a lot of meditation.
But in my heart of hearts, I believe Rosalyn had the biggest influence."
Not all her treatments were so successful. One man I knew who developed
lung cancer had treatments from Rosalyn for months, then took a downward
turn and died.
I asked her why this had happened. She shook her head, saying that
every illness has multiple causes: physical, mental, emotional and
spiritual. "Maybe I didn't know enough about lung cancer. Maybe
he was too far along when he came to me. Maybe it was his time to
go."
Losing a patient makes her agonize, blame herself, forgive herself,
blame herself and vow to do better in the future. "Being a healer
is a hard life because it breaks your heart when you can't help someone,"
she says. Unlike healers who assert that death doesn't trouble them
because it's a transition, Rosalyn says, "Death bothers me terribly.
I take death personally. It's failure, and I refuse to see it as inevitable.
I fight for life and I'll keep fighting until six men shovel dirt
on the coffin."
* * *
In l975, Rosalyn founded the Healing Light Center Church and became
its pastor so she could lay hands on people and not risk being charged
with practicing medicine without a license. She set up a clinic and
school in the basement of the Maryland Hotel in Glendale, where she
taught a generation of healers who now practice across the country,
including Barbara Brennan who founded the world's largest hands-on
healing school in Islip, New York.
Rosalyn had developed a technique for scanning the body that she
calls "chelation." (pronounced key-lation) Diane Goldner,
in her book, Infinite Grace, says chelation "has become a kind
of MS-DOS for healers, a basic operating system." In chelation,
Rosalyn begins at the feet and moves her hands up the body, running
energy through various systems and organs "until I see what the
problem is, where the blocks are. Then I'll come up with a treatment."
Although chelation has not been studied scientifically, when Ellen
Burstyn was cast as the healer in the film, Resurrection, she spent
time with Rosalyn to learn the technique. "All right," she
told Rosalyn after observing her for five days. "I'm ready. Want
to see me do you?"
Rosalyn recalls, "Who wouldn't want to see an Academy Award
winner do her?"
Burstyn asked a friend to lie on Rosalyn's table and scanned her
friend's body with her hands. She raised her eyebrows as she'd seen
Rosalyn do. Then Ellen called to Rosalyn, "Oooh! I saw an aura!"
Rosalyn laughs. "I wasn't conscious of it until I saw Ellen do
me, but I move a certain muscle in my forehead when I shift from one
kind of seeing to another. When Ellen moved that muscle, she saw the
aura."
I tried moving the same muscle and saw nothing.
* * *
Rosalyn is working in her garden in Sierra Madre, pruning the walnut
trees where dozens of wild parrots come to perch. She's recuperating
from hip replacement surgery. When I'd met her, she'd been limping
and explained that it was due to a congenital hip defect. To her frustration,
she'd never been able to heal herself. "I was doing wonderful
work on other people and was powerless to do anything about my hip,"
she says. "I couldn't get cartilage to grow where there wasn't
any. Everything I tried made it worse."
She noticed, however, that the more disabled she became, the stronger
her ability was to help others. "There's a myth about the wounded
healer," she says, "which suggests you have to experience
suffering - to know disease as a formidable enemy - to have the gift."
For years she refused to have surgery because she was afraid she'd
lose her healing power. "If I had a prosthesis in my body - something
that was solid steel and not human - I was afraid it wouldn't conduct
energy." But she was finding it more difficult to teach and had
to take pain pills to get through the day. "It came down to a
choice: I could accept the limits on my ability to work, or have the
surgery and buy myself more time."
She had the surgery in Ohio because she knew a surgeon there who
was also an acupuncturist and sympathetic to her work. She recovered
with remarkable speed and, to her relief, found her healing power
undiminished.
She believes her most important work now is creating a way for healers
to collaborate with medical doctors, to build a bridge between Western
and alternative medicine. "I like doctors. I'm a boomer and was
raised on drugs. My body responds very well to antibiotics."
She wrinkles her face. "But Chinese herbs make me sick."
Numerous doctors have begun collaborating with healers. For six years,
Dr. Mehmet Oz, an acclaimed surgeon at New York-Presbyterian Hospital,
has brought energy healers into the operating room while he performs
open-heart surgery. "There definitely are energy fields that
impact our lives," he says. He's conducted research that's produced
"interesting, curious results but there are so many variables
that at the end of the day, all we can say is: There's probably something
there but we don't know what it is." Dr. Oz says that if scientists
can identify what energy is, "if we can peel away the shrouds
covering this jewel, it will open up a huge vista of opportunity.
We'll understand a whole new way in which the human body works. That
excites me."
Rosalyn has given up her private practice so she can concentrate
on teaching and research. At the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore,
she's participating in four pilot studies. Sharon Reeves, the chief
health care executive, says Rosalyn gives energy treatments to children
suffering from brain injuries, some of whom are paralyzed. "We
don't have a control group because with brain injuries there's so
much variation between patients. So each child serves as his own control."
She says the research staff collects data before, during and after
Rosalyn's treatment and looks for changes in the patient's mobility
and range of motion, "so we can document the impact of her treatment."
Rosalyn is also training Reeves and other staff members to do energy
therapy. Reeves signed up after receiving a treatment herself. "When
I met Rosalyn I had a knee injury and was in excruciating pain,"
she recalls. "Rosalyn worked on me--I was a bit skeptical--but
the pain subsided immediately. The relief was phenomenal."
* * *
It's Friday night and 130 people-mostly women-have gathered at the
Embassy Suites near Sierra Madre for a weekend seminar on "The
Third Eye." Rosalyn introduces her partner, Ken, who'll be teaching
with her. "We're a real couple," she tells the group, "and
we live together with a fair amount of agreement and disagreement."
They speak in a rambling style and I grow sleepy and bored. I can
barely drag myself back on Saturday but the atmosphere changes. I
feel alert, every sense is heightened and an intoxicating sense of
well-being spreads through me like a drug. Others report similar feelings.
"It's Rosalyn's energy," they say.
Rosalyn believes most people can learn to heal, just as most people
can learn to play piano "but only a few will play like Vladimir
Horowitz." She says we can all activate the third eye, which
supposedly sits in the middle of the forehead and is the center of
creativity, insight and intuition. "We all get a knowing, then
we talk ourselves out of it and when it turns out to be right, we're
amazed!" She suggests we write down our intuitions in a journal,
date them and see if they prove correct. "When the phone rings,
never answer it without first asking, who is it?" After the seminar,
I try this ten times and strike out ten times.
She says we also have to develop faith. "Every time you set
out to do something, you have to conquer your fear that it can't be
done. When I begin a healing treatment, I have to believe I can see
through the body even though there are days when I can't."
I ask her if a client needs to believe in energy therapy for it work.
"No. If I truly have faith, my client doesn't need to because
I'll make enough for both of us."
She asks us to choose a partner and practice drawing energy up from
the earth through our feet and pushing it out through our hands into
the person's body. Then she asks us to pull energy out of the body,
"as if your arms are hollow and you're sucking it up." I
try this, having little faith I'll be able to do it, and notice that
it seems easier to pull energy than push it.
"For females, it's easier to pull," Rosalyn says. "But
most of the time in healing, you're putting energy into a sick person
to get them well. You pull if the person's in pain and push if they
need energy. The art is to make it look effortless."
Before we leave, she asks us to scan our partner's head with our
hands and see, "What do they need? Then let your hands rest on
the head and send them what they need."
My first partner, a small, dark-haired woman from New York, feels
wiry and jangly and I sense that she needs self confidence. I place
my hands on her head and imagine sending her this quality. Then we
take a second partner and she feels different: heavy and inert. I
decide to send her joy and liveliness.
When we trade places and the first woman scans me, I feel a strong
desire for her hands to touch the top of my head but just off center,
to the sides. To my surprise, she places her hands on those exact
spots. When the second woman scans me, I feel a burning sensation
in my forehead. I want to draw her hands there, I need her hands there.
Rosalyn says: "Now let your hands rest on your partner's head."
No one is touching the forehead, they're all touching the crown, but
my partner reaches around and puts her hands on the burning spot in
my forehead. I let out a cry.
On the ride home, I marvel: two times I've drawn people's hands to
specific and different places. The thought ticks across my mind: was
it coincidence?
Nah. Couldn't be. Or could it?
As I make my way from one freeway to the next, I find that I don't
care if it was coincidence or if I've tapped into what Rosalyn calls
energy - a force, a current I can palpably feel although I can't define
what it is. A full moon is rising over the San Gabriel mountains,
startling in its intensity. The world seems a rich and intricate place.
The mountains, the moon, my car, my own hands are shot through with
mystery and unanswerable questions. For this I'm grateful.
