Amen!
**While such practices may cause some relief (just as psychic healing can, at least temporarily), it invites in spirits of darkness that are only too happy to masquerade as angels of light -- if indeed they are not behind the reiki energy to begin with.*
Extremely frightening! Yikes!
imho, the RC church is wise to reject such seductive and deceptive spirits and practices.
Wow, news to me.
I always thought acupuncture was manipulating nerve points, in order to stimulate an inhibiting or facilitating response.
There is no rational stopping point on the slide down the slope of superstition.
This is merely hypnotic suggestion. I can teach you to do it in five minutes, and predict if it will work on you in one minute.
The problem is that the "nuns" who use it are dickheads. I had one patient with cancer in the nursing home. She really needed to reconcile with her daughter, so I asked a nun for prayer. Instead, the dickhead did this occult voodoo healing because the lady complained about pain.
Now, the lady had "on call" narcotics, both pills and shots for pain, but the nun didn't bother to ask the nurse, she just did her thing and then bragged to me how she culred the old lday doing her thing. Which was nonsense. What helped the lady was her routine MSContin given two hours earlier concked in. I told her to stop playing at medicine and stick with the prayers.
So is it "occult". Nah. Just normal hypnosis. the spiritual danger is that these dingbats become puffed up with pride thinking THEY are powerful healers.
Unlike us docs who are always humble when our concoctions work ;-)
And Chesterton's line, to the effect of, "When you stop believing in God, you don't believe in nothing, you believe in anything.
A common enough practice, but like all idolatry it distracts from the proper goal.
I'll suspend judgment on this one. I don't see any signs that these people are invoking spirits or demons. And some of these "alternative" methods seem to work, acupuncture being the best known example. Herbal lore also can be beneficial, although few MDs know much about it.
If so, then there's nothing religious about it, one way or the other. It's only troublesome because it seems to be spreading among whacky nuns, if this story is to be believed.
Yes, it could become dangerous if it has a false religious element, but I'm not sure that's the case.
This technique is so fraudulent, a girl of about 12 debunked it at a science fair a couple of years ago. There is, however, something to be said for the placebo effect.