The Six-Step Spiritual Healing Protocol

FORWARD I first met Robbins in 1969. Although the arc of a life’s journey is always clearer in retrospect, the seeds for this book were evident in her worldview even then. She has made a career of living at the boundary between the known and the unknown, starting with her move overseas and immersion in another culture as a teenager. She then spent two decades researching cross-cultural adaptation and training others to engage more effectively with these unknowns. She went on to a successful career as a management consultant in international development. Twenty-five years ago, confronted with healing challenges of her own and in our family, she went beyond the improvement of communications across the known world to communications in the spiritual realm. She keeps braiding new threads with the old, as you will see from her chapter on “global healing” where she has continued to integrate her international and outward-looking perspective into her spiritual work. She describes herself as an ordinary mystic. I have always understood “ordinary” in this context to mean she is grounded in daily life - in ordinary time. In most other respects she is anything but ordinary. She is, however, eternally practical, even in her approach to calling forth spiritual healing. She takes an empirical approach and constantly tests her methods, reads the research, and collects feedback from her clients. She is a fan of things that work and the healing protocols she shares in this book are seasoned with years of experience helping clients. Her prose is rich and we are rewarded with deeper nuances when we take the time to meditate on the meaning. She clearly does not expect anyone to absorb the book in one reading. Indeed, a major reason she finally sat down to write it was to provide her colleagues and clients a reference to all the learnings that have shaped her journey so these lessons and techniques can be shared more broadly. In this book, she sets out specific and practical methods for us to clear the fears and imbalances that keep us from embracing our whole selves. She has refined these methods after years of working with clients and deep meditation and gathered this wisdom into a Six-Step Spiritual Healing Protocol. One of things I admire most about Robbins is her courage. This is not to say that she is fearless, but that she faces her fears over and over, clears them from her field, and moves beyond them. I have come to appreciate that this is a rare form of courage indeed. One of my favorite bits of wisdom that she shared with me early in her journey is the idea that we get as many chances as we need in this life to clear whatever we have come here to clear. It was only later I came to understand that depending on whether we have the courage to face our fears, the repeating nature of these opportunities may be the good news or may be the bad news. As her partner on the journey and one of the primary beneficiaries of Robbins’ evolving understanding of spiritual healing, I am deeply pleased to see this book come to fruition. It’s time that a broader community of seekers experiences the transformational power of what she has learned. In our relationship I am the tender of the hearth where the flame is sometimes low but radiant among the shadows. Robbins is the one who lights the lantern and holds it up and out into the darkness. The flame is bright and the darkness does not overcome it. May her book be a lantern for you in the darkness and may the sacred flame burn brightly for you and in you. Giles Hopkins