Are Rituals Creeping into Your Bengston Method Practice?
Can the Bengston Method Lose Potency Over Time?
Can even a powerful healing practice like the Bengston Method lose its potency over time? The answer is yes—if we do it ritualistically. While some may argue that healing rituals offer helpful structure, William Bengston is adamant about avoiding them. But what exactly is a ritual? Could certain rituals actually help keep things fresh? Is there a way to make rituals enhance the Bengston Method rather than undermine it? The Octave Resonance Healing Approach™ offers a unique perspective, showing how to infuse fresh energy into your healing practice. By using this method, you can transform your routine, enhance your results, and reignite your connection to the healing process.
Are Rituals Creeping Into Your Practice?
As someone who has specialized in the Bengston Method since 2009, I frequently uncover elements of ritual in my clients’ practices. If you think you’re free from ritual, consider the possibility that more ritual has crept into your practice than you may realize. Avoiding deadening rituals while keeping your practice as fresh and alive as possible can deepen your results.
What Exactly Is a Ritual?
At its core, a ritual is a purposeful, repetitive action that strengthens our connection to ourselves, others, and the ideas we hold dear. Think about the simple yet profound routines you engage in daily: the morning coffee shared with a loved one, a devotional prayer you offer to your Creator, the bedtime stories you read to your children, or even the way you celebrate special occasions with friends and family. These rituals serve as anchors in our lives, nourishing relationships, and deepening connections. By appreciating the rituals you already practice, you can recognize their power in creating space for love, healing, and growth.
It is a Deeper Issue than Simply Keeping Things Fresh
While we celebrate the beauty of intentional, loving rituals, that’s not what Bengston’s method is about. My critique of ritual goes deeper than avoiding mindless repetition that can make things stale. Specific repetitive actions (aka rituals) in healing sessions can confuse practitioners into thinking that feelings of flow, warm sensations in the hands, or emotional releases are the keys to successful healing. A common mistake is confusing these byproducts—like warm hands or emotional release—for the actual healing mechanism. Just because your hands felt warm during a good treatment doesn’t mean they should always warm up for a session to be effective. Just because you got a great result doing a hands-on session doesn’t mean that, at some point distance healing would not work better for the same client. If you yawned in a session where the tumor cooled quickly, it doesn’t mean yawning will have the same effect next time.
Embracing Flexibility and Curiosity
It’s crucial to remain flexible and open during a healing session. The right attitude is one of curiosity about what will emerge rather than focusing on whether you’re doing it “right.” In fact, the instant you feel like you’re doing it right, you are probably doing it wrong, as you have succumbed to ritual. This is where the energy of healing can begin to wane. By embracing spontaneity and staying curious, you allow yourself to explore new possibilities, keeping your healing practice vibrant and engaging. Finding the balance between structure and creativity deepens your connection and enriches your healing work.
Living Rituals in Practice
Just to keep things fresh, I have observed certain repetitive forms (or “rituals”) actually enhancing the effects of the Bengston Method. However, even these can become detrimental if they’re not “living rituals”—actions that respond to the call of the present moment. So, what do living rituals look like in practice? Here are a few examples:
- Writing down your List every day and optionally seeking divine or inner guidance can be a powerful practice. If you vary how you review your List, this rhythmic ritual creates an energetic container for your practice to thrive. As long as you allow something new to emerge each time, you’re engaging in a dynamic practice rather than a dead ritual.
- When giving a hands-on session, you might routinely start by standing behind your seated client with your hands on their shoulders. This initial connection ritual can signal to your unconscious, “Now we are treating,” helping you connect quickly to the process. Just remember: any given day might call for a different first move. For example, I usually begin with cool, neutral areas rather than going straight to the tumor. While this is a style/ritual I’ve developed, it’s essential for me to switch it up if it’s not serving the moment.
- Repeating a guided visualization can also be a living ritual. In my group distance healing sessions on the Spirit Gate Cancer Support Facebook Group, I often use a similar visualization. This repetition establishes resonance among group members, but it’s important to remember that the visualization itself isn’t what does the healing. Different experiences arise each time, and sometimes we explore different visualizations to keep the energy flowing.
Common Pitfalls in the Bengston Method
On the surface, the Bengston Method is profoundly simple: connect and cycle. Yet, beneath that simplicity lie countless forms that can inadvertently become rituals and hinder results. Common pitfalls include:
- Always image cycling the same size, speed, shape, number, and location of cycles
- Never changing the images on your List
- Always receiving treatments at the same time, place, and with the same people
The list goes on.
Levels of Ritual
Ritual can show up at levels: physical actions done mindlessly, Life-Force sensations that are mistakenly believed to be essential, repetitive therapeutic visualizations, feelings of agape and peace, or spiritual connections to a favored deity. Ironically, these can diminish the effectiveness of your Bengston Method sessions. I help my clients reduce ritual by looking at their practice of the Bengston Method through the lens of my Octave Resonance Healing Approach™.
The Octave Resonance Healing Approach™
The Octave Resonance Healing Approach™ offers a four-fold perspective that can be applied to any aspect of life, including the Bengston Method. I divide observable reality into 4 levels or “octaves”. Physical, Life Force, Emotions/Images, Spiritual/Higher Awareness. We can observe and witness things on all these levels. We can also change things on all 4 levels. It gives one a simple but broad menu to ask oneself how to change one’s energy healing practice so as to keep it fresh and not confuse particular effects of healing with the ineffable source of healing. Sometimes just changing one small thing creates a living quality to one’s practice. Here are examples on each of the octaves.
How to Change Your Physical Octave:
- Change your posture. Sit instead of lying down. Walk while treating rather than holding still.
- Change the room you are treating in.
- Adjust the lighting in your treatment space. It’s art, so avoid the ritual of always dimming the lights and using candles, but at times, those things can really change things up.
- Change the bedding, clean the space, put flowers out, …change the physical environment.
- Use varying touch techniques, like gentle strokes versus firmer pressure.
- Change the time of day you conduct your sessions.
- Etc.
How to Change Your Life Force Octave:
- Treat when you are exhausted
- Treat after exercising
- Treat while walking in Nature and in various weather conditions.
- Have more than one healer working on a patient at the same time
- Incorporate sound or music during the sessions.
- Treat after doing a breathwork or meditation practice.
- Treat after reading 400 emails that have numbed your enthusiasm for life.
- Treat after taking a revitalizing shower.
How to Change your Emotions/Images Octave:
- Don’t change what you want, but do change the picture you associate with it.
- Cultivate gratitude or joy while you cycle
- Watch what your emotions are doing…they will change if you observe them.
- Do a distance healing while you are gardening. Cycle a bit more aggressively when you pull those weeds!
- Cycle when you have extreme emotion: happy, grateful, sad, angry, scared, etc.
- Use music to change your default emotional state.
How to Change your Spiritual Octave:
- Ask a Higher Power what to change.
- Seek guidance from mentors or training materials relevant to your work.
- Contemplate the meaning of your practice and acknowledge how new insights change how you connect with what you are doing.
- Journal about your insights to deepen your connection to your practice
- Ask, “What can I be aware of, that if I was aware of it, would enhance this healing process?” Then release the thought, but do notice when the answer shows up minutes or days later.
- Participate in group healing circles to foster community and shared experiences.
Invigorate Your Practice
Incorporating the principles of my Octave Resonance Healing Approach™ can invigorate your practice of the Bengston Method, allowing you observe your process enough to avoid ritualizing it because you believe in it. By embracing flexibility and creativity, you create space for the healing experiences that the Bengston Method facilitates.
Ready to transform your healing practice?
Let’s unlock its full potential together. Schedule a complimentary Get Acquainted Call with me, and we’ll explore how to make your practice dynamic, effective, and alive.
