Marya Mann : Blog : Brave New Braco ~ Energy Healing

Brave New Braco ~ Energy Healing

KONA, HI ~ As we sped south along the coast to meet the superhealing gaze of Braco, I felt very alive, and reminded my skeptical self of the power of belief. From the first moment I heard about instantaneous healings in the presence of this humble man from Croatia, I was changed.

Word of his amazing gift preceded his arrival on the Big Island with people saying his gaze deep into their eyes had sparked new wellness, joy, and affirmation of life. “Even paralysis, allergies and tumors disappeared,” said Dr. Harald Wiesendanger, a German expert on healers who has published 28 books on miraculous healings.

The quickening of energy around Kona this last month mirrored my own, as more and more colleagues, students, and friends felt a sparkling sensation, an expectant euphoria that catalyzed remembrances of gazes past. I know the eyes of divine love. Osho, Trungpa Rinpoche, dancers from Bali, holy men from India, faith healers, compassionate writers, my own mother, my partner – they all have eyes that gaze on me with unconditional love and appreciation.

“You have to see this guy, though,” said my friends of the gentle Braco, (pronounced Brot-zo), “he’s different.” His nickname Braco translates from his native Croatian to ‘little brother,’ and “he strongly adheres to his conviction that you should never make a business with something, which you have been given as a present,” says Dr. Wiesendanger.

“He could have made millions by only charging a few Euro from each of his visitors, but his help is for free and he even does not want to accept donations. He has the knowledge of how to become a media-star, but he refuses to give any interviews.”

Ever since Kona author Angelika Whitecliff introduced Braco to Hawaii with her heartfelt book, 21 Days with Braco, the buzz about him had been growing. He’s phenomenal, a real miracle-worker, people said.

THE POWER OF BELIEF

Dr. Green and I drove past the puffy white-fringed waves as the tide rolled in to our right, the turquoise sea crashing against dark lava rock formations. In the car, we spoke with enthusiasm about our belief that powerful healing energy exists, and that it can be shared through a touch, an intention, a story, and even a simple gaze.

“Don’t you think it’s a little risky though for so many people to place their trust in someone else’s hands?” I said. “It’s important to trust our own self-healing ability.”

“Could be, but I want people to trust me,” he said, “that my hands can help relieve their pain. . .”

“. . . which is what your chiropractic patients want,” I said. “But it’s still their inner perception that makes people open to trust, to being vulnerable, to letting the grace flow in.”

“Maybe he can activate a new and higher vibration,” he said. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

“I just want to evolve the love light in here, in my heart, so I don’t feel like I need to look for it in another person, or a pill, or a specific place, like Lourdes, or Fatima, or at the Sheraton Hotel in Keauhou.”

“You feel loving now, don’t you?” he asked.

“Now, yes. Yesterday, mostly, but there’s an alignment of spirit I want to feel all the time. LIke, Buddha, Mohammed, tribal Shaman, Hawaiian Kahuna, Christ, and Braco apparently, like all the tribal elders who’ve reached a kind spiritual or inner mastery and shown us what this alignment looks and feels like. I want that.

“You’re already pretty enlightened,” he said. “But maybe you have to fully trust and believe in another’s power first, so then you can fully believe in your own.”

“And here’s the real paradox. There’s no separation, really, at the spiritual level,” I said. “When our thoughts spread out into the environment, like now, going to see Braco, the environment shifts, altering the electron spin of atoms with our intentions. . .”

“. . . and his belief in perfect health is spreading out to us, even now.”

“I feel it. I’ve felt it all week, a powerful thought field. And our ability to feel and believe that he can heal is enhancing and evolving his ability and our healing.”

“I think we choose,” he said.

“I think we choose too. I’m a believer. I’ll believe unless proven otherwise,” I said.

So we made the trek with hundreds of other Big Islanders, as well as some who had flown in from the mainland, Canada, Sweden, and Australia. We had to go. We had to feel, to see, to hear, to sense, and to heal, for ourselves.

Arriving at the Sheraton, we bought $6 tickets and saw old friends, many of them dancers and musicians from our Dance for the Worlds group, others I hadn’t seen since Deva Primal and Miten’s concert. We easily made new friends as we waited in a sinuous line for the door to open, chatting and laughing, everyone cruising on the vibe of superhealing energy.

It felt like being at the Commune in India again, the light breeze carrying scents of plumeria along the late afternoon air. To see dozens of happy people helping other happy people to expand in the field of love was balm to my eyes, but there was still the skeptical part of me, a touch of doubt that ran neck and neck with my faith. I had been burned before, like everyone else, and sought communion with the holiest I AM, not a marketing scam.

Everywhere we looked there was a healing and heart-opening gaze, Pomaika’i, Alice, Bella, Alyssa, a pleasurable sweetness as everyone acknowledged the healing presence, the sacred eyes. I put on my sunglasses when the dappled light from trees above glared briefly, then took them off again. Oh, drat. I realized I had left my clear glasses in the car and only had my dark prescription shades for the viewing. We moved to the door.

Holy eyes! I thought as I locked gazes with Bernie who was taking tickets and hugging everyone. Ever the helpful volunteer for dance, talk, and community events, he had been fighting an illness, but his days with Braco, he said, made him feel immeasurably better. He was able to drive his own car again. Hurray!

When we entered the workshop space, more holy eyes as I was guided to a row of seats toward the back. There was a small platform on the stage for Braco to stand higher so everyone could see him well. After we sat down, Dr. Michael Salla, an international business consultant who was one of the hosts, reminded us of all the great masters who had given darshan. Darshan is the seeing or beholding of a deity. To receive darshan from a great saintly person, to see with reverence and devotion, is to behold a vision of the divine or to be in the presence of a highly revered person.

Granted, I feel we all should be worshipping each other. We could be chanting from the rooftops how great our neighbors are and how great it is that our partner or housemate or son put the laundry on the line and the food gets cooked and everybody is happy. But we have to somehow clear the channels to see the beauty beneath this sometimes chaotic surface. When we cleanse the mirror of the mind with every breath, the center of love appears.

When I had practiced yoga that morning, cleansing the mind, bonding spirit and flesh through the breath, I loosened up by body so the openness would invite the divine within. I placed my gaze on my fingertips, then beyond to the horizon to set my intention in warrior pose, focused on my nose in tadasana, and on my palms, the sea, and the sky in yoga dance. Aiming the loving gaze of acceptance both inside and outside to points of focus on the body and beyond is known as drishti in Sanskrit, meaning vision and or insight. Focusing with the eyes engages a full circuit of energy that clarifies body and mind in both yoga and dance.

Since it’s easy to become distracted when the eyes are wandering all over the room, simply focusing on a particular drishti aids concentration, alignment, and heightens vibration. In side angle pose, Parsvakonasana, the gaze is towards the raised hand, which also reminds us the turn our heads up towards the ceiling. Even though a drishti can be described as a fixed gaze, the eyes always stay soft, never straining.

I remembered the first time I had practiced “Looking and Allowing,” a Buddhist technique that came from Tibetan monasteries to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York to Boulder where I helped found the Holy Cow Theater Co. Confidence and trust in our acting partners and ensemble members was paramount as we explored the depths of our healing, emotive and creative powers. We were commissioned to do things like compose new scripts and mount six-week runs of new shows with only a a few months preparation. In a dance musical production about “The Trickster” mounted by 28 cast members and 22 technical, marketing, and production staff, we relied on 2- to 10-minute “Looking and Allowing” meditations during daily rehearsals to keep us cool and calm as the inevitable rush of opening night approached.

As part of a community collaboration, we wanted to maintain coherence, good communication, and compassion among ourselves without becoming hierarchical. Non-verbal, relaxing, eye-to-eye meditation with open attention set a powerful foundation for partnership to flower and for domination tendencies to dissolve. Venerable Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche had always encouraged us to be mandala-like, not hierarchical where power imbalances kept people stuck in old and often false identities. He said everyone is a center of their own wheel of influence, and we interpenetrate with chosen others on our journey through life, looking at things and people as they really are, loving each other as we really are.

When we gazed into each others’ eyes during those Looking and Allowing ensemble exercises, I recall the increasing awareness — and self-consciousness — as I allowed myself to simply be myself with myself with another for the first time. It felt like coming home, and with each new partner, the gazes became deeper, more lovely, increasingly energizing and total. We relaxed with each other whatever projections or false feelings we had carried to the moment, and in dissolving all past negativity, we became available to the light of the moment. We learned to trust, in the simple act of looking and allowing.

More than a dozen years later, I shared Looking and Allowing with artists and educators in Kealakekua, here in West Hawaii. Sixteen of us partnered up for ensemble art practice after a pot luck dinner at a friend’s shiny, wood-beamed home. We began gazing at each other. Some people laughed. Others cried. Some tried to look away and were reminded to come back, come back, to looking deeply within and loving yourself, and totally allowing yourself to be, while looking at the other, allowing them to be exactly where they were, accepting, forgiving, easily receiving the looking and being allowed to be your lovely self, while lovingly allowing others to be exactly who they were.

When will we stop forgetting that we all – even me, even you — have this same capability within, to gaze as true selves, looking and allowing other true selves to evolve, all of us loving beings who evoke and evolve higher levels of love and integrity as we see the great goodness in each other.

To feel the power that comes “when two or more are gathered” in the name of higher love, the creative mind, the unified state, isn’t that what we aspire to? My Aikido teacher Thomas Crum used to talk about Aikido eyes. Emilie Conrad-Da’oud called it global vision. Meditative eyes, seeing without looking, peripheral vision, complete awareness, seeing anew, open perception.

A very exonerated master once spoke of the gazing as “one hundred percent inner, and one hundred percent outer.”

I was ready. Dr. Salla finished and feelings of power and unity filled me as the music began. Braco walked into the room, crossed the floor and ascended to the platform. Equanimity and recollection, deep peace. An energy that could extend everywhere, even to you reading this now, if you imagine loving eyes everywhere, gazing at you.

Soaking up the love gaze, I felt as though everything I viewed was infused with this vision of loving kindness and forgiveness, magnanimous cheerfulness, hope, vitality, sacred vision.

Or not. The key here is that each of us must open our own heart to heaven. It is our power of choice.

With our gaze and our appreciation, we choose whether to see a friend or an enemy, another snake charmer or a true genius healer, a biospheric network of neural glee or a cave prison built of our mistrust. I chose the former, and was delighted to see so many people also choose to believe there is a power to heal available to us, and we can awaken it, and it is easier to awaken in the presence of some people more than with others.

The love field created by people awakening to this realization is enormous and significant, and you can feel it right now if you choose. Such beautiful power, to awaken to our higher selves, and to see the divine in each other and ourselves in every moment.

How much of this has to do with Braco’s healing ability, and how much has to do with our belief, as well as the thunderous praise of devotees who work tirelessly on his behalf? I don’t know. I do know it’s possible to raise energy vibration to such a high pitch that it radiates massive doses of healing energy.

Braco’s gaze had, according to thousands of people, reported thousands of people, cured cancer, healed bones, gastritis, and boils, bones, skin lesions, and brain problems. He had sparked miracles and emotional transformations at a distance, reversals of both chronic degenerative conditions and acute pain. In Europe, he gazes at 22,000 people a month in sanctuaries and ampitheaters.

Keep shining your own light, an inner voice said. You can’t receive the light from others, the next book or workshop, the next vitamin pill, the next guru. Others can ignite your light even brighter, but you are the center and source of your perceptions, and thus the manner and form of your understanding and expression. How much healing, wholeness and happiness can you absorb? Be the healing, the perfect happiness, and feel absolutely whole. That feeling spreads out into world, just as Braco’s gaze has spread out into the world, reminding us of our own strength, power, and agility.

After the gazing session, Angelika Whitecliff, the incandescent author and diligent organizer who brought Braco to Hawaii, said, “Let Braco’s gaze set the foundation for your own blossoming. When that foundation is set, you’ll know, and you’ll go on and help others on your path.”

One day when the gazing sessions were held outside on the luau grounds near the hotel, I went for the fourth time to feel Braco’s gaze. As we sat under the Hawaiian sun and breathed deeply, we were invited to stand up. He came on stage in his wrinkled white shirt, lop-sided lei and baggy pants. He stepped on to the platform and stood against the backdrop of the cyan-colored sea. Silent and gazing, simply standing there, looking at the 300 or so people standing tall and facing him. With all the intensity of an amiable uncle, he looked and allowed, without agenda, and we were each healed in our own way.

I stood for the five or so minutes he looked at us, then sat down when he left, listening to my heart under the luminous Hawaiian sun. I felt I was at a place where there was no death. I knew that if our thoughts are clear of negativity, pain, and fear, our lives are wholesome and good, and when we remember who we really are — interpenetrating high vibration pillars of delicious light — we spark goodness, health, positive movement, and a joyful light in each other.

I could imagine it however I wanted. Then I heard an inner voice, “There’s nothing to fear.” And the last link in the chain of pain fell away.

PLACEBO?

Placebo? The word nobody wants to utter, but why not? Why not utter it? What’s the matter with the “placebo effect?” Placebo aids at least one third of spontaneous healings and countless reversals of mortal disease.

Placebo is basically “a pleasing belief.” From the Latin placebo, meaning, “I shall please” and “to please,” it means “a medicine given more to please than to benefit the patient.” Isn’t the purpose of doctors and other healers to please the patient?

But western medicine views placebo as “scam medicine.” Swami Beyondananda points out that, “It does seem just a slight bit strange that we have to have scientific proof that love, compassion and joy are good for us.  I guess the thinking is, ‘Well, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”

When a patient gets a ‘medicine’ from a doctor that he trusts, he may get relief from the symptoms, even if the medicine happens to be a sugar pill. Knowing that placebo has a verifiable result can point us to new and potent methods of healing. Before the study of epigenetics, a new field that explores the field of energy around DNA, placebo was mocked as beyond the consideration of learned scientists. But research pioneered by Dr. Bruce Lipton who wrote The Biology of Belief has shown that “pleasing beliefs” actually change the biology of the human body. Focused intention, placebo,and the power of belief is more than mock medicine. It’s good science and can be measured.

Gazing at Braco works its magic exactly to the extent we allow it. So when Braco comes back from Croatia to the U. S. again in April, bring your worries and your wounds to him. Take your needs. Take flowers. But also take your power, your intention, your belief. Gaze back with all the loving awareness you really are, look around you with those same eyes, and help heal the whole world.

You can read more about Braco and enjoy an amazing writer’s journey on the quintessential spiritual path in 21 Days With Braco

Big Blessings, Dr. Marya

If you’d like to comment on this article or contact the author please CLICK HERE: Contact Dr. Marya