SELF-HEALING

New Healer Training Course Starts in September
Woodstock Times   Health Currents by Mala Hoffman June 27, 2002

After teaching in a variety of settings for several years, Ron Lavin, a spiritual hands-on healer based in Rhinebeck, decided to gather everything into one learning concept. “My work has gone through a lot of refinement,” he explains. “I was running a lot of retreats and workshops, and I coalesced them into a school. It’s been functioning for seven years in Europe. The students there who have been studying for five years became teachers. I do the masters’ work and the teacher training. Then three and a half years ago, I opened the school in Rhinebeck.”

The school, which starts again on September 27, is offered for one three-day weekend a month over a six-month period, running Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. “It’s a three-year program,” Lavin adds. “The first year is basic training, and in the second we begin the master’s program and do some extraordinary energy work.”

Through the coursework, students will learn 50 self-healing practices, basically focusing on principles including meditation, visualization, movement and sacred ceremony, and 30 techniques to use on others. “They learn to silence the mind to allow the spirit to come through,” Lavin says of his students. “It creates powerful personal healing.”

Lavin has been working in the healing field for 30 years, beginning with an encounter with shamans, Native American spiritual leaders, in Mexico on what he thought was a trip between college and law school. “I just said, oh my god, there’s a way for me to live in the world,” he recalls. “I ended up not going to law school and I lived with them for two years.”

He attended the Berkeley Psychic Institute for a number of years and has traveled throughout Europe and the world. In 1994, while touring India, he received what he describes as a “vision of unity consciousness,” which directed him to move north from New York City, which is how he ended up in Dutchess County. “The energy up here is quite incredible,” Lavin notes. “It wouldn’t take someone psychic, or spiritually connected, to get that there are at least 50 different spiritual groups located up and down the Hudson River.”

Over the years, many of those who have attended A Healing Touch, Lavin’s school, have been in the medical field, including primary caregivers, massage therapists and nurses, as well as those in human resource departments. “Those who take the course learn how to release the stress and tension of daily life,” Lavin notes. They also learn how to release the energy they receive from other people, he adds. “Any time you stand in the aura of another person and open to that person and listen carefully, you bring in not only information, but also their energy.”

Several of his students have also gone on to use the techniques for hands-on healing, which involve helping people to release “programming brought in in childhood. Messages that became subliminal,” Lavin says. “The only way to get rid of it is to actually connect with it, acknowledge it, express the emotions of it and release it.”

For Lavin, the school is the culmination of spiritual information he has been processing over his lifetime. “I’m basically teaching the same things that I was gifted with as a kid,” he notes.

For more information about the courses, see:  www.onelighthealingtouch.com.

–Mala Hoffman