The Healing Hands of Gloria Kaye

By Judith Lazarus

Right in the middle of my shoulder blades where I couldn’t reach, itching and little shooting pains made me uncomfortable around the clock. It kept me up at night and had me wiggling embarrassingly in meetings. The scar was left from an infection; when I kept asking what to do about the problem, the surgeon said he could go back in and do something to the nerve endings. Hah, fat chance. After trying various salves, potions, and lotions, I’d pretty much resigned myself to living with it. Then I happened upon Dr. Gloria Kaye.

Dr. Gloria Kaye is an energy healer. Trained as a psychotherapist, she is able to sense energy imbalances in her patients. “Energy work just seems to relax people,” Kaye says, noting that redirecting energy allows the body to go into a state in which it can find its natural balance and heal itself. After a brief discussion with a client, she then looks for imbalances in the face and shoulders and observes the symmetry of the entire body. “I try to determine which areas of the body are compensating for injury or traumas,” she writes in her book, Is There a Healer in the House? (1998). Biomechanics and balance are interrelated. “When you’re straightened out, your chemistry will change.”

Nothing is in isolation, she says. “I have found that if the energy is flowing freely through the body, the affected area will be more prepared to receive the healing energy. Energy healing works quickly because the energy is moving ona cellular level to put the body back into balance. The energy just seems to go where it is needed.”

Kaye thinks she’s just a conduit for energy, clearing the blockages that occur from physical and emotional trauma, directing it back to its rightful flow. She works intuitively, allowing her hands to lead her. Her hands have often led her to areas that appear to be unrelated to the complaint for which a client came to her.

The Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) reports that about 50,000 practitioners provide 18 million sessions in the United States annually. Most often, the therapies are Healing Touch, Therapeutic Touch, and SHEN (a physioemotional release therapy). The OAM says that there is “no generally accepted theory that accounts for the effect of these therapies.”

Kaye is in private practice in Santa Barbara, California. She works with doctors and health professionals, has taught a class on energy healing at the UCLA medical school, and even has done healing work on thoroughbred horses. She says anyone can learn to do this work, and she teaches her techniques in private seminars. Her energy-healing sessions are popular with athlete, including basketball Hall of Famer Rick Barry, and Kaye hopes one day to be a part of a sports team’s regular medical crew.

People have come to Kaye to be treated for a variety of conditions: chronic pain, migraines, digestive problems, anxiety, TMJ, arthritis, and more. Clients my feel sensations of heat, cold, or tingling and deep relaxation as Kaye works, sometimes without even touching them. Sessions last from twenty minutes to an hour, and a series of sessions may be needed to treat some disorders, but often, as in my case, the problem is solved in one visit.

Placebo, miracle cure, or self-healing? Maybe a little of all three, but for the thousands of people who believe, energy work is an important part of the future of healing.