#539: Rosalyn Bruyere

Rosalyn Bruyere is one of the most prominent healers, clairvoyants, and newthought promoters in the US. She runs The Healing Light Center Church (with a telephone line for healing requests) and the Crucible Program, a ”modern mystery school”. To see what she’s driving at, Bruyere has said that ”[i]t has taken thousands of years, but within this century both scientists and spiritual seekers alike have once again begun to view the laws of nature and the laws of God as reflections of the same truth,” a claim which many would view as mildly controversial (but more accurately as incoherent nonsense). Apart from that, she and her partner Ken Weintrub offer seminars on energy healing, chakras, Qi Gong practices, Brain Balancing, Pain Drain, and, well, pretty much the whole nine yards of woo. Her book Wheels of Light, A Study of the Chakras is claimed to be an ”invaluable text for the bridging of ancient and modern healing arts. Reverend Bruyere has studied extensively in areas of Egyptian temple symbology, Sacred geometry, ancient Mystery School rites, international shamanic practices, the pre-Buddhist Tibetan Bon-Po Ways, and various Native American Medicine traditions.” Indeed.

You can read an assessment of her energy chelation technique here. The idea seems to be that just as heavy metals are toxic to the body, so stuck emotions are toxic to the body, mind, and spirit. Though the claim is not formulated as an actually testable hypothesis (no attempt to cash out the metaphors, for instance), energy chelation is still promoted a “method which removes sticky, heavy dark energy from the human energy field,” which is not formulated in a manner that makes much sense either. And no, its proponents do not seem to know what “energy” means. As Blake Stacey put it “’Energy chelation’ is just one of several ways to remove interphasic parasites which live in subspace rifts and feed on the biogenic fields of organic life-forms who encounter them while using warp drive”. On the downside a study of the technique was actually published in the journal Cancer, and its authors were positive even though the results were consistent with placebo; see a discussion here.

Diagnosis: We are perfectly aware that sometimes life is hard and reality painful. “Reject it and make up your own,” does not in general seem to be a proper response for rational people. Bruyere seems to be relatively influential, however.