The Edge Interview with Deborah King

New York Times bestselling author and master energy healer Deborah King will speak for the first time in the Upper Midwest on Saturday, March 7, at the Minneapolis Psychic & Healing Symposium, followed by a daylong post-symposium workshop on energy healing in Brooklyn Center, Minn.

King’s life-changing career path, from young up-and-coming attorney diagnosed with cancer to noted author, spiritual teacher and energy healer, continues to impress audiences far and wide, but what is attracting the most attention today is her ability to teach people to heal themselves and her emphasis on each of us living our truth and discarding the lies we tell ourselves over and over.

“Unless you’re living in your truth,” she said in an interview with The Edge, “you’re slowly killing yourself — and then that takes us right back to meditating and journaling and doing whatever works for you to get to your truth, like walking or playing tennis or doing yoga or whatever drops you into your body and gives you a chance to actually get in touch with your thoughts.

“The worst lies of all are the ones we tell ourselves. They are the most damaging. ‘Oh, I love my job!’ Perhaps that is not true. Maybe you’re stuck with your job because you’ve got that big student loan, and you really regret studying accounting, but here you are, you’re now a full-fledged CPA and you haven’t got the heart to say, ‘I hate it.’ Those kinds of lies are very, very damaging, and so I urge people to get in touch with how you really feel, and don’t lie to yourself. Absolutely don’t. You may not necessarily be able to change it right now, but you need to know how you really feel.”

King will present “Meet the Master Healer: Get Activated Now” at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, March 7, at the Psychic and Healing Symposium, presented by Edge Life Expos & Events at Earle Brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn Center. Discounted tickets ($29-$64) are available now at Edgelife.net. Tickets also are available now for her daylong workshop on Energy Healing the following day, as well as combo tickets for the Saturday keynote and Sunday workshop.

She spoke with The Edge about her journey and the training she offers people to heal themselves.

You have transformed from a young lawyer who discovered she had an alcohol dependency to noted author, energy healer and spiritual teacher. What spurred such a great change in you?
Deborah King: Well, that takes us back a few years, Tim. I was in my twenties and was fast moving and on the corporate track. I was only six months out of law school and found out I had cervical cancer. It was really quite startling, and made me stop, get off the track I was on, and really take a look at myself.

That was disconcerting, because I found out I had addictions, which I was not aware of, and I had a lot of repressed trauma, which I didn’t want to think about, but was fully aware of. This was more than 25 years ago, so my thinking was very radical at the time, but quite conventionally alternative now.

I suspected there might be a connection between my illness and my emotions, so I worked with my physician, bought some time, started looking for early alternative solutions and stumbled on energy healing fairly quickly. I had a few sessions and had an amazing remission. It changed my life. I got very interested in it. I continued to practice law to pay for this avocation for many years. I traveled the globe and studied just about every modality under the umbrella to get the tools that worked for me. I became a teacher of this work about 15 years ago.

What led you to think that your cancer diagnosis was the result of emotions?
DK: Intuition. My experience with most people is when I ask them, “Why do you think you have X?” they will usually give me an emotional causation. They’ll say, “Well, you know, I never recovered from my dad’s death,” or “I can’t get over my divorce,” or whatever.

Almost 100 percent of the time they will point to an emotional component — and they’re right, of course. The physician to Bill Clinton was doing his internship in cardiology when he asked permission to do a study at the hospital where he was working by going to each person who checked in with a heart attack and ask, “Do you know why you had your heart attack?”Every single one of them said, “Yes, I do.” And each one pinpointed an emotional reason. Every single one. Pretty interesting, huh?

Indeed! In the 15 years since you have been teaching, what have you learned about emotions, in terms of how they cause disease?
DK: What we do is we don’t process them. We’re not taught that as children. None of the contemporary Western cultures teaches the child how to process their emotions. We’re taught to bottle them up or suppress them. You know, “Be a little man at grandma’s funeral and don’t cry,” or “Buck up now” — all the things we teach kids. And I was taught by the best. We all are. Our parents are quite good at it.

Once bottled up, emotions start to do harm — first to your energy field, and then later to your body.

Is there a way an average person can diagnose that for themselves?
DK: Oh, absolutely. I would suggest that they pick up my book Truth Heals, where I teach that very thing, chakra by chakra. The human energy field that you’re sitting inside of is the bell weather of your physical health and your emotional body. Chakras are powered by emotion, and there are easy ways to learn how to check your own chakras and determine the state of the health of your energy field. Your body looks just like your field. Your body actually grows out of your field.

What are the keys to becoming more truthful about our emotions.
DK: I urge people to journal. I think that’s one of the great ways. But what I’ve noticed is that different things work for different people. For one person it might be playing basketball. It’s a good way to get in touch with how they feel. For somebody else, it might be taking a walk. We all have various ways of dropping in and getting connected to ourselves.

How would you describe your system of energy healing?
DK: I’m writing a book right now on that very thing, trying to describe it. It is much harder than one would think, to articulate what it is I do.

Your system of energy healing consists of a lot of things you’ve learned from others?
DK: Yes, in combination with some things that I was given by Spirit. When I had the remission, I went back to the teaching hospital in the San Francisco Bay area where I was seeing the team. Being a good red-blooded American, I wanted an X-ray. I got it, and they said, “Whatever you’re doing, you just keep doing it. You’ve had this amazing remission.” So, I walked out of there fully intending to go study energy healing in the chakra-based system from the gal who helped me go into remission. I knew she had a school and that she was a teacher.

As I headed that direction, I got down to the curb to catch a cab and I tripped over a kiosk, and in this kiosk were fliers. I saw the word “healing” on them, and I snapped one up and took it back to the hotel. I read it, and I was puzzled. It was from some esoteric Christian sect that practiced healing through prayer. I was a little intrigued. But I also had a hard time with my belief system. I was a twentysomething who was anti-religion. But, I called these folks and I ended up staying and studying with them for 10 years.

I stayed a long time, and I sadly left them because I wanted to learn hands-on healing, which they did not practice. I didn’t know what exactly they did, but I had gotten really good at it, whatever it was. I worked in their institution and worked on sick people. That was my job. So, I finally left and enrolled in the very school that I had known about 10 years previously with the woman with whom I had had the remission.

I’m sitting in the class on the first day, and like a good lawyer I’ve got my yellow pad and I was prepared to take notes. All of a sudden, the teacher at the front of this big room looked way back at me in the back row, and she says, “You, back there, stand up.” She didn’t know who I was. She didn’t remember me. I stood up, and she says, “Where did you learn to do that distance healing you’re doing?”

“Oh,” I said, “Where I’m from they call that prayer.”

I was beginning to see what I later learned to be 100 percent the case, that energy healing is the same around the world, but different groups just give it different names. The esoteric Christians call it prayer and the Hindu-based chakra system calls it long-distance healing. So, over the years with all the various modalities I’ve studied, I’ve brought with me the practices that I believe were effective for me, plus some things that are unique that I’ve been given by Spirit,

So, I now have students who are very advanced. They’ve been studying with me about 10 years. Right now what we’re working on is learning how to use just intentionality in your entire energy field, all at once, very quickly. The whole thing takes about 3 seconds. It’s instantaneous, and it works on the body itself. So, now I’m teaching my students how to work on the body, as opposed to on the energy field.

What takes so much time to get a student there, to the point where they’re ready for that? I could teach technique until the cows come home, but what I really have to do is help them get a handle on their ego, in terms of where it’s out of balance or out of whack. An unhealthy ego gets in the way of affecting change.

Do you sense that there are untapped dimensions of healing that still will be provided to you by Spirit?
DK: Oh, they’re endless. Every year or two I get new information and can see something I couldn’t see before. In fact, I had a really interesting experience last April. I had been sick for several workshops in a row. I was out on the road speaking, and I had been dragging along with some upper respiratory thing for a few weeks, just trying to make do with it and get past it. It just kept getting worse, and the next thing I knew I got really sick and went in to see a doctor. She told me, “You can’t fly.”

Well, I said, “I have to. I have to be at this workshop, late today.”

And she said, “Well you’re not. I’m grounding you. You’re not going anywhere.”

This was pretty upsetting. A student group was waiting for me at a resort, so I decided to Skype in. I certainly have had students Skype in to my workshops all the time, but it’s the first time the teacher ever Skyped in. I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me, because I do a lot of teaching by video. In any event, this was a good-sized group and they walked in the room and there I was, on the screen. That was a 4-day workshop. On the third day, I had the most amazing opening of my own, and I knew why. Somehow I was better able to get out of my own way. Even though I wasn’t invisible, I felt invisible because I was sitting in a little room back home, with a little 12-inch monitor in front of me. Even though I realized that I was showing up on a big screen in front of my students, I wasn’t there and somehow it got me out of my own way and I had an amazing experience with all the spiritual bells and whistles one could wish for. So, it was pretty cool.

What process do people now use to learn from you?
DK: In the old days, you had to fly to where the teacher was. It was expensive and demanding and you had to leave your job. I did this myself for years, and it was so expensive and just flattened my career at home. I used to go for one week a month to different seers around the world.

So I have made it easy for people who want to study with me. All they have to do is join me in a series of video teleconferences that are live. So, you’re sitting there at home, and if you raise your hand, I can see you. You ask me your question. I have a seven-level program and through even into the fifth level it can be all done from a distance. “Why not?” is how I feel about it, because energy is not confined by time or space, so why should my teaching be. I’m teaching energy and how to manage it, how to handle it, and how to heal with it.

What are the most common barriers that prevent a person whose life is out of balance to transform into a conscious being with unlimited potential?
DK: Their own limiting beliefs — usually ones picked up from family. Maybe your family taught you you weren’t good enough or you weren’t smart enough, or that all those people in that group, group X, are bad. We have a lot of limiting beliefs that we’re not even conscious of. Perhaps we’re taught that this religion is good and all other religions are bad. It’s endless. So one of the first things I do with people is help them figure out what their limiting beliefs are and then encourage them to question, “Well, do I really want to keep that one? Is it limiting me? Does it not fit me? Is it holding me back?”

Some of us don’t start to really tackle it until we’re 40, and most people not until they get really sick. They don’t question why dad always said that money was scarce, or mom said you’ll never find a man who will make you happy. Some of the beliefs were actually valid or good for us. We just have to figure out which ones those are. Some beliefs fit us then, but don’t fit us now.

What is your sense about the relationship between conventional medicine and energy healing?
DK: I am a big proponent of working with conventional medicine, and I’ll tell you why. Once the problem has left your energy field and has entered your body, it takes everyone on your team to get on board. I’m always urging people to please go work with their doctor or their oncologist or their surgeon. Let’s get everybody helping you if you really have something physically wrong.

I do find that Western medicine is more and more open to proving energetic concepts. Why not, because modern physics is 100 percent based on it. And these are scientific and educated people. I’ve never had an issue with conventional medicine. I’m a big proponent of working as a team. Nothing horrifies me more than the audience volunteer who steps up on stage and tells me they have metastasized breast cancer and that they’re working exclusively with crystals and asks if I can help. Oh, my God! That’s just very upsetting to me, because I really want to expose them to all of the different forms of healing that they should be engaged in.

What will people experience at your talk at the Minneapolis Psychic and Healing Symposium?
DK: It’s going to be great fun. I know that some people are going to experience spiritual initiations, because I can already see that one coming. That’s a rather peculiar specialty I have. That started to evolve maybe 20 years ago and involved helping people ascend to a higher spiritual level, which is a vibrational change. It’s energetic, and it really affects the body, especially when someone goes from the second to the third level. They feel it. I know that will be a big component at this particular symposium because I am being given that information fairly early on.

I would encourage people to come see me who are hoping to step up spiritually.

What will people receive from the day-long workshop that they may not receive from the keynote talk that you give?
DK: In the workshop on Sunday I’ll be teaching techniques to take home and do on your own. Attendees will be practicing techniques themselves. I’m planning to share shamanic techniques — especially uncording techniques — that I have found to be really effective for people. A lot of us drag stuff around from earlier in our lives when we were incorrectly corded to someone else, perhaps an ex-partner or an ex-employer or an ex-family member, ex-mother-in-law — or even someone that you love dearly, but somehow you got entangled with them incorrectly. You can remove the incorrect aspect of the cord without disturbing the good aspects. I’ll be teaching that, as well as some hands-on healing, which I find people learn very easily and very quickly and just love to take home and help their loved ones and their pets.

Are you encouraged by the growing interest in energy healing?
DK: Oh, totally! It was almost a forbidden topic when I was first teaching. It was not something one mentioned unless you wanted to have the men in the white coats come and pick you up. Now it’s very openly discussed and pretty well accepted. My time has come!

It’s a positive sign for our evolution.
DK: It is! Great point. We are a species evolving. We really are.

For somebody who feels like they need to change and they don’t know where to turn or what to do, what daily tools would you recommend for them?
DK: I have one, meditating, but preferably with a mantra that has been selected for you by a teacher like myself — not just trying to sit in silence, which you can’t do today. There’s too much chaos in the Universe for that. When people tell me they’re trying to meditate, I always know they don’t have a format yet that works. I encourage a real meditative format that you use daily, because meditation is incremental and it only works if done every day. Twenty minutes is plenty, but you’ve got to do it every day.

I’m also big on journaling. Call it what you will. You can write in the sand or on a watermelon or whatever suits you, but the key is to get it out of your head and out of your heart and down your arms and into something, a keyboard or piece of paper. Write down how you really feel, not how you wish you felt or how you think you should feel, but how you really feel. Don’t try to change it. Honor it: “This is how I feel.” Express it, and then it’s not suppressed and stored somewhere in your liver or somewhere else.

Some of the things that your mother taught you are incredibly valid, like a little fresh air, a little exercise, good sleep, good food, good water.

Thanks for talking with me, Deborah. Is there any final word you would like to share with our readers?
DK: It’s just so important that they know that they are loved in the eyes of Spirit, just the way they are right now. They don’t have to lose 20 pounds or get another degree or some other achievement. Source, which created them, loves them just as they are. There is not enough self-love around. There is too much self-criticism and shame and discouragement. I want your readers to know that they are very lovable the way they are, and that I see them in that light, in their perfection.

For more information on Deborah King, visit Deborahking.com, and to visit Deborah King’s video channel on YouTube, go to
www.youtube.com/user/deborahkingcenter/videos