I have been blessed to have a breadth of mentors who were pioneers in the understanding of prayer for physical and emotional issues in the last century.
I am privileged to have cut me teeth on 'The Healing Light,' by Agnes Sanford, which launched me into a very active model of prayer, an example of inner healing and the active use of imagination in prayer. This foundation moved me light years ahead of the liberal church background I came from. I read books and then attended weeklong trainings with John and Paula Sandford when they taught in Alberta and later Stratford, Ontario. I began to teach lay people with weekly seminars based on a series of the Sandford books: Level One was Restoring the Christian Family, Level Two was Transformation of the Inner Man and Level Three in two parts on Healing the Wounded Spirit. These teaching were mainly done in the 1990's with my associate Don Blair when we had Mississauga Christian Counselling Service. I attended a Pastoral Care Ministry conference with Leanne Payne. I caught the power of listening prayer from that conference and read Leanne Payne's books on the subject. I spent a week in Colorado to learn from John Regier. He used pointed listening to God to break through core beliefs in a couple. He had to be very careful how he worded that because his audience had been taught that God does not speak today to his people. In 1999, by attended a series of workshops by Art Zieltra, I was introduced the work of Dr. Ed Smith called Theophostic. His was a more complete theory, practice and demonstrated practice of listening prayer guided by the Holy Spirit to key beliefs which were rapidly unlocked by God's truth (revealed word of God). This consolidated everything I had learned about listening prayer. Even better Rev. Zielstra demonstrated the practice. This immediately began to shift my practice of prayer therapy. I felt like I had been given the final piece of the puzzle. It is at this point that I began to write. I had found my voice! I founded Agape Christian Counselling in 1991 and launched the website www.HealMyLife.com in 2001. Now there are more than 150 articles posted at Healmylife.com and others on www.Listening-Prayer.com - the platform for articles about prayer. I draw on the insights of John and Paula Sandford especially into relationship principles, sin patterns, character patterns and the function of the human spirit. With many years of drawing on these in my counselling practice and through doing the seminars on the material I am thoroughly conversant in these principles. Effective application came as a grasped the method of listening prayer. I observed that Listening for God's truth when the emotions and the memory were activated was always effective in triggering some permanent level of healing of emotional learning. Core beliefs were being replaced with God's perspective. I discerned that this could be the basis for transforming personality issues as everything had a foundation in our emotional learned perspectives and beliefs. The very core of our self - our identity - could be touched by God and healed. This would be a fulfillment of I recently joined with a group of therapists who wanted support in building their practices. We launched the Life Transformation Group and did peer supervision. The blessing was that it gave me enough hours to be accepted in the newly formed College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario. I was equipped with tools that provide inner healing through listening prayer therapy. However my professional development on psychotherapy now complements prayer therapy. I can now provide permanent life transformation with secular tools using Coherence Therapy. Coherence Therapy is a form of depth-oriented brief therapy that allows the client to discover the core issues driving symptoms and uses proven methods to trigger an edit of core beliefs within the emotional brain. Coherence Therapy works along with the new psychological understanding called 'Memory Reconsolidation' for a non-religious psychotherapy. I am deeply rooted in and passionate about prayer therapy. Using the principles of prayer therapy is very important to me and applied whenever I can because inner healing prayer therapy can be very effective and permanent in changes wrought. It introduces people to a more intimate and meditative relationship with Jesus.
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AuthorGeorge Hartwell M.Sc. Christian Marriage Counsellor, Phone sessions available, fee $120 per hour. Archives
July 2018
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