by Maria Elena Garcia-Terra, Liaison for South America & Ethics Specialist
The busiest Pranic Healing Center in Uruguay isn’t in Montevideo, the capital city. It’s in a modest building in a small town. Yet, this Center hosts meditations six times each week, with 10 to 20 people attending. It all started with Basic Pranic Healing and SuperBrain Yoga.
In 2013, I was asked to teach Basic Pranic Healing in the countryside of Tacuarembó. The class was held in a mechanic’s workshop, with a white sheet draped across the wall as a makeshift screen for my PowerPoint presentation. Six people took that class. I didn’t know it then, but one of them would become my co-researcher in the SuperBrain Yoga study that would be published and presented at major Psychology conferences.
This student’s name was Ana Silvera. She was a rural schoolteacher, which is a very difficult job because most of her students came from poor families that were struggling to make ends meet. Psychological problems in such schools are common, and many students experience violence and even sexual abuse from a young age. They can be disruptive in class, and teachers must cope with many behavioral issues in addition to challenges related to helping their students learn.
Ana started using Pranic Healing and SuperBrain Yoga for her students right away. She followed the Basic class with Advanced Pranic Healing and Pranic Psychotherapy in Montevideo; she instituted regular SuperBrain yoga sessions; and she got amazing results. Her students began doing better and their test scores rose. The principal of her school was so impressed that she offered Ana her own bedroom to use as an office for healing.
While the stories from Ana were inspiring, they were still just anecdotal. I knew that to demonstrate these results to a wider audience, we needed more scientific, objective evidence. So I told Ana to let me know if she ever found a school principal who would go ahead with formal research.
In 2018, she called me with good news. Since Ana’s students had the best scores in the province, she was given her choice of schools in which to teach. She picked a school with a principal open to research, and that is where we began the SuperBrain Yoga research that was eventually published.
That research would not have been possible without the vision and support of Maria Teresa Ferraz, the public school principal who saw the potential of SuperBrain Yoga, and sponsored our research.
Along the way, Ana turned her small home into a Pranic Healing center. She converted her entire house – living room, bedroom and kitchen – into a healing center. It’s become busier and busier because people have seen that it changes their lives. The more they use the tools – Pranic Healing, Meditation on Twin Hearts and SuperBrain Yoga – the more they appreciate this healing system. I go to Ana’s center now two or three times each year to teach the higher courses because Ana became a Basic Pranic Healing instructor herself. The SuperBrain Yoga research has since been published in both English and Spanish by The Pranic Healing Research Institute, and presented in May 2019 at the 21st International Energy Conference in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico. Its theoretical framework was also presented at the South American Junguian Psychology Conference. Next month, we will present a poster about the research at the 26th Congress of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (IACAPAP) in Rio de Janeiro.