An experience of transmitting healing to another person, understood as a divine gift or channel.
Something moved through you toward another person. You were not the source of it, that is often the first thing people who have had this experience say. You were a channel, a conduit, a point through which something passed. The person you were with was affected. What arrived at them came from elsewhere, and you were the means of its passage. Hardy's archive contains 103 such accounts, people who found themselves, often unexpectedly, in the position of transmitting something they did not generate.
The experiences vary considerably in form. Some describe warmth or energy flowing through their hands. Others describe a quality of prayer or attention that seemed to reach the other person in a palpable way. Some describe being surprised, even alarmed, by what occurred, having had no expectation of being a channel for anything. Others describe a capacity that developed gradually through spiritual practice, always understood as received rather than cultivated. What is consistent is the account of mediation: something came through, not from.
These accounts place the respondent within a long and cross-cultural tradition. Healing mediated through a human channel appears in the New Testament, in Sufi accounts, in the practices of Indigenous traditions, and in contemporary forms such as Reiki, therapeutic touch, and intercessory prayer. Hardy's respondents rarely used these frameworks, they described what happened, often for the first time, in personal terms. If you have had something like this experience, the archive confirms that it is not merely personal, that people across decades have found themselves in the same unexpected position of being asked to carry something larger than themselves.
Healing given, the experience of being a conduit for healing energy, prayer, or spiritual intervention directed toward another person, is the rarest major category in the Hardy Archive and in some ways the most theologically distinctive. Where all other categories concern what the experiencer receives or perceives, healing given concerns what they transmit. The experiences described here range from intercessory prayer that appeared to have immediate and observable effect, to the physical sensation of energy passing through one's hands during the laying on of hands, to a vivid sense of being used as an instrument by a power that was not one's own. In many accounts the healer stresses their own passivity: they did not heal, they were healed through.
The practice of healing prayer and laying on of hands has been continuous in Christianity since the New Testament, and was experiencing a revival in the charismatic renewal movements of the 1960s-1980s, exactly the period of Hardy's collection. This context is relevant: some of these accounts come from people embedded in communities where healing practice was a recognized and expected spiritual gift. Others come from people with no such background who were surprised to find themselves apparently mediating a healing. Both types share the experience of being a channel, a consciousness of instrumentality that is perhaps the defining signature of this category.
In the archive, healing-given accounts are notable for their emphasis on the healer's subjective experience during the act: sensations of heat, tingling, or energy passing through the hands; a sense of deep concentration or prayer that transcends ordinary volition; sometimes a vision or communication that specifies what is being healed. Many writers describe a depletion after the event, physical tiredness or a sense of having been 'emptied out', which they interpret as evidence that something real was transmitted. Outcomes reported include immediate relief of pain, recovery from illness, and occasionally dramatic resolution of conditions that had been medically intractable.
At 103 accounts (5.0%), healing given is the least commonly reported of the 17 experience categories, appearing in only one in twenty submissions. This low frequency is unsurprising: the experience of transmitting healing is less common than the experience of receiving it, and the threshold for reporting it is likely higher (the concern about appearing to make extraordinary claims about one's own efficacy would deter many potential reporters). Healing given correlates with healing received, with the Christian tradition, with prayer as a trigger, and with psychic-gifts as a reported effect.
This is not the same as general prayer for another's wellbeing.
Most religious traditions include intercessory prayer, holding another person in loving intention and asking for their healing or flourishing. What the accounts in Hardy's archive describe as healing-given is a more specific and often embodied experience: the sense of something passing through the person toward another, often in physical proximity, often experienced by both parties, and distinguished from ordinary prayer by its quality of transmission. Not all who pray for others experience themselves as channels; those who do describe something qualitatively distinct.
This is not exploitative faith healing.
Televised and performative faith healing, in which a healer claims special power, extracts money or compliance from the ill, and operates in a commercial or coercive framework — is a distinct and ethically troubled phenomenon. Hardy's respondents describe the opposite disposition: surprise, humility, a strong sense that the capacity was not theirs to own, and often a reluctance to claim it publicly. The healing-given accounts are consistently non-transactional and self-effacing in their framing.
Does this mean I have a special gift?
Hardy's respondents were generally reluctant to claim this framing. The consistent account is of mediation, not possession of an unusual personal power. Some describe the capacity as available to anyone who places themselves in a position of receptivity and willingness; others describe it as something that arrived without preparation and cannot be reliably reproduced. Whether 'gift' is the right word depends on your tradition, but the archive's accounts suggest it is something held in trust rather than owned.
Is what I transmitted real, did the healing actually occur?
Some accounts in Hardy's archive include description of the recipient's response; others do not. The archive is not a clinical study and cannot establish causal efficacy. What it documents is the experience of the transmitter: the sense of something passing through them, and in many cases the response of the person they were with. Whether this constitutes real healing in a medical sense is a separate question from whether the experience, and the outcome as perceived, was genuine, both questions are worth holding separately.
Should I pursue this as a practice?
Hardy's archive does not provide prescriptive guidance. Respondents describe a range of subsequent relationships to the capacity: some developed it through spiritual practice, some continued it informally within personal relationships, some remained cautious about claiming or exercising it. The tradition of discernment, testing experience over time, seeking a wise witness, noting outcomes, is as applicable here as in other areas of spiritual experience.
How does this relate to traditions like Reiki or therapeutic touch?
These contemporary modalities formalise, within specific frameworks and training systems, what Hardy's respondents describe experiencing spontaneously. The underlying account, of healing energy or capacity mediated through a human channel — is consistent across the traditions and the archive. Hardy's respondents used their own language for what they described; whether structured practice traditions capture or distort the spontaneous experience is worth considering, but the phenomenological overlap is real.
Is this compatible with conventional medicine?
Nothing in Hardy's archive suggests a conflict. Respondents who describe healing-given experiences do not typically frame this as an alternative to medical care; they describe it as something that occurred alongside or independent of medical processes. The contemporary evidence base for practices such as therapeutic touch and healing intention, while contested, is taken seriously by some integrative medicine researchers. Hardy's respondents would not have framed the question in these terms, but their accounts place the healing-given experience within a broader human reality rather than in opposition to any particular framework.