The Healer

He's a 20-year-old UBC student living in suburbia. He has a girlfriend, a fondness for Adam Sandler movies and, according to a growing number of people he's helped, extraordinary healing powers.

By Sylvia Fraser; photographs by John Sinal

THOUGH IT'S STILL TWO HOURS BEFORE SHOWTIME, the air is crackling with expectation and all the best seats in the Toronto ballroom have been taken. This event, for which 500 people paid $99 each, sold out months in advance, advertised only by website. The woman on my left drove 13 hours from upstate New York. She tells me enigmatically, “If you’re meant to be here, you will be.” For the woman on my right, attendance is quite simply a matter of life and death. She’s wearing a headscarf to cover hair loss from radiation.

All these people have come to see a 20-year-old Vancouver university student named Adam. A rising star in the international world of energy healing, he uses only his first name and, until recently, didn’t allow himself to be photographed. His resume includes raves from rockabilly legend Ronnie Hawkins, who testifies Adam rid him of terminal pancreatic cancer, and lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who credits Adam with zapping a kidney tumour into oblivion.
Adam’s celebrity, fuelled by desperate hope, creates the supercharged world he inhabits while on tour. The rest of the time he hangs out with his parents and younger sister in a white frame bungalow in a Vancouver suburb—let’s call it Smallville. He takes his girlfriend to the movies, preferably something silly with Adam Sandler or Owen Wilson; he bungee-jumps, snowboards, kickboxes and plays tennis with his father, Frank, who’s 54. Most neighbours of this middle-class family remain unaware of Adam’s powers. Summing up the challenges of her son’s dual existence, Liz, his mother, says, “Sometimes we’re living with a very normal 20-year-old boy and sometimes a 4,000-year-old master.”

Many of Adam’s workshop participants are repeaters who’ve already signed up for future sessions. I’ve attended two. Though I’m here as a journalist, I’ve explored energy healing with shamans in the jungles of Peru, with yogis in the ashrams of India, and with Chinese acupuncturists. I’ve also studied the quantum physics and radical biology that supports holistic mind-body healing. I accept its underlying principles, and I’ve successfully used it on myself, but I have no idea if Adam can do what he and others say he can do.

Part of Adam’s public credibility rests on his well-publicized treatment of Ronnie Hawkins, which occurred before they even met. On August 13, 2002, Toronto surgeon Bryce Taylor (first husband of B.C. Finance Minister Carole Taylor) discovered that Hawkins’s pancreatic tumour was wrapped around an artery and couldn’t be removed. Hawkins was given three to six months to live. Meanwhile, Adam was searching for a suitable subject to test his developing powers on, and the aging singer, whose tumour was isolated and who’d refused all drugs, was just what the alternative healer ordered. Hawkins, who said he’d try anything short of throwing a dead cat over his shoulder in a hurricane, accepted the then-16-year-old’s strange offer of help—one of 35,000 messages he received after word of his illness spread.

On September 21—shortly after Bill Clinton and other celebrity pals had thrown him a tearful farewell-forever dinner—Hawkins relaxed in his Peterborough, Ontario, home while Adam, 5,000 kilometres away in Vancouver, focussed on his colour photograph. After projecting a hologramic, three-dimensional internal map of his patient’s body before his own eyes, Adam zeroed in on the pancreas. There he saw, in real time, what he describes as a tumour the size of a tennis ball appearing as a green mass. As he blasted it with healing red energy, the startled Hawkins says that he felt pulsations at the targeted site. Over the next couple of months, Adam repeated this ritual 30 times, using a 3-D hologram of his father’s healthy pancreas as a model, and sometimes chiding Hawkins for sneaking a smoke because it fogged up his system.

By November, Adam could see that Hawkins’s cancer was gone. On November 27, this was confirmed with a biopsy. A CT scan on February 27 revealed the tumour itself had disappeared. As the Hawk puts it, “Five of the world’s best doctors said I was done, and now I’m cleaner than an angel’s drawers!”

In the fall of 2005, I met Hawkins at a private party in Toronto. Larger-than-life, in cowboy duds with flowing white hair and Santa Claus beard, he was praising Adam to a circle of well-wishers in his trademark whisky voice. Today, he’s still rompin’, for which he gives ultimate credit to the Big Rocker in the Sky. Adam cites Hawkins’s own desire to heal. As he likes to say, “If you get better, it’s your own fault.”

Six-foot-two and handsome, with curly brown hair and an iron-pumper’s physique, Adam appears on the ballroom stage in a red shirt with blue shorts and white running shoes. His accessories include a single earring and a tattoo. He’s matter-of-fact, even a little self-conscious, as he asks for volunteers for an aura-reading. From hands frantically waving like castaways’ flags, he selects one belonging to a woman in her thirties.

Auras, Adam says, are coloured energy fields that shimmer around living forms much like the northern lights. Though I myself can sometimes glimpse a whitish glow around people when lights are dimmed as now, I can never perceive anything distinctive. To Adam, by contrast, they’re packed full of information, which he tries to convey this night by first drawing a stick figure on a lightbox, projected on dual screens. He adds a black band across the neck and shoulders and a blob over the pelvis, describing them as blocks or breaks in the aura signalling disease. His subject confirms, “I still have pain in my pelvis from an accident 20 years ago.”

For a stocky woman in her late fifties, Adam draws a bib connected to the shoulders, a band down the spine and a blotch on the right hip. She testifies, “My shoulders are a problem. I had my gall bladder removed and I do have trouble with my legs.” For a third woman—slim, blonde, energetic—Adam blackens the sternum, then draws broken lines, like rain, down her legs. She testifies that she has multiple sclerosis affecting her legs.

That was at my first workshop with Adam. By the second, last July, he was using a pre-drawn body outline on which to make his marks, but his readings were indecisive, and he cut the session short, citing good days and bad.

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