Who am I? | spiritwingshealing

Return to Vibrant Health On Spirit Wings

Interview with

Zerach Moshe Fedder

Holistic Health Practitioner

What is your General Approach to Health as a Holistic Health Practitioner?

Most people who are used to thinking in accordance with conventional Western medicine know that if their ears hurts, they go to an ENT specialist and if they have a broken bone, they go to an Orthopedic Doctor, etc. Complementary Medicine views health from a different, holistic perspective.

In complementary medicine, the body and mind are related to and treated as a whole unit. Symptoms are related to as part of a pattern of dysfunction in the whole. Every complementary method has its own technique or system for determining the health dysfunction in the patient. Complementary medicine strives to locate the imbalance that may be the cause of your discomfort or disease and return the body to a balanced state.

The most comprehensive discussion of the origins of disease and wellness comes from the complementary medical discipline named Applied Kinesiology. Applied Kinesiology defines balanced health as being a triad: Chemical, Structural and Mental. Each side of the triad affects the other. Chemical refers to discomfort or disease as the result of bad dietary habits and lack of proper nutrition. Structural refers to lack of energy and chronic or acute pain in the body, in specific places or in general, because the flow of energy is blocked or impaired. Mental refers to stress in the body and mind resulting from unresolved emotional issues. In my experience as a Holistic Health Practitioner, I have found the Mental aspect of the triad to be the primary cause of disease.

In my practice, I have found that the deepest and most effective approach is to use Guided Meditation techniques to get to the source of distress in the mind and body. For example, recommending a dietary regimen with food supplements for someone often doesn’t work because the client isn’t prepared to follow through with the instructions. Often such a person has some form of self-sabotage which prevents him/her from really listening to his/her body and taking care of it in a proper manner. Guided Meditation can enable such clients to want to take care of their bodies and naturally begin to seek out foods that are healthy for them.

Do You Believe that Alternative Medicine Should Replace Conventional Medical Treatment?

I prefer the term Complementary Medicine because Complementary Medicine implies exactly that: being complementary to your conventional medical care. Being open to gaining health benefits by means other than surgery and pharmaceutical drugs has tremendous potential to help many people become and maintain their wellness.

Yet conventional medicine is superior for medical emergencies. Conventional medical treatment has personally saved the lives of two of my children. I believe people should use any type of wellness or medical advice that may help them to become healthy or that may save their lives.

Therefore, the possibility for helping you that I provide is for educational purposes only. Any medical treatment and discontinuation or adjustment of medications should be fully under the jurisdiction of your regular attending physicians. Any complementary treatment should always be pursued with the full permission of and in coordination with these physicians.

Why Did You Decide to Become a Holistic Health Practitioner?

Becoming a Holistic Health Practitioner was exactly what I was looking to do as a career. I always had the desire to help others and come from a family of teachers, psychologists and social workers. From early on in my life, I became interested in the path of spirituality and healing, but such professions were not well known nor accessible to me when I was coming of age and looking for a profession.

One possibility for me could have been Psychology. However, Psychology never appealed to me because, at the time, it seemed to be a completely cerebral and analytical discipline and for me did not address the core problems of dis-ease.

One important outcome of my spiritual yearnings was that I took on a spiritual lifestyle and returned to my people's homeland and returned to Jewish religious observance.

Although my personal life became spiritually fulfilled, my career choices left me feeling stifled. When Natural Health methods started to become popular in Israel, I immediately understood that Holistic Health was the career path that I had been searching to find. I simply wanted to practice a more spiritual form of medicine. I have since studied over ten modalities.

I especially developed expertise in the modality known as the Journey and became an Accredited Journey Practitioner over seven years ago, which involved taking courses offered both here and in Europe. I became one of the first Israelis to receive accreditation to practice Journeywork in Israel. After certificate completion, I returned as a trainer, training new Journey students at the advanced certification workshops held in Europe. There I also received much personal instruction from the founder/director of The Journey, Brandon Bays herself. Slowly but surely, Journeywork (I refer to it as a form of Guided Meditation for Healing) became the center of my healing practice.

Today I provide my clients with a healing modality that I call Spirit Wings, Jewish Guided Meditation for Healing. This modality is the culmination and combination of many of the techniques I studied, with the addition of new concepts and techniques that I have developed myself during my practice with clients, especially drawing upon inspiration from the Jewish Mystic Tradition known as the Kabbalah.

You Call Your Healing Modality Spirit Wings, Jewish Guided Meditation for Healing, What Makes it Jewish?

Firstly, Spirit Wings Healing can be said to be completely Jewish because I have consciously excluded any techniques or ideas from other modalities that may contradict belief in the Divine Creator of all existence, or any other teachings in Torah Judaism, whether they be halachic or theological issues.

Secondly, I use the spiritual lexicon of the Jewish tradition, as termed by our sages, to describe the meditative and spiritual stages and processes that a client experiences. For example, when a client happily arrives at a state of meditative bliss, I encourage the receiver to experience this as being in awareness of his or her Divine soul. Prayer to or even arguing with G-d can be an important component of a client's process and healing work in Spirit Wings.

Finally, I draw upon concepts and imagery from our tradition for the creation of meditative process work. I draw spiritual inspiration from and have discovered ideas for meditative exercises from Torah teachings found in the Kabbalah of the Ari, the Baal HaLeshem, Rav Kook and from Chassidut, as well as many other Torah sources. Someday soon, I plan write a book to explain these connections in more detail.

Why Do You Believe It to be Important to use a Distinctly Jewish Approach?

At the beginning of my Guided Meditation practice, while I was successfully facilitating processes and helping many clients, I noticed that meditative techniques necessitated some kind of spiritual awareness or belief in the client.

To work on yourself to release negative emotional energy that may be literally destroying your life, works much more effectively when you have the awareness that this manifestation called "You" is more than just a physical/chemical machine. In my experience, I found that if you believe that phenomena of our reality are only physical then these types of modalities usually do not speak to you, as if some type of spiritual orientation is required as a prerequisite.

Therefore and a believing and practicing Jew, it is essential for me to approach the spiritual dimension of my work as a believing Jew. When I help you clear emotional challenges and trauma within your being, I firmly believe that we are also connecting and experiencing your spiritual self or your soul. This for me requires that I view and facilitate these healing processes from the perspective of the teachings of the Torah.

My Goal in this is to provide the observant Jewish community, the general Jewish community, and any human being who wishes to heal via Guided Meditation processes with an approach that is completely compatible with and that draws its definition and inspiration from the Jewish Divine tradition.

What Holistic Health Modalities Have You Trained in to Practice?

I began my Holistic Health Practice in 1998. I have studied the healing modalities known as Reflexology, Acupressure (Jin Shin Do), Massage, N.O.T. (Cranial Kinesiology), Touch for Health Kinesiology, Hopi Ear Candling, One Brain, Homeopathy, Western Medicinal Herbs and Natural Nutrition, Iridology, Ho Chi Veda Herbals, Chinese Tongue Diagnosis, TAT, EFT and the Journey and have received certification in most of them.

What were you doing before you became a
Holistic Health Practitioner?

I have a B.A. in Comparative Religion and Geography and after moving to Israel, studied in Yeshiva for three years. Professionally, I served as an officer in the Israeli Navy. Afterwards I was employed in High Tech; first working in computer assisted cartography and later as a technical writer, while I retrained myself to receive clients as a Holistic Health Practitioner.

What Keeps You Busy When You are not Actively Working with Your Clients?

I also tutor and receive a stipend for teaching Torah in various frameworks and help my working wife raise our seven wonderful children.

How do you summarize your
Holistic Health Outlook?

For me the root cause of physical and mental disease is emotional stress. According to many medical studies, stress is the root cause of at least 70% of all disease.

Freedom from dis-ease then can be achieved or greatly facilitated when release of negative stressful energy (both physical and emotional) occurs. Then too embracing a positive outlook on life also encourages the healing of the emotions and the body.

The fastest and most efficient I know to permanently relieve deep stress and create positive healing, healthful state of mind is via Guided Meditation and Guided Imagery techniques.

Thus Jewish Guided Meditation for Healing has become the major focus of my practice. I believe Guided Meditation, facilitated via a Torah Jewish perspective, to be the most powerful, deep and effective modality for eliciting positive and healing changes in one's overall physical and emotional health.