Splanka

Christian therapy is based on the conviction that the Holy Spirit (Counselor) and Biblical Truth are the foundational means of transformational healing and growth. Christian psychology is a merger of theology and psychology, adhering to biblical Truth and the teachings of Jesus Christ to discern and disciple human beings, their beliefs and behavior, into the fullness and image of Christ. Paul’s prayer of 1 Thess. 5:23 encompasses the heart of Christian psychology as one aspect of discipleship and sanctification:

“May the God who gives peace make you holy in every way. May he keep your whole being—spirit (pneuma), soul (psuche) and body (soma) —blameless when our Lord Jesus Christ comes.” GW

The New Testament uses these commonsense terms to describe centers of emotion, intellect, volition, and life-patterns: pneuma (wind, breath, immaterial part of man, Holy Spirit of God), psuche/psyche (soul, immaterial part of man, seat of personality, feeling, will, desire, purpose); soma (body, vessel of life), splankna (gut, center of being, compassion and mercy), nous (mind, intellect, understanding), kardia (heart as chief organ of the physical body, as well as seat of moral nature and spiritual life). The Scriptures and God’s Spirit is not so concerned with our understanding these theological terms as much as bringing every single part of a person into an effective whole, producing the abundant life and love that Jesus promised (Jn. 10:10).

Splankna is a greek term for the “center of one’s being” or whole person, the seat of a person’s spirit, soul and body. In the New Testament era, this “center of being” referred literally to “one’s gut” as their inner organs,” but was used metaphorically of one’s gut feeling or intuition, or in today’s terms, the feelings of “one’s heart.”

In the gospels, the verb Splanchnizomai is used of Jesus to literally mean “his heart contracted convulsively within him” towards people with various needs he would then reach out to meet: of compassion (harassed & exhausted Mt. 9:36), physical healing (leper Mk. 1:41, illness Mt. 14:14), blindness (Mt. 20:34), grieving (raised widow’s son Lk. 7:13), oppression (delivered of demon Mat. 17:15).

Jesus used this same word to describe the moving of one’s being unto love and compassion in his parables of the unmerciful servant about the king’s mercy (Mt. 18:34) and the prodigal son’s compassionate and forgiving Father (Lk. 15:20).

The Apostle Paul uses it referring to Christ as the LifeSource of love and it is Christ’s heart working within believers that moves them (His body) to transformational love, both within them and through them in actions of love (Phil 1:3-11).

This is the “heart” of a Splankna practitioner or therapist, to be a vessel for the Counselor, Christ’s Spirit, to facilitate the fullness and maturity of one’s being (Eph. 3:19, 4:13), especially in the healing and deliverance of one’s past hurts, hang-ups and habits that hinder them in their walk with Christ and His calling and destiny for their lives.

Splankna is the first Christian-based energy psychology. Its developers have spent the last 18 years developing this protocol from a fiercely Biblical perspective. “Energy Psychology” is a group of treatment protocols that use the same bodily system that chiropractic and acupuncture is based on to heal emotions that are stored in the body from psychological trauma. Splankna has been developed on the foundation that there is no other way to the Father but through Jesus, His son; and from the belief that all things belong to our Lord; and finally “…nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” (1 Timothy 4:3-5).

Since 1998, the primary developer of the Splankna protocol, Sarah J. Thiessen LMFT, LPC and her team have splankna_thiessensought to separate the created mechanisms of Energy Psychology from New Age theology and biblically redeem these tools for the Body of Christ. The story of Sarah’s background and the journey of developing the Splankna therapy protocol are told in her first book, Splankna: The Redemption of Energy Healing for the Kingdom of God.

Currently there are over 900 trained Splankna Practitioners in the U.S., Canada and Mexico who have a passion for Jesus and to see hearts healed. Dave and Sue are certified Master Splankna Practitioners, having attained and grown their skill and practice since 2013. If you’d like to learn more, click here for details on the Splankna Therapy Institute where Sue and Dave received their training and certification.

Splankna Practitioners have a compassion and whole hearted desire to avail healing and fullness to their client’s being and life. This is availed through the power and energy of Christ as our LifeSource. There is a Scripture that seems to describe this creative energy, its source and our personal God as Creator as the Apostle Paul witnessed to the religious philosophers of the Areopagus. In Acts 27 24-27:

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

Typically when Christians look for the concept of vital energy in the Bible they land on the idea of the “breath of life” in the Genesis account. Most of the time when the Old Testament speaks of the “breath of life” it uses the Hebrew word “Ruwach.” Pronounced “Roo-ahk,” it means “spirit” or “breath.” As spirit, it is used to denote the Spirit of God in the Old Testament and occasionally the spirit of a person or even an evil spirit. Another possibility for where the Bible references “energy” is in the Hebrew word “Chay” (pronounced “Kai”.) It means “alive,” “life,” or “living.” It is often used in conjunction with the Ruwach scriptures where it uses the phrase “the breath of life.” Ruwach is the “breath” and Chay is the “life.” It commonly represents the idea of a whole life or lifespan, i.e., “the six hundredth year of Noah’s life” (Genesis 7:11) Each of these terms have their Greek counterparts in the New Testament such as the term “Pneuma.”

However, the Circuitry + Intention of Energy Psychology is not altering one’s life force per se. We believe that John 1 speaks more directly to what is happening in Energy Psychology. The Apostle John explains to his audience that the Logos (typically translated “Word” but also accurately translated “active will / intention of God”) sustains all things. Johns’ audience was familiar with the term “Logos.” While culturally, it referred to a universal life force or cosmic animating principle, the Apostle John, teaching much like Paul in Athens (Acts 27:24-27), is saying in effect, “What you think is an impersonal force, I introduce to you as the person of Jesus.” It is Jesus as our LifeSource who animates all things by his constant will. Whether it be the original “Big Bang” generating all creation, or the ever present buzzing of the sub atomic particles in every cell of our bodies, it is God who activates and energizes all of life and matter in creation.

Quantum physics shows us that our attention also affects those particles. One of the many mysterious properties of the quantum level is that sub-atomic particles cannot be observed objectivity. As soon as we look at them, our observation changes their structure from matter to light waves. The quantum level gives us some insight into the mechanism behind what we know intuitively and spiritually; our thoughts as humans, created in the image of our Creator, also affect reality, just as our natural words and declarations have supernatural affect and impact. God has built partnership into humanity and Jesus has given us as believers His authority. Every word we speak, every thought we think, every emotion we feel contributes to the quantum field around us. When we employ “Circuitry + Intention” we are just doing it on purpose to bring healing and transformation. It is merely a shared property of God’s own creativity, and we are so grateful for the myriad of ways He has given us to heal.

Check out our blog on it.

Clients come into our office with a particular request…

Maybe some emotional hurt, depression, anxiety, addiction or relational conflict. It could be any issue one would normally take to a counselor. As your Splankna Practitioner, we will gather some general information about you, the history of your symptom(s), your family of origin, etc.

We open the Splankna session in prayer…

Together as client and practitioner, we’ll bring your request before the Lord, asking Him to take you to the original root of the symptom, inviting Him to address His priority for healing first, even if it’s different than the presenting problem. We as Him to melt our will to submit to His, to handle any spiritual warfare, to supply us with the necessary emotional and spiritual resources need to do this transformational work. There are several elements to a typical opening prayer. In the last step, we invite God’s Counselor, the Holy Spirit to search through your whole subconscious filing system and mark the place He wants to address.

We muscle test to begin the work…

Trusting that the Spirit did just choose a moment in your subconscious database, we muscle test your body/soul (splankna) to find what specific age the trauma occurred that will be addressed. Muscle testing is simply a tool that assist us in hearing the Holy Spirit as He reveals memories and data of the subconscious. Then we test for the “central emotion” which is your predominant emotional reaction in that moment of trauma. This process identifies what has been unconscious to you into consciousness understanding. For example, we might learn that the trauma was a father leaving at the age of 10, with a central emotion of ‘Grief.” We then work through the Splankna Emotion Chart to help identify which other emotions you felt during that trauma and where they’re stored in the body.

We clear each trauma emotion…

The proper combination of touch and thought allows the body to release each trauma emotion like letting go of an electrical charge. This occurs as you are instructed which Meridian point on your body to touch while thinking about the trauma emotion and how it was felt during the event/age we’re addressing. We work through spoken forgiveness statements as needed. We follow these steps to clear all the trauma emotions that were stored from the identified trauma. In our example, the central emotion might be “Grief,” then there might be 3 or more trauma emotions that the client also felt/stored when the father left. As your Splankna practitioner, we will walk you through the clearing of those emotions one by one so that your body releases them. Each emotion usually takes a few minutes to identify and clear.

We find the significant vow or lie…

Once the emotions are cleared around the identified trauma, it’s time to handle the accompanying spiritual issue. We find the significant vow or lie that you adopted in the moment of trauma. In prayer together, you will confess, repent and break any agreement with that destructive coping reaction. We as Jesus to breathe life into all the areas within your being that were affected. If you break agreement with a lie, we ask Jesus to write His Truth where the lie used to be. If you break off a vow, we give that place in your will to Jesus and ask Him to seal it to his own will… to establish his permanent reign there.

Results…

In the conscious mind, we choose life. Any of us could wake up any given morning with a fresh awareness of a lie operating in our lives and decide to break agreement with it. This awareness can come about as the result of reading scripture, prayer, hearing a sermon or a friend bringing it to our attention. But when we attempt that, it isn’t always as fruitful as we hope. As we read in Romans 7, this is partly because there is a conflict in our will. The ‘spirit’ man chooses life but our brokenness of the trauma chooses death. A Splankna session walks you through these steps because when the painful emotions around a trauma are released, the whole being (spirit, soul and body) is freed up to “agree” with finally breaking that lie or vow and transformational change can occur. You will notice that when something happens in your life the would normally “trigger” your symptom , you can now peacefully respond rather than inappropriately react. Yea God for transformation – Hooray for healing and freedom!