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July/August 2005 Spirituality
Dowsing, through the eyes of a child.

by Jerry Henderson

Jerry Henderson

My grandson and I were walking through the store the other day after I had picked him up from school and he was fiddling with a compass that he sometimes carries with him. It is mounted on a miniature carabiner and he usually has it clipped to a belt loop. He started telling me this tale about how the compass helped him find a lost toy. He said he had misplaced a plastic warrior and was really trying hard to find it when he thought of using his compass to point to the toy. Once the needle had settled down he followed it to the wall by his dresser, looked sideways, and there was the action figure! "How did that work?" he asks me.

Now- you and I think we know that compasses line up with invisible magnetic lines that run around the earth and end up somewhere near Greenland. But that’s not the thing that makes answering his question a little sticky; it’s that last week I found his cousin’s pacifier at our house using my dowsing rods, and I know he has been trying to understand how that worked. So which explanation do I use? Being experienced in such matters, I did the wise thing. "What do you think happened?" I asked, putting to work all my years of training as a counselor. "Well," he says "I think maybe the compass somehow knew what I remembered, but couldn’t think of." Not a bad explanation of dowsing for an 8 year old!

When I teach dowsing, one of the hardest lessons for people to keep in mind is that the rod or branch or pendulum, or whatever instrument you are using, is just an indicator, registering information that your body is already aware of. The fact is, dowsing works a little bit different for each person and you have to be willing to play with it for a while to see what works best for you.

In my journey I was introduced to a local dowser named Mike Doney. He suggested we try something that had helped him "get" the feeling of using an unfamiliar tool before. Mike picked up a large forked branch and held one side in his left hand and I held the other in my right. We than joined our free hands and once again moved across the water course and the branch reacted just as it should when finding water. I then picked up the smaller branch and….. It worked! Once my body had some help remembering what it knew, it was able to separate out the information and feed it back to me through the action of the dowsing tool.

Up to this day, I continue to work and play with many different dowsing tools. The brass rods still work better for me than branches or pendulums, but that’s not true for everyone I meet. The only real way to know what works best for you is to play with each tool and see if it can provide you independently verifiable information. Playing with thought forms and unseen energy is intriguing, but even the most experienced dowser (myself included) has been led astray by depending on such energies to provide accurate information about our real world.

Besides natural "born in" ability, which people have to a greater or lesser degree, there have been only two things which have consistently affected the ability of dowsers. The first is physical health and consuming adequate water; the second is emotional well being. "Know thyself"- a saying and an admonition that has come down to us through the ages. Only after full participation within this consensual reality will information we gain from other realms be of any value in this world. We cannot accomplish this through thinking alone, or in reacting out of old habits based in fear or shame. By freeing our joy through doing our personal work, we provide opportunities for dowsing and other practices to expand our play and our passions. Your body remembers all of this. Play with your memories!

Jerry and Mike are both members of the Pacific NW Territory of the American Society of Dowsers. More info at: nwdowsers.org. Intuitive readings from Jerry at New Renaissance Book Store may be arranged by calling 503-224-4929 or at visionarypathways.com.