Attunement

Attunement was the early term adopted by practitioners of energy medicine, originally developed by Lloyd Arthur Meeker (1907 – 1954) and his colleagues. Meeker taught and practiced Attunement as a central feature of his spiritual teaching and ministry, Emissaries of Divine Light. Attunement is taught as a personal spiritual practice and as a healing modality offered through the hands. Emissaries of Divine Light believe that Attunement is a pivotal factor in the conscious evolution of humanity. Attunement was the early term adopted by practitioners of energy medicine, originally developed by Lloyd Arthur Meeker (1907 – 1954) and his colleagues. Meeker taught and practiced Attunement as a central feature of his spiritual teaching and ministry, Emissaries of Divine Light. Attunement is taught as a personal spiritual practice and as a healing modality offered through the hands. Emissaries of Divine Light believe that Attunement is a pivotal factor in the conscious evolution of humanity. Like Qigong, Reiki and Therapeutic touch Attunement is a putative practice as defined by the United States National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), lacking published scientific study of its effectiveness. Attunement practitioners and clients rely on personal and anecdotal experience to promote it. Lloyd Arthur Meeker shared the first Attunement with Rudolph Plagge in Wichita, Kansas, in 1929, and developed the teaching and practice of Attunement with colleagues until his death in 1954. From September 14 to 16, 1932, Meeker had a spiritual awakening experience that he described as a “heavenly ordination.” He marked that experience as the initiation of Emissaries of Divine Light. That same year he instituted a series of energy medicine experiments. Meeker reported that he could stand across the room from the client and the client could feel the intensification of life force. He also reported excellent results when his hands were one to six inches from the client. Lloyd Arthur Meeker wrote and lectured using the name Uranda, which was how he was known to his followers. From 1935 to 1945, Meeker traveled across the United States and Canada, establishing centers for healing and spiritual teaching for varying periods of time in Atascadero, Oakland, Burbank and Long Beach, California; Buffalo, New York; Grand Forks, Iowa; and Loveland, Colorado. In December 1945 Meeker established his headquarters at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, where Attunement continues to be taught and practiced. The G-P-C movement played a significant role in the development of Attunement. G-P-C stood for God – Patient – Chiropractor. It was a no-fee system of service that George Shears created in the late 1930s after he, himself, had a severely debilitating ruptured disk, and vowed to offer his services on a donation basis. Shears had been a Major League Baseball pitcher in 1912, and then a graduate of the Palmer School of Chiropractic in 1917. He experimented with 'no-force' chiropractic adjustments in which he believed it was the healing energy through his hands that brought positive results, shown through x-rays. The G-P-C movement saw the relationship between the chiropractor and the patient as the base of a triangle with God at the apex. Meeker eventually embraced this model for the healing relationship. In 1949, Albert Ackerley, a G-P-C chiropractor in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was introduced to Lloyd Arthur Meeker’s writings. In June 1949, when Ackerley was preparing to offer an adjustment to his patient, he saw that the patient’s spine had aligned before he had given the adjustment. He believed that this result was a consequence of the flow of subtle energy between himself and the patient, rather than any physical intervention. Ackerley met Meeker in July 1949 and began to practice Attunement under his tutelage. Up to this point, Meeker had referred to Attunements as “treatments.” It was Albert Ackerley who named those treatments “Attunements.” With Lloyd Meeker’s urging, Ackerley began to experiment with long-distance Attunements in which the person receiving the Attunement was not in the physical presence of the practitioner. Albert Ackerley and G.P.C. President, Virgil Givens, were both prosecuted legally due to their practice of energy medicine, but continued to practice nonetheless. In May 1950, Lloyd Arthur Meeker met George Shears. Meeker’s meeting with Shears was followed by G-P-C meetings at a Chiropractic Convention in August 1950 in Davenport, Iowa, and then a G-P-C conference in Huntingburg, Indiana, which was attended by Meeker. Following these events, about twenty-five chiropractors attended a G-P-C Convention from September 2 through 8 of that year at Sunrise Ranch. The prospect of joining with Meeker and Emissaries of Divine Light raised suspicion and concerns among the G-P-C chiropractors. Nonetheless, at the G-P-C Convention in the home of George Shears in Huntingburg, Indiana, on February 24 and 25, 1951, the G-P-C board of directors voted to cooperate with the Emissaries to establish a G-P-C Servers Training School at Sunrise Ranch. Lloyd Arthur Meeker led three six-month G-P-C Servers Training School sessions at Sunrise Ranch from 1952 to 1954. His classes from the 1952 session were transcribed and published as The Divine Design of Man, # 1 and # 2. The audio recordings and the transcripts of Meeker’s classes from the 1953 and 1954 sessions are still extant. The sessions included Attunement technique, nutrition, psychology and a broad spectrum of spiritual teachings. In August 1954, Lloyd Arthur Meeker, his wife, Kathy Meeker, Albert Ackerley and two children died in the crash of Meeker’s small plane in San Francisco Bay. A close associate of Meeker’s, Martin Cecil, assumed the responsibility for the leadership of Emissaries of Divine Light and for carrying forward Meeker’s Attunement work. With assistance from G-P-C chiropractors, James Wellemeyer and Bill Bahan, and from Roger de Winton, Alan Hammond and others, Martin Cecil continued the Servers Training School at Sunrise Ranch and the teaching of Attunement. George Shears eventually moved to Sunrise Ranch in 1968 where he practiced Attunement until he died in 1978.