A Skeptic Miraculous Healing

By Arthur Letourneau as told to Jacqueline Sam, Los Angeles

It is a miracle that I’m here at all.

I think it’s important for you to understand some of my background, so you can understand why my Bodhi experience is particularly miraculous. I was a police officer for 25 years. During those years of being an officer, I developed a big dislike of people. I didn’t start out that way, but I became jaded by the job. People do not like the police. When they see a black-and-white cop car on the road, they get nervous. And of course, people don’t like being arrested, so they fight it. In the process of being an officer, my nose was broken twice, my neck, my finger was broken, lots of stiches. So I didn’t like people much.

When I left police work I became a teacher, which helped me rekindle a love of people. During my teaching years, I became active in a Christian church, eventually joining a religious order that takes a vow of non-violence. And over the course of many years, I tried to be true to that calling.

I was divorced when my daughter was a year old and I got custody of her until she went away to college. My daughter gets a lot of credit for softening my heart. I was a teacher at a high school in Houston, Texas for students 11 to 18 years old who are drug addicts. So I saw the horrible results of immense damage done to very young children. It was at that point that I met my wife, Yan, who is the most wonderful person I’ve ever met. She is my dearest friend and companion, and she’s Chinese. I’ve always been a Christian and I really don’t know a lot about Buddhism, except what I discovered through Bodhi Meditation. Yan wanted me to come here; I didn’t want to come.

My wife persisted and we eventually attended a Sunday afternoon class in May of 2012. During the break, a dharma sister, Yuan Lun, came by and asked me if I would like a healing. I’d had a tumor in my neck for two years, a very large one about the size of my thumb. It caused me pain when I turned my neck and when I swallowed. I knew it wasn’t cancer, but it was very uncomfortable. So Yuan Lun put her hand near my neck without touching me and started to make motions like I’d seen many other healers at Bodhi do. It is important for me to tell you that I didn’t have any belief in her doing this. I was just sitting there, very skeptical, saying to myself, “Yeah, sure.” But my neck suddenly felt warm and I could feel something happening there. She continued doing the healing for about 15 minutes. When she was done, she said, “It’s better now.” I felt my neck, and the tumor had gone from the size of my thumb to the size of the end of my index finger. Half the size – I was absolutely amazed.

My wife and I enrolled in the First Level Retreat. On the first day, Yuan Lun came back to me and asked if I would like another healing. Of course I said yes. When she had finished, the tumor was about the size of the end of my little finger. Throughout the First Level Retreat, she kept doing the healing and it kept getting smaller and smaller. Finally, it was the size of a small pea until she performed the healing one last time and said, “It’s gone now.” I felt my neck and the tumor had completely vanished.

So for someone who didn’t believe and didn’t expect anything, it was a complete miracle.