Hi Judy,
My first degree was in Psychology and I had the privilege of studying with one of the top "sceptics" here in the UK.
Studying "Pseudoscience" gave me an appreciation of how easy it is for the "fantasy prone" to attribute various happenings to supernatural causes when in fact most are easily explainable in terms of mainstream science.
However I have also had an enduring interest in various forms of spiritual practice and various forms of alternative and complementary medicine. I have studied several forms of psychotherapy to practitioner level and also NLP, Hypnosis and various systems of healing (Reiki, Tui Na, Shiatsu etc)
In my experience its like this:
If you go to a new age fair / show, you will get certain categories of people:
Firstly you will get the outright con artist. These are people who offer services (often healing or fortune telling) or products (bizarre bits of twisted plastic to protect your home from "Geopathic Stress" etc) These people know they have no ability or training or that their products are fraudulent. These are the "snake oil" sales people who are exploitng the credulous and vulnerable for their own financial gain and often the power trip that goes with it.
Secondly you get the self deluded. These people are often very nice and well meaning and they genuinely believe they are psychic or natural healers etc. However they have no ability or genuine training and are deluding themselves as much as their credulous, vulnerable, fantasy prone customers.
Thirdly you get people who have some ability but it's very weak or unpredicatable. The problem here is that the person cannot control their gift and this puts on a lot of pressure for them to fake it when it's not working. I have seen this with healers and so called psychics. Unfortunately their occasional successes lends credability to the BS they spout the rest of the time.
Fourthly you get the genuinely gifted person who really has something. This person is the real deal who can heal powerfully, has psychic ability etc. These people probably have some genetic "gift" however it's rare to see any real ability without a hell of a lot of training as well (Usually decades of practice)
The problem is that you rarely find the fourth category of person at a new age event (or through mainstream advertising) Its usually word of mouth and you need a sound BS detector to filter out the first three categories of individual to make sure you get the real deal.
It's the same with books and information.
Unfortunately you seem to have come across the mass market, shallow, feel good, end of the spectrum.
The basic idea that "reality" is a dream that we are dreaming and if we alter our consciousness we can change reality including our physical bodies is not new. In fact it occurs within many religions, notably the esoteric ends of Taoism and Tibetan Buddhism.
What you don't get in "The Secret" etc is the fact that to actually change your belief systems and habitual thought patterns to that degree is damn difficult. To change it to the degree of having an effect on causality you would need to have reached the level of being quite an accomplished spiritual adept. The actual message is not to blame the person for attracting XYZ but to try to empower them to change it. Still damn difficult. But I believe possible.
I have noticed in many years of working as a therapist that peoples beliefs often act like pendulums. For example you can start believing in the new age totally uncritically, then you get dissappointed and overnight swing to the other end of the spectrum and become a totally reductionist sceptic.
Bear in mind that the "total reductionist sceptic" is in a sense just as much a victim of a cult as the most uncritical new ager. The sceptic has their own blinkered doctrine, refuses to accept evidence that challenges their own personal paradigm, manipulates evidence to fit ther own belief system and argues away anything else with generic whitewash bleating about "Placebo's" (which they tend not to understand) and misquoting scientific studies out of context. Thus their belief becomes "non falsifiable" and amusingly therfore does not meet their own standards of scientific proof. This may seem a bit harsh but I remember well having a discussion with the aforementioned professor about the fact that for a parapsychological study they were requiring a higher statistical confidence limit than for a normal psychological study (also higher than that used to approve drugs for use, FDA etc) thus leading to what is known in the trade as a "familywise type II error " (failing to find something that is there) The reason for that was blithely stated that "extraordinary claims need extraordinary levels of proof" a straighforward double standard if you ask me!
However I digress. I think there is a middle ground. Develop a sound BS detector and learn to pan for the gold in the murky new age waters. There are useful things out there, including positive thinking (dont get in to the self blame game) perhaps rather than going for the mass market "california nutter" end of the spectrum, with critical thinking fully engaged try a bit of reading around the more serious end of the alternative health world.
I would suggest Lynne McTaggart's books "The field" and "The Intention Experiment" and Ernest L. Rossi "The psychobiology of mind body healing" also Candace Pert's book "Molecules of emotion" is well worth a read too.
There are in fact a number of genuine scientists from various disciplines who do seriously research this stuff and have the studies and empirical data to back it up.
If you are interested then check out
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www.scimednet.org]
I believe some parapsychological stuff is well beyond the reach of sciences ability to measure at the moment and so becomes a leap of faith that will either be supported or disproved in the future. But theres a lot of initial research that looks very promising.
Its interesting to note that a few years ago Traditional Chinese Medicine was regarded as superstitious nonsense and now even the most sceptic Doctor has to admit the number of studies now done which support its efficacy are unquestionable.
When I started studying hypnosis many years ago the sceptics still viewed it as people "faking it" and "pretending to be hypnotised" now over the last two years we have sound evidence from MRI imaging on several studies that show without question that hypnosis is an altered state that is charecterised by very discernable brain function.
I wish you well in your quest for healing. I would reccomend TCM and Chi Kung as a good place to start