To describe Brenda Davies, spiritual guru and faith healer, as an extraordinary person does not begin to do her justice. Even a brief retelling of her life story takes her from a tough upbringing in the North of England during the war, breaking through class barriers and becoming a consultant psychiatrist in the United Kingdom, to life today on a Zambian farm where she lives and supports 112 grown-up orphans.
From a very young age, Davies felt a strong connection with spirits, and she now works as a psychiatrist, faith healer and medium, teaching and writing about such things with amazing success around the world.
Aged in her mid-70s, her work incorporates the structures and rigor of traditional medicine but includes less orthodox skills which she has used to establish the Dr Brenda Davies International School of Healing and Spiritual Development.
The first two years of school is for anybody who wants to sign up.
“It’s quite emotionally demanding, and at the end they are presented with a Diploma in Spiritual Development,” says Davies. By invitation, students then progress to healing techniques which involve reading and using energy.
“In the here and now, I marry together my medical career, my natural gift as what people call a healer, and all the other things that I love to do,” she says.
For Davies, the ‘here and now’ means running a farm 30 kilometers from Lusaka, milking cows and helping build a wall. Or seeing somebody for psychiatry or with a cut foot where she can do a bit of surgery, or writing her many books, healing or teaching at her worldwide school.
“We don’t run a traditional farm. We grow vegetables and sell those, but rather we tend to farm people. Everyone gets some training and we have nurses, teachers, electricians, even a conservationist.”
Her spiritual and healing work takes her everywhere. In Japan, she has a large following and works at the government level advizing how spirituality can help in the workplace and curb the high suicide rate there. In Zambia, people might come for psychotherapy or marital counseling. She mentors entrepreneurs and politicians. She works with corporates in business and banking worldwide. And she is doing ongoing conflict work in Cyprus and Bosnia, working at grass-roots level helping bring people on both sides of the conflict together.
So to what extent does Davies run her practice as a business?
She has a set rate for work in different countries, but why she works is not about money, it’s about people.
“That said, if someone wants to send me a large sum of money I’m delighted. I don’t need it in my bank, I need it to come through me and I’ll put it where it needs to be.”
For Davies, each monetary transaction is ‘an exchange of energy’. She is happy to take payment in kind if people can’t afford to pay. Money must never stop people getting to see her as she believes there is always a pre-ordained reason why people meet. She loves working with people who are trying to make their way, and one of her ‘joys in life’ is a company called BongoHive, Lusaka’s Technology and Innovation Hub.
BongoHive may be a successful Innovation Hub today, but only recently they were a collection of nine or 10 young people who wanted to make apps – but who had nothing.
In true Davies style, she gave them $15,000, and told them to buy what they needed and to get on with it. She provided structure and leadership, and a couple more ‘exchanges of energy’ along the way. But most importantly, she taught them about spiritual prosperity.
“The very first day I met them, I said here’s the philosophy of spiritual prosperity. You give either before you get or you give immediately after you get, you are always letting it go, so that more can come in – and we always rejoice in everybody else’s success.”
For Davies, those are the principles from which everything grows.
So have BongoHive forgotten their founding principles now that they have won a $50,000 grant from the World Bank and are a big success?
“When they were going to get some training for 12 people, they asked could they give away some of it by sharing? They have been fantastic!” says Davies.
She is on one of her regular teaching tours which take her around the world. This one is four weeks long, and she is heading to Berlin for seven days for the next leg.
For a woman to become a doctor in post-war Britain, particularly from a poor, working-class background, was exceptional.
“I always had this healer stuff within me, and I used to do it with animals when I was little. No one in my family had ever been to university, let alone done medicine,” she says.
She went on to specialize in psychiatry and work as a consultant in both the National Health Service and in private hospitals. Gradually she began to introduce spirituality and healing into her work in the late 1990s.
Her other burning life ambition was to go to Africa, having seen pictures of Africa in a book when growing up. So at the age of 27, she set off for Africa.
“Immediately I arrived, I felt that Africa is my spiritual home and where I’m meant to be. And even though I left Africa for a long period in the middle of my life, that has never changed.”
Davies now lives on 100 acres of wonderful land built around two hills and the Kafue River. She describes it as ‘stunning, stunningly beautiful’.
“My dream was to make it into a place of peace and healing, where people with nowhere to go, particularly kids, could come.”
She says that she ‘asked’ for people to come and help her with the project, and that several young orphans were sent to her.
“I arrived there on my own, realized the house had a leaky roof and that I was going to need help. A young man walked up, asked if I needed help. He was a 17-year-old orphan and he’s still with me. He’s now the farm manager”.
Just before we finish, Davies explains what it feels like to communicate with souls.
“Sometimes people want mediumship. A soul has a higher vibrational frequency, and so what I will do is I will raise my frequency levels, the soul will lower theirs until we perceive each other. I’ll sometimes hear them, sometimes feel them, and I’ll speak through my own voice.”
I am not sure I would or could have believed anyone who sat on a sofa and told me about communicating with lost souls. But with Davies, it all seems perfectly normal and eminently believable.