Dora Kunz

Dora Kunz née Theodora Sophia van Gelder (April 28, 1904 – August 25, 1999) was a Dutch-born American writer, psychic, alternative healer, occultist and leader in the Theosophical Society in America. Kunz has published around the world in Dutch, English, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Dora van Gelder was born at a sugar cane plantation named Krebet near Djombang city on East Java in the Dutch East Indies. Her father, Karel van Gelder, was a chemist who ran the sugar plantation, and her mother, born Melanie van Motman, was from a very well-to-do Dutch family as well. Both her parents had been members of the Theosophical Society since 1900 and from the age of 5 meditation became a daily routine. Dora claimed that since she was a child she interacted with ethereal beings and her mother was a strong believer in her clairvoyance. At eleven years old she moved to Mosman, a suburb of Sydney (Australia), to study with someone knowledgeable about her abilities, the then-Anglican clergyman and psychic C. W. Leadbeater, who taught her ways to increase her supposed psychic skills.

Through Leadbeater she met Fritz Kunz, who used to accompany Leadbeater on his travels. In 1927, at the age of twenty-two, Dora moved with Kunz to the United States where they married in Chicago on May 16. She was still a Dutch citizen but sometime after the marriage became a naturalized American. Her husband became the principal of a scholastic foundation and she became president of a corporation related to pedagogic supplies. Soon after coming to the USA, the couple founded the first theosophical camp at Orcas Island in the state of Washington.

For many years, Dora dealt with new methods in healing, particularly therapeutic touch, which she co-developed in 1972 with Dr. Dolores Krieger, a nursing professor at New York University, which is said to promote healing, relaxation and lessen pain. Therapeutic touch, stated Kunz, has its origin from ancient Yogic texts written in Sanskrit, which describe it as a pranic healing method. The technique is taught in approximately eighty colleges and universities in the U.S., and in more than seventy countries.

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