Energy healing and the "globalization of medicine"

On CTV's Canada AM Dr. Oz recently made the startling and thought provoking statement that alternative medicine was in fact nothing more than the "globalization of medicine". Much has been globalized in this new interconnected world of ours, but here in North America the medical establishment continues to insist that patients should only have access to Western medical care and that everything else is "unfounded superstition". Dr. Oz asks the question why North American patients should not be able to put their money on the table and have the best medical practices other cultures have to offer, such as Ayurveda or TCM, made available to them.

Both TCM and Ayurveda recognize that the body is more than a collection of biological nuts and bolts, and that the energy that animates the human physical structure is an important component of health. Working with that energy is an integral part of ancient Eastern medical practices. Only here in the West have we declared that this energy does not exist. And in fact the great-grandfather of both TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) and current forms of energy healing is Qigong, an ancient Chinese energy healing practice developed by Daoists back in the mists of time. Energy healing along with herbalism is the oldest form of medicine on the planet.

In the truest sense the "globalization of medicine" means not only importing for western use the best practices of other cultures' medicines, as we've seen with acupuncture, but also understanding the philosophies behind them. Recognizing the energy that animates us all would be a huge shift in Western medicine. Imagine the health innovations we would see, the staggering amounts of money we could save on public healthcare, if, instead of investing billions of dollars in researching the next expensive designer drug, we made an investment in exploring healing in the human energy field.

Anita Moorjani, "Dying to Be Me" -- a commentary

I just finished reading Anita Moorjani's newly released book, "Dying to Be Me". As you may have seen in previous posts, I am a great fan of Anita's message. Her book is a must-read for cancer patients, their family members and caregivers -- maybe even their doctors, although I could see some doctors scoffing at her story as being just too unbelievable. It may be unbelievable, but she does have the medical tests to prove its truth, and it does classify as the mother of all "unexpected remissions".

Anyone who reads this post likely knows at least the bare-bones sketch of Anita's story, her lymphoma, her arrival at the hospital in a coma, her diagnosis of organ failure and imminent death, her near-death experience, and her exuberant return to health. To me the most important part of her message to cancer patients is "you have nothing to fear". Since everyone's greatest fear usually concerns dying and ceasing to exist, her experience of death as a release into painlessness, lightness, love and acceptance offers a huge message of hope.

To me the greatest problem with how we view cancer today is the phenomenal fear that is associated with it. People receive a cancer diagnosis and immediately their mind processes it as a death sentence. The way the world looks at them changes; they become heroic victims. Everyone participates in the fear.

I have long sensed that cancer feeds on fear, and in Anita's book I read that she feels that her cancer was caused by fear. Fear causes contraction in the body, in the spirit, in the mind. Contraction is contrary to health. So the disease that was caused by fear is then fed by fear. This is not far fetched: fear is a huge stressor, and studies have demonstrated that stress helps cancer grow.

Anita's book offers an antidote to that fear.

To me as an energy healer the most hopeful part of her message was that cancer is a disease of the soul that expresses itself first in the energy field and then in the body. If you remove it from the energy field, it will also disappear from the body, without needing to leave through the usual physical channels. This is what happened to Anita: her doctors said that if her billions of cancer cells had been eliminated by her liver, her kidneys, her lymphatic system, the toxicity alone would have killed her. Yet her cancer simply vanished, with no adequate explanation.

Could this be how all spontaneous remissions happen? Something causes the disease to vanish from the energy field, and then it just goes poof from the body as well? Should we then not be concentrating on finding the best way of treating diseases in the energy field rather than mucking about, painfully and inefficiently, with surgery and drugs on the physical plane?

Here is the link to Anita's book and a link to my previous post, "Anita Moorjani quotes for energy healers"

Recent healing stories

Two stories of miraculous healings of cancer came way my recently. One was told to me by a member of my meditation group. She related that a colleague of hers went on medical leave back in November. The colleague had had a heart attack and subsequently a shadow was discovered on her lung, and diagnosed as lung cancer. The next piece of bad news was that the lung cancer had metastasized to her brain, where a lesion was also discovered. The medical team decided to concentrate on the brain lesion first, and she received radiation. The lesion disappeared. She was next going to receive radiation for the cancer in her lung, but there turned out to be no need for it, because by then the lung cancer had also disappeared, even though it was never treated. In addition to her allopathic treatments, she also received healings from a women's healing group of which she was a member. I discussed the power of such healing groups in a previous post, "Are Healing Groups the Way of the Future?"

The other story came my way through a Reiki practitioner. She treated a woman at a health fair who had great difficulty walking due to cancer in her spine. Six months later she saw the same woman again at another fair, and this time the woman came up to her dancing. She was so impressed with her initial Reiki treatment, she said, that she decided to have weekly Reiki treatments, and now she was healed.

Even if Reiki and other energy practitioners can make no promises of miraculous healings, it is very much worthwhile for cancer sufferers to seek out their services. Energy healing practices strengthen the body and the immune system. They make radiation and chemo easier to bear. In cases where the cancer is terminal, energy healers can often do a better job of palliation than can be achieved through radiation and chemo alone. I discuss this in my post "Open Letter to Oncologists".

Radical Love and Cancer

I've been listening to the interviews on Shifra Hendrie's The Coming Era: Aligning With the Power of Your Core. Interview #3 was with Larry Crane, teacher of the "Release Technique". Being a hands-on guy rather than one who likes to lecture, Larry took a few callers through the Release Technique to demonstrate how it worked. The essence of the technique is radically loving oneself and others. One particular caller had a brain tumour and Larry took her through a process of accepting, loving, then releasing her tumour.

I mentioned this to my friend Ellen, who reminded me of the movie "The Divine Matrix", in which another woman, also suffering from a brain tumour, although not a malignant one, approached the tumour with radical love and acceptance. The implication made in the movie was that the tumour then dissolved.

This radical love and acceptance are the exact opposite of what we normally do to tumours, which is to try to cut them out or burn and poison them to death. The fight against cancer is seen as (and too often becomes) a fight to the death. But it is important to note that cancer is a part of oneself, which is why radiation and chemotherapy take such a horrendous toll on the body. In fighting cancer one is fighting oneself. But what would be the effect of radically loving and accepting that same self, extending that unconditional love to one's cancer as well?

What would be the effect of releasing all the negative feelings and grudges accumulated throughout a lifetime so that this love can thrive?

This is what Leigh Fortson, author of Embrace, Release, Heal advocates, and it's what Lester Levenson, on whose thought the Release Technique is based, did, in 1952, after he had a heart attack from which doctors said he would not recover. He went home and reviewed his life, and worked on releasing negativity and developing radical love and acceptance. He recovered and lived until 1994, another 42 years. He went on to teach that ultimately we are all seeking love and that the source of our suffering is that we all look for it outside of ourselves, from others, where we cannot find it, and not inside ourselves, where it lives.

In this blog I've been grappling with the question of miraculous cures and how they become possible. In Anatomy of a Miracle I quoted Anita Moorjani, who recovered from stage 4 cancer after a near-death experience, John Hill, who helped his mother heal from stage 4 cancer with qi gong, and "the Geordie healer", whose blog details his full recovery from lymphoma. "You must first love yourself", Anita Moorjani says. "Negativity is poison to our body," says David, the Geordie healer. "negative thoughts, feelings, anger, fear, keeping alive past hurt, extreme emotion, ego responses. Our preoccupation with negativity has a resonance that usually manifests dis-ease." In John Hill's meditations "you are breathing love from the center of creation to the infinite ends of creation, you are also breathing this love from the center of each cell in your body throughout the universe that is your body/mind/spirit." Healing is all about love.

The opposite of love is not hate, but fear. Cancer is arguably the one single word in our collective vocabulary that evokes the most fear. People diagnosed with cancer get on a treadmill of fear: even if they go into remission, the fear remains. I would argue that fear feeds cancer. Cancer feeds on fear. In fact studies have shown that stress helps cancer grow. if you go to a place of no fear and no stress, a place of love, your cancer has a lot less to feed on. Radical love is worth a try.

See also my post below "Why is meditation a good prescription for cancer patients" and corroboration for the mind-body-spirit link from a physician in "Revolutionary health message from a woman doctor".

Gathering momentum towards the tipping point

I just ran across a website called The Healers. It is the website of Dr. Craig Oster, who was diagnosed in 1994 with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS). Instead of dying as expected within a few years after his diagnosis, Dr. Oster has soldiered on. He even earned a PhD in psychology while fighting the disease. He was admitted into a hospice in 2008 and then "kicked out" in 2009. The Healers is his vision. "There is always hope in life on some important level," the website says, "regardless of your situation or whatever has occurred in your life":

All humans have tremendous healing power, and we are here to help strengthen your own quest to realize to a greater extent the level of healing power that is within you. Are you ready to claim yourself as one of The Healers? Many people have been so brainwashed by the status quo medical establishment, big pharmaceutical companies and the media that they believe that their only hope for healing comes from the external sources of prescription drugs or some medical/surgical procedure ... Let’s focus on the tremendous powers within you and opportunities for orchestrating healing processes.

Dr. Oster has brought together fifty "advisors", a group

of holistic health experts dedicated to changing the way the world views healing and holistic therapies. Dozens of internationally renowned scientists, physicians, holistic health experts and integrative medical professionals have joined together in this never before seen association dedicated to breaking through establishment medical assumptions to bring the world a better and more complete understanding of how holistic healing can benefit everyone.

Years ago I read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which is about how a thing or idea that is ridiculed, disbelieved, or not even a blip on a horizon can gain momentum and suddenly become huge. Well, to me this website shows that we are heading towards the tipping point on healing. Welcome to the coming new possibilities, everyone.

"The Beautiful Truth" - another movie about cancer and nutrition

I thank "Chris Beat Cancer" for bringing my attention to this movie. After the 15-year old protagonist, also called Chris, loses his mother, his father decides to home-school him and gives him Max Gerson's book on the Gerson therapy. Chris ultimately embarks on a cross-country tour to speak with scientists, doctors and cancer survivors to find out what's behind the book.

I found the movie informative, but I felt sorry for "the kid", who was likely still traumatized by the loss of his mom, and then had to go on this odyssey to find out that everything in the modern world is bad for you. And I didn't understand the dad's motivation in assigning him Max Gerson's book as a home-schooling project, given that the mom seems to have died in an accident and not of cancer. At one point in the movie "the kid" visits a company that manufactures coffins (the point being that Americans nowadays need larger coffins because they are so fat) and we see him climbing into coffins to test them out for size. This just seemed morbid to me.

At any rate, there is interesting information about things that are very bad for you, such as dental amalgam, aspartame and anything produced by Monsanto (who declined to give an interview) and things that are good for you, such as organic vegetables.

A New Year's Gift for You

Shifra Hendrie has put together another free teleseminar series, entitled "Quantum Healing, Consciousness and Soul: The Coming Era, Aligning With the Power of Your Core." The speakers include, among many others, Norm Shealy, Donna Eden, Richard Gordon (the founder of Quantum Touch), Gregg Braden, and Lynne McTaggart (author of The Field).

I have had the pleasure of listening to Shifra's interviews from a previous teleseminar series and I was impressed with her warmth and her ability to engage her guests. The interviews are deep and thorough. Listening is free; there is a cost if you would like to purchase downloads or transcripts.