We are on the cutting edge ...

On March 13-16 there was a conference at University College London (in England) entitled The Living Matrix: The Science of Healing. At this conference a movie was released that explains bioenergy healing. Click here for the press release.

Here is the trailer:



Here is a quote from the press release:

Unlike other documentary films about alternative medicine, the film brings together academic and independent researchers, practitioners, and science journalists - such as British biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, American medical doctor and former Stanford University professor Dr. Bruce Lipton, and former US astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell - whose work reveals scientific evidence that bioenergetics play as significant a role as biochemistry in human physiology and biology. In the documentary, they explore bioenergetic principles of the human body field and informational health care, which may be the most important factors influencing health and wellness. They also articulate the concepts and define new terminology to help advance an understanding of these principles.

''At the most fundamental level, all matter - including the human body - can be described in physics terms as fields of information and structured energy,'' said Massey. ''Information is the controlling factor of the body's energy fields, and therefore is the most important component for health. Western medicine has yet to move outside its comfort zone to embrace these revolutionary findings, which can have profound implications not only for medicine, but for the pharmaceutical industry and other health-related areas.''

Becker explained, "Some people spend years suffering, mostly in a conventional medical system that restricts their choices and limits their wellbeing by dismissing bioenergetic medicine as the placebo effect or spontaneous remissions. However, many people are embracing new approaches." He added, "The Living Matrix offers them deeper insight into how and why bioenergetic and informational health care works. It invites traditional practitioners to consider a total integration between conventional and alternative medicine."

Bioenergy healing is the wave of the future.

Spiritual dimensions in bioenergy healing

Over the past few years I've engaged in many debates with people about the value of "curing" versus "healing". In these debates "curing" refers to eliminating a certain physical condition, whereas "healing" refers to healing the whole person, including emotional and spiritual elements along with the physical. Some people say that you cannot have a cure without a healing. At the other end of the spectrum, however, it is quite possible to have healing without a cure.

For years I've scoffed at Reiki people who said that emotional or spiritual healing had taken place when there was no evidence of physical improvement. I thought that was a cop-out. I was also attracted to Bill Bengston's method because of his clear-cut scientific assertion that it dealt purely in cures.

But now I find myself taking the middle ground, having noticed that the people who do best in moving towards a cure are the ones who are also interested in receiving emotional and spiritual healing along the way. In fact I seem to be attracting clients who are looking for a spiritual opening, and it has been a great gift to watch these people opening up like flowers reaching for the sun. Their opening seems to give them a greater ability to absorb the healing energy and to create their own miracles.

Bill Bengston's mentor Ben strongly believed in a divine provenance to the healing energy that flowed through him. Bill himself is of a more scientific bend and teaches the method stripped of any kind of New Age spiritual iconography. He will refer to "Source energy" and never once mention that "Source energy" might be another word for God. People in the workshops have in fact said to me that it was refreshing to learn healing without New Age trappings like incense, soporific music, and crystals and references to divine origins. But I now wonder: does the spiritual dimension add something to the teaching that might make it more profound and more effective?

I had the opportunity this past weekend to take a workshop in a new healing method that had been clearly derived from another method, but with deep spiritual elements added. There were people in attendance who had learned both, who were blown away by the depth and the effectiveness of the teaching when the spiritual elements were not only included, but also honoured. Whereas they were unable to learn and anchor the method in the original teaching, they came away from this weekend transformed.

We are more than bodies after all.

How should healing be taught?

Why healing modalities become diluted over time

Bill Bengston and I had many conversations last year about the tendency of energy healing methods to become diluted over time and with distance from the originator. Many modalities show this pattern. Reiki in its original incarnation was very powerful: Mrs. Takata, who brought it North America in the 1930s, was reputed to have been cured of cancer and gall stones at a Reiki clinic in Japan, which is why she decided to learn Reiki and disseminate it. Now Reiki seldom produces such cures, despite Mrs. Takata's best efforts, and many practitioners are hardly able to generate more than a "little warmth" and a feeling of well-being (appreciated, to be sure, but hardly earth-shaking) in their patients.

Bob Rasmusson, from whose spontaneous ability to heal Quantum Touch was born, was able to push vertebrae around with a gentle touch of his finger, and thus align mis-shapen spines. His student Richard Gordon describes in his book miraculously straightening out the spine of a severely arthritic woman with QT, but it took him an hour and a half of hard work. I know one of Richard Gordon's original students who occasionally does brilliant healings with QT, but when I saw him treat a scoliosis, it remained completely unaffected by his efforts. There is clearly a progression (regression?) here. What was effortless for the master took quite a bit of work for his first student, and seemed a lot less possible for someone of the second generation.

Same with Matrix Energetics. Richard Bartlett can do mind-blowing things. It took him a while (years!) to train his first student, Mark Dunn, who finally mastered the technique after a dramatic "attunement" episode that is well worth reading about (see Richard Bartlett's book). But if you go on the Matrix discussion board now, you will find a great many questions from trainees and not much healing going on.

Which takes us to Bill Bengston's method. Bill in some ways is not the originator, but the first student. His mentor, Bennett Mayrick, developed the spontaneous ability to heal alongside a number of other "psychic" abilities. Judging by Bill's stories of him, Ben's ability to heal was prodigious. He was able to heal a deep cut on the spot, so that the skin was perfectly healed, as if the cut had never happened. He was able to heal very aggressive cancers in only a few treatments. On one occasion he cured a young woman, in a matter of a few hours, of incurable metastatic cancer that had spread to all her major organs (if I remember the story correctly). I do not know how Bill's ability to heal compares to Ben's, but I do know that those of us in the second generation, learning the method from Bill, so far have not been able to duplicate Bill's accomplishments in healing. A very few of us are able to approximate it, but duplicate it, no.

As I look at the pattern what comes to me is that in all cases the first student had the opportunity to spend a great deal of time apprenticing with the originator. I don't know how long Richard Gordon spent with Bob Rasmusson, but both Bill Bengston and Mark Dunn spent years apprenticing with their teachers. In contrast, more recent students are being taught in weekend workshops. As clearly even several weekend workshops do not duplicate years of apprenticeship experience, it makes sense that the second generation is less able to produce healing results. And going down the line, it would be from this imperfectly taught second generation that future teachers would come, so the dilution in the effectiveness of the original method is pretty much inevitable.

What about "cycling"?

There is also the question of how the method is taught. The originator develops the healing ability spontaneously. He doesn't sit down and think to himself: "I want to learn to heal. Now how do I go about this? What's step one? What's step two?" He just wakes up one day and is able to do it. Then when student number one comes along, the question arises: "how do I teach this?" The two of them together then pick apart what the master does and try to come up with a reasonable approximation. But keep in mind that the master doesn't really do anything -- what he does happens spontaneously without his conscious input. So the method that is developed is essentially an imperfect approximation of what the originator doesn't do to make the healing happen.

Bill Bengston teaches healing through a technique called "cycling." But his mentor Bennett Mayrick did not consciously need to go through the steps of this technique to become a healer in the first place. Bill questioned him extensively on what was happening in his mind while he was healing, and "cycling" was originally developed from this as a useful means of keeping the chattering mind/ego/left brain of the patient busy during treatment so it didn't interfere with the healing. Bill then used the "cycling" technique to teach his "skeptical volunteers" in the mouse experiments and since the volunteers then apparently healed the mice (or at least most of them did), he initially concluded that the "cycling" technique was sufficient to teach healing, but expressed some misgivings later in his paper "Can Healing Be Taught?" (for a discussion, see my earlier post "Resonance vs. Technique", toying with the idea that there might have been other factors at play in the success of the experiments, beyond the simple learning of a particular set of instructions).

"Cycling" in the workshops in my opinion allows Bill to transmit the essence of his healing ability. No one who has attended the workshops will question that something significant happens during the teaching, and no one to date has told me that they were dissatisfied with the experience. But the real test is not what happens in the workshops but what happens afterwards. After a year and a half of workshops we have yet to produce the full cancer cures inherent in the promise (and premise) of the mouse experiments. And it is not without significance that those of us who have come the closest, to my knowledge, are the ones who have had more than the workshop experience, including some one-on-one time "apprenticing" with Bill. Dilution happens when time with the teacher is supplanted by rote technique in an effort to streamline the teaching.

So it would seem that the original means of transmission laid down by the founders of the methods is still the best means of teaching healing. Weekend workshops are great to introduce the method to large numbers of people, but if we want it to be fully effective an apprenticeship program will be needed, along with a "school" where it can be implemented. This particular method of energy healing is too valuable to lose through dilution.

A "new" kid on the block

One of my colleagues recently attended a Domancic workshop in Los Angeles. She had a great time and added the method to her other practices. She will be keeping me posted on the effectiveness of the technique.

The Domancic method is of interest to this blog because it also claims to heal cancer. In the video on the website (www.healingbioenergy.com) two cancerous conditions are mentioned, one a breast cancer, the other leukemia. Leukemia is mentioned in passing, with Zdenko Domancic saying that already after a few days of treatment the numbers change (the "numbers" here I presume refer to leukocytes). Breast cancer is mentioned by an Israeli doctor whose wife's breast tumours decreased by "40, 50 per cent" in one course of treatment. Having myself seen the numbers in leukemia change dramatically in a patient who still died, with numbers in the "normal" ranges, and having also seen a tumour decrease in size by 50 per cent in two treatments and then continue to hang out at the new smaller size for months on end, I'd be curious to know the rest of the story in the Domancic cases. But all in all it does sound promising.

New practitioners in the method are instructed not to take on cancer until after they've had some practice under their belts, so it will be a while before we'll know how the new North American practitioners fare with the method in treating cancer.

In the meantime, it's worth keeping an eye on.