The purpose of this blog is purely educational. It does not advise any reader to forgo medical treatment for any condition. It describes methods that have not yet been proven effective through widespread scientific testing. Readers who are concerned about their health are advised to contact their physician.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Can healing be learned? - Part 2

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, I would like to add that learning how to heal is not a black-and-white proposition. There are many shades of gray in the mix. At one end of the spectrum you can learn to speed up the healing of cuts and scrapes; at the other, to treat serious diseases like cancer. While most people seem to have the ability to some degree, a few seem to develop it to quite a sophisticated level. It may be that learning a variety of modalities develops this sophistication.

Also, it seems that the various modalities I described each have their own "specialty", and maybe even their own "frequency" or "bandwidth" or "energy signature". So Reiki claims to work on the spiritual level, with effects that may or may not manifest in physical healing. Quantum Touch is good with bones, as for instance scoliosis. The Bengston Method has been shown to be effective for curing cancer in mice and we have seen it extend life and reduce suffering in people. The Domancic Method will take on all manner of diagnosed medical conditions, including some quite serious ones like cancer and diabetis. Matrix Energetics is more amorphous, refusing to engage with "disease", as Richard Bartlett believes that the twin concepts of "health" and "disease" create a duality which then leads to a focus on "the problem set" rather than "the solution set", interfering with the possibility of healing.

I've commented before that in the early days when I only did QT and Reiki I had clients who could differentiate between the two, and would even express a preference for one or the other. That's what leads me to wonder about there being different "frequencies" and "energy signatures" to the different methods. So maybe each of these methods opens up a different portion of the whole, in which case the more modalities you learn, the better your access and the greater your range and ability in affecting various health conditions will be.

But I stand by my statement in the previous post that you still need to get your own "satellite dish" or direct connection before you can be as good as a Bill Bengston, or a Zdenko Domancic, or a Richard Bartlett (or an Eric Pearl, whom I have only left out because to date I haven't yet taken any of his workshops). I also believe that these teachers are only the advance guard for where humanity is next headed: a world where their strange and "anomalous" abilities will be commonplace and freely available to all, without workshops and without teachers.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Can healing be learned?

James Oschmann, PhD, in his book Energy Healing: The Scientific Basis, calls the ability to heal a human attribute that has been hardwired into our species from the very beginning of our existence. He even suggests a physiological mechanism for it: the healer concentrates the earth's electromagnetic resonance through the pineal gland and channels the resulting "energy" out through the palms of the hands.

At the other end of the spectrum from the scientific worldview, many meditation traditions in the world teach that if you meditate long enough, and polish the mirror of your mind long enough to clear it of "obscurations", you will develop seemingly extraordinary attributes and abilities, one of which is the ability to heal. It has always been there; you just haven't been able to see it until the dust has been removed.

In the past 11 years I have taken 19 workshops: three in Reiki, two in Richard Gordon's Quantum Touch, six with Bill Bengston, three in Richard Bartlett's Matrix Energetics, two in Quantum Lightweaving, one in Shamanic Journeying, one in Jeff Levin's BodySpin, and one in the Domancic Method. What I do now, like many of you out there who have taken umpteen healing workshops, is a mishmash: whatever comes, whatever the client's body asks for, whatever seems most appropriate.

In Reiki, I was attuned and I was taught the Reiki hand positions, and I learned to "heal".

In Quantum Touch I was taught to breathe funny, to "sandwich the pain", and I learned to "heal".

In Bill Bengston's workshop I learned "rapid image cycling" and to look for "hot spots", and I also learned to "heal".

In Matrix Energetics, I learned to "two-point", to "time-travel", to work with archetypes and "drop down, place intent, and let go", and thus to create "healing through transformation".

In the Domancic workshop I learned to wave my hands in prescribed ways and to follow treatment protocols like recipes, and heal specific conditions.

In fact it almost seems that whatever the method, the effect is to teach healing, which would lead one to believe that healing is a very easy thing to learn.

The most telling moment in all these workshops came when, after two full and intense days of teaching us Matrix Energetics techniques, on the morning of the third day when we were all exhausted Richard Bartlett turned to us and said "All these techniques you learned are just there to entertain you while you watch the healing happen." Which means the techniques are absolutely unnecessary. And there was another telling moment when one of our teachers turned to my friend Ellen and said that he did not understand why she would want to learn another method when, having learned his, she now had perfect access to "the Source" -- which essentially says "my technique is the only Way".

In previous posts I have said that in my opinion all these teachers are Gateways. In my opinion they could be teaching you anything as a technique, from musical scales to drumming to reciting Shakespeare, and you'd most probably still "learn" to heal from them. Partly because quite likely there is nothing to learn (see above, as per Oschmann and "removing obscurations") and partly because they are mostly showing you where the door is. And some of them are indeed amazing Gateways if you see them in person. The fact that they believe their technique is important is what makes it important: there are too many techniques out there that work for this not to be the case.

But now I am going to take this a step further and state that if you have to rely on someone else to point the way, you are only going to be a "second-hand" healer. You are piggy-backing on someone else's signal, watching the baseball game through the neighbour's satellite dish. That satellite dish was set up for the neighbour's TV, and your signal will likely be less than perfect. This might explain why healing ability gets more and more diluted the farther away it gets from the original teacher. You need to get your own satellite dish: or in other words, you need to become your own Gateway.

Is it the case that if you take enough workshops, learn sufficient numbers of techniques, or practice one particular technique long enough and diligently enough this will automatically happen? Or is there something else you need to do? I did Shamanic Journeying for a number of years looking for my own gateway to the Source and for the last two years I've also been doing Mahamudra meditation. I can comment that the "signal" has certainly become noticeably clearer. But at the same time I will still be taking more workshops to "open it up" further, because learning is enjoyable and I am forever curious.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Ask Dr. Bill

I received a query yesterday about some particulars of Bill Bengston's method from someone who has just read The Energy Cure. Since I am always happy to interact with readers of this blog, especially if they tell me how much they enjoy reading it, I eagerly answered, and then it occurred to me that I may not be the most knowledgeable person to reply to these questions: Bill is! So I would like to urge you to contact Bill directly with your questions about the method. He can be reached at info@bengstonresearch.com.

I was also left feeling somewhat uneasy about the idea that there may be people out there who will try to use the method in the book to cure themselves of cancer without medical supervision, which is what my correspondent was intending to do. Bill did discuss self-healing through the use of treated cotton in the workshops and in the personal training I received from him, but I do not recall it being discussed in the context of treating one's own cancer. Aside from that, the second-generation use of the method is still experimental and unproven for curing human cancers, as so far it has only been tested on mice. I am not comfortable with the idea of readers experimenting with their own health, even if the method seems hopeful. So please do consult Dr. Bengston first for his opinion if you are intending to use the method to heal your own cancer.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Message from the past

This may have little to do per se with the general topic of this blog, but I was moved, and I feel that I should share it.

Last night I went to see a presentation about the Kogi, a pre-Columbian people in South America who were not affected by the Spanish conquest. Their civilization has remained largely unchanged for 3,000 years. They live communally, their language has no word for "I" or "me", and it is unthinkable for them to allow someone to be indigent or lonely.

They have a message for us, the "little brother" who is busily destroying the planet we all live on. They say their mountain is sick, and since the mountain is a microcosm for the earth, our "mother", she is sick too.

So I am here conveying the message of the Kogi that was given to us:


In Kogi Words

If we know the past, we can live well in the present and prepare the future. The little brothers think we cannot write; the little brothers have books and maps. We have no paper; we work with the heart and the soul. These thoughts are more alive, more real than what is on your paper. That is how we live, that is how we will continue to live. All forms have a father and a mother. Each family has its responsibility, with its own language and culture. We are all brothers, but we have different languages and we work differently. We must learn not to fight and argue over these different forms, but to take advantage of what the Sierra, Nature has left us.

Each of us has a territory, a piece of land where they can live well; each with their own way of doing, of talking … living together. We are all sons and daughters of the same mother, the same father. The little brothers have forgotten their work, the responsibilities, that their mother gave them. They look only for money to live well … they have to recover the memory of what they need to do. All that, is written on our maps. They give us all the details as to what we need to do to respect life, to live well, to respect the rivers, the plants, the trees, the forests and live well together. We won’t fight, we cannot fight over what the Mother has bequeathed us. We must learn to respect Her and live together in respect of the Mother. Each community, each family is responsible for a part of the territory. Each family must do what is necessary, the offerings needed. For that, we need memory. The maps help us…”


“It is up to each of us to search in our memory to find who they are and what they must do. We still have the memory to start the journey.”

Miguel DINGULA. Mamu

It has been said that one of the reasons there is so much cancer in our society is that we have removed ourselves from all that is natural and poisoned the earth. Maybe coming back into harmony with the natural world as the Kogi suggest would be just the beginning of the healing we need.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

And now for something different ...

In keeping with the mandate of this blog to keep you informed of the use of energy healing to treat cancer, I will now comment on some other interesting things that have recently come my way.

I've received a notice from the Bioenergy Life Center, the American representatives of the Domancic Method, about their next two healing events in Sarasota. Therapists at the Domancic Clinic in Europe have claimed to treat cancers with success, but I do not know whether the American clinic does. These four-day healing events are by donation and participants need to pre-register. There is also a talk and a demonstration coming up in Toronto on November 10th from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m.

Then the other day I was trolling the Matrix Energetics website and found a discussion on a newly arrived Russian healing method whose claim to fame seems to be that it teaches people to regenerate organs. Some of the discussion is "Matrix-specific", but as you scroll down you will find more information about the "organ regeneration" workshop itself. I was most impressed by an account of someone using the method to restore movement in a quadriplegic.

And finally, most relevant to this blog, I read about a healer named Kurt Peterson in the alternative healing section of a cancer website called Cancer Compass. Mr. Peterson charges quite a bit for his treatments, but also appears to have successes. I cannot in any way vouch for him, since I do not personally know him or his work, but the discussion string is interesting. And Cancer Compass in itself is an excellent website, providing discussion forums on multiple topics and cancers, as well as treatment information and group support for cancer sufferers and caregivers.

Since the internet is not the most reliable source of information, I hope that readers who have had personal experiences with the Domancic Method, the Russian Organ Regeneration Method, or Mr. Peterson's treatments will be willing to share them with me.

Postscript May 16, 2011: I just found this interview with Kurt Peterson, explaining what he does.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Is healing our birthright?

James Oschman, PhD, writes in his book Energy Healing: The Scientific Basis that he believes that we (humans) are programmed to perform and receive energy healing.

He could be right. Here is the evidence:

- You go to a Reiki course, get "attuned" and learn the Reiki hand positions, and you are able to heal.

- You take Quantum Touch, learn to breathe funny and to "sandwich the pain", and you are able to heal.

- You go to a Matrix Energetics weekend, learn to "two-point" and to "drop down, place intent, and observe", and you are able to heal.

- You go to a Domancic workshop, you learn to wave your hands in prescribed ways and follow protocols, and you are able to heal.

- You take Bill Bengston's weekend workshop on the Bengston method, learn "image cycling" and how to look for "hot spots", and you are able to heal.

The common denominator here seems to be that no matter what you do, what method you learn, you walk away able to help others heal, at least to some degree. That's interesting.

Now I will concede that not everyone learns, though most people seem to be able to. I will also concede that some methods work for some people and conditions better than others. But at the same time, isn't it strange that you can learn healing in so many ways?

When you are young and you don't yet know how to whistle, you already possess the muscles that enable you to do it and with then the latent ability. Then someone comes along and teaches you how to pucker your lips, and out comes a whistle. There could have been whole societies out there that had no clue that they could whistle until someone figured it out and taught all the others. So maybe what happens when you go to an energy healing course is that someone teaches you how to pucker your brain in ways that you never have before, but could have if you had known.

Perhaps you can do it for yourself.

Here is an experiment. If you read this post, and you have never taken any healing courses before, the next time someone you know has a tummy ache or a minor accident (obviously one that does not require stitches, or a hospital visit, or result in extensive blood loss, or involve bones sticking out through the skin) just try to heal them as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You will know that you've had an effect if the bleeding stops, the pain lessens, or the swelling goes down.

1) Start with Oschman's premise that you can.

2) Approach the exercise with open-minded curiosity (and it helps if your "patient" does too).

3) Put your hands around the affected area (without touching if there is an open wound).

4) Get out of your own way by not wondering whether you are doing it correctly. Just let it be.

5) Ask the question "what needs to happen here?" and just stay in a state of open-ended expectation that something interesting could happen in response.

6) Don't keep checking whether anything happened. Just wait in open-ended expectation until something obviously does happen, or until you or your "patient" get bored with waiting, whichever comes first.

If nothing happens, take a healing course. Or not, if this is not your cup of tea. If something does, let me know. And of course by then your curiosity may be whetted enough that you will go on to take a healing course anyway, just to see if you can learn to whistle better.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Is healing boring?

I just finished listening to another interview with Dr. Bengston on MyTalk 107.1.

It was very amusing to hear Dr. Bengston describing healing as a boring thing to do and the least favourite part of his experiments. Having known Dr. Bengston since 2007, I can tell you that he is a very bright man whose mind is always going a hundred miles a minute trying to figure out one thing or another, usually something related to his experiments.

Of course he would find healing boring.

But to those of us who do healing as a vocation, who are most of the time "people people" (unlike Dr. Bengston, who jokingly claims to prefer rodents), healing is anything but. There is now a blog post on the web in which someone states that they would not be learning Bill's method because he says it's boring. I would like to reassure that person that it is neither more nor less boring than any other modality out there (with the exception of Matrix Energetics, which is designed to be fun but does not call itself a healing modality), and it feels just as good to do as Reiki or QT or TT.

The interview ends with a giggly compliment from the hosts to Dr. Bengston for being "fascinating in a really weird way". That was amusing too.

I thought that generally it was a frivolous interview, unlike the one with Tami Simon, which had greater depth. But I note that no one seems to be asking the truly important questions: how teachable has Bill's method proven to be for curing human cancers? Among the 200+ people who have learned the method in workshops in the past three years, how many, as far as Bill knows, have gone on to remit documented cancers in people? As interesting as Bill's experiments are, ultimately whether people get cured is the only question that truly matters.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Are healing groups the way of the future?

In my previous post I commented on how much I enjoyed leading and participating in a healing practice group. The group had purpose, heart, and cohesion, and many of the wonderful women who were a part of it I am now honoured to call friends.

The feeling in the group when we were doing healing together was warm, meditative, and deeply satisfying. We positioned our chairs in a circle, and the person who was to receive the healing sat in the middle. When we were doing a distance healing, we placed the photograph of the intended recipient in the centre, sometimes by itself, and sometimes in the hands of the person who had requested the healing.

As the group consisted mostly of healers rather than "healees", the people who sat in the middle largely experienced enhanced well-being. But I recall two remarkable successes from our distance healing efforts, one in the group, and one in a group healing in a workshop. Both were of children. One is described here, in a post entitled Love, bioenergy, and miracles. The other was a little boy who had burned himself rather badly and was expected to be in hospital for weeks and weeks until his burn healed sufficiently for it to be safe for him to go home: he was released the day after we treated him because overnight his wound had unexpectedly scabbed over.

In her futuristic novel Oryx and Crake, author Margaret Atwood describes the genetically engineered people of the future, the Crakers, healing each other in just such a circle through the group purring at the afflicted individual. The purring was Atwoodian whimsy, but the healing was not. In Atwood's fictional dystopia the Crakers are genetically designed for group healing; but in James Oschman's Energy Healing: The Scientific Basis the genetic design is not fictional: he believes we are all designed to perform and receive such healing. We are just not aware of it yet.

Many energy healing modalities use healing groups. Zdenko Domancic, for instance, has an energy healing clinic in Slovenia that has been in operation for over 25 years. The clinic is a big open space where a multitude of clients sit and wait their turn while several therapists treat people. A treatment may last maybe 20 minutes, but clients are encouraged to stay in the energy as long as they can. It is recognized that the group setting amplifies the energy and that the people who wait are benefiting just by being present.

How are healing groups different from prayer groups?

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that healing groups are different from prayer groups, and more effective. I have a friend who is very sensitive to energy and cannot abide being prayed for. She described to me how a group once prayed for her and she could "hear" every single person and wished some of them wouldn't. She felt that while many of the people were really praying for her, others were inserting themselves into the prayer by trying to do good because they felt that they should.

A prayer through its very structure requires an "I". When I pray, "I" am beseeching God to do something. As the "beseecher" that makes me very much part of the equation. But the removal of the "I" from the equation is a crucial part of effective energy healing. The more effectively a healer is absent from the healing, the more effective the healing is.

So in my opinion a healing group engaged in a homogeneous healing practice such as the Bengston method or the Domancic method is likely to be more effective than a prayer group. With the removal of the "I" the group becomes cohesive and egoless.

How does group healing work?

Bill Bengston may have stumbled on the mechanism for group healing in his mouse experiments. When he found that not only the treatment groups but also the control groups of mice in his experiments recovered to full life-span cures from fatal injections of cancer, he set about trying to discover what might have happened. He hypothesized that the groups somehow became bonded, and that treatment then given to one group also applied to the other; he then showed in an experiment that this did indeed happen and published a paper about it entitled "Resonance, Type 2 Errors and Placebo Effects". He named the phenomenon "resonant bonding" and hypothesized that it not only affected the mice but also their healers.

I believe that the warm, meditative, harmonious feeling of oneness that we achieved in the practice group was in fact "resonant bonding". It had a distinct energy buzz and felt quite wonderful.

Distance group healing

I am going to go out even further on that limb and say that all the members of a healing group don't even need to be in the same room for the effect to occur. On several occasions we did group distance healings where members of the group sat in the comfort of their own living rooms and joined the group energetically at a mutually agreed upon time. The feeling of "resonant bonding" occurred each time, and I have felt it strengthen as more and more of the group came "online". We used this kind of group healing several times in the case of the girl described in Love, bioenergy and miracles.

Anecdotally I can tell you that when the method used is not homogeneous, but each person is asked to do their own thing, such as Reiki, or prayer, or shamanic work, the feeling of warmth and unity does not seem to occur and the healing is less effective. Homogeneity in the method used seems to create its own "resonant bond".

Groups and morphic fields: going one step further

Richard Bartlett, the creator of Matrix Energetics, says that he is reluctant to treat cancer, because taking it on means going up against the morphic field of cancer, which includes all the fear, doom and gloom, hopelessness, and expectation of pain and suffering associated with that disease, as well as the accumulated longterm failure of the medical establishment to find an effective treatment to eradicate it.

Morphic fields were the brainchild of Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge biologist and author, who believed that these fields were templates for all biologic forms and determined their development. Bartlett extends the meaning of morphic fields to also embrace beliefs and ideas. In this regard morphic fields can be related to C. G. Jung's archetypes.

Groups engaging in a homogeneous activity such as practicing a particular healing modality (or adopting a particular belief or political idea) can create their own morphic fields. The larger the group is that adopts a certain modality or idea, the stronger that field becomes. Healing groups engaging in resonant bonding can create a morphic field which will then make it easier for other healing groups to form. The more of us there are, the more of us there will be, and even more importantly, the more effective we will become.