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.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Anatomy of a miracle - part 2

In "Anatomy of a miracle" I described several cases of spontaneous remission from advanced cancer. And now here is another one from Qigong Master Chunyi Lin, who was recently interviewed by Shifra Hendrie on her internet series Quantum Healing.

Chunyi Lin's wife suffered from lung cancer, and like Anita Moorjani, she came to her final hours. Unlike Anita Moorjani, she was not in a coma and she did not have an NDE. What she did have, like Anita Moorjani, was a miraculous recovery from terminal cancer -- in her case lung cancer.

In the interview Chunyi Lin describes his wife as having had a lot frustration and anger in her life and not being open to healing. In her final days he had a doctor friend speak to her and tell her that a Western medical diagnosis was only one part of a much larger picture and that people could heal from life-threatening diseases even in terminal stages by opening their heart, and by deploying that most powerful tool of healing, forgiveness. Two days later in the emergency room Chunyi Lin heard his wife openly express feelings of love publicly for the first time. Then she closed her eyes in meditation and saw a beautiful light and within two weeks all her tumours disappeared.

Chunyi Lin believes that all healing comes from the heart. "No one can heal you," he says, "unless you believe you can heal yourself from your heart." He also believes in the power of unconditional love and forgiveness. Like Larry Crane, he advocates loving your tumour, loving your asthma, loving your arthritis unconditionally. With that love, you consciously bring in light and joy, and bathed in that light and joy your conditions can dissolve into healing. The mind makes a decision to open the heart, and the heart brings in the energies you need to heal you.

All this may seem quite simplistic to Western minds, and even evoke anger. But as I give bioenergetic support to cancer patients the image that often comes to me is that the patient is like a nut: a soft kernel encased in a hard shell. That shell is the ego, and it forms a barrier to the healing energy the patient needs. It's not only a barrier to the energy I try to provide, but also to the universal life energy (qi or ki) that circulates freely through us all, day in day out, when we are soft and open.

Qigong in all forms, including the Spring Forest Qigong Chunyi Lin teaches, opens us to the energies of the universe. When this energy available to us and circulates freely inside us, many diseases can be healed from within.

Here are some beautiful qigong meditations I received from reader John Hill, who used them to facilitate the healing of his 93-year-old mom from end-stage cancer.

Postscript March 5, 2012: A few days ago I ran across an article on Yahoo News about a 48-year-old woman who had a massive heart attack. Doctors worked for hours on reviving her but were unsuccessful and finally her husband and daughter were called in to say their goodbyes. Leaning over, her husband whispered "I love you" in her ear. She suddenly gripped her daughter's hand and came back to life -- with no brain damage from oxygen deprivation. Another testament to the power of love?

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Bioenergy healing and fear

I had coffee yesterday with a friend and colleague of mine, Ellen. She and I had studied with Dr. Bengston together, then we both learned the Domancic method together. We were two-thirds of the team that treated "Mischa" and another pancreatic cancer patient, both of whose lives were significantly extended through bioenergy treatments.

Ellen is now part of a group of practitioners who run monthly Domancic clinics in Toronto. These are based on the clinics run by the founder of the method, Zdenko Domancic, in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia. Mr. Domancic has been holding clinics in Kranjska Gora since the nineties, and he and his therapists have successfully treated hundreds of thousands of people with conditions such as cancer, heart disease, MS, diabetes, among many others.

People have been finding out about Ellen's Domancic clinics mostly through word of mouth, although she also sends out e-mails and I put the most recent one on Kijiji. People call, inquire, ask questions and then maybe decide to attend. Sometimes they decide to attend and then call back to say "something else has come up". Sometimes the people who call to say "something else has come up" are very ill and very much in need of what the Domancic Method has to offer. So yesterday over coffee we were discussing the meaning of "something else has come up".

My opinion was that people don't understand energy healing and because they don't understand it they are afraid of it. They are afraid that it might not work, but in some cases they are equally afraid that it might. For Ellen and me, immersed for years in the world of healing energy, it is as natural as breathing. It is just a different way of looking at the world, including the unseen as well as the visible, as simple as making the shift from living in a Newtonian universe of objects bumping off each other to a quantum universe of intersecting waves and energies. In our view the quantum universe is both more benign and offers greater opportunities for healing than the Newtonian one. In my view, the quantum universe is the place where "spontaneous remissions" happen.

I am puzzled by this fear of the unknown. People are scared to try energy healing, yet these same people will go to doctors and hospitals to be poked with needles, cut open, radiated and burnt, and to have poisonous fluids injected into their veins that cause them to vomit and lose their hair. Some of them will die from the treatment. The same people who are brave enough to subject themselves to these painful physical assaults are afraid to receive healing energy. Why? One answer is that they are afraid it might not work. But are they not afraid chemo or radiation might not work? The worst-case scenario with energy healing if it "doesn't work" is that nothing happens. The worst-case scenario with chemo and radiation is far, far, far worse.

Ellen and I treated a patient with pancreatic cancer for a whole year after he received his stage-4 diagnosis. Yes: a whole year, even though he was supposed to be dead in 7 months. During that year he took long walks, did major clean-up jobs and some improvement projects around the house, and helped a neighbour with a building project. His naturopath marvelled at his condition and told him that people with his kind and stage of cancer usually came to see him with walkers, wheelchairs, or not at all. Then after a year he stopped his energy treatments. Eventually a family member convinced him to try palliative chemotherapy. Why? What do people think palliative chemotherapy will accomplish? The family member did not understand energy healing but apparently had some kind of magical belief in medical treatment. So the man who was able to take long walks on an energy healing regimen started throwing up and losing significant weight on the allopathic one, and soon after became unable to live any kind of a normal life. Palliative chemotherapy was abandoned because it wasn't working and a short few months later he died.

So let me ask the question again: what are people afraid of with energy healing? Please send me your questions and comments and let's get a discussion going.

PS: to be clear, I am not advocating that people with treatable cancers abandon their allopathic treatment in favour of energy healing. I am saying, however, that energy healing does have something of great value to add to that treatment, and in the case of very advanced or end-stage cancers, it can produce a far better quality of life than palliative chemo and radiation.

Friday, February 17, 2012

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.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

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, a link to my previous post, "Anita Moorjani quotes for energy healers", and now also a link to a great audio interview with Anita and Wayne Dyer.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

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.

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 practices strengthen the body and the immune system. They can make radiation and chemo easier to bear, which is why many hospitals now offer Reiki for cancer patients who are receiving treatment. In cases where the cancer is terminal, energy treatments contribute to the patient's well-being. I discuss this in my post "Open Letter to Oncologists".