Treating cancer with Energy Healing (including the Bengston Method and the Domancic Method)

Radical Love and Cancer

2012-01-15T15:00:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-07T23:55:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-06T09:24:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-04T10:51:00.002-05:00

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.

The Right to Choose

2011-12-30T22:13:00.022-05:00

Before Christmas I had a long written discussion with a British blogger named Josephine who sent and posted an irate letter to the London Evening Standard for "promoting a fundraising campaign set up in order to send a five-year-old girl suffering a rare form of brain cancer to the controversial Burzynski Clinic."

I do not know enough about Dr. Burzynski to be a supporter, but this posting, which claimed that the "Burzynski Clinic are exploiting [vulnerable patients] (and the well-meaning public) in an unscrupulous, unethical, even illegal manner" and charged that the Evening Standard was "effectively complicit" in this, needled me into a response.

According to the Standard the girl suffers from a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer, called a supratentorial primitive neuroectodermal tumour, for which she had already been treated with chemotherapy and radiation. I would presume that if the treatment she received had worked to satisfaction, i.e., the child were now in remission, the family would not be raising funds to go to the Burzynski clinic. Elsewhere on the web I read that this type of cancer has a worse prognosis than other childhood brain cancers.

The issue at hand, for me, was that Josephine and the commenters who supported her view seemed to be implying that this family and their child should somehow be deprived of the right to access the treatment the Burzynski clinic offered because it was unproven and controversial.

To me, that is simply wrong.

They were contrasting Burzynski's unproven and controversial treatment to the scientifically proven (and therefore superior) treatments offered by orthodox medicine, namely the same chemotherapy and radiation which the child had already received, which were apparently not successful in eliminating her cancer.

The chief defence given for the superiority of these treatments to Dr. Burzynski's is that they are "scientifically proven". Scientifically proven to do what? To shrink a cancer tumour by a certain percentage for a certain period of time, apparently. What happens on the day after? Or the day after that? And is there any proven correlation between shrinking tumours and long-term survival? Not necessarily. But this scientifically proven treatment is the gold standard, and it's the treatment everyone must have, even if the chances of 5-year survival are minuscule and even if the treatment guarantees horrific suffering and in some cases may even lead to death.

Can someone explain to me why it should be the preferred treatment? Or why people should be prevented from accessing other treatments, which may not be scientifically proven, but for whose effectiveness there exists a body of anecdotal evidence?

And just how scientific is scientific medicine, anyway?

Dr. John Ioannidis ("Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science", The Atlantic, November 2010) has made a career of doing meta-analyses of medical studies. After years of painstaking research he has come to the conclusion that a large percentage of these studies is misleading, exaggerated, or simply wrong. He discovered an "astonishing range of errors":

from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.

When Dr. Ioannidis zeroed in on 49 of the most quoted research articles published in top medical journals, comprising the creme de la creme of medical research from the past thirteen years, he found that of the 49,

45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated.

He has concluded that overall as much as "90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed". That's a shockingly high number.

Then we have Dr. David Eddy, written up in Business Week in an article entitled "Medical Guesswork". Dr. Eddy has been hard at work exposing the "dark secret" of modern medicine, which is that as much as 85 per cent of medical procedures are not backed by any hard science. "We don't know what we are doing," Dr. Eddy says of his own profession. "I've spent 25 years proving that what we lovingly call clinical judgment is woefully outmatched by the complexities of medicine."

When he tested doctors on clinical judgement, citing a "typical patient" and a "typical treatment" in their specialty, he found that doctors' predictions for the successful outcome of the treatment ranged wildly over the map, from 0 to 100 per cent.

He found a number of promising but unproven procedures that upon closer look turned out to be useless and even harmful, as for instance costly bone marrow transplants for women with breast cancer. I note that because these procedures are performed by trusted doctors, and not so-called "charlatans" who are out to fleece vulnerable cancer patients, they are widely accepted by the public and the people who receive them (and sometimes die from them), and are even lauded as cutting-edge, heroic medicine.

My intention here is not to lambaste doctors. Josephine pointed out to me that I probably would not be here today to "rant" at her from across the Atlantic were it not for their ministrations. I had to agree with her, given that I received certain vaccinations, a timely appendectomy, as well as many doses of antibiotics in my youth. Who knows where I would be without them. I also recognize that most doctors are conscientious, well-meaning individuals, who have no idea how much of the medicine they practice, which they spent years of their lives learning, is not science based.

What I am here to point out is that our so-called modern scientific medicine is likely about as infallible as the pope is, given that the pope is probably right at least some of the time -- yet many of those who follow it are far more fervent in their belief than the most fervent Catholic. They hold up "scientific medicine" as some kind of talisman of infallibility, which it most definitely is not. Both Dr. Ioannidis and Dr. Eddy suggest that in actuality less than 20 per cent of medicine is scientifically based. The rest is little more than guesswork and educated hunches based on anecdotal evidence -- the same kind of anecdotal evidence that is deemed insufficient to prove efficacy in the case of the Burzynski clinic.

Whether or not modern medicine has clay feet, a family who is faced with the loss of their child to cancer should have the right to research and seek out other treatments. If medicine had a magic bullet to save her, they would not need to.

Postscript January 2, 1 p.m. EST: I just finished listening to a news program on CBC Radio that included a segment on hope and cancer. A doctor whose name alas I cannot remember was quoted as saying that too much hope is not good for cancer patients. He opined that hopeful terminal cancer patients who were looking for a cure often opted for aggressive chemotherapy instead of palliative care. He said that he and his colleagues were seeing more and more patients dying from the side effects of their chemotherapy, going straight from their treatment to ER, and from there to the morgue. What a horrendous way to die and how odd to pin the blame on hope, rather than the dreadful, toxic treatments that are on offer! Again I ask, why should these people not have been allowed to seek out alternative therapies instead?

Researcher tackles "unexpected remissions"

2011-12-10T19:51:00.003-05:00

I thank Sheila for this link, which made me want to whoop with joy.

Coming on the heels of Dr. Lissa Rankin's inspiring TED talk on what health truly is, and how healthcare should address it, Dr. Kelly Turner's research on what she calls "unexpected remissions" is giving me even more hope for the future of medicine.

I recommend reading her article, "When Cancer Disappears", accessible through the link above, but in the meantime here are the highlights:

1) Dr. Turner doesn't like calling "spontaneous remissions" spontaneous, because they may not be -- but they are certainly unexpected. A "spontaneous" or "unexpected" remission is when a cancer heals without allopathic treatment, or through other means after allopathic treatment failed.

2) Dr. Turner interviewed 20 people who experienced such remissions and 50 holistic healers all over the world for her research.

3) She summarizes her findings and outlines the beliefs and practices she most commonly found among those who healed. Her findings echo what I and my energy healing colleagues have been saying for years. Energy blockages need to be released. The lifestyle that contributed to the cancer needs to be changed. There is a mind-body-spirit interaction and an energy that connects all three. The will to live matters. And, as Leigh Fortson said in her book Embrace, Release, Heal, it is important for cancer patients to have choices and to feel in control of their treatment.

Dr. Turner, who is not a physician but a researcher in the field of Integrative Oncology, has a website on which she is collecting stories of "unexpected remissions". She is also at work on a book for cancer patients summarizing her research.

Revolutionary health message from a woman doctor

2011-12-07T21:22:00.003-05:00

The time to watch this is before you need a doctor. Especially relevant to women!

This message needs to be shouted from the rooftops.

Why is meditation a good prescription for cancer patients?

2011-11-19T17:25:00.013-05:00

Stress is deeply implicated in cancer. Not only can stress contribute to the onset of cancer, but it can also cause it to spread. And I would say that there are few life events more stressful than living with a cancer diagnosis.

Meditation shortcircuits that stress.

One of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, the first one, is that "life is suffering". According to the Buddha, life is suffering because of "old age, sickness and death", but also because of many subtle day-to-day discontents such as not having what we want, having to put up with what we don't want, and the subtlest one of all, being aware, even when we are happy, that the happiness won't last.

Meditation is a psychological remedy for the pain of the First Noble Truth. It teaches you to live in the now. Regretting the past or dreading the future take up huge amounts of mental and physical energy. Every moment of living in the now is like a vacation from regret and dread, freeing up energy for healing, creativity and resilience. The peace of living in the moment without fear floods your bloodstream with positive hormones. It gives your body a rest.

Cancer can fill you with fear of the future and regret for the things that you have not done in the past. Meditation teaches you how to stop those thoughts. Fear in particular constricts you -- it makes your breathing shallow, so you don't get sufficient oxygen (and cancer thrives in an anaerobic environment). It constricts your mind too, so you become trapped in a circuit of negative thinking. Negative thinking in turn floods your body with stress hormones -- which cancer also loves.

One type of meditation I have done is called Radiant Mind. We were shown on a very vivid graph how everything happens in the moment. Your mind might travel back with memories or forward in anticipation or dread, but it still resides here, in the moment. Everything you experience in your mind affects your body. The quality of your life, and to a large extent the health of your body, depend on how you feel in the moment, and it is from moment to moment to moment that the tenor of your life is determined. One exercise we were taught was to stay in the moment, accept everything in the moment, observe everything in the moment and let everything go, moment to moment.

Another type of meditation I learned is Mahamudra. In Mahamudra you calm the mind by focusing on the breath, and then you ask "where is my mind? what shape is it? what size? what colour?" You discover that's it's nowhere and everywhere, that is has no shape and no colour, and that it is not you. There is more to you than your mind, more to you than your body, more to you than your self, more to you than your pain. You can wedge some breathing space between yourself and your pain, yourself and your fear, by looking at them as an impartial observer.

If you can learn to become that impartial observer called "awareness", and so stop identifying with your body, with your fear, with your pain, you will have won an important battle in your quest for health. Alastair Cunningham, the creator of the Healing Journey, recognized this and made meditation one of the cornerstones of his program. Many graduates of the program fared much better with their cancer than their diagnoses suggested.

Meditation resources abound. There are CDs, DVDs, local meditation centers and teachers, Buddhist temples both of the Zen and the Tibetan variety, and Youtube videos galore. I would in particular recommend Adyashanti's teachings. But there are many others, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Pema Chodron, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, Thich Nhat Hanh. Find one who speaks to you.

Postscript January 19: Just found this article on a cancer survivor who partly credits the Healing Journey program for her healing.

Open Letter to Oncologists

2011-11-18T11:56:00.007-05:00

Dear Doctor,

Let me begin by saying that I respect the care and devotion you give your patients and that I understand that you are working within a widely accepted paradigm that you were taught many years ago in medical school.

But I am writing to you with some frustration because I have seen the suffering that this paradigm can cause.

I am not speaking of the many cancer patients who experience successful outcomes through the accepted practices of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. I am speaking of the ones who come to you to whom you have to say "I am sorry. Your cancer is too advanced to treat. All we can offer is palliative chemotherapy or radiation to improve your quality of life when it becomes compromised."

All too often "palliative" chemotherapy and radiation mean weeks or months of suffering (nausea, vomiting, hair loss, weight loss, exhaustion, pain) for a few weeks or months of added life. It is questionable how this improves quality of life.

I fully understand that because of your training you are not aware that there are alternatives. The purpose of this letter is to make you aware of at least some of them.

For eighteen months in 2007 and 2008 I trained in an energy healing method that was specifically said to be effective for cancer. Since then, I learned another one that is likewise said to be helpful for cancer sufferers. Over the past four years I and a colleague have worked with many cancer patients. I would like to tell you of our experiences.

In our work treating end-stage cancer patients we found that most of them experienced significant pain relief. In one case a patient in hospital who was expected to die within days of stage-4 pancreatic cancer instead rallied, and was sent home a week after we began treating him. Five days after the first treatment he no longer needed morphine. His jaundice reversed. Instead of dying within days, he went on to live another 10 weeks, able to resume some normal activities, including shopping, barbecuing, and going to the cottage. This was an extraordinary case.

In other instances we asked end-stage cancer patients in significant pain what their pain level was after treatment. Before treatment, it was 10 out of 10; after treatment 2 out of 10. Pain relief could last a couple of days.

In one instance a patient with end-stage bladder cancer, who developed a large inoperable metastatic tumour while receiving chemotherapy, came in supported by his wife, visibly in considerable pain. After treatment he walked out unassisted and laughing. He then opted for a round of heavy duty last-ditch radiation and died. His wife said he told her he wished he had continued working with us.

Energy healing modalities such as Reiki and Therapeutic Touch are already accepted under the current medical paradigm as adjunctive treatments. So a terminal cancer patient might receive palliative chemotherapy and radiation, and then receive Reiki or Therapeutic Touch from a nurse or a hospital volunteer to deal with the side effects of the treatment. But I would submit that the new energy healing modalities, which seem to pack more punch than Reiki or TT, would not need to be adjunctive to chemotherapy or radiation. In cases where the aim is palliation, they can be used as stand-alone treatments.

In our experience patients who have no hope of beating their cancer can live far longer and far more productively with energy treatments than allopathic ones. One man we treated who had bile duct cancer with metastases to the liver, and was expected to live 7 or 8 months, instead lived 20. Significantly, for the first 12 months while he was receiving energy treatments, he was able to walk the dog, paint his house, rearrange his garage, help the neighbour build a deck, and (at the end of the 12 months) travel to a national park to go salmon fishing and white water rafting. After 12 months he terminated energy treatments and was eventually persuaded to try chemo and radiation. He died 8 months after ending his bioenergy treatments and once again his family told us that in retrospect they believed it would have been better if he had continued working with us.

You are too quick to dismiss us. One doctor said of our pancreatic cancer patient who was sent home to live 10 extra weeks, instead of dying within days as expected, that his sudden turn-around was probably "the natural course of his disease". This in spite of the fact that man's own doctor called it "a miracle".

My point is that the patient has nothing to lose and a lot to gain. No side effects to treatment. An extended life span. Pain relief. More energy to live daily life. Society would also benefit, given the runaway costs of allopathic hospital treatment (e.g., $5000 a month per patient for chemo pills). I would think doctors and nursing staff would also benefit in not having to witness, helplessly and on a daily basis, the suffering of these patients.

All I ask is that you be willing to work with us, in particular if the terminal patient in question is a child. I just saw an interview with Dr. Andrew Weill in which he said that already twenty percent of medical schools are teaching an integrative healthcare model. What I propose is as good as integrative medicine gets. Everyone benefits.

Please think about it.

Anatomy of a miracle

2011-11-16T23:22:00.014-05:00

When you write a blog about energy healing and cancer you become a magnet for stories of miraculous healings. You read about them in your research and people contact you with links and even personal stories. You find out that miracles abound.

After a while you begin to ponder why some people see miracles while many others get a mundane reality of painful treatment, side effects, decline and death. What's the difference? Why did Anita Moorjani come back from the other side and heal from her stage 4 cancer? How did Jeff in chapter 5 of Leigh Fortson's Embrace, Release, Heal become cancer free in 6 weeks after being told to go home and put his affairs in order? How did many others in Leigh's book experience miraculous healing? How did David, the "Geordie Healer", beat multiple myeloma not once but twice? How did John Hill's 93-year-old mom get cured? What's the secret?

Alastair Cunningham of Toronto, who developed the Healing Journey program, has seen many cancer patients over the years, most in very dire stages of the disease. Many of them died, but a handful of them transcended even stage-4 cancers. These survivors were warriors of the spirit, who remade their lives, looked into their own hearts, dropped their grudges, and faithfully followed the program, which was heavy on meditation (or maybe I should say "light"?) and self-understanding.

It is a tenet of psychoanalysis that everything in a patient's life contributes to the neurotic structure causing the problems that brought him to the analyst's office in the first place. With cancer patients we assume that what brought them to their disease had to do mostly with physical things: diet, unhealthy lifestyle, poor genetics, or outside influences such as smoking, excessive alcohol, asbestos or other carcinogens. Few people dare to mention other factors such as lack of a self or depression or unexamined emotions. But in fact we should be looking at the whole picture, as Leigh Fortson did. When Leigh looked deep inside herself, she found a raging artistic younger self who felt left behind. When she took account of this part of herself, she got better.

Anita Moorjani through her near-death experience discovered that we are far more than bodies. We are spirit and we carry everything that becomes our life in our energy field. If cancer is in our energy field and we weaken, we develop cancer. If cancer is removed from our energy field, it is also removed from our bodies. Our chief task is to love ourselves, and from that love we will see arising a genuine love for others. If we love others but not ourselves, we will weaken. Many cancer patients I've seen loved others to the exclusion of themselves.

David, the "Geordie Healer", has an amazing blog. When I first found it, I contacted him to ask if I could quote from it. He said I could. So here is an excerpt:

If I tell you that cancer is no more than an energy; you could visualise this energy as a darkness within the light of our being, then you give it recognisable form. This energy, or darkness has affected the cells in your physical body, and you have 60 trillion of them. Your chemical DNA is also an energy that allows cells to die and new cells to grow according to your DNA blueprint. DNA is affected by thoughts, fear, food we eat, our environment and our thoughts about ourselves. Negativity is poison to our body, 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...disease. Every cell in your body is replaced over a 7 year period, this slows with age and we are meant to degrade slowly, to eventually die. What are we physically, not much according to science, cells are made up if atoms and molecules, these are 99.9999999% empty space. If you compressed 7 billion people in this world into a structure that had no spaces in between the atoms you would have a structure the size of a sugar lump. We are so much more than physical matter and we all need to know this.

David beat multiple myeloma once, but then in 2010 it returned.

In 2010 my cancer was again found in my body. I had just been through a clinical depression, my world was black, I did things that were alien to me and was in a hole of my own making, lost for a time to light and love. I lost my wife, my business nearly failed and I was doom and gloom. No wonder my cancer returned. It was a major lesson for me and having learned it, the cancer that threatened to kill me was removed for a second time. This time it will not be back, I learned the lesson. Hells bells who could beat MM twice; I did.

What did David do?

If I tell you that you have the tools within you and the connection to your soul that sees Multiple Myeloma as a minor disturbance in your energy field, and that it can be removed completely. Would you listen?

You can never access this healing power with your mind, your mind is weak. You must go within, meditation, where you still the mind and take your awareness in silence into your heart area. Your heart is your doorway and your shield of protection. You may be surprised to know that the heart carries an energy that is 50 times stronger than the brain. Relax and take several deep breaths, on each breath feel yourself going deeper into your heart, visualise a doorway and walk through it when you feel calm. Through this doorway visualise a landscape that is calming for you, by water, in nature, walking on a beach, etc, etc, close the door behind you and feel the warmth of the sun as it bathes you in light. In this place the sun is your soul and you can visit this place any time you like, in this place you will carry the energy from your soul into your heart. Light chases dark and this light and warmth from your soul connection will flood your cells with light. See it chase away the darkness that is cancer, it cannot exist in the light of your soul. Importantly...KNOW IT IS HAPPENING. See the colour black being washed down through your feet and into the earth where the energy is recycled and cleansed.

When you question consensus thinking and beliefs and know who you are, as an eternal being having a physical experience, connected to an awesome power of soul, you can transcend the limitations your parents and caregivers instilled into you. You can change the fear, the stress and be comforted by the connection to your soul that you might not have known you have. Your soul loves you unconditionally and will revel in the connection. Do it once or twice a day, and remember, nothing relevant is past, nothing happens in the future, the future only exists as possibility, EVERYTHING HAPPENS IN THE MOMENT OF NOW. Now is the most important moment you have, make it work for you.

This is the same message Anita Moorjani brought back: love yourself, love the moment, and build on each moment to make your life a work of art. The only thing required of you in this lifetime is that you be you.

And here is an excerpt from John Hill's qigong meditations, which he used to help heal his mom:

Hold the general intent that you are the Center of the Universe, your breathing goes infinitely in/out to the ends of creation, including all centers – the hollow center of a seed, the Big Bang, you as a tiny dot in your mother’s womb, the consciousness center of everyone past/future on the planet, every living thing growing from a dot to full growth, etc. Hold this macroscopic intention in a free-floating relaxed manner. As in all these meditative efforts, our minds will tend to drift from the intent – that’s fine, in fact this drifting adds to the ground covered, as long as you allow yourself to come back to your original intent/visualization. While existing as Center, also include the center of each cell, molecule, and atom of your body. Since 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. Your universe is also your mom and dad making love at your beginning through all things you have and will experience – all these things are visible from the center of your sphere.

He did this meditation and some others he mentions while visualising being one with his mother, one cell not yet differentiated. Here too, love is the centre.

People will scoff that this is simplistic, but it has vast advantages over radiation and chemo. I suspect that when the practice becomes genuine, it floods the body with hormones that do a world of good, suffering is eased, and even if death must follow, it will be a far less harrowing experience than what physical medicine alone has to offer.

Since all these people who experienced miraculous cures bring us the same message, I for one believe that there must be something to it. Namaste.

Waivers, disclaimers & legal releases

2011-11-05T21:34:00.010-04:00

Energy healers sometimes ask clients to sign disclaimer or release forms in which the client acknowledges that the practitioner works in the energy field and not on the body, and makes no promises about any actual healing taking place as a result of the treatment. The client is often informed, as for instance on Dr. Bengston's website, that "the physical body ... is the domain of the medical field and other allied health care professionals." But these days, probably as a result of malpractice suits, the medical field seems quite reluctant to take on the responsibility that we have been allotting to it.

Yesterday I had to make a visit to walk-in clinic in an American city to be seen by an actual bona fide medical doctor, and I was asked to sign a form that said

I am aware that the practice of medicine is not an exact science and I acknowledge that NO guarantee or assurance has been made or implied to me as to the results that may be obtained by examination or treatment.

In other words, we make no promises, folks. But hold on, isn't medicine supposed to be evidence-based and scientific, in contradistinction to energy healing, which is not? Isn't the perceived superiority of medicine based on its alleged scientific and evidence-based nature, and the resulting belief that we can pretty much count on certain drugs doing certain things to certain diseases in a relatively large percentage of people? Apparently we cannot count on our doctors either. Perhaps all of us might want to adopt the disclaimer used by the mutual fund industry: "past performance does not guarantee future results".

In related news, GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, has just been fined a record-setting $3 billion, yes billion, for fraudulent practices in marketing nine drugs, including Avandia and Paxil. These practices included marketing drugs for off-label use, meaning uses for which the drug was never tested, approved, or intended. The response of the pharmaceutical industry has been to prepare "an appeal to the Supreme Court to receive a ruling that permits off-label marketing as Constitutionally protected free speech under the First Amendment." The mind boggles.

The $3billion fine follows closely on the heels of a $750million legal settlement (announced October 26th) levied against GlaxoSmithKline for knowingly selling substandard and contaminated products manufactured in a plant in Puerto Rico that "for years was rife with contamination". Caveat emptor ("let the buyer beware").

Dr. Mercola interviews Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez about Steve Jobs and other celebrity cancer patients

2011-10-10T23:17:00.012-04:00

Click here for the interview.

And here is a link to the transcript, because sometimes Dr. Gonzalez is a little difficult to understand. Here is a short excerpt:

Conventional doctors can fail and still be considered heroes...

There’s a very eminent oncologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who treated Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney’s wife, who had metastatic breast cancer. He gave her a bone marrow transplant. There’s no evidence in the history of the world that bone marrow transplant helps metastatic breast cancer. None whatsoever, and it’s a deadly procedure – 10 to 30 percent of women who get it would die from the procedure. He gave it to her, and she died. Then he treated ..., who used to be editor of ... She had metastatic ovarian cancer. He gave her chemo; it didn’t work. He gave her a bone marrow transplant. It didn’t work; she died!

What did the New York Times do? They have a second-page major article about this hero oncologist who’s been working day and night against such odds to keep these wonderful gifts to the world alive. But they’re dead. He didn’t succeed. He gave them therapies that could not, in a thousand years, be of cancer significance.

DM: Are there any ethics or panels that need to approve those procedures before they’re implemented?

DG: There are ethics panels for the likes of you and me. When you’re a celebrity oncology star, you make the rules as you go along... These oncologists can pretty much do whatever they want, and they’re lauded for doing it. They’re considered heroes. They’re considered heroes for using this desperate, expensive, terribly toxic therapy. In fact the more toxic, the more heroic the doctor is perceived. The press loves them... If you stand outside of the back door of Sloan-Kettering, you see the bodies coming out every day. Conventional oncologists lose patients every day, and no one says they’re murdering anybody... Patrick Swayze’s doctors have been lauded as heroes; no one came out and said that the Stanford oncology team are sleazy quacks making money and taking advantage of their victims... [But] if you’re an alternative practitioner and succeed, you’re still considered a sleazy quack. So it’s a very interesting dynamic that has absolutely nothing to do with scientific validity, objectivity, or evaluation of data – it has nothing to do with that at all. It's almost a religious fervor... Conventional academic medicine is the last religion left in America.

Here is a Dr. Whittaker cited by Dr. Mercola on the same subject in a different article:

What is lost in the unemotional statistic of 500,000 cancer deaths per year is how those people died... In my opinion, conventional cancer therapy is so toxic and dehumanizing that I fear it far more than I fear death from cancer. We know that conventional therapy doesn't work -- if it did, you would not fear cancer any more than you fear pneumonia. It is the utter lack of certainty as to the outcome of conventional treatment that virtually screams for more freedom of choice in the area of cancer therapy. Yet most so-called alternative therapies regardless of potential or proven benefit, are outlawed, which forces patients to submit to the failures that we know don't work, because there's no other choice.

Taking a passive role with today's conventional therapy is terribly dangerous. Recently Jackie Kennedy, after a "courageous fight," succumbed to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma - or did she? Her early demise, attributed to the cancer, was a shock to cancer specialists worldwide, and brought into question the real cause of her death. She had been given an unproved protocol of very high-dose chemotherapy. The drugs alone could easily have caused her death - and this would not be unusual. There are numerous cases of iatrogenic (doctor-induced) deaths from chemotherapy.

And to show that Dr. Gonzalez and Dr. Whittaker are not just blowing hot air, here is a study about the effectiveness of chemotherapy published in the prestigious journal Clinical Oncology (Morgan G, Ward R, Barton M. "The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies." Clin Oncol (R Coll Radiol). 2004;16(8): 549-60). Their results:

The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA.

Their conclusions:

As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.

To this I would like to add my own story. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1983. She had a mastectomy and was prescribed Tamoxifen. Two years later she had a small recurrence at the site of the mastectomy scar and was given a full work-up to see whether the cancer had metastasized. It had not. All the same, her oncologist prescribed what he called "prophylactic" radiation, just to be on the safe side.

I had a very bad feeling about the radiation and begged her to reconsider, and she told me "I would trust this doctor with my life". She died five hours after her first radiation treatment. We never found out what killed her, but one thing's for sure, it was not cancer. More likely its treatment. We were too numb with grief to make a fuss and as accepting of the sanctity of the medical establishment as she was. But imagine if she had died with the same suddenness and the same lack of explanation in the hands of an alternative healthcare practitioner like Dr. Mercola. It would have immediately raised suspicions. There would have likely been an inquest; perhaps charges would have been laid. Certainly an effort would have been made by the authorities to shut the practitioner down to protect the public.

Whether it was misapplied radiation or deadly side-effects from Tamoxifen, the end result was that my mother died years before she should have, a few months before her 52nd birthday. One consolation was that she did not have to suffer through the "best practices" that oncology has to offer and we did not have to watch her throw up and lose her hair and then waste away to nothing at the end. One thing she told me after her mastectomy was that morphine did not so much take the pain away as make you not care that you were in pain. Please, let's find a better way.

Bill Bengston at the Toronto Energy Psychology Conference (ACEP)

2011-10-07T22:41:00.017-04:00

On October 22nd, almost three years to the day since our last Toronto workshop, Bill Bengston returns to Canada to give a talk entitled "Lessons from the Lab: Energy Healing Experiments on Cancer." This will be an exciting opportunity to find out what new discoveries he has made in the meantime and whether any more strides have been made towards moving the method from the lab to successful application in real life.

Approximately 35 years ago Bill Bengston did an experiment in which he cured laboratory mice of cancer. He then followed up this experiment with three others in which skeptical volunteers who learned a method he developed were also apparently able to cure the mice of cancer. Nothing much was heard of these experiments until the year 2000, when he described them in a paper in the journal of the Society of Scientific Exploration. Since then other experiments followed, in one of which Bill explored why the control mice in his experiments were also cured, and explained why the remission of the control mice did not nullify the results of the experiments and what bearing that has on drug research in general. He published his findings in another paper entitled "Resonance, Placebo Effects, and Type II Errors: Some Implications from Healing Research for Experimental Methods".

Other interesting experiments Bill participated in include fMRI studies to see how his brain functions while he heals, what happens to the brains of the subjects who receive healing from him, and how the healing affects geomagnetic probes.

My own personal interest has been in the clinical application of the method. Starting in July 2007, Bill Bengston and I organized a series of workshops in Toronto to see if the success of the skeptical volunteers with the sick mice could be translated into successful treatment of cancer by practitioners in real world situations. After six workshops over almost a year and a half we found that while students could obtain noticeably anomalous results, such as increased survival and the abatement or reversal of some symptoms, we did not see any cures by them, unassisted, of documented cancers in people.

As early as 2008 Bill raised the question whether healing could be taught in an article for Larry Dossey's Explore magazine. He is still wrestling with the question, although he has taught many workshops since then in other locations. I would be curious to know whether these later workshops produced meaningful results. What we would be looking for, and what I would hope to see, is a meaningful number of cancer remissions reported by a number of practitioners. One or two remissions would not be statistically significant; a dozen or more would be, although it's hard to know where to draw the line. Bill's own observation has been that healing ability, like musical talent, is distributed on a curve, with a few Mozarts who are able to achieve spectacular results surrounded by many others with varying degrees of lesser ability. Significantly he has also raised the possibility that he may have healed the mice in his experiments himself, using the skeptical volunteers as his proxy. Due to a phenomenon he calls resonance, bonding the mice and their healers, it cannot be known with any certainty who did the healing.

The clinician in me would like to see Bill take the next step and begin to study the effects of dissemination. One man being able to cure cancer is an anomaly, and to study his brain and the effects he is able to produce on fMRIs and geomagnetic probes has value in that it adds to our store of knowledge about energy healing, but it does not directly translate into anyone being cured of cancer in the real world. That same man being able to disseminate what he knows in an effective way is revolutionary.

What needs to happen next, in my view, is to study not Bill's brain and Bill's effects, but the brain activity and effectiveness of his students. Do they produce the same brainwaves? The same "resonance" with patients? Just as there is a minimum dose response among the mice, is there a minimum study time or exposure to Bill needed to create a student able to reproduce Bill's success? Skeptical students who participated in a six-week program with Bill were able to heal cancerous mice; students who learned the method in weekend workshops were (to my knowledge) not able to cure documented cancers in people; but that is not to say they would not have been able to cure mice had they been given the opportunity, or that the students who cured the mice would also have been able to cure people. Much is unknown -- a great deal needs to be investigated further.

Bruce Lipton on "The Power of Consciousness"

2011-10-04T17:27:00.003-04:00

Bruce Lipton is a scientist with a life-long interest in the life of cells. He is a proponent of epigenetics, a new way of looking at the influence of genetics that suggests that lifestyle affects DNA. He has essentially found that if you put cells in a poor environment they deteriorate and if you then put them in a nourishing environment, they recover and flourish. He says that we are all essentially giant petri dishes covered in skin, and how we nourish our cells determines how healthy we are. The blood is the medium which nourishes our cells, and the chemicals in our blood are determined by how we live. That includes not only what we eat and how much we exercise, but also the chemicals created by stressful living. Dr. Lipton believes that to say that we are genetically predisposed to get certain kinds of cancer because of our family history unnecessarily makes us into victims of our genetics. "Epigenetics" means we don't have to be.

Anita Moorjani quotes for energy healers

2011-09-05T14:41:00.008-04:00

Anita Moorjani is a cancer survivor who had a remarkable NDE experience. She returned from near-death and organ failure to experience a full cure from lymphoma. During her NDE she had a number of insights that I feel are quite pertinent for energy healers, especially those who deal with cancer patients. Here is a selection.

Anita Moorjani on time and choices:

Time seems to have a completely different meaning on [the other] side. What I felt was that all possibilities exist simultaneously – it just depends which one you choose. Sort of like being in an elevator, where all the floors of a building exist, but you can choose which floor to get off on. So if all the future possibilities exist for me to choose from, then I assume all the past scenarios exist too. So depending which future possibility I choose, that will also determine which past automatically comes with it (I chose life, so it affected the past, choosing the appropriate test result for the organ function).

Anita Moorjani on awareness and possibilities:

[I]magine there is a huge warehouse, which is dark, and you live in this warehouse with one flashlight. Everything you know about this warehouse is seen through the light of this one small flashlight. Whenever you want to look for something, you may or may not find it, but it does not mean the thing does not exist. It is there, but you just haven’t flashed your light on it. You can only see what your light is focused on. Then one day, someone flicks on a lightswitch, and for the first time, you can see the whole warehouse. The vastness of it is almost overwhelming, you can’t see all the way to the end, and you know there is more than what you can see. But you do see how all the products are lined up on all the shelves, and you notice just how many different things there are in the warehouse which you never noticed, never even conceived having existed, yet they do, simultaneously with the things you know existed (those are the things your flashlight had been able to find). Then, even when the light switch goes back off, nothing can take away the understanding and clarity of your experience. Even though you are back to one flashlight, you now know how to look for things.

Anita Moorjani on energy and cancer:

I saw all people as “energy”, and depending where our energy level was, that was the world we created for ourselves. The understanding I gained from this was that if cancer was not in our “energy”, then it was not in our reality. If feeling good about ourselves was in our energy, then our reality would be positive. If cancer was in our energy, then even if we eradicated it with modern medicine, it would soon come back. But if we cleared it from our energy, the physical body would soon follow. None of us are as “real” or physical as we think we are. From what I saw, it looked like we are energy first, and physical is only a result of expressing our energy. And we can change our physical reality if we change our energy. (Some people have mentioned I use the term “Vibration”). For me, personally, I was made to feel that in order to keep my energy/vibration level up, I only had to live in the moment, enjoy every moment of life, and use each moment to elevate the next moment (which then elevates my future). It is in that moment of elevating your energy level that you can change your future (like my test results). It sounds very simplistic, but it felt very deep when I was experiencing the understanding of it.

Read the full article here or read another post here.

Here are some questions that these quotes raise for me:

Can an energy healer effectively facilitate the removal of "cancer" from a client's energy field? Will that result in a "cure"?

If the healer succeeds in this, but the client does not change his or her life and energy patterns and belief systems, can the cancer reappear in the energy field and subsequently in the body?

Is changing one's life and energy patterns and belief systems to bring them into line with these universal truths sufficient in and of itself to create healing?

Is it more useful to treat a client or to teach the client to heal him or herself?

Is it possible to go back to the seed moment when the cancer began and choose a different outcome? Is this something the cancer sufferer needs to do for him or herself, or can a practitioner do it from the outside?

Please feel free to add your own questions -- or answers.

Read also Anatomy of a Miracle.

Dr. Wayne Dyer on receiving treatment for his leukemia from John of God

2011-08-30T09:09:00.006-04:00

A thought-provoking interview with Dr. Wayne Dyer:

"There are no previous lives. There are only parallel lives. Everything is happening at once. And that when you begin to assume the feeling of a wish that you would like to have fulfilled, which is what I did with this leukemia, it isn't just like an intellectual exercise where you say 'I am well and I live from that perspective', it's like you begin to feel that in your body and you experience the feeling of it and you assume the feeling of whatever wish you would like to have and you assume that it is already fulfilled." - Wayne Dyer.

I thank Upswing for the link.

Problems "hyper-cycling"?

2011-08-12T15:24:00.008-04:00

I was recently contacted by a reader who said that he had difficulties getting into "hyper-cycling" mode and was asking for help. ("Hyper-cycling" is when you take Bill Bengston's image cycling sequence to what seems like impossible speeds. Listeners of the CDs and attendees of the workshops will know what I am speaking about here.)

I am not sure that anyone who merely reads the book or listens to the CDs can attain the speeds required for "hyper-cycling". But the good news is that hyper-cycling may no be necessary to activate healing.

In a relatively recent interview with Dean Radin of IONS Dr. Bengston mentions that he also heard from readers who had problems attaining the speeds required for what he calls "hyper-cycling", but who also said that they were still able to get healing effects.

I would say that worrying about not being good enough at "hyper-cycling" will get in the way of healing far more than not being able to "hyper-cycle". Even Dr. Bengston now theorizes that the ability to heal could be our birthright and that technique may in fact be secondary.

I was recently chatting with a neighbour who had had surgery done on her hand to correct a dislocated thumb. This neighbour is particularly sensitive to energy and as we were chatting she suddenly asked me if I was working on her thumb. I wasn't consciously doing any such thing and I asked what made her think that I was. She said she could feel energies surging through her thumb and things "moving around".

The upshot is that I wasn't doing anything, I wasn't healing her in any way, but the thumb needed healing, was asking for it, I was an open conduit, and voila, the energy flowed -- without any conscious decision or even awareness on my part. The lesson here is that the "healer" is in fact not doing any "healing". You, as "the healer," are "hanging out" to a far greater degree than you think is possible while the "healee's" body or energy field converses with the Universe. BTW this reminds me of the experiment Bill Bengston describes in which he "hung out" with his head in an fMRI while envelopes containing hairs from sick animals were dropped into his hand. When the envelopes contained hairs, his brain reacted. When empty control envelopes were placed in his hand, his brain went lah-di-dah. He had no conscious idea which envelopes contained hairs and which did not.

So the point is, don't worry, be happy, and let the healing begin, whether or not you can "hyper-cycle".

And now here is a link to a visual cycling aid by reader Vic Smyth.

An explosion of information about alternative cancer treatments

2011-08-10T16:42:00.004-04:00

Lynn McTaggart, editor of the website "What Doctors Don't Tell You," has put together a teleseminar series entitled Your Blueprint for Beating Cancer. Six speakers are featured, among them Dr. Patrick Kingsley and Dr. Bernie Siegel (author of Love, Medicine, and Miracles). The series will consist of six downloadable interviews, each costing $39. The full program can be had for $177. It offers dietary suggestions, a supplement program, suggestions for lifestyle changes, plus contact information given for healing professionals. In her videotaped introduction Lynn McTaggart calls it "a blueprint for what you should do to improve your chances of survival".

Also received, a link to a new feature-length movie entitled Cancer is Curable Now. This movie features a different set of experts from the ones interviewed by Lynn McTaggart, including Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. The movie can be downloaded here for $19.97, or ordered here as a DVD.

These two programs follow on the heels of the movie about Dr. Burzynski, Cancer is Big Business, freely available for viewing on Youtube.

Using qi gong visualisation for cancer

2011-07-20T09:26:00.007-04:00

Exciting news: a reader named John Hill wrote to me to say that he used qi gong visualisation to treat his 93-year-old mother, who had terminal stage-4 cancer. Six months later she was cancer free. He described what he did as an

entanglement in a synchronistic dance where every day during my Qigong practice, part of the practice would be holding my 93 yr. old cancer-diseased mother in an energy ball, with energy passing from one hand, thru her to the other, circulating around, while cycling the visualizations thru my mind as my mother's cancer cells slowly disappeared. Not a cause and effect relationship - a synchronistic dance, like kids playing in a play-pen........

He also sent me a document describing his visualisations and generously agreed that they could be published in this blog. So without further ado, here they are:

MEDICAL QIGONG/TAICHI PRACTICE FOR UNIFYING WITH
THE COSMOS AND HEALING OF SERIOUS ILLNESS

All is based on “Watching the Breath” – standing feet parallel shoulder width apart, knees flexed, pelvis tucked under, most of the weight on balls of the feet, sinking into the earth, breathing abdominally thru the nose, tongue touching top of the mouth, eyes staring straight ahead in a general gaze, not on anything in particular. Best in a comfortable spot or in nature, gazing into a pleasant view. The breathing builds like a slow river, deep and relaxed, allowing thoughts “to fly” and happen, observing them and your mind/body/spirit (if you believe spirit). The thoughts tend to break-up as you pay attention to the breathing, leaving you in a state of peace, turning-on your immune system. Anywhere from a minute to ½ hr.

This state of peace accompanying “Watching the Breath” is called “The peace that passes all understanding” in Christianity. It resonates as brain Alpha waves, with the peace accompanied by alertness. Also called “the meditative state”, it has been shown by many scientific studies on meditators from TM, Yoga, Qigong/TaiChi, Sufi, etc. to enhance immune response. Most notably among the hundreds of scientific forays into measuring the effect of “meditative intent” on physical matter, the most exhaustive is “Conscious Acts of Creation” by Wm. Tiller, and the most impressive are Dr. Wm. Bengston’s controlled experiments healing mice of cancer at 5 universities, as detailed in “Chasing the Cure”.

Since we are always breathing, we always have the opportunity to “Watch the Breath”, making it possible to use our intent to change our cells. Greatly increasing the potential for cellular change is to combine visualization with our intent, especially if the visualization matches what is actually happening in Nature. For example, The Standard Model of Particle Physics tells us that a hydrogen atom is less than .0001% matter – it’s volume is the Vacuum Space, or Vacuum Energy, with more potential energy than all the matter in the universe. Put simply, all matter arises from the Vacuum Space, and on an atomic level, pops in-and-out of the Vacuum Space – the fuzz on an out of tune TV screen are electrons popping in and out of the Vacuum Space. Tiller theorizes in “Conscious Acts of Creation” that the “Spirit World” and the “Vacuum Space” are the same, meaning that the “Big Bang” issued from the Vacuum/Spirit World.

From Tiller’s model, our consciousness, especially the part associated with Spirit/Vacuum Space, can powerfully influence the atoms popping in and out of the molecules that comprise our cells. When we add the notion of Quantum Physics, that time is only a marker, really non-existant as a physical entity, we then have access to the full health range of our cells, for our whole life range.

So if, for example, I have cancer (which we all do), I should be able to enter the meditative state, and influence how the atoms popping in and out of the vacuum space appear in molecules that support my cancer cells. My intent should be able to change this cancer game plan with little effort!!!

But how???

By utilizing “watching the breath” with intent and visualization.

1) Make a general practice of viewing your breathing as a bellows, inhaling sustenance into your skin pores and lungs, the exhale driving this sustenance in bellows fashion to all your cells while exiting toxins from your pores and lungs.
2) In your extended meditative sessions, picture your consciousness as the center of a sphere and practice Macroscopic/Microscopic visualization:

Macroscopic – Hold the general intent that you are the Center of the Universe, your breathing goes infinitely in/out to the ends of creation, including all centers – the hollow center of a seed, the Big Bang, you as a tiny dot in your mother’s womb, the consciousness center of everyone past/future on the planet, every living thing growing from a dot to full growth, etc. Hold this macroscopic intention in a free-floating relaxed manner. As in all these meditative efforts, our minds will tend to drift from the intent – that’s fine, in fact this drifting adds to the ground covered, as long as you allow yourself to come back to your original intent/visualization. While existing as Center, also include the center of each cell, molecule, and atom of your body. Since 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. Your universe is also your mom and dad making love at your beginning through all things you have and will experience – all these things are visible from the center of your sphere.

Microscopic – Hold the general intent that your body, etc. is expanding to fill the entire universe, your atoms infinitely spread apart, so that the Andromeda Galaxy could be a tiny part of, say, your spleen. You are breathing in the Vacuum/Spirit Space, and your intent upholds all matter popping in and out of the Vacuum Space, the galaxies, all life, etc. You are breathing love thru everything that ever did or will exist, as the atoms pop in/out of the Vacuum supporting these things of past/present/future.

YOU ARE WASHING IT ALL WITH LOVE, even the atoms of everyone you ever knew or will know. This love to your universe, delivered thru your bellows breathing and your intent/visualization can influence the way your atoms pop in-out of the Vacuum Space, especially with time not existing, you both have/don’t have cancer, with the “don’t have” part gaining supremacy in your universe.

Thank you, John, for this beautiful contribution.

More about Bennett Mayrick?

2011-07-20T00:14:00.016-04:00

I just finished reading Leigh Fortson's Embrace, Release, Heal, a compilation of stories from cancer survivors who had been given death sentences by their doctors and managed to heal anyway with the help of alternative and integrative healers.

Chapter Five describes "Jeff", who had an aggressive form of multiple myeloma that after a series of horrific treatments left him in a wheelchair. With the cancer in his spine he was finally offered a last-ditch experimental treatment that would have most likely paralyzed him. When he refused he was told by his doctors to go home and put his affairs in order.

He then went for his last haircut and his hairdresser suggested to him that he consider visiting a spiritualist named Ben, who lived on a mesa. Ben said to Jeff, "You go home and decide if they can tell you that you’re going to die. If you determine that the answer is no, then come back and see me."

Jeff thought about it and decided that "no one else can tell you when you’re going to die."

Ben taught Jeff a meditation and visualization technique to clean up his spine. He told Jeff "You’ve got to be able to go outside your body and then come back into the parts that need work. You can go there, to the part that needs work, and make the changes."

In his visualizations Jeff saw his spine as a hallway. He first saw it as being "full of all kinds of horrible-looking liquid and nasty-looking fish, as if I were underwater." He worked on cleaning up the hallway for about half an hour, three or four times every day. Over time, he saw less and less gunk. Eventually "the liquid was all cleaned up".

The next time Jeff went to see his oncologist, the doctor told him there was something wrong with his labtests. He simply refused to believe that Jeff was free of cancer. A mere six weeks elapsed from the time Jeff was sent home to die to the time his cancer disappeared. Twenty years later he is still alive. He says that Ben taught him that:

‘Every day, every second, your body is recreating itself on a cellular level. That cell, at some point, determines whether it’s going to be a good cell or a bad cell. You just need to coach that cell into being a good cell.’

I have reason to believe that the Ben who treated Jeff in the early 1990s was the same Ben Bill Bengston met in the early 1970s. The chronology fits. Both Bens could cure cancer, both Bens lived in the desert, both Bens seemed to be the same age, and both Bens passed away about 8 years ago. I was very moved to find this story. The most exciting part for me was that here was a first-hand account, from a patient's perspective, that showed the evolution of Ben's healing abilities from twenty years before. In the 1970s when he was teaching Bill Bengston he was not yet able to heal cancer patients who had been subjected to radiation and chemo. By the 1990s he seemed to have transcended that barrier. His technique seems to have also evolved so he was able able to teach the patient to heal himself. Embrace, Release, Heal is full of such positive stories, and well worth reading.

Postscript Sept. 18th: And now here is a related story from a talk Dr. Depak Chopra gave 20 years ago, in May 1991:

Recently I had a patient with a very dramatic outcome... [H]e was one day repairing an antenna on the roof and he picked up a wire, but it happened to be live and had 12,000 volts in it. He was immediately electrocuted. The mechanism of death for this is ventricular fibrillation which is an electrical event in the heart.

He fell from the roof 15 feet to the ground and as luck would have it he fell with the right impact at the right place with the right location of his chest with the right amount of angularity to restart another current and defibrillate. So it's as if God called him and then changed His mind.

And you ask him, "Bob, what happened?" He says, "I went into the gap." I say, "What was there in the gap?" He says, "It was sheer unbounded joy. It was absolute, total bliss." You ask him, "Were there any thoughts there?" "No. I didn't have a mind." "Did you have a body?" "No. I didn't have a body." "So what was there?" He said, "l was just aware. " You ask him, "What were you aware of?" "I was aware that I was aware. But it was pure wakefulness. I was grounded totally and completely in the experience of my own immortality."

So much so, that he now doesn't know what the meaning of fear is. In fact, not only was he lucky to have this experience, but like a true scientist, he started experimenting in this field of pure awareness. He would go into the gap. Now he knew how to slip into it, and from there he would put his attention on his leg which had completely burned. There was no muscle - nothing. His femur was exposed to the atmosphere. Over the course of 2 years, by diving into the gap, projecting his awareness from there, he has actually regrown a new lower extremity. Because he found that place from where everything was created. It's his own Self. It's his own Self.

It seems that what Ben taught Jeff was how to go into "the gap" and heal himself from there ...

A "must-read" for every cancer patient and care-giver (Anita Moorjani NDE)

2011-06-07T15:34:00.022-04:00

Anita Moorjani had lymphoma. After years of battling the disease, she came to the end of the road. She was rushed to hospital, unable to move, and her husband was told that she was dying. And yet she lived through the experience.

This is how the story begins:

I had cancer (Hodgkin’s Lymphoma), and on this morning, I could not move. My husband rushed me to hospital, where, after doing scans, they diagnosed me with grade 4B lymphoma (the highest grade). The senior oncologist looked at my report and told my husband that it was too late, and that my organs were now shutting down. I only had 36 hours to live....

Anita returned from the brink of dying, and brought back knowledge on how to heal and how to stay healthy. After her near death experience her organs returned to normal functioning and her cancer disappeared. The message she imparts is that her healing experience need not be unique.

Here is her tale, in print. And here is an interview. I thank Upswing for the links.

Highlights: Anita describes herself as having been very fearful of cancer, and feeling that this fear contributed to the development of her disease. She describes cancer as an emotional illness. Two important lessons she learned in her NDE were to live fearlessly and to love herself. She realized that we are all far greater in consciousness than our limited minds, bodies and egos allow us to perceive. When we die we lose these restrictions and experience a realization of our true purpose.

I was shown how illnesses start on an energetic level before they become physical. If I chose to go into life, the cancer would be gone from my energy, and my physical body would catch up very quickly. I then understood that when people have medical treatments for illnesses, it rids the illness only from their body but not from their energy so the illness returns. I realized if I went back, it would be with a very healthy energy. Then the physical body would catch up to the energetic conditions very quickly and permanently. I was given the understanding that this applies to anything, not only illnesses — physical conditions, psychological conditions, etc. I was “shown” that everything going on in our lives was dependant on this energy around us, created by us. Nothing was solid — we created our surroundings, our conditions, etc. depending where this “energy” was at. The clarity I received around how we get what we do was phenomenal! It’s all about where we are energetically. I was made to feel that I was going to see “proof” of this first hand if I returned back to my body.

Much of what Anita Moorjani says about consciousness echoes what I learned from my meditation teacher. The only difference is that Anita Moorjani speaks about an individual consciousness that is part of the whole but somehow still conscious of its uniqueness, whereas according to the Tibetan meditation tradition individual consciousness merges into the whole after death the way a drop of water merges into the ocean. It may be that people who experience NDEs return before the final merging. At any rate, I found Anita's description of her experience deeply moving. Here is another excerpt from the interview:

NDERF: Can you elaborate a little more on how you now live your life, while being able to see “beyond the illusion?”

AM: One of the problems I have is that language is just so limited and inadequate in trying to explain what I am saying. It’s so easy to misunderstand and misinterpret the true feelings being conveyed.

First of all, to me, suffering is an illusion. And I wish there was a better word to use, because when I had cancer, and people would tell me it’s only an illusion, I would get even more frustrated. The feeling that comes is: “if it’s only an illusion, then why does it feel so real to ME???” and “So, how do I break thru the illusion??” So sometimes I hesitate to use the word illusion when others are suffering. It can cause more frustration. But right now, it is the only word I can think of to explain what it is I am trying to say.

When I was sick, I had thought that maybe the “illusion” is ... something that can only be viewed from the other realm, and while in this realm, we are “bound” to the illusion. I thought that as long as we are in this realm, it always remains “reality” to us. I never would have believed it possible to be able to see thru the “illusion” and still be able to come back and express life in the physical. But in order to do that, and come back and live life in the physical again, I had to be prepared to view life completely differently from others. Perhaps for some people, the thought of doing that is harder. It’s easier not to come back, than to live in a world of people who don’t view life this way...

The way I view life now, nothing exists in this world until we bring it into our consciousness/awareness. Nothing exists until we express it, either as an individual or as a collective. The more awareness we draw to something, the more real it becomes in the physical. As a collective, we are probably inadvertently creating our physical reality by default, unknowingly. But as individuals, we always have the choice to create differently than what is being created “out there”...

If I still saw the world through 3D eyes, putting physical before consciousness, then I would have to take the doctors’ words at face value when they said that it is medically not possible for billions of cancer cells to pass through the host body in such a short time without killing it. And it is also medically not possible for billions of cancer cells to just “disappear” just like that, without passing through the host body. And if I had to wait for the scientists to have proof FIRST, before I discovered that my consciousness overrides ANYTHING physical, then I would still have cancer!

Update August 30: Anita Moorjani has now written a book entitled Dying to Be Me.

Postscript Sept. 18th: And now here is a related story from a talk Dr. Depak Chopra gave 20 years ago, in May 1991:

Recently I had a patient with a very dramatic outcome... [H]e was one day repairing an antenna on the roof and he picked up a wire, but it happened to be live and had 12,000 volts in it. He was immediately electrocuted. The mechanism of death for this is ventricular fibrillation which is an electrical event in the heart.

He fell from the roof 15 feet to the ground and as luck would have it he fell with the right impact at the right place with the right location of his chest with the right amount of angularity to restart another current and defibrillate. So it's as if God called him and then changed His mind.

And you ask him, "Bob, what happened?" He says, "I went into the gap." I say, "What was there in the gap?" He says, "It was sheer unbounded joy. It was absolute, total bliss." You ask him, "Were there any thoughts there?" "No. I didn't have a mind." "Did you have a body?" "No. I didn't have a body." "So what was there?" He said, "l was just aware. " You ask him, "What were you aware of?" "I was aware that I was aware. But it was pure wakefulness. I was grounded totally and completely in the experience of my own immortality."

So much so, that he now doesn't know what the meaning of fear is. In fact, not only was he lucky to have this experience, but like a true scientist, he started experimenting in this field of pure awareness. He would go into the gap. Now he knew how to slip into it, and from there he would put his attention on his leg which had completely burned. There was no muscle - nothing. His femur was exposed to the atmosphere. Over the course of 2 years, by diving into the gap, projecting his awareness from there, he has actually regrown a new lower extremity. Because he found that place from where everything was created. It's his own Self. It's his own Self.

Interview with Dr. Joyce Hawkes, NDE survivor and healer

2011-05-23T16:40:00.002-04:00

Interview with Dr. Joyce Hawkes, a scientist who had a near-death experience after a domestic accident and spontaneously developed the ability to heal. I thank Upswing for the link.

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski's successful cancer cure

2011-05-22T11:20:00.013-04:00

This is not energy healing, but an alternative medical approach to treating cancer that seems to get better results than standard treatment. Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his son and colleague, Dr. Gregory Burzynski, are interviewed by Dr. Mercola:

And now see the the movie on Dr. Burzynski's struggles with the Texas Medical Board, the FDA and the American Cancer Society, who, according to the film maker, tried to shut him down and bankrupt and jail him, while at the same time the U.S. government was trying to patent his discoveries:

And here is a commentary on the movie by Jennifer Hawke, a "mama and an MD".

And now a website with testimonials: www.burzynskipatientgroup.org. On the right hand side you will see a list of names and cancers, and as you click on each name, a testimonial will come up.

Update, Dec. 24: I've received some criticism for this post from people who pointed out to me that what Dr. Burzynski does is not in any way related to energy healing, the topic of this blog. People have also told me that Dr. Burzynski is highly controversial and that the movie is little more than an "infomercial" for his clinic. I have no way of evaluating the correctness of either Dr. Burzynski's position or the criticisms leveled against him. My position on the matter is that people should have a right to choose their own treatment, and that no government or agency should step in to deprive them of this right by making sure that only orthodox treatments (which have proven to be dismal failures) area available to them.

Embrace, Release, Heal: an inspiring look at healing from cancer

2011-05-15T08:49:00.007-04:00

Embrace, Release, Heal by Leigh Fortson is now available for purchase from Sounds True. This book is a must-read for anyone and everyone who has had reason to visit my blog, everyone who suffers from cancer, has a loved one with cancer, or just fears it based on the statistics that are regularly produced to scare us. IMHO it should be sold as a companion volume to The Emperor of All Maladies, which has much information to offer but little hope. Dr. Mukherjee should be gifted with a copy of this book.

Here is a link to the foreword and the introduction, and here is an excerpt in Leigh Fortson's own words:

I include here both my own [story] and the stories of other people who’ve had cancer. Most were told they would die. They didn’t. After exhausting what conventional medicine had to offer, they walked away from the grisly prognosis and found another way. Some call it a miracle. I’ve come to believe it’s just the way things work when we get out of our own way. These stories will help inspire you to see the infinite possibilities that may be available to you, but that your doctor will likely dismiss. They reflect the truth that cancer can be effectively treated physically, emotionally, and spiritually through a different, more life-affirming paradigm than conventional medicine traditionally offers. These stories demonstrate why the conversation around cancer must be changed. If nothing else, I urge you to read all of them. Simply put, they are good medicine.

Many readers of this book share my view of how valuable it is. Here is a link to some reader reviews on Amazon.

And here is Tami Simon interviewing Leigh Fortson about the book on Sounds True.

What I've learned from 12 years of energy healing

2011-03-28T10:27:00.035-04:00

Some thoughts on healing offered for your perusal. Please feel free to argue with me and to present your own thoughts and experiences in the comments section.

Just because you will it, it won't necessarily happen

Helping someone heal is not about willpower. It's about an elusive quantity known as "intent". You somehow get the ball rolling and then both you and your client simply watch the healing "happen". This is the hardest thing for fledgling energy healers to learn. Every healing method emphasizes the necessity for "getting out of the way" and offers techniques to accomplish this, but few students get what it really means. The best analogy comes from Matrix Energetics: it's like dropping a pebble in a pond. The pebble is your intent. You won't get any ripples (effects) until you let go.

If you are unsuccessful at healing, you need to see how you get in the way and also take a look at how your client gets in the way. For instance, if you see your client frowning with concentration trying to direct the energy to a specific location in his body, he is not in the right mindspace for healing. You too get in the way by "trying", i.e, by making an effort. What Yoda said about "the Force" also applies to energy healing: "do or do not; there is no try".

Cancer patients find it very difficult to want things for themselves -- and this may be a significant factor in their disease

For a while we required cancer patients to participate in their healing by doing a process called "cycling". By "cycling" here I mean "image cycling", which requires a list of at least 20 things that a person wants that do not involve others, creating images of them, and then flashing the images rapidly in front of their mind's eye.

We discovered that most cancer patients have extraordinary difficulty creating such a list. Many cancer patients tend to put the needs of others before their own, especially those of their loved ones, and so have a problem with selfishly wanting things for themselves. The possibility has been raised that there is a correlation between this devaluing of one's own needs and developing cancer. I discuss this in greater detail in my post The mind is a powerful thing -- part 2.

I have often been surprised (and frustrated) to see my clients using the increased energy they feel after our sessions not for their own healing, but for doing things for their families. My exhortation that at least for the duration of their illness they need to become selfish and look after their own needs first invariably falls on deaf ears. E.g., a client who above all needs to rest will drive his child to a birthday party hundreds of kilometres away in order not to disappoint her. Another client with stage-4 pancreatic cancer with metastases to the liver paints his house and reorganizes the garage so his family will not have to worry about these details after he is gone.

As a corollary to this there seems to be a need to go on with an appearance of normalcy for the sake of loved ones as long as possible, i.e., to just carry on as normal until carrying on is no longer an option. But since "carrying on as normal" was what contributed to the cancer in the first place, what may be required is change. (Dr. Cunningham of the Healing Journey program found a link between patients making definite psychological shifts towards greater self-definition and self-reliance and long-term cancer survival.)

We have seen some patients who lived in the shadow of much stronger partners, or recently lost such a partner to an illness, and did not know how to cope. Others had come to a point in their lives where they felt completely derailed and had no clue how to get back on track, or the energy to make the effort. All these people had extraordinary difficulty simply wanting things for themselves -- even knowing what to want. One practitioner told me that she can pretty well gauge a client's prognosis by his or her ability to learn to want.

Cancer patients have been operating for a long time on low energy reserves

Many cancer patients hardly seem to breathe, and are used to operating on a very low energy setting. Many of them have been burning the candle not only at both ends but also in the middle, and expending far more life energy than they've been taking in, for a very long time. When they find their energy levels raised through breathing practices or energy treatments, many of them feel uncomfortable with this unfamiliar sensation and immediately rush off to dissipate what they perceive as excess energy. The refrain will be "I felt so good that I had to do a 40 km bike ride" or "after our session I went to the gym and ran on the treadmill and did weights for an hour." Then of course once the energy runs out, as it invariably does, they crash. I don't quite know how to handle this, because exhortations "not to overdo things" have been about as effective as asking the client to become a bit more selfish in the interest of his or her own healing.

Animals and people heal differently

Animals heal faster than people. Whether it is an issue of metabolism, body size, or lack of a belief system that would interfere with the effectiveness of the healing, animals are a lot more able to respond to energy healing than people. My best patient to date has been a mutt named Bo, whom I treated ostensibly on his deathbed on two separate occasions 6 months apart. The first time his owners told me they thought he had cancer, the second time that he ate something poisonous. Both times he recovered, and he is still around, a normal, healthy dog. I wish for all our sakes that human clients were as responsive.

Animals healing differently from people in fact may not only be true for energy healing, but for healing in general, and it plays havoc with research. A 2004 article in Fortune magazine pointed to this effect as the reason so much promising cancer research turned out to be disappointing when transposed from mice to humans. Substances that healed transplanted human cancer in mice did not necessarily affect cancer in humans. We are similar to our animal cousins in many ways, but we are also much more complex. I suspect that this added complexity has to do with the complicated psyches produced by our complicated brains.

Sometimes miracles do happen

Every energy healing modality has stories of miraculous healings, which people tend to dismiss as being only anecdotal. In our group we've seen our share of miracles, the mutt named Bo only one among them. There was also the girl whose lung abscess and scoliosis cleared up within three weeks of our group beginning to treat her, a stage-4 pancreatic patient whose jaundice reversed, and a woman whose severely prolapsed uterus simply went back to normal.

The question from my perspective is what preconditions produce miracles and how we can re-create them on a regular basis. Though I suspect that once you make the miracle a daily occurrence it ceases being a miracle and becomes the science of the day.

But the technique that produces miracles for the teacher may not work as effectively for the student

I discussed this in earlier posts as the dilution effect. Essentially if everyone who has to date taken an energy healing workshop from any of the great lights in the field were now able to duplicate the teacher's ability to heal, we would have little need for doctors and hospitals. Unfortunately most people go to workshops, diligently learn the technique, practice a little, get so-so results, then quit, or go on to the next workshop.

The issue from my perspective is that the techniques being taught in these workshops may in fact have very little to do with the teacher's success in healing. I will take an example from physical medicine to illustrate what I mean.

Earlier this year I noticed, through the agency of the WYDDTY website, the stellar work of Dr. Patrick Kingsley, who is reputed never to have lost a cancer patient. I read the transcripts of an interview with him and discovered that what he did to treat people was no different from the treatments offered at many alternative cancer clinics, of which few will match his stellar track record. So what is different about Dr. Kingsley's treatments? I submit that it may be Dr. Kingsley himself, and what he adds to the healing through his own personality, belief systems, and energetic interactions with patients.

Another doctor in the U.S., the now famous Dr. Issam Nemeh, discovered that his patients fared better than the patients of other anaesthesiologists because he prayed for them. He firmly believes that the agency of his healing ability is prayer. It may be so -- but many others, in fact most others, pray with much lesser effect. So what is the difference? What does Dr. Issam Nemeh do/have that others who also pray don't? And could he teach others to pray as successfully as he does?

After 20-odd workshops I've come to the conclusion that the best way to learn from a teacher is to hang around with him or her for months or years on end, and to absorb not only his or her technique but the mysterious je-ne-sais-quoi that lurks behind it. I suspect that the technique offered is more often than not a sleight of hand that hides the real magic happening behind the scenes while you are busy looking somewhere else.

Is fighting cancer the right strategy?

2011-03-24T16:04:00.016-04:00

My attention has lately been riveted by posters on the subway shouting "Join the fight!" and asking "Who are you fighting for?"

These posters are funded by the Canadian Cancer Society and they invite you to visit a website called "fightback.ca". On the website you are informed that "April is the month to fight back" and that "every three minutes another Canadian is faced with fighting cancer". The Society invites you to buy a daffodil in April to show your support, because the daffodil "is a symbol of strength and courage. A symbol of life. It says we will not give up. It says we will fight back. It says we will beat cancer. Join the fight."

We have been fighting cancer for a long time, with dubious results. Forty years ago President Nixon officially declared war on cancer, making "the conquest of cancer a national crusade." Thirty-seven years later, in 2008, a headline appeared in Newsweek: We fought cancer and cancer won. The thoughtful, well-researched article attached to this headline suggests that "After billions spent on research and decades of hit-or-miss treatments, it's time to rethink the war on cancer."

Indeed it is, not only because the war is being lost on multiple fronts, but also because it is being fought in and over the bodies of millions of cancer sufferers, who often end up as collateral damage. According to Ms. Begley, the author of the Newsweek article, the investment of two-hundred billion dollars in cancer research since 1971 has produced an estimated 1.5 million scientific papers, but no reduction in overall cancer deaths.

Most of the scientific studies funded by the campaign to beat cancer have had little or no impact on the lives of cancer patients in the real world. "Indeed, it is possible (and common)," Ms. Begley writes, "for cancer researchers to achieve extraordinary acclaim and success, measured by grants, awards, professorships and papers in leading journals, without ever helping a single patient gain a single extra day of life." Many exciting scientific findings turn out to be "interesting but irrelevant to patients," so perhaps throwing more money at more scientific research on the minutiae of cancer is not the right and only answer.

Cancer is a disease with many facets, and it morphs to find its way around the "weapons" thrown at it by science. "Just as cancer cells develop resistance to standard chemo drugs, so they are finding ways to elude the new targeted drugs such as Avastin, Gleevec and Herceptin," writes Ms. Begley. If one route to their proliferation is blocked, they will find another. According to oncologist George Demetri, "By the time there are 10 cancer cells, you probably have eight different cancers. And there are different pathways in each of the cells." That's how complex cancer is.

I would like to propose that what we want to do is not wage war on cancer, but find ways of "waging peace" with it. By that I mean we should not try to eradicate these rogue cells by every deadly means at our disposal -- often causing irreversible damage to the patient receiving the so-called treatment -- but instead aim to bring them back into alignment with the body. When we are waging war on them, they clearly outsmart us, and have been outsmarting us for decades. But what would happen if we spent our research dollars on "waging peace" instead? "Waging peace" is what energy healing therapies do.

Update Jan. 16, 2012: Also read my posts "Anatomy of a miracle", "Why is meditation a good prescription for cancer patients?", "Open letter to oncologists", "Using qi gong visualisations for cancer patients", and "Radical love and cancer".

The New "New Kid on the Block"

2011-03-20T14:13:00.009-04:00

A while ago I referred to the Domancic Method as "the new kid on the block". After three years on the North American continent it has gained traction, with regular clinics through the Bioenergy Life Project, the brainchild of Zoran Hochstatter, who brought the method to America and the U.K. The method is easy to learn and straightforward, and practitioners report good results with many conditions, including frozen shoulder, thyroid irregularities, and even some cancers. It has no religious connotations of any sort and it successfully removes the mystique from energy healing.

The new "new kid on the block", somewhat awkwardly named the "Russian Organ Regeneration Method" (a.k.a. the "New Knowledge"), does the exact opposite. It hails, as you would guess from the name, from Russia, and its originators call themselves "spiritual scientists". The method has a non-denominational religious, or if you like, spiritual bend, in that it seems to work through a series of meditations that sound very much like prayer.

ROR is grounded in the recognition that we are all one with "All That There Is" and therefore co-creators of our reality. There are a series of videos on the method on Youtube in which people give testimonials of having regrown lost teeth and also internal organs that had been surgically removed. It may sound "far out", but having now attended a workshop on it with a friend, I wonder (along with my friend) whether what the Russians do is similar to what Dr. Issam Nemeh does quite successfully in his healing services in the U.S.: a sort of targeted prayer.

The Russian method was translated into German and then taught in English-language workshops in Mount Shasta and Thailand. The Thailand group also included some Australians. I thought this was highly symbolic of our new united world: a Russian method being taught by Germans to Australians and Americans in the far east. You can't get much more international than that. BTW the method is not only being translated, but also transposed, and going forward it may also be renamed. It will be interesting to track its evolution. My reading of the method is that its core concepts are quite powerful and that it will go a long way if those core concepts can be retained in translation.If you want to know more, take a look at the Organ Regeneration discussion group on Facebook.

Greg Braden video on Curing Cancer Using the Technology of Emotion

2011-02-27T12:19:00.005-05:00

This video is from Youtube. It features a talk by Greg Braden on another video in which qigong doctors in China make a uterine cancer disappear in three minutes. I like his comment that when we don't know how something is done, it's a miracle, but when we know, it becomes a technology.

This may be another answer to the question posed by Dr. Oz to Dr. Nemeh.

Bill Bengston interview with Michall Jeffers

2011-02-25T14:52:00.002-05:00

Revolutionary new study on breast cancer surgery

2011-02-10T15:40:00.003-05:00

A new study has found found that for certain women with breast cancer, removal of cancerous lymph nodes is quite unnecessary, and may even be harmful.

One by one the old surgical shibboleths about breast cancer are falling by the wayside, first radical mastectomies, and now this. A doctor is even quoted as saying “I have a feeling we’ve been doing a lot of harm” by routinely removing lymph nodes that did not need to be removed and causing unnecessary suffering for thousands of women who developed complications such as infections and lymphedema.

The study has found that for women with early stage breast cancers "about 20 percent of patients, or 40,000 women a year in the United States — taking out cancerous nodes has no advantage. It does not change the treatment plan, improve survival or make the cancer less likely to recur."

Paradigm changing book on cancer coming from Sounds True

2011-02-05T09:00:00.003-05:00

It's called Embrace, Release, Heal. Its author, Leigh Fortson, was initially diagnosed with cancer in 2006 and endured the usual round of brutal treatments, only to find out that her cancer had metastasized in 2008. She was at the point where she couldn't have any more radiation or surgery, and chemotherapy wasn't deemed appropriate. She was expected to die. And then she embraced a new regime, and lived, cancer free (read more and watch a short video).

She also found thirteen other cancer survivors whose stories were similar to hers, and wrote this book. Here is her mission statement from her website:

The time has come to recognize cancer as a message to recommit to a vibrant life rather than automatically subject ourselves to a slow and meaningless demise.

The book will be published by Sounds True in May. In the meantime you can peruse the table of contents, read some excerpts and follow the author's blog.

Why is this book paradigm-changing? Because it shows that healing is possible, and gives a full complement of possibilities discussed by experts in the field of alternative healing. Because it's changing the "morphic field" of cancer, and shining a bright light of hope into the darkness and fear that surround this dreaded disease today. I believe that looking ahead we will see more and more spontaneous remissions from cancer that no one will be able to explain -- simply because we will know that it's possible.

An answer to the question Dr. Oz posed to Dr. Nemeh on his show

2011-02-01T16:24:00.005-05:00

Dr. Oz said in his interview with Dr. Nemeh that many of his patients told him they prayed for healing, and he wanted to know why their prayers were not always answered. He asked Dr. Nemeh in what way his prayers were different that made them more effective. And Dr. Nemeh replied that everyone's prayers were the same; everyone had the same access [to God] as he did. The only thing that mattered was their "state of mind".

Here is an elaboration. A lot of people pray from their head space rather than their heart space. They pray with thought rather than feeling. And at the same time that they send up the prayer they also send up doubt. What goes out is a double message: "I ask for this, but I don't really believe I'm going to get it." "I don't really believe that prayers work." Their thoughts create an interference pattern.

Modalities such as Matrix Energetics have demonstrated that there is such a thing as instantaneous healing, but it happens from the heart space. The Matrix mantra is "drop down (into the heart space), create intent, and let go (or 'let God')". As I watched the video of Dr. Nemeh "dropping" people in his prayer service, it reminded me of what I see in Matrix workshops, except in Matrix there is a lot of silliness and laughter, whereas Dr. Nemeh's healings happen in a church in the midst of great solemnity.

But regardless of where the healings take place, the mechanism seems quite similar. Dr. Nemeh drops down into his heart space, into his faith, and becomes one with God and with the person standing in front of him, and out of this joining of the three, healing happens. No matter how you look at it it's beautiful, it's possible, and it's entirely real. Dr. Nemeh seems very skillful at holding this healing space through prayer, and what he does could become quite reproducible if he could teach others to do the same.

Here are the links to Dr. Oz's interview with Dr. Nemeh: Part One; Part Two; Part Three. Dr. Oz asks the question in Part Three.

A first-hand account of Bennett Mayrick

2011-01-29T16:32:00.003-05:00

I very recently heard from a reader named Barbara who said that she had known Bennett Mayrick in the 1970s as his patient and student, and wrote that she was glad that he was finally getting some recognition for his work. I asked her if she could tell me more, and this is what she wrote:

I remember that when he placed his hand on my left side, which was where I had pain, it felt warm and he would hold it there for several minutes for sure. He also placed his thoughts and hands on my son who has autism. The goal was to increase verbal communication and this did occur, but one is never sure of what intervention was ultimately responsible for the success.

I know that we stayed very goal oriented with singleminded purpose for these healings and he did them in his apartment over a period of a session a week over several months. It seemed clear to me that you did not have to believe in it for it to work.

Regarding the classes, he wanted people to become aware of the potential of this kind of healing. Therefore he wanted us to begin to see that there was a force of a sort that was not what we were used to. So, we began by holding various items and trying to tell something about the owner of each. Of course only one person in the group knew the facts of each item and usually it turned out to come pretty close to the truth. We sent healings to a few people who we knew needed it even though they were not present. We sat in a circle and it was all very cordial.

Ben said that this just came to him. One day he saw an image of himself with some kind of medical equipment on his head and he knew he was to heal. His hands got hot and maybe, or maybe not, reddish. We did these healings to each other for minor things like toothaches etc.

I do know that at the time I knew him at least one person came to see him with a serious cancer. I have no idea how it worked out.

Ben was not a wealthy man and had been working installing carpeting or floors. He lived in a middle income apt. and had a very nice wife and two children.

He wanted to be tested at Duke University or someplace that was researching the paranormal as it was called in those days.

He showed some intuitive abilities I think and was eager to share.

Bill Bengston's book, The Energy Cure, has an amusing account of what happened when Bennett Mayrick was finally tested by researchers of the paranormal: a lot of their equipment appeared to malfunction in very odd ways and they were quite distressed and apologetic that he could not be tested properly.

For an article on Bennett Mayrick, see my earlier entry, Bill's teacher speaks.

Sat Dharam Kaur interview with Shinzen Young on Meditation for Newly Diagnosed Cancer Patients

2011-01-29T15:22:00.007-05:00

Sat Dharam Kaur, N.D., discusses the benefits of meditation techniques for those newly diagnosed with breast cancer in three short videos.

There is useful information here presented in a very low key, conversational fashion: the videos needs to be watched several times to get everything fully. Shinzen Young points out that the information is not just pertinent for newly diagnosed breast cancer patients, but all cancer patients, and in fact anyone facing any kind of health challenge that produces anxiety.

What is needed, from someone who has been there

2011-01-22T22:45:00.003-05:00

I just ran across a blog entry entitled "Energy healing, the connection" written by someone who experienced a cure from an incurable cancer. This is the place of the heart, the deep lasting healing, that we are all looking for. Read it, feel it. I've seen it expressed in many ways, but never like this. This is someone who truly knows.

Dr. Issam Nemeh in context?

2011-01-15T14:07:00.005-05:00

Observe Dr. Issam Nemeh doing a healing over Skype, and listen to the sound that accompanies the healing. Listen to Dr. Nemeh say "everything is vibration". Is this in fact the new "energy healing" placed in a Catholic context, with God as "the Field" and "the Source" and the Holy Spirit as life energy?

Read more here.

Dr. Oz and the new bioenergy therapies

2011-01-14T22:32:00.035-05:00

On January 6, 2010, Dr. Oz endorsed Reiki on his show as something all Americans should try in the coming year as part of their health care regimen. And now he is endorsing Dr. Issam Nemeh, a former anasthesiologist turned acupuncturist who helps people heal by praying over them.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the show on Reiki caused a fellow doctor to write that Dr. Oz has "gone over to the dark side", abandoning sound medical principles in favour of promoting woo-woo. But has he really?

Reiki and its cousin Therapeutic Touch have been gaining increasing acceptance in hospitals as "adjunctive therapies", or as therapies that can help patients navigate their hospital experience with greater ease and comfort. Reiki and TT have been shown to reduce pain and anxiety and to speed recovery from surgery and other hospital procedures. In current practice Reiki and Therapeutic Touch complement orthodox medicine as nurses complement doctors.

Healers such as Dr. Issam Nemeh who pray over patients also complement medical practice by adding a spiritual element and offering comfort. And if it so happens that in a number of these cases a miracle, or a spontaneous remission, occurs, in what way can that be construed as harmful, either to the patient or to the medical profession? You could say that Dr. Nemeh complements the work of other physicians as a chaplain would, although he seems to be rather more successful at healing than your average chaplain.

In a radio interview on WDOK radio Dr. Oz spoke of being impressed with Dr. Nemeh's sincerity, and of considering that sincerity as being more important than results. Dr. Oz is eminently practical: from this practical perspective if something can help a patient along a healing journey, as for instance Reiki in the operating room, then that something should be made available and not be discounted because it's not part of the orthodox or accepted medical route. At the same time, his position is that he would not send a patient with lung cancer to Dr. Nemeh to be cured solely by prayer. Prayer, like Reiki, is adjunctive.

But now there are energy therapies coming up on the horizon that go beyond being merely adjunctive to orthodox medicine and its standardized toolkit of drugs, surgery and radiation.

Dr. Larry Dossey, author of numerous books on alternative medicine, speaks of there being three "Eras" in medicine. Era I is "mechanical medicine", or the traditional medical practices that treat the body as a biochemical machine. Era II is "mind-body medicine" that recognizes the importance of psychology and practices such as meditation in creating well-being. Era III medicine is "non-local" or "consciousness based", which would be where Reiki and Dr. Nemeh fit in.

In describing Era III medicine Dr. Dossey proposes that

consciousness is not confined to one's individual body. Nonlocal mind -- mind that is boundless and unlimited -- is the hallmark of Era III. An individual's mind may affect not just his or her body, but the body of another person at a distance, even when that distant individual is unaware of the effort. You can think of Era II as illustrating the personal effects of consciousness and Era III as illustrating the transpersonal effects of the mind.

In Era III medicine the mind or consciousness of one person can heal the body of another.

In Dr. Dossey's view these three "medicines" will coexist peacefully for the benefit of patients and humankind. But it is my opinion that in this future of peaceful coexistence doctors may have stop relegating energy medicine into an adjunctive role to drugs and surgery. The new energy therapies are on their way to being powerful enough entirely on their own. Dr. Bengston, for instance, insists on patients being under a doctor's care while receiving energy treatment, but sees his therapy as a stand-alone proposition and speaks of chemotherapy and radiation as being hindrances to its effectiveness. The Domancic Method also works with physicians, and views them as being essential for the diagnosis and monitoring of patients, but sees their chief role as providing diagnosis, not treatment. In Era III medicine doctor and energy healer work as equal partners.

I wonder how the doctors critical of Dr. Oz's endorsement of Reiki would feel about that proposition. Here is my message to some of them: An Open Letter to Oncologists.

Postscript: Here is a video on the Domancic Method:

Study shows homeopathy may be effective against breast cancer

2011-01-10T22:45:00.006-05:00

Huge news. Four homeopathic remedies were tested in vitro on human breast cancer cell lines. The remedies caused delayed growth and cell death ("apoptosis") in the cancer cells. According to the authors the study demonstrates "biological activity of these natural products when presented at ultra-diluted doses", i.e., that the homeopathic principle works.

Click here for the full abstract.

Because of the rate of dilution in homeopathic remedies, which sometimes means that not a single molecule of the active ingredient remains in the solution, homeopathy can almost be considered an energy therapy: what ostensibly makes it work is the energy signature of the active ingredient which is retained in the medium in which it was "succussed" (= energetically shaken, the means of potentiating homeopathic remedies).

Critics may scoff, but there is now other evidence of strange effects at play in our brave new world. For instance, a recent study has shown that placebos work even when people know they are taking a placebo. And Dr. Bernie Siegel tells a strange tale of a radiologist colleague who found that the radioactive isotope had been removed from his radiation machine during repairs and not replaced: for a full month this man radiated cancer patients with a machine that in effect had no "active ingredient". And yet his patients' tumours shrank and they had the same side effects as if they had received real radiation. What was at work here? The placebo effect, i.e., that his patients believed they were being radiated? Or the "homeopathy effect," i.e., that the machine retained the memory of its purpose?

Cue the Twilight Zone music.

Dr. Oz to feature "faith healer" on his show on January 11th

2011-01-08T13:51:00.027-05:00

January 11th update: This episode has been pre-empted because Dr. Oz will have a special show on tonight with guests discussing the injuries sustained by Congresswoman Gifford and her condition. The show featuring Dr. Nemeh will air at a later date. Scroll down for a link to a radio interview featuring Dr. Oz speaking about Dr. Nemeh.

January 12th update: According to the latest information I received, the episode has been rescheduled for Feb. 1. In the meantime, I invite readers to give me their opinion on whether faith healing and energy healing are the same, similar, or different.

Read more.
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This is my original January 8th post:

According to buzz on the web, Dr. Oz will have a "faith healer" on his show on January 11th. The title of the show will be Is This Man a Faith Healer or Not? According to another site, called Path of Faith, the healer in question is Dr. Issam Nemeh, "a Cleveland-based physician and devout Catholic who has prayed over tens of thousands of people from all faiths and all walks of life in the past two decades."

Dr. Oz is here joining something of a trend, as both CNN and Oprah have recently featured shows on John of God, a faith healer from Brazil. Oprah has certainly come in for her share of criticism for doing this, and I look forward to seeing how Dr. Oz handles the issue on live television.

Here is is a radio preview.

From the critics' perspective the problem in featuring selected "faith healers" would be the implied endorsement of all faith healers, not to mention of the concept of faith healing in general, horrifying Western scientific rationalist thinkers who would prefer not to have such a thing exist.

And from the practical point of view while John of God and Dr. Issam Nemeh may be able to perform miracles, your self-proclaimed faith healer down the block might not be. But generally speaking faith healers attract their clientele through word-of-mouth endorsements, so by the time they have been in business long enough to be well known, one has to assume a certain amount of proficiency.

The issue from my perspective is what faith healing is, and through what mechanism it works. Is it simply "anomalous" healing, done through belief in an outside agency? Is this belief even necessary, or does it simply create trust in the healing, and along with it the brainwave patterns that are known to produce such healing? It is known that healers can induce these brainwave patterns in those they treat through a process called entrainment. What is less clear is who or what the entities are that some psychic healers, such as John of God and the late Lew Smith, claim to work with. Are they indeed real entities, or are they projections of the healer's own abilities?

Dr. Bill Bengston, who calls himself a "faithless healer" and claims that belief is not necessary for healing, provides a bridge between the skeptics who say this kind of healing cannot exist and the believers who say it most certainly does. I wonder what the critics would say to Dr. Bengston's experiments, in which dozens of mice were cured of deadly cancers through energy healing. The idea that this kind of healing is possible even without faith, and that there is scientific proof to show it, ought to reassure them. But maybe it will only make them more nervous.

"Rethinking Cancer" Movie Trailer

2011-01-07T21:33:00.006-05:00

This movie and the organization that created it, Foundation for Advancement in Cancer Therapy (F.A.C.T.), "an international nonprofit organization providing information and referrals to [cancer] patients ... seeking a different direction from standard toxic protocols, such as chemotherapy and radiation," just came to my attention through Dr. Bernie Siegel's ECaP ("Exceptional Cancer Patient") discussion forum:

In my view the best holistic approaches to cancer would need to include nutrition, energy healing, meditation, as well as psychological support both for the patient and his or her loved ones. We are all physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual creatures, and our diseases have their root causes in imbalances in all these areas, as well as in imbalances in our physical and social environments. "Rethinking Cancer" tells us about setting right at least some of these imbalances.

Dr. Bernie Siegel interviews on Mind Health Matters

2011-01-06T18:03:00.004-05:00

Dr. Bernie Siegel is a physician and the author of the best-selling Love, Medicine and Miracles. His radio show Mind Health Matters on HealthyLife.net radio network airs at 9 am PT (12 am ET) on the first Tuesday of every month and an archive of his most recent interviews is available online. Each of these is well worth listening to:

Jan. 4/11 - Bill Bengston, author of The Energy Cure

Dec. 7/10 - Laurie Nadel, co-author of Happiness Genes

Sept. 7/10 - Ivan Rados, author of The Role of Consciousness in Healing

Ivan Rados cured himself of kidneys stones using meditation, Laurie Nadel experienced a miraculous healing from ovarian cancer through Reiki and prayer, and Bill Bengston has cured hundreds of mice of fatal cancers in laboratory experiments using energy healing.

Some thoughts on healing for the New Year

2010-12-28T17:18:00.006-05:00

Here is a thought to ponder for the New Year from Michael Talbot's Holographic Universe (p. 30):

Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote ...

This has profound implications for healing. If we can theoretically find the Andromeda galaxy in a thumbnail, or Cleopatra meeting Caesar, we can also find the seed moment when that first cell mutated and became cancerous, and affect it to make it reverse its course.

I invite you to read an article by William Braund, Phd, entitled "Wellness Implications of Retroactive Influence: Exploring an Outrageous Hypothesis". Here is a quote:

Consider another simple system — a small group of cancerous or precancerous cells at a certain location within the body and a natural killer (NK) cell that is roaming near those cells in a random or freely variable course. It is conceivable that there exists a point at which a random "choice" or "decision" occurs, and the NK cells could move, with 50-50 probability, either toward or away from those cancerous cells (seed moments of disease). In principle, PK or intentional influences could bias the probabilities of action of the NK cell sufficiently to promote movement toward and subsequent destruction of the small group of cancerous or precancerous cells, thereby terminating a seed moment that otherwise might have eventuated in illness or even death (several "linkages" down the line — through probability-pyramiding or snowballing effects).

When a patient appears in our office with a particular malady, we tend to think that the curing or beating of this condition involves using our armamentarium of conventional and unconventional treatments and interventions to slowly and progressively correct that malady in the present. We believe we should use our tools to chop away and gradually destroy an undesired condition that is already well established — working on what now exists, a system with great momentum and inertia. In addition to such real-time therapeutic influences, the findings reviewed in this article suggest an alternative healing pathway. Along with such real-time effects that are often taken for granted, it is possible that our healing intentions may be acting "backward in time" to influence the initial seed moments of the development of the malady that confronts us today. Such an alternative healing pathway or process might be a more effective and efficient one — an "easier" one, because it would be influencing a system at a more labile, flexible, sensitive, and susceptible stage in its development and progression. If such a process could act early and thoroughly enough, it might actually prevent the development of harmful physical or psychological processes. This would constitute an instance of true preventive medicine. Time-displaced healing modalities might actually have important advantages over real-time healing modalities.

These things might be impossible in Newton's universe, but not in Neils Bohr's. Happy New Year!

Dr. Oz "gets it" from a colleague for promoting reiki

2010-12-21T18:24:00.012-05:00

Dr. Oz gets it from a colleague in a blog chronicling "the miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine, quackery, science, pseudoscience, history, and pseudohistory (and anything else that interests him)". I am including this for comic relief. The title is "Dr. Mehmet Oz: Gone completely over to the Dark Side". Here is a quote:

Dr. Oz's number one favorite "alternative medicine" treatment is reiki. That's right, reiki, which is at its core nothing more than faith healing without Christianity. It's the laying on of hands, nothing more, the only difference between reiki masters and Hinn or Popoff being that reiki is based on Eastern mysticism rather than Christian beliefs. Indeed, the founder of reiki, Dr. Usui, even "discovered" reiki after fasting and meditating on a mountain for 21 days in a story a lot like that of Jesus going into the wilderness for 40 days to pray and face temptation before coming back to start his ministry. Reiki is every bit as much quackery as the faith healing of Benny Hinn and Peter Popoff.

And Dr. Oz names it as his favorite alt-med modality. He even uses reiki masters in the operating room for his patients. Of course, I can't help but wonder where Dr. Oz gets the time to keep his operative skills up doing an hour long show five days a week or where he finds time even to see patients and operate any more. I also can't help but think he must have the most understanding surgical partners in the world, given that they must have to cover for him almost constantly while he's away doing shows, public appearances, and such.

Whatever the case, this sealed it for me. Dr. Oz is completely over on the Dark Side. I realize that he went over to the Dark Side a long time ago; I simply hadn't noticed that his journey to the Dark Side was complete. I thought there was still hope. Another thing that sealed it for me was a little discovery I made while researching this post. That discovery? Dr. Oz is married to a reiki master.

Sleeping with the enemy indeed.

Meeee-oooowwwww.

I'm finding it highly amusing that while the Vatican disapproves of reiki because it's "superstition" and could expose people to "malevolent" forces (as if being afraid of exposure to malevolent forces were not superstition par excellence), medicine from the other end disapproves of it because it defines it as Christian faith healing (= "quackery") without Christ. Kudos to Dr. Oz for being willing to stick his neck out and basing his opinion on reiki on what he sees with his own two eyes instead of ignorant, baseless prejudice.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Walking Through Walls

2010-12-13T22:23:00.015-05:00

A reader of this blog alerted me to a book entitled Walking Through Walls by Philip Smith, a memoir of the author's childhood growing up with his psychic/healer father, Lew Smith. What caught this reader's attention and prompted her to write to me was the multitude of similarities between Lew Smith, and Bill Bengston's teacher, Bennett Mayrick.

Lew Smith was an interior decorator in Miami who in the 1960s became interested in esoteric subjects such as macrobiotic food, meditation, and yoga. As he delved more and more deeply into this arcane world, he suddenly discovered a talent for healing (among other things). The memoir mostly focuses on young Philip's reaction to the changes in his life caused by his father's newfound obsessions, but it also provides considerable detail about Lew Smith's healing work.

Bennett Mayrick in turn was a man of many trades who lived in New York state, who one day also came to realize he had unusual psychic talents, which included healing. What is fascinating to me is that the two men, living half a continent apart, discovered, within a couple of years of each other, the same psychic abilities. They could both dissolve clouds, diagnose the sick with 100% accuracy, read minds, do token object reading, and heal serious disease. Both men had wives and families, but their inability to reconcile their newfound talents with any kind of "normalcy" broke up both their marriages.

Here is a very brief excerpt from Bill Bengston's The Energy Cure:

Without the slightest embarrassment, he made the most absurd claim I’d ever heard. "I can dissolve clouds. If I stare through them for a few seconds they dissipate. Here, I'll show you." ...

“Pick a cloud,” Ben urged...

I pointed directly overhead. "That one."

As I watched him, his eyes took on that same unfocused look I’d noticed before. After 15 or 20 seconds, he announced with satisfaction, "There it goes."

I looked up. The cloud was gone...

Now here is Philip Smith in Walking Through Walls:

I scanned the horizon and found the biggest, puffiest cumulus hanging low on the horizon. "That one," I said, pointing. "Do something to that one." ...

"The one with the gray spots at the end?"

"Yeah, that one."

"Okay. I'm going to punch a big hole right in the middle of the cloud and make it look just like a donut." ...

Minutes passed .... My father just stood there staring at the cloud. His eyes squinted, his jaw tight... I turned to walk back in the house, but when I took a second glance at the sky, I noticed a small indentation -- a soft, shadowy area -- in the middle of the cloud. It definitely had not been there before. Wispy strands of cloud started to emerge from the center like a trail of smoke. After these first few strands floated away, the center of the cloud began to open wide as if it were yawning. Slowly the entire central core of the cloud disappeared, revealing a round window onto pure blue sky.

Here is Bill Bengston on how Bennett Mayrick perfomed healings:

Ben would place his hands on a client’s shoulders or, occasionally, the solar plexus. After a few minutes, he would search for hot spots. Most often, but not always, they coincided with the area of complaint. Wherever they were, Ben concentrated on them.

Now Philip Smith on Lew Smith:

Generally, Pop would have the patient sit in one of our white wicker chairs. Without saying a word, he would begin running his hands over the top of the person's head and then slowly over the front and back of his or her body as he intuitively searched for hot spots of disease that needed his healing energy. He looked like one of today's airport screeners "wanding" a passenger for metal items. Like a Geiger counter, his hands would suddenly react to a weak spot or a diseased area. It was at this particular spot that he would let his hands pause to pour forth the healing energy.

Bennett Mayrick could provide 100% accurate diagnoses of people's ailments given nothing more than their signature in an envelope, while Lew Smith favoured using a pendulum for the same purpose:

[He] liked to say that he had a complete hospital in the pendulum. With the pendulum, he didn't need a stethoscope, a pathology lab, or an X-ray machine; he could diagnose quicker and more accurately than all the MDs and their fancy machines combined. He would astonish patients and doctors by describing to them in accurate detail the exact nature of their illness.

Neither of these two men knew that the other existed. They both believed that they were unique, and that they had to save the world. They both turned their living rooms into clinics. They both could cure cancer. Both had "guides". In Bill Bengston's book they are referred to only as "the Fellows", but Lew Smith's guides had names, like Arthur Ford and Chander Sen.

Now here comes what for me is the best part. Both Lew Smith and Bennett Mayrick began by doing straight "energy" healing. But Lew Smith over time branched out and the book describes a rich array of methods he developed with the help of his guides. We have no way of knowing whether Bennett Mayrick did the same, because his association with Bill Bengston only covered the early years of his healing work.

These two books, the one by the disciple of one healer and the other by the son of another, are best read side by side for full effect. The Energy Cure brings Walking Through Walls down to earth by taking a skeptical view and moving the healing into the laboratory. But Walking Through Walls complements The Energy Cure by giving the reader a son's detailed, rich, and loving close-up of his psychic/healer father at work.

Click here for an interesting interview with Philip Smith.

In tribute to my father

2010-12-07T00:48:00.006-05:00

In tribute to my father, who recently passed away.

He wouldn't have understood the words, but what the words express applies in every language.

Bill Bengston on "What is Energy Medicine?"

2010-12-03T22:49:00.004-05:00

... and other related topics: KMVR interview with Michael Stone, Nov. 30, 2010. This one is fun, and quite comprehensive. It contains a good description of "image cycling".

The mind is a powerful thing - part 4

2010-12-02T23:58:00.016-05:00

This posting may be the one you have been waiting for through parts 1 to 3, although it could be more appropriately be entitled "The brain is a powerful thing", and it is also quite esoteric. Simply put (or not so simply put), it turns out that the brain engages in some very specific brainwave activity during healing, and that that brainwave activity is somehow connected to "electromagnetic micropulsations" in the earth's atmosphere, the so-called "Schumann resonance", which one could more poetically refer to as the heartbeat of the planet.

James Oschman, author of Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, cites experiments in which a certain Robert C. Beck "used EEG recordings to study brain wave activity in ‘healers’ from all over the world: psychics, shamans, faith healers, a Hawaiian kahuna, practitioners of wicca, etc." and found that "all these healers produced similar brain wave patterns when they were … performing a healing… register[ing] brain wave activity averaging about 7.8-8.0 cycles/second… Beck performed additional studies on some of the subjects and found that during healing moments their brain waves became phase and frequency synchronized with the earth’s geoelectric micropulsations – the Schumann resonance.”

More recent experiments by Bill Bengston and Luke Hendricks showed "high amplitudes at about 8 hertz" in the healer's brain, also echoing the Schumann resonance. Healer and healee then came to share the same brainwave frequency during sustained periods of high amplitudes at this level, meaning that entrainment had been produced. Entrainment occurs when two separate objects share the same rate of activity, as when two hearts beat together, or two pendulums swing in synchrony.

The way it seems to work is that the healer produces this brainwave activity first, and then entrains the healee, and the two of them might rest there together briefly. According to Bill Bengston, healing happens in such bursts.

In his recent book, Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce Lipton tells us that trained healers are not the only ones able to produce entrainment. Experiments have shown that the same kind of entrainment occurs with people who simply love one another. The mechanism is in place for each and every one of us to become a healer; we just have to access the right frequency.

What is the Schumann resonance?
The Schumann resonance is an electromagnetic "standing wave" caused by electrical activity in the atmosphere that "readily penetrates the body" and has "considerable overlap with the biomagnetic fields such as those produced by the heart and brain" (Oschmann). Experiments have shown that subjects experience the best reaction times when the Schumann resonance is at 7-10 hertz, and that physiological disorientation can occur when subjects are magnetically shielded from it. The optimum resonance of ca 7.8 hertz is in the alpha state of brainwave activity associated with "body/mind integration, present during meditation and states of relaxation."

No one entirely knows why this happens, but we do know that non-waking states in which brainwaves are slowed down and become synchronous are necessary for the body to repair itself (as Shakespeare said, sleep does "knit up the ravelled sleeve of care"). Oschman theorizes that when when the mind is calmed, the Schumann resonance "can take over as the pacemaker" and "regulate the overall tone of the nervous system".

Oschmann also mentions that studies have shown pulsations emanating from the hands of healers sweeping through the range of 0.3 to 30 hertz, with most of the activity centering around 7.8 hertz -- again the Schumann resonance. Why that would produce healing is anyone's guess, but being entrained to the "heartbeat" of Gaia might have something do with it.

Finally, to add another piece to the mystery, the EEG study cited in the video excerpt above also showed occasional peaks during which a doubling or a tripling of the Schumann resonance occurred in the healer's brain during healing. This took brainwaves into the high beta range, speeding up rather than slowing down activity.

As best as I can figure, what we call energy healing is based on the reality of us being electromagnetic creatures, while medicine as it is practiced today is mostly based on our chemistry and biology. Energy healing is just a different way of approaching the complex creature that is a human being, but may turn out to be more-user friendly and less complex in the long run than the orthodox biochemical approaches have been.

The mind is a powerful thing - part 3

2010-12-01T13:50:00.003-05:00

And the evidence for the connection of the psychological to the physical and its effect on cancer sufferers just keeps mounting ... The latest is a study that shows that stress undermines the effects of chemotherapy and radiation. Patients are advised to avoid stress for two days prior their cancer treatment:

[C]ancer cell survival can be traced to the presence of heat shock factor-1, which previous research has linked to stress. Ohio State University researchers first noticed that this common protein can help heart tissue survive in a toxic environment, leading the scientists to suspect that in cancer, this phenomenon could have serious consequences.

A series of experiments using breast cancer cells showed that a protein activated by the presence of heat shock factor-1 could block the process that kills cancer cells even after the cells’ DNA was damaged by radiation. The same was true when the cells were subjected to a common chemotherapy drug.

The researchers hope to develop a drug that could suppress heat shock factor-1 as a supplement to cancer therapy, but in the meantime, they recommend that patients avoid both psychological and physical stress in the days leading up to a cancer treatment.

I will have to hazard a guess here, not having had any personal experience in the matter, but I would think that one of the greatest stresses one could possibly have is living with a cancer diagnosis, and that the days leading up to one's treatment, in which one expects to be injected with deadly poisons or bombarded by deadly X-rays, are not likely to be stress-free either. It is very difficult to be equanimous when one is living in fear of losing one's life or in fear of significant and impending discomfort or pain.

And leaving conventional cancer treatments aside, I would also wonder what kind of effect this same stress would have on alternative cancer treatments, whatever they may be, and what kind of effect removing stress from one's life would have on one's survival from cancer, with or without treatment.

"What is Cancer and Why Do You Have It?"

2010-11-30T19:21:00.007-05:00

Now there's an eye-catching title. It's a Lynn McTaggart teleconference with a Dr. Patrick Kingsley, who has cured over 3000 people of cancer. When you click on the "Order Now" button, you get three pricing options, $117 for the 90-minute conference call, the mp3 recording, and the transcript; $107 for the call and the transcript; and $87 for the conference call alone. The friend who forwarded it to me also enclosed a comment asking me whether she was alone in thinking that these prices were a bit high for a 90-minute conference call, particularly one with that title, and on that topic. She felt that giving people vital information about cancer was more in the order of public service than a business proposition. Ms. McTaggart is the highly successful author of The Field and The Intention Experiment and publisher of the internet journal What Doctors Don't Tell You. Click here if you would like to inquire about the pricing of this teleconference. Both mailing address and an e-mail address are provided.

Update Jan. 2011: Here is a short summary on some of what Dr. Kingsley does.

The mind is a powerful thing - part 2

2010-11-29T15:05:00.017-05:00

I ran across an article entitled Cancer in the Mind's Eye written by Margaret Philp in 2006 and published in the Globe and Mail. The article illuminates a number of interesting points on the relationship of stress and cancer, and also on the power of the mind to lengthen survival and produce healing.

On the correlation between stress and the spread of cancer Ms. Philp wrote:

A recent study from the University of Texas that is turning heads injected mice with ovarian-cancer tumour cells. When the animals were tightly confined in plastic chambers for several hours at a time — causing a surge in their stress hormones — the tumours multiplied in size and number and were far more likely to metastasize. But blocking the stress hormones stalled the spread of the cancer...

And just last month, a study published in the medical journal Cancer Research by prominent PNI researcher Ronald Glaser showed that stress hormones increased the growth and spread of an incurable head-and-neck cancer called nasopharyngeal carcinoma. The hormone, norepinephrine, stimulated the tumour cell to produce two chemicals, one that spurs the growth of new blood vessels nourishing the cancer and another that breaks down healthy tissue allowing the tumour to spread more easily.

The article then goes on to describe Alastair Cunningham's Healing Journey, a program that uses meditation, introspection and visualization to help people cope with cancer. After working with thousands of cancer patients, Dr. Cunningham -- an immunologist turned psychologist who is also a cancer survivor -- has come to believe that the techniques taught in the program add not only quality but also quantity of life. And when oncologists reviewed the participants' files, they found that the ones who lived the longest, with a few exceptions, were the ones who practiced the techniques most diligently.

Dr. Cunningham also observed that longterm survivors tended to exhibit definite psychological shifts. He found that

the long[term] survivors all shared a clear sense of what was important in their lives, felt the freedom to shape their lives according to those priorities and were more accepting of themselves, others and their lot in life. For these people, cancer was perceived as a motivation for change rather than a life-destroying illness.

When I speak to energy healers across the board, most feel that cancer can be healed, but that unless the survivor changes his or her life to remove or deal with the stressors that contributed to the initial bout of illness, it will return. I have often thought of this as "blaming the patient", but I now have had cause to wonder if there is not something to this. Something caused the cancer in the first place. If it were all caused by environmental pollutants or mutant genes, we would all likely get it. In fact, we do, but our bodies are most of the time effectively dealing with it -- until one day, for some unknown reason, they don't. The million dollar question is why?

The article also mentions research that has shown the existence of a type-C personality, which predisposes one to cancer just as a type-A personality predisposes one to heart attacks or strokes. Type-C personalities are

too nice — prone to repressing their feelings and stoically appeasing others at the expense of their own needs. They have been described as unassertive, unable to express emotions and feeling hopeless, helpless and unloved. In some cases, they had also suffered the loss of a close relationship within a few years before their diagnosis.

Of course not all type-As get heart attacks, and likely not all type-Cs get cancer. But it does jump out that Type-Cs seem to live to make other people happy and are dependent for their own happiness on the happiness of others. Their reasons to live are other- rather than self-directed. When my own mother, a classic type-C, died of complications of her cancer treatment (which her oncologist had described as "prophylactic"), I strongly wished she had been more selfish about her own needs and her own survival. I would have rather had her around a few more years being "ornery" and difficult than not have her around at all.

Ms. Philp herself died in 2009 when her cancer returned. I found the last few paragraphs of her article quite thought-provoking. She wrote:

Some insist that the alluring promise of a cure with a mind-body approach strikes false hope in cancer patients with advanced disease. Others, Dr. Fortin among them, warn that the prospect can be subtly twisted to make people feel guilty that if their cancer comes back, it will be because they didn't work hard enough at healing.

But all I can do is what I can do. My life is joyfully consumed by the busyness of four children, their homework and school lunches, hockey games, swimming lessons, piano practising and Christmas parties, never mind my job at The Globe and Mail.

I am fastidious about diet and exercise. I faithfully visit a naturopath. But between bedtime stories and dinner dishes, I find little spare time to plunk down on the floor in a lotus position to meditate.

I do feel a little remiss at times for the healing work I'm not doing. And yet I am mindful of my abundant blessings in a way I never was before cancer. Not a day passes that I don't thrill at being alive to be a mother to my children. And maybe this is a healing meditation all its own.

The Emperor of All Maladies

2010-11-25T21:41:00.021-05:00

I was listening to the CBC one morning this week and my attention was caught by an interview with a doctor by the name of Siddharta Mukherjee, who had written a book on cancer entitled The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

As Dr. Mukherjee sounded like a caring and knowledgeable physician whom one facing cancer might very well want to have as an oncologist, and also had interesting things to say, I next looked the book up on Amazon. Its Amazon ranking was #27 (anything under 100 is a best-seller) and it had nine 5-star reader reviews. One reader called it a "tour de force" and compared its author to Melville (of Moby Dick fame) for the scope and artistry of his writing; he also said that had he read this book in his teens, it might have inspired him to become a cancer researcher.

Publisher's Weekly described the book as "a sweeping epic of obsession, brilliant researchers, dramatic new treatments, euphoric success and tragic failure, and the relentless battle by scientists and patients alike against an equally relentless, wily, and elusive enemy." Clearly a book well worth reading, and one that readers are gravitating to in large numbers, judging by its popularity.

But now I would like you to take a step back and pretend that you are an alien and you have never heard of cancer, and look at the words that are being used to describe it. "The emperor of all maladies, the king of our terrors"; a "relentless, wily, and elusive enemy"; and from reader Kenneth E. MacWilliams this:

Siddhartha Mukherjee ... almost parentally takes us by the hand to give us the courage to open with him the door to that dark and foreboding closet in order to see what is really lurking inside. Since eventually most of us are going to have to wrestle with this monster anyway -- either as a victim or as a loved one of a victim -- looking intelligently and closely into that dark closet does diminish fear and enhance wise perspective. And on this incredible journey into the depths of that darkness, what an absolutely marvelous guide is this modern day Virgil called Siddharta Mukherjee as he leads us on this long and often harrowing journey through the swarth (sic) that cancer has cut through mankind throughout time. (my emphasis)

Do you feel the foreboding and the power of that language? Can you visualize, as an alien, the terrifying creature that is being described here, lurking in the darkness of that closet? What you are seeing is not the thing itself but what Richard Bartlett calls the "consensus reality" view of cancer, a morphic field that has been created by us through centuries of fear and not-knowing. We are afraid of it because for all our science and all our effort we have not been able to understand it or master it. The moment we understand it, it will lose its power and its terror, and it will be revealed, like the wizard of Oz, to have been much smaller and less frightening than we had believed it to be.

The face of any monster can change. The energy healing community has been saying with a quiet voice for years now that cancer can be treated and even healed without drastic and damaging interventions. Did you know that over 200 mice have now been cured of deadly cancers using energy healing in experiments that took place in accredited university laboratories and showed near-100% or 100% success rates? Or that the first series of these experiments took place over three decades ago, yet few people have heard of it? The results were so strange, so inexplicable, that no one wanted to know anything more. But the observed reality has been that, when energy healing works, cancer simply becomes a non-event. There is no monster, no monster-slayer, no heroes, no victims, no drama, no pain. Is this not something worth looking into for further research and development, for all our sakes?

A few years ago I read a small, insignicant article in the Globe and Mail that said that a few people in the American Southwest had contracted bubonic plague. Bubonic plague, the article went on to say, is easily treatable with erythromicin. Six hundred and fifty years ago bubonic plague wiped out half of Europe, an estimated 75 million people. Back then it, not cancer, was the "the emperor of all maladies, the king of our terrors." When new discoveries are made, things change -- sometimes faster than we can imagine.

Postscript, Feb. 25: I find it fascinating to see how well this book is doing. Everyone seems to be interested in cancer. It's almost like people slowing down to gawk at an accident scene on the highway. Yet few people, it seems, are interested in possible non-medical solutions to cancer. I wonder why that is. Here is another book to read alongside Emperor of All Maladies.

Postscript, May 14: It is now three months later, and the book is still at #107. People seem to be flocking to it almost the way they would slow down to view a road accident. For an antidote to the pessimism of the Emperor of All Maladies, read Embrace, Release, Heal by Leigh Fortson, now available from Sounds True. It's a paradigm changing book, sitting around #48,000. For my part I would rather have people reading Embrace, Release, Heal, but it seems that people prefer doom and gloom to hope.

What’s wrong with “anomalous” healing?

2010-11-25T00:46:00.009-05:00

If you look up “anomalous healing” on Google, you will find, among other things, a video on Youtube by Dr. Bengston and the PEAR report on intentional healing which I excerpted in my previous post. If you look up the meaning of the word “anomalous” in a dictionary, you will find the definition “deviating from what is standard, normal, or expected”. In short, something “anomalous” is also something “weird” or “strange”.

The problem with “anomalous healing” is the use of the word “anomalous”. “Anomalous” healing is also considered to be something “paranormal”, which is why it was studied by PEAR, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (there is that word again!). And “paranormal” in turn conjures up things like ESP, remote viewing, and strange CIA experiments (like the men who stared at goats in the recent reality-based movie of the same name).

In short, it’s all something strange and somehow not quite respectable, at least not to rational-minded people.

Part of Bill Bengston’s book The Energy Cure features Bennett Mayrick, his mentor, who among other talents developed an impressive ability to heal cancer. Because his other talents were token-object reading (psychometry) and cloud-busting, he is described in the book as a “psychic”. Rational-minded readers who might otherwise be impressed with the results of Bill’s experiments may run for the hills when they read about the “psychic” from whom he had learned to heal, a jack-of-all-trades who lived on the fringes of society, never quite able to fit in.

But in fact it is quite likely that these “paranormal” abilities are nothing more than abilities that will become "normal" as we evolve, and that people like Bennett Mayrick are just precursors of a future iteration of humanity, reluctantly pointing the way. The rest of us, stuck in our 3-D boxes, may consider their abilities weird and worrisome, but that’s not their fault, but ours.

Consider this: today a man healing someone of cancer through bioenergy healing is considered to be doing something strange and “anomalous”. But a nurse wearing a facemask and rubber gloves putting -- at doctors' orders -- a poisonous substance into a patient which if spilled could cause serious burns and would be considered a biohazard is doing something acceptable and “normal”. Which scenario would you rather see as anomalous?

Postscript: An alert reader directed me to a book entitled Walking Through Walls about Lew Smith, a successful Miami interior decorator who seemingly overnight developed abilities very similar to Bennett Mayrick's, including cloud busting and healing, at more or less the same time. Some of his experiences echo those described by Bill Bengston in The Energy Cure, as for instance the disbelief of the medical establishment resulting in cured patients undergoing dangerous procedures, and patients in treatment, like Bill's mice, feeling healthy and energetic while their cancer was apparently still strongly viable. The book was written by Mr. Smith's son, Philip Smith, who is planning a second book more focused on his father's healings. It would be interesting to read Walking Through Walls (and its successor) side by side with The Energy Cure.

How "energy healing" works

2010-11-24T13:40:00.006-05:00

This is how "energy healing" works, according to the PEAR lab. I put "energy healing" in quotes because what is being suggested here is clearly not based on energy, but information:

Taking consciousness as a form or manifestation of information, Jahn and Dunne suggest a metaphoric extension of quantum mechanical principles into the consciousness domain (3, 36). Consciousness is regarded as both particulate and wavelike, in analogy with quantum mechanical descriptions of matter and energy. In its nonlocalized, wavelike manifestation, it is unbounded and can penetrate barriers and resonate with other consciousnesses and the environment, thereby acquiring or inserting information that is unique to the interacting system. Based on this metaphor, Jahn and Dunne suggest possible mechanisms for anomalous influence. For example, they invoke the quantum mechanical principle of indistinguishability to help understand bonding. When molecules are formed from atoms, the constituent elements lose their identity and from this loss a classically anomalous "exchange force" results, producing a strong covalent bond. Analogously, through a sacrifice of conscious individuality, a unifying resonant bond may be established with another consciousness or a physical system, allowing the acquisition or insertion of information. Viewed as an influence of one system on another, this would be anomalous, but in a coherent, unified system, information is distributed throughout. The merging of subjective identities with each other, or with the environment, enables the transfer of objective information manifesting as coherence between previously separable constituents, yielding a total system within which entropy is reduced (37). While these suggestions may seem abstruse, the fundamental principles are parallel to those involved in common interactive experiences such as falling in love, or creating a work of art, or enjoying the beauty of a sunset.

...The research on anomalous interactions provides intriguing evidence that a nonlocal intervention such as intentional healing may contribute similarly to the continuing exchange of information that is essential to maintaining the integrity of living systems... Living bodies, with homeostatic, immune, and nervous systems that epitomize the realm of applied nonlinear dynamics are intrinsically susceptible to influence from small inputs and are able to identify and amplify the most subtle of inchoate patterns and information. Biological systems utilize random processes and uncertainty to maintain the highest level of sensitivity to subtle changes in the environment. They are reactive on the finest scale to information that reduces entropic disorder and provides an increment of structure and predictability, yielding a stable internal milieu and successful interaction with the environment. In this context, we see that healing a wound or recovering from an illness is dependent upon the generation or addition of appropriate information to help restore order and structure.

... An injury or disease manifests as a disturbance or disorder in a system that, when healthy, is magnificently structured and orderly. It is, on the other hand, so complex that its function at the fine scale is beyond our full scientific understanding, as in the extraordinarily precise homeostatic control of the body, or in the exact mechanisms of mending and regeneration when we are injured, or in the creation of ideas. When there is a disruption, and healing is required, the need is for additional order, the infusion of information. Of course consciousness is nothing if not a manifestation of information, and in its creative and structuring capacities, it is ideally suited as a reservoir for the processes that sustain and restore health and wellbeing.

This is just a small excerpt from an article entitled "The Physical Basis of Intentional Healing Systems" written by Roger D. Nelson for the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab and published in 1999. To read the full document, click here. The PEAR lab itself closed in 2007.

If I understand the excerpt correctly, it says that based on the principles of quantum physics one consciousness can affect another consciousness and help it return to healthy homeostasis. The effect observed at PEAR was not very strong, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has been getting stronger, and that the ability can be developed.

The mind is a powerful thing

2010-11-23T16:20:00.013-05:00

I had a discussion with a patient today that helped me crystalize some of my ideas about the contribution of patients to the success of their treatment. As we were speaking it suddenly came to me that no form of treatment, allopathic or alternative, actually heals anyone. What all forms of treatment do is help create conditions favourable to healing. The final step -- the actual healing -- comes from the patient himself.

We have all heard stories where healing occurred against impossible odds -- and also stories where people who should not have died did. At one end is the almost unbelievable Krebiozan story, described in Michael Talbot's Holographic Universe, in which a man riddled with tumours and expected to die was given an experimental drug called Krebiozan by his physician (see embedded video below). The tumours practically melted away and the man was discharged from the hospital to resume his normal life. Then he read in the paper that Krebiozan was shown to be less effective than expected -- and his tumours returned with a vengeance. The second time his curious physician gave him nothing more than a saline injection, and told him that it was a new, improved form of Krebiozan. Again the tumours melted "like snowballs on a hot stove", but the patient died after reading in the paper that Krebiozan had been definitively discredited.

At the other end of the spectrum are the victims of voodoo curses who die because they believe they have been mortally hexed, or patients whose lives are shortened by negative prognoses. Larry Dossey wrote an entire book on this subject entitled Be Careful What You Pray For: You Just Might Get It. He calls it the "nocebo" effect, which is the opposite of the placebo effect. The doctor, who is seen as a powerful and knowledgeable authority figure, pronounces that the patient has 3 months to live. The patient believes this, and obediently dies in the allotted time. Dossey cites a case where the patient had in fact been misdiagnosed and did not have the condition that was supposed to kill him. He died anyway because his doctor told him he would. The mind is an incredibly powerful thing, far more powerful than we give it credit for, for better or for worse.

The question then is, how can the mind's power for healing be engaged? The general pattern for cancer patients -- in fact, patients in general -- is to go to a practitioner (doctor, naturopath, chiropractor, homeopath, energy healer) and ask to be healed of an ailment. The patient expects that the practitioner will use some outside agency (chemotherapy, radiation, chelation, intravenous vitamin-C, cleansing agent, bioenergy) to cure him. In this scenario the patient is a passive recipient of the treatment, much like one goes to the dentist and opens one's mouth, and then quietly submits to whatever happens next.

What happens next outside the dentist's office, at least in the case of cancer patients who seek alternative therapies, is often nothing much, because most treatments don't have immediate effect. Most alternative treatments work through creating a positive healing environment for the body by removing stressors or harmful agents and/or by building up the immune system. This takes time. In the meantime the patient goes on to the next practitioner, and the next, and the next, in each case expecting something immediate and miraculous to happen, ultimately ending up disappointed, unless somewhere along the way he also manages to engage the incredible ability of his own body/mind to heal himself.

It seems to me that the next step in healing is to help the patient do just that. I will be returning to this topic in further posts as I work out the ideas around it -- stay tuned as this is definitely a work in progress and I am quite aware that I only raised the question and have not yet answered it. In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Now available for your perusal: The mind is a powerful thing - Part 2

Postscript: Here is Michael Talbot on Youtube, speaking about the holographic brain model. The discussion on the Krebiozan story comes shortly after the 19 minute mark:

Bioenergy healing and childhood cancers

2010-11-22T13:05:00.011-05:00

Children, according to Dr. Bengston, are very responsive to energy healing because, unlike adults, they are in the process of "composing" (as opposed to "decomposing") and have no preconceptions or prejudices that could get in the way. They also have a much faster metabolic rate than adults, and Dr. Bengston had observed that metabolic rate is a determining factor in how fast remission occurs.

Two years ago two of us trained in the Bengston method gave a single treatment to a little boy who had been diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a deadly form of childhood cancer. We had intended to treat him before he received chemotherapy, but were too late. The effect of our treatment was to give him what his mom described as "the best bloodwork he had since his diagnosis," which astonished the medical staff, as the effect of chemotherapy is supposed to be the exact opposite. Since the Bengston method is contraindicated when the patient is receiving chemotherapy or radiation, we decided not to continue, for fear that we might counteract the effectiveness of the allopathic treatment he was receiving.

At about the same time I had an interesting discussion with a nurse from Sick Kids' hospital. I proposed to her that we try energy treatments on the small percentage of cases they see where the initial diagnosis is so dire that the parents are told "nothing can be done" (other than palliative care). It made great sense to me that the parents of children who had no chance of survival through conventional means should be given the option of trying alternative therapies with the blessing of the hospital.

Her response surprised me. She said that in 99 per cent of these cases, where conventional therapies offer no hope, parents still opt to give their children chemotherapy and radiation, they are so desperate to see something done. It makes me wonder what these parents would do if they were told about all their options, not just the conventional ones.

I have also heard of cases where the parent does choose alternative treatments in preference to conventional ones and the state then intervenes and removes the child from the parent's care so the child can receive chemotherapy or radiation -- even when he or she has refused it! I am not sure, however, that this would also apply to cases where conventional therapies offer no hope.

But I think my proposal to the nurse was entirely reasonable. Chemotherapy and radiation cause great suffering. Why subject a child to them where they offer no hope? What possible harm could there be in offering energy healing as an option?

Postscript: I just found this interesting and informative article on childhood cancer from the BC Children's Hospital Foundation.

Can healing be learned? - Part 3

2010-11-20T09:30:00.010-05:00

Almost as if in response to my comment that in order to become the most effective healers we can be we each have to find our own connection to the Source, along comes Frank Kinslow, the founder of Quantum Entrainment, with a method that seems to teach just that. Healing modalities are proliferating like bunnies these days!

Frank Kinslow is a chiropractor who spent many years on a path of spiritual search and meditation, and his healing method is based on going to your own source, what he calls your capital-S "Self", the eternal you that observes the small everyday "you" going about its business. The first exercise for learning the method, which is really a non-method, involves observing your thoughts. It is not you who does the healing, it's "awareness".

Quantum Entrainment seems to have some similarity to Matrix Energetics in at least one technique. Richard Bartlett of ME teaches "two-pointing", where you find two points, connect them, and then through observation "collapse the wave." Frank Kinslow teaches "triangulation", where you find two points, connect them, observe the way they feel, connect to your Self, and then watch what happens.

Having spent two years learning Mahamudra meditation, I can really appreciate the simplicity of Kinslow's method and I have now also begun to incorporate his "thought observing" exercise both into my meditation and into some of my healing practice. It's quite effective at stilling the chattering monkey mind that interferes with healing.

For the purposes of the specific topic of this blog I should note that in his book Kinslow also describes his experience treating a case of metastasized uterine cancer and touches on a number of topics covered in this blog: e.g., the acceptance or non-acceptance of energy healing by medical staff, and the participation of the patient in the healing.

This was Kinslow's experience: When he began treating this patient in the hospital room where she was expected to die, he was initially unwelcome by staff, who then became quite accepting and helpful when they saw the effects of his treatment. He saw the cancer shrink markedly in eight treatments, with the primary tumour disappearing altogether and the secondary tumour shrinking from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a walnut. The patient was then released to go home and resumed a normal life, but when Kinslow offered to continue treating her until the cancer went away altogether, she said that would not be necessary, that "she would take it from here". When the cancer became a threat again and he offered to resume treating it, she still declined treatment and died peacefully at home. Her family said that the extra time he gave her was the most beautiful time of her life and that she was grateful for it. Why this happens is appropriately the topic of another, more lengthy discussion, about life, illness, death, choices, beliefs, and how little we know about what really goes on.

Since I've not studied or experienced Mr. Kinslow's method, this post is not an endorsement but a commentary on what I've read about it. I do like its meditative aspects, however, and will follow up further on it.

Herewith a link to a free audio download of two of Mr. Kinslow's meditations.

Are energy healing modalities affected by the personality of the founder?

2010-11-17T16:01:00.006-05:00

A few years ago I took a workshop in a method called BodySpin. The method, which involved the use of small, specially designed magnets illustrated with intricate and colourful geometric patterns, was quite elegant and architectural. Its creator, Jeff Levin, also happened to be an architect.

Richard Bartlett, the creator of Matrix Energetics, who likes to play air guitar at the beginning and end of his workshops, comes across as a would-be rock star and media personality. He is spontaneous, fun, and irreverent, and he created a system that is likewise spontaneous, fun, and irreverent.

Bill Bengston is a professor and a self-described skeptic and rationalist. So when almost 40 years ago he encountered a strange man who was able to bust clouds, read real-time diagnoses from signatures hidden in envelopes, and eventually developed the ability to cure cancer, he immediately asked himself, what is this strange phenomenon? can I prove that it exists? can I tease it apart to see what makes it work?

Out of these questions came a series of seminal experiments that proved that what we call "energy healing" indeed exists and can work on cancer. At the same time Dr. Bengston also devised a teaching method which he has since used in a dozen or so workshops, but his preference as a skeptic and as a rationalist continues to be the probing of these healing energies in the lab to see if they will yield up their secrets.

By way of contrast to Dr. Bengston's approach, I would like to present the case of Richard Gordon, the founder of Quantum Touch. Like Dr. Bengston, Richard Gordon 30-odd years ago met a man who could dissolve grapefruit-sized tumours and move vertebrae with the touch of a finger. Richard Gordon learned to heal from him and developed Quantum Touch, which has since then become a world-wide phenomenon with reputedly over 500 instructors. He says Quantum Touch is easy to learn and his motto is "your love has impact". Along the way there seems to have been some dilution, but practitioners out there are arguably doing quantities of "good" -- as are practitioners of other modalities all over the world.

Both Dr. Bengston and Mr. Gordon serve the public weal through their own particular means and it is difficult to judge which means will ultimately prove to be of greater benefit to society. Dr. Bengston would like to figure out the underlying mechanism of healing and find alternate means of delivery for it. Richard Gordon wants to teach his method to as many people as possible so they can go out there and help others.

Judging by the unprecented results of Dr. Bengston's mouse experiments, the closest we have come to date to finding a cure for cancer is the healing energy that came through Bennett Mayrick, Dr. Bengston's mentor, almost 40 years ago. It was then that Dr. Bengston also learned to cure cancer, and a short while later a method was devised to also teach others. Yes, it is a worthwhile exercise to study this healing energy in a lab to see what makes it tick and whether it can be reproduced by other means; but it also belongs in the hands of people helping real cancer patients in real time, out in the real world. That is why I keep carping on the need for an institute to do teaching as well as research, so not only the energy itself could be studied, but also the most effective means of passing it on.

Bill Bengston interview with Dr. Kamau Kokayi on WBAI New York

2010-11-16T18:06:00.004-05:00

I particularly recommend listening to this interview if you are curious about the role of consciousness in healing. Dr. Kokayi asks Dr. Bengston some very compelling questions about the implications of his research. At ca the 39 minute mark Dr. Bengston says that he is trying to find the underlying mechanism for the healings and Dr. Kokayi comments that it sounds like he is trying to find an underlying mechanism for consciousness. An interesting discussion ensues.

You will need to scroll down the page to get to the interview, which is dated November 3rd.

An important link for practitioners

2010-11-05T13:33:00.025-04:00

I was impressed by this thorough and informative FAQ for cancer patients posted on the website of a Bengston practitioner who has learned the method in 2008 and has received a good deal of personal mentoring since from Dr. Bengston himself.

I noticed that many of the challenges she faced were similar to the ones we did: tumours that grew, the need for many hours of treatment, and the uncertainty of patients about the progress of their treatment.

She writes:

Wouldn’t it be nice if the tumor got smaller and smaller and smaller and then gone? It doesn’t usually work this way. Be prepared. This is a natural, not a magical process and most tumors get bigger before they get smaller.

Patients tend to become quite concerned by this development, but then they are encouraged to practice the "cycling" process, to recall that the mice in Dr. Bengston's experiments developed large tumours that then imploded and healed, and to notice how they are feeling:

If you are feeling good, sleeping well, eating well, living well and your body is "taking" the treatment, it is all a sign that you are getting well. In fact, in nearly every tumor it gets bigger before it gets smaller … [I]f you are responding well to the treatments, and your gut says you are OK and if other aspects of your health are improving, it bodes well.

How many sessions are needed? It is dependent on the cancer. According to this practitioner, it could be 20 or 200 or more. We too have found that there was a need for many sessions. I suspect we could have helped some of our patients more efficaciously if we treated them 4 hours a day instead of one. But realistically we simply didn’t have the time; also, if a practitioner is to eat, he or she needs to be paid, and how many patients can afford this kind of intensive treatment?

The patient is asked to make a huge leap of faith: to put many hours into treatment, to pay large sums of money, and to accept that his or her cancer will grow before imploding. Yes, their sleep has improved, they have more energy, and they are able to do things that other people with their cancer are no longer capable of. But then they go to their doctor, who says “your tumour is larger” or “such and such cancer marker has gone up”, and then they start looking at you funny and wondering if you are really doing them any good. I think their often unarticulated fear is that though they are feeling well, in fact much better than anyone else in their condition would be feeling, their cancer may just be gathering steam in the background and preparing to pounce.

It sounds like this practitioner, with Dr. Bengston’s mentoring and personal assistance, may have overcome the hurdles that some of the rest of us stumbled over when trying to treat terminal cancers. But I note that none of us, not this practitioner or even Dr. Bengston himself, can ultimately guarantee that a full cure will occur. Of course neither can an oncologist, and a patient is likely to have a much better quality of life with this treatment.

In my opinion this powerful method begs for institutionalized learning, ongoing follow-up, and the creation of an accumulated body of knowledge to assist practitioners. Longer-term teaching would allow practitioners to strengthen their abilities, follow-up would help them with any problems they encounter, and an accumulated body of knowledge would give them access to the experiences of those who have gone before them. This helpful FAQ is a beginning.

It's a two-way street

2010-11-04T10:07:00.003-04:00

Last week I was treating one of my semi-regular patients who has a very prominent and visible tumour. He is "semi-regular" because he is one of those cancer sufferers about whom Bill would say that managing their condition has become a full-time occupation (of course who could blame them?) and as a result he spends a good deal of time in the States receiving intravenous vitamin C and ozone injections. He has decided not to go for allopathic treatment, which he said would put him through a great deal of suffering for a small chance of remission. Instead, he wants to prove that alternative treatments work, and he is trying as many of them as he can.

Last week I tried something new with him, which resulted in a very "intense" treatment. Although I wasn't touching him, he said he felt his tumour being "sqeezed" and "pulled". The treatment was so intense that he said it was almost uncomfortable. But two days later he called me and said that the tumour was smaller. I suggested that we do it again.

The second treatment was much less intense. I kept asking him what he was feeling, and he said that it felt "nice and warm and soothing." Nice and warm and soothing was not what we were looking for. It occurred to me that, forewarned by the last treatment, and not wanting to experience the same discomfort, he was now unconsciously blocking.

Keep in mind that the practitioner does not by a conscious act of will "put energy into" the patient. It's more like the patient and the practitioner are engaged in a dance, and the patient is the one who leads.

I told him what I thought was happening and reminded him that he was in the driver's seat and that what he wanted mattered. If he wanted a nice, soothing treatment, that's what he would get. But if he wanted something that worked, he would have to ask for it. The question I suggested to him was "how intense does this have to be for it to be effective?" And then I suggested that he allow the energy to become as intense as it needed to be, regardless of discomfort.

What happened next was a lot of heat and a lot intensity. The skin around the tumour got quite red and shiny. I do not know what has happened since, because he has left for the States for more intravenous vitamin C and ozone injections. But I was stunned by how much his intention mattered.

Can healing be learned? - Part 2

2010-10-30T10:16:00.008-04:00

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.

Can healing be learned?

2010-10-28T09:59:00.014-04:00

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.

Ask Dr. Bill

2010-10-24T00:45:00.007-04:00

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.

Message from the past

2010-10-21T10:49:00.003-04:00

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.

And now for something different ...

2010-10-19T17:07:00.007-04:00

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.

Is healing our birthright?

2010-10-09T23:18:00.006-04:00

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.

Is healing boring?

2010-10-07T18:24:00.014-04:00

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.

Are healing groups the way of the future?

2010-10-04T15:38:00.009-04:00

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.

Tami Simon interview with Bill Bengston

2010-09-29T23:15:00.009-04:00

Here is a link to Tami Simon's interview with Bill on Sounds True. She asks many thoughtful questions, some of which seem to echo ones I raised in earlier postings in this blog.

I would like to add some more questions and comments:

For instance, I am curious to know if when Dr. Bengston is being tested he can generate measurable changes in his brain through the cycling technique alone or if the changes are always in response to need? If I understand correctly, REGs and geomagnetic probes don't seem to respond to cycling unless there is a cage of sick mice nearby. I guess the question is whether it's the cycling technique itself that generates the changes that are visible on the MRI or the healing response?

I am also curious to know if Dr. Bengston has ever tested anyone he taught to see if they can generate similar changes.

I would like to comment that in my experience with Bill my own healing ability increased noticeably through direct contact with him well before I learned cycling, and I recall being able to pass on this increase in ability to at least one other person through similar contact. Bill has also told me that the people he worked on were temporarily also able to do healings, although it wasn't clear how long the effect lasted and why it wore off. Since he apprenticed with Bennett Mayrick for a long time, years even, I wonder how much his on-going exposure to Mayrick's ability and the fact that they did many healings together affected Bill's own learning curve.

At the end of the June SSE lecture "Healing and the Mainstream" (part 5 on Youtube) someone asks Bill a question about "reiki vs fakey" -- i.e., an experiment using real and sham reiki healers. In response Bill cites an experiment of his own, in which volunteers who were not taught the cycling technique could also heal the mice just by mimicking his movements. He then went on to say something else, but was cut off, and I would be curious to know what that something else was, because it began with "and then" and Bill looked quite excited about it.

Re: the mechanism of distance healing that Bill and his physicist friends have been pondering and tossing around ideas about, has anyone tossed around any ideas about folding space and time? There seems to be a concept in Buddhism and maybe even Hinduism about every point in the universe being linked to every other point that I've heard has found an echo in quantum physics; it would be interesting to know if that has some relevance. Of course I don't have the physics or the math to parse any of this out, just a general gut feeling.

Re: Bill's suggestion that people form healing groups, I would like to add that organizing, running, and participating in the Toronto group that was the offshoot of the workshops we held here was one of the most pleasurable activities I ever engaged in. The group had heart, purpose and cohesion and we all learned a great deal together.

Congratulations on an interesting interview. I recommend reading the transcript as well, for clearer understanding of some of the more complicated elements of the discussion.

A small note of frustration

2010-09-27T10:34:00.006-04:00

This is a comment on energy healing in general, on the great divide between "them" and "us" -- "them" being the folks who believe that "us" who do energy healing are totally out to lunch.

The day before yesterday I met a woman who had dislocated her thumb back in February after falling. The thumb was in a splint, and would continue to be in a splint until it would be operated on. After the operation she would continue to wear the splint and would undergo painful physio.

I treated the thumb on the spot for about five minutes and told her to come and see me on a strictly "as a favour" basis. I was mostly curious to see how much good I could do. By way of encouragement I told her of some past experiences I had had treating injuries with some very positive outcomes.

The treatment and our conversation were witnessed by another person who had also fallen, and dislocated her elbow, with subsequent surgery and a six-month nightmare of therapy and pain. This person insisted that surgery and pain were the only way to go.

The person with the injured thumb never came to see me. So the message here is "I would rather have my right hand immobilized and then operated on and undergo six months of pain and physio than give you a few hours of my time to see whether you can help it heal on its own. I am so attached to my belief system that all that exists is this 3-D reality that we can see and smell and taste that I would rather suffer pain and inconvenience than see it challenged."

I think energy healers of all stripes will resonate with this, having probably had the same sort of experience many, many times. I find it quite frustrating. And I am sure someone will now comment that I couldn't have helped this woman anyway, since treatment is a two-way street and we don't really heal anyone, just help them heal themselves.

On healing and sociological experiments

2010-09-08T12:16:00.024-04:00

There are two pieces of information out there about the Bengston method that require some discussion. One is that Bill has been successfully treating animals and that he is just now beginning to apply the method to people. The other is that he is conducting a "sociological experiment" to see if people can be taught to duplicate the success of the "sceptical volunteers" who were able to heal cancerous mice in his laboratory experiments.

To clarify, the healings are said to have begun many years ago, in real time, in the real world, with real people, and then they were followed up in the lab by animal experiments.

As to the "sociological experiment" Bill is said to be conducting to see if the people he teaches can duplicate the successes of his "sceptical volunteers", it needs to be said that the experiment is now three years old. I kept loose tabs on the Toronto portion which lasted a year and a half, but then there were other workshops (in Long Island, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Oregon, California, and possibly other places) on which I have no information.

It seems to me that for something to be called an "experiment" someone needs to be tabulating the results, particularly if it is being conducted by someone described as a trained scientist. Now that three years and two months have passed since the first Toronto workshop, I would love to ask Bill how the experiment has progressed since then and about his views on the results.

To treat or not to treat ...

2010-08-20T12:00:00.011-04:00

One of the questions I received over the weekend was whether I screen patients, and if I do, then how? The simple answer is that by and large I don't. I assume that if someone turns up on my doorstep, there is a reason. I will try to treat the person at least once. If it doesn't appear to have had much of an effect, I will ask what the treatment did for them and whether they think it would be worthwhile to come again. I leave it up to them to decide.

I find that most of the people I treat feel better right away and that even the ones who don't see an immediate change improve once they've had a chance to sleep on it. The very few who don't feel the treatment at all, and report no change even the day after, generally decide not to come back. So you could say that in effect patients "self-select", and that no screening process is needed.

I will admit to a selfish preference for treating conditions that can show quick improvement, such as knee, shoulder and back injuries. The patient gets speedy relief and I get the reward of immediate gratification and of knowing that what I do works. Treating longterm conditions such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome or arthritis can be difficult and frustrating in comparison.

And cancer is on a page all by itself. Cancer treatment takes a long time and a good deal of commitment. Cancer patients who try alternative treatments tend to "shop around" and not to stick to any one method. So in addition to allopathic treatments, they will be receiving intravenous vitamin C, ozone, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, naturopathic cleansing agents, colonics, radionics, homeopathy, etc., along with energy healing, and how in God's name do we know whether all or any of these things are compatible? There could be the energy equivalent of negative drug interactions going on, with one method counteracting the benefits of another (Bill Bengston in particular does not recommend using his method while the patient is receiving chemotherapy or radiation). But understandably cancer patients are so frightened and so motivated to try to rid themself of their illness that they will try anything, and they believe that more is better. I believe it's not, and the combination of treatments makes it hard to know what, if anything, is working. Are frustration and the general sense that one does not know how much one is contributing in this cocktail of treatments good reasons to screen these patients out? Again, I believe that being honest with the patient and leaving it up to them to decide is a good way to go.

I remember reading somewhere that doctors have been known to cull patients whom they find difficult to treat from their practices. I would have thought that doctors of all people had a moral obligation to treat everyone. It's an interesting question to mull over whether this is true, and whether the same yardstick should also be applied to energy healers.

Hello and welcome, Energy Healers!

2010-08-16T10:28:00.003-04:00

In the past few days I've received a number of e-mails from energy healers far and wide. Hello and welcome! It has long been my dream to turn this blog into more of a discussion forum, so I hope you will continue to pepper me with questions, which I can then respond to in the blog, and maybe attract some comments. There is a lot of knowledge and experience out there, which we really should share.

I will in the next few days address the questions I've already received. In the meantime, feel free to send me more.

Bill Bengston speaks on Youtube about his research on energy healing and cancer

2010-05-23T21:59:00.008-04:00

Click here for a five-part talk in which Bill Bengston describes his cancer research and discusses its implications. If you want to get to the "meat and potatoes" part of the talk and skip the preliminaries, start at ca 6 minutes 25 seconds.

The view from the ground -- explaining the "Commentary"

2010-03-26T19:20:00.019-04:00

Recently I found out that one of our former "energy" patients had just passed away. He was our second pancreatic cancer patient, and anyone with any kind of medical education or any kind of experience with pancreatic cancer will appreciate the length of his survival from the time of his terminal diagnosis in late July of 2008 to the end of March 2010 (around 20 months). It was in July 2008 that he was told that his recently discovered cancer had already spread to his liver and that nothing could be done for it except palliative chemotherapy, "when the time came". Based on the location of his cancer he was expected to die in 7 or 8 months, and to become quickly debilitated by his disease.

He came to see us in August 2008, and we treated him until July 2009, first 5 days a week, up until November, then 2 to 3 times a week when the winter snows set in. Then in the springtime there were sometimes gaps of a week or more when we didn't see him at all because he had been called in to work. I note that in the springtime he was still able to do stints of real work, and to take walks, and to complete jobs around the house. In July 2009, a year after his terminal diagnosis, he took a two-week holiday that involved active outdoor pursuits in a national park. Then when he returned he told us that he had decided to terminate his treatment.

Why? It seems that part of the reason was that he felt that what we were doing wasn't really working for him. No one with medical authority seems to have told him how astonishing it was that he was still walking around, let alone able to do the stuff that he was doing. His doctor was looking at his labtest results, seeing the numbers going up, and saying that it might be time to try palliative chemotherapy. From what we heard it seemed the chief purpose of the chemotherapy would have been to "get the numbers down".

Our patient was hoping for a full cure, basing this hope on the astonishing remission rates of Dr. Bengston's mice and the apparent reproduction of those remissions by the "skeptical volunteers" trained by him. He held on to the hope even though he knew that the treatment was meant to be "experimental" and had not yet been tested in laboratory studies involving people. When the magical results did not materialize, and instead all we could deliver was the more subtle daily magic of keeping him alive and relatively active while the numbers on his labtests inexorably continued moving up -- apparently slowed down but not fully halted or reversed -- he was quietly disappointed in us.

This is what I meant in my previous posts by "partial" transmission and "partial" results. I do not know what would have happened if we had kept on treating him, but the direction of the numbers in his bloodwork seemed to suggest that we were mostly slowing the cancer down while keeping him relatively symptom free.

I should add that our patient was a robust man and that his strong constitution might have contributed to his lengthy survival. Even so, he lived much longer and much more actively than his physicians had expected him to.

A friend of mine who has medical training and reacts with intense scepticism to "woo-woo" stuff like energy healing has pointed out to me that instead of focusing on full cures I should be looking at the value of the added time we have been giving people. An extra year of relatively symptom-free life is an appreciable gift for someone living with an aggressive cancer -- though unquestionably a full cure would be better.

The sad irony is that if our patient had not expected a full cure and had allowed us to continue to treat him, he would have likely lived longer with an improved quality of life. Instead he had chemotherapy, which he said "really kicked his butt"; then after chemotherapy was stopped because it was clearly not helping him, he quickly declined. From the time we stopped treatment to the time he died 7 months elapsed: the exact prognosis he had been given by the medical establishment 20 months before.

Postscript: In answer to those who might say "but that could have been the normal progression of his disease", I note that we have now seen this pattern of longer survival with improved quality of life on several occasions, so this case cannot be so easily dismissed as a fluke. It would seem that energy healing in general, and this method in particular, do have beneficial effects for cancer patients.

How to teach energy healing "properly"

2010-03-16T15:17:00.019-04:00

It could be argued that no one really knows how to teach energy healing "properly". It's too new, too revolutionary for our Western mindsets, and there are too few signposts in our culture on how it could be taught. "Properly" implies acquisition: we know how to teach children how to read so they can read a book and surgeons how to operate so they can reliably remove an appendix or a gallbladder, but how do we teach people to heal?

In an earlier posting I suggested that the way most energy healing modalities likely come into being is through someone who develops the ability spontaneously, most often by accident. Next someone else comes along and says "that's a cool thing that you do. Can you teach me?" and then the two of them put their heads together to figure out how the healing is produced.

The problem is that the method thus developed is, of necessity, only a conscious approximation of what the teacher does unconsciously -- or rather, an attempt to replicate what the teacher doesn't do, in the sense that doing implies conscious action, and nothing is really being "done" here.

This means the method isn't quite it, but it's arguably the next best thing to it -- whatever it is -- and likely better than nothing at all.

Elsewhere I have also suggested that transmission forms a significant part of the teaching. The teacher stands as a gateway for the healing ability, and students can access the ability by being in the teacher's presence. Sometimes, as in Reiki, the teacher does something special to activate the transmission. Sometimes, as in Buddhism, it is sufficient for the teacher and student just to look at one another.

In my opinion it is most likely that method and transmission work together to allow the student to acquire the ability to heal. It would be interesting to know which one is more important and whether one will work in the absence of the other. My best guess is that the method is a means for facilitating the transmission and then acts as an "anchor" (in the NLP sense of the word) to allow the student to access the memory of the transmission.

Yet a third issue I have raised is that the effectiveness of the method decreases as it moves away from the original teacher, as each successive imperfectly taught generation also imperfectly teaches the next. And this is how we go from the original version of, let's say, Reiki, which was reputed to be able to cure serious conditions, to some current Reiki practitioners only being able to generate "a little warmth" and and a sense of well-being through their treatments, but not much more.

At the moment no method of energy healing has a perfect record of teaching students to heal. Students of most methods acquire different ranges of ability depending on a variety of unknown factors. This is as true of Bill Bengston's method as of all the others. But what Bill Bengston has on all the others is that he is the one best situated to tease out through scientific means how the teaching of energy healing works and how it could be made more effective. Given adequate time and resources, and provided that he possesses the will to do so, he is uniquely placed to figure out how to take energy healing into the mainstream and how to make it work.

Further commentary on Bill Bengston's Chasing the Cure

2010-02-17T17:42:00.083-05:00

Dr. Bengston and Ms. Fraser call their book Chasing the Cure a memoir. But it also contains a teaching supplement which has excited some chatter among publicists on the web. Here are some examples:

The book is about Bengston's ability to cure various forms of cancer and purports 'to pass on his healing ability to others'. (Quill & Quire Industry News June 2009)

The content is not only detailing the magical effect of this therapy, but also to provide the reader with a self-learning method, because the doctor emphasized that this treatment does not need to have special expertise or skills can be achieved. (Chinese literary agency website, translation by Google)

These statements rest on four astonishing mouse experiments performed by Dr. Bengston in the 1970s in which 29 out of 33 mice (87.9%) remitted from a normally fatal breast cancer as a result of an energy healing method which Dr. Bengston helped develop apprenticing with a New York psychic. In the first experiment Dr. Bengston cured five out of five mice. In three experiments that followed skeptical volunteers taught by Dr. Bengston appeared also to be able to cure cancerous mice (with the exception of three mice which died).

Dr. Bengston at first believed that these results meant that his method was teachable. But later he expressed caution about drawing the conclusion that he had shown unequivocally that the skeptical volunteers had been taught to heal. He recognizes the possibility that he himself might have inadvertently cured the mice by proxy or somehow contributed to their cure -- which would not be a far-fetched notion given that he can demonstrably heal mice from hundreds of miles away, and that in his experiments even the on-site controls, which are meant to die, recover to full life-span cures, due to an intriguing phenomenon Dr. Bengston calls "resonance".

Looking at the experiments a scientist might say that there is a "suggestion that the method is teachable", and know that "suggestion" does not mean "certainty". But everyday folks (including publicists) all too easily seem jump to the conclusion that if Dr. Bengston could apparenly teach skeptical, inexperienced volunteers to cure cancer in mice, then pretty much anyone could learn to use his method to easily cure cancer in people. This leap of logic at the moment is premature.

My solution would be to say that the experimental results appear to have been replicated using skeptical volunteers, but that further study is needed to verify and understand those results. I would be concerned about drowning the fledgling possibilities of Dr. Bengston's promising method in overwhelming expectations of near-100% success rates.

A personal postscript

In my own experience (= 6 Bengston workshops + 3 follow-up "alumni" events) there is what appears to be a partial transmission of ability, which in some cases has led to partial results such as apparent and sometimes significant anomalies in the progression of cancer and even a case of temporary remission that was termed a "miracle" by the patient's own physician. We were not able to reproduce with people the notable success rates achieved with mice in Dr. Bengston's experiments, but we did see results that would justify using the method to improve and extend the life of cancer sufferers.

Workshops participants I spoke to, particularly reiki practitioners, said that they experienced a noticeable increase in their healing ability. In my own experience this increased ability peaked right after the workshop and then seemed to trail off somewhat with the passage of time, while still remaining higher than it had been before. How lasting the effect is would be a good area for research. For instance, would the students who apparently healed the mice in Dr. Bengston's experiments have been able to cure another batch a few months later, without any further involvement from Dr. Bengston? On the whole I believe that if Dr. Bengston were to spend some time researching the effects of his teaching methodology on the brainwave activity of his students, success rates could be improved.

Dr. Bengston says he "juices up" the participants in his workshops, which to my mind seems comparable to Reiki attunements and Buddhist transmissions. It is not clear how much of the healing ability gained in his workshops is due to the "juicing" and how much is due to the technique he teaches. I would see that as another fruitful area for research. Is the technique effective in and of itself, or does it simply act as an "anchor" (in the NLP sense) to allow the student to access memory of the workshop experience? Could someone other than Dr. Bengston teach the technique and achieve an increase in the healing ability of students? Could students learn the technique through written instructions alone and demonstrate increased healing ability? All these questions await answers.

Again based on my experience I would say that the single-weekend workshop format has ultimately proven to be not quite sufficient. In another location Dr. Bengston employed a 4-week format similar to the 6-week format that he had used to teach the skeptical volunteers in his experiments, but I do not know with what results. Since Dr. Bengston spent years apprenticing with the New York psychic from whom he learned to heal, in my opinion it might be worthwhile for him to take his cues from the likes of the Barbara Brennan school and develop an intensive, long-term energy-healing program to duplicate his own experience for the benefit of students. In the absence of such a program the workshops remain a good introduction to the method, but in my opinion more is needed.

I remain awe-struck by the healing ability that Dr. Bengston has shown in ten experiments in five different labs, producing near-100% rates of full-life-span cure in mice injected with a cancer that is normally 100% fatal. It would be an incomparable gift to be able to extend these success rates to human cancers on a large scale, and an even greater gift to put this ability into the hands of others.

William Bengston, Chasing the Cure: A commentary

2010-02-05T22:10:00.060-05:00

William Bengston's book Chasing the Cure, co-written with Canadian author Sylvia Fraser, is due to hit bookstores next month. The Canadian publisher of the book has chosen to give it the eye-catching subtitle An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer and Other Diseases, which is a change from an earlier subtitle, A Passionate Quest to Prove that Hands-On Healing Can Cure Cancer and Other Diseases.

Is the book about An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer and Other Diseases? Certainly (and astonishingly so), if you are a mouse injected with mammary adenocarcinoma (H2712; host strain C3H/HeJ from Jackson Labs) in one of Dr. Bengston's experiments. If you are that mouse, your chances of full life-span remission are nearly one hundred per cent, and you would be in a small but select group, because the mice injected with this cancer are usually doomed to certain death. But if you are a human being looking at a recent cancer diagnosis, it's early days yet: the method has not been tested on people.

While the remission of these mice is of huge and unprecedented significance for cancer research, a treatment cannot be called an effective alternative to the current medical model, until it has shown reliability and replicability in humans. In other words it has to be available to more than a few selected cancer patients, and it has to be proven effective in the hands of more than one or two individual practitioners. Human remissions need to be documented in dozens, if not hundreds, of cases (= reliability), treated not only by Dr. Bengston himself, but also independently by others who have learned his method (= replicability).

Further, scientific minds would want to see controlled studies done in human populations, which may not even be ethically possible, given that participating cancer patients would be required to receive no conventional medical treatment for the study's duration.

I note that a pharmaceutical company would not be allowed to market a drug it has only tested on mice as an "effective alternative for treating cancer" no matter how successful its animal testing has been.

To be fully accurate, the subtitle would have to say An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer in Mice and a Potentially Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer in People because in the Absence of Documented Human Studies We Can't Really Say So for Sure. Or better yet, since that would clearly take up most of the cover, why not simply add a question mark to the existing title?

The promise of what Dr. Bengston has to offer is that if his ability to affect cancer could be taught, then a relatively easy, inexpensive and side-effect free form of cancer treatment would be in the hands of the many, creating a grass-roots medical revolution. Many years ago, after a series of experiments involving mice and skeptical volunteers, Dr. Bengston believed that he had achieved just that. But since then, he has said in talks and papers that he has not proven to his own satisfaction that he met all the criteria to show that he had indeed taught the volunteers to heal. (See now part two of his talk "Healing and the Mainstream" on Youtube.)

And when it comes to healing people of cancer, we do not yet know with what effectiveness Dr. Bengston's ability can be taught or transferred. The book ends without delving into what happened when in a two-year "sociological experiment" Dr. Bengston tried to teach people to apply his method not to mice but to humans. I was present for the first year and a half of that experiment. Suffice to say that there were questions and practical challenges, as well as what Dr. Bengston would call "interesting" results, including a temporary remission termed "a miracle" by the patient's own physician.

In my opinion there still remains a good deal of work to be done to tease out the full possibilities of this healing method, but Dr. Bengston, with his scientific mindset and his experiments, is uniquely positioned to be able to do just that. Let's hope he takes up the challenge.

Postscript The title of the American edition will be The Energy Cure: One Man's Quest to Unravel the Mystery of Hands-On Healing. That subtitle makes more sense to me, but the word "cure" in the title is open to the same questions and caveats as "effective alternative treatment" would be.

PostscriptThe German edition is now out under the title Heilen aus dem Nichts, or Healing from Nowhere. There is no mention of cancer in the German promotional material on amazon.de, but the method is said to be particularly effective for serious illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson's and arthritis. This is odd, given that the heart of the book is to be found in Dr. Bengston's experiments with cancer in mice, and that in his introduction Dr. Bengston says that with chronic diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and arthritis he is only able to alleviate symptoms up to about 50 per cent -- and heart disease is not even mentioned.

Dr. Bill Bengston on using energy for curing cancer in humans

2010-01-30T22:58:00.005-05:00

Healing Humans

The eight hundred pound gorilla in the middle of the room is the question of whether any of this works on people ...

As I noted at the beginning, my experimental work grew out of clinical observations and my frustrations at not being able to isolate what works and why through clinical observation. Certainly people have been taught my techniques and applied them to people with some interesting anecdotal results. But to a researcher anecdotes are simply not enough. At what point will there be enough evidence to do a controlled study on people? I don’t think the question has a clear answer. While my passion is in the lab, I would certainly be open to some clinical trials. But in my experience watching human cancers being treated decades ago, my anecdotal clinical observation was that the most successful remissions were all associated with a lack of conventional treatments whose purpose was to kill cancer cells. When people speak of “complementary medicine,” perhaps the methods I am aware of are not really complementary to the current crop of conventional treatments. If that turns out to be so, then the difficulties of carrying out successful clinical trials are greatly compounded. I don’t yet know how to solve this problem. I do know that it is a problem worth pursuing.

This is excerpted from an article by Dr. William Bengston entitled "Breakthrough: Clues to Healing with Intention" in an e-journal called EdgeScience. If you are curious about some of the anecdotal evidence that exists for the Bengston method, read the early entries of this blog. We certainly would like to see the human clinical trials done that Dr. Bengston refers to, as we believe that the treatment of cancer through energy healing is a grail worth striving for.

Update on June 9th post

2009-10-05T21:54:00.004-04:00

On June 9th I wrote about a little tyke we were asked to treat who was suffering from neuroblastoma. It is now four months later and the poor little guy has gone through hell and back, with five courses of aggressive chemo and surgery, with more to follow. The word had gone out that he needed help, and innumerable people have been praying for him and sending him healing energy.

Well, it turns out that with all the treatment he has been receiving, allopathic and alternative, his nasty tumour had shrunk by 97% prior to surgery. The incision surgeons needed to make was half the length they originally thought it would have to be and the surgery was hours shorter than they expected. I was originally concerned about using Bengston bioenergy to treat him because of Dr. Bengston's caveats about mixing his method with allopathic treatment, so I forwarded the call for help to the Therapeutic Touch network, and I've been told that a large number of other people have been using other methods to try and help, including straightforward prayer and Reiki.

The huge shrinkage in the tumour is great news, but I am sorry that he had to suffer as much as he did to get this far. His mom posts pictures of him regularly, and the change in him is heartbreaking. He is a little trooper, but his eyes tell the story of someone who has suffered greatly.

More practical challenges in using bioenergy to treat cancer

2009-09-15T23:19:00.004-04:00

We have now seen this pattern several times, so it's worth mentioning. We treat someone with some kind of aggressive, scary cancer, and it seems to halt temporarily or significantly slow down, with the added side effect that the patient has a much improved (sometimes near normal) quality of life. Then the person decides to take a break from treatment because it doesn't seem necessary, or because they go on holidays, or the weather is inclement making driving difficult. During this break the cancer resurges. The patient then begins to doubt the efficacy of the treatment and quits for good. So in effect the patient quits because the treatment didn't work when we didn't do it. That's like saying aspirin doesn't work because your headache didn't go away when you didn't take it.

There is a kind of magical thinking applied to energy healing that is not applied to more orthodox therapies. The expectations are different: you will give your physiotherapist six to twelve weeks to fix your bad back or wonky knee, but if I can't fix it in one shot with a bioenergy therapy, you won't come back to see me the second time. Granted, cancer is a bit more complex. But people don't seem to appreciate the significance of a therapy that seems to halt it temporarily or to slow it down without the side effects of radiation or chemo, and gives the patient a decent quality of life and some extra time. The thinking seems to be that if you can't make it go away, the treatment is not worthwhile. At the same time, this thinking is not applied to the conventional therapies now being used, which more often than not give the patient extra time with decreased quality of life, and sometimes decreased quality of life with no extra time at all.

Why it's hard to know ...

2009-09-02T18:40:00.005-04:00

This is why it's hard to know what works ...

I am treating someone who has lung cancer, using the Domancic Method because the person is also receiving chemotherapy and the use of the Bengston Method is contraindicated during conventional treatment. In addition to the chemo and the energy treatments, the patient is also receiving intravenous vitamin C. After one chemo session the tumours have shown sign of shrinkage. Both the Domancic treatments and the intravenous vitamin C were started not long before the chemo. So, what worked? To make matters even more interesting, the chemotherapy drug is an experimental one. So if the cancer remits, the experimental drug will be credited for the remission, and this case will form part of the statistical analysis. In the meantime, the patient feels good and has no significant side effects from the chemotherapy. Onwards and upwards, keeping the clinicians happy and the experimentalists confounded.

I think what we are doing here is called "integrated medicine".

UPDATE Nov. 17: Unfortunately the lack of significant side effects from chemo did not continue. After the second round of chemotherapy the patient developed pneumonia and I haven't heard anything more since then.

Oh the heartbreak ...

2009-06-09T15:15:00.003-04:00

About two weeks ago we were told about a little boy with neuroblastoma who was about to start very aggressive chemotherapy treatment for a very aggressive cancer. We hoped to be able to treat him before he started chemo, but alas found out afterwards that he was already on day 4 of his chemotherapy treatment. Now he is 10 days post-chemo. His immune system has been completely wiped out, he has had a high fever for days, he has no appetite and he is in pain. And when he recovers from the effects of his first treatment, they plan to do the same thing to him five more times, followed by surgery, followed by radiation, followed by more chemo. And he is just a little tike, knee high to a grasshopper. His poor parents are beside themselves with anxiety and helplessness watching their little one going through this hell.

For me, this has been my first up-close encounter with the effects of chemotherapy. I am speechless. I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone can call this medicine. Who on earth decided that poisoning people is the best way of curing anything? Whatever happened to "first do no harm"? Why isn't medicine looking more closely at energy therapies like the Bengston Technique and the Domancic Method that claim to be able to cure cancer without causing the patient all this harm and suffering?

I wish we had been given a chance to treat the little guy before conventional medicine had a go at him. I know they mean well, but what they are doing to save him is just devastating.

Energy healing and the Catholic church -- or "the Pope butts his nose in"

2009-05-18T10:20:00.012-04:00

Recently we were treating a patient with stage 4 cancer. We were recommended to him for our ability to control pain and improve quality of life. We treated him three times, and each time he signalled that he had obtained significant pain relief.The day after the third treatment he was stronger and far more alert than he had been since the first time we had seen him. Then suddenly a wall went up and we were told our services were no longer needed. No explanation was given. The turnabout was so sudden and unexpected that we wondered whether there had been some kind of intervention. We were aware that the patient had received bad news and we assume that the bad news was that he was terminal. We now take a leap of imagination and go on to wonder whether he then spoke to a priest and was then told that what we were doing to him was unchristian. This is a leap of imagination; we don't actually know that this is what happened. I just can't for the life of me understand why someone with terminal cancer would turn down the opportunity to feel better without a strong philosophical reason. And of course we have to respect patients' choices, whatever they may be. As a friend of mine said, we can't negotiate dying, but we can negotiate how we die, or rather how we live until the moment of dying.

It seems that the Catholic establishment has a wee bit of a problem with energy healing. It summarily ignores Christ saying to his apostles in the Bible "all this ye shall do and more" and questions where the healing comes from, attributing it to suspect or even possibly malevolent forces.

This is from the March 31 2009 issue of the Guardian:

Reiki, an alternative Japanese therapy with a growing band of followers in the west, is "unscientific" and "inappropriate" for use in Catholic institutions, according to America's bishops.

Guidelines issued by the committee on doctrine at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops warn healthcare workers and chaplains that the therapy "lacks scientific credibility" and could expose people to "malevolent forces".

The document also claims that for a Catholic to believe in reiki presents "insurmountable problems".

Reiki means "universal life energy" and was developed by the theology professor Dr Mikao Usui at the turn of the 20th century, from Buddhist beliefs and Sanskrit teachings. The client lies on a couch, clothed and relaxing, while the therapist's hands rest lightly on the body in a special sequence. Clients often report heat and tingling sensations.

The church's guidelines state: "A Catholic who puts his or her trust in reiki would be operating in the realm of superstition, the no man's land that is neither faith nor science. Superstition corrupts one's worship of God by turning one's religious feeling and practice in a false direction."

The document goes on to state that since reiki therapy is incompatible with Christian teaching and scientific evidence, "it would be inappropriate" for Catholic institutions, such as healthcare facilities and retreat centres, or people representing the church, such as chaplains, to promote or provide support for it.

We should note at this point that the church's problem with Reiki is likely not lack of scientific evidence. It took the Vatican only 400 years to accept Galileo's scientific evidence that the Earth revolved around the Sun, so one could not exactly call the church a pillar of empirical scientific inquiry. It is amusing to read that worshippers who dabble in Reiki are engaging in superstition right after the warning that Reiki may expose them to "malevolent forces".

What we do is not specifically Reiki, but all energy therapies tend to be lumped under the heading "Reiki" by people who do not practice them. The problem seems to be that Reiki is "New Age" and "New Age" thinking is inappropriate for Catholics. (Click here for the Reiki response.) At any rate, this is the same church that is happy to let its people live in poverty or suffer from AIDS so long as they don't use condoms, so why should it be more humane about the manner of their dying? As I said to one of my colleagues, who was disappointed about the outcome of our treatment of this patient, we are lucky that the world has changed enough that "they" are not coming to cart us away to throw us on the pyre.

Bill's teacher speaks

2009-05-16T21:20:00.007-04:00

This is from an article dated January 5, 1973, written by John Pascal and entitled "Cloud-Dissolver, Healer of the Sick". The name of the newspaper in which it appeared is not given on the clipping I have.

... Bennett Mayrick is a psychic healer. He has laid his hands on the suffering and cured or arrested, he says, arthritis, leukemia, lymphosarcoma, chronic back ailments, blindness, emotional disorders, blisters. Dogs bedeviled with respiratory ailments breathe easier. Cats condemned to death by cancer live on. His success rate is formidable -- 90 per cent, he says. "I am not the healer," he says. "The energy heals. I am its channel."

Mayrick is a tall, dark-haired, brooding man of 50 who chooses his words carefully. When he talks of his gift he seldom smiles. His eyes are mournful, reflecting what he genuinely conveys as a deep melancholy that the world is not availing itself more of his powers. The people he treats are friends, or friends of friends, but he would like to function within a formal structure. He has offered himself, he says, to doctors and to hospitals to work in laboratory situations so rigid they leave no room for doubt. "But they, the medical establishment, dismiss me.... And why? If medicine has failed, why not take a chance with me? What can they lose?"

... Mayrick is utterly sincere, utterly convinced of his healing powers, and he produces a shoebox packed with correspondence testifying to his successes. Moreover, a check with others who have witnessed Mayrick at work on one or two occasions affirms that cuts do indeed seem to heal themselves and blisters fade away after Mayrick has placed his hands on them. Is it a case of the mind responding to a powerful suggestion from an intense and charismatic personality? "Possibly," says Mayrick. "But how do you account for the cats and dogs I've healed?"

...Once, on a summer afternoon, Mayrick says, he was sitting by the side of a pool "looking at the sky, and I remembered reading somewhere that people could dissolve clouds. There were four or five low clouds over me, so I tried it and it worked. I'd pick one out, and watch it dissolve. I called my wife over and pointed to a cloud and said watch what happens. It dissolved. She said, 'Did you do that?' And I said, 'I think so.' Now I've done it so many times there's no question about it."

It was about a year ago, Mayrick says, that he began to cure people. Now he has all but given up the house-cleaning service he has operated for years, and devotes most of his time to healing. He charges no fee, but accepts "whatever people want to contribute."

"I'm here," he says. "I'm available. I want to be used more. The energy is all around us. It can't be destroyed. It can't be created. But it can be used by those who have the psychic power, and I'm one of them. Why, I can't say. I don't know. It may, in the end, be unknowable."

Bennett Mayrick died in 2004, aged 82, with his gift still unrecognized.

Also read: More about Bennett Mayrick?

Moving right along ...

2009-05-05T15:40:00.013-04:00

Energy healing is exploding all over the map. Just in the past six weeks people I know have taken courses in Quantum Lightweaving, Access Consciousness, and Reconnective Healing. There is a Domancic method training weekend coming to Toronto at the end of this month, and it's already full.There will be another Bengston technique training weekend in Philadelphia in June, followed by a Domancic one in August, put on by the same people. I would love to hear from folks who have taken these modalities to get their opinion on how it all worked for them. My latest foray has been into Quantum Lightweaving and it has delivered what it promised: "transformation beyond healing".

Actually it is inaccurate to lump all these techniques under the term "energy healing". In fact there is energy healing and then there is "informational healing". In the former energy is given that allows the body to heal itself, but in the latter the sick body is provided with information about what's "normal". Quantum Lightweaving seems to be "informational healing". I suspect that most energy healing modalities contain a bit of both, but of the two "informational healing" is the one more likely to produce lightning fast miracle cures.

A breakthrough ...

2009-04-24T20:28:00.007-04:00

A few days ago I had the opportunity to visit with the oncology team of a large local hospital to tell them about the bioenergy work that we do. A friend of mine who was formerly a nurse told me that this was huge: that it was a miracle in the first place that they let me in through the door, yet another miracle that they let me speak, and a bigger miracle still that they listened to me. Only a few years ago this meeting could not have transpired.

The reaction to what I had to say was mixed, with some doctors appearing more open to the concept of energy healing than others. One person spoke for many when he commented that at the very least we meant well and did not take advantage of vulnerable people. A young woman doctor dismissed Bill's paper on his initial four experiments -- in which 29 out of 33 mice recovered to full life-span cure from a cancer which no mouse had ever survived before -- as "meaningless" because of the small number of mice involved. (There was no comment to my response that now he is up to 10 experiments and over 200 mice, of which only 4 had died.) Another doctor commented that Mischa's 10-week remission, during which he quite literally got up from his deathbed and went home and did normal things like grocery shopping and going to the cottage, might have just been "the normal course of his disease". But others were clearly listening with a more open mind and some even seemed to come from the point of view that integrative medicine was not a bad thing so long as the patient's best interest was served.

What garnered the most positive response (at least judging by body language) was my summary of some of Jim Oschmann's ideas from Energy Healing: The Scientific Basis, e.g., his comment that it has been shown that the energy coming of out healers' hands cycles through all the frequencies that human tissue needs to jumpstart healing and his theory that healers concentrate the Schuman Resonance, which are extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves, and pass it out through their palms. He also believes that we are all hardwired to give and receive energy healing. This clearly excited my audience and brought on the question whether anyone can learn energy healing, to which I said yes, everyone can, but to varying degrees.

In hindsight, I could have cut my teeth as a public speaker on something easier than trying to sell bioenergy healing to a bunch of skeptical doctors, but I did have fun, even if it was a bit stressful. And kudos to Mischa's doctor, who not only had the courage to invite me but also convinced her colleagues that I may be worth listening to, and thereby maybe initiated a fruitful dialogue on the nature of healing between "us" and "them". In fact kudos to all the medical staff who came for being there!

Why we need a paradigm change

2009-04-08T13:15:00.006-04:00

I received a phone call a few days ago about someone just diagnosed with stage-4 cancer. The cancer was advanced enough to require hospitalization for fluid drainage. Some kind of surgical intervention was being contemplated, to be followed by chemotherapy.

We all know how this kind of story usually unfolds. The patient will suffer greatly through chemo and then will probably die. At this stage chemo is a long shot. But it is being done because there are no other options.

Or rather it is believed that there are no other options. The person who phoned me had heard of the work we do and wanted to know more details. He then passed on the information to the family of the person who had just received the diagnosis. And the family then declined to contact me.

In terms of odds, the outcome we could have provided would have been likely better than the outcome of the orthodox medical treatment. Even if the person died in the end, there would have been less net suffering with energy healing than with the chemotherapy option, as energy healing alleviates suffering and chemotherapy often adds to it in spades. And even if you think of what we do as a long shot, how is it any less certain than what is being done to this patient right now, given the advanced stage of the cancer and the odds of cure through traditional means?

Current cancer treatments involve a lot of trauma, and a lot of drama. There is no drama in energy healing. It's kind of mundane. Nothing much happens, except that, in the case of the Bengston work, the patient feels mostly okay and is able to get on with life in a much more normal way than if he or she were receiving conventional treatments. But people are primed to think of cancer in dramatic terms. Cancer sufferers are expected to suffer heroically, as they do in the movies and on TV. And here is the paradigm shift that needs to happen: why should they?

We are on the cutting edge ...

2009-03-27T19:14:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-25T13:26:00.003-04:00

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?

2009-03-11T13:50:00.024-04:00

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. To the contrary, most of the people I've asked said that they would happily take another workshop with Bill. But 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

2009-03-04T17:57:00.003-05:00

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.

Love, bioenergy, and miracles -- part 2

2009-02-23T16:33:00.003-05:00

About 2 months ago we were asked to treat a young girl who had developed a lung abscess and scoliosis. The abscess was highly resistant to antibiotics. For five and a half weeks the girl suffered from exhaustion, fever and night sweats. The night sweats were caused by an astronomically high white blood cell count (over 30 times normal) that was due to the infection. We were told about her on a Thursday, and began treatment right away. On Friday, her fever broke, and did not go back up again. Over the weekend the night sweats stopped. By Monday her white blood cell count had dropped by two-thirds, she was taken off antibiotics and her doctor said that if she felt up to it she could go back to school. Two weeks later everything was normal and only the scoliosis remained. Her parents were told that she would have to wear a back brace for the remainder of her teen years. We kept treating her. Three weeks later the scoliosis was gone too! Her doctor said she had had a spontaneous remission.

Children and young teens are very receptive to bioenergy healing.

Looking for a paradigm change in treating cancer

2009-02-12T18:49:00.010-05:00

The history of the development of penicillin, the miracle drug that made infection control possible, is eerily similar to the development of energy medicine, with the difference that energy medicine is still in the uncertain early stages.

Myth has it that penicillin was discovered by accident, and voila, we suddenly had a miracle drug. But the true story is far more complex. There were many dead ends, near misses, even patient deaths, before penicillin became penicillin. There is an entertaining lecture, well worth reading, by an unknown author on the history of the discovery of penicillin available on the internet. It seems to have been a lecture in a botany class at the University of Hawaii (link).

It begins with the story of a man called Morton Paterson, a retired philosophy professor, who as a child suffered from a bone infection acquired through a cut on his knee. Here is the story in his own words:

The cut had become infected, and I had blood poison[ing]. For a few days I guess I was "out of it", in a coma, and hung in the balance between life and death. I was diagnosed as having osteomyelitis, which means "bone infection". Apparently what happens with osteomyelitis is that the infected blood seeks out a part of the body which is already weak for some reason. In my case that happened to be the socket in my left hip.

[T]hey knew they had to operate fast to stop the infection before it traveled to a vital organ. That led to three months in hospital. The surgeon was Dr. Mowat, and I remember him as a very kind and soft-spoken man. He had to scrape out the infected bone, but then leave the large incision open so the nurses could pack it every day with fresh gauze. Later I was told that the reason for not closing up the incision was that oxygen (fresh air) was needed to clear up the infection. Without oxygen the infection would stay in the bone, and be a continuing threat.

I've never been so scared in all my life. I didn't know why my hip was so sore and not getting better, and could tell that Dr. Mowat and my parents were pretty worried. As the nurses peeled away the old packing and re-packed my hip with fresh gauze they tried their best to cheer me up and not let on they were worried. I remember them saying, "Now be a brave little soldier, Mortie!"

Surgery had to be performed a few more times to clean out bone chips in the incision. All I can remember about those extra surgeries was being wheeled out of my room, down the corridor, and into a large bright "operating room". Suddenly a doctor (I later learned he or she is called the anesthetist) behind me would cover my face with a cloth and tell me start counting. Then the doctor would a couple of drops of ether onto the cloth. I would get to about 3 before falling asleep.

Looking back to that operating room experience these sixty-three years later I still remember my panic, crying out when the cloth went over my face. Ether had the most sickening smell I ever smelled, and I guess the scariest part was not knowing when they'd cart me down the corridor again and have that awful cloth suddenly draped over my face. Another thing about ether was that I'd be so sick when I came to back in my room. The smell seemed to linger forever, and I kept bringing up. The nurses would give me a pill to help me sleep, so eventually I'd doze off.

When the infection was finally contained (by mid-summer), less and less packing was put into the incision till the day finally came that I could go home on little crutches that I still have.

A few years later, Mortie Paterson's osteomyelitis returned. But by then, penicillin was widely available. With antibiotic treatment the infection disappeared in a few days and never came back.

The story caught my eye because little Mortie's suffering through months of excruciating treatments is very similar to the suffering that cancer patients have to undergo today with chemotherapy and radiation. When the paradigm changed, and penicillin became freely available, the suffering caused by infections became a thing of the past. I hope to see a similar paradigm change with cancer in my lifetime.

Eureka -- "Going to the source" works

2009-02-11T13:58:00.002-05:00

I had an indication yesterday that the technique described in my post "Advanced 'healership'" does work.

I was treating a friend who had just come back from a trip by plane which had left her ear uncomfortably blocked. As I treated her we were chatting back and forth, and I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing. Periodically I asked her how her ear was doing. She would report that she could breathe better through the nostril that had been blocked, but the ear was just about the same. At some point during the treatment I noticed that I was doing the healing on auto-pilot, with no formulated intent. So I "went to the source" and articulated the intent that she receive the healing that she needed for her ear. Within seconds she said "it's better now".

Okay, so it's not cancer, but it was still a good illustration of the effectiveness of the technique.

A description of Bill Bengston's mouse experiments

2009-02-10T18:18:00.005-05:00

This comes from the EEG Info newsletter. The author, whose name is not posted, is summarizing a presentation made by Bill at an ISSSEEM conference:

[I]t is timely to discuss the following experimental results, which were presented by William Bengston. His research topic was the issue of whether energy healing could be taught. The healing technique was the laying-on of hands. So Bengston taught a number of initially non-believing students in the techniques that he wanted used, which were to take an hour a day for a month. The technique was to be used on mice that had been injected with lethal doses of mammary adenocarcinoma. This dose is well-known to be 100% fatal, and in fact no mouse ever survived longer than 27 days under the challenge of such an injection.

The mice indeed developed the tumors, as expected, but then the tumors took a surprising course. They blackened and ulcerated, and then were resorbed. The mice went on to live a full lifespan. In fact, subsequent trials with the lethal elixir did not even elicit tumor formation. Lifetime immunity to this kind of cancer seemed to have been conferred. The experimental mice survived the challenge at the rate of 88% out of some 33 mice involved in a number of separate trials. The trials were run in different universities, by different groups of students. Looking just at these data, one would be tempted to conclude that first of all there is merit to the “laying on of hands;” secondly, that the skill can be taught; and finally, that even belief in the so-called “treatment” is not required. But this is not the end of the story.

It turns out that the controls did just about as well, responding at a 70% rate despite not having had the benefit of the laying on of hands. There were replications with another strain of tumor that is equally fatal, with similar results. But now Bengston was running into a curious snag. When he approached the same groups of researchers about doing replications, he was rebuffed. After all, the first time they agreed to do the experiment it was a matter of proving that Bengston was nuts. They were perfectly happy to cooperate in doing that. On the other hand, if they agreed to do a second similar experiment, it would just prove that they were nuts! Thus the enterprise of science protects itself from deviance.

Bengston reluctantly concluded that his carefully done experiment did not answer the question about whether healing techniques could be taught to the naive, since there was no significant treatment interaction, but it left him with the dilemma of explaining the results obtained with the controls. He is postulating that a kind of herd immunity was acquired by the group of mice that had once shared a common bond, a kind of resonant bond. It’s not like the data can be readily explained away. All of the mice did grow the tumors, after all, at least in the first administration. And the tumors are known to be 100% fatal. So there is clearly a need for an explanation. Finally, there was the fact that the experiment had in fact been done “triple-blind.” On their own initiative the students had established yet a third control group, unbeknownst to Bengston, so if Bengston was somehow intervening with the controls surreptitiously, this third group would be unaffected. They were healed as well! This is doubly ironic, since the students were the real experimental animals here rather than the mice. So we actually had a case of the experimental animals running a blinded, controlled experiment on the experimenter. That may be a first. Other experiments were ongoing in the same universities in which groups of mice were continuing to succumb to the tumor-kindling procedure as expected. Something was causing these particular groups of mice to respond differently from all the others. And they have done so now in six [now ten] independent trials.

Advanced "healership"

2009-02-08T16:29:00.009-05:00

The founders of great methods, like great chefs, often have difficulty translating what they do into a simple recipe. It is easy enough to distill the basics, but how do you account for the pinch of this and the smidgeon of that that get added in the process of preparation that in the end make the dish work?

I suspect the "cycling" technique is just the meat and potatoes of what Bill Bengston does to make his healings work and that there are many other subtler things for which there is no room in the workshop -- or in the simple instructions given to Bill's skeptical trainees. It is also entirely possible that there are some things Bill does in the course of his treatments of which he is not even aware, as there is much in energy healing that is subconscious and intuitive. (To take an analogy from psychoanalysis, Freud practiced his art far differently from the iron-clad instructions he gave his followers, from which modern psychoanalysis was born. If you read the memoirs of the people he treated, you would be shocked how un-Freudian Freud himself could be. To take another example from marriage and baking, my mother-in-law gave me the recipe for her son's favourite dessert, and it never, ever, ever came out the same as she used to make it.)

This is a long preamble to telling you about a technique we learned from Bill and what happened to it in the application. The technique is called "touching the source" and the description for it is quite simple: you "touch" the client, you "touch" the source, and then you allow the client to subtract from the source what he or she needs for healing.

Simple, right? But what the heck does it mean and how do you apply it?

Reiki folks at this point might scoff and say that this exactly what Reiki is meant to do, expressed in different words. In Reiki the practitioner is meant to be a conduit between the client and Reiki source energy.

Then we have the description of the Matrix Energetics technique called "two-pointing" described on the Matrix discussion board. The explanation went something like this: imagine you are in a two-room building. You are in one room with the client. In the other room you have God or the Zero Point Field (the source of all possibilities). Between the two rooms there is a door. Your job as healer is to open the door.

Voila: touch the client, touch the source, allow the client to take from the source what he or she needs.

So I was sitting there treating someone, thinking to myself "okay, I'm supposed to open the door. How do I open the door?" And as I sat and pondered, the door somehow opened and something very interesting happened. The client had been in a car accident and was experiencing considerable pain. After I "opened the door", there was a sudden tighness around his torso, then something left with what I experienced as a "woosh!" That night he slept normally for the first time since the car accident, and the next day he reported feeling "absolutely normal".

Then I thought further. Maybe this is not quite what Bill does. Maybe there is more to it. What this technique describes is something fairly passive, and from what I've seen what Bill does is not passive. That might be what makes him more effective than your average energy healer: that he goes the extra mile. For him it does not seem to be a question of allowing the client to take what he needs; it's a question of giving to the client way more than what he would take if left to his own devices. After all, the client possibly became ill in the first place because his body did not know how to ask for enough of what it needed. This is not something Bill taught our group, but my extrapolation from what I've seen him to do.

But who then decides how much more "more" needs to be? Not me! I, the treater, am not in any position to make that decision. But if I cannot, and the client is not able to, who can? Simple: let the source (God, the Zero Point Field) or the client's so-called "higher self" decide. So essentially what is needed is a simple change of focus from the client to the source energy; a simple change of intent from "let the client take what he or she needs" to "please give the client what it takes for him or her to heal". We tried this in our practice group, and the change was noticeable.

We'll now have to see what kind of difference this makes in bringing on actual, documented healings. I'll keep you posted.

Energy Healing 101 - A free online "introductory course" - Part 2

2009-02-07T11:59:00.017-05:00

This is offered for your information only and is in no way intended to replace the advice and services of a qualified physician. Please read the previous post (part 1) before proceeding with any of the practice in part 2. Please treat the information you read here as any set of instructions you would read in a book. Use it with full awareness that you are responsible for your own health and your own level of comfort in applying what you read. This particular post refers to generic energy healing, not energy healing specific to cancer. It is not a description of the Bengston method.

Having done the exercises in part 1, you may now be sensitized to feeling energy coming from your hands. One purpose to the exercises was to make you aware of this energy, which in fact is always there and available to be called upon. As I said before, we Westerners tend to "live" in our heads, and particularly in our analytical left brains. We are unable to feel the energy because we are insensitive to it; and because we don't feel it, we do not believe that it exists. The energy exercises allow the awareness to move from our head into our body and therefore increase our sensitivity.

There are two places in particular where the awareness needs to reside to allow us to do healing. One is what the Chinese call the dan tien (and the Japanese call hara): the area just below your belly button. This is one of the main storage areas for chi. It is also the place where the martial artist's spirit shout comes from, greatly increasing his or her power. It is here that you store up life energy doing the Qi Gong exercise that is called "standing like a tree". To maintain awareness of the dan tien or hara, it is important to practice breathing into the area on a fairly regular basis.

The second place the awareness needs to reside for effectiveness in healing is the heart. That probably needs little explanation. After all, most of us intuitively know that all healing is love.

An experiment

I hope you will now join me in an experiment. On the right side of this blog you will find the photo of a hand. It is an unremarkable, un-Photoshopped image, but it has been set up so one might feel energy coming through it. My inspiration for doing this came from a Dutch website that a few years ago posted a "Reiki hand" and invited people to test if they could feel anything coming from it. Another website in Vancouver posted a photo of the founder of Reiki, Dr. Mikao Usui, and claimed that you would receive Reiki if you looked at the image. I found energy coming from both images. I asked a couple of people, one a healer, the other a "regular guy" who is also a skeptic, to tell me if they felt anything coming from this image and they both told me that they did. So now it's your turn, if you choose to check it out.

Hold one hand over the image, then the other, each for just a few seconds. Run each hand over the screen to feel if there is any difference between the areas where the image of the hand is, and where it isn't. You can call up a larger image by clicking on it. You could also try closing your eyes and just sitting in front of it, and seeing if you feel anything different. Your feedback is welcome whether you feel anything or not.

Now comes the weird part. In the best of all possible worlds as it exists in my imagination, this hand is a portal for you to receive the kind of attunement that would happen if you attended an actual energy healing course. If you wish to try this out, hold each hand, one at a time, over the image for a longer period than 30 seconds. You may feel how long you need to do this. It may help if you set the intention that you wish to become a healer.

Putting it all together

This is how you do energy healing:

1) Begin by setting up a positive flow of energy. By positive flow I mean that you feel the energy coming in through your feet, your brow or your crown, and then feel it coming out of your palms. Use the energy sensitizing exercises described in part 1 if you need to.

2) Set up your intent. State in your mind that you wish to be a clear healing channel for the benefit of the person you are treating. If you are religious, and wish to do "laying on of hands" in a Christian context, this would be a good time to pray and to ask for the love of Jesus to come through you.

3) Establish a connection with the person you are treating by placing your hands on them (on the shoulders if they are sitting or on the solar plexus if they are lying down). Ask again for the energy to flow through you to them. Remind yourself that the source from which the energy flows knows what kind of healing is needed -- or, if you are not comfortable with the idea of energy that knows what needs to be done, just trust in the "healee's" body intelligence.

4) Keep the positive energy flow going by using your intent or your breath. One way of doing this is to remind yourself that you are drawing the energy through your brow/hara/feet on the in-breath, and sending it out through your palm on the out-breath.

5) This is very important: get out of the way! You are not doing anything. You are just a channel facilitating a flow of healing energy to a person who needs it. The energy doesn't come from you; it comes through you. As a side benefit you too will receive a healing at the same time.

6) You could intend to link up with all the healers in the world. This is a variation on the idea of the Buddhist "sangha". When Buddhists meditate, they ask the "sangha", Buddhist meditators everywhere, to join in and help them. Similarly, you could ask all the healers in the world to help you.

One way to fail is to let the left brain get into the act. The left brain will begin to ask questions such as "am I doing this right?" and "what on earth am I doing here?". Or it will make statements such as "this is absurd", "this could not possibly work" and/or "this doesn't make any sense", etc.

Another way to fail is to want it too much to happen. The ego can get involved just as easily as the left brain. The ego will say "I am doing this". You are not doing anything. You are just hanging out. The ego can also get involved in very sneaky ways, e.g., by trying to direct the energy.

So how do we get the left brain and the ego out of the equation? One way is through focusing on breathing. There is a whole energy healing method based on this, Richard Gordon's Quantum Touch. If you want to learn more about doing this, read his book of the same name. Richard's breathing exercises also teach you how to strengthen the energy flow.

Another way is to keep the brain busy with other tasks. Bill Bengston's method excels at this. A description of how he keeps the brain busy can be found in his "Methods" paper in the spring 2007 issue of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine [and now his books Chasing the Cure and The Energy Cure]. Bill's method of keeping the brain busy also helps strengthen the energy flow.

In our practice groups we have tried several methods in addition to Bill's. One was meditative breathing. If you are an active meditator, this may work for you. Another is to instruct your brain to make up spontaneous images of happy and beautiful things. My brain can generate quite a collage of people laughing, dancing, and interacting in gorgeous natural surroundings. I see mothers and babies, colourful swirling dancers, oceans, mountains, and trees. Sometimes I see colourful, symmetrical geometric designs spreading from a single point into infinity. Bill's method has advantages over this, and I recommend taking one of his workshops to learn it. By the way, the Domancic folk also recommend entertaining your brain with beautiful images, to which they also add rock music. Their general idea is to be happy while you work at healing: they suggest that both the healee and the practitioner "go to the beach" in their minds during the treatment.

We have found that asking "what needs to happen here?", then remaining open for an answer that may or may not come, takes the healing to a higher level. You need patience, trust, and stillness to do this.

The best attitude for both healer and "healee" to have is a kind of open-minded, non-judgmental curiosity that expects nothing and welcomes everything.

Where to put your hands

Different modalities have different ways of going about this. Reiki has set hand positions, which you will find described and illustrated in most Reiki books. Reiki hand positions essentially follow the chakras. You work down the front and then up the back, placing your hand on each chakra for about 3 minutes.

Quantum Touch begins with generic hand positions and then goes on to "sandwiching" the area that needs to be treated. You will find this described in Richard Gordon's book.

Bill also has a few generic hand positions, such as shoulders and the solar plexus, and then instructs his students to put their hands where they are guided to.

If after "taking" this course you find your hands moving independently of your will, e.g. making spirals, or waving over the body, or making other movements of their own, then congratulations, that means we've been eminently successful, and you have now entered the Twilight Zone.

One caution about hand positions: be respectful of people's comfort zones about being touched. Always ask before you do it. And it obviously doesn't need to be said that there are certain places you should never place your hands, unless the person you are treating is your partner, and you have their permission to do it.

Feedback and caveats

The person you are treating may feel warmth, heat, coolness, electricity, magnetism, or nothing. It's helpful to have feedback, especially if you are new at this. Don't get discouraged if the person you are treating feels nothing at first. Focus on your end of things (positive flow, breathing, getting out of the way) and something may happen.

I would suggest starting with small things like cuts, scrapes, sprains, sore backs, and minor sports injuries. Pets are also great candidates, whatever their ailment. I personally have never been very successful with colds and headaches, although if I wake up in the middle of the night with a burning throat, which usually indicates the onset of a cold, I can usually prevent the cold by putting my hands on my throat for a while and letting the energy run. I have, however, been very successful with injuries. Individual talents can vary.

You can work effectively with people who are skeptical about the concept of healing energy, but I would not recommend treating people who are out to prove to you that it cannot possibly work. Their attitude will simply block the flow of energy and discourage you.

If at any point either you or the person you are treating become uncomfortable with the treatment, stop immediately. Energy healing cannot do harm, but people's levels of comfort about doing or receiving it vary, and must be respected.

After doing a treatment, always wash your hands in cold water and intend to cut the energetic connection between yourself and the person you've been treating. This will prevent you from picking up their symptoms.

Please do not ever diagnose, or prevent a person from seeing a doctor or from carrying out the doctor's instructions.

Follow up

To become better at this, you need to practice, practice, practice. Keep doing the qi gong exercises described in part 1 and refining your energy flow. Practice getting out the way (it's the hardest thing to learn). The more you can get out of the way after setting the intention to become a clear channel, the more effective you will be.

If this "introductory course" has whetted your appetite to learn more, find a course in energy healing near you. If you live in southern Ontario, and you are curious about what we are doing, feel free to contact me. You can also contact me, wherever you live, if you have any questions or feedback.

Energy Healing 101 - A free online "introductory course" - Part 1

2009-02-05T09:59:00.018-05:00

This is being offered for your information only, and it is not in any way intended to replace the services and advice of a qualified physician.

Introduction

Energy healing is actually quite easy to learn. Most courses begin with a history of the technique being taught, followed by preparation to receive the "teaching", instruction in the technique, one or several "attunements" (which the participants may or may not be told about), instruction on how to apply the method, and finally ethical considerations on using the method, which chiefly boil down to "thou shalt not advise the client not to seek orthodox medical care" and "make no claims of being able to heal anything".

This techique has no history, inasmuch as it is a basic energy healing primer not relying on any single school of teaching. But I will give some basic "science" that should make all this much easier to learn.

Biologist James Oschman discovered the existence of "energy healing" after he hurt his back through years of bending over microscopes and an energy healer fixed it. Oschman then asked himself "what is this, how does it work, and why haven't I heard about it?" and went on to devote his time as a scientist to studying the phenomenon.

In his book Energy Healing: The Scientific Basis Oschman proposes that we, humans, arrived on this planet as a species hardwired to be able to perform and receive energy healing. I am no scientist, and I may be hopelessly mangling his argument, but from what I understand Oschman suggests that energy healers first concentrate the earth's extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic fluctuations (called the Schuman Resonance), possibly through their pineal gland, and then emit this energy out through their hands. The energy has been measured, and has been shown to be more powerful than expected. (link to Oschman chapter)

Oschman's hypothesis seems to be confirmed by some of Bill Bengston's mouse experiments, in which geomagnetic probes set around the cages of sick mice showed that the earth's geomagnetic micropulsations, which normally show up as a random pattern of spikes, became a visibly organized series of waves (referred to as "negative entropy") at the times the mice were being healed.

What you need to take away from the above is that a lot of people, including some scientists with impressive academic credentials, believe that being able to heal through bioenergy is an innate human ability. So essentially you are not so much learning something new here as having something awakened in you that is already there.

I have noticed that children readily feel the energy (and react to it with joy and a sense of discovery) but that adults tend to be less able to feel it. In fact a young man I watched growing up from the time he was a child still felt it at the age of 9 or 10, but lost the ability by the time he hit puberty. My sense of it is that we Westerners tend to live in our heads, except when we are pursuing pleasure, and even within our heads we tend to favour our left brains. The ability to sense bioenergy is in the domain of the body and the right brain, so no wonder most of us are not aware of it.

Preparation

I propose to begin with some sensitizing and energizing exercises that come from Qi Gong, a Chinese form of healing that is the great-grand-daddy of most energy healing modalities. In China of old, as in China today, longevity was much prized. The ancient Daoists, to whom we owe the beginnings of Chinese medicine, worked out numerous exercises designed to heal the body and to prevent disease. They believed that human beings did not only take in nourishment through food and water, but also from the earth and from the sky, as trees do. In fact the most basic Qi Gong exercise you can learn and practice is called "Standing like a tree". (link: see second video).

The first exercise
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, with your spine straight and all your joints slightly bent. As you breathe in, circle your arms up as if you were gathering in the air above your head, and as you breathe out slowly bring your hands towards your crown and then gently lower your hands holding them about 6 to 12 inches in front of you as if you were washing your front with the air you gathered. Next open your arms wide at chest level as you breathe in and slowly gather in the air in front of you into your heart as you breathe out; and again lower your hands. Next bend down, open your arms wide, and scoop up the air from around your feet, bringing your hands towards your lower abdomen. Rest your hands on your lower abdomen and concentrate on breathing into your belly for a few breaths. Your intention as you do this exercise is to gather in the life energy (chi or qi) from all around you, above, in front, and below.

Repeat this a few times.

A somewhat more complex version of this exercise can be viewed on the Guo Lin Chi Gong website (the sixth video from the top, entitled "Three Part Gathering").

The second exercise
Stand in the same posture: legs shoulder-width apart, spine straight, joints slightly bent. This time hold your arms at belly button level, as if you were holding a child's ball in front of your abdomen. The fingers and wrists, like all other joints, should be soft. Now imagine that you are growing deep roots into the earth. To use another metaphor, imagine that the earth is a giant battery charger, and you've just plugged yourself into it. You are going deep enough to get past all the pollution to the primal earth. As you breathe in, bring earth energy up through your roots, up your legs, up your spine, up to the top of your head, and as you breathe out, let the energy roll down your front to gather into your hands. Again, breathe in, bring the energy up to the top of your head, and as you breathe out, let it roll down and gather in your hands.

After a few breaths you may begin to feel something in your hands -- warmth, or buzzing, or magnetism, or electricity. That is chi or qi (ki in Japanese), or life energy.

Lift this energy up (or if you don't feel it, lift up the imaginary ball you are holding), over your stomach, your chest, and your neck; wash your face with it, wash your eyes, massage the top of your head; then push the energy in through your crown, and, breathing out, slowly lower you hands. The general idea is to feel the energy filling you up as you breathe out and lower your hands. You could visualize it as a white or golden energy, and you could visualize the stale energy that it is pushing out through your feet as gray or brown.

Repeat this a few times.

If you still don't feel energy coming from your hands, then clap your hands together vigorously, and rub your palms against each other. Do it three times. Now hold your hands 6 to 8 inches apart and see what you feel.

These are great exercises to do even if you do not intend on learning how to do energy healing. The Chinese believe that most illness is caused by stuck energy. Keep the energy moving, and you'll improve your chances of keeping illness at bay.

I will now post this, as there is sufficient information to begin. Please read Part Two to find out you how can take this ability to sense energy and apply it to healing.

Bioenergy and Cancer Web Resources

2009-01-31T20:30:00.007-05:00

Here is the practical stuff I promised. It is offered for your information only. Please note that none of this is meant to be used to replace standard medical care by your physician.

Aside from the Bengston Method, which is covered in earlier posts on this blog, one other bioenergy healing modality I know of that speaks of taking on cancer is the Domancic Method. While Bill Bengston focuses on cancer, saying that his method works on other illnesses as well, the Domancic Method (www.healingbioenergy.com) deals with a broad range of illnesses, and cancer, particularly breast cancer, is mentioned as just one of them. The video on the website briefly describes a case of breast cancer that shrank by half in a 4-day course of treatment. For people seeking practitioners, the same problem applies to the Domancic Method as to the Bengston Method: there are relatively few practitioners in North America, and most of them are quite new. Practitioners are not advised to try to treat metastatic cancer until they have at least one year of consistent practice under their belt. (Update Nov. 2011 - there now some Domancic practitioners with sufficient experience - consult info@healingbioenergy.com for practitioners in the U.S. or overseas, or contact me for names of practitioners in Toronto.)

Three other methods that have been known to affect cancer occasionally are Quantum Touch, Matrix Energetics, and Reiki. An earlier incarnation of the Quantum Touch website had a story by an MD who used Quantum Touch on a patient with breast cancer after the patient refused all other forms of therapy. The tumour shrank significantly in one session. I notice that the story is no longer on the website -- I wonder whether the MD got into trouble for posting it or for using an unorthodox therapy on a patient, or the patient's situation changed. If you troll the message board, you will not find many mentions of cancer cures.

Richard Bartlett, the founder of Matrix Energetics (www.matrixenergetics.com), has said that he does not like to attempt to heal cancer, because a) he does not believe in illness and healing, and b) cancer has too much "consensus reality" around it. Once a cancer has been CT-scanned, MRI-ed, and biopsied into full reality, its existence has solidified to the point where it is difficult to shift. There have only been reports of sporadic successes with ME involving cancer. It might be worth a try, but only with an open mind, and with no expectations of success. (Update Nov. 2011 - an associate of Dr. Bartlett's, Dr. Hector Garcia, is anecdotally reputed to be able to treat cancer.)

Reiki is an excellent modality to apply in conjunction with orthodox medical care. It eases the anxiety, side effects, and pain associated with cancer treatment. Patients receiving Reiki have been known to "sail through" radiation and chemotherapy. On occasion Reiki too has been known to make cancer vanish, but its chief benefit in most cases is to create a better treatment outcome. It has particular application in palliative care where it helps the patient on many levels -- including the emotional and the spiritual. It can also help family members cope with the stress of dealing with the serious illness of a loved one.

The great-grand-daddy of all forms of energy healing is Qi Gong. Qi Gong hails from China, and its roots are shrouded by the mists of time. It's related to Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, and to Tai Chi. In China of old, as in China now, longevity was much prized. Many exercises were developed to maintain health and to promote long life. There exist Qi Gong exercises particularly aimed at curing cancer. The Qi Gong Institute has published a scientific overview of the use of Qi Gong in the treatment of cancer (link).

One set of such Qi Gong exercises was developed by a woman called Guo Lin, who reportedly cured herself of cancer using Qi Gong. All Guo Lin instructors in China are former cancer patients. There is a highly informative website on Guo Lin Qi Gong, including free videos of the exercises. The use of these exercises for cancer patients is recommended alongside conventional Western cancer treatments including radiation and chemotherapy.

I have now tried out the exercises and I was astonished at their energetic effect. I would recommend them to cancer sufferers for the increase in energy levels that they can bring about, even if their curative effects turn out to be exaggerated.

Update, Nov. 2011: I received a beautiful qi gong meditation from a reader, John Hill, who says he used it to heal his 93-year-old mom of stage-4 cancer. Here is the link.

I will edit and update this post as I find new information.