Remembering Zoran Hochstatter

I recently learned of the passing of Zoran Hochstatter this past August.

Zoran was a cinematographer who was drawn into the world of energy healing when he made a documentary about the Slovenian healer Zdenko Domancic and became himself a practitioner and a teacher.

Back in the oughts I took three energy healing workshops with Zoran in Toronto and Sarasota. He was then a teacher of the Domancic Method, but later he branched out on his own with a method he called PureBioenergy. A good deal larger than life and a man of strong opinions, he inspired many to learn and practice energy healing. I had huge fun at his workshops and will always remember his ready laugh and his impressive mane of hair.

The world will be a poorer place without him.

Godspeed, Zoran!

Waxing metaphysical

A few weeks ago I had a eureka moment as I came to the realization that we are not just made of cells, but that our cells are made of atoms, and that each of those atoms is perfect -- every last one of them.

I shared this realization with my (Buddhist) meditation teacher, who then added that every atom is not only perfect, but also conscious, and possessing what she called "Buddha nature," which one might rephrase in non-Buddhist terms as "partaking of the divine perfection of the whole".

So if our atoms are perfect, where does our sickness come from? It seems that imperfection creeps in through less-than-perfect interaction between all these perfect parts. But where does the imperfection of the interactions come from? I thought my teacher might say "karma," but instead she said "conditioned beliefs." "Karma" in this context does not have punitive connotations, but simply means "cause and effect," as in "if you smoke cigarettes, you might get lung cancer." "Conditioned beliefs" in turn are the parameters of your life, the rules you absorbed, beginning the day you were born from the society you were born into, creating the self-chosen prison you live in beyond whose bars you cannot see.

A number of years ago I learned a healing system called "Russian Organ Regeneration," which held that sickness was a deviation from your perfect divine blueprint, and that healing was nothing more than a return to that original blueprint. The divinity that created the blueprint was not only outside you, but also inside you; you were the co-creator of your own blueprint. Your return to health returned a small piece of divine creation to its original perfection, and the task was to return as much of the whole to its original perfection as possible.

But if perfection already underlies the whole, then the task becomes to bring perfection to the relationship of the parts within the whole. Energy healers talk of "harmonizing," Buddhists of "removing obscurations." Dr. Bengston suggests that energy healers provide not energy but information, which teaches the body the interactions it needs to return to healthy functioning. The "Russian Organ Regeneration" folks go back to the time before the initial deviation and from there follow the path of divine perfection, the unfolding of the blueprint as you and God originally intended.

Whatever the case may be, it cannot hurt to embrace the timeless perfection that lives at the core of you. Every one of your atoms is functioning as it should. Every one of them has been around for billions of years. Every one of them is immortal. And beyond that is the something that animates them all, that gives life to their dance, that existed before you were born and will continue to exist after you die, and for the time being, however long that may be, makes you you.

That's worth meditating on.

I need to re-up a post that fills me with positivity and joy

This post is from 2011, and it is about Bill Bengston's teacher, Bennett Mayrick, quite possibly one of the most talented energy healers on the planet. The post describes one of Bennett's incredible healings.

Bill was with Bennett Mayrick for only a short time, at the beginning when Mayrick first discovered his considerable healing abilities. The two then had a falling out and went their separate ways, with Bill gravitating towards research, and Ben, as this post suggests, continuing to grow his talents as a healer. For instance, when Bill worked with Bennett, Bennett could not yet heal cancer in patients who had had chemotherapy or radiation; but twenty years later he apparently could. At the beginning he also practiced what Bill Bengston now teaches as "image cycling"; but twenty years on he seemed to be doing something quite different. I am saddened that he and Bill did not reconnect in his later years, when he had two more decades of experience to draw from, and so much more to teach! But even though he is now gone, he shows us what is possible, and what is possible is mind-blowing.

A recommendation

My apologies -- I haven't written in a while. Not because there is nothing happening in the world of cancer and energy healing, but because my attention has been diverted. I now work with active young seniors who do not need treatment for cancer but have more immediate, movement related problems, such as painful knees and frozen shoulders, which, unlike cancer, can be relatively quickly fixed. I get a great deal of satisfaction from seeing immediate or almost immediate results.

Treating cancer in contrast requires both healer and client to make a long term commitment. There can be immediately noticeable benefits in the form of greater energy, increased peace of mind, and decreased levels of pain. Often there are clinical changes too, which can show up in lab test results. But regular treatments have to continue for a long time, and that requires a special degree of dedication and stamina on the part of the healer, who is dealing not only with the physical but also with the emotional and spiritual needs of a client who is facing a life-threatening illness.

Among the many people I met on my energy healing training journey, the one who has impressed me the most is my friend and colleague Ellen. I first met her twelve years ago in one of William Bengston's early trainings, and we both participated in workshops taught by Zoran Hochstatter, who now teaches PureBioenergy and back then was an authorized instructor of the Domancic Method. Unlike many of our fellow students, Ellen has kept up both her training and her practice. As she has a background in psychotherapy and social work, clients find her manner uniquely helpful and reassuring. Her energy is strong and pure, and when we work together, the synergy feels wonderful.

So I am pleased to post a recommendation from one of her clients, who writes

I first visited Ellen the week before my last round of chemo. I was low on my blood counts and had been delayed a week – my therapist recommended Ellen to help boost those counts. What I didn’t bargain for is how much Ellen’s approach would also boost my spirit. Three-plus cancer-free years later, I continue to visit Ellen monthly to maintain my physical and mental well being. Along the way, she completely healed my “clicking” shoulder from a 20 year old nagging injury and resolved other maladies such as eye floaties/dryness. Importantly, I am healthier than I have ever been and able to approach my visits to the oncologist with confidence because of Ellen’s work. Ellen has enriched my life in ways far beyond physical healing and has taught me about the critical connection between mind and body.

If I ever found myself seriously in need of healing, Ellen would be my first choice, and I don't say that lightly. Her website, worth a visit, is https://healingtransformation.ca.

Post-script to "Bladder Stone Dissolved"

In my previous post I mentioned that M.'s bladder stone was dissolved through a combination of potassium citrate and energy healing treatments. This may lead people to ask whether in fact it was the potassium citrate alone that dissolved the stone. I found a 2009 PubMed paper about the use of potassium citrate for kidney stones that might help to answer this question.

Eight patients were enrolled in the study. Each had at least one kidney stone sized 15 mm or less. The study was divided into two 6-week periods. In the first 6-week period the subjects were told to drink 1500 ml of water a day. In the second 6-week period, they were given potassium citrate and potassium bicarbonate. These were the results:

During the first period of treatment stone burden remained unchanged in all patients. On the contrary after 6 weeks of potassium citrate/bicarbonate treatment, complete stone dissolution was found in three of the patients. In the other five cases a partial dissolution was observed and in two of them complete dissolution of the stone was achieved after prolongation of the treatment for 4 and 6 month[s] respectively.

M., in comparison, had a 25 mm stone, which dissolved in 21 days.

Bladder stone dissolved

A client I will call M. was diagnosed with 2.5 cm (1 inch) bladder stone that was causing him intermittent pain and difficulty in urinating. He was scheduled to have a medical procedure called "transurethral cystolitholapaxy" in January to break up the stone. This procedure consists of

the surgeon insert[ing] a small, rigid tube with a camera at the end (a cystoscope) into your urethra and up into your bladder. The camera is used to help locate the bladder stones. A crushing device, lasers or ultrasound waves transmitted from the cystoscope can be used to break up the stones into smaller fragments, which can be washed out of your bladder with fluids.

The procedure is usually done under local anesthetic and is not painful at the time, but patients can experience discomfort afterwards, and there is also a small risk of infection or injury to the bladder.[source]

Needless to say M. was not keen on having this done. Aside from the issues of physical risk and discomfort, there was also a substantial cost involved. So he scoured the internet for natural solutions, and found a compound called potassium citrate which can help prevent and over time dissolve bladder stones. His doctor advised him, however, that for a stone as large as his, it would take a long time to work, if it worked at all.

M. decided to try the potassium citrate along with energy healing. We did 12 bioenergy sessions in two blocks of six with a break of 10 days in between. Right after the first session he reported easier urination and increased flow, which made him feel a lot better. This continued right up until the ninth session, when he once again began to experience difficulty and complained of frequent, painful urination which produced small amounts of sand residue. After the 12th session he returned to the urologist and asked for an ultrasound.

I will quote the urologist's comment on the ultrasound verbatim. This is what the urologist said:

I am sorry to tell you that there is no bladder stone.

M. was quite pleased and astonished by this, as was I. He has experienced no pain or difficulty urinating since. He is now trying to address the possible underlying causes of his bladder stone through lifestyle changes, so it does not return.

Let's get some clarity on the Bengston Method

Every once in a while I run across a forum discussion on the Bengston Method. The latest one is here. There is usually a predictable pattern as the discussion polarizes between a group of enthusiastic supporters who know next to nothing about the method except what they can find on the internet, and another group that is on principle opposed to anything "woo-woo" and calls Dr. William Bengston, the founder of the method, a charlatan.

So backed by my experiences with both Dr. Bengston and the method, I would like to offer some clarification.

Is he a charlatan?
In response to Dr. Bengston's detractors I will say that I do not believe he is a "charlatan". His mouse experiments are quite convincing, and there have been enough of them to show that there is indeed something anomalous going on. As far as mice go, it's all well and good: Dr. Bengston can demonstrably cure them. He also has visual proof of at least one human cure and might be able to produce testimonials of others. He is, however, very uninterested in treating people, so the claims he makes are not designed to make sick people flock to him as his critics charge.

Propagation, not enrichment?
What Dr. Bengston seems to be focused on is the propagation of his method and this is where things get interesting. Unlike some other teachers of bioenergy healing, he does not appear to be doing what he does to enrich himself. There are no weekly or monthly workshops of hundreds of students paying large sums to attend. He seems to be teaching mainly to see what will happen when people learn the method, and he claims, anecdotally, that some of his students are doing "amazing things".

The key word here is "some". Obviously Dr. Bengston can't keep track of all his students, but because the mouse experiments resulted in near-100% cures, the received wisdom on the internet is that the method is 100% successful. But not so fast: it's only 100% successful if you are a mouse. The track record for human beings is entirely different, because human beings are far more complex than mice. This is also true with conventional treatment: many promising anti-cancer agents that work on mice fail when applied to people. The other issue is transmission: Dr. Bengston may indeed be able to cure people of cancer, but that is no guarantee that the people he teaches will be able to do likewise.

Dr. Bengston claims in his experiments to have successfully taught the method to skeptical volunteers, who then went on to cure mice. He offers a caveat, which is that because of the way the method worked in the experiments (through something he calls "resonant bonding") he could not be sure that it was the volunteers who cured the mice rather than he himself using them as proxies. He will also say that those volunteers never tried their hand at curing humans. But in the rhetoric around the workshops these volunteers are being used as proof that the method can be taught, even though early on Dr. Bengston himself expressed some skepticism about actually "teaching" them.

An on-going sociological experiment?
So in effect Dr. Bengston's workshops seem to be an on-going sociological experiment around healing, belief, and transmission (which is fitting, because Dr. Bengston is a sociologist). The problem is that the people who attend are not going to them in this spirit but with the intent to learn a healing method that they believe is 100% successful in curing cancer. And the result is that we have graduates of these weekend workshops who then go home and post on their websites that they have learned this method, and offer treatments with the statement that Dr. Bengston says eight weekly sessions are sufficient to deal with stage-4 cancer. It's when I see these claims that I begin to see red, because I think they are firmly in the realm of snake oil. We have gone from someone curing mice in the lab over 40 years to someone who took a single weekend workshop and now believes they can reliably cure people, without ever necessarily having cured a single person.

Somewhere in the middle
Attending a workshop, however, is not a waste of time and neither is practicing the method. We found that it had a lot to offer in terms of palliation: patients treated with it had less pain and a much better quality of life, and they also (anecdotally) seemed to live longer than their doctors predicted. But I think it's less than ethical for a student of the method to offer it as something that cures and ditto to use the success of the mouse experiments as proof of efficacy in humans. Call it what it is: something experimental. Tell the truth: the 100% success rate applies to mice, not to people. Don't claim anything you cannot back up: don't say you can cure stage-4 cancer in eight weekly treatments unless you have done it, repeatedly, yourself.

So, as always, the path of truth lies somewhere between the cheerleaders and the detractors. To say that the method is 100% effective without adding "in mice" is to promote a lie; to say that it's worthless is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The best way to describe it is as something potentially helpful, a work in progress, and an intriguing glimpse of what one day might be absolutely possible.