Update on June 9th post

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

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 ...

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 ...

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"

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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

Here is the trailer:



Here is a quote from the press release:

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

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

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

Bioenergy healing is the wave of the future.

Spiritual dimensions in bioenergy healing

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

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

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

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

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

We are more than bodies after all.

How should healing be taught?

Why healing modalities become diluted over time

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

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

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

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

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

What about "cycling"?

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

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

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

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

A "new" kid on the block

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

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

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

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

Love, bioenergy, and miracles -- part 2

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

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

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

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"

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 -- Healing Others

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 - Healing Self

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. This section focuses on basics and "healing self". For healing others, see Part 2.

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, as it does not rely 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 he was healing 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 receiving healing.

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, and as you breathe out slowly bring your hands towards your crown as if your were pulling down the air you gathered up above you and then gently lower your hands in front of you as if you were washing your front with the air. Next open your arms wide at chest level as you reach out and slowly gather the air in front of you and bring it into your heart; and again lower your hands and wash your torso with the air you gathered. Next bend down, open your arms wide, and scoop up the air from around your feet, bringing your hands towards your lower abdomen. Finally, 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. If you feel an energy ball, you can now use it to energize any part of your body that is unwell or injured.

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 others.

Bioenergy and Cancer Web Resources

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.

Bioenergy and Cancer

Cancer as an "energy parasite"

It has long been my opinion that cancer is an energy disease. That is why it has been so difficult to find a cure for it, because researchers have simply been coming at it from the wrong angle, focusing ever more minutely on ever smaller disease entities, and trying to find a separate solution for each particular cancer when there are too many kinds to count.

Think of cancer as an energy parasite: something that finds a way to corrupt the cells of the human body so they funnel the patient's life energy to feeding and growing the cancer. Existing treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation simply make the host inhospitable to the parasite, but at great cost to the host itself. In most cases the parasite simply goes dormant in response to treatment and then returns with a vengeance when the host recovers and once again becomes a potentially hospitable environment. I seem to recall some research that mentioned finding "super-cancer" cells that were not affected by treatment and triggered other cells to become cancerous; these "super-cancer" cells may be just the parasite I am talking about here.

At any rate, it has now been my experience that energy healing does affect cancer. It doesn't seem to matter what kind of cancer it is. Certain forms of bioenergy in sufficiently strong doses do something to cancer that makes it behave differently from the way it normally does. Or maybe it's the body that's persuaded behave differently than it normally does with cancer. We do not know whether bioenergy healing provides a boost of life energy that allows the body to tackle the cancer, or a burst of information about what's "normal," making the body recognize the cancer as "not normal" and act upon it. It could be both. Or in some cases it could be a quantum event, where one moment there is cancer, and the next moment there is not. Before you scoff, I've heard of this happening, and I've also met someone to whom it has happened. "There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio."

So bioenergy does affect cancer, but at the moment we are still wearing diapers when it comes to our ability to use it. Most treatments and information downloads are too weak to do much more than make the cancer patient feel better. But there are now some bioenergy therapies, such as the Bengston Method and the Domancic Method, that seem promising in terms of increasing survival.

When I first found Bill Bengston's "mouse" paper ("The effect of the 'laying on of hands' on transplanted breast cancer in mice") and read his astonishing results (87.9% remission in a cancer known to be 100% fatal) I had two thoughts. One was that someone finally had the guts to test bioenergy healing on something that really mattered (usually it's tested on Mickey Mouse stuff such as "adjunctive opioid relief", "effect on anxiety" or "post-operative wound healing") and two, that maybe we have made an evolutionary leap as a species and could suddenly use energy to heal cancer. From the 1960s to 2000 no healer given this mouse model other than Bill could cure the cancerous mice. But maybe since then we have made an evolutionary leap. Maybe others can do it too. (Mehmet Oz asked this question, too, in his recent interview with Bill.)

Not to take anything away from Dr. Bengston, but would it not be a grand thing for the world at large (and especially for cancer sufferers) if we were to find out that his ability was not unique and special, but something more wide-spread than we thought? That the potential exists in a substantial segment of the population, and we just haven't thought of trying it yet, or we just don't know how?

Energy healing in a Sheldrake-ian world model

I am hearing of more and more people suddenly discovering an ability to heal with their hands. I am also seeing more and more healing modalities popping up on the internet. What I find truly amusing is that almost every person who discovers it thinks that they are the only one and many then proceed to give the thing a name and try to sell it.

A few years ago a chiropractor from a state that shall remain unnamed discovered an ability to do distance adjustments. He would "see" what was wrong and then fix it without having to touch the person, or without even having to be in the same physical location. He put up a website on which he described his ability and encouraged people to phone him with their ailments. He was a decent guy: he asked for payment only if the treatment worked, and he left it up to his phone-in patients to be honest enough to pay him. But the board of chiropractors of the unnamed state began to huff and puff that this was not the way chiropractic was meant to be done, and they threatened to withdraw his licence. Soon his website was gone. I have no idea what happened to him. But other chiropractors from other states, such as Richard Bartlett (Matrix Energetics) and Erik Pearl (Reconnective Healing), did rather better for themselves with the modalities they discovered.

It does make sense to me that as more and more people learn, develop and discover the ability to heal, a small, and growing, number of those people might also be able to affect cancer. It is also likely, in a Sheldrake-ian model of the world, that the more of us know how to do this, the more it will become part of the information field "out there", and the better we will become at it as individuals and as a species. That would mean that energy healing is the up-and-coming thing. Good news all around, I should think.

Change of focus

In the coming days and weeks look for a broadening of focus in this blog to include a wider range of information on the use of bioenergy therapies in the treatment of cancer. While the Bengston Method remains the bioenergy healing modality most focused on cancer, and the only one proven in laboratory studies to work on cancer in mice, other methods have also claimed some successes, and can be safely used to provide support to patients receiving conventional cancer treatments. Having realized that there was a need to have all the information available for use in one place, I will now take the time to make as much of it accessible as I can, by and by.

There will still be regular updates on my experiences and thoughts on using the Bengston Method.

Practical challenges -- part 3 -- and some partial successes

Some practical challenges, or maybe I should say frustrations ....

1) You begin to treat someone who has incurable cancer. Over a few weeks the condition begins to improve, at which point the doctor pricks up his ears and decides that the patient now has a fighting chance and should go for last ditch experimental chemotherapy. You can't say to the patient "don't go for experimental chemotherapy", but once the person starts getting chemo, you are pretty much done. You can't continue treatment during chemotherapy, and your effectiveness is limited afterwards by the damage that the chemo has caused. Altogether I'm not sure whether the patient will be better off.

2) We are now looking at three cases where the MRI shows soft, new tissue around or under the tumour. The doctors can't figure out what this tissue is. We think it has something to do with our treatment, but we don't know. It seems consistent with how Bill describes the treatment working, but there is no experimental evidence of any sort to back it up.

3) Someone is looking at cancer surgery a few months down the road. They know about what we do. They wait until the 11th hour and then ask us to treat it. Why wait that long? Because they don't believe that what we do will work, and they don't want to make a long-term commitment and then have the disappointment of failure. But just on the off-chance that it might work magically, they'll try it at the last minute. Failure is almost guaranteed ....

4) We ran out of time with two cases of breast cancer. The good news is that in both cases the original option was a mastectomy, and the actual surgery that happened was a lumpectomy. But once a diagnosis has been confirmed, doctors are highly reluctant to re-test. MRIs are expensive and biopsies are invasive, and cancer is not expected to diminish or to go away on its own. So it is entirely possible to encounter a hypothetical scenario in which a tissue biopsy after the mastectomy turns up no cancer. This would be very much a good news/bad news scenario. No cancer is good news, but .... We have a to find a way to work in concert with the medical establishment. (PS: In both cases we found out that we did affect the cancer. In one case the affected tissue was less extensive than what was shown in the original MRI; in the other the cancer was found to be a lot less aggressive than the biopsy indicated.)

Practical challenges -- part 2

My one beef with the Bengston bioenergy healing method is the very real possibility that you can take a workshop, learn this wonderful thing that purportedly can be used to heal cancer, and then be set loose, with no follow-up and no supervision, to play. And chances are you won't have a clue what you are doing.

Bill reminds me of the man who used to own the keelboat sailing club where I was a member many years ago. This man had grown up around boats and everything about sailing was as easy and natural to him as walking or eating a sandwich. He just assumed that everyone else was the same way. We could do things with his boats no other owner would dream of allowing people to do. We took them out in storms, in fog, in six to ten foot waves. Heck, we were doing a sailing marathon the night the tail end of Hurricane Andrew came through town. We certainly learned how to sail in all conditions, but quite often we nearly killed ourselves doing it, and I recall at least one occasion where we almost sank a boat. At any rate, the reason Bill reminds me of this man is that healing comes so naturally to him that he imagines that once you learn his technique, it will be just as easy for you.

I would, however, like to put forward, ever so tentatively, the idea that it is not the same thing to go forth and play with boats as it is to go forth and play with cancer. Cancer is a teensy bit more serious than that. So a little bit of supervision would be good thing. Here in Toronto we have our monthly practice groups, which Bill for a while attended by speaker phone. This follow-up was very valuable. Now there are a number of us who know the method well enough to offer help or advice, but we could still use some supervision. I know of another location where there seems to be a similar kind of follow-up, but in another city they have set up "healing teams", which to me sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind. In the early days Bill was happy to offer his time to help or give advice, but I can see that as the workshops proliferate, this would be logistically more and more difficult to do.

The problem is that each and every one of us practicing the method has to reinvent the wheel. Things happen, and we have no clue what they mean, because we have never seen them before. Whereas if there were a body of learning, or evidence, that we could turn to, such as a textbook, we could say "aha, this is what this means -- this type of tumour often gets bigger before it becomes consumed." Or, "aha, this type of labtest result has been seen with this kind of cancer before". But instead, we grope around in the dark with no idea of what's happening.

For instance, with our pancreatic cancer patient, who had a ten week remission that included the reversal of most of the life threatening symptoms of his cancer, and a return to near-normal kidney and liver function (which is huge), we found that while he was getting better, which presumably meant that the cancer was going away, the tumours did not diminish at all -- in fact, they grew. So how is it possible that his body was behaving as if the cancer were in remission while it was still there? A skeptical MD acquaintance of mine, who followed the case, interpreted it like this: "That is amazing! The body is encapsulating the malignancy to protect itself!" There is a distinct possibility that what we are doing is counteracting the malignancy of the cancer by prompting the body recognize the tumour as something foreign and harmful, and barricade it for self-protection, so it can then deal with it in its own good time. Do we know this for a fact? No. Has anyone studied it? No. Does it need to be studied? You bet. Because when the patient then goes for a CT-scan or an MRI, all that will show is that the tumour has gotten bigger. But we will not know how the tumour has changed in composition, and what kind of tissue there is around it. There will just be a huge panic because clearly the tumour is growing, followed by loud calls for allopathic interventions such as radiation and chemo, and how can you blame anyone for reacting like that? What manner of reassurance can we offer, with no body of evidence to explain what's happening?

That is why I say we are dealing with something experimental here. A lot more work needs to be done. I hope someone comes forward to offer Bill the wherewithal to do the (many) experiments that need to be carried out. It might be also helpful for people from the various centres where there have been workshops to hook up to compare notes. That is one of the reasons for having this blog -- to give some of our experiences, and to hear back from others who also do the work.

In the meantime, if you go out to play on a boat in a windstorm, be careful, wear a life jacket, and have a good sail.

Here are some relevant links: Practical Challenges, Part 1, How effective is Bengston bioenergy?, Case study #2, Case study #1

Dose response

We had some bad news yesterday. One of our clients has had some negative test results. This client has an aggressive cancer for which the only available treatment is palliative chemotherapy and radiation when the cancer gets bad enough to interfere with quality of life. So far our patient's quality life has been near-normal, but the test results gave us all a bit of a jolt.

This being a serious cancer, we were seeing the patient 4 to 5 times a week up until mid-December, when holidays and inclement weather began to cut into the frequency of the treatments. The November test results were still fine, so I have to assume that cutting down on the frequency of treatments was the reason for the deterioration.

This brings up the issue of "dose response". Just how much treatment do you need?

Although Bill says in the workshops that serious, metastasized cancers need a lot of treatment, up to even hours a day, one can still manage to come away thinking that this somehow ought to be fast and easy. At the beginning I was wildly optimistic about treatment time. Now I am more realistic, but I still don't know how much is enough.

Last summer I was treating someone for lymphoma once a week. I had a sense that the weekly session was the bare minimum, but the patient was not ready to commit to more. Sure enough when we skipped a week the lymphoma "acted up". The patient then terminated treatment because it "didn't work", even though test results showed that the lymphoma had gone from "grade 2" to "grade 1" (for some reason the improvement was dismissed as a fluke).

Bill has done experiments with mice on dose response. He has found that with weekly distance treatments 40% of the mice still survive. (Here is a link to a brief commentary on the study by one of the researchers, providing a few more details.) In Bill's initial experiments the mice received one hour of treatment a day for about 35 days. The speed of remission was found to be a function of metabolic rate: the larger the animal, the slower the remission. People are a lot bigger than mice. Once you start treating someone, chances are you'll be treating them for a long time.

Since I've been thinking of this method in terms of "standard of care", the sheer amount of treatment time needed seems to be an obstacle. With today's treatment methods, patients get hooked up to IV-lines dispensing chemo, and little manpower is needed to monitor them (I am assuming, rightly or wrongly, that one oncology nurse can monitor 3 or 4 patients -- please correct me if I'm wrong). Sometimes chemo is just a question of popping a little pill. In contrast, with Bill's method treaters would need to spend hours providing one-on-one care. On the upside, however, we might be dispensing with the need for the kind of care where hours are spent with multiple professionals dealing with a single patient, such as in surgery, or where expensive equipment is needed to provide treatment, such as with radiation. The biggest upside, of course, would be an improvement in the patient's quality of life instead of the dreadful side effects of radiation and chemo. But it's early days yet: so far I'm only dreaming.

One more time, with feeling (some thoughts on "selling" Bill)

Today I found another ad for a Bill workshop on the internet, reproducing, in part, the text of one of my own original ads for the workshops and amending it to make it sound like we were curing people as successfully as Bill's skeptical trainees cured the mice in his experiments. Here is the text in question:

William Bengston is the first person in the history of cancer research to bring about full life-span cures of cancer in laboratory mice using energy healing. To date there have been 10 experiments at five universities including two medical schools. In the first four experiments 87.9% of laboratory mice injected with a form of cancer known to be 100% fatal recovered, lived their full lifespans, and showed immunity to reinjections of the cancer. In later experiments recoveries were closer to 100%. His method has been applied successfully to humans with a wide range of conditions. Dr. Bengston has taught his method extensively and successfully to trainee healers, all with similar success rates.

The last two sentences have been added to my original text. The last sentence is patently untrue, as it implies that trainees are able to heal humans with nearly 100% success rates. This has simply not been the case in our experience. Since I am the communication hub for over 100 people who took the workshops in Canada, and I am in regular contact with the 30 or so who come to practice sessions, if we were healing people with nearly 100% effectiveness, I'd be the one of the first to know. I wish it were that easy!

So one more time, with feeling: The teachability of the Bengston method has been tested in experiments with mice. Skeptical volunteers who were taught the method healed mice, not people. Their success rate over the course of 3 experiments was 85.7%. We are not yet seeing the same results with Bill's trainees curing cancer in people. Humans are far more complex than mice.

By all means, take the workshop. It's a fun workshop, it's a valuable workshop, but don't take it under the misconception that it is fully proven with people when it is not. We are still working on that part and you can choose to be a part of the experiment by participating in a workshop and practicing the method for yourself. If you see claims that teachability has been proven in treating human cancers, ask for details. It may be that I'm not aware of everything that's going on. Or it may be that the organizers have simply not bothered to cross their "t"s and dot their "i"s and are making claims they cannot possibly substantiate.

Being of a somewhat mischievous nature, I would suggest that you make the organizers work a little before you sign up. For instance, if they claim that the method heals all manner of human ailments, including severe psychiatric disease, ask them just what kind of ailments and psychiatric disease they are talking about, how many cases, and who exactly did the healing. If there have been multiple workshops, the organizers ought to be able to produce some results from the people who have taken the previous workshops or at least have some idea of how they are faring using the method. They should be able to stand behind the product they are selling. Asking questions is just being a good little consumer. And again, keep in mind, that I do recommend taking the seminar.

"Resonance" vs "technique"

The factual statements come from Bill's papers and talks. The speculation based on them is mine and is put forth for consideration and debate.

Bill Bengston has shown the ability in experiments to heal mice of cancer from up to 1000 miles away. He also says that he has cured mice of whose existence he was not aware, when it was the unstated intention of his research partners to include those mice in the experiment.

When Bill published his first mouse paper in 2000 he was very enthusiastic about having proven that skeptical volunteers could be taught the method. But by the time he published his "Resonance" paper in 2007, along with the companion "Methods" paper, outlining the technique through which he taught the skeptical volunteers, he was more restrained. Then followed "Can healing be taught?" in which he stated that he had in fact not proven to his own satisfaction that he had taught his skeptical volunteers how to heal.

The fly in the ointment (and also the great marvel of it all) is "resonance". In the original experiments it was found that not only did the treated group get better, but so did mice in the control group if someone involved in the healing part of the experiment so much as looked at them. The pattern was that when reports came in of a mouse in the control group having died, someone would look in on them to see what the surviving ones looked like. After that visit the control mice all began to exhibit the same symptoms as the treated mice and then proceeded to remit to full cure. In later experiments every single mouse was cured, except for the ones that were sent to a distant lab whose location was unknown to Bill.

In the minds of orthodox researchers this means that "nothing happened". The whole point of experimental design is to have a group that receives treatment and a control group that doesn't. What proves that the treatment works is that the first group gets better and the second one doesn't. If both groups get better, the experiment is considered a failure. In this case, however, that would lead to a false result because in fact all the mice should have died.

Bill addresses the problem in his "Resonance" paper, published in the spring 2007 issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. As I understand it, what happens is that all the treatment subjects get bonded, whichever group they happen to be in, so when one group gets treated, so does the other, by proxy. Every time a mouse gets treated, so do all the others, unless they get somehow pulled out of resonance by, say, being shipped out of town, or by being treated by a self-conscious biologist.

"Resonance" not only complicates experimental design, it also muddles the issue of teachability. Not only do the mice bond, so do the healers. The way Bill puts the difficulty is to say that so long as even one person learns the method, all the mice could still be healed, and it would be unclear which particular skeptical volunteer was responsible for doing the actual healing. But I would say that "resonance" taken to its logical conclusion means that it is unnecessary for any of the volunteers to learn anything at all. If Bill can heal mice from 1000 miles away, and heal nearby mice of whose existence he doesn't know, would it not be a piece of cake for him, quite unintentionally, to heal mice being treated by his students, just by desiring to see the experiment succeed? Just a question. And here is another: what kind of experimental design would you need to rule these factors out? How do you rule out the experimenter's mind as a factor, when that mind is known to have a range of 1000 miles?

(BTW those of us who took workshops with Bill would say we definitely learned something.)

"Resonance" in workshops and other interesting places

(Speculation alert!)
We have all experienced "resonance" at places like big family gatherings, historic events like the recent U.S. election, or football or hockey games where the home town team is winning big. We suddenly become bonded into a group whole where the group becomes more important than the "I". We feel as one. We shout as one. We do the wave. We leave the confines of this little shell that is our ego and become part of a much larger whole, and it feels damn good. It lasts for a little while, and then it's over. We go back to being our normal little selves and forget about the feeling, though I suspect some part of us continues to hanker for it.

When you go to an event such as a healing workshop or a mass-market self-help event like a Tony Robbins or a Journey seminar, chances are you will also find "resonance" at work. Many of these people are masters at preparing the field for it energetically. Some do it ahead of time, others unabashedly do it right on the spot. Recently I attended a Matrix Energetics evening with Richard Bartlett. Richard danced in, in a Hawaiian shirt and a fedora, to the tune of Elton John's "Benny and the Jets". When he reached the podium he sat down on a massage table and continued swaying and dancing as he charged the room. And you could feel it. It felt absolutely marvelous, an energy that made you want to sing and dance, going straight to your heart. Non-commercial folk like the monks of the Dalai Lama do it too, in a more sacred way. The last time I saw His Holiness, they turned Toronto's 50,000 seat Rogers Centre (formerly SkyDome) into what definitely felt like a small, quiet temple (but you had to get there early).

Bill is more discrete than Richard Bartlett. He doesn't dance in (although he might in some of his American venues -- you never know). He would probably be more partial to Bob Dylan than Elton John. But he does create resonance -- and likely he does it while teaching people his mental imaging technique. It's as if having everyone in the room concentrating on the same task gives him the switch he needs. It took me a while to catch on to what was happening. I, like everyone else, was so focused on the technique that nothing else entered my mind. But after a couple of workshops I had the luxury of just watching and feeling, and I began to notice what was going on around me. It is particularly noticeable on the second day, in the form of a wonderful sense of common purpose and camaraderie. By the time the day comes to an end, we are all reluctant to leave.

And now here come the questions. What part does Bill's mental imaging technique play in the creation of resonance? Which is more important to the teaching of healing, the technique or the resonance? Are they equally important? Could Bill teach people to heal through resonance just by having them do, say, vocal exercises in unison?

Next question: which is more important to the production of a healing effect: being able to reproduce the technique or being able to get into resonance? Are they both necessary? Does one aid in the creation of the other? (I do know of someone who rates themselves quite proficient at the technique but gives a very low rating to its healing effectiveness. That would suggest an inability to get into a resonant healing state, while still doing the technique as instructed, though perhaps not well enough.)

And another one: Is the mental imaging technique the thing that allows one to become "resonant" when one is doing healing all by one's little lonesome, without the benefit of others resonating along? (As I wrote this down I had an image of one resonating all by one's little lonesome as a bell that somehow starts reverberating by itself from the inside out.)

At any rate I suspect that anything you hear or read about "resonance" is pretty much the tip of the iceberg. We ain't heard or seen nothing yet, and we definitely don't have all the answers. And that "we" I suspect includes Bill himself.

My theory is that Bill, his friend Ben, Richard Bartlett, Erik Perl et al. are all "gateways". Something has come through to them; and through them, whatever it is, it can come through to the rest of us. IMHO what we are looking at is nothing less than the next stage of the evolution of the human mind. The trick is for all these gentlemen to remember that being a gateway is a gift rather than a personal achievement, and that one does not own the passage or the energy that comes through it. And that then to go on to market one's gift like a set of Ginsu knives is to invite a proverbial karmic kick in the shin. And likewise for the rest of us the trick is to remember, when we are in the presence of the gateway, to be grateful to the source where the energy comes from, whatever that Source may be.