A recommendation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anatomy of a miracle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did David do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Bernie Siegel interviews on Mind Health Matters

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

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

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

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

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

The mind is a powerful thing - part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Bengston, Chasing the Cure: A commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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