A few weeks ago I had a eureka moment as I came to the realization that we are not just made of cells, but that our cells are made of atoms, and that each of those atoms is perfect -- every last one of them.
I shared this realization with my (Buddhist) meditation teacher, who then added that every atom is not only perfect, but also conscious, and possessing what she called "Buddha nature," which one might rephrase in non-Buddhist terms as "partaking of the divine perfection of the whole".
So if our atoms are perfect, where does our sickness come from? It seems that imperfection creeps in through less-than-perfect interaction between all these perfect parts. But where does the imperfection of the interactions come from? I thought my teacher might say "karma," but instead she said "conditioned beliefs." "Karma" in this context does not have punitive connotations, but simply means "cause and effect," as in "if you smoke cigarettes, you might get lung cancer." "Conditioned beliefs" in turn are the parameters of your life, the rules you absorbed, beginning the day you were born from the society you were born into, creating the self-chosen prison you live in beyond whose bars you cannot see.
A number of years ago I learned a healing system called "Russian Organ Regeneration," which held that sickness was a deviation from your perfect divine blueprint, and that healing was nothing more than a return to that original blueprint. The divinity that created the blueprint was not only outside you, but also inside you; you were the co-creator of your own blueprint. Your return to health returned a small piece of divine creation to its original perfection, and the task was to return as much of the whole to its original perfection as possible.
But if perfection already underlies the whole, then the task becomes to bring perfection to the relationship of the parts within the whole. Energy healers talk of "harmonizing," Buddhists of "removing obscurations." Dr. Bengston suggests that energy healers provide not energy but information, which teaches the body the interactions it needs to return to healthy functioning. The "Russian Organ Regeneration" folks go back to the time before the initial deviation and from there follow the path of divine perfection, the unfolding of the blueprint as you and God originally intended.
Whatever the case may be, it cannot hurt to embrace the timeless perfection that lives at the core of you. Every one of your atoms is functioning as it should. Every one of them has been around for billions of years. Every one of them is immortal. And beyond that is the something that animates them all, that gives life to their dance, that existed before you were born and will continue to exist after you die, and for the time being, however long that may be, makes you you.
That's worth meditating on.
Showing posts with label energy healing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label energy healing. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Monday, August 17, 2020
I need to re-up a post that fills me with positivity and joy
This post is from 2011, and it is about Bill Bengston's teacher, Bennett Mayrick, quite possibly one of the most talented energy healers on the planet. The post describes one of Bennett's incredible healings.
Bill was with Bennett Mayrick for only a short time, at the beginning when Mayrick first discovered his considerable healing abilities. The two then had a falling out and went their separate ways, with Bill gravitating towards research, and Ben, as this post suggests, continuing to grow his talents as a healer. For instance, when Bill worked with Bennett, Bennett could not yet heal cancer in patients who had had chemotherapy or radiation; but twenty years later he apparently could. At the beginning he also practiced what Bill Bengston now teaches as "image cycling"; but twenty years on he seemed to be doing something quite different. I am saddened that he and Bill did not reconnect in his later years, when he had two more decades of experience to draw from, and so much more to teach! But even though he is now gone, he shows us what is possible, and what is possible is mind-blowing.
Bill was with Bennett Mayrick for only a short time, at the beginning when Mayrick first discovered his considerable healing abilities. The two then had a falling out and went their separate ways, with Bill gravitating towards research, and Ben, as this post suggests, continuing to grow his talents as a healer. For instance, when Bill worked with Bennett, Bennett could not yet heal cancer in patients who had had chemotherapy or radiation; but twenty years later he apparently could. At the beginning he also practiced what Bill Bengston now teaches as "image cycling"; but twenty years on he seemed to be doing something quite different. I am saddened that he and Bill did not reconnect in his later years, when he had two more decades of experience to draw from, and so much more to teach! But even though he is now gone, he shows us what is possible, and what is possible is mind-blowing.
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Healing cancer in the lab - can it be done without a healer?
This talk was recorded for the 2015 Conference on the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of water. Dr. Bengston talks about in vivo experiments using mice and a variety of cancers and an in vitro experiment with leukemia cells.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
"Why nothing applies 100 per cent"
A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a blog post by Lynne McTaggart on the subject of the variability of results in alternative medicine. Lynne McTaggart points out that, in essence, nothing works 100 per cent. Things that work for some people do not make one whit of difference for others, and the big mystery is why. She comes to the heart of the issue in describing some relevant research on energy healing carried out by University of Arizona psychologist Gary Schwartz and colleagues involving a double-blind study of distant Johrei healing on cardiac patients:
Many of the modalities I learned, including Reiki, shamanism and the Bengston Method, stress that the energy healer is nothing but a conduit, a kind of telephone line between the client and the Universe. The way shamanism puts it is especially poetic: the shaman is supposed to be a "hollow reed" or a "hollow bone", through which the Universe can act and do what is needed. My experience with healing has been that the more a practitioner is able to get out of the way, the more effective he or she can be. The same is true of the patient. Disbelief, negativity, contempt masquerading as skepticism (but not true skepticism, which is open minded) all just get in the way.
After three days, the patients were asked if they had believed that they had received Johrei healing. In both the treatment and control groups, certain patients strongly believed that they had received the treatment and others had a strong feeling they’d been excluded.This is the reason why it is so difficult to prove to skeptics that energy healing works. They come to you with their arms crossed and their minds closed, and say, "prove it to me". Then, when their prejudice is confirmed, they say "I told you so. It's all just placebo". Well, Gary Schwartz's research seems to suggest that while it's all not "just" placebo, the recipient's expectations do play a significant part in the outcome.
When Schwartz tabulated the results, he discovered the best outcomes were among those who had received Johrei and believed they had received it. The wors[t] outcomes were those who had not received Johrei and were convinced they had not had it. The other two groups – those who had received it but did not believe it and those who had not received it but believed they had – fell somewhere in the middle.
This result tended to contradict the idea that a positive outcome is entirely down to a placebo response; those who wrongly believed they received the healing did not do as well as those who rightly believed they had received it.
Schwartz’s studies uncovered something fundamental about the nature of healing: not simply the energy and intention of the healing itself but also the patient’s belief that he or she had received healing and belief in the particular treatment itself promoted the actual healing.
Many of the modalities I learned, including Reiki, shamanism and the Bengston Method, stress that the energy healer is nothing but a conduit, a kind of telephone line between the client and the Universe. The way shamanism puts it is especially poetic: the shaman is supposed to be a "hollow reed" or a "hollow bone", through which the Universe can act and do what is needed. My experience with healing has been that the more a practitioner is able to get out of the way, the more effective he or she can be. The same is true of the patient. Disbelief, negativity, contempt masquerading as skepticism (but not true skepticism, which is open minded) all just get in the way.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, January 30, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, December 22, 2008
So how can you learn Bill's method?
If you are new to this blog: Bill Bengston's claim to fame is a series of experiments with laboratory mice in which he cured a significantly large percentage of the mice of a normally fatal form of cancer using a new method of bioenergy healing. In some of the experiments he used "skeptical volunteers" to whom he taught the method to do the healing. The question is whether the technique can be taught to be successfully applied to people as well. There have been a number of workshops to teach the method. For the results, see my post below, entitled "So how effective is Bengston Bioenergy?"
Can you learn Bill's method by reading about it?
When Bill published his "Resonance" article in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in the spring of 2007, he also published a companion article describing how he taught his "skeptical volunteers" to heal the mice. His detailed instructions are sandwiched between a caveat that says that it is logically possible that the healing the students produced had nothing to do with the techniques described and another that states that no one he knows of has actually learned the technique from written instructions. He ends by inviting readers to reproduce his experiments with mice to see if his results can be replicated and offering to go teach them in person.
There is a reason for Bill's caution. He doesn't yet know exactly what part the technique plays in the actual healing. Following the instructions might not in itself be sufficient to produce a healing effect. There might actually be an energy transfer, as there is in Reiki and Buddhism, that opens up a necessary pathway in the student and that requires some form of mental contact between teacher and student. The technique might simply be a tool to allow this energy transfer to take place and an anchor (in the NLP sense of the word) to help the student practice.
Can you learn Bill's method in a workshop?
Maybe. We've certainly been trying to teach people. Bill says in the workshops that the technique is complex enough that it would be arrogant of him to assume that you'll be able to get it all in one go. His "skeptical volunteers" needed six sessions spaced out over six weeks to "get it". A workshop followed by practice sessions (as we've been doing) or taking several workshops might do the trick. I would think that the learning progresses by degrees. As you get more exposure to Bill and the technique, your knowledge and your ability to heal would deepen. This is not unique to Bill's method -- it's true of anything you're trying to learn.
There are some people who already have an ability to heal that they may or may not be aware of. Such people would either discover their ability or find it enhanced just by attending a single workshop and by being exposed to the energy Bill carries and learning his method. One such person recently said that learning the technique has allowed her to be able to do healing work even when she wasn't "in the mood".
So what's the best way to learn?
Here is what Bill writes in the "Methods" article:
Finally, it must be emphasized once again that all training of the volunteer healers in these experiments took place in group settings and lasted for an average of 6 weeks. Furthermore, the techniques were molded to the idiosyncrasies of each of volunteer. However simple the techniques appear to be, every individual misinterpreted the instructions and needed correction and much practice.
I note that this generous 6-week format would also allow for repeated energy transfers along with a good deal of individual attention that is difficult to arrange in a weekend workshop involving dozens of people.
Clearly a longer course or a mentorship program would be the best way to go. It would be grand to get funding for an institute where on-going teaching and experimentation could be carried out. In the meantime other formats could be tried, such as courses lasting perhaps four or five days or mentoring via computer link-up.
Can you learn Bill's method by reading about it?
When Bill published his "Resonance" article in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in the spring of 2007, he also published a companion article describing how he taught his "skeptical volunteers" to heal the mice. His detailed instructions are sandwiched between a caveat that says that it is logically possible that the healing the students produced had nothing to do with the techniques described and another that states that no one he knows of has actually learned the technique from written instructions. He ends by inviting readers to reproduce his experiments with mice to see if his results can be replicated and offering to go teach them in person.
There is a reason for Bill's caution. He doesn't yet know exactly what part the technique plays in the actual healing. Following the instructions might not in itself be sufficient to produce a healing effect. There might actually be an energy transfer, as there is in Reiki and Buddhism, that opens up a necessary pathway in the student and that requires some form of mental contact between teacher and student. The technique might simply be a tool to allow this energy transfer to take place and an anchor (in the NLP sense of the word) to help the student practice.
Can you learn Bill's method in a workshop?
Maybe. We've certainly been trying to teach people. Bill says in the workshops that the technique is complex enough that it would be arrogant of him to assume that you'll be able to get it all in one go. His "skeptical volunteers" needed six sessions spaced out over six weeks to "get it". A workshop followed by practice sessions (as we've been doing) or taking several workshops might do the trick. I would think that the learning progresses by degrees. As you get more exposure to Bill and the technique, your knowledge and your ability to heal would deepen. This is not unique to Bill's method -- it's true of anything you're trying to learn.
There are some people who already have an ability to heal that they may or may not be aware of. Such people would either discover their ability or find it enhanced just by attending a single workshop and by being exposed to the energy Bill carries and learning his method. One such person recently said that learning the technique has allowed her to be able to do healing work even when she wasn't "in the mood".
So what's the best way to learn?
Here is what Bill writes in the "Methods" article:
Finally, it must be emphasized once again that all training of the volunteer healers in these experiments took place in group settings and lasted for an average of 6 weeks. Furthermore, the techniques were molded to the idiosyncrasies of each of volunteer. However simple the techniques appear to be, every individual misinterpreted the instructions and needed correction and much practice.
I note that this generous 6-week format would also allow for repeated energy transfers along with a good deal of individual attention that is difficult to arrange in a weekend workshop involving dozens of people.
Clearly a longer course or a mentorship program would be the best way to go. It would be grand to get funding for an institute where on-going teaching and experimentation could be carried out. In the meantime other formats could be tried, such as courses lasting perhaps four or five days or mentoring via computer link-up.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Bill and the psychic - my take on the "Bill story"
Bill met the psychic back in the early seventies, when he was still a youngster fresh out of university. The psychic was in his late forties and had just recently discovered his abilities. His talent was "psychometry" (token object reading), and he could also make clouds disappear. "Token object reading" means that he could pick up an object and tell you things about the owner that he could not possibly know. The ability to heal arose out of these token object readings, as the psychic, whose name was Ben, found that he developed the physical symptoms of the people whose property he held in his hands. Bill was the first person he healed "hands on". From there, he and Bill went on to test his abilities on all sorts of illnesses, and they found that cancer was something that he could easily cure.
The way most forms of energy healing seem to come into the world is that someone first spontaneously develops the ability and then someone else comes along and says "that's so cool, teach me!". The first person then says "I can't teach you -- I have no idea how I do this". And then the second person says "let's figure it out!" And that is how a system is then developed to teach the method. In fact the method is only an approximation of what the original person does, since the original person doesn't really do anything. The method is only there to set up the conditions to allow something to happen that with the original person happened spontaneously. As such, of necessity the method is already flawed because it is trying to imitate something spontaneous.
Bill was fortunate in that he was present as Ben's ability developed, because as it developed in Ben, it also developed in him. He also had Ben's undivided attention for a long time and could pepper him with questions. The "cycling" method developed out of him questioning Ben on what happened inside him when he did his healings. I have often wondered about this. I am pretty sure that Ben did not sit down and write down a list of 20 things that he wanted, created pictures out of them and then turned the pictures into an ever accelerating slide show in his head. If that is an approximation of what happened with Ben, then Ben must have been spontaneously generating images, IMHO. In fact when I originally spoke to Bill and he told me that he used "mental imaging techniques" in his healing, my brain started generating first geometric images and then images of happy people in beautiful surroundings, mothers and babies, people dancing etc. The images feel like a computer search, like something in my brain is scanning the universal mind for answers, and the images are the by-product of this search.
People like Ben somehow connect to the database that is the "universal mind". Another such person was Bob Rasmusson, the man on whose work Quantum Touch is based. The story goes that he could sit down and write any qualifying exam on any subject anywhere and pass with flying colours without studying. The interesting thing is that you would expect the Mother Teresas of this world to be making these connections, especially when it comes to healing. But most of the people who do are not Mother Teresas; in fact, quite the opposite. I suspect it takes a certain kind of brainwave activity to make the connection; the people who have it do, and and the people who don't have it don't. So when you learn Bill's method what you are most likely doing is developing the brainwave activity that will connect you to the universal mind.
Bill and Ben had a falling out when Bill decided to take the method to the lab, because Ben did not want to be "tested." Ben had also developed a religious bend by then that Bill did not agree with. He wanted to keep the method strictly secular. Ben wanted to open a church, whereas Bill wanted to go in a more scientific direction, so they had a parting of the ways. Ben died a few years ago in his 80s. And Bill went on to be famous among mice.
The way most forms of energy healing seem to come into the world is that someone first spontaneously develops the ability and then someone else comes along and says "that's so cool, teach me!". The first person then says "I can't teach you -- I have no idea how I do this". And then the second person says "let's figure it out!" And that is how a system is then developed to teach the method. In fact the method is only an approximation of what the original person does, since the original person doesn't really do anything. The method is only there to set up the conditions to allow something to happen that with the original person happened spontaneously. As such, of necessity the method is already flawed because it is trying to imitate something spontaneous.
Bill was fortunate in that he was present as Ben's ability developed, because as it developed in Ben, it also developed in him. He also had Ben's undivided attention for a long time and could pepper him with questions. The "cycling" method developed out of him questioning Ben on what happened inside him when he did his healings. I have often wondered about this. I am pretty sure that Ben did not sit down and write down a list of 20 things that he wanted, created pictures out of them and then turned the pictures into an ever accelerating slide show in his head. If that is an approximation of what happened with Ben, then Ben must have been spontaneously generating images, IMHO. In fact when I originally spoke to Bill and he told me that he used "mental imaging techniques" in his healing, my brain started generating first geometric images and then images of happy people in beautiful surroundings, mothers and babies, people dancing etc. The images feel like a computer search, like something in my brain is scanning the universal mind for answers, and the images are the by-product of this search.
People like Ben somehow connect to the database that is the "universal mind". Another such person was Bob Rasmusson, the man on whose work Quantum Touch is based. The story goes that he could sit down and write any qualifying exam on any subject anywhere and pass with flying colours without studying. The interesting thing is that you would expect the Mother Teresas of this world to be making these connections, especially when it comes to healing. But most of the people who do are not Mother Teresas; in fact, quite the opposite. I suspect it takes a certain kind of brainwave activity to make the connection; the people who have it do, and and the people who don't have it don't. So when you learn Bill's method what you are most likely doing is developing the brainwave activity that will connect you to the universal mind.
Bill and Ben had a falling out when Bill decided to take the method to the lab, because Ben did not want to be "tested." Ben had also developed a religious bend by then that Bill did not agree with. He wanted to keep the method strictly secular. Ben wanted to open a church, whereas Bill wanted to go in a more scientific direction, so they had a parting of the ways. Ben died a few years ago in his 80s. And Bill went on to be famous among mice.
Monday, December 15, 2008
How Bill Bengston came to teach bioenergy workshops
I found Bill Bengston on the internet in January 2007 while doing a search on Google. The search was for Oskar Estebany, the Hungarian healer on whose work Therapeutic Touch is based. I wanted to know if he could heal cancer, so the Google search read "Estebany cancer". And up popped a link to an article entitled "The effect of the 'laying on of hands' on transplanted breast cancer in mice". Bill Bengston was one of the authors. The article describes four experiments in which mice were injected with a form of breast cancer known to be 100% fatal within 27 days and then given a form of bioenergy healing taught by a New York psychic. To everyone's great astonishment 87.9% of the mice remitted to full life-span cure. When selected mice were reinjected with the cancer after their remission, the cancer didn't take. (Here is the link to the article.)
Exciting stuff! But why wasn't it headline news? The article was published in 2000, and as I was to find out later, the experiments took place over 20 years before! I contacted Bill Bengston to find out what has happened since the publication of the article and he told me that there have been other experiments with even more positive results, all in all 10 experiments at 5 different institutions, including 2 medical schools. Again, why wasn't this headline news? Apparently there was a small problem with the control mice remitting as well. As soon as anyone involved in the healings so much as looked at the control mice, they too remitted. This in the minds of some people meant that "nothing happened". Dozens of mice remitted from a cancer known to be 100% fatal, yet people scoffed that the results were meaningless.
I persuaded Bill Bengston to teach public workshops in our location. The first one was in July 2007, and consisted of a 4-hour talk about the mice and a half-hour instruction on Bill's technique, which he calls "cycling". (Dr. Bengston offered a thorough description of the technique in the Spring 2007 issue of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 13: 3, pp. 329-332, "A Method Used to Train Skeptical Volunteers to Heal in an Experimental Setting".) Later workshops (there have been five others to date) followed a two-day format, with the mice relegated to the first part of the first day followed by an introduction to the technique, with the second day mostly devoted to practice and deeper instruction. (I say "mostly" because Bill is a university professor and he does do a great deal of "professing" in his workshops. The professing is very entertaining, but also consumes a lot of time. He does eventually get around to hands-on practice, but it takes some persuasion.)
The workshops from Bill's perspective were meant to be a "grand sociological experiment" to see if people could be taught his technique well enough to heal other people of cancer. We already knew from Bill's four initial experiments that "skeptical trainees" could be taught the technique well enough to heal mice. (Or rather we thought we knew, but then Bill recently published another article entitled "Can Healing Be Taught?" in Larry Dossey's journal Explore [Volume 4, Issue 3, pp. 197-200]. In this paper he puts into question his earlier assertion that he has effectively demonstrated that "skeptical trainees" could be taught and says that the experiment did not meet a number of criteria that he now posits as necessary to demonstrate that teaching had in fact taken place. The argument is intricate, and it involves a process called "resonance", by which the mice become bonded, and so do the healers. "Resonance" in effect means that any healing given to any of the mice is given to all the mice, and the correlate is that any healing given by any of the healers might also involve the others, including Bill himself, so it is impossible to know who actually did the healings. If you take the "resonance" theory to its logical conclusion, it is in fact entirely possible that Bill did all the healings, with the students only involved as intermediaries. My concern was not so much whether the method could be taught, but to what degree of effectiveness. Would Bill's skeptical students also have been able to heal people?)
To follow up the workshops, we have had monthly bioenergy practice meetings which Bill initially attended by phone. The practice meetings usually take the format of discussion followed by hands-on practice, with people pairing off and then forming ever larger groups, until the whole group is involved in healing. These evenings are very satisfying, as we concentrate not only on developing our skills, but also on "healing the healers". The discussions have also been quite valuable, covering topics such as "healing vs. curing" and the intricacies of Bill's "cycling" method (described in the "Methods" paper). In brief, Bill's cycling method requires people to make a list of things they want, and the question that often arises is how ethical it is, since part of the reason for doing the list is to get the things that you want, to put things such as red Ferraris and large flat-screen TVs on the list, given that the planet is in such an ecological mess. The method requires the list to be "selfish", and some of us have a heck of a time doing that. A related question that comes up is whether the same result (i.e., healing) can be had by other means, say meditation instead of "cycling". We also talk about the genesis of cancer, how much of it is environmental, biochemical, emotional, psychological, karmic etc., and what needs to happen for healing to occur.
To sum up, to date there have been about a hundred people taught the method in our location. About two and a half dozen still come to the practice sessions in various configurations. People have been remarkably (or maybe not so remarkably) shy about using the method on any kind of ailment, let alone cancer. About half a dozen or so have tried the method with cancer. We have had interesting results, which will be the subject of another post.
Postscript: Here are some links to other posts in this blog that people have found interesting: Practical challenges (what we found as we started working with the method); Case study #2 (a miraculous temporary remission); Bill's teacher speaks (some excerpts from an article about Bennett Mayrick); Energy healing and the Catholic church (not a happy relationship); Love, bioenergy, and miracles - part 2 (another story from the case files); A description of Bill Bengston's mouse experiments (from an audience member at one of his talks).
And some of my personal favourites: Looking for a paradigm change in treating cancer (drawing parallels between the history of the development of penicillin and the current state of energy healing); Can healing be learned? (commenting that in fact energy healing seems to be a relatively easy thing to learn); The mind is a powerful thing (on healing and the power of the mind); Walking Through Walls (another psychic healer, a contemporary of Bennett Mayrick, heard about).
Exciting stuff! But why wasn't it headline news? The article was published in 2000, and as I was to find out later, the experiments took place over 20 years before! I contacted Bill Bengston to find out what has happened since the publication of the article and he told me that there have been other experiments with even more positive results, all in all 10 experiments at 5 different institutions, including 2 medical schools. Again, why wasn't this headline news? Apparently there was a small problem with the control mice remitting as well. As soon as anyone involved in the healings so much as looked at the control mice, they too remitted. This in the minds of some people meant that "nothing happened". Dozens of mice remitted from a cancer known to be 100% fatal, yet people scoffed that the results were meaningless.
I persuaded Bill Bengston to teach public workshops in our location. The first one was in July 2007, and consisted of a 4-hour talk about the mice and a half-hour instruction on Bill's technique, which he calls "cycling". (Dr. Bengston offered a thorough description of the technique in the Spring 2007 issue of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 13: 3, pp. 329-332, "A Method Used to Train Skeptical Volunteers to Heal in an Experimental Setting".) Later workshops (there have been five others to date) followed a two-day format, with the mice relegated to the first part of the first day followed by an introduction to the technique, with the second day mostly devoted to practice and deeper instruction. (I say "mostly" because Bill is a university professor and he does do a great deal of "professing" in his workshops. The professing is very entertaining, but also consumes a lot of time. He does eventually get around to hands-on practice, but it takes some persuasion.)
The workshops from Bill's perspective were meant to be a "grand sociological experiment" to see if people could be taught his technique well enough to heal other people of cancer. We already knew from Bill's four initial experiments that "skeptical trainees" could be taught the technique well enough to heal mice. (Or rather we thought we knew, but then Bill recently published another article entitled "Can Healing Be Taught?" in Larry Dossey's journal Explore [Volume 4, Issue 3, pp. 197-200]. In this paper he puts into question his earlier assertion that he has effectively demonstrated that "skeptical trainees" could be taught and says that the experiment did not meet a number of criteria that he now posits as necessary to demonstrate that teaching had in fact taken place. The argument is intricate, and it involves a process called "resonance", by which the mice become bonded, and so do the healers. "Resonance" in effect means that any healing given to any of the mice is given to all the mice, and the correlate is that any healing given by any of the healers might also involve the others, including Bill himself, so it is impossible to know who actually did the healings. If you take the "resonance" theory to its logical conclusion, it is in fact entirely possible that Bill did all the healings, with the students only involved as intermediaries. My concern was not so much whether the method could be taught, but to what degree of effectiveness. Would Bill's skeptical students also have been able to heal people?)
To follow up the workshops, we have had monthly bioenergy practice meetings which Bill initially attended by phone. The practice meetings usually take the format of discussion followed by hands-on practice, with people pairing off and then forming ever larger groups, until the whole group is involved in healing. These evenings are very satisfying, as we concentrate not only on developing our skills, but also on "healing the healers". The discussions have also been quite valuable, covering topics such as "healing vs. curing" and the intricacies of Bill's "cycling" method (described in the "Methods" paper). In brief, Bill's cycling method requires people to make a list of things they want, and the question that often arises is how ethical it is, since part of the reason for doing the list is to get the things that you want, to put things such as red Ferraris and large flat-screen TVs on the list, given that the planet is in such an ecological mess. The method requires the list to be "selfish", and some of us have a heck of a time doing that. A related question that comes up is whether the same result (i.e., healing) can be had by other means, say meditation instead of "cycling". We also talk about the genesis of cancer, how much of it is environmental, biochemical, emotional, psychological, karmic etc., and what needs to happen for healing to occur.
To sum up, to date there have been about a hundred people taught the method in our location. About two and a half dozen still come to the practice sessions in various configurations. People have been remarkably (or maybe not so remarkably) shy about using the method on any kind of ailment, let alone cancer. About half a dozen or so have tried the method with cancer. We have had interesting results, which will be the subject of another post.
Postscript: Here are some links to other posts in this blog that people have found interesting: Practical challenges (what we found as we started working with the method); Case study #2 (a miraculous temporary remission); Bill's teacher speaks (some excerpts from an article about Bennett Mayrick); Energy healing and the Catholic church (not a happy relationship); Love, bioenergy, and miracles - part 2 (another story from the case files); A description of Bill Bengston's mouse experiments (from an audience member at one of his talks).
And some of my personal favourites: Looking for a paradigm change in treating cancer (drawing parallels between the history of the development of penicillin and the current state of energy healing); Can healing be learned? (commenting that in fact energy healing seems to be a relatively easy thing to learn); The mind is a powerful thing (on healing and the power of the mind); Walking Through Walls (another psychic healer, a contemporary of Bennett Mayrick, heard about).
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