The purpose of this blog is purely educational. It does not advise any reader to forgo medical treatment for any condition. It describes methods that have not yet been proven effective through widespread scientific testing. Readers who are concerned about their health are advised to contact their physician.
Showing posts with label quantum touch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quantum touch. Show all posts

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.

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.

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.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Bengston bioenergy and other modalities

A little discussed or understood aspect of Bengston bioenergy is the possible energy transfer that occurs during the workshops. (People who can "see" energy report that they can actually observe this happening.) Reiki folk call this transfer an "attunement" and it is what Reiki teaching is based on. It also occurs in Buddhism, allowing the teacher to take the student to higher levels of understanding. This energy transfer in the workshops makes me wonder whether any of these methods could be effectively learned through written instructions alone.

Before I ever met Bill I was already what is called a "Reiki master", which simply means that I've been attuned to teach Reiki to others. When I met Bill he very generously shared the energy with me and described his technique. When I returned home, attuned to the energy but less than proficient at the technique, I found that my energy treatments had changed. I also found that whenever I encountered or taught another Reiki practitioner, the energy would readily flow to them. They too found that their treatments changed, even though they, like me, were not at all proficient at the actual technique.

As a practitioner of a number of modalities, I find that they all seem to have different energy signatures, or different "frequencies". I have had clients who could, for instance, tell the difference between Reiki and Quantum Touch. They told me that Reiki felt light, diffuse and ethereal, while QT had weight and warmth. Medical qi gong (or chi gung) in turn produces an energy that can feel heavy and magnetic, like a million minuscule ball-bearings rolling around inside one's body.

Bill says that what he accesses is "source energy", and that other modalities (and even religious experiences) use various filters to access the same energy. The use of different filters would explain the difference in "frequencies".

At a recent workshop we had a number of participants who also do "shamanic journeying". Shamanic journeying, taught by Sandra Ingerman, who has also written a book of the same title, is based on age-old shamanic practices designed to contact helpers in the spirit world. It is the oldest form of "medicine" in the world. One of the practices is called (among other things) "calling in the ancestors" and it involves the generation of spontaneous sound. At the workshop attended by the "shamanic journeyers" we were practicing Bill's technique on one another when suddenly spontanous sound arose, grew, and built to a beautiful crescendo before diminishing into silence. The spontaneous sounding has since happened in some of our practice evenings as well.

It makes sense that something that comes from the "source energy" would have affinity with all energy practices. I am looking forward to the on-going journey of finding out what else is possible.