Healers in the operating room

Dr. Oz started it, with Reiki Master Julie Motz, who was allowed to perform Reiki in his operating room while he did open heart surgery. Dr. Sheldon Feldman, chief of breast surgery at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia, followed suit. In Dr. Feldman's program patients could choose to work with a Reiki pracitioner before, during, and after breast surgery, and Dr. Feldman has said that "the positive impact [of Reiki] on healing after surgery can be potentially huge." In this article, posted by columbiasurgery.org, patients spoke of their experience in very positive terms. One patient commented that without the help of her Reiki healer she would have been overwhelmed and unaware that she could direct her own healing process. Another patient called her Reiki healer her "surgical doula" and said that her presence made procedures not only tolerable, but a healing experience.

A more recent article describes the experience of a patient in Dr. Feldman's program who healed from stage-4 breast cancer after being given two months to live. It also quotes Dr. Feldman's explanation of the usefulness of Reiki to cancer patients. "It’s not just about curing people of cancer and keeping them alive," he says, "but having less trauma in going through these difficult medical experiences is a big deal."

Reiki healer Pamela Miles (who demonstrated Reiki on the Dr. Oz show) has logged many hours treating surgical patients. Time and again she has seen patients who had been treated with Reiki turn down pain medication because they didn't need it. She has also seen them heal faster than anyone expected. She explains:

When the surgeon is finished, it’s up to the patient’s body to heal. That’s where the balancing effects of Reiki practice make such a difference. Reiki treatment soothes the shock and optimizes the body’s innate ability to heal. And when you are practicing on someone hooked up to monitors, the benefits of Reiki are often measurable: improved heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation. If patients improve faster and need less pain medication, they are able to get out of bed sooner, which helps prevent post-surgical complications. Patients receiving Reiki treatment recover bowel function faster, which means they often can go home sooner.

In short, Reiki helps.

"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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dr. Oz and the new bioenergy therapies

On January 6, 2010, Dr. Oz endorsed Reiki on his show as something all Americans should try in the coming year as part of their health care regimen. And now he is endorsing Dr. Issam Nemeh, a former anasthesiologist turned acupuncturist who helps people heal by praying over them.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the show on Reiki caused a fellow doctor to write that Dr. Oz has "gone over to the dark side", abandoning sound medical principles in favour of promoting woo-woo. But has he really?

Reiki and its cousin Therapeutic Touch have been gaining increasing acceptance in hospitals as "adjunctive therapies", or as therapies that can help patients navigate their hospital experience with greater ease and comfort. Reiki and TT have been shown to reduce pain and anxiety and to speed recovery from surgery and other hospital procedures. In current practice Reiki and Therapeutic Touch complement orthodox medicine as nurses complement doctors.

Healers such as Dr. Issam Nemeh who pray over patients also complement medical practice by adding a spiritual element and offering comfort. And if it so happens that in a number of these cases a miracle, or a spontaneous remission, occurs, in what way can that be construed as harmful, either to the patient or to the medical profession? You could say that Dr. Nemeh complements the work of other physicians as a chaplain would, although he seems to be rather more successful at healing than your average chaplain.

In a radio interview on WDOK radio Dr. Oz spoke of being impressed with Dr. Nemeh's sincerity, and of considering that sincerity as being more important than results. Dr. Oz is eminently practical: from this practical perspective if something can help a patient along a healing journey, as for instance Reiki in the operating room, then that something should be made available and not be discounted because it's not part of the orthodox or accepted medical route. At the same time, his position is that he would not send a patient with lung cancer to Dr. Nemeh to be cured solely by prayer. Prayer, like Reiki, is adjunctive.

But now there are energy therapies coming up on the horizon that go beyond being merely adjunctive to orthodox medicine and its standardized toolkit of drugs, surgery and radiation.

Dr. Larry Dossey, author of numerous books on alternative medicine, speaks of there being three "Eras" in medicine. Era I is "mechanical medicine", or the traditional medical practices that treat the body as a biochemical machine. Era II is "mind-body medicine" that recognizes the importance of psychology and practices such as meditation in creating well-being. Era III medicine is "non-local" or "consciousness based", which would be where Reiki and Dr. Nemeh fit in.

In describing Era III medicine Dr. Dossey proposes that

consciousness is not confined to one's individual body. Nonlocal mind -- mind that is boundless and unlimited -- is the hallmark of Era III. An individual's mind may affect not just his or her body, but the body of another person at a distance, even when that distant individual is unaware of the effort. You can think of Era II as illustrating the personal effects of consciousness and Era III as illustrating the transpersonal effects of the mind.

In Era III medicine the mind or consciousness of one person can heal the body of another.

In Dr. Dossey's view these three "medicines" will coexist peacefully for the benefit of patients and humankind. But it is my opinion that in this future of peaceful coexistence doctors may have stop relegating energy medicine into an adjunctive role to drugs and surgery. The new energy therapies are on their way to being powerful enough entirely on their own. Dr. Bengston, for instance, insists on patients being under a doctor's care while receiving energy treatment, but sees his therapy as a stand-alone proposition and speaks of chemotherapy and radiation as being hindrances to its effectiveness. The Domancic Method also works with physicians, and views them as being essential for the diagnosis and monitoring of patients, but sees their chief role as providing diagnosis, not treatment. In Era III medicine doctor and energy healer work as equal partners.

I wonder how the doctors critical of Dr. Oz's endorsement of Reiki would feel about that proposition. Here is my message to some of them: An Open Letter to Oncologists.

Postscript: Here is a video on the Domancic Method:

Energy healing and the Catholic church -- or "the Pope butts his nose in"

Recently we were treating a patient with stage 4 cancer. We were recommended to him for our ability to control pain and improve quality of life. We treated him three times, and each time he signalled that he had obtained significant pain relief.The day after the third treatment he was stronger and far more alert than he had been since the first time we had seen him. Then suddenly a wall went up and we were told our services were no longer needed. No explanation was given. The turnabout was so sudden and unexpected that we wondered whether there had been some kind of intervention. We were aware that the patient had received bad news and we assume that the bad news was that he was terminal. We now take a leap of imagination and go on to wonder whether he then spoke to a priest and was then told that what we were doing to him was unchristian. This is a leap of imagination; we don't actually know that this is what happened. I just can't for the life of me understand why someone with terminal cancer would turn down the opportunity to feel better without a strong philosophical reason. And of course we have to respect patients' choices, whatever they may be. As a friend of mine said, we can't negotiate dying, but we can negotiate how we die, or rather how we live until the moment of dying.

It seems that the Catholic establishment has a wee bit of a problem with energy healing. It summarily ignores Christ saying to his apostles in the Bible "all this ye shall do and more" and questions where the healing comes from, attributing it to suspect or even possibly malevolent forces.

This is from the March 31 2009 issue of the Guardian:

Reiki, an alternative Japanese therapy with a growing band of followers in the west, is "unscientific" and "inappropriate" for use in Catholic institutions, according to America's bishops.

Guidelines issued by the committee on doctrine at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops warn healthcare workers and chaplains that the therapy "lacks scientific credibility" and could expose people to "malevolent forces".

The document also claims that for a Catholic to believe in reiki presents "insurmountable problems".

Reiki means "universal life energy" and was developed by the theology professor Dr Mikao Usui at the turn of the 20th century, from Buddhist beliefs and Sanskrit teachings. The client lies on a couch, clothed and relaxing, while the therapist's hands rest lightly on the body in a special sequence. Clients often report heat and tingling sensations.

The church's guidelines state: "A Catholic who puts his or her trust in reiki would be operating in the realm of superstition, the no man's land that is neither faith nor science. Superstition corrupts one's worship of God by turning one's religious feeling and practice in a false direction."

The document goes on to state that since reiki therapy is incompatible with Christian teaching and scientific evidence, "it would be inappropriate" for Catholic institutions, such as healthcare facilities and retreat centres, or people representing the church, such as chaplains, to promote or provide support for it.

We should note at this point that the church's problem with Reiki is likely not lack of scientific evidence. It took the Vatican only 400 years to accept Galileo's scientific evidence that the Earth revolved around the Sun, so one could not exactly call the church a pillar of empirical scientific inquiry. It is amusing to read that worshippers who dabble in Reiki are engaging in superstition right after the warning that Reiki may expose them to "malevolent forces".

What we do is not specifically Reiki, but all energy therapies tend to be lumped under the heading "Reiki" by people who do not practice them. The problem seems to be that Reiki is "New Age" and "New Age" thinking is inappropriate for Catholics. (Click here for the Reiki response.) At any rate, this is the same church that is happy to let its people live in poverty or suffer from AIDS so long as they don't use condoms, so why should it be more humane about the manner of their dying? As I said to one of my colleagues, who was disappointed about the outcome of our treatment of this patient, we are lucky that the world has changed enough that "they" are not coming to cart us away to throw us on the pyre.

Energy Healing 101 - A free online "introductory course" - Part 2 -- Healing Others

This is offered for your information only and is in no way intended to replace the advice and services of a qualified physician. Please read the previous post (part 1) before proceeding with any of the practice in part 2. Please treat the information you read here as any set of instructions you would read in a book. Use it with full awareness that you are responsible for your own health and your own level of comfort in applying what you read. This particular post refers to generic energy healing, not energy healing specific to cancer. It is not a description of the Bengston method.

Having done the exercises in part 1, you may now be sensitized to feeling energy coming from your hands. One purpose to the exercises was to make you aware of this energy, which in fact is always there and available to be called upon. As I said before, we Westerners tend to "live" in our heads, and particularly in our analytical left brains. We are unable to feel the energy because we are insensitive to it; and because we don't feel it, we do not believe that it exists. The energy exercises allow the awareness to move from our head into our body and therefore increase our sensitivity.

There are two places in particular where the awareness needs to reside to allow us to do healing. One is what the Chinese call the dan tien (and the Japanese call hara): the area just below your belly button. This is one of the main storage areas for chi. It is also the place where the martial artist's spirit shout comes from, greatly increasing his or her power. It is here that you store up life energy doing the Qi Gong exercise that is called "standing like a tree". To maintain awareness of the dan tien or hara, it is important to practice breathing into the area on a fairly regular basis.

The second place the awareness needs to reside for effectiveness in healing is the heart. That probably needs little explanation. After all, most of us intuitively know that all healing is love.

An experiment

I hope you will now join me in an experiment. On the right side of this blog you will find the photo of a hand. It is an unremarkable, un-Photoshopped image, but it has been set up so one might feel energy coming through it. My inspiration for doing this came from a Dutch website that a few years ago posted a "Reiki hand" and invited people to test if they could feel anything coming from it. Another website in Vancouver posted a photo of the founder of Reiki, Dr. Mikao Usui, and claimed that you would receive Reiki if you looked at the image. I found energy coming from both images. I asked a couple of people, one a healer, the other a "regular guy" who is also a skeptic, to tell me if they felt anything coming from this image and they both told me that they did. So now it's your turn, if you choose to check it out.

Hold one hand over the image, then the other, each for just a few seconds. Run each hand over the screen to feel if there is any difference between the areas where the image of the hand is, and where it isn't. You can call up a larger image by clicking on it. You could also try closing your eyes and just sitting in front of it, and seeing if you feel anything different. Your feedback is welcome whether you feel anything or not.

Now comes the weird part. In the best of all possible worlds as it exists in my imagination, this hand is a portal for you to receive the kind of attunement that would happen if you attended an actual energy healing course. If you wish to try this out, hold each hand, one at a time, over the image for a longer period than 30 seconds. You may feel how long you need to do this. It may help if you set the intention that you wish to become a healer.

Putting it all together

This is how you do energy healing:

1) Begin by setting up a positive flow of energy. By positive flow I mean that you feel the energy coming in through your feet, your brow or your crown, and then feel it coming out of your palms. Use the energy sensitizing exercises described in part 1 if you need to.

2) Set up your intent. State in your mind that you wish to be a clear healing channel for the benefit of the person you are treating. If you are religious, and wish to do "laying on of hands" in a Christian context, this would be a good time to pray and to ask for the love of Jesus to come through you.

3) Establish a connection with the person you are treating by placing your hands on them (on the shoulders if they are sitting or on the solar plexus if they are lying down). Ask again for the energy to flow through you to them. Remind yourself that the source from which the energy flows knows what kind of healing is needed -- or, if you are not comfortable with the idea of energy that knows what needs to be done, just trust in the "healee's" body intelligence.

4) Keep the positive energy flow going by using your intent or your breath. One way of doing this is to remind yourself that you are drawing the energy through your brow/hara/feet on the in-breath, and sending it out through your palm on the out-breath.

5) This is very important: get out of the way! You are not doing anything. You are just a channel facilitating a flow of healing energy to a person who needs it. The energy doesn't come from you; it comes through you. As a side benefit you too will receive a healing at the same time.

6) You could intend to link up with all the healers in the world. This is a variation on the idea of the Buddhist "sangha". When Buddhists meditate, they ask the "sangha", Buddhist meditators everywhere, to join in and help them. Similarly, you could ask all the healers in the world to help you.

One way to fail is to let the left brain get into the act. The left brain will begin to ask questions such as "am I doing this right?" and "what on earth am I doing here?". Or it will make statements such as "this is absurd", "this could not possibly work" and/or "this doesn't make any sense", etc.

Another way to fail is to want it too much to happen. The ego can get involved just as easily as the left brain. The ego will say "I am doing this". You are not doing anything. You are just hanging out. The ego can also get involved in very sneaky ways, e.g., by trying to direct the energy.

So how do we get the left brain and the ego out of the equation? One way is through focusing on breathing. There is a whole energy healing method based on this, Richard Gordon's Quantum Touch. If you want to learn more about doing this, read his book of the same name. Richard's breathing exercises also teach you how to strengthen the energy flow.

Another way is to keep the brain busy with other tasks. Bill Bengston's method excels at this. A description of how he keeps the brain busy can be found in his "Methods" paper in the spring 2007 issue of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine [and now his books Chasing the Cure and The Energy Cure]. Bill's method of keeping the brain busy also helps strengthen the energy flow.

In our practice groups we have tried several methods in addition to Bill's. One was meditative breathing. If you are an active meditator, this may work for you. Another is to instruct your brain to make up spontaneous images of happy and beautiful things. My brain can generate quite a collage of people laughing, dancing, and interacting in gorgeous natural surroundings. I see mothers and babies, colourful swirling dancers, oceans, mountains, and trees. Sometimes I see colourful, symmetrical geometric designs spreading from a single point into infinity. Bill's method has advantages over this, and I recommend taking one of his workshops to learn it. By the way, the Domancic folk also recommend entertaining your brain with beautiful images, to which they also add rock music. Their general idea is to be happy while you work at healing: they suggest that both the healee and the practitioner "go to the beach" in their minds during the treatment.

We have found that asking "what needs to happen here?", then remaining open for an answer that may or may not come, takes the healing to a higher level. You need patience, trust, and stillness to do this.

The best attitude for both healer and "healee" to have is a kind of open-minded, non-judgmental curiosity that expects nothing and welcomes everything.

Where to put your hands

Different modalities have different ways of going about this. Reiki has set hand positions, which you will find described and illustrated in most Reiki books. Reiki hand positions essentially follow the chakras. You work down the front and then up the back, placing your hand on each chakra for about 3 minutes.

Quantum Touch begins with generic hand positions and then goes on to "sandwiching" the area that needs to be treated. You will find this described in Richard Gordon's book.

Bill also has a few generic hand positions, such as shoulders and the solar plexus, and then instructs his students to put their hands where they are guided to.

If after "taking" this course you find your hands moving independently of your will, e.g. making spirals, or waving over the body, or making other movements of their own, then congratulations, that means we've been eminently successful, and you have now entered the Twilight Zone.

One caution about hand positions: be respectful of people's comfort zones about being touched. Always ask before you do it. And it obviously doesn't need to be said that there are certain places you should never place your hands, unless the person you are treating is your partner, and you have their permission to do it.

Feedback and caveats

The person you are treating may feel warmth, heat, coolness, electricity, magnetism, or nothing. It's helpful to have feedback, especially if you are new at this. Don't get discouraged if the person you are treating feels nothing at first. Focus on your end of things (positive flow, breathing, getting out of the way) and something may happen.

I would suggest starting with small things like cuts, scrapes, sprains, sore backs, and minor sports injuries. Pets are also great candidates, whatever their ailment. I personally have never been very successful with colds and headaches, although if I wake up in the middle of the night with a burning throat, which usually indicates the onset of a cold, I can usually prevent the cold by putting my hands on my throat for a while and letting the energy run. I have, however, been very successful with injuries. Individual talents can vary.

You can work effectively with people who are skeptical about the concept of healing energy, but I would not recommend treating people who are out to prove to you that it cannot possibly work. Their attitude will simply block the flow of energy and discourage you.

If at any point either you or the person you are treating become uncomfortable with the treatment, stop immediately. Energy healing cannot do harm, but people's levels of comfort about doing or receiving it vary, and must be respected.

After doing a treatment, always wash your hands in cold water and intend to cut the energetic connection between yourself and the person you've been treating. This will prevent you from picking up their symptoms.

Please do not ever diagnose, or prevent a person from seeing a doctor or from carrying out the doctor's instructions.

Follow up

To become better at this, you need to practice, practice, practice. Keep doing the qi gong exercises described in part 1 and refining your energy flow. Practice getting out the way (it's the hardest thing to learn). The more you can get out of the way after setting the intention to become a clear channel, the more effective you will be.

If this "introductory course" has whetted your appetite to learn more, find a course in energy healing near you. If you live in southern Ontario, and you are curious about what we are doing, feel free to contact me. You can also contact me, wherever you live, if you have any questions or feedback.

Energy Healing 101 - A free online "introductory course" - Part 1 - Healing Self

This is being offered for your information only, and it is not in any way intended to replace the services and advice of a qualified physician. This section focuses on basics and "healing self". For healing others, see Part 2.

Introduction

Energy healing is actually quite easy to learn. Most courses begin with a history of the technique being taught, followed by preparation to receive the "teaching", instruction in the technique, one or several "attunements" (which the participants may or may not be told about), instruction on how to apply the method, and finally ethical considerations on using the method, which chiefly boil down to "thou shalt not advise the client not to seek orthodox medical care" and "make no claims of being able to heal anything".

This techique has no history, as it does not rely on any single school of teaching. But I will give some basic "science" that should make all this much easier to learn.

Biologist James Oschman discovered the existence of "energy healing" after he hurt his back through years of bending over microscopes and an energy healer fixed it. Oschman then asked himself "what is this, how does it work, and why haven't I heard about it?" and went on to devote his time as a scientist to studying the phenomenon.

In his book Energy Healing: The Scientific Basis Oschman proposes that we, humans, arrived on this planet as a species hardwired to be able to perform and receive energy healing. I am no scientist, and I may be hopelessly mangling his argument, but from what I understand Oschman suggests that energy healers first concentrate the earth's extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic fluctuations (called the Schuman Resonance), possibly through their pineal gland, and then emit this energy out through their hands. The energy has been measured, and has been shown to be more powerful than expected. (link to Oschman chapter)

Oschman's hypothesis seems to be confirmed by some of Bill Bengston's mouse experiments, in which geomagnetic probes set around the cages of sick mice he was healing showed that the earth's geomagnetic micropulsations, which normally show up as a random pattern of spikes, became a visibly organized series of waves (referred to as "negative entropy") at the times the mice were receiving healing.

What you need to take away from the above is that a lot of people, including some scientists with impressive academic credentials, believe that being able to heal through bioenergy is an innate human ability. So essentially you are not so much learning something new here as having something awakened in you that is already there.

I have noticed that children readily feel the energy (and react to it with joy and a sense of discovery) but that adults tend to be less able to feel it. In fact a young man I watched growing up from the time he was a child still felt it at the age of 9 or 10, but lost the ability by the time he hit puberty. My sense of it is that we Westerners tend to live in our heads, except when we are pursuing pleasure, and even within our heads we tend to favour our left brains. The ability to sense bioenergy is in the domain of the body and the right brain, so no wonder most of us are not aware of it.

Preparation

I propose to begin with some sensitizing and energizing exercises that come from Qi Gong, a Chinese form of healing that is the great-grand-daddy of most energy healing modalities. In China of old, as in China today, longevity was much prized. The ancient Daoists, to whom we owe the beginnings of Chinese medicine, worked out numerous exercises designed to heal the body and to prevent disease. They believed that human beings did not only take in nourishment through food and water, but also from the earth and from the sky, as trees do. In fact the most basic Qi Gong exercise you can learn and practice is called "Standing like a tree". (link: see second video).

The first exercise
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, with your spine straight and all your joints slightly bent. As you breathe in, circle your arms up, and as you breathe out slowly bring your hands towards your crown as if your were pulling down the air you gathered up above you and then gently lower your hands in front of you as if you were washing your front with the air. Next open your arms wide at chest level as you reach out and slowly gather the air in front of you and bring it into your heart; and again lower your hands and wash your torso with the air you gathered. Next bend down, open your arms wide, and scoop up the air from around your feet, bringing your hands towards your lower abdomen. Finally, rest your hands on your lower abdomen and concentrate on breathing into your belly for a few breaths. Your intention as you do this exercise is to gather in the life energy (chi or qi) from all around you, above, in front, and below.

Repeat this a few times.

A somewhat more complex version of this exercise can be viewed on the Guo Lin Chi Gong website (the sixth video from the top, entitled "Three Part Gathering").


The second exercise
Stand in the same posture: legs shoulder-width apart, spine straight, joints slightly bent. This time hold your arms at belly button level, as if you were holding a child's ball in front of your abdomen. The fingers and wrists, like all other joints, should be soft. Now imagine that you are growing deep roots into the earth. To use another metaphor, imagine that the earth is a giant battery charger, and you've just plugged yourself into it. You are going deep enough to get past all the pollution to the primal earth. As you breathe in, bring earth energy up through your roots, up your legs, up your spine, up to the top of your head, and as you breathe out, let the energy roll down your front to gather into your hands. Again, breathe in, bring the energy up to the top of your head, and as you breathe out, let it roll down and gather in your hands.

After a few breaths you may begin to feel something in your hands -- warmth, or buzzing, or magnetism, or electricity. That is chi or qi (ki in Japanese), or life energy.

Lift this energy up (or if you don't feel it, lift up the imaginary ball you are holding), over your stomach, your chest, and your neck; wash your face with it, wash your eyes, massage the top of your head; then push the energy in through your crown, and, breathing out, slowly lower you hands. The general idea is to feel the energy filling you up as you breathe out and lower your hands. You could visualize it as a white or golden energy, and you could visualize the stale energy that it is pushing out through your feet as gray or brown.

Repeat this a few times.

If you still don't feel energy coming from your hands, then clap your hands together vigorously, and rub your palms against each other. Do it three times. Now hold your hands 6 to 8 inches apart and see what you feel. If you feel an energy ball, you can now use it to energize any part of your body that is unwell or injured.

These are great exercises to do even if you do not intend on learning how to do energy healing. The Chinese believe that most illness is caused by stuck energy. Keep the energy moving, and you'll improve your chances of keeping illness at bay.

I will now post this, as there is sufficient information to begin. Please read Part Two to find out you how can take this ability to sense energy and apply it to healing others.

Bioenergy and Cancer Web Resources

Here is the practical stuff I promised. It is offered for your information only. Please note that none of this is meant to be used to replace standard medical care by your physician.

Aside from the Bengston Method, which is covered in earlier posts on this blog, one other bioenergy healing modality I know of that speaks of taking on cancer is the Domancic Method. While Bill Bengston focuses on cancer, saying that his method works on other illnesses as well, the Domancic Method (www.healingbioenergy.com) deals with a broad range of illnesses, and cancer, particularly breast cancer, is mentioned as just one of them. The video on the website briefly describes a case of breast cancer that shrank by half in a 4-day course of treatment. For people seeking practitioners, the same problem applies to the Domancic Method as to the Bengston Method: there are relatively few practitioners in North America, and most of them are quite new. Practitioners are not advised to try to treat metastatic cancer until they have at least one year of consistent practice under their belt. (Update Nov. 2011 - there now some Domancic practitioners with sufficient experience - consult info@healingbioenergy.com for practitioners in the U.S. or overseas, or contact me for names of practitioners in Toronto.)

Three other methods that have been known to affect cancer occasionally are Quantum Touch, Matrix Energetics, and Reiki. An earlier incarnation of the Quantum Touch website had a story by an MD who used Quantum Touch on a patient with breast cancer after the patient refused all other forms of therapy. The tumour shrank significantly in one session. I notice that the story is no longer on the website -- I wonder whether the MD got into trouble for posting it or for using an unorthodox therapy on a patient, or the patient's situation changed. If you troll the message board, you will not find many mentions of cancer cures.

Richard Bartlett, the founder of Matrix Energetics (www.matrixenergetics.com), has said that he does not like to attempt to heal cancer, because a) he does not believe in illness and healing, and b) cancer has too much "consensus reality" around it. Once a cancer has been CT-scanned, MRI-ed, and biopsied into full reality, its existence has solidified to the point where it is difficult to shift. There have only been reports of sporadic successes with ME involving cancer. It might be worth a try, but only with an open mind, and with no expectations of success. (Update Nov. 2011 - an associate of Dr. Bartlett's, Dr. Hector Garcia, is anecdotally reputed to be able to treat cancer.)

Reiki is an excellent modality to apply in conjunction with orthodox medical care. It eases the anxiety, side effects, and pain associated with cancer treatment. Patients receiving Reiki have been known to "sail through" radiation and chemotherapy. On occasion Reiki too has been known to make cancer vanish, but its chief benefit in most cases is to create a better treatment outcome. It has particular application in palliative care where it helps the patient on many levels -- including the emotional and the spiritual. It can also help family members cope with the stress of dealing with the serious illness of a loved one.

The great-grand-daddy of all forms of energy healing is Qi Gong. Qi Gong hails from China, and its roots are shrouded by the mists of time. It's related to Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, and to Tai Chi. In China of old, as in China now, longevity was much prized. Many exercises were developed to maintain health and to promote long life. There exist Qi Gong exercises particularly aimed at curing cancer. The Qi Gong Institute has published a scientific overview of the use of Qi Gong in the treatment of cancer (link).

One set of such Qi Gong exercises was developed by a woman called Guo Lin, who reportedly cured herself of cancer using Qi Gong. All Guo Lin instructors in China are former cancer patients. There is a highly informative website on Guo Lin Qi Gong, including free videos of the exercises. The use of these exercises for cancer patients is recommended alongside conventional Western cancer treatments including radiation and chemotherapy.

I have now tried out the exercises and I was astonished at their energetic effect. I would recommend them to cancer sufferers for the increase in energy levels that they can bring about, even if their curative effects turn out to be exaggerated.

Update, Nov. 2011: I received a beautiful qi gong meditation from a reader, John Hill, who says he used it to heal his 93-year-old mom of stage-4 cancer. Here is the link.

I will edit and update this post as I find new information.

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.

Teaching bioenergy healing and chasing the American Dream

So let's say you have discovered you are a healer and that you have a method to teach. How do you now go on to disseminate it?

If you are altruistic and not overly ambitious, you can teach a number of people to do it, and a number of people to teach it, and let them loose. This would be the "trickle down" model, where the originator teaches the method to several people, who then go on to teach several others, and so on and so forth. You, the original teacher, would not benefit financially from the teaching done by the others; you also don't get to control how your method is disseminated.

If you want to make some money and exercise a certain level of control, you can use the "pyramid" model, where the originator teaches several others, whom he then authorizes to teach, who then also teach and authorize others, and so on and so forth. Here there is an effort at creating a central authority and a portion of each teacher's income is funnelled back to you, the originator. This guarantees a certain level of income, especially if the method is widely taught.

If you wanted to make lots of money, you would go for the "American mass-market self-help seminar" model, where the originator teaches ever larger groups with the aid of authorized helpers, until the groups get so big as to be unmanageable, at which point a number of the helpers split off and start teaching their own authorized or unauthorized versions. With this model most of the income goes back to the originator, who then gets to buy expensive sports cars and real estate and then chiefly uses his talent to live the American dream.

The problem with all three models is that teaching gets more and more diluted the farther away it gets from the original teacher and the larger the group is that is being taught. (It could be argued that this may be true of all healing models -- after all, Jesus taught the apostles how to heal, and what happened after that? You hear of very little healing going on in the Bible after Jesus, and successful "laying on of hands" did not seem to pass down through the generations of Christians that followed.)

With the current systems, Reiki follows the "trickle down" model, Quantum Touch the "pyramid" model, and Matrix Energetics and Reconnective Healing the "self-help seminar" model. All four produce practitioners of varying qualities.

Bill likes to say that healing talent, like musical talent, is distributed unevenly in the population. Some people are Mozarts, others are like the tone deaf kid down the block playing Chopsticks on the piano, and most people fall somewhere in between. If you teach enough people, the reasoning goes, you will get a few Mozarts. So the trick is to go for volume. And of course volume benefits the teacher, especially with the "self-help seminar" model. If you do a few weekend workshops with 300 people each at $325 a pop, that can translate into some serious money. You can tell yourself that everyone will get something for their money, and it's really not your responsibility to make sure that they really get the method, as there are too many of them. That's what your helpers are for. Your helpers get to attend the workshop for free, so you don't have to pay them anything, but you also don't really know how good they are. A number of people will walk away satisfied and a number of people will feel stymied and confused, but then that's the way most things are. The truly important thing, this being America, is to entertain them, and to give them something to take home. And you are doing good, because you are after all teaching them something that could awaken those potential Mozarts -- however few of them there may be.

Most of the systems produce books (and now DVDs) to promote the teachings. There are many Reiki books out there, most of which say "this can't be learned from a book, go find a reputable teacher in your area". Quantum Touch has a book that says it teaches the method, which is indeed very easy to follow, and claims that a number of people have learned the method from the book alone. Books from teachers who follow the "mass-market self-help seminar" model focus on how the teacher found the method. They also claim that some people have learned the healing technique, pretty much by osmosis, just by reading the book. The purpose of most of these books is to put the teacher's name out there, to get the bodies into the workshops. (Of course the sale of books and DVDs also generates a certain income.)

What's wrong with this picture? Lack of accountability, that's what. When you go to your local MD and see his or her diploma from X University, you know that your doctor has gone through a rigorous program of instruction and testing that guarantees a certain minimum level of competence. Your basic energy healer's certificate guarantees no such thing. Mostly it guarantees that he or she was a warm body at a workshop for which he or she paid a certain amount of money. This is why it's so hard to get any respect as an energy healer, unless you are known for producing results.

Quantum Touch and Matrix try to get around this by requiring practitioners to attend a minimum number of workshops and put in a minimum number of hours of practice. But the practice is unsupervised, the hours self-reported, and there is an assumption made that a minimum number of workshops attended will guarantee competence. There is no testing of candidates.

After the first Bengston workshop we held, someone asked me if they could now add the certification to their list of modalities. That made me think. Here we were teaching a method that purportedly cured cancer. The people who came to the workshop, which at that point was only 1 day long, had had at best a few hours of instruction in a method that Bill had been practicing for 35 years. They would now go out there and claim that they "did" the Bengston method, people with cancer would come to them for healing, and how could I even begin to guarantee that they could actually do anything? The conclusion I came to is that no one should be certified as a practitioner in the method, let alone as a teacher, without producing at least one documented cancer cure.

There is, by the way, another teaching model. It's the model practiced by actual schools, where there are multiple teaching levels, extensive supervision, and testing and mentorship programs. If we are going to take energy healing seriously, that's where we should be headed.

Deconstructing the hype

When we first started doing workshops with Bill, we were very cautious about how he was presented. There were to be no extravagant claims to be made on his behalf. My efforts at advertising reflected this caution, simply inviting people to meet Bill, professor of sociology, researcher, energy healer, who in a series of experiments had brought 87.9% of mice injected with a fatal form of cancer to full life-span remission, using a new form of bioenergy healing. No claims were made that could not be backed up by Bill's research.

Later on as we began using the method, I added our own experiences, e.g., the prolapsed uterus, the healed knee, the efforts by psychotherapists to use the method in their practices. We remained grounded in facts and realities; only claims that could proven; no hyperbole.

Recently a flyer came to my hands from another city, a flashy, neon affair proclaiming the "Bengston Mind Technique" and exhorting the reader to get "ready for a world without dis-ease". This is what I read:

What if there were a simple documented method —
that implodes cancerous tumors and heals a variety of
physical and psychological conditions including clinical
depression and severe psychiatric conditions — are
you ready to learn it and add it to your practice?

It then proceeded to add, among other things, that Bill had taught MD's and other healthcare professionals and that he was a featured speaker on Mehmet Oz's show on Oprah and Friends. People who signed up for the workshop being promoted would receive a free MP3 download of his lecture on his experiments and also a copy of the "famous mouse papers". A graphic of two mice toasting over a hunk of cheese could also be noted. (The presence of the two mice made me hope that Bill had not actually seen this, as my own efforts to introduce a tiny photo of a mouse into one of my early flyers had been summarily overruled.)

Here is the deconstruction:

The method is extensively documented to implode cancerous tumours, in mice.

In workshops Bill speaks of one person he healed of clinical depression using this method. A psychoanalyst in South Africa reported good results with a client with obsessive compulsive disorder. Locally someone else found that it helped someone with OCD and two others who suffered from anxiety, but that a number of patients were resistant to the method because it fell too far outside their expectations of what psychotherapy should be. Some psychotherapists reported using it on themselves to handle their own levels of anxiety and to prepare themselves for sessions, but did not feel comfortable offering it to their patients. It is too early to say that the method heals "severe psychiatric conditions".

Bill also says that the method appears simple but almost everybody gets it wrong at first and requires much correction. He even says it would be arrogant of him to assume that people will get it in one weekend, because much practice is required. Which takes me to the related point that, IMHO, no one should be putting on Bill Bengston workshops who is not prepared to do follow-up in the form of regular practice sessions, including, at least for a while, on-going consultation with Bill. The purpose of these organized practice sessions is to provide further instruction and support. I invite you to read previous entries for my experiences with the method to see what kind of learning curve can be involved.

How about What if there were a method, documented to implode cancerous tumours in mice, anecdotally reported to cure cancer and other ailments in some people, and shown to be of benefit in some psychiatric conditions? That would be more like it.

In our locality Bill has taught a small number of MD's and "other healthcare professionals" who were drawn to see him speak out of curiosity after reading the "famous mouse papers", and elsewhere he has given talks. He was interviewed in September by Dr. Mehmet Oz, who invited Bill on his show after I sent him the same "famous mouse papers". The "mouse papers" are indeed quite amazing, and getting more famous all the time. The interview aired in November.

The teachability of the method is so far established only for curing mice (although Bill, ever the researcher, questioned whether his experiments constituted adequate proof in his "Can Healing Be Taught?" paper in Explore magazine). When it comes to showing that the method can be taught effectively enough for people to cure other people of cancer, it's early days yet. Nothing is effectively proven, only suggested. Until such time as there are at least half a dozen documented human cancer cures produced by people Bill taught, there can be no hype. When these cancer cures are produced, there will be no hype, because by then the "hype" will be the new reality. Then we can go to town on the advertising.

The practical challenges of working with Bengston Bioenergy

So here you are: you've taken your first Bill Bengston workshop, you had a great time, you're raring to go, but you have no clue whether you actually "got it".

You have been taught an energy healing method that purports to fix cancer. Not just headaches and wonky knees, but cancer. Are you going to run out there and put your hands on the next person you find who says they have the big "C"?

Judging by our experiences here over five newbie workshops, the answer is "no". There are very few of us who have taken the workshops who have also had the temerity to offer treatments -- I am one of the few. My two posts below describe some outcomes; and the post below them discusses the effectiveness of the method in our hands to date. I remain hopeful about the method's long-term prospects. We are not yet where Bill is -- I hope that someday we'll get there, in fact I hope for the sake of all present and future cancer sufferers of the world that a lot of us get there fairly soon.

For those of you who are considering trying to treat others, here is my "treatise" on the practical difficulties.

When to treat?
The method is contraindicated while the patient is receiving radiation or chemo, as the two treatments, Bill's and the allopathic one, the one designed to energize and the other to kill, could cancel each other out. But Bill also says that it has been his experience that after someone has received radiation or chemo the technique is no longer as effective as before, and will not bring the patient to full remission. So that leaves one option: to treat the person before conventional treatment is employed. That's all fine and well, but you can't very well tell someone not to have conventional treatment. That would be highly irresponsible. So that leaves you the window between diagnosis and treatment, which is not a very long time.

How long will it take?
Dilemma number two: we have no clue. It could be quick or it could be slow. In our experience the time between diagnosis and treatment has not been long enough. It could work in that short a time, but going by our current experience chances are it won't.

How do I know it's working?
There's another rub. According to Bill in some cases the tumour will shrink, but in others it will grow to a critical mass before it "implodes". Some people feel the energy during treatment, others don't. Some people feel energized by the energy, others feel exhausted. Some people bounce off the walls, others develop cold symptoms. Some have pain during treatment or after. Some experience all of the above at various points. Blood test results can be all over the map too: sometimes they get worse, sometimes they get better (though the overall trajectory should point towards "better"). So everything is "good". Tumour getting smaller? That's good. Tumour's getting bigger? That's good too: it's getting ready to implode. You have pain? That's good. No pain? That's good too. Cold symptoms? That's excellent: that sounds like a healing crisis! It's not difficult to see why it's hard to get credibility as an energy healer.

So how do you know it's working? The answer is you don't. Not really, not until something actually changes for the better. People will often have an increased sense of well being and will, based on that, be willing to trust you. But what if the next time they go for a check-up, they find out the tumour is bigger? That's when trust flies out the window, and that's when you begin to doubt yourself. In fact it has been known to happen that trust flies out the window even when the next test shows the tumour is better. Just by getting into an allopathic environment the patient can begin to doubt you, as it is perfectly their right and prerogative to do.

This is the problem with energy therapies of all stripes: there just hasn't been enough research to know what's going on.

So how do we get around these challenges?
One way to get around these challenges is to start with animals. One of my first patients was a cat with brain cancer. The cancer had invaded its nasal passages, so the poor thing sounded like Darth Vader. After I treated it, it breathed normally for about three days, so clearly something had happened. Cats have no preconceptions; the treatment will work or not work on its own merits. I didn't get to treat the cat often enough, only about once every two weeks, and eventually it died. But the last time I treated it, it jumped up on the sofa and put its paw on my arm as if to say "thank you". That was nice.

Another patient was a dog, a big white mutt called Bo. When I saw Bo in the springtime, he was clearly on his last legs. His owners thought he had some kind of cancer but didn't have money for the vet. I briefly treated Bo. In the middle of the summer his owners told me that after I treated him he bled from the nose for two days, then started eating again. The second time I saw Bo was in the fall, and this time he was really on his last legs, not even getting up from his doggie bed. Another treatment, and he was better again. I last spoke to the owners New Year's Day, 2009, and Bo was at that point a happy, healthy mutt.

Another way, and you have to be brave for this one, is to take on the incurable cancers, the ones where the conventional treatments are known not to work. But that makes for a steep learning curve, and you could find yourself attending funerals. You also have to be willing to put in the time. Serious cancers take daily treatment. And there is no way you can charge for your time, not if you can't guarantee that you know what you are doing. These are the cases where it's impossible not to get emotionally involved. You feel for the patient, you feel for the family; you root for them, you grieve with them, you share their joys and their despair. You have to have some ability to establish professional distance, otherwise you could become a basket case -- and I speak from personal experience here.

If you are going to take on these difficult cases, we advise you to work in a team. It's good to have buddies to keep you sane. It's also good to be able to rotate if the patient needs treatment every day. Adding a "Greek chorus" of distance treaters is a great help. This is how I envisage the future of the method: groups treating individuals in a web of shared responsibility.

By the way this is also where the method could most clearly shine. It's with the serious cancers that you can see if it's working most clearly: if the white blood cell count starts dropping, though there is no way it should; if the jaundice reverses; if the person who needed morphine every four hours no longer needs any painkillers at all; if instead of dying, the patient gets out of bed and begins walking again; if the doctor has reason to say "there has been a miracle". This is why we are doing this. We are looking for that miracle.

A third way, if you just want to get your toes wet, but still do some good, is to join or create a group that offers distance healing. I suspect distance healing groups are quite potent. When we were treating our pancreatic cancer patient we had a "standing date" to offer distance healing at 10 p.m. every day. One day I started at 9:52 and then felt a remarkable jump in energy when everyone else came online. The people we treat tell us that they feel the treatment. They feel more peaceful and sleep better, or they feel more calm and energized. Sometimes incredible healings can happen, as with a little boy I will call James, who was in the hospital with severe burns from a household accident. He was supposed to be in the hospital for weeks and weeks but the day after we sent him a distance treatment from one of the workshops he was released to go home, because his burn had unexpectedly scabbed over overnight. An added bonus to doing distance healing is that it feels really, really good.

Getting it wrong before getting it right - case study #1

(NB: The personal details of the people in all case studies have been changed to protect their identity.)

Mileni came to us with acute myelogenous leukemia. She had no family here, no husband, no children, only a solicitous group of concerned friends who were quite prepared to help her get through chemo. But Mileni didn't want chemo. She looked at her odds, and having been told by her oncologist that she would need the absolutely most aggressive kind of chemo possible and would likely end up intubated in intensive care for weeks on end, she decided that the odds were not worth it (the 5-year survival rate for her cancer with chemo was 10%, but without chemo, 0%). She was fatalistic: she was willing to try what we did and if it didn't work, she would settle for death with dignity.

Full of confidence after our first seminar with Bill, we decided to treat Mileni. Bill had told us that aggressive cancers remitted quickly, and as acute myelogenous leukemia is one of the most aggressive kinds, we were secretly hopeful for Mileni's speedy recovery. We told her that the treatment was experimental and that because we could not guarantee results we could not accept payment. At first there were three of us treating her, but then it became just me. She received treatment first once a week, then twice a week, then three times a week. In spite of this her blood count continued to worsen, although the treatments seemed to slow her deterioration. About three months after her treatment began, however, her doctor announced that her white blood cell count was now "gravely concerning". This meant that she could at any moment develop a fatal brain haemorrhage. When she left his consulting room to use the bathroom, he made baleful eyes at me and told me that "leukemia patients die in horrible ways". He wanted me to convince her to agree to have chemo.

By this time Mileni had stopped talking to her friends because of their solicitous insistence that they would help her through chemo. She would not hear of it. The very mention of the word "chemo" made her angry and anger made her condition noticeably worse. I did the only thing I could think of: I took her to see Bill, who graciously agreed to see us. After a few days of treatments from Bill she seemed to perk up, and could even be seen doing the occasional pirouette on the lawn. But upon her return home she crashed, and her white blood cell count sky-rocketed. The numbers went from "gravely concerning" to astronomical ("astronomical" was almost five times "gravely concerning"). The numbers would now only rise, we were told, and the white blood cells would spill over into her lymph nodes and her brain. She had bruises because her platelet count was low and a constant fever. I was treating her daily but with little hope.

Then suddenly something happened. One day during treatment I felt something different accompanied by a sudden sense that I had just "got it". And sure enough, the next time Mileni went for her blood test, the white blood cell count was down. Her doctor said it was a lab error. There was another blip up the time after, but then the count decidedly reversed. She was having two bloodtests a week, and with each one the number would go down 15 to 20 per cent. People at the hospital who did not know her history would ask her what kind of chemotherapy she was on, because her body was behaving as if she had been receiving chemo. But unfortunately along with the white blood cells her red blood cells and platelets were also falling. She began receiving transfusions, which only worked for a while, as her body began to react to the blood as if it were a foreign substance. It became a race against time. I had the idea that if all the bad white blood cells were to go, her body would start manufacturing healthy blood cells -- just as with chemo. Mileni by this point had settled for death with dignity but allowed me to have my delusions, and to keep treating her, so long as I kept her company.

When the final crash came I went with her to emergency, where a young doctor shouted at her, as if she were hard of hearing, that she needed to contact her family because she was dying. He helpfully assured her that she would not survive the weekend. But survive she did, with hours of treatment, and then my next act as her healer was to negotiate with the social worker to have her transferred into palliative care. I continued to treat her and I continued to remain hopeful. Surely a miracle would happen and Mileni would walk out of the hospital on her own two feet. On her last day I sat with her until 11 p.m. She died peacefully in her sleep at 2 a.m. Her last blood test the day before showed her white blood cell count as "normal".

Discussion

I was devastated by Mileni's death. I had clearly become too involved with her in the course of her treatment, but I do not know at what point it would have been possible for me to walk away and still be at peace with my conscience. Some people comforted me by saying that I had done something beautiful by sticking with Mileni to the end, and that even though I hadn't cured her, important healing had taken place. There was a big debate in our group about the value of "healing" versus "curing" with the conclusion that without healing no curing could take place. A number of the group who think beyond matters of the body in this life felt that in cosmic terms healing the whole being was far more important than curing the physical body.

From the perspective of practicing Bill's technique my over-involvement with Mileni was not a good thing. It is an important part of the technique for the practitioner to be detached from the outcome. If you care too much, you get in the way. Also, it is not a good idea to treat someone who desires death with dignity. The best candidates for Bill's technique are people who passionately want to live. I think Mileni wanted someone with her who would not pressure her into treatment. I was chiefly there to hold her hand and to ease the process of her dying. It's not what I wanted to happen. The lesson Mileni taught was "it's not about what you want." I am still not sure how well I learned it.

So how effective is Bengston Bioenergy?

The mouse experiments have done wonders in proving that Bill's method works. We know that method cures mice, but the important question is whether it cures people. Anecdotally we have heard that in Bill's hands it does cure people, so the next question is: can the people Bill teaches also cure people the way Bill does after taking his workshops?

We've been doing workshops now for a year and a half, six to date, five for newbies and one workshop for "alumni" who have already taken the introductory one; there have also been several "alumni" evenings with Bill. I've been at every single event as the main organizer. Several people have attended a few as helpers. We also have monthly meetings. We are excited by the potential of the work. But after a year and a half I would have hoped to have more concrete results, or at least a half a dozen documented cures, to show for our labours. Our results have been promising, but not necessarily conclusive.

We have had success with suspected cancers in the testing stages, even some that were strongly suspected, considered to be metastases or recurrences of a prior cancer. The first test would confirm the presence of something worrysome, but the next test would find nothing, or the "something" would just disappear before the biopsy, so no biopsy would be done. From the patient's perspective these are the best-case scenarios because they involve the least amount of suffering, but for those of us trying to prove that the technique works, they don't do much. In the view of orthodox medicine the lump that disappears wasn't cancer in the first place because, by definition, cancer doesn't just "disappear" all by itself without painful, momentous, and destructive intervention.

We have had a bunch of interesting anomalous results. A visible tumour that shrank to less than half its size in two treatments -- then proceeded to just "hang out", still shrinking slowly, for the next six months (it's still there). A lymphoma that was re-diagnosed, first as leukemia, then as a case of lupus. A case of acute myelogenous leukemia where the white blood cell count reversed and a case of stage-4 pancreatic cancer that went into a 10-week remission (these will be the subjects of separate posts as both these patients subsequently died). With non-cancerous conditions we've seen a severely prolapsed uterus return to normal after treatment and knee-replacement surgery cancelled after the patient no longer needed a cane to walk.

Judging from my limited experience I would say that these treatments have a different rhythm and a different way of working from standard medical treatments. The outcome is either inexplicable and mysterious -- things vanishing from one day to the next -- or languidly slow. My preference is for the quick, inexplicable vanishings. With slow you can doubt whether it's working, and so can the patient. It can also take months, and months, and months of treatment. But what we have observed is an increase in the well-being of the person receiving treatment even when the treatment is taking its sweet old time. The results we've observed are different from some of the ones Bill describes where tumours simply shrink as if someone were playing a movie backwards.

The other observation I would make is that all these healings have been done by a handful of people. All of them have other types of energy practices such as Reiki, shamanism, or deep meditation in their background. They have also either attended more than one workshop or have had access to Bill in one-on-one training situations. People who take one of Bill's workshops from scratch, with no other "energy" background, tend to be shy about trying out the technique to begin with, and they also have less access to patients, so we have less of a chance to find out how effectively they could use it. An argument could be made that because they have the method in its purest form, they ought to be the best at it.

So it's exciting and promising, but as yet, no cigar.

I expect the first documented cures will come from Bill's own bailiwick, where there is now also a group, with some people receiving active mentoring from him. This kind of mentoring and participation by the teacher is how Bill learned the technique in the first place, so it would make sense for the method to work best under these conditions.

Postscript Oct. 20, 2011: I have recently heard another cancer healer say that cancer adapts to treatment over time, so the longer the treatment goes on, the less effective it becomes, unless you radically change it up as you go along to keep the cancer "confused". Our experiences treating people seem to confirm this observation. This particular healer, Kurt Peterson, gets around the problem by giving one whopping full-day treatment to knock out the cancer for once and for all. Both Kurt Peterson and Bill appear to be very strong healers; the rest of us here seem to have only managed, by and large, to keep people relatively healthy while slowing the cancer down. It's been helpful, but not quite what I was aiming for.

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.

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).