Posts Tagged ‘Healing’

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What if Your School Guidance Counselor had Recommended Energy Healing?

Monday, January 2nd, 2017

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I graduated high school in 1998. I’d loved energy since 5th grade, but how did a person make money doing that? There were no jobs. There were books and training courses, but no way to know which were worth the investment. I didn’t seriously consider energy healing as a career path, but if I had, it would have looked risky and uncertain. Instead, I went to college, learned computer science, got a safe job that I could enjoy enough, even if it took hours and years away from the study that truly called to me.

But what if there had been salaried positions for energy healers?

The job requirements would list courses, certifications, and other programs. And that’s not just an energy healer saying, “I like these courses” — it’s a company saying, “We find these courses to be useful for new hires, and seek out people who have taken them.” And knowing there’s a job waiting, I would have felt good investing time and money in those requirements.

Fresh out of those training programs, I would have joined that company, worked under experienced energy healers and researchers, and been assigned projects and cases suited to my skill level. I might have started by giving healing sessions in the techniques I was already certified in, then learned more techniques on the job, and eventually developed new techniques for others to use.

I imagine the company funding energy healing research, both developing new energy healing techniques, and performing placebo-controlled trials to demonstrate their effectiveness. Maybe there would even be research-focused positions, where we pick a particular health condition that no one knows how to help, only see people with that condition, and work to develop techniques for them. I think I would enjoy a role like that.

Other people might go into management, mentoring a team of energy healers, or marketing or training or any of the other roles that most companies need. I imagine those folks would be interested in energy healing too, but just don’t want to make it their full time job.

Eventually, I might leave the company, start a solo practice, develop my own techniques. If I did, I’d probably maintain a certification in their system of healing, paying an annual fee and taking their training courses, so I could keep using their ethereal software and learn their latest techniques. Or maybe I’d stay, lead a team of researchers working on life extension, or on using energy to enhance cognitive function.

And what about you? How might your life be different if there were energy healing jobs when you graduated high school?

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Posted in Learning Magick | 1 Comment »

Feeling Worn Out? Here’s an Energy Healing Technique

Saturday, December 24th, 2016

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A reader asks:

I’m a psychotherapist and am sensitive to emotions and spirit. I feel like I not only counsel people with my words but also help the healing process by providing a “home” of positive or healing energy. I’m naturally energized and excited but sometimes get tired and drained. I’ve done some work with Qigong with sound and visualization but am still left wondering about protection and shielding from others (or spirits).

Let’s start with the scope of the question. I’m going to split “worn out” into roughly 3 types:

  • Tiredness caused by someone directly altering one’s energy, such as a spirit draining you. This would be rare with clients, but it’s possible.
  • Tiredness caused by normal work, that has an energetic component. For example, after doing computer consulting for a week, my body’s energy can get into an odd state, not because someone drained me, but just because I’ve been stressed and jet lagged and tired.
  • Tiredness caused by short-term exertion, such as a particularly complex task that took a lot of focus, or a hard workout.

It could be any or all of these, though my guess is it’s the second, normal tiredness that has caused your body to alter its own energy. But here’s what to do for the other options:

If someone is altering your energy, you want shielding. Here are some posts on shielding for beginners.

If it’s caused by short-term exertion, there’s not much to do with energy. Just get some food and rest a bit.

OK, now let’s talk about when your body gets stressed, produces energy in a stressed energy signature, and that energy is anchoring your body in that stressed or worn out state. This happened to me last week, after a 20-hour flight and a week of computer consulting. I was just worn out. And I felt much better after resetting my energy.

First: Shielding won’t help here, because the energy isn’t coming from outside, it’s coming from your own body.

What you want is grounding: Releasing the unhealthy energy in your body and returning your body’s energy to its normal healthy state. There are lots of visualizations for grounding, and you probably already have one you like. But most practices just release the energy, and it turns out there’s a much more effective technique. Let me explain:

Most people think of grounding as releasing the unhealthy energy, usually into the earth (which is where the term “grounding” comes from, as far as I know). It’s a nice idea: Get rid of the unhealthy energy, then replace it with healthy energy later. But you’re never going to get rid of 100% of the energy in your body, and you really don’t want to. So what winds up happening is that you get rid of half the unhealthy energy, and half of it stays in your body. Then when you build healthy energy, it combines with the remaining unhealthy energy, and you wind up with half-healthy energy. Not ideal.

Try this: Let your energy flow out of you, and while that’s happening, also build energy in a healthy state. It’ll mix with the unhealthy energy, and create half-healthy energy that will keep flowing out of you. Then the next bit of healthy energy will mix with that half-healthy energy, and you’ll wind up with 75% healthy energy, and so on. At the end of it, if you have 90%-healthy energy, that’s probably good enough, and it’s much better than the half-healthy energy you’ll get with normal grounding.

I discuss this technique more in this series, including some testing I did as I developed it.

Also, I want to mention: This will help with the portion of your tiredness caused by the energy. But if you’ve worked all day, some of your tiredness is just fatigue, and you’ll still need rest. But take some notes, gather some data, see how you feel and how quickly you recover using this grounding vs just resting. Be your own experiment, learn what works for you, then come back here and leave a comment so we can learn from your experience.

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Posted in Energy Healing | 1 Comment »

Safety for Energy Healers: How to Avoid Absorbing Ailments

Sunday, November 27th, 2016

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Ruthie asks:

Good morning Mike. I’m a body worker and lately I have had a spirit wanting to take over and help. So occasionally I let him. The good is that he does a great job. The client is always happy. The bad is that ultimately I take on some of the clients ailments. How can I better protect myself?… Or is that possible?

The first step to solving a problem is understanding why it’s occurring. So I want to rephrase your question to just describe the experience, without guessing at why:

The good is that I do a great job when channeling this spirit. The client is always happy. The bad is that I feel lousy after, often with symptoms similar to the client’s.

Why did I rephrase it? Because illness isn’t like poison. You can’t suck it out, you can’t take it on yourself. If a person’s immune system is attacking their skin, you can’t absorb their immune system. And if a person has an infection, getting infected yourself doesn’t help them. It’s tempting to think of illness as a pool of black badness that you can drain, but that’s not how the body works. And having an accurate model of what’s going on is key to fixing it.

If you’re not actually taking on your client’s ailment, what’s going on? Here’s my best guess: The spirit may be sending the same healing energy to both you and your client, or through your body on the way to the client.

This sounds good, right? Who doesn’t want healing energy? But think of energy healing like mixing paint, trying to find a healthy green color. If your client’s energy is yellow, and you add blue, they’ll feel pretty good. But if your energy is already a healthy green, and you add that same blue, you’ll wind up feeling lousy.

But wouldn’t that suggest you’d feel the opposite symptoms? Why do your symptoms mirror your client’s? Because energy can target particular organs or systems of the body. For example, if the client has a stomach issue, you’ll be working with stomach-targeting energy, and your own stomach will wind up feeling pretty lousy. That’s how we get mirrored symptoms, even though the energy shift is more or less the opposite.

(Another possible explanation: The spirit might be draining your energy, a sort of fee for helping. But this would most likely have you just feel drained, and doesn’t match with the symptom mirroring.)

How to fix it? Talk with the spirit, without a client there. Explain what’s been happening, ask him if he knows why. Then suggest this as a possibility, see if it makes sense to him, and ask him to be more careful in targeting only the client with the healing energy. And after a session, try channeling him and asking him to reset your energy, so even if you pick up some healing energy it gets fixed right away.

And please report back and let us know how it turns out.

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Posted in Energy Healing | 6 Comments »

Germ Theory of Disease: From Laughingstock to Life-Saving in 100 Years

Tuesday, October 4th, 2016

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In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis suggested doctors wash their hands before surgery. He thought it might prevent deaths. He was mocked and driven out of medicine.

Ten years later, Louis Pasteur proposed, tentatively and controversially, that microorganisms might be responsible for contagious disease. The idea was debated for over 20 years, and didn’t become accepted science until 1881.

And even small wounds were potentially fatal until 1928, when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.

Less than 100 years. That’s how quickly we moved from Semmelweis to Fleming, from mocking hand-washing to curing disease.

Remember that next time someone mocks energy healing.

In 100 years, once we understand how energy interacts with atoms and cells, what life-saving technology will we create?

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What Is the Biofield?

Sunday, June 26th, 2016

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Energy healing acts on the biofield, using biofield energy. But what is the biofield?

Short answer: It’s the body’s natural energy field, produced by living cells. The term was coined in 1992 by researchers at an NIH conference. It refers to the “energy” of energy healing modalities such as Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, Chi Gung, and many more.

Long answer: That’s a definition, not an explanation. What is the biofield?

Before I start, let me say: All of this is speculative. It’s my current best understanding, but I’ve updated that understanding in the past, and probably will again in the future. None of this is established science, and other energy workers and researchers would probably disagree with some parts.

Cells seem to emit some sort of energy field. The signature of this energy (its state, sometimes called a “color” or “frequency”) seems to correspond to the state of the cells. That is, healthy cells emit a different signature of energy than inflamed cells, and both emit a different signature than cells under attack from an auto-immune disorder, and so on.

Some people ask, “Isn’t it possible that you already know the person’s condition, and are just feeling what you expect to feel in their energy?” And it’s hard to rule that out completely — in fact, our expectations influence all our senses. But like many energy workers, I’ve had the experience of feeling a person’s biofield, not knowing their condition, feeling an inflamed energy in their knee or other area, and having them confirm what I had sensed. That gives me confidence that something real is happening here.

Normally, energy flows from the cells to the biofield, and the state of the cells determines the state of the biofield. But it also works the other way: Altering the biofield seems to influence the state of those cells. When I’m developing new biofield techniques, I’ll usually start with the tissues involved in a condition, sense their biofields, then figure out what signature to set each of those biofields to. When I do that, I like to think of the biofield as inhibiting or promoting the cell’s processes. (Which process depends on the particular energy signature.) Is that how it actually works? I can’t say for certain, and I’d like to collaborate with biologists to verify that someday. But that model leads me to useful techniques, which is another way of saying that it makes non-obvious, useful predictions that turn out to be accurate.

What about the shape of the biofield? It’s easy to imagine it as just a cloud of energy. Part of the biofield is like that, but as I’ve explored it, I’ve found energetic pathways and structures beneath that shapeless energy, between the energy and the cells. When I adjust someone’s biofield (changing the signature of their energy), if I also sink those changes deeper into the pathways (closer to cells), I find it produces faster, stronger results.

So, those are the moving pieces: A cloud of energy and some energetic pathways to cells. Normally, the cells produce this energy, and it flows from cells through the pathways to the energy cloud. Energy workers change the signature of the cloud, which feeds back to influence cells. And by sinking those changes deeper into the pathways, we see a larger, faster influence.

OK, but what is the biofield, in terms of physics and biology? I have no idea. I don’t think today’s physics can explain the biofield, I think we’ll need new physics, and as a non-physicist, I’m going to stop there. A major part of Healing Lab’s mission is to demonstrate phenomena that will get physicists interested and open up collaborations to actually answer those questions. For more, see the vision.

As a closing thought, asking “what is the biofield” is a bit like asking “what is magnetism?” Here’s Richard Feynman explaining why he can’t answer that:

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Posted in Energy Healing | 11 Comments »

Case Study: Side-Effects of Energy Healing, Part 2

Sunday, May 15th, 2016

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It seems that biofield energy can have emotional / psychological side effects. That’s what I discovered this week.

First: Yes, energy healing can have side-effects. If you’ve every gotten an energy headache, that’s an unwanted result of something you did with energy — a side-effect. Any time we influence the human body, we’ll produce multiple results, some intended, some not intended. As we get better at producing larger influences, those unintended results will also intensify, and eventually reach a threshold where we can’t ignore them. When that happens, we label them “side-effects.” I wrote about this previously in 2015, while working with a friend who had cancer.

Here’s what happened this time. On Friday, I opened more power to the deeper parts of my biofield, parts that are normally powered just by my physical cells. I drew that power from the same power source that supplies my ethereal muscles and the outer parts of my biofield. I call that power supply my “core.” You can think it as connecting to a non-personal soul if you like. I discuss it here, from a time when I called ethereal muscles “mental areas.”

My goal was (is) to increase power for my entire body, to give me more resources as I explore techniques to create sensations. (Erotic energy, which seems to produce sensations in non-energy-workers under the right circumstances, is the first step in unraveling those techniques.) But for this first attempt, I only increased power to my stomach, because a smaller test seemed like a good idea.

(Why my stomach? My arm didn’t seem interesting enough — I wanted an organ. But my chest seemed too risky. Stomach seemed reasonable.)

I increased the energy flowing into my stomach. Remember how energy has a signature? That’s the type of energy, corresponding to the state of the tissue. So normal, inflamed, etc, all have their own signature. Here, I used a broad energy signature, which includes normal, inflamed, anxious, plus any other state my stomach might wind up in. I figured, let’s just power it, no matter what state it’s in.

That was Friday afternoon. That evening, I had a disagreement with my girlfriend — nothing serious, just something to talk through next time we connected.

Saturday morning I woke up deeply bothered by that disagreement. I wrote and mulled and distracted myself and returned to it and wrote more. It had turned into a big deal. My stomach felt odd too, but Friday night I’d eaten a bit of an eggplant dish with lots of garlic that had bothered my stomach, so I figured it was just that. I resolved that I’d check the energy once I got my head around this disagreement.

Around noon, still bothered, I decided to just check the energy in my stomach. It looked wrong. Muddy, to pick a word. It wasn’t just the signature of an unhealthy stomach, it was a signature that didn’t correspond to any state I could recognize. Just wrong.

I fixed it. Reduced the total flow of energy into my stomach. Changed the signature, so it was primarily the signature for a calm, happy stomach, with only a little bit of energy for any other signatures. And within seconds, I felt better. Not just physically, but emotionally. My stress disappeared. I went from cycling about this disagreement to thinking about it calmly — it was still something to talk about, but not something to obsess about anymore. It seems that the wrong energy in my stomach had caused my emotional state. The shift into that emotional state was slow, it happened overnight, but the change out of it was abrupt, profound, and surprising.

How did that happen? I know it sounds strange, but psychology research indicates that emotions come from the body, not the brain. The brain notices what’s happening in the body, interprets it as an emotion, then comes up with a cause for that emotion. There’s some elegant research on this. My brain noticed the weirdness in my stomach and concluded I must be really bothered by something, then focused on that disagreement as a result.

I have a few take-aways from this. Side-effects can show up in unexpected ways. Testing is important.

And the one that excites me: How can we turn these side-effects into healing techniques?

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Posted in Case Studies | 2 Comments »

What Does Energy Healing Feel Like?

Monday, March 21st, 2016

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“Huh, I didn’t feel anything.”

I’d just done the healing for better sleep on a friend. She’s had energy healing before, and had a mystical experience with a shaman, so she was more believer than skeptic. It didn’t come off as dismissive. I think she’d just hoped for another cool mystical experience, and was a little disappointed.

But really, energy healing shouldn’t create tingles or sensations. Here’s how I think about it:

  • Most people don’t feel energy (and most demonstrations of energy are actually proprioception). If they did, researchers would have found the biofield by now. I’m actually working on how to create sensations reliably, and it’s challenging work.
  • For people who do feel energy, they usually need a lot of it. (That’s what my book’s ethereal software does to create sensations, more or less.) Except good healing techniques aren’t about flooding the person with energy. They’re about applying exactly the right type of energy to the right spot in the body, sustained over hours or days. You wouldn’t want a flood of energy sustained over days.
  • Feeling tingling is unrelated to sleeping better. And if you took a sleeping pill and suddenly your head started tingling, that’s not a good sign.

My friend liked this explanation. I think I’m going to add it to my “what to expect from this healing” talk, so people know not to expect tingles. This isn’t Head and Shoulders shampoo.

——–

In April, I’ll be consulting in Singapore and Manilla, the Philippines. If you live there and want to show me around, let me know.

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Posted in Energy Healing | 4 Comments »

Why Energy Healing Needs Physics

Sunday, March 6th, 2016

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Biofield healing (aka energy healing) has shown tremendous results in case studies, placebo-controlled studies, cell culture studies, and other peer-reviewed research over the past few decades. It’s recognized by the NIH and approved for use in hospitals.

And yet, biofield healing is only used by 1% of the population, and research funding is almost non-existent. Why?

It’s not failings in current research. Yes, most studies are single-blind not double-blind, and like all research you can find flaws in some studies. But you know what? If a drug were producing these results, there would be a pile of money to fund top-quality double-blind trials.

So what’s the difference between drugs and biofield healing?

The short answer is: Physics.

See, the sciences aren’t isolated. Medicine is based on biology, and we can explain how drugs function in terms of cells and hormones and neurotransmitters. And biology is based on chemistry, which describes the details of those interactions. And ultimately, all of that is based on physics. Science isn’t just a collection of facts. It’s a tower, with physics at the bottom, and chemistry, biology, and medicine built on one another, going up.

To research a new drug, we only need a new top floor. All of the foundation already exists — the physics, chemistry, and biology.

But when we research biofield healing, we’re starting from zero. There’s no biology that corresponds to the biofield, and no chemistry, and no physics. We need the whole building, not just the top floor.

That’s why current research isn’t convincing: It’s starting with the medicine, and skipping the physics.

But scientists add to physics all the time. Two hundred years ago, relativity, quantum, string, and many other findings didn’t exist. So why can’t we just run some good medical studies and let the physicists update physics, while we get on with healing people?

The short answer is: Medicine and physics have different rules. Except that isn’t satisfying at all. Why do they have different rules, and why does that matter?

In any research, there’s a chance that the results are coincidence. Some portion of your volunteers will get better all on their own, and if we get more of those destined-to-be-healthy people in the treatment group than the control group, the treatment group will have better results with or without the drug. Think of it like flipping a coin — heads means healthy, tails means sick, and if you flip 10 times, sometimes you’ll wind up with 7 or 8 heads just from random chance.

If instead of 10 flips, we do 100 or 1000, it’s must less likely we’ll wind up far from 50% heads. So that’s what we do: We test the drug on many people, and ensure there’s only a 5% chance the results were just luck. Maybe 1% chance if we’re really serious. Those are good papers in medicine.

But in physics? Between 0.01% and 0.0001% chance the results are luck. That’s 10,000x as careful as top-notch medical research. And physics can do that, because atoms are much easier to work with than humans, and there are no ethics committees.

The point is: Accepting the biofield requires new physics. So we need a way to produce physics-level results, that only have a one-in-a-million chance of being luck.

How do we do that? Short answer is to develop new biofield techniques producing obvious, unmistakable results. The long answer is its own post, or more likely its own book.

But the first step toward a solution is understanding why the problem exists. So that’s why: Because we don’t just need new medicine. We need new physics.

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Posted in Energy Healing | 7 Comments »

What is the Biofield?

Sunday, February 28th, 2016

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A friend asked me, “What is the biofield?”

That’s like asking, “What is gravity?” Or “What is magnetism?” There’s no simple answer, and perhaps no known answer. The best we can do is give you examples, and describe how those phenomena behave.

Examples include Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, Chi Gung, and many more. “Biofield” is the term used by the NIH and medical researchers to describe the energy used by all of those healing modalities.

How does the biofield behave? It seems that living cells emit some sort of field. The state of those cells — inflamed, injured, healthy, etc — determines the state of that field. Normally, the field flows out of cells. But it seems that the flow goes both ways, and that influencing the field can also influence those cells. (This has been demonstrated with cell culture studies, for example.)

That’s my answer. But there’s also a story here. The question came up at a writer’s potluck — bring food, bring something you’re writing, share both. I read the start of my vision for Healing Lab, got asked that question and flubbed it in front of a dozen writers. Just went off on a tangent, focusing on how no one knows instead of giving examples. Not a good answer, and I got gentle, kind feedback to that effect.

Today, this feels ok. That’s what practice is for: To make errors, reflect on them, plan a better answer next time. Better now with friends than later with investors.

But in the past, that writer’s potluck would have terrified me. I wouldn’t have read my work, wouldn’t have taken the question, would have frozen up instead of reflecting on how to answer it better.

I think bloggers too often share only our successes. Only the good answer we’ll give next time, not the failed answer we said in the moment. So I’m sharing that failure, too. If you’re afraid of flubbing an answer, know that us experienced folks mess up, too. I hope it helps you share when you get the chance.

The world doesn’t need your silence. The world needs your art.

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Posted in Personal Stories | 2 Comments »

The Missing Half of Healing Research

Monday, February 22nd, 2016

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If we understood energy healing as well as we understand pharmaceuticals, how would that change our lives? And what would energy healing research look like?

Currently, most energy healing research starts with an established system of energy healing and tests its efficacy for patients with various conditions.

The equivalent in drug research would be testing a folk remedy, like chewing leaves or making tea from bark. Don’t get me wrong — that’s valuable research too, drugs like aspirin came from that research. But it’s only one step.

After finding out that willow bark is effective at reducing inflammation, chemists analyzed it, identified unusual compounds, and tested each compound to identify the active ingredients. That’s why we have aspirin in pill form, fast to take and with standard doses, instead of needing to brew tea from willow bark each time we have a headache.

And of course, folk remedies can only find cures that already exist in nature. Most pharmaceutical research doesn’t start from a folk remedy. It starts with the condition we want to treat, plus an understanding of the human body and the chemistry involved. Researchers test possible solutions in test tubes, then in mice, and slowly work up to randomized controlled trials in humans. This lets us discover compounds that no folk medicine could know, because many useful medicines don’t occur in nature.

That’s what’s missing in healing research: A chemistry-like understanding of the biofield, to let us analyze existing techniques, find the active ingredients, and make them more concentrated and effective. And a science for developing new energies and techniques, beyond the ones that healers naturally produce.

Once we have that, we’ll be able to develop even better healing techniques and help even more people.

Developing that chemistry-like understanding is up to healers, at least for now. Doctors can help us test the healing techniques, and help us understand the physiology of the conditions we’re dealing with. But to develop that fundamental science of the biofield? Only healers can do that, at least while we’re still working understand the biofield well enough to explain it to non-healers.

That’s the real reason behind Healing Lab.

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