Posts Tagged ‘Healing’

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(Im)balancing the Biofield

Sunday, November 8th, 2015

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“Instead of balancing the biofield, we precisely imbalance it to produce the energy healing result.”

How is my system of healing different than Reiki? I’ve been searching for a simple answer to this. Not one that explains sensory connections or the pathways from energy to cells, but a simple metaphor for laymen. And that’s where I’ve ended up: Balance vs imbalance.

Vitamins balance the body, more or less. They help your body do what it naturally does.

But painkillers? They precisely imbalance the body. A balanced body signals pain when there’s an injury. But imbalance the body in the right way and those pain-signaling nerves stop firing (or the brain stops registering them).

Chemotherapy precisely imbalances the body too, damaging all cells, but damaging cancer cells more.

Balance is great when you want your body to do what it’s doing, just a little better. But often, that’s not the goal.

Thoughts?

This was a short post. Want more to read? Here’s a hilarious take on the Randi prize.

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Posted in Energy Healing | No Comments »

Killing Skepticism in Magick: A Plan

Sunday, October 25th, 2015

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Skepticism dies via mature technologies.

Take Hertzian Waves. Invisible messages floating through the air, passing through solid objects. Sounds pretty woo, right?

Today, they’re better known as radio waves, and everything from remote controls to wifi to cell phones depend on them. Mature radio-based technologies are ubiquitous, and only a crazy person would remain skeptical.

Mature technologies produce obvious results, experienced by everyone. That’s what kills skepticism.

Here’s the rub: Energy healing and magick haven’t produced a mature technology yet.

Can an expert use sigils or beliefs or ethereal software to create luck? It certainly seems so. Can we do it with the precision and reliability to create an obvious, media-friendly demonstration? Do we have something a layman can experience themselves? No and no. So it remains limited to stories at magick conferences, only convincing the already-convinced, and laymen never get the visceral, proving impact of a successful manifesting.

What about energy healing? A decade or more of scientific research suggests that an expert in Reiki or Therapeutic Touch can reduce pain for 24-48 hours. This is a great first version of a technology, and I hope it continues helping more and more people. But a mature version? That would produce fast, obvious numbing, or invert the technique to produce clear sensations. Mature energy healing would affect the long-term outcome of a disease, convincing people by saving their lives. And the healing techniques we have today, which right now is applied by an expert at $60-100 per session? It would be tied to a sigil that anyone could meditate on and experience the energy healing themselves, for free or a low monthly subscription.

Skepticism in magick is rational, and it has many causes: A history of mages and healers making false claims, which continues today. The language we use, and our misuse of science, particularly quantum physics. How even our solid, well-researched claims would require new physics. And more. We’ll have to address all of that eventually.

But when I look for solutions, I look for something that’s both necessary and sufficient. And getting all healers to stop making false claims? That isn’t necessary, it isn’t sufficient, and it probably isn’t possible. Same with getting everyone to use less-woo-sounding terms, or to understand that the “observer” of quantum physics is a photon, not a conscious mind. And developing new physics that explain our results? That happens after we’re taken seriously, not before.

But a mature technology? That’s necessary, sufficient (or nearly so), and can be accomplished by a small group of experienced mages and healers.

If we want to kill skepticism, we need a mature technology.

Moving forward, I’ll be performing studies on this blog, based on healing energies tied to sigils. They’ll be double-blind, placebo-controlled, solid research. I hope you’ll help. (If you live near San Francisco, I’ll also be doing in-person research, publishing the results here.)

And if you want to copy my design and do your own studies, tell me and I’ll help you publicize. Because we all benefit from building a community of researchers.

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Posted in Science | 13 Comments »

Explaining Biofields to Skeptics

Sunday, October 18th, 2015

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George asks:

Question: What language would you use to describe to someone what a “biofield” is and how you work with it, if they weren’t well-versed in the topic (or even a little wary or dismissive about these things)?

(Also a great discussion of direct / indirect magick in that thread, worth reading from the start.)

To answer, I’ll imagine a potential client, curious but skeptical, is asking this. I’d start with case studies:

“Before explaining the biofield, let me explain why I care about it, why I work with it…” And then whatever case studies matter most, simply describing that person’s condition before the healing session and after.

Note: I like to let people draw their own conclusions on whether the results were from healing energy or placebo or coincidence. That way they don’t feel pressured. Also, it lets me avoid claiming more than I actually know, and also avoid legal issues with saying that a healing technique had specific medical results.

Why start with healing results? Because you can’t convince someone of the biofield by describing it. You need to start with the experimental evidence. You also want to share the impact, why it’s worthwhile to study and use this. For us, the experimental evidence and the impact are both our healing results.

(If they’re more skeptical, I’ll discuss peer-reviewed journal articles, particularly the recent studies done on cell cultures. It won’t convince an unreasonable skeptic, but if they want to believe and just need to know they’re not foolish for believing, journal articles can be great.)

Once they’re on board with this healing technique being awesome, I’d explain the biofield:

“The short answer is, no one really knows what the biofield is. It’s our current best explanation for how this phenomenon works. Our current thinking is, there’s there’s a field of energy around living tissue, probably emitted by the cells. By influencing the energy, we can affect the cells. Now, is this literally true, or is it just an explanation that happens to lead to useful healing techniques? I can’t say. But it’s our current best model.

“My current hypothesis is that the energy inhibits or promotes cellular processes, and by picking the right energy we can target the right cellular process. Healing techniques based on that model seem to work well. Is that literally true? Again, no one knows. At some point I’d like to do cell culture studies so we can advance our understanding further.”

The point is to be really honest about what we know and what we don’t, what we believe and why we believe it.

I continue that tone as we talk about their healing session, setting expectations that the first technique rarely works and that we’ll need to debug it. And clients tell me how other healers overpromise and underdeliver, and that they trust me more for admitting the limits of our knowledge and our current healing research.

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Posted in Energy Healing | 1 Comment »

The Heart of Direct Magick: Love and Engineering

Sunday, October 11th, 2015

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Sonia asks:

Where is the heart in all this? This – like connecting to the software hehe ;-) – is all braintalk to me.

In all you have experimented. Have you noticed a difference between just bringing sort the idea of simple deep emotion of “love and light” to a cell then whatever technical precise command you give… ?

(Read her full comment here.)

You’re right, this is different than focusing on love and light. It’s a different way of doing energy healing and magick. It won’t feel easy or intuitive the first time, and it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. That’s OK.

I want to share the heart of Direct Magick for me. Why I do this. Because this intellectual approach ultimately is in service of love.

Four years ago, one of the loves of my life, Lisa, had chronic hives. She’d had them for 9 months, seen doctors, was taking prescription antihistamines, and she was still getting worse. She told me, “If I knew I’d be like this for the rest of my life, I’d kill myself.” I don’t think that was hyperbole.

My first healing technique failed. So did my second. Hives is simply too complex of an illness to get much result by focusing on love. My unconscious didn’t know the right healing technique to use, so focusing on that intent wouldn’t get us anywhere — my unconscious would say, “Yeah, I get that you want to heal her. I want to heal her too, but I don’t know how.”

But we did succeed. She researched the medical science. I developed energies to target the specific tissues involved. After we got the right technique, her hives stopped literally overnight: We did the healing session after dinner, and the next morning she woke without hives for the first time in months.

I practice magick in this intellectual, problem-solving way because I care about solving problems. Not because that’s clever or cool, but because that’s how I help the people I love.

Another example: Today, a friend has relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis. She has mild pain, numbness and odd sensations, but she’s mostly in remission and can live a normal life. But no one knows when it’ll relapse.

Like hives, MS is an autoimmune disorder. Like hives, it’s too complex to get much result just by wanting to, by focusing on intent and love and light. But maybe, if we’re smart and diligent and lucky, we can adapt the healing technique for hives to also help her. I’ve been working on that, on and off, for 8 months, and I’m going to keep at it until we get somewhere.

There are healing techniques I want to get out into the world. One for depression I developed for myself in 2013, which I need to adapt for others. Several for people with chronic joint pain, insomnia, and infections. And other healing techniques for people with pain from chemotherapy and advanced cancer.

Focusing on intent and love is great for communicating your intent to your unconscious. And if your unconscious knows how to solve that problem, then awesome, you’ll get good results. But all those things I just listed? My unconscious didn’t know how to do any of them. Solving those problems required intellect and engineering to develop the techniques.

So the heart of Direct Magick is this: Understand your magick. Research the problem you’re solving. Engineer a new technique. Then use it to help the people you love.

The purpose is love. But the path is science and engineering.

Also, a new front page. It’s been on my list, and writing this post finally showed me where to start.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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Posted in Fundamentals of Conscious Magick | 11 Comments »

What it Takes to Bring Energy Healing to Everyone

Sunday, September 27th, 2015

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A friend wants to make energy healing available for everyone, not just the well-to-do. That’s a great goal, and I’m totally on board. But what would that take?

Some numbers: Let’s say one energy healer can see 6 people a day, 7 days a week. That’s ambitious but not crazy, which will be a theme for this post. That’s 42 people a week, or about 2,000 people per year, one session per person.

There are 7 billion people alive right now. 7,000,000,000 / 2,000 = 3,500,000, or 3.5 million healers.

The US has 300 million people. 300,000,000 / 2,000 = 150,000 healers in the US.

Those numbers are intimidating. They certainly were for my friend. Years ago, when I first started thinking about building energy healing into a science, those numbers intimidated me too. But having those numbers lets you plan, it makes the difference between a daydream and a goal.

A few takeaways:

  • That’s much larger than a single company. If we want energy healing to be available to everyone, we need an entire industry, including trade schools. Currently, our competition isn’t the other companies or healing systems, our competition is market penetration (fewer than 1% of Americans use biofield healing).
  • Energy healing either needs to be easy to learn (think Reiki), or a high-skill, highly-paid profession (like doctors and nurses.) I want to build the second, which means published studies to build credibility and connect energy healing with medicine.
  • Helping the currently-existing healers offer lower-cost sessions won’t help. That might let them help different people, but it wouldn’t let you help more people. We simply don’t have enough healers right now.
  • How do we get more healers? Create jobs. Currently, if you want to offer healing sessions, you also have to market yourself and network for clients. If healers could instead join a company, be assigned healing cases, and have a marketing team to bring in clients, healing would be a safer, easier career to succeed in, which means more healers.
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When Self-Doubt is Healthy

Sunday, August 16th, 2015

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Imagine a friend has a complex medical condition. Multiple Sclerosis, epilepsy, etc. You want to help them. You research the condition, identify a change you’d like to make to the energy of a particular tissue, and figure out an energy signature to use. You do the healing technique.

What’s the chance of success?

Or more critically: How disappointed should you be if it fails? And how should you present the technique to your friend?

When we settle on a current best guess, it’s easy to idealize it. We see the reasons it should work. And it took so much effort — in a fair universe, that effort ought to produce a success.

But my first plan rarely works. I say this with the confidence of years of experience, years of debugging techniques until the third or tenth version works. The human body is deeply complex. Ethereal structures are deeply complex. And I rarely see the entire picture in my first attempt.

The effort to produce a success is 10x or 100x what feels fair. But that’s not reality’s fault for being unfair. It’s an error in my fairness-detector.

I typically assign my initial best guess 5% probability of success. For every 20 conditions I take on, I expect one technique to work on the first try. (The other 95% probability goes to the billions of options I haven’t thought of.)

My second technique draws from what I learned. It usually gets 10-20% chance of success. And my third technique is higher still.

But until a technique succeeds, I never assign it more than 50% chance of success.

This keeps me from getting too hopeful, then too disappointed. And it keeps me from over-selling the results to my friend. They should know this is going to take research, testing, refinements and even fresh starts. Knowing that going in gives us the time and chances to develop a successful technique.

And when that first technique fails, I don’t say I’ve failed. I say, “The technique failed. We haven’t found the correct healing technique yet.”

Then I get back to work.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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Posted in Learning Magick | 3 Comments »

4-Dimensional Magick

Sunday, July 19th, 2015

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Imagine one nerve cell. Above it are ethereal structures. Tubes, or pathways, coming out of the cell Each time the nerve fires, it creates some biofield energy, which these ethereal pathways carry to the person’s aura. When we do healing work, we put energy in the aura, letting it filter down through those pathways to the cells. Advanced healing techniques act on the pathways themselves, helping the energy reach the cells more quickly, powerfully, and precisely.

Now imagine a chain of nerve cells, all in a line, carrying a signal from the hand to the brain. Each nerve has its own ethereal pathways leading to its own piece of the person’s aura. That’s two dimensions: Horizontal is the chain of nerves, and vertical is the ethereal structures leading to the aura. Like a picture in a magazine.

What if we’re applying healing energy to all the nerves in an area of skin? We’ll have a flat sheet of skin, with the ethereal paths and aura rising above it. This is a 3D picture — 2D of flat skin, and the third dimension is the ethereal paths and aura.

And what if we want to work with all the nerves throughout the person’s body? That’s when we need four dimensions. Here’s why:

There are nerves throughout the body, so you need three dimensions for the physical nerves. Then each nerve has its own ethereal pathways leading to the aura. Except here, the ethereal pathways can’t be “up.” Up is already used — up from my bicep is either my deltoid (going up the arm), or my skin (going out). Either way, the ethereal structures can’t be there, because my deltoid and my skin have their own ethereal structures.

Image of CT brain scan

CT scan slices via Wikipedia.

To visualize this, think of a brain scan. As the scan sweeps through the brain, it presents slices — 2D images that add up to the 3D brain. To visualize a 4D ethereal structure, you would have a series of 3D slices. The first would show the ethereal structures immediately touching the person’s cells, then the next would move a bit along those paths, then a bit farther, until you’re at the person’s aura. (For anyone doing this: Look for spots where the ethereal pathways split or quickly change signatures. These makes excellent points for 3D slices.)

Lost? Here’s an excellent video explaining the fourth dimension in a video game.

I first thought about 4D magick as a teen, for visualizing energy healing (probably). It wasn’t terribly useful. Remember, visualizations only communicate intent to your unconscious mind, then let the unconscious handle the details. The added details of 4D didn’t help my unconscious, and the added complexity probably detracted from my results. If you’re visualizing, just use a good representation, a 2D body with ethereal structures rising out of it. Keep it simple.

But these days, all my magick involves sensory connections. Here, accuracy matters. First, a quick primer on sensory connections:

We all know about sending energy along a connection. A sensory connection is when you make a connection but don’t send energy along it. Instead, let it absorb a bit of energy from whatever it’s connect to, not enough to drain anyone, just enough to feel the energy signature there. Now it’s sensing that signature.

For practical healing techniques, I make a network of sensory connections throughout the body, to each group of cell’s ethereal pathways, then another set of connections a little bit out along those pathways, and another set of connections farther up, until we reach the aura. It’s like the brain scan, taking a snapshot at each point along those paths. And since each snapshot is a 3D body, the overall map is 4D. That’s what I use to guide my energy healing.

Note that sensory connections are different than just visualizing the ethereal body, just like how touching an object is different than visualizing that object. That’s why 4D matters here: When you’re reaching out to touch the ethereal structures, instead of just visualizing them, it’s important to mentally track everything you’re touching. And since you’re working with 4D objects, that means mentally working in four dimensions.

I’ve used this for energy healing, for awakening ethereal muscles, and this week I’m using it for creating sensations. I’ll give some examples of working in four dimensions next week.

(You may have noticed, this is 4 dimensions in the mathematical sense, not as in “beings from another dimension.” Yes, I sneakily taught you math. Mea culpa.)

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | 2 Comments »

Healing Techniques for a Reiki Master with Chronic Hives

Wednesday, July 8th, 2015

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Minty, a Reiki Master suffering from hives, writes:

I’m so excited to find your site. I have been suffering from hives for 3 long itchy weeks and although I’m a very experienced Reiki Master I was struggling to breakthrough. Reading your blog on your Hives client and the rest of your site has giving me much needed new insights, hope and a renewed excitement in discovering new techniques! ! I will be getting into all the Magick over the next few days and will give you an update.

I’m so sorry to hear about your hives. I’ve seen up close how miserable that can be.

I’d like to help. Let me lay out some healing techniques, you try them and give me feedback, and together we’ll work to debug them.

As a Reiki practitioner, you’re used to channeling healing energy, right? I’m guessing you’d say you channel energy from “The Universe.” Keep in mind, that’s just the name someone chose to refer to “the source we channel energy from.” In Direct Magick, we call those channel-able energy sources “ethereal software.”

There are many different pieces of ethereal software out there. Some are used by healers, some by psychics, some by ritual mages. Any one person can use multiple pieces of ethereal software. I’ve already used two ethereal softwares today, and it’s only 9am.

Here’s what I’ve set up: I took the healing technique for chronic hives and programmed it into the ethereal software for my book. There’s a lot going on in that sentence, so let me unpack it for you.

Healing technique for chronic hives: It’s three effects, actually. Note: I’m going to speak about what the effects are designed to do, because without medical research I can’t say what specific changes they cause.

The first effect is designed to act on the nerves in your skin, spine, and the rest of your body to inhibit the itch signal. When I worked with Lisa, she would get significant reduction in itching after using this healing technique, typically 4 points on a 10-point scale.

After two or three weeks, it stopped working for her. We think that’s because of a buildup of neurotransmitters in the inhibited nerves.

A little background: Nerves send signals by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters. One nerve releases the neurotransmitter, and the next nerve in the chain absorbs it. That’s how the signal passes from one nerve to the next. If the receiving nerve doesn’t absorb the neurotransmitter (for example, because it is inhibited), then the neurotransmitter floats between the nerves, eventually building up to problematic levels. So, the first nerve (that sent the neurotransmitter) can absorb it back, kind of like an envelope stamped “return to sender.” This process is called reuptake.

The second technique is designed to increase neurotransmitter reuptake for the itch-signalling nerves. With Lisa, we did this effect and let it run while she slept, and the next morning she woke up nearly hive-free. She would sometimes have smaller outbreaks during particularly stressful night shifts, but when she did, she would use the first healing technique, and the itch would decrease to a manageable level.

There’s one more technique, too. Ultimately, hives is caused by the immune system attacking the person’s skin. So the third effect is designed to decrease overall immune system activity. Not down to zero, just a little, to take the edge off. After we added this, Lisa’s stress-related hives decreased dramatically, too.

So, three effects. We used them in this combination:

  • Effect 1 (anti-itch) for 2-3 weeks
  • Effect 2 (neurotransmitter) for one month
  • Effect 3 (immune system) for 2 weeks

There is probably some more optimal schedule for these healing techniques, but that schedule worked well, and it should give you a starting point in healing yourself. In particular, let Effect 1 (anti-itch) run for a couple of weeks to get that buildup of neurotransmitter, so that Effect 2 knows what to target. (Based on testing I just did, if there isn’t a buildup of neurotransmitter, the ethereal software refuses to run Effect 2.)

Those are the healing techniques I’d use in person. But how do we get these effects to you? Ideally, I’d like to empower you to heal yourself — it’s a more scalable solution than me doing every healing session, and to be successful this system needs to be easy to pick up and use.

But it’s not enough to tell you goals like “decrease immune system sensitivity.” You can focus on that intent, but you need ethereal software that can turn that intent into a specific energy targeted at a particular tissue. Most ethereal software would probably say, “That’s great, I see what you want there, but I don’t know how to do that.” We need to get you some ethereal software that’s programmed to handle these particular instructions.

I’m not sure if you’ve gotten to my book-in-progress yet, but it walks you through contacting a piece of ethereal software I made specifically for the book. That software is bound to a sigil, and by focusing on the sigil you can contact the ethereal software. Using it will be pretty similar to channeling Reiki energy, but you’ll be tapping into a different source that knows different commands.

I’ve programmed the three healing effects into that ethereal software. The commands are based on the intended result of the energy:

Numb. Focus on “Numb me” or “numb the itch.” To turn it off, focus on “turn off numbing.”

Increase neurotransmitter reuptake. I want to mention, this communication happens in concepts, not in syllables. To me, neurotransmitter reuptake conjures images of nerves and chemicals, so those words work well for me. But if you find those words awkward, read up on neurotransmitter reuptake before using the command. (It might be possible to also use your own words, or even images, but it might not. It depends on how similar they are to the command I programmed. The surest bet is to use the words I use, after getting comfortable with what they mean.) To turn this effect off, use “deactivate increase neurotransmitter reuptake.” It’s an unintuitive sentence, but if you think of “increase neurotransmitter reuptake” as all one phrase, it makes sense. (Based on testing for similar commands, “decrease neurotransmitter reuptake” won’t work.)

Decrease immune sensitivity. This does a small effect, and you can repeat the command to increase intensity. “Decrease immune sensitivity — turn off” cuts it in half, and “decrease immune sensitivity — entirely off” turns it off completely.

We programmed some protection into the ethereal software, too. If it notices something going wrong, it’ll stop the effects. But also trust your intuitions — if something feels off, shut down the effects. Also, do each effect one at a time, and do them in the morning so you have plenty of time to observe the results before going to sleep. And I’m sure this goes without saying, but all of this is delivered as-is, use at your own risk.

Based on my testing, increase neurotransmitter reuptake won’t run unless you have a buildup from the numbing command. The software said as much in its error message. Also, when I ran decrease immune sensitivity on myself, it gave a warning, “You don’t have a condition this will help, are you sure you want to run this?” Neat to see the protection and error checking in action.

And before doing any of this, work through the exercises in my book to connect to the ethereal software and turn on and off an obvious connection. Practice until that’s easy and works reliably. That way, we’ll know you can reliably send messages to this software before you try any of these commands.

If you have questions, or if anything seems odd, please leave a comment here, or email me if you want to ask privately. Whatever the results, please let me know.

Lastly, please go into this with a research mindset. This may require some adjustment, some debugging. I’ll work the problem with you, both through writing and through distance work. Working these problems is how we discover the mechanisms behind healing, which lets us develop better techniques and help more people. Think of this as part of creating a new science, a new set of human capabilities. Because that’s what we’re doing.

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Posted in Energy Healing | No Comments »

Limiting Beliefs and Missing Questions

Monday, June 8th, 2015

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Your beliefs determine your experience and your results.

That’s a meme among magick writers, anyway. At a psychological level, it’s clearly true: Confidence creates success, despair creates failure, and your beliefs create both confidence and despair.

But I get the impression that many writers mean something larger. That doubting your energy healing is will cause it to fail, or that believing your energy healing is safe will prevent side effects.

I wouldn’t call that entirely wrong. But it’s far from right.

Every new healing technique I try, I expect to fail, simply because energy healing is complex. But they often succeed. (This is a “let’s see what happens” sort of doubt, not a despairing doubt.)

And I used to do energy healing by building energy in my own body. That will create side-effects because, well, that’s what happens when you build energy in yourself. It happens whether I believe it will or not, like gravity.

But here’s what I will say: Believing that energy healing cannot be done without harming yourself will keep you from creating the techniques to do it. The question won’t occur to you, the technique won’t seem worth exploring.

The belief doesn’t create the limitation, but the belief prevents us from solving it.

Can energy healing, combined with Western medicine, cure disease? Extend the human lifespan? Maybe one day end death?

How are your beliefs limiting the questions you explore?

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Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

The Danger of Popular Memes and Ancient Wisdom

Monday, May 25th, 2015

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How well-meaning, non-scientific memes can slow your learning.

A friend asks:

When you do healing technique, how do you keep from messing up your own energy? Particularly when you’re working with someone with a terminal illness?

This a popular meme, but it’s not a real concern. Energy healing is about shifting the energy signature of living tissue (the “biofield”). Shifting someone else’s biofield doesn’t affect your own, just like massaging someone’s neck doesn’t create knots in your neck.

But where does that meme come from? Here’s my best guess: If you imagine energy healing as transferring some finite quantity of “health,” then the healer would have to get sicker to make the person healthier.

When I started this post, I’d intended to refute the “health transfer” idea. But I realized that, while inaccurate, it’s actually an honest attempt to explain some problems healers can face:

First, energy healing takes focus, and it requires engaging ethereal muscles. In new healers, those ethereal muscles aren’t strong yet, which is tiring in a different way than playing a sport or taking an exam. If a healer isn’t consciously aware of their ethereal muscles, they’ll experience an unusual fatigue but not understand why.

Second, just like you can cause side effects in the person you’re working with, you can cause side effects in yourself. It happened to me, too: When I started practicing energy healing, I’d build the healing energy in my own body. Everything I did to the other person, I also did to myself. Combine that with an inexperienced healer using slightly-off energy signatures, and you can get headaches, nausea, fatigue, and similar problems. I mostly avoided those, but I’d already been using energy for a decade.

(New healers: Remember, none of these side effects are serious, and most go away if you return your energy to normal afterwards.)

The healer, perhaps new, perhaps experienced and teaching new healers, sees these problems. When they work with a tired person, they also become deeply fatigued. When they work with someone with a headache, they too sometimes develop headaches. An explanation is needed, and it sounds so simple to say that the health and illness are transferred.

A trained scientist will do two things. First, they’ll ask, “How might that work? What mechanism?” And they’ll notice how really, incredibly complicated this would be to implement. Second, they’ll try as hard as we can to refute an idea, knowing that an idea they cannot refute is probably true. They’ll ask, “Are there times when I work with an injury, but do not get the symptoms myself afterwards? Does the level of headache I get afterward correlate with the level of headache my client had? Do I ever get headaches when the client had none?”

But that takes training, and experience, and a desire to be accurate rather than think you’re right. That’s hard. I don’t always live up to that goal, and I don’t know anyone who does.

But most people don’t do that. The default for humans not trained in science is to look for confirmation, thinking of times when they worked with a particularly bad headache and got a nasty headache themselves, or times when they worked with an aching knee and then (coincidentally) had their own knee ache. It’s called confirmation bias.

Of course, they don’t consciously say, “I’d rather feel right than be accurate, so I’ll ignore evidence.” The human brain just does it automatically and unconsciously.

They repeat their stories, and their warnings, intending to help other healers avoid these problems. And the story, “I worked with this person, then got the condition they had” is so compelling. Much more fun than, “I worked with this person, then nothing else happened.” And it gets retold, each retelling adding to the perceived evidence, until “health transfer” becomes a meme, implicit in our beliefs without ever being explicitly taught.

There is no villain to this story. Just common, very human errors.

This is the danger in trusting popular memes. I suspect it’s also a danger of trusting ancient wisdom.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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