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Childhood disrupted: how your biography becomes your biology, and how you can heal Atria Books Donna Jackson Nakazawa Year: 2015 Language: english File: EPUB, 3.30 MB Your tags: 0 / 0

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The everything history of the Bible book: from divine inspiration to modern-day discoveries--a complete reference F+W Media;Adams Media Donley, Jeffery, Ph.D Year: 2006 Language: english File: EPUB, 1.92 MB Your tags: 0 / 0

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Author’s Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

Foreword





Part I - Awakening the Two-Million-Year-Old Healer Within

Chapter 1 - Energy Is All There Is

Chapter 2 - Energy Testing

Chapter 3 - Keeping Your Energies Humming





Part II - The Anatomy of Your Energy Body

Chapter 4 - The Meridians

Chapter 5 - The Chakras

Chapter 6 - Aura, Electrics, Celtic Weave, and Basic Grid

Chapter 7 - The Five Rhythms

Chapter 8 - Triple Warmer and the Radiant Circuits





Part III - Weaving It All Together

Chapter 9 - Illness

Chapter 10 - Pain

Chapter 11 - Swimming in Electromagnetic Currents

Chapter 12 - Setting Your Habit Field for Optimum Health and Performance

Epilogue - Journeys to the Outer Realms

Appendix - Energy Medicine Resources

Notes

Other Books and Programs of Interest

Index

About the Author





Other books coauthored by Donna Eden and David Feinstein

Energy Medicine for Women



The Promise of Energy Psychology





JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN



a member of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

NewYork





JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

; 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England



Copyright © 1998, 2008 by Donna Eden and David Feinstein

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned,

or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do

not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation

of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Published simultaneously in Canada



Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.



Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eden, Donna.

Energy medicine : balancing your body’s energies for optimal health, joy, and vitality /

Donna Eden with David Feinstein ; illustrations by Brooks Garten and Cindy Cohn.—Rev. ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-585-42650-8

1. Energy medicine. I. Feinstein, David. II. Title.

RZ999.E

615.8’9—dc22





Neither the publisher nor the authors are engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision. Neither the authors nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assume any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

http://us.penguingroup.com





Dedicated to the memory of Garnet Audrey Clarke Edens, my mama,

who taught me the power of the body’s ability to heal itself.



And to Jeff Harris, M.D., who added legitimacy and levity to

energy medicine, and joy to so many, and who crossed over

on the day this manuscript was completed.





Let the body think of the Spirit as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining into it from all sides.

— PLOTINUS





Acknowledgments

My personal gratitude and professional debt to Dr. John Thie cannot be overstated, for having had the courage, and the genius, during the 1970s, to make available to more than 10 million people in more than 100 countries sophisticated self-healing techniques through his system of Touch for Health (his book is currently available in thirty-four languages). Dr. Thie, Gordon Stokes, Shanti Duree, Hazel Ullrich, Warren Jacobs, M.D., and many others whom I met through the Touch for Health organization helped set me on my path.

Sandy Wand has been an amazing friend, healer, and source of boundless support. Madison King has been the kind of student who comes back to inspire her teacher. Paul Brenner, M.D., showed me what a physician can be. My editors, Irene Prokop and Wendy Hubbert (first edition) and Sara Carder (this Tenth Anniversary update), have been enormously patient, provocative, and very smart. My agent, Susan Schulman, has provided wise and empowering counsel. The institutional support of Innersource and its friends, particularly Laleah and Hugh Bacon, Dorothy Lamb, Winn Frankland, Ling Chin, and Rodney Plimpton, are gratefully acknowledged. Stanley Krippner’s brilliant critique of an early draft of the first edition strengthened the book substantially. Catherine Feather Potenza was a backbone as my work developed and remains one of my closest friends. Richard Duree provided source material for several of the research studies reported in the book. Rik Jensen, our handyman with heart, has been a model of how to remain buoyant through floods and other disasters that could have derailed the original edition. The tens of thousands of students who have taught and studied energy medicine through Innersource have made contributions to my thinking and to this revision.

Of inestimable help and a source of joy has been the incredible Innersource administrative team, including Lori Kats, Leslie Adams, Katrina Hill, Jeffrey Harris, Vicki Matthews, Veronica Sanpere, Sherry Rhea, Carrie Cento, Eric Stahlman, Frank Dowler, Cindy Haight, Julie Conley, and the amazing teaching faculty of our basic classes and our Energy Medicine Certification Program. Our Certification Program, a bit of a miracle in galvanizing complex amorphous ideas and the teaching talents of two dozen faculty into a single forum, was heroically launched by Vicki Matthews. And then, my daughters! To my delight, Dondi and Tanya Dahlin have both stepped into the organization, putting their glorious stamp on everything from its administration to how to bring more joy into our teaching.

My husband, David Feinstein, has been tireless in interviewing me and writing first drafts from those interviews, editing transcripts of tapes from my classes, conducting computer and library searches, and generally bringing left-brained organization to my right-brained way of being. His abilities to craft a phrase, suggest an analogy, find order amid complexity, and place an idea into its larger intellectual context—all the while retaining the spirit of my voice—permeate this volume. In short, this is the book I would have written if my mind worked like both of our minds combined.





Author’s Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

When Energy Medicine was first published in 1998, I never imagined how very quickly the field would grow over the next decade. In the past ten years, energy medicine has gone from being an obscure curiosity within alternative health-care practices to an integral aspect of the worldviews of leading-edge thinkers within conventional medicine. Mehmet Oz, M.D., one of the most respected surgeons in the United States and the director of the Cardiovascular Institute at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, speaking in 2007 to an international audience on Oprah, announced that “the next big frontier in medicine is energy medicine.” Indeed, as the costs of medical care spiral out of reach and the dangers of potentially lethal side effects from standard treatments skyrocket, our culture is desperate for a good, reliable folk medicine, and energy medicine is quickly stepping in to meet that need.

When I go into a city and teach an introductory weekend workshop, the group usually develops a buzz of excitement about the tools and ideas they have just mastered, but at the end I remind them, “I leave tomorrow. Who here knows a local resource you can recommend to everyone, a person in the healing profession— whether a physician, a massage therapist, or someone simply with a shingle on the door—who brings an energy medicine perspective to their practice and to whom you would refer a loved one with a serious illness?” When I first went on the road, perhaps one or two people in an audience of 200 would raise their hands, and we would promptly put the name of the practitioners they were recommending on the whiteboard. Ten years later, 40 percent of the group typically raise their hands. Some 40,000 people, including many doctors and nurses, have attended more than 600 classes and presentations I myself have given on the topic in the past ten years, and now my students are teaching many more classes than I ever could have hoped for. Besides starting to shift the paradigm in Western medicine, energy medicine is rapidly finding its way into local communities.

But you do not need an energy medicine practitioner to experience the benefits of energy medicine. You can use the methods in this book to help yourself, heal yourself, increase your energies, become happier, and grow healthier. People are finding the most basic principles of energy medicine to be surprisingly easy to learn, simple to use, and enormously helpful in addressing their own health challenges and the health challenges of those they love. In these past ten years we have received thousands of notes and e-mails describing the way this book alone was key in overcoming a challenging health condition. A few of these are recounted in the following pages.

Energy medicine arises out of centuries of wisdom from different cultures around the world. This is why it is so especially gratifying to me that this book has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In fact, I was honored a few years ago to be asked to write a special introduction to the Chinese edition, in which I was able to say:



When Huangdi, the legendary Yellow Emperor of China, decided some 4,500 years ago to codify the already ancient practice of acupuncture, the body of work to which this book owes its most profound debt was compiled. I cannot overstate how humbling and satisfying it was to learn recently that Energy Medicine would be coming out in a Chinese translation. Only in a world where globalization allows an unprecedented cross-fertilization of ideas and practices could we expect to see such exchanges. Just as the time-honored healing arts of China are impacting the Western world, scientific investigations being conducted in China are refining healing procedures and concepts from the Yellow Emperor’s time.



When Jeremy Tarcher and Joel Fotinos asked me to update and revise Energy Medicine, I had to think twice. I had had a full-time practice in energy medicine for twenty-three years prior to writing the book, and the book accurately reflected the insights I had garnered, and it presented the techniques I had developed and found most effective. It was already a central text in many schools and training programs. I had subsequently coauthored The Promise of Energy Psychology to apply the principles of energy medicine to psychological issues, and was completing Energy Medicine for Women, which focuses on many of the health and developmental issues that are dearest to my heart. I had expanded the ideas in the original book into an extensive curriculum for our two-year Certification Program. Did I have anything new to say that would fit into the scope of a revision of the original book? In reflecting on that question, I felt resolved that the basic model presented in the first edition had stood up quite well to the tests of time, many readers, and many discerning students. Nonetheless, with David and me now having worked with 40,000 additional people in classes and audiences, we know better than we did a decade ago what questions people have as they try to assimilate the sometimes curious concepts of energy medicine; we know how to make instructions for the exercises clearer; and we know how to present certain concepts more lucidly. So we have reread every sentence of the book and made literally thousands of revisions, many of them minor wording changes for clarity or emphasis (this can happen if your “with author” is obsessive enough), but many are more substantive as well.

I have also incorporated numerous helpful suggestions from my readers, students, and teaching faculty. A difficulty some of my students who are well versed in traditional Chinese medicine had with the original edition is that the acupressure points I showed in the drawings often did not match the points shown on standard charts. While for this edition I have had Cindy Cohn redraw many of the diagrams (the original drawings by Brooks Garten remain unsigned; Cindy’s name is on her contributions) to match the traditional charts, it was not a matter of one set of charts being right and the other being wrong. The differences reflected, instead, a very important concept to understand about the body’s energies.

I see energy—vividly, distinctly, and palpably. This is what has allowed me to chart the body’s energy systems in ways that have been so useful for others who do not see energy. From this mapping and through physical procedures you will learn in this book, all people can enhance the health of the body’s energies—their own, their loved ones’, and, if they are health-care professionals, their clients’ energies as well. But just as everyone has a different physical structure, everyone has a different energy anatomy. So the points I listed on the charts are averages or approximations (though still within a narrow range, fractions of centimeters rather than inches) rather than precise points that hold true from one person to the next. What I find remarkable is not that they are not exactly the same as the points on the traditional charts, but that the points I see are so close to the points recorded by Chinese physicians thousands of years ago.

The field of acupuncture has actually been debating the exact location of these points for thousands of years. There truly is ambiguity, and it is actually an endless debate for two fundamental reasons: (1) No two people’s anatomy or energy systems are identical; and even more basic, (2) The location of the points actually changes within a single individual. Before you roll your eyes and ask how it is possible to develop a scientifically based practice around such imprecise and varying fundamentals, let me explain a bit more about energy anatomy. The acupuncture points are the physical connection on the skin to an energy field called the meridian system. Taking the metaphor of the “ghost in the machine,” the meridian system is like the ghost, and while it stays within the boundaries of the machine, it is not fixed. It is fluid. So the points on the skin that connect with it may move somewhat as well. Are the points I charted in the first book better than the points on the standard charts? Not at all. Both sets of points are averages and approximations. In revising the book, I am acknowledging that there is value in showing points that correspond to the standard charts but also emphasizing that the standard charts must still be understood as averages (and even there I often had to select which standard chart to consult for a given point).

The good news is that you do not need to be completely precise as you do the procedures that are based on these points. With acupuncture, precision is more important because a needle is so thin. The best acupuncturists can instinctually sense exactly where the point is before inserting the needle. In Japan, in fact, it is recognized that blind people often develop an enhanced attunement to energy. They are encouraged to study acupuncture because they make some of the finest practitioners. Fortunately for those who are not so attuned, you can use acupressure . The width of your finger is far greater than the size of a needle, so you have more latitude. If you make a three-finger cluster (bring your thumb and first two fingers together) to touch the point shown on a chart, you are almost ensuring that you will be covering the correct spot. Another variable that can work in your favor is your intention to be helpful. Mind moves energy, and simply knowing what you are attempting to accomplish will get the energies of your hands to find their way to the energies in the body that are needing their support. It can seem very metaphysical, but all of this can be measured scientifically.

I have also added a number of new sections to this book. The most important, I feel, is a discussion of how to use energy medicine and conventional medicine in concert. If you are going in for surgery, how can you prepare your energy system to optimize your ability to tolerate and benefit from the operation? What can you do to speed your recovery? How can energy medicine enhance other medical treatments or be used in tandem with them? Which energy medicine techniques are most effective in alleviating the side effects of medications or radiation or chemotherapy? I am asked these kinds of questions all the time in my classes, and I have summarized some of the best strategies that I know in a new closing section in Chapter 9.

Another new section introduces the “electrics” as one of the body’s major energy systems. While the electrics are briefly mentioned in the original edition as points used in traditional Chinese medicine, their importance as an energy system has become more evident to me during this past decade. I didn’t include them with the primary energy systems presented in the original book because I saw them as an aspect of each of the systems, which they are. But they also operate independently of the other systems, and I have experienced remarkable results working with the electrics alone. So they are presented here as a ninth energy system. This is not to imply that there are only nine energy systems in the body’s complex dance of energies, but rather to suggest that if you have a good understanding of these nine aspects of the body’s energy anatomy, you can be very effective in helping the body thrive.

We have reviewed the books and research studies cited and have generally let the original studies stand. While perhaps a bit dated now, they are still solid, and we have also added references to some of the most important books and studies of the past decade. Finally, as you might imagine, the resources section from the original book has (happily) become totally out of date because of the field’s rapid growth, and it has been thoroughly revised.

As I ponder the publication of this Tenth Anniversary Edition of Energy Medicine, I realize that, for me, energy medicine is far more than a system for healing people. David, my husband and co-teacher, often says toward the end of a class, explaining why we spend so much time on the road instead of enjoying the comforts of home, “If you had an opportunity to raise the vibration of this troubled planet, you would probably go out of your way to do it. We have the privilege of being able to help raise the vibration of the planet by teaching people, one individual and one group at a time, how to raise the vibration of their own bodies.” This may be the unexpected gift of energy medicine as we face challenges in the world that tend to throw our energies into disarray. When we don’t feel good in our bodies, we don’t make choices from the radiant joy that is our birthright. As a result, we suffer and our planet suffers from the choices people make out of unnecessary suffering. Energy medicine is a modest enterprise with far-reaching implications.





Foreword

Caroline Myss, Ph.D.





I have been asked for years about the nature of energy medicine—what is energy medicine? How is it different from allopathic medicine? What benefits does it offer that people cannot gain from conventional medicine?

Though these may appear to be questions that can be answered simply, they are not. They represent the fact that we have entered an energetic era in which we will redefine our understanding of ourselves. Soon we will come to know ourselves as multisensory, rendering obsolete the belief that we are five-sense creatures. No longer will we speculate about whether our thoughts and emotions have creative authority within our cell tissue; we will come to consider that form of perception one of the central truths of life. We will view as ordinary such treatments as the laying on of hands and the use of healing oils and sounds. The belief that repressing an illness through drugs is of use to the healing process will come to be seen as harmful rather than beneficial.

And when shall we expect such changes to occur? Dramatic shifts in medicine and healing are happening all around us now. Our society has shown respect for the holistic movement and energetic medicine by its growing interest in learning more about this field and choosing to engage in alternative healing methods for diseases. Research and studying the impact of thoughts and emotions in relation to the physical body increase continually, and again and again, the results indicate that the body/mind/spirit system is the accurate portrait of the human being.

The contribution Donna Eden has made with Energy Medicine will stand as one of the backbone studies as we lay a sound foundation for the field of holistic medicine. Her research is solid, and the suggestions she gives her readers to use to help themselves are simple and effective, the way help should be.

As someone who has been a part of the holistic field for fifteen years, I have met numerous people who either have wanted to know more about energy medicine as students or have needed to make use of its techniques. I feel extremely confident that this book will serve as a guide for people for years to come, because its information is based upon truth, and truth does not change.

When we look at our lives these days, it seems unwise not to acknowledge that we are residing in an age when the energetics not just of the body but of all of life are reshaping our world. The computer age represents our coming to rely upon energetic rather than vocal or written information. We are moving at a pace that is racing to keep up with the speed of thought—and thought drives the human body. Energetic medicine recognizes the power of our thoughts and of this world we are now residing in. We need texts of the quality achieved by this book to serve as guides along the way.



—1998





Introduction

The Return of Energy Medicine



Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE All’s Well That Ends Well





You are a latticework of energies. The enormous implications of this single fact are the basis of energy medicine. I invite you to step into a domain that exists beyond the world of appearances. Explore how invisible energies shape the way you feel, the way you think, and the way you live. Marshal these energies for your health and well-being. Study your eternal dance with the unseen forces within and around you. And as you do, marvel with me as the dynamic energies that stream through your body, mind, and soul exquisitely reveal the genius of nature’s “fashioning hand.”1

The first practitioner of energy medicine is you, the one who inhabits the body being cared for. Using the principles of energy medicine, you can optimize your body’s natural capacities to heal itself and to stay healthy. You can bring renewed stamina to a tired body, fresh vitality to a weary mind, and new bounce to a sagging spirit. You can manage your energies to more effectively meet stress, reduce anxiety, and free yourself of many ailments. And you can apply what you learn for yourself to benefit family members and other loved ones.

To cultivate these abilities, you will be learning a language your body already speaks and understands—the language of energy. You are, in fact, required today, when virtually everyone’s lifestyle has become so alienated from the natural order, to live in conscious partnership with your body’s energy systems if you are to live fully. Your body is an exquisitely engineered energy-driven, energy-managed machine. Our energy systems evolved in resonance with our anatomy and our environment over millions of years, but the environment has changed radically since the advent of industrialization. We evolved for a world that hasn’t existed for centuries. This, however, is but a blink in the evolutionary eye, far too short a period for natural selection to have updated the arrangement, so we adapt to the industrial and postindustrial world with energy software that was designed for living in the wild.

Nonetheless, your energy system strides on as the intelligence that animates millions of processes in your body every second. Each cell emits and responds to electrochemical signals in an unimaginably complex and coordinated dance that keeps you breathing, keeps your heart pumping, your food digesting, your eyes blinking, and your tissue safe when microorganisms invade. Your mind is not required to assist the larger full-bodied intelligence of your energy system in accomplishing these feats.

But the costs of attempting to adapt to an environment for which our bodies did not evolve are seen everywhere. Our immune systems keep us safe by attacking what they do not recognize, and they evolved over millions of years with a finite number of foods and few foreign particles in the air. Now with tens of thousands of artificial chemicals in our food, high concentrations of pollutants in our air, and technology-induced electromagnetic radiation everywhere, the immune system is on continual alert, a “code orange” emergency response that drains your energy and depletes your life force.

Meanwhile, the unyielding stress of daily life triggers another type of emergency response. We are always on the edge of the fight-or-flight response. While this heightened state is one of nature’s most brilliant achievements, it is now being called to manage all forms of stress for which it was never designed, from an argument with your spouse or child to a malfunction of your computer. In attempting to adapt to an environment for which it did not evolve, an environment that is biologically unfamiliar, your body’s energy intelligence is operating outside its scope of competence. It is required to make compromises, and such compromises often have costs. Chronically marshaling extra energy for the immune or fight-or-flight response tends to undermine your overall health and vitality. Energy runs in established patterns, or habits. Left to their own devices in the modern world, your energy systems must rely on patterns out of resonance with the environment. If you are to thrive, you must participate in the evolution of your body’s energy patterns.

This is where the intelligence of your intellect can assist the incredible—though outdated—intelligence of your body and its energy systems. We are increasingly required, with our lifestyles so divorced from nature, to live in conscious partnership with our body’s energy systems if we are to live fully and healthfully. Fortunately, it is easier than you might think to update your body’s energy software to adapt to the world in which you live. This book provides you with simple techniques you can self-apply to shift ineffective or harmful energy patterns that have grown out of compromises within the strange, unnatural, stress-filled environment in which we live. In the process, you will mobilize inner forces that enhance your health, empower your mind, and literally brighten your spirit.





ENERGY MEDICINE IS TIMELESS


Energy medicine is safe, natural, and accessible, and it is beginning to change the face of health care. According to Richard Gerber, M.D.: “The ultimate approach to healing will be to remove the abnormalities at the subtle-energy level which led to the manifestation of illness in the first place.”2 Norm Shealy, M.D., founding president of the American Holistic Medical Association, has flatly stated that “energy medicine is the future of all medicine.”3 This emerging approach is actually both contemporary and ancient. According to Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel laureate in Medicine: “In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy.”4

The term energy medicine is being used in many ways today, ranging from the introduction of ancient shamanic healing practices into modern cultures to the use of powerful electromagnetic and imaging technologies in modern hospitals. It embraces lawful principles and mysteries; routine procedures and artistry; matter and spirit. Energy medicine is the best term I know for describing the growing number of approaches where an understanding of the body as a system of energies is being applied for promoting healing, health, and well-being.

Energy medicine is the art and science of fostering physical, psychological, and spiritual health and vitality. It combines a rational knowledge and intuitive understanding of the energies in the body and in the environment. Cultivating your capacity to weave these energies can make you a more conscious and sensitive instrument of energy medicine than all other technologies combined. By focusing on your body as a living system of energy, you begin to realize that the technology for powerful energy interventions is already inherent in your hands and in your being.

The term energy medicine is itself a double entendre:1. In energy medicine, energy is the medicine. Medicine is an agent that is used to heal or prevent disease. Your body’s energies know how to mobilize themselves to respond to all manner of illness and threat, bringing the purest and most natural elixir that exists to care for your maladies. Energy gives life to the body.

2. In energy medicine, troubled energies are the patient. The energy systems that attempt to adapt to a world of stresses, pollutants, and information overload unknown to your ancestors become overwhelmed and confounded, settling for imperfect compromises, and requiring significant repatterning if you are to fully thrive. Energy medicine is able to bring about such repatterning.





Energy heals, and energy systems are healed.



The return of energy medicine is one of the most significant cultural developments of the day, for the return of energy medicine is a return to personal authority for health care, a return to the legacy of our ancestors in harmonizing with the forces of nature, and a return to practices that are natural, friendly, and familiar to body, mind, and soul. Regardless of the dazzling technologies that have already been introduced, such as electromagnetic imaging, or the undreamed-of advances that will come along, the essence of energy medicine will always be the energy systems that make up the subtle infrastructure of every body.





WORKING WITH THE BODY’S ENERGIES


I have always had an intimate relationship with the body’s energies. I register them through my senses. I see them as clearly as you see the print on this page, and I feel them in my body, literally vibrating to the energies of others. Early in my career, licensed as a massage therapist so I could legally touch my clients, I would see and feel in people patterns of energy that told me about their physical problems. One of my first clients was a woman with ovarian cancer who came for a session with the hope that I could help her relax her body and prepare it for surgery that was scheduled in five days. She had been told to “get her affairs in order,” as her immune system was so weak that her chances of surviving the surgery were limited. Metastasis was also suspected.

From looking at her energy, I was certain that the cancer had not metastasized. While her energy was dim and collapsed close to her body, the only place that looked like cancer to me was in her left ovary. In addition, the texture, vibration, and appearance of the energy coming up through her ovary were responsive to my work with her. I could see and feel them shift, and by the end of the session, the pain that had been with her for weeks was gone.

I told her that her body was so responsive to what I had done that I wondered about her plan to have surgery. I was concerned that her immune system was indeed too weak, and I was confident that by working with her energy, not only would her immune system be strengthened, but the tumor’s growth could be reversed as well. While I carefully made my statements with the strong disclaimers required to avoid immediate arrest for practicing medicine without a license, she responded with horror to the implication that she cancel the surgery. I suggested that she at least delay the operation for two weeks. She scheduled a session with me for the next day and said she would discuss the surgery with her husband.

That evening, I received a call from her husband. He was outraged and threatening. He called me a quack. He said I was putting his wife’s life in jeopardy by giving her false hope, and he told me I would never have another chance to confuse her like this. He made it clear that she would not be coming back. When I began to respond, he hung up. I called back a short while later. She answered. Talking in hushed tones, she was clearly uncomfortable speaking with me. I said, “Okay, don’t postpone the surgery, but please keep your appointment tomorrow. You don’t have to pay. You have nothing to lose. I believe in what I am saying. In fact, I want you to bring your husband in with you. Find a way!” She did not believe he would come in, but the next day, they both arrived for the appointment, with the offer to see her for free having quelled some of his suspicions that I was a charlatan out to make a buck.

I had her lie down on the massage table. My hope was to find a way to give this traditional and skeptical man, so poignantly fierce in his protection of his wife, an experience of healing energy that his senses could not deny. I could see a dark, dense energy at the site of his wife’s left ovary, and it felt like my hand was moving through a muddy swamp. I asked the husband to place his hand a few inches above the area and begin to circle it, using a motion that tends to draw energy out of the body. To his great surprise, not only could he immediately feel that he was moving against something, within two minutes his hand was pulsing with pain. And to his utter amazement, his wife reported that her pain diminished as his increased.

By the end of the session, she was again pain free, felt better, and looked better. I showed them both, through the use of energy testing (to be explained later), that we had been able to direct healing energies from her immune system to the area of her tumor. I taught him a set of procedures to use with her every day. They decided to temporarily postpone the surgery and to ask for further medical tests before rescheduling it. After about ten days of these daily treatments from him and three more sessions with me, she went through the additional testing. The tumor was gone.





A PERSONAL JOURNEY INTO HEALING


I was, my mother has told me, born smiling, and the first energy I can recall feeling is the energy that wells into a smile. When I smile, it doesn’t actually feel like I am smiling. It feels more like an energy is smiling me. I love to feel that energy come up through my face, my cheeks, my eyes, and permeate my entire being. Smiles and laughter are your birthright. If you can expand their energy within yourself, you will expand your joy. And you will bolster your health. While this book focuses on many kinds of energy, the joyous energy that wells into a deep smile is not insignificant. It is a natural and powerful healing force, and by clearing and balancing the various other energy systems in your body, you open a channel for it to shine through.

I wrote this book partially on the basis of my work with people’s energies and partially on the authority of having overcome a series of personal health challenges. I was born with a heart murmur, contracted tuberculosis at age five, had terrible food allergies and hay fever, showed the first symptoms of what was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis when I was sixteen, had a mild heart attack in my late twenties, had severe asthma in my early thirties, had a breast tumor at thirty-four, and have been hypoglycemic and struggled with severe PMS since I was twelve.

I was also given a fairly free spirit, and I took these difficulties in stride. But I learned quite early that conventional wisdom didn’t always work for me, and I’ve had to use my body as a laboratory. Aspirins gave me headaches, sleeping pills kept me awake, fruits and vegetables made me gain weight. Nor were doctors particularly successful with this body that didn’t seem to follow the rules.

By my early thirties, all my physical systems were breaking down. My health was extremely precarious. I had been told, in one way or another, to “get my affairs in order” by several doctors. But I had two young daughters, and I was determined to raise them. I retreated to Fiji to live a very basic life. Early in my stay, as fate would have it, I was bitten by a poisonous insect. Because my immune system was already badly impaired, I had no resistance to the bite. I became very sick and went in and out of a coma. It seemed I might die.

But the shamans of Vatukarasa, a nearby village, learning of my plight, came with a treatment for the bite. They buried me up to my neck in the sand and left me there for long stretches several times each day over a forty-eight-hour period. They believed that the toxins would be drained into the sand. I recovered. This was one of many incidents that set me on a course toward healing work.

My health returned while I was in Fiji. My family and I lived out in the wilds, far from the nearest town. We swam in the ocean every day. We ate breadfruit from the ground and fish from the sea. Nothing was processed. Nothing was canned. Everything was fresh and organic. There were no fumes from cars and no chemicals in our clothing. Life was lived at a slow pace. It was a world where you could just be. There was no competition and little stress. There was no radio, no newspaper, no television. After a time, I wasn’t even sure the United States still existed.

By simply living naturally, I grew healthy. This happy outcome was reminiscent of a formative period during my childhood. My mother contracted tuberculosis when I was four. She was put in a terminal ward, not expected to live. My father eventually brought her home, but our whole family was quarantined. I had tuberculosis by age five. My mother was told she would not survive if she wasn’t on penicillin for the rest of her life. Instead, she switched to all-natural foods and high amounts of vitamin C. We raised chickens so we could have fresh eggs. My father planted a garden so we could eat organic vegetables. Everything we ate was pure. We all got well. In the same way, everything I ate in Fiji was pure, and again I grew healthy.

However, when I returned to the States in 1977, I went into culture shock. My taste buds had become so sharp that I felt assaulted by the chemicals in the foods I ate. I could taste the packaging in which even the healthiest foods had been stored. I could feel the chemicals in clothing. I wanted to move to some tiny town, to get away from cities and everything that is polluted. I wanted to raise my daughters in a healthy world. But my marriage was ending, and I didn’t know how I was going to make a living.

Even though healing work comes naturally to me, I had no idea that feeling and seeing energies could lead to a career. I had taken a premed curriculum in college, but my sensibilities were offended by an approach to health that was based more on what you could learn from cadavers than what you could learn from the body’s living energies.

Shortly after returning from Fiji, through one of the more striking synchronicities of my life, I wound up in a Touch for Health instructor training course taught by Gordon Stokes and Shanti Duree. In the early 1970s, Dr. John Thie—after a collaboration with the founder of applied kinesiology, Dr. George Goodheart— developed a health-education system for laypeople called Touch for Health. Combining Chinese medicine with empirical techniques from the West, applied kinesiology and its gregarious stepchild, Touch for Health, represent a potent synthesis of healing practices found in both cultures. Many of the techniques presented in this book are adapted from these two systems.

I learned about such approaches to healing after I encountered a woman wearing a T-shirt inscribed with a picture of a hand and the words “Touch for Health.” When I asked her about it, her only reply was, “Oh, I’m so excited, I’m leaving next week to be trained as a Touch for Health instructor.” I felt lightning strike. I still didn’t know what Touch for Health was, but I heard myself say, “Me, too.” She gave me a phone number. I called the Touch for Health office to have them send me information. They made one of those serendipitous errors that changes a person’s destiny. They sent a letter congratulating me for having successfully completed the basic Touch for Health classes, which were the prerequisites for attending the teacher’s training. The next teacher’s training began the following Tuesday. Off I went. Everybody else there already had a solid foundation in Touch for Health methods and concepts.

While I had never before been exposed to any training in alternative medical practices, I had the sense that I had come home to something that was deeply familiar. The training was ideal for me. Touch for Health gave me a structure that balanced my intuitive nature with a form for working with the energies I could see and intuit. Its use of muscle testing—which I also call energy testing—gave me a tool to demonstrate for a client or a student what I was seeing.

The training was residential and intensive. I completed it on a Tuesday and began teaching my first course that Friday. Another graduate of the training, Hazel Ullrich, and I charged ten dollars for an entire weekend class. I told the participants, “I’ve never taught a class before in my life, and that’s why it is so cheap. I’m charging so little so I can have the space and feel the safety to make mistakes while I figure out how to teach this to you.” I freely admitted my beginner’s status and proceeded to learn how to teach energy healing.

I next studied therapeutic massage so I could be licensed to touch people. The Mueller College of Holistic Studies in San Diego had stringent requirements, and I learned a great deal about anatomy, physiology, and the many forms of therapeutic touch. The licensing exam for massage therapists in San Diego in 1977 was, believe it or not, administered by the vice squad. Their interest was in preventing prostitutes from becoming licensed massage therapists. I’m not good at tests, so I felt nervous as the date approached. Alone in a room with a gruff, intimidating vice officer, I waited to see if he was going to ask me questions or ask me to massage him. Instead, he demanded, “Let me see your hands.”

He looked at them briefly and said, “You pass.” “How?” I asked. “You don’t have nail polish and your fingernails are short,” he replied. “You’re not a prostitute.”

Armed with this dubious certification of proficiency, I opened a private practice. My private practice and teaching have been my primary professional activities for more than three decades. With my own physical illnesses and a lifetime of finding out how to alleviate them as a backdrop, I have vigorously pursued ways to help people balance their own energies and heal their ailments. Many of my clients have been suffering with problems that have not responded to conventional medical treatment. Each of my thirty-plus years working with them has brought me more deeply into the intricacies of energy medicine and has helped prepare me to write and update this book.





HEALING IS AN INSIDE JOB


I am ambivalent about the word “healer.” It implies doing something to someone else, holding power over the other, separating the healer from the healed. Because the healing relationship feels sacred to me, I think of it more as being a minister— ministering to body, mind, and soul.

I do, however, appreciate the concept of the wounded healer. With my own personal history of health challenges, I could be the poster girl for “We teach what we need to learn.” I also know that when you heal yourself, you discover what no one can teach you. It is an initiation into the very foundation of life, and it organically seems to follow that you have compassion for people who are frightened about their health and want to offer the harvest of your experience.

Since my introduction to Touch for Health, I have studied many natural healing approaches, apprenticed myself to enormously talented healers, and taken something from each. Still I have never been attracted to set formulas. Each person is unique; each client takes me on a healing journey I have never before traveled. Along the way, I began to call my approach energy kinesiology, with a respectful nod toward applied kinesiology. But as I embraced methods from the likes of folk medicine, spirit medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, and Native American medicine (the Cherokee—and I have Cherokee blood running through my veins—call anything that is healing “medicine”), I began to realize that it is wrong for Western doctors to have the patent on the word “medicine.” I began using the term “energy medicine.” While I am as concerned as anyone in the field about false claims and incompetent practitioners, it is equally disgraceful that legitimate forms of healing can be called “practicing medicine without a license” and prosecuted as a felony.

Fresh understanding about energy and healing continually filters through me, so I evolve with each client I see and each class I teach. I also cherish and take confidence in knowing that the body is designed to heal itself. Your body is engineered so that if you tap into its healing force, that force will lead you toward health. It is not just the personality or the soul wanting the body to get better. The body wants to heal, and every cell carries extraordinary intelligence and fortitude. While we all sometimes need outside help and direction, healing is an inside job.





HOW TO USE THIS BOOK


You can approach this book at any of several levels. You can go through it alone, practice its techniques with a friend, or use it as part of a study group. By reading the text and experimenting with the exercises, you will develop a solid overview of energy medicine to the extent that it can be practiced by the nonprofessional. You can read the book without doing the exercises and return later to sections that are the most pertinent to you. Individuals in the healing professions as well as individuals with an interest in self-healing can scan the chapters and refer to the table of contents, section headings, and index to locate information on specific topics. For instance, if you are buying the book because you suffer with chronic pain, you could begin by going directly to the pain chapter (10) and consulting earlier chapters as necessary. When a technique requires specific knowledge from previous chapters, you are referred to the relevant pages from those chapters.

Part I, “Awakening the Two-Million-Year-Old Healer Within,” emphasizes my belief that we instinctively know a great deal more about our body’s energies and how to optimize them than we usually realize or take advantage of. The first chapter addresses some of the elusive terms that arise in energy medicine—such as energy, subtle energy, soul, and spirit—and it recognizes the language of the body’s energies as a language that can be learned. Chapter 2 introduces techniques for identifying the energies that operate within your own body, as well as the energies that surround you. The chapter presents energy testing as a method for assessing the flow and health of your energies. Energy testing also serves as a tool for determining the impact of the environment on your own energy field. In addition, it allows you to tailor the procedures in the remainder of the book to your unique needs. Chapter 3 introduces a Five-Minute Daily Energy Routine that can unscramble and bolster your energies for your own health and healing. It also shows you how to experiment with energy testing to gauge the benefits of each of its methods, and it closes with an enormously valuable approach for reprogramming your body’s response to stress.

Part II, “The Anatomy of Your Energy Body,” details nine major energy systems. Because my sensory apparatus translates subtle energies into pictures, I see in the human body a spectrum of energies that is often more colorful than the kaleidoscope of flowers in a spring meadow. Over the years I’ve found that I focus primarily on nine distinct patterns or energy systems. Descriptions of every one of these energy systems, it turns out, exist in the healing traditions of one culture or another. Some cultures recognize many of them, others one or two. The nine energy systems include the meridians, the chakras, the aura, the electrics, the Celtic Weave, the basic grid, the five rhythms, triple warmer, and the radiant circuits. I am not claiming there are only nine systems of energy in the human body, but I am claiming that within these nine systems, you can chart a systematic route to better health. If you keep these energy systems thriving, greater physical and emotional health will follow.

Part III, “Weaving It All Together,” shows how to apply what you’ve learned to what you encounter in your life. You will be focusing on ways of meeting your body’s inevitable illnesses more effectively, relieving pain, and creating external and internal energy fields that optimize your health and happiness. The Epilogue invites you to reflect upon the mysterious realms that can be opened by an energy approach, and it considers the way such experiences can provide a window into your own soul’s journey.

Integrated throughout the text are more than a hundred procedures I have adopted or developed after more than ten thousand individual ninety-minute sessions and hundreds of classes. I have been meticulous to present them as clearly as possible, though it is always easier to learn such methods when you see them demonstrated. Energy Medicine: The Essential Techniques is a DVD in which I present many of the procedures described in this book in a clear and systematic manner (available through www.innersource.net).

Self-care techniques are particularly important in energy medicine. While a powerful healer can on occasion effect a one-session cure, a good energy session almost invariably begins a process that requires ongoing support for a time if long-standing patterns are to be corrected. Unlike the primary tools of conventional medicine—surgery, drugs, and radiation—the techniques of energy medicine are gentler, more organic, less intrusive, and they lend themselves to back-home use rather than being confined to the treatment setting. The procedures presented here have been designed for use with no special ability to perceive energy. Employing them, however, is a natural way to cultivate such sensitivities.

This is the kind of book where you are invited to use what draws you. As a manual covering nine major energy systems, it is far too detailed for you to expect yourself to master every exercise on your first reading. But my intention is straightforward. The book is designed to empower you. The first three chapters are themselves an introductory class in energy medicine. You could set the book aside with a sense of completion after reading them and practicing what they present. You will have gained an overview of how energies can be optimized for your health in Chapter 1, picked up the invaluable tool of energy testing in Chapter 2, and mastered, in Chapter 3, a basic five-minute routine for keeping your energies balanced and vital. Or you could continue on and acquire more advanced skills and understanding as you proceed.

You can also randomly thumb through the book and find “how-to” boxes that address a potpourri of common complaints. These are not the challenges that usually bring people to me but, rather, the practical problems they mention incidentally, from how to prevent a cold to how to calm one’s kids so they will go to bed at night. These boxes refer you to the specific pages where the techniques suggested are described. I offer them partly because they are so practical and partly because they give you a taste of how you can figure out ways to apply the techniques in the book in virtually any context.

References to laboratory or clinical research supporting many of the book’s major assertions and suggestions are sprinkled throughout the text. When I entered the field three decades ago, anyone offering any form of energy medicine was going out on a scientific limb. Since that time the scientific literature has seen an explosion of studies related to the body’s energies.5 Although still a fringe area within medicine (even impressive research has generally not yet been reported in mainstream medical journals), energy medicine has reached a healthy scientific adolescence. 6 Its rite of passage into American medicine occurred in 1992 when the National Institutes of Health established the Office of Alternative Medicine. While many younger health practitioners recognize that the future of energy medicine looks bright, the field’s exuberance and unfamiliar paradigm make the old guard uneasy. The growing body of research sampled in the text hopefully provides a bridge that skeptics will at least find provocative. A scholarly overview of the field that David and I have published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, “Six Pillars of Energy Medicine,” can be downloaded from www.EnergyMedicinePrinciples.com.

Energy Medicine: Balancing Your Body’s Energies for Optimum Health, Joy, and Vitality lays out a systematic yet open approach for consciously working with your own energies, or the energies of those you care about, in order to achieve a healthier body, sharper mind, and more joyful spirit. Deciding which techniques are and are not appropriate for a self-help health book required a string of judgment calls on my part. I have generally not pulled my punches in presenting techniques that are potent and that can be helpful with serious health problems. On the basis of my experiences in teaching these techniques to laypeople in hundreds of classes, I have a good idea of how each method presented here impacts a wide range of people, and I have used my best discretion. Your part of the bargain is to exercise your own best discretion as you go through the program. If you need professional treatment, please consult a competent health practitioner. The techniques in this book will only complement the care you receive. But while sincerely stressing the value of professional intervention (see the Appendix for guidance on finding a competent energy medicine practitioner), I do not want to undercut my primary message and deep conviction that there is much you can do to care for yourself. Ultimately it is you who is responsible for your health, and the more you know and the more you do for yourself, the better your health will fare. This book offers tools. May they serve you well.





Part I

Awakening the Two-Million-Year-Old Healer Within

Beneath our conscious intelligence a deeper intelligence is at work — the evolved intelligence of humankind.



— ANTHONY STEVENS

The Two-Million-Year-Old Self





Chapter 1

Energy Is All There Is

E = mc2

—ALBERT EINSTEIN





Your body is designed to heal itself. The ability of a body to maintain its health and overcome illness is, in fact, among nature’s most remarkable feats. But you’ve been placed in a world that systematically interferes with this natural capacity, and your conscious involvement in your health is required if you are to truly prosper.

This book shows you how to work with the electrical, electromagnetic, and more subtle energies that give your body life. These energies form the foundation of your health. They are your body’s fuel and its atmosphere. You were spawned within the earth’s electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear fields. You were raised under the sun’s life-giving rays. Your own energy systems, such as your meridians (your body’s energy pathways), chakras (your body’s energy centers), and aura or biofield (your body’s energy atmosphere), emit electromagnetic energy and light.1 As you will see, energies that are more subtle than we have even known how to measure also dwell within and around you, and they are the key to energy medicine.

While our culture does little to help us look more closely, energy really is all there is. Even matter, as Einstein’s elegant formula shows, is congealed energy. When you watch a log burning in a fireplace, you are seeing the congealed energy that is the log transform into the roaring energy that is the flame. The flame could then be transformed into mechanical energy, where it might propel a locomotive or run a generator. That generator might, in turn, produce electrical energy. Perhaps, as Einstein believed, there is only a single energy, “a unified field,” but if so, it has countless faces.

Numerous cultures describe a matrix of subtle energies that support, shape, and animate the physical body, often displaying intelligence that transcends human knowing, called qi or chi in China, prana in the yoga tradition of India and Ti-bet, ruach in Hebrew, ki in Japan, baraka by the Sufis, wakan by the Lakotas, orenda by the Iroquois, megbe by the Ituri Pygmies, and the Holy Spirit in Christian tradition. It is hardly a new idea to suggest that subtle energies operate in tandem with the denser, “congealed” energies of the material body.





THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE BODY’S ENERGIES


Perhaps the most startling premise of energy medicine is that the body’s energies are not only intelligent, but that you can engage them in intelligent dialogue that fosters your health.2 This actually becomes quite apparent when you are working in a healing context and connect with the energies that flow through the human body. Energy is not just the force that causes your heart to beat, your lungs to breathe, and your cells to metabolize nutrients. It is also the intelligence that orchestrates millions of such biological actions every second. While your body’s energy intelligence generally operates beneath the mind’s radar, it dwarfs the capacities of the mind in its abilities to keep you breathing and alive. While the human mind may be nature’s most exquisite achievement, it does not tend to the activities of your organs and cells. Often, when I am with a client, I feel directed by the energies themselves, as if an amazing intelligence has taken over the session. I can do nothing better than pay attention and follow.

The biologist Lewis Thomas beautifully expressed his awe at the capacity of a single cell to make intelligent choices in his classic book The Lives of a Cell.3 I feel that way about energy. The closer you look at how the body dances to its energies, the more you recognize that this is a brilliantly conceived ballet. Each organ, it turns out, is permeated with energies that carry complex information. In a remarkable book, A Change of Heart,4 heart recipient Claire Sylvia describes the way many people who have had a transplant may suddenly be obsessed with the thoughts, memories, dreams, tastes, desires, and values that they later learn correspond with those of the person whose heart now beats in their own bosom. The following is from the database of Paul Pearsall,5 one of the foremost investigators of such reports:



The heart donor had died from a fall while reaching for a Power Rangers toy sitting on the cement ledge just outside a high hotel railing. The recipient was a five-year-old boy with an uncorrectable septal defect and severe cardiomyopathy.



DONOR’S MOTHER: When I met the recipient family and little Daryl [the recipient] at the transplant meeting where donor and recipient families meet, I broke into tears and—if my husband hadn’t caught me—I would have fallen to the floor. I saw it right away. Daryl smiled at me exactly like Timmy [the donor] always did. He had a very crooked smile and sort of looked at me sideways as if he was teasing me. It was that exact slanted smile. We sat and talked with Daryl, and it was uncanny how I could feel in my own heart my son’s heart seeming to call out to mine. Like our dog wags her tail when she recognizes us, my heart began to race with glee. I asked if I could put my head to Daryl’s chest and listen, and I could have done that for hours. My son’s heart and mine seemed to fall into sync and Daryl loved it and kept showing the slanted smile the whole time. What Daryl told [us] left us in total awe.



HEART RECIPIENT: I gave the little boy who gave me his heart a name. I called him Timmy, and I could tell he was just a little kid younger than me. I could feel that I had been hurt real bad by falling a long way. I can sometimes still feel the thump that killed him. He liked Power Rangers a lot like I used to, but he was probably too little to know what they really are. Sometimes at night I get woken up by my whole body jumping and I can feel Timmy’s heart like it felt when he fell—like a heavy thump. I wonder what happened to my old heart. It was broken, but it did its best to take care of me and I feel sorry for it sometimes and I cry.

RECIPIENT’S FATHER: We never really knew until today how old Daryl’s donor was. We knew he had fallen, but that’s all. I guess Daryl got Timmy’s age right by a lucky guess and they needed a small child-size heart for the transplant. I’ll never know how he got his donor’s name right. Maybe it’s just chance because Daryl used to watch Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor on the television show Home Improvement. I do have to say that the crooked smile Daryl started having after his transplant always did bother me a little and now I can see where he might have gotten it from the donor. I don’t know how, but I’m sure he did because he never smiled that way before.



RECIPIENT’S MOTHER: Are you going to tell them the real Twilight Zone thing? Daryl used to love collecting and playing with his Power Rangers. When we brought him some after his transplant, he threw all of them in a box and said he never wanted to see them again. He hasn’t looked at them again.





No explanation for this and many similar stories makes sense other than that the heart carries its own energy field (indeed, the electromagnetic field of the heart is about 60 times greater in amplitude than that of the brain, and its magnetic field, according to some estimates, is up to 5,000 times stronger6) and that this field carries information about the person. My own experiences, and those of my colleagues and students, based on tens of thousands of less dramatic cases, have been that the more you work with the subtle energies in a person’s body, the more evident it becomes that you are encountering and collaborating with an intelligent force.





THE ENERGIES OF ENERGY MEDICINE


While energy takes many forms—kinetic, thermal, chemical, nuclear—the energies that are most pertinent to energy medicine encompass various combinations of the body’s (1) electrical energies, (2) electromagnetic energies, and (3) “subtle” energies.1. Electricity involves the movement of electrons and protons. Like a miniature battery, every cell in the body stores and emits electricity. Normally, the outside of a living cell has a positive electrical charge and the inside a negative charge. But these charges may be momentarily reversed by the action of “ion pumps” on the cell membrane that drive sodium ions out of the cell and pump potassium ions into the cell (an ion is an atom or group of atoms that carries an electrical charge). This is the way that neurological impulses, for example, move along nerve cells. By the time an embryo is only four cells in size, an electrical gradient can be detected that starts switching on specific genes.7 Every breath you take, every muscle you move, every morsel of food you digest involves electrical activity. Likewise, your memories, feelings, and thoughts are encoded in patterns of tiny electrical impulses.

2. Electromagnetic radiation moves as a wave. It falls along a spectrum that extends from radio waves to microwaves to infrared light to visible light to ultraviolet light to X-rays and gamma rays. This spectrum extends in frequency from 30 Hz (30 cycles per second) all the way up to gamma waves, at a frequency of 300 EHz (300,000,000,000,000,000,000 cycles per second). The electromagnetic spectrum can be expressed in terms of energy, wavelength, or frequency. Electromagnetic energy travels as a wave (e.g., light travels from the Sun to the Earth as a wave), but it is absorbed by matter as a particle, called a photon. The precise nature of electromagnetic waves, however, is still a mystery. Photons are distributed through the traveling wave, but you can’t take an electromagnetic wave apart and find the photon any more than you can take an absorbed photon apart and find the electromagnetic wave that delivered it. It was this enigma, in fact, that gave birth to quantum physics.

3. “Subtle” energies were described by Einstein as energies we know of because of their effects but do not have the instruments to detect directly. Electromagnetism was in that category only 250 years ago. Its effects could be observed, but electromagnetism could not itself be measured. I believe that many of the energies I work with have qualities that existing scientific instruments cannot detect. While these subtle energies cannot move a needle on a gauge, many healers know how to engage them to restore health and vitality. A device has, in fact, been developed by William Tiller and his colleagues at Stanford University that has demonstrated the existence of an energy field that is not in the electromagnetic spectrum. 8 Most interestingly, Tiller’s device has also shown that this subtle energy field responds to human intention. If you think negative thoughts, this field exhibits qualities that are different from those involved if you think positive thoughts.





I believe that the basic energy systems, such as the meridians, the chakras, and the aura, may include any combination of these types of energy. A chakra, for instance, can be measured according to electromagnetic frequencies in the area of the body where the chakra is located.9 But it also contains information that a sensitive person can “read” intuitively by becoming attuned to the subtle energies held by that chakra. Energy medicine practitioners may see or even relive a person’s deep traumatic memories by tuning in to the person’s chakra energies.





SEEING SUBTLE ENERGIES


I tend to vibrate to the energies of other people. At times I feel like a tuning fork. I see and sense other people’s energies as rhythms and oscillations, frequencies and flows, jolts and currents, colorful swirls and geometric patterns. Early in my life, I came to understand that the colors, shapes, movements, and textures I saw hold meaning.

As a fourth-grader, I once overheard a number of teachers gossiping about my teacher, Miss Proctor, belittling her intelligence, ridiculing her as strange and eccentric, wondering out loud how she ever got through college. I was shocked and totally puzzled. Were they blind? The strongest thing about Miss Proctor was a beautiful, pale creamy yellow energy emanating from her body that said volumes to me. I intuitively knew it meant she was both wise and kind. She led with a sort of innocence, but it seemed obvious to me that she was an advanced and trustworthy being. Her peers, as I later came to understand, would have found it easier to respect her had she assumed a more sophisticated demeanor instead of being so spontaneous and carefree.

To this day, my appraisals of people are based more on the subtle energies I feel and see emanating from them than on their words, physical appearance, status, or personality. This quirk has proven invaluable in my work. I have learned over the years not only to understand that what I see and feel in a person’s energies has meaning, but also how to use my hands to weave these energies to improve a person’s health, vitality, and clarity of mind. Matter follows energy. That is the fundamental law of energy medicine. When your energies are vibrant, so is your body.





SUBTLE ENERGIES IN HEALING


Leah was carried up the stairs to my office.10 The man who brought her told me she had been to the Scripps Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, and many, many doctors. She was diagnosed with bronchitis, but no one could determine why she wasn’t responding to established treatments, and it appeared that she was dying. Her closest friend had died just before the onset of her illness, and she had been to a psychiatrist on a doctor’s hunch that her bronchitis might be exacerbated by complicated grief, but to no avail. She was reduced to grabbing at straws, and I guess I was a straw.

When Leah tried to speak, she could only wheeze. Because she had already been tested by the best, I didn’t start with the obvious systems, involving her lungs, but rather sank into her deepest energy system, which I call the basic grid. It appeared to me that two of the energy pathways in her basic grid were so seriously disrupted that her life force could barely flow through them. I touched the points that are at either end of one of these energy patterns (one near her hip and one on her forehead), using my own body like a jumper cable to connect the circuitry and rebuild the grid.

When this energy began to move through me, it at first felt jagged. Then I couldn’t breathe. Leah was looking at me, not knowing what to think about this alternative healer who was now in some kind of agony. It went on and on. I was gasping for breath for about thirty minutes. At the moment I finally felt the energies hook up through my body, she gasped and then took her first normal breaths in months. My breathing returned as well.

I moved to the second blocked energy pathway. Very soon after I began to hold its points, a grief came through me that was as deep as any personal grief I’ve ever known. It was overwhelming. I began to cry and couldn’t stop crying, regardless of how it might look to Leah. She told me later that had it not been for the fact that she could now breathe better, she would have been off the table and out of there in an instant because of my lack of professionalism. After what seemed a very long time—at the moment I felt the energies connect—she began to sob in uncontrollable, loud, heaving grief.

A puzzle was instantly solved for her. Leah and her best friend had traveled the world together. When her friend became ill with cancer, Leah had decided they would take this last journey together, and she had spent the final year of her friend’s life caring for her. When her friend died, Leah’s grief was not so much about the loss of her friend. They had consciously grieved together during that final year, and she had been irritated with the psychiatrist who insisted her physical problems were based on unresolved grief. No! She had fallen into a pit of existential despair over the thought that no one would ever be there for her as she had been for her friend. At a level below her conscious awareness, she had given up on life. Her sense of emptiness and isolation had buried itself in her lungs and manifested as bronchitis. With her basic grid reset and her immune system given a boost, I could only hope for the best, as she was contending with a major illness. Still, she had been carried in, and now she walked out.

Several days later, I came to my office to find a long string of Guatemalan tribal bells hung on my door with a note from Leah telling me that she had been getting “better and better.” She also felt renewed in spirit, and she had a vision for her future. She wanted to study energy healing and then go to Guatemala, where she and her friend had dreamed of settling. She came to see her healing crisis as a gift that opened her to a new sense of purpose. After studying with me, she moved to Guatemala and began to do healing work. For several years, I received cards from her each Christmas with stories of people she had successfully treated.

How to Nip an Illness in the Bud

If you are just starting to feel sick, you can often reverse an illness at the onset with a few well-chosen energy techniques. Any or all of the following will help. The first three can be done without a partner (time—5 to 20 minutes): 1. Do the Connecting Heaven and Earth exercise (page 266).

2. Do the Hook-up (page 98) and the Three Thumps (page 74).

3. Massage your neurolymphatic reflex points to detoxify your body (page 92).

4. Have a friend do a Spinal Flush on you (page 93).

5. Have a friend clear your chakras (page 183).





ENERGY WORK IS SOUL WORK


The medical institutions that treated Leah’s bronchitis without correctly assessing how her symptoms reflected the predicament of her soul failed to help her. Illness and healing are way stations on the soul’s journey. The soul, however, is not an easy concept to fathom, and conventional medicine has hardly even attempted to incorporate soul-level concerns into its understanding.

To approach the soul, Renaissance theologians would have an initiate study the vastness of the night sky as a metaphor for the vastness within. It is an illuminating exercise. The soul is the source of the most subtle energies of your being. Yet this subtle energy gives form to everything else about you, from your cells to your sense of self. If Spirit, as it is often defined, is the all-pervasive, intelligent energy of creation, soul is its manifestation at the personal level. Soul and Spirit are the unfathomable, vital mysteries of our existence. We can, however, experience them directly, whether through the energies of love, contemplation, healing, or mystical experience. William Collinge, a researcher of subtle energies, describes energy as “the bridge between Spirit and matter”:



Einstein showed through physics what the sages have taught for thousands of years: everything in our material world—animate and inanimate—is made of energy, and everything radiates energy. . . . He concluded that the continuously unfolding and dynamic nature of the universe could only be understood as the work of a higher guiding intelligence of another dimension.11





I think of soul as the spark of Spirit that infuses the body with life and the brain with consciousness. When the soul leaves, the brain dims, the body dies. To work with a person’s energy is to touch a soul as well as a body. Ironically, the deeper you enter into the life of your personal soul, the more fully you identify with your roots in the life of a universal, unifying intelligent Spirit. And the better your body will fare.

When all your energies are brought into harmony, your body flourishes. And when your body flourishes, your soul has a soil in which it can blossom in the world. These are the ultimate reasons for energy medicine—to prepare the soil and nurture the blossom.

How to Overcome Despair Through Spiritual Connection

Whenever you are in despair, feeling alone, sick at a crossroads, suffering with physical pain, in anguish because of an illness that will not heal, or otherwise unable to find the answers you ache to find, the following can be an uplifting practice. It can put you in touch with the sacred dimension of your life, infuse you with the knowledge that you are not alone, and give you the odd comfort of realizing that all you see is only a glimpse of a larger picture.

If at all possible, do this out in nature, perhaps under the stars, or in another setting that feels sacred. For me, this is like a prayer. It connects me with the spiritual realm. I call it Heaven Rushing In (time—2 minutes or longer): 1. Stand tall. Take a moment to ground yourself by spreading your fingers on your thighs, breathing deeply, feeling your feet on the ground, and being conscious of your connection to the Earth as the energy pours out of your fingers, down your thighs, and into the ground. You are preparing yourself to make a sacred connection.

2. Take a deep breath in, open your arms wide, and bring them into a prayer position in front of your chest. Exhale.

3. With another deep breath, open your arms wide and lift them. Look to the heavens (see Figure 1). Reach toward heaven as heaven reaches back to you. Release your breath. Bask in the knowledge that you are not alone in this universe and that you are worthy of this blessing from the heavens. You may feel a tingle, a buzz, or heat in your hands. You are touching heaven with your hands, and you are inviting healing energies from the cosmos. cosmos.

4. Scoop this energy into your arms and bring your hands into the middle of your chest. There is a vortex here called Heaven Rushing In, and “heaven” rushes into your heart with healing, with a glimpse of your true nature, and with a peek into who you are in the larger plan. Even when you do not receive guidance or inspiration, know that they will unfold in their perfect time.

5. If there is a specific area in your body that needs healing, place your charged hands over that area and let the energies stream in.





IN AND OUT OF BALANCE


Energies from the Sun and the Earth penetrate your every cell, and they give substance to your energy body. Your energy body, in turn, becomes a distinct, self-regulating universe, a force within your body and a force in the environment. It is continually interacting with the energies around it and moving its own energies to warm you, cool you, activate you, calm you, and establish a cycle of repair and rejuvenation. In this exquisite alchemy, energies are built up, stored, spent, transformed, harmonized, and brought into balance.

Balance is a pivotal concept within energy medicine, just as homeostasis is a pivotal concept within biology. All systems move toward an energetic balance, a state of internal stability and harmony with other energies. At the same time, every expenditure of effort and every interaction with the environment upsets this balance. You are always moving toward balance and always disturbing that balance in living and adapting.

When one of your body’s energy systems is chronically out of balance, or when several systems are not in harmony with one another, your body does not work as well. Your energy body is always adjusting the energies available to it to restore its balance. Several facts of modern life make it more difficult than perhaps ever before in history for your body to maintain the energetic balances that best preserve and nurture it, ranging from our multiple and highly refined psychological stresses to our immersion in polluted air, processed foods, and artificial electromagnetic energy. This book describes how to zero in on precisely the energies in your body that need balance, and shows you how to balance them by dissolving energies that are stagnant, boosting those that are faint, and dispersing or sedating those that are excessive.





AWAKENING THE TWO-MILLION-YEAR-OLD HEALER WITHIN


Having taught healing classes all over the world, I firmly believe that virtually anyone can learn to influence their energies to improve their health. You can do this! Instinctive knowledge of how to heal themselves was a possession of your ancestors, and it still resides deep within you.

Evolutionary psychologists have shown that survival strategies are passed along in our DNA.12 Healing energies are embedded in your tissues, and healing abilities are coded in your psyche. Carl Jung spoke of the archaic component of the human psyche as the “two-million-year-old man” who lives within each of us.13 Two million years ago, our ancestors, with brains only slightly larger than those of the gorilla, were carrying out many cultural activities. Not only were they “hunting, building shelters, making tools, treating skins, [and] living in base camps,”14 they were also healing one another. For most of humanity’s history, natural healing was the only game in town.

Our ancestors had to depend on themselves entirely for their own and their clan’s survival. They couldn’t go to the local hospital for an antibiotic or a kidney transplant. They were their own authorities, which forced them to be far more finely attuned than we are to subtle energies. They sensed the energy in a potential food, a wild animal, or a diseased compatriot, and they knew how to regulate their own energies to maximize their strength and proficiency. They could not have survived the nasty and brutish world of millions of years ago if they had not intuitively understood what was required to maintain, in a hostile environment, the most complex physical structure that had yet evolved. That your ancestors knew how to heal themselves by working with their energies and that their hard-earned survival strategies are deeply imprinted in your own urges, passions, and reasoning should bolster your confidence in your own latent abilities. You need only knock on the door to arouse the two-million-year-old healer dwelling within you.

How to Rid Yourself of a Tension Headache

The traditional headache points in Chinese medicine have been used for thousands of years and are effective (time—about 1 minute): 1. Massage the traditional headache points at the indents where your neck meets your head, move up to the ridge of the skull, and massage all across the back of that ridge, rubbing hard with a circular motion.

2. Place your fingers at the bottom of your neck, next to your spine. Push in on the back of your neck with a circular massage.

3. Maintaining pressure, drag your fingers out to the sides of your neck.

4. Repeat, moving up a notch higher. Work your way up to the top of your neck.





IS THE BODY’S ENERGY LANGUAGE A LANGUAGE THAT CAN BE LEARNED?


Our healing abilities still reside in our ancestral bones, our healing hands, our compassionate hearts, and our intuitive brains. I believe that as infants we see and feel the energies that surround people and that we innocently absorb information about their health, mood, character, and soul. But our culture does not talk about or reinforce such perceptions. By the time we are two or three, these capacities atrophy from lack of use, just as empathy, which is also an inborn capacity, will fade if not mirrored by the infant’s caregivers.

Nonetheless, I have time and again watched the capacity to see or feel subtle energy rebuild itself. Occasionally someone will even begin to hear or taste the subtle energies that pulse through the body. Animals are naturally attuned to these energies,15 and humans can reactivate this ability. I once saw a demonstration by blind people in Java who had learned to attune themselves so accurately to the energies of inanimate objects that they were able to flawlessly walk through mazes constructed of bamboo poles, moving with the precision of bats navigating by sonar.

While some people have more healing aptitude than others, just as some have more natural ability in the arts or physics or athletics, I have never worked with a person who had no healing ability at all. And I have many times witnessed people in my classes see energy fields for the first time or perform a successful healing, instinctually innovating a valid method that had never been taught to them.

I saw an amazing healing while I was teaching a large class in San Diego. Within the first half hour, a man in the back of the room had a heart attack and fell to the floor. I couldn’t get back to him as a sea of people crowded around. A physician who was sitting nearby did get to him. He began to administer CPR as the paramedics were called. The doctor had clearly become the person in charge, but he couldn’t get the man’s heart going, and before the paramedics had even arrived I heard him say, “He’s gone.” My heart jumped into my throat. At that moment, as I anxiously watched the whole scene unfold, a boy of about sixteen suddenly seemed electrified and made his way over to the man. The boy picked up the little fingers of each of the man’s hands, put them between his teeth, and chomped down on the sides, at the tips. The man bounced up off the floor, and his heart started beating! Unbeknownst to the boy, those points are precisely at the end of the heart meridian. He said he had no idea what inspired him to do what he did.

One of the first classes I ever taught was at a retirement home. A man well into his eighties had been paralyzed on his right side by a stroke a few months earlier, and he was extremely depressed. He wondered why his life had to be dragged out, and bemoaned the fact that he had survived the stroke. He wished he were dead. With no feeling or control on his right side, he couldn’t do the physical exercises designed to improve the flow of his energies. Reaching for a way to help him, I asked him to sit in front of a mirror and imagine seeing himself doing exercises that cross energy over from each brain hemisphere to the opposite side of the body. I encouraged him to “see” the energy radiating light, color, and power to the frozen side. He did this every day for several days. Feelings began to return to the paralyzed side of his body. He had been told he would never have feeling or movement there again. By the time the class ended twelve weeks later, he had enough movement in his right arm and leg that he could begin to perform rather than only imagine the exercises. He was so excited to see that his mind had reactivated his body that his whole self-concept shifted. His was not just a dwindling body and mind; his mind could make his body stronger. Simply imagining he was doing the exercises had led to improvements in his physical condition that exceeded anyone’s hopes. This makes little sense until you understand that subtle energies can be influenced by the mind.





MEASURING SUBTLE ENERGIES


In recent years scientists have introduced the term subtle energy to describe previously undetected though apparently intelligent forces in the environment and in the body.16 If a “green thumb” is a force that helps plants grow, if prayer is a force that speeds healing in the person being prayed for, if a healer’s hands transmit a force that relieves a patient’s symptoms, each of these forces is comprised of “subtle energy.”

Believed to exist outside the electromagnetic spectrum, subtle energies operate within a domain that has until recently eluded even the most sensitive scientific instruments. Now, however, there are devices that are sensitive at least to the denser electromagnetic counterpart of subtle energies. Electrodes attached to the hands and the feet, for instance, can provide an assessment of the energy flowing through each meridian and the corresponding internal organs it feeds.17 Changes measured in light emissions emanating from the chakras and meridians correspond with the energetic shifts that follow meditation, acupuncture, qigong, and other energy healing treatments.18 Such devices can even anticipate illness. Shifts in meridian activity, for instance, have predicted changes in physical conditions that have occurred hours, days, and sometimes even weeks later. 19

Thought also appears to emit subtle energy. In the experiments at Stanford mentioned earlier, using a gas-discharge generator that registers electron activity, Tiller found that with mental focus alone, people can increase the electron activity within the generator.20 Independent studies originating in the School of Engineering at Princeton University also suggest that thoughts affect subtle energies. Not only could certain individuals use their minds to influence instruments that generate numbers on a random basis, but also the presence of organized groups imposes a degree of order on the output of random number generators. At ten separate gatherings, ranging from business meetings to scientific conferences to religious events, the effect was strongest during periods when the group’s attention was focused, when the group’s cohesion was high, or when the group’s members were sharing a common emotional experience .21 Other studies have produced similar findings .22

Among the most dramatic applications of subtle energies in healing are those demonstrated by individuals who consistently provide accurate medical diagnoses from a distance. When I look at a person’s energies, I can often recognize whether the energy holds a particular disease. Some practitioners need not even be present. In research conducted by the neurosurgeon C. Norman Shealy, a patient’s name and date of birth were given to the medical intuitive Caroline Myss, who had no contact with the patient. Myss would psychically “enter” the patient’s body and methodically examine the relative health of each organ system in the patient’s body. On one sample of fifty patients, Myss’s clairvoyant diagnosis matched Dr. Shealy’s medical diagnosis in 93 percent of the diseases identified. Myss’s statements were specific, such as “left testicle malignant, spread to left kidney,” “venereal herpes,” and “schizophrenia.”23 A growing body of evidence suggests that certain subtle energies are, like quantum fields, “nonlocal” in their effects—their influence is unaffected by distance. Thus there is a plausible explanation within physics for the explosion of scientific findings supporting the existence of telepathic communication, the influence of prayer on healing, and feats such as Myss’s long-distance diagnosis.24

People who are suffering and experiencing themselves as victims of their own body become empowered when they are able to direct subtle energies to effect their healing. A pathway opens that they are, not surprisingly, inclined to follow. When you discover that you have the ability to help yourself feel better and think and function more effectively by becoming attuned to the subtle energies within and around you, I believe you will want to cultivate this capacity. While technologies for reading subtle energies are clearly on their way, all the tools you really need are built into your own physiology. By introducing you to energy testing, the following chapter shows you how to read subtle energies with no special equipment or extrasensory perception required.





Chapter 2

Energy Testing

Talking with Your Energy Body



The Chinese physician can detect imbalances in meridians by feeling the pulses, but this is a sensitive touch, and it may take ten to twenty years to develop proficiency with it.

—JOHN THIE Touch for Health





Energy testing, on the other hand, can be learned quickly. You don’t need any great intuitive powers or an ability to “see energies.” In fact, when I learned energy testing, what excited me the most was that it gave me a way to demonstrate to others what I was seeing in their energy fields. With energy testing, you can reliably assess, in any given moment, the body’s unique energies and energy fields and their ever-oscillating fluctuations.

Your body is, in fact, a cascading fountain of energy systems, remarkably complex, exquisitely coordinated, and entirely unique. That is why no book can tell you exactly what you must do to thrive. Not only does every person carry a distinguishing energy, so too does every cell, every organ, and every system of the body. Just as your thumbprint, your heart, and your brain are unique, so are the energies of each. These local energies speak their own local language, and they also share a universal language.

Energy testing is a precise tool for translating these languages, phrase by phrase. It is also the case, and all my students eventually experience this, that the more you work with your own energies and the energies of others, the more strongly you develop your ability to intuitively sense them.

Illness shows up in your energies before it manifests in physical symptoms. In provinces of China where the doctor’s primary job was seen as maintaining health by keeping people’s energies balanced, the physician was paid only as long as the person was well. If the doctor had to treat an illness, he had failed, so the patient didn’t pay. Western medicine’s practice of waiting for physical symptoms to appear before intervening in a person’s health is rather crude by comparison. It is much easier and much wiser to treat the imbalance while it is still only a disturbance in the energy field than to wait until it has progressed into a physical symptom that is far more traumatic, entrenched, and difficult to reverse.

Anyone who has successfully adapted to a modern society has pushed a great deal of visceral wisdom beneath the threshold of awareness. When you were growing up, your culture affirmed your intellect while negating the primal knowing of your body. We have all been instinct-wounded. Becoming civilized is, to a large extent, learning not to do what your body wants you to do.

Still, your body carries an intelligence that exceeds the understanding of your intellect. Over the years, I have been figuring out ways for people who do not consciously register subtle energies to begin to detect, connect with, interact with, and work in partnership with them. In learning ways to determine how subtle energies are affecting you, you will be cultivating your own latent capacities to see, feel, and influence your body’s health. This is not a passive read. But each ounce of effort wisely applied to your energy systems can yield a ton of reward.





GLIMPSING THE ENERGY BODY THROUGH PHANTOM LIMB PAIN


Your energy body is the subtle counterpart of your physical body, and it is more responsive than your physical body to many kinds of influences. Because the energy body holds the blueprint of the physical body’s health, it is the focus of energy medicine. Treatments that affect your energy body reverberate throughout your entire system.

The energy body reveals itself rudely and unmistakably in phantom limb pain, one of medicine’s most disconcerting puzzles. A person may feel terrible and inexplicable pain in a part of the body that is no longer there. Some 300,000 people in the United States have had an arm or leg amputated, and a majority of them report itching or pain in the area where the limb was.1 Because of “their vivid sensory qualities and precise location in space,” notes Ronald Melzack, a research psychologist at McGill University, phantom limbs “seem so lifelike that a patient may try to step off a bed onto a phantom foot or lift a cup with a phantom hand. . . . A person may feel a painful ulcer or bunion that had been on a foot or even a tight ring that had been on a finger.”2 Phantom limb pain is reported by people born without a limb as well as by people who have lost a limb, and medical science has generally been unable to relieve either group of its discomfort.

Some neurologists believe that the brain is coded from birth with a map of the body and that the limb remains on the map even if it never develops or is severed. The sensations in the phantom limb, according to this theory, are activated by nerves at the stump of the missing limb.3 This theory would better account for my observations in working with phantom limb patients if it were complemented by an understanding of the energy body. I believe a phantom limb is the energetic “double” of the missing limb.

A man who had a finger amputated and preserved in a jar in the heated basement of his mother’s house had no pain for several years. He then went back to the doctor who had performed the amputation, complaining of a feeling of extreme cold in the area of the missing finger. Following the doctor’s advice to check on the condition of the preserved finger, the man learned that the basement where the jar was stored had become very cold due to an undetected broken window. After the finger was taken out of the cold, the pain left.4 An assortment of similar reports suggests that the energy of the phantom limb somehow remains connected to the energy of the physical limb. This becomes more conceivable as an increasing number of nonlocal effects, such as distance healing and the healing power of prayer, are being documented.5

The following three cases involve phantom limb pain and provide insight into the nature of the energy body. Phantom limb pain wouldn’t be seen as such a puzzle if it were understood that an “energy limb” remains after the physical limb has been lost. Just as phantom pain is undeniable to those who have it, its responsiveness to energy work is undeniable as well.

Unbearable Phantom Pain. A good-looking man who had lost both of his legs in Vietnam was brought to me in a wheelchair. No one had been able to help with the pain at the end of where his right foot had been. He vividly recalled the scene of stepping on a land mine and watching the bones and flesh of his right foot explode into pieces. The pain he now had was massive. The sensations were so similar to the original shock that he could never get relief from the traumatic memories. The relentless pain also led to terrible nightmares. The area where his left foot had been wasn’t as painful. It sometimes itched, but it was a mild discomfort compared with the area of his right foot.

As he sat there with his friend, he cried and said, “The pain is so excruciating, and the way it keeps me tied to my past is so bad, that I sometimes think of taking a gun to my head.” I could see the energy still there in both of his absent legs, and I could feel it with my hands. I followed the energy along his absent legs to the end of where his feet had been. It was palpable. My hand began to hurt terribly. I asked him if my hand was in the area of the worst pain, and it was. The most painful areas were at the sides of his feet, which happen to be at the end of the bladder meridian. I said to him, “This may sound crazy to you, but I believe I can hold some points in midair where your feet were and help you.”

I moved my hands to the ends of his legs, where his feet had been, and held the points on the bladder meridian. As the two men watched these strange conjurings, it must have seemed to them that I was just holding air. But I was not! I felt and saw the meridian lines as strongly as if his legs were still there. At first it was painful for him to have me touch the area of his absent right foot. After a couple of minutes, he reported that not only was the foot being relieved of the pain, but another chronic pain in his back, just above his waist, was also lifting. Interestingly, that area is also governed by the bladder meridian.

His kidney and liver meridians were also involved, and I held those points as well. The kidney meridian governs fear, and holding those points opened a powerful catharsis. Fear and terrors buried deep inside, which had kept him locked up emotionally, just plummeted out of him. He cried and cried. I held on to the points until the emotions had worked their way through him. As the fear subsided, he became euphoric. By the time I had finished holding his liver points, he was painfree. I showed the friend, who lived with him, how to hold points and which points to hold. The man and his friend never returned, but on my invitation they called me about once a month. The friend told me that after the session, the man began to lift out of his deep depression. While the phantom pain would return every now and then, they knew how to deal with it.



Itchy Fingers and Indigestion. A man whose hand had been mangled in a machine at the factory where he worked was missing his index finger and the tip of his little finger. He had some feeling where the fingers had been, though this was not a problem for him. He actually thought these sensations were “kind of funny,” except when his phantom fingers itched. He was referred to me because he was having terrible digestive difficulties. After a trail of unsuccessful medical treatments, he went to a psychotherapist to see if the problem might be related to underlying stress or unconscious fears, perhaps because of his accident. As he told me this, I was realizing that his missing index finger is at the beginning of the large intestine meridian and that the small intestine meridian begins at the little finger. I began to wonder if the meridians that flow along his missing fingers might be related to his difficulties with digestion. I told him this. He didn’t know anything about meridians, and it seemed far-fetched to him that there might be some kind of connection between his digestion and his missing fingers.

Nonetheless, I traced meridians up and down bo