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Collective Intention in Healing
Howard, 72, was suffering from metastatic prostate cancer, and was living in constant pain despite the medication he had been prescribed. He described the pain as "like two five pound weights hanging from my testicles."
He was in the third day of a seven day group retreat at the Cancer Support and Education Center in Menlo Park, California, with his wife Bonnie. The participants were undergoing group therapy for coping with the stress of cancer, and were also learning techniques of mind/body medicine to cope with symptoms and promote healing.
This particular afternoon, when it was particularly apparent that he was in great discomfort, I asked if he would like to receive some direct support from the other group members, to which he agreed. I asked him to sit in the middle of the circle, and the other eight participants brought their chairs close around him. I then instructed the others to each gently place one hand on Howard, close their eyes, and, in their own way, begin visualizing the pain leaving Howard's body.
As we sat there with eyes closed and maintaining contact with him, we then went around the circle with each person in turn slowly describing out loud their own personal imagery of the pain leaving Howard's body. It took about thirty minutes to make it all the way around the circle.
At the end of this exercise, Howard was beaming. He reported that he was completely pain-free, for the first time in months. Three days later, he was still pain-free.
Was the relief of his pain simply a result of the power of suggestion, or did something happen on an energetic level? Studies have found that when one person contacts another person's energy field with a healing intention, with or without contacting their physical body, a state of coherence and synchrony between the brain waves of the healer and the recipient develops -- they literally become unified in one energetic field. Other studies have found this kind of communion to reduce the severity of pain, reduce anxiety, heal wounds more rapidly, and even raise the level of hemoglobin in the recipient's blood.
To me this experience showed that all support groups could be easily transformed into healing groups. We all have the potential to be a healing presence for one another, if we will just set our intention to do so, and follow a few simple guidelines. I believe that what happened in Howard's case was that the collective intentionality of the group, coupled with their direct energetic and physical contact with him, transformed the energetic dynamics that were creating pain in his body.
We have no way of knowing what happened on the physiological level to his disease process or the mechanisms that were leading to his perception of pain. However, as I see it, what mattered here was that Howard had the clear intention to receive, the others had the clear intention to give, and the images formed in the minds of the participants were somehow potentized by the collective intentionality of the group. A strong, coherent field of energy was created, he received it, and it had a lasting impact on the coherence of his own field for an extended period, overriding the forces of incoherence being produced by the disease process.
-Excerpt from Subtle Energy: Awakening to the Unseen Forces in Our Lives by William Collinge, Ph.D. (1998)
New, less invasive medicine is our future
From personal experience, I can tell you that surgery can be extremely invasive usually necessitating narcotic pain medication. There is a reason for that cloth that covers a surgeon's instruments, and it's not to prevent contamination! My surgeon is an expert plumber he was able to remove my colon and still leave me to function quite normally, saving me from bleeding to death.
The cost of beating death, however, was such a trauma that I cannot remember 80 percent of what happened, and I thank my brain for the ability to forget. I spent eight months recovering as my stomach muscles reattached themselves, as my wounds filled in and as the staples holding the intestines together would become superficial as the pieces of intestine will join to become one again.
In a magazine, I came upon a picture of a surgeon's kit from the 19th century, with a syringe for injections, a cutting utensil and a bleeding bowl to drain blood from the patient to alleviate headaches.
My first reaction was, "How barbaric!" But the more I thought about the 19th century approach to medicine, the more I began to realize how similar it was to our current surgical procedures. The only difference in medicine today lies in our knowledge of the body, its systems and our access to more mechanical technology.
Much like that Œbarbaric' 19th century methodology, we are integrating inorganic materials into the body to help prolong one's earthly existence.
But just as we advanced from the bleeding bowl to the combination of man and machine, a new age is quickly approaching an age of technology looking to encourage the healing power within ourselves healing with the body, rather than for the body. This "vibrational" medicine is a less invasive, less painful and a natural alternative to conventional removal and/or integration technology.
We entrust our bodies to govern the physical aspect of ourselves when we sleep, and most of them when we are awake; however, conventional medicine attempts to force our bodies to accept certain agents that it naturally resists. The human body has amazing defense systems against foreign objects. This is one of the drawbacks to integration technology the body will simply not accept certain foreign materials.
Science has been able to help the acceptance process with the aid of anti-rejection medications. If the anti-rejection medications are successful, then the body attempts to make the once-foreign object part of its own being by surrounding it with bodily tissue. Our bodies' knowledge led us to grow from millimeters to meters; yet we do not listen to its cries when we attempt to override our bodies' innate knowledge of growth and preservation.
Vibrational medicine works within the body to overcome these obstacles which current surgery tries to alleviate. The nature of matter is a controversial issue, and I believe that the closest theory that relates to vibrational medicine is "string theory."
In a nutshell, the theory states that matter is made up of vibrating strings, and the formation of a certain particle is based on the many possible combinations of geometries and vibrations. With the majority of academic acceptance being based on scientific approach, discovery and agreement, vibrational medicine may soon become actualized. Edward Witten, arguably one of the great physicists today, states "string theory is 21st century physics that fell accidentally into the 20th century."
Vibrational medicine is rooted in this concept that all of matter is vibration and geometry, and works to change the vibration of certain diseased parts of the body so that healing may take place.
From my own experience, I can tell you that there is nothing invasive about vibrational medicine. This method of healing uses intention, visualization and communication with the body.
Our bodies are constantly communicating with us through our five physical senses (i.e. pain and emotions); using these techniques is just one way to not only listen, but to respond as well. Many medical intuitives (people gifted in the ability to "see" within the body and recognize the underlying causes of disease) will tell you that pain is wonderful and say, "Congratulations!"
Patients may think these intuitives are nuts, but they are actually responding from a different perspective on a different level of understanding, rather than seeing the body as a well-oiled machine that you can build replacement parts for, they see it as a culmination of energies vibrations and their geometries ripe for a new phase of medicine.
The one constant in life is that things can and do change. Technology has made the integration of man and machine a reality. This technology may have done many wonderful things, but the future offers even better, less invasive methods of healing.
The future holds "alternative" medicine not as the alternative, but as the building block for new devices that encouraging the amazing healing properties of our bodies, rather than replacing them.
-Jeff Weichman, Biomedical Engineering student, University of Southern California (September 2000)
 Touch in Healing Marianne, 68, was in the recovery room after open heart surgery. She was full of tubes and needles when she slowly began to wake up from anaesthesia. This post-operative period is a time when people are very vulnerable to complications developing, and one of the greatest sources of concern is how the patient handles the trauma emotionally. The nurse who was assigned to watch Marianne had a practice of using the laying on of hands to calm and soothe her patients, and Marianne benefitted tremendously from this. As the nurse placed her hands on Marianne's shoulder and arms, she felt a loving presence and a flood of relaxation and warmth throughout her body. Her troubled and fitful breathing became calm and rhythmic, and she went into a state of deep relaxation. Why do we instantly feel warm and peaceful when one person touches us, yet we may bristle and cringe when touched by another? Is it purely psychological, or is something happening energetically? An Exchange of Energy |
The Human Energy Field
Everything that is alive pulsates with energy and all of this energy contains information. While it is not surprising that practitioners of alternative or complementary medicine accept this concept, even some quantum physicists acknowledge the existence of an electromagnetic field generated by the body's biological processes. Scientists accept that the human body generates electricity because living tissue generates energy.
Your physical body is surrounded by an energy field that extends as far out as your outstretched arms and the full length of your body. It is both an information center and a highly sensitive perceptual system. We are constantly in communication with everything around us through this system, which is a kind of conscious electricity that transmits and receives messages to and from other peoples bodies. These messages from and within the energy field are what intuitives perceive.
Practitioners of energy medicine believe that the human energy field contains and reflects each individual's energy. It surrounds us and carries with us the emotional energy created by our internal and external experiences -- both positive and negative. This emotional force influences the physical tissue within our bodies. In this way your biography -- that is, the experiences that make up your life -- becomes your biology.
Experiences that carry emotional energy in our energy systems include: past and present relationships, both personal and professional; profound or traumatic experiences and memories; and belief patterns and attitudes, including all spiritual and superstitious beliefs. The emotions from these experiences become encoded in our biological systems and contribute to the formation of our cell tissue, which then generates a quality of energy that reflects those emotions. These energy impressions form an energy language, which carries literal and symbolic information that a medical intuitive can read.
Here is an example of the kind of message the energy field may communicate. Lets say you had some trouble with math when you were in elementary school. Knowing the fact that twelve makes a dozen would not ordinarily carry an emotional charge such as would alter the health of cell tissues. On the other hand, if you were humiliated by the teacher because you didn't know that fact, the experience would carry an emotional charge that would create cellular damage, especially if you were to dwell on that memory through adulthood or use it as a touchstone for determining how to deal with criticism, or authority figures, or education, or failure. An intuitive might pick up the literal image of your exchange with the teacher or any other negative symbol linked to that experience.
Positive images and the energy of positive experiences are also held in the energy field. Think of a time when someone praised you for a job well done, or a kind act, or for some help you gave someone. You feel a positive energy -- a surge of personal power within your body. Positive and negative experiences register a memory in cell tissue as well as in the energy field. As neurobiologist Dr. Candace Pert has proven, neuropeptides -- the chemicals triggered by emotions -- are thoughts converted into matter. Our emotions reside physically in our bodies and interact with our cells and tissues. In fact, Dr. Pert can no longer separate the mind from the body, she says, because the same kinds of cells that manufacture and receive emotional chemistry in the brain are present throughout the body. Sometimes the body responds emotionally and manufactures emotional chemicals even before the brain has registered a problem. Remember, for instance, how quickly your body reacts to a loud noise before you've had time to think.
As Dr. Pert said on Bill Moyers's Healing and the Mind,
Clearly, there's another form of energy that we have not yet understood. For example, there's a form of energy that appears to leave the body when the body dies. . . . Your mind is in every cell of your body.
Moyers: . . . You're saying that my emotions are stored in my body?
Pert: Absolutely. You didn't realize that? . . . There are many phenomena that we can't explain without going into energy.
Reading the Field
In addition to reading specific dramatic childhood experiences, sometimes an intuitive can even pick up on superstitions, personal habits, behavior patterns, moral beliefs, and preferences in music and literature. At other times the energy impressions are more symbolic. For instance, from one patient who was suffering from tightness of breath, I kept receiving the symbolic impression of him being shot in the heart before a firing squad. Obviously this had not literally happened to him, but he had undergone extensive medical tests, which could locate no known physical cause for his condition. After I shared my impression with him, he told me that his wife had betrayed him several times with other men, and being shot through the heart was exactly how he felt about her actions. By admitting these emotions, which he had previously tried to ignore, he was able to address the problems both in his marriage and in his health.
Our emotional energy converts into biological matter through a highly complex process. Just as radio stations operate according to specific energy wavelengths, each organ and system in the body is calibrated to absorb and process specific emotional and psychological energies. That is, each area of the body transmits energy on a specific, detailed frequency, and when we are healthy, all are in tune. An area of the body that is not transmitting at its normal frequency indicates the location of a problem. A change in intensity of the frequency indicates a change in the nature and seriousness of the illness and reveals the stress pattern that has contributed to the development of the illness.
This way of interpreting the body's energy is sometimes called vibrational medicine. It resembles the most ancient medical practices and beliefs, from Chinese medicine to indigenous shamanic practices to virtually every folk or alternative therapy. The truth is that energy medicine is not new; but I believe my interpretation of it and of how you can use it to heal spiritually in conjunction with contemporary medical treatments is unique. If a person is able to sense intuitively that he or she is losing energy because of a stressful situation -- and then acts to correct that loss of energy -- then the likelihood of that stress developing into a physical crisis is reduced, if not eliminated completely.
While I can parse the language of energy for you so that you can begin to see and feel the human energy field, begin to understand its corresponding spiritual anatomy, begin to know the sources of your personal power, and begin to develop your own intuition, I have some trouble explaining exactly how I personally acquire energy information. Other intuitives appear to have the same difficulty, but we all pick up on information that has the strongest impulse -- the most intensity. These impulses usually relate directly to the part of the body that is becoming weakened or diseased. As a rule, a person's energy system transmits only the information that is essential to bring the conscious mind to an awareness of the imbalance or disease. Like the shot in the heart image, symbolic information can sometimes be disturbing. But this intensity is necessary in order that the body's message can break through the habitual mental or emotional patterns that caused the disease to form in the first place. Medical intuitions cooperate with the body's intention to promote its own health and life; that is, our energy will always seek health, in spite of what we may do to ourselves physically. If, for example, we tell a lie, our energy field will often communicate to the other person the energy fact that we are not telling the truth. Energy does not and cannot lie.