January/February 2007

Creating Green-Collar Jobs
Van Jones & Ben Wyskida

Bringing Democracy to Life
Frances Moore Lappé

The War Within Islam: Interview with Reza Aslan
Arnie Cooper

US Gas Tanks and Iraq's Hydrocarbon Law
Stan Goff

Restorative Justice: The New Hope for Reviatlizing Community
Pip Cornall

A Unique Model of Green Architecture
Jody Woodruff

Exploring Uncertainty and Paradox
Marla Estes

The Energetic Properties of Crystals
Robert Simmons

The Storm Hasn't Stopped: A First Person Account of the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Rita
Carol Hwoschinsky

Healing Energy: In a Vibrant Field, Energy Medicine Flowers
Gaea Yudron

Intuition and Heart
Swami Dhayana Giten

Walking Meditation
Thich Nhat Han & Nguyn Anh Huong

Mixed Media Reviews
Debi Weiss

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

Healing Energy

In a Vibrant Field, Energy Medicine Flowers

By Gaea Yudron

Since the 17th century, Western medicine has primar-ily focused on the physical aspects of disease and illness. Descartes gets the credit for fathering what we call the dominant paradigm. Descartes firmly believed that the body and mind were separate. The body was measurable; the mind was immeasurable. So strong was his partiality to the measurable that he believed the body could affect the mind, but the mind could not affect the body!

This fierce allegiance to the tangible and “scien-tifically” measurable, which became known as the Car-tesian worldview, still characterizes our culture. It’s a worldview that invests great importance technological and economic “progress” with its accompanying drive to dominate and subdue nature.

Mainstream medicine expresses the Cartesian paradigm with its reliance on sophisticated, expensive technologies, specialists dedicated to treating various body parts and functions, denatured and sometimes toxic chemical formulations and emotionally removed, machine-like ways of treating ill people.

So, by now you may be asking, what about the healing energy mentioned in the title? I’m getting to it. Here’s one very good item for starters; A growing number of people do understand that the mind influences and affects the body, which is quite the opposite of Descartes’ presumption—and that is just the beginning.

It’s not really as if everything that is not Cartesian disappeared completely in medicine, or any other field, but energetically-oriented perspectives and methods have been opposed, ridiculed or ignored. Take homeopathy for example. It is not the oldest form of energetically-based medicine but it is one of the biggest, recognized by the World Health Organization as the second largest therapeutic system in the world.

The German physician Samuel Hahneman developed homeopathy in the late 18th century. Homeopathy aims to stimulate the body’s own defense and immune processes using the principle of similars, or “like cures like.” That was heresy enough to allopathic doctors, but what really got homeopathy in trouble is the fact that homeopathic medicines are completely energetic in nature. In making homeopathic remedies from plants, animal materials and minerals, the physical substance is diluted until no discernable physical trace of the original substance remains.

Homeopathy was dramatically successful in several big epidemics. During the worldwide Spanish flu epi-demic of 1918-19 conventional medicine in the US had a mortality rate of 30% for those hospitalized, while homeopathy reported a mortality of 1.05% in 27,000 documented hospitalized cases.

In an 1890 issue of Harpers Magazine Mark Twain noted, “The introduction of homeopathy forced the old-school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business.” Twain added, “You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopathists (orthodox physicians) to destroy it.”

You can read all about the high drama and intrigue between allopathic medicine and homeopathy in Divided Legacy, homeopath Harris Coulter’s now-classic explor-ation of the schism in Western medical thought. Don’t be frightened off by the fact that there are three volumes! They are fascinating, very readable and highly instructive.

Medicine, like much else in human history, goes in cycles or spirals, the apparent conflict of various philosophies and practices swelling and subsiding, separ-ating and mixing, a process filled with tumult, inspiration and assimilation.

Paracelsus, a Swiss physician who lived only a century before Descartes, described “a healing energy that radiates within and around man like a luminous sphere.” He was speaking about the élan vital, or vital force, also known as chi or prana. Many forms of natural medicine, such as homeopathy, osteopathy and naturopathy work with the vital force. Chinese medicine, which charted a system of energy meridians applied through acupuncture, includes many ways of working with chi or vital force.

Newer forms of energy healing utilize both the energy meridian system and attention to the flow of vital force or chi. Reiki, which means spiritual healing energy, is a form of healing touch that originated in Japan in the early 20th century. It’s estimated that there are one million Reiki practitioners worldwide. The hand positions and techniques used in Reiki often refer to the body’s energy channels and pressure points.

We’ve learned from well-publicized studies that meditation, prayer, visualization and positive thought have powerful beneficial effects both for the practitioner and others. Peaceful and integrated brain states, intangible though they may be, ripple out in a healing way. This is a potent form of energy medicine.

EMDR (eye movement desensitization processing), another form of energy medicine that has gained popularity, is used within the conventional psychotherapeutic model and has been shown to be dramatically effective in resolving trauma, anxiety and other imbalances. Emotional Healing at Warp Speed by David Grand Ph.D. presents an eloquent and inspiring picture of EMDR’s powerful healing capabilities.

Another amazing form of energy medicine that uses eye movements to heal is RET, or Rapid Eye Technology, developed and taught at the Rapid Eye Institute in Salem, Oregon. RET is a holistic, spiritually-informed method used by a wide variety of practitioners, including therapists and counselors, ministers, priests, holistic health practitioners and emergency responders. RET incorporates eye-accessing cues identified in NLP (neurolinguistic programming) and uses a variety of eye movements, blinking, breathing techniques, tapping therapy, visualizations, chakra work and reframing to help people discharge traumatic events. Birth trauma, abuse and PTSD along with limiting patterns including depression, addictions, anxiety and phobias are often successfully addressed with RET. While conventional talk therapy works with cognitive areas of the brain, these two eye movement therapies work with the emotional areas of the brain. Results with both EMDR and RET are usually fast and long-lasting.

Not long after I moved to Ashland in the mid 70s to start a healing center, a beautiful, ebullient woman named Donna Eden moved in next door. Of course, I didn’t have any way of knowing that she would later become one of the world’s most well-known natural healers, but it was obvious then that she herself was like a delightful sea of chi. (If you’ve ever met her, you know what I mean.) With an effervescent energy that is strong and positively contagious Donna has been healing people with energy modalities for 30 years. In Energy Medicine, her ground-breaking first book written with her husband David Feinstein, a clinical psychologist, she describes many of the simple and profoundly effective methods she uses in her work. That book is already considered a classic.

Recently I’ve been reading The Promise of Energy Psychology, authored by David Feinstein, Donna Eden and Gary Craig, who developed a popular form of energy healing called EFT, or emotional freedom technique. EFT is Craig’s reformulation of TFT or thought field therapy, developed by Roger Callahan. In both EFT and TFT one taps lightly with the fingers on various acupuncture points to effect healing. (Sounds funny? Maybe, but it works.)

The Promise of Energy Psychology also deserves to become a classic, and it too breaks new ground. This inspiring, thought-provoking and thoroughly researched book cogently presents the history of energy psychology/medicine and makes a case for the value of energy-based healing methods. Reading it, you can learn more about how energy medicine works and what kinds of clinical trials and other forms of research are being done. Great illustrations accompany descriptions of the many healing techniques shared by the authors. Scrambled energy, psychological reversals, energy toxins and other factors that delay or obstruct healing are also covered.

Of course, I thoroughly enjoyed the accounts of various people’s healing experiences and I expect that you will, too. It’s always rewarding and uplifting to read about how people heal, especially as we are often provided with news that is not as uplifting. Whether you are a health care practitioner or someone seeking healing, I recommend this entirely readable book, which is useful on a daily basis.

Many forms of energy healing available today provide simple, effective methods that you can use yourself or with the help of a practitioner to shift problematic emotions and behaviors. These days, we can use that kind of support. Each of us is not only working with our own set of life issues and lessons; we are also responding to the collective experience of wars, violence, global warming and other disruptions of nature and culture. This can seem overwhelming. The perceived difficulties of our collective situation and the experienced speed of our lives certainly accounts for the tremendous increase in depression and anxiety disorders and the use of medications to dull or mask those symptoms. Medications are one way to deal with the stress of our current world, but they are not the only way. Energy medicine and energy psychology provide tools to help us shift our emotional/physical response to stressful situations and events, whether they are personal or global in nature. This choice to shift, to change our mind, allows us to experience calm and balance, and that in turn allows us to be more open and effective in creating positive conditions, both personally and on a wider scale.

May the Force be with you!

Gaea Yudron MRET has been doing RET rapid eye healing since 1995. Her involvement with spiritual/energy healing began in the early 70s at the Berkeley Holistic Health Center. She has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for the past 30 years, and that philosophy/psychology/
contemplative tradition informs her healing work. She can be reached at gaea@snowcrest.net or at (530) 475-3649.

Gaea Yudron