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| Foreword | |
| Introduction: The Return of Energy Medicine | p. 1 |
| Awakening the Two-Million-Year-Old Healer Within | p. 13 |
| Energy Is All There Is | p. 15 |
| Energy Testing | p. 29 |
| Keeping Your Energies Humming | p. 60 |
| The Anatomy of Your Energy Body | p. 93 |
| The Meridians | p. 95 |
| The Chakras | p. 133 |
| The Aura, Celtic Weave, and Basic Grid | p. 172 |
| The Five Rhythms | p. 196 |
| Triple Warmer and the Strange Flows | p. 224 |
| Weaving It All Together | p. 257 |
| Illness | p. 259 |
| Pain | p. 277 |
| Swimming in Electromagnetic Currents | p. 295 |
| Setting Your Habit Field for Optimum Health and Performance | p. 317 |
| Epilogue: Journeys to the Outer Realms | p. 339 |
| How to Find a Competent Energy Medicine Practitioner | p. 355 |
| Notes | p. 363 |
| Index | p. 373 |
| Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved. |
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Chapter One
Energy Is All There Is
Y our 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 will show you how to work with the 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 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) and chakras (your body's energy centers), emit electromagnetic energy and light. 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, called qi or chi in China, prana in the yoga tradition of India and Tibet, yesod in the Jewish cabalistic tradition, 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 *
AND ITS ENERGIES
T he core premise of this book is that the body and its energies are intelligent, and that you can engage them in intelligent dialogue that fosters your health. This becomes quite apparent when you are working in a healing context and connect with the energies that flow through the human body. 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 expresses his awe at the capacity of a single cell to make intelligent choices in his classic book The Lives of a Cell . I feel that way about energy. The closer you look at the ballet of energy and protoplasm, the smarter each appears. In fact, the idea that a complex organ such as the heart carries a sort of consciousness has been gaining favor. In a remarkable book, A Change of Heart , heart recipient Claire Sylvia describes the way many people who have had a transplant may suddenly be obsessed with the thoughts, memories, dreams, tastes, and desires of the organ donor. The more you work with the subtle energies in a person's body, the more clear it becomes that you are encountering and collaborating with an intelligent force.
* 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 vibrations, 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 rather than being so spontaneous and carefree.
To this day, my appraisals of people are based on the subtle energies I feel and see emanating from them, not 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 *
L eah was carried up the stairs to my office. The man who brought her told me she had been to the Scripps Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, and many, many doctors. Leah was diagnosed with bronchitis, but no one could determine why she wasn't responding to established treatments, and it appeared 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 travelled 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 kineseology 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.
* ENERGY WORK IS SOUL WORK *
T he 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 of 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 .
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 place that feels sacred. For me, this is like a prayer. It connects me with the spiritual realm. I call itHeaven 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 .
3. With another deep breath, open your arms wide, lifting them up. 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 have been inviting healing energies from the 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 *
E nergies from the Sun and from the Earth penetrate your every cell, and they give shape 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 growing.
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 would 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 will describe how to zero in on precisely the energies in your body that need balance, and it will show you how to balance them by dissolving energies that are stagnant, boosting those that are faint, and disbursing or sedating those that are excessive.
* AWAKENING THE TWO-MILLION- *
YEAR-OLD HEALER WITHIN
H aving 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. 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. 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," 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 neighborhood clinic 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 Oriental medicine have been used for thousands of years and are effective (time--about a 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?
O ur 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 an inborn response, will fade if not mirrored by the infant's caregivers.
Nonetheless, I have time and again watched this 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, and humans can cultivate 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, bemoaned the fact that he had survived the stroke, and 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 *
I n recent years scientists have introduced the term subtle energy to describe previously undetected though apparently intelligent forces in the environment and in the body. 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 a complete assessment of the energy flowing through each meridian and the corresponding internal organs it feeds. Changes measured in the ion flow or light emissions emanating from the chakras and meridians correspond with the energetic shifts that follow meditation, acupuncture, qi gong, and other energy healing treatments. 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. 14
Thought also emits a subtle energy. William Tiller and his colleagues at Stanford University built a gas discharge generator that registers electron activity, and they have found that with mental focus alone, people can increase the electron activity within the generator. 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. Other studies have produced similar findings.
Among the most dramatic applications of subtle energies in healing are 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 systematically 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." 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.
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. In discovering 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.
Copyright © 1998 Donna Eden. All rights reserved.
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