The Human Energy Field: An Interview with Valerie V. Hunt, Ph.D.

With broad degrees in the fields of biology, physiological psychology, science education, and physical therapy, for over fifty years, Dr. Valerie Hunt has been a pioneer in every area of research she has undertaken. In the 1950’s, she established the neuromuscular patterns of anxiety and anger at a time when the only physiological research of emotions was chemical and behavioral. In the 1960’s, she added to the field of behavioral psychology with her discovery of neuromuscular nerve stimulation patterns related to nonverbal communication of individuals and cultures. In the 1970’s, while a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, she developed a high frequency device known as the AuraMeter(TM), which is capable of recording the electrical energy (the human aura) from the body’s surface. In the process, she discovered that the energy radiating from the body’s atoms emit frequencies one thousand times faster than any other known electrical activity of the body. During the 1980’s and 90’s, using fractal mathematics, her energy field data produced the first dramatic chaos patterns ever discovered in human biological systems.

Today, Dr. Hunt is actively involved in research that is uncovering the various dimensions involved in the bioenergetic transactions between humans and the environment as they relate to human behaviors, emotions, health, illness, and disease, as well as scientifically quantifying the human aura and the levels of consciousness it contains.

Your research shows that disturbances in the body’s bioelectromagnetic field, rather than biochemical imbalances, are the primary cause of disease and malfunction. That being the case, how did biochemistry come to be the underlying basis for the diagnosis and treatment methods of orthodox or conventional medicine?

We got into this state back in the 18th century, when medicine started to become more serious about finding scientific evidence to support medical theory and practice. At that time, the field of chemistry was the most scientifically advanced, well before the study of electromagnetism occurred. The researchers of that era began to investigate biochemical changes, and when they did their experiments, they could see biochemical differences. That’s where it started. In addition, there was already a body of established scientific evidence regarding the mechanics of alignment and things of this nature in the scientific literature, dating much earlier than the 18th century. Having these two basic references and scientific information to go on, they grabbed it, and that was the basis of the biochemical paradigm.

It wasn’t until the discovery of the atom early in the 19th century, that we started really understanding electromagnetism, but by this time the biochemical paradigm was already locked in. The first research into electromagnetism was also concerned only with material substance; it had to do with atoms and the physical things of the earth. The study of bioelectromagnetism, the subtle, invisible energy fields which enfold and animate physical matter, is much more recent than that, such as the work done by Nikola Tesla in the 1950’s.

So this is a brief history of why energy field medicine, alternative medicine, or whatever you wish to call it, has been late in coming. The chemistry is there and we need to be concerned about it, but it is not our primary concern and it certainly is not the cause of illness. It’s a downstream cause. Even the biochemists say that all chemical reactions have to have a catalyst in order to occur. You can’t just put two substances together, you have to have a catalyst, and the catalyst is electromagnetic energy. When the pattern of the electromagnetism is disturbed in the body, you will get disease and malfunction. And this electromagnetic pattern can be disturbed in a number of ways: genetically, due to the nature of the tissue, although I don’t think that’s a major factor; experientially, due to lifestyle patterns; or emotionally, which I think is the primary factor. What happens is there is a disturbance that occurs in the electromagnetism of the tissue, which will eventually alter the chemistry. And actually this goes clear to the DNA. I predict we will learn before long that the DNA is reprogrammed by the emotional organization of the energy field. I am not saying this simply. I have had experiences here.

What you are saying, then, is that the primary cause of all disease occurs first and foremost in the field. Correct?

Absolutely. Many people are coming to that conclusion theoretically. I’m coming to it through my research.

Conversely, then, for healing to truly occur, it has to occur in the field, as well.

All healing that takes place in alternative medicine is electromagnetic. Whether it’s the laying on of hands, Tai Chi, meditation — everything that takes place, even the thought process, or the person’s intent or spiritual state, changes the electromagnetic field and changes it almost instantaneously. Now if it stays changed and improved, the body heals itself, and the chemistry reorganizes. This biochemical reorganization is the effect that medicine is working upon. Medicine has never, ever cured anything. The body cures itself. Sometimes, in emergency situations, we need the offset of biochemistry, but not as a cure of disease. It never has cured disease, and it never will cure disease. Only if the field changes will there be a true cure.

For example, I can measure the energy field of a person who has had cancer but that cancer, according to chemistry, is in remission. I can tell you if the person still has a cancerous field, and until that cancerous field goes, I don’t care if there is remission or not, biochemically, as long as the field does not change, it’s going to recur.

And the reason they have cancer is because the field is a very high, very weak field. They’re sweet, dear, lovable people. That’s their emotional orientation. They aren’t aggressive, and they don’t have lower frequencies which have to do with tissue vitality. Without the tissue vitality, the cell becomes cancerous. But the difficulty is that some of these people would almost rather die than to give in to the very intense, angry, and hostile emotions which they have.

Would you say that those emotions are basically suppressed?

Yes, they are suppressed as their consciousness soars, staying in what they perceive to be the more positive emotions. I have measured the fields of people with cancer many, many times, and it’s always the same pattern. I’ve never, ever seen a cancer person whose field had the full spectrum of electromagnetic energy, from its lowest to its highest. Never, ever.

Are you saying that cancer is a passive/aggressive disease in the sense of the person’s emotional make-up?

I wouldn’t say passive/aggressive. I would say it’s passive, not aggressive.

How did your research shift into this area of the field?

My academic background is as a neurophysiologist, and I was also a registered physical therapist. I was working in electromyography and electrocardiography, and I was interested in the patterns of electromyographic energy in the body that were related to emotions. Eventually, I established a pattern of emotions connected with neurological energy. In the process, I was the first researcher to have a telemetry, electromyography instrument. This was when the first astronauts went into space. They had to have monitors of their basic health — the heart rate, the blood pressure, and the galvanic skin response — sent from space. They did this using telemetry, which is a radio frequency instrument system. It would send a signal on an FM frequency down to the earth, where NASA would record the FM frequencies and know what was happening to the astronauts.

When I heard about this, I got in touch with NASA and the young scientist who had first made that telemetry instrumentation, and I had him build for me the first telemetry electromyography instrument. This meant I could test a person using an FM frequency, a radio frequency, process the data through my instrumentation and record it. And when I did this I found the electromagnetic energy field.

This was in early 60’s, and I thought, “Oh my God, what have I got here?” So I brought in researchers from the university’s chemistry, physics, and engineering departments. I said, “What have I got, an artifact?” And they kept saying I didn’t, that my equipment was working fine. They tested everything, and finally I realized I was dealing with a new kind of energy in the body.

Now, forty years ago, I didn’t know much about meditating, or Far Eastern literature, or mystical ideas. I just knew I was onto something. So I brought in Rosalyn Bruyere, a very top aura reader, and had her read the energy radiating from the body at the same time I recorded energy from surface electrodes. I also brought in healers and people with polio, or who were paralyzed. I just ran the gamut, because at first I didn’t know what I was doing. But pretty soon I seemed to know exactly what I was doing. I was measuring an energy field that was in the form of light that radiated from the human body. It could be seen by aura readers and could be altered and changed by psychic healers, by hands-on healers, by all kinds of energy techniques. And it was extremely dynamic. It changed, and would frequently go back to where it was. Eventually, I found that I could measure the resting energy signature of a person. With some people I could get the signature in about fifteen minutes, which meant that, no matter what I did with them, they always had this dominant signature. But for others, it would take five or more recordings until I could find their signature – they were so dynamic and so changeable. This, of course, was good. Such people are not stuck with just one way to play the game. They can play it in all kinds of ways. Under new situations, emotional or physical, they can adjust the electromagnetic field so that they can cope, they can handle, and they can desirably work in the electromagnetic milieu of the world.

In other words, their adaptive skills are optimal.

That’s right. They are absolutely optimal, in all areas. I call these kinds of fields ideal. Now, what is an ideal field? Health first and foremost is health of the electromagnetic field. You’re not going to have health if you don’t have health in the electromagnetic field because this is the source. Biochemistry never gives you source. It is legion that some people who go to their doctor find that everything, biochemically, checks out fine. Then they may walk out of the office and die of a heart attack because their fields are not dynamic, and optimally adaptive. The models that we have which say healthy heart rates, blood pressure rates, etc., should conform to a certain standard measurement are stupid. A healthy blood pressure is one that can shoot to the top, and drop to the bottom, and stay somewhere in the middle. It is more often that the people who can’t do that are the ones that die suddenly, not necessarily the ones who have what they call high blood pressure.

Based on what you’re saying, a person’s health index would be directly related to how well he or she adapts to whatever they are experiencing moment to moment.

Well, there are certain parameters. First, for optimal health to exist, the field has to be very broad-spectrum and adaptive. Some of the people we test have electromagnetic energy that is in the middle of the spectrum and is truncated there. They can’t go very high, and they can’t go very low. They seem to dribble through life and struggle . Then there are the people, such as those who practice certain types of meditation, whose frequencies are extremely high, so that if something happens in the world, they don’t respond on the middle or lower branches. They respond on the upper branches. They have a certain kind of peace, yet they often die of hypotension (low blood pressure, cancer) diseases because they don’t have enough vital energy. And then there are some people who are in the lower ranges, which means they don’t have the high frequencies, but they have a heck of a lot of energy. They can do things that the rest of us can’t physically do even if we push ourselves to exercise and build more strength. These are the people who have difficulty with hypertension, skin conditions, anything that is hyper or excessive in terms of imbalances. The ideal field is one that has the low frequencies, the middle frequencies, the higher frequencies, and no major break in between any of them, so that they can play the total range of the piano, as it were.

The next parameter is power. Power is a quantitative measurement. You may have the complete frequency range, but the only place you have power is in certain aspects of that range. That’s where you operate from because that’s where you’ve got power. If you have power in the lower ranges, you will be physically active, and have vital dynamic life. I’m 85 and nobody knows it. I have lower frequencies and this keeps cells and organs working and keeps me looking younger. If you have great frequency in the middle ranges, you can easily handle intellectual issues and can solve problems. If you have power in the upper ranges, you can go into higher states of consciousness, find wisdom, you have levels of thought which are conceptual. But the ideal is to have power within the entire spectrum of frequencies.

Then there is the question of coherency or stability, which has to do with whether the field comes back to a resting state when it’s not being challenged. When the field starts to disintegrate or become anti-coherent, it means that things don’t go together. You will have frequencies out of sync and the energy does not flow. Now in the lower parts of the body there are more of the lower energy frequencies, in the middle body there are more of the middle frequencies, and in the upper body there are more of the upper. But this is not the same as saying that each chakra has a particular energy. It does not. It has to do with the nature of the field, and as soon as the field becomes anti-coherent things don’t flow. And the primary organizer of all of this is human emotion. It is the apex. When we shift human emotion, we can do amazing things with the electromagnetic field.

You’ve developed instrumentation you call an “AuraMeter” to calibrate all of this. What methods existed prior to the AuraMeter, and what are their inherent limitations?

The first method, which has always been around, are people who can see the light aspect of these electromagnetic frequencies, or the human aura, as is depicted in early art work showing the halo around the body and the head of the angels, the Christ, the Buddha, and religious figures. People who access the higher level frequencies can see this. This has been one of the areas that initially validated my electromyography or my aura meter. I used eight aura readers, the best I could find in the world. They worked simultaneously to read one person’s aura from different parts of the lab where they could not hear what anyone else was saying. I recorded their findings at the same time that I recorded the subject’s energy field. I found complete correlation among them with the primary colors of the field’s spectrum — red, yellow and blue — and I found very high correlation with the secondary colors. But I found no correlation with colors like puce, chartreuse, or turquoise because those colors are an interpretation of a blend of colors. If we kept the aura readers observing the area of color frequency and nature of the field, they sometimes saw the flow of the field and they saw blockages within it. Blockages are signs of anti-coherency. The problem here with many aura readers is that they want to interpret what the blockages means, and many of them are very fuzzy thinkers; they do not have scientific minds capable of making an accurate diagnosis.

The second method of evaluation involves bio-frequency machines. There are a bunch of them out there, and they take a quantitative sample of the electromagnetic field. But they are only measuring one aspect of electromagnetic field — the power of the energy. They don’t measure the frequency range itself, or the flow, coherency, and stability of the field.

Then there are the organ system energy devices. These test the energy of organ systems and some functional systems, which measure if an organ has too little or too much energy. But these devices don’t tell us why. They are very good for finding out which organ is sick, but are incapable of telling you what the source of the sickness is, or how your field handles your relationships in the world.

Then there are the Kirlian devices which photograph the subject. Kirlian himself was supposed to have exposed the photographs through his own mind; he didn’t have any film in the camera. What he was doing was recording the energy in his mind and then putting in on the tape. That’s why it took so long for Kirlian photography to develop. I used to work in Kirlian photography using films. I did it for many years trying to see what was going on. But in order to work with it, you have to introduce an energy field to enhance the radiation of the electromagnetic field. This means you are measuring a secondary response, not the primary one. You’re getting something that happened as a result of giving it a shock, by introducing energy. We also found out that there are many things that can change the result, such as the moisture on your fingers or your emotional state. And the measurement comes in the form of a picture so, even though you may get a change in color, for example, you have to interpret what it is. It’s not raw data, in other words. Some of the new Kirlian devices are getting better because they are photographing much more of the electromagnetic field and then assigning numbers to it, but the numbers come secondarily. They are not in the data itself.

These are the major limitations to these types of methods, even though all of them do give some indication of the electromagnetic field. The aura meter does everything that they can do, but it is far more complex. My basic recording has been 200,000 cycles per second, and I now have an instrument that records to 750,000 cycles per second. That’s a heck of a lot of data. And we put it through fractal analysis, which is the only kind that you should ever use on these data. Fractal geometry replaces the old Euclidian geometry which presupposes that the world is made up of triangles, circles, and straight lines, and any piece of information that does not fit into that pattern gets dumped. It gets thrown out. Yet life is not a bunch of straight lines and circles. Anything that is living has dynamic differences and changes, and fractal geometry provides me with a dynamic formula which allows me to look at emotion and change.

My data is handled not by correlations, but by patterns of interrelationships. I look at the pattern in the electromagnetic field using fractal analysis. I look at the patterns of health and biological disturbances. I will soon have software that will enable me to conduct very sophisticated and complex measurements of these patterns. Not the simple things like brainwave patterns, EEG, which only go up to 100 cycles per second, or cardiograms, which only go up 150 cycles per second. The electromagnetic field does not even begin until 400 to 500 cycles per second, which is beyond the range of the nervous system of the human body. I’m talking about atomic and sub-atomic patterns — the transactions between the electromagnetic field as it radiates out from the body and transacts with the electromagnetic field from outside of the body, which is radiating in.

Let me say a little bit about this. If you take a ball and drop it, it will fall because the gravitational pull reacts to its mass. That’s a reaction. Then we have the next higher level, which is called an interaction. If you put oxygen with hydrogen, in ordinary circumstances, it creates water. This is a form of interaction. But, when it comes to field interaction you have what is called a transaction, which means the human being can change his field. There are three types of transactions. In the first type, the person can come in contact with an external field of reaction and not even react to that field. People sometimes refer to this as putting a barrier up. The person doesn’t interact with the external field at all, or he may put up a total barrier so that nothing ever comes into his field, so there is no transaction. Or the opposite can occur — he can be overwhelmed by the external field, which is a one-way transaction. We’re all familiar with the experience of being sapped by another person’s energy, for example. The person who is said to be doing the sapping is, in a way, overpowering the other person, and the other person has to be overpowered. That is the transaction, and I have tested this.

Then there is the third type of transaction, in which both fields change and improve. That’s the ideal situation, and I’ve tested this, as well, putting two people together and watching to see if there was a transaction. Sometimes the energy changed, going from one person into the other; one person changed while the other stayed the same. Sometimes there was total barrier. I had them close enough, yet nothing happened. There was a complete lack of transaction. And sometimes I put people together and their fields blended and became more elaborate, as each became stronger. This is the ideal transaction, and is what should happen in all human situations. There should be a beneficial transaction for both people.

What this means, in terms of healing, is that the healers have to start approximately where their patients’ fields are to get them to transact. They can’t force the energy. This is why some healings are effective, and some are not. It’s because the healers are effective at working on some people, and are not effective with other people. This is one of the areas I’m researching. I’m checking techniques and checking the healee and the healer’s fields simultaneously, to see if, when the transaction takes place, both fields improve.

You’ve just explained why not all therapies work for all people.

Yes, but we’re going to see that certain therapies have to do primarily with the therapists, plus the energy, which is transmissive. We will be testing all of the techniques, and the kinds of fields, and how they respond, so that we will be able to not only diagnose and prescribe the technique that is needed, but also be able to determine which healer will be most effective with each person. And we will do this using the AuraMeter to record their field, and bring it out in fractal images.

We can also display the pattern of disease in fractal images so that even doctors who don’t have a background in this area will be able to make a more effective diagnosis, including for conditions where the etiology is unknown. We will have the signature pattern of the major diseases. It is going to take me a while to do this, but eventually I will have the signatures for Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and so forth, all of the diseases that kill the most people or cause the most serious disturbances. We’ll have those patterns and the signature of the person and eventually we’ll be able to show that, if we change the person’s signature or electromyographic pattern, we can expect a cure. The disease or dysfunction will go away. This is the future of medicine. When a patient comes in to see his doctor, the first thing that will be done is to record his individual signature. All diagnosis and treatment will start from there. We have to have the energy field of the person. We have to have the energy field of the disease or illness. We have to have the energy field of the energy which is being introduced, and then we have to have the energy field of the therapist, because the therapist is the part of the transaction.

I have recorded the signatures of healers who have healed pain. They have a particular frequency spectrum in their signature. They can walk in a room and merely by their presence they can stop pain. I have others that, if they come into the room, they’re going to create the pain with their frequency. So, when we come into the ideal alternative medicine hospital every single person in that room who treats people is going to have to have his field checked.

Spiritual healing is another area I will be researching in more detail. It’s been stated that if you pray over a person, they tend to get better. This is an oversimplification. It depends on who prays and from what level, or frequency, they pray. I’ve recorded people who pray and pray and pray, but they are praying from such a low level that nothing happens. They don’t have the amplitude and the necessary frequency to bring in the spiritual healing energy, which is unconditional love. Unconditional love is coherency with great power. If you don’t have coherency, you can talk about unconditional love, but you don’t really know what it is.

What role does a person’s intention play in influencing the field?

Practically every technique now says we use the power of the mind in addition to whatever energy we introduce, in order to focus the energy and make it opportune. I do know that we can introduce energy and it just goes through the body and doesn’t really do anything, but if we consciously intend and we focus it, we can do amazing things.

Years ago, while working on my doctorate degree at Columbia University, I needed to earn some money so I taught a course on cadaver anatomy to doctors, nurses, and therapists. During the course I breathed in formaldehyde and it settled into my tissue. I had formaldehyde poisoning and required a series of chelation treatments to detoxify my blood. This resolved most of my symptoms. Years later, I went to see my internist, who told me I still had some toxicity but that he didn’t have anything more to offer me. Later, I had a conversation with some young biochemists I know, who are very creative, and they told me they had discovered that these deep-seated poisonings affect the DNA itself. It’s not stored just the cellular tissue, it’s stored in the DNA of the cells. But when I asked what I could do about it, they said they didn’t have anything they could offer me. So I decided to treat it using my intention. For three days, I focused on removing the toxic condition of my cells’ DNA, and you know what? I removed it.

Now intention has many levels. Some people have very weak intention. But people who have command over their human consciousness can focus a tremendous amount of energy to do things. So when we talk about intention we have to talk about the consciousness of the person. Some people can’t focus their intention; they go to sleep. Other people focus weakly. And for some people the focus is, God will take care of it. But other people have a powerful focus that can influence their cells and organs, expand their emotions, and so forth.

Why do individuals respond differently to specific energy treatments?

One of the main principles behind this is the fact that the energy we like is the energy we’ve got, because it doesn’t stress us. It’s easy for us to have a transaction with it. We just slip into it. Many people who, for example, have very high vibrations and no power, do not like to experience low vibrations with power. It’s just too big a shock for them. They don’t like baseball games and screaming, for example; they prefer to go to the symphony, because this is compatible with them. It has to do with how they have organized their energy field, and how the body can transact comfortably without being stressed to change. Ideal energy field treatment requires this transaction, but if the voltage is too high, without a rise and fall of amplitude, it creates a shock and the body response is one of reaction. Generally, we prefer the energy field patterns that constitute our signature; these feel comfortable but can be less effective. Still, there should be a more gentle and more consistent way of introducing change, which is not a shock reaction.

Some people are tremendously susceptible or sensitive to sound, for instance. Even as little kids, sound was very important for them. If we’ve been in a family in which music has been played throughout our life, music will be the one that will open us up the fastest. We can take the same frequencies of sound that we take in light and introduce them that way. Other people are terribly sensitive to color, so we can introduce the energy field by way of the color spectrum, in a form with which their sensory system is compatible. Other people are best treated using imagery or meditation techniques geared toward providing them with emotional insights, because emotions organize the energy fields. The effectiveness of the treatment has to do with the kind of stimulation that a person can pay attention to.

Now there is one thing more that I want to say something about this, and that has to do with the person’s consciousness. I have been finding that a person’s frequency spectrum and power determines his level of consciousness and how he processes information. There are people who have got a lot of very low frequencies and a lot of the power, and they process information directly through profound physical energy without getting overwhelmed. Other people process the energy rationally. They are the great problem solvers on a material level, and are the people who write about solving problems. They take this energy into the realistic form and they remove the problem realistically. Then there are those individuals who come from a very high level. They take the energy into the spiritual. I have found that when people reach a frequency level of around 250,000 cycles per second, they will have a spiritual experience. I don’t care whether they are an atheist, an agnostic, or a Catholic or a Buddhist. The form of it may be different, but the nature of it is the same. It is expanded beyond ordinary reality. It is profound. It is full of light and that is a spiritual experience. For these people, when problems come in, they take them to the Lord, or into the Divine. And for some things that is the best way to handle them. Shipwrecked people who survive in the water for a long time can be an example of this. They couldn’t physically handle it, and they couldn’t rationally figure out how they were going to get out of that ocean when there was nobody there. Instead, they went into a spiritual level. At that level you lower your metabolism so low and you make everything so refined that you can live with less oxygen and nourishment, and even with extreme cold. So if you have a specific proclivity in your electromagnetic field, this will determine your primary focus. And if you a not bound by a certain proclivity, then you can make the choice of the best one to use, and if one doesn’t work, you’ve got another.

Based on the growing body of research regarding consciousness, it would seem to me that a person’s proclivities not only determine how he processes energy and information, but also determines the types of experiences and challenges he encounters. Which leads me to what you call a person’s “lifehoods.” What do you mean by that term?

The word “lifehoods” is not just a term I coined for the old ideas about past lives. Past lives emphasize the physical existence of a life, a time-space construct. Lifehoods emphasize the soul itself, which is part of the field, exists now, and has no time reference. As Stephen Hawking as pointed out, laws of science do not distinguish between past, present, and future. Neither do higher states of consciousness. There is neither soul-time nor soul-space, and since the soul is never destroyed, information from lifehoods is always a part of each new life, or incarnation.

As a hardcore scientist, this was the hardest thing for me to understand, until my own lifehood started coming through with information that I had no way of ever knowing otherwise. Of course, some people say, “Well, I don’t believe in that,” but whether or you believe in it or not, it’s a fact, and more and more information is coming out that verifies that the soul has existed before this lifetime. And each time the soul comes into this life, it brings through its experiences. Lifehood information can either help or hinder our evolution, but in each new life this information powerfully influences the development of our selfhood and behaviors. In addition, these memories are the true psychological source and deepest director of human life. It is as if the soul is saying, I’ve got to solve this and therefore I’m going to have these experiences.

When a person reexperiences a lifehood, the past and the present are now, and it is not a historical event. Likewise, as people go up in consciousness and vibration to the levels in the field where recalls occur, there is no time but the present time. I believe that as man evolves rapidly in the future, the concept of lifehoods will become a dominant, new philosophical idea, one which is important because it views human emotions, spirituality, and the body in a way that focuses holistically on human empowerment. My work in this regard focuses primarily upon the spiritual aspects of lifehoods, which I find to be the ultimate source of a person’s problems in this lifehood, especially the emotions connected with other lifehoods which are the barriers to progress. When I open people’s fields there is a dramatic increase in the frequency and quantity of the field, and not only do they get better, they evolve.

This is different from what is known as past life regression, which based upon the person regressing backwards in time. The person doesn’t have to regress at all. In their field the memory is right there. All you have to do is expand their consciousness, which can be done by the use of energy frequencies, and it’s there. Once their conscious expands, they can take the information and they can put it consciously in the human mind so that they can do something with it. This is one of the great frontiers of human consciousness. I think it’s probably one of the most important, although it’s beyond where most people are ready to go.

What other areas of research are you involved in?

New frontiers of research concerning participation. What I mean by participation is that I’m not wanting to do things for people, I’m wanting people to do things to and for themselves. It’s fine to have a healer, but unless you can take the energy in the field and heal yourself, you’ve got to go see the healer. It’s an on and off deal. I want it to be an “on deal,” so that’s why I want the individual’s participation.

I have created what I call “Mind Mastery Meditations,” which are self-help healing procedures. These teach people how to move energy into their own field, and can be applied to broad categories of illness, and help them in their personal evolution.

I will also be developing subliminal energy tapes with focused instruction. I’ve already developed a series of music and sound tapes, which are the world’s first authentic auric field sounds harmonically correlated with music. What I’ve done is taken the various electromagnetic frequencies of the field and combined these with the music that matches each frequency. The red, orange, amber frequency spectrum, for example, goes with contemporary African music with a strong beat, and can be used to revitalize the physical body and activate spontaneous emotions. The yellow, green, and gold frequency is a waltz wave. When you listen to it, it fine tunes sensation and perception, improves the efficiency of the nervous system, and creatively activates the mind. Then you have the blue, violet, and mauve spectrum, which correlates to the great classical music repertory, and encourages a contemplative state of peace, tranquility, and higher consciousness. Then we come into the white and gold spectrum, which correlates to spiritual a cappella choral singing, and elevates thoughts and emotions to a broader worldview of richer beauty and deeper wisdom. Or you can listen to the Rainbow tape, which progresses through all the frequencies to stabilize the field and encourage expanded awareness. The tapes work directly on the amplitude of the human body.

Now the subliminal tapes I’ll be doing will not only focus on a specific problem, but also the frequency necessary to heal it. Diabetes, for example, is a problem related to not enough of the red frequency in the field. I’ve cured diabetes by changing the person’s field, bringing in the red, and guiding them back to where they dispense with their anger and hostility. These tapes will include the sounds of the necessary frequencies with instructions we will record and make subliminal, and they will directly interact with the electromagnetic field of the human aura.

Another area of my research has to do with bioscalar waves.

Which are … ?

The human auric field is composed of electromagnetic frequencies which pass through the body as waves of energy. But there is also a form of electromagnetism that is organized differently. It is not a wave, but is changed to a standing energy. In physics, this is known as a scalar wave, and when it exists in the body, I call it a bioscalar wave. If energy is introduced on a straight line from two energy sources of the same frequency at the same time, coming toward each other to meet in the middle of a mobius coil, the frequencies get cancelled out and it becomes standing energy. This energy doesn’t flow like a wave, but it does occupy space and can increase in spatial mass. When the space it occupies is sufficient, the energy expands outward in circles of energy, directly influencing the blood and the body’s lymphatic system. As you know, red and white blood cells tend to clump together when there is illness or injury. According to research conducted at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, scalar energy reverses this — it “unsticks” the cells and circulation and lymphatic flow improves, hastening healing.

I believe the creation of the bioscalar wave is the essential electromagnetic phenomenon of all healing procedures, and I’ve discovered that each of us can be the generator for that. We can create a standing energy. We can imagine bringing in a particular frequency or a particular color of energy through a straight line through our body from our hands reaching out to the sides. We can bring that energy in to the middle of our body, and that’s the mobius coil from which the energy spirals upward. You can do amazing with this process. We have found that all medical conditions are improved or eliminated by bioscalar activation, although in some situations the results can take weeks or months to occur. But the direction is always positive as the body establishes new energy field patterns that are self-healing.

What do you foresee occurring in the health field as your work begins to reach a broader audience?

A new model. As I said, the model I am after is a new model of the human being based on health, consciousness, and evolution.

Currently, there are three models that define our belief systems. The first is the physiological model, which has to do with how we treat disease. We treat disease symptoms because we do not know what health is; we accept as fact that health is the absence of disease. Second is the biochemical model, which says that life started from a chemical soup and then progressed to protozoa and so forth. This isn’t so. You can have all the chemistry in the world, but if there is no electricity, no power, and no charge, there is no life. In the medicine of the future, the emphasis on biochemistry will be phased out.

Then there is the behavioral model, which has to do with perception, experience, ego, personality, emotion, and brain hemispheres, and only addresses a very small part of human behavior, and only the memories and experiences of this current lifehood.

These models are not incorrect, but they are incomplete and cannot explain all of our choices, actions, and perceptions. We need a new model rather than trying to fit ourselves into models that do not encompass all we are. This is the model of the human energy field or the mind of man, a field of energy that incorporates all behaviors, even to the highest level — the level of the soul. The soul is the apex of the field; it holds the memory of everything that has ever occurred to it, including other lifehoods, and is also the source of intuition, insight, and creativity, and the source of mystical experiences. I talked about energy field levels of consciousness. All of us are electromagnetically wired for divine experiences. It’s not a case of these being something foreign to us; when we reach a certain frequency level, we will have a spiritual experience, and spiritual enlightenment is our evolutionary goal. Acknowledging our field and learning how to activate it is a way of achieving that, creating health and healing disease in the process.

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 Creating Bioscalar Energy

The following exercise was developed by Dr. Hunt as a means of empowering others to create bioscalar energy within their bodies to promote health and healing. This is achieved, Dr. Hunt explains, “by consciously manipulating the environmental electromagnetism in the air we breathe.”

Lie down with your arms stretched straight out sideward from your body and begin focusing on your breath. Concentrating your breathing in the area of your chest, imagine that each breath is simultaneously coming from opposite sides on a straight line into your body, through your hands. Now imagine the same frequency of energy coming through each of your hands into the middle of your body. (To ensure the same energy in each hand, select a pure primary or secondary color, e.g., red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, or white.) As you inhale, visualize that energy entering each hand at the same time, and bring it into your body. Allow the energy to remain there as you exhale, then take in more with your next inhalation. Continue breathing in this manner.

As you do so, you will become aware that your chest feels full, not of air, but of standing bioscalar energy. Now stop concentrating on your inhalation, and feel the bioscalar energy expanding outward in a circular motion, like that caused by a stone thrown into water. This is the automatic action of the scalar wave, and as it occurs, it separates the compacted cells and tissues in your body, facilitating the healing phenomenon.

Soon you will notice that your creation of bioscalar energy in the center of your body has established an automatic pattern. Stop consciously creating the scalar wave and use your mind to tell the energy what you want it to do as it spreads outward, e.g., heal pain, regenerate tissue, eliminate pathogens, etc. Do not be passive about this; use your focused intent and “command” the energy to obey your directive.

In the beginning, do this exercise for thirty minutes twice a day. As you become more skillful, ten minutes several times a day should produce excellent results.

A Note About Color Frequencies: Colors have different energy frequencies and produce different effects. Dr. Hunt’s research has shown that the red-orange frequency spectrum seems to have the fastest build-up, while the blue-violet spectrum tends to continue the expansion longer. The red-orange spectrum is useful for healing damaged tissue, but to calm pain, the blue-violet spectrum works best. During each session try using both at different times and see which one works best for you.

Resources

BioEnergy Fields Foundation

P.O. Box 6653

Malibu, California 90264

(310) 457-4694

http://www.bioenergyfields.org

Malibu Publishing Company

P.O. Box 4234

Malibu, California 90264

(310) 457-4694

http://www.malibupublishing.com

(Publishes and distributes Dr. Hunt’s books, tapes, and videos.)

By Dr. Hunt

Infinite Mind: Science of the Human Vibrations of Consciousness, 2nd edition (1998).

Mind Mastery Meditations: A Workbook for the ‘Infinite Mind’ (1997).

Mind Mastery Meditation Tapes

Tape 1: Activating the Physical Field and Opening the Mind-Field and Emotions

Tape 2: Telepathic Knowing: The Transfer of Thought and Uncovering Past Lifes

The Music of Light (Available as a five audiotape set or as 2 CDs. Developed and recorded by Dr. Hunt, this series is the first collection of authentic auric field sounds which can be used by listeners to balance, energize, and expand their human energy field.)

Energy Psychology–An Interview With Fred P. Gallo, Ph.D.

One of the most exciting developments in the field of psychotherapy is “energy psychology,” a term coined by Fred P. Gallo, Ph.D., one of the leading proponents of this breakthrough therapeutic approach, and the developer of a specific form of energy psychology known as Energy Diagnostic and Treatment Methods, or EDxTM. A licensed clinical psychologist since 1977, Dr. Gallo is a member of the American Psychological Association and Pennsylvania Psychological Association, has worked in the fields of corrections, mental retardation, child welfare, vocational rehabilitation, and chemical dependency, and has studied a wide range of therapeutic approaches, including Gestalt, client-centered, cognitive-behavioral, contextual, Ericksonian hypnosis, neurolinquistic programming (NLP), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and thought field therapy (TFT). Since 1993, he has personally trained thousands of health professionals in the techniques of energy psychology, which makes use of the body’s energy system to rapidly and effectively eliminate anxiety, depression, painful memories, trauma, cravings, and other emotional issues. In 1997, he developed EDxTM, and since that time he has been certifying practitioners in its practice and has emerged as a leading and prolific author of books and articles on the entire energy psychology field.

What is energy psychology how does it differ from traditional talk therapy?

I would say that energy psychology is a distinct force in psychology. Traditionally, when we talk about therapeutic approaches in psychology, we’re talking specifically about psychotherapy. There is a lot more to psychology than that, of course, but within the context of psychotherapy three forces have been identified: psychoanalytic, behavioral, and humanistic; and within humanistic we would include cognitive and phenomenological. The humanistic focuses on human values, and I would include the transpersonal approaches as being in line with the humanistic third force.

Energy psychology assumes the existence of a fourth force which holds that psychological problems are fundamentally energetic disruptions that cause the chain of events that result in emotions and external behavior. That’s not to say that emotions aren’t also physical — of course they are. There are chemical aspects to emotions, neurological aspects, hormonal aspects, environmental aspects, and so on, but at a fundamental level human behavior is significantly influenced by the body’s bioenergetic systems, which include the electrical activity of the nervous system, the acupuncture meridians, chakras, and the human biofield, or aura.

When a person tunes into an emotional issue or finds himself in a certain situation that elicits an emotional response, there are specific thoughts that occur. I don’t mean thought that is limit to just words, but a certain level of awareness and representations that we are calling thought. And a thought is an energetic field in the same way that there are other fields that have been identified in physics, such as gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Within this energetic thought field, whenever the field causes negative emotions, there are energetic markers, and these markers trigger a disruption in the bioenergy system as a whole, which in turn causes a disruption in your chemistry, your neurology, your cognition, your behavior, and so forth.

What energy psychology does, which is different that other approaches, is specifically target these energetic markers through the acupuncture meridian system in order to collapse them. We do this by diagnosing the markers, using manual muscle testing to identify the meridians that are out of balance due to the way the energetic field is organized. Once the meridians that are out of balance are identified, we then use various techniques, such as holding, rubbing, or tapping specific acupuncture meridian points, to rebalance the meridians. This, in turn, collapses the markers, or subsumes them, taking them out of the thought field so that the circumstance or situation of which the person has an awareness, or the recollection of a past trauma, no longer causes the negative emotion. The person is much more in the present moment, and can view the circumstance or recollection from a state of what Buddhists have called mindfulness.

In other words, the charge of the imprint that was in the field has been resolved.

Right, the charge of the imprint has been resolved. And generally the techniques that comprise the field of energy psychology tend to achieve observable and measurable results rapidly and usually without causing undue emotional distress. Again, this has to do with the thought field. Obviously thoughts are not disembodied; they have cognitive and chemical aspects to them, and during the thought process various areas of the brain are being activated energetically in the form of electricity and electromagnetism. Because of this fact, there is a very delicate balance that holds the thought in place. There can’t be too much or too little energy. What the techniques of energy psychology do, by balancing the meridians, is change the form and structure of the thought, thereby also changing its meaning. This is extremely valuable when dealing with trauma, phobia, and other psychological problems. By directing and injecting energy into the meridian points that correspond to such problems, we can change the emotional meaning they have. What is so interesting about this is that, after the treatment is completed, the person retains a clear memory of the event that caused the problem, yet the bothersome emotions that were associated with it are gone. In the past, one of the mistakes that we made was to conclude that memory was equivalent to trauma when in actuality they are different. The trauma, based on my experience, is more related to the emotion and the energy that produces that emotion, which is what energy psychology addresses.

How did energy psychology originate?

The development and use of energy work goes back at least five thousands years, when the Chinese discovered the existence of the meridian system and found that it communicates energetic information throughout the body. The Chinese call this energy Qi (“chee”), and in India it is known as Prana, while in Japan it is called Ki. All three terms mean “life force” or “life energy.”

The roots energy psychology itself began in the early 1960s, with the development of applied kinesiology, or AK, by chiropractor George Goodheart, D.C. AK is a unique method of evaluating physiological functions by means of manual muscle testing. Eventually Dr. Goodheart and other AK practitioners discovered that when people placed their attention on an issue in their lives that was troubling them, their muscles would momentarily weaken. In the 1970s, John Diamond, M.D., influenced by Dr. Goodheart, found an interrelationship between specific meridians and emotions, and that this could be evaluated by muscle testing. He also found that meridian imbalance could be corrected by having the patient make specific statements or affirmations or by tapping at the center of the chest over the thymus gland. He called that procedure the thymus thump.

By 1979, Roger J. Callahan, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, found that when clients tapped on specific acupoints, it helped eliminate negative emotions, such as anxieties, phobias, and painful memories. It was Dr. Callahan who provided the majority of the initial clinical work about this tapping technique. In the 1990s, a number of other practitioners, including myself, developed additional methods of accessing the acupuncture meridian system to effectively treat psychological problems. I coined the phrase “energy psychology,” and today there are a variety of approaches in this field, such as Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), Callahan Techniques Thought Field Therapy (CT_TFT), Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT), and my own approach, known as Energy Diagnostic and Treatment Methods, or EDxTM.

And all of these approaches access the meridian system to diagnose and treat psychological issues?

Correct, and the use of specific affirmations, body postures, and breathing exercises might also be used.

In your books, you describe the energy tapping sequences as algorithms. What do you mean by that?

The algorithm is the specific sequence that you employ in order to achieve the desired outcome. A formula or recipe would be another way of describing it.

Do specific formulas correspond to specific types of issues?

Yes, although not in all cases. For example, we have found that among a very high percentage of people who have phobias, the meridians that tend to be out of balance include the stomach meridian, the spleen meridian, and the kidney meridian, and so the algorithm that we would use to treat such cases would most likely involve energy points along those meridians. The process involves first identifying the problem and having the person think about it and rate it in terms of its distress, zero to ten, for example, and then using the appropriate algorithm to treat the problem. After that, we do follow-up by rechecking the distress rating, and work on any further issues that may come up until resolution is achieved.

What types of issues is energy psychology effective in treating?

There are two categories of problems for which energy psychology is particularly effective. The first category is comprised of life events caused by energy imbalances or disruptions, and the second category has to do with what are called psychological reversals.

Problems or issues in the first category often occur when specific meridian points are impacted by traumatic life events. This results in energy imbalances which lead to the creation of painful memories or feelings of inadequacy, shame, and so forth. At the onset of such traumas, some of the energy flowing through the meridian can become depleted, creating an imbalance in the system that leaves you unable to resolve the problem and vulnerable to similar problems in the future. Every situation we encounter in life becomes embedded in our nervous system, and although we may forget particular events, our body remembers them. For example, if a person is mugged, his or her natural and appropriate reaction at the time might be fearfulness. In some cases, these feelings of fear will pass once the traumatic event is over, but for most people the trauma will create an energy imbalance that can perpetuate feelings of fearfulness indefinitely and inappropriately, eventually to the point of phobia or perhaps a personality disorder. When this occurs, even though you are no longer in a threatening situation, you may find yourself placing limits on your lifestyle and being overly cautious in your interactions with other people because of the energetic imprint that was created in your field at the time the mugging occurred.

Divorce or the loss of a loved one are other life events that can create such imprints, as are the changing dynamics of families and communities, which can leave us feeling socially disconnected or that no one cares about us. Some evidence suggests that energy imbalances can even be passed on from one generation to another, with the energy field of the new generation carrying the imprints of traumatic life events experienced by its parents or other ancestors.

The other category of problems involves psychological reversals, meaning that a person’s energy is literally reversed. Such psychological reversals can result in negative, limiting, or false beliefs leading to self-sabotaging behavior. People dealing with issues in this category will often persist in behavior or actions that they know are bad for them, yet they can’t stop themselves because their behavior or action seems like the right thing to do or at least they are compelled. The result is that they create situations that are the exact opposite of what they truly desire, hence, the term “reversal.”

For the most part, psychological reversals are situation-specific, meaning that they only affect certain areas of your life, such as your ability to attain a particular goal, overcome a particular phobia, or get along with a particular person. All of us at one time or another experience situations created by psychological reversals. Some of the most common have to do with strong feelings of shame or guilt, or they can be related to a lack of self-acceptance. For example, if there is a part of ourselves that we don’t accept, then we may unconsciously sabotage our ability to achieve a goal we consciously desire. It’s my belief that psychological reversals and the sabotaging beliefs they engender are a primary reason why many of us experience difficulties in certain areas of our lives, even though we have the skill and ability to achieve our goals in those areas. When psychological reversals are present, they must be addressed before balance in the meridians can be restored fully.

Based on what you’re saying, is it accurate to say that an energy imbalance can also perpetuate a negative or false belief by affecting one’s thinking?

Very much so. It’s well known among scientists that each time a person has a thought, a chemical presence or reaction occurs and neuropeptides, the biochemical correlates of thought and emotion, become detectable, not only in the brain, but throughout the body. What this means is that our thoughts have a real embodied, physical presence. Moreover, an electromagnetic-like field can also be detected whenever a person thinks. Dr. Callahan named this energetic manifestation of a thought a “thought field.”

When there is a disturbance in the thought field caused by either physical or emotional trauma, negative emotions are created. According to the theory of energy psychology, this disturbance affects one or more specific acupuncture meridian points, which in turn triggers the physiological, neurological, chemical, hormonal, and cognitive events that result in our experiencing negative emotions. Such disturbances cause energy imbalances that we experience as depressions, fears, addictive behaviors, and so forth.

What is important to emphasize is that whenever a disturbance occurs within a thought field, it always corresponds to a specific energy point on the body, which is why energy psychologists have been able to correlate meridian points with specific problems and develop the protocols to effectively treat them.

If someone comes to you wanting to start therapy but is unable to identify exactly what the underlying causes for his or her problems, how would you go about diagnosing and then treating such a person?

The person hasn’t been feeling good and doesn’t know why. He doesn’t exactly know what it is that he’s feeling, but it’s interfering with his life in some way. Is that what you’re asking me?

Yes.

First of all, let’s look at some of the ways such a person might be treated by other forms of therapy, so you can see the contrast in how energy psychology works. For example, if you were a therapist coming from a cognitive point of view, you would try and figure out what it is that the person is thinking or telling himself, and why, and then you would explore whether those thoughts and beliefs were accurate or grounded in actual reality. If you were a psychiatrist, you might first put the person on medication in order to help him cope with his depression or anxiety, and then employ one or more psychotherapeutic processes to go deeper into the issue. But when such a person comes to see me, although I might be doing the standard kind of DSM-IV diagnostic stuff to try and get a sense of what category the problem falls under — that’s really just part of doing the interview and getting the person’ history — I would explain to the person that in my experience a lot of times problems like this can be resolved by treating an energy system in our bodies. I would then explain how thoughts are a type of field, and that when disturbances are created in that field problems of a psychological nature can arise, and that I have found that we can remove the fundamental cause of these disturbances using the procedure of energy psychology.

After that, there are a number of ways we can proceed. The first thing I would do is check to see if the person’s energy system is prepared to accept the treatment, assuming that there isn’t a psychological reversal, for which I would also check. There are various methods for determining and resolving that. But if the person’s system is ready to treatment, depending on the nature of the problem, I might have my own insights into his problem, based on my clinical experience, and proceed by using a specific sequence of “energy tapping” in which the person would tap, rub, or hold certain meridian points which experience has shown me are associated with the problem. In some cases, that might be all that is required to resolve, or start to resolve, the problem.

But if I did not know what was causing the problem, then I would take a more diagnostic approach. I might, for example, employ muscle testing and have the person extend his arm straight out from his body, parallel to the floor. What this does is isolate the middle deltoid muscle in the shoulder. I should point out that there are a number of muscles that can be used for this purpose. I could just as well isolate a muscle on the hand, for example, but working with the arm and the deltoid muscle is fairly common. I would then check the muscle in the clear, meaning that the person is simply holding his arm out parallel to the floor, and by applying a bit of pressure to the arm I would get a strong response. Now if I don’t get a strong response then I have to do certain kinds of adjustment to make sure I get a strong response, and there is a whole category of things that I could do there, but let’s assume that we have a strong muscle. Now I have the person think about the issue that bothers him, and after he’s identified his feeling, I ask him to rate it on a zero to ten scale, with ten being most distressful, and zero being the absence of distress. This is the Subjective Units of Distress scale, or SUD. So let’s say the rate his distress as an eight. As he continues to think about his problem and I again apply pressure to his arm, in the vast majority of cases, this will cause the muscle to go weak. It’s not really that the muscle is weak, but that the energy that supplies the muscle becomes interrupted because there’s kind of an incongruence caused by the person thinking about his issue, whatever it might be. As he does so, he doesn’t feel a sense of harmony; there is a disruption. And the disruption is not only affecting the nerves themselves, but, more fundamentally, it is affecting a meridian or a series of meridians, which in turn disrupts the cerebral hemisphere, which in turn disrupts the muscle.

If the muscle tests weak, then I know I have discovered at least part of the cause of the person’s problem. Now what I do is look for what are referred to as alarm points to cancel out the weakness. Let’s say, for example, that there is an alarm point over the stomach between the navel and the bottom of the sternum. If the person puts his hand over this point, and now the muscle goes strong, I know that the stomach meridian is involved in the problem. There are then a number of different places where I could have the person tap, one of which is directly under an eye, and represents the first point of the stomach meridian. I find sometimes I have to use other points, but a high percentage of the time, if I have a person tap that point for a period of time, if the stomach meridian is the only meridian that is out of balance for the person, this will bring the meridian back into balance and the person will find that the emotional charge of the issue will change.

While the person taps that point, I have him rate the SUD once more, and if it is only the stomach meridian that was out of balance, then invariably we find that the charge has come down and that the emotion has changed. Usually people will say things like, “I think it’s less,” but as they try to decide what the SUD might be, a lot of times they will say, “You know, it’s really hard to focus on it. I really can’t quite bring it back to mind.” They can still recall whatever precipitating event may have caused the problem, but there is no longer an emotional charge surrounding it.

At this point, there are a number of other procedures that I might employ, such as the brain balancing procedure, which can bring the charge down even further. It also makes it easier to tune in other aspects of the problem, if they exist. Usually a particular problem will have different features. We may have balanced one meridian, but there may still be another significant meridian that is involved, or a cluster of meridians. In such cases, we would then repeat the process I’ve described, continuing to balance the additional meridians or meridian clusters in order to achieve a complete resolution. At that point, the person is then able to discuss whatever the problem may have been, and once the treatment is completed the person will almost invariably have a higher level of awareness regarding the issue. It seems to come from more of a spiritual place, affording the person with a clearer vision that is more rational and in touch with his or her deeper feelings. For example, if, as part of their issue, they were really angry with somebody, once we resolve the problem usually the person will regard the other person in a more understanding way.

In other words, the person no longer takes the other person’s behavior personally.

Right. It’s like you are no longer trapped in negative ego. You’re no longer trapped in insecurity. Instead, you now view the situation from a place of serenity. That’s what this therapy often does.

How many sessions are typically required before the person achieves such results?

Depending upon what type of problem you’re treating, resolution can sometimes be thoroughly achieved with one brief treatment. Traumas are usually resolved that way. Other conditions, such as phobias, can also sometimes be resolved in one session. It depends upon the complexity of the phobia. Sometimes they might require several treatments. Like agoraphobia, for example, which is a much more extensive phobia. I might need to treat a person with that condition for a longer period of time, perhaps a few months. I’ve worked with people with agoraphobia that had been in treatment for years and never got over it, and within a matter of one to three months, they’ve been completely cured using this approach. On other occasions, I’ve also achieved spectacular results resolving long-term, problems in a single session, again, particularly with traumas. One session is usually all that is required.

Let me give you an example of an interesting case I had regarding a phobia. A woman came to me who suffered from a fear of flying. She and her husband were wanted to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary by flying to Puerto Rico and then taking a cruise down to the Caribbean. Approximately 25 years prior to her coming to me, she and her husband had flown to Florida, and during the return flight home there was a stop-over and she had a panic attack on the plane as they were landing. It was so bad that when they when they landed she refused to get on the connecting flight. They had to rent a car and drive the rest of the way home because she was so panicky. After that, the woman refused to ever fly again, but now she wanted to resolve that, so she came to see me.

In my experience, it is an oversimplification to view a phobia like this simply as a fear of flying and to say that’s all it is. There are many aspects that led to this fear, all of which have to be considered and addressed. For example, there could be flight turbulence, there could be anxiety during take-off or during the landing, there could be the fear that comes with knowing that you’re way up there in the air and thinking about the plane crashing, or there could be a claustrophobic experience of being around so many people in close quarters and not having the ability to get of the plane while it’s in the air. And there could be other things involved, as well. So, during the course of four sessions with this woman, we treated every possible aspect that we could think of. In the process, she was able to really get in touch with the disruptive emotion. Each week, I’d treat several aspects and then I’d see her the following week and we would treat other aspects and check on the results of the previous ones. And after four sessions, she and her husband went on their trip. When they returned, she had left a message on my answering machine, saying, “I had a wonderful time. I slept on the plane. I’d do it again.” This is an example of a type of phobia that usually requires more than one session to completely resolve. In such cases, you would certainly want to follow up with the person. This is also true of people with panic attacks. Usually there has to be some follow-up. One way to treat them, incidentally, when they are in the field, so to speak, is over the telephone. I’ve resolved panic attacks by verbally guiding them through the treatment over the phone many times with people.

Another area in which more than one session with EDxTM or other forms of energy psychology is usually required has to do with people who want to quit smoking, or have some other addictive urge. They need to repeat the treatment any time the urge arises. But I find that if they stay with the program, after awhile they completely lose the urge for cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, or whatever else they may be addicted to. With severe addictions like alcohol and drugs, however, I strongly recommend that people also get involved in support groups if they can, and to avail themselves of the other things the field of psychotherapy has to offer.

There are a wide range of other conditions for which energy psychology can provide benefit, too. I’ve found it to be very effective for treating posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, irrational feelings of guilt, loneliness and rejection, and anger and rage, and I’ve also found that with some people it can be helping in relieving certain conditions of physical pain. I’ve also found that we can use this therapeutic approach to quickly alleviate negative core beliefs. I also find that energy psychology is very effective for children. Children tend to be far more receptive to it than many adults are; they think it is kind of cool.

You mentioned energy psychology’s effective for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. How effective is it for cases of rape or sexual abuse?

It can be very effective. As an example, one woman I treated had been raped when she was 13 years old. As a result, she developed an extremely negative self-image and eventually began abusing drugs and alcohol. She was chronically depressed and exhibited suicidal tendencies, and was not very successful in her occupation or in her relationship with her husband. Before coming to see me, she had repeatedly sought other forms of treatment for her problem, but without results.

She was 32 when she came to see me, and as I began discussing her situation with her, she initially and quite understandably became very emotional. I helped her calm down, and then had her briefly think about the rape event and to rate its level of distress. On a scale of zero to ten, she told me it was 100. Then I had her take her attention of the memory, and had her tap specific energy points about her head and body. As she did so, her energy system became more harmonious, and within ten minutes she was able to recall the rape without feeling distress. She still vividly recollected what had occurred, but it no longer disturbed her.

Just as importantly, not only was she much calmer, but her view of herself changed dramatically as well, becoming far more positive and no longer self-degrading. As I continued to work with her, she came to many profound conclusions about herself and ceased being depressed and suicidal. Once the energetic imprint of the trauma was removed, she made very rapid progress. Resolution of the trauma occurred after only one treatment. We resolved many other problems over the course of follow-up visits. The woman then went on to complete her college education and graduate school, and is now a licensed psychotherapist.

Given the effectiveness of energy psychology that you’re describing, do you see it as a stand-alone approach, or can it be integrated with other methods within the field of traditional psychotherapy?

In many instances, energy psychology is effective as a stand-alone approach, including as a self-help measure in some cases. But certainly it can also be integrated with other types of therapeutic approaches. Let’s take cognitive therapy, for example, certain aspects of which I think are very valuable, particularly for problems that don’t involve a really emotionally charged issue. It is very useful for helping people to understand the logic or illogic of their thoughts and beliefs and to act more rationally. For example, if someone experiences anxiety each time his is around a group of people, cognitive therapy might help them see that the anxiety is related to what he worries people might be thinking about him, or whether he’ll do something to embarrass himself. These are anxiety-provoking thoughts, or anxiety-charged thoughts. And generally what people do when they are made aware of them is say, “You know, I really can’t control what people think, and what do their thoughts have to do with what I am anyway.” In cognitive therapy you’re trying to get a person to that point through rational discussion and so forth.

With energy psychology, by having a person tune into the discomfort they feel around a group people, and then removing the charge from that, they can arrive at the same insight that is sought in cognitive therapy. If we remove the energy disruption, the emotion changes, and the person moves to a more rational position and is feeling calmer about it. I think that’s a wonderful time to do some cognitive therapy. The person is going to receive it very well, and be able to discuss things about his worthwhileness and so on without still being burdened by the emotional charge, and that makes the outcome that much more successful. So yes, I think energy psychology used in conjunction with other forms of therapy can be extremely valuable.

Let me also add that, although I do believe there remains a need for traditional therapy, there are certain aspects of it that I don’t think are necessary. For instance, I don’t think it’s necessary for a person to emotionally relieve a traumatic event in order to achieve a catharsis and resolution. It’s not necessary to go through that in order to feel better. In addition, while it certainly can be worthwhile to change your thoughts or beliefs about a distressful event or life experience, in my experience often simply changing or balancing the person’s energy field is all that is necessary to produce a positive change in their thoughts and outlook.

I also think energy psychology represents, in many cases, a viable alternative to the medications which are increasingly being prescribed for people with psychological issues. Many people cannot tolerate such medications, and for many others, although the medications may help them to cope, they do not bring about a cure. As an example, one of my clients was a woman who suffered from social phobia and anxiety who had been on medication for twelve years. The medication relieved her symptoms to some extent, but they did not cure her condition. After a few months of EDxTM energy treatments, her condition was completely resolved and she no longer needed to be medicated.

Earlier you mentioned that energy psychology helps people be free of negative ego. Given that, it seems to me that it could also have benefits for people who aren’t necessarily psychologically disturbed, but who are simply looking to increase their self-awareness or self-actualization. Would you agree?

Yes, definitely. Even if there is something that isn’t what we would think of as a real psychological disturbance, energy psychology can be a worthwhile exploration. For instance, it’s useful for eliminating mental blocks and is very effective for balancing out the lower moods that we all go through from time to time. In addition to psychotherapy and psychopathology, it’s applicable to a wide range of other areas, such as education, physical health, sports, peak performance, and improving relationships, and I can see it being used as a real complement to self-actualization processes.

Weight loss is another area in which energy psychology can be effective. Not all cases of being overweight are due to poor diet or metabolic imbalances. Often there is an underlying component, as well. For example, one of my clients was an overweight middle-aged man who had tried numerous diets without success. Using the diagnostic methods of EDxTM, I was able to determine that he suffered from feelings of loneliness and rejection. After one session with me, he found the motivation he needed to successfully lose weight, and through using the techniques I showed him on a regular basis he accomplished his goal and was able to keep the weight off.

That would certainly be an example of how energy psychology lends itself to self-care. How useful overall is it as a self-care approach?

Ideally, I would say that it is best to work with someone who has been extensively trained in this field, especially for serious psychological issues. But there are many instances where energy psychology is appropriate as a form of self-care. In fact, I wrote one of my books, Energy Tapping, to teach people how to apply energy psychology methods without the assistance of a trained therapist. As I said, to treat a problem, specific meridian points need to be stimulated, and through years of experience and testing, we have determined the algorithmic patterns that are most effective for a variety of issues, such as phobias, depression, anger, shame, guilt, loneliness, rejection, trauma, and painful memories.

Who is trained to do this work? Is it limited to people within the psychiatric field only, or do you train other health professionals, as well?

The vast majority of people I train are psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric social workers, and counselors, but I’ve also trained a certain number of holistic physicians, chiropractors, acupuncturists, and hypnotherapists. I’ve also trained a number of people that are performance coaches who want to apply energy psychology in that area. They’re not really treating people with psychological problems as much as people with blocks who want to be performing at a higher level.

Overall, my training is geared to people who already have a knowledge base in the health field. I may also provide trainings for the general public, but I would structure it differently and emphasize the self-help aspects of the work. Which I think is a legitimate thing to do. But in general, I think that people with a background in mental health diagnosis and who already has psychotherapeutic skills are going to be much better at doing this than somebody who doesn’t have that kind of background.

Do people who take your training receive an accreditation or certification of any sort?

Yes. I do different types of trainings, and have personally trained a few thousand professionals. One of the trainings I conduct is called The New Energy Psychology, which is an overview of energy psychology and some of the elements that comprise it, and I teach the algorithms and some of the other approaches that are involved. This course is primarily about the meridian-based approach, but I also discuss things such as chakras and biofields, and the science and research that supports this.

I also conduct an EDxTM Practitioner Certification Training, which consists of four levels of training and is for professionals wishing to learn the Energy Diagnostic and Treatment Methods. (I also refer to EDxTM as an aspect of Psycho-Energetic Psychotherapy or PEP.) I recommend that before people take this training that they have either attended The New Energy Psychology training or have studied some other form of energy psychology. Both trainings are very hands-on, and as the participants are practicing the methods, I’m observing their work. They also have to do an individual project, which involves either providing me with a case study or conducting some other form of research. A number of interesting things have resulted from the case studies. For example, one of the participants has written a book about EDxTM integrated with yoga, and another person created an audio tape based on a technique I call the Healing Energy Life Process, or HELP, which combines meridian balancing with visualization, affirmations, and certain body postures that you assume to balance the energy system. She developed that into a professionally engineered tape which a lot of therapists now use and make available to their patients, who then work with it at home. In addition, each participant must take an objective test at the end of the training. If they completed all of this successfully then they become certified EDxTM practitioners.

Do you provide referrals to those you certify?

Yes, I list certified practitioners at my website. There’s going to be a bunch of them listed there before long and if people call my office I refer to them because they’re the most qualified.

Additionally, I’m now allowing practitioners whom I certify teach the certain levels of the EDxTM certification training. My goal is to get enough people out there who can teach levels one and two, and then eventually a certain select group who can teach the entire four levels of certification training. My intent is to make sure that there are people out there that can provide this training in an appropriate effective manner so that I don’t have to be the only one who is doing that, and that the work can be carried on without me. To ensure its long-term integrity, in other words.

What do you think the future holds for energy psychology?

Because energy psychology is so efficient and effective, I think it will eventually be applied extensively in a variety of areas, in addition to the fields of therapy. These include medicine, education, business, sports, and other areas of performance. The applications truly appear to be limitless.

In the field of medicine, for example, energy psychology can serve as a useful complement. We all know how greatly stress impacts physical health and can significantly impede the healing process and lead to additional illnesses. I foresee the techniques of energy psychology being used by physicians to help their patients gain more personal control over their health by more effectively dealing with stress issues, particularly those that have a strong emotional component.

In the area of education, energy psychology can help students overcome psychological barriers to their education, such as lack of motivation, learning blocks, and anxiety of testing. It can also help children who are exposed to violence or other trauma, either in school or in their neighborhoods, so I think training school psychologists and counselors in energy psychology would be a very worthwhile endeavor.

And in the field of sports and performance, energy psychology can easily be taught to athletes and performers to help them reduce anxiety and rid themselves of self-sabotaging beliefs that can cause mental errors. It can also serve as an effective means of regaining and maintaining one’s focus in crucial situations.

How do you see energy psychology being applied in the business field?

I see it being used as an effective means of coping with job stress, as well as enhancing worker creativity, improving morale, and reducing the incidence of relationship problems amongst worker. In addition, I believe that managers who are trained in the methods of energy psychology will be better able to establish and energy balance within themselves, which in turn will have a positive trickle-down effect on the workers they manage, thus benefiting the entire organization.

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Locating and Tapping Your Energy Meridian Points.

The following exercise is adapted from Dr. Gallo’s book Energy Tapping, and is intended to make you more familiar with the location of various energy meridian points used by practitioners of energy psychology. Practicing the exercise can help you resolve emotional issues by balancing your energy.

Begin by thinking of an issue that causes you a minimal amount of emotional discomfort. (In the beginning, do not focus on a more complex, serious issue.) As you think about the issue, on a scale of zero to ten, rate it according to the level of distress it causes you, with zero equal to no discomfort, and ten equal the highest degree of emotional distress.

Now lightly tap five times on each of the following points, using two fingertips: the point inside your left eyebrow, the point just behind the side of your left eye, the point under your left eye (located in the middle, just below your eye socket), the point midway between your nose and upper lip, the point just below your lower lip, the point on the inside of your left upper collar bone, the point inside your upper armpit, the point just under your upper left breast, the point inside your left pinkie finger (just opposite the nail), the point inside your left middle finger (just opposite the nail), the point inside your left index finger (just opposite the nail), the point inside your left thumb (just opposite the nail), the point on the back of your left hand (located approximately one inch below the crease between your ring and pinkie finger), the point on the side of your hand (located just above the outer wrist), the point on your forehead (just between your eyebrows), the point in the middle of your upper chest (between your collar bones), and the point known as the sore spot (located approximately two inches below the collar bone in the center of the upper chest; you will know you’ve located it because it will be sore when you press into it).

Once you complete this tapping sequence, think once more about the emotional issue you selected and once more rate it on a scale of zero to ten, according to level of discomfort. Most likely it will now be less discomforting than before. If the discomfort isn’t completely eliminated (zero), you may need to tap the sequence one to three more times. (If you still don’t experience a change in discomfort, it may be due to a psychological reversal.) Don’t be surprised if you find that the issue you selected is now only a vague event in your mind and that, even if you try to really bring it into focus, it still no longer upsets you. You may also find that you now feel calmer, more relaxed, and more energized. (You can also use this tapping sequence whenever you find it necessary to relax.) With practice, you will find that this tapping sequence can be effective for handling a variety of emotional issues or problems.

Resources

Fred P. Gallo, Ph.D.

Gallo & Associates Psychological Services

40 Snyder Road

Hermitage, Pennsylvania 16148

(724) 346-3838

http://www.energypsych.com

Books by Dr. Gallo

Energy Psychology: Explorations at the Interface of Energy, Cognition, Behavior, and Health (CRC Press), 1998.

Energy Psychology in Psychotherapy (editor) (W.W. Norton & Company), 2002.

Energy Diagnostic and Treatment Methods. (W.W. Norton & Company), 2000.

Fred P. Gallo & Harry Vincenzi. Energy Tapping: How to Rapidly Eliminate Anxiety, Depression, Cravings, and More Using Energy Psychology. (New Harbinger Publications, Inc.), 2000.

Mark Evan Furman & Fred P. Gallo. The Neurophysics of Human Behavior: Explorations at the Interface of Brain, Mind, Behavior, and Information. (CRC Press) 2000.

The Healing Energy Light Process (HELP) (audiotape available from Psychological Services).

Neurotherapy: Programming the Brain for Optimal Health and Mental Function–An Interview with Steven Fahrion, Ph.D.

An outgrowth of pioneering research conducted at the Menninger Clinic in the 1960s and 70s, neurotherapy, also known as neurobiofeedbackand brain wave therapy, is an emerging technology that rebalances brain chemistry by normalizing the brain’s beta, alpha, theta, and delta rhythms. In the process, it improves overall brain and nervous system function, making it an effective form of treatment for a wide range of health conditions, including alcoholism and addiction, as well as a quick and powerful way to optimize psychophysiological functioning.

Dr. Steven Fahrion, Ph.D., along with his wife, Dr. Patricia Norris, Ph.D., is one of the leading researchers in the use of neurotherapy, and was an original participant in the Menninger studies that were instrumental in illustrating the technology’s potential. Dr. Fahrion is also clinical psychologist and a leading expert in the fields of energy and mind/body medicine. Past president of both the Biofeedback Society of America and the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM), he is a co-founder and current Research Director of Life Sciences Institute of Mind-Body Health, Inc., in Topeka, Kansas. In the following interview, he shares his research into the uses of neurotherapy and discusses the potential it holds for the future.

Explain what neurotherapy is and what it means.

Neurotherapy is the latest term for a form of biofeedback that involves neural events and altering neural events in a specific direction according to one’s intent. An example of it might be to deal with the common problem of not being able to stop thinking about something. This would usually involve a tight focus of attention that is associated with high-frequency brain waves, known as beta waves. To be able to let go of thoughts means being able to let go of high-frequency brain activity, and move toward slow brain activities such as occur in the alpha and theta frequency ranges. Put another way, neurotherapy is a way of altering the function of the nerves and the brain in relation to your desires.

How does it work?

The way it works is the same way that biofeedback works. That is, you set up a picture in which you can measure brain wave activity, and a behavior or neural pattern that you’re interested in changing, and then you feed that information back to the individual whose behavior needs to be changed. As that information is fed back to the person, he or she will begin to move toward the changes that they are looking for.

Biofeedback generally involves establishing a feedback loop and we under-value the usefulness of how this works in our lives. We learn everything through feedback from the time that we are babies and we find our mouth with our hand, to when we’re learning how to drive a car down the street without hitting the curbs. These are all feedback processes that are applied to events in the outside world. What is relatively new in the last several decades, is the idea that you can apply the same type of processes to the events going on inside of ourselves. The process works exactly the same way. We are all masters at feedback. We know how to reach for a glass of water and actually be able to pick it up. That’s a feedback process. But not everybody realizes that they can apply those same processes to warming their hands, to controlling the heart rate, and actually to controlling the brain and, as a result, our behavior and the nature of our experiences.

When someone is having a neurotherapy session they are, for lack of a better word, “hooked up” to a device, correct?

Yes. Usually they are hooked up usually to a single channel EEG, or electroencephalogram, and they’re receiving information about the activities of the brain under that particular electrode.

How does the person who is facilitating the experience determine what is the appropriate feedback that should be entrained in the brain?

Well, usually you’re dealing with a specific problem. Let’s take attention deficit problems, for example. Usually a person who has attention deficit disorder, or ADD, shows one of a couple of patterns of brain wave activity, and depending upon which pattern they evidence, it is apparent what has to change in order to normalize that pattern. Let me be specific. Usually the classic attention deficit problem is that under the electrodes and where you’re measuring things from — which is typically placed over the center of the head at a location technically known as CZ — the person will be showing too much slow-wave activity. There will be too much theta activity, and also delta, which is an even slower wave. If that is the case, then obviously the way to normalize the brain, and thereby to normalize behavior, is to reduce that excessive rate of theta and/or delta activity. With the EEG you can see when the little plane representing the amplitude of data is flying too high or if it’s coming down to a more normal level, and by changing the altitude of the plane on the video screen you can literally change the brain waves that are occurring inside the person’s head.

If, say, five people come to you and they all have ADD, is there any sort of preliminary screening that is done to individuate the treatment or do you pretty much operate on the assumption that they’re all going to have the excess of slow brain wave activity and that you need to up-regulate that?

There is an evaluation session, and usually within a half-hour time frame we can determine what patterns exist. There are two basic patterns that we see commonly. One is the excessive slow wave activity I just mentioned, and the other is one in which all the brain waves may be small in amplitude. The effect of either pattern is that the person is highly distractible. He or she is not easily able to lock onto timeless moments that people ordinarily experiences in their lives, and which are often associated with pleasure. Examples of this would be a person that gets so lost in a good book or a good movie that he doesn’t even hear what’s going on around him, or the elation that can come from watching a sunset, or any other of these kinds of events. People with either of the brain wave states I’ve described are not capable of easily participating in such activities. In fact, they miss out on a lot of the pleasure in their lives because their brain wave amplitudes are so small that their attention becomes highly scattered. We’re training a whole generation of people now to be like this, incidentally. We are seeing this in more and more people, perhaps as a result of television or all of the other items in our society that clammer for attention in quick little bites, you know, two seconds here or two seconds there.

Just like the evening newscast.

Exactly. The whole idea in television is to move quickly so people won’t get bored. But in moving so quickly, we are teaching a pattern of using the attention that is not too good for some other purposes, like experiencing pleasure.

I read recently of a study that was published in that last few months which found that people in the younger generation, particularly people in their 20’s, who have grown up with computers and video games and other such devices, are showing a very high incidence of short term memory loss and things of that nature.

That would make a great deal of sense because memory requires, first of all, that you are attending to the event that occurs and, secondly, that you have time to consolidate what you attended to in memory. And that second stage wouldn’t occur readily if you are constantly drawn on to the next thing and the next thing.

So we are actually conditioning an entire generation to be susceptible to a lot of these conditions. You mentioned ADD. What are some of the other health issues for which research has shown neurotherapy to beneficial?

It can provide benefit in a lot of areas. Obsessive compulsive thinking, meaning that you’re highly focused on what you’re thinking about and you can’t really let go and let your attention float and just daydream, is one example. The way we are constructed is that, in a healthy state, we go through cycles during the day that are approximately 90 minutes long. At one point in the cycle we are very focused and alert, and at the mid-point of the cycle we are more day dreamy and floating in our attention. This is the way our brains are designed to function. But if you constantly try to maintain peak alertness through the day, what happens is that you get very tired. Basically, you need to let go and recover your energy at the mid-point cycle. Once you become aware of this cycle, you can notice it occurring. Sometimes I find on planes, for example, that I’ll notice at one point in this cycle that the sound of the engines disappears and I get much more quiescent and turn inward with my attention, and then I come back to the normal kind of alertness. But people who are having trouble with their thoughts and remaining too focused, miss out on the natural recovery that would ordinarily occur in that mid-point in the cycle.

Another area in which neurotherapy has been shown to be significantly effective has to do with problems with addiction. People who have addictive problems usually have brain waves that are just exactly the opposite of those who are not focused enough. People who have addictions are highly focused. They have brain waves much like the obsessive compulsive pattern, with a lot of beta activity, and when you help them to restore a more normal brain wave function by teaching them how to increase their alpha and theta activity, it restores the normal balance that has been missing. People with addictive problems will often say, “I feel like there is a hole inside me,” and the hole is the missing kind of imagery and symbolic activity that ordinarily rise up to the surface of the unconscious and comes into consciousness. Addictive people don’t have as much of that type of neural activity. So teaching them to get into the normal kind of slow brain waves helps them to recover that process.

I know that you and Patricia have done a lot of work involving the use neurotherapy to help people recover from alcoholism, drug abuse, and other and addictive behaviors. Summarize your research in this area, particularly what you were doing in the Kansas prison system.

In the prison system we began with a study funded by the State of Kansas that was a randomized control study where we were looking at two treatments. The first involved a somewhat conventional addiction treatment that occurred within a seven week time frame, and the other involved the same more or less conventional components plus alpha-theta brain wave training through neurotherapy over the same time frame. The study participants were assigned to either the group receiving conventional treatment alone, or to the group receiving conventional treatment plus neurotherapy. In both groups, the treatment was usually provided within a matter of weeks from the time that they would be released from prison, and the individuals themselves were all convicted felons who typically had a number of inprisonments previously and who were typically convicted for substance abuse problems. They usually had used one of three drugs at the time of their conviction, which were alcohol, cocaine, or marijuana, and they ranged in age from their early 20’s to their 50’s, with a median age of around 35.

Both groups were given some additional components besides the components I just mentioned. One was hand warming, a form of biofeedback self-regulation exercise that they were taught. This enabled them to lower their sympathetic activation by warming their hands as a stress management procedure. They were also taught diaphragmatic breathing exercises, which are useful for dealing with stress, promoting calm, and so forth. Both groups received training in how to properly perform these exercise over a period of one week.

They were also subdivided into smaller groups in which they received counseling that included various psychosynthesis processes, with a more spiritual focus than traditional talk therapy, and a larger kind of orientation, if you will, that was geared towards providing them with the “big picture “with respect to their core values and exploration of growth issues, and so forth. All of the study participants were treated within a very human context, and one of the things they commented on that was most different about our program from other programs that they attended was that they were treated in a more humane way. We didn’t regard them as convicts who were out to somehow manipulate or use the staff and so forth. In addition the staff which oversaw the study was highly experienced; it was comprised of addiction counselors who were able to take a more human kind of orientation due to the people that they worked with generally.

The six weeks was spent with the first group receiving the components of conventional addiction treatment, and with the second group also receiving these components, plus a one hour session each day of compensative brain wave training via neurotherapy. Each group received the same amount of treatment time, which was approximately five to six hours per day. At the end of the treatment process, the individuals who had received neurotherapy said that that was the most important component of the program, while the individuals in the other group said that the small group work was the most important component.

Soon after the conclusion of this pilot study, the participants were release back into society, after which time they were followed on parole by the State parole officers, who saw them once a week and did follow-up in terms of how well they were adhering to the terms of their parole and so forth. Two years later, based on the follow-up data supplied by the parole officers we found that over 50 percent of the individuals who were given brain wave treatment had not relapsed. They did not test positive for any drug during the ongoing drug testing that were given randomly by the parole offices. They did not return to incarceration for any reason, including technical violations, any one of which would have caused them to be categorized as being a failure. And they did not abscond from parole. This was quite a tight criteria they were asked to meet, and they were quite closely watched by their parole officers, which doesn’t necessarily help matters, incidentally. There is evidence that suggests that when you are observing people closely in that type of a situation, it actually results in more returns to incarceration. So over all, they did very well. Ordinarily, one would have expected only between 10 to 20 percent of the parolees to have remained sober and free of re-incarceration, and yet here was a much larger percentage of people who were able to succeed for a two-year time frame.

There are a few other things to point out here. One, the total length of their treatment was only seven weeks long, and was conducted within a prison setting, which is hardly the ideal setting for such treatment. And, two, the vast majority of these people had histories of recidivism and returning to jail due to their addictions, and all of them had previously undergone multiple alcohol and drug treatments, none of which had proven to be successful in the long-term.

What was the response on the State level, and by the prison system?

Because the results were so statistically significant, the State immediately tripled the number of people within the prison system who received neurotherapy, and we eventually expanded to six different facilities, one of which was the county jail, and five of which are five different prisons where the programs are operative. We’ve trained people to continue delivering the treatment and they are continuing to do so. There is one threat to this continuance now, however, which is that the state budget is in some degree of trouble and there is a possibility that all addiction treatment in prison may be eliminated. We don’t know whether that will come to pass yet, but I would say that would be extremely shortsighted if it does.

Are you getting the same sort of success rate in the additional facilities?

Yes we are. In addition, at one of those facilities the program is being administered to women inmates, and we are very pleased to see the very positive response among the women that we are treating. They are making significant gains in terms of their issues related to substance abuse. I should point out that one of the things that happens during the course of the brain wave training is that, through the imagery that the participants will have, there will be an accompanying awareness of these triggering issues that occurs in a climate in which its tolerable to think about them without provoking a need to drink or do drugs, or whatever. The participants essentially go through a therapeutic process that fixes these things, to the point that repetition of the addictive behavior is no longer required.

Based on your experience, would you say that the primary reason neurotherapy is proving to be so successful in this regard is due to its ability to normalize, or optimize, brain wave activity?

Very much so. We know that people who are prone to alcohol and drug addiction have a relative absence of alpha and theta activity during the course of the day. If you do a spectral analysis of their brain waves, where there would be a peak for most people, for most of the addicted people there is just a flatline there. There’s a very profound absence of slow wave activity, which means basically that the person is not likely to experience satisfaction from everyday life events that most of us take for granted. Looking at a sunset or playing with a child, for example, doesn’t really bring them the same kind of pleasure that it brings to the rest of us. Unless they drink or take drugs. That is one of the primary reasons, I believe, that people become addicted — the drug or alcohol temporarily and artificially produces these slow brain waves for them and therefore, for a time, they find themselves more relaxed and able to enjoy themselves a little bit more. Otherwise, often without knowing it, because of their brain waves, they are in a chronic state of stress or depression.

What neurotherapy does for such people is restore the brain waves to their normal function, which allows them to access these pleasurable states on their own. After that, they find they don’t need the drugs or alcohol. This is a very big biological correction that occurs with the treatment process.

After the treatment is completed, does spectral analysis show that the flatline, as you describe it, has changed back to a normal gradient?

Absolutely. And not only that, but we’ve discovered that there is a change that occurs, typically about two weeks into the treatment, that seems to represent an adult developmental state change. Before the treatments, the people, as you experience them, seem to have some kind of invisible wall between you and them. Rapport is absent. They’re not responding to you as a person so much as something to “get around” or whatever. But after this developmental state change occurs — and it’s demarcated by complicated changes in the EEG spectrum — we see that the person is “back,” if you will. Their sense of humor returns and they are now relating to you like a human being. They also change in terms of their core values, and begin to think in terms of being responsible citizens within society. The only way to describe it is that it’s a transformation. I’ve never seen anything in my years as a psychologist that transfroms people in the way that neurotherapy does.

You mentioned imagery a moment ago. By that, are you talking about subjective experiences that the participants have as a direct result of neurotherapy?

That’s right. When you are producing the theta brain waves that result from the neurotherapy process, you typically will experience hypnogogic imagery which comes from a different source than the thoughts and imagery that occur during our ordinary thinking process. It’s evident that this type of theta imagery is much more symbolic in nature, and often the person who looks at it from his or her ordinary waking frame of consciousness will ignore it, or dismiss it as not meaning anything. But while you’re in this theta state, the imagery makes perfect sense, and if you can maintain the state long enough, you can often discern its meaning.

So what we do is to have people report back the images that they have had during the treatment sessions and we encourage them to work with the imagery, asking them to consider that it might mean. We don’t tell them what it means. We would never presume to do that. But we allow them to have the imagery in front of themselves, and typically the meaning of many of the images will emerge to them and they’ll realize that there is somebody behind the scenes in their lives who is guiding the show to some extent, and is helping them to overcome the problems that they have had in the past. This revelation usually fills that hole that we talked about earlier.

What do you mean by someone behind the scenes?

A part of themselves that you could think of as a sub-personality or a different state of consciousness that has more answers to the problems in the person’s life than they have often recognized in the past. You can also think of it as a higher self, if you will. It’s that part of us that is usually nonjudgmental and is not fear-based, and acts as kind of a watcher of everything that we do and experience without passing judgement on it, and yet it has some ideas about what would be better directions for us to take. Some guidance that it is waiting to offer help once we become aware of it.

In one of the conversations that you and I have had in the past, you’ve also mentioned that sometimes what occurs during neurotherapy training is that the painful memories that in many cases are at the heart of the reason why people take drugs or use alcohol in the first place will also emerge, often with startling results, in the sense that they get reframed or that the person gains a deeper understanding of them. Would you talk about that?

Yes, that’s very true. There is something about the theta state that is slightly disassociative, in the sense that it protects you from feeling the hurt too much. When people have a bad experience and they disassociate, they do so as a protective measure, to kind of cut loose from what’s happening and maintain their integrity, but at the expense of no longer being fully integrated. But the theta state helps us to integrate because it allows the reemergence of material from a bad experience, such as, let’s say, an abusive situation. It allows us to re-experience what actually happened and, in doing so, often will enable us to discover that in fact we have been thinking about the experience in the wrong way. We discover that there was something about the experience that we had not taken into account, and when we do this it changes the meaning that the experience has for us, and allows us to process the event and to let go of it in a much more favorable way then we were capable of before we gained this insight. And these insights are commonly achieved as a result of the imagery that emerges during treatment when the person is cycling through theta.

I would imagine that this would also be a large part of the reason why people who previously had addictive personalities are achieving success and recovery from their addictions after they undergoing neurotherapy training.

Absolutely. It changes the way that they think about themselves, and the way in which they relate to others. They are able to get rid of some of the barriers that have kept them isolated and alone and separate from other people.

What other conditions can neurotherapy be beneficial for, according to research and case histories?

One of the areas is the field of personal growth. These same procedures that we can use to treat a condition like addiction or ADD, can also be used to pose questions to these other parts of ourselves that we tend to be less conscious of in our normal state and see what answers emerge as we move into the “alpha and theta levels of awareness.” Typically, when we have a certain life problem that we’re trying to deal with, we put it in terms of a question and hope that if we just think about it intensely enough then we will know what to do. We think, “I’m in charge of my life and I’ve got to solve these problems myself.” That’s all well and good, but what we often forget about in trying to solve these problems is that usually what works better is to address the question to this larger or higher self that we can make contact with. The way you do that is to be very clear about what you want, then to be very easy about answering the question. In other words, you don’t push it or force it to come to you; you allow it to occur on its own, trusting that it will do so. When people begin to take that approach in their personal lives and to apply it to themselves, they will often find the answers they are looking for emerging as they are, let’s say, shaving or putting on their make-up, or that kind of thing. They find that the answers just naturally and spontaneously occur and suddenly they know what they need to do. And the answer will often appear almost as a set of images that can be directed. When I write papers now I very often write them in this kind of way. That is, I don’t necessarily start at the beginning of the paper and march on through to the end under the advice of my ego, so much as I get a clear idea of what it is that the topic is and then I try to allow myself to just quiet down and be very much into this meditative state and very often something will emerge. It might be an entire section that I don’t ever have to edit again. It’s curious, but the things that come through are often in good form. They’re not loose and unformed. But usually I won’t know exactly where this fits into the paper until more pieces emerge and then they gradually take shape. This way of operating or accessing information and guidance can be used in any creative process. It’s very much a creative way of being, in the same way as it is when you are painting a picture or writing some music. You get into this very contemplative or meditative type of state and simply allow the more unconscious parts of ourselves that have more of the big picture, as it were, to inform us. I often think of the rational mind as the dwarf and the rest of the mind as the giant. The giant needs the dwarf because it can’t do anything by itself. On the other hand, the dwarf all too often doesn’t recognize that it needs the giant if it’s going to do anything significant.

Many people, however, require training before they can regularly access information in this sort of way. There are many approaches that can facilitate them in learning how to do so, but neurotherapy, in my experience, is certainly one of the most effective and efficient, in that usually you start to see these type of results after only a few weeks of treatment, and after that you can do it on your own.

It seems to me, based on your explanation, that if someone were to experience neurotherapy over a certain period of time their actual thinking process as a whole would be integrated, and I would assume that this integration would therefore have a positive effect on the function of the central nervous system as well. Is there any evidence to support that?

There is. One of the things that has been observed in the research about alpha/theta training is that after the traumatic incident has surfaced and been processed there is an increase in synchrony in the brain so that more areas are doing the same thing at the same time. Now synchrony is exactly what we see in meditative states with highly experienced meditators. There is an increased tendency for different brain areas to become integrated into the whole, and synchrony in that sense can be a good index of integration. We see this very clearly when people receive neurotherapy training.

Taking that one step further, if the central nervous system is starting to be optimized as a result of this, and since the central nervous system in effect controls all of the other physiological processes in the body, would it be accurate to say that neurotherapy has the potential to enhance the functioning of the over-all body?

I think very much so. I think we make too much of a distinction in a way between brain and body. After all, it’s the same neural transmitters in both places that are facilitating behavior. The way that meditative groups, like practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, for example, describe this synchrony we’re talking about is as the “state of least excitation.” The aim is to quiet the nervous system and the brain to the point that the nervous system becomes very responsive to things that happen, with improved sensory detection and intuitive, “big picture,” all of which enables the organism to function more optimally. You can think of it as a general kind of phenomenon that helps keep the whole body and brain coherent, and this too is one of the results that can occur during neurotherapy sessions.

That being the case, it would seem to me that at some point this might actually be something that’s available as a matter of course in the health clinics of the future.

I would expect that it would be. I think we’ll see a lot more research on the value of meditation, for example, and as that becomes more and more apparent in general, and when that research is cross-referenced with research that shows similar positive psychophysiological outcomes, to have neurotherapy be more widely available will definitely be an item of desire on the part of health care professionals, as well as the lay public.

What about recovering from brain injury; is neurotherapy effective in this regard too?

It’s very effective in that regard. We use the same basic approach that is used with attention-deficit disorder. That is, we may identify a particular area within which to work using multi-channel brain scans, and perhaps an array of twenty or more electrodes. Once the area has been identified — and there are some quick ways of doing that, by the way, that don’t require a lot of expensive equipment — then training that area to be active, if it is responsive, normalizes behavior. The basic equation is normalize brain function and you normalize behavior, and the results can be remarkable.

My most, almost magical experience in this regard involved a man who was a mechanic who had had a stroke. After the stroke he could still do a lot of things, but he didn’t know the difference between a bolt and a nut and a screw. I saw him for two half-hour sessions — the evaluation session and one training session. During the evaluation, we identified an area on the right side of his brain that was not functioning well. He wasn’t showing enough good beta activity there, so I trained him in this during the first half-hour session. He got the basic idea and he went home and he began to sort bolts, nuts and screws, and he did this consistently for one whole week, just doing that and not much else — just eating and sleeping and sorting. When he came back the next week, the area where we had been working had normalized in its brain wave indication, and his behavior had normalized. And his wife said it had generalized into other areas. He stopped repeating himself by telling the same stories over and over again, for example, and he began to be able to fix his lawnmower again, and things of that kind. I followed him for about two years after that and the improvements continued. Once you fix these things, usually they do continue to show improvement since they have to do with the way you use your attention and you get practice every moment.

In other words, there is not a built-in dependency on the neurotherapy device itself. I would imagine that once people start to normalize their brain wave activity and also learn how to distinguish between beta, alpha, theta, and delta they also develop a skill that allows them to regulate and shift between these states for themselves. Is that correct?

That’s exactly right. You learn the “feel” of it so that you know when you’re producing theta, for example, and it’s easy to be able to repeat that state if you’re not under some kind of intense stimulation or whatever, which would tend to take you out of theta. And the same thing is true of beta — you can tell when you’re really focused and concentrating. There is not that much scientific evidence yet about this, but the research that has been done so far shows that ten years later the person who has been trained using neurotherapy is still functioning properly. They haven’t forgotten the skill of regulating these brain states by themselves, in other words.

I’m sure it varies from individual to individual, but typically what is the average number of treatments that are required before the skill really starts to take hold?

With alpha/theta training usually it’s about six sessions, and these are one-hour sessions in this case. After about six of those you begin to really lock onto it. If you’re talking about addiction treatment, I would say 30 sessions is about the minimum. Beta training to treat ADD or things of that nature is usually delivered in half-hour sessions and typically around four sessions we will begin to see some indications of improvement, and after six to ten sessions you will see substantial positive changes occurring. It doesn’t need to take a long time, although that’s partly a function of how we do the training. Unfortunately, a lot of our colleagues are doing, for example, the ADD training over large blocks of time. They may hook the person up and have them watch the machine for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. That is not optimal. It’s not efficient because the person is often getting reinforcement for practicing the wrong thing as their attention drifts off onto other things, and so forth. We don’t do that. What we do for ADD training is have them watch the screen in one minute intervals and within that time frame we collect and collate their brain behavior so that it can be averaged across multiple sessions within the half hour period. Usually we can do about six of those one minute blocks within the half hour period with a hook-up, and, in between blocks, talking with the person and answering any questions, and so forth. We can look at the average across sessions so that we can see when the person is improving or if he or she is not, and then respond appropriately to that feedback as well.

This raises another point, which is about the skill base of the people who are currently providing neurotherapy. Are there any certification programs in place to insure that people aren’t just going out and buying devices and then calling themselves neurotherapy therapists?

There are, but in my experience, they don’t help very much because they unfortunately can be certified without any kind of practical examination. This is not unusual in the practice of medical treatment, as you may know. There has been a great deal of hullabaloo about certification processes. Usually people are placed in front of study materials and so forth, but when it comes to actually determining if they can practically do the things that they are learning about, that part of the testing is often missed. There has been some challenge of certification tests, and I think somewhat rightly so. Unfortunately right now, certification is often given without adequate checking to see what the people have really learned, rather than whether they can regurgitate material out of a book.

Then what would be the criteria that someone such as myself or the lay reader should look for in order to determine whether or not they are working with someone who truly knows what he is doing?

I think there are two basic things to look for. It’s very appropriate to ask the person who says he can teach you how swim, if he knows how to swim. Similarly, I think it would be appropriate to ask people who call themselves neurotherapists if they have actually been on the machine? Do they know how to do it? Can they control their own brain waves? That’s one very important element, and unfortunately there are a fair number of trainers who think it’s for somebody else, and not something that they need to do for themselves. In addition, if you are electing to receiving the training for a specific issue, such as addiction or ADD, ask to see proof that the trainer has expertise in that area.

The second thing, since so many of the applications depend upon relaxation. is to find somebody who you experience as someone you can relax around. Are they the kind of person you can feel comfortable with? Because if they are not, that can often interfere with the training itself. A lot of behavior in society is fear-based. It’s judgement-oriented, and evaluative, and so forth, and if you’re constantly feeling that the person who is doing this training with you is not really with you but is evaluating you or testing you, or whatever, that’s not going to result in effective training.

I would also recommend that you work with someone who has some level of psychological expertise since, especially during theta training, there can be times where painful memories can come up and sometimes it is helpful to have someone who is trained to deal with such abreactions.

Are there certification organizations out there for neurotherapy that you would recommend?

I don’t believe that there are effective certification organizations at this time. Not ones that you could depend on and say, okay, this person is certified and therefore I can go to him.

Buyer beware, in other words.

To some extent, at this time, yes.

Let’s finish up be returning to what you foresee as the long-term ramifications of neurotherapy in terms of its potential use.

I think we’ve really only scratched the surface of neurotherapy’s potential. Just as an example, all of these applications that we’ve been talking about have had to do with training brain wave frequencies. The frequencies are the wave forms that are being produced. We talked a little bit about amplitude, and that is certainly important, and it’s vital if you’re thinking about things like increasing synchrony. There are many different aspect of the way these wave forms could be addressed in particular areas of the brain. One thing that has recently emerged is that it’s now possible to get three-dimensional scans of the brain using what’s called a Loreta Procedure. With those three-dimensional scans you can literally see whether a particular area of the brain is doing its job or not. Is it really producing the wave forms that we would look for. For instance, is there adequate theta activity in the hippocampus? It becomes much more of a three dimensional chess game at that point rather than just working on the surface board.

Is this what is also referred to sometimes as brain mapping?

Yes, it is brain mapping, but it’s brain mapping with the application of feedback from the map itself so that you’re using the map to generate a feedback process.

Based on that, I’d speculate that eventually it will be possible to go into a clinic that offered this in order find out exactly where the weak links are in the brain and its activity, almost like we can now go into a high-tech garage and have them hook your car up to a computer to do a diagnostic.

Very much so, and the patterns might be identified that have to do with optimizing brain functioning for a particular purpose. Some Japanese research, for example, has indicated that alpha in the frontal areas of the brain is related to peak performance. As we continue to map the brain via these scanning methods and continue to correlate specific brain wave activity with specific purposes, we will increasingly be able to optimize our abilities for achieving that purpose, whatever it might be, by using neurotherapy to train ourselves be able to regulate those brain wave patterns.

In other words, the applications are pretty open-ended.

Very much so. At this point, we literally have only begun to research what the implications are for this technology.

But to further answer your question, I think that alpha/theta training will eventually be used in the field of psychotherapy, and that it has applications for depression and anxiety, and a variety of other psychological problems. As we are seeing with people who have addiction problems, it is also very useful for helping people heal and move away from experience of the past that are holding them in bondage, thereby freeing them up to pursue new levels of growth.

I also think that we will begin exploring the potential neurotherapy has for group problem solving — particularly alpha/theta training. Many times, if you train a group at the same time, several people within the group may have an image that is shared between them, and such images can be particularly potent when it comes to solving the problems the group may be facing.

Overall, as a concluding statement, I would say that you can really change a lot of things for the better using this technology. I see it everyday.

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Exercises to Increase Theta Waves and Sensory Motor Rhythms and Awareness.

The following exercises are not intended as substitutes for neurotherapy, which initially requires the assistance of a trained therapist and appropriate equipment. However, using brain wave equipment, Dr. Fahrion has verified that regular practice the exercises can increase beta activity and enhance sensory motor rhythm and sensory awareness.

“The first exercise, which is for the left brain, is one that we use frequently in our trainings because it increases theta and sensory motor rhythm,” Dr. Fahrion says. Increasing sensory motor rhythm is especially important for those individuals who have very low amplitude brain waves across the board. Increasing the sensory motor rhythm helps increase all the other frequencies in such people.” Perform the exercise by reading one sentence in a book. Now close your eyes, and restate the sentence in your own words. Don’t try to repeat it verbatim. Instead, using your own words, express its meaning. Now open your eyes and read the next sentence, then again close your eyes and repeat the process. Work up to the point that you can do this with an entire paragraph at a time, without rushing from sentence to sentence.”

“This is a good exercise to practice for two or three minutes everyday,” Dr. Fahrion says. “We’ve monitored people when they do this, using EEG devices, and can see that it increases beta activity and sensory motor rhythm.”

The second exercise can help stimulate your right brain and enhance sensory awareness and involves looking at patterns. It can be performed anywhere at any time, whether you are looking out the window, taking a walk, in the car, etc. Take a look around you and see in detail everything that you can see. Now close your eyes and recall in detail what you saw. Open your eyes and see what you missed. “Initially, most likely you will find that there were a number of things that you didn’t notice,” Dr. Fahrion says, but if you practice this every day for a few minutes at a time, after a while you will notice that it definitely increases your ability to observe and detect the events that are in your visual field, while also opening up your sensory awareness.”

Resources

Life Sciences Institute of Mind-Body Health, Inc.

4536 S.W. Wanamaker Road

Topeka, Kansas 66614

(785) 271-8686

http://www.cjnetworks.com/~lifesci

Books about Brain Wave Therapy

A Symphony in the Brain: The Evolution of the New Brain Wave Biofeedback by Jim Robbins (Atlantic Monthly Press), 2000.

Beyond Biofeedback, 2nd Edition. by Elmer and Alyce Green (Knoll Publishing), 1989.

Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, Vol. 10. Steven L. Fahrion and Patricia Norris, Editors (ISSSEEM, Arvada, Colorado), 1999.

The High Performance Mind: Mastering for Insight, Healing, and Creativity by Anna Wise (Tarcher/Putnam), 1997.

The New Medical Paradigm: Self-Reliance Medicine and Other Emerging and Converging Trends An Interview with Patricia A. Norris, Ph.D.

Dr. Patricia Norris has been researching and working in the field of mind/body medicine for over 30 years, and is a recognized expert in the use of biofeedback, psychosynthesis, imagery and visualization, neurotherapy, energy medicine, and self-regulation techniques for integrating the body, mind, emotions, and spirit. She has conducted hundreds of workshops and seminars worldwide in these areas and, along with her husband, Dr. Steven Fahrion, has been in the vanguard of those researching the potential uses of neurotherapy. In addition, Dr. Norris has an extensive background in training patients in the use of various holistic self-care approaches, including many patients suffering from cancer, alcoholism, or addiction. Her most famous case involved her work with Garrett Porter, then nine years old, who was diagnosed with an inoperable, terminal brain tumor. Using imagery techniques and biofeedback, Dr. Norris was able to guide Garrett through an intensive year of therapy, after which his tumor completely disappeared. Today, he is a healthy man in is 30s, and many other cancer patients have experienced similar successes as a result of using the same techniques.

Past president of both the Biofeedback Society of America and the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM), Dr. Norris co-founded the Life Sciences Institute of Mind-Body health, Inc. in Topeka, Kansas, and serves as its Clinical Director. In the following, free ranging interview, she discusses the convergence of emergence trends that are shifting and reshaping medicine into an entirely new, and far more comprehensive paradigm, and shares techniques anyone can use to immediately begin enhancing their health and overall well-being.

Why don’t you start by providing us with a general overview of where you see health care and health care treatments going based on the work that you’ve been doing and the people that you’re in contact with.

I think that over the course of this new century, medicine is going to change almost entirely and people cannot now imagine how much will be changed. I think we’ll still have the wonderful high-tech medicine that we have now for emergencies and for very recalcitrant cases, but for the most part I believe almost all the techniques will be the ones that are now called complementary and alternative techniques. These are growing in research areas, and we are beginning to see a lot of proven efficacy, particularly for chronic conditions. I also think we are going to see more use of sound and light in healing, and more use of energy medicine techniques in general, as well as more people learning how to use them. The use of energy psychology techniques will also become more commonly available, I believe, as will neurotherapy. A lot of things are coming together now because of the interdisciplinary approach that’s being taken by the complementary medicine community. This is in direct contrast to the direction that allopathic medicine has taken, which is increasingly about specialization, with more and more physicians not really knowing what the physicians in the next area of specialization are doing. The complementary medical field is operating under a more inclusive umbrella and bringing practitioners of a wide variety of disciplines together. A good example of this is the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine, or ISSSEEM, which is going in its 12th year and is bringing together physicians, physicists, psychologists, psychophysiologists, and healers. I think this is the trend that we are moving towards, and with this trend is coming the growing realization that being well is something that everyone can learn. I think we will continue to see growing numbers of individuals taking personal responsibility for their well-being, and, of course, complementary medicine has a lot to offer in this area as well, due to its many types of effective self-care approaches.

In line with the self-responsibility and self-care you’re talking about, two things occur to me, both of which I know you have been researching for quite some time. The first has to do with how much each of us inherently does possess the capacity to self-regulate our health even though, for the most part, we may not be aware of this. My second thought has to do with role that our imagery, thoughts, emotions, and things of that nature also play in our health, both positively and adversely, when they are not regulated properly.

I think the imagery that we hold pretty much regulates everything that we do, not only our health, but also how well we learn, how well we can engage in various activities, and how well we communicate with others. Imagery precedes action on all levels, and certainly it has an enormous effect inside the body at all times. We take so much of this for granted, like, for example, the fact that the mind controls the body via the neuromuscular system. It controls every movement that we ever make. Some of it is unconscious, naturally. For example, if you are told that you have someone at the door, you’ll get a lot of mental images and probably the ones you will pay the least attention to is where the door is, and what it feels like to stand up, and what your legs feel like as you walk toward the door, and so on, because you learned all those activities long ago and now the unconscious does it all. But all of our deliberate actions start with an image of some kind and an intent of some kind that are very conscious.

How does this relate to managing illness and creating optimal wellness?

I think our bodies “believe” our images and intentions all the time, and they respond to any image that we have in our minds, conscious or unconscious. This can be illustrated simply and easily initially by just becoming aware of your salivary glands. Just tuning in and making mental contact with the salivary glands starts the salivation flowing.

That certainly what’s happening for me right now.

That’s what happens almost inevitably. And if you make mental contact with the lacrimal glands that feed moisture to the eyes, your eyes will begin to water a little bit. It may not seem detectable, but if you were measuring tearing flow, usually you can detect an increase. Or, if somebody tells me not to blink, it becomes almost impossible not to do so because the urge to blink is there. So, to get back to your question, inside the body everything is directed by the imagery we have, which is a major factor among all the other influences.

There’s a microbiologist and cellular chemist at Stanford University named Bruce Lipton who has been studying the behavior of cells and it’s kind of mind blowing what he and his research team are discovering, the essence of which is that, genes don’t determine things — that this was a mistaken assumption that we’ve been operating under for the last 50 years, and in his lectures around the country he provides examples of the experiments that verify this. For example, experiments have shown that you can take all the genes out of the cell, and it will go right on functioning perfectly well. Lipton’s work has shown that the “brain in the cell” is in the receptors of the cell, and that the receptors determine which genes will be selected. What determines how the receptors behave is the environment, including emotions, attitudes, and our mental imagery, and if receptors don’t get activated, no message can get into the cell and its genes cannot be expressed. Lipton states that genes never decide to express themselves; they are always selected through the cell mechanism and through the receptors, and these in turn are affected by the environment, which includes our beliefs and images. I’m sure you’re familiar with the fact that all of the immune system cells have receptors for the brain’s chemical messengers — neurohormones and neurotransmitters — so that anything that brain can “say” chemically, the immune system can “hear” and act on. The immune system is really powerful. If we could leave it alone a little more or trust it a little more, it could make us well from many more things. I’ve often seen examples of this in the work I’ve done with cancer patients. Garrett is the most famous example because of our book, but there are probably 20 other patients from that time who succeeded against expectations, and several hundred who succeeded in general. And what their successes illustrate is how powerfully imagery is the basis of, or determines, much of our psychophysiological processes, and it intercedes because many of these other processes are automatic. That’s what the autonomic nervous system means. It operates automatically so that, for instance, we don’t have to interact with our heart to keep it beating. But if you consciously turn your attention to your heart it immediately begins to behave in a slightly different manner, and then you can speed it up or slow it down just by visualizing.

Provide an example of how that would work.

Let me first of all tell you how I discovered this. When we were doing the biofeedback research at the Menninger Clinic, between 1972 and 1980, one of the things we did was demonstrate heart rate control. We would hook people up to their equipment, and I was really amazed to see that everyone could influence their heart right away, without needing to be taught how to do it. You can influence your heart rate too, Larry, if you think about what your heart feels like when you’re really excited, or if I suggest that you’re going to do something very exciting in a few minutes. As we talk about that, your heart will speed up — maybe a little, maybe quite a bit. It varies from individual to individual, but it will actually speed up. At Menninger the equipment that we measured it with had a rising tone as the heart rate sped up, and descending tone when the heart rate decreased, and we saw this happening with everyone we worked with. Every time we get excited or even think about being excited, our heart speeds up a little bit. Now imagine how wonderful it is reading a good book, or sitting by the lake with nothing to do. You feel so comfortable and warm in your favorite place. As you just imagine how that feels, your heart will slow down. With a bit of training and practice, anyone can learn how to positively influence their heart rate. In the Menninger experiments, I had one psychiatrist with hypertension whose baseline heart rate was consistently around 88, and who was taking high blood pressure medication. Over a period of time, he lowered it to 70 beats per minute as part of the training.

You can use the same types of visualizations to influence any of the organs or systems in the body. And this works in other ways, too. For example, if you were drinking coffee and you believed that I put an emetic into it, something that would make you nauseated, most likely you would feel nauseated. Norman Cousins told this wonderful story about how one time at the Los Angeles Coliseum two or three people got sick to their stomach who drank Coke from a certain Coke machine. So somebody announced over the loud speaker said not to drink Coke from such and such machine. Everybody who had been drinking Coke, regardless of what machine they’d gotten it from, started to feel sick, and before long people starting vomiting. Later they found out it wasn’t even the Coke; the whole thing had been a mistake.

So it was the power of suggestion.

But what is the power of suggestion? It’s the effect of the visualization. That’s exactly what it is. And how does that operate? Why is it powerful? Because what you visualize is what happens. Because the brain can’t always tell the difference between an event and an image. For instance, if you see a tiger running towards you, you’ll get a huge arousal response, but if you see a shadow that you think is a tiger running toward you, you’ll also have that response. If you actually believe that the shadow is a tiger, your response will be just as large as if the tiger was there. That’s a pretty interesting response, and I think that we’re now learning what some of the power behind thought is, and some of the ways that we can use that power to influence our health.

Let’s discuss the other side of that issue. In the work that you do with people with cancer, for instance, are you finding a common ground in terms of the type of imagery that people with cancer, or who are prone to cancer, characteristically have?

Actually, it’s almost the opposite, because imagery is very idiosyncratic. I have a list of elements that make for effective imagery, and the very first one is that the imagery needs to fit the person’s own experiences and, secondly, the imagery needs to be congruent with their values and beliefs. I think that the common ground has to do more with the amount of confidence that people begin to get in their ability to affect change – their sense of empowerment, or their sense of self-reliance, their sense that they can make a difference. Things tend not to work if we don’t believe in them. If somebody told Olympic athletes, “Only one person is going to get the gold medal, it probably won’t be you,” that attitude would change how they would train and practice. The same holds true for cancer patients, and any other patient faced with a life-threatening illness. A lot of the time, they will either die or survive based upon what their doctor tells them, and part of that has to do with our society’s visualization about cancer, or about any kind of death. If a doctor tells a patient, “You have five years to live,” often that patient will literally die five years to the day. I knew someone quite well who was told that by his physician, and five years later he just died on the spot. But I think that was self-generated primarily; he died because he conformed his beliefs about his survival to his physician’s prognosis.

It’s very useful to think about two things when we’re talking about imagery and visualization. One is that, even though the words are used loosely, they are in fact two distinct processes. The visualization process is the process of intent involving what we wish to have happen, and which creates a purposeful set of instructions to the body. For now we could say that intentional images make up the visualization, and that working with such images usually involves a certain amount of precision. Whereas unconscious imagery works automatically for better or worse, we need to make the effort to focus consciously and with intention on the results we want if our visualizations are to be most effective.

Imagery, on the other hand, is spontaneous and not intentional; it’s coming back to us from the body. It is composed of the unconscious images and beliefs that we already hold. If you have the unconscious belief that something is not going to work, your image will come back and tell you that. That’s why it’s important to work together with the imagery you already have and the visualization of what it is you want to have happen.

Although you say imagery is idiosyncratic, would it be accurate, based on your experience, to say that people with chronic conditions, are predisposed to have the type of imagery related to a the sense that they are helpless or that they are not at cause?

I think that’s generally true. And they also usually have all these pictures of what they’re going to feel like, even with simple matters. For instance, someone outside in chilly weather might think, “I’m going to have a cold tomorrow,” and they will in fact be more likely to have a cold the next day.

Learning to use positive, effective imagery is one of the things that biofeedback is good for. Learning control begins to give people some confidence because, for instance, with temperature control, as they learn to warm their hands, that quiets the autonomic nervous system. An inevitable result of warming your hands in this manner is that it will lower the entire autonomic arousal and decrease the sympathetic nervous system activation, and then the person starts to feel better. If they have symptoms, they can make them go away or lessen them, and so they begin to feel empowered. This was very true with Garrett. He was very good at the hand warming and he really noticed the difference, and that gave him confidence. But, to continue with this idea about visualization and imagery, I usually start out with trying to find out about the imagery the person already has.

How do you go about doing that?

Usually with a trip inside the body after they have some facility with doing some other kinds of imagery. All of us use imagery to get around in the world, but this usually goes unnoticed. Sometimes people say, “I never image.” Or they will close their eyes and say, “I don’t see anything.” The way that I overcome that is to help people become aware that they do in fact have many images that they rely upon all the time. I might ask, “Do you think you’ll recognize your wife next time you see her?”, and of course the answer will be yes, but then I ask, “How do you know it’s her?” And the reply will be, “Well, I know what she looks like.” Okay, that’s your image. Then people begin to realize that they hold images of everything and that’s how we recognize each other — by recognizing the image that we hold.

I find it’s often helpful to instruct people who are having trouble not to close their eyes during this process, because when they close their eyes, it seems they expect to see little slide projections of the images on their eye lids. Occasionally I think people do see in that kind of very sharp detail, but for most of us the image appears in “the mind’s eye.” Like thinking about someone. Most of us don’t actually see their face floating in the space in front of us when we think about them.

Describe the process of taking people through a tour of their body.

After they begin to realize that, yes, they are imaging, I usually do a four-step process. Step one is to image that they are in front of their house. To look at it and notice its color, where the door is, and so forth. Then imagine that you just opened the door. What do you see? It’s fun to do this, and people see all kinds of things. The second step is to now imagine a fantastic castle that you can create in your mind, making it any kind of a castle you want. Imagine that you’re looking at the front of it. What kind of a castle is it? Can you see the entrance to it? What are the doors made out of? What do they look like? No one says they don’t see anything; everyone comes up with a castle.

The third step involves exploring a cave, and this helps them over the initial discomfort they might have of going down into a place that’s a little dark or unusual. We might have light shining in the entrance so they can stand there and look in, or they can explore it with a flashlight or a minor’s lamp. They have everything they need. I like to do this before going into the body, because I don’t want anyone to get scared in their body. I try to alleviate that possibility as much as possible.

And the fourth step is going into the body. There are a lot of different ways you can go in — you can be in a little bubble of air and be inhaled; you can imagine you’re a small person entering into the mind’s eye — however people want to do it is fine. By this time I will have shown them films, pictures, and graphics so that they will have seen their immune system in action. It’s partly an educative process; when people can see things it makes a difference.

Throughout this process, as images come up, we work with them. A client may express an image representing either a fear or a new growth that wasn’t known by anyone. But you can work with them in this space. I’m thinking now of a woman who had metastatic breast cancer. It was in her bones, her shoulder, her arm, and one rib, and they were taking about a quart and a half of fluid every other week from her body, so it was an advanced metastatic breast disease. She was interesting to work with in several ways. People usually welcome varying degrees of prayer or spiritual support, but in her case she wanted none of it. She told me, “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in all that stuff, I just want the science.” I said that’s fine. She did the visualization and imagery work every day and also really practiced the stress management tools she learned. She made a lot of changes and got control over certain irritating symptoms that she had that were not related to the cancer, and started to feel a lot more empowered. Her relationship with her husband also improved enormously during this time, which helped too, and she got well against initial expectations.

Later on, when she was free of cancer, she developed a pain in her lower chest, and she described it as looking something like lightning. It seemed to her that it went from the bottom of her left lung over to behind her belly button, and it was shaped like a red zigzag going down to where it hurt. So we worked with that image, imagining that she could gently stroke it and straighten it out and ease it, and change the color a little bit, and so on. We worked with her own image and the pain went away and didn’t come back. I have no idea what that the red lightning image was symbolic of, or whether there was a stitch in the nerve pathway, but it didn’t matter. We just worked with the image that she had, visualized it changing, and it did.

How long was it before she was free of cancer after you started to work with her?

About a year and half I think.

What was her prognosis when she came to you?

The prognosis was very poor. Once cancer is widely metastasized like that and in the bones, they just hope to extend your life. The five-year chance goes down to two percent, or something like that, but I don’t pay that much attention to the statistics and try to help patients not to obsess about them. People tend to believe in the odds. If the statistics indicate that there is an 80 percent chance of dying, they think their chance of dying is 80 percent, and I convince them that the statistics don’t have anything to do with them as an individual, and also point out that we can change our odds, no matter what they are. Let’s suppose for instance, that your chance right now of running a mile without stopping is about zero but you really want to get to the mile. If you can start out by just walking around the block once or twice, and then, a bit later, go around the block ten times and then maybe run around it, maybe in six months, if you practice everyday you can run a mile without stopping. What doctors really should say, if patients or their families insist on being told the statistics, is, “In this particular case, about 80 percent don’t survive, but 20 percent do, and we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure you’re in that 20 percent.” I think that would make a huge difference in patients’ outlook, survival, and in how they would approach their treatment.

Let’s move back to a discussion of the converging trends you mentioned earlier.It seems obvious to me that the research we’ve been discussing regarding imagery and visualization and its ramifications will become more emphasized in the future of health care. What else do you foresee happening?

One of the areas gaining attention is the studies of prayer and how they have a healing effect. These studies are demonstrations of fields in which we are immersed. We live in a physical field, we live in energy fields, we live in mental and emotional fields, and we live in what is sometimes referred to as the planetary field of mind, the field in which people have knowledge outside their local time-space coordinates, if you will, like the mother in the States knowing when her son is killed in Germany. She may see him, he may talk to her, or she may just have the feeling exactly at the time of his death. Because the message is loud enough and emotionally meaningful, it gets through. But we exist in this field of mind all the time. That’s how ESP happens and I think that’s how the prayer effects happen. People receive it directly. I don’t think that prayer works by intercession, even though prayer for healing is called intercessory prayer. If you take 300 people who are sick and divide them into two groups, only one of which is prayed for, I don’t think God is saying, “Oh, they’re praying for these 150 people, so I’m going to make them well, but I don’t hear any prayers for the other 150 people, so I’ll let them stay sick.” It can’t be that way, no matter what kind of a God one believes in. The prayers work because of our connections in the field of mind. What’s interesting, though, is there is some evidence that shows that when people’s families are praying for them they sometimes get worse. The reason for that seems to be that they have hidden agendas and other things going on. The kind of abstract prayer that’s done by prayer groups that pray for the best and focus on the person’s highest good have been shown to be very effective.

In the final analysis the human body is kind of like an energy structure held together by DNA messages, but the substance of the planet is just flowing in and out of us. For instance, we breathe in and out so many times a day and the air that we breathe in is breathed out by the people around us, and vice versa. I read in ParadeMagazine some years ago, that in every 20 breaths the likelihood is almost 100 percent that at least one atom of oxygen that we’re inhaling was once in the body of Jesus.

Or Julius Caesar.

Or Julius Caesar, or Hitler, or the guy next door, or somebody in China, or whomever because there is a finite amount of oxygen on our planet. IThe same air that we’re breathing was here thousands of years ago.

Then think of all the liquid that we drink and then dump down the drain, where eventually it may find its way to the ocean and be evaporated and come back in the rain clouds. Water flows in a river, a bear might drink it, or it may end up in a flower garden and then evaporate there, etc. Our body is 75 percent water, and water is constantly moving through us as our bodies participate in the water cycle. On the cellular level the body is constantly renewing itself, mostly in days or weeks. And on the intercellular level, the level of atoms and molecules, this process of renewal is a lot faster. Atoms and molecules are coming in to our bodies, and others are eliminated constantly as we breathe, eat, drink, and recycle. That is how I think healing at a distance works. We’re all part of it, with all other living things. If we could see it on the level of atoms and molecules, we would see all of these exchanging substances of air, water, and food flowing through us, and through all of life.

What implications does this have for health and well-being?

The enormous plasticity of the body. How much it is constantly remaking itself, and what holds it together? Partly, I think, it is DNA, but I think the other thing, and more scientists are coming to believe this, is consciousness. Consciousness is what gets all the substances that flow through us to behave in the same way over and over again.

Based on what you just said about the vast permutations of the body, and how quickly it changes at the intercellular level, there really is no logical reason to assume, let’s say, that just because a person currently has acute stage four cancer, he needs to have acute stage four cancer three or four months from now.

I think that’s true. As we come to better understand these fields and the enormous plasticity of the body, and we learn to work with them, we will learn to do more self-healing, and have more knowledge of how to go about it. Even if we don’t have this knowledge, the confidence that we can heal can be of tremendous help to us. In my book with Garrett, I also mentioned a patient named Tommy, who had stage 4B Hodgkin’s disease when we started working together. That’s considered terminal, yet he got well and he’s still well. I know him to this day, and he’s an active adult in his 30’s now. So that is the possibility.

Aside from visualization, what else did you use with Tommy and Garrett?

The other important component was the self-regulation skills which biofeedback teaches and helps people acquire. These help people to not only manage their stress more effectively, but to literally direct blood flow anywhere in their body, to be able to relax their muscles completely, and to influence their heart rate, and so on. This empowers them and builds their confidence, and works very well with visualization and imagery.

I also use the principles and some exercises of psychosynthesis with just about every cancer patient on a level that is suitable for them.

What does the psychosynthesis add to the picture, and how do you employ it?

It’s another effective avenue for self-discovery, in terms of our true self. It’s very empowering, and helps people to recognize they are more than they thought they were. We may bring certain sub-personalities into awareness, allowing people to realize they don’t have to be identified with them. They are able to deeply realize that they have this tendency or condition, but they are not that tendency. It is very helpful, and is a part of my background and philosophy of treatment in the drug addiction program, with cancer patients, and in fact with all of my clients.

I think increasing numbers of people are now recognizing that illness can represent an opportunity for making these discoveries about our true nature that can occur during the psychosynthesis process, and that true healing can be a journey of transformation, into an expanded view of ourselves.So what you’re describing, I believe, is another element of the integrated model of care that will be part of the medicine of the future.

I think that’s true.

Tied in with this is the question of spiritual or distant healing. You talked about prayer in that regard. What about the potential of laying on of hands techniques, Qigong, and so forth?

To my mind, the most interesting research study in energy measurements of states of consciousness and energy medicine is the work referred to as the copper wall research. We conducted this research at Menninger between 1983 and 1991. Elmer Green was the principle investigator and designed the studies. It had been his intention to explore relationships of electrophysiology and lucidity ever since he read that Tibetan meditators were trained in self-awareness “lucidity” while seated on a thick glass vessel, isolated from electrical ground, in front of a north wall covered with thick copper, and with a magnet with north pole up, suspended over their heads. Green understood that this setup might well serve to conserve an electrostatic charge that builds up during meditation, and eventually he developed instrumentation and procedures for detecting and measuring the body-potential phenomena in and around the bodies of the experimental subjects. A lab was built with a copper wall on glass blocks (late, four walls, all electrically isolated from one another), and with a platform raised on glass blocks where meditators, and later healers, sat. We believe that electrostatic and electromagnetic phenomena are correlates of other subtle forms of human energy systems, as described in yogic theory, and by healers and seers.

I participated in this research as a meditating research subject in two different double-blind experiments, sitting in the copper wall environment for many 45 minute sessions, gazing at my reflection in the copper wall under random conditions of magnet north up, south, up, and absent. The wall was connected to a polygraph in another room, and demonstrated that the heart rate could be picked up five feet away from a subject. Right this minute, if a sufficiently sensitive detector was placed five feet or more away from you or me, our heart beats would be picked up. In the absence of detectors, of course, our heart beats are nevertheless radiating at least that far. Voltages connected with body-potentials were collected, and for “regular” meditators body-potential surges did not exceed 4 volts. In subsequent experiments a number of healers were studied, both while meditating and during actual healing sessions with patients. In similar 45 minute meditation sessions, many body-potential surges greater than 4 volts were found; and during healing, as much as 190 volts were sometimes recorded. This seminal research sets the stage for other studies that will begin to shed light on many aspects of human subtle energy systems and human potential.

There is one study of Qigong I’d like to mention, published in the journal Subtle Energies in 1994 and titled “Effects of Qigong on cell-free myosin phosphorylation: preliminary experiments.” Phosphorylation is a process that combines phosphate with an organic compound in the body, in this case myosin, which makes up about 65 percent of the body’s total muscle protein. This process helps regulate the contraction of smooth muscles found in the arteries, the digestive tract, and so forth. Now most of the things in our body are subject to magnetism and electricity and so are affected by them, and that is certainly true of myosin. In the study, the researchers first used magnets and they saw a certain reduction response from the myosin according to the amount of magnetism that was applied. Then two Qigong masters, standing two to six feet away from the samplings, produced responses similar to that of the magnets. The question one could ask is whether the results in both cases were due to a magnetic effect. To determine this, the researchers next placed the myosin samples inside of boxes made out of mu-metal, which is opaque to magnetic fields. This time, when the magnets were placed around the box nothing happened; there was no response in the myosin. However, the Qigong masters were still able to produce an effect. The researchers who conducted the study wrote, “The results of these preliminary experiments demonstrate that Qigong practice can consistently effect a biologically relevant enzyme system. The interaction requires no physical contact between the practitioner and the sample or the body.” They also stated that the mechanisms by which the Qigong masters produced these effects are not yet clear. The actual effect may come from the etheric energy.

Right now, we can’t measure the etheric energy itself, although we can measure its electromagnetic correlates. However, it’s getting to the point where we are going to be able to make such measurements, and that will make a very big difference in our understanding and acceptance of these types of energy medicine and will, I think, result in them becoming much more widely available.

Sound and light therapies will also be used more widely as forms of medicine in the future. We are learning an enormous amount about the healing effects of both of these modalities. Sound and light are both vibrations that effect our physical bodies by their effects on our energy bodies, and this relationship is being scientifically explored.

The work of Sharry Edwards is an example of what is being done in terms of using sound for healing purposes. Another example is the highly successful research program in Germany conducted by Peter Hubner, who creates music according to what he calls “microcosmic principles.” He has created a series of music CDs which contain harmonic frequencies for aiding a variety of conditions, including heart conditions, sleep disorders, headaches, general pain, digestive problems, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and stress relief. In Germany, doctors give people prescriptions for his music because it’s been so thoroughly researched. I met first met Hubner at a conference in Switzerland in 1997, where I showed a movie of a healer doing bioenergy. When he saw it he said the healer was working with the same microcosmic principles that he composed music with. This is another example of how these various healing disciplines we’re discussing may be interrelated and converging. This, to me, is one of the most exciting things, because now there is more dialogue than ever before between the researchers and practitioners in these areas. I think all of them tie together in the realm of subtle energy, and energy medicine will be a big part of the medicine of the future.

As all of these disciplines start to converge, what can we as individuals do to make use of them in order to self-regulate and optimize our health and our overall-well being?

Apart from availing ourselves of these things individually according to what seems to harmonize with us right now, I don’t have a ready answer. Two things need to happen, I believe. One is a different doctor-patient approach, where interdisciplinary teams of practitioners would actually meet together with the patient, so that a person wouldn’t have to separately see, say, a psychiatrist for antidepression medication, a psychologist for therapy, and a physician for gastroenteritis. Rather, there would be an interdisciplinary team that would meet with the patient, and the patient would be the most important member of this team. And from this meeting an integrated therapeutic that would most fit the patient and his or her symptoms would be decided upon by the group and the patient together. There would be special diagnostic tests when necessary, and the tests would come back to this team. Instead of dividing the patient up into a bunch of pieces, as it were, with one doctor treating one piece and another doctor treating another piece, etc., which is the model that is most prevalent now.

The second thing that needs to happen is to have all the different forms of energy medicine also available in one place, along with things like diet, nutrition, detoxification therapies, and bodywork. You know what I would really love to see in the future? A modern day version of the healing centers that existed many centuries ago in Greece. Then, people would consult an oracle and then go to a place where there was beautiful music and beautiful art, and temples, they’d bathe in special waters, and would do certain tasks, and be guided towards receiving certain spiritual insights about themselves and their condition. I’d like to see this model reinvented in the future so that we would have health clinics that would really be directed toward the whole person, and geared towards a total, transpersonal healing, not just a curing of whatever disease the person might have.

How far away do you think we are from that?

I know we are moving in that direction. People like Dr. Norman Shealy and others around the country have created proximities of that, but we’re still years, and probably decades away, from where this will become standard practice and generally available. It’s available now, but unfortunately it’s not yet in the reach of everybody.

Of course, other changes need to be made, as well. People need to have more freedom in terms of their health care choices. There needs to be more funding for and controlled studies of all of these therapies to bring them into the mainstream.

My thinking has always been that the changes that need to occur, will not occur within the organizational structure of health care in this country. It will occur because of patient demand.

I absolutely agree. In the meantime, though, in terms of self-care, or what I like to think of as self-reliance medicine, the people who are attracted to this can to some extent create their own programs right now. The information for doing so is now becoming more and more available.

Could provide some guidelines for how they can go about doing that? Because I think that’s the most empowering aspect within this new paradigm we’re talking about.

Absolutely. It is.

The way to go about doing it is, first of all, to see what appeals to you. Become aware of what your options are. Use the Internet, read books, attend conferences, workshops, and trainings, and then begin applying what you learn within an environment of your own creation. In addition, once you decide what you want to do, you need to know that the time has passed for equivocation. Move forward with confidence, because your mental attitude is one of the most important elements.

One of the techniques that I would like to see more people use is the thermal form of biofeedback I mentioned earlier. Hand warming is very easy to learn, and it’s like having a golden key into the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The reason for that is because, in the innervation [nerve supply] of the body from the sympathetic and the parasympathetic sides of the ANS, only the blood vessels in the hands and the feet have innervation solely from the sympathetic. When people warm their hands in this fashion, the only way they can do it is by lowering the sympathetic side of ANS activity. The parasympathetic isn’t involved in hadn warming, whereas heart rate, the hair rising up on your skin, the dilation of pupils, digestive track activity — all the autonomic organs, glands, and their functions are innervated from both the parasympathetic and sympathetic. They have a GO button and a STOP button, if you will. But the hands and the bottom of the feet are innervated from the sympathetic side, and when you warm your hands, it can only be accomplished by lowering sympathetic arousal.

You can make an analogy to driving a car. The gas pedal revs the engine up and provides the energy to make the car go, and the brakes slow the car down or bring it to a stop. When we are under stress, it is like revving the engine and holding the brakes down at the same time. If we work under stress for a prolonged period, it’s like driving the car with both the gas and the brake pedal pressed to the floor. People know exactly what that feels like inside when you describe this.

Hand warming is a method of self-regulation that is akin to lifting up on the accelerator in the car, without having to use the brakes. It eases up on the sympathetic outflow, restoring normal blood flow to the glands and organs. The heart slows down, breathing relaxes and deepens, and the body moves in a direction opposite to the fight or flight response. It leads to what Wolfgang Luthe termed the “autogenic shift,” and what Herbert Benson termed “the relaxation response.” People feel it very definitely occurring at a certain point, when hand warmth is achieved. It’s powerful, is easily learned, and accessible to everybody. It can help almost anything that ails you.

How does one actually do it?

Hold your hands in front of you with your palms toward you, and then bend your fingers gently forward until they are over the base of the hand, so that you form a kind of a hollow with your fingers and your palm. Then turn one hand over and slip its fingers into that space so that you’re holding hands with yourself in a gentle way. Don’t grip your fingers Then drop your hands into your lap, find a position that’s comfortable, and let your shoulders, arms, and everything else relax. And then focus your attention just on your hands, feeling what they feel like, however they feel.

Now see if you can feel your little fingers, their entire volume. Feel the proximal knuckle, then the distal knuckle, and then the tips of the little finger. Feel under the fingernail, the whole fingernail bed — just be aware of it in a sensory way. I usually spend five minutes or so initially with people doing this, sensing with each finger. Most everybody can pretty quickly feel a tingling, a pulse, or a warmth as they focus on each finger. If you have a little temperature meter or thermometer taped to the end of your fingers, you will see that the temperature climbs. The goal is, while keeping your hands together, to get your temperature to 97 degrees or above; that’s about where the autogenic shift occurs. For some people, it occurs at a bit lower temperature. With practice, this becomes very easy to do and occurs automatically, like what happens when you focus sensory attention on your saliva glands.

Typically, how long would you recommend that people practice this?

If they just want to learn relaxation, I would suggest they spend ten or fifteen minutes at a time. For general stress management and to boost immune function, do it several times during the day. As I tell the cancer patients I work with, the immune system is the most active when we are the most relaxed, and it’s the most inactive when we are really aroused. When we’re stressed, anxious, upset, feeling helpless and hopeless, immune function is diminished. So, with cancer patients, for instance, I suggest they do it several times or more a day, including before their visualization work and during visualization. Once the skill is acquired, which for most people takes two weeks or less, then warming can be done in response to every stab of pain or discomfort and every anxiety, depending on what’s going on in the body. Simultaneously imagine sending a flood of white cells to the affected organ. Every time we feel a pain our body is saying, “I need help.” Sometimes the signal is small, like when we’ve been sitting in one position too long — we adjust our posture without even thinking about it — but in every discomfort the body is asking for some relief. Hand warming is a way for us to help to relieve anxiety and pain.

This accomplishes a lot of things. For example, patients who have cancer or some other serious disease are often really mad at their bodies. They literally think, “My body betrayed me,” and that’s a very unhealthful attitude. So I try to have them relate to their bodies’ pain signals as they would to their child. If the child told them, “My tummy is really hurting,” they would reply, “Come here, let me help you,” instead of, “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you until you feel better.” Often we treat our bodies with rejection. We try to ignore it or push it away, or we get mad at it. But if there is something to do in response to these pain signals, such as had warming, your attitude tends to change and, as a result, you feel more empowered.

Hand warming is also useful for handling emotional issues. For example, a person might be watching TV or having a conversation, not thinking of cancer, then all of a sudden a remembering and a feeling of dread arises over the condition. Instead of panicking, the person can use pain or fear as a reminder, an opportunity to again warm the hands, use a visualization, and trigger that autonomic shift into relaxation.

In addition, once this skill is mastered, it is always there when needed. You can get to the point where every time you think about your hands being warm, they automatically start to warm. Just like, every time you think about your saliva glands, you automatically start to salivate.

Resources

Life Sciences Institute of Mind-Body Health, Inc.

4636 S.W. Wanamaker Road

Topeka, Kansas 66614

(785) 271-8686

http://www.cjnetworks.com/~lifesci

International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM)

11005 Ralston Road, Suite 100D

Arvada, Colorado 80004

Phone: (303) 425-4625

Website: http://www.issseem.org

ISSSEEM is an interdisciplinary, nonprofit organization formed for the purpose of improving human health and welfare through the advancement of education,

practice, training, and research in the emerging field of subtle energies and energy medicine.

By Dr. Norris

I Choose Life: The Dynamics of Visualization and Biofeedback. (with Garrett Porter) (Stillpoint Publishing), 1987.

Why Me? Harnessing the Healing Power of the Human Spirit. (with Garrett Porter) (Stillpoint Publishing), 1985.

POSTSCRIPT: ENSURING MEDICAL FREEDOM

The new paradigm approaches to healing and personal growth shared in the preceding pages, bright and full of promise as they are, will not come into full fruition without opposition. Such is the nature of innovations and discoveries made “outside of the box,” it seems. In the field of medicine, as I know only too well from my years of research, this problem is greatly compounded by the machinations of various parties with deeply vested financial interests in maintaining the status quo, despite the overwhelming evidence that the current medical model is, overall, an abject failure. But, at an annual cost in the United States alone of $1.3 trillion, this failing model is also generating enormous profits for those who would most see it remain unchanged.

In an ideal world, such machinations which place self-interest over service and the greater good, would be handily kept in check by our various governmental agencies. We do not live in an ideal world, however, and the evidence is great that collusion often occurs between what may properly be termed “the medical/industrial complex” and various state and federal regulatory agencies meant to ensure our rights and health care safety.

During the time of our nation’s birth, Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s physician, wrote: “Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a republic. The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.” Dr. Rush’s recommendation was ignored, and the medical dictatorship against which he warned has in many ways indeed come to pass.

Despite this fact, I am extremely optimistic about our medical future, based in large part on the work that the experts featured in this book, along with their many colleagues, are doing. The new paradigm their work is indicative of is not only emerging, but inevitable. But my optimism is not based on their work alone. It is also due to the groundwork we the lay public have laid, and which the experts themselves gratefully acknowledge, that is now enabling viable healing alternatives and new technologies to find the room they need to complete their emergence. Make no mistake: our desire to heal, backed by the choices we make and the money we spend making them, is where the true power lies, and so, ultimately it is we who will decide how quickly the far more comprehensive model of healing envisioned by the experts in these pages comes to pass. That it will come to pass cannot be doubted. My aim in writing this postscript (which is based on my views alone, and is in no way meant to be attributed to those whom I interviewed in these pages) is to encourage you to join me in doing what we can to make it happen sooner, rather than later. In order to do so most effectively, I recommend the following:

Educate yourself about the possibilities that now exist. More than at any other time in history, a wealth of empowering information now exists which is of benefit to anyone interested in learning how to take greater responsibility for and more control over their health. As a start, read the books and visit the Web sites recommended throughout this book. The more informed you become, the wiser will be your choices.

Contact your elected representatives. To offset the intensive lobbying exerted upon members of the House and Senate by the medical establishment (according to a recent article in the New York Times, between 1999 and 2000, the pharmaceutical industry spent $177 million in lobbying fees, $50 million more than their nearest rival) our elected officials need to be kept informed about what you desire in terms of your health care and medical freedom. One of the most effective means of letting them know your desires is to write to them. A signed, mailed letter is best, but you can also send e-mail. Be sure to include your full name and address to ensure that your letter is read. To find the names and addresses of your local senators and representatives, visit (Senate) http://www.senate.gov/contacting/index_by_state.cfm

and (House of Representatives) http://www.house.gov/writeup

Support grassroots organizations dedicated to medical freedom. The following organizations are in the vanguard of those seeking to preserve and extend medical freedom. Contact them to learn about the causes they support and the information they provide, and to learn how you can get further involved.

American Holistic Health Association (AHHA)

P.O. Box 17400

Anaheim, California 92817

(714) 779-6152

http://www.ahha.org

American Preventive Medical Association (APMA)

9912 Georgetown Pike, Suite D-2

P.O. Box 458

Great Falls, Virginia 22066

(800) 230-APMA

http://www.apma.net

Citizens for Health

P.O. Box 2260

Boulder, Colorado 80306

(800) 357-2211

http://www.citizens.org

Foundation for the Advancement of Innovative Medicine (FAIM)

Health Lobby/Monica Miller

Two Executive Boulevard

Suffern, New York 10601

(877) 634-3246

http://www.faim.org and http://www.healthlobby.com

Institute for Health Freedom

1155 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 300

Washington, D.C. 20036

(202) 429-6610

http://www.ForHealthFreedom.org

Physicians Committe for Responsible Medicine (PCRM)

5100 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite 400

Washington, D.C. 20016

(202) 686-2210

http://www.pcrm.org

Together, we can continue to make a powerful difference.

Larry Trivieri, Jr.