Research
Healing Energies by David Maginley A man who thought a great deal, Said "Although pain isn't real, When I sit on a pin and it punctures my skin I dislike what I fancy I feel." What is pain? What is health? Is there a growing agreement between healing as experienced in the spiritual and medical fields? The research is extensive in this fascinating and controversial realm. Through research, in fact, the scientists of our day are climbing to the mountain top, to behold with new eyes what the mystics have seen all along. I'd like to invite you to also climb to the mountain top to explore the realms of scientific research and spiritual healing. Perhaps you, too, will behold the exciting vision of who you are with new eyes. Spiritual healing has been a fundamental aspect of all world religions. It is a universal human potential which has found renewed interest not in only in the religious field, but the medical as well. Reiki, Qi Gong, Reflexology, Acupuncture, and Therapeutic Touch are all expressions of the healing nature of life energy. It is Therapeutic Touch that has found most acceptance in the medical field, not so much because it is so effective, but because it is a nursing modality, developed by Dr. Deloris Kreiger and Dora Kunz in 1975. Krieger was a professor of Nursing in New York, and through her pioneering efforts has influenced the path of nurse healing on thousands of hospitals throughout the world. In the medical arena, energy healing must stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Even under this pressure, it is exciting to see developments. In order to grasp the scientific basis of energy medicine, we have to shift our understanding of reality itself. Therapeutic touch (TT) is the most extensively researched complimentary healing modality to date. Because it is a nursing technique, developed by nurses for nurses, and because it is non-invasive, thereby not needing the permission or consultation of attending physicians, it has become the most widely used energy treatment in the world. TT is part of standard training and medical care in England, and most parts of Europe. While commonly used, it is not commonly understood. Medicine's perspective of human beings has shifted in the last century. Most of western medicine is based on the concept that human beings are bio-mechanisms, that is, we are complex machines. This an outgrowth of the Newtonian model of physics that sees the world as a grand clockwork. Healing in this model is a bio-mechanical intervention. The most simplistic of these, while not being simple, is surgery. You go in and take out the bad stuff, (the tumor or a blockage in the artery). This is not an easy procedure, but it is simplistic in how it takes a carpentry approach. We've become very sophisticated wherein we can replace kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. We're making replacement organs, lens implants, heart valves, Dacron grafts. Quite a bevy of spare parts at our disposal. But this is a rough, invasive approach. Spiritual healing operates on an energetic model, one that addresses consciousness, before mechanics. Consciousness itself is a spiritual energy. It pervades all the cells of the body. There are different levels of consciousness, so we have to distinguish them. We have an inherent cellular consciousness that is particular to the job it is to do within the organ - a nerve cell, a fat cell, a muscle cell, a liver cell. Going up, we have an organ consciousness, specific to each organ. While a kidney cell is relatively stupid or limited, the organ consciousness can orchestrate the subroutines within the body, not just within the organ. It has the ability to network, if you will, with the body. The heart is the organ credited most powerfully with consciousness, and indeed research seems to show it's real. The Institute of Heart Math is investigating the connection between the heart and the brain, and they've discovered the heart is in fact a separate seat of consciousness. There is an acoustic link between the heart and the brain, standing acoustical waves, electrical pathways strengthened during meditation. There really is an influence of the heart on the immune functioning, and much of this has to do with our centering on the heart and our ability to express love. An interesting application of this awareness can be found at Columbia University in New York. Dr. Menoit Oz allows Therapeutic Touch practitioners to be present in heart transplants, in the OR, and before hand with patients. They address the donor heart as if it had its own specific level of consciousness, preparing it for it's new home, and they found in such cased the risk of rejection is significantly reduced, as is the need for immunosuppressant drugs. Love itself is the most powerful energy of consciousness, and carries with it its own intelligence and awareness of what healing needs to be done. If we use this bio-informational model, as opposed to a bio-mechanical model of the body, we can see disease as information distortion. Just as we use a computer program to correct misinformation generated by a virus on a hard drive, energy healing of illness may be purging incorrect bio-information from the body and replacing it with balanced or correct information. Homeopathy may be an example of this, wherein a particular natural substance is purified and diluted, then introduced to the body. It may be a process of removing the gross molecular aspects and leaving only the information. Could TT be a form of introducing bio-information, an energetic restructuring of the body's life energy field? There's always been allot of controversy on how it works, but the basic teaching is that its a life energy transfer, like a battery getting a boost. It encourages healing by reducing anxiety and stress, which inhibits the healing process. In addition to just transferring this life energy, you may be increasing Chi energy. Remember that this is a life force all around us. In the Christian tradition, the apostle Paul expressed to the Romans in the temple courtyard of their gods, in Acts 17:24-28 "The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything. He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,' as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.' This is energy that is not simply static, but restorative, intelligent, even creative and loving. "God is Love", instructs Jesus. And its interesting to note that the effectiveness of a TT treatment depends more on the compassionate intent of the practitioner than their beliefs, or even the beliefs of the patient receiving treatment. Maxwell Cade in England conducted a fascinating study of the relationship between healer and patient using a device called the Mind Mirror, doing non contact TT. The mind mirror does a real-time E.G. power spectra analysis. Lets say someone is in an Alpha brain wave in meditation or healing, and the machine shows right and left hemisphere brain waves simultaneously. Cade found those in a healing meditation produce a brain wave never before seen in human beings before. He called it a State 5 pattern (waves are usually Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta). It wasn't just one peak of brain wave, but three peaks, not only in the Alpha Theta range, but one in the very slow Delta range and one in the rapid Beta range. This triple curve has to date been found only to be dominant in master yogis and those who are more continuously in deep meditation (the kind where they seem able to endure extreme pain). What's so interesting is that when the healer and patient are in the process of TT, their brain wave rhythms sync up, a resonance also of heart rate, synaptic rhythm, body rhythms, and breathing. One of the areas of the synchronization is in the range of 7.8 cycles per second, which interestingly enough is the dominant resonance frequency of the Earth's magnetic field. It is the Schumann resonance. The Earth's field is not fixed, it is a background magnetic wave, and we are tied into this magnetic field. It's a synchronizing signal to all life on Earth that influences hibernation cycles, migration navigation, plant growth... in fact, NASA found they had to incorporate this resonance into the equipment on the Space Shuttle to promote the health and well being of the astronauts while they were outside the magnetic field generated from the ionosphere to ground level. In healing, a frequency window opens between a healer and patient, a Schumann resonance. When both are oscillating their brain waves around the 7.8 cycles per second there is maximal transfer of energy. Is the healer then acting as a conduit for this subtle energy? Life force energy itself has it's own frequency characteristics. These could ride on the 7.8 cycle carrier wave as higher harmonics which carry information, bio-information, which stimulated the body's natural healing ability. Research clearly shows that TT practitioners are able to raise hemoglobin levels in their patients. This is to the amazement of oncologists who have their patients on bone marrow suppressive chemotherapy agents and hemoglobin levels keep rising instead of dropping as they would expect. There's quite a bit of TT research going on in Canadian hospitals to raise hemoglobin levels for bone marrow transplant patients. For example, in Effects of therapeutic touch on biochemical and mood indicators in women, Lafreniere-KD; Mutus-B; Cameron-S; Tannous-M; Giannotti-M; Abu-Zahra-H; Laukkanen-E, in the Journal-of-Alternative-and-Complementary-Medicine (J-ALTERN-COMPLEMENT-MED) 1999 Aug; 5(4): 367-70 (12 ref), the authors note: "Previous research has shown therapeutic touch (TT) to be effective in reducing anxiety and discomfort and promoting relaxation. The present investigation experimentally evaluated the effects of TT on biochemical indicators and moods in a sample of 41 healthy female volunteers. Participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group who received TT or to a control group who did not receive TT. Pretest and posttest urine samples were collected, and personality and mood inventories were administered across three consecutive monthly sessions. Results indicated that mood disturbance in the experimental group decreased significantly over the course of the three sessions, while the control group increased in mood disturbance over time. Specifically, experimental group participants showed significant reductions in tension, confusion, and anxiety and a significant increase in vigor across sessions. Analyses of the biochemical data indicated that TT produced a significant decrease in levels of nitric oxide in the experimental group by the third TT session. The results of the present investigation have important implications for reducing symptom distress in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy." One of the ways TT might to this is in the transfer of energy to the kidneys, which filter poisons such as nitric oxide. The kidney produces a hormone called arithropoetin, EPO, that has now been created with recombinant DNA technology. The healing energy seems to stimulate EPO, which stimulates kidney filtration and hemoglobin production. Now hemoglobin, which carries oxygen to the body, has an iron atom at it's centre. Iron has magnetic properties. If the life force is a subtle magnetic energy, it may increase the life force carrying capacity of the blood, like holding a magnetic charge. A variety of studies confirmed healing energy has similar qualities as high frequency magnetic fields. It stimulated plant growth, accelerate enzyme activity. Both magnetic fields and healing energy changed the surface tension of water, stimulating hydrogen bonding. The membrane is measured with infrared spectroscopy. One can also take saturated copper chloride crystals and add it to water, and the color of the water will change when it is treated by a healer or intense magnetic fields. Oddly, when we measure magnetic fields during the experiments, we detect nothing. The force needed to create these effects has to be 5000-10,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. This is likely due to the fact that these instruments are designed in and the observations made from the positive side of the space/time curve. Now healing energy also has this negative entropy property. Enzymes were damages with ultraviolet light, the DNA helixes would begin to unwind. Yet healing energy resulted in the helixes recoiling and then accelerating the enzyme production rate and emitting bioluminescence in the infrared range. DNA itself seems to be an information emitter and receiver, using light to communicate information to other helical coils and other cells. We really are beings of light! Healing energy seems to have this inherent biological wisdom. It knows what to do. It preferentially stimulates certain enzymes while ignoring or inhibiting others, always to the effect of stimulating the cell to carry out repairs and increase metabolism. So this is really pure life energy that stimulates enzyme repair. As a healer, you also create ripple effects that affect the local environment. One of the things the Heart Math institute looked at were distinct difference in heart rate variability during different emotional states. Those in a discordant agitated state of mind produces an erratic signal. Those who maintain compassion in their heart centre produced a sinusoidal frequency distribution that is the same mathematical proportion as Phi, or the golden mean proportion ratio, which is an interesting proportionality constant in Renaissance architecture, the DNA helix, the most stable structures of nature. They also found that when individuals held this love energy in meditation, they could affect other field rhythms. Daniel Winter, a researcher with Heart Math, actually hooked up a tree outside the lab to a physiograph and was motoring the field rhythms. Trees seem to act as an antenna for the local geomagnetic rhythms of the earth as well. The person in the meditative healing state of unconditional love would enter this sinusoidal heart rhythm, and the tree outside would also enter the same rhythm. There was an effect at a distance, a harmony. The healer working with TT may actually generate a re-patterning of geometric and etheric fields around them. When healers work in teams, the effects are exponential, not additive. Group meditation classes in South Africa synchronized with a dramatic drop in crime rate and the rate rose again when the conferences were over. Larry Dossey has looked at group prayer, with patients who had heart attacks. The groups that were prayed for had fewer complications in need for respirators , medications, pulmonary edema... there was a dramatic difference between the prayed for group and the control group. This was a double blind experiment where the pray-ers did not know the condition or location of the people, only their names, and the patients did not know they were part of the experiment, and the doctors is not know who was in what group. Prayer as an act of conscious intention is an example of non local mind at work. For more information on medical studies and Therapeutic Touch, access these online databases and input as your search criteria "Therapeutic Touch". BioMedNet (http://research.bmn.com) will give you access to multiple databases. A search on MedLine will yield 317 studies. 329 studies on Therapeutic Touch can be accessed in PubMed's online database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=&DB=PubMed), and over 800 studies are available through the CINAHL database from 1982 to 2000. Also, visit ISSSEEM, The International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine for the latest research in the area of energy medicine by the world's leading scientists. Its an exciting and wondrous vision we are beholding, a return to the mountain top to realize what was within all along. David Maginley is a Lutheran minister serving in Lower Sackville at Peace Lutheran Church, where he runs a Therapeutic Touch clinic monthly, and incorporates it in the worship experience. David is also the chaplain for the Queen Elizabeth Health Sciences Center in Halifax, on the hematology/oncology and bone marrow transplant unit.
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