Introduction
Medicine and psychotherapy have changed radically in the last century. A major shift has been in the length of time healing processes are expected to take. Average hospital stays for some procedures are a third of the length they were twenty years ago. Many procedures that used to involve prolonged hospital visits are now done on an outpatient basis. New noninvasive surgical techniques damage the body much less than the radical surgeries of old.
In the field of alternative medicine, there are therapies that promise equally dramatic results. What are some of these, how do they work, and when do you use them? This seminar explores some of the most leading-edge applications, their origins, and possible causes for their effectivness. It goes into detail about one such therapy, Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT, and provides participants with some hands-on experience and simple summary techniques that they can take away with them.
Case History
A part time employee walked into my office one recent morning, before the start of a busy work day. Her name was Anabelle. Tall, slender, well-dressed and poised, with commanding blue eyes and a sharp intelligence, Anabelle was a force to be reckoned with.
Except for that morning… The moment I opened the office door, Anabelle appeared to be in such obvious distress that it was clear that she was falling to pieces, emotionally. Instead of going to a desk, I took her elbow and guided her to a chair in the waiting room, where, without much prompting, she poured out her sad story.
Her step father, Jack, had abused her, verbally and physically, from the age of around seven. She ran away from home at the age of fifteen, and rarely visited her parents after that. The last time Jack had hit her was on one of those visits. At that time, she was twenty-one years old. She never went back to the house; it had now been over fifteen years since the last incident.
In the previous day's mail, she had received an embossed formal invitation to a family reunion. It had been sent to her by her mother, who was still married to Jack, and who was arranging the get-together. Anabelle knew that Jack would be there.
"How could my mother send me this invitation, knowing I'd have to see him again?" she wailed. That slip of paper summarized the whole nightmare of abuse for Anabelle&emdash;plus what she saw as her mother's condoning Jack's behavior.
I asked her if I could perform an energy intervention with her that might make her feel better. She nodded wordlessly. I then asked her to remember the moment she had opened the envelope and read the invitation, and feel where in her body the sensation of distress was most concentrated.
She responded, "My tummy" and pointed at her solar plexus. I then asked her to rate her distress, as she thought again about the scene, on a scale of one to ten, with one being calm, and ten being as upset as she could possibly be. "I'm a ten!" she said through tight lips, with flushed cheeks, her voice rising emphatically.
I performed a very fast and basic emotional energy release technique on her, one used by hundreds of therapists for many years. The entire process took less than two minutes. "Now think back on the moment you opened the envelope," I asked her. "Remember the scene. Feel your tummy. Then tell me how upset you feel, on a scale of one to ten."
"Zero." She shrugged, and looked at me with calm puzzlement. Then she added, "It was just a scrap of paper, after all."
I have seen the same results from EFT and other advanced techniques time and time again. EFT is one of a number of methods that have recently been developed, that promise to shorten the time taken to heal psychological trauma dramatically.
Surveying the Cures of the Future
In the last couple of years, I've edited several new anthologies including Healing the Heart of the World and Healing Our Planet, Healing Our Selves. Many distinguished authors have contributed chapters to these books, including Dean Ornish, Andrew Weil, Bernie Siegel, Larry Dossey, Joan Borysenko, Caroline Myss, John Gray, Deepak Chopra, Neale Donald Walsch, Gay Hendricks, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and others. In these books I survey the field of healing today, with particular emphasis on prayer, meditation, and "Soul Medicine," a collection of safe, non-invasive therapies that is building up a sound theoretical framework, and a huge experimental database, that demonstrates its efficacy. I present summaries of some of these new techniques, especially ones that produce dramatic results in a short period of time. Then, to soothing music, I do a group guided meditation to produce a quiet atmosphere.
I then move on to review some of the studies of Soul Medicine that show great promise. I read some excerpts from studies, and show slides of some of the mechanisms covered by these experiments, including the activation of Immediate Early Genes (IEGs), which turn on in as little as two seconds of us having certain thoughts and feelings, and in turn activate or deactivate other genes associated with the immune system. I also describe the semiconductive properties, including the transmission of electrical impulses, of the connective tissue system, and how this allows our trillion-celled body to communicate at many times the speed of neural signalling.
Integrating Alternative and Conventional Treatments
How do energy healing and other modalities work with technological medicine? I talk about some of the conditions for which they are ideally suited, and also about conditions for which a doctor's advice should always be sought - and how to tell the difference.
I talk about chronic mental and physical patterns, and offer some suggestions for getting unstuck. I also talk about some of the directions that health care treatment will go in the next twenty years, and trends that I see occurring as some of these advanced cures enter the mainstream treatment environment. I end with another quiet time, in which I read inspiring sayings from some of the great healers from Paracelsus to the present.