Speaking energy goes way beyond explaining physical phenomena using what science has discovered about the subtle energies. Speaking energy entails shifting how you understand yourself to be constructed and learning how to participate more consciously in the energetic exchanges within and around you. Practicing energy medicine similarly goes well beyond learning techniques or studying modalities. It involves activating your ability to speak the language of energy and addressing your body, mind, and spirit in their own native idiom.
However, using allopathic medicine or energy medicine does not need to be an either/or proposition when you are trying to address your health. There are times when allopathic medicine is a godsend, and times when energy medicine is a more effective mode of communication. Often, the two can complement each other.
My friend with the rare cancer got treated medically for cancer and that threat to his life was neutralized. But if he had been seen by his medical team as a web of meaningful exchanges that had fallen out of balance, creating cells that no longer followed healthy replication patterns, his practitioners might have addressed both the cellular issues and the imbalance in his web of meaning. He might have learned self-care tools that no practitioner can provide day in and day out. He might have found practices that balanced his body’s chemistry from within. And he might have found true recovery and wellness, rather than cancer remission among his life-hampering imbalance.
A BROADER PERSPECTIVE ON HEALING
What does it mean to transcend the limitations of allopathic medicine and our shared cultural beliefs about healing? Too often when we are looking for new approaches, we turn to complementary medicine but bring our conventional medicine mindset to the task. We want the same old model of diagnosing problems, receiving treatment, and then taking a substance to medicate. We want approaches that are scientifically validated. How can you transcend these cultural expectations and learn to think differently in order to harness the true potential of energy healing?
Reclaim Subjectivity
The scientific mindset calls for objectivity and discourages subjectivity. This means that all the information that arises within you — your inner knowing, your experiential insights, your personal experience, the personal storyline in which the health challenge developed — is considered mostly irrelevant.
A young doctor finishing up her residency recently told me that she is not able to use her intuition in her job. She is expected to practice evidence-based medicine, which means she must cite studies that validate her medical choices. This might be a good idea if studies were funded to research all kinds of people and if these studies were able to account for the multiple dimensions of how disease and illness play out. But that isn’t what happens.
By asking doctors to turn off their intuition and rely on evidence, I believe the medical profession is hampering the way the mind is designed to work: Right-brain intuition guides our journey, and left-brain logic works out the details of the itinerary. What would happen to medical care if doctors were encouraged to use both evidence and intuition to guide their choices, and they could use both medical and alternative remedies as needed?
Validate Your Authority to Determine Your Own Well-being
Related to the notion of subjectivity is the question of who has the authority to decide what you should do in order to heal — or even what healing would look like for you. In our culture, doctors are often seen as allknowing priests, and friends and family tell us not to question that. Physicians’ input can be valuable, but many of them don’t distinguish well between what they know and don’t know. Missing from their knowledge base is what your individual soul is trying to enact, how your lifestyle and beliefs affect your health, and how your energies — which underlie the chemical behaviors of your body — flow and interact.
The authority we give doctors and scientists to define our individual and collective truth is sometimes taken to an extreme. The other day I read an article with the teaser: “Scientists have proven the existence of past lives.” The need to have something proven by science that has been explored and validated as a truth within many spiritual traditions is almost a caricature of our culture’s obsession with scientific “proof.” How can we trust ourselves to find our own path to healing when people around us are trained to ask: Can that be proven scientifically? Has that been validated with medical tests? Is that what your doctor thinks?
In this book, I use subjective information to guide the discussion as much as possible: I prefer using anecdotes that illuminate concepts and understandings rather than offering scientific studies to prove my points. This is a nonscientific form of discourse. You might ask yourself whether it bothers you to not have science repeatedly cited as an authority. Can what I am saying be true if I don’t cite some study that proves it? I am not saying science is always wrong, nor am I rejecting science. Instead, I think focusing solely on science deflects us from understanding the communications of our bodies and minds. It undermines our confidence in our ability to participate in our own healing and it curtails other ways of knowing.
Be Willing to Be an Exception to the Rule
Allopathic medicine is based on studies that prove statistically that something is true or effective. A medication or treatment must work for a given percentage of people studied before it is approved for use, though sometimes the demonstrated effectiveness of a medication is not much greater than its placebo effect! There are good reasons for insisting a medication work for many, but this shuts out usages that might help individuals. Herbalists believe individualized potions are more effective than just giving the same generic treatment to everyone with the same complaint.
Years ago, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, I had a client who told me he had healed his AIDS. He had been tested (a number of times) as HIV positive, and then he caught pneumonia, which bumped his diagnosis to active AIDS. After he recovered from the pneumonia, he worked on his health using spiritual and nutritional approaches, and after eight years, he was consistently testing HIV negative. I was amazed and excited to hear his story. I asked: “What do your doctors say? Have you shared your story with others?” The belief at that time was that AIDS could not be survived, much less healed.
He said he was choosing to keep his story private, explaining, “When I tell people, they either don’t believe me or they believe I am in denial and will soon die. I have chosen not to live with their beliefs because that will overwhelm my own truth. So although I do occasionally get retested, I do not choose to live as an AIDS patient.”
This man was an exception, and life is full of splendid, amazing exceptions from whom we have much to learn. What he taught me was not to discount individual solutions or exceptions to the rule. I also learned to be more aware of the power of social beliefs in healing.
If everyone around you believes you can’t heal, it takes tremendous self-confidence and precious resources to break through that field of expectation to find your own path and truth, to become the exception to the rule.
Sue was a nurse who came to see me at the strong request of her partner, who believed in complementary medicine. Sue did not. But since she was scheduled to undergo a procedure the next day to have her thyroid irradiated (which essentially kills the nonfunctioning thyroid so they can balance your thyroid function through pills), she decided to give energy healing a try. I agreed to see her on the condition that, afterward, she have her thyroid blood levels retested before she went ahead with the planned medical procedure.
She agreed. When I tuned in to her throat energetically, I found that her thyroid had basically switched off. I used the language of energy to dialogue with her thyroid and move the switches to the on position. I could see the glandular tissue reanimate and return to normal functioning. I could hear it, the way you hear a refrigerator start up once you change the fuse that has blown a circuit.
She