Talk Tracks Ep. 17: The Healing Power of Consciousness with Deepak Chopra

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In this incredibly profound episode of the Talk Tracks, we bring together three visionary voices who are reshaping our understanding of health and human potential.

Dr.

Shamani Jan shares groundbreaking research from the Consciousness and Healing Initiative, exploring how energy and biofield science are transforming cancer care.

Musician and healer Madhu Adziani takes us inside his astonishing recovery from quadriplegia through his sound and energy practices.

And the legendary Deepak Chopra offers a profound lens on consciousness as the source of all experience and the key to true healing.

Together, their stories reveal not only the science, but the miracles of what becomes possible when we embrace the body, mind, spirit, and consciousness as one.

My name is Shamani Jan, and I am the founder and president of the Consciousness and Healing Initiative.

I'm also an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego, where I'm very active in the Centers for Integrative Health there at UCSD.

The Consciousness and Healing Initiative is a nonprofit organization comprised of a coalition of scientists, health practitioners, educators, innovators, and artists dedicated to advancing both scientific understanding and real-world application of consciousness and healing practices.

A lot of people want to know what brought me to the work.

And really, it was my own joy and sense of connection with vibration early on in my life as a singer.

I've always loved singing.

You know, I think singing is some of the best medicine we can have.

And I learned early on that it was beyond self-soothing for me.

It was a way for me to come home to myself.

And so I actually started out wanting to understand the effects of sound and vibration on health.

And so when I did my undergraduate work at Columbia University, I majored in neuroscience and behavior.

At that time in the 90s, neuroscience was really just coming online.

So when I told my Columbia professors I wanted to study music and sound and its effects on healing, believe it or not, back then, that was really far out.

And as I deepened my own self-study of it, you know, through the lens of neuroscience, which I was learning, but also just trying to understand that nature of vibration beyond even the physical, what changes in my brain, right?

But also what changes in my body and what can explain this shift that I feel if I chant mantra or even if I sing opera, any of that.

But it wasn't until I had my first Reiki session in my mid-20s that this area of energy medicine literally lit up for me.

I was laying on the table.

I expected nothing to happen, you know, or if it did, it was going to be placebo, which is something we can certainly talk about.

But when my friend put her hands on my body in silence, there was just music playing and all of that, but there was no talking going on.

I didn't have any particular struggle that I was aware of.

I just wanted to explore what it was.

She put her hands on my stomach.

And the wildest thing happened for me.

I actually felt the strong sense of pain, which typically when people have Reiki sessions, they don't.

But I did.

I was like, oh my God, it's so tight in my stomach.

What is happening?

And I had this flash of situations

and thought patterns where I was holding back my power.

That was sort of the message that I was getting.

And as I had that realization, it was almost sort of a flash, the energy moved.

So I realized that this.

these practices like Reiki, laying on of hands, pranic healing, they're just bringing us back to ourselves in a deeper way, a deeper sense of feeling about who we are and where we may be stuck and how we might help to clear that.

So the energy healers are no doubt able to sometimes see energy, feel energy, and help move stuck energy.

But the actual healing, the realization of what's happening, and even the body's response, That's all really up to the receiver.

And that's what every single healer in every tradition, indigenous, modern, has said.

Healing is happening within the person.

I'm just helping facilitate that process.

We've created the Consciousness and Healing Initiative primarily to support the community that's bringing forth the science and the practice of healing in really wonderful ways in healthcare, in clinics, in hospitals, but also in laboratories.

I started out really conducting my own research, randomized placebo-controlled trials in energy healing, or what we call biofield.

But what I realized was the advances that we need to make in science and even in the integration of these healing practices are not going to just come out of one laboratory.

We really needed a concerted effort among all of the scientists so that we could support the scientists because when you're studying things like consciousness and its effects on health, even down to the cellular level, it really challenges the mainstream medical and scientific model, which is still really steeped in a vantage point of materialism.

We've kind of gotten comfortable with the idea that my mind and my emotions might affect my immune system or my central nervous system, but something as ineffable as energy?

How does that work?

How could an energy healer actually facilitate healing down to the cellular level?

The beauty is this.

We do know that we have over 425 clinical trials in biofield healing energy healing approaches already.

And when we look at that data as a whole, we see using the best standards for systematic reviews that these energy healing practices are helpful for things like pain in a variety of different patients.

mental health, including anxiety and post-traumatic stress, but even changes in the body, changes in the physiology, including changes in our hormones, changes in our immune system.

Our bodies are also healing machines.

And so studying the process of cellutogenesis or health promotion, how does the body heal?

What do my emotions have to do with that?

What does my energy have to do with that?

And my consciousness have to do with that.

What's working?

How can I facilitate what's working in the body, mind, spirit?

And that's what energy healers do.

So it's really a much more holistic way to look at health and healing.

And in the West, we call that whole health or whole systems health.

My energy matters, my consciousness matters, my relationships matter, my environments matter, my habits matter, right?

My diet, all of it.

That's all whole systems.

And what the indigenous

communities knew, and this is the basis of Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, all of it, is that consciousness underlies all of it.

Everything is a reflection of consciousness, including our bodies, our emotions, and our energy.

It's all a reflection of consciousness.

So rather than trying to get to it from the physical,

they actually acknowledge that consciousness is the source and substance of all creation, and that by working to come into an awareness of our consciousness and the connection between all things in consciousness, we can foster that healing, we can foster that salutogenesis by recognizing that we're not separate.

Here's more on that idea from Deepak Chopra.

For decades, he has blended scientific research, Western medicine, and meditative practice to advance a holistic view of mind-body healing, making him one of today's most influential figures in exploring the connections between consciousness, health, and human potential.

He's also on the board of the Consciousness and Healing Initiative.

If we understand consciousness as fundamental, as the ground of all experience, spaceless, timeless, irreducible, beyond imagination, and incomprehensible, and yet the basis of all experiences, whether out of body, in body, telepathy, this experience we are having with me right now.

This is all happening outside of space-time.

Consciousness is outside space-time, if I may use that word, or independent of space-time, or beyond space-time.

And the theater of space-time and causalities in which we participate right now, including this conversation, is happening in consciousness.

And consciousness does not exist in space-time.

Space-time exists in consciousness.

And if you start with that premise that consciousness is the ontological primitive of the universe, then everything is easily explainable.

Ancient healing traditions always knew that consciousness was the source and substance of all creation, and energy was always a part of that understanding.

The exploration of energy, you know, sometimes called things like prana, chi, shakti, many different terms for different aspects of this energy, was really

acknowledging that we are living embodiments of consciousness.

We are vibrating elements of consciousness.

And so, therefore, a life energy flows through us and connects us.

And now, we'll turn to Madhu Adziani.

Madhu has an amazing story of recovery from quadriplegia, something I never thought possible.

And he did it through energy healing.

My name is Madhu Anziani, and I was born in Oakland, California.

When Madhu was just 23 years old, he suffered a life-altering injury, after which he was told by doctors there was no hope of a full recovery.

He would never walk again.

I was always drawn to music and spirituality.

I was fortunate enough to have two amazing grandmothers.

Madhu shares his story.

to show how through a lifetime of familial love, ancestral knowledge, and the embrace of energy and sound healing, he would go on to defy all expectations and do the impossible.

My other grandmother was in New York, and I just so happened to have more of a closer relationship to my grandmother, who was born in Puerto Rico, who lived close to us.

She opened me to

ideas such as reincarnation and

meditation from a very young age.

I loved the way she carried herself as a human, how charismatic she was,

how gracious she was, and how she engaged with people.

And there was something about her that I really admired.

We were also a very musical household, my father's side being from Puerto Rico, my mother's side being Jewish.

originating from Ukraine.

There was always music in our house.

My grandmother would play piano.

My father would play accordion.

And I learned piano at a young age and then went on to play guitar and then begin to develop my voice and sing.

I went to San Francisco State University to study jazz and world music for the guitar.

And at the same time, my spirituality was opening up.

The more I...

meditated

and

sought out different practices like energy healing, the more the world started to open up to me.

And I feel like I began tapping into the mysteries of existence in a more direct way.

And

what I feel was a significant turning point before my injury was when my grandmother, who taught me so much about spirituality, passed away.

And she always told me when I was very young, she said, when I take my big trip, she never said, when I die.

We have been together many lifetimes.

And so when the time came and she finally transitioned, I was very open to how she would communicate with me.

Would she communicate with me?

Would I get any direct signs?

And what I discovered was I did feel a presence, though, very subtle, and I could feel my life being guided in very subtle ways.

I still had to work to go deep within.

One of my classes in San Francisco State was a holistic health class.

A man from Japan came and demonstrated doing energy work with his hands without even touching people's bodies, but getting instant results.

And

this changed my life

because I knew in that moment that's something that I wanted to know more about.

And if I could learn how to do that, that's what I wanted to do.

And almost almost instantly, I found myself being guided towards learning about Reiki, which was very similar to what this man was demonstrating in front of the class.

And upon receiving a Reiki attunement, I began to feel energy in my hands.

And I would practice on myself and experience a great deal of emotional healing.

I would cry.

I would release things that I hoped that I was going to receive healing through talk therapy the couple times that I went to therapy, which was somewhat helpful, but it never really hit the core.

Reiki is a Japanese term, and it just means universal healing energy.

It's the healing energy that exists in the universe.

And there are many modalities in the world that tap into

this universal healing energy.

At its most basic level, the healing energy is emitted through the practitioner through the palms of their hands.

And if you look into the acupuncture meridians and how energy moves through the body, there are these gateways at the center of the palm.

And we can use our mind to direct energy to flow.

We can send or receive energy through the palms of the hands.

And so it requires just simply intending for

the

healing energy of the universe, meaning the energy that encourages wholeness and order and the proper functioning of living systems.

And so the energy is not directed from the practitioner.

The practitioner simply allows themselves to be a conduit and basically opens to this vast power, so much more than just this physical body.

And the body is a wonderful conduit to allow that vast consciousness

to

come through

and then be directed to a client who would typically be laying down.

Hands can be laid on the body for 10 minutes in one particular location, let's say the chest or the head or the belly, wherever the healing is needed.

And the hands can also just simply hover above the body because one of the things that we discover when we work with healing energy is that our body is just one part of our living system of energy.

We do have an energy field that is very much part of us and our body.

Although it's not physical, the space that's around our body is a part of our body's experience.

And so, when you put your hands within two, three feet of the physical body, there

is a lot that can happen.

And by doing Reiki, one can really experience the movement of energy and the transformation that takes place within the client.

without even having to touch a person's body, just holding that space and allowing for the universal energy to flow.

So it's a quite natural process that anybody can learn.

And I feel like everybody just needs to remember that this is something that human bodies can do and our mind can do, and then it happens quite elegantly.

And I developed a passion for that.

I really enjoyed seeing transformation happening so elegantly and so easefully in a way of just laying on of hands.

This space around the body that Madhu is speaking of is called the biofield.

Here's more from Dr.

Jan to go through the scientific perspective regarding what's going on.

There was this peaking interest and a bunch of scientists got together at the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s and they said, how can we explain what we're seeing with things like acupuncture and bioelectromagnetic healing devices?

and energy healers.

Like what's tying all this together?

How can we explain this scientifically?

How do we go about even studying it?

So they coined this term biofield.

And the way that they described it, I'll give you the scientific parlance, is a massless field, not necessarily electromagnetic, that guides the homeodynamic functioning of a living organism.

So what does that mean?

It's like the ray terms.

They're studying field of energy and information that can guide our healing.

And the reason they started using biofield, and this is really important because I know that we're curious about things like distant healing.

Does that work?

Energy drops off at a distance.

Our current definition of energy is that it follows an inverse square law, right?

And it drops off at a distance.

But they were starting to see this evidence behind things like distant healing and distant intentionality that someone could affect someone's physiology from a distance.

Well, how would you explain that with the term energy?

You can't.

So they started using this term biofield as a way of trying to almost expand a perspective.

Okay, and back to Maru.

It was within this period of life.

I was about

22 when this began really opening for me.

Then by the time I turned 23 is when I had my injury.

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Madhu is careful to always refer to this event in his life as his injury and never his accident because he does not believe that anything in life is an accident.

Everything happens for a reason.

I was set to graduate from college at that time, and

I always felt like I was somewhat clear audience.

I mean, musically, it's like I get melodies and ideas constantly.

And also, I've always felt like a subtle whisper of guidance can be clear if I quiet my mind enough.

And that guidance was kind of telling me the path that you think you're on is not actually what's going to happen.

You're not going to be graduating from college and writing your thesis and going on from there.

Something very different is going to happen for you.

And it was actually startling to feel this type of a message, but it came multiple times.

And what ended up happening was

on April 28th, 2009, I fell from two stories high and ended up shattering two vertebrae in my neck, C5 and C7.

This led to me being rushed to the hospital in need of an emergency spinal fusion and being hooked up to a respirator and My family being notified that this had happened.

I eventually woke up in the hospital to discover that I was quadriplegic and that I was unable to breathe or speak on my own.

And that began the most serious healing initiation of my life.

Madu would be in the hospital for two and a half months enduring incredibly trying physical and mental challenges, facing his new potential future.

of being severely handicapped for the rest of his life.

It was very challenging.

I can hardly even put into words what it's like to be disconnected to the body.

Every couple days or so, the doctors would ask me to move my feet and nothing would happen.

But there was the day that came when they asked me to move my foot and I was able to wiggle my big toe on my left foot.

And the doctors got very excited and called over more doctors and they said, look, he's doing it.

And they were trying to get me to move other parts, but that's all I had.

But that was the first miracle.

When recovering from such a severe injury, every body part counts and any return is a miracle.

But the work it takes to even wiggle a toe is exhausting and hard-fought.

I was dealing with being scared, thinking, my life is over.

Now I'm going to have to live like this in a wheelchair, completely dependent on other people and unable to function as a normal,

able-bodied human.

However, I also trusted the path that I was on leading up to this.

I was so passionate about healing.

I had my grandmother's teachings, the one who always taught me that

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

And learning the principles of Reiki was extremely helpful for me.

Because in order for the healing energy to flow, one must

agree to five principles in order for that energy to even flow at all, which are, just for today, I will not get angry.

I will not worry.

I will be grateful.

I will work hard, and I will be kind to others.

And these five principles anchored me in the mindset that I knew I needed to have.

If I was going to have any kind of a miracle that I was praying for, I had to adhere to that agreement each and every day.

Deepak Shopra explains that for energy healing to work, it requires us to tap into consciousness itself in order to truly heal.

Energy is a mental construct in the same time that the body is a mental construct.

There's no such thing as a physical body.

How do we know we have a physical body?

As sensations, perceptions, images, feelings, and thoughts.

How do we come up with the concept of energy?

Because we can move our body and we can modulate it.

So our body already is a field of biosensors and our motor organs are what actually regulate.

the sensory experience.

So your body is both a biosensor and a biomodulator and energy is a mental construct, and it's a useful mental construct, just like space or time or matter is, but none of them are real.

So healing only occurs when we go to the source of all experience, and that is beyond space-time, beyond energy, beyond matter.

Having said that, you know, in the local domain, energy healing like Reiki and all kinds of other remote healing, they make sense if you understand consciousness.

So energy is in the same category as space, time, matter in the yogic traditions.

So you have a physical body which is made of matter and energy.

You have a subtle body.

which is mind, intellect, and ego.

And then you have a causal body, which is outside of space-time, which is pure consciousness, a field of infinite possibilities, a field of self-regulation, a field of self-evolution, a field of non-local correlation.

Integrative medicine and Ayurveda can all be understood because they work through change of experience.

Experience at the level of mind, experience at the level of emotions, experience at the level of energy, experience at the level of matter,

and experience at the level of space-time.

But these are all modifications of pure consciousness, which is a field of infinite possibilities and which modifies itself as sensations, images, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions.

These are qualities of experience.

What do we experience?

Eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, breathing, social interactions, personal relationships, emotions.

And so the integrative approaches that I see right now, they take bits and pieces.

So somebody is talking about energy healing.

Somebody's talking about nutrition.

Somebody is talking about nutritional supplements.

Somebody somebody is talking about sleep, somebody is talking about dreams, somebody is talking about mind-body practices, Tai Chi, Qigong,

yoga.

Other people are talking just about mental healing.

They're all changing qualities of experience.

You change the quality of experience at a holistic level rather than a fragmented level.

It takes incredible resilience and focus to stay present in reaching consciousness.

And Madu didn't do it alone.

That took a great act of my will to not be worried about what was happening.

And I am so grateful that my family has always been so supportive and so healing.

I have an incredible family.

My father, my sister, my mother, all my cousins that showed up for me.

Maru explains that beyond the energy healing, the presence and support of his family was to recovery.

Matter of fact, my father and my sister both sought out my Reiki teacher.

So they could learn how to do Reiki and heal me while I was in the hospital.

And even when I was unconscious, before I woke up, they were performing Reiki on me and putting their hands on my body.

And that was actually the first memory that I had of waking up.

And I could feel this beautiful, warm energy.

And I remember feeling very happy.

And I opened my eyes and I saw the palms of my father's hands hovering above my face.

And it didn't occur to me till later, oh my goodness, my dad was doing Reiki on me.

When did he learn that?

And then he eventually told me what he and my sister did when they discovered that I was hurt.

Going into being in the hospital, I was already becoming aware of sound as a healing modality.

I actually...

wanted to write my thesis paper on sound healing.

However, my injury occurred six weeks before I was going to graduate and I had just barely begun researching.

But I guess I researched enough to know that sound and vibration can transform physical structure, including our bodies.

And sound can also help us get into the proper brain wave state to activate healing in the body.

Sound healing is a general term used to describe the healing power of sound and vibration, which falls under numerous different modalities and expressions.

So it's kind of the blanket term for a whole realm of working with sound, which could be drumming, it could be tuning forks, it could be with the voice.

My experience is that the voice is the number one sound healing instrument.

And the reason for that is because your voice is recognized by every single cell in your body.

When you create sound, your cells are responding to that.

And the water of your body is responding to that and moving with that sound.

And the cells of your body rejoice at the sound of your voice.

The cells of your body love the sound of your voice.

It puts a different spin on it.

And then the voice becomes a gift to the body, which it is, because it truly does activate all of the organs, all of the cells.

And with the right intention, it creates harmony, healing, order, coherence.

And also, going back to my grandmother, she taught me a special form of meditating that comes from the East.

It's an Indian form of meditating called japa, where one recites an elongated syllable.

And in this case, it was the sound of ah.

And I would hear my grandmother in the other room chanting ah as a young person.

And I was always like, what is she doing?

And I actually learned how to do this practice.

after she passed away and I inherited some of her things, including the cassette tape, which had the instructions for how to do this.

And so, knowing a bit about sound healing, I had a few tools, I had Reiki, and I had this ah sound.

And as soon as I realized that I could make some sound with my voice, even though it was almost like a whisper at first, I would make the sound ah,

and I would feel my body, even though I couldn't move it in the early stages, I could feel the vibration through my body.

And if I could allow my mind to direct healing light energy into my body and visualize the perfection throughout my body, coupled with the vibration, the feeling of the sound ah,

I knew that I was creating transformation at some level.

And so that became one of my practices.

making sound, making the ah sound.

And that is one form of sound healing that was with me.

But then there's the external sound, and that was also part of my healing environment, which was the music that was being played for me.

My father would put on some Jonathan Goldman recordings.

And then also, one of my cousins brought a C D that had a mantra, and it's called the Gayatri mantra.

It's a very powerful mantra that invokes healing power, among other things.

And it had a traditional recording being chanted 108 times, which is about a 45-minute recording.

And this is something that I listened to morning, midday, and night as it was instructed to receive the results.

And that was a big part of my journey as well to be receiving sacred sound, sacred syllables in the Sanskrit language.

And I've come to fully understand how Sanskrit is an energetic language and can open channels within the body that might be dormant otherwise.

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Madhu praises the care and support he received from the doctors and nurses while he was in the hospital as well.

He would not be where he is today without them.

However, there were parts of Madhu's journey that they cautioned optimism around.

I was receiving a lot of internal guidance.

I feel that there was

a wise

source, a wise spiritual energy with me that was kind of guiding me through the process and letting me know that I would heal, that I would walk out of the hospital, and that I would go on and teach others about energy healing and sound healing.

And that message became so clear that I remember I spoke it out loud once to one of the doctors and they said to me, Mr.

Anziani, I don't think you should be thinking these kind of thoughts.

You should just be focusing on being a good quadriplegic and learning how to live your life in this way.

And at that moment, I decided that I would keep my visions to myself and that I was just going to enjoy the process of healing miraculously and

smile.

And I wasn't interested in what the doctors thought at that point because I knew that this was happening for a reason and I trusted that.

And what ensued was every single day a different part of my body would turn on.

I would be able to wiggle my knees.

I'd be able to roll over in the bed.

I would learn how to use my voice again, which that was another thing that the doctors weren't sure of is if I would even have a speaking voice because of some some some way that the trach was in my throat.

And that very same day when the doctor expressed a doubt to my father that I would have a speaking voice, I woke up out of a nap and I said, hey, Dr.

Shah.

And he was shocked when he heard me speaking with a trach in my neck, which shouldn't have even allowed me to use my voice.

So that was one of the first miracles as well.

And I continuously

got my body to respond right when it was being asked of me.

The doctors would kind of challenge me to do a move or some type of

movement in my therapy.

And if I wasn't able to do it that day, the next day I was able to do it.

This integrative approach to recovery, using energy healing as well as modern Western medicine, was vital for Madhu's success.

And here's Deepak Chopra again.

Right now, the most fundamental science is regarded as quantum mechanics.

And

it's a model, it's a good model, but it doesn't explain reality.

You know, if you look at the principles of quantum mechanics, they apply to subatomic particles.

It doesn't explain anything.

So

what

needs to be understood is something called qualia mechanics.

Qualia is quality of experience.

So

just like a photon is a unit

of electromagnetic energy, An electron is a unit of electricity.

A photon is a unit of light.

So too is a qualia, a unit of experience, such as the color red, or the taste of strawberry, or the texture of our

rose

or the smell of garlic.

These are very fundamental experiences.

And actually,

if we understood that qualia mechanics is fundamental and quantum mechanics is a modeling of it, then integrative medicine can be understood.

Even in the integrative field right now, you know, people are specialists, which is fine.

You know, somebody is an herbologist, they know everything about herbs, somebody is energy medicine, and even within that, they are Reiki or this or that.

But a truly holistic approach would say, what do we experience in a 24-hour period?

And we pay attention to all these in one integrated manner.

And I've, in my life, incorporated this as 11 pillars of healing.

Number one, understanding that your body is not a physical entity, nor is it an energetic entity.

It's a field of consciousness.

That's number one.

It's a field of awareness.

And you, as awareness, by being self-aware, can modulate it because you have biosensors and biomotors.

Now I wear these other biosensors that only extend the range of my ability to sense my body is a field of awareness.

Also how the experience of time shapes our reality.

So most people are what I think having is time sickness.

They're running out of time.

And if you're running out of time, then then your heart rate speeds up,

your heart rate variability changes, your body gets stressed, you have inflammation, and you suddenly drop dead of a heart attack, you run out of time.

So how do you slow down the experience of time through transcendence?

When you're in samadhi, there's no time.

And when there's no time, there's perfect self-regulation.

So deep rest, sleep, mind-body coordination, emotional resilience, the experience we call love, regulating our biological rhythms and actually paying attention to the connection between your skin, your brain, and your gut, microbiome, getting rid of toxins in our life.

If you include all of these, then you have a new medicine.

And you can call it integrative medicine, but that is not a good idea.

because your body is already integrated.

So I would call it qualia medicine.

It's incredibly challenging to be in the spinal injury rehab unit, being amongst others who have similar injuries, and you're seeing people get better, and you're seeing a lot of people not get better.

And everybody has the same prayer, which is, I want to walk again.

And I wasn't even sure that I'd be able to do that.

But I'll tell you this.

While I was in the hospital, I remember that's when somebody showed me the movie The Secret,

which part of that movie, there is a a story of a person who had a spinal cord injury and then they wrote down, I will walk by Christmas.

And then they did.

And so I was just trusting everything that was happening.

And

my dad helped me put a pen in my hand and like strapped it to my hand because my hands weren't working.

And I remember writing, I will walk.

by July 1st.

Even though I didn't think it was going to be possible based on how my body was feeling and how it was performing in the physical therapy.

But the day came, June 30th, when all of a sudden I was able to stand up for long enough and the physical therapists put me in the parallel bars, stood me up and they said, are you ready to take a step?

And I started crying.

I never thought I would hear those words.

And when I composed myself, I said, yes, I am.

And I walked down the parallel bars and sat back down in the wheelchair and they turned it around.

They said, okay, do it again.

I did it again.

And they had me do this like three, four times.

And I remember one of the other physical therapists comes up to me and says, you're doing a great job.

How long have you been at it for?

And I said, this is my first time.

And she was like, what?

Oh, my God.

Like, I was...

I was known as the miracle patient.

They called me the miracle man,

the superman patient, because I was healing at an accelerated pace that they had never seen before.

By the time I left the hospital, I was able to stand up out of my wheelchair and walk out of the hospital, which is the vision that I had, told the doctors.

Just as Madhu had written down, he walked out of the hospital.

and returned home to continue the rest of his life.

It took about a full year for Madhu to get back to his fully functioning self, as able-bodied as he was before his injury, which is still a miraculously fast time to heal for an injury of this severity.

After one year, I was able to get on a plane and I went to Sedona, Arizona.

That was the first place that I chose to go to to pursue further healing.

I went to Sedona and that really proved to myself that

I was healing.

I was healed, and I would continue healing more.

Now he's a musician, a hypnotherapist, and teaches energy healing, the purpose he fought so hard to fulfill.

Dr.

Shamani Jan continues to do amazing work with the Consciousness and Healing Initiative.

Her focus on cancer studies and energy healing has resulted in potentially life-changing results.

Most likely, either we or someone we know has been affected by cancer.

Nearly 40% of Americans are expected to receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime.

That's obviously concerning, concerning, and we want to do everything we can to prevent that cancer.

But for those who have received the diagnosis, as we know, it's incredibly scary, right?

It's scary.

The treatments can be grueling at times, although we're making strides in cancer treatments with immunotherapies and other types of therapies that are a lot less grueling for patients.

There's a lot of hope for cancer patients now.

And there's an increased understanding that Things like energy healing and biofield healing aren't necessarily looked at as alternatives.

They should be and are often part of the cancer care journey.

One of the major things that cancer patients deal with, and this is the number one complaint among cancer patients and survivors, is fatigue.

Unfortunately, a third of people who receive cancer experience debilitating fatigue, both during cancer treatments and even after.

And sometimes that fatigue lasts up to 10 years or more post-treatment.

And it's a real drag.

Like it's literally literally life interfering for these patients.

I was pretty concerned about this and I was really wondering what we could do to potentially support these patients.

So I decided while I was at UC San Diego to conduct a randomized controlled trial examining whether a biofield healing approach could help cancer survivors who had this debilitating fatigue.

And so in our trial, we had breast cancer survivors who were anywhere from one month to 10 years post-treatment.

A lot of them had different kinds of cancer.

Some of them had chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, or some combination of all of them.

A few of them didn't do anything, but they survived fine, but they still had this fatigue.

So that's what they all really had in common.

I went to my healing teacher, Reverend Rosalind Bruyere, who I've learned everything about in terms of healing.

She's an incredible leading light in the healing field.

And I went to her and I said, Rosalind, what would you do for these patients?

And she said, oh, that's easy.

I do energy chelation.

And I said, what's that?

And she said, well, you place your hands on on the patient.

So she was very much a hands-on healer, still is.

She said, so you put your hands on the patient, you know, and you go through the entire body.

And what you're doing is really sinking through the body, getting all the way into the bone marrow, stimulating the bone marrow qi.

And when you do that, you're able to stimulate the bone marrow qi to restore the vital energy of the person and draw out the toxicities energetically.

So you're literally bringing out the toxicities that may be still underlying from cancer treatment or the trauma of diagnosis or or whatever it is.

And you're just drawing out those things that don't need to be there anymore.

So I said, okay, great.

I'll just go and tell UCSD this.

I'll just explain.

We're doing energy healing, you know, we're stimulating bone energy.

It's a story in itself to talk about what it was like to actually get that study approved through UCSD, but we did is the short answer.

We did a placebo-controlled trial, because of course they laughed, right, when we said all this.

And, you know, we basically went to them and said, look, patients are engaging in these therapies.

We know that you guys think it's all hocus pocus, but don't you think that these merit study?

If you think it's all hocus pocus, maybe we should do the research and determine whether it really is, right?

So we did this sham trial where we had mock healers who were trained in the same hand positions.

And, you know, I was really interested in placebo effects.

I really wanted to understand whether this could all be explained by what we call placebo, which is a lively topic in and of itself and how we understand it.

So what I did was I didn't just have actual varum healers who were trained in energy healing therapies, who had experience working with cancer.

And then we had the mock healers who were trained, had no experience with energy healing, didn't practice meditation or yoga.

They did exercise.

They were healthy.

And I got to tell you, because there's a big question about whether, what the heck does this kind of trial mean?

Can you control for energy?

If a healthy person's touching a non-healthy person, current's just going to flow from one person to the other.

You can't control for energy.

I mean, that's just basic physics.

And I get it, you know, and we're in this box of randomized placebo-controlled trial and I get it.

You know, this is kind of the lever of change that we need to be able to integrate these into healthcare.

So I understand the hypothesis that energy is just going to flow, right?

From the science point of view, we don't know.

But what we do know is we could potentially control for intention and experience.

So that's really what we were doing.

So when we had the mock healers or the Varum healers do these treatments, they did them on the survivors.

Survivors would come in.

So we had three groups, weightless control where people were just going through their usual whatever they did, and we were measuring their blood, and we were measuring their saliva, and we were taking questionnaires.

But for the women who were randomized to receive sessions, they were receiving either energy healing or what we called touch alone, but they didn't know which one.

They received eight sessions over a month.

Every time they came in, they met with the same practitioner.

Practitioner agreed to them.

They were in silence.

But I was so interested in placebo, it wasn't enough to just have a mock healing group.

After each session, I had each patient rate, what do you think you got?

Do you think you got energy healing or just touch?

And we told them, by the way, the truth, which is that both are said to have beneficial effects, because touch itself has beneficial effects.

So we tried to control for expectation right there.

But really, what do you think you got?

Energy healing or touch?

You know, did they have some sense of what they got?

How friendly did you feel like your practitioner was?

How connected did you feel like that healing session was?

How connected did you feel with your practitioner?

How much do you feel like the treatment is helping?

And so those were all placebo variables.

And in the end, what we found out was the energy healing was incredibly effective.

Patients who received the energy healing dropped down to fatigue levels of what you would expect for someone walking down the street.

The effect size was huge.

It wasn't just statistically significant.

It was a huge clinical effect size.

And The women who received mock healing, where they came and laid on a table and they were touched by a loving person, they reduced in fatigue too.

They reduced to about what we would expect for a breast cancer patient who's about to undergo chemotherapy.

So their fatigue didn't totally go away, but it reduced significantly, right?

But what blew me away was when I looked at the physiology.

Because in this case, what I found, and I honestly didn't believe it at first when I saw it, was it was only the women who received energy healing.

that showed a normalization of the rhythms of cortisol.

And the reason we picked that biomarker was because we already knew that women who suffered from fatigue and depression had disrupted rhythms of cortisol during the day.

So there was already a link of disruptions in cortisol with fatigue and depression.

And there's at least one study that's actually shown that those dysregulations in cortisol rhythm have also been linked to early death in breast cancer patients.

So we thought we should look at this.

And when I saw those results showing that the cortisol rhythms normalized only for those receiving energy healing, not the touch, not the mock healing, I was like, I need to understand whether this is, quote, real and really having to have anything to do with energy.

So I threw every single placebo variable and clinical variable I could into the analysis.

Could it be explained by body mass index?

That's related to cortisol rhythm.

Could it be explained by chemotherapy status?

That's related to cortisol rhythm.

Could it be related to belief in healing?

friendliness with the practitioner.

I threw all those variables into the analysis and I could not make the effect go away.

So I published that in the journal Cancer, which is widely read by oncologists and was happy to publish that research.

Then, I started learning about other research that other of my colleagues were doing with biofield healing therapies.

What we've discovered now with the latest research of biofield healing in cell and animal research is profound.

With the cell studies, we've now learned with different kinds of healing, with

external qigong, with

therapeutic touch, and with other types of energy healing practices that a healer can be in the same room with cells not know which cells they're directing energy to whether they're healthy cells or non-healthy cells when they send the healing to the cells and by the way the person doing the analysis doesn't know what kind of cells they are either that's why it's a double-blind

what we've seen in three different labs with different kinds of healers and different kinds of models of cancer, different kinds of cancer cells, is that healthy cells receiving energy healing won't decrease in number.

Sometimes they actually increase in number.

They proliferate, right?

They grow in response to this healing energy.

But if they are cancer cells, they actually decrease in number.

They stop growing.

And this has been shown across at least three different labs at this point with different skills.

The research with animals, which has come out from University of Connecticut and now ND Anderson Cancer Centers with mice injected with different kinds of cancer.

So here again, you've got healing practitioners compared to sham healing practitioners directing energy, some with mice that have cancer, some with mice that don't have cancer.

The energy healer does not know which mice have cancer and which ones don't.

The people doing the analysis don't know which of the mice had cancer and who don't.

So it's a double-blind placebo controlled kind of design.

In these studies now,

we have shown that energy healing compared to sham healing reduces the spread of cancer in the body of these mice, reduces what we call cancer metastasis.

And now they're drilling down to show changes in inflammatory cytokines, which are like neurotransmitters in the body, and changes in cell subsets.

even changes in protein kinase signaling, even changes in calcium flux between cells in response to energy healing.

So this biofield or energy healing is truly getting under the skin, shifting the bioelectric communication within the body, even in these cell and animal research models.

Can we measure the energy coming out of the healer?

Not quite yet, but we are able to measure things like the changes in EEG when the healer is doing healing.

So we're finally beginning to uncover how consciousness is shifting energy and how that energy is changing the signaling in the body.

And it's absolutely profound.

These results are incredibly promising and as evidenced by Madhu's healing journey, maybe a signal that our perspective on medicine and what medicine looks like is expanding.

When I tune into the possibilities for humanity, I'm so excited.

It's no accident that at a time where we have such suffering, global wars, false sense of separation, tearing people apart for no reason, there's this hunger for something more, right?

That's why the telepathy types has blown up the way it is.

There's no accident.

We are seeking to deeply understand the nature of who we truly are and how we can be in right relationship and in harmony.

And so what I envision as we wake up to our incredible healing power and our connection is that this work of biofield science is really going to open us up to the experience of connection in such a beautiful, palpable, energetic way that this hidden dimension, this hidden dimension of energy, this hidden dimension of connection through energy becomes so strong between us that we'll literally be able to provide peace.

and create the heaven on earth that we seek because we'll be able to create heaven on earth within us.

And that's really our charge as a humanity.

And biofield science, I think, is really helping lead us there to really uncover the beauty of who we truly are and the beauty of our human connection.

And so this is what I see.

You know, I see this very clearly.

There is a hunger for this.

We have to create the demand for it.

We have to stand in the truth of our demand.

that this is this is where we're going.

This is how we want to evolve.

And we really want to come into the joy of interconnection.

And I'm really excited for those moments.

For his closing thoughts on consciousness and healing, Deepak Shopra said this about the miracle of being alive, a miracle that Madhu lives every single day.

Remember, there are 2 trillion galaxies, 706 trillion stars, and today we are told 60 billion of habitable planets, according to...

biosphere estimations in the Milky Way galaxy.

Like you and I see this planet, 60 billion in the Milky Milky Way galaxy, multiply that by 2 trillion, then our planet is not even one grain of sand in all the beaches and all the deserts of this world.

Go to a beach and try and hold on to one grain of sand, the next breeze will make it drift away and the beach won't notice that one grain of sand disappeared.

And the only response to that is reverence.

And we don't have reverence anymore.

The fact is the most people I see in the Western world are not shocked that they exist or that this is happening.

I mean

the most extraordinary thing that's happening.

You can't explain it, right?

Oh, you come up with Big Bang and all these mental constructs based on faulty observations and you create these constructs and oh, this is science.

or this is the best philosophy or this is the religious doctrine.

All of it is nonsense.

You should be totally astonished, bamboozled, shocked, awed,

and surprised that you exist.

That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks, but new episodes will now be released every other Sunday.

So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones, that knit together our reality.

Please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind.

Thank you to my amazing collaborators.

Original Music was created by Elizabeth P.W., Original Logo and Cover Art by Ben Kendor Design, the audio mix and finishing by Sarah Ma, our amazing podcast coordinator, Jill Pachesnik, the Telepathy Tapes Coordinator and my right hand, Catherine Ellis, and I'm Kai Dickens, your writer, creator, and host.

Thank you again for joining us.