S2E8: Energy Healing Part 1: Consciousness at Work in the Body

Hi everyone, this is Kai Dickens and you're listening to the Telepathy Tapes podcast.

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Last week, we explored whether psychedelics could help us tap into a larger field of consciousness.

Because if they're one of the oldest bridges humans have to tap into a larger field, it invites another question.

Does consciousness or the larger information field only engage with our mind, or can it engage with our physical bodies too?

Energy healing is where the mysteries of these unseen forces leave the mind and enter the body, where intention meets biology and telepathy meets physiology.

It's one of the oldest practices humans have ever created, found in cultures across the world long before modern medicine existed.

And today, it's resurfacing through research, data, and lived experiences that challenge the very foundation of Western science.

And to begin, we start with someone who never believed in any of this, a Cambridge-trained material scientist who had his worldview altered by a single experience.

I was happily working as a material scientist, so I came to study from China with a PhD in material science from Cambridge University, the metals, ceramics, polymers, advanced semiconductors.

This is Dr. Simon Duan, founder and CEO of Metacomputics Labs.
He studied material science, so he trusted matter and measurement and nothing really beyond it, until something happened in Dr.

Duan's life that defied his understanding of the world and the logic of material science.

That's why I go beyond physics and get into the consciousness study because I realize material science cannot really explain what I have experienced, what I have witnessed.

The experience that would change the course of Simon's career happened in the early 2000s while traveling in China when he was struck by a horribly painful toothache back near his wisdom teeth.

My wisdom tooth start to become very painful. It's not pleasant.
So I consulted the conventional dentist.

I was told I actually need a fairly significant operation and to get the general anesthetic to take it out. So then a friend of mine said, oh, why don't you go to see this dentist?

The dentist his friend recommended was not a traditional dentist. It was someone who worked with energy and not traditional dental tools and didn't even use things like general anesthesia.

I was skeptical. I went to his place, he tapped my cheek and

he just took the mount. Wait, so he just took out your teeth? Like, what do you mean? With what? With a power of tweezers.
Yeah.

No anesthetic, no anesthesias, and it's no medication. So it takes less than a minute, all the procedure.
So it's very straightforward.

Okay, so the tooth came straight out with tweezers, but was it painful? It wasn't painful. Then we went to lunch together.
Yeah, during the lunch, I asked him, what the hell did you do to me?

What actually happened? He said,

I have an incantation it's like a spell so like a mantra incantations or mantras are words or phrases repeated to channel energies or to achieve an altered state of consciousness he said he recited this incantation silently which allowed him to make the tooths loosen then he can took them out effortlessly simon told me that the dentist can even perform very complicated extractions where a broken off tooth leaves roots impacted inside a patient's gums Roots are left in the gum.

He managed to just get those roots pop out.

So, how can a mantra physically loosen a tooth? Is it a miracle? Or is this dentist on the outskirts of Beijing working with a technology that has been obscured in most of the modern world?

To understand this, we need to look at qigong, an ancient system of Chinese healing and spiritual practice.

And qigong sits at the heart of many branches of traditional Chinese medicine and is deeply connected to Taoism, an Eastern belief system that sees the Tao as the underlying life force that moves through everything.

In these traditions, a Qigong healer is trained to align with that universal energy.

Through breath and focus and intention, the healer actually becomes a conduit for qi, this natural force or energy that brings the body into balance.

And from that perspective, a focused mantra isn't magic, it's a way of directing qi toward an area that is blocked or out of harmony, perhaps even towards a stubborn wisdom tooth.

Qi Gong has many many levels. To practice Qigong is to cultivate the energy, unity between your inner energy and outer cosmic energy, your body and the cosmos.

Qigong as a way of enhance those energies, enhance those connections, promoting the balances of energies. So that's the traditional Chinese method.
It has been used for thousands of years.

Traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM, is the contemporary name for interconnected practices of medicine, spirituality, and philosophy originating in China over 5,000 years ago.

Forms of traditional Chinese medicine are practiced worldwide today in both the East and the West and things you've probably heard of like Qigong, acupuncture, Tai Chi, and herbal medicine.

However, today, these forms are not always practiced with the same psychic and spiritual dimensions that were once fundamental to ancient Chinese healers.

In traditional Chinese healthcare, the top doctors or the famous Chinese medicine men are psychic people. They are able to use their psychic power to see through the body, see the organ.

They can use their mind vision to exam patients. Simon is saying something that made me have to rewind a few times.

That in traditional Chinese medicine, the top doctors are often psychic and can use their psychic powers to see through the body and to see organs and bones.

So how did they discover different herbs have a medicine property? It's because the psychic people actually can communicate with different herbs.

And just like we explored in episode six about plant communication, Simon said that these top psychic doctors in China could communicate with different herbs and plants to decipher their medicinal properties.

So by communicating with different herbs, they can discover the energy property of this particular herb.

The property of certain herbs used in Chinese medicine is actually discovered by psychic people by communicating with the plant.

So, traditionally, historically, psy was very much an applied technology in the culture of China.

Simon just referred to psi, which is a term for mental phenomena that cannot yet be explained, including things like telepathy, clairvoyance, and other experiences, suggesting that consciousness may extend beyond the brain.

And Dr. Duan just said that historically, psy was an applied technology in the culture of China, especially in medicine.

But as often happens with the stuff all over the world, political and cultural upheavals in China in the mid-20th century pushed many traditional healing practices into the shadows.

Some were suppressed, and others were just reshaped to fit Western medical models. And as a result, the subtle, energetic methods Dr.

Duan described as psychology largely disappeared from the public view, even though the psychic or energetic element to their medicine had been used successfully for thousands of years.

Chinese intellectuals become sort of disillusioned about Chinese culture. They think the reason China is so weak is because China lacks science and technology.

Suppression started anything non-scientific. Many Chinese leaders became convinced that the nation's strength depended on embracing modern science.

And Simon said that anything that did not look scientific, including ancient healing practices, was pushed aside.

During Cultural Revolution, traditional Chinese culture was actually destroyed the most. After Mao died in 1976,

things started to loosen up. So, Mao Zedong, who led China for almost 30 years, imposed strict limits on many of the traditional practices.

But when he died in the late 1970s, those restrictions eased and parts of Chinese ancient medical heritage began to return.

And this renewed interest in Qigong helped bring back the kinds of energy healers who could perform procedures like removing a tooth without anesthesia. And it was this discovery that pushed Dr.

Simon Duan to re-examine his own beliefs and return to the tooth clinic outside of Beijing, but this time, not as a patient, but as a researcher.

I went to his clinic a few times after that because I became curious. And I saw on his wall, clinic wall, is full of photos of celebrities, movie stars,

and politicians, including the Communist Party, Holy Bureau members. They all took their tooth out in his clinic.
And he's still doing that. He does it daily.

He actually claims he can take people's tooth out over distance. I haven't seen that happening.

So he can remove a tooth effortlessly and painlessly using a mantra. But he can also do that remotely, like not being in the same physical place as the patient?

Yeah, yeah, he can do it remotely, over distance. Okay, so is this tied to Qigong? I've never heard anything like this before.
In some cases, the Qigong master can do distant healing.

But isn't Qigong a form of energy medicine, which then you'd think you have to be in the presence of a physical body to like harness and transfer the energy into another physical body?

Depends what your perspective about Qigong. Many people have different understanding of Qigong.
So some people think it's energy. Some people think it's informational.

If it's energy, normally we think about energy as a wave, like sound and like light. Yeah, it's all electromagnetic wave.
It travels in a kind of a field. Normally, it deteriorates with distance.

The further it goes away, the weaker it becomes. So, that's energy.
So, Simon's making a distinction between energy, which moves through space and weakens with distance, and information.

And that information he's referencing is more like an informational field. And on this show, you've heard it called many things: collective consciousness, universal intelligence, the Tao.

And so, remote healing would be impossible if it depended on energy alone.

But it's not impossible if a healer is interacting with an invisible informational field, field, naked to the eye, but everywhere, like the ocean we're swimming in. So it's not energy.

I mean, it's information. In his case, it's information, I think.
The distance can be the other half of the globe.

If healing can happen without two people being in the same room, then what we're talking about may not be energy in the usual sense at all. Simon might be right.

We may be dealing with something closer to information or something else entirely that does not weaken with distance.

So before diving into what energy healing is, how it works, and what the science says, I wanted to understand one simple thing. Can healing truly happen at a distance?

Because if it can, the whole question shifts. Are we really studying energy or is it some other subtle force?

As I started researching and looking for stories and healers, I was introduced to a UK-based Science Forward film team that's been working on a documentary series about energy healing for years.

It's called Phenomena, and they've been deep in this world, following some of the most groundbreaking research that might finally answer our biggest questions about energy healing.

And on our first phone call, they mentioned an incredible healer who said that doing energy healing remotely or from a distance was easier for her than healing in person.

I'm Julie Geltz, and I live in Barrington, New Jersey with my husband. And we raised our twins there.
We are empty nesters with two dogs. I'm licensed as a massage therapist.

And I've been doing this for about 14 years and I absolutely love it, but I am also a Reiki master.

Reiki is a healing practice that originated in Japan, where the practitioner uses gentle touch or holds their hands near the body to support relaxation and the body's natural healing process.

But Julie did not plan to learn Reiki. She was skeptical about it, unsure, and only agreed because her teacher was persistent that she had a gift worth exploring.

Years after I began at my practice, one of my massage therapy teachers came to my building and she walked in with a book about Reiki.

And she said, so I was cleaning out my library and I found that I had two copies of this book and I'm supposed to teach you Reiki. And I was like, oh, that's nice, but I'm really not interested.

I was really skeptical because I feel like the work that I've always done has been from a scientific background, learning about anatomy and working with people's muscular systems.

But her former teacher did not let up. She talked me into it and I have great respect for her, but I was still very skeptical.

This incident would prove to be a blessing when her husband John was later diagnosed with cancer, having 32 lymph nodes and his his tonsils removed and undergoing radiation.

In recovery, a side effect developed that could be life-threatening. He developed lymphedema in his neck.
It was almost like a bladder in his neck that kept filling up with lymph fluid.

It was getting worse. And we went to many specialists and it turned out that he really needed to clear the fluid on an hourly basis because it just kept filling up.

It was filling more rapidly and more fully. It was just getting worse and worse.
Lymphedema has no known cure, only management strategies.

John was tasked with constantly having to self-drain the lymphedema fluid from his neck or he could essentially drown. So John became Julie's first Reiki patient.

John was skeptical of Reiki, but I knew nothing else was working. I was in early stages of training for Reiki or early practice of Reiki.

I had just been working with my teacher and she said that she wanted me to do six Reiki sessions with six different people. So I chose John as one of my people, of course.

And when I was doing his Reiki treatment and I went to his neck, I really wanted to focus there, of course, because he was having an issue there. Let's just try it.

So as my hands were near and around his neck, it looked like a dam broke. Fluid, like water rippling over rocks in a river or in a creek.

The fluid was just rolling over, but I could see it like bubbling like a babbling brook. And the fluid went away.
And after it went away, it never came back the same way that it had.

Everything changed that day. I was no longer skeptical.
It was phenomenal. And how's John's health today?

John has been with no evidence of disease and without lymphedema for at least eight and a half years.

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John's recovery changed everything for Julie. Massage had always made sense to her.
It was anatomy and muscle and touch that she could see. Reiki though feels completely different.

She doesn't feel like she's fixing tissue from the outside. She feels like she's entering into a shared field with her clients.

She talks about seeing colors, feeling a sensation where people need healing the most, and sensing pain in her own body that she knows is not her own.

For Julie, Reiki Reiki is the body's own healing mechanism waking up with her simply standing there, almost just like a witness.

When I work with Reiki, it seems to awaken other parts of my brain and other parts of the brains of my patients. So I'll feel heat in my hands.
Sometimes I feel sensations in my body.

Sometimes I'll even feel intense pain, but I know that it's not my pain and I don't know how to explain that. It's a sense.

And I would say in the early years that I was practicing it, I would sometimes take my hands away from the patient so that I could validate that and see if the pain went away in my body.

And I learned that it did go away. When I work with Reiki, I tend to see colors.
It's usually purples and emeralds. And what's amazing to me is that sometimes my clients see the same thing.

So we're just so connected during the sessions. Julie's mastery now enables her to heal people remotely.
When I started doing distance healings, I was a little skeptical of that too.

What amazed me with distance healing is that I could actually connect or tune in to people who were across the country, you know, and then across the world.

And I could actually see their environment where they were. So physical proximity doesn't matter.

The first patient that I remember is a cancer patient who was getting treatment out on the west coast and I could tell where she was, like I could see and feel where she was in her car across the country.

Were you thinking that she'd be in a hospital? Yeah, I asked her which hospital she was going to be at. I wanted to know where it was on a map and what it looked like.

But I could tell where she was, like I could see and feel where she was in her car across the country. Okay, so I just want to clarify this for the audience.

So you thought she'd be in the hospital, but then you saw her in a car instead. And then you verified it with her and she confirmed it, right? Well, yeah.

And then I thought, okay, well, that was just a flu, you know. So then I had another distance session with a woman who lived in Florida.
I said, okay, I called her up and I couldn't find her.

Like I couldn't connect to her energy at all. And I was like getting a little frustrated and feeling like I was a fraud and feeling like this was wrong and I shouldn't be doing this.

So I had a bit of imposter syndrome going on.

And then something told me, I heard like something that said, she's not in Florida. And I asked her, are you in Florida? And she said, no, I moved.
And I said, oh, okay. Well, that makes sense.

I said, are you in like the Washington, D.C. area? And she said, yeah, exactly.
And I was like, oh, okay.

And I said, do you live in like a townhouse or a row home that's across from a park?

And when you walk in the front door, there's a staircase to your right and you go up the stairs and then you go, you're in the bathroom on the left side of the house if you're looking at the front of the house.

And she said, yes, exactly. And I was like, oh,

look at that. Wow.
So like, can you see it? I can't see it. Like I was walking into her house.
So it sounds like Julie's talking about remote viewing, which we've talked about on the show before.

And just for a recap, remote viewing is an ability to see a location that you're not physically in. It can pretty easily be taught, and it's been used by governments around the world with success.

So it's a thing. It's so amazing to be able to see where people are sitting in their environment when I'm working with them.

Have you been able to connect with everyone remotely that you've ever tried to connect with? Yeah.

One of my clients, she asked if I could check in on her mom who lives in Korea and do a healing on her mom. And I don't know what Korean homes look like.
I've never been to Korea.

And I ended up describing where I knew her mom to be sitting when I connected with her. She's got a spot that she sits in in the house.
It's at a table and there's some corner behind her.

And whatever is going on in that corner is very toxic energy. What was behind that wall is the sewer line for the people who live in the apartments above her.

Do you feel like when you're doing healing remotely, it's as strong? I actually tend to feel that it's more potent when I do remote healings healings for some reason that I can't explain.

So it seems like in addition to healing, you can also remote view. But my question is, do those two go together? Can you remote view when you're not healing?

I don't think I ever have when it wasn't connected to a healing. And so interesting.
So it's almost like your remote viewing is tied to your ability to energy heal.

So I guess my question for you is, what is energy healing to you? How would you define it? Energy healing is our body's innate healing mechanism.

And I just get to be there to help facilitate that healing, to help kind of tap into it.

And I teach my students that they should leave their egos out of their healing sessions because it's not about us. The healing session belongs to the patient.

And we just get to be there to help facilitate it. Some may call that channeling.
I don't connect to that word. I just sense it and facilitate it.

What do you think is at play now that you've been doing it for so long? I really don't know how to answer that question. I wish that I knew.
It's just something that I don't understand.

Julie feels it, her patients feel it, but she's honest about not fully understanding what's moving through her hands or her body and why distance makes it even stronger for her.

So what's actually at work here? If healers can sense an intelligence they can't name, maybe that intelligence isn't coming from them at all.

Maybe it's rising from the body's own coordination system or from something deeper that we've always been connected to.

To widen this out, I spoke with someone who spent her life exploring this terra cultures, across histories, and has volunteered herself to be researched for science. I'm Jill Blakeway.

I'm the founder of a center in New York called the Inova Center. And I practice Chinese medicine, both herbology and acupuncture.

And in 2019, I published a book called Energy Medicine, the Science and Mystery of Healing. And I went on a bit of a journey really to explain myself to myself.

I had energy, for want of a better better word at the time coming out of my hands that my patients could feel.

And over the years, I was doing acupuncture and then I would just get the needles in and do the hands-on healing because I wasn't under any pressure to deliver hands-on healing.

I never charge for it, so I don't feel under pressure at all. I got to play and I got feedback from the patients when it got stronger and when it didn't.
And I thought, what if this is just placebo?

What if I have very impressive energy that comes out of my hands that people can feel, but it does nothing at all?

And and they're very impressed by it and thanks to the placebo effect they get better and i'm taking credit harper collins commissioned me to go and find out the science behind what i was doing and so i talked to scientists and healers and started to work out oh yeah this is real it's measurable and i began to understand that i was manipulating my own biofield and that i was part of a much bigger sort of oversoul biofield and i now understand quite a lot of the science behind it and why it works so jill you've studied energy healers around the world.

And from what I understand, you've treated a wide range of things from cancer to fertility to physical injuries through energy healing.

So I guess maybe to start, how do you personally define energy medicine? I include as energy medicine anything that prompts the body's own self-regulating systems to do the work.

So I would include prayer in that and hypnosis. I would include guided imagery in that, hands-on healing, hands-over healing, acupuncture.

These are all forms of energy medicine because they're a prompt, albeit a subtle one, to the body to self-regulate. Energy in Asia was always known as qi.
In India, it was known as prana.

Every ancient culture understood that we have intelligence. You have intelligence in your body that is quite outside of your mind.
We sort of think of our brain as directing operations,

like the hardware for the software.

And the brain does a lot of directing of information, but all day your body is digesting lunch and regulating your thyroid and transitioning hormones and

regulating respiration. And you never have to think about it.
Your brain, it's involved, but your conscious mind is not. And that intelligence is coherent.

And I think in science, we by necessity started to view the body as very mechanical with a series of systems which have specific functions and therefore can malfunction. But actually,

the thing that we miss by doing that is that we have a coherent intelligence from the top of our head to the tip of our toes. And that is what's directing operations.

And a lot of the chronic diseases that medicine struggles to solve for people are in fact problems of coordination and synchronization in that communication system.

Some of that communication is done through the nervous system, some of it's done chemically through the blood, but some of it is done electromagnetically. And that is what we mean by qi.

Qi is your body's intelligence and acupuncture is a very well thought out and old method of directing that intelligence to help it become more coherent and prompt the body to heal.

Jill describes qi as a kind of intelligent life force, something that moves through us, maintains coherence, and communicates moment to moment, a consciousness and information system moving through the body.

And while that sounds mystical, in 2018, something unexpected happened.

A group of scientists in New York discovered an entire structural network inside of the body, one that some believed to be facilitating an energetic intelligence connecting the body's interrelated systems.

One of those scientists was Dr. Neil Thiese, a liver pathologist and stem cell research pioneer.
So, Neil, introduce yourself. I'm a liver pathologist clinically.

That's my training in how cancer starts in human livers. I stumbled into some novel anatomy thanks to some colleagues of mine.

I used to be at Beth Israel Medical Center and that's where this work started. This novel anatomy was stumbled upon when Neil's colleague Dr.
David Carlock was testing a new high-tech endoscope.

This miniature microscope enables the viewing of live tissue in real time instead of viewing non-living tissue on a glass slide.

When viewing dead tissues on glass slides, collagen dries, producing a visual artifact that looks like cracks, or so it was believed that that's all they were.

They looked like cracks and the explanation was that collagen is so stiff that when you try to make a very thin section to make a microscope slide, it cracks. That's what I was taught.

That's what I taught people. But viewing live tissue with the endoscope would reveal that these cracks were something else, a significant anatomical structure of fluid-filled gaps between cells.

It turns out they're remnants of fluid-filled spaces. And so for the first time, we saw the actual structure.

They called it the interstitium, a fluid-filled highway-like communication network that we now know holds more fluid fluid than all the blood in the body.

And once researchers knew what they were looking at, they started noticing something else. This isn't just plumbing.
It behaves electrically.

The collagen of the fascia itself probably produces electricity. And the spaces that we've defined also are producing electricity.
And this gets into the bioenergy.

thing because if you've got a continuous network through the entire body and it's all producing electricity independent of the the nervous system, then it's producing a bioelectromagnetic field around the body.

And then you might be able to start talking about chakras and meridians, energy bodies, etc.

Could this be what the ancient Chinese intuited as qi long before the invention of microscopes or endoscopes?

One of the questions I've been asking myself with the interstitium work is, should we have known this was there? Should we have known we should be looking for something?

News of the interstitium went viral worldwide, but many healers and scientists working in other traditions did not agree that this was a new discovery.

Whenever I speak to someone about the interstitium from another culture of healing or health, shamanic healers, energy practitioners, Taoist healers, acupuncture, Ayurvedic medicine, they all see this structure and go, that's what we've been talking about.

There was a senior person at the Chinese version of NIH for traditional Chinese medicine. And he laughed and he said, yes, and we've been speaking about it for 4,000 years.

So how were healers able to access and influence this system before technology made it seeable? How did they know it was real and communicate with it to promote healing?

And in order to answer that, Neil suggests that we zoom out beyond the body into the very fabric of reality itself. Consciousness doesn't come out of the structure of the universe.

It's what gives rise to the universe. On the one hand, I would say that the universe is consciousness.
On the other hand, I would also say this world at this level of scale is in fact material.

Consciousness is becoming stuff that looks material and then works through that at the same time to communicate consciousness. This is where Neil makes a leap that can sound huge at first.

He's saying if consciousness is the foundation of reality, not the brain, then everything physical, including our bodies, is shaped out of that same field.

And the interstitium, this newly seen network woven through every organ and every tissue, might be one place where that larger consciousness interfaces with us physically.

In other words, the body may have a built-in communication system that's not just mechanical or chemical, but informational. But how is that going to give rise to this world?

There's an urge within that pure fundamental awareness that wants to know itself. And in order to know itself, it has to start to distinguish within itself a subject and object.

But to really turn into a subject and object, to really have that moment of discovery, you have to have space separating the subject and object, space and time, and suddenly you have space-time,

which is an energy-rich field. If consciousness is primary, then everything physical, space, time, atoms, molecules, all arise out of that same field.

And eventually, those building blocks form the structures inside our bodies, including the interstitium, which raises a question, question, could the system not just be carrying fluid, but information?

The structures that combine together from space-time up through the quantum foam, as it's called, to quantum-level stuff to atoms to molecules that form the interstitium, is it also mediating some form of consciousness as a communication network in the body?

If that's true, then our sense of being separate, our little subjective islands of consciousness, may only seem that way.

In reality, there may be no hard boundary between you and me, between subject and object, between our bodies and the wider field that we're part of, or from a faith perspective, between us and God.

And if none of us are actually separate, if physical form is just one expression of consciousness, then maybe energy healing isn't about sending something at all, but interacting through a field we already share, a field that could let one person influence another in ways that we can't see or fully explain.

And that's exactly what Jill Blakeway experiences in her work. I'm a bit more of a transmitter than a receiver, but I am an antenna.

Jill Blakeway describes feeling like an antenna when she's tuning into the energy-healing frequencies coming through her body. Life has a vibration to it.
And when you tune in, it's got a little fizz.

That's life, yeah? It has movement to it.

That's your qi. Working with the concept of qi, she connects to a universal consciousness.
I call it the Tao because I practice Chinese medicine, but it is a network of communal consciousness.

And Lao Tzu said the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao because it's incredibly complicated. And I think of it in my mind as just this matrix of connection going infinitely.

Many Qigong exercises and philosophies draw inspiration from Lao Tzu's teachings, in particular his emphasis on balance and the interconnectedness of mind and body.

It's when you're flowing with the same intelligence that runs through your body, but the bigger version of it. And here's something interesting.
If I try and direct it, it goes away.

And it was my first hint that I have to get my own ego, my own sense of separate self out of the way in order to do this, because your ego is the little bit of you that's really invested in being separate.

I think it is about a dropping of the separate self and feeling your way into alignment. And when you let that go and just feel the greater coherence, When we let that flow through us, magic happens.

Synchronicities happen. Amazing coincidences happen.
Jill's abilities seem to be living proof that bypassing the illusion of a separate self seems to open up paths to healing the body.

So, Jill, have you always been able to do this or how did you figure it out? I had energy coming out of my hands that my patients could feel.

That was my first clue, Kai, because they'd have their eyes shut and they'd say, oh, you're over my abdomen. I can feel it.
I can feel it in my abdomen. And I'd think, I wonder what they can feel.

I developed, I think quite naturally, a way of regulating my breath and my body to make it get stronger. And I got feedback from the patients when it got stronger and when it didn't.

And so I'm very much self-taught. And that's what sent me on my journey to work out what the energy that heals us, for want of a better word, actually is.

And then can you describe how you physically prepare to channel this energy to a patient? I stand in what's called horse stance in Qigong, which means I bend my legs are sort of shoulder width apart.

I bend my knees, I tip my pelvis forward a little bit, and I get my spine really straight. And then I feel something tingling down my spine.
It's almost fizzy feeling in my spine.

Then I have energy that comes out of my hands that the patients can feel and I hold it over specific areas, in my case, based on their Chinese medicine diagnosis. What about the placebo effect?

What role does this very real and measurable phenomena play? And isn't the placebo effect one of the arguments that skeptics raise about energy medicine?

There are studies, as I'm sure you're aware, that show that the placebo effect isn't just that you think you're better.

If you believe that something is going to work, your body produces chemicals to make it work.

So I would say that the placebo is just a prompt to self-healing and it causes measurable physical changes in the body. It's not just I think I'm better, so I feel a bit better.

I love this because sometimes I think that the placebo effect in and of itself is the best evidence we have of energy healing.

We have so much evidence of this in science that deeply believing your body can get better can help it to get better.

So I usually start by explaining the placebo is energy medicine, actually, and what you think your body can hear you.

The tighter and tensor you get, the harder it is for your body to communicate coherently all the way through.

So you learn to heal through intuition, training your mind to bypass the ego, tuning into your body's energy and then connecting to your patient's response.

But did you have any notable teachers teachers or masters that helps you to understand this better? Dr. Bill Bengston, who died recently, sadly, and he was an absolute pioneer.

He was a professor at City University in New York, and he would gather together skeptical students and faculty, and they would take mice that were specially bred to have cancer, poor mice, and they would inject them with cancer.

And then his students would do the technique and they would remit. And they did this on tens of thousands of mice over the years.

The technique he taught his students was a form of ego distraction, like I do. But he had them flash ego-gratifying images in their heads while they held their hands over, in this case, the mice.

These aren't your noble wants, like world peace. These are your like, I don't know, a beach house winning the lottery type ego-gratifying things.

And he would have them flash about 20 images round and round and round really quickly so they couldn't think of anything else. They were just flashing.
Wow, that's fascinating.

It's like distracting the ego with the ego itself.

And when they measured the frequency coming out of the healer's hands, it was 7.87 Hertz, which is the most common frequency of the Earth, the Schumann's resonance. The Schumann resonance.

This is often called the Earth's electromagnetic heartbeat. And many believe these frequencies influence human physiology.

But again, he was distracting the ego, keeping the separate bit of self occupied so that the healer can just let whatever this is flow through them.

The most skeptical, sneering, irolli of students could do it. They could all keep their mice alive.

So interestingly, the control group mice who were not receiving any healing started to remit or just get better as well. How did that happen?

When they visited the control group, they looped the control group of mice into the healing field and they remitted too.

So Bill, in the end, had to send the control mice to a different lab in a different state. I know you looked at Rupert Sheldrake's work.
It was creating a resonant field.

And that's where the mouse study becomes interesting because mice can't be skeptics. They cannot placebo themselves or talk their way into feeling better.
Yet the effects still show up.

With humans, the picture gets even more layered. And Jill pays close attention to the energy of language when she works with cancer patients.

She believes that phrases like fighting cancer or battling cancer can actually pull the system out of coherence. Instead, she focuses on language that helps the body remember its own capacity to heal.

Using battling language, you know, teaching people to visualize little Pac-Men eating up the cancer and things like that.

And if you think about all the language we use about cancer, it's all about winning the war and battling it. And I realized, oh, this is the wrong track.
We should be encouraging coherence, yeah?

Because as your body communicates better internally, it cleans up. Bodies clean up cancer cells all the time until they get overwhelmed and can't.

When Jill talks about coherence, she means the body's communication system working in sync instead of in chaos.

It's like an orchestra playing the same piece of music instead of a bunch of instruments out of sync making discordant noise.

So when the body is coherent, it can recognize what doesn't belong, including cancer cells, and clean them up the way it's designed to do.

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A skeptic who became a longtime patient of Jill's is actor Tim Daly. Like many people, I I thought energy healing was bullshit.

My natural predisposition is to be, I would say, an open-minded skeptic, but I hadn't experienced anything that showed me that it was significant in any big way until I experienced the electric, magnetic, whatever it was, this incredible feeling of energy and power of some kind, some invisible thing, going through my body.

He was quite skeptical. He liked the acupuncture.
He's quite a fit gym-going person. I would use acupuncture to help his knees and things like that.

So he didn't really need much, just the odd tweak when he pulled his back or something like that. And I would play around with energy medicine.

And to be honest, he was a bit eye-rolly in an affectionate way. He'd be like, yeah, do whatever you think.

And then he was in a skiing accident and he broke both his legs. And anyone who's ever worked in TV knows once production dates are locked, they don't move.

And they wanted him back to work within a week with two broken legs. Jill began working on Tim's legs, combining acupuncture with her form of energy healing.

She placed the needles, then moved her hands slowly above his skin, never making physical contact. And yet, both of them reacted as strong waves of sensation moved through his body.

She was just doing something with her hands at the bottom of my feet. And she said, this is energy medicine at work.
This was beyond her putting needles in the energy healing.

It wasn't going to put my shattered tibial plateau back together, but it sure helped heal the nerves and helped make my recovery a lot faster.

When I put my hands over the brakes, his whole leg would shake.

And he'd be like, what are you doing to me? He could feel the energy running through his legs and his legs would vibrate completely out of his control. I would say things like, try and stop it.

And he couldn't. It was like his legs had been taken over.
And he was back at work within about a week to 10 days. He healed very, very quickly.
His doctors were amazed by how well he healed.

When Jill and Tim were filming for Phenomena, Tim joked that in their first few energy healing sessions, he didn't really feel anything remarkable.

I remember the first time you did energy healing on me. The sensation was almost non-existent.
And I, you know, indulged you and let you do your thing.

But when I busted my legs, the sensation that I got from the work you did was profound.

The teacher who taught me so much used to say, healing is an autonomic response to need.

And I have noticed that my abilities such that they are increased depending on need.

Because his need for healing was greater, his body responded more intensely to your energy. Tim had never really needed me before.
He had a bit of acupuncture for the occasional minor thing.

And now he really needed me. It was a completely different experience.
The effect is more dramatic the more you need it.

I still, as does Jill, want to find some people who will put it into a context of scientific process or method.

It's something that is very hard to measure unless you're some of the scientists who are really using cutting-edge technology. What I want to know is why.

Why do we experience these things? And Tim isn't alone in asking that. If people really experience these things, they should be measurable.
They should leave traces somewhere.

In part two of this episode, we'll follow Jill and Tim into a lab that tracks what happens between their hearts when healing begins. We'll hear how Reiki stacks up against standard pain treatments.

And we'll visit a lab where something groundbreaking may have happened. A healer impacts cancer cells from miles away.
Next week, we ask if something is moving between us, can we catch it in the act?

And if we can, even in the smallest way, our ideas about what a body is and where it ends may have to change.

And the bigger question that science has skirted isn't just whether energy healing works, it's what kind of universe would make this possible at all.

A very special thank you to the Emerald Gate Charitable Trust and the Subtle Energy Funders Collective for their incredible research in this space and their help consulting on this episode.

And I want to thank our producers, Jesse Steed, Jill Pachesnik, and Katherine Ellis. Contributing producer, also working on the Phenomena film, Debbie Hinnigan.
Original Music is by Rachel Cantu.

Mixed Mastering and Additional Music is by Michael Rubino. Our associate producer is Selena Kennedy.
Original artwork is by Ben Kendor Design.

And I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.

To learn more about Phenomena, a three-part documentary featuring access to groundbreaking scientists, transformative healers, and evidence that's rewriting what we know about energy healing, you can visit phenomenahealing.com/slash telepathy tapes.

This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended to substitute the advice of a physician, professional coach, therapist, or other qualified professional.