Energy Healing: The Essentials of Self-Care

Health and Healing: A Crucial Shift for Our Time

Forgetful one, get up!

It’s dawn, time to start searching

—Lalla, Naked Song

This book is an induction into self-healing and into a heightened perception of energy within your body and, by extension, the world around you. You will learn energy practices that are helpful, and more fundamentally, you will learn to read reality from the level of energy. By reading reality at this level, you can drop into multiple layers of body information through what you sense, feel, see, and even hear about energy, and you can become adept at moving energy in your body and in your environment.

I began to learn energy healing before I even conceived that I might go to medical school. I had met a hands-on healer and took her energy healing class. I began to practice energy healing in my spare time. Years later, when I entered medical school, I was curious about how the energetic body interacted with the physical body and how the paradigm of energy healing would fit into what I would learn in conventional medicine. How would these two systems work together? From my perspective, one paradigm was not more valuable than the other; they seemed to be different views of the same theme: health and healing. Much to my surprise, none of the healers or physicians I encountered shared my view, nor do most of them now.

In addition, I had a medical condition that was causing chronic pain. While I was in residency, I had surgery for the problem, but the pain persisted even though there was no longer a medical reason for it. My doctor hinted that depression was the underlying cause. I knew that there was another paradigm that explained the pain and could lead me out of it. I knew from energy healing that the residual pain was located at the level of the energy body. I began to deepen my study of energy healing, visiting healers and shamans from around the world. By the time I was finally pain free, I had become hooked on what energy healers were teaching me.

Through this healing process I came to realize that our current approach to energy healing, energy modalities, and other healing paradigms (including conventional medicine) is too fractured. We focus on how to do techniques. We focus on the differences, or divergences, between the healing paradigms. We focus on how to eradicate our illness rather than on supporting the body’s underlying healing mechanism. While this approach has brought many wonderful advances in the last two hundred years, to make the next leap in our experience of healing, we must go much deeper, to the common root of all our healing paradigms.

The one thing all the healing modalities have in common, at the deepest layer, is the body—at both the physical and energetic level. While this may seem obvious, the implications are profound. Just a few of these implications include:

•  The body has its own awareness, which is quite distinct from the awareness we usually identify with.

•  The body is self-healing and constantly moving toward self-healing.

•  Rather than being the enemy, illness is a body-initiated move into healing.

•  All the healing paradigms we know converge and are accessible to us at the level of the wisdom of the energy body.

The body is the source of the wisdom and information, but how do we harvest this knowledge? We learn to read reality and the body from the level of energy. Once we can begin to read reality at this level, all the different paradigms begin to make sense in a larger, fuller perspective. The different forms of healing begin to partner with each other with ease. Healing is no longer about using one technique for one problem and another technique for another; it is about learning how to read our own body to get the help we need to bring it back into balance.

I call this body-mind medicine. The body informs the mind of what is happening. We use the body as our tool, and the mind can formulate the questions and answers from the information the body provides. When we hold this body-full awareness from the reality of energy, healing becomes easier to explore and follow. Allowing the body to inform the mind is a natural process, yet through the shift over the past hundreds of years into developing our rational mind and rational processes, some of the connections from the body into the mind, and between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, have been dampened or overridden. This body-mind perspective is about opening the aperture of our awareness to allow more information from the energy body to come into play in our lives, in how we view our world (which informs our reality), and in healing.

In this book, I will discuss the reality of energy by exploring the unified field and the shamanic field. It is through this exploration that the convergence happens. Reading or seeing reality from the level of energy is not learning the notes to a song; it is learning what the music is and how to make the music. Many people have asked me whether I believe in energy healing. I want to stress that learning and using energy healing is not about belief. I do not have to believe in electricity for the lights in my house to turn on. Nature lives by the rules of energy. We do too, although we are not always aware of it, and some of us are rarely aware of it. When I was pregnant with my first child, I was in awe that while I was working in the hospital, going grocery shopping, or sleeping, the fetus inside my body was growing. My awareness of the pregnancy had little role; the baby was growing whether or not I was paying attention. In the same way, our bodies are living in, aware of, and using energy even when we’re not conscious of it doing so. Energy healing is about opening the aperture of how we see, feel, and experience the world. Energy moves in the body and in our environment all the time. We each have a natural ability to read it and work with it, although individual skillfulness varies.

I will induct you into this radically different way of reading your reality by introducing both structured and unstructured information. We need structured information to build the scaffolding of a new topic being learned. We also need unstructured information, such as experience, to make the information come alive and shift into knowledge. Add years of knowledge with more experience, and one tumbles into wisdom. Experience is the best form of unstructured information, so I encourage you to do the exercises in this book until you are adept at each one. Training in energy healing from this perspective takes time. I encourage you to give yourself nine months before you look back to assess what has shifted in your health, healing, and life.

I will introduce you to multiple paradigms of energy healing so you can begin to see what is underlying the energy perspective. You can use the one that suits you best or explore all the paradigms. It does not matter how you view energy healing at first. It only matters that you continue to explore what is happening in your body. This is how you will be able to harvest what is happening from the level of energy for yourself.

I also use multiple stories to convey information or my experience of becoming aware of certain aspects of energy healing. While these may seem like digressions, I include them to give you a map similar to an experience. Stories carry energy and pattern; it is the energy and pattern within the story that allows the listener or reader to glean a secondhand experience from the story. The map of energy and pattern is an experiential map that can be picked up through a story, often without effort. Providing this experiential map is the function of myth, stories, and more recently, movies, in cultures throughout the world. The pattern of an experience can be conferred through a story, as if one has had the experience itself. Even conventional medicine is now embracing the power of story in the healing process; this new aspect of medicine is called narrative medicine. In an effort to give you a better ability to read energy and pattern in the energy healing process, I include stories from my experiences at different stages of my own exploration.

We can also talk about structured and unstructured information as rational and nonrational information and even as right- and left-hemisphere brain activity. Rational thought and didactic learning occur mostly in the left hemisphere, and nonrational learning and nonrational abilities occur mostly in the right hemisphere. Energy healing and most of the skills used to sense, see, feel, and read energy are housed in the nonrational area of the brain. Reading reality from the level of energy involves skills that depend on the experiential, nonrational right side of the brain. If you have never worked with energy, then learning to read energy and to engage in energy healing are like learning to speak a foreign language. The more you strive or struggle to understand this material, the more you are using the rational process instead of the experiential process. You may understand the concepts immediately, yet if you don’t, do not become concerned. Instead, I encourage you to let your world tilt, to use the practices, and to watch what happens. The book may bring up as many new questions as it does answers. If this happens, it means you are well on your way to learning this new language.

Expect to be shifted by what you learn. After you have used this book’s techniques for a few months or longer, you may find that the way you view your body—as well as your life and the world around you—has changed. Likely, you will feel more a part of the natural world again. You will fall back into sync with the naturalness of what is going on within you and around you, and your sense of being separate from the natural world will disappear. The wisdom of the body is housed within the body. It is our access to this wisdom that governs how we work with the physical body and energy body. As you work with the practices in this book, I suggest you use the techniques rigorously just as they are described for a few months in order to harvest what each practice is offering. However, once you begin to experience the body at the level of energy, you may find variations or new practices that are offered up by the wisdom of your body.

I encourage you to allow your body and the energy within your body and the natural world around you to become your primary teachers and guides.

Ann Marie Chiasson, MD

Tucson, Arizona

January 2013

CHAPTER 1

The Basics of Energy Healing

Lost in the wilderness between

true awareness and the senses

I suddenly woke inside myself …

—Lalla, Naked Song

The underlying paradigm of energy was first documented five thousand years ago in India, in a text called the Upanishads,¹ and also in the original texts of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). ²Ninety-four cultures have been documented as having a concept that describes the underlying energy of the body³ Each of these cultures has a model or system of healing based on an underlying energy flow, and there are both similarities and differences in how they describe and map out the energy. I will give you a unified view of a few of these various systems, so you can see how they are interrelated, as I do.

Energy medicine was commonly used in the West as late as the 1800s, most notably by Franz Mesmer, a nineteenth-century physician who was the father of hypnosis (and whose name is the root of the word mesmerize).⁴ Mesmer wrote about animal magnetism, an energy that could be transferred between objects, and he practiced energy transference. The concept of an underlying energy or vital force was part of conventional medicine until the late nineteenth century, when medical educators and physicians began to delineate the body and its illnesses by organ systems (such as cardiac disease, respiratory disease, and bone disease).⁵

While this delineation fostered wonderful advancements, we are now seeing a reintroduction or resurgence of energy healing techniques in Western culture and medicine. We are now in an integration phase; we are able to harvest the wisdoms of other paradigms of healing and integrate them into our current views and therapies. We see that medicine is an art and that many of these older paradigms—including energy healing, traditional Chinese medicine, ayurvedic medicine, mind-body medicine (which dates back to the ancient Greek temples of Asclepius), and herbal or botanical medicine—are of value in treating certain illnesses. Energy therapies and techniques can help with disease prevention and general wellness—and with conditions where conventional medicine is insufficient, such as chronic pain, chronic disease, and healing from deep psychological or physical trauma. We are beginning to see an integration of many different paradigms and can explore which technique works best for which disease or combination of symptoms.

Today, the United States’ National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), delineates two types of energy fields: veritable (measured) and putative (yet to be measured). Veritable energy fields are scientifically measurable; these include, NCCAM notes, electromagnetic fields used in magnetic resonance imaging, cardiac pacemakers, radiation therapy, ultraviolet light for psoriasis, and laser keratoplasty.⁶ Even though these therapies use energy fields, conventional medicine does not refer to techniques that work with veritable energy fields as energy medicine or energy healing. Instead, these terms are currently applied to healing techniques that fall within the putative fields that NCCAM describes. According to NCCAM, putative fields have defied measurement to date by reproducible methods.⁷ However, NCCAM recognizes that the concept of people being infused with a subtle form of energy has persisted for more than two thousand years and that this energy has many names, "such as qi in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), ki in the Japanese kampo system, doshas in ayurvedic medicine, and elsewhere as prana, etheric energy, fohat, orgone, odic force, mana, and homeopathic resonance."⁸

NCCAM currently defines energy healing as those complementary and alternative medicine techniques that involve the putative fields. Both within and outside conventional medicine circles, conversations about energy and working with the energy field of the body are under way, even though some physicians and scientists consider this energy body and energy healing to be hocus pocus. What I can share is that many, or even the majority, of physicians who have practiced for many years intuitively understand the role of something other than science in healing. We just do not have a common language for what this other thing is at the moment.

Lack of medical research on and scientific verification of the body’s energy field has kept many conventional medical practitioners and researchers from accepting and using energy healing techniques. It is difficult to research the energy field of the body, although some research is appearing. There is reproducible, fair data showing that energy healing can decrease pain and the use of pain medication. We can also measure the effect an energy healer has on plants and animals.⁹ Ambiguities in the definition of energy healing and what it is useful for will likely continue until a method is devised to measure accurately the body’s energy field in a way that jibes with conventional medicine.¹⁰ There is early work in measuring the body’s energy field by researchers in the United States, Canada, and Europe, including James Oschman, PhD, Melinda Connor, PhD, and Gary Schwartz, PhD.

THE ENERGY BODY

Energy healing, or energy medicine, is based on the ancient concept that there is a vital force, an underlying flow of energy, both within the physical body and extending from it. The body’s entire energy system is referred to as the energy field, the energy body, the biofield, or the subtle body—all interchangeable terms. This system of energy is the template from which the physical body grows, and it guides the body’s function. I like to think of the physical body as a plant and the energy body as the soil in which the plant grows. The soil affects the plant’s growth and health. While factors other than the soil (such as trauma, freezing temperatures, or poor sunlight) might impact the health of the plant, the overall homeostasis and growth of the plant relies on the soil.

The flow of energy through the subtle body can be compared to the flow of water through a river and its tributaries. If a dam is built along the river (an energy block forms) or a huge rain dumps extra water into the river (there is an enormous influx of energy), the water will overflow to create new streams. If there is a paucity of water (energy), the smaller, shallower tributaries will dry up. Our goal in energy healing is to keep the water (the energy) flowing smoothly throughout the system by clearing the main riverway and the tributaries and dredging any silt that builds up, so to speak.

What is the anatomy of the energy body? The answer to this question depends on the culture and the paradigm of energy healing we’re looking at. In Western culture today, the most commonly known paradigms are from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which includes the dan tiens and meridians; the chakra system and aura from India; and the matrix described in several shamanic traditions. These systems have all been written about extensively elsewhere; I will give a brief overview of each, and the references can give you more extensive material.

The Dan Tiens and Meridians

Traditional Chinese medicine is the most complexly mapped system of energy to date. The ancient texts written about TCM go back five thousand years and describe techniques still employed today: herbal medicines, acupuncture, breath, movement, and energy techniques to restore the energy, or chi (qi), balance in the body.

In TCM, there are three primary energy centers, called the dan tiens (figure 1). These are also referred to as separate energy bodies housed within the energy body. The lower dan tien is what regulates or controls the overall energy or vitality of the body. The middle dan tien is responsible for the heart, thymus, throat, and the emotional body; the upper dan tien is responsible for the head and brain and the spiritual body.¹¹ These energy centers are like wheels of energy within the body. They communicate with each other and with the organs of the body, as well as with the meridians (see figure 2), to influence and affect the function of the body.

In addition, each organ in the body has an energy that communicates with and influences the other organs in the body. For example, the liver can overpower the spleen, or the spleen can affect the heart.

Outside the dan tiens and organs, right under the skin, is the meridian system, a series of linear energy channels throughout the body (figure 2). This meridian system is what acupuncture, acupressure, and many of the body-tapping techniques presented in this book work on.¹²

Figure 1: The dan tiens

Figure 2: The meridian system

The Chakra System

From India we have the chakra system, described five thousand years ago in a set of texts called the Upanishads. The Upanishads were the first written texts of Indian philosophy that described the origins of health.¹³ In the chakra system, the energy body contains seven main wheels or vortices of energy (figure 3), with smaller secondary vortices at each joint. How these main vortices rotate and how they communicate their energy flow with each other controls the health of the body. Each of these chakras has a function and an effect on the body. They affect organ function through a healthy energy flow or lack of flow. For example, at the level of energy, the first chakra is one of the gates, or connection points, to the larger energy field around us (see chapter 2). It connects to and communicates with the larger energy field around us, interpreting the energy from the larger field. To whatever extent this chakra is communicating with the energy field around the body is the extent to which we are grounded. (We’ll talk more about grounding in chapter 3.) The second chakra takes the energy from the first chakra