Epigenetic Healing

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rail and slight, a quiet woman shuffled up from the back of the room and stood in front of me at the microphone. My name is June, she said. I don’t believe in this energy stuff, and if you don’t want to work with me, I’ll sit down again.

In front of us, the large conference room was packed. Every seat was taken, and many more people stood in the back of the room. The air was hot, as the crush of bodies overwhelmed the air-conditioning system. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath. I had just concluded a lecture on the history of energy in medicine and psychology. I then asked for volunteers to demonstrate Energy Psychology methods, so that the audience could witness how they worked in real life.

I reassured June that while there were no guarantees that Energy Psychology could help her condition, I’d be happy to try. She told us that her left shoulder was frozen. I asked her to demonstrate, and she could only move her left hand a couple of inches forward and a couple of inches to the side.

I asked about any emotional issues that might underlie her physical complaint. June told us, in a monotone, that her adult son had been kidnapped while on a mission as a peace worker in a third world country. His kidnappers held him for several months, and finally killed him. She was in touch with the US State Department throughout the ordeal, and finally received a phone call from a consular official to tell her that her son’s body had been found. She had developed many physical problems during her son’s captivity, one of which was that her shoulder froze up. She finished by telling us. Today is the ninth anniversary of his death.

I asked her about the emotional intensity of each step of the tragedy, asking her to rate them on a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no intensity, and ten being the maximum possible intensity. After listening to her carefully, I finally decided to work with June on the phone call from the State Department, which she said was a seven in intensity. I then performed a very fast and basic emotional energy release technique called EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), used by thousands of doctors and therapists worldwide, as she thought about the phone call. Rate the intensity again, I asked, and she reported that it had gone down to zero.

How’s your shoulder doing? I asked. She hesitantly moved it forward. It went farther and farther. She raised it up all the way, till it was perpendicular to her body. She began to swing her arm around in circles. Her eyes opened wide, and she stared at the swinging arm as though it were an alien oozing out of a spaceship.

After the lecture ended, June walked up to me in the hallway, exuberantly swinging her arm around and around. Her face was wreathed in smiles, her eyes lively, her voice sparkling. I felt so horrible this morning I didn’t want to come to the conference, she confided. I was carpooling with two friends, and when they arrived at my house, they dragged me out of bed and made me come here. I can’t believe what just happened.

Usually, my logical mind can’t believe it either, I reassured her. Nevertheless, when you use these energy techniques, such shifts become routine. Although they seemed miraculous to my skeptical brain when I first witnessed them, I now understand that they are based on sound medical and physiological principles, and they have more to do with biology than magic.

Turning Gene Research into Therapy

From all around the world, in virtually every field of the healing arts from psychiatrists to doctors to psychotherapists to sports physiologists to social workers stories like this are being told, as the world of psychology and medicine begins to awaken to the potential of energy medicine and its effects on the expression of our DNA. They are the first loud reports of a revolution in treatment destined to change our entire civilization, reaching into every corner of medicine and psychology and beyond them into the structures of society itself. In the space of one generation, we have discovered, or rediscovered, techniques that can make us happier, less stressed, and much more physically healthy safely, quickly, and without side effects. Techniques from energy medicine and Energy Psychology can alleviate chronic diseases, shift autoimmune conditions, and eliminate psychological traumas with an efficiency and speed that conventional treatments can scarcely touch.

The implications of these techniques for human happiness, for social conflicts, and for political change promise a radical positive disruption in the human condition, one that goes far beyond health care. They hold the promise of affecting society as profoundly as the scientific and artistic breakthroughs of the Renaissance changed the course of civilization. And they are at the cutting edge of science, as experimental evidence stacks up to provide objective demonstration of their effectiveness.

Along with the case histories accumulating from pioneers in this new medicine and new psychology, scientists are discovering the precise pathways by which changes in human consciousness produce changes in human bodies. As we think our thoughts and feel our feelings, our bodies respond with a complex array of shifts. Each thought or feeling unleashes a particular cascade of biochemicals in our organs. Each experience triggers genetic changes in our cells.

The Dance of Genes and Neurons

These new discoveries have revolutionary implications for health and healing. Psychologist Ernest Rossi begins his authoritative text The Psychobiology of Gene Expression with a challenge: Are these to remain abstract facts safely sequestered in academic textbooks, or can we take these facts into the mainstream of human affairs?

The Genie in Your Genes takes up Rossi’s challenge, believing that it is essential that this exciting genetic research progress beyond laboratories and scientific conferences and find practical applications in a world in which many people suffer unnecessarily. Rossi explores how our subjective states of mind, consciously motivated behavior, and our perception of free will can modulate gene expression to optimize health. Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, MD, believes that in future treatments, Social influences will be biologically incorporated in the altered expressions of specific genes in specific nerve cells of specific areas of the brain. Brain researchers Gerd Kempermann and Frederick Gage of Salk Laboratories envision a future in which the regeneration of damaged neural networks is a cornerstone of medical treatment, and doctors’ prescriptions include modulations of environmental or cognitive stimuli and alterations of physical activity. In other words, when the doctor of the future tears a page off her prescription pad and hands it to a patient, the prescription might well be instead of, or in addition to, a drug a particular therapeutic belief or thought, a positive feeling, a gene-enhancing physical exercise, an act of altruism, a day of gratitude, or membership in a social club. Research is revealing that these activities, thoughts, and feelings have profound healing and regenerative effects on our bodies, and we’re now figuring out how to use them therapeutically. ... more

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