Interweave Newsletter

“Oh, no!” my friend John sighed. “The ankle I turned in the airport is swelling up again. I guess I’ll just have to live with it.” We were on the third day of a transcontinental sight-seeing trip this past summer, and John was afraid his injury would hamper him in walking to view interesting vistas.

His fears did not materialize. That evening, I used a popular energy healing technique, Therapeutic Touch, to (as the lingo goes) “clear and smooth” the electromagnetic energy field radiating from his leg and ankle. After the fifteen-minute treatment, the swelling was almost entirely gone. Eyebrows raised, my friend said, “That’s amazing. It feels almost normal again.” I wasn’t surprised. I’ve seen ankles more swollen than his literally shrink before my eyes, minor sprains clear up in minutes, and wounds heal more quickly. I’ve watched while someone seemed to “pull” the pain out of another person’s broken foot. I’ve heard people swear that their recovery from surgery was swifter because of some form of hands-on energy healing.

Let me be clear—I am in no way a miracle-worker. I do not believe something supernatural was involved. All I did was use a technique that takes seriously the fact that our bodies are more than bones, flesh, and fluid—that this complex body-mind organism is also an energy system.

“Energy” was one of the pillars of medicine, East and West, for thousands of years. Asian practitioners talked about “chi” or “subtle energy” and used their intuitive “feel” of a person’s physical-emotional-spiritual energy, along with traditional herbal remedies, to diagnose and treat illness. European and American doctors talked about “humours” and “vital energy” as they worked with the sick and made recommendations for boosting health to the well. The primary goal of medicine was to make sure the vitality, the energy, of the body was humming at maximum strength.

We’ll be exploring energy healing at Interweave’s October 14 symposium “The Light in the Body: Healing Energies in Daily Life,” teaching participants how to sense and work with their own bio-physical energy. We will have practical instruction in naturopathy, using the chakras (energy centers) in the body, and a simple, powerful form of self-massage. By so doing we’ll be tapping into time-tested traditions as old as civilization.

Naturopathy, based on this energy model, was the dominant form of medicine in America as recently as 1900, but was swiftly displaced by the rapid advance of allopathy, the underdog form of medicine, which used strong toxins, vigorous purgatives, and surgery. The increasing sophistication of surgical procedures, the growing knowledge about microbes and viruses, and the advent of antibiotics began to save the lives of millions with life-threatening illnesses. Based heavily on modern physics and biology, the allopaths ruled out “energy” as a primitive superstition.

But energy wouldn’t go away. From the mid-20th century onward, good medical studies confirmed that the body generates energy and is sheathed in an electromagnetic field, strongest around the brain and the heart. Institutions like Harvard Medical School began serious investigation of the chi-based medical systems. The National Institutes of Health has a number of studies in progress. Medical therapies using low-voltage electricity and ultra-sound to speed up healing have been developed.

The old naturopathic and energy healing systems have begun to flourish again. Many mainstream observers, including a growing number of M.D.’s, feel that they don’t have to wait for Western science to trap “chi” in a lab to accept the results of energy-based therapies.

Healing Energies in Daily Life,
October 14, 2006

Meet the Presenters

Denise Rizvi, ND is a certified Naturopath, fitness instructor and energy healer, and co-owner of The Healing Path, an integrative approach to wellness located at Terra Sky Center. “Uniting body, mind and spirit creates a powerful healing triad,” Denise says, “activating the strength of the natural healing force that each of us possesses.” She will frame our Healing Day with an overview of the body/mind/spirit triad and lead us in “Body Journeying,” an exercise for learning how to understand the language of the physical self.

Ali Rizvi is an energy healer and ceremonialist and co-owner of The Healing Path. The great-grandson of a Sufi teacher, he is trained in Inka Shamanic Energy Healing and Theta Core Belief healing and has a black belt in Shaolin Kung Fu and Tai Chi. “The path of the shaman is to bring balance and harmony to her relationship with life,” Ali says. He will take participants to a direct encounter with the energy centers, the charkas, to bring energy and healing to the whole self.

Bonnie Lundberg began studying Jin Shin Jyutsu in 1988 with Mary Burmeister, who brought this ancient healing art to the West. She has done presentations for cardiac rehab and cancer patients and sees clients in Morristown and Bedminster. On October 14 she will teach participants simple practical exercises to help free and harmonize the body’s energy, bringing relaxation, healing and wellbeing.

Therapeutic Touch is used in countless hospitals; the Chinese art of chi-gong (meditations that “move” the energy in the body) is taught to medical patients; “intuitive” diagnosis is used by some doctors in concert with blood tests, x-rays and CAT-scans.

But you don’t have to be a doctor or energy healer to use the simplest forms of energy healing for yourself and your family. You already know about energy in your body, mind and soul. You know when you feel on top of the world, mentally and physically, and what that rush feels like. You’ve experienced the loss of vital energy, physically as well as spiritually, when you’re hurt, wounded, or depressed. You know the time of the day when your energy is at lowest ebb. This isn’t entirely your biochemistry; it’s electromagnetic as well.

You just need to become more aware of the energy that’s with you all the time—that is you all the time. Then you can claim it, and learn some simple methods for helping that vital life-force flow more freely through your own organism.