Reiki or drugs?

Posted on November 30, 2012

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New clinical studies published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (Vol. 56, No. 12, 2010) have established that Reiki is as effective as beta blocker drugs in re-establishing optimum heart rate in subjects who have experienced acute coronary syndrome (sudden reduced blood flow to the heart accompanied with chest pain and unstable heart rate).

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Your Beautiful Brain

Posted on November 30, 2012

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New imaging technology reveals that functional energy in the brain is even more beautifully organized than scientists had imagined. Using new software with a technique called diffusion tensor MRI that tracks water molecules as they move along axons, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital found that the fibers are arranged in a surprisingly regular 3-D grid. Several millennia ago, yogis described this configuration calling the linear pathways nadis (Sanskrit meaning little river) or tsa (Tibetan meaning channel).

 

See the hidden energy structure in humans and other primates at Smithsonian.com/brainimages

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The universe is made of stuff we can barely begin to imagine…

Posted on December 1, 2012

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Number 10 of The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries ::

 

Everything you probably think of when you think of the universe—planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, dust—makes up just 4 percent of whatever is out there. The rest comes in two flavors of “dark,” or unknown stuff: dark matter, at 23 percent of the universe, and dark energy, at a whopping 73 percent:

 

Scientists have some ideas about what dark matter might be—exotic and still hypothetical particles—but they have hardly a clue about dark energy. … University of Chicago cosmologist Michael S. Turner ranks dark energy as “the most profound mystery in all of science.”

 

The effort to solve it has mobilized a generation of astronomers in a rethinking of physics and cosmology to rival and perhaps surpass the revolution Galileo inaugurated on an autumn evening in Padua. … [Dark energy] has inspired us to ask, as if for the first time: What is this cosmos we call home?

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Spiritual Bankruptcy

Posted on December 16, 2012

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“It’s easy to lose the sense of the sacred in the modern world. Many of us live out of touch with the power of the natural world, knowing it as something fenced in parks and tamed in gardens. Behind the reflected light of the city, night is no longer dark and vast. We live in a world in which life has been reduced to a chemical reaction, the stars are dead material processes, and there is no life after the death of the body. If we have no sacred relationship to the environment, to people, to ourselves as spiritual, to religious images, to mantras, and so on, it means the sacred aspect of our lives is dying, or buried, or hasn’t been accessed. It doesn’t arise in our internal experience because it hasn’t found a match in the external world; there is nothing to evoke it or fuel it. The societies of the West have created wonderful technologies, arts and sciences, but living in a dead world, relying on entertainment for fleeting satisfaction, it is a sad unnecessary price to pay for those advances.

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Gleaned from Healing with Form, Energy and Light by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

 

Clearly there is something missing from Western society. We are more affluent and have more ease, abundance and freedom than any other culture in the world. Yet, the prevailing dissatisfaction of our lives is increasingly expressed in our desire for medication, meaningless obsessions, and the ease in which we are distracted by the newest shiny object.

 

Sure, I have a pod, pad, phone and PC. They are amazing portals into the vast world of bytes, bits and buzzwords. But the illusion of meaningful connection is technological trickery. Use, them as tools. Have fun with them. But don’t fill up on high tech cotton candy and forget to ingest what is real and nourishing to your soul. Make space, pause, turn off your gadgets, have no agenda, be outside, feel deeply inside, be. Chasing after what is deeply meaningful is futile. Make space and it comes to you. Unexpectedly, reverently, comically, beautifully.

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Is seeing really believing?

Posted on December 21, 2012

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Physics tells us, in no uncertain terms, that everything that has temperature-everything that “is”, including us – is constantly and dynamically emitting frequencies of electromagnetic signals (light) in the infrared spectrum. All electromagnetic waves are ultimately light waves. Yet, most light is invisible to our eyes. If you imagine that the total band of electromagnetic frequencies is represented by the height of the Empire State Building, how tall would the slice of the band of frequencies be that you can see? Would it be ten stories high, five stories high, one story high, or one foot high? None of those: something much smaller. The band you can see, visible light, is much less than the height of a grain of sand.  We are blind to more than 99.999 percent of the light that actually exists in the universe. Our retinal cells only resonate with a tiny slice of the band of energy frequencies that make up the total electromagnetic pie. Were it not for the advances in science and the evolution of technology, most of the universe would be unknown to us. If we limit our ideas about light simply to what we can see with our eyes, we are actually blind to the fact that the universe is a light universe, what we can even call a living light universe. And we are a dynamic, integral part of it.

 

Gleaned from The Energy Healing Experiments, Science Reveals our Natural Power to Heal, by Gary E. Schwartz, PhD., Atria Books, 2007

 

Energy healing is believed to work with this light matrix we express. Areas of disease and discomfort will “appear” as blocked to the flow of energy. A skilled energy healer will perceive these areas of blockage and facilitate reconnection to the flow of energy in the electromagnetic field. Sounds simple? It is, but hardly easy. Most healers start with a natural ability to perceive energy that must be cultivated, trained and honed for many years.

 

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Where DO we come from?

Posted on January 20, 2013

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With the advent of the space program more than 50 years ago, there was a great deal of conjecture about the psychological consequences of breaching the cosmos. At the 1959 Symposium on Space Psychiatry Dr. Eugene Brody ominously warned that “Separation from the earth with all of its unconscious symbolic significance for man, …might in theory at least be expected…to produce–even in a well-selected and trained pilot–something akin to the panic of schizophrenia.”   Though pilots who had flown at high altitude expressed a much different experience. “I feel like I have broken the bonds from the terrestrial sphere,” said one pilot. Other pilots expressed similar experiences of euphoria. “It seems so peaceful, it seems like you are in another world: “I feel like a giant.” “A king,” and multiple reports of “feeling of exultation, of wanting to fly on and on.” NASA psychologists became nervous after the first two spacewalkers had expressed not only an odd euphoria but a worrisome disinclination to go back inside the capsule. “I felt excellent and in a cheerful mood and reluctant to leave free space,” wrote Alexei Leonov. Gemini IV astronaut Ed White gushed that he felt “like a million dollars.” and later after the crew and Mission Control spent twenty minutes pleading with him to return to the space craft. “This is the saddest moment of my life.”  Gleaned from Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars, 2011, Norton Books

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Do science & spirituality still have to be an either/or choice?

Posted on March 29, 2013

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As a neurosurgeon, I’d heard many stories over the years of people who had strange experiences, usually after suffering cardiac arrest: stories of traveling to mysterious, wonderful landscapes; of talking to dead relatives-even of meeting God Himself.

 

Wonderful stuff, no question. But all of it, in my opinion, was pure fantasy. What caused the otherworldly types of experiences that such people so often report? I didn’t claim to know, but I did know that they were brain-based. When your brain is absent, you are absent, too. All of consciousness is. If you don’t have a working brain, you can’t be conscious. This is because the brain is the machine that produces consciousness in the first place. When the machine breaks down, consciousness stops.

 

Or so I would have told you before my own brain crashed.

 

Mysteriously, I contracted an illness, managed to be conscious in another dimension for a week while in a coma, and somehow recovered completely. During my seven day coma my own brain wasn’t just working improperly. It wasn’t working at all.

 

As a practicing neurosurgeon with decades of research and hands-on work in the operating room behind me, I was in a better-than-average position to judge not only the reality but also the implications of what happened to me.

 

The place I went while I was in my coma was real. Real in a way that makes the life we’re living here and now completely dreamlike by comparison

 

Those implications are tremendous beyond description. My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the universe itself and all the beings within it are ultimately going.

 

For some time after my recovery I continued to wrestle with the fact that everything I had learned in four decades of study and work about the human brain, about the universe, and about what constitutes reality conflicted with what I’d experienced during those seven days in coma. When I fell into my coma, I was a secular doctor who had spent his entire career in some of the most prestigious research institutions in the world, trying to understand the connections between the human brain and consciousness. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in consciousness. I was simply more aware than most people of the staggering mechanical unlikelihood that it existed independently-at all!

 

We can only “see” what our brain allows through. The brain’s filter (in particular its left-side linguistic/logical part, that which generates our sense of rationality and the feeling of being a sharply defined ego or self) is a barrier to our higher knowledge and experience.

 

I now know that the primary hurdle that most people who have a Near Death Experience must jump is not how to re-acclimate to the limitations of the earthly world (though this can certainly be a challenge) but how to convey what the love they experienced out there actually feels like.

 

But like me, when these people come back to the earthly level, they’re stuck with words alone, to convey experiences and insights that lie completely beyond the power of words. It’s like trying to write a novel with only half the alphabet.

 

It is my belief that we are now facing a crucial time in our existence. We need to recover more of that larger knowledge while living here on earth, while our brains (including its left-side analytical parts) are fully functioning. Science-the science to which I’ve devoted so much of my life-doesn’t contradict what I learned up there. But far, far too many people believe it does, because certain members of the scientific community, who are pledged to the materialist worldview, have insisted again and again that science and spirituality cannot coexist.

 

They are mistaken.

 

The unconditional love and acceptance that I experienced on my journey is the single most important discovery I have ever made, or will ever make, and as hard as I know it’s going to be to unpack the other lessons I learned while there, I also know in my heart that sharing this very basic message-one so simple that most children readily accept it- is the most important task I have.

 

Gleaned from Dr. Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Simon and Schuster, Inc. 2012

 

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Why Integrative Medicine?

Posted on March 7, 2013

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Robert Stoller, MD, a California psychoanalyst, made important discoveries through visits to S&M (sadomasochism) and B&D (bondage and discipline) establishments in Los Angeles. He interviewed people who practiced hardcore sadomasochism, which inflicts real pain on the flesh, and discovered that masochistic participants had all had serious physical illnesses as children and had undergone regular, terrifying, painful medical treatment. “As a result,” writes Stoller, “they had to be confined severely for long periods in hospitals without the chance to unload their frustration, despair and rage openly and appropriately. Hence the perversions”. As children they learned to replay the story of the trauma so that they could win. And the way they won was by erotizing their agony.

 

“Patients want to be considered whole human beings in the context of their world” says Esther Sternberg, MD, a National Institutes of health senior scientist. There is a deep dissatisfaction with a health care system that often leaves doctors feeling rushed and overwhelmed and patients feeling as if they’re nothing more than diseased livers or damaged joints. Integrative medicine seems to promise more time, more attention, and a broader approach to healing. Experts are exploring new ways to treat the mind, body, and spirit – all at the same time. Integrative medicine seeks to incorporate treatment options from conventional and alternative approaches, taking into account not only physical symptoms, but also psychological, social and spiritual aspects of health and illness. “It’s no longer considered fringe,” Sternberg says, “Medical students are being taught to think in an integrated way about the patient, and ultimately, that will improve the management of illness at all levels.”

 

 

Reiki is a complete Integrative modality that supports healing of body, mind, emotions and spirit. It compliments and supports traditional medical treatments and procedures by addressing and integrating all aspects of being.

 

Gleaned from The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, MD and The Osher Center for Integrative Medicine website.