Graham took the training seriously and learned rapidly. Sam was less disciplined; he began with initial excitement, but learned in fits and starts.
“Our teacher brought people up from the audience who had chronic conditions like lower back or neck pain. He made a simple diagnosis, and then he would adjust their qi,” said Graham. “The method was simple. In his mind the healer asks if certain aspects of a person are weak or strong. If he gets the feeling that any aspect is weak, he asks for it to go back to being strong, the way it is in a healthy person. These aspects could be anything physical, psychological, or environmental. If you had asthma, for example, our teacher wouldn’t ask just about the lungs and respiratory system. He’d ask if the nervous system was weak or strong, he’d look into depression and general fatigue. Any disorder involves hunting for where the chain of energy has broken down, and then repairing it one link at a time. The amazing thing was that the volunteers who came forward with sore backs and necks were healed on the spot.”
For many westerners, the story so far contains some unresolved questions. Can the body’s energy be detected by someone else? We know what it’s like to sense if someone is angry or sad, but we tend to call those emotional states, not energy states. Can we go a step further and call disease an energy state? It’s meaningful that cancer is often detected first by the patient, who feels a sudden drop in energy or an unexplained mood shift toward depression or vague uneasiness. Qigong would call this a breakdown in the pattern of qi, while Western medicine waits for more-concrete physical changes before taking action.
Even though we understand in theory that the body’s energy patterns are affected at the quantum level, westerners don’t recognize that energy can be detected subjectively, either by the sick patient or a healer. The major sticking point in Graham’s story, the notion that the qigong healer can change another person’s energy through intention, actually fits the field model of physics quite well. In Chinese medicine, qi is a field, just like a magnetic field, and it embraces both patient and healer without any boundaries to separate them. A pocket magnet looks separate and isolated, but it, too, is embraced by the entire magnetic field of the earth.
Graham found that a simple demonstration helped to overcome some initial distrust he had. “In qigong the main pathway of energy is up and down the spine. We got into pairs and did a simple muscle test. While I held my arm straight out, my partner would press down on it. We had no problem resisting the downward pressure on our arms. Then we were asked to envision the energy running down our spines and to follow it in our mind’s eye. As soon as I did that, I couldn’t resist the pressure on my arm; it became instantly weak.
“Then we reversed the exercise. While my partner kept pushing down on my extended arm, I imagined the energy running up my spine. This time it was easy to resist the pressure on my arm; in fact, I felt stronger. At first we used the muscle test with extended arm—a simple form of kinesiology—but after a while the healer could perform the testing in his mind, asking ‘weak or strong?’ without contacting the patient’s body. I know it sounds incredible, but that’s the basis of the healing I’ve been doing for several years now.”
And what happened to Sam, the man who suffered from early-onset Parkinson’s?
“His tremors decreased dramatically while we were at the course,” said Graham. “Sam got very excited and talked about going off his medicine. Driving home from the airport, he seemed like a different person, enthusiastic and totally free of symptoms that I could observe. But I made Sam promise not to go off his medications. We parted, and I don’t know what happened after that. I just hope he kept up his qigong practice.”
This story isn’t just about qigong; it illustrates a larger point: the body is nothing but energy patterns, and whether you are aware of it or not, you are manipulating them. Energy is a clumsy word. It doesn’t denote how alive the body is, how trillions of cells can cooperate to create a whole, and how, if you increase the positive energy in someone, they become incredibly more alive.
The concept of vital energy hasn’t caught on in the West because it leaves no physical traces. Without a map of how this energy flows, comparable to a map of the central nervous system, skeptics can call life energy imaginary. But there are many medical treatments in India and China that rely upon exactly such maps, which were drawn purely by seeing energy channels through intuition. Acupuncture and acupressure are the best known of the Chinese systems.
Here is a story I heard from Henry, a friend who visited a local acupuncturist in Los Angeles. “I had pulled a muscle in my upper arm doing work around the house, and although I thought the pain would go away on its own, it grew worse over the next three weeks. I knew, from doing this sort of thing to myself before, that it was tendinitis. Instead of going to my family doctor, I decided to try an alternative treatment first.
“I was given the name of a good acupuncturist and made an appointment. He said he could help, and as I lay on his table he stuck needles in a few places, not just on my afflicted muscle but also on other places on my neck and shoulder. When the treatment was over and I was about to leave, the acupuncturist surprised me by asking if I was depressed. My mother had died the year before, and I told him that I had been feeling down, even though I didn’t think I was still grieving.
“He told me that he had detected weak energy around me. That was how he recognized that I was depressed, and he suggested that I let him do a few things. I didn’t want to have more needles in me, but that’s not what he did. He pressed a few points along my spine, very gently. He also told me he did a little psychic work at the same time. The whole thing took no more than ten minutes, and he didn’t charge me.
“As I was walking back to my car, I couldn’t tell if my tendinitis was any better, but my mood had shifted. Suddenly I felt very good. I was buoyant, my footstep was lighter. Only then, when the gray cloud over me had lifted, did I realize that I had been feeling down for quite a while. The next day I was still in a good mood, almost elated. My shoulder improved enough that I didn’t go back to the acupuncturist. That visit stands out for receiving a healing I never expected.”
The energy to change
The difference between healthy and unhealthy energy can be summarized as follows:
Healthy energy is flowing, flexible, dynamic, balanced, soft, associated with positive feelings.
Unhealthy energy is stuck, frozen, rigid, brittle, hard, out of balance, associated with negative emotions.
You can bring healing to any aspect of your life by shifting an unhealthy energy state into a healthy one. People who can’t find a way to change are entangled in one or more of the qualities just listed. The hard, frozen looks of hatred that spouses exchange in a bad marriage express one kind of energy, while the soft, loving looks exchanged in a happy marriage express the other. The distinction between physical and nonphysical is no longer relevant. In your body the soft, flowing blood fats that are healthy can become hard, stuck deposits of plaque in your coronary arteries, which are unhealthy. In society, the soft, flowing exchange between people who are tolerant of each other can turn into hard, stuck feelings of prejudice and animosity.
There are strong indications that energy is more powerful than matter. Studies in longevity, for example, examine why some people live to a healthy old age. Their secret isn’t good genes, diet, not smoking, or even exercise, beneficial as all those things may be. The highest correlation for reaching ninety or hundred years of age in good shape is emotional resilience, the ability to bounce back from life’s setbacks. That fits neatly with one of the qualities of healthy energy: flexibility.
Starting in the late 1940s, Harvard Medical School undertook a study of young males to see why some developed premature heart attacks in middle age. The leading correlation wasn’t high cholesterol, bad diet, smoking, or a sedentary lifestyle. The men who escaped premature heart attacks were likely to be those who faced their psychological problems during their twenties, as opposed to men who ig
nored them. Psychological problems are marked by stuck, rigid attitudes and distorted emotions, pointing us once again to the importance of energy.
I know a woman with a hair-trigger temper who recently received a joke video that was going around, the kind that inserts your name into a generic scenario. It was voting season, and the video was titled “The one person who caused the election to be lost.” It showed a mock newscast about how the presidency had been lost because a single voter had stayed home on election day. Her name was inserted into it. Most people would see this as a harmless reminder to vote, but this woman became incensed. She wrote angry e-mails to the organization that was circulating the videos, condemning them for invading her privacy. It was hours before she stopped fuming, and for most of the day her family knew to stay out of her way.
Here we see every sign of unhealthy energy in action. She was already stuck in a pattern of getting angry. Her outrage was rigid and unyielding. It took a long time to subside, and it was associated with negative emotions (not just anger but resentment, victimization, and self-pity). Once she had erupted, it would do little good to treat the outward manifestations. Assuring her that the video was just a joke, imploring her to be reasonable, placating her with distractions or cheering up would all have missed the underlying cause, which was energy-based.
Mainstream medicine vaguely understands how negative emotions can bleed into physical symptoms. But two problems have blocked this from being a fruitful road to treatment. First, distorted energy is too general and widespread. It isn’t possible to define a “cancer personality,” for example, because disease-prone people are open to all kinds of disorders; there’s no one-to-one match between anxiety, for example, and cancer. Finding a simple correlation between negative thinking and a single disorder hasn’t worked out, either; nor can being generally positive in your thinking safeguard you from a particular disorder. Your risk factors will improve overall by a certain percentage (usually small) compared with negative people, but beyond that, statistics don’t give us any answers.
Second, having detected unhealthy energy patterns, conventional medicine isn’t equipped to offer a cure. Psychiatry comes the closest, but it is slow and unpredictable—traditional talk or “couch” therapy can last for years. Taking a shortcut by giving a drug, typically for anxiety and depression, alleviates the symptom but doesn’t cure the underlying disorder. The effectiveness of a pill ends the day you stop taking it. Still, psychiatry does direct us to the region of energy where words and thoughts are powerful enough to move molecules. To give just one instance, Prozac, the antidepressant that launched the era of billion-dollar drugs, had an unexpected side effect: it proved effective in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Patients suffering from OCD look like perfect examples of people whose lives are run by their brains. They cannot stop repeating the same behavior (hand-washing, cleaning the house, adding up the numbers on license plates), and their minds are filled with obsessive thoughts that return no matter how hard the person tries to evict them. Using a brain scan, neurologists can spot an abnormality in such patients—specifically, low blood flow to the orbitofrontal cortex. This region is associated with being able to make decisions and behave flexibly, the very thing OCD sufferers can’t do well.
Prozac restores normal activity in the brains of OCD patients, and with that finding, neurology moved a little closer to seeing the brain as an all-purpose chemical factory that determines behavior. But then a new discovery threw that view into question. When OCD patients seek so-called couch therapy, it turns out that talking through their problems can also relieve their symptoms, and brain scans reveal that normal activity has been restored to their brains, only without a drug. This makes logical sense as well. If you are depressed about losing your money in the stock market, taking an antidepressant may relieve your symptoms, but having the market shoot back up will do the same thing, and far more effectively, be cause now you may have a reason to be euphoric.
Our ingrained habit in this society is to grab the Prozac and bypass the psychiatrist, which once again comes down to trusting the physical over the nonphysical. We must overcome this bias, but how? Does this mean we should all immediately seek psychotherapy?
Most studies indicate that we are becoming by the decade a more anxious and depressed society, more hooked on antidepressants and tranquilizers. Stress levels keep increasing, whether from loud noise, long work hours without rest, interrupted sleep patterns, or pressure at work. Anyone suffering from such stressors will tend to show a marked imbalance in the body, such as elevated blood pressure, increased stress hormones like cortisol, or irregular heart rhythms. Psychiatry can’t address such a wide swath of problems. Trying to create a patch of coherence in someone’s life does small good when their whole system is in chaos.
What’s really needed is a broad-spectrum cure. If all the qualities of unhealthy energy, from blockages and rigidity to negative emotions, could be healed at once, your body could quickly rebound to its natural state of health; it already knows how to thrive in the flow of healthy energy. It takes one more breakthrough to find such a cure, which we will come to next.
In Your Life: How Efficient Is Your Energy?
Every life-form uses energy with great efficiency. A wolf, leopard, or field mouse instinctively knows what food to eat, where to find it, how to survive hardship, and how to obey the rhythms of nature. Animals use life energy in the optimal way for their species.
Unlike creatures in the wild, you and I can manage our supply of energy any way we choose. How you employ your energy makes all the difference between a life well lived and one that is squandered. You and I parse our energy according to the way we express emotions, intelligence, awareness, action, and creativity, since all of these aspects require subtle energy. Much more than burning calories is at stake. Energy must be considered holistically because when body and soul are aligned, every aspect of life is affected.
To get a better idea of what energy efficiency means, take the following profile quiz. For each item, rate yourself from 1 to 3 according to how well it describes you.
3 - This is how I am almost all the time.
2 - This is how I am some of the time.
1 - This is how I am a little of the time.
__I leave work on time every day. I don’t stay late more than one day a week.
__I get up and go to sleep at the same time every day.
__My desk at work is organized. There’s not a big backlog.
__I don’t procrastinate. I believe that the best way to handle unpleasant tasks is to face them right away.
__I don’t harbor negativity for a long time. Keeping score and waiting for payback isn’t my style.
__My closet is organized. I can get at anything I want easily.
__My refrigerator isn’t full of leftovers. I’m not surprised by old fruits and vegetables I forgot I had.
__I know where I stand emotionally with the people in my life. We are open and clear with one another.
__I know my weaknesses and have a plan for overcoming them. I will be stronger tomorrow than I was yesterday.
__I use money well. I don’t hoard and I don’t spend recklessly. I am not worried about my credit card balances.
__My salary fits my needs for now and the future. I am a good financial planner.
__My yard is maintained in all seasons. (If you don’t have a yard, substitute patio, balcony, house plants, or personal environment.)
__I keep up with my housekeeping. I’m not faced with accumulated dust and dirt that’s piled up for weeks.
__When I go shopping, I come back with what I need. I rarely have to run back because I forgot something.
__I keep up with how everyone in my family is doing. I have a good idea of what’s going on in their lives.
__I don’t have to rush at the last minute to get things done. I am good at scheduling and balancing my time.
__I feel that there’s a good balance between work
and play in my life. I’m having fun and getting things done.
____Total Score
Looking at your score:
43–51 points. You are leading an efficient life and have a good chance of feeling comfortable, contented, and in control. There are no drastic imbalances in how you use your time and energy. Each aspect of your existence is given a good amount of attention.
36–42 points. Your life is mostly under control and runs along well enough. You have minor areas of neglect, however, and there are times when you feel a little overwhelmed by all the things left undone. If you look closely, there are aspects of your life where you know you could be more efficient, using your time and energy better. Attending to those aspects now will increase your sense of comfort and contentment.
26–35 points. Your life is inefficient. You have a sense that you are treading water rather than getting ahead. Too much is out of your control, and your ability to cope with everyday challenges is only adequate. To begin to feel more comfortable, you will have to discipline yourself and change your habits. Look realistically at your inefficient ways, because sloppiness or disorganization, procrastination or denial, impulsiveness or neglect drain our energy.
17–25 points. Your life is barely your own because so much is out of your control. Daily life is a struggle just to keep things together, and most days you feel that you are losing that fight. On the periphery something very wrong is probably happening. You are being held back either psychologically or by bad circumstances. To get back on track, outside professional help will be needed.