Richard G. Petty, MD

Qi, Prana and Pneuma

I often hear people expressing concern over words like qi (chi), believing that it has something to do with primitive or pagan cultures. In actual fact qi is based upon observations by a culture that looked at the world very differently from that developed in the Western world. It is often mistranslated as “energy” which is not quite accurate.

Some experts now refer to the “subtle systems” of the body, and they appear to be of many types. In China these systems were thought to be the highways of the animating force of the body. In Japan it s known as ki, in India it is prana, the Greeks called it “Pneuma” or in the West were called the etheric or the fifth element, after earth, fire, air and water. There are at least 97 cultures around the world that have claimed the existence of some form of “energy.” We use the term subtle “systems”, to be a little more precise than saying “energies”, for these subtle systems are composed of the inseparable twins: 
1. Subtle energies and
2. The subtle fields that carry them.
Without energy, the fields could not actualize, and without the fields, there would be nothing to carry the energy.

Let’s look at something else.

I have been interested to see whether these different concepts map onto each other. I just found an interesting discussion here, that adds some interesting material, all of which I have been able to confirm.

According to my dictionary the word prana does indeed come from the root "Ãpraa" that expresses the idea of "breathing" or "blowing of the wind." Prana means "breath" and also "life" and "living being". In Genesis God formed us out of dust from the soil, He blew into his nostrils the breath of life and the human became a living being.

Jung is one of the people who said that the Indian prana corresponds to the Greek pneuma. Pneuma means "air in motion" as in breath and wind, and it is connected with the idea of life. There is a further correlation: prana is related to the mind and rendered as "spirit," and pneuma has the same meaning.

The trouble with qi has arisen because the Chinese have never had any interest in discussing the meaning of a concept. So they do not speculate on the nature of qi, but instead perceive it functionally: by what it does. Qi, chi, ki has a similar meaning to prana and pneuma: it is translated as breath, vapor, and energy.

This is different from the New Age idea that everything "has" prana or qi. Only living beings do.

"Jesus answered and said unto him,
Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man born be born again,
He cannot see the Kingdom of God.
Nicodemus saith unto him,
How can a man be born again when he is old?
Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?
Jesus answered: Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
Except a man born of water and the Spirit,
He cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.
That which is born of flesh is flesh and that which is born of Spirit is spirit,
Marvel not that I said unto thee: Ye must be born again.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof,
But cannot tell whence it comes and where it goeth:
So is every one that is born of the Spirit.”
The Bible John 3:3-8


"The term "Spirit" translates the Hebrew word ruah (Rûach), which, in its primary sense, means breath, air, wind. Jesus indeed uses the sensory image of the wind to suggest to Nicodemus the transcendent newness of him who is personally God's breath, the divine Spirit."

J. Cardinal Ratzinger, Catechism of the Catholic Church 1994

T’ai Chi Chih and the Sympathetic Nervous System

One of the problems about getting older is that the activity of the sympathetic nervous system may increase, bringing with it an increased risk of metabolic problems such as insulin resistance, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

The sympathetic nervous system  is a branch of the autonomic nervous system. It is always active at a basal level, which is called sympathetic tone. It becomes more active during times of stress. Its actions during the stress response comprise the classical fight-or-flight response.

There is a very interesting study from the Norman Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior in Los Angeles.

There were 32 people in the study aged 60 or over. There were 19 people who were T’ai Chi Chih (TCC) practitioners and 13 who were not. The practitioners had completed a 25-week training in TCC the 13 others just had health education classes. T'ai Chi Chih is a simplified  type of T'ai Chi that emphasizes the development of qi, a.k.a. chi.

TCC practitioners performed the breathing and movements for 20 minutes, while HE participants passively rested for the same time. Investigators measured various cardiovascular parameters before and after the task. A subsample of participants returned for a second evaluation and performed videotape-guided stretching for 20 minutes to evaluate the cardiovascular effects of slow-moving physical activity. TCC performance was found to significantly decrease sympathetic nervous system activity as measured by cardiac pre-ejection, blood pressure and heart rate. In contrast, there was no change in sympathetic activity following passive rest or slow-moving physical activity.

This shows us that there is something different about T’ai Chi. Practicing it leads to a decrease in activity of the sympathetic nervous system to levels that are not achieved by performing comparable physical activity alone.

Non-pharmacological and Lifestyle Approaches to Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: 11. Integrated Medicine

The whole point of Integrated Medicine and Integrated Health is to help the person with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to become integrated as a person by using an integrated approach to treatment. This kind of comprehensive approach is particularly important for many people with ADHD. I also want to re-emphasize that although ADHD is the approved term for the problem, many people, particularly adults, may have little overt evidence of hyperactivity, and they are better thought of as having “ADD.”

Attentional problems come in all shapes and sizes. Some are so mild that people just need to be shown how to use a day planner and implement some time management scheme. Others need a more aggressive and comprehensive approach. Whatever we do has to be individualized to the person with the problem. Not only do we have to match the plan with the person, we also need to match it with his or her belief system.

It is important to recognize that no one approach is likely to work on its own. Medications may be very helpful, but they are only tools to help people get organized so that they can fulfill their potential. And medications are unlikely to be effective unless we also deal with nutrition, posture, breathing, sleep and environmental stress.

It is also essential to realize that ADHD is highly co-morbid: there is evidence of increased rates of physical problems, including disturbances in thyroid function and cell membrane function throughout the body. The rates of conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, learning disabilities, tics and Tourette’s, worry, anxiety and mood disorders are all much higher in people with ADHD. So high that until recently, many experts believed that ADHD was a symptom rather than a clearly delineated illness. This overlap is also one of the reasons why some people persist in saying that the diagnosis of ADHD is nothing more than a stigmatizing label for socially unacceptable behavior.

Physical

• Medications
• Nutrition
• Posture
• Exercise
• Environment

Over the last few weeks we have spent a lot of time looking at some of the options for treating the physical components of the problem. Now let us look at the rest.

Psychological

• Find out and work with a person’s interests. ADHD is highly dependent on context. A child or adult may have terrible problems with schoolwork, but be able to play a video game for hours on end
• There are multiple intelligences: uncover which are of the greatest importance. It is essential for a person to discover their strengths rather than being forced to focus on the weaknesses. Many people with ADHD find that highlighting text in a book can be useful, while others learn by doing
• People are more likely to follow instructions if they are interesting and emotionally charged
• Bear in mind that many people have poor self-esteem and others suffer from enormous feelings of regret. This is a particular issue for people who may have reached middle age before being diagnosed. We have seen countless people who feel that they have missed out on life. A man working in construction realized that he could have gone to college thirty years ago if only his ADHD had been diagnosed and treated
• Teach visualization skills
• Discover which times of the day are best in terms of attention and alertness
• Learn some simple relaxation techniques
• Learn problem-solving skills

Social

• ADHD can play havoc with relationships. If a child has it, there can be enormous stress on the parents and siblings, all of whom are at higher risk of some features of ADHD themselves. It is essential to help the family with coping skills. ADHD can also put a great deal of stress on a spouse or children. It is also important to know that many people with ADHD have sexual problems that stem from impatience, a low frustration threshold if they cannot have sex when they want it, and real problems with enjoying the moment and taking time to enjoy a romantic interlude. Some people also use sex as a form of self-medication. So it is essential to find out if there are sex or relationship problems and to deal with them, which may need outside help
• Many people with ADHD are socially awkward and may need to learn some social and communication skills
• ADHD and social awkwardness can be magnets for bullies, and it is remarkable how many young people with untreated or inadequately treated ADHD have been bullied. Occasionally they become the perpetrators of bullying to compensate for their difficulties. In either case it is important to discover and deal with bullying. It is one of several reasons why some experts have recommended enrolling a child in martial arts classes. Not only can they help with self-defense, but also the discipline of a martial arts class can work wonders for some people with ADHD
• Role models are important for people with ADHD. It is very helpful, particularly for young people to see that other sufferers have become extremely successful
• It is also important for parents and other family members to develop and maintain a positive image of the person with ADHD
• Develop positive yet realistic career and life goals

Subtle

• Poor breathing techniques can engender many problems. Learning to breath effectively can have profound physical effects as well as stimulating and balancing the subtle systems of the body
• As we have seen, although the research base is very small, yoga, t’ai chi ch’uan or qigong can all be very helpful
• Many people with ADHD are acutely sensitive to “atmosphere:” to the thoughts, feelings and attitudes of other people, and they need specific help to remain grounded and to protect their senses. Some of the flower essences can very helpful for that, as well as some other techniques that we shall be publishing shortly

Spiritual

• How can there be a spiritual component to ADHD? Some people find it difficult to engage in prayer or meditation because of problems with attention. However, with a little perseverance, we have evidence that some forms of meditation may actually help.
• Second the rituals of religion can sometimes provide a wonderful anchor for the person who is having a had time with ADHD.
• Another point is that ADHD is not all bad. Some people who have it become more attuned to nature, animals and to a mystical understanding of the world: an over-reliance on reasoning and linear learning can stifle those perceptions.
• Some people have suggested that ADHD may for the same reasons unlock a rich vein of creativity that might otherwise never have appeared.

There are plenty of books and websites that portray ADHD as a gift. While I have the greatest respect for this approach, it is still important for us not to forget the demonstrable problems caused by inadequately treated ADHD.

ADHD exists, it is treatable, and though it can bring many problems, it can also bring many opportunities. Just so long as we remember to respect every dimension of the person who has it, and remember that if we do not manage it, it will manage us.

Non-pharmacological and Lifestyle Approaches to Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: 10. Traditional Chinese Medicine

One of the problems when looking at research using traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is that the Chinese medical system does not easily map onto the Western system of medicine. So while we might talk about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a Chinese medicine expert would be more interested in disturbances of qi, shen and jing in the whole person.

Most people who have done much acupuncture have seen people with attentional problems and tried to help them with acupuncture or acupressure. In traditional Chinese medicine, hyperactivity is thought to be the result of disturbance of the Shen (Mind or Spirit) that resides in the Heart. If the Shen is healthy then the mind and body of the child will be calm.

According to traditional Chinese medical pathology, there are three things that can disturb the Shen residing in the Heart:

• Heat
• Phlegm and/or
• Xu (Deficiency)

In the poetic language of the Chinese:

“If the Shen is not nourished sufficiently the child will not feel grounded and their Shen will flutter around nervously, like an agitated flame; this will be made worse if further Heat develops and rises, or if excessive Phlegm develops and obstructs the portals or orifices of the Heart to cause confusion and poor judgment.”

You see why Western doctors often have a hard time learning about Chinese medicine, and few ever comprehend its beauty and subtlety. And I say that after 26 years of acupuncture practice under my belt!

Despite the popularity of Chinese medicine, which includes acupuncture, herbs, nutrition and qigong, there are very few studies.

There have been some done in China, but often the structure of trials is different in China, where it is often considered unethical to withhold treatment, so studies rarely have a placebo arm.

A number of experts in Chinese medicine have written articles on their experience in treating ADHD.

Since there are so many people claiming success using Chinese medicine, there is an urgent need for controlled studies so that we can see how acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine might fit in with other forms of treatment, and when to use what. As we have said when examining all the different forms of unorthodox medicine, we always have to balance the natural desire to do without medications against the havoc that can be caused by untreated or inadequately treated ADHD.

Having seen acupuncture and acupressure help some people with ADHD myself, I shall continue to monitor and report on any research reports that come out in the future.

Acupuncture and Acupressure for Morning Sickness

Although I am most definitely of the male persuasion, I know that morning sickness can be an awful problem, though there is some evidence that it is an attempt by the body to rid itself of toxins that could otherwise harm the baby.

I have had a longstanding interest in the use of acupuncture and acupressure for the treatment of nausea and vomiting, whether pregnancy related or caused by infections, anesthesia or chemotherapy. Over twenty years ago my committee at the Research Council for Complementary Medicine helped fund research on the topic at the University of Belfast, and I have used both acupuncture and acupressure to treat many hundreds of people with nausea and vomiting. Before I left England, we were planning to do a clinical trial of acupuncture on morning sickness at Queen Charlotte’s hospital in London.

So I was delighted to see a meta-analysis published in the journal Explore.

The authors identified 14 eligible trials that had been completed over the last sixteen years, involving a total of 1615 women who had been treated with either acupressure, acupuncture or electrical stimulation at acupuncture points.

The conclusions were that these methods may reduce nausea by more than 50% compared with controls and vomiting by around 40%. These figures look about right, though acupuncture and acupuncture are very “operator-dependent:” some therapists get better results than others. What was interesting was that the effect was all due to acupressure: acupuncture was not shown to be effective, but acupressure was.

The analysis also points out a potential weakness in other meta-analyses. It is not wise to lump all acupuncture and acupressure together, since each may work somewhat differently.

As a sidebar, when we use acupuncture or acupressure, we always tailor the treatment to the individual, but the most commonly used points are Liver-3 on the top of the foot between the big toe and second toe, and Pericardium-6, which lies on the inside of the forearm, about two inches above the wrist.

World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day

It seems incredible that a year has passed since I last wished everyone a Happy World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day, which falls this year on April 28th.

At 10 a.m. local time, wherever you are in the world, there will be what they describe as, "A global health and healing event that will be held in hundreds of cities in sixty nations. Free and open to the public these events welcome anyone interested in personal and global health and healing."

The aim is to send a wave of positive healing "energy" around the world and draw attention to the benefits of T'ai Chi and Qigong.

You can visit can visit http://www.worldtaichiday.org to find events being held in your area that will be offering free teach-ins and exhibitions.

If you look on the left-hand side of the website under "Everyone's Resources" you will find a great many extra resources, primarily related to T'ai Chi and Qigong and health, including a list of much of the research  that has been done. It is just a list of papers and their summaries, but is a good place to start if you are not a specialist. There are also lists of places where you can learn T'ai Chi.

In my view, learning the basics of T'ai Chi and Qigong from a competent teacher is one of the best investments that you can ever make in yourself.

Now to that picture at the top of this article. It is not a hoax! You can find it at the Taichi Heartwork website.

I have had the privilege of studying T'ai Chi and Qigong with eight superb teachers on three continents. I learned a very great deal from each of them. The one who really resonated with me was Grandmaster John Kells, an Irishman who was a disciple and adopted son of Dr. Chi Chiang Tao.

John introduced more than 10,000 people to these arts, and many of them saw him demonstrate his internal force by throwing people without any physical contact. I have experienced it myself many times, and it is very real.

It is a by-product of personal development and a great deal more than a party trick. Very few of the Masters that I have known have developed themselves this far. If you get the chance to meet one, it can be life-changing.

For years now various scientists have claimed to have made machines that can generate this kind of force. So far I have not been convinced, despite having traveled to China, Russia and a dozen other countries to look at some of these gadgets.

If I find one that works, I shall let you know.

Until then, consider developing your own Qi. (It's sometimes spelled Chi or Ki). Next Saturday may be just the excuse that you need!

People Watching

For the eighth time in a week your humble reporter found himself at the Atlanta airport. Ahem, I should say, of course, the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

It’s a perfect place for people watching. New statistics out today have shown that in 2006 it held its position as the world’s busiest airport, followed by O’Hare in Chicago and London’s Heathrow.

I was chastened to realize that I have been in every one of the top ten airports in the last year or so. For people who like such things, here’s the list of the top ten busiest airports with the number of millions passengers who’ve been through each:

1. Atlanta    84.8
2. O’Hare    76.2
3. Heathrow   67.5
4. Tokyo’s Haneda    65.2
5. Los Angeles International    61
6. Dallas/Fort Worth    60
7. Paris, Charles de Gaulle    56.8
8. Frankfurt    52.8
9. Beijing Capital International Airport    48.5
10. Denver International    47.3

Spending a lot of time in airports can stress the physical, psychological and subtle systems of the body, as well as making it easy to lose touch with your spirituality.

I’m going to let you in on a secret: for over two decades I had learned and then taught methods for building resilience and bouncing back from adversity. But it wasn’t until I started flying a quarter of a million miles a year that I got the chance to test and refine the methods under the most extreme conditions. Engineers often talk about taking their constructions and “testing them to destruction.” I did the same thing with the methods I teach. If they couldn’t help people cope with flights, illness or job loss, then I discarded them and looked for something else. And if they didn’t also have another piece – a way to grow in response to adversity, they were out too.

The result has been a whole raft of techniques and methods that have been tried and tested again and again. Over the next year I shall be rolling out a great many of these techniques in a novel format.

Watch this space!

“Every adversity carries with it the seed of equal or greater benefit.”
--Napoleon Hill (American Founder of Personal Success Literature, 1883-1970)

“From the withered tree, a flower blooms.”
--Zen Buddhist Saying

“How you handle adversity in the workplace tends to have much more impact on your career than how you handle the good stuff. The people who know how to overcome adversity are the ones who rise to the top of the organization."
-- Martin E. P. Seligman (American Psychologist, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Former President of the American Psychological Association, 1941-)

“Adversity is the diamond dust with which Heaven polishes its jewels.”
-- Robert Leighton (Scottish Presbyterian Bishop and Classical Scholar, 1611-1684)

“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous times would have lain dormant.”
--Horace (a.k.a. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Roman Poet and Satirist, 65-8 B.C.E.)

“Adversity is not undesirable. Because, it is only when you are down and out in life that you can realize its true value.”
--Swami Ramdas (a.k.a. Papa Ramdas, Indian Spiritual Teacher, 1884-1963)

Daniel J. Benor's WHEE

I have become convinced that the so-called tapping therapies have a great deal to offer many people, as bizarre a they appear the first time that you encounter them!

I have recently come across another form of therapy developed by the holistic psychiatrist and author Daniel J. Benor. I have met Dan many times, and he is one of the most knowledgeable people that I know when it comes to healing, and this new technique seems to be helping a great many people.

He calls it WHEE: Whole Healing - Easily and Effectively, a.k.a. Wholistic Hybrid derived from EMDR and EFT.

Like the other tapping therapies, it seems often to be a quick way to release psychological and physical pains, and it is said to enhance performance in sports. Interestingly, it also seems to help some allergies. There are many helpful resources and a articles at the parent website: Wholistic Healing Research.

If you are looking for more options in your own path toward wellness, or if you have some stubborn problem to deal with, WHEE and the accompanying materials might well be worth your attention.

 

Back Pain, The Brain and Pain Cycles

A German research team using a specialized imaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to look at the differences between back pain sufferers' and healthy volunteers' brains found that individuals suffering from chronic low back pain also had micro-structural changes in their brains. The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago by the lead researcher Dr Jurgen Lutz, a radiologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany.

DTI tracks the movement of water molecules in the brain's gray and white matter. Individual water molecules are constantly in motion, colliding with each other and other nearby molecules, causing them to spread out, or diffuse. DTI allows us to analyze water diffusion in the tissues of the brain. In normal white matter, water diffuses in only one direction. So if they are moving in the “wrong” direction, we can use this as an indication that there are changes in the fiber pathways.

The investigators studied 20 patients who were experiencing chronic back pain with no precisely identifiable cause and 20 age- and gender-matched healthy volunteers. DTI was performed to measure the diffusion in several areas of each patient's brain. 
 



They discovered the brains of patients with chronic back pain had a more complex and active microstructure compared with the healthy volunteers' brains.

The changes were found in regions of the brain associated with pain-processing, emotion and stress response, including the cingulate gyrus, postcentral gyrus and superior frontal gyrus.

Although it is possible that theses structural disturbances are a cause of chronic pain, it is more likely to be the other way round.

This leads us to a very important concept that is not talked about as much as it should be: it is the idea of pain cycles. Pain cycles can have a physical or psychological origin and are thought to be maintained by some of the centers in the brain that process pain and emotional distress. The two are often mixed together: pain is extremely common in both depression and in bipolar disorder, and pain can, of course, make you feel depressed.

Theses pain cycles will often persist for long periods after the original cause of the pain has gone. So we may continue to feel pain long after a broken bone has healed, or we may continue to suffer emotionally long after a bad relationship should have been dead and buried. Many interventions like acupuncture or injecting steroids or anesthetics into trigger points can interfere with the pain cycle. Similarly there are many therapies, including some of the tapping therapies, that seem to “re-set” some of the systems in the nervous and subtle systems of the body.

In my forthcoming book Sacred Cycles, I talk a lo about these vicious pain cycles and how to interrupt them.

“Pain is part of being alive and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbeatable, and we need to be taught that.”
--Rabbi Harold S. Kushner (American Rabbi Aligned with the Progressive Wing of Conservative Judaism and Writer, 1935-)

“Softness is a dream in every ache to become a better soul.”
--John Kells (Irish-born British Grand Master of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, 1940-)

Of Horses and Hearts

I live on a horse farm, so I see the interactions between horses and between horses and humans almost every day. Horses are extraordinarily sensitive creatures with their own sets of emotions and highly developed sense of propriety. They are also very good barometers for the emotional states of humans. We could not work out why one of the horses at another farm was consistently bratty with one particular rider, until we discovered that she was high on ecstasy. Her “energy” was a mess and it totally confused the horse.

On the other hand, horses are often used therapeutically with emotionally and mentally ill and handicapped children and adults. My old horse - Mr. Black - was a perfect therapy horse: nothing ever fazed him.

There is now some more research demonstrating one of the possible mechanisms by which horses may be able to pick up on a rider’s emotional states.

I have a couple of times mentioned some of the work being done at the Institute of HeartMath in California.

Some of their work is controversial, but most has been quite convincing.

I have for several years now been interested in the phenomenon of Heart Rate Variability (HRV). As the name implies, it is a measurement of the beat-to-beat variation in the heart’s rate. Alteration (primarily reductions) of HRV has been reported to be associated with various pathologic conditions like hypertension, hemorrhagic shock, and septic shock. It has found its role as a predictor of mortality after an acute myocardial infarction. It may also be disturbed in major depressive disorder.

I knew about it from the days that I worked at the National Heart Hospital in London, but Roger Callahan – the discover of Thought Field Therapy (TFT) – has been able to show that TFT is one of the few therapies that can normalize it. We also discussed it in the context of the vagal nerve and compassion.

From a pilot study by the Institute and Dr. Ellen Gehrke from Alliant University  it appears that a horse's heart rhythms reflect their emotional state and can respond to the emotional state of a nearby human. When in contact, a horse's heart rate may mirror a human's emotions, implying a close unspoken form of communication between the two.

The study took place at Dr. Gehrke's ranch in San Diego, where electrocardiogram (ECG) recorders were placed on her and also on four of her horses. All five were monitored during a 24-hour period in which the horses were under a variety of normal conditions and activities such as eating, grooming or being alone. Measurements were also done while they were being ridden and accompanied by Dr. Gehrke.

The ECG recorders projected increased coherent HRV patterns for the horses during times of close, calm contact between them and Dr. Gehrke. Coherent HRV patterns have been shown to be the result of positive emotions and facilitate brain function.

Dr. Gehrke said, "Horses receive information from body language and give feedback. They don't think very much, they feel. They are very emotional and honest. They also have a powerful impact on your sense of self and ability to lead."

I don’t think that cardiac coherence is the whole story. They also respond to micro-movements - small movements of the legs, arms and trunk that are all but imperceptible to humans – and we have seen many of them sense events at long range. I travel a great deal and come home at odd times. But several witnesses saw Mr. Black start to become very excited 20-30 minutes before I would arrive home. In England, Rupert Sheldrake has amassed a considerable body of evidence to support those observations.

Nonetheless, this is very important research and I shall be very interested to see the final version once it has been subject to peer review.

"There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man."
--Sir Winston Churchill (English Statesman, British Prime Minister, 1940-1945 and 1951-1955, and, in 1953, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1874-1965)

“A man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot.”
--John Steinbeck (American Writer and, in 1962, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1902-1968)

“Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilization we will find the hoofprint of the horse beside it.”
--John Moore (American Man of Letters and Former Archivist and Librarian for the State of Tennessee, 1858-1929)

“I'd rather have a goddam horse.  A horse is at least human, for God's sake.”
--J.D. Salinger (American Writer, Student of Advaita Vedanta and Recluse, 1919-)

And finally:
"In my opinion, a horse is the animal to have.  Eleven-hundred pounds of raw muscle, power, grace, and sweat between your legs - it's something you just can't get from a pet hamster!"
--Unknown Author

Stonehenge

One of the most amazing monuments in England is Stonehenge. These days most people cannot enter it, but  when I first saw it as a teenager in the early 1970s you could still go inside, and it was one of the places that I was taught to dowse. The power of the place has undoubtedly risen with its fame and mystery, but the fact remains that most sensitive people are quite strongly affected by it.

Some of the stones were probably brought from South Wales and the entire Stonehenge complex was built in several construction phases spanning about 2,000 years, although there is evidence for activity both before and afterwards on the site. There was a wooden henge of the site long before the stones arrived.

The BBC is reporting that archaeologists have discovered a huge ancient settlement used by some of the people who built Stonehenge.

Excavations at Durrington Walls have uncovered remains of ancient houses. People seem to have occupied the sites seasonally, using them for ritual feasting and funeral ceremonies.

It is thought that in ancient times, this settlement would have housed hundreds of people, making it the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain. The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC - according to the researchers, the same period that Stonehenge was being built or re-built.

Mike Parker Pearson from the University of Sheffield, said, "In what were houses, we have excavated the outlines on the floors of box beds and wooden dressers or cupboards."

The researchers have excavated eight houses in total at Durrington. But they have identified many other probable dwellings using geophysical surveying equipment. They think there could have been at least one hundred houses, each measuring about 5m (16ft). They are square, made of timber, with a clay floor and central hearth. The archaeologists found 4,600-year-old rubbish covering the floors of the houses.

And archaeologists love rubbish!

The evidence suggest that Stonehenge drew Neolithic people from all over the region, who came for massive feasts in the midwinter where they consumed prodigious quantities of food. The bones were then tossed on the floors of the houses.

Durrington has its own henge made of wood, which is strikingly similar in layout to Stonehenge. It was discovered in 1967.

Both henges line up with events in the astronomical calendar - but not the same ones. Stonehenge is aligned with the midwinter solstice sunset, while Durrington's timber circle is aligned with the midwinter solstice sunrise. So it would seem that they were complementary.

Stonehenge lies on an extraordinary system of ley lines that crisscross the British Isles, parts of Northern France and parts of China. The lines are usually dismissed as pseudoscience, and it is certainly sometimes difficult to follow what some writers have to say on the subject. There is also a small body of evidence that some people can sense these ley lines. For people who can, the sensation is much the same as feeling the acupuncture meridians of the body. This apparent similarity has lead some experts in Feng Shui to approach personal wellness in the same way that they recommend the placement of plants, mirrors and other objects. Both the body and the land are looked at like gardens that need to be cultivated.

With some people, where they live, how they lie in bed and where they are treated can all be affected by these lines. Others don't seem to notice a thing. I was once treating a lawyer with insomnia, and things were not going well. Until she went on vacation to England and she was fine for a couple of weeks. On her return to the USA we just moved her bed and the problem was solved. I just wish that it were always that easy!

It took me a long time to be persuaded that what I and others felt at Stonehenge and along these lines was real and not just make believe. But now I am convinced. The Ancients knew something about the relationship of the land to their lives, and we are finally recovering some of that knowledge for ourselves.

Separation and Integration

“The ego always seeks to divide and separate. The Holy Spirit always seeks to unify and heal.”
--A Course in Miracles (Book of Spiritual Principles Scribed by Dr. Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1975, and First Published in 1976)

Many of us feel that we have lost or forgotten something important and it nags at us. In the Matrix, Morpheus tries to capture this when he says, “There is a splinter in your mind.”

What we have forgotten is the hidden secret not only to who we are but also to what we may become.

There are hundreds of thousands of books, websites, classes, groups and, of course, religions that all say that they have an answer to those two questions. And I tend to believe that they probably all do. But each has only a part of the puzzle.

Integrated Medicine was always designed to provide answers synthesized from the very best of what is already available.

I am always being asked whether Integrated Medicine is an approach toward health and wellness, a method of achieving personal growth and development or some form of holistic treatment?

The answer is “Yes!”

The goal is not to replace other forms of self-care or treatment, but to integrate and enhance them. The reason for using the term “Integrated,” and why it is a little different from Integrative or Integral medicine, is that it aims to:

1. Integrate an individual’s current health and wellness practices into a combined whole
2. Integrate all the parts of a person, for the quotation is true: the role of the ego is to separate itself from the rest of the Universe, and healing come from the Source: your Informational Matrix, your Inner Light or Soul
3. Integrate healing methods that will ensure that each aspect of you being is addressed and respected so that the healing can flow. Not only of your body, but of your mind, relationships, the planet, society, subtle systems and your spirituality
4. Integrate your views about the nature of reality: healing is not simply a matter of fixing a physical machine. In any case, this is not always possible. The objective is not to “use” methods and insights to heal the body. It is rather to ask that your Overself or Higher Self teach you the right perception of your body and your mind. That is why I am always recommending that the first thing that you can do for yourself is to develop your intuition so that it provides a delicate counterbalance to your ability to reason. If you have ever been to a gym, you know the importance of exercising not just your bicep muscle, but your triceps muscle as well. One without the other will make you lopsided. So it is with intellect and intuition.
5. Integrate the personal you with something beyond yourself. The ultimate aim of Integrated Medicine is not simply to stay well, but to return to Wholeness

And all have been done already with tens of tousands of people around the globe.

Will you be next?

“To have a curable illness and to leave it untreated except for prayer is like sticking your hand in a fire and asking God to remove the flame.”
-- Unknown Author (Sometimes attributed to “Sandra L. Douglas”)

"A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
--Abraham Lincoln (American Statesman and, from 1861-1865, the 16th President of the United States, 1809-1865)

“In the integral Yoga, the integral life down to even the smallest detail has to be transformed, to become Divine.”
--- The Mother of Pondicherry (a.k.a. Mirra Alfassa, French-born Indian Spiritual Teacher, 1878-1973)

The Biology of Beauty

When we think about the characteristics that make someone physically attractive most of us probably think that they are purely subjective and culture bound. But recent evidence suggests that this is not true.

In an astonishingly comprehensive study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Devendra Singh from the University of Texas at Austin has analyzed references to fictional beauties from modern times back to early Indian literature. He found that slimness of the waist was the most common term of praise from an author.

I found it very surprising that this association even seemed to hold in times when a more Rubenesque figure was in fashion.

But I think that the key is not the actual number of inches, but the ratio of waist to hips.I have commented several times that the waist to hip ratio is probably a better physical marker of health risk than body mass index (BMI). Though even this needs to be supplemented by other tests.

Professor Singh's work has nothing to do with making value judgments, but is instead looking at some of the factors involved in mate selection and this work adds to evidence highlighting the role of the ratio between waist and hips in attracting a mate.

All the recent furor over the dangerously shrinking fashion model has again raised the question that although female waist size has become important in modern Western society and culture - and is likely a factor fueling eating disorders - it is not completely clear whether this waist obsession has always been the case.

In what can only be described as a labor of love, Singh has spent years examining representations of women through history, and in one study, he measured the waist-hip ratio of hundreds of statues from different eras.

In the most recent research, he looked at how "attractive" women were depicted in literature, analyzing more than 345,000 texts, mainly from the 16th to 18th centuries. While most of the writings were British and American, there was a small selection of Indian and Chinese romantic and erotic poetry dating from the 1st to the 6th century of the Christian era.

Singh had this to say: "The common historical assumption in the social sciences has been that the standards of beauty are arbitrary, solely culturally determined and in the eye of the beholder. The finding that the writers describe a small waist as beautiful suggests instead that this body part - a known marker of health and fertility - is a core feature of feminine beauty that transcends ethnic differences and cultures."

Other studies have found a link between a woman's waist to hip ratio and her fertility which may offer some explanation as to why during evolution it became a factor in selecting a mate. The ratio, like breast size and smooth complexion, is partly under the control of estrogen, which is, of course, a key hormone in the maintenance of fertility.

There has been a great deal of work - and even more speculation - about why men and women are found physically attractive. The idea is that beauty is an indicator of genetic and developmental health. There is also some evidence that physically "attractive" people are healthier than less attractive people.

In 2004 Satoshi Kanazawa and Jody Kovar from the London School of Economics published an intriguing study in the journal Intelligence with the controversial title: “Why Beautiful People are More Intelligent."

The basic idea is that evolutionary processes have, both genetically and socially, led to what we call assortative mating, in which partners have been chosen for their strength, good health and even height: all attributes which have given their possessors a high status. I must be honest that even though I've seen the data, when I see and hear some of the comments of a few people in the public eye I still question the association between beauty and intelligence.

There appear to be a few features that characterize physically attractive faces: bilateral symmetry, averageness, and secondary sexual characteristics. Attractive faces tend to be more symmetrical than unattractive faces. 

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) - random differences between the two sides of the face - is usually not found to be attractive. And this may be why: it increases with exposure to parasites, pathogens, and toxins during development. FA also increases with genetic disruptions, such as mutations and inbreeding. Developmentally and genetically, healthy individuals have less FA and more symmetry in their facial and bodily features.

Across many societies around the world, there is a positive correlation between parasite and pathogen prevalence in the environment and the importance placed on physical attractiveness in mate selection. The theory is that in societies where there are a lot of pathogens and parasites it is especially important to avoid individuals who have been afflicted with them when they select mates. 

Facial averageness in another feature that increases physical attractiveness: faces with features close to the population average are more attractive than those with extreme features. The evolutionary reasons for why average faces in the population are more attractive than extreme faces are not as clear as the reasons for why facial symmetry is attractive. Some current speculation is that facial averageness results from the heterogeneity rather than homogeneity of genes so that would mean that individuals with average faces are more resistant to a larger number of parasites. Therefore like FA, facial averageness may be an indicator of genetic health and parasitic resistance.

There is good data that infants as young as 2-3 months gaze longer at a face that adults have judged attractive rather than a face judged unattractive. And other research has shown that 12 month old infants exhibit more observable pleasure, more play involvement, less distress, and less withdrawal when interacting with strangers wearing attractive masks, than with strangers wearing unattractive masks. They also play significantly longer with facially attractive dolls than with unattractive dolls.

2-12 months is not nearly enough time for infants to have learned and internalized the cultural standards of beauty through socialization and media exposure. So the research data seems to suggest that the standards of beauty might be innate, rather than learned.

Even though there is all this evidence for a evolutionary and biological factors in beauty, it is a mistake to use such a simple model  to try and explain away all of our partner preferences.

By the time that they leave high school, most people have grasped that physical attractiveness is an important first step in attraction, but after that becomes highly subjective: delightful but not essential.

This work also fails to take into account the attractiveness of factors like radiance, humor, attention, attentiveness, energy, self-assurance, movement, grace and gesture.

Neither can it take account curiosity, presence, charisma, compassion and spiritual awareness. All of these can be extremely attractive, but are hard to explain on simple biological and evolutionary models.

And, by the way, all of these additional factors can be learned: whatever your weight and measurements, whether you are tall or less so and whatever your age.

You can learn to develop many of the things that genetics may have forgotten.

“Beauty awakens the soul to act.” --Dante Alighieri (Italian Poet and Philosopher, 1265-1321)

“Beauty is not in the face, beauty is a light in the heart.” --Kahlil Gibran (Lebanese Poet and Philosopher, 1883-1931)

The Irreducible Mind

I get a great many requests for recommendations for books and papers that either debate or provide support for the topics that I discuss on this blog and in my books and articles. That is why I've been constructing some reading lists at Amazon.com and linking them to this website.

A friend recently commented that she was surprised that the book and CD series, Healing, Meaning and Purpose that was created for a general audience, contains over 800 books and websites. My response to that was that I think that my readers and listeners are all grown ups who should be able to check everything that any author says!

The days of authors or speakers waving their hands about and making airy statements are finally coming to an end. If an author tells you that "science" proves what they are saying, they must show that they understand the topic themselves. I just saw yet another paper in which the writer said, "Quantum mechanics proves what I'm saying, but let's not get into that." Well, that's just the point: let us indeed get into that to see if what you are saying holds water!

Which brings me to a book that I've just read and reviewed. It is entitled Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century and it is an extraordinary achievement. For the last century, the vast majority psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have believed that thoughts, emotions and consciousness are the product of physical processes in the brain. And , of course, the brain is heavily involved in many  mental phenomena. The question has always been if neurological activity is sufficient to explain the whole of human experience.

This new book presents the most comprehensive and critical analysis of phenomena normally ignored by psychology, including mystical experiences, the placebo response, stigmata and hypnotic suggestion, memories that survive physical death, near death experiences, automatic writing, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, deathbed visions and many more.

It comes to the inescapable conclusion that the mind is not generated by the brain but is instead limited and constrained by it. There is no hand waving, and no "science has shown that..." Instead everything is laid out in front of you. There are a hundred pages of citations and references. Despite that, it is an easy and enjoyable read.

I have no personal connection with the book, but the next time that someone says that there's no proof for any of these phenomena, and that emotions, cognitions and consciousness are just byproducts of biochemical processes in the brain, refer them to this book.

And if Santa brought you any gift cards that you haven't used yet, you might want to have a look at the book for yourself.

Dark Matter Mapped

As we have discussed before, many creative scientists working at the cutting edge of physics and astronomy have a strong intuition that dark matter is more than just an astronomical curiosity, but something of immeasurable importance to all of us.

An extraordinary article was published this morning in the journal Nature.

Dark matter does not reflect or emit detectable light, yet it is thought to account for 80-90% of the mass in the Universe. Using the Hubble telescope astronomers have presented data at the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington, showing a map of the cosmic scaffolding of dark matter upon which the stars and galaxies are assembled.

The research involved over 1,000 hours of observations followed by many more thousands of hours of analysis. The research provides the best evidence yet that the distribution of galaxies follows the distribution of dark matte,  because dark matter attracts "ordinary" matter through its gravitational pull.

Previous studies of dark matter relied on simulations, this one details its large-scale distribution in 3 dimensions. As the authors said in a press conference, it is like suddenly seeing a map of a city for the first time, when before all you had to go on was an aerial picture of the street lamps at night.

What is fascinating is that this is direct confirmation of what until now had just been a theory. But interesting problems remain, so we certainly do not know everything yet.

Students of the Ageless Wisdom will be intrigued by these findings that seem to echo predictions and statements about the Universe made many centuries ago.

There are some amazing pictures here.

I shall keep you informed as this story develops and as its practical implications are revealed.

Growing Evidence for the Efficacy of Homeopathic Medicine

When you first hear about homeopathy it sounds like utter nonsense: "like curing like"; vital forces; miasms and super-dilute remedies that no longer contain a single molecule of the original substance.

The trouble is that - apart from two centuries of clinical experience - there is a respectable and growing body of evidence that there is indeed something to homeopathy. David Reilly from the Center for Integrative Care in Glasgow, Scotland, has written a very useful paper that is available for free download.

Over in the "Resources" section on the left hand side of the blog I have a link to a reading list that I put together for Amazon.com.

There are many good introductory books on homeopathy, and I have mentioned some of the best. There are also a few books that delve into some of the science that could well provide a mechanism by which homeopathy may work.

In the coming weeks I shall be putting together some more reading list as well as summaries of the research into this fascinating field.

There is a final point. Homeopathic medicines, Flower essences and many forms of "Energy medicine" seem to have been becoming more effective over the last few decades, and this observation was one of the reasons for believing that New Laws of Healing are emerging.

Let me give you a simple example. Two weeks ago, I heard about a woman in the first trimester of pregnancy was being seen because of a quite severe mood problem. She had such severe morning sickness that she asked to have a trash can positioned next to her chair. Many experts believe that morning sickness begins as a reflex to expel food toxins that might harm the baby, but then develops into a neurologically-mediated cycle.

The patient had never heard of homeopathy and probably did not understand why she was asked some apparently irrelevant questions. She answered that she would feel better in the evening, if she applied pressure or a wash cloth to her stomach. She also reported that the sudden cold spell had made her much worse, and that stress and spicy foods made her much worse.

She was given the remedy Nux vomica in a very low potency. The nausea and vomiting stopped immediately, never to return. And her mood - which had been bad for many months before she became pregnant - also improved.

This is another one of those "N of one" reports, and the plural of anecdote is not data. But I was trained by homeopaths, some of whom had been in practice since the 1930s, and all had sat at the feet of some of the greatest homeopaths on the last century. Yet they all said that problems like morning sickness normally need repeated treatments over several days. Not a single treatment and it's gone.

If you keep you eyes open you will be amazed to see how the efficacy of some forms of treatment appear to be getting better, while some others are becoming less effective with time.

Healing the Broken Brain

I recently reviewed a fascinating book on adult neurogenesis: the creation of new neurons; something that was thought to be impossible until very recently. It is still thought to occur in certain specific regions of the brain, but even that may be changing.
   
The field is moving forward very rapidly and is important to every one of us, which is the reason for writing so much about the topic.

There is an exceptionally interesting article in the current issue of the journal Neuron. Researchers from Lund in Sweden have shown that cells generated from stem cells in an adult, diseased and damaged brain function as normal nerve cells. Not only do the new cells function like proper neurons, they also try to make connections with other neurons, indicating that they are trying to repair, or compensate for diseased or damaged parts of the brain.

This work was done in rats and is in its infancy, but it part of a global effort to learn more about how new neurons are formed, how they function and whether it is possible to help the brain heal itself after a disease or injury.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that it is possible. In Healing, Meaning and Purpose I described an individual with a severe neurological problem that responded to a novel treatment method using the subtle systems of the body. One of the goals of Integrated Medicine is to establish how best to use such methods in combination with conventional medicine not just to treat someone, but to initiate healing.

“A therapist doesn’t heal, he lets healing be.”
--A Course in Miracles (Book of Spiritual Principles Scribed by Dr. Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1975, and First Published in 1976)

Energy and Fields, Prana and Qi

I just had a kind and important letter from a correspondent:   

Dear Dr. Petty,

I enjoy reading your reviews in Amazon.com. Could you allow me to ask a question here?
I saw in a couple of reviews you oppose the idea of "Everything in this world is made of energy." Could you recommend some books which can explain this more beside Entangled Minds?

Thanks & Best Regards

One of the problems that I explore in detail in Healing, Meaning and Purpose is what I refer to as “Physics envy:” the attempt by non-specialists to use physics to buttress comments about “Energy” in biology and healing. Comments that would produce apoplexy in most practicing physicists. Within the last few days I have been listening to some CDs by a biologist in which he makes the usual claim that quantum physics “proves” that the universe in made of energy and that consciousness and matter are inextricably linked. He then goes on to say that the famous equation E=MC2 proves it, despite the fact that we are still waiting for a rapprochement between quantum and relativistic theories. To his dying day, Einstein remained skeptical about quantum mechanics.

The biologist may be right. The trouble is that his evidence is not.

The loose usage of the word “energy” may make people wotking in biology and healing look foolish and ill informed, and it is guaranteed to prevent any meaningful dialogue between biologists and physicist. This is not a semantic argument but a practical one.

When someone says, “I like his energy,” or “the arrangement of the furniture has good energy,” or I got his to tap his hand and that cured his energy,” what do these statements actually mean?

According the Lawrence LeShan, the idea that “energy” is some universal substances that is the basic building block of the universe arose from a slogan created by a popularizer of science in the early 1950s. The original slogan was that the “Universe is made up of energy,” with the corollary that all solid matter was simply congealed energy. This was some years before the development of modern field theory. Journalists, broadcasters and science fiction writers commonly wrote about converting matter into energy, though this is impossible according to the current understanding of the laws of physics.

Energy is always manifested as a state of a particular field. It may be manifested as a matter-field or an energy-field. When one form of being is converted to another, its energy is passed on. I am indebted to Professor Chris Clarke formerly of the University of Southampton for an excellent metaphor: “when one form of manifest field converts into another, its energy is like a relay-runner’s baton that is passed on, but always requires a runner; though without the baton there’s no point in running. The universe is made of energy in the sense that without the energy the fields could not actualize; the universe is also made of fields, in that without the fields there would be nothing to carry the energy.”

There is only one energy and its different manifestations – electricity, the strong and weak forces, and so on - are fields.

There is an extremely interesting idea in philosophy, called “Energy monism,” that proposes that energy and consciousness are aspects of one another. This is an attractive concept about which I shall have a bit more to say on another occasion.

This concepts about “energy” as the fundamental force of the universe later became consolidated with a wonderful example of an inappropriate use of metaphor: Qi and Prana were equated with energy, though nobody schooled in Chinese or Sanskrit would translate the words that way. So many New Age ideas conflated “Energy” with Qi and Prana, and some even went so far as to claim that matter is no more than a series of vortices in the primary “stuff.”

I once termed some of the common intellectual fallacies, Petty’s Paralogia:

1. The inappropriate use of metaphor
2. The King’s New Clothes phenomenon
3. Moving the goalposts

If you are looking for some more reading, it depends a little on the level that you are looking for.

Here are one or two that I have recently found interesting, useful and very readable:
Healing Beyond the Body by Larry Dossey
Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife
Radical Knowing by Christian de Quincey
And finally for Energy Monism, Paradigm Wars by Mark Woodhouse is excellent.

If these do not give you what you need, do let me know: I have scores of other recommendations. You may also find some of the lists that I’ve put up at Amazon may guide you, for example this one.

Acupuncture, Qigong and Fibromyalgia

As we have discussed before fibromyalgia can be difficult to treat, so any decent research indicating a new approach is always welcome.

Two recent studies have indicated that acupuncture may be helpful in the treatment of fibromyalgia. In the first, published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 21 patients completed the study, which consisted of 16 treatments in eight weeks. The patients all know that they were getting acupuncture, and there was no attempt to “blind” the study. The investigators used something called the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire, and found an improvement. One of the problems with the study was that there were so many measurements done in so few people that there’s always a worry that something positive will turn up by chance. This may explain an odd observation: sicker people did better and it didn’t matter how long they had been in treatment.

The second study was a partially blinded, controlled, randomized clinical trial of 25 patients and 25 controls done at the Mayo Clinic. Acupuncture seemed to be more effective in improving pain, fatigue and anxiety, than putting needles at ineffective points.

One of the biggest practical problems is that some people with fibromyalgia are so sensitive that they cannot tolerate even the mild discomfort of acupuncture, which is usually all but painless if done by an expert.

So I was interested to see a small pilot study from the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey, of the use of external qigong in fibromyalgia. A qigong practitioner worked to stimulate the flow of Qi in people with fibromyalgia, on the principle that in traditional Chinese medicine, pain is usually conceived as a blockage of the free flow of Qi. The results were very strongly positive, thought the trial only involved ten people.

Clearly more research is needed, but these preliminary results are all very encouraging.

Cluster Headache: A New Approach

By a strange "coincidence", just a couple of days after posting about cluster headaches, the BBC is carrying an article about a woman with cluster headache who was successfully treated by a neurosurgeon who implanted a nerve stimulator attached to the greater occipital nerve at the back of the skull.

It has been known for some time that there is a type of atypical cluster headache that can be treated by blocking these nerves. Some experts feel that since cluster headache is usually driven by the hypothalamus, headaches that can be stopped by nerve blockade or nerve stimulation are not cluster headaches at all.

That is something for us to sort out at scientific conferences.

But for now, there is at least one person - who was featured in the BBC's article - who has been cured after everything else failed.

But here's the strange thing: none of the neurologists or neurosurgeons has a clue how the treatment works.

Yet anyone versed in Traditional Chinese Medicine would tell you immediately the nerve runs directly above a key acupuncture point - Fengchi, or Gallbladder 20 - that is often used in treating severe headaches. Because disturbances in the subtle systems of the liver and gallbladder are common in many types of headache.

In other words, knowledge of the subtle anatomy of the body can explain how the nerve stimulator is working, but the best of current Western neurological science cannot.

A beautiful example of how the combined approaches of Integrated Medicine can help and inform everyone involved.

And it is the patient who gets all the benefits.

Treating Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

There is an important article in this month's issue of the journal Psychological Medicine.

Researchers from the University of Heidelberg in Germany carried out a systematic literature review concerning two treatments that are widely used in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).

They identified eight publications between 1989 and 2005 describing treatment outcomes of EMDR and CBT in active–active comparisons. Seven of these studies were investigated in a meta-analysis.

What they found was this. Both trauma-focused CBT and EMDR seemed to be equally efficacious and any differences between the two forms of treatment are probably not of clinical significance. Our main focus now should be to attempt to establish which trauma patients are more likely to benefit from one method or the other. The authors comment that it remains unclear is the contribution of the eye movement component in EMDR to treatment outcome.

This paper is interesting in light of our recent discussions concerning brain laterality and PTSD. It seems likely that part of the mechanism of both forms of therapy is to re-wire the brain. I tend to think that the eye movements probably are of importance, since they are also used in thought field therapy which appears also to be helpful to many people with PTSD.

Qigong Therapy at a Distance

I just had a very nice question from someone who had seen my article in which I commented on the way in which I had seen qigong masters treat patients without touching them.

Dear Dr. Petty,
That’s really interesting, and if it’s true, it would be very important for the future of therapy. Is that actually any scientific evidence to support what you said?

Good question, and yes, there is. But not very much of it.

A recent study from South Korea examined the effects of Qi therapy, also known as external qigong. During the study they looked at the effects – if any – of touching the patient. The researchers examined the impact of treatment on anxiety, mood, several hormones and cellular immune function. Whether or not they were touched, the patients showed improvements in anxiety, alertness, depression, fatigue, tension and cortisol levels. Treatment at a distance was just as good as hands-on treatment with one interesting exception: treatment at a distance caused the white blood count to rise slightly, while the effect wasn’t seen in people who were touched.

There is also another type of research in which qigong practitioners have tried to influence either animals or cells in culture. In one recent study practitioners directed their intention toward cultured brain cells for 20 minutes from a minimum distance of 10 centimeters. The first study seemed to show an effect on the proliferation of the cultured cells, but the second did not, showing the difficulty of doing experiments like these.

More experiments like these are underway in centers throughout the world, and I shall continue to report on both the positive and negative studies.

Qigong in the Treatment of Depression

I first started teaching T’ai Chi Ch’uan and qigong over 20 years ago, and I was always impressed by the apparent benefits for people with chronic low mood. Not so much in people with severe depression, but in people who were just chronically miserable.

During a visit to Hong Kong in 2004, I heard about some interesting research that’s just been published. Researchers from the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Kwai Chung Hospital, examined the effects of regular qigong in 82 older people with a diagnosis of depression. After just eight weeks of regular daily practice, there was an overall improvement in mood, self-efficacy and personal well-being. By week sixteen there were really quite marked improvements not just in mood, but also in activities of daily living and how people felt about themselves.

We know that there are close links between mood and the immune system, so this research fits in with a study from Tokyo in which a breathing method said to enhance Qi was shown to reduce stress and modulate the function of the immune system.

There are many studies of qigong, but they are of variable quality. Another one which supports both of these two studies comes from Korea, where something slightly different - qigong therapy - was shown to help both pain and mood in older people with chronic pain form a variety of causes.

I do not think that we have enough evidence to try using qigong alone in the treatment of depression, which is, after all, a potentially fatal condition. But I do think that Qigong is an important part of an Integrated Medicine program, and I am creating more resources for people to do the first stages of qigong on their own.

Acupuncture Points

The Pacific College of Oriental Medicine publishes a newspaper entitled Oriental Medicine, that carries a great many interesting articles mainly written by practicing acupuncturists. In the current issue there is a nice article entitled “What are Meridians and Points?” by Iona Marsaa Teeguarden a therapist who has developed some very interesting acupressure techniques for dealing with an array of problems. This is a very interesting topic to me: you may have seen some of those pictures of acupuncture points that look like tramlines traversing the body.

Over the last few years I’ve read everything about the acupuncture points that I could get my hands on. If it’s in one of the ten or twelve languages that I can read, then I’ve probably got a reprint of the paper, and people have been kind enough to send me translations of at least parts of papers in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Some of the research has been excellent, and some less so.

The first point (ha ha…), often controversial when I am talking to classically trained acupuncturists, is that although some of the large well-known acupuncture points are usually in the same place in different individuals, many of the lesser known points are not. Of the 361 main named acupuncture points only a couple of dozen seem to be fixed on the body. Most of the rest can be some way off from the pictures in books. I learned that first when I was an apprentice in London, and then during my studies in China. The top Chinese acupuncturists search for the right points to use. It’s one of the reasons why modern Chinese acupuncturists have identified over a thousand “extra points.”

Although people usually talk about “meridians” joining the acupuncture points together, the Chinese usually refer to them as “channels and collaterals.”

There does not seem to be any neurological or vascular structure at the site of an acupuncture point. Taken together with he fact that acupuncture points tend to be tender and to have characteristic electrical properties, both of which get better with treatment, suggests that they are functional rather than structural entities. Most experienced acupuncturists have noticed that the points vary not just with treatment, but also with mood, the weather and in women, during the menstrual cycle.

In the late 1930s, a French physician named Niboyet was probably the first to find indications that the main acupuncture points have lowered electrical resistance compared with surrounding skin. Some other studies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)have provided some support for these findings, although it is difficult to known precisely what to make of the finding that these areas of reduced electrical resistance can also be located on fresh but not dried cadavers. Some people have invoked some mechanism involving electrolytic fluxes along connective tissue or fascial planes of the body. But that’s all just speculation backed by some research correlating acupuncture points and fascial planes.

An additional problem for simple electrical models is that some of the acupuncture points also respond to polarized light, which would be odd if the primary mechanisms of acupuncture points were electrical.

Another set of experiments sought to exploit the phenomenon of “propagated needle sensation.” If acupuncture is done well, then this happens very frequently. It is a subjective sensation of warmth, heaviness, numbness or bursting, that moves at between 1 and 10 centimeters per second, which is much slower than a nerve impulse. This sensation moves along the proposed channels along which the Qi is supposed to flow. But this is the interesting bit: the sensations are not related to any known neurological pathways. The precise nature of this propagated needle sensation remains elusive, with reports of it being interrupted by chilling, local anesthetics and mechanical pressure, whilst it has also been shown to travel to phantom limbs in amputees.

Attempts have been made to trace out acupuncture points and their associated channels by the use of radioactive tracers and by measuring electrical propagation along the channels. 99-Technetium has been the most widely used, and it has been claimed that the tracers diffuse from acupuncture points along the classical acupuncture channels, whilst tracer injected at non acupuncture points diffuses without showing any such linear pattern. The speed of the linear migration of the tracer injected into acupuncture points was accelerated by the use stimulation of appropriate acupuncture points.

If we cannot find anything anatomical at acupuncture points, and they clearly change place and character as the person changes. Then what do the Chinese have to say about the points and the channels?

They say that the channels are there to distribute Qi, and that the acupuncture points are the control points of the channels. The traditional theory is that Qi flows in response to thoughts and emotions. Perhaps thoughts and emotions have effects on muscle contraction and that pushes the Qi along, but I thin that we have to step away from the physical body. I can well remember one of the first people whom I ever treated. I gently needled a “Liver point” on her foot, and she felt the sensation in her eye on the same side of the body. There is no known neurological connection between the foot and the eye on the same side. But in Chinese medicine, the Liver channel terminates in the eye on the same side of the body. The theory of fascial planes can also not explain that. Neither can the observation that many of us have made in the clinic. In some people, acupuncture reveals their entire acupuncture system: the channels become red.

Even when acupressure is used in the subtle systems around the body. I have seen a Chinese Qigong Master demonstrate this phenomenon in a paraplegic patient.

While the Master’s hands were three feet away for the body.

And that will be the topic of yet another research study.

Searching for the Laws of Life

In the book of Genesis, God’s fifth act of creation was to create life on earth. Of course, modern science has a different myth.

In the beginning, there was a simple soup of inorganic chemicals: water, ammonia and methane. And into this soup came a bolt of lightning that brought into being the amino acids that gradually assembled themselves into peptides and proteins and the nucleotides from which came RNA and DNA. And the DNA learned the art of becoming self-replicating and so began the ascent of life.

I recently reviewed a fine book – The Fifth Miracle, by Paul Davies - on the Amazon website. Paul points out that believing the scientific myth demands an act of faith and credulity as great as believing in the literal truth of the Biblical story. He is one of many scientists who have calculated the seemingly impossible odds of all this happening by chance. This is not some back door into intelligent design, but instead an exploration of some profoundly important ideas in biology that make us realize that there are some gaping holes in our current models.

We know that inorganic processes tend to run down and become disorganized over time: they show entropy. By contrast living processes become progressively more organized, a process that requires massive amounts of information. It is not difficult to calculate that the amount of information required for even the simplest organism far out strips the biochemical processes of an organism. Thus the implication that life requires a new fundamental law of nature that is yet to be discovered.

If this is true, and the mathematics indicate that it is, it would imply that life should exist everywhere, and wherever it is found it would march toward progressive greater and greater complexity, that would eventually lead to sentience.

The most likely candidate for this natural law is information. The book and CD series, Healing, Meaning and Purpose is dedicated to this notion that a fundamental property of the Universe is conscious awareness and that the first content of awareness is information, in its technical sense. And it is this information together with energy that generates the subtle systems that animate biochemical processes.

Long after I wrote that, I came across an important paper by someone whose work I like very much: William Tiller. In the paper he examines homeopathy as a form of “information medicine,” and comes up with some interesting mathematical modeling to support his conjecture, which I feel sure is correct.

There is also some older data that supports this idea of information. A study from Brazil examined highly diluted thyroid gland extract on the rate at which tadpoles developed into frogs. The extract increased the speed of metamorphosis of the tadpoles, despite the fact that the solutions were so dilute that there could not have been any molecules present. This work was in fact a replication of work done in 1995 in Graz, Austria.

There is a much larger literature than most people realize on this idea of information in biological systems, though most has been presented at meetings or written about in textbooks.

But I’d like to leave you with an interesting paper that is easily accessible. It has the title “Paranormal phenomena in the medical literature sufficient smoke to warrant a search for fire.” The author has done us a great service by collecting a large number of cases of phenomena – collected by physicians and other educated people – that cannot be explained within the current biomedical paradigm. He includes some splendid examples, including the well-documented cases of people being able to speak foreign languages of which they have no conscious knowledge. The most parsimonious explanation for the observations? Information transfer between individuals, even if sometimes separated by many miles.

“Disease of the body as we know it, is a result, an end product, a final stage of something much deeper. Disease originates above the physical plane, nearer to the mental. It is entirely the result of a conflict between our spiritual and mortal selves. So long as these two are in harmony, we are in perfect health: but when there is discord there follows what we know as disease.”
--Edward Bach (English Physician and Creator of the Bach Flower Essences, 1886-1936)

A Very Useful Demonstration of Thought Field Therapy

I have written several times about the tapping therapies: primarily thought field therapy (TFT) and its child: emotional freedom technique (EFT). They also play a central role in the combination of techniques that I discuss in Healing, Meaning and Purpose, and my forthcoming book, Sacred Cycles.

Andy Hunt in the UK has a very nice blog, and I found a reference to another website for the Center for Integrative Psychotherapy. This one contains a very nicely done short video demonstrating TFT.

I've had a lot of experience with these therapies, and despite a paucity of research, they really do seem to work with a great many people. This video is a wonderful service: it shows you what to expect from treatment.

Thank you Andy for alerting me to the site, and thank you to Mary Sise for making the video and for making it available for free.

Banquo’s Ghost

“Chess is the game which reflects most honor on human wit.” -- Voltaire (a.k.a. François-Marie Arouet, French Writer and Philosopher,  1694-1778)

For anyone with even a passing interest in chess, a re-unification match for the World Championship is currently taking place in Elista, the capital city of Kalmykia, a small region of the Russian Federation that is Europe’s only Buddhist country. Though I’m sure that some would quibble about whether it should be in Europe or Asia.

The beginning of the match between two of the world’s top Grandmasters - the aggressive Bulgarian gambler Veselin Topalov and the conservative Russian, Vladimir Kramnik - has led to and 2-0 score in favor of the Russian.

So why am I mentioning this is a blog dedicated to Personal Growth, Healing and Wellness? Because the current one-sided score line has a lot to do with each of these topics. This match is not just about chess playing ability: it is also about psychological and emotional strength, character and resilience.

There was a time when chess masters were unfit, often over-weight and the majority smoked. When I first started playing in tournaments in England, it was quite normal to have ashtrays beside most of the boards.

Oh how things have changed!

Now the players prepare physically, psychologically and some even spiritually with prayer and meditation:

1. Very few players smoke, not just because of long-term health risk, but because the deleterious effects of lowered oxygen levels on cognition outweigh the short-term improvement in attention caused by nicotine.
2. Aerobic exercise is essential to ensure that the brain is perfused with oxygen, and if you are physically unfit you cannot expect to survive a number of games that may each last for five or six hours.
3. Strength training is also essential to overall fitness and physical and the maintenance of psychological resilience. Topalov is going to need that now.
4. Posture is extremely important. According to Chinese and Ayurvedic physicians and chiropractors, bad posture results in a restriction in the flow of Qi, Prana, or blood. Whether or not you believe in the flow of Qi in the body, it is easy to demonstrate that bad posture has bad effects on cognition.
5. Flexibility is also an essential part of physical wellness that affects you psychologically as well as physically. Daily stretching should be part of everyone’s life.
6. Relaxation and meditation: one or other or both are essential tools for maintaining your balance while under stress, and for building resilience.
   
7. Diet: a carefully balanced nutritious diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids (without any added mercury!) and fiber is essential for optimum mental functioning.
8. Fluid intake: the current recommendations are for a healthy person to drink between 80 and 120 fluid ounces of pure water each day.
9. Avoid alcohol: A former World Champion – Alexander Alekhine – lost his title after turning up drunk on a number of occasions during a match to defend his title.

Looking at the pictures from the match, in both games Topalov looked intense and Kramnik far more relaxed. It could have been an illusion: I would need to be in proximity to be sure. In the first game Topalov took a needless risk in a dead level position. In the second, he had an absolutely won game. I’m no grandmaster, but even I spotted a win in three moves. How could he have failed to find it and then lost?

What is the explanation? Chess players have to play a certain number of moves in a specified time, so not only are they playing their opponent, they are also playing against the clock. The biggest prize in the game is on the line, for which both players have been preparing since childhood. And there are hundreds of thousands of people who are watching and analyzing their every move.

I know from personal experience that it can be hard enough to be interviewed on a television show being watched by millions of people, where any false statement would haunt me forever. Imagine having a battle of wits with one of the finest chess players in the world in the knowledge that every move will be analyzed for the next century, and computers are already analyzing every permutation of every move that the two players have made.

The stress on the players is unbelievable. Both have prepared for it, but it is also a matter of who has prepared best: that is a mixture of temperament and training. Just today I read an article talking about ways of avoiding stress. This is silly: stress is part of life and it can provide the motor in motivation. The trick is how we learn to respond to stress.

There is also another stressor that has only been felt by world championship contenders on two or three previous occasions. This match is being played in the shadow of the retirement of Garry Kasparov, who, in the opinion of most people, is the strongest player who ever lived, with the possible exception of Bobby Fischer. The difference is that Bobby became World Champion all by himself, with little help and by inventing a new approach to chess. It is a great tragedy that his life has apparently been blighted by mental illness, and that he has played only a few recorded games in the last 34 years.

By contrast, Garry was the strongest player in the world for twenty years, and in the opinion of most experts would probably still beat both of the current contenders. So whoever wins wants to prove himself a worthy champion. Garry’s specter remains like the ghost of Banquo in the Scottish play.

The final essential is that both players have to detach from the results of the first two games. Kramnik will obviously have his tail up now, but he is too smart and too experienced to give in to complacency. Topalov has to completely forget about the first two games and focus on what lies ahead: I’m sure that he has someone on his team working on simple techniques to stop the past from populating his psychological present.

Whatever lies ahead for these two men in the next few weeks, we shall see that chess is a microcosm of life in general.

“What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.” --Jiddu Krishnamurti (Indian Spiritual Teacher, 1895-1986)

Karma

The Sanskrit word karma has been part of our vocabulary since the late 1960s. Over thirty years ago I was speaking to one of George Harrison’s lawyers in London, who had followed in the footsteps of the Beatles and flirted with Transcendental Meditation. He told me that karma just meant “fate,” which was not at all what I’d been taught.

I’ve just seen a number of articles that have used the term very loosely. What is even more perplexing is that often the same writer will talk about karma as a causal law, and then immediately start talking about quantum mechanics, in which many actions are not causal at all. Some even start dabbling in synchronicity, forgetting, perhaps, that the subtitle of the original paper by Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli was “An Acausal Connecting Principle.”

It’s important to get it right: if we misunderstand a law or principle of life, it’s difficult to stay on track. And we have to realize that although there are plenty of opinions about karma, synchronicity, quantum mechanics and the rest, there are also some real objective facts to guide us.

Let me give you an example of one of these articles: “Karma deals with the law of cause and effect. Everything that happens to us (effect) has had a previous cause. The evolution of karmic law means that we can be master of our own destiny. Your karmic lessons in life reflect the qualities that you either lack, or are weak in, and are those hindering your success…” This is so contradictory. There is no place for chance, yet you can master your destiny, despite the fact that your behavior must have a previous cause. This isn’t just circular reasoning; it’s more like pretzel logic!

So is karma complicated? Is there a simple way to understand it and work with it?

Karma means “action,” and it refers to the intentional acts of conscious beings. These acts may be physical, or they may be thoughts or feelings. Intentions results in acts that cause effects in the mind, the body, the subtle systems, our relationships and our spirituality. This way of looking at karma links inextricably with the evidence being generated by the Global Consciousness Project.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his book The Universe in a Single Atom makes a clear distinction between the operation of the natural law of causality, in which some action will have a certain set of effects, and the law of karma, in which an intentional act will reap certain results. He uses a good example: if a campfire gets out of control in a forest, the resulting fire, smoke and charcoal are simple, natural and expected results. By contrast if you light a fire and forget to put it out, which then causes the chain of events: that’s karmic causation.

I this view, the large-scale universe evolves according to causal laws. When it has evolved to the stage of supporting sentient life, now the fate of the universe becomes entangled with the karma of the sentient beings that now inhabit it. But there’s something more to it.

Matter in its most subtle form is Qi or Prana, a vital field energy that is inseparable from consciousness. The Qi or Prana provides dynamic movement and cohesion, while consciousness provides awareness, cognition and self-reflection. This indivisible pair produces our bodies and the universe as a whole. Every particle in the universe possesses conscious awareness, but it is not until sentience arises that the law of karma comes into play.

In Kriya Yoga there has been the development of many complex ideas about karma, subdividing it into multiple types, and with advice on how to attract good karma and dispel the bad. For students who would like to go into these distinctions in more detail, there a very nice short book entitled The Laws of Karma.

Because karma implies that the universe is lawful and moral, it has often been misinterpreted as fatalism. But that s not correct: every decision is a product of free will. To be sure, it is a free will that is tempered by the causal forces of our genetic makeup and environment. One of the major goals of self-development is to free yourself from the restrictions imposed upon you by your genes and your environment, so that you can make decisions that will generate the greatest good for the largest number of people.

What we must not do is to use karma as an excuse. If you are playing a game of cards, you play the hand that you are given. There’s no point in complaining about your bad luck: your learn how to make the best play wit the cards that you have in your hand.

“Knowing that his past actions may try to overwhelm him, the devotee must be prepared to combat them. God will give him the strength: His Name will be an impenetrable armor. It will save him from all the consequences.”
--Swami Brahmananda (Indian Religious Figure, 1854-1922)

“It is horrible to see everything that one detested in the past coming back wearing the colors of the future.”
--Jean Rostand (French Biologist and Historian, 1894-1977)

The Ethics of Complementary, Alternative and Integrated Medicine

In my recent item about ethics I mentioned that Paul Root Wolpe from the University of Pennsylvania is interested in the ethics of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), and, by extension, its offspring, Integrated Medicine. This caused some raised eyebrows, but it shouldn’t.

Using unorthodox therapies carries a number of ethical and moral responsibilities.

When I was still on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, on one occasion I caused outrage amongst many friends using natural medicine, when I pointed out on a TV show that just because something’s natural doesn’t mean it’s safe. Think arsenic, deadly nightshade and hurricanes! But there is more to the ethics of CAM than just the safety of the treatments involved.

Just a few months ago I was asked to look at a study by someone claiming to debunk one of the tapping therapies. Neither the investigator nor the practitioners and patients inveigled into the “research,” understood the principles of informed consent. This is important: one of the many consequences of the Holocaust was a re-consideration of what to do with medical “data” collected by Nazi doctors in the most unprincipled ways imaginable. Should the data be kept, so that people would not have died in vain? Or should it be destroyed, because information from unethical experiments was tainted. After a great deal of heart searching, it was decided that any information obtained under those circumstances was likely to be junk. This is one of the reasons for the absolute insistence on informed consent. I shall say something else about consent in just a moment. Let’s have a look at the ethical issues involved in CAM, because much of the criticism of the emerging models of healthcare has come from people genuinely concerned about patient welfare.

1. If we do anything with or for an individual, there has to be informed consent. Informed consent includes full disclosure not just of the chances of efficacy, but also of the possible toxicity of a treatment and an agreement of what we hope to achieve. A therapist may want to balance your Qi and stop you getting sick in the future. You may just want to be rid of your headaches. When we ask about the chances of efficacy, we all run into the problem of positive bias. I was once planning some research with a very well known practitioner in the UK, who told me that he cured every single person he saw, whether they had cancer, schizophrenia, heart disease or anything else. I was astonished, and asked him for something to backup what he said. He flew into a rage! “How dare I question him?” he said.It soon turned out that although he probably was a genuine healer who got a lot of people better, he had no evidence at all. It was like a study in the medical arena in which the investigators decided that anyone who did not come back for treatment was cured! Not a common reaction if someone fails to turn up for an appointment!
2. People often say to me that there can be no harm in giving someone a homeopathic remedy. And of course, from a purely physical and psychological perspective, that’s probably true. Though I once participated in an experiment in which I took the homeopathic remedy Pulsatilla, that is prepared from the Passion Flower. I had what is known as an exacerbation, and was unable to function for several hours. But we also need to think about some of the other things that can follow from using treatments that work at the level of the subtle systems. One of our biggest objections to people who believe that they can do acupuncture after a weekend course, is that acupuncture, homeopathy and the rest are powerful medicines. Putting a needle into the wrong part of a person’s anatomy may not just cause physical harm, but can do extraordinary things to a person’s subtle systems. A fact that is exploited in some martial arts. In the Jet Li movie Kiss of the Dragon, Jet uses acupuncture needles to do some extraordinary things. The filmmakers used little artistic license: with one exception I have personally seen all of the things demonstrated in the movie.
3. I mentioned that informed consent includes full disclosure about the chances of efficacy and toxicity of a treatment and agreement on therapeutic goals. We can find ourselves in a real ethical dilemma when patients have unrealistic expectations for an untested remedy. Sometimes people don’t inform their patients realistically, and they rationalize it as either choosing not to remove hope or as providing support. But we have to be sure that we are not supporting potentially dangerous or harmful decisions. The problem is not necessarily the treatment itself. Using an untested treatment in place of something that we know can be effective can also lead us into difficult ethical waters. Regular readers will remember a sad case that I highlighted a few months ago.

I’m all for holistic therapy: the less invasive the better. I've spent the last 35 years helping develop new and better ways of integrating treatments.

But it’s really important to be realistic, to use what we know works and if we don’t know if a thing works, then to be totally honest with the individual, and keep meticulous records of why we want to use an untested remedy in combination with the conventional.

In the 1980s, the Research Council for Complementary Medicine began to train complementary practitioners in the basics of research, so that they could be better at obtaining informed consent and monitoring the effectiveness of treatments that they were using. We had some success, and it is high time that we helped practitioners in other parts of the world do the same thing.

People Dangerous to Your Health

I found a terrific blog with the title “Warning: Bores and buffoons may endanger your health.”

Our ability to self-regulate is a limited resource that fluctuates markedly, depending on our prior use of willpower, tiredness, stress and our personal resilience.

A new study by a team lead by Professor Eli Finkel of Northwestern University has shown that poor social coordination impairs self-regulation. What does this mean? If you are forced to work or interact with difficult individuals you may be left mentally exhausted and far less able to do anything useful for a significant period of time. In other words, draining social dynamics, in which an individual is trying so hard to regulate his or her behavior, can impair success on subsequent unrelated tasks.

In the research, volunteers were asked to work in pairs to maneuver an icon around a computer maze, with one volunteer giving the instructions, the other moving the joystick. Those operating the joysticks were actors, primed to respond to instructions in slow, stupid, inefficient and generally irritating ways. What was interesting was that the effects were not mediated through participants' conscious processes: they were almost entirely going on below the level of conscious awareness.

There is extensive literature on the consequences of social conflict. But until now, very little research has been conducted on the effects of ineffective social coordination. That has been a big gap in the research literature, particularly given the fact that most of the higher systems in our brains are dedicated to social functions, and since the earliest days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, tasks requiring social coordination have been the norm. In our day-to-day activities we have to cooperate with other people. Ineffective social coordination consumes a great deal of mental resources and has high costs for subsequent self-regulation. This is so important, because self-regulation is essential to living life well. It is also essential to the existence of a well functioning society.

What to do with this new information?

Identify people who drain you. If you need to work with them, do it in short bursts, and give yourself plenty of time outs.

And continue to build your resilience.

There's also one other piece, that we'll look at another time. Some people may also drain your energy directly. You may have come across "energy" or "psychic vampires." They really do exist, though there is nothing supernatural about them, and they don't have fangs or an aversion to garlic. In another post I'll show you some techniques for dealing with those people as well.

The researchers have done us a great service by putting the entire paper on the departmental website. Access is free.

A Gene for Infidelity?

Last January I wrote about the link between creativity and promiscuity.

I’ve just picked up this month’s copy of the Mensa Magazine, published by British Mensa  and there’s an interesting article by Dr. Desmond Morris entitled “Why brilliant men betray their wives.” Desmond is a national institution in Britain. A zoologist, ethnologist and surrealist painter, he always used to be on television and gained considerable notoriety for his book The Naked Ape that tried to explain human behavior by analogy with apes.

In his latest article Desmond follows some of the same reasoning that I did in my article: many intensely creative people also enjoy risk taking. He just talks about males, but I think that the same principles apply equally to many intensely creative and successful women, who also enjoy taking extreme risks.

Every act of creation demands that we see, feel or think differently about something. Desmond says that every piece of innovation or creativity is an act of rebellion. I only half agree with that: the truly creative person is busily establishing a new level of order. The creative rebel is a stereotype that’s not born out by experimental work on genius and creativity. The creative or innovative act is one of making new connections and in a sense it is also a moment of risk-taking, for the new technique, formula or invention may fail. We recently discussed the way in which resilience is a key to creativity: to keep going in the face of failure or adversity. Even the most highly creative are not every single day: I have known many Nobel Prize winners and award winning artists, and they all have their off days.

Desmond’s article highlights the multiple extra-marital affairs of Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Charlie Chaplin and Bertrand Russell.

He argues that it is the innate compulsion to take risks that leads both to creative brilliance and an inability to remain with just one partner. He pursues the idea that our distant hunting ancestors required a new personality trait: bravery. The successful needed to take risks and be courageous. Desmond then again excludes women from his equation, saying that their reproductive contributions to the tribe made them too important to risk on the hunt. He now fast-forwards to the present, saying that the offspring of the adventurous males could either engage in physical risk-taking or explore new ideas. And that their curiosity leads them to explore not just ideas but novel sexual experiences. Once a “conquest” has been made, the risk-taking adventurer moves on to a new target.

It is certainly true that men are far more likely to die in accidents than are women, but it’s a bit of a stretch to attribute all of that to risk-taking. What about the male difficulties with multi-tasking and to resist peer pressure, to say nothing of much higher rates of substance abuse?

And yes, fame, power and wealth can be powerful aphrodisiacs. But to reduce immoral, dangerous and disrespectful behavior to a risk-taking gene from our distant ancestors seems to me to a wild extrapolation based on a very selective use of a small amount of information.

Because infidelity surely has many more strands to it that just a genetic “itch.” Many highly successful people are enormously narcissistic and so fail to take into account the damage that their infidelity might do to their spouse and children.

Seeing sex as no more than a branch of gymnastics is also off the mark. Even a casual encounter will likely contain emotional, subtle and even spiritual components. If a relationship is failing because those are all missing, it is no surprise if a spouse investigates divorce and other options. But that is not risk taking: it is fulfilling a need that is not being met by the current partner.

Dark Matter and Subtle Energies

There have been many attempts to explain observations about subtle energies, Qi and Prana. Amongst the most promising scientific candidates is dark energy and dark matter. The trouble has been that it is a fundamental mistake to try and explain one mystery – subtle energies and subtle systems – with another: dark matter and dark energy.

So I was delighted to see that Scientific American is reporting on a new paper in the coming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For almost 75 years, astronomers, cosmologists and physicists have deduced that ordinary matter must be surrounded by vast quantities of an invisible substance that is not substantial enough to collide with atoms or stars but massive enough to keep galaxies from flying apart. Named dark matter, this mysterious material has eluded the most careful means of detection, but has been assumed to exist because of its gravitational impact.

Observations of a relatively recent collision of two galaxy clusters have finally proven the existence of dark matter. The discovery is a triumph of perseverance, creativity and rigorous mathematics.

My own understanding about all this is that dark energy and dark matter may indeed be the mechanism by which these subtle energies interact with our universe. But beyond or within that lies something else: Consciousness, Mind or the Informational Matrix. This is the realm of the One, the First Cause.

Why all this matters to us, is that this new research provides further evidence that there is more to the Universe than the things that we observe with our normal senses. It already has us thinking of ways in which this will likely impact our maintenance of health and management of illness.

We had to learn about dark matter from observations of the unimaginably large, but it has implications for the very small: the fundamental structure of the systems and materials that constitute our bodies.

“We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.”
--Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist and Philosopher, 1817-1862)

T'ai Chi Ch'uan and Health

I have written about some of the research into the health benefits of T’ai Chi and Qigong.

I was very pleased to see that this month’s issue of T’ai Chi: the International Magazine of T’ai Chi Ch’uan dedicated several pages to some of the research that is being done on the field and advised practitioners to participate in local research projects.

It was that last piece of advice that I particularly liked.

The article by Charlotte Jones, a Chen Style practitioner from Houston, is not a critical review of the literature, and neither is it supposed to be. It lists some of the key findings from studies on balance, osteoporosis, pain and arthritis, blood pressure and cardiovascular health without going through their pros and cons.

But a short list like this is a good jumping off point if you are starting to look into learning T’ai Chi and would like to know some of the possible benefits.

I shall also continue to provide you with more critical reviews of studies as they come out.

Sex Drive and Relationships

The BBC is reporting on an article published in the journal Human Nature.

According to the report - and I haven't yet seen a copy of the original research - investigators from the Hamburg-Eppendorf University in Germany found that the sex drive of many women begins to plummet once they are in a secure relationship. They found that four years into a relationship, less than half of 30-year-old women wanted regular sex.

Conversely, they found that a man's libido remained the same regardless of how long he had been in a relationship. The researchers interviewed 530 men and women about their relationships.

They found 60% of 30-year-old women wanted sex "often" at the beginning of a relationship, but that within four years of the relationship this figure fell to under 50%, and after 20 years it dropped to about 20%.

And here's a shock: The study also revealed tenderness was important for women in a relationship. About 90% of women wanted tenderness, regardless of how long they had been in a relationship, but only 25% of men who had been in a relationship for 10 years said they were still seeking tenderness from their partner.

The researchers then start talking about the evolutionary implications of all this: that women evolved to have a high sex drive when they are initially in a relationship in order to form a "pair bond" with their partner.

That is all quite plausible, but it is a usually a mistake to try and reduce human behavior to hormones, neurotransmitters and evolutionary drives.

Most men and most women may well have different sex drives, and the duration of a relationship may play a part. But it is just as likely that we are seeing the effects of having children who need lots of a couple's attention and a natural reaction to one or both partners focusing more on their careers and outside activities rather than on the relationship.

In Healing, Meaning and Purpose I talk about the best solution to tired relationships: it's not a matter of trying every variation in the Kama Sutra. The most valuable thing to ensure the viability of intimate relationships is not so much to try to learn lots of different techniques, but instead to make the time together really count. There is nothing quite as attractive as an intimate occasion marked by complete focus on and awareness of the other person. Feeling the dance of the duality, focusing on all your senses, and, if you can, feeling the subtle systems of the other person.

Simple things that have rescued countless relationships. And a lot cheaper than hours of therapy.

Surviving Airplanes

I’m an extremely frequent flier: in an average year I fly the equivalent of ten to twelve times around the world, or all the way to the moon and part of the way back. So I’ve had to learn all the tricks for surviving countless hours in the air.

Some of them you will know already: keep hydrated, avoid alcohol, move and stretch whenever you can. I’ll soon be posting my jet-lag strategies.

But I wanted to let you know about a product that I’ve been using for years: it’s now called Yarrow Environmental Solution. I’ve certainly found that it’s been very helpful in reducing some of the exhaustion that is a common part of long haul air travel.

There is a piece of unpublished research that seems to confirm that the remedy is having a measurable effect. I wish that I had the time to do a more extensive study to see whether my observations have a scientific basis.

Current scientific models can’t explain how the flower essence could possibly work. Yet my observations and those of many students and patients are that it can be very helpful indeed. Not just to frequent fliers, but also for people who spend a lot of time in front of computer screens or under artificial light.

If you are exposed to any of these things, and find yourself constantly drained and exhausted, you may find this essence very helpful, as part of a package of Integrated Medical care.

Regular readers know that I’m most insistent on full disclosure. So I can reveal that I have absolutely no relationship with the manufacturer, other than buying bottle of their essences.

Technorati tags: Yarrow Environmental Solution Flower Essence Society Biofield Subtle energyIntegrated medicine Integrative medicine Environmental illness 

Revisiting Resilience

“I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs, but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.”
--General George S. Patton (American General, 1885-1945)

Resilience is the process of being able to adapt and to thrive in the face of adversity, stress, trauma, tragedy or threats. A resilient person is les likely to succumb to any of these life events and is less likely to develop mental illness. But resilience is more than a passive strength or resistance to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: it is a dynamic capacity that not only protects us, but enables us to turn adversity into strength and an opportunity for growth.

Despite our extraordinary health care system and a multi-billion dollar antidepressant industry, the rates of depression are increasing throughout the Western world. A recent book has suggested that boredom was unknown before about 1760: the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. All this tells us that something is seriously wrong with our resilience.

“The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.”
--Plutarch (Greek Biographer and Priest to the Oracle at Delphi, A.D. 46-c.120)

In Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I pointed out some of the incredible changes that have taken place over the last one hundred years, and their impact on health. To try and apply the principles of the past to the problems of the present and future is unlikely to be crowned with success. We need to adapt. Buddhists do not normally eat meat. Except for Tibetan Buddhists, who need to eat some meat in order to survive at the high altitudes of the Himalayas. I have a good friend who created the finest integrated medicine clinic in the world, the Hale Clinic in London. Normally an abstemious vegetarian, when she was embroiled in business meetings, she would often take some meat to remain grounded. I have done the same thing myself for years. I prefer not to eat meat. I have not had a steak in more than thirty years. But if I am to do a lot of traveling and need to work with politicians and business people, a bit of chopped up fish or poultry can be essential.

The changes in our lifestyles over the past century have dramatically reduced the level of physical activity necessary to provide life's basic resources: our effort-based rewards that are intimately involved in the regulation of mood. If you think about it for a moment, if your great-grandparents wanted to eat, there was probably a lot of effort involved. Our brains still contain a huge number of circuits that evolved to play roles in sustaining the kind of continuous effort that would be critical for the acquisition of resources such as food, water and shelter. So what happens when we suddenly on longer need much physical activity to obtain those resources? What happens to those parts of the brain that have millions of years evolving? There will be reduced activation of those brain regions essential for reward, pleasure, salience, motivation, problem-solving, and effective coping strategies. The practical consequence of that is that these systems will not sit there idling: if under-stimulated, since these systems are so heavily involved with our emotions, we would expect to see people becoming depressed. And we know that depression has been increasing throughout the Western world. Of course, many people need to stimulate these regions of the brain artificially, as with drugs, pornography or extreme sports.

Effort-based rewards are an essential component of resilience to life's stressful challenges. Purposeful physical activity is important in the maintenance of mental health. It therefore makes sense to put more emphasis on preventative behavioral and cognitive life strategies, rather than relying solely on psychopharmacological strategies. Our strategy is geared toward protecting people from developing depression, and compensatory behaviors. One of the very interesting new ideas in pharmacology is that antidepressants and antipsychotics may act to enhance resilience at both the cellular level and in the whole person. This is a very different concept from thinking of medicines as chemicals that simply block symptoms.

Our aim is to improve resilience and gradually to increase activation of all those under-used systems of the brain to treat and then to prevent problems. All the things that mother always said were good for you: healthy exercise, meditation, a balanced diet, charity and kindness, and actions aimed at fulfilling your personal and Higher Purpose have already been shown to treat and to protect.

Here are some proven methods for improving resilience:
1.    Learn to be adaptable: the heart of resilience is the ability to take things in your stride and to be able to surf the ocean of change, rather than trying to hold the hold it back.

2.    Be aware of the blockages in your mind or in the subtle systems of your body that are preventing you from bouncing back form adversity

3.    Attitude: avoid seeing a challenge as an insurmountable problem

4.    Accept that change is part of life: you can do little about it, but you can do a great deal about how you react to change

5.    Ensure that you have meaningful goals that are consistent with your core desires and beliefs, and that you are moving toward them

6.    Do all that you can to work on establishing your own Purpose in life. You can create a purpose for your life, but also be aware that there is a Higher Purpose in you life

7.    Take decisive actions: even if the first action may not be the best one. Any action is usually better than denying that problems exist, and hoping that they will evaporate while you are asleep or watching television

8.    Develop and maintain close relationships. Even if you are not a sociable person, relationships are one of the most potent way of protecting yourself from life’s ups and downs

9.    Look for opportunities to learn more about yourself, and how you react to situations. This doesn’t mean becoming an introvert or a rampant narcissist, but it does mean taking a moment each day to review where you are and what you can learn form things that are or have happened in your life. This is a big subject, but there are many good ways to answer the question, “Why is this happening to me  again?” and from preventing habitual problems and routine self-sabotage. (I shall be publishing an eBook and CD about this crucial topic in the very near future)

10.  Work on developing a positive self-image. I have had some harsh things to say about the excesses of the self-esteem movement, but it has now been replaced by something far more valuable: the science of positive psychology. We have a great deal of empirical data on how to improve a person’s happiness and resilience. Again, we can speak about that some more if you are interested.

11.  Maintain hope for the future. We have done research that has shown that one of the best ways of predicting a positive outcome with major mental illness, or of reducing the risk of recurrent substance abuse is to instill hope. Again, there are techniques for doing this, even when the whole world seems to be against you.

12.  Maintain perspective: do not blow things out of proportion, and remember that this too shall pass.

13.  Take care of yourself, physical, emotionally and spiritually. Listen to yourself: what does your body need? What do you need emotionally? What do you need from a relationship? What do you need spiritually?

14.  Are you giving others what they need from you? If you have a nagging sense that you are not giving a child or a spouse that they need and deserve, it can dramatically reduce you resilience.

15.  Rather than just thinking about and worrying over your problems, or problems that may turn up in the future, get into the habit of thinking of yourself not just as an individual who is going through problems, but as a boundless spiritual being who is learning a lesson.

16.  Never forget to think about the legacy that you are going to leave. Not just to your family, but to the world at large. If you can’t think of one, this is a good time to begin to create one. That is an enormously  powerful perspective on the world and on your problems.

“I am an old man and have had many troubles, most of which never happened.”
--Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer, 1835-1910)

Technorati tags: Resilience Life event Life balance Legacy Stress management

Cosmology and the Ageless Wisdom

“Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.”
--The Buddha (a.k.a. “The Awakened”, a.k.a. Siddhartha Gautama, Indian Religious Figure and Founder of Buddhism, c.563 B.C.E. – c. 483 B.C.E.)

I was very interested to see a paper in Science by Professors Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University and Neil Turok from Cambridge University.

Based on calculations and observations, the new theory proposes that instead of there having been one Big Bang that lead to the creation of the Universe, there are instead cycles of "Big Bangs" and "Big Crunches", meaning our Universe is merely a "child of the previous one". This proposal challenges the conventional view of the cosmos, which observations show to be 12-14 billion years old and may explain why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. It also suggests that there's a continuous cycle of universes, with each a repeat of the last, but not an exact replica. This whole idea is so startling that it was picked up by the BBC.

However, there is another piece to this that does not seem to have been picked up yet. Various publications of the Ageless Wisdom seem to have done a good job on predicting many findings of contemporary science. There are some interesting papers here.

One of the key postulates of the ancient teachings is that the Universe goes through cycles. In the metaphorical language of the ancients, the Universal Mind breathes out the Universe that we can see around us, and then inhales, collapsing the Universe, before once again breathing out. Precisely what the new model is also saying.

I’ve previously reported about the speculations concerning “dark matter,” and whether this has something to do with the subtle systems of the body. This new model includes a consideration of dark matter.

This represents a remarkable confluence of the Ageless Wisdom and some of the most creative scientific thinking.

“Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.”
--Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor and Philosopher, A.D. 121-180)

Technorati tags: Ageless Wisdom Cosmology Subtle energy Qi Dark matter

Capacity

There’s a nice article at a website that I like a lot. This one recommends adopting an approach of examining our capacity for work in four different ways: physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.

There are powerful reasons for using multidimensional perspectives to help people not just function at their best, but also to be resilient in the face of adversity. I would like to add two things to this article.

First is an exceedingly useful concept is the “complexity quotient” (CQ), which measures our ability to adapt to changing complexity. It is another way of thinking about a person’s “capacity.” Successful leaders, winning athletes and healthy individuals are extremely flexible and have a high CQ. They can raise their game and adapt quickly. On the other hand, they also have the ability to let go when the pressure is off. After recovering from a mental breakdown, the psychologist Carl Jung was known not only for his remarkable scholarship, but also for his extraordinary ability to relax and to become childlike and to think up all sorts of games for his children. These are signs of a well-rounded, balanced and integrated personality. Sometimes we see people in whom this ability goes haywire, and they overcompensate with drugs, alcohol or risky sexual behavior.

Second, I think that it’s valuable to also add the capacity of your relationships and your energy. Robust, dynamic and supportive relationships can enhance your capacity for work and play, and they buffer you from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We do not usually think about the capacity of the subtle systems of the body, but they are there and very real. Strengthening them with techniques such as breathing, yoga or qigong, can dramatically improve your quality of life and capacity for effectiveness and enjoyment.

Technorati tags: Capacity Complexity quotient Subtle systems Biofield

The Biofield

The biofield is a word about which you are going to hear a great deal in the years to come. It is a term that we use for the organizing Informational Matrix, which is the underlying field of life itself. If you are not functioning at your best, or if you’re ill, this means your Informational Matrix or as the ancients called it, your Inner Light is being hidden and not expressing itself. We decided upon this new term several years ago because it best explained our observations. The Matrix underlies the energy fields of the body, which themselves support molecular and biological processes. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this issue in Healing, Meaning and Purpose.

Information is a form of energy. But when we use the term “energy,” I must issue a word of caution. The term itself is fuzzy, conveying multiple meanings, with many people discussing “energies” and “vibrations” with little clarity. There is a potent reason why this matters: When healers only visualize energy flowing from them into a receiver, like water flowing from a pipe, they are limiting what they can do to help. When we use self-healing, it is essential to use the bigger idea of the Informational Matrix to help us focus our mind and our attention. Yes, there is a flow of “energy:” I can see and feel it, as can thousands of other people. I can train most people to sense it within an hour, and it can probably be photographed. But the energy flow is secondary to a correction in the Informational Matrix.

For centuries, most of the traditional forms of healing have relied upon the notion that there is a “Vital Energy,” an “Essence,” a “Life Force,” forming the basis for a person’s health and healing. Many scientists around the world are now re-investigating this life force, now re-labeled the biofield, or, as we prefer it, the Informational Matrix. A recent paper in a prestigious journal has advocated the importance of integrating “energetic” therapies into cancer care. Here are just seven recent and very interesting papers on this incredibly important subject: 1. 2.3. 4.5. 6.7.

“The cause is hidden, but the result is known.”
--Ovid (Roman Poet, 43 B.C.E.-c.A.D.18)

Technorati tags: Biofield Informational Matrix

A Mini Experiment

Well we consumed the first of the squash, cooked with onions and walnuts: delicious! And I’ve been a real bore telling everyone about my horticultural adventures.

But there’s another small piece to all this. It’s almost ten years since I became a Reiki Master. The person who performed the final initiation worked in the business world and told me that all the plants in her office leaned toward her desk, rather than the sunlight. Since then I’ve known a number of Reiki practitioners who have told me that they have used it to help the growth of plants.

So I thought that I would try it on the new vegetable garden. But being a good scientist, I just used it on half of the vegetable garden. Look at the picture, and see if you can guess which half of the vegetable plot got the treatment.

You can certainly see that one half has a luxurious growth of corn, beans and squash, and the other half a great deal less.

I’m not going to read too much into this little experiment. Although the whole plot has received identical care, and the pH of the soil is same from one end to the other, there could still be some other factors influencing the growth of half the plants. But it has made me think about doing a more formal experiment. And for now I’m going to do a typical crossover study: I’m going to go out and use reiki on the half of the garden with the less impressive growth and see if we can get some catch-up growth.

Technorati tags: Reiki Plant growth Experimental method

Human Evolution

For more than a century, the received wisdom has been that humans finished their physical evolution between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago, and that there have been only minor changes in cognitive abilities over most of that time.

I have always found those assertions to be fundamentally flawed. Our bodies have changed beyond all recognition in the last few hundred years, as I’ve pointed out in my last book and CD series Healing Meaning and Purpose. Even more than that we have changed and are changing mentally. If we were to go back in time ten thousand or even one thousand years, we would find that people were cognitively, emotionally and morally quite different from modern humans. Not simply because of technology and the explosion of knowledge about the external universe, but because there is a dynamic relationship between our development as a species and our creations, with each feeding off the other.

It is only recently that a number of theoreticians, philosophers and psychologists have begun to look at the ways in which we are continuing to develop and what it means for all of us.

The German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers first pointed out the great moral leap forward in what he called the Axial Period, between about 700-200B.C.E., during which the foundations of many of the world’s great religions first appeared, probably in response to the prevailing violence and unpleasantness of the time. More recently the Polish-born Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser started developing intriguing models of the transformations of human consciousness. In the United States, the psychologist Clare Graves developed a revolutionary concept of developing levels of development of the personality, that has evolved into Spiral Dynamics. (You may be interested to look at a review that I have just written about an excellent CD program detailing the latest developments in this field.)

And then there is Ken Wilber whose work in this field is remarkable, and whose creation of the Integral Institute promises great things. To these luminaries I now add Dudley Lynch a writer whose work I have only recently discovered.

Dudley recently wrote a very sensitive blog item about the efforts of a person with a mental illness trying to keep himself integrated in a sea of psychic chaos. He was kind enough to publish my brief response, which needs a little more detail.

The reasons for raising these points about continuing human development are these:

1.The manifest physical changes in people over the last few hundred years have enormous – and largely neglected - implications for clinical medicine.

2. It is likely not just peoples’ physical bodies that have changed, but also their subtle systems. I pointed out in my last book and CD series that the chakra system has developed to its current point only within the last few thousand years. This continuing development is also one of the reasons why some therapies that once only worked occasionally are now becoming more stable and predictable, and why some new forms of therapy – like the tapping therapies - are now being discovered.

3. It is because of these profound changes that new forms of therapy are now being developed. Not just using a supplement here, or a breathing exercise there, but precise combinations that help guide the healing of every aspect of an individual and his or her relationships and spiritual connections.

4. Some people who appear to have psychotic illnesses are moving into new developmental stages without having passed through the necessary intermediate stages. I have just read a first person account of an English journalist who could easily have been diagnosed with a manic illness, but was almost certainly undergoing a spiritual emergence.

5. Major emotional, cognitive, moral, conscious and spiritual shifts can be profoundly frightening to many people, and are doubtless one of the reasons for the profound feelings of social dislocation and violent reactions that we are observing throughout the world.

6. It is no surprise that new spiritual pathways are now emerging. Many will doubtless be very helpful to many of the thirty million Americans who count themselves as spiritual seekers, but have not yet found what they are looking for.

7. Taken together, these new understanding about the longitudinal development of people, relationships and whole societies are already having extraordinary effects on our ability to guide them all in more healthy and integrated pathways.

Technorati tags: Human evolution Axial period Ken Wilber Karl Jaspers Alternative medicine Complementary Medicine Integrated Medicine Chakras Subtle energy

Tapping Therapies

Hearing that my friends in the United Kingdom at www.thoughtfieldtherapy.co.uk were about to have a conference on Thought Field Therapy (TFT) was all the encouragement that I needed to write a few more words about TFT and some of the other tapping therapies. I made mention of two of them in a blog entry for February 28th 2006, and I have dedicated several sections to it in my book and CD series Healing Meaning and Purpose.

TFT was the creation of the psychologist Roger Callahan, who discovered that stimulating a number of acupuncture points while connecting with an negative emotion, thought, impulse or memory, could initiate a cascade of healthy neurological, chemical, emotional, cognitive and even physical effects. There is an interesting sidebar here. When I first came across his work, it seemed absurd. It looked like a collection of unproven techniques cobbled together into some sort of system. I worry about sick people being treated by ineffective therapies, so I was determined to debunk TFT. I was a little taken aback when I sent for some of the Callahan materials and saw a smoker permanently cured in about five minutes. Undeterred, I flew to California to expose what I thought might be another scam. Within two days, I discovered that it was no scam. Roger has indeed made an extraordinarily important discovery that supports the notion that the laws of healing are changing. As a simple example, I used one of Roger’s simplest treatments on inveterate smokers. The first 11 whom I treated all stopped smoking, and when I followed up almost one year later they still were not smoking. This could have been beginner’s luck or a placebo effect, but both are unlikely. We know a great deal about the duration of the effectiveness of placebos.

TFT is based on the concept that thought is a form of energy, structured by a field and that psychological problems are manifestations of distortions within “thought fields,” which Roger defines as “a complex of forces that serve as causative agents in human behavior.” He conceptualizes psychological problems as the consequence of “perturbations” in the thought field. These perturbations contain the information that triggers negative emotions, and they also have relationships with specific major acupuncture points on the body. Fixing these perturbations involves tapping specific points in a specific order, while doing a series of other small tasks.

An important aspect of TFT is the concept of psychological reversal. Roger calls this the energetic blockade of natural healing, caused by reversals in the flow of Qi through the acupuncture channels. It now seems that much of what has been described as therapeutic resistance, self-sabotage or lack of willpower is a result of psychological reversal. He has devised some deceptively simple treatments that have shown us that people’s difficulties were often not a matter of a lack of willpower at all, but were the result of reversed energy. Deal with that, and many problems can melt away.

Like Roger Callahan, I emphasize the importance of toxins, of extending our concept of them, so that we conceptualize them as units of rogue information. In recent years Roger has done pioneering work into how to track down and deal with them.

Not everyone will be helped with any single form of treatment, and even with the best therapists, TFT is not for everyone. However, when someone says that he or she has not been helped with TFT, it most often for one of these seven reasons: 1. The treatment has not been done quite correctly. 2. The problem has been only partially treated. 3. Psychological reversal has not been dealt with. 4. There are still some toxins lurking around. 5. There is more than one problem, and they haven’t both been treated. (Somebody who said that he felt silly doing TFT needed to treat that fear of appearing foolish and then getting on with the primary problem.) 6. The problem may need the help of someone trained in TFT. 7. The person may have needed a combination of therapies.

TFT is the original tapping therapy, but others have now sprung up, including Emotional Freedom Techniques, and I have just read a new book called the Tapping Cure that claims that tapping an array of points on the surface of the body, while at the same time doing a specific affirmation, can be just as effective.

I have tried all these techniques, with varying degrees of success. Not just for clinical problems, but also for sports and other types of performance. While I was recording the CD series Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I several times found places where I fluffed my lines. On each occasion, the problem was resolved by tapping the border of my hand, because I was developing psychological reversal.

Unfortunately, proponents of each of these – and there are others – tend to be competitive with proponents of other techniques. And some enthusiasts have made some pretty incredible claims about what they claim to be able to cure. The competing claims really need to be resolved through empirical research.

Until we have that, I strongly suggest exploring the tapping techniques as adjuncts to other forms of therapy.

Technorat tags: Alternative medicine Complementary medicine Integrated medicine Thought Field Therapy Emotional Freedom Techniques Qi Subtle Energy Biofield

Happy World Tai Chi & Qigong Day!

Saturday, April 29, 2006 is World Tai Chi & Qigong Day . The day is going to be celebrated in 60 countries around the world as well as all fifty states. The event has been recognized by the United Nations World Health Organization, and proclaimed officially for 17 US states by their governors, as well as senates, legislatures and mayors of various countries.

I taught Tai Chi and Qigong for several years, and had the privilege of studying with teachers in China and Malaysia whose methods were part of an oral tradition. Much of this material has still not been published. I recently reviewed a very nice book at the Amazon.com website. One of the things that impressed me about the book is that it contained exercises and techniques that I had been taught by Chinese Masters, but which to my knowledge have never been published anywhere else.

I thought that it might be a good moment to review the world literature on the medical effects of Tai Chi and Qigong. My search has turned up over 2,200 published reports, of which about a third are the reports of clinical trials. I have been able to analyze the data in about a half of those trials. The data now suggests that Tai Chi is genuinely useful for:

• Preventing falls in the elderly
• Improving functional mobility and some aspects of immune function
• Improving blood pressure and lipid profiles and subjective wellness
• Improving overall physical performance
• Stress reduction in HIV positive individuals

There are many other studies indicating the value of Tai Chi, but these give you a sense of some of the research that is going on at the moment.

As I mentioned in another post, qigong is both a personal practice and is used as a form of therapy. It has recently been shown to help:

1. Chronic pain
2. Cardiac rehabilitation in the elderly
3. Chronic fatigue syndrome
4. Overall immune function
5. Asthma

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but as you can see, this is an active area of research.

Learning some Tai Chi and Qigong could be one of the best investments that you ever make in your own health.

Technorati Tags: Tai Chi, Qigong, Wellness, Asthma, Chronic fatigue, HIV

Toxins and Information Medicine

In Healing Meaning and Purpose, I twice mention the impact of toxins: first I mention that environmental factors are now generally believed to contribute to many tumors. Three years ago the World Health Organization estimated that environmental factors are responsible for between one-quarter and one-third of the global burden of disease. Since the creation of synthetic inorganic and organic chemicals in the late 19th century, the global community has faced an enormous rise in the production and subsequent exposure to environmental chemicals, many of which are potentially toxic. The concentrations of many of these chemicals remain quite low, but a key observations if that combinations of chemicals may produce significant health hazards not generally seen with small concentrations of each individual chemical. There is a synergy that forms between them.

Secondly I mentioned the intriguing hypothesis that environmental toxins are a factor in the obesity pandemic.

The first of these has just received significant support from a study by Tyrone Hayes and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley. They studied frogs in York County, Nebraska, and found that a mixture of nine chemicals found in a seed-corn field killed a third of exposed tadpoles and in the survivors lengthened the time to metamorphosis by two weeks. This work confirms the point that I made: individually low concentrations of the chemicals have little effect on developing tadpoles. But add them together and the effects can be devastating. This study is cited together with several others in a thoughtful article in the current edition of Scientific American.

Understanding the damaging effects of combinations of chemicals, or the disease-producing effects of a combination of minor risk factors, was one of the planks that allowed us to construct the new and growing science of Information Medicine, in which combinations are the key to successful treatment.

Technorati tags: integrated medicine, toxins, information medicine

Thoughts on Qi

The essential idea that there is some subtle force or "energy" associated with the body is very ancient, and was discussed in India where one form of it was known as prana. Yet there are many types of prana, and there are other forces and energies of increasing degrees of sophistication. The most comprehensive investigations of subtle fields took place - and continue to be explored to this day -in China and Japan, where they have been known as Qi, Chi or Ki. Yet many other cultures also described something similar. Indeed paintings of the Christian saints with golden halos has been thought to be an interpretation of a highly developed subtle energy system. The subtle systems appear to be the bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds.

My book Healing, Meaning and Purpose makes the point that this idea of subtle systems is not some quaint notion belonging to an era of folk medicine and superstition, but is instead a vibrant area of academic research.

Some years ago, before I had started visiting China, I asked the apparently naive question: "What underlies Qi?" I was told that the question was meaningless, because Qi is everywhere and in everything. But I was not so sure, and so began the development of the concept of an "Informational Matrix," that permeates and animates the Universe. Over the years I discussed this concept in great detail with dozens of scientists, intuitives, and then some of the finest acupuncturists and qigong masters in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, as well as in the United States in Europe. I discovered that many people had similar evidence for this underlying principle. And this fundamental animating force has also had many other names: the Inner Light, Mind, Love and God.

I have posted an extract from my book on my website.  If you choose to read it, let me suggest leaving all of your current knowledge and beliefs at the door. You can pick them up again on your way out!

With any luck, you will never again look at things in quite the same way.

Enjoy!

Technorati tags: Qi, chi, Inner light, subtle energy

Monday Folly: Don't try this at home!

I have written before about the benefits of qigong, but your reporter has just heard about a stunt filmed for the British Channel Four Television Network, that left his eyes watering. Channel Four is doing a three part series entitled "Penis Envy." A 50-year-old Taiwanese-born Californian man named Tu Jin-Sheng, The Grandmaster of Iron Crotch, strapped his penis to a rental truck and twice pulled it across a parking lot in Fremont, California while the cameras were rolling. Master Tu, who believes sex organs have great power, tied a strip of blue fabric around the base of his penis and testicles, tugged to make sure it was tight, then lashed himself to the vehicle. I would like to assure my female readers that not all men would be interested in doing something like that!

Technorati tags: Qigong

Acupressure for Sleepiness

I’ve been using and teaching about the use of acupressure for boosting energy for a very long time. Since the early 1980s I’ve used pressure and tapping of some specific acupuncture points to give myself a quick jolt of energy. I’ve also had some success in helping patients with chronic fatigue by giving them some acupressure methods to use on a daily basis.

So I was very interested to see the publication of a small study involving 39 students in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The students were participating in three days of all-day lecture classes. They were taught to apply acupressure - either tapping or massaging – either five stimulating or five relaxing points. The students were not told the intended effects of the different points.

Acupressure stimulation points were:

1. The top of the head

2. The top of the back of the neck on both sides

3. On the back of the hands in between the thumb and forefinger

4. Just below both knees

5. On the bottom of the feet -- at the center just below the balls of the feet

Acupressure relaxation points were:

1. Between the eyebrows

2. Just behind the earlobes

3. On the front of the wrists

4. On the lower legs above the ankles and toward the midline

5. On the top of the feet in between the large and second toes

The methods that the students were shown consisted of applying pressure to these points with light tapping of the fingers and massaging with the thumbs or forefingers.

The study was a cross-over design: Half of the students applied the stimulation acupressure regimen at lunchtime during the first day of class followed by two days on the relaxation regimen, and the other half followed the reverse schedule.

The results showed that students reported significantly less sleepiness and fatigue on the days they used the acupressure stimulation regimen. This is a fertile area for research. People have also claimed to be able to fatigue with both Thought Field Therapy (TFT) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and I’ve certainly found them to be useful on some occasions. The challenge now is to replicate this acupressure research and also to try out TFT and EFT in a similar study design.

Technorati tags:Thought Field Therapy,  acupressure, sleep, complementary medicine, Qi, Emotional Freedom Technique

Nonlocal Interactions and Entangled Neurons

“Nonlocal” has become a bit of a buzzword recently, so let me explain what it means and why it so very important. It is an idea first proposed by the Irish physicist, J.S. Bell, in the 1960s, that at the microscopic quantum level particles that have been in contact remain permanently connected.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated in the laboratory, but for a long time seemed no more than a curiosity, the effect being infrequent and unstable, and only occurring at the quantum level. But then data started coming in from surprising sources: The “distant viewing” experiments of Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in the 1970s, and work reported from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory. Then some exquisitely clear-cut research by Dean Radin, first while he was at the University of Nevada, and now at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and finally data on distant healing. Together these have really made it seem very clear that these nonlocal effects do indeed occur in the world of large physical objects. Not surprisingly, this research is so important for our understanding of the world, that it has all been viciously attacked. But the fact is that the data keep coming in, and keep resisting the most ferocious attacks.

Larry Dossey, an important voice in medicine for more than two decades, asserts that we are now seeing the emergence of what he calls Era III or nonlocal medicine that acknowledges that your thoughts and intentions may affect the functioning of other individuals, at any distance, and with or without the awareness of the recipient.

The same Dean Radin whom I just mentioned, has recently suggested the existence of entanglement in biological systems. A study published by a group of scientists from the University of Milan is intriguing. The investigators used cultures of human neurons derived from neural stem cells. What they did is fascinating and important. They split the neurons into two little dishes, and equipped each dish with tiny electrodes to record the electrical activity of the cells. I remember doing something similar back when the world was new, and I was a physiology student. But what we did not do back then is this: one of the dishes was shielded from electrical or optical inputs, so that there could be no ordinary influence of one dish on the other. However, when cells in the unshielded dish were stimulated with a laser beam, the cells in the shielded culture responded at the same time. The team took every possible precaution to ensure that there was no known way of one dish or cells influencing the other, and yet the stimulation of one dish caused the other to respond. This experiment was repeated and repeated over a three-year period. This provides evidence for some form of nonlocal linkage or entanglement between the cells in the dishes.

Interestingly, the authors themselves remain very cautious and despite repeating the experiment in a number of different ways, still worry that some of the laser light might somehow have leaked and stimulated the cells in the shielded dishes. The prospect that they have genuinely found a new force at work in biology is enough to worry anyone whose future is in the hands of grant givers.

Technorati tags: Nonlocal medicine. Larry Dossey, nonlocal, medicine, neurons, intentions

Acupuncture Without Needles

There are, in the United States, over 7 million people who are partially or completely disabled by back pain and another 40-50 million people who suffer from chronic recurrent headaches. Frustrated with my inability to help all my patients with conventional treatments, I have been using acupuncture since 1981. But about ten years ago I started using more acupressure, particularly since I could teach a lot of people to continue treating themselves.

Last month we saw evidence from a study using magnetoencephelography (MEG) scanning equipment that acupuncture reduces the activity of regions of the limbic system of the brain. MEG is a relatively new technology that measures the very faint magnetic fields that emanate from the head because of brain activity, instead of measuring electrical activity itself, which is a fairly blunt instrument. This reduced activity only occurred with deep needling, and when the patient experienced what is known as de qi. In Chinese medicine it is normally considered that the needle has not been correctly positioned until the patient and the practitioner both get the sensation of de qi. By contrast, superficial needling just caused activation of sensory areas of the cortex. Many doctors trained in needling techniques ignore the de qi experience, which is, I think, a mistake. When you are able to elicit it, the efficacy of acupuncture increases enormously.

Keep in mind what I have said before: just because acupuncture is associated with neurological changes, does not mean that they are responsible for the effects of acupuncture.

In this week’s British Medical Journal is an article from Taiwan, showing the effectiveness of acupressure in 129 patients with chronic low back pain. Like every study ever done, it is possible to pick some holes in this one, but overall it appears to be sound.

Now I am interested to see a press release about a form of needle-less therapy. I have written before about Thought Field Therapy (TFT), and the subject of the press release is a development of it called Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT. While TFT uses tapping at specific points, together with humming, counting and eye movements, EFT is much simpler. It combines gentle fingertip tapping on key acupuncture points with focused thought. It is claimed to effectively reduce – and often permanently eliminating – chronic pain. According to its practitioners, EFT is more than 80-percent effective in treating headaches, back pain, cancer pain, arthritis, and pain from other conditions.

There is the rub: I could find no published research when I did a Medline search. That being said, I have reported elsewhere that I went to California to debunk TFT and became a convert after being treated by its inventor, Roger Callahan. There is a small amount of research on TFT that appears to confirm its effectiveness in some conditions, and I have certainly found it to be very helpful for many people.

Whether the claims of EFT will be born out remains to be seen. I have seen the techniques work, and I have to give credit where it is due. In exchange for your email address Gary Craig, who developed EFT, allows you to download a EFT manual from his website. You may also purchase DVDs from his site to learn more about this treatment modality. As always, I do not suggest using EFT or any other method in place of tried and tested treatments, but it may be a good adjunctive treatment for mild conditions.

In future message and in my newsletter I shall share some of the precise techniques that I have found useful, as well as ones that did not work out for me.

Technorati tags: Emotional Freedom Technique, headaches, acupuncture, acupressure, chronic pain

The Tools of the Emerging Laws of Healing: 1. Qigong

Qigong, which is also sometimes written as Chi Kung, is a component of traditional Chinese medicine that has been becoming increasingly popular in recent years, and is practiced by millions of people every day. It is an ancient system that involves the coordination of different patterns of breathing with specific physical postures, movements of the body and mental disciplines. Qigong is mainly taught for the maintenance of health, but, particularly in China, there are many who teach it as a therapeutic intervention, and medical qigong treatment has been officially recognized as a standard medical technique in Chinese hospitals since 1989. Some forms of qigong are taught in conjunction with the “internal” Chinese martial arts like T’ai Chi Ch’uan.

There are at least three thousand different styles and schools of Qigong, many of which have been modified by Taoist, Confucian and Buddhist beliefs. Most rely on the traditional Chinese belief that the body has an energy field called qi. It is a common error to equate it just with “energy” or with breath. It is more accurately translated as “influence”, and in the language of modern physics we describe it as a field of information – the Informational Matrix – that underlies the energies of the body. More than 25 separate but inter-related types of qi are recognized. In Chinese, “gong” means, “work”, so qigong then, is working with the qi.

Qigong was not allowed to be practiced in China from the time of the Cultural Revolution until around 1976. Most Western medical practitioners, as well as the Chinese government view qigong as a set of breathing exercises and movements exercises, that may benefit health by reducing stress and keeping the body mobile. Others see qigong in more metaphysical terms, claiming that the meditative breathing and movement exercises can influence the fundamental forces of the universe. Some practitioners have claimed to be able to do everything from felling a charging bull, to putting out forest fires. Some also claim that there is a profoundly spiritual aspect to qigong, which is seen as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment through the cultivation of virtue.

The rising popularity of qigong has had one unfortunate consequence and that is the ready availability of books and DVDs which promise to unveil all the secrets of qigong, when in actual fact learning qigong requires intense application and is difficult without a teacher. That being said, there are plenty of simple qigong methods that can be taught quickly and easily by a good teacher, and there are some excellent primers available, to which I shall refer you in a moment.

There is a substantial body of empirical research into the health benefits of qigong, both for health maintenance and for treatment. A literature search completed in January 2006 found 230 papers published over the preceding three years, of which 154 reported data from studies of everything from stress management to modulation of the immune system. Most of the studies were small, and some contained evident methodological flaws. One of the problems in the evaluation of Chinese medicine is that huge numbers of studies are done in China, often involving vast numbers of patients, but many of these studies are not done to Western standards, since in many cases it is felt unethical to undertake controlled studies. However, we have enough data to say that qigong is proving itself for stress management and for pulmonary problems.

But, as I’ve pointed out in many previous postings, your watchword should be “caveat emptor.” I have been looking at some websites that contain the most extravagant claims for what qigong can do, both as prevention and as treatment. It’s a safe bet that if someone claims that one single practice or technique can cure everything from cancer to the common cold, while also transforming you into an immortal sexual athlete, you should take it all with a large pinch of salt.

Most biologists and physicists reject the notion of qi altogether. I did as well until I observed a number of demonstrations, and subsequently learned to work with qi myself. I can now teach most people to feel energy flows in their own body and some are also able to learn to feel it in others. Such trainings are now being offered by teachers throughout the world and generating consistent reports of the subjective sensations and of health benefits. Learning one or two basic qigong exercises is a fine adjunct to other – including conventional - medical practices and some of these materials are available through my University program at success.com.

I have also put a list of resources at Amazon.com. If you click the button on the left hand side under “Resources for you to check out,” it will take you straight there. I have deliberately chosen not to affiliate myself with any particular schools or programs, but for people living in the United States, The American Qigong Association is doing good work in improving the professionalism of this art and science.

Technorati tags: Qigong, Tai Chi Chuan, healing,