Good Life Project - The Science of Energy Medicine | Jill Blakeway

Episode Date: August 22, 2019

When you hear "energy medicine," what do you think? For many, it's a blend of curiosity and caution. You've heard about incredible outcomes after nearly everything else has failed, yet you can't wrap your head around HOW it works, let alone IF it works. Is it real? Is there science? This week, we sit down with Jill Blakeway, L.Ac, DACM, a licensed and board-certified acupuncturist and clinical herbalist, to explore applications, research and scientific bases for this fast-growing healing modality. Blakeway is the founder of Yinova (https://www.yinovacenter.com/), a group of alternative health clinics in New York City. She is also the co-author of Making Babies: A Proven 3-Month Program for Maximum Fertility, Sex Again: Recharging your Libido, and her latest book, Energy Medicine: The Science and Mystery of Healing (https://amzn.to/2SGUi76).-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So when you hear the phrase energy medicine, what do you think? If you're like me, maybe you're sort of like halfway curious, halfway open, and halfway skeptical. And you've read and heard a lot of different things about what it is and is not, whether it's real or entirely fake. Which is why I was really excited to be able to sit down in today's conversation with Jill Blakeway. So Jill is actually the author of a book called Energy Medicine, The Science and Mystery of Healing. She's also a doctor of acupuncture medicine, and she has spent a lot of years studying both the clinical practice of healing of acupuncture, of herbology, and also with a heavy emphasis on Western medicine

as well and where the two meet. And she has taken a really deep dive into also trying to understand what is happening underneath these different modalities. Is there science behind it? Can we actually talk about this thing called energy? Can we give it a name and a background and measure it in some way that will allow us to understand it, to describe it, to really understand how it works and relates to different people, and in a certain way, also understand it on a level that will allow other people to access it and harness it. But to even get there, we need to actually believe in it. That is part of the journey that we go on in this conversation,

along with Jill's deeply personal narrative, because she did not start out in this world or somebody who was incredibly open to it. In fact, she came up from a sort of profoundly different background in the UK. Really excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS

are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. I have been sort of a long time student of and fascinated by the relationship between the mind-body and the exploration of, however you want to phrase it, energy. You know, like radiating from within, through, and between people. And probably on some level what I would call a, I wouldn't say a skeptic, but I'm always looking for,

can we in some way explain these things in a way that the rational mind will grasp? Although, in truth, the older I get, the less I'm looking for those explanations and the more I just experience it as real. But you have had a fascinating sort of story and exploration of this entire world. I want to dive deep into that. Before we do, let's spend a little bit of time exploring how you got there. So you did not grow up in New York City. I did not, as you can probably tell. Where are you from originally? I grew up in a small town in Yorkshire in England. So I'm a long way from home these days. What was early life like for you?

It was a mixed bag when I look back. And as you know, this book is partially memoir. And I sort of had to look at it from the vantage point of being a grown up. My father was quite a well-known motorcycle star, which meant he was away a lot of the time and quite a glamorous figure in my eyes when he came home with prize money and, you know, toys from various parts of Europe. My mom was young. She was 21 when she had me and she struggled. And I think she could just hold it together for the time my father was home. And so nobody knew how much she struggled except for me, really, and my little brother, who was too small to really register. And so I grew up very scared of her. But as a grown up, and I hope this comes across in the book, I have some deep compassion for her, you know, how out of her depth

she was and how mentally ill she was and how she had all the ordinary burdens of motherhood, but also was struggling with her own mind. But she was violent and scary. And as I said in the book, and I know you've read it, I think that started me off, though, to pursue the career I eventually pursued, because it also made me very intuitive. Were you aware of this sort of intuitive sensibility at a young age? Or is it something that you sort of just noticed upon looking back? Well, I think frightened children nurture a sense of premonition. And so I think what started as me checking the set of my mother's jaw and, you know, trying to work out her mood that day and trying to manage it as a very little girl, maybe five or six, eventually became a broader understanding of the field that we live in and an ability to kind of pick up information from

the field. But no, I didn't. I was always an intuitive child, but I think that was just me keeping myself safe. And yeah, and I went into a profession that not only required me to have intuitive skills, but also make other people feel really safe. And my patients always tell me that I create a sense of safety in the clinic. And I try very hard to, you know, they can't say anything to me that I would look down on them for. I create a sense of safety and calm. And I think it's what I didn't have. Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, it's, do you differentiate between intuition and a state of hypervigilance? Well, I think it's a continuum, to be honest. I think people start out in a state of hypervigilance,

often become very intuitive. I once interviewed the woman who teaches most of the mediums on Long Island. I don't know whether you've ever wondered why there are so many mediums on Long Island, but there are a lot, if you think about it, including the Long Island medium. And her teacher is a woman called Pat Longo. And she told me that the best psychics and mediums have often had childhood trauma, that she noticed that there was that connection between a lot of the people she taught. So I think there may be a link between having a little radar when you're small, an antenna, trying to keep yourself safe, and then being I guess if you learn as a child that your safety, or potentially the safety of everyone in your family, depends to a certain extent on being constantly hyper aware of everything that's happening around you. And maybe the tiniest little, you know, like rays of an eyebrow or sound of a breath that might signal the elevation of some bad scenario. You're just living in that state.

I guess it would make just sense logically that at some point it might expand beyond reading the immediate physical environment and cues into something larger. I think at some point you start to read someone's energy field and the way they energetically change. And that is the jump that people make. So you go from there into university, studying. Yes, I studied English literature to start with.

Right. Yeah. Was that a passion of yours or was it just that? I was a reader. Again, I was a lonely, scared child. So I read as an escape. I was one of those kids who, you know, read with a flashlight under the covers. I was a voracious reader.

And so I studied English to start with, yeah. Yeah. What was your intention from that? I don't think I had one. Like lots of young people. I don't think I did. I went from that to working for the British Royal Family, which was quite a jump in London. But I didn't know where I was going. I think I just wanted

to read in college. Not a bad approach, actually. British Royal Family, what were you doing with them? I was organizing charitable trusts and events for them, which was actually really fun. So you come out of school, you're working for the British Royal Family, organizing these events and trusts and sort of building a life in a fairly mainstream way, in a fairly mainstream path. Become married, have a child. How does that start to shift? How does the trajectory of your life, of your profession, of where you're getting called to start to shift? I always felt a little empty, like I wasn't pursuing my path, but I didn't know what my path was. And it was rather fun to work for the Royal Family. And I got married, you're right. And I had Emma, my daughter,

and then I had a really horrible divorce and it was miserable. I think all divorces are miserable, but this one, you know, I was very ill-equipped to be married. I married young. I sort of replicated my mother in some ways, but I was a little older. I was 27 when I had Emma, but I was still really young. And I took it as an opportunity to jump off into something completely different. And I was offered a job in Key West, Florida. So I went. Had you been before? No. No. And I worked for some really exotic drag queens. So I always joke I went from the queen to a bunch of really tough drag queens who are awesome, who kind of brought me up, ironically, because I was still quite young. And during that time in Key West, which could not be further from my life,

obviously, my parents were horrified. You can imagine, can't you, that Jill takes a small baby and goes to an island of Florida. They're just horrified. I met an acupuncturist and I thought what he was doing was extraordinary. It was at the height of the AIDS crisis. And a lot of young men had moved further and further south trying to find a community and had been rejected from their own community and ended up dying in Key West. And Emma, who was very small, and I would take soup and, you know, keep people company. I can remember big lunches that I would throw with everybody around the table. And I think of those men and they all died. And there was an acupuncturist on the island who was so good at looking after them and so fearless about helping them confront

their reality and good at getting them out of pain. And I became fascinated with what he was able to do. And it led to me going to acupuncture school. And I packed little Emma in a truck and drove across America to California because I did not understand how big America was. This is absolutely true. So I thought, well, how bad could it be? And I remember getting halfway across Texas and thinking, well, Texas is like France. You know, I come from such a little country, you can get the full length of it in a day. So we stayed in motels and I kept driving until I reached the ocean in San Diego. And then mystically, in my price range, I found the most wonderful house that was actually extraordinarily cheap. And Emma and I settled down and I went to acupuncture

school in San Diego and I did a master's in traditional Chinese medicine and then subsequently a doctorate. And I found myself and it was the thing that was missing. And I was a really good student. I was really diligent. I brought up Emma on the beach and studied. And it was like Hogwarts, you know, I studied herbology and acupuncture point location and Chinese philosophy. But at acupuncture school, you study that alongside Western medicine and physiology and toxicology. And there's a real tension in your studies, which I actually enjoyed. And in the book, I say that there was a point in my studies where I got it that what I was struggling with was what science has always struggled with, which is the relationship between energy and matter. That Eastern medicine sees the body

energetically, although still physical, and Western allopathic medicine sees the body as physical and doesn't give much thought to the energetics of it. But in fact, everybody from Einstein onwards has been, or in fact from Newton onwards, has been wrestling with the relationship between energy and matter, I think. Yeah. I want to unpack a whole bunch of what you just shared. We went very quickly through a wide swath of time and experiences. The time that we're talking about is late 90s-ish when you started, when you landed in Key West. And as you shared, it was a horrifying time, especially in this country. And Key West kind of became a bit of an oasis for people who were being diagnosed with HIV and AIDS, which back then, this was just a sentence where there really wasn't any hope. I'm curious, you shared what it was like to be in community at that moment in time

with people who were moving through this. And as you shared, all of whom are now gone. Coming from the background that you came from and just dropping into that world from a profoundly different place with a young child also, where you're both experiencing this together. How does that affect just you as a human being in the way that you see your role in the world and and the need to embrace what you have at any given moment I think I was looking for a sense of family I had escaped this difficult marriage I'd escaped a difficult. I was miles away from home and from anyone I knew. And I started to want to create community like people do. And I found the gay community in Key West to be extraordinarily warm and welcoming and nonjudgmental. I mean, I just left a great job and a wealthy husband and everybody in my life was judging me. And they understood my need to escape. They didn't even ask me what I was escaping from. They just, we were fellow travelers washed up in Key West trying to find ourselves or trying to find something. And so Emma had lots of lovely uncles and many outfits. And I found a sense of acceptance. And I met people who,

by necessity, were living in the moment. They couldn't think too far ahead at this point. They understood that their disease was a death sentence. And yet when I look back, I remember, obviously, great sadness, but I also remember a lot of joy and laughter and fun and real connections. I think when people are facing their mortality in that way, they don't have time for fake connections. And so truthful, honest, open-hearted connections was something that I'd probably experienced for the first time, ironically, in Key West with people who didn't have much time left. And Emma and I would go to the hospice. Key West Hospice was very busy, sadly, and visit people. And it became a way of life.

I think it was actually the mid nineties. It wasn't the late nineties, but, or even the early nineties, but it became just our life. And these were our, our tribe for the, for the time being. I mean, what I'm, I'm curious also what, on the one hand, it's like, you experiencing this duality, like this just stunning embrace of life and, you know, like beautiful human beings living as fully as they can, you know, accepting you, just incredibly welcoming and warm with you and a young child. Have you talked to your daughter over time? I'm sure you have about what it was like for her to move through that moment also, because as an adult, it's hard to see people that you love pass on a repeated basis. As a child, you know,

and it seems like you were both very involved going to hospice. Curious how that window of her life sort of affected her, if you've had those conversations, and you'd be open to sharing, of course. She's a very compassionate person. Yeah. And I think it comes from that. She remembers those times as beach and fun, funnily enough.

And she doesn't seem to remember the loss as deeply as I do, but she was probably about three. So she was really tiny. So her little bits of memory of that are just, you know, laughter and dress up clothes and beach and that kind of thing. And her memories start to take shape when I moved to San Diego, I think. Yeah. the journey cross-country to San Diego. I'm curious what's behind the decision also to say, okay, not just I'm going to go cross-country, but what I'm seeing happen with this one person in Key West is so compelling that I want to do it. I want to understand this and actually make this my contribution. Well, I realized I wanted to help people. And it was really as broad and as simple as that. I wanted to help people. And I found Chinese medicine to be fascinating because the philosophical aspects of

it drew me in. The idea of qi, the idea that we're a little microcosm of a bigger macrocosm, it resonated with me, although I didn't really know much about it, to be honest. And when I look back as a, you know, an older person now, I'm amazed at my audacity. I wouldn't, you know, and sort of slightly terrified by how reckless I was. And if my daughter started to behave like this, I would be having a serious talk with her. But, you know, by then my parents were literally horrified because I was sort of the trifecta of everything that was terrible. I was a single parent in California training to be an acupuncturist. Now my father tells everyone that I was ahead of the alternative medicine boom.

But back then I looked like, you know, some hippie daughter who had spun off. But I was finding myself. Again, I built a community in San Diego, or at least I was accepted into one. These were my fellow acupuncture students. And we would have potluck picnics on the beach. And we would do martial arts classes in the park and we played football, soccer too. And I found a sort of embracing community of Chinese medicine practitioners. What's interesting also about that time is when I look at, you know, we're in New York City right

now and I think across the United States and probably a lot of the Western world now, acupuncture has become pretty mainstream, pretty accepted. But then it wasn't. It was still sort of considered fringe. It was a weird thing to do at that point. And I think most acupuncturists of my generation came to it with some experience of acupuncture, having changed their lives or the lives of people they know. And it is a very profoundly affecting practice and effective. So yes, we were an odd group of misfits in some ways. And acupuncture schools have changed a lot. You know, in those days, we were like a bunch of hippies on the beach, really.

And now they're extremely professional. And I teach acupuncture school. I teach at the doctoral level. And, you know, it's an academic specialty and it's very integrative. And everybody has everybody's licensed and board certified. And it was a little looser back when I was studying, I think. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. When you go through school and you come out of it, what was the, I mean, because most people come out of acupuncture school and, Brenda, you were in California, so that's a good thing because there was a more open community at

that point. But, and then, you know, you're a single mom, you've got a young child, you know, you have to take care of yourself. You have a degree that says I can go out into the world and do something. What's the first, how do you then start to say, okay, so what's the first step into building a career on that or a lifestyle or living? Well, I started working in a hospice, which I resonated with because of my experience in Key West. And I sort of deepened my practice in hospice. And I always tell young acupuncturists that hospice work is possibly the best training for clinical practice because it gets your ego out of the practice of medicine very early on. If all your patients are going to die,

then you can't esteem yourself for saving people or fixing people or anything that's about your own ego. You just have to see the value of being of service. And I loved hospice work. Again, I love the immediacy of it. I love the truthfulness of people when they're at the end of their journey and they don't have time to waste with, you know, the superficialities. I loved being able to support people at that stage in their lives. And I was good at it. So and at the same time, my mom was dying back at home and I was able to bring the knowledge I had from hospice to her. And it was very healing of our relationship. We had forged a somewhat durable relationship during

this time, partly because I was a long way away, I think. But I went home and helped her at the end too. And I thought that hospice was probably where I was going to spend my career. And then I met a woman called Dr. Ni, who was an MD from China and an acupuncturist. She was a gynecologist and she was extraordinarily brave. She had come to San Diego with her young son and her husband hadn't been able to get out of China. So she was on her own with a child a bit like me. And she was my kind of doctor. She was really smart. She was solving complex problems. Columbia University was studying her because she was reversing cervical cancer with herbal, retained herbal douches and things like that. She was extraordinary. But she would also make soup for the patients and

take them to the park to do qigong. And she was just an amazing person. And I thought I would study for the rest of my life with this woman, you know, and I would follow her. And she was very unfortunately killed in a car accident. And I remember sitting at her memorial service and thinking, well, there is nothing keeping me here in San Diego anymore. And I had met a nice man. And he was a New Yorker. And he was an acupuncturist. And he had been in my class. And he had babysat Emma. And we were friends. But he had moved back to New York. And so I followed him. And I needed to earn a living, as you pointed out. And New York is a very expensive place to live. So I could no longer be some kind of barefoot girl on the beach, just eking by.

And I started a practice. And what I hadn't realized is that Dr. Nee had taught me something extraordinarily valuable, which was she taught me to integrate Western and Eastern medicine when it comes to gynecology and particularly when it comes to fertility. And so I was extremely good at getting people pregnant, couples who were infertile pregnant because of the information she'd given me. And I was really unusual in New York. So within, I don't know, a couple of years, I was seeing 150 patients a week. I was absolutely packed. And it was before there was all that research about how acupuncture can help IVF be more effective. So I was kind of ahead of the game. And these days, the Inova Center has two centers. We're about to have another. And I have 21 acupuncturists working with me. And it all came from that knowledge base of how to integrate Chinese medicine to make

Western medical techniques work better all those years ago. Yeah. I mean, so, like you said, ahead of the curve in terms of the idea of bringing these two worlds together. And because I think especially then, my experience of those two worlds, and I actually had a fleeting moment in my life where I explored actually going to acupuncture school, the New York version of the exact same school you went to in San Diego. And so I had a lot of conversations with people who were in the practice and conversations with people who were on the educational side.

And I'm also fortunate to know a lot of people in the medical community in New York and the more progressive side of it, functional medicine. And even now, I think they're, now I think they're woven together, but 10, 15 years ago, especially, they really just, it wasn't like they were warring factions, but it was really, you know, there was a certain amount of invalidation that I feel like happened on, on both sides, to be fair, saying like, well, that's, you know, they're good for this and these people are good for this and diminishing the value of both approaches. So to be the person who sort of stood in the middle of that and said, no, like, let me just bring it all together. Made you pretty unique, I think.

Accidentally. Yeah. And I think as I talk about this, I realize how much was accidental. Or maybe I was being led by a higher purpose. Maybe I was following my path. But I certainly wasn't being smart about it. You know, I accidentally studied with Dr. Nee. And she was an MD. She was an allopathic doctor as well as an acupuncturist. So she embodied that. So I took on her values and came here. And yes, what I found was that at best, we kind of tolerated each other.

And I love Western medicine. And I find it fascinating. I love science. That's why I wrote this book. And what I don't like is dogma. And I think that there is dogma on both sides. The people who are very anti-Western medicine get very positioned and dogmatic about it. And it's a shame. They throw out an extraordinary system with amazing diagnostics and some really important solutions. And I've met Western doctors who are massively dogmatic and just don't see what's right in front of their nose. But I ended up writing a book with a doctor, my first book, the New York Times called me a fertility goddess, which is a very weird thing to be called, to be honest, and something I've never been able to live up to. But I got a book deal and I wrote my first book with a reproductive endocrinologist.

It was called Making Babies. And it was an east and west guide to how to get pregnant and how to get the best of both worlds, which I think is what most of us want, really. We want to get the best of all possible worlds. We don't want to be over-medicated at all. But we do want Western medicine, I think, when we need it. And we want to get the wisdom of traditional medicines and traditional practices and incorporate them. And so I was always doing that for the patients and trying to help them navigate a line through both systems that was reasonable and that would help them. Yeah.

I mean, I think at the end of the day, right, from a patient standpoint, patient doesn't walk in, doesn't say, like, I want to go this path or this path. They just want to feel better. And it's interesting. I think so much, I can't remember what the stat was, but about five, six years ago, I remember reading that people were paying more out of pocket for complementary and functional medicine and alternative medicine than they were paying to traditional medicine. And the reason when people were being asked was because they weren't, quote, feeling better from the traditional path. So they were willing to actually go out of pocket to try something else. So it's actually, I think it's really cool to see the worlds. I feel like really in the last couple of years, it feels like coming together a lot more in service of this one fundamental need

of a patient, which is I'm sick, I'm in pain, I just want to feel better. And I don't particularly care how it happens. I think that's true. And I think if we all get our egos out of the way and work together with open hearts and open minds, then the patients benefit from that. And that's been the focus of my career. I work with doctors the whole time. I speak doctor, you know, those doctors in the hospice taught me well. I chart well because of doctors, Western MDs. When I first came to New York, I also set up a program at Lutheran Medical Center, NYU Lutheran in Sunset Park, which is a hospital. And I set up a hospital based program, particularly in obstetrics. We did a lot of pain relief for women in labor and things like that.

So I was always someone who was talking to doctors and learning from doctors and asking questions. And I think that served my patients well. And to this day, you know, and these days, the vast majority of our referrals come at the Unova Center come from doctors. Interesting. That's great to know. At some point along your journey, you're building a practice, building a life, building everything in New York City, succeeding in helping to create outcomes for your patients that are really powerful. You start to have experiences that make you question, is it really the needles? I did. I started to, well, patients would report that they could feel energy, what they thought of

as energy coming out of my hands. And I would ask them what they felt, and it would be a sort of warmth and a tingling. And I had all the questions that I think any responsible and scientifically literate practitioner would have, which is, you know, is it placebo effect? Do I have something coming out of my hands that's very impressive, but it does absolutely nothing and people are just impressed and feel better? Is it actual energy? Can it be measured? That kind of thing. And it got stronger. And what I realized was it responded to need. And there was a point where I was still very green in practice. I hadn't been in practice that long. And I had a patient who was very senior in the financial markets. And he used to fly in by helicopter to see me, which was very impressive to me as a young practitioner. And I used to treat him for back pain.

And he liked it. And I was able to get his back out of pain. And then one day he came to me and he looked much more somber than usual. And he told me, I have prostate cancer and I don't want to do the Western treatment because I don't want to be impotent. And I think there's a real risk of impotency. And he said, I think you can help me. And he had way more confidence in me than I had in myself. And I was scared, actually. And I'm not someone who rejects Western medicine or encourages my patients to. So we talked to his doctors, and it turns out the prostate cancer is quite slow growing. It's not the emergency that, say, pancreatic cancer would be, which grows very quickly. And his doctor said he had three months

to do what he wanted to do to see if he could turn it around. And so we decided to work together. And I noticed that when I treated him, the energy coming out of my hands was way stronger than it had ever been before, which is interesting. But I also noticed that if my ego got involved, if I started to say, please help this man, you know, please get rid of this cancer, even if my ego was wanting something nice for someone else, it would diminish. I needed to distract my mind and I would look out the window or I'd chat to him about other things. And it would be very, very strong. And he also responded to the challenge. He is someone who had grown up in poverty and created this extraordinary life for himself. And he was

a very determined man. And so he took it like, you know, a challenge, this prostate cancer, and he changed his relationship with everything in his life, you know, his family, food, gods, everything. And at the end of three months, his cancer was gone. And I know him to this day. He's an elderly man now. And I'm seeing him next week, in fact. And he, it has never come back. That was 15, 18 years ago, something like that. And it's actually very hard to tease out what happened there. You know, I certainly wouldn't take credit for it myself. We did Chinese herbs. We did retained enemas, which my teacher had taught me to do, Dr. Ni, you know, to get the herbs really close to the prostate. We did acupuncture. He changed his relationship with a lot of things. He had a

big wake-up call. Who knows what worked? A bit of all of it. I'm just glad it did. Yeah. When three months later, or whenever it was, you, I'm assuming he got scans or tests that showed that this was actually gone. Were you surprised? Yes. No one was more surprised than me. And you know what else surprised me? I thought his doctors would ring me and say, what did you do? And we would collaborate somehow on some great study and we'd move forward with prostate cancer and things like that. And they just dismissed it. They told him he'd had a spontaneous remission and that it occasionally happened. And he was very lucky and which negated

his work actually his hard work to turn this around and his determination um i think and um we moved on so how does that inform you and your understanding of what's actually happening when you're working with this. So you go through this process, you're like, wow, this is actually, we've just had some sort of result where somehow the blend of things that was happening created a profound change in something. And you're also noticing at the same time, there's this something coming out of your hands and it's, it changes based on need and it changes based on your trying to willfully make it happen or not. How does this affect your lens on what this thing is and what the relationship is between the actual needles going into a person's body and making a change because they're stimulating something within the person's body and something else moving potentially through you into the needles, into or through another human being.

How does this affect your whole sort of understanding of all of these ideas? I was very inspired by it. I was very inspired by the idea that there are prompts that can prompt the body's intelligence to restore balance and homeostasis, which is what I think that is, that your body can be prompted to heal itself. And it can be prompted by a placebo. It can be prompted by hypnosis. It can be prompted with a physical prompt like an acupuncture needle and an energetic prompt. And so I started to explore the prompts that help people to heal and I did that for my patients you

know the thing about being in clinical practice is that you get really fond of your patients and you want to help them to the best of your ability and so it's a constant searching for answers it's what I love about my job it's's always detective work. It's always a collaboration with another human being, in this case, the patient. And it's a constant search for what will spark this body to heal itself, I think. And at about that time, I met a man called Dr. Bill Bengston. And Dr. Bengston was a professor at City University and he has a sort of extraordinary story. He came across a psychic healing technique from a quite strange psychic healer and he decided as a scientist to test it in the lab. And so he got mice that were specially bred to have cancer,

poor mice, and they are given cancer and they reliably die by day 27. That's how pharmaceuticals are tested and all sorts of cancer therapies are tested. And he gave the mice cancer and then he was going to test the psychokina and he was a little unpredictable and volatile, this man, and he decided not to do it. So Dr. Bengston, having already got the mice, decided to do it himself, the technique. And to his absolute amazement, it worked. The mice got sick. They got noticeable tumors, although they didn't appear to be sick. And then they started to recover. And what's more, when they re-injected the mice with cancer, they couldn't get it.

They had changed their own immune system in response to this technique. And then Dr. Bankston did what any good scientist would do. Good science needs to be replicable. You can't have a special someone somewhere who does something, but nobody can see them. You know, we have to build on each other's knowledge in order to advance science, I think. So he got groups of skeptical students together and he didn't tell them really what they were doing. And he taught them the technique and they too were able to turn around the cancer in these mice, almost invariably. They rarely lost a mouse. And I came upon his work

and then was connected to him. And his work really inspired me because it's good science in so much as you can't criticize the man's science. The outcome is a sort of astounding thing. But he's doing it in a very scientific way. And I was so impressed by his technique, which actually explained me to me in some ways. How so? Well, because what he was teaching, and I have the exercise in the book, so people can try it for themselves. Dr. Bengtsson very generously let me write about it. But what he was teaching was he was teaching the students to distract their egos. And he was doing it by having them flash in front of themselves in their mind's

eye very quickly, all sorts of ego gratifying things that they would like. These aren't your noble wants like world peace and a better government and things like that. These are sort of, you know, silly ones in some ways, you know, a bag, a watch. Mine had a beach house on it and things like that. And the flashing before your eyes, in your mind's eye, seems to do two things. It distracts your ego and it projects you into some place into the future. And then energy comes out of people's left hand. It's always the left hand with this technique. It must affect, I think, the right side of the brain in some ways. And it's palpable and it affects change in the mice and actually also in human beings. And I interviewed people who'd been cured of cancer by Bill's technique for this

book. And so I realized, oh, he's doing it differently to me, but he's doing the same thing. I look out of the window or chat to the patient about something innocuous, but I'm distracting my mind. And I had already learned that if my ego got involved at all, it all went awry, that I needed to get out of the way. And that's when I began to think that I was making myself into a conduit for something that was coming through me, because I certainly wasn't channeling it with my own mind. So that was the moment where I realized, oh, this is measurable by science. And I am like a little antenna. As I said, when I was small, I'm an antenna.

I'm picking something up and I'm passing information through a frequency, I think, to the patients. Yeah. Were you immediately open to that idea? No. No. No. I mean, I believed Bill's research. And I began to dig. And this is the beginning of me writing this book, Energy, Medicine, the Science and Mystery of Healing.

I didn't know I was writing this book. I thought I was just at the time trying to work out, explain me to me. But I began to dig. And I realized that there are ways we affect each other through frequency. For instance, people interviewing people a bit like you're doing now, often pick up the heart waves of the person they're interviewing in their brain waves, which is very interesting. And they use EEGs and EKGs to measure that. Or at the University of

Connecticut, there was some research where they put people in separate MRIs in separate rooms. And when one had healing thoughts about the other, their brainwaves synced up. And I realized, oh, we are in some kind of silent collaboration with each other that science is beginning to be able to measure. And it freaks people out, so nobody talks about it. But we're beginning to be able to measure that. And so, as you know from the book, I decided to submit my own body to science at some point. And I had an EKG of my heart and an EEG of my brain while I did my thing, which is different to Bill's thing. And what I found is that my heart and my brain go

into resonance. They go at the same frequency. And to do that, I have to slow my brain down a lot. And then through something called mirror neurons, the patient's heart goes into the same frequency as mine, which I think is quite beautiful, actually. And I think when that connection through frequency, when we're all going at the same frequency, I think is quite beautiful, actually. And I think when that connection through frequency, when we're all going at the same frequency, I think that's when information gets passed, I think. Yeah, it's sort of like you're aligning all of the blocks so that you just, you know, there's always a channel there.

Yes. But there are kinks in the hose to a certain extent. But then when you sort of like, it's like process of removing all the kinks so everything kind of flow naturally. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. time and actual results will vary. It's funny, you know, where I have, as I mentioned, you know, in my 50s now, I've become so much more open to just the truth of certain things being, you know, without having to find. I'm still constantly trying to figure out what is the scientific, is there a rational basis? Is there some way we can explain this in a way that my rational brain will say, okay, I can reverse engineer this. I understand how we go from in a subtler way. And then you weave the fact that we do, in fact, we are, whether you want to call it, and I think we get tripped up on language a lot of times, whether you want to call it energy, prana, chi, electromagnetic forces, bundled with sound waves, there is something that persistently is within us and around us and between us that is now very accurately measurable

with modern science and modern medicine. And the question I think becomes, what do we do with that? There's always a little bit of mystery that's just outside of our reach. And I think that's very tantalizing. But yeah, there are ways of measuring the ways we subtly connect with each other. And one of the things that I was fascinated by, and Bill introduced me to a man called Dr. Robert Jeanne, who has subsequently passed away. He was elderly, but he was the Dean of Engineering at Princeton. And he had a fascinating story to tell. He had a female grad student who wondered if she could design a machine that could be moved by the human mind. And I don't think at the time Dr. Jeanne thought for a minute she would pull this off, but I think he thought it was a fun project for a grad student and she'd

learn a lot by going through the process. And so he gave permission for her to do it. And of course, the engineering department at Princeton is possibly the least woo department of Princeton, I imagine. And she pulled it off. And it changed Dr. Jeanne's life. It changed his view of the world. And he set up a lab to study what she'd been able to do and why. And to cut a long story short, she created a machine called a random event generator, which thanks to decaying atomic

material, spits out random numbers. And when it is focused on with intention and feeling, it becomes less random. And when it's focused on by more than one person, if they're connected, it becomes less random. So to give you an example that is sort of extraordinary, this lab was running for a long time from the 70s. On September the 11th, four hours before the planes hit the Twin Towers here in New York, the random event generators, which at this point were all over the world at universities, all over the world spitting out random numbers back to Princeton, started to come into line. And they stayed that way for the entire day,

which I think is extraordinary, presumably because we were all looking in the same direction. People always ask me why four hours before, and of course I don't have all the answers at all, I just have more questions. But I think it may be either a sense of collective premonition or that the act that was about to take place was already starting. The people were already getting on the planes. It was, you know, destiny was rolling out, something like that. But they've created little portable random event generators, and they've taken them everywhere from the Trump inaugural to yoga retreats and churches. And

what they found is that strong emotions connect us and change the machine, therefore change our reality in some ways. And the strongest connection is love and compassion, the kind of compassion I felt in the hospice in Key West, which is such a motivator, I think. But the second strongest was fear. And I think as we live in times where people are getting increasingly fearful and spreading that fear like a contagion, we need to be cognizant of that, that fear as an energy contracts. It's a very, you contract when you're fearful and the world contracts, you start to pull everything in. And love is, of course, a very expansive energy and compassion. And if we choose fear, this isn't just a sort of theoretical concept. Fear changes these machines. And so fear changes our reality and starts to create, I think, the very thing we're fearful of in all probability.

And then I guess by extension, if you're saying that this then becomes that we are radiators, no matter what, whatever it is, whether it's fear, whether it's love, compassion, that that changes us, that we're not just antennas, but we're beacons. We are, and we're affecting each other. Right, which if it's fear and that creates a negative psychological and potentially physiological effect, then that would not be a good thing if we're actually affecting other people. Yes, it's definitely not a good thing. And we do see that, don't we?

We see that in countries around the world, including my home country of Britain and here in America, that fear and people exploiting fear are able to manipulate the world and make us smaller. I'm seeing Britain get smaller on the world stage from afar, sitting here in New York. We're seeing America do the same thing. Fear contracts and it spreads like a contagion, but love spreads like a contagion too. I like that. When you think about, so I'm guessing that a lot of our listeners are like, yeah, this all makes sense. And I'm guessing also that in the last 10 minutes or so of our conversation, a bunch of people who are listening were saying, well, yeah, this, this, oh, okay. Yes, yes, yes. And now their eyebrow, like an eyebrow got increasingly been raised saying, really?

Like, are we going there? You know, I, like, I, I love the idea of acupuncture. I love the idea of us being able to affect, you know, and I buy into the idea that we can measure energetic electrical fields within bodies and we can manipulate that. But people becoming actual energies, you know, like antennas and beacons of some palpable energy that is measurable externally and can affect other people, that's pretty trippy. It is, although you can look at it in a very grounded way. And in the book, I did both, as you know, I explored my mystical side, but I love science. And so I would keep coming back to what is provable. And if you look at, say, the hands of Qigong masters, they produce a field from their hands which is a thousand times stronger than the electrical field that comes from what is normally the strongest organ in the body, which is the heart, which produces a powerful electrical field. But when Qigong masters are healing people, they have a force that's a

thousand times stronger coming from their hands. And that frequency is a very specific frequency. It's very low, interestingly. And science also uses low frequency to heal. Here at Columbia University, and we're not far from Columbia University sitting here, you and I, they did research which showed that running a low-frequency electrical current through bone helps it heal faster. And now at all the best orthopedic hospitals, they routinely run current through bone. Interestingly, it's the same frequency that Qigong masters produce from their hands. That's fascinating. It is. And so science has arrived at this from a different route,

but I'm interested in the places where we join up. I mean, it's fascinating, right? Because if you tell somebody that researchers have developed this device that generates a certain frequency that can heal bone faster, a lot of people are like, okay, cool. Yeah. And then you tell somebody, well, a Qigong mask can place their hands around that same area and generate the same result.

A lot of people would be like, no, but it does make sense. I mean, because it's effectively the same thing. It's just one is a machine that was created out of the effort of human beings. And the other is a machine that is a human being. And also, I think it's fascinating, the idea of the energy that is transmitted by us. And this is always one of my questions. Is it something that is generated from us or something that in some way moves through us. I think what the conversation has been is your sense is that it actually is something more that we open ourselves to becoming conduits to allow it to move through us

and that it's not actually you are uniquely qualified to generate this. It's something which is out there and around us and somehow we can almost allow it to move through us, harness and direct? Well, I don't think I'm remotely special for a start. So I think pretty much anyone can do this. If I can do this, anyone can do this, I think. And I think it's, to me, I obviously don't know the answer to this question completely

and definitively, but to me, it feels like it comes from outside of me. And it may be that get the better of them and they become exploitative in some way. And we see this all the time in the spiritual community. And I wrote about it in my book. But, you know, when I looked at what people call charlatans, I was expecting to see people who wave their hands around, were doing absolutely nothing and charging a fortune. I didn't see much of that. I saw the occasional one, but I didn't see much of that. What I saw were people with some talent who were using that talent exploitatively. And that actually gave me such a pause for thought that I contacted the head of psychiatry and law at Harvard, who is a man called Dr. Goodhile, who's considered to be one of America's greatest experts on transgressions

of the therapeutic relationship. And I asked him, you know, about this. And he said, watch out for people who are a cult of one and have ritual and dogma and watch out for people who are banking on people's confirmation bias and encouraging it in order to encourage people to cherry pick through their experiences and only see what they want to see, which if you have a cult of personality is, you know, is the temptation that people really want to believe in you. So I think for me, it's been an aspect of good mental hygiene to see this as something that comes from outside me and not me. And to see myself as just like a convict, like I always tell my patients, oh, it's not particularly clever. I'm like, just like an aerial or something. I'm just an antenna.

And then be able to do it without, you know, putting myself on a pedestal. That's been healthy for me. It also means I can train my team and I can work collaboratively with people. It's less lonely. There are lots of reasons for that, I think. I mean, I think that's it. To a certain extent, that lens helps democratize both the practice and the effect, right? I mean, it's funny because for a long time,

I have believed that, and it's funny because your book and this conversation sort of has shifted my beliefs. But I believe that there were healers and there were other people. And very often, you know, like the healers were the people that just got astonishing outcomes with the people that they worked with.

And they could exist as, you know, neurosurgeons, healers were the people that just got astonishing outcomes with the people that they worked with. And they could exist as neurosurgeons, as acupuncturists, as herbalists, as coaches, as therapists, but it wouldn't have actually really... The modality that they chose as their mechanism to attribute the results to, it almost didn't matter. There was just something unique about them that was happening in the in-between between them and the people they saw, their patients, their clients. And they almost had to point to the mechanism because it was too trippy for them to actually say,

no, this is actually something less definable that's coming from me. And so I'm going to point to the needles, or I'm going to point to this device, or I'm going to point to that, or this drug or this herb. It sounds like, but that again, there's a lot of risk in that approach. Whereas if you actually take the approach and say, there's some bigger energy that sort of exists and floats around in the universe. Describe it, define it, however you want. And the healers are not necessarily the ones where they have some special gift. They're the ones who have engaged in some process that opens them to the notion that this exists and allows it to move through them in an effective, repeatable, effective way, that changes things in a really big way.

It does, doesn't it? And in the book, I give exercises to start to help people develop their own healing talent. I think there are certain personalities, certain people who are more healing than others because of will. You know, they want to, just like I, I'm your typical wounded healer. I wanted to heal my mother. I never quite could. So now I'm healing everybody else, sort of thing. I think there are people who are very passionate about what they do and will go to the far ends to try and help a patient and unravel a case. And obviously they get better results. There are people who are

more suited to being in healing professions than others. But I do think it democratizes it. And I think it's correct. I think this idea of the special healer is an error. And certainly in my case, I've been able to teach people this and some of them, you know, have more aptitude than others. Some of them have more will than others. Some of them have better people skills, but it's not the province of a few chosen ones. And I think that's important for people to understand that we're all affecting each other all the time. Yeah. And that there are also, there are many different approaches, ways, exercises, rituals, routines that might allow any person to access whatever it is that, you know, we're talking

about potentially being able to access. You get some interesting experiences in Japan, almost sort of seeing people who lived in profoundly different ways, yet still had access to some stunning capacities. Well, I did. I met some extraordinary healers in Japan. And what they had in common was they'd worked very hard to be good at this. And that is something that when I say we can all do it, you have to work at it. You have to learn how to do this. But yes, I went to Japan on the advice of a man called Dr. Pepper, the improbably named rather lovely Dr. Pepper from San Francisco State, who had studied healers in Japan and had data on them, which was interesting to me because I was trying to look where science

and mystery came together. And it was a big trip. So I was setting off to see a monk called Hiroyuki Abe and then another healer. And I wanted some verification that I wasn't going on a wild goose chase because, you know, I have quite a lot to do. I run a big practice. And so I talked to a man called Yuval Oded in Israel, who is a research psychologist. And Yuval told me he had a baby that was born partially blind, mostly blind. And out of

desperation, they had taken the baby to meet with Hiroyuki Abe in Japan, in Kobe. And they had taken the baby every day and Abe had done his thing. And not much had happened. And they were a little disappointed. And then one day they were pushing the baby out in a stroller. I think it was about the fifth day. And he screwed up his eyes and they realized he could see light. And by the time I talked to Yuval, the little boy was four and was still doing well. And so with that, I got on a plane and I went to meet Hiroyuki Abe, who was a fascinating character. He was the most jovial of monks. He smoked and drank heartily and was always surrounded by students and people. And he wouldn't, he didn't immediately trust me, which I think is fair. I was very foreign. And he said, well, we need to be friends, you and I, before I can explain

what I do. And he was charming. I thought, well, that's absolutely fine. I'd love to be your friend. But this went on for days and days. And we had a translator in tow who had been the translator for the New York Mets when they had a Japanese baseball player and was as bemused as my husband and I were. And we kept following Hiroyuki Abe all over the place. We got on trains, off trains. We went to Kyoto. We went to endless restaurants. There was an ever-changing cast of people coming and going who were all very confusing. I had no idea who anyone was. And I couldn't get any information out of him at all.

My husband, Noah, who is lovely, said, how long is this going to take, Joel? And I was like, I don't know. I'm trying to be his friend. I'm just like hanging out. And eventually he said to me, would you like to watch me in clinic? And I said, I would love to. And he was extraordinarily talented. But he had worked very hard to become this talented. And one of the things that Dr. Pepper told me that struck me was that he had made a study of lots of healers. And he said to me, the best healers create a sense of safety. And one of the things I noticed about Hiroyuki Abe was although he was quite sort of riotous in his private life,

in the clinic, he created an extraordinary sense of safety, like a container for people's experiences and radiated love and acceptance. And all those things that people way back earlier in my journey had traveled to Key West to try and find. And just that deep sense of acceptance and compassion. And somehow, during that experience, people unraveled what was wrong with them. And so from there, I was a little worried about the next healer that Dr. Pepper sent me to because he stuck skewers through his tongue and his neck and things like that. His name was Master Kawakami. And I headed off to an island off the south coast of Japan to meet with Master Kawakami, who again was a lovely man, couldn't be more different to Hiroyuki Abe. He was a former bodybuilder, as in weightlifting. He was a Mr. Japan in 1979.

And then he decided to focus on his insides and he'd become an extraordinary gifted yogi. And he'd become an extraordinary gifted yogi. And he was massively disciplined. And again, I watched him work. And he was a very talented healer. And he had come to this skill through discipline and disciplining his consciousness and his body. And Hiroyuki Abe, I feel, came to it through something more akin to compassion and acceptance, but they were both doing amazing work. It's interesting to me. I love hearing those two different stories because what it tells you is that you don't have to step into the identity or the role of like, this is the way to live. And this is the way to to be if you want to be somebody who gains access to these this

understanding these these capacity which i i it goes back to the early part of a conversation around dogma i think oftentimes we believe this or we're told that like this is the way that it has to happen yeah i think about uh tibetan buddhism to a certain extent in different forms of buddhism and there's a rich tradition of what they call crazy wisdom in Tibetan Buddhism, where some of the most enlightened masters are also the ones who are living the wildest lives. And then there's more of the Zen Buddhist side, which is much more regimented and simplified and distilled and focused in all elements of life and then across different traditions. But I love the idea that there is a freedom to be who you are, to live the way you want to live, and yet still devote yourself to whatever expression and

embrace of discipline works for you and who you are. but the universals are in some way kindness and safety across all of them and a devotion to developing the capacity to do this work and to be that person. I think you're absolutely right. I think there's a lot of dogma in the wellness community, for instance, which can be very sanctimonious and self-righteous and judgmental. And what I saw universally in all the healers that I saw that were really talented was the opposite. There wasn't much dogma. There wasn't much self-righteousness or sanctimony. They were just meeting people where they were at on the journey, one human being to another. And they were coming at it from different perspectives and with different lifestyles. And I agree. I thought that was very inspiring.

Yeah. One of the things I wanted to ask you about also, so we've talked about your journey to certain that we've sort of talked about different aspects of this idea of energy and what it can do and how it transmits. The idea of the breath and breathing and how it relates to the movement of this thing called energy. I had a background in yoga. So pranayama, which was the Sanskrit word for essentially constraining or manipulating energy, was breathing exercises. And it seems like when you cross so many different traditions, at the heart of working with manipulating, changing, moving energy is some focus on breathing. Yes, I think so. And I'm self-taught, as you know. I mean, I was trained in acupuncture,

but the energetic aspects of it, I sort of worked out myself. And I had, quite by accident again, everything happens to be by accident, it turns out, but I had taught myself to breathe in a way that created internal resonance. And that is measurable. That's what the biofeedback doctors measure, actually, is the way they teach people to breathe in a certain way so that they create internal resonance between the breath and the heart. And I had taught myself to breathe in a certain way that creates resonance between my brain and the breath and the heart. And I think that's the triad for healing. And it creates a great deal of calm in me. And that calm in me creates a great deal of calm in the patients.

And in my real life outside the clinic or my other life, I'm not necessarily the most calm person. My husband always jokes that I'm the only type A acupuncturist he knows. You know, we have a big clinic and I'm always thinking up new things to do. I'm not a particularly calm person, but in the clinic, I go into this very calm space, which I love for me, selfishly. It's like my little respite from running the business and writing books and being on book tour. And, you know, just recently, I've been on book tour for months now.

And I say to my husband, I miss the patients, I miss the clinic. Well, what I really miss, I do miss the patients and I do miss the clinic and my lovely colleagues. But what I really miss is the version of myself I am with the patients, which is calm. And that has to do with breathing. And obviously I could breathe the rest of the, calmly for the rest of my life, that would be, but I'm a work in progress. I'm getting there. But, you know, I taught myself to stay very centered in clinic. And that is, that comes from the breath. Yeah. I love that. I've played around with a lot of different breathing exercises over the years

and have developed my own sort of daily practice. And depending on sort of what I wake up and how I feel, what do I need? If I'm freaked out and anxious, there's a particular breathing where I'll actually bring my breath down to two breaths a minute, which is remarkably comfortable actually when you get there over time. Or if I'm really low energy, I'll change that sort of breathing pattern. And I've always been amazed at how quickly and how quickly it works and how much it actually does work. And, you know, certainly there's research now on how that activates or, or tamps down the sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system, but they also do sense there's something beyond that.

There's an alignment that happens, I think. And I noticed that Master Kawakami, the second healer I told you about in Japan, the one who put skewers through his body, in order to do that without feeling pain. And we know he doesn't feel pain, incidentally, because researchers put him in an MRI and burned his feet with lasers and his brain registers no pain at all. But he floods his body with endorphins, which I think is interesting because he's a human being. He's highly trained, but he's not superhuman. So if he can do that, we can all do a variation of that. And in the middle of an opioid crisis, it is quite interesting to study someone who has learned how to be impervious to pain. But how he's doing it is with his breath. He takes an out breath. He slows his breath right down to two breaths a minute, funnily enough. And then he takes

the out breath as he pierces himself and he feels nothing. Yeah. I love all these connections. You and I could talk for a long time, but I think it's a good place for us to come full circle. As you sit here in New York City, you've got this wonderful book. On the verge of opening, I guess, your third clinic, living a big life, bouncing between safety, calm, and residence, and healing in the room,

and then being a public person and an entrepreneur out in the world. At this moment in your life, if I offer up the term to live a good life, what comes up? Love. Love, I think, comes up more and more for me. Community. I have been thinking a lot about how to create community, real community, supportive community in a world that is so virtual and has communities that are so superficial. And I am thinking about kindness and compassion and love in a fearful world, the expansive energy of love. I've stopped being as scared as I was when I was younger. I think you hit your 50s and you start to think, I don't care what anyone thinks of me, actually. Like, why would I care about

everybody's projections? So I don't get scared in the way that I used to. I don't hide my light in the way that I used to because of that. And I want to use the time I'm on Earth to connect. I think we're here to be connected with each other in ways that are tangible and practical and are about community. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening.

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