Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Substack Live Re-Air: Did An Energy Healing Practice Stop Cancer Cells From Growing? | Meredith Sprengel
Episode Date: August 7, 2026This week we’re sharing something special that was previously only available on Substack: Jonathan’s conversation with Meredith Sprengel, Research and Program Director for the Subtle Ener...gy Funders Collective and Fellowship Director for the Biofield Fellowship Research Program. Meredith studies what most people would call energy healing — someone holds their hands over you, or sends an intention, and the body drops into a deep state of rest. In that state, curious and sometimes miraculous things start to happen.Science can already measure the electrical field your heart and brain give off, and the faint light your cells emit. But what about a field that connects all of us? And what if it’s the missing piece in how the body heals itself?Meredith walks us through a preclinical study at MD Anderson Cancer Center where a specific energy healing practice stopped the growth of pancreatic cancer cells. She also describes her own research in the Netherlands, where people receiving healing showed an exponential rise in biophoton emissions — the faint light our cells give off when they’re metabolically active. A mitochondrial researcher who reviewed the data said it resembled what you see in someone who just went for a run.Meredith has interviewed many healers who describe scanning the body and feeling spots that are heavy, hot, or stuck — places where old emotional pain is believed to be held. What her research has found is that healing rarely looks like pain suddenly disappearing. More often, a person’s relationship to that pain changes, and connection to other people and a sense of meaning seem to play a role in that shift.So how does it actually work? Some healers say they’re channeling god, source, or consciousness. Others describe clearing blockages of stuck energy. And others say they’re not doing the healing at all — just giving the body space to do what it already knows how to do.Meredith and her co-host Ivy Ross explore all of this in their six-part podcast series, Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing, sitting down with healers, people who’ve received healing, and the scientists studying what’s actually happening.Energy healing has been practiced for centuries. Science is finally starting to catch up!Watch the Stuart Fails to Save the Universe Official Podcast on HBO Max, the HBO Max YouTube channel, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. https://link.mgln.ai/StuartVisit drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN and get a FREE AG1 Flavor Sampler and a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3 + K2 in your Welcome Kit with your first AG1 subscription order.Get your annual IANDS Conference tickets at https://conference.iands.org.Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/BialikBreakdown.comYouTube.com/mayimbialikSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Hi, I'm I'm Bialli. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we've got a very special something for you. It was previously only available over on Substack. It's a conversation with Meredith Springle, research and program director for the subtle energy funders collective, as well as the fellowship director for the biofield fellowship research program. Her work centers on evaluating how complementary modalities can be incorporated into conventional medicine for the treatment of chronic disease.
The goal is strengthening resilience, supporting well-being, and fostering more of a whole-person healing.
This conversation discusses energy healing, which has been practiced for centuries, but is now kind of finally,
we're seeing the science catching up, and Jonathan is the perfect person to talk about that.
In this conversation, Meredith and I explore biofields, energy fields.
We talk about the field that is emitted around our bodies and how science is starting to measure it.
The research she's doing really is fascinating because it explores all the hippie ideas that
spiritualists and healers have and how science is trying to translate them, understand them,
and really help us get a better sense of how they can be used and how the impact our healing.
One particular study that really stands out is the recent release of a cancer study from
M.D. Anderson, where energy healing,
was used to change cancer cells in petri dishes, showing the reduction of cancer.
Jonathan's also going to talk about his Reiki practice, and a lot of what Meredith says
really resonates with what Jonathan has experienced to be true, as well as the people that
Jonathan has worked with. Really, really incredible. Are we channeling God? Can we channel source?
Can we channel consciousness? How do we release stuck energy? It's a great conversation. Please make sure
also to check out Meredith's new six-part podcast series with co-host Ivy Ross, which is called Phenomena, the science and stories of energy healing where they sit down with healers, people who've received healing and scientists studying what is actually happening when we talk about energy work in particular.
We really hope you enjoy this episode and we hope to see you over on Substack.
Here is Jonathan talking with Meredith Springle.
Break it down.
As someone myself who has practiced Reiki for a long time,
who has thought a lot about hands-on healing,
the mind-body connection,
when we hear words like subtle energy and biofield,
a lot of people are like,
they think they kind of know what it is,
and then we quickly discover that we have no idea
if we're all talking about the same thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think we have ideas of what they are,
but I don't think we know what they are.
I mean, so let's start with subtle energies.
I mean, subtle energy is the mechanism by which that healers describe that they're healing you.
But they use a number of different terms.
You could say subtle energy, God, consciousness, the universe.
And it's kind of the idea that that is that energy that connects all of us and can help facilitate a healing response.
So when I talk to a lot of healers, it's kind of, I do that a lot for my research.
And healers say they heal by, they connect themselves to source.
And then they're a channel for source energy or that subtle energy that then they use to that
interact with participants' biofields to help reset the blueprint, right? The blueprint being of
health and wellness and the core of who they are. And the idea is that over time, they use these
blockages of energy or this information that gets stored in this concept of a biofield that
perturbs your health or then creates health and disease. A lot of times it originates with trauma,
be it physical or mental health. This idea of a biofield, so we literally have a biofield. We are
bioelectric beings. So we admit a bunch of different sources of bioelectric beings.
from the heart, from the brain. Those are biological fields, right? It means it extends outside of our
skin and we can measure it. And we've done some of that, some preliminary work here in the Netherlands
to measure biological fields like ultra-week photon emissions and electromagnetic fields from the heart.
The biofield that is kind of defined within this realm, which is this frontier form of science,
like this subtle energy and biofields healing, there are fields of energy and information, not necessarily
electromagnetic. So the idea is there might be some additional fields that we don't understand
via physics or a current paradigm of science that we might also be sharing between us
that might be creating that transpersonal healing effect you get from energy healing that may be
core to the mechanism of how it works. So or the idea that somehow there's a collective
biofield that's being manifested from all of these bioelectric fields. So these are all concepts
and ideas that are grounded in science, but kind of extends outward.
to try to explain what's happening.
But there's very preliminary research,
although the Settlergy Funders Collective
for which I work,
that is kind of what we're trying to do
is to foster new science
to understand these concepts.
First of all, I want to know
about the types of healers
that you're speaking to
who are describing this
because I have heard it described
in many different ways
and I was taught a very specific thing too
that has a lot of overlap.
Then, of course, there's the biofield
themselves and the notion of God in consciousness entered your description early on and you're like
well consciousness as a perception consciousness as a field like those are two very different ideas of
that word and then of course God has its own stack of implications the notion of the biofield as
fields of energy and information admitted from the body not necessarily electrical but potentially
partly electrical. How are these being studied? Because I think a lot of people who are
curious about this, and we've spoken to this on the podcast, I've spoken about like, oh, well,
your body is not just your body. You have an energy body around you. And if you're in meditation
and you look at your chakra system and then you think, okay, you know, you do the classic grounding
technique where energy is being pulled from the ground up through my crown and then comes cascading
around me, you start to become aware of things outside of your skin. And then, well, how far does
that go? And then you're suggesting, well, maybe we're all interconnected. And then the field is actually,
there's just information being passed. And it's an infinite amount of connection between my skin and
someone else's skin. So like, these are huge ideas. Let's try and like pull them back. Because I think
we're going at, you know, 100 miles an hour, which I love. But I want to also help people come along for
the ride. So start with, do we have, you know, this notion of a field or an energy outside of our
skin? How is it being measured? What do we know? Yeah, we can definitely measure fields outside of
the skin, right? So again, the heart creates an electromagnetic field. You can measure that
using things like gradiometers or squids. And these particularly will measure your heartbeat,
but through the bioelectric signal that's coming from it.
There's these things called ultra-weak photon,
this ultra-week photon emission,
these biophotons that are believed to be a byproduct of the mitochondria,
but we don't really understand them,
and these biophotons are ultra-week light,
so you can measure them outside the body with particular boxes.
That's another way you can measure a biological field coming off the body.
And then you can also measure the brain, right?
you also have electricity coming out of the brain.
Those are kind of the core ones that most people are measuring right now
and can measure reliably and with a good signal.
And these are all open-sourced and open-calibrated devices,
meaning that science recognizes them as meaningful.
There are a lot of devices out there that are closed box,
meaning like you don't know how they work,
but they say they measure your aura or they say they measure your chakras,
or you put your finger in and it gives you a blueprint of your aura.
there's no science to back it and there's no way to know if it works because the back end,
meaning like how it works is shielded.
So we know we have a biofield that extends outside our body.
Physicists would say it only extends like a few centimeters or a few inches outside your body.
I think that this whole concept of measuring fields outside the body is new and we haven't really
even switched fully into thinking about us as bio-electrical beings.
within the scientific paradigm.
So I don't think we know what we don't know what we don't know right now.
So I think it's almost like when we do experiments, when we look at biological fields,
it's kind of meeting where we're meeting science where it's at,
which is kind of these very crude measurements that are not always easy to measure, right?
Because a lot of times, like we live in a, we're in a very noisy electromagnetic environment.
So, you know, there's a lot of places that this can go with these measuring biofields.
But, and then there's some other concepts like these vector potential, vector and scalar wave potentials that people say, don't ask me what, don't ask me more than that.
But like, there are all these other concepts that have entered into the conversation about long range, transpersonal sort of electromagnetic impact.
I couldn't give you any science that would say that there's this biofield that connects all of us and that, that I, that right now you and I are somehow connected by some sort of biofield in, in terms of science, right?
But I mean, it's not measurable yet.
You know, and I don't want to be careful because we want to have the explanation and the data to help us understand these things.
But it does make us think of our mutual friend, Nieltheis, where all the hippies previously said that the body is interconnected by this system.
And then every Western doctor said, no, it's not.
And then he discovers the interstition.
And then all of a sudden we have language and an explanation for this thing that others have felt.
And that's, you know, we're trying to like parse this out, right?
We're trying to understand what are these healers say is happening?
What do the meditators say that the body, when they close their eyes,
they're able to see beyond the five senses and say that there is this field around us?
And then you have the physicists who say, well, actually, we can only currently measure it.
That is also accurate, but maybe not the entire story.
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There's a scientist or community, Lorenzo Cohen,
that loves to talk about germ theory, right?
You know, that Emil Weiss knew something was happening
when the doctors would go from the morgue
to delivering babies.
And then, you know, highly contested until the microscope,
right, until we could see these things.
So see the bacterian and this, that was also,
I love that.
I love that analogy because the invisible to the visible, right?
And just like Neil's story, too, right?
like a new microscope enabled him to see the interstitia.
The idea of why we should care about this biofield is that there's probably a natural variance
amongst each individual, but there are likely patterns in the qualities, textures,
formation of this biofield when it comes to illness.
And that actually helping someone heal on the bioenergetic level is going to be in parallel
with what's happening on the physical level and that these things can work in tandem or actually
it may be helpful to work on the biofield almost as a precursor to helping the body actually
heal physically. Is that somewhat in the ballpark of accurate?
So I think there's a great interest in using this as a detection of illness, right?
Saying that maybe there's something that's manifested bioelectrically or biolectically
before it actually has long-term systemic effects in your body could be very useful. And I do think that
that is in a wonderful use case, particularly when you're going to talk to someone who wants to move past
kind of the current paradigm. And I think that's of great interest. And I think I hope one day with this
ultra-week photon emission, because it's particularly tied to metabolism and metabolomics in the body.
So that in particularly might be a measure of health that you'll be able to take a shot of
and then understand like what is going on in the body.
And there is some preliminary research that was done actually in the Netherlands
to look at people with obesity that are,
that have obesity to see if they were going to be developing diabetes
using this ultra-week photon emissions.
The problem people have, if I'm putting on my hat for the skeptic or the materialist,
is I've heard if someone believes in God,
then they're not going to take traditional medicine.
Oh, yeah.
Which is like totally outside of my realm of just how I would,
understand it, right? It's like, well, if you think that you can just heal naturally, then you may,
you may circumvent or avoid other forms. And I think there's, you know, a new paradigm of understanding
that these worlds live together in a way. So I'm wondering if you can speak to, like, what is the role
of a healer or an energy practitioner in traditional healing? Or is it taking the place of traditional
I mean, I would never tell anyone not to use traditional medicine as in the allopathic system,
the system we all use that our health insurance is based on. I mean, it works. I think that what we're
seeing is as we live longer and the traditional medical system prolongs disease longer is that all
these other lifestyle diseases are manifesting, right? The mental health crisis, the chronic pain
crisis and even the crisis of meaning, right, is really one that also sometimes perpetuates a lot
of these chronic illnesses and also cancer, right?
A lot of people live with cancer for years,
but things like chemotherapy and radiation
are quite taxing on the body.
And so a lot of times, right,
that system is really good at curing,
but not healing, right?
So it's very targeted, it's specific to parts of your body
or, you know, or you take a necessary eye
very much apparently works on your brain.
I mean, we don't really know.
But these integrative health modalities do is,
they put your body into a state to heal itself, right? Because I, because all these practices are
based on putting you into the relaxation response. And by putting yourself into the relaxation response,
you're giving your body the chance to heal. I think it should be lifelong practices, right? As we all
know, like there's great research on meditation, also with neuroplasticity and, um, uh, you know,
gene repair and, and all these things. But I also think what I love about energy healing, and I'll say,
all the time is a lot of times we get ourselves into a state where we can't take the step
to do the meditation, to go to the acupuncture because it's needles, right? Or to start doing
yoga or Qigong. And I almost think it's the entryway sometimes into remembering that we have
the capacity to heal ourselves. Because you don't have to do anything, right? All you have to do
is show up. I would say have somewhat of an open mind and then allow this person to help you put your
body back into a place to heal and to reconnect. What you find also is that just the phenomenology of it
or people talk about when they engage in these energy healing practices and things like meditation
and also psychedelics, a lot of times all your priors start to lesson. All your beliefs and all
they kind of sort of go away and then that helps reconnect you to a larger universe or a larger
sense of self. And in that process, a lot that can bring on this relaxation response. I'm trying
to dumb this down into terms that everyone can understand, but I also just think that we've all
had experiences like that, even with really good doctors and therapists and friends, right?
But I think the idea is that energy healers are being able to tap into something and, you know,
we can say, is it or is it not some sort of larger concept as an energy, a universal energy or a
God, but they also might have just, there might be some sort of practice that they've engaged in that's
enable them to really harness all these contextual features or, you know, these things like
therapeutic alliance that really put someone into a place where they can feel healed and have these
really deep, rich experiences. But I would say it's a lifelong practice. And I would also say
that seeing an energy healer can also just be something that helps you reset. The Phenomena
podcast, this healer, her name's Lori Neeland, she's incredible. An old friend comes to see her. And he
doesn't have anything particularly wrong with him, right? But he's just like, I need to see this
healer. And I need you to heal me. You know, it wasn't at the surface. It was at the subconscious
level, right? All this stuff comes flooding after he saw her and was able to heal all these parts of
themselves that he didn't even know that he needed to. You have a podcast, the phenomenal podcast.
Everyone should visit phenomenohealing.com. Join our mailing list because you'll get all this information,
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amazing things we're fighting about, about energy healing.
The term healing, right, is a really complicated term because, again, it's one of these words
that means so much when you're describing the man who needed to go to this particular healer.
We think about healing as like in the Marvel movies, like, I've just been shot in the arm and
all of a sudden I'm able to regrow this skin and heal the wound.
But actually, what we're saying is that it's far more complex.
complex than that. When you say healer, like, are these train modalities when a woman wakes up and just has a gift that's different than someone who's studied and has a certificate in some way. And I think there's a huge variance in these types of practitioners, which makes people both curious and then also apprehensive. Because I really do think about it from both sides. Right. I grew up in a very materialist family. I studied in a system with a teacher who had a long tradition.
then I learned that actually the tradition that she worked in was actually a little bit different,
that she had added her own unique gifts to the tradition.
And so, like, each person who does this type of work is often bringing a unique skill set to it.
There's three kind of major terms that I think people use when they talk about the healers we're
talking about.
So energy healer, biofields healer, spiritual healer, right?
Those are kind of the terms that you hear being said.
And these are right.
These are individuals that don't have to physically.
touch you, don't have to use any instruments, but through their intention and attention,
heal you, right? And that was through that whole mechanism of the use of subtle energy and
the biofield to remove blockages, both within the body and within the biofield. And this makes
sense to me because I've just spent a lot of time in this world, but I have mine right here
up on my shoulder. If you're only listening, there's a little bobblehead. Actually, that's me,
but there's a same bobblehead beside me here that I have my mind. I have my mind. You know,
I'm like in my ear thing.
What are you talking about the removing blockages from your field?
So like your field you may not see, but you may be carrying something.
Could be emotional, could be psychological.
Correct.
Could actually be a combination of emotional and psychological that has manifested
physically, right?
Like you could have a real concrete, diagnosable wound.
But that injury, but that injury may carry a psychological and emotional component.
that we can't really put our finger on where it is.
Right?
We don't know where in the body it's being stored.
Some will say it's in the brain.
That emotional psychological baggage or injury that you're carrying may be present in
your energy field or bio field.
This is what healers say, right?
I can't, I can't verify it, right?
I'm talking about, like, more the anthropological or, you know, what they report.
So they report that when they're going to heal you, that they, you know, a lot of
of them scan you, right? And there's different techniques. I mean, you did Reiki, right? There's a
scanning technique. And they'll say they'll feel something. So just really clear, it's heat or it's
sticky or it's vibrating. And they would say that is a blockage. And as you said, it's something
psychological. It also would be a physical trauma that you haven't, that is that has then
resided psychologically in this field. And again, it resides in the field. And then if not
dealt with, the belief is that it manifests physically. And then also what's interesting is like we
kind of know some of this, right? Even in mainstream science, right? Adverse childhood events are
highly correlated with chronic pain, knee osteoarthritis. There is a literature that trauma,
if not dealt with, and especially it dealt with at early parts of your childhood, does lead to
disease. The stuff that you haven't dealt with, they're claiming like they can feel. Yes.
They can visualize. Like there's a lack of harmony or visual coherency.
in the energy that is being admitted around this individual.
Correct. Yeah.
So, which I think is amazing.
Some other people were like, you know, this is anecdotal and how, but every modality operates
into some degree of this.
And, you know, when I was learning, it was very much follow your hands, right?
It's a felt sensation.
Try not to use your brain much.
Where are your hands?
Like, so, you know, when you say a scan, it would just be a quick, like, wash over the
person.
and then the texture of your felt sense and your hands would change.
It may be really heavy all of a sudden.
It may be cold all of a sudden.
Okay.
What are some of the types of healing?
Like, is there a list of the ones that you've spoken to?
Often I have, you know, I've always practiced hands-on.
You can scan around.
You can definitely feel without hands-on,
but there is something about actual hands-on versus hands-off.
Yeah.
That is interesting for me, but there's so many different varieties of healers.
Is there like a list of like, you know, like when we say a biofield healer versus an energy healer,
do you know if there are different types of practices?
I think they're interchangeable if you consider it an energy healer, a biofield healer.
But I think that there's a distinction between the modality.
So yes, I have a list.
Of course I have a list.
And I mean, I add to it as I learn new things, right?
And I've been doing a huge qualitative study where I'm trying to take it to interview as many
healers from as many different modalities to really understand what's the common.
and what the differences are and just understand it that the lineage is better because if we're
going to operationalize this in research, we should probably understand what people say they're doing.
I actually think the biggest distinction is historically when the practice was developed.
So you have these ones that are really based in religion, right, or in indigenous traditions
that had come from a different era of how we understood the world through religious practice or
through association of gods.
So, you know, like laying on of hands, the Sufi traditions, right?
They come from Abrahamic backgrounds.
And then you kind of have a break where like the language of modernity got in the way, right?
You know, science.
And so you have all these energy healers that come or biofield healers.
And you see things like Reiki is relatively new.
It's right.
It's, I think, in the early 1900s, although based on other practices,
therapeutic touch, healing touch, which are nursing traditions that use the same model.
I kind of think of them as like the spiritual and they,
a neo-spiritual. It's kind of how I've defined them. I mean, this is Meredith. This is the Meredith
Sprangle interpretation, but it's just as I talk more and more, right, some of them are heavily
anchored in a god, right, or in some sort of interpretation of creative entity that has a huge
impact on our lives and our destiny. And some of them are based on a universal energy or a
connection to the greater, you know, universe. And so those are different orientations. But they still
put their power in something greater than themselves, right? Some connective tissue that has that,
that is perpetuating the universe. All of them have that similarity. I try to talk just to healers
that are particularly what I would say, advanced practitioners, so people have been doing over a long
time and people who have over time kind of integrated themselves and their own techniques as
they develop a relationship with spirit and the invisible world. A lot of things come to them that
don't necessarily look or in a book.
Yeah, but one of the things is that you find with some healers,
and this is, again, this is through living the lore of, you know,
talking all these healers, like not super advanced or some healers that haven't fully
honed in their practice use their own energy.
And they will say that that is what will also cause disease in yourself over time.
Because you have deplete, you're depleting yourself.
There's this great healer's names, Oliver Nino, and he said that that was the biggest change
in his practice is when he started.
to use the sacred geometry to connect him to source and then he could hold these big rooms,
group healings. Their idea is that they get it from that source. They get it from the God,
the universal energy. But when they use them their own energy, at least this is what healers tell
me. And just anecdotally, it seems that it creates illness in the healer or not the ability to
practice on a regular basis or in a meaningful way over time. Yeah.
Yeah, when I was taught, it was all about leave my baggage at the door and remove myself.
I have no intellectual understanding of what this person needs and to become a conduit for a universal
energy is what it was called, but you can exchange energy consciousness, God for this other person's
highest good. And, you know, I actually really struggle with the word healer because it denotes that
there's an active will or agenda of the person doing or facilitating.
There's a doing instead of a actually, you are just a conduit for this other person to
sort of reconnect and do what they need to do.
And as you talked about, it all works by getting them into this relaxed state whereby the
natural abilities of the body can begin to take form and to be expedited in some way, right?
It's like we can't actually go through a healing process if we're constantly on the move
and we can never truly get into that relaxed state.
So what's happening?
You mentioned, is there just a therapeutic alliance whereby the person feels comfortable
enough to drop the defenses and actually go into that space?
Is there really an increase in energy available to them?
Most healers will be like, well, you're healing yourself.
I'm just giving you the space to do the healing.
Not to put my own judgment on.
That's what a good healer.
does, right? I mean, I think in any good healing, they want the person to learn the, to integrate,
right? And to really to really integrate the lessons and practice kind of what they've learned
from that experience. Is there energy really great? So I don't know. I mean, I've done one,
so this is one fun study that we did. It's not published yet. But we looked at the biopotronivisions.
I have a really fun picture of like these healers sitting across the room with people in like all this
equipment around them. We had three healers, six healies for the people receiving the healing.
They weren't touched. The person just sent healing intention across the room. And the four people who had like these deep, rich experiences of, they'd say like they're in an experiment room. I don't know how, but they like lost track of space and time, had deep like energy like somatic experiences. This like very physiologically enriching, like feeling of where you feel like you feel like you're full of energy. Some people said like they, you know, when you, when the time was over, they just, there was like a total loss of time. It's really interesting things.
in this experiment room, those people who then, like, said I felt like I had a healing,
they had this really interesting increase in biophoton emissions. It even looked like exponential.
I showed this to a mitochondrial researcher, and it looks like someone went on a run.
Really?
Yeah. So, I mean, this is so preliminary, but someone has to do more of this research.
I mean, but that would indicate it, right? It's metabolic, right? Biophotones are metabolic.
So that literally could be a representation of your body healing itself, right? So this result gets me
really excited. Recently, we spoke to someone on the podcast and Miam and I were led through
what felt like a couple minute meditation. And we both came back totally disoriented.
Like we opened our eyes and you're like, well, we've been podcasting a lot, what's going on.
It doesn't explain the sort of shift in our perception of time. So we spend so much time
constructing the boundaries of our reality that as soon as we're able to, we're able to,
to let that drop for a minute.
There's an entire other world to explore.
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And in a similar way, when I was actively in practice, often we would work in groups
where there would be multiple tables across from one another.
There'd be 30 people in a room, multiple people working on each person on the table.
All of a sudden, these people who are like not going into a session with any particular agenda
would go into a relaxed state and then all of a sudden have a memory or life experience
surface for them that was very emotional.
And then all of a sudden they're reliving that experience.
And then what you would almost always have is a ripple domino.
effect where the next person on the table would immediately all of a sudden the whole room is alive
in this active emotional processing now where did those come from right like it wasn't planned
they didn't go in saying i want to look at this particular part of my childhood like so you can just
imagine that as those filters drop all this stuff that we've been carrying that has a weight to it
is now all of a sudden being processed.
And as it gets processed,
potentially the body is now more invigorated in a way,
which is going to lead me to a question about what is healing.
Because often someone says,
I've had carpal tunnel for a really long time.
I'm going to go to someone who's going to take it away from me.
But that isn't often what happens.
A lot of the time,
what I've heard and what I've experienced,
and I'm curious how, you know,
the experiences you've researched, people get something that they weren't expecting when they go to
some form of healing.
Well, so what is healing?
I mean, first, healing is a continuous process.
I just want to say we're never healed.
It's a whole lifelong journey, right?
Because we're unpacking not only the, this lifetime.
But even previous lifetimes, we've even seen that, right?
Epigenetics.
We carry trauma through our genetic line.
So there's a lot to unpack this life.
So I always want to say to people like, I'm never healed.
I'm constantly healing, right?
So that's one.
And two, what I think is interesting, two, especially with the carpal tunnel example,
is that a lot of times pain or anxiety, because I've done interviews with people who've done
healings for a lot of mental health.
It doesn't go away, but your relationship to it changes, right?
So it's not like my carpal tunnel went away or the pain went away, but your relationship
to it has changed.
That's one thing.
So a lot of times that you're saying it's not taken away from you.
it's just how you relate to it.
And a lot of times, like you said,
that's because of the sort of reconnection that occurs.
Because a lot of times when we have anxiety or pain,
and those are the two conditions I know that work the most with
or know the most about,
there's a hyperfixation that occurs.
Again, if you're in that hyperfixated state
or you're very concentrated on your disease
or your identification with it,
we don't always have the space to see, right,
where it has manifested from.
And maybe that's also something that happened,
And like you said, and it's funny that you brought that up about the group healing as I literally just did a group healing last week.
With, yes, I was at.
So you want to laugh at our partner retreats at our solar energy fund respect.
We do group healings.
And that happened to me.
I wasn't even aware about something that I needed to grieve, right?
Because I wasn't given the space in my life to have that opportunity.
And also it is fascinating the magnification that being in a group is in.
Right.
And the type of group.
I mean, this is all just talking like anecdotally from my experience.
but who's in your group and even the physical location, right, the contextual features, right?
We know this, right?
Certain times, even in drug trials with psychedelics, depending on the room they're in,
the psychedelic will work or not.
So, yeah, it's really interesting how this amplification occurs in group environments with healers.
So, right, you're creating a container.
I mean, they would say that we're all healing each other in that moment, right?
They're bringing the, they're bringing us in reconnection with God consciousness source.
And then, yeah. But yeah, that literally happened to me last week. So yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot.
I used to experience so many, quote unquote, coincidences where these people who would just sort of sign up, come together once the intention, another word that it needs a little bit of explanation, was set for the group would come together.
And then people from all walks of life, all different ages, would all of a sudden have these unbelievable parallels in the story.
stuff that they would be carrying. And it was true that the more people came together to do this
type of work, the more elevated and magnetized the impacts often are. So it does bring up the question
of like, when we talk about healing as this continual process, maybe that is the natural state
that we have fallen out of is the ability to dive in and to purge and sort of the more isolated,
the less connected we've been as a society, the less connected we are to the types of
of work that this carries. I don't think that processing our emotions is only supposed to be done
in a therapist office, right? We've lost an element of our social dynamic that has allowed us to
have this intense level of moving through these things that we're carrying.
I mean, the Industrial Revolution, we became machines, right? I mean, is kind of our source given,
universe given, right, is to be in community and to also to have these space to process who we are
in our emotions.
Yeah.
The skeptic may be saying, but doesn't work.
And I know work is obviously, you know, it's a very fixed idea of what this process actually
is, right?
It's a bit reductionist in a way.
Yeah.
But can you tell us a little bit about the MD Anderson study?
You know, because what we're trying to say is that it has an impact.
Yeah.
And result is hard to say to say work as the, you know, finished product.
There's more and more evidence to show that there's significant.
significant impact. Can you describe a little bit about what you're seeing? So Lorenzo Cohen, who is a
psychoanur immunologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center, has been leading a bunch of preclinical research
into energy healing for pancreatic cancer. And this is both in cell and animal models. What he has found is
that this particular energy healing practice, it's called the Bankston method. And it's a cycling practice.
it's a well-defined method that you can Google.
He used three practitioners.
So across practitioners, he found that the practitioners were able to put the cancer just in essence
and then stop metastasis.
And he found a number of different biological pathways for that.
One of which he saw changes in the biological gradient of the cell.
And a lot of times one of our funders likes to say that, right, cancer is a disease where, right,
the cells have forgotten its neighbors.
It's gone off in a malignant path.
And so what you're seeing is this change in the electrogradient that could be a key to reintegrating the cells.
You're also seeing the swelling of the mitochondria and a number of different changes in both the tumor properties and the cells.
But basically what to say is that you're finding a method that is very effective at treating cancer.
Cancer treatment is difficult.
It's hard.
It has a lot of symptoms.
What we found with the biofield healing therapy is that it only was,
was targeting the cancer cells and that it also could potentially be something that could work
across cancers. I mean, we spoke to Michael Levin at Tufts University and he describes that same
understanding of cancer, that it has forgotten its relationship with the larger body and has gone off
on its own agenda. I actually think there's an enormous amount of spiritual wisdom in that, you know,
who are we as a whole? And the more we are carrying things that we are.
able to process, the less we're able to sort of align as an entire entity, for lack of a better
word. When you were describing earlier in this conversation, you were like chronic pain,
mental health, and meaning, the lack of meaning that we can encounter, especially when we're
carrying a level of emotional baggage that we aren't able to work through and get closer to our
actual selves. What do we really like? What lights us up? What are our objectives in this world?
We lose track of who we are. Yes. And I think we've created a false sense of community and connection,
right? A lot of times meaning is brought by community. When people would do really deep
energy work and they would have those cathartic experiences, they would feel younger. They would
feel more connected to some sort of earlier version, often a childlike version of themselves.
that had a curiosity and a playfulness that they had, you know, not lost,
but sort of put away in favor of just getting things done.
This healer was talking about, she always says energy healing is pure joy, right?
And that that joy of living of life, of curiosity, mystery,
whenever I hear that I was like, oh, yeah, that's what it is.
Right?
Because we're talking about a healing journey,
and we're talking about really sad things like chronic pain and anxiety and depression.
And joy is kind of the antidote to all those things that keep us stuck.
Meredith, I'm so appreciative of you coming and speaking to this topic and helping people understand it.
My whole podcast and career, I've been a little bit in the closet about my background in this space
because I think it brings up so many questions and people have different experiences and expectations.
And I do believe we need people experiencing it, sharing the potential and also scientists
who are studying it and trying to understand the mechanism so we can really better understand what's happening.
So I'm just really grateful for the work you're doing.
Thank you. And I just think it's fascinating. No one's taken the time to really dive into this because this has been something that's been going on for millennia and has been effectively healing people for centuries and whatever healing means. It's been able to help people on their journey of feeling better and living a more fulfilled life.
There are more things happening than we really understand when it comes to getting better, whatever better means or overcoming the challenges that we're facing, whether physically or mentally.
and having a connection to something greater than ourselves,
whether that be a personal connection or in a healing modality,
is showing over and over again to have truly profound impacts on our well-being.
Excited to see what we find for sure. Yeah.
It's My and Bealics breakdown.
She's going to break it down for you.
She's got a neuroscience PhD or two.
One fiction.
And now she's going to break down.
It's a breakdown.
She's going to break it down.
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