Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:03:55] Maria, thank you for having me on your show.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:04:10] Well, yes, I explain a little bit of this in the book, Energy, Medicine: The Science of Mystery of Healing, because it’s interesting how energy medicine practitioners find it. And I was a very unlikely person too. I had a very conventional upbringing in the U.K. I worked for the Queen at one point and found myself and you’ll read more about this in the book in acupuncture school in Southern California. Having had a really good experience with acupuncture myself, I’m becoming completely entranced by how it worked. And I did a master’s in Chinese medicine and then a doctorate and I started a practice in New York. But one of the things that I hadn’t given much thought to Maria was how much acupuncture is energy medicine.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:04:55] I think practitioners, particularly in the West, have stressed that medical credentials were all board certified and licensed. And we do a lot of pathophysiology and toxicology and anatomy with cadaver and things like that. But one of the things that I began to realize as I began to practice is that acupuncture is one of the oldest forms of energy medicine in the world and one of the most tested. But as I became more connected to my patients and I think I wanted to help them more, I started to feel energy coming out of my hands. And I had all the questions I think anyone responsible would have. Like, you know, was most of it just placebo and it impresses people because they can feel it and then they get better because they’re impressed by it. But in fact, it does nothing at all. And so energy medicine, the science of mystery, of healing was my attempt to explain me to me, although it became a much bigger project, as you know, if you read the book.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:06:42] Well, energy medicine describes any of those modalities that diagnose or treat by manipulating the electrical energy in a cell. And that sounds a little woo. But actually, as my book showed, it’s measurable these days. But the way I explain it to patients is this: your energy is everything about your body that isn’t skin and tissue and bone. So to a certain extent, it’s your mind and your feelings and your beliefs and even your memories. But more importantly, when it comes to your health or as importantly, when it comes to your health, it’s also all the ways your body has awareness. And most of the decisions your body takes are taken outside of the mind. They’re what’s called autonomic, respiratory decisions, cardiovascular, metabolic, reproductive. And to do that, the body has to have a very complex feedback system and ability to communicate. And in your body, every cell knows who it is and where it is and what it’s supposed to do. Every organ system coordinates its activities with other organ systems, and that requires a form of intelligence.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:07:52] And that is, I believe, what the ancient Chinese were referring to as chi. Your body’s intelligence, its consciousness, its ability to communicate. And so acupuncture affects that intelligence. It’s very good at bringing people back into balance because of it, but. People also use hands on healing, and I describe some hands on healers in my book, particularly some amazing ones I met in Japan. The placebo is, if you think of it this way, a way of influencing the mind to control the body’s intelligence. So it is, in fact, positive energy, medicine and not necessarily the enemy. And that doesn’t mean that all the other parts of energy medicine are just placebo because they’re not or at least in my book, I found that they were very measurable and their outcomes, were measurable, and also that you can do energy, medicine, studies on animals. So it’s a very broad field. But really what is doing is prompting the body’s intelligence to bring people back into balance.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:09:00] I looked at lots of studies for this book, but to start with, you can measure the energy coming out of energy healers hands, and it is, in fact a very low frequency. And interestingly, it’s the same frequency that orthopedic hospitals use to heal bone and soft tissue. They do it by sort of plugging it into a current. But qigong to a very highly trained energy workers from China and throughout Asia. They produce the same frequency, which I think is quite interesting. And one of the stories I love in my book is the story of a Dr. William Bengston at City University in New York. And Dr Bengston learned an energy medicine technique that was a hands off technique. So it was relying on the frequency emitted from the hands and he decided to test it in the lab. And so he took mice that was specially bred to have cancer. I know this is sad for the mice, but I want to reassure your listeners that these particular mice have a happy ending and they gave them breast cancer. And those mice always die on day twenty seven. That’s how pharmaceuticals and treatments for cancer are measured if the mice can stay alive a little bit longer.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:10:16] And what Dr. Bengston found was with this technique, the mice recovered. And not only did they recover from the breast cancer, but when they were re-injected with the cancer, they could no longer get it. Their immune systems were permanently changed. And so what Dr. Bengston did, which makes sense, is he realized that this was only interesting if it was replicable. Good science needs to be replicable. We all have to stand on each other’s shoulders as we move forward and use each other’s research. And so he took a group of skeptical colleagues and students. He taught them the technique and they, too, could do it. Anyone could do it. It wasn’t someone specially skilled or anything like that. And what I like about this story is not only have they done this on thousands of mice and thousands of mice have reversed their own cancer with an energetic prompt. But of course, mice don’t know they’re supposed to get better. So it takes out the effect of the mind on the body and expectation, which I think is interesting. And then I love the fact that it’s replicable because I think people start to think there are very special healers out there and they have to find one. But the truth is, we can all do this. It’s our birthright and it’s relatively simple.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:12:02] Well, I’m going to give you two and I’m going to do one scientific one and one slightly more mysterious one, because the book is called Energy Medicine The Science And Mystery of Healing. So, HarperCollins, very kindly let me wander around the world talking to healers, but also scientists about how we communicate with each other on this level and what information is passed. So I was very lucky to meet a man called Dr. Robert Jahn, unfortunately, what was the end of his life. He was very elderly when I met him and he has subsequently died. But he was the dean of engineering at Princeton University. And I always think at the Princeton University Engineering Department is probably the least woo place imaginable because they actually make machines.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:12:46] But Dr. Jahn had a female grad student who wondered if she could create a machine that could be moved by the human mind. And Dr. Jahn told me he didn’t think for a moment she was going to pull this off, but he thought it’d be an interesting grad student project. But she did. And to cut a long story short, thanks to decaying atomic material, she created what’s called a random event generator. A machine that spits out random numbers and what she found is that when people focused on it with emotion, with feeling, the numbers became less random, when lots of people focused on it with the same feeling, the numbers became less random in a way that was statistically impossible. And so she really had found a way of creating a machine that gets moved with the human mind.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:13:35] But more than that, she had shown that we connect and amplify in a way that changes our physical reality, i.e. a machine. So in the intervening years, this is back in the 70s, they did this research and this research has been going on ever since. They have taken a little portable random event generators all over the place from the Trump inaugural to yoga retreats. And what they found is that love and compassion have the greatest healing effect, the greatest transmittable effect and effect on the machine. But fear and cruelty also have an effect on the machine, and it’s not far behind. And it spreads like a virus, which means that we have to be careful what we feel and what we transmit to each other because it starts to amplify and it starts to change the physical world we live in. And that’s the meaning of those Princeton studies. Which brings me to my second really lovely healer, a man called Hiroyuki Abe, who is a monk in Osaka, Japan. And I was told to go and see him by San Francisco State because they done physiological testing on his body. And a lot of my book is about what happens in Healers bodies, including my own, while we’re working. And I was a little reticent to go and see him, to be honest, because it’s a long way, Japan and I love it. But I was busy.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:14:57] And so I talked to a patient of his, a man called Yuval Oded, who lives in Israel, and he’s a research psychologist. And Yuval had a baby that was born blind and he took the baby in desperation, he and his wife to see the monk, Hiroyuki Abe, and they wheeled the baby. And every day and not much happens. And on the fifth day, Yuval was feeling a bit despondent. And as a researcher, he was feeling a bit sort of like he’d he’d been silly to try and find such a miraculous treatment for his son’s blindness. But they wheeled the baby out and he squinted eyes and they realized he could see the light. And when I talk to Yuval, the baby was four and could still see. And I headed off to Japan to meet with Hiroyuki Abe, who was the most magical healer and continues to teach me weekly to this day on Zoom and is an amazing probably the best healer I have ever seen. And I’ve seen some very good ones.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:16:00] But the reason these two stories tied together, Maria, is that one of the things that Hiroyuki Abe does is make people feel incredibly safe. And I began to realize that people heal themselves when they feel safe and that is part of that study at Princeton, that love and compassion changes reality, but also fear and cruelty. And so, Hiroyuki Abe great love and compassion for all people, which is very genuine in his lack of judgment for people is an important part of his ability to heal them.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:18:07] Well, I gave exercises throughout energy medicine actually because I wanted people to be their own healers. And the reason I wanted to was because I came across a subset of healers who I would describe as charlatans. And when I wrote about them and when I was looking at charlatans, I thought I would find lots of people charging an enormous amount of money and not doing very much and just conning people. And I saw the occasional one like that. But actually the subset of people who worried me the most were people with talent who used it to be exploitative and manipulative and have power over other people. And as I thought about this, I realized that the best way of encouraging people not to fall into that trap and let people have power over them was to explain to them how to have power over themselves. So I went back over the book and wrote exercises all the way through.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:18:59] And really it’s possibly outside the scope of a little short podcast like this. But it’s not hard. It takes a little bit of practice. But the first thing you need to do is ground yourself and your physical body and just feel what it is to be physical and grounded and have the pull of gravity on your body and then divert attention from your mechanical physicality to your body’s intelligence. And I do that with patients all the time. I do energy work over video with patients where I guide them to heal themselves rather than do healing on them so that they can be independent of me and spread the word. And so you just draw your attention to your consciousness. And I have techniques to do that in the book. And then you can start to move that consciousness, whatever you want with your mind. So you’re using one aspect of your energy system, your mind to affect another aspect of your energy system, which is your body’s intelligence, the kind of decisions your body takes outside of your mind.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:21:25] Yes, I think that’s true. And in fact, those studies at Princeton that showed that when we band together, we change possible futures in some ways because we effect a physical machine. It’s something that we’ve all felt when we’ve been to a live music concert or even a yoga retreat or something, where you’re with a group of like minded people enjoying the same thing and you start to have a feeling that transcends that moment. I often feel it if you go into a very old church. I come from England, so there are very old cathedrals indeed. And they feel different. The air feels different. And I always think it’s thousands of years of people being on their best behavior in the cathedral, make it feel peaceful. So, yes, you can pick up, I think, and everybody has that feeling and in fact everybody experiences versions of this.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:22:14] In my book, I looked at a study at the University of Connecticut that put two people in separate MRIs. And when one thought about the other, their brainwave synced up, which is fascinating, but it’s not something that we’re unaware of because I don’t know about you, Maria, but I often think about people who then text me or and this happens to me the whole time. I’ve been in practice for a long time, like twenty five years. So I’ve seen thousands of patients and I suddenly think of someone that I haven’t thought of for ten years. And sure enough, they’re on my schedule. The next week they look to me at the same time. And I think those MRI studies at the University of Connecticut start to show us that we are how we affect each other, that our thoughts start to affect each other’s brainwaves.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:23:41] One of the things I realized when I was writing this book that I hadn’t really understood before is that we are at the level of consciousness literally all one that is no separate self at that level. And I think that helps with that idea of bad vibration, a good vibration and the sorts of judgment about that. However, we are individuated in our physicality and we have complete control over our own energy field. We have autonomy. And so you we let in what you want to let it. And I often with patients, I teach them how to clear out their energy fields. But it really is as simple as putting up energetic boundary. Sometimes I just get people to fill themselves with light and then push it out of the skin and just push off any little hooks that come from other people’s projections.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:24:30] And I think what weighs us down is people’s pull on us energetically. Need can be very exhausting, which doesn’t mean that you’re not going to fulfill the needs of people you love or people you want to help, or in my case, my patients. But the pull of need can be a little draining. But it starts, I think, from understanding that we are all one. And at the level of consciousness, there is no separate self. So there are no bad vibes or good vibes or things like that. What there are thought forms. People’s thoughts start to affect other people. And so protecting you, yourself, from projection is the first step in just feeling comfortable in your physicality.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:25:13] And I have to tell you, for years I’d teach a hundred and fifty patients a week was a very busy practitioner. Now there are twenty eight acupuncturists at Yinova, and they see patients in three clinics. And I teach patients how to take care of themselves over Zoom. So I’m not seeing as many people. But when I did, I wasn’t particularly worn down by it. And I think that’s because I learned how to have good, energetic boundaries.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:25:55] Well, I ground and I literally when I start my day and I sit in my seat before I see a patient on them, I imagine that I have tree roots going into the earth and I just direct my mind that way. Because where your mind goes, your chi follows, as the Chinese say, until I feel heavy. And then I straighten my spine and I imagine a ball of very intelligent light above my head that this is the stuff that literally gives me life. Without it I’d just be an empty body. And this is moving and warming and dynamic and transformational and aware. And I just run that light through my body all the way to my toes. And it takes me about three or four minutes because I look for areas of stagnation and I focus there a little bit in areas of tightness. And then when I’m full of my own light and grounded, I just push it out of my skin about an inch and a half with my mind. And I imagine just popping off everybody else’s stuff. And I tell myself that it’s easy because it’s as difficult as you decide it’s going to be this.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:26:59] And I know that people are really scared of negative energy or always encountering it because they kind of create it. So I just pop it off like it’s little fleece falling to the ground. And that’s how I get ready for a morning of zooming with patients or chatting with you, in fact.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:28:00] Well, I think life is more of a mirror than we understand, and it mirrors our inner state of being. Not necessarily completely thoughts, but just a state of being and our connection to our own consciousness, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t wild cards in life at all or the bad things don’t happen or things we perceive to be bad or at least happen. So, but you are much better able to deal with them if you feel safe at a very deep level and grounded and you align your being with what In my book, Neale Donald Walsch, the author of Conversations with God, called The Next Greatest, Grandest Version of yourself. And I often talk about that to my patients, that at any moment we can just step in to the next greatest and grandest version of ourselves now.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:29:04] I don’t think everything can be healed with energy medicine. And I am someone who is a big believer in integrative collaborations. And I send my patients to doctors the whole time. And I have very good relationships with doctors in New York because I practiced there for a long time. So I’m not someone who believes that energy medicine is the answer for everything because there is no one size fits all answer for everything. What I think energy medicine is particularly suited for is chronic disorders of imbalance. So autoimmune diseases are a really good example of that. If you had an acute trauma like you broke your leg, you wouldn’t go see an energy medicine doctor, first of all, would you. You’d really go to the doctor and you’d get yourself an orthopedic surgeon and you get your leg sorted out and then your self healing after that might be a good place to experiment with energy medicine.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:29:59] As we say, healers produce the same frequency that hospitals use to speed up the healing of bone. So I long term chronic disorders, irritable bowel, allergies, infertility, which is one of my specialties, reproductive disorders in general, respond very well to energy medicine. But I do have a story, Maria, that surprised even me about energy medicine, and I like it because it illustrates integrative collaboration as well. So towards the end of the book, I tell a story about a young man called Madhu Anziani, and when Madhu was a student at San Francisco State, he fell out of his dorm room window and broke his neck and he was paralyzed from the neck down. He was tetraplegic. He was in a coma for a long time and when he woke up he was told that he would never walk again. His spine was ninety nine percent severed and that was considered something he could not recover from and be able to walk.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:30:59] And Madhu was in UCSF, which is an excellent hospital, and he got very good surgery and very good care. But one day he was lying in his bed and he made a sound and he felt the vibration of the sound going through his body and he was only twenty three. But he had the wherewithal to realize that if he could feel the vibration, he had some nervous system left, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to feel it. And so he started to make lots of sounds. He started to learn tones. Someone brought in a Tibetan prayer wheel and his father would hold him up and hold his hand so that he could move it. He started to chant and at one point a nurse said to him, Madhu you need to stop thinking that you’re going to kill yourself and get better? And work had to be the best tetraplegic you can be, which I think was well, meaning. It sounds cruel, but I think she was trying to get him to accept what she perceived to be his reality.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:31:53] And he told her, no, I’m going to walk out of here. And he said to me, Jill, I wasn’t stupid. I knew I would probably spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, but I never allowed that belief to permeate my being. And I just tried to live in joy, which I thought for such a young person was incredible. And so Madhu in his hospital bed, living in joy and not allowing his diagnosis to permeate and making these sounds. And true to his word, he walked out of the hospital three months later on a walker. He was he was a bit wobbly. But a year later he told me I got on a plane to go see my family in New York from California and like a normal person. And what I like about the story, Maria, is that Madhu didn’t do this all on his own. He had great surgeons. He had great nursing. He had great occupational therapy and physical therapy.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:32:47] But there is no doubt that the vibration he created down the spine and sound is a form of energy and just a frequency helped his spine to heal in a way that created a sort of miraculous recovery that everybody was blown away by and it also had something to do with his mind, it was also had something to do with how he held a state of being. And so for me, it is the perfect energy, medicine, healing story because it’s not about energy, medicine being the only thing that works, but it is about frequency and the information that gets carried by frequency having a very healing effect on the body.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:33:45] Well, I wrote this book for you, actually, because Harper Collins asked me to write a book that didn’t alienate skeptical people. A lot of books on energy medicine, they felt you needed a reasonable amount to buy-in to even read the book. Which would mean you had to believe in something and so they wanted me to look at the science of energy medicine and see what was measurable. So I would actually say, read this book. For instance, one of the things I did was submit my own body to science for the book. And we did an EEG of my brain and an EKG of my heart when I was giving acupuncture. And what we found is that my heart and my brain go into the same frequency when I’m working. But it’s called internal coherence or heart brain coherence. And it’s something I do quite naturally by manipulating my autonomic nervous system. And I do that with my breath. I taught myself to do that unconsciously because I think I just wanted to help people a lot.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:34:42] But it seems to be important and also very measurable. And then the interesting thing, Maria, is that the patient’s heart then goes into the same frequency as mine. And when we’re all going at the same frequency, when I’m in heart brain coherence and the patient’s heart starts to emit the same frequency as my own heart, that appears to be when the magic happens and information gets passed from one human being to another. So I would say to skeptics, look at what is measurable. Not all of it is measurable by any means. We’ve got a long way to go. I give a very detailed explanation of how the electromagnetic nature of acupuncture that’s based on very clinical research that came out relatively recently. So have a read of this book and see if it changes your mind. I wrote it to make you ask interesting questions. And I do think that any kind of dogma ends up creating confirmation bias and skepticism can be a dogma, too. There are professional, dogmatic skeptics who are determined not to believe things. And but if you have an open mind and open skeptic was my ideal reader and I’d be really interested to hear what you think and whether I prove my case when you get to the end of the book.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:36:22] Well, it’s interesting because spirituality does have a role, but it doesn’t need to have a role at all. People with all sorts of spiritual beliefs are able to practice energy, medicine. And going back to Hiroyuki Abe, who is very devout, he’s a monk. He sees the goddess of mercy when he heals. I asked Eric Pepper, which I think is a beautiful name, Dr Pepper at San Francisco State University, who has studied Hiroyuki Abe for his take on that. I was like, is he really seeing the goddess of mercy? Why do other people not see the goddess of mercy? What if you’ve never thought about the goodness of mercy, I had lots of questions.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:37:03] And Dr Pepper said to me, I think people create avatars in order to access this extraordinary matrix of energy that we live in. And because he’s a Shinto monk, the goddess of mercy makes sense for him. I interviewed a woman in Long Island who teaches a lot of the psychics and mediums on Long Island, and she is Catholic. She’s an elderly Catholic grandma, and she sees angels when she heals, which makes sense within her own frame of reference. So I think very broadly, we’re accessing a matrix of energy that is beyond our understanding, a matrix of energy that the ancient Chinese called the tao and that Laozi said the tow that can be spoken of is not the real tao, meaning that it is huge and complex and bigger than human ability to understand. And we have, of course, all of us anthropomorphized God in some way.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:38:05] No matter what your God is, he’s more human than godlike because we don’t have the experience for the the hugeness of the tow or Gods or our source or whatever this is. So I do think that energy medicine is a connection to a much bigger source. It is a connection to our collective consciousness. I think we couldn’t heal each other if we weren’t literally each other at this level. So it is a very spiritual experience. And writing this book changed me spiritually in ways that I was I couldn’t have predicted ahead of time and has given me enormous peace, actually. I feel like having written this book and having spoken to all these healers and scientists about the energy that heals us, one of the things that I have learned is that I’m safe, that I bubbled up out of the tao into the physical, and that I will bubbled back down at some point. And all the way through that process, my consciousness will never end. And then I’m in, I’m safe, and it’s given me an extraordinary amount of peace.

Dr. Jill Blakeway: [00:39:53] Thank you, Maria.