Invisible Force
by Jane R. McGoldrick
Used with
permission of the author
As
a lawyer required to play hardball in the big leagues of Washington,
D.C., Karen was sidelined with a huge problem: She feared authority.
“I would come across as tentative and timid,” she says, “in
dealing with my boss, in meetings, in talking to opposing counsel over
the phone.”
Karen,
39, recognized her fear as a childish reaction to events of her past and
so decided to seek help. “When I identified what I needed to work on,
I didn’t want to take months or years,” she says. “I wanted
something with a fairly quick effect.”
That’s
what she found in Thought Field Therapy—a form of psychological
treatment based on the concept that the human being is a sea of vital
energy and that thoughts are a form of this energy. In a process that
surely seems to skeptics like hocus pocus, Karen’s therapist, social
worker Deany Laliotis of Bethesda, Maryland, instructed her to hold in
her mind an image of a current trigger for her fear—for instance,
dealing with an angry client. At the same time, Laliotis had Karen tap
with one index finger at various spots on her body in a specific
sequence, starting with a point on her chest and finishing just under
the collar bone.
“I
immediately felt incredible energy,” recalls Karen, who learned the
sequence and practiced it as homework. After two office treatments and
several repetitions on her own, Karen now finds that her old fear no
longer paralyzes her, and coworkers have noticed her newfound energy.
A recent business meeting—a situation that previously would have cast
her into a state of trepidation—provided an opportunity for her to
display her new persona. “I’m much more effective with people,”
she says. “Even my body language has changed.”
Increasingly,
energy therapies are attracting clients like Karen and winning over
mental-health practitioners like Laliotis. At the national conference of
the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy
Medicine (ISSSEEM)—the Colorado-based organization founded in 1989 by
Elmer Green, Ph.D., the father of biofeedback—mental-health
professionals form one of the largest contingents. To China scholar Kenneth
Cohen, master of the Chinese healing system qigong,
the numbers make sense. “Psychotherapists believe in
self-regulation as a form of healing,” he says. “They’re the ones
who, among all healing professionals, recognize the subtle-energy
interaction between the patient and healing. Mainstream medicine, on the
other hand, has a fix-it mentality.”
With
more psychotherapists taking up energy methods that range from qigong
to light therapy to sound healing to Thought Field Therapy, patterns
are emerging. Some therapists have abandoned their former practices for
careers as healers, finding traditional talk therapy too slow or
redundant. Still others find their practices revolutionized as they
adopt paradigms different from the Western medical model. The largest
contingent, however, has blended talk therapy and energy work. Foremost
among this group are those who practice various forms of spiritual healing—Therapeutic
Touch, Reiki, External Qi Healing, and other modalities rooted in
traditions like the biblical laying-on of hands. For most, this
integration has evolved as they add energetic techniques to an already
accomplished psychotherapeutic repertoire. But for a growing minority,
the aim at the outset of training is to acquire dual sets of skills.
Five
times a year, Anna White of Arlington, Virginia, travels to a hotel in
New Jersey for a week-long training with the Barbara Brennan School of
Healing, based in East Hampton, New York. There Brennan, a former NASA
research scientist, teaches High Sense Perception (HSP), in which
students are trained to “see” nonphysical energetic phenomena.
White,
a Psy.D. student at the American School of Professional Psychology in
Arlington, entered the four-year Brennan School in the fall of 1996, at
the same time that she began her conventional doctorate. “The two
programs complement each other,” she says. “In the Psy.D. program,
we get training in psychotherapeutic methods. At the Brennan School, we
do in-depth self-analysis and learn to use HSP to diagnose and work with
energy fields.” According to White, “Psychological dysfunction shows
up in the energy patterns before manifesting as illness—mental or
physical. With hands-on energy work, a healer can release frozen energy
blocks, helping clients then to do their own self-healing.”
Throughout
the world and across time, people have had many words for an unseen
energy used for healing, including qi
(ch’i), prana, fohat, orgone, and vital force. Now most commonly
called subtle energy, this force is generally conceived of as higher
levels of vibrations beyond our normal perceptual abilities.
Drawing
on esoteric tradition, spiritual healers such as Brennan talk of working
with the chakras—centers of consciousness or energy in the physical
body that act as step-down transformers for these higher subtle
energies. Much of their work, these healers say, involves the chakras
and the etheric body, or the “subtle blueprint” of the physical
body.
Frequently,
healers speak of transmitting their own energy while opening chakras and
smoothing disruptions, cooling hot spots, and relieving congestion in
the patient’s energy field. They sometimes equate the etheric body, or
other subtle bodies beyond it, with human thermal or electromagnetic
fields.
Some
even claim that Kirlian photography—an electrographic process that
records a corona of electrical discharge around a subject—actually
captures a form of subtle energy, the normally invisible aura, on film.
(Skeptics charge, however, that the shimmering halo seen in Kirlian
photography has nothing to do with life energy. Any object that conducts
electricity—for example, a metal coin—will reveal the corona
discharge.)
Although
scientists have treated talk of human auras and an “energy transfer”
from healer to patient with a hearty dose of skepticism, noted
biofeedback researcher and consciousness expert Elmer Green forced them
to wrestle with some unsettling data. Green blazed a subtle-energy trail
by measuring the electromagnetic voltages of healers in his Copper Wall
Project, conducted with colleagues at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka,
Kansas, between 1983 and 1995. Because copper is an excellent conductor
of electricity, a specially designed copper-walled room was constructed
at the clinic. Green then had healers and those known for
parapsychological sensitivity, along with control subjects, sit on a
chair on a nonconductive glass base, facing a copper wall. In a complex
series of studies, scientists measured changes in the body’s
electrostatic charge, or body potential, and in the electrical fields of
the subjects while they meditated or attempted noncontact healing.
Electrical-field changes around the subjects were also measured. In some
studies, the subject attempted noncontact healing with volunteer
“patients,” both within the copper room and outside it.
In
600 trials, no unusual electrical surges were noted with control
subjects, but with “sensitives,” body-potential surges ranged from 4
volts to 221 volts during meditation and, during healing, from 4 to 190
volts. These surges prove to be 10,000 times greater than the heart’s
electrocardiogram (EKG) voltages and 100,000 times greater than
electroencephalogram (EEG) voltages of the brain. During healing, the
experimenters found that the patient’s body potential, although less
than the healer’s, fluctuated in synchrony with that of the healer.
Psychologist Patricia Norris, Ph.D., outgoing president of ISSSEEM and Green’s daughter,
points out that, despite its significance, the Copper Wall Project
measured only electromagnetic energy, not subtle energy itself. Just as
thunder is a correlate of lightning, for example, electromagnetic energy
is a correlate of still unmeasurable subtle energy.
Green
also had healers practice distance healing and found that although the
patient’s body potential did not change, patients often reported
feeling “healing energy” or receiving imagery visualized by the
healers. This outcome, according to Green, suggests that subtle energy
correlates with more than electrical energy. For example, a healer’s
intent may resonate with the patient, even when electrical correlates
are absent.
Among
the healers in Green’s study was Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N., who in
1972 had developed, with her colleague Dora Kunz, a new healing method.
Based on several ancient healing techniques, it involves the healer’s
consciously centering herself or himself, then using the hands to sense
and modulate the energy field of the patient, usually without direct
touch. The practitioner “scans” the field, with hands held two to
three inches above the patient, tuning in to temperature differentials,
sensations of congestion, tingly feelings, and other cues. Following the
scan, the healer then attempts to direct a flow of energy through the
hands—for instance, projecting cooling energy over a warm area of the
patient’s body.
Krieger,
now professor emerita of nursing science at New York University, wanted
her technique to gain mainstream acceptance. Avoiding any hint of what
was then often called “psychic healing” or “spiritual healing,”
she chose the respectable yet innocuous name Therapeutic Touch. And to
ensure a legacy of proficient healers, she says, “I started where I
was—teaching Therapeutic Touch to nurses, both because they had a
background in anatomy and physiology and because she believed she could
count on them for compassion.
Krieger
also conducted many studies of the physiological effects of Therapeutic
Touch within the medical environment, a move that other researchers have
followed, tallying a substantial body of basic and clinical research
over more than two decades. Today more than 100,000 health professionals
worldwide practice Therapeutic Touch.
While
research shows Therapeutic Touch to be most effective on physiological
systems, Krieger has seen it have profound psychological
effects—calming emotions and treating psychosomatic illness, depression,
bipolar disorder, catatonia, and hyperactivity. With regard to an
illness like schizophrenia, she says, “we’re selling schizophrenia
short if we think simply in terms of energy blockages. It is energy that
has gone down aberrant pathways. Shamanism has taught us about places
the mind can go. People are now beginning to realize there are alternate
realities and, so, to take another look at an illness like
schizophrenia.”
One
of the forebears of Krieger’s method is ancient External Qi Healing (EQH),
which qigong master Kenneth
Cohen describes as the “Chinese version of Therapeutic Touch” in his
book The Way of Qigong. Also known as ch’i kung and pronounced “chee gung,” qigong uses movement, meditation, breathing, and relaxation to
gather, cleanse, circulate, and release the flow of qi—the subtle
energy of healing—in the body. Its aim is to improve health and
harmony of both the mind and the body. Thus, according to Cohen, regular
qigong practice best prepares a person to do External Qi Healing.
Cohen tells of one qigong master
who in 1980 “induced anesthesia in surgery patients using External
Qi”—touching off a revival of interest in the technique and a host
of studies demonstrating its effectiveness.
Cohen’s
wife, Rebecca Cohen, M.Ed., a certified counselor, often combines EQH
and talk therapy. With her hand or hands held about six inches above the
body, she projects qi directly into the client’s body. Rebecca Cohen
finds EQH particularly suitable with teenagers, who tend to be highly
dissociative. “When they go into dissociative states,” she says, “I
ask if they mind if I do a little energy work. If they agree, I do
External Qi Healing. It takes away the anxiety and brings them back to
the present so they can focus on real issues.”
At
the Center for Change in Somerville, Massachusetts, Richard Curtin,
Psy.D., a clinical psychologist, and Judith Prebluda, M.A., a
psychotherapist and dance/movement therapist, have integrated a
different spiritual healing system into a practice they call
“psychotherapeutic Reiki.” The name Reiki comes from two Japanese
words: Rei, meaning “universal” or “spiritually guided,” and Ki,
the Japanese version of qi, the life force. Thus, defined by
practitioners as a universal or spiritually guided life-force energy,
Reiki is said to flow from their hands or to be transmitted mentally.
The ability to channel this energy is not taught, as are most hands-on
healing techniques, but transferred to the student from a Reiki master
during a one-on-one initiation process called an “attunement.”
Believing that Reiki flows where it is needed, practitioners do not
actively try to direct the energy as in Therapeutic Touch or EQH.
After
becoming Reiki masters—the highest level in the conventional Reiki
teaching system—Curtin and Prebluda decided to make Reiki treatments
available to their psychotherapy clients. The two have since found that
Reiki has helped clients access their feelings more quickly and that it
generates optimism and quiets the mind—making it especially effective
in cases of depression and anxiety. However, it does not replace talk
therapy, they note. “People need to be active in their treatment,”
says Prebluda, “integrating their own understandings and insights to
make what’s happening real for them.”
Joseph,
a 27-year-old workman, had never heard of Reiki when he went to Curtin
for psychotherapy to address some childhood issues. When Curtin
suggested he try a sample of Reiki at the end of their first session,
Joseph agreed, mainly out of curiosity. “Lying on the massage table, I
closed my eyes and he put his hands underneath my head,” Joseph
recalls. “I could feel the warmth from his hands—it was amazing how
warm they were.” At the second session, Joseph and Curtin talked for
about 15 minutes, and then Joseph lay down on the table. “He started
at my head, and as he was working on me I would get little spasms in my
body,” he says. “We talked a little, but mainly the Reiki let my
mind relax.”
As
therapy continued, a healing breakthrough occurred that Joseph
attributes largely to Reiki. A few days after talking with Curtin about
how he had suppressed his emotions as a child, Joseph unexpectedly burst
into tears. At the time, he and his wife were having a conversation
about contemporary events of their lives—unrelated, it seemed, to his
past experiences. “A lot of sadness came up,” he recalls. “It was
a real mourning of my childhood.” Joseph, who felt more at ease after
what he describes as a “wonderful release of emotion,” has since
learned Reiki himself.
Like
Curtin and Prebluda, Steven Vazquez, Ph.D., a longtime student and
teacher of energetic techniques who practices in the Dallas-Fort Worth
area of Texas, has created a synthesis of healing and psychotherapy
that he calls Confluent Somatic Therapy. After talking with his client
and deciding where interventions are needed, he uses the skill of
focusing his attention to enter an altered state of consciousness.
Allowing himself to fill with compassion, he reports, he then senses a
flow of energy in his body—“It’s like turning on a faucet, then
the whole hose comes on.” Vazquez places his hands near the client’s
body and, he says, directs healing energy to the client. “I don’t
need to touch the person,” Vazquez explains. “There are no
boundaries of material matter in this intervention.”
Vazquez
regards psychological disorders as energy blocks. “I use energy
interventions to unblock the energy and to allow a natural flow to
take place,” he says. How effective is the therapy? “The energy work
helps a person progress through the stages of emotional process 10 times
faster than if we merely sat and talked.” For example, Vazquez
explains, a client might be extremely bitter toward someone who betrayed
her. Consciously, she wants to let go of the bitterness, but her
unconscious is holding on to it. “While we’re dialoguing,
I
have my hands above the energetic field where she is holding the
bitterness—usually
the solar-plexus area,” says Vazquez. “This ‘energetic massaging’
loosens the restrictions in the body so the unconscious then goes along
with her conscious desire.”
In
his practice, Vazquez also uses light therapy, in the form of brief
strobic phototherapy (BSP). This adjunct to talk therapy relies on a
Photron machine, a portable stroboscopic light of adjustable speeds
between
1 and 60 cycles per second, along with 12 glass filters of
different-colored glass. The strobe’s pulsing entrains the
client’s brain-wave pattern, shifting it to a target rate associated
with a certain mental state. For example, certain strobe rates cause a
person to feel uninhibited. The colored filters enhance the state.
Vazquez has found, for instance, that orange often serves as a catalyst
to bring forth self-esteem issues. “The cumulative effect of light
stimulation has the potential to transform longheld patterns,” he
says. “For example, I can do talk therapy with depression and it
will be helpful, but brain stimulation for three weeks has a powerful
cumulative effect. People change deeply.”
Frances
is a 57-year-old consultant with a doctorate in counseling. “I could
talk the talk and ostensibly walk the walk,” she says, “but there
was something inside of me that wasn’t on target, and I knew it.”
After travels down various personal- and spiritual-growth paths and 25
years, on and off, in psychotherapy—along with prescriptions of
antidepressants—Frances heard about Vazquez’s light therapy. Early
in 1997, she began treatment. In each session, the two talk about
different issues, as Vazquez changes the light’s speed and colors,
constantly checking to see how Frances is processing her feelings. “If
I start to get agitated, feeling angry or sad,” she says, “he might
stay with that or shift to another speed or color so we can go deeper
with it.”
After
a few months of regular sessions, Frances reports that her mental
state has improved dramatically and she has no need for antidepressants.
“The
light treatment has brought up antiquated beliefs and attitudes and
enabled me to dislodge them,” she says. “I feel much more powerful
and at home in myself now.”
Although
light waves fall into the visible electromagnetic spectrum, light energy
seems to act on a subtle level in clients of this type of therapy, who
report tingling and flowing sensations throughout their bodies. In
fact, to some theorists both light and sound serve as bridges between
the realms of the nonsubtle and the subtle. Jonathan Goldman, founder
of the Sound Healers Association in Boulder, Colorado, conceives of
sound as “the grossest of the subtle energies,” stretching across a
huge spectrum. For example, at one end auditory sound is not at all a
subtle vibration, he explains. It is easily perceivable by the ear and
measurable by the ear and other instruments. Then there are sound
vibrations—both ultrasonic and very low frequency (below the auditory
limit)—that we experience in our bodies rather than hear with our
ears. And then, he believes, there are those sounds that we experience
only on the very subtle level, vibrations that influence chakras and
etheric fields. Even beyond these is an energy from the mind of the
healer—the intention. “Intention is probably the most subtle
energy,” Goldman says. “It’s almost like the consciousness of the
energy.”
Goldman
practices and promotes sound healing—the use of sound and music for
health and wellness. “Every object, including various parts of our
bodies, has a resonant frequency,” he says. “When something becomes
diseased, it is vibrating out of harmony with the rest of the body.
Sound can be used to restore that harmony.”
“It’s
through sounding our own voices that we actually massage and vibrate our
bodies from inside out,” says Don Campbell of Boulder, Colorado, an
expert on sound in healing and education. Campbell put his own views to
the test when he was diagnosed three and a half years ago with a
potentially fatal blood clot in his brain. As he recounts in his book The
Mozart Effect, he refused surgery, instead combining imagery,
prayer, and humming as his treatment. As he hummed a tone—careful not
to use loud sounds that might dislodge the clot—he attempted to
“massage away the blood clot from within.” Campbell envisioned the
sound as a vibrating hand over the right side of his skull, then
traveling through his body. The calming exercise, he suggests,
encouraged the release of endorphins and other positive biochemical
changes in his body. He also came to feel what he describes as an
“inaudible sound” that accompanied a healing image, which he
“replayed” for himself frequently.
Within
three weeks, doctors declared him out of danger. Although they
referred to his recovery as a “medical miracle,” Campbell writes,
“I knew I had been healed by the music of the spheres—or should I
say hemispheres?”
Sound
energy, experts say, heals the mind and emotions as well as the body.
“By using our voices, we begin to let go of emotions that have been
held in our bodies for a long time,” explains Campbell. Not
surprisingly, he notes that therapists and mental-health nurses now make
up a large portion of participants in his workshops.
After
meeting up with a Campbell like “miracle,” some find it hard to
stay in the system. One former psychotherapist who has abandoned
psychotherapy
entirely is psychologist Roger Callahan of Indian Wells, California,
creator of Thought Field Therapy (TFT). “For me, the essence of
psychotherapy was to eliminate symptoms,” he says. “That’s what
TFT does.”
Callahan
discovered the strange technique by accident while treating a patient
named Mary for a severe water phobia. After a year and a half of
conventional psychotherapy, Mary had improved only slightly. She could
go near Callahan’s swimming pool but would not get wet.
Callahan,
who had been investigating acupuncture, knew of the meridian
system—a theorized network of qi-carrying pathways in the body. One
day he decided to follow an intuition and try an experiment with Mary.
Believing that her fear was focused along the stomach meridian, he
tapped under her eye, the beginning point along that meridian.
Immediately
she exclaimed, “That horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach is
gone!” As he recalls, she ran to the pool and put her face in the
water. “She was cured after this brief tapping under her eye,”
says Callahan. “She still has no trace of a problem.”
Eventually,
Callahan invented a series of algorithms—recipes for sequential
tapping along various acupuncture meridians—each keyed to a particular
psychological problem. Later, he developed a diagnostic system to
treat more difficult cases and began training others in TFT.
Of
course, not all therapists who learn TFT stick to it exclusively. Many
combine talk therapy with both TFT and Eye Movement Desensitization
and Reprocessing (EMDR), in which a client recalls a traumatic memory
while moving his or her eyes in a prescribed pattern. While both
therapies apparently break up long-held patterns, EMDR is usually
described in terms of physiology, not energy. EMDR, practitioners say,
reconnects the brain’s neural networks that have been isolated by
trauma.
Because
TFT has not been accepted by mainstream science, few researchers have
studied it. An article about TFT by psychologist Fred Gallo in the
March/April 1997 issue of the Family
Therapy Networker generated the ire of letter writers who targeted
the therapy for lack of substantiating research, as well as a commentary
by research psychologist and healer Lawrence LeShan, who wrote:
“Tremendous
and imprecise claims are made for a process so far from our usual ways
of thinking and conceptualizing modern therapy that we simply do not
know what to do about it or how to respond.”
How
does Callahan in fact explain TFT’s effects? “I believe that thought
fields and thought patterns are organized energy,” he says. When
there are perturbations in the thought field, so his theory goes,
psychological problems arise. The tapping seems to eliminate the
perturbation—often instantaneously—although some clients may need
repeated treatments. “If you break a leg, it takes months to heal,”
says Callahan. “But the energy field doesn’t have the inertia of the
material world.” As a result, he claims, “TFT can cure thought
problems
in minutes.”
In
an ironic twist in this tale of two therapies—psychotherapy and energy
healing—some psychiatrists have found their psychotherapeutic
practices shifting into general medical ones as they embrace holistic
and energetic systems. Leon Hammer, who is now retired, practiced
“pure psychiatry”—mainly psychoanalysis—in New York until
discovering acupuncture and Chinese medicine while in England in
1971. After learning the Chinese system, he tried it on a patient.
“The person came to me for an emotional problem, but a physical
problem also disappeared,” he recalls. Word spread, and Hammer soon
reversed direction, developing a general medical practice. “One of the
great values of this type of medicine is that it’s all-inclusive,”
he says. “I can treat tennis elbow with the same concept energetically
as if I’m treating bipolar disease [because] we’re essentially
dealing with qi.”
Like
Hammer, Todd Rowe of Phoenix, Arizona, gave up conventional medicine
12 years ago for energy medicine, and a psychiatric practice for a
general holistic one. Says Rowe: “I practice homeopathy exclusively,
because it can treat someone physically, emotionally, mentally, and
spiritually all at once.”
In
the case of mental illnesses, Rowe reports that when he prescribes the
correct homeopathic remedy, problems like phobias and some anxiety
disorders may resolve quickly, without the need for psychotherapy. Other
disorders may require psychotherapy, but he says that homeopathic
treatment allows the therapy to flow faster and more smoothly because
it removes energetic blockages that can interfere with therapy.
Rowe
tells of treating a 42-year-old elementary-school teacher, a victim of
child abuse who suffered from depression, tremendous anxiety, and
multiple fears—of cancer, of making new relationships, of poverty, of
talking in groups, and more. As a result, she found herself in a
series of dependent relationships. Psychotherapy had yielded no
response, and high doses of the antidepressants Prozac and Xanax had
ceased to offer relief. Rowe prescribed a single dose of the homeopathic
remedy arsenicum album. The patient’s depression steadily lifted,
and her fears abated, resolving within 10 weeks. Rowe gradually tapered
her off all medications. Rowe continues to see her as her family
practitioner and reports that now, two and a half years later, she
appears free of her previous fears, her energy is improved, and she has
developed new relationships without her former dependencies.
Homeopathy,
founded in the late 18th century by German physician Samuel Hahnemann,
is based on the law of similars: Like cures like. A person exhibiting
a set of symptoms is given a carefully matched remedy that, in a healthy
person, would create the same symptoms. Homeopaths have not been able
to explain how the remedies work, other than to say they act on a
subtle, energetic level rather than a material one.
In
this regard, homeopathy is akin to other energetic systems whose
mechanisms remain mysterious but whose efficacy is increasingly being
documented through research. In 1991, for example, after an extensive
search, Dutch researchers at the University of Limburg analyzed 107
controlled clinical trials of homeopathy conducted worldwide. Of the
105 trials with interpretable results, 81 indicated positive results,
they reported in the British
Medical Journal. A look at the field of spiritual healing yields
similar conclusions. Psychiatrist Daniel Benor of Cherry Hill, New
Jersey, author of the four-volume study Healing
Research, has found 165 controlled studies of healing in humans,
animals, plants, and more. Two-thirds of them show statistically
significant effects.
Still,
as subtle energy strives for legitimacy, critics and practitioners agree
that more research is needed. But funds are scarce, and many of those
practicing energy-based therapies have no interest in studying them.
As one acupuncturist told me, “I just want to do the work.”
Psychologist
Gregory Nicosia, who has combined several energy modalities, including
TFT, into a method he calls Thought Energy Synchronization Therapy, says
he had to ask himself, “Do I spend time validating procedures, or do I
train others?” He concluded that, ultimately, training others would
be of more value. Not for another 10 years, Nicosia predicts, will there
be a body of research demonstrating TFT’s efficacy to the
satisfaction of mainstream psychologists. “My hope is that I will be
training people who will do research,” he says, “and that the
research generated will exceed what I could do as an individual.”
Despite
a highly publicized 1993 survey from Harvard Medical School indicating
that one in three Amencans
uses at least one unconventional therapy, the National Institutes of
Health, with a $12.8 billion budget, funded its Office of Alternative
Medicine (OAM) at a relatively meager $12 million in 1997. Although
the studies that OAM has supported include such modalities as
homeopathy, qigong, acupuncture,
Therapeutic Touch, and energetic therapy,” the office as yet has no
official position or definitive information on subtle energy.
Even
at the Institute of HeartMath, a research center and think tank in
Boulder Creek, California, where some of the most advanced research
indicating the presence of subtle energy is taking place, the studies
are not widely publicized. Rollin McCraty, the institute’s director of
research, admits that to do so might alienate the mainstream
cardiologists and corporate executives who, institute officials
believe, are key to taking its heart-related stress-reduction programs
to the wider public. Yet McCraty sounds clearly excited about the
latest research. “We’re still measuring
correlates of subtle energy now,” he says, “but we’re very close
to being able to measure the next level of the subtle.”
What
is the next level? Michael Conforti, a Jungian analyst in Brattleboro,
Vermont, postulates the existence of a subtle, nonlocal field, which
is observable, for example, in the therapist-client dyad. “It seems
clear,” says Conforti, “that human behavior, culture, and systems
are responding to some core around which they organize.” Conforti
calls this core an archetypal field, drawing on Carl Jung’s concepts
of the archetypes—the organizing principles or structural elements
of the unconscious that function like magnets within the psyche. In
terms of the therapist and client, Conforti explains, we should look at
the two as if they’re on a stage, with their behavior mandated by an
archetype. Clinical issues of transference, countertransference, and
even synchronicity become responses to this archetypal field. Conforti
thinks such fields could account for phenomena like distance healing or
telepathy. “Whereas electromagnetic fields are reduced at a
distance,” he suggests, “archetypal fields are not.”
As
science measures, quantifies, and analyzes the subtle, level by level,
will archetypal fields—and then all subtle energies—one day become
non-subtle? The trap here is the temptation to be reductionistic. “For
a long time we’ve tried to justify subtle energy by referring to it in
scientific terms, but scientists pooh-pooh it,” says Robert Duggan,
president of the Traditional Acupuncture Institute in Columbia,
Maryland. “This means we leave it in the realm of ‘experts’ rather
than calling upon everybody to reawaken to what they already
know—that it’s real but not quantifiable.” Duggan believes that
subtle energy is actually common sense, or a reawakening of all our
senses as if they are one.
For
his part, Elmer Green believes that one day humankind will become aware
of subtle energy as we are now aware of sunshine. “There will be a
consensus about what subtle energy is, and then people will cease to
talk about it,” he says. Green predicts that, as today’s “crude”
instruments improve, most of what we now consider subtle will be
measurable. Yet, at the most rarified level—as the link between mind and
matter—subtle energy may never be fully quantifiable. “Ultimately,
some quality of subtle energy,” suggests Green, “will remain
ineffable.”
Jane R. McGoldrick, Psy.D., L.P.C., is a writer
and an integrative psychotherapist in Washington, D.C., and Maryland.
She can be reached at janem@cpcug.org.