WellBe by Adrienne Nolan-Smith getwellbe
Dr. Jill Blakeway Explains The Science Behind Energy Healing Techniques
Dr. Jill Blakeway, founder of the Yinova Center in New York City and prominent energy healer and acupuncturist, sat down with WellBe to share her journey and explain the science behind energy healing techniques.
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Hi, everyone and welcome back
for another episode of the WellBe Show and Podcast. I am so excited
to have with me Jill Blakeway today. She is a licensed and board-certified
acupuncturist and clinical herbalist. She is also the founder of the lovely Yinova Center
in New York City, where we are right now and she is the author of three books,
including Energy Healing, which you can see there, which we'll be discussing a lot about today
but also, about acupuncture and the rest of her life and career. She also teaches gynecology
and obstetrics in the doctoral program at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine in San Diego and has a focus on fertility in her practice. She was also the first acupuncturist,
which I love, to ever give a TED Talk at TED Global in 2012.
It's a very exciting career and person. I'm so excited to have you.
– Thank you so much, Adrienne. It's lovely to be on your show.
– Thank you. Okay, so first things first,
clearly you are not Chinese or even Asian, so I would love to know how you got
from Great Britain to Chinese medicine and becoming an acupuncturist and energy healer. Yes. It was a bit of a journey and in fact,
it's a journey I tell in this book — Energy Medicine — which is part memoir,
which is how I got from being a sort of ordinary British girl
and very conventional. I worked for The Queen and you know,
I did not think I was going to end up an acupuncturist in New York, let alone,
an energy worker and how I got here. And how I got here was in stages. I discovered acupuncture and like a lot
of acupuncturists of my generation… I've done this for 25 years but I came to it
because I saw that it works and then I became fascinated and I sort of
fell down a rabbit hole of Chinese medicine and I ended up doing a masters
and then a doctorate in Chinese medicine. And acupuncture is energy medicine. But for a long time, I didn't necessarily understand
how deeply connected to energy medicine it is. It is in fact one of the oldest forms
of energy medicine but when I started to practice, I started to feel the energetics of the treatment
and that led me on a journey to explain the science, as well as some of the mystery behind
the energy medicine, which is why the book is called ‘Energy Medicine:
The Science and Mystery of Healing.' Besides acupuncture, you know, what is it
and what therapies does it officially include? Well, energy healing refers to all those modalities
that either diagnose or treat illness by manipulating the energy — the electromagnetic energy,
that pulses through every cell. And so, it's a broad field
that includes acupuncture at one end. It's not just an energetic technique. It is actually more physical as well. And acupuncturist are the only licensed
and board-certified energy workers, which means they are held to
a certain standard of education and a certain standard ethically,
and things like that. But, there are some very interesting
hands on and hands off therapies. And energy medicine covers things like
Reiki, and pranic healing and therapeutic touch, as well. And in the book, I set off on a
journey. I was very lucky, HarperCollins paid me to go around the world and meet with
healers and also scientists who could explain what they were doing, and measure the effects. And so I met some extraordinary healers,
as I journeyed. Particularly in Japan. I spent a bit of time in Japan. And there is
a big tradition of energy medicine in Japan. It's where Reiki comes from. Or you can show that acupuncture increases
endorphins and so, people assumed that increase in endorphins, which is your
body's own natural opiates, was pain relief. But for the book, I was really interested in
the energetics of it, so I went looking for scientists who were studying this and the first person
I looked at was Dr Helen Langerman at the University of Vermont Medical School,
who looked at how acupuncture points themselves are different from other tissue,
which is so interesting. And what she did is she looked at
the pull force of a needle, which means when we put a needle in,
we manipulated a little bit as you know with acupuncture and then the body grasps it
and the pull forces 18% higher at the acupuncture points. And when she did research, which she did
on rat abdomen impact tissue, she saw that the connective tissue winds
around the needle like spaghetti around a fork and that makes it more electric conductive. So that was my first clue
that the acupuncture points are more electric conductive and then, I wondered, “Why?” And they aren't salized at embryology. It turns out and nobody ever asked
this question or at least, I hadn't is how the embryos
communicate with themselves. So I don't know if everybody has brought that
but you know, they need a communication system and we communicate through
our central nervous system more often through the blood, through the cardiovascular system,
through hormones and proteins in the blood. But embryos don't have
a sophisticated enough cardiovascular or central nervous system and what they do
is they do it electrically and I'm going to refer you to a YouTube video, you and your viewers
and called ‘Electric Frog Face.' It's from Tufts University
and it's a frog embryo creating itself and it's like lightning going across. And the way that the body does it is to create
little staging posts that then have an electrical reaction and then the next bit of
the body bugs off from that. And if you put the major acupuncture points
on a map of those staging posts, they're in exactly the same place. So it turns out that what was used to create us
in some ways is, once we're here, used to regulate us, I think or mildly,
which is interesting. Yes. I think there's a lot of people who in
my audience know this but just so anybody who doesn't, the acupuncture points then connect
two different organs and pieces of the body, right? So that's why you'd be putting
the points in them to begin with. Well, that was another mystery to me
and in the book, I tell the story that I worked in a hospital, in an OB department
and we were clearly able to use acupuncture points to dilate the cervix in women in labor.
We could measure it. In fact the NIH gave us a grant to study it
because it was so interesting. But I wondered how a point on the leg
down here somewhere could dilate the cervix of a woman in labor and I didn't think
that had been adequately explained. However, I think it goes back to
the connective tissue that we talked about when we talked about the nature of acupuncture points. One of the major forms of connective tissue
in the body is fascia and it's everywhere. It wraps our organs,
it keeps our body in compartments. When I was writing the book, I talked to a surgeon
who told me, “I was always taught never to cut the fascia and if I could avoid it
because bad things happen, adhesions and things like that,”
and fascia is extremely electric conductive. It has a very high collagen content and collagen
has a lot of water in it, as you can imagine. That's why we put it on our face
and things like that. So the fascia is very electric conductive
and if you look again at a map of the fascial planes, you'll find that they line up
with the major acupuncture meridians. So I think that is how that signal
gets communicated deeply into the body. Oh, okay. So putting, you know,
an acupuncture needle into, like you're talking about, you know, down here uses the fascial planes
to communicate to the cervix. Yes. The point itself is more like dry conductive
than the tissue around it and then it contacts the fascia and sends a mild
but profound in its impact signal through the body. This is a ridiculous question maybe but how does it
know where to go when to put it in? Maybe it would go up to, you know,
your heart or something. Well, the acupuncture points have been used
for thousands of years and I think they probably work them out by trial and error,
to start with, if you see what I mean. But it's following the path of
a specific fascial plane. So this one here does actually go all the way
up to the groin and I imagine they didn't have x-rays and things like that when they were
working out with these points was. I imagine they did what's called empirically,
which means trial and error. Oh, that's fascinating.
I've been doing acupuncture for a long time but never really thought about the details
and how it works. So you talk about fascia and cells and connective tissue
but how does that all relate to the science of other kinds of energy medicine.
– I think that's a really good question. And also how does that then relate to chi,
if you could explain a little bit about that. Well, chi, every ancient culture has
a concept of what the Chinese called chi — an energy that animates us. So you know, the Greeks,
sorry, it's the NOOMA — the breath. In Judeo-Christian tradition,
it's the breath of life. In Ayurveda, which is from India,
it's called prana. The Chinese call it chi and what they were
talking about really was the relationship between energy and matter,
that we're not just matter. We are matter. We are solid. We're not actually a solid as we think we are. We're all vibrating but you know what I mean
— we have skin and bone and flesh but we also have something
that animates us. And in that way, back in the day, science
and philosophy and medicine were all intertwined. And then in the West, we un-intertwined them. We separated them out. Medicine is over here and spirituality is over here
and philosophy is over here. But chi, at its most basic, it's electromagnetic. I like to call it ‘your body's intelligence.' I like to think like that.
It's your body's ability to restore homeostasis. There's something really smart about our bodies. If we have a couple of too many drinks at dinner,
liver goes into overdrive overnight, how does it know to do that? There is an innate intelligence as
a messaging system within the body. So that is chi. And then your question was really
what's the scientific basis for the other forms of energy medicine and that took me a book
to disentangle because they're a little harder to understand and they've been less studied
than acupuncture but you can measure the force — the frequency — coming out of
a Qigong Master's hands that sort of Chinese version of Reiki in some ways
and it's a thousand times greater than the energy that comes out of the largest
energy field in the body, which is the heart. It's a very low frequency, which is interesting
and when I was researching the book, I looked at that low frequency and it turns out
quite coincidentally at the best orthopedic hospitals in the world now, they run a very low frequency
through bone to speed up healing and it's the same frequency, which I think is interesting.
– Exactly the same. Exactly the same and I wonder
what happened in my body when I was treating patients, so I had an EEG of my brain
and an EKG of my heart while I was working. And it turns out that my brain
and my heart go into what's called resonance. They start to go at the same frequency
and to do that, I slow my brain down quite a lot. And then energy comes out of my hands
— that's measurable. It feels warm but it's not actually warm.
It's a bit like a microwave. If you measure that, the patient will tell you,
“Jill's hand feels warm,” I think my hand feels warm
but when you measure it, it's not, which is interesting. And then the patient's heart goes
into resonance with mine. We all go at the same frequency
and I think when that happens, information gets transferred
and that's when the magic happens. That is so cool. You mentioned this also in your book
and I thought this was so interesting — the placebo effect, right? The placebo effect is wildly powerful
and I learned this filming the interview with Kelly Noonan Gores who interviewed
a lot of doctors in her documentary, ‘Heal,' all about the mind-body connection.
And there were so many modalities that she mentioned and there was
a lot of great research. But she also talked about the power of just the placebo
and the mind to overcome things itself and so, I wondered how that
kind of plays into energy medicine. Is it a component? How much of it accounts for that?
– I think tha's a really good question. I devised an entire chapter
to placebos in my book. It's what I gave a TED Talk back to back. And the way I see it is that there is
a continuum of things that act as prompts to the body to self-heal and those prompts
can be physical, like acupuncture but they can also be a suggestion
and you're absolutely right. The placebo effect works
and it doesn't just subjectively work. It can be objectively measured to work
and by that I mean, there's a study that shows that Parkinson's patients whose brains lacked dopamine,
if you get them a placebo and tell them it's a medicine, they will make their own dopamine
and you can measure it. So our minds are profoundly powerful. And so it's hard then to tease out,
both in Western medicine and other forms of medicine, how much of any cure is a placebo,
I think because there is some element in all medicine and in the book,
I talked to an orthopedic surgeon, Dr Ian Harris at Northwestern University in Sydney, Australia
and he wrote a book called ‘Surgery, the Placebo' and he talks about how a lot of
the common orthopedic surgeries don't work any better than placebo
when they're measured against a sham and they actually do sham surgeries these days,
which blew my mind. For instance, they do sham knee surgeries
where they open people up and then close them up again without having done the surgery
and then they do an ultrascopic knee surgery on some people and the control group
who have the sham surgery do just as well as the people who had the ultrascopic knee surgery. It blew my mind that that was ethical
because that's one thing to do — energy measurement
which has no real side effects. It's quite the other thing — to do a surgery
and then inform people up, get them anesthetic and things like that
but I guess, it is the only way to tease it out. I wouldn't want to scar to be part of
an experiment but I mean — I guess they gave the consent
and they get better, so yes, I guess that's it. But there is a range of promise
that you can give people to self-heal and they're all interesting and acupuncture
isn't straight placebo. As I said, we can measure
the physiological effects of it quite easily but there will be some placebo in it
just like there is in those knee surgeries. I love the idea that these different things
are just moving this stagnant energy, so that you can clear a path
for the immune system to come through and say, “Oh, yeah.
There is a problem over there. Let's go fix it,” because something has happened,
in which they can't tell bad or they can't react. They, being immune system, even though. Your body's a sort of self-healing machine
in some ways and it does it every single day if you think about it. It deals with all sorts of things.
– Absolutely. Sometimes, it gets overwhelmed
and sometimes, it needs the medicine but sometimes, it just needs a little prompt. I loved also hearing about, you know,
referencing the immune system, how much success they've been having lately
with immunotherapy drugs because for cancer and such. I mean, they're really just, you know,
accessing the power of the immune system, even though it's in this field of Western medicine
and pharmacology but it all comes back to that. So I just love the idea that people are
on both sides of medicine — this conventional Western healthcare system
and everything else — all kind of trying very hard to use different physical and mental ways
to access the power of our immune systems and allow us to self-heal
because I really believe that that's the most powerful thing
we have at the end of the day. Well interestingly, in the book,
I actually have a story about a man who worked out how to kill cancer mice by the immune system
and it's through an energy technique and it's fascinating.
There is a man in New York. His name is Dr William Bankston.
He teaches at city university here in New York and many, many years ago, back in the 70s,
he learned an energy healing technique from a psychic healer
and decided to take it into the lab and what he did was he took a mice
that's specially bred to have cancer — poor mice — and these are mice that reliably
when you give them cancer, die on Day 27 and so,
it's how pharmaceuticals are tested. So if you have a pharmaceutical
that keeps them alive to say, Day 32, then you've got something promising. So they took these mice that had been
specially bred to have cancer, they gave him mammary cancer — breast cancer —
and build it the technique and they started to get worse to start with. They looked much worse and then
they got better over a period of weeks and they recovered completely. But interestingly, to your point about
the immune system, when they re-injected them with the cancer,
they couldn't get it. Their immune systems
have been permanently changed. So Bill did what all good scientists do. I mean, he's just a scientist. He's not dogmatically in favor of energy medicine
— good science should be replicable, you know? There's no point in having
a special somebody somewhere that nobody else can see and then measuring them. There's some limited value to that
but the real value of science is when it builds and we all learn and we can reproduce it
in various ways. So Bill took a group of skeptical students
and he told them, I believe that they were doing research into gullibility, which I'm sure
they believed and they all got groups of mice to do and there was also control group
and reliably, he could teach the students the technique and they would reverse
the cancer in the mice. And he, very generously, let me put the technique
in the book so when you read the book, you can learn it.
It's quite simple. It takes a little while to practice
and learn it but it's not complicated. It just requires practice and they have done this
repeatedly studies at city university with thousands and thousands of mice
and they are clearly able to provoke the mouse's immune system into both reversing the cancer
and not being able to get it back. Why isn't that, you know, making its way into –?
– Well, he had trouble getting that study published. It was in the end published
but a lot of major journals turned it down and Bill actually had eight Nobel Prize winners
endorse the science behind it because the science is impeccable
and Bill's not positioned about it. He says, “Look, if you can think of
a better experiment, then tell me,” because this is an anomalous result
but it's significant. Because it's replicable over and over again
and it was just really hard to get people to publish it because confirmation bias
is a bit of a drug. We see it in our politics at the moment. People de-emphasize the news that doesn't agree
with their world view and emphasize the news that does and that's why we have so much
polarization in our politics, yeah? And it's the same in science that we've been
told a certain thing, this flies in the face of it, you know, that mice can heal themselves of cancer,
get in a prompt and so, we de-emphasize it if we're not careful. But his science is good
and I devoted an entire chapter to his story. It gets more complicated because it turned out
that this was information on a wave that could be put into things. So they, at Brown University,
he put the information into cell medium and they put human cancer tissue into
the cell medium and when I wrote the book, each have made nine genetic changes
in the human cancerous tissue. By the time the book came out,
Bill came to my book launch, he told me, it made 67 genetic changes
to the human cancerous tissue and that is an extraordinary thing. So he's off there studying this and I felt like
people should know, which is why I wrote about him. Yeah. I think people should know
which is why I'm glad you're talking about it right now. What kind of conditions would you say
you've had the most success treating or managing through your energy healing,
both just acupuncture and then also the other hands on
energy healing that you do. At the Yinova Center, we treat everyone. We're known for our fertility, especially
because my first book is called ‘Making Babies.' But we actually treat the whole families.
We treat tiny babies with colic. We treat senior citizens with arthritis
and everybody in between and we find acupuncture really helpful,
as I said before, for the chronic diseases. You know, the things that are
a tangle of different systems into relating or not relating very well. So I have treated just about all sorts of
chronic diseases with good success. Fertility has been a particular focus of mine. I think not being able to
conceive is hugely painful and often, Chinese medicine
is particularly good in teasing out the complex amalgam of issues
that create infertility. It's often not one thing. It's lots of little things that start to gang up on people
and we're particularly good at sorting that out. I think because it's subtle
and its subtleness is, in fact, its strength and that's true of all energy medicine. If you think about hormones,
they're in a feedback loop with other hormones, so if you give pharmaceutical hormones,
even in small doses, you tend to throw off a lot of other hormones too and you cause, if you're not careful,
as many problems as you solve. With Chinese medicine and energy medicine broadly,
it's more normalizing. It's prompting your body to restore homeostasis. It's prompting your body's intelligence to kick in
and I think that means when it comes to something as subtle as hormones, I think that means that
it works particularly well because it's so balancing and it's not affecting other hormones
while it's doing it. That's a great description. I've known that acupuncture
was very effective for fertility more than other things but I wasn't really sure why and I would say,
having had a hormone-related issue myself when I was in college, I think I mentioned
I had amenorrhea for two years, you're actually right in that.
There is definitely not one. It's a combination of issues
that finally come to ahead in your body, can't quite handle it and so,
it stops producing monthly menstruation but I kept looking for that one silver bullet And then once I finally healed,
actually through Chinese herbs and supplements and some diet change and a little acupuncture. I realized that it was a couple of things
that had happened with my life that were related and I wasn't realizing that all of those things
come together and create a big impact because they all seemed kind of small
of studying abroad in China with some parasites and a poor diet at college and these
low thyroid and all together created this — They gang up on you.
– They gang up on you. And it also show that Chinese medicine
recognizes mental and emotional and spiritual pain as completely equal
and entangled with physical issues, whereas Western medicine
tends to separate them out. And again, there's often an emotional element
as well as a physical element and you know, a lifestyle element
to a lot of hormonal disorders and there's a sort of stigma about
the emotional element in Western medicine that there isn't in Chinese medicine
and I think that's helpful too. Yes, absolutely. Somebody I heard described conventional
or Western healthcare as a two-party system. You've got mental health care facilities over here
paying no attention to diet or any other lifestyle, things that might be going on and then
you've got the physical, which doesn't pay any attention to the mental really
and until they come together, it's very hard to heal either one. I agree and it's what I was saying before
about the relationship between energy and matter, we've separated them out in our Western societies but we're energetic, spiritual beings with feelings
and we need to acknowledge that. We're not just machines that break down
and have to be kind of repaired. We're people and all our roundedness
and all our magnificence really and I talk to people all day
and I just think human beings are awesome but we're sort of fascinating amalgams of you know,
emotion and experience and physicality. And until we take all of that into account,
we're not really taking care of whole people. Right. Since you focus so much
on fertility in your practice, how do you think hormones
and you sort of just describe this but how do they fit into the energy field
that you described before? It was sort of what I was saying is that
it's very normalizing and so, bringing them back into balance
is subtle, I think and I think that's the answer to that question. When it comes to acupuncture and fertility,
we do know that acupuncture increases circulation to the ovaries as it potentiates
a healthy egg in the follicle. We know that it increases circulation
to the uterus, so that we know that it helps the uterine environment for implantation. So we know that it balances hormones. We particularly know that it offsets
the effect of the sympathetic nervous system — your fight or flight response —
on the uterine environment but also, on hormones. So again, it's multifaceted. It's part physical and it's part prompting your body
and your body's intelligence — your chi, as I would call it — to restore order. And when you were treating your amenorrhea,
what you eventually came to was you did things that restored order. You realized, “Oh, my diet in college, my parasites,”
so meaning, I'm not absorbing nutrition and my body thinks I'm in famine
and has quite smartly cut down you know, and is saying,
“We won't have babies until the famine is over,” and what you need was better nourishment and so, it's about restoring order
in some ways and rhythm. Yes and the herbs, I think made a huge difference.
– Yes, they really do. I know you're also an herbalist. Could you talk a little bit about how that plays
into restoring order and your healing practices? We're sitting right next to our herbal pharmacy,
in fact here at Yinova and at Yinova, we believe that everybody needs
their own tailored herbal preparation, that you can't really pull things off the shelf, that we are this weird amalgam of our history
and our physiology and our spirit and our feelings. And so, we create a specific herbal formula
for every patient and then, we tweak it. We tweak it through the month for
our female patients as they go through their cycles. So they'll have a different formula
when they're building a follicle than they will when they need high progesterone
after they've ovulated. But we also modify the formula
as they improve or don't for that matter. As their internal landscape changes,
we're reacting and so, herbology at its best, Chinese herbology is like
a communication with the body. It's not that you take a supplement
that you take the same supplement for a year. It's that you're on a journey and the herb should be
taking you on that journey and so as you change, the herb should change with you
and that's the kind of herbology we practice at the Yinova Center. In Chinese medicine, we create formulas
that can be absorbed. So we take into account people's GI systems. Some people have an enormous problem
getting nutrition from their food and we would add herbs to help them digest
the herbs we're giving them to make sure that they reach the organs they supposed to reach. And then we have
a very well-worked out system of herbology. Each herb affects different organs
in different organ systems and some of them are cardiovascular tonics.
Some of them cleanse the liver. Some of them help support the kidneys. Some of them make you pee
and it's the fun of our job — it's putting together a herbal formula for each patient
but it's also, the responsibility of our job and we have five years of tertiary education. We have doctorates in what we do. It's not a pull a herb from the shelf
and Whole Foods kind of thing. This is herbology, very targeted. The acupuncturist at the Yinova Center
are board certified herbalist and they're very skillful. Oh, you are very much convincing me
that I need to come, get one of your custom herbal formulas. Moving into talking through sort of all of this
at the system level because there's clearly research, there's been thousands of years,
there's pretty much no side effects to energy medicine or acupuncture specifically. In your book, I read that the NIH
is recommending that acupuncture be taught in conventional Western medical schools. Is that really happening? What's the adoption rate
and do you see that coming to fruition? I do, actually.
As I said, I run a program in a hospital. I find doctors very open
to acupuncture particularly. What they worry about
and they're right to is charlatans. You know, they worry about people
overpromising and under-delivering. They worry about people being led astray
and not getting the treatment they need. They worry about unsafe practices
and to be honest, as a license practitioner, I worry about those things too. I have to say, I have a section
on charlatans on my book. I didn't meet that many but I did meet some
exploitative people and some deceptive people and I taught about it in the book. But I find that doctors are very open
to looking at this and more and more open. I work with doctors all the time and it's all about
how you communicate with them. Obviously, if you just talk very esoterically,
it's a little harder to communicate but I have worked in hospitals. I speak doctor and I understand
what I'm doing physiologically and I am perfectly capable of explaining it
and I have good relationships with doctors. We all do at the Yinova Center. We actually pride ourselves on being able
to integrate our treatment with people's Western medical treatment. Yeah, it seems like this is
the kind of place that really values that and I'm sure doctors are happy to work with you
because you're so interested in science and so knowledgeable in both
what you do and what they do. So if somebody's watching this
and I have some little chronic health issues but I've never tried acupuncture,
I've never tried energy healing, where do you start? Are there things that you can do on your own
as far as energy healing? I know you had a few sort of self-healing things
in the book that you mentioned. What would you say if you have these
couple of things, like this is a great fit for acupuncture energy medicine
but perhaps, if you have that, not so much? Where would you start if you were somebody
who was just dipping their toe in? Well I would say, if you have something acute
and life-threatening, do not call an acupuncturist. If you're having a heart attack, please call 911. I will say one caveat to that, which is
I had a horrible pinch nerve under my shoulder blade that I could not fix
and my acupuncturist just did a number on. It was an extremely painful treatment
but it helped so much. We're very good at the pain actually
but in general, chronic issues, pain, imbalances, all the issues where one system
is affecting another system, I think are a really good candidate
for Chinese medicine. Multifaceted issues, autoimmune problems,
migraines, hormone disturbances, pain, headaches, digestive problems, those are all good things
to go to an acupuncturist for. And the thing about acupuncturist
in this country is they are all licensed, which means that they are held to a standard, ethically
and also, held to a standard educationally. They passed board exams and things like that
and I think that is helpful. Now having said that, there are a ton
of other really talented energy workers who are not necessarily
in the licensed end of the business because there is no licensure for
that kind of thing and some of them are amazing. And in the book, I try to help people find the best of those and one of the things that I did was I talked to
the head of psychiatry in NORD at Harvard who is a forensic psychiatrist whose specialty
is transgressions of the therapeutic relationship. And he told me that,
“You should be careful to avoid people who are a bit of a cultive one
or have a lot of ritual and dogma or who tell you that only they could help you.” We couldn't think of any case
where that would really be the case and he said to me, “The only thing
a good practitioner should be getting from treating you is their fee and the satisfaction
of having done a good job. So if anyone's trying to get any more
than that from you, introductions to people, sex is a big one unfortunately,
then you need to give them a wide berth.” But if people want to start out
at the risk of plucking my book, ‘Energy Medicine,' I do give you self-healing techniques in this book
and I do teach you how to transmit energy yourself and one of the things that I wanted to make sure
that people know is that you don't have to be a special person to do this
— some special guru healer. I'm certainly not special and I can do it. Everybody can. This is not something that relies on some special talent
that only some people are born with. Everybody can do this
and everybody can be taught to do this. And if you think back to Bill and the mice
and the skeptical students, he could teach any of the students to do
the technique that healed the mice. It wasn't that they need to have a special aptitude. So it's just about if you are doing it on yourself,
really understanding how to harness these waves and this energy in your own hands,
I think, right? And — Well, I give exercises at the end of
every chapter in this book because you know, and it's meant to lead you into your first steps
at harnessing this energy and using it for healing. I love that. So now I want to ask you two questions
that I think help, you know, a lot of people care, especially in the WellBe community,
about trust and recommendations and knowing that certain people helped you
and you had a good experience. So are there any, you know,
any kinds of practitioners or doctors since functional integrative medicine is a focus for us, that have helped you
that you recommend and loved working with and would you be able to share
any of those experiences, wherever they are? I think you should have somewhere
in your medical armory, someone who takes a look
at you as a whole person. Chinese practitioners of Chinese medicine do that
but also, the functional medicine doctors and some naturopaths and what they're doing is
they're looking how one system interacts with another — how the digestive system
impacts the reproductive system, how the cardiovascular system
and your circulation impacts, say the reproductive system
or the digestive system, how the digestive system
and the gut microbiome affect mood, for instance. So I think the people I found helpful
have been the people who take that look and that's the naturopaths, the functional
medicine doctors, and the Chinese medicine doctors. Got it. My last question for you is
what we call our ‘how I get WellBe' question. So there's a lot of noise right now
about wellness routines and morning rituals and I think some of us believe it
starting to get stressful how many things we need to do before we can even leave
the house for ourselves, right? So I'm sort of immerse and I know
that some people have mentioned it to me as well, like how do you just pull some of these things back
and ask people who live and breath this, what they do, what their ‘can't miss' absolutely no matter
what's going on in their day, in their life, things that they do to ensure
that they prevent chronic health issues and keep any that they've had at bay. So we say, “How I get Well Be is…” Well, I get Well Be is
I deal with a lot of people all day. I deal with patients. I have a big team here at Yinova
and one of the things that I realized when I was writing this book is
that the human energy field is real and it's interacting with people
and it can be exhausting. And so, I have learned to sort of
seal myself off a little bit. At the beginning of every day, I send,
in my imagination, a big old grounding chord down into the earth and I used to think that
visualizations were a bit hokey but the truth is you can manipulate your energy field
with your mind and so, visualization does work. So I send a big old — to me, it's an anchor chain —
all the way down the earth and I wait until it makes me feel kind of heavy.
I'm doing it now. I can feel it. I just feel solid and heavy and actually sometimes,
you can feel your voice getting deeper, like you're just here. And then I open up the top of my head
and my mind and I bring in light — my own light, my own spiritual light,
my connection to you, to everything, to the spirit, to the world we live in — and I fill myself
with my own lights in my mind and then I push it just an inch outside my body everywhere,
like a little protective egg of lights. And I try and get through my day like that
and sometimes I have to top it up at about 11 o'clock and again at four or something
and again before I go to bed. But since I have been doing that,
I have been less swept up in other people's dramas, I've been less stressed and less anxious
and I think in a busy city like New York, particularly where we're just surrounded by people
and their own energy fields, giving yourself a little egg of light that acts as protection
between you and everybody else is not a bad idea. I love that and I'm sure that little bit
that's outside of you is also running into other people's energy fields
and bringing them some light when they haven't brought it to themselves.
– Well, that's a nice thought. I hope that's true. I always thought I had. When you're on the subway
and you bump into somebody, you're getting them light. Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much.
This has been so interesting and wonderful. I love to hear how you're bringing
the Western health care system and modern day issues
and these ancient traditions — thousands of years of trial and error
to get to where we are today and how many things
that you are talking about have also affected me and improved things in my health.
So thank you so much again for having me here. A beautiful space too, by the way. I hope everybody comes to visit
the Yinova Center, either in Flatiron or Brooklyn Heights in New York City
and picks up a copy of Jill's wonderful book.
#Jill #Blakeway #Explains #Science #Energy #Healing #Techniques
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I’m still grieving the loss of my health, my job, my home, my relationships, my resources, my autonomy, my everything. I’ve tried and am still trying every possible healing protocol out there. Too many dark nights of the soul. Water damaged buildings with toxic mold and bacteria was eventually found out to be the culprit behind all my symptoms so please be careful everyone bc I don’t want anyone to go through decades of debilitating illness. If there is anyone out there looking to volunteer their time to help me with their psychic or healing gifts, please please reach out. I would do anything to heal and would be forever grateful. 🙏♥️