Cover Story: Energy Inside and Out

Body Mind
I’m sitting with Dana, Shelly, Phyllis, Lori, Cynthia and five other graduates of Feldenkrais training — a big step up from before August 2001, when Cincinnati had only one practitioner.

Moshe Feldenkrais developed this somatic (body) therapy after being injured playing soccer. He noticed that while experimenting with body movements and sensory awareness, his uninjured knee began having problems just as the injured knee got better. Phenomena such as this lead to an integrated system of positions and movements.

Feldenkrais attracts trainees who are often already therapists.

“It’s really a sophisticated way of doing physical therapy,” says Shelly.

“The difference,” says Dana, massage therapist, “is that we don’t just focus on the area of discomfort. We integrate a solution to the problem with other areas.”

“Then,” continues Cynthia, “you have more energy, less reactivity, less irritability and an increased ability to be spontaneous.”

In other words, the art changes the structure of the person — physically, mentally and even emotionally. Somatic therapists of all persuasions have commented on these phenomena. Studies have shown the results of such therapies to include stress reduction, pain relief and lowering of blood pressure. Besides injuries, the students tell me that Feldenkrais can help with sports performance, personality, self-expression, thinking problems, attention deficit disorder and handwriting problems.

The training is extensive, requiring four years. Students spend one-third of their time practicing awareness through movement and learn the directive part of the therapy, functional integration, by practicing on each other.

“It’s really about life growth,” Cynthia says, “not a specific therapy, not doing one thing. It’s about being more human and improving hundreds of things.”

Mind Body
“Whereas Feldenkrais works from the sensory system to the brain,” says Vivien Schapera, co-founder with husband Neil of Alexander Technique of Cincinnati, “Alexander works from the brain to the neuromuscular system.”

From Feldenkrais to Alexander, we move from profound to deeply profound. Alexander “lessons” involve, on the students’ part, mostly sitting, standing and lying down. The touch by the teacher is at times so gentle as to be almost indiscernible. Yet, after not so many lessons, I found myself sitting, walking, standing and crouching differently. I’m beginning to use my arms and shoulders with less effort, with perhaps finally less bouts of neck and shoulder tightness.

As with most other healers, Neil and Vivien have other skills and, if you will, second jobs. Vivien is the only crystal-healing therapist I’ve met in the Cincinnati area who does healing every day.

I’d had exposure to crystal healing and so wasn’t shocked when Vivien first laid a variety of stones on my body, mainly on some, or all, of the seven centers, or “charkas,” of the human energy field as recorded in the Hindu Vedic literature. I’ve had some surprises since then — obtaining energy, relaxation, recovery from acute illness — and as time goes on, I’m not so surprised at crystal effects on the human system.

“Quartz is an amplifier and transmitter of energy,” Vivien says. “Crystals also emit energy.”

In the Melody system of crystal healing therapy crystals, in theory, are connected to an energy grid inherent in the earth through its largely crystalline structure. A grid made with crystals pulls on that energy. Interestingly, the interdisciplinary research field of quantum biodynamics indicates that the energy structure of the human cell is crystalline in nature.

“I practice a little differently,” says Vivien, “using myself as an extension of the crystals and the crystals as an extension of myself.”

Besides using stones in sessions, Vivien will do healing sessions over the phone, using an intuitively created pattern of crystals that gives an “energetic picture of what’s going on with the person and what they need.”

Schapera has found crystal healing useful with headaches, sinus problems and colds, pain, multiple sclerosis, Raynaud’s, arthritis, heart problems, spastic colon and fibromyalgia. She also has success in healing relationships such as marital difficulties. She has plenty of clients who find her by word of mouth. Physicians and psychotherapists also refer clients.

Spirit
I’m lying on the floor with several other students who are ready to journey. We have blindfolds over our eyes to create complete darkness. Neil Schapera is ready to begin the steady drumbeat that aids the trance state.

Our assignment: contact a spirit guide in either the lower or upper worlds and obtain a message for a partner in the room. The experience requires 15 minutes.

As pictorial and symbolic as my message seems, received by someone I only just met, it makes perfect sense and, strikingly, involves two diamonds removed from the wall of a cave — an experience, as a matter of fact, completely literal in my recent life.

Neil trained as a shaman at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, with Dr. Michael Harner — “perhaps the most knowledgeable westerner regarding shamanic practices,” Schapera says. The shamanic student learns to act as an intermediary between the client and the spirit world. Neil will journey into the spirit realm on behalf of clients, but spends more time teaching clients how to journey. This takes about six sessions for basic proficiency.

“In learning this,” Neil says, “people establish contact with their own helpers and teachers, obtaining useful information.”

Neil also conducts a monthly group journey. Those who have had the basic six sessions may attend.

Journeying has helped clients with career choices, midlife crises, resolving conflicts due to previous relationships and receiving healing for ailments or being shown what to do to heal. One physician who did shamanic training with Neil’s class overcame hearing loss.

Energy Entrepreneurs
Reiki rocks! What are Reiki rocks, I ask Pat Kolata and Susan Maccoy.

If fact, Reiki rocks — trademarked by Kolata and Maccoy — are smooth basalt stones charged with Reiki energy by a master.

Reiki is a Japanese system of conveying healing energy, which can be done close up or at a distance. Kolata and Maccoy are both masters. The training can take between one and 10 years, depending on the student.

Early studies have shown Reiki effective for pain control and reduction of anxiety. Reiki has similarities to healing touch.

“In the same church, but not the same pew,” Maccoy says. “We’re concerned with conveying the energy and allowing it to take its course. We don’t consider physical anatomy, and we don’t predict results.”

“The hardest piece is to listen and see,” Kolata says, “to see what it is then get out of the way. Practicing Reiki doesn’t involve scientific thinking.”

In addition to pain control and stress reduction, the two have seen Reiki work for control of attention deficit disorder, healing group dynamics and for hunger control.

Kolata and Maccoy, besides supplying Reiki rocks, which are used with massage or in self-help home kits, have developed an entire line of spa-related products, including massage and essential oils, moisturizers and exfoliators. They also train massage therapists to use the rocks.

I visited Spa Pharo in Hyde Park and chatted with Terri Pharo about hot rock treatments. She keeps the stones hot in an old-fashioned roaster in the massage therapy room.

“The heat and pressure from the rocks relaxes tissue faster,” Pharo says. “The client is more relaxed. I’ve noted a lot more calm and a lot less talking. Because of all of these factors, the massage is actually easier to perform.”

Spa Pharo offers services from Swedish massage to physical therapy along with skin care consultation, from pedicures and manicures to exfoliation.

Bring Back Light
I first went to Spice of Life Health Choices because I found out that Nancy Holbrook is trained in the use of Jacob Lieberman’s light box (spectral receptivity system), used for color therapy. Treatment begins with three protocols with numerous sessions of 15 minutes on average.

In a completely dark room, all of the colors are viewed first. Later protocols select certain colors and include strobe effects of varying frequency. Light therapy is used to improve general well-being, to enhance vision, to improve mood, to balance the mind and to raise energy.

The treatment really relates to syntonic optometry (Lieberman is an optometrist). Syntonics uses light frequencies to affect vision and its functions. Lieberman has extended syntonics to general healing and spirituality.

Holbrook and her partner, Helen Bales, provide color therapy, reflexology, massage and aromatherapy at their center. If I don’t see them at least twice a month, I begin feeling deprived. One of my happiest recent experiences was having my mother, who just underwent chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, treated with a full hour of reflexology — finding and massaging selected pressure points on the foot corresponding to troubled areas in the body — while I had my weekly color session. For the first time since chemo, Mom’s feet stopped being numb, and she feels that their circulation has improved.

Holbrook and Bales have found reflexology to help with migraines, PMS, fibromyalgia, stress, lowering blood pressure, decreasing spasticity in cerebral palsy, gingivitis and improving circulation.

Nature’s Touch
Lisa Roth became interested in healing while working as an advanced level nurse in intensive care units.

“I sat and watched folks who, because of their lives, had wound up on ventilators,” she says. “I wanted to focus on prevention, to help them before they get to the ICU.”

Roth is also trained in herbalism, Reiki, crystal healing and aromatherapy. Extensive herbal study and certification in aromatherapy led her to her current focus on plant oils. She recently worked full-time for the Mercy Health Partners Holistic center, assisting in the acupuncture clinic. She was just bringing her aromatherapy skills to patient care when the center closed.

She uses essential oils — the volatile essences of herbs — in combination with the M technique, “a specific set of gentle touches in a set pattern used to apply the oils in a carrier oil to the body,” she says.

The oils are sometimes mixed as formulas, sometimes used to provide therapeutic scents. I found one study in the Archives of Dermatology in which aromatherapy effectively treated patchy hair loss.

“Most studies come from France and England.” Roth says. “Here in this country we’re still at a point where practicing such things as aromatherapy is perceived as questioning authority. I get criticism, but I also get results.”

Roth has found her techniques helpful in fibromyalgia, chronic back pain, migraines, improving mood and reducing stress.

“When I use oils, I don’t just look at the physical,” she says. “I look particularly at the emotional, mental and spiritual.”

Vibration, the Memory of Water and Sugar Pills
Imagine multiple layers to you, who you are. These layers have direction and importance — spiritual into mental into physical.

There’s a structural direction: head to toe and inside the body to outside. There are physical symptoms, mental characteristics, personality traits and spiritual tendencies. The picture develops over the course of a lifetime. Sometimes who we are becomes imbalanced and this creates symptoms.

Homeopathic remedies start with the picture a “potentized” (repeatedly diluted and shaken) substance, even a poison like arsenic, creates in a balanced individual. Higher — more dilute — potencies cover more symptoms in more layers.

A perfect match in pictures between an ill person and remedy — correct remedy/correct potency — brings about heath and “cure.” In homeopathy, even chronic disease, when viewed and treated in this fashion, is amenable to cure.

“The irony,” says Norma Curry, homeopath of some 30 years, “is that the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) keeps telling us the remedies are nothing but sugar pills, but they say some require a prescription from an MD.”

Curry, being a non-MD homeopath — probably among the majority of homeopaths in the U.S. — approaches health from a nutritional consulting standpoint.

“I see clients, take the case, then suggest what they could do,” she says. “This starts with dietary and lifestyle changes. The homeopathic case taking can help find a remedy that supports these changes. I make sure that everyone has a primary care physician. Diagnostics are often useful.”

Homeopathy has more science behind it than almost any other “alternative” to conventional therapy. Developed by MDs to cover from serious illness to first aid, at least three meta-analyses — analyses of multiple clinical trials — show that the “sugar pills” work. Mathematically and experimentally, the solvent, usually water, appears to retain a vibrational memory or “oscillation” on quantum dimensions (a la modern particle physics). The effects of such quantum memory have been demonstrated repeatedly in animal and plant experiments.

“Its advantage is that it links everything together: the spiritual, emotional and physical,” Curry says. “Most people come to me when nothing else has worked, and I mean they’ve tried everything.”

She points out that lack of physician acceptance is due to the fact that homeopathy doesn’t fit current market models, prescribing can take hours and the thinking involved in prescribing is complex and difficult, requiring many years of practice.

Sometimes Even Needles
Carole Paine trained four years for her degree in Chinese acupuncture at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Francisco. Although we tend to think of acupuncture as placing needles under the skin for specific treatments, such as back pain or migraine, it’s actually part of a wider healing system that includes nutrition, exercise, meditation, massage, acupuncture and herbs.

Paine starts a session with a complete history from a Chinese medical perspective, proceeds to pulse and tongue diagnosis (involving pulses in both wrists and numerous characteristics of the tongue’s appearance) then makes the acupuncture site selections. The point of the needle placement is to either bring energy into an energy channel (meridian) or, in the case of excess energy, take it out.

“Almost anybody can benefit,” Paine says. “Acupuncture is a complete medical system.”

By moving to Cincinnati to be near family, Paine gave up some autonomy in her practice. Ohio law requires a referral from an MD for a non-MD acupuncturist to treat patients.

Ironically, Paine points out, most MD training for acupuncture is nowhere near four years and might be simply a set of weekend seminars. On the other hand, she says, “I’m an advocate for acupuncture, so I’m glad to see it catching on. I really believe in it.”

Paine’s Inner Peace Holistic Center downtown provides acupuncture, Chinese herbalism, nutritional counseling, massage and yoga. She’s found her methods useful for neuropathies, colitis, colds and flu, hypertension, migraines, liver disease, type II diabetes, stress reduction and health maintenance.

Research studies most recently demonstrated acupuncture to have measurable biomechanical effects on the human system. Clinical trials go back and forth, but some are showing a benefit for a variety of problems.

Earth and Heaven
My first session with Greg Pitman wasn’t like my experience with other chiropractors. He did very little thrust (joint popping) technique.

“Your body will tell me when it’s ready for that,” Pitman says as he checks weakness and strengths at meridian (energy channel) points using muscle response testing. Such testing then directs his therapy, from subtle jaw adjustments to the not-so-subtle diaphragm release. When I stand up, I notice my face to be flushed, with a feeling of heat moving upward.

Pitman, fellow chiropractor Liz Clark and other professionals at Family Tree Chiropractic have patients fill out extensive questionnaires. This might lead to chiropractic adjustment, nutritional treatment including homeopathy, adjunctive massage or cranial sacral work and something with the enormous name of Nambudripod Allergy Elimination Technique (NAET).

NAET involves muscle response testing to see how energy channels are affected by allergens. Once an offending substance (in a special container) is identified, the patient holds it while the “Huato Jiaji” points along the spine are clicked (desensitized) with a special tool. Meridian points are then checked again to see if the allergy is cleared. The system first tests 10 basic nutritional groups, then moves on to typical allergens such as mold and even many environmental pollutants.

One patient had a horrible allergy — full body rashes — to poison ivy. After one session of NAET, he tested himself, having only a small, local skin reaction to the plant.

Clark performs most of the NAET, wanting to “focus in this one area.”

The practice at Family Tree also involves prayer.

“We pray silently for God to do the work,” Pitman says, “usually before but even during a session. This brings more peace and relaxation. We are mostly stepping stones. Healing is not always pretty and sometimes it’s painful, but we strive to get the person in balance.”

Investigation into NAET is preliminary. More and more studies, however, are verifying the efficacy of prayer in promoting healing and better health outcomes.

Just Look
Those attracted to the healing arts are in all walks of life with all types of education and experience. This article simply scratches the surface of a pin. I found all of these people by word of mouth, in search of experiences I wanted, needed or performed out of curiosity.

Financial rewards for healers are highly variable. Most either work two jobs or provide a variety of services within their businesses. Scientific verification for the healing arts always varies; if it didn’t, we would never see anything new. Political, economic and regulatory considerations do influence what gets studied and who practices what. Insurance companies mostly reimburse conventional practice, but that’s changing.

As you experience your health and health care, feel your overall state of being. Are you gradually functioning from a sense of increased energy and sense of wellness, with a decrease in pain and suffering?

Simply and calmly observe the place where you live, inside and out. A misguided practitioner of any type or training can promote the negative. Peace can be promoted by anyone as well, including you yourself.

This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2002.