Hi everyone,
Steve Straus forwarded me this excellent article about the use of EFT for emotional healing. I think you will find some of it is highly relevant to WaveMaker and Core Dynamics work. Here’s a copy of it -
MD writes article on Emotions, Energy, and Healing
Hi Everyone,
This article by Eric Robins MD, a long time EFT friend and supporter, emphasizes the emotional causes of our physical ailments. It should have great use as a convincer for those who question the emotional contributor to our health. The article is actually a chapter from “The Heart of Healing”: Inspired Ideas, Wisdom and Comfort from Today’s Leading Voices by Dawson Church (Editor)
Hugs, Gary
By Eric B. Robins, MDMichelle, a bright, perky, 21-year-old woman, arrived in my office complaining of severe bladder pain. She had to urinate frequently and urgently. I did a complete medical workup but could find nothing out of the ordinaryby the standards of my profession there was nothing wrong with Michelle. Yet it was clear to me that Michelle’s pain was real, and her physical symptoms were real. After I had finished looking in her bladder with a cystoscope and found everything to be normal, I ventured, “Sometimes women with your symptoms have a history of sexual abuse or molestation. Is this possible with you?” In the corner of her eye, the slightest of tears welled up. It turned out that Michelle had been sexually penetrated by an uncle almost daily from the age of three, till she was ten years old.
I asked Michelle to think back upon these memories and find a part of her body where they were strongest. She said she could feel them acutely in her lower abdomen and pelvis. I asked her to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the mildest and 10 being the most intense. Michelle rated her feelings at 10 out of a possible 10.
I then spent 45 minutes working with Michelle, using some of the simple yet powerful techniques I describe below. I then asked her to rate her level of discomfort. It was a 1complete peace. I urged her to cast around in her body for the remnants of any of the disturbed feelings she had previously felt. She could not find them, no matter how hard she tried. The emotionally charged memories had been so thoroughly released that a physical shift had occurred in her body. Her bladder condition disappeared. In the three years since that office visit, it has never once returned.
How are such apparently miraculous healings possible?
Many years ago, treating patients was much more difficult for me. I am a urologist in the Los Angeles area. Urology is a surgical subspecialty, which means that I spend much of my time in the operating room. Despite this fact, urologists still see a significant percentage of chronic and functional problems in the office. Patients with functional problems have real complaints and symptoms, yet physical exams, lab work and x-rays reveal no anatomic or “physical” findings. I’ve always believed that what these patients are feeling is real and genuine, and that the problems are not “just in their heads” as many physicians are prone to think.
Chronic problems are those conditions that patients have over long periods of time. To me, a chronic problem means that the body cannot heal itself. Taken together, chronic and functional problems make up about 80% of the cases that walk into a primary care doctor’s office. Often, patients with these conditions get angry when I tell them that I cannot find the “cause” of their problem. After many years of urology practice, I found myself getting frustrated; I could dispense medications to treat the symptoms yet not be addressing the underlying cause.
When I first began to look for better ways to understand and treat chronic and functional problems, I had to look outside of the standard allopathic medical model. The reason I had to do this is because allopathic medicine is based on the belief that “the body needs medications or surgery to heal.” If you are interested in ways to get the body to heal itself, you’ve stepped beyond the realm of allopathic medicine. As I studied several different types of alternative healing, I saw a common thread. Whether found in acupuncture or acupressure or homeopathy or energy healing, the common belief is that the body tends to heal itself, and there is a healing energy that flows through the body that allows this to happen. If this energy gets blockedproducing either a congestion of dirty, stagnant energy, or a depletion of energythis predisposes the body to disease. All these systems, with their various techniques, try to re-establish flow of energy.
Early in my practice I noticed that I had a significant number of younger, sexually active women who would get recurrent urinary tract infections after intercourse. I rarely found an anatomic reason why this would be the case, despite doing a complete workup. I said to myself one day, “Many women are sexually active and are not getting urinary tract infections. So why do they recur in this sample of patients? It is almost as if the body’s healing energy is not getting down to the pelvic area; if it were, their immune system would know what to do to prevent the infection from getting started.” With this thought in mind, I began a study of the body’s healing energy.
I was fortunate at the time to come across a healing system called “Pranic Healing.” Master Stephen Co, one of the senior Pranic healing instructors in the world, was living and teaching in the Los Angeles area. I was able to spend a great deal of time studying the technique with him, as well as with the Grand Master of the system, Choa Kok Sui. Pranic healing is a powerful and effective system of energy healing. It incorporates all sorts of energy-related techniques, including feng shui, kundalini-based meditation, higher clairvoyance, sexual alchemy, and financial manifestation. Grand Master Choa has great ability to take complex esoteric topics and boil them down to their practical essence.
I began to use Pranic healing with my patients. It produced a number of recoveries like Michelle’s, and gained the notice of other staff members at my medical center. Master Co and I subsequently wrote a book on self-healing entitled Your Hands Can Heal You. This book is a treasure of techniques that you can use to increase your vitality, your level of personal energy, and your health. As an example, one chapter teaches two simple yogic exercise routines that will literally double or triple a person’s energy level. This is not like drinking a cup of coffee and getting a buzz for a couple of hours; the energy lasts the entire day. One of the biggest “complaints” that we get from folks who do these exercises is that their sex drive increases dramatically!
For the first couple of years that I was doing Pranic healing, I treated one to five patients a day in addition to my full-time urology schedule. When patients walked in the door, I used my hands to feel where the energy was out of balance in their bodies. I was able to sweep away the dirty, congested energy and subsequently pour some clean energy back.
Yet sometimes the treatment did not produce obvious results. Sometimes I would do a healing, fix the energetic defect and the patient would feel better. But they’d come back a week or two later and their energy would be out of whack again, and their symptoms would have recurred. What factors were involved, I wondered, when people didn’t heal as a result of the practice? Many of them were there because they hadn’t been helped with a standard medical approach either, so they had run out of options. I began to wonder, what might be causing the energetic defect to begin with?
A principle of Pranic healing (and all other energy healing modalities) is that energetic changes precede physical changes. This means that before anything manifests physically, it is already present in the energy field. The work of Dr. Robert Becker elucidates this fact. Dr. Becker is an orthopedic surgeon who worked at New York University. He experimented with the use of electrical currents on bone healing. He did some interesting experiments on salamanders. If you sever the tail or the leg of a salamander it will regenerate a new one. Dr. Becker did an experiment in which he removed both the tail and the leg of a salamander. Then, when it began to regenerate a new tail, he scraped off some of the tail cells and moved them up to the area of the severed leg. The tail cells, whose DNA had already differentiated into tail cells, changedand began to grow into normal leg cells. The same thing happened when he took regenerating leg cells and brought them down to the tail.
How did these cells know how to change so as to grow into the appropriate organ? Some researchers speculated that nearby nerves gave the signal, but further research showed these nerves to be silent. Becker’s work suggests the presence of a larger energetic template that directed the cells to grow and differentiate into what was needed at a particular site. Similarly, when you cut your finger, just enough cells grow to fill in the wound. The body “knows” when to stop.
One day I was hit with an intuitive flash. I realized that the biggest factor that causes blockage of the body’s healing energy is emotional issues, particularly how these are stored inand processed bythe body. Stress and negative emotions aren’t in the head; they are stored as tensions in the body. You don’t need a double-blind university study to convince yourself of this. If you think about the last time you were angry or scared or depressed, notice where you felt those emotions inside.
Stress and negative emotions are frequently stored in the smooth muscles. The smooth muscles are those muscles that function automatically, without our conscious control. If people store tension in the smooth muscles of the blood vessels going to the head, we might call this a migraine headache. If they store tension in the smooth muscles of the air passages of the lungs we might call that asthma. If they store tension in the smooth muscle of the intestinal tract, they might have symptoms like nausea or bloating, or diarrhea alternating with constipation, or vague abdominal pain, we might call that Irritable Bowel Syndrome or IBS. IBS is the second leading cause of missed work in the US, and accounts for some 50% of all visits to gastrointestinal specialists.
Emotions and Our Innate Healing Ability
Emotions stored in the body also affect our immune systems. Some of this work was beautifully compiled and summarized by Dr. Bernie Siegel, whose chapter appears elsewhere in this book. Dr. Siegel was a cancer surgeon at Yale University for thirty years. He recites study after study about how stress suppresses the function of white blood cells called T-cells, which are crucial to a healthy immune system. He observed that a small subset of his cancer patients did remarkably better than others, either living a lot longer than expected or tolerating their therapies more easily. A few even had spontaneous remissions. Dr. Siegel began to study these “exceptional cancer patients” to find out what traits they had in common, and discovered that they all looked at their cancers as representing or being the result of a psychological or spiritual conflict in their lives. Those patients who were able to look at their cancers in this way and then sought to make whatever changes were necessary did much better.
Another big breakthrough in understanding how emotions affect the flow of healing energy comes from the work of Dr. Paul Goodwin. In a paper on “Foundation Theory” he says that wherever stress and negative emotions are stored in the body, they create a “functional boundary condition in the nervous system”a blockage of the flow of the body’s healing energy. This might explain why chronic conditions persist. For instance, the stomach sheds all its old cells and produces a new lining every seven days. So how can ulcers continue to exist for long periods of time? Why shouldn’t all ulcers be healed within a week? They might be, unless the body’s healing energy is not getting to that part of the stomach.
I categorize emotions and their effects on the body in one of two main ways. First, there are distinct traumas that occur to people in their lives. Some of these might seem minor to an outsider looking in, but to the person who has experienced them they can have a big impact. Other times the traumas can be severe, including shocks like childhood abuse, rape, losing a parent or close friend, seeing or being involved in a serious accident, or war-time stress. These traumatic experiences are stored as memories inside our bodies at an unconscious level (some researchers say at a cellular level). Later on the unconscious mind will try to re-present these memories to our conscious minds so we can deal with them and resolve them. But because these memories are so painful, a part of us resists feeling or re-experiencing the memory. In order to keep these memories from coming to conscious awareness, the body has to clamp down internally. This internal clamping causes tension in the smooth muscles or skeletal muscles and is responsible for many of the functional diseases that people present with, ranging from hypertension to migraine headaches to chronic back pain to IBS.
Many times, the initial traumas are so deeply buried inside the body that they cannot be easily accessed by the conscious mind. When I was going through therapy it took me six months to get in touch with my deeper emotional pain and with the early memories that caused it. Before that time, anytime I got close to the pain I’d either fall asleep or “check out” and disassociate. Patients might likewise present with a physical disease and not be consciously aware of any emotions that could be contributing to it. I tell many patients, “Yes, you have a real physical ailmentbut this is probably secondary to stress or negative emotions which have physicalized in your body.” The patient might respond, “But I’m not aware of any stress or negative emotions in my life right now.” I might reply, “If you were consciously aware of the stress or emotions, you wouldn’t have the disease. Your body is doing such a good job of keeping the emotions or traumatic memories deeply buried that they are not coming to conscious awareness. But, the presence of the disease you have presupposes the existence of these emotional issues.” Emotional issues or traumatic memories are stored in that patient’s body, preventing the flow of healing energy.
Vast amounts of energy must be expended in order to keep painful emotions and memories held down in the body and outside of conscious awareness. In my opinion this energy drain is one of the leading causes of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and multiple chemical sensitivity disorder. These diseases are very real and the patients who have them are truly run down and depleted. The place to begin with these patients is by clearing any past emotional traumas so as to free up more energy for physical healing. We will discuss several very effective methods for clearing traumas later in this chapter.
SIDEBAR: Vast amounts of energy must be expended in order to keep painful emotions and memories held down in the body and outside of conscious awareness.
A second way to categorize emotions and their effect on the body is to assess how early events shaped the way that we handle or process emotions. One of the main functions of the unconscious mind is to keep us safe in our family while growing up. Often when we are young, events happen in our family that cause us to develop beliefs such as, “It’s not okay to show our anger or anxiety.” Showing these might upset our caretakers which would compromise our survival.
The problem with developing a global unconscious belief that says, “It’s not okay to feel your anger or anxiety” is that life will elicit these emotions whether we like it or not. As these emotions begin to arise in the body, the unconscious mind says, “It’s not okay to be feeling these things, it’s not safe. Not feeling or showing these emotions is what kept you alive when you were growing up.” Then the unconscious mind prompts the body to clamp down on these emotions, to hold the emotions down in the body and prevent them from coming to conscious awareness. This internal clamping down can present as a back pain or hypertension or asthma attack or headache or IBS or urinary urgency. It may present as susceptibility to catching a cold or the flu. It may show up as difficulty recovering from surgery, injury or illness , because so much of the body’s healing energy is tied up in the internal tension.
Harry, one of my clients, had chronic throat problems. He told me that as far back as he could remember, whenever a powerful emotion came up (either positive or negative) his throat would clamp down and get tight. He was also susceptible to getting sore throats and had three to four episodes of laryngitis a year during which he’d lose his voice. I did a session of hypnosis with him. I first had Harry focus on the tight sensation in his throat. Then we regressed that feeling, traveling all the way back in time to the first event he could recall. Harry was about 6 months old. The scene that unfolded was that he was crying inconsolably in the middle of the night and his father came to pick him up and comfort him. But his crying persisted, and after about 30 minutes his sleep-deprived father got frustrated and put Harry back somewhat abruptly in his crib with a mild jar (perhaps letting him drop 2 inches down into the crib).
As a result of this seemingly minor event, Harry’s unconscious mind developed several beliefs, one of which was, “It is not okay to express strong emotions like anger or fear.” As I had Harry re-live several repetitions of the event, I had him get in touch with and express his anger towards his father. Next, I had him look at the event from a more adult perspective during which he could understand that his father hadn’t meant him harm, and certainly didn’t mean to instill a belief that engendered lifelong emotional stifling. He proceeded to have a real breakthrough at the unconscious body level in his beliefs about expressing his feelings. That was more than 4 years ago, and Harry has had no more problems with either laryngitis or sore throats. He is able to feel and appreciate and express all of his emotions now in a healthy way.
This is more than academic theory. A model of how people abnormally process their emotions, and how to shift them, is responsible for the highest cure rate in the world among patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain. It has been well documented in the books Healing Back Pain, and The Mind-Body Prescription by Dr. John Sarno. Interestingly, it is not our negative emotions that cause the problembut rather our resistance to feeling these emotions. My friend and internationally known psychologist Gay Hendricks once said, “All emotions are gentle and short-lived, unless we resist feeling them.”
SIDEBAR: It is not our negative emotions that cause the problembut rather our resistance to feeling these emotions.
In Dr. Sarno’s academic experience, his patients have about an 70% rate of curing their severe musculoskeletal pain (with regards to both pain and function). An additional 15% of his patients are much improved (meaning they are 40-80% better). Many of his patients had been in pain for 20 to 30 years prior to seeing him. Many had already undergone surgery or epidural injections into their spinal columns.
The way that he gets this amazing cure rate is by encouraging his patients, when they have pain, to ask themselves, “I wonder what I am angry or anxious about?” Once they get in touch with their anger or anxiety, the goal is not to push these emotions away or to act them out, but rather to allow themselves to feel them fully. Gay Hendricks describes this process of “putting non-judgmental awareness on what you are feeling” as “presencing,” and it is highly effective. For those of us who have spent our whole lives repressing or running away from our anger and anxiety, this can be a long learning process. We may require outside help. But it is essential to go through this process if we want to learn how to free up the flow of our body’s healing energy and regain our health and well-being.
Several years ago a friend of mine was having a challenge in his marriage. He told me that his wife had made a comment that he thought was really stupid. In fact he thought it was so dumb that he told himself, “I don’t think I can stay married to someone who is stupid enough to say something like this.” Just pondering this and all of its implications brought up a tremendous amount of fear. What would happen to his house and his children should he and his wife split up? As this fear began to arise, he pushed it away, since he didn’t like the way it felt. He thought about how spiritual a person he is, about how he’d meditated daily for years and about how “spiritual people aren’t supposed to feel these types of feelings or think these types of things.” Later that night he went to a movie with his wife. The fear kept coming up and he kept pushing it awayuntil the middle of the movie when he went into the rest room, and had a full-on panic attack.
He remembered some of the principles that we’ve been discussing here. He decided to allow himself to feel whatever he was feelingno matter how disgusting, scary, or un-evolved it waswithout either judging it or taking it out on his wife. As he allowed himself to feel the feelings and breathe into them, the intensity rapidly diminished. He actualized the teaching that, “All emotions are gentle and short-lived, unless we resist feeling them.” Once he fully opened up to feeling what he was experiencing, he stopped projecting stupidity onto his wife (who is a high-achieving executive with an honors degree from college). After the emotional flood died down, he came to view his wife as an excellent source of advice and guidance!
Rapid Healing Techniques
We are blessed to have been born at a time where there are very good techniques and modalities available to help us quickly resolve these emotional issues. I will discuss several of the best ones here. First, there is a whole evolving field known as “Energy Psychology.” The main belief behind this approach is that negative emotions are caused by disruptions in the body’s energy system. If a person uses their fingers to hold or tap on certain energy points in the body while they are mentally focused on a traumatic memory or limiting belief or phobia, this clears the emotions out of the energy pathways, and the person experiences rapid and long-lasting relief.
At the outset of therapy I ask the client, “When you think of this problem, where do you feel it in your body?” Most folks feel emotions in their chest, solar plexus or throat, but others might feel it in their back, head or pelvis. I know that I am completely finished with the therapy if the person, when thinking about the original issue, can no longer feel the emotional pain in the body anymore. When this happens it means that the problem is cleared out at the unconscious level. The result is usually permanent. For me, this is the gold standard for whether a psychological intervention works.
Two of the most effective energy therapies are Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT). I have used both extensively in my clinicwith phenomenally good results. I have personally used EFT to completely resolve a number of cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for which there is generally no cure within the standard psychological paradigm. EFT can be applied very quickly in the clinical setting to relieve stress, and about 70% to 80% of the time can be used to improve physical pain. Dr. Joseph Mercola is a well-known physician with a huge practice in the Chicago area and the largest “natural healing” web site in the world. His main emphasis is on finding natural ways for people to heal themselves, especially through diet and exercise. He, like many enlightened doctors, has seen the clear connection between stress and illness and espouses the regular use of EFT for many of his patients. With Michelle, the 21-year-old woman with severe bladder pain with whom I started this story, I used TAT. If you are interested in checking out these modalities, the web sites are www.emofree.com (EFT) and www.unstressforsuccess.com (TAT).
Sometimes painful traumas are very deeply repressed and people are not consciously aware of their presencethey can’t remember them. In the hypnosis literature, inflammatory bowel diseases (such as Crohn’s disease or Ulcerative colitis) and migraine headaches are classically associated with repressed anger. I can promise you though, that if you went up to person with a flare-up of Crohn’s disease or a migraine headache and pulled out a gun and said, “Tell me what you’re angry about or I’ll pull the trigger,” they wouldn’t consciously know. In this case it is helpful to make the assumption that the presence of the disease presupposes the existence of repressed emotional issues or traumas. So how do we access that repressed material?
Hypnosis can be tremendously effective. The word hypnosis sometimes conjures up stage show antics. The truth of the matter is that when someone is in a trance they are fully in control of their actions and cannot be forced to do anything against their will. About 95% of hypnotists use a “progressive relaxation” technique that draws the client into a light trance, where they are receptive to direct suggestions. This type of hypnosis can be effective.
However, with deep-seated issues or serious illnesses, I have found that a deeper level of trance, followed by regression back to the original root cause of the problem, is necessary. A few hypnosis schools teach this advanced work. The best one I’ve encountered is the Banyan Hypnosis Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A couple of years ago I took Cal Banyan’s 5-PATH tm hypnosis. 5-PATH tm is a systematic way of doing regression-based therapy that can be easily taught and replicated. It consists of several steps. The first involves inducing a deep level of trance called somnambulism. In the somnambulistic state the “critical factor” of the mind is bypassed. This allows access to deeply hidden and repressed material that might otherwise take standard psychotherapy months or years to identify.
During somnambulism a person can regress back to the first event that is responsible for their emotional issue. Once at the root issue, there are ways to work through the event, learn important lessons, release pent-up emotions, and even forgive those who hurt us (as a way of empowering ourselves, not letting the perpetrator off the hook). Regression often produces a shift that is so deep that the body changes, and its function is improved. 5-PATH tm work is incredibly powerful and life changing, and I highly recommend its study for those who are serious about helping others at a deeply transformative level.
These techniques can heal emotional issues at such a deep level that physical healing then results. The healer versed in them might perform feats that might seem magical or miraculous. Their abilities are a gift to the world. The best healers will always be focused on healing themselves first and will hold in mind the possibility of unlimited success for their clients.
Pushing Above Our Upper Limits
There is one last level to consider in healing. This is what Gay Hendricks refers to as the “upper limits” problem, which says that we all have an unconscious limit to how much positive energy we can handle coming at us from the world. If the energy begins to exceed this level, we will usually unconsciously sabotage ourselves so as to bring the energy back down again.
Almost everyone I’ve ever shared this with can relate to the upper limits problem. Right before a romantic three-day weekend, a fight breaks out between you and your partner. One of the children gets sick before a family trip. You obtain a much-needed vacation from work, and on the first day away from the office, you fall ill with the flu, and spend your vacation in bed.
For some people, having physical heath and vitality, financial success, relationship intimacy, or a full social schedule all represent too much positive energy, and this calls for an unconscious sabotage. Agnes, a nurse I work with, grew up in a poor section of East Los Angeles, an area known for crime and gangs. She is smart, pretty, and friendly, but cannot seem to form a relationship with any man who doesn’t have a criminal record or history of incarceration. I have often thought about why Agnes isn’t able to get into a stable relationship with a nice guy, perhaps a professional of some sort. After learning about the upper limits problem I could understand that being in a loving relationship with someone who has the ability for emotional intimacy and financial stability would represent too much positive energy for Agnesit would make her feel uncomfortable. If you’ve ever heard the expression “water seeks its own level,” what this means for my nurse friend is that she only feels chemistry for guys who will keep her energy level in her known comfort zone.
If we think of the upper limits problem in broader terms, we might say that everyone has a limit or a neurological threshold for how much “stuff” they can handle coming at them from their environment. There are a number of studies now showing that children who grew up in a dysfunctional environment or who underwent major traumas actually have structural changes in their brains that affect how well they can (or rather, cannot) handle stress. A person raised in a dysfunctional environment tends to have a much lower threshold than a person raised in a better home. Whenever we are pushed above our threshold we develop a generic stress/anxiety feeling. We then try to deal with that stress through a variety of coping mechanisms learned during childhood. These include anger, depression, fear, substance abuse, overeating, plus others considered more healthy such as exercising, talking with friends, or isolation. Obviously it would be a great idea to be able to raise our own stress threshold rather than trying to alter our external circumstances all of the time (which is what is advocated by most stress reduction workshops). Just imagine if you could raise your stress threshold so much that no matter what was happening at home or at work, and no matter how hectic life became, it couldn’t make you anxious. Now the technology has arrived to be able to do just that.
A couple of decades ago, researchers decided to evaluate advanced yogis. We’re talking about people who have meditated 6 hours a day for 15 years and who were amazingly relaxed, expansive, brilliant, and at peace in the most trying of circumstances. The researchers hooked these yogis up to EEG machines to find out what was going on with their brain waves during meditation. They made two distinct findings.
First, they found that these yogis were able to maintain conscious awareness while they slowed their brain waves from normal (waking) beta waves, down to alpha, then theta, and all the way down to delta patternstheta is normally found only in REM sleep and delta is usually found only in deep, dreamless sleep. Second, they found that these yogis could think using their whole brain, as opposed to most of us, who are predominantly either right-brained or left-brained.
At about that same time research was going on involving bi-aural beat technology. Bi-aural beat technology demonstrated that, if someone is wearing stereo headphones and 2 different frequencies are played, one in each ear (for example 400 hertz in the left ear, and 410 hertz in the right), that whatever the difference is between the two (in this case 10 hertz), the brain waves will be entrained to go to that frequency. So in simplistic terms what I’m saying is that by using stereo headphones, sound wave technology can be used to slow the brain waves down to the alpha or theta or delta range.
What is interesting about bringing someone’s brain waves down to delta and then keeping them there for a while is that delta waves, although they are slow, contain tremendous amounts of energy. The waveforms are large. If you hold someone in delta for a while, you are forcing the brain to handle a lot more energy than it is used to. This forces the brain to develop new neural pathways to handle the increase in energy. It’s like taking someone who doesn’t exercise and having a drill sergeant show up at their door every day to make them run two miles: they have to develop more muscular strength in their legs and better pulmonary and cardiovascular ability to be able to handle the exercise.
In order to handle the increased energy of being held in delta, the two sides of the brain are forced to improve their cross-hemispheric communication. This releases endorphins, so participants oftentimes feel euphoric after a session. As cross-hemispheric communication is increased, people begin to naturally think with both sides of their brain. Studies have also shown that it is almost impossible to have depression or anxiety if you are looking at any situation in your life through a “whole brain” approach. A few months after I had started listening to this technology my wife and I got into a disagreement. I was looking at the problem from my usual logical perspective and my wife was being (in my opinion) overly emotional. Then suddenly I found myself seeing things from her perspective; I could see the problem from a whole-brain perspective and could understand exactly where she was coming from. Nothing remained to argue about.
The best source of this bi-aural technology that I’ve found is a company called Centerpointe Research Institute ( www.centerpointe.com). They produced a product called “The Holosync Solution” that will create the changes that I’ve delineated above. The Holosync tapes contain the bi-aural tones embedded underneath the soothing sounds of rainfall and crystal gongs. Since I’ve been listening to this technology my life has improved unimaginably as have the lives of several dozen of my friends and colleagues who are also listening. When patients come in wanting to relieve stress and anxiety, or when they ask for a very fast and effective way to get all the benefits of deep meditation I refer them to Holosync.
SIDEBAR: We are blessed today with simple, inexpensive, accessible techniques that have the potential to revolutionize our sense of wellness, shift the patterns that trap us in chronic disease, and dramatically raise our thresholds of happiness.
After using this technology for a relatively short period of time I observed that my own stress threshold markedly increased. I noticed that my busiest days at work, the ones that used to leave me tense, exhausted, and short-tempered, now had little effect. I also noticed that it was easier for me to share time with my family at home or on vacations; the increased energy generated by the fun and intimacy didn’t push me over my threshold. I refer to this technology as “getting even with your past,” since it is often a challenging childhood that lowers the threshold to begin with.
Another benefit of this technology is development of a “witness perspective.” This means that you can develop the ability to step outside of yourself and witness your thoughts and emotions rather than being caught up in them. One of the main principles in The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is to be present in the now and to watch or observe your thoughts and emotional reactions to things. This process is extremely valuable although it can be difficult to do unless one has developed a witness perspective. In The Dark Side of the Lightchasers, author Debbie Ford talks about embracing our shadow and about coming to terms with and accepting all of the negative and disowned parts of ourselves in order to be whole again. Ford’s explanations and processes are great and can be much faster and more easily implemented if one has developed a witness perspective.
We are blessed today with simple, inexpensive, accessible techniques that have the potential to revolutionize our sense of wellness, shift the patterns that trap us in chronic disease, and dramatically raise our thresholds of happiness. I challenge you to experiment with these methods and see what results they produce in your own life. And as you have the courage to travel healing journey, I salute the divinity within you and trust God’s blessings with you always.
Eric Robins, MD
Postal address for EFT is:
EFT, PO Box 269 Coulterville, CA 95311
Physical Address (not for mailing): 36808 Greencroft Close, The Sea Ranch, CA 95497
