The more you know about science, the more room there is for wonder and awe.” ~ Rich Roll
“You actually can’t come close to the science of atomic physics, and astrophysics, and human biology, without an overwhelming sense of ‘we are just so far beyond logic; we are so far beyond the material world.’
We are these entities that are moving with such power, and we have been kept from that power…” ~ Dr. Zach Bush
I lamented to Scott, our intern this past summer at The Wellness Spot, that my resume is a cobbled hodgepodge. When he’s about to be clever, he smiles wryly, preparing delivery like a comedian:
“Actually,” he said, “you’ve been working in energy your whole career.”
Let’s talk about BioEnergetics & Health!
Around 2003, while shopping for camping gear in Denver, a cheery young sales rep at REI asked me what I did for work. “Energy,” I said, fatigued by the very thought of my sunlight-deprived, cube-constrained, and conservative corporate job.
He replied, with tons of enthusiasm, “So do I! I do Reiki! What about you?”
“Oh, not that kind. I work for Xcel, the electric and gas utility.”
He was still beaming, “We are all energy!”
Corporate utility culture assured me a daily dose of disconnection and perpetual stress. It seemed to express itself physically; my left arm and hand were numb and tingly, as if shot up with novacaine, and I got sick a lot with whatever flu was making the rounds.
My fellow marketers dismissed me as a “tree-hugger,” a quick route to political fratricide. Their banter went as deep as rehashing the previous night’s episode of Survivor. No one else seemed bothered by a hypocrisy that wound me up tight: wind turbines figured prominently in marketing, for example, though most of Xcel’s power came from coal and the corporation fought mightily on all fronts against energy efficiency and cleantech projects … my projects.
I didn’t belong to this tribe.
When my energy is out-of-flow, so to speak, I experience an interwoven crisis of spirit, body, and mind that I have had difficulty understanding and healing.
The Intersection of BioEnergetics & Health
Tripping Toward the Light
I have been on a mission to understand this “energy crisis” for a long time and took matters into my own hands to learn about nutritional, genetic biochemistry, the energetics of the human biofield, and the bridge that connects these elements of well-being, all of which have been ignored by conventional, industrialized, medicine.
Muscle testing, an effective treatment for the panic triggered by my job, fear and isolation, was an utter mystery to me. Bikram yoga was my sweat-soaked addiction. Acupuncture and ayurvedic massage felt wonderful, but couldn’t get me past “the grip” of a bound-up neck. Sunday’s moving meditation on the sun-soaked trails of the Rocky Mountains were therapeutic but wore away by Tuesday.
Emotional Freedom Technique (tapping), chiropractic adjustments and vagal nerve activation would have helped, but I didn’t discover them until many years later. I spent lunches working out at a gym lifting weights, and my ‘guns’ were blowing out of my blouses.
Going on appearances, I was fit but in reality I was a mess. One night, I stood in the middle of my living room quaking through a full-blown panic attack until the sun came up. This “energy crisis” set my heart racing.
Conventional medicine (drugs, talk therapy) actually made things (insomnia, constipation, anxiety, chattering mind) worse. “Energy work” in popular culture resided in new age spiritual leaders like Chopra and Tolle (brought to the fore by Oprah and Oz). Books about secrets and miracles, didn’t resonate with me, although satsangs led by yogis speaking in deep resonating timber, and audio relaxation tapes, helped ease my relentless “body-mind.”
I had studied Zen and practiced meditation as a student at Wesleyan University in the 80s. (Herbert Benson, the Harvard medical professor who gave meditation the scientific name, relaxation response, graduated from Wesleyan in ’57.) Not far away, the same year I graduated from high school, Jon Kabat-Zinn established mindfulness-based programs at UMass.
Something was missing, just the same and that was a health practitioner who could embrace the totality of me, to help me help myself.
About then, Dr. Valerie Hunt, a scientist at UCLA, had developed a high frequency device (the AuraMeter™) that recorded the electrical energy (the human aura) from the body’s surface. In the 1950s, she established the neuromuscular patterns of anxiety and anger at a time when the only therapies presented by conventional medical practitioners were chemical (drugs) and behavioral (talk therapy).
That hadn’t changed much by the time I was coming up.
Do you wonder what your life could be like if we had been raised with a consciousness of the energetics of the human condition, and not confined by the physiological, biochemical and behavioral beliefs about health and well-being?
I do.
Beyond Biology
I was a very long way from interacting with anyone who was versed in Valerie Hunt’s work, James Oschman (“Energy Medicine, The Scientific Basis”) or Richard Berger (“Vibrational Medicine: The #1 Handbook on Subtle Energy Therapies”) or Jerry Tennant (“Healing is Voltage, The Handbook”).
The post-Flexner Report, pre-YouTube United States was a health information desert … where devices like the radionic Rae machine had been banned, the electro-magnetic Rife machine and its creator Royal Rife pilloried, and chiropractors — who might use devices like transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) and light lasers and pulsating magnetic frequencies (PEMF) — were attacked by the AMA and called quacks.
Learn more about Rife technology from this great book.
You don’t know what you don’t know, and this stuff I certainly did not know!
Boulder was just up the road, but no practitioner or health collaborative whom I knew, could explain the biochemical, structural, emotional and energetic connections between yoga, hiking, muscle testing, meditation, organic vegetables, nutri-bio-chemistry, sunshine … and well-being.
An acquaintance suggested HeartMath to me, as a spiritual quest to love the universe and each other unconditionally. But HeartMath Institute is so much more!
HeartMath Institute is concerned with the physical and the energetic, as well as the divine. The Institute is a proponent of heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is influenced by breathing and is an indication of the health of the autonomic nervous system; an imbalance between sympathetic and parasympathetic has a lot to do with balanced mood and proper elimination. It is a useful tool to assess the effects of therapies like PEMF, yoga and meditation.
Conventional medicine determines health based on fixed ranges for blood pressure and heart rate. A more accurate index of health is the ability of the heart, and our complex information signaling web, to adapt to stressors which is what HRV measures.
I tend to hold my breath when under social stress. In “the mile-high city,” I was dehydrated, breath-less, rarely at rest, and jammed up in a way that conventional medicine could not explain or address.
These are some of the symptoms of sensitivities to electrosmog (or EHS): clumping red-blood cells, heart palpitations, chest pain with anxiety, down-regulation of the parasympathetic and up-regulation of sympathetic typical of the flight-or-flight response, and cold, numbness or tingling in the extremities. These may also be symptoms of working at a job, or living in a society, where you don’t fit in … or residual trauma.
The biggest obstacle for me, and I suspect for many in the US, has been finding practitioners who can take the time to sit, to educate, to help people help themselves. Not everyone, after all, can (or wants to) spend their afternoons watching Dr. Oz and surfing the NIH and PubMed databases.
Will the practitioner of the future explain how energetics effect physical health, in terms that make sense to western sensibilities?
I think a lot about those kinds of questions as I create my own practice as a health coach. Looking for answers to my own “energy crisis,” I headed inward, believing the answers hid at the biochemical, physiological level. I was not going to wait around for conventional medicine or the US government to get on board.
I delved into myelination with Joan Borysenko, identified with Elaine Aron’s “highly sensitive” people, and discovered Candace Pert, who, through psychoneuroimmunology, would explain the science of Chopra, the energetics of molecules and the body/mind connection. I took Dr. Kharrazian’s “Brain Rescue” course.
I had yet to hear of Fritz-Albert Popp’s biophotonics, Valerie Hunt’s chakra imaging, Gerald Pollack’s and Nassim Haramein’s information-bearing water, Thornton Streeter’s biofield science, Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, or Eileen McKusick’s tuning forks.
Had I not traveled to Orlando for Dr. Joe Mercola’s ACIM conference in 2018, I would never have heard of, or experienced, BioWell, a Russian Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) camera and similar energy therapies. (Check out this interview by Dr. Mercola regarding bioelectricity.)
Into the Cell: Enzymes
Perhaps it was necessary to go deep into the cell before looking up, out and beyond biology. For instance, I knew nothing of enzymes:
“Enzymes catalyze specific reactions of chemicals either to create structure through molecular assemblies or to provide the electro-chemical fire to run the cellular engines and ultimately keep the entire system working efficiently.” ~ Gerber p 57
Or that the biochemical processes of the body, and the co-factors supporting them like vitamins, are vibrational and bioenergetic:
“Vitamins facilitate proper energy flow through the electron switching mechanisms of the cell. These bioelectric systems control the basic processes of growth, replication and repair … vitamins assist the body in promoting cellular health and wellness at a vibrational or bioenergetic level.” ~ Gerber, p 443
“Antioxidants are molecules that fight damage by free radicals, unstable molecules that can harm cellular structures. Antioxidants do this by giving electrons to the free radicals and neutralizing them.“
Or this …
“All chemical reactions have to have a catalyst in order to occur. You can’t just put two substances together, you have to have a catalyst, and the catalyst is electromagnetic energy.”
BioFields, Meridiens
Organs, like the heart, are not machinery: the heart emits the strongest rhythmic electromagnetic field in the body. I had never heard of a “biofield.” This is what it can look like:
The year I was born (1961), a Korean medical professor, Bong Han-Kim, discovered an “anatomical substratum.” It offered evidence of the system of “acupuncture meridians and collaterals.”
Filled with a transparent fluid containing more nucleic acids (such as DNA) than any other tissue, it is like a web, a matrix, throughout the body, and it has electrical properties.
Damage to this system can ‘modify the frequency and amplitude of the heart and change the peristaltic motion of intestines.’ It can also reduce nerve excitability and decrease muscular contractions.”
If your heart tends to speed up and trip, and your intestines move like sludge, this is interesting stuff.
By 2002, this substratum had been renamed the primo-vascular (or vessel) system (PVS).
“The discovery of the PVS in intravascular and extravascular spaces, in the central and peripheral nervous systems, on the surface of and within viscera, in cutaneous layers, and in most body systems, may signify a novel and complete morpho-dynamic system, with the potential to reshape paradigms in medicine and manual therapy.”
Is there a medical or nursing school in the United States incorporating these concepts … biofields, morpho-dynamics, meridiens … into the teaching of the next generation of physicians?
Challenging Convention
Xcel brought me on as a consultant because I had some knowledge of telecom and fiber optics, but my real interest was in clean energy technologies like solar, wind, organic biomass, smart homes and electric cars.
Many of these energy technologies challenged the interests of coal and gas companies which had aligned with the utility.
I was a contributor to a seminal blog on cleantech and sustainability. About that time, United Technologies in Connecticut agreed to give me a tour of their fuel cell operation.
One version of a fuel cell takes water (H2O) and splits the hydrogen from the oxygen, while crossing over a membrane, to create an electrical charge. In a similar fashion, energy (ATP) is created through several ‘complexes’ crossing over the myriad folds of the mitochondrial membrane of the human cell.
Fuel cells generate electricity. Solar PV panels convert sunshine to electricity. Hydro dams, steam and wind spin turbines to generate electricity.
None store energy.
More on BioEnergetics & Health …
Dr. Stephanie Seneff of MIT presents the case that our skin is a solar-powered battery. She explains how our cells store energy, working with electrically-charged sulfates and an enzyme called eNOS (endothelial nitric oxide synthase). Dr. Seneff is an active participant in conversations about nutri-genomics at NutriGenetic Research Institute.
None of these power technologies possess, innately, an information signaling network … the kind that complex human beings with primo-vascular systems, biofields, cellular fluids, and pre-historic mitochondria do.
Energetics & Mitochondria
Although I’ve been repeating in this blog the convention that “mitochondria are the powerhouses of the human cell” there is disagreement in the scientific community about metabolism and whether mitochondria are the one and only energy source.
This is Sayer Ji writing for GreenMedInfo:
“[a study] extraordinary in its hypothesis and implications, and titled “Beyond Mitochondria, What would be the Energy Source of the Cell?”, argues that melanin (the archetypal pigment molecule) is capable of providing up to 90% of the cell’s energy needs through capturing and converting sunlight into chemical energy (specifically, disassociating and reforming H20). If proven true, this view would profoundly decenter the glucose-centric view of cellular energetic which presently dominates cell biology, with many deep-reaching implications to the field of nutrition and medicine.”
This is from a website on sunlight and health:
“One third of the energy your body consumes comes from the food you eat. The vast majority of the energy your body needs to maintain systemic equilibrium comes from environmental infrared light exposure.”
“Every metabolic process, enzyme reaction, muscular movement, the digestion of food and the burning of fat are augmented by sunlight energy.”
“A reduction of natural light energy causes a slowdown in these processes that leads to decreased metabolism, reduced burning of fat, reduced vitality & compromised immunity.”
Frequency, power, light, spin, charge, mass, amplitude, coherence, flow, stability, hydration, vitality, signatures, patterns.
This language needs to be an integral part of the science of holistic human health and well-being, not an adjunct to conventional medical beliefs.
More on BioEnergetics & Health …
Invisible but Measurable, Scientific & Spiritual
Conventional medicine denies what science is proving to be true and what ancient wisdom has always known.
“Energy is controlling your life, not chemicals and drugs. … You live in an energy environment … What we are calling alternative kinds of medicine all of a sudden seem to be kind of mainstream.” ~ Bruce Lipton
Let’s get serious about bioenergetics and health! What is the intersection between bioenergetics and health?
Bruce Lipton was a professor in the University of Wisconsin system, teaching medical students about the science and biology of magnetic fields in the 1980s. It would be years before his scientific work would become part of the public conversation around health.
Around that time, the movie, “What the Bleep Do We Know: Down the Rabbit Hole” was released to theaters (or Blockbuster, I can’t remember!)
We are not matter, we are energetic atoms, moving in waves.
Newton is out; Einstein (and quantum physics) are in.
We are light. Nature energizes us at the atomic level. It gives life through myriad fields of energy. It connects the physical to the spiritual and universal, in ways previously unimaginable to the western mind.
It is possible to measure an energy field in the form of light that radiates from the human body. That light is a measure of health and well-being.
Healers move energy and influence biology. This is why the intersection between bioenergetics and health is crucial.
“Healers can accelerate the kinetic activity of enzymes in a fashion similar to the effects of high-intensity magnetic fields.” ~ Gerber, p 148
“The activity of the enzymes affected by the healers always seemed to be in a direction that was toward greater overall health and balanced metabolic activity of the organism.” ~ Gerber, p 149
“The energetic fields of healers [have] … the ability to reassemble disordered molecules such as enzymes.” ~ Gerber, p 149
“Evidence is accumulating that vibrational therapies actually deal with the transfer of frequency-specific energetic informational patterns and not with direct molecular effects.” ~ Gerber, p 507
In 2005, Lipton published, “Biology of Belief.” We can now find Bruce Lipton, Candace Pert and Lynn Taggert (author of “What Doctors Don’t Tell You) on PBS!
“Explore breakthroughs in the fields of energy medicine, quantum physics, DNA and genetics, the biochemistry of emotions and the power of the heart, mind and intentions. See how the old conventional healthcare models, which have relied on surgery and prescription drugs, are being challenged by a wave of dramatic, non-invasive mind-body and energy-based healing techniques. While many of these techniques are centuries old, they are now generating worldwide studies with remarkable results.” ~ Candace Smith, Booklist Online
Zach Bush, a brilliant triple-board certified MD, draws together myriad influences on health, like the microbiome, nutrition and soil integrity. A stirring orator and deep thinker, he is moving conventional conversations around health away from the materialism of medical science into the realm of energetic healing, the science of resonating frequencies and information signaling. On YouTube!
He speaks of the disconnect of identity, at the cellular level, of how a lonely damaged phenotype becomes a chronic disease, like cancer. When it cannot communicate with the larger reality and community around it, it becomes degraded and damaged.
The same can be said of the larger organism, of disconnected and stressed-out human beings and a diminished planet.
“We all emanate electro-magnetic frequency, anything does, a rock does, a tree does. Any solid form will resonate an electro-magnetic field off of it. And each of those, like light frequency, red light having a different frequency than blue light. That’s the visible spectrum, but then you’ve got spectrum of frequency going all the way out in every direction. To almost the infinity points in those two directions.” ~ Zach Bush, MD, “On The Science & Spirituality of Human And Planetary Transformation”
Russell Brand — intellectual, authentic, and provocatively outspoken — gets this, too!
Gaining Back Your Power
This article wanders like a vagus nerve! The point I am making is this: bioenergetics in its many forms plays a big role in our health. Energy can harm and it can heal. But first, it must be recognized and respected. To embrace energetics (whether it be from sunlight, a Reiki healer, or a device like the Rife machine) is to gain power over your own well-being.
If you can get to it, “Beyond Materialism: Transforming our Approach to Wellbeing,” takes place in New Zealand, April 2019. The conference aims to “bring together some of the world’s most respected, advanced health and well-being medical doctors and holistic practitioners. They work in multi-dimensional ways; integrating leading edge science, spirituality and natural therapies.”
A Final Note …
Utilities are governed by regulators who are political appointees of the governor of the state. Their policies and programs are meant to reflect the beliefs of the public whom they serve.
I was “downsized” from that job at Xcel after the humiliating and farcical exercise of re-applying for my own job. I went on to direct Colorado Interfaith Power & Light, presenting Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” to faith-based organizations and calling for moral awareness about climate change … agitated for solar requirements in utility resource planning … planted organic xeriscaped gardens … and hugged my dogs (as well as trees).
In December 2018, Xcel Energy, the utility that opposed those solar requirements over a decade ago, announced its plans to go 100% clean energy.
I hope you enjoyed this article on BioEnergetics & Health. If you want to learn more about the intersection of BioEnergetics & Health, keep reading Holistic Haven of Health. BioEnergetics & Health…
Heather Rae is a functional health coach with certifications in integrative nutrition, functional genetic analysis, and “green” building. Her practice is informed by chiropractic, traditional naturopathy, and functional, environmental and energetic medicine. Heather owns and operates The Wellness Spot, a boutique retreat for detoxification and spiritual renewal in the heart of Maine, which has hosted over 280 guests from 11 countries.
Check out her inaugural article on Naturopathic Earth welcoming you to her Holistic Haven of Health. And read her great article on Methylation. Hope you liked this BioEnergetics & Health excerpt.