Energy Healing Part 2: Consciousness at Work in the Body

Hi everyone. This is Ky Dickens and you're listening to The Telepathy Tapes podcast. In Season one, nonspeakers showed us that telepathy is possible shattering our assumptions about the world itself. This season, we're turning to others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create.

What if only by listening to those who've been ignored, we could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from, and where we're going? This is The Telepathy Tapes, and we're opening up the next channel.

Last week we stepped into a world that many people write off as fantasy. A world where teeth are removed without anesthesia, where a healer can sense a person's home across an ocean. And where diseases are put into remission by just hands skating over a body. And we ended on the question, if something is truly moving between us during healing, what is it? And can science catch it in the act?

Today we're picking up exactly where we left off. Not in the realm of myth or anecdote, but inside labs, hospitals, and research centers where scientists are trying to measure what healers feel, what patients experience, and what skeptics can't fully explain. In part one of this episode last week, many healers said they weren't working with energy the way most of us imagine it.

In fact, they might be working with something more subtle like information or an informational field, and that's why they could do energy healing over a distance. And that explanation made a lot of sense to me, but here's where it gets complicated, some of the most rigorous lab studies on energy healing suggest that electromagnetic fields may be involved, and those two things don't line up easily.

If healing works across a continent or even the globe, it cannot be explained by electromagnetics alone. But if labs are detecting electromagnetic changes during energy healing, it can't be only information either. So that's a paradox. This may not just be energy, and it may not just be information. It may be both or something larger or a confluence of mechanisms we're only beginning to understand.

By the end of this episode, you'll hear about some of the most groundbreaking and convincing research ever done on energy healing research that's already changing how major institutions think about this field. But even with that data, the question of why energy healing works is still elusive. So to start, I think we look at a nuts and bolts study, something very measurable.

What I want to know is why, why do we experience these things?

This is actor Tim Daley in last week's episode, we shared the moment he went from skeptic to believer. After a terrible skiing accident left him with two broken legs and less than 10 days before he had to be back on a film set, he was out of options.

And what happened next with energy healer Jill Blakeway didn't just speed up his recovery. It challenged everything he thought was possible. Here's Jill Blakeway.

He could feel the energy running through his legs and his legs would vibrate, uh, completely outta his control. I would say things like, try and stop it.

And he couldn't. It was like his legs had been taken over and he was back at work within about a week to 10 days. He healed very, very quickly.

After that experience, Jill and Tim wanted to understand what was actually happening between them. So they went into a lab to be measured, monitored, and studied.

Researchers turned to technology that can measure the smallest shifts inside the body. One of those measurements is called heart rate variability or HRV. It's the tiny change in time between each heartbeat, and it's one of the clearest windows we have into stress, relaxation, and the body's ability to return to balance.

So Jill, why measure HRV in this kind of work? You know, what exactly does it tell us?

The heart has waves. These waves should be very coherent again, and for most of us, particularly when we're stressed, it becomes very choppy and incoherent, and there are waves of different lengths and things like that. A healer's job is to organize themselves in such a way that the patient can calibrate themselves against it and get back to a homeostasis.

Before diving into what scientists found when they studied Jill and Tim together, I wanted to understand first what researchers observed years earlier when they studied Jill on her own.

Researchers put an EKG on my heart and an EEG on my brain while I worked. And what we found is that my heart waves and my brainwaves go at the same pace. It's called internal coherence in biofield science. So I become internally coherent and at that point I think all I am is something that people can calibrate themselves against. I don't think I'm doing anything that clever, but then the patient calibrates against my very coherent biofield and I have to live quite well to, to maintain that coherent biofield. When I realized what I was doing, I gave up drinking and my party days were over, and that's the only bit of effort I put in to the whole thing. But the key to it is to explain to everyone you have a biofield, and by biofield I mean that every little cell has an electromagnetic field.

Every organ has an electromagnetic field. We measure the ones of the heart and the brain in medicine, but your liver has an electromagnetic field, and all those fields are working together as an information system. And you have the same kind of biofield that I have.

So now with that baseline, the question becomes simple.

If Jill reaches coherence in her body, when she's healing, can the person she's working on reach it to? And that question was important to Tim as well.

I still, as does Jill, wanna find some people who will put it into a context of scientific process or method.

Dr. Leah Lagos was the expert who investigated what was happening between Jill and Tim in the lab.

She's a health and performance psychologist and specializes in using highly sensitive biofeedback technology to track these subtle shifts in heart rate variability. So she measured Jill's HRV as Jill entered the Healing State, a state where the heart's rhythms become more organized and coherent.

Here's Dr. Lagos explaining her findings to Tim and Jill. This was captured on film in the upcoming documentary titled Phenomena.

When we started, you were not in resonance with each other. You had heart rhythms that we're not in synchrony, which one would expect, but at approximately 45 seconds, Jill went into resonance and then 47 seconds, Tim went into resonance.

His heart rate started to absolutely coincide and beat in the same rhythm as Jill's and that persisted almost till the end of the session.

It's true actually. I can feel when I go into resonance 'cause my spine tingles and then I can feel when you do, 'cause I feel the connection. That's when the magic happens.

So it sort of bears out what I feel. But it's really good to have some data.

Knowing that Jill and Tim fall into coherence, raises a larger question for this episode. Why does coherence matter? And I asked Jill about some of the most exciting emerging research where energy healers have been doing work on cancer cells in the lab.

And what they found was that when the healer did their technique, the cancer cells moved towards each other and the ones that were being worked on made a number of changes that meant they were going into senescence and they were reversing the cancer.

Senescence is when a cell stops reproducing and loses its cancer like behavior.

I was really fascinated by the idea that they moved together because if you think about it, cancer cell is a cell that has forgotten it's in community. It's like riding rough shot over everything, getting where it's going. It's like a narcissistic cell. And so something about this prompt, this energetic prompt meant that the cancer cells move together and when they move together, I think they calibrated each other and the cancer cell became part of the community again.

They were in coherence just like Jill and Tim, and that's why all of this matters.

And while I was mulling this over and wondering what this all meant, I had a patient with terminal cancer and she came to me for end of life care. And I had just learned this and I began to regret that we, I'd spent my career in medicine just like everybody else, teaching people using battling language. And I realized, oh, we should be encouraging coherence because as your body communicates better internally, it'll, it cleans up.

And so I explained this to this patient and she was game. And so we developed a series of exercises for her to do that encouraged, that included breath work and movement that encouraged coherence in her body.

And after three months. All her tumors were gone, which nobody was more surprised than me actually. And we are very much in uncharted territory. I dunno what happens next. She is continuing with treatment because obviously she should, yeah? This is a very experimental technique, but I have no doubt that what I taught her thanks to that research that was done helped her reverse her disease. It gave me a sort of new insight into how intelligent bodies are and how we should be helping them do what they do well rather than battling against it.

It just sounds like such a miracle to be able to heal someone without touching them even.

I mean, it is a miracle, but it's an everyday miracle, and it's a miracle that I think anyone can take part in.

What Jill believes is that healing isn't meant to be rare or reserved for a chosen few. She sees it as something human and democratic, and we all might have access to this natural healing capacity, but especially when our bodies are guided or prompted or reflected or supported by another person's focused attention or intention, like a healer.

We're affecting each other electromagnetically. So I think it is your biofield connecting through the group consciousness to someone else's biofield. Part of a much bigger sort of oversold biofield is just that, only recently have we been able to measure it and say, oh, there's actually something there that we can measure.

One of the most widespread healing traditions that works with the same idea of the body's subtle field is Reiki, a Japanese practice where a healer uses gentle, sometimes no touch movements to help the body shift into a more relaxed and regulated state. Some describe it as working with the biofield.

Others describe it as channeling a universal life force, but the idea is the person receiving the treatment, their body already knows what to do, so that makes you wonder what happens when Reiki is studied in a clinical setting.

This idea that another person's consciousness can have a physical impact on somebody else's body is a pretty wild proposition.

That psychologist, Adam Hanley, director of the Complimentary Health Innovation Lab, he studies consciousness pain and the mind's influence on the body. And Adam wasn't looking into energy healing at all when he was asked to do a study on Reiki.

So I have no history with energy healing. I have no history with Reiki.

My usual topics of research are mindfulness in the context of pain management and addiction.

So even though Adam didn't know much about energy healing going in, he recently led a team of researchers at the University of Utah and Harvard that put Reiki to the test. They worked with 164 people with chronic knee osteoarthritis.

Comparing four different treatments or paths: Reiki, pretend Reiki, that they called Fakey, a mindfulness group, and then just a standard control group sitting on a waiting list, maybe answering some questions or filling out questionnaires. So to really understand what Reiki may or may not be doing in the body.

They needed a control group to undergo treatment that looked like Reiki, but without any healing intention behind it. They called this fakey and Adam explains how they created this sham condition.

We just had our lead Reiki healer go through a healing session like they would naturally, and we videotaped it.

And then we had all of our fakey providers just learn and follow those exact movements. Just try to make it as as similar as possible.

So the fakey healers were just faking the Reiki hand movements over the patients with no conscious intention to heal.

To try to sort of block any sort of subconscious energetic movement or healing intention,

we had our fakey folks count backwards by sevens from a thousand to keep them occupied.

And then, so what did the mindfulness group do?

The mindfulness arm participants came in. They learned a little bit about the mindfulness technique that we're gonna be guided through.

A typical mindfulness practice involves slowing the breath and noticing sensations, letting thoughts come and go without reacting, that calm shift in physiology can allow the body to move out of stress and into healing.

And then they did that mindfulness practice for about 10 to 15 minutes, and they talked with their provider for five to 10 minutes afterwards, kind of about the experience. So the patients were randomized into the mindfulness, Reiki and fakey treatment groups, and none of them knew that they could be receiving a fake Reiki treatment for their pain.

So Adam, what were the outcomes?

A 30% decrease in chronic pain is considered clinically meaningful. Over the whole course of the trial from baseline to one month after treatment ended, mindfulness decreased pain by about 38%. Reiki decreased by about 32%, fakey by 20%. Reiki decreased pain to a significantly greater degree than the fakey.

But it wasn't inert.

Human presence alone is medicinal. Just being cared for can change physiology, which may be why the fakey session worked a bit, but the fact that Reiki produced significantly stronger effects suggests that something more is happening.

So just having somebody kind of wave their hands and count backwards by sevens made people feel better over time.

Reiki is doing a little bit more.

What intrigued Adam wasn't just the pain scores, but the possibility that something about the state of consciousness in a Reiki session was showing up in the data.

So we had participants rate the type of experiences they had during their Reiki sessions. 55% of the folks in the Reiki reported their boundaries dissolved between themselves and the healer.

26% in the fakey condition, 14% in mindfulness.

So more than half of the Reiki group felt their boundaries with the healer dissolve a level of connection not seen in the fakey or mindfulness groups.

50% of the folks in the raking condition reported feeling sensations of waves of energy. Whereas 30% felt them in fakey, which is interesting, and only 17 in mindfulness.

This one was also crazy, 32% of the Reiki folks felt the treatment provider in places they physically were not. Whereas it was 4% in fakey group and 0% in mindfulness.

Half of the people receiving Reiki said they felt waves of energy compared to much smaller numbers in the fakey and mindfulness groups. And about a third of the Reiki group felt the healer's presence and places the healer wasn't physically standing.

Something almost no one reported in the other groups.

So even, what does that mean? Like, I don't even know what people were endorsing when they said yes to that, if that was just like the person was behind them, but maybe they felt they were in front of them or like they were distributed through the room or like what that means.

So the team also gathered physiological data to see if these inner experiences showed up in the brain. So Adam, what were you seeing in the EEG and the other recordings?

We had tentative conclusions on the fNIRS data. The folks in the Reiki condition experienced significant increases in brain activity kind of in this lateral prefrontal region.

Reiki folks seemed to be kind of focusing in, kind of attending in a different way than the fakey folks. We also saw significantly different brain activity in the somatosensory cortex, and that's a part of the brain that's involved with kind of feeling and sensation.

So the real Reiki group wasn't just reporting sensations, they were showing measurable changes in the parts of the brain tied to attention and physical feeling.

What's really fascinating about activity in both of those regions is that those are really well established regions in other complimentary therapies for pain management. So in acupuncture and cognitive behavioral therapy and hypnosis and mindfulness, like we see these specific two regions operating in a very similar way and predicting pain relief so that these Reiki data are mapping onto these kind of established neural zones for pain relief is shocking to me. Having, yeah, yeah. I mean, it shocks me because I still don't really understand what Reiki is, and I don't really understand what energy healing is even more globally.

And even researchers who don't fully understand energy healing are seeing signs that something real is happening.

I didn't expect there to be some sort of physiological effect from this Reiki stuff that I don't understand. It's like spirit changing the body. Or alternatively, just some sort of interpersonal set or setting type thing. But something's happening there that this Reiki process that involves no language is changing kind of activity in the brain.

Adam's past research has looked at the power of language and suggestion when it comes to healing. Yet he's watching the brain respond to Reiki in ways that can't be chalked up to either. So something else is happening here.

If you wanna talk about like the core feature of the healing experience, like profound healing, I think it's that ego dissolution. I think it's that like self dropping off, whether from the provider side or the patient side. And so I think in a very real way we're all connected and just maybe some people are more attuned to that connection and kind of tap into that source of unity a little more skillfully than others.

So I know you've published aspects of the study in a prominent peer reviewed journal, and is it too early to speculate on how Reiki compares to pharmaceutical medications for pain?

These are comparable pain decreases to what we see from common pain medications. 30% reduction in pain is a pretty standard metric, and so I think this study suggests that Reiki can give you potentially a similar degree of pain relief as some of these common medications that have adverse health impacts.

This seems like a really accessible tool. I think the way I think about this is like, improving and expanding all kinds of care.

Before we go any further into studies and data, I want you to meet someone who experienced something that sits right at the edge of what science can explain.

My name is Rustin Hughes. I live in Fort Collins, Colorado. Growing up, I loved wrestling, being outdoors, fishing, hunting, camping. Then right after high school, I graduated and went into the Army.

After his time in the Army, Rustin built a life. He married the woman he loved, but she was diagnosed with brain cancer. And after 11 years of treatment, she did not survive the cancer, leaving Rustin in a place of not just grief, but anger.

After she passed away, I was devastated. Uh, didn't really know what I was

gonna do with the rest of my life.

Grief gutted him for a long time, but eventually he tried to rebuild his life. He found a love of cooking. He started a new relationship, and he started working toward a food truck dream when something in his right leg started to go very wrong.

I had this issue in my leg that had been bothering me for quite a while, but I just thought I had like a pinched nerve or something like that, and I just really started getting to this point where there were moments when like I, I just could not walk.

His girlfriend convinced him to go to the emergency room.

The doctor comes in and he is like, listen son, like you've got one of the largest blood clots in the your femoral artery, and we need to get you to ICU right now.

And it was just like this surreal moment. He even said, you're probably gonna have your leg amputated and you're gonna be a blunt, thin as for the rest of your life. And it was just this surreal moment of like, I like, am I in a dream right now?

Doctors tried everything, threading wires through the artery, attempting to break the clot, which they said felt like cement, but nothing worked, and he was soon sent home to wait for surgery.

They gave me a, a really big bottle of oxycodone and they were like, all right, we'll see you in six weeks.

Before his amputation, Rustin had several Healing Touch sessions. Healing Touch is another type of energy healing where you alter the body's energy system using specific hand movements over the body to influence self-healing.

And though Rustin wasn't sure he believed in any of this stuff, something unexpected happened.

And, and I really didn't know anything about Healing Touch. She started to do this opening of energy on my leg that I was gonna have amputated. And she would always start with that leg and she would start from like the foot to the knee.

And it was weird as I could feel this energy that was was going on. And it was crazy because like I didn't have a lot of circulation on that side. And then I was feeling this like, uh, counterclockwise motion. That's the way that the energy was flowing and into I could feel it, and then she would open up from like my foot to my hip and I could just feel like I could feel this moving.

And I, I think that we had done it three or four times before my surgery.

And in August of 2014, Rustin had part of his leg amputated.

I come out of it and, uh, I'm a little, you know, just depressed because I never thought that I would lose my leg.

Complications, forced a second emergency surgery this time above the knee.

During recovery, Rustin kept receiving Healing Touch sessions through Healing Warriors, a nonprofit that offers energy healing support for veterans. And here's where the story becomes scientifically meaningful. Most people know about phantom limb pain, but there's another layer, phantom limb sensation, the experience of feeling a limb even when it's no longer there.

Neuroscientists usually explain it as the brain's body map staying online, but they still can't fully explain why sensation can feel active, warm, or energetic, especially when triggered from outside the body. And that's what happened to Rustin.

With the Healing Touch, and it was one of the craziest things.

I'm wearing my prosthetic leg and she starts where my prosthetic foot is to my prosthetic knee, and I can feel that energy. I can feel that same feeling that I did. I could feel this energy that was was going on and I really appreciate that the phantom sensation, I think that that really helped me like through learning how to walk again, knowing where my foot, the perception of where my foot is, and then I can feel like right under the arch.

It's an awesome feeling. Even though that the leg is gone, that energy is still there and realizing just because the leg is gone doesn't mean it is necessarily gone.

And though Phantom sensation is normally described as a neurological glitch, Rustin's sensations didn't just appear, they intensified during healing touch even through his prosthetic and even when his eyes were closed and he didn't know where the healer was working and having that energetic imprint of his leg real and tangible helped him relearn how to walk.

To him, it didn't feel like imagination, it felt like connection and energy healing has worked for him in other ways too.

There was one moment where my shoulder was just so messed up. It just, it hurts so bad. The, the muscles were so tight and I remember when she got to the shoulder, it was like the shoulder turned into butter and it just like melted into the bed and all of that muscle tension and whatever was going on in that muscle was just gone.

And it just, it blew me away because I've tried every, I was trying to, you know, like roll it out on a roller and, and do all these stretches and do all these things, and then it, it's such a hard thing to explain. I think it's kind of like it, it opens up your mind to connect with your body and realize that we're nothing but energy.

Today rustin not only walks again, but is a world champion adaptive athlete in Para Jiu Jitsu, and he's an MMA coach with his own studio, Be Bold, which empowers those of all abilities to rise to physical and mental challenges. So Rustin, how do you think all this really works and what has it taught you?

People see me today and they probably look at me and think that the leg is my disability.

This, the leg is not the disability. I was more disabled when I had two legs. My mindset, the anger and all that other stuff was disabling me and our mind is very powerful. And so I think that there's so much more that we can tap into and I think that we can heal ourselves with with ourselves.

Phantom limb experiences are common after amputation, but what Rustin describes feeling energy traveling through a leg that no longer exists in sync with a healer's hands is harder to wave away.

And yet there's that part of me and maybe you that still thinks that could be placebo. Placebo effect is real and the brain is powerful. So if we're really gonna test whether energy healing is happening, not imagined or suggested, or psychological, the most airtight setup is a test with no mind involved.

What happens when a healer works not on a person, but directly on cells? Cells that can't expect anything or hope for anything or believe anything because if there's measurable differences in an experiment like that, we are looking at something concrete, something beyond psychology, and this is why the next study matters so much.

It's one of the most rigorous and convincing experiments ever done on energy healing, and the results of it aren't even published yet. So you're hearing about it for the first time here. And to get a good overview, I wanted to reach out to someone who knew about this research inside and out, and who understands what it takes to do the gold standard kind of research that can actually shift mainstream science and society at large.

So I'm David Leibsohn. I'm the Managing Director of The Subtle Energy Funders Collective, a collaborative group of philanthropic funders who are catalyzing a shift in consciousness and healing. And we're working to scientifically validate and better understand the science of energy healing. Really important when you're making extraordinary claims to have extraordinary evidence.

And so part of having extraordinary evidence is really working with the top folks in mainstream science, if you will. So we're working with tier one research institutions as much as possible because there is a lot of pseudoscience out there. You gotta do it rigorously and you gotta do it the right institutions.

And that's the approach that we're taking.

So I'm really excited to talk about the research study done at MD Anderson around energy healing cancer cells in Petri dishes. And it's thrilling because I know that hasn't been published in a mainstream journal yet. So give us the contours of what happened, and I guess first, why was MD Anderson chosen as the place to do the study?

So MD Anderson is one of the premier cancer research institutions in the country, if not the world. So MD Anderson rigorously approached this research. It's preclinical research, so that means it's with cells and with mice. It's not with people. But that's where you start, and then you build a line of research and you go to people next.

So what type of cancer cells were used in this study?

So they chose pancreatic cancer because if pancreatic cancer is one of the most severe forms of cancer and the most deadly, it's one of the one of the cancers that we've had the hardest time to solve in terms of treatments. So it can work in pancreatic cancer, it can work in anything.

I think they also chose pancreatic cancer because they're just a real need there. The solutions are not good. And so when there's a real need, there's more openness to sort of frontier modalities for potentially treating it. And so, you know, the scientific community might be more open to it.

And then can you talk us through how the study was designed, especially with the controls?

It was highly controlled and the cellular research, these were cancer cells in Petri dishes, and they had control group in the incubator. Then they had another control group that was treated by sham healers, and finally, the active group that was treated by biofield therapists, the sort of active therapists.

What he means by that, are the energy healers. And I saw footage from the upcoming Phenomena documentary of one of the healers named John at work during this experiment, and it looks like he had both hands kind of elevated on either side of the Petri dish. It didn't appear that he was touching the dish or moving his hands over the dish.

It's like he just held them in space on either side of the dish.

And they conducted this research in a very rigorous way. They had three different healers and they repeated the research with each healer across a large number of samples to reach statistical significance in a controlled study, a large portion of the study was on pancreatic cancer cells and Petri dishes, and in mice.

And so from what I understand, the energy healing that was done both on pancreatic cells in dishes, as well as energy healing done on mice with pancreatic cancer, that both were effective. Was that the case?

What's amazing about it is they found that the biofield therapy significantly had an impact on reducing the growth of cancer in these cancer cells and Petri dishes.

And similarly, it had a significant effect on reducing the cancer in mice. And it's pretty amazing for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons, and first of all, it's amazing that this kind of thing can affect, that a healer can affect cancer cells in a Petri dish, it's incredible. And the other reason it's really important from my perspective on sort of understanding these modalities in the bigger picture is a lot of people write these modalities off.

Because they think it's just placebo effect. They think it's just the expectation of the recipient and then they convince themselves to feel better. When you're talking about a healer working on dozens and dozens of repeated experiments of Petri dishes in a highly controlled lab and on mice in a highly controlled lab, there is no placebo effect.

These cells don't have an expectation. They don't have a a mind to have a mind body effect, and the mice similarly don't have a placebo effect. So if you're trying to criticize these modalities by saying, yeah, it's just, just placebo effect, this research has to open your mind up and get you to consider that there may be something else going on.

So to you, what's the significance of this research?

This research, because it was so rigorous, because it rules out the placebo effect, it's something that has to wake people up and get folks to understand that there seems to be something more here. And so then you start asking the question, what else is at work?

Like how does this work? So there's a whole bunch of research building now looking at does it work? The efficacy and the effectiveness. And then there's a body of research that's building around what we call mechanism, which is how does it work? How does it work within the body of the recipient, and how does it work between the healer and the healie?

One way to think about how this might be working is to test the healers themselves. While they're healing, what changes occur in their minds and their biofields. And one of the energy healers involved in the Petri dish cancer study was John Lavack, who's been an energy healer most of his life.

I'll say my first memory of doing any energy work was on my grandfather, and he had cataract surgery.

When I put my hands on his eyes felt really good for him, and, uh, he recovered from the cataract surgery very rapidly, more so than expected.

And over time, energy healing became a passion.

So I started taking all kinds of different trainings and courses that helped me understand energy work and helping people to heal themselves.

So as you heard earlier, John was able to slow the growth of cancer in pancreatic cancer cells that were in Petri dishes in an incubator, and he did it with energy healing.

They put cells in front of me and asked me to run healing energy on the cells. I'm generating a frequency of energy, a field of energy that the cells are responding to.

There is a change in the cell, so it is making a difference.

John was also being studied while doing the energy healing, and this is important so researchers can better understand the mechanisms that might enable healing.

They took me to the laboratory and they had me wired up. They had a, a cap that had all kinds of electrodes all over my head, wired to directly to the computer, and they're measuring my, uh, heart rate and respiratory and all my brainwaves.

So, David, I, I understand the researchers also looked at the healer's brain for clues that might explain how energy healing works. So what else did they find?

They discovered that the energy healer somehow affected the bioelectricity of these cells and that it could be impacting the cancer. They also looked at the mitochondria within the cells in the mice, and the energy healer seemed to have affected the shape and the width and the length of the mitochondria, which is kind of amazing.

They looked at what might be happening in terms of this entanglement between healer and healy, so what's happening between the healer and healy as well, and so they're really exploring this. And there is a thought that the this biophoton emissions may contain information.

Okay. And for listeners who have not heard the term before, what are biophotons and what role might they play in healing?

Bio photons are photons of light that are emitted from all of the cells of the body. And they're not controversial. Most people don't know about them, but they're not controversial in terms of their existence. And if we can measure these biofuel emanations from the body, it may help us with the diagnosis of disease and ultimately with treatment as well.

So I think what we've just heard is stunning that energy healing influenced cancer cells in a positive way in a Petri dish. So there's no human mind or expectation to placebo or mess with the results. And the scientists also measured changes in the electrical behavior of those cells, and they measured shifts in their shape and structure, and they saw effects that science has yet been able to explain.

So for me, the question becomes how does a cell register that something is happening? And to start answering that, I think we have to zoom inside the cell to the mitochondria. And that's a structure that most of us learned about in school as the powerhouse of the cell. But some researchers believe that mitochondria may be doing far more than keeping us alive, and that idea is coming from a Columbia University scientist, Dr.

Martin Picard. He's trained in computational biology and psychosocial oncology. And his research around mitochondria might reshape how he understand healing. So here's Dr. Martin Picard.

The cell is kind of, has a, a shell around it. Then there's a nucleus, which has the DNA half from mom, half from dad, and then the mitochondria inside the cell there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of these little mitochondria.

They're like antennas and when they receive information, they integrate that information a bit like a, a an intracellular brain. Very important cellular decisions are actually made by mitochondria, not by the nucleus.

And if mitochondria might help us sell to know what's happening around it, the question is, where's that information coming from?

Towards the end of my PhD thought if there is an underlying field of consciousness, there's a chance that mitochondria is actually the portal.

A portal, the space where something immaterial like consciousness might be actually interacting with the physical body.

The real distinguishing factor between someone that's alive and a dead body,

a cadaver is not the molecules, it's not the cells, it's not the brain or the neurons or whatever. It's the flow of energy. Mitochondria are the source of energy so that we can live and feel and think and you know, move and grow and age and die. So mitochondria, I started to think maybe they're the portal, the portal between subjective states of mind than what whatever we call consciousness and the physical molecular reality of the body.

A single cell can contain hundreds or thousands of mitochondria, and together they form a sensing network, constantly receiving and integrating signals.

They're there like antennas and they're sensing energy, metabolic signals, electromagnetic field and other types of energies, light. And then when they receive information, they integrate that information a bit like an intracellular brain.

And that brings us back to bio photons. They're tiny flashes of light emitted by living cells like David described earlier, and some early research suggests that mitochondria may use these light signals to communicate. That might be one way that healing information travels through the body.

There is good data out there showing that there is light-based communication between cells and between mitochondria.

That's clearly happening under experimental condition. Whether this happens inside the body, right, and this is part of what keeps us healthy, we don't know.

So mitochondria don't just make energy, they process information and help keep each cell in conversation with the whole, which raises the question, what happens when a cell stops listening?

What we know in cancer is that cancer cells kind of ditch their mitochondria. The mitochondria is still present, but they're not doing their, their job as, as they do in normal cells. That seems to be a way in which cancer cells disconnect from the cell collective. If you think like what is cancer? Cancer is basically a cell that used to be part of the cell collective, right?

This whole, the body that we enjoy, this is a cell collective where every cell is kind of in a social contract with every other cell, and then if you break the social contract and you go on your own and then you say, I'm gonna create my own thing, and then you create a tumor, that's what cancer is. It seems like one of the trigger for a cell to exit the cell collective is to disconnect effectively from its mitochondrial information processing system cells become cancerous because they lose the ability to feel and to to sense the coherent signals around the body.

So cancer cells aren't just multiplying, they're losing their ability to receive information. Or as Jill described earlier in the episode,

if you think about it, cancer cell is a cell that has forgotten it's in community. It's like a narcissistic cell.

The studies we highlighted earlier showed cancer cells shifting under energy healing as if some signal was reaching them.

So that brings us back to the how the, how does that signal travel from a healer to another person or a healer to a Petri dish? Here's David Leibsohn again.

Our hunch is it's a confluence of mechanisms that's at work in these different modalities, and each one of them is being explored and we're gonna know more about how these work.

In order for a lot of people to really wrap their heads around this, there needs to be plausible theories of mechanism. The first step is to validate that it does work, and there's really good rigorous research happening right now to do that, and certainly the stories for thousands of years. So that's step one.

Step two is how does it work? And it's not clear that it's working in one way. So what do people talk about? They talk about a placebo effect, that there's some sort of, you know, client patient relationship, it's called a therapeutic alliance that's doing the work. That's amazing. Placebo needs to be understood.

Is that part of it? Probably part of it. But clearly the MD Anderson research is showing that it's not just that there's more. Is it electromagnetic fields? Possibly. Then there's other research happening to understand that as well. Um, and then it goes beyond that because some healers appear to be working at a distance and that doesn't make sense then for electromagnetic fields.

So what's happening with them, you have to explore other things. You know, people certainly throw around the word quantum and quantum entanglement. I think we need to be careful with that, but that's one of the mechanisms that certainly needs to be explored in order to start to understand this better as well.

So there are emerging theories about how energy healing might work, especially up close, like through measurable changes in electrical activity or bioelectricity and bio photon signaling. But healing at a distance across the country or the world is much harder to explain. And that's where things get really interesting for me because that same puzzle shows up in the latest telepathy research.

There have been multiple telepathy tests happening at universities and centers across the country. Some scientists have postulated whether bio photons could be transmitting telepathic information between people, but that idea only holds up when people are near each other in terms of proximity. Yet many of the strongest cases of telepathy among the general public happen over a distance, especially when great need or great love is involved.

So again, we reach a fork in the road. Either there's something else at play that we don't fully understand, or there's several mechanisms at work which could account for both local and non local transfer of information, and that brings up kind of a frontier idea, something not proven, but being explored.

That information might travel through subtle fields or waves that have not yet been characterized. And one theory that shows up in this space is the idea of carrier waves. And here's Jill Blakeway again.

I think there is a method of communication that we are only just nibbling at the edges of in science, but within the next five years, I think we will understand exactly what that is.

So I'm not much of a distance healer myself, but I do know people who can do it and it's measurably effective even on cancer cells, which rules out the placebo effect. So we are looking for an informational carrier wave. I think at the moment people are looking towards torsion, scalar waves, that kind of thing as being the transmission.

Of course, we're all familiar with the limitations of things like wifi signals or radio waves dissipating in the air over distance. Scalar waves are a theoretical waveform that does not dissipate over distance and is not dissipated by any physical barriers either. They're also called Tesla Waves.

Theories describe them as having properties of non-locality bypassing the speed of light, and therefore able to carry information instantaneously. Some think they're interacting on the quantum scale and possibly influencing the human biofield or some other unseen fundamental level, and thus they're able to influence health.

Scalar wave based health devices are on the market today, but their effectiveness on health and even the existence of scalar waves at all is currently contested among scientists. So right now it's all still theoretical, but if a non-local carrier wave exists, it could help explain how a healer's intention might reach cells in a dish or body across the world.

I'm always reminded that in the UK where I come from in 1890, the Royal Scientific Society told the government that science was almost complete, that there wasn't much left to discover and think about everything we discovered between 1890 and 1990, say in the next a hundred years. So there's always that idea.

People often say things like, the science is settled. Science is never, ever, ever settled.

And this is one of the major priorities of this show. Just because we don't understand something yet doesn't mean you shouldn't ponder the question and see where the journey takes you.

I'm profoundly impressed by what bodies can actually do and how smart the human body actually is.

The piece we're missing is the informational carrier wave. And once we have that, and I think we're not far off, we're going to understand more about our place in the universe and our role as human beings and who we actually are, um, and how much bigger our connection is to all that is than we have ever thought that we're not isolated and small at all.

We're part of something huge. And when you really get that, when you really take that on, you realize that all the silly stuff you worry about is all just your ego. It's the little bit of you that's invested in being separate. And once you let it go, there's an enormous piece there. I'm pretty sure having practiced this for as long as I have that this isn't all there is the material world isn't all there is.

There's more I'm, I'm so sure.

For me and my team, we've seen this episode is pivotal because it starts to validate some of these concepts and explain how so much of the unseen might be possible. And for me, it actually raises a bigger question: if information can move through the intersystem, the biofield, and even the light inside of our cells, and if bodies are open systems that sync and respond to each other and a greater field of consciousness, then couldn't this also be a way of explaining telepathy?

And if that's true, then telepathy shouldn't be limited to just the gifted few or even just the non-speaking individuals we met in season one. It might be something far more ordinary and more accessible. And that brings us back to something we learned last season. The clearest examples of telepathy came from people who could not speak, not because their minds were limited, but because they had apraxia a mind body disconnect.

In other words, their awareness was intact, but their expression was blocked. So if telepathy is part of how humans communicate when speech fails, we should see signs of telepathy in others who cannot speak those locked inside by a condition they didn't choose in our next episode, we explore whether telepathy could be a bridge to reach those whose minds have become inaccessible because of dementia.

And please note, due to the holidays, we'll be dropping the final two episodes of the season on Monday, December 22nd, and Monday December 29th. And before our next episode is released on December 22nd, I have some homework for you. Next week, we will be re-releasing two talk tracks episodes into this feed. But those episodes share

some of the most moving stories we found about consciousness when memory is slipping away. They will lay the necessary groundwork for what comes next and the question we are going to explore together: does a deep spiritual and emotional connection survive when language does not? And could telepathy be a way of forging that connection?

Join us on December 22nd to find out, and again, remember to do your homework next week listening to the two Talk Tracks episodes we're gonna re-drop in our feed.

A very special thank you to the Emerald Gate Charitable Trust and the Subtle Energy Funders Collective for their incredible research in this space and their help consulting on this episode.

And I wanna thank our producers, Jessie Stead, Jil Pasiecnik, and Katherine Ellis, contributing producer, also working on the Phenomena film, Debbie Hinnigan. Original music is by Rachael Cantu. Mix, mastering and additional music is by Michael Rubino. Our Associate Producer is Solina Kennedy. Original artwork is by Ben Kendora Design.

And I'm Ky Dickens, your Executive Producer, Writer, and Host. To learn more about Phenomena, a three-part documentary featuring access to groundbreaking scientists, transformative healers, and evidence that's rewriting what we know about energy healing. You can visit phenomenahealing.com/telepathytapes.

This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended to substitute the advice of a physician, professional coach, therapist, or other qualified professional.

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