the technique she called muscle testing, a biofeedback tool that allowed her to ask my body what was going on in various energy channels and get responses in the form of muscles holding strong or releasing.
Dialoguing with the body in this way made sense to me. I loved the Chinese medicine charts on her walls and the way she’d use these pathways to figure out what needed to be balanced in my body’s energies. I had always thought of energy as what I didn’t have when I crashed out. I had never thought of it as the fuel that governs the body’s functions in positive ways!
Then something strange started happening to me. First, I found I could predict which meridian pathway would test “weak” with the muscle tests. I could just feel it, see it, or even hear it. My chiropractor used a lot of nutritional supplements and dietary modifications as part of her healing work. I discovered I could see which supplements I’d need. I could point to the bottle on the shelf that contained what I needed, and I could even tell her the ideal dosage. Although I knew so little about anatomy that I didn’t even know where my organs were located, I found I could point to the organs that were out of balance, and the energy testing would confirm it. I could see in my mind’s eye that my chiropractor’s gallbladder was a lovely forest green and mine was puke green, and sure enough, my gallbladder meridian would test weak.
Over the course of the six months we worked together on my health, I learned to feel when an energy would test weak, and I started seeing what might fix it. Some of the fixes were in line with Applied Kinesiology. Others were more off the wall. For example, I might take both hands and push the energy on either side of my head down my body and off into the ground. Then an energy that had tested weak would right itself.
With time, my energies balanced, my gut healed, and my lifelong exploration of energy healing was launched.
SELF-HEALING WITH ENERGY MEDICINE
Energy medicine is, as Donna Eden and David Feinstein have said, a form of healing in which energy is both the patient and the medicine.1 Our bodies communicate using chemical messaging and energetic messaging. By using energy techniques to influence the energetic messaging of the body, mind, and spirit, we can influence the behaviors of the body (including its chemistry) and activate its natural abilities to heal.
In its contemporary form, energy medicine involves using pathways and techniques mapped out within various traditions, such as Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, yoga, and shamanic healing, among others, in healing practices that date back thousands of years. Contemporary energy medicine also incorporates newer understandings from energy healing pioneers, physics, kinesiology, and body-mind modalities, which give us ways to work practically with our subtle energies to promote well-being.
In this book, I invite you to delve beneath the particulars of formal energy medicine modalities to understand the source codes, the language that underlies them. Too often people with chronic illness are drawn to study complementary modalities or nutritional science in a desperate search for wellness, but they end up learning dietary dictums and prescribed practices, rather than how to actually participate in the communications of their body, mind, and spirit. My goal in presenting this language is for you to be able to create your own, personalized energy medicine, in order to truly participate in your own creation of self. My goal in focusing on self-healing is to encourage you to discover how to take healing into your own hands and, in a very individualized way, support your miraculous, inbuilt capacity to heal.
ENERGY DIALOGUE
Energy dialogue is at the heart of successful energy medicine. It quite simply involves being able to get the messages from your body, spirit, and mind and to respond in their idiom — using movement, gesture, light, sound, vibration, imagery, interaction with energy flows, actions, placement in an environment, and more. This is the vocabulary of the language of energy.
The goal of energy dialogue is to participate moment by moment in the ongoing energy communications within you. It is not something to use just when you are sick. It is a practice that allows you to bring your body’s rhythms and expressions, your conscious understanding, and your behaviors into collaboration, creating your spirit’s truest embodiment.
Once you can participate in energy dialogue, you have the basis for activating and supporting your body’s natural ability to heal.
You use energy dialogue much as you use any language. As you proceed through your day, consider all the ways you use language to think or speak. First, there are the monologues and imagined conversations going on in your head. Perhaps you listen to the radio as you get ready for work. You might have conversations with family members or talk to yourself in the mirror. You might interact with the neighbor on your way out the door, and so on. All of this is natural. You probably don’t have to stop and formulate sentences, look up words in a dictionary, do fifteen minutes of language exercises, or struggle to find the right tone of voice or emphasis as you joke, question, respond, or inform.
The goal in learning the language of energy is to participate in the energetic dialogues that are you and to skillfully navigate among the exchanges with energies that are not you. If you are fluent in the language of energy, it becomes second nature to rebalance your energies, to pull in what is needed, and to recognize when something requires conscious attention.
USING ENERGY DIALOGUE THROUGHOUT THE DAY
The energies that make up your body continuously move and swirl and spiral and flow and block and release and swarm and envelop. They put on quite a show. If you have eyes to see, there are patterns to the movement and colors that represent differing vibrations or kinds of movement. There are shapes created by energies moving in collaborative ways. Some healers refer to this massive dance of energies as the energy body, and it has been mapped in various cultures. What is amazing is that, although you can find common features from one body to the next, each energy dance is also individual and unique.
And if you have ears to hear, it’s a counterpoint of sounds, a symphony of exchanges embodying meaning, intention, and recognition. It is choruses engaged in call and response, expressing our truth. And each of us is set to a different, individualized key. There are harmonies and dissonance, melody lines and chords, and elements (like the heart) that set and keep the beat. It is extremely entertaining to tune in and just listen!
Imagine if, as a child, you learned to tune in to this dimension of being. Today, you would see, hear, feel, know, and smell when the patterns shifted or faltered. It would be no big deal to recognize what is needed and supply it, to recognize what is going awry and right it, to participate in that conversation as it is unfolding.
If you had learned this language as a child, your day might look something like this: You would wake up and spend a few minutes just checking in — helping the energies transition from the more muted circulation during sleep to the more active movement of your day. You would know if it’s time to get up or you need more rest. You would feel what pace and rhythm is needed. You might stretch every which way to allow energies space to flow. You would hook up the main energy arteries that run up the front and back of the spine — like getting Main Street cleared of snow. You might tap or drum various junction points in your energy circulation system to get that system circulating more effectively.
As you get out of bed, you would check in to see if you are truly oriented to the energies around you — including those of the earth and sky. You would make sure that your elements are balanced. You might tune in to your spirit, your mind, and your body to make sure those three aspects of your consciousness are accessible to guide your choices as your day unfolds.
Throughout your day, little conversations and adjustments would happen. As you emerged from your car, you would take a moment to shift your sense of pacing, from the rapid speed of travel to a more leisurely stroll that allows you to tune
