Donna Eden - Energy Medicine: Balancing Your Bodys Energies for Optimal Health, Joy, and Vitality

Table of Contents

Other books coauthored by Donna Eden and David Feinstein

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
NewYork

Let the body think of the Spirit as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining into it from all sides.

PLOTINUS

Acknowledgments

My personal gratitude and professional debt to Dr. John Thie cannot be overstated, for having had the courage, and the genius, during the 1970s, to make available to more than 10 million people in more than 100 countries sophisticated self-healing techniques through his system of Touch for Health (his book is currently available in thirty-four languages). Dr. Thie, Gordon Stokes, Shanti Duree, Hazel Ullrich, Warren Jacobs, M.D., and many others whom I met through the Touch for Health organization helped set me on my path.

Sandy Wand has been an amazing friend, healer, and source of boundless support. Madison King has been the kind of student who comes back to inspire her teacher. Paul Brenner, M.D., showed me what a physician can be. My editors, Irene Prokop and Wendy Hubbert (first edition) and Sara Carder (this Tenth Anniversary update), have been enormously patient, provocative, and very smart. My agent, Susan Schulman, has provided wise and empowering counsel. The institutional support of Innersource and its friends, particularly Laleah and Hugh Bacon, Dorothy Lamb, Winn Frankland, Ling Chin, and Rodney Plimpton, are gratefully acknowledged. Stanley Krippners brilliant critique of an early draft of the first edition strengthened the book substantially. Catherine Feather Potenza was a backbone as my work developed and remains one of my closest friends. Richard Duree provided source material for several of the research studies reported in the book. Rik Jensen, our handyman with heart, has been a model of how to remain buoyant through floods and other disasters that could have derailed the original edition. The tens of thousands of students who have taught and studied energy medicine through Innersource have made contributions to my thinking and to this revision.

Of inestimable help and a source of joy has been the incredible Innersource administrative team, including Lori Kats, Leslie Adams, Katrina Hill, Jeffrey Harris, Vicki Matthews, Veronica Sanpere, Sherry Rhea, Carrie Cento, Eric Stahlman, Frank Dowler, Cindy Haight, Julie Conley, and the amazing teaching faculty of our basic classes and our Energy Medicine Certification Program. Our Certification Program, a bit of a miracle in galvanizing complex amorphous ideas and the teaching talents of two dozen faculty into a single forum, was heroically launched by Vicki Matthews. And then, my daughters! To my delight, Dondi and Tanya Dahlin have both stepped into the organization, putting their glorious stamp on everything from its administration to how to bring more joy into our teaching.

My husband, David Feinstein, has been tireless in interviewing me and writing first drafts from those interviews, editing transcripts of tapes from my classes, conducting computer and library searches, and generally bringing left-brained organization to my right-brained way of being. His abilities to craft a phrase, suggest an analogy, find order amid complexity, and place an idea into its larger intellectual contextall the while retaining the spirit of my voicepermeate this volume. In short, this is the book I would have written if my mind worked like both of our minds combined.

Authors Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

When Energy Medicine was first published in 1998, I never imagined how very quickly the field would grow over the next decade. In the past ten years, energy medicine has gone from being an obscure curiosity within alternative health-care practices to an integral aspect of the worldviews of leading-edge thinkers within conventional medicine. Mehmet Oz, M.D., one of the most respected surgeons in the United States and the director of the Cardiovascular Institute at Columbia Universitys College of Physicians and Surgeons, speaking in 2007 to an international audience on Oprah, announced that the next big frontier in medicine is energy medicine. Indeed, as the costs of medical care spiral out of reach and the dangers of potentially lethal side effects from standard treatments skyrocket, our culture is desperate for a good, reliable folk medicine, and energy medicine is quickly stepping in to meet that need.

When I go into a city and teach an introductory weekend workshop, the group usually develops a buzz of excitement about the tools and ideas they have just mastered, but at the end I remind them, I leave tomorrow. Who here knows a local resource you can recommend to everyone, a person in the healing profession whether a physician, a massage therapist, or someone simply with a shingle on the doorwho brings an energy medicine perspective to their practice and to whom you would refer a loved one with a serious illness? When I first went on the road, perhaps one or two people in an audience of 200 would raise their hands, and we would promptly put the name of the practitioners they were recommending on the whiteboard. Ten years later, 40 percent of the group typically raise their hands. Some 40,000 people, including many doctors and nurses, have attended more than 600 classes and presentations I myself have given on the topic in the past ten years, and now my students are teaching many more classes than I ever could have hoped for. Besides starting to shift the paradigm in Western medicine, energy medicine is rapidly finding its way into local communities.

But you do not need an energy medicine practitioner to experience the benefits of energy medicine. You can use the methods in this book to help yourself, heal yourself, increase your energies, become happier, and grow healthier. People are finding the most basic principles of energy medicine to be surprisingly easy to learn, simple to use, and enormously helpful in addressing their own health challenges and the health challenges of those they love. In these past ten years we have received thousands of notes and e-mails describing the way this book alone was key in overcoming a challenging health condition. A few of these are recounted in the following pages.

Energy medicine arises out of centuries of wisdom from different cultures around the world. This is why it is so especially gratifying to me that this book has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In fact, I was honored a few years ago to be asked to write a special introduction to the Chinese edition, in which I was able to say:

When Huangdi, the legendary Yellow Emperor of China, decided some 4,500 years ago to codify the already ancient practice of acupuncture, the body of work to which this book owes its most profound debt was compiled. I cannot overstate how humbling and satisfying it was to learn recently that Energy Medicine would be coming out in a Chinese translation. Only in a world where globalization allows an unprecedented cross-fertilization of ideas and practices could we expect to see such exchanges. Just as the time-honored healing arts of China are impacting the Western world, scientific investigations being conducted in China are refining healing procedures and concepts from the Yellow Emperors time.