Transcriber: Raissa Mendes Reviewer: David DeRuwe
It truly is amazing that we’re all in the room together once again,
and I will tell you I have certainly missed it.
But I think we all know that the social isolation
that we’ve just experienced has also helped us realize
how interconnected we really are.
So we’re just going through what is hopefully the tail end
of a global pandemic.
And now together,
we’re all struggling to grasp the atrocities of war.
Together we all hold the suffering of so many friends,
family members and even strangers.
And I think we’ve learned
that we truly don’t have to be in the same room to feel each other.
Now, what’s interesting
is that the neuroscience of interconnection
supports our experiences here.
In fact, researchers at UCLA have found
that the very parts of our brain that respond to physical pain
also respond to social pain.
But what if it goes beyond that?
What if we’re biologically wired
to not only feel each other, but heal each other?
So imagine this:
you’re in an fMRI scanner, a brain scanner,
and you’re playing a game of catch.
Well, virtually of course.
You’re playing this video game of catch with some strangers that you don’t know,
and you're just tossing the virtual ball around back and forth to each other
one person to person, just like you might have done during recess at school.
It’s just a pleasant way of interacting with each other,
you know, tossing the virtual ball around, just bonding.
Or so you think.
Because what you don’t know
is that you’re about to get socially rejected.
The scientists have rigged the game,
and in this case you think you’re playing with people,
but you’re actually not playing with anyone,
and the game is set up so that the people you think you’re playing with
just stop playing with you ... altogether - boom!
For no reason, you’re completely socially excluded.
So it turns out when this happens
your brain lights up like crazy in very similar ways to what would happen
if the scientists put your hand in a freezing cold bucket of ice.
Your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and your anterior insula
light up like you’ve just experienced physical pain.
Only you didn’t;
you just experienced social pain.
But that’s not all.
If your friend in another fMRI scanner is witnessing you being socially rejected,
the same brain regions light up in them.
These UCLA researchers have found that your friend,
witnessing you in social pain,
will actually experience that social pain with you
down to their neurons firing the same way as yours.
Why?
Because your friend views you as an extension of herself.
But what if your friend tried to support you?
The same researchers have found, for example,
that if your friend tries to comfort you
when you’re getting an electric shock, for example,
the brain areas in your brain related to reward will increase in activity,
and the areas related to your pain processing will decrease.
So the neurobiology of interconnection
helps us realize that we’re biologically wired to heal each other.
But what if I told you that the science is taking us even further than that,
that our very state of conscious connection can help heal another
without even needing to touch or even engage in talk therapy?
This is where the science gets really interesting.
It’s the science of human healing connection,
and it’s part of a larger field that we call biofield science,
where we study the electromagnetic nature of our bodies
and we study the fields of energy and information that guide our health.
Now, biofield science isn’t necessarily mysterious.
We know, for example, that we can place electrodes on the body
to get a state of our brain and heart health, for example,
using electroencephalograms and electrocardiograms.
And we’ve known for a long time that we can put electromagnetic energy
into the body to foster healing for things like bone fractures, wounds,
depression even, and pain.
We can even manipulate the voltage gradients
across cell membranes to grow new neural tissue.
So biofield science in the realm of bioelectromagnetics
is poised to make huge breakthroughs in the areas of regenerative medicine
and in neuropsychology.
And these studies show us
that much of what we Western scientists call “the biofield”
is somewhat visible and measurable, just like the spectrum of light.
And perhaps, like the spectrum of light, there may be some aspects of the biofield
that are more difficult for us to see with the naked eye.
Interestingly, though, Indigenous medical systems all over the world,
Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, African medicine,
native medicine have all understood
the vital role of what we Western scientists call the biofield
for health and healing.
And they described it as a field of vital life energy
that helps connect us with our environments,
and that by fostering a connection with the biofield
through contemplative practices and practices like yoga, even breathing,
we can foster a connection with mind, body and spirit.
And healing practitioners for thousands of years have also described
the use of this biofield to not only help heal ourselves but also heal others.
Healers describe going through what may be even considered a meditative process
when they connect with the biofield,
and it’s a way that they find that they move beyond
their conditioned, egoic minds,
into a deeper sense of connection with their patient,
as well as what they view as the source of healing,
which they may call things like “universal life energy,”
“divine consciousness,” many names.
And through that connection, they’re able to better channel
the currents of compassion to their clients,
allowing them to augment their own healing response.
OK, now wait. What just happened?
Did I just go from hardcore bioelectromagnetics
and neuroscience into the “woo woo of person-to-person healing”?
Isn’t that pseudoscience?
I mean, that’s not real science, is it?
That was certainly what I was taught in school,
where I had the privilege of attending some of the best universities
in the United States.
And in fact, I even had this particular statistics professor tell me
that whole-systems medical approaches
like Ayurveda and the practices contained with them
were simply ”primitive medicine.”
Primitive medicine?
Well, that floored me, as you can imagine,
and I began to wonder, “Why was he saying that to me?”
I began to understand that, for professors who are steeped in a particular worldview,
one may even say informed by a monocultural ethnocentrism
that has dominated science and medicine
for well over a century,
whole-system healing practices like Ayurveda, Chinese medicine,
and the practices contained with them,
may be considered to them “primitive medicine.”
But as an East Indian woman of Jan spiritual heritage,
who grew up in South Carolina, surrounded by my Baptist Christian friends,
(Laugher)
I’ve always had an instinct to build bridges
between seemingly different ways of thinking.
So, as a clinical psychologist and a researcher
in an area called psychoneuroimmunology,
I decided to conduct my own randomized, placebo-controlled trial
of biofield healing connection for cancer patients.
Now, how many of you have been touched by cancer?
Either someone you know or yourself personally, right?
Probably everyone in this room; it’s very personal.
So you probably know that fatigue
is the number one complaint among cancer patients and survivors.
And when I was doing the study,
I had calls from survivors all over the country that said,
“Thank you for studying this because I’m so fatigued.
I’ve gone through chemo, gone through radiation,
I’ve talked to my doctor, but he doesn’t know what to do.
I’ve told him I’m not depressed, but he’s just giving me an antidepressant.”
So this is why we do these studies.
And what we found in a nutshell with this trial
was that fatigue survivors who received just eight sessions
of biofield healing connection over the course of a month
dropped down dramatically in their fatigue
to levels that we would expect for someone walking down the street.
But what really floored me
was that I saw changes in physiology that I could not explain.
The women receiving the biofield healing actually dropped down to levels
of what we would expect for women going down the street,
but also their cortisol rhythms normalized.
That is, the rhythms of their cortisol throughout the day became more regular,
and as it turns out, this is extremely important
because dysregulations in cortisol rhythms actually are linked to fatigue,
depression and even mortality in breast cancer patients.
So these results were surprising, to say the least,
but then I was awed to find out that there
were a number of other tenured professors at major universities conducting research
in biofield healing connection for patients.
And in fact, there are over 125 randomized controlled trials
of biofield healing connection for patients.
And when we pull together all of the data in systematic reviews
and meta-analyses where we evaluate the studies for quality
and assurance of inferences,
we find that these connection practices help medicate pain, anxiety,
trauma and even behavioral symptoms in dementia.
What's more, when we examined
the impact of these biofield connection practices directly on physiology
using, for example, cell and animal studies conducted at Harvard,
University of Connecticut, and now MD Anderson Cancer Center,
we’re seeing a pattern in the data
where biofield healing connection is actually preventing
the spread of tumors in the body, in these cell and animal studies,
down to reductions in inflammatory cytokines, changes in cell subsets,
and even changes in cell signaling related to tumor spread.
In fact, we’re still trying to find drugs that can mimic some of these cell actions
that we’re seeing in these studies,
but in these studies, it’s not a drug or even a device
that’s having these effects.
It’s simply a human connecting with another biological system,
channeling the currents of compassion to generate a healing response.
Now these peer-reviewed published studies are very real,
but we tend to kind of ignore them or even discount them.
We kind of just don’t believe them - they seem too fantastic or magical to believe.
You may even be feeling disbelief right now
as I’m sharing with you the results
of these published studies by major professors,
who get millions of dollars of NIH - National Institutes of Health - funding
for their mainstream work.
Well, the disbelief is natural because, as humans,
we tend to engage in something that we call cognitive dissonance.
That is, we set our minds and belief systems a certain way,
and when we encounter data that supports that belief, we take it in, right?
And when we encounter data that doesn’t support that belief,
we tend to refute it or ignore it.
Sound familiar?
We see cognitive dissonance everywhere, right, in religion and politics
and debates about climate change,
even about the way health and healing works.
But being doggedly attached to one point of view
doesn’t actually serve science and medicine.
Healing doesn’t happen from just one pathway.
Basic biology tells us that.
Our inability to see the possibility of multiple ways of healing
is rendering us unable to solve the current global health crises
that we have today.
But here’s the good news:
We are evolving our understandings of health and medicine.
Take for example, the global pain epidemic,
which also became a global opioid epidemic -
we’re all aware of this, right? -
costing trillions of dollars and millions of lives.
Why?
Because we were so focused on a particular molecular chemical pathway
as the only way for healing
that we unfortunately augmented addiction,
mental health issues,
as well as difficulties with life, with suicide.
We exacerbated the suicide rates because of that opioid epidemic.
But now here is the good news:
Thanks to the evidence,
we are expanding our understanding of how health and healing work.
And the American College of Physicians
now recommends, as first-line treatments for chronic low back pain,
practices including exercise, yoga, acupuncture and meditation.
Why? Because we chose to invest in the evidence.
And now we know something
about their helpful evidence-based effects.
The reason why biofield healing seems so unbelievable to us
is because we’ve been walking around with a very narrow perspective,
one may even say tunnel vision about how health and healing work.
Truly, we have to understand that it was not even 50 years ago
that we thought our brains didn’t connect with our immune system,
that our emotions had no bearing on our health, and that our environment,
our socioeconomic environment, had no bearing on disease.
But now, of course, we know differently.
So when we view the data from these whole-system healing practices,
we recognize that we have to peer through the scientific kaleidoscope
in a different way -
from the lens of interconnection, not disconnection -
because all of these Indigenous medical practices
have shown us that every single part of us -
our environment, our relationships,
our mental capacities, our emotional capacities
and even, yes, our spiritual and energetic health -
are all powerful, interconnecting forces
to guide our health and the health of others.
So now you may be wondering, “OK, well, this is really interesting.
How do I make use of this data? What does it mean for me?
Should I go try to find a healer? Should I take up a yoga class? Meditate?
How can I show up for someone who is deeply suffering?”
Here’s our critical action step:
First, look at the data,
trust your instincts and forget the hype.
There are plenty of people who want to sell us something,
whether it's a pill for our latest ills or the latest wellness craze.
Remember that you, all of you, are an incredibly powerful force
for your healing and the healing of others.
because the studies are very clear here -
our compassion is literally a superpower.
And when we show up in compassionate support for someone else,
whether it’s physically, emotionally, financially,
simply showing up with compassionate presence
and asking for compassionate support when we need it,
can very literally reduce our suffering down to the physical level.
And the biofield science and healing work is telling us
that even when we feel alone, we’re always deeply connected.
So for me, when I sit with this emerging data in human healing connection,
I’m incredibly excited and I hope, great hope,
that those that are in a financial position
to support this groundbreaking work in human healing connection
will step up, pay attention
and invest in this research and the healing practitioners
that are doing so much to mitigate suffering across the globe.
But mostly, when I look at all of us and I take in this data
and I realize that we’re just waking up to our interconnection,
it makes me so full of joy
because we’re finally realizing that we can release
the shackles of separatism
and the false things that have been taught to us
about how disconnected we are,
coming into our full capacity for human healing connection
so that we can foster flourishing for every member of our society
and be in right relationship with the Earth.
Because truly there’s never been a better time for us to understand
that we are literally wired to heal each other.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)