Dr. Shamini Jain: http://www.shaminijain.com/
CHI, the Consciousness and Healing Initiative: https://www.chi.is/
Dr. Fritz Albert Popp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz-Albert_Popp
ALICE: Today's question is: What is your biofield? And what is the vital energy exchange?
ALICE: Our expert speaker, Dr. Shamini Jain is the founder and C.E.O. of "chi", the Consciousness and Healing Initiative.
JAIN: We can describe the biofield as a set of inner penetrating and interacting fields of energy and information that guide our health.
So that might sound abstract, to you, but let me give you some examples. We know, for example, that we can manipulate, basically altering the electromagnetic field around cells. And when we, for example, manipulate these electromagnetic fields around cell membranes, we can grow neural tissue.
So there are biofield advances that are happening in the field of what we call regenerative medicine, growing new tissue. That's one example of biofield science.
ALICE: Dr. Jain is a psychologist, scientist, and social entrepreneur. She formed the Consciousness and Healing Initiative for the study of systems-based healing processes. Partners of CHI include the Institute of Noetic Sciences, San Diego Cancer Research Institute, U.C. San Diego Center for Integrative Medicine, and Chopra Foundation.
JAIN: And there are many other examples that are devices that are being used right now that basically put out certain electromagnetic fields that we can measure. And those are being used to guide our health. They're being used for things like wound healing. They're even being used in the case of treating mental illness. Many different ways.
But we're not taking a pill or anything like that. We're really working with electromagnetic fields. Some of the most exciting work is also coming out of really doing things like focused ultrasound where we're discovering that by using light and using sound waves, essentially, we could dissolve plaques, which seem to be really important in treating Alzheimer's Disease. So all of these aspects are part of what we call the biofield and using the biofield for health.
ALICE: That's the biofield, the fields of energy and information that effect our health.
And it's not actually new. For thousands of years, this principle of energy, vital energy, has been described by cultures around the world, there are many different names for it: prana, chi, ruah.
The biofield, and vital energy, have been used in the practice of health and healing for millennia.
JAIN: the vital energy aspect is core to the principles of everything that we consider holistic medicine today. So, whether we're talking about osteopathy, craniosacral, Chinese medicine, acupuncture, Ayurveda, all of that is there. Yoga, meditation, many of these different practices talk about the vital energy flow in our bodies, and some of them actually very specifically teach you how to work with that, even for your own self-care.
Then you have healing practitioners, hands-on healers, energy healers, biofield healers as we call them sometimes, that practice things today like chronic healing, healing touch, therapeutic touch, reiki, laying on of hands in the Christian tradition, and they're working with this vital energy in the body to foster healing in another person. And that's been the bulk of a lot of the research that I've done, where I've done randomized controlled trials, for example, looking at can these hands-on healers, can these so-called energy healers, biofield healers, actually foster meaningful healing in another person?
Because here, there's no stretching, there's no needle, there's no device, right? It's just the field. It's just working with the field, sensing and working with the field. And the results so far are profound. It's amazing, when we start to realize that we are bioenergetic beings, how we can uplevel our sense of empowerment on our own health and how we can uplevel our ability to heal ourselves.
ALICE: Yes! We are bioenergetic beings! We are learning how the biofield, the fields of energy and information, the light and the soundwaves around us is affecting us.
So how can we use that to benefit our health?
JAIN: How can energy heal us all the way to the physical level? And quite frankly, it's still a mystery. There are a lot of different theories around it. But one of the things we know is that it can't be completely explained by what we call placebo elements. And we can have a long, wonderful discussion about what we call placebo because it's very rich and it's very important.
So, we're not really getting rid of placebo because placebo is just the basis of good medicine, its relationship, its ritual, its expectation, its conditioning. So placebo effects happen in every healing encounter. And they should be maximized. Yet when we try to control for those in studies, we're learning that it's not just the placebo effect that's affecting it. There's something else happening.
So, the question is, how?
Are the receptors on our cells simply chemical or do they respond to electromagnetic fields? And there are some studies now by several groups, mostly, I believe, in Europe, that have been demonstrating that there are certain types of cells that respond to electromagnetic fields.
So that is you can apply electromagnetic fields and they will respond. And it seems to be all the way down to DNA response elements. So, there's some indication that if, for example, healers are actually emanating electromagnetic fields as many suspect, we don't know if we can measure all of those physically, but it could be that cells are responding that way.
ALICE: In a previous episode, Dr. Fitz Albert Popp told us: "We are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean." We are surrounded by fields of energy and information. And Biofield science is exploring many ways to use electromagnetic fields in healing. This is exciting!
JAIN: We might ask, well, if we're seeing these effects with biofield healing shrinking tumors, why aren't we studying this more? Why are there only a handful of researchers looking at this? Well, because it's challenging to our general world view, right? Our general worldview is that we've been taught that the body is kind of more of a machine and that we're really mostly physical and yeah, there's something called the spirit, but we don't really understand or appreciate how strong the effects are of the spirit of the body. So it really sort of flies in the face of what we call materialism in medicine. And because it challenges beliefs, really deeply entrenched beliefs about how the body works and how medicine works and it touches on spirituality, which a lot of people really quite frankly aren't comfortable with in science, it's like they really want to keep those things separate, we end up seeing these incremental pieces of progress where we really need a systematized, deep, and broad level of research.
Now one of the things that we've uncovered at the consciousness and healing initiative is that there are over 400 researchers worldwide that are doing work in this area and want to do more. And many of them are tenured professors at the best universities, but a lot of them keep their interests here in the closet because they're afraid. They don't want to lose tenure. They d...
