Becoming Your StellarSelf

The Reality of Reiki

As some of you may know, I volunteer for Inova Hospital's Life With Cancer program, which offers Reiki treatments for people undergoing chemotherapy (or who have recently completed chemo), as well as for their families and caregivers. I blogged about my experience as a Reiki volunteer last December. Knowing of my involvement with Reiki, a friend emailed me a link to Friday's uncredited Washington Post article "Reiki: Touching the Intangible," about how Reiki is increasingly being used in hospitals to help reduce stress and promote healing in patients. Luann Jacobs, head of Reiki Partners, and creator of the George Washington University Hospital Reiki program, is quoted in the Post article. I have had the pleasure of meeting Luann, and am familiar with the high standards of the GW Hospital Reiki program, which is a wonderful resource available to all patients who are interested in utilizing this service.

The Post article is short, but informative. However, I believe that the author missed the point in saying, "There's no scientific evidence behind their claims, but reiki healers believe that during sessions, they're tapping into a universal source of energy that is then transferred to the recipient." While it may be true that we do not have the means to measure something as ethereal as "a universal source of energy," several studies have investigated Reiki, and a number of these have supported its efficacy in treating a variety of conditions.

An article by Anne Vitale (a nurse/researcher/Reiki Master), published in Holistic Nursing Practice in 2007, reviewed Reiki research published over the past 20 years. Most of the studies had small sample sizes, or did a poor job of controlling for factors other than Reiki. However, several showed significant positive effects of Reiki treatment, including decreased distress, anxiety, pain and physiological stress responses.

Pamela Miles, a Reiki Master who "has developed Reiki programs in prominent New York City hospitals, published in peer-reviewed medical journals, and presented and taught Reiki at medical schools and conferences," provides citations for current research on her website (see the Reiki and Medicine section). Findings from these studies show significant effects of Reiki, including reduced anxiety, pain, depression, and fatigue. One thing that the literature on Reiki has suffered from is the lack of large-scale studies, although this is true for many areas of research in the medical field. As Reiki gains more attention, more and more studies are being designed to address this issue. Currently, the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is supporting several studies on the effectiveness of Reiki, the results of which I hope to see in the not-too-distant future.

In the meantime, empirical evidence shows us that huge numbers of patients have reported relief from pain, nausea, anxiety and fatigue after receiving Reiki. Nurses, who are on the front line of patient care, have long understood the healing power of touch, and see first hand the positive effects of Reiki, Healing Touch and Touch Therapy. The Reiki in Hospitals website lists over 40 hospitals in the U.S. that offer Reiki to their patients, and this is just a partial representation. The authors of the Reiki in Hospitals website are undertaking the task of gathering and summarizing the entire body of peer-reviewed Reiki-related research in order to educate the medical community and the public as to the current state of knowledge about the effectiveness of Reiki.

Admittedly, all of the studies I have mentioned only addressed the tangible effects of Reiki, not the mechanisms underlying it -- not the transfer of "universal energy." However, The Promise of Energy Psychology by David Feinstein, cites recent studies that have begun to show how energy runs through the body and may be transferred from one person to another. Science is just beginning to try to address the measurement of the "subtle energies," and it is still in a nascent stage, but the more interest the public shows in complementary and alternative medicine, the more investigations there will be. In the meantime, remember that, before Einstein, we looked at the physical world in a very different way -- we didn't hold the concept of light as particle AND wave, energy AND matter -- and could not measure many of the things we now measure. And before we had microscopes, people scoffed at the idea that we could get sick from little unseen creatures (which we now fondly refer to as bacteria, viruses, etc.).

Our current inability to measure the transfer of universal energy does not negate the possibility that it exists. Just because we don't currently understand how something works does not mean that it isn't beneficial. Take aspirin as an example. Around 400BC, Hippocrates prescribed the bark and leaves of the willow tree (which contains salicin) to his patients. Then, in 1897, chemist Felix Hoffmann created aspirin (whose key ingredient is salicin), which today remains one of the most widely used drugs for treating pain and fever. However, it wasn't until the 1970s that scientists figured out the mechanisms by which this medicine worked. Similarly, even if an objective measurement of universal energy transfer isn't developed anytime soon, this does not in any way diminish the effectiveness of Reiki as a healing practice.

(Image borrowed from The International Center for Reiki Training FAQ page -- a comprehensive source of information on Reiki)

Spiral Dynamics, Spiral Webs, and Evolving Business

On Thursday I attended "The New New Internet, Web 2.0 for Business" hosted by Potomac Executive Biz. This one-day conference focused on the rapidly changing nature of consumers' interaction with the Internet, and how business and government need to adapt to this morphing landscape. As more and more people utilize blogging, wiki-ing, RSS, Twitter, social media, podcasting, video blogging and other instant modes of communicating information, there is an increasing expectation that enterprise and government will provide transparent, up-to-the-minute information. There has been reluctance on the part of business and government to adopt many of these new technologies, partly because of heavy beauracracy and partly due to concern over security and control.

At the conference, I attended a seminar entitled "Spiral Web-The Future of Web Society" presented by Michael Smith of TeraTech, which gave me a glimpse of a fascinating idea. Spiral Web is Smith's conceptual model (based on the Spiral Dynamics theory of human biopsychosocial development) which is designed to describe and predict the evolution of web societies. Both models consist of a series of colored tiers representing different levels of increasing integration and complexity. In the Spiral Web model, the first tier is the stand-alone PC. The subsequent tiers represent the increasing vastness and complexity of the interactive nature of the web (from BBS to services like AOL to blogging, Wikipedia, Facebook and beyond).

In the Spiral Dynamics model, the first several tiers (the majority of the model) represent individual survival, followed by group and societal survival: Purple is tribal safety, Red us raw power, Blue is eternal salvation, Orange is individual success, and Green is the need to be accepted. The highest two tiers (Yellow and Turquoise) are integrative, holistic and incorporate feeling with knowledge. They are distinguished by the values of flexibility, responsibility, spontaneity, holons, intuitive thinking, and global networks.

After discussing how the Spiral Web model describes the Internet's evolution up until now, Smith touched briefly on what the model means in terms of where the Internet is heading. He feels that the next level will be more holistic, and will constitute applications and sites designed to benefit business, individuals and the planet (the Triple Bottom Line). When asked if he could give an example of this, he said that he was not aware that anything like that yet exists.

I tried to think of examples, feeling that there must at least be some nascent examples out there, but couldn't come up with anything specific. In discussing this with a friend yesterday, she referred me to "The Hughtrain" by Hugh MacLeod. MacLeod presents a straightforward, no holds barred call-to-action for businesses to evolve to the next level if they want to maintain the trust of and engagement with their customers. In his manifesto, MacLeod posits: "I believe we are living in the beginning of a new global spiritual awakening. It is not religion. It's everything and everyone around us...The spiritual implications are staggering. It's no longer enough for people to believe that your product does what it says on the label. They want to believe in you and what you do. And they'll go elsewhere if they don't."

Given the Spiral Web model's prediction of how the next tier of web entities will manifest, along with MacLeod's observations of the changing consumer landscape, companies that are early adapters in implementing the concepts of integration, holism, and intuition are likely to lead the way, while those companies that fail to evolve are likely to become extinct.

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For more information on Spiral Dynamics, check out the interactive resources at What Is Enlightenment?

Spiral Dynamic model image copyright What Is Enlightenment?

Just Thinking About It...

The October 2007 issue of Women's Health, featured an article entitled "Muscle: Defined." In it, there was a short section with the caption Best.News.Ever, which talked about a 2007 study that found that women who visualized weight training, over a period of time, gained almost as much muscle strength as women who actually trained. I wanted to read the original scientific article, but there was no citation in the magazine, and a Google search failed to reveal any recent research in this area. The only reference to a journal article that I could find was on Sports Medicine About.com, which referenced a 2004 study conducted by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

About 13 years ago, I was working as a research assistant for a public health research facility. I was part of a neurophysiology laboratory where they were studying muscle fatigue. They would place extremely thin needles (like acupuncture needles) into people's arms, then have them move their muscles. They would record the neuronal activity of their muscles, observing how long it took for the muscles to fatigue.

Twice weekly, the researchers would take turns presenting their latest research, along with discussions of the current state of their field of study. One time, one of the post-docs from our lab made a presentation, and mentioned a study that had just been published, which indicated that muscle strength could be built simply through the act of thinking about moving one's muscles. Several of the senior researchers chuckled at the idea, and dismissed it as nonsense. But I was fascinated. The study had shown significant increase in muscle strength in a controlled study -- over the period of a month, people who simple thought about exercising a particular muscle gained almost as much strength as those who actually did exercise it, and those who neither thought about it, nor moved it (they had their hand put in a splint and were not given visualization instructions), didn't gain anything. It seemed there had to be something to it.

Since that time, several studies have supported this idea, and it seems that it is becoming common wisdom -- many professional athletes and trainers now accept the idea that you can build muscle strength through consistent, repeated visualization of a physical action. Not that the idea of mind over matter is in any way a new concept!