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Dear Friend,
I appreciate what you are saying and this is a problem as old as psychology itself - just look at the hypnotherapists! They have been trying for a hundred years and failing wonderfully in every way - a friend of my son's has just completed her psychology BSC at one of the most forward universities in the UK and hypnosis was not even mentioned.
To get public acceptance (aka billions of users!) for energy approaches the slowest possible way is for all of us to start playing the game that currently, we cannot help but lose - namely the whole idea of funding research studies.
The plain fact is that the scientific community has not even considered that the existence of meridians has been proven; the latest on that is that there are nerve connections doing something with bio electricity which is a million miles off the mark.
As far as the established global scientific community is concerned, there is NO energy body.
There are NO subtle energies at all, there is NO energy flow in the way that we use it and there are NO meridians.
This being so, there is therefore NO foundation for studies on the effects of treating this non-existent system.
You can conduct these studies but they are not taken seriously because of course, they are based on the underlying presupposition that there is an energy system - and that has not been proven, ergo all the rest is nonsense.
It is fascinating to consider that even those who are so desperately seeking "scientific respectability" completely overlook this simple fact and why they would choose to do that.
It could be that psychologists in general try not to think about the fact that the hard sciences have never accepted psychology as a science at all - and so to the rest of the scientific community, psychology itself is highly unscientific!
I have proposed for a very long time that if we want to see any serious change in the way people are being treated we will have to do it the other way around - namely by public acceptance forcing the scientific community and including the psychologists to have to use it EVEN THOUGH IT IS BASED ON AN UNPROVEN THEORY.
This works, in effect, in the following ways.
1. Pseudo Science
By all means, use the term "Energy Psychology" if you are selling things like ET, EFT and TAT to *psychologists* (just as you would use "Energy Healing" if you were selling the same techniques to healers).
By all means, cite the "studies" that have been conducted which are either completely immaterial to the point as to whether you can make allergies disappear by tapping a few meridian points because they pertain to Chi Gung for example; or because they simply leave out the fact that the existence of an energy body hasn't been proven and thus the whole thing is nothing but a house of cards built on thin air.
By all means, make up important sounding references or quote things that "sound scientific" such as making references to Prigogine & Co which hardly anyone has ever read but thinks that's an OK kind of science.
All of this eases psychologists into being able to allow themselves to come into contact with the material and once they are, they become just human beings who are amazed by how it all really works and get convinced, one person at a time by their own experiences - true science, if you will.
Which brings me to the second and perfectly parallel option, namely:
b) Go for "the people" directly.
Folk who are deriving their income and friends and interactions and literature from the psychology scenes and circles tend to forget, much like Mormons in their iron clad communities do, that there is a very, very big world outside their own city walls.
Psychologists represent approx. 0.000000000000013% of the human population.
It is my assumption and has been for a very long time that the only way to make Energy Therapies go really mainstream, completely accepted and all over the planet is to do this with people power - from the grass roots up.
Gary Craig also believes this and I think he is absolutely right.
When we consider how to make a real sea change happen *within our own life times* rather than leaving that to the generation after next, the answer is clearly that these new ways of thinking, doing and being are a product that needs to be sold to the population - en masse.
Like any true missionary, I absolutely believe it is for their own good and that they'd be better off if they knew about EFT etc. and were in a position of choice as to whether to try it for themselves and use it, or to reject it as something they do not find useful.
I want a whole new approach to science, namely people science.
Just as I have always said that I would prefer to communicate with the Universe myself rather than through a priest, I would also prefer to have my scientific evidence directly out of my own experiences.
There is the base idea in science that a theory should be tested and that an experiment should be designed so that it may be replicated anywhere in order to prove the theory.
I want *everyone* to become their own scientist on the Energy Therapies/Approaches front and conduct their own experiments and come to their own conclusions, rather than leaving that to some few and strangely chosen mysterious people who have clearly designs and power issues of their own.
To this end, people need to be invited and encouraged to conduct the first base experiment with one of the energy techniques.
Many have already done this, in the form of using Donna Eden's energy drills, for example, and found the benefits.
Many have tried EFT and found it to work for them - their experiment concluded that this was worth doing or doing more of.
This is the kind of "scientific evidence" that will make people know and understand things, and make it entirely irrelevant what may be preached from the pulpit above in important sounding words - you experience, you understand and YOU KNOW.
I see it as my job, amongst other things, to present energy approaches in such a way that *one person at a time* may conduct their own experiment.
In order to do this, the basic sales idea of finding a need and presenting a product that will fill this need is a perfect solution as to how to approach this.
EFT, for example, being so very flexible, can be dressed up as all kinds of things to fit a particular targeted community (and including psychologists when dressed up as "energy psychology"!).
It can be a weightloss aid, it can be a relaxing technique. It can be this and that and then that, and although it is both neither and much more than that (as are all the energy techniques), to make it fit is what is required to get the people to do their own test - one person at a time, it doesn't work any other way.
See, even *if* someone got the Nobel prize for some energy thing, what would happen next? There is no "psychology edict" that would be handed out from all the church roofs (or library roofs) in all the countries all of a sudden and folk would simply stream into energy therapies. It would still take 50 years for the current training programmes to be re-written and all the current paradigm thinkers to have died out, as well as the people they favoured to take their places during their life times.
So, for each of us who are working in this field, what we have to do is to make decisions as to where exactly each of us is going to go and start their missionary work.
If you personally feel it is your mission to preach in the village of the psychologists, then of course you must observe their strange customs, their language, their taboos, and dress up what you are teaching and how you are presenting it accordingly or else they will just throw you out.
If you feel you would rather go to the city of eating disorder sufferers, the county of sex abuse survivors or the continent of health & fitness people, of course the very same applies.
The reality behind this is that just like in my metaphor of missionary work, where we are inviting people in with sparkling glass beads and promises of a festival they've never had before, there is another world behind those little trinkets.
It is another world and another world view; a totally different paradigm and at the end of the day, a totally different religion of how the universe works and what people actually are in the context of all of that.
Paradigm shifts of this order don't come from the top down, never. They never have, not in the entire history and record of human civilisations; and structurally, they cannot because of course the old paradigm seeks to protect itself with everything its got - everyone who is involved in the old paradigm and made their lives and reputations there will fight for survival against the new where they would have to start afresh.
Luckily, we *do have* the lessons of history to look back at. We do have the evidence of what happens to treatment forms and personal development models that lie outside the currently established paradigms - just look at hypnosis, NLP, Reiki, and so on.
The only times when the established paradigm gets forced to turn a blind eye is when economics are involved - let the nurses play at the therapeutic touch thing, silly as it may be - it keeps them quiet and we save a few dollars in the long run even though it's all mumbo jumbo placebo effect ...
Acupuncture was NOT accepted by science but turned up in the mainstream because *insurance companies* decided it was in their financial interest to have people get a few needles stuck into imaginary points rather than to have to pay for endless prescriptions.
Clinics went for acupuncture NOT because they believed in it but because they could make extra money from the insurance company and please their punters. I am aware there are individual doctors who are exceptions to this, of course, but I do know of many cases in which the economics and NOT the holistic spirit were the deciding factor for practices to offer "alternative health treatments".
These are the realities under which we operate.
If one wishes to make the new energy paradigms available to as many people as possible in the fastest time possible, the question is how useful it is to spend all available resources of time and investment on conducting "studies".
The same time and resources spent on, say producing a free guide to overcoming eating disorders with energy approaches and mailing it to support groups (rather than to clinics which are financially invested in their existing treatment programmes) free of charge would have an immediate impact on the current sufferers AND on those who treat them - if they want to keep their clients.
I believe in building a revolution from the ground up and then, the other structures which seem so rigid and difficult to deal with are forced to follow suit unless they wish to marginalise themselves into extinction.
I would like to make it clear that this revolution need not exclude the individual psychologists; indeed it includes them by definition.
Now, to sum up.
We have two major bodies for Energy Therapies at the moment - the GoE and ACEP.
ACEP is very much doing the "science" angle. They are very serious about it and thus, provide an excellent place to which to send those who need to have the paradigm shift presented to them in that particular way.
The GoE, on the other hand, is going for the popular markets and this includes the entire non-scientific holistic healers and therapists communities as well as the individual end users such as special interest communities and support groups.
Those things, however, are only doorways into the new paradigm as anyone who has stepped through one of them (and it doesn't matter then through which one you came) will know and recognise.
At conferences, you meet these people who came through these different doorways. They stand there and look at each other and are quite astonished to be in the same room - but once they are there, it doesn't matter anymore if you "were" a psychologist, or a hypnotherapist, or a coach, or a nurse or whatever *before* you stepped inside.
Now, you're a human being who can give and receive healing and that, THAT is a totally different world altogether.
This is a world where all your old limitations and what you thought you were, what you thought you could be and do, what you thought was right and wrong or what could or could not be done is now in question and wide open to more investigation.
A very different world.
For me, a world in which for the first time in my entire life I really, really want to live and where there's hope and excitement, new horizons, wonderment and even the possibility of something so new, it has *never been before* in the entire history of mankind.
Wow.
So what I would say is, let's go out there and build these doorways. The more, the better. Some of these doorways can be really big and others are smaller - but they lead to the same place and in my opinion, it's a place out of the dark ages.
I hope that helps some with your question as to how to present energy therapies to your particular audiences,
all the best,
Silvia Hartmann
Energy Therapies Discussion? - The MET List is at http://yahoogroups.com/group/meridiantherapy
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