A Conversation With... Richard Gordon

The Monthly Aspectarian: Richard, I always like to start with background. Give us a thumbnail of your journey through healing.

Richard Gordon: I went to the Christos School of Natural Healing in Taos, New Mexico in the early '70s. We studied therapeutic massage, spiritual healing and herbal medicine. At that time I was introduced to Polarity Therapy. I eventually wrote a book on that, Your Healing Hands: A Polarity Experience that's been a best seller and has been translated into nine languages. Right around the time it was going into print, about 1978, I met a man named Robert Rasmussen. Bob Rasmussen had an extraordinary ability to do hands-on healing work. He worked with a woman who had a severe case of scoliosis, and I couldn't believe my eyes as I watched him touch her back. The bones spontaneously started to move. Her hips realigned themselves, the occipital ridge realigned, and within about 20 minutes, the scoliosis was about two-thirds straightened out. I immediately reached a few conclusions: He had some extraordinary ability; I would never be able to do it; and no one else in the world would ever be able to do it. I then discovered that with great focus and concentration, I could. I apprenticed with him and was eventually asked to take over upon his retirement. That's how this work was born.

TMA: What is the difference between what he was doing and what other people were doing?

RG: He had an ability to focus life force energy -- what the Chinese call chi, the Japanese call ki and the yogis call prana -- and that focus concentrates the life force energy like a laser. There are certain breathing and body awareness exercises that he was doing that ordinary people can take up and start to do immediately that will allow them to do this amazing work. To give you an example: when chiropractors learn to do this, they think it's an advanced form of chiropractic; the acupuncturists say it empowers their acupuncture; Reiki masters call it Reiki empowerment, and so forth. The Qi Gong teachers say that it triples their power immediately.

I've been teaching this to people of every modality, and everyone finds that they can include it in what they're currently doing ... and yet it's a terrific stand-alone for the total layperson who's never learned any technique. It's faster and easier to learn than the other techniques, and it seems to be a lot more powerful as well.

TMA: What are some of the early steps to learning it?

RG: I teach people some very simple body awareness exercises and some very simple breathing exercises. When the breathing and the body awareness exercises are linked together, they are running life force energy in a terrific, powerful way. I feel a little bit funny -- like the guy who sells the cheap suits on television -- because I tell people that I guarantee it. I guarantee people on the first day of class that they'll move bones back into alignment with a light touch or they can have all their money back. Because this is not a hard skill. This is an extremely easy thing that people can do.

TMA: Anybody who's doing any of the physical yogas is using breath and body. How is this different?

RG: If you were to look at pranayama exercises, you're doing lots and lots of wonderful breathwork. And if you're doing [a certain kind of] yoga, you're doing a tremendous amount of internal focus to move life force energy through your body. But neither of the systems were designed to be linked together, nor were they designed to be used for hands-on healing. So the practitioners of yoga and different arts are actually doing some of the steps of this. But for some reason, people just hadn't put the very basic pieces together, or they would have created this work.

TMA: Do you have a sense of how Mr. Rasmussen put it together?

RG: As a child, Bob Rasmussen was very intuitive. He used to take tests by writing the answers down without having studied. He got in trouble when he did it for math tests because the teachers accused him of cheating. Eventually, he would just tell the teacher, "Well, please give me more questions and I'll show you how I do it." He just wrote answers down, and they let him go. When he was an adult, he was visiting a woman who had a child who had a severe case of bowed legs. He asked, "What can I do to help?" He got the information to run the energy (this is what we call the combination of the body awareness and breathing exercises) -- he ran the energy and he touched the child's knees and immediately, her knees came back together again. She cried, "Mommy, I can touch my knees together!" At that point, he just stopped doing all the other things he had passed examinations for, such as being a structural engineer and a real estate broker. He just gave it all up to do hands-on healing work for the rest of his life.

TMA: How is it that bones move? You get a sense that they're dense, hard things, not easily rearranged.

RG: I call the work Quantum Touch because of the awareness that we're actually dealing with the quantum subatomic level of life. When Deepak Chopra wrote, "In order for consciousness to affect matter, it must affect it at a quantum or subatomic level," I really took that to heart. We believe that what we're doing is affecting matter on that quantum, subatomic level and it works its way up through the atoms, the molecules, the cells, the tissue ... and then we see bones move. But because we have a very gross, dense awareness, we're not aware of all the millions of changes taking place within the cells or the mitochondria or even the cell changes in the tissue. We see the bone move and we go, "Uh ... the bone moved."

But we're actually affecting all the levels of your body healing itself. The bones will spontaneously glide into adjustment. But they're the very last thing that's changed. Everything else has been affected before that.

The principle at work is really very simple. By doing the breathing and body awareness exercises, the practitioner lifts his or her vibration to a very high pitch. Then by holding their hand over the affected area, the body responds by doing its own healing. It's all about resonance and entrainment. The practitioner holds a high vibration. The person receiving the session entrains to the vibration of the practitioner. The definition of a healer is someone was sick and got well. A great healer is someone was very sick and got well quickly. But you don't really heal other people. All you do is hold the space, hold the resonance for them to heal themselves.

TMA: So it requires some cooperation on the part of the person being healed.

RG: Biological entrainment is a cooperation process. When they take little animal hearts and put them into petri dishes, they all will begin to beat together. Women sharing a dormitory begin to menstruate at the same time of the month. When you run energy through a person, their body entrains to the vibration and then their body decides to do whatever healing it decides necessary ... not the practitioner.

TMA: That's interesting. So it could end up healing something you didn't even intend to heal.

RG: It has happened more times than I can count. For example, the person with a terrible headache says, "My god, the sinus pain went away!" or the person with the sinus pain says, "Wow, it also took away my headache!" We had one woman who had terrible sinus pain. She called me the next morning to tell me her sinuses were still hurting like crazy, but her left eye was no longer 200; it had gone to 20/25.

TMA: Vision as well?

RG: We don't know what this work is not good for. We keep seeing it working for all kinds of things. We're hearing everything from pain free childbirth to working with premature babies to helping people with cancer to ... you name it. The body heals itself. It's a very radical principle. When the AMA is often trying to see if they can poison the disease in the hope that the disease dies before the patient, they're not respecting the intelligence of the body or the ability of the body to self heal. With Quantum Touch, we absolutely rely on the body's ability to self heal. That's why we have a couple of very simple, almost kindergarten-type techniques. The first is the Where Does It Hurt? technique in which you ask the person where they're experiencing pain. You put your hands there and you start running the energy into that spot -- which leads to the corollary of the Chasing the Sensation or Chasing the Pain technique. Sensations start moving around through their body. This is not theoretical physiology. This is actually the body speaking in its own language. It says, "Here. Here. Now go over here." It's very basic stuff.

In the last class I taught, a woman had some pain in her head and as the energy was going in, the pain became sharper. But then she felt it moving down to her throat and the woman working on her worked on her throat and the throat pain got a little bit worse while she was working on it ... because sometimes symptoms tend to feel a little worse before it gets better. And then the pain suddenly jumped down and went to the liver-gall bladder area. The woman started working on that area and all of a sudden, all the pain in the whole body was totally gone. If somebody complains about head pain, I venture to guess that not many people are going to think that you need to go down to the liver-gall bladder. But it wasn't about the practitioner being a genius, it's about the intelligence of the body directing the practitioner to allow the healing to go where it needs to go.

TMA: At what point did you differentiate what you're doing and start to call it Quantum Touch?

RG: Bob asked me to take over in his retirement and the organization he was running was having a lot of difficulties. There were really heavy negative politics and I just wanted to create something fresh.

TMA: You got an endorsement by Norman Shealy, the founding president of the American Holistic Medical Association.

RG: He's the one who tested Carolyn Myss for years and years before he endorsed her work. He's written over a dozen books and he's respected by both the alternative and holistic communities. In my efforts to get the work validated, I met with Elmer Green, who is considered to be the father of biofeedback. Elmer got so excited about this work that he said, "It's not enough to get Dr. Shealy excited about this. We've got to make sure that he actually tests it." Well, Norman Shealy is known to be a great skeptic. He wanted to see how it worked on his secretary, his accountant, his nurses. So I gave little session to them and each person's pain level went down from whatever it was to zero in about eight or ten minutes. And then he said, "Well, let's give you somebody harder." He marched me into a room where there was an 88-year-old woman with severe osteoporosis. One of her hips was about three inches higher than the other and she could barely walk. After they took her history for about half an hour, I placed my hands on her hips while she was standing and to everyone's amazement, the hips slowly rolled back into total alignment so that in about six or seven minutes, she could start walking comfortably.

Then I asked Norm, "Are you impressed?" And he said no. I said, "Norm, what does it take to impress you?" And he said, "Well, you know, I think some of those people might have liked you a little bit, and might even have been open to what you were doing." He said, "I want to see how this works on my most difficult chronic pain patients." He lined up people who had had twenty and thirty years of constant chronic pain, who had not been helped by any traditional therapy or alternative modality, and I trained his secretary, his accountant and his nurse to run energy and we gave one-hour-long group healing sessions to every one of these people. Now Norm was impressed that everyone experienced between 30 and 70 percent reduction in their pain. But what impressed him much more was that the pain relief was lasting. When he called me about ten days after I got back home, he said, "This is incredible! Everybody's still experiencing pain relief from that single session."

But that's not what impressed Norm the most. He had been trained as a neurosurgeon and had developed a test to see if people could affect other people's electroencephalograph readings. He would have someone lie down on a table and not be told that they were going to be receiving a distant healing session. Then he'd have people like Olga Worrell and other famous healers send energy, and he'd measure the EEG to see how the session had gone. What he found was that some of these people actually had the ability to affect the electroencephalograph reading. What impressed Norm the most was not that I was able to affect the EEG readings, but that every one of his staff members that I trained was also able to affect the EEG readings at a distance.

He wrote the Foreword to Quantum-Touch. He called this work, "The first technique that may truly allow everyone to become a healer." He teaches a course at Greenwich University that includes this work, and he wrote about it in his new book, Sacred Healing.

TMA: It's hard to do better than that.

RG: When you've got Norm Shealy on your side, you're doin' okay. One of the questions that people often ask is, do people become drained from doing this work?

TMA: That wouldn't have occurred to me because when you channel healing energy, you actually end up with more of it yourself.

RG: Well, you've got it totally right. Yes, not only do people not become drained from the work, they actually get energy from doing it.

TMA: That's the old "It's better to give than to receive."

RG: And it's also about not entraining to the other person. When I've asked groups of hands-on practitioners if they've ever become drained from the work they've done, oftentimes most of them will say that from time to time they'll feel energy creeping up their arm or they're becoming drained. With this work, you just get more and more energy from doing it because you are holding a high vibration and you never entrain to the other person. They always come up and match your vibration.

I show people that they can actually dramatically change the taste of wine by directing energy into it. We're definitely affecting the very physics and chemistry of matter, and I see that in the future, when research has been done, life force energy will be appreciated as being real ... and powerfully impacting physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and psychology. Our world will forever be different as people realize that their love has impact and their love has value.