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Donna Eden has been able from childhood to clairvoyantly see the body’s subtle energies. She works with those energies to further health, happiness, and vitality, and has made a career of teaching people who do not see subtle energies how to work with them. She has treated over 10,000 individual clients and has taught hundreds of classes throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America.

     David Feinstein, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, author, and Executive Director of the Energy Medicine Institute has lectured and consulted internationally on bringing a mythological perspective to personal, organizational, and social change, and has served on the faculties of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Antioch College, and the California School of Professional Psychology

Guy Spiro: Please tell us how you got to be who you are now

Donna Eden: In some ways there was nothing else I could have done with my life. I really had a lot of illness, a lot of health problems. I was born with them. I could not metabolize fruits or vegetables. Then I had tuberculosis as a little girl because partly, I suppose, because I couldn’t metabolize things. I was allergic to everything, and by the time I was sixteen, I got multiple sclerosis. I had a heart attack at twenty-seven. I had asthma. By my very early thirties, western medicine had pretty much given up on me. They said that all my organs were breaking down and that there was nothing more that anyone could do.

GS: What, no leprosy? No plague?

[laughter]

DE: No, but I was in pretty bad shape. For two years I could hardly walk. In a way, that was the best thing that could have happened to me. Because I couldn’t turn to medicine, I had to figure out another way. I had great incentives because I had two little girls that I wanted to raise and I wanted to get a divorce. In order to do all of that, I had to get strong and healthy and that’s what I did. I started working on my body and getting myself healthier. I did this with energy, not with food because food couldn’t do it for me. I was just too allergic. I had ended up with insulin shock in the hospital twice from my blood sugar doing strange things. So it happened for me with energy and that’s what I teach now, energy medicine. I had a practice for twenty-five years.When the book came out, David and I went on the road to teach for six weeks. Seven years later, it hasn’t stopped—we’re still out there.

GS: When you say “energy medicine,” that’s a term that many people use. What do you mean by it?

DE: First of all, energy medicine is the oldest medicine on earth. It was the first thing that people used. It’s the safest, most accessible, and oldest medicine there is. Acupuncture is a form of energy medicine because it affects the energy that runs through your body meridians. I teach acupressure as one of the systems, as well as chakras, auras, grid-work, and Celtic weaves; all the different systems of energy in the body that weave together as checks and balances. They work off of each other and with each other to get you healthy. You can use it as prevention against getting sick, but it works beautifully to get yourself well.

GS: David, how did you come to be where you’re at now?

David Feinstein: I am a clinical psychologist and I’ve always been interested in cutting edge developments. I was trained in the late sixties and early seventies and my first academic position was as a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry. So I was in the midst of both a very traditional approach to helping people change and also, at that time, a very innovative department. The event that really got me into energy work, however, was not based on my own professional explorations, it was marrying Donna. We’ve been together for twenty-nine years. She is a master in this work but I was very skeptical at first. I tried applying all of the ways of judging a new approach that I had applied in my research at Johns Hopkins to her system. It has held up extremely well. So when I think of energy medicine, I realize that it is a different paradigm than Western medicine because the fundamental building block of the human body, according to energy medicine, is energy. While that is well understood by physics, Western medicine does not, for the most part, take advantage of how accessible and fluid energy is. So when we attempt to change an illness, if you focus on the symptoms and the physiology through medication and surgery, it is really, in one sense, more primitive than shifting the energies that underlie the physiology. If you can change your energies, you can change your cellular structure. You can overcome illness through interventions that are much less invasive. That is why energy medicine is such an exciting field to me.

GS: Psychology and psychotherapy is not very old.

DF: That’s correct. In working with Donna and learning about energy medicine, I realized that it is possible to apply energy medicine to psychological issues with great benefit and very rapid results; amazingly rapid results. My whole way of practicing has shifted.

GS: Talk about your collaboration and how it works.

DE: It really works well. It’s been great for our marriage. I mean, we are each other’s homes now. We’re on the road teaching because we feel like we’re on a mission to help people know that they can be empowered by helping themselves. David and I are extremely different from each other on all surface levels, but when you really get down deep, we aren’t that different. Those surface differences are the very things that help us teach well together, because it would never occur to me to say what he says and it wouldn’t occur to him to say what I say. Yet we both know we’re telling exactly the right thing. We have no sense of competition whatsoever.

GS: Pick a particular problem and explain how you would work together on it.

DE: David, you start.

DF: Supposing someone has cancer ...

GS: Oh, sure, start with an easy one first, huh?

[laughter]

DF: ... and they come to Donna for treatment. The first thing to understand is that in energy medicine the focus in not on the symptom.

DE: Or on the name of the disease either.

DF: What you focus on and assess are the energies in the body, how those energies are flowing, where they are blocked and where they are in state of chaos or disruption. The illness is a manifestation, a reflection of the energy problem. So you don’t treat the disease as such. You treat the energy and balance. The symptoms of the disease may give you clues about where to work with the energy and balance but Donna has, since childhood, has been able to literally see the energies in the body and how they flow and where they are blocked.

     She sees them physically, just as your readers will be seeing the page they are reading. She sees them that literally, that distinctly. She sees colors and flows. That tells her where to work. She can work with her hands because our bodies are electromagnetic and a person’s hands have an electromagnetic field coming off of them. So you can move and harmonize the body’s energies with your hands.

     Now, it is also the case that all illnesses have a psychological component. That is not to say that the cause of the illness was in their psychology. It may have been genetics, environment, or stress, but you can use energy psychology to complement the energy medicine approach by helping people work with their fears, expectations, and their terrors. You can often find that some trauma earlier in their lives may have made them more vulnerable to an illness and that you can use energy psychology for healing the aftermath of that trauma. It gives them greater resources to overcome their physical illness. So the combination of energy medicine and energy psychology is quite a natural.

GS: Now, is Donna’s ability to see the disease or the problem more or less a “born with” ability, or something that can be taught?

DE: Let me speak to that because it always makes me a little nervous to have that attributed to me. I mean, it’s true, but I don’t want people to feel that I’m special, therefore I can do it but other people can’t.

     One of the things I do is teach people how to use other means to figure it out and eventually other people do begin to see. One of the things I am convinced of is that everybody, every single baby born, can see energy. But because we live in a culture that does not talk about energies or auras or colors, and nobody keeps it alive, by the time we’re a year old, it’s gone. When you pick up a baby, you’ll see them looking around your head and all over the place, but they’re not looking at you. Babies see. We live in a small town and I’ve had the opportunity to watch a lot of babies grow into young people. When a couple who were pregnant would come to me, I would explain that, when their child was born, they needed to keep talking about energy, talk about colors, ask the questions. Keep it alive. A baby has to learn so much in that first year of life, it will simply go dormant if it’s not being used.

GS: Not only does our culture not value it, it actively discourages it.

DE: That’s right. That’s exactly right. My gosh, I was grown before I knew the whole world didn’t see energy. I thought that this was how we all were out here in the world. It was so normal.

GS: I remember one of my children sitting on my lap one day. She said, “Dad, don’t you see the colors? Don’t you see those pretty colors?” I answered, “No honey, I’m sorry that I don’t, but I know that you do.” I affirmed it for her.

DE: That’s right. I’ll tell you, again, if you get grandchildren down the way and you talk about it to those grandchildren, you’ll be amazed how apt at seeing they are. On the other end of it, a lot of people in my classes start seeing energies again. It opens up a sensory awareness that had closed down. It is a great tool to be able to assess where the problem is in the body.

GS: It could work a lot of ways, I mean; some people are just very empathetic.

DE: Absolutely. And you don’t have to actually see, some people feel it extremely well. I see and I feel, but I trust what I feel more than what I see. Actually, all of the senses begin to open up and get stronger. A surprising thing has sometimes happened during classes I teach on seeing energy. Sometimes somebody will open in another way. It is not what I am teaching at all, but because we are working with the senses, I’ve had people begin to hear the energies. That’s amazing to me because I can’t do that. But it opens your world. It’s far beyond learning how to heal yourself or others. It opens your sensory awareness.

     And importantly, since energy is everything, energy medicine really is about everything. It’s not just about the healing force. It’s about how well you learn in school; how you can learn, and keep your mind functioning well. It’s about how you are in relationships and about how much zest you have in life. Can you pull that energy up and suddenly be okay? That’s some of what you can experience if you learn what I call the language of energy. You can have these skills for the rest of your life.

     I’m not kicking Western medicine, because there are so many important things that it is good for, but we overuse medications. You know, 100,000 people in this country die each year from prescribed medicines. That’s pretty scary. And 98,000 died last year just from mistakes made in hospitals. And anyway, who can afford medicine anymore? Energy is free! Learn how to use energy and you have tool for the rest of your life that is free.

GS: So, how do you go about teaching?

DE: Well, when we teach a weekend class, I start with the basics. But it’s not a simple class. You will get so much information in a basic class that some people find that they can go off by themselves with just that alone. Other people will want to go on and take longer classes. I have been teaching class after class for seven years, since the book came out. A weekend and a five-day class are great to take. For a lot of people, that’s enough for them.

DF: The way that Donna teaches is that there will first be some explanation of the framework. A lot of the teaching in an introductory class is having someone from the audience come up and helping them identify where their energies are not flowing and then correcting it, right there in front of everyone. It’s very persuasive because people are often shocked at how accurate the assessment is, how they immediately feel different, and how this can be demonstrated with various energy tests. So that’s one of the ways it is taught.

     The second way is by giving people specific techniques they can do right there in the class on themselves, such as pushing or tapping on certain points. These techniques move their energies in specified ways. They will often feel the benefit. They will be told that with this kind of difficulty you do this, so it’s very practical.

     A third way is we will have people pair up and one person will work on the other, with a kind of square dance caller telling them what to do. They do it and the partner will feel the benefit.

GS: Well, experience is always the best teacher.

DE: Yes. Our classes are very experiential. Nobody leaves with doubt.

DF: During the class, Donna will often ask if there are any skeptics. If there are any, she will bring them right up on the stage and work with them. You can usually see a look of surprise on their faces because they never expected it could be something that could be demonstrated on them. In longer classes, it gets much more systematic. We’re really teaching a body of work. It goes from a weekend class such as the Conference Works event, to a five-day basic intensive residential class, all the way up to a two-year certification program that people can take for a very full training to become a practitioner of energy medicine.

GS: Talk a little about what you will be teaching and what people will experience at your event in Chicago.

DE: Now, I have to tell you that I’m not very linear in teaching style, but I’m pretty sure that I will be covering these basics at least. I will be teaching people what I call a five-minute routine. If people begin doing this five-minute routine every day, with about six different either points to push, message, tap, or exercise, they will begin to feel a shift in their energy. What you want is to be in alignment with how your energies can flow the best. It’s like tapping your own inner-healer. So they will get that. They will work on each other’s chakras so they will learn a routine of how to clear and balance the energies in the chakras. I can almost guarantee that people will feel it no matter what, because people who think that they can’t feel energy at all, feel the chakras. It’s very palpable. It depends on the group, but if there is pain in the class and if people want to work on pain, I’ll give them pain techniques. We do these things on people who are there so that people can experience how the energy healing works right away.

DF: Donna will cover the basics in these classes, like the five-minute routine and the chakras, but she also adjusts her teaching methods to what are called for through working with the audience. So what is demonstrated and taught also depends on the audience, who comes up on stage and what is going on with them.

DE: You know, one of the things that is really clear to me is that everybody can heal. Everyone can do healing work. It’s our birthright. We carried this forth from millions of years ago when people had to heal themselves in order to survive. So what you see in an audience, in their mannerisms and behaviors, are instincts that are still holding on. Most of the time these instinctual behaviors, such as how they hold their bodies, are really a part of this healing mechanism that is trying to talk to them. It’s like we don’t know this language anymore, but it was ours at one time and it lasted for so long and helped us survive, so people still do some of these things. I’ll give you an example. Have you ever, when you were very stressed, thrown your hand up to your forehead?

GS: Of course, I never have any stress myself.

[Laughter]

DE: Well, that is an instinct that we’ve carried forth. There is a reason that we throw our hand up there. When you get very stressed, you loose blood and energy from your forebrain. Blood and energy travels down through your body for the flight or fight response. It’s not to use your mind and figure things out. It’s to beat someone up or run away. And when you throw your hand to your forehead, if you would keep it there, after a time you will feel calmer because blood and energy will start coming back up into your head so you can think again.

DF: There are certain trigger points there that work with the cardiovascular system and send a single to bring the blood back to your forehead.

GS: Interesting. Is ther anything else you feel it is important for people to know about your energy healing work?

DE: I’d like to say that energy is the life force. It has an intelligence that absolutely surpasses our intellect. It already knows how to heal and restore you. But it evolved for a world that we don’t live in anymore; that world quit existing about 100 years ago. Now it’s all about unnatural energies; unnatural additives to our foods; unnatural electromagnetism in the air around us. You name it. Everything is so unnatural; our bodies did not evolve to deal with those things. We have to awaken these energies and deeply engage them to be able to really live well and in a healthy manner for the rest of our lives, instead of getting some of these diseases that are caused by these unnatural energies.

GS: That’s a really good point.

DE: Our cells absorb these things all the time and we didn’t evolve to be able to adapt or throw them off or anything. It is extremely important. I don’t think that this is an elective. I think this is mandatory that you learn it so that our children can thrive and be really happy. Some of our unhappiness stems from all of our stresses and sometimes it’s because our bodies are having to throw off so many things, and are trying valiantly to make you healthy. But the energies are not going towards joy, and they can. They can

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Additional information about the work of Donna Eden and David Feinstein is available at their website, www.innersource.net. On March 24-25, Donna Eden presents “Come Alive! The Healing Tools of Energy Medicine” weekend class at Indian Lakes Resort, Bloomingdale, Illinois, followed by David Feinstein’s “Change Your Mind, Change Your Life” workshop. See the Conference Works website, www.conferenceworks.com for more information and to register.

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