Guy Spiro: Donna, I usually like to start by asking people to give us the thumbnail story of how they came to be who they are.

Donna Eden: Well, my thumbnail story is I was very sick from early on in my life. I had real challenges. I had tuberculosis as a little girl and I was allergic to everything. By the time I was sixteen, I had multiple sclerosis and by 27 years, I had a heart attack. All my organs started breaking down. I had asthma really bad. The multiple sclerosis was getting worse and worse and I didn’t walk for much of two years.

GS: So it has just been a day at the beach for you, then.

[laughter]

DE: Yes. But I was lucky in a way, in that it never occurred to me that you couldn’t heal all this. It was just that I didn’t know why nobody did. I have always thought that one of the best things that ever happened to me was that Western medicine gave up on me. They said, you know, “pack it in” basically, because my organs were all breaking down. I was told by three different specialists that it looked like I was just winding up my life and I had better find a mother for my kids.

GS: Nice.

DE: But I knew they were wrong. I thought they were just not seeing something, and so I started working with my own energy. How it began was I just put my hand at my upper leg area and the other on my knee. When I would hold them together, for about three minutes, I noticed that I could begin to feel and even see the energy connect.

     That’s another thing. I always saw energy. But I thought the whole world did. It never occurred to me that other people were not seeing it. My mother saw energy, so she talked it up and kept the idea alive. She kept it alive all my life. I think every baby can see energy when they are born. I don’t think it is such a special gift on my part or anything.

GS: Sure.

DE: Then it just goes dormant, because nobody talks about it or keeps it alive.

GS: More than that, it is discouraged in all too many cases.

DE: That’s right, but in my case it wasn’t discouraged and I have a brother and sister who both see energy. So using both seeing and feeling, I began to move my own energy and manipulate it. I got stronger and stronger and my legs got stronger. I began to lose my allergies. It just kept going on that way and that was, oh, about 35 years ago.

GS: So you had that environmental sensitivity thing before it got popular.

[laughter]

DE: Yes. Now, I didn’t know anyone who had all the stuff to deal with that I did. But I really do feel it was a godsend in the end, because I am healthier than most people I know that are my age now. When you start working with your energy, you find that the body is so brilliant, it already knows how to heal. But we have so many obstacles to prevent us from being healed, like our environment. You know, we have all these additives in our food and the air and all these things we didn’t evolve to live with, and our bodies don’t know what to do with them. But if you start working with your energies, you can not only heal, but you can get to know your immune system and it gets stronger. You become not as vulnerable to the same things that you were in another time. So I really see this as evolving the body as well as healing the body.

GS: Sounds like part of the enlightenment process.

DE: I guess so. I didn’t think of it in those ways back then. But I will tell you that when your energies get stronger and stronger, it affects every system which means body, mind, spirit, soul—the whole thing gets touched. You change, you really do change.

GS: It’s as if you are saying our bodies are not just meat.

[laughter]

DE: Oh my god, that’s right. In fact energy is all there is. We are not solid. We are these lattice works of force fields that come together so tightly it just seems to makes us solid. But there are streaming energies, there are circular energies, there are figure eight energies, there are energies all over that make up our body. You can tap into them and really affect them. My latest book, Energy Medicine for Women, takes all the things that I understand about energy and applies it to women and their hormones and all the different things that really affect women. So there is the one book, Energy Medicine, and now also Energy Medicine for Women.

GS: So you healed yourself and then turned around and started to write about it to help other people?

DE: I didn’t start writing about it first. First, I had a practice for 23 years. I just wanted to teach everybody I knew how to heal and how to empower themselves. But as long as I had a practice, people were much more interested in my doing it to them and they were not as interested in doing it for themselves. I didn’t plan it when Energy Medicine came out. I didn’t know that it would hit the culture at exactly the right time. But people want to take their power back and not always just take every prescription drug that comes along. People are ready. So I gave up my practice and now ... we were going on a six city tour when our book came out ten years ago ... and we have never quit. We are on the road so much that maybe a week of each month we’re home, and that’s it. The time has come. It’s wonderful.

GS: Until people get deeper into these things, they tend to think that they have a finite amount of energy available to them.

DE: That’s exactly right. That’s what they think and it is not true. You can generate energy. You can renew your own physical body with energy. Your body always wants to heal itself. Just like last week, the man who is the brother of this guy doing research on regenerating fingers on mice. He cut his finger off and the brother who was doing the research on mice said “well, here, put this powder on your finger and see if it helps restore any feeling or anything.” I don’t know if it was a month later or a week later, I don’t know what it was, but his finger literally grew back, completely.

     He had been doing it to mice and they found, you know, your meridians continue to run even if you lose a limb.

GS: Sure, the phantom limb thing.

DE: That’s right, the phantom limb thing. I have always thought that that was just the next step. In the work I do, I have people who say, “I am experiencing feelings in my leg or in my arm,” something that isn’t there any more; or maybe they’ve got their leg but haven’t been able to use it for more than thirty years. And they are starting to feel it and they are able to pick up their leg a little bit. It is because the nerves can regenerate. I know it is the wave of the future. There is just no way that people will not embrace this god given right to heal yourself. Again, the body is more brilliant than anything we have ever figured out.

GS: What a time to be alive.

DE: Oh, it is an amazing time. Of course, there is a lot of stuff going on that is really scary, but at the same time this glory, this amazing consciousness of waking up to what, really, our ancestors knew. I believe that energy medicine was the first profession.

GS: There is another profession that people usually say that about.

[laughter]

DE: No, the real first profession had to be energy medicine because people had to heal themselves and others in order to survive. Healing one another and taking care of one another fosters love and companionship and all of that. So it becomes critical to learn energy medicine because we are so out of synch with our environment that we have to rev up our immune system energetically so it is not attacking our own bodies. That’s why people get autoimmune illnesses. There is so much the immune system doesn’t recognize out there, that we didn’t evolve with. I don’t think this is an elective course; people have to take it now.

GS: The indigenous healers and the shamans have been caretaking this knowledge for us.

DE: That is exactly right. It is an extraordinary time. And you know, even though I have been in this, I started working on myself about 35 years ago, I never get to the end of my excitement about our energy systems. New worlds of understanding keep opening up. One of the things I am very thrilled about is that I’m going to write a book on the energies of joy. A lot of people have written about happiness and how to think about it, but I’ve come to really understand how to tap into the energies of joy. If your mind can’t move out of its depression or sorrow, you can manipulate the energies in your body so that you get relief. That has been one of the wonderful things to come about by working with energies. Western medicine may know a lot about hormones, but they don’t deal with how a woman’s cycle is not only complex, but completely unique to each woman. How could it be possible for the same prescription of hormones or the same prescription for anything to work for everyone?

GS: If you get in a car accident, or get shot, you want the western doctors. But otherwise ...

DE: If you have been in a terrible accident, boy, Western medicine knows how to put you back together. But you know, there is another thing about even that, and I have a lot of doctor friends and a lot of doctors, by the way, now take my classes, doctors who are real healers. You come to the end of what you understand and you see how mechanical it’s all become and you want to tap into your own healing skills again. They are the first to admit that they don’t know anything about autoimmune illnesses or what to do. They can give you something to handle the symptoms but cannot heal the illness. And energy is your body’s best healer. It really is. It is the best medicine we have and it is the oldest medicine on Earth. It is the life force, for god’s sake! It knows how to heal you, and fuel you and restore you and repair you. It’s astounding!

GS: To put it in a traditional way, “In whom we live and breathe and have our being.”

DE: Oh, that’s beautiful. That is exactly right and the energies are free. So if you learn these tools and techniques, you will have them for the rest of your life and our world desperately needs affordable medicine. I just think this is really, really valuable. Many different hospitals have people who do energy medicine in them now. They are really recognizing the importance of walking hand in hand with energy medicine.

GS: Even very simple things, like laughter therapy. Who was it, Norman Cousins?

DE: Norman Cousins—yes, absolutely. Laughter is part of the energy system of the radiant circus, and that is part of what I want to write about. How to free up the joy energies, the gladness energies, the appreciation energies. They are just not in our consciousness.

GS: Well, you have made a great deal of lemonade here, haven’t you?

DE: I have a wonderful life, that’s for sure. And it is my passion to turn other people on to this. I need to do a lot of volunteer work in the school systems because I know that with nine out of ten kids who are having trouble in school, it’s an energy thing. It is not a mental block. So it is a great joy to work in schools with kids or adults. Because everybody can learn better than they think they can learn. It is not about working harder, it is about freeing up your energy so that energy also moves through your mind and you can think better. I have often thought that if the school systems made energy medicine a part of the curriculum, kids would be empowered very early on to know that when they suddenly can’t think or figure something out, or they feel scrambled, they will know how to move their energy so they can learn better.

GS: Well, and there is this rush to drug.

DE: Oh! There is this terrible rush to drug!

GS: But “Just Say No To Drugs!”

[laughter]

DE: Right! Oh, yeah that’s right.

GS: No hypocrisy here. Move along, move along.

DE: One of my teachers spent most of her young years, up until she was about sixteen, drugged by society because she was, quote, ADD and ADHD and hyper—all these labels. The day she got off these drugs, and they said okay, she was a senior and she didn’t need it any more. They didn’t think. That very day was the day she turned to street drugs and she was a drug addict for twenty years.

GS: It’s almost like there could be a connection there.

DE: Could be!

[laughter]

GS: I mean what is Adderall or Ritalin? It’s speed.

DE: It’s speed. That is exactly right. And you know, I don’t remember the names of the medicines, but just last week on CNN they were talking about two more medicines that they have decided to keep on the market that have caused so much cancer and heart problems and muscle deterioration. Two of the biggest cholesterol drugs, and I just can’t believe that they didn’t immediately yank them off. But in the last seven years, over 100,000 people in the United States died each year of taking medication, as they are supposed to, not by accident or mistake, but as they are supposed to. I heard someone speak on this recently, and I loved it, something like, I don’t know, five percent die of street drugs?

GS: It is in that neighborhood. It’s ridiculous.

DE: It is. Anyway, the demand for energy medicine is getting stronger and stronger. There is something changing in our culture. I love seeing this happen. One of the things I have seen happen is at Indy Anderson, which is one of the two biggest cancer centers in the United States, their Orlando branch now has an energy medicine center. One of their departments does energy medicine because they found through their research on people who they were still going to put through chemo and radiation and all that, that if they also give them treatments of energy medicine, the people did not have side affects and they didn’t lose their hair.

GS: I’d say that what they found through their research is that they can’t deny it any longer.

DE: They can’t deny it. But the pharmaceutical companies have such power, and the only place most doctors get their information from is from those companies. People are as unique as a thumbprint, so how can you possibly give the same medication to everyone even if it is for the same thing? I mean, how their energies are going to react in their bodies is utterly different.

GS: You’re going to be here in the Chicago area.

DE: In Chicago, the first day will be all the basic energy medicine information for people who have never taken a class from me, so they can get up to speed and I don’t have to start from the beginning. From that jump off point I can go into all sorts of things, like how to speed up your metabolism if you are not able to lose the weight or if you just don’t have any energy in your day. I can deal with hot flashes and how energy is the bottom line to hormones. The building blocks of hormones, (and everything else) is energy. And very specifically I have things for people to do.

     That was another thing about my process. Oh, my god, nobody had worse PMS than I did and I had to figure out how to affect that. This was another blessing. I could never take any kind of hormones or medication, because my body did react differently. I had to figure something else out. I also had extremely low blood pressure and had to figure that out. In the process, I figured out what helps people with high blood pressure or low pressure and how to burn calories faster.

     The body will do all of this for you if you start balancing the energy systems. I am going to show people about all sorts of hormone hookups, how to help their memory. If you are having problem with your eyes, how to work with your eyes better. If you are having problem with your digestive tract—or anything—I get very, very specific. How to heal your heart, heal your liver, all of these things I’ll work with.

GS: Now, the new book is specifically for women. When you are in Chicago, will you be dealing just with women or with men as well?

DE: The class is called “Energy for Women and the Men who Love Them.” Even though this is for women, energy is energy. I can show men things for their prostate or sexual energy, anything. It comes down to energy. What men who have the classes have told me is they weren’t quite sure what was happening, but they felt better and better. And they were just there to assist their wives. You just start balancing the fields or balancing energy in particular organs or meridians or chakras and that’s everything.

GS: Well excellent. Is there anything else you want to say?

DE: I really do believe that we have got to prime the evolutionary pump and evolve now. We don’t have another million years to do this. Life has sped up too fast with artificial ingredients and chemicals and heavy metals and radiations that may be frying our circuits. Everything that is artificial interferes, even if it is at a level that you don’t recognize. It interferes with your body’s capacity to heal itself. If your cells cannot throw off toxins and adapt to the environment that we live in, your body begins to break down and we age faster. We really must participate and learn how to heal ourselves. And it’s easy! That’s the thing, it is so simple and so easy.

     In my classes I demonstrate over and over how to move energy, so that by the time the class is done, people can do it for themselves. One great thing about evolution is that millions of years of evolution have not only created but strengthened our energy systems. They are so responsive now and you can affect them so easily.

GS: We are certainly in a period of accelerated evolution.

DE: Yes! Yes. Yes.

GS: The question becomes, is it going to be a good thing or not? I think it will.

DE: Exactly. That’s why it is so important for people to feel empowered, lifted, knowing and getting feedback very quickly on their own bodies. That, “Oh my god, I took away my headache!” “Oh, my god, I just couldn’t get any of my energy back and then I knew what to do and got my energy back.”

GS: And if I can do that, what else can I do?

DE: Yes! It just opens a door and you want more and more. I love teaching this. It is one of the most fun things in the world to watch people heal.

GS: I understand. When you see the lightbulbs going on over people’s heads, what could be more fun than that? It is such a privilege to be the conduit for all of these kinds of things.

DE: Ah, yes, I know. I am very, very privileged and glad. I am so glad when other people take what I teach, get into energy medicine and start understanding and experiencing how they can move the energy, perhaps in ways I never taught them. I want people to take this information and jump off my shoulders and go further.

GS: Because nobody owns it.

DE: Nobody owns it. This is our magic. Really, it is miraculous and I want everybody to surpass me. Come and learn what you can and then surpass me with it.

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