To listen to ‘Shedding the Ego’, please click here.

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• Podcast - Healing the thought
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In a stunt redolent of James Randi, the magician-cum-quackbuster, the twosome have offered anyone £10,000 if they can prove that homeopathy works.

Many of you may be familiar with Edvard Ernst. Once receiving the UK’s first chair of Complementary Medicine at Peninsula University, Ernst, as Robert Verkerk, director of Alliance for Natural health puts it, set about firmly establishing himself ‘as one of CAM’s biggest detractors.” At the European Skeptics Congress in 2003, for instance, Ernst gave the keynote address.

Ernst and Singh’s usual M.O. is to combine a mismash of disparate studies into one ‘meta-analysis’ – a questionable methodology shown to have severe limitations with conventional medicine — and then to hack and slice away any studies that do not fit their own rigid criteria.

For instance, in such a review of herbal medicine, they began with 1345 peer-reviewed studies, and by the time they were done they’d rejected all but three. From these three studies, Ernst believed it possible to denounce all of herbal medicine, including Chinese herbal medicine and Ayurvedic herbal medicine, as having ‘no convincing evidence that it is effective in any indication’ particularly ‘in light of its high potential for adverse effects’.

Aside from the fact that randomized, controlled trials of many types of alternative medicine do exist (of 32 such studies of homeopathy, 81 per cent show a beneficial effect), the real problem here is Ernst’s and Singh’s attempt to use a tool of conventional medicine to study alternative medicine.

Alternative medicine doesn’t simply use radically different therapies; it rests on a radically different theory of biology – indeed a radically different world view.

Conventional medicine conceives of the body as individual entity— a machine. A broken part gets repaired in isolation through a chemical agent. Virtually all of alternative medicine understands the body only in relationship – to others, to the environment, to its healers, indeed to the world.

Ernst acknowledges that besides the specific effects of any therapy, a patient’s expectation of benefit, his behavioural changes, the intentions those around the patient, including his healer, for instance, all may have an effect on a favourable outcome.

But to dismiss this as a ‘placebo effect’ is to miss the point of alternative healing. Most alternative practitioners understand that the belief and intentions of the healers, the healee and those surrounding them all play a role.

To heal a symptom, the entire person must be healed — in relationship to his environment. Homeopathy doesn’t seek to fix the broken wheel; it seeks to fix the car, the garage and the street where it is parked.

During our radio show, a young man called in. He’d been covered in psoriasis in his teens. After a course of acupuncture his skin was 80 per cent improved. Although he’d had to abandon treatment, this improvement remained over the years.

Ah, but it probably was your age – a lot of teenagers have conditions that clear up by themselves, said Singh.

No, replied the young man. It definitely was the acupuncture.

Now, what cured him? Was it expectation of benefit, the healing talents of the acupuncturist, the needles themselves, the atmosphere at the clinic, or the prayers of his mother?

In our view, all played a part and indeed the intentions were probably the most important aspect of treatment.

As we are witnessing in our workshops, healing is an alchemical process between intender and receiver. The intentions of both matter.

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• Podcast - The placebo effect
• Why your intentions don’t come true
• Living with intention: a toolkit for the new paradigm
• Living with intention: something’s happening here
• Podcast - Even the body responds to intention

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Imagine our access to information if we are receiving at every moment from everywhere in the galaxy.

Most of this information is picked up unconsciously, without our cognitive awareness. According to Joseph LeDoux, of New York University, our sense of fear about something travels to the unconscious part (the more primitive amygdala) in a few milliseconds and then to the conscious part of the brain eleven seconds later.

This has an obvious survival advantage. You run away from something potentially dangerous before you take the time to work out in your frontal lobes whether it actually poses a threat.

I believe that our gut hunches could be operating similarly, so that we are recipients of two types of information flow — ’low-road’ unconscious information to the amygdala, and conscious ‘high road’ cognitive information to the neocortex.

It is likely that our unconscious intuition is constantly receiving sensory and intuitive data that our ‘sensible’ neocortex dismisses.

Clearly, our task now is to relearn how to ‘listen’ to this instant information– to become conscious of our own innate intuition.

The evidence from both animals and humans shows that our well-developed forebrains may inhibit our ability to access precognitive ability, including other people’s intentions. The forebrain sees a portion of something and, in a sense, ‘fills in’ the conceptual details to produce a whole.

One way to develop your sixth sense is to work on other parts of the brain by trying, for example, to think in pictures or to work on developing one of your five senses.

This week, try this experiment on yourself. Place blindfolds and earplugs on and experience the ‘feel’ or ‘smell’ of a room or your backyard without sight or sound (make sure it is safe first or a loved one watches you). Or concentrate on what happens when you only focus on your smell for a day. Write down if you pick up any additional extrasensory information and write in here to share it with us.

Remember: pick up on the first thing that comes into your mind. The correct information always comes to you immediately before your conscious mind gets hold of it.

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• From ‘lumper’ to ’splitter’
• What is intention?
• Living with intention: a toolkit for the new paradigm
• Whose mind is it, anyway?
• Every thought is a relationship

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Last weekend, when our participants returned on Sunday, they had extraordinary stories to tell. One of the women, who has suffered wakefulness for years with night sweats, enjoyed her first good night’s sleep. Another woman with severe leg pain, whose pain increased initially, reported that the pain had diminished so much by mid day that it was the best she could remember for nine years. A migraine sufferer woke up and her headache was gone. The stories continued in this vein for an hour.

From these and the other stories we’re beginning to hear about the power of group intention I keep thinking of that old song by Buffalo Springfield which starts out, ‘Something’s happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.’

Many people ask us: are all these healing successes just a placebo effect? Or is it the power of group intention?

My answer is: We can’t say for certain what is going on here, but the evidence would suggest that it’s a combination of the two.

It’s a placebo effect in the sense that the person receives the group’s permission to heal himself. He realizes that it is now possible and that belief mobilizes his powers of self healing.

But this process is enhanced by the power of the group. A number of healers tell us that their powers are magnified by the presence of a healing circle of intenders. The science tells us that we have mirror neurons and are able to establish powerful resonance with subjects of our compassionate attention. This resonance appears to be further magnified in a small community.

There is also the simple power of community – the fulfilling of our profound need for connection. Being in a group counters our biggest 21st century disease – the disease of separation. Creating a connection with others takes us all home.

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• Podcast - The extraordinary power of group intention
• The true path to heaven
• Living with intention: a toolkit for the new paradigm
• Re-establishing a connection
• Podcast - The placebo effect

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By way of introduction, in Chicago I explored the question, “Who am I?”, examining how philosophy has answered this question in the past. As I explain, philosophy and science have failed to answer this question adequately, and in our workshops we hope to take things a step further.

To listen to this introduction, please click here.

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• Can our thoughts shape the future?
• Teleseminar - What is intention?
• Why your intentions don’t come true
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Ordinary human beings process specifics — say, all the sensory data about a building — into a generalized whole, and are ‘lumpers’. However animals — and autistics as well — don’t have a unified concept of an object, but perceive ‘pieces’ of information: they are ‘splitters’. Rather than seeing an entire object, they see what the famous autistic animal handler Temple Grandin terms a ‘slide show’ of the object. Consequently, they have access to lower levels of raw information.

Instead of processing these raw data into a whole, autistics, as well as animals, attend to each tiny, separate piece of sound, sight and smell. With this hyper-specificity comes extreme perception. This is why autistics are able to demonstrate extreme feats of memory, or an extraordinary talent for discovering ‘hidden figures’ or patterns, such as shapes, within a complicated picture.

Dr Allan Snyder, a psychologist at the Center for the Mind at the University of Sydney, has demonstrated that people who have smaller frontal lobes — as animals do — or a frontal lobe that has been damaged, develop hyperspecific perception and greater conscious access to the raw data held in the brain.

In one study, when he has applied magnetic fields to the frontal lobes of normal subjects, they begin to make far more detailed drawings than they did before the magnetic-field application and are also better at proofreading than before — as if they were suddenly more aware of the parts than the whole.

With the need for greater introspection and problem-solving, most of us have lost the ability to consciously tune into our intuition. The evidence from both animals and humans shows that a well-developed forebrain may inhibit our ability to access extrasensory information. The forebrain sees a portion of something and, in a sense, ‘fills in’ the conceptual details to produce a whole.

One way to develop your sixth sense is by training yourself to become more of a ‘splitter’, to begin to observe your world in exquisite detail.

Your free audio download from Lynne McTaggart

• The low road of psychic information
• Living with intention: a toolkit for the new paradigm
• Re-establishing a connection
• Podcast - Why mainstream science doesn’t understand intention
• Your moment-by-moment intentions

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To listen to the recording or download it to your computer, please click here.

Your free audio download from Lynne McTaggart

• Podcast - The extraordinary power of group intention
• Podcast - Why mainstream science doesn’t understand intention
• Teleseminar - What is intention?
• Podcast - The placebo effect
• Podcast - Time and space are irrelevant

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In our workshops, we created small groups of eight, and taught them all how to become more focused and effective senders and receivers of information, individually and in groups.

At the end of Saturday, we asked the group to split up into small groups of eight and to send intention to one of the members with health challenges.

Well, we believe in the power of intention, but the results exceeded our expectations! As you’ll hear on our podcast, one young girl, who had come to our workshop with her mother, was plagued by constant migraines. After being sent intention by her groups, she woke up that morning and her headache was gone.

Or Liana, who suffered from severe irritable bowel syndrome and other gut problems. We observed her group holding her and sending her intention. The following day, she said, “I feel better than I have done in 20 years.”

We are creating web groups of those groups, so they can continue to be in touch – even through cyberspace. We’ll continue to report on their progress - and the progress of many others who were healed last weekend.

To listen to a recording taken from the workshop, click here.

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• Living with intention: something’s happening here
• The true path to heaven
• Retro-Intention
• Podcast - Even the body responds to intention
• Living with intention: a toolkit for the new paradigm

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You can listen online, or download the MP3 file, by clicking here.

Please let us know what you think.

Your free audio download from Lynne McTaggart

• Teleseminar - When your intentions don’t come true
• Teleseminar - What is intention?
• Podcast - Healing the thought
• Podcast - Time and space are irrelevant
• Can our thoughts shape the future?

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It’s a five-minute talk about the placebo effect, and the astonishing role the mind plays in healing the body.

To download the podcast, click here.

Your free audio download from Lynne McTaggart

• Podcast - Healing the thought
• Podcast - Mindfulness in daily life
• Podcast - Even the body responds to intention
• Podcast - Time and space are irrelevant
• The intentions of the healer

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