Hemi-Sync® Journal 2000-2 (Spring)

--- PAGE 1 (OCR) --- Journal Vol. XVII ring 2000 A Research and Educational Publication of The Monroe Institute IN THIS ISSUE PROFESSIONAL SEMINAR OVERVIEW . SHAMANISM AND HEMI-SYNC IN THE MEDICAL ENCOUNTER .. Cecile A. Carson began to explore spi 's role in healing in 1977. Over the years that followed, she became proficient in using shamanic methods and Hemi-Syne as complementary doorways into nonordi- nary reality. Dr. Carson's story, illustrated by dramatic case histories, is an cloquent testimony to the healing resources to be found in the realm of nonlocal Mind. SEMINAR TAPE ORDER FORM . PROFESSIONAL SEMINAR OVERVIEW The Seventeenth Professional Seminar continued a long tradition of excellence. The speakers, professional members, and guests who attended on March 18-22, 2000, met not only to expand their knowledge of Hemi-Syne but to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of The Monroe Institute's Professional Dix Retreat were pressed into service to accommodate the overflow crowd. The sion. Both The Nancy Penn Center and Roberts Mountain ent reaffirmed Robert Monro: wisdom in gathering together educators, therapists, physicians, and scientists who would develop Hemi-Syne applications based on the proposition that “focused consciousness contains all solutions to the questions of human existence.” After introductions on the first evening, TMI President Laurie Monroe got everyone’s visionary juices flowing with a tape on visiting the year 2050. The exercise set the stage for keynote speaker Peter Russell, MA, DCS. The author of Waking Up in Time and From Science to God launched the Seminar with a truly inspiring address. He argued convincingly that consciousness is as fundamental a space, time, and matter and that its evolution must outpace technological change if humanity is to reap the rewards, rather than the perils, of the twenty-first century. Next, a controlled by TMI R cally significant EEG evidence of Hemi-Syn udy of neurological adaptation to binaural beating, ch Director F. Holmes “Skip” Atwater, BS, showed statisti- ffect on cortical arousal. A paper based on this study has been submitted for publication Cecile A. Carson, MD, followed with an enthralling account of how she has interwoven conventional medicine, shamanism, Hemi-Sync, and other modalities to offer her patients the best options for health and healing. Co- investigators Edward O'Malley, PhD, and Mary B. O'Malley, MD, PhD, carefully defined the terrain of sleep disorders as a preface to a progress report on their double-blind study using binaural beats to affect insomnia, now under way at the Norwalk Sleep Disorders Center. Jonathan H. Holt, MD, shared the sometimes dramatic results of employing Hemi-Syne with surgical and substance-abuse cases and in a hos- consultation-liaison (medical) psy- pice setting in the course of his work as chiatrist. Mme Dominique De Backer overcame the language barrier to speak on her Synchrotherapy® method, related discoveries in brain-mind research, and using Hemi-Syne to spark breakthroughs for patients with terminal diagnoses. Anecdotal reporting has consistently indicated that Hemi-Sync is 1a valuable intervention for attention disorders. Martha S. Lappin, PhD, reviewed research designs for evaluating alternative therapies—with emphasis on adapting them to demonstrate Hemi-Sync’s impact on ADD/ADHD. Peter Spiro, BA, MFA, riveted the audience with hard-hitting, dramatic selections from his original poetry as he told of using Hemi-Syne alternative high school to help troubled youngsters in a New York program awaken to a new curriculum of self-identification and lov "TMI's network of OUTREACH trainers disseminates the Hemi-Syne technology globally. Bob McCulloch, MA, OUTREACH and Registration Department coordinator, gave a complete overview of the Trainer Development and Assessment Program (TDAP) and the OUTREACH Continuing Accreditation (ORCA) program. Richard Werling, MS, DPA, and Susan Taylor, MA, have both attend- © 2000 The Monroe Institute 62 Roberts Mountain Road, Faber, VA 22938 804/361-1252 --- PAGE 2 (OCR) --- HEMI-SYNC® JOURNAL. ed Institute graduate programs that access Focus 27 and beyond. Their joint presentation shared the practical results of adventuring in the “outer lim- its’—for Dick, augmentation of his work as a healer; for Susan, an explosion of creativity as an artist and art teacher. During a special evening session, participants saw the Ancient Astronauts documentary—which aired on The Learning Channel in late 1999—and got the inside scoop from Skip Atwater on the many challenges of brainmapping in a cave beneath the Sun Pyramid in Mexico. By Tuesday, everyone was ready to s ft into experiential mode. Under the expert guidance of Laurie Monroe and Darlene Miller, PhD, Seminar attendees became the first to sample the Seventh Wave of the GATEWAY EXPERIENCE. Groundbreaking for the Millennium Booth, which will be erected next to the cabin where Bob wrote his books, and a gala reception at Roberts Mountain Retreat were fitting conclusions to a satisfying Seminar. Singers joined Greg Carroll at the piano, enjoyed a sumptuous buffet, and chatted with old and new friends, ending the Seventeenth Professional Seminar on a note of confident optimism—for the Institute, the Professional Division, and the new century. SHAMANISM AND HEMI-SYNC IN THE MEDICAL ENCOUNTER Cecile A. Carson, MD E Cecile A. Carson, MD, is clinical associate professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center. She has been a member of the Professional Division of TMI since 1996. An internist and counselor, she has focused her work over the past several decades on the mind-body-spirit interface in teaching and clinical care, and in particular on working with people who are facing life-threatening illnesses such as cancer and HIV disease. Her great fascination is the endless variety of forms the healing process can take, and she has explored and integrated a number of them: spiritual healing, hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, therapeutic recreation, psychodrama, and dreamrwork in addition to shamanism. She can be reached at Integrated Health Institute, (716) 271- 5650, or by e-mail at ecarson4@aol.com CASE 1. I¢ is 3:00 am. and I am awakened suddenly from deep sleep by an image of my patient M. drifting out into the cosmos. Inexplicably, I go downstairs and sit in meditation for a few minutes, finding myself saying, “M., come back; come on back,” over and over again. I then go back upstairs to bed and to sleep. I find out a week later from an angry M. that she had once again tried to kill herself, this time with an amount of medication that she calculated to be twice the minimum lethal dose listed in a toxicology text. She was shocked to find herself alive the following morning. She reported taking the pills around 11:00 p.m. the night I had been awakened. She carried the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, had been quite unstable, and had been working with bath her psychiatrist and me as her internist. There had been no inkling of her plan at our last visit two weeks previously, or any contact between us by phone or message. CASE 2. B. is @ physician in her mid—60s who requested a soul retrieval (1) to resolve her chronic depression for which she is on mainte nance medication, and (2) to improve her breathing (she has asthma and uses medication as needed for flare-ups). We began the session with a brief ceremony to welcome the help of the Spirits in returning any soul parts back to B. As the sound of steady drum- ming began through an audiotape player in the room, I relaxed deeply and moved into an expanded state of awareness, where a Helper met me and took me down a long, dark tunnel to a little girl sitting on the floor in the darkness with one small candle. She was about three to five years old, with dark hair, and looked somber. She gave the impression of being “holed up.” Her soul essence was nearby: a soft glow, in a crate with wide, open slats. The essence agreed to come with me as long as the crate remained around it, for B. to unwrap later. Iwas then taken to another place. A rabbit jumped back and forth in (front of me over and over again. It was small, energetic, and joyful. It lay on the crate in a protective gesture, and wanted to return to B. to help sup- port the returning soul part. I brought both back and blew them into her heart and head, as the soul retrieval process required, to move them from nonordinary to ordinary reality. She drew in a deep breath each time I --- PAGE 3 (OCR) --- Spring 2000 blew in. She began crying and laughing as she heard my story of the jour- ney, and said, “The crate is my ribs for breathing.” She told me of being beaten in nursery school between the ages of three and five for not speak- ing German (she had emigrated with her family from Russia to Germany during that time). She bad had no conscious memory of this; her mother had told her about this experience in her life. She then described a good family life after the age of five. She also reported a bunny being in her garden each year, and this year it had stayed only a few feet away from her as she worked there. In my last follow-up conversation with her two years after the soul retrieval, she has had no recurrent bouts of depression; in fact, she reports a rather joyful twenty-four months. She remains on the same amount and type of antidepressant, though it had not held her depression in check in the past. She also reports that although she continues to use inhalers for her asthma, it is well controlled with half the amount of medication she had required before. She continues to have much more energy and creativity daily, and has been actively painting and making wall hangings, All this she reports as temporally related to the soul retrieval, with no other significant events she could correlate (see photo of her drawing depicting the soul retrieval). These cases, and many more from thirteen years in training as a shamanic practitioner, have rocked my concepts of reality and of the nature of the medical encounter. These experiences do not fit the usual biopsychosocial, psychoanalytic, or humanistic explanatory models of health care. How does one make “sense” of contacting and intervening with another person beyond the five physical senses? How is it possible to obtain specific information that has not been given to you verbally or nonverbally through ordinary channels? Although these experiences defy usual explanations, I feel they should not be dismissed as “epiphenomena” or curiosities. I think they represent true phenomena that are about our relationship to a Larger Order of Things. These phenomena take many forms, and may seem confusing as they are articulated through the particular lens the observer is using. A Jungian analyst might report the phe- nomena as “synchronicity” or as an aspect of the “collective uncon- scious”; a religious person as possibly “angelic or divine intervention’; a parapsychologist as “out-of-body” or “psychic” experiences; a shaman as working with “helping spirits.” It seems to me that it is not so important what we call this larger relationship, but that we recognize its powerful potential in our lives, and particularly in work with patients. Our ability to know about events through time (precognition), to send “thought messages” to someone at a distance, or to heal at a distance has raised legitimate questions of whether the mind is lim- ited to existence in the physical brain.’ Scientific studies over the past several decades have been steadily building up data that verify a real- ity beyond the five senses. Daniel Benor, MD, made a survey of stud- ies of spiritual healing published in the English language before 1990. He found 131 controlled experiments dealing with healing