In June, 2008, I travelled to Minneapolis to record MF activity during Healing Touch with three different HT practitioners. Tim McConville, a Healing Touch instructor, volunteered for the experiments and recruited 2 other healers. Tim gave Healing Touch to 4 different clients in a single day in a specially designated healing room in his home. These experiments were notable in highlighting the differences in MF activity between physical and emotional releases, and between healthy clients versus those clients in need of healing.
In the figure below, the first client, Client 17, presented with physical symptoms: pain and fatigue due to rheumatoid arthritis. The MF activity in this HT session included low-amplitude MF oscillations (44 minutes). The client in the second session (Client 18) was in good health, except for a pulled muscle in his left calf. MF activity in this session was largely quiet with some minor MF oscillations. During the third session (Client 19), the MF recording was extremely quiet with no MF oscillations or waves. Client 19 had experienced Healing Touch therapy many times, and was completing his training as a HT practitioner. Tim felt a strong heart connection to the client, who was one of his students. He described the energy in this session as “expansive”. The client in the fourth session (Client 20) presented with caregiver stress. Her daughter was very ill, and the client was taking care of both her daughter and newborn granddaughter. During the HT session, Tim sensed “heartbreak emotions” with her. “As I was pulling energy from her heart area, she gasped and was jolted from her deep place. She couldn’t describe the big release” that he felt. After the “big release”, MF activity increased dramatically, extending for several hours past the end of the session, with sustained, high-amplitude MF oscillations (457 minutes).
I observed similar results with the other two Minnesota healers. In one session with Jodi Tschida, a certified HT practitioner, a client presented with ‘tennis elbow’, an elbow that was chronically painful whenever she moved it. Low-amplitude MF oscillations were evident during this HT session, and afterwards, the client moved her elbow and reported that the pain was gone. In a session with certified HT practitioner Kathy Kerber, a client presented with birth trauma, emotional trauma caused by a difficult childbirth experience. High-amplitude MF oscillations, the highest I ever recorded in a HT session, were present during this session. Overall, I noticed that physical release and diminishment of physical symptoms (e.g., pain) is accompanied by low-amplitude MF oscillations (e.g., Client 17); MF activity is very quiet in HT sessions with healthy clients (e.g., Clients 18 and 19); and emotional release, the release of “heartbreak emotions” or trauma, is associated with high-amplitude MF oscillations (e.g., Client 20).
Why does magnetic field activity change so significantly during, “healing of the emotions”? Healers have described an ‘emotional body’ component of the biofield. According to Valerie Hunt (1996), the biofield is “organized by emotion, where emotion is an agitation, a disturbance in the quality of flow of energy occurring as a result of field transaction”. She further notes the importance of emotional release in reorganizing the “mind-field”, which can lead to a reordering and healing of the physical body.
Healer Mietek Wirkus describes three subtle energy fields around the human body: the thermal field, corresponding to the etheric body; the low-frequency electromagnetic field, corresponding to the emotional or astral body; and the acoustic field, corresponding to the mental body. According to Wirkus, the low-frequency electromagnetic field around the body may provide information regarding emotional intensity and/or content. How interesting that Wirkus would associate the low-frequency electromagnetic field (which is what I am measuring) with the emotional body!
Barbara Brennan and Dorothea Hover-Kramer have also noted the importance of biofield therapies for emotional symptoms.
Although these findings made sense in the world of healing, I still was not sure whether the MF oscillations were “real” or artifact, so I began to measure MF activity in other environments, such as Tai Chi classes and meditation group sessions.