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‘We're just a conduit' in the healing process
Practitioners of holistic medicine insist nature has many secrets still left untapped
Friday, Feb. 19, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
"Both traditional
medicines and holistic medicines have a place. We're helping expand a repertoire of choices," according to Carol Marcy, psychologist and meditation instructor for the Joy Lane Healing Center in Hollywood. Here, she demonstrates her singing crystal bowls from her "Living from the Heart"
meditation class.
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Disease has always been with us, but modern, Western medicine is only a few hundred years old.
Before germ theory and pharmaceutical research, the human race devised countless strategies to relieve pain, banish illness and prolong life. Southern Marylanders are keeping a few of these ancient disciplines alive, insisting they have much to teach us, even in a scientific age.
Energy flow
Janet Hall could be called a complementary medicine polymath. She teaches all 13 courses in "natural health and healing" offered by the College of Southern Maryland's continuing education program, as well as a course in "inspirational walkabouts." She operates Overhall Consulting out of her Port Republic home, where she has a massage table in her basement for Reiki and other therapies.
"I love it, sharing my knowledge and experience with alternative and complementary medicine. I love doing healing work because it's amazing. The energy we can transmit through our hands, we transmit from the universe," Hall said recently as a grizzled retriever-mix dog twitched and snored on the floor of her studio. "The person receiving healing work is really the healer. We're just a conduit."
Energy therapies can differ in their particulars, but practitioners trace their origin to concepts in traditional East Asian and Indian medicine, especially the Chinese idea of "qi," roughly meaning life-force, that is said to permeate all human beings, and the ancient Indian belief in "chakras," seven energy centers located along the spine.
Reiki, a Japanese energy-balancing technique, was the first that Hall learned. It captivated her, leading her to study spiritual energy disciplines founded in the United States, including Quantum Touch. Hall said she found it useful for everything from nasal congestion to post-traumatic stress disorder. Eden Energy Medicine, in which she is certified to work, focuses on seven of the human body's eight "energy systems." Emotional Freedom Tapping teaches clients to touch different parts of the body with their fingers to tap away anxiety, cravings and trauma. As a "raindrop" practitioner, she rubs essential oils in at points along a client's spine, a process she says causes the person to gain up to an inch in height.
"You smell like a salad afterward," she said.
Having begun studying herbal medicine, Hall had examples of nature's meager winter bounty arrayed on her coffee table: a spearhead-shaped leaf of vitamin-rich sheep sorrel, a tendril of chickweed and a withered dandelion stem.
She'd used vodka to make a tincture of rank-tasting chickweed, to which she ascribed medicinal properties.
"I put a drop of chickweed tincture under the tongue. It helps break up and dissolve fat and cellulite. I just went through a 45-pound weight loss. Now I'm working on my cellulite," she said.
Hall stresses that she is not a medical practitioner. Three years ago she was ordained as a minister to get added legal protection for her work, she said. Consulting a certificate, she said she is a minister of The Sanctuary of the Beloved, Order of Melchizedek, based in New York.
In parting, Hall said: "Be open and do not be afraid to be open because this is all-natural stuff people have used for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. If it was a fad, it if didn't work it, it would not still be around, people wouldn't be using it."
Monica Pope of Prince Frederick, a client of Hall, vouches for the healing taking place on her friend's table. She went to her last May for help with a fever that developed after she broke her leg, and after a Reiki session, "It was like a breakdown, a release. I began to cry. I went through a lot of emotional changes one right behind the other," Pope said. "It was real interesting. She did a pendulum swing over my body, the different chakras on my body. I'll tell you it helped out a lot, cleared out my head, cleared me spiritually and mentally," she said.
Going mainstream
Institutions are embracing some of these ideas as well. The KeepWell Centers at Calvert Memorial Hospital in Prince Frederick offer an array of complementary "healing modalities" including acupuncture, reflexology and Reiki.
Rebecca Ridgell has worked as a registered nurse at the hospital for two decades, but for the past several years she has also been available to perform "healing touch" and Reiki for patients who request it. Both are energy therapies, but healing touch is more difficult to perform than Reiki, she said.
Neither can do any harm, according to Ridgell, while a successful rebalancing can alleviate pain and even slow down bleeding.
"The [practitioner's] ego has to be out of it and it allows the work to be done. You just basically smooth it, you run your hands down the energy of the person. … It takes a lot of training to figure it out. Some people don't feel anything. Other people feel a lot and it's a wonderful experience," Ridgell said.
Ridgell is also a certified crystal therapist, though Melinda Gaines, complementary health coordinator, stressed that crystal healing is not practiced at the hospital. The colored stones have value in focusing the energy in a person's field, Ridgell said, a view shared by Sherry Lancaster, a nurse and acupuncturist.
To Lancaster, a necklace of chunky semi-precious stones had spiritual benefits as well as aesthetic ones, generally by influencing the chakras with which their colors corresponded: Violet amethyst playing a protective role; blue lace agate enhancing speaking and listening abilities; green aventurine and peridot boosting the heart, chest and lungs as well as facilitating love of self and others; citrine influencing the organs of the abdomen; clear crystal quartz providing balance.
Lancaster has been at the hospital for 30 years, and been certified for more than a decade in acupuncture, a modality originally from China that promotes the free flow of qi via hollow metal spines stuck into a patient's skin.
"The reason we do [use needles] is needles can move energy in the body if you put them in in certain points. Energy meridians are channels to access different things. This is moving the energy, clearing blockages so everything else falls into place," Lancaster said.
While the idea could alarm the uninitiated, the needles are so fine that most patients feel no pain, Lancaster said. In fact, she has often seen people become so relaxed that they fall asleep while she is working, then awake invigorated.
"Before we had medications, MRI machines, X-rays, you had what you had on earth — plants and stones. Before we had modern medicine we had this," Lancaster said.
Learning that a visitor had never experienced "energy work," Ridgell stood behind her and put her hands on the woman's shoulders while she conversed with Lancaster.
The visitor's shoulders tingled faintly as Ridgell pulled her hands away.
The women are not looking to take the place of doctors; saying that what they do is intended to be in addition to what they sometimes called "allopathic," or conventional, medical care.
"You don't go in there and say, ‘You've got a broken arm? I'll fix it.' I'm not going in there to perform miracles. Do miracles happen? Yes, they do occur. But I'm going in there to help the person relax and maybe facilitate the healing process," Ridgell said.
Ridgell and Hall are instructors at Joy Lane Healing Center, which Carol Marcy, a clinical psychologist, runs out of her Hollywood home.
Marcy's exploration of complementary medicine began in the 1960s, as her career as a professional dancer took its toll on her body. Studying dance therapy at Goddard College in Vermont eventually led her to get her psychology degree to be able to heal the mind as well.
She moved to St. Mary's County in 1993 to join a local sweat lodge community, now defunct, founded by a member of the Cherokee nation. Now the center is home to a variety of healing and spiritual approaches, with certified nutritionists, Tibetan lamas and New Age teachers equally welcome.
When asked if healing successes could be attributed to the power of suggestion, Marcy laughed.
"I don't agree with that at all. My guess is that [a skeptic] has never tried any alternative healing modalities herself," Marcy said. When she was diagnosed with a form of skin lymphoma years ago, Marcy used acupuncture and a traditional Japanese form of heat therapy — in addition to surgery — and "it's never recurred. That's pretty concrete. It did, in fact, work and I know there are other things that I've had experience with." The last manifestation of her cancer she treated with alternative medicine alone.
Acupuncture also cured her jet lag after a cross-country flight, she said.
Joy Lane has not been as financially successful as she hoped, something she attributes to the slumping economy. Marcy's home has been an informal center for alternative healing since she moved to the area, but she and her son, Marin Goldstein, just abandoned an attempt at having Goldstein work as a paid staff member of the center because the revenue could not support him, she said. Goldstein incorporated Joy Lane as a nonprofit last year.
But Marcy continues to welcome anyone coming to her wooded cul-de-sac in search of transcendence.
"It is my deepest desire to really help people discover their ‘something' that's really good for them, that nourishes their soul, body, mind, spirit. That can come in a lot of different forms. The land here is part of that. … It is just pretty primitive in a sense, but we need to go back to that. Nature has a lot to teach us," she said.
Matter over mind
At the new Studio Cooperative in Waldorf, teachers offer different types of healing, ones focused primarily though not exclusively on the body, not the mind. Since November, students have study ballet, Pilates and three different types of yoga there under the tutelage of experts.
The rigorous exercise boosts the mind as well as the body and is a great help for those struggling with certain mental problems, including attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorders, said Deborah Stanley, a registered nurse and the cooperative's principal. Her own son has Asperger's syndrome, a milder form of autism, and the physical discipline he learns at the cooperative does wonders for him, she said.
For those "struggling with bipolar disorder, this is truly part of the treatment," Stanley said. "I tell the family, it doesn't matter how you're feeling. It's like taking your medication. It is critical that they come to class."
"The best antidepressant on the market," said Pilates instructor Ida Adams.
"It's legal and it's cheaper than therapy," Stanley agreed.
Studies have even found that ballet can benefit those who suffer from Parkinson's disease, a nerve disorder that causes patients to gradually lose control of their bodies, they say. Stanley is working to bring a program for these patients to the cooperative.
The instructors stressed that they are not medical practitioners and that the services they provide are to enhance, not replace, medical care.
Pilates was developed by a German prisoner in an internment camp after World War I, where he worked with what was available to help rehabilitate wounded soldiers, Adams said.
"That's why that stuff looks like torture equipment," Adams joked about her set-up. "He worked with what he had." She credits the discipline, which provides an intense workout aimed at increasing strength and flexibility, with her own good health. Calling herself the "poster girl" for Pilates, she said, "I've been sport-mad all my life. I don't think there's a muscle in my body I haven't torn. If it hadn't been for Pilates, I don't think I'd have been mobile today."
Christine Legowik, the cooperative's ballet mistress, vouched for it as well. "Pilates is the choice for a long time by dancers to rehabilitate themselves. Their bodies are their instrument," she said. "As a dance teacher, I have a lot of respect for what it does for you from the beginning and in having a long career."
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