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Mainstream ideas of “healing” deeply believe in ableist ideas that you’re either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind. Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, these ableist ideas often carry over into healing spaces that call themselves “alternative” or “liberatory.” The healing may be acupuncture and herbs, not pills and surgery, but assumptions in both places abound that disabled and sick folks are sad people longing to be “normal,” that cure is always the goal, and that disabled people are objects who have no knowledge of our bodies. And deep in both the medical-industrial complex and “alternative” forms of healing that have not confronted their ableism is the idea that disabled people can’t be healers.
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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice)
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Dr. Spencer Eth, who ran the psychiatry department at the now-defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, was curious where survivors had turned for help, and early in 2002, together with some medical students, he conducted a survey of 225 people who had escaped from the Twin Towers. Asked what had been most helpful in overcoming the effects of their experience, the survivors credited acupuncture, massage, yoga, and EMDR, in that order.1 Among rescue workers, massages were particularly popular.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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Food has become a cause of disease rather than a guardian of health in the modern world. Once regarded as the central pillar of life and the most effective of all medicines, food is now a major contributing factor in cancer, heart disease, arthritis , mental illness, and many other pathological conditions. Virtually monopolized by agricultural and industrial cartels, public food supplies, are processed and packaged to produce profits and prolong shelf life, not to promote health and prolong human life. It seems incredible that public health authorities permit the unrestricted use of hydrogenated vegetable oils, refined sugar, chemical preservatives, toxic pesticides, and over 5,000 other artificial food additives that have repeatedly been proven to cause cancer, impair immunity, and otherwise erode human health, while restricting the medical use of nutrients, herbs, acupuncture, fasting, and other traditional therapies that have been shown to prevent and cure the very diseases caused by chemical contaminants in food and water.
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Daniel Reid (The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Healing: Guarding the Three Treasures)
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Because everything is energy, when we heal and maintain our energy body’s health—through modalities like acupuncture, Reiki, meditation, yoga, and qi gong, among others—and make better lifestyle and diet choices, we actually heal issues that may come up before they manifest in the physical body.
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Margarita Alcantara (Chakra Healing: A Beginner's Guide to Self-Healing Techniques that Balance the Chakras)
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It never ceased to amaze me how much stupid shit people believed in—acupuncture and astrology and crystal healing and homeopathy and naturopathy and ley lines and dowsing and lizard people and black magic and voodoo and ghosts and spirits and angels and demons and mediums and chakras and feng shui and colon cleansing and gods and so on.
How come they didn’t realize that all of these things were either misunderstandings or scams that were disproven a long time ago? Although all of us believed in stupid things, such as happiness or hope, some of us really crossed the threshold into pure fucking insanity. And by some, I mean most.
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Keijo Kangur (I Hate Traveling)
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When filled with qi, the body is like a tree branch filled with sap; it can bend and flow with the breeze, but it does not snap or lose its connection with the root. On the other hand, a stiff, dead branch is easily broken. Thus the adage of Lao Zi, "Concentrate the qi and you will achieve the utmost suppleness... Suppleness is the essence of life.
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Kenneth S. Cohen (The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing)
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Most sick and disabled people I know approach healing wanting specific things—less pain, less anxiety, more flexibility—but not usually to become able-bodied. And many of us don’t feel automatically comfortable going to healing spaces at all because of our histories of being seen as freaks, scrutinized, infantilized, patronized with “What happened?” prayed over, and asked, “Have you tried acupuncture?” and a million other “miracle cures.” Able-bodied practitioners without an anti-ableist analysis—including Reiki providers and anti-oppression therapists—often see us as objects of disgust, fascination, and/or inspiration porn. Mostly, these practitioners dismiss our lived expertise about our bodyminds and their needs, or on the flip side, they tell us we’re “not really disabled!” when we insist on the realities of our lives. This carries over into organizing, where, even in HJ spaces, often when the crips aren’t there, there’s no access info and no accessibility.
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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice)
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Eat and heal your metabolism. Let your body gain weight. Eat carbs. Sleep a lot. Do your lie-down. Say no to things you hate doing. Say yes to things that sound fun. Take personal days. See friends. Eat probiotics or fermented food. Take a supplement to support your adrenals and stress hormones. Breathe deeply. Stretch. Find ways to laugh. Watch or read something life-affirming or heartwarming. When you have energy, move your body in ways you like. Go to your weight-neutral doctor. Get a massage or acupuncture. Go to a therapist you trust. Try new foods. Get out in nature. Get in the sunshine. Put plants in your house.
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Caroline Dooner (The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy)
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three tiers to the heart: physical, ethereal, Eternal
with each one being more spiritual and subtle
the physical heart a little brain with over 40,000 neurons
it sends and receives by electromagnetic field operations
it's got its own nervous system that senses and remembers
making decisions and giving directions to other centers
emitting enfolded energetic organizational patterns
information, that is—communicative interactions
detected outside the body by magnetometers and other people
for heart coherence listen to Pärt's “Spiegel im Spiegel”
valid are chakras and acupuncture meridians
meditate on the heart chakra to see what this means
energy meridians are strings of polarized crystalline water
bioelectric signals transmitted in connective tissue matter
information is sent along these lengths of collagen proteins
molecules of structured water allowing the transfer of protons
crystal water wires inside protein pathways
with acupuncture points being junctures in the maze
the protons, then, are what have been referred to as “chi”
a current flowing, much like electrical circuitry
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Jarett Sabirsh (Love All-Knowing: An Epic Spiritual Poem)
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Life Path # 11: You are highly intuitive and you are gifted with amazing psychic abilities. Without any effort you become a source of inspiration for other people. You have this innate ability to connect the subconscious and the conscious and the higher and the lower realms. You are a natural psychic. Eleven is the life path of many prophets, inventors, historical leaders, religious leaders and artists. They usually don’t progress early in life but they are destined to accomplish more than other life paths. When they reach the age of maturity (35-45) their success starts to bloom. Confidence is the key to success for the Eleven. Your tremendous potential needs equally tremendous confidence for you to realize your dreams. Without confidence, you are reduced to nothing. As a higher vibration of the number 2, you have many characteristics, talents and tendencies inherent to the Twos. You have to guard your nervous system from stress. Seek out peace and harmony and you will find it in nature. Exercise and diet is necessary for you. Just like the number 2, you love harmony and peace and you possess a refined taste for beauty. You are best suited to anything that requires healing like physical therapy, acupuncture, massage and counseling. As a partner, you know what your partner needs and desires.
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Saskia Hall (Numerology: How to Have Unstoppable Success in Your Career, Relationships, and Make Your Dreams a Reality)
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Pike said, “This is dim mak. That’s Chinese. It means death touch.” Dim mak was the dark side of acupuncture; in one, pressure points were used to heal, in the other, to damage.
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Robert Crais (The Watchman (Elvis Cole, #11; Joe Pike, #1))
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It’s like an emulsion of artistry and healing, like a, a spiritual acupuncture,” she declares.
“The use of negative space really brings his screaming face energy into the visual realm,” Roland says hoarsely with a swallow.
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Zofia Warwick (The Haunted Life of Matilda Harley: A Documentary (But Actually, A Novel): Part 2)
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In 1992, the U.S. Congress funded an Office of Alternative Medicine, which seven years later became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), still associated with the prestigious National Institutes of Health. In the two decades ending in 2012, the government sank $2 billion into NCCAM. Despite that huge expenditure, the center has never produced one bit of evidence for the value of “alternative medicine”—and that includes acupuncture, reiki, and various forms of spiritual healing. (The joke among advocates of scientific medicine is “What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.”) The work funded by NCCAM included studies on the effects of “distance healing”—including prayer—on HIV and glioblastoma (brain cancer), on coffee enemas as a palliative for cancer, and on magnetic mattress pads as cures for arthritis. None of these studies gave positive results; indeed, many of their results haven’t even been published.
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Jerry A. Coyne (Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible)
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Naeser, a research professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, had done studies using lasers for stroke and paralysis and was one of several pioneers using “laser acupuncture” by placing light on acupuncture points.
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Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
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Dr. Margaret Naeser and colleagues from Harvard, MIT, and Boston University, including Harvard professor Michael Hamblin, a world leader in understanding how light therapy works at the cellular level. Hamblin, at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Wellman Center for Photomedicine, specializes in the use of light to activate the immune system in treating cancer and cardiac disease; he was now branching out into its use for brain injuries. Building on lab work that applied laser therapy to the top of the head (transcranial laser therapy), the Boston group had studied its use in traumatic brain injury and found laser treatment helpful. Naeser, a research professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, had done studies using lasers for stroke and paralysis and was one of several pioneers using “laser acupuncture” by placing light on acupuncture points.
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Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
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second category we track is unconventional healing. This covers everything else, including acupuncture, homeopathy, crystals, magnets, energy healers, and all varieties of unregulated herbs and supplements. Extraterrestrial incidents, witchcraft, religious or faith-based claims, multicultural findings like Sam’s shaman example, and any related historical stories, fall into this group. “Most are hoaxes, but you just never know. Some of the religious incidents and also some of the crude healing methods used in other cultures have merit. Some work.
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Hunt Kingsbury (Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2))
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Many New Age activities are being practiced by the ordinary everyday person, who may not even be actually interested in New Age. Yet they receive its influence unawares. Relaxation techniques and even some physical therapies contain New Age exercises. Acupuncture, reflexology, and visualization techniques involve spiritual “energies,” whether or not the therapist or clients realize that. Health centers offer their patients reiki, a relaxation technique that originated in Japan, yet many are unaware that it involves the transmission of healing from reiki spirit guides.
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Jeff Harshbarger (Dancing With the Devil: An Honest Look Into the Occult from Former Followers)
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Gotquestions.org describes acupuncture as “rooted in superstition, occultism, and false religions that are in direct opposition to God’s Word” yet vindicates Christian participation by asking rhetorically, “If inserting acupuncture needles into a person’s body at strategic points results in physical healing or relief from pain, does it matter if the practitioner is wrong about why it works?
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Candy Gunther Brown (The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America)
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There is evidence that during qigong the conductivity of acupuncture points—that is, the ability of these points to conduct an electric charge—changes dramatically.
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Kenneth S. Cohen (The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing)
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the Ruler gives a powerful workout. The Ruler exercise stimulates the Bubbling Well acupuncture points in the feet, the points that feed the kidneys and bones with earth-qi. It also puts a stimulating pressure on the ming men point on the lower back, opposite the navel, increasing overall vitality.
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Kenneth S. Cohen (The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing)
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Minute Three: Help Your Body Release the Feelings Tap the acupuncture point on the edge of your hand (the karate chop point) while you breathe deeply. Say to yourself while tapping: “Although I’m upset, I’m safe. I can calm myself and heal this situation.” If you find yourself yawning, that’s great—your body is releasing. The more you practice this, the more quickly your body will calm.
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Laura Markham (Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting (The Peaceful Parent Series))
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Pain relief is the goal of all treatments, but treatments to relieve pain are designed to take away pain per se. Generally, this is symptomatic treatment and, therefore, poor medicine unless it is administered for humanitarian purposes. The use of morphine, Demerol, or other strong analgesics is certainly justified when there is excruciating pain but not as a definitive treatment.
Acupuncture appears to work as a local anesthetic. In other words, it blocks the transmission of pain nerve impulses to the brain. If one is dealing with a chronic disease for which no relief of pain can be expected, this is a good treatment. For the typical back patient, it can give temporary relief but it does nothing about the underlying process, the cause of the pain. (page 145)
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John E Sarno, M.D (Healing Back Pain)
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The ancient Vajra Sattva Hitting Qigong practice by Helen Liang is of particular importance to the cultivation of the soul light body by promoting Qi flow in the energy centers and acupuncture meridians, and is complementary to the cultivation of soul communication channels in the Tao Healing Hands practice.
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Ricardo B Serrano (Six healing Qigong sounds with Mantras)
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Traditionally, the chakras and their corresponding auric layers are shown in certain colors, such as the root red, sacral black, solar plexus yellow, heart white, throat violet, third eye indigo, and crown purple, and it is common to be mindful of these colors when dealing with a different chakra. Most students see some of these colors during a Reiki tuning, most commonly purple or orange. The energy, or ki, carried in through the chakras, is transmitted through a huge number of meridians and nadis around the body, which are something like blood arteries and veins. The first two are larger, the latter smaller, and some old charts show 72,000 of them. A treatment like acupuncture would not even be thinkable without detailed knowledge of their location. You need to be fairly confident about the right placement when doing open-heart surgery without anesthesia, helped only by a few long needles! The chakra function and its relation to mind, body, and spirit are explained in many good books. Many Reiki courses also incorporate aspects of it–after all, it's important to become more aware of the subtleties of our existence on Earth. And yet we are faced with a shock when it comes to Reiki: this information is not a precondition for its use. It's interesting and helpful–but not necessary. The practitioner will be guided by Reiki. It's just difficult to position your hands falsely! Even if it is difficult to get close to the actual difficulty site for some reason, Reiki will still get there, as thousands of Reiki users have learned.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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Since then, tai chi, meditation, yoga, hypnotherapy, acupuncture, massage therapy, Reiki, quantum healing, qigong, emotional freedom technique (EFT), and many other methods have emerged as independent protocols,
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Bradley Nelson (The Body Code: Unlocking Your Body's Ability to Heal Itself)
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General traditional theory asserts that when under stress, the body’s meridian system becomes imbalanced. Many factors cause stress, including physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual challenges, psychological issues, biochemical problems, and even electromagnetic difficulties such as geopathicstress. Even natural environmental factors such as excess cold, damp, wind, dryness, or heat can create imbalance. Under duress, the blood, chi, and fluid cannot flow normally, usually leading to congestion (excess or blockage) or depletion (deficiency or weakness). Symptoms of these imbalances can be found through the meridians even before they manifest physically. Once these problems appear physically, these underlying causes can impede the body’s healing ability. The meridian therapist essentially stimulates the acupuncture points to restore balance. Stagnant chi calls for stimulation. Cold chi needs warmth. As we will see in the section on meridian treatment modalities, diagnosis, and treatment, there are many paths open to a meridian specialist, including needling and non-needling techniques, massage, energy work, diet, herbs, and more. YIN/YANG Yin/yang is a synthesis of the other categories. Yin equals interior, empty, and cold. Yang equals exterior, full, and hot. It can also describe two kinds of emptiness: deficiency (not enough yin or yang) and collapse (critical “collapse” or recession of yin or yang).
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Cyndi Dale (The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy)
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some medical students, he conducted a survey of 225 people who had escaped from the Twin Towers. Asked what had been most helpful in overcoming the effects of their experience, the survivors credited acupuncture, massage, yoga, and EMDR, in that order.1 Among rescue workers, massages were particularly popular. Eth’s survey suggests that the most helpful interventions focused on relieving the physical burdens generated by trauma. The disparity between the survivors’ experience and the experts’ recommendations is intriguing. Of course, we don’t know how many survivors eventually did
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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But what about all those poor met/mets out there? Don’t they deserve effective therapies too? Hall and Gunther point out that met/mets respond well to both placebos and regular drugs. It’s just that their brain chemistry has the bonus of supercharging their response. All things considered, they are actually the most fortunate members of the population. They can take the drug and they will respond at a higher level than the recalcitrant val/vals. Or, if they decide that conventional medicine isn’t their thing, they can try acupuncture, homeopathy, or faith healing and perhaps do just as well—whereas on a val/val, those treatments are more likely to fall flat.
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Erik Vance (Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal)
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When our chakras are in balance, our lives are in complete harmony and our health is good. If a chakra becomes blocked, we will eventually experience emotional distress or disease. Because everything is energy, when we heal and maintain our energy body’s health—through modalities like acupuncture, Reiki, meditation, yoga, and qi gong, among others—and make better lifestyle and diet choices, we actually heal issues that may come up before they manifest in the physical body.
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Margarita Alcantara (Chakra Healing: A Beginner's Guide to Self-Healing Techniques that Balance the Chakras)
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Many books have been written on these types of healing. For further reading, I suggest the following books: The Science of Homeopathy by George Vithoulkas, M.D., Dimensions of Radionics by David Tansely, M.D., Chiropractic, A Modern Way to Health by Julius Dontenfass, M.D., Traditional Acupuncture: The Law of the Five Elements by Dianne M. Connelly, Ph.D.
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Barbara Ann Brennan (Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field)
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Enter one of my favorite placebo treatments, acupuncture.
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Erik Vance (Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal)
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What if acupuncture is an active placebo? What if that tingling sensation in my nerves and pain in my muscles is a message to my brain that this exercise with needles is doing something? That would explain why it performs so well in trials, yet not well enough to reliably beat placebos.
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Erik Vance (Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal)
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What we call science is actually physical science. What we call spirituality is actually inner sciences or sciences not dealing with the physical world. The process of the union between science and spirituality is already in progress. This can be seen in the field of quantum physics merging with mysticism, in homeopathy, in acupuncture, feng shui, chi kung, vibrational medicine and others.
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Choa Kok Sui (The Origin of Modern Pranic Healing and Arhatic Yoga)
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In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, surprisingly few people showed up for traditional talk therapy. Instead, many turned to acupuncture, massage, yoga, and EMDR, which seemed to offer more effective relief.
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Bessel van der Kolk M.D. (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)