Harvard Referencing Quotes

RESEARCH SUPPORTS THE use of intuition in at least a limited capacity for subtle—and maybe even all—energy work. Norman Shealy, MD, for example, published a study referencing the work of eight psychics to diagnose seventeen patients. These diagnoses were 98 percent accurate in making personality diagnoses and 80 percent correct in determining physical conditions.28 Research by the HeartMath Research Center at the Institute of HeartMath in California is corroborating the existence of intuition and its accuracy. Most of its studies showcase the heart as a key intuitive center, responding even to information about the future. As an example, the heart decelerates when receiving futuristic, calming stimuli versus agitating emotional stimuli.29 A myriad of issues are involved in using intuition for energy work, including questions about boundaries; the importance or applicability of the information; accuracy of interpretation; the unpredictable and changeable nature of the future; the effects of the information on the recipient (i.e., to “prove” or “disprove” the data); and overriding all of these, the intuitive skills of the energy professional. Regardless of the inexact nature of intuition, a professional should not be embarrassed to exercise intuition in his or her trade. Energy work is an art and has traditionally encompassed intuition. Your energy fields interact with your patients’ fields. How you feel about yourself—what you hold near and dear in your heart-space—transfers into a client’s heart-space, and from there, into his or her body. (There is more information about heart-centered healing below.) As mind-body practitioner Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard puts it, “Our brains are wired for beliefs and expectancies. When activated, our body can respond as it would if the belief were a reality, producing deafness or thirst, health or illness.”30

It’s unfair that we can’t just be regular students here like everyone else,” I argued. “We’re the ones having sleepless nights while trying to get the administration to support us. But that is exactly what the Confederate flag bearer wants—for us to be so distracted that we fail our classes and reinforce the stereotype that we can’t cut it in a place like Harvard.” I then referenced a quote from Toni Morrison, who three years earlier had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved, her devastatingly lyrical novel about a formerly enslaved woman choosing freedom on her own terms. More than a decade before that, in a 1975 lecture about the American Dream that Morrison gave at Portland State University, the author had cautioned that Black people needed to take care not to get turned aside by racism. “The function, the very serious function of racism…is distraction,” she had told her audience. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” Thankfully, my friends heard what Toni Morrison sought to convey. From that day forward, we became more purposeful in how we showed up for rallies and protests, advocating for the causes we supported in between attending classes and study sessions, and refusing to allow our necessary activism to undermine our academic success. As Antoinette put it, “Our backs got straight, we faced forward, our stride was sure, because once we recognized the true toll of that Confederate flag, not just on our psyche but also our work, we were determined to get the last laugh.