S2E8: Energy Healing Part 1: Consciousness at Work in the Body

In Part 1 of this two part exploration, we turn from the mind to the body and begin with a mystery that modern science has struggled to explain. Energy healing is one of the oldest medical traditions on Earth, yet it has long existed at the margins of Western understanding. The episode opens with a Cambridge-trained material scientist, Simon Duan, whose worldview shifts instantly when a Qigong practitioner in China removes his wisdom teeth pain-free - without anesthesia. His story leads us into the origins of ancient Chinese medicine, where psychic doctors once perceived organs with their mind’s eye and communicated with plants to understand their medicinal properties. From there, we meet healer Julie Goeltz, whose husband’s life-threatening lymphedema disappeared during a Reiki session, launching her into a practice that now includes remote healing and vivid remote viewing experiences that transcend physical distance. We also hear from author and clinician Jill Blakeway, who describes energy healing as the body’s own intelligence becoming coherent and who has spent years tracing the science behind these subtle forces. The investigation widens further through the work of physician-scientist Dr. Neil Theise, whose research helped identify the interstitium, a fluid-filled network running through the body that behaves electrically and may be the physical basis for meridians, chakras, and the subtle systems described by healers for thousands of years. This discovery raises a provocative possibility that the interstitium may carry not only fluid but information. If so, the boundary between mind and body becomes more permeable than we imagine. Part 1 sets the foundation for next week’s episode, where we follow healers and scientists into the lab as they attempt to capture what might be moving between people during healing itself. Exciting update: As of April 2026, the scientific journal Cancer Medicine published a landmark study from MD Anderson Cancer Center showing energy healing slows pancreatic cancer growth and spread in pre-clinical research. This rigorous four-year study at one of the world’s top cancer institutes found that biofield therapy reliably reduced cancer metastasis by more than 50%, and influenced key biological systems, in cells and animals. Access the full study here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cam4.71726 For this episode we would like to thank: Phenomena, a three-part documentary and six part podcast featuring exclusive access to groundbreaking scientists, transformative healers, and evidence that’s rewriting what we know about energy healing and the human body https://www.phenomenahealing.com/telepathytapes https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.phenomenahealing.com_telepathytapes&d=DwMGaQ&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=Ojc_-YzTv49PeBRAe5Jz0FPjPjtANse6CpHZtGSk0S8&m=Uo8TZpwuPftsHElFhhx2kJVYnPe9gru8CPWgPB5FNBL62UjRyMmdNtQpPRyKuNQD&s=46J_8E0dNibPYhU3lCqMMXm3MeTXxgWF9AtSBRdr3_w&e= The Emerald Gate Charitable Trust, a philanthropic foundation committed to improving the human condition and expanding the conscious mind through rigorous scientific research, whose research has been cited in this podcast https://emeraldgatefoundation.org/research-projects/ https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__emeraldgatefoundation.org_research-2Dprojects_&d=DwMGaQ&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=Ojc_-YzTv49PeBRAe5Jz0FPjPjtANse6CpHZtGSk0S8&m=Uo8TZpwuPftsHElFhhx2kJVYnPe9gru8CPWgPB5FNBL62UjRyMmdNtQpPRyKuNQD&s=qZoIAPjZb11MVFXPXg2ChAhkba2djfoV9WidKfG3h8g&e= The Subtle Energy Funders Collective, a network of philanthropists in support of bringing energy healing to the mainstream through a systems change approach www.subtleenergyfunderscollective.com https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.subtleenergyfunderscollective.com&d=DwMGaQ&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=Ojc_-YzTv49PeBRAe5Jz0FPjPjtANse6CpHZtGSk0S8&m=Uo8TZpwuPftsHElFhhx2kJVYnPe9gru8CPWgPB5FNBL62UjRyMmdNtQpPRyKuNQD&s=h2NTbYWFkkr5wSR1C-dDtGZ7uxHtRW2QGKv-4go9dQc&e= To work directly with Julie Goeltz visit www.juliegoeltz.com _______ Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass https://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com. https://thetelepathytapes.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

  This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended to substitute the advice of a physician, professional coach, therapist, or other qualified professional. This show will discuss psychedelics, which are illegal in many countries, including at the federal level in the United States. Consult with your physician or other qualified medical professional regarding the use of psychedelics, and any use should only be conducted in a safe and legal way. This episode also mentions suicidal ideation. Listener discretion is advised. Hi, everyone. This is Kai Dickens, and you're listening to the Consciousness Cassettes from TTT Media.

• 0:34Ky Dickens?

  In our first series, The Telepathy Tapes, non-speakers showed us that telepathy is possible, shattering our assumptions about the world itself. In this series, we're turning to others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create. What if only by listening to those who've been ignored, we could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from, and where we're going? This is the Consciousness Cassettes, and we're opening up the next channel.

• 1:06Speaker 01

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• 1:37Ky Dickens?

  Last week, we explored whether psychedelics could help us tap into a larger field of consciousness, because if they're one of the oldest bridges humans have to tap into a larger field, it invites another question. Does consciousness, or the larger information field, only engage with our mind? Or can it engage with our physical bodies, too? Energy healing is where the mysteries of these unseen forces leave the mind and enter the body, where intention meets biology and telepathy meets physiology. It's one of the oldest practices humans have ever created, found in cultures across the world, long before modern medicine existed. And today, it's resurfacing through research, data, and lived experiences that challenge the very foundation of Western science. And to begin, we start with someone who never believed in any of this,

• 2:20Ky Dickens?

  a Cambridge-trained material scientist who had his worldview altered by a single experience.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  I was happily working as a material scientist. So I came to study from China with a PhD in material science from Cambridge University. Metals, ceramics, polymers, advanced semiconductors.

• 2:39Ky Dickens?

  This is Dr. Simon Duan, founder and CEO of Medic computing labs. He studied material science, so he trusted matter and measurement and nothing really beyond it, until something happened in Dr. Duan's life that defied his understanding of the world and the logic of material science.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  That's why I go beyond physics and get into the consciousness study. Because I realized material science cannot really explain what I have experienced, what I have witnessed.

• 3:08Ky Dickens?

  The experience that would change the course of Simon's career happened in the early 2000s while traveling in China, when he was struck by horribly painful toothache back near his wisdom teeth.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  My wisdom tooth start to become very painful. It's not pleasant. So I consulted the conventional dentist. I was told I actually need a fairly significant operation and to get the general anesthetic to take it out. So then a friend of mine said, oh, why don't you go to see this dentist?

• 3:40Ky Dickens?

  The dentist his friend recommended was not a traditional dentist. It was someone who worked with energy and not traditional dental tools and didn't even use things like general anesthesia.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  I was skeptical. I went to his place. He tapped my cheek and he just took them out.

• 3:57Ky Dickens?

  Wait, so he just took out your teeth? Like, what do you mean with what?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  With a part of tweezers. No anesthetic, no anesthesia, and it's no medication. So it takes less than a minute, all the procedure. So it's very straightforward.

• 4:15Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so the tooth came straight out with tweezers, but was it painful?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  It wasn't painful. Then we went to lunch together. Yeah, during the lunch, I asked him, what, how did you do to me? What actually happened? He said, I have an incantation. It's like a spell, it's like a mantra.

• 4:32Ky Dickens?

  Incantations or mantras are words or phrases repeated to channel energies or to achieve an altered state of consciousness.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  He said he recited this incantation silently, which allowed him to make the tooth loosen. Now he can took them out effortlessly.

• 4:50Ky Dickens?

  Simon told me that the dentist can even perform very complicated extractions, where a broken off tooth leaves roots impacted inside of patients gums.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Roots are left in the gum. He managed to just get those roots pop out.

• 5:06Ky Dickens?

  So how can a mantra physically loosen a tooth? Is it a miracle? Or is this dentist on the outskirts of Beijing, working with a technology that has been obscured in most of the modern world? To understand this, we need to look at Qi Gong, an ancient system of Chinese healing and spiritual practice. And Qi Gong sits at the heart of many branches of traditional Chinese medicine. And it's deeply connected to Daoism, an eastern belief system that sees the Dao as the underlying life force that moves through everything. In these traditions, a Qi Gong healer is trained to align with that universal energy. Through breath and focus and intention, the healer actually becomes a conduit for Qi, this natural force or energy that brings the body into balance. And from that perspective, a focused mantra isn't magic. It's a way of directing Qi

• 5:51Ky Dickens?

  toward an area that is blocked or out of harmony, perhaps even towards a stubborn wisdom tooth.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Qi Gong has many levels. To practice Qi Gong is to cultivate the energy, unity between your inner energy and outer cosmic energy, your body and the cosmos. Qi Gong as a way of enhance those energies, enhance those connections, promoting the balances of energies. So that's the traditional Chinese method. It has been used for thousands of years.

• 6:26Ky Dickens?

  Traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM, is the contemporary name for interconnected practices of medicine, spirituality, and philosophy originating in China over 5,000 years ago. Forms of traditional Chinese medicine are practiced worldwide today in both the East and the West, and things you've probably heard of like Qigong, acupuncture, Tai Chi, and herbal medicine. However, today, these forms are not always practiced with the same psychic and spiritual dimensions that were once fundamental to ancient Chinese healers.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  In traditional Chinese healthcare, the top doctors or the famous Chinese medicine men are psychic people. They are able to use their psychic power to see through the body, see the organ. They can use their mind vision to examine patients.

• 7:11Ky Dickens?

  Simon is saying something that made me have to rewind a few times, that in traditional Chinese medicine, the top doctors are often psychic and can use their psychic powers to see through the body and to see organs and bones.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  So how did they discover different herbs have a medicine property? It's because the psychic people actually can communicate with different herbs.

• 7:32Ky Dickens?

  And just like we explored in episode 6 about plant communication, Simon said that these top psychic doctors in China could communicate with different herbs and plants to decipher their medicinal properties.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  So by communicating with different herbs, they can discover the energy property of this particular herb. The property of certain herbs used in Chinese medicine is actually discovered by psychic people by communicating with the plant. So traditionally, historically, sci was very much an applied technology in the culture of China.

• 8:08Ky Dickens?

  Simon just referred to sci, which is a term for mental phenomena that cannot yet be explained, including things like telepathy, clairvoyance, and other experiences, suggesting that consciousness may extend beyond the brain. And Dr. Duan just said that historically, sci was an applied technology in the culture of China, especially in medicine. But as often happens with this stuff all over the world, political and cultural upheavals in China in the mid-20th century pushed many traditional healing practices into the shadows. Were suppressed and others were just reshaped to fit Western medical models. And as a result, the subtle energetic methods Dr. Duan described as sci-technology largely disappeared from the public view, even though the psychic or energetic element to their medicine had been used successfully for thousands of years.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Chinese intellectuals become sort of disillusioned about Chinese culture. They think the reason China is so weak is because China lacks science and technology. Suppression started anything non-scientific.

• 9:08Ky Dickens?

  Many Chinese leaders became convinced that the nation's strength depended on embracing modern science, and Simon said that anything that did not look scientific, including ancient healing practices, was pushed aside.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  During Cultural Revolution, traditional Chinese culture was actually destroyed the most. After Mao died in 1976, things started to loosen up.

• 9:30Ky Dickens?

  So Mao Zedong, who led China for almost 30 years, imposed strict limits on many of the traditional practices, but when he died in the late 1970s, those restrictions eased and parts of Chinese ancient medical heritage began to return. And this renewed interest in Qigong helped bring back the kinds of energy healers who could perform procedures like removing a tooth without anesthesia. And it was this discovery that pushed Dr. Simon Duan to reexamine his own beliefs and return to the tooth clinic outside of Beijing, but this time not as a patient, but as a researcher.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  I went to his clinic a few times after that because I became curious. And I saw on his wall, clinic wall, it's full of photos of celebrities, movie stars, and politicians, including the Communist Party Politburo members. They all took their tooth out in his clinic. And he's still doing it. He does it daily. They actually claim he can take people's tooth out over distance. I haven't seen that happening.

• 10:33Ky Dickens?

  So he can remove a tooth effortlessly and painlessly using a mantra. But he can also do that remotely, like not being in the same physical place as a patient?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he can do it remotely, over distance.

• 10:45Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so is this tied to qigong? I've never heard anything like this before.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  In some cases, the Qigong master can do distant healing.

• 10:53Ky Dickens?

  But isn't qigong a form of energy medicine? Which then you'd think you have to be in the presence of a physical body to like harness and transfer the energy into another physical body.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Depends what your perspective about qigong. Many people have different understanding of qigong. So some people think it's energy. Some people think it's informational. If it's energy, normally we think about energy as a wave, like sound and like light. Yeah, it's all electromagnetic wave. It travels in a kind of a field. Normally it deteriorates with distance. The further it go away, the weaker it becomes. So that's energy.

• 11:34Ky Dickens?

  So Simon's making a distinction between energy, which moves through space and weakens with distance, and information. And that information he's referencing is more like an informational field. And on this show, you've heard it called many things, collective consciousness, universal intelligence, the Tao. And so, remote healing would be impossible if it depended on energy alone. But it's not impossible if a healer is interacting with an invisible informational field, naked to the eye but everywhere, like the ocean we're swimming in.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  So it's not the energy. I mean, it's information. In his case, it's information, I think. The distance can be the other half the globe.

• 12:12Ky Dickens?

  If healing can happen without two people being in the same room, then what we're talking about may not be energy in the usual sense at all. Simon might be right. We may be dealing with something closer to information, or something else entirely, that does not weaken with distance. So before diving into what energy healing is, how it works, and what the science says, I wanted to understand one simple thing: can healing truly happen at a distance? Because if it can, the whole question shifts. Are we really studying energy, or is it some other subtle force? As I started researching and looking for stories and healers, I was introduced to a UK-based, science-forward film team that's been working on a documentary series about energy healing for years. It's called Phenomena, and they've been deep in this world, following some of the most groundbreaking research

• 12:56Ky Dickens?

  that might finally answer our biggest questions about energy healing. And on our first phone call, they mentioned an incredible healer who said that doing energy healing remotely or from a distance was easier for her than healing in person.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  I'm Julie Geltz, and I live in Barrington, New Jersey, with my husband, and we raised our twins there. We are empty nesters with two dogs. I'm licensed as a massage therapist, and I've been doing this for about 14 years, and I absolutely love it. But I am also a Reiki master.

• 13:28Ky Dickens?

  Reiki is a healing practice that originated in Japan, where the practitioner uses gentle touch or holds their hands near the body to support relaxation and the body's natural healing process. But Julie did not plan to learn Reiki. She was skeptical about it, unsure, and only agreed because her teacher was persistent that she had a gift worth exploring.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Years after I began at my practice, one of my massage therapy teachers came to my building, and she walked in with a book about Reiki. And she said, "So I was cleaning out my library, and I found that I had two copies of this book, and I'm supposed to teach you Reiki." And I was like, "Oh, that's nice, but I'm really not interested." I was really skeptical, because I feel like the work that I've always done has been from a scientific background, learning about anatomy and working with people's muscular systems.

• 14:16Ky Dickens?

  But her former teacher did not let up.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  She talked me into it, and I have great respect for her, but I was still very skeptical.

• 14:22Ky Dickens?

  This incident would prove to be a blessing when her husband, John, was later diagnosed with cancer, having 32 lymph nodes and his tonsils removed, and undergoing radiation. In recovery, a side effect developed that could be life-threatening.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  He developed lymphedema in his neck. It was almost like a bladder in his neck that kept filling up with lymph fluid. It was getting worse. And we went to many specialists, and it turned out that he really needed to clear the fluid on an hourly basis because it just kept filling up. It was filling more rapidly and more fully. It was just getting worse and worse.

• 14:56Ky Dickens?

  Lymphedema has no known cure, only management strategies. John was tasked with constantly having to self-drain the lymphedema fluid from his neck, or he could essentially drown. So John became Julie's first Reiki patient.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  John was skeptical of Reiki, but I knew nothing else was working. I was in early stages of training for Reiki, or early practice of Reiki. I had just been working with my teacher, and she said that she wanted me to do six Reiki sessions with six different people. So I chose John as one of my people, of course. And when I was doing his Reiki treatment, and I went to his neck, I really wanted to focus there, of course, because he was having an issue there. Let's just try it. So as my hands were near and around his neck, it looked like a Danbrook fluid, like water rippling over rocks in a river

• 15:50Speaker 03

  or in a creek. The fluid was just rolling over, but I could see it bubbling like a babbling brook. And the fluid went away. And after it went away, it never came back the same way that it had. Everything changed that day. I was no longer skeptical. It was phenomenal.

• 16:08Ky Dickens?

  And how's John's health today?

• 16:09Speaker 03

  John has been with no evidence of disease and without lymphedema for at least eight and a half years.

• 16:20Ky Dickens?

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• 17:05Ky Dickens?

  I wear it with everything. It can be dressed up, it can be dressed down, it can be layered with other necklaces. I love it. And you'll see it in a lot of our video podcasts. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the telepathy tapes. It's the best way to support our show.

• 17:34Ky Dickens?

  John's recovery changed everything for Julie. Massage had always made sense to her. It was anatomy and muscle and touch that she could see. Reiki, though, feels completely different. She doesn't feel like she's fixing tissue from the outside. She feels like she's entering into a shared field with her clients. She talks about seeing colors, feeling a sensation where people need healing the most, and sensing pain in her own body that she knows is not her own. For Julie, reiki is the body's own healing mechanism waking up, with her simply standing there, almost just like a witness.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  When I work with reiki, it seems to awaken other parts of my brain and other parts of the brains of my patients. I'll feel heat in my hands, sometimes I feel sensations in my body, sometimes I'll even feel intense pain, but I know that it's not my pain, and I don't know how to explain that. It's a sense. And I would say in the early years that I was practicing it, I would sometimes take my hands away from the patient so that I could validate that and see if the pain went away in my body. And I learned that it did go away. When I work with Reiki, I tend to see colors. It's usually purples and emeralds.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  And what's amazing to me is that sometimes my clients see the same thing. So we're just so connected during the sessions.

• 18:54Ky Dickens?

  Julie's mastery now enables her to heal people remotely.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  When I started doing distance healings, I was a little skeptical of that, too. What amazed me with distance healing is that I could actually connect or tune in to people who were across the country, you know, and then across the world. And I could actually see their environment, where they were.

• 19:19Ky Dickens?

  So physical proximity doesn't matter?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  The first patient that I remember is a cancer patient who was getting treatment out on the West Coast. And I could tell where she was, like I could see and feel where she was in her car across the country.

• 19:36Ky Dickens?

  Were you thinking that she'd be in a hospital?

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I asked her which hospital she was going to be at. I wanted to know where it was on a map and what it looked like. But I could tell where she was, like I could see and feel where she was in her car across the country.

• 19:52Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so I just want to clarify this for the audience. So you thought she'd be in the hospital, but then you saw her in a car instead? And then you verified it with her and she confirmed it, right?

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. And then I thought, okay, well, that was just a, you know. So then I had another distance session with a woman who lived in Florida. I said, okay, I called her up and I couldn't find her. Like I couldn't connect to her energy at all. And I was like getting a little frustrated and feeling like I was a fraud and feeling like this was wrong and I shouldn't be doing this. So I had a bit of imposter syndrome going on. And then something told me, I heard like something that said, she's not in Florida. And I asked her, are you in Florida? And she said, no, I moved. And I said, oh, okay. Well, that makes sense.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  I said, are you in like the Washington DC area? And she said, yeah, exactly. And I was like, oh, okay. And I said, do you live in like a townhouse or a row home? That's across from a park. And when you walk in the front door, there's a staircase to your right and you go up the stairs. And then you go, you're in the bathroom on the left side of the house. If you're looking at the front of the house. And she said, yes, exactly. And I was like, oh, look at that.

• 21:14Ky Dickens?

  Wow. So like, can you see it?

• 21:15Speaker 03

  I can see it like I'm just walking into her house.

• 21:18Ky Dickens?

  Well, it sounds like Julie's talking about remote viewing, which we've talked about on the show before. And just for a recap, remote viewing is an ability to see a location that you're not physically in. It can pretty easily be taught and it's been used by governments around the world with success. So it's a thing.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  It's so amazing to be able to see where people are sitting in their environment when I'm working with them.

• 21:39Ky Dickens?

  Have you been able to connect with everyone remotely that you've ever tried to connect with?

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. One of my clients, she asked if I could check in on her mom who lives in Korea and do a healing on her mom. And I don't know what Korean homes look like. I've never been to Korea and I ended up describing where I knew her mom to be sitting when I connected with her. She's got a spot that she sits in in the house. It's at a table and there's some corner behind her. And whatever is going on in that corner is very toxic energy. What was behind that wall is the sewer line for the people who live in the apartments above her.

• 22:18Ky Dickens?

  Do you feel like when you're doing healing remotely, it's as strong?

• 22:21Speaker 03

  I actually tend to feel that it's more potent when I do remote healings. For some reason that I can't explain.

• 22:28Ky Dickens?

  So it seems like in addition to healing, you can also remote view. But my question is, do those two go together? Can you remote view when you're not healing?

• 22:36Speaker 03

  I don't think I ever have when it wasn't connected to a healing.

• 22:40Ky Dickens?

  It's so interesting. So it's almost like your remote viewing is tied to your ability to energy heal. So I guess my question for you is, what is energy healing to you? How would you define it?

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Energy healing is our body's innate healing mechanism. And I just get to be there to help facilitate that healing, to help kind of tap into it. And I teach my students that they should leave their egos out of their healing sessions because it's not about us. The healing session belongs to the patient, and we just get to be there to help facilitate it. Some may call that channeling. I don't connect to that word. I just, I sense it and facilitate it.

• 23:23Ky Dickens?

  What do you think is at play now that you've been doing it for so long?

• 23:26Speaker 03

  I really don't know how to answer that question. I wish that I knew. It's just something that I don't understand.

• 23:33Ky Dickens?

  Julie feels it, her patients feel it, but she's honest about not fully understanding what's moving through her hands or her body and why distance makes it even stronger for her. So what's actually at work here? If healers can sense an intelligence they can't name, maybe that intelligence isn't coming from them at all. Maybe it's rising from the body's own coordination system or from something deeper that we've always been connected to. To widen this out, I spoke with someone who's spent her life exploring this terrain across cultures, across histories, and has volunteered herself to be researched for science.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  I'm Jill Blakeway. I'm the founder of a center in New York called the Inova Center. And I practice Chinese medicine, both herbology and acupuncture. And in 2019, I published a book called Energy Medicine: The Science and Mystery of Healing. And I went on a bit of a journey, really to explain myself to myself. I had energy, for want of a better word, at the time, coming out of my hands that my patients could feel. And over the years, I was doing acupuncture, and then I would just get the needles in and do the hands-on healing. Because I wasn't under any pressure to deliver hands-on healing, I never charged for it, so I don't feel under pressure. At all, I got to play and I got feedback from the patients when it got stronger and

• 24:48Speaker 04

  when it didn't. And I thought, what if this is just placebo? What if I have very impressive energy that comes out of my hands that people can feel, but it does nothing at all. And they're very impressed by it. And thanks to the placebo effect, they get better and I'm taking credit. Harper Collins commissioned me to go and find out the science behind what I was doing. And so I talked to scientists and healers and started to work out, oh yeah, this is real. It's measurable. And I began to understand that I was manipulating my own biofield and that I was part of a much bigger sort of oversold biofield. And I now understand quite a lot of the science behind it and why it works.

• 25:25Ky Dickens?

  So Jill, you've studied energy healers around the world. And from what I understand, you've treated a wide range of things from cancer to fertility to physical injuries through energy healing. So I guess maybe to start, how do you personally define energy medicine?

• 25:39Speaker 04

  I include as energy medicine, anything that prompts the body's own self-regulating systems to do the work. So I would include prayer in that and hypnosis. I would include guided imagery in that, hands-on healing, hands-over healing, acupuncture. These are all forms of energy medicine because they're a prompt, albeit a subtle one, to the body to self-regulate. Energy in Asia was always known as Qi. In India, it was known as prana. Every ancient culture understood that we have intelligence. You have intelligence in your body that is quite outside of your mind. We sort of think of our brain as directing operations, yeah,

• 26:22Speaker 04

  like the hardware for the software. And the brain does a lot of directing of information. But all day, your body is digesting lunch and regulating your thyroid and transitioning hormones and regulating respiration. And you never have to think about it. Your brain, it's involved, but your conscious mind is not. And that intelligence is coherent. And I think in science, we by necessity started to view the body as very Very mechanical with a series of systems which have specific functions and therefore can malfunction. But actually, the thing that we miss by doing that is that we have a coherent intelligence from the top of our head to the tip of our toes.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  And that is what's directing operations. And a lot of the chronic diseases that medicine struggles to solve for people are in fact problems of coordination and synchronization in that communication system. Some of that communication is done through the nervous system. Some of it's done chemically through the blood, but some of it is done electromagnetically. And that is what we mean by Qi. Qi is your body's intelligence and acupuncture is a very well thought out and old method of directing that intelligence to help it become more coherent and prompt the body to heal.

• 27:45Ky Dickens?

  Jill describes Qi as a kind of intelligent life force, something that moves through us, maintains coherence and communicates moment to moment. A consciousness and information system moving through the body. And while that sounds mystical, in 2018, something unexpected happened. A group of scientists in New York discovered an entire structural network inside of the body, one that some believe to be facilitating an energetic intelligence connecting the bodies into related systems. One of those scientists was Dr. Neil Thies, a liver pathologist and stem cell research pioneer. So Neil, introduce yourself.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  I'm a liver pathologist clinically. That's my training and you know, how cancer starts in human livers. I stumbled into some novel anatomy, thanks to some colleagues of mine. I used to be at Beth Israel Medical Center and that's where this work started.

• 28:31Ky Dickens?

  This novel anatomy was stumbled upon when Neil's colleague, Dr. David Karlock, was testing a new high-tech endoscope. This miniature microscope enables the viewing of live tissue in real time instead of viewing non-living tissue on a glass slide. When viewing dead tissues on glass slides, collagen dries, producing a visual artifact that looks like cracks. Or so it was believed that that's all they were.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  They looked like cracks and the explanation was that collagen is so stiff that when you try to make a very thin section to make a microscope slide, it cracks. That's what I was taught. That's what I taught people.

• 29:03Ky Dickens?

  But viewing live tissue with the endoscope would reveal that these cracks were something else, a significant anatomical structure of fluid-filled gaps between cells.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  It turns out they're remnants of fluid-filled spaces. And so, for the first time, we saw the actual structure.

• 29:19Ky Dickens?

  They called it the interstition, a fluid-filled highway-like communication network that we now know holds more fluid than all the blood in the body. And once researchers knew what they were looking at, they started noticing something else. This isn't just plumbing, it behaves electrically.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  The collagen of the fascia itself probably produces electricity. And the spaces that we've defined also are producing electricity. And this gets into the bioenergy thing because if you've got a continuous network through the entire body, and it's all producing electricity independent of the nervous system, then it's producing a bioelectromagnetic field around the body. And then you might be able to start talking about chakras and meridians, energy bodies, et cetera.

• 30:07Ky Dickens?

  Could this be what the ancient Chinese intuited as qi long before the invention of microscopes or endoscopes?

• 30:12Speaker 05

  One of the questions I've been asking myself with the interstition work is, should we have known this was there? Should we have known we should be looking for something?

• 30:22Ky Dickens?

  News of the interstition went viral worldwide, but many healers and scientists working in other traditions did not agree that this was a new discovery.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  Whenever I speak to someone about the interstition from another culture of healing or health, shamanic healers, energy practitioners, Daoist healers, acupuncture, Ayurvedic medicine, they all see this structure and go, that's what we've been talking about. There was a senior person at the Chinese version of NIH for traditional Chinese medicine. And he laughed and he said, yes, and we've been speaking about it for 4,000 years.

• 31:01Ky Dickens?

  So how were healers able to access and influence this system before technology made it seeable? How did they know it was real and communicate with it to promote healing? And in order to answer that, Neil suggests that we zoom out beyond the body into the very fabric of reality itself.

• 31:15Speaker 05

  Consciousness doesn't come out of the structure of the universe. It's what gives rise to the universe. On the one hand, I would say that the universe is consciousness. On the other hand, I would also say this world at this level of scale is, in fact, material. Consciousness is becoming stuff that looks material and then works through that at the same time to communicate consciousness.

• 31:42Ky Dickens?

  This is where Neil makes a leap that can sound huge at first. He's saying if consciousness is the foundation of reality, not the brain, then everything physical, including our bodies, is shaped out of that same field. And the interstichum, this newly seen network woven through every organ and every tissue, might be one place where that larger consciousness interfaces with us physically. In other words, the body may have a built-in communication system that's not just mechanical or chemical, but informational.

• 32:08Speaker 05

  But how is that going to give rise to this world? There's an urge within that pure fundamental awareness that wants to know itself. And in order to know itself, it has to start to distinguish within itself a subject and object. But to really turn into a subject and object, to really have that moment of discovery, you have to have space separating the subject and object. Space and time. And suddenly, you have spacetime, which is an energy-rich field.

• 32:41Ky Dickens?

  If consciousness is primary, then everything physical, space, time, atoms, molecules, all arise out of that same field. And eventually, those building blocks form the structures inside our bodies, including the interstichum, which raises a question: could the system not just be carrying fluid, but information?

• 32:58Speaker 05

  The structures that combine together from spacetime up through the quantum foam, as it's called, to quantum-level stuff, to atoms, to molecules that form the interstichum, is it also mediating some form of consciousness as a communication network in the body?

• 33:15Ky Dickens?

  If that's true, then our sense of being separate, our little subjective islands of consciousness, may only seem that way. In reality, there may be no hard boundary between you and me, between subject and object, between our bodies and the wider field that we're a part of, or from a faith perspective, between us and God. And if none of us are actually separate, if physical form is just one expression of consciousness, then maybe energy healing isn't about sending something at all, but interacting through a field we already share, a field that could let one person influence another in ways that we can't see or fully explain. And that's exactly what Jill Blakeway experiences in her work.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  I'm a bit more of a transmitter than a receiver, but I am an antenna.

• 33:54Ky Dickens?

  Jill Blakeway describes feeling like an antenna when she's tuning into the energy healing frequencies coming through her body.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  Life has a vibration to it. And when you tune in, it's got a little fizz. That's life, yeah? It has movement to it. That's your chi.

• 34:12Ky Dickens?

  Working with the concept of chi, she connects to a universal consciousness.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  I call it the Tao, because I practice Chinese medicine, but it is a network of communal consciousness. And Lao Tzu said, "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao, because it's incredibly complicated." And I think of it in my mind as just this matrix of connection going infinitely.

• 34:35Ky Dickens?

  Many qigong exercises and philosophies draw inspiration from Lao Tzu's teachings. In particular, his emphasis on balance and the interconnectedness of mind and body.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  It's when you're flowing with the same intelligence that runs through your body, but the bigger version of it. And here's something interesting. If I try and direct it, it goes away. And it was my first hint that I have to get my own ego, my own sense of separate self, out of the way in order to do this. Because your ego is the little bit of you that's really invested in being separate. I think it is about a dropping of the separate self and feeling your way into alignment. And when you let that go and just feel the greater coherence, when we let that flow through us, magic happens. Synchronicities happen, amazing coincidences happen.

• 35:26Ky Dickens?

  Jill's abilities seem to be living proof that bypassing the illusion of a separate self seems to open up paths to healing the body. So Jill, have you always been able to do this? Or how did you figure it out?

• 35:38Speaker 04

  I had energy coming out of my hands that my patients could feel. That was my first clue, Kai, because they'd have their eyes shut and they'd say, oh, you're over my abdomen. I can feel it. I can feel it in my abdomen. And I think, I wonder what they can feel. I developed, I think quite naturally, a way of regulating my breath and my body to make it get stronger. And I got feedback from the patients when it got stronger and when it didn't. And so I'm very much self-taught. And that's what sent me on my journey to work out what the energy that heals us, for want of a better word, actually is.

• 36:13Ky Dickens?

  And then can you describe how you physically, you know, prepare to channel this energy to a patient?

• 36:18Speaker 04

  I stand in what's called horse stance in Qi Gong, which means I bend my legs are sort of shoulder width apart. I bend my knees. I tip my pelvis forward a little bit and I get my spine really straight. And then I feel something tingling down my spine. It's almost fizzy feeling in my spine. Then I have energy that comes out of my hands that the patients can feel and I hold it over specific areas, in my case, based on their Chinese medicine diagnosis.

• 36:46Ky Dickens?

  What about the placebo effect? What role does this very real and measurable phenomena play? And isn't the placebo effect one of the arguments the skeptics raise about energy medicine?

• 36:56Speaker 04

  There are studies, as I'm sure you were, that show that the placebo effect isn't just that you think you're better. If you believe that something is going to work, your body produces chemicals to make it work. So I would say that the placebo is just a prompt to self-healing and it causes measurable physical changes in the body. It's not just, I think I'm better, so I feel a bit better.

• 37:19Ky Dickens?

  I love this because sometimes I think that the placebo effect in and of itself is the best evidence we have of energy healing. We have so much evidence of this in science that deeply believing your body can get better can help it to get better.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  So I usually start by explaining the placebo is energy medicine, actually, and what you think your body can hear you. The tighter and tenser you get, the harder it is for your body to communicate coherently all the way through.

• 37:46Ky Dickens?

  So you learn to heal through intuition, training your mind to bypass the ego, tuning into your body's energy and then connecting to your patient's response. But did you have any notable teachers or, you know, masters that helps you to understand this better?

• 37:58Speaker 04

  Dr. Bill Bengtston, who died recently sadly, and he was an absolute pioneer. He was a professor at City University in New York. And he would gather together skeptical students and faculty. And they would take mice that were specially bred to have cancer, poor mice. And they would inject them with cancer. And then his students would do the technique and they would remit. And they did this on tens of thousands of mice over the years. The technique he taught his students was a form of ego distraction like I do. But he had them flash ego gratifying images in their heads while they held their hands over, in this case, the mice. These aren't your noble wants like world peace.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  These are your like, I don't know, a beach house, winning the lottery type ego gratifying things. And he would have them flash about 20 images round, around, around really quickly so they couldn't think of anything else. They were just flashing.

• 38:53Ky Dickens?

  Wow, that's fascinating. It's like distracting the ego with the ego itself.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  And when they measured the frequency coming out of the healer's hands, it was 7.87 hertz, which is the most common frequency of the earth, the Schumann's resonance.

• 39:08Ky Dickens?

  The Schumann resonance. This is often called the earth's electromagnetic heartbeat. And many believe these frequencies influence human physiology.

• 39:15Speaker 04

  But again, he was distracting the ego, keeping the separate bit of self occupied so that the healer can just let whatever this is flow through them. The most skeptical, sneering, Irolly of students could do it. They could all keep their mice alive.

• 39:32Ky Dickens?

  So interestingly, the control group mice, who were not receiving any healing, started to remit or just get better as well. How did that happen?

• 39:40Speaker 04

  When they visited the control group, they looped the control group of mice into the healing field and they remitted too.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  So Bill, in the end, had to send the control mice to a different lab in a different state. I know you looked at Rupert Sheldrake's work. It was creating a resonant field.

• 39:59Ky Dickens?

  And that's where the mouse study becomes interesting. Because mice can't be skeptics, they cannot placebo themselves or talk their way into feeling better. Yet, the effects still show up. With humans, the picture gets even more layered. And Jill pays close attention to the energy of language when she works with cancer patients. She believes that phrases like "fighting cancer" or "battling cancer" can actually pull the system out of coherence. Instead, she focuses on language that helps the body remember its own capacity to heal.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  Using battling language, you know, teaching people to visualize little Pac-Men eating up the cancer and things like that. And if you think about all the language we use about cancer, it's all about winning the war and battling it. And I realized, oh, this is the wrong track. We should be encouraging coherence, yeah? Because as your body communicates better internally, it cleans up. Bodies clean up cancer cells all the time until they get overwhelmed and can't.

• 40:51Ky Dickens?

  When Jill talks about coherence, she means the body's communication system working in sync instead of in chaos. It's like an orchestra playing the same piece of music instead of a bunch of instruments out of sync making discordant noise. So when the body is coherent, it can recognize what doesn't belong, including cancer cells, and clean them up the way it's designed to do.

• 41:17Ky Dickens?

  A skeptic who became a longtime patient of Jill's is actor Tim Daly.

• 41:21Speaker 06

  Like many people, I thought energy healing was bullshit. My natural predisposition is to be, I would say, an open-minded skeptic. But I hadn't experienced anything that showed me that it was significant in any big way. Until I experienced the electric, magnetic, whatever it was, this incredible feeling of energy and power of some kind, some invisible thing, going through my body.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  He was quite skeptical. He liked the acupuncture. He's quite a fit gym-going person. I would use acupuncture to help his knees and things like that. So he didn't really need much, just the odd tweak when he pulled his back or something like that. And I would play around with energy medicine. And to be honest, he was a bit eye-rolly in an affectionate way. He'd be like, yeah, do whatever you think. And then he was in a skiing accident and he broke both his legs.

• 42:16Ky Dickens?

  And anyone who's ever worked in TV knows, once production dates are locked, they don't move.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  And they wanted him back to work within a week with two broken legs.

• 42:25Ky Dickens?

  Jill began working on Tim's legs, combining acupuncture with her form of energy healing. She placed the needles, then moved her hands slowly above his skin, never making physical contact. And yet, both of them reacted as strong waves of sensation moved through his body.

• 42:39Speaker 06

  She was just doing something with her hands at the bottom of my feet. And she said, this is energy medicine at work. This was beyond her putting needles in the energy healing. I wasn't going to put my shattered tibial plateau back together, but it sure helped heal the nerves and helped make my recovery a lot faster.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  When I put my hands over the brakes, his whole leg would shake. And he'd be like, what are you doing to me? He could feel the energy running through his legs and his legs would vibrate, completely out of his control. I would say things like, try and stop it. And he couldn't. It was like his legs had been taken over and he was back at work. Within about a week to 10 days, he healed very, very quickly. His doctors were amazed by how well he healed.

• 43:27Ky Dickens?

  When Jill and Tim were filming for Phenomena, Tim joked that in their first few energy healing sessions, he didn't really feel anything remarkable.

• 43:34Speaker 06

  I remember the first time you did energy healing on me. The sensation was almost nonexistent. And I indulged you and let you do your thing. But when I busted my legs, the sensation that I got from the work you did was profound.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  The teacher who taught me so much used to say, "Healing is an autonomic response to need." And I have noticed that my abilities, such that they are increased depending on need.

• 44:07Ky Dickens?

  Because his need for healing was greater, his body responded more intensely to your energy.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  Tim had never really needed me before. He had a bit of acupuncture for the occasional minor thing. And now he really needed me. It was a completely different experience. The effect is more dramatic the more you need it.

• 44:24Speaker 06

  I still, as does Jill, want to find some people who will put it into a context of scientific process or method. It's something that is very hard to measure unless you're some of the scientists who are really using cutting-edge technology. What I want to know is why? Why do we experience these things?

• 44:47Ky Dickens?

  And Tim isn't alone in asking that. If people really experience these things, they should be measurable. They should leave traces somewhere. In part two of this episode, we'll follow Jill and Tim into a lab that tracks what happens between their hearts when healing begins. We'll hear how Reiki stacks up against standard pain treatments. And we'll visit a lab where something groundbreaking may have happened. A healer impacts cancer cells from miles away. Next week, we ask if something is moving between us. Can we catch it in the act? And if we can, even in the smallest way, our ideas about what a body is and where it ends may have to change. And the bigger question that science has skirted isn't just whether energy healing works. It's what kind of universe would make this possible at all?

• 45:33Ky Dickens?

  A very special thank you to the Emerald Gate Charitable Trust and the Subtle Energy Funders Collective for their incredible research in this space and their help consulting on this episode. To dive in deeper, subscribe to our Backstage Pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content like telepathy tests, Ask Me Anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free, connect with other members on our Telepathy Tribe Discord, and hear and see exclusive content from the Telepathy Tapes Vault. Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com. For more info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. It takes a village to make this podcast and I want to thank our producers, Jesse Steed, Jill Pachaznik and Catherine Ellis. Contributing producer, also working on the Phenomena film, Debbie Hinnegan. Original music is by Rachel Cantu.

• 46:17Ky Dickens?

  Mix, mastering and additional music is by Michael Urbino. Our associate producer is Selena Kennedy. Original artwork is by Ben Kandora Design. And I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer and host. To learn more about Phenomena, a three-part documentary featuring access to groundbreaking scientists, transformative healers and evidence that's rewriting what we know about energy healing, you can visit PhenomenaHealing.com/telepathy tapes. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended to substitute the advice of a physician, professional coach, therapist or other qualified professional.