Presenter: Jeanne Achterberg, PhD
Objectives: Participants completing this presentation will be able to:
- Name 3 forms of distant intentionality.
- Formulate a hypothetical mechanism for transpersonal imagery.
- Describe empirical findings suggestive of transpersonal imagery.
Description: It’s an ancient belief that has
survived through time: We affect one another with our
intentions. And now it’s a demonstrated medical fact.
Distant Intentionality (DI), the ability to affect others
in the absence of sensory contact mechanisms, is a widely
debated subject. The use of therapeutic modalities such as
prayer, Healing Touch, shamanism, qigong, and transpersonal
imagery evolved from the premise that our spiritual
connections and our oneness can be used to heal, and some
form of DI can be found in almost all cultures throughout
the world. But creating a measurable physiological change
in another person without any physical contact defies the
biomedical paradigm. How can there be an effect, scientists
ask, if there is no known mechanism of action?
With high tech tools at their disposal, Jeanne Achterberg
and team at North Hawaii Community Hospital set out to
prove — or disprove — that measurable biological changes
occur when a healer engages with a patient, even though
there is no physical contact. To test the hypothesis, they
recruited eleven healers who were recognized as being
skilled by the communities they served. Their practices
included, among others, Healing Touch, Hawaiian pule,
Peruvian shamanism, Reiki, sound healing, and qigoing.
Each healer then chose a recipient for the DI experiment
with whom he or she felt some connection. During the course
of the study, each DI recipient spent 34 minutes in a
functional magnetic resonance machine (fMRI) while the
assigned healer, in an electromagnetically shield room,
practiced his or her art in random 2-minute “send” or
“no-send” intervals, as assigned by the researchers.
During this presentation, Dr. Achterberg will discuss the
results of these studies.