Interview with Dr Laskow by Stephan Bodian for Yoga Journal
Published in the March/April 1992 issue of the Yoga Journal; Stephan Bodian.
by Stephan Bodian for Yoga Journal
As I let myself in the front gate of Leonard Laskow’s Mill Valley home, I’m greeted by Shaina, his devoted companion for the past eight years. We walk down the stairs together, and I’m struck by Shaina’s statuesque beauty, her poise, her powerful, silent presence. When she spots Laskow coming out the door to greet me, she hurries to his side in an unmistakable show of affection.
“Oh, Shaina,” I offer, when Laskow repeats her name for me, “as in shaina maideleh (Yiddish for ‘pretty girl’).” “Exactly,” he says with a laugh, pleased that I’ve intuited his secret (it was actually a wild guess) and unabashedly proud of his beautiful friend, who happens to be not a woman, but a female German shepherd with dark markings and wolflike hindquarters.
Shaina remains outside as we enter Laskow’s small, meticulously organized den of a home, which serves as a combination office, healing center, and sanctuary. Spiritual objects from a variety of traditions adorn the walls: Tibetan thankas, handmade Native American shields, Thai buddhas, Western esoteric art. An abundance of hardwood furniture gives the dark, low-ceilinged rooms the warm, well-tended glow of an old ship’s cabin.
When he moved into these quarters in the mid-1970’s he was a highly successful ob-gyn in private practice in San Francisco. He had served as a naval flight surgeon during the Vietnam War, done his residency at Stanford, and taken a post-doctoral fellowship in psychosomatic medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School. He had also dabbled in mysticism, read a lot of Alice Bailey, taken the est training, even attended a few meditation retreats—nothing out of the ordinary for a native New Yorker displaced to northern California. But his medical practice was mainstream allopathic—that is, until a series of remarkable experiences revealed to him in no uncertain terms that his vocation was to heal in an entirely different modality.
The first occurred during a meditation retreat: “It was about two o’clock in the morning,” he recalls, as we start our interview “and I was in deep meditation. Suddenly, there was this incredible presence, and a voice that said, “Your work is to heal with love.’ As soon as I heard it, I knew that it was telling the truth.
“So I’m worthy?’ I said.
“You’re no more or less worthy than anyone else,’ the voice replied. “your work is to heal with love.’
“I was awestruck,” Laskow recalls, his voice filling with emotion as he recounts this numinous moment. “The presence was overwhelming, and the message left a profound impression. But I didn’t understand it at the time.”
Several years later he had an opportunity to put the voice’s mandate into practice: “While attending a conference, I roomed with a young man who had cancer that had metastasized to his lungs. In the middle of the first night he awoke moaning; he was in pain, and he was having difficulty breathing. When I asked if there was anything I could do, he said, ‘Yes, anything. Please help.’
“So quite spontaneously, I put my hands on either side of his chest, and I visualized a ball of light above my head and felt the light descend through my head to the center of my chest and out through my arms. I recreated the ball of light between my hands.
“In a few minutes, the man started to breathe deeply, his whole body relaxed, and he said, ‘It’s gone. Thank you.’ When he awoke the next morning, he said, ‘You know, Doc, you’re a real healer.’ For the next few days he experienced no more pain, and his sleep was undisturbed.
“Obviously something profound had happened that night, but I couldn’t make any sense of it based on my medical knowledge.”
With some hesitation, Laskow began to experiment on his patients using the technique he had spontaneously discovered—with often dramatic results. Perhaps the most impressive of these early cures was with a 62-year-old woman who had severe rheumatoid arthritis. “She was in a lot of pain,” remembers Laskow, “and her joints were so badly swollen that she could no longer hold a pen to sign her name. Within a half hour of working with her energetically, the pain disappeared, the swelling went down, and she put aside her cane and began doing deep kneebends. It was amazing!
“When she went back to her rheumatologist, he could no longer find any evidence of arthritis. She also had diabetes, and she was able to cut her insulin requirements by two-thirds, and after an additional session she stopped taking insulin entirely. This was one of the healings that persuaded me to start exploring this approach in a more serious and systematic way.”
With neurochemist Glen Rein, he conducted a series of experiments that ruled out the placebo effect by showing that focused intention and imagery can not only heal human beings they can influence the growth rate of tumor cells as well. Convinced at last, nearly five years after his first spontaneous healing session, that love can be a powerful force in preserving life, Laskow sold his private practice to devote all his time to “the exploration of transformational energies and their application to the healing process.”
Over the years he has developed, augmented, and refined his approach, using it with thousands of patients and teaching it to other medical professionals throughout the world. (Although Laskow developed holoenergetics independently, he is well aware of its similarities with more traditional techniques like shamanism and faith healing.) He now believes that the physical body is actually a field of energy that has taken a particular form, and that, by restructuring energy patterns through focused intention and imagery we can ameliorate or even cure physical illness. Despite his successes, however, Laskow remains self-effacing: “Healing takes place on a level we can only call grace, coupled with willingness on our part,” he explains.
When we interrupt our conversation so he can field an important phone call, I meander back to Laskow’s meditation room cum healing temple, which is replete with sitting paraphernalia, an elaborate altar, assorted bronze and crystal gongs, and several large quartz crystals. As I step into the dim interior, I feel what I can only identify as a loving presence that tugs at my heart and gently nudges it open like a tentative flower. Clearly, the healing energy Laskow has so often invoked has now taken up residence here.
“I’d love to spend an hour or two in that room,” I say to Laskow as we resume our interview. “I’m sure that would be a transformative experience in itself.” But before I can take time off for self-healing, I’m determined to get the good doctor to explain his ground-breaking approach.
You call your work holoenergetic healing. Why holoenergetic?
Holoenergetic healing means healing with the energy of the whole. As I began doing healing work, I came to realize that it takes energy to maintain separation—of one person from another, of one part of myself from another, of parts from the whole. In reality, there is no separation, other than what the mind creates and the emotions maintain.
Since the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as we release the appearance of separation and bring ourselves into wholeness, a tremendous amount of energy is liberated. That’s why I created the term, which means healing with the energy of the whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
So the work of healing is to eliminate the illusion of separation and to allow wholeness to emerge.
Yes. The energy it takes to maintain separation is often expressed as illness or stress in mind and body. The word “healing” comes from the same root as “wholeness.” To the extent that we bring ourselves into wholeness, we’ve been healed.
What exactly do you heal? What is the focus of your work?
The work focuses on the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of our being. For those who want primarily physical healing, it accomplishes that. Not in every case, of course, just as is true with allopathic medicine, homeopathy, or any other form of healing—there are many variables involved. But holoenergetic healing definitely has an impact on a physical level. To determine its physical impact, I did research with tumor cells and bacteria until I was satisfied that, by holding an image in our mind with intention, we can affect, through our consciousness, nonhuman living systems. Of course, emotional, mental, and spiritual healing are also integral to the holoenergetic approach.
So you’ve actually developed a methodology for healing the physical body using imagery and intention. Could you describe how this methodology works?
First let me talk about what I call holoforms, energetic patterns that exist on the subtle dimension and can induce illness in the physical body. These holoforms usually originate in choices and interpretations we made about our experiences, often at an early age. Even though those interpretations are no longer valid and may well have been distorted at the time they were formulated, we continue to hold them in consciousness, where they shape our present experience and perpetuate the illusion of separation.
Not only does a holoform influence how we receive experience and how we express ourselves, it also acts like an energetic template that directs and configures the molecular, atomic, and subatomic activity of the body, which, in the case of a dysfunctional pattern, may give rise to illness.
By focusing our attention on a thought, feeling, sensation, or belief associated with the old pattern, we can recreate the entire holoform. That’s why I call the pattern a holoform: as with a hologram, the whole is contained in each of its parts. Holoenergetic healing allows us to go back to the source of the dysfunctional pattern—the moment in which we chose to interpret a particular event in a certain way—to take responsibility for our choice, and to choose again.
That’s quite an ambitious undertaking—going back to the source of an illness and transforming it at a basic level. How exactly do you go about it? I understand the process has four distinct stages.
The first stage is to recognize what you want to change. What is the form that’s not satisfying to you now, and what information do you need now in order to change? There are two levels at which we access this information. The first is the rational, cognitive level—the information you get when you ask the following questions: What do I want to change? What is prompting me to change now? How do I see myself contributing to the present circumstances? What does this illness or situation keep me from doing, being, or having? What does it allow me to do, be, or have? What result, outcome, and inner experience do I really want to create for myself?
The second level is the intuitive. When I work with somebody, I assess their energy field intuitively to determine which of the energy centers are out of balance and where there may be distortions in the field. Intuitive assessment continues throughout the holoenergetic process.
Having recognized the problem, the next stage is called resonance: By focusing your attention on the sensation, thought, feeling, or symptom, you come into resonance with it—that is, your awareness starts to vibrate at its frequency. Each holoform has its own unique, natural vibratory frequency. When you come into resonance with this frequency, you become one with the form, and then you can trace it back to its source. This may mean reexperiencing the initial event completely.
For example, if you’re dealing with a painful incident, you may have to go into the pain and reexperience it, rather than disowning or denying it. If you resonate deeply enough, you will come to understand what it was you really wanted to experience at the time. This is what I call the life-force intent of the holoform.
Most people, when they penetrate to the very essence of a traumatic event or an illness, find that what they really wanted was freedom, love, peace, joy, a sense of their own empowerment and creativity, a feeling of security—one or more of these essential inner experiences. For example, they may have gotten abuse and abandonment, but what they really wanted was love.
Finally, to complete the healing, you need to release the old form energetically and replace it with what you really wanted. To release it, you take a deep breath, hold your breath while you’re feeling the form intensely, and then, intending to totally and completely dissipate it, release your breath through the area of the body where you’re holding the pattern. Usually this is the place where the symptom, trauma, or tension manifests itself physically. If you’re working with a holoenergetics practitioner, they will at the same time withdraw the energy from the area using their breath. It’s like deflating a balloon while somebody else is helping you to collapse it.
Having dispersed the original pattern, you’ve created a void. Now within the void you can reform what you really wanted—peace, love, freedom, empowerment, creativity, security, joy—in the form of a symbol that represents the missing inner experience for you.
These are the four stages of the holoenergetic healing process: recognize what you want to change, resonate with it, release the form that no longer serves, and reform it in alignment with what you really wanted to experience, with your purpose, your essence, your Self.
How does this approach differ from others that also work at an energetic level, such as acupuncture or homeopathy?
There are actually several different levels of change. You can shift energy from one place in the body to another place where it’s more useful for healing. This is called translation. Or you can transform the energy by bringing the person closer to wholeness, closer to the Self, and thereby change the way the energy is structured in consciousness. Such transformative change releases the energy that’s bound up in separation. Or you can transcend the old energy patterns completely by shifting to an entirely new way of perceiving and experiencing reality.
Acupuncture, homeopathy, bodywork, and allopathic medicine are all good examples of translational change: healing is facilitated by shifting and balancing the energies. Holoenergetic healing is an example of transformational change: by releasing and reforming the pattern that underlies an illness, we release tremendous reserves of life energy that can transform the person’s entire life. Then there are people who in the course of healing come to transcend identification with body and mind. For these people, what happens at the level of personality no longer matters the way it used to. Translation, transformation, and transcendence are three levels of energetic change, and each has its own particular value.
Let’s get back to the four stages of the holoenergetic process. Could you describe a case in some detail, to illustrate how the process works?
Several years ago a patient came to me complaining of severe, debilitating low back pain. The pain was so severe that she had to crawl from her bed to the bathroom in the morning. A CAT-scan indicated that she had a ruptured, herniated disk, and her neurosurgeon had scheduled her for a lumbar laminectomy and spinal fusion. That’s an operation in which the protruding portion of the ruptured disk is removed and the lumbar vertebrae are fused. She came to me with the hope that she could avoid surgery and also better understand the meaning of her illness.
As she responded to my questions in the recognition phase, she realized that she had a “back-breaking” job, which she performed so perfectly and so responsibly that her boss kept heaping more and more work on her shoulders. As we delved deeper, she got in touch with the shame underlying the perfectionism, and she was able to trace the source of her illness back to her relationship with her father, a silent man who withheld his approval and love until she earned it by what she did, not by who she was. Work had become a surrogate father, and her self-esteem now depended on her job, which she felt compelled to do perfectly.
In the resonance phase, she was guided to come into resonance with the holoform, the disharmonious energetic pattern, which was located in her lumbar area and consisted of the shame and perfectionism based on her relationship with her father. I had her focus her attention on the holoenergetic pattern, describe the feelings and images associated with it, and then go back to the earliest time she could recall having similar feelings, a time when she was first developing the belief that she had to be perfect in order to get daddy’s love.
She was able to see that the beliefs she had developed about herself at an early age had become self-fulfilling prophesies, and from then on she had attracted into her life people who needed her to be perfect before they would give her the acceptance and affection she desired. When she realized her role in this process, she had the opportunity to choose again and to release the whole pattern.
How did the release take place?
The release took place energetically. While still in resonance with the holoform, the energetic pattern, she took a deep breath, held it, looked at her willingness to totally and completely release the form, then released her breath through the lumbar area, totally dissipating the image of the energetic pattern. At the same time I helped withdraw the energy using my hands and breath while she was intentionally expelling her breath.
Then she filled the area with the healthy image and with a symbolic form that represented what it was she really wanted. In her case, the healthy image was a normal-looking spinal column, without any disk protrusions. So before we started the process she had an opportunity to study pictures of a healthy spine. At the same time, she tuned in to what she really wanted at the time the pattern formed, which was love.
First she created a symbolic image that represented this love—in her case, an image of her father tucking her in at night and kissing her on the forehead. For other people, love is represented by such symbols as a sunset, a rose, an animal, an archetypal figure, the ocean. After the release, she filled the lumbar area with the image of the healthy spine, and then she infused it with the image of her loving father. This image represented the positive life-force intent for her—the energy that’s aligned with the natural order and harmony of the inherent healing process of the body. When we fill an area with that positive life-force intent, we deeply facilitate the healing process. That’s the reformation phase. All her life she had sought this love and acceptance—now she had it, she didn’t have to seek it outside herself anymore. With reformation came the profoundly healing insight that she could give herself the love she wanted from others.
What did you yourself do during this final, reformation phase?
I guided her while maintaining an unconditionally loving field with my hands, placed in front of her abdomen and over her spine, while she was doing the resonance and release work within the field. When she focused her attention on the lumbar area again after release, the pain had disappeared—and it never recurred. Her neurosurgeon canceled her surgery. Not only was she able to avoid painful surgery and rehabilitation, but upon returning to work she was promoted to head the international division of a well-known organization and given her own office with a secretary to lighten her workload. She knew that a major transformational shift had occurred in her. She felt self-empowered and was able to give and receive love in a much deeper way. That’s why I call this work transformational: Along with the physical and emotional changes, a person’s whole life can change as they release dysfunctional holoenergetic patterns and get in touch with their true nature.
You just mentioned the importance of an unconditionally loving field, and of course your book is called Healing With Love.
We all have a sense that love can be healing, but there is very little “hard” scientific evidence to prove it.
What about the research you mentioned earlier with bacteria and tumor cells?
What kinds of effects did your focused, loving energy have on these microorganisms?
When I first became involved in healing work, I got some exciting results with patients, but I wondered how much of it was due to the placebo effect. We know that approximately 35 percent of people who experience positive changes as a result of a given medicine or therapy do so because of the placebo effect. So I decided to do some research on bacteria in conjunction with a biophysicist who was also trained as a microbiologist. I found that, when I focused my attention on bacteria in test tubes with the intention of diminishing their growth, I could reduce growth by as much as 50 percent relative to controls.
Then I decided to see what would happen if I focused loving energy on the bacteria to try to protect them from the inhibitory effects of antibiotics. I found that by silently intending to “preserve all life forms in solution” while feeling love for the bacteria and projecting it through my hands, the bacteria remained active even in the presence of antibiotics, while similar numbers of untreated bacteria exposed to the exact same amount of antibiotic stopped moving and died. Love was obviously a powerful protective force, and intention could likewise inhibit bacteria growth. Then I started working with tumor cells and tried to refine the work I did with bacteria.
What did you find?
The neurochemist Glen Rein and I set up experiments to determine to what extent intention can influence the growth of tumor cells in culture and how that compares to the impact of imagery and thought. We used state-of-the-art scientific techniques involving the uptake of radioactive thymidine by tumor cell DNA to measure rapidity of growth. The results were very interesting. We found that if you just casually think the thought “diminished growth of tumor cells,” it doesn’t seem to have an effect on cell growth. But if you have a real intention for the tumor cell growth rate to slow, the rate is reduced by 20 percent relative to contemporaneous controls. Before I would actually do the experiment, I would look at the cells in culture under a microscope and come into resonance with them. If, in addition to intention, I added the image of a reduced number of cells, I got a 40 percent reduction. When I held no intention but only an image of reduced growth, I also got a 20 percent reduction. The conclusion we came to was that intention and imagery each contributed 50 percent to the total inhibitory effect in this experiment.
This confirms what Carl Simonton has said about the power of imagery to combat cancer.
Yes. And we also demonstrated that we could stimulate as well as inhibit growth of cells by using intention and imagery. Then we took the next step. Instead of dealing with the cells themselves, I focused the same intention and imagery on the water we used to make up the medium in which the cells grew. We got the same effect! We could structure water to contain the information and then use the water to grow the cells, and we would experience the same 20 percent/40 percent inhibition.
The water would hold the intention.
The water seems to hold both the intention and the imagery. Since our bodies are two-thirds water, the information could be stored in the water of the body. Our research wasn’t the first to show that the structure of water could be altered by intention. In the 1970s, Bernard Grad at McGill University and Douglas Dean at the Newark College of Engineering found that you can change the bond angle between the atoms in the water molecule, which in turn alters the absorption spectrum, pH, solubility, and surface tension of the water. It’s interesting to speculate that personality information, for example, may exist as a self-organizing vibratory pattern which is held in the water of the body and also in the bones, which are crystalline in structure.
The energies we’re talking about are subtle. They’re in the realm of the quantum potential, which influences the electromagnetic spectrum, and in what David Bohm calls the superquantum potential, a higher-order energy common to both mind and matter.
Where does love fit into all of this? What is love, in your view, and how is it a healing force?
Love, as I understand it, is the awareness of relatedness and the impulse toward unity. When you focus on what it is you want to change, acknowledge your relationship to it, and come into oneness with it, any intention on your part to change it releases it. Whereas if you deny or disown it, you’re not in touch with it. What you can love, you can heal.
So resonating at the same frequency and focusing intention is love, even though you’re releasing the form.
Love, in this sense, is the universal harmonic. There are many other ways to change something. You can hit it with a hammer or cut it with a knife, or you can change it energetically. The most powerful way of changing something on the subtle energetic level is with love. If you change it subtly, then it changes physically.
I would imagine that love in itself would be healing, even without the intention to change.
Yes, it is. Because your essence is love—the awareness of being and the desire to be one with all. It’s the natural frequency of the Self. As you experience loving energy, you start to vibrate at this frequency. The separative dissonances begin to fade, and you come back to your own true Self.
The goal of healing, then, is to come into resonance with the Self and ultimately to merge with the Self, which is wholeness.
Yes. Ultimately, healing is being whole, being the Self, which is one with all. Here healing and love become one and the same: Love heals, and complete healing evokes love.
Do we all have the capacity to be healers of ourselves?
Yes, more or less. We all have the capacity to play the piano or to sing, although some people have more of an aptitude than others. As long as there aren’t any physical infirmities or severe disabilities that prevent it, everyone is capable of being their own healer by facilitating the body-mind’s inherent healing process.
You talked before about taking responsibility for your illness. I think there’s a tendency in new age circles toward what some people have called “new age guilt.” That is, I create my own reality, and if I’m sick it’s my fault, so I need to take the blame. How is taking responsibility for your illness different from taking the rap?
What I mean by responsibility is how you choose here and now to respond to the circumstances you find yourself in. In the past, circumstances occurred that may have been beyond your control, and consciously or unconsciously you chose to interpret those circumstances in a certain way, which ultimately gave rise to a dysfunctional energetic pattern. Perhaps that was the best choice you could have made, given your limitations at that time. There’s no blame or judgment associated with the choice. We’re all human, we all have limitations, and we all make mistakes. If we chose to interpret events or to behave in a way that no longer serves us, we can forgive ourselves for making that choice and then choose again.
In what sense does a five-year-old girl being raped by her father have responsibility for what is happening to her? Let’s say she decided at that moment that she was inherently worthless, and she has been influenced by that decision from that point on. How does she go about choosing again?
That’s where holoenergetic healing is particularly effective, because the effect of her choice wasn’t only a psychological one. Her experience has had a profound and ongoing influence on her, which she holds as an energetic pattern in her body and in the energetic field around her. Even if she could go back to the experience and generate compassion for the offender, she may not be able to let go of her deep-seated feelings of worthlessness. She has to access the energetic pattern, resonate with the experience, bring the moment of choice to conscious awareness if she can, understand what she really wanted to feel, and release the pattern energetically.
Why must she take responsibility for the pattern before she can release it?
When she wasn’t conscious of the pattern, she wasn’t really responsible for it. But once she becomes aware of it, she needs to assume responsibility in the present for holding it. At the same time she may become aware of some resistance to releasing it: She may want to continue to blame and punish the perpetrator, or to remember the abuse so it won’t be repeated. Once she realizes that holding the trauma of an abusive incident in her body is not the only way to remember and protect herself, she can choose to release it energetically. Responsibility always implies choice. Once choice is made or identified, responsibility can be taken, and self-empowerment begins.
Published in the March/April 1992 issue of the Yoga Journal; Stephan Bodian.