The force is with us all

We can manipulate our body's energy with touch to cure many mental and physical problems, one self-described "energy healer'' says.

By SUSAN ASCHOFF, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 6, 2002

Eden workshop Donna Eden, above, will present a workshop from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday at First Unity Church, 469 45th Ave. N, St. Petersburg. She also will speak at First Unity's services at 9 and 11 a.m. A Healthy Living Fair with exhibits featuring holistic and alternative therapies and heart-healthy food is 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the church's Friendship Hall. Cost of Eden's workshop is $20 in advance, $25 at the door. The fair is free. To purchase tickets, call (727) 727-2222. For information on Eden and energy medicine, visit her Web site at www.innersource.net.

ST. PETERSBURG -- Donna Eden says she can see the surging, spinning life force coursing through individuals. She can teach them, she says, how to harness that vital energy to heal and hone their body and mind.

"I see energy as the body's best medicine. I have never met anyone who cannot produce self-healing," says Eden, author of Energy Medicine (Tarcher/Putnam, $16.95) and self-described energy healer.

A well-known practitioner of alternative medicine but not a trained physician, Eden has treated thousands of clients and taught classes from Australia to South America for more than 20 years. She will conduct a workshop on energy medicine Sunday in St. Petersburg. Participants will learn simple techniques for tapping into and redirecting the body's energy for better health, she saidin a phone interview.

She has counseled people overwhelmed by stress, who are suffering headaches or colds, and who are battling immune disorders and disease.

The answer is energy, Eden said.

Similar to an acupuncturist who relies on a map of the body's pressure points and pathways, or meridians, to treat patients, Eden said she can see the "lattice of force fields" in a person's body and whether the fields are working in harmony.

She uses physical touch, which can be self-administered, to nourish and redirect those energies.

"If someone is exhausted," she said, "I will show them some points right under the collarbone" they can touch or massage "to turn that energy around." A person overwhelmed by his thoughts can find clarity, she said, by dragging the fingers across the forehead and skull in specified patterns to make more "mental space."

Energy medicine is part of the burgeoning field of alternative medicine. The $25-billion-plus industry includes dozens of therapies from the maligned to the mainstream: Touch therapy and herbal supplements, for example, are now prescribed by doctors and used in some hospitals.

Eden said hers is not some new brand of snake oil. Self-healing has always been part of the human race. "Have you ever, when you heard stressful news, thrown your hand to your forehead?" Leave it there, she said. The body's fight-or-flight response pulls blood to the torso; the hand pulls some back to the brain so it can think clearly in a crisis.

Eden, 59, lives in Oregon with her husband and collaborator, David Feinstein, Ph.D. The couple also lives in South Florida, an escape where she works on her next book and because "we love the beach," Feinstein said.

Eden does not have a medical degree. Momentarily stumped when asked for her title, she said she is an energy healer. She does not reject traditional medicine. But, she said, she had to become her own guinea pig to be well.

She had tuberculosis and allergies as a child; at 16 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By her early 30s, the MS had left her bedridden. "I couldn't even take vitamins and herbs because my body would throw them up," she said. "I had to start to work with my energies.

"It's what I believe in and trust the most."

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