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March 7, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast
29:30
How to Change Your Energy to Change Your Stress Levels

In this interview, author and scientist Joyce Whiteley Hawkes opens up about her near death experience, and how it changed her career and connection to science. She also reveals how energy work and prayer can tap into our soul to encourage emotional healing. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I feel like I'm walking a line stretched out in front of me, and my right foot is in the material world and the world of science, and my left foot's in the world of spirit.
And so I try and walk close to the middle line to dance between those two.
Because I've had experience in the spiritual arena of this, in the mode of thought of working to promote energy, healing, that I can't explain as a scientist.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. podcast.
As much as I can operate on someone's heart when they're about to have a heart attack, the real issue is, could I have intervened earlier by figuring out what's going on energetically within them?
Now this seems sort of soft, touchy, and feely to a lot of folks out there.
And so I thought we'd sort of comb through the literature and see who some of the nation's experts are, scientists, who spent a good part of their career in conventional science figuring out why atoms work and cells function or whatever.
And try to see what work has been done, seriously looking at energy, at the level of the cell, trying to figure out if there's anything there.
And there are a few people who are better candidates to talk to us about this.
And then Dr. Joyce Hawks, who, besides being a biophysicist and a cell biologist by training, is someone who's a fellow at the American Association for Advancement of Sciences, which is the nation's premier scientific body.
It's the most prestigious, I would argue.
I don't know how one becomes a member, but it's tough.
You're elected.
Oh, I know you're elected, but I don't know how they even picked to elect you.
It's a mystery.
It is a mystery.
But this is a wonderful society that prides itself on bringing together some of the leading thinkers of science.
And Dr. Hawks is a member of that group.
And she's written about her experience at the level of the cell.
It's a book called Cell Level Healing, The Bridge from Soul to Cell.
Thanks for joining us.
I'm so happy to be here.
Thank you.
Let's go back to 1984, which is when I understand you first began to think about the cell in a very different way than you had been trained.
What happened then?
Well, I had a near-death experience a few years before that, and in 1984 I changed careers.
Not all of a sudden.
I had about a six, seven-year runway after my near-death experience.
What was the near-death experience, by the way?
I was hit on the head with a leaded glass window that fell off of something unexpectedly, and it shouldn't have.
And I was an atheist at the time.
And all of a sudden, here I'm shooting down the long, dark tunnel towards the light.
My mother and grandmother greet me, an experience I had never read about before.
NDEs were not popular at that point in time.
Your mother and grandmother were deceased?
They were deceased.
If they weren't, then it wouldn't be near death, I guess.
Yes, you're right.
But it was one of those amazing experiences of being able to communicate with them, to feel their love, and passing into a place that was full of light, where everything was lit from itself, is what it seemed.
Like the blades of grass had this extraordinary color of light and vitality.
Then I was in the presence of a being of light for, felt like a long time.
And I had no specific life review.
I just knew there weren't any secrets and there was no opportunity to waste time thinking about having secrets or coming or going.
And then I was back on the floor.
Apparently after about an hour, I had a big scar on my head and dried blood all over my head.
So I wasn't out just a second or two.
Why do you think near-death experiences are so frequently described like that?
I've had my share of patients who have experienced these events and they've come back and it's almost always sort of seen that same way.
It's curious because I've traveled other parts of the world where people have had near-death experiences, but they're different.
In Bali, for example, the healer that I worked with walked down a long path in the middle of a forest.
She arrived at a place that felt like a tribunal.
Someone came and pled her case, and then, boom, she came back into her body.
Her whole family died.
Was grieving because she was out so long they were sure she was dead.
It changed her life.
She became a healer.
That was one of the reasons I was attracted to talking with her.
People in other parts of the world also may go down a river.
So it's fairly common in our culture to do the tunnel.
Why?
I don't know what precedence there is for it.
So it's understandably a life-changing experience.
Totally.
And seven years later, you changed your career.
I did.
Okay.
After I had started meditating, started working with a healer, all of a sudden I experienced this amazing feeling of energy moving through my body and to other people.
And in that sense, they were describing to me how much it helped them.
All of a sudden, You know, diseases they had, particularly inflammatory diseases like arthritis, were receding or they felt tremendous well-being during that time that I was working with them.
The feedback was really strong.
Right.
What do you think is happening?
It's a good question.
There's a place of mystery with this.
Even as a scientist, I look at on the right side of the field of science and factual stuff, what is happening?
And on the other side, there is an entry into the mystery of simply moving compassion, skill, wisdom, of moving some kind of energy that I'm not sure is measured yet to another person which affects them in a healing way.
Mm-hmm.
Because you're a scientist, I wanted to probe you a bit more and help all of us understand what's happening at the granular level.
So I know that life is defined by cells.
And most of us think that when we get sick, it's because one of our cells got sick, right?
A virus got into the cell, replicated, and burst out.
Or the cell got crushed by a carcinogen or became a cancer itself.
But what is it about the energy that would flow into our body that would influence the cell?
What do you think it's actually doing there?
The subcellular parts are so small, they work in such quick modes that if you want to bring the word quantum in, there's probably a quantum field.
There's an interaction with energy at a mitochondrial level, at the power pack of the cell, at the action level of the cell, where endoplasmic reticulum makes the enzymes and the structural proteins, at the information level of the cell, where DNA is coding at the information level of the cell, where DNA is coding for what's needed next, and at the communication level of the cell, that amazing cell membrane, which receives information from hormones, from proteins, from glycoproteins,
from proteins, from There's nanotubes that are ultra-small that touch each other.
So one cell communicates to another in some amazing ways.
So these very small parts are very sensitive to...
Energy to frequency to magnetic fields probably and to who knows what in the level of consciousness that may touch those cells.
It would seem to me that in the 20-some years since you switched careers, we've made such huge progress in our understanding of what's happening within a cell.
You beautifully articulated these, little microtubules that cells talk to each other, the magic of the membrane, the ability of the endoplasmic reticulum to make substances that the cell uses.
We understand these so much better than when I was in medical school that we would have also by now tested the role of very subtle amounts of energy.
If the sun shines in a cell, except for drying it out, doesn't the ultraviolet radiation change the ability of the membrane to talk to another membrane?
Who's doing that kind of research?
There's not as much research going on along those lines as one would think.
The research is still at how does that basic cell operate.
You know, recently scissor RNA was discovered so that when the nucleus is telling the endoplasmic reticulum what to make and it's made enough, there's a feedback loop inside of the cell and a whole separate molecule that comes up called scissor RNA clips it off and says, there's a feedback loop inside of the cell and a whole separate molecule Now, that's fairly new stuff.
The complexity of the interactions, the feedback loops inside of cells and between cells is still a huge area of research.
And do you think that in the next decade, for example, we'll have a pretty good amount of data around the fact that willing yourself to be well might play a role energetically?
I hope so.
I truly hope so.
NIH is now funding some of those studies.
But it's another one of those places where the funding stream also designates how much we know about whatever is going on.
As a scientist, you have insights into what's mechanistically going on, but as a healer, you're not confined by that knowledge.
How do you reconcile the two?
Do you ever get frustrated by the reticence of either side to talk about what's happening in the middle?
I do.
And there are days when I feel like I'm walking a line stretched out in front of me, and my right foot is in the material world and the world of science, and my left foot's in the world of spirit.
And so I try and walk close to the middle line to dance between those two.
Because I've had experience in the spiritual arena of this.
Mm-hmm.
In the mode of thought of working to promote energy, healing, that I can't explain as a scientist, but I know it works because I've seen it.
I've heard the feedback, and it lasts.
So I would love to have a full, clear explanation, and I don't, but I know both work, and both are important to human life.
So if someone were to ask you to describe the bridge between a cell and the soul, how would you describe it?
The bridge is an energy bridge, and it is a bridge that contains mystery, and it's a bridge that's very effective.
It's positive.
It enables life.
It brings vitality.
It supports life.
Repair and renewal.
So my descriptions are active descriptions of how it works.
They're not descriptions of the mechanism of one molecule to another.
And there's a whole area, once again in there, of mystery.
You have this term soul signature.
Yes.
That you've coined.
What does that mean?
What I found when I worked with people is that some people have a certain kind of energy or vibrational energy that's different from others.
You can almost tell people like a fingerprint.
There's a uniqueness about it among people, and each person's a little bit different.
For example, are there differences that are tenfold differences, or are they so subtle that you really can't differentiate it with a scientific tool, you just have to sense it?
I'd say they're more subtle.
They're much more in the subtle arena.
There's a lot where that came from, but first, a quick break.
So then a question that I've always wanted to ask someone who is an expert.
As a heart transplant surgeon, I take out hearts from people who are injured in traumatic events frequently, put them into others who are just clinging to life, just trying to crawl their way back up out of the abyss of death.
And sometimes you see these personality shifts.
And colleagues of mine, Paul Pearsall being one in particular, have written about the concept of cellular memory.
The idea that we don't just have memory up here, we have memory at the level of the individual cell in our body.
Do you think that's possible?
I think it is possible.
And I think that people have described it.
People who have had heart transplants, obviously there's a whole literature, and I'm sure you've heard many of those stories of people that suddenly have an experience of some other consciousness or reality than what there was in them before they had this new heart.
I've also worked with people for whom there's trauma, and we're trying to help release trauma, which is really seated somewhere at a very physical level, not just a blocked amygdala, but somewhere in the body.
Let me tell you one story of this.
There was a gentleman who came to me some years ago who had broken his ankle in a soccer game.
And he had bone spurs.
His physician had done everything he could for him, and he still was somewhat immobile and in pain.
As I started to work on him, he was lying on my table, and his sock and shoe was off, and I just began to move my hand above his leg.
And when I got to the place where the brake was, all of a sudden, that flesh turned ghostly, white-gray, and running with sweat.
None of the rest of him was.
It was clearly a trauma response from that original accident that had never left.
So part of my work with him was to clear that somatic memory.
And the bone spurs resolved themselves.
They went away.
He was able to go back to soccer.
It was amazing.
I'm struck by this in part because you have such a deep grounding in the way that cells work.
And I personally struggle a lot with how energy works.
And you're sort of pulling me a little bit that way.
I get it.
But the example of cellular memory is a wonderful one.
I bet you that at the level of the cell...
Memory is much more subtle than, hey, I used to like hamburger, now I like french fries.
And that's how people tend to interpret cellular memory, that you just take the personality of the donor.
I would suspect that cells talk to each other at a much more subtle level.
than one would appreciate just at this level, when you and I talking here.
Let's talk about the role of God.
You mentioned that when you were hit by the pain glass, that this is from a church ceiling? - No, it was actually in my house.
I was cleaning house, which at that point in time, being a very busy scientist, was a rather rare occasion.
And this thing was decorative and in a frame.
I was kidding you, actually.
You mentioned that, but I was thinking that it was a stained glass window falling out.
Yeah, right.
Peter falling out, you know, one of the disciples falling in your head.
Wouldn't that be nice?
That's right.
Yes.
But you mentioned that it actually changed you from being an atheist.
Do you think that prayer, if it works, and I want to give everyone out there the benefit because it's hard to prove that it works.
There's tons of anecdotal information.
It's just the kinds of double-blind, randomized trials that convinces everybody is still not there.
But if prayer works, do you think this is how it works?
I think prayer taps something in people which allows healing energy that's universal.
If you call it from God, from the universe, people have lots of different names for it.
But yes, I do think it works.
And the anecdotal studies are pretty powerful.
And there are people who don't have a particular religious bent who also receive healing.
Out of something, whether you call it meditation or prayer or centering or being quiet or going into the solitude, into the emptiness, It works.
So my wife, Lisa, went off and got her Reiki training.
Sure.
And now she comes home every once in a while when I don't feel well or she uses it on the kids a lot and does Reiki on them.
And actually, I feel the heat that she generates when she does this.
And since she's not here to ask these questions, I'm going to pose them to you.
If you had to explain to a skeptical individual...
Why Reiki might be possible.
How would you go about painting that picture?
The answer for that has got to come from the experience of people.
Because there's nothing really measured yet.
Now, a Japanese film crew came to Seattle and filmed me working.
And they brought a thermographer who had a fancy thermography camera, and they filmed my hands, which get red hot when I'm working.
It blew this thing off the scale.
And so I can't just sit here and think about making my hands hot, but they do that when my compassion's engaged and when I'm actually working with someone.
In fact, my whole body gets hot.
So Lisa's does too.
What is that energy that flows through us all over?
All of us who experience it describe it as a sacred energy, a place where compassion and skill come together.
But the precise kind of energy and exactly how it interacts with the cells for healing is still in the realm of mystery.
It's unsolved.
You've traveled all over the world.
You've seen Reiki masters, you've seen shamans, you've seen healers from ancient traditions and modern communities.
What are some of the interesting ties that pull them all together?
Are there any uniform elements that you see?
Yes, there are some bottom-line similarities.
There is always a great appreciation and devotion for however they connect spiritually, and it could be by many different names.
There is a great sense of being able to reach the other person, to touch them in a way that is healing and compassionate.
So underlying this are those qualities that Of someone who's empathic, who can even take on someone else's illness, and that sense of compassion, but a skill and wisdom about how to work with energy, not just dumping it all over them.
As a scientist, I'm sure as you watch these different individuals work through their different traditions, you must think to yourself, I could do an experiment and test that.
Why do you think it doesn't happen?
Why don't we actually do some of the tests?
Is it because it's too subtle for us to be able to tell if it's really happening?
Is it because it's too difficult to get our west thinking brains to comprehend that other approaches might be effective?
There are some studies.
They are small.
One of the challenges in working with a scientific study in a shamanic community or out in the boonies in a place like Valley is that the healers are not used to it, and it shuts them down.
It does.
It does.
And so that kind of harsh looking at it, setting up a double-blind study is very foreign to them, and they don't operate well under it.
That's very interesting you mention that because we did a series of studies looking at Kirlian photography, which is this old technique which was developed in the late 1930s by a husband and wife team in Russia.
Actually, it was information that was not released to the West, but they developed using photographic plates ways of measuring the body's energy.
And so in the midst of these studies, I would measure our healers.
We did a randomized trial, compared healers to non-healers.
Most of the healers we worked with Had difficulty reproducing what they do every day.
It wouldn't be influenced by how the trip to the hospital was that day.
Was there too much noise outside?
What was the attitude of the people doing the studies?
It became interesting to me to see how subtle changes in the environment influenced these healers.
Now, part of the appropriate criticism some might make is, listen, if I take a knife And cut out a boil on your back.
That will almost always work.
It doesn't matter if there's a lot of traffic outside, what the humidity is, whether you believe it's going to work or not.
And I think for many of the therapies that are used with some success in other parts of the world, acupuncture is a good example of that.
Once a very wise traditional Chinese medicine physician said, acupuncture works, but it won't work in America.
And I said, well, why not?
He said, because some Americans will understand its potential, but if the mind doesn't want it to work, then it can't work.
And if your gut instinct is, I can't see this needle in my arm affecting my eyesight or my pain in my back, then you're going to block it.
You'll stop it from happening.
Do you think there is a way of studying some of these healers without stymieing them at the same time?
I think there must be.
And part of it would be having someone who can make them comfortable and explain what all the equipment is.
You know, I went to Japan and was tested in a research lab with my 128 sensors recording brainwave patterns while I was doing healing work.
I've done this long enough and I'm not...
Did it hurt?
No.
It didn't.
It was wet.
But I asked for someone who was really ill because I knew I couldn't just wave my hands around and pretend.
And so the brainwave testing showed beta and delta in a waking state.
Explain what that means.
Well, beta waves are the alert, clear mind.
And delta usually only show up in deep sleep.
Mm-hmm.
But I run those really strongly during the healing work.
They peak all over my head.
And so here's one of the routes of looking at how cells respond and activate in a person who's doing healing work.
It would be a wonderful route of research in the future.
I'd also like to make another comment, if I may, about people believing this is going to work or not.
Most of the time, clients who come to me are very happy to be there, and they have a great attitude, and they're really receptive to the work.
But I had a woman once who had a severe bleeding colitis.
She was due for surgery.
Nothing had helped it.
Her psychotherapist sent her to me.
She was uncomfortable with it.
She was not happy with it.
She stretched out on my tables.
I started to just work above her with my hands, and she was like a board.
I thought, you know, I've wasted her time.
I haven't helped her.
She called me later that night.
The bleeding had stopped.
It never returned.
It took us about three or four months, and all the symptoms of colitis stopped.
So why was she still rigid, do you think, when she was done?
She was still just, her mind was working.
This was not going to work or help her.
But the energy actually touched her, and it was a profound healing.
But she had a bad attitude.
Right.
So, you know, go figure.
You never know.
We just got going, so stay with us after the break.
We're here with Dr. Joyce Hawks, PhD specialist and biophysicist, as well as a cell biologist who's talking about her healing experiences.
You wrote a book called Cell Level Healing, The Bridges from Soul to Cell.
Why?
Why would you write that book?
My clients bugged me for years to write it and something inside of me said, it's time for this work to be available to people so that they can do this themselves.
And that's really the intent of the book, that it guides them to be able to incorporate the link between their physical body and any kind of meditation or prayer or spiritual work for their health.
So, earlier in the book, you talk about clearing blockages.
And I was struck that you said, you know, if you have blockages then.
But how do you know if you have blockages?
Many people know because they repeat patterns that aren't healthy for them, and so they notice that.
Or they have an emotional response they wish they didn't have.
Other times, that's one of the ways in which healers work, is they can feel blockages, often with their hands.
Like, energy's stopped here.
What's going on there?
Sometimes where there's pain in the body, there's actually blockage.
And acupuncturists talk a lot about that.
Once you get a flow of energy through the body, it's usually much healthier.
People feel better.
To use that as a jumping point to talk about post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now, you mentioned the word amygdala.
It's A-M-Y-G-D-A-L-A, right?
That's the way I spell it.
Good.
For those of you at home, next to the Scrabble word, I mean, they're coming to get the Y out of the way, the G, couple A's.
So, the amygdala is this sort of relay station, in some ways, in the middle of the brain that allows the emotional center of the brain to talk to the thought center, the supertentorial brain, the brain that has all the executive function.
And In post-traumatic stress disorder, that tends to get blocked, according to your writings.
And it makes sense to me.
That's what seems to happen.
And so because it's blocked, the emotional center can't talk to anybody.
No one can turn it on or off, regulate it, advise it, so it just begins to cause action.
Right.
So how is it that the healing processes that you've been using influences that pathway?
And I ask this question because it's so common in war-torn areas.
It's very common for our GIs coming back from Iraq.
It's common to post-Katrina survivors.
And there are many people who have an element of post-traumatic stress disorder.
And other people have found ways psychologically to help with it, like rapid eye movement.
There are other kinds of therapies.
I know what it is, but how does it work, the therapy?
Nobody knows how it works, but they know that people no longer are reacting just out of the emotion.
They're able to process whatever the trauma was, and so they're beginning to release from that knee-jerk emotional response.
Explain to me, what is this therapy?
How do you induce rapid eye movement?
You usually only get that when you're asleep.
Oh, there's a certain therapy that psychologists use, I'm not an expert in it, where they move their fingers back and forth and have people track with them.
And there's something about that that starts to allow the amygdala to link up again.
Now, the energy work that I've done and other healers have done with people seem to allow it, and it's more from the results...
And then it is from knowing exactly what the function is.
And so one sees that emotional response, softening, lessening, and being able to process what's going on so that a loud sound is no longer...
It induces hitting the ground as if there was a mortar next to you.
Got it.
You talk also in the book a lot about the flow state.
And I sort of sense it actually when I'm in the operating room.
When the world goes away.
I don't know what time it is.
By the way, the reason that I bring this up is because...
For many people, they don't have any flow state experience in their day-to-day life.
So it prevents them from reaching that nirvanic condition that I think sort of recharges your energy, your chi.
So what is going on at the level of the cell when you're in that flow state?
I think cells are alive and vital and they're all working together in that state.
And so the best of what the body can provide is now working when there's flow through the body.
Obviously, we experience our emotions in a certain way.
We experience very clear cognitive function and we're totally present.
You know, I suspect in the ER when you're working, there's nothing else going on in your head.
Completely present.
That's one of the modes of getting to that state of flow.
When you can't get into that flow state, it destroys all the harmony within your body.
Yeah.
The actual vibrations in our cells, can you bring those alive for me?
I mean, how does the flow that's going through you vibrationally change?
And can you do that by listening to music or other mechanical ways of doing it?
Some people do it by listening to music, but meditation is one of the ways of getting there, of whatever it takes to get to total quiet where your mind is not just chattering at you.
And then there is an experience of energy flowing through the body and through the cells from one cell to another.
I can imagine that the nanotubes are working away saying, you know, hey, this is going on over here, what's going on over there?
So the whole body is resonating with that flow.
Have we ever yet been able to look at those nanotubes and see cells talk differently to each other?
Yeah, published in the Journal of Science.
What did it show?
It shows that one nanotube touches another cell and it sends a tiny packet of some biochemistry.
So there's two kinds of information, tactile information and biochemical information that goes from cell to cell.
That's perfect.
Dr. Joyce Hawks, thank you very much.
Your book, Cell Level Healing and the Bridge from Soul to Cell.
It's a hardcore scientist breaking the ice on energy healing.
Thank you.
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