Interviews & Articles

Living in Findhorn from '89 to '93 I took 2 massage courses. Just for the fun of it. No serious intent.

In '93 I moved to Samye-ling in Eskdalemuir and in the farmhouse was a treatment room full of mud and dung. Facilities have much improved since then. There I gave massages for free and by donation. Just for fun no serious intent.

Response was so positive, that I decided to rent a cottage in the area, print business cards and buy a treatment couch. Finances permitted me to live for 1 year with little income. After 10 months my thought was "Oops, it ain't gonna work". An interveiw with the Annandale Observer changed all that. Fun remained. Intention started to shift.

During the same time a bald-headed man asked if he could join me in Carlisle on a terrace in the sun for a cup of coffee. We clicked and Dan Russell invited me to set up a clinic in his Atlas Works, then a huge filthy mess, now a thriving complementary health centre in Carlisle. Fun remained. Intention got serious.

Whilst only performing massage, strange phenomena occurred spontaneously and client's health and well-being improved way beyond what could be expected. Reputation grew and people drove up to 100 miles for a session.

In Lockerbie library I found Barbara Brennan's book "Hands of Light", explaining these strange phenomena. A fortnight after finishing the book I attended in Denver an introductory weekend to her school and found my calling, my niche. Calculating the immense financial cost of the four year study, I was forced to put it on hold. With serious intent and most of the time a lot of fun I gave between 20 and 25 massages a week and saved. Interviews with for example News and Star and BBC Radio Cumbria secured an ever full diary and waiting list.

In 2001 I graduated and moved back to Findhorn and in 2007 as teacher of Brennan Healing Science followed after 30 USA and 6 Germany trips. Fun remains. My intention to do the work is focussed and strong. Clients now travel from all over Western Europe for treatments and teachings.

This is my journey over the last 18 years resulting in running a healing and retreat centre in a beautiful tranquil location, in living a life fully dedicated to supporting clients in empowering themselves, in organising workshops including TECHS, a 7 week diploma course in healing techniques and cellular awareness.

It's a good life, a fun life, a full life and I thought you might find it interesting and inspiring to read.

Blessings

Tjitze

CANCER: CURSE OR BLESSING?

Most people who are being diagnosed with a serious disease, be it cancer or another illness, will initially be shocked to receive such news. Once they have taken in the diagnosis though, the chance of recovery can be largely influenced by the way an individual perceives the illness with regard to their life. There might even have been an expectation of being confronted with a serious disease in their lifetime in the first place.

Do people’s general attitudes and expectations veer towards seeing cancer as an adventurous journey of self-discovery? Or does the mind veer towards a doom and gloom scenario?

The answers to these questions are of vital importance. “Energetic Cellular Healing and Cancer – Treating the Emotional Imbalances at the Root of Disease” discusses questions like the ones above in great detail.

Fifteen years of experience in energetic healing and cancer have brought me a wealth of insights in the why, what and how of the onset of cancer and its possible cure. The mind plays a crucial role as do emotions.

In this article I aim to present you with a brief summary. As a Dutch qualified Social Worker I left society’s system behind in 1993 and started my own massage clinic. After reading Barbara Brennan’s book “Hands of Light”, I studied with her for six years and found my calling. Massage turned into energetic healing.

What does it entail, energetic healing? Everything in and around us is energy, is in constant motion and vibrates. Even the seemingly solid oak table top on which my laptop rests is energy, is in motion and vibrates. All matter is energy. All life is energy. For life to continue its biological cycle of death and resurrection to guarantee the survival of the various species, this vibrational motion is essential. Life ceases to exist without vibration and death follows. The same counts for people. The species Homo Sapiens is unable to sustain itself without vibrational energy. We are aware of our physical anatomy. We are less or not at all aware of our energetic anatomy. It exists nevertheless and consists of an aura or energy field in and around our physique and of chakras joined together through the so-called Vertical Power Current. A chakra (Sanskrit word, meaning “Wheel of Light”) is a vortex of energy absorbing vital life force from the universal energy fields all around us. When a chakra rotates less or not at all, less or no vital life force is being absorbed and physical life reduces in vitality, compromising our immune system. Try not to underestimate the importance of the previous sentence. People like Barbara Brennan, Bruce Lipton and Gregg Braden, to name but a few pioneers, have gradually been able to prove scientifically how subtle vibrations affect our energetic bodies and how the relatively recently discovered DNA strands are directly influenced by our mood, our emotions, our energetic vibrations. Therein lies the key, together with decades of observing clients, to the statement in the introduction of my publication: “The causes of cancer are 90% psychosomatic. Or should that be 95%? 98%? 100%?” Positive moods and pleasant emotions enhance our immune system by opening our energetic bodies to absorb the higher vibrational frequencies of joy, pleasure, love, kindness etc. Negative moods and unpleasant emotions reduce the immune system by (partly) closing our energetic bodies to the lower vibrational frequencies of fear, anger, grief, guilt, etc. Chakras begin to vibrate less or become still and the aura becomes denser, cloudier and creates energetic blocks. If such discrepancies last for a short period only, no lasting damage occurs. If energetic imbalances remain in place for any length of time, gradually a certain section of the physical body is being depleted of life enhancing vitality. This is the root cause of a psychosomatic symptom. It can equally turn into the root cause of cancer. “Energetic Cellular Healing and Cancer” relates 13 real life stories from actual clients along with in-depth descriptions and explanations of the various energetic blocks the person has embodied as a result of emotional and mental imbalances. A description of the process during sessions portrays the often delicately intimate cooperation between client and energetic healer.

Cellular Healing

A vital energy force flowing through all organic life that can be manipulated for healing the body and mind. Any of this sound familiar? Energy medicine, while considered in the West to be an alternative therapy not subject to rigorous evidence-based examination, clearly has a lot in common with traditional Chinese medicine. The supposed non-physical energy at the heart of it bears a strong resemblance to qi, and treatments are often similar to reiki and qigong healing.
Therapies that purport to treat this kind of theoretical energy field suffer from a credibility problem in Western medical circles. Regardless of how many practitioners claim the therapies work, and how many patients say they have benefited from them, the absence of solid scientific evidence remains a major stumbling block for many people.

One such practitioner, Tjitze de Jong, who refers to himself as an energetic cellular healer (you'll also hear names including biofield energy healer, spiritual healer and contact healer), visited Hong Kong recently to conduct private healing sessions and courses. His trip here was the first time he'd taken his practice away from the Findhorn eco-spiritual community in northern Scotland, where he attracts patients from around the world to a clinic that has been fully booked for the past 16 years. After starting his professional life as a crisis social worker in his native Netherlands, 20 years ago, de Jong, on the advice of a friend, went to Findhorn to take a short course in massage - and never left. That was partly because he felt at home there, and partly because he discovered he had a talent for massage.

Within a year, he was fully booked as a massage therapist, attracting clients from more than 150 kilometres away to a small community 25 kilometres from the nearest town, served by just three buses a week. Then things got stranger. "During the massages, I started to see black strings from people's mouths, throats and bodies," he says. "I thought I was going crazy." Fortunately, looking through a local library, he found the spiritual healing classic Hands of Light, by American author and healer Barbara Brennan, which exactly described some of the phenomena he had seen. Within two weeks he was in Florida on a course at Brennan's School of Healing. When he opened his own clinic, the waiting list was soon up to a year. He returned to Brennan's school 30 times, graduating as a healer in 2001, and, in 2007, as a teacher of healing science, after which he opened his own Energetic Cellular Healing School. He claims some startling results among his patients. Energy here is defined as a life force, something that differentiates living from non-living objects, often conceptualised as a field, and it's completely different from the physical type of energy. That there is absolutely no scientific evidence for this type of energy's existence is something de Jong cheerfully admits, although other people's scepticism seems to frustrate him. Edzard Ernst, for example, the world's first professor of complementary and alternative medicine, at the University of Exeter, England, and a leading proponent of an evidence-based approach to alternative therapies, says that "healing continues to be promoted despite the absence of biological plausibility or convincing clinical evidence that these methods work therapeutically and plenty to demonstrate that they do not". In his book, Trick or Treatment, co-written with science writer Simon Singh, he adds: "At best it may offer comfort; at worst it can result in charlatans taking money from patients with serious conditions who require urgent conventional medicine." Perhaps part of the problem is the tendency of proponents and practitioners of energy medicine to use language almost calculated to infuriate fans of science.

When treating a patient, de Jong says, as well as getting information verbally about their condition, he also closely observes "how their chakras and aura function", and then, via his touch, "the energy from around us energises and balances their field. It can be locally clearing and restructuring a chakra, aura or organ, or it can be spiritual surgery where a spirit guide works through me." He also claims to talk with sprites in the forest near his home. The energy field he manipulates, he adds, can be manipulated by anyone. "I never promise I can heal you. I don't heal. I'm the simple son of a Dutch pig farmer and I've got no specific skills. Anyone can do it. I learned it." Susan Jamieson, a qualified medical doctor who describes herself as an integrative specialist, using traditional Chinese and Indian medicine along with Western alternative practices as complementary treatments, was responsible for bringing de Jong to Hong Kong. While theoretically anyone can heal, she says, "anyone can play the piano - it's not complex - but some will be better at it than others." She sees her belief in de Jong's powers as empirical, because it's based on what appears to help people - for whatever reason.

"As doctors, we have to be open to what benefits the patient and not bring our own prejudices to it," she says. "I'm a scientist and I don't want to endorse anything flaky. We can't say that Chinese medicine or acupuncture is rubbish - people do it, it works and it's ancient. We're recognising the qi force that the Chinese have recognised for centuries and trying to bring it within the framework of science. I think science is behind. We'll probably find out in 10 or 20 years how it works, but for the moment I don't need to know. It doesn't do any harm and it seems to help people." As ever with alternative therapies, however, perhaps the main harm it can do is to your bank balance. "Everything we do can be explained, but it goes into realms that can't be tested scientifically," adds de Jong. "Most people are not open to it - they're scared of it, because it's untouchable, unscientific. All you have to do is open up and become an instrument of it. It's been around for thousands of years." And still we're waiting for proof that it works.