REMARKABLE PEOPLE, dr. norm shealy

from 1995 Thresholds Quarterly

It All Comes Back to His Favorite Word...ATTITUDE

C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D. is the founder of the American Holistic Medicine Association and a world-renowned neurosurgeon. Previously the founder and director of the Pain and Health Rehabilitation Center in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, Dr. Shealy is now the director of the Shealy Institute in Springfield, Missouri which he founded in 1982.
In the last issue of Thresholds, Dr. Shealy shared with you his views on healing and his experiences with remembering a past life as an internist who used mesmerism for patients undergoing surgery. In this issue, we continue our conversation with this remarkable man who has cultivated the capacity for “tuning in” to the wisdom of the universe. He is passionate about sharing his miraculous discoveries with the world, to improve the quality of life for all.
Although he no longer sees private patients, Dr. Shealy is extremely active with research, intensive healing sessions at the Institute, education, writing, and public speaking. He frequently presents seminars on healing and energetics with his partner Caroline Myss who is a “medical intuitive” and teaches courses on developing intuition. He has authored over ten books including the Self Healing Workbook and Miracles Do Happen and is currently writing a book with Dr. Myss called Sacred Contracts.


Thresholds: I read somewhere that you knew at age four that you wanted to be a doctor.

Shealy: That’s right.

Thresholds: How did you know that and how did you get from there to where you are here?

Shealy: Well, I can’t answer how I knew that. I have a number of early life memories and one of them is knowing at age four that I wanted to be a physician. Another one is about that same age, somewhere between four and five, I was in my grandmother’s kitchen. I was up on a lard can and was watching my uncle outside making a snowman in one of the rare snowfalls in South Carolina. And I was unhappy because my mother wouldn’t let me go out and play in the snow. Grandma came in and she was all excited that I might fall or cut myself on the edge of the can. I said, “Grandma, don’t worry! If you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die.” To which she replied, “Well, that may be true, son, but you can certainly shorten your days.” And let’s put it this way, I did not know or even think about reincarnation until I was forty. I always had a belief in life after death; it never had occurred to me there was any possibility of anything other than that. I was raised in a very liberal Southern Methodist church, that was my background.
In February, 1973, I was at a lecture in Snowmass, Aspen. And I was to be the next speaker, and as I was sorting my slides I was listening to the lecturer try to convince the audience that acupuncture was hypnosis. And I was sitting there saying, “That’s bull! That’s ridiculous!” And all of a sudden he said, “and in the last century there was a physician who demonstrated that you could operate upon mesmerized patients. His name was John Elliotson.” And as he said that, I felt as if an iceberg went down my spine and I sort of sat up and I said, “My God, I’m John Elliotson.” And I knew that I was John Elliotson. Now I never had a need to or a belief in reincarnation before that.
I couldn’t find anything in this country about John. So I went to England in June. I was going over there for something else anyway. But specifically, I wanted to find out about John as my major interest in going to this meeting. And so I got in a cab and said “take me to the Royal College of Surgeons” because all I knew was that he had demonstrated you could operate on mesmerized patients. And we were going down a street and he turns to the right to go to the Royal College of Surgeons and I am literally picked up, physically, and turned 180 degrees the other way to look down the street, and that’s were John practiced. When I walked in the building, I just knew it. I knew this building. And the fascinating thing about it is, I designed this building [the Shealy Institute] in a flash. And I had been in this building maybe three or four years when I suddenly remembered, I was thinking about that episode, it was a round brick building and so when I got the design for this building it’s a series of six round, circular buildings. At any rate, I’m convinced that I was John Elliotson in my last life.
Now as far as I could tell at this point, having had several spontaneous recalls of past lives and quite a few guided past life sessions, I have been a physician many times. Obviously, not always. I’ve been a priest three times, Catholic priest at that. I have probably been a Jewish -- not a rabbi -- but some kind of Jewish leader many many years ago. Maybe four thousand years ago. Now to me that’s real. That is as real as sitting here in this room is real. And it has no great meaning other than, I’m very comfortable with that. So, I believe this long-winded answer to your question is that I came in this life to be a physician. And I just happened to know that at age four.

Thresholds: And I know that you had been a neuro-surgeon, I guess you still are, but just not practicing as such.

Shealy: Right. I am very happy that I am a neurosurgeon, have been a neurosurgeon, because it gives me an ability to understand the nervous system that I don’t think a neurologist, psychiatrist, or any other branch of medicine can understand as well. I went into neurosurgery because I was interested in the mind. And I was interested in the mind because I had read Magnificent Obsession, which was a novelized account of Loyal Davis’s life. Loyal Davis was a neurosurgeon in Chicago and of course, in a glorified novel-type thing, it made neurosurgery a lot of what it is not. Neurosurgeons are not interested in the mind, until they mature. Often, neurosurgeons in their sixties and seventies get interested in the mind. Wilder Penfield, for instance, got very much into that after he had retired from neurosurgery.
Well, I was interested in that when I went into neurosurgery. And I realized after I got extremely busy in neurosurgery, which I loved, surgery is fun! It’s the only thing I have ever done that I can say I am technically good at. I mean, with my hands. I’m not a carpenter, I don’t have that kind of dexterity for other things. In the operating room, I was totally at peace with myself. But, I was more interested in what makes people tick. And why people got into all of these neurologically-related problems, like chronic pain especially, and didn’t get well.
So, primarily as a result of introducing a technique called Dorsal Column Stimulation, I got thrown into a very peculiar practice in neurosurgery. I was seeing about three hundred people a year who were total failures of the system with chronic pain. Mostly people who had had, well, an average of five or six unsuccessful back operations. And I suddenly was having all these people referred to me for this procedure. And I found that conservatively 94% of them were not candidates for this because I felt that their problem was primarily psychological and not physical. So I decided in 1971 to restrict my practice. I thought I was restricting it to the management of pain. But what I learned was that I was restricting it to the management of chronic stress. Because very quickly, I began to recognize that my average patients had five major medical illnesses, not just pain. They had forty-nine symptoms, you know, they had a lot of distress. And as we got better at teaching people how to bring their pain under control, we began to see their blood pressure becoming under control and some of their other stress illnesses getting better. So in 1974, I decided I needed to learn more than I had learned in medical school about psychology. I hated psychiatry with a passion. I thought it was the sickest thing I’d ever seen in my life. So I decided to get a Ph.D. in psychology. For my own benefit, mainly. I just wanted it, and this has been a very satisfactory combination from my point of view.

Thresholds: And is that, I’ve heard the word “biogenics” but I don’t know what it is.

Shealy: Well, what happened is, let’s see, in 1972, I first learned about biofeedback and autogenic training, a technique that was introduced early in this century. A book [was] written on it in 1932 by J. H. Schultz, a German psychiatrist who was not at all like a Freudian psychiatrist. It’s Freudian nonsense that I guess I rejected so much in medical school. I consider Freud the great fraud. But Schultz introduced this excellent technique which really is a very ritualized form of self hypnosis. And I learned about that at the same time I learned about biofeedback for management of migraine. And this was before it was out into the medical public at all. So I called Elmer Green and I said, “Dr. Green, has anyone ever used biofeedback to treat back pain?” because at that time 90% of my patients were failures of back surgery. He said “No, why don’t you try it?” I said, “What do I do?” He said, “Well, get yourself some equipment and try it.”
So we bought an EEG and an EMG and a temperature biofeedback machine and I had the nurses start doing it. The instructions were pretty poor. And what happened was, I had a man sixty years of age who had been paralyzed for seven years from the nipples down who couldn’t sit up because of pain. His pain became agonizing within fifteen minutes of his sitting up. The nurses said, “What kind of feedback do you want to do with Leonard?” I said, “Just do EEG.” Two days later I walked in and he said “Doc, I don’t have any pain.” And I had never seen anybody with paraplegic pain get rid of it, never. I mean, twice, I operated and actually cut out a hunk of the spinal cord in people who were totally paralyzed for years in an attempt to control their pain and it was back in six months. So I said, “Leonard, how did you do it?” And he couldn’t tell me. He finally said, “Well, it’s as if I throw a switch in my brain. I can be on the machine fifteen minutes and I’m free of pain for four hours.” How did you do it? Well, he couldn’t tell me.
So, I read three hundred and fifty books in the field of hypnosis and autogenic training and self regulation, and I tried to find out how you throw the switch. And by early 1974, I wrote, I tried to integrate this whole concept, and I had pretty well written my Ph.D dissertation before I started to get my Ph.D. because it was a workbook for how to use biofeedback. I called it initially, autogenics. I just added an ‘s’ to autogenic, because I was doing a lot more than just autogenic therapy. Well, the expert, theoretically, in the world at that time was Wolfgang Luthe up in Canada. I sent it to him. I didn’t know him, and I said this is what I’m doing. And he was furious that I would conceive this! He was sort of the disciple of Schultz, who carried on the work after Schultz. He was furious that I would even say that I did autogenic training without having been certified by him. Very Germanic. I don’t think he ever practiced autogenic training or he couldn’t have been so rigid. So, rather than fight with him over the use of the word, (which obviously I could’ve used, it’s not a trademark name) I said, well, we are really doing biofeedback with autogenic training so I called it biogenics and got it federally trademarked so I wouldn’t be fighting with anybody over the word. But it’s what I would call the software for using biofeedback.

Thresholds: And is that something you teach people to learn how to do here?

Shealy: Yes. We do teach that; not everybody learns it. Those people who will do it, do fantastically well. Eighty percent of people who really get into it get excellent control of pain. I think that there are a number of people who just won’t do it. They say, that’s bull. Well, obviously nothing works if you don’t use it.

Thresholds: Right. That kind of leads me to my next question. One thing I have seen, not so much with people who have had an accident, but with someone who has been sick over a long period of time... It’s as if there is something inside of them that kind of goes dead. And in order to really heal, something has to happen inside of them that moves them or wakes them up.

Shealy: Well, I think that’s true. It’s a very difficult question to know what is the exact, unequivocal cause of an illness. There are always, I believe, psychological, psycho-social, emotional problems as part of any illness. Either significantly preceding it, very common, or certainly after you have been ill for awhile.
For example, I’ll just give you some personal stuff that I realize significantly at this juncture. I suffered ... suffered? I developed, I never seen that. The surgeon who operated on me was the one who did the fusion in ‘60. I went back to him, he’s never seen that in four thousand patients. And so it was an odd type of spasticity. The tightness in my hamstrings and low back was gone after the surgery. So I know that for at least sixteen years, I had some kind of slow, progressive spinal cord compression.
Now I’m going to come to the point of what this is all about. I have always been considered a very strong willed person. One of the earliest psychics that I ever met said, “You have such a strong will that some people think your parents were robots.” I prided myself on my strong will. And so here I’ve had major difficulties in the fifth chakra, the will chakra. I could go on another hour about all I’ve learned out of this but basically, I don’t have any doubt that I was stubborn enough that it took three big-time illnesses for me to get the message that the will shouldn’t be dominant. So I hope I’ve learned the lesson, I don’t need any more trouble in that area. And I think in all of us there are always these other meanings, I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. Now I don’t feel as if I had a bad, unfinished business. I don’t have any anger, guilt over my past life. I have no people that I hate, I haven’t been abused, I was treated as well, better, than most people, as well as any child could be. My mother adored me. I don’t have a lot of psychological problems that I’m aware of. I don’t think I do. But I had a will that was out of balance. And maybe it can be that simple, that’s fairly simplistic in a sense. And yet, I believe that I was so stubborn and so unwilling to pay attention to the basic need to integrate the heart and the will and the mind and not have any one of them truly dominate that I didn’t pay attention. And I think even when one doesn’t have serious psychological things you can have an imbalance of that kind that can lead to accidents and/or illnesses.

Thresholds: So do you think that it takes a wake-up call like that?

Shealy: Well, if you’re stubborn it takes a wake-up call like that and I suspect in most people it takes a wake-up call. You know, in general, people don’t buy consciousness until they are threatened with loss. John Travis tried to set up a wellness program in Mill Valley, California, the wealthiest county in the country twenty years ago. He failed, he went bankrupt because people were not willing to pay for wellness until they lost it. There’s never been a truly successful wellness preventive program in this country because nobody is willing to pay for it until they lose it. So yeah, I think it takes a wake-up call and only you can know what needs to be awakened. Nobody else can know that for you. I don’t care how good they are as intuitives, all of them miss.

Thresholds: You just said, and I also read in your book Miracles Do Happen, that for most people there’s some kind of unfinished business emotionally, like guilt or anger...

Shealy: Oh, yeah!

Thresholds: It interested me when you wrote that one of the benefits of music is that it brings that unfinished emotional stuff up. Once it’s brought up, how do you help people to resolve it?

Shealy: Well, that’s an interesting question because I don’t think at this point, now again, I’m being an extremist here and I realize that. I honestly believe that very few people get well with counseling or psychotherapy unless they get the personal insight that is necessary. In other words, if I tell them what is wrong and what they need to do, or the best clairvoyant, intuitive in the world, tells them that, my observation from years of working with this is that they don’t pay much attention. They just ignore it. I mean it’s like, I can tell a patient they need to quit smoking, they know that. It doesn’t do any good for me to tell them, I mean I can sometimes try to brow beat them but unless they come to the conclusion it doesn’t do any good.
So several years ago we began working with, well we’ve worked for twenty-five years with techniques for helping people do their own resolution. And basically what we tell people now is you’ve got to have the insight: “Ah-ha, that’s what I’ve got to do,” and you’ve got to be willing to do it, and you have only three solutions. You never have but three solutions. The question is making the decision to do something about it. You can assert yourself to try to correct the problem -- fight back; you can divorce the intolerable with joy, (divorcing it with anger will get you nowhere); or you can go for sainthood -- accept and forgive. Now again, I can tell you that and you can even logically agree with me but you’ve got to feel it. And it is that integration of the left and the right brain that I think has to happen. So we just teach people these are the principles, you’ve gotta do it. And obviously, if you want help when you reach that decision, it’s worth getting it but you can do it on your own. When you’re ready. So we developed what I call an insight meditation chamber. And there’s a sketch of that in the book. It’s looks as if people who get into that have a strikingly better response to personal insight than anything else we’ve done, including the music, which is very powerful.

Thresholds: Do you use that yourself, the meditation chamber?

Shealy: Yes, I have one at home. I use it, we use it in our classes teaching intuition too. We use a lot of adjuncts in teaching intuition.

Thresholds: How would you define health?

Shealy: (Laughs.) You know, I’ve played with that for twenty-five years or more. I still have to say that I think health is a state of being reasonably free of unpleasant symptoms and feeling good about it and being at peace. Now, that is somewhat vague. I don’t know Christopher Reeve. I have seen him twice on television. I have phenomenal admiration for him. For the way in which, at least publicly, he is handling something which I would have had great difficulty handling. I mean I was in pretty bad shape just thinking of being paralyzed below the arms let alone including the arms. I would say that psychologically, Christopher Reeve is extraordinarily healthy. His body is hardly what anybody could call healthy, at this point. But his attitude, at least what he presents to the public, and that’s the only thing that I can evaluate, is remarkable.
I’ve seen a woman here in town like this who was in an automobile accident and is quadraplegic. And I have the greatest admiration for her because she works every day counseling people at a Social Security office. And I thought, wow, when I see people who’ve got, you know, a big toe that hurts, and they go on the public dole or worse, and here’s this woman who’s actually out there making a difference. I have remarkable respect and admiration for that. Mentally, she is presenting an extremely healthy picture. She has a lot of pain. She has a lot of problems. So I think ultimately it is one’s, we’re back to my favorite word, attitude.•

Thresholds: This is a question I have for you personally. I know that a lot of people -- whether they’re traditional physicians or they come up with some kind of alternative cures -- once they find something that they think is a key, they stick with that and tend to be closed-minded. You seem remarkably openminded.

Shealy: Well, some people would consider that a weakness, not a strength. My staff actually sometimes is driven mad by it. I am utterly convinced that what we do is relatively unimportant. It is the attitude with which we do it. And to some extent, what the patients do is unimportant, it’s the attitude with which they do it. Now that’s a very difficult concept to get across and it’s frightening to a lot of therapists because it means that these external things aren’t important but the attitude with which you do it is critically important. Because it can be the thing that motivates the patient to do what needs to be done. And so I’m always looking at what might motivate and assist, and evaluating it as well as I can.
I think there are just some people who think that way. That is the way I think. I probably have three to six innovative ideas a week. Now maybe if I’m lucky, once a month one of them pans out! I came up with one yesterday which I will evaluate and I’m really excited about it. It may not [work] and if it doesn’t I won’t be distraught over it. It’s just another toy to play with as far as I’m concerned. But a lot of people don’t have that, perhaps they don’t have a mind that wanders as much as mine, I don’t know what the difference is. Some people are more attuned to the cosmic information than others. And I honestly believe that, and I want to put this in a way...I don’t know how to put it. I happen to have a computer, a brain computer receiver, that I think is remarkably open to receiving information from the cosmos. I think everybody has the option of being that receptive.
Now what you do with that information is important. Some people get hung up on it and go crazy. Because not all of it, well, the collective unconscious, if you will, the morphogenic field, is filled with a lot of nonsense. As well as higher dimensional information. And I think a huge number of people get attached to the nonsense, to the negative thought forms of centuries of humanity. And some of them are your really serious criminal beings. And occasionally one is able to sift well enough not to get so much of the negative collective unconscious but just hear a message and do something with it. Am I being too vague?

Thresholds: No, I understand what you are saying.

Shealy: I communicate with my personal angel, I have long involved conversations at times. I receive a lot of intuitive information. I’m not the least bit interested in receiving intuitive information about another human being. Other than safety factors, you know. I don’t want to be in the position of having everybody who enters my presence sap me, wanting “Oh, tell me what’s wrong with me!” I think that’s disgusting. I’ll watch it with Carolyn [Myss], with whom I work. I mean, I see energy around people. I’ve always seen energy around people. And when Carolyn walks in the room, and everybody knows she is a medical diagnostician, there’s this sort of vacuum, sucking her energy. I don’t want that. Fortunately, that’s not my interest anyway. My interest happens to be in creating tools for people to use in being healthy. And so I’m blessed because I have blocked that other bit of information. I don’t want it. I don’t want to come near it. But I’m very open to potential ways of improving the delivery of health care. I think that’s what I’m here for. I’m not here just to be a physician, I’m here in a small way to open the door for people to think about the reality of the universe and what it means in relation to health. That’s really my understanding and my purpose. I really hope I do what I’m supposed to do so I don’t come back next life as a politician. I want to be a botanist in New Zealand.

Thresholds: Sounds a lot more fun.

Shealy: Yeah.

Thresholds: That actually was one of my questions that you just answered.

Shealy: What am I going to do next time?

Thresholds: No, what your idea is of your mission in life.

Shealy: I think that I’m supposed to help people and if possible the medical profession (which is almost as constipated as any other) to be aware that there are many different roads to Rome. To look and observe and test. Ultimately, only the patient can do it. Now, here’s the kind of thing that I will follow up on. This happened just today. My thought of the day. I have a nice, wonderful lady I’ve known for several years. She just walked in the clinic and she’s really only seen me in consultation once. She’s really been a friend, has been a student, and it turns out that even though she looked very healthy she had a very low DHEA [level] a couple of years ago. And I made some suggestions of what she could do to raise it and it didn’t work. So she was concerned about it being really seriously low. She went on to DHEA supplementation but she didn’t want to take DHEA because, even though she’s in her late sixties, that’s a long time to take it. So she decided, based upon her knowledge and what she’s learned, that she was going to take a very tiny dose and tell her body that this is what you want to make. "Clone this" is what she called it. Well, taking ten milligrams of DHEA twice a week, her DHEA [level] came from fifty-eight to five hundred and two. Now ten milligrams twice a week by itself probably couldn’t raise you to a hundred. So obviously it is her belief system and her knowing [that made the difference]. It’s such a wonderful idea I’m going to have to play with it, you see. You’ve got to have many different ways of getting people to do what they can do. She could do it without taking ten milligrams. The point is, that’s pretty safe even if she took ten milligrams twice a week for the rest of her life, I wouldn’t worry about that. And so that’s a wonderful tool for some people they’re going to be able to trigger that, that way, so I’ll play with that. I may find that it works. Maybe it’ll only work in twenty percent of the people but for those twenty percent it will be better than anything else I could give them. And so it’s always being opened. She said to me, “I would not tell my physician back home this, because I know they wouldn’t understand.”

Thresholds: Do you think if you were using that kind of method, telling your body to make its own "clone", would your body know what level was too high?

Shealy: Oh, I believe that. Unless you’ve got some lesson to learn. (Laughs.) Let me give you an example. In 1974, I met a man whose name I knew from his work. We were at a meeting together in Gainesville, Florida. He was forty-nine years of age and said “Norm, I’ve got an enlarged prostate and they want to take it out, is there anything I could do?” I said, “Well, yeah, I think so.” Now, I didn’t know and had never tried this before with an enlarged prostate. I said, “Sit down, feel the pulsations of your heartbeat in your fingers.” “Yeah, okay.” I said, “Now you know where your prostate is.” This guy is a, I guess you’d call him a psychologist, it’s as close as anything. He doesn’t know anatomy that well, but he knew where the prostate was. I said, “Now, feel the pulsations of your heartbeat in your prostate.” He said, “Mmm, okay, it’s a little weak but I feel this.” I said, “Fine. What I want you to do is fifteen minutes twice a day, sit down and feel the pulsations of your heartbeat in your prostate and visualize it being normal in size.” He said, “I don’t know what size that is.” I said, “It doesn’t matter. You create a symbolic image of what normal is there and you tell your body to do it. It knows what normal is.” Two weeks later, his symptoms were gone. That was 1974. 1984, he was at a meeting we held here in Springfield and he got up and told the whole group his story. Fifty-nine years of age and he still had not had his prostate operated upon.
In general, at a symbolic level, the body knows. It will not overproduce unless there is something wrong that you’ve got some other lesson to learn. I think will, I know will, can be too strong. It’s a very important difference between willing something to happen and being willing to have something happen. Or as Carolyn calls it, the “will to live” which is extremely strong. I’ve often said I think if you were on top of the Empire State Building threatening to commit suicide and somebody tried to push you, you’d fight back. Our will to live is remarkably strong, but the will to live means you are willing to deal with your crap. And honestly. And that’s not always easy to do.
For years, I would lecture and I would say my father committed suicide, smoking. That was my opinion. About two and a half years ago, my father came and he said, “I wish you’d stop telling people I committed suicide, I didn’t commit suicide. That was my role in life. You came into this life saying you wanted a strong will. I gave you an example that you would consider a weak will. That was my contract. I was supposed to die at age fifty-four. I did not commit suicide." I suddenly realized, first of all, the gift that someone would do that for anybody, and secondly, just how we never, never can tell whose playing what role and for what purpose. Now the old [saying] "walk five miles in my moccasins" -- I don’t think you’d know even after walking five miles in the moccasins because unless you can talk at a soul level you’d never know what another person’s role in life is. I’m sure my father had other parts of that life for his own growth but I got my strong will and even after that happened it didn’t teach me enough. I had to go far enough that I came close to being in a wheelchair. And I finally said, “Thy will be done.” And what choice did I have? I mean, you can fight it but at that stage that I was in last June, you don’t have any choice. You don’t fight something that isn’t fightable. And so, sometimes that’s what it takes for a stubborn person to learn to let go. And have I learned the lesson? I don’t know. I hope I have. I remind myself every day to be careful about trying to push other people to do what I know is right. [See the May issue of Thresholds for the story of Dr. Shealy’s healing experience and recovery. -- Ed.]

Thresholds: Is there any one person that you would say has had the most influence on your life?

Shealy: I could say there are half a dozen people who have had a powerful influence on my life. My mother, my father, my sister, in a very different way. My wife, my partner Roger Cady, and Carolyn Myss. But then I’ve left out, Willie Tiller, my music teacher when I took piano; Ma Stanley, my voice teacher. There have been dozens. Talmadge Peale, my mentor in medical school. Each of them has played a very powerful role in teaching me something.

Thresholds: I know you are really interested in research. What’s the research that you’re currently doing? They tell me that you’re retired, but...

Shealy: I know, I hate that word. I despise that word. I am not retired. I am in an alternate career. I don’t see patients privately anymore. I’m interested in doing research and writing and teaching. If, well, I’m going to go out on a twig....Two years ago I received this information about the Ring of Fire. The Ring of Fire appears to me to be a critically important circuit in the human body. I have been told that I will receive in the next sixteen months four other circuits in the body. I don’t have them yet. I can’t speed up the process. I’ve been told I will get the next one by April. I don’t know if that means the beginning or the end of April. That one will be called the Ring of Air. The Ring of Air will be helpful, I am told, in treating tinnitus and deafness. I was told three years ago that some day, (if I remember correctly, within five years from the time I was told that), "you will have the technique for regenerating an eye, a spinal cord or a limb." I am told, I know the names of all the energetic circuits. The final one that I will be given which theoretically I will get within sixteen months of now. I always say “theoretically” because I never know timing is not something that I can control certainly. But at least that’s the guidelines I’ve been given. The final one will be the Ring of Crystal. And I’m told when we get the Ring of Crystal that we will be able to regenerate human tissue.
Now, I have reason to believe that this information is correct because I’ve had so much information over the years that has been correct. I can’t recall ever being told that I’m going to get certain bits of information that it doesn’t happen. When that happens, I mean, it’s almost incomprehensible in one respect. But, interestingly, when I finished my neurosurgical residency, my number one interest was not in pain. It was in regenerating the spinal cord. That was 1963. And the research I wanted to do at that time had to do with something called nerve growth factor. And so I was all gung-ho about using nerve growth factor in the experiments in animals to start with, to prove you could regenerate the spinal cord. I was told it would cost 750 million dollars to do the project I wanted to do in 1963. So I couldn’t do it, but I planted the seed and I have to assume that thirty-three to thirty-six years after that I’m going to get the answer to how to regenerate the spinal cord. I think that would be a remarkable achievement and I want to point out again, I’m just a receiver of information. I don’t feel as if, well, I used to argue is that mine or yours? [Laughs]. And I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. But the information is there. I believe it is there. And obviously, I think that’s a very important avenue for me to demonstrate the energetics of the human body in such a way. Basically we’re talking about not energy, but energetics in its broadest sense. And I honestly believe that that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.
When I get the information about regenerating the spinal cord, I’d love to help Christopher Reeve. I think he is a remarkable person. It’s a very funny thing. If I had not decided to leave academic neurosurgery, I probably would have been at the University of Virginia. I had been asked to consider that position as the Chair. The man who took my place who was immediately behind me in the department at Western Reserve, John Jane, is the chairman and he operated on Christopher Reeve. And so, if the time comes I think I could help but I hope that he would never see this, even at this point, because I wouldn’t want to give false hope to anybody until I’ve got the proof. But you know in first experiments with the Ring of Fire, we are first getting regeneration of peripheral nerve tissue in patients with diabetic neuropathy. So that’s a beginning.

Thresholds: And that, is that using acupuncture?

Shealy: No, it’s using GigaTens on the Ring of Fire. That’s fifty-two to seventy billion cycle per second energy, the same as human DNA. [See the May issue of Thresholds for more information on GigaTens. -- Ed.]

Thresholds: Well, you really have given me all kinds of wonderful information and wonderful giving of yourself.

Shealy: Well, thank you, I’ve got to say the most painful thing I’ve ever done is learn to be open like that. Vulnerable. But I was told that is what I was supposed to do. And you don’t argue, you know, either you accept the information or you reject it. My sister died of complications of diabetes at 58 years of age in a family where nobody dies that young. Except my father, but I mean in my mother’s family, people live forever. And I used to say my sister committed suicide of depression. Well, a couple of years ago my sister came and she said, “That wasn’t really the way it was, that was for a lesson.” Her lesson was to learn the language of the heart from the dark, the shadow side. And I said, “What is my lesson?” To learn the language of the heart from the light side. So, I came in and I told my staff, okay, that’s what I’m supposed to do, and I’m going to do it. And a couple of weeks later I was at Findhorn. The beach has no sand, it’s on rock. Billions of rocks. And I’m walking along the beach and what should jump up at me but that [Dr. Shealy picks up a perfectly heart-shaped rock from his desk] out of these billions of rocks. And so I know that it was to learn to be able to do that and I don’t enjoy it, I’ve got to tell you. It’s very painful but I’m doing it and learning that’s it’s okay.•

©1996 Vol. 14 No. 3
©1996 Vol. 14 No. 2


Return to Directory

Contact Us

Course of Study


Copyright© 2002, School of Metaphysics