Recognizing the Voice of Healing in the Twenty First Century

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling

Words Go into the body. So they cause us to be well and hopeful and happy and high-energy and wonderous and funny and cheerful. Or they can cause us to be depressed. They get into the body and cause us to be sullen and sour and depressed and finally sick.
Maya Angelou

Our health and wellness is a reflection of the extent to which we are “in tune” with compassion and reverence or “detuned” with gossip and thoughts of ill will.
Dr. Darryl Luke Pokea

We need to wake up. For this author the most important element to understand energy transformation in healing is to realize the powerful effects our words and thoughts have on one another. Each one of us can have more of a negative impact than we want to be aware of. This causes damage. Equally important, we each have the potential to have profound positive effects on one another. This causes healing.

We all grew up hearing “Sticks and Stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” This clever rhyme is simply not true and the research I will cite in this article confirms that such a rhyme contaminates our minds. We need to become aware that we are killing each other with our thoughts and words, as much as our actions. Likewise we have the potential to heal each other with life affirming words and thoughts.

Our Spirits came into this existence with a body and mind to learn our lessons through service and love. So many have distorted the lessons and created separation between themselves and others. This in turn leads to abuse of power and promotes greed through misleading and lying words and the accompanying hateful thoughts of complete disregard for others. Alan Greenspan chose to point this out with his powerful words about “infectious greed”. Our harmful words and thoughts that begin a separation process, must be dissolved to eliminate the sickness and dis “ease” of mind and body that we perpetrate towards one another.

Writer and poet, Maya Angelou said, “I believe that words are things. Someday we will be able to know and measure,… as mad as it sounds,… we’ll be able to measure the hostility or kindness that emanates from certain words that people exhume when they say certain things. I think they stick on the walls, they go into the upholstery, they go into your clothes, and finally into your very body.”

Intuitively from the heart, we already know the effects of words, thoughts and actions that we have on one another. Rumors, gossip, and bullying are so very poisonous. I know of many students who are deeply affected by the words of their teachers and classmates. Some have been so affected, that they attempt and even succeed in suicide. Likewise words of genuine support, kindness and compassion lift them from so many disparaging things they endure in our conflicted world. Our words do “matter”, both positively and negatively. We all know, what words of “respect” or “disrespect” feel like in our bodies.

Science is beginning to understand the impact that compassion, expressed through our words and thoughts, has towards one another. Psychophysiologist, Dan Winter, has insight and research into heart wave coherence that confirms what we have known in our hearts. He found that each heartbeat is like a “sonic blast” which includes harmonic waves that affect the body’s tissue at the deepest level of “mattering”. His heart monitor instrumentation has shown that when the mind and body together are filled with love and compassion, the harmonic resonance of this love and compassion affect the heart. These cardiac waves of compassion become part of the compression wave in each of our heartbeats. These harmonic waves radiate towards all life outside the body as well. With each beat of our heart, the harmonics are also present in the constellations of our brain waves. These waves mirror our thoughts and mental state of consciousness.

Consistent with Maya Angelou’s belief, Dan Winters has also discovered that the heart’s compassionate coherence in each beat resonates in the subtleties of the harmonic sounds of our voice. Further, he has found the braiding of our DNA, the twist that protects our DNA, is also affected by how compassionate we are. When we are disingenuous, there are discoherent effects upon the heart wave and this in turn is subtlely present in the wave harmonics of our voice. Simply stated, our heart, our brain, our DNA and voice are all affected by dishonesty, denial and lying to ourselves and others, just as they are all affected by love and compassion. Our bodies do have powerful physical reactions when we are showing respect or disrespect; they also react dynamically when we are being shown respect or disrespect by someone else.

Maya Angelou said she has never heard a voice that she did not enjoy. As a writer and poet she may be more sensitive and attuned to the Spirit in each human voice. Native peoples throughout our world, whose rituals with “the drum” have been ignored and labeled “primitive”, may also be our teachers. Many of these cultures have referred to the human heart as the “first” drum and their ceremonial drums representing the “hearts of many” as a “discussion between body and Spirit”. Some cultures add the insight that the drum is the “voice” of their ancestors that brings the body out of itself through the recognition that “I am here both in body and Spirit”.

What Maya Angelou, Native people and many of us have known, we are seeing science approach in its research. Science and technology have had profound effects upon our lives and have dominated consciousness over the last 150 years. There are many who can no longer acknowledge from their hearts and minds, these new paradigmatic matters. They cannot relax their left-brains sufficiently, until science tells them it is OK to do so through scientific research. All of this is part of the evolution of our species, but we must also recall that science, until recently, has avoided research that would include mind body and Spirit in their search for a unified field theory. Perhaps these delays in research have occurred because the heart must be in the right place before the mind can proceed openly in its investigations.

Our mind and heart are intricately interwoven with the fabric of our body. Likewise our bodies and minds are ringing with the balancing rhythms of our planet earth and the words and thoughts we have about one another. Our health and wellness is a reflection of the extent to which we are “intune”with compassion and reverence or “detuned” with gossip and thoughts of ill will.

Have some of us lost harmony and become so out of tune that we need science to tell us that dishonesty isn’t good for our heart, our brain, our DNA, and our voice before we can believe it? Have we become so hearing impaired, that we cannot hear the sounds and rhythms of the earth and each other? All of us, who have any attunement, can know these things before science confirms these effects.

We can know that any healing accomplished with harsh or empty words devoid of Spirit, can lead to harm rather than health. We can recall our connection to our heart and the Divine in all we think and say. All real wisdom comes from the Divine. Any of us can be the instruments of Divine Love in our service to one another. All of us can know, under the guidance of our truly loving Spirit, when we are being treated with compassion and reverence and when we are treating others the same. Just as Maya Angelou and many Native cultures, we can awake to the powerful impact that our thoughts and words have as we are instruments of healing towards one another. We can be the harmonious accompaniment as we join with the Divine Symphony of Love and Healing in our new Millennium.

“Why Knot”, a satiric play by Jan Jennings, artist

Negative thinking narrows thoughts that can manifest in habitual self-destructive behaviors. This may be thought of as “karma”, that we pattern within our daily lives and occurs when we simply do not realize what we are doing to ourselves.
Dr. Darryl Luke Pokea

Ruth decided not to waste her time on negative people or negative thoughts: