JULIE MOTZ

P.O. Box 75

Lake Peekskill, NY 10537

914 528-4018

In 1980, while pursuing a successful career as a documentary filmmaker, I fell and hurt my back in an acrobatics class. Although the injury was more annoying than disabling, it introduced chronic pain into my otherwise untroubled physical existence, and with it, the despairing feeling that my body would never again function effortlessly at my command. After trying both acupuncture and chiropractic without results, I had given up all hope of relief when a chance encounter at a dinner party led me to Reiki, a Japanese form of energy healing. Thus began a journey into healing and a search to understand the mechanisms of health which eventually led to a change of professions and a profound transformation in my way of connecting to other people.

A major influence along this path was the sickness and death of Patrick Gilligan, the only child of my partners and closest friends, Mike and Sonja Gilligan. Patrick was diagnosed in 1985 with an astrocytoma - a mildly malignant brain tumor. Over the next five years I watched this beautiful and courageous young man disappear into the jaws of conventional medical practice. Most painfully for his parents and the rest of us who knew and loved him, Patrick was given treatments which proved, upon autopsy, to have been more lethal than the disease itself.

Because of Patrick, I became interested in alternative cancer therapies. I studied macrobiotics and the energetics of food, and eventually, oriental diagnosis and healing. At my urging, Patrick's parents put him on a macrobiotic diet, which enabled him to survive way beyond what his physicians had predicted. It did not, however, save his life. Thinking about Patrick's experience, and our experience of Patrick , I came to realize that the search for healing is a search for meaning. I feel particularly blessed that my life has brought me to a place where I can pursue this in a loving relationship with other people.

In November, 1994 1 began doing energy healing work in the operating room during open heart surgery with patients at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. For five months prior to this I had been working pre- and post-operatively with end-stage heart disease patients under the care of Dr. Mehmet Oz, a . cardiothoracic surgeon with an interest in alternative medicine. (A more complete .-description of my work with Dr. Oz's patients is contained in the attached paper, "Energy Healing for Cardiothoracic Surgery Patients.")

Although my work before and after surgery had been quite successful in relieving pain and anxiety, improving vital signs and, in some cases bringing about both emotional release and an increase in spiritual awareness, I felt it might be even more effective if I could be with patients during the critical hours in which their bodies were opened and their hearts were touched - and in some cases removed and replaced - by human hands. Although Dr. Oz was initially, and understandably, hesitant about the idea, one of the patients with whom I had worked extensively requested that I be allowed to do healing with him during his heart transplant surgery, and Dr- OZ gave me permission to do so. It was a powerful experience for surgeon, patient and healer, and led me to consider the possibility of the operating room as a healing venue beyond the boundaries of conventional surgical treatment.

To prepare myself for working in this environment, I had requested permission to observe part of an open heart operation so that I would be familiar with both the people and the processes involved. I was taken by Dr. Oz into an operating room where veins were being removed from a patient's leg for coronary by-pass surgery, which Dr, Oz was about to perform. Standing at the patient's head, I was assaulted by waves of feeling which I realized were coming from different parts of the patient's anesthetized body. The veins were screaming in terror, the brain was indignant and enraged and the heart was in a state of confusion and pain. Looking around me I realized that no one else seemed to notice this emotional cacophony. I made a mental note of the fact that this issue of the feeling states of tissues and organs during surgery was one which I wanted to address.

During the subsequent heart transplant operation in which I worked with my patient, I observed that there was also an emotional journey which the patient experienced on a whole-spirit, whole-body level, which seemed to relate to traumatic memories triggered by the surgical invasion. These appeared to involve a sense of humiliation and a feeling of being angry and frustrated - a sense that defending oneself and exerting an effort to assert oneself were futile and hopeless acts. The first image that came to me after the chest was opened and the surgeon began searching for the tissue plane of the heart was of a child flailing his arms about in frantic and despairing motions. When these feelings, and others of fear, rage and pain came up during the surgery, I leaned over and whispered words of comfort and support into the patient's ear.

I also verbally prepared the brain for the shock of the chemicalized blood that would be passing through it once the heart went on by-pass, telling it to simply observe and record the experience. When the heart-lung machine was turned on and the heart emptied of blood, I sang to the patient to stimulate brain wave activity. The purpose of these actions was to prevent what is called "post-pump depression," a state of emotional depression which sometimes follows open heart surgery, and seems to be correlated with the time spent on the bypass machine.

When the donor heart was brought into the operating room, I left my position at the patient's head to go over to the ice chest containing the heart, and to contact it energetically. I felt its fear, and sent it the message that it was coming into a wonderful body where it would be protected and loved, and experience many adventures. Then I returned to the patient and told him to begin to say goodbye to his current heart, and to welcome the new heart into his chest.

When Dr. Oz's other patients awaiting transplants heard about what I had done, they all asked me to work with them during surgery. I subsequently did four more transplants, three mechanical heart implants and three coronary bypass surgeries. None of my patients had any post-operative depression. The coronary by-pass patients had none of the usual post-operative leg pain and weakness, and the transplant patients all had no organ rejection on their first biopsies, below normal rejection rates on subsequent biopsies and lower than normal post-operative heartrates.They all seemed deeply appreciative of my work, and I began to have an increasing sense that the experience of surgery could be used to move people along both emotionally and spiritually, which would, in turn, have- a positive impact on their physical recovery. In the last three surgeries I did I consciously prepared the patients for the fact that old emotional trauma might come up and be released, and was able to discuss what I experienced during their time under anesthesia in a way that they said was very meaningful for them.

As I became more and more familiar with the Department of Surgery, I became aware of the compassionate and skilled work being done in breast cancer surgery by two women- Alison Estabrook and Freya Schnabel. A third year medical student whom I had trained to help me with energy healing during surgery worked with them during her surgery rotation, and told me that she was extremely impressed with the quality of feeling they had for their patients, both in and out of the operating room. I had been thinking for some time about applying the techniques I'd developed with cardiac patients to other kinds of surgery, and working with these women seemed an excellent place to start. Coincidentally, I began receiving calls from a number of cancer patients who had heard about my work.

When I asked Dr. Estabrook and Dr. Schnabel what problems I might address with my work, they mentioned regaining full use of the arm on the side of the surgery, rebuilding the patient's sense of body image and of self and enhancing the immune system to prevent recurrences of the disease. I was particularly impressed with their eagerness to try anything reasonable and non-invasive which might help their patients, and with the fact that, unlike cardiac surgeons, they followed their patients throughout the entire course of the disease. I was also impressed with their sensitivity to their patients' emotional as well as physical needs.

I felt that my work could certainly help with post-surgical recovery and boosting self-esteem, which psychoneuroimmunology tells us has a direct impact on the immune system. The very low organ rejection rate I was getting with my heart transplant patients also suggested that I was directly affecting their immune systems, so it seemed reasonable to assume that I could do something for the immune systems of cancer patients as well.

My over-arching goal was to use the opportunity of surgery to help women process the trauma of the disease and the loss of a body part, and whatever other trauma might have helped weaken their resistance to the disease in the first place. I believed, based r - --on my experience with cardiac patients, that old trauma would come up because of the patient's extreme vulnerability and because the diseased area was being touched by loving human hands, creating a feeling of safety in which emotions could be experienced.

I had also started to think of surgery itself as a spiritual as well as a physical act, with the state of being under anesthesia akin to having a protected near-death experience. I was influenced in this by reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying , which describes the ideal spiritual state as one in which there is no judgment - a perfect of the patient's mother, and of the burden she felt the patient had been to her as a child. I told the patient, under anesthesia, that I knew that she had been a delightful child, and that this sense of burdening her mother would leave her body with the breast.

When I shared this with the patient in the recovery room, immediately after the surgery, she breathed a sigh of relief, and told me that she hoped she had, indeed, released the energy of that memory from her body.

What I propose to do now, and what I am requesting a $10,000 grant from the Foundation to support, is a series of twenty operations, half of which will be done with low-income, minority women from the Breast Center clinic. There will be no charge to any of the patients for this work, which will involve pre- intra- and post-operative sessions. I am proposing that the grant be made through Women at Risk, a research, diagnostic and treatment group aimed at women at high risk for breast cancer. The money will be used to cover the cost of my time, which will involve seeing each patient on three separate occasions, one of which will involve my participation in the surgery.

My goals here are multiple. The first and most obvious is to apply healing techniques I have developed for cardiac surgery to breast cancer surgery for the benefit of the patients and their physical and emotional recovery and spiritual growth.

The second is to bring to the awareness of breast cancer patients, their families and the health care professionals who work with them what kinds of trauma may underlie the onset of disease, as it is revealed in energy healing trance sessions before and after surgery and during the surgery itself. All the information revealed will, of course,

be confidential, and will be shared anonymously and, even then, only at the discretion of the patient.

The third goal is to determine if there is any consistency in the nature of the traumatic memories which are evoked and, if there is, to use this information prophylactically with women who are at high risk for breast cancer. I would work to design energy protocols to help these women surface and process these memories, and remove them as emotional stressors which may be contributing to their vulnerability to the disease.

The fourth goal is to transform the venue of the operating room itself into a realm of emotional and spiritual healing - or, if you will, to evoke its full healing potential - for every one involved in the surgery. Thus, the anesthesiologist will be acknowledged for putting the patient into a state of spiritual receptivity, and the surgeon will be acknowledged for the love as well as the skill of her hands. Every one who participates in the surgery will be asked to bring into the operating room whatever part of herself needs to be healed, and to place it in the energy field created in the circle of love around the patient. The patient will be made aware of her power to heal as well as to

be healed, and honored for bringing these people together for the highest of spiritual purposes.

Evaluation of the project will be done through follow-up interviews, conducted in the surgeons' offices when the patients return for post-surgical examinations at one and three month intervals. Patients will be questioned about rate of recovery, over-all sense of well-being, body image and sense of self.

Two other hospitals and one other funder have expressed interest in my work, and there is an excellent possibility of expanding and continuing it, based on the results of the project for which I am requesting support from The Lloyd Symington Foundation. In addition, I plan to take advantage of the strong relationship I have developed with Harris Dienstfrey, the editor of ADVANCES, to propose an article for the magazine based on this work. (Two of my articles have appeared in ADVANCES in the past two years, and I have a commentary appearing in the fall, 1995 issue.) Finally, I plan to share the techniques I develop with the operating room nursing staff, whom I gave an in-service workshop on my cardiac surgery work this past summer, and with first- and second-year medical students at Columbia, whom I am training in energy healing.

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