In a world teeming with scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs, one man has devoted his life to unraveling the mysteries that lie at the intersection of science and spirituality. Meet Dr. Rick Leskowitz, a distinguished physician and the author of the thought-provoking book, “The Mystery of Life Energy.” With a career spanning decades, Dr. Leskowitz has embarked on an extraordinary quest to shed light on the elusive concept of life energy and its profound implications for our well-being. In this captivating article, we dive into the intriguing world of Dr. Rick Leskowitz, delving into the essence of his groundbreaking book and the profound insights it offers. Join Mystic Mag as we explore his journey, from the corridors of modern medicine to the realms of ancient wisdom, in a quest to bridge the gap between science and spirituality. Dr. Leskowitz’s work not only challenges conventional thinking but also offers a tantalizing glimpse into the potential of harnessing life energy to enhance our health and elevate our understanding of existence.
What actually inspired you to pursue the mystery of life energy, and to write a book about it?
That’s a very good question. I had always been interested in science but was never quite sure what to do with it. My father was a research scientist, so that was always in my mind as a career. I did pre-medical studies in college as the next step but took some time off before medical school. And when I went to medical school, I just wasn’t satisfied because they never seemed to have explanations for anything. They used euphemisms or words like “idiopathic” to explain diseases; it sounds impressive until you translate it from the Greek, and find that it literally means “we don’t know what’s going on.”
Things didn’t fall into place until a friend of mine convinced me to attend a lecture on energy healing. To my conventional mind, it sounded very unconventional, off the beaten track. But I trusted my friend, so I went. The speaker was Rev. Rosalyn Bruyere, who had a background in engineering but could perceive what she called the subtle energies around bodies. Not only that, she could tell when and where they were blocked, and she could get them to flow again and bring back health. I was very impressed with her big-picture understand of health and illness.
She was based in Los Angeles but came to Massachusetts twice a year to give workshops. I participated in those 5-day intensives in the ‘80s, and that opened my eyes to a whole other dimension of health and healing that conventional medicine overlooked. So, I was pursuing two tracks at once: while learning about energy healing, I also had a conventional medical career working in the Veterans Administration in an outpatient clinic as a psychiatrist, primarily treating post-traumatic stress disorder, although with limited success, I must admit.
After about six or seven years, I transitioned to pain management at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. That’s where everything started coming together. With chronic pain patients, doctors who referred their patients to us were somewhat at a loss about how to proceed, so we had the freedom to try different approaches. Initially, we explored mind/body methods like biofeedback meditation, which were considered somewhat unconventional at the time (1990), along with imagery, hypnosis, and even acupuncture. Later, we incorporated a wide range of energy-based treatments.
I observed that these approaches had effects that conventional methods did not. This piqued my curiosity about what was happening and why. It became the focus of my work for most of my career, as I sought to understand the mechanisms underlying these unusual practices based on “energy”.
In your book, you mention biofield healing, phantom limbs, and Gaia consciousness. Could you please explain a bit about what Gaia consciousness is?
The key idea is that this life energy infuses every living thing. So, I started by studying humans, but I’ve learned that veterinary energy medicine treats animals with acupuncture and homeopathy, so animals have this energy system too. Maps of the acupuncture meridians in animals are available online, in parallel to human subtle anatomy. And then we have indigenous cultures talking about the Earth as a living, conscious being. In the West, only animals are conscious. We do have the Gaia hypothesis, which is an analogy – the Earth is like an organism (rivers are like blood vessels, forests are the lungs, etc.), but not literally that the Earth is conscious and has energy. However, if you follow these other traditions, there is a lot of evidence that this is in fact literally true.
One of the fascinating things I discovered that got me interested in Gaia consciousness occured in England. My wife is British, so we’ve spent a lot of time there, and they have a tradition of working with Earth energies called geomancy that goes back several hundred years. In the 1920s, a British surveyor noticed that many of the so-called sacred sites in England line up on a map. These include holy wells, stone circles, and places where churches and pagan shrines had been built. It seemed that there is are energy lines, what they called ley lines, that are part of the Earth’s energy system, Gaia’s own acupuncture meridians. Indigenous and pagan people were attuned to that energy and consciousness, and that’s what drew them to erect their shrines and stone circles along these lines.
Once you start with that idea, you notice that sacred sites like Stonehenge, Avebury and the like tend to be clustered in that part of southern England. Maps of England and the world show these sacred sites as energy centers of the Earth, analogous to the chakras in the human biofield. I’ve had the opportunity to visit them, and there’s a sense of wonder that is partly cognitive and psychological because you see their grandeur, but there’s also an internal energetic experience that is heightened in those places.
More recently, in those parts of England over the last 20 or 30 years, people have noticed patterns appearing overnight in the wheat fields that are visible from above. These are geometric shapes that started as simple lines and circles but have become extremely complex in recent years,a phenomenon known as crop circles. The existence of crop circles raises many questions. Are they manifestations of the consciousness of the Earth? Is Gaia expressing herself? Or are there regions in Gaia where her energy field is so coherent and clean that other consciousnesses can draw geometric pictures on the wheat field “canvas”? This notion leads to an infinite number of possibilities to explore, including that of off-planet origins.
Its perspective leads to a very different worldview than our conventional Western thinking, but every step along the way has solid backing. That’s what I’ve tried to outline in my book: the progression from starting with biofields, exploring group energies when biofields of different people interact, examining group phenomena like sporting events, then moving on to sacred places where these energy interactions occur, and finally delving into Gaia and global consciousness. It truly leads to the infinite and deep questions about who we are and why we are here. It has been an exciting journey of discovery, to say the least!
What type of services do you offer?
I’m retired from clinical practice. I worked at an outpatient clinic of Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital until six or seven years ago. I’ve gradually tapered off my clinical work, so I no longer see patients. Nowadays, I focus primarily on program development, research and writing (and cultivating my garden out back). I’m working with some colleagues who are researching phantom limb pain – a fascinating phenomenon where people who have had amputations not only feel as though their limb is still there but also experience pain in that site. The standard explanation attributes this phenomenon to the brain creating sensory experiences from memories stored in the cerebral cortex, but this pain doesn’t respond well to medications or injections. However, when viewed from an energy and biofield perspective, some remarkable insights and treatments emerge.
My personal awakening to the concept of biofields came while conducting the manual energy therapy called Therapeutic Touch, in which I used my hands to smooth out any irregularities I could feel in their energy field. During one session with an amputee patient, I noticed something extraordinary. The energy sensations I noticed over his intact body were also present where his leg used to be, even though it was physically missing. Plus, even though his eyes were closed, my patient could feel me touching his phantom leg! This discovery challenged the conventional notion that phantom limb pain was solely a result of cerebral cortex activity. It became evident that his biofield was still present in that “empty” space, and it was generating these sensations, even without physical nerves.
Exploring the role of emotional trauma in phantom limb pain became a key aspect of my research. Releasing emotional trauma often plays a crucial role in healing from this type of pain, although surgeons do not typically focus on their patients’ emotional reactions to surgery. Energy-based treatments like tapping, where patients tap on their own acupuncture points under the guidance of a therapist while thinking about upsetting events, have shown promise in releasing this emotional charge. This not only helps alleviate emotional distress but also reduces physical discomfort, suggesting that emotional energy may become stuck in the body, to be experienced as phantom pain or other types of chronic pain.
I am working with colleagues on the West Coast who have expertise in electrical engineering to explore ways to detect the biofield more definitively. One method involves capturing the light emitted by the human body (biophotons) using high-sensitivity cameras inside light-proof boxes. Healers emit even more light from their hands, and this approach has been used to photograph phantom limbs. However, these images lack specificity. Another method is Kirlian photography, which is well-known for capturing images of energy fields but has not been widely applied to phantom limbs. A leaf experiment showed that even when part of a leaf was cut off, the energy field remained intact, raising questions about its source. If the leaf tip is gone, then where did that part of the corona come from?
Replicating the so-called Phantom Leaf effect has proven challenging, but my colleagues are working on fine-tuning the process. Our ultimate goal is to capture highly specific patterns in the biofield, for example in individuals missing fingers, where the Kirlian image would ideally display energy patterns surrounding both the missing and the intact fingers, not just a generalized glow emanating from the hand. This would be a crucial validation of the biofield model, showing that the biofield is the template for the physical body (like the bar magnet’s invisible lines of force that hold the iron filings in place).
These are some of the research areas that currently pique my interest.
What were the biggest challenges that you faced while conducting research for your book
The book was a project I undertook during the COVID pandemic. It came about after I had stepped away from clinical practice, allowing me the time to sit back and reflect on the events that had transpired throughout my career. During this reflection, I began to discern patterns that I hadn’t been aware of at the time.
What emerged was an understanding that there was a long tradition within Western medicine of rejecting unconventional ideas, including energy healing. Institutional structures tend to resist threats to their established practices, a process I delved into while researching for the book. One of the most fascinating figures I encountered in my research was an Austrian doctor named Franz Mesmer, who lived almost 250 years ago. During a time when electricity and magnetism were just being discovered, Mesmer proposed the idea that people possessed their own form of “animal magnetism”, which he claimed to transmit through his hands. He magnetized water and asserted that anyone touching it would benefit from its properties. Mesmer gained immense popularity in Paris, drawing aristocratic patients away from conventional doctors. In response, King Louis XVI appointed a Royal Commission to investigate Mesmer. In some ways, it was a notable research project, but the deck was stacked against Mesmer.
Patients were blindfolded, to be unaware of whether they received real or sham Mesmeric treatments (ie, holding a glass of treated or untreated water). Unfortunately, the treatments were administered not by Mesmer but by a former student of Mesmer who had been threatened with expulsion unless he could discredit Mesmerism. Consequently, the Commission reported no evidence of the existence of magnetism and published their findings widely. Although social media did not exist at that time, they distributed thousands of pamphlets and effectively destroyed Mesmer’s reputation. He returned home to die, and history now views him as a charlatan. However, I believe Mesmer was ahead of his time, and the medical establishment simply wasn’t prepared for his ideas. While some of his concepts were incorrect, many were accurate and we are now finding better terminology to understand them. Exploring this forgotten history was one of the most enjoyable aspects of my work in writing this book.
As for my clinical work at Spaulding, I’m grateful that the hospital’s administration had an open-minded approach and allowed us to explore what would later be termed integrative medicine (IM). When I attended medical school in the late 1970s, concepts like meditation were considered unconventional and unproven. I had learned Transcendental Meditation before medical school, and while I found it beneficial for stress management, it was not widely accepted in the medical community. I remember asking about the potential benefits of meditation during many med school lectures, but at that time (the late ‘70s), there was little research on the topic. However, over the past four decades, there has been an explosion of studies on meditation, demonstrating its significant impact on various stress-related aspects of health. It has even been shown to stimulate the growth of certain regions of the brain.
Hospitals have gradually become more open to these alternative approaches as the body of evidence has grown. Funding often plays a crucial role, with philanthropic individuals sometimes driving the implementation of new programs. Hospitals affiliated with renowned institutions, like Harvard Medical School, have established centers and training programs in IM, such as Harvard’s Osher Center, which focuses on research in these fields. The landscape of medicine has evolved significantly over the years, and it’s been exciting to witness this progress.
How do you practice to keep your energy levels high?
I enjoy discussing these topics but I don’t actually practice them. Just kidding! I actually practice what I preach,in different ways during different phases of my life. When my career was based in Boston, I lived in a suburban environment there but about nine years ago, my wife and I relocated to Western Massachusetts, where we are surrounded by rural beauty and nature. It’s just breathtaking to look out the front or back, and I find solace and energy in nature and that’s become my favorite stress management practice. There’s even a specific technique related to nature that I find intriguing, based on the idea that we’re not just psychologically disconnected from nature; we’re also physically disconnected. Even when we go for a walk in nature, our shoes with rubber soles insulate us from the earth’s electromagnetic field. The technique is called “earthing,” in which walking barefoot outside for around 20 minutes helps excess electrons flow from our bodies back into the earth. Research on this practice shows that it prevents chronic inflammation, among other benefits.
I also have a semi-regular meditation practice and a semi-regular yoga practice, although I haven’t been as disciplined as some people are. During the summer, I enjoy swimming in a nearby lake, which recharges my energy. Now that it’s mid-October, the lake is too cold, so I’ll have to come up with something else. Ultimately, there are numerous ways to recharge one’s energy. Engaging in activities that bring you joy and enthusiasm is essential because enjoyment itself is a form of energy. Enthusiasm, interestingly, has a fascinating etymology. If you break it down, “en-” means “in” or “inside,” “-iasm” turns the word into a noun (like “miasma”), but the key part is “-thūs-“, which comes from the Greek word “theos,” meaning “God.” So enthusiasm is about having a sense of the divine within you, which energizes you and propels you forward. While this meaning may have been lost in contemporary usage, connecting to something greater than yourself can indeed be a source of energy to recharge your batteries. Honestly, discussing these topics with you is invigorating for me, and I feel more energetic after our half-hour conversation, not drained – quite the opposite!
