One week recently, Nancy Vislocki of Dumont went to the gym every day. She took yoga, pilates, aerobics and even weight training. Strange thing is, she hadn’t been to the gym in 17 years.
Vislocki was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome 10 years ago, and with an inflammatory auto-immune disease called Sjögren’s syndrome five years ago. She shouldn’t have been able to drive to the gym every day of the week, let alone attempt lunges and presses.
But that week, “my energy level was so high,” said Vislocki. “That’s why I thought I could do all this stuff!”
Vislocki believes that dramatic change in her well-being was the result of two weeks of intensive treatments with energy healer Shoe-Zen Shin (known as Osamu Kamiyama when not healing). She went every other day to lie fully clothed on a table so that Kamiyama could briefly prod and pinch her problem areas, then infuse her with universal energy using his hands for the better part of an hour. She emerged relaxed, refreshed — and, miraculously, energetic.
Skeptical? Vislocki didn’t buy any of it, either, when she first heard of energy healing.
Hands-on treatment
Unlike massage therapy or chiropractics, energy healing does not involve a therapist manipulating muscles and bone structures with physical force. Instead, energy healers from various traditions put their hands on patients and, staying almost completely still for minutes on end, pass energy to the patient. The idea is that the patient suffers aches and pains from imbalances in his or her life-force energy that the healer can remedy.
Although life energy is a common idea in many Eastern medical traditions, it has been slow in coming to North Jersey. Even so, practitioners like Kamiyama are gaining credibility. Certain variations of energy healing, such as Reiki, have widely recognized certification standards. Healer and masseuse Renee LeBental of Wayne says that she has worked on patients from 8 to 80 years of age, from the overstressed to the terminal cancer patient.
“I love working on [the skeptics],” LeBental said, laughing. Over the years, she has offered 10 minutes of energy healing at the end of her usual massage sessions and has had a slow but steady conversion rate. At her Ridgewood practice, energy healing is about 30 to 35 percent of her work.
Yet energy healing of all kinds — Quantum-Touch, Chinese qigong and polarity treatment, among others — has had a difficult time gaining official recognition. LeBental and Kamiyama earned massage therapy certificates (although neither initially was interested in massage work) because the state does not offer licenses for energy healing.
It pays, however, to be a discerning customer. Even LeBental has met “inauthentic” healers whom she could not trust.
“You have to be careful,” she said. “There are a lot of people selling things that are questionable. … But I can say honestly that energy healing does work. I’ve had a lot of people come back and tell me about what it did for them, so I feel comfortable offering it.”
She’s not alone. Some North Jerseyans are such staunch believers in energy healing that they are taking matters literally into their own hands. Jocelyn Kahn, a Wyckoff energy healer trained in Reiki, Jin Shin Jyutsu, TAT (Tapas Acupressure Technique) and Quantum-Touch, offers a workshop in Quantum-Touch three times a year — and her January class was at capacity.
Beginners with no healing background take the weekend course and can do basic healing“by lunchtime the first day,” said Kahn. Quantum-Touch teaches a system of breathing and mental awareness that heightens energy in the practitioner and allows her to transmit it to a patient.
At monthly healing circles she holds at the High Mountain Clear Lake Zen Center in Wyckoff, Kahn guides the initiated in mutual healing sessions. One member of the group lies on a table, and all others place their hands on problem areas to give energy. Participants have health concerns ranging from stiffness and bad circulation to cancer recovery.
“The sessions give us a chance to practice,” said Roseanne Cavenna of Westwood, who has been doing Quantum-Touch with Kahn for two years. She isn’t a professional healer, but “I practice on family and friends whenever they have a rotator cuff injury or joint pain.
“Now, because they know it helps, they let me do it,” said Cavenna.
Find qualified healers
Despite anecdotal testimonials, finding a qualified practitioner is almost entirely experiential for the consumer. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), a division of the National Institutes of Health, defines the forces used in hands-on energy healing as “putative,” or defying measurement.
“We rely on scientific proof without paying attention to our own gut feelings,” said Kamiyama. “But our brains are much more precisely designed than any man-made machines — MRIs, CAT scans, X-rays included. Oftentimes, science or medical testing cannot find problems until they are a certain size, but our brains can recognize it.”
Vislocki listened to the explanation, but did not get in line for a treatment when Kamiyama visited the chronic fatigue syndrome support group for a free demonstration last November.“People were saying, ‘Wow, I feel great! My neck was hurting, but now it’s not hurting me anymore!’” she said. “I was thinking, I don’t know … this all seems a little odd to me.”
Despite her misgivings, Vislocki had a terrible pain in her neck and shoulders when the healer visited the group a second time. So she decided to give it a try.
For a few days afterward, she waited for the pain to come back. It never did. That’s when Vislocki took the plunge: Kamiyama’s two-week intensive treatment. By the end of the two weeks, she had more energy than she knew what to do with — and a bunch of gym class coupons from a gym that was about to close down for good.
What followed was a manic week of exercise — and then a small crash as Vislocki recovered from the muscle pains. “I’m good, but I can’t take you back 17 years in two weeks,” joked Kamiyama.
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com
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