I’d presented thirteen of my Power of Eight groups with a most unusual challenge, particularly as they were focused on personal improvement: get off of yourself. Stop doing any intending for anyone inside your group, including yourself, and focus on the other. I had some particular “other” in mind. On December 8, 2015, Luke, then fourteen, had broken up with his first proper girlfriend, and in an extravagant gesture of adolescent existential angst, had thrown himself off a forty-foot structure onto hard ground.
Miraculously, Luke survived, but everything in his body was broken. After his fall, he had sustained fractures to his skull, eye socket, pelvis, ankle, and one heel and one elbow. Besides all these broken bones, he had a brain injury, a punctured right lung, double vision in one eye, nerve damage in his pelvis, a major chest infection, a spinal injury at the bottom of his spine, and urinary tract nerve damage. He’d gone through several emergency operations and had now also to recover from the trauma of surgery to his pelvis, spine, and elbow. All this was in addition to his suicidal state of mind. He was fighting for his life but still lacked the will to live. His stepfather, Michael, contacted me to ask if we could do an intention for him.
This case spoke to me possibly more than any I’d ever received. I still had a teenage daughter at home at the time. It could have been her or any one of her friends. I made Luke an Intention of the Week and a focus of Power of Eight groups on Sunday, January 10, while Michael kept a weekly running commentary on Luke’s moment-by-moment progress.
Right after our intention Sunday evening, Luke was quite agitated—which his parents attributed to an aftereffect of the group healing. A day later, as his chest infection started clearing up, the nurses could stop the antibiotics and he began to get better sleep. He was more conscious and began asking more questions about his recovery and trying to visualize himself back home and at school.
I asked my audience to send another intention to Luke the following Sunday, and Michael sent through another detailed progress report. Luke’s brain injury had stabilized. His elbow fracture was healing and he could now use his arm for weight bearing, as he could with his left ankle. All his infections had cleared up and he was able to come off painkillers and antibiotics. The double vision in his left eye had cleared up. He was allowed to start moving from bed to wheelchair and his bowels had improved. Suddenly he became impatient to get better and to get back into the gym.
Michael sent though a picture of Luke whizzing around in his wheelchair, exploring the ward and hospital—“a major achievement!”—and then another one of him high-fiving the camera with his three best friends who’d come to visit him.
Everything was going in the right direction, when Michael wrote back with another update that week: Luke still didn’t have feeling in his bowel and bladder, which was causing him a great deal of discomfort and pain. He’d had to continue to use a urine bag and there was a threat of a colostomy bag too. His mood had crashed. On more than a few occasions he remarked that he didn’t want to live anymore. Later that day, Michael wrote to confirm that Luke was not in a “good place emotionally.”
We ran a third intention on January 24 and got a note from Michael a few days later.
“Luke’s mind and body have responded massively to the healing intention on Sunday 6 p.m. In fact, his mother noticed an incredible improvement in his state of mind at exactly 6 p.m., right at the time of our intention,” he wrote.
At that very moment he said, Luke’s mood transformed. He began speaking more positively with his mother and shortly thereafter he cleared his blocked intestines, after which he was no longer in pain. For the last four days he’d refused to get out of bed; right after the intention, he was eager to go to the physio gym. He had positive chats with his mother about returning to school and going on a family summer holiday. “This is incredible progress considering that he was having suicidal thoughts again only last Friday!” wrote Michael.
The following week, Luke was due to meet with his doctors, and with all this improvement, it was likely he would be given the all clear to start walking. But the most startling change of all was a positive change in his mood. His mother had noticed a very “confident and positive” Luke. “This is a massive step forward!” wrote Michael.
Later that week after doctors fitted him with a different catheter system for his bladder, Luke no longer had a urine bag to deal with, which improved his spirits and well-being further. His mental state was now steady, even hopeful. He could see himself back at school after the summer break. He didn’t mind repeating the year.
Had that just been a case of good doctoring, or had we somehow willed Luke to want to live? Both Michael and his wife, Clair, were convinced that this change in Luke was a direct result of the healing intention. “The improvements were so sudden and totally unexpected,” wrote Michael. I could say only one thing about this complete turnaround in Luke’s situation: it wasn’t a placebo effect. Luke did not believe one bit in what we were doing. Like most teenagers, he thought his parents’ belief in the power of healing intention was stupid.
Andy was one of those who’d kept up the healing vigil for Luke, and once she started focusing on the other, things started shifting in her life.
Over the last six months, she’d tried everything to remove old patterns that had interfered with her ability to make a good living. When she joined the group, she shared with them a very specific intention she wished to put out about finding a dream job that would also provide ample income: “I am easily and joyfully allowing $20,000 or more a month net to flow to me in many joyful ways,” she set as her intention. “I am being highly compensated for doing the work I love which feels like play to me.” Her other intention was “trying to get clear on my new business, speaking, teaching, and healing” after closing her retail gift store of eighteen years in 2013.
None of intentions the group tried were working for her. She’d even attempted, as I suggested, to go back to her “seed moment” when she first experienced limiting thoughts about herself, and imagine changing that situation in some way. Andy remembered one very specific moment as a child when she had a very visceral feeling about just not having enough money. That still didn’t bring about any big change in her fortunes.
She then started experimenting with altruism—shifting her intention to Luke and others outside her group, and suddenly she got the breakthrough she needed. “Two days after that, I got an unexpected offer to do product development and strategy for an online organization involved in human development, a job that would joyfully bring me money doing work I love, which feels like play to me!” said Andy. When she realized this might not be an ideal fit, she had the courage to draw “boundaries” with the CEO, turn it down, and accept a job coaching for a well-known and highly respected coach “with great integrity and alignment with my values.”
“At times, focusing on one’s own intention may be the metaphysical equivalent of a watched pot not boiling,” Andy later wrote me. “Focusing on the good of others and being of service takes the focus off ourselves in a way that allows movement without noticing the passage of time. Perhaps altruism is the secret way of both consciously and non-consciously NOT observing so the desired outcome can occur.”
Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at University of California at Berkeley, has made it his life’s work to counter the prevailing view that human beings are hardwired to be selfish for one simple truism: we’re healthier and happier in every way when we do the giving and not the taking. In his book Born to Be Good, Keltner quotes Confucius about the cultivation of jen, a Chinese concept which means that he who wishes to establish his own “character” does so by bringing “the good things of others to completion.” Jen is essentially a rebound effect: your global well-being, your essential nature, in fact, is defined by how much you do to help others to flourish.
To figure out how this works, Keltner asks us to consider the function of the vagus nerve, one of the longest of the body, which originates at the top of the spinal cord and works its way through the heart, the lungs, the muscles of the face, the liver, and the digestive organs. Keltner notes that it has three functions: to connect with all the communication systems involved with caretaking; to slow down your heart rate, calming the effects of any fight-or-flight autonomic nervous system activity, the body’s response to stress of any sort; and to initiate the release of oxytocin, a neuropeptide that plays a role in love, trust, intimacy, and devotion. If oxytocin is the “love hormone,” as it is generally referred to, the vagus nerve, maintains Keltner, is the love nerve, a hypothesis given weight by the work of Chris Oveis, one of Keltner’s UC Berkeley graduate students. Chris wanted to determine whether or not activation of the love nerve helps to nurture universal love in a person and a greater acceptance of differences between the self and the other, and to do so, he set up a unique type of research project involving a batch of his fellow university students.
During the study, Chris showed one group of student participants photos of malnourished children—the ultimate of the world’s victims. As soon as the students saw the photos, their vagus nerves went into high gear. The same effect was not produced in another set of students, who were shown photos designed to elicit be-true-to-your-school pride, such as images of landmarks on campus or U Cal sporting events.
But the most interesting effect occurred when the students were shown photos of twenty other groups of strangers who were markedly different from them: Democrats, Republicans, saints, convicted felons, terrorists, the homeless, even students from their strong competitor, Stanford University. Those students love-bombed by their own vagus nerve reported feeling a far greater sense of similarity to all the disparate groups than those who’d been exposed to photos designed to elicit pride. Activity of the vagus nerve helped to remove a boundary of separation, causing the students to focus more on similarities rather than differences, and those feelings of similarities increased, the more intensely their vagus nerves fired. Even students identifying themselves as Democrats suddenly recognized the similarities between themselves and Republicans.
A closer look at the results revealed something even more fascinating: this group of students felt the greatest sense of common humanity to all those in need—the homeless, the ill, the elderly—whereas those whose sense of pride had been activated identified themselves far more with the strongest and most affluent groups, such as lawyers or other private university students. Instead of identifying with the people most like us, when the vagus nerve is fired, we are prompted to feel closer to the other, particularly the people in need of our help—and more prone to reach out to them.
Research at Stanford University discovered similar effects in a group of volunteers being trained in a simple Buddhist loving-kindness meditation. First they were told to imagine two loved ones standing on either side of them and sending their love, and then to redirect these feelings of love and compassion toward the photograph of a stranger. After that simple exercise, as a battery of tests revealed, the meditators experienced a greater willingness to connect with strangers, compared with group given a similar exercise but without the loving-kindness meditation. Just a simple statement about expressing love for all living things activates the love nerve and prompts a person to put those statements into action in the world.
This might explain why my audience felt far more open to strangers after participating in the experiments, and why so many of the Arab and Western 9/11 Peace Intention Experiment participants began forgiving each other. The compassion elicited in my participants by the Peace and Healing Intention Experiments may have activated a nervous system complex that created a greater willingness to connect with the “enemy”—indeed, all of humanity.
In biological terms, activating the vagus nerve and increasing levels of oxytocin, as occurs when we show kindness or compassion toward others, has a marked healing effect on the body. David Hamilton, the former medical researcher and author of Why Kindness Is Good for You, made a study of the healing effects of increased oxytocin levels and found evidence that they lower inflammation and boost the immune system, aid digestion, lower blood pressure, heal wounds faster, and even repair damage to the heart after a heart attack.
Oxytocin is so protective that it can defend us against bacterial assault. In one groundbreaking Austrian study carried out at the medical University of Vienna, ten healthy men were first injected with disease-causing bacteria on its own and then given the bacteria plus oxytocin. When first injected with the bacteria, the men displayed evidence of rapidly increasing levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines—evidence of increased inflammation. However, these cytokines were reduced markedly when oxytocin was injected at the same time. Oxytocin even plays a key role in turning undifferentiated stem cells into mature cells, which also help in repair and renewal.
The pure act of no-strings-attached giving, so scarcely experienced in our modern society, may also prove healing, as FranÇois Gauthier from the University of Quebec discovered when studying three examples of healing at the Burning Man festival. Held in Black Rock Desert in Nevada every summer, the festival runs entirely on a transaction-less system. Other than the space and toilets, the first aid, and the burning man effigy, the organization provides nothing. Attendees must provide their own food, water, and shelter, and other than an entrance fee, no money is allowed to exchange hands, which encourages an elaborate system of barter and gifting, including healing. The “gift” itself of healing someone else and “the primacy of social relationships” proved to be the most powerful therapy for many of those who came to the desert to be healed of psychic or physical wounds. “When Burners give of themselves and work in [the] healing and well-being of others, they work together for their own well-being and their own healing,” Gauthier noted.
I was still puzzled about the healing effects of the Intention Experiments and why they would overcome long-standing conditions until I came across perhaps the most compelling piece of research of all about the transformational effects of altruism. It had been carried out by psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who wanted to examine the difference in likely future health between healthy people who live a fulfilling life of pleasure—what we’d normally define as the good life—compared to those who live a life of purpose or meaning.
The researchers examined the gene expressions and psychological states of eighty healthy volunteers in both groups. Although the members of the two groups had many emotional similarities and all claimed to be highly content and not depressed, their gene expression profile couldn’t have been more divergent. Among the pleasure seekers, the psychologists were amazed to discover high levels of inflammation, considered a marker for degenerative illnesses, and lower levels of gene expression involved in antibody synthesis, the body’s response to outside attack. If you hadn’t known their histories, you would have concluded that these were the gene profiles of people exposed to a great deal of adversity or in the midst of difficult life crises: a low socioeconomic status, social isolation, diagnosis with a life-threatening disease, a recent bereavement. These people were all perfect candidates for a heart attack, Alzheimer’s disease, even cancer. In a few years, they would be dropping like flies.
Those whose lives were not as affluent or stress-free but were purposeful and filled with meaning, on the other hand, had low inflammatory markers and a down regulation of stress-related gene expression, both indicative of rude good health. If you have to choose one path over the other, the researchers concluded, choosing a life of meaning over one just chasing pleasure is undeniably better for your health.
This all sounds counterintuitive to us in the West, with our emphasis on material success at any cost, but it has to do with what exactly constitutes “meaning” in our lives, and the best way to gauge that is what ultimately helps ill people get better—the one aspect of life that will turn around a serious illness. Scientists from Boston College discovered this when trying to figure out why patients suffering from chronic pain and depression markedly improved in both disability and mood once they began helping others in the same boat. As they repeatedly noted to the researchers, it was all about “making a connection” and being provided with “a sense of purpose.” Our need to help other people is perhaps the one element that gives our life the greatest meaning.
But there was another factor here not covered by any of this research. The altruistic acts of my participants have been performed within a giant virtual prayer group, and this appeared to offer some sort of amplification of healing power. Certainly there is a long tradition throughout all the sacred writings of all the major religions describing the healing effects of spiritual belief and practice in a group. Those who regularly assemble in churches to pray together have been shown to have lower blood pressure, enjoy far stronger immune systems, spend far fewer days in the hospital, and are a third less likely to die, even when all other factors are controlled for. Scientists believe that those who are now age twenty who never go to church can expect to live seven years less than those who attend more than once a week.
It isn’t just someone’s religious fervor or assembling as a community; the collective spiritual practice appears to be as important as the group effect. One study found that those living in a religious kibbutz and praying together had about half the mortality rate of those in a nonreligious kibbutz. Like the groups who put meaning at the forefront of their lives, those who attend church frequently have stronger immune systems than those who attend less frequently, as measured by lower plasma interleukin-t (IL-6) levels. An elevated IL level is a marker of one of the degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, osteoporosis, or AIDS.
Religious belief on its own is strengthening, but not as powerful, it seems, as the group experience of prayer.
In fact, the collective aspect of the praying may be the essential factor in creating the healing effects. Rich Deem, who was healed of an incurable disease in 1985, went on to study prayer and healing, particularly the evangelistic meetings in rural Mozambique. Prayer leaders recruited blind and deaf subjects from the meetings for healing touch, and doctors were on hand to measure auditory and visual acuity before and immediately after the prayer. All were in prayer meetings involving groups of people, and all involved touch. Of ten subjects, all but one improved in visual acuity and also all but one had their hearing improve. The scientists then compared these results with those achieved by studies using suggestion and hypnosis on subjects with the same maladies. Although those studies achieved statistical significance, they paled in comparison to the results achieved by collective prayer.
It is clear that altruism brings out all the loftier emotions in us; it might be the emotion that most defines our humanity—our sense of a life well lived—and gives our life a sense of meaning. It may even be the key to whether we live or die. But the powerfully transformational mechanisms at work in my healing intention groups appeared to be the unique power of group prayer coupled with a deliberate focus away from the self.
It had been there all along, in the early Christian teachings, all those homilies so familiar that they now sound like words on a Hallmark card: Do unto others. Love your neighbor as yourself. Focusing on someone else heals the healer.
All this research was leading me toward a heretical thought. Maybe the endpoint of the “I want, I get” good-life scenario is that it ultimately kills you. I want, I get—I get sick. The key to a long and healthy life is living a life that concerns itself with a meaning beyond satisfying the needs of number one. I considered how dangerous some tenets of the “self-help” movement might ultimately be. All that focus on the self could ultimately be terrible for your health, and highly unnecessary. The quickest route to rewriting your own life’s script was simply reaching out to someone else. And if that is true, the entire New Age premise of intention—using the universe as essentially a restaurant with you the customer ordering whatever dinner you happen to fancy—was wrong.
Getting what you wanted in your own life started with the readiness to give.
As my husband once wrote, Jean-Paul Sartre was mistaken. Hell is not other people. Hell is thinking there are other people. Bryan was talking about the fact we are simply a single consciousness and the falsity of thinking that we are separate. I would just add a little coda. In seeing yourself in the other, in joining together as one, other people, it turns out—particularly a small group of them praying with you—are your salvation.