Whole Energy Lifestyle (WEL)™
Over the past thirty years, I’ve trained in many modalities, from Gestalt therapy to Heartmath; mindfulness to biofeedback; meditation to EFT.
As I practiced each one, and enjoyed the benefits they gave me, I asked myself some key questions:
“Despite the fact that they’re different, why do they all lead to personal transformation?”
“Why do some people get great results from one modality but not another?”
“What do they all have in common?”
And then the big question occurred to me:
“What would happen if we put all the best practices together?”
Each method addresses an important element of personal transformation. No one method seems to be the right path for everyone. Some people take to meditation, while most find it difficult and impractical for a busy lifestyle. EFT works for most people, but not always, and not for every problem. Personally, I use many techniques. I wondered:
“What combination of techniques is the most potent to unlock the maximum human potential?”
This led to me experimenting with various combinations. After much trial and error, I came up with a combination of the best practices of the personal transformation field. I call it Whole Energy Lifestyle or WEL.
WEL introduces you to the “best-of-the-best” practices from all these diverse fields. You then develop a personalized routine that fits perfectly with your lifestyle, your body, and your psychospiritual history.
WEL induces deep, trance-like psychological states in which remarkable healings occur. Messages and guidance emerge from the deep unconscious mind, as levels of consciousness that are not normally accessible come to the surface.
Using the EcoMeditation technique, WEL allows non-meditators to effortlessly enter a deep meditative state in less than two minutes.
Besides healing childhood and adult trauma, WEL can heal trauma that is beyond the reach of most methods, such as birth trauma and womb trauma. At WEL experiential workshops, participants report being able to literally “see” and “feel” energy as they immerse themselves in this powerful combination of all the best healing techniques.
I invite you to join me at one of the upcoming WEL workshops. We’ve had rave reviews for this course, you can read actual comments from participants here.
– Dawson Church, PhD
Over the past thirty years, a shift has taken place in psychology.
For the first half of the twentieth century, the behaviorist school of psychology was dominant.
Pavlov’s famous experiments with dogs demonstrated that behavior could be conditioned by stimuli.
The most famous of the behaviorists, B. F. Skinner, declared that “All behavior is learned behavior.”
The Mind in the Body
Behavioral psychology was displaced from its position in the 1960s by the cognitive school, which recognized that human beings are more than the sum of their conditioned behaviors. They have minds, and those minds can change. The cognitive frame through which a behavior is viewed can be altered, and the behavior changed through conscious mental processes.
At the same time, some researchers were discovering the value of body-centered treatments. Joseph Wolpe used Diaphragmatic Breathing or DB to counter-condition traumatic emotional memories. DB became part of other successful psychological methods such as Prolonged Exposure therapy or PE.
Conversely, practitioners using purely physical techniques such as massage and chiropractic sometimes reported that their clients experienced emotional shifts through physical manipulation. This showed that emotional memories weren’t stored just in the brain; the body clearly had a role as well.
Psychologist Roger Callahan discovered that tapping on acupuncture points with the fingertips could alleviate fear.
He called his technique Thought Field Therapy or TFT; our method of EFT is a simplification of Callahan’s TFT. Like Wolpe, Callahan discovered that keeping clients centered in their bodies during the recall of traumatic events could alleviate psychological trauma. Some schools used breathing, others used tapping, others used stroking or holding, but the common factor was some form of soothing physical stimulation.
Psychologist Fred Gallo dubbed this new field “energy psychology.”
When used with techniques from cognitive therapy, physical stimulation seems to facilitate the processing of traumatic memories. Research shows that symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety, rapidly diminish after treatment with energy psychology.
This is a desirable therapeutic goal, but is only part of the picture. The next step is personal transformation and development. The first step, healing, represents a return to baseline. The second step, development, represents movement above baseline.
Baseline and Above
These two different states have an analogy in physical healing as well. If our bodies sustain a physical wound, the full healing of that injury represents a return to baseline. If we then adopt a set of healthy lifestyle practices, like good nutrition and exercise, we raise our physical functioning above the baseline.
Just the way physical wounds heal, and return the sufferer to baseline physiological health, energy psychology techniques offer healing from psychological wounds, and a fast method of returning to baseline mental health.
But here’s a very important distinction: Energy psychology doesn’t necessarily raise the sufferer higher than baseline.
It isn’t the equivalent of nutrition and exercise for the physical body. That movement towards psychospiritual transformation requires a further set of techniques.
Even though EP can heal your history, your basic ego and personality structures often remain unchanged. Commentators and historians of EP and transformational schools often have the unfortunate task of chronicling professional rivalries, lawsuits, and ethical scandals in these fields. These bear witness to the need for further psychospiritual development.
One reason for this is that when psychological trauma has been healed, and the sufferer has returned to baseline mental health, the ego can expand into the newly-liberated mental space. If a person has not developed spiritually and ethically in parallel to using EP, dysfunctional personality structures that were previously constrained by emotional trauma now have free reign. A return to baseline, without a concurrent development of spiritual and ethical practice, can liberate the dark side to take over the psyche.
Introducing Whole Energy Lifestyle (WEL)
Whole Energy Lifestyle (WEL) was developed to address these problems, and move the field of energy healing to the next level. WEL uses the healing methods of EP, while also providing transformational training and practice to raise psychological and spiritual functioning far above baseline.
It combines the best practices from the most advanced methods developed in the past decades.
These are grouped into techniques to alleviate past trauma (WEL 1), techniques to reduce stress in daily life (WEL 2), and finally, techniques to build a positive future in which a user’s full human potential can be realized (WEL 3).
Though the combination might sound complicated and difficult to learn, the reality is that WEL techniques are so simple and intuitive that they are easily integrated into the user’s lifestyle. WEL’s focus is on physiological rather than psychological interventions. An example is relaxing one’s tongue, which though it takes only seconds to learn, has the immediate beneficial effect of calming the central nervous system.
WEL uses simple techniques drawn from mindfulness meditation to establish a consistent and strong spiritual practice. It brings in heart coherence methods that provide instant stress reduction. Conventional meditation has been shown to decrease heart coherence; WEL uses breathing methods that produce the opposite result. It draws on techniques from biofeedback and neurofeedback that reinforce the other methods used.
Elements of WEL Summarized
– EFT: Basic Recipe. Personal Peace Procedure.
– TAT: 9 cognitive steps of healing.
– TFT: 9 Gamut, generalizing success to clear a range of similar experiences.
– Mindfulness Meditation: Releasing thoughts as they arise in meditation.
– Heart Coherence: Five second breathing. Sending love from heart area.
– Biofeedback/Neurofeedback: Tongue relaxation. Visualizing empty space behind eyes.
– Law of Attraction: Physical sensation of desired outcomes.
– Transpersonal Psychology: Seeking guidance from the subconscious.
The 3 Components of WEL
These techniques reinforce each other when used together in a systematic manner. They both heal past wounds to bring the user back to baseline mental health, and develop the user’s full human potential, aiming at transformation and growth far above baseline.
The therapeutic part of WEL (WEL 1) uses cognitive and deliberative therapeutic practices. It employs EFT techniques like chasing the pain, tearless trauma, tell the story, and the movie technique. These uncover past traumatic events, and decrease their emotional charge. WEL uses the 9 Gamut technique from TFT to generalize successes to clean up a range of similar experiences.
The stress reduction part of WEL (WEL 2) is focused on teaching meditation and stress-busting skills for daily life.
WEL 2 teaches a meditation method that is so simple that even those who have failed at meditation in the past are usually meditating effortlessly within two or three minutes. The reason it works is that it is physiologically based, and does not require belief or prior spiritual practice.
Ten second breaths, with a five second inbreath, and a five-second outbreath, have been shown to induce heart coherence. Breathing this way during meditation allows the user to maintain heart coherence during meditation, in contrast to conventional meditation methods which have been shown to decrease heart coherence.
Relaxing the tongue on the floor of the mouth promotes regulation of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic branch of the nervous system is calmed by the simple mechanical act of relaxing the tongue. Though quick and easy to learn, like most WEL techniques, it has profound physiological results.
WEL has meditators picture a blank space behind the eyes. This induces a brain state in which alpha waves predominate, and beta waves subside. Beta is associated with worry, stress, and anxiety, while alpha is associated with relaxed alertness. While an alpha state can be induced by autogenic training or the use of neurofeedback software programs, the simplest method is to picture a blank space behind the eyes. This reliably creates a brain state in which alpha waves predominate.
With these basic instructions, in a few minutes, WEL has meditators in heart coherence, in alpha, mindful, and relaxed.
The developmental part of WEL (WEL 3) focuses on the future. It begins with nine steps of acceptance, similar to those used in TAT. These provide a bridge from past trauma to the possibility of a positive future. At that point users can bring in the Law of Attraction (LOA) to invoke the feeling states associated with a desired outcome.
The contribution made by LOA is it sets up the neurological wiring to perceive desired changes. LOA teaches users to feel, in their bodies, the physiological sensations of a being in a desired state. This wires the brain to perceive such a state. The user is doing much more than fantasizing mentally.
Evoking the emotions associate with the desired outcome creates synaptic connections in the brain associated with such an experience. The consequence of this is that when some part of the user’s daily life is similar to the desired experience, the user has the neural capacity to perceive it, and reinforce it.
Finally, WEL 3 uses elements of Transpersonal Psychology to draw messages from the subconscious. Using a protocol called the House of Doors, WEL 3 integrates conscious and unconscious needs and desires. If these are in conflict, EP is used to resolve them.
The result is that users discover inner resources that support their transformational journey.
