Donna Eden with David Feinstein

Physicists have been puzzled for nearly a century that if you measure the momentum of an electron (its energy), it is impossible to at the same time determine its position. If you observe one, you cannot simultaneously determine the value of the other. Known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it illustrates how the observer becomes part of the observed.

This paradoxical principle is not just an obscure factoid from quantum physics. It is essential to understanding our relationship to physical reality at its most fundamental level. Reality is relative to the observer. And this is particularly important as we go deeper into our understanding of the subtle energies that are the infrastructure of the material world.

When you attune to a client’s energies, your own emotions, energy patterns, and blocks become part of the interaction. What you see is not just about them; it is also about you. This is why our ethics guidelines put so much emphasis on making yourself as clear a vessel as possible. But no matter how evolved you may become, you will always be a human instrument, observing through your own eyes, ears, hands, mind, and energy field. You can learn about the shadings and spin you characteristically impose onto the world and adjust for them, but you also need to accept that they are in themselves part of your divine dance with your clients.

While this is not a reason to give up the quest for general principles that apply universally for all practitioners and clients, it underlines how difficult that quest is and attunes you to the reasons for seeming contradictions. I have always seen energy, but I didn’t know of the formal descriptions of subtle energies found in the various healing and spiritual traditions that have been around for millennia until I was in my 30s and began to apply myself toward healing others.

While it was fascinating to see the correspondences between what I saw and what these systems had been describing, I didn’t know what to make of the discrepancies. The chakras were described as each having a distinct color yet I was seeing multiple layers with multiple colors in every chakra and they simply did not correspond with the traditional descriptions. I was seeing Triple Warmer as a much more complex and powerful force than in traditional accounts. The “strange flows” (which I have come to call the radiant circuits) are much more fundamental to our health than most systems seemed to recognize.

This was confusing to me. How much more confusing it must be to embark on the study of Energy Medicine and to be confronted with so many different explanations from so many different teachers. Does it mean the whole field is invalid, just a series of loosely related visions? No! Absolutely not. It is a single reality perceived through a thousand sensory and cultural lenses. But I do think that you should not give over your own authority to the experts in any field, and particularly not in energy healing. Notice what you resonate with. This will bring to you the explanations and techniques that are in greatest harmony with you as you develop your own healing prowess.