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- Lynne started as an investigative reporter, and in the early 90s started a magazine with her husband called, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, that investigated what works and what doesn’t work in conventional and alternative medicine.
- Through this research Lynne began to come across many good studies on spiritual healing.
- Lynne started speaking to frontier scientists who were on the verge of discovering a completely new way that we work and the world works, developing and creating a revolution in science.
- Lynne put together the science of what these scientists were discovering in her first book called The Field.
- Trying to find out further how thoughts can be used in healing, Lynne set up, The Intention Experiment, that connected scientists in consciousness research and her many readers, to create the largest global laboratory of this topic in the world.
- She began testing the power of thought by having scientists in prestigious universities set up very controlled experiments, where her audience members would send an intention to a target.
- Some of the studies included sending intentions to effect basic properties of a leaf, to make seeds grow faster, to purify water, to lower violence in war torn areas, to attempting to heal a person of PTSD.
- Of the 32 experiments they have run to date, 28 have shown measurable, mostly significant effects.
- In Lynne’s book, The Field, she covers how we are more than just chemical signaling and electrical charge; we are frequency and are communicating with every other living thing on the planet on a subatomic level in a large quantum energy field.
- Quantum particles trade energy and information back and forth with each other constantly, storing an infinite amount of information, which creates a massive quantum library.
- In Lynne’s book, The Power of Eight, she covers the intention experiments she did, with only small groups of 8.
- She ran countless group experiments in this format with thousands of participants who became healed and found peace through the process.
- Lynne discovered that altruism had a great effect on people’s ability to heal in her groups, and that being altruistic can actually lead to longer, healthy, and happier lives.
- Altruism fires up the vagus nerve, the largest nerve in the body that winds through all the major organs, and helps release the hormone oxytocin that is responsible for love and for improving the immune system.
- Lynne ran an intention masterclass, a year long teleseminar, where she monitored and gave intention tips to 250 participants. 150 maintained the weekly meetings with the groups and of those 150, 100% of them had major positive life changes.
- There was a priest who wanted to see if you could use prayer to heal depression. He had 400 volunteers do the experiment with 200 receiving the prayer and 200 doing the prayer. Those who received the prayer had improvement, but those who were doing the praying had significant improvement.
- Lynne worked with a Neuroscientist who organized a study of a Power of 8 group, and by putting an EEG cap on the student volunteers, discovered that individuals who were setting intentions had an immediate quieting of the parts of the brain that are involved in creating a sense of separation, as well as the parts involved in worry, doubt, and negativity.
- These individuals had brain wave signatures that were identical to Sufi masters during chanting, and Buddhist monks during ecstatic
- Lynne did an experiment called the American Peace and Intention Experiment which was a global webcast aimed at healing the most violent place in America, in Northern Saint Louis Missouri. For 6 days viewers sent intention to this area, and several months later, once stats were compiled on the change in violence, it was discovered that, while everywhere surrounding this one spot in Missouri had risen in violence, the intention area had lowered in violence.
- To learn more about Lynne Mctarggart, her intention experiments, teleseminars, workshops, and retreats go to lynnemctaggart.com
- To set up a virtual power bank group go to lynnemctaggart.com/forum
Wendy Myers: Hello, everyone, my name is Wendy Myers of myersdetox.com. Thank you so much for joining us for this super charged podcast. We have a very special treat for you today, we have Lynne McTaggart who is the author of the phenomenal, groundbreaking book The Field. She’s going to be talking about her new book, The Power of Eight, and the intention experiment she’s been doing with the power of prayer, which is essentially your thoughts sending healing messages out to other people, and the power behind that, just essentially a concept in bioenergetics. Your thoughts are very powerful, your words are very powerful. Lynne explains the science behind prayer or sending healing messages to people to heal them of physical health issues, mental issues, even, on an experiment, she talks about in lowering crime rates in a certain area where she did an intention experiment. Such a fascinating conversation, and just listen. It’s really, really interesting. I got so much out of this, and I know that you will too.
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Wendy Myers: Our guest today, Lynne McTaggart, is one of the central voices in the new consciousness movement. She’s the award winning author of seven books, including worldwide bestsellers The Field, The Intentional Experiment, The Bond, and her latest book, The Power of Eight. She also serves as editorial director of What Doctors Don’t Tell You, WDDTY.com, one of the world’s most highly praised health publications. Lynne and her husband, WDDTY co-founder Brian Hubbard, live and work in London.
Wendy Myers: You can learn more about Lynne McTaggart at lynnemctaggart.com.
Wendy Myers: Lynne, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Lynne McTaggart: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and how you came to do the work that you do?
Lynne McTaggart: Sure. I started out life as an investigative reporter. My kind of work was doing things like busting baby selling rings with hidden microphones and tape recorders.
Wendy Myers: That’s amazing. I love that, that you-
Lynne McTaggart: That kind of investigative streak in me has never left me. But in, I guess it was, in the early ’90s, I had set up a magazine with my husband called What Doctors Don’t Tell You. That was all about investigating what works and what doesn’t work in conventional and alternative medicine. We would look at medical literature every day for this and read the studies, etc., and I kept coming across very good studies of things like spiritual healing. I kept thinking to myself, “Well, if you can take a thought and send it to someone else, and make that person better, then that undermines everything we know and think about how the world works.” I was set on trying to find out why this could be. I figured there might be something very simple like human energy fields, but I figured, well, maybe I should start talking to scientists who are involved in consciousness research, some frontier scientists, and they’ll probably be able to tell me.
Lynne McTaggart: I started speaking to them, and I realized soon after doing so that they were on the verge, each of them, in discovering a completely new way that we work, that the world works. They were really developing and creating a revolution in science. But scientists talk in math, they talk in code. They can’t … it’s hard for them to be comprehensible to ordinary folk. Also, they don’t like to move beyond their own experimental boundaries to look at the big picture on all of this, what the real meaning is. I still realized, essentially to my alarm, that I was going to have to put this stuff together my self if I was going to understand the really point of what they were discovering. I did with my first book in that area called The Field.
Lynne McTaggart: After I finished The Field, there was some leftover business, there were a lot of studies suggesting that thoughts are an actual something with the capacity to change physical matter. Again, being the investigative reporter, I thought to myself, “Well, how far can we take this here?” Are we talking about shifting a quantum particle, are we talking about curing cancer? How far does this go? Also, what happens when lots of people are thinking the same thought at the same time? Does it magnify the effect?
Lynne McTaggart: I decided to put this to the ultimate test. I set up a thing called the intention experiment, and I figured I knew a lot of these scientists by then in conscious research, and I also had lots of readers because The Field was in 30 languages by then. I thought if i just put them together, I’m going to have the biggest global laboratory in the world. That’s really what I did. We started testing the power of thought. Every so often, one of the credible scientists, working in prestigious universities like University of Arizona or University of California, Penn State University, would set up a very well-controlled study. Then, I would invite my audience of readers around the world, or an actual audience if I were speaking somewhere, to come on my website and send an intention to that target.
Lynne McTaggart: I was pretty convinced it wasn’t going to work. I thought this would be interesting to ask the question, but I did not know how far we were going to be able to take it. We did start out small, we went from very, very simple studies of trying to affect very basic properties of a leaf to trying to make seeds grow faster to trying to purify water to trying to lower violence in war torn areas to trying to heal a person of PTSD.
Lynne McTaggart: As I say, I was not sure it was going to work, but of the 32 experiments we’ve run to date, 28 have shown measurable, mostly significant, effects. It really worked. In fact, it’s worked better than almost any drug on the market that you can-
Wendy Myers: Wow.
Lynne McTaggart: Of. It was shocking to me, but it’s not really the point of my story.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, let’s go from the beginning. Let’s talk about your book The Field. It’s a phenomenal book that’s inspired so many people to think outside of our typical paradigm of thought about how the human body works and communicates. Can you discuss some of the concepts that you wrote about in The Field?
Lynne McTaggart: Sure. I wrote about … essentially the central idea of the book is that we are not this kind of discrete, chemical object, the way we are described by conventional science. They describe us as lonely individuals on a lonely planet in a lonely universe basically. [crosstalk 00:08:32]
Wendy Myers: That’s very bleak.
Lynne McTaggart: Yeah, and we are a kind of a colation of chemical signaling and electrical charge. But what discovered, what the new science has discovered, is that we are part of something much bigger. We are, first of all, not just chemistry, we are frequency at our heart, and that we are communicating with every other living thing in the planet, on our subatomic level. We are part of a much larger quantum energy field, which is why I called it The Field.
Lynne McTaggart: But there were so many new facets of that, the idea that consciousness, our thoughts, are not locked inside our head, but are trespassers, and that affect other people and things, that our brains are more like antenna centers and receivers, rather than repositories of information, that our cells communicate through quantum frequency, and through that we send out tiny currents of light to other living things. They send out light back to us, we’re having conversations all the time via quantum frequencies.
Lynne McTaggart: That, as I say, our thoughts are trespassers. We’re leaky buckets, we’re affecting everything from small celled organisms to full-fledged human beings at every moment.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Yeah, and what role … What you’re essentially talking about is bioenergetics. What role do you think bioenergetics will play in the healthcare of the future?
Lynne McTaggart: Well, I think bioenergetics is the healthcare of the future. I mean, I think some of the really important work that we’re seeing in various modalities has to do with energy, thought, and frequency. I’ve certainly seen that in power of eight groups. A lot of the groups that I’ve been running with healing for more than 10 years, which I stumbled on in the course of doing the intention experiments. I’ve watched people, thousands of them, get healed in an instant through the power of thoughts.
Wendy Myers: Well, let’s talk a little bit about the science of our body’s energy field. Can you cover some of the major theories of like this new science and the frontier scientists who made these groundbreaking discoveries?
Lynne McTaggart: Well, it was what I was just talking about. The doctor [inaudible 00:11:09] really put forward the idea that maybe the zero point field, which was called the zero point field, the quantum energy field, called zero point because little subatomic particles continue to vibrate and communicate even in temperatures approaching absolute zero, when everything is supposed to stop and come to rest. What you have to realize with the quantum energy field is, it’s a kind of mothership of information. I mean, there’s two amazing things about quantum particles. One is, they trade energy and information back and forth. Think of them as having an endless little game of tennis with each other. We know that that’s what’s happening all the time with quantum particles, they’re sending information back and forth, they’re sending energy back and forth. It’s tiny, but once you add up all the quantum particles doing this in the whole planet, you’ve got this unbelievable, unfathomable amount of energy going on in empty space, like some supercharged backdrop.
Lynne McTaggart: There’s another thing about it is that, quantum particles, which are also waves, when they bump into each other, they take on information, and they have an infinite capacity to store information. If you think about the zero point field with all of this information constantly being gathered, it is like this … it’s like the Library of Congress in an energy field, essentially.
Wendy Myers: After your hit book The Intention Experiment inspired thousands across the globe to participate in a worldwide healing project, what moved you to try the experiment with small groups of eight, which is what you’re exploring in your new book, The Power of Eight?
Lynne McTaggart: Well, back in 2008, which was a year after we started the intention experiments and I’d published the book itself, we had been getting some positive results with the experiments. I kept thinking to myself, “Well, I suppose I should run workshops now,” but I’m an investigative reporter by training, I hadn’t run personal development workshops before, so I wasn’t really sure what to do. How do you help people manifest intention over a weekend? I mean, I knew about all the rudimentaries of intention, I’d studied with intention masters and I’d studied what works in a laboratory and I’d distilled that down into a simple program of how to do intention, that I wrote about in The Intention Experiment, which I called powering up. But I wasn’t sure, okay, what do we do in a workshop setting?
Lynne McTaggart: I’m kicking this around with my husband one day, and I say to him, “I don’t know, maybe I’ll just put people in groups of eight or so, and have them sending healing intention to one of the members of the group with a health challenge.” He is a good headline writer, he’s a journalist too, and he goes, “Yeah, the power of eight, I love it.”
Lynne McTaggart: In 2008, that’s just what we did. We got together a workshop, our first workshop in Chicago. We put people into groups of eight, we told them to send healing intention. I told them about holding hands and doing this and doing that, and I was essentially making it up as I went along. I had no idea what was going to work and what wasn’t going to work. But I figured it was probably going to be a very mild effect, a nice, little relaxing gesture and experience, a little bit like having a facial.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Lynne McTaggart: [inaudible 00:14:41] to this day, and said, “Come back and tell us what happened.” The people who were the recipients were people who had some sort of health challenge. So, they stood up, got the mike in turn, and said things like this, “I’ve had headaches all of my life, I had terrible migraines, and my head is clear today for the first time in I don’t know how long.”
Wendy Myers: Oh, wow.
Lynne McTaggart: “I have terrible arthritis in my knee, and I’ve been able to walk normally. I have cataracts and they’re 80% better.” On and on and on it went in this vein for about an hour.
Lynne McTaggart: After I’d picked my jaw up off the floor, I dismissed it. I just thought to myself, “Oh, no. This is a placebo effect. I’m probably the ultimate doubting Thomas on some of this stuff.” I dismissed it, but kept experimenting with it on workshop after workshop after workshop. I had thousands of groups, and in every single time I ran this, we had major instant healings. I just had something in the Mile High Church. We had a woman who came, she was in terrible pain. She had an awful … she had dislocated her shoulder in a really bad car accident. She came to a talk of mine, and she had this terrible pain. We put them in circles, and she felt it slot back into place and felt it, and the pain was like down to almost zero.
Lynne McTaggart: Then we had another woman in that same group who had … her knee was, from being an athlete all of her life, her knee was really shot. She was scheduled for knee replacement surgery, and it was really wobbly, and she was having a hard time even climbing up the stairs or doing anything. Once again, during the intention, she said she’d felt like giant mitts were holding onto her knee. As soon as she finished, she could squat. She showed the whole audience this. On and on and on, a woman with TMJ, it went down to normal. She was in pain, sort of 8 out of 10, that went down to zero. On and on and on, lame or walking, essentially.
Lynne McTaggart: This was shocking to me and scary. It’s why it’s taken me 10 years to write about this, to really want to talk about it, because I needed to, as a journalist, I needed to understand why. What’s responsible for these instant healings and why me? The book is really a lot about that. It’s also about the rebound effects that occurred with the big intention experiments. When I said early on in this interview, the intention experiments themselves aren’t the real point of the story, what I mean is, yes, we’ve had amazing experiences with everything from making seeds grow faster, as I say, to purifying water to lowering violence to healing someone. But the more interesting thing is what happened to the participants because, again, I’ve tried to quantify, record, document all of this, using scientists but also surveying the participants. The first time I did this was 2008 with our first peace experiment. We were sending intention to lower violence in Sri Lanka, which was undergoing a really … a 25 year intractable civil war. The upshot of the experiment itself is it had really interesting effects in like that very week, the government won some decisive battles, and within a few months had recaptured the North, which was all but lost to the rebels. A few months after that, that 25 year war, which had been at a total impasse, was over. Maybe we did this, maybe we didn’t.
Lynne McTaggart: But the more interesting thing is what was happening to the participants. I surveyed them a few months later, and I got answers like this, “I felt I was part of a higher network. I was sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. I had energy running up and down my arm, it was like being in the tractor beam in Star Trek,” and on and on and on like that, like they had undergone some sort of mystical altered state. But also what happened to them in the weeks and months afterward is they said they … well, it was really just the weeks afterward, they said, “My relationships have changed. I’m getting along better with everybody in my family. I’m getting along better with that not-so-nice boss. I’ve made up with my estranged partner.” This is thousands and thousands, “Or my estranged father,” or whatever, “Or my children and I are really … they’ve changed amazingly. I am in love with everybody I come in contact with,” that was about half of the people said that. They were essentially hugging strangers. Many of them left their jobs, a number of them left their jobs and did something involving peace. One person joined the Peace Corps, people were working on charitable projects. It was really quite amazing, something profound had happened to them.
Lynne McTaggart: Remember, these were not people in a group together. These were people who were sitting in the main, individually, in front of their computer screens, nevertheless, they were describing this overwhelming feeling of energy and some altered state, and also describing a major, major change in their lives. Their lives became more peaceful.
Lynne McTaggart: I ran these a number of times before it finally dawned on me, having studied the surveys time after time, this seemed to be a mirror effect, which was when we were sending intention out for peace, their lives, the participants’ lives, became more peaceful. We were sending out an intention for healing, they had major healings too.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and that’s so fascinating. I mean, I found also when I started getting involved in bioenergetics and using various platforms to improve my health and my mental wellbeing, it was totally life-changing as well. That’s why I’m doing this podcast about bioenergetics, to get the word out about the power, the healing power of prayer or thought or energy, and the science behind this. How does scientific study play a role in your findings with these intention experiments?
Lynne McTaggart: Well, particularly with the power of eight, I wanted to find out why on Earth this happened. There’s a lot of good evidence for the power of group support in healing, that there is something that the French psychologist Emile Durkheim coined the term collective effervescence, there’s that. Another French social scientist called these kinds of group healings soiree miracles, that when you get together in group, miracles can happen. But that’s not the whole story.
Lynne McTaggart: The big piece, and I found that, I found obviously lots of evidence for intention and the power of thought, but the biggest piece of all was the power of altruism. I mean, altruism is an amazing bulletproof vest, and that’s not something most people talk about because in this self-help business, everybody’s talking about self-help.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yeah.
Lynne McTaggart: There’s a lot of focus on me, me, me, me, me, but what started happening in my groups, because everybody’s got to get together in a group, send intention to someone with a health challenge in the group, loving, healing, self-less intention, and what I started to notice is that a lot of the senders, as well as the receivers, get healed. In fact, a number of people, where their intentions aren’t working, as soon as they get off of themselves and start intending for someone else, they start healing. That I found really amazing and fascinating, why this should be.
Lynne McTaggart: But when I started looking at the power of altruism, I found altruism is like a bulletproof vest. People who use … do something altruistic, whatever it is, live longer or happier or healthier than people who don’t. There’s a lot of good reasons for this. I mean, when we do something for someone else, we fire up a thing called the vagus nerve. It’s the longest nerve in our body, it starts from our neck and it winds through all of the major organs in the body. It also does things like helps to release oxytocin, the hormone oxytocin, which is called the love hormone. That gets released when we’re caring for babies, things like that. That also has a profound effect on our immune system, that kind of refreshes our immune system.
Lynne McTaggart: It’s easy to see that getting off of yourself, really can affect yourself just by the nature of doing good for someone else. People feel really complete. I noticed it, I run a thing called an intention masterclass, which is a yearlong teleseminar, but what happens is, we run it for six weeks, then I put people in groups for the rest of the year, and we monitor them, we give them tips, we follow them, follow what they’re doing. The first time I did this was 2015, mainly because I wanted to study what was going on. If I put people in groups for a whole year, would everything in their lives begin to heal too?
Lynne McTaggart: I started monitoring them. I have 250, and I started monitoring them month by month to find out what was going on with their health, their relationships, their finances, their job or career, their life’s purpose. Of those 250, 150 maintained weekly meetings with the groups. They met faithfully with their group and did intention together. Of those 150, pretty much 100% had major life changes. I’m talking about one guy cured himself of lifelong, debilitating suicidal depression. A woman who had had terrible chronic fatigue for 15 years was healed and is now lifting weights and hiking. A woman re-pigmented herself with vitiligo. Then, we had people with all kinds of amazing financial windfalls, we had people who … And it was always in the nick of time. Four started great new jobs, even if some of them were in their fifties. We had relationships start up, we had relationships resolve that had been problematic or even estranged. People lives were just healing.
Lynne McTaggart: When we started, I noticed after a while, a lot of people were progressing amazingly, but a few weren’t. I noticed one, for instance, Andy. Andy was just getting nowhere. She was going through a divorce, she had two small children, and she needed a new job. She had sold her gifts to her business, but she was not getting successful in getting any kind of work. She was looking for marketing or coaching, and she couldn’t get anything, nothing. Tried everything, the group tried everything, I tried everything with her. Then finally, I just said, “Andy, just get over yourself. Stop intending for yourself. Start intending for someone else.” I had thrown out a challenge to all the groups, there was a stepfather who wrote to me about his stepson, Luke, who was 15 who had broken up with his first serious girlfriend, and, in a fit of adolescent existential angst, had thrown himself off of a 40 foot structure onto hard ground. Luke broke every bone in his body, and he had nerve damage and brain damage, everything. They didn’t think he was going to live. I asked all the groups to spend some weeks just sending intention to Luke, and Andy was one of those people.
Lynne McTaggart: Now, Luke got out of the hospital in record time, he did live, he healed, maybe it was good doctoring, maybe it was us. But what was really interesting is what happened to Andy. The moment she started intending for Luke and not intending for herself, literally, the following week, a dream job comes through on the telephone, somebody calls her, she doesn’t know this person, she didn’t solicit anything from this person, and it comes out of the blue. I think there is an interesting [inaudible 00:27:44] interesting piece here with altruism that is never explored, but there’s an enormous amount of evidence to suggest that it’s very, very powerful.
Wendy Myers: Oh, yes. Yeah, it is. There’s such incredible power in not thinking about yourself and wanting to help other people in that way. In your book, The Power of Eight, you tie in the power of prayer as well as meditative practices like transcendental meditation. Can you tell us about the ties that you saw there?
Lynne McTaggart: Yeah. I mean, what was really interesting to me was trying to find out, I mean, in terms of prayer, where did this come from before? Other people must have done this before me. I was looking and looking, and I did speak to a lot of experts and looked into a lot of esoteric practices, I spoke to the Rosicrucians, I spoke to experts in religious prayer, I spoke to experts in indigenous practices. All the people, there were plenty of circles and healing circles, that’s nothing new. What they didn’t have any information about was this kind of rebound effect that I was seeing.
Lynne McTaggart: But I was really fascinated to find a strange mistranslation in the Bible, which was talking about during the time that the Apostles were supposedly setting up the new church and they were supposedly following what their teachings from Christ, the King James version of the Bible always talk about them praying with one accord. That’s a very anemic phrase for the actual original in the Hellenic Greek. What that was, was it was a word homothumadon, which is a word that actually means passionately and with one voice.
Lynne McTaggart: What they were told to do was always pray together, passionately and with one voice, essentially, an intention, right? All together. Over and over in that section of the Acts, it talks about you pray together like this, and you will heal, you will be healed. I was fascinated by that a possible antecedent, this whole idea of this passionately and one voice. Certainly, there’s plenty of evidence on prayer.
Lynne McTaggart: There was a really interesting study done by a priest who was also a psychologist who wanted to see if you could use prayer to heal depression. There’s been plenty of studies showing prayer works for physically illnesses, but would it work for a mental illness too, he wondered. He got 400 volunteers, all of whom suffer from clinical depression, put them into two groups. One group was going to receive the prayer, the other group was going to give the prayer. Afterward, he measured them according to all these kinds of psychological parameters, and he found that the people who got the prayer did really well. I mean, they were improved, but not anywhere near as improved as the people who had done the praying. I mean, they were off the charts improved. He had to admit, I guess doing the praying is more powerful than getting the prayer.
Lynne McTaggart: There’s that really interesting piece about the power of prayer. In terms of meditation, I mean, I was curious, as I say, I wanted to take this apart in every way. I wanted to see what kinds of brainwaves get produced during these power of eight groups, would that give me any information? Certainly, people who were reporting what … Abraham Maslow was fascinated, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, was fascinated with peak experiences, as he called them, these moments of mystical altered states. He talked about a lot of conditions, like everything from feeling this extra energy to feeling outside your body to feeling connected with everything and all that is to having amazing rejuvenation and change afterward. The people in my big experiments were experiencing all of this.
Lynne McTaggart: I wanted to find out, okay, what happens when you’re in a group intention situation, and is it like meditation? Luckily, Life University, which is the largest chiropractic university in the world, had heard … I gave a talk there, and they were fascinated by the power of eight. They put their neuroscience and psychology departments at my disposal, and said, “Sure, go ahead and let’s start setting up some studies.”
Lynne McTaggart: I worked with a neuroscientist who organized a study of the power of eight groups, using student volunteers. We put an EEG cap to measure brainwaves on one of the student volunteers in each group, and we ran it [inaudible 00:32:47] time. Every time, these students with the EEG cap, setting intention, sending intention in the group, had an immediate effect, and it was essentially a global quieting of those parts of the brain that are involved in creating a sense of separation. That concerns things like the parietal lobs, which sit sort of to the back of the head. They help us navigate through space, but they also make us understand what’s me and what’s not me. They were dialed way down, but so were the parts of the brain involved with worry, doubt, negativity. That was also way down too. What you’re seeing essentially is a brainwave signature of someone in a feeling of ecstatic oneness. Very different from ordinary meditation, very different brainwave signature, which was, the meditator usually may feel a slight sense of expansion, but usually has a sense of still being there and being present. These people were lost in the larger group kind of situation.
Lynne McTaggart: What it was much more like, almost identical to, were the brainwave signatures as recorded by Andrew Newberg, Dr. Andrew Newberg, at the University of Pennsylvania who studied Sufi masters during chanting and Buddhist monks during ecstatic prayer. They had identical brainwave signatures. But here is, of course, the difference. Those people, a Sufi master or a Buddhist monk, requires years and years of disciplined training, and also hours and hours of priming to get into that state. My people were total novices, most of them hadn’t even meditated, they were just student volunteers, and all they had was a 13 minute video from me, telling them how to do this. Nevertheless, they were transported into that extraordinary altered state. Of course, as we know with these groups, that has seemed to be involved in these healings as well. It made me understand that when you’re talking about healing practices, when you’re talking about altered states, you don’t need sweat lodges, you don’t need iowaska, you don’t need years of discipline practice, all you need is a small group and a common intention, and you are transported into the miraculous.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean, you did a phenomenal experiment using just these concepts called the American Peace Intention Experiment, which was webcast on Gaia around the world last year, September 30th to October 5th in 2017. Can you tell us about that, and if it’s still available to view?
Lynne McTaggart: When we did this, I wanted to do a webcast and try to send an intention to heal America. We decided to choose the most violent place in America, which turned out to be an area of northern St. Louis, Missouri, along the Northbridge Avenue section of that. For six days, as part of this broadcast, I invited all of the viewers to send intention to this area, and we showed pictures of it, we had a lovely little meditative music.
Lynne McTaggart: Then, what you have to do with a peace experiment, and we’ve run peace experiments I think, excuse me, five times now, what you have to do is wait a lot of months afterward because you have to see what unfolds. I mean, if you measure the effects of violence, violent crime, the week after you’ve done it, I mean, that’s meaningless. What you have to see is whether or not there is an ongoing trend.
Lynne McTaggart: We [inaudible 00:36:53] and we finished on October, in early October, we patiently waited six months to … well, more than six months, we needed six months worth of data to see about the trends. I asked Dr. Jessica Utts, who has done … she’s a professor of statistics at the University of California, and I asked her to do the mapping of what had happened afterward. She’s just finished, she just sent it back to me because we had to have statistics from October to March, and those six months, and then it took … we had to get them from the police, which we didn’t get til late April.
Lynne McTaggart: When we looked it over, what I asked her to do was to go through monthly statistics of violent crime and property crime, and make them separate for all of Saint Louis, and then just that area, which was … one of the neighborhoods that’s there is an area called Fairground. That’s one of the most violent areas, it’s got … it has a higher … it’s got a violence level that’s about 300% higher than the typical other part of America. It pretty much has … its great claim to fame is negative superlatives, the most violent area, the poorest, the this, the that, that kind of thing.
Lynne McTaggart: We looked at violent crime there and property crime. We looked at violent crime and property crime for all of St. Louis, and we looked at it from September 2014 to March 2018. Then, Jessica mapped what should have happened based on a trend and what did happen. What was extraordinary was every other part, property crime in Fairground, property crime in all of St. Louis, violent crime in all of St. Louis, all of it went up, except for violent crime in Fairground, where we sent intention, which actually dropped compared to the six months of the year before, it dropped 43%.
Wendy Myers: Wow. That’s unbelievable.
Lynne McTaggart: We’ve had this with every intention experiment where we’ve done it for six or seven days, I think we’ve done it six days or eight days, where we’ve measured it with this kind of vigor we’ve had, we’ve had this kind of lowering of violence. Did we do this? Who knows, it could be total coincidence except that every time we’ve done it, we’ve had the same result. When you start having that four, five, six times, it starts getting more compelling.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes. Yeah, that’s just so fascinating how you’re able to impact so many different facets, like people’s health or their mindset and even violent crime, Sri Lanka, I mean, it’s just a … if the intention experiment was impactful in that way in Sri Lanka. It’s just so fascinating, and I just love this conversation with you, and I love the work that you’re doing, I love your book The Field, and I’m just so appreciative that you came on and shared with us and shared with the listeners everything that you’re doing. Can you tell the listeners more about you and where they can find you?
Lynne McTaggart: Sure. I run loads of different intention experiments. I also run teleseminars, workshops, and retreats. To find out more about all of that, you can come onto my website lynnemctaggart.com, and just sign up and be part of the intention experiments. But also, if you want to set up a virtual power of eight group, we have an area on our website, lynnmctaggart.com/forum, that is just dedicated to people announcing or joining virtual groups in their time zone. We have hundreds and hundreds of groups forming.
Lynne McTaggart: Also, I have a, coming up in the end of June, I have a specific teleseminar, Becoming a Better Healer with the Power of Eight. That’s a teleseminar, running for three … over a week, three sessions with lots of downloads. It’s really aimed at healing professionals of all persuasions. If people want to try to use intention and learn how to do it with an advanced course, that’s what I’m doing right now.
Wendy Myers: That’s fascinating. Yeah, I love that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, well, Lynne, thank you so much for coming on the show. I so appreciate your time.
Lynne McTaggart: I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Wendy Myers: Everyone, thank you so much for listening. My name is Wendy Myers, you can learn more about me at myersdetox.com. You can also learn about how to do your own bioenergetics healing program at neshealth.com.
Wendy Myers: Please take two minutes to go to iTunes and leave us a review, so that we can get our word out and our healing messages to more people. Thank you so much for listening today.
