From Aura to Algorithm: The Search For A Universal Healing Principle

When she was five years old, she tried to heal her mother by shaping the colors of her aura. Three decades later, she came across machine algorithms that mimic nature’s healing principle. Today, she combines both natural and machine-made fields to stretch the possibilities of non-intrusive medicine.

Imagine an intelligent species of fish debating the existence of water. For the majority, water doesn’t exist because it’s simply not there to be seen. A minority believes that water may exist but in some type of paranormal dimension. And just a small handful of fish can see and feel the flow of the water, but keep it a secret, for fear of appearing weird.

Mechthild Rex-Najuch was a rare fish by the time she was five.

Not only did Mechthild see the aura of a person, but of everything that was alive. When she walked out in the forest, the leaves, branches, blades of grass bled like watercolor on canvas. The aura seemed chaotic at times, but it sought order, like a fractal kaleidoscope opening new vistas, or a river rushing towards the sea.

When there were blocks in energy, the aura hit a bend, the colors dimmed, the river slowed down.

That’s how she knew her mother was ill.

“Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease.” 

― Hippocrates

It is not uncommon for gifted kids to see the aura, but the talent usually fades right around puberty. Mechthild was an exception. The visions only became stronger as she developed herself. The irony was that her talent connected her with everything but her kind.

Mechthild grew up in a tiny village near Bremen, Germany. There were only five houses with 30 adults living next to the forest. The adults all had their individual aura, often revealing secrets that Mechthild kept to herself. She was already considered “a bit too creative” by the tiny community.

When Mechthild sensed her mother’s decline, her first instinct was to try and patch up her broken aura. She found plants in the forest that contained the missing color spectrum. She made herbal tea and ointments out of them, tending to her mother’s aura with brushstrokes.

Despite brief remissions, her mother kept getting worse. She was eventually diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

One day an electro-acupuncturist treated her mother. It was as if the river broke through the bend. Her mother lit up, began to walk and talk. For two days, everything was as it should be. Then she relapsed. The light was still there, just not inside her.

A few days later the light departed, too.

“We know today that man, essentially, is a being of light.” 

― Prof. Fritz-Albert Popp

At school, Mechthild painted, played music, danced, wrote stories, studied herbs, and dabbled with the occult. She wanted to be everything and everywhere — although often alone.

She got better at reading people and places. By 15, she was able to leave her body and read people remotely.

After graduating, she studied physiotherapy and met a biologist who recognized both her talents and isolation. He recommended she study quantum physics, which she did. Along with shamanism. Magnetics. Gems. Electrotherapy. Martial Arts. Dance. Herbal medicine. Biology. Anatomy. Histology. Craniosacral therapy.

The founder and visionary of the California Craniosacral Institute, Hugh Milne, was puzzled by Mechthild’s non-stop craving for learning.

“What are you waiting for, lady? You have everything you need. What am I supposed to teach you?” Milne wondered.

Mechthild wanted to comprehend the human energy field on a practical, scientific level. She tried to tie it to other medical disciplines but found little help. The experts in new medical fields aren’t trained to think of the body as a connected system. They were like blindfolded men trying to describe an elephant by fumbling at its tail and trunk, Mechthild lamented.

When she finally opened up her first clinic in 1993, she combined it with a dance studio, a martial arts gym, and a library. She had two black belts and a dozen diplomas from medical and alternative therapy fields. Although she hated to promote herself,  the clinic took off very quickly because her clients raved about her.

People who had seen several doctors for their chronic conditions felt seen and understood with Mechthild — often for the first time. The trust she developed with her clients was the first step in healing. Lab reports would mostly confirm what Mechthild already saw and felt from their fields.

Universal Healing

She combined a broad spectrum of methods, focusing on her hands to redirect energy where it was needed most. She made it clear to her clients that she wasn’t healing anyone, she was simply aligning the body to have the energy it needed to become self-healing. Her ability to see the bend — the interruption in energy flow — became her signature mark.

Over time, she began to detect a pattern. She kept a detailed record of every client, what method worked, and when and why. Everyone was vastly different energetically, with individual archetypal rhythms, speeds, and phases — but there was also a universal principle underlying the healing process. Nature had a way of continually reorganizing the vibrations by shifting between chaos and order.

Was there a universal healing principle that could be employed at will?

“Future medicine will be the medicine of frequencies.” 

― Albert Einstein

Biologists have argued about the secret that drives life since the beginning of, well, biology.

Modern medicine sees human functionality at par with a machine. By breaking the body down to its chemical components, we can figure out function and behavior. The disease comes from an intruder, a mutation or pathological microorganism, which can be fought with chemical or surgical countermeasures.

Energy practitioners believe that matter and behavior is a manifestation of energy flow. The disease is about hindering the flow.

Today, this conceptual divide is stronger than ever between modern medicine and energy medicine. One seeks to eliminate symptoms and the other in order to deal with the energetic causes.

In the late 19 century, time and circumstance favored the machine perspective. After millennia of religious subordination, we were ready to replace an invisible and dogmatic god with nuts and bolts logic.

Copernicus had flung Earth from the center of the divine to the edge of stardust. Newton had descrambled the behavior of physical objects, planets, and human limbs with calculus. Darwin had erased doubt with the theory of evolution, random mutations, and natural selection.

The mechanistic belief system shaped the modern world, especially the world of medicine, by declaring it the only real science.

In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation commissioned a single gentleman, Abraham Flexner, to standardize medical education and practice under a scientific standard. The report that Flexner wrote abolished the bulk of energy medicine. Collective knowledge from homeopathy to naturopathy, from acupuncture to Ayurveda, became foreign to the modern medical paradigm. Medical education, regulation and licensing followed the modern monorail, which saw the human body as a complex machine that could be patched up when broken. “Alternative” practitioners were increasingly discredited and delicensed in the post-Flexner century.

Other developments supported the mechanistic view. When Crick and Watson discovered the DNA helix in 1953, we began to regard genes as the new Supreme Overlords of organisms.

Western medicine became the fourth largest industry in the world with state-of-the-art chemical intervention and surgical technology — but something profound was lacking from its promise.

Chronic disease rates continued to accelerate over the century until they hit a remarkable milestone. Today, for the first time in history, chronic disease is the norm and health is the exception.

In America, noncommunicable chronic diseases account for 88 percent of all deaths, or nearly 3 million people per year. More than 80 autoimmune conditions have been identified as “new” and “incurable”  in the last decade. Half of the men and forty percent of women will have cancer in their lifetime.  One in five suffers from anxiety or depression. The list goes on.

Why, in the age of modern science, are humans sicker than ever before in history?

I asked Mechthild the question in September 2018, during an interview in Hamburg, Germany.

“We got disconnected,” she answered without pause.

“In nature, we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.” 

―Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Energetic disconnection. Tens of thousands of records from clients spell the same story. What makes Mechthild’s documents particularly unique, is that they are not just her observations but also hard data in the form of digital algorithms that measure hundreds of millions of variables in the human energy field.

The “digitalization” of her practice began 18 years ago after an accidental meeting with a group of biophysicists from Germany, who were experimenting with the therapeutic potential of weak electromagnetic fields of cells and living organisms. They called the principle Vitalfeld (German for “vital field”).

The meeting changed her life. It put her on a path that merged science and energy healing with a practical, reproducible, and measurable effect.

Simple frequency generators were popular in the late 19th century and used for various ailments like bone fractures, pain, and inflammation before biophysical principles were sidelined by Flexner’s report.

The new biophysical pioneers saw 21st-century restart for biophysical medicine with novel computer algorithms that could influence the human field in a manner that had clinical value.

Isolating the therapeutic field was a massive undertaking, both theoretically and technologically. The system needed to measure and generate an unprecedented spectrum of frequencies, ranging from a few cycles per second to hundreds of Gigahertz, while eliminating interference from other types of radiation. It meant figuring out the emission spectrum of every cell, organ, microorganism, and their relation to each other.

The new biophysicists weren’t building the idea from scratch. They collected and dissected a century worth of research and experiments from forgotten archives, buried legacies, forgotten innovators. They stood on the shoulders of forgotten giants, such as Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp and Nikola Tesla.

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” 

―Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla’s universe, made entirely of energy and waves, was too far out for the newly born mechanistic world in the 1880s. Although Tesla’s innovations transformed a century of electronics, his biophysical concepts of reality failed to capture a wider audience.

Four decades later, quantum mechanics revealed that what was going on inside the atom was vibrations inside 99.9999999999996 percent emptiness. It stood to reason, then, that molecules, cells and the rest of the human organism are made of the same stuff. Knock on wood. What seems like solid matter to the knuckles, merely is high vibrational energy.

The German biophysicists saw through the wood, along with a handful of international biologists and physicists.

One of them is the father of epigenetics, Dr. Bruce Lipton, whose own epiphany came after he observed a cell without DNA function normally — supposedly an impossibility under classical biology. Lipton’s study eventually relegated DNA to a protein blueprint, good enough to build bricks, but not to build houses.

Independently, both Lipton and the Vitalfeld physicists worked on the same conundrum. What really governed cellular behavior? The answer would redefine the reality of the human health equation.

Lipton analyzed the cell’s behavior through an electron microscope and discovered that all the important decisions come from the cell’s membrane, the thin layer that surrounds the cell and acts as both a brain and an antenna of the smallest living entity. The membrane decides which proteins to fold based on the signals it receives from the environment.

The Germans observed the same cellular interaction in the biophysical realm by measuring the cell-environment interference directly. They could see the epigenetic aspect of life before Lipton coined the word.

The environmental signals — which covers everything from nutrition and chemicals to electromagnetic fields, sounds, light, radiation, our thoughts and emotions (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Theta frequencies) and also the fields of other organisms, fauna, flora, and nature itself — is the architect.

Chemistry alone is too slow to explain the realtime complexity of life. Even DNA shapes itself according to environmental signals, a key factor of adaptation and survival.

The Vitalfeld breakthroughs brought together top experts from various fields — physicists, doctors, biologists, energy therapists — to help realize the practical applications of a new frontier of biophysical medicine.

One of them was Mechthild.

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

―Werner Heisenberg

“The first thing I told them (Vitalfeld team) is that I didn’t like machines. I explained that there are two fields, one is from the body and the other is not, and it takes a lot of work to bring them together. A machine could interfere in that work,” Mechthild remembers.

She was very skeptical about machines that could potentially replicate her handiwork.

The biophysicists were familiar with the skepticism of energy healers. To connect their thinking, both sides had to stretch their language. The biophysicists thought in numbers while Mechthild thought in pictures and feelings. Mechthild described what she saw and felt in specific therapeutic fields while the engineers developed new algorithms for the machine.

Over the following decade, the bridge between the “non-verifiable,” abstract parts of energy medicine, slowly dovetailed with scientific reality.

Then, one day,  she got to test one of the first Vitalfeld machines directly.

“I open this large box and inside is another box with a power cable. No manual. It was called MitoSan. As soon as I plugged it in, I was attracted to it. It changed the room.”

One of the first fields that Mechthild tested with a machine was related to the craniosacral pulse, a pattern known and used mostly by osteopaths. The pulses originate from cerebrospinal fluids (CSF) that course through the brain and the spine, down to the sacrum. Mechthild’s hand tapped into the CSF field instinctively. She believed that CSF carries a special significance for people whose health issues are primarily trauma driven.

The Vitalfeld team programmed the CSF spectrum into the first machine. Mechthild observed the effects of the new algorithms on her clients.

“I hid the machine under the table so my clients wouldn’t be distracted by it. Some of my clients looked up at me, puzzled, asking how I could touch them without touching them. That was the general reaction.”

The reaction from her clients changed her mind about machine-generated fields. They were as real as her own.

“[A] lady in her 50s, Anna, with 20 years of arthritis, ankles swollen, came in. I could feel her pain just by looking at her. So I decided to give her the machine first, just to test it. I could see it shift her field, just like with my hands.”

She placed a bestrode, a specially designed antenna, under Anna. After about half an hour, her ashen face seemed to come back to life. It was the first time she experienced painlessness in two decades.

When Anna’s pain came back three or four days later, Mechthild would repeat the treatment a few times, until her improvement became permanent.

“When cells get the energy they need, they start fixing things, which means accessing even more energy. This is why sometimes we feel worse before we begin to heal. It’s known as the healing crisis.”

After two months of meetings, Anna’s arthritis was gone, for good.

“The first experiences marked a major shift in my practice. The field that I had worked [in] with my hands could now be replicated and measured by a machine. In a sense, I could be there for my clients even when I was not there. It spelled endless possibilities,” remembers Mechthild.

“We are always doing. We’ve become human doings rather than human beings.”

―Mechthild Rex-Najuch 

In chronic disease, the body doesn’t have sufficient energy to counter the cumulative stressors — toxins, stress, nutrition-poor diets, etc. — from a modern lifestyle, thereby undermining our natural ability to self-heal. The key is to bring energy back in the system, so the body can regenerate again.

The Vitalfeld team knew that nature’s frequencies are regenerative by design. They had a lot to learn from nature.

Vitalfeld combined Schumann resonances, for example, as a base carrier in many of the therapeutic algorithms. The Schumann resonance is a planetary wave, generated in the upper layers of our atmosphere by lightning that feeds the planet with an extremely low frequency (ELF) band, a spectrum that begins at 7.83Hz. This frequency also happens to match human consciousness at the optimal alpha brain wave state.

Schumann resonance is a typical example of a natural rhythm that we miss in city conditions when we are insulated with concrete, asphalt, rubber, and soles.

Insulation from Schumann resonances has been shown to cause fatigue, migraines, brain fog, mood changes, and cellular degeneration. But reintroducing the same vibrations — even when generated by machines in insulated areas such as cement homes and offices, underground facilities, and space stations — can cancel out the negative symptoms.

In 2009, Nobel laureate and HIV co-discoverer Dr. Luc Montagnier used Schumann resonances to successfully organize random strands of DNA in a remarkable experiment that tested the ability of water to retain genetic information via electromagnetic frequencies. When Schumann resonances were absent, the DNA was unable to reorganize itself.

Schumann resonance generators are today being used to counter the slowly accumulating degenerative effect from electrosmog, such as cell phones, wifi routers, and other manmade microwaves. Yet, Schumann resonance is only a fraction of the massive bandwidth of natural frequencies that have a regenerative effect on our body, mind, and spirit.

Today, Vitalfeld mimics and combines thousands of therapeutic algorithms.

“The variability and range of natural frequencies that we are exposed to correlate with our health. Vitalfeld made the natural fields available in therapeutic, controllable situations, for the first time,” said Mechthild.

The list of fields that were relevant to our wellbeing grew exponentially over the following decade. The Vitalfeld team developed a new generation of devices that could scan any material samples into digital spectra.

Every material has its signature frequency spectrum. Any combination of frequencies can be relayed back into the human field in a waveform, opening up a new universe of therapeutic possibilities. Orthomolecular substances that are administered in both pill and waveform, for example, enhance the metabolic update dramatically (in the case of vitamin C, up to 300 percent faster).

But there was still the question of how to diagnose a patient, to determine what localized fields they needed for optimal regeneration.

In 2005, the idea to take a snapshot of the entire human field — to see what’s actually going on in the human energy equation — became real.

“Here is the amazing thing: the caterpillar and the butterfly have the exact same DNA. They are the same organism but are receiving and responding to a different organizing signal.” 

―Bruce H. Lipton

The Vitalfeld team had been working on a diagnostic application for over seven years. The first model came out in 2005 and was called Global Diagnostic (GD).

The GD was both an instant hit and an instant mystery to traditional practitioners. Everyone loved its speed and accuracy, but few understood the principle.

Mechthild notes:

Most diagnostic solutions work based on the data that we give them about a client. The GD starting point was to give the machine as little information about the subject as possible.  It wasn’t programmed to discover disease or symptoms, but to measure how well the body is communicating with itself.

The GD produced frequencies in the 1 Hz – 1Ghz range to map the energy efficiency of the body. In a healthy body, the organs, microorganisms, muscles, bones, and cells would show high resonance.

Think of a pair of tuning forks separated by a space, such as a room. The closer their frequencies match, the higher their resonance, the more dynamic is their exchange of energy and information. Ergo, the low resonance areas picked by GD in a human body point to current or potential problems, because that’s where energy flow is not optimal.

“We did endless field tests. The practitioners couldn’t believe how closely the diagnosis corresponded with actual health issues,” remembers Mechthild.

The GD scan lasts less than 10 minutes, but it gives astonishingly accurate results. Yet, both traditional energy practitioners and modern doctors have a hard time grasping its principle.

Mechthild was asked to train the first group of practitioners for GD. Most of the 120 people in the conference room — doctors, physiotherapists, general therapists — were dumbstruck by her presentation. But even the hardest skeptics became interested in digging deeper when they tested the device for themselves.

The GD could spot issues that blood tests would miss. Things that clients had never told anyone else. GD would map specific bacteria, parasites, toxins, and environmental chemicals that were stressing the system. It could detect energy variations in the endocrine, metabolic, cardiovascular, urogenital, reproductive, lymph, and immune system, along with 610 vital objects such as specific organs, vessels, and bone structures. It spotted allergies, inflammation, and sensitivities that clients didn’t even know they had, along with gut microbial balance, metabolism, toxic loads, and other stressors that affect energy flow.

The latest GD tracks over 200 million data points in eight minutes and connects directly to a new generation of therapeutic machines that can reproduce the spectra of over 12,000 substances in the human system: minerals, vitamins, nutrients, herbs, plants, micro-nutrients, homeopathic, and ayurvedic medicines.

Individualized, non-intrusive, preventative medicine became real with the introduction of GD. Since then, Vitalfeld practitioners have adopted diverse ways to apply the frequencies to a broad range of conditions, from chronic diseases, sports injuries, skin disorders, and depression to burnout.

Today some 3,000 clinics use Vitalfeld applications. but biophysical medicine overall is still largely unrecognized by mainstream practitioners. New practitioners have mostly heard about Vitalfeld by word-of-mouth.

After its century-long suppression, biophysical medicine is finally reaching a critical mass, however. Modern doctors begin to recognize the speed and accuracy of frequency measurements.

In late 2018, the Vitalfeld team introduced a new generation of machines. The frequency ranges have much wider latitude and can work in parallel. Units have also become smaller and less expensive. One of the units is a portable device called E-Relief. E-Relief packs precise Schumann resonances, digitalized substances, and fractal frequencies to counter the most common modern stressors like electrosmog or jet lag, while also supporting sleep, regeneration, and countering pain without the use of opiates. Therapy can be localized with an optional bestrode.

New clinical trials are also coming out, one of the most interesting ones being in the field of fertility. A prominent clinic in Innsbruck was recently able to increase the longevity of sperm cells by up to 35 percent by using targeted frequencies for no more than 10 minutes at a time. This is crucial because the DNA degradation of sperm and egg cells is the first casualty of environmental stressors such as electrosmog, which is partly responsible for the dramatic decline in fertility rates.

Biophysical medicine is beginning to make its mark, although the grapevine is still more of a whisper than a buzz. A critical mass of early adopters is needed before revolutionary technologies can become mainstream. The inertia of adopting new paradigms has delayed the popularization of electric motors (invented in 1821) and telephones (invented in 1876), for example. When it comes to biophysical medicine, we are finally nearing a critical mass of users who accept a more complex, connected universe, where we can be fully in control of our own health and destiny.

Once a year Mechthild travels to Tanzania, where she often hangs out with a local Masai tribe.

“The Masai are naturally connected to nature, grounded with their bare feet. They have a way of saying, ‘If you don’t listen, you don’t learn,’ something our experts in the West could benefit from as well.”

The Masai lifestyle encapsulates the promise of biophysical medicine.

“I call it co-regulation. This is what my practice is about today. Helping people get re-connected, inside and outside. It’s what health is all about.”

Jan Wellmann
Founder & Health Coach
Energy For Living

 

PS. Find more information about the Vitalfeld principle and research here.

Like many other colonized cultures, Indians are sick and dying from the aftermath of Western dietary standards. But they also face a healthy alternative, if they tap into their old traditions. I didn’t discover this fact until 2017, after a decade-long journey that brought me to India to learn the principle of self-healing… a principle that can help a few us here in the West too.

I was in my early 40s when I began to battle a legion of demons. They came in various forms, from microbial attacks, infections, and gut disorders to cyclical fatigue and mood shifts that undermined my overall mojo and wellbeing. Every year, the symptoms got just a little bit worse. I surmised it was all part of a natural aging process.

I was dead wrong.

One day, a doctor gave me 72 hours to live, if I didn’t opt for an experimental antibiotic dripper. The infection levels in my blood were off the chart. I survived, but the subsequent infections became even more chronic, a common aftermath of antibiotics.

As an investigative journalist and co-owner of a health and wellness site HoneyColony in Los Angeles, I went guinea pig on myself, trying to figure out what the problem really was.  I experimented with dozens of different approaches. Western. Tibetan. Chinese. Holistic. Alternative. Shamanistic. I tried all the miracle cures, supplements, drugs, and diets that promised vitality and resistance. And every year I kept getting just a little bit worse.

My healing didn’t begin until I was struck by an insight.

The insight was this. There is no expert, doctor, shaman, drug, pill, or another miracle, that can heal the human body. Only the body can heal itself if it has enough energy. “Vis medicatrix natural,” a.k.a. “the body heals itself naturally,” wrote Hippocrates, two and a half millennia ago.

The realization contained a catch.

Understanding Bio-Individuality

If we assume that we heal naturally with sufficient energy, the next question is how do we measure and manage natural energy in our body? Our metabolism, or the way we process energy, is as unique as our fingerprint, remarkably different from person to person. Lab tests, MRIs, X-rays, or stethoscopes don’t measure energy. Most doctors don’t even recognize energy as a medical concept. Yet cellular energy (ATP) produced by mitochondria covers over 90 percent of our functions, and impairment of mitochondrial energy is increasingly identified as a root causative factor of chronic disease and aging-related decrepitation.

Even when we recognize the importance of energy, the challenge is that the way in which we digest and produce energy through foods, air, water, electromagnetic radiation, even our relationships and sense of purpose, is highly individual. Ergo, a functional healing protocol must be equally bio-individual.

The scientific concept of metabolic individuality, or bio-individuality, was established by Linus Pauling, a quantum chemist, biochemist and one of the founders of molecular biology, half a century ago. Bio-individuality is the reason why most healing protocols are unpredictable, why one medicine or diet that works for one person, can be poison for another. Pauling understood Hippocrates’ insight, but he didn’t have the tools to measure bio-individuality.

The good news is that humans have an innate, evolutionary ability to sense what type of energy our bio-individuality needs in order to prosper and heal. But the ultimate catch-22 of the 21^stcentury is that most people also don’t have the requisite energy to tap into this sense. It’s like having a nose, without a sense of smell. Modern lifestyle has desensitized us with toxins and nutrition-poor diets and then enslaved us to a healthcare model that is obsessed with symptoms, not root causes.

Yes, hospitals and allopathic doctors are great for broken legs, surgery, acute care, but when it comes to a chronic disease, it’s better to hedge your bets.

The catch-22 is particularly true in the USA and Europe, but also other Westernized countries like India, where symptomatic medicine has overtaken millennia of natural, functional healing methods. Today, Indians are literally crashing from inadequate energy levels, blithely unaware of their root problem. High performing executives in their 40s or 50s are running on adrenaline and dopamine, imagining that their energy levels are just fine, whereas what’s really happening is that their system is speeding on first gear, with tremendous wear and tear that will ultimately crash the engine.

The final key to my own healing was Pauling’s wet dream, the ability to measure bio-individuality accurately and objectively, without having to rely on biased judgment. Molecular blood tests are known as metabolomics track so-called metabolites, the traces of over 5,000 energy processes in human biochemistry, to identify specific blockades and deficiencies in e.g. the Krebs cycle. Metabolomics is less than a decade old science, but it’s catching on fast (you can do a free survey here to see if the method applies to you). Based on metabolomic information, a metabolically certified doctor can recommend a precise nutritional, supplementation, and lifestyle protocol to restart the human engine.

This is what self-healing is about, after all: to give the human body enough energy to fix itself. The method is relevant for all chronic disease conditions.

Metabolomic data shows that the most fundamental blockades we have in our biological combustion engine are based usually on nutritional deficiencies and/or excessive toxins.  When I began to address both areas, I not only healed but transformed. Within six months of starting the protocol, I was flying mentally and physically. No more recurring doctor visits. No more prescriptions. No more shifting energy and motivation levels. No more excess weight. Just a pure flow in a state of perfect health and energy.

It was a gift that I couldn’t just keep to myself. I shifted my priorities to start helping others.

Coming To India

I came to India in June 2017 to help a friend lose weight and regain his health. I had just spent two years deep in the Peloponnesian mountains of Greece on a bio-individually adjusted nutrition and lifestyle protocol, eager to share my newly found zest.

Pankaj, 54, my friend, was a smart and thriving businessman, but he was also severely overweight, with pre-diabetes, deteriorating energy levels, general inflammation, mood shifts, chronic pain in his torso, and lower back.  To my shock, as I would discover, his condition was not an exception in India, it was pretty much the default in his age class.

After Western nutritional habits became the norm during the colonial years, India began its tailspin. The low-fat regimens introduced in the 1980s made matters worse. Excessive carbs, sugar, grains, vegetable oils, compromised air, and water combined with scant exercise and a stressful, metropolitan lifestyle, has caused a massive toll on the Indian population. India is about a decade behind the US in terms of its chronic health disaster. The effects are visibly apparent in the shape and composure of Indian bodies, but also in their increasingly stressed and depressed mindsets.

Today, over half of the deaths in India are due to a chronic disease, with cardiovascular, respiratory, and digestive issues as the leading causes. Diabetes is rampant in at least one-in-five, but pre-diabetes is becoming as common as obesity. And these complications are for the first time also appear in children.

India is on the fast track to becoming another America, where half of the men and 40 percent of women get cancer, two-thirds are overweight, 70 million have one or more autoimmune conditions, up to 88 percent of deaths involve a chronic disease… and rising.

In the case of Pankaj, I integrated an approach that combined a metabolomic nutrition and supplementation protocol with additional lifestyle tweaks that I had picked up over years of experimentation.

Some of the lifestyle tweaks include getting at least 20 minutes of sun on the skin per day, to jack up vitamin D levels. To get a sweat going with a simple exercise, 3-4 times a week. To detox with heat once or twice a week. To drink at least three liters of water per day, spiced with a pinch of Himalayan salt for better hydration (filtered water doesn’t hydrate as well) or molecular hydrogen. To give up antibiotics by using natural antimicrobials, like colloidal silver. And other simple tweaks.

The big change always begins with the diet, which needs to be bio-individualized. But even before that, it’s necessary to address the most glaring mistakes in the general Indian diet. Sugar and grains are probably the biggest killers in India. They spike up insulin levels, which in turn convert carbs into excessive fat, cause wear and tear on cellular and vascular levels, and over time manifests as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, overweight, food addiction, cognitive issues, and rapidly fluctuating energy levels that have to be compensated with constant snacking of carbs.

Western standards also suppressed some of the healthiest aspects of the Indian traditional diet, which used to be rich in fermented foods and fats like ghee and coconut oil. Today modern Indians cook with vegetable oils that are high in trans fats, essentially an industrial poison that causes oxidative damage.

Like most Westerners, Indians think that low-fat foods help shed fat, whereas the opposite is true. It’s the excess sugar that accumulates into fat. By relearning to eat healthy fats, Indians can transform from sugar burners to fat burners and change the vitality in months.

Another dietary custom that was buried with colonialism is fermented foods. Rich and diverse in bacteria, fermented foods like canned vegetables help the gut function with proper metabolism and manufacture of brain chemicals. Over 90 percent of serotonin, the neurotransmitter that is associated with the feeling of wellbeing, for example, is manufactured in the gut. Yet most Indians are bombarded with antibiotics that nuke the gut’s ability to produce brain and body fuels, exacerbated further by a sugar-rich diet that feeds pathogenic bacteria. Gut dysfunction is a major source of chronic inflammation and mood disorders in India.

Lifestyle and diet tweaks can transform the principal sources of biochemical energy, but there is also a bigger picture involved in the healing process.

We expel and accrue energy from multiple inputs and outputs. Relationships can drain or charge us. Prearranged marriages in India wreak havoc in couples after the initial buzz of romance wears out. Childhood trauma, even if it remains subconscious, can keep us chronically deficient with energy, even if we do everything else right. Our careers, hobbies, and work activity are massive energy factors… do we feel like we’re part of something meaningful (positive energy) or are we working just to make ends meet (negative energy)? Do we live in a primarily urban environment (negative) or do we ground ourselves in nature occasionally (positive)?  Do we work primarily in a sedentary position (negative) or do we get to move around frequently (positive)? The list goes on, and the prioritization of these factors is as individual as our dietary requirement. We simply have to learn to sense what we need in terms of energy, in multiple dimensions of our existence.

Empowering the individual to be self-sensing, self-directing and self-healing again is the main challenge for the average Indian, today. The alternative is the present: a steady biochemical collapse that afflicts the majority of the population, both on a physical and mental (consciousness) level.

When we address the root causes of our energy processes, the results are nothing short of a transformation. Pankaj reversed his pre-diabetes in less than three months. His sensation of energy went up by a factor of three. He lost 15 kilograms naturally within the first 12 weeks, without restricting his calorie intake (the body achieves an optimal weight naturally when it gets the nutrition it needs). His skin and hair improved visibly, and most importantly the zest and drive got back up to youthful proportions. Not only is he running his family’s enterprise, but two more startups. Today, Pankaj gets up at sunrise, fully rested and ready to rock.

Other clients in India experienced natural weight loss without calorie restriction. Reversal of diabetes. Two to three times higher energy levels. Ability to rest deeply and soundly. Reversal of autoimmune and diabetes symptoms. Cognitive boost, positivity, and life zest. Mira, who is a 60-year old textile industry executive, used to have chronic fatigue and cyclical crashes during the day, indigestion, overall body inflammation and pain, hair loss, insomnia, depression, and anxiety. Six months later, her friends can barely recognize her. Her skin shines, her hair is growing strong again, she is pain-free, sleeps soundly, and kickboxes with energy levels that her trainer calls a “5X phenomenon.” Most importantly, she is positive and driven again, performing with youthful capacity.

The principle of Energy For Living is to measure, understand and identify metabolic individuality with the most advanced metabolomic blood and urine tests, but also to coach the client with nutrition and lifestyle practicalities until they have enough energy to be self-guiding and self-healing. The key is to understand that there are no miracles outside of the body’s self-regulatory ability with energy.

A typical healing process takes between three and six months. It is energy-giving in itself to observe the full-body-and-mind upgrade that happens in clients after they get their first nudge in energy levels. Coaching is an integral part of this process, to make sure clients don’t revert back to their old ways.

According to metabolomic data of over 15,000 patients, most people live at 30 to 40 percent of their natural energy capacity. Someone with a chronic disease may be down to 10-15 percent of their potential, without even realizing it. The body tends to compensate for low energy with hormones, making one feel as if everything is normal until the inevitable crash needs to be compensated with coffee, drugs, carbs or energy drinks – the vicious cycle that wears and tears our constitution on a cellular level.

Driven and successful people in their late 40s and 50s are often in this predicament, sensing that something is fundamentally wrong, but ignoring the signs… until they face the inevitable crash. With enough knowledge and awareness, this problem can be reversed. Unfortunately, a lot of people need to experience a crash before they understand the severity of their situation.

Understanding the principle of energy and how critical it is to our performance, stability, happiness, and future needs to become a key consideration again, especially for people living under the Western paradigm of compromised nutrition and lifestyle.

Indians themselves accept too many Western norms as axioms, whereas their own energetic heritage happens to be the oldest, most versatile, and rich in human history. Ayurveda, which predates metabolomic science on nutrition by a cool 7,000 years, states the same energetic principle of bio-individuality, just with a slightly different approach that requires decades of training for ayurvedic masters. The Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures, the Sanskrit heritage all boil down to the principle and flow of life energy, of self-healing, which begins in our mitochondria.

Jan Wellmann
Founder & Health Counselor
EnergyForLiving

Psychotropics don’t treat a chemical imbalance, they cause it.

Army reservist Micah Johnson, 25, had a problem. He kept waking up in the night, dreaming about his buddies being blown up in combat. During the day he was fatigued, unable to focus, demotivated. The army doctor prescribed him the standard PTSD medication as a depression treatment.

By the time Micah got back from Afghanistan, he was a mess. Even minor disturbances, like witnessing a small altercation at a shopping mall, gave him panic attacks.

On July 7, 2016, Micah went to a peaceful march in Dallas, protesting against police shootings; he took out an assault rifle and opened fire on the police. He took his time, shifting positions and continuing to fire, killing five officers. Hours later, the police sent a bomb-carrying robot after Micah. His nightmare finally caught up with an explosion that shook downtown Dallas.

In the media, Micah went down as yet another veteran who had gone postal, traumatized by the hells of war.

A month before Micah had his final episode, Dionisio Garza, 25, drove into Houston to visit some friends. Upon arriving, he decided to break into a tire shop to spend the night there. In the morning, he came out of the shop with an AR-15 assault rifle and released 212 rounds at passing people and cars, igniting a gas station, killing one and injuring three, before the SWAT team moved in.

A Depression Treatment Or A Synaptic Shaker

Garza and Micah shared more than a violent end. Both were being treated against PTSD with a standard depression treatment that included an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor), sedatives, and antipsychotics.

The idea behind an SSRI is that it artificially increases the availability of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter commonly linked to feelings of wellbeing. The first SSRI was released in 1987 as Fluoxetine, which became later known as Prozac or Sarafem. Today’s second-generation SSRIs are used to treat depression, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, bulimia, panic, anxiety, premature ejaculation, and a host of other disorders like PTSD.

If a doctor prescribes you an antidepressant, you can say “no, thank you,” if you don’t like the idea of artificially messing with your brain chemistry. In the military, it’s different, because you have no say.

According to a report from Veterans for America, “U.S. troops are being forced to take drugs like Prozac and Seroquel for anxiety and depression. Troops cannot refuse to take the drugs without consequences from their superiors.”

Although the military has classified the data on pharmaceutical usage, some reports estimate that at least 20 percent of soldiers are popping psychotropic cocktails like candy, often combining two or three drugs at the same time, including benzodiazepines (aka benzos) like Ativan, Valium, Xanax, Klonopin; painkillers like Lortab, Vicodin, Oxycontin; sedatives like Ambien or Lunesta; and SSRI antidepressants like Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa, Effecox, Luvox, Pristiq, Trazodone, Viibryd, Wellbutrin, Remeron, Lexapro, and Brintellix.

SSRI is an odd thing to prescribe for a trauma patient, incidentally, because it doesn’t just cause the synaptic gap to flood with serotonin but also with norepinephrine, which enhances emotional memory.

“A soldier taking a stimulant medication that releases norepinephrine in the brain, could be at higher risk of becoming fear-conditioned and getting PTSD in the setting of trauma,” writes Richard A Friedman, a professor of psychiatry and director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College.

SSRI meds may have dramatically boosted Micah’s emotional attachment to flying limbs, which is probably why the doctor may also have prescribed benzo to reduce his neuronal excitability, by boosting another neurotransmitter, GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid).

Let’s recap this logic. Benzos artificially reduce the communication between neurons while antidepressants artificially stimulate them. Any type of confusion that this might cause in the regular K-Mart shopper or the 19-year old grunt is typically handled by throwing in a sedative-like Ambien, and maybe even an antipsychotic like Seroquel. This kind of cocktail is quite common, judging by coronary reports.

Which came first, PTSD or SSRI?

On February 12, 2008, Marine Corporal Andrew White, 23, died in his sleep after being treated for PTSD, along with another three young West Virginia veterans who inexplicably all died during the same week. Andrew’s mother and father went on a mission to find out what happened, believing that their son’s and his friends’ deaths “must be a reaction to biological warfare’ in the battlefield. Twenty-three-year-old boys don’t just die in their sleep like that, right?

The parents were right, the cause of death was biological warfare. Except that the biological agent wasn’t Saddam Hussein’s WMD, but a prescription cocktail containing 20mg of Paxil (SSRI), 4mg of Klonopin (benzo) and 50mg of Seroquel (antipsychotic), prescribed to Andrew by his friendly VA doctor, who claimed that the dosage adhered to normal guidelines.

The case caused a rare outcry, to the point of prompting Senator Jim Webb to call on the Department Of Defense to release prescription drug data from the military in 2010. Needless to say, the data is still pending.

We can only estimate the true reach of this psychotropic pandemic. We know from mental health studies that 1 in 8 returning soldiers suffer from PTSD.  We also know that Gulf War syndrome alone affects more than 275,000 US and British veterans who were injected with an Anthrax vaccine, containing an illegal booster known as squalene. The symptoms include “severe headaches, nausea, muscular pain, joint swelling, short-term memory loss, and depression.”

Depression… again. As if Gulf War syndrome isn’t enough, most of the victims also get the standard PTSD cocktail.

Exposing soldiers to harm off the battlefield is not a novel tradition. Between 1945 and 1963 nearly 400 000 U.S. soldiers were subjected to debilitating amounts of radiation from nuclear bomb testing, without much ado.

Psychopharmaceuticals are the WMD of the mind. And this particular WMD is not limited to the military.

How Far Down Does The Rabbit Hole Go?

SSRIs are the most widely distributed antidepressants in the world today. One in six Americans takes a psychiatric drug, of which SSRI’s are the most common, followed by anxiety relievers and antipsychotics. According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability, affecting an estimated 322 million people worldwide.

One reason we almost never read about prescription drugs in connection to tragedies like the weekly mass shootings is that most of the perpetrators’ medical data remain classified, just like the medical data of the soldiers who commit suicide (22 of them per day) or other acts of violence. The pharmaceutical companies, in addition to the DOD, desperately need the data to remain in the dark. Still, some of the facts leak out through coroners’ reports, court cases, and frustrated relatives.

Stephen Paddock who killed at least 58 people and injured hundreds in Las Vegas in 2017, was on Diazepam, benzo which is linked to 2.52 times higher risk of homicide in a study of 950 offenders. This type of multiplier is cumulative, so if you combine e.g. opioid analgesics (multiplier 2.16) with a benzo regimen, slip in an antidepressant and maybe cap it off with an emotional trigger like a gambling loss or a faltering relationship, you may quickly creep up towards the critical limit of blowing the grand Mandalay Bay fuse.

You don’t have to be born fickle or weird to become depressed and go bazooka. All you need is the right chemical cocktail, prescribed by the wrong doctor, and trigger it with stress factors.

Some independent researchers believe that the single most common factor in all the mass shooting incidents over the last two decades is psychotropic drugs. PsychDrugshooters.com lists more than 100 shooters who went on a rampage with prescription drugs. SSRIstories.com has compiled more than  6,000 media stories in which SSRI drugs were linked to violent and adverse outcomes (you can search by categories such as “road rage,” “murder-suicide,” “postpartum reaction,” “workplace violence,” “celebrity,” et cetera, or by any of the 18 different SSRI drug names).

The public discourse about guns as the nation’s chief problem takes a new vector when we integrate the question of psychotropics. Guns do kill, but mostly in conjunction with the wrong chemical cocktail. Just like kitchen knives. Or ropes. Or duct tape.

The violence we witness today is the tip of the iceberg. The fundamental damage accrues silently, through the erosion of personal identity, loss of will, and a perversion of reality that may be tied to a collective neuronal imbalance.

How do you estimate the real damage from loss of performance, joy, and motivation in life? Observe the family unit, the military, the education system, the media, and even the highest echelons of the government. Something is off.

Having once gone through a mild version of withdrawal from benzo, I can’t even fathom the effect of the cocktails that today’s doctors prescribe routinely.

A Beverly Hills doctor prescribed Xanax to me without a question, to help me “sleep and relax” during an intense travel phase. It took less than a week to get me hooked. I flushed down the pills after my friend warned me about their side effects. The sudden cut-off was as brutal as a sledgehammer. I locked myself in an off-hour sauna compartment in Hong Kong, believing that I was surrounded by Chinese agents. I tried to calm myself with intermittent cold and warm showers, but ultimately what saved me was another benzo, followed by several months of careful withdrawal protocol.  

Right after the Hong Kong episode, I began to do my own research about stuff that I intended to pop into my mouth.

The Reality About Depression Treatment

Depression and most other common mental disorders don’t originate in the mind, but the gut. Ninety percent of serotonin is manufactured by bacteria in the digestive tract. Our gut influences how we perceive the world, through our emotions and thoughts, thanks to a direct chemical link between the gut and the brain.

The gut is the center of our emotional universe.

Our singular focus on the mind, or the concept of a “mental disorder,” is what enables Big Pharma to sell 320 million antidepressant descriptions alone per year.

The reality is that even the concept of an SSRI is sort of insane. There are no ultimate levels of serotonin to make us happy or depressed, angry or contemplative that we can just fix by messing around with neurons.. Neurotransmitter levels are highly individual, just like metabolism. The way the gut allocates the exact right amount of serotonin to the brain depends on factors that modern science hasn’t been able to figure out yet. Yet we take drugs to “re-uptake” serotonin, flood our receptors synthetically, expecting more to be better, and then counter the blowback by artificially adjusting other neurotransmitters like GABA. When that goes wrong, we drug the rest of our senses out. Cocktail complete. Tailspin in the making.

There is no evidence linking depression to a serotonergic imbalance, according to the National Institute Of Mental Health (NIMH). Mood disorders overall are more linked to epigenetic factors, the individual biological phenotype, and especially stress factors that originate in childhood, according to a serotonergic study published by the NCBI.

Neuroscientist Steven Hyman’s research also proves that when we treat depression as a mental condition with psychotropic cocktails, we’re not treating a chemical imbalance, we’re causing it.

When a patient first responds to an SSRI, there may be a period of temporary relief if the SSRI happens to be a match with the individual chemical imbalance. When the patient adjusts to a psychotropic drug over time, however, the brain undergoes a series of compensatory adaptations that often become permanent, and never normal.

Research into the long-term effects of antidepressants shows that only about 15 percent of patients go into remission, which is less than the placebo rate. The remaining 85 percent will experience longer relapses and gradually become chronically depressed.

The result is the present world at large, a jungle of psychological disorders.

So how do we fix this faulty equation? The answer to a functional depression treatment begins with what we shovel into the gut, morning, day, and evening.

We have to treat the gut first.

Psychotherapist Dr. Robert Hedaya gave up on antidepressants after doling out pills to patients for three decades with a miserable track record. He eventually got an idea to look at nutrition and other lifestyle factors. When he introduced wholesome, probiotic foods to enable a healthy bacterial balance, his patients established a healthy serotonin balance naturally.

The idea of a natural protocol is not a favorite amongst healthcare professionals who get a considerable part of their income by enabling drug sales. But a narrow spearhead of nutritionists and psychotherapists today are finally addressing mental disorders successfully with a protocol that has been around pretty much as long as the human race. The protocol boils down to 10 steps, none of which include prescription drugs.

1) Plenty of organic wholefoods sans grains and sugar

2) Plenty of healthy fats like coconut and olive oil

3) Plenty of fermented foods and probiotics

4) Plenty of water

5) Plenty of sunshine

6) Plenty of exercises

7) Plenty of love

8) Plenty of play

9) Some Natural remedies

(10) plenty of smiles.

Considering the track record of SSRIs, even a smirk may have a higher success rate.

Without healthy nutrition, synthetic drugs will continue to accelerate the tailspin. What psychiatrists call trauma or PTSD, is not the cause of depression or anxiety.  Once the gut re-establishes a healthy neurotransmitter balance in the brain, it’s easier to tackle the deeper programs, whether they originate in childhood or adult trauma. Most of us deal with one or another, but they are not the beasts that psychotropics make them out to be.