In Overeaters Anonymous, they talk about “trigger foods” – foods that bring on that bottomless pit, must-have-now, at-all-costs, inhale-kitchen insanity. I thought I didn’t have a trigger food. Food was my trigger food – salmon, brown rice, salad, ice cream, apples, you name it, I could go to town.

But then last week I decided to cut out all sugar, kick cheese out of my house, and all but totally stop eating fried food, because I was outta control. I figured I didn’t need to be ingesting those things for nutrition, so away with them! Then a few things happened that surprised me:

1. Food lost its sex appeal. It was no longer a source of entertainment, but rather a function of sustenance. I mean, seriously, when you take out all those ingredients, what’s left to play with?
2. I do not have the crazy reaction to the same foods that were making me crazy before. I do not desire to eat an entire watermelon or pound of beef. Which leads me to wonder: Did the cheese, fried oil, and sugar change my brain chemistry in such a way that food almost triggered an allergic reaction in me? By removing those ingredients, am I now experiencing food the way that people who are not compulsive eaters have experienced all foods their whole lives?
3. My eating behavior got more and more healthy each day, without trying. I went from inhaling two quesadillas, four oranges, and a big bowl of salad in one sitting, to having, oh, a small bowl of oatmeal. (With soy milk. Blech. Dairy milk is back in the fridge now, thank you very much.)
4. I suddenly found myself wanting a social and romantic life. I was the Happy Hermit for a long while there. But all of a sudden, you take away my cheese, sugar, and fried goods, and – hey, where’d the party go? I also suddenly have the urge to paint. Go figger.
5. People are getting out of my way. OK this one is seriously hilarious. Who knew there was a relationship between cheese and body space??? For a while now, people constantly were entering my energy field and nearly plowing me over when they passed. Not today. Suddenly everyone – and I mean everyone – was making arcs around me when they passed. Has my energy field taken on that of a football player, sans sugar? I need more observation time to come to a conclusion on this one.

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Yesterday I went to a day-long workshop with Adam, also known as DreamHealer. I spent some time talking with his dad after the program, discussing our mutual frustrations in raising awareness of energy healing.

Certain assumptions, prejudices, and systems are getting in the way of sharing what is perhaps the most extraordinary scientific discovery ever – the power of the mind and spirit to heal the body.

 As Adam’s dad shared with me, a number of scientists who have worked with DreamHealer have been afraid to report their discoveries. The discoveries go against the grain of conventional scientific thinking, so those scientists might lose their jobs or reputations if they stand behind the findings.

In my own experience, mainstream magazine editors turn bizarrely OCD on me when it comes to writing about the science behind mind-body medicine: They seem unwilling to believe that hard scientific data exists. They therefore become unwilling to risk letting me do research into the matter.

These editors also seem to have the notion that someone who has experienced self-healing cannot accurately write about the hard science that does or does not exist, because of “bias.”

Let it be known that I firmly believe there is no such thing as “objective” journalism. You can present as many so-called sides to an issue as you want. But whom you interview, what you ask, and how you present the information easily can be a conscious or unconscious reflection of your own beliefs.

But let’s put that philosophy-of-journalism argument aside for the moment.

What if science itself is biased? What if the methods implemented and evaluations utilized are constructed around a pharmaceutical model of medicine – making data reflective not so much of the reality of what is effective, but of the reality of how we think and what we value?

What if it is power, money, and politics are fueling decisions of what to research and where to publish that research? What if the hard data is there, but our society is refusing to look at it – at the expense of millions of people suffering unnecessarily?

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I am meeting with the owner of a dance studio in Studio City, CA tomorrow evening, to discuss scheduling a Dancing with Pain class series. If you live in the greater Los Angeles area and would like to attend, let me know what days and times work for you, and I’ll take it into consideration! You can reach me at loolwa@dancingwithpain.com

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Harvard University. The Mayo Clinic. Oprah Winfrey. Mercedes Benz. The New York Times. These brand names inspire in us a sense of confidence and trust. We assume that anything going through their ranks must be high quality.  Must be effective and reliable.

The idea is good: Create institutions with standards that spare us from individually pre-screening each and every single study, doctor, book, car, or news item. Create some kind of a measuring standard — a point of reference from which we can determine the worth of that which is around us and make decisions based on that evaluation. So that, you know, we have time to do laundry and watch The Gilmore Girls reruns.

But the system is flawed, even dangerous. 

For starters, social agreement – ie, popular belief — determines the standards by which the “best of the best” are chosen. Social agreement is by its very nature prone to error and foolishness, because it is a human system. It is the root cause of “The Emperor Has No Clothes” syndrome.

Second, the system demands deference. As in, how fascinating that you think Mayo clinic doctors wrongly diagnosed and medicated you. But you’ve never even been to medical school, my dear, so who the hell are you to challenge their findings?

Third, the system fosters laziness, by combining the two items above. Rather than sharpening our own intelligence and honing our own bullshit detectors, we look outside ourselves for instruction on what to think. Which further feeds the system.

In college, I was regularly frustrated by the requirement to use footnotes to substantiate my assertions. I was doing a lot of field research and drawing my own conclusions, based on my original thinking. Nonetheless, my professors made me pour through endless books, in search of someone else who thought the same damn thing I did.

Why should the fact that someone else did or did not say the same thing make my thinking any more or less valid (assuming I could even find anyone thinking remotely the same thing as I)?

Sure, if a million studies come to the same conclusion as yours, you’ve got quite a bit of weight behind you. But what if the core question in each of those studies is inherently flawed? Does it matter that everyone to date has found the same thing? What if a young child comes up with the million-dollar question that scientists need to be asking? Will the brilliance of that question be recognized? Will anyone even consider listening to that child?

The idea of quality control is good. It just needs a little tweaking – namely, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We need to figure out what we think, what we believe, and what we need. We need to listen carefully, with both an open mind and discernment. We need to value our own experiences in and of themselves. We need to measure everything around us by our own damn standards.

Because if we don’t, we may reject ideas that can change the world. We may pass over treatments that can save our lives. And we may spend our lives not knowing who we are.

I like the way a t-shirt I saw today sums up the matter: “Everything I say can be substantiated by my own opinion.”

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