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Call him an accidental doctor and you would have perfectly described Dr. (Chief) Iwowari Berian James. an Energy Therapy expert and consultant.
A trained mechanical engineer, with a master’s degree in managerial psychology and a career tour spanning human resource management, logistics administration and industrial production in reputable organizations including the Nigerian Breweries, James has had a rainbow of experiences before becoming a frontline advocate and practitioner of Energy Therapy, a relatively new field in health care in this part of the world that involves no drug treatment!
Unlike some who claim to have found themselves in such field based on some peculiar experiences or in pursuit of certain goal, James, the CEO of GoldenRays Integrated Energy Health Services Ltd, sees himself divinely guided into what has become a fierce passion to help people overcome their various health challenges most of which including physical, he says have their domain and solution in their human energetic or psychological make up.
In this revelatory interview with Oyeyinka Fabowale, he opens up on his journey into the world of medicine without drugs, its benefits and potential for boosting the national health system, as an alternative medical practice and more.
Excerpts:
How did you an engineer turn into a health practitioner?
I think its divine guidance. In 1996, 1997, 1998, I did my Master’s degree programme in managerial psychology. That was my first encounter with psychology. Of course, you know my background in science, I did engineering and worked as an engineer as a mechanical engineering practitioner with Delta Steel, Aladja from where I was sent on training to Austria for the Steel Plant that came up in Aladja. I worked there for eight and half years before a life event experience made me to look elsewhere and the intervention of the Light made it possible for me to get the job at the Nigerian Breweries in a production -related engineering function. I got the job on assistant management level, grew and after few years was moved to logistics and supply chain management. From there I moved to Cranfield University in Bedford, UK to do management development programme in supply chain management and I came back, worked for couple of more years before I moved to human resource services management function after which I retired. I began my journey with Energy Therapy, Energy Psychology ten years to the time I was to retire. I’d been hearing about Quantum Physics, after I graduated from the University of Ibadan. I did not know what Quantum Psychology was, so I checked the internet but I did not get Quantum Psychology but Quantum touch. Quantum touch is a healing process developed by Richard Gordon in America. By just simulating the energy field in your hand, you can transfer energy to somebody and the people get healed. That was a good sign for me because I have always had this subconscious desire to be of help to people and I was also looking at life after work. So, that fitted the network of my expectation and goals. That was about 2004, 2005. I ordered all the materials about Quantum touch, I read them and I did a video workshop of Quantum touch. I invited friends to my house, we did the demonstration and almost everybody that participated in that workshop got healed of one thing or the other. We were about six, and I said to myself, if six people got healed watching this video workshop, then, it would take care of 60 people if not 600 people. So the idea of having a quantum touch workshop came to my mind and I organized a quantum touch workshop. The first one was in 2005 and was held in Lagos. I had over 90 people in attendance. Different categories of people. It was a big event and was the first time I launched energy health practice in Nigeria.
In 2006, I became aware of another healing process called Emotional Freedom Technique and from it I got to know about Energy Psychology, and an organisation called Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology… the rest is history.
It would appear that this field is many -sided?
There are different healing modalities in energy medicine or energy psychology field. The essential thing common to them is that energy therapy is drugless. Apart from quantum touch that I spoke about, there are other ones we call healing touch. All of them are derivatives from the old traditional healing modalities of the orient – Chi and yoga, etc, they are now all synthesized and put together to form this distinct body of knowledge.
In the past, the West did not accept anything that has to do with energy, not to talk of energy medicine. Why? Because they can’t see energy, they can’t touch it, they can’t feel it, they can’t smell it. They said it does not respond to all the senses they can use for scientific evaluation to determie what it is. Even when the Chinese came with acupuncture, the West did not approve it. So, it took a long time of battle – academic and research to get to the level where the West now opened up and began to embrace acupuncture, acupressure and energy therapy-related protocols. This was also because some Americans went to China to study Oriental medicine and brought back with them the knowledge and then began to practice it in the Western cultures.
As it gained momentum, of course, the West also started research, they studied a lot of laboratory experiments and found validation for it. Development quantum physics, and quantum science also opened ways because they now began to develop instruments such as EEG, MRI, ECG. These are instruments that depend on the frequencies of internal organs to report the state of their health. Energy began to make sense to them. There is so much research that has gone into energy medicine now to show that when there is an energetic intervention in the health of an individual, there is significant result that shows that something has taken place.
Energy therapy, as we know it in Nigeria, is made up of energy medicine and energy psychology. The Energy psychology aspect also has a couple of other modalities. There are thought field therapy, emotional freedom technique, talk about healing from body level up, talk bout be set free fast, these are all variations of energy psychology modalities. While Energy medicine has to do with the physical human body, energy psychology is looking at the cognition or cognitive aspect of the human system. It works through the energy patterns that have meridians as a principal component of it. The meridians are the invisible pathways through which the life force energy flows and if there is a block, by stimulating the acupoint, you can send electrical signals to open the blocks and the challenge get dissolved. That is the basis of energy psychology.
In what ways do these interventions help people with health challenges?
The human energy system is designed to respond to certain situations that happen to it, a kind of response to what I called life event issues. Such as when you lose somebody when you lose opportunities, when you lose your job, you are expecting something to happen but that did not happen (disappointment) and so on. How we react to life event issues depends on the writings on our wall. What are these writings on our wall? Programmes that we have received, the training we got from our parents, the knowledge we got from school from our teachers, what we have gotten from the environment in relating with people and the environment. In our environment, we get certain imprints which we call social norms. These social norms will now help us to interpret these life event experiences. Sometimes, the interpretation is positive, sometime, it is negative. When it is positive, we feel happy, that is a vibrant uplifting energy but when it is negative, we feel bad, we become depressed, that is, negative heavy energy. The negative energies will now go and block the pathways, they would either block the pathways or block the points through which we get this energy that is called chakras, and it will disorganize our energy field which is called the Aura. Whatever happens within these three domains of human energy system will affect our physical health. Research has shown that 85 percent of our physical health challenges are rooted in emotional health. Emotional health is challenged when we generate negative energy. If somebody hears bad news, something happens, the person collapses, sometimes, before the person gets to hospital he has passed away.
The question is what is the relationship between that news and his passing away? It is just emotion. There is an eruption of emotion which could not rekindle immediately and that overwhelms the body system, and something happens. If we are able to counter that emotional eruption at that primary time, then we will be helping the body to come back to what we call energetic homeostasis, that is balance and harmony. When issues happen and overwhelm the body, it creates imbalance in our energy system and the imbalance affects our body. You find out that; anger and fear, for example, affect certain organs in the body. Depression affects certain organs in the body.
How?
There is what we called the life force energy that comes in from the cosmos. We don’t see how our body takes it, but it has been established that our body takes it. Research has shown that we have energy centres called chakras. These chakras are like invisible wheels that suck energy from outside. If we sit down, we are breathing in, our nose, the physical body is taking air from the environment. We are breathing in and out. Some of us are not conscious of it until something happens. That is also how this other parts of the energy body breath in and breath out this life force energy. Even though we don’t see it. If we look at a newborn child, the crown chakra, the energy centre on a pulpy part of the head for example, goes up and down. There are seven major chakras in our body and they take this energy. The energy works through the meridians and unfold itself into the energy field that we talked about (Aura) and they have different colours and different frequencies.
This energy is what is actually keeping us active and functional. If for any reason there is a cutting off or a blurring of these energy centres, then there is a problem. Sickness will come in. Tthe Chinese knew and using pins and needles, they are able to access the energy centres and the acupoints to open them up so that clogged energy along the meridian pathways will be removed and when that happens, the person recovers. That is a link between physiological health and energetic health of an individual.
Will it be right to describe you as the pioneer in this line of healthcare provision in this part of the world?
With the way I am promoting energy therapy in this country, yes, you can so describe me. I am the first African to be trained and certified by the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology in the USA. The association is the only body that was bold enough to bring the knowledge of energy psychology together and began to propagate it from what the individual practitioner, individual developers did on their own, individual developers – people like Dr Roger Callahan, who laid the foundation and developed the techniques that we use in energy psychology. There is also Garry Craig who was a student of Dr. Callahan and a good number of them who came together with other people to form the association and the began to train people. I happened to be the first African to be in the first International group in 2007. When I got certified in 2009, I took it as a mission to educate Nigerians, to develop capacity in this new field.
Level of spread and acceptance?
In terms of application of the knowledge, we have had tremendous success, but in terms of acceptance at corporate level, at organizational level, I can say it has been very challenging. Challenging in the sense that, because it is new and people don’t investigate new knowledge. Not until something becomes common knowledge all over the world, that it will start booming in Nigeria, that people now begin to talk about it in Nigeria. We are not there yet to pick the new knowledge and run with it.
The new level of development in medicine is Energy -Based Medicine and when we begin to pay attention to that area, we would see a lot of opportunities. It becomes difficult talking to organizations that are not yet exposed to this level of knowledge, even when you write proposal, they send the proposal to their medical department and the medical department will say ‘we don’t know anything about it’. So many such experiences with big organizations.
In one particular case, an adviser of a big organization who was wowed after listening to me, asked me for a proposal? She sent the proposal to the medical department, and the medical department came back to her to say there is no research backing this. When she came back with that information, I sent her an avalanche of research materials that gave justification for the effectiveness of this method of therapy, even though it is new.
It is also part of the challenge that we have many religious people. They think that whatever can speed up a process of healing must be magical. This is based on scientific validation. Individual human being is a piece of energy. Everything material is energy. For us as human beings and even animals, the energies that we are require sustaining energy. That sustaining energy is in the cosmos and that is what we called Life Force Energy. Healing becomes relevant when that energy is no longer functioning or moving effectively. Medically, they will advise you to move around, take a walk so that there shall be (blood) circulation. That is to allow the system in the body to carry this life force energy to the various parts of the body. It is important that appreciate that because that is the basis for functionality in our life. Over 15 years now, people have started appreciating what I have been talking in the area of adoption of the process because it is effective in healing physical health issues and emotional health issues.
People who have taken advantage of coming to me for therapy purposes have a lot of positive stories to tell and they have become to a large extent my mouthpiece in communicating the benefit of energy therapy to the populace. We are making progress, we are speaking to organizations, with individuals becoming open even as they now go through challenges of which they don’t have other solution, they are now listening, they are forced to listen to what I have to tell them.
There is no place that you go to complain of emotional break down and they will tell you what to do. I am the only person who will give you a solution as to what to do, when to do it when you have emotional breakdown. In psychotherapy which is an aspect of healing psychologists also use, we have talk therapy, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, cognitive behaviour therapy and so on.
But, these modalities do not address the energetic components of the issues. You go for counseling, for example, spend ..33, 38 minutes, yet you will find somebody saying in frustration, I have been in therapy for one year, two years, nothing is happening, nothing will happen because the therapist does not know that there is an energetic element that needs to be addressed.
But taking about people who had benefited from energy therapy, a lady came after four years of marriage without baby, but her major issue is that she has pains in her body. I put her through a therapy process, the pain went away, the body became settled, she did not even know when she became pregnant for her husband. The baby she gave birth to from that experience is in secondary school now. Another lady, in her own case said she was having hormonal imbalance, and did not conceive for four years in her marital relationship. I put her through a therapy and I asked if I can check whether she has any issue and she said, okay because I have a tool we used to do exploratory diagnosis. I subjected the energy to certain questions and the energy said there is trauma in this body. I ask to know how long it has been in body, the energy said since she was six-years old. I asked what her experience had been since she was six-years old and she started crying. She said she remembered that she was abused by her parents, that she was even ill-treated as if she was not their child. She said, at a point, they wanted to marry her out as a small girl. That was a very difficult period of her life. She said she carried that damage even till she got to the university, that in her university days, she did not have any relationship. She said though, guys were coming, she never had any feeling for anybody.
Now she is married, she thought that she would be happy with her husband. I put her through therapy to clear that trauma, we cleared the trauma on a Saturday and on Monday, she sent me a very interesting testimony about how she felt after the treatment. Three months after, she told me that she became pregnant but later lost the pregnancy after six months. But later again, she got pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl.
For us, we can establish that trauma can affect fertility and conception. Most people who are taking fertility drugs, who are going in for IVF, who feel challenged by the fact that they are not able to conceive, my advice for them is to check their energetic profile, because by clearing the energy center that is responsible for conception and fertilization they might be able to deliver without medication.
There is also care for people who lost their loved ones. A lady lost her brother and during that period, she nearly killed herself due to the shock. Someone later referred her to me and I took her through therapy and it was as if nothing happened after therapy. She wrote a testimony. I can give the names and contacts of these patients for investigative reporting purposes.
How can Energy therapy help people suffering depression?
A lot of people don’t understand what depression is. Before you talk about being depressed, there are symptoms that will need to manifest. Constant sadness, inability to enjoy life and a lot of bad thoughts. When these symptoms start manifesting, that is when you will need to go for evaluation. I don’t talk about resolution of depression; I talk about resolution of the issues around what is causing the problem. You will find out that most times, it is the body’s response to improperly manage traumatic experience. You may even begin to attract other negative entities that will now begin to overwhelm the individual and when that happens, the energy field which is the aura of the individual will begin to collapse. One will feel empty energetically sometimes. So, we help such people to come out of depression, using energy therapy techniques.
What has been your experience in terms of cooperation or collaboration with your colleagues in orthodox medicine and allied fields?
My experience with other colleagues in the medical profession has been manifestly negative, but I don’t hold it against anybody because for me, I think it is based on ignorance. At individual level, some of them value what I am doing. They know that at a time where is supposed to be integration but on their own professional part, they don’t see it as anything useful, when you talk about collaboration. It operates only at the individual level. I have encountered some of them where I have been invited to consult on health facilities. The fact that I am also registered with the Nigerian Association of Complementary and Alternative Medical Association (NCAMA) and through NCAMA, registered with the Nigerian Medical and Dental Council. I have a practice licence. Even at that, a medical adviser to the company where I worked for, though likes what I do but he never approves that I should come and give a lecture on the subject to the staff of the company, despite having the authority to recommend it as useful.
I address health issues such as stress resolution, you don’t need to manage your stress, resolve the stress, get it out of your system. I also talk about capacity development, productivity improvement, trauma healing because the individual has potential to do so many things in quantum field if he has capacity but it is limited by the fact that he might have had Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). If an individual has had life event experiences that are not resolved, the person is capable of developing Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder. If somebody had done something that made him blame himself or feels guilty, he will be developing what we call Moral Injury. These are factors of facts of life that, when they happen, you do not have medication for them, it is only psychotherapy angle that is the lifeline.
What are you doing to get government to recognize and possibly integrate this into the national health system?
We are making effort to get government’s attention. We are talking to people in government, I have been invited to various official events to make presentations on the benefit of Energy Therapy and how it can help to resolve emotional issues and traumatic experiences and stress. Since I started, I have written proposals to various organizations, various arms of government. In this country one of the dangerous things about us is that, if you don’t have somebody in a place of authority, no matter how many letters or proposals you write, you will not even get acknowledgement not to talk of invitation to come. Where we have been able to connect with individuals, they have invited us to come and make demonstrations which we have gone to do and we are still waiting for some to approve.
For someone with a scientific background as you, how do you expect colleagues or even people to take you seriously on this subject that tends to deal with intangibles?
We limit ourselves through our own indoctrination. Human being has capacity for so many things. There is a research talk that says we use 10 percent of our brain, what happens to the other 90 percent? So, the brain is capable of taking as much as you give to it. There is a lady who can speak up to nine languages, apart from her native language. And of course, if we really know that it is really not the brain, it is the human spirit that has the capacity to take in as much as you are able to give to it and allow it to express it. There are people who are scientists and went into accountancy, art and they became very good in that field. I think it is just opening the mind and allowing the thing to flow in and flow out, so for me, it is not really a big issue.
I asked that question in appreciation of the fact that your original discipline is research-based – that is relies on factual enquiry and findings but much of the concepts you talk of in energy therapy – life force, and so on don’t appear to be in the realm of materiality or time and space, so, won’t people be justified if they dismiss them as mere claims and conjectures?
It is not true that people can’t see these things. There are different levels of consciousness and we talk about different planes of existence. People who are open and want to know can perceive other planes of existence. People sleep and they talk in the dream, don’t they? That’s not physical, they are sleeping, their body is on the bed, so what is making that encounter? It is their inner self, their real substance, their real person. That same place where the person is having that dream, while in physical body, he can also project himself and go to that realm if it becomes necessary for him to learn anything from there. What I don’t encourage is people forcing themselves into those experiences. It can be harmful. Why I am explaining all this is that, energy can be seen at different levels, energy is present at different levels. Even, the air we see is part of energy. At different levels, we have the energy manifest. There are other levels we do not see. Colour is a form of energy, but we are able to see colour because of the way it reflects in our eyes but there are other parts of the energy that we do not see when we talk about ultraviolent, gamma rays, beta rays, these are also part of the radiations that we do not see, but which exist. With equipment now, we are beginning to harness them and we are now able to see the result that they can produce. When we do X-ray, the ray go through us, we see the image on a screen. This is also how the energy we are talking about can be seen.
We expect cynicism, we expect sceptics, in fact we are even more at home with sceptics but when they see result, they can become better followers or mouthpiece for the profession. We have had cases where people have left hospital and come to us for therapy and we gave therapy and they become well. We are not in competition, we are providing service which is part of the holistic process that the individual is supposed to be exposed to, for good healing. We are supposed to be complementary. There are some aspects of medicine that will be alternative because there are certain things that drug will not do, this other one will effectively do. We advise people that, when you are seeing your GP, your physician, you also open yourself to possibilities of other help and energy therapy is one of those modalities that will help the body to be in harmony for wholesome, healthy life.