As fellow lovers of truth, science, and consciousness, I need your help, my friends. One of the healers I interviewed and studied for my Sacred Medicine book has had her TEDx talk censored by TED, and we need your help broadcasting this “idea worth spreading.” Brandy Gillmore, whom I met two years ago and who has since become one of my best friends, was once a person who suffered from such severe neurological pain after an accident that for six years, she was immobilized by the pain, bound to her bed and a wheelchair to get around. She failed all Western medical treatment—narcotics, epidural blocks, etc. Through the unfolding of realizations about how pain, the mind, and healing work, she was able to heal herself (with prayer and Divine support, as well as the power of her own mind) from years of agonizing, debilitating pain.
For two years, I’ve been watching her work with people with chronic pain, and just by tuning into Divine knowledge, talking to those in pain, and “changing their mind,” she can help them get out of pain. She’s now on faculty at the Whole Health Medicine Institute, and her work will be featured in my upcoming book. Those of you who have attended my workshops know that she has also been co-teaching with me at places like Kripalu and Esalen. Each time she asks for a volunteer from the audience who is experiencing chronic pain, I have watched her intuitively read the area of pain, talk to the mind of the person in pain, and then ask them to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10. Within 15 minutes, the pain will go from 8 to 5 to 3 to gone. She has also documented this phenomenon with thermography, demonstrating that the area of pain scans red where there is inflammation, and then green when the inflammation is gone.
Here’s why I need your help. I was with Brandy when she took the brave risk to tell her story publicly in a TEDx talk in Santa Barbara in August. It was very scary for her. Like many of us, she has “burned at the stake” fears about going public with her gift. So when TED censored her talk, it hurt, especially because their reason for censoring the talk was “A number of specific claims made in this talk about healing the body with the mind are not supported by medical doctors, researchers, or the scientific community. There is no viable research or evidence presented in the talk to support these claims.”
While it may be hard to scientifically verify what Brandy is doing, the science proving that the mind can heal the body is all laid out in my book Mind Over Medicine. We understand the physiology of it; we can explain how the placebo effect likely works, and the body of knowledge linking psychoneuroimmunology and other such disciplines continues to grow. So it’s bogus that TED is saying that the mind can’t heal the body.
Please help me take a stand with Brandy, not just because I love her on a personal level, and I can vouch for the fact that what she claims in this video is true, but because it’s time for the establishment to stop censoring those with gifts that science may not fully understand yet. While I believe the science backs up what Brandy claims, if we wait for science to catch up to the phenomenology of the miraculous kinds of healing I’m witnessing in my Sacred Medicine research, we will be way behind the cutting edge of what is actually possible.
I am grateful to TED for helping us broadcast ideas worth spreading. As a medical doctor helping to raise awareness of healing methods like the one Brandy teaches, I have benefitted from the assistance of an organization that helps open-minded doctors like me transform consciousness about health and the healing process. My four TEDx talks have had over 4 million views. (You can watch the first three here, here, and here. My latest TEDx talk The #1 Public Health Issue Doctors Aren’t Talking about was just released a month ago, and you can watch it here).
I deeply appreciate what TED has made possible on the planet. There is no more efficient way to deliver a public health broadcast like the one I shared about loneliness as a public health epidemic. But let TED hear us loud and clear. Censoring the work of people like Cambridge scientist Rubert Sheldrake, PhD, Duke physician and researcher Larry Burk, MD, and Graham Hancock merely demonstrates that the old story of materialist science is growing beyond its rigid edges, and that we must make way for new ideas, a newly expanded world view, and a new spaciousness around the intersection of science and spirituality, not from some reckless, ungrounded, “woo woo” place, but from the humility of true scientists who understand that sometimes new data contradicts our old world view and requires us to expand our understanding of how the world works and what is possible. May TED join us as we grow as a culture, making room for new and even shocking ideas worth spreading, rather than censoring the gifts of those who are showing us evidence that the world is round, not flat.
The censorship of TEDx talks like the one just released by Brandy Gillmore demonstrates that TED may be operating from an outdated world view, stemming from a fear-based dogma that more closely resembles religiosity than science. When those who represent mainstream science fail to make room for true stories and real research that is at the cutting edge of what is actually happening in the realms of science and healing, it demonstrates that we have lost our sense of curiosity, humility, and a willingness to be humbled in the face of the mysteries of the Universe. Let us remain curious but open, and let us stand together to support those who are pioneers on the cutting edge of what is possible. TED can put a big red box on this TEDx talk, but they cannot keep us from making Brandy’s talk an idea worth spreading.
I posted Brandy’s TEDx talk on Facebook on Friday, night, and since then, it has been viewed over 23,000 times, a testament to the collective hunger for messages of truth like this. Since then, I have received many requests from those of you who want to know more about how Brandy does this. I will be writing more about her process in Sacred Medicine, but since that book will not be released for several more years, I am inviting Brandy to write something as a guest blog, which I will share with you all in the near future. So stay tuned!
With love and a commitment to curiosity, openness, scientific integrity, and mystery,
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