Donna Eden is one of the most well-known and successful Energy Healers of our time. For nearly four decades she has been teaching over 100,000 people – both professionals and laypeople – how to work with their body’s energy systems to reclaim their health and vitality. And her abilities are legendary.
Even the most hard-nosed doctor will admit that some people have a healing presence that makes us – and our immune systems – better than before. Donna Eden is one of those rare healers.
– Gloria Steinem
Donna speaks and works from experience when it comes to energy healing. From an early age Donna has been clairvoyent, able to see the subtle energies of the body. But it wasn’t until she faced a serious physical illness herself that she learned how to work with those energies.
Although she would mention her family first when asked about her “raison d’être,” she has also taken on the mission to help people overcome difficult health challenges and to teach others what she has been able to do for herself: heal with Energy Medicine.
Why Donna Had To Take Healing Into Her Own Hands
Family has always come first for Donna, but the passion that has driven her work in the world traces back to her journey with multiple sclerosis, an illness that affects the nervous system.
Donna Eden was first diagnosed in her teens and in her late 20s her body had deteriorated to the point that five physicians had told Donna, essentially, to get her “affairs in order.”
“But I had two daughters by then and by some combination of will, hope, and a special sensitivity to the body’s energies, I took my healing into my own hands, overcame the disease during a couple of years of intense experimentation, and have been symptom-free for the past 40 years.”
From that experience, Donna’s approach to working with the body’s energies emerged. “And I have been privileged to be able to teach it to others.”
The fact that she knows first hand what it means to get stuck in the traditional medical circuit is one of the reasons she is so passionate about her mission:
“When you have healed from a serious illness after the medical community has given up on you, and you know what you needed to do to overcome that illness, the prospect of helping others facing difficult health challenges became a compelling mission.”
If everyone understood and applied Energy Medicine the way Donna teaches it, Donna believes that people would be healthier, happier, and more spiritually attuned.
Energy Medicine empowers you to take care of your body, mind, and spirit in ways the culture you grew up in never taught you.
– Donna Eden
How Donna Is Now Healing The World
By now, Donna Eden’s classic book, Energy Medicine, has become the textbook in hundreds of healing classes. It’s available in 18 languages and has won golds in both the U.S. Book News and Nautilus competitions. Her most recent book, The Energies of Love, achieved best-seller status on the NY Times Relationship List as well.
Despite the fact that she can not teach others to see exactly what she is able to see when it comes to the body’s energies, she has developed a system to teach others how to work effectively with their own energies nonetheless. More than 1,100 practitioners are certified “Eden Energy Medicine” practitioners, helping Donna on her quest to provide as many people as possible with the healing benefits of working with our body’s energy systems.
Many of Donna’s students are physicians, nurses, and other mainstream health care professionals, and she is widely referenced in the alternative medicine field.
Over time, she’s been able to convince many skeptics of the healing benefits of her techniques too. And because of the great success she’s had in her endeavours, she has been a consultant or guest speaker in numerous universities, hospitals, and corporations.
You Don’t Need Superpowers To Heal Yourself
However, Donna does not believe she has superpowers:
“One of the reasons I have had such an impact is that I don’t think I have a unique superpower. I recognize that everyone has strong inner force for health, healing, and vitality. My approach to energy medicine helps people touch into and activate that force. I have one advantage that brought me into an energy approach, which is that since childhood, I have been able to see the subtle energies that surround and move through the body. This comes in handy, but my whole career has been oriented around teaching people who can’t directly see these energies to nonetheless work with them effectively.”
Empowering tools are readily available to nurture, heal, and evolve your body, mind, and spirit in ways the culture you grew up in probably never taught you.
As a child, Donna Eden was very ill. Beyond M.S., she had tuberculosis at age 3, asthma, multiple severe allergies, and a delicate nervous system. Despite these struggles, her focus on helping others has always prevailed.
When asked to evaluate her own personal growth and accomplishments, you can tell how well she’s been able to transform her own challenges into a gift for the world:
“Staying healthy has been a major accomplishment. One of the personal growth issues that has been challenging for me has been the ongoing pull away from my own self-care and development when my heart goes out to so many people. Many people who have some gift in the healing realms face this. I still struggle with boundaries, but I am much better than I once was.”
Donna now strives for every man, woman, and child to have access to tools for self-healing. An organization, Innersource, has sprung up around her with that mission. “Our motto is raising the vibration of the planet, one person at a time, and I am passionately pursuing that vision.”
The paradigm shift she’s trying to make with Energy Medicine is “simple”, she says:
“That the culture, and Western medicine in particular, recognize and work effectively with the subtle energies that are at the foundation of health and well-being.”
I see energy medicine as a full partner with conventional medicine rather than being on the fringe.
How Energy Medicine Relates To Other (Traditional) Types Of Health Care
As Energy Medicine provides a different approach to health and vitality than other types of health care like Western medicine, Chinese medicine, acupuncture and homeopathy, Donna Eden and her husband and business partner, David Feinstein, are often asked if and where these health care traditions meet. And so did we.
Donna responded: “In my earlier years, seeing people’s subtle energies, this was simply a natural part of my sense about the person, along with their physical appearance, personality, and behavior. But during and after my healing from M.S., I began to pay closer attention to the flows and colors and shapes of the body’s energies. It was only then that I recognized the connections between these flows, colors, and shapes and the body’s health. As I began to study other healing systems, such as Chinese medicine, yoga, and the Celtic healing arts, I realized that ancient approaches to healing and spiritual development had produced maps that corresponded with what I was seeing.”
The energies that flow up and down the body in the eyes of Donna, she found, were called “meridians” by early Chinese physicians. The energies that form spiraling pools over various parts of the body were called “chakras” in ancient Vedic texts. And the energies that surround the body are referred to as the “aura” in many traditions.
Donna has come to work with nine separate energy systems in her approach, and she found at least one culture that describes each.
“The different healing traditions you refer to are working with the same energy body, but each emphasizes a different aspect of it. Our work in Eden Energy Medicine shows that an understanding of the various energy systems and how they inter-relate, rather than being overwhelming, often provides the key to the fastest and most effective approach to healing.”
The relationship with Western medicine is different, but would ideally be complimentary, Donna explained: “During the two decades I lived in Ashland, Oregon, the conventional medical community and the holistic health practitioners had an unusually close working relationship. This was just part of the culture in Ashland. I worked with many physicians in a totally synergistic way. I could help them with diagnosis and treatment plans, including giving patients back-home exercises to optimize their energies for healing.”
In Ashland some doctors wouldn’t perform surgery until the patient’s energy systems had all been balanced, and they would have an energy medicine practitioner re-balance the energies after the operation. This way, people healed faster and had fewer side effects.
“I would often be consulted to “energy test” a medication when there was concern about which medication to prescribe and in what dosage. Since energy medicine is so non-invasive, I totally agree with the pioneering physician, Christiane Northrup.”
Christiane Northrup, M.D., wrote in her foreword to Donna Eden’s book, Energy Medicine for Women:
In the medicine of the future, as I envision it, working with the patient’s energy field will be the first intervention. Surgery will be a last resort. Drugs will be a last resort. They will still have their place, but shifting the energy patterns that caused the disease will be the first line of treatment. And before that, teaching people how to keep their energies in healthy patterns will be as much a part of physical hygiene as flossing or exercise.
– Christiane Northrup
A Challenging Mission
Despite the incredible success Donna Eden has had up to date, it hasn’t been all praise that she received.
As with all people who go in to bat for unconventional methods, and especially those that are challenging billion dollar industries, Donna has received her fair share of critique and resistance. Some Western health care practitioners even went as far as to press charges against Donna, mistakingly thinking she was a quack. But since all of her clients actually reported benefits of her work, the case got dismissed:
“When I first started offering Energy Medicine services, one of my clients was a woman whose doctor was part of a group practice. She referred a number of her friends to me who were also patients at this group practice. Noticing that a number of their patients were also seeing someone who seemed like a total quack, the doctors got the Medical Board to press charges against me for practicing medicine without a license. It went to court and was quite a stressful experience.”
Some of the doctors were called as witnesses, but so were some of the clients. And the latter all reported the benefits of the work they had done with Donna.
“The judge asked the doctors to produce one patient who had been harmed by working with me. When they couldn’t, the judge got angry, gave them a lecture, and dismissed the case.”
And the experience had an interesting sequel for Donna Eden too: “A decade after the court case, they were instrumental in having that same hospital bring me in to do an in-service training on energy medicine.”
Donna is as optimistic about the future of Energy Medicine and human health though, as she is about the future of the planet. But she’s also not completely without concerns. When asked what worries her most about the world as it is today, she replied:
“Humans evolved on this beautiful planet that allows life to flourish, yet nature can be brutal, “red in tooth and claw” as Tennyson put it. We have in so many ways transcended our savage roots, creating cultures that produce Mozarts and Shakespeares, but we did not come inborn with a map for how 8 billion people can live together on a planet that doesn’t have infinite resources and with technology that gives us the power of the Gods, benevolent but also destructive. What an adventure! I am excited watching it all unfold, certainly not without worry, but also with optimism that the many miracles that have gotten us this far will continue to guide us.”
Donna Eden’s Own Inspiration
Donna Eden has obviously become an inspiration to many, including us here at Mindvalley, but who – apart from her family – does she get inspiration from herself?
“Jean Houston is an amazing human being, visionary, social change artist, and generous soul. I am so proud to call her a friend.”
As for must-read books according to Donna: “Anais Nin’s diaries were highly influential when I was in my 20s and 30s. They were not only unflinching as they revealed the struggles and triumphs of a beautiful soul, they were spiritually and philosophically profound. They became a source of deep insight and inspiration for me.”
And if there’s anything Donna would like to inspire you with after reading this article, it’s that “empowering tools are readily available to nurture, heal, and evolve your body, mind, and spirit in ways the culture you grew up in probably never taught you.”
