My personal voyage into the perspective expressed in Energy Psychology Interactive  occurred over many years and with much resistance. I happened to marry a woman (Donna Eden) who was destined as it turned out to become one of the world's most renowned natural healers. For the first nineteen years or so of our relationship, I did not know what to make of her work. I did witness people coming from all over the world with serious illnesses report improvement after a session or two, but I explained it to myself in terms of her charisma, deep empathy, and healing presence. I did not think it was a system that could be taught or replicated, and the "subtle energy" explanations seemed more confusing than clarifying.

Donna was receiving overtures to write a book. She kept passing up these opportunities, for a number of reasons: Her healing work was all-consuming. Conceptualizing was not her forte. And she did not want to hold herself up as being particularly special (she believes that everyone is born with the capacity to see energy as she does, but that the capacity is usually lost very early in a culture that does not validate the experience), plus she is allergic to having people put her in a guru role. One evening, however, after telling me about her four clients that day, each of whom took a somewhat miraculous turn, she said, "You know, David, it would be a shame for my work to die with me." I mark that comment as the point where she became open to describing her approach in a book.

When she had firmly decided to move forward, she asked me, as the conceptualizer in the family, to help her write the book. The next 18 months were an amazing process for me. I interviewed her, day after day after day. I could not pose a question that she could not persuasively answer from within her energy paradigm. Granted, she has one little quirk that is hard to verify, her claim to a lifelong ability to "see" energy as clearly as you are seeing the words on this page. While she has again and again made diagnoses that were later confirmed medically by simply looking at a person's body, the ability to see and read energies is so far outside my own experience that I cannot directly verify it. But given a great deal of indirect evidence, such as her accurate medical diagnoses based on very little other information and impressive cure rate, I finally came to accept that it is so.

Once the ability to read and derive meaningful information from the body's energies is accepted, then Donna's approach turns out to have a strong internal logic. In our interviews, I realized that she operates according to a set of principles that are based on empirical observation and that can be systematized and taught to others. Now with the book widely distributed and many students trained, there is much anecdotal evidence that the procedures work whether self-applied or applied by individuals who do not match Donna's charisma or "healing presence."

The book was released in January 1999, and we headed out for a six-month book and workshop tour. I went on sabbatical from my private practice as a clinical psychologist in Ashland, Oregon. As the close of the six months approached, the book was rapidly becoming the classic in its field and the demands on Donna to speak and teach were compelling. I returned to Ashland, and with strong misgivings, closed what had been a deeply satisfying clinical practice in order to support her work, which seemed to be hitting a cultural nerve. I was sad that I might be leaving my own career forever. I was in my 50s and did not know where this would lead me. Where it led was right back into psychology. Many of Donna's students were psychotherapists who were applying energy interventions to psychological issues. Through their influence, I began to study with some of the pioneers in this area. I found it daunting. While I was now open to an energy paradigm, as I educated myself about the new field, which had developed independent of Donna's contributions—they are just both part of the same Zeitgeist—I found that despite this being a relatively new area, it was already rife with warring factions, incompatible explanations, and deep schisms about procedures and appropriate claims.

Something else happened, however, that in my mind overshadowed the field's confusion. The outcomes I was seeing were remarkable. Because I read the field's fractionated literature before I learned how to apply its methods, I was quite skeptical at first. But I began to obtain results for a wide range of complaints that were more rapid and consistent with anxiety-related disorders in particular than anything I'd seen in some 30 years of practice. One of my first sessions outside of a supervised setting was with one of Donna's friends who had recently been spurned by the first man who had opened her heart in years. She was in agony and had been for several weeks. Within an hour of relatively mechanical procedures, the spell was broken. She still felt the loss of a dream. She still missed his love and presence. But she radiated in her relief ("My heart isn’t hurting!!!"), and she was no longer incapacitated. After she returned home, her responses to him were no longer pleading and bereft. I'd never before facilitated such a healing of intense heartbreak in a single session. I now have had many cases that were similarly dramatic and have interviewed dozens of practitioners whose claims corroborate my personal experiences. This does not constitute scientific proof, but it is not a one-person medicine show either.

Energy Psychology Interactive began as my way of trying to learn about the field and sort through all of the claims and confusion. Bringing on an Advisory Board with many of energy psychology’s leaders and pioneers transformed my computer into a lightening rod for the field's controversies. It turned out that learning how to reach consensus between Donna's and my deeply contrasting intellectual styles was great practice for this task. The Advisory Board, however, was wonderful in positioning themselves behind a project whose purpose was to draw the field together. Many many hours were devoted freely and intelligently. Energy Psychology Interactive is the product. It is the most comprehensible statement I am capable of pulling together at this point about the state of the art in this very new and potentially revolutionary area of study.

With the book and CD in galley form, I sent the program to one of the most respected clinical psychologists of the past half century. His reply began, "If your claims turn out to be true, it will stand everything I have ever learned and believed about human behavior and physiology on its head." He went on to pose strong doubts about the program’s claims. In my response, I shared some of this history and closed by noting, "I am only one witness, but I have been slowly persuaded that the findings from this area of investigation will, as you put it, ‘stand’ some of our understanding ‘about human behavior and physiology on its head.’ But I should mention that the claim that perhaps should first turn our understanding about human physiology ‘on its head’ is anesthesia through acupuncture, which is now used throughout the world and has been widely documented in procedures from appendectomies to brain surgery. Those reports, as mentioned in the Introduction, may be challenging for Westerners to assimilate into their world view. But from there, entertaining the possibility that anxiety can be reduced by stimulating a set of acupuncture points is only a small conceptual step."