Hands of Life, A Healers Journey with Julie Motz

Book: Hands of Life, Julie Motz Bantam Books, September 1998
Reviewed by: Pat Cougar R.N., Reiki Master
Date: June 2000

Ms Motz calls herself an "energy healer", and her book, Hands of Life, addresses her concepts and methods of using energy for healing, documents several case studies, and chronicles her own personal journey of healing. This book may be of benefit to Reiki practitioners and other energy healers, as well as to any person seeking insight into the healing of the mind, body, and soul.

Ms Motz starts with telling the story of her own challenges, beginning in 1970 when she was depressed and made a suicide attempt. With therapy, she realized how fearful and angry she was, and "that emotions are some kind of energy". After six months studying with the "Fusion Group", run by Mike and Sonya Gilligan, she was able to feel what other people felt, in the room or even at great distances. Ms Motz occasionally refers to research done by Albert Einstein, Robert Becker, Wilhelm Reich, and Louis de Aroglie. De Broglie stated that all matter emits waves, now referred to by physicists as Broglie Waves. Motz believes these waves are what she is sensing. She also believes that the ability to sense feelings is "available to everyone".

In 1982 Julie Motz injured her back and was introduced to Reiki. During her initial Reiki session she experienced a painful and emotional childhood memory when the practitioner worked in the area of her back injury. "We train ourselves as children not to respond to injury with anger. Preventing the message from getting to the brain becomes a habit. After six months of Reiki, and many memories of childhood suffering, the back pain was gone. In 1986 Ms Motz learned Reiki. She states that it is intention that allows a person to use her/his hands for healing.

Later Motz changed her diet to a macrobiotic diet, and healed her problems of insomnia, mood swings, and pain after exercising. Through macrobiotics she was introduced to the Eastern concept of "human energy", which she uses in her work.

In 1992 after a car accident, Julie Motz made her commitment to healing work and went to Columbia University where she earned a degree in public health. She hoped that she could help "introduce alternative medicine into public health policy". She describes some incidents of success, but relates mostly being frustrated in her efforts by the public health authorities.

One of the success stories first surfaced at Columbia when she met Dr. Mehmet Oz, a famous cardio-thoracic surgeon, who was trying hypnosis with some of his coronary bypass patients. Ms Motz convinced Dr. Oz to allow her to do energy work with a few of this transplant patients before, during, and after surgery. It was through this work that Motz first developed her idea that healing is a process in which four basic feelings, corresponding to the four basic forces in physics:
Electromagnetism - as light and electricity governs observation, communications and corresponds to fear
Gravitation - anger with its accelerative power
Nuclear force - pain with its power to pull in toward the center
Weak force - (the most recent and most mysterious to be discovered) active whenever neutrinos are released or absorbed, as in the hydrogen-helium reaction which fuels stars like our sun, sending billions of neutrinos out into space. It corresponds to love, the radiant feeling of creation and connection.

In her own body, Ms Motz became aware that these four basic forces and their corresponding feelings were located in her tissues. In working with very ill patients, she sensed feelings being held in tissues that normally didn't correspond. She called these "emotional defenses". an example would be heart patients having "sorrow in their blood", which weakened their hearts. Motz believes that every cell in our body has a personality and memory, and is able to communicate with every other cell. She listens to, and interacts with cells for healing purposes, and also teaches her patients to do so as well.

Julie Motz did energy work in neurosurgery and discovered that patients were holding feelings of anger in their brains. When she worked with women having breast surgery for cancer, Ms Motz realized that breast cancer is an "expression of the crisis around nurturing". She became "convinced that repeated emotional distress and abuse, starting very early in life, and usually ignored or denied by the patient, are key factors in weakening the body and making it vulnerable to chronic disease". Motz believes that disease offers us a chance to return to earlier wounds for healing, not only through the symptoms of that disease, but the healing modalities we chose.

Julie Motz addresses the "crisis" we are experiencing in our present health care system, and feels that medicine needs a shift from emotional detachment to compassion for the feelings of practitioners, as was as those of the patients. In the last paragraph of her book, Ms Motz proposes that our technological failures in attempting to heal chronic disease may actually result in an increase in the development of our loving and healing of ourselves and others.