Intention of the Week - Saturday July 14 at 10:00am PDST

Here's the latest newsletter from Lynn McTaggart . She is the author of Living the Field and The Intention Experiment. If you'd like to participate, tomorrow's intention is for Alex Clivet. Please read more about him below and also the instructions for how to word your intention.

Dear FRIENDS,

I’m thrilled to tell you that our Intention of the Week program is now up and running again on our brand new website, about which more later. We’ll be running our weekly Intentions of the Week on Saturday, July 14 at 5 pm GMT. These, as you know, are open to anyone without a password. Check our website which will tell you what time the experiment runs in your time zone.

Our Intention of the Week is a beautiful 3-year-old boy named Axel Clivet.

Axel, born on January 26, 2004, has been diagnosed with a brain tumor —astrocytoma grade I. The usual treatment for this kind of tumor is radiotherapy, but as he is so young it would damage his development. Instead, the doctors are proposing to give him doses of chemotherapy to keep the tumor at bay so that they can do radiotherapy later.

His mother Debbie, who believes in the power of positive thought, has asked for us to send intention. She has copies of brain scans and will measure any progress.

So come on our site on Saturday, July 14 at 10:00am PST and join us in sending intention to Axel:

My intention is for all the cells in Axel Clivet’s brain to revert to normal and for his full health to be restored.

So why aren’t we sending an intention to ‘kill’ the cancer?

We’ve written as a ‘positive’ intention. In my book The Intention Experiment, you’ll read about a study with a healer named Leonard Laskow.

Laskow was recruited by American biologist Glen Rein to test the most effective healing strategy for inhibiting the growth of cancer cells.

Rein prepared five different Petri dishes containing identical numbers of cancer cells and then asked Laskow to send out a different intention while holding each one.

Laskow’s first intention was that the natural order be reinstated and the cells’ growth rate return to normal.

With the next Petri dish he was to adopt a Taoist visualization that entails imagining that only three of the cancer cells remained in the Petri dish.

For the third dish he was not to have an intention, but simply to ask God to have His will flow through Laskow’s hands. He offered unconditional love to the cancer cells of the fourth dish, which involved meditating on a state of love and compassion, much as Davidson’s Buddhists had done.

For the final dish of cancer cells, Laskow carried out his only truly destructive intention, by visualizing the cells dematerializing, either going into the light or the ‘void’.

As a yardstick of Laskow’s effectiveness, Rein would measure the amount of radioactive thymidine absorbed by the cancer cells – an indicator of the growth rate of malignant cells.

Among Laskow’s various intentions the most powerful were undirected intentions asking the cells to return to the natural order, which inhibited the cancer cells’ growth by 39 per cent. Acquiescing to God’s will with no specific request was about half as effective, inhibiting the cells by 21 per cent, as was the Taoist visualization. An unconditional acceptance of the way things were had no effect either way, nor did imagining the cells dematerializing. In these two instances, the problem may have been that the thought was simply not focused enough.

In a follow-up study, Rein found the strongest effect of all occurred when Laskow combined two approaches, mixing an intention to return to the natural order while imagining only three cells left; his rate of cell inhibition doubled, to 40 per cent. Clearly the combination of asking the universe to restore order while imagining a specific outcome exerted a powerful effect.

Finally, Rein instructed Laskow to hold each of his five states of mind in turn while grasping one of five vials of water, which would later be used to make up the tissue-culture medium of the cancer cells.

The water treated with the ‘natural-order’ intention again had the greatest effect, inhibiting the growth of the cancer cells by 28 per cent.

In this case, water apparently ‘stored’ and transferred the intentions to the culture medium and on to the cancer cells.

Laskow’s approach is instructive. The most effective healing intention is framed as a request, combined with a highly specific visualization of the outcome, but not necessarily a destructive one.

With healing, the most effective approach may not be to destroy the source of the illness, but, as with other forms of intention, to move aside, let go of the outcome, and allow a greater intelligence to restore order.

The new Living the Field and Intention Experiment community

I’m thrilled to announce that we have a new website up and running for The Intention Experiment. If you type in our usual URL – www.theintentionexperiment.com - you will be sent to our new Intention Experiment community. With the invaluable assistance of Nick Haenen, we’ve built a state-of-the-art worldwide intention community. You can join the forum, post your own blogs and videos and photos, set up your own study groups and of course join our periodic large-scale intention experiments. We’ll be announcing the results of our germination Intention Experiment soon, so please stay tuned.

The rest of the site is still under construction — with downloads, a shop, periodic podcasts from me —will be up and running in a week or two. But for now, my hope is that you will use this site to establish a worldwide community to learn how to bring intention into your life.

Our community is built on Ning, and once you join one of our communities, you can automatically visit one of our others.

Our new Living the Field site (we have the bare bones of it up now. It will provide you with a similar community to discuss how to bring these new scientific concepts into your daily life. PLUS, we now have downloads ready to place on the site for anyone running or hoping to run an LTF group. Ning will provide us with a facility so that all the members of an LTF group can email each other and post information visible only to their own members. And I now have the facility to interview scientists whom I periodically meet on all my travels.

So please be sure to take advantage of our new websites in order to stay in touch with likeminded souls around the world. The Intention Experiment site is already very popular.

Stay cool and connected this summer.

Warm wishes,

Lynne McTaggart