Lynne McTaggart: The Power of Eight
Lynne McTaggart is an international best-selling author who has spent many years exploring the nature of human thought and intention and their relationship to health and wellness. Her best-selling books include The Field, The Bond, The Intention Experiment. Lynne McTaggart shares some of the extraordinary stories that emerged from The Intention Experiment, which then led to the experiments and discoveries chronicled in her latest book, The Power of Eight: Harnessing the Miraculous Energies of a Small Group to Heal Others, Your Life, and the World.
The following interview with Lynne McTaggart is from Sandie Sedgbeer’s radio show, What is Going OM, on OMTimes Radio.
An Interview with Lynne McTaggart: The Power of Eight
Sandie Sedgbeer: Lynne McTaggart, in your best-selling book The Intention Experiment, you invited people all over the globe to join you in an experiment to see if harnessing the power of intention could affect change in the world. The scientific study of ongoing results revealed that 31 experiments run to date, 28 have evidenced measurable change. And specifically, all three of the global peace intention experiments had positive outcomes in lowering violence in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Washington. But, that wasn’t all you learned from those experiments, as your latest book The Power of Eight reveals. So, tell us what happened next.
Lynne McTaggart: Well, what happened was, around 2008 when I’d just finished the Sri Lanka experiment, I decided to survey my
participants. I just wanted to find out what kind of experience they’d had and whether they had been able to get on the website. We ran these experiments via my website. So, people would have to come on, and all intend together, and I would put on my website the target that they were to focus on.
I sent this survey, and had about 15,000 participants, I got back thousands and thousands of responses saying things like this: “I felt like I was part of a higher network; or “ I was sobbing uncontrollably, I had tingles up and down my arms, I felt like I was in the tractor beam in Star Trek”. These descriptions of some sort of altered state, almost like a mystical experience.
That was bizarre. I had thousands of these kinds of responses. Remember, people were participating by sitting in front of their own individual computer screen. Nevertheless, they were feeling this just incredible palpable electricity.
But, I had asked them, what’s happened to you now? I also had thousands of people saying things like they had made up with their estranged relatives, they were getting along better with all of their coworkers, they were feeling like, even closer to their not so nice boss. And, nearly half said I am in love with everyone I come in contact with. I mean, they were essentially hugging strangers. And I’m thinking to myself, what on earth is going on here?
Sandie Sedgbeer: So, what happened after you had that thought?
Lynne McTaggart: Well, I carried on doing, doing these further experiments. But, the other thing that had happened around the same time as I decided to scale these down to workshops. Now, I have a background as an investigative reporter. That’s where I started out in life. So, I hadn’t run many workshops before. I was, used to doing stories, not necessarily being a personal development trainer. But how do you show the power of intention over a weekend? So, I was sitting there one day with my husband just kicking around the ideas, and then I said, I know, I think maybe I’ll just put them in groups of eight or something and have them send healing intention to a member of the group with some sort of health challenge.
And my husband is a good headline writer turned to me and said, yeah, the Power of Eight.
And so, when we ran our first workshop in Chicago, I did put people in groups of eight.
I had them choose someone in the group with some sort of health challenge. They all sent intention to that person. And I knew how to do intention because I’d studied the techniques of intention masters and master healers, Quigong masters, Buddhists monks. But, I’d also looked at what worked in the laboratory in mind over matter experiments, and I put that together as a simple program I called Powering Up.
So, I could teach them Powering Up, all the good techniques of intention, but I wasn’t sure how to do it in a small group. So, I’m essentially making it up as I go along and telling them they’ve got to form a circle, they’ve got to hold hands, this and that and the other. And I figured it was going to be a feel-good effect, sort of like having a facial.
That’s not what happened. When they came back the next day to report on how they were, they took the mic in turn, and they said things like this: “ I have cataracts, and my eyes are 80 percent better”,” I have terrible arthritis in that knee, and now I’m walking normally,” I had terrible migraines every day of my life, and my head is clear and, and on and on.
I was dumbfounded. I didn’t think about it. I just dismissed it as a placebo effect. But, in every group I’ve run, thousands of groups now, the same thing happened, these amazing healings after these little short Power of Eight groups.
So, between the two, I started realizing that something was going on in here. There were healing effects of being in a group of intentions and intenders in a group, and also in the case of our big experiments, there was a mirror effect. If people sent an intention for peace, their lives became more peaceful, too. If they sent an intention for healing, they got healed.
I saw that in our Power of Eight groups, too. We had people who were the senders, not even the receivers, people who had been stroke victims and their eyes started to focus, people who had terrible scoliosis, and suddenly, their backs were straighter, and they were out of pain, people with MS who showed up the next day without their crutches. It was just extraordinary what was happening, but the same thing was happening, whether people were receivers or senders.
Sandie Sedgbeer: In those workshops when you first started this, were the intentions specific, or were they just generalized?
Lynne McTaggart: No, I always told people to be very, very specific. What we have found with our intention experiments and also in these Power of Eight groups is, the more specific, the better. People sending intention to someone say with pain, with arthritic pain on the right side, you focus on where it is, we intend that Jane Doe is free of all pain in her right hip and be healthy and well in every way, that kind of thing. So, be very, very specific.
Sandie Sedgbeer: So, while the group of eight was sending that to one member of the group, everybody was experiencing something. Is that correct?
Lynne McTaggart: Well, many of them were. I can give you a wonderful example, a guy called Wes Chapman. He was in a group. I put together a couple of groups as a little experiment last autumn from the Mile Hi Church in Denver. And Wes had a very sad story. He was going to be a scientist, and when he was at university, he got drafted the very last year of the war. And at that point, you couldn’t have deferments for college, so he had to go.
The experience was so awful and depressing that he came home very depressed and traumatized, and his life just continued to go into a downward spiral. The only light part of his life was his second marriage, and then his wife died of cancer. The medical bills were so huge that he’d had to sell his house and essentially live out of a truck driving a long distance to try to pay those bills.
And he’d got to the point where I met him, he was 65. He lived in a senior community, and he’d just kind of got to the point of what’s the use. Even getting up in the morning or doing the simplest thing like making himself breakfast was too much effort.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Lynne McTaggart
