Confessions Of A Recovering Woo Addict

Lately I've been talking to Jane. (not her real name) I am having trouble talking to her, and I think I figured out why. We knew each other about 10 years ago in a state far, far away. We were acquaintances, but we had a lot in common. (here's where I tell you some dark secrets) We were into many different kinds of woo.

Woo: (n or adj) when you uncritically believe unsubstantiated or unfounded ideas. Short for woo woo, according to the Urban Dictionary, definition 4.

I was into reiki, divination, numerology, you name it. While I was an agnostic back then, I still clung to the idea of a kind of Universal Energy. Not really an intelligence, but kind of "magical" principles to energy that science just hadn't quantified or qualified yet. I held to the beliefs that ancient societies knew secrets that had been lost. Like the Chinese were better at medicine than modern science, or the Mayans had some secret knowledge about the Universe that we were missing out on, as seen in their calendar stopping in 2012.

My main thing was reiki. If you don't know anything about it, basically you channel energy from the universe through you into your subject. You get an "attunement" where "sacred symbols" open you as a channel. A reiki master has to administer this attunement which is basically a short ritual.

I've never been one for ritual. But I really wanted to cure myself of all that was wrong with me and help people, so even though I didn't like that part of it, I accepted it. And reiki worked for me. My hands would get really hot when I "channeled" this "sacred healing energy" for people. People would feel better when I did my "healings" for them. They would get better. The anecdotal evidence was positive.

I became a reiki master, actually. I then "attuned" other people so that they could go on and be a practitioner, or better yet, go on and attune others. I really enjoyed it and thought it was doing good for people.

I did a lot of reiki for awhile. I held "reiki circles" where we'd all do reiki on each other to "clear our channels" and heal ourselves. I even had a reiki "healing" center with some friends of mine. We offered "healings" and "attunements" in a clinic. We did talks at different places. One talk was at the hospital for cancer patients who wanted alternative healing methods.

I totally believed in reiki. I developed a set of "reiki runes" which had Japanese writing on them. I then gave divination readings with them. I was pretty good at it too. People came back to me again and again for readings and advice.

I can't believe I'm telling you this. Personally I'm very embarrassed by how much woo I believed back then. But I'm telling you for a reason. I was really wrapped up in this kind of belief in "magical energy". It made sense to me. It worked for me. I was good at it. I was helping people.

After awhile, I started noticing several things. At first, since they went against what I was practicing, I tried to ignore them or write them off with different woo thinking. What happened was that one of the women I had the clinic with got really sick with pneumonia for quite some time. At first she still tried to do healings with us, before she knew it was pneumonia. But she would cough and hack and we finally all agreed that she needed to get herself better before she could heal others.

This disturbed me. If we're healing people by channeling this amazing, loving energy from the universe, how could she get so sick? But this was explained that she wasn't doing reiki correctly. She was supposedly taking on the illnesses of the clients, instead of simply channeling the energy into them. Basically the woo thinking was that she was doing it wrong and that is what made her sick. She did it to herself.

She ended up in the hospital. She almost died because she was trying to treat it herself with woo magic at home, instead of the medicine she really needed. Of course, we dutifully went to the hospital to give her more reiki healings.

The other thing that I noticed was that it really didn't matter much what I did. If the person I was working on "believed" I was healing them, they got better and felt a difference. If they didn't believe, or were resistant to change, they stayed the same.

It was all about psychology. I did some testing of this theory, more so in the readings I did for people and found it to be blatantly accurate once I was aware of it. If the person believed I was channeling awesome energy, the reading was successful. Even if I didn't feel connected.

After noticing that it was all about psychology, I finally realized there's no evidence that this stuff does anything at all beyond the power of the human mind and the placebo effect. And that's when I started letting go of woo. It has taken some time and education, but now I think I'm actually getting somewhere with skeptical thinking.

Of course, now there's a skeptical community that I can tap into and get new information from. Which is very nice.

Anyway, back to Jane. She's still very much into all kinds of woo. Talking to her makes me ashamed of who I was. I think back on how I used to think 10 years ago and I feel embarrassed. I can't believe I embraced all that nonsense.

Of course, the way that woo is packaged and delivered to people is very slick and shiny and palatable. It's easy and simple and will cure all your ills if you believe the lies.

I've rambled enough for one day. But tomorrow I will have a list of some of The Main Features Of Pseudo-Science. This list is quite helpful for figuring out what is nonsense and what is based on real scientific fact and research.