Hands of Life : An Energy Healer Reveals the Secrets of Using Your Body's Own Energy Medicine for Healing, Recovery and Transformation [Hardcover]

Julie Motz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1998

Julie Motz takes us on an extraordinary journey into a revolutionary form of healing. Five months after she began treating patients recuperating from open-heart surgery, she became a pioneer, crossing into uncharted territory--the first alternative healer to work on a surgical patient whose dying heart was being replaced with a new one. Inside that operating room, her own experience of healing would be completely transformed and redefined....

This remarkable book chronicles Julie Motz's uncommon mission to bring alternative methods of healing to the country's most prestigious hospitals. Invited by a young heart surgeon, she began working with patients undergoing radical lifesaving procedures. As she sensed the traumas and unresolved emotions that contributed to their suffering, she helped them release fear and anger, to begin healing both body and soul.

This breakthrough form of healing draws on Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, treating the body and spirit as an interconnected whole. Julie Motz shows how strong emotion affects our bodies, creating energy imbalances that can lead to illness if unaddressed. And as she offers her deep compassion to the people under her care, she shows us how to care for ourselves as well: with patience and love, without judgment. She teaches us the role of the systems of our bodies in processing emotion, and how we can detoxify anger and fear, whether past or present. And she makes a persuasive case for allowing feeling into the sterile world of the O.R.

Hands of Life offers a stunning new view of the synthesis of high-tech medicine and ancient healing wisdom, presenting powerful evidence of the role of the spirit in matters of life and death. It is a book that urges us all to find deeper understanding of our bodies and enter the mysteries of our flesh with curiosity and wonder instead of passivity and fear.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Hands of Life opens with "energy healer" Julie Motz trying to observe heart surgery. She is so overcome by the opened chest and blood that she runs out and collapses on a gurney. From this inauspicious beginning, Motz learns to work with heart-transplant and breast-cancer patients during surgery, as well as before and after. She feels the patient's energy and emotions, senses images of childhood pains, and helps to direct energy toward healing.

Motz tells stories of her experiences with her patients in a gripping, dramatic style--you can't help but keep reading. She is also candid about her personal background: an abusive mother, destructive relationships, depression, attempted suicide. We piece together how she healed herself as she learned how to heal others. Between stories, she explains how emotions and disease are linked and the theory behind what she does. "Cells are in constant communication with each other," Motz explains. "They have to be, in order for billions of them to function in that incredibly efficient bureaucracy called the body.... What I'm doing is simply tuning my brain's consciousness, and that of my patients, into those conversations, so we can have direct input." --Joan Price

From Library Journal

This book could have as accurately been subtitled "When Worlds Collide." A self-described "energy healer," Motz used her personal interpretation of therapies based on reiki, acupuncture, and ayurvedism to work with noted Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center cardiac surgeon Mehmet Oz in treating patients undergoing procedures including heart transplants and coronary bypass. In clear, expressive writing, she presents case studies and tips for tapping one's own healing energy. Motz assumes a readership totally accepting of energy medicine, and skeptics are likely to drop the book after the first few pages. That would be unfortunate, for the book is most interesting when portraying the confrontation of two radically different medical belief systems, each equally horrified by the other. For all alternative medicine collections. [Coming in October from Dutton is Dr. Oz's own account of energy healing, Healing from the Heart.?Ed.]?Catherine Arnott Smith, Ctr. for Biomedical Informatics, Univ. of Pittsburg.
-?Catherine Arnott Smith, Ctr. for Biomedical Informatics, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; 1St Edition edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553107143
• ISBN-13: 978-0553107142
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #468,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, helpful and VERY worth the read!, January 23, 2000

By 

Karen Caffrey (Connecticut, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Hands of Life : An Energy Healer Reveals the Secrets of Using Your Body's Own Energy Medicine for Healing, Recovery and Transformation (Hardcover)

I greatly enjoyed Julie Motz's wonderful book which describes her ongoing work and development as a subtle energy healer. She is a gifted medical intuitive who has conducted her healings during actual surgeries. Getting herself in the door was no small feat given the general skepticism of the established medical community to "alternative" medicine! I highly recommend this book to all those interested in energy work and healing.

Also, I initially didn't buy this book because of the lengthy, contemptuous review of another reader. I only bought it after a personal friend read it and convinced me it was worth reading. The criticisms in this negative review seem to me to be unfounded.

Ms. Motz is speaking her truth about the healing work she does. She clearly references both existing research that may support her experiences, and also notes the need for more study to explore what she and other intuitive healers are experiencing. The patients she works with often corroborate her intuitions, and have improved outcomes from whatever other treatment (usually surgery) they are undergoing. The contempt of this other reviewer seems undeserved and, I believe, says more about the reviewer than about Ms. Motz or the book.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding and Brilliant Insights Into Energy Healing!, November 28, 1998

By 

Judith Prager, Ph.D. ([e-mail]) (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hands of Life : An Energy Healer Reveals the Secrets of Using Your Body's Own Energy Medicine for Healing, Recovery and Transformation (Hardcover)

As a serious alternative healer, myself, I approach books on the subject with some cynicism, concerned about writers who might take advantage of the public's desire for magical answers. Unlike other authors who only pretend a mastery of such subjects as energy medicine, however, Julie Motz is the real thing! With a stunning blend of candor, brilliance, surprising theory and examples of her technique that are both breath-taking and clearly applicable to our lives, Julie Motz provides important, even life-saving, original answers to healing issues . I wanted to underline the whole book, it was so full of insight and inspiration. Read this and find out what the medical profession has yet to learn: that we are mind/bodies that respond to energy medicine in ultimate, transformative ways.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and a good read, March 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Hands of Life : An Energy Healer Reveals the Secrets of Using Your Body's Own Energy Medicine for Healing, Recovery and Transformation (Hardcover)

In general, I found this book thought-provoking and a pleasure to read. Motz is candid, and I think she makes it perfectly clear that what she does is based on intuition, not some scientifically proven model of mind-body interaction. The point is that, a lot of the time, it WORKS, and it works well enough to convince some pretty hard-nosed physicians that "energy medicine" is a valuable adjunct to the healing process. The book is much more autobiographical and less "how to" than the title implies (this is true of a number of other books on intuitive healing, e.g., Mona Lisa Schulz's), but it's quite likely that the author didn't choose the title!
Perhaps the most controversial part is Motz's theories about prenatal memories -- but I don't think we should dismiss them out of hand. After all, we spend the first 9 months of our lives taking in all our sustenance through the umbilical cord, absorbing whatever hormones et al. are in our mother's bloodstream, so it's likely that the old folk wisdom is true and we really ARE influenced by the way she's feeling about the pregnancy.
What I found most impressive about Motz's insights is that they confirmed something I've long felt: even if our brains are anaesthetized, our bodies remember what happens to them during surgery. I recently had a colonoscopy, was "out" the whole time, and felt no pain when I awoke -- but I had an overwhelming sense of having been violated. I think most people who have surgery experience something similar. But, because our bodies are viewed by most doctors as merely mechanical objects (and, from what I observed before I went under, this was certainly true of the team who did my procedure), our emotional reactions are considered "silly" and we try to ignore them. By contrast, Motz's attitude towards the body is one of reverence and respect. I think that's an important factor in her success as a healer, and many -- perhaps most -- doctors should take a lesson from her.