Energy and Spirit:
Communication and Connection
A Week-Long Symposium at the Epona Center
Monday, March 16 through Friday March 20
The Epona International Study Center at Apache Springs Ranch is pleased to present its
first week-long symposium featuring internationally-known researchers/authors recognized for
their contributions to mind-body science, consciousness studies, and the healing potential of
the human-animal bond. With each clinician sharing his or her latest insights, including research
so new it hasn’t yet been published, participants have the opportunity to hear cutting edge
theories and studies “straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Seminars may be attended individually, or as a package for 10 percent off the total cost.
All programs include lunch. A limited number of rooms at the Epona Center are available for
out-of-town guests, and dinner in the Epona Cantina will be served each night, offering
participants more time to share their ideas and discuss the day’s events. Contact
booking@theeponacenter.com or 520-455-5908 for more information.
THE SACRED PROMISE:
REUNITING SCIENCE AND SPIRIT FOR
HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION
Gary E. Schwartz, PhD
Monday, March 16, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
$250 (includes lunch)
Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D, is the author of numerous books that explore the
borderlands between science and spirituality, including The Energy Healing
Experiments (2007), The G.O.D. Experiments (2006), The Afterlife Experiments
(2002), The Truth about Medium (2005), and The Living Energy Universe (1999).
As Professor of Psychology, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Surgery at the
University of Arizona, he also serves as Director of its Laboratory for Advances in
Consciousness and Health, where much of his cutting-edge research is conducted.
Gary’s newly completed book, The Sacred Promise, which will be published
in 2010, expresses “an urgent call for reuniting Science and Spirit” by focusing on
three areas of visionary science – Afterlife, Spirit Guide, and Spiritual Healing
research – with direct applications for our personal and collective lives. Join us
for an inspiring pre-publication introduction to the latest research exploring these
“big picture” questions as Gary draws on remarkable new discoveries from his
university laboratory as well as the laboratory of personal life:
Does consciousness – including our personalities and memories – survive
physical death?
Does our energy and information – our visible and invisible light – continue
like the light from distant stars, long after the stars have “died”?
Do “spirit guides” really exist? Do we have personal spirit guides,
sometimes called guardian angels, and can they play an active guiding role in our
lives?
Does Spirit play a fundamental role in healing and health?
Can we learn to call on Spirit – what Jonathan Ellerby, PhD, calls “The
Sacred” in his book Return to the Sacred – for the healing and health of ourselves
and the planet as a whole?
And is Spirit literally “calling on us” to accept assistance? Is this its Sacred
Promise to us?
A highly experienced and dynamic public speaker about mind-body, energy, and
spiritual healing research and applications, Gary has been interviewed on major
network television shows including Dateline and Good Morning America, as well
as on MSNBC, Nightline, Anderson Cooper 360, and The O’Reilly Factor. His work
has been the subject of documentaries and profiles on Discovery, HBO, Arts &
Entertainment, Fox and the SciFi Channel, among others. Gary has been a guest
on hundreds of radio shows, including four evenings on Art Bell's Coast to Coast,
and on PBS, CBC and BBC. His work has been described in various magazines and
newspapers including USA Today, the London Times, The New York Times, and The
LA Times, as well as a feature profile in Biography magazine.
Gary received his PhD from Harvard in 1971 and was an Assistant Professor at
Harvard for five years. He served as a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at
Yale University, director of the Yale Psychophysiology Center, and co-director of
the Yale Behavioral Medicine Clinic, before moving to the University of Arizona in
1988. In addition to numerous books, he has published more than 450 scientific
papers and chapters, including 6 papers in the journal Science, and co-edited 11
academic books. He also serves as Corporate Director of Development of Energy
Healing at Canyon Ranch.
Mystics with Tails:
Horses as Messengers and Guides for Transformation
Linda Kohanov
Tuesday, March 17, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
$250 (includes lunch)
With or without wings, horses are universally depicted as messengers of wisdom,
creativity, healing, and redemption. Pegasus brought inspiration to artists and
carried the heroes of ancient Greece to the stars. Muhammad received the
prophetic visions of Islam astride the magical mare Alborak. Druid priests
employed horses as oracles. Through a series of simple, ritualistic movements,
these sacred steeds would answer yes or no to questions about everything from
battle strategies to lover’s quarrels.
Hindu prophecies speak of an avatar named Kalki ushering in a future era of peace
on earth. The final manifestation of Vishnu, he’s sometimes depicted as a whitewinged horse accompanying the blue-skinned god. Statues also portray him with a
horse’s head and a human body, harkening back to an earlier manifestation of
Vishnu, Hayagriva, god of wisdom, representing the triumph of divine knowledge
over the dark forces of ignorance and misguided passion. Another mythic centaur,
Chiron, is said to have taught Aesclepius, the Greek god of medicine, everything
he knows, while in India, twin horses known as the Asvins were credited with
creating the healing arts.
Epona founder/bestselling author Linda Kohanov has spent nearly 20 years
researching the mythical/spiritual dimension of the horse-human connection---and
putting it to practical use. In this powerful presentation and demonstration with
members of her herd, she will show how many of these ancient myths have
parallels in reality as living, breathing horses are increasingly recognized for their
powerful healing capabilities. She’ll offer the latest research in consciousness
studies, emotional intelligence, and mind-body awareness to explain how horses
seem to read people’s minds, and why they so easily jump-start increased
creativity, intuition and transformation in receptive humans. She’ll teach simple
techniques for accessing the “Horse Ancestors,” the collective wisdom of the
horse, as a form of guidance---in the riding arena and beyond. Finally, she will
share the parallels between equine myths of transformation, powerful
synchronicities with living horses, and the meaning behind the predicted shift in
2012.
The Energy of Connection:
The Heart as an Organ of Perception and Communication
Learn how to control your heart rhythms to optimize your energy field;
develop more acute sensory awareness of the energy field interactions
between humans, between horses, and between humans and horses;
discover how cutting edge scientific research has provided measures of
these emotional interactions
Ann Linda Baldwin, PhD, Reiki Master
Wednesday, March 18 through Friday March 20 (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. March
18-19, and 9 a.m. to noon on Friday the 20th.)
$650 (2.5-day workshop, includes lunch all three days, materials,
attendance at both the Reiki I and Reiki II attunement)
$550 (workshop, meals, plus choice of either Reiki I on Thursday at 3
p.m. or Reiki II attunement on Friday at 9 a.m.)
$450 (workshop without attunements ends at 3 p.m. on Thursday, lunch
Wednesday and Thursday)
In this workshop, Ann Linda Baldwin, PhD, a physiologist and respected researcher in the field of
integrative medicine, will present the results of cutting edge research into the energetic dimension of
the horse-human relationship. She brings years of experience in biofeedback, Reiki, and the equestrian
arts into play, helping people find the optimal mind-body connection for riding, training, and gaining
the horse’s trust.
“Many different healthcare cultures, such as traditional Chinese medicine, the Japanese Kampo system
and Ayurvedic medicine embody the concept that living beings are infused with a subtle form of
energy,” she says. “This vital energy or life force is believed to flow throughout the material body, but
it has not been unequivocally measured by means of conventional instrumentation. Nonetheless,
therapists claim that they can work with this subtle energy, see it with their own eyes, and use it to
effect changes in the physical body and influence health. Other studies suggest that energy fields from
one person can overlap and interact. The electrical energy of the heart is a major source of the energy
fields surrounding humans and large mammals, such as horses. Heart rate rhythm patterns strongly
affect the extent and the quality of the energy fields.”
Using sophisticated yet accessible biofeedback devices, participants will experience how their heart
rhythms reflect their emotions, how positive and negative emotions can be easily distinguished in their
heart rhythm patterns. “Sensors attached to your fingers will show you that your heartbeat acquires a
balanced oscillation when you focus on breathing and on positive emotions,” Ann reveals. “This
oscillation is a signal that your heart field is pulsing at a certain frequency that indicates balance. On a
practical level, you’ll explore how your physiological and sensory experiences change when you go
from balancing your own field to sensing another’s field.”
The workshop builds on these principles as participants explore how horses sense, respond to and
communicate through the heart’s electro-magnetic field. Ann will share new, as yet unpublished results
of experiments she recently conducted showing how the heart rate rhythms of paired humans and of
humans paired with horses reflect the bonds that exist between them. She’ll also compare the
participants’ experience of feeling energy fields with the measured physiological responses of energy
healers sensing their own fields in scientific experiments.
The workshop also offers the opportunity to receive Reiki I and/or II attunements.
“Reiki is a Japanese name meaning spiritually guided life energy,” Ann explains. “Receiving and giving
Reiki is a very relaxing and soothing experience that reduces the debilitating effects of stress and
anxiety. An attunement is a special ceremony to awaken the inner healing power of a person. This
starts the process of healing within the person and also enables the person to give direct healing to the
self, other people, animals, plants and issues. You will learn about studies on animals and humans
published in scientific journals and magazines and also televised that clearly demonstrate the
beneficial effects of Reiki scientifically.”
Realizing that many people in the Epona community are experienced with Reiki at various levels, Ann’s
workshop offers flexibility in this portion of the program. The Reiki I attunement takes place Thursday
afternoon at 3 p.m. The Reiki II attunement will take place Friday morning.
Ann Linda Baldwin, PhD, is a Research Professor of Physiology and Psychology at the University of Arizona and is Director of
“Mind-Body-Science.” She is also a Reiki Master, a Level I/II Reconnective Healer and a one-on-one HeartMath Practitioner, Dr.
Baldwin has practiced Reiki on people and animals for the last seven years. She received her PhD in Physiology from Imperial
College, University of London and her MSc in Radiation Physics from the University of London. In her research she is currently
developing methods to evaluate the capabilities of energy healing practitioners and is using biofeedback techniques to help
people with Parkinson’s disease improve their memory and fine motor skills. She is also using heart rate variability as a tool to
measure the psycho-physiological linkages that occur between the human and the horse. Dr. Baldwin has published over 100
articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has been a member of several review panels for National Institutes of Health.
With her Reiki training and extensive scientific background, Ann Baldwin hopes to bridge the gap between energy healing and
quantitative scientific enquiry. Among her most significant achievements, she received a grant from NIH in 2003 to study the
effects of energy healing on animals, and achieved statistically significant results, which were published in 2006 and 2008. In her
spare time Ann likes to ride her horse and she also volunteers as a horse handler for Therapeutic Riding of Tucson.