Just how powerful are our thoughts? Renowned researcher, Lynne McTaggart’s work shows that the power of setting intention to heal is limitless, especially when done with others.

McTaggart has been at the forefront of researching and facilitating group intention-setting for decades. Her large-scale, global intention experiments have shown the dramatic power of thoughts to affect reality and promote healing.

Since 2008, the same effect has been seen in her Power of Eight groups, in which people send and receive healing intentions.

“Working like this in a group, whether they’re a sender or receiver, can have pretty much every aspect of their life healed,” McTaggart said. “So we’ve had extraordinary healings, everything from people getting up out of their wheelchair, to reversing stage 4 cancer, to healing life-threatening sepsis. We’ve also had people fall in love; we’ve had people where they’ve needed hundreds of thousands of dollars receive that; people who needed $2,000 dollars receive that; we’ve had people get new careers, exciting careers.”

Vietnam veteran Wes Chapman is one of the thousands of people who have experienced profound healing in a Power of Eight group. Having suffered from major depression for many years following his service, Chapman had virtually given up on life when he came across one of McTaggart’s workshops and took part in a group healing.

“I felt the energy running through our hands, I felt the vibrations in the room change, I felt a very special atmosphere was being created. The next morning when I woke up, it was an amazing thing. The first thing I felt was this energy, it was like the wheels are moving, I can do what I need to do, and do it happily,” Chapman said. 

“When I went to bed that night, now this is the second night after the experience, I woke up in the morning with a clear memory of the most lucid dream, is what a rational person would call it — I call it a vision. I found myself back on the campus that I was at when I was drafted. My 19-year-old self was waiting for me, and I felt the most powerful emotions of love, connection, and joy. All of his high hopes, all of his beautiful dreams, all of his optimism, all of his youthful energy, it was like ‘Wow!’ somehow I left all that behind. Now with my experience, wisdom, strength, and toughness, and his optimism, hope, and joy, it was like, hey, I get to start life all over again at 65. I’ve done a lot of work over the years, but this was the most phenomenal, the most powerful, and the most direct,” he said.

Just what accounts for these significant effects?

“It’s an amazing, extraordinary, transformational effect of groups. It’s kind of a collective effervescence. There’s also an extraordinary thing about oneness that we don’t get to experience, and I think this is the secret sauce of group intention, this. When we’ve done brainwave studies — I’ve worked with neuroscientists — we did a series of brainwave studies on novice people, people who had never done this before, were put into Power of Eight groups,” McTaggart said. 

“We put an EEG cap on a member of the group who was doing the sending, and we found in every instance there were similar brainwave signatures that looked nothing like meditation but looked everything, almost identical to the same kinds of studies looking at Sufi masters during chanting or Buddhist monks during ecstatic prayer. These are people where the parts of the brain that make us feel separate (are) all dialed way down. So, these are people like Buddhist monks in an ecstatic state of oneness. It is my belief that that altered state that occurs in just 10 minutes with a group intention is responsible because we get to experience what it is to live in the field. We finally get to feel that and not feel our own separation, and that I believe is the healer,” she said.

McTaggart continues to offer the opportunity for people to experience this healing as part of her ongoing workshops and intention experiments. She has a firm conviction that it has never been more necessary to do this kind of work.

“We’ve all been so isolated, and the science shows us that one of the most important things we need is not even food, as much as community,” McTaggart said. “Most of the groups that I lead are all virtual and yet these have become their new family. And I feel that these small groups not only can heal each other but start healing their communities, creating new communities, because small groups are the way every kind of change in our human history has been made. These Power of Eight groups can be little crucibles of change — the change we need, the healing we need, and the connection we desperately need right now.”