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.

As the first non-traditional healer allowed to work in an operating room, Julie Motz has assisted in many incredible recoveries that are unexplained in the scientific literature. She harnesses the body's own energy to help patients survive even the riskiest operations, including heart-transplants, head trauma, and breast cancer surgery.

Now Motz shares remarkable case studies of healing, transformation, and recovery — and step-by-step guidance on accessing one's own innate healing energy. She shows how every part of the body has an emotional life, even on the cellular level, and that these emotions have a physical effect on the body.

This ultimate synthesis of Eastern holistic healing and Western medicine is prescriptive in its look at how to access our innate healing energy and poignant in its detailed stories of recovery. A revolutionary effort by a revolutionary woman, "Hands of Life" takes energy medicine to where it has rarely gone before — the operating room. And Julie Motz reveals the true healing power of the body and puts it into your very own hands.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [297]-300) and index.

Julie Motz is an energy healer who has worked in surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, Stanford University Hospital in California, and many others across the country. In addition to her hands-on healing work, she has started a program, Health's Angels, that teaches energy healing to inner-city teenagers. She lives in Putnam County, New York.