More on the Farm at San Benito and Energetic Healing

Did I sound too high-minded in my last post? What I really meant to say was that it felt great to visit this place of healing where I could talk freely about alternative practices and energy healing without having to clean up my language for fear of sounding too woo-woo. I’ve gotten bad responses in the past. I remember going to an ear, nose and throat doctor about my sinuses and telling him that I’d had acupuncture for the condition. He was silently disapproving except for how his eyes narrowed. I think he disliked the fact that I was actually participating in trying to get myself well. He didn’t like being questioned, even when it was for a $5000 CAT Scan he proposed. I never went back but was none too happy when I got his bill and realized that the probe that he casually put up my nose cost $500.

By the time I sat down with one of the Farm doctors, Dr. Marian Alonzo, it was dusk. I was several hours late because of bad weather that put my whole day behind schedule, which ended up being a blessing because the doctor was finished with work and free to talk. I remember being aware that I should begin our conversation slowly despite the late hour. I thought she might be cautious or even defensive speaking with a journalist and I didn’t want to get too deep too fast. But it was she dove right in.

Dr. Alonzo was mesmerizing. She is young, petite, pretty and appeared . . . breakable. She wore flip-flops (practically the uniform of tropical countries) and a crisp white coat and her perfectly silky hair was perfectly pulled back. She shared stories about being green when she first started working at the Farm, and of her first patients and how she was afraid. When was the last time you heard a Western doctor admit that? She actually hid from one of them, she told me. It was a woman who came in quite ill but very feisty, angry and demanding. Dr. Alonzo called her a—and if you could see her you would know how out of character this is—“the bitchiest patient I ever had.” The woman came with a tumor in her colon. Dr. Alonzo and she ended up being great co-partners in restoring the woman to health. They had a ritual after the woman left: at 7 AM each morning, no matter where they were, they would both envision the woman’s colon being healthy. She said they’d often have wild images while doing this. I recall her saying something about an octopus. . . Seven months later, the woman’s colonoscopy showed no sign of a tumor.

Caroline Myss, the teacher and medical intuitive talks a lot about this type of energetic healing. If you’re interested, she has lots of great CDs on the topic. She also travels the world, teaching. And then there’s Dr. Mehmet Oz, of course, who's done wonders in bringing healing practices that were previously considered quackery to the mainstream.

After medical school Dr. Alonzo studied naturopathy at Chi Med Asia in Manila. The Philippines is very advanced in their acceptance and use of alternative therapies.

The Farm at San Benito - Unplugged

There was something about going to the Farm at San Benito that felt like I had come home. Yes, the grounds are spectacularly designed—feng shui’d within an inch of its peaceful and serene being. (Have I mentioned how inadequate I feel writing about the beauty aspect of spas and wellness retreats? To me, the experience is sublime and visceral, yes, but these are feelings that don’t lend themselves sufficiently to a block of words on a page. They are better experienced through stillness and an acknowledged sense of awe. So please don’t take my abrupt descriptions as anything but an admission that I choose not to attempt to properly do justice to works of beauty that are designed to create an emotional response within.)

The facts are that the Farm sits on what once was a coconut and coffee plantation—hence the term farm. It sits at the base of Mount Malarayat and any footpath you choose will take you one of many private oases where you can sit and . . . breathe in the beauty.

But as a follower and user of complementary therapies, what most compelled me to want to visit is the fact that the Farm is one of the few—and certainly one of the first—wellness facilities to seamlessly and unabashedly weave medical and complementary therapies into their core reason for being. They have a staff of 150, which includes 5 medical doctors, nurses and one medical secretary who can field calls from guest 24/7.

Now, to grasp how radical a concept this was when they opened in 2002—and apparently continues to be—can be put in perspective best this way: Just this morning I received in my inbox a media release from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which is a part of the National Institutes of Health, announcing that their medical journal, Academic Medicine, is about to publish research studies on why CAM (Alternative Complementary Medicine) courses should be required in medical school—just now, on the cusp of 2008!

It’s good news that the allopathic establishment is finally realizing that there must be something to this trillion-dollar wellness industry. But something makes me wonder if trying to crack the code on energetic healing quantifiably is a doable task. When Albert Einstein came up with E=mc2, he was saying that mass and energy are both manifestations of the same thing, that mass can be converted into energy and vice versa.

In the most simple language I can safely conjure, that’s the kind of healing that is happening at places like the Farm at San Benito: Medical doctors are looking at real diseases and, along with close medical monitoring, are using natural healing practices to excise disease. The owners say they chose their location because they found that it possessed four distinct energy wells—locations that vibrate at a higher level. They include a 200-year-old mango tree, the amphitheater, the orchidarium and one of the villas.

The Farm at San Benito is located in Lipa, Batangas, about 2 hours from metro Manila.