Mind Over Matter

Let's say you're a corporate exec and you're on a white-water rafting junket in Chile and you suffer a partially-paralyzing head injury. You think you're dying. You write letters to your wife, your three-year-old and your unborn child. And you survive. It takes almost two years to learn to walk and talk again. You decide to live more intentionally. To be there when your kids leave and come home from school. To do something you love. You end up becoming one of the most renowned chocolate makers in the world, with the first cacao farm in the United States (in Hawaii). You end up loving your life. What do you do next?

I fell upon Jim Walsh, CEO of Intentional Chocolate, in a bit of a roundabout way. I got an email from Gaia.com offering his chocolate product. It seemed like the perfect fit for someone on my gift list so I ordered it. But then, as with everything, I got curious. So Jim and I had a great talk yesterday. And I mean, really great.

I started with the product. Intentional chocolate? Chocolate that Buddhist monks who trained with the Dalai Lama had meditated over and embedded with positive intentions designed to increase a sense of energy, vigor and well-being for the benefit of mankind?

"I'm on board," I told Jim. "I bought the product, for goodness sake. But I'm thinking my readers might be a little skeptical."

And so we tossed it around for quite some time and yes, I do continue to wonder. Not is it possible. But why not?

* Why can't clarity of intention, intense focus, surrendering, and observation of change produce physical alterations in energy fields outside the body, just as they are increasingly being proven to impact change within the body?

* Why can't the independent, peer-reviewed, double-blind scientific studies that Jim has had conducted that show a 67% increase in well-being for those who have eaten Intentional Chocolate (even accounting for the placebo effect) hold up in the face of scrutiny?

* Why isn't it easy to extend the belief of a "participatory universe" to a measurable change in chocolate, and by consuming it, in us?

I asked Jim if the effect of the chocolate depends on our belief in it, and he says that tests indicate that it does not, that there does appear to be scientific evidence that supports the technology of intention, regardless of our belief in it. I asked then if we could apply this theory to anything, and he suggested that perhaps intention is the secret ingredient in those comforting, love-filled recipes we come to cherish, the ones that we can never really replicate once that gifted culinary-inclined relative passes on.

As Jim and I talked about fields of energy, I gazed out my window at my little fields of greens and thought of how full of vitality, with an undeniable life force, they all are. How energetic I feel after I eat them. How this undeniable sensation is simply not present after the greens have sat around awhile. And I got to thinking, why not chocolate? Why couldn't meditation restore the energy force to a product that is several stages from its life source? With recent tests showing Buddhist monks and other long-time meditators' ability to positively impact the left frontal cortex and other energy circuits in their brains, why couldn't this apply outside their bodies as well? A whole lot of work in quantum physics right now revolves around questions like this, about the spaces between atoms being filled with vital energy and how to best tap it.

I thought of how we honor our food at dinner each night, almost every item on our plates immediately identifiable with the face that grew it, and how I remind my children that this beet, this broccoli was grown and harvested and sold and prepared with intention and, therefore, deserves a moment of recognition and gratitude for that. And are we positively effected more because of this? I don't know the answer to this, but ask anyone who knows me personally. I have truly never had more energy than the last couple years.

Sure, scientists at Harvard and Princeton and Duke are involved in the effects of intention on matter. But, in the meantime, as Jim says, "The worst thing is you get a bite of some of the best chocolate in the world. The best is you find a little something more."

Not a bad risk ratio, if you ask me. I have no trouble eating chocolate with gusto. Why not intention?