Pat Jenson and Eldon Swensen in Conversation with Voices
Pat Jensen and Eldon Swensen sat down with Voices to talk about their meditation practice and shared interest in energy healing. Pat and Eldon exuded the comfort and ease of long-time partners, but that was not the real story. Their lives merged in 2015 when they volunteered to share energy healing practices with cancer patients. Their individual stories suggest that long before they joined RIM in 2019, they were already traveling the Dharma path.
Before we hear their story, it might be productive to describe energy healing. Energy Healing is a group of ancient practices that facilitates a positive change in the way energy moves through the body to reduce the symptoms of pain, depression, and anxiety. From a research perspective, there are both critics and defenders. Improving energy flow is fairly mysterious, but the results are quite real and often profound. Many patients report positive outcomes, so proof may be a moot point.
Eldon described one of his energy healing practices, Reiki, in this way:
In some oriental philosophies, we're all bathed in universal energy or life force. Our chakras are the way that life force connects to our body. Disease is basically a result of one of the chakras being blocked, our body getting out of balance.
I believe in the impressive impact of touch. I tell patients that our minds and bodies can unconsciously communicate. Through this communication, our internal healing abilities are activated to self-heal. This explanation was comfortable for me and made sense to my patients. I didn't need a more complex explanation other than the value of touch.
Pat’s Path
Pat’s interest in caring for seriously ill and dying patients began with the death of her father when she was 15 years old. Her father had been a medic in World War II.
He had been with many men who died during the war. And it changed his life. He showed me how to be around people who were in the process of dying. I've always felt that Dad was my first hospice patient. In my nursing program, I decided to do hospice work. Most of the patients I saw were cancer patients.
After marrying and having five children, Pat enrolled in Cardinal Stritch College and earned a degree in nursing and theology. This is where her interest in Buddhism began. Her interest in meditative practices emerged when Pat finished her degree in 1994. She took a job with the Sisters of St. Francis at Cardinal Stritch College. One of the young sisters invited Pat to attend a lecture in Madison on the healing process.
And that was it! The lecture triggered something in me. I had a nursing background and a theology background. That lecture sparked my interest in a program called Healing Touch. It was a perfect time in my life. Everything I did in my life brought me to where I was then, which still amazes me to this day.
With all that enthusiasm, Pat enrolled in a Healing Touch program. Pat attended night classes in Healing Touch offered by the American Nurses Association and continued working for the Sisters of Saint Francis during the day. The program would take 3-4 years, cycling through group instruction and independent study and practice. Some classes were held at UWM in Milwaukee, but the rest were held in Florida at a trauma center. Though a medical background was not required, Pat, as an LPN, used her medical background to enhance their Healing Touch program experience.
Healing Touch, like Reiki, works through the chakras. Anatomically, the entire nervous system moves down the center of the body through a series of chakras. There are seven chakras, each with a specific function. With practice, the practitioners learn to see and feel blocked chakras. They move their hands over a person’s body to determine which chakra is blocked. Reiki and Healing Touch open the blocked chakra, giving the patient more energy and making them feel better.
Before Pat finished the Healing Touch program, Pat’s husband, Bill, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Though highly motivated to complete the course of study, Pat knew she didn't have the time or the energy to do the classwork and also care for Bill.
During her husband’s 10-year illness, Pat rekindled a long-standing interest in the common threads of many religious philosophies. Her interest settled on exploring Buddhism.
After Pat’s husband passed away in 2014, she felt a need to “find herself again because you lose yourself as a caregiver.” During Pat’s search, friends encouraged her to volunteer at a nearby cancer center. Pat took their advice and made an appointment with the mentor to discuss a Reiki program. That mentor was Eldon Swenson.
Eldon’s Path
Eldon grew up in a small farming community with a stoic acceptance of life’s hardships and death. When Eldon became interested in Buddhist authors, he was surprised by the assumption of the human struggle to accept and embrace impermanence.
As a doctor, I'm not upset by a patient being near death. That just doesn't bother me. And I think that lack of fear transfers. Reiki allowed me to focus on one person. Patients know that for one hour, nothing is happening except there's somebody who's just interested in them … someone who is comfortable with their difficult medical circumstances. In that 45-60 minutes, I could almost see them expanding.
Eldon's interest in cultivating a supportive environment for patience about a year after becoming a practicing anesthesiologist, Eldon realized people were terrified of surgery and he started putting his hand on their shoulder. He asked them to imagine themselves relaxing. He'd play classical music. After changing how he interacted with patients, a recovery nurse explained that his patients were waking up differently. They were more comfortable and experienced less pain. She wanted to know what he was doing differently. Knowing it made a positive difference, he administered anesthesia with a gentle touch and reassurance for 30 years.
During his career, Eldon spent a year teaching pediatric anesthesia on a university faculty. When dealing with frightened children, the traditional response was to put them to sleep quickly. Very often, these children woke up with nightmares and general distress. Eldon initiated the practice of holding and calming the child while administering anesthesia. The outcomes were noticeably positive. After a while, all of the faculty started using those strategies.
Much later, Eldon realized these gentle additions to the anesthesia process were versions of energy healing which naturally led him to Reiki. When Eldon was 70 years old and disenchanted with retirement, he sought a meaningful way to spend his time.
Eldon had colleagues in integrative medicine, which involved chiropractic, acupuncture, meditation, yoga, tai chi, qi gong, and Reiki. The department chairman, a doctor, asked Eldon if he would take a Reiki course. When she explained Reiki, Eldon dubbed it ‘crazy’ but eventually took the four-hour course. A week later, he still thought Reiki was interesting but ‘crazy.'
Before much time passed, he had an opportunity to try Reiki on a neighbor facing a second hip replacement. She was anxious because of intense nausea with the first surgery. Eldon did Reiki with her two nights before and one night after her surgery. She responded to the surgery without nausea, and her doctor said he'd never seen a recovery like that, especially since a redo was often more difficult than the first surgery.
With this success,his hours of Reiki training, independent study, and decades as an anesthesiologist, Eldon started a Reiki program at the surgical center in Grafton. He described his first Reiki patient:
She was just a little thing under a pile of blankets. And she was dying of pancreatic cancer and had a lot of pain. I went over and saw her lying all curled up under these blankets. So I did Reiki over the blankets and touched her feet. After 45 minutes, she looked up at me with these little eyes and said, “All my worries went away.” Isn't that wonderful? I almost cried at that point.
Eldon was the sole Reiki practitioner at the cancer center for a year, and then a nurse joined the Reiki team. While working at that cancer center, Eldon saw about between 300 and 400 cancer patients. In his experience, at least 80% of them slept more hours during the week after a reiki session. And some of them got their appetite back. Some of them reported less anxiety. And many of them had a spouse who said there was a notable improvement.
Eldon described an impactful moment early in his career as a Reiki practitioner, doing a Reiki session with a woman:
I can visualize it. I had both my hands on her leg. And it was almost like I heard the voice, “This precious person.” In that moment, I realized that if I were offered a million dollars to get up right now and play golf at Pebble Beach, I would turn it down. I wanted to be right there more than any place in the world. I began seeing similarities between my Reiki and anesthesia practices over the years. I realized I'd been doing ‘touch healing’ for my entire career.
Eldon and Pat’s Shared Path
Pat and Eldon met in 2015. Eldon was the mentor responsible for training new volunteers to provide Reiki to surgical patients at the cancer center. His wife, Letty, passed away unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm less than a year earlier. Pat hoped to merge her nursing degree and her years of Healing Touch training into a new role as a Reiki practitioner. Her husband, Bill, had passed a year earlier after a 10-year battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. Ah! The stars were aligned. Everything that had happened to them brought them to this shared moment. Their common interests and personal experiences resonated with each other.
Pat and Eldon married in 2019. A dear friend with end-stage cancer was upset that she probably would not live to see them get married. With a shrug of their shoulders, Pat and Eldon arranged to be married in this friend’s home, with the friend and her husband as their witnesses. What an awesome celebration of life well lived!
After about a year in their new home, Pat and Eldon created a meditation room and committed themselves to developing a meditation practice. They did silent meditation, read various spiritual literature, and explored Buddhist websites. Eldon and Pat were essentially merging their Christian practice with Buddhism. Gradually, however, their daily meditation sessions began to fizzle out a bit.
They crossed RIM’s threshold in early 2020, a bit before COVID forced RIM to shift to a Zoom only format. Today (2024), they are still active members of the RIM community as regular participants in multiple sessions each week and as volunteers. Eldon reflects:
When Pat and I started a meditation practice, it felt a lot like doing Reiki. Like meditation, Healing Touch, and Reiki have changed my unconscious mind in ways that I don't fully understand. It made my life more balanced. And I was more open to RIM as a result of my experience with Reiki.
When Voices asked if Reiki practitioners were ‘special,' Eldon emphatically said that all humans have this capacity to facilitate energy healing.
I view Reiki as a different version of the calm we practice at RIM. A lot of what we talk about at RIM starts with calm. So I believe that a hundred percent of people have this capacity to calm themselves and access their own healing. We learn how to water those seeds of calmness and how to develop internal peace.
Pat echoed Eldon’s conviction. When Voices asked, ‘Who is doing the healing?’ Both Pat and Eldon emphatically said that the patient does the healing, and the Reiki practitioner is the conduit of that energy.
Pat and Eldon still practice Reiki on each other, on sick neighbors, a couple of people from an alcoholics anonymous group, and friends.
Pat ended our conversation with her daily ritual of reciting the Five Lines, which connected her way of living, her practice at RIM, and her practice using Reiki and Healing Touch.
I am grateful for this new day. I embrace impermanence. I cultivate compassion for myself and others. I walk the path of wisdom. I’m at peace with myself. Blessings to everyone! Share your calmness. It is contagious.