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‘Just Another Kind of Scientist’
Rodney Blount knows how to release the fear

by By Courtney Mather

May 12, 2005

I used to be terrified of hypodermic needles. There was no explainable origin, but if you put a needle in front of me, I would either break into a cold sweat or faint. Nothing I did would end it, even hypnotherapy.



Then last week my phobia became the focus of a dinner conversation at a friend’s house. But rather than make my phobia the source of entertainment, my friend introduced me to Rodney Blount.



She had described him to me as an “energy healer.” He’s a certified master practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and is trained in advanced Eastern energetic techniques.



“What I do is thought healing,” Blount told me later. “We live in a thought based universe. And thoughts are things. A person’s thoughts about you can literally change your blood chemistry, and your thoughts and your thinking can change theirs.”



Blount has studied all things energetic—Aikido, Qigong, Tai Chi, Pranic Healing, Bach Flower Therapy, Kinesiology, soft tissue release, the Enneagram, Polarity Therapy, Psychoneurobiology, as well Zen Buddhism and Hinduism.



“You can literally make an emotional, psychological, physical, mental or psychic change in a person simply by controlling your thoughts and where they go along the energy pathways that connect us all together,” he said. “We really are all connected, and we are connected by energy pathways that you can’t see, just like our cell phones, televisions and radios. There are electrical engineers and scientists who understand how these forms of energy travel in space and time around us. I’m just another kind of scientist.”



At the dinner party, Blount immediately volunteered to help me with my needle phobia.



“How ready do you feel to release this fear?” he asked me.



“Very ready,” I said.



“Are you ready to release it quickly?” he asked.



“Absolutely.” I said.



Still, I felt rather skeptical that this phobia could be cured over dinner in just a few minutes.



Blount asked me to recall an incident in my past related to needles. My anxiety levels immediately began to surge, and I nearly called the whole thing off.



“Don’t worry, I’ve got it,” he reassured me. “Go ahead and relax.”



Blount closed his eyes. I studied him as the room fell silent. He looked to be deep in meditation. All I could see was a glimpse of the whites of his eyes.



Several minutes passed in silence until he opened his eyes. “How is your fear now?”



Much to my shock, I had difficulty recalling the same memory that had minutes before nearly sent me horizontal. I could visualize the scene, but something felt different. The fear was gone.



Blount then asked me to imagine going somewhere to get a shot. My heart raced a bit, but not like before. What had just transpired overshadowed the disappointment I felt over this small pang of anxiety.



But Blount wasn’t finished. “I like to go for 100 percent,” he said. He closed his eyes again, and several more minutes of silence passed. When Blount opened his eyes again, I found myself laughing about a phobia that had plagued me for as long as I could remember.



“There are some folks that say ba humbug and hokus pokus and other folks who believe in this kind of stuff implicitly,” John Wittenburg, a well-respected woodworker in Kahakuloa told me later. “I can argue one way or another or philosophize until the cows come home. Me, I’ve pretty much got my feet on the ground. And I know that this guy is not only sincere, he believes in what he does. You can’t ask more of a guy.”



Wittenburg suffered from a staph infection in his leg. Nothing, not even antibiotics, helped him. It dragged on for two years. Then he met Blount.



“For me, he gets results, and that’s what counts,” said Wittenburg. “My leg is cured.”



To the eyes of an innocent bystander, it may appear that Blount is performing miracles. He disagrees.



“When I work and do this kind of stuff now, I kind of prefer if it’s unremarkable,” he said. “Because I have come to understand that it’s pretty unremarkable when you start to understand the laws of energy around us.”







For more information on Blount, who plans to move to Maui this summer, call (650) 364-6484. MTW