A changemaker in the veterinarian field, Bodywork, Energywork Practitioner and veterinarian Dr Edward is more than meets the eye. A singer, songwriter, abstract visual artist and nature lover, he has devoted his life to helping animals to heal with holistic, hands-on work.
His long 24-year career in his field has inspired his vision to create the Whole Energy Body Balance (WEBB) Method. He not only uses this evolutionary practice in his treatments with both human and furry patients to enhance their quality of life. Dr Edward also teaches this method 1:1 to seekers interested in expanding their skills in bodywork and healing with animals and/or humans.
What we love most about Dr Edwards is his passion and zest for living a balanced spiritual life and his passionate drive to pass on the importance of those benefits to others, human and furry alike.
Let’s see what he has to say.
Kim: Dr Edward, can you share with us who you are as a human doing great things in the world? What makes you tick?
Dr Edward: I think, in essence, I’m really curious about everything. I have an ongoing active curiosity. I think that’s one of the defining things about how I keep going because there’s always something new and wonderful to explore even more deeply. I’m passionate about spiritual connections, spiritual growth, and spiritual presence. I’m also really passionate about communication and connection.
I’m ASPI, on the spectrum, and when I was younger, communication was a big and difficult challenge. I’ve learned a lot of things, and most people wouldn’t think I had any ASPI traits these days because I mask them pretty well.
I have the Holistic Veterinary work I’ve been doing for 27 years. I’ve got the Whole Energy Body Balance work, which I’ve created over the last probably 20-odd years, which is a profoundly healing, bodywork and energy work modality for pets, people, and horses. I am a musician and singer-songwriter. I’ve been singing and performing for 20-odd years with that as well. I’m a visual artist, so I do visionary abstract art, and I love gardening, growing food, and getting out in nature. So, I’m passionate about a lot of things.
Kim: You’re known for being the healing vet and working holistically with animals. Not all vets see their work in that way. What drove you to create this beautiful body of work initially?
Dr Edward: The first time I stepped towards a more holistic view and wanted to build a relationship of mutual understanding and respect with animals was in my teens when I ran across the book ‘The Man Who Listens to Horses’ by Monty Roberts. That’s when I started moving away from making and breaking horses with aversive which is what the status quo was where I grew up, to more connecting, understanding, and communicating.
When I started doing hands-on work some years later, I was about 18 months out from graduating, doing a temporary job, and fellow Dr Tom Hearn came to town. He was a regular vet but an innovative regular vet, and he created this method of mobilizing and releasing the neck and vertebrae. Dr Hearn would take horses that had fallen lameness that they could not find a reason for with X-rays, notebooks, and examinations. He worked on them, and the lameness would go away. So, I got fascinated.
He was generous with his time and wisdom and sat down and talked to me for a few hours. I immediately started thinking, what about dogs and cats? They have necks and backs, too, so I felt deeper into their bodies, and when I did that, I started finding a lot of hidden pain and tension restriction from healthy movement that I didn’t notice until I started sinking deeper into their body.
That was another step out of the more traditional veterinary paradigm into more complimentary type treatments.
Then a few years later, I was already interested in spirituality at that point, and I was reading many Buddhist books and things like that after I graduated. But then I went to England, and I crashed with chronic fatigue and what I didn’t realize until 20 years later, most likely Lyme disease. Luckily my parents came to visit me, and they had to take me home. I couldn’t work for a couple of years. Western medicine initially helped with some symptoms like gastric ulceration and depression. But you know what? If the thing is a syndrome, the doctors don’t know what it is. I was left with a lot of pain, stiffness, fatigue and quite comprehensively unwell, so I started exploring Alternative and Complementary things.
There was a local guy who did bodywork and massage; it turned out he was also an energy healer. I noticed that his work helped me feel better than anything else. I also started working with an online energy healer at that time, and again, I had sessions with her and noticed improvements. So then I went off and studied energy healing.
I learned the EMF balancing technique, a modality I don’t use anymore, but at the time, it was a massive feeling of energy and opened up big things in my body. My consciousness was enormous.
I noticed an interesting thing when I went home after training and would sit down and practice. My little staffy dog would sit beside my feet every time I sat down to practice. At first, I thought it was a strange coincidence, but after 9, 10, 20, and 30 times, it is not a coincidence-this is a repeatable phenomenon. So, I started integrating healing work in vet hospitals. At that stage, most vet hospitals were vehemently not open-minded to that sort of thing.
The first vet practice I created and ran myself was the Home Visit Vet in Townsville, and I had that practice for about seven years. Being my own boss allowed me to start integrating and exploring holistic complementary and alternative treatments in what I was doing. I also had the opportunity to do a lot of hands-on work.
I then moved from Townsville to Northern New South Wales, which has a very open-minded community, and that’s where the Healing Vet Brand started and when the Whole Energy Body Balance brand was born. So that’s where I started teaching the bodywork and hands-on side. I did face-to-face workshops all through the time that I was there.
Then I moved to Melbourne, and in 2019 we took the Whole Energy Body Balance Bodywork training online, which was good timing. Then about 18 months ago, we launched the Whole Energy, Energy Work for Animals. I was scared, but there’s surprising a lot of research looking at energy healing interventions and showing measurable results greater than a placebo. Science gets a headache because they can’t elucidate a scientific reason for the mechanism, but it works.
We knew there was gravity before we could understand why that was, and no one complained.
Then we launched the Whole Energy Body Balance for Humans program about nine months ago for the first time, and I’m beautifully busy.
Kim: You’re in the unique position to work with humans, understand their energy system, and then have that perspective with animals. How do they compare? For example, do dogs have auras?
Dr Edward: Dogs have all the same subtle energy anatomy that we do, so I talk more about the primary energy field, the coherent, intelligent dynamic fields of different vibrations of energy. Electromagnetic, paramagnetic dye, magnetic light from our biphotonic emissions.
There’s a whole coherent field of light, energy, and information that surrounds all living beings. Within our physical bodies, we have chakras and nadirs and the energy, qi or prana, that moves through all these subtle energy anatomy networks. The interesting thing about subtle anatomy is that you can have multiple equally valid systems of anatomy that you can perceive, interact and work with. They’re all equally valid.
I think that’s curious, and I believe all of the subtle energy systems, anatomy systems, and methods of working with energy are just metaphors. Ways for our consciousness to hook into and engage with understanding and shifting the energy in the system to higher patterns of harmony and balance.
Kim Obviously, animals will have a relatively different response to humans; however, are you finding that overall, healing patterns that show up for both are similar?
Dr Edward: It’s very similar in that how you work is the same. You need to create a healing space with boundaries around it for the safety of everyone involved in the process. Before doing that, you have to ensure that you’re grounded and present and that your whole energy system is online and coherent.
Then when you’re working with animals, in one way, they are easier because they don’t have ideas that get in the way. I think that’s probably the most profound difference between animals and people; animals don’t think that this thing’s good, or not going to work, or don’t have social patterns, ideas, and subconscious problems that get in the way of being open to working with these kinds of modalities.
Kim: Considering human patterns and the fact that, as you said, we get in our own way. Do you find it easier working with animals?
Dr Edward: Yes and no. It used to be that animals were a lot easier for me to work with, but now that I’ve got my energy systems into a good place so that I’m solid, strong, clear and coherent, I can work with humans, and it’s not a problem anymore. With humans, you have to be curious and inquire, ask questions, get them curious, and see if you can get their conscious mind switched off and their unconscious mind switched on. They’re just as easy to work with; it’s just different.
Kim: Why do you feel working in this way with animals is essential, and would you like to see it showing up more in the ‘institution’ of veterinary science?
Dr Edward: We have two main practitioner training for working with animals. One is the whole antibody balance bodywork for pets which is very hands-on. Using a range of pressure and movement and stretching and stroking the tissues and structures of the body to find and relieve silent pain, soft tissue pain, and neck and back pain. This therapeutic touch approach is also very effective for helping and treating animals with anxiety and trauma—post-traumatic rescue pets etc.
I would love to get this into the veterinary mainstream, and it’s a long-term goal of mine to do that.
One of the reasons that I only started teaching bodywork is that it’s a lot easier for people to accept than energy work; it’s just a fact in the world that we live in, right? But I believe there’s a huge place for therapeutic touch. Soft tissue pain is very much underdiagnosed by pet carers and vets. Vets are still not taught anything about this kind of pain or how to assess it at university, so they miss it.
I’ve had heaps of animals that come to me that other vets have recently examined, and I get my hands on them, and there’s a lot of pain that other vets missed. It doesn’t mean they’re bad vets. It just means they don’t haven’t been trained appropriately. So the energy part of it, well, I would love to see that in veterinary science, but I think that’s less likely. I would love, longer term, to get some evidence base for it to help break up this fundamentalist kind of worldview.
It’s always curious that scientists are so closed-minded when science is supposed to be an exploration of the unknown to find out what is useful.
Kim: How would you love your work to shape the world?
Dr Edward: My dream is that people be brave enough to connect with themselves and know themselves.
The core practice of all energy-body balance work is an internal or experiential process that we call the Whole Energy Body Balance, Somatic Embodiment, and Energy Connection Practice. That’s a three-stage process.
The first stage is a gentle postural alignment because you need your physical alignment for your energy to flow optimally.
The second stage is a process of gently and continually bringing all your awareness into and throughout your physical body.
Then when you expand into further training, we start bringing awareness into the energy body and the energy field. This process of bringing awareness to the body is something that I came across after my second marriage when I was left with post-traumatic stress. I went through an Experiencing Somatic therapist, and it’s through it that you bring all your awareness into your body without associating it with trauma because that is not helpful. If you only bring awareness to trauma to the extent that you can stay present with it and not be overwhelmed and not going to fight-fight arousal states.
I reckon that is the most profound spiritual practice I’ve ever come across because, for one, your awareness is effectively infinite. The more awareness you bring into your body, the more awareness is there to bring into your body. The more you practice, the more sensitivity and consciousness of that awareness can grow as you bring awareness into your body.
Then the final stage of that practice is connecting to the natural flows of energy that move through our systems. Just like rivers move through the landscape, right?
We connect to the flows of energy up through the body from the earth and down through the body from the sun, and you can drink them in with your heart, combine them and fill yourself to overflowing. And that overflowing energy then informs all the touch work we do with the bodywork side.
Kim: Magic. What have we missed asking about that you feel important to share?
Dr Edward: I would say to everyone that you can grow and transcend whatever happens in your life. I am now fit and healthy, working 40 to 60 hours a week, and have a strong exercise meditation and movement practice. But I could hardly do one or two when I started doing push-ups.
So, devotion. Have devotion to yourself, love yourself, embrace healthy discomfort, and do that consistently.
I do my morning practice, and my morning practice is full on. I probably do two to three hours, five mornings a week. I do a range of meditative, energy practices and resistance exercises, which is so important. Everybody needs to be doing resistance exercise multiple days a week and movement and stretching.
I’m not a morning person. But if you make caring for yourself as important as wiping your bottom after you get off the toilet, then you will do these things. Many mornings it’s uncomfortable, and I get sore muscles from it. And some mornings are blissful.
But the thing is that if there’s one thing that I can get one person who reads this to take action is to do what you need to do to make yourself strong and healthy in terms of exercise, eating and spiritual practices. It might take six, nine, or twelve months of hard work before you start reaping the rewards, but I can promise you will.
Dr Edward, what is your fierce truth?
My fierce truth is that I’m going to show up no matter what, and I am not going to die wondering.
Fierce Truths Magazine
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