By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter

Five women stand in their socks on Sue Gridley’s dining room floor, thumping their chests, massaging their temples, throwing their hands into the air.

Dr. Gridley herself regards them approvingly, occasionally adjusting somebody’s posture or pinching somebody’s armpit. “You’ve got to be grounded,” she tells a woman. “If you’re not grounded, everything gets screwed up.”

So she removes a large stainless steel spoon from a decorative fabric bag and scrapes it across the woman’s instep.

What’s going on here? It’s called energy medicine, and if you don’t know what that is, here’s how Dr. Gridley described it in a subsequent interview. “It is the oldest, safest, least invasive form of healing on the planet.”

Though some may dismiss energy medicine as a New Age notion, it’s been around a good 5000 years in the Orient and has been practiced in the United States for several decades anyway, says Dr. Gridley.

The discipline evolved, she explains, around the Asian concept of chi. That’s pronounced “chee,” and it’s spelled qi or ki in different parts of the East, where it’s also pronounced differently, but in each case it means the same thing:  energy. 

“Everything in your body, and the universe, for that matter, is energy,” said Dr. Gridley. “In many cultures, medicine has been practiced by using the energy in your own body, the kind of energy that is shown in your heartbeat and your pulses and your EEGs, to intervene in making your body have harmony and balance and health and well-being and joy.”

The theory is, energy flows through channels in the body called meridians – or chakras, in Indian systems – much as blood flows through arteries and veins. “When the energy is flowing freely, you tend to be healthy, but it’s not unusual in anybody’s life for energy to be blocked or clogged,” said Dr. Gridley. “If you can bring harmony back into that energy, it helps the body go into a self-healing mode, so you not only feel better, you are better.”  

Acupressure and acupuncture are based on chi, said Dr. Gridley, and so are all the forms of Oriental martial arts, as can be observed in names like Tai Chi.   

In January, Dr. Gridley taught a two-part “Introduction to Energy Medicine” at Lookout Mountain Holistic Center in Valley Head, Ala. She meant to start her current course, Energy Medicine for Women, at the same time, but snow and ice interfered and classes began Feb. 4 instead.

The course, held in Dr. Gridley’s Sunset Drive home, meets monthly on the first Thursday at 2 p.m. The first two classes, including the next one, to be held March 4, are free. Dr. Gridley plans to charge $20 for subsequent classes, mostly to cover the price of materials.     

The story of how Sue Gridley, a conventionally trained psychologist, came to be teaching an alternative medicine course shows that life has some interesting chakras and meridians – read that “twists and turns” if you like – of its own.

Dr. Gridley, a native of Massachusetts, grew up in Florida and returned there after completing her PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In Florida, she practiced at a teaching hospital, a Veterans Administration facility, for over 20 years.  

“Then in my 40s, I developed a kind of mystery illness that no one could diagnose well and no one could treat well,” she said. “My immune system just wasn’t working. I got sick from everything. I was extremely ill and I eventually had to quit working.”

Dr. Gridley stayed sick for seven or eight years, much of the time completely bedridden. At one point she realized that she was on 14 or 15 different medications “Though I was very well steeped in conventional medicine, I realized it wasn’t working,” she said.

That’s when she decided to take charge of her own health. She started by discontinuing half the drugs – she had sufficient medical training to know which ones were safe to stop cold turkey, stressed Dr. Gridley – and felt better immediately.

Meanwhile, she had long been interested in energy medicine, and now that she felt less like a zombie she started going to workshops and learning more. “I realized that energy medicine was what was working best for me,” she said, so she pursued it, and eventually was healthy again. “I’ve gone from being completely bedridden to being normal, as much as anyone can tell,” she said.

During this period, Dr. Gridley studied for two years under energy medicine mogul Donna Eden and was among the first Eden graduates certified to practice. But that wasn’t the extent of her education. Though not conventionally religious, through a home study course she also got herself certified as “the Reverend Sue Gridley.”  

Why? As a psychologist, Dr. Sue Gridley was forbidden by Florida ethical standards to touch her patients, which had always been a source of irritation anyway. “A lot of people who come to a mental health counselor of any sort might just need a pat on the back, maybe even a hug,” she said. But practicing energy medicine, she could see, might well involve pinching an armpit or, say, scraping a foot, and in Florida law it was fine for Rev. Sue Gridley to lay on her hands.

But leaving that interesting side chakra and returning to the main meridian: What kind of patient can benefit by energy medicine? 

Patients like herself, for one, says Dr. Gridley. “It’s not unusual to find somebody in energy medicine who’s had fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome or immune system disease, because those are diseases that conventional medicine doesn’t, or at least didn’t, know how to treat that well,” she said.

But she’s also worked with cancer patients, she added. Energy medicine may not be able to make cancer go away, she said, but it can at least make patients comfortable, as it is useful in easing much chronic pain.

Well, asked the Sentinel, what kind of condition can energy medicine cure?  

 “One of the things that’s different is you don’t think in terms of cure,” said Dr. Gridley. “You think in terms of harmony and balance.”

But.

But, while she was still in training, Dr. Gridley said, she was practicing energy checks on a friend when she found what she thought was an imbalance in her kidney meridian. Her friend, impressed, confessed that MRIs had in fact revealed nodules on her kidneys, and that she was scheduled the next week for a biopsy. 

So, on the principle it couldn’t hurt, Dr. Gridley worked on the meridian with energy medicine, then gave her friend exercises to do on her own. And lo and behold, when the friend went in for her biopsy, a second MRI revealed: No nodules.

“So I don’t know for sure that it was me but, you know, there was an imbalance, we worked on it, she went back, and they weren’t there,” said Dr. Gridley.  

On the other hand, she said, energy medicine is not just for the gravely ill. In addition to the pressures of work and family, we live in an Information Age that keeps us up to date on every terrible thing happening everywhere in the world. “All these things make your body react and can throw it out of harmony. I think it’s pretty unusual to find somebody who’s living in the world who’s in consistent balance,” said Dr. Gridley. “I don’t know anyone who would not benefit.”

Those interested in attending her classes may contact Dr. Gridley at sue.gridley@gmail.com.