Turn right for enlightenment

For Roy Martina, the quickest way to health and happiness is to connect the right brain with higher consciousness—with a little help from hypnosis.

Jurriaan Kamp | March/April 2012 Issue

After a 30-year search for greater health and happiness leading to the development of a number of innovations toward those ends, Roy Martina has concluded that the most successful path to a wholesome life is very short: the distance from the left brain to the right.

Eastern monks and Western yogis have spent centuries meditating to enable the creative right brain to serve as a healthy counterpoise to the usually dominant left brain and to synchronize both halves on the path to a deeper awareness. A growing body of research shows that this harmonious balance does indeed create greater vitality and happiness.

The meditative path is a long one for most people in the best of cases. But ­Martina found a shortcut. He discovered that it is possible to activate the right brain through hypnosis, linking it with higher consciousness and simultaneously neutralizing the left brain. He is convinced that the main thing isn’t the synchronicity between the halves of the brain, but the connection between the right half and one’s higher consciousness. “Contact with that higher dimension leads to the most effective form of healing,” he says. “I’ve seen and tried so many things in the last 30 years, and this works so much faster than anything else I’ve ever done.”

Over the last nine months, Martina has treated some 150 people using his new method. The results amaze him, although he is quick to add that they aren’t yet statistically significant enough for medical ­science. He has seen tumors disappear, kidney patients stop dialysis, cartilage grow back and prevent the need for a hip replacement operation and striking improvement in “impossible” diseases such as Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis. “My healing efficacy has increased by a factor of 10, without making use of any other method at all,” he says.

Martina studied medicine first, then moved on to acupuncture and homeopathy. He began his career by founding a clinic for complementary medicine in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Back then, he would cap his patients’ payments at 10 treatments. If their symptoms hadn’t yet resolved by then, he would continue to treat them free of charge for as long as it took for them to feel better.

So Martina kept searching for better healing methods. As he told Ode in a 1999 interview, “Sooner or later, you stumble onto the emotions. That was the final barrier for me.” He learned that emotions—traumas from the past—can cause illness at the body’s cellular level. He developed a system of neuro-emotional integration (NEI) to remove emotional blockades that prevented healing. Martina has trained hundreds of therapists in his NEI method, and it is still being used with success by many of them. But that “final barrier” from 30 years ago turned out not to be the last one, after all.

We meet at Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam for a chat before Martina leaves for China, where he has led many courses and training programs. Years ago, Martina told me one of the items on his wish list was to run the New York Marathon when he was 80. He still has 20 years left to prepare. The energy contained in that wish is highly illustrative of Martina. I see a vibrant man across from me, for whom large chunks of life have yet to begin. Even as he catalogs his expertise and experience, his curiosity and sense of wonder shine through. He looks for—and finds—new insights into healing with an open mind. And then there’s the warm, winsome smile with which he disarmingly lets you know he doesn’t always take himself seriously.

“I’ve always approached things as a Western doctor looking for methods that don’t necessarily fall within the Western paradigm but are effective,” Martina says. “It might be alternative, but it’s always tangible and measurable, too. Mainstream medicine focuses on the mental and the physical. In alternative medicine, you add in emotions and energy. Beyond that lies the spiritual, and I’ve always shied away from that. I’ve tried to keep both feet on the ground. But to my immense surprise, I have to admit that there is something called a soul and a spirit, and that dimension also exerts an influence on the physical, mental and energetic body.”

Martina grins as he casts a critical eye on his own experiences. “You can accomplish useful healing through the physical/mental/energetic approach, but some people are still left with particular ailments and challenges. Ultimately, you can’t escape the question of who you are, what your mission in life is and why you encounter yourself in disease. That spiritual dimension is the great missing link. I have to tell you, I wasn’t looking for that invisible world. Sheer necessity led me to it.”

Martina’s search began with a meditation session in which an intriguing thought surfaced: “The holy grail of medicine is buried deep within hypnosis.” Inspired, he began a two-year journey to visit hypnotists worldwide. At that time, he participated in 60 workshops. Over and over, he watched people under hypnosis return to their past, to their subconscious.

The sessions brought back participants’ memories but no groundbreaking new insights. Martina hit on the idea to use hypnosis to communicate with a higher consciousness. He started researching the idea, and his experiments led to what he calls his “greatest discovery”: the difference between the roles of the right and left brains. “According to mainstream science, the left brain is logical and rational, and the right brain is creative and intuitive,” Martina says. “My insight is that the left brain creates the sense of ‘I’ that allows us to function and survive in the three-dimensional reality of life here on Earth. The right brain, however, is connected to higher dimensions. This isn’t some flaky story about the existence of God. I’m talking about all the tiny little gods we are, our own higher selves, that higher consciousness that knows everything. The right half of the brain isn’t creative at all. It’s a kind of transmitter and receiver. When you have a new idea, you believe you thought of it yourself. But in fact you’ve made a connection to a higher dimension, and that’s where that idea comes from. And that communication transpires specifically through the right brain.”

Martina tested his hypothesis with scientists in Taiwan who study brain waves in qigong and t’ai chi masters. The Taiwanese were accustomed to seeing synchronized brain waves in the Eastern masters, but they saw something else when Martina was in trance: the right brain displayed deep theta waves, which indicate an increased state of consciousness; the left brain remained in the everyday beta frequency.

Martina’s hypothesis also seems to fit in with another theory that’s gaining ground: that an all-encompassing zero point field connects and constantly affects man, matter and all of creation (see “The amazing promises of the Zero Point Field” in Ode’s November 2003 issue). If there is such a field, there must also be some way for people to exchange information with it. In Martina’s theory, that exchange runs through the right brain, which functions as transmitter and receiver.

As a writer, I recognize Martina’s hypothesis on a purely anecdotal level. I often look at my monitor and wonder where my fingers plucked a particular sentence from. Could it be that my most creative writing moments occur when my right brain is able to contact a higher dimension?

Martina uses hypnosis to neutralize his patients’ ego-aware left brains. But he isn’t wed to the practice. “I’m not interested in hypnosis as a technique. I’m interested in hypnosis as a method for bypassing the ego, which stands in the way of healing. If some other way is easier, we’ll do it a different way.”

At that point, Martina is able to communicate with a patient’s higher consciousness through the right brain. “At that moment, I can speak with a part of you that knows things about you [that] you don’t know yourself. On that level of consciousness, everything turns out to have a precise reason. Our lives are being orchestrated from a higher dimension. You could say we’re playing ourselves as instruments. It’s very confrontational to discover that your higher consciousness is pulling your strings to get you onto your life’s path.”

Martina records these conversations, and once patients come out of trance, they can listen to what they have said. “For many people, it turns their lives around completely,” he says. He speaks of “practical spirituality” and says our higher consciousness is very precise, specific and even insistent about giving advice and orders on how a person can rediscover his or her life’s mission and, with that discovery, accelerate healing. “But we all maintain our free will,” Martina adds. “If you don’t want to follow that advice, you don’t have to, of course.”

The connection with a higher consciousness overrides the ego-driven subconscious sabotage that keeps illness alive. “The higher self has access to all the information and can show you the way out of the labyrinth you’re in,” Martina says. “We have to contact that part of us that knows what’s going on. Therein lies the solution. That part becomes your compass.”

Martina’s new method adheres to Albert Einstein’s adage that a problem can only be solved on a different level from the one on which it arose. Healing takes place on a higher level than the physical level of illness. “The connection with higher consciousness imparts new life force. By recharging at a different frequency, people change. Ultimately, every healing is self-healing,” he says.

Is the opposite also true? Do we create our own illness? Are we responsible for our suffering? “It’s true that you’re responsible for your own disease. You create your disease,” Martina begins. “But no one does that intentionally. If a child doesn’t work through an emotional trauma, it may express itself as a liver malfunction 30 years later. Did you create that yourself? Or were you ignorant and powerless then? It’s not your fault. Most things happen on a subconscious level. And that’s why an aspirin or an operation doesn’t always help, and why symptoms keep recurring.”

Martina realizes that established medical science won’t be quick to embrace his new method. “That’s not a fight I’m going to fight,” he says. “I’m interested in results. I want to make people better and happier.” He is planning to propose a deal to health ­insurance providers, however. A kidney dialysis patient costs the insurance company an average of $75,000 per year, for example. Martina an intends to offer insurance providers a “no cure, no pay” treatment plan for 200 “expensive” patients who are willing to try his method. For each patient who no longer needs dialysis afterward, Martina plans to  charge the insurance company $20,000. He exudes the buoyant confidence of the karate champion he once was. “If we keep going down this path, 70 percent of operations will be unnecessary in the near future.”

Ultimately, Martina’s mission is not focused on better and more efficient hospitals. “The most important thing is that the whole world operates primarily out of the left brain,” he believes. “As a result, practically everything is focused on me, me, me and more, more, more. But that attitude undermines your own position over the long term. It’s like a tumor that keeps growing until it’s destroyed its host. We’re doing it to the Earth, too. The great discovery is that when we use our right brains, we’re connected with one another. That we live based on ‘we’ and not on ‘I.’ And that we make better decisions that are better for everyone. That isn’t soft-hearted; it’s wise, and it’s in our own best interest.”

Martina believes his ideas are a good fit for the zeitgeist. He refers to 2012, the “last year” of the Mayan calendar, which is supposed to ring in a new era. “For me, 2012 means the battle between good and evil—between the we and the I—is going to be fought differently. Most CEOs in the corporate world are still working from the left brain. They focus only on profits and as a result, the whole world is falling apart. More spirituality isn’t the simple answer. Many people who meditate still cling to the controlling left brain. And what difference does meditation make if you keep flushing chemical crap down the toilet? It needs to be broader. Spirituality isn’t about meditating. It’s very concrete. You have questions, and you ask them of your higher self. You get answers and orders. It’s up to you what you do with that, because you still have free will. But I’ve made my choice: I’ve put my life completely in the hands of my higher self. I do what it tells me to do.”

Lately, it tells him to introduce the method widely to realize his target of 70 percent fewer operations and to develop a corporate focus. “Nothing will change the world for the better more quickly than getting CEOs to work out of their right brains.”

Martina’s enthusiasm renders me silent. We stare at the blanket of stars above the hotel restaurant, and I ask, “If you give yourself so completely over to your higher self, then what’s happened to Roy?”

With a characteristically triumphant grin, he says, “Before you came down to Earth, you had a wonderful master plan. The question is: What happened to that master plan? See, it’s the other way around. The distractions and challenges of the three-dimensional world sever us from our connection to our life’s mission. Now I know why I’m here and why I’ve gone through what I’ve gone through.”

Jurriaan Kamp, who has always wondered why some people have “right” of way, might just run a marathon with Roy Martina when he turns 80. 

Join us at OdeNow’s event featuring Roy Martina himself!