This 3 year project will conduct a randomized controlled trial on Biofield Therapies for treating anxiety, with purposeful recruitment and sampling of BIPOC and LGBTQI+ communities. Our current data indicate that delivering a biofield-based sound therapy was feasible and effective for substantially reducing anxiety.  However, because feasibility studies do not have control or comparison groups and are done on a very small group of people, and because we had a very brief intervention with no follow-up measurements,  it is unknown whether

1) this approach is helpful for a more diverse population (including BIPOC and LGBTQI+ communities) suffering from anxiety
2) how long the effects might last after the intervention is over
3) whether reductions in anxiety are comparable to relaxation or other gold-standard approaches for clinical care.

We hope to answer these questions and provide an evidence base for holistic care for anxiety in a diverse population.  If Biofield Therapies is shown to be helpful and effective for persons with anxiety, this therapy can be considered by healthcare administrators to be integrated into clinic and hospital settings, allowing us to more readily integrate holistic therapies into healthcare and self-care.

TheoryU, developed by Otto Scharmer at MIT, is a “framework and methodology that allows diverse groups of stakeholders to co-sense, reimagine, reinvent, and co-create the larger eco-systems in which they operate.” It operates in the domain first developed by Jay Forrester in his systems dynamics theory. Ed Shein, who worked with engineers to develop T group theory, and Peter Senge, who brought systems thinking to the broader business, technology, and education communities, have provided some of the key theoretical frameworks for Otto’s systems change theory.