Denise Rodgers, M.Div., C.Ht. began her formal study of the mind at the School of Metaphysics in 1984, following an incident when she was shot twice, beaten severely, and left for dead while her 5- year old daughter hid in the next room. Due to multiple nerve severing of the left arm, the medical community “proclaimed” that Denise would only regain 18% of the use of her hand. Not willing to accept such a dim prognosis, Rodgers set out to prove the healing power of mind through spiritual practices. Eighteen months later, quite coincidentally, she found the School of Metaphysics and began her formal education of the mind, healing and spirituality.

Denise spent seven years at the School of Metaphysics (SOM). After two years as a student she was asked to join faculty as a Teacher, eventually becoming a Director of a School in Norman OK. The last two years she was National Field Director and worked with three Schools in the Chicago area, as well as Madison WI. She became prolific at teaching Teachers and opening new schools. While still at the School of Metaphysics, Denise launched the National Dream Hotline in 1989, which continues to be held annually each year.

For many years, Denise was a guest on hundreds of radio and television shows analyzing caller’s dreams. Her home station was KMOD in Tulsa, OK where she was a regular monthly guest for ten years. In addition, the Dream Lady was featured as a monthly guest on Tulsa’s local CBS morning show that preceded the national morning news show.

Denise has been heard interpreting callers’ dreams on the following radio stations:

WKFI – Los Angeles, WTN – Nashville, WOA! – San Antonio, WKOA – Denver, KSSK – Honolulu, WWWE – Cleveland, WSPD – Toledo, KATT – Oklahoma City, KING – Seattle, WVKS – Toledo, KLIF – Dallas, WINK – Cincinatti, KEYN- Wichita, WLUM – Milwaukee, WVOR – Rochester, KTAR – Phoenix, WVOR – St. Paul, KHMX – Houston, KROC – Austin, WIYY – Baltimore

After Denise left the School of Metaphysics in 1991, she went to Tulsa OK and began writing and teaching her own coursework to the general public. Her appearances as the “Dream Lady” on KMOD, the top Rock & Roll station in the region became the springboard for her to become well known as an authority on the mind, consciousness, dreams, and spirituality.

The MBSSEP© (Mind, Body, & Spirit Self-Empowerment Program©) was comprised of tools and techniques to understand how the mind works —the conscious, subconscious, and superconscious. Other modalities included visualization techniques, stress reduction, meditation, focusing & concentration, self-healing and of course, dreamwork. Denise noticed huge changes spiritually, mentally, and emotionally in people after completing first six-weeks programs.

Denise also began experimenting with conducting psychic readings similar to those that Edgar Cayce of the ARE Institute became famous for back in the 1950s. It was through these readings that Denise and her partner came to understand that the cause or source of illness resides in the mind and emotions.

While Denise continued to develop and teach her MBSSEP©, she also began to modify the program for various other populations. Due to her experiences with hospice patients, she was asked to develop a program for hospice workers. Programs were modified for continuing education credit for faculty and clinical nurses at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston TX.

Denise was a frequent guest on the national lecturing circuit, presenting her program results at major conferences in Seattle, Atlanta, and Kansas City. Denise was a keynote speaker at the International Society of Humanistic Medicine in Breckinridge CO, providing two 3-hour workshops for physicians.

After Denise and Carolyn published their findings in the Journal of Holistic Nursing, they were invited to present their findings at the National Institutes of Health new institute, the Center for Science and Spirituality. It was at that time that they realized that their research and findings were on the cutting edge of the new millennium.

Through a series of synchronistic events, and after the urgings from several Psychologists, in 1993, Denise initiated a research project entitled “Mind Over M.S.” where she adapted her Mind, Body, & Spirit program for those with Multiple Sclerosis. This project was conducted in collaboration with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Tulsa Regional Medical Center and the Oklahoma Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, with 27 people who had clinically definite MS participated in Denise’s 24-week Mind, Body, & Spirit Self- Empowerment that had been taught to the general public, but modified for those coping with M.S.

Throughout the program, students healed in many tangible and intangible ways. Some went from wheelchairs to walkers, some went from walkers to canes. Some who were incontinent when they began the program, became continent in bowel and bladder.

However, the big news was that the program provided more benefit than anything pharmaceutical at that time. Statistically significant results were seen in all neuro-psychological measures including cognition, memory recall, and abstraction skills. Grip strength and visual acuity also improved by the end of the program. More importantly, with the overall reduction of depression by 46%, the benefits of Denise’s program further supported the idea that when the immune system is suppressed, the body has a more difficult time maintaining and recovering. A six-month follow-up showed that 75% of the improvements had been retained. Denise published these results in September 1996 of the Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine Journal, with Larry Dossey, M.D. As Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Dossey then invited Denise to present her findings at an annual conference sponsored by the journal.

Research findings showed that most of the significant improvements were achieved by mid-point, or within 3 months, so Denise decided to shorten the program to 16 weeks and similar results were seen. She also added a body-work component and some people received weekly massages or chiropractic adjustments as adjunct therapy to the MBSSEP© program. Results showed conclusively that those who participated in the MBSSEP© program plus the body work component showed a 35% improvement over those who did not.

The success of the MBSSEP© “Mind Over M.S.” project encouraged Denise to further modify the program for various forms of cancer while continuing to examine the spiritual, mental, and emotional causal agents behind what contributes to the manifestation of Cancer. Denise then initiated a 24-week MBSSEP© program to study four women with advanced stages of various cancers, 3 of which had a medical prognosis of having only three months to live.

All women lived well beyond their 3-month prognosis by over a year. Her students were continuing to attend the classes beyond the 24 weeks. A year and a half after the program had begun, one of her students, a 38-year old student with Pancreatic Cancer, asked Denise to help her die. This woman had already exceeded her life expectancy by over 15 months and her tumor count had gone from 18,000 to 1,800. However, since the MBSSEP© program was an adjunct treatment to her traditional medical treatments, the medical community continued to blast her system with chemotherapy. Sadly, it soon became apparent that while she was healing from Cancer, she was dying from chemotherapy which had caused her blood cells to splinter. Denise became actively and intimately involved in her transition. Throughout this 2-week process of withdrawal, Denise had a series of incredible experiences in and outside of the dream state that further validated and expanded upon her understanding of the dying process. These experiences later became the focus of her Masters of Divinity thesis at Sancta Sophia Seminary. Denise was slated to deliver her dissertation on 9-11-2001 and early that morning she had a powerful 9-11 dream which she quickly integrated into her thesis dissertation, “Beyond Hospice.”

Following the success and publication of this small pilot study, also in the Journal of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, Denise was asked to present the pre-conference workshop at a Cambridge conference on Alternative Therapies for Cancer. Attended by physicians and academicians across the country, her workshop was entitled “Healing into Death.” This 3-hour workshop gave her the opportunity to speak to the non-tangible aspects of healing while still dying.

On the way to the conference, again through a series of synchronistic events in the Atlanta airport, Denise connected with a conference attendee who was the Co-Chair of the Doctoral Program at the School of Nursing at University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), where she was heading up the “Holistic Healing” PhD program. Denise’s soon-to-be colleague, Dr. Kinney, shared a precognitive dream which foretold her own breast cancer diagnosis and she was particularly interested in what Denise had to say about dreams at the workshop. In Dr. Kinney’s dream, her deceased brother told her she had breast cancer. Alarmed by the dream, a mammogram revealed she did indeed have breast cancer. She had a radical bi-lateral mastectomy six weeks following the precognitive dream. In all likelihood, paying attention to the dream could have saved her life.

Following the conference, Denise was invited by Dr. Kinney and the Dean of the nursing school to offer her innovative MBSSEP© program to the doctoral students as an elective course. While already scientifically validated and published, her program was still quite controversial in academic circles due to the spiritual nature of the program. Nonetheless, Rodgers’ was accepted into the halls of academia with both skepticism and promise. While Rodgers was initially considered a “Visiting Scholar,” she soon became beloved on campus as an “Visiting Professor”. The 12-week version of the MBSSEP© program continued to be offered in the Doctoral program for several years as an elective course for PhD credit.

While at UTMB, one project lead to another, and soon the MBSSEP© programs were offered as CEU programs for Faculty and Clinical Nurses at UTMB. Two PhD students who had taken the MBSSEP© program created their own dissertation projects, modifying it for middle school adolescents. The program was called “MPower Galveston Youth” and was awarded a $35,000 grant from the Provost at UTMB. The purpose of the grant was to implement the program for middle school students in two Galveston Public Schools as well as one private school. In addition, the grant allowed the MBSSEP© program to be taught to administrators, counselors, nurses and teachers at the middle schools.

The most important work conducted at UTMB however, was offering the MBSSEP© program to 250 breast cancer survivors residing in four different cities (Houston, Galveston, Austin and Tulsa). These projects received a $50,000 grant each for two years in a row from the Susan G Komen Breast CA Foundation of Houston. The second grant enabled Denise and Carolyn to implement the MBSSEP© program into a free-standing Breast Cancer clinic in Houston called “The Rose.” This grant provided funding to teach 7 facilitators to also offer the MBSSEP© through the clinic. With the focus to empower within, this grant allowed Denise and Carolyn to teach the MBSSEP© program to the entire staff, including the physician, administrator and 12 employees of the clinic. Thereafter, those facilitators offered the MBSSEP© program to breast cancer patients of the clinic. This grant also enabled the MBSSEP© program to be translated to Spanish and was taught by a Spanish speaking physician to 30 Latino Breast Cancer survivors.

Statistically significant results of the MBS Self-Empowerment Program for Breast Cancer Survivors was published in the Journal of Holistic Nursing in 2004, a peer-reviewed publication.

Throughout this same decade of 1995-2005, Denise contributed a chapter on Mind/Body Interventions in the world’s leading medical textbook on Alternative and Complementary Medicine. As one of the only non-physicians in the book, Denise was a contributing author in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions of the textbook, and is in the company of Dr. Patch Adams.

As a result of her experiences with cancer patients, she developed a program called “Beyond Hospice” and graduated from Sancta Sophia Seminary in 2001 with a Masters of Divinity degree. Denise then became an interdenominational Hospice Chaplain for the next 11 years.