Gene Ang travels the globe teaching “Quantum Spoon Bending” classes. He’ll be in Maine in two weeks and in Switzerland after that.

The 45-year-old from Thousand Oaks, Calif., is quick to point out that his class name is a bit of a misnomer.

He prefers teaching people to bend forks. With their minds.

“If kids go, they get it really easily,” Ang said. “Believe it or not, skeptics — true skeptics — are the next people to bend. They’re not really invested one way or the other; they just want to check this out.”

He’s quick to say he has no particular passion for bending forks.

Ang, who has a doctorate degree in neurobiology from Yale University and teaches half a dozen healing techniques, describes it as demonstrating via parlor trick how to tap into energy and use the same techniques to heal yourself.

Most people want to see proof that such a thing is possible.

Enter the suddenly curlicued utensil.

“Once it goes, you’re, like, floored,” Ang said. “You realize something almost miraculous kind of happened — something you didn’t expect.”

Ang began teaching “Quantum Spoon Bending,” among his other classes, in 2008.

For $55 and over two and a half hours, Ang covers the how-to techniques. He supplies the forks and spoons — and you will them to bend.

Participants can also bring metal objects from home, he said, but they have to be strong enough — something you can’t easily muscle in half.

Ang calls on as many as a dozen healing techniques. In one, shown in a YouTube video, he holds onto a spoon with both hands, one hand cupped on each end. He calls upon white light, or heaven energy, to travel down from the sky, through his head and into his hands, and says aloud, “Bend, bend, bend.”

After that, it’s a waiting game. 

“It’s almost like an incubation period,” he said. “I call it the ‘allow’ phase. After you do the work, you just kind of have to let it go. The more you reiterate it in your mind, the longer it takes.”

A really strong piece of metal can take half an hour to soften, Ang said. He’ll test the spoon or fork every so often by pressing down on either end. Eventually — for just a few seconds — it will soften to the consistency of putty, long enough to twist or pinch it in half before it hardens again, he said.

Ang offers a variation on that technique. 

“Rather than going above your head to get the white light, you send your awareness down to the center of the Earth,” Ang said. “You kind of bring that vibration up through your feet, then to your legs and then over into your hand that’s holding the fork.”

Class participants may have more luck with some techniques than others. They may also get better with practice, Ang said.

“One of the ideas out there is that whatever you’re doing to the metal with the technique is somewhat speeding up the subatomic particles,” he said. “They shift into some nonphysical dimension — not all of the particles, but some of them. But that’s temporary. You only have that short window of time before it’s going to shift back.”

His end goal is not for participants to wow their friends — he actually declines to wow friends and bend anything outside class — but to use the techniques on themselves.

“When you send that white light down, instead of externalizing it into the fork, you could keep that white light into your body and instead of saying, ‘Bend, bend, bend,’ you could bring it to your liver, if it needed healing, and say, ‘Heal, heal, heal,'” Ang said.

That, he insists, can also work. The proof is in the fork.

He’s taught classes as large as 70 people and said he’s starting to field more requests to speak to business groups. His Maine class is scheduled for Feb. 26 at Leapin’ Lizards in Portland.  

“For most of us, we’re more physical in our orientation,” he said. “You kind of think that’s almost imagination. Suddenly, some part of your left brain realizes, ‘All right, something’s happening here.’ To have one or two experiences with fork-bending really hyper-jumps your skill level, because that doubt that almost comes in when you’re doing energy work is somewhat brought down. The upshot is, you actually do the (healing) technique (on yourself), rather than not.”

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on strange, intriguing and unexplained in Maine. Send photos, ideas and happy thoughts to kskelton@sunjournal.com.