Tami Simon: Today I speak with Judith Orloff. Dr. Orloff is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and a board-certified psychiatrist who blends traditional medical skills with her knowledge of intuition, energy and spirituality into a complimentary approach. She’s the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller, “Emotional Freedom,” as well as the Sounds True learning programs, “Positive Energy Practices,” and “Becoming an Intuitive Healer.” I spoke with Judith about the emerging field of energy psychiatry and how to work with our emotions in such a way that we experience what she calls emotional freedom.
Hi Judith, thanks for joining us. When I first looked at your new book a few months ago and saw the subtitle, “Liberate Yourself from Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life, I actually had a negative response. I thought, negative emotions; why do people always think about certain emotions as being positive and certain emotions as being negative. And then, of course, as I spent some time with the book I saw that you actually don’t really think of negative emotions as things that we should avoid. So could you explain that? Are there emotions that are “negative”
Judith Orloff: Well, that’s a really good point. There are emotions such as fear and anger and worry and anxiety. It’s negative in the sense that they can detract from health and well-being and clarity. And if you build those emotions up over a period of years it will create some toxicity in your body and cause you to age in a very destructive way. That’s what I mean by negative.
But I’m presenting in “Emotional Freedom,” all emotions as a path to spiritual awakening and that emotions are energy. It’s just like there’s a yin and a yang; there’s a positive and a negative charge. I don’t mean negative in a judgmental way. I mean negative as an opportunity to be able to transform what is dark within us into something lighter, not by repressing, suppressing, not noticing the emotions, but by noticing the emotions but then working with that energy–which can turn against you if it builds up in your body–to create something more positive, such as transforming fear with courage; transforming anger with compassion.
In traditional psychiatry and my training at UCLA I was taught to either medicate an emotion with Prozac or antianxiety or antipsychotic [drugs] or get to the bottom of it so it could go away. My approach with the book is very different from that. It has to do with the transformation of energy, transforming fear with courage. So negative, positive, yin, yang—all that—not in a judgmental sense but just the point of emotional freedom is creating more positive energy of emotions within the body and learning to work with the stressful, negative, difficult—those emotions that can bring us down—to learn how to work with those s”o they don’t bring us down. And we can learn to work with them as energy to transform. So that’s what I mean.
Tami Simon: But when you give the image of yin and yang, of course, there’s an equal amount and they’re in balance. But it sounds like the way you’re talking about emotions is a little different than that, because we don’t really want some equal amount of dark and light emotions, do we? Or do we?
Judith Orloff: As human beings we have dark and light within us and the key is—of emotional freedom—to learn how to work with the dark to create more of a tipping point to go towards the light. And unfortunately most people have fear, have anger, have resentment and they don’t know what to do with it except to feel justified holding onto it for an entire lifetime. And that creates more the balance toward the negative. But what we want to do is work with the energies within us.
As a psychiatrist I work with patients to teach them how to transform negative energies within and also in the book I talk about how I transform these energies in myself. It’s part of my spiritual practice. Learning how to work with darkness not in even a negative sense or a charred sense, but learning how to work with darkness and transform it into light in the self. I’m presenting emotions as a path to inner peace. It’s an inner peace movement. Because when we learn to work with these energies within, then we can actively create more inner peace inside, and then we become these transmitters that transmit peace out into the world. And then we have a chance of creating a critical mass in the world to tip the scales toward outer peace, toward global peace. But if you have populations of people who are mired down with fear, anxiety, worry, resentment, there’s no way that you can be congruent to create peace in the world because you’re not generating it in yourself. So that’s the essence of emotional freedom.
Tami Simon: Yeah, that’s helpful. I’m curious; you mentioned how a lot of this work came from your own engagement with emotions inside if yourself—your personal laboratory—and I’m curious if you could just give an example from your own life of an emotional challenge, something that’s difficult for you and how that transformation has worked.
Judith Orloff: Well in the beginning of the book I talk about how in the sixties as I was growing up I had all these powerful intuitions about death and illnesses and earthquakes, and my parents, who were both physicians, it really upset them. And when I was very young they told me that I was never allowed to mention [these intuitions] in my house again.
So I grew up believing there was something wrong with me. And my healing path, of course, has been to integrate intuition into the realm of emotions and into my whole being as a psychiatrist and everything I do. But, during that time I was really trying to fit in, and I wanted to squash my intuitions, so I got very heavily involved with drugs–crazy, wild person in the sixties–and my parents got very concerned. And I wrote about this in the beginning of “Emotional Freedom.”
So they packed me up one night and put me in a psychiatric hospital for drugs and locked me up there, you see, and that was where the path to emotional freedom began for me. Because I was able to meet my first psychiatrist who was my mentor who sent me to see Dr. Thelma Moss, who was a parapsychologist who helped me learn to integrate my intuition. But in that mental hospital, basically—they didn’t have drug units back then, for twelve steps that I was aware of—I was able to see that I was just rebelling against my parents. And in order to be whole and have emotional freedom I had to really begin to embrace my intuition and work with my emotions on my own terms, not just in rebellion to them. And what’s so interesting is that years later I was an attending psychiatrist in that same psychiatric hospital that my parents put me in. So, truly the inmates are running the institution, which I get a lot of joy from personally.
But that’s life. Life goes in cycles and that’s where I first learned about emotional freedom and I had to find a center in myself to not just be reactive to my parents or outside influences in order for me to be wildly intuitive and embrace that and find some inner peace emotionally.
Tami Simon: Now you have coined a term, “energy psychiatry,” to describe the work that you do. Can you explain what that is—it’s sort of a pioneering new outgrowth of a traditional psychiatric field?
Judith Orloff: Energy psychiatry is a combination of everything I’ve learned in traditional medicine during my training at USC and UCLA, plus I include an awareness of spirituality, subtle energy, intuition and the unseen realm in order to understand the soul of the person. So instead of seeing a person as a biological unit that requires biological intervention with medications or psychological intervention, I see everyone as an energetic being that needs to be really looked at mind, body, and spirit from the standpoint of intuition and something greater, because when I work with patients and when I give workshops it’s always me, them, and spirit. But I was never taught that in my psychiatric training. The word spiritual was never brought up, and so I feel really passionate about creating a new field of psychiatry that incorporates a truly integrative approach. I just want to make the point that it’s not static. It keeps growing, because when you deal with the unseen and you’re creating a new field of medicine, it keeps growing in terms of its potential and what can be included in it.
So that’s what’s so exciting—as all fields should be. The idea that a field is static and you’ve learned everything within a field doesn’t make any sense to me. You keep learning more and more and you incorporate that learning more into the field.
Tami Simon: So in the field of energy psychiatry, this evolving field, do you still see the need to prescribe psychiatric medication potentially for patients?
Judith Orloff: Yeah, it depends. My entire practice is based on a combination of decision-making and intuition. So when each person comes in I see them new, I see them fresh, I don’t put them in a box. So I always tune in to what’s most appropriate for the person and at times medication may be. I don’t have a preference for how I treat people. I treat people in the way that can help them the most. So if somebody comes in with a major depression–and I write about this in the book where when you’re depressed the amount of suffering that goes along with that is enormous. You can’t eat; you can’t sleep; if you have roses put in front of you, you can’t see the beauty in it; you feel hopeless; you may want to kill yourself. And so you don’t really have the wherewithal to start medicating or start using the other strategies that I talk about. So sometimes the biology and the biochemistry need’s a little boost. So you need to get a bit of serotonin to get you back on track, and that’s the most compassionate track. But where I have a real difficulty is with neuropsychiatry that just dispenses medication without giving psychotherapy or any kind of spiritual techniques to help a person develop serotonin and harness their biology. I talk about this in “Emotional Freedom,” where they don’t have any of those techniques.
And so in answer to your question, each person is different. I tune in. My preference, of course, is to help people work with their own bodies, so they can begin to be masters of their biochemistry. But sometimes they need to be on medication first in order to have the strength or the desire to even do that. Because otherwise, the clarity isn’t there.
Tami Simon: Can you talk about more what that means. How in this quest for emotional freedom can I work with my own biochemistry, so I can become, as you said, a master of my own biochemistry.
Judith Orloff: Yes, the divine—I want to make this point—is in the biology. It’s in the psychology. It’s in every body fluid that we have. It’s in every synapse that’s firing. So it’s not that biology’s over here and then the spirituality over there. It’s all a spiritual exploration. When you explore the body, my god, what a powerful exploration. But just basically in the book I educate people about the stress response, and I have a diagram there so that people are accountable for what happens when they’re chronically worried, when they’re chronically anxious, or indulging in jealously and envy in a chronic way. And what happens is to harness your biology you have to, number one, know what’s going on; number two, take action to reverse it. Basically what happens during stress if you’re a chronic worrier is that your amygdala, your emotional center in the brain, sends out a signal to your adrenal glands, which then stimulate the cortisol and adrenaline—the stress hormones–which start rushing through your system, which cause your muscles to tense, your eyes to dilate, the hydrochloric acid in your stomach to start pouring through, your heart to race, and all kinds of negative effects in your body. You need to know that.
To transform that you need to create the relaxation response, which allows the endorphins—those natural painkillers in the body—to start flooding through to calm the system down. All right, so biologically you need to learn to make that shift and be accountable for what happens if you don’t. There’s a diagram in the book in terms of what to look at, and I suggest to my patients—actually look at this. What happens to your body under stress? People don’t think about it. They don’t get it. So you need to bring that into your consciousness–again, take steps. There’s a three-minute meditation that I really recommend, and I practice all the time myself.
Tami Simon: Can we do it together, right now, Judith? It only takes three minutes. Can you take me through it?
Judith Orloff: Sure. What emotion are you feeling most now in terms of stress?
Tami Simon: Let’s say self-criticism. Fear that I’m not good enough, that this conversation won’t be good enough. Something like that.
Judith Orloff: [Laughs] That’s nice, Tami. I like that. What I love about you is you’re so honest. But that to me is emotional freedom for you in two seconds to get to that. I love that.
Tami Simon: But let’s do this three-minute meditation with our listeners.
Judith Orloff: All right. If you’re feeling fear about not being enough, notice what happens in your body when you focus on “I’m not enough, I’m not enough, I’m not enough,” and begin to feel that pumping through your system. But the three-minute meditation is to stop, close the door—if you’re in an office—turn off all your other electronic devices, take a few deep breaths and sit in your chair or sit on your couch and take a few deep breaths to calm everything down. And when the thoughts come: “I’m not enough, I’m not enough,” picture then a cloud floating by in the sky and refocus on the sensuality of the breath as you have the in breath, and then the out breath, and then the in breath, and then the out breath. And then put your hand over your heart, which is the heart chakra, the center for unconditional love. Focus on a beautiful, loving image, whatever it may be. It can be a sunset, a texture, the sand, the flowing water. Every person has to find what image calms him or her down. With the hand over the heart and breathing, focusing, feeling—my image is water, the flowing river with the night sky reflected in it. That’s the image I take to the meditation. And so you focus on the sound of the water and the flowing, beautiful water, fluid, clear, loving. You use the breath to calm your body down. As you very lightly incorporate the image of the breath, melding, breathing, tuning in, relaxing to the loving kindness within, sweetness. And you can just stay in that state for a few minutes, calming everything down and feeling any sensations of warmth in the heart, perhaps streaks of ecstasies that can come through. It’s the big exhalation. Feeling everything sent there. And it’s in this state that you can calm your biology.
So this is a sample of what I do. When I’m stressed I do this in the car before a meeting. I do this in the bathroom at the airport. I do this anywhere I can sneak it in. Because a few minutes of this can bring you back to your heart. Can bring you back to the love that’s always there, everywhere, and then you go back out into the chaos or the difficulty or whatever’s happening from this place. And I do this meditation many times during the day, because I love it. It’s what I suggest for people—to do no longer than three minutes. This isn’t the type of mediation you do for any longer. You have to stop yourself. You can’t keep going with this one. That’s not what it’s about. This is guerilla meditation. It shifts energy. It calms emotions. It calms the stress response.
If you’re around an emotional vampire—people who suck you dry, which is another chapter of the book, you go and you do this, and then you deal with the person. You don’t deal with the person in a hyperadrenalized state. Because then you’re just a loose cannon and you’re just reacting like everyone else who’s unconscious.
I was asked in an interview recently, “What is the one health practice you can’t live without.” And this would be it. Because without this I don’t know what I’d do. If I couldn’t stop three minutes and tune into my heart and what’s most beautiful and divine, I don’t know what I’d do. If I had to keep going with the mind. [Laughs] It would be like torture. But this is a key emotional freedom practice—to learn how to come back to yourself in the midst of chaos and use life as the experimental laboratory in which you can practice it. And this is the spiritual exercise. You don’t wait for the burning bush. You open your door and walk out the door, and there you’re given everything you need to practice. And with this one tool, this could make it better for you.
Tami Simon: What I did notice when I did this is I did have to drop my mental going round and round and round and just be in my body.
Judith Orloff: Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s not about the head. It’s about this intuitive receptor we call the body, and when you drop down into the heart, the heart is the antidote for the mind. Our poor minds are so overactive, particularly in the West. They go nonstop, thinking, problem solving, what if? I’m not this, I’m better than this person, I’m less than that person—that judging mind, the monkey mind that we’ve all been working with for so long. It’s not something to be ashamed if you’ve been on a spiritual path for twenty years, and your monkey mind is still going crazy. That’s fine, you just work with it. No shame, but this is the work. Because the mind sees about maybe 10 percent of everything, but the intuition sees about 100 percent into the unknown.
The mind will trap you in suffering. But it’s great at analyzing. You have to know what it’s good for, but in terms of I feel less than and I’m afraid, this is never going to work out feeling, the mind can’t really help you with that. You can go through the list of I’m an incredible person, I’m this, that, or the other, but to really absorb the essence of who you are and how that’s connected to the divine, that’s the body. That’s intuition. That’s all the water in your body resonating with all the water in the ocean. Knowing, yes, we’re communing and we’re one.
Tami Simon: What do you see as the connection between somatic awareness—body awareness—and intuitive capacity?
Judith Orloff: It’s all interconnected. In order to have somatic awareness and heal the body and be in touch with what the body needs, the only real way to do it is through intuition because the intuition can feel everything. And what I talk about in “Emotional Freedom” is learning how to sense the energetics of emotions. To be able to sense them—little inklings of anxiety of energy as they begin to build up in your body so that you can begin to break the cycle really early on before it starts momentum. But you see the body has to learn how to sense these subtle energies. I go through how to sense the energy of each one. They all have different vibes. For instance jealousy and envy can feel like a burning, searing hot flash, whereas fear can feel like a dull thud of a drumbeat that goes into some kind of pit.
Each person has a different intuitive take on each emotion. But in the book I want people to know, to experience what each energy feels like to you. So in the body you can pick it up early—really early. You can feel the first twinges of “I’m not enough.” Let’s say your vulnerable point is your solar plexus or somewhere else. You have to know that. That’s part of the training in “Emotional Freedom,” learning what part of your body is holding the emotion. But you need to recognize it pretty quick so that when it starts—and you can, once you train yourself to do this—you can pick it up quickly and then stop the cycle. That’s the key in prevention in working with emotions—to learn how energetically and somatically sense in the body just when they’re beginning. Not when you have a panic attack. Then it’s already off and running and it’s hard to break. Or not when the pain cycle starts and then it’s hard to break, but to feel those little inklings of pain like in your lower back. That’s when you begin to work with the energy of emotions. So it’s all connected, but it’s so fascinating when you’re able to explore the body and feel those energies of emotions in various parts of the body where they lodge.
I love the chapter that I wrote on anxiety because it talks about how anxiety or past trauma gets stuck in the body, and so talk therapy is really not enough when you’re dealing with trauma and you’re dealing with very intense emotions that have happened, because it gets stuck in the tissues, organs, and muscles. So I strongly suggest that people get body work along with any kind of talk therapy or spiritual psychotherapy because you have to really work with the muscles themselves to release the trauma, because it’s stuck and you need the physical hands-on approach or at least the energetic approach of acupuncture or Reiki or something, some kind of energy healing to get those old traumas of emotion moving through the body. Candice Pert, who’s so brilliant in her book, “Molecules of Emotion,” she talks about this, and it’s so, so true. And for people to know that—it’s the somatic, emotional, intuitive connection that allows the healing.
Tami Simon: Can you explain physiologically how it is that the traumatic response gets stuck in the muscles and tissues? How does that actually work in the body? Let’s say something happened to me when I was a child, whatever, how did that . . .
Judith Orloff: Candice says that there’s a receptor there for the emotion and that I don’t think she knows which tissues have particular receptors, but the emotion, she feels, travels and it hooks onto the receptor in the muscle itself and just stays there until it’s worked through.
I believe that’s the physiological explanation, but energetically the explanation is the trauma, I think, resonates with a particular part in your body or your vulnerability—whatever that is—and it just finds a home there. And so you can work it out with the right hands on the muscle or activating the tissues. That helps to release the emotions, so there is a strong, strong energetic element of emotional freedom that needs to be dealt with that is not dealt with in traditional medicine. They don’t even believe in the concept of subtle energy fields. So that’s a huge problem.
People need to know if they go to a traditional practitioner they’re not going to have this language, although it’s changing. For everyone who goes through a surgery, I strongly recommend energetic treatments before and after to help with the anesthesia, to work it through your body, to help with the emotions that happen before, during, and after surgery. It’s a big experience for the body emotionally to go through a surgery and physically, and so you need to work with the energy to clear it so it doesn’t stay in the system for so long.
Tami Simon: So let’s pretend I’ve had some kind of surgery for a broken bone or something like that, what kind of energetic treatments are you recommending that I would have before or after?
Judith Orloff: It depends what you like. If you have any experience with particular therapies that have worked for you, it’s ideal to have practitioners you trust ready and waiting before, during, and after. Memon Oz, who is a heart surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian, would have energy healers in the O.R. and afterwards to help with wound healing. So it can be Reiki, it can be energy healing, it can be therapeutic touch, it could be acupuncture, it could be a gentle form of body work, of massage, I would say not Rolfing because that’s a bit too intense after surgery, but just some kind of way to get the muscles and body awakened and help to purify the anesthesia, which is so rough on the body.
But the energetic technique helps you deal with the emotions involved with the surgery, because there’s often a lot of fear and anxiety, and god! What comes up over a surgery? There not a lot of exploration done on how a person feels beforehand. But it you really do that in yourself, if you’ve every had even a minor surgery, it’s a huge thing to surrender, to go under anesthesia, to have someone cut on your body, my god! So there are all these emotions coming up, and you can work with them energetically and notice what’s going on and clear them afterwards. And just know that you’re entitled to feel anything. Because having a surgery is a big deal.
But my point is that with any kind of trauma, whether it’s a physical trauma like a surgery or an emotional trauma, you need to have a multifaceted approach, using energy, using psychology, using intuition, and always asking what is the spiritual meaning of this experience for me, whether it’s depression, whether it’s a surgery, whether it’s being angry at a friend. Always the essence of emotional freedom is asking what is the spiritual meaning of this experience and how can it help my heart grow? Rather than the mind, which says, “This is horrible. I just want out of this. I want it to be gone.” The mind will always say that—you just have to know that’s what the mind says. But if you go on a deeper level, the intuitive level: what is the spiritual experience of this surgery, or this cancer, or this depression, or this anxiety attack. How can it help me find inner calm.
I had one anxiety attack in my own life, and it was after my mother died and I felt like the world was just disintegrating beneath my feel. It was a very hard adjustment for me to be without my mother here on earth. And I was walking on a rock jetty near my house by the ocean, and this anxiety—I’ve never felt anything like it. It was just quaking in my body—unbelievable–and I knew at that point I really had to get help. So I went into therapy at that point to help me deal with some of my feelings about losing my mother. But that feeling, that you just want to evaporate; it’s so anxious, and I’m happy that I went through that, and I’ve gone through so many other emotions that I can know what it’s like when other people feel it—when my patients feel it—so that I can have compassion for it.
I’m a big experiencer. When I have the experience it’s ingrained in me and then I can have compassion for how other people feel. So I like all my experiences as difficult as they get. But they are unbelievably uncomfortable. You can’t walk forward and you can’t walk back without feeling like you’re jumping out of your skin. And there’s nothing you can do about it at the time, other than learn to calm yourself down, which is what that particular experience helped me to really hone all these calming techniques that I share in the book. And learning how to find inner calm in the midst of chaos is the essence of emotional freedom and the essence of my spiritual practice. That’s it! And you be the one to center when the situation is reeling out of control. You don’t wait for someone else to do it. That’s a great challenge and great victory, isn’t it?
Tami Simon: Very much so. Now, when you say, though, the spiritual message or the spiritual meaning of the experience, taking for example this anxiety attack on the beach and the anxiety of being in the world without your mother. What would you say was the spiritual meaning of that anxiety?
Judith Orloff: Oh, multi, multi levels. But the spiritual meaning basic is to learn how find calm amidst the energy of anxiety. To be able to find that inner calm no matter what’s happening. Biologically, all my stress hormones are really having a meltdown and causing an anxiety attack, or whatever, to be able to find calm in the midst of the most turbulent energy you can experience. That is emotional freedom. That’s the spiritual challenge, and also psychologically to learn to see that I can be okay without my mother on earth. You see the mother was such a powerful energy for me and we had so many love-hate, wonderful encounters over our lifetime and we reached quite a bit of peace before she passed on. But to see that I would be okay without her, which is big for me. If you have a mother to buffer against and argue with and work things out, that’s very different than having a mother who’s not here in physical form to do that with anymore. To feel you’re on your own. It’s a rite of passage to lose a mother—big rite of passage—and it was a huge experience in my life.
And so it taught me to be okay in myself without my mother, and to find calm in the midst of this huge turbulent anxiety energy that can come forth. And when I feel anxious in smaller degrees in my life I know how to bring it down quickly. You see, and that’s the essence of emotional freedom—to not let it get you, but using, “Ah hah, this is the energy of anxiety. I know you, and this is what I can do to bring it down.” You see, working with the self, that’s the essence of emotional freedom, but working with these turbulent energies—these things we call emotions are wild—they are strong: depression anxiety, envy, my god they can bounce you around. That’s why we’re here on earth: to learn how to master energy. That’s part of the teaching here. But if you can see it from the spiritual standpoint instead of just torture, you can see it as the teaching here. This is it. That’s why I’m here. It’s uncomfortable, yes, it’s horrible, yes; but I’m going to learn to master it, and isn’t that incredible.
Tami Simon: So when you say seeing it from a spiritual standpoint, you’re saying seeing what the gifts are that it’s bringing, seeing what the lessons are. You mentioned how you can start to track that first arising of emotion, whether it’s fear, jealousy. I can certainly know when I’m talking to somebody, I can see that little jealous thing just start coming forward. I get it. Now how do I then inquire into what is the spiritual lesson of this arising of this emotion?
Judith Orloff: You close your eyes, you take a few breaths, you ask your intuition and you see what you get. You have to ask the question, though, and then tune in. But basically, the way I’ve written the book is the way to counteract and heal jealousy is with self-esteem, and that it’s always about a self-esteem issue in yourself. It’s not about the other person or the wonderful lesson of “thou shalt not compare”–on a spiritual level it’s irrelevant. Of course you know that, but it’s a lesson that deepens, because it’s apples and oranges—what this person’s getting over there, what you think you want that they have—it’s irrelevant. It might not be in your karma to get it and it might not be right for you to get it, and so it’s always the work with the self.
In the jealousy and envy chapter I talked about my work with envy. I had just horrible envy for many, many years when I would have friends who would get on the New York Times bestseller list, and I hadn’t been on it then. I would work with this feeling of burning and heat and just like a hot flash making me smaller and upset. I’d be aware of the energetics of it. And over the years I really worked with it in myself to root for the happiness of the rival even if you don’t believe it. It’s just the energy, instead of being stuck I the jealousy looking at my own path as being perfect and learning to work with my own self-esteem.
So with this book, when I did get on the New York Times bestseller list I was thrilled, happy, joyous, everything, but I had done a lot of the work with envy for years prior to that. So, I’m happy that that particular issue gave me the opportunity to work with my envy so it doesn’t get me that much anymore. I don’t want to be the kind of person who isn’t happy for you. That isn’t who I want to be, and so I’ve worked with myself using the principles of this book to develop my own self-esteem, to keep my eyes on myself, to be able to take contrary action and root for someone else’s happiness even when they’re competitive with me, or I feel they’re competitive with me. It was only in this one issue. I don’t really have it much in other issues. It was this one issue, Tami, that was really, really getting to me. You see I worked with it and looked at it as my spiritual challenge and I didn’t want to be that way.
The essence of emotional freedom is seeing nonreactively or nonjudgmentally that you have jealousy, you have envy, and maybe you don’t want to be that way. So the spiritual challenge is to work with the self. Jealousy and envy become dangerous when people aren’t working with the self. They can devalue. They can hurt relationships. They can cause all kinds of negative actions, where you try and hurt other people. And so that’s why it’s a spiritual lesson. Each emotion is a spiritual lesson if you work with yourself to transform the envy with self-esteem. When you get in a situation and your envy is coming up to look at this as your spiritual challenge to work with. This isn’t about the other person. They’re just the spiritual teacher who is invoking this in you. There are dark teachers and light teachers. The way I look at it in my own life—what upsets me most what other people do, it’s an issue in myself. Otherwise it wouldn’t cut into me so viscerally. I don’t want to be reactive every time my buttons are pushed, and if I am then whoever it is has gotten one of my buttons, and that’s my work. That’s not their work
Tami Simon: It’s interesting when you told the story about the anxiety you experienced after you mother’s death, and said that it was so crushing that you sought out help from a therapist, who helped you through this difficult period in your life. It’s interesting because you can imagine someone thinking, here, Dr. Judith Orloff, energy psychologist, she had to seek out a therapist?
Judith Orloff: Oh, yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. That’s a total illusion. I’m on the path just like everyone else, and I’m really passionate about getting through these emotions in my life. I’ve been in therapy off and on most of my adult life. I am good at seeking help. That’s a really positive quality that I have. I love to seek help because I want to be free. I do not want to be bogged down by all of this. I love guidance. There’s nothing better than good guidance [laughs]. It’s a gift when you get someone who can actually give you wise guidance, so I don’t hesitate to seek it out. And I encourage people to find the right people to work with, not the wrong people. You don’t want to find somebody who doesn’t get you. But when you find somebody who gets you and can actually help you, my god, I am totally grateful.
Tami Simon: Now, talking about guidance and health, I read in the book, “Emotional Freedom” that you have been working with a spiritual teacher for two decades, and I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about that—what it means for you to have a relationship with a spiritual teacher.
Judith Orloff: Well, it’s probably one of the most important things that has ever happened in my life. And my teacher is a Taoist teacher, he’s Chinese-Malaysian, and we practice Taoism, which is cultivation of the heart. It’s the cultivation of subtle energies. It’s being of service and it’s connecting to nature. And it’s developing intuition and meditation. And so over the years these helped me in so many deep, deep ways to go into the practice of the heart and I’ve learned so much in terms of my meditation practice and the kind of guidance that I needed on the spiritual level to develop. I’m not big on rules and regulations, and Taoism, thank goodness, is very flowing and open. It’s not like Zen Buddhism where you have a lot of rules. I could never do that. But Taoism is meditating—we have special ritual practices on the full moon and the new moon, and I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years.
Every time the new moon and the full moon come, I clean my altar, I light my candles, I do special prayers, I eat vegetarian, I honor the cycles of nature and the moon. Taoism is very reverent of the moon and water and all the elements, which I’ve always felt deep connection to. So in my prayers and in my meditations, it’s very nature related. Before I go to sleep at night the last thing I do is go out and look at the ocean and look up at the moon. That’s my touchstone into dreamtime. In Taoism in particular honors all of that, and I’ve done that instinctively since I was a child. I was an only child and my parents forbade me to express my intuitions at home and I thought there was something wrong with me, but at night laying there at night looking up at that sweet moon, I felt that I had a companion. So nature has always been deeply spiritual to me. So Taoism because of its fluid connection to nature and the heart and meditation and being of service—always with nature being in the background and the elements coming into all aspects of service and healing—that’s very appealing to me.
Tami Simon: Now the moon seems to be archetypally associated with intuition, I wonder what is the moon for you?
Judith Orloff: The moon is my friend. That’s all I know, it just signs through everything within me and I love it and it’s my companion. Is that what you mean?
Tami Simon: I like that Judith, it’s nice.
Judith Orloff: Sometimes when I do intuitive readings I just look up at the moon in the night sky and ask the question and get the answer. The night sky and the moon are my family—always have been.
Tami Simon: Well, finally, our series here is called Insights at the Edge. I’m curious here, a book on the New York Times bestseller list—what is your current edge for you? Internally what’s your edge? Are you working with one?
Judith Orloff: Always, I always push to the edge and beyond. That’s my thing. The edge is always trust, faith, open—don’t let fear stop me. I get into the child’s pose every morning doing my yoga stretches and pray to have my fear and anxiety released so I can be of service and so I can experience joy in that surrender experience of the stretch, in the opening up of listening to the ocean waves, listening and praying to have those emotions released from me. That’s my edge. I don’t want to be stopped by fear. It’s an ongoing practice of having fear released. It’s not like something that just happens and you’re done with it. It’s a flow of energy. And so that prayer and that desire to trust and faith and being playful and youthful, despite years [contributes to] not aging you. Aging in a way that you become freer instead of becoming downtrodden. That’s the edge of emotional freedom. Of doing things in a different way, not buying into the old, stale stereotypes of how they say things should be. That’s all the edge for me.
Tami Simon: Thank you so much.
Judith Orloff: You’re welcome.
