The Body Awake

TS: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is Ann Marie Chiasson. Ann Marie is a teacher, author, and a practitioner of energy medicine. She holds a master’s of public health degree, a doctorate in family medicine, and has worked as a primary care physician. Ann Marie currently lives in Arizona, where she has a private integrative medicine practice, and also teaches at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.

In 2009, Ann Marie worked with Sounds True and coauthored a program with Dr. Andrew Weil called Self-Healing with Energy Medicine. This year, Ann Marie and Sounds True will be releasing the home study course Energy Healing: The Essentials of Self-Care, as well as a video program called Energy Healing for Beginners: Ten Essential Practices for Self-Care. Beginning March 7, Ann Marie will also be teaching a six-session online course on energy healing at SoundsTrue.com.

In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” Ann Marie and I talked about our connection to the earth’s energy field, and the techniques we can use to connect with that field. We also discussed the relationship between conventional medicine and energy healing, and we also discussed in quite some detail some lesser-known methods of what she calls “high-velocity energy healing,” such as psychic surgery. Here’s my conversation with Ann Marie Chiasson.

Ann Marie, I know you became interested in energy medicine through the process of your own healing, and I’m wondering to begin if you could tell us a little bit about that: what you were suffering from, and how energy medicine played a role in your healing process.

Ann Marie Chiasson: Sure. So I was born with a congenital abnormality; I had two kidneys on the left side and one kidney on the right side. And as a consequence of that, I had many, many, many kidney infections. It took awhile for that to get sorted out, and with medicine, just because the top part of my kidney had died and so some of the tests weren’t accurate. But once I finally got that sorted out, I had that kidney removed.

After the kidney was removed, I still had a lot of pain, residual pain, even though I had no more infection. And as a result of that, I started to explore the energy body, because I knew the physical body was fine, but the energy body was still carrying the residual pattern of the block and pain. So about two years after the surgery was when I became pain-free, after having started to really explore energy medicine more deeply.

But along with that, when I was a kid, I used to put my hands on people. It was sort of innate to me; we would do hands-on healing with my grandmother, or sometimes I would work with my dog. So there was some way that I was already wired for it, it’s just that once I got sick, I started having to use it every day.

TS: What did you do during that two-year process? What techniques, what approach?

AMC: Before that, I was trained for hands-on work through Healing Touch and Reiki. In the two-year process is when I started using movement. So I started to really explore how to drop the energy body into my pelvis more, and how to open the lower half of my body to the energy that was coming up—I call it coming up from the earth. It’s not an accurate description; I don’t know that we have words that can accurately describe what’s really happening. But that’s when I began to work with using movement and all the practices that I teach now, using movement and moving energy through the body and up from the pelvis, up through the heart, and into the head.

And I started using the earth; I would lie on the earth when I would be having pain, and the pain would subside. And I started also—well, that’s really when I began studying with different healers from all over. I began to go down and explore different healing techniques to see what would relieve the pain I was having in my pelvis.

TS: Now, I want to talk more about this idea of healing through our relationship with the earth. And I want to read this quote that you have from the workbook that goes along with your Energy Healing Online Course. OK, here’s the quote: “We’re all born with a yolk sac of energy that we typically use up in the first 40 years of life. After age 40, feeling energized and vital depends on gathering energy from the earth’s energy field every day.”

So there are many questions here for me. First of all, this idea that we’re “born with a yolk sac of energy that we typically use up in the first 40 years of life.” Where did you come up with this? I’ve never heard this before. And then secondly, what does this mean, “gathering energy from the earth’s energy field every day”?

AMC: I can’t remember where I first heard it, but I remembered it, and I started to explore it when I was in my medical practice. I started watching my kids wake up full of energy, and I started watching patients come into my medical practice exhausted in their forties and fifties. And through the practices I had done for healing the pain that I was carrying in my pelvis, I started noticing that I was getting energized. And it made sense to me with the Traditional Chinese Medicine model that the practices I was using would increase the energy in the lower dan tien, which is where I think that yolk sac is.

TS: Now, the lower dan tien, that’s in the lower belly? Can you tell us exactly where that is?

AMC: Yes, it’s in the lower belly, so it’s between the pubic bone and the belly button. It’s in the same location as the second chakra, if you know about chakra systems.

TS: You’re saying that this lower dan tien is the home of what you’re calling this yolk sac of energy that we then need to replenish and restore after age 40?

AMC: Yes. And what happens is, I think the reason that we have to do it more than maybe other cultures is that there’s a way we process—because we think so much, there’s a way that we process emotion and experiences where we literally pull them up to the head right away. So something will happen, and we’ll take whatever that experience or whatever that emotion is, and we’ll sort of speed-shoot it up to the brain, and so it doesn’t have the ability to move through.

So an energy or an emotion or an experience is supposed to literally move through the body. So it comes in, and it’s in that sort of snake pattern; if you’re seen the chakras, it moves up through the body and out. But there’s a way in which often in our culture, because we think so much, we’ll take something and just bring it right to the head. So we’ll be like, “Oh no!” And it’ll go right to the head, and we’ll start thinking about it. So it doesn’t have its natural flow. And when that happens, we actually are not connected to the energy field the same way, because we’ve sort of bypassed it and gone to the brain.

TS: It sounds to me like what you’re saying is when the energy doesn’t circulate through our whole body, and especially this connection downward from the energy of the earth up to the lower belly, then that’s what creates the exhaustion that we feel?

AMC: Yes. Because what we do is, we sort of cut the taproot, which is the connection to the earth. What I’ve been exploring is the same way in the spiritualist traditions people say, “Our thoughts are not ours.” I don’t think our energy is actually ours; I think we’re part of an energy field. And I think that we’re in constant flow with this larger energy field, which is the earth, it’s the natural world, it’s the person next to me, it’s my dog walking through the room. It’s one energy field, and we’re part of it.

And there’s a way in which somehow as humans we can disconnect from it, in the sense that we shut down our lower chakras, we shut down our root chakra and our legs. And when we disconnect from it, we start to not feel so energized. So it’s not really our energy. I see it as a vital energy field, and we’re either open to it or not.

It’s like the creative field; it’s very similar to being in a creative process. When you’re open to creativity, here comes the flood of ideas. When you’re not open to creativity, there’s nothing there. So it’s like writer’s block in the body. Does that make sense?

TS: It does. Well, first of all, this idea that our energy is not ours: that’s a wild idea for people to really sit with and take in. It sounds like what you’re saying is, when we don’t have as much energy as we want, we’re somehow not connected, we’re not connected to this taproot, as you’re describing it.

AMC: Yes, that’s right. Depending on which tradition we’re in, it’s through the lower dan tien if we’re talking about Traditional Chinese Medicine, or it’s through the first and second chakra, really the root chakra, if we’re looking at the chakra system. And the legs; so it’s the hips and the legs that bring that energy up. And as people get older, the hips get less flexible, the legs don’t have as much energy. And in our culture, a lot of people have cold feet. Like when I work on people, often that part of their body is not as warm or as flowing with chi as the head.

So the way that I learned it in Traditional Chinese Medicine is, we should have cool head, neutral heart, and a warm pelvis. And in our culture, we’re flipped: we often have a cool pelvis, neutral heart, and a hot head. It’s part of rational thought, which has been a wonderful development. And you can have rational thought and still have the majority of your energy in your pelvis.

TS: Now, if I want to have a warmer pelvis, or to use the language we’re using, if I want to make sure that this taproot is open and flowing so I can have more energy, what are some simple things you could suggest?

AMC: So the things that I use are Toe Tapping, which is a great practice where you lay flat and you tap your big toes together, and it stimulates the energy flow all the way up the legs into the pelvis. I also would use something like Pigeon, which is a yoga move. And you can also use kundalini yoga, which I don’t teach in the work that I’ve done with you, but kundalini yoga has lots of practices to build that energy. The one that I use that’s the easiest is the Toe Tapping.

TS: So just to make sure that I understand the Toe Tapping. I’m lying down on the ground, and I simply just tap my big toes together?

AMC: Well, you have to rotate from the hips. So you lay down on the ground, and you let your hips relax and your legs kind of—like there’s a dowel in your legs, and they’re pivoting from the hips. And then you tap your toes together very quickly, like “tap, tap, tap, tap.” And your legs go out, and then tap together. So they’re like windshield wipers from the hips. And that will do a couple things. The tapping of the toes will stimulate some meridian points to bring energy up, and also it opens the hips.

TS: I have to say, that sounds ridiculously simple!

AMC: It is ridiculously simple. And I can teach it to just about anybody, because people who can’t get out of bed can do it; I’ve even taught it to hospice patients. It also works extraordinarily well for some of the things that we’re not very good at, like restless leg syndrome, peripheral neuropathy. It’s very, very simple. And kids do it naturally. I was teaching it the other day to a group of older people, and they were laughing, some of them were saying, “Oh, I do this sometimes without even thinking about it.”

So it balances the energy body. And then the thing that fascinates me the most is that once the energy body is balanced, it brings energy in, but it also helps people go to sleep. So it’s one of these practices that help us get enlivened, but when it’s time to go to sleep, it helps us relax for sleep. It’s called an adaptogen. It sort of brings you to where you need to be.

TS: So it sounds like you emphasize a lot opening the lower body. And I’m wondering if you could just say a little bit more about this idea of connecting the lower body to the energy of the earth. What do you mean specifically when you say “connecting to the energy of the earth”?

AMC: I think I mean opening the root chakra and the lower dan tien so it allows for the connection that’s already there to be more functional. So when we vitalize the lower part of the body—the legs and the root chakra and the pelvis—we’re actually in better connection with what’s happening around us.

I’ll give you an example. Before the tsunami, they documented that a lot of the animals moved out of the place where the water came in. So animals moved to higher ground. I think animals are in constant connection with the earth, and so without knowing what was going on, they moved away.

And if they look at animals that have been domesticated, because they’ve done seismic research with some rhinos that were domesticated, once they’ve been domesticated—not domesticated, but once they’ve been put in a zoo or domesticated, they lose the ability to have that same connection with the earth. So animals in the zoo don’t have the same ability to notice seismic energy, and they don’t respond to seismic energy, energy that’s coming from the earth, in the same way.

I think the same is true for us. So I think that as we moved into rational thought 500 years ago, we lost some of our instinctual connection with the earth. So some of the ways that energy comes up, and also information and knowing, sort of knowing from the natural world, that’s been cut off. And as people work more with their pelvis and their root chakra and their legs, this whole other way of interacting with the world comes in. There’s a tremendous amount more energy. So I do a practice, and all the sudden I’m quite vital, like having gone on a run for hours and hours.

As well, there’s a way in which I can interact with the world differently. I know when things are going to happen in a different way. It’s like I start to follow the wisdom of the body, which is connected into this much larger field, instead of thinking that I’m sort of running the show from thoughts.

TS: I’m curious in your work as a professional healer and medical doctor how you see this reestablishing of a connection with the earth impacting your patients.

AMC: OK. You mean how I work with them, or how do my patients experience it?

TS: Both. I’m curious to know what kinds of conditions can be reversed with this kind of approach, what kinds of conditions you think arise because we’re not connected to the earth, we’re zoo creatures, as you describe. And then how are they reversed? What do you see in your practice?

AMC: Well, the biggest thing I see is that people have more energy, so more libido. It’s not uncommon for someone to come in, for a man to come in, let’s say in his sixties, who all the sudden doesn’t have any more libido for life. He doesn’t really want to get out of bed, he’s not engaging in that much anymore, he’s not having sex with his wife anymore, and this can help reestablish that piece right away. So just a few Toe Tapping, or there’s some things where you can tap on the lower dan tien, and that’ll come back. So some of the desire for life comes back right away.

Just with the Toe Tapping alone, I see a tremendous amount [of healing] with restless leg syndrome, peripheral neuropathy, if they have swelling from poor Venus return. It depends on which practice we’re talking about. But once people connect into the earth, they can also start to align with what is instead of what they think. Because once the energy body drops down and opens up, there’s all this other resource in terms of vitality, instead of just thinking about the way things are. So often people can start to move into a greater acceptance of how things are; things will appear differently.

I see old injuries clear up pretty quickly, so depending on the practice, if someone’s got let’s say ankle pain, if they use the Toe Tapping the ankle pain will move through. Or the hips will start to open up, and they’ll have more ability to be flexible in their hips.

What else do I see? That’s a tough question, because it really depends on the practice that I use.

TS: That’s OK. I think I’m just still in actual awe that something as simple as tapping our toes together could generate such a healing response.

AMC: I pair the Toe Tapping with two other things. So tapping the toes will open the legs, then I do something called Body Tapping, where people sort of bounce up and down and bring in the energy. So it’s literally bring the energy in, and the whole body gets stimulated.

And then the other thing that I really like the most, which is called Shaking the Bones. These are very simple. And Shaking the Bones is just literally sort of bouncing up and down with the arms and head going side to side. And that will clear the blocks in the field.

Dancing is a great way of doing this, and that’s how young people usually do it. I had a woman in my practice yesterday who was having difficulty, and she didn’t want to shake; that was kind of too made-up of a practice for her. So I just sent her off with her iPod dancing, and she came back 20 minutes later and said, “Oh my gosh, I feel so good now!”

So when things can’t move through—we were talking about the energy not being able to cycle through well. There are really simple practices that we can use to help it cycle through. And so someone will be having difficulty with something, or they’ll be having pain in their shoulder, and if I can get them just to shake it through, then the pain will go away. Because the body naturally heals itself. So as long as we can continue to assist the body in naturally healing itself, naturally bringing the energy through, then the body will start to heal itself more and more quickly. And that is something I see: I see people heal much more quickly after surgeries, because the energy is flowing the way it needs to be flowing. And the healing response.

And I don’t want to just stay with energy. I mean, the lymphatic flow is better, the Venus return is better. It doesn’t really matter which model we look at; we could look at all the different medical models from the different traditions. These practices help with all of them, which is why I found these practices in lots of different traditions. I can talk about them in Traditional Chinese Medicine, but I’ve also seen them in shamanic teachings and other—I mean, we’re all tapping into the same thing. It’s the body that’s showing us the practice.

TS: You mentioned previously that as part of your own healing, you visited various indigenous healers and studied in different shamanic traditions. And I’m curious to know a little bit about what some of those experiences were for you that were particularly formative in your own approach.

AMC: One of the most formative experiences was a psychic surgeon down in Mexico named Jorge Gomez, who used very high-velocity energy work with a pair of scissors, and you would end up with scratches on your body. But he would use this high-velocity energy work, and things would change immediately.

So I had a friend with a breast cyst, and she would—I felt the breast cyst, and she went in, and 10 seconds later it was gone.

TS: OK, so hold on a second. “High-velocity energy work”: what does that mean, the “high velocity” part of it?

AMC: That’s how I see psychic surgery. It’s like they go in with a force, whoosh, instead of sort of gentle, hands-on healing. They move in with a force very quickly, and put a tremendous amount of energy into the body, and then something changes. That’s the best way I could describe it.

TS: OK, so you went down to this Mexican healer, and you went as someone who was somewhat skeptical? I mean, you are an MD, after all. Or you—

AMC: Oh, yes! Not only skeptical, I would come home and I would talk myself out of what I saw, and I’d have to go back. I went down nine times to visit psychic surgeons down there, because I would talk myself out of it! I would be like, “Wow!” Then I’d come home and I’d think, “That was not possible.” So I’d go back down. And I had to go over and over and over. I mean, that’s how tightly held our structures of belief are, that I went down for a year and a half until I finally went, “OK, there’s more going on here than I know. Let me start doing more exploration.”

One time I had this cough that just would not go away; I was so sick, cough, cough, cough, cough. Five seconds with them, completely gone. It’s really kind of amazing. And it took that much of an amazing shift from another paradigm to actually crack me open to all the paradigms.

TS: Now, what was going on with the scissors?

AMC: That’s a good question. He would use them on our body. Some people would talk about being able to see them go in and out of the body; I never saw that. But I think he used them as a tool for moving energy through the field. He was probably cutting through our aura, the energy field outside the body, and then right through.

But the thing I saw was that whatever he was doing with the scissors, it was actually going into the body, because it would make a shift inside the body. So one time I saw a woman who had some internal bruising from the force that he had come at, even though it doesn’t hurt. I can’t exactly tell you what was going on there, except that he was using the scissors as a way of penetrating into the body without the scissors going into the body.

When I took martial arts when I was in my twenties, I took a martial arts class one time, and my teacher threw a punch at me. And I felt wind go across my face, like a wind. And he pulled back, and he was an extraordinary teacher, and he apologized to me. And I said, “Why?”

And he said, “I hit you.”

I said, “No, you didn’t!”

He said, “Yes, actually, I did, and I’m so sorry.”

And the next day I had a bruise. But I didn’t feel it when it happened because it was so quick.

That’s what psychic surgery is: there’s a way in which they can use their hands—or people do it with sound, they do it with tools—where they can go in very quickly and back out, and you almost don’t feel it, but the energy goes in and breaks up what’s happening.

TS: Now, help me understand what your perspective is now. I mean, you say this sort of broke open all the paradigms, but what’s your understanding of how something like psychic surgery works? Knowing what you know about the energy body, how can someone with this kind of intensity make those kinds of huge changes in another person?

AMC: OK, so specifically psychic surgery, I would say psychic surgery works the same way regular surgery works, in the sense that it breaks up knots or mats or problems in the energy field.

There are lots of different paradigms that do lots of different things, like hands-on healing, which will harmonize the energy and allow the body to move things through the energy field. Or Traditional Chinese Medicine with acupuncture will stimulate certain energy points in the body so the energy flow will happen with more ease. But psychic surgery is a lot like regular surgery; it goes in and it actually breaks up what’s going on. So it depends on which healing technique we’re talking about.

TS: Sticking with psychic surgery for a moment, what’s your understanding of how energy works such that someone could have that kind of impact on the interior of another person’s body, that it was like physical surgery? How do you understand the mechanism there? What’s your view of that?

AMC: I think that psychic surgery uses the exact opposite frequency of what’s there, and it dissolves. I think that they’re working at the level of energy, at a frequency where they go in, and somehow the force and the frequency that’s being delivered will shift the energy underneath. Sort of like what we do with sound when we dampen a sound—you know, if you’ve got your mixers adding and detracting sound from a sound field.

And the other thing I think it does is, it goes in with such a force that it will break up— I see the energy field sort of like a grid, I see it as a matrix, and it will break up places where the energy’s blocked. Once you break up a block, then the energy—the body itself is going to heal itself. So you have to break up where the traffic jam is, and then allow the body to heal on its own.

TS: Now, when you say that you see the energy system in the human body as a grid, can you tell me more what that looks like to you?

AMC: It looks a lot like Alex Grey’s work.

TS: The visionary painter. Yes.

AMC: Yes. I think he’s done a great job of that.

TS: So now when a client comes to you, a patient comes to you—and I know it’s different with different people and different conditions—but how do you work as an energy healer with this grid? What’s your basic approach?

AMC: Well, my hands tell me what to do. So there’s a way in which I can see how someone’s energy body is being carried, but my hands will usually go to where the problem is. And as I begin to work on them with my hands, and I’ll do just very gentle hands-on healing, I can feel when there’s resistance. So if energy doesn’t flow up the foot, I can feel that; I can feel that there’s lower flow. If things are running well in the body, then it just feels normal to me. I mostly feel where there’s resistance.

So then I’ll work in that area with one hand, let’s say one hand on the foot and one hand on the knee, until I feel flow between the hands and up the leg. It’s like if you put your hands on a water pipe and there’s water running through it. When you do that, you can tell how quickly the water is running, or if there’s no water running at all. It feels like that to me. So that’s what I’m feeling for, a flow. And it’s like a vibrational flow. Just like holding on to a pipe when water’s running through it.

And I’ll do whatever it takes. So maybe I’ll just keep my hands there, or I might use a rattle in the energy field. And a rattle will move a tremendous amount of energy; you’d have to experience it if you haven’t already to know what I’m talking about. Since the body is not separate from the energy field right over the body, you can work over the body, and it will affect the body the same way.

TS: And what’s your understanding of how the sound of a rattle has that kind of impact on someone?

AMC: It’ll start to move the energy, again the same way we were talking about. It’ll shake up the energy flow around the leg, which is still in connection with the leg. And once you shake things up, it will start to allow the energy to move more quickly. So a lot of what we do in energy medicine is we assist blocks to move on.

You really have to experience it, but that’s why shamans use rattles: it moves energy. So if you take a rattle and start to shake it over the leg, it’ll allow the energy flow wherever the block is. It’s like taking a sweater that’s knotted, and running your fingers through it to make more space. Or it’s like taking—it’s hard for me to describe! I’m glad you’re asking me this. It’ll start to allow the flow to move more quickly because it shakes it up. I don’t know if I can answer it very well! Good question.

TS: What’s interesting to me is, here you’re both a medical doctor and you work as an energy healer. And thinking about how I come to a medical doctor and they have their stethoscope and we’re seated and we’re talking to each other, and the difference between that and just taking a gourd filled with seeds and shaking it all up and down my body—I mean, these seem like totally different worlds, and I’m curious how you bring it all together. How do you make sense of these two worlds?

AMC: Well, to me they’re not separate. So I would sit down with you with a stethoscope and do your blood pressure and work with all of those things. And then if you had back pain, I would probably show you three different exercises to do with the back pain. I might show you some vitality exercises if you were tired as well, or if you were having certain problems.

And then if you were still having some difficulty with your back, I would offer to run energy up your back, and I would lay my hands on you. And then I would do either straight energy flows, or I would use something like the rattle or some sort of sound to also assist in the healing of wherever the block is in the energy body.

So they’re not separate for me anymore. I do all of that: I work with medicines, I work with botanicals, I work with Traditional Chinese Medicine, I would send you to a homeopath if you needed that, because I use it but I don’t prescribe it. So I don’t really find a difference with that.

So I saw someone yesterday, who I referred to earlier. I was talking to her about some of her medical problems, and then she had anxiety. And so I started to work with her anxiety, and then I sent her off to dance the anxiety out. But I also worked with what her medical problems were in terms of conventional medicine.

I see conventional medicine as really excellent for certain disorders, and pretty inadequate for lots of other disorders. So to me it’s one big field of medicine, whether it’s Traditional Chinese Medicine or homeopathy or herbs or Ayurveda or nutrition or exercise, and then my special interest is energy medicine. So I don’t find them separate at all anymore.

TS: What is it that you think conventional medicine is best at?

AMC: I think conventional medicine is young. I want to start with that: I think it’s a young field. I think conventional medicine’s pretty extraordinary with certain traumas, like infection. I think it’s changed obstetrics, not that I totally love the way it’s being practiced, but I think that we had a pretty high rate of mortality before we started doing C-sections, so I think there’s a lot of use there. I think that for certain cancers, Western medicine has made leaps and bounds. Yes, I think the surgical field’s been doing good things.

I’d have to go through each piece, but there’s lots that Western medicine works at. With an acute problem, there’s a way that Western medicine can go in and deal with it. You know, asthma: when somebody’s having an asthma attack, our medicines for asthma attacks are quite good. If somebody’s having an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting, the different medicines we use for that are quite good.

I think that when we start to move into some of the chronic illnesses, that’s where the art of medicine in all of the traditions need to come in. So the way I see it really is, I see conventional medicine, like any other movement over time, it’s separated itself out. When we started looking at organ systems, which is really what conventional medicine did; instead of looking at the whole body and the vital flow of energy, it pulled itself away and said, “No, we’re going to look at the body through organ systems. We’re going to see that as heart disease, we’re going to see that as kidney disease, we’re going to see that as colon.” And so they started to separate out organ systems. Which was really useful, because we learned this other way of looking at disease.

What happened with Western medicine is that it made all the other medicines sort of primitive and wrong, that’s my understanding, around the 1800s and 1900s. But now that it’s self-differentiated itself, it’s coming back into the whole. It’s the same thing you would see with a teenager. You have the teenager, the teenager moves out of the house: “Everything my parents taught me is wrong, I’m a completely separate individual.” And then as they get older they go, “Oh, look! I’m part of this family.” But they have to differentiate themselves first.

And I think that’s where Western medicine is right now. It’s in this process of coming back in, to looking at the entire picture and all the wisdoms that have come through the last 4,000 years from all the traditions. So I never see any of these as separate anymore. I see them as just different tools in my toolbox.

TS: For me, imagining that I’m going to go to my integrative physician and they’re going to have a stethoscope and a rattle, and that I’m not quite sure which will be used in my session, but perhaps both—I mean, I love that idea, but it does seem very cutting edge.

AMC: Well, I don’t use a rattle that often! Maybe it’s cutting edge. I mean, you could go to see five different healers. Do you ever get energy work done?

TS: Yes. I think it’s just the idea that the medical doctor I see might pull out their rattle. We’re just using that as a symbol, but you know what I’m saying.

AMC: Yes, I know. Maybe it is cutting edge; it’s always made sense to me, because I was doing energy medicine first. And I don’t find that patients, that the people who come to see me—now, obviously they’re a selective population, but I don’t find that they mind. Almost everybody has some sort of cultural alignment with another healing tradition, be it a grandmother or a great-grandmother, or a story or their actual culture.

So I think this idea that these things have to be separate is really something that we made up recently. I mean, if you read even some of the good Hopkins physicians from the 1900s, they’re saying the same thing that we’re saying now: “A good physician treats the disease, a great physician treats the patient.” We’re talking about treating the patient, so I have to treat who’s in front of me, in whichever paradigm they need in that moment. Now, I don’t do all the paradigms really well, so I have to refer out to other people, but I see it in that way.

One of the things we did at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine is that we have a patient conference, where we’ll have a case and then we’ll have a Traditional Chinese Medical physician, a nutritionist, a homeopath, a conventional medicine physician, we’ll have all the different modalities sit around and discuss the patient. And that’s where we get the patient plan, which is really where I learned how to do this. So we have a group of 10 people, all who see illness and disease very differently, and we discuss the patient and the process the patient is in, and then we come up with a plan that includes everybody’s ideas.

So then they get an integrative medicine plan back, which says, “You can try all these different modalities. These are the ones we know work, these are the ones that might work, these are the ones that were traditionally used. Here’s something we heard of; we have no idea if it will work.” We’ll put it all in there, so they have choice from the entire pool of medicine.

TS: I love it! Go, integrative medicine! It’s definitely the direction that makes sense. I’m completely with you, Ann Marie.

Now, I want to ask you a question, because you mentioned that in your practice, you’ll often trust your hands, that they know where to go on a patient’s body. And you also said earlier in our conversation that in your own upbringing, this is something that you just did in your family, that you and—I think you mentioned your grandmother—would just find ways to put your hands on people if they needed healing.

AMC: When she was sick, I would put my hands on her.

TS: You put your hands on her. Did this wakefulness in your hands, this feeling of energy in your hands, just come to you? Did you have to train or wake it up in some way? Is it just natural to you?

AMC: I think it’s natural to everybody to some extent, and you can stimulate it quite a bit. I think that actually almost everybody in the medical profession has hands that I called “turned on,” that are turned on.

And in the beginning, I couldn’t feel energy at all. I would put my hands on people, but I couldn’t feel anything. It took me—it’s funny, I always end up doing what I’m worst at in the beginning. When I first started taking energy medicine classes, I couldn’t feel a thing. And it took me a few years before my patients and my clients would feel things, but I couldn’t feel anything. And then after about two or three years, I started to really notice sensation in my hands. And now I feel mostly resistances, and so it’s changed over time.

I think we all have an innate ability; we’re doing it all the time anyway. Again, it’s how connected are we to the body field, and how much are we in the head? It’s happening all the time. And with practice, with any art, you can get better at it.

TS: If somebody was interested in stimulating the energy in their hands, if they wanted to increase that, if they wanted to be more turned on in their hands, to use your language, what would you suggest?

AMC: I would suggest a couple things. I would suggest that they use a couple of movements; they would either use rubbing their hands together or clapping their hands together, or they can actually sing or tone into their hands to start getting an awareness. And then using their hands as a tool to send kindness or compassion. So starting to stimulate the idea that the hands are sending energy.

The other thing is, I would start them learning how to scan. So I would teach them the beginning of the sensation of scanning. So you put your hand over your leg and feel what you can feel, then take your hand off. Hand over the leg, take the hand off. And start to get the finer sensations being trained within the hand. Because it really is subtle; they call it subtle energy because it takes a little while to get the hang of feeling it. But as people start to play with the energy, even within an hour or two they can become pretty aware of what’s going on.

And if nothing else, I just have them practice sacred touch, which is just placing their hands on their own body, or on someone else, and sending compassion, sending the desire to help. And the hands will start to turn on, and the people that we’re touching, if it’s my own leg or someone else, will start to notice a difference in the quality of the touch. And that’s when you start to notice that there’s healing energy instead of just regular what I call “ordinary touch.”

One of the other things I like to do with people is have them place their hands on their own body and send fear, like they’re going to catch something, and then I have them send compassion. And within a couple of minutes, they can tell the difference between the quality of touch. And that’s really what we’re talking about: it’s the quality of the touch, what’s being sent through the hands. That’s the easiest way to understand it initially.

TS: I know in the energy healing course that you’ve created with Sounds True, you talk about using sacred touch to clear the energy that’s at the back of the heart. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, how someone might do that, and why that part of the body is so needed, why that part of the body welcomes this kind of sacred touch.

AMC: I love the back of the heart. So in the course, what I do is get people to tap on the back of the heart, because the back of the heart chakra is an energy center I’m fascinated with. It’s the assemblage point in the shamanic traditions; it’s the place where people in certain traditions say that’s where people leave the body, although most traditions say the top of the head.

TS: Ann Marie, what does that mean, the “assemblage point”? I didn’t get that.

AMC: So the assemblage point is a place where—it’s hard to describe—where we’re constellated around. It’s the center point of where the being is constellated. Not just the energy body, but the entire soul. So it’s a place where who we are is centered around; it’s a center point of the difference between me versus you.

It’s very hard to describe. I always find it interesting to talk to you, because whenever I bump into rhetoric, you question me on it. It’s fabulous! But the assemblage point is a certain energy center; it’s like the center of who Ann Marie is. It’s the place that the rest of me is constellated around in terms of the energy body.

I love this point because I find it provides an extraordinary amount of healing for the chest and for the opening. So in the Jungian tradition, if we were to look at things from a depth-analytic point of view, anything that we haven’t handled very well, we shove to the back of the heart. So it seems to me to be a place, the back of the heart chakra, where things hide out, where energies hide out. People can say, “Oh yes, my heart’s wide open,” but then when I move into the back of the heart, sometimes there’s a lot of stuff that hasn’t been handled.

It’s also a place that we naturally tap to help people feel better. So I noticed that men will give each other a slap on the back, or we’ll soothe a baby, we’ll tap on a baby to soothe them. And in some traditions, people even say that that’s the place where we sort of incarnate from, so you want to tap somebody on the back of the heart chakra to get them back into their bodies. In the Yacqui tradition, that’s soul retrieval. I’ve seen a Yacqui medicine man tap somebody on the back of the heart chakra for 15 minutes to bring them back into life. So it’s another one of those points that’s crucial in vitality, which is why I love it so much.

So I do that quite a bit: I tap people on the back of the heart chakra. And I’ve been using it in circles all over. People love it, because it immediately opens the chest and heart in a way that we don’t have access to sometimes just through meditating and exercise. So it feels like a place of stagnation that a lot of traditions are working with right now.

I mean, actually the back of the chakras is another thing that fascinates me. We all work on the front of the chakras, but I’m starting to notice that you can work with a chakra by emptying it through the back. So you can tap on the back of the heart chakra, you can work on the back of the second chakra, you can work on the back of the sixth chakra. And healing occurs in ways that I don’t usually experience from working on the front of the body.

TS: Now, I’d like to try this tapping on the back of the heart chakra, so I want to make sure that I’m going to do it right. When you say “tapping,” am I tapping with a couple of fingers? How do I tap?

AMC: Well, you can’t do your own, so that’s the first thing. Somebody’s got to do it for you. I use a full hand that’s out, sort of like a slap. And you’ll feel exactly where to do it; you’ll know right away. It’s between the shoulder blades, not too high up, and you get somebody else to tap it with a decent amount of pressure, like they’re clapping on your back.

And if you can’t get somebody to do it for you, I use a handheld vibrating massager, one of the ones you can get at a drugstore. And you can use that on the back, and it does the same thing. I don’t use a thumper as much, because I find them too rigorous.

And so you get someone to tap on your back. And get them to do it for a minute or two, two minutes at least, to really get an idea of the opening. When I do this in groups, they usually start laughing. They love it! It’s like a very quick emotional and energetic clearing.

TS: I love it! Thank you so much.

AMC: Has somebody done it to you yet?

TS: Well, you know, what I notice is that I know I love it when my partner just puts her hand on my back in that way. I’ve never asked her to tap, but it’s a place where she’ll just naturally put her hand, and it just feels so supportive and harmonizing. So I want to try this tapping.

AMC: Well, the psychic surgeon that I first learned from, that’s where he would go to work on disorders in the blood, which is the deepest layer of the body. Bone marrow and blood is one of the—if you were looking at depth of disease, that’s one of the deepest places, and that was his access point to it.

So it doesn’t matter which tradition I go into, that’s a really important [energetic] point. If you look at the Traditional Chinese Medicine books, they’re all these interesting spiritual centers in that spot as well. So I’m fascinated. This is my poster-child spot; I love it!

TS: Well, I’m glad we brought up the back of the heart!

Now, just a couple of more questions for you, Ann Marie. Our program is called “Insights at the Edge,” and I’m always curious what the edge is that people are working with. And so to begin with, I’m curious in your professional life, your work as an integrative physician and energy healer, what does the edge mean for you? What’s the question you’re currently the most curious about?

AMC: I think the thing I’m most curious about at the moment is the illusion that the body is not part of the natural world, and that we are actually separate. I think that’s an illusion. And I’ve been exploring more and more about how I think the body is running the show, and the mind is along for the ride. And how we even have the concept that we could be separate from our bodies. I’ve been fascinated just in the last few weeks with the idea that people say, “Oh, I need to be more connected to my body.” But why and when did we divide off through words that the mind and the body are separate? And where is all of that coming from?

I’m fascinated by the information that’s coming through the body. So if I check into the body, it seems to be that’s when I can tell what’s going to happen in the next hour or the next day or the next week, the intuitional ranges that are held vibrationally through the the body and this field that we’re in. And how it appears to me that the mind has really separated itself away, to its own detriment. So when I’m working with groups now, I love to work with—not really sending intention, but trying to do readings on the future, what’s going to happen in the next week, from having them go into their bodies.

The other piece that I’m interested in is that I’m starting to work with shamanic journeys, not the way that most people are doing shamanic journeys, where people go into a hole and into the earth, or up into the cosmos, but I’ve been actually taking people into their own bodies through the shamanic journey. So shifting the process of shamanic journeying with the drumming, and allowing them to find a way into their own body, having them go in through a nose or an eye or an ear, and what do they find inside their own body?

I’m almost thinking that the body is so unconscious to us, we are so unable to conceive of how incredible it is, that the mind has taken over and is running the show. But the body is just extraordinary. It’s got all the wisdoms, it’s got all the answers. It’s awake: I actually think the body is awake. And I think it’s just this little part of the ego and the mind that are not awake. That’s one of the things I’ve been exploring, and actually I’m talking about it, I’m really excited about it. It’s really extraordinary.

TS: So when you say “the body is awake,” I love that. What exactly do you mean by that?

AMC: “Awakening” to me means knowing that we are part of the Deity. There is no difference between myself and Creator and Source and everything around me. I think the body knows that. Again, I think the body belongs to the natural world, and this piece that’s speaking you, my awareness in the moment, is teeny compared to the fact that the body’s already in the natural world.

So I think that enlightenment—the body is enlightened, because it’s already in the natural world. And it’s just some small part of the ego that’s not. And so right now I’m in this place where I’m realizing the traditions that we’ve been looking at, a lot of the dominant spiritual traditions at the moment, are talking about enlightenment from the mind, which is wonderful. I think the body’s already there; I think the body’s already awake. And the more I can just move into that, and I don’t mean moving into an animalistic phase, although I am an animal—so again I just separated myself from the natural world! It’s fascinating to me. So there’s some way that the body already knows that it’s part of Source, and that it’s connected to the person next to me.

Even I’m connected to you [in this phone call]. This idea of time and space—they’re a bit of an illusion, because from the level of the body, I can connect to you. So one thing I’ve been doing a lot when I work with distant healing—and all distant healers know this—is that if I check into the body, I can find out what’s going on with somebody very quickly. If I’m thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what Tami Simon’s doing right now?” I would have no idea. But if you and I were working together, and I checked into the body, I can tell exactly what you were doing. I could stop and just say, “Hmmm, I’m going to see what’s happening right then.” And if I let go of my mind and start to move, the body will probably go into the movement that the person I’m working with is doing. But if I think about it, there’s almost nothing there.

TS: Beautiful. Now, just one final question for you, Ann Marie. I’m also always curious not just what the edge is for somebody in their professional life, but also, if I can, in their personal life. And what I mean by that is, what’s the edge you’re currently working with just as an individual, as a person, the sort of growing edge, if you will, of your own life?

AMC: There’s not a big difference in that. So the edge in my personal life is, you know, diving into the body and finding more vitality. And how to work with my own life in terms of just opening up to what’s coming in from the body. So in my personal life, my relationship, trying to work with what I feel in the body, not what I feel in the head.

I’ve been doing a lot with shape-shifting. So I’ve been really called to explore some of the shamanic traditions around what is shape-shifting? How do shamans move into animal form? Things like that. That’s been something I’ve been exploring.

TS: Can you tell me a little more? What is shape-shifting?

AMC: That’s a good question. I’m just in the beginning of exploring it. I think normally shape-shifting is when somebody has the ability to bilocate, so they can be in two places at one time. So I could be laying in my bed, and somehow send out my awareness into something, let’s say a bird, and then have a journey where I’m flying around. OK? That’s one form. Although I think I’ve just stumbled into teachings where people actually can fully go into the other form. I can’t do it. But personally, that’s something that I’m beginning to explore.

So my personal life always has a bit of the next place on the energy medicine, the next piece of the shamanic field, and then in my relationship is the other place that I’m always growing, in my marriage. So I’ve been working from a Jungian model, I’ve been doing some Freudian stuff, which is fascinating to me, because I hated Freud when I was younger, and now I’m in some Freudian analysis, and my goodness, he really was a genius. He really did start this movement into analysis, which is fascinating to me.

I’m sort of bouncing all over the place, but that’s what my personal life is like. I’ve got my hand in lots of different interests all at the same time.

TS: I love it! Thank you for being so open and so inspiring, and also offering some real practical ideas and things that people can do right away.

Ann Marie Chiasson has created several programs with Sounds True. A two-CD program with Dr. Andrew Weil called Self-Healing with Energy Medicine, as well as a complete home study course Energy Healing: The Essentials of Self-Care. It’s an in-depth training program that features more than 28 energy practices that you can do in a self-guided fashion. She’s also created a DVD called Energy Healing for Beginners: Ten Essential Practices for Self-Care, and we’re also featuring Ann Marie on a live online course, six online sessions beginning on March 7, 2011.

Ann Marie, thank you so much for being with us, and for sharing so much and so openly.

AMC: My pleasure! Thank you.

TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.

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