Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Amber Toomey, world renowned Reiki therapist. I really appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for joining today.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Awesome. So, Amber, you and I have been conversing for the last, I say, 10 or 12 minutes, and you're giving me some. Some gold nuggets on what we're going to go into today. But quite frankly, I am not 100% familiar with Reiki, and I'm sure that a lot of people who are going to listen to this aren't 100% familiar with it. Would you maybe just kind of give us a quick overview of what Reiki therapy is and then we can get into how you got into it?
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
So in the basins of it, Reiki is an energy healing technique where we gently place our hands over the body and try to use a sense of universal energy to facilitate healing.
Most people are familiar with the idea of different chakras.
These are centers within our body that hold energy, and when they don't move the way they're supposed to, it can create dis ease within the system.
And so sometimes just looking at these chakras as though it's a river flowing, we can end up with dams in the river and things back up and things can get stagnant and things can manifest physically.
So this is just a modality to just assist the body in purging things that doesn't serve it.
It's been around for a really long time. There's even people who, you know, throw it out that Jesus did the healing of hands, you know, that he placed his hands and with the belief of a higher energy that you can heal yourself. So it's kind of the rough introduction to it.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's beautiful. I never even kind of correlated that back to someone like Jesus. I know. I've heard.
There's a lot of stories that I've read about people who have used their energy to heal people in, like, Brazil, in South America. Obviously, I believe this came from Japan and the Japanese culture. And so if fits right in line with that, all the research that I've done, for whatever reason goes back to India. So I know that you know that the Indians are practicing this as well, but I never correlated that back to Jesus and some of the miracles that he performed. So I love. That's beautiful.
How did you get into this? Like, what sparked your fascination with it? I've known you for a while, and this is kind of an interesting topic. So what got you interested into it.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: To be begin with So I became a massage therapist back in 2007.
And initially, when I was going through school, there was times we touched base on energy work, Chinese medicine. And the whole time I'd be like, what are these hippies talking about?
Get the hell out of here. And I completely just blew it off. And I pursued my career within medical massage.
This is how the body works. This is physiologically how muscles respond. This is how injuries happen. How do we facilitate healing?
And I did that for a long time.
And a couple years into my career, I got really sick.
I started developing psoriasis over 90% of my body.
So I literally had no flesh from my neck down.
And modern medicine kind of failed me.
And that led me down this path. I had a woman that I worked with, and she was like, I don't typically offer this, but I'd love to offer you Reiki.
And I was like, hadn't. I was like, what is this? Okay, you're not going to touch me, but it's going to fix me.
And that changed my whole life.
It was such a profound experience. Experience that it led me to start getting acupuncture.
I started involving myself with Chinese medicine, naturopathic medicine.
And through this path, within 30 days, I had completely healed myself.
You know, of course, we did find out, like, I had some vitamin D deficiencies, so I triggered some autoimmune diseases.
And instead of just trying to mask the symptoms, which is what I was getting from modern medicine, we were really trying to get to the cause of why my system wasn't working the way it was supposed to.
I always use the analogy of, you know, our check engine light comes on. And most Americans were like, we're just going to get a louder stereo.
And instead it's like, hey, do we check the oil?
Are the tires good?
And so after that, and just having this profound shift in my body, I was like, I gotta learn everything I can about this. Like, and when I first started my Reiki training, the first thing the teacher said was, I want you to picture being in your house, and you go up and there's this light switch, and you shut it off, and we don't freak out. We're not like, oh, my God, the energy's gone. What am I gonna do?
It's just changes form.
And so energy never dies.
It only changes form.
And that gave this switch in my mind of if I could comprehend electricity moving through currents in our home to power electricity, to give us light.
It was that, that beginning switch that I needed to quantify it in a Physical realm and not give it this hippie voodoo inclination that I had had for so long about it.
And so it led me on this path.
While we were living in Denver, we had found this hippie church, is what we called it First Church of Spiritual Science.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: And there were people there who facilitated different classes. And that's where I completed my Reiki 1, 2 and my master's class.
And so being a massage therapist, I don't typically just do Reiki.
It's kind of like an extra tool in my tool belt.
If I can help facilitate any sort of healing physically, spiritually, I'm just holding space.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: And so. But that's kind of what led me to where I was.
And people are like, I thought you were always a hippie. And I was like, oh, no, no.
But when I saw the change it made in my own physical body and to resonate with how much I was truly holding in, not processing, not dealing with, I could definitely recognize how, to a point, my body began to physically manifest. Manifest disease in my body.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
Beautiful, Beautiful story. Super. And. And. And quite profound.
I think you. You touched on a few things there that I really want to dive into. I want to kind of talk in about the. The medical side of things really quick, because you bring up a good point. In terms of Americans, we tend to see that check engine light come on, and we misdiagnose it altogether. Right.
What were you doing before you kind of got into the Eastern medicine side of things? Like, what was the, quote, traditional medications they had you on? Like, were you going through anything specific? Like, what was the treatment exactly?
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Yeah. So with the amount of inflammation I was dealing with with my body, well, mostly the wounds on the surface of the skin itself, Steroids was pretty much what they just offer.
It got so bad to the point where I would go in once a week, and I always called it steroidal dialysis, but they would just pump steroids through my veins for 45 minutes, and my skin cleared up.
But the side effects was my right arm would swell to the size of my thigh, and the skin would just steep and ooze and split.
And at that point, I realized my immune system was so weak that every time I went to the doctor, it was more steroids.
They'd throw in some antibiotics here and there. So then I'm also killing my whole gut biome of immunity.
And I started getting really physically sick on top of just the topical issues.
And I knew my fear was I was gonna catch something, and I wasn't gonna have the Immunity to fight it off.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: Your skin is your number one defense with disease.
You can get viruses and bacteria and all sorts of stuff on your skin, and if there's not a break in the skin, it can't get inside.
And so with me not having most of my flesh, and if I did, it was seeping and oozing and open, I knew I was pushing my luck. And I was a massage therapist, so I was wearing long sleeves so no one could see it.
But I knew being in contact with so many people, I was, I was really pushing how far I could go with this.
And so.
But that was it. You know, I'd go in and I'd talk to the doctors and be like, hey, I've taken enough anatomy and physiology to get myself in trouble here.
The body just doesn't break down. We are a well geared machine that is designed to be durable and to just tell me, I'm sorry you got sick, and now you're just going to be like this for your rest of your life.
I just realized I wasn't going to take that as a permanent answer.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: So, yeah, I kind of forced my hand to see. Okay, well, I've got to take my healing into my own hands and see what else is out there.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, that reminds me of every pharmaceutical commercial you see. Right. We'll heal you here, but you might experience all these other, just devastating consequential ramifications of taking the medication. It's like, it's not good for the body. It's just kind of putting a band aid over a gaping wound that. That needs severe treatment. So that's crazy, right?
[00:11:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Right. When you, when you made the transition over to, you know, this alternative medicine, did you change anything else? I know you, you mentioned that you were a little bit deficient in vitamin D. Did you change your diet? Did you get more exercise? Did you go out in the sun? Like.
Yeah, okay, let's get into that.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: I want to hear flip upside down.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Um, so a massage therapist I worked with offered to give me Reiki, um, it without her touching me and still feeling the energy.
I had never experienced that before.
And so it, it led me to start asking more questions. And when I was in massage school at an instructor who is an acupuncturist.
And so I decided to reach out to her. Kind of gave her my sob story, I'm just sick, I don't know what to do.
Nobody can help me. And we just can't figure out what's wrong. And so she's like, come in, see me and the naturopath I work with and see what we can do for you.
And so my first meeting with the naturopath was, okay, we're going to do blood tests.
The body doesn't break down unless there's deficiency in toxicity.
And between deficiency and toxicity, that is where illness can thrive. Especially as we see through America, we don't talk about vitamins and minerals and making sure that we have what we need to function.
And if we get sick, we mask symptoms.
And so first thing I did was these blood tests, and my vitamin D levels were so low, they couldn't find any traces of it.
And so now we're finding that a lot of vitamin D deficiencies trigger autoimmune diseases. And so that even got my mind spinning of, like, is that why the Pacific Northwest is the Ms. Capital in the world?
And I think what really upset me was my doctors had prescribed me vitamin D. And I was taking this vitamin D calcium combo, a little tablet.
And what my naturopath informed me was, if you don't have enough vitamin D, your body can't metabolize calcium to absorb the vitamin D. So it was this conundrum.
And they told me I was actually really lucky that I didn't end up with any sort of kidney or bladder stones because my body was processing so much of this calcium and couldn't absorb it that I could have ended up with a lot of other health issues involved with it.
And so instantly, I got put on liquid vitamin D with K2, and almost instantly, my body started responding.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: I did some Chinese medicine herbs. I think they called it the great wind whisper.
I had too much dampness in my body, and so it pulled this dampness out.
I no longer use any harsh soaps, shampoos, laundry detergents.
I really started being mindful of what I put into my body.
One of the biggest things that I did was aloe. Super random. But we know what aloe does, too, to our skin.
And my naturopath talked about internally needs to be healed also.
So I would consume aloe.
And she really believed that it would help facilitate healing from the inside out.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: I think some of the hard things, especially when I started acupuncture, was just wrapping my mind.
Yeah.
Around, like, where did this come from? And what do you mean? If you hit this point, you know, it's going to change everything.
And the first image I sent you was a poster that my acupuncturist had on her wall.
And as I was getting acupuncture I would just stare at this wall, and there was these moments where all of a sudden it clicked and.
But there was. There was a lot of shift. There was a lot of evaluating what I was doing, what I was putting in my body, and then again, an energetic aspect. My brother had passed away in 2005, and I realized also through this process that there was a lot I had just shoved inside and I didn't want to process. I recognized how grief makes other people uncomfortable.
And I did everything in my process, in my, you know, personal possessions of not putting grief onto other people.
And in that, I think I internalized a lot of trauma that, of course, later on I recognized probably exacerbated everything I was going through.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I think sometimes when we're trying to be strong, it weakens us. And I think just being vulnerable and open, as uncomfortable as that is, I think that's one of the best ways to heal emotionally. So I hear you on that.
I'm really fascinated. I know before we started the podcast, we talked about being pragmatic in our approach to medicine and. And to health and fitness and all this good stuff. When you made the transition to say, okay, I'm. I'm going to take this in and I'm going to be intentional about my health, what. And I want to just know from, like, a. The perspective of a patient, how did you.
How. How did you justify that this is going to be something that is going to work for you? Did you resist it immediately? Did you just say, hey, listen, I've. I've exhausted all other options? What do I have to, like, kind of. What was your mindset?
[00:18:05] Speaker B: It was definitely along those lines. I mean, my whole life, I've always been the sick kid. So when you're sick, you go to the doctor and you get antibiotics, and that's what you do.
And so this thought process of trying to figure things out on my own and not going through a doctor was so foreign to me and actually kind of had a lot of shame around it. I.
I really didn't tell people what I was doing.
Kind of worried of their thoughts about it, and would they judge me?
Like, who goes and gets acupuncture instead of seeing a doctor?
And so I was really resistant because it was flipping my whole understanding of the world at that point in doctors and healthcare on its head. You know, all of a sudden, everything that I was told I was supposed to do had failed me.
And I think the hardest part is recognizing that my doctors and my practitioners didn't seem to Care like, well, we did what we could.
So sucks to be you.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: You're just right.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: You're just gonna have to live with this.
And I mean, this was 16, 17 years ago that it all started.
And so even now we mentioned like those pharmaceutical commercials. I'm constantly seeing these psoriasis commercials of, oh, look how much healing you can get and how much, you know, and it's just like. But all these other side effects. And I'm saddened that we're not diving in enough to preventative health care, diagnostic healthcare.
And then, you know, I don't want to paint it in one brush. But it's. Doctors don't make money off of us getting better.
So that leaves us, you know, it's good in a case of an emergency. Like I had my son in a hospital, super grateful for that. I almost died, like, so there's a time and a place where I'm grateful for modern medicine.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: But I think we should also encourage that preventative where this well geared machine.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Love it. Listen, I think that using one broad stroke to paint the medical and pharmaceutical industry is completely appropriate.
I definitely believe that modern medicine has its miracles. And obviously we should be super grateful and thankful that we have certain things, antibiotics, these sorts of things. Certain vaccines are really important, but it's obviously been completely taken over by commoditization and marketing. And listen, like during COVID how many times did they tell us to go outside and get vitamin D? How many times did they tell us to go out and stay hydrated, get sun, be with people, reduce your stress, meditate. They didn't tell us to do any of that. They told us to stay indoors, okay? Not healthy. They told us to take a vaccine experimental.
They didn't, you know, prescribe, hey, you should have this diet, none of that nonsense. So unfortunately, taking on our own healthcare is incumbent upon us to do our research and to be mindful and to be intentional. It's just an unfortunate fact. But in either case, I think people are waking up and thank God we have access to the Internet and people can do their own homework and they can't do their own research. So yeah, as far. Okay, so I wanna, I wanna get into how you got into. So you, you overcame your psoriasis In a miraculous 30 days.
Fantastic. 30 days. That's incredible. And that's just doing the right things. When you, when you made the transition to become a practitioner yourself, what was that like? Because from what I understand, you kind of have to go through a series of like, you know, you work with Somebody who's. I don't know if. I don't know if master is the right word, but they are somebody who has a certain level of expertise and then they approve you and then they test you. Like, what is that whole process? Like, I'm really fascinated by that.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: Yeah. So I mentioned the church that we went to.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: So there was a woman there who is a Reiki master.
And so there's three levels of Reiki practitioners. We've got Reiki one, and this is just to introduce you to energy, the chakras, and really focusing on healing ourselves.
And then Reiki2 dives into facilitating that for others, for other people, pets, the world we live in.
And then the Reiki master program includes a lot more in depth training and it gets you ready to then train others.
So a lot of people will just stop at like Reiki too, if they're a massage therapist or looking to try to make a career path out of healing.
And in my mind at the time, I just wanted to absorb as much as I could.
So being a massage therapist, I have to complete so many hours of continuing education to keep my license and.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: Intact. So this was a course that I could do that would then also go towards continuing education.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: Gotcha. Can I. Can I ask you a quick question?
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Can I ask you a quick question? As far as the certification goes, this is really. I kind of read up on this as well. This is kind of interesting.
This is a non invasive type therapy in, you know, probably. I don't know how much touching you do, but why in the world do you need to have a certification for it? I mean, it's just like an ongoing certification where they keep testing. I'm just kind of. I don't know, I'm a libertarian by nature, and so it kind of bothers me to hear about regulation. And this is like, come on, guys, this is.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: Well, the regulations is only strictly for my massage license.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Okay, fair.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: So the Reiki, once you're trained in it, that's it. You never have to do any continuing education.
Once you have your certification, no one can take that away from you. And you don't have to have licensing or special insurance for it. But me as massage therapist, I definitely, like I said, I incorporate it with what I do.
So because of my massage license, I carry liability insurance.
And just for the massage license, I have to do 26 hours every two years to maintain my license.
So it was nice with this Reiki course that I did, I was able to surpass that a lot. Yeah, Reiki 1. I did, I think it was 16 hours. It was a 28 hour day.
My Reiki 2 was another 16 hours.
Um, and then my Reiki masters was over three days.
So it ended up being like almost 24 hours. So it was a quite a bit of hours.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: That went into practicing, working on other clients, building up those hours.
Um, and so it, it was pretty in depth. Now I know there are some shorter programs out there you can always get online, find some discounted, sometimes even free, just to like get your feet wet.
But I definitely appreciated an in person experience working with other people.
And even since then, I've done some other additional continuing ed along the same sort of energy work. We did this aura palpation class which was really interesting.
And then even someone taught, I think it was like a 14 Chakra class that we talk about the main seven that are in the body that most people are familiar with. But this woman took it to another level that we have chakras in our feet, we have chakras in our palms. The Earth has a chakra, Our solar system has a chakra.
And how do we align not just physically, but universally. And so there's, there's a lot within this realm that people can go a hundred different directions.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: With everything that's out there.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's really complex. I feel like we could talk about this all day long.
The, the energy thing is really interesting to me. Like, you said that. I think it was your first session. Like, it was pretty profound. You felt it. It was something that kind of moved you spiritually and just emotionally in general.
What do you think that energy is? Have you. Do you feel like you can harness it at any time? Is it something that you have to be open to, kind of like, what. Can you maybe elaborate on the energy side of things? Because it's really fascinating to me.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: I think for me, one of the biggest things that I needed to even dive into all this was my understanding of quantum physics that we are all just energy vibrating at different speeds. You know, like, our flesh isn't solid. It's technically millions and billions of cells that are vibrating at such a firm and fast frequency that it gives the illusion of being solid.
And so me dabbling into quantum physics gave me, I think, a little bit of an understanding of the energy that they were talking about.
[00:28:17] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:28:18] Speaker B: I always love when we think of like the Earth and the Earth has our electromagnetic field around us, and when energy from the sun collides with the Earth, we get those beautiful auroras.
And so we see energy moving around us constantly, and so it's not different from us. It's just different vibrations.
And I think when my mind was able to flip science and recognize where the two can meet, it helped really implement it into.
Everybody has access to this energy. It's. It's part of who we are. It's the world we live in.
Now, even with science, we can almost start to map and see that we have our own energetic fields, just like the Earth does.
And I think people subconsciously will say things like, oh, I walked into a room, and you could feel the vibe was off, or you could tell something was off with people.
And those are our own energetic fields meeting other people's energetic fields.
And so with Reiki, one of the biggest things that they teach us is grounding, and we hear a lot about it. Now, even go outside, put your feet on the ground, and those negative ions really help facilitate a physiological change within the body.
We hear more and more about these grounding sheets that people can lay on, and they can map these negative ions affecting us on a cellular level, helping with pain, inflammation, sleeping.
And so the way we were always taught in Reiki is, I'm not doing anything.
I'm just a conduit, and so I stay grounded. So no matter what they've got going on, no matter what I've got going on, it has nothing to do with the energy that I'm trying to pull from the universe.
And so, for training, it was always a lot of visualization. I stay grounded. I'm just a conduit. Energy just moves through me. I'm not doing anything.
But there's this visual that they always tell you of. Picture the center of the universe, or even if it has to be small for our minds to, like, wrap our head around, is picture the Sun.
Everything within this planet requires the sun for survival.
And use that energy, pull that energy, and let that energy move through us and into somebody else.
And so for me, having those visuals of knowing how much energy our sun puts off, I mean, I'm not sure if you guys have seen any of the auroras down in Colorado lately, but up here, we've been seeing the aurora borealis a lot more lately with the amount of solar flares that we've been seeing.
And I think when I see that, it gives me that confirmation of everything's energy.
Everything's moving and vibrating and shifting and evolving, and this is just a smaller scale of that.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Yeah, Interesting. Super. Do you have to.
When you. Before you do a session, do you have to like, do any sort of, like, breathing techniques or meditate or just kind of like, you know. Cause obviously you're getting to a state of where you're grounding yourself, but do you do anything to do that, to get into that state of mind?
[00:31:55] Speaker B: Yeah. So for me, it's super little things.
I always picture roots coming out of my feet.
I know when I was trained, they always talked about anchors from your tailbone and this anchor dropping deep into the earth, down towards the core.
That didn't resonate with me as much, but the roots. I could almost picture roots and trees and, like, these myocilium networks that flow underneath, you know, the surface of the ground that interconnect everything.
And in a sense, I was.
I'm just connecting to what's already there.
And again, being a massage therapist. And before I got sick, I would take things from clients. They'd come in with a migraine, they'd come up with hip pain, sciatica, and I'd work on them. And then they'd leave and be like, I'm a brand new person.
And then 20 minutes later, I'd be like, oh, my God, my head. Like, what's going on?
Insane. And I had therapists at the time being like, you're not grounding yourself. You're not. I was like, bitch, get out of here with your voodoo and your hippie shit.
And I completely blew it off.
And then I got sick, and I realized there was a huge energy transfer that was happening, and I was taking it, and I was storing it inside of myself.
So grounding myself. And then, of course, with clients, I wash my hands before I even see them. And of course, every time I'm getting done, so I'm washing my hands constantly all day.
And that almost gives myself, in a sense maybe like a ritual where I wash my hands and I'm letting it go. I'm not taking anything with me.
I'm watching it wash down the drain, and then it can be dissipated that way.
But those are kind of, for me, just subtle things.
I do love crystals.
My dad used to give me chunks of petrified wood to keep in my pocket. And he was like, I mean, this is the grounding of grounding, right? I mean, these. These trees are millions of years old. I mean, you want to be grounded? Let's. Let's put a piece of petrified wood in your pocket.
And so even that was a little difficult for me to wrap my head around. And then I came across some studies done that quartz.
Quartz vibrates at such a perfect Frequency and a vibration that if we put a battery, any sort of electric current to it, we can use it to power things.
And, I mean, quartz watches is the perfect example that every time we see that little quartz on the face of the watch, we know that there's a quartz interface in there and that it vibrates at such a perfect consistency always that we can use it to power watches.
Um, and so maybe it's just for me that I'm, like, using it to recharge myself.
Um, but that's an extra tool that I use also.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Yeah, when you're. Okay, this I love. This is a lot of fun for me.
When you're working with somebody, can you, like, experience, like, their energy? Like, let's say, for example, somebody's got a cog in the. The engine, so to speak. Can you kind of determine where that is specifically? Is it in the shoulders? Is it in the mind? Is it. Like, how. Like, how are you kind of detecting energy in. In somebody that you're working on?
[00:35:37] Speaker B: So because I do medical massage, I work in a medical clinic, we work with car accidents, L and I, health insurance. So everyone's coming in with a medical necessity.
And so when I approach things, you know, and we're dealing with shoulder pain, neck pain, I can get movement just through massage therapy.
Now after a while, I've seen these clients, we build a rapport.
Then I'm like, okay, we gotta cross realms a little bit that you're holding onto something, and the more you hold onto this, it's manifesting in your body.
I think one of the hardest things I've recognized with my career path is there's a huge population of people that their illness is their identity.
Who would I be if I wasn't broken?
Who would I be if I wasn't dealing with this back pain all the time? And I didn't like it becomes their identity.
And so when you start asking those heavy questions of, like, well, what are you holding onto?
What. You know, what things in life are you dealing with that could potentially be causing this pain in your ass? You know, there's this author out there, her name is Louise Hay, and she wrote a book called you can heal your life.
And it got really popular in the 80s.
And what she started to recognize is almost every physical ailments that people have in their bodies are associated with a thought process.
[00:37:27] Speaker A: And.
[00:37:29] Speaker B: When we recognize that, I keep repeating, nothing ever goes right. Everything's always wrong. Why is everything always hard? Or, you know, I hate being a woman.
Those things can correlate and create dis ease in certain places of the body.
So she has this whole book, and at the back of the book, it has this whole catalog starting A to Z, every area of your body, every ailment, and the negative thought that we associate that creates energy to settle in those parts of your body.
Now, what I love what she does is then she also includes, like, a positive affirmation.
Like, my dad, he had COPD and emphysema.
And when I remember looking it up, it would say, the inability to take life in fully, not feeling worthy.
And I was like, no way. My dad's the best person in the world. Like, there's no way he feels that way about himself.
And I asked him, and he was like, yeah, my life has always been hard.
Things have always been a struggle.
I've never felt like I truly deserved good things in life.
And that crushed me. Like, I was like, wait, what? What? So I went around and I wrote all these sticky notes all around the house, in his bathroom, in his bedroom. And it says, I am worthy of all good things in life. I am lovable. You know, and how hard is that for us to say that about ourselves?
I mean, that's his specific with the lungs. But so many of us don't walk through life and being like, you know, I'm blessed, I'm grateful. I am wealthy. I am. You know, we hear these positive IMs, but we've got this monkey brain that kind of spirals, and we can hold a lot of things in our body.
So especially with, like, injuries with clients, you know, based around an injury at work, you know, there's. There's anger, there's grief.
And when we're not processing those, we definitely see that those physical injuries can be exacerbated and last longer because we're not always getting to the depths of where everything settles.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I think that the.
That's a really powerful.
That's. It's very powerful message to showcase that our bi. Our body and our mind are intertwined and interconnected. Yeah. It sounds like you're not just a physical therapist or a reiki therapist. You are a therapist in general. You really have to know who your clients are, kind of what their mindsets are.
How long does it take you to build that rapport? And has there. Has there ever been a situation where you've had to turn somebody away because you just like, look, I. You're not opening up enough. Like, there's not much I can do here for you? Because that's kind of a tricky situation. Right. Because you got. They have got to open up and they have to be vulnerable, and they have to be honest. Right. They have to want to, you know.
[00:40:43] Speaker B: You can't care more than other people care. And that has gotten me in trouble over the years that I give so much of myself.
I can fix them, I can heal them. I can give them all the tools.
Just like you mentioned with, you know, what you used to do.
You can give everybody the tools, but if they're not ready to own that, I think that that's where I've had to set personal boundaries of I can't care more than you.
If you are caring about what's going on. I will give you every bit of information I have to help set a trajectory for you, but I can't do it for you now. Firing clients, sometimes with clients, like I said, I'll bring up a little bit of, hey, I've read this book and it says that low back pain is an insecurity with money.
Is that ever anything that's cnl, you should look into that.
And if they're receptive, I've had people come back, they've bought the book, they've done the research. They're like, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize that my whole childhood we lived in scarcity. And I've carried this on with me in life, and maybe I am.
When I get worried about bills, when I get worried, yeah, my back does freak out.
Broad example, right?
[00:42:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:09] Speaker B: If they are willing to take those steps on their own, I'm just. I'm just facilitating. I'm just a conduit. I'm just sharing.
If I can tell they're not receptive, we move on through treatments just like anybody else. You know, physiologically, we're. We're breaking up scar tissue and adhesions. We're trying to encourage muscle to relax, release lactic acid, facilitate healing by getting fresh blood to the areas.
So in some ways, it doesn't stop what I'm still there to do.
I just realize where they are in their healing process, and I'm just planting seeds.
[00:42:48] Speaker A: Okay.
Okay. So it sounds like you kind of have to be primed to accept Reiki in its true form. You can't just. You've got to be accepting of it.
What was I going to say? Okay, question for you. Let's say somebody goes through the whole gamut. They listen to you, they're receptive, they take in all of your, you know, your tutelage. They're. They're very open to your to your therapy. What is it like when you are fully aligned mind, body and spirit? What does that feel like? What does that do for you?
[00:43:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
In a perfect world.
[00:43:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:26] Speaker B: You know, physically we would be healthy.
Mentally, emotionally, we don't have addictions that affect us, mental illnesses that are impeding in our relationships.
We're able to move through the world functioning.
And I don't. I don't know if this human experience ever will give us a hundred percent healing. I love the term.
We are universal beings having an earthly experience.
And sometimes the experience here on Earth is mostly learning. I'm pretty sure Earth is like high school.
And we come here and we figure out a lot of shit, and it can be really hard at times. Yeah, but what we want to see with the balancing of your energy is you have these tools when the exterior world comes at you that you can process things.
[00:44:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:35] Speaker B: Like, grief is a really good example, personally, for me, of when my brother passed, when my dad passed, when my husband passed.
Reiki just doesn't fix those things, but it gives me a sense of understanding that, again, energy doesn't die, it just changes form.
And that wherever we go after this, that energy current is still in existence.
But it helps give me the tools of God.
How grateful am I in my life to have these amount of people that I loved so deeply and loved me that we got to experience that.
And so the hard part is, I can't say anybody is going to have this perfect embodiment, but it's more of these tools that when things happen in life, you have a way to work through it.
Um, and so, yeah, like I said, in a perfect world, you know, we would see physical, spiritual, mental perfection.
You know, Christ like consciousness.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:50] Speaker B: I think that that's like, kind of the goal is that next stage of evolution when our physical human egos no longer push us through the world and we are more guided by divinity.
But, yeah, I look at it as more of like a tool when we recognize something's out of place and we see something come to the surface. Can we use Reiki as something to be like, hey, I've got some energy that's stagnant here. Can I get this moving? And can it help me process what it is I'm experiencing, experiencing at this moment?
[00:46:30] Speaker A: I love that. I love that. I feel like when you have your mind, body, and spirit in alignment, you just reach ultimate nirvana and the heavens open up and you ascend to the kingdom of heaven. That's what I'm gonna. I'm gonna roll with yeah, yeah. You know, so I love that. Another thing that it sounds like is that you're. You're trying to get at here. Excuse me.
Is a pillar of making sure that we have these things in alignment. And of course it's not going to be perfect. And, you know, obviously, you know, achieving perfection is a goal, but it's going to be hard to get there. But it sounds like one of the pillars that you highlighted and I'm a huge believer in, is gratitude.
Not everything's going to go your way.
Not everything's going to play out the way you want it to, but if you can just be grounded in gratitude, that's going to go so far, and making sure that, you know, you're. You're happy and you're healthy mentally and physically, for that matter.
[00:47:28] Speaker B: Have you ever. I sent you a video briefly about somatics.
[00:47:33] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:47:33] Speaker B: Have you heard of somatics before?
[00:47:36] Speaker A: No. Should we play the video? Is it the TikTok video?
[00:47:39] Speaker B: It is. Do you want.
[00:47:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:47:40] Speaker B: Yeah, we can watch it.
[00:47:41] Speaker A: Let's. Let's ride. Let's ride. I've never done this before on a podcast. Let's do it. Okay, hold on. Let me. Let me through this screen.
[00:47:49] Speaker B: All right.
[00:47:51] Speaker A: All right. Can you see my screen?
[00:47:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:54] Speaker A: Perfect.
[00:47:55] Speaker C: The cymatics. This was done in cathedrals, which I thought was really cool. There was a fellow who took a device, went into cathedrals, and saw that the stained glass windows in the cathedrals were emitting the same picture on his device as the stained glass windows. The sound resonated in, which we can't hear is actually being impacted by the materials and the colors and everything that's with it. So when you get into sound frequency, people can look into cymatics. There's lots of fellows who've done different things with cymatics. They take plates of salt, and they show how different pictures and different graphics are created with sound. Each different sound can heal a different organ. This is where you get into, like, sound therapy, sound healing. You know, they do the things with bells and they do things with the drums and the tuning forks. Back in the 1920s and 30s in Germany, they would do tuning forks. They put tuning forks up and down the body, and that's how they would begin to heal the person. They would find a spot that was stuck, and they would bring that tuning fork right to there. They'd hold it there until it cleared, and then they'd move it down. But when you get into plants, too, certain frequencies of music can be very beneficial, and then certain ones can be detrimental. People should look into Cymatic.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: So that was just a brief little visual.
So semantics, like he said, is where we take some sort of water, sand, and we expose it to a vibration.
And when we expose it to a vibration, we can see beautiful sacred geometry with what they showed, like the stained glass.
And one of the images, it shows a whole bunch of different sacred, sacred geometries. And those are all different notes.
Every note creates a different vibration. And then we correlate these notes also with different chakras also. So I'm sure you've seen, like, the quartz singing bowls that people use.
[00:49:45] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: So, again, depending on the vibration, we can use those as tools to emanate a vibration, to break up dis ease. Now, on the other side of the spectrum, if we have a low vibration, the vibration is off.
We can have again, some disease, stagnanticity.
And so there's some studies out there. This doctor, Dr. Emoto, and he talks about when we speak positive to plants, to ourselves, good things happen to us. There's growth. But if we say negative, horrible things, plants die, things rot.
And he does these studies where he takes water and he says love and peace and gratitude. And it makes these beautiful snowflakes when he freezes it. And he does it on the opposite side of the spectrum. Anger, hatred, war. And then he freezes it and he looks at it and it looks like sludge. And it's not really taking on any sort of form.
And so I love that idea of we are just these electronically charged bags of water, and if we can put a good vibration into our systems, it's going to emanate.
And so gratitude is number one. You know, it will help reset anything that we're experiencing.
And it's such a simple, easy vibration over scarcity, fear, grief, trauma, that even if people take five things that you're grateful for, it can shift everything. And again, I believe on a physiological level.
[00:51:40] Speaker A: Yeah. That I've seen that before.
I guess I didn't quite know what the name for it was, but I remember your brother sent me a video of that scientist who was yelling and screaming at the water and then saying pleasant things to the water. And the way that it froze was completely different based on the energy that he kind of emitted.
I am so fascinated by energy. Look, I'm not going to sit here and protest that I'm a religious person. I'm on my journey.
I'm currently in the process of reading the Bible. I've read the Bhagavad Gita in the Past, I've explored many other, you know, faiths and traditions, and so I'm trying to just kind of find my way.
But one thing that is really undeniable to me and I feel in the core of my body is energy and frequency. And so this all just really speaks to me is, like, when I say good things to not myself, I start to feel better about my day. I start to notice the positive things I have in my life. And gratitude is just, it's a practice that I try to internalize as much as I possibly can, and I try to showcase that to other people. So I, I love, love, love this, this was really, really interesting.
How do you get your patients to think like this? Do you have give them homework? Do you ask them to fill gratitude journal? Yeah, it has to be right, because.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: It'S a sticky note. I've got stacks of sticky notes.
And, you know, I will because I'm not a doctor and I can't diagnose and I can't prescribe. And so it's a lot of, hey, I'm going to write down this book. I want you to just Google it, Look this up for me. See what, come back and tell me what you find.
And like I said, I'm more, My goal is just to plant seeds because everybody here is on their own journey.
And what I might find guide me towards divinity and my sole purpose. And what am I doing here when everything around me feels like it's falling apart? Like, I keep coming back to.
As much as I tried to walk away from massage or healing or any of those things, something always throws me back in. And I'm like, okay, when my soul chose to incarnate here on Earth, this was my purpose.
But you have to find a way to have people want change.
And sometimes by just even feeling better after a massage is enough for them to recognize I can change things, I can shift things.
And, you know, I always tell people, I can't tell you to quit your job or quit this or quit that, but I can help give you tools to live a little bit more harmonious life. And so, and I think when you give people the option to kind of do their own research and their own education, when they find things that resonates with them, it's going to hit so much deeper than me just telling them what to think.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: Totally. Yeah. No, you have to find it for yourself. You know what I mean? It's like, and I'll take this back to, like, my religious journey. I, I, it's hard for me to adhere to a specific religion because I just, I. I have to believe in it fully. And for someone to tell me, you know, like, if I go to. Because I've gone to church a handful of times in the past couple of months, when someone tells me to believe in something, I immediately want to resist it. That's just my nature. That's just who I am. I'm an. I'm a rebel. I'm an Aries. Don't tell. Don't tell me how to think. I'll think for myself, thank you very much.
But if you show me the benefits of what you're trying to profess, that is much more likely for me to catch on to and for me to absorb and appreciate and then want to practice in my own life. So I think that you're hitting on something really important is like just showcase people the benefits of, of these practices and these tools and allow them to embrace it holistically as opposed to forcing it on them. Right. That's really important.
[00:55:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:45] Speaker A: Okay, so I want to. I have. I have a few more questions for you, Amber, because I could talk about.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: This all day, all the time for you in the world.
[00:55:53] Speaker A: I, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. So I want to. I wanted to stay on theme here in terms of tools that people can use on their everyday life. So we've already talked about gratitude. That's an important one. What about meditation and, you know, and incorporating. I know you, you. We just talked about somatics like frequency listening to certain frequencies and hertz and that sort of thing. What practical tools can people use today to try and elevate their vibration and be healthy?
[00:56:22] Speaker B: So even easy ones that I do, I.
Pandora, I have. It's called a 528 Hz healing radio. And so all the music that plays on this Pandora station is along those healing vibrations. You know, it's bells, donging, it's waterfalls, it's, you know, all the things that encourage healing within the body.
And so that's an easy one for people, even if it's just falling to sleep. YouTube has amazing videos. Go on.
[00:56:57] Speaker A: Yeah. I have a question for you. So on. On this note, I know that there are different types of hurts, right? There's like 528, 47, whatever.
They're different though, right? There's like, there's different vibrate, different hurt. Okay. Can you explain the difference?
[00:57:14] Speaker B: Kind of a rough list that people kind of base.
[00:57:19] Speaker A: Let me, let me open that up off of.
[00:57:25] Speaker B: And so when we see.
Here we go. So here we start to See where these are the top 10. And there's more frequencies, of course, but these are the most common that people will look for based off of what they're trying to address.
And so, like I said, I.
The 432 and the 528Hz is the most common that I hear and see, especially like, like I said, YouTube videos, Pandora radio stations.
But all of these have their own benefit.
And so say people are trying to connect with light and spirit, they're going to want to look up that 963Hz and see if that vibration increases enough within you to have you feel as though you and Source are connected, that there's nothing separating you from the divine, that we are all just space dust anyway.
Um, you know, we are the universe incarnate.
And so there's these great ways to incorporate that. And there's so many resources now, especially with the Internet.
I know, gosh, like, TEMU started selling these vibrational plates that you could pick the frequency you want and it would create that frequency for you.
But I want to keep it easy. You want to keep it attainable for people. And something as easy as putting on this kind of music before you go to sleep at night or while you're around the house, have it as a background while you're in the car, those are easy ways to introduce that into the system.
[00:59:19] Speaker A: Love that I'm big on meditating.
Um, and so after I go to the gym in the morning, and then when I come home, I try to meditate as much as I can, but I have, like, a playlist of hurts that I listen to, and I just try to focus on my breath. I meditate, I listen to the frequencies at the same time.
And then once I'm done, I kind of walk myself through a series of gratitude practices where I just say thank you for my mom, thank you for my dad. Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for. You know, I try to find things that are unique and whatever, and then I try to. I try to pray as well and. And project that energy out into the universe as best I can. You call it prayer. You can call it whatever you want, but, yeah, I love good vibes. Yes, exactly. And just trying to set up the. The day for success in terms of just my mental space. So I just wanted to call out the fact that I love the music side of things because it is beautiful music. Some of them. Some of them are a little harsh. Yeah, some of. Some are a little harsh. I'm not a lie. And I. I think when it gets kind of.
[01:00:17] Speaker B: If you pick up on anything that's harsh, maybe look into it and be like, oh shit, this is correlating with my root chakra. Am I not grounded? Am I fighting this? Is this something that like I am resistance to letting go?
Yeah. So that's always something. When something kind of rubs you wrong, it might be your body resistant to letting it in because you're like, no, I like where I've tucked this trauma and I'm going to keep it nice in this little package.
Um, so something, something kind of mull over there.
[01:00:49] Speaker A: Interesting. I. This just popped into my head and I want to get back to the tool set, but I just, I want to address this really quick.
Can, can Reiki in any way help with helping, I guess, heal trauma and like phobias? Like, if someone's scared of, you know, social engagement with people, there's obviously a lot of like built up tension somewhere. Can you use that to help somebody in that area?
[01:01:17] Speaker B: I think so. I think there's a lot of ailments that we physically manifest that we're kind of told you just have to deal with. But like you even touched base a little bit on that meditation.
[01:01:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:30] Speaker B: When we're open to letting things go or kind of diving in deep and unfolding where this is coming from, I don't think people wake up one day and they're like, I'm just anxious.
There's usually, you know, a systematic situation, whether maybe it was bullying as a child or trauma within the home in, you know, not consistent parents around that there's this seed that planted and has the anxiety is the symptom.
And so we have to be willing to unfold where is this blockage in our system.
And so when we think about the chakras, we've got seven of them. And the first one is your root chakra and it's associated with the color red.
And it's.
It's kind of what makes us human. You know, like we're this human experience. We're here.
But if we're not anchored and we're not addressing being present in this body, we can be flighty. We can not process the energy that's around us because it impacts us.
The second one is our sacrum and this has to do with like our reproductive organs. But this is also our first connections with other people.
If that's closed off due to trauma, you know, anything about potentially meeting partners is going to feel scary. It's going to feel overwhelming. Making ourselves vulnerable, that can create anxiety.
Our solar Plexus.
I feel it's kind of like our identity.
It's, what do I do? What is my purpose? What. What am I? What makes me creative?
And if that's closed off, you know, everything around you might feel difficult.
The fourth one is our heart.
I feel like a lot of people close off their hearts. Again, self preservation.
Yeah, but if we can't have true connection and we can't be vulnerable with people, we're always going to struggle with connection.
The fifth one is our throat. I see this in a lot of women that will end up with, like, thyroid issues.
And it's them never feeling like they could speak their truths. They've always been muffled. They've always been told to stay quiet. They've always been told, you know, just keep the peace.
Can that manifest?
I think so.
The third or the sixth one is our third eye, our penal gland.
This is our intuition. This is trusting that that voice inside of our head is guiding us in a good, correct direction. And if we don't trust it, then everything's going to feel alien. Everything's going to feel like it's coming at you because why am I struggling? Why am I suffering so much?
But if we have that intuition, we understand that we have to go through this for whatever growth, whatever lesson we're supposed to learn from it. And the last one is our crown, and it floats above our head a little bit, and it's that ultimate connection of recognizing.
You know, Rastafarians talk about it as, I am I, and we are one and I am part of the divine. I am not separate. We, we are all connected to it. And so when all of those are open, we start to see where we can dissipate some of the physical manifestations, like the anxiety and the stress and the fear.
But it also takes unfolding. Why did I close this off in the first place?
Am I ready to process this? Am I willing to forgive? Am I willing to change the narrative that that's who I was, but it's not who I am moving forward.
So as much as Reiki can help bring things to the surface.
And I could be like, hey, I love using physical attributes. So I have a pendulum, and I'll hold it over each chakra, and if it's not moving or if it's really moving fast or after I clear it, it starts to move.
People like to see that physical, you know, they like to see the change in their body. They're like, oh, yeah, look at that. That's not moving at all. And then as soon as it opens, it does this beautiful clockwise motion. And so say, I'm like, hey, look, your solar plexus is closed. This is where you might be feeling stuck in a career path, or you don't know where to move forward, or you're struggling with this.
And let me help clear this. And hopefully, when it's open, things download into them in a sense where they can trust where they're supposed to go. So, again, I'm not doing anything per se. I'm just trying to sweep out the clutter so that they can feel connected in this experience.
[01:06:48] Speaker A: Gotcha. Yeah, you've mentioned just being the conduit. You're just. You're there to guide people. You're. You're. You're there to kind of bring issues and traumas and that sort of thing to the surface and then allow them to recognize it, and then it's kind of on them to fix it. In. In a sense, you know, we were talking before we recorded about us both being a bit pragmatic and, you know, this discussion. I think a lot of people, if you don't live in Washington or 20 minutes away from Boulder, Colorado, you might think this is a bunch of foo, foo.
[01:07:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:07:21] Speaker A: What do you say to that? What is the science behind this? Can you kind of shed some light into the pragmatic side of things?
[01:07:28] Speaker B: I think, again, it comes down to most people who have that sort of mentality, let's go at it with science. And I love falling back on quantum physics.
When we get into cells and the way everything collides and moves, it's such a beautiful way to give people that opportunity to understand. Everything is energy.
Everything is just molecules and cells vibrating at different speeds.
And if people can wrap their minds around that, I think it helps them to.
Also there's that saying, as above is below, right? So if we can go down to the small, smallest cellular level and still see these cells of an atom looking almost like a miniature solar system, and then, you know, expand all the way out to our own solar system, our own galaxy, our own universe. I mean, what we've got mapped now of our known universe literally looks like a myocylium network.
And so when we start to see these correlations, I always love the pictures that they show of a star supernova where it explodes.
And then we also see a neuron in our brain activate. And they're almost identical.
You know, they also show, like, the iris of your eye and solar systems or space.
I guess it's universes out there. But we start to See, like, these small things within us, and then the world around us are correlating to the universe that we are part of. And so I think most people, once we can kind of get that first switch flipped, you start to recognize, oh, gosh, yeah, Energy is all around me. Like I said, the light switch. Just because we shut off the switch, it doesn't mean the power is never going to come back. It's just changing the direction of the way the current moves.
[01:09:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:09:36] Speaker B: And so I always encourage people to explore that science side of things, the somatics. When you watch somebody take that platform and they pour sand all over the top of it and they run a vibration through the bottom of it, and you watch the sand vibrate and eventually make these beautiful sacred geometry shapes.
That's visual. That's proving right there that sound creates vibration and can physically affect change.
[01:10:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I love it.
Yeah. I mean, that just kind of opens up the conversation to a million different things. Right. Infinity. And just everything along those lines. It's really, really fascinating. One thing in my research that I found is, at the very least, from a biological or physiological perspective, this puts you into a state of parasympathetic, into a parasympathetic system where you're resting and relaxing. And this is obviously going to de stress you. It's going to help with inflammat to boost your immune system. So just even obviously you're not going to get all those benefits from one session, but it teaches you to be able to control your mind and be able to, you know, be intentional with your thoughts and put yourself in that rest and relax state. So even from just a biological perspective, there are just tremendous benefits associated with it.
[01:10:56] Speaker B: That's literally one thing I talk to every single client about.
We've got two sides of the nervous system. We got our sympathetic and we got our parasympathetic. And I deeply believe that most humans live in sympathetic, and that's fight or flight.
When my dad was dealing with his emphysema, we were trying to learn breathing meditations and exercises how to get him out of fight or flight and into rest and digest.
And this woman that we were working with talked about that she believes it almost starts when we give birth, that we've changed the way we give birth. We used to have babies, and eventually the placenta would come out with the baby, so the baby was breathing on its own way before ever being disconnected from the mother.
And now what we do, as soon as the baby's born, we cut the umbilical cord. So that first breath is life or death.
And that is where we start to recognize people hold their breath, they shallow breathe, you know, so when I'm in a massage session, except especially the goal is diaphragmatic breathing. I need to reset your nervous system.
You're not being chased by a saber tooth tiger. You're. You know, there's not this internal fear of what that was created for. Right.
Self preservation. We. We're not meant to live in that. And it burns out our endocrine systems. I mean, a huge physiological effect by living in that sympathetic nervous system.
So if we can teach people that just that breath deep in, what do they use? It's the term is box breathing.
And they teach, like Navy seals to do it right, that even in the most intense situations with that diaphragmatic breathing, all the oxygen going to their brain, they can stop their system from responding to the stress.
And so sometimes that's the biggest thing. If I can get my clients to breathe on the table, and next thing I know, I hear their stomach growl. They're like, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. I was like, nope, that's what I'm looking for. That means you are in your parasympathetic nervous system, your body feels safe enough to start digesting.
And so that's a huge one. I mean, I would almost say that's at the top of the list. You know, I'm. I'm an instructor at a massage school right now. And those are day one things that we're talking about is I need you to recognize that if we can't get them out of that sympathetic nervous system, we might. We may not be as effective as we need to be, but if we can educate them the importance of that oxygen to the brain, the oxygen through the blood and resetting that nervous system, it can facilitate so much change in people's lives.
[01:13:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I also feel like just our day and age, we tend to put ourselves into artificial sympathetic nervous system situations with our phones. We're constantly looking at our phone. We're constantly drawn into drama. And, you know, like, my algorithm is an absolute mess. I don't even want to get into it, so I try to just keep it on the, on the other side of the room. But, uh, we're just. We're drawn to putting ourselves in a state of anxiety constantly. You know what I mean? And. And we really need to get back to being able to control our thoughts, be intentional about, you know, how our body's responding to the environments that we're Putting it into. So that was one thing that I just really appreciated when I was doing my research on this. It's fantastic.
[01:14:35] Speaker B: And breathing is the first easy step that people can do to, you know, regulate their bodies. I mean, and we learned that in counseling, too, that, you know, count to 10, do your deep breathing.
If you're having an anxiety attack, a panic attack, if there's anything going on, that that's instinctually the first thing we tell people.
And so when I try to break people down to, I want you to analyze your breathing. Most people, like, I know for myself, I'll be watching tv and the next day I'm like, oh, my God, how long has it been since I stopped breathing?
You know, And I'm just holding my breath, like, who does that? And I think so many of us subconsciously do that or the really shallow breathing that we don't realize how that's affecting us physiologically. And it does manifest through anxiety and stress, depression.
And that's again, one of those scientific aspects that we can prove, prove how our nervous system works. And if we can regulate the nervous system just through breathing, you don't have to believe that it's going to do anything beyond that. But physiologically, we understand how the system works and what the benefits behind it.
[01:15:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'd also argue that, you know, when you're in that state, it has a cascading effect. So if you're constantly anxious, you know, you're. You're not going to be as pleasant or patient with people. You're not going to be as empathetic with people.
If you are at a. In a more of a parasympathetic state, you are going to be more kind, you are going to be more empathetic, and people are going to be, you know, kinder to you. You're going to see opportunity, you're going to see gratitude and things that you might not have otherwise seen in the past. So I think, you know, just putting yourself in a, you know, was it rest and digest state really has a tremendous amount of positive outcomes, not just in that moment, but throughout the entire day and then hopefully, you know, weeks, months, years after the fact.
[01:16:35] Speaker B: Yeah. What's sad is when I was going through school, and again, it's been like almost 20 years ago, so things are shifting a little bit. But when I was first in school, we had two sides of the nervous system. Parasympathetic and sympathetic, fight or flight and rest and digest.
But what's crazy is over the last couple decades, we start to hear A lot more of this fawn response.
And I think for humans in general, we're really, we're really not supposed to do that. But I feel like it's deeply due to us living in fight or flight for so long that it's completely burned out our whole endocrine system. So when we do deal with trauma, we just shut down. I mean, it's, you know, and now. So we've got this whole thing in society where people are dealing with these fawn responses.
And I'm like, gosh, as a society, we've, we've ran so hard that now like the whole system is just shutting down.
[01:17:33] Speaker A: Yeah. What is fawn, what is that fawn response? What is that? Exactly.
[01:17:38] Speaker B: So how they kind of explain it is where we see it in like other parts of nature, like possums. Possums are a great, you know, example.
[01:17:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:17:50] Speaker B: Of when they're exposed to trauma.
Instead of running or fighting, they're done. They just shut down. And so I think that's where we hear, you know, people use the term a lot. Rotting. Oh yeah, I rotted in bed all day. And that could be a nervous system response that they are so burned out that they can't even be anxious anymore. They can't even be scared or angry anymore. Their just system has shut down, factory reset. Maybe you'll come back online.
And so, and again, for most humans, that's, that's not how our nervous system is meant to process. We're meant to be in rest and digest and in case there's an exterior danger. Like I said, primitive man, you know, is a saber tooth tiger chasing us or are there bears hunting us? You know, it's meant to protect us, to escape danger, self preservation.
But now we've seen this huge shift where we were so overloaded that now we're seeing a fawn response starting to show up within the nervous system. And I think it's almost a collapse of our sympathetic nervous system.
[01:19:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Super interesting.
Yeah. I cannot tell you how many people, including myself, have had to go to the hospital for anxiety attacks. And not knowing what that was exactly.
I had an anxiety attack a couple years ago and I thought everything was great, but I woke up in the middle of the night and my left arm was numb. I thought I was having a heart attack and I ended up going back to bed. And then the next morning it happened again and I went to the hospital and they couldn't figure out what it was.
And then they kind of just alluded to the idea that it might have Been an anxiety attack. And so that sounds like almost like the fawn state. You know, you're just like, what? Like, what else do I do? I don't know. There's nowhere to go.
Right, Exactly. And so that's really interesting. But.
All right, let's. Let's bring this home.
So Reiki therapy. Absolutely beautiful. I'm so glad that we got into this. I could go forever and ever and ever just on all the avenues to dabble into. I know it's. It's hard to stay because I'm like. I'm trying to, like, keep it on track, and I just to want to go down this avenue and that avenue. And you've done such a brilliant job of articulating these things.
If I wanted to start incorporating some of these tools on my own to practice Reiki in my own life, or at least embrace it and open my mind, open my heart to it, what are some tools I can do? I know we talked about just being grateful. Box breathing is a big one.
What else?
[01:20:32] Speaker B: We talked about music colors. As random as it sounds, I think I'd send you a chart, and it shows, like, all the different colors of the chakras.
If you recognize that you are having an issue with your throat, they deeply encourage that. That color vibration of blue helps so much, which is hard for me because I live in gray and black.
And I was like, hey, something so simple is, I'm gonna wear a yellow tank top today. Might be under my shirt, but there's the energy in that color, in that vibration, I think, even down to, like, the foods we eat.
I love the idea of conscious consumption to the water we drink, to the food we eat.
In a lot of religious, you know, beliefs, you know, we pray and we bless our food now, whether we want to take it that way or not. But even in Reiki, everything we consume, we bless and we thank and thank you, universe or God, however you associate, you know, bless this water to my system and bless my. My body to your service.
And so being intense, having that intentional correlation with the things we're putting in our system.
So food, the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, even connecting with nature, I think that's a really easy one that we kind of overlook how easy to go outside and put our feet in the ground and allow those negative ions that the earth naturally produces to help regulate our system.
And then, of course, there's so much education out there. I mean, you can go to the library and pick up books with YouTube and the Internet now, so many people could technically probably do basic Reiki training, you know, to at least. Because like I said, Reiki 1 is just so we can start to heal ourselves, where we can start to unfold the things that we're not processing.
And how can I heal myself? Because how dare I start to try to heal other people if I can't process my own shit, you know, so there's so many great things out there. Finding a way to be connected.
I think I had given you a chart, and it talks about the dysfunctions and what happens when certain things are out of alignment. So if that ever resonates with people, how easy to be like, okay, I know that this is my third eye.
What can I do to help open this up specifically?
And we have just so much information out there that educating yourself is number one. Yeah.
[01:23:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
My big takeaways here are education, being intentional about everything that we do, and then falling back on gratitude 100%.
[01:23:33] Speaker B: 100%.
[01:23:34] Speaker A: Well, Amber Toomey, I am so grateful that you spared some time with us today. I really, really appreciate it. All the resources that you mentioned, I will put in the notes Caption Regardless, with YouTube, Spotify, whatever it is so that people want to check that out, they can. Is there any final words on your end?
[01:23:52] Speaker B: Oh, thanks for having me. I. I'm so passionate about this, and again, the change and influence it's had on my life and then the way I've been able to, you know, facilitate that for others.
But, yeah, I believe we're in a state of humanity where we need to figure out where our direction is for the future and whether it's. You know, I think sometimes religion can be really limited, but a sense of spirituality and spiritual connection, of feeling connected to everyone and everything is really where I kind of hope humanity is moving. You know, with enough empathy, grace, and compassion, I really believe we can shift things. So love that.
[01:24:46] Speaker A: Awesome. Amber Toomey, we are going to find another subject to go down in the future, but until then, thank you so much. I appreciate your time.
[01:24:52] Speaker B: Take care, Quinn. It was good seeing you as well.
[01:24:56] Speaker A: Bye.
