If you’ve seen Netflix’s Goop Lab, you probably remember the episode of Gwenyth Paltrow, Julianne Hough and the crew flying on beds from energy moving through their bodies. Well that healer facilitating it is Dr. John Amaral who is this week’s Highest Self Podcast guest! We go IN on this episode on all things mind-body-spirit healing, from handling anxiety, stress + overwhelm, to finding the right type of exercise, to our bodies transitioning to 5D consciousness, to how your physical bodies are a manifestation of our souls. Let’s dive in!
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Transcript
Episode 300: Mind-Body Healing with Goop Lab’s Dr. John Amaral
By Sahara Rose
Namaste. It’s Sahara Rose and welcome back to the Highest Self podcast, a place where we discuss what makes you, your soul’s highest evolvement.
Do you feel the shift from this third and final eclipse of this summer? I am feeling so much more light; so much more love; so much more grounding spiritual awareness; so much more of that space between the inhale and exhale – the Sacred Pause – The Kapha. And that is actually my intention for this next month – is to really sink into my Kapha energy – the Dosha – the Ayurvedic energy type of Earth; or resting; of nourishment; of taking that Pause of not jumping to the next thing; not trying to make yourself busy because that’s all you’ve known your whole life, but to really sit in that Pause. Because truthfully, the past couple months (for all of us) have been extremely cathartic and confronting and all of the things. There has been a lot of anxiety, fear, tension, stress, I mean, any shadow (you name it) has come to surface in the past six months for us. And as I’ll share in my solocast, this is really the time to learn the lessons that you have been faced with in the past six months; and to really see them for what they are and decide that you do not want to bring these into the New Paradigm, because this is the opportunity for us right now to either evolve or repeat. And if we can learn from that soul lesson; see it for what it is, the medicine that it gave us, we can transmute it into Alchemy (which is what this month’s Rose Gold Goddesses circle is all about). But if not, if we continue to ride with that story of “I’m never going to be able to do what I love; or I’m never going to be healed; I’m never going to find someone; I’m never going to be able to find my purpose; be creative – whatever that story is – and if you continue to find “evidence” for it, then the lesson is actually going to repeat for you for the next year or even longer until you choose to look at it.
So this is our opportunity right now to either evolve or repeat. So, what are you going to choose?
So, evolving; finding your Dharma; being in touch with your highest self – this all requires us to integrate the codes in our bodies. We are born in our bodies for a reason; we are born in these human vessels because they are our temples, they are our homes, they are our conduits to experience this lifetime through. This is why this is utmost important to take care of your body, through exercise, breath-work, meditation, self-care practices, Ayurvedic practices, because your body is how you experience this world through, and when your body is convoluted, tense, dense, you’re actually not going to be able to receive the messages that your soul and your spirit are giving you because there is too much density in your physical form. And as we transition into 5D consciousness, which is a higher frequency, a new way of being, the paradigm of love and of joy and of complete possibilities.
Well, if we’re bringing on all of the baggage from the Old Paradigm, the 3D paradigm, the fear, duality, scarcity (which is the paradigm that we’re in and we’re shifting from), but if we don’t remove the residue from our bodies, we’re actually going to be stuck with it, and we’re not going to move forward. It’s like moving into a new home but bringing all of the things from your old home. Even if you buy all the new furniture for your new home, you still have your old couch, your old table, your old bed, your old rug with that stilled dusty and dirty, so it doesn’t matter what practices you do if you don’t clean up what’s already there and that is the residue that you’re carrying in your physical body. So this is why it’s so important, you know, I spent the beginning, the ten years of my career focusing on Ayurveda, which is the world’s oldest health system; the sister science of yoga based on the Mind-Body connection (I’ve written two books about it – “Idiots Guide To Ayurveda” and “EatFeelFresh” – I highly recommend both especially “Idiots Guide To Ayurveda” if you’re interested in the Mind-Body connections; Chakras; the Auras outside the body; the Koshas; Oil-pulling-tongue-scraping, dry brushing, morning routines, night time routines; nutrition; all of those things. And “EatFeelFresh” – for plant-based, gluten-free, alkaline ayurvedic recipes).
So, for many of us, food and nourishment, and exercise and our physical health is that gateway towards spirit. And it doesn’t end there because when you start to eat healthier and take care of your body, you start to notice things. You naturally become more intuitive, you’re not even trying necessarily, it just naturally arises. So, maybe you were doing a lot of yoga and then you start to become interested in the other aspects of yoga; or maybe it was from going vegan; or maybe it was from running for a triathlon or something else that required to look at, maybe your drinking patterns; or smoking; or eating sugar; or emotional eating, and that triggered this entire awakening that you’re experiencing right now. So, this is why it’s so important that we constantly go back to square one of our physical bodies and what are they telling us because our physical body is the manifestation of our soul. And whatever is happening physically is happening spiritually, but we’re actually seeing it in its most densest form in the 3D.
So, for example, if I am holding onto a lot of energy that I’m not able to process, I’m going to get bloated because I’m not able to move that energy through my solar plexus; you know, if I’m having different hormonal issues that’s going to be directly related to, of course, my sex drive but also my creativity, abundance and pleasure which are also related to the Sacral Chakra. So, this is why it’s of utmost importance to understand the Mind-Body connection, Ayurveda and all other forms of Mind-Body medicine to integrate the codes that your body is telling you and to see them as the messages as they are. And then when you see that your body is always communicating with you, to tell you what the pathway is for yourself spiritually, then you start to notice instead of trying to medicate or you know, ignore what your body is saying or “Ugh, how do just I get rid of the bloating? It’s, well, what energy am I not processing? What am I stuck with? What am I holding onto? Why am I feeling tired all the time? Where do I not have emotional boundaries? If I’m felling lethargic” Maybe it’s not the daring, it could be, but also, maybe you’re holding onto a lot of people’s energy. So we start to see that it’s so much more than just calories in and calories out; it’s so much more than just exercise more – exercise less; it’s psycho-somatic; it is the full body approach.
So, I’m obviously very passionate about this and I’m always looking for the top experts in Mind-Body medicine, energy-healing etc. to interview on Higher Self podcast, and I recently watched the Goop Lab Show on Netflix. Some of you may have seen it, Goop is Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand and they have a show on Netflix which I really loved, and it was talking about different forms of healing and there was one episode where they were really diving into this form of energy-healing – you may have seen it with Dr. John Amaral.
So, I was just so intrigued by this style of healing that he was doing, essentially, people were lying on a bed and they were flying, like, energy was moving from their spine and they were literally like lifting themselves up out of the table in this almost like trance-like state because the energy was shifting and moving through their bodies. So, we all have the ability to do this but when you move out the densities and stuckness in your body, you’re actually able to let the Kundalini energy move through you and your body becomes this free vessel. So, I was very, very intrigued about this and to learn more about energy-healing from John Amaral himself, and this is why I invited him to come to the Highest Self podcast, and I’m so grateful for him to share his wisdom with us.
So in this episode we talk all things Mind-Body-Spirit. We speak about different exercise types for different bodies; we talk about how our forms (our physical forms) are a manifestation of our souls; we speak about common questions people have; hormonal imbalances; how to deal with stress; how to deal with anxiety; how to deal with overwhelm; just everything that I am feeling the collective is experiencing right now – I asked him and he gave us such beautiful and elaborate responses with all of his, you know, decades of experience working with Tony Robbins and Julianne Huff and so many incredible dancers, healers, motivational speakers, authors, and really coming back to – we are souls; we are souls in these physical bodies and we can’t ignore that.
He started himself as a chiropractor and shifted to his energy-flow formula because he realized that we’re so much more than these physical vessels, and we really dive into that in this episode.
So, if you’ve seen Goop Lab’s I’m sure you’re super-stoked for this, if not, definitely check that out after this podcast. And now without further ado, let’s welcome Dr. John Amaral to the Highest Self podcast.
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Sahara:
Welcome John to the Highest Self podcast, it’s so great to have you here.
John:
Hi Sahara, it’s nice to be here.
Sahara:
The first question I’d love to ask you is what makes you your highest self?
John:
You know, my experience is that my highest self is always available and I think what makes me my highest self is when I shut off all the conditioning and all the noise, and all of that which is kind of in the way; it’s like a dirty windshield that I’m wiping away that which distorts what just is at the most high essence level. So, I think what makes me my highest self is not what I do or anything that I can possibly do in this 3D world, it’s what’s already there that I just have to truly remember and find.
Sahara:
I love that. It is always there for us and it’s just removing all of those blockages that we like, hold onto that to make us forget, and you are so adapt that helping us remove that from our physical bodies. So, a lot of us right now are feeling in fear; we’re felling defensive; we feel like we’re going to get it wrong; victimhood; like, all of the shadows are coming up and are bodies are feeling really tense.
So can you share with us, kind of what you are seeing for the collective and how it’s manifesting in our physical bodies?
John:
Yeah, we’re in an intense time because there’s an awareness that has come to the forefront, it’s something that has been going on, it’s something that we’ve known about but now the light is being shined on one of those places that we’ve kind of ignored or avoided for many people. And so, the collective, there was already the Covid pandemic going on, so there was already confusion and financial concern for people; there is a concern about health and “Am I going to be okay, how bad is this?” and then you add to this now this situation that is happening in our country around justice and inequality, and social justice and so what I feel in the collective is that there is just a heaviness and a density, but at the same time there is an incredible possibility because the structure that has been there is now, there are like cracks in the structure and the light is starting to shine in, and when the light shines in (the light of truth, the light of goodness, the light of just kind of possibility) it starts breaking up the existing stories and the beliefs and all of the places that have been in the shadows. And so, there’s this shadow aspect that’s being sort of revealed, we’re being asked to and in many times faced with looking at some of the places that we’ve avoided. There’s uncertainty; there’s intensity; there’s polarity; there’s a highly-charged and polarized environment, so there’s a lot happing on a lot of levels and so to be in this and at the same time continue to connect to and remember that which is spacious and free and possible for ourselves and our lives and for others, it takes a practice, it takes tools, it takes commitment to not get dragged into the heavy-density polarizing charge of it all but at the same weave in and out of it and actually be able to be productive and be adding value and be open and receptive of it. It’s taking a lot of self-awareness and it’s taken a lot of conscious action right now.
Sahara:
Absolutely, I think one of the biggest things is that uncertainty that you mention because before you could like map out your year and be like pretty sure, like, “Okay, in September I’m going to go on this trip; I’m probably going to go on this trip” and now you don’t know what’s going to happen, what borders will be open, whatever it is and because of this we’ve never lived out lives like this like up in the air but in a way is the way of the New Paradigm of just like completely being present and being in the moment. But most of us have not set up our lives to be so open and free, so it’s like, causing this like polarity and contradiction.
So, what tools and recommendations do you have for dealing with the anxiety that’s arising of the fact that you don’t know if your kids are going to go back to school in the Fall or what your life is going to even look like a month from now?
John:
I think that’s a great question. I think that, for decades I’ve been working with people from all walks of life from all over the world with all kinds of different backgrounds and different situations that they’re going through. Some people are going through extreme health crisis where they’re you know, cancer; other people that have literally lost limbs or had spinal cord injuries or you know, have been partially paralyzed; people that have had, you know, severe abuse situations and traumas and gunshot wounds; all kinds of things that I’ve come across. And so, one of the things that I found is that we have a need for certainty, for sure in our lives and to feel like there’s a stability and everything’s going to be okay. But that, there’s a foundational need for that like, survival elements have to be there. At the same time there is a high need to feel safe and in control for people, and the more you need to be in control or the illusion of control of your circumstances, the more anxiety you get when you can’t control them. And the truth is we can’t ever control the external circumstances. We can interact with; we can you know, shift our own internal being which shifts the world out there (there’s a tremendous amount of actually processes that we can actually do) but we cannot control the global events that are happening around us. So, I think right now, the tools that are most critical are the ones that help us find more peace and find more safety and security in the uncertainty. So, how do we navigate, when you talk about this (I’m going into some specific things) but how do we go about our lives when it feels very uncertain; and how, the income, what are we going to do? What’s the environment for the economics – what’s going to happen in the world? What’s going to happen, is there going to be there? So, we can just stack all of these uncertainties and it leaves us in a very vigilant, like, protective fight-or-flight state. And we can have the same amount of uncertainty going on and the same amount of chaos going on around us, and we can actually feel centered, we can feel at peace and we can feel like we can move in all the different directions if we’re cultivating our bodies, our minds and our connections to something higher, you know, source of spirit or divine (whatever you want to call it). We can actually create an environment that allows us to be flexible and adaptable no matter what’s happening. And this time is giving us an opportunity to do that at a very accelerated pace because it’s necessary right now; or you will go into reaction, you’ll check out of your body, you’ll go into avoidance strategies or addictions, you’ll do something to not feel because it’s so intense and it’s not just an individual thing. It is collective; we are all in it; you can’t separate yourself out; you are like one tiny atom of H2O, a molecule of H2O, in the middle of the ocean, you know, you can’t separate yourself out of the collective energy that’s happening around us, but you can experience it, move with it and then actually stay in a way peace and flow throughout.
Sahara:
So what can we do when we feel ourselves just going into that fear spiral, to come back into our bodies in the present moment?
John:
So, there are some components of navigating our inner world and our physiology. There’re really kind of two realms here, there’s the dimension of subjective consciousness; conscious awareness; consciousness that is transcendent of the physical body that is there beyond this time, space, dimension and beyond this lifetime (you being there is the hard part), essence and our transcendent self. And we have our somatic, physical, sensational body with our five different senses of sight, hearing, taste and touch etc. so we have the ability to start to navigate and cultivate our physical sensations and respond to our body and tune into what are body is actually telling us; start to better understand and better respond to the subtle cues that our body’s giving us about what’s happening. Maybe you’re not noticing this consciously, on your cognitive level, but your body is giving you information and feedback and maybe your body is having an eczema or maybe.. That was a thing for me in the past when I was growing up (asthma and allergies and eczema), where my body would have a somatic expression because I was disconnected from what was going on within me emotionally, so my brain and body had to give me some communication that I could actually pay attention to, so it would give me something. So physical symptoms are a way you know, for your body to give you information about something going on that you may be missing on other levels. And then we have the other area which is the subjective, the ability to travel in our consciousness or expand and bring increased awareness to the consciousness and the energy within in and all around us that’s not on a physical level at all, it’s purely on a subtle level which it doesn’t intersect directly in a way with the physical body – there’s like two different things happening there, so we can – meditation, especially meditation, and it’s been used for thousands and thousands of years to begin to become aware of that which transcends the physical and again, to cultivate and expand our awareness in that realm, and then there are the practices of working with the body and intersecting with those that are your breath; the flow of energy in your body; the movement patterns that are going on with your body; and your focused awareness on your body – that’s a whole another area. These are two, they are meshed together but they’re two different sort of pillars of how we need to approach our being and both are critically important. Some people, they meditate regularly, they eat right, they exercise, they do “all the right things” but they have a very low awareness and feedback of their body and the sensations that their body is giving them, and they override it and they push through, and maybe they do yoga regularly as a physical practice but they’re not connected on the sensations of feedback and so they’re kind of just checked-out of their body even though they use their body a lot; and then there are people that are very tuned in and connected with their body (maybe they have a fitness regimen; they eat well; they really focus on the 3-dimensional sort of body aspects of the things) but they don’t have a practice of cultivating the inner experience of traveling in their consciousness and expanding (which is more on the meditative side).
So the goal or objective is to be an integrated human being and is to actually to be developing both of those so there needs to be a practice of some kind of meditation and expanding that kind of awareness, and then there’re going to be practices of how we connect to and experience our body and its feedback.
Sahara:
So can you share with us some of the energy-flow formula and any practices of that that we can do to ourselves at home possibly?
John
Yeah, one of the things I did when Netflix show with Gwyneth Paltrow (The Goop Lab Show) came out and it had a lot of exposure on that too. People from all around the world reaching out, saying like “What can I do, what can I do?” I created a free seven-day course basically which was called Fight-of-Flight to Flow challenge. So, anybody can go on my website (johnamaral.com), they can just sign up and take that 10 days to go through the seven-day challenge, and it takes you through a process of a bunch of different exercises that involve using your focus and your breath; and using your touch, and using movement patterns to begin to cultivate more flow. And so, people can do that; so anyone listening or watching can connect into that. But just for right now, just the most simple practice of beginning to bring your attention and focus to your body, sensations and feedback – all you need is your hands. And it’s just literally touching your body and noticing.. Let’s say you have a place of physical symptom or distress, and you’re feeling, let’s say, maybe it’s a headache, or maybe it’s a tightness in your throat, or maybe you feel like a kind of clinching in your gut or you have an anxious kind of uncomfortable feeling in your body and it feel like fingernails on the chalkboard kind of energy inside, that anxious, kind of irritated; some people experience it as kind of a vibration, or a tone, or a sound even; some people experience, you know, just a physical intensive area of pain somewhere in their body or general regions of their body. We can take our hands and use them – our hands, you could think of as a stethoscope where the palms of your hands are almost like the receiving apparatus, and the truth is, we don’t really even need to touch that part of our body as we develop the awareness, but at first it’s very powerful to just put your hands on parts of your body that feels compressed or tight or tense or irritated. So, if it’s like your neck, you can put your hand there; sometimes people – they’re feeling tension in their neck but really there’s more going on in the energetic center of the throat, you know, in this area around the you know, the chakra, the energetic center which is tied in the fifth chakra (so voice and expression, and higher-self connects into this expressing world). So there are these co-relations as we start to put our hand on our bodies and start to touch different areas, we become aware that “What do I feel here; What do I sense here?” So, if you’re putting your hands on your neck and you’re feeling and you notice “Oh I keep getting neck pain, I keep getting tension there” Identify it notice, touch the area and see what does it look like, what is the sense of it? Does it feel like it’s in a specific area? Is there a shape there? Do I see a color? Do I feel like it’s compressing in? Do I feel like it’s expanding out? Do I feel like it’s moving from that place to another place? Is there an epicenter to it? Does it feel like the pain or tension that I’m experiencing is separate from me somehow, like something got jammed in there or something was being pulled or tugged on from outside of me? And we can start to and home in and feel and identify “Wait a minute, this area feels somehow foreign or separate from me” or “This area, oh I feel connected here but it feels like…” and you can start to fill in the blanks in your own consciousness. Once you’ve identified what an area feels like that’s been uncomfortable for you; you are feeling like it’s been a cause of tension for you, or cause of distress for you – you can take a breath in through your nose and out through your mouth while you’re touching the area, and notice “Do I feel more connected here; do I feel less connected?” If it feels like – sometimes what happens is when a part of our body is giving us a hard time, it feels actually separate somehow from us; it feels like a foreign object; or it feels somehow like we’re removed or divorced from it being a part of us. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve worked with people and I’m having them touch a part of their body, and they’re putting their focus there, they actually remark you know, “Wow, it feels like, almost like an appendage that doesn’t belong to me, like maybe it’s an arm and an elbow or some part that they’ve injured, and it feels so somehow foreign that it feels like something is happening to them, that they have no sort of control over because they can’t even find or feel that or awareness as part of them. It feels like it’s an outside force doing something. Like, if you’ve ever had the experience that you just like “I wish that it would just go away, I don’t care if someone cuts my freaking arm off or it cuts my leg, I just want this pain, I want this intensity to go away.” And so, when you touch or tune into a part of your body where you’re having an intense, or even if it’s a more subtle symptom or feedback, because symptoms are an opportunity, are a call from our body to say “Hey pay attention, something needs to change here, something needs your focus and awareness” if you keep avoiding it, keep overriding it, having people trying to work on it, do things to it, stretch it out, put some salve on it, take some medications to make it go away – you have an adversal relationship with this part of your body that you’re trying to control or manipulate or make fall in line with your objectives of where you think you need to go or what you think needs to happen. Does that make sense? And so many people are actually trying to treat their body like a, more of a mechanical device that they want to make work for them in the way that they want to make it work – “So, I have an agenda, I want to get these things done, I want to push through, I want to make it happen” it’s like “My body, this is a new sense that’s holding me back from what I want to do.” So, by putting your focus and attention onto your body and starting to with compassion, and this is the key, with compassion, with curiosity, with an honoring of the sacredness of all feedback and sensations that your body gives you, with a gentleness and kindness you start to touch and hold different parts of you, take a breath in and let it out, and feel and sense “What do I notice here; What do I feel; Is there a sense, is there a sensation beyond just a physical; If I go into that what feels like pain or if I draw myself out and I look at it from the outside the body, I’m visiting from the outside and I can actually see or feel that area – what do I notice there? And sometimes people would be like “Oh my God, I feel, this is so sad” and all of a sudden there’s an awareness like “Ohh” and in others there are tears and there’s a breath and then there’s just a release of energy because a majority of symptoms that we’re having are the inability to move or express emotional content of information and your body is holding energy that you have built up as you wanted to fight-or-flight. So I say fight-or-flight o flow because when you’re fight-to-flight, you’re holding, you’re in a tense state, and that means your muscles and tendons and your spinal cord and your spine, your soft tissues, your Phasha, everything, tightens up. And it tightens up because you’re binding up energy because it doesn’t feel safe and so you’re holding on to your vigilance, and when you finally connect, there’s an expression, all emotional expression involved – sounded motion. So you move, you take a breath into that area – you feel it, you let out a sound. And that sound, you want to match the feeling or quality or vibration that comes along into your awareness when you’re touching that area. And if you match it right on, what happens is it sends like a tuning fork kind of feedback to your brain, the part of your brain – the cortical area of your brain that can actually register and notice, and make up a meaning or an association with what that is and sometimes you have a memory of something that happened that you forgot about; it might just bring a sense of wholeness and a sense of “Wow, I’m actually in dialogue with this part of me now” instead of “I feel separate from this whole part of me and I’m trying to do something to it.” And amazing healing can happen because healing is a movement towards wholeness, and if you have a fragmented part of yourself which is energy-bound up separate from the flow of the whole system, it’s like ebbing to the current and it’s kind of settling, you see they’re moving very subtly or it’s moving rapidly or intensively but it’s compressed into an area of your body which we call ‘A standing wave’ – when you take a wave of energy that’s fluidly moving, you push it into a small area, it builds up intensity until it creates like a, it has nowhere to go, so it’s held or compressed in that area and contained, and then our brain thinks it’s separate, so it doesn’t register what that energy is even more. It just feels like a separate thing, a physical dense, hollow or some object, or something separate.
So, this like a way that we can start to move a simple practice of just put your hands on your body, breath in through your nose, out through your mouth, so grounding breath brings you more present, focus on that part of your body, notice “What do I feel, sense or experience here; is it nothing?” If it’s nothing, that’s something that’s a disconnection. If you feel like “I don’t feel anything here, I feel nothing” ok, just say it, state it “Right here, I feel nothing; right here I feel disconnected from my body; Right here I feel blank, fill in the blank” and it could just be “I feel so disconnected or separate from my body that I have no idea what I’m even feeling”. So, just say that, state it out loud “I have no idea what I feel, I feel..” and then just take a breath, and then you might notice something comes on to the radar because by acknowledging where you’re at, it opens up a window or in a doorway, something to come onto the radar, because you’ve acknowledged the truth.
But if you don’t connect to your body and you don’t actually ever take your focus and attention on like “What am I noticing here? What’s really happening here? Let me put my attention and focus here and breathe here and just see” then you may have just a story about it that is in a way divorced or separate from the actual feeling or sensation that’s there. And for a lot of people, they did learn to override and disconnect from feelings and sensations because – let’s say someone has sexual abuse; let’s say somebody had a traumatic accident or incident; or something happened physically or emotionally, whatever, that was very difficult to be with – we develop a strategy to not feel that by just tensing up, going into fight-or-flight, binding up that energy and then going into our head which is, make up a meaning, make up a story that helps us better navigate and get through it. And this is why a lot of people, when they’re under regression hypnotherapy or going through therapy process, they remember experiences or going and getting body-work; they might remember an experience of going through abuse or some situation that they had totally forgotten about because as a safety mechanism, the fight-or-flight or freeze mechanism overrides the higher brain awareness and checks you out.
So that seven-day challenge is a way that I take you very in-depth through each sessions between 10-12 minutes, and there’s 7 of them, and I take you through a process where you can learn to actually through the actual experience learn to reconnect to your body and start to initiate flow but then the basic premise of where I always started is connection, and that means connection to the body in the way I’m describing it.
Sahara:
I love that. It’s just having that first initial conversation with your body. I think so quickly we’re like “Oh, my neck hurts” but like, is it pulsing, is it throbbing, is it this, is it that? You don’t really go so far, you just feel it’s uncomfortable, so let me go get an adjustment, let me go get a massage, let me go put whatever on it and fix it, instead of.. You know, the same thing with food, if you actually ask your body “What are you hungry for; what do you want to eat?” It actually may surprise you.
So, I’m wondering if just that awareness of it is what heals it or after you’re aware? Let’s say my neck feels throbbing, then, do the different textures mean different things and how can you tell the difference of what is actually like physical, like it’s caused of me being on my phone too much, and what is like, emotional, related to a root chakra for example?
John:
Yeah, that’s actually a great question. So, you begin to know as you explore and as you discover more. So, at first it could be very vague. It’s something that hasn’t been developed for a lot of people, so, the difference between what’s a physical, mechanical thing; what is more of an emotional thing; are they totally tied together? How about the effect of chemicals on your body, someone goes out partying and they get a hangover, that’s a chemical stress, you feel a physical sickness, you feel a physical achiness in the body, if you put the different chemicals in your body and the foods you eat etc. So, it’s all usually kind of mixed together but there is generally a primary thing in each situation. So, let’s say, for example, someone was grabbed as a child, they were grabbed and shaken or something, grabbed by the throat (I’ve had people who were grabbed by the throat and they wonder later in life and now they’re in their 30s and when they were seven years old a caretaker or a parent or somebody grabbed by them by the throat and you just shut up and you hold it in and so they have a difficult time expressing their truth, feeling like they can be articulated because there’s been this holding. So there was a physical part of it, there was an intense emotional part of it and then they learned how to sort of at the same time, never go into confrontational situation; they learn how to sort of shrink down even if they wanted to express because there was a visceral encoded, embedded traumatic experience there that even though the cells and tissues that were there years ago, are all replaced every 2-7 years, everything is all new, the intensity in your limbic system and basically in your brain and body of high emotional charge events is retained until it’s finally integrated and discharged somehow through some kind of healing work, some kind of self-awareness body-healing therapy work.
So, things are held for often times for a long time and it can be hard to kind of tease out like what’s what, so you’re, you’re maybe wondering like, “I have tension in my jaw for example, or I have tension in my upper chest and like, you know, lung area” or someone has holding tension in their solar plexus or in their pelvis and they’re wondering is this because of some “I was in an auto accident; maybe it was the physical compression that happened when I was hit.” What I found is that (for a lot of people that I worked with over the years and still continue to) who were in auto accidents typically, you know, not typically, every time around the time of an accident, even if somebody broad-sighted somebody, rear-ended them, you know, even if you’re just minding your own business, just going along and somebody comes along and hits you – if you look at your life and what was going on in that moment, in the context around that accident, there were always other things happening where you either weren’t fully present because you were somewhere else; you might have peeled out of the driveway; taken off, you were just in a fight with a partner or something and there was a high emotional charge and if somebody just ran into you or you ran into someone else, and there’s all this entangled stuff going on around what seemed like just a physical thing, and people think “Well it’s the disc was herniated that ruptured, and it’s usually the C5 and 6 area in the lower neck area when auto accidents or flashes happen many times, especially rear end accidents, that just so happens to be that area around that throat and that fifth chakra, and it also happens to be tied into the energy around confrontation and conflict an inability to express anger or rage can bind up and hold up and people kind of compress in here. So a lot of, many, many times that I’m going through the history with someone or I’m going through a comprehensive journey back through their past experiences and I’ll look “Oh, you had an auto accident at 17 years old” and they kind of put that in their miles and then what happened? “Oh I was going 55mph and I walked out of it and didn’t have any injuries but the car was totaled, it wasn’t mild, first of all. And second of all, what was happening around the time I start asking some questions. “Oh well, my parents were going through a divorce and this happened and that happened; I was breaking up with this person” and all this stuff is like encoded around and then they feel like or I saw an MRI or an X-RAY 15 years later and there’s degeneration in that area and it must be physical now. Well what’s happened is there’s a physical component because there was injury but then the pattern stayed locked into the system for years and the whole posturing and breathing pattern, the expression pattern was all distorted. And then you start to see physical ramifications down the line in many cases. Sometimes it is super-intense physical when someone breaks a leg or they have a kind of injury but then what happened when you broke a bone? What was breaking apart in your life that you couldn’t process or feel or experience fully and you had to have a physical expression of it. So I’ve never ever experienced in working with tens of thousands of people, something isolated or existing in a vacuum they didn’t have a thread into some other aspect of your being in life relationships.
Sahara:
It reminds me of, you know, in the Vedas, they say that the different layers that the Universe is trying to warn you. So at first it’s like a tap and then it’s like a punch and then it can be a collision, but it’s that same thing that you may not have listened to until it manifested into something so huge and so physical that you had no choice but to listen.
John:
Totally and if you look back through at the Vedic texts and inscriptions, and if you look back through the teachings and the writings, you will see that the energetic bodies, which in those teachings are called the Koshas, are you know, five different layers of the energetic system that go from the you know, Annamaya Kosha, Manomaya Kosha, there’s all these different – they go all the way to Anandamaya which is bliss-body. So, you have basically this infinite interface with the infinite essence in the Hindu teachings is Atma or Atman – you have this divine connection but it’s like the physical, the body is in a way the outer-most shell and the outer-most shell which is the densest and it is where you interface with the physical plain in the 3-dimensional world and then you go into the more subtle bodies which are taking you more into the emotional and mental, and then you finally get to the higher spiritual body which is the Anandamaya.
There’s also like the mental body there which is like, there’s a higher part of the mental body which is the subtle like connected into your sense of who you are becoming – you can either be more focused more on the physical world, and physical reality and your identity, but the higher part of that, the deeper part of that, you start to actually see and experience more divine nature. So there’s this whole, and you’re nodding because I know you’re familiar with, so, you have this whole infrastructure of this subtle system – I see the seven layers, I call the ‘energy blueprint’ and it moves from your life force which is the interface of the physical, where the physical is the outer-most shell but then you have your life force body which is the process and experience off all this visceral communication, everything is under the radar of your conscious mind until you develop conscious awareness of it – and this is where a lot of stuff that I was just talking about lies. It’s like information encoded in the Phasha and the connective tissue matrix of your body. It’s organs and the surrounding tissues around all these different organ systems, deep into the core of your body. And then you have your emotional body, your mental body and you go into like your relational body which ties more into your heart and up through the chakra system as well. So, each one is related to a higher chakra, you get into this area that ties around into the higher mind then you go into soul and infinite consciousness. So, the fact that we are a multi-layered energetic being and we’re having this interface with the physical world and we’re experiencing these physical symptoms and feedback from the physical world, that’s where we can often times experience a lot of what’s happening on these more subtle levels, but they’re muted until we develop a more of a conscious awareness of the physical system and that helps us integrate what we’re experiencing on higher levels with this world we’re living in.
Some people definitively have a highly developed awareness of the subtle non-self-transcendent aspects but they’re totally checked out of their body. Some people, like I was saying at the very beginning of the conversation are totally checked into this like, Manomaya Kosha, these lower, like subtle bodies or the life force energy, or their emotional body (they’re very connected in there) but they’re totally checked out of the higher, deeper, more transcendent state. The idea, and this goes back to people like Sri Auribindo, who was the developer of intrical yoga (a brilliant philosopher and a very awakened consciousness being). You have people like that and they’re brought, really the transitioning from, he grew up in India, went to the UK, went from the UK back to India and brought Eastern and Western together. I definitely approach more like that, I want to know the Western; I want to know the scientific like, what’s happening on the physiological and physical basis and what is the science; I want to know the quantum and all the most recent physics; and I also want to know what are the practices, what are the ancient or spiritual practices that have been around for thousands, and thousands and thousands of years and how we bring those together.
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Sahara:
And I think that a lot of people struggle with finding the right practice because something like yoga – you’re not using weights, you’re not necessarily like using as much cardio, but then something like weight lifting, which is very like Manomaya Kosha doesn’t have any of the spiritual stuff. So, I feel like a lot of people struggle finding the right balance.
What do you recommend for that in terms of our daily exercise Mind-Body practice?
John:
I think that the most critical thing is connection, first. So, are you aware of what your body needs and wants, and are you connected to the rhythms and cycles, and are you in sync with your body? Do you really, truly need to rest and you want to push through because you have a concept that if I don’t do this, I’m not going to look a certain way and then I’m going to XYZ and go down the rabbit hole of total suffering because of self-worth and all these things. Or, is it like, does it feed my soul and being to energize myself in this way doing these practices? And this is where you have to explore. Certainly you can do a yoga practice, or you can just do the postures, you know, and do it for more of a physical stretch and for an experience of more physical balance and to feel more, just, at ease in your body. But that doesn’t mean you’re doing a holistic practice, it really is integrated, and so, you can lift weights and you can do it precisely to develop certain muscles to look a certain way, but you can be kind of disconnected from what your body really needs there and what practices would actually serve you the best.
So, what I found is that people are so different. Everyone’s got their own, they’ve really got their own unique blue print and you have to find what supports you. And I find that some weightlifting or using some kind of bands, or resistance training is really helpful for a lot of people. For most people, and in combination with some kind of like stretching, elongating motion. So, whether you’re doing some..I mean, I really like, I think Pilates is like a great, or Pilates-based motion is great for course strengthening; I think yoga, all different types of yoga are amazing; I find that some kind of explosive training where you’re jumping or you’re using some kind of expression and moves, like dance, is fantastic. I know that you know Julianne Huff who has been really, a long-time, now actually friend of mine and we worked together to help, and I kind of guided and helped in the process of where she created her cinergy work so we could integrate breath and moving patterns to create certain shifts in consciousness as you’re going through, so movement and explosive expression sounds really important, so, those are all important things to do with your physical body but the question is are you tactically doing it or just, like, trying, you know, doing different things like superficially that’s going to make your body toned in a certain way; or inwardsly go deeper? Are you doing this for a more integrated whole feeling in your body and what grounds you? Are you pushing too hard or are you not stretching quite enough to hit that place that really pulls you beyond a certain level of inertia? What do you need? It depends, and you have to discover that and no one can really tell you the right way. You have to find who are the teachers you resonate with; what feels right to you and good in your body? Some people need Ashanga Yoga; some people need Hot Yoga; some people, they need Yin Yoga; they need to do very, very subtle, very gentle approaches. It might be a combination. Again, there’s no like, formula that works for every one person, you have to find your own blue print really. That’s something that I’ll be offering and bringing in later this year, it’s a whole exploration around it, your energetic blue print and where you find your practices that work best for you, are going to be built around where your resources are and where your challenges lie. And everyone is different, so, once you have a better sense of that, it’s easier to know exactly what you need and what you don’t.
Sahara:
And I think so many of us have heard like “Push yourself, surpass your limits, you can do it” so we think to really be exercising is to. And in some ways, let’s say, you’re like, I don’t know, training for a triathlon or something like that that will cause you, you have to force yourself. But I also see that there’s this huge movement of like low impact shorter workouts because so many, specifically women, have hormonal imbalances.
So, what do you see happening with that of women’s hormones and how that shifts our movement?
John:
I mean, I think, I love your questions. I think that, like, I’m friends with a woman Lauren Roxberg, or LoRox as she’s known. So she guides people with a lot of foam rolling, a lot of phasha work and also rebound – rebounding. I’m a big fan of rebounding. I think, you’re moving your body and it’s low impact and you’re getting your heart rate up, and it has so many benefits because it’s activating the movement of chi in your body. I’m also a fan of qigong, I have a background in martial arts and for years (before I even discovered chiropractic or healing or got into any of this) I was doing qigong on a regular basis, so.
You know, when it comes to women’s hormones – I mean there’s so many factors here. There’s so many, there’s the environment; and diet; there’s chemicals in the foods that we’re eating; and then there are the stresses, more than anything it’s the stress that people are under. So, when you are stressed out, your cortisol goes up, you know, usually when you’re not sleeping well your melatonin levels are affected because the relationship between melatonin and cortisol’s is an inverse relationship, and so. Melatonin at night goes up and it’s tied into tissue repair and dealing with anti-oxidants in your body, and oxidation levels and so. And if cortisol doesn’t drop down and melatonin doesn’t go up it’s difficult for your body to repair and recover, so that’s one thing. A lot of people are familiar with Joe Dispensas work, he does a lot of meditations and processes what a pineal gland, like great work, heals and talks a lot about the pineal melatonin relationship. You have these master glands, you have the pituitary and thyroid, and you have high cortisol for prolonged periods; fight-or-flight for prolonged periods messes with your hormonal system and you can’t stay in a vigilant fight-or-flight state for a long periods and have your hormonal system work properly, it affects, you know, higher cortisol levels: it affect how you burn fat, I mean, there are so many factors here, so.
You know, every individual, every woman is different but I will tell you from my experience that when you reduce the stress in your system and you start to truly discharge that fight-or-flight state through connection and processes that help you release and relax, some of those are in the seven-day challenge. Again, when I work with people in either events or in like private work, that’s a truly high level where I can accelerate that massively, so that we can shift that. It’s like taking the body and taking it into a state that if you would go on a vacation and in about 5-6 days in and you realize “oh my God, I was so stressed, I didn’t realize how much I was holding” and finally you’re like “I’m relaxing” we can create that in like, you know, 20 minutes and just completely reset that whole fight-or-flight system in the body. And suddenly there’s this big release and the whole hormonal system shifts and changes. And I’m not saying that that’s the cure for hormones, it’s just that we know that one of the biggest factors in every single condition that you might be experiencing is the level of stress and it’s not necessarily just your stress because of what’s going on in your life. We started out talking about the cultural environment and the collective field that we’re in this super-high frequency especially if you’re watching news and tuning into these frequencies of high polarity and high charge, your nervous system calibrates to it and so, it’s going to affect your hormonal levels and it’s going to affect your adrenaline cortisol response, it’s going to affect your body’s tissue regeneration, it’s going to affect your ability to sleep, it’s going to affect your immune system. So we have to start, I think, there – and what are all the practices that we can do to decrease the amount of time we spend in a state of overwhelmed fight-or-flight when we might be overwhelmed because everything that is going on. We go like “Oh yeah, great John, it’ll be nice if I could just shut it all off, but it’s not stopping right. I have my kids, I have my this, I have my that, I’m out of work right now, I have all these things going on. How do you just shut that off when it’s really happening?” And my challenge to you would be – it’s really happening and it isn’t, it’s a paradox because in this exact moment is your life in danger? Is there an animal ready to like jump and attack you? Or, are you sitting in your house on your couch, or in your bedroom, or on a yoga mat, or wherever you are, and in this exact moment nothing is actually attacking you. Everything that you’re experiencing, all the uncertainty; all the numbers and the checking accounts which are just numbers in the checking accounts, there’s no physical anything there. Is that going to have the power over you to put you into a massive stress and keep you in amounts of stress mode or can you develop through awareness, through compassion and kindness, through breathing, through meditation and through working with your body in a productive way. Can you start to unhook the anchors and the triggers to this world out there that’s a looser rate, it feels like it’s really happening but the majority of it is not even real and you start to actually cultivate a sense of peace, and a sense of groundedness, and a sense of centeredness in the midst of all of it and be a sort of the eye of the storm or eye of the hurricane, because that’s the only way, no matter what you do in the outer world, you can do all the right stuff, but if you are feeling inside like “I’m not safe, I’m not ok, I don’t care if I’m doing every exercise and taking every supplement and seen every practitioner or working with every hormonal balancing program – if you are in that state, nothing is going to truly, truly move the needle all that much. It’s all going to be coping, not true healing, and so, that, you have to do yourself and you have to make the changes you have to make in your life and in your body that nobody can do for you.
Sahara:
Yes, this world is Maya, it’s all the illusion and as soon as we realize this, we’re not so fixated into what is actually happening but we can zoom out, and I think a lot of people, especially at this time, feel a lot of guilt around doing that, fell like “Oh well, everything’s crumbling so I have to like know all of the pieces of it.” I found myself doing that especially this past month and I’m like “You can’t solve a problem by being so in it, because then you just become part of it; you’re just tumbling along in it, you have to zoom out.” And I know a lot of people are having like, online confrontations, right? Like, maybe it’s on Facebook or with a bunch of strangers in an Instagram comment and it can feel like that attack is very real, it can almost feel like you’re in a fist fight with someone even though you’re basically writing words, an invented language to a person that you’ll probably never meet. So how do you like, do you have any tips or tools like when you’re in that like vigilant confrontational state to just like kind of zoom out and ground into your body again?
John:
Yes. When that’s happening, what we’re experiencing is, we’re experiencing the subtle world of consciousness. There’s no distance or time in consciousness, and most of what we are is consciousness, and there’s a little bit of the physical body right in this 3-dimension (but we exist in multiple dimensions 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and more dimensions). So, when we’re experiencing that, we’re feeling that (whoever that person is, or that group of people) we’re actually tuning into them as if, we’re all in this soup together so it’s very much, we’re feeling it through our being and then we experience it in our body. The only way we experience it in our body is the fight-or-flight trigger is if there’s a part of us that actually gets hooked, right? There’s some, it’s like we have the one part of the velcro and the other part is you know; or we have one tuning fork that that resonant energy pings and there’s the part of us inside is going (sound) because for some reason, either, we’re like “I am so not that, I do not have that cruel, evil, whatever part of me; I am a conscious, kind human being; how could someone be like, whatever, a troll, a hater like this?” And so the little part of us that actually can be (sound) gets triggered, because we have that; that’s the yin yang symbol right there. There’s the yin yang symbol has a little black dot in the white and a little white dot in the black – there’s always a little bit, even if it’s one atom of everything in us, because we’re a microcosm (the whole Universe), so, when we get triggered it’s really because that energy is somehow, we’re not ok with it, so we’re like, in defense now, we’re polarizing and we’re fighting back. Now, is there a time to take a stand and a time to draw the line and say no or yes – absolutely! So we can use that charge sometimes to direct us in a positive way but we can also get hooked. And I think what you’re describing is when it becomes so real, your whole physiology is viscerally hooked in and you’re (sound) and you’re processing it and you’re in your mind and you’re chewing on it and you’re like “How should I respond to this?” And that whole thing and it’s now consuming you. And now, how do you unhook yourself from this experience and how do you kind of pull out of it?
Well, one is to use the same strategy I was talking about earlier – it’s like actually touching your body and feeling where you’re hooked; where are you triggered; what actual location is it – is it your heart chest solar plexus area; is it your gut; in your pelvis; is it in your throat; it is in your head? Put your hands there, breathe, make this sound (sound), allow yourself to fully express the sound of that charge. What happens is, people are like “Ok, I’m above all this” meanwhile you’re getting hooked into it, so you’re in here like this biting but part of you is lke “I’m greater than all of this, I’m better than this, and let’s kind of pretend that I’m looking at it from a greater than, you know, I’m bigger than this, I’m mature, I’m more involved in this” and so now you’re in this internal battle because a part of you wants to (sound) and just like go at it, and the other part of you wants to help this person see, and elevate and expand and see the world from a more expanded place and the judgment is there of the projection of “How can someone be so unconscious?” So, all of this can be going on and meanwhile, you’re no more evolved in that moment than that other person in a lot of ways because you’re just as hooked, you’re triggered in this like, mudsling back and forth. So, make the sound, express it – the sound and the feeling and the quality, you don’t want to make it because you don’t want to let it come out of you, like, the rage, the charge, the intensity, the growl, the moan, the wail, and let yourself dissipate some of that energy because being with what is and expressing what is always is the path to wholeness. It’s always the path to more consciousness, so, playing pretend, like “I am not, I’m somehow better than these people on it and I have to, or I have to elevate myself and I have to not get drawn into this and I have to be above this” can actually be your own ego screwing with you where it doesn’t allow you to really express. I’m not saying go and discharge on the people; I’m saying go into your bedroom, shut the door, find that place, wail and moan and cry for a moment, feel the unjust experience of what’s going on and how sad you are, and how angry you are; like, kick and scream, and move around, let it out of your body. It’s like it having a tantrum, you know, sometimes it just has to move through and then they can get to the other side. So, we may have to do that. And then the other side of it is, yeah, you may just also need to just do that first for a moment and then reset yourself – now you go within, now you can meditate and expand; or you can feel your heart – then you can breathe into your heart; and you can send the true gratitude, not fake gratitude, where you’re just like “Let me just send my heart out to the world” meanwhile, you’re strangle someone. That doesn’t really, what people are going to get and what they are going to feel from you, is they’re going to feel congruence in your being, and so you have to deal with your..
Sahara:
It’s like bless your light I feel you.
John:
A hundred percent, and getting coachy with someone is like “Let me coach you on how I think; it’s like shut up.” Like, we’ve got to be right now with all of ourselves, I think this is a great, that’s one of the things that’s happening right now – there’s that authenticity and a true, like, of a ripping off the façade and we went to a big period of social media kind of glossiness that happened as Instagram and some of the social media, and Facebook and stuff, started building since last decade or so and it got to a period of height of just show this beautiful life and beautiful experience, people are getting depressed and there was all this research on this right, of people that spend more time on Facebook are more depressed and comparing their life to everyone else, and everyone is just like over that, so, there’s just been this big reorganization in society – it’s happening right now and it’s happening on social media. We just have to get real, we have to be with the real experience that we’re having to own it and learn more about it, and learn more about where our charges are and what our triggers are; we have to learn more about where our biases are and really start unhooking. But to do it, you have to visit, you have to visit these places and I think we have to start there. And then we can elevate and expand, but just to transcend and not actually go into the kind of muck and the gunk can lead to a lack of integration where you like a part of this really expand and you really elevate, you really feel open and you feel like a high conscious being, and then you have these parts that are just pushed down and shoved away and that’s what people get the physical symptoms, they get the bodies like “Yeah, we’re not fully integrated here, we’re going to have a little conversation here and it’s going to be in the form of intense pain or intense anxiety, or whatever it is.” And so, it’s going to be calling you to get real, to get in sync with what’s really going on with you and that, this is a process; no amount of exercise, no amount of yoga, no amount of controlling your diet, no amount of “doing the right things” and cutting down all the bad things is going to get you to be more authentic and more real with yourself. That is a practice of self-awareness starting to truly make a commitment to deepening your awareness of yourself and then starting to transcend that self, and that’s a spiritual journey.
Sahara:
Yes, and so many people are talking now, especially about 2020 being that shift from 3D to 5D consciousness and our bodies becoming lighter and less and less of the density somatically. So, what do you see happening to us and what shifts are you seeing in our bodies as we are elevating into these new paradigm beings?
John:
These are great questions Sahara, these are really good questions. I see that people are, they’re accelerated in how they’re moving. When I’m working with them personally, you know, on the table with people or in my workshops, events, even in the courses (I have some online offerings that are tied to the backend of the seven-day challenge – so an opportunity for people to do this discovering in the fundamentals of the energy program or Higher Heart and Brain activation, I have a couple of different little brief online courses) and the feedback I’ve been getting has been amazing, people are getting it. I feel like we’ve come to a point where we see the climate situation, we see what’s happening in our culture, in different cultures around the world, there’s a, the consumerism has gotten out of control, like, people are seeing, especially in the Megenzi and some of the millennial generations are recognizing that, like, this isn’t sustainable, this is not the kind of life we want to live; we’re not just trying to deplete the resources of the world around us and destroy the habitat that we need to grow in and that our kids need to grow up in, and so, that is already there and so, what I see is people are getting it, especially the younger generations but also the people that are a bit older too that are just like more conscious and they’re saying “Look, you know, we made some mistakes and we want to do what we can to contribute to making this world a better place for everyone and so. That movement from like a 3D and 4D world into a 5D, which for, when we get into dimensions – 3D is everything we can see around us and our kind of like physical world; when you go into the 4th dimension it’s really how we move about in time and the illusion of linear time really completely drops out when you get to the 5th-dimensional consciousness which is, you’re really like sort of simultaneously in different times all at once, although time is gone, you’re beyond time, so, it’s called super-position is physics, but we’re starting to connect into that that “Wait a minute, everything is not really just happening in this moment; we’re not just linearly moving from one point to the next in time. Like, there’s a possibility to have massive instantaneous change right now and I feel like that is happening, people are getting that and people feel like “Hey wait, we can make a difference, we can actually make a shift right now that could very well change the course of the direction of where humanity is going” and I feel like it’s a critical time and it’s a necessary time for this kind of thinking and for people to take action based on that awareness and we can’t shift into that awareness if we’re in fight-or-flight and if we’re just dealing with survival stuff that’s right in front of us. So, how do we, in the midst of a time when everything’s going on and it feels so intense and we need a fight-or-flight action, at times how do we make sure we don’t stay in that so that we can access higher consciousness, you know? And so, this is the sort of dilemma and the challenge that everyone is going through right now.
So, when someone used to come into my office, like over 20 years ago, and I’d start working with them, we were in a different place. In just over two and a half decades that I’ve been working with people – we used to do a linear progression in most cases where it was like “Okay, you’re starting here, you have these things going on, this is what happened in the past, this is where we’re going in the future” and I’d set out a whole timeline for them, we’re going to do like 2 weeks then 3 weeks, you know, I had a whole protocol. Now, I might interact with someone in this exact moment, we’re just going to address past, present and future all at once and a huge transformation that is completely life and course changing. It could happen instantaneously right now that would not even have happened in like six months or year of working with them in the past because it’s possible now, the field has primed that the whole energy and consciousness field of the planet and of the universe, we’re in a different place, and it’s accessible now, so, what’s possible now is pretty incredible, like, instantaneous change.
Sahara:
And so many timelines that we’re on, like, even just this situation of Coronavirus has so many timelines of how things can go down, right, according to collective consciousness, but then also each individual being on their own unique experience, you know. Like, for some people – they’re thriving, and for some people they’re having the worst time ever, and it’s the exact same situation but different paradigms that we’re all living with,
And one question that I would love to hear your perspective on is, you know, I’ve done a lot of reading that says that your physical body is the manifestation of your soul, so you look like and embody your soul. Do you believe in that?
John:
You know, I believe that the soul can manifest in many different times and different ways or you know, totally different look, totally different person. The soul isn’t timeless, but in most of the spiritual traditions, and especially when you look into the Buddhist and the Hindu, and most of the Eastern traditions that the soul was considered part of the, if you look at, we were talking earlier about the Koshas – the different sort of shells or the sheaths. It was considered that Koshas were sheaths that would kind of dim the light of the pure essence and each one was a little denser and less connected to the pure essence of pure consciousness. But the lower bodies, or like the physical and the emotional and the mental bodies that were considered to fall away and then the soul and the connection to the infinite stays and then reincarnates. That is one belief for many religions and many different perspectives around the world, like, the soul comes back in different ways and tells the total realization and you don’t have to keep coming back anymore.
Sahara:
Hopefully that’s like fine.
John:
Coming back and the sense scar and the wheel of Karma and the suffering and everything that people would experience over and over. So, it’s like, you can liberate yourself or free yourself from that sort of torturous wheel of suffering. So, in my experience, the soul is like that pure essence, that pure knowing part of you, and when we recognize it in others we know we’re like “I know you, I’ve encountered you somewhere somehow, in another place, time, I don’t know but I look into your eyes and I see that I know you somehow.” It goes beyond any kind of understanding and usually it’s very disruptive when you have these connections with someone in your life, to the life you’re living because, especially if it becomes an intimate relationship because you’re like “I’m going along, doing my thing and ahh this is very inconvenient and that suddenly you have this connection that makes no sense but somehow it’s a soul connection.” And there are certain souls that touch us and move us in different ways, and whether we encounter those souls in other lifetimes and we’re meeting them again or however that works, there’s some part of us that knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s not something that we have to figure out and not something we could ever figure out, but that is that essence that we just know that we know. I feel like that is the part of us that is timeless and that is infinite and will always be a resource and be accessible to us because in a way we’re peeling away all the illusions of this time and space of this 3-dimensional world and we’re remembering more and more that we are that, that we’ve always been that. Like, you asked at the beginning like, you know, what helps me be my higher self, and nothing here in this physical world could actually help me be what I already am. It’s like what helps me strip away the illusion that keeps me from remembering and knowing even more of who I am and what I know. And I feel that that’s the spiritual journey, that’s the path we’re all on in some way, shape or form whether we know it or not.
Sahara:
Absolutely. Well thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom with us. Where can listeners connect with you further and participate in your seven-day challenge?
John:
It’s been a real pleasure, actually. I love your line of questioning; it’s been really rewarding to have this conversation with you.
So, you can find me at johnamaral.com; you can find me on Instagram at @drjohnamaral and you both my Instagram, there’s a link tree on there and also on johnamaral.com there’s a very prominent seven-day challenge free. You can sign up for that, you can have immediate access to the whole challenge so you can go through it at your own pace and you can learn a lot about what I kind of have to teach in that free course and I have some more online courses there and then later this year, as we go further into 2020/21 I’ll be offering more, so, people can stay tuned because I’ll be going into a whole architecture, an all ecosystem of how you utilize what I call energy blueprint and how you work with each of these different energy bodies and all the different practices that you can do and choose from, and you can try on different things. You’ll be able to take a quiz and find out what your typology is and see which things are best for you, see which things are more challenging for you and then how you can focus and navigate it. So, we’ve been working pretty hard on that and we’ll have more on that coming up.
Sahara:
That sounds so fascinating. We love a quiz here, you know, so we’re excited.
John:
It’s so interesting, I want to know about me, where do I fit, so I’ll have a great quiz that will really make you actually have to dig deep and think about “Hmm, is this true for me?”
Sahara:
Amazing, and thank you so much again. We look forward to diving into all of that.
John:
Sahara, thank you so much.
Sahara:
How incredible was that conversation with Dr. John Amaral, I could definitely speak to him for hours on all things – Mind, Body, Spirit, Integrative Health and being the Conscious Beings that we are, so thank you so much to him for being here. Be sure to check out The Goop Lab Show and check out his episode that’s really good.
And remember to take care of your vessels, take care of your bodies. We are in the Great Void; we are in the Space between two eras, two civilizations right now and it’s a lot to hold. So keep anchoring into your body; keep practicing self-care.
In this month’s Isis circle in Rose Gold Goddesses I guide you through the personal breath-work practice that I do every single day that has shifted my life so much; has helped me transmute so much and just get me to such a high place, a high frequency that I’ve truly never been in before. And I’ll guide you through that practice; journal prompts; meditations; everything. Plus, we have access to all 10 other Goddess circles that we have done; my Healing and Embodiment Through Dance Workshop; my Awaken You Powers master class with Shaman Durek; Discover Your Dharma 10-day course; dozens of workshops; expert guests; all of the things; and a community of two thousand spiritual plus sisters waiting to connect with you. All available for you when you join us in Rose Gold Goddesses – it is rosegoldgoddesses.com the link is in the show notes and I’m soul excited to meet you inside.
If you loved this episode, I would love to send you a free gift which is the first half of my unreleased book “Eat Right for Your Mind Body Type“. This is a different book than “EatFeelFresh“. My first book ever which is not released anywhere, and I am gifting it exclusively to those who leave a review of my podcast in the iTunes store. So all you gotta do is head over to iTunes where you’re maybe listening to this podcast and leave a review, take a screenshot that you’ve left it and email it over to me at [email protected] and I will send you back the first half of my unreleased book “Eat Right for Your Mind Body Type“, which goes all into Ayurveda, Doshas, plant-based nutrition, body types – all of the things in a really fun and engaging way. So this is my gift to you for free for supporting the podcast. Every single review I personally read. It really helps the podcast be listened to by more people so we can raise the vibration of the planet together, and I am soul grateful to have you on this journey.
Thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you on the next episode. Namaste.
Episode 300: Mind-Body Healing with Goop Lab’s Dr. John Amaral
By Sahara Rose