Recently, I read a post on Facebook from a healer who was speaking of clients being brought to tears through her work. I have seen a desire among certain healers to be validated through the emotional releases of their clients. In my early days, I myself took is as some kind of achievement if my client had a huge, dramatic release on my table. 
 
But as time went by, I started to question this for several reasons. One was the whole concept of ‘re-traumatization’ that I first read about in Peter Levine’s book Waking the Tiger.  There is quite a bit of evidence that some emotional recapitulations of trauma actually reinforce what I call the ‘scar wiring’ of PTSD. I’ve learned that sometimes an emotional release can happen within a context that results in the client being worse off than they were. I’ve also learned that sometimes these releases take place in a context that catalyzes a positive quantum jump in their healing journey. And I’ve learned that sometimes the release represents a temporary catharsis that, while appearing profound, actually seems to engender no lasting change; it is ephemeral and wanes over time.
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The point is, there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about having a huge emotional reaction. As in so many things, it is the context that matters. I've had clients who themselves have measured a session's efficacy by how dramatic the ‘ride’ is. It’s almost as if the healing work we’re doing has an element of entertainment. I do not keep these clients - they either leave of their own accord, or in one or two cases where it was clear to me that we were treading water, I’ve asked to stop working with them. 

A lot of deep healing takes place with no tears. I remember hours of standing Taoist ‘Clearing Down’ meditation, wherein I felt waves of regret, loss, rage, grief, terror, anxiety, arrogance, and self-righteousness pass through me. it was (and still is) remarkable to me that merely standing in a specific posture and working on a specific set of sensation/release instructions could let such long-held, heretofore repressed emotions rise to the surface, unleashed with often astounding ferocity. But I didn’t cry, or yell, or gesticulate, I practiced releasing the emotions as they arose, letting them go. And that is harder than one might expect, because I didn’t want to let them go. There was a real, palpable fear to letting them go. 

Why, I asked my teacher, would I want to hold onto these things? Trauma is one of the ways we know ourselves to be who we are, he replied. The body collects and collates its emotional and physical scars as a survival mechanism: you learn from what harms but does not kill you, so it’s understandable that you don’t want to forget it. But as Levine and others have pointed out, we humans, with our time sense, our ability to stray from ‘being present’, derived from our well-developed pre-frontal cortex, can’t seem to discharge the emotional content of the lesson the way animals seem to (though, of course, we know that repeatedly abused animals also display PTSD behaviors, so even they can be ‘scar wired’ as I call it). We can’t let go of the emotions because our systems mistakenly link them to the experience as a unitary, indivisable whole. Therefore, we’re afraid of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In my teacher’s Taoist framework, every trauma is bound up into a knot of Qi (life force energy, pronounced “Chi”, also called Prana). This knot of Qi weakens the system and disrupts energy flow. By releasing the emotions woven into the trauma, we actually untie the knot and liberate this bound up Qi to be utilizable by our organism for health and vitality.
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This is where various modalities, from the Clearing Down meditation to EMDR come in - through them, we can retain the experience and the memory, but let go of much of the limbic charge - we can alter that wiring and at the same time, liberate that bound-together Qi. And these processes can be very undramatic at times, yet quite efficacious.

But I would be the first to admit that I have also seen a long-term healing effect, one that transcends temporary catharsis, in some sessions where there was yelling, crying  and screaming so loud that I was very, very glad that I give sessions on my own property now, and no longer in an office building. Here is one of them:

I had a client, whom I’ll call Mary. She’s in her 50’s, and has suffered several severely abusive relationships. She’s also experienced a lot of ‘idiopathic’ (doctor-speak for ‘We have no idea.’) respiratory problems, which have included collapsed lungs. her breathing has been an important concern to her for her entire life. When I first met her, my Guidance told me that she had been sexually abused at a young age. I didn’t mention what I saw to her because in general, I don’t like to ‘lead’ my clients, or, God(dess) forbid, ‘implant’ memories into them through suggestion. So, I kept it to myself. We worked together for quite a few months, and then one day, while I was primarily doing an AuraLuminance session with her, I found a gnarled, nasty ’tree’ of energy growing out of the side of her aura, just below and to the left of her heart, right out of her ribcage. It’s hard to describe how I ‘saw’ or ‘knew’ or ‘felt’ this, because there are some elements of all three of those verbs in what I was perceiving, but they are neither accurate nor adequate.

At any rate, I proceeded to ‘pull out’ this ’tree’ from her. It took all of my physical strength, working in her aura, and as I pulled it away, I could feel the energetic ‘roots’ sliding out of her body. Finally, at the precise second that the last ‘root’ popped out of her and I pulled this gnarled, energetically crooked, bound thing away, she started screaming at the top of her lungs. Screaming, swaying, weeping, sobbing, gasping for breath, and then screaming some more. I let this go on for while, and then the pattern started ramping up - I could see that a sort of feedback loop was instantiating. The release of a long-suppressed trauma was cycling back into the trauma experience and back out again in a closed loop. I went to her feet and grounded her, pulled the energy out, through her feet, through me, and into Mother Earth (she recycles everything!). Gradually, Mary calmed, and the physical manifestations of her trauma response, from rigidity to gasping, eased, and she was left limp on the table. 

But what had been accomplished? Mary told me that in the very second I’d pulled that tree out, the very second she’d screamed, she’d gotten back memories of being held down and sexually assaulted as a toddler by a family employee. We had never spoken a word of this, or even of the chance of childhood sexual abuse. Rather, this ‘knot’ of Qi, once liberated, unbound the memory tied up inside it, and it could now be consciously ascertained, and, with some more work, processed. 

The most interesting aspect of this case came a day or two later, when we spoke by phone. I asked how she was doing, and she remarked that she was breathing better than she had in years. Quite unexpectedly, it was my turn to cry, as my guidance told me that her life-long lung problems had stemmed from the stifled screams of a terrified toddler that had been waiting for decades to find a way out into the Light to be healed. 

I think it’s fair to say that this experience has changed Mary, and for the better. She continues to become more resilient, more trusting of herself, more connected to Spirit.

Other times, clients and I have quite successfully revealed and released traumas without any tears. But either way, we’ve often created a new relationship of the client to self that is replete with genuine empathy and acceptance. 

In a way, a ‘need’ for a kind of drama that some clients (and some practitioners) have is akin to the ‘need’ some have for deep tissue work; they truly feel that only the most painful therapies can yield release and transformation. I know: I used to be one of those people. I was numb from my spinal cord damage, and I fervently believed that I had to feel pain to release pain. This belief probably owes a lot to our “No Pain, No Gain” Calvinist roots. Although there are myriad examples in nature of gain without pain, we humans seem to believe that there’s a zero-sum game being played out there, and within, and that you always must suffer to succeed. 

This is why Ortho-Bionomy is often such a counter-intuitive revelation to people, as it most often painless, almost never, ever truly painful, and yet it can engender such radical and deep change. After having experienced the typical physical therapy Psoas muscle release on many occasions, which is quite exquisitely painful, the totally painless but equally effective Psoas releases achieved through Ortho-Bionomy were hard to for me to accept. Some part of me wanted the pain because it believed that it was necessary. What a relief that I’ve gotten over that! 

This process also applies to Ortho-Bionomy self-care. But more to the point, I am speaking to the fundamentals of what it means to be human: as I age, my “push through it all no matter what the pain” philosophy has been tempered by the realization that I must be more gentle with myself at times. I must be aware of my limitations, and, yes, push the envelope at times, but at other times I must discern when it’s time to step back and nurture myself with gentle care. A lot of my practice involves working with clients to engender this same love of self, empathy for self, which, it appears, is one of those things we find hardest to accomplish. We look to others for love, and we often find it much easier to nurture and comfort others, rather than ourselves (except for ‘negative comforts’ - self-numbing strategies from sex to food to drugs, which masquerade as nurturance but are really its opposite). 

So, whether you or your practitioner, or you or your client cry and have a huge dramatic release or not is not the question. The question is, always is: at this moment, what techniques, modalities, insights, energetic, physical and spiritual adjustments, and releases and behavioral alterations, can we use to engender evolution towards being more loving, more lovable, more sanguine, more contented, more creative, more generous, more moral and ethical, more magnanimous, more unreflexive and non-defensive human beings? 

This process never ends, for you, for me - for that is what it means to be human, in the best sense of the word.





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Here's an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, Walking Through Snow, about my journey back from Quadriplegia, Brain Damage, and PTSD. The moral of the story? Never give up! 

P.S. There's a FREE download of a song about this experience at the bottom of this entry!

So there I was, in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit, awake at 3AM. Just another long scary night like all of the 
others; the monitors screaming, signaling my imminent death every time I did manage to 
duck the feeling of electrocution long enough to drift off into a morphine sleep of shallow 
breaths and dreams of running, threading needles gleefully, of feats of athleticism and 
coordination. Another psychotic fear-filled night full of alarms, and murmurs from 
Robert, the comatose ex-cop somewhere near my head. Another night of seizures, alarms, 
and close-calls for Adnan in the bed somewhere near my feet.   

This night, the pain was really bad, and Cleve and the other staff had been just too busy 
to get to me. Not that there was that much they could do, but at least they could turn me 
over and stretch me, and change my smelly diaper. And then of course, there was 
Morphine, which couldn’t kill the pain, but could sort of distract me from it into those 
exultant denial dreams of playing sports and guitar.  
 
My arms were stiff blocks of burning wood. I was repeatedly convulsing in a feedback 
loop of vicious clonus(1) spasms. I was sweating from the convulsions, exhausted, and 
feverish too. I felt that my whole body below my neck was a mass of smoking, burning,                                                
crackling, arcing wires, all plugged right into my brain’s pain center. The new pain in my 
foot was starting to compete malignantly for my attention, another unbearable burden to 
bear. If I’d been sane, I’d have marveled at the body’s sheer unexcelled power to produce 
pain. But I was buried within it, not intellectualizing about it. The exhausted staff seemed 
nowhere to be found. There were no crises, no emergencies now, and it was almost dead 
quiet, just the subdued howl of my monitor whenever I breathed too shallowly. Just the 
chirps and beeps of the alarms of the others around me, as they also danced their own 
little pas de deux with death, advancing, then retreating from his arms.  

I guess because no one was around, I finally gave myself permission to cry hard. I mean 
really, really hard and loud. I felt like one of those soldiers who has been tortured to the 
point that he’s completely broken, that he’ll do anything, say anything to stop the pain. 
Up to then I’d largely been joking, superficially confident and almost ‘inspirational’ to 
my friends – telling them that this accident meant something, and that if it didn’t, I’d 
make it mean something. And I’d been somewhat stoic when alone, always hoping for 
things to ‘ease off’. When I did cry, it was quietly, discretely, kind of a controlled little 
letting off of steam. But now, my defenses were down, the pain had cut through all hope 
and the abandoned ward gave me some license. I started weeping powerfully and praying for death.
I found I couldn’t stop. A howling wail arose from somewhere and it took me awhile to register 
that the sound was coming from within me. It seemed that my whole body was weeping, 
that the clonus was my body’s way of weeping.   

I don’t know how long it lasted, but suddenly heard a quiet voice near me. I opened my 
eyes and saw a very old-looking, gray-haired doctor in a spotless white jacket, leaning 
over my bed. “Why are you crying?”, he said. I remember thinking “oh boy, here’s Mr. 
Macho, reproving me for crying”. It reminded me of a time in a park when I was a little 
boy and skinned my knee. I was crying, inconsolable, when an old man came over to me 
and said “big boys don’t cry” to me, contempt written all over his face. I’d never 
forgotten it, and perhaps that’s why it’d taken so long to finally let totally go and cry like 
a baby. I felt my gorge rise in righteous indignation and defensiveness. “because I can’t 
stand the pain, because it doesn’t stop, only gets worse!”, I spat back petulantly. “No one 
else is crying here”, he said quietly, in a soft, measured voice. “Do you know why that 
is?” Again, I thought he was going to disparage me like that old man in the park for 
somehow lacking courage. “No!” I shouted “Why?” “Because their wires are all broken. 
They will never walk again. Some of them will never use their arms again. Some will 
never breathe without help again. Take that woman over there:” (He pointed off into the 
darkened unit at someone I couldn’t see) “She’s 22, fell of a barstool drunk, broke her 
neck. She’ll never move anything below her neck again and will probably be on a 
ventilator for the rest of her life. If she’s lucky, she’ll get to the point that she can blow 
into a tube to move her wheelchair around. She keeps saying it’s not true, keeps praying 
to God for a miracle, but there will be no miracle, no escape for her. You’re the only 
person crying from pain in this ward.”

“You’re the only one who feels anything at all. And you’re the only person who will ever 
have a chance of walking, of using his limbs like a normal person again. Your pain shows 
that your wires, even if they’re crushed, still carry some signals. Those signals are chaos 
right now – that’s what the pain is – chaos – under-sensitivity, over-sensitivity – 
everything out of proportion, some sensations numbed to the point of disappearance, 
others amplified to the point of distortion. But you can push yourself through those wires 
and reestablish contact and recalibrate the sensitivity. Go into your pain. Use it. Your 
pain is your way back to the land of the living”, he said. And with that he left.   

To this day he has some of the qualities of a hallucination, and I’m not sure he wasn’t; 
what the hell was an elderly doctor doing in the NICU at 3AM anyway? But I somehow 
do not think he could be a construct of my mind, because his description of my situation, 
though absolutely correct, was totally antithetical to any opinions I myself had about my 
predicament; I don’t think I could have dreamed up his line of reasoning because it was 
utterly counterintuitive to my own at the time.
  
So he was either real, or perhaps he was a visitation from an angel, or God. I’ll never 
know. I only know that he gave me courage, and he did it in the only way that could have 
worked: he challenged me while acknowledging my pain, validated my suffering and yet 
imbued the experience with a positive healing connotation. In a complete reversal of my 
own mind’s sense of natural order, he managed to bathe the darkest coldest most 
implacable pain I’d ever suffered with an almost divine power to heal. He also washed 
away a large part of my self-pity, my petulance, and my rage at my predicament with his 
empathy, understanding and inspiration. 

I am struck, constantly, at how many people in the 'lightworker' community have grandiose titles *('Keeper of the Tablets of...', 'Divine Seer', 'Avatar', 'Celestial Shaman' etc.). This is often accompanied with some vaguely Indian-sounding name, ('Amajhzi' etc.).

I don't get it, frankly. I have a real streak of arrogance, in fact, some would say that by questioning or commenting on other people's self-titling, I'm being arrogant, and that's one way of looking at it. But for me, these baroque titles have a feeling of aggrandizement, bordering, at times, on parody. Where does this come from? Is it a need to stand out from the crowd? Is it borne of some lack of self-confidence that is ameliorated by the title? Is it really a heart-felt self-labeling and I'm just being a curmudgeon?

Often, these titles are doled out by Gurus, Swamis, and other teachers. Perhaps they are heart-felt, but to me, they often feel like part of a franchising operation: such and such a teacher from such and such a lineage (often there is no lineage, of course), gives you a title, and it's an imprimatur, a symbol of your successful 'graduation' from their course of study. It simultanously reinforces the teacher's 'brand' while also puffing up the recipient the way a graduate degree might. 

Others simply describe who they are and what they do: 'Channel', 'Medical Intuitive', 'Psychic', 'Shaman' etc. Though I really don't like the word 'Channel', and I find the world chock full ​charlatans and con artists using this label, a well as the label of 'psychic' and 'shaman', these are descriptive words, not grandiose titles. I find that while they may not connote humility, neither do they reek of grandiosity, and so I have, grudgingly, adopted some of these descriptive terms for myself. I first learned of the term 'medical intuitive' only about 5 years ago, but I have been one all my life (often called a 'witch' as a child). I only heard of the terms 'energy healer', 'energy worker' and 'light worker' in the last decade, but these too, apply to me. And, while 'channel' and 'shaman' seem particularly loaded, I have reluctantly come to realize that I do channel in my work, though I do not give long, pontificating speeches on behalf of aliens or divine beings (some of these channels also seem to hawk the channel's very own CDs and courses too). I do ask questions while working with my clients, and I get answers, in words, images, and sometimes I just 'see' or 'know' or 'hear' things from their past and present. 

I've also shied away from the term 'Shaman', but I've come to realize that I am indeed one. I like this definition of shaman, found on another, gifted and highly-trained shaman's website, that of Rebecca Singer:

A Shaman is someone who, either by birth and lineage, or serious illness, which acts as an initiation, gains the capacity to travel between the physical realm and the spiritual realm – the Spirit World. The process of moving between the worlds of earth and spirit is called journeying.

In most cases, the purpose of a Shamanic Journey is to gain information on another’s behalf… to assist with their healing process. When a Shaman travels to the spirit world, she or he will return with information regarding that person’s physical, emotional or spiritual health and well-being. With this information, the Shaman is able to guide the healing process using various practices and/or ceremonies.

I was either born with this ability, or learned it very, very early (having never been exposed to the concept of reincarnation, I told my mother at age two, in her words: "in my last life, I was an old Chinese man, and I knew everything, and I'm angry, because day by day, I am forgetting it all!"). I saw things other people didn't 'see' (the sex of a baby in a woman's belly, someone who was harboring cancer in their body). I spoke up about it, and eventually, I got in a lot of trouble for it, and shut my abilities down for the most part, rarely using them or even allowing myself to think about them. I also did 'energy healing work', including, to my skeptical first wife's amazement, quite successfully on my daughter, who was a toddler at the time. But I rarely let these gifts out; they had caused me much grief and misunderstanding in the past.

And, of course, I'd had quite striking experiences of detailed, specific prescience, throughout my entire life.

Then, at age 32, I suffered a horrendous injury that reopened these abilities - forced them open, blasted them out into the open. According to Rebecca's definition, I am a shaman, though I have no formal training, nor a lineage, and I am just really still in the process of uncovering what exactly this means for me, and for my clients. 

As I say, I can be arrogant, egotistical, all the trappings of all-too-human, which is why I will never give myself a grandiose title, or some exotic-sounding name, and why I am uncomfortable labeling myself even as a 'channel' or 'shaman' or 'medical intuitive', though I believe myself to be all of those things.

I am a human of the male persuasion, who, at my best, co-creates healing and transformation with my clients, utilizing my senses, and information I gather from some other place - some place beyond intuition and experience, that Rebecca terms the 'spirit world', which is a label that makes as much or more sense to me as any other. 

Be Well!

​- Samuel