Laurel Parnell: What typically happens is when you clear the trauma part out, then often what happens is they want to say what they didn’t get to say, and there’s an opening. This is where I wonder if bilateral stimulation doesn’t open a portal to other dimensions.
Tami Simon: Welcome, friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Laurel Parnell, a psychologist, a teacher, and a spiritual practitioner for more than four decades, and a leading expert and innovator in EMDR—eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. She has trained thousands of clinicians in EMDR in the United States and abroad, and she is the executive director of the Parnell Institute.
Now, I mentioned Laurel is an innovator, and indeed she is. She’s the developer of attachment-focused EMDR. Continuing to evolve her work, she developed resource tapping, which uses bilateral stimulation to tap in healing resources, and with Sounds True, she wrote a book on resource tapping called Tapping In. Now she’s developed a new approach: multidimensional integrative healing. That’s what we’re going to be talking about, and she’s written a new book on this topic with Sounds True. It’s called Releasing What Isn’t Yours: Living from Your True Self Through Multidimensional Integrative Healing.
Laurel, welcome.
Laurel Parnell: Thank you. It’s great to be with you.
Tami Simon: Okay, innovator, let’s start with EMDR itself. For people joining us who maybe have heard a little bit about it—oh, this is an approach for healing trauma, it’s evidence-based—give us, in a nutshell, how EMDR works and what makes it so effective.
Laurel Parnell: So EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. This is a trauma therapy that was developed in the mid-’80s by psychologist Francine Shapiro. What we do with EMDR is we light up the trauma network—wherever the trauma is stored—with the images, the emotions, the body sensations, and the negative beliefs that got locked in at the time of the trauma, and then we add alternating bilateral stimulation.
In the early days, it was eye movements. We’ve since moved into tapping on either side of the body and auditory stimulation. The idea is to activate both sides of the brain, and it sets off a rapid processing effect. Thoughts, feelings, and body sensations start to move rapidly. We call it accelerated information processing, and the person moves toward health and wholeness.
What’s been held in a dysfunctional way—negative self-constructs, emotional distress—moves out. It’s cleared out of the nervous system, and you naturally move toward health and wholeness. The idea is that we have a natural healing system that’s been disrupted by a traumatic experience, and EMDR kick-starts that natural healing system.
EMDR has been around since the mid-’80s. It’s one of the most researched therapies for trauma. It’s a very strange therapy—we don’t exactly know how it works. There are many different theories, especially around the idea of REM sleep. In REM sleep, our eyes are moving rapidly back and forth, and we’re clearing and processing information.
It also looks a lot like what Indigenous people all over the world have used for thousands of years: drumming, dancing, rhythm—bilateral stimulation for trauma healing. Everywhere I’ve gone and taught and traveled, people recognize this as something they’ve used. Indigenous people of the Americas have used rattling, drumming, and dancing for their warriors. So I think there’s something about the bilateral stimulation used in EMDR that Francine Shapiro put together with a protocol, and she found something very powerful—though it’s very recognizable to Indigenous peoples all over the world.
Tami Simon: Let me ask you a beginner’s-mind question here. When I think about eye movements and how that would shift my nervous system, I wonder—can that same power really be captured just by tapping on the left side and the right side, alternating? Part of me thinks, bilateral stimulation—does that really have this kind of incredible power? And how long do I have to tap, left, right, left, right, to get an impact?
Laurel Parnell: Well, here’s the thing. Let me differentiate between EMDR and resource tapping. With EMDR, we light up the network where the trauma is stored—you have to have a traumatic experience—and when that’s activated, we add the bilateral stimulation, and that sets off the rapid processing effect.
With resource tapping, we light up the neural networks associated with what we want to cultivate—peacefulness, calm, empowerment, nurturing, love. We light up memories or images that represent that, and when you have a strong feeling state of that experience, we add short amounts of bilateral stimulation, and that links the resource with our larger neural network.
So resource tapping is a way to light up and link in resources we want to utilize, and with EMDR, we light up networks that hold dysfunctional information and then process it very rapidly, and it moves out. I don’t fully understand why it works, but it seems that when we light up the network and add alternating bilateral stimulation, it sets off this rapid processing effect—whether that’s through eye movements, tapping on either side of the body, or auditory stimulation.
What happened in my own clinical practice is that I was trained in 1991—a long time ago—and it was all eye movements, and many of my clients didn’t like it. They’d get headaches, their eyes hurt. Some people were getting hypnotized. They just didn’t want to do it. They’d find excuses, and you’d have to make them move their eyes through their tears as they’re sobbing, which felt awful.
So when we found we could also use auditory or tactile stimulation—both sides of the body-brain—people wanted to do it more, and it worked just as well in my experience. I couldn’t see any difference between working with eye movements and working with other forms of bilateral stimulation. The results were just as good. It sets off that rapid processing effect, and it doesn’t seem to matter how fast or slow you go.
As I’ve worked all over the world, some people in some cultures like to tap very softly and slowly, and they still get that accelerated processing. Others tap faster and get the same effect. What I’ve come back to is: match what’s important for this individual. If they like eye movements, use eye movements. If they don’t, don’t.
The other thing I’ll say is I use a lot of imagery in my work—for healing, for strengthening people—and it’s harder to use imagery with eyes open. It seems like when the eyes are open and moving back and forth, the imagery disappears. But if the eyes are closed and someone is passively receiving the bilateral stimulation, they can connect more strongly with the imagery they’re wanting to cultivate.
And with eyes closed, you’ll often see people’s eyes moving rapidly under their eyelids while they’re passively receiving tapping—that looks much more like REM sleep. So we don’t really have distinct groups of eye movements versus no eye movements, because people receiving tapping can have their eyes moving just as rapidly underneath. I don’t fully know what’s going on, and I think it’s more than one thing happening.
Tami Simon: Laurel, there’s so much I want to talk to you about that I feel like I’m exploding over here, but I’m going to stay focused. I want to get into multidimensional integrative healing—
Laurel Parnell: Mhm.
Tami Simon: —and I also want to make sure everyone with us realizes the innovative work that has built to this new approach. I wonder if together we could do a one-minute grounding resource, something helpful that could bring us all right here into the conversation and give people a sense of what you’ve been describing. Do you think we could do it briefly?
Laurel Parnell: Yeah. I’m thinking—especially these days, when certainly in the United States people are very unsettled by what’s going on—that connecting to large landforms can be helpful, like a mountain, or even a tree that’s very large and has deep roots. Where I am, we have redwoods that grow in a circle.
Nature resources, large landforms, can be very grounding. So you can just close your eyes and take a moment and call to mind a large landform or an image from nature that helps you feel settled and grounded. You might even let the image come to you, and notice what that feels like in your body.
When you have a strong felt sense of that landform or nature image, start to tap. Tap on either side of your body—you can cross your arms and tap on either shoulder, tap on the sides of your legs, tap your toes even, whatever feels most natural and comfortable to you. My friend Shelley Pomponas SpearChief, who’s a First Nations woman, does eagle wings flapping, where you hook your thumbs together, and the wings of your hands tap on your chest, back and forth. So whatever you feel drawn to do—get a strong felt sense of that nature image, and then tap. Tap as long as it feels positive and it strengthens. If it turns negative in any way, stop tapping and go back to just the good feelings.
Tami Simon: Wonderful. Thank you. I think that’s a terrific way—there’s nothing like really understanding and connecting to something.
Laurel Parnell: Mhm.
Tami Simon: Your work evolved from resource tapping to now multidimensional integrative healing. It’s quite a mouthful. Tell me about this evolution—what drove it?
Laurel Parnell: Well, it’s kind of like all the different strands of my life have come together. I’ve been a meditator, a Buddhist practitioner, since the ’70s, and I’ve always been integrating psychology and spirituality together, because that’s just my practice. I had a Tibetan teacher, then I started Vipassana meditation in the ’70s, and some very big experiences happened. Then I met Jean Klein, a master of Advaita Vedanta and the whole non-dual tradition. With Buddhism, everything dropped away, and I lost the path—there was no path anymore, just consciousness in the moment, and the constructs had disappeared. But then, what do you do? Where do you go with that?
So the integration of psychology and spirituality was always going along, and then I was trained in EMDR, and what I found, which was so powerful, was that my clients were having spiritual experiences. Some of the most typical experiences they had were of clearing what wasn’t their true self—the conditioning, the things that happened to them, the interpretation of those things, the emotional experiences locked in the body—all of that would dissolve out.
Where they’d end up was in compassion and love—this great compassion for self and others, even for the people who harmed them—and this broader perspective fit right in with Jean’s teaching that who we are is not our conditioning, and that the conditioning feels like a contraction in the mind and body. So when these contractions and self-identifications dissolved, people were left with a free flow of energy through the body. The heart opens. Compassion develops. This was happening regularly, and it still happens. Often, as this stuff disappears, intuition comes, questions about spirituality come, all of that.
I wrote about this for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1996—a long time ago now—and in my first book, Transforming Trauma: EMDR. Francine Shapiro herself felt threatened by that and tried to stop the publication of my book, because she thought that if I wrote about the transpersonal, spiritual experiences my clients were having, it would destroy EMDR’s credibility. So I talk about it, but I don’t highlight it, because I don’t want EMDR to lose credibility—it’s already such a strange therapy to begin with. But instead of rearranging the furniture that Ram Dass said psychotherapy was, EMDR clears the room of old furniture, so you really come back to your true self.
So this was my orientation all along: so much of what blocks our experience of our true self is things that have happened to us in our childhood and during our life that create these contractions and negative self-identifications that cause suffering and limit us from living fully. That was pretty much my view.
Then I had this terrible thing happen in my life: the death of my son. It threw me into having to get help beyond what I knew to do, beyond EMDR. I needed help for him, because he was killed in a terrible way, and I knew from my Tibetan practice and my experience with the Tibetans that you don’t want to die the way he died—that this would not be good.
He’d been visiting us, and he was in a really good place, but I also had a sense that something was wrong, because I was having very frantic dreams of needing to put the pieces together—like there was a puzzle scattered, and I had to put the pieces together. So I put the word out to my community that I needed help for him, for myself, and for my family. This is how I found Jean Schneider, who I call a bodhisattva—she’s so loving, so kind, and so gifted as a spirit worker.
I’d had exposure to shamanic work in the past, but I never felt attracted to it, because it felt too much about power and the accumulation of power. I even met Carlos Castaneda when I was in college—I’d been reading his books and was very interested, but when I met him, I didn’t like him. He didn’t feel like he had a heart, and I recognized that right away. He was very much about power. So some of the shamanic work felt associated with power, and the power resided in the shaman rather than in empowering the person they were working with. I even had a client who’d been very traumatized by shamans in South America. So I recognized that these different dimensions of reality existed, but I didn’t trust the practitioners in that area.
Then I met Jean, and she is all about empowering the individual. She doesn’t take any of the power—she teaches people how to do the work for themselves. Her work was absolutely in alignment with mine, which is recognizing—and all of my teachers, by the way, the Buddha included—that the wisdom is in the client. We align with that, and we help them discover what’s true for them. We use inquiry rather than telling them; we ask, and through the asking, they discover what’s true for them.
So through Jean, we got help for my son. I learned things I’m still learning—she’s really my mentor. I’ve learned so much about what happens after people die. I’ve had very strong experiences that physical death is not the end of life, and that some people are in trouble when they’ve had a bad death and need help. I’ve learned ways of helping people and working with different energies.
Part of what shifted for me was an aha experience: when your intention is for healing, and you recognize that the wisdom resides in the client, and the therapist or healer aligns with that wisdom within the client, then the work isn’t about taking power—it’s about empowering. Some of what I’ve learned from her, around energetic sovereignty and releasing what isn’t yours, including spirit release work, is all about empowerment. Some of what we carry isn’t ours—isn’t from our own psychological background. It can be things we picked up from people around us, from an environment—there are so many things, including ancestral material. We can carry things in our lineages, and we can carry the spirits or souls of people who’ve passed on and attached to us. We can think it’s our own psychological material, but if you really look at it, and you learn how to do inquiry, you can ask: Is this mine or not mine? If it’s not mine, whose is it? Where does it need to go? How can I help with this? It’s all from a compassionate point of view.
So it’s almost like, with the death of my son and the work with Jean, my lens got really big. I have this image I keep coming back to, of a multidimensional mycelium network—strands of light connecting in all directions to all beings, to all things, and consciousness that illumines everything, illumines all dimensions also. That’s where I’d been caught in a duality—I couldn’t understand the non-dual approach alongside shamanic, multidimensional work. But it’s in all dimensions; this consciousness that illumines everything, illumines everything in all dimensions, always. When I had that understanding, the split disappeared, and I came back to: it’s multidimensional. And here’s the integrative part—that’s what EMDR does.
What EMDR and bilateral stimulation does is integrate these experiences—it’s profoundly integrative. I think part of what happens for many people is they’ll have big spiritual experiences, or experiences with psychedelics—which, by the way, isn’t something I’m connected to, but many people are doing this now, and I know it’s broadening their consciousness—but then it doesn’t get integrated into their daily life. EMDR and bilateral stimulation help with that integration. So this is multidimensional integrative healing, and it includes the earth, the somatic, the psychological, the spiritual—all these dimensions are included in this.
Tami Simon: I did pull out a sentence—it’s interesting: “EMDR can be thought of as a method to integrate information that is not integrating on its own.” I pulled that out because of this emphasis on integration. I think many of us sense right now that that’s what we need. We need more of it. Now tell me, with your son, Laurel—what did you learn about helping someone whose past, whose puzzle pieces are all over the place, and you’re not sure they’ve had a good passage?
Laurel Parnell: Yeah. I have to say, because of what happened to him—and I don’t want to traumatize people by even describing it—what happened to him was more terrible than anything I’ve ever worked with in my forty years of practice. I’ve never heard anything as terrible. So I’m just going to say that.
Tami Simon: I’m so sorry.
Laurel Parnell: Yeah. So EMDR could help me with the trauma piece—I cleared that out. But as a mother, my job is to help him. As soon as you have a kid, you have that connection, that job, and I felt I needed that. What Jean did, I wouldn’t know how to do. I put out the word to different people, and they couldn’t do what needed to be done. I needed one of the top experts probably in the world to help.
What I learned—and this is going to sound strange, and I can’t say I understand all of it—is that I’d always felt there was something missing in him. His whole life. He didn’t learn from mistakes. Something would happen, and he’d do it again, and again. As a little one—when he was really little, we were at the beach, and he ran right into the waves and got knocked over, crying, and after we comforted him, he went right back in and did the same thing again. He didn’t recognize danger, and he wouldn’t learn from things.
So I kept feeling there was something missing in him, and what I learned from Jean was that he was born without a soul part—a soul part that didn’t incarnate with him. I’d never heard of that, but it completely fit with my understanding. He had several soul parts—about five of them. One had crossed over and was the part that was joyous, telling everybody, “This is great,” as he was visiting friends. His former girlfriend was channeling him, which she’d never done in her life—she was channeling all this ecstasy he was expressing. He was also visiting family members. There was one soul part still in his apartment, one that had attached to the man who killed him, because he was trying to help him, and one that never came into being.
So Jean’s work, which was so advanced, was partly to gather all these parts and help them cross over. She also did some work on the lineage—where some of this stuff came from—and did some cleaning up of the lineage. For me, what I’ve learned is how to work with spirit release, and to recognize when a spirit or soul who has died in a difficult way has not crossed over. I had one of these attachments myself—it was the weirdest thing, after the Hamas attack. I had these strange experiences on my body and didn’t know what they were. I did this work with Jean, and they released, and I felt completely different afterward. I’ve since learned how to do some of this, and that’s part of what’s in the book—how to recognize it and how to work with it, some basic tools. I’m not advanced, but I can recognize some of it, and I can offer some help to people.
Even recognizing that there are these different soul parts—some people get perpetrator parts attached to them, and they don’t understand why they’ve got these strange feelings that feel alien, that don’t feel like their own.
Tami Simon: We’re going to talk more about releasing what isn’t ours and this spirit-level work. But before we do, I want you to address the listener who says, “Wow, this is getting really far out.” We started in the world of EMDR—I was with you in the evidence-based psychologist’s office—and now we’re talking about missing soul parts, communicating with deceased spirit beings. And yet you’ve traveled all over the world, and you’ve met and exchanged information with healers from different cultures. Through a non-Western lens, this might not sound that far out at all—it might sound like, yeah, that’s what spiritual healing is all about. I wonder if you can help us, through the conversations you’ve had with people in different cultures, appreciate this perspective of multidimensional integrative healing.
Laurel Parnell: I love that you’ve asked this question, Tami, because this is where my lens is much bigger, from traveling all over and living in different countries. I have to say—our minds have been colonized, and psychotherapy has been colonized. Even our sense of time is based on when Jesus was born—wait a minute, time existed way before then. So my sense of time is really expanded, and my idea of how constricted my mind is, of what it allows in and what it doesn’t, has been informed by colonization. That’s happened all over the world, and I know it.
My original people came from Northern Europe, where there was a nature-based religion, a nature-based spirituality, very much the same as in the Amazon. I spent time in the Ecuadorian Amazon. There was a period where—everything I had done to heal from the loss of my son had worked well, except I couldn’t feel joy. I couldn’t feel happy. It was like there was a wall between myself and joy. I could see people enjoying things, and it was like an old memory for me.
I thought, if I could connect deeply to nature, like I had in the Amazon years before, when I’d felt that deep connection—so I had an experience in the Amazon with an extraordinary healer, a shaman named Menari. Through what he did with me, he removed the sadness. His people, the Sapara people, work very much with dreams and with the space between waking and dreaming, and that’s where so much of their healing and their recognition of the spirits in nature comes from. I think it’s exactly the same as what we had in Northern Europe, which got destroyed when Christianity came through and said, “If you practice this way, we will kill you—you convert or you die.”
What I found in the Amazon, which was so inspiring, was that they were unbroken. They had their traditions and practices going back thousands of years, because they hadn’t been Christianized. They hadn’t lost it, hadn’t developed shame, hadn’t shut it down. If you look all over the world, there are certain practices held in common, and some of them have been oppressed, repressed, and gone underground. That’s part of what I’m looking at.
In the United States, we do—well, what’s therapy? Therapy comes from Vienna and Freud. The fifty-minute hour—who made that up? Sitting there, being neutral—who made that up? That isn’t going to work cross-culturally. The relationship is so important in any kind of therapy, and it matters so much to meet the person where they are, in terms of their culture, their background, all of that.
So as far as working with ancestral material, working with energies—when I work in Singapore with Asian clients, that’s very comfortable. If I work with people from India, all of this is very comfortable. If I work with Latino clients who aren’t so Christianized that they can’t connect to their Indigenous ways, I’m speaking what they already know, but they’re not allowed to even say it.
One of my dear friends, an Indigenous healer and psychotherapist, is afraid to talk about any of this for fear of losing her license, and she’s a First Nations person. I thought it was appalling that she was afraid. She calls these spirit attachments “hitchhikers.” All of this, of course she knows about it and works with it. Energy clearing—they all do it, all over the world. There’s a recognition of the need to do it. Baptism is a kind of energy clearing, using water. But our minds have been shaped so that there are only certain things we’re allowed to know and talk about, or we’ll be seen as fringe.
Our clients have these experiences, and then they’re afraid to tell their therapists because they’re afraid of being pathologized. But I want to tell you where I come from—I’m really solid clinically, and it’s so important that people understand psychopathology, development, case formulation, all of that. We’re grounded in that, and we’re open to other possibilities of what might be going on. It’s a broader lens, not a narrow one that only allows in certain things.
Tami Simon: So you’re doing EMDR with a client—and I love that you’re so grounded in clinical work, because I think that’s the actual experience of real people, not a theory. Say you’re doing EMDR with somebody who’s processing the trauma of a loss—a death, something like the experience with your son, their own big traumatic loss—and what emerges could be something like what you write about in Releasing What Isn’t Yours: they suddenly feel the presence of the person whose loss they’re grieving. How would you work with a client in that situation?
Laurel Parnell: This is actually very common with EMDR. What typically happens is when you clear the trauma part out, they often want to say what they didn’t get to say, and there’s an opening. This is where I wonder if the bilateral stimulation doesn’t open a portal to other dimensions. I’m just going to say that—I don’t know, I don’t have the evidence. But it seems, because the drumming and dancing done in so many cultures seems to open things up in that way.
One situation I write about: a woman’s former boyfriend had killed himself by hanging. She hadn’t seen it, and we were processing the trauma of that with EMDR, and suddenly she felt like he was in the room with us—a sense of his presence. He began to communicate very directly with her that it wasn’t her fault, in this very compassionate way. Then she had other imagery that was very powerful and healing, and she felt him leave, but still with her in a very positive way.
I’ve had so many of these come up. In one, the client’s brother and sister had died. She had no connection to spirituality at all, and suddenly they appeared to her, glowing, in light, together. She was shocked. She said, “What does this mean?” I said, “What does it mean to you?” I’m never going to interpret somebody’s experience. She said, “They’re together, they’re happy, and they’ll see me someday.” I said, “Go with that, with EMDR, with bilateral stimulation.”
So I never interpret—the client has their own meaning, and mostly with these experiences, the person feels this is an authentic communication with a loved one. Allan Botkin, a psychologist who was working at the North Chicago Veterans Administration Hospital, had thousands of these happen with veterans. First they happened spontaneously; then, as veterans were processing the trauma of killing someone, the person who had died would suddenly appear, and there was a completion of something, and the PTSD resolved. He did research on this, so we have pre- and post-research.
Tami Simon: Now, Laurel, let’s go into something you mentioned that got everybody’s attention—it’s in the fourth section of your book, on dimensions of spirit work, where you go into detail about how we can recognize, assess, and release spirit attachments. This notion that what isn’t ours—that some kind of being, an astral being of some kind, could be attached to us. Tell us more about this.
Laurel Parnell: Yeah, and I know this sounds so wacky. This has not been my area of expertise, not something I was particularly interested in—it just started showing up, and I’ve had to expand and learn about it, because it was showing up in my practice, in my consultation work, in a lot of places.
I think part of what’s happened is, because of our limited ways of thinking about things, we’ve been trained to believe that anything going on with a client has to do with something about them—their history, their childhood. But what if some of what they’re picking up isn’t theirs? What if it’s literally something that’s happened to them?
I’ll give an example. Some of these things showed up in EMDR, and I thought they had to do with the client’s past life. This is something else that happens with EMDR: we’ll be working with a symptom or problem a person has, and we use what we call the bridging technique—we trace it back in time, we light it up, and we go back and discover the root of what’s causing it. Sometimes, instead of going back into their own life, they go back into a past life, and there they are, and we process it just as we would anything else.
Tami Simon: How do you know it’s a past life, at this point, and not just a poetic journey they’re on?
Laurel Parnell: Well, the client feels it’s a past life—they define it that way, and it’s very vivid, very strong. An example: a woman whose symptoms had to do with feeling guilty, like she hadn’t done what she needed to do, like she’d let people down. The image that was very strong for her was that she was a man, with black hair, wearing a particular uniform she described in detail. When we processed it, she was in a battle, with a bayonet, a particular gun she described in detail—this was actually a demonstration I was doing in a group.
She—he, in this case—is killed and watches the battle from outside, not realizing he’s dead, feeling guilty for abandoning his men, stuck there feeling guilty. I said something like, “Do you know that you no longer have a body, that your body has died?” He didn’t know that—it came as a shock. Then: “It’s not your fault. There was nothing you could do.” He got that, released the guilt. Then there was confusion about which body—does he have the man’s body, or the woman’s body? I said, “That was your body then, this is your body now. Go with that, with EMDR.” There was an absolute switch—we were no longer identified with the man’s body, and there was a release.
The guilt this woman had been carrying was gone, and all the symptoms she’d had from the past associated with this incident were gone, and she lost something like a hundred pounds—she’d been carrying this in her body. At the time I did this work, I thought it was her past life. Now I think it was someone who had attached to her—a man who had died maybe a hundred years earlier. A friend of mine who was there, whose husband specializes in antique guns, described the weapon to him, and he knew exactly where it was from: Japan, around the 1800s—very specific.
So I’d thought it was this woman’s past life, but I now realize it was someone who had attached to her. She was a very open, very psychic, very spiritual person. When this being who had attached to her left, she could come back into her own body, and it allowed her to lose the weight—I don’t quite understand how, but that was the result.
So what I’ve come to see is that some people are very open to this, more receptive to these attachments, typically from people who have died and not crossed over—it could be a family member, an ancestor. Someone I’m just providing consultation to has a client who keeps doing ancestral work, carrying things from her ancestral lineage, and I said, “I don’t think this is in the lineage. I think she literally has ancestors attached to her,” because the work is with the person who had died.
I think some of the symptoms—physical, emotional—show up, and if you inquire with the person and ask, “Is this yours or not yours?” they can say, “This doesn’t feel like it’s mine.” Then you can discover where it’s located, where the attachment is. What I’ve learned is that often people who have died suddenly don’t realize they’ve died, so they hang around, and sometimes they’ll attach to family members or people who are more open. I have to say, I’m not an expert in this, but I think they’re looking for help—sometimes to communicate something, sometimes for help. My experience was that the people who had died didn’t realize they were dead, and they needed certain death rituals.
So often there’s something incomplete—people who have died didn’t get the rituals they needed, associated with their religious or cultural background. When that’s completed, a portal can open, and they can go wherever they go. Different traditions have different places people go when they die, and that has to be respected—that’s part of the inquiry. I think I’ve been hearing that in IFS, they’re discovering the same thing—that not all parts necessarily belong to the individual, and we don’t want to integrate something that doesn’t belong to us: the spirit or soul of a dead person. We want to facilitate their crossing over however we can, always with compassion, inquiry, and curiosity. It’s not a formula—it’s very much the way we work with EMDR.
Tami Simon: Laurel, let’s say someone listening has a sense that they’re carrying something that isn’t theirs—they’re not quite sure what it is, maybe an attached spirit being, maybe some ancestral pattern. How do you help people assess what is, quote-unquote, part of their true self and what isn’t, and how they can release it?
Laurel Parnell: Such a good question. First, I think it’s important to know how to do basic grounding and understand your energetic sovereignty—some of what I’ve written about. Grounding: putting in a grounding cord, feeling yourself connected to the earth, having an energy bubble, having your resources there so you’re really present, and knowing how to quiet your mind. Part of what happens is there’s so much mind activity that can interfere with clear perception. If you can quiet your mind and go into a place of listening, then go inside and notice what’s happening—notice, for example, if there’s something in your energy field that isn’t yours.
Examine your body—the front, the sides. Is there something here that doesn’t feel like it’s mine? What does that energy feel like—does it have a shape, a color? Is it mine or not mine? If it’s not mine, is it male or female, a child, an adult? Then begin to inquire about it more directly, as if you’re asking it questions—where did it come from, what are its needs? All of it is done with compassion, not fear.
This is very much a loving, compassionate relationship. It’s what we do in EMDR when we’re working with early childhood material—we just ask, what do you need, what’s happening here? When you have a quiet mind, images or a sense of something start popping in, and you can ask yes-or-no questions, and the answers come very quickly. You can get pictures in your mind of what’s going on, and with that, the answers of what needs to happen can come. If it feels too complicated, get help from someone who knows how to work with this in a compassionate way. It’s not a formula—it’s, what do they need?
In my case, this happened after the Hamas attacks. I have about four percent Jewish ancestry, so I don’t know why this hit me the way it did. I was feeling dissociated, terrified, like the world was coming to an end—it was catastrophic. I couldn’t stay in my body. In my work with Jean, I identified something on my right side and something on my left. I had two men attached to me—one on my right side, an Arab man, and one on my left, a Jewish man, from biblical times, dressed accordingly. I’m not a very visual person, but I could see this. What they needed, they needed certain things—there was healing that had to happen for them. The one on my left had recently been killed.
In the inquiry, I asked what they were needing, and they needed their burial rites—one needed his name on a plaque, his first and last name, his date of birth and death, and an olive grove planted in his memory. In imagining these things, a portal opened, and this figure, Abraham, with white hair and a beard, showed up—and this isn’t my religious tradition at all—and his hand came down and pulled them, one after the other, through the portal. The energy on my side completely went away, and then we worked on the other side. It was something I’d never experienced before, but the difference before and after was so significant.
What I come back to is—it can sound like mumbo jumbo, but what’s the result of it? The result was I felt back in my body. I was no longer preoccupied with what had happened. I no longer felt like the world was coming to an end. I felt sad about it, but not catastrophic, like I was in Israel. It felt like I was there.
Tami Simon: How did you know this was the process for you? How come this came through?
Laurel Parnell: I have no idea. I really don’t. Four percent Jewish—is that what brought it? I don’t know, and I don’t have a connection to that part of the world. I’ve been to Jordan and Egypt, but never to Israel. I’m an open person, but why this hit me like that, I don’t know. All I know is it felt really foreign—maybe it was so I could learn how to do this. It felt so ego-dystonic, like it didn’t make sense that this event, as terrible as it is, was affecting me this way. I was absolutely dissociating out of my body. I was crying, and it was so over the top. Then we did this work, and I felt shifted—back to myself.
I’ve participated in several of these, and one that happened at Esalen was so powerful, it really changed me after. I don’t know if I should talk about it.
Tami Simon: Go ahead.
Laurel Parnell: So, what happened was I was doing a retreat on this multidimensional work, and there was a group of women—maybe twenty of us in a circle. In the opening of the work, I did an acknowledgment of the different dimensions I was acknowledging, and I also acknowledged the land and the people of the Esselen—the Indigenous people whose land we were on.
That night, a friend of mine who’s very open to this had something happen. Then, when we were doing the true self exercise in the class, she felt a very strong block. Another woman in the group said she saw an image—I think bars. When we started exploring it with my friend and asking questions, it turned out a man had inhabited her body. She described him, and I got a picture of who this was: he looked like a Native person the missionaries had gotten hold of, his hair cut, straight bangs, black hair. He was lost—completely lost, looking for his family.
I asked questions, and my friend answered for him. It turned out he was an Esselen man—the Carmel Mission was right up the road from the Esalen Institute, about half an hour up the road, a major mission. She kept seeing gigantic crosses, keeping the people from crossing over, because they hadn’t had their death rituals. He didn’t know he was dead, and when I told him, he was incredibly sad. He was looking for his wife and children.
Once he found out he was dead and was looking for them, we did some ritual for him—whatever he needed. There are beings that help people cross over, certain ones that appear across mythology and literature, and certain animals typical of that role. Where we were, at Esalen, condors are important—they’d almost become completely extinct, and they’ve been bringing them back. Vultures are these psychopomp beings, beings that help people cross over.
I suddenly saw this gigantic cross turn into a condor. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen vultures drying their wings—they look like they’re in a cross, wings out. The cross turned into a giant condor, and the condor began to ferry his people across. My friend said she saw hundreds of people, like light, going and going and going. He didn’t go until he knew his family was over, and then he went too. My friend felt the shift—the whole room, this circle of women, felt the shift. None of us had ever done this before. We were just following what we’d learned from him, asking questions, following what he needed, and it was like a group intuition.
It was so sacred and meaningful. I think we were all in tears. And really recognizing what had happened—in California, with the missionaries who came through with Junípero Serra, they had killed almost everybody, wiped out the California Indians through the missions and through the diseases they carried. It was a horrific genocide, and I had just been reading about this before I came to Esalen. I think that was part of why this happened—I was open to it. As part of our invocation, I recognized the people there, and I think he was needing help.
When this was over, I kept seeing these crosses, and my friend kept seeing giant crosses keeping people from crossing over. On the way home, I went to the mission, and sure enough, two gigantic crosses were there, and in front of every grave of an Indigenous person was a cross. It was exactly like what we’d seen in our mind’s eye, even though we’d never been there. It felt like a sacred rite of passage—so profound.
I have a deep connection in my heart to Indigenous peoples, and I feel what’s been done to them—especially the children who were put in these schools, killed, and whose parents never found them—needs to be healed. In some cases, these children need to be helped, and the spirits of these people who never got their death rites—this isn’t for me to do, but it’s something I think needs to be recognized: that this happened, and some of it has never been healed because of the Christianization of what happened to these people.
That happened at Esalen, and it was so profound and meaningful, and I think it was meant to be shared—so that, on many levels, what happened in the past is not the past. The bones of people kept in museums, who’ve never been given proper death rituals—there’s something really important there.
Tami Simon: In our conversation, I described you as an innovator, but now I want to describe you as a multidimensional healer, because I think that’s the work you’re doing—the framework you’re now articulating, multidimensional integrative healing. You offered earlier in our conversation this image that stayed with me, of a multidimensional mycelium network. I wonder if we could end on that, and if you could share what it feels like to you.
Laurel Parnell: It feels like we’re all—I think of Joanna Macy, who was such a dear person, so connected to the natural world. Everything is connected to everything else, in all these dimensions. It’s like strands of light, the fibers of a web that goes in every direction and connects everybody and everything. When we can feel that, we can draw resources from it. Love is part of what makes that up—that’s this other dimension, this big love, which is what my teacher Lama Yeshe was all about, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama is all about. It’s a love so big your body can’t hold it, and it holds everything.
There’s this mycelium network of love that connects everything and everyone, that holds us all. If we can expand out into that, we can draw resource and connection from it, rather than get caught in our small view of things. That broader view takes us to what can resource us from many years in the past, so we’re held in something much larger. That view has a timelessness to it that really holds us and resources us.
Tami Simon: Laurel Parnell. She has created for us what I’m going to call a big-love offering—her new book, Releasing What Isn’t Yours: Living from Your True Self Through Multidimensional Integrative Healing. Thank you, Laurel, for being brave and speaking from the experience of your clients and yourself, for being willing to bravely share that. Thank you.
Laurel Parnell: Thank you so much.
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