{"id":19521,"date":"2022-03-29T08:46:19","date_gmt":"2022-03-29T14:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/?post_type=transcript&p=19521"},"modified":"2022-03-29T08:49:33","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T14:49:33","slug":"is-there-a-holy-grail-of-healing","status":"publish","type":"transcript","link":"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/transcript\/is-there-a-holy-grail-of-healing\/","title":{"rendered":"“Is There a Holy Grail of Healing?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"image_print\"Print Transcript<\/span><\/a><\/div>

Tami Simon:<\/b> Welcome to <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i>, produced by Sounds True. My name\u2019s Tami Simon. I\u2019m the founder of Sounds True. I\u2019d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources, such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you\u2019d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.com.<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019re listening to <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i>. Today my guest is Dr. Lissa Rankin. Lissa is a mind-body medicine physician. She\u2019s the author of seven books and founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute. She\u2019s also a mystic who researches radical remission, trauma-informed medicine, and spiritual healing. Her TEDx Talks have been viewed over 5 million times and she starred in two national public television specials, <\/span>Heal Yourself: Mind Over Medicine<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>The Fear Cure<\/span><\/i>. Lissa\u2019s interest in the link between loneliness and disease let her to spearhead her latest project Heal at Last, a nonprofit organization which aims to bring effective trauma healing and spiritual healing methods to anyone ready for the deep dive of healing.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this episode of <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i>, Lissa and I spoke about her new Sounds True book, <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>, a 10-year journey that Lissa went on. She started out trying to crack the code of healing. And although that\u2019s not exactly what happened, she did make some remarkable discoveries and even discovered what she calls a holy grail when it comes to using sacred medicine in your life. Here\u2019s my conversation with the very nuanced thinker\u2014someone who\u2019s able to hold a whole lot of paradoxes all at once\u2014Dr. Lissa Rankin.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lissa, I know that <\/span>Sacred Medicine <\/span><\/i>is a book that took you 10 years of research and writing. To begin our conversation, I\u2019d love to know what inspired you, what fueled you to take on <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lissa Rankin:<\/b> Well, <\/span>Sacred Medicine <\/span><\/i>is really the sequel to <\/span>Mind Over Medicine<\/span><\/i>. So, the original manuscript of <\/span>Mind Over Medicine <\/span><\/i>was part one and part two. Part one was everything I could find in the medical literature, everything I could prove with science that we can do to be proactive about making ourselves miracle prone. This was very academic, it was I joke that I should have gotten a PhD for <\/span>Mind Over Medicine<\/span><\/i>, because it was very much like an academic thesis. And part two was everything I couldn\u2019t prove with science. It was all of the anecdotal and subjective stories that I was hearing that I didn\u2019t understand as a science-loving doctor, but I was increasingly stepping into the aspects of myself that were more of the mystic, and I didn\u2019t want to ignore or exclude what seemed totally relevant to the questions that had fueled the inquiry for <\/span>Mind Over Medicine<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

As we had the issue with this book, that became an unwieldy attempt to try to cover both in one book. My agent at the time had said, \u201cYou know what? What if part two is a separate book?\u201d And I said, \u201cOh yes, that\u2019s <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>.\u201d As soon as I gave myself permission to think of it that way, it became a pilgrimage. It had started in that practical way. But then I was already maybe three years into the academic and scientific inquiries that were at the foundation of this, which really were stemming from some of these difficult questions like, why is it that some people with incurable illnesses do everything right and stay sick and then other people don\u2019t seem to do anything special and yet they recover? What is really causing disease? And is there anything we can do to be proactive about reversing disease? And why? Why does one person get their miracle and somebody else stay sick and suffers and is disabled or dies?<\/span><\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t initially satisfied with everything that science could give us, but I did come to some conclusions that I felt were very helpful. 300,000 people have read the book and have claimed that it was helpful with regard to what we can do to be proactive about making ourselves miracle prone. But there was this whole other rabbit hole that didn\u2019t fit into that. And even when I published <\/span>Mind Over Medicine<\/span><\/i>\u2014which I think I finished writing it in 2012 and it came out in 2013\u2014I was quite full of hubris at the time, I felt pretty certain that I could explain a lot of the mysteries that I had bumped into in my journey so far with what scientists call the mega-placebo. I thought, well, a lot of these seemingly mysterious things can be demystified with a very coherent, physiological, and nervous-system explanation of the conditions of the mega-placebo. Then I started hearing some stories that actually really made that interrupted my narrative around that that broke apart my hypothesis.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>Let just ask you a question, Lissa, at this point, because I think many listeners and I have of course heard of the placebo effect. What\u2019s the mega-placebo?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>Well, take for example a healing retreat center, some place like Lourdes\u2014and there\u2019s a whole chapter about Lourdes in the book, and there are many healing retreat centers around the world. So imagine if you are in the conditions where you are coming to a sacred site and maybe there\u2019s a special healer there that you believe has the power to cure cancer or raise the dead or make the blind see and the lame walk. Now add to that that everybody\u2019s wearing a certain uniform; you\u2019re wearing white, you\u2019re purifying yourself, you\u2019re eating this special diet, everybody\u2019s vegan, you\u2019re taking special herbs, you\u2019re drinking the miraculous water, and you\u2019re sitting in a room every day meditating or praying for hours on end in a coherent field of other believers who are sharing in this mass experience of setting up these conditions of healing. So that would be an example of a mega-placebo.<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Mind Over Medicine<\/span><\/i>, I defined the placebo effect as a combination of positive belief and the therapeutic relationship, like the ritual of healing that goes into the relationship with the person or in some cases the deity who one has given their power away to or come into relationship with where there\u2019s this nurturing care that happens within the relationship. And I now don\u2019t really agree with my original hypothesis around that. I have a much more nuanced and complex understanding of the placebo effect after the 10 years of study.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>Well, let\u2019s take a moment right there. So, tell us that, your more nuanced understanding of the placebo effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>Well, of course I have to start with the disclaimer [that] nobody knows. This is a hypothesis. Nobody knows. There was a multidisciplinary conference at Harvard in the 1990s, beautifully documented by Anne Harrington, where they tried to answer this question in a multidisciplinary way, with scientists, and people from the divinity school, and ethicists from the law school, and anthropologists. They basically did not come to any conclusion. It would be a bit arrogant for me to suggest in any way that I have the answer.<\/span><\/p>\n

But I feel a little closer to the answer than I did 10 years ago in that I think there are many assumptions built into the scientific method, particularly the evidence-based medicine, medical science method of randomized controlled clinical trials. That\u2019s where the placebo effect was discovered. We didn\u2019t know about this until the 1950s, 1960s, when that model was developed. And we realized that people get better regardless of what you give them, [some] percentage of the time. The percentage that gets better when they\u2019re given a sugar pill or a saline injection or a sham treatment or a fake surgery is what we have come to call the placebo effect. It ranges from 18 percent to 80 percent depending on the treatment. That is based on a certain set of assumptions. For example, that assumes that you can separate the treatment from the person giving the treatment. And I don\u2019t believe you can.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, when I was a medical doctor and I was participating in pharmaceutical trials and getting paid to be a pharmaceutical researcher, I was actually fired from my job because my placebo effect was too high. In other words, I had a greater proportion of people that were getting better on the sugar pill than the other researchers. So, I was messing up the data.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, let\u2019s say we want to study one of the tools that I share in <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>. Let\u2019s say we want to study Internal Family Systems\u2014IFS. My hypothesis is that we cannot necessarily separate the treatment, the IFS treatment, the thing, from the person doing the treating. Is the founder of IFS, Dick Schwartz, going to get a better outcome than somebody who has done one training and has less experience, or perhaps somebody that has other gifts, maybe some mystical gifts that could be overlaid on top of IFS? Can we separate that? Can we separate the presence of the healer, the amount of work the healer has done on their own trauma? Can we separate whether they\u2019re having a good day or maybe whether they\u2019re blended with some of their own traumatized parts just in that particular day that the study is going on?<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s one assumption. Another assumption\u2014and this really is boggling to the mind\u2014we make an assumption that we can separate the people in the clinical trial who are getting the treatment from the people who are getting the placebo. But part of what I discovered in my research is that something like HIPAA (which is the medical privacy laws that mean that we separate patients from each other, that doctors can\u2019t talk to one patient about another, that we have to separate out those being treated from those treating and from each other), part of what I learned from the healers that I worked with is that that might be the exact opposite of what\u2019s healing. We might actually get better outcomes if we brought together everybody who was in need of, let\u2019s say, cancer treatment for breast cancer. If we brought them together and treated them together, there may be a kind of resonant bonding\u2014is the language that William Bengston uses.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of the healers will misuse quantum language. That\u2019s a big trigger for me. They might call it quantum entanglement, but that is an inappropriate use of quantum language because quantum entanglement refers only to subatomic particles. Maybe in the macro, there is a way that we have some sort of macroscopic quantum entanglement in what Bill Bengston calls resonant bonding. Let\u2019s take the example of Lourdes. If these people are all coming together for healing at a retreat center and they are bonding together through their shared suffering and their shared desire for healing that perhaps in some mysterious way that scientists can\u2019t fully prove or explain, that if one person experiences an unexpectedly positive health outcome, maybe anybody else who is bonded to them in some mysterious way has a greater likelihood of also having an unexpected cure. And it\u2019s possible that that could be what we call the placebo effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a whole chapter in <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i> about William Bengston and his hands-on healing with mice that he has injected with breast cancer. And the curious thing about Bill\u2019s science is that he couldn\u2019t prevent any of the mice from getting cured, that the placebo mice were getting cured as well as the treated mice. That was his theory, that perhaps these mice were bonded not necessarily even to the other mice but to the healers; and that if they were included in the care of the researchers, including the skeptical grad students who were taught to do this thinking (they were participating in a gullibility study), that if there was care and love even for these mice, that care could extend\u2014he had to literally take them offsite so that the researchers never even had any contact with the mice, and then they would die right on schedule\u2014but if they were anywhere in the vicinity of the researchers, they seemed to have some odd spontaneous remission.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that really got me thinking about the placebo effect, that perhaps part of how we could explain these miracle cures at places like Lourdes could be that if anybody is having that rare health outlier experience of a \u201cspontaneous remission,\u201d maybe if people are bonded through love or through faith or through shared belief that if one person has a miracle, maybe that\u2019s almost contagious and perhaps that\u2019s the placebo effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>In <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>, you ask so many good questions, Lissa. I mean, you ask I think the questions that people want to know the answers to, from does distant healing work, does prayer work when groups of people come together, etc.? You ask the best questions. What I\u2019d like to know is, if you were to share with us\u2014I\u2019ll take an Oprah-ism for a moment. I don\u2019t do this very often. Here\u2019s what I know for sure. Here\u2019s what I know for sure. What does Lissa Rankin know for sure about sacred medicine and healing?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>Wow. What a great question. What I know for sure is that trauma causes disease. What I don\u2019t know for sure is whether treating trauma reverses disease. But what I do know for sure is that the reversal of chronic or life-threatening illness seems to be very much involved in the state of the nervous system. And part of this I already knew in <\/span>Mind Over Medicine <\/span><\/i>and I explained the physiology in great detail, but we\u2019ve learned more since that book came out about things like polyvagal theory and the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, in particular the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve that is involved in self-healing, in community self-healing, in relational self-healing, in, maybe we could even say, spiritual self-healing, where anything basically that restores the nervous system to that prosocial, proconnectivity.<\/span><\/p>\n

And when I say connectivity, I mean not only connectivity with other humans who can help us co-regulate our nervous systems and participate in healing, but also connectivity with the divine inside of each of us, whatever you want to call that. I call it your inner pilot light. In IFS, they call it Self. You can call it Christ consciousness or Buddha nature or the divine self or Santa Claus, whatever you want to call it. But that connectivity between ourselves and maybe the hurt parts of ourselves that anytime that we are able to restore connectivity and activate the ventral vagal nerve, we have at least the opportunity or the potential to make ourselves miracle prone. And I would say that underlies almost everything, almost every tool that I included in <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>I thought it was so. Interesting here I asked you what you know for sure. In the book, you say, \u201cI went on this journey to understand the mystery of healing. Could I crack the code of healing?\u201d And that you did in fact discover, and you use this language, a holy grail. And that that holy grail had to do with the healing of trauma. And I\u2019m imagining someone who\u2019s saying like, \u201cHold on, wait a second. This illness that I have,\u201d whether it\u2019s cancer or an autoimmune disease or whatever it might be, \u201cyou\u2019re saying that it\u2019s somehow related to trauma in my life. Help me.\u201d I know you started to talk about the nervous system, but I\u2019m not sure that people really get the connections here, why you call the healing of trauma a holy grail when it comes to <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>Well, I want to answer with a couple of disclaimers first, because when I talk about trauma, we also need to include in that, for example, it would be a trauma to the body if you lived next to a toxic waste dump. Not all trauma is psycho-spiritual in nature. It\u2019s also a trauma if you are in a black, brown or indigenous body and you\u2019re living in the United States. These collective traumas are also things that can significantly impact the nervous system and put us at risk of disease and make it more difficult to reverse that disease.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are certainly traumatic things. And obviously some of those might be having two copies of a recessive gene that causes cystic fibrosis, for example. So, I want to expand the definition of trauma so that it includes those things that are not related to psycho-spiritual trauma. But if you look at what we do know about trauma-causing the disease, we know to call it stress because the word \u201ctrauma\u201d can be a trigger for some people and people are more comfortable saying \u201cI\u2019m stressed\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m under stress.\u201d And we know that stress-related diseases make up 80 to 90 percent of doctors\u2019 visits and the majority of chronic illness.<\/span><\/p>\n

And so again, that\u2019s not news, we\u2019ve known that for a long time. But what I started unpacking is really looking at the relationship between stress and trauma and the nervous system and how that impacts multiple aspects in the body that are significantly interrelated. I want to slow this down because it gets complicated and can get nerd-sciencey pretty quickly. And I want to just first acknowledge that if anybody\u2019s listening and you just heard me say that trauma causes disease, and that if conventional medicine has failed to cure your disease, it could be related to untreated trauma. For some people, that\u2019s brand-new information and it can actually be triggering information, or it can activate a story that sounds like \u201cshe\u2019s blaming me for my illness\u201d or \u201cshe\u2019s saying that in some way it\u2019s in my mind or it\u2019s psychosomatic or I\u2019m somaticizing or I\u2019m a hypochondriac or something.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I want to make it very clear that when I say that trauma causes disease, I mean that the physical body manifests real physical illness as the result of what can happen in the nervous system, perhaps in the first year of life, perhaps even in utero, and that it can take decades in order for that to manifest in a physical, diagnosable way that might show up on an MRI or a blood test. I\u2019m not in any way saying it\u2019s in the mind. I think this is part of what\u2019s confusing when we start talking about mind-body spirit medicine is that psychological or emotional or spiritual trauma is actually a very somatic experience. I want to make that very clear.<\/span><\/p>\n

I also want to make it clear that when I say that trauma causes disease or perhaps that reversing trauma, treating trauma could potentially reverse disease and lead to some radical remission, I want to make it clear that part of what happens over time when there is dysregulation in the nervous system chronically as a result of perhaps, perhaps not even what we might think of as big <\/span>T<\/span><\/i> trauma, things like adverse childhood experiences (or \u201cACEs\u201d), which might include things like child abuse, sexual abuse, having a parent in prison, divorce in the home, domestic violence in the house, these sorts of big <\/span>T <\/span><\/i>traumas, or living in a war zone, such things.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of the holy grail of what I was understanding in my research around <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i> was the normalization of how many of us have developmental trauma, myself included. And by developmental trauma, these are what Mark Epstein, the Buddhist psychiatrist, calls the trauma of everyday life. So, someone like me, for example, it looks like I didn\u2019t have a traumatic childhood. I literally grew up at Disney World. I had two parents that were together for 40 years until one of them died. I lived a very privileged life, and my ACE score is zero. But if you start looking at the developmental trauma quiz that I co-created with some of the cutting-edge trauma therapists that I studied with\u2014and it\u2019s in <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>\u2014my developmental trauma burden was very high and led to significant health issues for me very early in life, in my early 30s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Almost none of us are immune when you start looking at developmental trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and then you overlay that with the collective traumas of things like systemic racism and climate crisis and even the trauma of things like white privilege are being part of what Resmaa Menakem calls white-bodied supremacy. You add to that the toxins in our foods and the toxins that go with unfettered capitalism and all of the other things that are happening in our life, pretty much nobody is immune to this, which can make it sound hopeless, but it\u2019s not. And I want to make that really clear. The reason I wrote this book is because I think it\u2019s actually incredibly hopeful because what we\u2019re learning is that we can actually treat and heal and dare I say cure trauma to the point that a portal opens.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes, not always, there are certainly no guarantees, but time and time again what I have witnessed and experienced personally is that when we begin to do that much more difficult work\u2014which is the more difficult work\u2014and in the beginning of <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>, I write about the tools that I consider more like energy transfusions that can uplift us and [reduce] stress and they\u2019re easier, they feel good, they\u2019re pleasurable, they\u2019re not so triggering. We can mix and match those together.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I started witnessing over and over again is that when we do that, there are a percentage of people that have tried everything and finally something is working. So, I do think that there is something hopeful in that. And I hope that people that hear that don\u2019t go into a punishing place or a \u201cblame the victim\u201d place or even a place where \u201cI want to be an ostrich and put my head in the sand\u201d or \u201cI want to just not look at my trauma because it\u2019s too painful.\u201d But if we\u2019re able to see the light at the end of the potential tunnel there, at the very least, I do believe we can have an experience of healing, even if we don\u2019t have an experience of cure. And that\u2019s always worth doing.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>First of all, I just want to appreciate, Lissa, you slowing the conversation down and us talking directly to the warm heart of the listener and the person who is taking in this conversation in their own healing process.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the metaphors you use in the book, and I think it\u2019s interesting\u2014you talked about these energy transfusion practices and how they can fill us up in a certain way, but then you go on to say that if there\u2019s some type of debilitating or unresolved trauma, that can be a leak. So, we can fuel up with receiving a light that a <\/span>qigong<\/span><\/i> healer, for example, is sending to us, but there could be a leak in our system from some unresolved trauma. I wonder if you can explain that metaphor a bit. That\u2019s part of, I think, in your journey through <\/span>Sacred Medicine,<\/span><\/i> why you emphasize the healing of trauma so much.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>Yes. When I began this journey, I was very naive and gullible and kind of a kid in the spiritual candy store. It was all very exciting and magic and miracles and shamans and mystics and gurus. And I look back with nostalgia and fondly at that part of my journey, but there was also a lot of spiritual bypassing. There\u2019s a whole chapter for anybody who doesn\u2019t know what I mean when I\u2019m talking about that. The short answer of what spiritual bypassing is, which is a term coined by spiritual teacher and psychologist John Welwood, is conflict avoidance in holy drag, or using our spiritual practices as a way not to touch the pain, the emotional pain of our traumatic experiences.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the beginning, I was working with a lot of energy healers and faith healers and indigenous healers and various types of practices, including things like pilgrimages to sacred sites. These things often feel very good, they feel easy, they feel they\u2019re not triggering. People come away from a session with an energy healer, for example, and almost everybody feels better. I would watch people, and many of these people looked like their symptoms were reversing. However, if you followed them over time as I did\u2014and I also was very respectful and appreciative of the work of Jeffrey Rediger, who wrote a book called <\/span>Cured<\/span><\/i>. Jeffrey was studying for like 17 years. He would follow these people over long courses of time. And Jeff and I have talked extensively about this. What we found is that a lot of the people who initially looked like they had been cured by energy healing, for example, were not cured, they experienced some temporary relief, but either their symptoms came back or their cancer came back or they developed a new illness over time. And I got very curious about that.<\/span><\/p>\n

And so after were realizing that much of what some of these healers were doing is that they were touching the trauma. They weren\u2019t necessarily trained to treat it. Most of these people were not psychotherapists. They weren\u2019t cutting-edge trauma therapists. They had developed their gifts in other way, but they were still touching the trauma in a way that was gentle and soft often in the good healers, the people that were not retraumatizing people. And they were creating a container for people to have an emotional experience, sometimes a spiritual experience, and to be held in that safe and sacred space where healing is possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

I came to think of some of those types of practices as akin to somebody who might come to an emergency room absolutely anemic on blood. Normal hemoglobin, for example, is 14. Let\u2019s say somebody comes into the emergency room and their hemoglobin is six. Now we don\u2019t know why they\u2019re anemic. But the very first thing we would do is we would want to tank somebody up\u2014that\u2019s medical lingo for give them a blood transfusion. The very first thing we would do is we\u2019d say, \u201cWow, we don\u2019t know if this person\u2019s actively bleeding or if their bone marrow has stopped making blood, but they\u2019re anemic, we\u2019re going to give them blood.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

However, it would be medical malpractice to stop there because if we did, let\u2019s say we gave them four units of packed red blood cells, we got their hemoglobin up to 10 and we sent them home. Well, it\u2019s likely that the next day or the next week or the next month, or maybe it would take a year, they\u2019d come back, and their hemoglobin would be six again or maybe they\u2019d die, maybe it went to two. And we can\u2019t live with a hemoglobin of two. So, it would be incumbent upon any good doctor to first tank them up and then do a workup to find out where they are leaking. Or maybe they\u2019re not leaking, maybe they\u2019re not bleeding, maybe the bone marrow has stopped working.<\/span><\/p>\n

When it comes to <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>, that\u2019s how I started thinking of these things. Some of the very sick patients that I\u2019ve worked with, they come in and they are anemic, on lifeforce. They can barely get out of bed. You look at them and they almost have this gray pallor. They are emotionally blunted maybe or very emotionally reactive. They\u2019re exhausted. They have chronic fatigue. They\u2019re in pain. They have a very difficult time functioning. If I see a patient that\u2019s like that, this is not necessarily the best time to go and say, \u201cLet\u2019s talk about your trauma, because that\u2019s difficult work.\u201d This is somebody that might need four units of packed red blood cells.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the case of <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>, that might mean some of the tools in part one of the book that are intended to be almost like a transfusion of qi or prana or life force or whatever you want to call that animating vitality that separates the living from the dead. And every different indigenous healing practice, things like Chinese medicine or Indian medicine or indigenous medicine or these various types of Tibetan medicine, they all have different language for what that life force is. But I came to think, okay, actually we should do that first. We should help people bolster their life force first and get them to a threshold where they actually have a little bit more resilience that maybe they have a little more capacity to function.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, we can\u2019t then ignore what happened to make somebody so anemic on lifeforce to begin with. And that\u2019s where the impact of trauma came in. And I started realizing that it would be energy healing malpractice or indigenous healing malpractice, or whatever you want to call it, to not address the root causes of how this person ended up so anemic to begin with. And in almost every case of chronic and longstanding illness when I was working directly with patients, which I don\u2019t do as much anymore, I\u2019m now working directly with doctors, training them how to do this with patient, almost always if you take a very complete trauma history, these people either have a very high ACE score and\/or a very high developmental trauma burden and often both.<\/span><\/p>\n

That became incumbent upon the healer, I realized, to make sure that we\u2019re not just making people dependent on the healer to go in to get the next transfusion and the next transfusion. And that\u2019s what I witnessed in a lot of energy healing, for example. These people were getting better, but it was temporary, and it would wear off, and they would need to come back. And if you followed them over time, which the energy healers often did not, if you followed them over time, they did feel better or maybe they did even look cured. Maybe they even had a scan that showed that something did actually reverse on a radiological scan. However, very often it did come back.<\/span><\/p>\n

I came to have a totally different idea of, for example, how to treat cancer. If I were to get cancer, I can tell\u2014and again, I want to be really careful not to let anybody give their power away to me, but I\u2019m just speaking for myself. If I were to get cancer, I would go to the best oncologist I could find to have the best cutting-edge cancer treatment that I could find. I would go tank myself up with as many of these sacred medicine energy transfusions as I could afford.<\/span><\/p>\n

I say that because I recognize that many of these practices, experiences, and healing sessions are luxury goods that are not covered by insurance and are not necessarily available to everyone, which is part of what I\u2019m trying to address in my new nonprofit Heal At Last. And I would go to my, I go to a therapist in Internal Family Systems. I also have seen a therapist who was an Advanced Integrative Therapy, or AIT, therapist. I also would make sure that I was actively working on any traumas that could be leaking my life force and making me vulnerable to begin with.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I say that\u2014let me be a little bit nerd-scientist here for a second, because if I got cancer, that would be evidence to me that first of all, my immune system has broken down because we all make cancer cells every day. And if our immune systems are in good shape, we are fighting the cancer to the point that we\u2019re not developing symptoms, we\u2019re developing a tumor. It would mean to me that probably something had happened in my body that had made me at risk of chronic inflammation, which we are finding is another holy grail of disease that almost every disease can be boiled down to being a side effect of chronic inflammation. And we have some very good, at least early, data showing that trauma survivors have a greater risk of chronic inflammation, which basically makes them at greater risk of almost every disease.<\/span><\/p>\n

I would know my immune system has broken down; I probably have chronic inflammation in my body. This also is going to impact probably my microbiome, my gut system, that I might have a more difficult time taking in appropriate nourishment and keeping out toxins that might be crossing the bowel wall and leading to even more chronic inflammation. And this can become a catch-22 that becomes very multifactorial. Again, I\u2019m not saying that it\u2019s in the mind even\u2014that it is in the gut, it is in the inflammatory system, it\u2019s in the immune system, it\u2019s in the nervous system. And so that would be a sign that most likely my nervous system is either hanging out in the sympathetic fight or flight stress response or it\u2019s hanging out in the dorsal vagal branch of the vagus nerve in the parasympathetic, and something needs to happen to help me move back into that ventral vagal rest and repair, restore and relax aspect of the parasympathetic nervous system.<\/span><\/p>\n

I would be wanting a multidisciplinary approach that would not only help get rid of the disease that might kill me right away, whether that means surgery or chemotherapy or radiation or some other cutting-edge immunotherapy or something that conventional medicine might offer me. But also, how am I going to restore my immune system, treat the chronic inflammation, heal the gut, improve my nutrition, and make sure that I\u2019m being very proactive about bringing my nervous system into that ventral vagal, which would potentially include further trauma treatment? That\u2019s the opposite of an oversimplified, like, \u201cYou can heal yourself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>Sure. Well, first of all, I really appreciate, Lissa, you talking about it in terms of how you would go about treating yourself. I think that\u2019s really useful using yourself as the subject. From my understanding and from this conversation working with what you call these energy transfusion practices, we shared the example of going to a qigong healer or a faith healer or somewhere where you\u2019d pay for someone else to heal you. But in the book <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>, you also write about dance and creative expression and being in nature and all kinds of ways we could receive fresh Qi or life force without having to pay another person to help us. We could dance in our room or whatever is needed.<\/span><\/p>\n

But OK, moving on. So you would do these energy transfusion practices, you would treat your chronic inflammation and you would work psychologically to get to the root of the trauma. You also shared, and this is the part I want to ask you about that you\u2019d go to an oncologist. And at the beginning of <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>, you have a whole list of these very intriguing and I would say challenging paradoxes of healing that you have come to see that there are all of these paradoxes when it comes to the mystery of healing. One of them, you write, \u201cConventional medicine can save lives, and conventional medicine is the third highest cause of death in the United States.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>Before COVID. I have to add that now, before COVID.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>Before COVID. OK. How does a well-informed human approach conventional medicine in such a way that in terms of this paradox, they use conventional medicine to help save their life and not be a cause of death?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>It\u2019s such an important question, Tami, and I begin the book, <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i> begins the book with a story of my own healing journey when I had a significant, potentially life-threatening injury from a dog bite right over my femoral artery. It did not get my femoral artery, or I would\u2019ve died, because I was very far from a hospital where they could have done an emergency blood transfusion and stop the bleeding. It would\u2019ve taken too long for a helicopter to get to where I was. I wouldn\u2019t have survived it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Given that I did survive it and it did not actually nick my femoral artery, I was basically told by conventional medicine when I had the injury looked at that it was not going to close that I was going to need multiple plastic surgeries and skin grafts in order to close the very thick open wound on my inner thigh right over my femoral artery just by my groin. And I relied upon what in the book I call my whole health intelligences. These are four different intelligences, but I think this sort of divine self that we all have inside, it\u2019s the responsibility of that aspect of our being to orchestrate these intelligences in order to make good medical decisions. Those are mental intelligence, somatic intelligence, intuitive intelligence, and emotional intelligence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mental intelligence is critical thinking and making decisions based on statistics and accurate information and evidence-based medicine and logical thought processes and things like that. Certainly, I am pro-science, I am pro-evidence, I am pro-data, but that\u2019s only one of my intelligences. And so, intuitive intelligences, this was coming in. It was just very clear when I had this injury: \u201cNo, that\u2019s not the way we\u2019re going to do this. We\u2019re not doing surgery.\u201d However, I did not turn my back on conventional medicine all together. I went to a wound healing specialist who was also a Buddhist and longtime meditator, a medical doctor, who was in the charity clinic where the people [go] who can\u2019t afford multiple plastic surgeries, who are dependent upon good wound care in order to try to get help with their very difficult wounds. I was referred there by somebody in one of my spiritual communities who\u2019s also a medical doctor and an energy healer.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was incredibly grateful for the technology of what she was able to offer me in the realm of cutting-edge wound healing without surgery. But again, that was coming from an intuitive hit that I got and the emotions that I was feeling in my emotional intelligence when I was trying to make this decision and the feelings in my gut, my somatic intelligence, my body\u2019s knowing. And it literally felt like my wound knowing it was very localized, it was like my wound was telling me what it needed. And I was having dreams that were giving me very specific guidance and information that felt like they were coming from my wound. And I was getting all this imagery. It was very bizarre.<\/span><\/p>\n

I guess that\u2019s the easy answer. And there\u2019s a lot more information in the book about how to tune into those different intelligences in order to navigate our way. So when I say I would go to an oncologist, that doesn\u2019t mean I would get surgery or chemo or radiation. It means I would want an expert to consult with me and give me that mental intelligence information to educate me as an expert in their area of mastery, because I\u2019m not an oncologist, I\u2019m an OB-GYN. And I would include that as part of my decision making. I can\u2019t say that I would do those or not. It would depend in the moment upon the orchestration of those intelligences when I was making those decisions.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the case of my dog bite, I wound up using aspects of conventional medicine, the technology for wound healing with energy healers that were working with me, with trauma therapists who were making sure I didn\u2019t get PTSD or a phobia from the dog bite injury, with my spiritual healing practices. One of the indigenous healers I was working with was sending me bear root to put on the wound. And I was taking a special high collagen, high protein diet to help my body repair this wound. I was taking supplements to try to prevent infection. And I got a vaccination to make sure I didn\u2019t get tetanus. So I was doing all of that at once.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>I love hearing about the whole health intelligences, all four, mental, intuitive, emotional, somatic. I love that, Lissa. And when the orchestration is going well and beautiful music is being created, it sounds terrific. My question for you is what happens when the mental intelligence in us is saying one thing and let\u2019s just say our intuitive sense is telling another? I can tell you in my own experience, I always go with my intuitive sense, but I\u2019m overriding sometimes mental information to prioritize intuition. I was curious what you think about this when our whole health intelligences don\u2019t agree.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>This is such an important question. And I think we saw the risk of this play out in exaggerated polarization in the past two years during the pandemic, because what we saw is people maybe that had a leaning towards trusting conventional medicine and science saying, \u201cFollow the science,\u201d and they\u2019re quoting the data and read the statistics, to the absolute exclusion of somatic, emotional or intuitive intelligence, right? It was lopsided in the party line of public health guidelines, conventional medicine. That\u2019s all there is, folks. That was triggering to me because I\u2019m like, \u201cWow.\u201d And I also was broadcasting and promoting get vaccinated, follow public health guidelines, like, \u201cGo to the doctor if you get COVID.\u201d I\u2019m not in any way against conventional medicine, but to be that lopsided is problematic.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the flip side, I saw, even more dangerously, people saying, \u201cWell, I\u2019m checking in with my intuition, I\u2019m checking in with my body, and my body is saying, vaccine is not good for me and COVID is a hoax. It doesn\u2019t even exist. I\u2019m checking with my intuition. It\u2019s fake. It\u2019s the fake media.\u201d And then there\u2019s the whole conspiracy theory realm, that some of those people tended to go way off the deep end. One of the paradoxes of healing that I said is keep an open mind, but don\u2019t be so open that your brains fall out.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the others was trust your intuition and follow the science and apply critical thinking or believe in magic and miracles and avoid indulging in magical thinking and denial. Lead with your heart and use your head. Germ theory and terrain theory\u2014we don\u2019t have to choose between these. But what I hear in the question, and it\u2019s such an important question\u2014what if those intelligences are giving you opposite guidance?<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, and I don\u2019t even know if I say this directly in <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>, but this is actually what I practice. Let\u2019s say my body is telling me one thing and my intuition is agreeing with my body and my mind is disagreeing with both of them and my emotions are just scared because my other intelligences can\u2019t come to agreement, that\u2019s when I go into Internal Family Systems and I start working with parts because in the Internal Family Systems trauma healing, spiritual path, shamanic path, whatever you want to call it, the way we would organize around parts that are polarized inside of us is that we might all have a school bus of inner parts, of inner children, of traumatized parts, of parts that are fighting each other all the time. And it\u2019s just a matter of who\u2019s driving the bus. We want that divine self or that inner pilot light as the mature adult driving the bus or that orchestra that\u2019s orchestrating these whole health intelligences that\u2019s making sense interpreting what\u2019s coming in from those intelligences.<\/span><\/p>\n

We can all relate to these inter-polarizations because all of us, I\u2019m sure everyone who\u2019s listening has had a part that makes a new year\u2019s resolution and then a part that like to weeks later breaks the new year\u2019s resolution and then a part that comes in and tells you you\u2019re a worthless piece of shit, you have no discipline, you can\u2019t ever keep your promises. And then we feel so worthless and ashamed that we go and do the bad thing again, it\u2019s this hopeless cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of IFS, it\u2019s really effective for addictions, for example, because we can work with the polarized parts inside, the part that maybe wants to be in recovery and then the part that doesn\u2019t want to be in recovery. They\u2019re polarized with each other, but that which is guiding them is larger than that smaller polarization. In the case of making a medical decision, let\u2019s say there\u2019s a part in the body that is giving you one bit of guidance and your intuition is giving you another bit of guidance and your mental intelligence or your mind is giving you another bit of intelligence and your emotions are giving you a whole lot. I love Karla McLaren\u2019s work and talk about it a lot in <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>. We get all these gifts of information and in the energy healing world, I realized that a lot of what the energy healers were doing is that they were working with that emotional intelligence with highly attuned, highly sensitive empath skills to use the gifts of those emotions.<\/span><\/p>\n

If we can think of those intelligences as parts, and if we do, there may be multiple parts, right? So, somatic intelligence might have, well, your solar plexus is telling you one thing, but your right upper quadrant is telling you something else and the left side of your back is giving you a different piece of information. The school bus can get quite full of parts. But what I have found in myself is that there\u2019s a mysterious, and this is the part I can\u2019t really explain, there\u2019s a mysterious way of working with all of those parts so that none of them are exiled and none of them are given too much purchase either. But it\u2019s almost like casting a vote, like a democratic process.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I\u2019m working with my parts, I see it almost like I\u2019m sitting at a conference table and I\u2019m like, \u201cOkay, who\u2019s here? Who has a vote about what we should do about this dog bite injury?\u201d And it\u2019s like I\u2019ll see 20 parts that have an opinion. And it\u2019s like I\u2019m holding court. I\u2019m like, \u201cThank you. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you\u2019re scared of. Tell me what you\u2019re intuiting. Tell me what you think I should do.\u201d And then this leader, because IFS is about self-leadership, this leader takes all of that into account without siding with one or overriding another to make a larger picture decision.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>It\u2019s really good, but here\u2019s the thing I\u2019m tuning into. I thought it was very brave of you at the beginning of the book to list these paradoxes of healing. And now you\u2019re talking about all the different parts of us that could come into voice and give their vote. And I\u2019m going to read a couple more of these paradoxes just to make my point here: Be proactive about taking back your power and go with the flow. Stay hopeful and be realistic. We\u2019re one and we\u2019re separate. Seek pain relief and feel your pain.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think most people when they\u2019re feeling in a good, resourced space\u2014because that makes sense, that makes sense, seek pain relief and feel your pain. I need to do both of these things. But when we\u2019re ill, when we\u2019re maybe diagnosed with a disease that could kill us, I think there\u2019s a natural thing inside where we want to go to an MD, Lissa Rankin MD. We want to go to the MD, and we want the MD to tell us what to do, like, \u201cNo, I don\u2019t want a lot of paradoxes, I don\u2019t want all these different intelligences. I want a medical doctor to tell me what to do. I\u2019m not well-resourced right now.\u201d How do you respond to that to people who are really suffering from an illness and \u201cOh my God, now I have to figure all this out?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>I guess, first of all, I want to say that\u2019s OK. That is a perfectly valid way to be. I mean, if somebody is so under-resourced and scared and confused and overwhelmed, that\u2019s a very common reaction to a scary diagnosis, if the only thing somebody is capable of doing in that moment is giving a 100 percent of their power away to their doctor and saying, \u201cI cannot handle this. Please make this decision for me.\u201d That is OK. So, I just want to validate that there are certainly people who do that, and doctors are used to that and there is nothing wrong with that.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, here\u2019s my paradox. The problem is that if you\u2019re giving your power away to a doctor, your doctor is going to be, unless you have an exceptionally gifted doctor\u2014and they are out there. Let\u2019s say your doctor is extraordinarily attuned to their own whole health intelligences and they are able to not only digest and filter all of the mental intelligence information from the medical journals and from the data points and the statistics and all of that, but they can also use their somatic, emotional, and intuitive intelligence to individualize the treatment for you. However, that is rare. Part of that is that medical school, if somebody is born intuitive, somatic and emotional, it gets traumatized out of doctors in medical school.<\/span><\/p>\n

The reality is that most of the time, if you\u2019re giving all of your power away to a doctor and saying, \u201cDecide for me,\u201d you are at the mercy of the statistic. And you are not a statistic. In the world of statistics, we would say you are an N-of-1, you are one unique individual. And the way that we make medical decisions is based not on unique individuals, but on groups of people who fall into the mean. And unfortunately, that also means that they\u2019re mostly white, and they\u2019re mostly male. And they may, especially if you are a brown female, that may not be an accurate statistic for you. So, we might be making a choice that might be based on the mean of a population that might look nothing like you and might not include you.\u00a0 So, you might not get the best possible medical treatment if you give all of your power away to your doctor.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, again, this is where I think those energy transfusions can come in. If somebody is seeing their oncologist, for example, let\u2019s say you\u2019ve just been given a cancer diagnosis, one of the most important things that I would say, and I say this with all disclaimers, like all medical legal disclaimers and such is that an oncologist has a tendency to rush people into treatment, to rush them to make a very quick decision, because legitimately there\u2019s the fear that if we don\u2019t rush, something could progress quickly and you could die quickly. However, it\u2019s also true that if we slow things down, things could start to reverse slowly or quickly.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the things that I can say I would probably do is I would probably slow things way down. I would say, \u201cOK, I\u2019m overwhelmed, I need time to take this in. I\u2019m going to research this. I want to listen to the statistics so that I can understand cognitively what I\u2019m facing. And I want to take some time to resource myself so that I can tank myself up a little bit so that I\u2019m not so triggered and overwhelmed and terrified and un-resourced, so that I can start to let some of those other intelligence come online in myself.\u201d And maybe that means I\u2019m going to go, if I can afford it, I\u2019m going to go and I\u2019m going to get some treatments, maybe from some energy healers, maybe from some trauma therapists, maybe I\u2019m going to see the neo shaman that\u2019s going to do a session, a ritual or ceremony with me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe I\u2019m going to go to my dance and let the community of dancers that I dance with come and help me. Maybe I\u2019m going to do some of my art to see if some of my other intelligences come online. I\u2019m an artist. So, I often get my information when I\u2019m painting or when I\u2019m writing or when I\u2019m dancing or when I\u2019m out in nature. And let me slow things down so that I can start to allow some of those intelligences to come back online.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>Very terrific answer. Thank you, Lissa. Now the subtitle of <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i> is <\/span>A Doctor\u2019s Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of Healing<\/span><\/i>. At the end of the book you have a section on \u201cHealing the Collective\u201d and how when you started your doctor\u2019s quest to unravel the mysteries of healing, you were really thinking about healing more in an individual sense, healing one\u2019s self, healing an individual. Tell me what shifted and what brought your thinking more to this whole topic of collective healing and the importance of healing the collective.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>Well, it\u2019s funny you say that because I just started working on a blog post today, Tami, called \u201cWhy We Can\u2019t Heal Ourselves While Traumatizing Each Other, and How the Wellness World Can Be Overly Self-Obsessed.\u201d I think we\u2019re really seeing that right now with what\u2019s going on in Russia and Ukraine, we\u2019re seeing it with what\u2019s going on with the pandemic and with Black Lives Matter and all of the social justice issues that have come up in the past couple of years, to suggest that I can heal myself as an individual unit, unrelated to my family, my city, my country, my planet, and every sentient and nature being that exists on this planet is obviously a fallacy. That doesn\u2019t mean that as a separate monad\u2014I\u2019m using the words of some of the energy healers\u2014as a separate unit of energy that\u2019s connected to the whole through the energetic grid; it doesn\u2019t mean that there aren\u2019t things that I can do to improve my individual outcome; but to suggest that I can in any way separate myself from that grid and not still be at its mercy is an absolute fallacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was working with one of the doctors in our training program for doctors, the Whole Health Medicine Institute, and she was an African American woman. She had this devastating epiphany where she realized, \u201cI\u2019m doing all of this work and I\u2019m trying to apply all these mind-body practices and all these trauma healing practices and all this nutrition and all this functional medicine and everything to my African American population. And none of it is enough, none of it is going to touch the impact on their nervous system of being a Black person in America. And she was just feeling really helpless around that.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s true that we can\u2019t separate ourselves from the sea in which we\u2019re swimming, the collective trauma [that we\u2019re in]. I really appreciate the work that Thomas H\u00fcbl is doing around that. I know you published his book <\/span>Healing Collective Trauma<\/span><\/i> as well. And that is very true. Another paradox of healing here, we can also do everything that is within our power, whether that\u2019s being proactive about using some of these <\/span>Sacred Medicine <\/span><\/i>tools or improving our nutrition or giving up our bad habits and doing our trauma healing, but also what can we do with our activism? What can we do to make an impact to be part of healing the collective, whether that\u2019s doing the trauma healing, collective trauma healing or generational healing in ourselves, which I do believe also impacts the whole, but also not to leave it at the level of the self?<\/span><\/p>\n

We need to be out there protesting. We need to be voting. We need to be putting our dollars in the right places. We need to be being willing to make sacrifices on the front lines at the level of policy. And this is why I\u2019m like, well, I can talk about this all I want, but my feet on the ground activism is working on this nonprofit to try to democratize healing and make sure that we can bring sacred medicine practices to anybody who has been traumatized and is dealing with a chronic illness that conventional medicine can\u2019t help. I don\u2019t know if that answered your question.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>It did. It did. I mean, we can\u2019t be healthy if we\u2019re swimming in toxic waters all the time. Makes me think of a fish. How could a fish be healthy if the ocean that it\u2019s swimming in is terribly polluted and toxic; it\u2019s impossible. I think it\u2019s such an important point you make at the end of <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>. OK, Lissa, I have one final question for you. In the book, you address the reader again and again, \u201cDear reader, dear reader.\u201d It\u2019s so beautiful. I feel it from you as you\u2019re writing. This is going to be the hardest question I\u2019ve asked you. If your dear reader could get one thing from <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>\u2014because I think your dear reader\u2019s going to get dozens and dozens and dozens of things from reading <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>\u2014what would be your one highest hope for your dear reader?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>Well, I\u2019m touched that you asked the question that way because what came to me first was that it sounds so trite and oversimplified, but it\u2019s love, because when I say, \u201cDear reader,\u201d really, I\u2019m feeling the dearness of my care for the people that I have devoted my whole life to trying to ease the suffering of the vulnerable. And there are limits to what I\u2019ve been able to personally achieve in that realm. And I feel, as an empath myself, I feel the suffering of those who feel helpless and powerless and frustrated and devastated and terrified. And it\u2019s tragic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of what fueled my desire to write this book and to do this research was that I don\u2019t want it to be that way. I want us to be in a world where there isn\u2019t so much suffering and these are very young and innocent parts in me that just want everybody to be OK and want everybody to get along and want everybody to be out of pain. But what I can say is that\u2014spoiler alert\u2014I did not find the panacea. I was not able to hack healing and be able to say, \u201cHere\u2019s the miracle elixir, I have found the holy grail and you will be guaranteed to be cured of all that ails you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But back to what I was saying about the placebo effect is what we do have is we have each other. And there is, I found, for example, tremendous beauty in places like Lourdes, when I was there in a sea of suffering, surrounded by people who had their hearts open, splayed and vulnerable on their knees in front of the Virgin Mary praying for a miracle and praying for each other. And 80 percent of the people at Lourdes\u2014I\u2019m making up this statistic\u2014but a significant proportion of the people that go to Lourdes are not actually sick. They\u2019re there to help the ones that are, and they\u2019re holding this container of love and support and safety and co-regulation and positive belief and faith.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even as I say that I get a little teary because it was just so intimate and so beautiful to be able to be like, \u201cWe are all in this together.\u201d And I don\u2019t mean that in the way that some of the people use that in an exaggerated way to say, I\u2019m not personally responsible for doing my own hard work and being part of the collective changes.<\/span><\/p>\n

But when we can touch the suffering in ourselves and extend that to hold empathy and compassion for the suffering of others and to feel\u2014I guess when I said, \u201cDear reader,\u201d I wanted every person who reads this book to feel every other person who will ever read this book and every person who has ever gone to Lourdes and walked a labyrinth and gone to a meditation retreat and been to the shaman and been to the healer and humbled ourselves before the great mystery with the desire to ease our suffering. If we can somehow touch in a loving way those parts of ourselves and also those parts of other people that are also touched in that way, there is something there that I think can\u2019t be bottled up, and we can\u2019t sell it, and we can\u2019t exaggerate it, but it\u2019s real. And yeah, I guess that\u2019s what I want \u201cdear reader\u201d to mean.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>I\u2019ve been speaking with Lissa Rankin. She\u2019s the author of the new book <\/span>Sacred Medicine: A Doctor\u2019s Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of Healing<\/span><\/i>. It\u2019s a book that was 10 years in the making. It started out as 250,000 words and got concentrated into the <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i> book that you can find today. With Sounds True, Lissa has also created an audio series called <\/span>Your Inner Pilot Light<\/span><\/i> and a previous book, <\/span>The Daily Flame: 365 Love Letters from Your Inner Pilot Light<\/span><\/i>. Lissa, thanks so much for all of your work and your devotion to <\/span>Sacred Medicine<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LR: <\/b>It\u2019s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me here.<\/span><\/p>\n

TS: <\/b>Thanks for listening to <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i>. You can read a full transcript of today\u2019s interview at resources2.soundstrue.com\/podcast. That\u2019s resources2.soundstrue.com\/podcast. If you\u2019re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. And if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i> a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","meta":{"_expiration-date-status":"","_expiration-date":0,"_expiration-date-type":"","_expiration-date-categories":[],"_expiration-date-options":[]},"class_list":["post-19521","transcript","type-transcript","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nIs There A Holy Grail Of Healing - Transcript | Sounds True<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Read the full transcript from this Sounds True conversation with Is There A Holy Grail Of Healing. 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