Ep. 94- Guided Self Healing with Dr. Andrew Hahn

This is the You Winning Life Podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence.

Each episode, we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes.

Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, trainer and certified entrepreneur coach, Jason Wasser.

So the universe is always working out in our favor because today's guest, Dr. Andrew Han, is a psychologist, is a kinesiologist, brings together Western paradigms with Eastern philosophy and Eastern psychology. Bringing spirituality, archetypes, Enneagram, guided self-healing, which is a program that he has created and is facilitating and teaching, coming all the way from Waltham, Massachusetts, in the beautiful, beautiful Northeast, especially as the weather is changing right now. So welcome, and thanks for, thanks for spending some time today.

Thanks, Jason Wasser. We used to be calling ourselves Guided Self-Healing. We now are— we're now called Life Centered Therapy. And Guided Self-Healing is for people who, um, want to learn this for themselves. So we have a, we have a program for people who just want to be able to use it for themselves and their friends. And we also have a training program for professionals. And the whole umbrella is now called Life Centered Therapy. We changed our name, but, uh, Very cool.

Good. So, and when you— so anybody who, as we go into our conversations, as those who've been listening to previous episodes know kind of where I'm hanging out in the integrative wellness and psychology and natural wellness and functional medicine, and those who've heard me talk about NeuroEmotional Technique and my passion and love for that modality as a therapist, I think that today is gonna bring a lot of really cool and exciting stuff to the table. So let's reverse engineer the conversation. Let's kind of, you know, you have a very, you know, I don't want to say, but like it's right in the box. You went to Harvard and then you went to Hahnemann University for a PsyD in clinical psychology, and then you jumped into Enneagram and Eastern psychology, Eastern spirituality. So walk me through from starting off undergraduate and graduate school What was— where were you hanging out in your mind then, and where did those shifts, uh, and changes start to happen for you, and what brought that up in order for that to happen?

Okay, beautiful short question. It's not a short answer, but I'll try.

Of course.

Um, I was always, um, a little bit non-mainstream, I guess I would say. When I was 9 years old, I woke up from a dream, and I'm gonna— I, and I went over to my desk and I wrote a poem. And actually, this poem is about the work I do and about me. I'll tell you the poem. I don't usually do this in podcasts, but you said start at the beginning. So this is kind of the beginning. So this is the poem. It's called Memories. And it goes like this. You remember things forgotten. You dream of tales untold. Your memory reminds you of your childhood days of old. Now you have your children and they have children too. And all you have is memories of things you would have liked to do. Words that were never spoken come back to you like then. All the things you would have done could you do it over again. So I would say that was a pretty strange poem for a 9-year-old. So, you know, but that poem is actually all about the work I do because it's all about remembering things forgotten and then opening up to new possibilities that you could have never known if you could go back and transform everything. And that you can— since the past is living in the present, you can change the past, you can change the future. And really, I always thought that poem was about my, you know, my Enneagram personality because I'm a romantic. So I thought it was about, you know, craving what I never had. But really, on a deeper level, I think it's really about my life work. So that was there. And Yeah, I did go to Harvard. My mother was a clinical psychologist. My father was a lawyer. And I was stuck, you know. But I always wanted to be a clinical psychologist. So I went that route. And then I went and got my doctorate at Hahnemann. And I got a PsyD. And I had wonderful training there with a woman who was— a woman named Mara Salvini-Palazzoli's only student because it was her translator. And she was an amazing family therapist. And I had the head of their psychoanalytic institute was my supervisor. I had really cool things. And I'll tell you, I mean, I don't usually tell long stories like this, but I had one thing that happened when I was there. And there was this really cool psychiatrist who was different from everybody else. And what he said was essentially, he said something, he said, well, someone said to me, I fell into something. And the guy said, what was it like when you landed? And I said, this man is listening in a way that nobody else is listening because he's listening literally. So that was sort of there. Um, and when I got halfway through Hanuman and I was learning all this stuff, I was thinking, uh, why am I here, kind of. Um, and I had a vision, and it was a vision of like Frost poem Two Roads. And I knew one of them was going to be edgy psychology, and I knew the other one was going to be totally over an abyss. And I had a sense someday I was going to go over the abyss. So, um, that's his background. So then I get my doctorate And I come and I become, uh, I become an associate professor, assistant professor at a graduate program. I become the training director in a clinic. And, um, then a lot of things happened, but, um, I started having unusual experiences that are generally called psi experiences and they opened up for me like a window and they ended. This was, uh, in just the end of 1990, beginning of 1991. They ended with an experience where a friend of mine had gone off and had left the UN. She was the head of all NGOs at the UN, and I'd had an amazing experience with her there that was totally psychic. And she goes off on spiritual retreat to the Self-Realization Fellowship, if you guys know that. Yogananda's work, The Autobiography of a Yogi. She became a disciple, and I said, I have to go visit her. So I go out there and visit her, and the day before— I mean, I tell a lot of the same stories because, like, they're dreams to me. I forget them, you know. It's like I have these amazing things happen every day, and people say, why do you keep telling the same stories? I said, they're like dreams. If I don't write them down right away, they're just, like, gone. But anyway, I tell this story because it's really the story of what changed things for me. She had fallen the day before we were there. And she had done something horrendous to her ankle. It was really bad. It was swollen. It was discolored. And she was in extremely bad pain. Like, she was hobbling. And I— but she wanted to take me to this unbelievably magical heart chanting service at the Self-Realization Fellowship. So we're just chanting for an hour and a half, like, from our heart chakras, which I didn't know heart chakras at the time. But anyway, and then we start walking around the fellowship and we get to these two benches and she says, I can't walk another step. You're going to have to carry me out of here. I'm I'm in such— and she was leaning on me, but she said, "I can't even do that." So she sits down, and the two benches are kind of like this, and she sits down at the end of one, and I go all the way around so she can put her— I'm thinking she can put her leg on my leg. And I sit down, and I am flooded with something like— the best way I could describe it was if you had a sun that totally filled up your whole field. So it was just everywhere, and I knew it wasn't just the sun because I knew where the sun was. And it was like this unbelievable radiance. And so I said, Roshan, give me your ankle. And I had her put it there and I just started channeling that energy through my hands without touching her to her ankle. And I did that for about 5 seconds and I had a sense it was time to be done. And she says to me, you know, I can, I can see auras, don't you? And I said, Roshan, this is 1991. I said, Roshan, I'm a nice Jewish boy from Boston. What do I know from auras? And she said, are you aware that there's pure light that's coming down from the crown of your head into the center of your chest and out your hands to my ankle. And, um, I said to her, I can't see it the way you're talking about it, but I know what you say is true. And I could feel the vibration of it. And then we look down and there's no discoloration, there's no swelling. She gets up and she walks and there's no pain. And as I say in these stories, I say, we're not in Kansas anymore. Exactly. So then I said, I have to go and find out what the hell is going on here. And I spent 2 years studying wherever I was led. So I did mystery trainings, and I did, uh, healing through touch trainings, and I did Reiki, and I did Joe Ray, and I did, I did a lot of— I did, uh, what are called past life regression therapy trainings, except for the fact that I think what people call past life regression isn't past life regression, and I think that's very important. I did psychosynthesis. I studied the Enneagram intensively. I did all that. Okay, so I have this whole background now in energy and sort of traditional psychology and edgy psychology, and I was, I was really into depth psychology, and I, I was doing a lot of archetypal stuff. And then I have an acquaintance, she said, you got to go see this woman, she's doing miracles in New Jersey. And I said, well, I can believe in miracles in New Jersey. But it turns out, and this is the story I was told, this is 1993, this is like long time before.

Well, first of all, the miracle part is one thing, but in New Jersey, you know, it's what I think.

I mean, I saw miracles in Boston, what the heck. I mean, you know, but it turns out— well, this is the story I was told. The woman whose name— the person who was running the workshop was named Judith, and Judith, um, had one of the participants had such a bad case of asthma she could barely walk up the stairs. That's what I was told. She was— the woman was wheezing so badly they weren't sure she could make it up with just a few stairs. So Judith does a session with her and she uses this thing called applied kinesiology, which in 1993 I certainly had never heard of. I'd never heard of muscle testing in 1993, but that was soon to end. And she has her tap all over her body. And I, of course, never heard of Roger Callahan or what was he called, that Callahan tapping, which became Thought Field Therapy, and then the whole deal with EFT and TFT, if your world knows that, and then that stuff.

The energy psychology stuff.

Yeah. I don't know what she's doing. And she's having her tap all over her body. My acquaintance doesn't really understand it. And she taps all over her her body, and then she muscle tests. In her framework, it says it's cleared. So Judith, having a strong personality, says to the woman, why don't you go outside and see if you feel different? The woman goes outside, she starts to walk, then she starts to run. She runs back and she's totally winded and exhilarated, and she said, um, this is like miraculous because I haven't been able to run a step. I can barely walk, and now I'm running. She said, I haven't been able to run a step in 7 years. So I thought that was pretty wild. So I said, I want to go and find out what Judith is doing, because I was finding out anything I was led to. And it turned out Judith lived 10 miles away from me in Massachusetts. And what Judith had done, if you're, if you, because you know, your, your audience may or may not know these worlds. Judith had no psychological background, but she was a, she was a neurobiologist who became very interested in brain function. And by via that, she became interested in NLP. And via NLP, she became interested in craniosacral therapy. And then she found Callahan. And started learning about tapping. And she also found this other woman who is an extraordinary craniosacral therapist named Mary Louise Muller. And Judith took what she learned from Mary Louise and craniosacral therapy and Callahan and some original research she had done on violence and lost traumas, which everybody should read her paper, it's extraordinary, and I don't give that lightly. And she'd started doing a training, and I was her first psychologist who ever did the training with her. And I came in with all of this archetypal psychology and all this stuff about pattern and all the stuff about other lifetimes And we became a team, and for a year at White Heat, we started mapping out universal patterns in the universe. Everything that is sort of mythic patterns that are universal stories that people might not be aware of. And, and Judith had a fairly simple protocol. She had taken Mary Louise's craniosacral protocol and had added stuff from chiropractic and a variety of other things, and she had a simple protocol. And then we became partners and for a while. And I guess what I can say is, uh, we did a lot of work together. And then I'm a soul psychologist basically who's interested in, uh, the mysteries in depth. And Judith is a neurobiologist who is interested in the medical model. So she was thinking about fixing and curing, and I was thinking about healing. And the two models didn't really go together, so we went our separate ways. But By then I had studied intensively the Enneagram, and I came up with this model that had integrated all of these things but into a very simple way. And like, I could tell people at that point, I could say, you know, I can teach you how to do this in a day, and you'll have practices you can do. Because we had a 17-year-old kid who did one of our first trainings because she was there when her mother was there, and her mother was an organizer for me out in California. This was like 1998, and she got hooked up with somebody like you. I mean, a really senior healer. And the healer looked at me and said, you're going to send me off on a dyad with her? And I said, uh-huh, because I muscle tested it and said yes. And an hour and a half later, she came back and said, this is the deepest healing I've ever had in my life. And the 17-year-old said, well, I had an open mind and I just could read a protocol. So like, you know, and yet I've been doing this for 27 years and I'm still learning stuff. So both are true.

Well, it's interesting, one of my quick stories about one of my conferences is that when for NET, um, it was one of the conferences where they— you can bring a guest. And the person I happened to work with during this breakout was a colleague of mine who was a chiropractor, uh, his wife. So she was very familiar with muscle testing because she basically ran the practice. And, um, obviously they would do this modality at home. And I had one of probably— at many of the conferences, it's— I don't know how many have been to, 30-something over the last many years. Probably one of the most deep, aha, energetic, emotional shifts because of something that came up in that experience. And this is one of the things that I love about what you're talking about is that sometimes the process and the intellectualizing gets in the way versus being present in the moment and experiencing it with someone who doesn't have all of this technical intellectual acrobatics that they have to jump through.

Right.

And I think that's a really profound— when it talks to when you're saying about self-healing versus fixing in the medical model, which is where, right, you and I are very aligned with that, where we're talking about that healing part. So from there, what came next for you?

Well, what came next is I then developed my own framework, which at the time we called guided self-healing, and I started doing it with people, and I started getting really remarkable results. But I mean, the thing I want to say, you know, um, Jason, is I think on one level it's very layered, but another level it's very simple. Like, you know, people— like, if someone says, why do people come to therapy? Right? I think you can answer that question really in two sentences. Why do they come to therapy? Because there's something they couldn't handle and integrate. That's the whole deal. I don't care if you call it chronic fatigue. I don't care if it's chronic pain. I don't care if it's autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, bad relationships, alienation. I think it's one thing. So I think suffering and trauma are the same thing. And so when you could handle and integrate everything and you could say yes to anything then you're free. And what I'm really inviting people into is freedom. So if that's what— why people come, they suffer because there's something they can't handle, which is trauma, whatever they can't handle, whether it's too bad or too good or too anything. Because if something's too good, they can't handle it either, and it's kind of like a trauma. But most traumas, because something is too bad—

would we look at it through the lens of overwhelm at some level? Because, right, it's an overwhelm in either, like you said, too good, or it's overwhelmed because there's something that's traumatic happened. But I would kind of maybe niche that down to like, how are you overwhelmed with whatever this is, and that's causing you not to be proactive and moving you into a reactive place?

Well, exactly. But, and that's, well, that's what therapy is, is to master what it is, whether it was too much or too bad or too good or whatever it was for you that couldn't be handled and integrated. So you say, well, why do people come to therapy? Because there's something that couldn't be handled and integrated. What is therapy? Mastering it. How do you do it? It's very simple to say. Here's what I would say: when there's something that can't be handled and integrated, in that moment a sensation is born. So just like Jason's born in a moment, the sensation is born in a moment. And so then what happens is, once that sensation is born, you go from free-flowing energy to dense energy. You go from E to M, right? And you can feel the dense energy in your body. It's called the discomfort. Discomfort, right? So I would say, of course, every discomfort is a narrative, and every narrative that can't be integrated has a reciprocal discomfort or discomforts. So how do you heal it? You choose to become the discomfort. That's all you do. And then what happens is, instead of reliving the story over and over and over again until you finally mastered it, you can choose to become it. You focus all your attention, all your awareness, and you bring all your attention to it and say, I am that sensation while simultaneously I'm the one who is witnessing it and hosting it. And then you go from identifying with that one, which you didn't even know you were identifying with it, to being the one who says, oh, I'm with you, I'm holding you. And then what happens, if it's that simple, then what happens is the sensation just transforms back and it's gone, which is how you can know at the end of 20 minutes if something has changed. And if something has changed Then I will say to somebody, you'll notice one of two things is going to happen. Either your problem goes away or your relationship to it changes to such a degree that you say it's not a big deal. And when you do that with everything, they call you Buddha or Christ. And that's what we're heading towards, is that level of saying yes to life and that nothing can happen to you. So then there's only one problem from my point of view, which is, well, so then what, you know, just to say this, Whatever symptoms you have then, from an ego point of view, from a personal point of view, there's a word for it in our field. It's called it sucks, right? But from a soul point of view, it's an invitation to remembering what couldn't be handled and integrated. So every symptom you have, and literally the way you talk about it, is the story of that sensation, right? And nothing can be outside of the process. Nothing. You can only be inside the process. So for example, people say that people can't get into their bodies, and I say, what do you mean? And they say, well, I ask them what they feel in their body, and they say, I don't feel anything. And I said, they're answering your question. What they're feeling in their body is, I don't feel anything. If you ask them where they feel, I don't feel anything, they'll be able to tell you, right?

Right.

Because that's a sensation. Or if they start up on a process and they say, I can't see anything, and you think they're saying, I can't do the process in 2020— no, they're 200 years ago in a dungeon that's black and somebody's just poked out their eyes. So it's As long as you know that everything is literal and you can't step outside the process, you're going to be better than virtually any therapist that people go to because you'll listen in a whole different way.

Well, and that's what I find on a consistent basis is that clients will tell me over and over again, "Here's where I'm struggling," and I'll have them describe that in their words.

Yeah.

And within their own words, they already give me the answer in how to solve the problem. Them based on the words and the definition and the description that they're using. And I'll literally say that to them and say, "You know, you already gave me the answer." And they're like, "I have no clue what you're talking about." And then I'll verbatim repeat what they said. And they're like, "I don't get it." And I say it again. And then I highlight those words. And then I say, "What is that definition of that specific word to you?" Because, right, we make up our— we're creatures of language and narrative. And people change words' meanings to fit their dominant story that they've always been carrying. And one of the themes that I'm working on, especially with a lot of my young professionals in my weekly classes, is how often are you telling a story of victimhood versus telling a story of empowerment? And then obviously everything that's going to align with that is just going to prove that point even more. So you just build longer momentum in that pathway.

Well, you see, what I would say also, because just pick up on what you say, I think if you have a story of victimhood, that just means you were in a trauma structure where you were a victim. So empowerment for me is to be able to say, I can choose to become the story of the victim as opposed to identifying with it. But then I just go on because I think there are 3 things you have to know that this is what I use muscle testing for. First, someone will come in and they'll say, I'm in a major depression, and I have to find out, is that their true intention, or is it a symptom of a deeper intention? So in our first step, we have to find out why you're really here. And why you think you're here may only be a clue to why you're really here, or it may be why you're here, right? So that's the first thing. And if you don't know why you're here and you can't find it, I have to be able to find it. And that's what I spent my life sort of mapping out, all of the universal themes that I could think of, or in myth, that people could get stuck in that they may never have been aware of. So I can ask, are you in a story of betrayal? I can ask, are you in a story where energy took you over. It's like if you go far and wide and you say, we're going to open to every possibility, including that a little green man in Alpha Centauri put a rod in your ear, because that may be the most elegant, powerful, simple story that would explain your tinnitus, and if we can change that, it goes away. It goes away. So I can— we can do a diagnostic to find out if the thing you say is your problem is your problem, or is a symptom of a deeper problem that's underlying it, which if you could take care of it, you might be able to take care of 6 different things in 20 minutes simultaneously, right?

In one fell swoop. And I want to just remind everybody who's listening that what we're talking about, at least from my perspective— and I don't know if this is the way that you would phrase it to your clients— is the client's emotional reality. It's the story and experience and narrative that they created based on what makes most sense to them within their own psychological world. Whether it's factual or not doesn't necessarily right, in the real world of fact. It's just their own created emotional reality. So I know that when we were going into that world, especially in the world of kinesiology and muscle testing, it doesn't have to be Moses on the mountaintop, right? But it's a lot of metaphors as well of what does this represent to you, right? How does that make sense to you that this could take place? Or what is the meaning of that to you? And how have you been affected by that if that were so?

Well, the only thing I would say on top of that is I actually think it's only in part the client's emotional reality. I actually think that who we all are are multiples, and I actually don't think it's the client's emotional reality. I think it's life's emotional reality as it reveals itself through a sensation. So I never talk with clients. Like, if I said— if, you know, I'd say, you know, Jason, if you said, you know, what's your name— I mean, if I ask you what's your name, you say— you can, you can answer that question. But if I say, Jason, how come you have a major depression, an anxiety disorder, you can't speak in French in front of crowds, you have chronic neck pain and whatever, you'd say, if I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be seeing you. So I think there's some being inside. So I don't want to talk to Jason, I want to talk to whoever that is, because it's their story, it's not Jason's story.

So would you call that more along the lines of innate wisdom?

No, I would call it literal be— I would, I would say I think there's an innate wisdom, I think that's life. Life has its own innate wisdom. And that's when you just know something is true. But I would say that we— when I say we're all multiples, right? If, uh, to take a simple example, if you're having a panic attack, right, because a motorcycle backfires, and you start having a panic attack in my office, and I say, well, what are you feeling in the body? And you say, oh, my heart's pounding. Well, I would say heart pounding is the name of a person. It's not the same as life. It's life revealing itself through something about something that was stuck energy that life is trying to evolve through. So it's revealing itself through heart pounding. So I'm no longer interested in Jason's reality. I'm interested in heart pounding's reality. So all I'm going to do is say, Jason, you become heart pounding, and then whatever comes out of your mouth will be heart pounding's literal story. So I don't want to start metaphorically. I want to start literally. It's way easier to go from the literal to the metaphoric. Like, I'll give you an example. Like, I was doing a demonstration a long time ago at behavioral medicine conference, and we were doing a demonstration. This woman comes up and she, she says, I have this major depression. And she says, I feel weighed down, I feel helpless, I feel hopeless, I can't move, and I— nothing is— there's no hope and nothing can help me, right? So I asked, is that your highest intention? She says no. Says no. So then she says, okay, now I'm starting to hyperventilate, you can see it. And she says, these people are going to kill me. I know they're going to kill me. I know it's crazy. So I say, is that your highest intention? It says no. So I say, all right, can— even though they're not, can you choose to work on them directly? It says no. So I say, can you find what it is? It says no. Can I find what it is? It says yes. So I find out that her highest intention is something we call a death wish, which in this case is a traumatic death in another lifetime that couldn't be handled and integrated. Dissociated. So when I had her say out loud and fully experience, "A part of me wants to die," which means experience dying, right, because it dissociated, she then says, "Oh my God, I'm having this excruciating pain in my neck." So I say, "Okay, you're going to become excruciating pain in neck." She starts doing that and she starts violently wrenching her neck and she says she's on a guillotine and she's facing up and she's weighed down, literally weighed down, they weighed down her legs Right? She's weighed down, she's helpless, she's hopeless, and the only thing she can move is her neck. So when she says, "I'm weighed down, I'm helpless, I'm hopeless, I can't move," she's not speaking metaphorically. She's speaking literally about something that happened to a woman 250 years ago in France. Okay? And then she says, "I'm in front of all these people, and they're throwing things at me, and I'm saying to myself, I will never be in front of a crowd of people again." Right? And, you know, then you can imagine, let's say, You know why she has a story about her chronic neck pain? Because something went bad to her in this lifetime. But really what it is is a template, because she sees this thing coming down in her head, and they put her face up in this thing, which I thought was really cruel, and this thing's coming down and she's screaming and like she's wrenching her neck violently. So you know why she has chronic neck pain. But she has a story about her chronic neck pain, but really it's a story of in her life, I'm trying to get away from something. But she's lived her whole life trying to get away from things, but it has nothing to do with trying to get away from things. It's trying to get away from a guillotine 250 years ago, and then it generalizes to everything. She said, I've been trying to get away from my whole life. I say, no big, no big, it makes total sense. You're about to have your head cut off, of course you're trying to get away from it. And it generalizes to pretty much everything. And then she's screaming at God, right? And she's saying, I'm a good— and she, and she comes to all these conferences, she's screaming, and you can hear all this. We have it on tape, it's really kind of cool. And she says, like, you know, I'm a good Christian, you know, she's— and how could you do this to me? I'm never going to believe in you again. Okay, she goes to all these cons— she's a very spiritual woman. She said, I've never had an experience of God. Why? Because she's being invited to remember something that happened 250 years ago in revolutionary France. However you want to understand that, and I don't care how you understand it. I don't care if you think it's a metaphor or literal. In my— your belief systems are none of my business, but I'll tell you what happened. Okay, she's screaming, right? And then she says, I must have died. So you know she has a problem, which is she dissociated. She left her body before she died. So what the hell happens if you leave your body before you die and then your body dies? You're kind of stuck, right? So that body is now trying to experience dying. That's why she has this belief, I want to die, right? So you say, well, it's not going to do it any good if you can kill you off. It's trying to make you relive the story so it can have a better result. So you'll end up dead and it won't be happy. So that's a bad situation, so why don't we help it die now that we know what the problem is? Now she looks at me funny, and I said, well, all you have to do is call the parts back. Call all the parts back in your story right before you die. Let yourself fully die and just leave through the crown of your head. Okay, you know what she says then? This is really hysterically funny. She says, which one, the one that's rolling down the hill or the energetic one that's still on the top of my head? She actually says this. This woman never done anything like— she said, I know which one. She's always out through the crown of her head, and she says, I see this light, I'm gonna go to the light. She gets has this big smile on her face. She says she's done, right? Then what happens is she starts talking. It's an amphitheater. She starts talking with people and they start asking her questions and she starts going like this. And then she says, "This is impossible because I have no neck pain." Right. She says, you know, "You guys should be— I should think you're going to kill me." She's taking all these beta blockers. She's done cognitive behavioral therapy. She's done tapping. She's done everything you'd imagine, even back in 1990. '89 or '88. Nothing was helping it.

Why?

Because no one really knew what the problem was. There was a traumatic death. And if you can map out it's a traumatic death, then you— I mean, people work a lot in this lifetime. They never get really their best results because it's not what the problem is, right? And then they don't know what to do with it. So they'll get them back to the tapping. But if the real problem is that you've died and you're stuck outside your body, you can tap for a long time and you won't get the best connection to it, right? So you have to like say, well, what's— how are you going to resolve the problem if you're stuck here? Well, get unstuck. Die. Experience dying. I mean, it was not rocket science.

Right.

So if we can figure out what your real intention is and where it really crystallized, then what the very best practice would be if awareness isn't enough, because usually it is, right? So that makes this process very simple because you don't have to muscle test very much. You don't have to go through all of these layers of what's going on because because I'm soulfully oriented. Judith was like so detail-oriented, so we were a good team. But you know, it's like all you have to do is find out what your real problem is, where it originated, what that person needs, drop in, feel it in your body, and whatever happens then will be their story, will transform the story, and then you'll be freer. And you'll know because the sensation just will not be there anymore.

Will shift, right, will shift and disappear. So let's talk about the science of this, because this is really, right, coming from a master— my degree is a master's in marriage and family therapy, And it wasn't until I started doing neuro-emotional technique that I really start getting the neuroscience, the triune brain theory, physiology, biochemistry, neuropeptides, where the emotions, right, Dr. Candace Pert's stuff about the neuropeptides and emotions carried through your DNA in multiple parts. So, right, where everything was psychosomatic, but it was like, well, you're conjuring it up because it's an emotional experience. So you have an issue. So if you talk about it, it'll go away. Go away. And there's a disconnect between neck-up therapy and somatic, right, in the soma-psychi and psychosoma. It wasn't until NET where I started learning all of this stuff, which I think is, in a way, how as therapists, if we're not learning neurology, if we're not learning physiology, if we're not learning biochemical cascades and physiology in that regards of how stress affects emotions, and disease— diseases are from dis-ease, right? That this is where it's coming from, that we're shortchanging a lot of the practice out there. And there's a lot of great therapists, but I feel like we're only hitting a wall. And as I was sharing with you before, when I was going through my panic attacks in 2009 and '10 and early '11, it wasn't until I stumbled upon these type of energy psychology modalities that it actually went away. Like, exactly like you're saying, within 2 to 3 sessions of doing a neuro-emotional technique is when my panic attacks went away. And it had this amazing shift for me, not knowing that me as a therapist could do this until I found a therapist I can actually do it. 'Cause I thought it came out of chiropractic or this really out there woo-woo world. And now knowing, especially NET doing the research through Jefferson Medical School and publishing the mind-body science behind this in the Journal of Cancer Survivorship, that everything you're talking about, for people who aren't familiar with this world, It sounds literally insane and crazy, but the science backs up physiology of emotions. And I just want to like just walk through what a muscle test is, is no different than having someone hooked up to a biofeedback machine, except we're doing it in real time with an inhibition or the disinhibition of a muscle response as if it's connected to the reflex of the fight or flight of the reptilian brain. In other words, a part of your brain is finding a disconnect from neutrality, okayness with that experience, and you can use it to test that fight-or-flight response. And like you're saying, in other ways, you can also test within the relationship to a story or the congruency to a story or to an experience. And all of this has been clinically validated in journals and research, especially coming out of major medical universities. So from your experience, from your background, right, again, coming from coming from Hahnemann, where we have a neck-up, body-dissociated mental health system.

Mm-hmm.

What has been some of the experiences you've had, especially when you're sharing this at conferences, especially when you've been a professor and you've been doing clinics and you've been working with people, where you're trying to explain that story to me? If I had, right, for some people out there haven't heard any of this stuff before, and they're like, this doctor, Dr. Han must be meshuggah.

And right, we both know what that means.

Right. There's a craziness to this. And this sounds insane. How did you start rectifying in your world these two parts of a beautiful whole for it to be, I have a license, I am an expert in my area, and now I want to validate it, here's how I can do that, here's the science behind it. So how would you explain that from your perspective?

Well, first of all, I mean, I, I know NET some, obviously not like you, but I have a slightly different perspective because I don't think it's a brain-body perspective. I think it's a mind-body field that's held by soul. And I take a different perspective, and I have a slightly different way of understanding muscle testing than I think you might, but I'll be happy to share that with you. So I think, I think I think what goes on in the brain actually is a manifestation of energy. So I know that world. I can talk Porgy's. I can talk, I can talk pretty much anything. I've studied it, you know, I know Bessel. I know Bessel. And I mean, I know that world really well, but it's not where I live. And I'll tell you what I think the advantage of the other way is. If you listen to Porgy's, Um, I assume people know who Porges is.

Let's fill them in just a quick—

um, gosh, um, polyvagal theory. All right, so he's interested in brain function. Um, but what I'd say is brain function comes out of energy. So I'm not so concerned about brain function any more than I'm concerned about— I think it's just a, a body field that plays out as energy. And I'd say the energy creates the brain function. It's not that the brain function creates the energy. Right. So if you can transform the field, I don't care if you focus in the brain. I don't— I mean, I've studied all that stuff, and what I'd say is, from my perspective, it doesn't really matter all that much, because if I can transform that story, I can get the read on the brain function. We have a machine that does it. So, um, what I'd say is, soul reveals itself through brain function. It reveals itself through illnesses, disease. But it's just narrative. So all I'm interested in is the narrative function of what's going on that is affecting your DNA.

Sure.

Because, I mean, you know, from that point of view, of course, it's epigenetic, and it's like it's the relationship of something that's affecting the brain. It's not that the brain's the starting place. And when I talk about muscle testing, for example, what I talk about not so much is brain function, um, or neurofeedback. I know the ways of talking about it that way, but I talk about it from a soul perspective. So what I'd say is, here's what I think happens when you're muscle testing. I think there are levels of wisdom, and the first level of wisdom you can call the wisdom of the conscious mind. So that's what you know, right? And so you can say, well, my name is Jason Wasser, but you don't know why you have the depression. Then there's a second level of wisdom, the wisdom of the unconscious mind, that comes through in dreams or etc., synchronicities. Then there's the third level. Third level we don't have a lot of good names for, but I think the third level is what we're muscle testing. And in the West, it doesn't— have a lot of good names. In the East, you call it chi or ki or prana or shakti. So I actually think what you're muscle testing— what is chi? It's your life force and your deepest, deepest intuitive knowing. And it's the knowing that if your conscious mind has the power of one, that knowing, I think, has the power of the speed of light squared. And that's what I think you're muscle testing. So when you muscle test that, what you do is you say, that level just knows the truth. And when you're in alignment with it, you typically get stronger. And when you're not, you get weaker, right? And when you just know something is true and you go for it. You just go for it. And if you don't, you go, or if you're a mother who weighs 120 pounds and a child is, you know, being rolled over by a car and the mother who's 120 pounds picks up a 2,000-pound car, that's what I think we're muscle testing.

Yes.

And so when she says— you asked her how could she do this, she just said, I just knew I could do it. It was just— I just knew it. And I think what we're muscle testing is I I just know. Yeah, that's what I think we're muscle testing. And then I think the fact that we can get information about everything says that there's a fourth level which is infinite, and that says that every— each one of us is a mystical cell in a mystical body called life that's holographic. So everything is available to Jason if Jason isn't identified with Jason. But as soon as there's any trauma, Jason becomes a dense energy to life, and he thinks he's Jason, and so he's a dense energy to When Jason comes to the realization that Jason is just the story and he's really a verb, right, then he's free, and then life evolves. And that's what— so that's what I'd say about muscle testing. And, you know, when I— when people talk, you know, panic attacks, I mean, I use the examples of panic attacks, um, because if you can do a diagnostic, I don't know what happened, I can get— I have some idea. But of course, let's say someone's having a panic attack here and they start hyperventilating, and you say, okay, hyperventilating feeling, what's happening? And you say, oh my God, I'm in a war and bombs are going off and I can't handle it. It's fairly direct. So of course the loud sound of the motorcycle equals the loud sound of the bomb. Now they're back being the bomb. All you say is, okay, witness it, and now you're the one who's remembering it, you're not the one who's living it. But let's take a different example of panic attacks, same idea. Guy comes into the office, right? Motorcycle backfires, he has a panic attack.

Attack.

But this time it's a different story, right? This time it's 100 years ago, however you want to understand that. It's in World War I. And instead of being a soldier, he's the leader of soldiers. And instead of like the bombs being the problem, the problem is he wasn't paying enough attention because he was like distracted, and he walks his men into an attack where they all died as bombs go off. Now I will tell you, you could work on bombs going off for a long time, but it's not the problem. The problem is I betrayed a trust. And if you could trans— if you could If you could handle that betrayal in 20 minutes, you might get rid of his reactions to sounds, but you also might get rid of his OCD, right? Because he's like, he has OCD. People say that's an irrational thought. It's of course not an irrational thought. He's a leader. He's a lieutenant in World War I, and he made a mistake. He said, I can never do that again. I have to watch everything.

Of course, hypervigilance kicks in, right?

Right.

So there's always the two emotions, and I describe this to my clients. There's the emotion Right? It's what you're feeling and your sensitivity to someone else also going through that, or because of that, right? So it's your emotion or your sensitivity to someone else's emotional display of that. And that obviously is going to affect you in some way, shape, or form because you want to either approach or avoid, right? We're going back to that reptilian brain of survival and safety. So taking that, taking that and seeing these clients and helping them walk through this, like, this is what I love about the work that we do is that But I've had those 15-20 minute sessions where a lifetime of stuff has been cleared out. And then, right, people are just astonished. I remember I had a client of mine who's also a therapist, and they went to the same program as me just years later. And I finally, I'm like, listen, you've been here, you've been coming to me for talk therapy, can we just finally try this? You've been hearing me talk about it, you've read all my stuff on it on my website, and we've talked about it, and you've heard me talk about it with other clients. Within 15 minutes, we found something that's been holding stuck for so long. And I remember that client looking up to me going, "Why the hell aren't they teaching this in our programs? Why aren't we— why are we still stuck in this?" And even though you're talking about narrative, and we're talking about systems and relationship dynamics, which is a lot of what we're, you know, and even a lot of the Narrative Family Therapy, you know, the metaphors and stuff like that. We're still hitting a wall. And I think when we get into this kinesiology muscle testing paradigm, you're able to go into a very different place in a much quicker and more efficient manner. That I feel that unfortunately most places— like you have— like I'm that guy, and those people who know me, especially those who know me in real life, not just listening listening to the podcast will joke. I have a group of friends of mine, they'll be like, "Oh, have you met Jason? Put out your arm." Right? And it's become part of our brand, your brand, my brand in a way of like, we know that we can take it faster, quicker, and deeper in a certain way with these tools. And thank God we do have, right? Because we have a license, we do have professional reputation to uphold too, that we do have value. Validation. And I want people out there to know that as much of like a lot of this, you know, we started our conversation that a lot of this did come out of like there's all these, you know, different modalities and what about this and what about that and, and these schools will say that's okay and this licensure will say it's not and this person will say that this stuff A) exists, B) it's clinically validated, and C) the shit works.

It really does.

Which is the most important thing.

Yeah, well, that's why we should all get together and talk. But the APA, you know, has now, uh, given its seal of approval to ideomotor cueing, which is muscle testing. So the APA is giving, you know, continuing credits for muscle testing. And the only thing I would wish— first of all, I wish everyone would know the Enneagram, because I— do you know the Enneagram?

I do, and I've actually had, uh, Dr. Jerry Wagner, uh, as a previous guest. I don't know if you know I know Jerry Wagner, actually.

I mean, like, because I've been teaching the Enneagram for 27 years also, and I know sort of all those people very well. Um, but to know someone's structure is an amazing thing because then you can do healing work on the underlying core fears of their structure, and you can do a diagnostic to find out, you know, is the problem a narrative problem, or is it really a problem about an existential fear that if you went into it, you'd cease to exist?

Yes.

And if you can do a diagnostic about that, then if I know that I'm a a person who has the structure of a 4, I know that I'm predisposed to thinking I'm ordinary and therefore something's wrong with me. And it's not that there's a narrative that would explain that. It's that it's fundamental to this. It's just the core lens. The other thing I really would like in our field that we don't do enough of, which really gets it a little woo-woo, except for the fact that I don't care how you think about it, is the non-material stories. Because I've seen non-material realm stories, particularly things we call superimpositions, that I've seen truly miraculous things happen that I don't know how you get to if you don't know those things exist. And I give you the best story I have about that because I love telling this story too, which is that I had a— I have a colleague and she tells this story, so it's fine. And, um, she came into me one day. She's 60 years old at the time, total heterosexual, and she's saying to Andy, something has to happen because I'm having these intrusive thoughts saying, look at the titties and those pretty little girls, because we had a we had a middle school right next to us, right? And she says, like, I don't know, this has been going on for about a month, I don't know what's happening, but it's really weird, and nothing I'm doing can stop it. And I don't know what happened a month ago, I went and visited my mother, but it can't be that, I do that all the time. So we do a diagnostic, and we found out that an energy a month, a month ago took her over. And she found the story, you know what, this was an amazing story. She was, she was had a, had a lover at the time who was a vice cop, and he was working, you know, he was, uh, going with—

he was, uh, like sting operation type.

Yeah, yeah, with pedophiles. And he and a pedophile got into a fight, and then he and this woman had intercourse that night. And however you want to understand it, she started living out that energy.

Right.

And, um, I've seen people who are psychotic and DID and psychotic. And if you know that those kinds of energies exist and you can find that story, you can transform that and have things— you can have people who are hospitalized. You know, I had one client who was hospitalized a couple times a year before she saw me, and I found out she had a horrendous history too, like murders and rapes and everything. But I found out that when she was 8 years old, an energy took her over, and that's what what was the root cause of her psychosis and her losing all this time. I asked her, do you know what I'm talking about? She said, I know exactly what you're talking about. She said, when I was in a, in a fire and brimstone sermon when I was 8 years old, this energy came in and took me over, and I've never been the same since. And I told my psychiatrist that the next day, and he put me on Thorazine, and I vowed I would never tell anybody again. This is now 30 years later. She's telling me.

And so that's been cooped up in that person's day-to-day experience without feeling safe to share this, without feeling like they can get anywhere with any therapist, without being medicated, hospitalized, and having repeat trauma over and over again.

Right. And so what happens is, so we go back there and it says she knows how to, she knows how to heal it. I must have said she knows how to, and she says I'm supposed to dance. She starts doing this. She's 1/16 Native American. I can still see this. This is the one session I wish I had on videotape. She starts to do this dance that is clearly Native American but also looks like the Flower of Life. She's dancing, but like, to a Native American beat, which she doesn't know. And it's like she is possessed by something beautiful. And then a minute in, she looks at me and she says, "What am I doing?" And about a minute after that, you can literally feel— if you know this stuff, you— I mean, anyone's in the room pretty much would have said She said, "The room is shaking." It got brighter. And I saw that woman 25 years later. I stopped working with her. I moved and she moved. But I ran into her 25 years later. She said, "I was never hospitalized again." Amazing. So, I mean, not all stories are like that. I had a woman who had a blood draw. It took a year for her to be able to get her blood drawn because there were so many layers. So it's not— I mean, the miracle stories are one where, you know, there's one totally crystallizing thing that's affecting all these things and not much else is affecting them. Then you look like you're in the Bible. But, you know, if there's layer after layer, it's like all these streams come into this one symptom, and it's like it's a doorway into everything, right? So, right.

And then I think one of the beautiful benefits of muscle testing is you can cut through those layers much more succinctly. Like you're saying, is this primary, is this secondary? And I know that some of the experiences that I've had, A, in NET as a practitioner, but also having having, you know, being a client or a patient of it, is that there's no way that this stuff would have come up where it said— I remember a story. I was at a conference and I was working on something, and right, we go back to an original event around a certain age, and it was my sensitivity. The narrative that came up was my sensitivity to a family friend thinking that someone was weird. And we start focusing through and we finally got like, you know, was it from this area, from this time of my life, from this school, from whatever? We finally figured out who it was. And I'm like, but that makes no sense. Like, it didn't make sense to me, right? Because I was looking at it from a 3-year-old, 4-year-old, 5-year-old perspective. I then had dinner with my dad that night and I retell him the story. And my friend who I was working with in that specific segment actually was staying with me for the conference. That worked with me earlier in the day on this little segment. And I asked my dad, like, do you remember so-and-so? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, do you remember so-and-so's father? Yeah. What was he like? And his response was, he was really weird. And what came up was, it was the story before was that it was my sensitivity to this kid thinking that there's something uncomfortable and awkward about their father.

Yeah.

And right, there's no way, shape, or form on an intellectual, rational level that that made sense to me looking at from the vantage point of a 3, 4, 5, 6-year-old kid until it gets validated by other experiences when you have the opportunity to ask in context. Because like, if we're looking at our soulful paradigm, you and I know this, but for people out there, right, that time is only based on what we put a descriptor on it. And our knowledge is infinite, and it isn't a supercomputer. So we can only understand it from the limited language in which we can construct it. But this is one of the beautiful things about what you and I are doing. So as I know, we only have a few minutes left.

Can I just say one thing about that?

Yeah.

What's also cool is like, I've had people— like, I had this man who was really a medium, and that was also a death wish. And he was so vivid about it. He knew exactly the year. And he was a— he was a train robber. And he had never heard of this person. He'd never done work like that. But he knew the person's name and he knew the year it happened. And this person was just a large enough figure in history that when he went back, he found the name, he found how the guy died, which is he was shot in the stomach, which is exactly what happened to him. And he's having all of these stomach problems, which then go away. Right. So not only can you find weird shit when you're 3, I mean, like I had another man and he said, I don't know anything about this, but I'm a Nazi. And I— he knew his name, and he knew what he did, and he knew how he died, and he knew nothing of this history. And he goes back, and it was a high enough official in the Nazi government, and everything he found was this man's story. Yep, it's wild.

And never have access to it. I know there's so many— I can't remember the name of the book, but we can definitely figure it out offline— is, uh, regarding Holocaust stories that people who didn't even grow up in Nazi Germany or weren't Jewish would do these certain rituals that were Jewish rituals and not know why. And then come to turn out that they had these, right, past life experiences, whatever it was, and, and figured these things out. I mean, again, this is like definitely as we go further down the rabbit hole versus the simplistic healing. But I know that, right, there's so many wonderful, wonderful ways. And again, just to kind of recap everything, you know, really, we were talking about the wonderful world of energy psychology. Methodology, which does have different ways of showing up now, right? We have Thought Field Therapy and EFT and TM, right? All these different things. People are very familiar with the tapping and the EFT modality. There's NeuroEmotional Technique, which people have heard me talk about. And then, right, there's more your modality. So I know that when we started off with was, A, if people want to learn how to do this work for themselves, where do they go? And B, if you're a clinician and you want to get trained in this work, where do they go?

Well, they go to the same place. They go to our website. We do— we do— right now we're doing online trainings, and we do the online trainings. And, um, we have a program that you can go if you want to learn how to do it for yourself, and we have a program that is similar but a little bit different if you are a therapist and you want me to not only teach you how to do it for yourself but for clients. And, um, they get also— they get the training, and they also get 100 hours of of open supervision for, I think, a really good price personally. But all they have to do is go to Life Center Therapy and they can find us and they can find our whole training program, just like they can find with you. And, um, you know, I'd love to have anyone who wants to study. I mean, like, you know, and I just love sharing this work and I love sharing these stories and, you know, and I love talking with you.

So thank you. It's interesting, just to wrap it up is that like years ago, I knew all this stuff existed. And it was always, like I said, it was always like, but there's all these other modalities out there. And I knew it was like, okay, this is really hippie dippy. It's really out there. What are the people in my world, like my professors or friends, like what are they going to think? And after a certain amount of time when you have validation and verification, right? And you build up and you build up your own personal reputation and personal success, that, and then you have what to back it up with, it does change the way that people can hear about this. So it's always an honor to have people who are coming from the world of academics, doctoral degrees, clinical training, creating their own modalities, and then synthesizing all that to bring this amazing, game-changing information to the world. And again, people have heard me talk about N.E.T. multiple episodes, throughout the podcast, but to hear how many different entryways there are into healing. And that's what I really wanna focus on, right? It's not this like medical model of like, right, we're gonna put a bandaid on this problem, but we're getting to the root cause of where all this stuff is built up upon. And I really wanna, A, thank you for doing the work that you're doing, but being brave, being brave earlier on, 'cause, you know, I started this 10 years ago. Doing this work, and you've been doing it for a little bit longer, a lot longer than me. So I want to thank you for being out there and around to allow those of us who are now newer to this to be less— we don't have to be as bold, you know, in our worlds to present this to our colleagues and say like, "This is what we do," and it's not that weird anymore. So I'm really excited to always have these conversations with with more senior practitioners and experts. So thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me, Jason. You know, I'm going to try to shift down into a little bit slower pace because we had so much time— not so much time, but it's been a real pleasure. And like, I can see your joy in the whole thing and your radiance about it. And it's also— it's really— I mean, we deal with very serious stuff, but it's also real joy and it's really fun to do. And yeah, yeah.

So everybody who's looking for more of that joy and the radiance, and you're stuck, this is a way to go find it.

Or life-centered therapy or neuro-emotional training at all. It's, you know, emotional therapy. Yeah, go find it. Yeah.

Cool. Thank you.

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