Episode 26: Dr. Andrew Hahn — Healing at the Root with Life Centered Therapy

Welcome to Super Connections. I am your host, Jennifer K. Hill, helping you with the Golden Triangle of Connection, where you will super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Join me each week as I will share from some of my favorite tips and tools for super connecting, and I'll bring in some of my favorite friends and thought leaders to help support you On your journey to super connecting to the life of your dreams. Hello, friends, and welcome back for episode 26 of Super Connections. I'm your host, Jennifer Cahill, and it is my privilege and my honor to get to join with you every week as we offer tips, tools, and tricks on how to super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Today we have an incredible author, thought leader, Dr. Andrew Han, who is joining us today. He is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and founder of Life-Centered Therapy, which is a mind-body approach to healing emotional, physical, and spiritual suffering. With over 3 decades of expertise, Dr. Han has helped individuals break free from limiting patterns by accessing deep unconscious materials stored in the body. He is the co-author of The One-Hour Miracle, a transformative guide that introduces readers to a powerful method for rapid emotional healing through present-moment awareness and body-centered techniques. Thank you so much, Andy, for being here with us.

It's truly a pleasure. I feel grateful to be here with you, and I'm so looking forward just to having a conversation with you, Jennifer.

Yeah, me too. I love this idea of miracles, Andy. I get pitched a lot of shows, and the minute your publicist sent me the thing about The One-Hour Miracle, I said, he's my guy. I wanna talk to this guy for our Because it is true. I think we all want a little more miracles in our lives. And so many of the miracles we want often are around healing, either physiological pain, psychological pain, emotional pain. So tell us a little bit about where this suffering comes from. I know we were talking a little bit before the show about the 3 or 4 things that you would love our audience to take away from our time together today. Do you want to start by maybe talking to us a little bit about our suffering and our story and what we can do to transmute that?

Sure. I guess what I would say is no matter what your symptom is, and it doesn't really matter to me, so it'd be physical, like chronic pain or autoimmune disease, or mental, like anxiety, or emotional, like depression, or relational, like you keep getting yourself stuck in the same thing, or something that feels spiritual, like you feel just a deep sense of alienation. I think there's only one reason that people suffer. It plays out in all kinds of different symptoms, but there's only one reason, which is there's something that can't be taken in stride and handled. I think that's it. And I think all of our symptoms are clues about the thing that couldn't be taken in stride and handled. So that's the basic premise. So I think all healing is simple to say what it is. It's mastering what you couldn't take in stride and handle until finally You could take in stride and handle anything, at which point you would be like what's called a realized being. Because even if you were being crucified, you wouldn't scream at your Father and say, hey, what are you doing to me? Why have you forsaken me? You'd say, I commend my spirit to you. And there'd be nothing that you couldn't say, I can just take this in stride, and then I can be in alignment with what life is asking from me, my particular Differentiated role because nothing would block it. And I think it's easy to say how to do it, which is when something can't be taken in stride, in that moment, a discomfort is born. And people unconsciously identify with that discomfort, not even realizing it's there, and live out echoes of the story over and over again, trying to master it. Except from our point of view, there's a simple word that I feel what that's called. It's called, it sucks. So

that's a scientific term, right?

It's a scientific term. But, and so let me just give you a brief example of what I mean. You're in my office, a motorcycle backfires, and you have a panic attack. Probably not because the motorcycle's backfiring. All right? So I say to you, when you're feeling this in your body, what happens to your body? You say, my heart's pounding fast. And I say, Jennifer, I'm going to say something funny to you. You're not— Jennifer is not having a panic attack. Jennifer's little soul is just fine. So it can't be you that's having a panic attack, but someone whose name is heart pounding fast is. And we're going to be become, by choice, heart pounding fast. So I'm gonna say is, you be an actress and you're gonna play a role and you're gonna become heart pounding fast. And then all you're gonna do is report. And then no matter what happens, you won't get retraumatized because you're now the one and you're not gonna unconsciously identify with heart pounding fast and live out an echo of its story. But you're gonna become the one who chooses to become heart pounding fast and says, I'm here with you. And I bear witness to you, and I hold you with loving kindness and acceptance, and I'm not you. You're just something being experienced. And then you'll say, oh my God, bombs are going off, I'm gonna die, etc., etc., etc., because you were in a war 20 years ago in Afghanistan. Except now you'll be the one who says, I'm with the one that happened to, but it isn't who I am. And I think everything is just a jazz riff off of that. And sometimes if you have 15 different symptoms that have made your life miserable and nothing has touched them, and you find that one story, you might get something that literally looks like a miracle. Like, I've seen people who've had chronic pain that nothing has touched and major depressions and everything, and it was all one story and it all went away in 40 minutes. But I've seen other people that one symptom took over a year because there were so many layers to it. So all I tell people is, It's like a dig, and we're going to keep getting freer and freer until finally you're free. And that's basically what I do.

So beautiful. I love this work, and I think it's so powerful. I remember years ago I was taught a version of this, 15 years ago, in a personal development class based on neuroscience. And they said that step number 1 is to get your brain to realize you're going to survive it, whatever it is. Whether in your case, I think you're talking about dissociating and taking an observer principle and be like, oh, I can I can see myself breathing quickly, heart pounding fast, but that doesn't mean that's who I am. And I can choose to be that or choose not that. Am I hearing you correctly?

1 million percent.

Yeah. And I remember I used this many years ago. I was terrified of getting motion sick, and I went to Australia and New Zealand for the first time in my life. And bless you. And as I went to Australia, I used up all my motion sickness pills. And here I am in a foreign country. And I'm about to go to New Zealand where I'm going to be traveling around. And I did a technique on myself years ago where I remember feeling like, I'm not going to survive. This is so dangerous. I couldn't even imagine getting in a car because I was terrified I was going to wind up vomiting the whole time. And within a few minutes, I rewired my brain. And then next thing you know, had a great trip. I was even able to sit working in the passenger seat and have no symptoms. And that's what I hear you talking about, is it's that much of an on-off switch that we have the capacity to utilize within our own physiology.

Totally. And the only thing that I could find out for you, if you're my client, is I could find out— because I would just have you choose to become motion sickness, and then I could find out for you, is all you need to do become that and let it share, or does it want to share an origin narrative? And it will tell us if all it wants to do is like share, or it said, I want you to know That it will be useful to you to know that your motion sickness is actually part of something that is associated with a lot of other symptoms because you died in a car crash in another lifetime. And it's also so why you don't trust other people. And I, you'd say, how's my motion sickness affecting being trusting other people or whatever? And you'd find out, oh, it's cuz someone was driving that car and you were in a passenger seat. Mm-hmm. And so you're spinning outta control and your last thought is, I'll never trust somebody, put myself in their hands again. And you'll say, how could those 2 things be the same? But of course you'd find in a narrative they were. So your soul will essentially tell you, do you want, does this aspect of your being just wanna share something or does it wanna tell you something? So you'll see, oh my God. 'Cause then your mind gets happy and says, oh, that's how this all fits together. And that's the only thing that I would be doing slightly differently than what you're talking about.

I love it. I— for anybody who's not familiar with what Andy's speaking about, he's referring to this idea of past lives. And if you had asked me like 15 years ago, is this possible, is it real, I would have said you're off your rocker. And then a shout out to an old friend of mine, Damien Bertrand, who had a television show on the topic. And at the time, he was hypnotizing me for a fear of needles. He had an office in West Hollywood, California, and I would go in and see him. And one day he says, Jennifer, people pay me lots of money, fly in from all over the world. Why don't I just do a free past life regression on you? And he did. And next thing you know, I saw myself in Andy as an old fat white man in 1845 London, and I was a jerk. And then everything in this life made sense. And so often we don't understand it. And of course, I love Brian Weiss's book, Many Lives, Many Masters, that touches on that as well.

Yeah. What I'd say is, if you want to do that for yourself, because you don't have to do hypnosis, just— it's everything is happening in the here and now. So all you have to do is find the sensation, choose to become it, and then Something will come to you. And if you don't believe in past lives, which I've had people who don't, I say, your belief system doesn't matter to me. Let's just see if it's— you can think it's imaginal. You could think it's another lifetime. I can find out for you. I can, cuz I use kinesiology and I'll find out. But if you don't, I don't care what you literally believe. I just say, if it's useful to you, you won't care whether it's their other lifetimes or if it just helped you and you still think it's crazy. It doesn't matter.

Yeah.

By the way, I also don't think it's a regression because it's here right now. That sensation is here. So no one has to hypnotize you because I used to use hypnosis. I never use hypnosis. I just say everything is hypnotic in a sense because I say take a few deep breaths and bring yourself— but you're going to find the sensation, become it. And there's no inducting process. I have to do hypnosis with you. Well, you can do it in a heartbeat. Literally just find the sensation, drop into it, and just get receptive to anything that comes to you, even if it seems nuts to you. On a conscious level.

That's so true. There's— do you know Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning?

I just read it again, and I love his book. And I think 2 of the pages in that book are the most powerful things I ever read. So why are we bringing this up, Jennifer?

His logotherapy changed my life with insomnia. In logotherapy, he came— I think he references it in the book, at the end of the book, called paradoxical thinking, where he jokes about insomnia and how most patients, it's resistance. Like, whatever it is, the symptom, the fast-beating heart, the whatever it is, We're resisting it. And what I hear you saying is drop into it. And in Viktor's methodology, he gives an example in the book of a patient who sweats profusely. And he says, oh, this guy comes to me and he's so mortified. He sweats everywhere he goes. And so he says to his patient, instead of saying, I don't want to sweat, drop the resistance and say, I hope I sweat buckets. I hope I sweat so much that people need to follow me around with a mop and bucket. The guy stops sweating. I started doing that for insomnia and I'll say, oh, I hope I never sleep again. It's funny, whenever I say this, I start to nod off. I hope I stay awake for the next 10 years. And then all of a sudden the resistance drops and your power returns to you, which I would imagine is tangential to what you're talking about.

I wouldn't even say it's tangential. I would say it's— I would say anything you're resisting, first of all, what I would say is the resistance actually is just a protection from something. So if you can say it's not a problem, it was actually trying to help me from something. But what would happen if I don't have to make the same choice? What would happen if I whatever it is, right? And then you say, all right, I will let myself go through it and get to the other side of it. How do you get to the other side of anything that's paradoxical? Is you go further in, you go further towards the thing that you've been running away from. And you say, I will just choose to face you. Which in his case, why not amplify it? When you're ambivalent, you always— amplifying the thing you're afraid of just makes it better. And so you'll say, now I don't have to worry about it anymore because I've faced this nightmare. In fact, I've not only faced the nightmare, I've said I'm going to choose the nightmare and I want it to be the worst nightmare could ever imagine. And then you're— it frees you for sure. Yeah.

And so to tie this into your work and to The 1-Hour Miracle, I know we talked a little bit before the show about how sometimes the problem is reliving a thing that couldn't be handled, and sometimes it's protecting against something else. How do we distinguish that? I can hear people's minds, the wheels in people's minds turning as you're sharing all of this deep wisdom, Andy. How do we begin to do the self-work and then find our way to you so we can release and let go of the things that aren't serving us?

If you just knew that basically your symptom, if I'm going to keep things really simple, is going to be one of both of two things, and both of them are always there. So it's a question of emphasis, right? Or emphasis or whatever. Anyway, don't smile, it encourages me. So you know that you're— let's say I take depression. All right? I've seen people with major depressions. I'll give you two stories where they went away. One was totally a protection. One was a reliving. Okay? The reliving was the woman describes her depression as, I'm weighed down, I'm hopeless, I'm helpless, I can't move. People don't listen. They say, oh, she's making a commentary on it. No, she's literally telling us a story. So if you dropped her into that, which actually I found out was a traumatic death story, she's on, she's being, she's about to have her head cut off and she's literally weighed down, helpless, hopeless, and she can't move. And the only thing she can move is her neck. And she has chronic neck pain because they have her face up and she's watching this thing coming down and she's wrenching her neck terribly. So her major depression and her chronic neck pain actually turned out to be the same story, as did several other things too. But it was a reliving of the story. So her depression literally was, I'm weighed down, helpless, I'm hopeless, I can't move. And as soon as she found that story, her major depression, which had been unresponsive to treatment, went away in 40 minutes. That was a miracle. And I know it's true because she came back the next year and said, no more depression. So I think it's narrative. Now let's take the other example. I had a young man who came in and I found out his depression actually was a protection from something worse. So I said, all right, we're gonna drop you into the depression, but we know it was a choice you made. And I can find out quickly that it was a choice he made in this lifetime when he was between 0 and 5 years old. That's what we— the only clue we needed. And he drops into it, which he says it feels like heavy, wet oatmeal. And suddenly he's immediately there again, and he's 3 years old. He's giving his father a gift. And his father not only doesn't receive the gift, he pushes him away, walks out the door, leaves him at the door. And my client remembers saying, I don't care. I don't care is a precursor for major depression. It says, I have to numb myself. What's a depression? I'm not gonna feel right. So really the trauma was the not receiving the gift. The protection was, I don't care. He comes in and says— So I say, here's your problem. Your problem is your depression was a choice you made to protect yourself. It's not the problem. It was a solution. You can be grateful to it and say, I don't need you anymore. How do you do that? You feel heavyweight oatmeal, you say, thank you very much. And heavyweight oatmeal really is a 3-year-old who's feeling a trauma who says, I'm gonna like call in this heaviness, right? So I say, bear witness to it, send it love, but it isn't who you are. You can actually externalize it, right? Because he can. Bear witness to heavy, wet oatmeal. So I say, from the witness point of view, it's outside of you anyway. So literally bring it outside. He sees it outside himself. He sends it loving energy. And I say to him, find out who you were underneath it. That was the 3-year-old before that happened to him. He says, oh, I see this kid. He's like happy. He's got golden hair. He's dancing around everything. I say, put your hand right where he's been. Invite him out and invite him to expand. And you become him from the inside out, except for the fact that he's no longer going to be 3. He's going to be 21, but he gets to keep all of that awe and wonder, but he gets to keep all your experience. So then he says, smarty pants, so how come I got depressed? I said, I don't know. If you want to know, find out, recreate. He said there was no— they thought it was biological. He said there was no precipitant. I said, probably there was, but you're not aware of it and nobody else is either. So I said, become Heavyweight Oatmeal again, go into it and ask it. You know what he says? Oh my God. He says, I know exactly what happened. You know what happened? He was In an improv troupe, and his opening night was coming up. He goes to his dad, who is now remarried and has 2 little kids, and says, Dad, I want— we have opening night. I want you to come. Dad says— he loved me, it was his name. He says, Nate, I'm so sorry. I can't come because we have these 2 little toddlers. I've agreed with my new wife that we're not going to do anything. I'm so sorry. He says, Dad, doesn't matter. I don't care. Next day, he forgot all of this, goes into a major depression that lasted for 2 months. Then he says, smarty pants, they told me it's it's not this because the year before it happened again and my father went to my opening and he got all huffy. And I said, I don't know. Have you had oatmeal? Choose to become it again. Oh my God! I know exactly. No precipitate. I know exactly what happened. I gave my girlfriend. He made his girlfriend a special gift, right? Christmas time. All these things were happening at Christmas time. Interestingly, it's not an anniversary action. It just so happened coincidentally that they thought it must be seasonal affective disorder, right? He says, oh my God, I made her a special gift. And all of this was subliminal. He says, now I'm there, I give her the gift, and I can see she's giving me a fake smile. And unconsciously I'm saying to myself, I don't care. No precipitant. Next day goes into a major depression, lasted for 5 months. No, untreatable.

Hmm.

Finally, finally just wears off. But the miracle is, if you know this, that looks miraculous. Those stories look miraculous because you get these results. That's why we called the book— our agent said, we told him one of these stories, he said, it's a miracle. The woman said, it's a miracle. He said, you guys have to call it A One-Hour Miracle. And our field, by the way, does not like that title. You, people like you love the title. People in our field say you're promising too much, and I can understand that. So the title's been a problem, has been a curse and a blessing because our field says it's impossible. And they say it's impossible basically because they think you can't do this kind of stuff.

It's all possible. And I think it's when we look at the word magic or what we consider to be magic, it's just what hasn't been verified yet. Quantum physics, if you told somebody 50, 100 years ago, a couple hundred years ago, Or the cars that we have that self-drive. I was just in a Waymo the other day in Texas, and the car was driving me around. People would have said it's a miracle, it's magic. It's just something that somebody else hasn't yet been able to explain. And I witnessed this firsthand. My business coach— shout out to Julian Adler, who's now my co-founder of our current company, OptiMatch— he did parts reconciliation with me years ago. And it turned out, much like this beautiful work you did with your team, I had two parts to myself: Juicy and Angel. And Juicy was the one who was created at the age of 4 to penalize everybody, including me, to be sure we were in line. And Angel was the people-pleasing one who just wanted to keep everybody happy. And thank God we all came to a roundtable with Angel, Juicy, myself, and Julian, who moderated it all. And next thing you know, I was able to heal the part of myself that felt like it had to judge everybody and push everybody away. And then when that happens, you become liberated, and then freedom and miracles occur.

You want another brief story like that?

Sure.

Way worse. I saw a woman who'd been hospitalized, psychiatrically hospitalized over and over again with what's called dissociative identity disorder with psychosis. And it was very clear. She also lets me use her name. Her name was Camilla, but there was also a Joy. And Joy did things that got her into enormous trouble. And Camilla kept getting hospitalized, and then she'd have bugs crawling all over her and she couldn't account for time. And she was medicated like you wouldn't believe, and nothing was touching her, and she hated the medication. So we find out that the root cause of that— and she had the worst history I ever ran into. She was incested, she was raped, she watched her mother shoot her sister, and she grew up in an unbelievably violent situation. Said none of that was it. It said when she was a little girl, right between the ages of 6 and 10, she was taken over by a dark energy. Okay. And she wasn't psychotic because I'd seen her for a few times. She was a good reporter. I said, this kinesiology is saying you were taken over by a dark energy. Does that make any sense to you? And she says— now, this woman is multiracial, but she's very dark. She literally turns white and says, I know exactly what you're talking about. I was at my father's service. And he was— this is the one who was incesting her, which nobody was talking about. I'm at my father's service. Mm-hmm. And he's giving this bright Southern Baptist fire and brimstone sermon. And this energy came in and a dark cloud came over me, and I've never been the same since. And I went to my psychiatrist the next day and I told him this happened. And he, her reporting was, she said, you are crazy, and put her on Thorazine. A little kid on Thorazine. This was like in the '60s or something. And she said, I will never tell anybody again. And for 30 years she never did. And so she tells me this. I said, we can take care of that. We can find that little girl who's here who's being taken over. And we do. And she finds it and says she knows what to do. And she's 1/16 Native American. And she starts doing the most amazing dance. And she's dancing around my office, making little circles, and you can feel the beat. She's— and you— this woman does not dance. I want you to know she doesn't dance. She doesn't. She looks at me like, what am I doing? She does it again. You can literally, if you attune to these things, you feel the room shake a little bit. It gets lighter. She says, I'm done. And I want you to know, I saw that woman 25 years later in a doctor's office. We moved apart and she said, I was never psychiatrically hospitalized after that day.

Oh, I have chills, Andy. That's amazing. And that's what's possible. I wish— this is why we created this podcast, Super Connections, to help us understand that the answers are out there, but they're also within us. And that is why I tell everybody in this golden triangle of connection, we must first understand and connect to ourselves. If we look externally for validation or to other people, we collapse in on ourselves like a house of cards. And that is my dream, having been through the darkness myself. And I just wrote an article a couple of months ago about what the red mist taught me about compassion and anger. And I used to just not even be able to control my anger. And yet the moment I learned to love myself, accept myself, regulate my nervous system, Wow. I learned how to become peaceful from the inside out. And that really is my goal, Andy. And I'm so glad you shared all these beautiful stories. So tell us, where can people connect with you, connect to the work, buy the book, The One Hour Miracle? Where can they do all of that?

They can go to our website. It's called Life-Centered Therapy. And so they go to lifecenterededtherapy.com, and they can book a consultation. We've trained lots of people, and we have a training institute. So we have Everything you can imagine. We have certified practitioners of what we do, so they can do that. Anybody can train with us. We do intensive short trainings because you can learn all of this stuff, the foundations of it, in a day. Or I've been doing it now, or you can do it over 3 years because there's layers and layers to what we've touched on, like the tip of an iceberg. But if all you know is what we talked about today and you can drop people into body sensations or drop yourself and open to all possibilities, including something that looks like, that didn't happen to me. I had a 17-year-old girl in one of my trainings who knew nothing about this stuff, teamed up with someone like you. Mm-hmm. And the woman looked at me like, you're putting me with her? And I said, uh-huh. Because it muscle tested. She came back 2 hours later and she said, this is the deepest healing I've ever had. It's because she didn't open to the possibility that body sensations were animate and living beings, because everything is consciousness. And it never occurred to her, because she was only in this lifetime, that she was stuck in a story that was a genealogical story from 3 Generations ago. You know what the girl said? She said, I can read a protocol. And that was the second day of the first weekend of our training. So, you can learn this stuff and get really good, unbelievably fast, and get amazing results. I've been doing it for 30 years. I'm still learning stuff. It's like, you'll find— I find— I think I keep doing this work, and then I say— and then wife shows me, Andy, are you kidding me? And then I get trapped again. I said, oh, geez.

I love it. It's— we're all on this journey for however long we get to breathe air into our lungs. Hug our loved ones. We don't know if we have days, weeks, months, years, or decades on this planet, though the time we do have, better not to waste it and to embrace it, heal ourselves from the inside out. If you want more tools, you can go to on LinkedIn Inspired Living Tools, where I write a weekly article for people on how we can heal ourselves from the inside out. So check out Inspired Living Tools on LinkedIn, and I'm so grateful to each of you for tuning in and intending that maybe there was a morsel of wisdom that Andy or I shared. that you can take with you, take out into the world, and definitely go check out what they are doing with Life-Centered Therapies. Thank you so much and have a beautiful week.

Check out what Jennifer is doing too. It sounds—

Aw, thank you, Andy. I appreciate you.