Exploring Daoist Medicine & Alchemy with Leta Herman

Can ancient Daoist alchemy transform your health and unlock your potential?
In this episode, Leta Herman — alchemical healer, Chinese Medicine teacher, author, and co-host of the Inspired Action Podcast — shares insights from over two decades of study in Daoism, Alchemical Healing, and Classical Chinese Medicine.

We explore the distinctions between TCM, Classical, and Five Element approaches, the role of elemental constitution in healing, and innovative methods like the non-needling needle and Ghost Points for mental health. Leta also reflects on her own journey from skepticism to deep healing, and the nine stages of alchemy for personal transformation.

In this conversation:

• The differences between TCM, Classical, and Five Element Chinese Medicine
• How Daoist alchemy can shift your health and life path
• Innovative techniques: non-needling needle & Ghost Points in acupuncture
• Viewing illness as a choice between potential or pathology
• Creating safe, non-judgmental spaces for healing

letaherman.com
alchemyhealingcenter.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

you're talking about this concept that everything in your life is potential or pathology, your choice. That can be very triggering for a person because they don't think necessarily that their trauma was their choice and I do think that there's no hierarchy to trauma, Like we might not say from hearing someone's story that they had a very traumatic life, but for them it was.

Speaker 2 0:38

Welcome to the Field Dynamics Podcast. We're here to facilitate inspiring dialogues about the nature of consciousness across disciplines, communities and practitioners, all with a holistic perspective.

Speaker 3 0:50

From energy healing to somatic therapies, from neuroscience to meditation. We believe the most interesting things happen at the boundaries of disciplines.

Speaker 2 0:59

I'm Christabel.

Speaker 3 1:00

And I'm Keith.

Speaker 2 1:01

Thanks for joining us today today and enjoy the episode. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Field Dynamics podcast. Today we have with us Lita Herman. Lita Herman is an alchemical healer, chinese medicine teacher, host of the Inspired Action podcast and author. She is the founder of the Alchemy Healing Center, a Chinese medicine teaching clinic dedicated to helping clients find their true potential through alchemical transformation.

Speaker 2 1:45

Lita has immersed herself in the philosophies of Taoism, alchemical healing and Chinese medicine for over 20 years. She is the long-term student of Master Jeffrey Ewan, an 88th generation Taoist priest, and also a graduate of Elliot Cohen's Plant Spirit Medicine Studies program, and she has studied extensively with teachers and former students of JR Worsley, who brought five-element acupuncture to England in the 1960s. She describes her practice as a very unique and diverse, focusing on ancient Chinese healing practices that are largely unknown today in Western culture. A Smith College graduate and past nationally syndicated journalist, lita is a world explorer who speaks multiple languages, loves life and her family. Welcome, lita, an absolute pleasure to have you here with us today, thank you so much for inviting me.

Speaker 1 2:34

I'm excited to talk to you today. It'll be fun.

Speaker 2 2:37

We're looking forward to it. Firstly, we'd like to ask you to tell us a little, if you could about your journey and what led you to be practicing TCM and Taoist alchemy?

Speaker 1 2:54

Yes, well, that's a great question. I started out really with my own healing journey. I had endometriosis in my 20s. Actually, even before that I had some issues with bursitis in my hips. I in college was, you know, hobbling around a lot on crutches and I discovered martial arts and that was like a whole new world for me. My parents are from academia, very scientifically oriented, so I this this whole thing like what's chi. So I this this whole thing like what's qi, what's I don't get this Like, what is that about? So that led me to when I, when I didn't discover any cure for my ailments in Western medicine, I started to look at alternatives and people would recommend. I think I was out in San Francisco at the time and people were like, hey, have you tried Chinese medicine? And I was like I don't know, that sounds weird. But people were like, hey, have you tried Chinese medicine? And I was like I don't know, that sounds weird. But of course you know, when you're in pain you go and try things. And so I did and it was immediate like I, I was getting relief and that was huge. But it wasn't really until I.

Speaker 1 4:00

I was going through sort of a transformational process, having my child, and I discovered someone, a friend, who kind of started helping me understand there was other ways to look at the world, and she was studying plant-spirit medicine. So that's how I got introduced to that. And when I first read Elliot Cohen's book, it just brought me to tears. I was literally sobbing and I didn't know why. And so of course I had to go, you know, learn more. I'm a curious person. That is one thing about me. I'm very curious. So I took his two-year program. I was surprised to realize that I wanted to practice and that just started the whole journey. I really I had worked through my own healing and then, just you know, it just became apparent that I was going to do this, and it took a few years to transition from a high, a full-on tech job I was a system engineer for a system engineer for AT&T slash Lucent company and you know it was a huge transformation.

Speaker 3 5:16

Let's talk about TCM a bit. What are your thoughts on the way TCM is offered to the public and made accessible? And I ask this because you use many lesser known aspects of treatment options, like working with the belt vessel, the divergent channels, the ghost points. You favor lesser known aspects of treatment options, like working with the belt vessel, the divergent channels, the ghost points. You favor lesser known treatment approaches Maybe you could say more esoteric or under the radar aspects of the meridian structuring or channels. So why do you choose to use these lesser known treatments and do you think that's reflective of how you feel TCM is being offered to the public currently?

Speaker 1 5:44

I honestly don't think that I relate to that idea of TCM the way that it shows up in our culture here, but the way I look at it is. Well, first of all I started with shamanism Plant-spirit medicine is a shamanic treatment and then I started studying because it was based on the Worsley five element paradigm. Elliot Cohen was a Worsley graduate and he started teaching plant spirit medicine kind of as as a as you know, being on top of what you know, the five element Chinese medicine paradigm is. So that was really interesting because from the very beginning I had a very different perspective when I started studying Chinese medicine. But I really started with five element Chinese medicine, which is, you know, emphatically very different than TCM in that, you know, jr Worsley kind of developed a whole system based on the five elements, kind of developed a whole system based on the five elements, and so the idea is in TCM.

Speaker 1 6:55

You know which, if you really look back through history in China, tcm is a new kind of Chinese medicine that really was brought about by the you know, post-communist Chinese who really wanted to actually make sure that the historical medicine of China was being offered to the populace. So it was a really good thing because at that time Chinese medicine had been waning a little bit. Herbal Chinese medicine had picked up, but due to the fact that you have to unclothe a little bit during the Victorian times, which really affected China as well they didn't actually take clothes off much, so they preferred herbal medicine. So it was like Chinese medicine was waning, herbal medicine was getting more popular, and then the communists took over and they said wait a minute, this is our well, they wanted everything Chinese, so they brought it back, but not because they weren't really interested in spirituality. In fact, they were quite against it.

Speaker 1 7:54

You know, it was different. They brought it back without a lot of that spiritual component that I'm interested in. You know. That has been what's really fueled my interest in Chinese medicine and why, when I discovered Jeffrey Yuan, I was so excited. Because here was a Taoist priest, you know, who you know did not, wasn't able to grow up in China because at that time they had to flee, but I mean his grandfather did, and so you know here was a group of people who were actually, you know, in touch with more ancient Chinese medicine, the Chinese medicine that's, you know, centuries and centuries old, instead of this more modernized version that the communists had kind of resurrected and maybe taken out a little bit of the spirituality. You know. Even the point names were changing. Things were changing about how they used Chinese medicine.

Speaker 1 8:51

And I always say that it, you know it makes sense Like Western. It's very, in my mind, a little similar to Western medicine. Because you know, what are we really trying to do in Western medicine? We're trying to get the worker back to work, and that was definitely something that would have been very favorable. I believe this is my opinion that maybe the communists wanted, they wanted the worker to get back to work.

Speaker 1 9:16

It wasn't so much longevity or spiritual happiness and growth, it was just like, you know, your elbow hurts, you want to fix it, and we kind of have that attitude here in this country and I think that's, you know, maybe changing a lot in the last 20 years since I started. The word alchemy was very woo-woo when I started out and then, as I've been progressing over the years, I, you know now it's like you know, Alchemy Nail Salon, I mean, it's everywhere. So it's not so weird to talk about transformation. It's not so weird to talk about spiritual growth. So for me, I've just been watching this transformation over the years of our culture being way more accepting of some of the concepts. So for me, TCM is still a little bit.

Speaker 1 10:12

Every TCM practitioner is different. Some are going to make the, some schools of TCM are teaching a very broad TCM. So the word traditional Chinese medicine is used more to describe that modern Chinese medicine, Whereas when we study with Jeffrey Yuan and other groups that are really more ancient, they're calling it classical Chinese medicine. So I tell everyone there's like five element Chinese medicine, which really came from one person, Worsley. There's TCM, which is again this more newer imported version of Chinese medicine, and then classical Chinese medicine is a word that's being used to describe everything that came before communist China took power.

Speaker 2 11:08

You mentioned there Worsley and the five elements. I'd love to hear you speak a little to the five elements, their energetic signatures and how this relates to this idea of elemental constitution.

Speaker 1 11:20

A huge part of what we're doing, even in alchemy, is trying to understand a person's authentic nature. It's so imperative for your health to understand that, because I was just having a conversation with someone yesterday about yourself. But in Chinese medicine we say, well, that is your spirit's path, that is the spirit that kind of came down to earth and gave you a trajectory, a destiny or something like that. But then you had your parents and their essences. That came together and created something genetically unique and that we call your essences, which in Chinese medicine is called your jing, and those two things you know come together and now you have an energetic signature that's a mixture of your astrological chart and all the things that we talk about in astrology. Whether you're doing Western or Chinese, you know Eastern astrology doesn't really matter. They're very different, but that's still indicating something that tells you something about your life. But it's not the biggest picture. So when you look at an energetic signature, you're looking at today, here and now. You're looking at a person's astrological influences and physical influences and together we have energy. In Chinese medicine we say there's heaven, earth and humanity, and so you know, the astrology is your heaven, the earth is your physical essences that your parents gave you. And then there's humanity, which is your energy, your chi. So it's interesting because your chi can be very young and very outward and expressive, or it can be kind of quiet and withdrawn and a little inward and maybe not as engaged in the world all the time. And then there's all these varieties where there's some that's, you know, some of the time really young and some of the time really in and some of the time really in and some of the time you know so. So and then there's one that's really balanced. So if we go through the five elements, we say wood is very young, it's very expressive, it's very outward and yet it has kind of a quiet side. And when they move through life we can see they kind of march. When they walk, they have like forward movement to them, and so you can see that in a person when they're walking, for example. We evaluate walks when we're looking at the five elements. It's a really nice indicator of just the general hit of what that person's energy is like. It can change based on your I'm having a bad day, maybe your walk isn't going to be quite the same. So it's not the be all, end all diagnostic tool, but it's very helpful.

Speaker 1 14:18

And then you go to fire, and fire is very young, we call it double yang. It doesn't really have that yin aspect. And then you go to earth, which is equally balanced yin and yang. They just have an equal amount of both.

Speaker 1 14:35

And then you go to metal, which is a little disengaged, a little quieter on the outside. So what you see is someone who's maybe sort of on the periphery watching, observing, but one-on-one very engaged, because on the inside they're very young, they're very strong. And then you have someone who's water, and that's the most mysterious one, because they are all over the place. They have lots of different ways of being, but we call them double yin and you'd think that would be the most withdrawn, most disengaged person. But it's not Double yin. People are quiet a lot of the time and then very expressive, because when you get a lot of yin energy compacting in a person, then it spurts out all of a sudden and you're just like whoa, you know, where'd that come from? So they can be very bold, very oddly, speak up out of nowhere, and that's how you, how water people are.

Speaker 3 15:39

I'd love to focus in on all these interesting treatments that you do, your clinic and your practice. You have a lot of particular treatments, kind of like I was saying before, you seem to be focusing on lesser known things like the extraordinary vessels, the ghost points. You know, these aspects of the anatomy in acupuncture that people are less familiar with. We actually bring some focus to these things in field dynamics as well as we explore the meridian system. But I'd love to know how it is you go approach these different things. So let's just start with. For instance, the first thing I saw on your treatment list was treatments focused on what you're calling chaotic energy. So could you describe what you mean by? So somebody comes in and you say, hey, you have chaotic energy. How did you detect that chaotic energy? Where does that express in the meridian system and what do you do to quell it or balance it?

Clearing Chaotic Energy and Ghost Points

Speaker 1 16:31

This is an interesting topic because when I started 20 years ago plus I mean it was a long time ago now chaotic energy was quite rare, I wouldn't say completely rare. Maybe about 30% of the people we saw had chaotic energy was quite rare, I wouldn't say completely rare. Maybe about 30% of the people we saw had chaotic energy and JR Worsley called it aggressive energy. I never liked that term and my clients don't like that term because it's not aggressive in that it doesn't make you aggressive. It could, but that's not really what it's about. Why he termed it that, I believe, is because it aggressively, would over time get worse and fundamentally I do think people that have this for a very extended period of time it does cause major illnesses and a lot of those mysterious autoimmune type of illnesses or cancers or different things that it's like. Why is this person sick? And then you find out that it's chaotic energy. What it's doing is it's like chaos out there outside of you somehow gets through your defense system, which in Chinese medicine we call your Wei Qi. Your Wei Qi is your defensive Qi. Medicine we call your Wei Qi your Wei Qi is your defensive Qi. It's the Qi that's on the surface of you. That is like a border between you and the outside world and it's you know, it's meant, it's our immune system, it's what we think of as our immune system. But for some reason, that outward chaotic world, maybe you're at the airport and freaking out, or people around you freaking out, or you're in a hospital where there's an emergency, or you're just out today in public, pretty much anywhere you might find a chaotic energy, which is fine. You have a wagey system. It shouldn't bother you, it should be out there. But we get thrown off, we might be having a bad day or we might have a weakened immune system for other reasons. And you, you know, you go into Subway and someone's screaming. This actually happened to a client of mine. She went into you know Subway to get a sandwich and someone just like went off on her and she came in and she she was like ah, and she had the chaotic energy.

Speaker 1 18:46

So the way that we can understand that when people come in diagnostically is we can take the pulses and in Chinese medicine we always look at pulses. It's not 100% accurate, you can't always pick it up in pulses, but a lot of times the pulses feel buzzy or they feel maybe tense and that person's not normally tense, what we call wiry. So there's some qualities that we might feel about chaotic energy in the pulses. But I check it anyway and what that means is I do the points for releasing chaotic energy, which are all the points for those of you who are Chinese medicine background, the yin organs on the back, the back shoe points, we call them, and it's like dispersing, we call it in Chinese medicine. I hope I'm not getting too technical for you here, but we're just you think of it like I'm just.

Speaker 1 19:46

I like to say to my clients, when I teach them how to do this on themselves, I like to say you know, when you tap a maple tree for those of you who live near maple trees when you try to get maple syrup, you don't put the spigot in really deep in the tree, you just put it into the tree's wachee. Really deep in the tree, you just put it into the tree's wachi, you just put in the surface so that that sap that runs can just kind of come out on its own. And that's how we look at. If someone was using needles, they wouldn't put them in very deep, they would tap them in. They 'd literally tap them in and then they would allow it to drain. Now I don't use needles and I think it's it's I.

Speaker 1 20:24

I think it actually takes a long time with needles to drain chaotic energy. The way I do it is I use my fingers on points and I drain the energy that way. So it's a little bit of a different way than a lot of acupuncturists do, and I teach many acupuncturists how to do it my way, because it is quite a bit faster and really useful. How to do it my way, because it is quite a bit faster and really useful. Today I'm seeing 90% of my clients and I don't think I'm exaggerating who come in with this. I just think social media, everything that's going on in our culture it's really hard not to feel that chaotic energy inside, and most people acknowledge that that's how they feel when they have it. And, what's amazing, when you drain it, they feel such a difference. Just sitting right on the table, they feel like, wow, oh my gosh, I didn't realize how stressed and tense I was, so it's like that.

Speaker 3 21:17

Just as a quick follow-up in relation to this, how you're describing things reminds me of the term used regularly today called dysregulation. Do you find there's overlap here?

Speaker 1 21:27

chaos in their life and they're reporting that even if the pulses feel okay, I still treat it and then I take the pulses again, because the pulses change right away when you remove chaotic energy. So even if the pulses to me weren't really really off, I will feel the difference. If I feel no change, then they didn't have it and it's something else. You know. It doesn't mean that that's what's causing the chaos in their lives. It's just that I'm double checking, just the way, the nature of this. I tell all my clients this is really mysterious. I don't think Western minds can understand what this stuff is, but just you know, when I tell them chaos they really relate to that term. So that's why I renamed it chaotic energy.

Speaker 2 22:29

I'd love later to speak about the ghost points and what they are. This is a subject that fascinates me and, reading literature, it does really seem to vary how people talk about and discuss the ghost points. I've read everything from them being about treating mental illness, psychosis, anxiety, even manias, schizophrenia, bipolars, and I noticed on your own website and copy there's information about effectively the word Chinese word for ghost having a hook in its character and it being something that hooks or holds you back, which is really visceral sort of visual experience to think about. You do a 13 point or ghost point treatment, which takes four hours. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about this, starting with what ghost points are from your perspective in their history.

Speaker 1 23:17

Actually I used to do it in four hours and I tell people now four to six hours because I don't stop until it's done. So I did one that was seven hours the other day. You know, isn't true to you Something? It could be a thought. It could be a worm, like someone who's got some kind of parasite. It could be a traumatic event that ever since that traumatic event, I've never been the same. You know. It could be a person in your life that's incredibly negative and over time it's hooked into you and now you, that person's voice is now in your head telling you all those bad things.

Speaker 1 24:11

So basically, we've come to the conclusion we started out doing these treatments really just for mental illness and they were amazing. They were fantastic, like people actually changed. I mean, it's hard to imagine that people can heal from things that you know that are being diagnosed as bipolar or schizophrenia or things that kind of in Western culture we don't really think there's cures for. But these people were experiencing real health, mental health, after doing some of these sessions. So once we started getting going, their loved ones came and said I want that treatment too. And at first it was like, well, why would you get that treatment. You're not mentally ill. They're like no, no, I've got ghosts too. I've got skeletons in my closet. I would like that treatment. And so we started doing it with people who you know. I mean, for all intents and purposes they're fine, right, there was nothing wrong with them. And I do think that there's no hierarchy to trauma, like we might not say from hearing someone's story that they had a very traumatic life, but for them it was, and those hooks got in even though nobody hit them, nobody screamed at them, nobody. You know they didn't have some horrible car accident. I mean, they don't seem to have a really traumatic life. But I've come to this conclusion that most of us have been on this planet for 20 years or more. We've got some stuff. Probably, obviously there are some people who just have had a beautiful life and there's none of that. And I've met them and I've tried treating them and it was pointless. They're just doing great. So they didn't need the ghost points. But the majority of us, we've come to the conclusion, actually do Like we have some skeletons in our closet, some guilt, some shame, some doubt. So the ghost points address all of these things.

Speaker 1 26:17

So it's really evolved over time for me in particular, from doing things that were really more about possession, which is a concept we have in Chinese medicine, you know, which is often thought to be a cause of mental illness. But we always believe that you could be possessed by your own thoughts. So the word possession doesn't necessarily mean an entity possession. If you don't believe in that, that's fine. It could just be someone's negative thought forms. So we just over time looked at the fact that it's almost like you can use these points for your own self-cultivation. You know how can you clean up inside yourself. Almost like all those I know you guys work a lot with energetic patterning, all those patterns that kind of come in cellularly. I like to say that the ghost points break up cellular patterns or mental patterns or spiritual level patterns. So that's one way I describe it a lot.

Speaker 2 27:21

What's happening for you as a practitioner when you're, you know, two hours into a person's session, say, and you think this is still going four hours, in, five hours, in? What are you perceiving? How are you reading the system? How is this information presenting to you?

Speaker 1 27:36

Well, one of the things I believe and I teach my students is when the person comes in that room, they bring the treatment. So we don't come in with any expectations or any belief system about how this ghost point treatment is going to look for you. We really allow you to bring it. So that means that while we're doing these points, there typically is a lot of talking. We say the heart needs to speak, and that's in the classical Chinese literature, like the heart needs to speak for these kinds of treatments. So when they begin speaking, we just try not to interfere with the process and occasionally we are inspired and sort of instructed by the divine to ask a question or prod a little bit, but only as needed. We really try not to interfere and we just move through these points. So what we're experiences experiencing is we're doing a point, we're feeling maybe some. If you're, if you're, uh, clairsentient, I like to call it if you're psychically sentient, meaning you can really feel what's going on in the point. Not everyone's like that, I am, so I can feel like turmoil or gunk or something that doesn't feel right in each point, each point's different, and then that begins to clear. And as that clears, then I realize, okay, we're moving on to the next point.

Speaker 1 29:09

And then my mental level is listening to stories, and also listening not to the trauma so much, but where in that traumatic story is the point of transformation?

Speaker 1 29:22

Where can we kind of move them maybe 180 degrees and just see it from the other vantage point? I always say, like you know, if we all saw a car accident, if there are 20 of us there, each of us would have a different report of it. So it's almost like what would it be like if you're standing across the street, you know, and that person might just need that vantage point shift to begin to heal something that was a belief system that came out of that trauma, like it's not safe for me to be in a car, in the car accident. You know Now I'm terrified of driving. I have people that come to me all the time I'm terrified of driving. You know they have different reasons. Sometimes it's a car accident, but it's like how can that heal? And so the points are doing something on a cellular level and then mentally I might have a come to a conclusion of a point of transformation where something I say might get them directing in a different direction in terms of how they think about it.

Speaker 3 30:25

Before we go further into alchemy as a larger subject, I was curious about you using your hands and acupressure, rather than what we might then say is acupuncture with the needles. What are you finding is an advantage working with your hands? Why do you prefer that method? Et cetera.

Alchemy and Energy in Healing

Speaker 1 30:41

Well, I have to say, over the years I've gotten stronger in my opinion and it's only my opinion and I think people using needles are doing amazing work and I love that they're doing that work. But for me and a lot of my students I've been surprised over the years how many of my students are not using needles for alchemical Chinese medicine. I always suggest they try it and then they compare that to what we're teaching, which is using your fingers as needles. I call it the non-needling needle technique and what that means is that you become the needle. So this is a really important concept for acupuncturists, because they are, you know, their needle is everything Like. They really are focused on the needle and the needle is ostensibly doing the work, but of course that's not really true. The person and their intention and the points they're selecting and what they're doing as they needle it that which we call the needle action all of that is what's doing the treatment. So we've taken sort of this idea that a needle has to be inserted and instead it's energetic needling, meaning the energy of the practitioner is causing the needle action is going to the depth that the needle would go and which is very handy when, when the ancient prescription was three inch needles. You know in your belly, for example, like it's much more pleasant to have. You know what I call the nine needling needling, because your finger can go the three inches energetically.

Speaker 1 32:28

And people have said to me they feel like there's a needle there or they're just shocked. So what I've been surprised about is that people who love their needles, a lot of people that have come to work at the Alchemy Healing Center, they were like I'm going to use needles all the time. I hope you're okay with that. I'm like sure. And by the time you know they've been there a couple of years. I would say they use it 20 to 30% of the time and and it's great, you know, because mostly because the patients are asking for the needles. That's their paradigm and that's fine. So we're not against needles or anything like that. We love both modalities. We just think there's an incredible power to helping a practitioner become the needle. It's, like you know, a masterful way of treating. You know to treat from that perspective.

Speaker 2 33:21

Can you with us, perhaps, what daoist alchemy is?

Speaker 1 33:26

so there are many alchemical traditions in china and obviously all over the world, so that the goal of alchemy in china in particular, and in da Taoist alchemy, was not this idea of turning lead to gold, for example, that we often think of in Western culture. It was that you, the human being, are the gold, and you have likely forgotten that, meaning that you were born perfect and you actually still are perfect and you're going to die perfect, because gold is a metal that you can bury in the ground for centuries and dig it up and it's still perfect, like there's. It's just always beautiful and it doesn't change much, right? So it was more of a metaphor that we as human beings, we tend to think we're going to grow old, decrepit and die, and the alchemists believe that if you do the right things and you cultivate the right way, that you could actually become immortal, physically immortal, or at least transcend yourself to an immortal realm, and so that was what drove them. And then there were different groups of alchemists and you know there were the eight immortals, for example. They're very famous, but even before the eight immortals there were people practicing this, and one of the most famous ones, gehong G-E-H-O-N-G for those who don't know how to spell it, gehong. He was one of the first ones and he did it through stone medicine, so he would drink elixirs that he, you know, had a cauldron to create and there was a whole process that was nine stages. So what we're practicing is from that tradition and it's called the nine stages of alchemy, and this is something that Jeffrey Yuen has taught. He's taught other traditions as well, but why I like it? This particular one, the nine stages? That stems from Gahang. We're not drinking stone medicine poisonous by the way, they stems from Gahang. We're not drinking stone medicine poisonous by the way, they were poisonous elixirs. We're not drinking mercury or anything like that, which was cinnabar back then, but that has over centuries, transformed in the Taoist alchemy community to stages of meditation, stages of self-cultivation.

Speaker 1 36:02

How can you get from this place where your life isn't so great, like what's going on? I feel like I'm a little boat being tossed at sea this way and that I have no control over my life, like that kind of feeling? How do I get from that to really feeling like I'm flying in my life, like really everything is just flowing, you're in the zone all the time, like it's just going great. So how do I get from point A to point B? And the nine stages of alchemy was kind of what a lot of these early alchemists were thinking about how do we get there? And they mapped it out. And I like to say you know, there's a million ways to transform. There's inconceivable ways to transform. You know, you look at all the history around the globe and there are so many different ways, and this is just one way, with a lot of smart people from ancient times put their heads together and said, hey, how can we do this? And they noticed, if you do this first and then you do this second and then you do this third, and you know, etc. That it's good, it helps, and so what we're doing is the first three stages are really important and it is kind of unique.

Speaker 1 37:21

I work with a lot of people who've been meditating for like years and years and years and they're shocked when they first start doing alchemy, because a lot of meditation in the world focuses on very high level, like they get you there pretty quick and what they're not focusing on is our basic human nature, which can be very problematic on a lot of levels. So even the ghost points is like one of the first steps I do. And then the second stage. The first stage of alchemy is like how do I just get ease? How do I feel at ease? Can I actually believe that I get to have what I want? That would be just a real simple thing. Not much to do with high-level meditation, but what I think the alchemists were saying is, if you sort that out, then the high-level meditation stuff can be so much more effective. You won't hit those walls in yourself when you're at that level of the higher meditation.

Speaker 1 38:23

So the first three stages are how do I get ease in my life? How do I let go of my baggage of this lifetime? You know that just keeps surfacing over and over again how do I let go of my ancestral baggage or my past life baggage? So that's just like the first three stages. And then you get to go on to things, like you know, being like a child's mind, like a lot of the famous philosophers, like Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi they all had this childlike mind that they were trying to get to. And then you can go to the wise sage, where you're actually like you've rebirthed yourself, you've let go of your ego and all of these things that we talk about in Western society, when we're working spiritually. That's all like you becoming the sage. And then, finally, like, the sixth stage is like what would it be like to really fly in your life, or even that levitate? They believed that these alchemists could fly and were seen to be flying around the mountains even by Westerners as late as the 1950s. So I think yeah.

Speaker 3 40:12

Yeah, so and then the last three stages are way out. There you seven the limbs of yoga, from Ashtanga yoga, traditional yoga, through whatever lens, through whatever tradition, giving people a step-by-step process by which you purify yourself, clarify, neutralize yourself and then start to refine and crystallize and come into higher levels of potential. And that might be like the commonality in all of them. I like to think that the films and modern mythology are reflective of these very same traditions, whether it be Crouching Tiger, hidden Dragon, where people are flying right, they're flying, but there's reference to these traditions in the way in which we look at more, you know, esoteric kinds of concepts, or, like Marvel films and stuff, superpowers yeah, doctor Strange, you know, like the Marvels and Harry Potter are great examples of modern forms of magic and human potential.

Speaker 1 41:04

Yeah, and I I love the idea that I always tell people is, even if you're not levitating on my table yet, I want to see someone feel like they're flying in their life, and that's really specific, like when someone feels that it it is really real, like it feels like things are just going your way and you've got some kind of awareness of how that works, and so that's kind of where where I like to help people towards, like that's one of the goals of doing the alchemy work.

Speaker 3 41:40

When you train people, you say that the alchemical healer isn't doing the healing, but rather is acting as the medium or the intermediary by which something comes through them, and through them they serve as a vehicle for the healing process. Could you talk about this principle a little bit, about healer not being the healer all those words and sometimes we just use a word just as a facilitator.

Practitioner Transformations and Neutrality

Speaker 1 42:10

I like intermediary better, but the idea that you're facilitating something. We have a training where we have people just repeat over and over to themselves as practitioners, I cannot help you. I cannot help you because we have such a desire to help and we don't recognize that the desire to help can actually get in the way of the healing, because maybe that person's just going to heal quote, unquote because they want you to like them more. You know, there's all these really strange complexities. So not being tied to the outcome is what a facilitator is doing. It's really walking by a person's side and allowing them to know that there's somebody there helping them. You know, transform, but not in the way that I'm doing something to help you. I'm just, you know, witnessing, maybe facilitating, facilitating all of these words, and one of the key things that we teach is the practice. The treatment hasn't really been fully successful unless the practitioner has also changed. So we're looking for transformation for that person on the table, but it's it's as if on the table, but it's it's as if you're shifting as much as they are. So every treatment you do is is transformational for you as the practitioner, and this is huge. I mean, I've I've been in I do a lot of supervised treatments where I supervise practitioners and I've been in a treatment where you know someone's heart as a practitioner has had a lot of struggle. Hard to be open hearted in their life, hard to you know, really connect on a heart level. Amazing practitioners maybe they know tons of stuff, amazing stuff. But when it came down to that moment at the end of the treatment when something was going to shift, they had to rip their heart out energetically like so intense. They had to feel what it's like to feel heart pain, for example, to feel into their heart so deeply, and that's hugely transformative when they can. You know, I'm not saying everyone is that dramatic at all. It could be very mild, but I wanted to use that as an example because that actually happened. That actually happened.

Speaker 1 44:34

A song came on and it's like, oh, we didn't talk about the music yet. We play music, we play random music in these treatments, and a song came on and says it was just that song. I want somebody to love. I need somebody to love.

Speaker 1 44:57

So here is this person whose life was a struggle of love as the practitioner and now had to relate to this person on the table, and so we energetically, just, you know, like, just took that heart out and, you know, felt what it would be like to, you know, have your heart in your hand, basically, and feel that. So it was a very dramatic session Because you know a practitioner who's going through a treatment like that, where you know there's just so much going on with that person and you're feeling it with them and you're facilitating, you're witnessing, you're walking by their side. I like to say because you know I was thinking about this with fields, with what you're doing that the field of of their heart has to connect with their, the person's heart field, and so we call that treating from the void of the heart and that's what we teach our practitioners I love everything you're sharing here.

Speaker 2 45:58

That's something so powerful in this idea of recognizing the client as sovereign, not having an agenda. As a facilitator or, to use your word there, which I really appreciate, intermediary, like to be able to really watch our role and also to value that balance, that equality between treating and treaty, you know, in terms of who's experiencing what, and holding that as a very sacred and profound exchange, without stepping into these roles egotistically or disempowering a client. You know, with that orientation of I'm helping you, et cetera, really important concepts I really appreciate you sharing. And this idea of bringing what we might call radio religion to the sessions, in terms of the song choice and the synchronicities, is beautiful as well. I really appreciate that. We call it the divine DJ. The divine DJ Beautiful. You've also stated along these similar lines. I think that every illness is considered a choice between potential or pathology, and that's something that comes to mind as we're sharing these broader, higher principles. I wonder if you could speak to that idea a little bit.

Speaker 1 47:14

Yes, this comes up a lot and it's something to be very sensitive about as a practitioner because we have to embrace this with no judgment whatsoever. So if you're talking to someone who's had a lot of trauma and you're talking about this concept that everything in your life is potential or pathology, your choice, that can be very triggering for a person because they don't think necessarily that their trauma was their choice. I recently had a client who a song came up and we have talk, talk people in the mix. We don't just have songs, we have different, like Eckhart Tolle, different people. You know that come, come into the mix. And this particular track was all about positive thinking and how important it is and how you got to do it.

Speaker 1 48:06

And it was like suddenly the treatment went sideways. I call it when the treatment goes sideways, something's really throwing the treatment into jeopardy and you have to be as a practitioner. It could have been something I said and that's happened in the past by mistake. How would you know that's going to trigger someone? But they get triggered by mistake. How would you know that's going to trigger someone, but they get triggered? And now you have to. It's important that that happened. I don't think it's a mistake. I teach everyone no mistakes when you're doing this work. That happened for a reason. We had to witness this. We had to be there with them. We had to walk through that with them and feel what that feels like. To feel like.

Speaker 1 48:47

Why do people keep telling me to just think positive when this horrible thing happened? And they're it's like they're, they're discounting it. And so yet, underneath, you know, as a practitioner, you can stand back and you can see the lifetime unfolding in a person and how right some of those traumas were as horrible as they are. I had someone who had probably the worst trauma I've ever seen, a story of tell me she wouldn't trade that in because she's gotten to where she is today because of it. To have that recognition, I mean, I think anyone who's been through trauma, if they could feel that, that's a blessing. I'm not sure everyone can get there. And so for me to say potential or pathology, your choice can feel very judgmental and discounting of the actual trauma.

Speaker 1 49:51

And yet, as a practitioner, to see the unfolding of someone's destiny, to recognize that you know, trauma happens, sometimes for a quote, unquote reason. We create meaning out of it, we might evolve because of it and to not as a practitioner, stand in the place that all trauma is bad and yet you know that may not help at all in the session, that may not come in because that could be again really hard for the person to think you think that about them. So it's 100% being in rapport and professional intimacy with that person. So we can't really have opposing views or we really have to be, I like to say, amoral, not moralistic and not immoral, but amoral Like there is no good or bad from the practitioner point of view. There's definitely good or bad from the person sitting on the table.

Speaker 3 50:54

I appreciate that term amoral. It's really interesting to consider it. I think we have a parallel point. We just use the word neutral and really the role I think of people doing therapy in general is that there's a fundamental, open, neutral space in which the person can be however they are, without any judgment, without any modifications, without any expectations, and that safe space is the space where healing can take place. And when that's violated in any way whatsoever, the client then, or the person receiving the work, doesn't feel okay being who they are, and without that quality of safety, then all else is just out the window potentially.

Speaker 1 51:34

And the fifth stage of alchemy, the nine stages of alchemy, is where you get to no good or bad, also in your life. It's easier for you to practice that as a practitioner, talking about someone else's life and really being in that neutral space. But can you be that about your own life? You know, maybe you know your spouse says something to you and you're, or you know your parents or whatever you know work. We have a lot of lot of opinions. I mean we're really subject to yin and yang as human beings, like good and bad, dark and light, like all these things that that humanity is constantly. It's in our face and it's a really high level idea that you could get to neutrality not just in the treatment room but in your life.

Speaker 2 52:27

I think that's a very empowering piece and alongside this idea, you also visited in what you were sharing around, what we call at Field Dynamics radical responsibility, that if a client, a trainee, an attendee, a person can come to view their experience as I don't even want to use the word positive over negative, but simply opportunity as a gift, as the seed for that transformation that you keep referring to in the alchemical process right, that we can transmute what was challenge, hardship, struggle, all these words that you know the ego wants to apply to a situation and allow that to become. You know, it's the old adage, isn't it? It's the cracks in which the light can enter.

Speaker 1 53:19

Yes, yes, and again, sometimes a more challenging concept is this idea that we create our reality. The Dallas Alchemists believe that our reality is an illusion. But this idea that when I heard you say radical responsibility, it made me think about are we accountable for everything that happens in our lives? And that's a question you know, but it is a question to ask in alchemy because in some people's lives that actually helps for them to understand that that could be happening. It's helped me Before I wrote my first book.

Speaker 1 54:11

I talked all the time about writing my first book and it never happened and I was frustrated but I had lots of excuses, lots of reasons. And then to just take accountability for for myself and to see, oh, I'm creating all those reasons that are stopping me from writing the book. I mean, on one level, I'm creating the struggle that was hard to, that was a tough phase to get through. Like could I, could I see that I'm creating my reality? Like I'm creating all of the obstacles that I am pointing fingers at out in the world. So that that's a lot of the stage one of alchemy is about what are these obstacles and why? Why do I think they're so? In my way, you know what's stopping me really from doing what I want to do?

Speaker 3 55:08

In terms of the work that you offer. Where is it that people can find your work? What things do you offer? What's coming up?

Speaker 1 55:16

Well, first of all, we have a learning center for alchemy it's called Alchemy Learning Center, and, of course, we have our clinic in Northampton, massachusetts, which is called Alchemy Healing Center, and both of of course. We have our clinic in northampton, massachusetts, which is called alchemy healing center, and both of those. We have those websites, alchemylearningcentercom and alchemyhealingcentercom, so that's where you can find us. And we also have a book coming out called cultivating cultivating the 13 ghost points, so we're super excited about that. We have a book on the nine stages of alchemy, called Through the Mystery Gate, which you can get on Audible or print, and we have several other books on the five elements and some Chinese medicines. So they're out there and you can look them up.

Speaker 1 55:57

But yeah, so we have some study groups going starting this fall. We have an apprenticeship that happens every couple of years and this fall, if you want to begin that process, you would join the Ghost Point Study Group or the Five Element Study Group or the Alchemy Study Group, and so all that means is that we're going to have a six-month program. That's a real deep dive into this work, both for lay people and for practitioners, and then from there, if you want to join an apprenticeship, you can do that. And I should just say one more thing we do have a lot of online classes about these topics, so even releasing chaotic energy and stuff like that, so anyone can go take those at the Alchemy Learning Center.

Speaker 2 56:45

Fantastic, we'll make sure to include at the Alchemy Learning Center. Fantastic, we'll make sure to include all the information and details in the show notes later. And we've just really enjoyed the discussion, looking forward hopefully to connecting for further discussion as well.

Speaker 1 56:57

Yes, I would love that. I'd love to have a wonderful conversation with you on the Inspired Action podcast. So thank you, keith. Thank you, christabel, I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 57:08

Thanks so much for your time, Netta.

Speaker 3 57:09

Yes, thank you so much. Thank you rating and review of the show on your preferred listening platform. This helps us get the message out to a wider audience. If the topics we discussed today appeal to you, do take a moment to subscribe. Lastly, we invite you to check out our website, fielddynamicshealingcom to learn about our training programs, private session work and to see how we're setting the standard in contemporary energy healing. Many thanks and see you next time.