The Future of Wellness
This is The Future of Wellness, your go-to resource for the art of wellbeing and the science of self-transformation. Explore a holistic approach to life with world-class experts as we uncover the tools and traditions of consciousness transformation. From energy healing to ayurveda, somatic therapies to neuroscience, meditation to enlightenment – we believe the most interesting things happen at the boundaries of disciplines. Whether you’re curious about holistic wellness or deeply committed to your inner work, this podcast is an invaluable guide to unlocking your inner potential. Hosted by Christabel Armsden and Keith Parker, founders of Field Dynamics.
The Future of Wellness
The New Frontier of Healing: Human Biofields, Energy Healing & Integrative Health with Dr. Shamini Jain
In this 50th episode and in celebration of our new podcast name, we are excited to host Dr. Shamini Jain, an eminent clinical psychologist and scientist, as she guides us through the revolutionary paradigm shift in holistic wellness and alternative medicine. Author of the award-winning book Healing Ourselves: Biofield Science and the Future of Health (2021), Dr. Jain is also founder and CEO of the Consciousness and Healing Initiative (CHI), a collaborative accelerator that forwards the science and practice of healing. Join us as we delve into the emerging field of biofield science and its profound implications for wellbeing. Dr. Jain explains how biofield science bridges the language of modern medicine and traditional healing systems through overlapping concepts like qi, prana, bioelectricity and cellular membrane potential. Furthermore, we learn how investigating the biofield requires studying molecular biology, energy healing modalities, distance healing and consciousness. Our conversation takes a personal turn as Shamini recounts her powerful early encounters with a Reiki healer which led her to study the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology. She shares the emotional and physical revelations that led her to a deeper understanding of vibrational healing, energy work and sound therapy. She also discusses the fascinating subject of distant healing and the scientific breakthroughs by researchers Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlitz, exploring how our interconnectedness can transcend time and space. We learn more about the incredible work being done by CHI, and the cultural shift towards a more inclusive view of health. This episode emphasizes the importance of grassroots movements in driving change and the power of collective efforts to shape a future of integrative health. Tune in for an empowering discussion that bridges science and spirituality, offering a fresh perspective on what it means to truly heal.
Dr. Shamini Jain is an international keynote speaker, and integrates her background in clinical psychology, psychoneuroimmunology, Eastern spiritual wisdom, and vocal empowerment to teach others how they can best heal themselves and live joyful, fulfilling lives. She teaches regularly at major conferences and leading retreat centers, including Esalen, Sivananda Ashram and Omega Institute. Dr. Jain obtained her B.A. in Neuroscience and Behaviour from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. from the San Diego State University/UC San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology. Her award-winning research has been featured in major media including TIME, CNN, and Good Day LA, as well as with two TEDx talks on healing and several documentaries.
shaminijain.com
Consciousness and Healing Initiative (CHI)
theenergythatheals.com
Liked what you heard? Help us reach more people!
Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Start Energy Healing Today!
Unlock your healing potential with our informative and fun introductory 10 hour LIVE online class in energy healing
Our Flagship Training is Setting the Standard in Energy Healing
The next 100 hour EHT-100 Energy Healing Training is open for enrolment! LIVE & online - 12th October - 16th March 2025.
Contact Field Dynamics
Email us at info@fielddynamicshealing.com
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to the future of wellness, exploring self transformation and holistic healing to unlock your inner potential. Hosted by Christabel Armsden and Keith Parker.
Keith Parker:This episode we are joined by Dr Shamini Jain. Shamini is a clinical psychologist, scientist, social profit leader and author of the award-winning book Healing Ourselves Biofield Science and the Future of Health. She's the founder and CEO of the Consciousness and Healing Initiative, a collaborative accelerator that forwards the science and practice of healing. An international keynote speaker and self-healing teacher, she integrates her background in clinical psychology, psychoneuroimmunology, eastern spiritual wisdom and vocal empowerment to teach others how they can best heal themselves and live joyful, fulfilling lives. She teaches the science and practice of healing regularly at major conferences, corporations and leading retreat centers, including Esalen, sivananda Ashram and the Omega Institute. Dr Jain obtained her BA in Neuroscience and Behavior from Columbia University and her PhD from the San Diego State University-UC San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology. Her award-winning research has been featured in major media, including Time, CNN and Good Day LA, as well as having had two TEDx talks on healing and several documentaries. Dr Jain, it is a pleasure to have you today.
Dr Shamini Jain:Thank you, Keith. Wow, and congratulations on saying the word psychoneuroimmunology with such flair, because most people stumble on that word. It's a big word and most people, sadly, aren't still clued into this beautiful field.
Keith Parker:Well, we're hoping to learn a lot more about it. So, in terms of opening things up, in your book, you share an inspiring message about the paradigm shift we're experiencing, how, as a collective, we're being called to expand our understanding about health and healing, that we're not simply complex machines of siloed systems but, in fact, bioenergetic beings completely intertwined with our environments. I'd love if we could open with you speaking a little about this shift from individual to systems thinking or individual to collective thinking, in terms of connectedness.
Dr Shamini Jain:Beautiful. I think we're seeing it in many different sectors, right, and ultimately, what it is is it's a return to wholeness, which is what healing is. For many decades, as you know, we've had this discussion in medical science what is healing? And we've conflated healing with curing, where we think that healing is just about getting rid of a physical disease or optimizing our physical bodies, which can be part of it, for sure. But I think what we're seeing both, as we explore healing from a scientific and spiritual perspective, because they're both valid perspectives on what it is is we're waking up. We're waking up to what it means to be a whole human being and not feeling like we have to eschew the spiritual part of us and that it doesn't matter for our health, but that healing is about integrating and honoring all of our parts, as some of my psychologist friends like to say. And this is what's really cool about the data, because we are learning that our spiritual health, emotional health, mental health and sometimes those things are put together. We can talk a little bit about that. If we take a look at what's happening in the world it's kind of the same with global warming, with some of the issues that are happening sociopolitically around the world. We're realizing we're not separate, and this is what I love about the study of energy the exploration of what we Western scientists have been calling the biofield for many decades now is, I think, one of the most exciting things about studying the biofield is understanding on a scientific level, truly, that we're not separate. We've all had that felt sense, especially these days as we come up with better solutions, even exploring how do we work with the mess that we've created that has caused the climate change that we have. We recognize that we're not separate from the earth, Like we're very clear on it now, If there was any question about it, you know, there's no question about it.
Dr Shamini Jain:Now we see this movement to plant medicine, you know, to opening up to plant spirit.
Dr Shamini Jain:As you know, there's a huge corporate push to just, you know, kind of make plant medicine monetizable by kind of going through the pharma route. So there's one aspect of that. But there are many people that are waking up to recognize that ingesting plant medicine is more than just shifting the chemistry in our body. It's about waking up to the larger world and the plants within it. So you know, in short, up to the larger world and the plants within it. So you know, in short, I think that exploring all of these facets and dimensions of being and realizing that we're not separate from that is where we are right now. It is exciting times and it's extremely important because the sooner we all embody it you know, as you know from your teaching I know that you guys teach about this and we're not just exploring it up here in the head, but we're really deeply feeling it here in the heart that's when we're going to have the energy and the motivation to bring our entire society and our connection with the planet into a larger wholeness and prevent our extinction
Christabel Armsden:nd you mentioned a key term there, biofield. You speak of biofield science as a bridge to help us finally truly understand how consciousness fosters healing. Here at Field Dynamics, as you mentioned, we teach energy healing and, as such, the existence and role of this human energy field and a person's subtle anatomy. What exactly is biofield science and its significance in health and healing as you present it, and can you explain the concept of the biofield specifically?
Dr Shamini Jain:Yeah, and I want to honor that this is a westernized term that was created several decades ago at a National Institutes of Health meetings where several scientists came together to say how do we explain things like the effects that we're seeing on energy healing or devices like post-electromagnetic field stimulation or acupuncture, or even Tai Chi and Qigong, which is practiced both internally and externally? What kind of terminology can we use scientifically to help us understand what is happening and can we systematize that understanding in some way so that we can explore this more scientifically? And I will say a lot of people say well, what's the big deal? Like I feel my energy. Why do you have to even study it scientifically? A lot of folks come to this work because we want this work to be available for all. So there is sort of a pathway when we do research, especially clinical research, where we can demonstrate that these holistic practices have effects on patients, and then we're more readily able to get them into hospitals, clinics and even community care facilities. So that's kind of from my perspective as a clinical psychologist, why I do the work that I do in science. Honestly, there's also a fascination with it in general, but it's also very practical. So this is why the scientists were like, well, there's lots of terms, there's chi, there's prana, there's subtle energy, there's the field, there's the zero. Like all the practitioners are using all kinds of language already and have been, for, you know, thousands of years to describe this. So why did we even come up with this term? It was just to try to get some consensus and, honestly, it's evolving. 10 years from now we might be calling it something else, but this is the term we landed on.
Dr Shamini Jain:And the biofield was termed in NIH, basically like this a massless field, not necessarily electromagnetic, that guides the homeodynamic functioning of a living organism. In plain English, what does that mean? It's fields of energy and information that seem to guide our health, and some of those we can measure and some of those we can't. And what's really cool about it in the way that it's being studied is it's like multiple levels of scale. So the biofield isn't just one thing. You can talk about levels of scale of the biofield just like you do consciousness, and we can wax on that if you want. But people study the biofields of cells and cell-cell communication and they look at things they can measure, like voltage gradients across cell membranes, where we're seeing, for example, in cancer. We're seeing that the membrane depolarization across mitochondria in cancer is different. It's almost like leaky, you know. There's like strong polarization, there's strong voltage, current flow between mitochondria which seems to create that sort of me against the world thing that goes on in cancer where the cancer cells are growing and they're not listening to the other cells. So this is actually biofield science, because we're studying electrical charge. Okay, that's what we're studying.
Dr Shamini Jain:But we also look at things like distant healing and what we call energy healing, whether it's in person or at a distance, and we explore how practitioners like yourselves who are teaching people how to work with their field or who may work with the field themselves in sort of a healer-patient or healer-client kind of relationship, what is it that they are doing? And, most importantly, from the data, from the clinical perspective, does it help? Is it more than placebo? Does it have effects all the way down to physiological levels like hormone changes and immune function? Does it reduce pain? Does it reduce anxiety? And, by and large, the studies that we have right now there are over 400 clinical studies in what we call biofield therapies, which are essentially what we might call energy healing practices Like modern ones mostly are the ones that have been studied, like healing touch, therapeutic touch, reiki. There's a little bit now more data coming in on pranic healing, external qigong. Those are the things that have been studied. Chronic healing, external qigong those are the things that have been studied. When we look at the clinical studies that are over 400 and over maybe now 150 randomized controlled trials we see that these actually have benefits for patients. We do see, overall, looking at the data, reductions in pain, reductions in anxiety, shifts in depression, shifts in immune function, reduction of symptomatology in cancer my own placebo-controlled randomized trial which I conducted at UCSD for breast cancer patients, or rather survivors, who were experiencing debilitating fatigue.
Dr Shamini Jain:What we found in that study was that these women who were experiencing fatigue for over 10 years, some of them anywhere from a month to 10 years post-treatment. A lot of them did chemo radiation, some of them didn't do anything, some of them did everything. What they all had in common was fatigue, when they received just eight sessions of energy healing twice a week for four weeks, compared to women who were just touched, but not like actually having their energy moved by a practitioner just, you know skeptical scientists who did sort of the mock healing. We found significant and a weightless control group, we found significant drops in fatigue for these women. Not only that, but unique for the women who received energy healing, we saw shifts in the cortisol rhythm. So that is that their cortisol rhythms became more regulated, which is a really important biomarker in cancer.
Dr Shamini Jain:And I won't go into more detail here, I don't want to bore anyone, anyone who's interested in the data. You know about the book, hopefully you know about the book. It has over 600 peer-reviewed published references clinical, preclinical meaning, like studies with cells, animals. The data is really starting to show up and it's really exciting. So there's the long-winded answer on biofield science and where we are today.
Keith Parker:I'm fascinated by the terminology you use, that massless and not necessarily electromagnetic. That is extremely abstract in general for medical science to be acknowledging a factor of significance in terms of health improvement upon something that is that amorphous. So my curiosity here is to ask what is the big hurdle, what is the big mystery in actually more concretely being able to account for the biofield? And you know, is it that bio is misleading? I sensed a little bit of trepidation in your use of the term bio. Is bio misleading? Is this field necessarily involved with biology in the first place?
Dr Shamini Jain:Great question. And then this is where you know, as a scientist, I'm unsatisfied, as you could pick up very good noting. And it's funny because our friend Deepak Chopra always tells me well, Shamini, you're branded with the term biofield, whether you like it or not, you know, I mean it's in the title of your book, but honestly and some of my healer colleagues don't like this, but I said I'm not sure it's the right term, you know I'm really not it leads to our perspective on consciousness, right, right. So my questioning of the term bio field and linking the term bio with it you're absolutely right, Keith kind of comes from my own personal experience and my background, growing up as a jan and in the east indian spiritual traditions, where our view of consciousness is that everything is conscious. You know, and it links back to what we call the big B biofield, big C, consciousness. We can explore those terms if you want, but if we consider that everything has consciousness, then you know there are some spiritual traditions and philosophical traditions and you know, in in academic parlance now, we use this term panpsychism, right, as a kind of a description of everything is conscious. Even this computer, the table that the computer is sitting on, all of this has shakti or vibrational quality to it and so, because of the quality that it has in it, it is conscious. That's a panpsychic approach. If you follow the panpsychic approach, then it means that everything has a field as well. Whether the field can pass through something, whether it has its own field. A rock has its field. Most people think of rocks as inanimate, but people who work with crystals may tell you very differently, right? So it really is sort of the edge.
Dr Shamini Jain:Then the question, also with biofield, is how do we explain distant healing? Because we are seeing studies that suggest that distant healing is a real thing and there need to be more studies on this, and there are many, many scientific gaps. But let's take, for example, the seminal work that was done decades ago at the Institute of Noetic Sciences by our dear colleagues Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlitz, where they weren't necessarily looking at healing, but they had people far away in different rooms, right? I remember reading about these studies when I was before even graduate school and I was just salivating on them. I was like, wow, I'm so glad someone's looking at this. What they demonstrated, in very carefully controlled experimental conditions, was that a person could tune in to another person across, not even just across the room, but in completely different rooms and sometimes even separated even more in space, and they could affect their physiology in consistent and measurable ways. They looked at skin conductance, they looked at heart rate, they looked at EEG. If this is the case, they're not talking, they don't know. There are all these randomized conditions, so the person who's having their physiology moved isn't aware of when the person is trying to intend to affect their physiology or whether they're not.
Dr Shamini Jain:Is there a field that is sort of governing that connection? Is it beyond our concepts of time and space? I mean, there are many, many open questions, and this is where I used to joke about the hand waving of quantum physics. But as we get deeper into exploring entanglement and now you know we see that entanglement happens in macroscopic systems I talk about this a little bit in my book we used to think, oh well, entanglement could be an explanation for this. But does it really happen with biology? You know, is there entanglement-like behavior in physical systems, macro systems? We're beginning to see that there is.
Dr Shamini Jain:But I'm going to be honest again, keeping my scientist hat on. We are far, far away from being able to confidently say beyond the shadow of a doubt that, yes, we have borne out all the studies and what is happening in distant healing is entanglement. It's connection with the larger field of where everything is and everything is happening, where time and space are irrelevant. And what is happening here is a larger connection with the field and that is what is actually happening Now. You'll talk to many practitioners and they'll say that's exactly what's happening. You look at the ancient traditions and their descriptions of things like the Akashic field and you may say that's exactly what's happening, but from a modern scientific perspective, we're not there with the experiments.
Christabel Armsden:You mentioned a little there about your background and I'd like to backtrack a little bit to help our listeners understand your journey and how it is you came to be doing this. Really, you know critical, valuable work from our perspective. What inspired you to pursue a career in integrative medicine and consciousness research? We'd love to hear something of your journey.
Dr Shamini Jain:Deep curiosity and a resonance with vibration really two of those things. So one, because I was kind of holding different worlds early on, being born and raised in the deep South as a Jain um, where you know we have particular beliefs. Most people know Jainism for our major tenant, which is ahimsa or non-violence. So all my baptist christians were friends, were like you know why do? Why do your priests and nuns, like, wear cloths over their face and why don't you eat meat? And you know. So right away we were discussing and kind of exploring the different ways that we understood the world, the way we connected with spirit. So I was always comfortable to some degree holding different polarities and realizing that different people felt differently. And I'm a singer and I realized at a young age that singing was a very powerful thing for me. So right away I was sparked by the power of vibration and how we were looking at it. At the same time, my father being a chemist, you know I was kind of a skeptical scientist from an early age. So I would read these books, like Easy Journey to Other Planets, you know, and they're talking about all this far out stuff and they're even saying things that I thought were far out at the time. You know, growing up like yoga impacts the autonomic nervous system and you know, if you breathe this way, it's going to shift your body this way. And I was like, well, how do they know? Right, they're making all these claims like is anyone actually looking at this? So, because I had the privilege of going to some great universities, I started questioning why aren't we looking at this? Why aren't we looking at consciousness and all of these descriptions of vibration and energy? And at that time, as an undergraduate at Columbia in the 90s, I actually wanted to study music and sound and its effects on healing, and back then my professors thought that was out there. Now there's like multi-million dollars NIH grants for music therapy, thank goodness.
Dr Shamini Jain:But the vibrational curiosity was really what got me into the field and I talk about this in my book. It was actually my first experience of a Reiki session in my 20s where I was like, oh, this is vibration. I could feel, and I can feel this shift in my energy body, even though she's not even moving her hands. And not only that, I can feel that when my energy shifts, my thoughts and my emotions are shifting. And it was like, you know we, when my energy shifts, my thoughts and my emotions are shifting and it was, like you know, we started talking about psychoneuroimmunology. This is the extension of psychoneuroimmunology. Psyche means spirit. Biofield science is part of psychoneuroimmunology. In my view. That is not a traditional view, but that is my view. I think we'll get there.
Dr Shamini Jain:So that's really what led me on the journey and I will say and it's still the case now I did really find mentors who would understand what it was I wanted to do and not be afraid to mentor me to do it. So you know, that's a journey I talk about in the book too, because I have many young scientists that come to me and ask like how did you get into this and how did you figure out? How did you navigate the academic system to be able to study something like this in traditional academia? It's not easy. You've got to find support, you've got to find a mentor who is willing to actually mentor you to do something beyond what they're doing, maybe related, but actually has a genuine interest. And I will say this it's changing. I have conversations now with academics at top tier research universities, including Harvard, UCSF, USSD, other places where there's a genuine interest of really established researchers to begin looking at this field, and that makes me very excited.
Keith Parker:I'd love to look at the word healing. You speak in your book about healing from a Vedic point of view, which I'd love for you to share here. But in general, in terms of the scientific way in which we interface this word healing, how is healing happening through the lens of the biofield.
Dr Shamini Jain:So let's take it part by part. Most people in the integrative health field, by the way, there's also a shift now. It used to be alternative, then it was complementary and alternative, then it was integrative. Now people are moving toward a term called whole health, and that's relevant because we're talking about healing and most of us will say healing is a return to wholeness. It's literally a return to connecting with the deeper aspects of ourselves, beyond our conditioned mind, beyond even the fixation of whether my body is going to get well or not, to open myself up, to allowing for my body, mind, to restore health if it has been lost, and that's on the mental, emotional, physical, social levels. Some of the indigenous traditions might describe healing as a return to harmony, again, understanding that we're not separate from our environment, our surroundings, our diet. The healing process is a process, it's not an outcome, so it's ongoing. It's a constant joyful return to harmonious being in all aspects of our life, but often, especially the way that we've just been conditioned in the global world. We begin to seek healing when we notice that we're out of harmony. That's typically when we think about healing. We think, oh, notice that we're out of harmony, right, that's typically when we think about healing we think, oh well, I'm out of whack, I'm out of harmony, something's not right with my body, something's not right with my mind and there's still that thinking of I need something outside myself to fix it. That's not healing, that's more aligned with what we call a curing model and it's very valuable. We need that. Sometimes there's a pathogen that got into our bodies. You know we drank water that didn't suit us from another country. You know we contracted a real like germ and we need you know we need surgeries. Different things can come up. So sometimes we do need that. But it's almost really a mindset of I need support to help me heal myself is very different from I need something outside of me to fix me. So healing is more. You know, when we reach out for healing support which we do and we should it's I need support to bring me back into balance and that's really. That's really what healing is.
Dr Shamini Jain:Now, with relationship to the biofield, as you, that was the second part, I think, of your question is how does the biofield relate to healing?
Dr Shamini Jain:It's a subtler dimension of our being.
Dr Shamini Jain:So, from my perspective and again I will tie this into kind of Vedic, you know, and meditative, contemplative practice as we develop our subtle awareness moment to moment as practitioners, whether when we're healing someone else or helping heal someone else, or whether we're just coming into our greater sense of being. That deeper subtle awareness can help us more quickly understand when we're in and out of balance and therefore we might be able to keep our health strong and prevent disease before we get sick. Of course, there are opportunities too to work with the field when we are already sick, when we're all already out of balance, and we might do this for ourselves. We may step up our yoga or pranayama practice, we may go to an energy healer or an acupuncturist, but ultimately it's the same thing we are bringing greater awareness to the field that gives rise to the chemistry that gives rise to the shifts in the body, and when we work with the energetic field in the subtle dimension, often we can facilitate very powerful effects in the physiology because we're working with the field as well.
Keith Parker:A brief pause to thank you for listening to this episode. If you're looking to take the next step in your transformation, find out how we can support you with our popular energy healing training, one-to-one private sessions, free resources and more.
Keith Parker:Visit energyfielddynamics. com to learn more
Christabel Armsden:There's something, um, something really crucial in what you're sharing here around this idea, and it struck me the the point you made earlier about this work being available for all and and shifting from being over there in the corner somewhere right in in the world of woohoo or holistic health, and then, you know, allopathic, being over here and 'never shall the two cross'. What's the dialogue here? What's the conversation realistically going forward? Because we're in an era where you mentioned plant medicine, for instance. It's increasingly common for modalities and holistic practitioners to be working at the boundaries of the developments in contemporary science and the wisdom of ancient practices, and we are seeing really positive steps there.
Christabel Armsden:Keith and I, you know that's part of the dialogue that we're heavily involved with and wish to actively promote. But what are the realities here? What are the challenges? How is it that those working in the holistic fields to use a broad umbrella term can help aid this integration? Because I do feel like there's something that's required on our side, as it were, to really be looking to integrate well into what is essentially a very large pre-existing system of healthcare.
Dr Shamini Jain:Yeah, it's a beautiful question and a very important one, because each person listening to this podcast is a leader and your communication on this is critical to its growth and the ability for us to get healing practices more readily out there for all. So I'll talk a little bit about resources because, as you may have mentioned in the beginning and I think you did one of the things that and, honestly, where I spend a lot of my time, if not most of my time, is with our beautiful nonprofit collaborative, the Consciousness and Healing Initiative. And when we first started the Consciousness and Healing Initiative as a sponsored project around 10 years ago, we've been our own 501(c)(3) for about five years. We really started initially to support scientists who were trying to do this research work and felt very isolated, couldn't get funding for their work, couldn't publish, and a lot of that still exists today. But we began to build community among the scientists and we made a point of being able to share our data more broadly with the public. So, as part of our service, we said, Okay, here's the research, you guys. And then all of a sudden, we had all these practitioners coming to us saying thank you. Oh, my God, now I finally have data. I mean I will tell you. You know, Christabel, I have had practitioners come up to me after you know the talks and retreats I'll give and they're literally in tears because all of a sudden they feel and they can stand in their own authority with this work. So CHI, or the Consciousness and Healing Initiative, is really a beautiful meeting place now of scientists, practitioners, healing and healthcare practitioners, educators and artists, because each of us understand what healing is from our own point of view, our own training, what we do. So there has to be this common community meeting ground where we're all sharing wisdom, and that's part of what we do at CHI.
Dr Shamini Jain:We have free Friday webinars every month, usually the first Friday of every month, where we have leading lights in healing practice, healing science. Some of them are well-known luminaries in our field. Some of them are people deep at work in their labs that you never get to hear from, who are telling you about the most amazing data. So when you come to these webinars, for example, you're resourced to be able to share this with other people and point them back to content. So we're in the midst, actually, of building a beautiful container that we can share with the world, so that we have the resources we need, that there are many faces and many voices, not just one icon that's sharing about this work, because it really is this grassroots effort and it really matters.
Dr Shamini Jain:I mean, this is why the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health exists because of public demand and you know we probably don't have time to get into the whole story, but the only reason we have that is because the public demanded it. They demanded it from their constituents, they demanded it from their representatives. We want integrative health practices, we want research on integrative health practices, and that's how it happens. All of us have to be fortified.
Dr Shamini Jain:I will say one of the initiatives that we're up to right now at CHI is that we just finished our production, or, you know, filming for a beautiful documentary called the Energy that H eals, and god is willing, with enough financial support, we will. We're completely on target right now and we believe in the field and we believe in everybody that's supporting this, and there are many people coming to the table donating whatever they can to get this film out there. It's a beautiful film. I encourage people to go to theenergythatheals. com. You can see the trailer and everyone that's involved and understand what's behind it.
Dr Shamini Jain:It's really showcasing an incredible community of patients, scientists, of course, our leading thought leaders in the area, and healers, both from the indigenous traditions and the modern traditions, to share the reality of healing in terms of the impact of it on patients with PTSD, with cancer, explore what healing really is so that people, when they watch it, can really feel that you know it's really important.
Dr Shamini Jain:It's not just information, it's about the feeling, but we're also sharing the cutting edge science, because this is a really huge lever. As I mentioned before, To get healing available to all means that we have to conduct the studies and we have to share what the studies are showing, Because there are barriers to sharing those studies. Even some of the universities and medical centers where these studies are happening don't necessarily want this to be out in the public because they're afraid of what people are going to say. So that means that we need to share those resources with people so we can say, hey, if your doctor's questioning whether energy healing is real, here's a one-pager of all the best studies that have been done that are peer-reviewed, published in some of the best journals in the country. Have them, take a look.
Keith Parker:Yeah, what you're saying really relates to what I was hoping to touch into next, which is the challenges that arise being a person within academia and scientific communities and then doing this kind of work within that structure, right, and that's very challenging because it's against the stream of what is generally accepted. So I was just wondering, what do you feel are the common hurdles or challenges? How would you describe that? You know we're not scientists, christabel and I, so we're not in that academic kind of institutional environment at all. But, yeah, what is the pushback scientifically? Because there's obviously a paradigm that you're speaking to when presenting some of these studies that's going to be challenged, right, but also there's the potential for the long-term of even a financial issue, because these things are free. These are these modalities. These approaches in general are things that people can learn themselves. They're preventative medicine, as you're saying. They require no external you know pharmaceuticals. They require no external, even potentially caretakers that we are really empowered in our health and well-being when we learn to get more sensitive to our kind of holistic health.
Dr Shamini Jain:It's a revolution, right? How do you incite a revolution in a system that may not want that revolution? I think essentially that's what you're asking with that latter part of your statement there. That's why at CHI, we also take a multi-pronged approach. We say we're bringing healing into healthcare, into self-care and community care, because actually the levers of change and not to bore you, but we did a whole deep dive on this, like we did what we call the systems mapping process, where we interviewed over 60 stakeholders in policy, technology, research, practitioners to kind of figure out what those levers of change. Again, totally free resources available at our website. We created an 84-page report to kind of get stakeholders involved in a 12-page summary. But, most importantly, we created what we called a roadmap for systems change.
Dr Shamini Jain:Okay, so what are those key levers of change that we need to kind of embark on to shift the system? We know there are going to be some systems that are just, you know, not going to be involved. There's going to be lots of social things that we have to do. There's cultural changes, there's language issues, you know. So there's a whole group of people you know that are working on those things, including, like, how do we come to common language. Is it possible, you know? Can we actually just hold the diversity of language around this and be okay with that? But how do we integrate this into healthcare? I will say this yes, there are going to be forces that try to kind of go along the way that they monetize things now, but they're gonna again go with public demand. I hate to say this but honestly, even going to again go with public demand. I hate to say this but honestly, even from our deep dive, it's public demand. We are the customers. If we demand these practices in our care systems, whatever they are, they will have to be provided. It's that simple. And this is why we have doctors that are quitting certain hospital systems and managed care and going out and opening their own integrative health clinics and they've got people coming to them. But then the question is okay, how do we do that? So it's not just out of pocket and it's only the rich people that are getting that.
Dr Shamini Jain:I'll give you an example. We're doing right now a randomized controlled trial on a sound healing approach for anxiety. It was born out of some work that we did during COVID. We did a feasibility study. We saw a pretty large signal, meaning that this seemed to be helpful. So we're doing an RCT, a randomized controlled trial, where we actually have a health education control group and we have a biofield tuning. That's the thing that we're studying. It's a biofield-based, sound approach. You don't have to have an MD or even an MSW to do this. You do have to have training, but this is a way that we can take. That's just one example of a sound healing approach.
Dr Shamini Jain:As you know, people are using gongs, they're using bowls, they're using vocal, they're using all of these things. We can do a few studies on those. We can actually get grants from other places besides just the government to implement those kinds of practices in community health settings and train community leaders in those practices if they don't already have one of their own within the culture that they are embedded in. We can't just rely on the managed care system, although it is important to get those in. And I will say, in our documentary we are interviewing, we interviewed some wonderful practitioners that are actually training people at the VA hospital. This is happening, for example, in Kansas City. They're training people in energy healing and they're able to provide energy healing to patients. Right now it is happening kind of, you know, through grants and not through the managed care system but they're looking into. If a nurse, for example, learns healing touch can, can the nurse basically charge for the healing touch work that they do as a nurse?
Dr Shamini Jain:I don't want to bore everyone with details.
Dr Shamini Jain:Believe me, there's a whole community that's on this, like trying to figure out how do we implement into health care.
Dr Shamini Jain:But I don't want to discount again for those of us who aren't necessarily interested in going to the hospitals, your work on the ground with people, even if it's just private practice, is super meaningful because as people begin to shift the culture, how do we shift the culture? We talk about it. You know, my research director, Dr Richard Hammerschlag, talks about coming out of the closet with this work and honestly, this is really what we see. Whether it's with a group of funders, with a group of scientists, group of doctors, it's all about people being willing to share, about the energetic and spiritual experiences that are profound, that have shifted their life, shifted their view of healing and really helped foster healing in someone else. The more we get comfortable with these conversations, we can talk about the data and the nomenclature and all of that, but it's really just a comfort about what it means to be fully human, beyond just the materialist view that, like, has been pounded into us for so long.
Christabel Armsden:Thank you for sharing that. You preempted where I was going next beautifully. It's the experiential aspect and that was where I was going to go next, and I'm so pleased you mentioned this idea of coming out of the closet. It's something that I sort of can connect to quite deeply from years back in my own practice and experience in this life and this idea of what it is to learn to get comfortable with speaking up and being transparent, authoritative, as you said previously, honest about deeper experiences in this life that go beyond those silos in which we've been conditioned or learned to operate within. And on that note, I know you mentioned this in your book there's often one seminal experience for an individual in which that they feel confident and comfortable saying, okay, I know this for myself with my inner wisdom. You know, I'm seeing data and facts, but I now know this for myself. And you mentioned a Reiki healing experience in your book and I wonder if you would share a little with our listeners about that.
Dr Shamini Jain:Yeah, I'm happy to, because it was really my first seminal experience with energy healing. That opened me up tremendously. And I was in my 20s. I was in Santa Cruz taking organic chemistry to pacify my father who was trying to bribe me to go to medical school, and I told him no, I'm not going, but I'll take organic chemistry and fail it, just to show you that I'm not fit to be a medical doctor. I hate the system. They don't allow us to sleep. Sleep is big for me. So you know I was also taking the physics of music. You know I was just kind of having fun and taking different classes and I met this woman.
Dr Shamini Jain:You know I was just kind of having fun and taking different classes and I met this woman, you know, kind of typical Santa Cruzian and dreadlocks. You know, white woman with dreadlocks, a stray dog that she had adopted and she was learning this thing called Reiki and I was like what's that, you know? And she's like, oh, it's this really cool, like kind of energy healing modality, and I hadn't really heard about energy healing. Honestly, I was in my early 20s and I was like I don't know what that is she's like, do you want a session so you can kind of experience it. And I was like sure. So she comes in, she sets up a table, she sets up some candles, she puts some music on. I'm like this is so Santa Cruz. Okay, she says, lay on the table. I'm like, are you gonna do? She's like, no, no, no, it's like very light touch, I'm not massaging, you can keep your clothes on, and everything. I'm like, okay, I was tired, I was like I'll take a nap, whatever's gonna happen. You know, kind of skeptical scientist, right, know-it-all sign to young scientist there, didn't expect anything at all. And she's like I'm gonna invite your guides in. You know, I'm gonna invite my guides and I'm like go for it. You know, whatever. Know, whatever you got to do, just go for it. Again, like total, you know just totally skeptical.
Dr Shamini Jain:And then she starts placing her hands gently on my body and she's sort of moving. You know she starts at the head, she goes to the shoulders and then she gets to my gut, she gets to like around my stomach, my, what we call it, solar plexus, right, and all of a sudden I felt this massive tightness, like it was. It was painful. Now listen, I'm sure everyone here has had a session, so you know that typically you don't feel pain typically when you have an energy healing session, but this was my first connection with it and I guess I needed to wake up right. So it was, oh my God, like what's going on. Your hands are on my stomach. This isn't hunger. Pain like this is like this massive tightness I'm feeling and then all of a sudden, I started having like information coming to me.
Dr Shamini Jain:You know, I realized that this tightness was about anxiety, like there was sort of like the stuckness in my body that was related to this holding on, and I I got this message and we weren't talking right. So I'm just downloading these messages and I'm wasn't in the habit of downloading messages, so I'm like I'm getting this message that you know, this is really about me holding my power, like not really coming fully into my power and sharing my feelings about things, and it had to do with the relationship I was at the time. It was really about like not necessarily owning my feelings in things and it had to do with the relationship I was at the time. It was really about like not necessarily owning my feelings in the relationship. That's what I got at the time and as soon as I had that realization, the energy moved. So I was like whoa, that's really wild. I had this connection with the energy. It's related to an emotion. I'm having an insight about the root of the emotion and as soon as I have the insight, the energy shifts. And, you know, I hopped off the table, being like this is fantastic. Like I was still processing a lot of emotion, but the science part of me was like this is so cool. Who is looking at this? This could be so helpful for so many people.
Dr Shamini Jain:So then I started digging into the research and I found out almost nobody was publishing anything in the area, except for some really wonderful nurses who were doing a lot in this area of therapeutic touch, which I hadn't even heard of. Anyway. And that's how I found out about the field of psychoneuroimmunology and, again, I'm sure, very guided, I was like, oh, I think this is where I'm supposed to go, you know, because these people are looking not just at the brain now, but they're looking at the whole body. And I definitely felt a shift in my body, not just my energy, but like there's a connection of energy with the body that we really need to uncover. So for me it was like this wonderful aha moment, you know.
Dr Shamini Jain:And then there was also I'll mention another sort of more deeper spiritual experience I had with my first Reiki initiation, which I also talk about in my book where we were meeting some Reiki practitioners at the University of Arizona. When I was there we were going to do a study with them and they really felt like, as scientists, we needed to understand it on an embodied level. So they offered us training in Reiki and you know, again, young scientist, totally open to experience I was excited. I was like I can't wait to figure out what this is about. But I had no expectation because I didn't know much about it. Honestly, after I had that Reiki session it wasn't like I was going to get a bunch more right, I just noted how cool it was. But I didn't necessarily pursue it at that time.
Dr Shamini Jain:But when I got that initiation I had this enormous, beautiful experience of bliss, like a connection with the whole universe, and this deep, deep sense of love for everything. It was profound and it lasted for a long time, over an hour I think that. You know the teacher didn't expect that to happen, so she was kind of trying to navigate how I was. Just you know, the teacher didn't expect that to happen, so she was kind of trying to navigate how I was just sort of sitting on the sidewalk all like blissed out as if I had taken MDMA or something you know. But I had it and there was nothing you know physical that had happened.
Dr Shamini Jain:But again it like, as a scientist said, you know, it opened me up to this idea that the biofield is a bridge between consciousness and healing, because working with the field allows us to experience more the vastness of our consciousness and the totality of who we are as human souls in a physical body, and so it's a beautiful bridge for bringing more awareness to the body. That's why people like to call these mind-body practices or mind-body-spirit practices. But it's way beyond that. It's about experiencing the totality of who we truly are. We're just usually too busy to notice who we are.
Keith Parker:I'm wondering if you could help us to understand how psychoneuroimmunology fits into the context of biofield science. Why is it a good communication interface from the biological physiological side into the context of biofield science? Why is it a good communication interface from the biological phys iological side into the energetic?
Dr Shamini Jain:Sure. Well, we're moving from these different layers of experience and being and understanding the interconnections. So I mentioned some early work. You know that's being done right now, looking at the shifts of voltage across cell membranes, its relationship to cancer. We are now beginning to look at these relationships, trying to understand the relationships between our energetic health and our physical health, and psychoneuroimmunology is a key.
Dr Shamini Jain:Now in mainstream science, psychoneuroimmunology has been a boon because it's helped us understand things like the placebo effect. I go deep in the placebo effect in my book. Psychoneuroimmunology helped us understand how emotions affect our health, how our thinking affects our health, but is also going to be very valuable in understanding how our sense of energy and the shifts of subtle energy in the body shift immune function and all these things are connected. The body shift immune function and all these things are connected. When I have a thought, my energy changes. When I have an emotion, my energy changes. So again, psychoneuroimmunology is I don't quite like the word anchor, but it does provide a little bit more grounding for us to understand how our subtle energy changes are affecting changes on the physical level in our bodies.
Dr Shamini Jain:PNI there, or psychoneuroimmunology or psychoneuroendocrinology, p-n-i-e, you know, putting it all together helps us sort of ground this energy more in the body, helps us understand how energy is affecting things down to our cells, cell migration, cell signaling. I mean so much that we're starting to learn from these studies with cells and animals and people. It's really exciting.
Christabel Armsden:That brings me to this idea of sensing ESP. It might be called extrasensory perception, HSP, learning to map the topography and the structure and the content of the energy field. You spoke about that powerful experience previously around, okay, there's something happening in my belly, I'm having an insight. The energy's moving. We teach this at Field Dynamics how people can connect to and map the information, the topography of what's happening in their fields. From your experience, how can people become more aware and attuned of this? Is this something that you're interested in talking to people about, and I'd love to hear a little about your own sensing.
Dr Shamini Jain:Those are definitely linked. For me it is. I come back to sound and that is a very powerful way for me to ground the energy in my body and teach others how to do it as well. There are many different ways that we can feel and sense energy. I'm not a seer, I'm more of a kinesthetic learner, so I tend to feel energy and I'm not in practice necessarily with specifically trying to feel energy. It just happens, as you know, as you deepen your practice. It will happen in meditation, it will happen in yoga, it will happen in practices where you're just doing a spiritual practice and you become more energetically attuned and aware because you're more in the moment. It's really that simple. So there are so many practices that each of us can do and we can gravitate to the one that really feels like it's nurturing and harmonizing for us. And if we allow ourselves that time and space, then we become more deeply ingrained in subtle awareness.
Dr Shamini Jain:But in my retreats what I like to do is really bring sound into it, because I've noticed that most people are shut down with the sound of their voice. I always say your voice is one of your biggest healers. You may not recognize that, but it is. So I teach people how to first of all open up with a voice. There's a lot of joyful inner child work that comes with that because most people kind of they left their voice with their inner child. So the inner child comes back with a voice and it's really fun.
Dr Shamini Jain:But it's also very liberating because there are so many things that the ancient traditions understood about the power of sound as consciousness itself. There are so many layers of subtlety with sound and the human voice as an instrument for calling the divine nature back to ourselves. This is the basis of mantra devotional singing. But first we just get comfortable with sound and experiencing it energetically in and around our bodies. So that's a lot of the work that I personally do with people is kind of connecting them in with those energetic flows and then working with the elemental aspects of energies and I typically use the Vedic framework of the five elements there to learn how to work with sound to move energy in the body if there's stagnation, to open more to the heavens and the cosmic aspects. So we have a lot of fun with this because yes, it is singing, but it's also mantra chanting and it's vocal toning work to kind of tap more into the body and expand the field that way, and that's really one of my favorite ways to do it.
Keith Parker:That does sound like a lot of fun. As we're coming to a close here, we're wondering if you could make mention of what your offerings are. You mentioned some retreats that you're doing. If people are interested in working with you or finding your work, what is it that you're offering and where do they find it?
Dr Shamini Jain:Thank you. Well, a couple of different places that you can go. Two main websites are my first and last name, shaminijain. com, where you'll find all kinds of great resources and information, including my upcoming teaching events. I have several this fall. I'll be teaching at Esalen in September on the Healing Keys, which is born out of the third part of my book, where we'll be exploring this in a very embodied way. I will share science, because people do like that, but it's very.
Dr Shamini Jain:Retreats are a beautiful way to just sort of come into practice together, amplify the field and really work with the collective field for healing. So that's a lot of what my retreats are focused on, as well as sharing some of the science and being a resource for that. So, Esalen in September. I'll be at Omega in the end of October. I will also be speaking and giving a workshop at Donna Eden's conference, that which is in Tucson in early September. There's another one that I'm speaking at and teaching in New Mexico. Also, September is a very busy month. And then, for anyone who's listening, who's in Europe or who wants to go to Europe, I will be speaking at Deepak Chopra's Sages and Scientists in Mallorca, Spain. It's the first Sages and Scientists in Europe. Join us at the Consciousness and Healing Initiative. We have so many resources and community for you to join on a regular basis. Just go to www. chi. is You'll find all the things. Get involved in any way that you want and join the beautiful community that's gathering there community that's gathering there.
Keith Parker:Thank you so much for all that info. We'll make sure to put all the links in the show notes, and I just want to acknowledge and appreciate everything that you've shared with us today. You're doing amazing, amazing work in a space of affinity to what it is we're doing. Also, just a message I'm taking away from this, as well as the power of change in this shifting landscape of science and spirituality, that happens from the bottom up and not the top down, empowering individuals to share their experience, to own their experience and also to spread word and demand, like you were saying, to the top, if you will, in order to effectuate the change that we're all interested in seeing happen. So, thank you so much for today.
Christabel Armsden:It's been a real pleasure. Thanks so much.
Dr Shamini Jain:Thank you so much. Thank you to both of you. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Christabel Armsden:Thanks for being a part of the future of wellness. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more people and to make great episodes like this one. See you next time.
