Healing with Edan Harari

(upbeat music) Most of the time when we try to subdue the pain or like treat the symptom of the pain, it's gonna yell loud.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. (upbeat music)

Welcome to synchronicity. My guest this week is Idan Harari, a pain specialist, a manual therapist, really just has steeped in the world of how to do body work, mind body connection, spiritual connection. You're gonna learn a lot in this one. I know I did. If you are an avid listener of synchronicity, you may remember me speaking about Dr. Sarno, who recently passed someone who pioneered the idea of not only psychosomatic symptoms, but actually an underlying relationship between our emotions, our unconscious emotions, and physical pain. And even Idan mentions it in this episode, we like to think maybe a herniated disc or a pain in our arm, but it can be even immune diseases as well.

So I think this is an emerging field that we're gonna learn a lot more about in the coming decades, but it is always interesting to speak to people who are doing this now. And for reference, if you want another really good kind of like side episode to this one, check out the episode with Jonathan Faust. Really, these two are, I'm gonna revisit them whenever I have some pain that I'm dealing with. You know, and pain, again, doesn't just have to be physical. This can be psychological, emotional, whatever it is. There's really, this is applicable in many different aspects of our lives. So one thing we touched about in this episode is the idea of what's the function of pain?

Why do we have pain? Is it just like, oh, we are put in this world and here's pain and we gotta deal with it and all bets are off, just good luck and slog through it? Or is there a reason for it? Is it a communication of some sort from ourselves or something else? So we get into that as well. This is a good episode. I have big thanks to Diego, young Pueblo for introducing me to Edon. I'm looking forward to connecting with Diego again soon. Lots of good things. A note about next week's episode. I think I'm gonna do finally the LSD synchronicity origin story. I've gotten a bunch of emails from people in the past couple of weeks saying they can't find the episode where I specifically talk about what happened back in 2003, 2004.

So I'm gonna attempt to do that. There's not gonna be a guest. It's just gonna be me talking. It'll be a nice Thanksgiving episode and then we'll get back with the regular program. So for people who are expressing interest in that and wanting to hear it, it's coming. Thank you to everyone who supports this show. Subscribing, listening, telling your friends, reviewing, donating, patreoning, whatever it is, it's greatly appreciated. As you know, I'm still working out the logistics of taking care of my son Eli over the next few weeks until I get him into daycare. It's been kind of a, I'm trying to find the right word, a challenge to get some of these episodes out on time, but I'm doing it here on the day it's being released.

So just thanks for bearing with me. Love and the reviews coming in, loving the comments. Reminder, if you wanna send an email to me to talk about anything, know@synchpodcast.com. I always write back. Also, many of you wrote in requesting the way of dream documentary by it with Marie-Louis von Franz, Carl Jung's translator and disciple, I had that. Email me, I'll send it to you, ask anyone who has. I don't know how you'd reach them, but you can. That's it for this episode. Quick hit, intro, really, big things to eat on. Go check him out, all the links to everything he does are on the podcast episode and the podcast episode pages, which can be found at syncpodcast.com.

That's S-Y-N-C, podcast.com, and minepodnetwork.com. So check him out there, lots of cool stuff coming up. That's it, how will we get to the episode? Sound good? Sounds good to me. Without further ado, here is Edan Harari. (upbeat music) Thank you again for coming on. You were just mentioning really quickly before we started recording what you wanted to talk about and I couldn't be more interested in those things, specifically because I had something two and a half, three years ago, where I developed a pain in my neck and it shot down my arm in these every five seconds or so, I'd get an intense pain, just like shooting pain down my left arm and I was like, what the fuck is this?

I went to a doctor. He said, oh, here's some Valium and steroids. I took an X-ray of your back and you have some vertebrae or a little, whatever it is, bulging disc, whatever. Took those for two weeks, nothing happened. Then three people in three days recommended I read a book, mind over back pain, right? Sarno, I'm sure you're familiar with. His theory I've explained on this show plenty of times, very Freudian, very related to psychosomatic things. And what was very interesting about the book that I was reading is not only did the symptoms of bait as I was reading it, there was a chapter in the book where he talks about the pain for some people moving around when you begin to identify it, when you begin to acknowledge the unconscious things that are creating these.

And that started happening to me right then as I was reading. It was jumping around my body. I'm like, oh, fucking shit, this is both really nice because it's alleviating some of my symptoms but also terrifying. Like I'm doing this without my knowledge and my mind is having this impact. I bring this up for a lot of reasons. One is, I know mind-to-body connection. Most listeners of this podcast will be very acutely attuned that that's a real principle of play. However, thinking that it's that in your face and can have such an impact, I can't think of anyone better to speak to than you about this because you give a little background about who you are and what you're doing.

I know I gave a very long intro there but I'm really interested, I just wanted to give you some background why I'm so interested in this.

Yeah, I mean, I'm really excited for this and thank you for having me on.

Of course.

I'm excited to talk about this topic because it's very controversial. And I'll tell you a little bit about myself but more can be found on my website, on my bio. I prefer that. But yeah, I basically got into, different types of manual therapies when I went to massage school in 2000 and I graduated to massage school 2008. But originally I started with yoga. When I was in my, I'd say I was about 18 years old and somebody recommended that I start doing yoga 38 now. So I started using yoga as a form of stress relief and anxiety relief to help me with my anxiety instead of smoking weed. It was great because I ended up not having to smoke all the time to be relaxed and to take my anxiety instead I was, I replaced that with yoga.

And eventually I was in the restaurant business very stressed out in New York City. I ended up at the age of 21 having a manic episode. I was diagnosed bipolar, was hospitalized. Long story short, I ended up taking medication. I was on medication for 15 years and got off the meds and found myself years later doing manual therapy to serve others with their anxiety, with their pain, with their body aches and pains because yoga really saved my life. And so did time massage. Originally I got into time massage and that kind of helped me tremendously. And that's when I decided I wanted to become a massage therapist.

So before you know it, I was doing massage therapy and discovered that massage wasn't getting me the results that I wanted with my clients. People were coming back every week with the same pains. Eventually found myself discovering something called ortho-bionomy, which is an osteopathic-based manual therapy system that was developed by a judo instructor and osteopath in the 1970s, very potent work. So I started doing ortho-bionomy. I was doing that for about seven years now. I still practiced that as well. And then I went into barns, myofascial release, all these other amazing and tremendous hands-on manual therapy systems.

And now what I do is I treat people for pain mostly, but I also help optimize people's performance. I have a practice in New York City in Flatiron. And I'd say over the last decade, I've been working with people and their bodies to help them from anywhere from pain to anxiety to structural dysfunctions and distortions that are causing pain or maybe not, but that's right now. And really optimizing people's performance, working with athletes as well, and all different kinds of people, even from children, from a two-year-old who's in utero stroke victim, all the way up to a 95-year-old woman. So I can work with any age.

I have worked with a few puppies a few times as well.

So that's adorable.

It's fun, it's really fun. And it's really all about supporting others in their healing, in their healing journey so that they can really heal well, whatever that means. So I facilitate their healing, I consider myself a healing facilitator, working with many different mind-body therapies, not just physical manual therapies that are hands-on therapies. I do a lot of work now online as well with treating people around the world with short half-hour Skype sessions, which will actually tap them into that psychosomatic role so they can understand the root cause of their pain. So it's all about treating the cause, and that's what I do now for years.

I was doing-- - The symptoms.

I see what, yeah, the symptoms. I was doing exactly what everyone else is doing in my industry, which is treating symptoms. Everyone from doctors and physical therapists and massaged therapists in chiropractors and acupuncturists. Well, acupuncturists, there's definitely a lot of good--

I had some stories of an acupuncturist, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, but there's, most people again are treating the symptoms. And so I went on a mission of just like, how can I treat the cause? I want to cause, I want to really cure people and heal people in that, you know, support their body's healing, that is, right? 'Cause our body heals itself. So it's just really, what can I do to support that, and that's kind of been my mission, and that's what I do now, is I find people coming to me for pain that they have in their body where they've tried everything and not works, all of a sudden we're able to get results, and it's still mind-blowing to me.

But then the more I do this work, the more I realize just how important it is for us to do mind-body work and also multi-dimensional healing work, which is looking at many different dimensions and not just massage therapy or physical therapy or actual structural work or hands-on therapy, but looking at all different realms of healing, you know, and now I'm even interested in like, okay, well, how can you go see a functional medicine doctor to look into your nutrition? Because everything is important. And we need to look at everything. We can't just take this approach where we're pigeonholing ourself in one modality.

So that's, you know, that's not--

Well, dude, I think that's amazing because I think for me personally, and I know a lot of people like me, I like to stay in the mental, psychological, spiritual realm. And someone I always, I really admire his teachings via Plato was Socrates. And Socrates is a really interesting character because Socrates essentially had a very pejorative view of the body. He thought it was just this vessel, like we're here for a little bit, like do whatever you want to it. It's not that big of a deal. And I think I unconsciously intuitive that that's what's going on. As I've gotten older, I realize that's obviously not the case.

There is a very real connection between our physical form, feelings, kinesthesiology, all of this stuff, and our psyche and the world around us and unconscious and conscious things. So I totally admire that you've been able to kind of focus in on this. And I know from the bio from your site that this is in part because of your own difficulties, both physically and psychologically issues that you've dealt with. So I have this question for you. What's like a big takeaway you've noticed throughout the decades at this point of using the body, mind, body connection? Like what are some like key things that have emerged from you concepts or motifs, if you will?

Well, I'd say that most of the time when we have physical pains, we are thinking in terms of what's wrong with my physical body and the physical structure. I would say a really important thing to pay attention to is what is going on in my life right now, right? How am I relating to my environment and to my stresses, right? Everybody's always like, oh yeah, I know the pain is coming from stress, stress, stress, right? They throw that word around a lot, but it's much more than just stress. Let's get a little more specific here. I find that it's in anger and anxiety, like John Sarno says. I'm a big fan of Dr. John Sarno.

And I'm actually reading this book now called The Great Pain Deception by Stephen Ray Ozanich. And it's pretty amazing. And I think he was a client or a patient of Dr. Sarno's and he wrote this book. And there's lots of great books on this right now and about psychosomatic medicine. And so I would really just say that it's important that we know, that we'd remember that we are not just a physical structure and that our body is just the tip of the iceberg. It's what we can see. And that's why when we go to a doctor or a physical therapist or a chiropractor and they show us these MRIs or x-rays and they could show us that we have an issue with our disc, then because we see it.

Yes, yeah.

And we think that that's the cause of the pain. But the pain is very, very, very rarely being caused by a structural or physical dysfunction or distortion or degenerated discs and degenerated spines, all these myths. I really wanna just dispel these myths today and talk about them because so many of my colleagues, if you will, are learning in school, just like I learned in school that our spine is very fragile and our body is very fragile and we have to be careful how we lift things up because we can bulge a disc or hurt it. If you only knew how many people actually have her native disc and have no free food because they've never gotten an MRI and they have no pain, right?

So, we need to understand that pain science is a very different thing than what we've learned in schools, whether it's massage school, acupuncture school, chiropractic school, medical school. We have to really question a lot of the things that we've learned as practitioners and we have to stop with these myths. These are really, there's a lot of myths out there and I really wanted to spell them with you today. I mean, we really need to go into the mind-body connection and what I mean by that is like our mind and body is one, however, there's still a separation. So, what I'm here to do, my mission in this world is to bridge the gap between the mind and the body.

This is exactly what I'm here to do with my somatic education and my talks and I'm slowly transitioning now to become more of a educator and somatic educator, which I've been for years, but more of that than I am an actual manual therapist because for me to be treating, let's say, 15 to 20 people a week in my office in New York City and supporting so many people through their pain that way, it's still very limited and I wanna make much more impact in this world. So, I really wanna spread this knowledge and this is knowledge therapy as Dr. Sarno calls, both knowledge therapy and so what's amazing to me is that for years I've been treating people physically doing treatments with them hands-on and in one, two sessions, the pain is completely gone, but then I can have a half hour online Skype session with someone from Sweden and we can talk about some deep emotional stuff, hear out some stuff and all of a sudden they're healed in a half hour Skype session with me and it really blows my mind so what do you think was impact of working in this way?

What do you think is the mechanism or mechanisms at play there when you get this verifiable, even if it's anecdotal, that's really not important in this. If you're actually alleviating someone's pain and suffering, what do you think is at play there? I mean, I obviously have theories, a lot of people do, but you're doing this, you're seeing this happen over Skype thousands of miles away so what, and I'm not holding you to this so your answer is your answer forever, I realize this is an evolving thing and we're becoming more aware of this connection but what do you think is actually transpiring when you work through kind of emotional feeling stuff and it has an impact on the body and pain?

Well, I'm speaking, everything I say, I just want to put a disclaimer here, this is all my experience. This is all my experience and so sometimes I'm very passionate about this and you know, but I will say this is all my experience, I allow you to be skeptical because skepticism leads to understanding. I love people and I really tell people you want to be skeptical, great be skeptical, like for you to be skeptical, to open your mind, to do some research, to study this, to try things, right? But definitely try these things. And so I would say that most of the time, to answer your question, our pain is coming from my experience, I notice people holding back their emotions, suppressing or repressing their emotions, whether it be anger or anxiety.

Now anger, a lot of people will tell me, oh, but I'm not angry, I'm fine. I'm like, yeah, but no, you get frustrated, right? Frustration is a form of anger, right? Maybe it's not as intense as anger so you can be the most peaceful person, such as myself who's into Buddhism and meditation, you could be super calm, but we get frustrated, if you're human, you get frustrated sometimes. It doesn't have to be frustration from like road rage, let's say, 'cause that doesn't happen to me anymore, I'll be honest, but it can happen, it can be frustration from just a conversation with somebody, especially parents, right?

Or something like that, I mean.

Yeah.

Yeah, family, you're spouse, right? People who are very close to you, they'll say certain things, they may trigger your ego, something will happen, you'll feel this emotional response in your body, but instead of feeling it, most people will go and suppress or repress those emotions because there's no time to feel we got to make money, we got to work, we got to live, we got to take care of the kids, right? I have so many, you know, Upper East Side women who I treat who like have all this pain in their body, they can't figure out what it is, it's like they got to take care of all their kids.

Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot, they're not the weight on their shoulders, right?

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Precisely, the weight on the shoulders then causes pain in your shoulders, and your upper back, or your lower back, or your knee, it could be anywhere that the body simply chooses to send a signal, it's just like, my favorite thing to say is like, 'cause I drive, so it's like the check engine light in the car, okay? Our pain is simply a message from the body, it's simply the check engine light, check the engine, right? Check what's going on in your life, what's the engine, it's your body, it's your mind, it's your emotions, it's your spirit, right?

Which gives it a function too, not to intertype, but I wanna point out that gives pain a function. I think we have as people naturally, we don't like pain, right? If you experience, I have to go to the dentist, and I know it's probably gonna hurt a little bit, it's not gonna be that bad, but it's this aversion we have to it. So people like to say it's this bad evil thing, but the way you're describing it, which is something I've realized suffering, mental, psychological, physical, whatever it is, there's a function behind it, it's not just this random horribleness that happens to it, so I just wanna point that out as you were saying this check engine light, I love that analogy.

Yeah, so I always shift people's consciousness around the pain, everyone comes to me to try to erase the pain, that's what they're used to, like they go to a doctor, take a pill, take an injection, do something to get rid of the pain so I can continue with my life. But most of the time, when we try to subdue the pain or treat the symptom of the pain, it's gonna yell louder, our body is going to yell louder. Now most of the time also, I noticed that our body was whispering to us for years or for months or whatever, and until we weren't listening so much to our body and we're so focused on our mind and our life and doing, doing, doing rather than being, our body needs to yell.

So it's gonna yell with pain, but it doesn't have to be pain, it could be an ailment, it could be cancer, it could be anything. And so we have to realize that there's a deep connection with how much of a connection we have with our body and when we're missing that deep connection to our body, 'cause we're so much in our minds and our heads and our thoughts, that's when our body will complain, like a little child, right? It's a little child who's just like needing attention, who's yelling, and that's how I like to look at the pain, it's a blessing, it's not a verse. Yes, it fucking sucks, okay, because when it comes to pain, I would say that I'm an expert in it, because I myself have suffered from cluster headaches.

Now, cluster headaches are the worst pain known to man, scientifically proven to be the most painful condition known to man, worse than giving birth to a child or actually having your limb severed.

Oh my God.

Now this is the kind of pain that I went to, the emergency room at least four or five times in my life for and opiates didn't even help. Like they put me on every medication that you can think of and nothing helps. So when it comes to understanding pain, I fucking get it, okay? And I think that that's why I connect with my clients and patients so much that I can actually support their pain because I know what it's like and as an empath, right? I'm actually a very sensitive empath. I can feel their pain because I connected them on that level and I allow them, they actually can feel that I feel their pain, I hold space for their healing.

And I find that that's when their body self-corrects and heals because everything I work with is very gentle subtle healing mechanisms that work with the nervous system and tap into the body's self-corrective mechanisms or the body heals itself. But the body will not heal itself if we're sitting there trying to delete or erase that pain. It'll heal when we listen to that child. The pain, which is that inner child who's just crying for attention and for care and for nurturing and love and for just attention, right? Just yourself, that's why meditation is so potent and I practice Vedic meditation daily.

And when I don't practice that, I feel my body tensing off. I feel the aches and pain starting to come because of the anxieties.

Well, you're reminding me as you're saying this, but I've gone, especially this week in the past week, I became, I think I told you this, my one and a half year old's primary caretaker every day, except today's, my day off my mom watches him and I still have my other jobs. I still have this podcast of all these other things. And today I got sick or a few days ago, I got sick. I'm just a little cold for the first time in a really long time. And I am the type of person who doesn't think it's just, oh, I got a virus from somewhere. There is some immuno thing going on. And I'm hearing you say this and this is now the third time I pay attention to threes that someone has mentioned meditation in the past week to me.

I meditated, I've been a regular meditator, I've been a non-regular meditator, but I usually don't stick with it, but I notice what you notice. If I'm not doing, doesn't have to be meditation, it just happens to be a really good modality. But if I'm not doing the things that allow me to check in with myself and process what is actually going on in my interior and exterior life, shit does happen. And it doesn't paradoxically, what I would say is this is, often the thing that's gonna wake us up the most is gonna be our own body, right? What you're saying, whether it's a disease, like cancer or a malady or just an acute cold or whatever it is, or too thick, that's gonna wake us up.

But sometimes this extent, this connection between psyche and matter can actually manifest in our lives too. More shit can start going wrong seemingly, that has nothing to do with us. So this really does put the focus back on something you said, what you think is so great, and you referred to yourself as a healing facilitator, which I love, because it implies not that you're doing something to someone, but that you're allowing them to do what is naturally they have the ability to do. I absolutely love that. So what, you said you do Vedic meditation, what are some of the other modalities? Like how did you start getting into this stuff less from the manual, practical kind of physical side of things, but the more esoteric, the more the Vedic stuff, the yoga stuff, how did that start to seep in, you referred to yourself as an empath, which I can clearly see and pick up on, how did these things kind of weave their way into your life?

Well, like I said, it all started with yoga, and yoga has meditation embedded into it, right? It's actually a practice to meditate, you know, the asanas are just a small portion of what we should pay attention to, and I found myself, you know, seeing this psychotherapist who's an organomist, right? Organomy is the study of organ therapy, so it's Wilhelm Reich, it's Reichian kind of therapy that's actually a form of body work as well. So it's hands-on healing in addition to talk therapy, and that's what really served me when I left the hospital when I was 21, just to kind of help me integrate back into life after I had, you know, and I found that, you know, I tried many different forms of meditation, and I just found that Vedic works best for me personally in terms of a mantra, I find it to be the easiest, but I have tried through the years, so many different forms of meditation and things like that, and I would say, you know, we did a lot of work with Jorge Stokner, the psychotherapist who I was working with, the organomist, we did a lot of meditation work together as well, of actually just feeling my emotions and just being with myself, and that was a good start as well, and just through the years, I've always, you know, been interested in different types of meditation practices, so that's really, you know, all about that.

Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. I'm always interested because I have natural meanings towards the esoteric and philosophical, a lot of these lines, just since before I would have any intellectual, you know, cultural ideas that I should be interested in this, but meditation has always been a pretty elusive thing for me, and I have friends with, you know, great meditation teacher, Sharon Salzburg, people who are steeped in this stuff, and I still have difficulty maintaining a meditation practice, and I don't think it's necessarily any fault, or like, oh, it's just not for me, but I think what you're saying about finding something until it works is very useful because meditation, just to talk about what I think the practical benefits are, is that it gives us this awareness point, it gives us this ability to at least have an idea of what the hell is going on, and without that, we're literally just grasping in the dark.

We don't know. We may luckily stumble onto some modality that can help us, but if we can't get to that root focal point, which is a theme in your life, it seems, what is the use of it? So you became a meditator right when you started yoga. When did you get into the Vedic stuff, though? How recently is it?

The Vedic stuff I got into recently, actually I studied with someone here in New York, that's been only about a year or two that I've been doing that regularly. So meditation was never really something that I got into either, I got into moving meditation instead, doing classes like vibritms and different types of moving meditation practices. And as a house dancer and a dancer, my dance was my meditation. So just movement for me was a form of meditation, but of course it's very different. And so that's a very recent thing for me in terms of meditation and sort of doing it regularly as well, because in the past I've always wanted to do it, but you know, it's tough to get on that track.

And so until I had a coach and someone who actually helped me accountable for meditating and someone who taught me about making it non-negotiable, that I started to practice it daily and I really saw the shifts, it really supported me. But I will tell you that when I get manual therapy sessions myself, let's say orthobionomy or Barnes-Mile Fosher release from some of my colleagues, I find that it's so much easier for me to sit down and actually meditate. And then homeopathy has helped me so much, and that's what I attribute to not being on medication anymore. I was able to get off 15 years of medication on Depacote, which is just an anti-convulsant, you know, in order to, just by with homeopathy, right?

So homeopathy for me has changed my life. And that's what my wife does actually. She's actually studying homeopathy. And so I see her teacher and he's been supporting me so much. And so with that, what's interesting is when I find I can't meditate or sit in need, but I can't just sit in stillness, that's when I may need a remedy to shift me energetically so that I can become an at ease. And then the meditation is reading is amazing. And I used to go out to party and that was my escape. Going out to dance and party, that was my form of escapism that worked really well for me. However, as soon as I started taking homeopathy, remedies that were right for me, the right remedy, which takes time, I ended up not wanting to go out to party and escape.

I was just happy coming home to my wife and just reading a book and relaxing and just taking it easy and not running away from my troubles and the troubles and the marriage that may have had here and there, which we all do.

Of course, I'm married, I have a kid, man. I can't really all have him, yeah, of course.

So we all have a way of escaping. And that's something I'm really passionate about too, is just how can we replace those habits of escapism to good habits? So how can we, for me, dancing was a great habit compared to my friends growing up, who a lot of them are actually no longer around because of opiate use, you know? So I think that that's really important or really important conversation these days is how can we replace these habits with ones that are more nurturing, nourishing, and healing for our body, mind, and spirit?

So I couldn't agree with you more, man. I, how, what would you say to someone? I would say that I fall within the normal, whatever that means, threshold of daily, Western, society, anxieties, and pressures. But let's say there's someone listening who is, you've had a manic episode, I've had a manic episode, which was followed by a depressed episode, which I had never had. Let's say someone is in one of, yeah, I know, that wakes you up really quickly. The manic shit is, this is what people don't realize and anyone who's actually bipolar had any type of mania. The manic stuff is actually fucking awesome.

You feel like a God and things are just, it's really insane and there's more to it than I think just what we label mania. It's a very interesting psychological, psycho-spiritual phenomenon that is, we really box in, but the depression wakes people the fuck up, especially if you're not naturally depressed. Once, if you're just normally not like that, when you get depressed, you wake the fuck up. So let's say someone is in one of these states and I know people, people write into this to me a lot because I've shared my experiences as getting diagnosed as bipolar and also going off medication. Let's say you're in one of these points and let's say you're not doing yoga, you're not meditating.

Maybe you have some form of escapism, whatever it is. What would you recommend to someone like that in terms of getting into some type of remedy practice or something they can do to help themselves out of one of those states that they're listening?

That's a really good question. Now, I think that just like diet, there's no one approach that we should be taking 'cause everyone is freaking different. So different, everybody relates to their environment differently, whether they're an internal person and external person, you know, there's so many different ways. Like someone like me who's an empath, like I would definitely have to be doing something very different than the next person. So what works for me may not definitely, definitely may not work for the next person, you know, it really depends on what the person needs, what kind of personality they have, what things they're gonna actually do as compared to things they're not gonna do.

Bottom line, there are some people who just, the only thing that they can possibly do is take pill every day. So the medications have their use and I think that we have to be very careful and that we do this safely and responsibly that we get off our meds to meet a long time. It wasn't an overnight thing. And so homeopathy worked great for me, but some people it doesn't work great for them. So I think it's really about finding the right customized solution that's integrative, like an integrative approach for each individual.

And that's, of course, you have to say that too because that's your experience and that's what is true, right? But let's, I'm gonna make you answer this. Let's say there are some, like let's say this, like I know diet is very important and yes, there are people who can't process fruits and vegetables, but we know as a general good rule of thumb, eat your fruits and veggies 'cause they're good for you. Are there some blanket things that people can do to kind of at least maybe tune themselves in to the other things they should be doing that are more catered to them specifically? Like, I'm not asking you to solve people's problems, but I just know that there's people listening right now, like, not like me, but like I have some idea of what homeopathy is, right?

Homeopathy. - Homeopathy.

So classical homeopathy is something about, I'm not talking about like the tinctures and remedies that people put together.

Explain the difference.

Show. - Explain the difference.

Yeah, so the difference is classical homeopathy is where they work with one remedy at a time. So let's say the most popular, one of the most popular remedies is arnica, right?

Sure.

Let's just say a homeopath prescribes you arnica, you would take one remedy and just that remedy alone and you'd clear out certain symptoms, symptom pictures that you've had for years possibly. So you go through step by step to heal the body with whatever shows up first. I'm really not the person to talk about this too much 'cause it's really, you know, understanding it very deep. That's something where one day we should get my wife on the show, you know? - Yeah, yeah, I would love to.

But yeah, I mean, you know, it's tremendous. So that's a very big difference between the classical homeopathy and what most people are calling homeopathy these days, which is just working with herbs. A lot of people confuse that. They think that homeopathy is herbs and our naturopaths who are doing homeopathy and mixing a bunch of different tinctures and herbs that they call that homeopathy, that's not the classical.

So how, here's something that comes up with a lot of this stuff for me. They're like everything today. There's so many different streams of consciousness and modalities and ways to go. What is something that you have used yourself to kind of sift through some of the more valuable things and some of the stuff that maybe is just, quite frankly, bullshit, you know? 'Cause of course there are hucksters out there. Like, we know that in every profession and everything. So like, what's a good tip for someone like, okay, I'm interested in the things that Adana is saying and I'm hearing these things. You know, I think I want to get into this.

What is something that you have used yourself to kind of like sift through, whether this is someone I can trust and make sense and not an obviously knowing for all of us. This is some aspect to trial and everything. You know, I've, of course.

Yeah, so I, my philosophy in healing is one that I stick with people who believe in the same philosophy of healing, which is that my body will heal itself and that we're just here to facilitate that process and support the healing. So if somebody, for instance, let's say a cranial sacral therapist or orthobionomist or Barnes-Mile-Foster release therapist or homeopathic doctor, all these people, you know, even Felden Christ method, right? All these modalities are following the same philosophies of healing in that our body is going to heal itself and it can heal itself. So most other forms of allopathic medicine, for instance, are all about, you know, Western medicine is all about, let's fix the problem.

Right.

Right, let's treat the symptoms.

Which is ironic. Hippocrates didn't say to do that.

Yeah, totally. And you know, so as long as I think you're, you're focusing on stimulating healing and strengthening your vital force and to actually supporting the body's healing mechanisms and listening to your body, then you're on the right track. If you're starting to go towards the consciousness of, I need to fix this, I need to get rid of this pain, I need to fix this problem, I need to fix this spinal dysfunction and get surgery, then I would say you gotta be very wary when you start to go in that realm because that's going against nature. So as long as you're sticking with nature and the natural process of life, our body has that power.

The doctors will tell you you have a degenerative disc issue, you have arthritis, you have all these fancy words that they throw in that make you think that your body is fragile. It's not true, our body is extremely adaptable and extremely resilient, okay? So as long as you're realizing this truth and you're staying within the truth of natural healing, responses of the body and natural self-corrective mechanisms and you're doing whatever it takes to support that, doesn't matter what modality you use, not modality, it's the actual philosophy. It's the philosophy of healing that is very different and opposite of what most people are doing.

How long did it take you to kind of attune to that truth?

Because I think that's a really important thing just to let it sink in that that is most of our problems. I don't have a ton of physical problems, luckily. I'm very grateful for that. I do have anger issues, anxieties, these types of things, not overwhelming, my anger is pretty bad and I see a therapist for it and it's very, very nice to actually be able to talk that out. But these things can kind of dominate our lives, right? They can take over what's going on and it's important to recognize this idea of that fixing everything, fixing things. I have to go to the doctor to fix this. I have to go to this to fix this problem.

My anger can actually perpetuate the problem. It doesn't give us a chance to actually go and say like, what is going on here? Do I actually have to fix something or is there some underlying thing here that I should take a look at and this is providing an opportunity? And I think just as you were saying it related to like going to the doctor to fix like a bulging disc or something, I'm thinking in my own head like, man, this is whenever I get really stressed out or really like freaked out, I'm always trying to fix stuff. This has to be fixed, put out this fire and then that'll be happening. And this inevitably leads to some physical immuno thing or something like that.

So it really just struck me as you were saying that how important that idea that we shouldn't be fighting or trying to change something but really just investigating it, that seems to be investigating the latent ability for healing.

I would say that we should always go back to the body. The issue is that we're in our minds and with our consciousness, we're trying to do things but we need to realize that our body's healing is just like the universe and how the universe works, right? I just posted something yesterday about this. I got high expectations but I got no patience.

Right.

You know, and that's a common says that in one of his rap songs, you know? And that's what happens with healing too is that everybody's trying to rush things. They're trying to heal fast. They're trying to fix things so they can move on with their life. But the reason why you're not healing is because you're trying that because how does it feel in our body when we're trying to fix the body? How does it feel? Does it cause us contraction and fear and resistance? Or does it cause us ease and love and harmony and surrender, right? So I'm all about looking at the compassionate way of working with the body, not on the body, right?

A lot of physical therapists, massage therapists, chiropractors, you know, are going, even doctors, right? So it's like they're trying to work on the body like it's a robot, like it's a machine where there's the knees, you have a problem in your knee, let's go and fix the knee, bullshit. It's not the way it works. Our body doesn't work like that. We are a mind, we are a body, we are a spirit, we're multi-dimensional being of light, we're just a vessel. This is just a vessel, right? Just the tip of the iceberg, we need to remember that and we need to realize that when we're rushing things, our body doesn't like that.

And it's to yell even louder and the fucking pain is gonna be even worse because you're not listening to your body, you're not taking the time to be with your body, to be with yourself and to feel your emotions. 'Cause what happens is we don't feel our emotions, we start to block that energy and it becomes this pressurized system with a full of pressure and the pressure then causes us lack of oxygen flowing through the spine, lack of circulation, dysfunction and then pain, but it's because of the contraction and what is contraction, it's fear. It's the opposite of love, let's keep it really simple.

Are you in fear or are you in love? Is what you're doing right now in your life harming you or if you, is it harming your healing? If it's harming you, it's that contraction, it's protection, it's armoring, which is a very big topic I talk about all the time, it's like, are you armoring right now? Are you protecting? Are you in that trauma response? So what I do with people is complete that process that they're stuck in, 'cause it's just a completion process and it's all about just an intervention of like, as a therapeutic artist, what I do is I use all these different tools, but really it's all about figuring out which tool to use at which time for which person, depending on what they need, but it's all about supporting that completion process and putting an intervention, which is just a reminder to the body that it is okay to heal, that it can heal.

And sometimes all that is, it's just me placing my hands on someone's body and listening deeply and intently with a loving amount of touch and with the right amount of quality of touch, what happens there, it just allows them to be with their body and then their body just heals, magically. It's like magic and all it is is the nervous system. It's just a hyper aroused nervous system that we have and when you just step into the body, it just resets and that's what flow state does as well. And it's one big fan of Stephen Kortler's work and how he healed himself from Lyme disease with the flow state and surfing every day.

And I'm big on, sir, I surf, I snowboard, I skate, I slackline, these things have actually healed me tremendously. So I would recommend going into some form of sport or some sort of art, I mean, dancing is a huge thing for me and that's something that healed me so many times.

It's one of the paths to enlightenment in Vedic stuff.

Yeah, it is, yeah.

It is, and so what I would say first is like, if somebody's coming to see me, I ask them, when's the last time you danced? When's the last time you cried? When's the last time you got angry? And when's the last time you got frustrated and had a tantrum? When's the last time that you connected with your friends and family and had really deep connections and talks and discussions? These are the things that, the connection to one another, not Facebook or Instagram, right? The connection to one another and the listening to one another and the being with our bodies and ourselves, that is where healing magic happens and that's when we become well-rounded individuals who are completely at ease and when walking around in love, not in fear, right?

So pain and contraction is all fear, right? It's all fear-based and so how can we step out of that fear?

Man, this is getting to the point where I'm loving that it's going. I love this idea of fear being contraction and kind of love being this openness because that is my experience and when you're saying all of these things when I reflect back on what it feels like and has felt like in my life, before I was able to even identify something like anger or rage, it always inevitably feels like contracting or pressure or something like that and that is a fearful response and something that I've noticed on the rare occasions that I can do it where I can drop the narrative, recognize this is going on and actually drop it.

It is, it's just this flow state. You recognize all this stuff is still there but it's not, it doesn't consume your ego and this whole narrative that's happening to me. Why is it happening to me? And then magically, like you said, this healing does take place and we know this stuff and I'm interested, I wanna pursue one line of inquiry here because you mentioned at the beginning, I myself am a daily cannabis user and have been for the past 15 years of my life and I've seen the cannabis world change in a lot of different ways and I think I've come to the conclusion that a lot of cannabis use in this country is far more destructive than I've ever realized and I think this has a lot to do much in the same way that if you get your food from McDonald's, all the karmic chain of things to get that to your plate is imbued in your food.

Same thing with the illicit drugs or marijuana we may be consuming. So there's this very interesting thing, however, cannabis does seem to have this amazing potential and getting people to acknowledge these more ethereal aspects. It can, it doesn't always do this, this is not a quality that has to happen, but it can allow us to become in better contact with our emotions, with our body. It can let us drop our narrative for a little bit. So I'm noticing that this is why I think CBD and a lot of these things do seem to have some positive impact on people's health. And it's this weird balancing act, we don't wanna be abusive with it, we don't want it to be destructive, we don't want it to harm ourselves or someone else, but there does seem to be this openness around it, even in the psychological benefits that people seem to happen.

So I'm curious, like, how do you, I know you don't use it anymore, but how does it, what are your thoughts on cannabis?

I will say that cannabis is plant medicine and it's medicine like any other medicine. We have realized that one person's medicine is another person's poison. For me, cannabis was my poison, it supported my anxiety and it supported my mania. And some people, you know, my family might think, oh, well, it was the drugs and the cannabis and everything that actually triggered my job case, but it definitely supported that, right? So I do, I personally, I have clients who are into, you know, smoking every day and I will shift them into doing a CBD vaporizer, which I love by wildflower, which I'm obsessed with right now.

And so I share CBD with my clients that need it, right, who are in chronic pain, but I'm very careful with recommending it to people, even if it's just CBD, because the truth is, is that plant medicines and all these types of medicines are simply also treating the symptoms. Yes, they are reducing the inflammation. So CBD is tremendous. I recommend that I think it's amazing as a plant, especially for my clients who has MS and people have chronic pain. They're using this and getting some amazing results, amazing results. However, we always have to remember that it sometimes is gonna be used as something to treat symptoms.

Now there's always gonna be, my wife taught me this about the primary and secondary effect of a substance. When you take, when you smoke a joint, all right, the primary effect is it soothes your anxiety and relaxes you. The secondary effect is it's gonna cause you more anxiety. So I bring this back to, you know, the cabbalistic perspective, 'cause I'm big on, I love kabala and you're Jewish too as well.

I am Jewish, yeah.

No, I know, eat you again.

Follow up, but yeah, yeah. Anyway, so what happens is, is that the cabbalistic perspective perspective is that this is bringing light or darkness into my life, right? So when you smoke the cannabis or do your drugs or drink your alcohol or do your gambling or have your sex or whatever it is that you're doing to escape as a form of escapism, which we all use as a coping mechanism, is this bringing light into my life and remaining and keeping that light within my life or is it putting me back into the darkness even further once that substance wears off, right? Is it just treating the symptoms or is it treating the cause?

So I'll tell all of you out there who are listening, stop treating the symptoms and start treating the cause and doing the fucking work, okay? It took me years to do work of psychotherapy, homeopathy, trial and error of all different types of things, which types of meditation work best for me to figure out what I can do so I can stop smoking every day because cannabis can be awesome but it's a way of escaping, it's numbing the pain, it numbs things just like when you take a pill, okay? So if you take a strong pill to numb your pain, you're again not treating the symptoms, the cause, you're only treating the symptoms.

So if you have an antidepressant and it's helping you not be depressed, you're not going through your process, you need to be depressed and like me took me six months to get out of my depression after my episode, I needed that time to myself to process, if I would have took an antidepressant and just went back into the world and back to work and just, that's basically ignoring the dysfunction and this harmony that you have within your emotional body, your spirit, your body, right?

Absolutely. - So let's stop with all these, you know, tools of temporary relief, like even massage, right? Stop doing massage because it's temporary relief. Now I'm not saying don't do massage. No, I'm not saying don't smoke cannabis. I'm saying no that we need to be sure that we're using the correct tool for the right person, for the right ailment, for the solution. What is the solution? What are we looking for? Are we looking for temporary relief from discomfort and pain or are we looking for lasting results that are going to make us a more powerful individual so that we can optimize our performance in every area of our life?

And that's what I'm all about. I'm like a biohacker also. We're going to be into optimizing our performance. So it's not just about being, you know, out of pain. It's about how can I achieve peak performance in all areas of my life, whether it's my work, whether it's my life, whether it's my relationships with my love, my spouse or my family, you know, or my kids, right? That's what it's all about. It's not about temporary like going to that joint, you know, which I have clients who still smoke every day, but I will again, try to get them to use the CBD vaporizer instead and stay away from the THC.

A lot of people don't agree with me, but I say the THC is what may cause you some more anxiety in the long.

Without a doubt, I mean, I love what you're saying and I love that we get to have this conversation here 'cause I agree with you. This is the one thing and I've spoken about being a daily cannabis user on this podcast very often. And the one caveat I give with that is that I, not every single day I smoke, but every week at least, multiple times a week, I check in with myself. I say, why am I smoking? Is this hurting me? Is this hurting people around me? Is it having a negative impact on me? Am I able to stop? Is it infringing on my happiness in any way? One of the things that I love about cannabis and THC in particular, the active ingredient which can really get, give anxiety to people.

And I know I've been a smoker long enough and a cannabis enthusiast that I've seen people drop off. That day will happen, it'll just the anxiety will consume them and it ceases to be fun. One of the things I've noticed about cannabis is it seems to be a magnifier. And that means it can magnify almost anything ranging from anxiety to happiness to humor to gustatory sensations, whatever it is. That is a very useful tool, if used, mindfully. And if used in a way that you're consciously using it, not letting it use you, which is a very seductive element of cannabis, which is why I think we get a lot of people psychologically dependent on it.

If you can use that magnification to hone in on your actual issues, rather than what you're saying, relieve them as symptomatically, I'm gonna numb, I'm gonna use this joint to escape. I think cannabis has a tremendous amount of potential. I think the issue is culturally based on stigma, based on the actual strength of the plant at this point, and how people are cultivating it, that's a really fucking hard thing to do. This took me decades to actually be able to get to a place where I understand why I use cannabis every day, and that I'm okay with using cannabis every day, and that knowing that it's not a destructive part of my life, but what you're saying is totally valid.

I know more people who are daily cannabis users, who use it as an escape, who don't use it as their spirit animal, as I refer to it, in the shamanic sense, and I think that's important to point out because cannabis is strong, alcohol is strong, opioids is strong, they're really effective at numbing us to things, not, I don't know what the real practical benefits of opioids are long-term, I haven't found them, but I do think cannabis has them, but again, like you said, that threading that needle can be a motherfucker. That is not like a really easy thing to do, so I like that you're encouraging people to be aware of the effects, and that it probably, the truth is, as much as I hopefully don't glorify myself being a daily user, but it's not for everyone.

The percentage of people who really can effectively have this be psychologically, physically, mentally, spiritually functional for them is small, and I know that from anecdotal and just general experience, so I really love that you pointed that out, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, honestly, I'm all about shifting states of consciousness for healing purposes, like, floor states, right, so I believe we can do that with a flow state, we can do that with meditation, we can do it with yoga, we can do it with many things that are a lot more healing rather than being harmful. Now, what happens is, you know, there's a lot of people now with ayahuasca, right, they're going on with ayahuasca. Now, that's another thing that's, again, it's a medicine that should be used carefully, and of course, it has its place, but it is not for everyone. I would not recommend that to someone who's had a history of psychotic break, right?

So that's the thing, is like, we have to realize that just like ayahuasca is getting more and more popular, cannabis is also really popular now, and it's just like, we have to realize that, again, it's not for everyone, and we need to use it as a sacred plant medicine, and if we don't maintain that sacred awareness around, or the sacred help me out here,

Context? - Yeah, the sacred context of this medicine, then we end up becoming abusers. We end up going through these processes of using this as a tool for, again, symptom care, rather than treating the cause, rather than real healing, real transformations. And we have to understand that while I've had my history of like drug use and psychedelics, and I've actually used psilocybin microdose, with a cluster. - With the cluster, yes.

Yes, where I've actually healed myself with the cluster headaches with using that form of medicine in microdoses where you don't trip, you don't go and put second up.

Microdosing is, I just got into this this past year, it's an incredible modality.

Yeah, yeah, so, but we, again, we have to be mindful. Very mindful, and realize that these are all medicines that should be very, very carefully used with the right professional, right? So I love that they're even using MDMA now for PTSD people, for PTSD. And so, this is tremendous, but again, they're doing it in a controlled environment. I'm very sorry, but a controlled environment is not being a burning festival and playing with all these medicines and sacred medicines in a way that is really causing you more and more harm because people are not able to integrate their experience, they're not able to really dive deep into their psychological process to clear out the emotional draws that stuck in their body, right?

They're not able to integrate this with their life to help support them on being a, how can you say, a whole individual, right?

It's really the root of being a holistic person. So, we're gonna wrap up, I mean, we could talk for hours, I'm sure, I'd love to meet up in person next time I'm in the city if you're around too.

So, I end with three quick questions and then one larger one. So, what's your favorite color?

I would say blue.

Cool, what's your favorite number?

My favorite number, oh, seven.

Cool, what's your favorite animal?

Oh, all of them, wow, that's a tough one. I mean, I guess dogs 'cause they're just a lot more. That's what I love about animals.

Okay, and then the last question is, what's a practical tip that you can share with people listening that's helped you in your life?

Move, move your body, dance, move dynamically. This is really what kinetic is all about. Kinetic body therapy, kinetic living, right? It's just move your freaking body, like start moving. Dynamically, I'm not talking about walking or biking. You know, while those things are great, I'm talking about moving dynamically in ways that you're not normally moving.

I love it, you're done. This is really, really, really awesome. Let's do it again sometime and just thank you for coming on and sharing so much wisdom about all of this stuff, really, amazing.

Yes, I'd love to, that would be, that would be great.

Cool, thanks. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

Thank you for listening to that episode. Edon, go check him out, really cool dude. If you're in New York, you can go see him in person. If you're not in New York, you can do Skype calls with him. I can tell you just having this conversation with him. Dude is legit. Big thank you to Patrick Nemchik for getting this episode out every month for a producer level credit. Greatly appreciate it. Or, mind if you can support the show on patreon.com/synchronicity. Lots of other ways to do it. We got a Facebook community, we got an email community, we got a whole bunch of stuff going on. That's it for this week.

I will see you next week.

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