¶ Longevity and Shamanic Practices
Welcome back to the Path of Longevity show , or soon to be the Health Longevity Secret show , and I'm your host , dr Robert Lufkin . If that's a little confusing , don't worry , stay tuned , it will all become much clearer .
In today's episode , we explore the intriguing journey of a world champion in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu who found another way to use her amazing talents of sensing energetic pathways through shamanism . Her story serves as an inspiration to us all , illustrating the transformative power of internal conversations and self-exploration .
One of the most common questions I get asked are which blood tests I rely on most heavily for myself , and that's really a whole topic unto itself , but I'm going to cover it in future programs . But simply put , there are about 17 or so biomarkers that I check on myself on a regular basis .
Now the way I do it is from my home , with a simple finger stick like this , and then I just mail it in . It costs less than $10 per marker and I get the results right away . If you want to try this test for yourself , you can check my website , robertlufkinmdcom under Secrets and use the code SAVE10, . Save the number 10 for $10 off . Try it .
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Also , let us know if there is a certain topic that you would like to see covered or a particular guest that you would like to hear from . And now , please enjoy today's program . Hey , samantha , welcome to the show .
Thank you very much , Dr Rob .
It's so great to have you on this program . We met serendipitously and our paths were met across . I think Before we get started , you have such a fascinating origin story . All the stuff you've done in your life , yeah , the origin stories .
Yeah Well , yeah , we can do the first basic , what you did before , the shamanic stuff , and then the shamanic origin story too , or however you'd like to do it . But yeah , tell us a little bit about how you came to be where you are today .
Man . So I've been in physical arts I guess for a long time . I've been doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu since I always say 2002 or 2003 in the way I describe Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for the entrepreneurial areas . If you've ever watched a UFC fight or a cage match in MMA , it's everything they do on the ground without the punching and kicking .
So I've never been big into striking arts . I never particularly wanted to get punched in the face or learn how to do it . But grappling arts , where you're learning to control opponents through leverage and body mechanics and understanding sensing , where the strengths and weaknesses are in close quarters , like that . So that's molded a lot of my life .
My dad wanted me to do it for self-defense and then I ended up teaching and traveling the world and moving to San Diego once in 2010 , 2011 for a year to pursue on the world stage . I have one world championship under my belt at Blue Belt and I was a Pan American champion at Brown Belt . I got to go to Abu Dhabi .
There's all these cool things that happen as a result of that , the ironic thing being that I think I kind of just pursued that because I didn't really know what else to do and I never asked myself what else I wanted out of life .
So it was a bit of a strange relationship with the sport and that sort of leads into how eventually I started to kind of release my grip on this thing that I had committed most of my life to , because all my jobs all the jobs I needed because it's often difficult to make a living as a jujitsu athlete were related , oriented around being able to train four to
six times a week at least and open academy or manage academies and things along the lines , and then so it was a strong part of my identity , while also feeling quite stressful at times .
So eventually I started to kind of let that go a bit and see what else was out there and ask myself the question of what I actually wanted , which I think that most people need to do a lot more often , because you get on these tracks where you just kind of start going and I avoided a lot of things that many people not everybody , obviously , but many people
get stuck in , like I never wanted to go to college because I didn't have anything I particularly wanted to do that involved college . So , no , I'm not going to go where a lot of my friends went , because it was the next thing you do after you go through high school , right ? So , kind of .
At the same time , I've been insatiably curious and love learning most of my life , and so just pursuing lots of little rabbit holes and seeing where they lead me one after the other , jujitsu led through to a connection to learn Thai massage , which is an energy healing art from Thailand , which is also the catchphrase is like having yoga done to you .
So you're usually prone , usually on a mat . A practitioner is fully clothed , you're both with a and your . It uses compression , range of motion and stretching to help the body feel better and to open up energy throughout the body . Right , and there's lots of ways that works . That led into well , I'm doing this for my clients .
I'd really like them to be able to do things for themselves when we're not together so that they don't depend on me , and so that led into studying mobility training with a group out of Canada , primarily with a few other things that I tried along the way , but focused mostly with them called functional range systems .
And then I traveled around the country and the world trying to take seven hours from them and learn things about the way the body works and how cells develop and how the forces that we enact upon our bodies change the way that we function in our day to day lives right and how our body accommodates for the things that we actually do not , the things we wish
we were doing right , and sort of all the health offshoots that kind of came from that .
The blending of the active and passive physical modalities , the massage kind of end of things and I've never gone to massage school but like it all makes sense to me and the active like exercise side of things , fighting those kinds of things , kind of just all blend together to me into the human experience and energy and the way people interact with the world and
themselves . And I started down a spiritual path , sort of by accident , through doing time massage on people where I learned choreographed sequences right when it's like , okay , you do this when they feel this way , you do this when they feel that way , great , and people would feel good , great , come back next week , whatever .
And eventually I'd be on one port of choreography and wish I was on the other side for some reason Started following that intuition . People immediately started falling asleep in like some kind of deep , who knows what kind of brainwave state , theta or whatever , and I was like , okay , well , that's interesting .
And that dive into intuitive , trusting myself from what I was feeling , healing eventually led me to more shamanic practices .
Well , for our audience and for myself also , let's start at the beginning for shamanic practices . What is shamanism ? What are the basic foundations that we need to understand in order to follow what you're going to tell us ?
Yeah , For me , I've mostly learned from the resources of a guy who's named Shaman Durik Durik Barrett is his name , and I made the connection to him because somebody opened my eyes to interacting with spirits in a wood-fired hot tub in Hawaii on an eco resort , which is like , of course , of course , that's how that happened , right , I would say is sort of the
study of relationships . If people may be a little more familiar with the idea of , like animism that you know Pocahata song , every rock and tree and creature has a voice , has a spirit , has a name , right , and the idea that you can have conversations with everything , anything , everything , and I include that with people's bodies , is a big thing .
I have a page on my website where I posted one of my newsletters that is just like here's examples of some of the things that you could maybe have a conversation with , and what we talked about at that lunch that we met at a little bit was what I like to do is bring people into a sense of their relationship with things through what is actually happening .
¶ Exploring Senses, Analysis, and Spiritual Healing
When we say senses , usually people skip right to analysis and judgment , right , so an example would be I've played with let's go deep quickly , played with the ideas saying okay , well , hey , Rob , like if you say , hello God , what happens right after that , Like , do you hear something ? Do you sense ? Do you have a feeling in your body ?
Do you have you know , yeah , do you see something ? Do you have a ? I think I already said that Generally . Say like , usually it's something , like words pop in your head or a sense of something or a vision occurs , right , and that's literally what happens . And so I'm just curious , like what are the things that pop up for you ?
And I don't know if you would like to play along with this game where I can just keep kind of just right , Sure , yeah .
no , I'm up for yeah .
So if you say in your thoughts or you say out loud hello God . Like what's the response that you get ? What happens ?
Hello God , I feel a real pause in things and I feel an intensity , but I don't you know it just sort of focused , maybe because we're just pausing the conversation there , but I feel a little intensity amp up .
Right and I would say that that pause that's a big part of a lot of introducing people to these kind of ideas is that there's always there's most frequently , the question of did I just make this up ?
Or some kind of backfilling of , like , well , this is what it probably was , and maybe you're right , maybe that's absolutely correct and maybe it just what it was right .
Like , it's almost difficult in this day and age to we're so trained to interact on an analytical level almost constantly that purely engaging with the senses turn the leapfrog over it into the analysis , right , so like , okay , cool , I feel this . But expansiveness is certainly something that's very that's common for people .
If they ask a question like that and then you play the game , you say , okay , well , what if there's so much that we don't understand right and how I judge whether or not something is actually being helpful ? To a client say is , yeah , everybody's got a problem , there's some problem , right , Like I'm , like I've got this going on or whatever .
I believe that everything makes sense . We just have to figure out why or how . Like how it makes sense , but everything makes sense in the body and what's going on with you .
So somebody might come with a problem and we figure out that it's related to some memory that they have that's really charged right and every time they think of it they either try to avoid it or they get upset , or they get agitated or cry or whatever .
It is right , that's a common thing , and then we'll just go in and have a conversation with the memory almost , but it's however it appears . This is also largely modeled or integrated with internal family systems methodology , and I haven't . I told you before we started recording that I've gone into a lot of rabbit holes with mid depth .
I have not taken the internal family systems training . Apparently there's like several years long wait list on that . It has still provided me with a lot of benefit feeding into the way that I approach like shamanic healing with people . It's a frame , it's like a modern day psychological framework of how to interact with like your inner selves , so to speak .
They posit that all people mental people would say or schizophrenic that you have a part of you that wants to eat ice cream and a part of you that doesn't , and those are like different aspects of your personality , right , and so conversing with those different aspects that are in conflict leads you down the pathway to figuring out your own healing stuff , how to
help these stresses release , and what I've found is that oftentimes it'll lead me down the path that reveals , like a spiritual entity or something in this person's psyche or purview that they weren't previously aware of , that we can just have a talk with , and the way that I judge whether or not the conversation was helpful , right , is that in that case they might
bring up the memory at the end of the conversation or at the end of the session . We'll be like , okay , I think of bringing that memory again . That's been bothering you for 20 years and makes you agitated . Every time you think of it and almost every time I can't think of any times it didn't happen the person just feels different about the memory .
They can think of it without it being an agitating thing , right ? Their experience of it has changed , and so while you could say like , yeah , you're making this up , it's weird to think of that you're talking to spirits or you're talking to God , or you're talking to the rock outside your door or your heart , and it's actually responding to you .
Whatever is happening is processing something in a way that creates a felt change , and I think that's what everybody is actually looking for is that they have a change in their experience of something that was unpleasant prior . Does that make ?
sense . Yeah , yeah , going back to what you were saying about the statement and then immediately going into analysis , it reminds me of some work Joe Dispenza does with his meditation program .
He was just a guest on here and I've been diving into his work and I'm gonna be going to a deep session , a week long meditation session , which will be interesting with him in a couple months , but it sounds like I want to experience what it's like to be in a room of a thousand people meditating like that , like that's gotta be so cool .
Yeah , have you done it ? Have you followed his work ?
No one of my friends just did the Mexico retreat . I've listened to him off and on .
¶ Exploring Shamanism, Healing, and Psychedelics
So there's a real power of turning off the analytic mind and feeling the feelings and connecting with the spirits or whatever is happening to help process these things .
Yeah , To a point , though , like the analytical mind . So here's some crazy stuff that happens If you find that you can't just turn it off , and that's something that people there's certainly like reprogram there's lots of ways to reprogram a mind right , and Dispenza knows way more than I'm probably ever gonna know .
But one of the things you can do is , yeah , okay , I'm just gonna not pay attention to it for a while and I'll focus on my goals and cool like , it's fine , it just loses its power . But when you find that it's super overwhelming or you can't get space from it , you can literally go where is that analytical voice coming from ?
And you'll be able to I've never come across somebody that wasn't able to locate it somewhere in or around their body , and this is like a fascinating idea , right Like , where do thoughts come from ? This was my last online course that I made was focused on these kinds of ideas about , like , I don't know where do thoughts come from .
Let's ask these questions , right , like , and sometimes it might be a spirit Sometimes it's the memory of your dad yelling at you and you haven't closed that loop yet in your brain , right and . But you can find it in or around your body and then you can say , hey , can you give me some space so that I can just feel stuff , and it'll work .
It's the craziest stuff I'm still . I'm always amazed by it . I think it's the coolest thing . And if it doesn't , then you have a conversation with it about why , and then answers arise from wherever they come from , and it's a really interesting experience to have .
Yeah , yeah . No , it's fascinating these interactions , and I mean it's obviously with many spirits . And this is different from the sort of mainstream religions , the spiritual paths sort of like organized religion , with , you know , judaism , christianity or that . This is more like a pantheism , where everything is a God or everything is a spirit , basically .
Well , I wouldn't necessarily say that , I would say just that everything . I definitely have the idea of universal positive regard for everything . Like I don't think anything is actually evil , right , like everything has its own motivation . It's just as much as you know , the creature that some you know a predator , animals eating might think that they're evil .
It's like , well , they also got to eat , right . So , you know , I think there's just these relationships and there's so much . Yeah , just that you can , that nothing means harm per se , that everything is understandable .
It doesn't always mean it's fun , right , but you can , through the senses , particularly kind of ground yourself , ironically , back in a 3D reality when you're kind of going all over the place .
And yeah , I'm sorry , I just didn't think that pantheism sounded quite right to me , I was just thinking that you can , that everything is energy , maybe a little bit more in my , in my thought process , that everything is like is energy made form , whether that's through form into thought , form into sound feeling , vision .
Yeah , that makes sense . Yeah , and what you said about assigning meaning and looking at the good , you know , the things are basically good that's a really powerful concept . That , in a sense , as humans , you know the world is sort of neutral , I mean , one way to look at it . It's neither good nor bad , you know , it is what it is .
But we assign meanings , like I just have a puppy over there and it's not a good dog or a bad dog , it's a dog . I mean , I love the dog , you know , but you know a dog is a dog and being able to assign the meanings and look at the world through the lens of the meaning that we give it is a really powerful tool . I would think .
And is that part of the shamanic healing , that choosing the meanings that way , or how does that ? Is that a separate thing ? We're going down ?
The way that I look at healing , I suppose and that's a great question is around , or clarifying one for me perhaps is I'm kind of , I'm thinking about how I tune into someone's body when it's like a bodywork session , right , and it's a lot of asking and not a lot of telling .
When I think of healing , it's like what feel , and then for me it's very sensory , a very kinesthetic of like , what am I feeling drawn towards right On someone's body , and then what is the way that I need to manipulate this ? I guess it's more of a balancing , Like I don't like .
If somebody is particularly agitated , there is a balancing that can happen and it's sort of like bringing it back down . I don't think that the experience of being agitated is necessarily bad . Excuse me , but it's not what we like , want all the time .
Alright , and yeah , that gets into a whole another line of very interesting thinking about oh , and then why do you decide to do anything ? What do you feel drawn to ? What do you not like ? You know , if everything's fine , then why do anything ? And that's a question that I semi-tournament myself with constantly .
One of the classic sort of stereotypes for shamans . When people hear the word shamans , oftentimes they go to a place of psychedelic drugs you know like , or you know famously , ayahuasca . You know these creatures come to us on the ayahuasca journeys . You know mother ayahuasca appears , you know and is .
What role do you think psychedelics play in your approach to shamanism ?
Well , I have . I think people , if you watched me in a day , they would probably think that I'm on drugs on a reasonable basis , because I just love the senses a lot and I'm just like tree you know like kind of stuff like that .
I have very , very little experience with any drugs myself , including alcohol , like I've been drunk once in my life after a breakup in my 20s , by myself , you know .
Like I have one one weekend in a really nice setting , setting that a friend of mine put together with any experience with like I think I had one micro dose of psilocybin and I tried San Pedro and I tried five MEO DMT , like in like a week , like that , and then that was it .
I learned in that process that I had a major resistance to the idea of people like using psychedelics for healing and in taking them I had a voice in my head that was like screaming like you don't need this . I wanted to yell at everybody don't need this and order this stuff . This was like four or five years ago , I guess .
And and then at some point another little voice of mine came up and was like why are you so mad , bro ?
I was like oh man , I just pushed myself out of that .
That was really funny to me . I was like why am I so mad about this ? Like what ? And that's kind of like a sign . And you're like , well , okay , like that self reflective piece of like , why am I so mad about what other people are doing ? Like , why does this bother me as often ?
Like , let's take a look at that and let's kind of go into the healing side of things , right ? I think one of my most popular Instagram posts recently by far was just a quick text . That was like most people that are going to do ayahuasca should probably try sitting with themselves alone first .
And I still think that I don't think that any avenue is wrong , Right , I think it's helpful to kind of figure out what it is .
Normally , you're going to go into anything with a lot of intention , right , and people that do the full dieta and they get ready to go have a ceremony with ayahuasca like we'll often do that and then , as it's getting more popular sometimes , there's people that are just like out drinking one night and they're going to go do ayahuasca somewhere in LA tomorrow right
and it's like how is that ? is that ? You know , some of the benefit is in making it a ritual and making it a ceremony . Absolutely so down to presence right .
Yeah .
It's presence and intention , and you could probably do a lot of the free rituals and get a lot of benefit just from that , even if you never went through with it . And that's kind of my point is like if you can't sit with yourself at all , then then I don't know . Maybe you have some questions to answer about why that's the direction you want to go .
I don't personally feel too drawn towards doing doing a lot of psychedelics , but I'm not totally close to the idea either . Now , now that the little voices in my head argued about it , it just I wish I could take a stronger stance . I'm going to be honest with you about whether or not people should or shouldn't do it . I don't think there's anything wrong .
I just wish just like I wish somebody had asked me why I was doing devoting my entire life to Jiu Jitsu .
I would just have friends around you that ask you why you're doing things non-jiz mentally and and have the courage to ask yourself that when in a journal , even when you're setting off , so that you have more of a relationship with yourself and the aspects of yourself that that are desiring to go forward and make a change , and maybe you come out with the answer
being that , yeah , this is exactly what feels right to me . Or maybe you solve your own problems just by listening to yourself talk for a little while . I guess I'm . I tend to be a fan of less complication and more . I love you know , the idea of anything endogenous would be ideal versus exogenous means of going after something that would be .
My preference is is doing a lot of like checking in with what already exists before necessarily introducing more to the system .
Yeah , that certainly made makes sense . I mean , we touched on meditation a little bit previously , do you find ? Do you have a meditation practice , a mindfulness practice ? Did you find that useful in your shamanic work ?
I really , really do . I wouldn't say that I have , I don't have a like . Every day I do this kind of thing . I find my days are better when . I do when I do sit down and like just take a little bit of just being with myself .
I had when I when I used to live in Philadelphia and that was where I started really tuning in , that's when I learned , where I learned time massage and started tuning into intuition and stuff , and I did have a while where I like meditated for an hour a day for a long time and I've done a postnat retreat which is a 10 day silent meditation retreat which is
modeled on the teachings of Katana Buddha and it's it's it's all sensory based and I think that's great and I think it makes so much , it makes so much sense right To just kind of get back into the physical body a bit . I yes , I do .
I think meditation is super helpful to people and I've I've gone back and forth over the years about only meditation and silence where , like your only you know you're not doing a guided meditation or something , as I'm working a like a normal job right now and it's been an interesting like experiment seeing how , like people are doing in like a grocery store , like
the average person working in a grocery store my NA equals one thing Seems like they're kind of in like a big survival mode , and maybe sitting with themselves in total silence would be way harder than having a guided meditation .
Take them there with something that they can focus on , especially if they're so used to focusing exogenously and they're not at a place where they can go like , oh , why can't I sit with myself ?
Like that's weird , you know , like whatever turn it takes in the road to make that realization that it's a strange thing to not be able to sit with yourself , I guess I'm a fan of anything that can kind of help people towards that lane of being able to have some self reflection without a panic attack .
In reading about shamanism , it seems like a lot of the writings about it are people who practice this . Maybe it's more in indigenous cultures , but a lot of these people have sort of traumatic events in their lives , or even to the point of head injuries or things where they or seizures or something that allows them to connect .
¶ Shamanic Healing and Its Benefits
And in your experience , do you have anything like that ? It was at the hot tub in Hawaii . Maybe that was the foundational thing or was there some experience ? Or was it more kind of gradual over time , like this ?
For me it's more gradual over time and that's why , like , my Instagram is shamanicsam . Like , I think like two or three times in my life I've called myself a shaman , but I'm like , I don't know , like who decides , like , I just know that .
But there are people like the shaman Durik guy that I've taken more of the courses from , like , yeah , he like full blown , like fifth generation shaman . Like you know , spirits told him like , yeah , like , if you continue on this path , there's going to be some hard stuff .
He died , he had organ failure and , you know , went to the one , to the other side and then chose to come back right or like , and to help the people on earth , right . So he has these whole experiences . Thank you that I haven't had to go through that .
But my gradual thing has just been being more and more open to me to what is like I think all children are born with , interacting with metaphysical things , right , and are especially boys , tend to have it kind of beaten out of them .
I've seen there's almost like a stereotype for me of men that I've met as adults who seem like they're like holding it together by a thread , like something's like they're , they're chaotic , right , and I really think that most men in those situations were very sensitive children that had , like , their entire reality , sort of denied me .
Like well , I'm interacting with ghosts in my room and my parents tell me I'm not . So therefore , who am I to trust ? Right , I'm going to trust my caregiver . That is the symbol of my , of my existence in this world , I don't know . But then if you can't trust your , if you're taught not to trust your senses , that gets complicated quick .
Right Like now , we get into virtual reality and all the other crazy things that I don't even know , but like simulation . simulation great Like but most of the time it seems that being in touch , getting in touch with your senses , truly makes a market difference in people's experience in the world , that it's much more grounding to be like .
I literally feel this period Stop Like judgment Okay , the judgment separate , okay , cool , Like I can , I can have these separate things , or I can feel this and the chatter can be going on or whatever .
Yeah , on your , on your website you you mentioned rocks , candles and altars and as not being necessary , or what role do those play in shamanism ? Or you know ?
like I'm just , I have some right . Like I have some , I have some cards , I have some things . I think of everything sort of . I like to use the example of like horoscopes , right , like you know what's easier to poke fun at for people than horoscopes like that are in the daily paper and you're like , oh , you are going to see a tree today , like whatever .
No kind of thing . I think any of this stuff and this goes from like I don't care if it's a medical , western medical text , to an ancient whatever . Or like you're sitting next to a tree and all of a sudden you have this awakening , right , and that's like Buddha , that's Jurassic Newton , like you know whatever , whatever comes up .
If something draws your attention in a way that affects you and makes sense , then why wouldn't you value that and that's so great ?
Like I think that there are higher energy fields around some things than others , but but it's always going to be complicated , and I don't mean that a negative way with my energy and how I interact with the other energetic field , which is why somebody can hold something and call it sacred and and another person will be like well , I don't feel anything with that .
Therefore , you're wrong .
Right .
Like obviously you're making it up because I don't feel anything . It's like . Well , I don't think that's true . I think it's just you don't feel anything , right .
So if you love , I think a lot of my friends that I admire would say that you have to be careful about what anything , anytime you feel like you're giving your power away to something right , versus it being a symbiotic relationship that's helping you in some way .
So if you think that the only way you have power is if you hold onto a special crystal , then that's a little bit more of an issue than if you're , like you know , have some sense of yourself that is fairly positive and can consistently so and you also feel like this does something for you . Does that make sense ?
Yeah , yeah , what , what sort of things ? If a patient or a person has has problems and we we all have problems . which sorts of problems are best ? Would who , what kind of patient , what kind of problems is shamanic healing good for ? In other words , what , what kind of people would benefit from coming to you ?
What sort of , what types of problems can you address ? And maybe , conversely , maybe there are things that , hey , this is not a shamanic issue . Your , your leg is broken , you need to cast on it , or I mean , or I don't know , but maybe , yeah , you could speak to that who , who , who benefits and who doesn't benefit .
I feel like most like crunchy people and and like hippies and spiritual people and all the thing most of us seem to try to draw the line , like the people , people that are will be the last to turn to Western medicine for most solutions .
Still , like , emergency medicine exists , you know , like , and I'm also fascinated like there's bone setting techniques that have been , you know , around for centuries too , that I have no awareness of right and and different styptic like herbal formulas that that are can be used and all these things .
So I I mean I , in lieu of not having that , yeah , please like , stop the bleeding . You know , like man , I love helping people . Well , to what I said earlier , like the stuff , that the stuff that I enjoy the most is probably when people have something that's just been bothering them , that they just can't seem to get rid of .
Like they're just and I take less , I'm less fearful about doing something wrong , I would say , because it's just essentially guiding a conversation internally for the most part , there are times where I'll say something and I'll be like well , this is what I'm seeing or perceiving or whatever , and it's helpful and I'm confident in that right Versus being like .
I hope that you don't mind that I say , but I see this right , that energy is not not very protective . And I've done that , I've been there right . Less effective , to not be strong and confident .
But I love when somebody's like I just have this memory that keeps popping up and it's driving me crazy , because to me that just signifies that there's like an open loop is the way I talk about it . Like like nothing is traumatic if it's been resolved right , nothing's a problem if it's been resolved . If you had co-regulation with someone .
I love German New Medicine , which you , mary and Minette , have heard of , where they use brain scans and things to show how everything in the body does make sense on a more pragmatic , practical level . Sorry , where am I going with that ? But it's all about just like figuring out why what is happening makes sense .
Oh , I brought that up because they define , like the causes of people's maladies are essentially that you had a surprising acute event in that resulted in emotional isolation , right , so you weren't able to co-regulate back to a feeling of that the trauma has passed right , and most of us just kind of like , just yeah , we'll deal with it later .
I don't have anybody around me that knows how to hold me while I cry .
That's kind of the general Western world human experience these days , right , and so I think that's why , like , I think all these physical things come up as a result of these unresolved metaphysical things the experience of emotion , the whatever it is that you weren't supposed to feel or you didn't give yourself time to feel , which is why meditation is really helpful
off the bat , just to skim off the top , be like , actually sit with yourself and feel things .
A lot of stuff resolves , like because you're just not pushing it away anymore and creating more and more internal stress which has so many cascading effects throughout your nervous system , your physical body and all these things , whether or not you ever get to a point where you're like I need to ask the spirits what's going on right . These kinds of things .
I help people deal with what is there and it's and that can be addressed to virtually any problem that they're having . I definitely will refer people out if , for some reason , it feels like I'm not the right one . If it doesn't feel right to me , I have to respect that sense too .
But my super long answer to your question , I guess , is like helping to resolve painful memories is something that I really love to do . Yeah , I guess I can stop there .
Yeah , I mean that's a great point . I mean , the longer , the longer , the more time I spend in Western medicine and full disclosure . I've spent my entire career as an acolyte in the cathedrals of conventional Western medicine .
I realize how important practices such as you do and you describe there can influence so many systems in our body in ways that we don't even begin to understand , and things like assigning meaning and purpose and going deep on the spiritual side could just have remarkable effects .
And it's something that sadly , I think is greatly overlooked in our current healthcare system , which has tons of problems anyway .
I think what it is like about that the present experience aspect of it when you sort of choose to believe the story , that , like you're imagining it , you're making it up instead of , like , going immediately into , like rejection it's a rejection of something that you're experiencing and then and that gets sticky really fast , right , it's like , okay , well , what's
wrong with experiencing that ? I know I said I don't think anything is evil or anything either . I also don't think everything is good for you , right ?
So , like there's a , there's a vetting process that happens when , if you go in , if you just go , start having conversations with all the thoughts in your head , I think yeah , I do want to mention it's a lot of spiritual girlies will go off and be like , oh , I heard this voice and it told me to do these things , and it was that I'm gonna own , that my
inner child needs this stuff . So I'm going to go start doing this thing in real life .
¶ Exploring Shamanism and Personal Growth
Chill , chill for a second , because most of the healing is going to happen internally . There are the actions that you can take .
For sure , maybe you need to have more protein , I don't know , you know , but maybe you need more saturated fats , like all the things that you talked about , like keto and the civs up as well , like are going to affect the way the chemical reactions are occurring in your body .
Yes , that's all true too , and um , but to just go off and believe all the voices in your head because now you think that , like Samantha or somebody told you it's okay to go listen to them , is not the same .
Like you , still , there's still a vetting process that occurs of like whether or not this , this interaction , is in your best interest , asking it more questions , checking in with whether or not , like , the experience you're having is mostly loving or not .
Because if you're , if you're interacting with someone that isn't feeling loving , then that means that you have a responsibility or job to help that thing heal and get back to its normal state . I think that humans , and then the world in general , are inherently loving .
I think that that is our baseline and that things that are outside of that are ever the conflicting things of me eating something right or whatever , or a thing trying to eat me like , and there's still a like , a calmness or , you know , a level at which there is no intent , that is , that is evil or anything in there , and you can still . Yeah .
So anyway , just just check in , checking in with a few questions like whether or not the experience you're having is loving , and not proceeding , if you , if you feel like it's kind of the wrong thing to do and I put a little note of caution in there with anybody that just goes off and like starts asking all the questions and then following directions without
vetting it further , absolutely To our listeners .
As always , this is not medical advice , I mean , it's not only for the emotional purposes only , but it's a great education . I love the fact that your your journey going from the , from the , you know , world champion , now black belt and jujitsu , and then turning to this , this spiritual path , with shaman , a keeling into the work that you do .
It reminds me of a story that I read . You may be familiar with it . It's someone who sort of went the opposite way . He was a world class chess champion and he actually had a movie made about him , something with Bobby Fisher is Josh Waitzkin . Do you know him ? And and after the public , okay , well , yeah , yeah , go ahead and finish the story if you want .
Yeah , he . Well , after the , after the , the chess publicity from from the movie , he continued to go to tournaments and he was a world you know , champion chess grandmaster . But he found that there was so much publicity at the tournaments people would come to see him because he was . He was the character in the movie .
I can't remember who played him , but it sort of distracted him from the chess and he finally wound up giving it up and he switched into martial arts and in talking to him he said Well , it was really the same sort of things , because in the chess game he doesn't memorize moves or anything .
And his , his approach was he looks at the board and see , he visualizes energy flow in the pieces and that's how he can , you know , be a grandmaster for him . That was his approach . And when he switched to martial arts , it was the same thing . He would just visualize the flow and his mind was set up that way .
And you know , I wonder if some of that isn't that play at you , you know , going the other direction .
Yeah , absolutely . I mean , and that's you know , that's like the makes me think of the way people are modeling , even AI models and stuff these days . Right , like what was ? I don't remember the specifics , but that that story about , wasn't it Google that like changed the world of like chess , like chess robots for life , because they changed like .
It wasn't about like memorizing every move , it was . It was like learning how to learn , like was the way that the change like instead of being like , well , I just need to know 25,000 more combinations , it was like , well , what if we just learn how to learn ? And that's what I feel like .
Like my work is with people is like just paying attention to energy and and what it feels like to do things . What is actually happening .
Yeah , you can't memorize all the moves . It was deep mind with Google and Alpha go , which is like chess board , but it has an innumerable possibility , so it's not possible to program it . But yeah , like you say , it's since figured out the best way to play .
So One thing I wish , like I think that even a little bit of attention into being okay with what is right and and and observe , being able to observe what is less judgmentally like , which happens through the senses , like the senses themselves , and non judgmental we add that later right , like how people with parenting , for example , there's something that might be
relatable to people listening to . This is like if you can be like , oh , like my kids doing that or my kids experiencing this thing , and I don't have to like take the ball and run with it in any direction . It's just is what it is . Everybody just has a much better experience . It's like pretty calm , you know , like that's .
That's one thing I think is yeah , it sort of circles back to the assigning , meaning you know something happens and then we don't have to immediately say or that's good , that's bad , it's just , it's what happened . What's actually happening .
Yeah , the kids are learning something . They're figuring something out for themselves .
Yeah , no , absolutely Well for your , your programs , people . People can do this remotely or they don't need to be in person , or is a combination of it . Who can access your programs ?
Yeah , I have . So I have programs that are like focus on the physical body , when I was more focused on that .
I'm getting back into that a little bit now just because , like said , we're working in a grocery store and observing people just limping around the grocery store and I'm like man , just a little bit more movement in your life would be life changing , right , and it's moving energy .
It's like you know this stuff , but it's just it's moving your freaking joint around in a bunch of directions . That's how we evolved was not having the option not to , and our bodies are very confused about the sedentary lives we lead . So , like adding stuff like that , and I have a pre recorded course as well .
That's kind of , I would say , an introduction into shamanism in some sense , which is the supportive mind , because the idea is asking those questions or where are my thoughts coming from ? How can I direct them more effectively towards the things that I want ? And how can I deal with the things that pop up when I try to direct towards what I want ?
You know , like , how can I , what questions can I ask of myself , of these ideas that are stopping me Right ? And and then I also for sure do do sessions with people and zoom , or in person . I'm in San Diego . I love in person because then we can have body work involved and it's just nice .
It's so much it's nice to just have that you know multi dimensional field that we can do , but it's very effective . Online to just having conversations . I usually get people going in a really good direction within three to three online sessions . They kind of have a lot of knowledge that they can kind of use moving forward for it's asking themselves .
Or usually they come to me with some problem and the problem you know that particular problem resolves rather rather quickly once we have a talk with it and you know they don't even use the rest of their sessions .
Well , how can people follow you on social media , samantha ? And what ? What is your website ? We're going to put it in the show notes as well , but people who are listening to this or watching it on YouTube ? Maybe you could just tell them now .
I have some , have some remnants all over the internet , but shamanic Sam is my main social media . It's on Instagram , shamanic Sam .
I have a YouTube channel which is called move well Durham , because Durham was where I moved from in North Carolina , where I was teaching martial arts and and doing body work and all the things , and there's a lot of physical and metaphysical content on there .
And then I also have a website , samantha fall paper calm , which I probably should go check and update .
Great . Well , thanks so much , samantha for for spending time with us today . Will will . Maybe we'll schedule another podcast to do the Tantra talk . I want to dive deep into that , but we covered so many , so many great things about shamanism and everything . It has been wonderful and thank you so much for for all the work you're doing .
I really appreciate you and thank you for reaching out . I was extremely flattered to hear from you again . I loved being around you guys at lunch that day and I think it's really cool . Thank you so much Thanks .
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