[LISA LEWIS] The podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/slash network. . Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. [LISA] Today on the Am I Ok? Podcast I have a very special guest with me that I’d like to share a backstory about how I know her. My guest today is one of a handful of people that has helped me change my life and led me to where I am today. And I may get a little emotional about this because it means so much to me to have her here. I was first introduced to her work back in 2006, when I began individual transpersonal energy healing sessions with her as my healer and my therapist and after about six months working with her individually, I went on to take classes on learning how to become a transpersonal energy healing therapist through the Lionheart Institute, a transpersonal energy healing. She was the founder and director of the school. I loved working with people so much, and I saw the effects of my own transformation through this healing modality that I went on to earn three certificates in transpersonal energy healing at Lionheart. Then I started my own private practice and continued to be mentored and supervised and by her, and then eventually teaching alongside of her with her incredible teaching team. She saw in me what I didn’t see in myself, and she does this with everyone. She holds such a beautiful and warm space for healing, that the experience is profound and life changing, which I can testify to. I strive to hold that same type of space with my own clients. Today on the Am I Ok? Podcast, my very special guest is Laura Fine. Laura Fine has two master’s degrees and is the author of four books. Laura mostly finds herself in professional positions as a teacher of teachers, healer for the healers and coach of the coaches. She is an energy healing therapist and the creative director of The Transpersonal Energy Healing Therapy, Practitioner Certification. Laura has spent over 35 years training thousands of healers, coaches, and body mind professionals. As a survivor of a life threatening illness she has a passion for helping others transform trauma, life changes and dis-ease and to a profound opportunity for personal healing and spiritual growth. Laura travels to India annually to pursue her own spiritual practice and to contribute to a fully charitable hospital in Mangar, India. If you’d like to contact Laura for a free 15 minute consultation, her website is laurafineonline.com. You can learn more about classes she teaches for highly sensitive people at www.transpersonalenergyhealingtherapy.com. So is with great pleasure that I welcome Laura Fine to the Am I Ok? Podcast. Welcome Laura. [LAURA FINE] Wow. Thank you so much, Lisa, what a beautiful introduction. I’m very moved by what you shared and very honored to be here with you and to also be teaching alongside of you now. So it’s just been a quite an amazing journey for us. So thank you for having me. [LISA] Well, you’re very well. You are one of the people that I definitely wanted to have on as a guest expert on my podcast. And I just wanted to share with you, I was thinking about this, about how I even came to know about sensitivity. It was probably back in 2009 when I was taking a character-ology class with you, which is the five personality patterns or structures and it was the third weekend of a five month-long course and talking about the third pattern of the enduring pattern or the masochist or the sensitive pattern. That’s where I learned that sensitivity is actually a gift. I did not believe that when I first heard it from you and it took me a long time to understand that and really accept that that is a gift. I’m so blessed to have learned that about myself. [LAURA] Wow, that’s wonderful. Yes, it is a gift. It can be an amazing gift and it can be a liability for us. It can certainly have its challenges. But the beauty of it is that when we learn how to work with those challenges that show up we can really harness the gift and bring it to full expression so that we can gain all the benefits of that. [LISA] Yes. And I want to ask you, do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person? And if so, would you share a little story about that with us? [LAURA] Yes, that’s interesting. You know, I actually never thought of myself that way, but I think the way we grow up, we don’t necessarily know any different than what we are. So I would have to say that I never really thought of myself so much that way except that I always found myself surrounded by other highly sensitive and intuitive and psychic people, and I was very drawn to that world. So when I looked around me, I always felt like everybody else was more intuitive, more sensitive than I was, but it’s interesting how, I always wanted to be able to quote, see auras and see energy in the way some of my other colleagues. And when I was learning this work studying energy healing myself, were able to perceive. And I remember in school I was working with a woman who had an amazing vision or being able to see auras and see energy inside the body. And we were working together on a client and I would say to her, “Do you feel this?” And she’d go, “No. But I see this.” And I go, “You see that?” And she’d go, “Yes.” And then I would say, “Oh, did you feel this?” No, she didn’t feel that, but she would see. So we would be able to compare notes about what she was seeing and I was feeling, and through that practice, I was able to start seeing what she was seeing and she was able to start feeling what I was feeling. So that’s sort of one of the interesting ways that I learned about, you could say the subtle, the ability to begin to perceive subtle energy. But there are many other ways that we can experience our high sensitivity. It’s not just necessarily through hands-on healing work or energy healing work. Many people are highly sensitive and don’t even necessarily use that language for what they are experiencing with their sensitivity. [LISA] What other ways have you seen it expressed if not considered sensitivity? Like what other ways does it, do you see it or do you hear it expressed? [LAURA] Yes, it’s a great because there’s probably a lot of people listening in on this podcast who could relate to some of these. So some of the ways might be that people are very sensitive to environments. Like maybe you, if you’re around a lot of people and then you feel drained or exhausted or you just know you can’t be around a lot of people, or if you are, then you have to sort of go hole up for a while in your room and be by yourself. And it could be with people who are having strong reactions to some stimulus and others might be thinking oh, stop exaggerating or you’re being overly dramatic or what’s the big deal. This might be some of the language that people who are highly sensitive get responded to regularly. They might be able to, they also might be able to see what other people can’t see, and then they would doubt what they are seeing as a result. Like they might see spirits or auras or energy around the body, or they might hear voices and they’re not schizophrenic. But they hear voices or they hear sounds, or they hear music that other people can’t hear or they hear a wider pitch range of frequencies. Or they can hear when, or feel it when someone’s not telling the truth. They can feel a sensation in their body. Or if they’re around somebody who’s not feeling well, they might all of a sudden feel that person’s symptom in their own body. Or they could have a heightened sense of smell and more like the sensitivity that an animal might have. I remember when I used to do massage work, especially, and I would have people who were partially rubbed on a massage table. I could smell the people who used drugs. I could smell it through their body. I could smell it if they were drinkers or what kind of diet they had, or if they were cigarette smokers. That was certainly easy enough. But if they were using drugs, I could even tell sometimes what drug they were using because I could smell it through their system. [LISA] Wow. It’s so interesting. And how does someone like learn how to smell or hear or pick up those subtle sensitivities? [LAURA] We all have the capability to learn it. It’s just a skill, like any skill. If you learn how to play the piano, you have to practice. So you practice the skills that teach you how to do that. And that would be through learning how to open up the chakra energy system, like beginning to practice the movements and the breathing techniques and the ways to, and the meditation techniques that would help you to begin to attune to the subtler frequencies of energy that are always surrounding us. [LISA] Hmm, Okay. Wow. I know from experience, from learning from you, what you’re talking about and yes, like what I heard you say is just like opening up all our senses, just kind of opens us up like wide open to take in more. And I guess also with that, knowing how to maybe like protect ourselves, we’re not taking in too much or taking in other people’s energy. [LAURA] Yes, that’s correct. It’s super important for when we start to do this, when we start to open our system, that we do it really with professional instruction, because it can be easy, like you are saying. So importantly the point that you’re bringing up that you don’t want to take in other people’s energies that could be harmful to you or unhealthy for you. So we want to be able to not be so wide open that we could get sick more easily or anything like that. So really being grounded in this work and learning how to do it mindfully, to do it with professionalism, to do it with an awareness of what we are doing. We’re dabbling in energy that can be very potent and so we want to be careful with how we learn and who we learn from. [LISA] And I just, working with clients, and I’m just thinking about my own life personally. I hear a lot of times maybe with clients, just like the way that they’re feeling, and then as we explore maybe their history that there’s other people maybe in their family or friends that are feeling the same way. And then we kind of identify that, oh, maybe they’re picking up on other people’s, taking on other people’s things or stuff that really doesn’t belong to them. [LAURA] Yes, that’s exactly right. Sometimes when we are highly sensitive, it’s almost like we have antenna, a really big antenna coming out of our head in every direction, and we might be perceiving and picking up everybody else, but not as attuned to what’s happening in our own system, in our own body. So it’s really important that we are, that we can be clearer and distinguish what’s mine and what’s theirs? What’s real and what’s grounded in reality and what’s really am I just sort of thinking is out there, but it’s not grounded in physical reality? When I say physical reality, I mean, grounded in the physical body. We could be picking up energy cues and clues. It’s sort of like, if you think about radio waves or radio frequencies, you can turn your dial to any number of frequencies and you can pick up a lot of static that way. But when you’re really honed in on a station, it comes in nice and loud and clear. So that’s what we want to be able to be mindful of what’s useful, what’s practical, what’s pragmatic for us in the physical world that we’re attuning to when we open our energy system, rather than let’s just go out and play in the static. [LISA] And how would someone go about like really tuning into a station and getting really clear? [LAURA] I think the first step would be to being really grounded, meaning really in your physical body, aware of the sensations in your own physical body, before you try to sense what other people around you might be feeling. And grounded in our physical body means being attuned to the Earth’s frequency, the actual 7.8 Hertz frequency that earth vibrates at. So our physical body, when it’s healthy is also attuned to that 7.8 Hertz of vibration. So we want to stay very connected to that mother Earth’s energy, as we expand our higher frequency. So you could say the lower chakras, especially the root chakra helps us get grounded and connected to the earth energy. And we really want to be rooted deeply, into the earth into that grounded Earth’s energy. The more grounded we are, the higher we can go into the higher chakra frequencies to be able to perceive and sense the energy that’s around us and use it in a positive or productive healing way. [LISA] Wow. I just love that. And as you were explaining that I was just becoming more grounded myself. Thank you for that. [LAURA] Thank you. I know I catch myself too, as I’m talking about it, I better be grounded while I’m talking about this stuff. [LISA] It’s always a good reminder to check in. I’m really curious about when clients maybe come to see you, or people that are coming to find out about sensitivity, the people, and this is including myself that have the, I’m going to say that I call it like the waterworks, like they can just cry instantaneously, and it’s just like the waterworks turn on the flood of tears and there’s not a way, it feels like they’re never going to turn off. How do you work with someone like that or what does that tell you about the person? [LAURA] Yes, it’s a great question. So sometimes, I mean, it’s so individual, but in general, how I could maybe address that is to say that we can become easily over-identified with our emotion feelings or over-identified with our sensitivity. So when we are over-identified with the emotions, which open in the front chakras, we have openings in the front of the chakras to our emotional energy and in the rear of those chakras, there’s the back opening to the chakras that has to do with our will energy. So we need to have a balance between our emotion and our will. And so when there’s an imbalance, we can often be so overly emotional that it’s really exhausting and depleting for us, blows out our neurotransmitter and we can get very tired as a result of feeling overly emotional. So how I would maybe work with that individual is to help them feel and find their spine, to help them sit up, to help them feel the power that lives in the rear opening of those chakras, the will centers, and to pull some of that energy, that emotional energy into their will current, into their will chakras so that they can have a balance between their emotion and their will, their power, their sense of strength. And then also bring into balance the reason centers, which are in the head. So sometimes it’s just a matter, it might be a matter of helping them sit up strong. Maybe even if I’m in person with that individual, maybe stroking their back, stroking their spine to help them actually feel their strength back there. Or if I’m not working with them in person, if I’m working with them long distance might be to just physically push their back into the back of their chair, to be able to feel that they have a back to their body and that they can hold that back up and that they can feel the power and the strength that lives there. [LISA] And how does the person overdevelop the front side, the emotionality on the front side of the body? [LAURA] You know, that, again, it’s so individual, but I think if we’re habituated in that pattern, it’s maybe something that we’ve learned in childhood. As a coping mechanism that we learned that to be in our power is not safe. So maybe it’s more safe to express my emotions or to be in a collapsed position than it is to be in a position of power. It could go way back into our early childhood where our needs, our physical needs, or some of our survival needs didn’t get addressed in a way that taught us how to be safe, to have our own strength and our own voice. So I don’t know if there’s any individual example that you have in mind, but I think just generically, those could be some of the reasons. [LISA] No, those are, I think are excellent examples that you provided. And to give me a clear picture of what you were talking about and how someone maybe that experiences maybe could help them understand themselves a little bit better and how they can help themselves, which leads me to my next question about the modality that you teach. If you can share with about transpersonal energy healing therapy. [LAURA] Yes. This modality is transpersonal. So trans means across and person, the whole person. So cross the whole person is the meaning of transpersonal in this context and energy healing refers to the working with the chakras and the arc or field and the subtle energy as it moves through the body, through the physiology, the energy that is the same energy that one might feel if they’re receiving acupuncture, the tingling sensations that go through the meridians of the body. And then that energy manifests not only within our physiology, but around our org field. So if there’s an issue that happens in our life, it’s recorded in the energy system, and then it upwells into the physical body. So you could say like, if you’re a geologist and you’re studying the life of a tree and you take a slice of that tree and you read the rings of that tree, like the geologists look in and go, “Oh, in 1945, this tree was in a drought and in 1962 a lightning hit the tree and in 1975 there was a blight.” So we can read the history, the whole history of the person through their chakras and org field. All of that is encoded on this subtle level of vibration. And so being able to perceive that as we open the chakra system, then we start to work with that individual physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. So it’s especially potent for working with healing trauma, or healing any kind of self-destructive pattern that we might feel stuck in. And it doesn’t have to be like this hugely serious thing. It could just be something as simple as I can’t break my overeating addiction, or I can’t seem to stop yelling at my kids when I get tense or anxious. There are reasons that we are wired to do these patterns that we don’t like in ourselves that are self-destructive or self-sabotaging. And these are things that we can work with a subtle energy to heal. And it also can be physiological things like migraines or a woman that wants to get pregnant and the doctors can’t seem to find an answer. So it’s very often the answers to some of those issues can be found through energy healing work. [LISA] And how is this modality different from let’s say regular, talk therapy? [LAURA] What’s amazing about it is because we track the movement of energy. When a client is just talking, they are always giving us clues and cues as to what’s happening on the subtle energy level, meaning that they might do a gesture that expresses something that they’re feeling, or they might use language that describes it and we are not picking up on it. For example, if they say, I just feel like my boyfriend stabbed me in the back. I just got stabbed in the back by him. I just got stabbed in the back and I have this pain between my shoulders and the chiropractor can’t fix it. So that’s an energy wounding that person is carrying. So we have to work on the level of energy to be able to help that be repaired. So what we do with transpersonal energy healing therapy, which I know you do also now brilliantly Lisa in your practice is we follow the client’s experience of that in their physiology, through an art of inquiry, a series of questions that helps the client get in touch with how and where they are actually feeling that pain on a level that’s deeper than the physical. And once we do that, once we help them become aware of how and where it’s living in their body, they start to describe that energy, well, it feels like there’s a, where they stuck that knife there’s a big hole in there. Okay, well, let’s notice what the hole feels like. Okay, it’s dark, it’s gooey, it’s black, and they start to describe it. And then what invariably will happen is some emotional feeling will start to show up around it or some in image or some memory that often can take them even back into their early childhood. And they go deeper and deeper into a trans like state that takes them to the root of where this pattern began for them in their life. So it might not just be about this incident that just happened with their boyfriend, but it might track all the way back to their family of origin and something that happened there. And this all starts to unwind and that the client might actually have some, not just emotional releases, but shaking or vibrating or sweating, or some kind of release that their physiology is unwinding. If you think about like, those of you who have a pet dog at home, if you’ve seen your dog, sometimes all of a sudden they get down on the floor and they do all these weird movements, shaking and kicking and scratching. Of course, they only do that when company comes over and they do these embarrassing things all over the floor for about 10 or 15 minutes. They’re kind of going a little wild and then all of a sudden they’re relaxed and they fall asleep. So inherently in our physiology, our system is always wanting to unwind like that. It knows when it needs to move, when it needs to release. But we are so acculturated within a certain limited range of expression that we don’t pay attention to what our body needs to do to move to recorrect itself to come into balance. So this is what we train our transpersonal energy healing, practitioners, how to do with clients. So people who come to learn this are to learn it, to work, have their own practice, or they could be already working as therapists like yourself, or as health coaches or life coaches or chiropractors, and just wanting to have a way to more deeply help their clients get to the root of unwinding a problem before it becomes too much of a disease or pathology for them. [LISA] And from my experience, just working with clients and my own personal experience of using this for myself is that it’s much, the process is much quicker. It gets to like the root of the issue much quicker than I’d say I talk therapy. [LAURA] Yes. I’ve had that experience too. As a person who was trained as a therapist, I also have found that mostly of the modality I use is energy healing in combination with some the therapeutic model principles. [LISA] Yes. This the same with me too. With the different modalities, just being in a licensed therapist that I learned in my master’s program. Like this is the one that I use all the time with my clients. [LAURA] That’s great. [LISA] What do you feel, or what are some self care tips that you could provide for our listeners about, just coming back to like the high sensitivity, how to manage high sensitivity? [LAURA] Hmm, yes. I would say grounding, grounding, grounding. Be in your physical body. It’s so important to exercise and to be in nature. Go out and hug trees, lay on the ground, feel the vibrational frequency of the earth energy. Put your bare feet on the ground. But also get support from people who are grounded, who feel grounded. We’re often attracted when we are highly sensitive to other people who are maybe as out of their body as we are. When I first start started this work as I was anyway. But really practice being pragmatic and trust that we’re here on the physical plane because we have to bring the intuitive, psychic work onto the physical level. We’re born as a human being for a reason and so we need to marry those two worlds, the intuitive world, the sensitive world with the physical world. So that would be my, those would be, and to get support, to get with a professional, a licensed professional like yourself or an energy healer who has really good training because there’s lots of people out there doing this work right now, but there’s many levels of acumen in their ability to execute those those skills. [LISA] Yes. And the grounding, I don’t think we can ground enough. It makes such a difference just to go through the day. And when you start to do it, and if you’re already doing it, when you notice what you’re not doing it, it makes such a difference. [LAURA] Yes. [LISA] So my last question I want to ask you, and is part of the last question I just asked you, but what would you want highly sensitive persons to know? [LAURA] I think you kind of said it at the beginning that this is a gift. It’s not a liability and that it’s something that as a gift, it’s their job to cultivate that gift. It’s a privilege and to not be afraid of that gift and not be afraid of their perceptions and to get help, to deal with the fear that might come up around having those sensitivities and to know that there is a tribe out there that you’ll feel very normalized when you find them. And they’re out there and you can certainly look at our website for, we have a membership community that’s very low-cost that people could join. There are lots of other organizations out there also that offer support nowadays. When I first started I was really considered a weirdo. So there wasn’t much of this out there. It’s in vogue now, which is wonderful, but I would say get support, get a community that supports you and know that it’s a privilege, it’s a gift and it’s there for a reason. [LISA] That’s wonderful. And can you tell us again how listeners can get in touch with you, Laura? [LAURA] Yes. Just go to transpersonalenergyhealingtherapy.com. Www, you have to type in the www with many of the browsers to get to our site, so be sure to type that in. It’s www.transpersonalenergyhealingtherapy.com. My personal website is laurafineonline.com. [LISA] All right. Thank you. [LAURA] You’re welcome, Lisa. Thank you for having me. I feel such so honored to be with you in this way and to teach with you now. It’s so great. Great privilege to be able to do that. [LISA] Well, thank you for your time and for your tremendous knowledge and information and the gifts that you provide to the world, Laura. [LAURA] Thank you, too, Lisa. You’re most welcome. [LISA] Thank you for listening today at Am I Okay? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.