Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com.
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Hello, friends, and welcome. We are here with Dr. Shamini Jain, someone who I really respect and who is a good friend to Sounds True. Let me tell you a little bit about Shamini. Ivy League-trained clinical psychologist, award-winning research scientist in psychoneuroimmunology and integrative medicine. Shamini is a mom. She’s also a social entrepreneur who’s the founder and CEO of CHI, C-H-I, the Consciousness and Healing Initiative, which is a nonprofit collaborative accelerator that connects scientists, health practitioners, educators, and artists to help lead humanity to heal ourselves and in the process, I believe, help heal each other. She’s the author of the bestselling book, it’s called Healing Ourselves: Biofield Science and the Future of Health. It’s a book that’s won several awards, including an OMMIE Award and a Nautilus Book Award. Dr. Shamini Jain, welcome.
Shamini Jain: Tami, thank you. It’s so great to see you again, and I’m so excited for our conversation.
TS: I always learn so much being with you, just so mind, heart, soul expanding. So it’s great to have this chance. All right, right here at the beginning, to try to help our listeners connect to how you see healing, how you think of the body, I want to start with this idea of a metaphor we often hear for our body, which is that our body is like a car. It’s like a car, right? And over time, the parts wear out. And I know you offer a different metaphor for the body where you use the metaphor of a garden for our physical body. And what I’d love to know, here at the outset, is how our view of healing changes, from your perspective, when we think of our body as a garden.
SJ: It’s such a beautiful question, and I want to name that this view of the body as a garden is actually very ancient. It comes from ancient indigenous medicines including Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, Ayurveda and others. And it really means that our body, like everything around us, is part of an interconnected system. So rather than these parts and pieces that, like you say, just sort of wear out and we have to get in to the mechanics and fix it, or yank something out and replace a new part, that’s one perspective of the body, but that’s kind of a very limited view. And I think even modern medicine understands that that’s a limited view now, because we know so much more than we did before. For example, when we look at the body as a garden, we recognize how the root systems can inform each other and we’re learning so much about that in reality in terms of how trees connect and things like that.
Well, it’s the same in our body. Now we know from home fields of study like my home field psychoneuroimmunology, right? That fancy term, what does it mean? Well, we’ve discovered, just only 50 years ago or so, that our brain and our immune system connect. It’s helped us understand even more deeply how our mind and our emotional state and our energy actually connect with the healing process throughout our bodies. So the interconnected garden perspective helps us understand that we’re really part of an integrated system. And when we look at this from the indigenous wisdom and indigenous spirituality and medicine perspective, it goes even beyond what we perceive as the physical body, but a recognition that our body is literally the reflection and is informed by our environment that includes the foods we eat, even the seasons, the quality of nature around us actually informs the flourishing in our garden.
So it’s a really deep and beautiful metaphor, and I believe that science is really bringing us to a deeper understanding using our fancy ways of looking at things like omics and systems biology. We’re beginning to look at this garden aspect of, even the physical body, more deeply. So it’s not just about changing one gear, but it’s really about looking at the whole system and where the system might be sort of misaligned, if you will, and how we could bring that back to harmony, back to flourishing.
TS: Now, Shamini, when you talk about how we’re connected with the larger environment and how the environment could be impacting us as a garden, what I think about is how difficult the times we’re in are, for so, so many people. And I wonder—here we are, we’re having this conversation right now, right now when we see violence accelerating throughout the United States and different parts of the world, where there are so many pressures on people and they feel a sense of the toxicity, if you will, of the larger environment and how that could be impacting our health, our personal garden. And I’m wondering how you see that—this moment right now in time.
SJ: Tami, I honestly believe this is why the focus in this area of the biofield and what we’ve called subtle energy is so important. The ancient traditions describe the strong linkages with what we call the vital energy force and the emotions. So this has been known, again, through indigenous wisdom for millennia, really. And we’ve approached it from modern day empirical science in terms of mind, body connection and emotions, and we’ve learned a lot. It’s very powerful. So we’ve really looked at that more from the physical level and begun to explore it in the mind. And now that so many of us are doing more practice, whether it’s in yoga, meditation or energy healing, we’re even more aware of the subtle influences on our being. And the key to developing our subtle awareness through biofield practices is for us to really recognize the vibration of an emotion and the vibration of the inputs around us in more moment-to-moment awareness.
So this is the beauty of subtle awareness, and the beauty of connecting with the biofield is that it’s just another avenue, if you will, another layer of intervention. It’s another way for us to say, “Oh wait, all of a sudden I notice, I walked out of that room and I’m feeling really funky. OK, let me just take stock of what’s going on here. How am I feeling energetically? How am I feeling emotionally? Now, how can I work with my energy system to better clear that, to recognize all of this—toxicity, for lack of a better term, that I feel is almost put upon me? Where am I at with that and how might I clear it so that I could come back to my inner nature, my true knowing?”
So it’s like as a humanity, we’re really being benevolently challenged, I think, in a way, to come back to ourselves in every moment and not get stuck in the constant conditioning that is thrust upon us by the powers that be, by most of the typical popular media, by a lot of the bad news, that’s really real.
And I want to stress that this is not a bypass. We’re not asking people to bypass what’s actually going on. We all need to play a role in creating flourishing for our planet. And that means addressing the violence, the inequities, all of the things that we’re seeing. But we have to have the energy to do that, and we can’t have the energy to do it if we’re constantly simply being fueled by anger or despair, it won’t get us anywhere. So to tap into the subtle awareness, and recognize, “What are these energetic residues that are really coming from anger, despair, depression? And how might I transmute that energy by first coming into recognition of it, embracing it and then working with it for a more desired outcome?” That I think is the challenge that we have for today, and for today’s times, and as human beings.
TS: Now you use this very beautiful and interesting phrase, “benevolently challenged,” we’re being benevolently challenged. And I have a question about that, which is how you have determined that it’s a benevolent challenge. And tell me more what you mean by that. It really struck me because I think a lot of times people feel challenged and they don’t have that other descriptive word, benevolently challenged. They’re just like terribly challenged or horribly challenged, something like that.
SJ: Because there is still this opportunity to come into grace and to connect with grace, to carry us through these difficult times. That’s the benevolence aspect of it. And those of us who are deep in our practice, we sense that, we feel it. I’m getting very spiritual here, I assume that’s OK for our discussion.
TS: Bring it on!
SJ: We are at a time where spirit is here to help facilitate our learning and our growth, and the suffering is part of this benevolent challenge for us to really deeply look at our suffering, to recognize what’s working and not working within us and around us. What are the systems that we’ve had in play that have been driven by greed, by lack, by scarcity? Well, I think it’s full force in our face at this point, isn’t it? With climate change, with economic crises, with growing violence often caused by disparities in economics and racism and all of it. And yet there’s this benevolence, that I feel and that I think many of us feel, that there’s more to being human than this. We know that. And so the challenge is: are we going to come forth and really embrace our spiritual nature, our interconnectedness, to foster a new way of co-creating this world that we’re in? Because we are the creators, the creatrix, as I like to say, creatrix being a more general neutral term, but really informed by the feminine.
We’re all consciously creating this and we may say, “Wow, we’re consciously creating this mess?” Well, kind of, whether we’ve been fully conscious of it or not. So the benevolence is that challenge. Are you ready to step into your full power, which means stepping into the full power of the spiritual nature of who you are, to bring about a better world?
TS: Now, you talked about how we can become aware of emotions in the body, and perhaps emotions that are in response or that we’ve “caught” from other people, they’re in response to situations. Tell me a little bit about a biofield healing approach when we’re feeling difficult emotions, and how you, personally, work with that.
SJ: Well, Tami, as you know, I love to sing, have loved to sing since childhood. And that’s really what brought me to the study of the biofield was recognizing that power of vibration. And I teach this a lot, because I love sound-making and I realize a lot of people feel very shut down with their voice, but our voice is one of the biggest tools that we have to sense and shift our biofield moment-to-moment. So I often work with my voice in just a playful way to express emotions, to connect with myself energetically, and in groups, to really foster a stronger collective biofield. And I find that practice really, really fun and very powerful in the moment. And this can be really simple.
So when I talk with people, of course there’s this strong link between sound-making and enhancing our creativity energetically. So this is as simple as singing in the car and singing in the kitchen, singing in the shower, all of those things count, but it’s even as simple as toning. It’s also as simple as sound-making. Sometimes we’ve just been taught to shut down. And so, what we really want to do is just take a nice deep breath and sigh, or even take a breath [AAAHHHR] and just let it go. Even a little growl like that, that literally helps us to discharge energy that we may have been holding onto, tension that we may be holding onto. But sound, of course, is even more than just catharsis. Often, we start with catharsis, but then we can move in an even more expansive and beautiful direction with it.
TS: Now I’m going to ask you if it’s OK, invite you if it’s OK, to lead us in a biofield-based sound healing practice. But before we do, for the person who’s listening and they’re like, “What is the biofield? What are we talking about here? What is Shamini pointing to?” These are biofield therapeutic interventions that you offer to people to help them learn more about healing themselves. But what does that mean, a biofield activation?
SJ: Tami, thank you for the question. So “biofield” is a fancy term that was coined by our fellow western scientists here in the 1990s at a National Institutes of Health meeting, to try to make sense of all of these things that we were noticing about the power of energy, including that part that is measurable, electromagnetic energy. There are a lot of devices that we know are already being used in the biofield sphere where we put known amounts of electromagnetic energy with things like pulsed electromagnetic field stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation, all of these things. That’s part of the biofield. But there are these subtle aspects too that are used in all kinds of indigenous healing practices, including acupuncture, including yoga, including certain forms of meditation, and so many what have been called “energy healing therapies,” modern day practices like therapeutic touch, healing touch, Reiki, pranic healing, age-old practices like external qigong, laying on of hands.
Those are all biofield therapies. And sound can also be a biofield therapy. It is a biofield therapy. So when we go and immerse ourselves in Tibetan gongs or Tibetan bowls, crystal bowls, a lot of people are doing these sort of sonic immersions. When we use the voice consciously, we’re tapping into the biofield. So the biofield is always here. These are fields of energy and information that guide our health, and they’re numerous and we’re just beginning to explore the science behind them. As you know, that’s a huge focus of my book. Healing Ourselves is really helping us understand all the science behind the biofield, but it’s something that we carry with us all the time. And so just by consciously coming into contact with our biofield, we can uplevel our healing and our wellbeing, moment-to-moment. So that’s what’s cool about it.
TS: OK. And one more question before we do the practice. So here you are as a young person, you love singing, you experience the power of vibrations and how they impact you and have this sense of, “I feel better, my consciousness is raised,” I get that. And then you become a research scientist, you want to understand what’s going on. How has your understanding and all of the studies you’ve both read about and conducted yourself, how has that impacted your view of what is going on when we do a toning practice like the one we’re about to do. What’s happening? How is it that we feel so much better afterwards?
SJ: We’re vibrating on the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels. And honestly, this has all been laid out in many different traditions. For example, in the East Asian tradition in Vedanta, in particular, we talk about the four levels of sound, the four levels of sound, and the physical aspect is called vak. That’s the audible sound, like the sound of my voice reaching your ears, tickling the cilia, creating neural impulses. That’s the physical aspect. But then, there’s also madhyama, which is the subtle aspect. That’s the subtle-energy aspect that we feel. There’s pashyanti, which is actually the experience of sound as light, which often we might experience when we chant mantras, for example. And then there’s para, which is the all. That is the actual experience of consciousness unbounded. So when we chant mantras, when we connect with our inner sound-making, we have the opportunity to vibrate at all of these different layers of sound. And all of our biofield studies right now, honestly, we’re just scratching the surface of this.
We’re seeing these profound effects in anxiety, in pain, in symptoms in cancer—even down to the physiological level because of the way our scientific community is where it’s sort of like the “prove it” model. It doesn’t exist unless I see it down to the neural firing level or the cellular signal. We’re really hyper-focused on the physical aspects of healing, and that’s what we tend to study because it’s easier to study that, right? It’s something we can tangibly measure. But if you ask me, when I combine all of that with the practices, and what I’ve noticed in my students, and what I’ve noticed from the patients in these studies, there is something even more profound going on spiritually, that we’re just scratching the surface of.
And the way that we typically try to capture that is through qualitative interviews where we might ask the patient, “What did you notice?” And then they might talk about their spiritual experiences—and that really is data. But so we’re seeing data from spiritual experiences all the way down to cell signaling in ways that can help prevent the spread of cancer with these biofield therapies. That’s all laid out in the book, of course.
TS: Have you seen actual research studies on sound healing and physical healing results, physical results like, sound healing has resulted in these types of physical improvements?
SJ: So little has been done, empirically, with sound healing at this point. We conducted a feasibility study on a sound healing approach during COVID for people who were suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. Now, again, I’ll be honest, we thought about adding a biomarker. If you look really deeply, though, there’s not actually a really solid biomarker for generalized anxiety, believe it or not. We assume that there is—a generalized anxiety, must have some kind of biomarker, C-reactive protein or some inflammatory cytokine or heart rate variability or something. Actually, no, it’s not consistent. So it’s a challenge, I think sometimes, for us to almost come out of our view that the physical manifestation is the most important. Because we have a massive mental health crisis and it’s a real crisis, doesn’t actually matter whether there’s a physical component. Yes, prolonged anxiety will probably lead to physical issues down the line, very, very possible.
But I would say it’s almost too simplistic for us to think, “Oh, if we alter this biomarker, we’ll get rid of anxiety.” Anxiety is profoundly spiritual, also, in nature. So that’s actually why I think these biofield approaches, and there are studies including the one that we did that’s published, looking at this sound healing approach, dramatic decreases in anxiety. During the pandemic shutdown where everyone was isolated, these people couldn’t even get out of their homes, they couldn’t access care, the results we saw were amazing. And we’re actually following that up right now with a randomized controlled trial looking at this more deeply, comparing it to gold standards of care for anxiety. It’s important that we recognize that this healing is happening, yes, on the physical level, but I think, even more importantly, on the mental and emotional level. Because everything that we understand from these ancient perspectives, and from energy healers, is that the disturbances begin to happen first on the energetic level, then begin to instantiate on the mental and emotional levels, and then the physical levels.
So yes, the physical healing with energy healing is important, but I think there’s a huge role for us to play both in our daily practice, and in the research, in looking at these practices as what we might call preventative care or wellness care. Can we actually work with our systems before we get physically sick? Wouldn’t that make more sense to do? I think it would.
And I think that’s again, part of that benevolent challenge. Do we have to wait until things are so bad—whether it’s out in the world with climate change, or whether it’s in our bodies with a colitis diagnosis for example, do we have to wait until things get to that level before we notice that there’s a disharmony taking place? So it’s a long-winded answer. I think it’s important for us to explore these energy healing, biofield-based spiritual practices every day, so that we don’t have to wait for things to get to that level.
TS: All right, let’s do this biofield vocal toning practice. Take us through it.
SJ: OK, so this is really fun. I’m going to invite everyone, if you’re sitting to just relax in your chair, you can be standing too, but allow your feet, as much as possible, to be on the ground. And actually, I’m short, for those of you who know me. So I’m going to push my chair out a little bit so my feet are firmly on the ground as well for this practice. And we’re just going to start by taking some nice deep breaths. So you don’t have to think of yourself as a bonafide singer for this. This is fully available to all of us. And let’s just take a few nice, simple breaths, undirected in the body, bringing our breath awareness all the way into the belly and feeling the breath touch into the hips and the legs, the sit bones, the base of the spine, down to the feet touching the ground, taking a nice breath and exhaling down the legs.
Now we’re going to use a very simple seed mantra, which I suspect you all know, called Om, the universal sound. And we begin by vibrating Om in the lower body. So you can use any tone that you like. It doesn’t have to be D, but we’re really going to focus resonating your tone in the lower body, from the belly down to the legs. And so I’ll demonstrate, you can do this along with me. Om. Twice more. Om. And once more. Om. Now taking a nice breath into the heart area and placing our attention in the front and the back of the heart, the lungs. We’re going to vibrate Om now in a more connected fashion, really allowing for the expansion here in our heart center. Again, nothing really to do or even intend, but just to vibrate this beautiful beej mantra, this universal sound of Om in our hearts collectively. Om. Twice more. Om. Giving yourself and others a nice big Om hug with this last one here. Om.
And now we will vibrate Om to the heavens. And so here we’re going to focus the sound at the tip of the nose, or if you prefer, behind the eyes. And if you’d like to, you can do something fun here to really hear this higher vibration. You can take your hands and cup them behind your ears and sort of pull them in front of you so you’re pushing your ears forward. And if you say, “Hello, hello,” for a moment, you’ll notice you sound kind of like you’re in an echo chamber. La la la. You can kind of hear that. So for fun, if you want, you can do this because we’re going to kind of make a spaceship sound. That is, we’re going to make this sound very nasal. So you’ve heard likely of the variation of Om is Ong, right? Ong, and you’re really making that nasal sound, so [REEREEREER] you’re kind of making that sound.
So we’ll do this three times. Stay grounded in your body, feel your feet. You don’t want to get dizzy when you do this. So staying in your body is really important. This is why we do it last. So we’ll do this three times. [REEREEREER] Again. [REEREEREER] And once more. [REEREEREER] And relax. Just tapping into the awareness and around your body, noticing what you notice. When you’re ready, if you had your eyes closed, you can open them.
TS: What an accessible and powerful practice, Shamini. Thank you.
SJ: Thank you. It’s my pleasure. I love to remind people that your voice is a healing instrument, and it’s as simple as taking a few minutes a day to consciously connect with it, connect with your breath, and a sacred syllable. You can use any sacred syllable that resonates with you and your spiritual practice.
TS: Now Shamini, I could imagine having this conversation with someone who’s a sound healer, who’s a yogi, who’s a spiritual teacher, and they might have led us through the practice, similar to the way you did. But here you are. And in addition, you’re a research scientist with a vision of the future of medicine, the future of biofield science and medicine.
What I’m curious about is when you envision the medicine of the future, because several times in our conversation you’ve referred to indigenous people always knew this and the old traditions and the Vedas, they knew this. But how are we merging together, do you think? What’s your vision of what we’ve learned from western medicine that can be valuable and helpful with biofield science? How’s it all coming together? I have sci-fi images in my mind of being in light sound crystal healing chambers and stuff, but I’m curious what you see and envision.
SJ: I think it’s really amazing, and I don’t think we’re very far off from that. So it is happening, and I think the key here is for us to all connect the dots in medicine. Many of us have connected these dots, personally. We’re whole people, we’re a whole system. And the research is pointing to this. Our social environment matters. Our connection with others matters. Our spiritual life matters. Our energy matters, our emotions matter, our physical aspects of our being and our nutrition matters. All of this matters for our health. So we’re really moving toward whole-person health. Instead of having all of these splits and these divides, “Well, allopathic should only focus on the body, and we should only focus on drugs and surgery, and that’s all we should be doing.” Well, why? Because the data doesn’t really just support that, nor does it mean that we only work on the spiritual levels and we ignore the physical body, right?
We’re a whole system and all these things connect together. So imagine, and I don’t think we’re far off from this, some of the most wonderful clinics are actually doing this, and even hospitals, that have indigenous healers in the rooms working with people, that’s often people who are from those cultures because it’s culturally resonant. But it is beginning to happen.
So imagine that you walk into a doctor’s office, that doctor could be an MD, a DO, a naturopath, whoever, and they do a full assessment with you. So yes, the physical symptoms, what’s going on physically, doing the blood work, assessing nutrition, but we’re also exploring your energetic terrain. And yes, we will have devices that will actually measure the dynamics of energy fluctuations in the body. It’s an extension of things that we already do, for example, with the EKG and EEG. Only in this case, we typically will do an EKG or EEG when there’s something wrong in the physical body.
Then we are like, “Oh, OK, there’s something wrong. You’re having a transient ischemia attack or something, a TIA, we better do an EEG,” or “You’ve had a stroke and now we need to check out your heart and your brain,” and all these things. So it’s always reactive. So now medicine has to be proactive. You come in, you get a whole-person assessment, what’s going on in every dimension of your life: your work, your family, your relationships, your nutrition, your diet. All of that is totally in hand for us to do now, and we ought to be doing it because there’s evidence to suggest all of that matters. And yes, there will be technology that will help us determine, “Well, your biofield is indicating that you may have propensity, if you were to go into a path of disharmony, to maybe be more prone to having a heart attack,” versus cancer or something like that.
So what can we do preventatively, to prevent you from having that issue, or a chronic pain issue? So it’s about wellness, it’s about allowing ourselves to come into full proactivity, both as people and in medicine, so that we don’t have this chronic disease debacle. It’s completely unnecessary.
TS: Strong statement.
SJ: Oh, it is. It’s completely unnecessary. And if I were to be even more bold, I would say the reason we have it is because we have not placed the importance of the emotions, the energy, and the spirit in our health and healing. If we were paying more attention to that from the get-go, we wouldn’t have the ramifications that we have now, certainly with mental health debacles and also with chronic disease. I mean, as you know, most people with chronic pain, even now, are just given pain pills, which are addictive, which cause addiction, which cause more depression often. And there are other ways of treating that, by getting to the root causes of them, to getting to root causes of pain. We know that the same brain regions that process social pain are the ones that process physical pain. We know that when we carry trauma in our bodies, physically and energetically, we’re more prone to having chronic pain.
So what if we actually release the traumatic residues in our field, as well as in our physical nervous system propensities, so that we had less propensity to have chronic pain if we had an insult. And this is honestly very personal for me, Tami, I’ll just share really briefly. Most of us don’t like going to the dentist. Well, I’m definitely one of those people, and I’m paying for it now, going to the dentist when I should have gone years ago. And so it’s strong medicine for me sometimes. And I had this really wonderful insight as I was dealing with a chronic inflammation from the dental procedures, and an exploration of the emotional and even traumatic residues that could be perpetuating that inflammation in my body. And I did work with it spiritually, energetically, and sometimes physically. So these are the things that we can do. We have all of these tools available to us to resolve these disharmonies.
TS: Now one thing I just want to pick up on and ask you to clarify, you said the part of the brain that processes physical pain and social pain is the same part of the brain. What’s social pain? What do you mean by that?
SJ: Well, so I give a real clear example of this in my most recent TEDx Talk for TEDx Berkeley, and I invite people to watch it, because I have some really fun animations that speak to all of this in the specific brain regions. But what it means is when you actually even, first of all, when you are socially rejected yourself, and these are brain and immune studies that have been done by my colleagues at UCLA and other places and wonderful research published in the best of journals, including Science, which is one of the top journals in the world for scientific research. So this is very real. If we experience social rejection, the same parts of our brain light up as if we had put our hand into a freezing cold bucket of ice. So these are all very well elaborated studies with FMRI that are showing this.
So they actually facilitate an experience of social rejection in the FMRI scanner, and they notice that the same brain regions will light up for a person when they’re socially rejected as when they put their hand in a freezing cold bucket of ice. But it’s even more than that. They extended these studies and what they found is that if you are friends with someone who is experiencing social rejection, and you witness them being socially rejected, the same brain regions involved in social and physical pain will light up in you. Some people call this mirror neurons, for example. It’s very real. It’s substantiated, it’s published, and in my TEDx Talk I talk about that, because a lot of people don’t know about this neuroscience of connection and how deep it is and how much we’re processing the pain of our loved ones.
Now you’ll like this, Tami, I think this is interesting when we talk about the nature of how we experience the self. What they found in those studies that was interesting, was that if you watched a stranger experience the social rejection, you were less likely to have those pain regions light up in your brain. But if it was someone that was very dear to you, those pain regions would light up. Why? Because you have this empathic connection, perhaps a biofield connection with that person, because perhaps you knew them as an extension of you. So this is again, the beauty of the biofield work.
These biofield healers, in essence, when they come into their practice to help foster healing with someone else, first of all, they say, “I’m not the healer. I’m not doing the healing. I’m helping facilitate healing in this person.” But what they are doing is they’re attempting to let go of their ego and even their desire to try to substantiate healing, “Oh, I’m going to make it happen.” There’s no room for that. They actually try to come into a very grounded and open neutral state to be a channel for the energy and spiritual assistance when they’re doing healing with another person.
So there is this empathic connection, and there’s at least one study that has actually shown connections between brains during a healing process using FMRI. It was a study that was done over 20 years ago. So there you have some indications of even physiological connection and there are more, between a healer and healee. And then of course, this facilitation of a healing process that again, as you know, and I describe in my book and in many other places, including our Science of Healing Course, real effects of this facilitation through the biofield for another person, or even an animal, that can affect our healing down to the physical level, even down to protein kinase levels that direct the spread of cancer in the body. How is this happening? It’s amazing. It’s almost unbelievable to a western-trained scientific mind, and yet it’s very real.
It’s emerging science. There’s a tremendous amount more that we need to do on the research level, but what it’s pointing to is the power of this energetic and spiritual connection for healing, and the recognition that we’re really not separate. That I’m sitting here, you’re sitting across the country in a very different place. We’re having this conversation. We can engage in practice together. We can actually feel a biofield resonance across the miles that is very real and can potentially foster healing for you and for me. How powerful, and how needed for us to come to that realization.
TS: Shamini, what would you suggest to someone who’s listening to this and says, “I want to extend my biofield presence to someone in need, someone that I know, someone who’s suffering, I’d like to be a healing force and have a healing impact in someone else’s life. How do I do that?”
SJ: Very simple. First, center yourself with a practice. Even this practice that we just did, this centering and toning practice with Om is a great practice, or simply settling yourself and resting in, first of all, in your awareness. That’s first and foremost. If we’re caught up in tension, anxiety, that blocks the energy flow. So the first thing we have to do is literally get out of our way, and that’s to just first of all, come into presence and feel your heart as well as your feet on the ground so that you can be a conduit for this energy. And then you simply can ask for help. You can ask for guidance. You don’t have to be a profound energy healer. You don’t even have to try to get into their body or focus too much initially. You just allow yourself to bring this person into your heart and mind.
Once you feel like you’re in a centered place, you can ask again for spiritual guidance to be with you, to help facilitate a healing for someone, if that’s your practice, and open your heart to that person, bring them into your awareness and then let go. Simply let go and allow whatever happens to happen and observe it. You may notice different things. You may hear things, you may get information, or you may just be in a place of quietude. So just simply allowing that to happen so that you connect with that person through your heart, is all you really have to do. And let go. You’re not the healer. You are just an agent. You are just facilitating a healing process for that person. It’s not your responsibility. It is their journey, and you’re here to just bring light to them so that they can come into a deeper recognition of their own healing ability, and then they get to work with that energy the way they wish to.
TS: In your book, Healing Ourselves, Shamini, you talk about one of the keys to healing ourselves being this key of surrender. And I’m curious, in your own life, if you could share with us a time when you had to surrender. You knew you had to, it was hard, it was a benevolent challenge, and what you went through, how you did it, and how it changed you.
SJ: Well, it’s really almost these days an everyday process, but sometimes it’s more dramatic than others. And I think the one that comes to mind was actually a massive physical move that we made, from California to South Carolina. And it happened to be just before COVID, of course, we didn’t know COVID was happening. All of these things, and I’ll try to be brief in the story. I can’t remember if I shared it in my book. I don’t think I shared all of the story. But essentially, at the time, I was just, as I typically am, full of activity, full of activity, running the nonprofit, having young children, going out, speaking monthly if not more, very active, throwing my energy all over the place. And one of the ways that I tried to get out of my head was by singing, and this is a long story, but at the time, I had found myself kind of fronting a heavy metal tribute band, which was very successful in San Diego, and I really enjoyed it, but it takes a lot of energy to sing that.
This was an Iron Maiden tribute band of all things. And so it’s really heavy singing. It takes a lot of energy, and I loved it. It was just amazing. I loved it. It was just beautiful, but it was a lot of energy. And everything else that I was doing was a lot of energy too. So a lot of energy out, and not a lot of energy directed inward. And interestingly, a lot of my friends and family members started getting a message from spirit that I needed to quit the band, and I really wasn’t listening. I was kind of like, “I don’t want to quit the band. I love this. This is my lifeblood. I just enjoy it. It runs my energy. I love all of it. I love the music, I love the audience, I love everyone singing together.”
I was really addicted to it, honestly. I was addicted to performing. I was addicted to the feeling of running that much energy through my body, and I wasn’t paying attention to the disharmonies happening. I noticed I was getting more tired, and I noticed there was something funky going on on the side of my throat. Well, long story short, I saw an energy healer, actually just through exploration, and just curious about her, because I was visiting with a colleague and he said, “She’s renowned, you should really have a session with her.” Well, I didn’t think there was anything really wrong with me. I noticed I was kind of tired or whatever. Well, when she was doing work on me, this came up and she said, “Listen, energetically, it feels like you have something really growing here on the side of your throat, and if I don’t treat it could be a cancer.”
And I said, “Wow, that’s crazy.” And then I had some kind of idea to ask her out of the blue, I said, “Could this be related to the heavy metal singing I’m doing?” And she said, she laughed first because I don’t seem like a heavy metal singer, obviously in my typical day-to-day. And then she paused and she said, “Yes, actually, this is really forceful singing you’re doing, and it’s not really your voice, but more importantly, you’re forcing so much energy through your system that it’s not healthy for you and you need to let it go.” And I still wasn’t listening and I said, “Well, OK, I have a couple of gigs coming up. Can I cancel the next one? But can I do one in a month?” And she said, “You are not listening. If you don’t stop this, you’re going to develop cancer.”
Now, I hadn’t done the blood work and all that, so I have no way of verifying what she said, but I could feel it in my body. After she did that session on me, I had such a strong and profound connection with spirit. And this lasted for months and months. And interestingly, while I was hemming and hawing about not wanting to release this heavy metal project, my husband got an unsolicited job offer out of the blue for his dream job, which was the director of mindfulness and social emotional learning for the largest Title I school in South Carolina. He was called into service. And we sat with the offer and everyone said, “Well, you’re going to leave San Diego. You’re going to leave everything, your faculty position, all of this. Are you sure?” And there was no question, Tami, because for me, surrender was literally feeling the presence of spirit.
And it was so clear that spirit said, “You guys are meant to do this. You’re meant to make this move.” And I don’t think it was just because I needed to quit the heavy metal band, but that is what happened, right? I had to go to them and say, “I’m moving, guys. I can’t do this anymore.” But more importantly, things can be orchestrated for us in ways that we can’t even imagine, right? There is often a larger plan for us, whether you want to call it spirit, fate, or you don’t believe in any of that, it doesn’t matter. Our limited conditioned mind can only see so far. And sometimes we can get really stuck in our way of being, even when we think everything’s great.
But when we feel that call to something greater and sometimes it’s difficult, there’s a letting go that has to happen, and there is a trust. And ultimately, I had to say, “I fully trust in this. I fully surrender to this process, and I’m here to ask you for your support and your guidance because I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m a little scared. I’m nervous. I don’t know how it’s going to go.” When we engage in that surrender process and we really feel the call, I encourage all of us to just really deepen that connection with spirit, so that it doesn’t feel so anxiety-provoking. Because sometimes surrender feels like anxiety, right? It’s hard for us to let go. It’s hard for us to release and not know what comes ahead. And yet it is the biggest gift that we could give ourselves. So that’s been my experience.
And I think because of experiences like that, it’s easier for me to see now when I’m in a place of stuckness, of attachment, of anxiety, and say, “What am I attached to here? What am I afraid of? Can I take a deep breath and can I trust? Can I trust this person? Can I trust this process? Can I trust my guidance?” So it can really be this everyday process, and it is a huge healing key for us, whether it’s physical healing we’re looking for, or just a shift in a situation.
TS: Shamini, one of the things I’m struck by in our conversation is the multidimensionality of you. And I think that more and more creative people in the flow, deeply connected with both their sense of fidelity to their soul and the analytical powers of their left brain all coming into a package of service with this artistic expression and imagination all combined. I’m seeing it more and more in people, and it blows open all of the boxes that I think historically, the status quo has asked us to put somebody in like, oh, this is “the Dr. Jain box,” and this is “the heavy metal performer.” And I’m curious how you see that from the inside, how you experience it from the inside.
SJ: Thank you. It’s such a beautiful question, and I agree. I think all of us are coming to question why we created boxes in the first place. They don’t exist. We created them. I think because of my upbringing growing up as an Indian American, first-generation, in the South, I always sort of knew that I was straddling a lot of different worlds, and I was very comfortable with that. So I almost had no choice but to be myself, right? And to embrace being myself if I wanted to enjoy being in the world. And I think this is our calling, for all of us, is we’re all of it. And to align with the creative flow that directs and guides our life to provide the expression of this beautiful vehicle who you are.
You, Tami Simon, are this beautiful creator out in the universe. And every single person listening is a beautiful creative agent. You’re an expression of divine consciousness in all of these different ways. And you get to choose how you express that in a way that fulfills you and for everyone around you. And there is no box. I can’t tell you how many scientists I know that are closet musicians, or how many musicians I know that have had these profound spiritual experiences and ask really deep scientific questions. We’re all of it, right? We just have to give our permission to be everything that we want.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Shamini Jain. She’s the author of the book, Healing Ourselves: Biofield Science and The Future of Health. She’s also the founder and CEO of the Consciousness and Healing Initiative. As we come to a close, Shamini, tell us a little bit more about CHI, the Consciousness and Healing Initiative, what you’re up to now, and how people can bring their energy and support to the Consciousness and Healing Initiative.
SJ: Tami, thank you so much. Well, because of my work as a scientist, initially, we began the Consciousness and Healing Initiative years ago at first to support the scientists who were doing this incredible research, who really were underfunded, under-resourced, and we began to share what they knew with the larger community. We soon began to realize that we were bringing in a beautiful community of healing practitioners who said, “Thank you, thank you for sharing this evidence. Because now I can stand in my power even more authentically about what I do and share the evidence behind it.”
And we have lots of patients and people who are saying, “I’m really interested in exploring this for myself and exploring what these healing practices are that can better my life.” So CHI is this beautiful social-profit, 501c3 community where we foster both research and real-world embodied education in the biofield, sharing the best of evidence, the best of practice for humanities flourishing, bringing together the facets of wisdom so that we can really expand this for all, through science and education.
So we’re doing a number of things. One is, as I mentioned, we have a randomized controlled trial that we’re forwarding to explore the impact of these biofield and integrative practices for anxiety in those who often don’t get treatment for anxiety, including all of our brothers and sisters in the BIPOC community, and then LGBTQSIA2+ communities. We know that actually they’re under-resourced in terms of access to many of these integrative care approaches for anxiety and mental health. And they want those, they don’t necessarily want some of the more supposed tried-and-true practices that are out there because they were never studied on those populations, quite frankly. So we’re doing research like that. We’re bringing this out more broadly to the community. We’re actually in the midst of gathering support and energy around a documentary and a learning center that we’re doing with healing, and we’re super excited for that.
Tons of momentum building. Invite anyone who’s interested in that to please contact me, love to share more with you about what we’re doing there. And we align our community through councils, scientific advisory councils, healing practitioner councils, and our EDIDI council to really make sure that we’re anchoring all of these practices in indigenous wisdom traditions. All of these councils meet freely on their own accord, and it just takes a modicum of support to support them on an infrastructural level so that they can get together to continue to make change in healing for healthcare, for community care, and for self-care.
And there are ways to get involved. There are many different free events that we have. You can simply go to C-H-I or chi.is, chi.is to learn more, connect and learn more. You’ll get just a couple of emails a month, really, on the latest science, a healing practice, and some cool events that go on in the community. So I invite everyone to connect in with the community. It’s totally free.
TS: Dr. Shamini Jain, love you, love your biofield. Love the CHI initiative. It’s always great to be with you. You lift me up. Thank you so much.
SJ: Thank you, Tami. It’s been an honor. I love being with you as well. Thank you so much.
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