Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True. I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources, such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you’d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.com.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Dr. Lissa Rankin. Lissa is a mind-body medicine physician. She’s the author of seven books and founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute. She’s also a mystic who researches radical remission, trauma-informed medicine, and spiritual healing. Her TEDx Talks have been viewed over 5 million times and she starred in two national public television specials, Heal Yourself: Mind Over Medicine, and The Fear Cure. Lissa’s interest in the link between loneliness and disease let her to spearhead her latest project Heal at Last, a nonprofit organization which aims to bring effective trauma healing and spiritual healing methods to anyone ready for the deep dive of healing.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Lissa and I spoke about her new Sounds True book, Sacred Medicine, a 10-year journey that Lissa went on. She started out trying to crack the code of healing. And although that’s not exactly what happened, she did make some remarkable discoveries and even discovered what she calls a holy grail when it comes to using sacred medicine in your life. Here’s my conversation with the very nuanced thinker—someone who’s able to hold a whole lot of paradoxes all at once—Dr. Lissa Rankin.
Lissa, I know that Sacred Medicine is a book that took you 10 years of research and writing. To begin our conversation, I’d love to know what inspired you, what fueled you to take on Sacred Medicine?
Lissa Rankin: Well, Sacred Medicine is really the sequel to Mind Over Medicine. So, the original manuscript of Mind Over Medicine was part one and part two. Part one was everything I could find in the medical literature, everything I could prove with science that we can do to be proactive about making ourselves miracle prone. This was very academic, it was I joke that I should have gotten a PhD for Mind Over Medicine, because it was very much like an academic thesis. And part two was everything I couldn’t prove with science. It was all of the anecdotal and subjective stories that I was hearing that I didn’t understand as a science-loving doctor, but I was increasingly stepping into the aspects of myself that were more of the mystic, and I didn’t want to ignore or exclude what seemed totally relevant to the questions that had fueled the inquiry for Mind Over Medicine.
As we had the issue with this book, that became an unwieldy attempt to try to cover both in one book. My agent at the time had said, “You know what? What if part two is a separate book?” And I said, “Oh yes, that’s Sacred Medicine.” As soon as I gave myself permission to think of it that way, it became a pilgrimage. It had started in that practical way. But then I was already maybe three years into the academic and scientific inquiries that were at the foundation of this, which really were stemming from some of these difficult questions like, why is it that some people with incurable illnesses do everything right and stay sick and then other people don’t seem to do anything special and yet they recover? What is really causing disease? And is there anything we can do to be proactive about reversing disease? And why? Why does one person get their miracle and somebody else stay sick and suffers and is disabled or dies?
I wasn’t initially satisfied with everything that science could give us, but I did come to some conclusions that I felt were very helpful. 300,000 people have read the book and have claimed that it was helpful with regard to what we can do to be proactive about making ourselves miracle prone. But there was this whole other rabbit hole that didn’t fit into that. And even when I published Mind Over Medicine—which I think I finished writing it in 2012 and it came out in 2013—I was quite full of hubris at the time, I felt pretty certain that I could explain a lot of the mysteries that I had bumped into in my journey so far with what scientists call the mega-placebo. I thought, well, a lot of these seemingly mysterious things can be demystified with a very coherent, physiological, and nervous-system explanation of the conditions of the mega-placebo. Then I started hearing some stories that actually really made that interrupted my narrative around that that broke apart my hypothesis.
TS: Let just ask you a question, Lissa, at this point, because I think many listeners and I have of course heard of the placebo effect. What’s the mega-placebo?
LR: Well, take for example a healing retreat center, some place like Lourdes—and there’s a whole chapter about Lourdes in the book, and there are many healing retreat centers around the world. So imagine if you are in the conditions where you are coming to a sacred site and maybe there’s a special healer there that you believe has the power to cure cancer or raise the dead or make the blind see and the lame walk. Now add to that that everybody’s wearing a certain uniform; you’re wearing white, you’re purifying yourself, you’re eating this special diet, everybody’s vegan, you’re taking special herbs, you’re drinking the miraculous water, and you’re sitting in a room every day meditating or praying for hours on end in a coherent field of other believers who are sharing in this mass experience of setting up these conditions of healing. So that would be an example of a mega-placebo.
In Mind Over Medicine, I defined the placebo effect as a combination of positive belief and the therapeutic relationship, like the ritual of healing that goes into the relationship with the person or in some cases the deity who one has given their power away to or come into relationship with where there’s this nurturing care that happens within the relationship. And I now don’t really agree with my original hypothesis around that. I have a much more nuanced and complex understanding of the placebo effect after the 10 years of study.
TS: Well, let’s take a moment right there. So, tell us that, your more nuanced understanding of the placebo effect.
LR: Well, of course I have to start with the disclaimer [that] nobody knows. This is a hypothesis. Nobody knows. There was a multidisciplinary conference at Harvard in the 1990s, beautifully documented by Anne Harrington, where they tried to answer this question in a multidisciplinary way, with scientists, and people from the divinity school, and ethicists from the law school, and anthropologists. They basically did not come to any conclusion. It would be a bit arrogant for me to suggest in any way that I have the answer.
But I feel a little closer to the answer than I did 10 years ago in that I think there are many assumptions built into the scientific method, particularly the evidence-based medicine, medical science method of randomized controlled clinical trials. That’s where the placebo effect was discovered. We didn’t know about this until the 1950s, 1960s, when that model was developed. And we realized that people get better regardless of what you give them, [some] percentage of the time. The percentage that gets better when they’re given a sugar pill or a saline injection or a sham treatment or a fake surgery is what we have come to call the placebo effect. It ranges from 18 percent to 80 percent depending on the treatment. That is based on a certain set of assumptions. For example, that assumes that you can separate the treatment from the person giving the treatment. And I don’t believe you can.
For example, when I was a medical doctor and I was participating in pharmaceutical trials and getting paid to be a pharmaceutical researcher, I was actually fired from my job because my placebo effect was too high. In other words, I had a greater proportion of people that were getting better on the sugar pill than the other researchers. So, I was messing up the data.
For example, let’s say we want to study one of the tools that I share in Sacred Medicine. Let’s say we want to study Internal Family Systems—IFS. My hypothesis is that we cannot necessarily separate the treatment, the IFS treatment, the thing, from the person doing the treating. Is the founder of IFS, Dick Schwartz, going to get a better outcome than somebody who has done one training and has less experience, or perhaps somebody that has other gifts, maybe some mystical gifts that could be overlaid on top of IFS? Can we separate that? Can we separate the presence of the healer, the amount of work the healer has done on their own trauma? Can we separate whether they’re having a good day or maybe whether they’re blended with some of their own traumatized parts just in that particular day that the study is going on?
That’s one assumption. Another assumption—and this really is boggling to the mind—we make an assumption that we can separate the people in the clinical trial who are getting the treatment from the people who are getting the placebo. But part of what I discovered in my research is that something like HIPAA (which is the medical privacy laws that mean that we separate patients from each other, that doctors can’t talk to one patient about another, that we have to separate out those being treated from those treating and from each other), part of what I learned from the healers that I worked with is that that might be the exact opposite of what’s healing. We might actually get better outcomes if we brought together everybody who was in need of, let’s say, cancer treatment for breast cancer. If we brought them together and treated them together, there may be a kind of resonant bonding—is the language that William Bengston uses.
Some of the healers will misuse quantum language. That’s a big trigger for me. They might call it quantum entanglement, but that is an inappropriate use of quantum language because quantum entanglement refers only to subatomic particles. Maybe in the macro, there is a way that we have some sort of macroscopic quantum entanglement in what Bill Bengston calls resonant bonding. Let’s take the example of Lourdes. If these people are all coming together for healing at a retreat center and they are bonding together through their shared suffering and their shared desire for healing that perhaps in some mysterious way that scientists can’t fully prove or explain, that if one person experiences an unexpectedly positive health outcome, maybe anybody else who is bonded to them in some mysterious way has a greater likelihood of also having an unexpected cure. And it’s possible that that could be what we call the placebo effect.
There’s a whole chapter in Sacred Medicine about William Bengston and his hands-on healing with mice that he has injected with breast cancer. And the curious thing about Bill’s science is that he couldn’t prevent any of the mice from getting cured, that the placebo mice were getting cured as well as the treated mice. That was his theory, that perhaps these mice were bonded not necessarily even to the other mice but to the healers; and that if they were included in the care of the researchers, including the skeptical grad students who were taught to do this thinking (they were participating in a gullibility study), that if there was care and love even for these mice, that care could extend—he had to literally take them offsite so that the researchers never even had any contact with the mice, and then they would die right on schedule—but if they were anywhere in the vicinity of the researchers, they seemed to have some odd spontaneous remission.
And that really got me thinking about the placebo effect, that perhaps part of how we could explain these miracle cures at places like Lourdes could be that if anybody is having that rare health outlier experience of a “spontaneous remission,” maybe if people are bonded through love or through faith or through shared belief that if one person has a miracle, maybe that’s almost contagious and perhaps that’s the placebo effect.
TS: In Sacred Medicine, you ask so many good questions, Lissa. I mean, you ask I think the questions that people want to know the answers to, from does distant healing work, does prayer work when groups of people come together, etc.? You ask the best questions. What I’d like to know is, if you were to share with us—I’ll take an Oprah-ism for a moment. I don’t do this very often. Here’s what I know for sure. Here’s what I know for sure. What does Lissa Rankin know for sure about sacred medicine and healing?
LR: Wow. What a great question. What I know for sure is that trauma causes disease. What I don’t know for sure is whether treating trauma reverses disease. But what I do know for sure is that the reversal of chronic or life-threatening illness seems to be very much involved in the state of the nervous system. And part of this I already knew in Mind Over Medicine and I explained the physiology in great detail, but we’ve learned more since that book came out about things like polyvagal theory and the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, in particular the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve that is involved in self-healing, in community self-healing, in relational self-healing, in, maybe we could even say, spiritual self-healing, where anything basically that restores the nervous system to that prosocial, proconnectivity.
And when I say connectivity, I mean not only connectivity with other humans who can help us co-regulate our nervous systems and participate in healing, but also connectivity with the divine inside of each of us, whatever you want to call that. I call it your inner pilot light. In IFS, they call it Self. You can call it Christ consciousness or Buddha nature or the divine self or Santa Claus, whatever you want to call it. But that connectivity between ourselves and maybe the hurt parts of ourselves that anytime that we are able to restore connectivity and activate the ventral vagal nerve, we have at least the opportunity or the potential to make ourselves miracle prone. And I would say that underlies almost everything, almost every tool that I included in Sacred Medicine.
TS: I thought it was so. Interesting here I asked you what you know for sure. In the book, you say, “I went on this journey to understand the mystery of healing. Could I crack the code of healing?” And that you did in fact discover, and you use this language, a holy grail. And that that holy grail had to do with the healing of trauma. And I’m imagining someone who’s saying like, “Hold on, wait a second. This illness that I have,” whether it’s cancer or an autoimmune disease or whatever it might be, “you’re saying that it’s somehow related to trauma in my life. Help me.” I know you started to talk about the nervous system, but I’m not sure that people really get the connections here, why you call the healing of trauma a holy grail when it comes to Sacred Medicine?
LR: Well, I want to answer with a couple of disclaimers first, because when I talk about trauma, we also need to include in that, for example, it would be a trauma to the body if you lived next to a toxic waste dump. Not all trauma is psycho-spiritual in nature. It’s also a trauma if you are in a black, brown or indigenous body and you’re living in the United States. These collective traumas are also things that can significantly impact the nervous system and put us at risk of disease and make it more difficult to reverse that disease.
There are certainly traumatic things. And obviously some of those might be having two copies of a recessive gene that causes cystic fibrosis, for example. So, I want to expand the definition of trauma so that it includes those things that are not related to psycho-spiritual trauma. But if you look at what we do know about trauma-causing the disease, we know to call it stress because the word “trauma” can be a trigger for some people and people are more comfortable saying “I’m stressed” or “I’m under stress.” And we know that stress-related diseases make up 80 to 90 percent of doctors’ visits and the majority of chronic illness.
And so again, that’s not news, we’ve known that for a long time. But what I started unpacking is really looking at the relationship between stress and trauma and the nervous system and how that impacts multiple aspects in the body that are significantly interrelated. I want to slow this down because it gets complicated and can get nerd-sciencey pretty quickly. And I want to just first acknowledge that if anybody’s listening and you just heard me say that trauma causes disease, and that if conventional medicine has failed to cure your disease, it could be related to untreated trauma. For some people, that’s brand-new information and it can actually be triggering information, or it can activate a story that sounds like “she’s blaming me for my illness” or “she’s saying that in some way it’s in my mind or it’s psychosomatic or I’m somaticizing or I’m a hypochondriac or something.”
I want to make it very clear that when I say that trauma causes disease, I mean that the physical body manifests real physical illness as the result of what can happen in the nervous system, perhaps in the first year of life, perhaps even in utero, and that it can take decades in order for that to manifest in a physical, diagnosable way that might show up on an MRI or a blood test. I’m not in any way saying it’s in the mind. I think this is part of what’s confusing when we start talking about mind-body spirit medicine is that psychological or emotional or spiritual trauma is actually a very somatic experience. I want to make that very clear.
I also want to make it clear that when I say that trauma causes disease or perhaps that reversing trauma, treating trauma could potentially reverse disease and lead to some radical remission, I want to make it clear that part of what happens over time when there is dysregulation in the nervous system chronically as a result of perhaps, perhaps not even what we might think of as big T trauma, things like adverse childhood experiences (or “ACEs”), which might include things like child abuse, sexual abuse, having a parent in prison, divorce in the home, domestic violence in the house, these sorts of big T traumas, or living in a war zone, such things.
Part of the holy grail of what I was understanding in my research around Sacred Medicine was the normalization of how many of us have developmental trauma, myself included. And by developmental trauma, these are what Mark Epstein, the Buddhist psychiatrist, calls the trauma of everyday life. So, someone like me, for example, it looks like I didn’t have a traumatic childhood. I literally grew up at Disney World. I had two parents that were together for 40 years until one of them died. I lived a very privileged life, and my ACE score is zero. But if you start looking at the developmental trauma quiz that I co-created with some of the cutting-edge trauma therapists that I studied with—and it’s in Sacred Medicine—my developmental trauma burden was very high and led to significant health issues for me very early in life, in my early 30s.
Almost none of us are immune when you start looking at developmental trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and then you overlay that with the collective traumas of things like systemic racism and climate crisis and even the trauma of things like white privilege are being part of what Resmaa Menakem calls white-bodied supremacy. You add to that the toxins in our foods and the toxins that go with unfettered capitalism and all of the other things that are happening in our life, pretty much nobody is immune to this, which can make it sound hopeless, but it’s not. And I want to make that really clear. The reason I wrote this book is because I think it’s actually incredibly hopeful because what we’re learning is that we can actually treat and heal and dare I say cure trauma to the point that a portal opens.
Sometimes, not always, there are certainly no guarantees, but time and time again what I have witnessed and experienced personally is that when we begin to do that much more difficult work—which is the more difficult work—and in the beginning of Sacred Medicine, I write about the tools that I consider more like energy transfusions that can uplift us and [reduce] stress and they’re easier, they feel good, they’re pleasurable, they’re not so triggering. We can mix and match those together.
What I started witnessing over and over again is that when we do that, there are a percentage of people that have tried everything and finally something is working. So, I do think that there is something hopeful in that. And I hope that people that hear that don’t go into a punishing place or a “blame the victim” place or even a place where “I want to be an ostrich and put my head in the sand” or “I want to just not look at my trauma because it’s too painful.” But if we’re able to see the light at the end of the potential tunnel there, at the very least, I do believe we can have an experience of healing, even if we don’t have an experience of cure. And that’s always worth doing.
TS: First of all, I just want to appreciate, Lissa, you slowing the conversation down and us talking directly to the warm heart of the listener and the person who is taking in this conversation in their own healing process.
One of the metaphors you use in the book, and I think it’s interesting—you talked about these energy transfusion practices and how they can fill us up in a certain way, but then you go on to say that if there’s some type of debilitating or unresolved trauma, that can be a leak. So, we can fuel up with receiving a light that a qigong healer, for example, is sending to us, but there could be a leak in our system from some unresolved trauma. I wonder if you can explain that metaphor a bit. That’s part of, I think, in your journey through Sacred Medicine, why you emphasize the healing of trauma so much.
LR: Yes. When I began this journey, I was very naive and gullible and kind of a kid in the spiritual candy store. It was all very exciting and magic and miracles and shamans and mystics and gurus. And I look back with nostalgia and fondly at that part of my journey, but there was also a lot of spiritual bypassing. There’s a whole chapter for anybody who doesn’t know what I mean when I’m talking about that. The short answer of what spiritual bypassing is, which is a term coined by spiritual teacher and psychologist John Welwood, is conflict avoidance in holy drag, or using our spiritual practices as a way not to touch the pain, the emotional pain of our traumatic experiences.
In the beginning, I was working with a lot of energy healers and faith healers and indigenous healers and various types of practices, including things like pilgrimages to sacred sites. These things often feel very good, they feel easy, they feel they’re not triggering. People come away from a session with an energy healer, for example, and almost everybody feels better. I would watch people, and many of these people looked like their symptoms were reversing. However, if you followed them over time as I did—and I also was very respectful and appreciative of the work of Jeffrey Rediger, who wrote a book called Cured. Jeffrey was studying for like 17 years. He would follow these people over long courses of time. And Jeff and I have talked extensively about this. What we found is that a lot of the people who initially looked like they had been cured by energy healing, for example, were not cured, they experienced some temporary relief, but either their symptoms came back or their cancer came back or they developed a new illness over time. And I got very curious about that.
And so after were realizing that much of what some of these healers were doing is that they were touching the trauma. They weren’t necessarily trained to treat it. Most of these people were not psychotherapists. They weren’t cutting-edge trauma therapists. They had developed their gifts in other way, but they were still touching the trauma in a way that was gentle and soft often in the good healers, the people that were not retraumatizing people. And they were creating a container for people to have an emotional experience, sometimes a spiritual experience, and to be held in that safe and sacred space where healing is possible.
I came to think of some of those types of practices as akin to somebody who might come to an emergency room absolutely anemic on blood. Normal hemoglobin, for example, is 14. Let’s say somebody comes into the emergency room and their hemoglobin is six. Now we don’t know why they’re anemic. But the very first thing we would do is we would want to tank somebody up—that’s medical lingo for give them a blood transfusion. The very first thing we would do is we’d say, “Wow, we don’t know if this person’s actively bleeding or if their bone marrow has stopped making blood, but they’re anemic, we’re going to give them blood.”
However, it would be medical malpractice to stop there because if we did, let’s say we gave them four units of packed red blood cells, we got their hemoglobin up to 10 and we sent them home. Well, it’s likely that the next day or the next week or the next month, or maybe it would take a year, they’d come back, and their hemoglobin would be six again or maybe they’d die, maybe it went to two. And we can’t live with a hemoglobin of two. So, it would be incumbent upon any good doctor to first tank them up and then do a workup to find out where they are leaking. Or maybe they’re not leaking, maybe they’re not bleeding, maybe the bone marrow has stopped working.
When it comes to Sacred Medicine, that’s how I started thinking of these things. Some of the very sick patients that I’ve worked with, they come in and they are anemic, on lifeforce. They can barely get out of bed. You look at them and they almost have this gray pallor. They are emotionally blunted maybe or very emotionally reactive. They’re exhausted. They have chronic fatigue. They’re in pain. They have a very difficult time functioning. If I see a patient that’s like that, this is not necessarily the best time to go and say, “Let’s talk about your trauma, because that’s difficult work.” This is somebody that might need four units of packed red blood cells.
In the case of Sacred Medicine, that might mean some of the tools in part one of the book that are intended to be almost like a transfusion of qi or prana or life force or whatever you want to call that animating vitality that separates the living from the dead. And every different indigenous healing practice, things like Chinese medicine or Indian medicine or indigenous medicine or these various types of Tibetan medicine, they all have different language for what that life force is. But I came to think, okay, actually we should do that first. We should help people bolster their life force first and get them to a threshold where they actually have a little bit more resilience that maybe they have a little more capacity to function.
However, we can’t then ignore what happened to make somebody so anemic on lifeforce to begin with. And that’s where the impact of trauma came in. And I started realizing that it would be energy healing malpractice or indigenous healing malpractice, or whatever you want to call it, to not address the root causes of how this person ended up so anemic to begin with. And in almost every case of chronic and longstanding illness when I was working directly with patients, which I don’t do as much anymore, I’m now working directly with doctors, training them how to do this with patient, almost always if you take a very complete trauma history, these people either have a very high ACE score and/or a very high developmental trauma burden and often both.
That became incumbent upon the healer, I realized, to make sure that we’re not just making people dependent on the healer to go in to get the next transfusion and the next transfusion. And that’s what I witnessed in a lot of energy healing, for example. These people were getting better, but it was temporary, and it would wear off, and they would need to come back. And if you followed them over time, which the energy healers often did not, if you followed them over time, they did feel better or maybe they did even look cured. Maybe they even had a scan that showed that something did actually reverse on a radiological scan. However, very often it did come back.
I came to have a totally different idea of, for example, how to treat cancer. If I were to get cancer, I can tell—and again, I want to be really careful not to let anybody give their power away to me, but I’m just speaking for myself. If I were to get cancer, I would go to the best oncologist I could find to have the best cutting-edge cancer treatment that I could find. I would go tank myself up with as many of these sacred medicine energy transfusions as I could afford.
I say that because I recognize that many of these practices, experiences, and healing sessions are luxury goods that are not covered by insurance and are not necessarily available to everyone, which is part of what I’m trying to address in my new nonprofit Heal At Last. And I would go to my, I go to a therapist in Internal Family Systems. I also have seen a therapist who was an Advanced Integrative Therapy, or AIT, therapist. I also would make sure that I was actively working on any traumas that could be leaking my life force and making me vulnerable to begin with.
When I say that—let me be a little bit nerd-scientist here for a second, because if I got cancer, that would be evidence to me that first of all, my immune system has broken down because we all make cancer cells every day. And if our immune systems are in good shape, we are fighting the cancer to the point that we’re not developing symptoms, we’re developing a tumor. It would mean to me that probably something had happened in my body that had made me at risk of chronic inflammation, which we are finding is another holy grail of disease that almost every disease can be boiled down to being a side effect of chronic inflammation. And we have some very good, at least early, data showing that trauma survivors have a greater risk of chronic inflammation, which basically makes them at greater risk of almost every disease.
I would know my immune system has broken down; I probably have chronic inflammation in my body. This also is going to impact probably my microbiome, my gut system, that I might have a more difficult time taking in appropriate nourishment and keeping out toxins that might be crossing the bowel wall and leading to even more chronic inflammation. And this can become a catch-22 that becomes very multifactorial. Again, I’m not saying that it’s in the mind even—that it is in the gut, it is in the inflammatory system, it’s in the immune system, it’s in the nervous system. And so that would be a sign that most likely my nervous system is either hanging out in the sympathetic fight or flight stress response or it’s hanging out in the dorsal vagal branch of the vagus nerve in the parasympathetic, and something needs to happen to help me move back into that ventral vagal rest and repair, restore and relax aspect of the parasympathetic nervous system.
I would be wanting a multidisciplinary approach that would not only help get rid of the disease that might kill me right away, whether that means surgery or chemotherapy or radiation or some other cutting-edge immunotherapy or something that conventional medicine might offer me. But also, how am I going to restore my immune system, treat the chronic inflammation, heal the gut, improve my nutrition, and make sure that I’m being very proactive about bringing my nervous system into that ventral vagal, which would potentially include further trauma treatment? That’s the opposite of an oversimplified, like, “You can heal yourself.”
TS: Sure. Well, first of all, I really appreciate, Lissa, you talking about it in terms of how you would go about treating yourself. I think that’s really useful using yourself as the subject. From my understanding and from this conversation working with what you call these energy transfusion practices, we shared the example of going to a qigong healer or a faith healer or somewhere where you’d pay for someone else to heal you. But in the book Sacred Medicine, you also write about dance and creative expression and being in nature and all kinds of ways we could receive fresh Qi or life force without having to pay another person to help us. We could dance in our room or whatever is needed.
But OK, moving on. So you would do these energy transfusion practices, you would treat your chronic inflammation and you would work psychologically to get to the root of the trauma. You also shared, and this is the part I want to ask you about that you’d go to an oncologist. And at the beginning of Sacred Medicine, you have a whole list of these very intriguing and I would say challenging paradoxes of healing that you have come to see that there are all of these paradoxes when it comes to the mystery of healing. One of them, you write, “Conventional medicine can save lives, and conventional medicine is the third highest cause of death in the United States.”
LR: Before COVID. I have to add that now, before COVID.
TS: Before COVID. OK. How does a well-informed human approach conventional medicine in such a way that in terms of this paradox, they use conventional medicine to help save their life and not be a cause of death?
LR: It’s such an important question, Tami, and I begin the book, Sacred Medicine begins the book with a story of my own healing journey when I had a significant, potentially life-threatening injury from a dog bite right over my femoral artery. It did not get my femoral artery, or I would’ve died, because I was very far from a hospital where they could have done an emergency blood transfusion and stop the bleeding. It would’ve taken too long for a helicopter to get to where I was. I wouldn’t have survived it.
Given that I did survive it and it did not actually nick my femoral artery, I was basically told by conventional medicine when I had the injury looked at that it was not going to close that I was going to need multiple plastic surgeries and skin grafts in order to close the very thick open wound on my inner thigh right over my femoral artery just by my groin. And I relied upon what in the book I call my whole health intelligences. These are four different intelligences, but I think this sort of divine self that we all have inside, it’s the responsibility of that aspect of our being to orchestrate these intelligences in order to make good medical decisions. Those are mental intelligence, somatic intelligence, intuitive intelligence, and emotional intelligence.
Mental intelligence is critical thinking and making decisions based on statistics and accurate information and evidence-based medicine and logical thought processes and things like that. Certainly, I am pro-science, I am pro-evidence, I am pro-data, but that’s only one of my intelligences. And so, intuitive intelligences, this was coming in. It was just very clear when I had this injury: “No, that’s not the way we’re going to do this. We’re not doing surgery.” However, I did not turn my back on conventional medicine all together. I went to a wound healing specialist who was also a Buddhist and longtime meditator, a medical doctor, who was in the charity clinic where the people [go] who can’t afford multiple plastic surgeries, who are dependent upon good wound care in order to try to get help with their very difficult wounds. I was referred there by somebody in one of my spiritual communities who’s also a medical doctor and an energy healer.
I was incredibly grateful for the technology of what she was able to offer me in the realm of cutting-edge wound healing without surgery. But again, that was coming from an intuitive hit that I got and the emotions that I was feeling in my emotional intelligence when I was trying to make this decision and the feelings in my gut, my somatic intelligence, my body’s knowing. And it literally felt like my wound knowing it was very localized, it was like my wound was telling me what it needed. And I was having dreams that were giving me very specific guidance and information that felt like they were coming from my wound. And I was getting all this imagery. It was very bizarre.
I guess that’s the easy answer. And there’s a lot more information in the book about how to tune into those different intelligences in order to navigate our way. So when I say I would go to an oncologist, that doesn’t mean I would get surgery or chemo or radiation. It means I would want an expert to consult with me and give me that mental intelligence information to educate me as an expert in their area of mastery, because I’m not an oncologist, I’m an OB-GYN. And I would include that as part of my decision making. I can’t say that I would do those or not. It would depend in the moment upon the orchestration of those intelligences when I was making those decisions.
In the case of my dog bite, I wound up using aspects of conventional medicine, the technology for wound healing with energy healers that were working with me, with trauma therapists who were making sure I didn’t get PTSD or a phobia from the dog bite injury, with my spiritual healing practices. One of the indigenous healers I was working with was sending me bear root to put on the wound. And I was taking a special high collagen, high protein diet to help my body repair this wound. I was taking supplements to try to prevent infection. And I got a vaccination to make sure I didn’t get tetanus. So I was doing all of that at once.
TS: I love hearing about the whole health intelligences, all four, mental, intuitive, emotional, somatic. I love that, Lissa. And when the orchestration is going well and beautiful music is being created, it sounds terrific. My question for you is what happens when the mental intelligence in us is saying one thing and let’s just say our intuitive sense is telling another? I can tell you in my own experience, I always go with my intuitive sense, but I’m overriding sometimes mental information to prioritize intuition. I was curious what you think about this when our whole health intelligences don’t agree.
LR: This is such an important question. And I think we saw the risk of this play out in exaggerated polarization in the past two years during the pandemic, because what we saw is people maybe that had a leaning towards trusting conventional medicine and science saying, “Follow the science,” and they’re quoting the data and read the statistics, to the absolute exclusion of somatic, emotional or intuitive intelligence, right? It was lopsided in the party line of public health guidelines, conventional medicine. That’s all there is, folks. That was triggering to me because I’m like, “Wow.” And I also was broadcasting and promoting get vaccinated, follow public health guidelines, like, “Go to the doctor if you get COVID.” I’m not in any way against conventional medicine, but to be that lopsided is problematic.
On the flip side, I saw, even more dangerously, people saying, “Well, I’m checking in with my intuition, I’m checking in with my body, and my body is saying, vaccine is not good for me and COVID is a hoax. It doesn’t even exist. I’m checking with my intuition. It’s fake. It’s the fake media.” And then there’s the whole conspiracy theory realm, that some of those people tended to go way off the deep end. One of the paradoxes of healing that I said is keep an open mind, but don’t be so open that your brains fall out.
One of the others was trust your intuition and follow the science and apply critical thinking or believe in magic and miracles and avoid indulging in magical thinking and denial. Lead with your heart and use your head. Germ theory and terrain theory—we don’t have to choose between these. But what I hear in the question, and it’s such an important question—what if those intelligences are giving you opposite guidance?
For me, and I don’t even know if I say this directly in Sacred Medicine, but this is actually what I practice. Let’s say my body is telling me one thing and my intuition is agreeing with my body and my mind is disagreeing with both of them and my emotions are just scared because my other intelligences can’t come to agreement, that’s when I go into Internal Family Systems and I start working with parts because in the Internal Family Systems trauma healing, spiritual path, shamanic path, whatever you want to call it, the way we would organize around parts that are polarized inside of us is that we might all have a school bus of inner parts, of inner children, of traumatized parts, of parts that are fighting each other all the time. And it’s just a matter of who’s driving the bus. We want that divine self or that inner pilot light as the mature adult driving the bus or that orchestra that’s orchestrating these whole health intelligences that’s making sense interpreting what’s coming in from those intelligences.
We can all relate to these inter-polarizations because all of us, I’m sure everyone who’s listening has had a part that makes a new year’s resolution and then a part that like to weeks later breaks the new year’s resolution and then a part that comes in and tells you you’re a worthless piece of shit, you have no discipline, you can’t ever keep your promises. And then we feel so worthless and ashamed that we go and do the bad thing again, it’s this hopeless cycle.
Part of IFS, it’s really effective for addictions, for example, because we can work with the polarized parts inside, the part that maybe wants to be in recovery and then the part that doesn’t want to be in recovery. They’re polarized with each other, but that which is guiding them is larger than that smaller polarization. In the case of making a medical decision, let’s say there’s a part in the body that is giving you one bit of guidance and your intuition is giving you another bit of guidance and your mental intelligence or your mind is giving you another bit of intelligence and your emotions are giving you a whole lot. I love Karla McLaren’s work and talk about it a lot in Sacred Medicine. We get all these gifts of information and in the energy healing world, I realized that a lot of what the energy healers were doing is that they were working with that emotional intelligence with highly attuned, highly sensitive empath skills to use the gifts of those emotions.
If we can think of those intelligences as parts, and if we do, there may be multiple parts, right? So, somatic intelligence might have, well, your solar plexus is telling you one thing, but your right upper quadrant is telling you something else and the left side of your back is giving you a different piece of information. The school bus can get quite full of parts. But what I have found in myself is that there’s a mysterious, and this is the part I can’t really explain, there’s a mysterious way of working with all of those parts so that none of them are exiled and none of them are given too much purchase either. But it’s almost like casting a vote, like a democratic process.
When I’m working with my parts, I see it almost like I’m sitting at a conference table and I’m like, “Okay, who’s here? Who has a vote about what we should do about this dog bite injury?” And it’s like I’ll see 20 parts that have an opinion. And it’s like I’m holding court. I’m like, “Thank you. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you’re scared of. Tell me what you’re intuiting. Tell me what you think I should do.” And then this leader, because IFS is about self-leadership, this leader takes all of that into account without siding with one or overriding another to make a larger picture decision.
TS: It’s really good, but here’s the thing I’m tuning into. I thought it was very brave of you at the beginning of the book to list these paradoxes of healing. And now you’re talking about all the different parts of us that could come into voice and give their vote. And I’m going to read a couple more of these paradoxes just to make my point here: Be proactive about taking back your power and go with the flow. Stay hopeful and be realistic. We’re one and we’re separate. Seek pain relief and feel your pain.
I think most people when they’re feeling in a good, resourced space—because that makes sense, that makes sense, seek pain relief and feel your pain. I need to do both of these things. But when we’re ill, when we’re maybe diagnosed with a disease that could kill us, I think there’s a natural thing inside where we want to go to an MD, Lissa Rankin MD. We want to go to the MD, and we want the MD to tell us what to do, like, “No, I don’t want a lot of paradoxes, I don’t want all these different intelligences. I want a medical doctor to tell me what to do. I’m not well-resourced right now.” How do you respond to that to people who are really suffering from an illness and “Oh my God, now I have to figure all this out?”
LR: I guess, first of all, I want to say that’s OK. That is a perfectly valid way to be. I mean, if somebody is so under-resourced and scared and confused and overwhelmed, that’s a very common reaction to a scary diagnosis, if the only thing somebody is capable of doing in that moment is giving a 100 percent of their power away to their doctor and saying, “I cannot handle this. Please make this decision for me.” That is OK. So, I just want to validate that there are certainly people who do that, and doctors are used to that and there is nothing wrong with that.
However, here’s my paradox. The problem is that if you’re giving your power away to a doctor, your doctor is going to be, unless you have an exceptionally gifted doctor—and they are out there. Let’s say your doctor is extraordinarily attuned to their own whole health intelligences and they are able to not only digest and filter all of the mental intelligence information from the medical journals and from the data points and the statistics and all of that, but they can also use their somatic, emotional, and intuitive intelligence to individualize the treatment for you. However, that is rare. Part of that is that medical school, if somebody is born intuitive, somatic and emotional, it gets traumatized out of doctors in medical school.
The reality is that most of the time, if you’re giving all of your power away to a doctor and saying, “Decide for me,” you are at the mercy of the statistic. And you are not a statistic. In the world of statistics, we would say you are an N-of-1, you are one unique individual. And the way that we make medical decisions is based not on unique individuals, but on groups of people who fall into the mean. And unfortunately, that also means that they’re mostly white, and they’re mostly male. And they may, especially if you are a brown female, that may not be an accurate statistic for you. So, we might be making a choice that might be based on the mean of a population that might look nothing like you and might not include you. So, you might not get the best possible medical treatment if you give all of your power away to your doctor.
However, again, this is where I think those energy transfusions can come in. If somebody is seeing their oncologist, for example, let’s say you’ve just been given a cancer diagnosis, one of the most important things that I would say, and I say this with all disclaimers, like all medical legal disclaimers and such is that an oncologist has a tendency to rush people into treatment, to rush them to make a very quick decision, because legitimately there’s the fear that if we don’t rush, something could progress quickly and you could die quickly. However, it’s also true that if we slow things down, things could start to reverse slowly or quickly.
One of the things that I can say I would probably do is I would probably slow things way down. I would say, “OK, I’m overwhelmed, I need time to take this in. I’m going to research this. I want to listen to the statistics so that I can understand cognitively what I’m facing. And I want to take some time to resource myself so that I can tank myself up a little bit so that I’m not so triggered and overwhelmed and terrified and un-resourced, so that I can start to let some of those other intelligence come online in myself.” And maybe that means I’m going to go, if I can afford it, I’m going to go and I’m going to get some treatments, maybe from some energy healers, maybe from some trauma therapists, maybe I’m going to see the neo shaman that’s going to do a session, a ritual or ceremony with me.
Maybe I’m going to go to my dance and let the community of dancers that I dance with come and help me. Maybe I’m going to do some of my art to see if some of my other intelligences come online. I’m an artist. So, I often get my information when I’m painting or when I’m writing or when I’m dancing or when I’m out in nature. And let me slow things down so that I can start to allow some of those intelligences to come back online.
TS: Very terrific answer. Thank you, Lissa. Now the subtitle of Sacred Medicine is A Doctor’s Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of Healing. At the end of the book you have a section on “Healing the Collective” and how when you started your doctor’s quest to unravel the mysteries of healing, you were really thinking about healing more in an individual sense, healing one’s self, healing an individual. Tell me what shifted and what brought your thinking more to this whole topic of collective healing and the importance of healing the collective.
LR: Well, it’s funny you say that because I just started working on a blog post today, Tami, called “Why We Can’t Heal Ourselves While Traumatizing Each Other, and How the Wellness World Can Be Overly Self-Obsessed.” I think we’re really seeing that right now with what’s going on in Russia and Ukraine, we’re seeing it with what’s going on with the pandemic and with Black Lives Matter and all of the social justice issues that have come up in the past couple of years, to suggest that I can heal myself as an individual unit, unrelated to my family, my city, my country, my planet, and every sentient and nature being that exists on this planet is obviously a fallacy. That doesn’t mean that as a separate monad—I’m using the words of some of the energy healers—as a separate unit of energy that’s connected to the whole through the energetic grid; it doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that I can do to improve my individual outcome; but to suggest that I can in any way separate myself from that grid and not still be at its mercy is an absolute fallacy.
I was working with one of the doctors in our training program for doctors, the Whole Health Medicine Institute, and she was an African American woman. She had this devastating epiphany where she realized, “I’m doing all of this work and I’m trying to apply all these mind-body practices and all these trauma healing practices and all this nutrition and all this functional medicine and everything to my African American population. And none of it is enough, none of it is going to touch the impact on their nervous system of being a Black person in America. And she was just feeling really helpless around that.
I think it’s true that we can’t separate ourselves from the sea in which we’re swimming, the collective trauma [that we’re in]. I really appreciate the work that Thomas Hübl is doing around that. I know you published his book Healing Collective Trauma as well. And that is very true. Another paradox of healing here, we can also do everything that is within our power, whether that’s being proactive about using some of these Sacred Medicine tools or improving our nutrition or giving up our bad habits and doing our trauma healing, but also what can we do with our activism? What can we do to make an impact to be part of healing the collective, whether that’s doing the trauma healing, collective trauma healing or generational healing in ourselves, which I do believe also impacts the whole, but also not to leave it at the level of the self?
We need to be out there protesting. We need to be voting. We need to be putting our dollars in the right places. We need to be being willing to make sacrifices on the front lines at the level of policy. And this is why I’m like, well, I can talk about this all I want, but my feet on the ground activism is working on this nonprofit to try to democratize healing and make sure that we can bring sacred medicine practices to anybody who has been traumatized and is dealing with a chronic illness that conventional medicine can’t help. I don’t know if that answered your question.
TS: It did. It did. I mean, we can’t be healthy if we’re swimming in toxic waters all the time. Makes me think of a fish. How could a fish be healthy if the ocean that it’s swimming in is terribly polluted and toxic; it’s impossible. I think it’s such an important point you make at the end of Sacred Medicine. OK, Lissa, I have one final question for you. In the book, you address the reader again and again, “Dear reader, dear reader.” It’s so beautiful. I feel it from you as you’re writing. This is going to be the hardest question I’ve asked you. If your dear reader could get one thing from Sacred Medicine—because I think your dear reader’s going to get dozens and dozens and dozens of things from reading Sacred Medicine—what would be your one highest hope for your dear reader?
LR: Well, I’m touched that you asked the question that way because what came to me first was that it sounds so trite and oversimplified, but it’s love, because when I say, “Dear reader,” really, I’m feeling the dearness of my care for the people that I have devoted my whole life to trying to ease the suffering of the vulnerable. And there are limits to what I’ve been able to personally achieve in that realm. And I feel, as an empath myself, I feel the suffering of those who feel helpless and powerless and frustrated and devastated and terrified. And it’s tragic.
Part of what fueled my desire to write this book and to do this research was that I don’t want it to be that way. I want us to be in a world where there isn’t so much suffering and these are very young and innocent parts in me that just want everybody to be OK and want everybody to get along and want everybody to be out of pain. But what I can say is that—spoiler alert—I did not find the panacea. I was not able to hack healing and be able to say, “Here’s the miracle elixir, I have found the holy grail and you will be guaranteed to be cured of all that ails you.”
But back to what I was saying about the placebo effect is what we do have is we have each other. And there is, I found, for example, tremendous beauty in places like Lourdes, when I was there in a sea of suffering, surrounded by people who had their hearts open, splayed and vulnerable on their knees in front of the Virgin Mary praying for a miracle and praying for each other. And 80 percent of the people at Lourdes—I’m making up this statistic—but a significant proportion of the people that go to Lourdes are not actually sick. They’re there to help the ones that are, and they’re holding this container of love and support and safety and co-regulation and positive belief and faith.
Even as I say that I get a little teary because it was just so intimate and so beautiful to be able to be like, “We are all in this together.” And I don’t mean that in the way that some of the people use that in an exaggerated way to say, I’m not personally responsible for doing my own hard work and being part of the collective changes.
But when we can touch the suffering in ourselves and extend that to hold empathy and compassion for the suffering of others and to feel—I guess when I said, “Dear reader,” I wanted every person who reads this book to feel every other person who will ever read this book and every person who has ever gone to Lourdes and walked a labyrinth and gone to a meditation retreat and been to the shaman and been to the healer and humbled ourselves before the great mystery with the desire to ease our suffering. If we can somehow touch in a loving way those parts of ourselves and also those parts of other people that are also touched in that way, there is something there that I think can’t be bottled up, and we can’t sell it, and we can’t exaggerate it, but it’s real. And yeah, I guess that’s what I want “dear reader” to mean.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Lissa Rankin. She’s the author of the new book Sacred Medicine: A Doctor’s Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of Healing. It’s a book that was 10 years in the making. It started out as 250,000 words and got concentrated into the Sacred Medicine book that you can find today. With Sounds True, Lissa has also created an audio series called Your Inner Pilot Light and a previous book, The Daily Flame: 365 Love Letters from Your Inner Pilot Light. Lissa, thanks so much for all of your work and your devotion to Sacred Medicine.
LR: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me here.
TS: Thanks for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at resources.SoundsTrue.com/podcast. That’s resources.SoundsTrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. And if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.
