Releasing Emotional Blockages
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
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, and 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.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org and in advance. Thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge Live, my guest is Amy B. Scher. Amy is an expert in mind-body healing and helping people release energetic and emotional blocks to become their happiest, healthiest, and most creative selves. She’s the award-winning and bestselling author of five books translated into 20 Languages. Amy’s most well-known for her memoir, This Is How I Save My Life, and also a series of books, How to Heal Yourself, including a book from Sounds True on How to Heal Yourself from Depression When No One Else Can. She’s also created a new offering from Sounds True, it’s the How to Heal Yourself Oracle Deck. And we’re going to be talking about the Oracle Deck and having an experience here on Insights at the Edge of interacting with the Oracle Deck.
Amy is an immensely creative person. In 2026, she’s debuting a young adult novel and she’s also coauthored a book called Out in the World, which is a queer travel guide with National Geographic. Amy coaches writers and, in her own words, she lives with her beautiful wife and bad cat in New York City. Amy, welcome.
Amy B. Scher: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here
TS: For people who are meeting you for the very first time, how I saved my life. This is how I saved my life. How did you save your life or back when you were in your twenties at this point?
AS: Yes. Yeah.
TS: And you had a debilitating case of Lyme’s disease. What did you discover could save your life?
AS: I Discovered after many, many trips and treatments and doctor’s visits and specialists, that I had to do the piece for myself that nobody could, which is to turn inward to figure out what was going on inside of me that was lending itself to being this person who kept creating or attracting or being diagnosed with illness after illness after illness. And it was a sort of a harrowing journey in which I got to the very last part when nothing else worked and realized I don’t want to blame myself here, but I am the common denominator in most of the problems in my life, including illnesses. And I really turned inward to see if there were places where I could not blame myself but look at patterns or ways in which I was living, which were not conducive to or in alignment with health. And that is how it ultimately saved my life after no one else could.
TS: Amy, this is the second podcast recording we’re doing together and in the first one we talked quite a bit and I immediately responded with, well, you created manifested these different things, I have issues with that. And I grilled you pretty hard and you said something that stuck with me and it made a big difference for me actually. So I remember it and I want to thank you for it and bring it up here right at the start, which is you said that what you discovered was that if you had an influence, any level of influence on the condition of your health, and that also meant you had the capacity to be an influential agent of healing in your situation. And I thought, well, that makes a lot of sense. There’s no blame in that. No, I take a hundred percent of this or that, oh, I may be influencing this and if I’m influencing it, I could influence it in a different direction as well.
AS: Yes, thank you for sharing that. I think it is so important, especially in this kind of space where people are talking about manifesting your illness or you brought it to yourself and it’s not true. We don’t manifest our illnesses and we might be contributing to them in some way. And I think we can have that, that we can hold both things. We’re not to blame, but if we’re part of the solution, then I want to find what within myself I could shift to help move myself in the direction of health.
TS: If you were to summarize, and I realize this is a big question, but at the same time you’ve done a lot of writing and a lot of speaking and what it means to really devote ourselves to self-healing. If you were to summarize the principles that underlie your work and your approach to healing yourself when no one else can, what are the main principles?
AS: I would say the foundation of my healing approach and what I used for myself and how I help others is to release any emotional or energetic blocks that prevent you from being who you really are. I believe that we are in this world to express who we are in the most free way we can, but stuff piles up on us because life, what can we do? And we become a micromanaged version of ourselves. We become perfectionists, become people pleasers. We hold beliefs that don’t serve us. We hold trauma, we hold all kinds of stuff in our body, and I believe that that stuff actually has a physical impact on the immune system. And we know this from a scientific place too, that stress is not good for your immune system, it’s not good for your nervous system. And I believe that when we hold ourselves back, not by any fault of our own, but just because we’ve been buried by life and we hold fears and we hold these beliefs that we can’t be the truest best version of ourselves. And I believe that is where true healing comes. When you look at those things within you that have been suppressed, that you’ve been holding back, that you’ve been afraid of, that you’ve been micromanaging to be the person you think that you need to be or others want you to be. My work is all about freeing yourself from that. And I believe that’s where true healing comes from.
TS: I think it’s one thing to identify the ways that we’re either holding ourselves back or feel held back, but then when you point to something like who you really are, I think what meaning it sort of points people into this direction where we have a sense of what that means, but it also feels kind of amorphous and I wonder if you can speak more. What does it actually mean? Who we really are?
AS: I think it is our truest essence, the person that we are with all of our hopes and desires and our sort of spiritual side without the things that hold us back. So when we believe things like we’re not deserving of health and people don’t love us or when we’re we’re holding trauma from the past, we are not able to live in a way to the fullest expression of ourselves as we would be if we were free from those things. And so that’s what I mean. Do we misdirect or redirect our behavior and our thinking and our feeling because these things are holding us back? And who would we be without them? We would be the purest, truest version of ourselves. That’s how I say it. What
TS: Did you discover in your own journey of healing from Lyme’s disease about what was holding you back?
AS: So for me, one of the things was that I am a perfectionist to the core. I’m a Virgo in every way I could be, and I was scared. I realized during my journey with Lyme disease that I had lived in fear my whole life, not in a typical sense, I had no phobias. I could drive across the bridge, I could do all of the things we normally think of, but I was afraid to be myself. I was afraid to be myself. And to me, being myself out in the world felt so scary that I believe part of me felt safer at home, sick, bedridden like I was for almost 10 years than that responsibility of being who you are in the world. And so I think that deep fear of being who we are and expressing ourselves that way, speaking up for ourselves, doing things that we think are right for ourselves, I think that holds a lot of us back. And that was definitely, I think at the core of what caused so much distress in my body was I was scared of everything, but I was most scared of not being perfect, of making a mistake of somebody not liking me. So all of those things I think really contributed for me.
TS: What are ways that you’re living in a more self-expressive, or free way now that wouldn’t have been available to you back then?
AS: The thing that stands out most for me is that I live with more levity about life and about myself. Some of this probably came with some age, right? But because when you’re in your twenties, everything feels consequential. I mean, I have cousins in their twenties and everything. Everybody, they date every job. They may or may not take every move, everything feels so huge. But the way in which I live now feels so free and unencumbered because I trust the path. I trust not only myself, but the path will unfold as it should and I allow it to because I don’t live with the fear that I used to. So if somebody doesn’t like me, they’ll fall away. If I want to try something and I might fail, I’ll probably live anyway. I just don’t hold the pressure on myself that I did my entire life. And I think that has been immensely feeling for my body.
TS: You help people release energetic blocks and you work with various techniques from energy psychology and you make the connection to emotional blocks. And right here at the beginning, I want to understand what you see as the connection between blocks in our energetic flow and emotions that we might be holding onto or suppressing. Do you see it as energetic blocks equals emotional blocks, they’re the same thing, or do you see them related in some way?
AS: Yeah, what I see is that emotional blocks block your energy from flowing. So that’s how I see it, that I also believe that emotions are energy. And so what I believe is that when we are storing these emotions in our body and they become stuck, they are preventing us from having the clear, clean, energetic flow through our muscles, glands and organs that we should. I believe that that is essential for physical health. And I also believe that when we hold emotional blocks, it blocks the energy of our spirit. It blocks who we are from expressing that out into the world. And so I do see them intertwined. I think that our energy body and our physical body are intertwined. And much of my learning came from very early on in my career over a decade ago now studying Donna Eden’s work. And she of course is an energy medicine pioneer and incredible healer and teacher.
And so I learned a lot about, less about emotions, but a lot about how energy flows in the body. And when I started to learn that when I was really sick with Lyme disease and bedridden, I really started to figure out, well, what’s blocking my energy? I know it keeps getting blocked or imbalanced, but what is that? And that’s when I really dove into energy psychology, which is a kind of umbrella approach to help you balance your energy system in relationship to emotions, beliefs, and thoughts. And for me, I could really see as somebody who was a perfectionist, I was somebody who was always very sensitive that that was the missing piece that I never got. Oh, I can’t just bottle up my emotions for my whole life and think I’m going to be okay. It was like I have to figure out a way to not only talk about these emotions. My dad was a therapist, so I was used to talking about things, but how do you neutralize them? How do you release them? How do you actually live a life without this stuck stuff just rumbling around in your body? And so I moved from sort of Donna, Donna Eden’s energy work as my foundational approach to going what I saw as a step further and really learning energy psychology, which is the techniques to release those emotional blocks from the body. And that again, opens up or balances the energy system.
TS: And now you’ve released an Oracle Deck. And I was a little bit like really it’s one thing for me to engage and look inside and try to see through introspection what stuck emotion might be keeping me from feeling as free as I could be and resulting in physical symptoms. It’s another thing. I’m going to consult an Oracle Deck about this really? So help me cross that bridge.
AS: I’m going to help you, Tami. I have the same type.
TS: I know. You’re Amy.
AS: I have the same type of brain as you. When I first got into this work, I was like, really? But I really studied it and I really used it and realized that all the things that made more sense that I was trying didn’t work. And so that helps me cross the bridge. But the Oracle card deck is really a way for people to tap into their intuitive side to find what they cannot identify. So one of the really interesting things that I learned in my own healing journey was that many of the stuck emotions that I had that were blocking me were emotions that I was not aware of. Again, I was the daughter of a therapist. I had been to therapy for so many years that, I mean I did the therapy circuit and I still had these problems. And that’s not because therapy didn’t work.
I gained so much perspective, I learned new ways of looking at things, but I still felt like, great, I’ve talked about this stuff for 10 years and it’s still stuck in my body, but I don’t know because I don’t feel good what’s there and what to do about it. And so the Oracle card deck is really a way for you to draw on your own intuition in terms of picking up which cards you are called to pick up on for any given challenge to help you tune into your own intuition to identify these emotions because we tend to use our thinking brain to think about emotions and emotions are absolutely not logical. You can end up on the wrong train if you use your conscious brain to decide what emotions are stuck in your body. And so this is a way to get information in a different way than you do when you just consciously think, oh, I must be angry. Oh, I must have fear. And what I find is that when we get information in a different way, we actually get different results. And so that is what the Oracle card deck is about. It’s about taking you a step further from where you’ve already been, which is seeing a therapist thinking about being reflective. It’s just a different way of accessing what’s going on.
TS: There’s a core practice that’s at the center of the Oracle Deck that involves using and tapping the tapping our thymus gland. Can you describe that and why that’s so central and why you put it right in the middle of how we approach the Oracle Deck?
AS: So the thymus test and tap technique is one of my signature techniques. It’s in all my How to Heal Yourself books including How to Heal Yourself from Depression, which is published with Sounds True, and it’s almost everybody’s favorite technique. And what it is, is it’s a way to access and release stuck emotions from the body. So your thymus gland, which is T-H-Y-M-U-S, is the master gland of your immune system. And again, I learned about this gland from energy medicine teachers, including Donna Eden, and your thymus gland is attached to your energy system in your body. It’s not only useful to your physical body, the master gland of your immune system, but when you tap it because it is energetically connected to the rest of your body, when you tap it, you can actually elicit a response of one calming stress and two, clearing the energy system.
And so the reason that we use this technique is one, it’s accessible for everybody. I do this with kids, I do this with elderly people who don’t understand this work all the time. You can do it with anybody and it’s simple and it works. So the idea is that once you have identified a motion that you need to clear, you do a simple tapping with your fingertips on your thymus gland, which is about an inch below where a bow tie would be on your neck. So if you find the notch on your neck where a bow tie would be, you slide your fingers down, you’ll feel a raised area of your chest. And what the thymus test and tap technique is, is you’re testing for an emotion, which in the Oracle card deck is pulling a card in my books. It’s another type of testing. And the tapping is that you hold the intention of releasing that emotion as you tap. And the percussive effect of the tapping is actually clearing that emotion out of your system. And when you do this process by clearing several emotions at once, it actually helps you release whatever is going on linked to the challenges in your life. And may they be linked to love or health or career or whatever they are.
TS: Okay. Some of the things where I went, really, these are just questions that I had was if I tap my thymus gland for just, you said in the Oracle Deck, seven taps, seven taps, that’s not very many taps.
AS: It’s not very many taps.
TS: And emotion is really going to start to flow and release from seven little taps. I was like, really? I think I might need a few hours or something for some of the deeply
AS: Out emotions. No, it’s really seven taps. So interestingly, you’re really not going to like this, Tami, I found that the average person releases the emotion fewer than seven taps. But for people like you,
TS: Yes, I need seven.
AS: Yes, I added a few extra because otherwise, this is the human brain though. This is what’s so interesting. We want it to be complicated. We want to make it harder than it is. We want to reflect, we want to think, we want to get into it. And that gets us in trouble sometimes with emotions. I talk to so many people who come to my work and they’ve been in therapy for 20 years or 10 years or however long, and they’re still talking about the thing that their mother did or the thing that their brother did, and it may be completely relevant, but we end up, when we use our conscious mind to decide what’s wrong, we end up talking about what makes sense. And emotions don’t always make sense. How many times have you felt something and not understood why feel that or why it’s so strong? It seems so out of proportion or you would’ve thought you felt this. It’s just kind of a faulty way to deal with emotions is to think you know what the emotions are and how to deal with them. So this is just a whole other system.
TS: So I’m willing to easily grant you that we can’t think our way through challenging emotional experience. What I’m still trying to understand, comprehend, is how seven taps on the thymus gland are going to release a held emotion, how that works.
AS: Yeah. Okay. So I can only tell you from creating this technique and years of trial and error before I shared it, that there are a lot of techniques that we use including emotional freedom technique or EFT, which I love so much. We’re tapping on different places in the body releases stuck energy. This is just my way of releasing specific emotions using a different tapping point. So this is the tapping point that I found after much trial and error works with releasing lots of different emotions in lots of different areas. EFT also works. Chiropractors have tapping techniques that there’s so many tapping techniques because it’s tied into a lot of times the chakras, the meridian system. I am just tying my specific tapping technique into one of the most important glands of our system that is also directly related to our immune system and modulate stress. So because emotions are stressful or held as stress when they’re stuck in our body, my finding was that by tapping on the thymus gland, a place where emotions are held and stress is felt along with holding the intention that you’re ready to release it and that tapping that helps mobilize energy that just works. I wish I could pull out a diagram or something, but that is just part of my creation.
TS: Right. Okay. Just a couple of more questions before we get into an experience with the deck. You said that when interacting with the Oracle Deck, we’re going to tap and release whatever card we choose for the emotion that our intuition is guiding us to pick because it’s time to release it. But that in your books you teach a different technique for identifying which emotion is ready to be released. What’s the technique you teach in your books?
AS: So I teach muscle testing and pendulum testing, which are a way again, of tapping into your highest guidance to figure out which emotions are stuck. I also teach a technique that is actually, so there’s a chart in my book. So whoever has How to Heal Yourself from Depression book, I have a chart. And one of the ways that you can sort of turn that into an Oracle Deck, which is not nearly as fun, so you should get this one and not nearly as pretty, is that you can close your eyes and swirl your finger a few times over the chart and just feel into where you’re being called to stop, open your eyes and see what emotion your finger is touching. And that’s another way that I help people test. And the testing part is simply asking your intuition to draw you to the emotion that’s keeping you stuck. It’s so simple. It’s so simple that everybody argues with me about it. But that is the premise behind it, is that we want to stop using our brains and tap into our intuition. The challenge is that most people who don’t feel good, who have a chronic illness, who are experiencing depression or anxiety tell me that they have no intuition. And this is why people spend thousands and thousands of dollars a year going to intuitives, going to medical healers when they can learn to do it for themselves.
TS: Alright, introduce us to the Oracle Deck. Let’s have an experience ourselves here. Okay,
AS: So the Oracle Deck, and for those of you who can’t see it, is a deck that comes with a little booklet and the booklet tells you how to do everything that we just talked about. So in case you forget, and it also gives you an abundance of questions in several categories of life, like career, love, relationships, and health to ask while you’re using the card deck so that you can kind of target the area of your life that you’re having the most challenges. So like any Oracle card deck, you want to shuffle it and I shuffle it in a very, very messy way. And then unlike every Oracle card deck where you put it down on a table and you spread the cards out in a nice neat way, I have a system where I do what I call mess the deck, I make an absolute mess, I spin them around, I make a mess.
This is going to kill anybody who’s a perfectionist. But these cards are not spread out in any way. Some of them are upside down, some of them are turned the wrong way. It looks like an absolute mess on my death. And the reason we do that is because as we talked about earlier, Tami, I felt like such a big part of healing was learning to be lighter about life and ourselves. And this is a problem for people in healing. They believe that they have to do everything perfectly and they carry over that perfectionism and they do the opposite of healing, which is stress themselves out. So my method of messing the deck is just one more way. I’m trying to get people to not be so perfect and to just really trust the process once the deck is messed. And I’m going to do this for all of us.
We want to ask a question. And again, there’s tons of questions, the booklet, but you don’t need it now since you have me, which is something like, and I’ll just ask a general question. What emotion can we release that may be blocking us in our health? And I’m going to hold the intention that since we’re with this special group that I’m intending to pick a card that will include everybody who’s listening now and everybody who will be listening at any time that they listen. And I’m just going to hold that intention and I’m going to pull a card and the card that comes up is to release anxious. Now each card is double-sided because my technique talks about and helps people release emotions and also install emotion. You get two decks in one because the card is split in half. The first reading that I’m doing is all about releasing emotion.
So I’m going to pay attention to the purple part of the card, which talks about emotions we might want to release a little bit later. I’m going to help everybody install positive emotions to bring that vibration and support into the body, and we’ll pay attention to the other side. But for right now, the emotion that’s coming up is anxious. This is an emotion that’s coming up for a lot of people right now. And so I’m sure many people resonate. But what this card is telling me by picking it is that the feeling of being anxious or anxiety is stuck in my body and it’s preventing me. It’s blocking me from my full health. And most people already know that feeling anxious is not good for your nervous system. It’s not good for your immune system, and it’s also just not a good way to live.
And so to clear this emotion, all we do Tami’s so easy, even though I’m going to ask you, you have to go with the levity on this one, is that you are going to just truly hold the intention and ask your body and your inner being to release the emotion of feeling anxious and tap on your thymus gland. And the percussion effect of tapping is actually helping mobilize that energy to release it. And what I like to say to give some direction to the body is these words releasing, releasing, releasing, releasing, releasing. And then I have people take a deep breath and we did a little more than seven, which sometimes it comes out, but once you hit seven, you’re good to go. And then we would do another card. Are you good, Tami? Can I keep going? Let, let’s keep going. Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to go ahead and just hold the intention again of picking a card to help release that will open up to abundant health.
And the emotion that’s coming up to release is feeling vulnerable, which is a really interesting one for people with chronic illness because especially with Lyme disease like a bacteria, viruses, we know so much about viruses now probably more than we ever wanted to parasites, chronic infections, feeling vulnerable is a really big one. It’s also a really big one on an emotional level. So let’s go ahead and release feeling vulnerable, and you’re just going to tap and hold the deep intention and ask your inner being to help you release that energy of feeling vulnerable from your body and repeat after me. Releasing, releasing, releasing, releasing, releasing, releasing.
All right, and take another breath. And while everybody’s doing that, I want to just circle back to something and share. We talked about how stuck emotions can impact our immune system and nervous system, but there’s something else that’s important to know about stuck emotions. When you have stuck emotional energy in your body, whether it be from the past, something that happened this morning, whenever it is, what happens is we are feeling that emotion at a low level all of the time. And whether we totally realize it or not, we are also seeing life through the lens of feeling that emotion. So for instance, when you have the emotions stuck in your body of vulnerable as an example, it is likely that you are seeing the world through the filter of that emotion, feeling more vulnerable, seeing how you’re more vulnerable in the world. The same goes for anger.
Everybody knows that when you’re holding anger, you then start to stub your toe. The customer service person on the phone is the meanest person in the world. Nobody likes you. All these things go wrong because you are living life and seeing life through the lens of that emotion of that anger. And you are much more easy to anger. And so one of the reasons it’s really important to clear these is not only for the physical aspect but for a better life experience. We just feel better when we’re feeling less of bad emotions. And so that’s something I just wanted to point out as a reason that this could feel important to somebody
TS: In the guidebook for the oracle you write that you could pull as many as 20 emotion cards right now when doing a reading and there are 48 cards plus two blank ones that people can fill in, but you would pull 20 cards, you wouldn’t find that that makes you feel kind of overwhelmed or confused or no, you just keep going. Go, go, go. No,
AS: I just go. I mean, I don’t always do 20 cards, but it’s safe for people to do 20 cards. I think what’s different about my approach to emotional healing, again because I created this approach from my own very difficult healing experience, was that it is lighter and faster than most things. I had spent so much time analyzing and dissecting and thinking and processing that when I came to needing to do more emotional healing, I knew I had to do it different. And that’s why people resonate with my work. You don’t have to sit on your bed crying for three hours to release emotions. That doesn’t mean it’s not good to talk about them. It doesn’t mean it’s not good to reflect and go see your therapist. But this is a different way. And what I want people to do, which is what helped me heal, is to just have the energy of, oh, that’s interesting.
I have vulnerable stuck in my body. Let me release it and move on to the next thing. We don’t need to give as much weight to every single emotion as we do because then we become people who are constantly analyzing our emotions. And I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten anywhere from that. So you’re seeing sort of in the booklet and in us talking and doing this, it’s a little bit of my insistence coming through that we do healing in a different way because it can feel so heavy and it doesn’t help, it doesn’t help us feel better faster. And so that’s what you’re experiencing here.
TS: Alright, another card, Amy, another card.
AS: Thank you Tami. So you had to hurry me up. Okay, the next one is releasing nervous. This is a big one for the nervous system. And by the way, my editor and I went back and forth on this, but at the end of the book there’s an encyclopedia of emotions and it talks about what emotion means, what each emotion is and what it means and how you can interpret it in a new way. Because what I realized is a lot of people don’t have language for their emotions. They actually don’t know what each emotion means. So this one’s nervous, but in case you didn’t know an emotion, the book really talks you through that. So let’s go ahead and hold the intention of releasing nervousness from our system with ease and grace and levity and go ahead and tap and repeat after me. Releasing, releasing, releasing, releasing, releasing, releasing. And that’s it. Some people yawn, some people get the chills, some people feel nothing. All of it’s fine. Doesn’t matter. So yeah, go ahead.
TS: How did you come up with the 48 emotional cards? I mean, I don’t know if I would’ve ever thought of putting nervous down as an emotion.
AS: So I came up with these emotions because I have been working with students and clients for over a decade now, and I put in the ones that I see most. So nervousness comes up a lot, especially in terms of people that have anxiety and also bladder issues. You’ve heard of a nervous bladder. A lot of people with bladder issues have a lot of stored nervousness. And so this is just based on things. Thousands of thousands of clients I teach at hospitals around the nation, just working with clients, with students, and that’s where I got these from.
TS: Okay, and can I bruise my thymus by tapping it too often. Now I’m into this. So I’m walking around in every email, it’s tapping it. 15 minutes, I’m tapping. Is there a problem here?
AS: There’s not a problem. Sometimes people will say their thymus gland is sore. And what I learned from some of my own teachers is when it’s sore, it’s a good indication, they’re stuck energy. So you don’t want to tap it so hard that you hurt yourself, but if it’s a little bit sore, it’s not going to hurt you.
TS: It’s not going to hurt you. So we can interact with the deck and pull as many as 20 of these emotion cards for each challenge. For each challenge. And then you mentioned the second step when we’re done with that is to install positive emotions. Talk me through that because once again, this is where my critical mind kicked in. It’s like, do I really want, it’s one thing, yes, I want to release things, but do I really want to install things really?
AS: So you do want to install things if they’re positive. And there’s a reason I work a lot with clients with depression and anxiety and I can’t tell you how many times they start to feel better, meaning less anxiety, less depression, and then they tell me they feel like there’s something missing. Something’s missing, it feels like something could be wrong. It feels like I feel a little empty or I feel a little ungrounded. And it’s because when we release something that we’ve been holding for so long, we can feel a little imbalanced. And installing positive emotions are my way of helping bring something good into the body to almost complete the healing process. The other reason is because all emotions have an energetic vibration. And I feel like in the same way, it lifts us up to be around positive people or friends that help us laugh or have fun.
It helps to bring in positive emotions in this kind of space of healing. We’re so worried about all the bad stuff, bad stuff we have inside of us. But a lot of healing comes from laughing, from dancing, from focusing on the positive. And those of us who have tunnel vision about healing, forget that we’re so strict, we have to get all this stuff out of our body, we have to work on all the negative things, we have to talk to the therapist every five minutes. And there’s a lot that comes from looking at the other side of that, which is what can we bring in to lift us up versus always focusing on clearing out what no longer serves. So that is my sort of just balance out for that process. So can we kick it all?
TS: Alright, but still a couple questions before we get there and then we’re going to install and I’m going to install with you. But before we get, and you’re going to love there, I’m going to love it. I think the bias I have is something like the body has its own natural way and natural flow and yes, I want to get things out of the way, but I don’t need to put anything in, I don’t need to. It’s artificial in some way. There’s a natural process going on. So I wonder what you have to say to that.
AS: Interesting. Okay. So the way that I see it is much like if we went outside and absorbed the energy of nature, we’re just bringing positive energy in another way. I should be clear, Tami, this is not mandatory. This technique will work even if you don’t put the positive emotions in or install positive emotions. At the very beginning of creating my healing approach, I didn’t do positive emotions, I only ever did negative ones. It was as I worked with thousands and thousands of clients, I realized how much our minds during healing focus on the negative, what are the negative beliefs, the trauma, the anger, all that stuff. And I really again felt like there was a way we needed to round out that process. Healing can’t be so negative, it can’t be so miserable, it can’t be so serious that’s not healing. And so this is a little bit of my rebellion toward that.
TS: Okay, and one other question about it. Yes, almost every time anyone talks about shifting your mind to a positive belief, somebody will say, well, how do you make sure this isn’t a form of spiritual bypassing where you’re not bypassing something? What would you say to that?
AS: Okay, so I’m very sensitive to the issue of spiritual bypassing, so I’m glad you brought this up. So what I feel is I don’t believe in trying to change your thoughts or your beliefs in terms of forcing yourself into positive thinking. I would definitely say that that falls into toxic positivity. What I feel truly and what I experienced is that when we feel less bad, we are able to more naturally get to a better thinking point. People think that they can control their thoughts, but their thoughts are doing things because they feel bad inside. And so my approach is can we clear out some of or can we get you some relief from the bad feelings so that you can more naturally trend in the direction of positivity. If you can feel in yourself a little bit better because holding a little bit less fear and a little bit less anger, you will more naturally without forcing it, without bypassing, without toxic positivity, you will more naturally be able to talk to yourself or allow yourself to gravitate toward those more positive thoughts. And I don’t think anyone would disagree that positive thoughts can be helpful, but the forcing of them is definitely bypassing and definitely toxic. So my thing is can we feel a little better and go from there?
TS: Can we install? How do we install without making it a forcing move?
AS: So I install the same way I release. And again, if somebody was uncomfortable, I have to say this is my first time running into somebody who doesn’t want to install positive. But if somebody was uncomfortable or didn’t feel right to them, I would say, Tami, maybe this part’s not for you.
TS: Don’t do it. I’m going to try it. I’m going to try it. Amy, now that you’re telling me I don’t have to, especially I desperately want to.
AS: Yeah, you don’t have to, but if you want to try it and give me feedback, I would love that. Let’s do it. I’m going to pull a card and I will be really interested to see how you feel. So the installation for this one is the emotion of feeling optimistic. Perfect, yeah, perfect. And my intuition led me there. So let’s tap and let’s just hold the intention that you’re really focusing on that energy, being optimistic and tapping it into your body. This is the same way I see as you would bring in the good feeling of nature or people around you or a baby’s laugh. So just go ahead and tap that feeling of optimism or feeling optimistic into your body. And if you want you can say installing, installing, installing. If that feels uncomfortable, no need at all. And whenever you feel like you’ve tapped enough or at least seven times you could take a breath. Do you like it so much you’re tapping extra times?
TS: Yeah, I do like it. What I discovered for me is that the word installing was not attractive to me, but I could say opening perfect and I was opening to optimism and I enjoyed that quite a lot. Opening, opening, opening.
AS: Perfect. And I love that you brought that up because part again of what I’m talking about with my healing is you don’t have to do it perfectly. You don’t have to put these constraints on yourself, it will still work. It’s your interaction with the techniques and with the inner healing, it’s not the perfectionism.
TS: Alright, let’s have your intuition pull another positive card that we’re going to open to.
AS: Alright, let’s open to it. Tami, where were you? When I was printing this card deck, we could have done releasing and opening, but now everybody knows that they can say that if they feel more comfortable. Okay, so the install is feeling grounded, which is a great one. You might not need that one and you’re beautiful in your beautiful place, but I need it in New York City. So let’s go ahead and install Grounded and go ahead and hold the deep intention that you’re releasing the energy, sorry, installing or opening to the energy of grounded. And tap that right into your thymus plan, which will be carried into the rest of your energy system and flow throughout your body with ease. And you can repeat installing or opening as you wish. Whenever you feel like you’re good, you can stop and take a deep breath. I think I’m going to have to, can I with credit Tami, use that in all of my classes and give people that option? No need for credit.
TS: One more. Let’s do one final one.
AS: One more. Okay, one more. And that’s funny. Did I tell you I always do three or you just felt that? Are you like it balance?
TS: I just felt that you and I are sinking up.
AS: Yeah, we are. Okay. Installing, flowing or opening to flowing. Such a good one. Okay, so let’s go ahead and open to the feeling of flowing. Tap on your thymus gland and go ahead and repeat either flowing or opening whatever you wish and just hold the intention of really bringing that into your body. That good feeling of flowing. That’s it. Tami, could I tell our audience a few other ways they could use the cards not just for help?
TS: Yeah, sure, of course.
AS: Okay. One of the reasons that I really wanted to do this deck was because I really wanted a quick way for people to deal with whatever was going on in the moment. So if you are healing from a chronic illness or depression or anxiety, you can certainly use these cards with a longer term goal of Cleary. But what I do often and what my students do often is use these cards more in the moment. So let’s say that you were triggered by a family member. You could sit down with this card deck, you could mess the deck and you could pull some cards to release for emotions that were triggering you around this person to release them. Let’s say you were sitting at your desk one day and you felt anxious and you didn’t know why. You could pull out the card deck and pull a few cards that would point you to what emotions you were feeling that were contributing to anxiety and pull those cards.
If you were going to make a big decision about a job and you didn’t know which one to make and you wanted to get some clarity, you could pull a few cards from the deck to clear emotions that were blocking you from clarity around this decision. So there’s so many ways, almost any question that you ask yourself in your mind, you can use the Oracle Deck to really clear emotions that will bring you closer to your intuition and your inner knowing because I believe that those emotions that then drive thought often block us from our own sort of inner knowing or centeredness or groundedness. And so I just wanted to share that there’s so many quick ways to use the deck and they’re all in the little booklet. You don’t have to remember what I said, but sometimes they sit down for two minutes and do it. I did that today when I was having a hard time. I just felt overwhelmed and anxious and I pulled a few cards and I felt a lot better after that.
TS: So Amy, I get how this deck is a really beautiful friend and tool to help me have more emotional flow. I get that. But if I’m someone who has a serious physical illness and I pick up something and it’s the How to Heal Yourself Oracle Deck and my physical illness, perhaps the trajectory that it’s on, I’m doing this but it’s not really changing, maybe it’s even getting worse. How would I interpret that? I mean, how deep can emotional health really take us when we’re facing a serious physical challenge?
AS: Yeah, that’s fair enough. So when I came to this work, I was essentially dying from Lyme disease. I had had many treatments and nothing was helping. I did get one treatment that brought me into a really good place and then I relapsed. And that was really what brought me to the idea that if I was doing all the most radical and modern cutting edge treatments for my physical health and it wasn’t working, then maybe it wasn’t my physical body that I solely needed to focus on. So I hear that question and I understand that place of being what we know is that our emotional health is directly tied to our physical health. I don’t think that there’s any doubt about that, that stress and inflammation can lead to chronic conditions. And so my answer to that is you just never know how emotional stress is impacting you physically.
And so in that spirit, you never know how much releasing emotional stress will help the body to instigate its own healing mechanism. So what I believe and what I experienced is that that stress puts pressure on the body and that when we release our emotional baggage or stuck emotions, it can help relieve some of that pressure and send the healing energy back to the systems that do the job of healing us. Now, to play devil’s advocate, which I’m always happy to do, I say for people who don’t want to or don’t believe in the correlation between the mind and the body, I think a lot of people with chronic illness do because we have to at some point, maybe we haven’t seen any movement going to doctors. I know that I was going through it for years and years and I was like, there has to be something else.
So most people I think have come to this place, at least in part. But what I’d also say, having been somebody who was once in a wheelchair, who once thought I was going to die, who was bedridden, who couldn’t wash my own hair, who couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself as that person, it’s so valuable to still do the emotional work because if there is any way of feeling better internally while you are struggling with the physical, there is, as somebody who was truly, I mean on my deathbed for many years in my twenties, there is nothing better than emotional relief about the physical illness. And so I say there is no pressure to make the connection if it doesn’t feel comfortable between emotional healing and a physical healing. But we all just want to feel better. We all want to feel less crappy while we are going through a health challenge or a divorce or a anxiety, a spell of anxiety. That is what I would say to that.
TS: One of the things you address beautifully, and I’d love for you to comment on it because I think it’s a challenge many people have, is this sense that I’m doing all of this emotional release work and it seems to not be working fast enough. And you’ve written on this that there can be a time lag between the emotional work we’re doing and the time it takes for our physical body to respond. And I wonder if you can explain that
AS: And to all those people who are thinking it’s not working fast enough, I absolutely agree. When you feel bad, nothing’s working fast enough, nothing’s working fast enough. The way that I see how emotional healing interplays with the physical body is similar, I’m going to give you an analogy of a sunburn. If you went out in the sun and you got a horrible burn on your arm and you looked at and you thought, I need to heal this horrible burn, but your skin is skin is not in good shape because you didn’t wear sunscreen, I would liken that to having a physical illness in a way, a physical problem, right? A sunburn or a chronic illness. And I would liken putting self healing self on the skin to be doing the emotional healing work. So what it would be like to expect that as soon as you put the S on this blistery terrible sunburn where the skin does not look like it should and look at it and go, why isn’t it healed, is the same idea as when we do that and we do the emotional work and say, why don’t we feel better?
What happens when you put the S on? Or what happens when you do the emotional work is you give your body what it needs to heal itself to start on the healing process. And what I believe is that when we do the emotional work, we are doing something for our body that allows for more ease in the healing process that instigates our own healing response. We’re giving it sort of the medicine in a way so to speak, the emotional healing medicine. And now we must wait for the body to do the work. If you have an injury and you do the emotional work, your injury still has to heal. You are not going to release five stuck emotions and then be able to walk on a foot where you’ve had an forever. No, what you are doing is releasing the burden from the immune system and the nervous system and allowing then your body to have more capacity to do the healing for itself. So you are putting on the cell, but it takes time for the body to do the healing work and it often lags very often.
TS: Two final questions for you, Amy. This is the one when I read this in another interview that you did a transcript of a recording, I was like, oh wow, this really helps me understand Amy’s approach better. It’s a very, very simple idea, but here we go. Okay, the interviewer asked you if you were walking down the street and you could only give one piece of advice for what would help somebody with healing, what would you say? And your response, and then you explained it a bit had to do with relaxing and how relaxing impacted the nervous system, which then impacted the immune system and went all the way down to activating our healing mechanisms. I wonder if you can explain a little bit more about that, how relaxation or letting go is sort of the secret key in your method.
AS: Yeah, it’s ironic that I give this advice now because if somebody would’ve given me this advice at any point when I was sick, it would’ve taken me a very long time to forgive them for giving me such simple advice. But what I learned in my own healing journey is the fighting energy against an illness or a condition or an emotion like anxiety or anger or whatever you’re struggling with only perpetuates it. And so what I learned, and this is why I talk about levity and healing, the more serious and heavy and insistent about getting rid of the thing we are, the more it puts us into stress mode. It is literally the opposite of healing. So I talk a lot about relaxing and surrendering, which means not that you have to accept that whatever you’re going through right now is your fate forever. But what it means is if I chill out in this moment, could I gain more from this moment than I would if I was insistent on blasting through it?
I hate it so much, which is totally validated, and could I help my nervous system and my immune system to be in a better place to heal me? And the answer is yes. There is nothing like the idea and the feeling and the energy of surrender and relaxation into the moment not giving up, but just saying in this moment there may be nothing else I can do but chill and observe where I am and just be okay. If I would’ve been more okay with where I was when I felt least okay, I have absolutely no doubt I would’ve healed faster.
TS: One clarifying question about that, when you use this phrase levity in healing, I imagined someone listening who wanted to say, screw you. And that person who is like, I levity not my situation, not what I’m going through. What would you say to that person who doesn’t quite know how to connect to what you’re saying when you say that?
AS: I think it’s fair enough, and I might have thought that as well, but having been through a decade of just such severe and challenging misery, I realized that that heaviness just doesn’t help if you can find a small space of relief or levity or taking a little pressure off of yourself. And by levity I don’t mean making it funny. I don’t mean you have to be happy, but taking a little bit of pressure off just letting go a little bit of that fighting energy, you will send that energy right back into your body for healing. So I tell my students, it’s a trade-off, will you trade some of your fighting energy for healing energy? I don’t know anyone who would say no to that. So if that helps that you’re handing over some of that fighting energy to your body to use for healing that energy of fighting.
And I don’t want to be here right now and I can’t have this symptom and I have to get rid of it right now is all understandable. Absolutely. But it wastes energy that can go to healing and it doesn’t make a difference. You can wish and hate and hope all you want in the moment that that symptom is going to be gone right now, but I’ve never seen it work in that way. And so you are not only wasting the energy, but you are wasting the moment in misery. And so maybe I hope that plants some kind of seed and I’ll also say if you’re not there yet, that’s okay.
TS: And then here’s my final question. You had a motto on your website that you modified, and I think this is really interesting when life kicks your ass kick back, but you modified it by putting a dash between kick and back and I interpreted that as kick behind you, put it behind you, release it, clear it. So tell me, what did you mean by when life kicks your ass kick dash back.
AS: Interesting that you interpreted like that and only somebody in publishing would have noticed the dash and made meaning of that, I think, which I did too. So when Life Kick Your Ass kicked back was originally, this was interesting, was originally kickback, like fight back, and then I added the dash because it’s kickback almost in a surrender or relaxation. But your way is so interesting. I never would’ve thought of that, but kick things behind you or Clear. Mine was on the topic of what we were just talking about, which is kickback. There’s nothing more you need to do now, but be where you are and deal with where you are.
TS: I got you. Alright. Amy Scher. I want to say, sometimes I talk to people and they get a little defensive or they’re like, Hey, you published the Oracle Deck. What’s wrong with you? Why are you asking all these hard questions? And yet for you, you rose so beautifully and helped me and helped expand my appreciation. And I think our listeners’ appreciation and also just had a spirit of adventure for our conversation. And thank you so, so very much. You’ve created a beautiful tool for people and I’m so proud that it’s out there in the world.
AS: Thank you, Tami. It’s been such a pleasure to be here.
TS: I’ve been talking with Amy Scher. She’s created the How to Heal Yourself Oracle Deck. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.