Conscious Healing Ourselves with Dr. Shamini Jain

Lorne Brown 

Shamini Jain, consciously healing ourselves. Hi, it’s your host, Dr. Lorne Brown. This week we’re doing one of our replays, and this is something special where we bring back one of our favorite episodes from the very first year of the Conscious Fertility Podcast. It’s a classic. It’s packed with timeless insights and valuable conversations, and I didn’t want you to miss it. Now, I’ll be releasing one to two standout episodes each month to compliment our weekly new releases. So keep an eye out for these gems and whether you’re hearing it for the very first time or revisiting it, I do hope you enjoy this week’s episode. Enjoy this week’s replay with Shamini Jain on unconsciously healing ourselves by listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast. You agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Welcome to the podcast. Today our guest is Dr. Shamini Jain. Now she’s a scientist, psychologist, author and teacher. She is the founder and CEO of the Nonprofit Consciousness and Healing Initiative, the CHI, which is a collaborative accelerator of scientists, healers, artists, and educators to help lead humanity to heal themselves. She received her BA degree in neuroscience and behavior from Columbia University and her PhD from The UC, San Diego, San Diego State University joint doctoral program in clinical psychology with a research focus in psycho neuroimmunology, which we’ll say many times during this talk I’m sure, and she’ll discuss more about. She received numerous awards for published research studies in integrative health approaches, including biofield healing and Meditation. And in 2021, she published her book, Healing Ourselves: Biofield Science and the Future of Health, when Dr. Jain integrates her background in clinical psychology, psycho neurology, healing arts, vocal performance, and East Indian spiritual practices to share with others how they can best heal themselves and live joyful meaningful lives. Shamini speaks and teaches in diverse venues, including TEDx talks, universities, conferences, hospitals, retreat centers, and here we are today on the Conscious Fertility Podcast. Now, I did mention that she does work with vocal performances. You may be surprised, but I think when she says vocal performances, she is talking about how she used to sing in a heavy metal band. Is that correct?

Shamini Jain 

That’s correct.

Lorne Brown 

That gives me cognizant dissonance.

Shamini Jain 

Yeah, and we should talk about that as part of healing ourselves, integration and honoring all of our parts. But yeah, a lot of people, you’re not alone. A lot of people were very perplexed by that.

Lorne Brown 

Great. Well, I do want to let our listeners know that you can learn a lot more about Shamini’s Healing resources at www.shaminijain.com and also at her nonprofit that I mentioned, conscious and Healing Initiative, which her website is chi.is. And I’ve included these links also in our show notes on this episode’s Conscious Fertility podcast. So I want to jump in because there are terms that I’m going to need to get defined biofield consciousness. So let’s talk about our audience. So our audience, most of them are those looking to grow their family, and I’ve shared on our podcast many times to heal our planet. My agenda is if to heal our planet, we have to heal our minds, and these women are motivated to do things to help their body heal, to help them grow their families, and they are definitely in the traditional conventional approaches. And you seem to be suggesting that there are other ways that we can heal and that there’s science behind it. And our topic is conscious fertility, and I’m looking to hear how we can heal ourselves with this biofield that you’re mentioning and consciousness. Can you share with us a little bit about how consciousness can help us heal or what this biofield system is about?

Shamini Jain 

You bet. And we’ll do it through the lens of growing our families. I think that’s beautiful and I want to honor all of your listeners who are on the journey to expanding their families. As the mother of two beautiful children who are now teenagers don’t always act beautiful, but they are very much beautiful, beautiful souls. I’m wishing for every listener of this podcast that they get to realize their dreams of having a family in whatever ways that manifests because it can manifest in many different ways. Well, it’s interesting then to have the conversation on biofield and consciousness and how could that help us in our general healing journey as well as maybe even specifically with growing our family? Let’s begin first with sort of eradicating the old thinking of either or when we engage in what are called conventional or allopathic treatments is really what they are.

We try to call them conventional and the other things alternative. Those are all just labels that don’t really have any meaning when you take a larger global perspective because what we call alternative or even complimentary say in the western world in the US and Europe is actually considered traditional in many indigenous cultures. So let’s release first of all this idea of alternative conventional and call it whole person medicine or whole person health because here’s what the science is showing us, the mind, body, emotion, social, interpersonal, and even environmental connections that we have as human beings are incredibly powerful to foster our healing. And we don’t have to choose. We can explore healing on the physical level, even with allopathy. We can explore it with MINDBODY practices including yoga, meditation, tai chi, qigong. We can explore these facets of healing through exploring energy, which is related to the biofield, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes, and even consciousness itself.

Now, what we’re learning from the data in this field of neuroimmunology, which I joke with people, is just a fancy way of talking about exploring the MINDBODY connection. So let’s just call it P and I for short because it’s a heck of a lot easier to say than psycho neuroimmunology. When we explore things from p and i, what we’re learning is that the old thinking that we used to have say 50 or 60 years ago, that our emotions had no bearing on our health is simply false because psycho neuroimmunology has shown us now in carefully controlled experiments with animals and now humans that not just our mindset but our emotional state, let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s often emotions that can be very powerful drivers of health effects or imbalances in health. So that’s number one. That’s one of the first levels. As we get deeper into exploring the relationship of energy with emotions, we begin to realize that the energy that we’re bringing to ourselves and the energy that we’re bringing to a situation can actually impact our health trajectory. So I’ll stop there for a minute in case you have any follow-on questions before we get into a discussion on the biofield or wherever we want to go.

Lorne Brown

Yeah. So when we talk about neuroimmunology, just for our listeners, can you unpack that a bit? Because the term in itself is showing you what parts of the body it’s impacting. So you mentioned that the emotions affect our physical health, but the science is showing that it’s not just this general, you are seeing it in the immune system, nervous system. 

Shamini Jain 

In fact, there are parallel fields called psycho neuroendocrinology or PNE. Some people just call it PNEI. In my book, as you know, I mentioned some quotes from the founder, one of the founders of PNI, Bob Ader. And what he alluded to is that we’re just starting to put together the connection, for example, with our central nervous system, which is our brain and spinal cord with our immune system. That’s part of the work we do in p and i. We connect the brain with the immune system. But wait, the psyche part of it actually refers to the spirit, and some people will say the emotions, right? More reductionist people will say the emotions or the mental state, but psyche actually refers to spirit. So psycho neuroimmunology is about looking at the integration of our consciousness with our bodies and we explore these different pathways. For example, the impact of the vagus nerve, which is part of the central nervous system on our immunity. There is a powerful connection, and I detail a lot of that in my book, especially when we look at the power of MINDBODY practices, even by doing simple things like taking long exhales, and we can just practice this for a minute. We take an inhale and then we take a nice long exhale through the mouth.

Now, simply by doing that, you have enhanced the activity of your vagus nerve, which is the biggest cranial nerve in your body. And when we enhance that, we’re enhancing our parasympathetic nervous system, which allows us over time when we practice things like yoga, meditation, even singing many different ways that we can do this, it helps enhance our sleep, it helps enhance the immune recovery that happens during sleep. It helps create harmony in our autonomic nervous system so that we’re not on what we call sympathetic overdrive. And let’s talk about that for a minute. I want to unpack what we mean by sympathetic overdrive in case this is a new concept for your listeners. Our autonomic nervous system has two parts, basically the sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic is sort of the go go fight or flight. It’s necessary for survival. It helps us mobilize, it makes our muscles tighten.

When we catch a move or run lots of great things that it does helps us focus. The sympathetic nervous system is great, and so is the parasympathetic nervous system. And what we learn is that it’s the harmonic balance between these systems that helps drive our health. Now, unfortunately, we often live in a world where we tend to be in sympathetic overdrive. We’re bombarded with information, we’re bombarded with bad news, with things that make us feel stressed with a super packed day, with an overactive mind. When that happens, our sympathetic nervous system becomes more aroused and sort of dominates the scene. And when that happens, it can have a negative effect on our immunity. We know that enhanced too much sympathetic activity and not enough parasympathetic activity can drive inflammation in the body. Inflammation in the body is not a good sort of background, if you will, context for allowing for fertility to take place.

So we can see how these things affect us. And so if we start tracing these pathways, which are, this is very, very well documented now, and the pathways are very much elucidated, and I’m just giving you a basic overview here, we can begin to understand that if we allow ourselves to be dominated by a go go mentality, let’s say we’re even doing all the right things, right? Maybe we’re doing even yoga, we’re going to the acupuncturist, we’re going for conventional therapies for fertility. We might be doing all the right things, but in our minds we’re really stressed out about this. Listeners, maybe you say, well, Shani, of course I’m stressed out about this. I want to have a family. I’m doing all the right things to do that. I’ve got my appointments packed in. I’m eating as healthy as I can. But our mindset is such that we’re so attached.

We’re almost clinging to this in such a strong way that we’re actually not allowing for the full deepening of our conscious experience to happen. And now this is where we get more into the energetic and spiritual aspects of the work. I talk about this in my book. The last part of my book is called The Healing Keys. These are things that I’ve drawn from clinical psychology. I’m also a clinical psychologist as well as research and psycho neuroimmunology, MINDBODY practices, but also the spiritual realms to help us understand that when we’re so attached to a health outcome, whether it’s getting rid of cancer, chronic pain, becoming pregnant, these are really things that we’re really tied to emotionally. We want these things desperately, right? And paradoxically, what I’ve learned is when we can allow ourselves to fully feel that desire and let it go and say we surrender it, this is the last healing key in my book.

We literally say, I want this so badly. I want it with my whole being. I can feel it. And we allow ourselves to feel all the emotions around that, the grief, the sadness, the anxiety, that’s natural, right? We’re not going to stuff those emotions. We’re going to literally just allow ourselves to feel all that, let it wash through us, use some of the mind-body practices that I teach and others teach to help us flow through those emotions and then release it. When we go through that surrender process, we allow for the deep harmony of our vagus nerve. We allow spiritually for us to say, I don’t know what this is going to look like. It may happen in a month, it may happen in a year. It may not happen at all. I may decide that I’m going to adopt or something instead, but I’m going to give this up to the universe, to the higher power, whatever it is that we believe in, and I’m not going to try to control the outcome. So I know this may be provocative, there are a lot of places we can go with this, but I just want to offer this because I think for all of us, when we get really attached to a healthy outcome, sometimes it’s difficult to go through that surrender process. But I found that it’s such an important healing key,

Lorne Brown 

And we’re going to talk about these healing keys and shamini. When I had been interviewing the experts in consciousness, there was this common concept or idea of surrender, this idea of manifestation and surrendering. For some reason, it seems to take you into this present moment. And in this present moment, the way some people describe it is this potential to tap into consciousness, which I think in your book you describe as big C, and so we’re going to go left and right, yining yang, very scientific and spiritual. And I think you’re sharing that there is not a big divide between science and spirituality. So that’s going to be where I want. I would like to have the conversation.

So tini, one of the things that I’ve seen with the women I see and in my own life, I want to believe, I want to believe in this consciousness, this idea that we can heal ourselves. And even though I’ve had personal experiences, and I get really excited when I read the stories in your book about people who had these healing, spontaneous healing experiences, sometimes doubt still comes in. And I think it’s part of it for me because I’m so ingrained, I call it the left brain side. I’m so ingrained in this materialistic world and sometimes I feel embarrassed that I’m doing this stuff or embarrassed that I have this podcast. And I’m wondering, you’re a clinical psychologist, you’re a PhD, you’re trained at Ivy League schools, and I’m sure you get from colleagues that don’t share your enthusiasm and you have research to support this. But I’m just curious for yourself, do you go through that waxing waning as well? Sometimes? Is this real because you’ve even had the experiences or is it kind of isolated to a few of us?

Shamini Jain 

Oh, no, thank you so much for naming that. And I think that’s what drives many of us to go into the sciences in the first place because we are skeptics. And let’s break down what that means. Skepticism doesn’t mean that you don’t believe in something or that you do believe in something. It means that you’re open. But when you’re presented with phenomena, you’re really curious and you say, well, what’s behind that? What’s really behind that? And honestly, Lorne, it was reading these books when I was a kid on yoga and them describing how these types of breathing practices. Now, this is in the seventies when it wasn’t well known, and I was reading these books from our spiritual teachers, and they’re sitting here saying, well, if you breathe this, you’ll enhance the parasympathetic nervous system. I was sitting there saying, how do they know that I don’t see the studies even at age nine, I was like, where are the studies?

That’s what drove me into science. And even then when I did my first randomized placebo controlled trial on energy healing, and I saw that the effects of the energy healing actually impacted the fluctuations of cortisol in the body for these fatigue breast cancer survivors, and the mock healing didn’t, and the weightless control group didn’t show those effects either. I was really like, is this real? And I put in every single placebo variable I could into the data I put in every clinical variable. That’s good science in a way. You never want to take things for granted. But even on the personal level, I have seen things with my own eyes that were very, very difficult. And I’ll just sort of share a generality of how I’ve tried to deal with that as a scientist, right? Because for me, the dedication that I have to both the spiritual and scientific way, I really honor both of those paths.

And part of my life has been to explore where do those areas converge and where do they potentially differ in the way that we do science and in the way that we go in with what some people would call blind faith. In this particular situation where I was literally seeing things with my own eyes that were very hard to believe, I felt my doubting mind come in. It started looking for all of the ways that I could be being tricked at that moment. And yet there seemed to be something very profound spiritually that was happening around me. And I said to myself in that moment, Shani, instead of going into a supposition that you think what’s going on or you don’t know what’s going on, just go back to the moment. Go back to your breathing, notice what’s happening in your body. Notice what you’re actually feeling kinesthetically, and just cultivate that broader observer.

Suspend your judgment for a moment and open to the mystery and say, I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what it is, but at this moment in time, while it is happening, I’m simply going to come into true skepticism, which is just to observe it, not to judge it this way. So if folks ever find themselves specifically in that kind of acute situation where something seems like a miracle is happening in front of your own eyes and doubting mind comes in, I invite you to just come into the moment, tune into your body, suspend judgment, really come into a moment of mindfulness and just observe with no need to judge or even figure out what’s going on. Now, in terms of the other aspect of what you talked about, Lorne, which is I feel like an imposter. I heard that a little bit, right? I feel a little bit like an imposter. I’m doing something that

Lorne Brown 

Perfect. That’s the word. You got the word.

Shamini Jain 

Yeah, it feels foreign to me. This is not normal for me. I’m not the kind of person that usually goes and does global own group meditations or whatever it is. I talk about this in my most recent TEDx Berkeley talk, which is called We’re wired to heal each other, the science of interconnection. And in that talk, I go over the data both from neuroscience, biofield science that shows how profoundly we as human beings can impact each other through conscious healing, connection, even beyond touch. So when we sit with that data, believe it, most people will sit with that data and say, how could this possibly be true? I would have to be a fool to believe this. I don’t care if they’re peer reviewed, published studies. So I call this, it’s a very common term in clinical psychology. It’s cognitive dissonance. So what we’re experiencing when we feel like we’re imposters is pure and simple.

It’s cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance means that we have been trained to think a certain way. We’re all conditioned by our environments, we’re conditioned by our schools, we’re conditioned by our families, by the things we ingest, including television, radio, podcasts, whatever. So we’re trained to think a certain way, and when we encounter something that is foreign to that or different from that, the brain almost doesn’t handle it, right? They want to kind of discount it. The brain wants to discount it, say it doesn’t exist. It’s like, how do I integrate this into my worldview when it’s very different from my worldview? And here again, I say I would invite people to just be curious and be playful. So let’s not overthink this. Let’s say, you know what? I’m just curious about what happens when I do this group meditation and I’m going to just notice what happens in my body and I’m going to again, suspend my judgment, and I’m not going to even think about what this means for my identity or what people think of me or any of that stuff.

I’m just going to go in and play. Playfulness is a huge part of the healing process. I talk about that in my book too. So that’s part of my advice is, well, let’s not take our identity so seriously. Actually, from the consciousness perspective, identity is almost a fallacy, right? We hold on too deeply to our more constrained sense of identity. We actually limit the experiences that we can have in life so we can honor our identity and honor ourselves as a cisgender, bisexual woman who is mono monogamous, married, who has children, who is a wife, who is a daughter, who is a mother. I can honor all of these aspects of myself and the roles that I play, but ultimately, I’m really none of those things. Those are just layers on my conscious experience. If I can get into practices and situations that help me go even deeper beyond my roles and my identity to the core of my being, the core of my being, which is more aligned with what we call big C consciousness, then I’m opening myself to broader possibilities than my conditioned mind can even conceive of my identity. Because if I believe that I’m a person who doesn’t do global meditation, then I will limit the possibilities of what could happen for me and others during the global meditation. Instead, I can just go in with an openness.

Lorne Brown 

I like the terms that you’re using here, curiosity, playfulness, and with conscious work, I often share that it’s simple but not easy. That’s why I call it conscious work, right? It’s simple, meaning anybody can do it, but not easy. That’s why not everybody does it because it is a practice. You said it’s practice, right? And it does take some focus or some discipline, especially at the beginning to make time, to become aware of your breath. In your book, you talk about some of the healing keys, grounding, and so there is a skill that you develop in tuning into your emotional beingness when you can become present and surrender to what you’re feeling right now, like you said, kind of let go of the judgment and be open that you’re feeling skeptical, so not judging yourself, this is how I feel. Do you find that is one of the gateways to tap into this big C where I think it’s conducive to healing, it’s a bridge to healing. 

Shamini Jain 

Absolutely. And if we break that down further, what we recognize with all these healing keys is that what’s happening in the process is that we’re expanding our experience of the self. In my book, I say that I’ve come to realize that the path to healing and the path to spiritual liberation are the same. Now that’s of course flavored by my background in East Indian spiritual philosophy and practice. And people may say, well, what does spiritual liberation mean? It literally means liberating your spirit. When we liberate our spirit, what it means is we begin to recognize our deep inner connection with not only different parts of ourselves, but for example with the earth. That’s very real. The studies in earthing and grounding are showing that by coming into harmony with our bioenergetic connection with the earth, which is a very real thing, there are studies behind this with earthing and grounding.

We not only expand our sense of self and feel supported by a living, vibrating, pulsating earth, but that bioenergetic connection helps us discharge pain, discharge anxiety, it helps us sleep better. These are what the studies are showing with earthing mats, for example, grounding mats and things like that. But there are these time honored mind-body practices for grounding as well where people have been saying this for millennia. So what’s going on there? We’re enhancing our state of connection. We’re expanding our experience of connection. When we connect with our breath, same thing. We’re enhancing the mind, body energy connection. We’re bringing the energy more deeply into our bodies by guiding the breath into our body. We can practice mind practices like Tai chi and Qigong to do these very ly. We can go to energy healers to help us move energy flows in our body if they’ve been stagnated.

But we can do those ourselves too, with certain practices. They’re not so hard. And even the practice of creativity, which I mentioned in my book, and I’m a big fan of liberating our creative energy, and I would say for our listeners here on the pathway of growing our families, both in the fertility process, and then once you have your children and experiencing the joy of being with your children, liberating our own creative self and our creative expression is a very, very powerful healing key. On the bioenergetic level, what’s happening is we’re actually liberating life energy that helps to foster vitality in the body. It actually does help with fertility because we’re working here with the second chakra, which is called the Stan Chakra, which is literally the source of creation. It’s the source of life. And so from the spiritual level, when we’re working creatively, we’re literally liberating that energy in us.

Lorne Brown 

And you’ve mentioned the bile, energetic part of us. Is there data, is there evidence to support that we are these bioenergetic beings because it sounds like breath work or certain breathing techniques, yoga, meditations, grounding, we’re seeing some benefit to those. Do you have an understanding of how these are impacting the body? Is there a shift in our bodies that we are able to measure or have you done experiments on Petri dishes which would have no placebo effect, right? Cells and stuff?

Shamini Jain 

All of this is very deeply detailed in the book healing ourselves. And we go through the journey of exploring what consciousness is, what does the evidence say behind mind body practices like meditation, yoga, what does it have to do with this idea of energy or the biofield, which we still need to discuss? And then in the book, I go into what most people would call energy healing studies, what we call biofield therapies, biofield healing studies in cells, in animals, in people. And so the upshot of all of those studies, Lorne, is yes, there is evidence to help us understand, not even suggest, but help us understand that we are biomagnetic beings, bio electromagnetic things. We have what we call bio fields. And I talk about this in all of my talks, my recent TEDx talk, which will only take 20 minutes versus the book, which would take more than 20 minutes.

It’s also on audio though, for those who like audio books. What we’ve learned is that when we explore things from what we call the biofield perspective, the way we scientists describe the biofield are fields of energy and information that guide our health. So the biofield isn’t really just one thing, it’s almost a perspective, but much of that quote perspective is measurable. We can measure the biofields of cells. There is groundbreaking work, for example, going on at Tufts University led by Dr. Mike Levin, who is showing that we can manipulate the electricity across cell membranes and grow new tissue, even brain tissue. So we’re not using drugs to do that. We’re not using chemicals, we’re using electricity. We’re actually bio electromagnetically manipulating cells to grow new neural tissue. That’s pretty incredible. And we know that we can measure biofields on the body. That’s what we do with EEGs.

When we place electrodes on the head to measure brainwaves or EKGs, we use ultrasounds. Of course, we’re familiar with those, right? Those are all ways that we’re measuring aspects of the biofield using sound, picking up electricity, magnetism. We can even put electricity and magnetism into the body to generate healing effects. So those are all really measurable ways that we explore the biofield, these fields of energy and information that guide our health. Now, there’s the subtle aspects of those, which include things like pranayama, the breath work, even the yoga, asanas, the whole pathway of yoga. And many meditations are actually focused on restoring what they call the vital energy, the qi, the prana in the body. And if any of your listeners, for example, have gone to acupuncturists or other types of holistic healing providers, they may have heard these terms. Well, we’re moving energy flow.

We’re moving prana in your body. We’re restoring QI in this area to help with fertility. Well, this was a very deep perspective that was pretty much ingrained in all of the, what I would call traditional indigenous medicine practices, including Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, Ayurveda, they understood that what they called the vital life force prana chi related to what we call the biofield, is essential for health. So these time honored indigenous healing practices work to restore that energy in the body through MINDBODY practices, through proper eating, through proper sleep, interpersonal harmony, and even things like energy healing. So we’ve studied things like energy healing right now, you asked about the cell level. So let’s just go there. I talk about clinical studies and all of that. There’s so much here on the groundbreaking level of people who want to say, okay, well, is there a rule there?

There with this biofield energy stuff? How do we know? Like you said, beyond placebo, beyond people. There are several studies that have already been published at MD Anderson Cancer Center led by Dr. Lorenzo Cohen is a dear colleague and friend and sits in our scientific advisory council for my nonprofit on tumor shrinkage and tumor spread in mouse models of cancer with really profound results all the way down to cell signaling, inflammatory cytokines, which are cellular mechanisms, cellular messengers in the body, kind of like we think of neurotransmitters, cytokines are like immune transmitters. They’re looking at this not just saying, wow, these energy healing practices seem to actually reduce metastasis or spread of cancer in the body in these mouse models. Highly controlled studies, internal and external review groups. I could go on and on. They’re actually going all the way down to cell subsets, inflammatory cytokines, and even the signaling pathways that are involved. And here again, we’re not using devices, we’re not using drugs. These are simply skilled energy healers, and these are things that we can all learn. So we might think, wow, well that’s really great, but does that mean I need to go see a rockstar energy healer? Yeah, maybe. But it’s amazing because we’re also seeing that the energy that we can work on with ourselves with Tai Chi Qigong, for example, meditation, this is where we’re working with our own energy ourselves, healing ourselves is also incredibly powerful.

Lorne Brown 

We have that potential. And it reminds me of some of the retreats that I’ve gone to. The people that have these most awesome mystical experiences or healing transformations at the retreat are the newbies. Ones that they’re the little expectations, never really worked with the process before, and they’re the ones having it. And then those that have been reading the book, studying it and trying so hard. So I’m glad you said that. Yes, you can go see an awesome healer, but reminding people that we all have that potential. And the reason I wanted you to share a bit of the science, it was kind of related to that cognizant dissidence that you mentioned earlier, that to help people be open to other ways of healing because we have been ingrained that there is a pharmaceutical surgical approach. And I know in your book, and I’ve heard you say before, you believe in both.

That’s what I like about you is the integration. It’s not an either or. You really are living and breathing this interconnectedness. And so both exist and so use both. Currently. Oftentimes the traditional medicines, I’m trained in Chinese medicine, that’s what I practice. And often these traditional medicines are dismissed because they don’t fit into the materialistic view or understanding. I think just hearing some of the science, it’s just how we are when we hear it’s been published, peer reviewed, repeated studies, it does give people some comfort to be open to listening or exploring it. And that’s why I wanted you to share a little bit about the research. So thank you,

Shamini Jain 

And I appreciate Lorne so much because the research is important. We are not going to just go willy-nilly and try any little thing, or we don’t want to waste time. We don’t want to waste money, and we don’t want to hurt ourselves. So we need to know that there’s evidence and we need to continue to do the studies. As you know, there are very few side effects for things like fertility issues as far as I know of it. We’ve been looking at are there significant side effects with things like energy healing? There can be, there’s sometimes a detox effect that happens for certain types of healing that isn’t often talked about. But when you compare those with other side effects for other more invasive types of therapies, including herbs or drugs, they’re very, very minimal and they’re very, very low in prevalence. Mostly these studies have a super high benefits to harms ratio, and that’s important.

That means that we want to go for therapies that are safe and that have an evidence base behind them. Super important. And just to note about what you were saying before, with the newbies having these profound effects and the ones that are sort of more into it, been doing it for a while, maybe seeing less, it’s the nature of the mind to doubt. So it’s always a challenge for all of us to go into any situation with what we call a beginner’s mind that has been discussed in the zen traditions. What is a beginner’s mind? When we’re going into a beginner’s mind, we’re again suspending the tendency for the mind to judge and think it knows something. We’re going to go in as an open, curious, playful scientist and say, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m just going to go in and play because I feel safe. And by the way, if I don’t feel safe, I’m not going to play.

Lorne Brown 

And that safe part, again, if you don’t feel safe, which is a state of mind most of the time, right? Engages that sympathetic nervous system, which works for us if we’re about to get hit by a car or attacked by wild animals. But if we’re just worried about getting pregnant or what’s happening at work or in our relationships, the body doesn’t know the difference and it still puts in the alarm system, which if it’s on all the time, can impact our physical wellbeing. And so these practices that you share in your book are needed more than ever. Now with the pandemic, the wars, the social media, I think more than ever, it’s probably why these ancient practices of yoga, Tibetan Chinese, ayurveda medicine, these meditative practices, mindfulness are I think are making such a comeback because we haven’t found a chemical or a surgery that can make us feel whole and complete. That can make us feel free to have ease in our life, to have that peace of mind. I don’t think there is anything that exists like that. And that’s why I think people are being drawn to these practices again.

Shamini Jain 

Yeah, absolutely. Because being drawn back to exploring that nature of our own wholeness,

Lorne Brown 

And I want to tie this nature of our wholeness and this idea that we’re connected, this interconnectedness, again, what you grew up with, the Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine, the similarity that we are connected, and you talked earlier about the earth, they talk about the interconnectedness. If we damage the earth, we’re going to suffer. And we can see that on, they talked about this thousand years ago before we saw some of the climate change or the damage pollution in the world, but it’s so obvious now that if we lose species of fish or if our waters pollute, our air pollutes how we can suffer. And it goes well beyond that on a very subtle biofield level as well that you talk about in your book, the conscious idea, I guess I’m going to preface it with this. We know that there are things that work before we know why they work gravity, they experienced gravity before they named it and knew what gravity was.

Let’s talk about consciousness. I don’t think anybody has a patent on what consciousness is yet or has the full, this is what it is. Everybody has ideas and opinions. They’re trying to study it and measure it. It appears to me that there is something beyond us that through these practices that you share in your book, we’re tapping into something, so I’m going to use the word your big C consciousness, universal intelligence. Everybody has a name for this, but it seems like this is what’s manifesting in our physical world. It seems to be impacting our health. Do you subscribe to that, that there’s a link or a bridge to consciousness and our healing? Is this what you’re describing it as from your book and your experience, your research that you’ve looked at?

Shamini Jain 

Absolutely. I mean, that is really the point, right? The reason that these mind, body, spirit practices work. When we’re looking at both ancient science and modern science, we can just sort of look at one layer and look at the physiological effects. Yes, when I breathe and I take long exhales, which a lot of pranayama practices do, I can look at that purely physical level, look at the physiological mechanisms and say that’s how it works. But when I look more deeply into the practices and the teachings and I go to my own experience as a practitioner, which we all do, then we begin to realize there’s all these other levels of mechanisms that are happening. And what all of these ancient practices and philosophies and traditions have taught us is that it’s coming into a greater sense of our wholeness, interconnectedness, and uniting with what some people, and I call in my book the Big C Consciousness.

It’s that process that really helps to write the healing reflex because why does that work? Well, we can even look at it from the psychological level. Again, we are coming out of the limited conditioned mind that wants to control and manipulate and figure things out. Actually, we limit ourselves in that way. So when we come into a sense of a deeper wholeness, there is a physiological relaxation that happens. No doubt that’s part of it. But it’s bigger even than that. From the spiritual perspective, we’re literally allowing for the flows of energy and information to go more through us to write a healing reflex. Now, this is a spiritual perspective. A lot of people will say, well, you can’t prove that through empirical science. No, you probably can’t. But what you can do is you can actually gather people’s experiences of this experience that they have of coming into a larger consciousness and what it’s meant for their healing practice.

So for example, during the pandemic, we did a study on distant sound healing for people experiencing clinical levels of anxiety. So these people met clinical psychology standards for having generalized anxiety disorder. This was during the shutdown. People couldn’t get out. A lot of them were just literally shut in. There was no way to do the thing they might have done to mitigate their anxiety, even go see their traditional therapist. And we saw these profound effects, justifiable, quantifiable, measurable, statistically valid reductions with gold standard measures of anxiety. These people dropped down to levels of what would be considered almost sub-threshold for meeting generalized anxiety disorder. That is to say it was a pretty decent, huge drop in anxiety in just a few weeks of receiving these sound healing interventions. But what was even more interesting was when we queried them on what their experiences were like and what a number of them said when we asked them, well, what was the experience like?

They talked about having a broader perspective and a different relationship with their anxiety, that they were able to come into a different frame of consciousness where they could not only sort of see their triggers, but recognize that they weren’t their anxiety, that anxiety was happening, but they were no longer identified with that. So it was almost sort of coming into a state of mindful observation around their anxiety simply by coming into contact with a larger consciousness. And many of them didn’t expect that, right? We had people who had experienced energy healing before and sound healing before. Some people who had never experienced anything like that before, never did any healing work, and it didn’t really matter whether they had experienced it before or not. Actually, all of them talked about touching into this larger C consciousness and how that experience helped them gain a sense of perspective on their issue. And we are seeing this with psychedelics. We’re seeing this with meditation. This is a common theme that we have of coming into a larger sense of consciousness to allow a broader perspective.

Lorne Brown 

And I find that the potential is exciting for our future. I think in recent decades, we give our power away for somebody else to heal us, and this idea that you’re sharing is reminding us that we actually participate in healing anything. I think we do the healing, our bodies, our bodies do this, and this is us getting involved in our healing. So again, some people will need a pill or an intervention of some sort with surgery, an evasive, and some people will just need to breathe, right?

Shamini Jain 

Absolutely.

Lorne Brown 

And that’s what I got excited about when I was reading your book, it allows us to participate because in the main system of medicine or conventional western medicine, often absence of disease equals health, but you don’t agree with that definition that the absence of disease is health. I think you subscribe to the Chinese and Aveda style that there’s more to health than absence disease. There’s this idea of vitality, feeling whole and complete, getting that creative energy going.

Shamini Jain

That’s right. Healing is a return to harmony, right? It’s that simple. It’s not just about getting rid of something or trying to even bring something to us. It’s about restoring the harmony of our interconnection with ourselves, the deepest aspects of ourselves with each other and even the planet.

Lorne Brown 

And when somebody says, well, what you’re doing is just a placebo?

Shamini Jain

Yeah. Oh, and Lorne, such a deep conversation that can be had on placebo and unfortunately not enough in the remaining five minutes that we have here, but that is something that I detail very deeply in my book. There’s a whole chapter on placebo, what it means and why I say that placebo is really better off. We’re better off thinking about it as healing holistic elements that activate life force because we see what we call placebo effects in everything in surgery, in acupuncture, in drugs, in energy healing. And yet what placebo is telling us is that these things that we have thought weren’t important to our healing, like connection ritual, mindbody conditioning are also showing that all of the aspects are very powerful for our healing. So in the healing keys, I discuss how we can come into healing rituals to help powerfully manifest healing for ourselves by taking those heal elements, what we’ve learned from placebo to generate powerful healing effects for us. So the idea that placebo isn’t meaningful or that it doesn’t have strong clinical effects is actually not true, but the point of it is, okay, what can we take from that research and really use for ourselves in our everyday healing process?

Lorne Brown 

And I like this idea because the placebo’s got a bad rap, as if it’s not real. And what the research is showing and what you’ve shared in your book, and yes, you have a great chapter on that, is that it’s not inert. And you show this in some of these studies where they can measure things showing that this inert chemical or inert technique is actually causing a physiological change in the body. It’s not just they think and they feel you can measure cellular gene expression changes. So something’s happening. And that’s where we tie back into this idea of consciousness and there’s something more to this world than what we just see on a material level. And I think this is where the paradigm shift is happening in medicine and in healing, and this is why these traditional or ancient medicines are making a comeback because they actually have a place in our healing.

Shamini Jain 

Yeah, absolutely.

Lorne Brown 

So to wrap up, I want to share a few things. So Shamini has a book and I recommend getting it both in audio and in print. I have both. And so I got to listen to your book. And the reason I suggest both is there’s so much depth to this material that it’s nice to go back and read some of the stuff that you shared. And the reason I like listening to it is in the healing keys, you share practices and you do some breathing techniques with us. And meditations, you do some singing. Guys, just a spoiler alert, she will not do heavy metal on the audiobook. There is no heavy metal singing. It’s beautiful. Not that heavy metal singing. It isn’t beautiful, but it’s a very beautiful chance that she shares as well. And so I encourage both. So rapid fire here as we finish here. One is do we have the potential and capability to heal ourselves?

Shamini Jain 

Absolutely.

Lorne Brown 

Is there an interconnectedness? Can we help other people heal based on how we are being, feeling, thinking, and experiencing the world?

Shamini Jain 

Absolutely. The data supports that.

Lorne Brown 

And do you have anything you want to share with the listeners, like next steps and those that are maybe struggling on this journey? You mentioned curiosity, playfulness not being attached to form an outcome. It’s so difficult for this group to not be attached to that form of an outcome. So, any suggestions or tips?

Shamini Jain 

Yeah, a few. Actually. The main one, if you are not connected with a supportive community yet, please do. We didn’t really tap into the energy of social support today, but suffice it to say that first of all, I lead retreats quite often and teach quite often, and I’ve noticed in these group gatherings how powerfully the collective energy can help foster support and healing for people. So I encourage you, whether it’s coming to some of my events or other events where you can meet like-minded people who are just exploring their healing journey, their transformational journey, maybe not even necessarily the same desires for growing a family that you do, but maybe that as well. Support and connection are really huge drivers of healing. We didn’t have time to get into that today. And yeah, I would encourage you to check out some of the opportunities to connect virtually and in person with me.

I think Lorne, you talked about a little bit of our nonprofit consciousness and healing initiative. I want people to know that we have free webinars every first Friday of the month. And depending on when this is aired, the first Friday in September, we’re actually going to have a healing circle with four really wonderful healers. It’s a really wonderful community connection. It’s absolutely free. You can also go on my website to see where I’m teaching this year and next. We have some really fun events planned all over the world, actually in the US, but also coming up in Bali, London next month, I think in September. Different places. Some are beautiful retreat centers, really beautiful places to connect and heal. So don’t forget that your community supports, you obviously learn you’re building community through this podcast, and so encourage you to connect with healing community

Lorne Brown 

In that community. We’ve learned so much from COVID how much, when we don’t have that connection, how it affects our mental health and through online shopping, we’re not at malls or at stores as much either. And so community, and there’s tons of research on how community helps us heal. And so there’s that idea where we’re connected, we’re needing the connectedness as human beings. So I want to thank you very much for being born. I really appreciate the fact that you have gone in and are sharing research and our openness to these other ideas because again, it’s not mainstream yet and it can be difficult. I know for me sometimes doing this podcast, I find it difficult because what do people think? And I have to move past that and have this more positive experience. So Shamini, thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to reading more that you put out in the near future.

Shamini Jain 

Well, thank you Lorne, and thank you everyone who’s listening. Thanks for having me.

Lorne Brown 

So I want to tie in and connect some of this stuff that we had with Shamini today on our podcast and just with the conscious work idea. So spend a few minutes here and just summarize what my takeaways are, and hopefully these are helpful for you guys as well. One is our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions can impact our physical health. And she talked about that, about psycho and neuroimmunology, PNI, how your thoughts and feelings have an impact on your endocrine system, your hormonal system, your nervous system, your immune system, all those things can impact your health. And of course your reproductive health as well. When you’re in that fight or flight feeling tension and stress all the time or are predominantly that diverts blood flow away from your reproductive system, that can create chronic systemic inflammation, which is more and more they’re linking to possibility of unexplained infertility, implantation failure, early miscarriage, impacting possibly egg quality and sperm quality because chronic systemic inflammation is connecting to a lot of disease processes.

And so engaging your parasympathetic nervous system is one of the things that we’re seeing through conscious work and in Shauni’s book. And in talking to her today, a big part of it was just to let you know that there’s actual research that exists on this biofield and consciousness. One of the reasons we don’t hear a lot about it, she mentioned about cognizant dissidence, meaning we kind of have our frame of reference, our beliefs, and because of that, we’re not often able to see or open to see other ideas, and it can take time for new concepts and ideas to take hold. For example, back in the day I thought the earth was flat and that the sun rotated around the earth. Actually some still think the earth is flat, and now we are aware and believe that earth is, and it actually is the earth that rotates around the sun, but it took a long time for that science to change their understanding.

So that’s where we’re at with that. Then the whole idea of surrender, I just want to tie that into in the baby manifestation or approach that we do, which is part of the energy psychology and conscious work I do in my practice, I mentioned that when we have that resistance, there’s an approach that I’ve been labeling in a C as in notice, except choose again. And notice that everything that happens is neutral. Don’t take it personally. This is where I believe what shamini talks about, that observer comes into play. So you’re going to interrupt the story when you have a negative thought that leads to negative feeling, negative behavior, and it’s a vicious cycle. And if you keep repeating behaviors, they become habits and it becomes your destiny. So the idea is to interrupt this story, so negative thought, negative feeling, negative behavior, interrupt it, positive thinking, positive feeling, positive behavior.

So we use notice. Just notice that you are feeling anxious or you fear that your cycle is not going to work this month. Just noticing it is not attached to trying to change how you feel, just being curious in a playful manner of observing this feeling, just getting in touch with your body. That’s the notice part that ties quickly into accepting what, that’s what I started talking about is surrendering, getting into the present moment. And we use certain tools to help you surrender. Accepting what is it doesn’t mean you’re resigned to what’s happening. We know usually you don’t like it and you don’t want it. However, just surrendering to this is how it is right now and this is how I feel. And totally surrendering into that feeling. And there’s few tools we use. One of the ones in Mimi’s book talks about surrendering to a higher power.

So letting it go. That tends to sometimes allow people to feel a release because they’re no longer the ones that have to solve it. So they can imagine that they’re giving this up to somebody else to take care of consciousness, divine love, and universal intelligence. Breathing also is great, and I like the infra four. Hold for four long exhales, exhale, exhale for eight. I like to use emotional freedom techniques often to help us get into the present moment. And there’s many tools that we can use to help us surrender to what is, to just observe it with curiosity to allow ourselves to experience it. And I don’t know exactly why, but it seems to be when you fully get present that suffering transforms. It no longer feels like suffering, and people sense a sense of relief, a lightness, they feel a sense of peace, and it’s paradoxical, but that’s when you can actually change how you feel.

And that’s what I call see, choose again. And so when you notice it, you accept what is. That’s the A part surrender. And when you get to that place where you feel a sense of relief or peace, and it could take seconds or it can take several minutes, then you choose how you want to feel. And that’s the idea of allowing yourself to experience the love, the joy, the bliss, the compassion, and as if you already have it. And I talk more about this in my practice and on some of the other podcasts, but I just kind of wanted to tie this in that this present moment in the notice, except based on the talking to Shamini and the other people I’ve been interviewing, there’s this potential that’s in this present moment. And some people have called it the quantum field, the zero point field consciousness.

Again, many things work before we know why or how they work. And it seems to be in this place where people become deliberate creators and there’s shifts that happen. And I usually describe that one of two things happen when you do conscious work, when you can get fully present and choose again, notice, accept, choose again. And one of two things is either your perception of the situation changes so you’re no longer triggered by it. You can be at peace in that unhappy situation. So you can still not want the current situation, but your perception of it changes how you experience it and feel changes. And the second thing that can happen is the external environment actually changes. And that’s where people call miracles, where the environment changes. People have these biological upgrades or miracle healings or just general healings. And somehow we’re tapping into the body’s innate ability to heal.

Lastly, I just want to share, I really appreciate how she talks about integration, and it’s not a choice of either. And so you can pursue the medicine that we’ve grown up with the conventional medical mainstream system of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and surgery. There’s a place for that. And you can also help your cause by activating that innate healer, healing our cells and some of you helping other people heal. And the whole idea of conscious fertility is when we become conscious through this work, we go from conscious fertility to conscious conception to conscious parenting. And when you are parenting and raising your children consciously, the idea is that they’ll get the attachment needs met because it’ll be raised by a conscious parent. Some call that a developmentalist versus how most of us were raised by behaviorists. And so the children get their attachment needs and so they grow up not needing to cut themselves, suicide drugs, join gangs to get their needs met.

They feel whole and complete, and they have the tools to feel whole and complete. So they don’t need it from the outside, they have it on the inside. And in one generation, we can heal the planet because they see and sense. Because if you do this work, you will sense that we are connected and we go from competition to cooperation, and it just doesn’t make sense to harm our planet or each other, go to war with other countries because we see ourselves as connected. So harming others is harming yourselves on a certain level. So that’s the dream of this podcast, and I just wanted to add that to the end here. And I’m really appreciative of Shamini sharing all of her ideas and the research. So it allows us to feel a little bit more, for me anyhow, open and curious as we pursue conscious healing and as she describes it, as the biofield science and the future of our health in her book, Healing Ourselves. Enjoy.

Speaker 3

If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach, using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Acubalance.ca. That’s acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne_Brown_Official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites, Lornebrown.com and Acualance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.