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All articles written by Jyoti Rawlinson, EEM-CP, LMT, unless otherwise stated.
Ever Wished Your Dog Could Talk?
Photo: Alba Elena
Anyone who has ever loved a dog knows the feeling. Something’s wrong and you don’t know what. If only they could talk and tell you where it hurts, so you’d know what to do for them.
Ruby, my Golden Retriever, had been limping on and off on her right front leg for a while. Actually, a long while - several months, maybe even a year or more. It would come and go, and didn't seem to unduly bother her. She would limp briefly, hold up her paw, which we'd check, find nothing there, and she'd be on her way, seemingly forgetting about it.
Then one day the limping came on with a vengeance. Out hiking, she would walk a few steps, stop and hold up the paw, we'd check, find nothing, she'd walk a few more steps and hold the paw up again. Back home, she wasn't her usual self and seemed to be asking for something, but we couldn't figure out what. If only she could tell us! Well, she could, or at least, her body could, by using surrogate energy testing.
For those not familiar with Eden Energy Medicine, energy testing has a big role in the accurate determination of what is needed in terms of techniques. We use an indicator muscle to check the flow of energy, and can localize any point on the body to discover where energy is unbalanced, sluggish or otherwise upset. With small children, very sick people or pets, where asking for resistance in a muscle is impractical, surrogate testing is used. So instead of asking Ruby to "please hold out your paw and resist against my pressure", we have someone touch Ruby while we test their indicator muscle to show us what's going on with Ruby. I acted as the surrogate, while my partner, Tod, did the testing.
In less than a minute I had, with one hand, scanned the whole of Ruby's right leg, while Tod was constantly testing against my other outstretched arm. My arm faltered at the shoulder muscle. We went somewhere else and tested then went back there and tested again. Definitely "weak", i.e. I couldn't keep my arm up against his downward pressure while I was touching Ruby on her shoulder muscle.
I palpated the muscle to see if I could feel any differences in the tissue quality. I'd massaged this muscle many times, but palpation is different. It's more precise and focused. I moved my fingers over the muscle in small increments, letting them sink in and feel for knots or adhesions. Suddenly I was feeling something odd, something that felt like a small stick or toothpick lying horizontally under the skin, slightly embedded in the muscle, something that felt like - a cactus spine!
We live in Sedona. Cacti are everywhere. Ruby has often got a few spines stuck in her. She usually lets us know and we get them out. Sometimes it requires tweezers and a lot of patience, but we always get them out. Or so we thought. We'd obviously missed this one and it had apparently been in there for some time, embedded deeply in the muscle. Thanks to energy testing, we were able to locate the culprit and have it removed without a single x-ray or expensive MRI.
Photo: Jyoti Rawlinson
Energy Medicine In The Red Rocks
Photo: Jyoti Rawlinson
For the past 17 years I have lived in Sedona, Arizona. This is both a blessing and a curse. I get to enjoy the stunning, natural, ever changing beauty every day I am here (most definitely a blessing), and I have to share this corner of paradise with almost 4 million tourists every year (both blessing and curse). 4 million. For someone who has for the most part lived in very small towns, that’s a lot of people!
The impact of the seasonally increased population is not easily missed in a town that covers a mere 19 square miles and has only three entry and exit routes (two, in a heavy snow storm). But for the most part, I couldn’t have chosen a more suitable location for my bodywork and energy medicine practice.
I spent the best part of 5 years in the early 1990s at the Osho Commune International in Pune, India, (a center for spiritual growth and meditation), where I was accustomed to being among visitors from all over the world, sharing my massage and healing work with them. When I left there in 1994, a more mainstream life in the Western world seemed daunting. Fortunately, I was led to Sedona, where I was embraced by other like-minded souls, and happily discovered I could still share my work with the many visitors.
Working with folks completely new to energy work means that many of my sessions involve going over the basics, explaining Eden Energy Medicine (EEM) in simple, layman’s terms and sharing the Daily Energy Routine (a basic sequence of exercises to get the body’s subtle energies flowing in a healthy manner). But far from becoming stale and rote, the uniqueness of each person’s energies brings something new and different to every session. My passion is newly stoked as a complete novice catches my enthusiasm for this work, and they leave with a new aliveness as dormant energies awaken.
Many who have visited Sedona speak of a special something that pulls them back here again and again. This makes the tourist part of my practice somewhat unusual in that I have out of town clients who become regulars, even though their visits to me may be stretched over several months, or in some cases, years. One client returns from England each year to run the Sedona Marathon, getting a tune up session with me before the event, and a decompression session after the run. Others become dedicated to their healing and return two or three times a year for intensives. We work together every other day for a week or two, maybe focusing on an issue such as weight management, or a chronic illness.
One of the questions I learned to ask myself during my time in India was “what makes your heart sing?” When applied to my healing practice, the answer is “sharing what I love with new people, who otherwise may not be exposed to this work.” Sedona is something of a magnet for those seeking new experiences in the healing arts, and many come from places where EEM has yet to be introduced. Here, I have the distinct honor and privilege of being able to give them their first taste.
Shapeshifting Through The Sensory Types
Author's note: Nancy read this post in its entirety prior to it being published
and gave her wholehearted permission for me to share.
Photo: Hava Derby and Om Aloha
The Dance
If you take an anger and slam it into your chest,
like a fast tennis ball across the net,
and a laughing Buddha in the other court catches it,
lotus blossoms will flutter to the ground.
If you see your heart is a diamond,
mountains, the waters and the earth
will twirl and dance with you,
pull you tight against their hips,
crush you with kisses,
claim you as one of their geodes.
If you take a hammer
and smash anger open like a ripe watermelon,
oceans of crystals will rise
up from the core of your palms
and belly dance.
Go ahead. Grab a hammer.
Break your heart open.
Offer the shards to the Buddha within.
Nancy Lee Melmon
This poem was written by a client of mine, and arose from some insights she had from the Eden Energy Medicine work we have been doing together. It reminded me of how important it is to be meeting a client’s energy, rather than simply rolling out techniques as they were taught to me. This means being able to step into, or at the very least, understand a client’s sensory type and how that may impact the way I effectively work with them.
Nancy perceives the world through visual clues, whereas I am kinesthetic. When I ask her to rate something she is experiencing, using a scale of 0-10, she will “see” the number, even though I may have asked her how strongly she feels it. She is also a singer, so understanding how important sound and words are to her has helped in making the energy techniques we do more effective. In the beginning of our work together, getting the energies into a healthy crossover pattern, and more importantly, getting them to stay there, proved to be a bit of a challenge. One day I asked her to make up a song while she was doing the cross crawl. As a visual, the words are important, probably more so than the actual tune. The difference was immediately noticeable, not least because suddenly she started to really enjoy what she was doing. Her radiant circuits began "humming" and were able to support the shift in old habits as Triple Warmer let go of its hold. For those unfamiliar with these energies, in Eden Energy Medicine, we recognize Triple Warmer (a meridian and radiant circuit, or strange flow) as being in charge of habits and, in general, controlling the body’s energies. The radiant circuits act as more of a nurturing support system, but often get deactivated when Triple Warmer has been running the show for a long time. Getting the radiant energies turned back on and flowing can give immediate and dramatic shifts.
Realizing we were on to something, Nancy made up songs for other parts of her energy routine, and wrote poems to help process the shifts that were happening for her as the energies came back into balance. We have also brought sound into the techniques. Working with seed cells (specific points that tap into the radiant circuit energy), I will often use representations of the elements through the hole in a ceramic magnet held over the point (e.g.a chopstick or stick of charcoal for Wood), but with Nancy, this wasn’t shifting the energy out of its frozen state. I had her choose a tuning fork (she listened to each one and chose the one she “saw”) and vibrated it through the hole, which immediately started making a change to the way the energy was moving. Other times, I’ve had her tone while we’re holding points.
Meeting a client’s energies by tuning in to their ways of approaching life and processing information provides some distinct advantages for my work. I find that my energies start responding and my intuition becomes heightened. It’s as if our energies begin to talk and all I have to do is stand back and listen. Although my own approach is very kinesthetic, and I feel energy in a very tangible way, when I’m working with someone visual, my perception changes and I’m able to describe energy in terms more understandable to them, such as through a vivid story, with pictures or colors. It can be challenging, because I’m sometimes taken into unfamiliar territory, but I inevitably learn a different way of understanding, or a new way of shifting energy and this is what keeps the work so vital and alive.