Conversations on Healing

Introduction Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole healed and connected.

Shay Beider All right, well, I’m delighted to have both of you, Katie and Patty on our special episode today where we’re going to talk about Integrative Touch Therapy. This is such a treat haha, as you both know, this is a therapy that is near and dear to my heart that I’ve developed over the past 20 plus years through the wisdom and intelligence of so many humans who have been my teachers and helped this therapeutic approach to evolve through my being. And now it is out in the world being practiced at our Integrative Touch Healing Center, which is fantastic. And obviously you guys are both part of that healing team that is helping to bring this to fruition. And so for the conversation today, we’re really going to talk about what is Integrative Touch Therapy, and it is going to be a conversation. So unlike so many of our conversations on healing episodes where I’m kind of generating the questions and the guest is responding, this will be a really different style where both of you will be asking me questions, I might ask you a question at some point, but it’ll be kind of a different dynamic interplay between the three of us. So that’s how we’re setting the stage for the conversation today. And so first off, welcome to the show.

Patty Atkins Thank you. Glad to be here.

Shay Good, good. Glad to have you.

Katie Frazee Lovely to join you in this way.

Shay Yeah! A whole different approach. So I think Katie, you are going to kick us off with the first question around Integrative Touch Therapy. So I’ll let you start the questioning here. Let us begin.

Katie All right, let’s do this. So yeah, I love the fact that this is a team approach and we’re going to learn a lot more about that and that we’re going to approach it as a team here today. So I just, you know Shay, I think a fun place to start would be how did this unique therapy originate in your story and how has it evolved from there?

Shay Yeah, so Integrative Touch Therapy has a long point of origin, and so I kind of want to go into two parts of this. I want to share a little bit around the evolution, and then I want to share a little bit around what does the therapy look like so that people understand even what it is, but just to get people grounded. It is a team-based approach, as you said, Katie. And so everything is done with a group of people, usually about three to five people, sometimes more depending on need. And then one recipient or participant who’s kind of at the center, we’re always asking this question of what is it that you most want to heal in your life right now? That’s kind of our centerpiece question. And so it’s about a transformative healing experience. The sessions usually last a few hours. That can vary. It’s not very time bound, but we usually like to have sort of a longer period. So that’ll give people, we’ll go into more depth on what the sessions actually look like, but I just wanted to give people who’ve never heard of this before. Just a quick, okay. It’s an intensive three hour long team-based therapeutic approach. It involves conversation movement, it has sort of spiritual underpinnings that are ancient across many traditions and cultures at its core, but it can be used in a very modern context, which is how we’re using it. The origins of it, I think run deep. I do feel this type of work has been practiced in pretty much every culture in indigenous communities, probably for thousands of years. It’s about healing at the mind, body, spirit level. Most cultures didn’t separate those three things. They were fully integrated. It wasn’t seen as there’s a mind separate from a body, separate from a spirit. It was a full integrated approach. And Integrative Touch Therapy is a full integrated approach. It’s old school in that way. So we’re accessing all of those dimensions and domains of a being. So that would be part of the origin story. How it came into my own being, I think it evolved in many ways. It evolved through my own trauma and history. I had tremendous trauma in my life that I had to figure out how to heal from. And part of it was what did I need? And part of what I needed was a group. I needed community, I needed a team. One-on-one had a place in my healing trajectory, but I really needed more than that. And one of my root teachers, Raymond Castellino, who has now passed on, did a body of work that was team-based that was very influential for me just in an understanding of how healing could look in a team context. And he, I worked with him in the very beginning of his career and at the very end of his career in particular. And I got to see the evolution of his work. And a lot of it was rooted in a small group of people, a little larger for him, six or eight. And then one person was kind of at the center. Our groups are a little smaller typically, but that team-based formation that I really learned from him was critical to the development of this therapeutic approach. And then of course, it evolved out of my own work, which was very focused on working with children who have severe illness or disability. I started in my early twenties at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and working with some researchers at UCLA to look at some of the different kinds of touch modalities that could be beneficial for children who are seriously ill or hospitalized. And I started the, a pediatric massage program through the largest pediatric hospice in Los Angeles called Trinity Kids Care, and worked with a lot of children who were in a process of dying, but also their families. And so over a series of many, many, many years now, they taught me what they needed to heal. And it was what became increasingly clear that I think is probably the most important thing about this therapeutic approach is that within each human being, there is an inner intelligence that already knows how to heal. And that in a sense, the job of the healing team or the individuals who are surrounding someone who is having a healing experience. The job of that team is to listen as deeply as possible to that inner intelligence and allow that to emerge and kind of lead the process of unfolding that will allow the greatest potentiality for healing experience. So in many ways, the art of healing itself is in my view, deep listening. And so this entire therapeutic approach of Integrative Touch Therapy is designed around deep listening and a deep respect for the inner intelligence that every single human being possesses around their own path forward for how to heal.

Patty There’s a, I’m just wondering about the space in you that came together within the hospital and the alternative, and we talk about it as alternative, but what was it in you that brought yourself into a space that felt like healing was happening, but you could help out? I’m just wondering about what was?

Shay Yeah. I think as I actually positioned myself in the hospital, initially I was doing some research studies, and so those got me in the door because once you have a research design and you’re going to do a clinical trial and you’ve gotten the institutional review board and sort of all the stuff you have to do to get into a hospital. And how I got in was we started with research and then as I was actually there with the patients, I had two kind of very important epiphany experiences. One was as I was actually interfacing with the patients themselves, my heart had an intelligence that was rooted in compassion that wanted to do more. I felt very limited as a single individual, and I could feel and sense immediately. I wanted more intelligence and more layers of support around me. And I actually had a vision. I was in the neonatal intensive care unit, this is back many years ago at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. And here I was working with all these babies who were so on the precipice of life and death, and I was doing a lot of it by myself. And intuitively I just knew that wasn’t the best methodology. My heart, my inner intelligence knew that wasn’t the best methodology, and I had this literal, I saw in my mind a group of Buddhist monks walking through the neonatal intensive care unit. They weren’t actually there. It was just like a vision. And I was like, that’s what I need. I need the energy, the presence that a collective group of people that are highly trained, intelligent, mindful, aware, could provide. I need that layer of support. I can’t do this alone. I cannot do this alone at the level I want to do this, which is a very deep level of healing. And as soon as I saw that vision and I understand the message, I understood the message that it was conveying to me. It became very clear what I needed. I needed a team. So I immediately started to build out a team of healers for the hospital. And really that was the inception, and this is a long time ago now, many years back, but that was the base was like, okay, this is what this is. You don’t do this work alone. This is sacred work done in community with people that are able to have those skills of presence and compassion and to hold a certain level of energetic presence that can help to awaken and elicit that inner intelligence and healing potentiality in each individual.

Katie Along that same train of thought, kind of following that, listening within yourself and a greater knowing as you began to approach the kids that way, with that deep listening, what did they share with you through their need?

Shay Yeah, I mean the heart of it, what I could feel, I mean, I can still remember so many stories right because they never go away. Each one of those children sort of carved something into my heart, and it was really about the essence of suffering itself. I think the greatest teaching I’ve received over all of these years around, the essence of suffering itself is inherent to a process of deep suffering, is an experience of feeling alone. And that essence of that understanding of deep suffering has embedded in it an experience of feeling alone or separate from that help to guide me towards the path sort of out of suffering. Right. Okay. So given that suffering has contextualized within it an experience of being separate, isolated, alone, how do you move through or out of suffering? You move through or out of suffering with companionship, with love, with compassion with community. And so they awakened in me an understanding of, oh my God, you could go back through their worst trauma and accompany them. And in that act of accompanying, of witnessing, of supporting, of slowing it down, of being present with, of fully exploring like, oh my gosh, right there, you could pivot the deep core of that suffering, which is built upon isolation, it’s built upon a framework of I’m by myself, I’m inherently isolated. And that’s for us as beings a deep root in the architecture of suffering itself. And so Integrative Touch Therapy became an opportunity to sort of reconstruct that moment of suffering with an experience of community and togetherness,

Patty The valuable sense of your own inner intelligence in all of this, Katie was mentioning, where is that, the place in you that comes together to be able to accompany, where is it the connection in yourself, not isolating yourself off from parts of yourself?

Shay In my own being, I see two layers of it. I feel like pretty much all of my service work, whether that’s healing work or community organizing at its core is coming from my heart and very directly an experience of compassion. That’s the driver, and that’s kind of what is the organizing kind of force or entity. And then also for myself, because I’ve thought about this very deeply. Sometimes I’ve been in a room, for example, in a hospital with a child who’s dying, the parent is sobbing and screaming, maybe they’re grabbing me and hugging me. I have a very specific memory of this. The child has blood coming out of their nose. They’re purple, they’re dying, and the parent is in so much pain. And I remember this exact moment that I’m referencing. I remember what happened in my system as that parent was hugging me and holding me. And precisely what happened is the language I would give to it as I went to source, and this is a bit more on the esoteric spiritual side, but my being reconnected with source, you can call that all sorts of things. Everybody has different names for it. You use the name that feels best to you, that feels a lot less important to me than what it is, which is an experience of core love and extraordinary intelligence, wisdom and compassion that we all have access to. It’s something that we all have access to. It’s rooted fundamentally inside each one of us and when, for reasons that maybe I don’t totally understand, but when I am faced with extraordinary pain and suffering, there’s a part of my system that knows how to go straight to source, and that saves me every time because you can’t just meet suffering with suffering because then you can just dance in the darkness together for a really long time. And that doesn’t ultimately, yeah, of course you want to be fully present in the darkness, but you want to be carrying a light because that’s what helps that person to remember they’re not isolated, alone, separate from, right. That’s the core intelligence, and I’ve distilled it in my language when I think about what’s sort of the short description, I would say, of what we can do in the healing arts is bring light into people’s darkest moments, bring light into people’s darkest moments because that’s what can be forgotten in the midst of tremendous pain and suffering. And I would want someone to hold that candle for me, not in a way that dismisses the dark, but just says, guess what? In the dark, even in the deepest, darkest, most awfulist dark, there is still a light. I want someone to do that for me. And so in my essence, that’s what I choose to offer to others whenever possible.

Katie It’s beautiful imagery, and I think each one of us yearns for it. What you’re describing, I’m curious if you can share more, Shay, around carrying that light and allowing for the leading to be generated from within the inner intelligence of the person you’re working with. That blend right there.

Shay Yeah, that point of the blend is all of it, right? Because even when you extrapolate this, like I said, the bigger picture here is integrative touch therapy. Today as we practice it, it’s done in teams. I think it always will be. That’s the nature of the therapeutic approach, right? It is a team-based approach. So what does that mean when you have a team-based approach? Well, in this particular case, it means you have the inner intelligence of the individual who’s like the client or the recipient. So you’ve got their inner intelligence. Then you’ve got the inner intelligence of every single member of the team. And you might have people on the team that are a little bit more skilled. Maybe they’ve been doing the therapeutic practice longer. They might just from their own life experience, have certain strengths that life has called out of them so they’re stronger in a certain area or they’re more vulnerable in a particular area. So you’ve got a unique composition of beings that are kind of working together like a band or a group. They’re harmoniously performing together in a kind of synchrony to help unfold a healing opportunity for the recipient or participant who’s kind of at the center of this. So you’re actually negotiating continuously with the intelligence of all of those beings, with the intelligence of the person who’s in the participant role, but also with the intelligence of everyone in the room. And to me, the framework of negotiation that you always want to be holding, and it’s a very specific framework that requires a high level of ego modulation, is this idea that you always want the greatest intelligence at that moment. Whoever in the room has the greatest intelligence, and I’m talking about a heart intelligence here, not an intellectual intelligence. So it’s an embodied, spiritually informed, physically informed, mentally, emotionally, psychically informed intelligence. It captures all of those domains. That’s the intelligence you want to be leading. So that means it trades off at some moments. The participant, their intelligence is core. It’s the one that’s going to get you to the next moment of healing, but sometimes it’s another person on the team and sometimes it’s you, but you have to know when it’s not you. And it’s not about your ego. It’s not about, oh, I’m the fancy schmancy healer. I’ve been doing this the longest I know the most. Uhuh. No, no, no, no, no. Because there will be instances where someone else in the room very definitely should be taking the lead because their inner intelligence has greater wisdom in that particular moment, or it has greater resonance, or it has, I mean, there’s so much potentiality to this. It can sometimes just be that the person who’s in that kind of centerpiece role, the participatory role, they might just have a greater resonance with a man or a woman or a person of a certain age or of a certain race or ethnicity or life experience, and you have to recognize that’s who they need right now. Get out of the way, literally get out of the way and let whatever is needed come forward. So it takes a high level of self- regulation and ego modulation to know, this is my turn. This is not my turn. I need to step forward. I need to step back. And even you guys have seen me do this a lot in the sessions. Sometimes you have to know when to call someone else forward where you feel like, oh no, it’s really like you that needs to come forward right now, so please do that because we need you, it’s a we, we need you. Right. So yeah, that’s a really powerful part of the way that this therapeutic opportunity unfolds.

Katie We’re going back and forth between the two places where you saw the need, you felt it within you, you allowed it to emerge through the teachings of your predecessors and all of our ancestors and this place where we are now, and the application of the therapy. And I’m curious, how did you start to train and formalize, and where did it come to be in those kind of middle stages of development?

Shay Yeah, it was super organic. This whole thing has been organic. It started more than 20 years ago at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Just like as I developed that team, I started to pull people in. We started to do the team-based work. Then I was in hospice that was in home-based hospice, and I was working with whole family systems and I saw, okay, whole family system. That’s a team. Okay, I’m working with that whole family system. Then at a certain point, I was really called into action through, we were doing some hospital based work that I, well, it was actually pre, so I’d gone from hospital based work in Los Angeles and then had a patient in Arizona who was having to be in the hospital regularly, and his family contacted me, his name’s Logan, and they said, God, every time he’s going in for this endoscopy and colonoscopy, he’s panicking because he woke up one time, he didn’t have enough anesthesia. He woke up in the middle of the procedure, had a tube down his throat and up his behind and it scared the hell out of him. He woke up in the middle of a procedure and had all this stuff, and it scared him. It scared him. And so now they were giving him massive doses of anesthesia to try to keep his body sedated for this procedure that he had to have every few months. And that wasn’t going well because then he had to be hospitalized for a week after that. And so the family just said, is there anything that you can do? And I said, well, let’s try, which is usually my approach. It’s like, I don’t know, but let’s try. And so I used everything I had learned from all those patients, from everyone I had worked with. I knew the model at this point for Integrative Touch Therapy, even though we weren’t calling it that. Then at that time, internally, I called it conversation with the body. And when I first taught it, I called it conversation with the body that just sort of felt right, that just sort of felt like what it was. I mean, you could say body, mind, spirit, soul. It’s like a multidimensional conversation. But for most people, I felt like it simplified it just to say the body. It made it easier to just internalize. So I knew the framework at that point. So when I went to start working with Logan, I saw it was literally crystal clear to me that his inner intelligence knew exactly what he needed to be able to calm and settle himself so that he would not need high levels of anesthesia. And so we just simply worked together. We developed a whole protocol for him that was based out of his own inner intelligence, and we literally created a whole visualization exercise that he ended up using every time he went in for the procedure where he came up with this drink of a blueberry hot chocolate. That was what felt exactly right to him. That was the most soothing. And he would in his mind, and I would go in with him and his doctor was very kind and let me actually go into the operating room. He was fully under anesthesia and we would take his body through a whole experience where he would feel he was shifting into this place of calm, drinking this blueberry hot chocolate, and he just felt so good, and he would go under anesthesia like that, and as it turns out, they were able to give him way less anesthesia because his whole fight or flight mechanism wasn’t kicking in and resisting the drugs. And so then he could be released from the hospital 15 minutes after the procedure instead of a week later because his body couldn’t tolerate all that extra layer of anesthesia and the drugs. He didn’t have an ability to process that. His liver couldn’t handle it. At that time. His doctor literally said to me, I don’t know what you’re doing, but whatever it is, it works and I want this in the hospital. It was just that he was a great man who also was practical, and he was like, I kind of don’t care. This isn’t hurting anyone and it’s effective just whatever it is you’re doing. I don’t even need to understand all the nuts and bolts of it. I just see that it works. And so then that allowed us to develop a hospital-based program in Tucson, Arizona. It was that patient and that physician who ended up spearheading it and saying, let’s do this. And so that allowed the growth of a whole program really. And so you can kind of hear in this story, all of it. It’s just an organic evolution. And I think the future of Integrative Touch Therapy will also be an organic evolution and we can talk more about what the therapy actually looks like today, like how we’re practicing it. I started out practicing it in the hospital, but then it moved into community-based work. We practiced it in the community for a number of years, and that now we’re practicing it in community at our Integrative Touch Healing Center. And so that’s also how it looks right now, but that’ll continue to evolve. We’ll practice it in the hospital and all sorts of other places, I’m sure.

Katie Do you want to help us start to understand more the anatomy of a session and the reality of that?

Shay Yeah, I thought a lot about it because evolved an architecture of a session that we use in our community-based work currently. So I want to define that, but I also think it’s also important to say that everything in our conversation that’s led up to this point is kind of the essential anatomy of a session, which is that it’s about suffering. It’s about accompanying someone through suffering, by bringing that light into their darkest moment. It’s about a team-based approach, even if that’s just one other person, but we tend to do it in larger groups that allows someone not to feel that sense of isolation and loneliness and that it involves this heart centered, compassion driven practice that comes out of love, not out of some idea that’s very egoic of master healer nonsense. So everything that all matters to get to where we are. Yeah, so if you were to come in for an Integrative Touch Therapy session and you’re like, okay, what does this look like? So essentially there’s a number of steps to it, and we can talk this through together and you guys can add stuff too, but basically there’s a team that’s chosen and there’s a participant that’s chosen. So somebody signs up and says, I’m coming in for this session. We block off usually about a three hour time period just to allow us to have some space to do deep work and not worry too much about the clock, but the timing is not precise. The whole team prepares in advance for the session. And that is based on a deeply intuitive listening process that just essentially shows up and pays attention. This can be days before, hours before, it can be the night before the morning of, but the members of the team, of the Integrative Touch therapy team, they’re all starting to tune in to who the client is that they’re going to be serving before the session actually takes place. And that tuning in is an intuitive listening process, and then you just start paying attention, notice track, what am I seeing, hearing, feeling as part of that preparatory process. You might gather objects, you might feel inclined to bring something in to the session that then we end up putting on kind of an altar that we use as a centerpiece for the recipient or the participant to receive different things that we’ve collected together that seem representative of some aspect of what’s about to occur in the session itself. So let’s say we might bring in a feather or a rock or a piece of jewelry or literally anything. It could be a crayon, it could be a penny you found on the street, but something in that physical object feels like it is in right alignment with what needs to heal or transform or what wants to kind of break free. And so each member of the team notices feels Intuits in advance of the session and brings in objects as needed. And then we gather prior to the start of the session to discuss that preparatory work essentially to say, okay, here’s what I’m feeling. Here’s what I’m noticing. My body is telling me this when I’m tuning in to who we’re going to serve today, this is what’s coming up for me. It might be an emotion, it might be a color, it might be a sensation, it might be a thought. It could be a whole lot of different things. Really anything goes, it might be an object that you brought in that you’re going to contribute to the altar. So we share that with one another. And then again, you’re listening like, okay, what’s the collective intelligence? Okay, Patty’s noticing this, Katie’s noticing this. Another member of the team’s noticing this. I’m feeling this. How is this coming together? My system is reading all of that information, kind of like a microprocessor going, okay, I get that. I feel that. I hear that, that intelligence knows that. And that is sort of the foundational field for where the session is going to sort of take hold. So it’s kind of like an analogy I would use. It’s like a womb. It’s like, okay, this is the womb of this session. It has these elements, it has these nutrients, it has these ingredients are in this womb that’s going to hold this collective experience. And so that sharing is very important to track and understand more deeply kind of what’s about to happen.

Patty One of the things that I just have found really valuable in that process is the honesty with each other, with ourselves and with each other in terms of we’re human beings showing up for someone else, and how do we do that collectively in a way that informs the inner intelligence of the human being we’re working with, but also ourselves. And I’ve just really appreciated the idea that we come as who we are. If we’ve had a hard morning, it’s like, actually, this is where I’m at and I’m totally available to do this. I am actually, I can do this session at any point. In that beginning it’s like, are you okay being here? We check in with each other. So there’s a real integrity to how we show up to this session. And I’m just wondering, Shay, in terms of your own creating of this work, the integrity of it in your own system and the integrity of the team itself, I’m just wondering what informed that for you, it may just have been just that own organic process, but I feel like it’s a valuable aspect of it.

Shay Yeah, it totally is. And I think Ray taught me that. So Ray taught me the importance of differentiation that when you do healing work, it’s really critical that you know what belongs to you and what doesn’t belong to you because don’t want to get muddled in that. That can be really messy if you’re projecting and putting your stuff on someone else. So it’s very healthy in the beginning to differentiate and to say, okay, coming in today, I’m tired coming in today. I just had this intense moment with someone coming in into I am feeling X, Y, or Z, because then also it alerts everyone on the team to that maybe vulnerability or whatever word you want to give to it, but it’s an honesty. It’s a level of honesty and transparency that says, look, I’m a human being and here’s what I’m bringing in as a human being today. Again, it doesn’t allow you to elevate yourself. The most dangerous framework in my view that you can get into in healing work is an elevated framework. That’s what gets a lot of people in trouble. If you look at where does healing work go to hell, it’s with what happened with John of God. It’s with what has happened with a lot of gurus. It’s where suddenly I’m a special master. I know better. I get to make all the decisions. You move into the infrastructure of a cult, essentially. It is the nuts and bolts of a cult that allows one person to have the greatest power, control and authority without relational checks and balances. And to me, that is how you construct a dangerous healing hierarchy. And so the design of this therapeutic approach, I’ve done everything I can figure out to date in my system to deconstruct a potential for that dangerous hierarchy because we are human beings and we have egos, and it’s very easy to run amok, especially as you become increasingly skilled. So you actually need greater protections in place, not fewer protections in place. The more skilled you are, the more skilled you are. That’s such an important point because we don’t talk about this ever. The more skilled you are as a healer, the greater protections you need to have in place that your ego does not get in the way and take over. It is not the other way around because you have the potential to be far more dangerous. And so the only remedy I know for that, which is sort of what I’m like I working so hard to create in the essence and development of Integrative Touch Therapy, you have to create teams. You have to create checks and balances. You have to do things in a way with shared power. You have to learn how to share who is taking the lead at different times because you have to remember that there will always be moments where someone else’s intelligence is more optimal to run the show at that particular time. And then for my own self and my own practice as much as I can, and I’m an intense person, there’s no doubt I work so hard to go back to my heart, go back to my heart, go back to my heart, because that is a protective mechanism as well. The heart has an intelligence that is deeply protective of harm and doing harm, but it takes, believe me, you get to a certain level, and I mean, I could cry saying this right now, but certain gifts get handed to you along the way and my, oh, you better be careful how you handle those gifts. My, oh my. You better be careful how you handle those gifts because they can do deep healing. They can support is a better way to say it. They can support deep healing, but if misused, they can support deep harm. And so you need a collective intelligence around you that is equally committed to holding a framework of deep healing that involves shared power and collective understanding of how we heal and togetherness to not allow you to spin off and to cult leader status.

Katie I’m curious if we could reflect for a bit on just like your reference to the womb as the container for the session in the parallels of receptivity and deep listening and this space of sort of the truly being in the unknown almost the entire time of the session, the greatest potential to highest outcomes, how to be fully in nothing in order to access the all. Yeah, just these are all themes that really resonate with more femininity or yin principles, not male female, but some of these traditional ancient kind of tendencies towards this kind of yin core work. And I just love, if there’s anything you want to share on that, Shay, why the design of that, why now? How does that ?

Shay Yeah, that’s a great question. This is a methodology, if we’re going to call it that, that is more yin influenced or feminine principle influenced. It is done in a circle. It is done collaboratively, and it is done with this sense of a womb. I mean, I like the womb language. I think that also is driven by some of my early experiences with Ray’s work. He did a lot of birth work, and so a womb was deeply influential. And I want to give credit. A lot of Ray’s work came out of the lineage for him of Randolph stone. So again, I think all of these lineages get passed down. I want to really speak to the fact that my understanding is there is a chain, there is a chain, and we pass it link by link by link from person to person to person. And so again, I want to acknowledge there are deep lineages. There are many, many thousands of ancestors who passed this link by link along that chain, down from one to another, to another, to another, to another. And we’re doing the same thing. We are passing it down link by link, chain by chain. So I think just an acknowledgement of that is very important. But in this model, the yin nature, that kind of feminine principle that is inherent in it allows for an openness to being so fully engaged in the present moment that you are willing to live completely with the unknown. And when you think about our philosophies of western medicine, or for example, in the hospital work that I did have done over all these years, the first thing every physician, every research person asks is, well, give me your protocol. And I’ve written those protocols and I could burn and tear up all of those protocols. Because in reality, that is a very different systemic approach that is a much more masculine or young method methodology, which is primarily what we are often not exclusively, but often embracing in a lot of aspects of Western medicine as it’s practiced today. This is not historically how world medicine has looked. World medicine in many cultures around the world has had exactly these same principles that we are discussing with Integrative Touch Therapy around more of a yin or feminine style that is collective, that has a lot of spiritual underpinnings that allows an exploration of the unknown that opens yourself from your heart. So again, this is nothing new, it’s just we’re not calling upon it very much in Western medicine right now. It’s not our predominant path. And I honestly think a lot of what Integrative Touch and Integrative Touch Therapy are doing is calling forward this ancient wisdom and saying, look, we believe, we feel as a collective that this has a place in modern medicine, that modern medicine can be deeply informed by these ancient, spiritual, physical, collective healing intuitive practices. And that it doesn’t have to be exclusive. It doesn’t have to be an either or, that we can actually pull all of this together. And I think that largely our organization, Integrative Touch is calling that forward in a very visceral way. And this therapeutic approach is one way that we’re doing it. So that womb, we start in a circle, this therapy, you come in, we’ve done the prep work, we’ve talked, the participant comes in and there’s a circle, and they get to be in that circle however they want to be in that circle. They can sit, they stand, they can move around. If they’re like, I don’t want to be in the circle, I want to stand over in the corner, then we’re like, great. Stand over in the corner. But there is a framework that’s established that is a circle, and we start with a welcome and an introduction and just kind of like a, hello, here’s who we are. But even those introductions are done with a lot of inner intelligence around what needs to be said for this particular participant to feel safe and good and heard in this moment. So I know for myself, and I think you guys, it’s the same. You never do that introduction exactly the same way twice because you’re not really doing it for yourself. You’re doing it for the person to give them whatever they need to hear so that they feel okay, obviously with honesty and integrity a hundred percent, but you’re focusing on different parts of who you are. A simple example of this, I remember a lawyer that I worked with in the hospital. He was a father of a patient who was so seriously ill, and I could see immediately that if I didn’t present myself from my highest intellectual capacity and kind of the part of me that knew how to show up and be extremely professional, he was going to kick me out of the room if I came in with any of these other healing arts lingo that this man was going to discharge me, shall we say. And so I altered very quickly, and I do this pretty much for every session. It’s just sometimes you have to do it a little more dramatically. But I altered everything about the way I talked about who I was, what I did into a language and a format that I thought his system would both comprehend and respect. And so a lot of healing work is having a willingness to transform yourself in such a way still with authenticity and integrity and without making anything up, but so that the other person can feel safe, comfortable, and aligned with you. And that’s critical. So we do that at the start of every session. We reveal ourselves, but we reveal ourselves strategically in alignment with what we assess in the moment, which again is living in that space of the unknown, assessing it. You can only assess it in real time, present now, so that we can share who we are as it would feel good to the person who’s receiving that.

Katie Even that malleability and that mutability, that also carries the principle. It’s sort of an embodiment of the unknown. You have known aspects of yourself, but you bring core threads of your story forward in ways that they braid together with the group for support in the arc of this healing narrative. And even that, to me feels like and truly embodiment in itself could be discussed as a yin principle as well, and embodiment, and maybe I should say full presencing in spirit, heart, mind, and body, because every practitioner has their own technique, but the fullness of presence within the areas that you tend toward also to me feels like it has a feminine quality to it as well. There was a lot of pieces there. Maybe we want to unpack one or two of them haha.

Shay Haha, wherever you want to go!

Katie Maybe just that each one of us brings our own innate acuity in different areas and how we weave those together on a given day or with a cohort with whoever’s on the team that day. Back to that band scenario, if you could share more.

Shay Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what’s so cool, and you guys know this, we live it all the time. You’re going to have people on the team who are really good at feeling things in their body. They’re very somatic. Both of you are very good at that. You’re very somatic. You can feel a lot physically. And just in an embodied sense, that is information that is super valuable because especially in our modern world, a lot of people are not very embodied and don’t have a lot of somatic intelligence. So your somatic intelligence as a part of that band or that team is highly instructive, especially when a person is kind of hidden that part of themselves from themselves. And so you can support them in picking up on things they may not be noticing or disregarding or shutting down because, and we know it, even just from a neurobiological level, our prefrontal cortex, it does so many great things, but it also can shut down body responses. It can tell us, stop shaking, even though you might need to be shaking, because that’s how you’re discharging nervous system energy that needs to discharge. So it has pluses and minuses. It’s not always so good from our early mammalian sense of these impulses that need to vis early move through our body. And so when you have people in the room with good somatic intelligence, they’ll pick up on parts that are getting missed by a participant who doesn’t have as much access to that somatic intelligence at that moment in time. So you want people on the team like that. You want people on the team who are intuitives. There’s some people, there’s whole bodies of work around this medical people who just have, that’s a skill in the healing arts, there’s a whole bunch of skills. And so you start to notice, okay, that person’s really intuitive. There are people that are good at accessing, there’s lots of different ways to language this, but spiritual ancestors that are providing support for a given session, so being seen and unseen who are providing support, and they are just good like intermediaries. I guess in our culture, we sometimes call these people mediums or whatever. I don’t know that you need such formal language. The language for me is all sort of silly. It’s just like what it is, which is it’s just a form of access to a conversation with beings who you may not be able to see in physical form. Is that somewhat radical? I don’t know. I mean, in our modern western world, we make it a radical act. Historically, not radical at all. Pretty much every culture for the last many, many thousands of years have had individuals who correspond sort of across the lines of reality, across the threshold of life and death with an understanding that there are relational capacities and potentials that can be navigated. So I don’t know. I think we just need to understand the historical context around that, which is, it’s been with us throughout the generations and don’t worry so much about it. But actually the way I look at all of these skills, and we could go on, there’s a huge list of these kinds of skills that come in to play in a team of healing arts professionals. The way I look at all of them, it’s a gift essentially. And then they’re gifts that you refine. So you think about it in another field. Someone has a beautiful voice, they refine that and become an amazing opera singer. It’s no different In the healing arts. You have a gift towards somatic intelligence. You have a gift towards clairvoyance. You have a gift towards communicating across the lines of life and death. Great. You have a gift and then you practice, you develop and evolve that, and then you increase your capacity. So it’s really not like any other profession at core. It’s the same fundamental raw materials.

Katie In the weaving of that. Right. So let’s say you’ve got the composition of the team looks different every session. Yeah. I guess you mentioned a little bit around ego modulation as one way to keep the collective creation balanced. Is there anything else you want to share around the play of when one scale steps forward or how you call folks forward or how the rhythm of that shifting gears there?

Shay Yeah, I mean I really do feel it is so musical because it’s energetic. So it is like a band where sometimes you have the drum solo because that’s the moment where the drum solo makes sense. Sometimes the vocalist is featured because that’s the moment where you want to feature the vocalist because energetically in the composition, that’s why music is such a good analogy for this in the composition of the whole healing experience. It’s energy. So is music, it’s energy, and it has an orchestration to it. It has an infrastructure to it, it has a team to it, it has an execution and it has a timing and a synchrony. And so it’s really quite parallel on a lot of levels. And of course you’ll have maybe that conductor is calling out someone or calling out a section of instruments. Right now we need the string section because that’s what we need. So yeah, there’s usually a person even within a band that’s kind of helping to do that. But as you get to know each other better and better and better, you can start to pick up subtle cues from one another where verbal and nonverbal cues that will start to help you to read. Okay, I can sense that person is indicating we might need to move in a certain direction. And so you pay attention to their cues, but in any performance, it takes a lot of skill to get to a level where you can read one another well enough that you know how to interpret that and then to respond. So there’s both interpreting and then responding appropriately. And that takes a lot of time and cultivation. And I think the other part in the session I want to talk about, so as we go into the session, we have the initial introduction, then we do a whole period of guidelines where we share with people. Katie, you often call it like a set of permissions. It’s all these things, and happy to share more about that. But I don’t think we’ll go into the detail on the guidelines a long list. But it’s permissions essentially. You can move your body in a lot of different ways. You can pause the session at any time you are in control. It’s your inner intelligence that gets guiding it, but you don’t have to do that consciously. So there’s a whole series of these things that we go through that are designed essentially to empower the person who’s in the participatory role to feel like they are in charge and at the same time that they’re really supported and taken care of. And then a little bit of those guidelines is just to explain how we will also be supporting one another that we work as a team. And so you might see us helping or supporting one another over the course of a session of the session so that they understand that too when that’s occurring. So it’s explaining it. It’s explaining that some of it can look really weird, that healing by its very nature at a deep level where you’re accessing soul level healing, it’s very symbolic. It can be very animalistic, visual, sound oriented, energy based. It doesn’t always make a lot of rational sense. It doesn’t live with any kind of exclusivity or even strong tie to what we would think of as rational thought. And so you have to also allow people to just say, I feel like a redness in my stomach. I feel like if I were an animal right now, I would be a bird. You don’t have to understand that with rational thought. You just have to allow the imagery and the symbolism to come forward because that’s what allows kind of deeper soul level transformation. And if you look at this in the work of mythology or some of Joseph Campbell’s work, again, these aren’t new ideas. There is already language written around the idea that soul level transformation is often symbolic and image-based. It’s often through storytelling that we convey it from culture to culture. But this is the landscape we’re playing with in these Integrative Touch Therapy sessions. It’s the landscape of the soul. So it is often energetic, symbolic image involves a lot of movement to help things to transform. And so you’re in kind of another language. You’re in another sort of paradigm. And so you have to respect, well, what’s the constraint of that paradigm or what’s the landscape of that paradigm?

Katie I’m glad you referenced the animal component. It was coming forward really strong as you were discussing the band aspect, because in a lot of ways, sciences come to understand that animals can communicate across groups at a great distance beyond space and time. They have other senses that allow them to circumnavigate the world or hear each other from across the ocean or behave and move and choose action through interrelation. And one really beautiful thing I love about this work is we don’t that hierarchical kind of resistance, that avoidance of that, the placement in hierarchy within this work also does not place us as humans above animals like we are within a greater ecosystem in the way that we work and the way that we come together. And even to reference your last point, Shay are woven in story beyond the constructs of the western mind.

Shay And as you know, Katie, I will be learning from the whales for the rest of my life. So how do I see that? I see it, it’s almost the same as how there’s different intelligences among different members of the team. Well, there’s different intelligence among different members of the larger team, the birds, the whales, you just take it out and out and out and out. Guess what? They have forms of intelligence. We don’t have to. And there’s times you want to call on the turtles, and there’s reasons that biologists are studying some of the extraordinary things that other animals can do that we can’t do because it has incredible potential for how life on this planet moves forward. If we really draw upon that collective intelligence, it’s so much broader than just human being intelligence. Human being intelligence is quite myopic in certain ways. There are other forms of intelligence that are much more collaborative in certain respects, right? We’re obviously super hosts. We’re very, very good at that. Our guts exhibit that very nicely. But all I’m saying is it’s really so similar to the team-based approach on the Integrative Touch Therapy team that all the members of the animal kingdom, they’re bringing other forms of intelligence that we can also be drawing from and learning from their wisdom. So yeah, there is no dominion over the animals in this methodology. We are very often drawing from appreciating, respecting and giving gratitude to those sources of wisdom and knowledge that other animals carry and offer. So part of the deal.

Katie And I would expand that even more just to include the elements or the aspects more universal material or the forces of this earth habitat that also have their own inner intelligence and can be great resource.

Shay Right? Well, a hundred percent. And I think I was thinking about this this morning. I think part of what for some folks could make this conversation a little challenging is we’re talking about a methodology that at its core is really energy based. So yes, it interfaces with bodies, with animals, with nature, a hundred percent. We are interfacing with all of those things. But at core, integrated touch therapy is operating system is an energetic operating system. And so what does that mean? It means the rules are a little different, right? It’s not a materialist view, it’s a spiritual view and it’s a non-material view, but that interfaces with the material world. And so that’s a really interesting dynamic when you’re dealing with things that are spiritual, not materially focused, and yet you are interfacing with how those immaterial spiritual influences play out in a physical form like a human body or in a life. And that interface is super interesting, and it’s, in my mind, it’s the biggest piece right now that’s overlooked in western medicine is we’ve disconnected. And I don’t believe that a lot of ancient cultures did create this disconnection. I think it is a little bit more of a modern problem, so to speak. But we’ve sort of disconnected from the understanding that physical problems can have deeply spiritual roots. And so we tend towards an understanding of if you got cancer, it was a physiological, it was a development of a physiological illness through a biomechanical model. That is largely how western medicine currently understands illness. This understanding of illness that I think is really a very ancient one says actually there are spiritual roots in all illness that connect in through energy systems and then through physical presence that supports the manifestation of certain types of illness. And there’s a variety of different reasons for why that happens. But you can go back to those spiritual roots and have a deeper of understanding of why that particular illness is needing or wanting to manifest at this particular time. And to me, that understanding is so valuable because then that gives you more opportunity to create change because it could manifest in a lot of different ways. It’s not like it only has to manifest in one way when you understand the roots of it. So to me, that’s why I love practicing Integrative Touch Therapy because I think you can get way upstream to why did this have to, what was this spiritual need or path that then led you down ultimately this road of a particular illness or imbalance? What led to that? And could we attend to what that upstream element is so that maybe the illness doesn’t even have to continue to manifest in this particular way? Maybe we can just shift it together, maybe together with your inner intelligence, we could just shift it. And sometimes you do and sometimes you can, because it doesn’t need, you don’t have to hold something in the material world that’s shifted energetically and spiritually. You don’t have to hold it. That right there can create change.

Katie Love that love, so much freedom there haha. Yeah. I really want to make space for you to share more about that calling to the root, that deep dive. Because this work is set up as an intensive to go as deep as possible. And there’s a million opportunities to get to the kind of just down corollary stories or down different paths that can just not be as core as essential to the primary challenge at hand. So I’ve seen you so many times say it, it’s not that door and root just a little lower and uncover a grand entrance to the true what’s really at the heart of the matter. And there’s this knowing in you that really knows which precipice leads to the greatest healing. And if there’s anything you can share around that.

Shay Yeah, I think a couple things come to mind right away. One, the drive for that to go to the deepest place possible and to create the greatest healing transformation that is available in that given moment. That drive is based in love and compassion because if you could help someone heal a little bit or a lot of bit, I want to help them heal a lot of bit because why not? It’s better that way. And again, you’re going to have, in any given moment, you’re going to have kind of a maximum potentiality that that person is willing and able to do in that moment. But I always want to go the furthest that I can with their permission. That’s the essence of it. I want to go the furthest that I can with their permission to heal as deeply as possible that will allow the greatest positive transformation in their life. So that’s kind of what I’m always looking for. And in integrated touch therapy, after we go through those guidelines, we ask the question of what is it you most want to heal or transform in your life right now? And the person will share that however they want to share that. It can be in their own words. It comes out and even sounds, and there’s a whole lot of ways you can express that. We use that as this jumping off place really to delve more deeply into the next layers of the session that continue to unfold. But there will always come, it seems sort of a catalytic moment because there typically is a resistance at some level to what it takes to heal. Because healing requires transformation, which requires change, which can feel scary. And so at some moment, that person’s system will resist a bit, right? It’ll push back like, ah, I don’t know if I want to jump off this cliff. You’re going to ask me to jump off of. I’m not sure what if it’s scary and dangerous. And so almost everybody, almost everybody needs a little bit of a catalyst. They need a little bit of an impetus that says, guess what? We’re doing it anyway. We’re doing it together. You’re not alone. I’m with you. I’m jumping off the cliff with you. Here we go. Let’s go. I would imagine it’s like a lot in skydiving where sometimes the person who’s jumping with you, if you’re doing it in a pair, they’re like, and we can do it. Let’s go. We’re doing it together. Here we go. It’s the Sherpa as you’re climbing Mount Everest that says, guess what? This is hard. You can do it. We’re together. You have a guide. I’ve done it before. Here we go. Let’s go. It’s an energetic thing that communicates from one system to another. You’re not alone. Don’t be afraid. I’m here. I have a path of wisdom that’s going to help to guide and protect you. Let’s make it happen. And it is a little bit of a forceful thing sometimes for me when I think of the, I like a lot the analogy of surgery when it comes to integrated touch therapy in this kind of a method because, but there also is the place in which you make the cut and the catalyst is the cut. The catalyst is kind of like, no more bullshit. Here we go. And it cuts through. It cuts through. You hear this actually, it’s in so many traditions, which is why it’s so fascinating. This is in Buddhism, it’s the sword that cuts through ignorance. You need that sword. There are times that you must wield that sword in a healing session. And it’s not a literal sword obviously, but it’s an energetic sword that cuts through ignorance and just goes right to the heart of it and gives a strong, in a way, it’s an impetus, but it’s a strong clear, I don’t like the word command because that doesn’t, right? But it’s a clear energetic, it’s a push, but we don’t have the word in English for what this is exactly, or I can’t think of it right now If we do, but you got to do it. You got to do it. It’s just like a surgeon. You got to cut open the body, otherwise you can’t get in and perform the surgery. So it’s really similar to that. And then you’re in, once you make that cut, once they jump off that metaphorical edge, now you’re into the next domain of the session. Now you’re in the inner workings, now you’re in the spiritual, now you’re in the immaterial. Now you can go at a much deeper level and that even in the session is often when people start to transform, they might lie down. They sort of go into more non-dual states. A lot of this, it’s like states that people could experience on plant medicines or other things that again, have been used historically. But in these sessions you don’t need that because we’re kind of a collective plant medicine. We’re energetically embracing a lot of the similar principles of that non-dual reality. But we’re doing it energetically through collective system and entrainment. And so it’s just a different path in, but it gets you in and you can do this through meditation. There’s all sorts of ways into the layers of consciousness. Yes. Like plant medicines is one way. It’s not the only way. You can do it through all sorts of things. You can do it through Integrative Touch Therapy. And so you get people passed into that kind of non-dual state, and now you’re in the next layer of the session and that’s where the deepest healing work happens. There will still be points, potentially of resistance, but you move through all of those. That’s the body of the session really. And where most of the work is actually done, it’s after the cut just in a surgery. Most of the work is done after the cut. And you have to make that decision very carefully of when and how you do that. Once you do that, you’re in. So there’s a lot of intelligence to sort of the when and how you play that catalytic role. And it consciously then emerge into the next part of the session that is a little deeper.

Katie Feels relative in that analogy still, that you would not want to open a body and not clear out all that you came to visit. The energy it will take to integrate and recover from that type of an experience is worth honoring. That opportunity is worth accomplishing the most that’s available.

Shay Precisely. It’s serious business. I treat Integrative Touch Therapy as I would treat a surgery and there’s a part of me don’t f around, and I mean that very literally. Don’t f around. You’re in surgery so you damn well better take this seriously. And I mean that in my own system, I’m communicating that to myself because I know where I’m going and what I’m doing. It’s big, right? It’s like taking someone into surgery and you’re on holy ground in a way when you do that. I would hope that many surgeons honor, feel and remember that you’re on holy ground. And so there’s a part of my own system that says, step up. This is important. Be careful, be wise, be intelligent, and be very present. Be very present.

Katie Yeah. No extraneous efforts or movement or no, make no mess. That’s so key.

Patty And the humility that’s involved in being that I feel that in the space, it’s like there is nothing done without the permission of either the soul of that person or it is actually an accompaniment even when it is more like the surgeon decides on the cut. It’s like that person decides that that’s what is one, what’s guiding even the impetus for that.

Shay Exactly.

Katie Maybe might be a nice, there’s so much more to the quality and the depth of the session that we could get into, but maybe it would be nice to share a little bit of the emergence from with a little bit of how we support folks in coming to conclusion in the work or how their systems signal and identify that they are concluding.

Shay Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, because you go through this sort of deep transformative healing work experience, which looks very different for each individual, but then there is a coming out to the other side, it is very equivalent to the waking up out of anesthesia and then kind of coming back into what we consider normal reality, right? It is that. And so you’re moving from a non-dual reality back into this reality that we call life here on earth. And there’s a transitory process to that, just like there is in waking up out of anesthesia in hospital, what do you see? You start to see cues and signs that the person’s system is starting to regulate back more in the day-to-day. So that can be things like they’re tracking more and orienting more to the physical environment. It can be things like they’re looking, they’re able to see and look and hear and communicate more with the members of the team. They’re basically reorienting. It’s like nervous system reorientation and integration back into this realm, this dimension, this earth plane with all that exists on it, which is material immaterial and the people that are present in the space along with the objects that are present in the space. So as the system kind of awakes out of these non-dual states, it comes back into relationship with the here and now and the who’s here in the here and now, what’s here in the here and how do I feel in the here and now. So there’s all of those layers that begin to come back online. And then as you guys know, we do a ritual at that point, once it feels like the person’s kind of reacclimated to present time and is out of that non-dual state where time and space are not what they are here as they’ve come back, then we actually do a ritual where we sit in a circle, we share, we have objects that we use that the person can use to express themselves in terms of what their experience is, and they get to share and we each get to share, and there’s this kind of collective ritual that we do where we share and then we take objects and we put them into usually a vessel or a container that we have in the center of the circle. So we’ve both begun and ended in a circle, which also creates a format and a framework. So that person’s system is like, okay, got it. We start, we end in a circle. Okay, got it. That’s how this is. And then as you guys also know, we very gradually move them back into their life. We ask people to take the day off, not to make commitments because you are still kind of in a little bit of an altered state of consciousness typically after the session. And so you don’t want to drive quickly. If someone can pick you up, that’s good. You may just want to lay out in the sun for a little or listen to the birds or just kind of reorient to life here on earth. So it’s a slow gradual unfolding and reorientation back into the world essentially.

Katie I would say maybe we’re expanding what follow-up care can look like and the way that resources to support are offered longitudinally from there too. Right?

Shay Yeah, exactly.

Katie Do you want to share a little Shay about maybe your vision for the future of this work?

Shay Yeah, I mean, at this point I want to continue to develop our team of people that are trained in Integrative Touch Therapy. We’re doing it at this stage internally with our staff, but we’re also developing a manual and a book that’ll be coming out eventually. And then classes that people can come to take to both be introduced to the therapy. I think it’s much harder to understand this in words. We’ve tried to convey it in words today in this conversation, but language is challenging when you’re dealing with things like this. And so a direct experience can be really beneficial. So we’re creating opportunities for people to directly experience Integrative Touch Therapy, both in our ongoing clinical work at the healing Center, but then also I’m working with someone to develop the whole training platform that we’re going to be offering. So people will be able to come and train in this and then take it back into their communities. And provided it always has to be provided in teams. So you’ve got to have teams of people that are learning it, that can practice it together. It will continue, I think, to grow and evolve from there through all the beings that are sharing it. And as we continue to share it at our Integrative Touch Healing Center, it’ll continue to evolve. The cool thing about any organic process is it’s not stagnant. I mean, even if I look like I talked about my root teacher, Ray, if I looked at the beginning of his career and the end of his career, I was at those two pivotal times in his life. The core of what he did was still the same, right? There was an essence to it. That was probably the lineage that he was working from that was handed down. He put his own unique imprint and stamp on it, and it had an essence that was there from the beginning, and it was there at the end. But his operational model for how he did it changed because he grew, he evolved, he learned things, he developed new ideas. He actually added more layers of support. He was a lot more ambitious, younger in his career in terms of, and then later in his career, he made sure he had a lot more layers of support. So it wasn’t so hard. So he figured things out along the way that made it better over time. And we will do the same thing. We will figure out collectively over time things that help this to go more smoothly for people and for us as members of the team. So I don’t anticipate this will look exactly the same. I think the core elements are the core elements. There’s an essence to it that it’s intact, right? There’s that. But will it like any biological process, continue to change, transform, evolve? I would fully anticipate that. I hope that continues well beyond my lifetime. I don’t want this. This is not frozen in time. It is like other sort of biological creations here in this place. It’s changing, it’s moving, it’s growing, it’s learning. So we want to keep that happening and not try to lock it down. So yeah.

Patty So appreciating just all the sharings, your awarenesses, the collective experience, and as you so wonderfully and your podcasts with this question, we would love to ask you, and I know this, it feels like an ongoing conversation. It feels like we’ve touched into integrative touch, and I was going to ask, are there questions that we didn’t ask? And I know there are many. So actually in this moment, I mean, was there something that you actually, in this moment that we were together, is there something you feel like maybe was missed or a question that wasn’t asked in this moment that you would like to share a little bit more before we ask the question about healing?

Shay Yeah, I don’t feel something specific. I think my sense is maybe we’ll do a series over time. There is so much more we could delve into here. And so perhaps we’ll do a series on Integrative Touch Therapy that will release gradually over time that will help to call out some of the specific aspects of a session and to delve because it’s such nuanced work. And so there’s many things you could go into in great detail that we’ve touched on today, but that you could really hone in on and explore a lot further. And so maybe we’ll talk about the possibility of doing just that. So that would be one idea I would have.

Patty Great.

Shay Yeah.

Katie I’ll tune in. So yeah, how would you define healing Shay?

Shay Hmm… my first answer is, I don’t know.

Katie Perfect.

Shay That’s my answer. I’ve asked a ton of people. I love all their answers.

Patty Hahahah

Shay Oh my God, it pulls everything out of me, Patty, everything just in my own life to heal from all the things that I am healing from and continue to heal from. It’s such a beautiful and deep calling to access the deepest part of who you are, which is for me at core, what healing really is. It’s accessing the deepest part of who each one of us is that is connected in my to source. Again, lots of names for that, but it’s just dropping in to that essential nature and intelligence that we have emerged from and are living through and and allowing that to more deeply inform how we live. So I think my understanding of healing is deeply rooted in that source intelligence that is loving, compassionate, very willing to change and transform as needed and is highly interdependent and relational. So my experience of a lot of beautiful moments in healing from through inter dynamic relationship, and it can be relationship with others like we’re kind of talking about today, but it can also be relationship with source or kind of divine intelligence, however you want to name that. It can also be relationship with that. But it seems to me that most healing at its core is relational and connected to that deep essential source energy that has incredible potentiality for transformation, and also a recognition of a depth of wholeness and perfection that is instilled in each one of us at all times already. So on another level, there’s absolutely nothing that needs to heal. It’s almost like at some core level, there’s such a perfection inside each being already that there’s actually nothing that needs to heal or transform. So to me, the greatest definition of healing that I could try to come up with and put into this language that we’re using today called English, it’s a composition of these two things. And even more than that, that there is a full perfection that is already healed, that needs to do nothing, grow in no way. Change in no way is already essentially perfect exactly as it is. And simultaneous to that, there’s an energy of potentiality that can move and shift and evolve and grow. And that synergistically, those two live together in a kind of perfect dynamic harmony that is one that is ultimately unified. Really simple answer know.

Katie Great.

Shay Well, first off, thank you both. I honor you both so much. I don’t know how I would be doing this work without either one of you. I am so grateful to have you as members of our Integrative Touch Therapy team slash band slash surgical unit slash slash slash other things too. We are completely doing this together. It is a synergistic harmony that is co-created and evolving and changing, and also perfect already exactly as it is. And I appreciate your courage in stepping forward and having this conversation today on a little bit more of what Integrative Touch Therapy is. And also we touched a lot on what it means to heal. So thank you both.

Patty Thank you Shay.

Katie Thank you, Shay. It’s an honor and delight to steward this work together.

Conclusion We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Conversations on Healing Podcast. If you haven’t yet, please go to Apple Podcast, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform and subscribe, rate, and review. This podcast, it helps so you won’t miss an episode. See you next time.