Consciousness And Healing

Introduction to Peter Mark Adams and healing energy 0:00

My guest today is Peter Mark Adams, and in his new book, The Power of the Healing Field, you'll also find that he talks a lot about what is his experience, as is shared both with his his clients and also those of work with his wife, Kenzie. They've shared a healing and personal development of practice for over 20 years, and they specialize in energy therapies, breathwork and meditation for over 45 years is practiced a range of meditative and energy based techniques including Mind Connection, Healing, Reiki, EFT, Mindfulness, and Rebirthing.

Peter, it's a joy to have you on the show. Thank you. Dawson. The pleasure's mine. Yes, it's, people are listening to. Don't need convincing that energy heals. You are. So have we. Have we finished? All right. So we're done here. So what was your your very first experience of the power of energy to heal. And how did it shift your thinking in your practice? Well, my my engagement with energy goes right back to my teens. that was a long time ago. And it was through the, mechanism of the martial arts.

And it seems a rather contrary starting point, but in fact, the, system of Shotokan karate that I studied as a teenager had a close connection with the healing arts, both, concerned with the cultivation of inner energy and with the effects of that on consciousness, on on the depth of our awareness, so that the same acupuncture points that may be strike points in an offensive capacity are also the same points that you would need to stimulate to, provoke recovery so that the energy body, so to speak, has this dual aspect to it.

So very early on, I was, taught by a very prominent UK master, and his ability to cultivate and direct energy was truly astonishing. So, I progressed from there to Tai Chi, and then after many years in business, I started working with Reiki and the again, it was an encounter with an extraordinary teacher

Martial arts, Reiki, and early energy healing experiences 2:37

that really opened my eyes to the full dynamics of the energy field. So it was that initial experience of energy through the martial arts. And till you said that I had no idea that the acupressure points to use for healing are the same as those were used when you're, say, doing a martial art for real and needing to actually defend yourself. I didn't know that. Yeah. It's not it's not spoken about very much because it is a deadly, form of offensive, action. So it's generally kept quiet. with good reason.

And so also meaning being masters, many people who are masters of their energy craft or of healing is powerful because it gives you a model. And I also think there's some residents going on there to it helps them train you in the in a very practical, real way in, in a felt sense of what those practices and therapies are like. Yeah. I mean, working with a master like that, was a lesson in discipline and itself, in integrity, self-management and all of these things are conducive to the energy bodies, health and well-being, you know, and on top of the practical benefits of exercise, I mean, on an inner plane, let's say. Yes.

And then you get in the book, you go into the various types of that, inner work. And you start by talking about how we can access knowledge beyond our five senses. How does that work? How does work for you? And I've become over the years, I mean, let me, let me put some background here. My, my formal academic background is in very rigorous philosophy. Okay. So it's not very conducive to views of consciousness, that emerge in healing contexts. So, I, I've, I've come to the view over the years that the only sensible way of understanding the phenomena that arise during energy healing is that we are living in a pantheist universe.

That's to say, consciousness is distributed throughout every part of reality. And that being the case or awareness is something like a torch or a focus that can be moved from its present setting with day to day reality, to explore far wider reaches of consciousness in the past, in the future and at great distance from us. And energy healing practices over these 20 odd years has taught me that this is integral part of the energy healing path. So that idea that consciousness is distributed in every part of reality means that when you access consciousness, you're able to access all those different parts of reality.

That's a really powerful way to look at it. But how do you begin to actually operationalize that and healing and insight into people you work with and, and in your own life? Yeah, I think anyone who practices EFT starts out tapping themselves. There's a very kinetic element in that. but very quickly you realize that you can tap for somebody else, which is a strange concept, and therefore the kinetic element is put in question to some extent. And then if you imagine your tapping for someone else, that can also be efficacious in certain circumstances and so can imagine in your tapping, for somebody who's not even present at the moment can be efficacious.

So from a very basic starting point with a very effective technique, you can be very quickly led into the depths of the field. The healing field is. Interesting because when I teach workshops, there's always a moment, usually around hour or two. So it begins. Usually I'm in a conference center or I'm, in a institute, or maybe I'm in a university and I'm teaching, and then usually somewhere around the second hour or the third hour, it's something starts to get really fluid about people's psyches, about even about the room.

Even people say that that the atoms, the room starts to tend to shimmer and become become plastic and, and suddenly transformation begins. So, yeah, I know that this traditional acupuncture theory and that we say we're tapping on the exact bunch of points and changing and balancing in the meridian energy flows. But I, I it does feel subjectively to people who are doing it that something else is going on there.

Consciousness beyond the senses and the healing field 7:27

Yeah, I think it really hit home, for me, when I first attended Family Constellation Therapy and the the facilitator was a very dynamic woman, shamanic. So she, she had this aura, but the constellations were fascinating because complete strangers were picking up the thoughts and feelings and even the physical posture of people who were not present, but were part of that client's family constellation of relations. Okay. Because, you know, essentially you go there and 1 or 2 people will be there for therapy, and the others are kind of observing participants who may or may not be selected to represent particular family members, but when you are selected and placed in the middle of the room to represent some of these long gone grandfather, for instance, you find that you, all all of a sudden subject to an emotional overlay.

That's to say you're perfectly self conscious, aware, thoughtful, like you're able to access a range of thoughts and feelings which are not your own. And as you do so, in effect, you're recovering from the field, an ethical dimension of behavior and practice that's long past from the physical plane. And so that leads us to the whole area you talk about in your work of ancestral healing, how those, those patterns can be passed along to us from the past and how by healing them, the present healing in the past, I think, is just a really remarkable idea.

I'd I'd love to you to elaborate on that. I think for me, the other great lesson from Family Constellations is that the traumas in the ancestral and familial line, so to speak, often have a pronounced ethical basis. And so it's possible through the constellation to, so to speak, resurrect the disturbance, the ethical disturbance that gave rise to the problem. and through the practice, the practice of, of of acknowledging pain given and of forgiving it, you recode the field to nullify ancestral trauma.

That's to say the field has a distinctly ethical character to it. You recall that trauma. Give us an example from an actual client or from the old life where that happened. And thinking of, this an example in the book, of course, of a close friend of ours who lived for years with a fear that somehow her son was in danger and there was no basis for this feeling. But she went into constellation therapy, and they found that generation after generation, there was this fear of losing a child in the maternal line.

And I think 5 or 6 generations into that line, they found the causation, the traumatic loss of a child. So it had happened. And then being conveyed through the field, through all the generations of women down to her today. Was there any basis for that fear? I mean, was it any basis in, in terms of danger to her son? No, not at all. No. That's the irony of the case. It was totally irrational fear, but it was a persistent one. it was it was not something that could be brushed off or ignored, even though it had no basis whatsoever.

And then might we have been changing the past in some way by changing the present? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, this this whole issue of time in relation to the field is a very problematic one because we think in linear terms that the field doesn't seem to possess that quality. about the future. Yeah. It all seems to be co-present, you know, but that's too much for us to grasp. yeah. It's interesting. I, I had experience that sexual healing when I was doing a lot of clearing at one point in my life, and I, I have some pretty stinky ancestors who did some pretty miserable things, and we're pretty generally just really unhappy people.

So I backed along the line and tapped and released and and escaped with all of them. And I always felt this whole group of beings breathed a huge collective sigh of, So you rectified the ancestral field? Essentially. Yeah. I'm not sure. You know, what what what objective effect it had, but certainly subject could be for me. It made me feel much more peace and and compassionate to all these people who are really struggling in their lives. I mean, they were acting these doofus ways because they were they were just suffering so much. So.

that. Yeah, yeah. When you consider the temporal element in this, were you in the future for them, or were you. oh. Your activities in the future experience contemporarily with. Them? This really is messing with our notions of the linear nature of time.

Family constellations and ancestral trauma 12:44

Yeah. I think there comes a point when we just can't quite get our minds around it. Yes, of course that's that. That's the present moment, too, when you just deal with what you have in front of you at the present moment, you heal in the present moment, and then you know that that's that's what's really your real work to do right now. Like I was asking, members of mine who's a really well-known coach about what collectively we can do about all the, the kind of the global counter trend crises that are going on that that seem as other threatening our survival and and her advice was just, just do your work.

Do what's in front of you right now. That's enough. Yeah. I think it's it's important for anyone engaged in energy healing work to. Yes, of course. Be in the now. It's the only time we have after all. And the other thing is to shift into, a position of leadership. You know, I think there's a pivotal point where we move from I to we. And when we do so, all of that other stuff matters, but it matters in a different way because we now become proactive in terms of, of of the assistance we give. And it changes everything.

So somebody who for whom this is really new and somebody who's been just living life with the the no local reality of their five senses, how do they start to become aware of these other dimensions? I think the path is is through, empathic engagement. And that is the probably the key characteristic of a very successful healers. Certainly Kenzi has that in abundance. And you can see from the stories, her stories in the book that she probes into incredibly deep recesses. but but it occurs spontaneously.

It doesn't require an effort. There's not a trick to it. It's just the empathic engagement is of such a depth. The will to heal and to help is sufficient to navigate the field. the will to heal, the will to help. Yeah. So for somebody, again, for who? This is unfamiliar. what. How they they find that signal, how would they tune into that empathic engagement if it's not something that they've been trained in or a practice for spontaneous, you know, spontaneous, but how does somebody for whom this is very new make a start?

I think for me, Reiki did a lot in that sense. Firstly because it's just hands on and there's no, intellectual engagement in it. It's just the willingness to put yourself forward and and hands on for a period of time. and with that, it kind of disengages the rationalizing side of your mind and focuses you on the effects that you're generating. And I think this this affects a shift or a transition from our normal modes of awareness, which are generally very controlling into something far more empathetic.

So for me, Reiki really helped. consciously. Increase that that feeling, that feeling of empathy, that feeling of connection by by intending to do that. And I'm not sure about that. I think just, by putting yourself forward and actually engaging with other people, teachers, all that you need to know about an increasing depth of engagement. So you come to experience such a range of difficulties, problems that other people have. It changes your perception of reality and of the motivations that drive people's behavior.

Very often you come from or understanding of the deep roots of people's behavioral problems. Which again makes us more compassionate. And then you talk a lot in the book about past lives. And, I, I was, having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day about past lives, and she was saying, oh, I remember all these past lives, and I mean literally dozens of them. And going back and working with them. And she, in fact, reached a point of non-duality in her life where when she hit that experience, she spent several months actually spending about 4 or 5 times a day going back to past lives, recalling them in great detail, healing them, and then eventually was sort of resolved with that.

Whereas, I just have, you know, I've had past life regression, sessions. I really don't remember any of those. How necessary is it and how possible is it to recall those? I think it's as variable, as the person you know, I'm very much, aligned with you on this one, dose. And it's not something I consciously explore and never have. On the other hand, I am aware of some people who seem to have a natural facility for slipping into it. So I think we're all called to do some different work in this life.

And, whatever that is, as long as you are on it and engage with it, that's sufficient. So it can go either way. And if you, really have access to those past life memories, then getting engaged with them is is a appropriate and good healing path. You think I've ever taken. and, I think the problem with it, if there is a problem, is that you can get too much engaged in the stories of past lives and neglect the healing because healing happens in the here and now,

Early trauma, womb experiences, and haunting 18:38

and it's essential that that process go on. Recalling past lives in Roman times or whatever is kind of by the by, unless a profound healing or deep traumatization takes place at that time. You know, let's talk about a topic now that is, of a lot of interest in psychiatry at the moment. And that's early life trauma, especially prenatal trauma. And we know that we have good tools to do to deal with trauma. Nowadays, we can take people who are traumatized with high levels of symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares and, intrusive thoughts or some form of PTSD.

We know that in a very brief time frame of usually out of ten sessions, we can clear them of those those those symptoms using techniques like EFT and eMDR, these body based techniques. But we also know that. When the. Trauma occurred early, before the development of language, especially womb trauma, it is really hard to treat because that's when the brain was developing. The brain was forming at that time. And so if those traumatic memories were being embedded at the phase in which the emotional brain especially was growing and developing, the first couple of years of life, and certainly earlier in the womb, it's really hard to to treat trauma that occurred so early.

I'd love you to show you insights into how we work with that type of very early life trauma. Well, there was one, interesting case that Kinsey had. it was a client who came to her with an acute snake phobia, and, it was not so much snakes that triggered the phobias. Anything snake like, anything that tended to bind. And that included roads. So you can imagine how difficult time they were having. Now. There's so many curve things, pavements, you know, there's so many things that occurred and are so.

Constantly getting these. Jolts. So now the strange thing is that, Kinsey worked with the client using classical TFT, and as they worked through it, there were no memories associated with a snake surfacing whatsoever. And this is the peculiar thing. When he was in the womb, still, his mother had walked into the kitchen and seen a snake on the floor, and it given her such a shock. Although it wasn't a danger, it was a distinct shock to the system. And he seems to have inherited this, this this unaccountable, snake like phobia throughout his life.

But classically EFT was sufficient to remove it. So it was a phobia without any real basis, but nevertheless a real phobia. So what's going on at the energy level in the case like that? Well, I take the view that the mind, I mean, the problem is if consciousness is produced by the mind, then of course there's no basis for such a phobia to form. in the early years of being in the womb. So surely this disproves that thesis that the mind is a transmitter receiver, let's say, instead of a generator of consciousness, and in which case perfectly capable of picking up what the mother is feeling.

and then, what would happen in a case where a person was in a womb that, for example, where the mother was having a lot of negative experiences, the mother was being abused, the other was being abusive, the mother was at, say, a mutually abusive relationship. And the baby is being subject to constant psychological insults and energetic insults in the womb. How do you I mean. The techniques are, the same. but, you know, to work at that level, at that depth, I think requires a good deal of experience.

there's so many aspects, involved in that. And primarily the threat, to survival that's so fundamental. And we have cases where, at some point in the, in the, in the birth cycle, the perinatal cycle, the mother considered abortion and the child, had a distinct I mean, the the fetus had a distinct reaction to that and came for healing. And it emerged through the healing process. The extended work with the EFT that it had felt that its life, right to life was threatened. And it made a commitment not to be a burden and carried this through life, which incredibly difficult thing to do, so that the EFT, so to speak, peeled away the layers of this trauma down to a threat, fundamental threat to survival.

that said, the techniques did not alter that much the efficacious, but the empathic guidance to the core of the trauma is what the the experienced healer like, like Kenzie brings to the situation the persistence with which they stay with the client. And these are kind of cases which, she would wear for three hours, for instance, easily. that's not unusual with the depth that she's working. So her sessions are in the normal sort of one hour of most healing sessions. They can go much longer for three.

Now, and she's dealing with some, extreme trauma, traumatic cases. Peter, you have a whole section in the book on haunting, and I found that really interesting. I've never given it much thought before that you have all kinds of different types of haunting you talk about and what these are, what these beings are, these energies, energies are. I'd love you to share that with us, that respect of all the different kinds of hauntings, and also some stories about people that you've worked with or kenzie's work with, where this was a factor.

Yeah, it's a, it's a it's a pretty strange, avenue to consider, but it's nevertheless one which is recognized in a kind of time honored fashion within the world of energy healing. and I'm referring specifically to acupuncture with the kinds of, the shell they call it the will gooey of somebody who's passed over, attaches itself to, somebody, and becomes a drain on their energy. So we have some cases where people have had an operation, and obviously people have died in that hospital unexpectedly and kind of not realizing that that have attached themselves to somebody else's energy body.

now the the signs of this are normally that there's a persistent, failure to heal. So if it's an operation, if you don't seem to recover, there's a persistent ache and pain, and it's often the case that a attachment has taken place. So these are fairly easily removed. So this is one aspect of the, haunting so to speak. a more profound aspect is when you have an intercession in a healing session, for a specific purpose. And one of Kenzie's cases was a woman who was in the kitchen persistently washing up and washing up because she she had lost her husband.

She was lost in sorrow and was attempting, you know, because he did so much in the kitchen to kind of recover that through acting out the process of being in the kitchen and imagining him to be there now, when she came for treatment for The Sorrow, Kenzie got the distinct impression of this presence and the message coming through. I want you to stop doing that and to let go of it. And although the woman hadn't actually conveyed all of this background to Kenzie when she relayed the message, it immediately triggered her awareness of the kind of causative nexus of her sorrow.

And it came out and she was able to clear it with, again, classic EFT didn't require anything more than that. So the intercession brought through the healer exactly the information that was necessary for the healing process to start. What are some of the other types of haunting you cover in the book?

Peak states, Kundalini, and transcendent awareness 27:48

Well, some of them are, of course, a kind of shadow cast by past events. And it seems that certain places, landscapes, certain buildings have an energetic configuration and such that they seem to capture rather like a negative, in a camera, an impression of events that have passed. Now, the characteristic of those types of haunting haunting is that they're always the same. They never change. You see a certain figure at a certain time moving across a certain space, and it never alters. of course, battlefields are also places where you can, divine a kind of ongoing conflict with their places that require healing.

In other words. So these are two aspects of the, haunting phenomena in the landscape and in, in buildings. there's there's a final one that we can mention or is more uplifting. Let's say it's it's called petitioner haunting. And that's when you have an intersection in a healing context in which the client is being urged to do something that was left undone by a relative who's passed on. And we we have one case like that in the in the healing field. And it was to sort out land titles and deeds that they had been responsible for, hadn't resolved, but wished this client, who they were very close to, to do so, and they'd use the healer as a mechanism or a child to get this information across, even though it wasn't directly related to the healing experience.

Peter, I'd like to explore with you in this last segment what you talk about regarding peak states, because healing is necessary. We need to heal our pain, heal our physical bodies, heal our afflictions that hold us back and it's great to be pain free and healthy. But that's just the baseline for for life. Then the next phase is to move into transcendent consciousness. And so, Abraham Maslow in the 1940s called these experiences peak states. Then, Mikhail sent me high, cold, flow. We know that monsters get there.

All the great poets and saints were in these ecstatic states. Let's talk now about peak experiences and how energy and consciousness help move us. There. subject, if that's the right word to Kundalini rising experience on a number of occasions. so that it kind of came out of the blue and there was distinct feeling of like a kind of rumbling in the base of the spine. And then there'd be this ascension up the spine of, of a kind of fiery feeling, when it when it reached, reached your head, it was like an explosion, in which you were kind of and ecstatically engaged with all reality.

And these were not permanent states. They they just occurred spontaneously. and for a short time, you're kind of suspended in ecstasy. And the strange thing about it is that it shifts your awareness from an awareness of what's wrong in the world to an awareness that everything is just as it should be, this extraordinary feeling, these states, temporary then they're not something I've ever worked to cultivate and to try and bring about it. Will. I mean, they were just a gift. and after, after these experiences for like, ten days or so after, I'd be at peace with everything and everyone.

And then slowly this is erodes us all the troubles of life come flooding back in and you have to deal with them. So, So for me, they they opened a window. they didn't become an obsession for me. They opened a window into a level of perception, a way of being that was elevated. And I think they're integral to it in a sense of our spiritual or spirituality. Let's say. You know, most people, it turns out, have them in surveys. more than two thirds of people have had these spontaneously. And you're right, they do fade, but they do have them.

And, it's interesting that the people who were religious had them. So Christians and Buddhists and Jews and Hindus, however. But atheists have them and agnostics have them too. So many people have had those, those glimpses. But one of the striking features of the research into that is that they don't share them with other people, because there's no culturally accepted way of integrating them into your life. So the people have these elevated experiences, and they don't even tell their husbands or wives or priests or daughters or sons or friends about them.

And I know I had the same experience at about 13, and I didn't know what to do with it. I never told anybody about it. So, our culture doesn't provide us with the, the training and the, the, the, the tools to integrate these real lives and expand on them. Yeah. I think the other side of the coin, Dawson, is that there is a tendency to, tend to pursue these experiences, through certain, like, harsh uses of yogic systems to try and stimulate the Kundalini to rise. and I would caution everybody not to do that.

The classic text for this is Gopi Krishna's Kundalini. and there's no doubt about it, he says it in there. It happened as a result of his meditation practices, but then he tried to encourage it and grow it and, and it really got out of control. And he felt he was at the point of dying when the system, his energy system finally kind of balanced out and equalized. So I, you know, if it happens, it happens. But if it doesn't happen, it's okay as well. there are other ways of coming to states of awareness that are inherently spiritual.

So if the Kundalini experiences is is a kind of path of excitation, there's also the path of quietude, of deep inner contemplation that also takes you to a state of non-dual awareness. So, you know, I just caution people from attempting to overstimulate the root chakra, for instance, to cause Kundalini to rise because we don't have the social knowledge and support structures to sustain and look after people who are successful in raising Kundalini. the knowledge about it is so minimal, you know, so if it goes wrong, you're really in trouble.

There'll be very few people who can help you balance it out. So I really, you know, go forward slowly if you're going to go forward at all on that avenue. A friend of mine actually had that experience and then wound up, in a padded cell in a straight jacket because he was he was insane. So, just, Yeah. Took a long time to. Yeah, go through that. So how how else you mentioned, inner contemplation. What are the other, other paths to reaching those peak states? I think for me, I mean, there's always movement.

for instance, Tai Chi. Now, it's going to be an investment of time and effort because the ritual sequence is long and it needs to be memorized and become part of your body memory. but having done so, you have a way of of moving the energy within your body in a very satisfactory way that combines energy movement with meditative states, so that there's a clear path for those who who would want to engage a more physical level. I mean, pure contemplation is difficult. It it's like, you know, facing the wall.

And, you know, there's a lot of this stuff comes up that has to be dealt with in order to, to come to a place of peace. So again, energy psychology techniques are going to be very helpful in that process. But there's going to be a need for enormous amount of patience. Yes. Yeah. Patience and times lead back to that. That's peaceful state over and over and over again. Yeah, I have it. Well, I'm so glad you do kind of peak experiences in the book because they are where we go to once we resolve trauma and then they, they back at us.

And you're right, there's lots of paths to them. And energy psychology is great way of clearing people has been wonderful to connect with you today to share. And just I know that everyone listening is is feeling. You're loving and compassionate and caring and very pleasant tone and your own personal energy, as well as the wonderful insights you share. So thank you so much for being you, for giving this very lucid voice to your experience, and for doing the work you do in the world.