Unlocking Your Hidden Energy Healer
Energy Medicine is based upon the pseudo-scientific premise that the human body encompasses an energetic “life force” and energy centers (chakras) that keep the body’s cells healthy, functioning, and alive. We talked with Dr. Anne Marie Chiasson on her own journey into energy healing, how she combines energy healing with being a traditional Western physician, and her top tips and things everyone needs to understand about energy healing.
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TRANSCRIPT FOR SEASON 1, EPISODE 12 | Unlocking your Hidden Energy Healer
[Music Playing]
Voiceover:
Welcome to The Matcha Guardians Podcast, brought to you by matcha.com. Here we focus on the biggest trending health topics of our time, featuring the greatest and upcoming wellness advocates. Now here are the Matcha Guardians, licensed dietitian, Diana Weil and medical journalist, Elara Hadjipateras.
Elara Hadjipateras:
Hello, hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Matcha Guardians.
Diana Weil:
This week we have Ann Marie Chiasson, who is a very dear friend and someone that I have always looked up to my entire life. She is incredibly well versed in medicine. She's the director of the Fellowship of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. She's also board certified in integrative medicine and family medicine.
She has a longstanding interest in traditional energy healing traditions with an extensive experience exploring energy medicine and alternative healing practices, including time spent with Mayan shamanic healers and psychic surgeons in the Yucatan Peninsula.
She's the author of Energy Healing: The Essentials of Self-Care, co-author of Self-Healing with Energy Medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil, as well as multiple other academic and instructional publications on energy healing and integrative medicine.
She teaches integrative medicine and energy medicine around the country and also has worked extensively as a medical director in hospice. Welcome, Ann Marie.
Ann Marie:
Hi. Thank you for inviting me today, you two.
Diana Weil:
So excited to have you. I think right off the bat, it's interesting when you hear someone who has extensive medical knowledge and is a doctor, but then also has sort of these energy shamanic experiences. And I'm really curious, just sort of your background and how this came about for you.
Ann Marie:
Yeah, so I did it in the opposite way that most physicians do it. I started off as an energy healer. So, I learned energy healing before I went to medical school. And when I went to medical school, which was really kind of a series of accidents, I never wanted to do medicine, but I ended up in medical school, thankfully.
I would scan my patients, so I would run my hands over the patients that I would see in the hospital when no one was looking. And I would notice what the energy field of the body was and then I'd run down and look at the X-ray. So, I started putting the two together. Initially, medicine was the second tradition for me. Energy healing was the first tradition.
The other thing that happened with it was that I had chronic pain when I was younger, and I used energy healing to really resolve that problem. So, I knew about both conventional medicine and energy healing from the moment that I started in medical school.
And it's been helpful for me because they're not really separate, and having conventional on top of the medicine made more sense to me. I think that's why I'm so versed in it and why I like it so much.
Elara Hadjipateras:
So, you mentioned you trained in energy healing. In my mind, it's something that is an innate quality that people have. Some people have it, some people don't. You have this kind of extra sixth sense. You said that you got trained, but do you feel like you had a natural affinity towards it before you did the training?
Ann Marie:
Yes, I agree with you. Everyone's running energy all the time and it's really about changing the aperture of your awareness to it. So, if you only paid attention to your hearing today, your hearing would be different by the end of the day.
So, I think everyone does have a natural affinity and you know this, we know that our hands turn on, they literally start running more energy and capillaries vasodilate when we're holding a baby or touching someone that we care about. Nurses, their hands turn on, physicians, their hands will turn on at work even though they don't know it.
So, I think there's a natural affinity. At the same time, you have to train in things. You have to practice and see when is the energy running, when is the energy not running? So, for learning, you have to have contrast. You have to know on and off to know the difference between on and off.
So, when I trained, I took a class where they showed us how to scan and they showed us how to run energy. And we had feedback, that immediately transfers to medicine, nursing, massage school. Most healers are running energy in their hands.
I do think that each of us has a natural affinity. At the same time, I think that it can be taught and it's more about how you're running energy, whether or not if you're running energy. And I wrote a story about a gentleman that came to see me who was a hunter, and we were working down in Mexico on a trip, and he just could not feel the energy between his hands over and over and over we worked with him.
And finally, I said, how do you feel a bear or an animal when you're in the woods? He said, “Well, my whole body.” I said, “Well, yeah, he feels it with his whole body, which we're doing as well.” So, it's just about how somebody's sensing it, not if they're sensing it and then practicing it.
So, you have the discernment. Oh yeah, when this happens, I'm feeling that. So, it's the same as you doing podcasts. Or in business where you put the aperture of your awareness is where the development occurs.
Diana Weil:
So, do you think everyone can be taught this?
Ann Marie:
Yeah, I think everyone runs that. And I'll tell you something most interesting is I didn't feel a thing for the first year and a half and now I feel all sorts of things. So, I would put my hands on people and run energy and they would immediately fall asleep or say, “This feels so good,” but I couldn't feel a thing, which is kind of ironic. The slower learner ends up doing it the most.
And then over time I could feel it. So, I don't think the actual feeling of it makes as much difference as the running of energy, letting the flow run through your hands into the person and you can send anxiety as easily as you can send compassion into someone.
My teacher used to say, the body doesn't care who's touching it, it only cares about the quality of touch. And I find that to be true. We've all experienced creepy touch. That's somebody who wants something from us or somebody who's trying to get you to stop crying when you burst into tears. That feels terrible. You can feel how uncomfortable they are when they're doing that.
So, I think anyone can be trained in the quality of touch and paying attention to the fact that your quality of touch makes a difference is important. And Elara, I did this with my babies in the beginning. I would notice, or with dementia patients, that if I was rushed, they'd pull away. And if I was in a really good mood, they would be quite calmed and soothed.
Elara Hadjipateras:
Absolutely. That's something I've run into where especially when I'm trying to calm my two-and-a-half-month-old, I need to be calm for him to be calm. He's looking for me to guide his energy. He doesn't know, he's two and a half months old.
I mean, he knows a lot, don't get me wrong, but there definitely is something to that where it has to be the energy I put out and I have to be calm, if I want him to be calm. If I get frustrated, he gets frustrated.
Ann Marie:
Vaccinations are good. I remember when I was exploring this as a family doctor in Canada, we gave the vaccinations and I would see the mother hold the baby and go (eek), right before the needle would go in and the kid would start crying before because the baby's responding to the mother, not the needle. And so, I would distract the mother and just slip it in, no crying. It's so easy to see with mothers and babies.
Elara Hadjipateras:
Well, we just went through our vaccinations, and he actually handled them, knock on wood, his first run really, really well. And I was kind of like, it's going to be a pinch. It's like a bee sting. Then it'll go away. He had the initial like, wow, like kind of, why are you pricking me? And then after 30 seconds he was fine.
Diana Weil:
That is so interesting.
Ann Marie:
Yeah.
Diana Weil:
Ann Marie, you said something else that I thought that really stood out to me just when you were kind of describing your history, you said that you would run your hands over someone's back and then run down and check the X-rays.
And I'm so curious, how often did you know before reaching the X-rays that you were like because you felt that before getting to the X-rays.
Ann Marie:
Yeah, so I would scan their fields. So, here's the body about, well, it's right here, but up somewhere between nine inches and a foot off the body is the edge of the first layer of the field. And I would feel that, so I would run my hand over the patient and then run down.
And I had a friend who, it happens all the time now. It's predictable. The first time it happened, I had a friend who was sick in Nova Scotia, and I was scanning her, and I said, “The problem's right here,” it was over her right hip. I said, “I don't know what it is, but it's here.”
She called me about a week and a half later and she said, “I went to the emergency room, and it was a … she had a huge ovarian cyst. She said, “You're the only one that picked it up.” Now I couldn't tell you what it was, but I knew where the disturbance was.
Or in medical school we would have parties. And people thought it was really interesting I did energy healing and one of my friends said, “Tell me what's wrong with me.” And I scanned her, and I said, “It's your throat. I don't know what it is, it's your throat.” And she said, “I've had 16 polyp surgeries on my vocal cords.”
So, you can tell where, but you can't tell what. Medical diagnoses, western diagnoses don't translate into energy diagnoses one to one. People try to do that, but they don't.
But you can definitely tell. I trained a group of clinicians not too long ago, and one of them said, “There's something wrong with the knee.” And the person on the table said, “I had pain in my knee.” And she had never felt energy before with her awareness.
Now in medicine, you're always feeling people's bodies, so they're feeling it. They just don't know that's what they're feeling.
Elara Hadjipateras:
So, you said the energy field it's around, what was it you said 9 to 12 inches away? So, is energy healing something that you need to do in person? Are we able to accomplish anything, for example, by video or connecting by voice?
Ann Marie:
You can do it at a distance, which is surprising. So, people do, do it at a distance. It's helpful if you pretend the person's on the table, because then you get a sense. Or I had somebody once teach me how to do it with a stuffed animal. If I was working on you, I could do it with a stuffed animal.
I'm not great at distance healing. That's more Johrei and certain techniques, however it does work. It's better in person. And the reason it's better in person is that when you put your hand directly on the body, it creates oxytocin. If you're using good quality touch.
So, you think about the drug companies are making these — they're starting to develop spray oxytocin. And yet touch and vision, looking in a dog's eyes or looking in someone's eyes creates oxytocin, but touch creates it the most.
So, that part of energy healing, I think is much better in person. You put your hand on somebody and all of a sudden, they’re receptors in the skin that respond to the quality of touch, not just the touch, the quality of touch.
And then that creates oxytocin, which has a wonderful, wonderful properties for trust and all sorts of other things, including, I think, healing. So, I think that's one of the hidden pieces of energy healing that we're not talking about.
There's a woman named Tiffany Field at the University of Miami that does a lot of work with this. She has a touch research institute, and she talks about the different types of touch and what kind of oxytocin it creates.
And it decreases depression in college students. It's the kangaroo hold when you put mother to baby, skin to skin, which we use in the ICUs now. And the neonatal ICUs is that it creates more oxytocin, and it creates more healing and relaxation.
Elara Hadjipateras:
So, you mentioned the creepy touch. I assume that that's kind of in the category of different qualities of touch. What are some of the other ones?
Ann Marie:
Well, I mean, I think touch transmits all sorts of things. So, creepy touch, we have all had creepy touch, right?
Elara Hadjipateras:
Yes.
Ann Marie:
The other one is anxious. When somebody's feeling anxious or worried or they're afraid, I call it second year medical student touch. When you're afraid or first day nursing touch, second year medical student touch, nurses are better at it.
If you put somebody on a table and you have everyone touch them with that, the person on the table becomes anxious. It's very easy to transmit. And so, when you pull away from somebody's touch, don't stop yourself because they're probably having a moment of anxiety or uncomfortableness or they're wanting something from you.
So, I think the body's much wiser than the mind. So, if I had to feel like pulling away from a touch, I do.
And you'll see that with your baby. Your baby knows. People with dementia also know, animals know.
Elara Hadjipateras:
What about people with autism that tend to pull away from personal touch?
Ann Marie:
Well, I think kids with autism are reading reality from the level of energy all the time. So, I spend time sort of watching what they're responding to. There's too much input, there's too much touch. There's a boundary there.
You have to go very slowly if you're going to put your hand on a child with autism, because remember there's this field, I can't show you here, but there's this field around the body. It's your aura. And most of the time we just go in, and people get startled.
We've dampened down a lot of our awareness of this because of the way we're living. And yet you have to go very slowly. So, I would move very slowly until I felt like I was invited in.
So, I'm very interested by kids with autism because they're reading energy all the time. That's what they're responding to. Everyone is, and yet they haven't dampened that down. So, if they pull in, there's probably too much stimulation. People want them to be doing things all the time.
I'll tell you a story. I was going to Colorado to tape the Heart Center meditation for the first time. And it was at the airport in Tucson. And this young child who had autism sort of wandered over to me. And he had this wonderful mother that wasn't trying to modulate him. She let him, she was checking me out, I was fine. And he literally sat down on my lap. Southwest. So, sitting, waiting in the little lineup.
He sat down on my lap, grabbed my two hands, his two hands. He grabbed his two hands and my two hands, put them right on his chest at the heart center. I mean, I was just stunned. He was so reading the field I was in. And we just sat there, I sat there with my hands on his hands on his chest and the two of us sat together for like 10 minutes.
He had to get on the plane first and he was like, “Come, come.” Most children don't pay attention at that level. He was paying attention. I mean, it's kind of the story's almost miraculous that he was reading exact … I was not meditating, but I had been meditating that morning for hours because I was getting ready to do a recording and he just did it.
And we just sat there together. I thought, “What an incredible child,” and a mother for not trying to stop him from what was natural to him. She was just looking. And I was like … instead of, “Honey, come sit next to me. Don't bother the strange lady.”
Diana Weil:
So, what about, I remember my dad showed me this movie a long time ago and I think it was pretty accurate. I don't know how accurate it was, but it was about an energy healer who worked with really sick people, and she would briefly take on the illness and then it would go away.
Do you find that if you are healing someone who has really sick energy or really anxious, do you feel like you take on their energy? And also, how do you protect your energy and your space with energy healing?
Ann Marie:
Wonderful. So, the movie that he showed you was it Resurrection?
Diana Weil:
Yes. That was it.
Ann Marie:
And that's actually based on a real healer. Yes, she would pull it into her body and then she would go home at night and sort of wind it through, remember she’d wind it through.
So, in energy healing traditions, they say protect yourself, don't take on somebody else's energy. And I don't think it's actually possible to protect yourself without creating a barrier. We can try. But I've been at conferences where somebody will be protecting themselves. You can always find your way in through the back or the feet.
So, I differ from a lot of the healing traditions in the sense that I think that you have to clear your energy after every healing. So, I don't think you can protect yourself accurately. So, I shake, or I jump into some water or I do something to move the energy through.
It's not dangerous, but the energy can't stick if it doesn't have a place to stick. So, let's say somebody has back pain. My brother was over one time and I remember waking up one day and saying, “Who's got the back pain? I have back pain today.” Because we're constantly in communication with each other. You can really protect yourself maybe for 20 minutes, but you can't do it while you're living in the same house.
And my brother said, “I have back pain.” I said, “Okay.” So, I just went and shook it out. We're always in communication and I know physicians, and there are probably nurses who do this too, who actually will feel the symptom of the patient when they walk in the room because they're two bodies running energy together. So, they'll be like, “Oh, I feel a pain here. Do you have gall bladder pain?” “Yes.”
So, then you go off and just shake it out. It's not hours, it just stimulates it in the body. So, the fear that you can catch something from somebody, my teacher once said, if you're worried about the fear, then stay away, but then just go shake it out.
So, I don't think you can catch an energetic illness, but you do have to clear it at the end of the day. The same way a baby, I'm going to go back to babies since Elara, you have a new baby and Diana's right behind you on this process.
Babies will cry at the end of the day to release the energy of the day. People call it colic, but they're really just resetting their nervous system. So, you can shake, you can jump in water, you can jump up and down, you can use breathing techniques, and then you don't catch it. You just are going back to your own centered set point.
Elara Hadjipateras:
I mean, I always feel really good after a nice long cry in my experience.
Ann Marie:
Yeah. Or working out.
Elara Hadjipateras:
Yeah, working out.
Ann Marie:
You do it through working out.
Elara Hadjipateras:
A cold shower. I love a sauna. I was just in the sauna yesterday for 35 minutes last night after putting the baby to bed. It was amazing.
Ann Marie:
So, in hospice, I was working with a gentleman in hospice, and I was talking to him about this. One of my … I worked for him; he was a physician. He said, “Oh, that's so interesting because when I get home from the hospice, I always jump in the shower. I never knew why.” Shamans talk about water, water on the hands, water on the back of the neck, water on the head, water on the seat, back to center.
Elara Hadjipateras:
So, go back to the — you were saying that if people are guarded, there's a way in through the feet and the back.
Ann Marie:
If somebody shuts themselves down, they're really only shutting themselves down. So, if they protect themselves, you can still get through, because you don't protect every part of your body. So, when we're playing with energy, that's what I show people that you can get in through the back or the feet.
However, I don't enter into somebody's field if they're like this. I wait until it opens up. But standing next to somebody is the same as running energy. See, like you said, with your baby, whoever's got the most centered field wins, I used to say whoever has the largest field wins.
So, if somebody's really defensive, if I just relax, they'll relax. This has got to do with not just energy, but mirror neurons and breathing patterns. Somebody's really anxious, you change your breathing, watch, they'll change their breathing because you will be inducting them into a more relaxed state.
Most of the time somebody's anxious, and we get anxious too. I'm like, “No, get grounded.” So, we're constantly exchanging energy, constantly. In the grocery store. I mean, I'm sure this has happened. You get into an elevator with somebody who's angry, even if you can't see their face, you know, you know it, you back up a little, you go, whoa.
So, we're constantly putting out emotion and energy into the world, and we're constantly receiving it. The only thing is we've sort of domesticated out of it because of the way we are living in community.
So, if you went out and lived in the woods for three months and then came back, you'd be like, whoa. You could sense all sorts of things that are going on. We've dumbed it down to be able to get on the subway.
Diana Weil:
What does it feel like for you? I mean, I don't know if it's even something that you can describe, but when you are working, energy healing, or you wake up and you can tell that someone's in back pain, what does that feel like?
Ann Marie:
Well, the back pain story, I felt pain in my back, which I don't have. What's going on here? I don't know. There's this principle that once you're traveling the speed of the wind, you no longer feel the wind.
So, in the beginning I felt nothing. Then I would feel vibrations in my hands, or I would notice things. And now it's just a knowing. So, I'll go teach this this morning and I'll scan the room and I'll just have a sense of what's going on. I can't identify it often.
But you'll see it. The same way you'll see different people doing different things and then I'll feel something coming in. So, it feels like a body sensation to me pulling or moving away or a disturbance, I'll feel some anxiety in the room. Energy itself to me either feels very smooth or it feels gravelly. There'll be an unevenness in the pattern, or sometimes it feels like heat if it's pain. So, it feels different ways.
I know that with intuition, which Diana you were asking me about with intuition, if I'm teaching in a room or I'm talking to people, something will come in, but I can't identify who it is. So, I'll be like, for example, if you're thinking about a red Corvette and somebody will say, “How did you know that was my favorite car?”
I'll be like, “I don't,” but the image of a red Corvette comes in. So, sometimes it'll come in as image and I just use it because we're all in the same energy field. And so, I can't identify who I just know to pull these things and use them. Does that make sense? I'm not being very-
Diana Weil:
Yeah. Well, and I have to say, anytime I'm around Ann Marie, I have multiple moments where I'm like, “How does she know what I'm thinking?” I mean, she'll just say things and I'm like, “How do you know that I was just thinking that.”
And I do want to get into intuition, and I just want to tell this one story because I think it's so … it's a meditation that you did with me. And growing up in this with my dad and energy healers and I mean, I grew up with all these really incredible healers and I remember feeling like something was broken in me because I didn't feel like I had that intuition. I just didn't feel like I was so connected to my intuition.
And it felt like something, like I'm around all these incredible healers. Why don't I also have that experience of my baby talking to me, or my body talking to me? Or a dream that's really powerful that later comes to pass or something like that?
But when we were going through our fertility struggles, before we'd started, before we knew what we were working with, before we'd started IVF, I was feeling really anxious. And you sat down with me, and you said, “We'll do a meditation together.”
And you had me close my eyes and you just ran through dates. This was about two years ago. So, a year and a half before I got pregnant. And you ran through dates with me, and you said, “You'll know when you have the baby.” And going into it, I was like, “I don't have this intuition. I'm not going to feel anything.”
But somehow being in your presence or whatever you did with me, I knew that I was going to have a baby in my arms by 4th of July of 2024. And that is indeed happening.
What advice do you have for people around intuition? Because you have such a strong intuition, I think working with people, you can help people bring out that intuition, but do you have any advice for people around growing their intuition or even just what does that look like? How do we pay attention to it?
Ann Marie:
Yeah. So, that's an interesting thing I developed. I call it patient-centered prognosis because the person knows better than the psychic. If you can get to your intuition. So, psychics are just reading off your body. And the head interferes terribly.
I could have not said, you're going to have a baby on such and such a date. However, I was like, you can tell me because the body is primary, the body's temporality, the body knows, and the body houses the connection to the entire field of energy. And the head is constantly interpreting in ways that I find often not accurate.
So, when people are working with their intuition, it's the same thing as energy. How does it work for you? And I find people, if they just get into their body and use sensation and image, you could feel it when I mentioned the date.
So, with intuition, the question isn't, “Do you have it?” The question is, “How does it work for you? Some people get images, some people just know, some people can feel it in their body with the temporality. This is that piece where the animals moved out of the way before the tsunami and the humans did not.
They can tell, they can even feel seismic vibrations unless you put them in the zoo. So, there was some research that showed if you put rhinoceros in a zoo, they can no longer feel seismic vibration from the earth.
That's what's going on with us. I like to say we're over domesticated and that's okay. We live in society and a lot of amazing things have happened. So, when people are working with their intuition, I tell them to either write it down or tell one person and locate it in the body.
So, let's say I have this idea that I'm going to get a blue feather today. Check in. Where does it vibrate in the body? It actually doesn't. So, I probably am not going to get a blue feather today. But you write it down and then locate it in the body or what the sensation was.
And then over time it becomes predictable. They talk about it being — somebody had some research on this. It's intra observer, meaning within yourself, reliable but not inter. So, how you do it and how I do it are two different things.
So, you have to be willing to be wrong. And I did this in the emergency room when I was a resident. because I had been studying with somebody, maybe Carolyn Mace or something, and I was a hundred percent wrong in the beginning. I'd say to the nurse, “Just tell me the patient's name and the age.”
And then I'd be like, “Okay, this is an ear infection,” and it would be a broken elbow. I was terrible at it, but I was willing to be terrible at it for quite some time before I started getting a sense. I like Judith Orloff's book Second Sight on this because she talks about this as well.
So, you just start to work with it and it's very subtle. And I like to say, if I can spin a big story on it, that's probably a story I told myself. It was a hope, a fear, or a desire, not a flash of insight. When it's an insight, it just comes in as a flash and there's not much I can do with it.
The other thing is, when you're working with psychics or yourself or anybody who's reading, the energy or the image is always correct, the interpretation is where we blow it.
So, I've had people come and give me readings, had a nurse one time who said, “Ann Marie, I have this reading for you.” And it was beautiful. And she offered me this reading and she went into this whole sort of terrible blah, blah, blah.
I said, “Just give me the image.” And she said, “Well, I see you sitting in a swirling ball of chaos.” I said, “The image is accurate,” but the bad part that she had projected onto it was inaccurate. So, that's why you go with the image, you take the image or the sensation, you write it down and then you see, because we immediately attach story to it, and that's where it's not right.
And even the best foreteller in the world is only 80% correct. Which I think is great. And things change so you can't attach to it.
That body meditation that you did is highly accurate because the body knows the future. I don't know how that's true, but the body knows what's coming. It has a sense. And I talk about vibrating in the root chakra.
So, if the root chakra has a pulling or if the root chakra feels more active, it's probably going to occur. If it doesn't, it won't. So, let's say I get a book idea. I'm going to write a book on this. And then I check in, and if there's no vibration there, I just let it go. I'm not going to do it.
If there's a vibration there, I'll do it. I may not do it this year, I may do it in three years, but I know. So, the body is really the main sense we have. Long answer, Diana, I'm sorry.
Diana Weil:
No, it was a beautiful answer.
Elara Hadjipateras:
It’s a great answer. As far as the visual intuition coming into play. I think about dreams, like vivid dreams. Diana, I don't know about you, but during my pregnancy and now while breastfeeding, I have super vivid dreams all the time. I'm remembering them all the time. I think it's also because I'm sleeping two, three hours at a time.
But Ann Marie, you make me think of, there was a dream I had about a year ago. so, before I got pregnant. I was in a yoga studio. And then I walked to the back and then I went into the bathroom, and I see my husband with another brunette (brunette is not me), in a shower. And the immediate projection I put onto this dream was like, “Oh my God, my husband is going to cheat on me in the future with a woman in a yoga studio in the shower.”
Fast forward, a year later, I all of a sudden had this major Déjà vu moment where we were working with a baby nurse for the first month of when our baby arrived, and she was helping us. She was here 24 hours. And every night Peter was in charge of bathtime, and she would be there with him during bathtime. And that was my break.
And I just walked down the long hallway just like I did in my dream. I turned into the bathroom, and I just realized, “Oh my God, this was the dream I had a year ago. And it was completely misinterpreted.”
Ann Marie:
Right. Almost always misinterpreted. That's a really good example of how you have to really be trained in how to read images and energy without putting the personal overlay. And often it'll be another part of yourself that you don't even know about.
I've done that many times where … and the last thing is the most difficult dreams are often good news. And people don't realize that they’re change. And change occurs on the dreamscape as destruction of violence and initiations will occur that way too. So, initiations into a new, new energy flow or a new set of wisdom. So, it's a great example.
I wanted to mention something to you. I'm going to hijack the question. I apologize, Elara. Oxytocin when you're nursing, that's the first time I saw auras. So, I would nurse because it creates a huge amount of oxytocin. And then I would look at people with soft sight and I could see their aura for about 30 minutes after the nursing and then it would go away.
So, this is like the first time I could see it. And I think Rosalyn Briar talks about, she didn't start seeing energy till she had babies because the kids would say, “Mommy, what's that orange glow around that person?” And then she would use soft sight and she'd see it.
So, have fun because nursing my first child was how I started seeing auras. And again, only for 30 minutes after. So, I would nurse and then I would go … I remember one time nursing and then having to go into the medical conference. And I was like, “Oh my God, I can see his aura.” And then it would go away.
So, there's something, back again to touch, oxytocin, that activates a part of our brain that actually can sense and feel these things. This is not a logical process. You do not find your way into this art through logic.
You find your way into this art through other parts, intuitions, sensing, knowing, which are other parts of our makeup that we don't spend a lot of time on in our culture, but they're just as valuable as our logical piece.
It's the logic that takes the dream and hijacks it into the wrong thing. It's the logic that takes the image.
So, with Diana, what I did with her was a guided imagery session. And I just taught Diana how to feel what it was like not to have a baby. And she knew the presence of having another person in her life and we just looked after, we waited until the body could sense another presence in her life. And there it was.
And I do the same thing when people are dying. You can tell when somebody's — you know what it feels like when somebody's here. You know somebody who's already gone, they feel differently in the body.
And then that's how I work with people who are dying. Same technique, just looking for absence. With Diana, we were looking for presence, and there's a presence. If you close your eyes, your baby has a certain feeling to you. Your husband has a certain feeling in your body, you know they're here versus your great grandmother who's not here. So, same thing.
Elara Hadjipateras:
Diana, do you have any questions about auras? When I think auras, I think, okay, different colors. People have different color auras, and they change. Can you see our auras by any chance, like in the video or once again, it's hard to do because we're far away. I wish I had nursed right before this. That would've been good.
Ann Marie:
Well, you can see them when you nurse.
Elara Hadjipateras:
Now I'm going to keep an eye out for it. Yeah.
Ann Marie:
And you have to use soft sight. I see a little bit around Diana, not so much. I don't see it right now at all. I mean, I kind of see a little bit of a flow around Diana. Again, better in person.
Sometimes it's colored. We had one medical student that came through that could see amazing colors. Kids see colors more. And then I see often white every once in a while. color, not as much. When I was around Rosalyn Briar, I could see colors and she'd say, “That's good. Now see if you can do it on your own.” Her presence was inducting it.
But if you want to see auras, put down a piece of black velvet or a black tablecloth and get the lights down a little low and then put your hands down and see if you can see these lines of energy that are coming off the hands. It's not that hard to do.
Or I could put either a white background or a dark background behind you. And then I use something called soft sight where you're not focusing, but you're just sort of letting yourself space out a little bit.
The way you look at those 3D pictures we used to have, you space out and then it pops out in front of you. Or at night, go outside at night with your partner and then just sort of go soft sight and you'll see it around them more.
Diana Weil:
So, I feel like a lot of times kids tend to be pretty psychic, like you were saying, that kids can see color. I feel like most kids are pretty psychic or have that sense of other something else, they can see auras. And then they lose it. I feel like a lot of times as we grow into adulthood; we lose it. What do you think that's about?
Ann Marie:
I think it's crucial. I think you have to lose it because — I mean, not have to, but the cultures that make sure the kids don't lose it, isolate the children and use them for visionaries later. So, children can see all of this.
And then you have to sort of shut down and develop an ego because being wide open all the time in the way that we're living is not very useful. So, some kids stay wide open, but mostly we shut down and then we open up later.
So, children are very good at this, you'll notice until 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and then they shut down. It's too much information. So, and they have to do the information of how to learn how to read, how to write, how to do this, how to clean their rooms, how to unfortunately sit still in class, unless they're in a school that lets them move around.
So, I think that people do shut down and many cultures have ways of not having the children shut down. And yet it's a bit of a sacrifice because then they have to be a seer for the culture. So, the Mamos down in Columbia, they isolate them in tents for a while to keep their vision unchanged and keep them with the mother.
And then they keep the vision that way and then they provide a service to the community. And there are other cultures that talk about this too. I think the Mayans did it for a while. The Mayans would actually change … would run a ball down and change the way that children would see.
In fact, look at the Pharaohs. They also have one eye that goes in which apparently offers a different pathway in the brain to be able to have more vision states.
So, people are doing it now. They're reopening now through things like psychedelics. I use meditation. Just takes longer. And there are ways to open up, but you really want your ego and your sense of who you are, ego in a really positive sense to be developed before you open back up.
Otherwise, it's very hard to not just be communal. And in our culture, just being communal is not very useful, if that makes sense. We are communal. We're sort of one individual all over the world. I think we're like mushrooms. One huge mycelium that's connecting us and we're the mushroom body, the fruiting body.
And yet we have to develop, this is me and mine. If you don't have an ego, and if you don't know this is me and mine, you can't even eat. Can't put a fork to your mouth.
So, it's very important to go into what you are, for the child, what their individualness is, and then later they can open back up. I'm not a big fan of keeping kids wide open. I think they need to shut down and then reopen later when it's time and it's time for different people at different ages.
Some people like Eckhart Tolle talks about just waking up one day at 28, but for me it's been a very slow process. I thought it was going to be like, well I can see all of a sudden, fantasized it was going to be like I was going to be seeing bodies like Alex Grey when it took 25 years and it's still going. It's very slow.
And yet the information I'm working with is different. And women use intuition because it's sort of accepted in our culture. So, women open up a little more quickly than men, I think.
Diana Weil:
So, I think, I mean I feel like being an energy healer and an MD is such a great example of integrative medicine. But I'm just curious if that was a battle for you working in hospitals and I mean having kind of both modalities of energy healing and also X-rays and I mean surgeries and was that difficult for you? Do you feel like that was respected? What was that experience like?
Ann Marie:
Well, first of all, I didn't talk about it. So, and to me it's just like an extra sense. It's just an extra sense. So, it wasn't a battle for me.
However, I trained in the 90s. So, when I would go off to do energy healing conferences, I would lie and say, “I'm sort of going to do like a yoga meditation thing.” I never said I'm going to learn more about energy healing or I'm going to go see a shaman in Mexico who does psych surgery. I just didn't bother to share the two worlds.
Now, I probably could because medicine's getting more open and also there's this principle that you have to hear the ears to hear it, to hear it. So, you have to have the eyes to see it, to see it. So, I'll scan patients. Nobody ever says anything unless they know about the energy field and they'll say, “Are you scanning the aura?” I’m like, “Yeah.”
But somebody else would probably think that maybe I was an indecision, where should I start the exam? So, you have to have the eyes to see it. But in the beginning, I didn't talk about it.
It wasn't conflictual because it was just another set of information I was using. Like when you listen to the heart sounds, you use the stethoscope to listen to the heart sounds, I'd scan the body and then I'd go find out what the conventional tests use.
So, I didn't have any problem at all. I actually liked it. I felt like it made me a little better at sensing what was going on. But I had a teacher when I was in medical school who brought us into a room one time and said, “Do not speak to the patient. I've warned the patient about this. I just want you to use your eyes. You have three minutes. Look at the patient, come out and tell me what the diagnosis is.”
Same practice except using the eyes. He was brilliant. He was the best clinician I worked with, and we all walked out, and somebody said liver failure because this person had all the sentinel pieces, but we weren't using our eyes enough.
So, this is the same thing as that. So, he said, “Look at the patient for a few minutes and see what you see.” Instead of just going in and saying, “Hi, my name's Ann Marie and tell me your history.”
So, it's the same piece, but it's just sensing the energy. So, you use it all the time, Diana, and Elara, you walk into a room, you know exactly what's going on. You just haven't made it into words yet.
You say, “Gosh, that person feels anxious.” It's the exact same sense. It's just that I've developed it a little more because I tracked it for so long and found out where I was reliable and where I wasn't reliable. And I know that I'm only 80% correct.
So, keeps you humble, which I love. I love that piece of this. Otherwise, you get those psychics who are like, “I know” I’m like, “Well,” I call that early psychic world when somebody's like, “Excuse me, a message is coming through for you right now.” I'm like, “There's messages coming through for all three of us right now.” Diana, Elara, and me.
Elara Hadjipateras:
Okay. So, you mentioned psychedelics can help people tap into this a little bit easier. Meditation can help people tap into this a little bit easier. Right before my pregnancy, my baby he was breached. So, I started doing a ton of acupuncture to just kind of communicate with him and figure out why he's breached. Does he want to flip? Does he not want to flip?
And I think, Diana, I remember telling you this, that I had never done acupuncture before this actually. And I love it. I felt incredible. I told the doctor, I went, “Oh my God, this is the best natural high I felt my entire pregnancy.”
And I felt that it really helped me tap into my intuition. And I just remember, especially the several hours after I had treatment, I felt so good. I'd go around everyone and they'd be like, “What did you just do? You seem to be in a great mood,” and I'd have wonderful conversations. Are there any other modalities?
Ann Marie:
Well, acupuncture for sure. I mean 4,000-years-old or something like that. And we know that it makes a difference. But the first research study just came out Elara, saying exactly what you said, that acupuncture on the body affects which parts of the brain highlight.
So, these are parts of the brain we're not using that highlight. Psychedelics do it, rhythmic drumming does it. Breath work does it. All of the arts in integrative medicine have an impact on the brain and what we're sensing through the brain, but also through the body sealed.
So, acupuncture is a wonderful one. The question is how do you do it for yourself? So, this is the whole thing, psychedelics. But what do you do in between the journeys? And that's the cultivation of the techniques by yoga's my favorite, yoga's like the be all end all of all the techniques. It's got breathing, it's got movement, it's got energy, takes two points of focus to move energy. Yoga's got all of it.
This is one of the things I loved about COVID. I mean, I didn't love COVID, but I noticed that I'd go to the grocery store and people who don't do any practices at all could tell when I was six feet away. We all became aware of our fields. I was like, “Whoa, that woman knows I'm six feet away.”
Because again, we pitched our awareness to six feet outside our body the way animals do because you could tell when somebody was too close. Before that, nobody paid any attention.
So, acupuncture's a good one. Anything that works for you, Elara. And acupuncture, my question is, what do you do in between to keep that state? And you could probably just even imagine the state that you experienced in acupuncture and then it would come back for you.
So, it's what it's doing for you, but it's also, they're like doorways, the doorway’s open. How do you get through the doorway on your own? So, maybe later today, if you're out doing something, just drop in and say, “How would I feel after acupuncture?” The body will activate, the brain will activate and you'll probably be able to sense things more just like you did after acupuncture.
Elara Hadjipateras:
So yeah, I was just feeling it actually in that moment. So, I was just enjoying it and you made me think one of the things I did is, one of the points of acupuncture that the doctor did on me was my pinky toes.
And he was like, “Look, you can't do this every day, but have your husband, a couple times a day massage your pinky toes.” And then he also gave me this incense and he would burn the incense near my pinky toes, and it would give that same sensation and it would make the baby move.
Ann Marie:
You're talking also about traditional Chinese medicine, which is an extraordinarily developed method of healing. The more I learn, the more I like traditional Chinese medicine. It's amazing. We're just touching it with licensed acupuncturists. They're amazing.
But if you go see a doctor of oriental medicine, I mean, it's just stunning. They'll be like, “You have a runny nose and pain in your left knee, that's because you have — and they put them together. Everything fits together in one diagnosis from the organs, from the level of the Dantians and the organs and the energy.
Diana Weil:
When I work with anyone who has an autoimmune condition or chronic pain, and I know that this is something you have experience with. You had chronic pain and something I've talked to you a lot about. I feel like a lot of time these people they have a really frustrating experience in the medical world because no one can quite help them.
And I feel like energy healing can be something that is really beneficial for anyone experiencing this. And I don't know that I have a specific question, but I'm just curious if you could speak a little bit more on that and kind of give your thoughts to someone who maybe has a really difficult autoimmune disease or chronic pain.
Ann Marie:
What you're referring to, Diana, is that I had chronic pain for about 30 years. I had a whole medical thing, and then once I got the surgery to take care of it, I still had the pain and I used everything I could.
The good news is that medicine has now figured this out, it's a change. It's called central sensitization and peripheral sensitization. So, any pain that lasts more than three to six months increases your pain sensitivity in the periphery.
And the brain continues to support it by increasing pain sensitivity. So, you start getting pain even when you don't have a stimulus. So, I like to say, if you hit your thumb with a hammer, that hurts. But if you have chronic pain in your thumb, you just have to do that because the periphery is more sensitive. But also, the brain is.
So, chronic pain requires changing the brain and the periphery. So, we know everything that I did without knowing it is what is now researched. You have to use mind body medicine because it changes the way the brain is communicating.
So, emotions are now communicating with sensory parts of the brain. And you have to use meditation, guided imagery, hypnosis, acupuncture, breathing techniques to get the brain back to the way it was.
Now that's not great news if you have chronic pain, because it makes it sound like it's in your head. It's not in your head, but your head has to go back to the way it was before. And I ask people that I'm like, “Before you had pain, you thought differently. And they always burst into tears.” Say, “Tell me about it”
People start ruminating, they start worrying. That's because of the brain change. It's not because they have a personality disorder. Medicine used to put people like this in a personality disorder state. They diagnosed me with depression. I wasn't depressed. I had central sensitization.
Depression goes along next to it. The pain's not from the depression. The depression's secondary to the pain. Well, we know this now, it's become really well delineated. 2005 and then 2015, there were two leaps in medicine about this.
So, you have to sort of teach people what's happening and how to get around it. And mind-body medicine's enormous for this. But acupuncture is too. Even yoga makes a big difference. Not even yoga. Yoga's amazing.
With autoimmune, autoimmune is a little bit different. And yet you can use the same principles. Autoimmune is the body seeing itself as foreign. And so, often some of the same techniques will work because you're trying to get into a part of the body and the immune system that's not accessible.
So, we can use medications to dampen it down. That's amazing. You can use a lot of dietary herbs to dampen it down. And then there are other things that you can use. But I find that mind-body medicine is the one thing that people take as blame when it's probably the most powerful thing we have going.
So, the first thing I would say is use guided imagery. It's amazing what the body and the vagus nerve and the relaxation will do to the immune system. So, if they only have one thing, I say go use guided imagery.
And acupuncture, like you mentioned, Elara, is an amazing one. Going into traditional Chinese medicine where they don't just say, “You have this, and it'll last for the rest of your life.”
And that's the other thing that I found shocking is that as I've been working with autoimmune illnesses in people, they are told that it's never going to get better. And yet it does. It can. It doesn't for everybody.
But I had a woman that had scleroderma, I wanted her to go to a conference with me, the National Scleroderma Conference. And she said, “I don't want to go, I don't want to see what the end stage is going to look like.” And I went, “Oh no, it doesn't have to go to end stage.” And she had this amazing thing where her symptoms stopped.
So, conventional medicine’s one piece out of 28 different traditions that's useful to suppress things. But then jumping into the other ones where a lot of the healing occurs. And so, the idea that we don't know the course of the illness. We can't tell if it's going to go faster or slower, but using everything we can to try to relieve the symptoms.
And it's not one acupuncture session. It's a few; many breath sessions. I did breath work every day for two years and all of a sudden, the pain started to go away. And I used meditation and guided imagery and then a lot of energy healing. I loved energy healing.
Elara Hadjipateras:
And then there's definitely something to that. Diana, you've taught yoga over the last few years as well. There is something to be said, I taught yoga remotely during COVID and then I taught classes afterwards. The energy you feel in the room breathing with everyone else, when you reach that state of Shavasana when you're doing what you describe as the body scan from head to toe, it's euphoric. It's this amazing feeling where you're in the flow you've tapped in.
Ann Marie:
Yeah. I mean, yoga's got all of it. Yoga and TCM have all of it, the Traditional Chinese Medicine pieces. Yeah.
Elara Hadjipateras:
I love heated yoga especially like to kind of get. For me mentally, it really helps. The heat I guess adds an extra factor of being in the moment. It really forces you to be there to focus on your breath because you don't have the capacity to focus on anything else.
Ann Marie:
You remind me of a time I was going to go to heated yoga and my kids made massive fun of me. “Mom, just go outside. It's 110.” (Laughs.) The thing is people have to open their — we're in pill culture. That's the other problem. Which is give me the pill that makes it go away because I got to go get this done instead of hearing this is going to take nine months and there's going to be a dramatic shift.
You know it takes nine months to learn a train longer. You know it takes nine months to get the beginning of a language. So, how do we convey that to ourselves and to the people we're working with?
This is just going to take time. It's just going to take time. And that's the other thing that I find difficult with pill culture is people are like, “Give me the pill. I want it to go away.” And who doesn't want it to go away? And yet it takesv some time.
So, this is why groups are so important. The induction through a group, getting into a group with other people that have the same thing and trying things together. So, my resistance gets taken care of by somebody else and their resistance gets taken care of by me.
So, I think medicine should move into the same kind of thing as yoga classes into group visits because people do better in groups. Just like you said, they relax together, there's more relaxation in the room. You can ride somebody else's relaxation if you can't get there.
One of my teachers used to say get around somebody who's had it and healed. You don't even have to talk to them. Just get around somebody who's had it and healed and just go to the movies with them, have a cup of coffee with them, pay attention because there's this mirror neuron and this energy between the two bodies and equilibration, you'll get the mend from the person who's had it and healed.
Elara Hadjipateras:
It’s why I think Alcoholics Anonymous has had so much success. With the group visits and being around other people that have gone through the struggles, the ups and downs. But anyway, that could be a whole nother … without judgment, just without judgment. Just being with other people and having that shared experience.
Diana Weil:
I just have to ask you about psychic surgery. And it doesn't have to be a long answer, but I'm just so curious what that is.
Ann Marie:
Next time you come visit Diana. I will put a … (laughter)
Psychic surgery means lots of different things. The way that I was trained, it's really high velocity, energy work. In and out. And then things change. But it means lots of things on lots of different cultures. So, it depends.
The person that I spent the most amount of time around who did this was a man that was half African, half Mayan, and he could sort of go into the body and come back out and leave a little scratch on the body and you would feel it. It's really, I had to experience it.
That being said, there's traditions in Asia where they use organs from animals and try to rub it on the body and different things. So, for me it's high velocity energy work that creates a difference in the body. But even you can do it outside the body because what's inside my body and what's outside my body are contiguous for quite a bit of time.
When you're standing next to somebody, you're standing in their body, they're standing in yours, they're just standing in your field, your energy field. Psychic surgery usually goes into the energy field and sometimes into the body.
But the way it goes into the body is so unusual that it's hard to describe. It's almost like the body opens up and they can move the energy quickly. Lots of different forms. I had to see it. I've seen bad psychic surgery that doesn't do anything. I've seen good psychic surgery that's mind blowing and it's very unusual.
So, it's not something I send people to. I just happen to have the opportunity to do it. And I've seen other psychic surgeries done with a 20-minute, deep practice with five or six people around the body using massage. So, the word’s really used to mean lots of things, but it's high velocity energy work that makes a difference very quickly.
Diana Weil:
You hear about people undergoing surgery without pain medication because they're being hypnotized or something like that. And I was wondering if it was something that was more in that kind of vein?
Ann Marie:
No, no. Usually just leaves a scratch. But I did have one psychic surgeon that would give us fake, not fake, but he would give us anesthesia through the skin. And he would say, okay, I'm putting the anesthesia now. And the whole body would relax just through his voice. Because he used a blade on the back of a head, a little cut on the back of a head, which could be painful or ecstatic, depending.
So, I trained with people that used scissors and it would almost be like, you could see it go in and out, but it was so fast. And then there would be a little scratch. Although one time I saw bruising, I remember him going, “Oh no.” And the person had bruising. I mean, he just went. And then it was all this bruising.
It reminded me of when I did my karate training. One time the teacher was sparring with me and he went like this, and I felt a little wave on my skin and I go, “What's wrong?” He goes, “Oh no.” And I'm like, “No, you didn't hit me.” He goes, “I was close enough that the force was going to create a bruise and it did, just the force.”
So, he didn't make contact, but he pulled back. He goes, “Oh no.” And I had a bruise the next day. I thought, “That's amazing.” So, the martial arts know about all this stuff too.
We've been talking about yoga but look at people who are good at Akido and karate. They really know how to move energy. And that's why they were, initially, martial arts. They were used for protection because they moved so much energy. Akido was a great way of learning how to stay centered because you get grounded, and they can't knock you off your center.
Elara Hadjipateras:
What about Jujitsu? Does that fall into that category as well?
Ann Marie:
I think so. I don't know Jujitsu, I've never tried it, but I imagine. I mean, they're all kind of incredible and they require the whole energy field, and you can push somebody off their center just with energy in some of these. You can just go like that, and the person starts to fall over, and you go, “Okay, my body extends outside my physical.” It's really amazing.
Diana Weil:
So interesting. Okay, we have to get Ann Marie out of here, so we got to ask her our last two questions. Elara, do you want to start first? Because I feel like I always start.
Elara Hadjipateras:
Sure. Okay. So, we always wrap up the podcast asking two questions and don't overthink it. Just whatever right now feels like whatever you want to say that works. So, what's something that you've had to learn the hard way?
Ann Marie:
Staying centered all the time. Realizing that this is this body and the field around this body is what's mine to tend to. And just because somebody else is over there going, I don't have to do it. So, and that's an energetic principle. It's also an emotional principle.
So, staying centered all the time. Not just every once in a while, but all the time. So, if somebody comes in and goes “Ahhh!”, I don't have to respond, I just go down and get centered and go, “Oh look, they're flipping out,” instead of going on their ride with them. That took me a long time.
Diana Weil:
That’s something that I am always-
Elara Hadjipateras:
Still working on that, still working on that principle.
Ann Marie:
It's low in the body. It's not here. That would be the other thing is that I had to learn in some ways to cut off the head and realize that the center of my being is down here. It's down here in the lower down, not what I think.
So, the second thing I had to learn was not to trust every thought that came in. And that took me a long time to realize the thoughts come in and they have to be checked with the body sensation and with the energy. That was another one that took me a while. Just because the thought came in doesn't mean it's accurate. I have to check it.
And then the other thing, the last thing I'm giving you three, sorry, is what's right about it. So, from looking at the level of energy, I have to look and see what's right about this, what's right about that chaos over there that's coming in.
What's right about me staying centered, instead of just that's terrible. What's right about it? Why would 13 million or billion brain cells fire off for this? Or why would that energy flow over there be happening? What's right about what's going on?
Diana Weil:
Okay. And then last question, kind of the opposite. What is a lesson or a mantra that you've learned from an important figure in your life or a friend, something that you kind of live by?
Ann Marie:
I learned this when I was 24-years-old, maybe 25, when I was going to do my master's in public health. I learned that if you're doing your job well, if you're living your truth well, you're probably going to disturb someone.
If you're making change in the world, I don't have to go out there and intentionally disturb. And yet, if I'm making change in the world and living what's true for me to bring through, not everyone's going to love it. And that's been helpful for the part of me that was a people pleaser. Like, “I want everyone to like me.” Not everyone will.
So, if there's a reaction against it, it's not about me unless I'm being cruel. Which I try not to do. It's not about me. It's about the fact that something that I'm bringing through is disturbing a firmly held belief that they have.
So, it's made me far more gentle. And at the same time, it's allowed me to experience the fact without reaction that not everyone's going to like what I'm doing and not everyone's going to believe it.
And that people might even get a little disturbed by it. Not everyone, just every once in a while. And it's been very helpful for me. If you're making change, not everyone's going to like what you're doing and it's okay.
And so, then I don't try to get people to believe or any of that stuff. I just show them what's coming through me and how it is for me. And they either like it or not.
So, it really, again, kept me centered instead of my center being out in the world, seeing how the world's responding to me. I started here and allowing the world to respond to me whatever way it needs to.
Diana Weil:
That is so powerful. Well, Ann Marie, this has been amazing. I think everyone is going to see why I look up to you so much. You just are such a wealth of knowledge and have so many life lessons to share.
Ann Marie:
Well, I think the three of us are a mutual admiration club, aren't we? I look up to the two of you as well. The baby as well, Elara.
Elara Hadjipateras:
Thank you. Yeah, he's a lot of fun. Well, I can't wait to meet your little guy, Diana, coming in June 2024.
Diana Weil:
Alright, Ann Marie, where can people find you?
Ann Marie:
My website, annmariechiassonmd.com and at the Center. If they want to do anything at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, we have amazing programs, training physicians, nurses, pharmacists, nurse practitioners, DOs. It is a wealth of information and openness and acceptance for people who are interested in exploring these things.
Elara Hadjipateras:
We would, of course, love to have you as a guest again, Ann Marie. I think we could speak for hours at different topics. So, hopefully we have a chance to get you back on here soon.
Ann Marie:
Anytime.
Voiceover:
Sip, savor, and live well with new episodes of The Matcha Guardians every Wednesday. Follow our show for free on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening right now. Leave your questions and comments below. Find us on Instagram at The Matcha Guardians or click on matcha.com.