Today is Thanksgiving in America. It's a day of gratitude that has deep roots - it goes back much further than the Pilgrims. In fact some sort of similar ceremony shows up in virtually all cultures and religious traditions throughout recorded history.

Because I'm preparing to start calls for the Accunect Energies course, which includes understanding how to work with the Wei Qi in the body, I thought it would be interesting to create a post and a video connecting up the idea of gratitude and good health.

If a ritual or ceremony shows up in lots of cultures around the world over time, there's probably good wisdom and some kind of health benefit from embracing that tradition. And it turns out that giving thanks before you eat is very good for your digestion and immune system.

To understand why we need to look at a bit of physiology of the digestive tract, and then bring in concept of Wei Qi from Chinese Medicine to explain how our mental and emotional state can affect our digestive health.

In a nutshell, when we say grace or give thanks in some way before eating it strengthens our Wei Qi. The Wei Qi is an energy field that governs all of the "boundary" surfaces of the body: any place where we meet the outside world. This includes our skin, our respiratory passages, and the inside of our intestines.

When the Wei Qi is strong it makes the skin a better barrier to infection by closing the pores which are naturally open. It takes Energy/Qi to close the pores, and Wei Qi is the energy that runs within and along the surface of the skin.

Wei Qi also circulates within and along the intestinal lining. When it's strong it helps the intestines absorb nutrients efficiently, while preventing toxins and microparasites from passing through the intestinal wall into the blood stream.

This makes the Wei Qi an essential part of the innate or inborn immune system. This is also referred to as the non-specific immune system which protects us by using barriers such as the skin, airways, and intestinal lining to keep unwanted pathogens from entering the body.

How do you get strong Wei Qi?

The strength of the Wei Qi is determined largely by our attitudes and beliefs. When we are in stress and seeing life as a series of problems and obstacles we are likely to be in fight or flight mode and experiencing some level of fear. Fear contracts the Wei Qi and makes us more vulnerable to invasion by pathogens.

When we take time to give thanks for our food, our family, and the good things in our life we enter a state of gratitude. This helps us come out of whatever fight or flight mode we've been in and releases more energy for the digestion and immune system.

Gratitude is an expansive energy and it helps the Wei Qi in our intestines expand and protect us from toxins and microoganisms. People who take a moment to say grace or otherwise give thanks experience less reactions to food - including food poisoning - than other people do. And they have stronger digestion, better vitality, and stronger immune systems.

Giving thanks on Thanksgiving is good. To keep your immune system and your digestion strong, take time to bless or give thanks for your food at every meal, not just once a year.

If you have trouble taking time to center yourself in a place of gratitude before eating, consider using Accunect to help shift your beliefs about your self-worth, change your beliefs and attitudes, and strengthen your Wei Qi.

If you're a practitioner and want to be able to help people have stronger Wei Qi so that they can have stronger immune systems and stronger digestion and vitality, consider studying Accunect.

Thanks for reading!

When is a tumor not a tumor?

I recently had a client referred to me and one of her complaints was a mass or hard lump in her upper abdomen.  Her doctor was concerned about a possible tumor and had referred her for an ultrasound. Because of the location, the doctor also wanted to rule out an aneurysm on a blood vessel. 

But I also saw an interesting pattern with some of the other symptoms that were on her intake form.

She had bloating after meals, sluggish digestion, food sensitivities and allergies, and periodic headaches behind the eyes.

That to me suggested a pattern involving the Liver meridian, and I explained how stagnation in the Liver meridian could induce tension into the stomach.

I showed her a picture of the lesser omentum, which is a ligament that connects the liver and the stomach - see diagram.

This in turn produces a sensation of a lump in the upper abdomen, indigestion, bloating after meals, sluggish digestion and headaches behind the eyes. Headaches behind the eyes indicate stagnation in the stomach and intestines in Chinese Medicine.

The energy imbalance that produces this pattern of symptoms has been recognized for thousands of years.

It’s called Liver invading/dominating the Stomach.

It’s a very descriptive name, because tension and emotional stress in the Liver meridian directly affects the lesser omentum and then this tension literally invades the stomach in a physical way which turns the emotional stress into physical digestive symptoms like indigestion, bloating, nausea, acid reflux, a tight area in the upper abdomen that feels solid like a tumor, dizziness, headaches, and sluggish digestion.

To confirm the pattern, I asked her one more question.

Trying to be diplomatic, I said “Look, I know I just met you, but is there any chance that you have perfectionist tendencies?”

She laughed and asked how I guessed that, because she resonated with that.

And I said it goes along with the energy pattern of Liver Invading Stomach.

The amazing thing about having a continuous record of clinical discussion over a period of several thousand years is that there has been plenty of time for practitioners to observe the bodymind patterns that result from energy imbalances. And this includes recognition of both physical and psychological symptoms.

Just knowing that there was an alternate explanation for her symptoms that didn’t have to involve a tumor or an anuerysm was a visible relief for my client.

I then proceeded to do an Accunect healing session with her, and sure enough one the things we balanced was the imbalance pattern of Liver invading Stomach.

She felt noticeably better after the session, and the lump completely disappeared shortly after our session.  She did have the ultrasound, and it was unremarkable – no mass in her abdomen, nothing of concern at all.

It’s natural to be afraid that a lump in your abdomen might be a tumor, or something else.

In this case, the tumor didn’t suddenly go away – there never was a tumor.

It was simply muscular tension resulting from an imbalance in the Liver meridian.

It is an amazing gift to be able to reframe someone’s scary medical problem as an energy imbalance instead of a medical problem.

It’s way more empowering for the client because there is then a natural way to address the symptom without drugs or surgery.

I can do this reframing because I’ve been studying Chinese Medicine for 35 years. To practice acupuncture, you need to go to graduate school for 4 years. And then it takes another 10 years before you get good at diagnosing patterns.

I’ve been teaching applied kinesiology based energy medicine internationally for over two decades. 

I wanted to be able to teach my students a way to focus on the underlying imbalances and to draw on thousands of years of accumulated wisdom – without having to go to school for 4 years and to practice for many years after that.

I came up with the Accunect Ancient Wisdom course that combines the ancient wisdom of Chinese Medicine along with modern techniques from Applied Kinesiology with an extensive set of reference pages.

Using muscle checking and these well-organized reference pages, practitioners without any knowledge of Chinese Medicine can find just the right aspect of energy to balance. And then they can read out to the client what they found and say something like “this energy imbalance can produce one or more of the following symptoms….”

When the client realizes that what they thought were separate problems are all tied together by a long-recognized energy imbalance they are able to shift their perspective on their problem – which is a treatment in and of itself.

Then the practitioner uses tapping over the head and the heart to stimulate both the nervous system and the meridian system so that they can come more into balance. It’s like doing acupuncture, only without the needles.

With almost no training at all, students are able to find and balance Chinese Medicine energy imbalances without needles. And they are able to communicate this to clients so they can help the client see their issue as an energy imbalance that can they change rather than as a medical problem that they may have to take medication for long-term.

Accunect Ancient Wisdom is available to take online with a mix of self-paced lectures and live support calls for demonstrations, practice time, question and answer time and healing sessions.

For more information, click here.

Don’t Be So D*mn Sensitive

Lots of people think it is compassionate to be sensitive to other people’s emotions.

And it is to a degree – if someone else is suffering it is polite to notice and acknowledge what they are going through.

But it doesn’t help them if you actually feel their emotional state.  Actually, it’s worse than that. You actually hurt them by absorbing their emotions.

Hurting someone who is already suffering is the exact opposite of compassion.  So don’t do it. Easier said than done - "How?" you ask...

This is not something that most people are aware of, but crucial to understand for your own healing, and if you are interested in helping others heal it is especially important.

Allow me unpack this dynamic in this post.

Let’s break it down

If you feel their emotions in your body, it means you have absorbed their emotional energy into your body.

And this means that your Wei Qi for emotional energy is weak. Wei Qi is the Chinese term for a layer of energy that protects us from the environment – kind of like a force field that keeps things out that don’t belong. When the Wei Qi is strong you can still notice that someone is suffering, but you don’t actually feel what they are going through directly.

Before I explain more about what Wei Qi is and how you can balance it, it’s important to note how dangerous it is to absorb other people’s emotional energy.

When you are over-sensitive and absorb other people’s emotional energy your body has to process this emotional energy as if it was actually your own emotions. It’s enough of a job for your body to process your own emotions every day – when you absorb other people’s emotional energy you overwhelm your emotional processing system.

Every time you experience an emotion, either from something that’s happened to you or because you have absorbed some else’s emotions, your body makes special neuropeptides (the molecules of emotion). These chemicals interact with your immune system and affect efficiency of your immune function.

When you overload your emotional processing system, you overload your immune system. You are more prone to getting colds, having excess inflammation, and you are more likely to develop cancer.  This is what the field of psychoneuroimmunology studies.

Okay, this means that that being sensitive and absorbing emotions is really bad for you.

But what about the person whose emotions you are absorbing? Does it help them or hurt them?

Again, the short answer is NO. Not only does it not help them. In fact, it actually hurts them.

Why?

We’re all Connected

Your mind isn’t contained in your brain. Your mind is an energy field that extends outside of your body.

And this field broadcasts your mental and emotional state.

Scientific studies have shown that your physiological state can be influenced by someone on the other side of a wall from you. If you sit in a chair next to a wall and someone sits in a chair on the other side of the wall there is an interaction between your energy field and the energy field of the person on the opposite side of the wall..

If the person on the other side of the wall has calm energy, your nervous system relaxes.

If the person on the other side of the wall is a high stress state, your nervous system goes into partial fight-or-flight mode: increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, increased muscle tension and increased stress hormones.

We are not islands unto ourselves, and science proves it.

Sleep researchers have even been able to determine the content of someone's dream imagery by measuring the electrical field off the body. 

If you think it, you broadcast it.

How this Affects My Healing Work

I work with a lot of clients with serious health challenges. It’s understandable that they may be experiencing fear, frustration, depression, or other emotional states.

I am definitely aware that they are going through a lot. But it is not my job to commiserate with them.

My job is to remember that the body is amazing.

My job is to remember that the body is capable of spectacular healing on a daily basis. After all, the body replaces 50-70 billion cells a day – that’s a miracle in and of itself.

My job is to remember all of the healing miracles that I have witnessed in the past.

My job is to remember all of the healing miracles that my Accunect students have shared with me.

My job is to believe that the client in front of me, with serious or even life-threatening challenges, is also capable of healing.

This means that it is also my job to keep my Wei Qi strong so that I don’t absorb my clients emotions.

If I absorb their emotions, how is it possible for me not to get depressed as well?

Whatever we are thinking is broadcast into the electrical field around us.

If I get depressed, I’m not broadcasting positive energy and hope to my client.

I’m broadcasting depression and fear instead.

How terrible is that?

Imagine this...

Someone gets referred to me because of my experience and credentials. And then because I’ve absorbed their energy I radiate back to them fear, hopelessness, and depression.

And instead of thinking “I feel like I’ve come to the right place” they end up feeling “OMG. This guy is supposed to be an expert and I can tell he’s depressed. I must be well and truly and messed up.”

The words I say out loud are “Let’s see what we can do to balance your energy.”

But my energy field shouts “Sh*t, this is really depressing. Let’s just go to the pub and cry in our beer together, because I feel hopeless.”

Be Careful What You Ask For

When I first started my journey into healing learning Shiatsu 34 years ago, I was oversensitive.

This is very common amongst new massage therapists.

I was desperate to feel more intuitively and I was jealous of more experienced therapists who seemed to know what they were feeling with more insight than I did.

So, I begged the universe to make me more sensitive.

And it worked – but be careful of what you ask for.

I started getting other people’s headaches. And I started getting other people’s shoulder and neck pain.

I was absorbing their energy and being too empathic.

Worse yet, some clients just seemed to drain me. I would be exhausted after working with them.

This a big reason that most massage therapists quit being in practice in five years or less – they simply find it too draining to process the emotions from so many people.

Something had to change.

Negotiating with the Universe

I began a long journey of negotiating with the universe about how I wanted my intuition to work.

I asked for information to come in ways that weren’t overlaid with emotional content.

I asked to be SHOWN where someone’s pain was, NOT to FEEL their pain.

This journey ultimately led to the creation of the Accunect healing system.

When Sarah and I created Accunect, we wanted to create a healing system that helps both practitioner and client to connect to their sense of spiritual connection. This is an important aspect of how healing works, as in Chinese medicine the root cause of all disease is separation from God/Self/Tao/All That Is.

We wanted a system that gave people a way to access their intuition safely – without absorbing other people’s emotional energy and burdens.

It works

I no longer take on energy from people – and I help them more than ever.

Sure, my skill at doing energy work has improved with time and experience.

But I’m also able to consistently stay in a space of hope and faith in the ability of the body to heal - that's a big part of why my results keep getting better over time.

I spend my sessions looking for solutions, not looking for problems.

And we’re able to teach students to get better results AND stay safe.

As students go through the Accunect curriculum, their intuition steadily develops.

And we spend a lot of time discussing how to develop insight and intuition, WITHOUT becoming over-sensitive.

Back to Wei Qi

There are main types of Qi in the body:

• Nutritive Qi – the Qi that circulates inside the body to bring blood and nourishment to the internal organs and tissues
• Defensive/Wei Qi – the Qi that circulates on the boundary surfaces of the body to protect from physical injury, resilience to climates (heat, cold, wind, etc.) and emotions.

You could think of this as “inside Qi” and “outside Qi.”

On a physical level, Wei Qi provides the energy to keep the pores in the skin closed. This makes the skin a better barrier, which is part of your innate immune system.

To have strong Wei Qi, you need to:

• Have enough Qi – make enough Qi from food, get enough sleep, etc.
• Distribute the Qi to the surface – this is affected by mental attitudes

When I work with clients, I often end up working with digestion to make sure they are getting enough Qi out of their food. You need energy/Qi to run all of your body system, nourish your organs, run your immune system, replace worn out tissues, etc.

You also need enough Qi to be able to spare some for the surface/Wei Qi. If you don’t have enough Qi, your body prioritizes internal organ functioning.

After someone has enough Qi, we need to work with their attitudes in order to strengthen their Wei Qi.

When people take on too much responsibility for others, it weakens their Wei Qi.

When people live in chronic fear, it collapses their Wei Qi.

Working with clients

I’ve had many clients with Wei Qi for emotions so weak that they can’t go to the cinema to watch a movie. The movie is designed to stimulate a strong emotional response, and when a whole theater full of people around them experience the same emotion at the same time the amount of emotional energy becomes overwhelming for people with weak Wei Qi.

It’s not just about limiting social interaction. People who absorb too many emotions have weakened digestion and weakened immune function.

People never come to me because they feel they are too sensitive for the cinema - they come because physical health problems and I find out about the cinema issue when I get led to Wei Qi for emotions and ask them if they are sensitive to other people’s emotional states.

I’m able to help people with this by strengthening their overall energy levels AND working with beliefs that make them oversensitive.

Working with students

It’s exceedingly common that people drawn to learning and practicing energy healing are oversensitive.

Let’s face it – you wouldn’t be drawn to this work unless you liked helping other people.

Unfortunately, this tendency towards over-compassion also leads to weak Wei Qi and over-sensitivity.

This observation strongly informs and influences our curriculum and how we teach.

My job of teaching people to be effective practitioners has many levels:

• Teaching them the actual knowledge, theory, and techniques of Accunect
• Teaching them how to use muscle checking to access intuitive information without being sensitive
• Convincing them that they can get all the information they need to facilitate healing WITHOUT being sensitive

We begin this process with the first course, Accunect Connect. They learn:

• The theory of how healing works, including an appreciation of how miraculous the body’s ability to heal really is  (medical trivia: your body replaces 50-70 BILLION cells a day – that’s a lot of healing)
• How to do muscle checking to access intuitive information in your subconscious mind
• How to combine the muscle checking with the Accunect Health Map to find the right path to healing for each person – no sensitivity required
• How to use tapping to activate and supercharge the body’s self-healing abilities

The advanced curriculum gives:

• Much deeper understanding of the nature of healing, and the relationship between mind, body, and energy
• Extensive reference pages to use along with the muscle-checking – this allows practitioners to get deep insights into the emotional and spiritual aspects of imbalances involved with a health issue WITHOUT having to FEEL the clients emotional state
• Many more opportunities to practice doing Accunect healing sessions with other students to gain confidence that they can get to the right information without having to be sensitive
• Understanding how the Wei Qi works, and how to balance the different levels of Wei Qi
• Understanding how to find specific beliefs that impact on the strength of the Wei Qi and other body systems

We cover the Wei Qi in detail in the Accunect Energies course.

The other advanced courses, Accunect Mind and Accunect Body, also serve to develop and understanding of the “spiritual anatomy” of the bodymind. This aids in the ability to improve overall vitality and to transform belief systems into a healthier state of mind.

Conclusions

Being sensitive to other people's emotions ruins your health, whether you are a practitioner or not.

It doesn’t help the other person at all – you aren’t able to take their emotion away from them, you just end up joining them in their suffering.

When you join them in their suffering, you broadcast that suffering back to them and reinforce their perspective that “Life’s a b*tch and then you die.” That’s not helping, it’s actually hurting them.

You can’t be an effective practitioner without strengthening your own Wei Qi so that you can hold a space of hope and possibility for them.

Someone needs to be holding space for transformation and healing. If your client is sick, it’s a lot to ask them to hold that space for both of you. It’s your responsibility as the practitioner to manage your own energy so that you can stay focused on looking for solutions.

It's also the practitioner's responsibility to radiate hope and optimism instead of reinforcing the client's fears.

Next steps - practitioners

If you’re a practitioner of any kind, Accunect is the only healing system that integrates the importance of important energetic boundaries into every level of the curriculum.

If you find it difficult to work with clients in poor health, or if some clients seem to mysteriously drain you, you have weak Wei Qi.

Contact us to learn more about learning Accunect, or about studying the advanced curriculum if you’ve already taken Accunect Connect.

Accunect Energies support calls are starting now - this is a perfect time to balance your own energy systems and Wei Qi while learning to help others in a more powerful way.

Click the button below for more info and registration options.

You may also want to book in personal healing sessions for yourself.

Next steps – everyone else

If you are not a practitioner and if this article makes you realize that you are too sensitive, or that you have health issues that like chronic fatigue or inflammation, you likely have weak Wei Qi for emotions.

Consider booking in for a series of healing sessions to work on your overall health and wellbeing, including balancing your sensitivity.