I should have been more careful about what I said in the January blog post about understanding the concept of healing crisis vs healing response. And I did say that some people have an immune backlog – they were exposed to a virus but never took enough time off to allow their immune system to clear it. Which means that sometimes people will get sick as part of a natural healing response.

What I should have also said to practitioners was “Please don’t tell people they might get sick after a session.”

This omission has become apparent as I’ve had people emailing me to ask if they should warn people they might get sick after a session. My is answer is NO.

Most people don’t get sick after receiving a healing session. So I don’t tell people that they might get sick, because that would be planting a suggestion into their subconscious mind that they are supposed to get sick. Or that getting sick is part of receiving an energy balancing.

Just because some people have an immune backlog doesn’t mean that everyone does.

And I find that because Accunect works to optimize efficiency in the immune system, even the people that do need to clear out and old virus or toxins generally do so easily and without a strong reaction. So why plant fear?

Words have power. Saying someone is likely to get sick after a session is the same as offering a prognosis, or prediction of the progression of someone’s condition. And a prognosis is actually a form of diagnosis.

We don’t diagnose in Accunect, we simply look for areas of the body mind that are ready to function better in some way and focus the body’s awareness on those issues so that it can come into balance. That’s safe.

Diagnosis, and prognosis, can be dangerous. A diagnosis has the potential to disrupt the functioning of the nervous system, and hence the rest of the body by creating a perception of fear. This puts the body into fight or flight nervous system tone and the immune system is then compromised as a result.

In his book, Be Careful What Your Pray For – You Just Might Get It, Larry Dossey discusses the idea that a diagnosis can be a form of medical hex or curse. In his years as a practicing physician, he witnessed first-hand how positive thinking can improve healing results. And he cites lots of research into the power of prayer that corroborates that view.

Dr. Dossey has also observed that negative thought or negative expectations have a strong potential to worsen a patient’s condition – they can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. There are many documented cases where some received a wrong diagnosis, or their test results were mixed up with someone else’s test results – leading to being given someone else’s diagnosis. In many of these cases of switched test result an previously healthy person quickly develops the disease they were told they had – and in some cases die from it before the error is realized.

This is why Dr. Dossey chooses to use a strong label like "medical hex" to describe the power that diagnosis can have on someone’s health. He presents substantial evidence that telling someone they are going to die can cause them to die - even if they weren't actually sick. If that's not a curse or hex, what is?

So be careful what you say. There’s enough people focusing on the negative possibility and looking for what’s wrong. If you keep looking for what’s wrong you’ll find it – or create it by creating negative expectations. We need more Accunect practitioners focusing on what could be better to create more potential for healing.

For an Accunect class near you, please visit the calendar page.

If you have taken Accunect, check out the Accunect Practitioner Development and Certification Program to take your practice to the next level and become a Certified Accunect Practitioner.

We all know we see things differently – that’s a big part of why we have arguments. If everyone saw the same thing and understood it in exactly the same way there would be much less to argue about. We argue because we are convinced that there is one version of reality out there, and we simply need to explain ourselves better for the other person to come to their senses and see the universe correctly – by which mean the way we see it.

What if we actually saw different realities? What if our observation and perception is actually defining and creating the universe we see?

That’s exactly what quantum physics says is going on. Even though quantum theory is over a hundred years old, the implications of the theory are so staggering that few physicists are able to really approach these ideas openly. One of the early contributors to quantum theory, Niels Bohr, once said that if someone thinks they understand quantum physics, they really don’t get it – because you can’t understand it. Other physicists think that physical laws actually do change according to beliefs in collective conscious – that the world we see is a product of a cultural habit of seeing the world in a certain way. This theory is borne out by the observation that people in heightened or altered states of consciousness are able to “bend” the laws of physics – it’s as if the world is responding to their world view instead of the world view of the surrounding culture.

What does this imply for health and healing? How much do our collective ideas about what conditions and diseases are hard influence whether or not people get better or not? Before the discovery of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, its cause was a mystery. For a long time people were believed to be cursed and that they could be healed by a touch from a royal, such as the king. And the death rate from tuberculosis was shocking. Once the bacterium was identified, the death rate went down dramatically, decades before there were any antibiotics available. People saw the disease differently and it lost its mysterious power.

I’ll talk about the idea of perception actually creating reality and how that relates to Accunect during the next Accunect Community Call – Thursday March 7^th at 4pm London time. If you haven’t signed up for the call you can do so here.

Like to listen? Click audio below or just keep reading...

This post was inspired by a couple of recent events. The first was a student messaging me because a client had mentioned having a chronic symptom get worse after an Accunect session – and she wanted to know if she had done something wrong or what she should have said to the client about it. Other symptoms had improved, but the one symptom had gotten worse.  It’s worth noting that the issue had started many years ago after a really bad infection and had never totally cleared up since that old infection many years prior. The other event was that I had just posted a lecture on Opportunities in the Accunect Practitioner Development Program on how to recognize challenging situations (like serious conditions and chronic illnesses) as really being opportunities to watch a bigger miracle.

So was the client’s symptom aggravation a healing crisis or not?

In this instance, some aspects of health improved although one symptom worsened – that’s not a crisis to me. It’s likely that the Law of Cure applies.

The idea behind the Law of Cure is that in homeopathy and in acupuncture we heal from the inside out. What this means is that more recent symptoms are likely to heal first, and then older symptoms are likely to reappear or re-intensify before being cleared - in the case above a number of newer symptoms improved, while the older symptom worsened temporarily.

I have to say that I don’t really like the term ‘healing crisis.’ Or maybe I don't like the way people use the term. Sometimes the way people say healing crisis makes any response to a session that isn’t instant relief sound like a problem. And other people use the term in a way that avoids the discussion of whether over-treatement or over-stimulation might have been an issue. For some experiences I think the better term might be ‘healing response.’  Sometimes the body needs to rest, or give energy to the immune system so that it can do it's job. That's a healthy healing response. But over-treatment can push the body past it's limits and create a healing crisis where additional stress is placed on the body - more stress than would be necessary to clear the issue.

What is a healing response and how do we define a healing crisis?

There’s lots of reactions that people refer to as a healing crisis, here’s some of the most common experiences:

• ‘Catching’ a cold
• Feeling toxic or foggy
• Feeling tired
• Having soreness or pain
• Feeling very upset or emotional

All of these reactions are possible after any kind of therapy, whether it be massage, acupuncture, chiropractic, energy work or herbal/nutritional therapy.

Sometimes these reactions point to a positive healing response. Other times they can represent over-treatment or over-stimulation. One source of some of these symptoms can be what’s called a Herxheimer reaction, or detoxification reaction. This happens when the body releases old toxins faster than the elimination organs can deal with them. This is where the possibility of over-stimulation comes in: clearing out old toxins is good, but trying to detox too fast actual creates additional stress on the body. It’s not just uncomfortable to go too fast, it’s a stressor that can weaken your system and deplete your Qi/Energy. I might call that a crisis. I think it’s better to encourage the body to detox at a more comfortable pace – one that doesn’t cause additional stress on the body.

Sometimes people are too busy to take time off to have a cold or flu. So they take something to suppress the cold symptoms. The problem is that they turn off their immune system by taking the cold medications. This pushes the virus or other microbe deeper into the body. The body puts the immune response on hold until the ‘emergency’ is passed. The virus is still there, but the immune system is ignoring it so you don’t have aches and pains or fever so you think you aren’t ill.

If an Accunect session brings more awareness and hence energy to the immune system, the person may experience cold or flu symptoms while the immune system clears out the old pathogen. But the energy work didn’t give the person the virus, it just woke up the immune system. That’s a healing response, not a crisis.

Here’s an image to put it into perspective: you’re really busy so you decide you don’t have time to take the trash out from the kitchen and put it into the outside bin for collection. You just keep tossing the trash into the pantry and closing the door quickly so you can pretend everything is okay. At some point someone comes over to your house and notices a smell coming from the pantry. You finally realize that you are going to have to make time to take the trash out. Taking the trash out after it has been rotting in the pantry for a long time is going to be a smelly and unpleasant task. But cleaning out the pantry isn’t a crisis. The real crisis was throwing all the trash in there in the first place.

The good news is that we see far less of these kinds of reactions with Accunect than with any other therapy that I’ve studied or practiced. I believe that the reason for this is that we place such an emphasis on looking for what is ready to shift or change, and not focusing on what is wrong.

As a result, clients typically clear out old toxins, emotions, and pathogens at a more comfortable rate without causing additional stress on the body. There might be some hiccups on the path to recovery, but I generally see far less negative reactions with Accunect than with other therapies.

The healing response may include something other than instant relief and abundant energy because the body has to rest or clean house. But I reserve the term healing crisis for when the patient is experiencing excess stress from the healing process. In my opinion the process of healing has likely been pushed too fast and that’s why they are in overwhelm. Because we only look for what’s ready to change in Accunect and don’t give medicines or manipulations we see healthy healing responses rather than healing crises.

I’ll go into each of the common kinds of ‘healing crisis’ below to shed more insight on them.

Getting a cold or flu after a treatment

Not taking time to have a cold is a very common occurrence. We’re conditioned to think that taking time to get sick is a weakness. How often have you heard someone say “I don’t allow myself to get sick! When I start getting sick I just push harder and tell my body to be strong!” Advertisements for cold remedies show people being too responsible (maybe self-important?) to take time off. So they reach for the cold remedy and trudge on through rain and sleet and snow…

My teacher Dr. Lam Kong used to say that a healthy person should get sick four times a year, once at each change of seasons. The idea is that you need to let the body ‘clean house’ periodically. If you get sick at the change of seasons and don’t fight it, you can be a little bit sick for a day and then be well again. The idea is if it's only been a few months since the last time you let your immune system 'clean house' it doesn't take long to clear out the recent toxins, bacteria and viruses.

Dr. Kong was a tenth generation Chinese Medicine physician who had been in practice for nearly fifty years when I studied with him. People who don’t take to get sick accumulate an immune backlog that weighs the body down. He called it ‘old flu.’ People with old colds and flus that have never been cleared don’t look sick – they look tired.

Many conditions that we call ‘syndromes’ in western medicine are really ‘old flu.’

We call something a syndrome when it is collection of symptoms that we don’t understand the cause of.

Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia syndrome are very often caused by old flu. Depression can be caused by old flu. Infertility can be caused by old flu. And I’ve seen multiple cases of epilepsy and other seizure disorders caused by old flu.

My teacher Dr. Angela Longo taught me Dr. Kong’s method of feeling the presence of old viruses by taking the meridian pulses at the wrist. Then we would use an herbal formula to encourage the body to work on an old/buried virus. And then the patient would have the flu. But we didn’t give the patient the flu – it was already in their system, sometimes from years before. We just raised it to awareness.

Sometimes we would end up having to clear several old flues from someone. It’s a challenging thing to explain to patients, because no one likes getting sick any more than they like cleaning out rotten trash from the pantry. And western medicine often focuses on suppressing symptoms rather than treating the root cause, so people are used to symptoms going away or being reduced.

But after the patient finished having the flu and we could no longer feel the indication of an old flu in the pulse they were healthier. Their chronic fatigue lifted and their muscles stopped hurting. I had one patient who was having several grand mal seizures a day when she began treatment. After clearing one old flu the seizures reduced by half. We cleared several old flues over the course of several months, and when all the old flues were gone she was seizure free.  Getting the flu and feeling terrible for a few days is way better than having to wear helmet for protection in case of seizure for the rest of your life.

With Accunect I see this process of having an old flu clear, but usually in a much more gentle fashion. Most of the time their immune system clears out old infections in a graceful way and over time they get healthier and I can no longer feel the old flu in the pulse – without them having to have a full blown flu with high fever and discomfort. Occasionally I have patients that do get sick after an Accunect session, but in general their symptoms are less severe. I believe that this is because Accunect can also balance the immune system in many different ways to make it more efficient.

Feeling toxic

Again, detoxing is a good thing. But if happens too quickly or in the wrong order it can cause stress on the body. More is not always better.

Liver cleanses are very popular and many people think you need to take really strong cleansing herbs to detox. In Chinese Medicine the preferred approach – developed over two millennia of clinical discussion – is to gently support the liver with strengthening herbs instead. When the liver is strong it’s natural function is to detoxify the body. Trying to detox without making the liver strong first is like putting the cart before the horse: you don’t get very far for the amount of energy expended and you end making the horse angry.

Our approach in Accunect is to look for what is ready to function better and bring awareness to those areas. In this way we help to improve the body’s natural ability to cleanse itself rather than pushing it with powerful herbs or medicines. Hence we see very few detoxing reactions compared to other therapies.

Feeling tired

Just like we don’t take time to get sick, we often don’t take time to rest. It’s a myth that we should have abundant energy all the time. We need to rest and sleep every day.

Our culture prizes overwork. The Protestant work ethic dominates many western cultures. America was founded by Calvinists and Calvin taught that you knew God loved you if he gave you the willpower to work hard every day. Taking time off was a sign that you were a sinner sure to end up in hell.

As a result, many people are always running on adrenal energy and they are exhausted without knowing it. They are always in ‘fight of flight’ mode.

Over the years I’ve seen a number of people in chronic adrenal fatigue who didn’t even realize it. They felt somewhat tired, but their commitment to their responsibilities was such that they would just drink more coffee and plow on. They couldn’t function without the coffee, and the combination of coffee and fight or flight energy was making them think they were just a little tired – rather than exhausted.

In a few of these cases, the Accunect session served to finally switch off the chronic fight or flight activation. And then they would sleep for 24 hours straight. That’s a not a crisis, it’s a miracle. If you haven’t rested properly in years, it’s a good thing when you manage to switch off and rest. The key here is that Accunect didn't make them tired. They were already exhausted and running only on adrenal reserves. The Accunect session allowed their nervous system to come out of fight or flight activation and then they realized that they were tired.

Feeling soreness or pain

I’ve seen these kinds of responses over the years more in response to bodywork such as massage or manipulation. Again sometimes it’s an appropriate healing response, and sometimes it’s a crisis.

If a muscle has been tight for a long time there will be lactic acid built up in the muscle. Because the circulation is poor due to the chronic contraction the muscle will more likely be numb than painful. When you release the muscle and the circulation is restored, there is some soreness from the lactic acid release, but this eases over the next few hours and it’s generally good by the next day. That’s a normal and healthy healing response. Muscles can release from Accunect sessions as well, and in some cases there can be soreness when this happens.

I’ve also had massages where the therapist worked too hard or too fast and I’ve been left bruised from the overly strong pressure. In these cases the soreness may last for days. That’s a healing crisis. I would have preferred that the therapist honor how much my body was ready to release on that day rather than literally pushing for more.

Feeling the difference between what’s ready and when you are overworking is part of the ‘art’ of massage and new massage therapists sometimes overwork until they get enough experience to feel or intuit how much to do in a session. An experienced therapist learns to feel how much pressure is enough or too much and gets better results with less effort and less soreness.

With Accunect, we don’t physically manipulate the body, we just raise awareness of areas that are ready to shift or improve so we see healthy healing responses rather than healing crises.

Feeling overly emotional or fragile

Just like we can only clear toxins so fast, we can only release old emotions so fast as well. The ‘better out than in’ philosophy still applies, but if you push too hard to clear everything all at once it can cause additional stress.

Sometimes less is more. With emotional releases many people have been led to believe that a bigger release is better. But I’ve also seen that just as flushing too many toxins out of the body at once stresses the elimination organs, pushing too many emotions out all at once stresses our mind and body.

Some therapies (and some therapists) think a huge cathartic release is a sign of a powerful treatment and a good thing. But there is often a new trauma created by the experience of losing control. One step forward, but also a step (or more) backward.

Since our focus with Accunect is to look only for what the bodymind is ready to release, and then we just hold the space with the tapping for the mind and heart to release it, the process is typically very gentle. Accunect isn’t a counseling therapy, we only hold the space for the person to release whatever they are ready to.

A lot of times people just naturally clear out old emotional baggage in their sleep and gradually feel lighter. Other times there is a stronger emotional release, but it usually passes quickly and gracefully.

I used to get more cathartic releases with other therapies in the past, but with Accunect the process is both gentler and more lasting. The release of old trauma is deeper and more complete when it is allowed to process at a more comfortable level.

Conclusion

Sometimes people need to clear out old toxins, emotions, or immune issues and an Accunect session can help to stimulate that process. Feeling tired or having a cold or flu after a healing session can be a healthy healing response. Tapping over someone's head and heart won't give them a flu or push toxins into their body. But many people have been too busy to take time to detox or cleanse so when their immune systems gets more energy it will start to work on the old backlog of immune issues.

It is possible with many therapies to over-stimulate.  When this happens the body releases more toxins and emotions than the elimination organs can handle. Or you can force the immune system into an overly strong response. This is a healing crisis. The art of massage is to not work too hard, the art of herbalism is to figure out the right dosages of herbs to support the body rather than stress it, and the art of acupuncture is to give enough stimulation without over-stimulating the body.

It takes many years of practice to master the art of 'dosage' in most therapies. One of the great things about Accunect is that we simply raise awareness of areas of the body that could function more efficiently and let the wisdom of the body take the appropriate action from there. So you can learn to do safe, effective treatments with Accunect in one weekend!

For an Accunect class near you, please visit the calendar page.

If you have taken Accunect, check out the Accunect Practitioner Development and Certification Program to take your practice to the next level and become a Certified Accunect Practitioner.

We are going to be featuring our new Connect Instructors in our newsletter over the coming months. This is a current theme as Josh Overcash, one of our new instructors has kindly been working on updating our About Us page to include Connect Instructors. The SelfCare Instructors will soon follow.

For our first instructor feature I chose Laura Freix. She did a heartwarming video interview with one of her students, Heather Rizzo, 5 months after she had taken Accunect. This is included in a link below.

Laura also contributed the inspiring article, “Do the Magic Tapping on Me!” about that interview.

Laura's deepest core values revolve around family, relationships, love and acceptance. Her passion and authenticity to help her clients achieve personal transformation in health, in love and in life, and become the next best version of themselves shines through with her clients and students.

Laura began her career with GE Aerospace, where she worked as a Senior Math Analyst for twelve years, before resigning to stay at home with her four amazing kids. She did not know she had any intuitive ability the first fifty years of her life, and is living testament that anyone can learn to cultivate this gift using the Accunect framework. Her excitement in helping others discover and refine this skill is evident in her classes.

Here's the video of the interview that Laura did with Heather (also featured in the "Do the Magic Tapping on Me!" post)

If you are on facebook then watch for our Valentine’s Day campaign called ‘healing principle # 5, be open hearted’. Be open hearted, is one of my favorite Accunect Healing Principles and obviously lends itself to sending lots of messages about LOVE. I have used Valentine’s day as an opportunity to send Love and Blessings shamelessly throughout the day.

Messages will come from our fb pages, Accunect – FMT, the public fb group - Mind Body Consciousness Healing – Accunect and from both our personal pages too. These messages are banners like the one above. If you see any of these on facebook please do share and like them so that we can get the message of Accunect, being open hearted and Connection out there to the world.

If you have not already liked our Accunect – FMT page, please also do that. We intend to continue to send valuable messages and quotes throughout the year, including updates, links to the blog and messages from Ka’imi, myself and the other instructors, as well as information about events.

I recently started the new public group called Mind Body Consciousness Healing – Accunect. It’s a public group to share stories and talk about Accunect and it’s theories, along with all concepts relating to mind body consciousness. It would be so great to hear about your stories in that group. We will add all of our fb friends so that you can join in the conversation. Friend us and ask to be joined or look up the group, Mind Body Consciousness Healing – Accunect and join.

LOVE Balancing For Everything Love on Valetine's Day

This is a Balancing for Love.  It is for all kinds of LOVE – accepting love, having love, loving yourself, receiving love, knowing you are worth it, clearing the past so that you are open for love … get your Valentine’s Day complimentary balancing for everything LOVE here!

This post was contributed by Accunect Connect Instructor Laura Freix

When Heather Rizzo, co-founder of the Joyful Healing Playground in Monona, Wisconsin, was trying to decide how she wanted to earn her massage CEs, she decided on Accunect.

After having an Accunect session with me, and learning a little bit more about it, she was really intrigued. “When you told me the course had gotten certified for CEs, it was a no-brainer for me.” she shared. “Accunect has exceeded my expectations and it’s only been six months.” Heather, continued enthusiastically.

You can watch an interview with Laura and Heather on YouTube here.

Heather’s thriving waiting list practice, known as Return to Balance, includes a laundry list of modalities that she pulls out of her toolbox when working with clients. She is a licensed massage therapist, Access Bars™ practitioner, as well as a HeartIQ™ Coach, and most recently added Accunect® to her list of credentials.

She could only take on a handful of new clients each year and was physically maxed out, so when Accunect came along it fit the bill. She integrates it into her practice by doing a single balance at the beginning of each massage.

“It’s part of the session now because it just creates a really beautiful foundation for the other work … so we’re not dealing with so much of the surface tension and stress they carry with them when they first walk through the door.”

“People are wanting to know more and schedule sessions, so I’m just over the moon right now!” This has also enabled her to maximize her time as she finds that she has the energy to see more clients doing Accunect. “I feel like my income cap and contribution has been released.” She added.

Another thing that was surprising to her was how quickly that she would be using Accunect in her practice. Heather offered Accunect sessions to a client who had broken her hip the first week after the class. Her client loved it, and the client’s physical therapist was amazed by the swift recovery. Another client, who recently moved out of the area, is so grateful that they can continue to work together with distance Accunect sessions.

What Heather did not anticipate was the impact that Accunect would have on her personal life. She uses the SelfCare balance daily, and finds it supports her in staying grounded, which allows her to better serve her clients.

Using the KISS routine for emergencies, she helped her husband recover from a nasty bike crash; and her 6-year-old daughter survive a bee sting and multiple other bumps and bruises.

She recounts the beautiful relationship that her daughter now has with the “magic tapping”:

“We got her a big girl bike a couple of months ago and she had some pretty gnarly crashes. …I did some balances on her, and she just got back up on her bike. When she’s feeling off, she’ll come up to me and say: “Do the magic tapping on me … It helps me feel more calm.”"

“I just want to say one more thing…” Heather piped in as the interview was coming to a close. “As a mom, I feel like I have this tool in my toolbox that is always with me. And, there’s just something that really brings me peace of mind and is empowering about that.”

“I agree,” I responded. “My kids are grown and I still get calls … Mom, can you do a session?” And I’ve been a mom at heart my whole life, so I love being able to still “be the mom” even from far away … It feels really good.”

Flash forward ahead seven months after taking the Connect class. At an event, Heather decided to offer 10 minute mini-balancing sessions, where she previously offered chair massages. Individuals who received the sessions offered generous tips, because they found the experience to be deeply moving, accessing something deep inside of them. The organizers were so pleased with the outcome that they asked her to send them an invoice for $200 and have requested that she come back again for the rest of the year in a new paid position.

I am looking forward to hearing many more stories like this one.

I’ve got an awesome link to share today.  It’s about using Accunect to heal emotional trauma. It contains a really nice and concise description of Accunect and what it can be good for by one of our instructors, Laura Freix, from the Washington D.C. area.

The article is worth a read just for the clarity of the explanation of Accunect that Laura gives (must be why we made her an instructor…). Laura explains how Accunect SelfCare should be a part of every parents skill set, as well as how the Accunect Connect and the rest of the Accunect curriculum aids her practice by providing both a connection to her intuition or “inner guidance system” and providing health empowerment to herself and her clients and students.

Here’s the coolest part of the whole article

The author was motivated to take an Accunect course because “my children’s doctor told me Accunect would be helpful for me to learn for my children to help them ground and calm.”   That’s right, Accunect is recommended as wellness tool for parents by a medical doctor! The medical doctor in question knows this because she uses Accunect in her practice and sees the results.

I’m very happy to be able to say that all of the medical doctors who have taken Accunect have found a way to use it in their practice. It’s safe, the theory of Accunect makes perfect sense from a medical perspective, and it works. What’s not to like?

Here’s another great quote in the article - from a nine year old Accunect client: “I don’t know what you do here, but it is like a massage for the mind.”

The article is a little old, so the Accunect SelfCare class mentioned has already happened. But Laura is teaching Accunect Connect April 28-30th in Virginia – you can register here for her class.

If you're not in Virginia that weekend, you can also take Accunect Connect in Christchurch, New Zealand or Edmonton, Canada the same weekend. All Accunect courses are now eligible for massage continuing education credit with the NCBTMB as well.

For more on healing emotions (and  other things) with Accunect, read the full article here.

I’m very excited to announce that we now have certification from the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork (NCBTMB) for all Accunect courses. NCBTMB provides national certification for massage therapists, and courses certified by the NCBTMB are accepted by many states for continuing education requirements. This is awesome news, because as a massage therapist I wanted to make sure that Accunect was easy to learn and fast to use so that massage therapists could have a powerful energy balancing tool that they can realistically integrate into their practice.

Combining Accunect and massage is a match made in heaven.  I’m a believer in massage – I’ve been a massage therapist for 27 years, and used to do acupressure and meridian massage full-time. I estimate that I’ve given over fifteen thousand massages in my life.  I also know that most of the common tension patterns that we are aware of – in our neck and shoulders, back and so on – actually have their roots in deeper energy imbalances. If the neck is tight, there is almost certainly some imbalance in the digestion. If the low back is weak or tight, there is usually some weakness in the Kidney meridian – either from overwork or from chronic fear (and we often overwork out of fear). IF the chest is tight, there is usually weakness or stagnation in the Liver meridian – usually from some repressed or unexpressed anger.  What this means is that massaging the affected muscles often only gives short term relief. If you really want to get more lasting results, you need to balance the body at a deeper level.  Acupressure and acupuncture are one way to do that deeper balancing, but both take a lot of training to understand and to successfully apply. Accunect provides a way to balance the same energy systems as acupuncture does quickly and safely, with minimal training. Acupuncture is a four-year degree program, and it takes even longer to master. Accunect can be effectively learned in a weekend, and it is possible to do effective energy balancing using Accunect in just a couple of minutes – the day after the workshop!

What I typically recommend to massage therapists taking Accunect is that they try to integrate a little Accunect into their sessions immediately after taking the workshop. I suggest that they determine a time in minutes that they feel comfortable setting aside (usually 3-5 minutes) and then to tell the person that they would like to include a little Accunect balancing before the massage. Here’s what I recommend they say:

Then proceed to do 3-5 minutes of Accunect balancing, followed by their normal massage routine.

When massage therapists do this, both they and their clients notice that they relax quicker, and that the benefits of the massage last longer.  After a while, some clients begin to ask for a longer Accunect session before the massage as they see that it is really getting at some of their issues in a deeper way. They also start to see that the sessions are helping them on more levels than just tension release and they start to see the these integrated sessions provided by the therapist as being more holistic. This allows massage therapists to develop a more diverse – and hence more satisfying – practice.

A huge thank you to Catharine Dress for her efforts in securing this approval. Catharine is an Accunect SelfCare Instructor, and a Certified Accunect Practitioner in Yorktown, Virginia.  She took on the project of completing all the necessary applications, corresponding with the NCBTMB, and shepherding the application through the approval process with minimal input from me. I am eternally grateful for her effort on this project and for her dedication to promoting Accunect. You can contact her to say thank you from her listing on the Accunect Practitioner directory here.

I got a great email from one of my students recently with the subject line “What if we could change the world?” Of course I opened it.

She shared with me an experience of being at a social event and in the middle of a casual conversation about what people did for work, when she talked about her Accunect practice she found that people were very interested in finding out whether Accunect could help them with their challenges. As she talked about the principles, she found that people got it and just wanted to learn more. The whole experience seemed to underscore how people don’t just have health issues, they have life issues, and they need a healing system that addresses all levels of the body-mind.

One woman had a son who was really struggling with anger issues, to the point where it was seriously impacting on his life as well as the rest of the family. There has been some difficult events that affected the family and the son just wasn’t coping well with it. Could Accunect help him? My student explained that some acupuncture meridians regulate how we react to and express anger. So Accunect could help by helping to balance the energy systems of the body around the anger issues, which could help the pent-up emotions to release and become manageable. What if we could help the mom and her son, she asked? That would change the world – because world change happens one person at a time. And although we are each just one person, to someone we help, we are the world.

Bad things happen to everyone, and sometimes it can overwhelm their emotional processing ability. We can hope and pray for them to handle it well, but what about when they need extra help? When something happens that upsets us, it’s natural to feel angry, but if we don’t know how to express that anger productively it just builds and builds it until becomes unmanageable. When the anger builds up too much, it becomes scary and explosive. Accunect can help by balancing the energy systems of the body to release some of the stored anger and change the physiological reactions to anger so that expressing it seems more approachable.

That got me to thinking about other issues that people often think of as hard:

• Infertility comes from a weakness in the Kidney acupuncture meridian  – and that perspective makes it really easy to help. Every time I help someone have a baby that changes their world – and adds a wanted soul to the world.
• Arthritis is hard in western medicine, but it gets a lot easier when you see it as a stagnation of Qi/Energy and fluid. When the fluid builds up in the joints they hurt. When you help the Qi and fluid move, the accumulation clears and movement becomes easier and less painful. When you help someone’s joints hurt less you also open their ability to live life – that changes the world.
• Digestive issues seem like permanent labels to many people, but I see them as a temporary weakness of digestive Qi/Energy. Because I see these issues as temporary energy problems, when I guide someone to a better energy imbalance, they overcome their digestive sensitivities and "lose the label." And at the same time that helps them to digest their life more easily – that changes their world in more ways than one.

I only wish that more people understood how many problems that we’ve been led to believe are hard are actually simple energy imbalances, and how people can really get help with this issues using Accunect. Until you can see a problem as an energy imbalance, it’s hard to imagine how energy medicine could help. So I’m working at several programs to raise awareness on these issues to help introduce people to Accunect principles so that they are more inclined to get Accunect for more kinds of issues in their lives.

• I’m steadily adding more information to Accunect.com in order to make it more useful educational resource. I’m trying to add a page or two a week of information, and I’ve made a schedule of blog posts so that they are more regular.
• I’m working hard on finishing the long-awaited Accunect Practitioner Certification and Development online course. Hopefully soon. An important aspect of the course is helping practitioners with their ability to explain Accunect.
• I’m planning to do regular group healing calls, with the first one scheduled for 11 September 2016. Each call will cover a different topic and will include a bit of lecture, some time for questions and answers, and an Accunect balancing session for everyone on the call.

I’m really excited by the group healing calls. It’s a way to communicate how Accunect is relevant to specific issues, instead of just a generalized theory.  I’ll keep the general theory to a minimum so that I can focus on the topic of the day and use it make the principles relatable to a real world problem.  I’m hoping that these calls offer an affordable way for people to reconnect to Accunect and get a balancing. I’m also hoping that people forward the announcement email to other people who might be interested so that it can be an outreach to get people interested in getting full Accunect sessions for themselves.

To read more about the group healing call/webinar series read more here.

The first call is called "Life Happened - What Next?" It's about how to understand accumulated stress and overwhelm from and body-mind-spirit perspective - and why it helps to get Accunect to break the pattern of overwhelm and depression. And there will be an group Accunect balancing as part of the webinar. Read more here.

I want to change the world. I want to do that by letting people know that lots of life challenges and health challenges can be solved at an energy level and that Accunect can help. As more people spread that message the faster the world will change.

Will you join me?

I’m offering a one day Accunect Healing Intensive in several locations this winter and spring as way to experience Accunect healing in a group setting. I'll be doing Healing Intensives in Limerick, Bozeman, Saskatoon, and Edmonton. And maybe in Portland.

Lots of people have been asking for this kind of a workshop for sometime, and I’m really excited by the possibilities. I’ve done several Healing Intensives since starting this program in 2016 and it was a great experience for me and for all the attendees.

Here’s how it works. It’s a day of sessions. They are full sessions using everything I know, using the whole Accunect Health Map, and all the insights from my knowledge and experience that come to me when I’m working with my private clients. In courses I do mostly very short, simple demonstrations of individual techniques and some general balancing sessions that illustrate how to use the Health Map. Those sessions can be very powerful, and they show how less can be more. But they stop short of showing the full power of Accunect.

Sessions in a group environment always affect the whole group. We all face many of the same challenges in life, and from an energy perspective we share many of the same imbalances from those stresses. In this workshop I focus on each person individually during their session and do a balancing that is driven by what is ready to shift for them. And for most of the balancings that I do, quite a few people in the audience are also ready to shift on that same issue to some degree. So they receive a balancing as well. It’s really like experiencing energy balancing all day long, whether you are getting a session or just watching. Observation changes reality. What we watch changes us.

This workshop is open to anyone looking for body mind spirit healing. There is no prerequisite, and no need to have studied Accunect or even be familiar with it. It’s a great way to experience Accunect and get a healing all at once.

For Accunect students, watching a senior practitioner work is an indispensable aspect of training. The techniques in Accunect are very simple, but they can combine with knowledge and intuition to produce individualized healing sessions that deeply resonate on all levels and that powerfully activates our natural ability to heal. The feedback I’ve had from previous students is that the Healing Intensive takes their understanding to a whole new level.

To register for one of the upcoming Accunect Healing Intensives, click here.

The first ten students to register and pay for each workshop will receive a session from me during the day.

After the first ten students sign up, the price goes down and the remaining participants will be able to observe the sessions and to benefit from the group energy shifts.

In many cases the Accunect Healing Intensive happens right after a course - so why not plan to make a weekend out of it and take or retake the course on offer that weekend. Even though Accunect is easy to learn, you always get a lot out of retaking the course. It's always a transformational weekend, no matter how many times you take it. Or send a friend you love. Or bring a friend...