Help Clients Change Chronic Pain

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[00:00:00] Glenyce: Welcome everybody to Tools to Create a Better Life with myself, Glenyce Hughes. I am so incredibly grateful that you are here. 

 

I am so incredibly grateful that I have two of the most magical people I know also joining me. Yes. We have V and O’tion all the way from British Columbia, which if you don’t know Canada, it doesn’t matter, but if you do, it’s on the west coast and they happen to have an ocean view where they get to see whales and all the things. I’m so incredibly grateful that they are here. Thank you guys for joining me. 

 

Just before I get you to do a little intro, I’m going to share the topic that we will be discussing which is all about helping clients change chronic pain. You’re gonna wanna listen to this one. If you two would do a little intro so people can know who you are… 

 

[00:01:04] O’tion: Yeah. So, I’m O’tion. 

 

[00:01:05] V: And I’m V.

[00:01:07] O’tion: This company on her little shirt right here, we founded Empowered Healers Academy almost four years ago actually. 

 

[00:01:14] V: That’s right. 

 

[00:01:14] O’tion: It started off because I suffered from debilitating chronic migraines and had tried all medical interventions and no one had thought to ask about my emotional state at all. And so, I had tried the highest form of pain meds and we had gone to the hospital and CT scans and all sorts of things. 

 

[00:01:36] V: I even remember sitting with the neurologist. We were sitting in the office and I remember sitting there being like, “This is not enough.” There has to be something more. That cascaded us on this journey, really. For me, it was partly ego-driven because I was an acupuncturist at that time and I was like, “I should be able to know how to do this. Why can I help?” and so it pulled us into this whole journey. 

 

[00:02:02] O’tion: Yeah. And really, just learning about the fact that repressed emotions and unresolved emotional trauma and even unmet needs can cause chronic pain. 

 

[00:02:12] V: Totally. 

 

[00:02:13] O’tion: She listens to a podcast and within a 15-minute conversation, she helps me uncover this random memory. It’s not always traumatic. It’s not always big, heavy moments that we’re helping people resolve.

 

It was a memory from when I was 12 years old and my dad had bought me an iPod Touch, but he told me to make sure that my stepmom didn’t find out. My stepmom always came before us as kids. There was a lot of neglect, some emotional abuse, and here’s this little kid, a 12-year-old old who has this joy around a gift and is also told that “you have to suppress that joy, hide that joy, and make sure this woman doesn’t find out about it.”

 

Those are the moments that we’re helping people uncover. When she helped me uncover that, I haven’t even had a migraine since, and they were… 

 

[00:03:05] V: They were debilitating. You even threw up driving your car one day. 

[00:03:08] O’tion: Yes.

 

[00:03:08] V: It was extreme. 

 

[00:03:10] O’tion: I was driving down the Whitemud in Edmonton when we still lived in Edmonton, and I knew I had 15 minutes to get home because when you start to get a migraine and the ocular… 

 

[00:03:19] V: It all starts. The vision closes in… 

 

[00:03:20] O’tion: I was like, I gotta get home! I knew the nausea, all of it. I puked into a dog poop bag. That was like rock bottom. But it’s so beautiful because I also learned from that that oftentimes the thing that we struggle with or the pain, it really can be channeled into. Once you learn that, it’s like, “We need to help other people!” 

 

[00:03:46] V: So many people. And then, so many people were being helped by it that I literally couldn’t fit people on my schedule. 

 

[00:03:53] O’tion: You started to do it in your practice. 

 

[00:03:54] V: I started doing it in practice. 

 

[00:03:56] O’tion: She started to have people driving from Calgary to Edmonton, from Saskatchewan, just to experience this. You were doing what most practitioners and acupuncturists weren’t. 

 

[00:04:06] V: That’s right. Yeah.

 

[00:04:07] O’tion: We bottled it up into a system and now we mentor practitioners and teach them how to do the same, and it’s very cool. 

[00:04:14] Glenyce: I love that. 

 

[00:04:14] O’tion: That’s who we are. 

 

[00:04:15] Glenyce: I love that so much. Thank you so much for that intro. I love it because it’s such an invitation for people to really recognize that it often isn’t what we think it is. You know? All of the doctors and all of that. 

 

I’ve had migraines, too. I haven’t had them for years but I used to, and I remember that feeling. If you Google it, not one of those Googles would’ve said anything about that memory that you had. 

 

[00:04:44] V: Right?

[00:04:45] Glenyce: That’s so cool. Part of it too, before we talk about our topic, I wanted to share that you guys have another class starting soon. I am an affiliate for that. We’ll have the affiliate link so you guys can go check it out. If you guys just wanna talk about that a little bit, about what’s starting in February of 2023, and if people are listening later, how they might connect with you, too?

 

[00:05:16] O’tion: Our certification program is for healers and practitioners who really want to access that level of healing with their clients, where their clients have tried everything. 

 

We have a 6-month immersion. It’s deep because we’re working on you as the human who comes into this world perfect and pure, and then has a shit ton of conditioning and unmet needs and all of the things that need to be dismantled. It’s a very embodied program where you go through the experience and then essentially, we teach you and certify you to be able to do this for your clients. 

 

[00:05:53] Glenyce: That is awesome. If people are listening and going, “I don’t have a practice but I’d sure like a session,” how do they find the people that have went through your training? 

 

[00:06:05] O’tion: You can go to www.armyofhealers.com, and that’s essentially the movement that we are creating. It’s an army of empowered healers. You can go to www.armyofhealers.com and a bunch of our practitioners are listed there. 

 

If you do struggle, we’ve got practitioners who are primarily online and virtual sessions because this work, it doesn’t know time and space so you can do it online. Also, we have practitioners as far as Germany… 

 

[00:06:36] V: … Mexico… 

 

[00:06:37] O’tion: … Zurich, Mexico, Guatemala, we got some down in the States, and then here. It just depends on if they’re operating in person or primarily online. 

[00:06:46] Glenyce: I love that. I love that so much. All of these, of course, will be in the show notes, guys. It’ll be in the link below if you’re listening on the podcast. If for some reason you can’t find anything, reach out. You can reach out to me, of course, or to V or to O’tion, and we will get you all the links. 

 

[00:07:00] Glenyce: So, let’s talk about how to help your clients change chronic pain. 

 

[00:07:07] V: This is a great topic. I think, right off the bat, one of the coolest things to even recognize is whether it’s physical pain or emotional pain. Going from there is really easy to decipher what system to use based off of that.

 

Most people can realize right away whether something like chronic pain is physically induced if it’ll respond to physical treatment, so that’s awesome. But if it’s emotional pain, it won’t often actually have long-standing resolution with something like acupuncture or massage or chiro or cranio. Something like that will give you the short-term relief, but it just keeps coming back. There’s often this emotional goop that’s underneath it that’s just waiting to burst through the surface. 

 

It’s enough to get people agitated and cranky. I like to mention that because most people who are in chronic pain are agitated and cranky in some way or sense, right? They’re not in that nice, restful, easy, flowy state. Anyways, I like to mention that so that people are like, “Oh, that could be emotional?” 

 

[00:08:10] V: I was just talking to his guy right before this call and he was like, “What do you do?” I was telling him the system and he went, “Wait a minute, I’m in a lot of pain all the time. You’re telling me that that could be a single past experience that’s creating all this pain?”

I was like, “Yeah!” 

 

He is like, “This is a medical revolution!” 

 

I’m like, “Well, yeah! Emotions that are not fully expressed can create all sorts of pain in the body.” 

 

[00:08:37] O’tion: It’s interesting too because if you even just think of the memory that I had shared about, I had to suppress that joy. Where does it go? That much energy that wants to come up and out, whether that’s anger as a kid because a parent overrode your needs or they used guilt to get you to make choices, where does that energy go? We’re taught to just shove it. 

 

[00:09:02] V: Shove it down! 

 

[00:09:03] O’tion: It has to come out somewhere. Even with joy, though, or our fullest expression. We wanna wear these badass glasses, but maybe we’re scared of how people are gonna judge us, and so we shove that down. It changes our posture. It changes the space that we take up in the world. It completely changes how we express ourselves.

 

And so, the opposite of expression is depression. When we’re in that state of depression, it’s like your body’s not free. The moment that we start to just remove those anchors, it’s like we’re this balloon that can… 

 

[00:09:42] V: … that can move and open and expand! 

 

[00:09:44] O’tion: You gotta snip the string off the anchor so that you can… 

 

[00:09:48] V: You can go! 

[00:09:49] O’tion: You can go! Yeah. 

 

[00:09:52] V: What I found really interesting, even when you look at the science of how the body works and how emotion works, etc., I mean, like Candace Pert, she’s done a whole entire book on what’s called the “Molecules of Emotion.” She has studied the emotional connection to the molecules that float all through our body.

 

By having a singular thought of anger that isn’t fully expressed, your body will immediately go into fight, flight, freeze, fun, whatever you wanna call it, immediately. What that does from a hormonal level will trigger your entire fight response in your body so you’ll get amped up because you’re ready to either run, fight, whatever you need to do to escape.

 

[00:10:30] V: If you don’t come out of that, which is like a natural tendency, if you don’t come out of that, and a lot of us don’t come out of that, your body stays in that natural fight mode. If you’re in constant tension, you’re immediately gonna likely down the road develop chronic pain, and that can come from a singular thought that is recycled over and over and over, from the playground when you’re seven years old all the way till you’re 50 years old until it’s interrupted. 

 

[00:10:56] O’tion: So main thing, help your clients express. Find what that is. What was it? What’s the anchor? And help them actually just even begin to express themselves. 

 

[00:11:08] Glenyce: If somebody came to you, let’s say that they’re in their 50s, they’ve got some chronic pain going on, are you questioning them? How do you get them to become aware of that moment of anger or the hiding it in from the iPod experience? How do you get them there?

 

[00:11:30] V: What happens with the process to take them through? 

 

[00:11:33] O’tion: The rhythm, the rhythm. 

 

[00:11:34] V: The rhythm, yeah. Basically, what would happen is this person would come in. Say, Glenyce, you come on in and you’re like, “I have nose pain.” I don’t know, whatever it is. We’ll go with nose pain just for shits and giggles. “My nose has been hurting for 10 years,” okay? So that’s your thing. 

 

[00:11:49] V: You would come in and myself as a practitioner, I’d be like, “Okay, let’s talk about the nose pain.” And then I’m gonna ask you a question of, “Okay, where do you wanna go? What do you wanna feel?” 

[00:11:58] V: You might say, “I wanna feel relieved of this. I wanna feel free of it, to be able to smell and sniff and do whatever I want with my nose without thinking about it.” Okay, so we’ve got a goal mechanism that we’re working towards.

 

[00:12:12] V: From there, we train our practitioners to use a very specific way to access these memories and these moments in time. We teach them this very specific way to pinpoint it to one age and one moment. From there, we also help them to carefully uncover all the emotions that are suspended in that moment. 

 

[00:12:32] V: Let’s say that moment in time for you and this nose pain was connected to when you were seven years old. On the playground, you got punched in the face. Okay? Say you got punched in the face and you had these feelings of shock and overwhelm and confusion and disbelief and whatever it may be. Now, we have this suspended conglomerate of an experience, a moment in time and emotions that are trapped in the body that are now asking to be out. 

[00:12:58] V: What the practitioner will do is carefully curate what’s called an “acknowledgement piece.” These are very specific to the person. They’re not the same for anybody ever. What that does is it helps the person, the client – you and your seven year old state with your nose hurting. It gives you this carefully curated moment for you to bring so much acknowledgement through your voice. We also teach somatic release processes – how to get it out of the body through specific types of movement. 

 

[00:13:31] V: After that, what we do is we actually restore the body. We get all the gunk out of the subconscious minds. You don’t have to think about that anymore. You don’t have the cellular data in your body that’s getting triggered anymore, and then we move you towards your goal of where you want it to be, which is free and relieved from this nose pain.

 

[00:13:47] V: From there, we help you integrate that into your daily life so that you’re not just stuck in the freedom in the treatment room. You can actually go upon your life without being afraid of this re-triggering all over again. 

 

[00:13:59] Glenyce: Wow. That must drastically decrease the amount of times a person needs to see a doctor or chiropractor or even a practitioner of this. It must change it and take away, I don’t know, that need for constant going over the problem type of thing. 

 

[00:14:25] O’tion: It’s interesting because when you [V] were in school, V had one of the main teachers in acupuncture school said, “Heal your clients, but don’t heal them all the way because you need them to come back to pay your bills.” We talked about that… 

 

[00:14:39] V: Right?! 

[00:14:41] O’tion: We’re like, hold on a second!

 

[00:14:42] V: But then at the same time, they’re saying, “Make sure you do at least a 10-session protocol. At least 10 times they have to come back.” 

[00:14:51] O’tion: And so with V, she really flipped this on its head when she started to do emotional release work with clients because you were having—people would drive, you know, Grand Prairie. This woman who had TMJ, migraines…

 

[00:15:06] V: Yeah, like, five hours one way.

 

[00:15:08] O’tion: … and resolve it in one session. 

 

[00:15:09] V: I broke the paradigm, okay? We went from don’t heal them fully and don’t do it in less than 10 sessions to it being possible in 60 minutes or less. 

 

[00:15:19] O’tion: It’s like, that’s the paradigm between the broke healer energy versus the… and that’s like scarcity and lack and all of that versus there are so many people out there, and if we can get them results in one, two, sure, maybe three, maybe even four sessions, let’s say four sessions, even that, isn’t that better because they’re gonna go out and tell everyone they know to come back? Whereas if they have to keep coming back to you, that’s not empowerment. That’s a little incongruent. 

 

[00:15:52] Glenyce: It’s kinda the exact opposite of empowerment really. 

 

[00:15:55] V: Yes. That would make this slogan Empowered Healers Academy very ineffective. It would not work well. 

 

[00:16:04] O’tion: So that’s super interesting because that’s a lot of that archaic and outdated residue that’s even just in the healing industry in general. Even us, I don’t think we look like what you think a healer is supposed to look like, whatever that is. Yeah, right?

 

[00:16:21] V: Yeah. 

 

[00:16:22] Glenyce: Oh, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. For the people, the practitioners out there that are considering this or looking at it or wondering about it, what would you say to them if they were concerned about it being a little bit weird for their clientele? 

 

[00:16:42] Glenyce: Let’s say they’re acupuncturists and maybe they have a certain way of working and not all acupuncturists only work one way, but it’s very hands-on and so they maybe haven’t involved the emotional aspect. What would you say to somebody who’s kind of, “I’m not sure how to do that with my clientele”? 

 

[00:17:01] V: That’s a really good question. I think first, there’s one thing that I wanna bring attention to. If you’re in the healing industry and you’re working with the body, you’re gonna have to, at some point, work with the emotional state because they’re so closely interconnected.

 

[00:17:18] V: If you’re that practitioner that’s like, “I want more, and I know my clients want more, and I know they’re seeking more but I don’t know how to give it to them,” if you are already asking those in the back of your mind somewhere, or you’re feeling that and you’re knowing that maybe your clients are responding to you and you have know it like, “Why are they having emotional releases?! I don’t know why this is happening!” If that’s already happening, all you need is the next step, to integrate that piece to understand how to support them and guide them all the way through the process. 

 

[00:17:49] V: And so my first question is that if you have a judgment about it being weird, can you, for one moment, just take a look at it? It’s an extension of you just sitting right in front of you, so how can you actually lean into it? If you’ve been looking for a place to lean in and feel supported over six months, we got you. That’s the first thing. 

 

[00:18:12] V: The second thing is really just trusting that. If there’s something weird about it and you’re like, “Ooh, I don’t know, that seems like really intense and advanced, and I’m not sure I can do that,” if you’re already asking those questions, you’re already partway there. 

 

[00:18:24] O’tion: Okay, just a really interesting fact. The emotions and the physical body were only separated, I think there’s 300 and some years ago. 

 

[00:18:37] V: Oh, yeah. 

 

[00:18:38] O’tion: The Pope, who basically had… 

 

[00:18:41] V: … control over the way the body was. 

 

[00:18:45] O’tion: The Pope and the founding father of Western medicine made a turf deal where the Pope said, “You can dissect human bodies, but you are not permitted to go into the emotional or spiritual body.” 

 

[00:18:59] O’tion: If you think about that, that’s really interesting, right? That’s where Western medicine… 

 

[00:19:03] V: … disconnected. 

 

[00:19:04] O’tion: Just like [neck slashing motion]. We’re still in that paradigm of it being weird. But if you think about it, we all have emotions and we all have a physical body, and they all are literally in this sweet little precious package. And 300 years ago is actually not that long. It’s actually not that long, so I think it’s also just that paradigm shift. It’s time. It’s time, yeah. 

 

Also, I think people deeply want to be seen and want to be heard and want to talk about what happened or what could be deeper beneath the pain. I think people are actually a lot more receptive than maybe we think they might be.

 

[00:19:49] Glenyce: I agree, because people are really, especially I would say after the last couple years where we were kind of cut off for a long time and now it’s like, it’s time to really live and part of that is that wholeness. It’s us as a oneness. It’s not like you say, just cutting our body. It’s all of the pieces.

 

[00:20:08] Glenyce: I had another question as you were talking. Let me see if my memory can bring it back here. In terms of when they’re in the training, it sounds like, if I heard you correctly, they’re actually going through these sessions themselves. I love that. I guess that’s not a question, that’s a statement. 

 

But I love that because it’s also, at least for me, I really learned by doing and being a part of it, and what that could really gift the people in their own practice when they have things come up and they’ve seen it or they’ve experienced it. That’s an amazing part of that. I’m sure it’s also part of the uncomfortableness for some people as they’re looking at your program. They’re kind of like, “Oh dear, what’s going to occur?” 

[00:21:01] Glenyce: But also, I was reading some of those testimonials. Guys, at least go to the page and check it out because to read what some people have really chosen with this and what it’s created to their life, I mean, wow. Just wow. 

 

[00:21:19] O’tion: Thank you for saying that because that is a really important piece, because that’s what takes it from being informational to transformational, and that’s such an important piece to us. 

 

We have these immersion sessions where it also creates lifelong friendships. The friendships that have been created where if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that everyone feels like they’re alone with what they’re experiencing. And yet you bring everyone into a room and it’s like, “Hey, who feels this way?” “Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!” It’s like, we all feel alone, and yet we all feel relatively the same way. 

 

For a lot of our practitioners who have felt like the black sheep or the weird one or people just don’t get them, those sessions are so beautiful as well because you create lifelong bonds with each other while receiving and gifting. 

 

[00:22:09] O’tion: Let’s just talk about some of the things that have happened. One gal had 10 years of chronic eye infections resolved in a student session. 

 

[00:22:17] V: I literally watched it happen before my eyes. I watched this session happen and I was like, “Shit, they’re doing it!”

 

[00:22:24] O’tion: Yeah. She used to have to wear sunglasses inside if it was so sunny out, and that was resolved in a student session. 

[00:22:31] O’tion: One girl, she’s a weightlifter, Olympic weightlifter, in class. Left shoulder pain. She couldn’t lift above her head. Next day, same thing. 

 

[00:22:40] V: After the practice session next day, she was like, “Oh my God, you guys.”

 

[00:22:43] O’tion: All the pain’s gone. 

 

[00:22:44] V: It’s gone. 

 

[00:22:45] O’tion: A woman with nine years of sciatica pain nothing could resolve. It was due to when she was five years old and her parents sent her to a pretty scary situation and it was locked in her body. Same thing, resolved on the first day of class and never came back. It’s so cool…

 

[00:23:03] V: It’s so cool. 

 

[00:23:04] O’tion: … what we are doing. Even just within the title of what we were talking about today, it’s so much more than just resolving chronic pain. It’s about coming into our fullest expression as practitioners, as humans, as healers, as everything that we are meant to be.

 

[00:23:22] V: When I think about even, we’ll go with my journey as a practitioner. The number one thing that I always wanted was confidence. I wanna feel confident in what I’m doing. Let the fear go away. What required that to happen was experience. 

 

A lot of people will ask us, “I don’t know if I can do that. Can I do that?” Because our step-by-step system is so easy to follow, the experiential portion of the program gives that. It gives that confidence because they’ve done it so many times before they actually go out into the world and work on complete strangers. It’s that confidence piece that also just feels so fucking good to have, you know, instead of being afraid of what you’re capable of. 

 

[00:24:04] O’tion: We were laughing today because it used to be a 6-week course. Our practitioners who did it… 

 

[00:24:12] V: They’re very good. 

 

[00:24:13] O’tion: … they’re crushing it. They’re still doing it. But the 6 months really creates more of that spaciousness, so it’s not like fire hose. Okay, get out there. We’re really with you for an extended period. It’s integrated. 

 

[00:24:26] Glenyce: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Before we finish up, I want to just ask a question. V, did you win an award? 

 

[00:24:35] V: Did I win an award? Like the Distinguished Alumni Award? 

 

[00:24:38] Glenyce: Uh, yeah! 

 

[00:24:40] V: I was nominated for it. However, I did not win because, well… I don’t know the official reason, but I’m going to guess that I ruffled some feathers in my industry saying that maybe I was doing too much of emotional work, which I would disagree with. However, I was nominated and the recommendation letters were pretty fucking cool to read, I’ll have to say that. 

 

[00:25:03] Glenyce: That’s amazing. I apologize. I thought that you had won it. But also, yes, when you are changing it — sessions are taking, well, one, people actually get relief and it goes away in any period of time, let alone a very drastic period of time, short period of time, I could see there’s gonna be some people in the industry that say, “Uh, no.”

 

[00:25:28] V: Naturally, right? 

 

[00:25:29] O’tion: It was that thought of for you it was like, “Do I contract or do I…”

 

[00:25:35] V: Do I blow up?! The answer was bigger. 

 

[00:25:42] Glenyce: Good, good. I love that. I love that so much. Oh gosh. Thank you guys so much for joining me and sharing all of this. I wonder what might be possible for even just the people listening that are curious about it, to go find the practitioners. Even if you’re just open to consider that whatever that thing is that possibly, it’s not what Dr. Google tells you. It’s maybe something else that occurred. 

 

For those that do have healing practices and such, do check out the program. Again, we’ll have the link above or below. Anybody who does join using my link will get a special offer. 

 

[00:26:22] Glenyce: That’s not quite ready yet, but some of you know that I’m opening up a Shopify store here shortly and so you will get a—thank you, thank you, thank you—$50 credit in my store that you will get as soon as it’s available, probably by February 1st is kind of our target at this point. Just a little extra bonus for you to check it out and join if it feels fun for you. 

 

[00:26:45] Glenyce: These two, I cannot highly recommend enough. I have just adored them for so many years. So, so grateful to know them and to get to play with them when I get to play with them. Hopefully, we’ll see them out on the BC coast sometime soon when there’s whales in the area. 

 

[00:27:03] O’tion: Thank you so much for having us, Glenyce. 

[00:27:06] Glenyce: Oh, thank you. All right, guys. Have a great rest of your week and I look forward to chatting again next week.

 

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