The Goop Lab (2020) s01e05 Episode Script
The Energy Experience
When I started goop in 2008, I was like, "My calling is something else besides, you know, making out with Matt Damon onscreen or whatever.
" And now, it's this modern lifestyle brand.
To me, it's all laddering up to one thing, which is optimization of self.
Like, we're here one time, one life How can we really, like, milk the shit out of this? You have a hundred needles in your face, Elise.
Just another day at the office.
The opportunity that we have with the goop lab is that, as a company, we can go out in different groups and go on a much deeper dive into some of these topics that our readers are curious about.
This is gonna be my first experience - with mushrooms.
- Oh! You have to let go of your ego.
So, what happens in a workshop? Everyone gets off.
What the fuck are you doing to people? We get to explore, like, is this real? Do we feel better? And grapple with some topics that are hard and embarrassing or shameful.
Isn't that beautiful? Relax.
That was, like, next level shit.
So, are you guys ready to go out in the field and make a ruckus? - Yeah.
- You can handle it, right? The entire universe is made of energy.
Only 4.
6% of the universe is considered physical matter.
The human body has an energy field and we're processing the world through it.
All right, come on up sitting.
The more connected you are energetically, the healthier you will feel.
So often people don't slow down and connect, especially the Western world.
We value achievement over fulfillment.
But I believe the 21st Century is the age of energy.
Close your eyes.
One more, inhale.
We're gonna see this holistic approach in Western medicine.
Now I'm gonna send that energy through.
We're gonna see energy healing more and more.
My body was, like, waving and reacting.
There you go, right there.
The first time that John worked on me, I really just cried.
I had an exorcism.
Beautiful.
What the fuck are you doing to people? So, I work with energy as a body worker and a chiropractor.
You have energy that's bound up in the muscles and ligaments and spine and fascia and organs when you're under stress.
So I show up and actually influence how energy's moving, so that your body can heal faster in your physical being, your emotional being, your mind, your soul.
Do you find in your practice that you see people who have diseases and that through the energy work things start to shift? Yeah, for sure.
I'm not treating a particular condition when I'm working with people, but I have a hypothesis: If you just change the frequency of vibration of the body itself, it changes the way the cells regrow, it changes how the sensory system processes.
- It's amazingly integrated.
- Yeah.
Dr.
Lekkos, as an integrated physician, how do you relate to this? I've been studying energy medicine for a few years, things like magnet therapy, laser therapy, light therapy, vibrational therapy and how they're manipulating the energetic field of a person to heal or break up tissue, et cetera.
So, we're seeing more of this manifest in our medical system.
Yeah.
In the United States right now, there's integrative medicine residencies to teach physicians how to treat people with energy - with their hands.
- Right.
So, John is trying to teach me a few pointers and things.
I hear that this is the first time you've ever let anybody film your work.
Mm-hmm.
You know, out of context, what I'm doing looks it just looks wacky, you know? Because people might be wondering, "Is this person having a seizure? Is this an exorcism? Is this person, um, having an orgasm? What's happening here?" - Right? So - I wish.
You know? So, I've been hesitant to show it, - just because it can look strange.
- Yeah.
But I think it's time for the world to see.
You look like a Svengali, - puppeteer master.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
What is objectively happening when you, with your hands feet above a body - Yeah.
- lift? What are you pulling on? What's happening? You can measure the energy field of the body, somewhere between four and six feet off the body.
The body doesn't end right here at the skin.
The body is multi-dimensional, there are layers to it, and I'm interacting with those layers.
So when I'm moving my hands in the air and I'm snapping my fingers and I'm making sounds with my hands, I'm putting energy into the field around somebody's body, and I'm changing their energy system just by the way I interact with it.
The way we interact with someone, without even touching them, at the subatomic level, changes them in some way, shape or form.
Aah! Sound.
There's been some amazing research done in the realm of quantum physics to support this.
One foundational study is called the double-slit experiment.
It proved empirically, without a shadow of a doubt, that our consciousness actually shifts or alters in some way, shape or form, physical reality.
But there's also a physical component of it.
I'm touching the sacrum area and the lower part of the neck to generate the wave moving through the spine to try to manipulate the flow of information between the brain, nervous system and muscles.
This approach was actually developed by a man named Donny Epstein in an approach called Network Spinal.
I studied with him for many years.
We had a session, we did a four-way, like nothing's happening.
- It was a group session.
- Yeah, we had four tables going at once.
- It was three goopers, - Yeah.
and Julianne Hough joined as our fourth.
You know, it was a really just extreme somatic experience.
Why wasn't I invited to this shindig? Because you got a one-on-one, princess.
Hi, thank you for calling goop.
Ayanna speaking.
Julianne, hello.
Hello.
I have known Dr.
John Amaral since 2013.
This work is so transformative that I just wanted to share my experience with every single person that I could.
And so, here we all are.
All right, Brian, is there anything going right now that you think would be relevant for me to know? Yeah, just, you know, kind of normal stresses of life.
I tend to just be a kind of uptight person in general.
I think everybody at goop knows me to be a bit of a skeptic.
I'm gonna be working off the physical body, - in the field of energy around your body.
- Mm-hmm.
The scientist in me wants to question everything.
- Hi, Janay.
- Hey.
I just wanna check in with you.
- I would say a lot of, like, chest pain.
- Okay.
Gets hard to sleep sometimes.
I have episodes of sleep paralysis.
It's a very scary experience.
It's like you can't move, you can't talk, and you're kind of, like, stuck.
Get comfortable there and I'll be right back over.
So, right, what's going on? Anything? Just anxiety.
It's just been a really intense few weeks.
Okay.
I am anxious always, um which is sort of my one of my baselines in my life.
Go ahead and go face down.
And I just want to, honestly, release.
I'm gonna come a little bit off the body here, about three or four feet is where there's the most access in the field of energy around you, right there.
You're It'll help that move through that lower sacrum area.
Your physical body is held in different patterns by so many factors.
A lot of people's emotional energy gets bound up.
The tip of the tailbone will tuck under when we feel, like, victimized or traumatized.
So we can see that our emotional system is like a fluid network through the whole body, it's not like emotion happens in your head.
It actually happens in the sites on our body.
And so, when I'm working on people and when energy starts moving and they start releasing, how emotion expresses is through movement and sound.
Right there.
The first time I worked with John, I'll never forget this because I'm a dancer.
I'm very connected to my body, and my body just sort of took over.
There was this one moment last year when John was actually working around my foot, and I got angry.
And then I just had such deep sadness.
And it was actually a memory that I had, and it was connected to a trauma that happened to me when I was ten that I hadn't even thought of for 20 years.
At ten years old, my parents went through a pretty aggressive divorce, and I lived with my dance coaches.
It was not the best living situation, and so I had this, like, really just pissed-off anger, like, literally attached in my foot, basically.
Oh! This method works incredibly well for me because it helps me experience and go back to things and be able to shift them.
Finish that stretch there.
Beautiful, Brian.
Sweet.
Really nice.
Here.
We're gonna come off the body here, out in the field.
There you go.
What's happening when I'm working with people is that they're feeling intense experiences and feelings, - that whole emotional range, - Right.
from absolute sensitivity and vulnerability to the range of absolute frustration, anger and despair.
- Hello, Janay.
- Hi.
There's that area right behind your heart.
And imagine this kind of funnel of energy going from the back of your heart, all the way through the front, shooting out the front.
Yeah.
Good.
Beautiful.
Yeah, that's coming right through your heart now.
Now, just let that out with a little Janay, who had a very emotional experience with you, quiet, not a lot of movement, but emotional.
I'm not a big crier.
But I'm somebody who keeps a lot of their emotions close to their chest.
I fell into, like, a deep meditative state and then it kind of intensified.
I was, like, playing everything back in my life.
It was a way to express myself and let things go, that I was holding onto for, I think, a really, really long time.
She felt all this density and pressure in her heart, and she felt physical tension in her heart.
- That's actually sadness or grief.
- Yeah.
When I first met John, there was a woman on the table.
She was screaming, and her body was just kind of, you know, moving.
And I immediately thought, "Wow, what's what's wrong with her?" You know, "Woo-woo," you know, "bullshit, not true.
Just, you know, a bunch of privileged people in LA.
" But, you know, at the same time, I was curious.
I wanted to get on the table myself.
During the time that I met John, I was living with massive pain.
I had migraines and depression.
The first time I got on the table with John, I started to sob uncontrollably.
Memories started coming up of my childhood, growing up.
I grew up where food was a scarcity.
Um, there was a lot of abuse, and at the time, I was so ashamed of my childhood, and I was so ashamed of, quote, unquote "where I came from.
" And the session on the table, it was almost like this release of what I had been holding in.
I left with this completely different perspective.
Fast forward to now, I feel this overwhelming peace and calmness, and every single cell in my body knows it and feels it.
Dr.
Lekkos, do you believe that - there is a correlation between - Yeah.
what's happened to you and different traumas, to how it's showing up in the body and expressing the symptom? It's almost like a memory gets stored in your brain or the emotion sometimes will store in your body.
- Like molecules of emotion? - Yes.
I've had the privilege to work with a body worker here in LA, pushing on people's thighs and grown men starting to cry like babies and memories coming out.
So, we're seeing how emotional pain gets stored in our cells.
There are researchers, PhDs, looking at the science behind the human energy field and people like you, Dr.
Lekkos, - are actually open to exploring.
- Exactly.
I don't think the technology's quite there to measure energy healing, but just 'cause something isn't proven, doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Look what he's doing and other people who do what you do, - they're helping people get better.
- Yeah.
Come over to you, Elise.
Here I'm gonna actually come off your body quite a ways, just because this is where it's most receptive to you out here.
And energy move right through here, up and there.
Doing amazing letting the sound come through.
I have to get it to release.
Yes.
Sound is hard, you know.
I don't even know if I could scream into a pillow.
- Hmm.
- Really? I don't know that I'm unlike a lot of women.
I feel like it's hard.
Culturally, we so suppress sound and the expression of weird sounds.
We don't want to make weird sounds, because then we'd be weird.
And so a lot of people's anxiety, a lot of people's stress, it's not expressing as emotion, it's not actually coming out as the movement and sound.
It's like contorting yourself or lowering your standards to make other people comfortable, trying to be perfect, - doing things you should do.
- So, just being a woman, basically? Right, totally.
Just gonna draw the energy up through the front of your solar plexus, your heart, your chest, your throat.
There you go right there.
When you've worked on thousands of people, you start to see patterns.
This pattern usually shows up for people that have all these roles and responsibilities and duties, and they torque themselves up.
Is my body in half? Feels like I'm bending in half.
Yeah, well your your whole Yeah, your whole sacrum, lower spine is raising up right there.
I had an exorcism.
Further from the body.
Okay, let your neck rock back into extension.
Let this come up through.
And it felt like I was being, like, pulled by a rope.
It was very painful, actually.
And then he just snapped his fingers and I just started retching.
I dry heaved for a while.
Could you, like, get any goop-ier? I could not get any goop-ier.
- Now people are gonna think I'm a witch.
- Yeah.
She's goop-ier than I am.
Yeah.
It feels amazing when you get the release.
But I pray that it looks less crazy than it feels, because I felt like I was standing on my head at points during that session.
When you've had the work, what has it felt like for you? Um Well, the first time that John worked on me, I really just cried pretty much the whole time.
So, for me, I felt like John was just helping me - sort of metabolize a whole lot of stuff.
- Hmm.
As an actor, you're embodying these different experiences, like putting yourself into a certain energy, you're building up, like, an architecture, an armory.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think everybody does it differently.
For me, it is a very energetic experience.
But how do you preserve your energy? Like, how do you keep it clean and strong? I see John as much as I can, but he's busier than I am, almost.
All right, so what's going on for you right now? Um I'm just I'm really, really tired.
Um, it's been a really stressful couple of weeks of just work.
I feel like all the energy's just zapped out of my body.
Well, I'm glad that we're doing this session.
Me too.
So, we'll get your body out of the go, go, go, stress mode and get it into the parasympathetic, rest and relaxed.
I'm gonna have you go face down on the table.
Okay.
We're starting to get some energy moving.
I noticed when you work on me, my nervous system, it'll sort of spasm, especially places where I've had injury.
Like, I had an emergency cesarean with my daughter, after being in labor for three days.
- It's not a good story.
- Yeah.
Um but the cesarean scar is really still I wouldn't say It's more emotionally painful to me.
It doesn't feel like physical pain, but I feel it as like this wound, still.
When our bodies are cut into, we don't think about, like, the energetic kind of planes that we're rupturing.
In my experience, it's more difficult to heal on the energetic level than the skin, which heals, knits together very quickly, but for me anyway, those interventions really have stayed with me and need care.
Yeah, that's such a well-articulated thought there.
I'm a true believer that the fascia, the connective tissue, that when you have a C-section or when you have a surgery or you have an injury that injures those fascia tissues, they actually are made up collagen fibers, and they transfer energy through them, like a fiber optic cable, almost.
- Right.
- It's considered a liquid crystal, which is like when you touch, like, an LCD screen, you see the little ripples come out.
That's how energy goes through the It's like a whole And it's so weird, it just looks like Saran Wrap or something, and it holds all of this incredible information.
But it's totally dismissed by most conventional doctors, right? They're like, "Fuck fascia, it's connective tissue.
" Probably one of the well-known researchers in this area, James Oschman, has done incredible work around the science of how fascia and connective tissue is a whole matrix of which consciousness is expressed.
We're coming up against some limitations of the matter-to-matter kind of healing, where you do physical to work on the physical.
But sometimes people need to have surgery, - and you can't avoid it.
- Yeah.
I just want to use all the tools we have and all the modalities and work together - to help people on this path.
- That's exactly right.
I had follicular B-cell lymphoma, which was creating numbness from the chest down.
I was unstable.
I couldn't run.
The great thing is it's a curable cancer.
What they didn't know was what would happen with the numbness.
They're like, "You know, you might never get that feeling back.
" And I was like, "No, I'm going to get that feeling back.
" I've heard of John's work through other people, through more word of mouth.
I didn't get on the tables at first and I sit back, watching and I'm thinking, "Okay uh, this is interesting.
" And then we actually did a session that night.
He didn't even touch me.
In that particular session, my back was starting to, you know, kind of crack, crack, crack, crack, and he was not touching me.
Which I found super, and I go, "What is going on, John?" He goes, "Your body's just kind of moving itself where it needs to go.
" You know, after four or five sessions with John, I could feel the energy flowing up and down my spinal column.
And I'm happy to say, I'm able to run again.
So, that's cool.
- Turn your head to the left.
- Okay.
Okay, great, then back to the middle.
After the session, we had Janay come in, and she laid on the table.
And he's trying to teach me how to treat people like this.
Why don't you come around this side and I'll just show you We're gonna start in her sacrum area.
If you touch right here, very gently, you'll feel an area where it's more receptive, - It's almost like - A sponge.
It kind of of draws you in, it's softer.
So he had me put my hand on her back, and I closed my eyes and was kind of concentrating and trying to feel or open my consciousness into what's going on There's really a lot of energy flowing right in this one little point.
Lighten your touch up and ask her, in a way, her body to just open.
Right there.
And that's where that opens this dimension up between energy and the physical - and you go into, like, a space - Yeah.
and that space is where things can really start flowing.
And I felt my hand go inside of her body, it went down.
Even though I knew my hand was still, but I felt it go down - and then up again.
- Oh, my gosh.
And then down, but with her respirations, I could feel it go really deep.
So, I was like, "Maybe this is some kind of I'm playing a trick on myself.
" I was like, "Let's try it somewhere else.
" Come right into like You're looking for that same feeling.
Like, right here.
Mm-hmm.
We're gonna send that and direct it, actually, up.
Tell me when you feel it at that end start to move a little bit.
There.
The same thing.
My hand goes inside of her head, outside of her head, inside, outside.
And that was really awesome.
I'm like, "John, what is happening?" It's like you're feeling another dimension.
You're on another plane.
It's not a physical touching thing, it's really interesting.
We used to take a phone book in chiropractic college, and we would put, like, a little needle under some pages and then we would put more pages And pretty soon, by the end, you could feel the needle through the whole book.
You're training your receptors to pick up information rather than try to go down through it.
And that's key to having this kind of response happen is being able to receive that information.
- How do you explain that? - I don't know.
That's what I'm saying, you can't measure this stuff.
So, Janay, do you notice, when we're doing this off your body, do you notice something going on? - I feel like I melt into the table.
- Yes.
Janay woke up in the middle of the night and purged for an hour.
- Really? - Yeah.
She threw up from three a.
m.
to four a.
m.
Her body went out of flight or fight.
It went into relaxation and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of resting and digesting and healing and detoxing, kicked in.
So, it's not surprising that later that night her body was continuing to purge because emotions, if you can't move it through as waves and sounds and vibrations, then you hold it as physical tension.
So, there's this loop.
The first time, I also kind of bar Not barfed, but I thought I was gonna.
I think you said it was an energetic - Barf.
- Yeah.
Nothing came out, but it felt as if I was throwing up.
It was like the slate had just been cleaned, you know? And I think afterwards, I felt incredibly, deeply peaceful.
All right, Gwyneth, come on up sitting.
How you feeling? I feel like I could sleep for, like I feel like I could go to bed for the whole night right now.
Yeah.
But I feel much better.
Your body needs sleep.
But give it about, like, ten or 15 minutes and you'll start to come back up, 'cause you just went to a really deep place - where it will recharge and reset.
- Yeah.
One more, inhale.
Fold forward.
Release.
This is the century where we're gonna have massive upgrades in how we view energy, human energy, the human energy field.
Inhale, warrior two.
Are simple things that everyone can do to try to get energy flowing better? Exhale.
Reverse your warrior.
We can use our hands almost like a stethoscope to feel ourselves.
Take one last inhale together.
What's there just needs a Exhale.
Down dog.
I do that all the time now.
So if I feel anxious or I'm at my desk and I start to feel like out of body, I put my hands, like throat and heart, and I just, I'm like, "Oh, wow, there's a lot going on in there.
" And then, I just kind of breathe and it's almost like bringing You said, "Bring some tenderness, you know, through your hands to it.
" Lay down on your back.
Anybody could sit at home and kind of put their own hands on the areas of their body where they feel the most stuck and just sit with it, just observe it.
Namaste, guys.
Thank you so much.
So many of us walk around in our heads, with our to-do lists and what we have to do, and the experience of being in our bodies and integrated with our bodies is not something a lot of us experience all day, every day.
The first time I worked with John, it was, like, really trippy and crazy.
I could almost feel where his hands were going to be - Yeah.
- without seeing them.
It was really weird.
My body was, like, waving and reacting.
The scientist in me wants to, like, do some research, ask some questions, come up with, like, a hypothesis and then kind of rinse and repeat and see if I do notice anything different.
But I think that the fact that I was able to relax and quiet my mind, it was therapeutic for me in that sense.
I feel very airy and grounded.
I've been sleeping like I'm not saying it may have fixed this - but I have been sleeping a lot better.
- You have trouble sleeping, right? Yeah, I usually have sleep paralysis-like episodes.
As we get more integrated and more whole, that means all the parts of us that are hard to be with, the sad parts, the scared parts, the helpless parts, the parts that feel lonely, the parts that feel like we're not enough if we start to feel those and be with them, we can be fully accepting of them.
What happens is that those things don't trigger us in the world out there so much, and we can be with so much more of the range of human experience and emotion without getting triggered.
It was really crazy.
It seems pretty normal for a day at goop now, don't you think?
" And now, it's this modern lifestyle brand.
To me, it's all laddering up to one thing, which is optimization of self.
Like, we're here one time, one life How can we really, like, milk the shit out of this? You have a hundred needles in your face, Elise.
Just another day at the office.
The opportunity that we have with the goop lab is that, as a company, we can go out in different groups and go on a much deeper dive into some of these topics that our readers are curious about.
This is gonna be my first experience - with mushrooms.
- Oh! You have to let go of your ego.
So, what happens in a workshop? Everyone gets off.
What the fuck are you doing to people? We get to explore, like, is this real? Do we feel better? And grapple with some topics that are hard and embarrassing or shameful.
Isn't that beautiful? Relax.
That was, like, next level shit.
So, are you guys ready to go out in the field and make a ruckus? - Yeah.
- You can handle it, right? The entire universe is made of energy.
Only 4.
6% of the universe is considered physical matter.
The human body has an energy field and we're processing the world through it.
All right, come on up sitting.
The more connected you are energetically, the healthier you will feel.
So often people don't slow down and connect, especially the Western world.
We value achievement over fulfillment.
But I believe the 21st Century is the age of energy.
Close your eyes.
One more, inhale.
We're gonna see this holistic approach in Western medicine.
Now I'm gonna send that energy through.
We're gonna see energy healing more and more.
My body was, like, waving and reacting.
There you go, right there.
The first time that John worked on me, I really just cried.
I had an exorcism.
Beautiful.
What the fuck are you doing to people? So, I work with energy as a body worker and a chiropractor.
You have energy that's bound up in the muscles and ligaments and spine and fascia and organs when you're under stress.
So I show up and actually influence how energy's moving, so that your body can heal faster in your physical being, your emotional being, your mind, your soul.
Do you find in your practice that you see people who have diseases and that through the energy work things start to shift? Yeah, for sure.
I'm not treating a particular condition when I'm working with people, but I have a hypothesis: If you just change the frequency of vibration of the body itself, it changes the way the cells regrow, it changes how the sensory system processes.
- It's amazingly integrated.
- Yeah.
Dr.
Lekkos, as an integrated physician, how do you relate to this? I've been studying energy medicine for a few years, things like magnet therapy, laser therapy, light therapy, vibrational therapy and how they're manipulating the energetic field of a person to heal or break up tissue, et cetera.
So, we're seeing more of this manifest in our medical system.
Yeah.
In the United States right now, there's integrative medicine residencies to teach physicians how to treat people with energy - with their hands.
- Right.
So, John is trying to teach me a few pointers and things.
I hear that this is the first time you've ever let anybody film your work.
Mm-hmm.
You know, out of context, what I'm doing looks it just looks wacky, you know? Because people might be wondering, "Is this person having a seizure? Is this an exorcism? Is this person, um, having an orgasm? What's happening here?" - Right? So - I wish.
You know? So, I've been hesitant to show it, - just because it can look strange.
- Yeah.
But I think it's time for the world to see.
You look like a Svengali, - puppeteer master.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
What is objectively happening when you, with your hands feet above a body - Yeah.
- lift? What are you pulling on? What's happening? You can measure the energy field of the body, somewhere between four and six feet off the body.
The body doesn't end right here at the skin.
The body is multi-dimensional, there are layers to it, and I'm interacting with those layers.
So when I'm moving my hands in the air and I'm snapping my fingers and I'm making sounds with my hands, I'm putting energy into the field around somebody's body, and I'm changing their energy system just by the way I interact with it.
The way we interact with someone, without even touching them, at the subatomic level, changes them in some way, shape or form.
Aah! Sound.
There's been some amazing research done in the realm of quantum physics to support this.
One foundational study is called the double-slit experiment.
It proved empirically, without a shadow of a doubt, that our consciousness actually shifts or alters in some way, shape or form, physical reality.
But there's also a physical component of it.
I'm touching the sacrum area and the lower part of the neck to generate the wave moving through the spine to try to manipulate the flow of information between the brain, nervous system and muscles.
This approach was actually developed by a man named Donny Epstein in an approach called Network Spinal.
I studied with him for many years.
We had a session, we did a four-way, like nothing's happening.
- It was a group session.
- Yeah, we had four tables going at once.
- It was three goopers, - Yeah.
and Julianne Hough joined as our fourth.
You know, it was a really just extreme somatic experience.
Why wasn't I invited to this shindig? Because you got a one-on-one, princess.
Hi, thank you for calling goop.
Ayanna speaking.
Julianne, hello.
Hello.
I have known Dr.
John Amaral since 2013.
This work is so transformative that I just wanted to share my experience with every single person that I could.
And so, here we all are.
All right, Brian, is there anything going right now that you think would be relevant for me to know? Yeah, just, you know, kind of normal stresses of life.
I tend to just be a kind of uptight person in general.
I think everybody at goop knows me to be a bit of a skeptic.
I'm gonna be working off the physical body, - in the field of energy around your body.
- Mm-hmm.
The scientist in me wants to question everything.
- Hi, Janay.
- Hey.
I just wanna check in with you.
- I would say a lot of, like, chest pain.
- Okay.
Gets hard to sleep sometimes.
I have episodes of sleep paralysis.
It's a very scary experience.
It's like you can't move, you can't talk, and you're kind of, like, stuck.
Get comfortable there and I'll be right back over.
So, right, what's going on? Anything? Just anxiety.
It's just been a really intense few weeks.
Okay.
I am anxious always, um which is sort of my one of my baselines in my life.
Go ahead and go face down.
And I just want to, honestly, release.
I'm gonna come a little bit off the body here, about three or four feet is where there's the most access in the field of energy around you, right there.
You're It'll help that move through that lower sacrum area.
Your physical body is held in different patterns by so many factors.
A lot of people's emotional energy gets bound up.
The tip of the tailbone will tuck under when we feel, like, victimized or traumatized.
So we can see that our emotional system is like a fluid network through the whole body, it's not like emotion happens in your head.
It actually happens in the sites on our body.
And so, when I'm working on people and when energy starts moving and they start releasing, how emotion expresses is through movement and sound.
Right there.
The first time I worked with John, I'll never forget this because I'm a dancer.
I'm very connected to my body, and my body just sort of took over.
There was this one moment last year when John was actually working around my foot, and I got angry.
And then I just had such deep sadness.
And it was actually a memory that I had, and it was connected to a trauma that happened to me when I was ten that I hadn't even thought of for 20 years.
At ten years old, my parents went through a pretty aggressive divorce, and I lived with my dance coaches.
It was not the best living situation, and so I had this, like, really just pissed-off anger, like, literally attached in my foot, basically.
Oh! This method works incredibly well for me because it helps me experience and go back to things and be able to shift them.
Finish that stretch there.
Beautiful, Brian.
Sweet.
Really nice.
Here.
We're gonna come off the body here, out in the field.
There you go.
What's happening when I'm working with people is that they're feeling intense experiences and feelings, - that whole emotional range, - Right.
from absolute sensitivity and vulnerability to the range of absolute frustration, anger and despair.
- Hello, Janay.
- Hi.
There's that area right behind your heart.
And imagine this kind of funnel of energy going from the back of your heart, all the way through the front, shooting out the front.
Yeah.
Good.
Beautiful.
Yeah, that's coming right through your heart now.
Now, just let that out with a little Janay, who had a very emotional experience with you, quiet, not a lot of movement, but emotional.
I'm not a big crier.
But I'm somebody who keeps a lot of their emotions close to their chest.
I fell into, like, a deep meditative state and then it kind of intensified.
I was, like, playing everything back in my life.
It was a way to express myself and let things go, that I was holding onto for, I think, a really, really long time.
She felt all this density and pressure in her heart, and she felt physical tension in her heart.
- That's actually sadness or grief.
- Yeah.
When I first met John, there was a woman on the table.
She was screaming, and her body was just kind of, you know, moving.
And I immediately thought, "Wow, what's what's wrong with her?" You know, "Woo-woo," you know, "bullshit, not true.
Just, you know, a bunch of privileged people in LA.
" But, you know, at the same time, I was curious.
I wanted to get on the table myself.
During the time that I met John, I was living with massive pain.
I had migraines and depression.
The first time I got on the table with John, I started to sob uncontrollably.
Memories started coming up of my childhood, growing up.
I grew up where food was a scarcity.
Um, there was a lot of abuse, and at the time, I was so ashamed of my childhood, and I was so ashamed of, quote, unquote "where I came from.
" And the session on the table, it was almost like this release of what I had been holding in.
I left with this completely different perspective.
Fast forward to now, I feel this overwhelming peace and calmness, and every single cell in my body knows it and feels it.
Dr.
Lekkos, do you believe that - there is a correlation between - Yeah.
what's happened to you and different traumas, to how it's showing up in the body and expressing the symptom? It's almost like a memory gets stored in your brain or the emotion sometimes will store in your body.
- Like molecules of emotion? - Yes.
I've had the privilege to work with a body worker here in LA, pushing on people's thighs and grown men starting to cry like babies and memories coming out.
So, we're seeing how emotional pain gets stored in our cells.
There are researchers, PhDs, looking at the science behind the human energy field and people like you, Dr.
Lekkos, - are actually open to exploring.
- Exactly.
I don't think the technology's quite there to measure energy healing, but just 'cause something isn't proven, doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Look what he's doing and other people who do what you do, - they're helping people get better.
- Yeah.
Come over to you, Elise.
Here I'm gonna actually come off your body quite a ways, just because this is where it's most receptive to you out here.
And energy move right through here, up and there.
Doing amazing letting the sound come through.
I have to get it to release.
Yes.
Sound is hard, you know.
I don't even know if I could scream into a pillow.
- Hmm.
- Really? I don't know that I'm unlike a lot of women.
I feel like it's hard.
Culturally, we so suppress sound and the expression of weird sounds.
We don't want to make weird sounds, because then we'd be weird.
And so a lot of people's anxiety, a lot of people's stress, it's not expressing as emotion, it's not actually coming out as the movement and sound.
It's like contorting yourself or lowering your standards to make other people comfortable, trying to be perfect, - doing things you should do.
- So, just being a woman, basically? Right, totally.
Just gonna draw the energy up through the front of your solar plexus, your heart, your chest, your throat.
There you go right there.
When you've worked on thousands of people, you start to see patterns.
This pattern usually shows up for people that have all these roles and responsibilities and duties, and they torque themselves up.
Is my body in half? Feels like I'm bending in half.
Yeah, well your your whole Yeah, your whole sacrum, lower spine is raising up right there.
I had an exorcism.
Further from the body.
Okay, let your neck rock back into extension.
Let this come up through.
And it felt like I was being, like, pulled by a rope.
It was very painful, actually.
And then he just snapped his fingers and I just started retching.
I dry heaved for a while.
Could you, like, get any goop-ier? I could not get any goop-ier.
- Now people are gonna think I'm a witch.
- Yeah.
She's goop-ier than I am.
Yeah.
It feels amazing when you get the release.
But I pray that it looks less crazy than it feels, because I felt like I was standing on my head at points during that session.
When you've had the work, what has it felt like for you? Um Well, the first time that John worked on me, I really just cried pretty much the whole time.
So, for me, I felt like John was just helping me - sort of metabolize a whole lot of stuff.
- Hmm.
As an actor, you're embodying these different experiences, like putting yourself into a certain energy, you're building up, like, an architecture, an armory.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think everybody does it differently.
For me, it is a very energetic experience.
But how do you preserve your energy? Like, how do you keep it clean and strong? I see John as much as I can, but he's busier than I am, almost.
All right, so what's going on for you right now? Um I'm just I'm really, really tired.
Um, it's been a really stressful couple of weeks of just work.
I feel like all the energy's just zapped out of my body.
Well, I'm glad that we're doing this session.
Me too.
So, we'll get your body out of the go, go, go, stress mode and get it into the parasympathetic, rest and relaxed.
I'm gonna have you go face down on the table.
Okay.
We're starting to get some energy moving.
I noticed when you work on me, my nervous system, it'll sort of spasm, especially places where I've had injury.
Like, I had an emergency cesarean with my daughter, after being in labor for three days.
- It's not a good story.
- Yeah.
Um but the cesarean scar is really still I wouldn't say It's more emotionally painful to me.
It doesn't feel like physical pain, but I feel it as like this wound, still.
When our bodies are cut into, we don't think about, like, the energetic kind of planes that we're rupturing.
In my experience, it's more difficult to heal on the energetic level than the skin, which heals, knits together very quickly, but for me anyway, those interventions really have stayed with me and need care.
Yeah, that's such a well-articulated thought there.
I'm a true believer that the fascia, the connective tissue, that when you have a C-section or when you have a surgery or you have an injury that injures those fascia tissues, they actually are made up collagen fibers, and they transfer energy through them, like a fiber optic cable, almost.
- Right.
- It's considered a liquid crystal, which is like when you touch, like, an LCD screen, you see the little ripples come out.
That's how energy goes through the It's like a whole And it's so weird, it just looks like Saran Wrap or something, and it holds all of this incredible information.
But it's totally dismissed by most conventional doctors, right? They're like, "Fuck fascia, it's connective tissue.
" Probably one of the well-known researchers in this area, James Oschman, has done incredible work around the science of how fascia and connective tissue is a whole matrix of which consciousness is expressed.
We're coming up against some limitations of the matter-to-matter kind of healing, where you do physical to work on the physical.
But sometimes people need to have surgery, - and you can't avoid it.
- Yeah.
I just want to use all the tools we have and all the modalities and work together - to help people on this path.
- That's exactly right.
I had follicular B-cell lymphoma, which was creating numbness from the chest down.
I was unstable.
I couldn't run.
The great thing is it's a curable cancer.
What they didn't know was what would happen with the numbness.
They're like, "You know, you might never get that feeling back.
" And I was like, "No, I'm going to get that feeling back.
" I've heard of John's work through other people, through more word of mouth.
I didn't get on the tables at first and I sit back, watching and I'm thinking, "Okay uh, this is interesting.
" And then we actually did a session that night.
He didn't even touch me.
In that particular session, my back was starting to, you know, kind of crack, crack, crack, crack, and he was not touching me.
Which I found super, and I go, "What is going on, John?" He goes, "Your body's just kind of moving itself where it needs to go.
" You know, after four or five sessions with John, I could feel the energy flowing up and down my spinal column.
And I'm happy to say, I'm able to run again.
So, that's cool.
- Turn your head to the left.
- Okay.
Okay, great, then back to the middle.
After the session, we had Janay come in, and she laid on the table.
And he's trying to teach me how to treat people like this.
Why don't you come around this side and I'll just show you We're gonna start in her sacrum area.
If you touch right here, very gently, you'll feel an area where it's more receptive, - It's almost like - A sponge.
It kind of of draws you in, it's softer.
So he had me put my hand on her back, and I closed my eyes and was kind of concentrating and trying to feel or open my consciousness into what's going on There's really a lot of energy flowing right in this one little point.
Lighten your touch up and ask her, in a way, her body to just open.
Right there.
And that's where that opens this dimension up between energy and the physical - and you go into, like, a space - Yeah.
and that space is where things can really start flowing.
And I felt my hand go inside of her body, it went down.
Even though I knew my hand was still, but I felt it go down - and then up again.
- Oh, my gosh.
And then down, but with her respirations, I could feel it go really deep.
So, I was like, "Maybe this is some kind of I'm playing a trick on myself.
" I was like, "Let's try it somewhere else.
" Come right into like You're looking for that same feeling.
Like, right here.
Mm-hmm.
We're gonna send that and direct it, actually, up.
Tell me when you feel it at that end start to move a little bit.
There.
The same thing.
My hand goes inside of her head, outside of her head, inside, outside.
And that was really awesome.
I'm like, "John, what is happening?" It's like you're feeling another dimension.
You're on another plane.
It's not a physical touching thing, it's really interesting.
We used to take a phone book in chiropractic college, and we would put, like, a little needle under some pages and then we would put more pages And pretty soon, by the end, you could feel the needle through the whole book.
You're training your receptors to pick up information rather than try to go down through it.
And that's key to having this kind of response happen is being able to receive that information.
- How do you explain that? - I don't know.
That's what I'm saying, you can't measure this stuff.
So, Janay, do you notice, when we're doing this off your body, do you notice something going on? - I feel like I melt into the table.
- Yes.
Janay woke up in the middle of the night and purged for an hour.
- Really? - Yeah.
She threw up from three a.
m.
to four a.
m.
Her body went out of flight or fight.
It went into relaxation and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of resting and digesting and healing and detoxing, kicked in.
So, it's not surprising that later that night her body was continuing to purge because emotions, if you can't move it through as waves and sounds and vibrations, then you hold it as physical tension.
So, there's this loop.
The first time, I also kind of bar Not barfed, but I thought I was gonna.
I think you said it was an energetic - Barf.
- Yeah.
Nothing came out, but it felt as if I was throwing up.
It was like the slate had just been cleaned, you know? And I think afterwards, I felt incredibly, deeply peaceful.
All right, Gwyneth, come on up sitting.
How you feeling? I feel like I could sleep for, like I feel like I could go to bed for the whole night right now.
Yeah.
But I feel much better.
Your body needs sleep.
But give it about, like, ten or 15 minutes and you'll start to come back up, 'cause you just went to a really deep place - where it will recharge and reset.
- Yeah.
One more, inhale.
Fold forward.
Release.
This is the century where we're gonna have massive upgrades in how we view energy, human energy, the human energy field.
Inhale, warrior two.
Are simple things that everyone can do to try to get energy flowing better? Exhale.
Reverse your warrior.
We can use our hands almost like a stethoscope to feel ourselves.
Take one last inhale together.
What's there just needs a Exhale.
Down dog.
I do that all the time now.
So if I feel anxious or I'm at my desk and I start to feel like out of body, I put my hands, like throat and heart, and I just, I'm like, "Oh, wow, there's a lot going on in there.
" And then, I just kind of breathe and it's almost like bringing You said, "Bring some tenderness, you know, through your hands to it.
" Lay down on your back.
Anybody could sit at home and kind of put their own hands on the areas of their body where they feel the most stuck and just sit with it, just observe it.
Namaste, guys.
Thank you so much.
So many of us walk around in our heads, with our to-do lists and what we have to do, and the experience of being in our bodies and integrated with our bodies is not something a lot of us experience all day, every day.
The first time I worked with John, it was, like, really trippy and crazy.
I could almost feel where his hands were going to be - Yeah.
- without seeing them.
It was really weird.
My body was, like, waving and reacting.
The scientist in me wants to, like, do some research, ask some questions, come up with, like, a hypothesis and then kind of rinse and repeat and see if I do notice anything different.
But I think that the fact that I was able to relax and quiet my mind, it was therapeutic for me in that sense.
I feel very airy and grounded.
I've been sleeping like I'm not saying it may have fixed this - but I have been sleeping a lot better.
- You have trouble sleeping, right? Yeah, I usually have sleep paralysis-like episodes.
As we get more integrated and more whole, that means all the parts of us that are hard to be with, the sad parts, the scared parts, the helpless parts, the parts that feel lonely, the parts that feel like we're not enough if we start to feel those and be with them, we can be fully accepting of them.
What happens is that those things don't trigger us in the world out there so much, and we can be with so much more of the range of human experience and emotion without getting triggered.
It was really crazy.
It seems pretty normal for a day at goop now, don't you think?