How to Find Your Spirit Guides with Michael Hunter
How to Find Your Spirit Guides with Michael Hunter
In this episode, I’m joined by Michael Hunter, an IFS trained acupuncturist and expert in connecting people to their spirit guides and the treatment of legacy burdens. We talk about understanding ancestral lineage healing and how these practices coincide with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.
Key Topics Discussed:
1. Exploring Ancestral Lineage Healing:
-Michael sheds light on the significance of ancestral lineage and how it influences our lives today.
2. Spirit Guides and Their Role:
- We discuss the concept of spirit guides, their presence in our lives, and how to connect with them.
3. Normalizing Spiritual Practices:
- Michael emphasizes the importance of normalizing practices like connecting with spirit guides, integrating them with therapy, and exploring the overlap with IFS for holistic healing.
4. Practical Techniques:
- Michael shares practical techniques for finding and communicating with your spirit guides, including connecting with the spirit of water.
5. Relational Intimacy:
- We explore the connection between understanding our ancestral lineage, working with spirit guides, and enhancing relational intimacy in our lives.
Learn more about Michael Hunter at https://ancestral-ifs.org/
Interview Transcript:
[00:00:00] John: Michael Hunter is IFS trained and has been an acupuncturist for 25 years. He specializes in connecting clients with their spirit guides and in the treatment of legacy burdens. Nowadays he sees clients exclusively online. You can find out more about Michael at https://ancestral-ifs.org/.
[00:00:22] John: Michael, thank you so much for being here. What else should people know about you, a little bit about your story, who you are and, you know, how you got here.
[00:00:31] Michael: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. My background actually started in acting and a lot of people think, why is that even relevant to healing?
[00:00:38] Michael: And it totally is. And in a really interesting way. And You know, the style of acting we have today derives from ancient Greek theater and in ancient Greek theater, acting was, and the theater was societal therapy. So if you had suffered a really heavy trauma in your life, you were prescribed to go to the theater that night to bear witness to heavy trauma [00:01:00] on stage and be in company with your neighbors and your community.
[00:01:03] Michael: So you could bear your own personal trauma in a community way. And so the work of the actor was very related to healing. And there's a certain mysticism to being an actor because it's actually an invitation to an intentional possession, right? It's inviting an external identity structure to take.
[00:01:27] Michael: Root in your body. And it is a, it is a deeply mystical experience when that, when that occurs, not unlike UBS in IFS or spirit guides, it's that kind of thing. I quickly transitioned out of acting when I got into the real world and out of my graduate program just because there's a lot more. To acting than just that mystical stuff the business of acting, and there's a lot more to it.
[00:01:51] Michael: So I went to acupuncture school and got a second graduate degree, and this is going back about 25 years and really satisfied that need for mystical [00:02:00] engagement with people and myself and my system. And then during the pandemic, I you know, stopped seeing people in person and was looking for a way to bring The wisdom of Chinese medicine to people in an online context.
[00:02:16] Michael: My wife is an IFS therapist and she. Oh, wow. Yeah. And she recommended I read a book by Dick Schwartz and I did. And I was like, Holy cow. He's saying exactly what Chinese medicine says about. The mind, which is that the mind is multiple, that the mind is made of parts. And there's a central self, which the Chinese call no self, but it's the same concept.
[00:02:39] Michael: It's a direct parallel. And the thing I loved about IFS was that here was a functional vocabulary that allowed me to interact with people. In plain English rather than in ancient Chinese metaphors, which, which most people walking around on the street don't really understand.
[00:02:58] John: Yeah. [00:03:00]
[00:03:00] Michael: And so I got trained in IFS and and began using it and seeing people online and sort of folding in my Chinese medicine background into my expression of IFS with clients.
[00:03:13] Michael: And not long thereafter, I came upon the work of Dr. Daniel Fore at ancestralmedicine. org. And he has a system called ancestral lineage healing, which is also within this domain. I see it anyway, within this domain of parts and self and self relating to systems, smaller and larger systems, depending on where the focus is.
[00:03:37] Michael: And I got trained with Dr. Four, did his practitioner training program. And between the three things, between Chinese medicine and IFS and ancestral lineage healing, I've been able to synthesize my own approach and my own comfort in the work and in the, in the domain. And and that brings us up to the present.[00:04:00]
[00:04:00] John: Wow. Yeah. I've got all sorts of curiosities. As always, one is a selfish one, which is that after being a therapist for 15 years, I became an actor, which is something a lot of people don't know about me. Oh, cool. And about two and a half years ago in the middle of COVID, I said, you know, I've, I've had this dream in the back of my mind, my whole life, really.
[00:04:21] John: My aunt is an actress in New York, you know, career actress. And I said, well I think I'll just try it. And one of the first things we did was this kind of volleying back and forth, you know, Meisner technique. Huh. Yeah. We just start and just not doing anything and just going, Oh, you're, you're smiling.
[00:04:39] John: Yeah, I'm smiling. Or then the smile goes away and I go, Oh, you're, you're not smiling anymore. I'm not smiling anymore. You know, this, this kind of sensitizing yourself to the moment, right? To your point about characters, I've always had an inclination toward being in character or even just making people laugh.
[00:04:57] John: Or I would take road trips with my wife and say, just give me a [00:05:00] kick and I will just embody that. Right away. I've always been able to do that and be completely in it and think as if I'm that person. So I just see so many parallels to therapy. And to your point about the therapeutic components of it, or even therapists that are doing like psychodrama or doing IFS with psychodrama sculpting, all that is really, I think, amazing.
[00:05:21] John: And there's that kind of improv element and Acting it out. I think it's wonderful. But yeah. So really your background is very interesting to me for many reasons.
[00:05:32] Michael: Yeah. You know, I think also that you know, when I'm working with clients, that's a part forward. That's one of my parts that comes forward to be with clients.
[00:05:40] Michael: And it's a very self led part. That I've spent many years cultivating and continue to cultivate that part to do that work of being with clients. And so it is a kind of acting. It's that allowing that part to be completely front, to be completely [00:06:00] centered, to be completely flooding my system, to be the center of the system, fully blended and and to great benefit.
[00:06:07] Michael: So, you know, I think in IFS, we're so accustomed to. I don't want to say quite pathologizing when parts blend, but that's typically our encounter, right? Cause people come to us with distress and the distress is usually what can be related to a blended part. But blended parts aren't automatically negative or Or undesirable sometimes and often they're, they're desirable.
[00:06:35] John: I another word for it that I went to a business conference one time and this guy was teaching about how to kind of access your alter ego. And he referenced a lot of athletes or people like Kobe Bryant that had this alter ego that even had a name, right? The black Mamba and the, you know, Kobe even talking about how.
[00:06:53] John: Right. For the game, he kind of switches into that, that, you know, that, that state or that alter [00:07:00] ego or that part of whatever you want to call it.
[00:07:02] Michael: Yeah. I heard about that same thing about Kobe. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Cool.
[00:07:06] John: Yeah. Yeah. And we didn't, we didn't pathologize it when Kobe said I'm the black mamba or I'm the black mama sometimes.
[00:07:13] John: And. People don't go, Oh, you're crazy. Well, I, gosh, there's so many ways we could go here, but I'm most interested in your integration of IFS and ALH ancestral lineage healing. Ancestral lineage healing is something I know very little about. I heard another podcast talking about it and that was about it.
[00:07:32] John: Maybe we can just start there with what What is it? And what should, what are the basics?
[00:07:38] Michael: So ancestral lineage healing is a recovery of a skill set that we as a species used to possess, you know, in general the human genus has been on the planet for about 2 million years. It's a really long time.
[00:07:53] Michael: And for most of that time, We lived as tribal indigenous people and that started to shift [00:08:00] maybe about 10, 000 years ago and then really started to shift, you know, it upshifted into even faster transformation around 2000 years ago with the rise of the Roman empire. And when those shifts began to happen, we saw civilizations begin to emerge and humans starting to live not as tribal indigenous peoples sort of universally.
[00:08:23] Michael: But one thing we know about Tribal indigenous people from deep in the anthropological record is that universally they are ancestor revering. So they have conversations with the spirits of their dead ancestors. They're in relationship to the lineages that came before them and in actual conversational relationships.
[00:08:45] Michael: And so. A lot of us can get our head around the fact that if you ask an indigenous person who's living in the old ways, Hey, do you speak to the spirits of your dead ancestors? We might expect an answer like, yeah, don't you? Like, how do you get through the day without speaking to [00:09:00] the spirits of your dead ancestors?
[00:09:02] Michael: And. The truth is that all of us are indigenous far enough back on our bloodlines. And so all of us have our down lineage from people that spoke to the spirits of their dead ancestors, and they had a skill set, a set of ritual skills that allowed them to be in conversation with the spirits of their dead ancestors.
[00:09:23] Michael: And why would we want to be in conversation with the spirits ancestors? Well, it allows us to situate ourselves in a much broader Relational field. Yeah. And we have available to us. The potential for relational intimacy. That's beyond just the flesh and blood others. And then IFS terms, we have access to a deep well of Of self energy that's outside of our own system.
[00:09:51] Michael: When we're in contact with the well and wise ancestors that are up lineage from us. So there's a lot of reasons, very [00:10:00] immediate reasons to, to have these skills and to be in these conversations and conversations and to have these relationships. And so ancestral lineage healing is a recovery of the ritual skills that allow us to have these conversations.
[00:10:14] John: Yeah. Yeah. I want to hear more about these skills because when I read about this on your website, that was a really interesting component to me around the skills and rituals to Yeah, tap into this, this communication. I have a part saying this is a dumb question, but I'm gonna ask you anyway, which is how does 1 become an ancestor?
[00:10:33] John: Who becomes an ancestor?
[00:10:35] Michael: No, that's a really good question. Actually, because a lot of us have the experience that. Our families, especially the recently dead in our families, the recent generations experienced a lot of trouble and maybe experienced a lot of intergenerational trauma is a pretty common observation on bloodlines.
[00:10:56] Michael: These days. Yeah. FS terms. We talk about legacy [00:11:00] burdens. It's just another way to say intergenerational trauma. Yeah. And it's yeah. Been widely observed in IFS circles that, you know, upwards of 60 percent of the average person's load of distress is legacy distress. Wow. That's definitely true in my system.
[00:11:17] Michael: That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you can If you're used to checking in with your parts, you can just ask them like, Hey, how much of the distress that's in the system is legacy distress? And, you know, you can get a percentage. And I was getting like three quarters or 75 percent when I first asked.
[00:11:38] Michael: And that's a lot, that's a lot of distress to be carrying around. And so, I'm losing my train of thought, forgive me.
[00:11:44] John: How does one become an ancestor?
[00:11:46] Michael: Yeah, so, we reserve the term ancestor for the well and wise ones on the lineage. The ones who are spiritually vibrant spiritually strong. And [00:12:00] those on the lineage who may have died and still have some work left to do or still encountering details of their life that need to be worked out.
[00:12:10] Michael: We would call them not yet ancestors. And we'd, so we reserve that term ancestors for those who have achieved this, this wisdom and this depth of spiritual vitality that really represents the bloodline behind them, the vitality of the bloodline behind them.
[00:12:27] John: And in that sense, is it something that you can work on?
[00:12:30] John: So to speak or work towards.
[00:12:33] Michael: Yeah. So this is a place where ancestral lineage healing differs from IFS and IFS and in a lot of therapies, the heavy lifting is done by the client and also the therapist, right? We do the work when we're dealing with our parts. We, we broker the self depart connection and we Do the work in there.
[00:12:52] Michael: We stay with it. And it's it's very active. In ancestral lineage healing, we're calling out to the well and wise [00:13:00] ancestors who are way up lineage before the troubles on the lineage began. And we're asking them to do the work. And as people standing in the material present, we're just anchoring.
[00:13:10] Michael: What's true for the lineage in the expression of DNA that is this physical body. And we're calling, we're supplicating down the vitality and the healing energy from the, from the ancient well and wise ones in the effort to heal the lineage. So it's called ancestral lineage healing. Cause we're, we're healing the lineage that's between the well and wise ones and us with the assumption being.
[00:13:35] Michael: That the lineage needs healing, and it's a safe assumption for many people on the planet these days, and it aligns with that same observation that you know, a lot of people, most people are carrying around a big burden of legacy distress. Yeah, yeah, and. The way we talk about that in ancestral lineage healing is that the lineage itself is in need of healing.
[00:13:58] Michael: You know, and this is an [00:14:00] interesting observation that legacy, legacy burdens are pretty different from personal burdens. In that they're entangled with a lot of people who came before us.
[00:14:10] John: Yeah.
[00:14:11] Michael: So in many cases, the entanglement goes back hundreds or even thousands of generations where you see this distress that's living within the family system and it's getting passed down from parent to child, from parent to child, from parent to child.
[00:14:25] Michael: And so you see long stretches of lineage that are unwell. And, you know, historically we know that things really started to go sideways on the planet in terms of an escalation in the human, non human harms about. Two or three thousand years ago with the rise of the age of empire and here in the West and I'm kind of myopically focused on the West because yeah from the West and derived from European settler colonialists But we know in that [00:15:00] Western story of the, the age of empire, which we're still within you had the Roman empire sweep through Europe about 2000 years ago, and they enacted a lot of human on human harms.
[00:15:10] Michael: So we saw genocide and slavery and cultural decimation, the likes of which hadn't occurred in Europe before before the Romans. Europe, the people in Europe were tribal indigenous people. I'm derived from Celtic people and my people were completely decimated by the Romans enslaved and just destroyed.
[00:15:33] Michael: And that's a lot of legacy burden to be carrying in a lineage from 2000 years ago. So, For the Celtic people and for many of the tribal indigenous peoples in Europe that existed before Rome, the legacy burdens began around 2000 years ago and they've extended through to the present. So that's a very long stretch of lineage of people that probably still need some healing.
[00:15:57] John: Yeah.
[00:15:57] Michael: And it was also around that time that those [00:16:00] rituals that we talked about at the beginning were taken from. My people, for example, so we were Celtic people, their culture was decimated. So they were not allowed to practice in the ways that they used to. They were forbidden. They were, they were forced to become Roman forced to behave as if they were Roman.
[00:16:16] Michael: So the culture was, was wiped out. And that meant taking away things like ritual and their connection with their ancestors and their power in the world. Their connection to this broader field of self energy. And so yeah, did I answer the question?
[00:16:30] John: Yeah, definitely.
[00:16:31] Michael: Okay.
[00:16:32] John: I was just sitting here thinking, man, I could just sit and listen to Michael talk for hours.
[00:16:36] John: And at least today I get to do that for one hour. Cause I'm, I'm, I'm fascinated. I'm also wanting to keep distilling it down into bite sized pieces. And so in thinking about, you know, a lot of the guests on our show have been IFS practitioners of different kinds. And so IFS topics across the board and IFS.
[00:16:56] John: , we often talk about guides or spirit guides. [00:17:00] What's the difference between an ancestor and a guide? It's a good question.
[00:17:06] Michael: So ancestral spirit guides, you know, we, we, like I said earlier, we reserve the term ancestor for well and wise ones. So any ancestor can act as a spirit guide. in the system. Okay.
[00:17:22] Michael: You can come into the system and behave as a separate entity if they're invited in, but in ancestor work and also particularly in Chinese medicine, there's a recognition of non human spirit guides. And this starts to get into the realm of UBs and what the definition of a UB is. You know, there's, if a UB is super benevolent and provides a lot of self energy, we call it a spirit guide.
[00:17:48] Michael: If UB is not so benevolent and maybe kind of hazardous, we tend to call it a UB. But it's kind of a continuum. And so spirit guides, non human and [00:18:00] ancestral are both relevant to the work. Especially the way I approach it. My first move with every client is to connect them with a non human spirit guide.
[00:18:09] Michael: Right off the bat. And this is something I really like about what Chinese medicine has allowed me to bring to IFS because I've heard in IFS circles that there's some mystery around what it is to get a spirit guide. You hear some IFS practitioners talking about their access to their own spirit guides, but I've seen not much information about how you do that.
[00:18:34] Michael: How do you get a spirit guide? I agree. And in Chinese medicine, you know, when I did my master's degree in Chinese medicine, it was like the first week of Qigong class. We connected with spirit guides. And so part of, part of like my mission statement in, in this work right now is I really want to let IFS practitioners know that they have ready access to spirit guides, that it's a fairly [00:19:00] simple procedure to get access to a non human spirit guide.
[00:19:05] Michael: Yeah. And so once, once that's established, once I, when I'm working with a client and we get them in contact and in relationship with a non human spirit guide, that spirit guide takes on sort of a protective function. Protective insofar as they become a really deep resource of self energy. So that the person can then be present to the troubles on the lineage.
[00:19:32] Michael: That is sort of step two of the procedure, because when we do turn toward their families and their family lineages. Yeah, we're then looking at the legacy distress, the legacy burdens, which they carry in their own bodies. So the, yeah, level of activation that can occur is high and the level of self energy that's required to navigate that safely is also high.
[00:19:59] Michael: And so having, [00:20:00] having a powerful non human spirit guide on board is really important. And I noticed in my own IFS work that just having access to spirit guides, they are a ready source of self energy. So whether I'm doing ancestral lineage healing, or I'm doing parts Rick and myself. Spirit guide is really useful and the parts know when a spirit guide is there, they can see them and they can relate to them and they know that the amount of self energy on the scene is that much higher when the spirit guide is there.
[00:20:33] Michael: So it really helps the IFS work and that's why I'm committed to IFS practitioners having access to spirit guides cause it's pretty easy and it helps the work so much.
[00:20:45] John: Yeah, absolutely. Can you, Say a little bit more about that process or like you mentioned, that's kind of a, the aim of the first session when you're working with, with someone is finding that, that first spirit guide.
[00:20:59] John: Can you let us know a little [00:21:00] bit about what that actually looks like if I was a fly on the wall in that session?
[00:21:03] Michael: Yeah, for sure. It's so prosaic. And that's part of the beauty of it and part of the aim. And really consistent with what I was talking about, recovering these ritual skills, we hear these terms, spirit guides and ritual skills, and they sound kind of esoteric.
[00:21:24] Michael: They sound mysterious and kind of cool. And the aim with the work is to normalize it all because that's where the real strength is to be shifting our paradigm into allowing a normalization of ritual skills and allowing a normalization of contact and relationship with spirit guides. And so I say, you say, what's the procedure?
[00:21:49] Michael: And I say, it's very prosaic. The first spirit guide to connect everyone with, and this comes from Chinese medicine, is the spirit of water. And in Chinese [00:22:00] medicine it's said that when every human is born the spirit of water surrounds and protects them from their first breath through to their death, however long that is.
[00:22:13] Michael: And connecting with that spirit guide Is so automatic and so already happening that the procedure of awakening to the connection is really just turning toward experiences. We've always been having our whole lives and recognizing the spiritual nature of what seemed like very normal experiences. So for example, everyone's moved by water in some way or another.
[00:22:43] Michael: So if you imagine standing at the Pacific Ocean and Surf pounding the shore. Yeah. What do you feel in your body when you're standing there? Or maybe your jam is a thunderstorm? Like, what does it feel like?
[00:22:57] John: You're talking to a surfer. So this is, yeah. And I'm, [00:23:00] I'm a quarter mile from the beach right now.
[00:23:02] John: So that's not hard for me to imagine.
[00:23:04] Michael: Yeah. So preaching to the choir here.
[00:23:06] John: Yeah.
[00:23:08] Michael: So the recognition of how water moves us in the many ways that it does. You know, like, or thinking about the silence of a, of a snowstorm. What does it feel like in your body to witness the first snow of winter? Or what is it like to take a cool drink of water when you're really hot and sweaty?
[00:23:29] Michael: Or to dip into a really warm bath or to take a cold shower or all of these different ways that water interacts with us in a very embodied way.
[00:23:42] John: This is this is already stirring something up in me. Which is just like a, a kind of a warm sensation, like under my seat almost, or like in my pelvis. So who, I don't know what that means, but you probably do.
[00:23:58] Michael: It only means. [00:24:00] It's only got meaning according to you and your relationship to water that is engendering the feeling. You know, the relationship you have with water is yours and it would just like you are the only one who knows what it's like to relate to your own particular friends. I have no domain over telling you what those relationships are, how you should be in them.
[00:24:24] Michael: That's you and your friends. Yeah. The same is true with water, with the spirit of water. The next step of the procedure is beginning to really recognize the, the sacredness of water and the sacredness of being moved in the ways we are in our physical body by water. We've, a lot of us have heard the statistic that by volume humans are about 70 percent water.
[00:24:50] Michael: But the more interesting statistic is that by molecule count, We're 99. 95 percent water. It's just that water is a very tiny molecule. [00:25:00] So we're really water beings, which is why Chinese medicine calls out water as the first spirit guide. So water is everywhere on the planet, but it's also mostly us. We're mostly water.
[00:25:15] Michael: And so the next step in the procedure is learning to stay with being moved by this sacredness, learning to recognize that it is a sacred spiritual experience to be moved. The feeling of standing on the beach with the pounding surf. Ordinarily, we encounter that, you know, get out of your car and encounter the pounding surf on the beach and you may stay with that for a few minutes.
[00:25:40] Michael: But before long, your thoughts return in the worries return and whatever else your mind was doing. Yeah, that's to return it. And that's so normal. Being at the beach is so normal that we just sort of take it for granted. But, the next step in this procedure of like identifying water as a spirit guide is learning to stay with that, learning to suspend our [00:26:00] disbelief that this is anything but sacred and turning toward it.
[00:26:05] Michael: And then even more importantly, interacting with it. So having a conversation with it, asking for its blessing, asking for its intercession in your life and allowing the beginning of a conversation to emerge. This for many people takes the suspension of disbelief. And in the same way that an IFS, when we're first new to IFS work, we're taught to suspend our disbelief about whether parts are real or not say, it doesn't really matter if you believe that they're real, but if you treat them as if they're real and give them dignity and respect, then the clinical outcomes are better.
[00:26:46] Michael: And the same thing is true with spirit guides and spirit work and ancestor work. You don't have to believe that. The spirit of water is real, but if you suspend your disbelief and [00:27:00] treat it as if it's real and give it dignity and respect and approach it with the right etiquette, then your outcomes are going to be better.
[00:27:09] John: Yeah. Well, I can I can also just say more of what's coming up for me, which is I'm curious your thoughts on this or happy to have you ask more about this, which is as you were saying all of that, you know, something that, Changed my life when I moved out here was surfing and I had never really been in the water in the ocean in the way that you are when you're surfing, interacting with it being humbled by it, being scared of it, being moved around by it constantly.
[00:27:36] John: And for me, what just came up was not the actual wave riding, which is part of surfing, but a majority of surfing is waiting on your board, straddling your board, waiting out past the break where you're pretty far out. And. You can feel the enormity of the water, you can feel how deep it is, you can [00:28:00] sense how deep it is under you.
[00:28:01] John: It's scary. It can be scary when you think about it. But just this all consuming kind of moving like this. I'm just moving my shoulders back and forth a tiny bit. This kind of rocking that happens in your board that I just love. I just love being in that and letting that happen. And again, as I do this, like, I kind of feel that happens.
[00:28:19] John: Yeah. Warmth in my my pelvis or whatever that is. So I'm very open to feeling more of this. Yeah.
[00:28:28] Michael: Yeah, I've had the same experience when I lived in San Francisco. I used to have this tiny little one person sailboat and I would sell out underneath the Golden Gate Bridge way out into the open ocean and that sense of being held by the huge hands of the swell.
[00:28:43] Michael: And being rocked like you're describing is that's it right there. That's the spirit of water holding you in the physical prosaic present. And it is a transcendent experience when you allow it to be. This goes a lot further. [00:29:00] This is just the beginning. This is an, this is meeting the spirit of water as an acquaintance for the first time.
[00:29:11] Michael: As a surfer, you have Probably a ton of experience in this sort of sacred relationship with water and you can sort of take, take it up a notch and up level it by recognizing that you're in the presence of your first and longest standing spirit guide every time you're in the water. You're never not in the presence of your first and longest standing spirit guide because you're 99 percent water.
[00:29:35] Michael: Every, you know, every day you're drinking water, you're consuming water in your food. It's, it's in the air. But learning to be with it in this way, and we can take it up even further by Really adding to the conversation and there's a really cool procedure that I use with clients that involves freezing the water.
[00:29:59] Michael: And I [00:30:00] recommend using the tap water tap water at home because it's the, probably the water we have most interaction with, you know, we drink it, we bathe in it and it washes our clothes. And this technique derives from a Japanese water researcher named Masaru Emoto. He wrote a book called The Hidden Messages in Water about 25 years ago.
[00:30:23] Michael: It was a New York times bestseller. And what Dr. Emoto did was he took water and like a Petri dish filled with water and exposed it to a prompt, like the word love. And then he would freeze the Petri dish. And once it was totally frozen, he would put the ice underneath. And photograph the images that came out.
[00:30:48] Michael: And when water was exposed to prompts like love, the formation of the ice crystals would be really beautiful and flowery and snowflakey really appealing and symmetrical. But he [00:31:00] also expose the. water to prompts like the word hate. And when he would photograph those ice crystals, they would invariably be jagged and ugly and disorganized and and chaotic looking.
[00:31:15] Michael: And he took thousands of photographs using thousands of these beautiful Sort of binary prompts, love, hate, and you would put a heart or a symbol of a fist or he would play different kinds of music like thrashy, heavy metal music versus really calming. Classical music. And each time when he would photograph the different outcomes, you would see the same source of water respond to the prompt in a different way.
[00:31:50] Michael: And so his work is really interesting because he's interacting with water. He's allowing water to have a voice that we can [00:32:00] interpret and also allowing the water to receive our input. On a very specific thing. So there's a conversation that's happening and there's a water researcher that started publishing her work about 10, 10 years ago.
[00:32:16] Michael: Her name is Veda Austin. She's from New Zealand and she extrapolated on Dr. Imoto's work. His work was all done in a very expensive lab with lots of expensive equipment. And you would need a big budget to reproduce his work. But what Veda Austin did was. She took the same Petri dish of water and froze it in her home freezer and photographed the results with her iPhone.
[00:32:41] Michael: And she also had the same responsiveness from the water, the streamlined and simple and home technique that she developed allowed the conversation to go back and forth pretty quickly. It takes about five to 10 minutes to have one good back and forth with the Petri dish of [00:33:00] water. And so, In my coaching of people to get into relationship with the spirit of water as a spirit guide.
[00:33:09] Michael: This is the next iteration of it is to suspend your disbelief and begin to treat water when you're sitting on your surfboard or standing on the beach or witnessing a thunderstorm, begin to treat it like a sacred being that it is suspend your disbelief and allow that treatment, but then to go a step further and actually begin to have a back and forth a meaningful back and forth.
[00:33:34] Michael: with frozen petri dishes of water. Yeah.
[00:33:38] John: Would they start with a, a question in this communication with the water or, or just listening or how does one open that door?
[00:33:49] Michael: It's a good question. So just like any relationship, right? If you're meeting a new friend for the first time, there's an etiquette to it.
[00:33:58] Michael: And we know what that etiquette is with flesh [00:34:00] and blood others. The same etiquette is true with the spirit of water. Here's a being that's much larger than your, yourself, who's known you your whole life, but you're for the first time making an acquaintance of it. And so I always suggest like, introduce yourself.
[00:34:19] Michael: And the technique is you take the petri dish. And you put a couple of tablespoons of water in it and you take like a sticky sticky note and you write a message on there and you hold it underneath the Petri dish. So you can read the message through the water in the Petri dish. And you hold that message there for 30 seconds and you read it out loud and you intend what the message says as you're, as you're holding the Prompting it and communicating with it.
[00:34:48] Michael: And so I always recommend that the first message is like, hey, my name is Michael It's really glad to meet you. Yeah, that's how I would approach a new person
[00:34:58] John: Right
[00:34:59] Michael: the very first [00:35:00] meeting with someone on the street or being introduced at a party like hi. My name is Michael Yeah, nice to meet you. I'm glad to be here
[00:35:08] John: I am both very swept away by this and I also have a part going in the future Talking to a Petri dish is crazy.
[00:35:14] Michael: Yeah.
[00:35:15] John: So I'm, I'm holding both right now.
[00:35:19] Michael: Terrific. Yeah. The nice thing about this is that there's feedback and it's kind of mind blowing the feedback that comes through what I normally get from water. And I try to have at least one back and forth every day. I've got a little freezer, I'm standing in my office now and I've got a little freezer over in the corner.
[00:35:41] Michael: And I. I have a conversation at once back and forth with water every day. And mostly what I get from water is I see you, I see what's going on for you right now. For example, the other day I was, I had too many [00:36:00] balls in the air. It was juggling too much and I was super, super stressed. And the picture that emerged in the water was a profile, almost a cartoonish pro profile.
[00:36:12] Michael: Of a man wearing a hat and I always wear a hat because I'm bald and he was his mouth was open and he looked like he was screaming and it seemed really clear to me that that's what was there. And it just felt very seen by the water. Like, I see you. I see what's happening. I see the level of stress that you're under right now from having too many balls in the air, too many appointments and too many children asking for help with homework and et cetera, et cetera.
[00:36:44] Michael: And I know this, even as I speak it, it, I, I, I, I have a part that goes, everyone's going to think you're crazy when you say this, but I invite everyone to try it. And what comes out of the freezer is pretty astounding. [00:37:00]
[00:37:00] John: Yeah. Yeah. It's like you know, one way of offering something like this is the worst that can happen is you try it and nothing happens and we can get curious about that or we can talk about the hat.
[00:37:14] Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
[00:37:16] John: Yeah. I, like I said, I am both very swept away by all of this and feeling very much on board and again, already doing my own kind of internal process here and connecting with water and have such an immediate entry to that with surfing and with living by the beach. And and yeah, I, I'm also, you know I, I have.
[00:37:40] John: Skeptical parts are very kind of like practical parts because of the therapies that I came from and the kind of practical types of therapies that I came from that are largely very western ideas around, like, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, like you're suffering because you're thinking is wrong or irrational or [00:38:00] whatever it is.
[00:38:00] John: So all of this is like a whole new world to me getting into these types of. modalities, even if as, as a psycho spiritual modality. Right. But I'm also, yeah, I'm also just so intrigued to, to hear more. Yeah.
[00:38:19] Michael: You're, you're pointing to a really interesting and germane detail in all of this work and that's, what are the allowable epistemologies here?
[00:38:29] Michael: What are the allowable ways of knowing? Yeah, Because a lot of the therapies, most of the therapies that we might study and are available to us conform to the reductionist scientific materialistic paradigm, which is the paradigm that represents the allowable epistemology, the allowable way of knowing in the modern world.
[00:38:55] Michael: And when I say allowable, I mean that we're conditioned. To [00:39:00] believe that ways of knowing that fall outside of that scientific, scientifically provable way of knowing, yeah, ways of knowing that fall outside of that are deemed accurate, inaccurate,
[00:39:13] John: They're pathologized, right? If you go in and tell. A licensed therapist that you've been talking to a petri dish, I mean, they might commit you or that the petri dish was talking back, you know, right.
[00:39:27] John: That's the world, the medical model in which we live in. Or when people even say like, I hear voices, right. There was a client, in our practice recently with a clinician I supervise and, you know, the client says, I, I hear voices. You know, the first question is like, well, how do you, how do you feel toward those voices?
[00:39:44] John: Right. It's like, what are they, what are they saying? Do they feel malevolent? Do they feel benign? And then again, in the medical model, we go, this is, this person is psychotic. They must be psychotic. And yet when people, Go to church on Sunday and say, I talked to God and God told me [00:40:00] to go on a mission trip.
[00:40:01] John: He told me to go to, you know, whatever. He told me to go to South America and build an orphanage. It's like, well, that's not pathologize, right? That's just good old fashioned religion.
[00:40:13] Michael: Right? Yeah. So yeah. That's a cool point that they're holding containers for larger ways of knowing that are outside of science and, but they tend to exist in religion.
[00:40:26] Michael: Yeah, yeah. And the point that, you know, spirit work and ancestral lineage healing, the point that is being made here is also a normalization of these other ways of knowing. That's not such a big deal to be in relationship to the spirit of water and that our imaginal sense. is a totally legitimate way to know.
[00:40:55] Michael: And that, you know, we do this in IFS too. So, you know, [00:41:00] you ask the part of question and the first thing that comes through is usually the one we go with. Let's trust that. Right. Because it's a trustable way of knowing, even though, again, it's outside of the scientific epistemologies. It's more in the realm of imagination or creativity.
[00:41:17] Michael: And because usually the second or third and fourth, Response that comes up is I'm making this up. So parts jump in, you're making this up. Yeah, this is your imagination. Right. And maybe it is, but where does, where do those impulses in our imagination come from?
[00:41:32] John: Yeah.
[00:41:33] Michael: Right. They're legitimate ways of knowing they're there.
[00:41:37] Michael: It's, it's allowable here and can be normalized. And again, the proof is in the pudding, so we can do all this stuff and. And when we do and when we pay attention to the outcomes, the outcomes are better when we allow these, this broader field of awareness to be front and center, the outcomes are better.
[00:41:58] Michael: So I can say, like, I, I relate [00:42:00] to the spirit of water and I encourage clients to relate to the spirit of water and these are some of the ways that you can, can deepen into that. That's all well and good, but nothing's. Nothing matters unless it positively impacts the person and yet to work with someone that hasn't come back the very next week moved and up leveled in their life because of this relationship they're now having with the spirit of water, which they weren't having the week earlier.
[00:42:29] Michael: And so the proof is there just the invitation to turn toward this spirit has positive impact on everybody I've ever worked with. And I've been doing this for 25 years and it's totally a normal thing in acupuncture circles in ancient Chinese medicine circles to do this kind of thing. So there's a cadre of people that are having this, this is an allowable way of knowing to a cadre of people out there.
[00:42:59] Michael: [00:43:00] And And the outcomes have been demonstrated over and over and over for centuries and millennia that yeah, interacting with this way in this way with the material world has benefits.
[00:43:15] John: Well, people, there are adjacent things happening and with people at large, the kind of zeitgeist People realizing, Oh, I kind of need to connect with nature more, right?
[00:43:26] John: Or even people that are like, I need to get outside more. I need to take a hike more or going one step further. Someone, some therapists on Tik TOK says, Oh, there's this thing called earthing, which is like putting your bare feet onto the earth every morning. Right. Connecting your electrical system with the electrical current of the earth.
[00:43:43] John: Right. That is literally ground when we talk about grounding and like that is not that big of a leap for people to take to see number one, like being out amongst the trees is good for me or putting my feet on the earth. Like feels good. I don't even have to know why. Right. But you're just like [00:44:00] stand sand.
[00:44:01] John: I feel a little calmer and I don't really have to know why. Right. And then, or even people that go, I need to clear my head and they go to the beach and they just stand there and they look out, right. And they're like, they just, something happens. Right. Part of what I'm thinking from your conversation though, is the communing with water in this case is taking that experience of kind of mindfully being in it and letting.
[00:44:26] John: The earth kind of do its thing of grounding you versus starting a relationship with, in this case, the spirit of water. So, like, that relationship is right there waiting to be had, and a lot of people are kind of tiptoeing all around it, right? And calling it whatever, you know, mindfulness, space, hiking, like a therapist, right?
[00:44:45] John: I mean, like, nature therapy, right? But I, so neat that taking that one step further in that relationship is really. My, one of my big takeaways from today, and I know this is just a starting point for the work you do that, but it's such a [00:45:00] great and easy to understand starting point,
[00:45:05] Michael: And, and easy to practice and easy to deepen into and easy to allow this continual unfolding because it's not effortful when you begin relating with.
[00:45:17] Michael: Any spirit guide trees are wonderful spirit guides and it's really easy to go throw your arms around a tree and feel What it feels like to actually hug a tree. You can actually feel the physicality of being in the presence of that being Profoundly grounding or like you described earthing taking your shoes off and standing on the bare earth You can really feel it so it doesn't take a lot of effort to deepen these relationships.
[00:45:43] Michael: It just takes a turning toward an orientation we're not accustomed to. We're used to experiencing ourselves as isolated and as there's this concept that we all have called inanimate objects that the rest of life is inanimate. [00:46:00] It's only humans that have consciousness. And what this work invites is that that's not so at all.
[00:46:09] Michael: That the rest of life, the rest of the world, the rest of material existence is animated, has consciousness and there's life flowing through it. That's the word animism is the sort of larger holding frame. It's how. Reality is organized indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Material reality is animated. And if you ask, look at any great wisdom tradition, including modern science, quantum physics, are the particles that make up all of matter animated?
[00:46:44] Michael: Do they exhibit agency and personality? And the answer from quantum physics is a resounding yes. It's just that in the popular culture, we're still accustomed to thinking of ourselves as these isolated islands of [00:47:00] consciousness in an inanimate world.
[00:47:02] John: Yeah. We, we had Bob Falconer on here. I don't know if you're familiar with his work around of course, unattached burdens.
[00:47:08] John: Yeah. Citadel mind. So a lot of the, this is linking would link well to that episode. So folks can feel free to check that out or check out Bob's book. Lot of, you know a lot of overlap here. I'm also just really appreciating this perspective around Chinese medicine is something I've always been fascinated in, received acupuncture herbal medicine, Chinese medicine doctors I don't know how long it's been or how much time you spent in San Francisco, but I live in the sunset, which is a primarily Chinese neighborhood.
[00:47:42] John: And so every morning when I walk out my door, there's older Chinese folks that are doing either Qi Gong or Tai Chi. And I And on one hand, again, as a white dude from Virginia, when I first move out here and saw that I'm like, Oh, that looks kind of weird. Right. They're like playing around with some [00:48:00] invisible ball.
[00:48:01] John: Right. And I'm like, I don't know what that is. And then maybe a year ago, I, Looked up a seven minute YouTube on Q Gong, like a morning routine. I started doing it and it's changed my life and I do it every morning now. And sweet. I know this seems very basic to you, but for someone like me in the culture I grew up in doing Q go and, and just being curious and going, oh, I think I'm actually moving something.
[00:48:26] John: Right? Like I'm doing my hands like this going down and as I like finish the routine, this is, you know, one of them. And I'm like. Oh, my gosh, I'm actually moving something that was wild to me and still is kind of wild to me. Yeah, just again, given the culture I kind of came from, but it's also so empowering.
[00:48:45] John: And even I had a client in session the other day and he's had these really, really bad panic attacks. We've tried to hit it from many different angles and a lot of it hasn't worked. And last week. We tried just hand on the chest, hand on the belly and using the hands just to kind of [00:49:00] listen to the energy there.
[00:49:02] John: And then just instinctively, I eventually asked him if he could just play around with moving it down and back up and down and back up. And he could, and he started doing it. Right. And we were both just kind of playing around with that. I was doing it on my chest as well. Right. And I'm just like, Oh my gosh, it's kind of all energy, isn't it?
[00:49:19] John: And I've been over here doing, you know, CBT for 10 years because that's where my teachers taught me. And I'm, and then I'm like, What is a panic attack? You know, I just go so far of like, have I been thinking about this wrong the whole time? Is it all just energy work? You know?
[00:49:34] Michael: Yeah. Yeah. I would submit that it is.
[00:49:38] Michael: Yeah. And what you were, what you were doing with your client is Qi Gong. So Qi is life force and Gong means agility. So it's agility with life force and we all possess the capacity to move our life force around to have that kind of agility. Some people are more open to. The downloads of Qigong than others and every single [00:50:00] style of Qigong that exists on the planet came by way of a spirit guide.
[00:50:05] Michael: And it's someone who, what they call the the lineage holder of these different forms of Qigong was originally a person who was deeply in touch with spirit guides and the spirit guide said, you need to do the movements of moving your cheer and moving your life force around. In, in this particular rhythm and this particular pattern, and that will permit a particular level of achievement and optimization and vitalization.
[00:50:37] Michael: And then when those patterns are sort of set down and established, they can be taught to other people. But you don't need to study with someone who received a download from a spirit guide. You can do just what you did with your client and say, put your hand on your heart. I want on your belly and let's see if we can move the energy.
[00:50:55] Michael: And that is Qi Gong, my friend right there. That is the real thing, the real deal happening [00:51:00] live. And
[00:51:01] John: yeah. And it's interesting how we came to it. Right. If I had said like, let's do Qigong and there might've, the client might've had parts up around that or that might not work. Right. That's not going to work on me.
[00:51:13] John: Right. Or I don't believe in it versus we just went right into it with curiosity and not, not even knowing like what this technique is called per se. And for me, the more I've progressed in doing IFS and I see it, my main job is accessing self and self energy and that self knows just what to do. So I have, the more I do that, the more things just kind of get downloaded to me in session like this thing.
[00:51:37] John: Right. And I had been banging my head against the wall with this client for months now and seeing him in absolute and then this thing just kind of happened because I was also activated by his activation and I started doing this and I was like, Do you want to try this, whatever this is with my hand on my chest?
[00:51:53] John: And and then with my own limited knowledge of Qi Gong, I just knew, Oh, if, if that's just energy, quote unquote, you, you [00:52:00] can move it. And what if we could just move it up and down a little bit as a starting point versus a lot of therapy, which is client comes in, they're anxious. How do we get them not anxious, right?
[00:52:08] John: How do we like control the anxiety, which is a primary way of seeing. Symptomology as, you know mental health therapists that have been trained in medical model, right. Versus then just IFS of client comes in with activation. Can we go toward the activation? Right. And can we know it? It's just, it's a total paradigm shift.
[00:52:29] John: Anyway, we're, we're going to have to do like three more episodes on this. Cause I love it. I know we're just scratching the surface and you're such an interesting dude. And I'm, I'm like so on board with this stuff. Another little. Admission. I'm getting Reiki level one train this weekend. If you knew me a few years ago, you would think that's crazy.
[00:52:49] John: How far this dude has come.
[00:52:51] Michael: Yeah.
[00:52:51] John: Yeah. But I'm really excited and I trust the teacher entirely. And that's part of why I signed up as my trust in her. And I know there's. [00:53:00] Of sorts with that work, but there is. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:53:03] Michael: And Reiki means similar to Qigong. Rei is universal or universe and ki is the Japanese for chi or life force.
[00:53:10] Michael: So universal life force. So just what you're talking about when you, when you are bringing a lot of self energy into your sessions and you're getting sort of a download of what to do, that's universal chi, that's Reiki coming into you. That's your opening to the broader field of. of relational intimacy that's available to you and allowing the download of the spirit guides that are surrounding you and looking after you and who are available for you to meet when you decide to turn toward them.
[00:53:43] John: I can't, I can't wait. I'll report back on that and I'll definitely have you on again. We can talk about that and all sorts of, of things. That being said, Michael, and this is, yeah, flown by and I so appreciate. Everything you've taught today and shared. I would love for you to say a little bit [00:54:00] more about how you help people, how you work with clients.
[00:54:03] John: And then of course how they can get in touch and we'll of course include your info and the links in the description everywhere.
[00:54:09] Michael: Yeah. So I specialize in the treatment of legacy burdens, which is another way of saying intergenerational trauma. And I just find that Most people can identify with that.
[00:54:19] Michael: Most people can identify that level of distress. So it's a good place to start to help people relieve some distress. But then the deeper dive is into this larger domain of relational intimacy. And I've seen with client after client, this gentle up spiraling of their life experience when this work is engaged.
[00:54:43] Michael: And so that's, that's the work I do is I, I specialize in the treatment of, of legacy burdens. People can find me at my website https://ancestral-ifs.org/
[00:54:56] John: Great. Easy enough. Yeah, we'll link everything in the [00:55:00] description and yeah, if you're interested in learning more or working with Michael, head to his website.
[00:55:05] John: And, and reach out. And, and genuinely, I'm going to have to have you back if you're up for it, Michael. Cause I, I know we're just scratching the surface. I'd be so glad to come back. Yeah. Great. Thank you again. And yeah, we'll, we'll see you back here soon.
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