Did you know one-third of our population is highly sensitive? Highly sensitive people can suffer from many symptoms including autoimmunity, multiple chemical sensitivities, depression, anxiety, and chronic pain. Unfortunately, most people who are highly sensitive aren’t even aware of their condition.
Dr. Schaffner and Dr. Kan discuss her new book, Sensitivity Is Your Superpower: How to Harness Your Gifts, Fulfill Your Purpose, and Create a Life of Joy, the research behind this phenomena, the problems highly sensitive people (sensitive souls) run into and why don’t they respond to conventional medicine.
Dr. Karen Kan is a medical doctor, Doctor of Light Medicine, best-selling author, and the founder of the TOLPAKAN™ Healing Method. In her experience, sensitive souls suffer more from depression, anxiety, allergies, autoimmunity, and multiple chemical sensitivities. Dr. Kan’s mission is to empower sensitive souls to use their gifts as superpowers; to heal themselves, fulfill their purpose, and create a life of joy. What she’s really passionate about is seeing them shine their light so they can pull the world out of darkness. Her latest #1 international bestseller is Sensitivity is Your Superpower – How to Harness Your Gifts, Fulfill Your Purpose, and Create a Life of Joy.
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Dr. Karen Kan is a medical doctor, Doctor of Light Medicine, best-selling author, and the founder of the TOLPAKAN™ Healing Method. In her experience, sensitive souls suffer more from depression, anxiety, allergies, autoimmunity, and multiple chemical sensitivities. Dr. Kan’s mission is to empower sensitive souls to use their gifts as superpowers; to heal themselves, fulfill their purpose, and create a life of joy. What she’s really passionate about is seeing them shine their light so they can pull the world out of darkness. Her latest #1 international bestseller is Sensitivity is Your Superpower – How to Harness Your Gifts, Fulfill Your Purpose, and Create a Life of Joy.
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TRANSCRIPT: Why Highly Sensitive People Take Longer To Heal – Dr. Karen Kan with Dr. Christine Schaffner
Dr. Christine Schaffner: Welcome everyone, to the Spectrum of Health podcast. I’m Dr. Christine Schaffner, and today my guest is Dr. Karen Kan, and we’re going to be talking about why many sensitive souls take longer to heal. A little bit about Karen. Dr. Karen Kan is a medical director, doctor of light medicine, a multi number-one bestselling author, and the founder of Total Kan Healing Method. According to research, approximately 30% of the population are highly sensitive, and in her experience, they suffer more from depression, anxiety, allergies, autoimmunity, and multiple chemical sensitivities. Her mission is to empower sensitive souls to use their gifts as super powers to heal themselves, fulfill their mission, and create a life of joy. What she’s really passionate about is seeing them shine their light so they can pull the world out of the darkness. Her latest number one international bestseller is Sensitivity Is Your Superpower: How to Harness Your Gifts, Fulfill Your Purpose, and Create a Life of Joy. I hope you enjoy this episode.
0:01:02.6 CS: Welcome everyone, I’m thrilled to have Dr. Karen Kan on today, and we’re going to be talking about why many sensitive souls take longer to heal. Welcome, Dr. Kan, it’s such an honor to have you on the podcast.
0:01:17.0 Dr. Karen Kan: Oh, it’s such an honor to be here, Dr. Christine, thank you so much.
0:01:21.2 CS: We really connect on so many levels, I just love the work that you’re doing, and you have this niche in working with sensitive patients. Over the years, I also have attracted a lot of sensitive patients, and you say something that got downloaded to me as well, it’s something that I’ve said to my sensitive patients–your sensitivity can be your superpower. You’ve taken that and educated your community and now mine on this, and so I’m really excited to have this conversation today.
0:01:48.3 KK: Me too, and it’s so funny because there are so many of us in the healing world, not just clinicians, but helper-healer types that are highly sensitive, who were never told they were sensitive, never honored that they’re highly sensitive, and then they end up in the healing profession. That is not a coincidence.
0:02:08.8 CS: Right. I know, it’s like we’re always on our path, and if we can see all these lessons along the way as our opportunities for growth. Dr. Karen, when we think about what a sensitive soul is, how do you describe that for someone who’s listening?
0:02:24.7 KK: Well, I’m going to go to the research a little bit. A number of years ago, a study found that about 20% of people were considered highly sensitive, so these people had sensitivities to light, noise, fumes, electricity, human emotions, things like that. And what’s really interesting, when I was researching for my book, Sensitivity Is Your Superpower, which came out last year, I asked the team, “Hey, could I get the exact citation for that study?” The team came back to me a couple of weeks later and gave me a different study, a more recent study, it was from 2018, which showed actually, one-third of the population, not 20%. So a little over 30% of people are highly sensitive. So in my world, what does that look like? I’m sure you’ve seen this as well, that people can feel other people’s emotions, sometimes they sponge them, they can walk into a room and feel bad energy and don’t feel good when they’re in there, and they tend to not do very well with conventional pills, like medication pills, they have some type of awkward or opposite reaction sometimes, and they tend to have a lot of allergies. If they’re not well-grounded and healed and have full control of their superpowers, so to speak, they tend to have symptoms, including autoimmunity, allergies, sensitivities to all sorts of dyes and chemicals, and electromagnetic sensitivities, so they can’t even have a cell phone, and some of them can get really, really sick. Highly sensitive people are people that tend to react to energy in a different way, they react to consensus energy in a different way than so-called the average non-sensitive person.
0:04:09.7 CS: The sensitivity is not only on this energetic level, but also, as you said, the physical level, it’s almost like the canaries in the coal mine, the center to those souls.
0:04:19.0 KK: Absolutely.
0:04:19.2 CS: Often they’ll say, “Oh, I don’t detox well from this, or I’m sensitive to this,” and I’m like, you’re actually demonstrating how we probably all should be reacting to these harmful things in our environment, but some of our bodies are asleep to it. In the end they have to navigate this really interesting world that we live in right now, with all of these issues environmentally and energetically. What’s your framework when you think about sensitive souls, does their energetic sensitivity make them more susceptible to being sick? What’s your understanding of the connection?
0:04:54.1 KK: I think one of the simplest visuals I can give people is, highly sensitive people can sense and feel lots of different energy, and as we know from quantum physics, everything is energy. Non-sensitives may receive information in a very simple way in whatever environment they’re in, highly sensitive people actually have bigger sensors, so it’s like they have a humongous radar, so the information coming in is overwhelming, there’s too much information for them to process in the human body in efficient speed, so it’s like giving them a fire hose of information that they can’t process, and therefore, sometimes the body just can’t catch up with that. And of course, if they have their own stuff, they’re dealing with their own emotions, traumas, bad habits, eating a lot of sugar, or whatever it is, then it makes it even worse because they really can’t process the information. What I find is that they need to be able to hone their skill and harness it so that only the information that’s necessary for them to understand and process or receive gets processed, and everything else can be cleared or released away.
0:06:06.4 CS: That’s a great explanation. I hadn’t really heard it explained in that way, they have more sensors, or they just have the ability to sense their environment more strongly, that makes a lot of sense. How do you start with helping people work with this superpower so that they don’t become so overwhelmed and so reactive? Where do we start?
0:06:31.8 KK: Well, there are three mistakes that highly sensitive people, who I call sensitive souls, make. On the opposite side of these mistakes is the cure, if you will. One of the mistakes is that they think there’s something wrong with them, and this is very common because, “Well, gee, I’ve got autoimmunity, I’ve got fibromyalgia,” all these things, and they think there’s something wrong with them. Instead of thinking there’s something wrong, just understand that who you are is who you are, and actually, you’re more gifted in some ways than the average non-sensitive. So it’s about reframing that because we know our minds and emotions have a lot to do with how our biology expresses itself. This is epigenetics, and in the work of Dr. Bruce Lipton, who I’m a big fan of, it’s taught that what you think and perceive, and how you think and perceive then produces emotions, which then produce signals, and then your cells can activate your DNA from emotions, or from thought alone. You don’t necessarily need a chemical or something to bind to a receptor per se–a biological agent to make a change in your DNA. By changing the perception–wait a second, there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m actually highly gifted, and the sensitivity is a good thing! That shift alone can help so many people shift out of that negative thinking that there’s something wrong with me, and the other side of that is they want to be normal.
0:08:00.2 KK: So another mistake. It’s like saying, “Hey I want to de-evolve.” It’s not going to happen, because we are evolving, and highly sensitive people are evolved humans. We’re not taking care of the earth like we “should,” we’re not having sustainability practices, we’re not caring as much about the quality of our environment–for what’s healthy to the average person, it’s more about corporate profits and making money, and what’s the quickest, fastest way to X, Y, Z? That has absolutely nothing to do with human health and wellness, so that desire to be normal actually is a problem and can cause even more symptoms because you’re trying to be something you’re not. So that’s a mistake that I see people make.
0:08:47.9 KK: One of the other ones, a major one is that they can’t discern what is theirs and what isn’t theirs. That is a skill set, you can learn that, and there are many different levels, but one of the things that I’ve been teaching and I’m putting in my books is a technique that I’d like to share with folks, if you’re open to that, that they can learn. This technique is a way to basically be here, be now. Now, I know people go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Eckhart Tolle talks about the power of now, and the presence and…” But I’ve got to tell you, having read all those books, and then having done all this reiki training and everything like that, Dr. Christine, I could never make myself meditate, not for very long, I just was busy. I like being busy, and I just didn’t see the benefit of it at that moment. People are like, “Yeah, yeah, meditation. Yeah, yeah, that should be good.” But I was like, honestly, the people that I did know, friends of mine, close people that did meditate sometimes for two hours a day, their lives weren’t any happier, better or more prosperous than mine, so I’m thinking, I’m a science nerd, I’m a medical doc, I’m like, you’ve got to prove it to me. I wasn’t convinced.
0:10:00.7 KK: Just a backstory, I did find that there was one book, I love efficiency and I love healing quickly, so this book was called The Secrets of Instant Healing by Dr. Frank Kinslow, It was very thin, and I was like, great, I can get this book quickly and learn how to instantly heal. He put you through this other procedure, and I thought, Oh, so easy, you touch stuff here, pay attention, touch stuff here. Pay attention to both. I’m like, that’s pretty easy! I had a feeling of what that felt like, and I was like, “That’s it?” So I’m experimenting with that, I started doing it regularly, and then lo and behold my life started to shift and change, positive opportunities kept coming, money started coming in, health shifts were happening, and I was like, “This is very interesting.” Even though I was doing healing work already, what I found was that doing this “technique” periodically throughout the day was very powerful in manifesting a different reality.
0:11:00.1 KK: And then one day, one of my clients who I had been telling to read this book, says, “I don’t really get it. I’m not really using it.” I said, “Well, I don’t understand, what do you mean, you don’t get it?” And he goes, “Well, I don’t know if I’m doing it right.” So I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what it feels like to me,” and everybody who’s watching can do this right now, and this is exactly what I taught him. I said, “Okay, why don’t you just rub your hands, move your body a little bit, and then I want you to stop and close your eyes, and I want you to feel the energy in your body. Can you feel that?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I can feel waves.” I said, “Great, well, focus on that and feel it and then follow the flow. Where is it going?” And he’s like, “Well it’s going here, it’s going here.” I said, “Well, that’s it.” He said, “That’s it? I just have to feel that movement?” I said, “Yep.” So then he could do it any time, anywhere, boom. He ended up manifesting incredible things in his life, including his favorite car, a Porsche.
0:12:06.0 KK: I realized for a lot of highly sensitive people, their dominant spiritual gift is actually clairsentience, the ability to feel in the body intuitive information, that’s my dominant clair. So if I’m going to sense or intuit something, oftentimes it comes through my body. Now, there are other senses like clairvoyance, the ability to see visual or energetic information, then clairaudience, the ability to hear, clairgustiance. We have all of these, some of them are more dominant than others, and at least for me, they’re all increasing, but the clairsentience is my dominant one. Sensitive people often, especially if they have autoimmunity or chronic pain, often we already can diagnose them in a way that they’re clairsentient. They don’t react well to medications, that’s almost diagnostic, so for them to be able to turn their attention inwards may not be comfortable at the beginning, especially about pain, but if they can just feel the flow of energy in their body, then that gets them into what we call a stillness point, or zero-point, some people call it. In that place, we connect to that source of all creation, that inner wisdom.
0:13:14.0 KK: And in that space, we get into what I call an auto-healing space. That’s where things actually start to move out that are not yours, and your body gets into a relaxation place where it naturally heals. So, just curious what you felt just doing that for a moment there.
0:13:34.2 CS: I love this. I felt a pool of energy on my right lung. If I stayed in that state I would’ve seen where it traveled, but I got some pulls right there. So that was interesting.
0:13:52.6 KK: What’s really neat and what I really appreciate Dr. Kinslow for is that I honestly felt bad about not meditating, because I thought I should, right? Just 10 minutes a day. That’s what your spiritual teacher told you. How hard could that be, right? But I couldn’t make myself do it. And when I was talking to Dr. Kenslow, he says, “My wife is the happiest person ever, and she never sits down.” She never does sitting meditation, but we can do this on the fly. Those were my words, so we can feel the energy in our bodies while we’re talking. I can feel the energy traveling in my body and pay attention to that and talk to you. I can be washing the dishes and feel it, I can be exercising and feel the energy flow. Every time we pay attention to the inside, we’re bringing all the energy inside the body and being grounded, being fully present. I didn’t understand, that’s what it meant to be fully present, to have all your energy circuits here, in the body, not in the head, in the body. And that I call stillness on the fly. It’s so simple, it’s so easy. It’s so free, literally, you don’t have to pay for it, so sometimes people are like, “It can’t be that easy.” I’m like, “Actually, it is.”
0:15:16.3 KK: The more we can do this, second by second, minute by minute, multiple times a day, people will start to see the synchronicities and the signs and the opportunities coming in. That’s where guidance comes in because your mind is quiet because it’s so busy focusing on the inside of the body. That’s the number one thing that I recommend for highly sensitive people, and in fact, that’s why it’s in one of the first chapters of the book.
0:15:38.8 CS: What a great tool. And again, I think in this modern-day, with these chronic illnesses, we think about how complex they are, and how many things we need to do to unpack them, and unwind them, to help people restore their health. I have a dear friend who I walk with a lot, and I say, “I just don’t think healing has to be so hard.” I’ve seen the most incredible things in my practice, but the pioneer in the frontier sciences are the scientists are really trying to get us to that reality of that paradigm shift. I just love that.
0:16:12.4 CS: Two points regarding what you were saying. First, I just want to add to the body sensitivity, because I think with my sensitive patients, really, the more that they can get in tune with their body, they get so much information to help guide me in helping them. They’re just so in tune, and the more they are in tune, the more that they just know what they need. I think that’s really an important refrain. The other point is, it’s interesting how just getting a connection with this energy allows for healing. I can understand how that allows healing to happen in the body, because there’s this natural, what we call naturopathic medicine, vital force or self-regulatory, inherent ability to heal, that biological medicine talks about. So when you’re talking, I’m thinking about quantum physics. And I love Lynne McTaggart’s book, The Field, and all this kind of work.
0:17:06.8 KK: I love her work.
0:17:08.1 CS: Yes, the field of energy around us. Is your scientific mind sensing that the more we tap into our own energy, we’re also in touch with the field of energy around us to bring the things that we need in life?
0:17:22.7 KK: Yes, absolutely. So in the quantum realm, they would call that the zero-point field. So as we go into that stillness. And when I say the word stillness, unfortunately, I think people have a misconception or misunderstanding about what that really means. A lot of people think, “Oh, I have to shut up.” Like I have to shut up my mind. But it’s not a forceful thing at all. It’s just directing what your mind does well, which is think and directing it to do something. Focus on this. And when you’re saying, focus on this, it doesn’t mean that people have to do it for 20 minutes in a row, it doesn’t matter. They’re like, “I can’t stand STOIM,” Stillness Through Observing Internal Movement. That’s the name of it. I’m like, you don’t have to stand STOIM. Can you do it for three seconds? Stand it for three seconds. And that’s it. That is connecting to that zero point field where we know dwells infinite possibility. What’s really cool is, in the later chapters in the book, I talk about STOIM for negative emotions. When we have a so-called negative emotion that we want to get rid of, sometimes we try to ignore it, pretend it’s not there, and yet it festers.
0:18:32.7 KK: And what I found is if you could actually accept it as energy, go into the exercise and actually feel your body while you’re feeling that so-called negative emotion, it will start to shift and change without you trying to get it to go. And so many times, I know you’ve seen this and maybe experienced it yourself–people have a problem or trauma, or something has happened in a situation, and they have to make a decision. It feels like a life-or-death decision for them. And they just can’t. They’re just so anxious and upset and stressed, it’s like they’re making decisions out of reaction instead of a place of groundedness.
0:19:11.8 KK: What I have found, personally, I think this is the case for all my students and clients as well, is if they can feel–even if they are like, “I’m anxious, I’m upset,” whatever. I’m like, “Okay, well go into STOIM. Feel that in your body in that moment.” And oftentimes, as they’re entertaining that movement in their body, the answer drops in, that guidance, if you will, drops in. It could be just a momentary thought, a feeling, or sometimes in my case, I’ll just take an action. I always thought of that action, but then it turns out to be the best action. It could be like, normally I don’t open that email, the emails from that particular marketer or something, but that day I decide I’m going to open it. It’s like this calling that says, “Just do this,” it’s very gentle, it’s very subtle, it’s not like an 8-foot angel stands in front of me. Well they’re probably standing in front of me, but I don’t see them, so it’s not like the 8-foot angel says, “Dr. Karen, you need to do this,” right? It’s not like that. So that’s the really cool thing, and then another chapter about manifesting in the book talks about how you can use that, because you’re in the zero-point field anyway, so you might as well seed it with your ideal reality.
0:20:25.2 KK: So then you can imagine your ideal reality, all in technicolor, how it feels, how it smells, what it looks like, and you just practice being there. It’s very different from visualizing, which is just visual, it’s really embodying that ideal new reality. This is how I won many, many, many figure skating medals, as an adult skater, by being in that space of actually doing in my body, even though I’m just sitting there, imagining it. So it’s much bigger than just a visualization. We can actually tap into that zero-point field and create from there, and that’s how we do weather magic, that’s how we influence the weather. I’ve done this for so many people, with them, actually moved hurricanes, right before. The hurricane’s coming right for them–I can’t remember, Matthew, or which one it was. We did so many. She’s like, “We’re going to be under 8 feet of rain. Please help with weather magic.” I said, “Okay, you know how to do it, right?” So we taught everybody to do it in our little group. So the hurricane comes and it goes like this, this is so funny, the eye of the hurricane goes like this, and it separates and goes around her. She goes, “Thank you, guys, thank you, thank you.”
0:21:41.1 KK: I mean just fantastical things. I’ve had people, like my friend Danny, who got married on a mountaintop near where we live, and it was supposed to be raining that day, and they’re like, “Oh no, we’re not going to be able to see anything, we’re not going to have pictures, it’s going to be all cloudy and foggy.” I’m like, “No, it’s not, we’re going to do weather magic, right?” We were performing, we were doing African dance and drum, so we’re performing, we were practicing.
0:22:00.2 KK: I said, “This is what you do.” I taught them in two minutes how to do it. I said, “I need to teach you the stillness part. I want you to imagine what it is you want.” So I asked her, what temperature do you want? She’s like, “Well, I want this, between this and this.” “Okay, great. So we’re going to have sunny, partially sunny. I’m thinking partially sunny because it’s better for pictures, what do you think?” She goes, “That sounds good.” So we made a decision of what we wanted the weather to be, then we all, except for one person, we all basically beamed it out into the universe, and the day came, it started raining in the beginning, but by the time that everyone got to the top of the mountain, everything cleared. The rain cleared, the clouds cleared, it was partially sunny, and people are like, “Oh my gosh, can you believe the weather? All these people are coming up to the bride and groom, “Can you believe the weather?” And they’re like, “Oh, Dr. Karen taught us weather magic.” And they are like, “Huh?”
0:22:52.4 CS: I have not been there myself, but I have heard similar stories with people who work in these realms so I totally think that’s in the realm of possibility, and obviously, your experience shows that. Some people might be thinking like, “Oh, okay.” And I get this sometimes, especially when people have been sick for so long, they get afraid to really tap into what they want because their life has just been such a struggle, so painful, and there’s been so much suffering. Every now and then, I’ll ask my patients, “So what are you going to do when you’re better?” And you look at them, and they look at you like, Oh wow, I need to put more thought into that. It’s like, how to encourage them, they haven’t thought about that reality in a while because they’ve been so sick and suffering. So, how do we navigate this cautious optimism or this being afraid to really tap into the life you want? I help people with their subconscious a lot, they might be thinking something, but there’s this whole other program wanting a different reality, and so they’re in conflict there.
0:24:11.0 KK: Yes, so the healing method that I do and teach is called the TOLPAKAN™ Healing Method. We use divine muscle testing, which is a way of using our bodies. Some people will use a pendulum, but we have a process where we can help people get the most accurate answers with the pendulum or with the body, which is what we prefer, because so many people are clear-centered, so we use the body for these yes, no answers. I teach them how to ask the right questions, and that’s really my expertise, is asking the right questions, because I’m not really doing the work, the Spirit team, God team, whoever you want to call it, they’re doing all the work, we’re just directing the healing. One of the protocols that I’ve been teaching to my practitioners is called the willingness and resistance protocol. What it means is these questions that we ask really delve into that subconscious piece that you were talking about because you’re absolutely right, people are afraid of their power.
0:25:04.8 KK: In fact, I had a client recently who said they didn’t get it, like, “Why am I not harnessing these superpowers, why am I overwhelmed with these symptoms? I want to get to the bottom of it.” I said, “Okay, we’ll find out the answers.” So we asked how willing he was to fully have control and access to his superpowers, right? The answer was 30%. And then we asked him, how high is your resistance to actually being in that space of fully accessing your superpowers and getting what you want, etcetera? And we get that out of 10. So we clocked it in about 7 out of 10. So there was high resistance to that. So up until then, he did not have that awareness that he was actually subconsciously resisting it and that he wasn’t willing to go into that. So then we ask further questions and using the TOLPAKAN™ Healing Method, we actually have quite a few helpers here, we actually have some charts where we muscle test the answers in one of our programs. So we have charts. We found out that in an alternate timeline, he was a very powerful female cult leader, and he had really great superpowers and was able to actually, do telepathy, and manifest things that probably we would consider evil or bad in this day and age, and so that made total sense to him, why he would’ve been scared to do those things.
0:26:26.8 KK: So we went to see how willing he was to forgive himself for that, and then we did the healing to optimize his ability to self-forgive and to release the resistance and unwillingness, and after that his resistant score was only 1 out of 10, and that was processing, and his ability to be willing to access his superpowers and use them was 98% from 30%. So I know it’s very left-brain intellectual, these percentages, but that’s just the way we do it in our healing modality, we go very, very precise into, where is the problem, and let’s get to it and deal with the subconscious mind that way.
0:27:05.4 CS: That’s fascinating, there are so many ways to look at that. I think that’s such an important part of the healing journey, to understand willingness, resistance, subconscious programs that are running that the patient is unaware of, that’s why they’re subconscious.
0:27:22.3 KK: Right. An old tape playing over and over again.
0:27:27.5 CS: Absolutely. Dr. Karen, I sometimes ask this in the beginning, but I’m sure people are super curious as they hear you talk. You’re a trained medical doctor, and you’ve evolved to do your work obviously in so many ways, you’re really a doctor of light medicine now. Can you tell us a little bit about how you shifted from a medical doctor to doctor of light medicine and into doing this powerful work on this energetic level?
0:28:00.2 KK: Well, ever since I was really young (and sensitive souls often have similar stories) the one thing I wanted was world peace, that sounds really weird for a five-year-old to want that, but that’s very typical of highly sensitive people, since childhood they really want peace and harmony, and it really pains them actually to see the world in disarray and chaos and things like that. So that was always in the back of my mind, but of course, that wasn’t very practical, I was told, to want that. I became a medical doctor because that’s what smart Chinese kids did, what first-generation kids did, be at the top of the class, and all that good stuff. But it was really hard on my physical body, Dr. Christine, the nights of no sleep, the stress, eating poorly out of vending machines at the hospital because I couldn’t make the cafeteria on time before it closed, and that happened all the time it seemed. I was a frail kid growing up. So, I wasn’t very resilient physically to the medical doctor lifestyle.
0:28:58.7 KK: And then in practice, I worked for various different organizations, including UCLA, and I was sometimes on call in some of these jobs 17 days in a row or 72 hours no sleepover Memorial Day weekend, and it really took a toll on my body. With the stress of me ignoring my sensitive soul self and trying to be the best for everyone else, which is very common as well among sensitive souls, sacrificing the self for others, I ended up in a place where I was really sick, so having fatigue, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, everything I just named for you earlier, like the multiple sensitivities, everything. I pretty much even had depression and suicidal ideation. I had to make a decision. I’m going to either change or keep pretending that I’m okay, and I decided that I wanted to live and not die, and would do whatever it took to get better because I know with my patients, people did not get better, I mean maybe when they work with people like you the could, but with regular western medical doctors they do not get better, people with fibromyalgia do not get better. So being partially disabled, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to figure it out.” I used that medical mind and curiosity and tenacity, and I focused it toward my own self-healing.
0:30:16.7 KK: Then I got to discover all sorts of really cool things, like reiki and nutritional therapies and spirituality and psychic powers, and I got together with a local healer and spent five, six years learning from her, and honed some of these powers in the way that she could teach them, and I applied them through what I did with patients. What I found was that I really loved energy medicine, and became an acupuncturist, and loved that so much. Then it wasn’t until 2019, interestingly, Dr. Christine, I had that feeling that I needed to shift because, and I know you know how this feels, I was saying the same thing over and over again to the patients–self-care, da-da-da-da. And it was getting a little old, because I was like, if they just took the class, they can all learn, instead of me doing one-on-one. I thought, okay, this is taking so much of my time, and I talked to some mentors and they’re like, “Whoa, you are really undercharging for what you do.”
0:31:24.0 KK: So I thought, “Okay, so I’m going to say to my patients, “Look, in order for you to continue seeing me one-on-one, face-to-face, you’re going to need to purchase this course, the course is $297, half-price,” whatever. And so that was the line, that was the boundary to see who was going to be self-responsible and who was not, and some people were still submitting things to their insurance company hoping they would pay for it. There was a proportion that did stay with me, about 20 patients, and then I realized, “Wait a second, I am paying $1,200 of rent a month for 20 patients,” and even though I didn’t charge a lot more, they did buy the program so that was awesome, but then I said, “I really have to have a conversation with my source about this.” So I went into my stillness and had this conversation, and I got the answer in May of 2019, it’s time to call it quits.
0:32:14.6 KK: I had already warned my patients, it might be a year, it might be a year and a half, it might be two years, I’ll probably transition to more online, and so it was about a year and a half, at the May point. But at the time that I did the testing, I only had like three months to prepare, so I rejected that guidance, and I’m like, “That’s too early, let’s do two years, let’s do November.” So I’m thinking November 2019. But you know what? The universe has a way of kicking our butts when we don’t listen, which is why I got fibromyalgia in the first place, so I learned to listen faster now. And so something happened to my practice that would risk my license, and I realized the minute it happened, and it was some minor clerical error, it wasn’t even anything major, I probably wouldn’t lose my license, but it was like this moment from the universe, like, “Ahem–May 2019.”
0:33:07.2 KK: So immediately I was like, “Okay, okay, May it is, I’ve no idea why May, but May it is.” So I made all these changes to get that done, and I felt sad, I had to go through my own personal healing, healing for my patients, the loss, all that kind of stuff for these 20 people. Some of them have continued with me online, but most of them did not. I had no idea that Covid was going to hit. So thanks to me actually taking action on that guidance that I got from the stillness, I had time between May and November to make all these changes, and I actually earned more money than I did the year before. So by the time Covid hit, I was already set, online, and it didn’t impact my income. But I would not have guessed what was coming.
0:33:52.5 CS: Thank you for sharing your personal journey in that story and how you incredibly also walk this medicine and walk this philosophy, which means it so much more tangible for people to see, as well. Hey, not everybody listens to guidance, right? So it’s the fact that you’re trusting that information, you have a little reminder. We don’t always take action until we really, really need to.
0:34:24.4 KK: Right. Some people need more pain, and this is what I went through with my illness, they need enough pain for them to take action, it’s not that the universe is mean or terrible to them, it’s just that the little knocks on the door weren’t loud enough. I call it the angelic 2 x 4. It’s like, “Now, listen, you’re going 2,000 miles an hour, so I think we need the 2 x 4.”
0:34:50.3 CS: I know nothing about this [laughter]. So, Dr. Karen, you’ve given us this really simple but profound practice, and then you teach people online. I want people to hear all the ways to connect with you when we wrap up. If someone is listening like, “Oh my gosh, I’m a sensitive soul, I’ve been on this journey for too long, it’s taking me forever to heal.” For that person, any other tidbits or any other pearls for them so that they can experience the healing we all want for them?
0:35:24.9 KK: Yes, so just an extension of what we’re talking about earlier, about that mistake, and the mistake is just not knowing, whose stuff is this? Is this mine? Is it not mine? Is this the universe’s, is this earthquake on the other side of the planet that I’m reacting to? So that discernment piece is very, very important, especially for highly sensitive people, so they do have to take personal responsibility to figure out how they’re going to figure out if it’s their stuff or not, and then what to do with it if it’s not. That’s something that we teach in some of our programs and courses, and I think if they learn a skill, like I really love teaching divine muscle testing, because it’s a very simple skill to learn, it’s something that children can do and they can start asking quality questions and help themselves along the way. One of the best questions is, “What percentage of whatever symptom I’m feeling actually is my stuff to heal?” And then if they get a 30%, that means 70% is somebody else’s stuff, and then the auto-healing state and the stillness state, that will start to automatically transform, but sometimes people that are highly sensitive have a higher responsibility because they’re evolved souls, and that means that sometimes they have to know more, or they have to understand more.
0:36:38.9 KK: So it’s not just about coming to you, Dr. Christine, and getting fixed, or coming to me and getting fixed, we don’t fix people, we want to empower people to have their own healing experience, so they have that skill set to go forward. So when one discerns, “Hey, this isn’t my stuff,” then it’s like, “What do I do with it? Do I clear it? Do I send healing to it? What?” Those are the two main options that people often go through. If the answer is to clear it, then there are multiple different ways of clearing that energy, that in our sensitive soul SOS program, we share with them. And also in the book, I actually wrote about it all in there, this is a sensitive superpower book, how to do those six different ways of clearing energy and grounding energy that isn’t yours. So people can be more comfortable, they can be more calm, they can be more centered, they can be more clear so they’re not inundated with energy they don’t need to know about.
0:37:33.7 CS: I love that, and I see that theme a lot, where a lot of sensitive patients are carrying other people’s emotions or stuff, that’s a huge light bulb for them, when they’re first hearing that. I love how you teach people how to do that themselves, because while there are so many gifted practitioners, and sometimes it’s time to work with the facilitator or guide, having the power to do that yourself, is just so empowering, especially if this is a theme and pattern in your life, being sensitive, there’s going to be always, always room and need for clearing and supporting and all of that.
0:38:16.1 KK: Exactly. People sometimes go, “Why do I have to do all this clearing?” I’m like, “Why do you brush your teeth every day? Why do you take a shower?” Because eventually you’re going to get dirty, and you probably won’t feel that good, and you probably want to clean yourself. So it’s very, very similar. Why do we not take care of our energetic bodies as much as we do our physical bodies? Just because you can’t see the stuff, well, some people can, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be cleared. Then people go, “Oh yeah, I guess I do shower every day, and I do brush my teeth.” But we need to make it more of a normal habit.
0:38:50.6 CS: Absolutely. Dr. Karen, I’m just super curious, before we wrap up, when you see things in threes, I have that experience with you, and you also work with these patches, which you’re instructing and guiding your clients with on how to integrate to heal. I’ve been with a patient who was very kind, and she sent me some samples as well. I had seen them one more place, it was funny, and so I’ve been exploring them with my patients. I put them on my body and I was like, “Oh my gosh,” I just immediately felt a shift with them. Can you introduce what we’re talking about with that concept, because it’s another tool for sensitive people to utilize?
0:39:33.7 KK: Yes, actually, it can be really, really helpful, we could do a whole show just on those, of course. It’s really helpful because I find that highly sensitive people respond really well to positive energy. It’s not that they don’t respond to biologicals. It’s not to say they don’t respond to supplements or herbs or things like that, but oftentimes they respond even faster to energetic therapies. Now, these sort of therapy patches that we’re talking about, whether you’re sensitive or not, they work well. There are $4.2 million of studies backing it and 100 patents that show that they do work on the human body. And so depending on which patch it is, what you do is you put this non-transdermal patch on, which means that nothing inside the patch goes through the body. They’re little tiny, tiny, tiny crystals that resonate with a set of waves or frequencies. It talks to your body on an energetic level.
0:40:30.9 KK: For example, our most popular one, the Stem Cell Enhancing Patch X39, you can put that anywhere in the body. And what it does is signals a particular peptide to be produced in your body, which we don’t produce as much as we age, which is called GHK copper peptide. And that peptide tells your stem cells, which are the cells that can turn into any other cell in your body, to get younger and to proliferate. So theoretically, if you have a bum knee and you don’t have cartilage in that knee, then the stem cells can go to that knee and rebuild the cartilage. That’s what stem cells do, that’s naturally what’s in our bodies, but the patch is very different from injecting somebody else’s stem cells, or even injecting your own stem cells from a different body part, because your own stem cells, as we age, they age too. So by using light, we can actually reverse age, literally, and so the patch has really helped with that. For highly sensitive people, one of their major symptoms is anxiety. There’s one of the patches that I use very, very often on them. It’s called the Aeon patch, and it helps to calm the nervous system. In very severe cases, because I’m an acupuncturist, I will actually use specific acupuncture points.
0:41:42.7 KK: I actually have one behind this ear right now from when I was sleeping, and I forgot to take it off. Then I’ll put one on their belly button right over that place. One of my clients and students, Jason, said I could share this testimonial. He’s been having very, very severe anxiety for a very long time. We ended up with this double-patching protocol, and he just felt after years of feeling too much, it just calmed his nervous system down, and he joked, “I’m never taking these off.”
0:42:11.0 CS: Love it. Oh my God.
0:42:13.1 KK: So sensitive people, generally speaking, will respond very well to phototherapy light and non-invasive therapies, and they’re very quick to respond. As I said, non-sensitives respond as well, but I think, in particular, they do better with light therapies oftentimes than they do with biological therapies, in my personal experience.
0:42:35.9 CS: Yes, definitely. I love that. The more we learn in quantum physics, also about the fascia and how that receives light, and the body electric effect, the matrix, and all of that. That makes a lot of sense to me, they’ve been really fun for me to play with and explore and I need to integrate them more. So I appreciate you sharing that. Dr. Karen, how can people work with you? I know people can take courses and programs and also of course read your books, so how can people work with you at this point in time?
0:43:11.6 KK: One of the easiest things to do actually is to get a copy of the book–sensitivityisyoursuperpower.com. What we’ve done is we’ve made a book bonus page. This was left over from our launch last year, and we just kept it up because I had wonderful people, colleagues of mine give about $1,000 of gifts, including, I have three things in there that are actually energy-healing infused MP3’s, so that people, especially sensitive souls, can listen to them and receive the healing. I think if they read the book, and I hope they’ll love it as much as other people have said they love it, they’ll have a good feel for it. They’ll actually at least get started on STOIM, the stillness through observing inner movement, they’ll have the bonuses. And if they feel like there’s a shift, it feels like it’s a right fit for them, then after that, there are some links at the back of the book to go further, join our community, and just being on my mailing list, because you will be, once people go to sensitivityisyoursuperpower.com, and find out more about some of the free interviews and trainings that we’re doing upcoming. It’ll be really nice to see some new people.
0:44:24.1 CS: Well, thank you so much for sharing that, and for all your work. I’m excited to learn more from you and share more of your work with my community. I can’t thank you enough for your time today, and we’ll have all of that information in the show notes so people can find the link to the book and all of the goodies behind all of that. Thank you so much, Dr. Karen.
0:44:44.7 CS: It’s all my pleasure, Dr. Christine. Thanks for all the work you do. I look forward to being on your telesummit next year.
0:44:50.7 CS: Yes, thank you. Thank you all for listening to the Spectrum of Health podcast today, with my guest, Dr. Karen Kan. All the information she shared is in the show notes, and there’s a link to her Sensitivity Is Your Superpower book on Amazon. I hope you found this information enlightening and meaningful. Have a beautiful day.