|
|
|
|
copyright © 1998, by Karyn Greenstreet. All rights reserved.
Click on the book cover to get further information about this book from amazon.com. KG: Today we’re talking with Belleruth Naparstek, author of the best-selling Health Journeys audio tapes and a look on healing with guided imagery entitled "Staying Well with Guided Imagery". Her latest book, "Your Sixth Sense," discusses and uncovers how people get psychic "pops" and how you, too, can open up your intuition. Greetings, Belleruth, and welcome! BRN: Oh, thanks for having me! KG: Let’s start at the beginning…can you tell us a little about your background and what influenced you to write "Your Sixth Sense"? BRN: Well, I’m a psychotherapist, and most therapists have experiences of concentrating, focusing very much on their clients as they’re speaking, and getting a lot of intuitive "pops" and flashes about what is going on with the client. So, it became a natural area of interest for me to pursue. KG: That’s great! Were you always intuitive? BRN: Probably. I think most of us are. I really don’t think it’s anything special, or weird, to be very intuitive. If we’re put in a place where we get to really focus our attention, open our hearts, and be very present, I think we’re all going to be pretty intuitive. KG: Do you find that more of the women that you work with are intuitive? Or is it genetic? Or more cultural, men vs. women? BRN: Oh, that is such a good question and that is such a hard question. I think women have some natural advantages, in that they have very clearly defined times of flaming hormone shifts. I think there is that big fat corpus colosum that makes the right brain and left brain much more in sync. I think culturally women are more encouraged to be more intuitive. I still think that there are a ton of intuitive men, but they don’t call it intuition. They call it gut instinct, or something more guy-like. So, the men that I found (and I interviewed 43 intuitives for this book) were every bit as intuitive as the women. But, they were harder to find. KG: It seems that this rediscovering of intuition and intuition development has been becoming very, very popular recently. Why do you think that is? BRN: You know, I don’t have a clue! I am very glad that it is so, and I agree with you that it is. I don’t know what all configure in here. KG: It seems like there are an awful lot of people out there who really want to finally tap into this and they are not afraid of it. Obviously, as you know, there are many people out there who still have the image of the woman with the silk scarf on, big hoop earrings and the tarot cards. I am wondering whether people are starting to culturally move away from that, or get beyond that, and start to understand what it is really all about. BRN: I think what you see on television is that cartoon representation of what is going on in the culture. I don’t think it is necessarily a bad indicator. Although, I don’t like to see what these psychic hot lines are doing for the intuitive world, I do think what it does say is that there is an opening to normalize and accept this experience. When you see it on television, you know it is going on in the culture as a whole. KG: I’ve done psychic development instruction and I have my own theories. I would like to ask you, though, where do you think the information comes from that an intuitive gets? How does it really work? BRN: You are not asking any easy ones! KG: Of course not! BRN: By the way, does everybody know that you were one of the intuitives that I interviewed for the book? KG: I am keeping real low key. (laughing) BRN: I have a whole chapter that actually, I think, is the juiciest part of this book on the physics of ESP and how, I think, it is an energetic phenomenon. The bottom line is that the information is literally in the energy; in the air around us and through us. If we line up our brain waves and our biochemistry, and our focus and attention. My big thing is to open up the heart to attune the instrument. The information, which is just hanging around out there anyway starts pulsing in, in a way that we can grab it and remember it. It is pulsing all the time, but we just don’t get it. KG: How can people get it? How can people align themselves that way, especially in the world that we have that is so crazy? You are running from work, to pick up the kids for soccer games, to dinner with friends, to PTA meetings, to whatever. Obviously, many people know that they have to slow down in order to do this. What else is there? Are there things that people can do on a daily basis that little by little will help them? BRN: A lot of these things have been said a lot of times by a lot of very smart people. I think that one thing, for instance, that slowing down is very important. Another thing is to start paying attention. Just by paying attention, tracking your hits and misses, that will really make a difference. Noticing how your body feels. How your emotions and awareness feels, when you are "on" and when you are "off". That means always getting external feedback for whether you are correct or not. Never assume you are right. Doing that helps a lot. Slowing down helps. I think the biggest thing, if I had to just be able to say one thing, it would be -- do practice this -- deliberately cultivate feelings of love, gratitude, loving kindness, and connectedness with the whole. It will not only enhance your intuitive ability; it has a built in ethicality to it. KG: Sometimes feedback is not always available. Sometimes you are driving to work and you sense a "pop", or you feel something, or know something, or sense something. There is not a feedback mechanism. How can you know whether you are getting a true psychic hit or whether it is your ego or your subconscious talking? Something you want to be true versus something that is really true or projection? BRN: Something like, "Is this Mr. Right?" KG: Yes, or, "It has to be, because I feel it." BRN: I think that there is a whole cultivation of discipline where you start to really know yourself and your flaws. You start to be more attuned to what it feels like when you are really correct. There are discipline practices where you can either keep clearing your mind so that for just a split second you allow the information to come on a truly neutral screen. Or diving into the heart will do it, too. It will get you out of your ego in your head. So, there are lots of ways to do it. I don’t want to give too glib an answer for this, but it takes discipline and practice. You must always - you are obliged to second-guess yourself, especially in areas where you feel a lot of wishing or fear. KG: Or you know that it is your own issue. I can remember a situation teaching someone whom every practice reading she did, she told people that they had an issue with their father and they had to learn to love themselves more. Eventually, I pulled her aside and said, "Perhaps we need to look at this. Could it be that this is your issue, too?" BRN: I know a wonderful psychic reader. He is always very paranoid about the men in women’s lives. So, I know that when I send somebody to this person, I always tell them, "So, when he gets around to your husband, boyfriend, or whatever, just take that piece with a grain of salt." KG: So, you send your clients to psychics? BRN: Oh, yeah. Not all the time, but definitely. If it is somebody, the person, for instance, that is in inconsolable grief. I will often send to a wonderful medium a few towns over. Because I found that is really the only intervention that makes a difference for people who are just in devastating grief. I won’t send somebody for whom this would be so strange it would not only not help them, but they would also wonder about their therapist! Yes, I do use that as an intervention. Sure. KG: I think that's great! Either of the people that you send your clients to, or the people that you interviewed – when you looked at them as a whole, what was it about them that allowed them to do this work? Is it just a gift? Or did they really have to work at it? What was so special about the way they lead their lives that allowed them to do this? BRN: Actually, I think it is both a gift and a skill. There were a few people in my sample that really didn’t have to do anything. They were born with such naked wiring for this that they spent most of their lives learning how to get some skin over their naked wires. Most people had developed this over time. There were sometimes life events that definitely popped it open more. Near death experiences do it, trauma and terror experiences, deep grief, falling madly in love will do it. I mean, all these things that shift brain waves and hormones. KG: Did you find that the majority of people actually had an event that triggered it, or were they born with it and work on it? BRN: I think that most people had a lot of it when they were little kids. It got submerged when they hit latency and they had to do grade school tasks, which take a lot of left brain concentration. It would often surface up big time during adolescence, child birth, times when either key life events or hormonal events would happen. I would say that almost everybody was born with a substantial amount of it and then based on what happened in their lives, it either disappeared or developed into a steady progression. KG: Let’s talk a little bit about intuition in children. Is this something that should be encouraged? If yes, how can parents handle the questions and fears that come up? BRN: Actually, the kids really don’t have that many fears. The only thing that will frighten a kid is if they have a sense that something terrible has happened. Because they are kids, they think that they did it. You would handle that the way that you would handle anything with a kid. Explain to your kid that they are just not that powerful. The interesting thing, I think, goes the other way. I think that parents tend to think, I value this. I am not going to ruin it in my kid. I did that with my three kids. I have three incredibly intuitive kids. I remember saying to myself that this culture tends to stop on this ability. I will make sure that my children are not be stopped. You know what happens? They go to school and they just have other business, other fish to fry. It probably is going to go underground and resurface when it is time to resurface. I think that if you handle it, not as neither jumping all over it as something fabulous and special to be rewarded or not talking about it as if it were something scary. You will have what you want -- an encouraged right-brain kid. KG: Right, exactly. Of course, part of the problem is that even though you may be encouraging, when they get to school and they start telling Ms. Jones that Mr. Smith hates her, there is going to be some social pressure at school to submerge it as well. BRN: And from the other kids. It is carried in the culture. With boys, for instance, what you will see is there psychic ability will go into their talent for sports. He will be the kid that always knows where the ball is going to bounce before it bounces. That is fine. That is a good mediation. KG: They will have a practical application for it. That is actually my next question. Why should people open up their intuition? What purpose does it serve? BRN: Why would you want to be wiser and have more information about anything? Just to function better? To serve the world better? Express your talents better? Don’t forget all the things that we say will open up your intuition, it is the exact same process as opening up your creativity. So, why wouldn’t you want it? KG: In "The Artist’s Way," Julia Cameron talks about people who feel that a lot of what they create is coming from a higher realm through their intuition/creativity. They certainly have the skill to do these things, but some of their work seems to be other worldly in some way. It is a higher peak. Even Mozart said that he just wrote down what he heard. BRN: It is also true that just in writing a really exquisitely organized, beautifully expressive paper, you can look at that later and say, "Who wrote that? I could never do that again." I think it doesn’t even have to be anything sort of extraordinarily what we see as creative in a traditional sense of the art. It could be a proposal. KG: In your book, you give a lot of guided imagery exercises for opening up intuition. Why does guided imagery work so well for people? BRN: I think it has been built in by definition. It draws attention inward, away from external. It quiets the mind. It lowers brain-wave activity. It shifts hormone activity to the seratonin stuff, that we love so much. It clears the mind. It focuses attention. If you have guided imagery, then, in addition, it focuses on opening the heart. That starts expanding the aura and starts feeding into this larger self -- a sense of connectedness with the universe. It allows you to identify with more parts of information. KG: It is sort of like a meditation, but without the "sitting on the cushion, cross-legged," which a lot of Americans have a difficult time doing. BRN: I think it is a little easier for most Americans to do "loving kindness" meditation or guided imagery that opens the heart, because it captures the senses and it captures the imagination without having to keep emptying the mind. KG: As a side question to that, there are people who have a difficult time imagining in a visual way. What can they do? When you say, "Imagine a beach ball." They just can’t see it. They know it, but they just can’t see it. BRN: In fact, it is the reason why I like to avoid using the word visualization. Only 55-60% of the population can do visual imaging really well. Most people do better with some combination of other sensory materials. So, if you have trouble visualizing a beach ball, you could imagine the bunga-bunga sound of it bouncing or the plastic smell it often has. Or just the feel of it, you know the wonderful resistance it offers the fingers of your hand when you try to hold it. So, there are lots of ways to imagine and visualizing is just one. KG: So, you use all of your senses? BRN: Yes, and the juiciest one is the feeling/touching sense. There is some data to show that with healing imagery, the most potent kinds of healing imagery are imagery that is felt as sensation in the body. KG: Let’s talk for a moment about intuition and healing and intuition and medical diagnoses. How do you think that works? Is this something that people can do on a daily basis or a weekly basis? Sort of scan themselves and see how they are? How does that fit in with, not just intuition, but the standard medical system and how can they make a balance with all that? BRN: Well, again, you always want to check it with external data. You don’t want to just rely on your intuition , for anything. Perhaps even more particularly for your or someone else’s health. Vivian Bohanic, who is one of the intuitive’s I studied, I interviewed, is an osteopath. She gets hunches all the time. She is almost always right, from my experience with her. But, she will get an x ray to check it out. But what it does is that it leads her in the right direction. She knows sort of the kinds of tests and where she wants to look first. KG: It kind of gives her a kick in the right direction? BRN: Kind of like a heads up. You would not want to just rely on intuition, I think, in any way. Except where you cannot help it. Where there is no other kind of data available. KG: Back in the early 1900’s or 1920’s, mediumship was a big deal. Then it kind of came at a favor. What I am finding is that as the baby boomer generation becomes older and their parents are passing away, more and more people want to get into contact with people who have passed away. What is your opinion on that? Is this something that really can happen? Is it something that people should try to do? How do they go about trying to communicate? BRN: Sure, it can really happen. As I have said, one of the techniques I have used is to send desperately grieving people to a medium, so they can have a nice conversation with their departed loved ones. I think it can absolutely happen. I don’t think it is a place where you want to hang around a lot. Looking for and conversing with spirits and ghosts. But, I think a.) It is a wonderful validation for the idea of the eternity of the soul. That can’t be bad. b.) It can really give a person a sense of how limited they have been seeing reality. That is a good thing to. It is like anything else. Hanging out with spirit forms of people who have died has limited value. Some of those people are nice people and some of those people are bad people. You wouldn’t hang out all day in a bad neighborhood. I think you do need to be careful and use good judgement and not get entranced with the phenomenon aspect of it. KG: Right. It can be very much of a distraction to "real life." Perhaps that is why people do any of thing like this is because it takes you to an expanded realm. Unfortunately, they can get stuck there. BRN: I do think that is always a basic motivation. That is thrilling to understand and comprehend it truly. Things are not what they appear to be, they are much bigger. KG: Let me sidetrack away from the intuition development side of things and talk a little about your health journeys tapes, in which you also use guided imagery. How did you get started in that project? How has that worked for you and your patients? BRN: It has been really exciting and I have learned a lot from doing it. I started out about over 10 years ago with a client who came in with breast cancer who wanted me to make her a tape. I had been making tapes for some of my clients just to help them get past difficult places in psychotherapy. She had heard about this. She was this very lovable, bossy woman who basically said, "I want you to make me a tape." I said, "I don’t know anything about cancer. I don’t know anything about chemo. I don’t want to do this." She basically said, "Call my oncologist. She will tell you it is okay and I will tell you what to do." And she did. The oncologist said, "She has six months to live, do whatever she likes." So, we collaborated on this chemotherapy tape. I was astonished at what she was able to do with that tape that helped create. So that is what got me started. KG: You have a whole series of tapes now. How did you go about figuring out the tape on grief or whatever. How did you figure out what should go in the tapes? Why are people picking certain tapes versus others, aside from the fact that the names are on the back or on the spine that says "this is the one on healing cancer?" BRN: They really are all quite different after the first five minutes of introduction. There is cellular imagery that really focuses in on what the cells do for healing with cancer, MS, arthritis, and so on. There is physiological stuff that is quite different and there is psychological stuff and metaphoric imagery that tries to focus on each health challenge and work it. It is a nice subtle sneaky way of helping your body recover. KG: Do you subscribe to the concept that a lot of people’s physical aliments are in many way energetic? Perhaps components of not just eating certain foods in the physical side of things, or their genetic structure, but also their emotional structure, their energetic structure and so forth? BRN: Yes, everything boils down to energy. So, if you want to go for the least common denominator of every phenomenon that exists, you would go to energy. I even object to the term "mind - body connection." I don’t think they are two separate things. They are connected. They are the same thing. The mind is the body. The body is the mind. You can address it from any place. It will effect all of it. KG: It is interesting, in Ken Dychtwald’s book "BodyMind", he uses it as one word. There is not a slash, it is just one world. This is from 1977. It is amazing how we are just beginning, even though he wrote that book over 20 years ago, to hear it in common parlance. BRN: It is only now that we are even at a place where we can comprehend something that isn’t dualistic. So it is a big, big shift. KG: We are running out of time. Let me ask you, what are you working on now? Can we expect more books? BRN: Right now I am working on a bunch of articles. I am making specific tapes for specific health problems and getting pharmaceutical companies to get them out as premiums. I think that is the best way to affect a ton of people in a way that I can afford to do it. I just finished the tape for chemotherapy patients who are experiencing anemia and fatigue. There is very specific help with that and their symptoms. The nice news is that SmithKline Beecham will make 20,000 of them and they will hand deliver them from a trusted health care professional to a patient and the patient will get it for nothing. KG: That is wonderful. Let’s get them all to do that! We will write to every pharmaceutical company and we’ll tell them. Just as a quick wrap up, how can folks get in touch with you and find out more about your books and your ideas and converse with you. BRN: I would love it if they would visit me at my web-site, which my son gave me as my birthday present. It is www.healthjourneys.com or we have an 800 number, if you want to use the telephone, which is 800-800-8661. KG: Thank you Belleruth for speaking with us and we hope to see you soon. BRN: Thanks, Karyn. You take care. Have fun with all your teaching and writing. KG: I will, thank you very much.
|
|
|
All pages and text of this website copyright © 2004 by The Seeker's Circle™. All rights reserved. No part of this site may be copied or distributed, by any means or methods, without express written permission of the author and copyright holder.
Website maintained by
author, speaker & intuitive consultant Dr.
Lauren Thibodeau |
