We're sunsetting PodQuest on 2025-07-28. Thank you for your support!
Export Podcast Subscriptions
cover of episode A Fresh Take On Wellness: Harnessing Inner Tools To Promote Self-Healing

A Fresh Take On Wellness: Harnessing Inner Tools To Promote Self-Healing

2025/5/1
logo of podcast Finding Genius Podcast

Finding Genius Podcast

Transcript

Shownotes Transcript

Forget frequently asked questions. Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. How about advice from a real genius? 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. 5% go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do, but only 0.1%.

are real geniuses. Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. This is the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast. My guest today is Larry Burke. He's an MD and a CEHP, a Certified Energy Health Practitioner. He uses what's called EFT, tapping, hypnosis, dream work, expressive writing, and Enneagram to coach you to heal physical illnesses. So we're going to talk about that and dreams and his work. So welcome, Larry. Thanks for coming. Yeah, good to be here.

Good. Tell me a bit about your background. How did you get into this area of health and medicine that I guess, you know, people label as an alternative? Well, I'm a somewhat unusual breed. I'm a holistic radiologist, which most people think is an oxymoron. So I

I started out in the early days of magnetic resonance imaging back in the 1980s. And we were just doing pioneering work on MRI of the shoulder and MRI of the knee. And then I did that for the next 40 years and finally retired three years ago from Duke radiology faculty. And along the way, I discovered that many of my MRI patients were claustrophobic. And in order to get them in and out of the magnet,

I had to either give him Valium or you had to teach him self-hypnosis. You go in there and it's like, and it's right around your face and you can't move. And it's just like,

It's terrible. It's been described by a patient as a coffin that makes noise. Yeah, exactly right. So I learned hypnosis, which turned out to be a much better alternative than Valium. And it was actually empowering for people to have this experience of using their own resources to get through a stressful situation. Then they could use that skill later when they went to the dentist or whatever. We wound up training a lot of the MRI techs.

and how to teach basic hypnosis, which is simple questions like, where would you rather be than laying here in this magnet? Oh, I'd like to be at the beach or the mountains and just go

Just go there and we'll tell you when to come back. And that's real basic hypnosis. Obviously, there's many, many layers of deeper hypnosis. But that was my entree into alternative medicine. Then I was on the National Safety Committee for MRI. And one of the things we were concerned about other than claustrophobia was the health effects of electromagnetic fields. And we were a bit ahead of our time then. Because the only thing people were really concerned about back in the 80s was...

the health effects of power lines and radar. There were no cell phones. Yeah, now cell phones with iPods in your head and all that, it's not good. And strangely enough, I read a book called The Body Electric, Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life by Robert Becker, who invented bioelectric bone healing on an orthopedic radiologist that was right up my alley. And in the middle of the book is...

he got given a million dollars by the NIH to find out how does acupuncture work? It must be electromagnetic. And he did some interesting research showing that the skin resistance actually changes at the, at the site of the big acupuncture points so that you can even use a little meter. It beeps when you go over the point and put your needle in there. And the caption in the book was acupuncture has an objective basis in reality. So I,

I learned acupuncture about 10 years later and was co-founder of the Duke Integrative Medicine Center back in 1998. And then about four years later, I discovered emotional freedom techniques, which is the tapping technique, where it's sort of an ideal combination between hypnosis and acupuncture, where you tap on the acupuncture points with your fingers instead of putting needles in them while you're focusing on a negative phrase as opposed to

hypnosis would be a positive for us. And that essentially is like deleting a malware program out of your body. By tapping on the acronym once, you effectively uninstall a traumatic malware program that got downloaded into your nervous system perhaps years ago. And then you use hypnosis to install a new program. And it works really effectively and really quickly, and it's safe. And that was the basis for my coaching practice. And then by me keeping a dream diary for about 40 years,

And a couple of my friends told me they had dreams about breast cancer. I never really heard about that before, but they claim the dreams happened before they had any x-ray studies or before they had a lump or any symptoms. As I was a researcher, I wanted to find out more about this diagnostic technique. And I did a survey around the world and found 18 women around the world who had a similar experience finding the breast cancer ahead of time and before they had any symptoms or signs. So that prompted me to now have all my coaching clients

Keep a dream diary because it gives you some amazing information about physical health and healing. What do you mean? What happens in a dream? How does it correlate with how you actually feel? Yeah.

I mean, well, the very first example was one of my close friends who had a dream one night that she was on the operating room table and a woman surgeon was operating on her left breast on cancer. And she was 50 years old, you know, hadn't had any problems. But she was so convinced that she went in to get a mammogram. And the radiologist came out and said, you know, your mammogram's fine. You can come back in six months. And she said, no, no, no, I can't leave.

you have to do an ultrasound. And the radiologist kind of rolls her eyes and goes, well, we don't just do ultrasound, you know, on a fishing expedition. There has to be a lump or you have to have, you know, a mammogram that shows something suspicious. And she said, well, I'm not leaving the radiology department until you do the ultrasound. And so the radiologist reluctantly gets the ultrasound probe out and says, well, I wouldn't even know where to look. She said, well, just look right here. She points to where it wasn't a dream. The radiologist puts it on the breast and is shocked to find a one centimeter cancer deep in the breast. And

And that was pretty much a freak show for that radiologist. And she said, how did you know it was there? That's when she told her it was a dream, only after the fact. Oh, wow. And then two weeks later, she went for her appointment for the surgeon. And she walked in and immediately recognized the woman from the dream. She had seen her a couple weeks before. So that led me down the rabbit hole into many layers of dream interpretation, which is quite fascinating. Oh, wow.

Well, how many times have you seen that before where someone's dream became reality later on? I'd only heard it from one friend of mine, and it wasn't about breast cancer. She was a very prolific dreamer. Every morning she would get up and write down her dreams. And she had a dream about, I don't know, it was about five or so years before I met her, of a spider crawling out of her mouth. And she interpreted that as having cancer in her mouth. So she went in.

The surgeon did a biopsy of her tongue for a suspicious area and came back negative. What happens with people who are talented dreamers, if they don't get the answer they want the first time, then they ask again. And they actually intentionally write a question down in your dream diary and say, tell me more about that dream about the spider last night. I'm not sure I got enough information. And the next day, two characters from the TV show M.A.S.H. show up, Hot Lips, Hula Hand, and one of the surgeons. And they say...

Yeah.

And so people, once they make the initial diagnosis, sometimes they get advice about what to do about the situation in terms of healing or treatment from more dreams. So it's kind of a skill once you develop it that turns out to be quite useful. Hmm.

Interesting. So what, again, does someone have to be having dreams and they tell you and then you say, all right, I can analyze them? Or do you ask them and maybe they're surprised and they say, you know, I haven't thought about it, but now that you mentioned it, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And some of my coaching clients signs up to work with me. I'll just give them the prompt to start your dream diary, start asking a question every night that you want an answer to. It doesn't have to be about health. It could be about your job or your relationships.

whatever is on your mind. And just assume that any dream you have is going to be related to that question. And people get some amazing insights into their situations. But it does, like

require setting that intention to ask that question and expect an answer. And some people will tell me, oh, I don't remember my dreams. I haven't remembered my dreams in months. But once they start setting the intention, sometimes they'll get a little dream fragment, a word or an image, and then the next night they'll get a whole full-blown dream that explains everything to them. It's pretty amazing how it works.

Interesting. Are you able to tell the person, I don't know, tonight when you go to sleep, think about this, that, and the other, and I guess induce them to have a dream somehow with suggestions? I shouldn't pick the question because it's really going to be the thing that's on their mind the most. And that's going to trigger the subconscious to generate the answer. Oh, you can't guide the dream with suggestions? I leave it up to them to suggest.

I'll just say, well, you seem to be worried about your breast or your leg or whatever it is. You might want to ask a question about that tonight and then just leave it up to them to do that. And then my job then is later when they bring the dream back to me is to, we use the International Association for the Study of Dreams protocol, which is you take the

the person's dream as if it were your own. You listen to the dream and then you start with the phrase, if this were my dream, I'd wonder if that spider meant that there was a cancer crawling in your mouth. So you don't tell them what it means. You tell them what it means to you. And then the dreamer has the choice of either agreeing with...

how you feel about it or saying, no, it doesn't feel right to me. I think it means this instead. And sometimes we do dream groups where you actually have like half a dozen people discussing someone's dream and you'll get six different opinions, which is very valuable sometimes.

Before we continue, I've been personally funding the Finding Genius podcast for four and a half years now, which has led to 2,700 plus interviews of clinicians, researchers, scientists, CEOs, and other amazing people who are working to advance science and improve our lives and our world. Even though this podcast gets 100,000 plus downloads a month, we need your help to reach hundreds of thousands more worldwide. Please visit findinggeniuspodcast.com and click on support us.

We have three levels of membership from $10 to $49 a month, including perks such as the ability to see ahead in our interview calendar and ask questions of upcoming guests, transcripts of podcasts you're interested in, the ability to request specific topics or guests, and more. Visit FindingGeniusPodcast.com and click support us today. Now, back to the show. Well, why is it valuable? Just one of them happens to be right or…

It gives a better perspective. They're all right. They're just different dimensions of dreams can be interpreted in so many different ways. Someone will pick up one thing and then someone else will notice another thing and they're both could be true. My strangest experience like that was particularly regarding precognitive dreams, which are dreams that come true.

true that you have and you've written it down you've got the evidence that you had this dream and then a day later or a week later the exact thing happens and that we call that a precognitive dream well i had a series of dreams in 1996 about three or four dreams of specifically of tornado and i was pretty blown away when every time i had a tornado during the next day there was a tornado in the news particularly here in north carolina we don't rarely have tornadoes and and

I would just check the newspaper the next day. Yep, there's a tornado in North Carolina. And even once I was in Florida on a business trip, I was flying home the next day, and the dream I had was, there's a tornado hitting the airport in North Carolina. And my plane got rerouted the next day because the tornado tore the top off the hangar in the mania. Oh, wow. And I was pretty enamored with this whole being able to seemingly predicting the future thing, but...

20 years later, I went to a conference on dream symbols and someone mentioned tornadoes. And they said, when you have tornado dreams, it usually means your whole life is being turned upside down. And for some reason, it took me 20 years to remember that in 1996, my whole career got turned upside down. I went out of mainstream radiology into holistic medicine, integrated medicine, while I was having those tornado dreams. All I could...

obsess on was the fact that they would come to the next day. It never occurred to me that they meant something about my life. So there are two different meanings in the same dream. Interesting. I guess like a deck of tarot cards, and I'm not saying this to demean it, but it's like, you know, a deck of tarot cards without meaning if you dealt with these dreams appear to have correlative meaning. Oh,

Just discovered a new friend who's a retired sleep researcher from up in Canada named Carlisle Smith and he wrote a book called Heads Up Dreaming and I

I had not heard of that when I wrote my book on dreams that can save your life back in 2018, but he's sort of been following a parallel path to me, except as a psychology grad student, he started keeping meticulous records of the dreams of everyone in his family and his graduate students. And he found out that a certain percentage of them absolutely would come true within a day, sometimes longer than that. But he said that the ones that tend to have a tendency to be precognitive were short-term

dreams of like one specific scene. And it wasn't one of these epic long dreams, a big saga. It was just these short ones. And he said, it was amazing that you could sometimes get so good at this that you could actually be warned of a coming event, like a car accident or some disaster and actually change the future. He said, and that I'd not heard of. Usually it's like... What do you mean change the future? Because...

We're going to sue people for what was going to happen. Tuesday, people take an action. And then the dream didn't happen? Or was the dream like, this is going to happen no matter what? And the car accident that they were going to be in was averted at the last minute. Did that contradict the dream they had? No.

No. Oh, yeah, yeah. The dream said you're going to be a car accident. And right before the car accident happened, they remembered the dream and took a right turn and missed the accident. Okay. So people are able to go counter to what the dream shows them. It's a song? I'd never heard that before. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know if it was like a rule or anything. You couldn't, you know, once the dream is, you're slated, it's slated to happen and that's it. Yeah. I mean, most people say, oh, you get, you're getting warned, but there's nothing you can do about it. It's like, it's, you're seeing the future. It's not like the future is changeable, but this guy seems to prove that it is. Yeah. Very interesting. So, all right. So how often are you using this dream analysis in your practice now? Every day with my clients. Yeah. And often it'll be,

When I'm doing the tapping technique, again, we're looking for a malware program from the past to uninstall from the hard drive. And sometimes we're not sure which one's the top priority. And I'll ask them, well, did you have a dream about this? And once they share the dream, it's pretty obvious what the focus of the session needs to be. And that works pretty amazingly well. Okay. Interesting. What other modalities or things are you incorporating in your practice that are unusual? Oh,

I'd say I also use sometimes, there's actually in my workshops that I do, I combine four or five different techniques in an attempt to see how many different things people can do in a short period of time. And these are also all scientifically evidence-based approaches. The first is meditation. I have them just do five minutes of meditation. And then I

But I usually do a paradoxical meditation. If there's something they're concerned about, like a fear of something, I'll have them use a mantra. This is the opposite of that, which is, I am safe. So they're worried about fear. They're afraid of something, but I have them say, I'm safe over and over again for five minutes. And what that does is that brings up

all the things they're afraid of it's like you know you're pretending to deny that that you're afraid by saying i'm safe i'm safe i'm safe it just manages to dredge up all the stuff you're afraid of and i tell them it does well yeah because they're saying i'm safe when they know they're not and so they sit there saying i'm safe i'm safe and all the objections come oh no i'm not safe hell no it's a scary world out there oh i've got all these fears and so i tell them just

deal with that for five minutes and then you're going to write them all down for five minutes and then i just have them get out a sheet of paper and it's called expressive writing it's different than journaling journaling you know you're keeping a dream journal like you want to keep that forever and you want to go back and reflect on expressive writing you get a you get a single sheet of paper you write for five minutes and try to fill like one side of a page use as many emotional words as you can about all your fears and all your things you're worried about and then

At the end of that five minutes, you stop and look back over what you've written and look for what's upsetting you the most. And then we use that as the focus for the EFT session because that's what's bothering you the most. That's the program that's triggering you and that's the one we want to deal with. And once you tamper out that program, then the usual ritual is you destroy the paper that you've written. You either shred it or burn it because the idea is you want to get that out of your body. And I didn't.

Until I took a course on this 10 years ago, I didn't realize there was over 100 research papers proving that this improves your health just by doing that. That's crazy. Why do you think that is? Because you're actually doing something to get those emotions out of your body. One of the problems with talk therapy, the way most people go to a psychologist or therapist to do cognitive behavioral therapy, that's proving not to be as effective as some of these other techniques that involve...

the body in some way. The tapping involves the body. There's some different somatic therapies, arm movement, desensitization, reprocessing, EMDR. Well, it's like this physical animal movement and maybe lower brain activity, you know? Maybe that's why it has such a powerful influence because, you know, that permanent part of our brain with phobias and things like that and fight or flight, I mean, it's incredibly powerful. And actually, just the act of writing is a physical act. It gets it out of your body, out of your head. And one

one of the famous psychiatrists in this field, Bessel van der Kolk, wrote a pretty amazing book about 10 years ago called The Body Keeps the Score. You've heard of that. So yeah, that's like the Bible for this kind of work. And he basically says, you can do all the talk therapy you want, but if your body still believes it, it doesn't matter.

So you're asking, so your body can't communicate to you with words, but this is a way that you can communicate with your body without it literally saying, blah, blah, blah, blah, talking to you? Well, you know, it's interesting. Jung and Freud, I'll talk about the subconscious as like some abstract thing in your consciousness somewhere. I have come to believe that the subconscious actually lives in your body. These memories are stored in your body. And in order to really heal, you need to access the memories that are stored in your body.

stored in your body and release them. And I actually have a fun play on words with the word emotion. In terms of the acupuncture meridians, there's the mysterious chi or energy flowing through your meridians. And

If you break the word emotion up into two words and say E for energy in motion, emotions are supposed to flow through your body. And if they get stuck, that's when they get a symptom. Any symptom, any emotion you hold on to winds up creating a symptom at some point. And I treat those blocks like something that needs to be released, that needs to keep moving. And there's a wonderful poem by Rumi that we use a lot in the mindfulness program.

called The Guest House. And it says, this being human is like a guest house. You never know who's coming to visit your house next. It could be a wonderful joy, a

terrible sadness, a horrible thief. And he says, welcome them all in because you don't know what they're preparing you for next. You know, perhaps the burglar is going to rob you blind and clean out your entire house and some new joy is going to come in the next day. But the whole point is the title of the poem is called The Guest House. They can all come, but they can't stay. Interesting. So how many sessions does it take? I know everyone's different, but

You know, on average, how many sessions does it take for a person to experience relief and what does that look like for them? You know, it varies from person to person. Some of it depends on how much childhood trauma they've had. There's something called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study from the CDC. It's probably the most important study ever done in medicine that most doctors don't know about them.

There were 17,000 Kaiser Permanente patients filled out a 10-item questionnaire about abuse and neglect in childhood before the age of 18. And what they found was that predicted their likelihood to get

chronic disease later in life, their score was above four. Terrible things happened to them before they were 18. Their life expectancy would go down by a decade. And it turned out to be the biggest risk factor for chronic disease ever discovered, beyond smoking, beyond drinking, how many adverse childhood experiences you have. So if you have someone who you encounter and you're working with who's had a lot, has a high ACE score, then you're going to have more work to do to get them healed. But if you have some person who had a happy childhood and has an ACE score of zero or one, and then they have a

bad car accident. That might be something you need to clear out of your system. And that was actually the very first case I ever did with the EFT was I was teaching a stress management class for Duke undergraduates. Student came in after a fall break and said, oh my gosh, I got hives all over my body. Itchy, itchy, itchy. I go to student health, they gave me some Benadryl. It took the itching away, but now I'm too doped up to study. So I take in the Benadryl, all the hives came back. I don't

I had just learned this technique the day before. I said, well, there's a new thing we can use. What exactly happened? Well, I had this scary car accident on the Jersey Turnpike and spun around in the rain, hit a telephone pole. Airbag went off, wasn't injured, but I was really shook up and I've had hives ever since. And I said, oh, well, maybe that's something stuck under your skin. Your body's holding on to fear. And I said, let's do this technique. And all I had was a one-page cheat sheet. I was just reading the instructions. I said,

It says, just make a phrase that captures your experience. She said, scary car accident that says a scale of zero to 10. How bad was it? How bad is it right now? And it's called subjective units of distress. 10 is the worst ever in your life. Zero, there's nothing at all. And it turned out that hers, she said, I was about a six. But she looked,

more shook up on a six. I said, add some more words to that to make it worse. And she said, oh, scary thought I was going to die car accident. I made an eight. So I said, okay, let's just follow directions and hit the hit. You tap like five or six times on each of the points on your face and chest. And you repeat that phrase over and over again. And she did it on one side of the body and down the other side. It took two minutes and her score went from an eight to a four. And I thought, this might be working. And then I looked at the sheet and I said, you can repeat the same process or you can change

change up the phrase to a different aspect that might be worse. I saw what's worse than almost dying in a car. I said, is there something worse? And she goes, well, I totaled my dad's car. I said, how high is that? That was an 11. So she tapped, I'm guilty about my dad's car, guilty about his car. And I went the whole way down to about two. And she looked visibly relaxed. I said, here, take this sheet and just at home before next class in two days, just don't take any more medicine and just tap every time you feel the need to. She came back two days later, she was beaming. She goes, no more medicine, no more hives.

And I tap every time I feel a little itchy. And then she said, I tapped on all my other car accidents. I'm like, what? I didn't know she had any other car accidents, but she figured out it worked for this one. Let's go back and handle all those other ones. Her inner hero kind of took over and told her what to do because trauma tends to come in a

in the theme through your life. If one bad car accident and you never regain your confidence in driving, what's going to happen? Well, you're going to attract another car accident until you go back and fix the first one. And that's what she did. And the same thing is true. You have an abusive father. You wind up having an abusive boyfriend. Your mom marries someone who's abusive and keeps coming until you finally go back and heal the origin of that from your adverse childhood experience.

So how often have you seen tapping to be good, the EFT? Well, in that case, what happened in that case, we call that a one-minute wonder. You know, just did it once, it was gone. And I've had that happen a few other times. And I've had other people, I usually do like four sessions with boys, sort of a package. And usually by the end of four sessions, they've managed to have some kind of more success. Who are the hardest people to help and why do you think you've experienced it?

Well, I mean, more women are willing to do this work than men. But I have to say, the biggest breakthroughs have been in military veterans because they're totally skeptical. When it works for them, man, does it work. Actually, when I opened my private practice finally in coaching, the very first clone I had was a Vietnam medic, trauma Vietnam from 40 years before. And his wife, who's a psychotherapist, referred him to me and said, he's got some anger issues that are unresolved, left over in the war. See what you can do. So he comes into my office.

and sits in a chair and he's like, he's a businessman. He's having a second marriage. He holds down a job. He's not a homeless veteran. And I said, what do you want to work on? He goes, I can't tell you. I'm like, okay. Fortunately, we have a technique and it's called the movie tech. You just simply ask someone, if you had a whole collection of DVDs of movies, what would be the title of the worst movie you have? Oh, Inferno.

It's all over me. And of course my immediate reaction was, I don't know if I want to see. But then you have him run the movie projector like one frame at a time. So it's on slow-mo and he goes at his own pace. And if anything gets distressing, he stops the projector and then does some tapping.

So his number doesn't go up too high because, you know, some of these people with bad PTSD, their number goes off the charts and they freak out. So we just gradually eased into it. He said, I'm in the foxhole with my best friends in Vietnam. And a mortar shell comes in and basically explodes and blows his three buddies all over to pieces. And he's the medic and he's trying to save them all and they all die.

And he's been carrying that for 40 years. And we basically just started tapping once he had said, OK, and when now that you've got that movie and you've seen the movie, you can go through the movie again and we'll tap our way through it again until your number goes way down until you can talk through the whole thing and have your number not go up at all.

And then at the end, I usually shift to a more positive, hypnotic kind of suggestion. I said, okay, now that we've cleared all that out of your system, what are your favorite memories of those three guys? And he starts rattling off all their great qualities. You know, he tears up. He's having an emotional experience. It's like the buddies, like he's back in a foxhole with these three guys. And his anger and grief is completely gone after a half an hour. It was amazing to watch.

That's really cool. I was like, wow. And I was one of the first veterans I'd ever worked with. It was like, I didn't know what was going to happen. And having a beginner's mind is sometimes useful. But then I realized, wait, we still have half an hour left in the session. What else do you want to do? He goes, well, they took me off the front lines and sent me back to the base area.

to the morgue where I put the body parts back together in the backs. That was a real upgrade. And so we tapped on that and we finished the session. And I'm thinking, boy, I hope I didn't open some big can of worms. He said, check in with me in a week and come back for another appointment. Just make sure, you know, you're healing. Comes back a week later and I go, how are you doing? He goes, I said, do you have any Vietnam nightmares or flashbacks? He goes, no, I

I think we handled the big ones. It's like, and it's true that if you get the really big ones, it knocks all the little ones over. You don't even need to deal with them. And so I'm thinking, okay, we got a whole session here. What do you want to work on now? He goes, my dad was a general in the army. I'm like, ooh, that'd be tough. So he tapped him. My dad was a general. My dad was a tough ass general. He did that in half an hour. And I said, well, we still got a half an hour left. What do you want to tap on now? My boss is an asshole. The whole way from 40 years in the... He's like, yeah, my therapist. Oh my God.

And so he finished that and he was done. He went back home. His wife emails him and said, what the hell did you do? He said, he's like a different guy, you know, so it's crazy. Oh, that's really cool. Is it, does it work with, is there any age restriction? Like, have you ever done it with someone young, underage, you know, like eight, 10 years old, 12 years old? I mean, kids are kind of in a suggestible hypnotic state to begin with. So if you use the proper language, they, they're easy to work. And there's also something easier, even easier for kids rather than tapping on their face and chest.

We just tap your arms across your chest and tap on your upper arms with the opposite hands.

That's called butterfly tapping. And that's great. Works great for kids. It's like a comforting motion. You're tapping on a lot of acupuncture meridians. And that's been done in disaster humanitarian relief efforts all over the world. And it's called butterfly tapping. Yeah, I don't know. Do you try it on yourself? Oh, yeah. It's a self-care technique. You do it. I recommend doing it once a day on the worst thing that happened to you today. It's like, oh, let's tap that away. So you don't wake up with it tomorrow morning. It's also a great way to get to sleep at night.

is if your mind is ruminating on something, you just tap on it and say, my mind is racing, I'll never get to sleep. Oh, I know. Wiped out tomorrow. And then at the end, you start shifting to, I'm letting that go, I'm falling asleep, I'm yawning, and then you go to sleep. So it's a pretty effective technique. When you ask who doesn't work with, I tend not to work with addicts, you know, alcoholics, smoking. I mean, it has been used with those people, but you need special training in addiction therapy if you're going to work with someone. Or why? What happens if you...

have someone who's an alcoholic tap, what happens to them? Maybe it goes back for opposite and the behavior becomes not that bad. Maybe it heightens their youth. They tend to have a lot of baggage with them. I mean, their adverse childhood experience scores tend to be quite high. And one of the reasons they're addicted is they're covering up all this trauma that they've been carrying since childhood. So they need a pretty comprehensive approach. I'm not looking for a quick fix on someone who's an addict. What if you don't know what it is, but you just, you try to think of it, but you don't know.

And you do some tapping. Can it still work if you don't know what it is? Well, my own example is I had chronic shoulder pain for 20 plus years on my left side during my first marriage, which finally started going away when I got divorced. And that was my aha moment of realizing that a lot of shoulder pain is related to depressed anger. It's just stuck in your shoulder, carrying that burden on your shoulder.

And so my left shoulder doesn't hurt me anymore at all. And then I got right shoulder pain related to some political anger a couple of decades ago that not went away in a few months. And nowadays, when I get shoulder pain, which is pretty rare, I mean, I

I do an insane number of pull-ups and push-ups every week and have no shoulder pain at all. But if I ever get shoulder pain, I'll assume I'm angry about something. And I'll start tapping on just my shoulder's really angry. My shoulder's really angry. I don't know what it's about. My shoulder's really angry. And sometimes just in that tapping process, something will come to the surface. So that's what I'm angry about. And then I'll release that and my shoulder will feel better. It allows like...

How important is it if you bring up a memory or you can't bring up a memory, but you identify where in your body the constriction of the problem is and you tap on that versus just the tapping points? I'll usually ask where people, it works the best if they have an event that they're working on

and emotion and a place in their body where they feel it. Those are the three things that really make it the most effective. But sometimes you only have two out of three and you just have work with God. The one thing I take home message for people really is that all symptoms should be treated as sacred messages from your soul. It's like,

Symptoms in Western medicine are just things to be suppressed no matter what the cost. Drugs that have side effects, surgery procedures, whatever, just make it go away. And I refer to that as the shooting the message approach. Whereas if you assume that every symptom you have is a sign that there's something in your life that's out of whack and you're off course, and the symptom is just attempting to redirect you and make a course correction, that way you wind up making friends with your symptoms. Because now when I get shoulder pain, it just tells me I'm angry.

And then I deal with it. So my shoulder's not my ally. So before, I was hating it for 20 years because I didn't know what it was about. That's amazing. Have you seen it not work on somebody? And if so, why? I think some people just want a pill. I have a friend who is a cardiologist working in integrated medicine. And he said when people came into him for chest pain or whatever their heart problem was, he'd spend 10 minutes talking to him and he'd size them up and go, you just want a pill, don't you? Yeah. They write a prescription and they're gone.

Someone else would go, you're really suffering from severe emotional heartbreak here, aren't you? And they go, yeah, you're right. No one's ever actually acknowledged that. And he said, why don't you enroll in the mindfulness meditation course, do some relaxation techniques, do some expressive writings, and you're really going through a major transformation in your life. And this symptom is triggering this. That's the two different paths.

Okay. Maybe one more modality if there is one, but between dream analysis and EFT, it seems that you help a lot of people. Is there a third modality that's very effective too? Well, I mean, the thing that's really underutilized, I mean, I combine the EFT with hypnosis, but you got to realize that EFT, meditation, expressive writing, hypnosis all have

literally hundreds of research pages on it. And yet hypnosis is almost shunned in medicine, especially if you're in the Bible about like I am an orthodontist, like, oh, it's the devil's work, you know, when it's really one of the most powerful techniques you can use. And I would, I would have to say I use it people going through surgery all the time because it's

It's been shown over and over again that the way you go into surgery tends to be the way you come out of it. So if you get yourself into a self-hypnotic state with all these positive suggestions about what you want when you come out the other side of surgery, when you wake up, it's going to start happening. If you go in fearful, and the worst thing you can do when you go to surgery is to pay attention when the surgeon's reading you the consent form. It's the worst thing in the world you can read before you go into surgery. He says, you could bleed, you could get infected, you die. These are all horrible suggestions, but

that you're going to the OR. And so if you're a surgeon skillful, he'll say, well, you could bleed, but we're very careful to monitor your blood. So that doesn't happen. It's very, you could get infected, but we're giving you antibiotics. That'll never, never problem. And, and, you know, very rarely do people die. And, you know, and so you, you negate all this. If you, in hypnosis, if you say, but after the first thing you say, it negates it. It's like, oh yeah, you could bleed, but that never happens. So it, it,

deletes that first phrase. So you really want, the things you really want to go into surgery with are, think about what you want to feel like when you wake up. You want it comfortable. And the real essential thing is you want to pee, you want to eat, and you want to poop. And if you go in thinking that as soon as I wake up, I'm going to have to pee, go to move my bowels, and I'm going to be hungry for my favorite food, you will do amazing.

Well, those are just kind of like neutral things, you know. Oh, I'm going to be hungry. I'm going to feel this. I'm going to do that. Oh, most people wake up from surgery, they're nauseated and vomiting. But if you tell yourself you're going to wake up hungry for your favorite food, you will. And it gets even more sophisticated than that. I don't know about that with sleep. But you're going to get like six hours. You could say like, oh man, I'm only going to get six hours. I'm going to wake up feeling like shit. Or you could say, I have to get a fifth of your hours. Some people get by on a very minimal amount. Some people need a lot.

But for my hypnosis teacher, went through surgery, major surgery with no anesthesia. I wouldn't have believed that if I hadn't seen the video. But she had had an emergency C-section during the birth of one of her children. And she told the anesthesiologist, look, I'm very sensitive to anesthesia. Don't give me very much. And they ignored her and she wound up in the ICU and almost died. So, and they had to stitch her up really quickly and left her with a big hernia in her abdomen that kept

popping out all the time and she needed to get it fixed. And she was terrified to go and have anesthesia and surgery. So she found a hypnotist and a hypnotherapist in Pittsburgh to train her how to do it herself. And then she had to shop around to find a surgeon who had operated on her with no anesthesia. And an anesthesiologist who would stick a needle in her arm and not give her anything.

And so she does that. She gives herself the hypnotic suggestions when she walks in that she's going to become numb from the chest down to her knees. But the key thing she did was she said, and all the blood is going to leave my abdomen and go someplace else. So it's not wasted. And also she said, since I want to learn something, I want to feel the knife, but not any pain. So when

When she started the video, I thought, she showed this to medical students at Duke all the time, just blow their minds. And I thought she's going to be a deep trance, like unconscious. She's wide awake bullshitting with the anesthesiologist the whole time. While the surgeon has cut a five inch wound in her abdomen, he didn't give her any Novocaine or nothing. And the surgeon said, you sure can do this for a whole hour? And she said, she like did a Jedi mind trick.

Oh, it won't take that long. And sure enough, because she had sent all the blood away, the surgeon didn't have to manage the blood at all. There was no bleeding for the whole half hour. He said, afterwards, he goes, I didn't realize how much time I spent cauterizing blood vessels and mopping up the blood. I didn't have to do that this time. There was one drop of blood on the gauze pad at the end of a half hour of surgery. And halfway through the surgery, my friend Holly, my teacher, goes,

there's something digging into my side. Like it hurts my ribs. So he's going, what are you talking about? And he's got his hands inside her abdomen. And he goes, no. And she goes, yeah, you checked. It's kind of bothering me. And so he goes, oh, I'm leaning on the metal retractor that's pulling her wound apart so he can work on it. And he readjusted the retractor and he said, people don't usually complain about that, you know. And then finished up

The surgery stitched her up and she said, okay. He left the room. The scrub nurse was just there and the scrub nurse in the room. The scrub nurse was trying to clean her up, take the drapes off and wipe the betadine off. And she gets a little, by this time, Holly has now turned the pain switch back on that she had turned off.

And she turned the bleeding back on and everything else. So it would all heal the way it's supposed to. And she turned just enough pain on so that if there was a problem, she would know about it. So the nurse starts scrubbing around the incision. Holly lets out a blood curve and a scream. And the nurse just freaked out. She said, what's going on? I said, I turned the pain switch back on. And the nurse couldn't believe it. I was like, you just went through major surgery and now you're complaining about me scrubbing your wound.

And it's just amazingly powerful when it works like that. Holly's the first, she's the first to say that most of her clients don't want to go through surgery. They just want to go in confident and come out and heal quick. Right. So where can other people dip their toe in and evaluate whether the dream therapy or the EFT or other modalities will help them? I mean, they can check my website out, which is LarryBurke.com.

B-U-R-K, or letmagichappen.com. That's the same website. And I've got lots of blogs. I've got two dozen YouTube videos you can choose from, you know, for preparing for cancer surgery, for losing weight, for dealing with different types of pain.

sinusitis, all kinds of different things. So just on my YouTube videos, you go and those are all free videos. And I've got lots of blogs and I've got two TEDx talks that are on my homepage that I've posted. Yeah, so lots of, and they can subscribe to a monthly newsletter if I send out a newsletter once a month with some new hot topic and a new YouTube video. And if anyone wants individual coaching, I do 20 minute just intake phone, free phone call just to see if

It makes any sense for us to work together. And then after that, I do an 80 minute zoom session on a hoard, the tapping session. So they have that use that. Well, it was very good. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast. And it's really interesting, this stuff, you know, so I encourage people to check it out. I know I will. And it's been a great call. Thank you. Appreciate Mark Mead sending me your way. So I love the podcast you do with him. Thanks, Luke. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes.

You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

If you like what you hear, be sure to review and subscribe to the Finding Genius Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And want to be smarter than everybody else? Become a premium member at FindingGeniusPodcast.com. This podcast is for information only. No advice of any kind is being given. Any action you take or don't take as a result of listening is your sole responsibility. Consult professionals when advice is needed.