Body Intuitive and Energy Psychiatry

Body Intuitive is a powerful new energy healing modality that marries current western medical science with Classical Chinese Medicine. It was created by molecular biologist Laura Stuve, Ph.D., and Chinese Medicine Doctor, Janet Galipo, DOM. Body Intuitive evolved from the BodyTalk System, and like Body Talk, it is a system of healing that takes the mind, body, and spirit of a person into consideration. It uses a variety of techniques to tap into the body’s innate wisdom and natural capacity for self-healing. A fundamental premise of Body Intuitive is that all types of stressors impact health, including but not limited to, adverse childhood experiences as well as traumatic experiences throughout the life-cycle, lifestyle habits and environmental factors, ancestral history, and genetics. These factors impact the function of bodily systems and affect their ability to communicate effectively with each other and undermine optimal health and well-being.

Body Intuitive is based upon the premise that cells in the body communicate with one another constantly via subtle energetic circuitry and that stress compromises this dialogue. Self-healing is facilitated by a Body Intuitive practitioner who discerns imbalances in the patient through structured intuition and neuromuscular feedback.  Using a variety of techniques, energetic connections in the mind, body, and spirit that have been interrupted are re-established and balance is restored.

Most Body Intuitive treatments include a breathing technique called the “Sweeping Breath” that combines elements of Kundalini Yoga with Core Shamanism and targets emotional imbalances that are linked with the presenting symptoms. There is a premise in Body Intuitive that “The Body Keeps the Score”. “The Body Keeps the Score”  was the title of a brilliant book written by Dutch psychiatrist Bessell Van der Kolk, MD. about the reality that adverse events in childhood as well as throughout the life cycle, are encoded in our brains and bodies. Trauma predisposes an individual to medical and psychiatric illness and can only be healed through an approach that integrates the body, mind and spirit.

A similar premise exists in the Body Intuitive System, i.e. that our bodies remember all of our history; ancestral, prenatal, and post-natal, all the joys and the sorrows, the illnesses and accidents, all the pharmaceuticals and antibiotics that we have ever taken over the course of our lives, as well as all of the toxins to which we have been exposed. All of this information is encoded energetically and continues to profoundly affect us, potentially creating imbalance and illness. Body Intuitive purports to support the body’s innate healing wisdom to restore balance and vitality. The recognition that there is an emotional component to all illnesses and the holistic nature of this healing approach makes it particularly appealing to me and naturally suited to my practice of holistic psychiatry.

I have been engaged with this fascinating modality since February and plan to continue and deepen my formal study over the course of the next year. I have begun to offer it to my patients and thus far it has been uniformly well-received. Body Intuitive both draws upon and strengthens my intuition as a practitioner and I have appreciated the opportunity it provides to incorporate the wisdom of Classical Chinese Medicine into my practice.  The Body Intuitive method allows us to efficiently hone in on the heart of the matter. It’s like the haiku of talk therapy. Patients are finding it both uplifting and relaxing, and it seems to noticeably increase their resilience and stress tolerance. The method is equally effective practiced at a distance as in person, so it naturally lends itself to telemedicine, which I am still doing a lot of these days.  I am thrilled to have this exciting new modality to offer to my patients.

Energy healing modalities that practitioners and patients alike find valuable and effective, are generally not supported by evidence-based research studies. My perspective is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. There was a recent article in the April 2020 issue of the Atlantic Magazine titled “Reiki Cannot Possibly Work. So Why Does It? 

” Reiki’s growing popularity in the U.S.—and its acceptance at some of the most respected American hospitals—has placed it at the nexus of large, uneasy shifts in American attitudes toward our own health care. Various non-Western practices have become popular complements to conventional medicine in the past few decades, chief among them yoga, meditation, and acupuncture, all of which have been the subject of rigorous scientific studies that have established and explained their effectiveness. Reiki is the latest entrant into the suite of common additional treatments. Its presence is particularly vexing to naysayers because Reiki delivers demonstrable salutary effects without a proven cause. Over the past two decades, a number of studies have shown that Reiki treatments help diminish the negative side effects of chemotherapy, improve surgical outcomes, regulate the autonomic nervous system, and dramatically alter people’s experience of physical and emotional pain associated with illness. But no conclusive, peer-reviewed study has explained its mechanisms, much less confirmed the existence of a healing energy that passes between bodies on command. Nevertheless, Reiki treatment, training, and education are now available at many esteemed hospitals in the United States, including Memorial Sloan Kettering, Cleveland Clinic, New York Presbyterian, the Yale Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.”

The healing power of Reiki applies equally to Body Intuitive. Though the Body Intuitive method violates our conventional mechanistic paradigm and does not make sense rationally, clinical experience demonstrates that it is therapeutically powerful and a great new tool that does no harm.