Applied Kinesiology, Chiropractic Medicine, Spiritual Healing: Accessing Your Bodies Inner Wisdom with Dr. Robert Ciprian, DC
On today's episode renowned chiropractor and applied kinesiologist, Robert Ciprian shines a spotlight on the body's rapid and profound capacity to heal at all levels.
References for the Show
Robert’s Bio
Dr. Robert Ciprian is a doctor of chiropractic, Diplomate of the International College of Applied Kinesiology, and has studied various types of holistic healing modalities for over two decades.
He graduated from Cleveland Chiropractic College of Los Angeles in 2000, practiced in Los Angeles, Portland Oregon, and is now in Washington, DC.
Dr. Ciprian has an eclectic background with his early years growing up in Queens, NY in a street gang environment, being an accomplished internationally known graffiti artist, and becoming a doctor and teacher of holistic medicine.
Full Transcript
Sarah Marshall, ND: Welcome to Heal! On today's episode renowned chiropractor and applied kinesiologist, Robert Ciprian shines a spotlight on the body's rapid and profound capacity to heal at all levels.
I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.
So, thanks again for being here. And, you know, we're here exploring, what does it mean to heal?
What does healing actually look like? What does it take to heal? Like, I think that very common people have a desire to be healthier and to feel better, but to actually recognize like the good, the bad and the ugly about what it takes to heal and the challenges. And I know in the work that you and I do, you as a chiropractor, me as a naturopath, you know, we know there's a huge emotional component.
It's yes, diet is important and yes, changing your biochemistry matters. But so much of what's locked in our bodies that keeps us in a physical state of illness, not just our emotional challenges, but the physical illness. Is connected to the emotional and it's connected to our mental view of the world.
So I'm really excited to have you here. Cause I feel like, you know, even more about that than I do. So
Robert Ciprian: Thank you! And that's what really brings it to essence this term holistic, which a lot of people just throw around, but holistic, it means looking at every aspect possible. It means taking the patient's world into a hole in any single aspect of their world in their life could be affecting our health, not just the nutrients, not just their spine being out of line and not just the emotions.
It could be, it could be anything you really gotta be a detective and figure out what's going on in the patient's world. That's really, ya know, the linchpin to prevent them getting well or where they want to get.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So what are the things that you've seen? Like what's really like stands out to you as an example of that.
Robert Ciprian: There are no, for instance. I remember when I was in school yeah. In Cleveland Chiropractic College, down in Los Angeles. And my girlfriend at the time Carlotta was working with these art dealers and one of the saleswomen that she was working with, she would go about every six weeks into the ER with pyelonephritis, like a super bad kidney infection. Just show up like clockwork. Like about every six weeks. She'd be hospitalized at work for a couple of days, come back. And it happened every month and a half. Finally she said, Hey, why don't you have Robert like check you out and see what's going on. Maybe there's something I can help you with. And so she took me up on it and I started doing some neuro emotional technique on her, the emotional aspect of it.
And, you know, she's someone that ate pretty well and exercise took vitamins. Like she, she really took care of herself a lot. We did some newer emotional technique and it went back to, I think, about 16 or 17 years old. And it went back to the emotion of fear and asked her what was going on at 16 or 17. We had fear.
She goes, Oh, that's when I was raped. So we helped her. Released and helped her kidneys release the emotion of rape. And for the next couple of years, I was still in LA. She never went back to the ER again for pyelonephritis.
So that's one aspect of how you could, you know, you've been doing everything else.
We just is that one little piece that you go and find and everything just...
Sarah Marshall, ND: unravels from that. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, one of the things I've seen is, you know, the body's ability to heal is phenomenal. If we remove whatever's in the way of it doing so. And so for so many people, like, especially I think in my practice, the first thing people come to me is they expect we're going to talk about food allergies.
And we do, we talk about all the different ways that the food that we eat can trigger immune responses and increase inflammation. But. I talk about it, like building a house, like that's just the foundation. That's not the whole house. Like you've got to get a good foundation in and that's important, but that's not the electrical.
It's not the plumbing. It's not the walls. It's not the art and the decoration or the family inside. Right. It's like, that's just the foundation. So that's pretty amazing to see that. So tell me about how you go about doing that because you are in a very, I think personally awesome form of chiropractic medicine.
The only chiropractors I work with practice applied kinesiology. Tell me about what that is.
Robert Ciprian: Kinesiology means the study of movement and applied kinesiology is applying the study of movement to holistic health. So we're trained as applied kinesiologists to take what we've learned in school as a healthcare professional, but kind of go through everything in a way that is broken down to understand what's going on holistically and apply it to the functions of the body.
Number one, we have the muscles of the body. There's two different ways to work with the muscles. We do muscle testing, but we also watch the way people stand and walk so we can tell how the muscles are working just in the way they stand or walk. We can go in and test individual muscles. Now, if the muscle's six months of chronic neck or shoulder injury, that no one's been able to help.
Well, maybe we'll go in and find the muscles aren't working right. Maybe they pulled off the bone a little bit, maybe the receptors in the muscles aren't working right to give the nervous system feedback or they turn on and off maybe the joints out of place for the muscles to attach to maybe the nerve from the neck, going to the muscle's not communicating properly.
And we could just get a muscle working again. And this person might have had years and years of shoulder injury. Problems. We can fix them in a minute or two. I've seen that many times. So when I had an injury for years and years and years, and I fixed them within just a couple minutes and they can't believe I did that.
Yeah. Now there's another side to the whole thing, too. Every muscle is related to a different organ or gland or acupuncture meridian or function of the body. So muscles is also are related to things inside the body and the nervous system and the acupuncture meridians and the organs. So if something stresses, one of those elements in the body, the muscle will shut off.
So we could use the muscles to tell, help us realize what's going on internally, but also what is going to bring up that person's nervous system and acupuncture meridian energy or what is going to deplete it. And that's usually what's better for a person will bring their energy up. What's worse for a personal bring it down so we can use a simple muscle test to see if something's good or not for a person.
Like for instance, you know, I've seen people take vitamins and they put a vitamin in a person right close to their body and see if a muscle goes strong or weak. Now the international college of applied kinesiology, they're more scientific. They want you to actually take the nutrient out, take it out of a little coating, put it on the patient's tongue and see if that makes something go stronger.
We can tell that right. But it works the other way too. It works in other energetic senses and.
You can tell a lot that way I could see the water I'm drinking, filtered water from the tap. And I could actually put this line off and see if the muscles stay strong or weak because we get, be into something this water not good for me; to stay strong, it means either that's just neutral. It's not bothering me or it's actually good for me.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And when you say strong or weak, you're, you're not just talking about like raw strength, right? There's like the way I understand it is there's sort of a neuromuscular reaction or like a response that you can tell that the muscle isn't like behaving properly. How would you say that?
Robert Ciprian: So it's like the switch from the nervous system to the muscle turns on and off. It's not the muscle, it's just the switch.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Got it.
Robert Ciprian: I've worked with huge body builders where I could see their arm could just drop like a feather if something's not working right. I worked with little old ladies where it barely moves, but
Sarah Marshall, ND: you can like hang off of it there. So like when they're locked out,
Robert Ciprian: it's not the issue. It's just how the nervous system's turning on and off. It's like you walk into your room and turn the light. The light turns on. It doesn't matter whether it's a 10 watt light bulb or a hundred watt light bulb, the switch turns the light on and off.
And that's what we're looking at with the muscle. If something turns the muscle on and off and the nervous system or the acupuncture meridian system. And because of that, we could figure out so many things in the body. The basic applied kinesiologist, training's about a hundred hours and you're have to be like a doctor to do that.
But then the diplomates degree is over 300 hours, you know, that is breaking apart, our team word in school and putting it back together more of a holistic sense of learning, how to track down AK muscle testing. That's basics of applied kinesiology and people take that to a lot of different other directions too.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I did the basic course twice during school and have never actually implemented a traditional muscle testing in my practice, but I use the whole interconnected, like all the education I got of how the adrenal glands are related to the knee muscles and how you can actually pick up on things going on in people's glandular system, just by their structure and how they're standing and what they look like, which parts of their body is in alignment, or if their shoulders high or low.
Like I use that stuff all the time with my clients. And I, then when I get stumped, I send them to people like you.
We work together.
Robert Ciprian: That's the amazing thing. You could see someone walking down the street and it's almost like you could read everything about them, you know, everything going on with their health and almost their life, just from seeing their way, their bodies moving in the way they're standing.
And it'd freak you out if you really knew how much they knew.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So, this is something that like, I don't know, we're just going to see where this conversation goes. But one of the things that I watch myself get frustrated with is: we have this understanding of medicine right now as if medicine was event invented a hundred years ago. And we knew nothing before that. And we've only advanced modern medical science in the last, basically a hundred, 120 years.
But 200 years ago, we had diagnostic tests that were actually quite accurate and it had to do with observing signs on the outside of the body. They would be able to see things in the way that people's urine bubbles looked, told them things about their health, the way that their skin had certain wrinkles or lines or crevices in it.
And that was a whole base of knowledge that like right now in, in professions like yours and mine, sometimes it seems like, Oh, it's woo. You guys are just like reading some crazy, but there's actually a ton of science to it. And there's a huge amount of, of reproduced results that have happened over some of it centuries.
I mean, I know in particular with applied kinesiology, it was Dr. Goodheart in the fifties that he put that together. I think
Robert Ciprian: Dr. Goodheart first figured out a muscle to turn on and off in 1964.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Okay. But before that, even still there was all kinds of diagnostic work that we would use that used signs of the body that had been a regular part of even traditional medicine.
And we've, we've stopped paying attention to the body in that way. Like the only thing we'll consider as if a lab test altars, like I've even had it where people have their own innate sense of what's going on in their body that gets discredited because a lab test doesn't match what the patient is saying about what they think is going on in their body.
That's one of my soap boxes. It drives me crazy when my patients come into me and they're like, well, they said there was nothing going on. And then they just give me this list and I'm like, well, that's something going on. Let's like, look into that.
Robert Ciprian: Well, you've got to compartmentalize that view into contemporary modern medicine.
They're the ones who did that. But if you're over in some little, you know, place in China or Italy or something like that, you know, some little place where these old school kind of practitioners are working somewhere in India or whatever, they're going to look at all sorts of different things. Asked you questions about your life.
They're still gonna look at you holistically. But that all stopped about the early 19 hundreds. I think money start getting, put, be tying to pharma, the drug companies, the pharmaceuticals, and, to make more money with that, they tried to close everything down to say, this is the way we observed things.
This is the way we check it. And this is how we tell what you need in medicine. And yeah, so it kind of just, they try to negate everything else in the world, but it's still going strong. And Chinese medicine has been around for thousands of years. (Inaudible) Medicine's been around all these different, you know, you go to these little towns up in Siberia or, and all these other little areas and you know, you go talk to the aboriginals in Australia, they all have their they're old ways of looking at things and healing things in their old medicines.
They still have that stuff.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Robert Ciprian: Just if you're in modern society here, they're telling you if you do that, you're going to die. You got to take this pill.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Right?
Robert Ciprian: And the pill might kill ya too, but the other stuff's...
Sarah Marshall, ND: minor details. Yeah. I, you know, I mean, I'm actually a really big proponent of what I've deemed the unification of medicine, where there's just one medicine and we respect all disciplines and that patients come in with whatever they need, people, even I actually.
In my practice, I use the language of client and consultant, because it's like, they're hiring me to produce a particular result. And there's actually, I've looked into the language of like doctor patient relationship. And some of it is really deeply embedded in like authority and victim. And so I like to kind of pull that apart, but even still like the people that come in, they actually could come in and get whatever it is that they need to get healthy in the like least invasive least harm way, which is a principle of all of our medicine. We just have different views of how we go about practicing that. And yeah, I know you and I are in a lot of agreement about it. So tell me about you. Like. How, I mean, how did you end up here?
Like, this is a particular niche cause you, we haven't even gotten into it, but you do all kinds of remarkable, amazing work in the spiritual healing realm and the emotional healing realm in addition to like straight up physical body mechanics. But how the heck did you end up here?
Robert Ciprian: Oh, I got tricked into it.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Perfect. (laughs)
Robert Ciprian: Tell me about that. I was looking for something to satisfy my ego and something that gives me power in life and something to make me a lot of money. So I figured I'm going to go into sports medicine and I'll become a chiropractor and I'll work on like football players and I'll, I'll have all that stuff.
Cause I was an insecure, lower middle class kind of young man. I'm like, and I felt powerless in life and, you know, used to get beat up in gangs and stuff in New York. So I did this to make something of myself for my ego, but then as soon as I started school at Cleveland chiropractic college in Los Angeles, everything changed pretty quickly.
I got severely sick and. There was times I couldn't even get out of bed for three days in a row. And this was like kind of a three week cycle, monthly cycle. And I wouldn't be able to eat or anything. I was failing out of my classes and everything was just falling apart. Might have something to do too, when I was an undergrad, I was getting ready to go to LA for. The chiropractic college and they're like, Oh, well we just need your vaccination card. And then we'll okay all your credits to go the chiropractic college instead of, I don't have that thing anymore. That was back when I was a kid. I had left my doctor I don't know where it is. She says, "oh no problem. Just go to the school nurse. She'll just give you all your shots over again. So I went and got all my shots over in one day, within six months, I thought that was nearly dying.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Oh my gosh, yeah
Robert Ciprian: So that might've been what kind of, Caused all those issues. And then from there, I started going to all these other types of esoteric type of trainings, like applied kinesiology, neuro emotional technique, total body modification.
I was trying to learn everything I could and the stuff was great. And I was like helping all these other people heal and just learning these fascinating things. But I still was not getting well myself. I found this one guy, Dr. Timothy Francis, he was at all these seminars I went to, and some of the people teaching the seminar said how they weren't things from this guy.
And I asked him, as a student, you know, Hey, can I come to your office and observe you? He goes, so, no, I don't allow students in my office. I'm like, Oh, great, well, I'm going to do it. You know? And I'm like, well, Hey, I have A, B and C going on here. Let me, he goes oh sure just come to my office. Just that a matter of factly.
And I'm like, yeah, I've been to all these doctors I've been trying for about two years, to help myself. Went to his officeoffice and in one day, everything cleared up almost just. Just one change from that, that first visit. So I wound up following him around for like almost 20 years now. And, I got a lot of other mentors along the way in different kind of esoteric things like everything from energy work and shamanism, other types of chiropractic work. Everything possible I got into whatever worked for me to kind of why, I got significant improvement myself, I wanted to help other people with.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And that's kind of, I feel like how many of us, but certainly... Even for me, I didn't really know the extent that I was on that path as well. Like I was dealing with, I had chronic asthma and a lot of, immune and lung inflammatory issues as a kid.
And they took my tonsils out when I was 18. Cause I had antibiotic resistant strep throat. So like, it made sense at that point. When the surgeon took my tonsils and adenoids out, he said, he'd never seen tonsils and adenoids that big in his entire life, like they were like so sick. They were so overwhelmed.
And at that point I didn't have very many other tools. Although I had been exposed to herbal medicine and I'd been exposed to homeopathy my whole childhood, but through varying interesting things like when homeopathy got outlawed in the practice to be practiced in the state of New York, my resident homeopath in my hometown, moved to Canada to practice and so we didn't have access to her anymore. And my health actually changed dramatically after that point. So I had like familiarity, but not fully. And so we went the traditional route and after my tonsils got taken out, all my respiratory issues stopped. And then these deeper things started to happen.
It's like the disease had to find its way in my body and it went into my large intestine and went into my head. I started getting migraine headaches, eventually got seasonal depression and chronic anxiety. That was just like, my whole nervous system was shutting down. But I went to naturopathic school because I was fascinated by, you could use natural elements and healing. I had not yet figured out I was going to naturopathic school to heal myself. And I through one of our colleagues, dr. Shannon weeks. He introduced me to Tim Francis and that's when we met. And I mean, it just was like, Shannon was very passionate about us all taking this basic applied kinesiology course.
My very first year, I was already overwhelmed with school. I was very resistant to taking an additional weekend seminar. I, when we were going to school seven days a week, you know, through that whole process, but my mind was blown in the first month and my very first session of the basic AK class. I went home on Saturday night, cried for three hours because I knew I was letting go of my identity as a vegetarian.
I'd been raised as a vegetarian. I'd never eaten meat. I was 25 years old and it just became so obvious to me that the way I was eating was not supporting. And this is personal to me. I have met a few vegetarians that actually, it really does seem to suit them and their body in general, though, I find some amount of animal nutrients make a difference for people. And for me, I was starving for it. And that was like the beginning of the light bulb going off. And literally I overnight gave it up. The next morning, woke up, had like, I think eggs and sausage for breakfast. And then a friend of ours cooked me a steak for dinner and it was like, I was on the paleo diet from that point forward, you know, and totally transformed it. (inaudible)
I have a tendency to jump in the deep end of the pool and see if I can swim. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So like, tell me more about some of the spiritual or emotional healing work. Like how, like, how does that work?
Robert Ciprian: Well, So we also, besides like this anatomy, physiology, that's, you know, very tangible, you could see it, you could operate and open up, get, look inside your body and see all these structures.
And you can mess with the physiology, we have this whole energetic anatomy and physiology too. And that gets problem. So we have (inaudible) aura, we have our chakras, we have our acupuncture meridians. We have bigger kind of acupuncture vessels that lead into the chakras. And then we have our connection to earth and heaven in between that.
We're like a little light bulb in the middle and we get the positive and negative current running through us. And if those currents aren't working right. On either end of us or something in the mechanism within us not working. Right? Yeah. All sorts of things can happen. So sometimes we get those blocks of energy taken out from within.
Sometimes we've got to remove things in there that are blocking our energy. Sometimes there's emotions in there blocking it. Sometimes it's all of our lifestyle or just something about our emotional aspect, because our mind controls our energy, but also our physiology, our mind controls our anatomy, it controls everything.
So. I look at health this way. So if you look at a pyramid four-sided pyramid, I see four sides. One is the structure of the body, like the muscles and the joints and all that. Even like the structure of your organs, like your stomach and like the physical structures, then you have the biochemistry. Of the different reactions that happen in your body, how your blood transfers like oxygen, how you take toxins out, how your hormones work, you have your mental, emotional piece.
Mental is kind of how your mind operates, emotions when there's things stuck in the past from like emotional memory things. And you have the energetic too, which is like the chakras, the auras, the meridians, all these different energetic things, but all four sides of that pyramid are held together on top by your will. Now your will is what keeps all that together. Cause if you don't have the will to get well, you won't; if you don't have the will to live, you won't live. If you don't have the will to change your diet or exercise, or do what someone tells you to get better, you won't, so your will holds all that stuff together. So that's kind of how I view holistic health.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, that's really good. And so, you know, one of the things that I, I feel like, I don't know. I have a pretty diverse spiritual background. I was raised actually in more of a Eastern philosophy, Buddhist household, although I didn't really know it at the time, but my mom had been studying Buddhism since long before I was born and Buddhism isn't really the kind of thing that you like evangelize. So it wasn't even obvious to me that that was the case until later on in life. And I went to a Montessori school growing up. And so I came from a pretty like, Different philosophical way of thinking like, Rudolf Steiner's work was who was a, I don't know.
How do you categorize him? A philosopher of a educator, a healer, a doctor. He had like so many things that he influenced. He's from Germany. Right? I think, I think he's from Germany. Yeah. And so Rudolf Steiner's work is one of the cores of a form of medicine called anthroposophical medicine. And there's elements of that, that influences applied kinesiology and vice versa.
And, You know, so I had that in there somewhere, but I wasn't conscious of it. And then I went off and I got a biochemistry degree and was all about like, how does it actually work? Like the mechanics? And I even remember when I was a kid. I had this view of the body and like that, okay. We've got our head and we've got our hands and we've got our chest.
And I knew that there was like a heart and lungs inside and I was like, okay. But. What powers that cause like, I, you know, I'm a kid of the eighties, you plug stuff into the electrical socket and power comes on and it makes it do things. I was like, okay, well, what powers that? And we get a little bit more into like nutrition and blood.
And I was like, yeah, but what powers that? And I was always looking at like, well, what powers that? What powers that? What's behind that? What's behind that? And then eventually my science, physical brain and my spiritual energetic self started to really come together in the middle. But I loved seeing just how the body works biochemically and how you could change your diet and you could produce a different result. Like that was where it started. But then eventually it's like, for me, I did a lot of work on my, my actual physical body and it thought me only so far, like I would hit these plateaus where. I was like biochemically pretty healthy.
Although there was still sources of inflammation that no matter how clean I ate, no matter seemingly how perfect I did my diet and exercise made no difference. And I would wake up into thick anxiety. Like it just was there in the morning when I woke up and it would take me two or three hours to get through my start of my day until I finally got enough momentum going, and then I could like freight train, like a tunnel.
And I would do that until nine, 10 o'clock at night, and then wake up in anxiety again in the morning would take me hours to get started. And this was actually two years after I'd graduated from naturopathic school. So I'd done a ton of work when I was in school, working with mentors and doctors around me.
And then I got to that point and it was like, I kind of hit for me, like a dark point. I believed in the medicine that I was practicing, but I was literally like WTF, like, wha-, what is this going to take? And it was way more about me being willing to start to address my view of myself, my conversations, about who I am and the kind of person I am.
And I had to start dealing with like, shame stories and issues of like being molested when I was a kid and my whole relationship to my sexuality. And thus, I believe sexuality and spirituality are really connected, like my sense of my own value and worth and who I am as an energetic, spiritual, sacred being and where I was disrespecting that.
And then I launched on this last eight years has been a journey of healing my femininity and my spiritual self. And that's where I've gotten the deep lasting shifts have come through that work, even though, and honestly, my diet ain't that clean anymore. I feel like there's more resiliency. Yeah, my physical body has, now that I've done that deeper work,
Robert Ciprian: that you, you, you, you bump up everything all around and you do have that more resiliency because everything's kind of working in a better flow.
So a little bit more abuse here or there, and it's okay. You know, like I have my vices, but I take care of myself so I can enjoy my vices, you know?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, I will eat a whole bunch of extra vegetables and really clean so that I can keep red wine and ice cream in my fridge. That's like, I'm like, cause like, you know, living a good life, like a great life, a life that you love.
And I used to go to those vices as an escape to cover up my emotional state. I now sit in meditation, work through my emotional state and I grant myself the freedom and the joy of what I get from sitting around with a bottle of wine with friends and having a dinner party. That's like, it's, it's adding to my health, not diminishing it and it can be the same thing.
They can do it in either direction.
Robert Ciprian: Yeah, the late, great Dr. Vic Frank, I don't know if you've ever met.
Sarah Marshall, ND: I haven't heard of him. I never met him.
Robert Ciprian: He's amazing, amazing character. He used to talk about when you're doing things like that, we're going to have a drink and have ice cream, whatever he says, be in your best emotional state you can.
Like do it when you're feeling good, do it when you're feeling on top of the world, don't do it when you feel you need it. Don't do it. When you feel like, you know, you've been put through the ringer or you're emotional, because then it's going to be like 10 times worse for your body. He would talk about a story of him going to his favorite ice cream place in LA, used to live up in the (inaudible) and you drive through the tunnel down to downtown LA to his favorite ice cream place. And it was just one interchange of the highways where people would always cut him off and he'd get angry at the person cutting him off and he'd just go make a U-turn and go back home because he knew in that anger stage, he didn't want to have ice cream.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Oh my gosh. That's awesome. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that's where people talk about, like, you can set the energy of your food and like bring it up to your energetic level. And I'm like, I've actually had the privilege of doing a few silent meditation retreats and like for like seven, eight days. And you're not doing anything but meditating, but then we still eat three times a day.
And it's amazing to me, how much more present and I pay attention to, and the things I notice and how I taste my food, just in that kind of a setting and to actually be able to set the intention of like gratitude and love for every single aspect of things on my plate. And I'll be honest, I don't do that every single day, every meal, but.
Robert Ciprian: So this touches on a couple things that we've kind of lost in life like that sacred, that sacredness of just having a meal and just really tasting it and enjoying it, that sacredness of, you know, just, just maybe having a glass of wine and just really tasting every aspect of that glass of wine. How's it feel in your body? How's it feel for you to drink that?
To really honor those things, you know, the sacredness of just being out and watching a sunset and really being present and absorbing that, you know, even things like being present when you're taking a shower, when you're just working with your whole body, when you're taking shower, feel your body feel what the shower feels like, feel what your body's doing and things like you're talking about also like you don't care if your sexuality that's something that so many people are just literally detached from.
They want it all the time. They're detached from their sexuality. And it's kind of like, they're almost are are sexually unconscious when they're doing those things. So all of that, it just, it goes back into just your awareness in life about everything. If you could go through life, just aware of every little breath, every little thing you're doing, life is so much more important and your emotions are better and your health is better. Everything's better that way.
Sarah Marshall, ND: I know that for some people, depending on where they've come from though, that, that disassociation is part of a mechanism, a survival mechanism because of whatever they've been through. And until like, like when I share about being that present, people are like, God, that sounds horrible.
Like, I would feel all my pain and I would have to confront like all of these emotions that have been basically locked up.
Robert Ciprian: That's exactly what they need to do,
Sarah Marshall, ND: right? Yeah. Yeah. So that kind of gets into the, like the, the harder part of healing.
Robert Ciprian: Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So like, what do you see about the things that people need to, I'm trying to come up with a softer word than confront, but we'll just use that right now in order to really get through it.
Robert Ciprian: I'll give you an example. I had just a few years ago, so I moved here to Washington, D C about five and a half years ago now. And nothing turned out the way I thought it would here. It was just filled with life changes and yeah. Yeah, just when I thought, like everything was going good in life. I was on top of my game, this and that.
I got knocked down pretty hard in all aspects of my life. And I was in a very deep, dark depression. I remember years earlier working with a couple books. One was the Sedona method and then another one by a doctor. David R. Hawkins who wrote power vs force. He wrote a book called healing and recovery.
And then after his death about the, he died on about five, six years ago or something like that after his death, one of his manuscripts was published called letting go the pathway to surrender. And that's more about just being aware of your feelings. The, the feelings you don't want to feel, but surrendering to them, letting them take you over and being present in them until, I mean, it can be painful.
I mean, I would sit there and do this stuff all day long. I would be driving to work, to a job I hated sitting there shaking and like, like almost hyperventilating in the car because I'm letting all these emotions come up to get them out, get them out, get them out. I did this work. Probably every single day for about two months, my whole life changed.
Everything started falling into place. When I started feeling better, everything, life around me started changing and, yeah, things happened. Starting very fast. And all these bridges showed up in my life because I'd got out all this negative stuff, but I never wanted to look at before things that aren't comfortable for people, but when you can take something that's super uncomfortable or scary or shaming or whatever, and welcome it in, let it take you over, even turn up the intensity on it, you realize that once it's under your control, that you're the one controlling how you feel this. It's a lot easier and it just processes like warm. It just, it just, it almost melts so way and you feel much lighter. You got, just keep doing that layer after layer, after layer. If the find that little kind of thread and just start pulling on it, you get the big glob out.
And like, my life never really changed. So, it was, it was another huge step up in my life. Like after been almost 20 years of self work on myself, this was another huge step for myself.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And I think that, that I remember at the beginning of that process for me, like really up until 2012, it was like I got through all the way through school.
And the first couple of years of my practice being, you know, terrifying, trying to figure out how to make it all work and like putting myself out there. I had just been driving off of , what I'll call my strengths. Like, like the things that have me win in life, I was just, that was all.. I was driven, I was focused and all of that, but there was a, well, there was a cost for sure to myself, but there was also a like monster sitting on my shoulder that if I slowed down. I felt him and I didn't want to, and I didn't want to deal with it. And so if I just stayed crazy busy and I just worked 70, 80 hours a week and fell over in a heap at the end of my day, adrenal fatigue be gone no matter what that was doing to my thyroid, like everything was happening.
That was part of the challenge. And I remember it was my third year in practice. It hit me and I actually created for myself that this was a year to heal and I let my whole practice just self. You know, if people sent me referrals. Great, but I didn't mark it. I didn't put myself out there. I, my income dropped by like 30, 40% that year, but I had time and I intentionally started to go into that space.
And that was like one of the hardest years of my life. And I remember it being like, I was terrified. I would just go into those emotions and never come out. It was like, I actually remember, I think it was Dr. Francis would say the ocean of emotions, the issue's in the tissues. It was like one of his like things, but I, it was like, it was like I was walking into a raging storm ocean that was just going to like sweep me out on the rip tide.
Robert Ciprian: Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: I thought! Wasn't actually what happened. Although I remember there being periods of time. Cause like, if you even are willing to get into our ancestral history and what we bring into this life from previous, my father's lineage, my mother's lineage. There's a lot of their suicide in my family lineage. There's a lot of addiction. There's a lot of mental, emotional depression and anxiety. So there was a darkness that existed now. This is a belief of mine, but I believe that all the healing work we do now impacts seven generations ahead and seven generations behind. So like the work that I got to do in my lifetime made a difference from my ancestors.
I don't know if that's really true or not, but it's a very powerful place for me to stand and like making a difference. And so it felt like that it felt like some of it wasn't even my own and it took. I wish it took me a couple of months. It took a long time and it wasn't like all dark. There were periods of lightness in there for sure where life kept moving forward.
But I remember somewhere along the line being like, God, if I have I cried enough yet, like, is this ever going to end? It might ever going to be done with this. And it seemed like it wouldn't. And now when I look at what my life is like and how happy I am and how much joy I have and how I'm so grateful that I spent the time to do that work.
But in the middle of it, it was dark, not fun.
Robert Ciprian: Yeah. The thing is, whenever I did this work, I'd feel like a little bit better, a little bit there. So I knew it was on the right track. And then all sudden I would find myself in places that I normally detested just kind of walking into it, like. Oh, like, I feel good today.
Like, okay, let's do this. You know what I mean? I got over that point where the things I hated didn't really get me down emotionally anymore then the universe pushed me on and different. Like, I got a different job and lived in a different place and everything just kind of happened. Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Yeah, those and a lot of times we think the external circumstances are the thing that did it, but there's almost always a shift that happens inside of us.
That, that I would, I love how you put that with your will. Something happened and your will shifts and then you change your circumstances. Like I was living in Phoenix, Arizona for four years. For good reason. I was down there for a training program. I am a snow bunny. I have been on skis since I was 2 years old.
My whole world revolves around skiing. I moved to the West because of the mountains and skiing and worked at ski resorts. And I've been a downhill ski race coach. And here I am in Phoenix, Arizona for four years straight, where like not a flake falls from the sky, except the ones you can see up on the very edge.
It just wasn't my environment, actually. And I remember there was like a breakthrough I had internally about realizing I could actually give myself my own dream life. Like this whole conversation of like someday, someday, it was like, no, you, you can just do that. Like, what's your dream life, go take action on it.
And I went on a road trip and I picked a new ski resort and I ended up moving back to Salt Lake and I've been here for the last three years. And like now I get the best of both worlds. I go down to Phoenix. I enjoy being down there and I get to live up here in the mountains, but it wasn't that I live in the mountains that made me happy.
There was like, mental shift and an emotional shift that happened before that led me to make those decisions.
Robert Ciprian: Yeah, my mantra, when my life wasn't going good was I'm in the right place. I'm in, I am in my right place. I felt like I am in my right place. And once I actually felt in my right place, I literally got put in my right place.
Yeah. So the feeling had to come before, the change in life, I really believe that.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And it's like, I think so much of our current culture revolves around escapism and leaving and moving away from things and like keeping stuff at arm's length, whether it's through television, Netflix, the news, being workaholic, food addictions, drug addictions, like, I mean, there's like so many things.
Robert Ciprian: Even exercise addiction. Don't forget that.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Exercise addiction! No, that, I'm glad you brought that up. Like I've had, I've had personal trainers, who've come to me and they look gorgeous and on the inside of their body, and they're a wreck and you know, I'm a huge proponent of teaching my clients about the power of rest and sleep, which is kind of like rest is like a four letter word in our culture, but I would say if I could summarize it, I've had to go in to the places.
When I went into those feelings, when I went into those, like you said, surrendering to them and allowing them to surface, that's been one of the greatest things that's helped my healing as much as it's scary to do so.
Robert Ciprian: Well more people got to get out there and tell people. If you go into it, you can come out of it, but they know it's charted territory.
They know it's safe to do that, but everyone's like, Oh no, think positive; don't have negative thoughts. Be happy. So they force the positive thoughts and the happiness. And yet they're there being torn apart in the inside . And they're like crap, but they're trying to stay happy and just think positive thoughts all day.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Robert Ciprian: They have to get that old stuff out because you can't paint on top of rust.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Right.
Robert Ciprian: If it's rusty underneath, you just can't put a nice, glossy coat of paint on it, it's just gonna like eat it away.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Flake off.
Yeah. Yeah. And then you don't get that. And I think that's sometimes where sometimes the criticisms that'll come up around natural medicine is like, Oh, well I tried glucosamine and it worked for a few weeks and then it stopped working or, Oh, I, you know, I did that diet for 30 days and like, I mean, I have seen people where they've taken gluten out of their diet and their anxiety of 20 years disappeared.
Like it literally was a gluten insensitivity that was causing it. Like that does happen. But more often I see where it is, like putting paint over rust, where you try to apply a natural substance the way you would a drug, and then it doesn't have the same effect. We ended up discrediting the natural substance instead of the way that we did the application and like what timing. I learned that a ton from applied kinesiology is the importance of, just because in general, there's science behind this new nutrient that could help this condition. Does the body want it? And doesn't want it now, like that, there's an order to things.
Robert Ciprian: There's a percentage of people where that's fine. There's a percentage of people where that's not going to work at all. Well, you got to look at this, like just looking at supplements, you gotta look at the spectrum. All right. Because there's a whole spectrum of things that people could take for biochemical type issues. I mean, you have your pharmacological drugs.
Sometimes it's needed. You have your heavy herbs, which are very potent, also like drugs. You have your synthetic, nutritional vitamin supplements, which are very heavy duty. Also the thing of like more whole food, natural vitamin supplements, where they're a little bit more balanced and they can be used more longterm.
Then on top of that, you have like different minerals; on top of that, you have different, like you start getting into things like flower, essences and homeopathies. So say someone has a stomach issue. What edge of the spectrum is it, is it really deep down like very, very kind of ingrained in their physiology where they need a drug or is it higher up where it's more the mental mind, energetic type stuff, because everyone needs something in a different spectrum for what's coming up their body too.
There's some people like, well, I took an herb, it didn't work, but oh my gosh, you've got essence. It just like cleared everything up where the same thing that will work.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, exactly. And like the timing of those things, like now, I mean, I'm. I dunno. I think I... really, it was that first year of school in 2005.
So it's been about 15 years that I've been like really seriously on my healing journey. And mostly it's flower essences and tweaking a little bit of like which specific B12 I'm taking or, you know, it's like, it's so much more subtle, but then I do way more work in like... I've started to, you know, walk the path of, of shamanism and getting into a lot of the more, I mean, it's just where it's drawn me is like what I would call deeper healing.
But. I don't know which direction are we going up or down? Like, is it higher yielding or is it low I don't konw? But, those practices in working with, you know, sacred plants and even the way that I think of herbal medicine shifted into a new context of, it's not, this has an alkaloid in it. That's going to change this biochemical pathway, which is more like a drug effect to this plant has a, has a personality. It has an energy. It has, it has wisdom of the Oak tree, right? For instance of strength and longevity and the ability to be this tiny little acorn that becomes this huge being. And then when I take Oak, I learn about my strength and my bigness and my capacity to become my full expression of myself.
Totally different way of dealing with it. Then the Acer, I don't even remember the name of the actual earth that can come from it, you know, and they can be applied in those different ways.
Robert Ciprian: Yeah. And that's, you know, it's just going back to the indigenous cultures, how they viewed the world, the world, we are part of this whole earth. It's part of us. I mean, we all just interact together and there's different aspects of the world that we need at times. If we're not getting enough of it, we could use some part of it to help that part of us.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So if you've got people listening right now who are like, Curious, right. They're interested in things outside of whatever medical system they've been exposed to up until now, you know, like how do you get started?
What would you recommend for people?
Robert Ciprian: It depends where their drugs... I feel different people are drawn to different places. Like. I've gotten to the point with myself where probably 95% percent of the people that like sign up for an appointment with me were the right fit. Like I used to get much more when I was a younger doctor, so many people that weren't the right fit for me. It didn't work out. I'm telling people I'm like firing patients or they're not listening to me, but now it's like a 95% fit. So I feel that the people gravitate exactly toward what they need. If they're aware, you gotta see, you know, what excites you, what just kind of pulls on you a little bit.
Oh, I want me to try that, you know, that's, that's that's, to me, that's the key in life. What do you have in a, a curiosity and an attraction to? What, what do you have the enthusiasm about trying? That's where you should go. That's that's kind of your inner self pointing you in the right direction. And that could be, it could be just a massage therapist that could do the most amazing healing, or it could be like the most amazing healer in the world. You can go to all sorts of different types of practitioners, but if it's the right fit for you, it's going to work out really well. So to me, it's, it's a complex thing.
Sarah Marshall, ND: One of the things I've shared with people is like, it's, it's a place to start, but that especially cause holistic healing can take some time.
Some things can happen very quickly. And other things it takes a little unraveling is, you know, to give a new practitioner three months; you should be able to be clear in three months that this is like a fit that you're starting to resonate with it, you're seeing results, but depends on the practitioner.
I mean, my experience with applied kinesiology is like, if I want to handle now, I'll go see applied kinesiology chiropractor and like 20 minutes later, I walk out different and it makes a difference really fast, but there's other modalities where there's an unwinding process, which also sometimes is what people need. They need it to be slower or faster or, and to give practitioners a few months and then you'll know. But I also say finding doctors and practitioners is like dating. Like that pull. You want good chemistry. You want good communication, you know, and to trust yourself, I am actually going to tell one on myself here, when I have clients that come to me and they're like, what do you think about acupuncture?
I'm like, you should do it like, well, what do you think about Reiki? I'm like, you should do it. They're like, I'm really curious about, like, I met this person. Like you should do it. If they bring it up to me, I trust their inner knowing. And I'm like, if you're even asking me about it, that means there's some part of you that is resonating there. Go explore it, see what it provides for you, you know?
Robert Ciprian: Definitely. Definitely. Like, I just worked with this, this intuitive woman this week. she came to DC several weeks ago and she, well, actually several months ago when everything was still normal and she did a couple of classes here in DC, she was like here for the week and something was just like, tell me, get a session with her, get a session with her. So I talked to her a little bit afterwards and I just felt that even more. And I'm like, right, I'm going to talk to you soon. I'll get a session with you and. I mean, she was good at what she did is intuitive and reading who I am. She knew a lot of things about me right away. And I'm like, Oh yeah, she's pretty right on. But she told me that one big thing I need to know. And I'm like, that's what I needed. And something was drawing me toward her to get that one big thing I needed to know, which was very pivotal for me. And I'm like, that's what I needed.
Thank you.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Are you willing to share what that was?
Robert Ciprian: Oh yeah. So, there's a lot of things I'm trying to get going in my life and you know, our, our, our friend Liliana Bar Zola (spelling?) , I've known her for, I don't know, like 15, 16, something years like that already. Now for so many years, we'd always just be doing this spiritual work and work on my old life and all the motions to like grow up like a gang member.
And I was, oh, I'll just be like a world famous graffiti artist and all this stuff. I've been through a lot of like really hard times, tell her some stories of things that would happen. And she was just like, she would just be like, Oh, my God, Robert, you gotta write down some of these stories, just kind of like start jotting these down.
You tell me all the craziest things of like what happened in your life. So when I was in my really dark space here a couple of years ago, I just like, felt it welling up. I mean, I did like catharsis and I just kind of wrote my memoir of everything. And I've wrote like 42,000 words in like two months, and almost got made into like a TV show or a movie.
I was talking to people in LA, but it kind of fell through and everything, but I'm like, well, if they were interested in the first place, there's gotta be something to it. So I hired a ghost writer and kind of polished the whole thing up. And it's just been kind of going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth with this ghost writer.
And I worked with this woman, this week and she's like, aren't you talking about a book or something like that? She was like, That is very pivotal in your whole life. Everything's being held back by that book coming out. It's like your guides show me, you're just in a cave with this book and your whole wife, everything's waiting outside of this cave.
Like where is he? Come on and you know, I gotta get this out. She's like, stop going back and forth on this book and just get it out. I'm like, okay. That's what I needed to know.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, totally get that for sure. That's awesome.
Robert Ciprian: Yeah she's just like, no ya know, she just like had to push me like "That's your big thing." I'm like okay, I got it, yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And that's an ability to see like where the energy is stuck. I mean, I trained under Liliana the entire time that I was in naturopathic school and there was a point where I was actually only doing intuitive energy reading because I hadn't graduated from naturopathic school yet. I didn't have my doctorate. So like that was my access to work with people. And it's amazing to me how when you allow yourself to be present and you get present to those subtle energies, it's like, you can see, I can, where the energy stuck. And if you could just like, nope, pull this thread out right. Then there can be a flood gate.
And those are the things that seem so miraculous. And actually now that I said it, I'm also going to put an underscore in that. Why not let our lives be miraculous? Why do we discredit that? Why do we say. Oh, quote, it's just the placebo effect or like we refer to miracles, like these frivolous things instead of this, like honorary.
Robert Ciprian: Just the placebo effect? If everything could be fixed with a placebo effect, we'd be set. Placebo effect is the best thing you can get. You body changes itself by itself.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And it's through suggestion and it's through your, your mental resonance. And, you know, it actually shows our innate ability to heal ourselves is right there. And I know culturally, the United States has a particular culture about placebo. There are other countries that scientifically have spent millions of dollars studying how to utilize it in medicine and they practice with it.
And you know, when you start to be willing to recognize that medical science and the science of healing is global. And the United States has a particular view on it and you're willing to look at research around the world. I mean, the things they've done in Brazil, in France, in Germany, in Belgium, in Korea, in Japan is like, astounding, some of the things that they have integrated into their conventional medical systems that we haven't been willing to do that here yet.
Although it's like I have, so doTERRA essential oils is out of Salt Lake city and we have the Huntsman cancer Institute up at the University of Utah. That's just like 10 miles from here. And I think because of proximity, doTERRA and Huntsman have created a relationship and I've started to learn things about Huntsman's institutes willingness to allow for people to honor their spiritual practices. Even if it's spiritual healing practices in the process of treating cancer. And they're getting a lot of information and a lot of data, and there's like, I'm rarely shocked by what is coming out of conventional medical institutions.
Huntsman Institute shocks me on a regular basis, what they're willing to explore, and that's why they have the success rates they do I think, because they are willing to take on healing in a much more holistic practice. And, you know, there, they went from using essential oils, simply as something nice to have in the room to help people feel better, to they actually can see the specific healing applications and how it changes things in the body's receptivity. And like, it's, it's pretty awesome to see when those places overlap. So it's not like it's missing completely. It's just not as prevalent in the United States, as you may see it in other medical systems where that integration exists.
Robert Ciprian: Yeah. Going back to this whole thing about researching the placebo. The founders of neuro linguistic programming, Doctors Grinder and Bandler. Dr. Grinder, he, was trying to put out uh placebo supplements. And the FDA was like, no, you can't do this. He goes, why not all the research is here of how much placebo fixes things. It fixes things better than some of the drugs that were created for these things. All the research has laid out there. It's scientifically proven already that this fixes this and this and this, this, these percentages. It's like, no, you're just selling a sugar pill. He goes exactly. And that's what creates the change.
And FDA is like, no, you can't put this out. So he tried, he tried to put out. Just, you could buy over the counter placebo and take it. It fixes these things at these percentages
Sarah Marshall, ND: That's wiled. One of the other things I've been studying too is, often when people talk about homeopathy, they say, well, homeopathy works cause it's all placebo, but we now have plenty sensitive imagery where we can actually take these electro photographs of homeopathic remedies and they have completely different electro signatures.
And it's so interesting how we have no problem going to get an MRI to have our knee problem diagnosed. And MRIs work through the same kinds of science. I mean, that's like back when I was in chemistry and we were learning about quantum chemistry and P orbitals and electrons, jumping different electrons, spin States, that was all how MRIs work.
It's the same thing that we can do in order to take photographs of energy medicine, and you can literally see the specificity and that one of the companies I work with, which I didn't even realize this until recently, how they maintain the safety and the consistency of their remedies is they, they have images from the 1950s of the remedies. And they will make sure that as they continue to produce them today, they match the energetic signature of the images that they had from then so that they can, can maintain the quality control. And this is a European company. And so I always had like an internal faith, but now I'm like, literally, like we just, it's literally science. We just haven't been willing to acknowledge it
Robert Ciprian: It's science, but it's not accepted because people that make a lot more money on a lot of other things won't allow it to be accepted. They're doing some changes. Like just with the terminology, like now they're calling it, I think nanoparticle medicine.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And I saw something on Facebook that said micro dosing, sacred herbs. And my brain was like, did these psychedelics on Facebook? I'm like, how can you do that? I'm like, what do you mean microdosing sacred herbs? And I look it up, it's like go to Cola and ginkgo. And like, like they took like, like herbs and they microdose them and I'm curious how they make them, I'm going to bet the differences they don't potentize them. The way that homeopathy is, potentized where there's like the actual succussion process, which is a different remedy than if you just dilute the herb itself. But I was like, Totally. It's, we've got hip terminology now to the old 250, you know, Hahnemann tradition, which is fine, but
Robert Ciprian: yeah. And well you know, so I live in Washington, DC off 16th street, and just about two blocks away from me is the Hahnemann Memorial in Washington, DC. It's the only statute Memorial that was erected in the district of Columbia for a physician, it was acted around 1900. It's still standing here down the street, but yeah, it's just a whole Memorial to Samuel Hahnemann, his life and his work toward homeopathy. And everyone just walks around having no clue what..
Sarah Marshall, ND: No clue that that's right there in the middle of Washington, D C
Well, Rob, thank you so much for being here and sharing your knowledge and your wisdom and your story. And when's the memoir coming out?
Robert Ciprian: Hopefully soon! I've been putting out emails last week and this week to my ghost writer, trying to hurry him up a little bit, so. He's really great. But he kind of gets lost in this process, I guess
Sarah Marshall, ND: Well keep us posted for sure. We'll make sure that it's all linked up and like, you know, we, we didn't really get into it.
You mentioned it a couple of times, but to go from a gang member and an internationally renowned graffiti artists to here, you are working at, you know, healing chakras and auras and helping people realign their light bulb on the spiritual realm is a pretty amazing journey. So I'm sure that's going to be a fascinating and probably make a difference for a lot of people in coming out, out there in the world.
Robert Ciprian: Yeah, a little, a little scary for me thinking about it, but that's kind of why I put it all down.
Show some other people they could change their lives too.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Yup. That vulnerability is also a key component to how we heal. So that's really awesome. Thank you for doing it. All right, my dear. Well, I appreciate everything. This has been so great and, we will hopefully be another resource for people out there.
Robert Ciprian: Thank you. Have a good one.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Okay. Bye. Bye.
Big thanks to today's guest, Dr. Robert Ciprian for sharing his years of experience and knowledge.
You can learn more about finding your own healing by going to SarahMarshallND.com or following me on Instagram at @SarahMarshallND. Special thanks to our music composer, Roddy Nikpour and editor Kendra Vicken, and thank you for being here. Until next time.