Seeking, Seekers, and Spiritual Illness
On today's episode, Cheri Clark and I dive deep into the world of intuition and paths and psychic illnesses as she shares her story of stepping out from under the suppressive veil of 34 years of pharmaceuticals to release her sensitivity and power as a practitioner of shamanic vibrational medicine.
Referenced in the Show
Cheri’s Bio
Cheri Clark is an Herbalist and founder of Moon Owl Medicine a traditional Shamanic Practice and Vibrational Medicine resource.
Full Transcript
Sarah Marshall ND: Welcome to HEAL. On today's episode, Cheri Clark and I dive deep into the world of intuition and paths and psychic illnesses as she shares her story of stepping out from under the suppressive veil of 34 years of pharmaceuticals to release her sensitivity and power as a practitioner of shamonic vibrational medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.
Sarah Marshall ND: So, this can go lots of ways and we'll just go with it organically. And, I'll just kind of set it up and really whatever's there for you to share, but I'm pretty interested like when we had originally first touched base about it, you talked about beating pharma and I imagine that goes back to when you got yourself off of medications and things like that. So wherever or however you want to start, I think what it's really valuable talking to you is just having you share your story of healing, what it's looked like and the stuff you've dealt with and kind of how you've come through it.
Cheri Clark: I want to start off by saying that at this point in my life, I feel incredibly blessed with health, which I almost never thought possible to be completely healthy like really?
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: So yeah, I'm very, very blessed with that. And I think that the journey to get here definitely did start with what you're pointing at that, that journey through Western medicine, big pharma.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: What that experience was is, whatever the childhood thing brings and that teenage angst and all of this spiritual energy and whatever that is wrapped up in me and not having way or words, our language too express that. (Sarah: yeah)
And the way that society in that time was dealing with it was. Oh, let me medicate that out of you rather than, Oh, let me use this experience as discovery. So I spent many years completely wrapped up in trying to find the right medicine. And it ended up being a cocktail of some very serious medicines that while they probably have their place in the world, they really have, I had no place in my healing.
And when I realized that I was so, so deep into it that they're way out of it really almost felt impossible.
Sarah Marshall ND: So take us back a little bit. When, when did that start? Like, were, were those conversations of possibility of medication and was it around anxiety? Was it around depression? Was that in your teen years or was it later?
Cheri Clark: It probably started even before the teen years, like in my generation, ADHD was not a word.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah
Cheri Clark: We, we did not have that distinction in that year, in, in my early developmental years. And if we had I'm sure that would have been applied and medication would have been applied to it. What was said in my mom's medical office about me was minimal brain dysfunction.
So like, how do you medicate that? (laughs) Yeah. and then there were drugs at that point in time that were a consideration and my mom viewed those as suppressants. So she didn't go in that direction, but that's probably the first place that medication for what it was that was life experience for me.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. What was your experience of your childhood? Like did you, did you have a sense I'm leading the witness a little bit here. When I was a child, my young years, my elementary school years, my parents were incredibly supportive of any sort of intuitive, heightened sensitivity, where I was tuned into things that I, I would talk about, past family members that like I knew them, but they had died before I was born.
Or I knew when my mom was going to pick me up early from preschool or from grade school. And there'd been no conversation or communication. I just literally was like, my mom's going to be here in five minutes. And the teacher's like, no, she's not. And then five minutes later, my mom would walk in the door.
Those things were actually honored, like, like real truth. And that was incredibly beneficial for me. And then I remember late high school, early college, something about my social structure, the conversation shifted and I started to feel more like I was just this super hyper emotional teenager. I was crazy. I was too sensitive. I was to everything and it shifted towards, there was something wrong with me and I wasn't honoring it like, Oh, this is a spiritual, intuitive connection I have. It was like, I'm effed up and it shouldn't be this way. So I'm curious what it was like for you. Yeah.
Cheri Clark: It's kind of that the very, very early, early developmental years say to maybe five or six, maybe two like, like landmarks recognition of there's something wrong here stage.
So the very early age were super encouraging. Like it was absolutely natural for you to talk to imaginary friends. And it was absolutely beautiful that you knew whatever, and there was, there's a lot of connection and love around that. That really probably started to change for me at about nine years old.
And at nine years old is, is when my intuition started to become kind of chaotically powerful in that I didn't really have language for that. At, at that point of time, but I was acutely aware of energies that were seeking. And I, what, whatever you want to make that mean, if you go back to like Christian dogma, those disembodied in energies that are seeking are demons, they feed off of, spirit or whatever else, if you want to go to that kind of language about it, I don't know what kind of language to really apply to other than that at about nine years old, I became acutely aware of that and had no way to even ask about how do you protect yourself from this? Is it safe? Is it not safe? It's so organic when it just starts to happen at nine years old that you don't really think of. Do I need to protect myself? It's just the way it is.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
It's as real... I mean, I remember. Probably my, most of my memories were a little bit older, particularly when like a school trip would go to, like I grew up in New York. So we would go to East coast battlegrounds from the war of 1812, or we'd go to burials of Gettysburg. We would go to war memorials, and, and my mom and my family was really into American history.
So like I went to Washington DC. I don't know, 13, 14 times growing up. And we would go to these, even the memorials that weren't even necessarily in a particular. And it was like, I would burst into tears, like I would get so in touch with the visceral spiritual energy to the point of like, I, I personally never had the experience of actual, a lot of visuals.
I know people and I have friends that have talked about, they'd sit in a room with them and their sister, and then there'd be eight other beings there that they could see plain as day. That wasn't how it showed up for me, it was much more, pretty much the emotional, but I could tune into that level and like, there'd be physical locations I'd go to. Now, I also have trafficked in this vernacular and it's one of the reasons I wanted to have this podcast with you, Sherry is to like, I think. For most people, this falls in the realm of like, there's a handful of people that consider themselves psychic and that's it and they're over here in this category, but I think it's one of these conversations that more and more and more people you get together and somebody will say, Oh, me too. Oh, me too. Oh, me too. Oh, me too. (Cheri: I think so, yes.) There's so much more that we just, and that's why I want to crack this open is especially in the realm where we miss... maybe we don't even misdiagnosed. Maybe it's accurate, but where there's ADHD, where there's heightened sensitivity, that creates, sensitivity disorders for kiddos where literally their nervous system is taking in more information and they don't look normal, but it doesn't necessarily mean there isn't like tuning into things that are beyond.
And, there's so many examples in our culture where what we do every day on our cell phones with the internet would have seemed like paranormal behavior (Cheri: activity) a hundred years ago. I mean, it would be just completely out to, and we explained, Oh, well, it's technology. And it's like, well, Yeah. And in 200 years, what will our technology say about our ability to sense into other energies? Right? And so you said, demons, which is like a big word for a lot of people. That is how
Cheri Clark: If you use that vernacular, right?
Sarah Marshall ND: Christianity and Catholicism tend to look at it. I love the disincarnate beings you're just not in a body. Right? And that there's a spectrum of benevolence. And then I, maybe at the end of this, we'll get into all my side of like, I still stand in that even the evil ones are teachers, but that's a whole nother level.
Cheri Clark: Absolutely and that's, like that's what I'm getting at like nine years old is when that started to, to probably show up the most, and the energy that just naturally attracted my attention or was, shocking or stunning or whatever it was, that had me be aware of it we're souls that are seeking, and anybody that seeking, whether you're seeking Christ or you're seeking an addiction or whatever it is, there is a sameness about seeking.
And that's what it was at nine years old, how do you even put that into words? There's no language about it at all. Other than that, you can express seeking, which comes out at nine years old, it comes out as something, like like, "I need to..." whatever, rid myself of this poison or uncover the make wrong or, whatever it is "I need to." So there was a very, "I need to" that started showing up at nine, and, and the spiritual way of being of it was horrible. Horrible. You're not being able to be at peace with seeking. So, yeah, it goes into teenage years, which I was probably about 17. I was driving a car early years of driving a car.
So I was probably about 17 years old when I took the very first pharmaceutical and it was Prozac. It was Prozac. The way Prozac worked in my world was that as that medication started to land in my body and, experience what it is that Prozac is all about, the words that I can remember discussing with my mother and close friends was, oh my God, this is a fucking miracle.
They should put this in the water. That lasted for about nine months. At which point, the ability to be unaware of seeking came back through, and then it doesn't work anymore.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: So then they just start adjusting the level of Prozac that they give you, so that they're trying to dial in the minimal amount of numbness that you're willing to be okay with or, whatever.
But, and then there, that, that just opens up the whole Western pharmaceuticals journey of not addressing what's actually part of healing and just trying to medicate it out. So (Sarah: yeah) prozac went from multiple different tries at the right. Dosage to adding to it a Prozac is a serotonin re uptake inhibitor.
So, once they get that to where they think it needs to be, then they're gonna work on like a dopamine monitor or then they're going to work on a norephrine thing, and they're, they're targeting each one of these little hormones or chemicals or whatever, trying to artificially induce a state of peace that's simply not real in the world. It's just not real, to ignore the fact that that is in there, and each one, one of those things has a vibrational impact on the body. It, it really does. You don't really realize that when you don't have language around it, but as soon as you find in a way to express it and in terms that release you from it. I don't know. There with that, then all of the sudden there's no need for the medication at all. I mean, it literally evaporates in an instant. (Sarah: yeah) So my pharmaceutical journey took me through from, 16 at the point that I took my very first foreign pharmaceutical through the array of adolescent and early developmental years, I was 50. It was the year I turned 50 that I decided to kick that. That (Sarah: wow) I didn't need it anymore. At the time I was 50. I was on 12 different lifetime prescriptions of pharmaceuticals. That was a cocktail of various different, serotonin re uptake inhibitors, the norephrine booster, the bipolar, balancer the, that.
Sarah Marshall ND: So what were like the diagnoses you had been given? For example
Cheri Clark: Started with depression.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yup.
Cheri Clark: Yup. Started there, the inability to be happy, and that then went into various different things. I had children during those, those years as well, so it went into (Sarah: yeah) postpartum depression, and then it escalated into bipolar disorder, which escalated then into the possibility of being in the schizophrenic spectrum.
Sarah Marshall ND: Wow.
Cheri Clark: Functioning schizophrenic spectrum.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: All of those things were possible diagnosis, and it's interesting enough what you're personally working with right now, because one of the diagnosis that came along the end of that cycle was Epstein-Barr.
Sarah Marshall ND: So this is there's there's. I want to put my disclaimer in here cause I want to be really clear, like we're highlighting your story and your experience and I think all medical intervention is also on a spectrum. And there's like, there's a time and a place, like if you break your leg, a cast is the most appropriate action for a period of time, until you can rebuild the bone and the stability. But there's other points in time. Like if you sprain your knee, a cast is not good. They've actually found that the more you immobilize joints with certain problems, the worst we make it. Right?
Right, right.
So I want to say the same thing about pharmaceuticals, but I'm very clear that in your case, and this is common. And I think that us, I have a tendency in myself to want to always like, Oh no, no, the conventional medical system isn't that bad. They're doing the best they can. This is where, like, I always want to create the disclaimer and the, the, and, and there is a degree of acknowledgement, but some I'll be honest. And I'm about to say the thing, a lot of that is because we've been taught to be afraid to speak out against what doesn't work.
And (Cheri: absolutely) I'm interested in seeking both sides. Like, I, I literally (Cheri: I have..) have stated I wouldn't be on the planet if it weren't for steroids and certain medical interventions when I was a child with the infections I was dealing with with what we had, I'm actually crystal clear that if naturopathic medicine and homeopathic medicine had been readily available, I would have never needed pharmaceuticals.
We just didn't have those tools available to us in a big way when I was a kid. So there's that challenge there, but I, (Cheri: actually, my motto..) you might just want to put this conversation in perspective, but at the same time, (Cheri: absolutely) I also realize that fear we have don't ever say too much about how the system isn't working, but there's definitely places, particularly when there's this whole new realm of what is it, what I call to have a psychic illness and illness. I don't even really use because there's anything wrong. There's just not a better word for it a psychic (Cheri: illness) imbalance. Right? Challenge, whatever. Yeah.
Cheri Clark: Yeah. and so like, like at nine years old, the way those, the being aware of those seeking entities or energies, whatever you want to call that perception that I was gifted at that age, the way it started showing up was that I could hear and perceive vibration. So that sound, and it would sound like for me, like if I were, at peace coloring my whatever in my room at night, I would hear like a scratching sound in the wall, and literally it sounded like that, (scratching sound) and it would catch my attention, and then I would be like, well, holy shit, what's that? and at nine years old, you're like run into my sister's room and grab her and bring her in there and say, can you hear that? And then we would sit there and color and she'd like that, yeah, I can hear that. What is that? and if I would leave the room, the scratching would leave the room. So it became evident that it was a perception that I had that was allowing that to come through, and then with that would come, whatever perception with it came of the need to know something, what is it that they're scratching for or, what, whatever, what
Sarah Marshall ND: Curiosity we have as kiddos to figure it out. And yeah.
Cheri Clark: but that's the way it all started, And then like when I came in contact with you, I was just like in an absolute whirlwind of change in my life. And I was doing anything I could to not be aware.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. Yeah.
Cheri Clark: It was just like being autistic almost of the amount of information that was available and, trying to make sense of it. Not having language around it, thinking know you needed to have language around it. (laughs) (Sarah: yeah, yeah) any of that where it's just like, just turn it off, give me those pharmaceuticals or whatever it is. By that time. I knew that the pharmaceuticals weren't going to work (Sarah: right) that it may give me a reprieve for a moment, but it's not going to be what I needed. I needed a different way.
Sarah Marshall ND: Well you and I have talked about that. Like how, again, if we just leave it in the realm of what works and what doesn't work, not making something right or wrong. If you have a serotonin deficiency, a serotonin reuptake inhibitor can actually make a difference. If that's the root source, is this biochemical neurotransmitter, but if that's not what's going on and I do think there's.
Cheri Clark: But wait a minute there. Yeah. I'm going to say something about that. Yeah. It's never what's going on and it's always what's going on because someone who experiences those feelings is experiencing that chemical cocktail.
Sarah Marshall ND: Right.
Cheri Clark: That's what it is.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: So you are experiencing a serotonin dip or whatever else, but that's not the root cause,
Sarah Marshall ND: but that's not the root cause.
Cheri Clark: That's not the root cause.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah
Cheri Clark: So there's realness in that (Sarah: yeah) Now, the inability to handle, to have the wiring, the ability to, manage that amount of chemical or whatever it is. That's also real. And there's times when pharmaceuticals need or benefit you from coming in and stabilizing you.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: At which then you pick it back up and you, do the work and you get stronger at being able to not create or handle those root causes,
Sarah Marshall ND: but it's still about yeah, no, and I totally agree about getting backed and that, that was ultimately the conversation, which is, these are just the wrong tool for the job, what you're dealing with and the pharmaceutical options that were available, it just was like, Just the wrong tool for the job and opening up to what will then now what? Where do I go? What do we do with this? Right. So take us a little bit through... you raised kids, you got to this point in your what? Thirties, forties, and then up until age 50, where that had been the way was, I would imagine seeing many doctors, would they constantly changing things? Was it, did you get on a set schedule for awhile?
Cheri Clark: The set schedule didn't last any longer than five years. I mean, it was from the time you're 16 to 50 that's a lot of years, so there was a lot of going to the doctor in various different ways, and a lot of different doctors along the way. This one offering this or this one offering that, or, many years of trying to be successful in talk therapy, counseling, which was for the most part disastrous, (laughs) any of those types of things that came along the way the, the moment at 50 that it absolutely dissipated from my life, the need for pharmaceuticals. I mean, literally a moment of grace. If you want to say, there was a moment that when I was examining the pain, the wreckage, the weirdness, the crazy, all of the things that are a part of, all of that, like in a moment of fear slash grace, a choice appeared.
A choice that was never available to me up until that point. So in that moment of grace, when the choice was shown me, oh you had the ability to click your heels and go home all the time. I was like, Holy fucking shit.
That entire cocktail of pharmaceuticals that they always say, don't try to attempt to go off of this shit by yourself. Let, let, let somebody help you wean off literally evaporated in that moment. Wow. I ha I've not ever taken another pharmaceutical of that type.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: From that day forward, all of the things about being weaned off all of the things about, the side effects that any of it literally I, weren't my experience. I mean, it was like the hand of God comes down and touches you on your head and said "Thou shalt be healed!" (Sarah: laughs) And at the same time, it was absolutely my willingness to make a different choice.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: But how do you make that choice when you're like totally in it and you there's no. Internal recognition of that choice. So you're just navigating up until that point.
Sarah Marshall ND: Do you have any clue where that came from? What the circumstances were that brought about that revelation?
Cheri Clark: Well, yes and no, I mean, from 16 to age 50, that seeking that was a familiar to me has, has always been there. So in the moment that that choice was shown me, I was definitely seeking. I was willing to be open to whatever guidance could come from that realm that nobody else saw, or, or that, that spiritual internal place. So I literally had to ask. And that looked like me actually forming words around, "Show me. I know that that the suffering is not the path. I am willing to die if that's what it takes. Show me!" And it was like, Oh, here you go. (Sarah: wow) (laughs) So I had to ask.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: And then that moment where they actually show you and you're brave enough to see it, like, Oh really? I almost feel like Gilda Radner, which might be too old for you but you (Sarah laughs) know it's like, (Sarah: yeah) "oh never mind." (both laugh)
Sarah Marshall ND: I mean, and again, with the willingness to ask and the willingness to see, I mean, I do know those healing moments and I mean, Oh, God, I'm going to get her name wrong. There's a book. Jump time, I think Houston, Jean Houston is her last name. She was a big metaphysical and kind of like new age writer in the nineties.
And I think she maybe wrote that book late nineties, early two thousands. And the whole premise is we have this view of evolution among other things like just straight biology that we evolve over this linear progressive way of doing things, but actually you go back and look and it, biologists will tell you that's not how evolution happens.
What happens is, is it's, if we take on and I know there's more complexity to this now that we know, but basically if we stay in the survival of the fittest, the ones that fit into their environment, that goes for a while, until the environment puts so much pressure on said organism, that they're not fitting anymore, but there's not a slow progression.
It's like pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure until it's so untenable. And then either the species or the organism dies and they go extinct. Or there is like a rapid, very fast jump in... pick a system, right? Like
Cheri Clark: that's that moment of choice, because in
Sarah Marshall ND: and it is. And it's like
Cheri Clark: that moment of choice, the experience of that is the willingness for it to be whatever it is, which is also the willingness to die.
Sarah Marshall ND: Right.
Cheri Clark: You are willing to say, if.. I am not willing for this suffering to continue, and if it needs for me to die to make it end, it ends right here. I choose. And then you have. Like you, like, you just explained this almost deck of cards going (shuffling sound) of a download of choices that you instantaneously make based on everything that's led to that moment.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
And I, for me that is. The experiential definition of transformation and I use transformation versus change. Cause we, we need a different word. Like life was one way and then something happens in that instant, a realization, a thought, an aha moment, a self discovery, and then life is different the very next moment. And I know. It's hard even for me, my brain still wants to be like, yeah, but what were you doing? Like, no, but seriously, like what.. Were you meditating? Are you breathing a particular way? Right. Like my, my part of my logical brain still wants to take it apart in that sense. But I also know personally, when I look at those moments in my life, like.
For me personally, several of them have happened while on long road trips, but it wasn't the driving that did it. It was the space and the thinking and the openness and the being in whatever the context I was in. I've had, it happened to me in meditation. I've had, it happened, just journaling in a notebook.
I've also had it happen with, working with sacred plant medicine. I've had it happen under..
Cheri Clark: All of those ways. That's why (Sarah: and and) I say it's like a moment of grace (Sarah: yeah) because there's nothing you can do. That will routinely or systematically produce it. it's like if you find follow this routine, eat vegan, meditate twice a day, be good at yoga and whatever that you will produce those moments.
I honestly, at this point in my stage, ask me tomorrow, I'll tell you something different probably, but in this stage, I believe it's the willingness to be seeking and to have nothing wrong with seeking.
Sarah Marshall ND: So say more about that. Cause you've used that word throughout and I have what I think you mean by it, but when you, you say that seeking energy that you experienced and then how that actually brought you into this willingness, like say more, what does seeking mean to you? Or what do you mean by that?
Cheri Clark: Well, I should probably look up the word seeking, let me, (Sarah laughs: yeah good) you look it up while I talk. (Sarah: yeah) Seeking because in seeking there is all the youthful innocence of discovery, there's that part of seeking, and then on the spectrum of seeking, the negative side of seeking is that there's something wrong here that I need something more, I need something different. I, that that actually perpetuates movement, whether it be movement of energy, into discovery, or if it be in the movement of energy, into the release of what doesn't work, it is that entire space of movement.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. All right. So here we have it "seek to seek to go and search or quest of. Like to seek the truth, to try to find or discover by searching, requesting again, to try to obtain, to try or attempt just in general, usually followed by an infinite to go to" so literally to go to. But there's that discovery that searching that questioning. And another word that I use a lot is being an inquiry.
the Buddhism tradition, we talk a lot about the power of being in an open question. Elizabeth nom, Gail wrote an entire book about that, the power of the open question and it's. We in our culture, particularly Western culture, when we say seeking what most people hear is an answer, seeking a destination, you guys are only listening to me, so you can't see my hands, but it's like a closing in, on something like th-, there's an expansiveness that goes down to a single point, but actually for mystics, for many spiritual cultures, in Buddhism, in the Socratic method, in the revolution of thought that came through in Europe and the Renaissance era, it was about inquiry inquiry, inquiry, ask another question, have 10 questions, follow, ask a question, have 10 questions, follow.
And the point wasn't about finding the answer. The point was about expanding the inquiry and that is a particular way of having your brain function and there's neuroscience that actually shows what that does. And while I'm with you about generally speaking, there is no formula to like produce a moment of grace because there probably isn't, there, there are a lot of people, this is, this is cutting edge, but it's not completely unheard of. I think I've even mentioned on the show, ahh flow state and the, the flow genome project. And it's, I think. Jamie and Steve Cottoner and Jamie wheel Wheeler, I got to get their names, right. cause they're heroes of mine and they literally they've been working with Red Bull athletes. They work with extreme sport athletes. They work with the Navy seals. They also set up a whole meditation plex at Google. there's like these companies that they actually do set up circumstances that allows people to drop into that state of flow state and have grace touch their work, have genius come through them. The thoughts they're able to create the work they're able to do.
There is a (Cheri: I think) actual level, we're figuring it out. How can you expand that?
Cheri Clark: I think that, that is medicine. That in itself, of teaching people, how to get in what word you're using is that flow state, how to have more of those, what I was using words of like moment of grace that shows my (Sarah: absolutely) the decades in which I have formulated myself,
Yeah. that, that flow state, to, to teach people like from infants all the way up about how to build the pieces that allow that to be more of the experience of being human. That's medicine.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: Absolutely.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. And I mean...
Cheri Clark: Landmark is good at that the forum that they have.,
Sarah Marshall ND: transformational education, those kinds of, programs that are out there, and that's actually (Cheri: that give you the experience) been referenced like in some of the books on flow state, they actually know that from again, going back to what the brain scientists have found transformational education that brings you through inquiry too an aha moment. That aha moment actually does the same thing in the brain that is flow state, and there's a whole series of how it actually inhibits our frontal cortex and calms down the part of our brain that's judging and assessing. And that's analyzing, which is a powerful part of our brain. But as many people realize certain states of depression and like PTSD in particular is actually where the frontal cortex has gotten hardened is probably the incorrect medical term, but it's like, there's less possibility there. So every red truck is going to produce a fear of a traumatic event. If there's an association with a bomb going off with a red truck and that's like standard PTSD experiences.
Where the realm of possibility of inquiry has been diminished and there's another, I really should have brushed up on my neurology before this conversation. I didn't know it, there is a part of your brain that's literally the filter, that's filtering how much information is coming in from the outside world, which is part of what you and I have wrestled with throughout our experience, being intuitive, empathetic, high-sensitive, psychic, whatever word you want to use in that realm is there's a level of, I was tuned into pull in more information consciously than someone else would, which without structure around it, without understanding what was going on without, until I met my first teacher, when I was 22 and started to get some tools of how to work in this realm, there was so much information coming in so quickly.
It felt crazy. It felt confusing. It felt overwhelming. My emotional state was like a freaking roller coaster. And then I was a hippie kid so toss in vegetarianism and blood sugar imbalances. And it was like a perfect storm of this mess that I was dealing with at that time.
Cheri Clark: Oh absolutely. I was a teenager in the seventies, not only were we trying to be vegetarian with no experience in how to do that correctly, we're also the drug era, it was like, it was like the perfect storm of this isn't gonna work. (both laugh)
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah, so.
Cheri Clark: It lead us here. So yeah, I think what you're pointing at, the experience of all of that blood sugar and chemistry and all of that, that actually happens. I've used... you, you referenced PTSD. I've used the reference of it feels like shock. Which is again in a spectrum, you kind of want that innocent shock of like (gasp) magic, and at the, at the other end, you don't want every red truck to have you sending, chemicals of, fight or flight through you, like just finding a way to, to have that information and not make it mean anything inappropriate to, just to be with it. You know?
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. Which it's, for me at 40 has been a lifelong journey of being with and allowing for, and I still feel like myself as a human and as a healer, which to even take on that word is new to not, to be willing to say, yes, I'm a trained physician and I'm a healer.
And that, that is right where my edge is right now is like, quote unquote, how woo-woo am I really willing to get ?How far out into these conversations am I willing to say? But they're, so there's such uh, there's more permission around these conversations and there have been before. And I think that I don't want to ever dumb it down or water it down, but I do think that there's some relatively mainstream ways of talking about our intuition, our gut sense, our fast thinking, whether it's completely outside myself, which I don't think it is. I feel more like we're coming to terms with how incredible our human bodies actually are, what they're capable of. And when we go back and we look at re-interpreting our anthropology and looking at our history as a human species, we can only interpret the findings we have through our own paradigm.
So the paradigm that we discovered, those things in the 1950s and the 1940s is going to interpret the information one way. And when we go back and look at the information again now in 2020 with a different paradigm, we see things we haven't seen before about how the aboriginals operate and they're incredibly tuned in sense, and the ability for the tribes of the Amazon to actually talk to and interpret information directly from the plants. And that's where, I mean, you ask the Aborigines, how did you know what to eat? How did you know where to find water? And they're like, the earth told us, like they're in communication with animals and the earth and the rocks. And that there was a point where that sounded crazy.
Although now what we're learning about animals, were discovering their intelligence is vastly superior to anything we ever could have imagined. And they're... octopuses dream. And that there's like, I mean, it's just like, like we're discovering these things about our world around us and starting to recognize, wait a minute.
Maybe we're not the only quote unquote intelligent beings (Cheri: yeah) and the communication can go in both ways.
Cheri Clark: It, it does go so much in both ways. I am so grateful for like the existence of who I am today versus, whatever. And I think that the moment that suffering, which is different than pain, Know, if you put your hand in a fire, it's going to be painful. And that tells you to pull your hand out of the fire. that's like Western medicine saves lives. So I'm talking about suffering the moment that you become aware that your experience is suffering. That ought to be our internal gratitude of, Oh, thanks for pointing me on a different, because the flowers will talk.
Yeah, I am hugely into vibrational medicine, like flower essences that have been super effective. And that is about as woo-woo as you can fricking get, right? (Sarah: right? yeah) Yeah. And just the willingness for it to be right. To, to not be low locating the what's wrong here. And let me get an antidote to that, but to be looking for the pieces that are just so very right and capitalizing on that.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. And, through my training as a pass. One of the models, and this is a model it's not necessarily the gold standard truth, but one of the models is that there are these levels to healing. if you truly are nutrient deficient, what there is to do is eat healthy whole food, but there is often a progression that happens for people, especially through chronic illness.
And then we get into the whole conversation of what is chronic illness and why does it exist? And what is it actually here to teach us and, and all that, but let's say you work through those physical levels. The diet's in, your sleep routine is in, you're handling that stuff. Then there's a phase two of healing that's about what we call treating the terrain, the train, being your genetics, your propensity, like how did you end up here in the first place? And another component of terrain in this model is your ancestral history, what you've inherited, the karmic path that has come from generations before. And if you deal with time and what we know scientifically about time, that we experience it to be linear, but time itself, isn't actually linear.
Then when you change something, when you heal something right now it heals seven generations behind you and seven generations ahead of you, you're, you're going in all directions in a 360 degree field. Then you reach that level and you deal with the ancestral history and the programming and the scripts that you've been brought into culturally from your family, all of that.
There's lots of times where my mom will say things like, well, you got that from me and your grandmother and your great grandmother, they all did it. Right. One of which is we, we lovingly call ourselves, drink a holics because we will have like a glass of water, a cup of tea, a cup of coffee, a smoothie.
There will literally be like all of them, these glasses of things. And that's a, that's a female cultural trait through my family, but this intuitive side also is. There is quieter conversations that weren't as big a deal. But my mom shares a lot about my grandmother's intuition and how she operated connected to the spiritual realm.
And then what her grandmother, my great grandmother and great aunt would talk to her about. And there, there has been... so like, I actually (Cheri: it's there) enjoy creating that as like my lineage of witches and healers. And (Cheri: absolutely) it's been there.
Cheri Clark: You know, you were talking about, those gifts starting to show up as you would travel and you would feel the different vibrations of the historical sites and yeah, like that.
So my background is that, like, I went to 13 different schools in 13 different locations, not like moving across town, by the time I was in eighth grade. Wow. So we were extremely nomadic in a modern day. And the family words around that is, Oh, well, it's natural for us because my mom did that. Or my dad did that and his dad did that. And his dad did that to the point that they claimed for themselves. Gypsy (Sarah: yeah) as their heritage, (Sarah: yeah) that was the language. And then all those spiritual cultism that comes with being a gypsy, all of that being there.
Sarah Marshall ND: And how do we know that's not true? I mean, it's
Cheri Clark: I think it is true,
Sarah Marshall ND: you and I both have done a lot of work around taking apart the stories in our life, the things we've made up about ourselves that hold us back.
But, but we are storytellers. And so then the other part is like, when I get into like, I'm owning it, like, like, (Cheri: absolutely owning it) the stories that empower me and give me yeah.
Cheri Clark: and, and storyteller is a great word, at one point in time, I think it was Carolyn Myss that used the word shape-shifter, and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. And yet it had a lot of connotations of inauthenticity, but really affective storyteller is a healer. Yeah, because all they do is open up the ability through story, through analogy, through vibration, whatever it is, those seven generations forward and seven generations back is they're opening up a new paradigm that each individual can hook into or not. It's creating (Sarah: yeah) possibility and some of ourselves, yourself, myself are such good storytellers, that there really is a blend, a bending between what is reality and what isn't reality, and our ability to transmute that into other's experiences makes us healers.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. And I'm crystal clear this episode has taken me way outside of the realm of my expertise.
Like I'm talking about a lot of things that are things I'm interested in, curious in, read a book somewhere, read a thing somewhere like I'm pulling a lot of pieces. So I've probably said eight things already that are like, well, that's not quite true. It's not quite that, but the point is to get the (Cheri: and, and there is no one thing, right?) thinking going. Right? 'Cause (Cheri: exactly) what I know of is, and this was one of those I got exposed to a naturopathic school. I, I think if things had been different in my life, I would have gotten a dual degree and I would have become both a doctor of Chinese Oriental medicine and of uh naturopathic medicine, but that didn't work at the time to be in school for six years straight.
So I took as many electives as I could. In the Oriental medicine program. And I took a whole year of a course called Cosmology that got into to the symbolism and metaphors of the 12 noble organ systems. And my professor was, brilliant man in the realm of Qigong and Chinese medicine and Heiner Fruehauf, and he told a story about. When they did a trip to China, we took a group of students and they video, they did video of this. And like, I don't know what happened about turning it into a documentary, but there are Chinese shamans, the equivalent of Chinese shamans and their whole healing modality is storytelling. (Cheri: mhm) That's it. And they gather a group of people together in a room. And they begin telling me stories and the whole ceremony process can be 12 to 15 hours long. Like it's a whole thing. And it's going to sound similar to what some people have heard about Ayahuasca ceremonies, but there was actually no plant medicine.
It was just the stories (Cheri: story) being told, and two shamans would be there and they would go back and forth. And in the beginning, the group of people would eventually find themselves in this place where all this giggles and laughter started to come out of them. And then they would laugh so hard belly aching labs.
It got to a point where they would start to cry and then it would shift. And the whole room would shift into tears and sobbing and expressing of sadness. And then there was a point of purging and there were buckets and they would vomit into the buckets and there are documented cases like a man walking in with a tumor and puking the tumor out of his body and walking out without it.
Cheri Clark: I totally believe that, my, my own experience as a shaman, and there I am with you thing. I don't really even know if I can call myself that, but I mean, it's new for me. But as a shaman, I went to Columbia, Columbia and studied Ayahuasca, got trained and was sanctioned as a leader of Ayahuasca and it is basically leading people through a psychology of story that allows something to be purged out, and then from there I moved into a different drug of choice. I'm moving North on the continent at this point, I moved into Mexican Mayan history and they're shamonic medicines and it's the same thing, it's just easier to do.
And then I kind of moved into Southern California moving North on the continent here (Sarah: uh-huh) , where they're at. At where I'm at now is that breath work can bring you through that various different, led correctly, with the right story being documented as you do that, exercise, into instantaneous healing.
And in all cases, what I've been able to witness for myself is instantaneous healing. I've gotten it that, it really doesn't have to be suffering. It doesn't have to be hard. And sometimes that's the path.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah, that was actually one of the first messages I got the first time I ever sat in a plant medicine ceremony... was, she goes, "you like to do things hard, don't you?"
Cause the first. Tonight was a lot of suffering and it was a lot of my own resistance and everything. And then there was this huge breakthrough around the conversation. And, I still grapple with this, but what, what she, the spiritual being voice proposed to me is even this doesn't have to be hard.
Like you could just have life never be hard again. And then this is a card carrying member of the perfectionist club, everything's got, and I have had to break up the story for myself that if it's not hard, it doesn't count. (Cheri: exactly, yeah) It literally is that was like my revolt against this intuitive magic that has lived in my life my whole life was like, I discredited that realm of energetic manifestation of the ease and grace that things can come to us, the pure bliss and joy, because, it's like some inherited puritanical conversation of if it's not hard work and you don't scrape your knuckles off doing it, literally, it doesn't count.
Cheri Clark: Can we just like... (lips make poppin sound) drop that?
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah (inaudible, talkin over each other, laughing)
Cheri Clark: My journey, like at the time that I like ran into you and stuff, my journey wasn't seeking, what is it about this thing about hard? (Sarah: yeah) I mean, if you could have a conversation or whatever it would take to just, you could just have it not be hard, and I'm like, Okay.
so I went from like Ayahuasca to (inaudible) to breath work to,
Sarah Marshall ND: flower essences. You're moving up in the subtlety, but also with the potency,
Cheri Clark: Right. And the, and the realm, like, I mean, yeah. If somebody comes to me for healing and intuitively, you just know this is a person who's really struggling with that.
It needs to be hard to be earned or deserving or whatever else. Okay. No, I'm going to stand with you in that suffering and we're going to do this, and as a shaman or as the storyteller, that's where you go, you lead them into the depth of what it is to be struggling or hard or valiant or whatever, and you pick up those little pieces of soul that would have it need to be hard.
And then all of a sudden it's not hard anymore, and you start walking up that level of story into grace and along the way they have the experience of.... really???
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. Like, I mean, for me, it's, it's. My experience is like I'm in higher alignment. I'm not fighting so many things in my life. I had a big shift around this same process of healing in my life where part of what was happening for me during that time was letting go of certain structures and ways of doing my life. And one of them was this. Like I have to make sure everything, everyone in my life is whole and complete. It's up to me, me too. Take care of those relationships. It's a very powerful place to stand is like I'm a hundred percent responsible to the way that my life goes.
And, but inside that I slipped into. It's my responsibility and the blame and the efforting and the hardness and the work of it all. Right? Which something shifted ultimately in like they're on a spiritual journey, I'm on a spiritual journey. Or they're on a human path; I'm on a human path. And that path may not mean we're going to be like five-year-olds in kindergarten laughing and giggling and being friends forever. And I actually had this moment where something fell away where I'm like, I'm not in kindergarten anymore. I don't actually have to be friends with everybody. Like it was like a revolution when I actually had that thought like, like I don't have to be that way.
And this thing cracked open and I started to... like my mantra all year, last year was "intentional non-doing." To just be and see what energy flowed towards me that was like the antithesis of this whole: my life has to be hard, I have to go out there, I have to climb the mountain, I have to surmount... and I had done a lot and I've accomplished a lot in that paradigm, but over last year, which quite frankly led me to even being able to do this podcast because. I'd been thinking about it for five years, but it was this hard, difficult thing that was going to add so much stress to my life and all of this work, it was more work. It was more challenging. And I was like, I'm not interested. It required this paradigm shift for me about flow, letting energy flow towards me, seeing where I'm flowing, noticing where I'm pushing a boulder up a hill versus allowing natural energy.
And it's not about me just being a wave and like. Oh, I have no intention about my life or, or I sit and meditate on the hill and millions of dollars are going to pour towards me. I don't live in any of that. It's not (Cheri: no, no) that it's something else though, that I've been able to start to get to that's this realm and it's like the hardness (Cheri: you're-) mostly disappeared.
Cheri Clark: It just does it just like opens. It's, it's almost like, the red sea parts in front of you. And you're like, "Oh wow. Look at that." Which I love to live my life in a magical state of being where like unbelievable stuff just happens, And you get to take advantage of those juicy little morsels that life gives you.
It doesn't mean that pain doesn't happen or that, emotion doesn't happen or that, you struggle or any of that, it just means that I have a lot of magic around me. (Sarah: yeah) You were talking about your mantra. My mantra for the past year has been, "it doesn't mean that." "It doesn't mean that," so as long as I have that attitude, if it's painful, it doesn't mean whatever I'm making it mean.
If it's delightful, it doesn't mean whatever it is that I'm making delightful, and just having that as my mantra just really allows -- for me in my journey -- the magic, that energy to flow. Towards me, threw me out of me, and I then get to choose, what do I want to radiate? Health, vitality, goodness, frustration, anger, whatever, (Sarah: yeah, yeah) make that choice, uncover it.
You'll find that magical moment where a brand new choice that has never been available to you before surfaces. And you have the courage to make it. Boom.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: So yeah.
Sarah Marshall ND: And it's like that... for me, the process. Cause I, for a while, cause I was a child of a community of people that had a lot of the Buddhist thought, metaphysical thought.
So I had a childhood interpretation of a lot of it. Like I always had to be happy. I had to think positively like, but they were in these have-to's, not a choice in discovery. So. I for a long time, hated the new age movement of intention and positivity and mantras, because it just like hurdled my gut that it was like, and I wanted to rebel and revolt and like, God damn it. I can be fucking angry and it's okay. And like that has been a lot of my adulthood is actually allowing myself to fully be in the emotion that's coming up. But like you said, dropping the story about it. Like I'm angry. (Cheri: tell a new story) That that means there's something wrong with me. There's something wrong with them that this shouldn't be happening, that this is effed up.
Like whatever version. I'm failing, I'm messing it all up. Like, but, but not throwing out the emotion though, not using that as another technique to go numb.
Cheri Clark: Exactly. And, anger is a great example to use because anger is a very, very, very moving and very powerful emotion. And the connotation of the word anger is not good.
Yep.
Like you said, no, I don't care where you really come from, like your Buddhist community background, mine was Irish, Catholic, witch, really weird (Sarah: yep) background, but, but that, and when you let "it doesn't mean that" go into anger, anger is still present, but how I relate to it becomes totally different. (Sarah: yeah)
Anger is a very powerful mover of energy. So as a practitioner, allowing it to be a very powerful mover of energy is a really good thing... if you're dealing with cancer.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: It is a really good thing. If you need to stop a vehicle from hitting a car.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Well, I mean, anger comes up when our boundaries get betrayed and it is a process to restore those boundaries and you can do it in a... inferno sort of a way where everything standing in your path has been destroyed and burnt to a crisp. You can also do it in a very healthy and restorative way that is about owning your truth, owning your space, all of that. And that's, I've mentioned this in previous episodes, but "The Language of Emotions" by Karla McLaren is a brilliant book and she's an empath.
And she literally wrote a chapter on 26 major emotions, including suicide. (Cheri: mhm) Like suicidal idealation. And she also wrote about anger. And that was like the first time I'd ever gotten language, words around anger being something that's useful. And when you think about, me being a doctor. Human evolution. We don't hold on to parts of our lives, bodies and biology that are not serving us. And emotion has been there for a very long time. And that's, I think where the next frontier of humanity is, is actually. We've been doing so much work on the brain, particularly the frontal cortex. That's mostly, how we think, how cognitive thought works, the advent of psychology, all of that, that has been a huge part of what we've been up to in the last hundred years as we've been working out the way human beings work.
And yet you get yeah, a thousand doctors in a room and ask them about anything having to do with emotional intelligence. Eh-eh. And I think that that's like we need...
Cheri Clark: Dr. Norm Shealy.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. Who's this?
Cheri Clark: He was the practitioner that, originally spurred Carolyn Myss's journey into intuitive medicine.
Sarah Marshall ND: Got it. Okay.
Cheri Clark: He is a Western medical doctor and tends to go into the areas of naturopath as, as part of why people heal, don't heal
Sarah Marshall ND: yeah.
Cheri Clark: With it, he's like one of the very first medical doctors that goes in that direction and has been quite influential for me, And, and. Being able to guide somebody through story or pharmaceuticals or plant medicine or nutrition or whatever to discovering the power of choice is amazing.
And when it happens, there is this like trans mutation that happens like your history, like the death of Buddha. The physical sensation of those that were present was the enlightenment of the area. Like the trees glowed different, the ground glowed different. The, the light that was present for everybody was colorful and different for them.
So when we do make those choices to embody within ourselves, goodness, or light or health or whatever it is, the people around us can't help, but be influenced.
Sarah Marshall ND: Touched? Yeah.
Cheri Clark: Yeah
Sarah Marshall ND: And it's so, like, very on the court in my life, like. I, I've been through, this is my third month inside the diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome and I'm, my life looks really different.
And one of the things is there's way more Netflix in my life than there ever has been before, but I'm not going to have that be just on anything. So I've been watching a lot of documentaries and I've been (Cheri: I love documentaries) exploring subjects through video and through that kind of media and. If been looking at stuff like I just watched the movie, "The Social Dilemma," which I want to do a whole podcast on.
I mean, it's the makers of social media showing how it's altered the way that we think and how we formulate our opinions and how we do, and don't get challenged and what the impact of that has been at a global scale. They're looking at it purely from sociology. Although there are neurology impacts to it as well. It's all related in biology, but like, One of the things I've noticed inside of that issue is when I watch a documentary with my boyfriend. He gets, he jokingly says he gets frustrated because he's crying more than he ever has before. And he's feeling things when people tell certain stories or he gets impacted emotionally at the heart level by witnessing the suffering that's going on in these different-- we've, we've watched movies on climate change.
We've watched movies on the state of politics. We've, (Cheri inaudible) a lot of these things and I'm just using as an example because he expresses it as frustration and not wanting to feel. And I--
Cheri Clark: Like feeling is a bad thing
Sarah Marshall ND: but that feeling is where we connect human heart to human heart. And we look at these issues: climate change, climate restoration. If that's actually going to be a thing, how do we heal what we're dealing with at the level of governing ourselves, allowing corporations to make determinations of, and it used to be like a software company, but now it's, these nebulous communities, but I just want to say like
Cheri Clark: I just watched a really old documentary that leads on that kind of thing.
It was like a 1988 film or something like that. It's called They--, we live, they live, "They live" it's funny.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: You should check it out.
Sarah Marshall ND: Okay. We'll check it out.
Cheri Clark: "They live" yeah "They Live"
Sarah Marshall ND: So inside of this, my very budding young hypothesis of just something I'm seeing happen in the people around me is. We don't have skillset or familiarity how to feel and not it's like what's right there is the fear of the ocean of emotions that we will open up Pandora's box and drowned in it. And I think if we look at this as sort of the counter to where we started with the incredibly huge raise in, pharmaceutical, anxiolytics and antidepressants and antipsychotics, and, They have whatever place they have that could be its own debate.
But one of the things is we've conditioned ourselves to have very little skill in being emotional sentiment, beings, sensual feeling beings. (Cheri: beings, absolutely) And that's going to be critical in whatever the heck we do next. Whether we manage to survive the next 200 years in this planet or not that willingness to become. Experts in our own emotions, feeling them, expressing them in healthy ways, knowing what they mean, getting more information gleaning. I say that that's going to be as big of a deal as what neuroscience and, and genetics have been in the last 40, 50 years.
Cheri Clark: I think it's the new frontier.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
(inaudible) that's why I go back to that is what is healing, is the navigation of that. Cheri Clark:
I can share a story that, quite personal to me anyway, in that. I had three individuals in my life who all experienced the lung cancer. In those three individuals, there's three very different approaches and three very different outcomes. (Sarah: mhm) The first two was my father and my father in law who passed within a couple of weeks of each other of that lung cancer. In the case of my father, he left the responsibility of that totally in the hands of the, his medical team, there was nothing that he could do, should do, whatever. He needed to just lay back and let them handle this. And they kept telling him, I think we can beat this. He died and the last six months, his existence was horrible. My father in law who died within a couple of weeks of him, took it as a spiritual journey.
And what he did in the last six months was to really allow himself to relate, like you were just pointing at, to, to touch the places. And it was never those happy giggly oh (happy sounds) it was sharing stories. Like he opened up to me for the very first time in his life about what it was like to be missing in action in Vietnam for two years. (Sarah: wow.)
He shared the stories of what it was to be that afraid to be that alone, to be that, not knowing what the next moment would be, bring, those kinds of things. And the connection that we shared in his sharing of those stories was incredible. Absolutely incredible. And he died in a way that was peaceful and he died strong.
And the spiritual evolution of what was left as far as intact within the family was such a healing, good place to be. The third person in my life who dealt with that particular lung cancer thing was recently somebody that I was dating and, he is the only lung cancer survivor that I've ever known.
Now, at this point in time, there are probably lungs cancer survivors out there, and they become more and more as Western medicine increases. (Sarah: yeah) But lung cancer is one of those cancers that if it is at the top of the lungs where the heart enters or connects it is inoperable and it is not survivable.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: This is somebody who survived that the exact same kind of cancer and the difference was his willingness to accept my story. I'm going to say that, as the shaman who walked him through that or walked with him as he made those dis--, those, he was absolutely willing to have this be his demise.
If I die, okay. I am going to die having gained this lesson. And literally he said in a particular moment of storytelling, he reached for my hand and he said, I'm cured. He just knew. And the next time he went into the, have his pet scans and x-rays and everything. They're like, I can't believe how quickly this has worked. All the medical procedures that we've done, this has worked, it's like gone, and it was absolutely his willingness to accept a new story.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. And how much we discredit that as not a valid modality and yet how much we've learned about the power of the mind. One of my favorite examples are there are people with verified split personality disorder, and one of their personalities has diabetes.
And another one doesn't. And they can get their blood work done within 24 hours, depending on which personality they're in. And the pathology is crystal clear in one and gone in the other. (Cheri: exactly!) Same physical body. And we have way more documented cases of things like this. And one, this just fascinates the heck out of me because I do always have one foot, I would undergraduate in chemistry. And my eight years of research and medical research has always, that side of me, that is a scientist, but I actually think that the exploration into the energetic and the intuitive is still my scientist exploring these questions of things we can't explain right now. And that doesn't (Cheri: absolutely) mean they're invalid.
Cheri Clark: It goes exactly back to what you were saying about, whether or not the pharmacology's is the modality, because the tests show that it does change the chemistry, but it's never the root cause. if you can get back to the construction of the way we made things mean this or that or that.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
Cheri Clark: For generations. Just tap to it. You don't necessarily have to live it, just tap into it, see what it is and pick out those decisions that don't support what you're up to these days. And it literally disappears in an instant. It's like, why don't we teach this? Holy shit. Everybody could have this.
Sarah Marshall ND: And there are people that I am familiar with, not an expert, Joe Dispenza's the first one that comes to mind that has created a body of work that creates reproducible, actionable lessons and teachings and meditations on how to start to alter things both through mental emotional, and then ultimately into your physical life, whether it's your body about health or whether it's other aspects.
And he has a huge body of research over the last 30 years of the work that he's been doing. That's one that comes to mind and there are other cause that's where I can imagine people being
Cheri Clark: Carolyn Myss
Sarah Marshall ND: Carolyn Myss's work. Yeah. Karla McLaren's work
Cheri Clark: another one,
Sarah Marshall ND: there have been several.
Cheri Clark: And then like personal experience, Ken Cunningham, him, I have witnessed him walk through somebody who was dying of leukemia, (Sarah: hmm) that leukemia, one of the protocols for that is the radiation to kill off all the negativity and then let the cells regrow healthy. If that goes overboard, then the bone marrow never regrows. And she was at the, at the point that there was no growth. There was no comeback. There was no... it was dead. And he walked through her through a different story. And today she walks. (Sarah: yeah) No blood transfusions, no kidney dialysis, (Sarah: yep) no nothing. She is leukemia free. (Sarah: I think--) At a point where Western medicine had done everything that it could do.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah.
I think what's important, like any prejudice we have, right? Like there's a huge conversation of racism right now. And then there's all these places, we don't even realize the extent to which we have judgments and prejudices against certain conversations. Certain... maybe it's not, like, like, Oh, that there's an immediate desire to just write off these stories as uncredible.
That there's some reason why they're not credible. Yet, why not allow more of these stories to be shared such that more and more of us just crack that encasement of cement into a realm of possibility. I don't know what will come out of it. And by no means, am I standing here saying don't get medical attention and just, (Cheri: that's a willingness) that's not it, (Cheri: no) but it's just cracking open what's possible. Like you said, the willingness to be in the inquiry and discover something. I am crystal clear through all the work I've done. And with my clients, healing begins when we step into the unknown.
Cheri Clark: Absolutely.
Sarah Marshall ND: Always.
Cheri Clark: And that can be a little bit uncomfortable, until (Sarah laughs) you do like so much. (Sarah: yeah) You step into the unknown, so many uncomfortable times that it becomes muscle memory. (Sarah: yeah)
At that point, you can do it speedily and effectively with less, experience around it, but then you are a light seed at that point, you really are anchoring change into the world.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. Yeah, well, that's the place, if any, to hit pause on this conversation. 'Cause there's endless places we could go with it, but this has just been an absolute joy, Cheri Clark, thanks for joining us. And what a remarkable miraculous conversation we've gotten to have here today.
Cheri Clark: Thank you so much, Sarah. You be amazing today.
Sarah Marshall ND: I will.
Sarah Marshall ND: Thank you to today's guest Cheri Clark for her passion and grace. If HEAL has been making a difference for you, we would greatly appreciate it if you left us a review on your favorite platform so we can reach more people and help heal our world. For a full transcript and the resources for today's show, visit SarahMarshallND.com/podcast. Keep the conversation going, have ideas or a healing story to share? Send us your thoughts, wants for future episodes, or questions by contacting us at sarahmarshalld.com or on Instagram @SarahMarshallND. Special thanks to our music composer, Roddy Nikpour, and our editor, Kendra Vicken. We'll see you next time.