Anna Parkinson- Physician Heal Thyself

Physician Heal Thyself. We've all heard it. Does anyone know what it really means? Well, Anna Parkinson says we can heal ourselves, physically. When she was diagnosed with brain cancer, Anna found a way to heal herself. In this interview, we discuss the techniques she has put into two books.

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Anna Parkinson is a former BBC journalist, now recognized as a writer, healer and teacher. Her book, Change Your Mind Heal Your Body, where she describes the process of healing her own brain tumor, has helped many to understand their bodies, to heal, and love their lives more. Her new book Beyond Sex and Soup: Living a Spiritual Adventure, shows how our common emotions, like anger, jealousy, anxiety or fear, can be turned from powerful destructive forces into ways of recognizing and fulfilling our path, explained through fascinating stories of her own experience.

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https://www.annaparkinson.com

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Transcript

Brian Smith  0:01  
Now that you're here at Grief 2 Growth, I like to ask you to do three things. The first thing is to make sure that you like click Notifications, and subscribe to make sure you get updates for my YouTube channel. Also, if you'd like to support me financially, you can support me through my tip jar at grief to growth.com. That's grief, the number two growth.com/tip jar or look for tip jar at the very top of the page, or buy me a coffee at the very bottom of the page, and you can make a small financial contribution. The third thing I'd like to ask is to make sure you share this with a friend through all your social media, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. Thanks for being here. Close your eyes and imagine what are the things in life that causes the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, or challenges, challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if like a seed we've been planted, and having been planted, who grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes, open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true infinite, eternal nature. This is grief to growth. And I am your host, Brian Smith. Hey everybody, this is Brian back with another episode of grief to growth. And today I've got with me an author. Her name is Anna Parkinson, I'm going to read a short bio as I always do, and then I'll bring in and and as a former BBC journalist, she's now recognized as a writer, a healer and a teacher. Her book, change your mind heal your body, which describes the process of healing her own brain tumor has helped many to understand their bodies to heal and to love their lives more. And her new book we're going to talk about today is beyond sex and soup, living in a spiritual adventure. And it shows how our common emotions like anger, jealousy, anxiety, or fear can be turned from powerful destructive forces, and new ways of recognizing and filling up and fulfilling our path explained through fascinating stories of her own experience. I want to read off and his website will also mention this later. But I would like to make sure we get this up top. So her website is www dot Ana parkinson.com. It's a and then a P AR k i n s o n.com. And with that like to introduce Anna Parkinson degrees to growth.

Anna Parkinson  2:29  
Hi, Brian, I'm really happy to be here.

Brian Smith  2:32  
I'm really happy to have you here, Anna. And I think healing is a really interesting subject that I'm always interested in talking about. And I know you've written two books on healing. So we're gonna we're gonna be talking, I think primarily about your second book. But tell me about your first book. I think that's kind of what got you started on this journey?

Anna Parkinson  2:50  
Yeah, I think the thing is that there is healing, and there is self healing. And both of them were a complete mystery to me until I got ill. And when I did, I was diagnosed with something that was, in retrospect, impossible for the doctors to deal with on a physical level. Of course, you know, our medical systems are fantastic when you have a, an acute crisis, and I would not want them to go back to any other form of of treating people. But the truth is that the source of the crisis is within you because you are the bundle of energy. And it's very difficult for us to recognize that when we're when we're living our ordinary human life. Anyway, I was very lucky, in retrospect, I would say, because what afflicted me could not be dealt with by the medical system that was inoperable. And I was forced to explore everything I put to to get better again, to get my life back. And I did I explored, you know, diet, acupuncture, and anything I could think of really, but the thing that I knew nothing about that really piqued my interest was healing. Because I began to understand that people could have a physical effect on my body just by having the intention to have an effect on my body, and I found that extraordinary. And so I persisted with it. I didn't necessarily like the effect and it didn't send away the symptoms or the problem at first, but eventually I met a healer, an American called Martin Brafman. Who gave me healing. But he also told me what it was that he'd seen in my energy and shifted. And that had a fantastically powerful effect on me, because it was like my conscious mind was able to see what he had seen. And I recognize that as my stuff, I just didn't think it was important anymore. And I realized that, if he could see it, I was still carrying it around. And even though this related to stuff that happened, when I was maybe, you know, two, three, pre verbal, I was still carrying it around. And so that began a process in me, of learning how to do what he did, which I did, it was like, suddenly, I was being given a whole language, which addressed the world, but in a way that I've never seen it before. And, and I also began the process of healing. So I was, I was involved in self healing, if you like, sending away the physical symptoms, which eventually was successful. And that is why I wrote the change your mind heal your body, because I wanted people to see that healing is kind of magic. Well, we describe anything that we don't understand as magic, don't we. But it is kind of magic. But it's also very logical, it's also something that you can grasp, and do for yourself. And so it's a process which I described in change your mind heal your body. So I continue to heal people. And I also continue to give classes in, in healing yourself in self healing. Because part of my joy and healing was to encourage people to stand on their own feet and to heal themselves. Because we all have our own story, we all have a really important story, which is our unique contribution to the universe. And we are the kind of the living exposition of it. And I began to realize that, you know, what I've written about healing was not really complete, because

we tend to think of ourselves as not needing healing unless we're sick unless we have some symptom. And actually, I knew from my own experience of healing other people and my own experience of healing myself, that the symptom is just the end of the story. And all the time, every day, we're nurturing other forms of negative energy, for lack of a better word, which we allow ourselves to carry, because we think it's somebody else who is doing it or somebody else who is creating this circumstance for us. One of the things that I kept on coming across when I was going through my own process of self healing was paradox, you have to learn to embrace two things at once. You have to learn to walk a very narrow line between two realities. Because that is the essence of being a human being. And I can say a bit more about that, but in, in effect that resulted in my writing this new book, beyond sex and soup, because I wanted to show how just the simplest every day, feelings like jealousy, anger, frustration, fear, anxiety, they are all you don't need to get sick to have a pathway into making life better for yourself. Those very negative feelings themselves, are potentially a pathway to your freedom to your greater creativity, and to your joy. And so that's why I wrote this new book Beyond sex and soup to show you that your own feelings are the The things that carry you on your spiritual adventure. Yeah. Wow.

Brian Smith  10:05  
So let's, let's go back a little bit. Let's go back to when you got your diagnosis and you met this this healer. So what type of work did he do with you because you described it as he's a healer, but you also said you self healed, so explain to me.

Anna Parkinson  10:20  
So let me just start by saying I knew nothing about healing. I mean nothing. I thought that Reiki was a form of massage. So that's how much I knew. But what I found was that I would visit healers. I mean, I didn't go to a lot, but I people come forward when you're sick, and they offer you things, and I just, I accepted every opportunity. And I found that it was all very mysterious. And I was a journalist, I was used to, you know, getting to the bottom of things. And so I would sit in a chair, and I would say, Well, this is wrong. And they would say, Okay, well, I'm gonna give you healing. I would walk away feeling that something had happened, but I wasn't really sure what I didn't know anything about it. And, to a greater or lesser extent, that feeling would stay with me, actually. Now, in retrospect, I would say that all of those healings helped, they helped shift me towards a place where I was able to accept the work that Martin did. Now, I'll tell you about the work that Martin did. So eventually, I went to see first guy who was very so sure if and, and funny and full of kind of witty stories he was, he was a Jewish New Yorker. And he was, you know, very good. He'd been teaching a system that he had developed himself. But his great skill was that he was, as well as being a very gifted healer, he was very logically minded, he, he, I think, like me, he wanted to get to the bottom of things. And so he had to devise a way of conveying exactly what had happened in the healing to the person who he had given the healing to. So for me, I have a very logical mind, this worked really well. And I would describe it now, like, when you offer yourself for healing, the person who is giving the healing is working from an unconscious level of their being, using that energy to communicate with the unconscious level of your being. And human beings constantly communicate on this level. And we just forget that that's how we communicate, it's really, really important. So this language is very powerful. But equally powerful. And a human being is our conscious language, the language that we use to speak that I'm using to speak to you now the language that we use to pass exams, or write books or whatever, really, really powerful to and when we can use the two of them together, then we're motoring in a we're doing something exceptional, by the nature of our humanity. And so when Martin had given me a healing, he talked to me about what it was in my unconscious that he had seen and shifted. And that allowed my conscious mind to catch up with myself if you like to catch up with my unconscious. He called this system body mirror healing, and he devised it. Personally, I think that all healing is the same thing. It's just in different language.

Brian Smith  14:20  
I was actually going to ask you about that because we do know of all these different energy healing modalities, and sometimes it's like, what's the difference between them?

Anna Parkinson  14:28  
I don't think there is a difference. I personally and I'm sure that people who have devised the system with a name would disagree with me, but I would say that it is all about the power of one of the power of connecting unconscious energy with another energy. That sounds maybe lesser than it is but I believe that our unconscious energy is collect connected to superconscious energy. And when we have the intention to connect to that superconscious, energy, whatever we wish to call it, we can focus that energy on the benefit for the benefit of another person. But in my case, I learned a healing from Martin. And I learned his system. And I learned his system simply because it worked so well for me. And that's the way I give healing to other people. And I found that I have found that shouting people in common sense logic, conscious thinking instead of only mystery is really helpful. Because the power of mystery, we have two languages in our bodies. And, and again, it's this paradox that I talk about and beyond sex and soup. So I called it beyond sexism, because that is the language of our physical body, we need those things they are, why we're here. And they are part of our physical existence. But we're not here just to explore those things. Because we have capabilities that go way beyond those things. And so built into our human body is this paradox that we are spiritual, and physical. And they're not separate, they are part of the same thing, and we explore one through the other. And so I've completely lost my thread. But anyway, that's that paradox is is part of the healing process to discover those, those parts of yourself where your conscious mind can review what you've held in, and you don't need it any longer. It's in your unconscious, but you don't need it any longer.

Brian Smith  17:29  
So just to ask you some some more details, if you don't mind. So you were diagnosed with inoperable brain tumor, which is I should have been documented by your medical record. And so and it's now gone, and what time what timeframe that is happening.

Anna Parkinson  17:43  
Okay, so I was diagnosed in about the end of 2002. And probably for the next 18 months, for two years I was doing, I was going from that point where the surgeon says, Oh, you've got a brain tumor, and we're gonna have to take it out. And I said, Well, how? And he said, Well, they just either they kind of cut a line in down the side of your nose, and they go in to the center of your head through that way. Or else, they just take the top of your head off. And they remove the brain and they go in underneath me do it that way. Wow. So I was, you know, and then they say, we'll be in touch. So you go away. And you have nightmares for, for for actually about two months in my case, because the National Health System is is a wonderful, but it's not instant. Actually, so I went from that process going through the process of being told by a surgeon Actually, no, we can't operate. It's too deep. We can't get in there. So we're just going to monitor you. And we're going to wait and see. And so they did they monitored me every three months, I would go up and I'd have these scans and they would just say well, we're waiting to see and eventually I So this went on for about 18 months while I was trying to find other things that I could do. Because I had a lot of symptoms I was I was completely cross-eyed I was dizzy, I was sick, but I was also busy. I was writing my first book, which was about a herbalist who has an ancestor of mine a 17th century herbalist who I was completely in love with because he was such a balanced and beautiful human being. And I'd read his books and I thought this is you know, this is really human versus really someone in touch with with the earth. And, and I said that the first thing I said to myself when I was done like no was I, if I'm going to go blind or die And damn, or going to finish this book first. And so I just carried on finishing the book, and, and sort of looking for treatment. And then eventually, as I said, I found I went for a healing with this man, Martin Brafman. And he said, Okay, this symptom, you have this brain tumor, it all has to do with your relationship with your father. And I thought, really, you know, that was such a long time ago, doesn't really make any sense to me. But I can feel that something strange is happening. And also, you've picked up an awful lot of other stuff that I really didn't think it was important. And I went home. And the very next day, I was starting to edit the book that I had written, I finished it by this stage. This book about my ancestor, the herbalist. And I looked at the first line that I had written in the book, I was sitting down to edit it. And almost the first line was, I never lived with my father. And it was, Oh, my goodness was like complete revelation that I had fallen in love. With this ancestors work, he'd written a couple of books in the 17th century. That day, my father died. The day after he died, I asked my stepmother if I could borrow these books. I took, I took one home that my father had, and I read it, I fell in love with it. And the whole of the next, I don't know, this project developed over time, but it was all, you know, I was like, searching for Who was this man? Where did he come from? What was origins? What motivated him? And that's what I ended up writing in my book. And I needed to explain that the 17th century book that my father owned, was not familiar with me, until I borrowed it, and took it home to read it, because I never lived with him.

But I realized at that moment, but the symptoms that are developed, also all all started after my father died. And that this was exactly two sides of the same coin. Oh, wow. Absolutely, only I was, because I had been working in my conscious mind, I was only aware of one side of the coin mix. I was completely passive about the unconscious side. Because I wasn't aware of it.

Brian Smith  22:59  
So So you, you, you start seeing Martin and you do this work. And so what did your What did your doctor say? When did the tumor start to shrink? Or how did that? How did that work?

Anna Parkinson  23:11  
Okay, so the first thing was there was understanding was incredible instance, clarity. That was this amazing language that I could learn to speak as well as, you know, seeing a rational human being. And so I began to learn Martin taught healing. He's not alive anymore. Otherwise, I would say he teaches it, but he taught and I went to learn from him. And I carried on also learning from self healing methods, what was in my unconscious and kind of letting it go. So my family was very aware of this. I didn't go to my doctors and say, Oh, by the way, it's all going to be fine now, because I'm, I'm going to be healed. Because I'm just not made that way. You know, let them carry on do their thing. But meanwhile, I started to do my thing, big time. So this was by, it didn't wasn't instant, by about tooth out a year later, I was still going for these scans. But instead of finding them really, really depressing, I was kind of mentally fighting back. I was kind of putting the energy out there, but I wanted to be and using it to protect myself from what I had felt was very negative energy. Anyway, I came home after about a year ago, incredibly, after about a year later, and I said to my daughter, she said she looked at me she was so excited. She said, Has it gone? And I said no, no, no, but it's got a wavy line on the Top, you know, I just knew that it was going to go, even though the scan was not showing it yet. And I carried on for another year. And the scan instead of showing this kind of ball, it showed kind of collapsed. You know, like a sail when the wind has gone out of it, it just had collapsed. And I was ecstatic. I thought, That's it, it's going. And in fact, they didn't want to see me for a scan again for another three years, I think. And what was it, I can't remember how long it was. But eventually, I went back, I just left it alone. I had a little operation on my eye, to pull back the muscle that it pulls it so that I could see straight again, and I just carried on healing, feeling better and better and better. And then eventually, in 2010. So this is eight years after the whole thing began, I there were some sort of signs around, I thought, you know, it's all very well to see your heel, but you really need this verified. And I went back, I asked them to give me a scan. And I went back and it virtually disappeared, there was a tiny little bit of scar tissue, that they could see where it had been, but it had just gone. So now I'm aware that, you know, we all have a separate story, I look back on this story. And I think there were so many things that are so lucky for me. But you know, I think about the subject of your podcast. And I think, and you will have heard people say this so much. But that terror, that grief, that horror, was the only thing that really shook me out of my accustomed language, and made me explore a bigger dimension. And the bigger dimension is so much better. And so much more beautiful. That it is, you know, you look back and you say, Oh, this was the best thing that ever happened to me. And of course, you know, it's horrible pain is is is a terrible thing. But pain is part of our growing process. It has to be it's the only thing that makes us pay attention.

Brian Smith  27:52  
Yeah, I agree with you. And I've had this conversation so many times with people and they say, why do we have to learn through through pain, and I've got my my theory, but the fact is, it's just the way it is the way it is it you know, we could think about why it's the way it is. But we can look at the human experience. And until we're shaken out of whatever it is we're doing, we were going to keep doing that thing. And so something comes along sometimes to shake us out. And I love your language about the paradox, because I hadn't really put it that way before but we are human and spirit at the same time. And you talked about the conscious and the subconscious, and the rational and the intuitive, you know, and we're both and we we tend to focus so much on the rational and the conscious and the physical, that we ignore the the what's probably the bigger part of us.

Anna Parkinson  28:47  
I don't think that that's because we're stupid. I think that's because we were made if you look so again, this is what I've tried to explain and beyond sex and soup. If you look at your physical senses, they are beautiful. You know, whether you're talking about your smell, or your eyesight or your hearing or your touch, they are unbelievably sensitive and strong. And they are there to keep your body safe. And that they are there in every animal for exactly the same reason to allow you to have a physical presence on the planet. What is unusual about us, is our sensitivity to inner senses. I've maybe I've put that wrong because I think that animals also have sensitivity to inner senses. It's just that we have conscious awareness of inner senses. So you know, if you have a pet in your life, if you have a dog in your life, you and your dog will communicate. You don't have to talk about it. You don't don't have to think about it you just your dog knows when you're upset your dog knows when you're meditating, your dog knows when it's time to go for a walk, oh, and you know what your dog needs. So animals always use this unspoken unconscious language. And I believe that humans have used it for multiple, multiple 1000s of generations in the past, and to a degree, we've sort of drowned it out by our focus, our concentration on the physical. And our focus on the science has meant that we found it really difficult to trust what can't be measured. And yet, if you look at yourself, everything that is important about you can't be measured. You can't measure your love. You can't measure your hate, you can't measure your passion, you can't measure your imagination, your desire, none of those things. And from the inside, looking out, these are the only things that matter. Your love, your memory, your desire, your imagination, none of them can be measured.

Brian Smith  31:22  
Yeah, I think I think you're you're absolutely 100% right with that. And it's interesting. As we start to break things down, and you talked about, I know you talked about in your book a lot about emotions. And sometimes we tend to be so rational that we say Oh, emotions are something that we should just ignore, our emotions are something we shouldn't care about. And I've come to the conclusions, conclusion, emotion is all there is. That's, that's, that's all that really matters, whether how we feel about things, whether we're happy or sad, or you said anger or love, it's, that's really all there is, is what is our emotions.

Anna Parkinson  31:58  
And the amazing thing about being human is that we have this capacity to be parents to our own child selves, in the most beautiful way. So what we learn, can relieve us of what we have carried as a burden on our own consciousness for so many years. And there are techniques that you can use to do this. And obviously, that's a well maybe not obvious to everybody, to me, it's obvious that that's why I write books to tell these stories, but also to share the techniques because they're so powerful, they're so simple. But they are so powerful, because you have the capacity to be your own parent. Yeah, and it's a beautiful thing to do for yourself.

Brian Smith  32:50  
So are the techniques included and in both of your books are more on one than the other.

Anna Parkinson  32:58  
Both of my books are written as sort of personal stories, an editor told me a long time ago that you know, people use the internet for facts and books or for story. Bless this man, I think he's right. But I always like to, you know, I only write books about healing because I want to teach I suppose, and there are techniques in both of the books. So the techniques in the first book are more about healing your physical stuff, and a lot of the focus is on you know, on calming yourself on learning how to look inside and so forth. But I sort of stuck them in the back of the book. So if you don't get to the end of the book, or you don't or you're one of those people that never read the bit beyond the story, then you won't get them in the new book and beyond sex and soup they're integrated into the whole book because I've written it as an exposition of of us moving from what is most physical and in in the, the non physical map of the body that the Hindus have that that will be the root chakra you know, your, your physical skeleton and and that primary part of your being. And I take it all the way through to what is least physical which is the part of you that is connecting with the divine or, or is allowing divine energy into your being and exhibiting it.

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Anna Parkinson  35:47  
But you know, it's very interesting, when you look at this when you look afresh at these these issues, you come to some very, very old pieces of writing and teaching, you know, you come to you come to bits of the Bible, or you come to bits of Rumi or you come to ancient quotes from the Upanishads the Hindus, you come back to the ancient

Brian Smith  36:20  
Yeah, very much. So I think that you spoke about this earlier, we've become so enamored with the physical, we've done such a great job in the physical world, you know, we with the technology you and I can use to communicate across the world that speed of light, speed of electricity, all the different things that we've got done, we've become so enamored with it that we I think we've forgotten this, these ancient ancient wisdoms that God said that bigger side of us, the part of us and we've kind of said, you know, oh, don't think Don't worry about your intuition. That's not really a real thing. Because Because we can't measure it.

Anna Parkinson  36:55  
Exactly, exactly. One of the interesting things is that I think that you know, you, you grapple with the idea of freewill, so, so you, as a, an individual have a choice about what to do with your energy, your energy was delivered to you by your mother and father. And you can call it God given energy because they didn't actually know how to create a living human being we just did it. And and yet, once you're here on the planet, you can do what you like, with your energy. And we see that, you know, we see humans behaving like bad children and playground. And it's very upsetting that, that those of us who consider ourselves good children can't stop the bad children from behaving badly. You can't you never will. You never will. There will always be some people who choose, choose the negative. But you don't need to do that for yourself. It's not a reality, you have free will to create your reality.

Brian Smith  38:11  
I do want to ask you this question. And I always ask whenever I talk to anyone who's a healer, I talk we're here to talk about healing. You know, I just my daughter behind me, you know, she passed away, you know, few years ago, but she had a friend that, you know, passed away a few months after her that had a brain tumor, glioblastoma and took her out very quickly. I interviewed a young woman Her name is Terry Dillion, who had ALS and she went all over the world looking for healing. And so I'm kind of an energy healer, and everything and she she passed away about a year ago. So as a as a healer, what do you can everybody be healed from anything? Or what? What are your beliefs on that?

Anna Parkinson  38:54  
I think it's true to say that anything can be healed. But I don't think it's true to say that everybody can be healed from anything. And so I think, I mean, I have worked with people who have had miraculous Well, you know, apparently miraculous recoveries. And I have worked with people who have died. You know, I haven't been able to prevent that. And I think quite early on, if you work as a healer, you have to take on board. But you are the energy doesn't belong to you. It's coming through you you're doing your best, but you're not responsible for the energy any more than that. My mother and father are responsible for the fact that I'm a living human being. They brought me into being but they did not create my life. And as, as a human being working with another, I can use my energy, or I can use my intention to release things in their body, which they feel. Some people feel it really powerfully, some people feel it, not very powerfully at all. But but they, they healing, then I just trust the healing to do its thing. But that doesn't mean that everybody, everybody will will be saved, or you know that it's too late. I worked with one man. And this is quite an interesting he, his wife called me, she said, can you come and see my husband at home? Which I don't usually do. But she said, can you come and see my husband at home, he's just had his second operation at the same hospital that I went to, for a brain tumor. It's a grade for cancer. And the doctors have said that they can't do anything for him. So you know, as a human being, I'm thinking, Oh, my goodness, I'm not sure I can manage this. But you go along you, you show up, you do your best. And you I guess, the healing, just like, you know, maybe he has a sore toe or something. And after the healing, I gave him and his wife together the feedback, which again, I don't usually do, but they were operating very much as a as one person. And he didn't recognize he accepted the healing. He didn't recognize the feedback so much. She recognized it, as you know, describing him very much. And then afterwards, I, he phoned me and he said, I'm working much best be Thank you. And that's great. And I was happy about that. But then I didn't hear and I didn't hear and I didn't hear and you just think, Wow, I wonder what happened there. And about a year later, someone with the same name popped up on Facebook. And I thought, could this be the same person? And I wrote him a direct message. And he said, Yeah, yeah, here I am. And anyway, I went to see them. And it turned out that he didn't have cancer anymore. And, you know, the doctors said, What have you done? And he said, Well, I have healing and homeopathy, and they kind of made the sign of the cross. Because they hate both of I can't say they hate both of those things. But they are definitely both not scientific. Um, and, you know, here he is, he's still doing his thing today. So that was probably about six or seven years ago. And, you know, so obviously, you want that to be the results. And it isn't always. But what I do do when I do healing is I give people what I, I do the healing, but I also give people what I consider to be the tools for self healing. And I would always do that, because the power you have over yourself is greater than the power I have over you by I don't know how many degrees, but it's very powerful.

Brian Smith  43:36  
I think that's an excellent answer. Because sometimes people again, and I think you said this earlier, we call things that we don't understand magic. And we use words like miracle because we don't understand them. If I went to a medical doctor or a medical doctor, and they gave me chemotherapy, or a radiation treatment, we would say the chemotherapy or the radiation treatment cured my cancer. If I go to an energy healer, and it doesn't always write some

Anna Parkinson  44:04  
model, it doesn't have to say it doesn't always Yeah,

Brian Smith  44:08  
yeah. So it doesn't always so we don't say, well, that's not real, because it's not 100% effective. I would say similar with energy, healings. I've heard people say, Well, why didn't it work for me or why didn't work for that person. But something I always have to tell the story because I think it's so powerful. I have a friend who was in terminal illness. She her body was dying. And she went to a very famous healer, and to get healing and the way that they put it, whether she put it in the healer or put it was she wasn't physically healed, because she did her body did die, but she was spiritually healed. And she she released all kinds of trauma. And I think that that's sometimes our path is that you know, because we all we are, eventually our bodies were out.

Anna Parkinson  44:57  
I agree with you absolutely. 100% I mean, we're all gonna die, right? That we do know. And you know, one of the things that is in beyond sex and soup is the death of my mom. Because this was happening all the way through while I was writing the book. And in fact, she was such a dynamic and powerful person, that this process of dying, really lends a kind of what can I say it lends an extra dimension to the life that we're living, you know, our life is so precious, because it's not going to last forever. And, and it is full of possibilities. And if we think it is going to last forever, and it doesn't change, then not only are we fooling ourselves, but we're wasting our time and wasting our energy. And, you know, this, this perspective of my mum, leaving the life that she had loved all the way through the book really does help to kind of give it a bit of an edge as to what you can do with your life.

Brian Smith  46:07  
Yeah, I think again, kind of like we were talking about pain earlier, mortality is a very important part of our experience here, knowing that because if you think about the things that we have an infinite amounts we take for granted. We don't air water. We, we take it for granted. But the fact that we know that our lives are limited does make those those moments more precious. So that's, that's something you want to hold on to. But I do want to talk more about beyond sex and suit because I think it's really important that you know, it's great that you had this this healing story, and your first book buy in from the from the brain tumor. But what if we could prevent that? What if we could prevent the disease and you talked about that in a little bit. So talk why it's so important to, to read beyond sex and soup before you get sick.

Anna Parkinson  46:57  
Because we make ourselves miserable all the time. We make ourselves miserable. We we, for example, we suffer terribly from anxiety, a lot of us, anxiety is an invention, we have invented something that hasn't happened yet. And decided that it's it's a reality. And the more that we respond to that reality, the more our physical body goes, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Because we're sending down signals. We're like the bus of the spaceship. And we're sending down signals to this brilliant machine that we're in charge of, which is our physical body. And, you know, I mean, personally, I only have to watch a horror movie on the television for my body to go into a tailspin. Because, for me, it's a reality, and I'm there, but people, we create our own horror movies all the time. So that's one thing, we make ourselves miserable. And we really, really don't need to. The second thing is that we have this capacity, through a sensitivity through our imagination, to be in touch with the energy that we are a part of the energy that we take for granted. The air, the earth, you know, the sky, the the growth of trees, that is, in itself, a very physically energizing component. And yet, we block ourselves off from our environment, by considering that emotions that we experience are someone else's fault, or someone else's responsibility. And that can get to a very extreme place where, you know, we don't talk to our sister because she has done something wrong. And we don't think that we are any part of this exchange, or, or, you know, we feel oppressed by our boss, and, you know, we're infinitely, our creativity is more and more suppressed. So we don't kind of ride on this wave of exchange, which is actually essential to our being, it's essential to our creativity and our communication. So these are kind of nuggets of feeling disconnected. And actually, it's like, if we can just pick up on our negative emotions and look at the roots of them, we discover that we have the ability to turn the switch. So where we feel anxious, we can look at the roots of that which obviously I tried to explain in beyond sex and soup. Hmm. And and we can then use our energy, our imagination, to reverse damage that we may have felt that we've carried with us for a long time. Because the exercises that I discuss are really exercises of the imagination, their positive imagination, if you like, as opposed to negative imagination, which is what anxiety is. And, and it has a physical effect, your body will respond in in just as much of a positive way, as it responds negatively to your negative imagination.

Brian Smith  50:42  
That's an excellent point. And I don't think I've ever heard it put that way before that anxiety is really a a product of our imagination. And we do have, our imaginations are very powerful. They're very, that I've heard people say, like, our brain reacts to like imagining something the way it does, something actually happens. You mentioned a horror movie, we have physical reactions, we're watching a horror movie, our palms get sweaty, our heart starts racing, you know, et cetera. And we don't usually think about what if we flip that around? What if we use that imagination for positive thing, so I love I love the exercise you're talking about there.

Anna Parkinson  51:18  
And, and we live in an amazing age of communication. Fantastic, that's great. But don't forget how much negative stuff comes to you on that wave of communication, masses and masses of daily blast, you know, and it can be hard to resist. I mean, I have felt physically depressed by the war in Ukraine and my powerlessness to do anything about it. And yet, even that, which is such a negative experience, helps us to see, yeah, this is true that people will always behave badly, they will always behave badly, you cannot wave a wand and and take away that free will, if you like. But it's how you respond to that. And one of the things that that distant drama, should tell us to do is to focus on what is in front of us what is what is good about the life that we have, and focus on that. And then do what you can, I mean, this level that we can do, except maybe, you know, give shelter or money or whatever is required of us, but we're not participants in that drama. But we do have to soak it up and deal with it.

Brian Smith  52:44  
Yeah. Wow, that's so powerful. Because, you know, the war in Ukraine COVID, we've all we've gone through these these things. And those are the big things. But I think about something small that just happened last night. You know, Will Smith smacked Chris Rock on the Oscars. And I was on my way to bed when it happened. I just, I saw it come across the internet. And I realized I was trying to go to sleep and I was upset about it. And it's like, this does not involve me at all. But it's that you said that mass communication. That's something that happens in Hollywood, 3000 miles for me, impacted my mood is I was trying to go to sleep last night. And then on Facebook this morning, that's all anybody was talking about. So the this this mat, this communication thing can cut both ways.

Anna Parkinson  53:30  
Interestingly, I hear if more 1000s of miles away, they they were talking about it on the news at lunchtime, and I can't remember where it is. But he said oh this is all in Will Smith autobiography. He said that he said in his autobiography, he says that he is the facade of the you know, the smiley, avuncular man, if you like, is an act inside he has so much anger and frustration because when he was a child, he felt he couldn't protect his mother from from an abusive father. And, and yeah, dead, right. It's all in his autobiography. And if, if one was, I'm not gonna tell Will Smith what we should do. But if one was in a similar position, and you were carrying that anger, but anger is really harming your creativity, it's harming your joy. And you have the capacity. And if if you want to live a joyous creative life, the duty to to deal with that anger, let it go. But you can only do that with your brilliant conscious mind. Right? I will tell you to do it. I can show you how to do it. I can't tell you to do

Brian Smith  54:51  
it. Exactly. And that's what I love about your book because we don't teach this. I'm actually working on a coaching thing right now. has a lot of intelligence, positive, positive caution to, to start teaching people these techniques on how to control your own mind. Buddhism does a great job of this. And we don't we don't teach that. In the Western world, we teach science, we teach math, we tell kids go out and become engineers, and you know, all this kind of stuff. But we don't teach how to go in our inner world and really start to control that. So that's why your book I think, is so important for people to understand. First of all, you can have an influence on your emotions, I'm not gonna say you can control your emotion, but you can have an influence on it. You can, you can choose the way you look at things and to not identify with like, Oh, I'm angry, or I'm sad, or I'm this or I'm that No, I feel anger, you know, it's even changing that language can be helpful.

Anna Parkinson  55:47  
Well, actually, you find so for me, anger is really fascinating. I've dealt with quite a lot of anger myself. And coming back to the theme of your podcast, when I got sick, when I got seriously life threatening me, Ill, I, I realized I had to get rid of this anger because I needed my energy to heal myself. And the first thing I had to deal with was extraneous emotion that really, you know, I was taking up too much energy. So I did a lot of work on anger and transformed the relationship with the person that it was. Because I think that anger is simply it's like, it's like a tug of war. It's a tug of war with whoever it is that makes you angry. And and so long as you hold on to your anger, you're continuing that game, that tug of war. And if you take responsibility for the anger, if you can say, Okay, you make me really angry. What is it in me, that allows you to make me really angry. And if you can find that, you can let that go. You can't let the other person go. You can't change the way they behave. But you can, if you can find the thing that allows them if you like to get their hooks into you, you can let that go. You have huge power there. And as soon as you do you know what? They don't get their hooks into you anymore. It's like having a tug of war with the other person. You let go the rope they fall over?

Brian Smith  57:34  
Yeah, yeah, it might I saw, I saw that quote recently. That was great. It said, you know, your family knows how to how to push your buttons, because they're the they're the ones who installed them. And that that to me, just I love little memes like that, because it just comes up to me. I'm like, okay, don't let people push your buttons, but the ones that are closest to you. They know exactly where they are. They know exactly how to push them.

Anna Parkinson  57:58  
And isn't it interesting that the ones you're most angry with other people you love most?

Brian Smith  58:03  
Absolutely. Yeah. It is interesting. I want to ask, I understand you interviewed the Dalai Lama once. And he said something to you about multiple or more than one reality. So tell me about that.

Anna Parkinson  58:16  
Yeah, that was that was very, this was really right. It was a long time ago. And I was a very young BBC reporter. And I heard that the Dalai Lama was going to be in Ladakh, where I happen to want to go anyway, right up in the Himalayas, the North of India. And so I said, I'm going and, and I said to my bosses at the BBC, I said, I'm going to do an interview with the Dalai Lama. Well, actually, I got there, and it was kind of chaotic. And the whole country was so excited about the Dalai Lama coming. And eventually I wound up in this tiny little room with about 20,000 monks, with airline armor, sitting calmly in the corner. I'm the only chair in the room. And me and two other reporters. And we were just was the fans wearing, we were just all asking our questions. So excuse me, I asked a political question. And, in retrospect, it seemed like so cheeky. I said, so. What if you did get back to Tibet? What makes you think that you know, the Tibetans would be happy to see you because they've grown up this new generation completely under Chinese rule, and maybe they don't want the old Tibetan way? And he said, he said, when you're young, you see with one eye, and here with one ear, and when you're older, you see with two eyes and you hear with two ears. So I thought, Oh, what am I gonna do with this? So what am my boss is gonna think of this? Anyway, I took it back and replay the interview. And, you know, he wasn't, if you like the world superstar them that he is now. And years later, when I was writing my healing, the first healing book change your mind heals your body. I listened to this again, and I thought, Oh, my goodness, I understand what he was talking about. And I have, as I said to you, at the beginning of our chat, I said, you know, I looked at the book that I had been writing my first book, and I saw how Yes, it was one thing. But it was also a whole other thing, which was my emotional history as well. And that was the other eye if you like the other ear. And I, when I came to write beyond section soup, I thought, you know, it is very curious that the very first symptom of the brain tumor that I had was double vision. And now I'm writing a book where I'm actively saying, what you need is double vision on your life. It's not just as it appears to be. It's, it's the other eye that you need to bring to, to what you see and what you experience.

Brian Smith  1:01:25  
Wow. Wow, that was that's great. I'm glad to ask your question. That was a great answer. That's, that's amazing. Oh, Anna, we're coming to the end of our time, I want to give you an opportunity to say anything, any last thing you'd like to say to the audience about yourself or your book or anything else.

Anna Parkinson  1:01:41  
Okay. Well, all I would say is that I love healing. I love writing. And I love teaching. And I have in the last year, started to teach the principles of healing and self healing. So I do have an online course, a couple of online courses actually coming up, I've got one that starts on April, the third. And of course, this wonderful world of communication that we're in, enables people to participate in that wherever they are. So I hope that if you're interested, you'll not only get the book, maybe write me a review, if you'd like to. But also have a look on my website, look for these online courses. And I hope to see you there.

Brian Smith  1:02:29  
Awesome. So go ahead and give your website again, make sure people have I know I said at the beginning, but I also want to give it at the end. Okay, so

Anna Parkinson  1:02:36  
it's www dot Ana parkinson.com. And on there, you'll get some guided meditations which you can try out for free, some description of healings and talk about my other books, and also under events, the workshops that are coming up.

Brian Smith  1:02:57  
Awesome, and it's been really great many thanks for spending your time with me today.

Anna Parkinson  1:03:02  
I've really enjoyed it. Bye. I'm really happy to talk to you.

Brian Smith  1:03:06  
Have a great rest of your day. You too. Don't forget to like hit that big red subscribe button and click the notify Bell. Thanks for being here.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai