Questions and Answers about PNE
an Interview by Healings and Judith Johnson
Healings:
Your work helps a person re-establish a healthy energy flow when it has been blocked by any stressful or traumatic life experience, be it recent or from years ago. But you start with the body, not the emotions or thoughts. Explain that.
Judith:
Energy can be blocked by any sort of extreme stress—emotional, physical, spiritual, or in the area of thoughts and beliefs. The work I do accesses all of these levels, in a comprehensive way, not just one or two. That makes it very integrative. It does this by going through the inroads of the nervous system and the body. This is what distinguishes my work. One of my mentors, Dr. Peter Levine, has studied stress and trauma for thirty-five years, and done incredible research on how the nervous system in the body deals with it. He says that traumatic symptoms are not caused by traumatic events, but rather from the lack of release or processing of the intense energy that is mobilized to meet such extreme events. Watch a deer face danger by freezing. When the danger has passed, the deer’s body will tremble, then it will run off. The trembling is the release of all the mobilized energy.
Instinctually, we have the same mechanism. If we’re suddenly very frightened, the body will first freeze, then tremble to release the mobilized energy. But if that frozen energy is not released, it gets locked in. It is that trapped energy that can disease our minds and bodies. My work bridges Dr. Levine’s studies in understanding the nervous system’s inroads, with my study of physical pressure points, their relation with organs and glands, and their connection with spirit, emotions and thoughts and erroneous belief systems.
Healings:
But why not start with the mind or emotions, as in traditional therapies?
Judith:
The nervous system is like a matrix. The body has a way of “knowing” the pathway to blocked energy, if we know how to listen to its messages. It can be the direct inroad to the truth of the heart, the spiritual heart, the source of our deepest personal truth. Often the mind and emotions are not in alignment with this knowing. They can give you a range of thoughts and feelings that is incredibly broad and can actually be part of the defense mechanism working to maintain the block of energy caused by the traumatic event!
The sequence I try to establish is to connect the body directly to the heart’s truth, then to align the emotions, and finally the thoughts. Processing energy through the nervous system and body first, then through that accessing emotions and thoughts, is very different from processing it through the mind and emotions directly. I’m looking to help create a true consciousness shift, an energy shift at the deepest levels, where healing and healthy change is inevitable, and permanent.
My own interest in this kind of healing came from an incident involving my son. He was 5 or 6 at the time and was dyslexic and was having a hard time reading, and walked with a limp from a turned-in foot. I was holding a point on his foot. Suddenly he started crying, “the bees are coming,” and I remembered that when he was 3 he had come running into the house crying and looking like a ghost, and falling limp in my arms when I picked him up, like the life force had gone out of him. He was so traumatized that he went into shock. So, as I worked on that point on his foot, some 6 years later, his mind went back to that place, cried out “the bees are coming,” and his body started trembling, sweating, and shaking. I didn’t understand it then, but his body was releasing energy held in for those years, and naturally going back into balance. He was doing the trembling he couldn’t do then. Within days he was starting to read normally and walking without a limp. Of course, I wanted to better understand what had happened and why holding that point on his foot had caused that release and so began my study.
Healing:
There seem to be many techniques evolving which seek to do “energetic clearing” or “energetic healing.” I see the term used more and more. Is using the nervous system as an inroad what makes your methods unique?
Judith:
Yes, that, and another thing. Many systems do the clearing and releasing of energy for a person, from the outside to the inside, for example, someone clearing your auric field. I’m trying to help a person find that pathway into his or her own body and heart to access their own inner healing forces. As that mechanism is rejuvenated within, healing returns to being a natural process within that person. We’re working to bring healing to the “inner healer,” so to speak, helping the client go inside through his own nervous system, his own sensations, and finding that matrix to clear his own energy. By opening and strengthening that inroad within, he can then access that healing power for himself. When he can link his physical symptoms and pains to suppressed sensations, emotions and thoughts, that will lead him to shifting that pain and releasing a healing vortex of energy to replace the trauma pattern, with all its physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral symptoms.
Healings:
It sounds like the distinction between having the doctor give you a pill to address an illness, as opposed to strengthening the immune system to release its capacity to fight off the illness. But does getting to the heart of the blockage mean we have to re-experience the trauma that set up the pattern in the first place? That doesn’t sound very appealing.
Judith:
When we experience pain in the body, we know there’s something out of alignment. It can come from genetic programming, from a misbelief arising out of a traumatic incident, or because of cultural programming. The body will take us to the program that created the pain in the first place, where we were out of alignment with our true nature, which is health and happiness. Once a reactive pattern has become established, it can be re-experienced a thousand different times a thousand different ways. You can go to any one of those times and get to the pattern through the nervous system. Once you experience the full nature of the sensations, emotions, words and thoughts, the possibility of a consciousness shift becomes available. You have to get to the limited belief system that caused the body to go out of alignment in the first place. It may not be necessary for you to experience the original source of that pattern.
We work with nutrition, too. As the nervous system is the inroad, we want it to be a clean, healthy “highway,” so the inner healing energy can flow well through it. Also, food intake is often part of the suppression pattern. Eating foods that don’t energize is a way to maintain the familiar, comfortable feeling of stuckness carried for countless years. And to avoid having to face the unknown, to suppress the energy, keep the trauma down. Similarly, any addiction—alcohol, drugs, anger, relationship addictions—all act to suppress the energy.
Healings:
Why would an individual choose to maintain a state of unhealth, choose to suppress energy in such distress-causing ways?
Judith:
For one, they often don’t know what overall health feels like, they don’t know the difference. Like a fish in water, it’s what they assume is all there is. In that sense, they don’t have a choice. And secondly, for those who know there’s something not right about all this, they just don’t know what options are out there. Most are still in the old paradigm of doctors for the body ailments, traditional therapists for the emotional and mental conflicts.
Integrative healing approaches that address the matrix of mind, body, and spirit at its core are very new. But in fifty years it will probably be the norm. Just 20 to 30 years ago, things like massage therapy and acupuncture were hardly accepted in the health community. Now they’re mainstream. I see the heart as our “spiritual brain,” so to speak. It gives us our connection to who we really are, to our path, to God, to our peace within ourselves. That’s what we’re all really looking for in life—connection with God and Love, and our healthy ability to handle our lives, our power. That’s the energy of life.
Any trauma, any stress, any conflict, takes us away from all that, because it causes the body to contract and constrict, causes the energy to be blocked, and leaves our consciousness separated from that heart energy. Our connection to heart, to God, to Love becomes broken. That’s why war, conflict, hatred, fear, and all the pain, disease and misery that results—these are all causes and effects of this pattern of separation. For example, many people’s heart disease can be traced to when they decided to shut their heart down, to close it, to stop the flow of love. Usually, when I work with the points around the heart, it will take them, through the nervous system to that place where they hold that memory, that thought, that decision to close the heart, to stop the flow of love. Fear and love are antithetical. When the Love connection is lost within, spiritual, emotional, mental and physical disease result.
I worked with a boy whose physical growth was stunted. During a session we accessed, through the body, a recall. He was 5 years old, his father was dying, and said to the boy, “You’ve got to be the ‘little man’ around here from now on.” So, he became the “little” man and froze there. Because he locked in that message, his body just couldn’t grow normally. It stayed locked. Probably the energy of that moment was too much for him to release as it came up, so he locked it in. It stunted his growth. After the session, we measured him. He was several inches taller, from his body unwinding that constriction. Some would call this a miracle. To me it’s just restoring one’s energy flow to its normalcy and health. We all have that within us.
Judith Johnson is the creator of the healing system called PsychoNeuroEnergetic PNE.. She lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and is offering workshops trainings and private sessions around the country.