The Secret Strategy Behind Healing & Awakening

What if real healing wasn’t a single breakthrough, but a developmental process that unfolds over time?

In this episode, we reveal the hidden structure behind deep transformation—what truly shifts beneath the surface when we heal, grow, and awaken. You’ll learn why sustainable change matters more than fleeting peak experiences, how energy healing interfaces with the subconscious, and what it really means to change your baseline.

The talk includes both Keith Parker and Christabel Armsden.

This is a foundational episode for anyone on a path of conscious growth. Whether you’re new to the healing journey or guiding others, you’ll come away with a deeper understanding of how transformation really works.

Transcript

Welcome to The Future of Wellness,

Exploring self-transformation and holistic healing to unlock your inner potential.

Hosted by Christabel Armstrong and Keith Parker.

I'm really excited to talk about this subject,

And that is how sustainable healing actually happens.

We could call it the secret strategy behind awakening,

Behind healing,

And how we can understand it through the lens of developmental directions of growth and why sustainable practices matter more or at least equal to the peak experiences that tend to attract us to this whole process.

You'll learn how shifting your operational baseline actually happens and what your operational baseline is,

How energy healing fits into the mix with all of this.

This is a bird's eye view and I think you're going to love it.

When you think of healing,

What comes to mind?

A sudden breakthrough?

A miracle moment?

We're diving into what we're calling the transformational process.

This is something that we often do in the longer EHT training.

We focus on this at the very beginning to give a sense of what does change really look like?

Many people are interested in the prize,

The carrot.

The words that attract us are the goals in a sense.

Things like freedom,

Self-empowerment,

Embodied presence,

Empowered will and choice.

Did these sound good?

How about increased ability to be of service to others?

Then we get into the realms of mystical experience,

Awakening experiences,

Extrasensory perceptual abilities.

We get traditional enlightenment concepts like ending one's suffering,

Realizing one's true nature or something across really the human spectrum which is actualizing one's potential.

Is there anybody walking around who doesn't want some of what I just described?

These are the carrots.

We should understand the carrots.

We should lean into the desire of the carrot,

But we have to understand the process of getting there and not go in a naive way,

Not go in an immature way,

But understand what exactly is going to get us there in a sustainable way.

There are two primary directions in which we need to grow.

Field Dynamics and the EHT program really focuses on both of these simultaneously.

It's really important.

I'd like to make a nod here to Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology.

We can look at things as two developmental directions,

One being vertical,

The other being horizontal.

Vertical development is what is sometimes referred to as state development,

Meaning how do we access the present moment?

Think verticality,

Think central channel,

Think spine,

Think where the chakras go as you move up them.

You're leaning into that verticality.

In a sense,

Verticality is about not being horizontal.

Verticality is about interfacing with the infinite,

The present moment,

The eternal,

The stillness.

Practices that develop this are pretty much stemming from the meditation traditions.

What is it like to actually break through to the profound eternal present moment?

This is vertical development.

This is a really important component to the development.

It's essentially moving us out of time,

Out of the narrative.

In contrast,

There's horizontal development where we need to engage with the narrative.

We need to engage with the story.

As opposed to state development,

This is often known as stage development,

The stages of life,

The stages of maturation.

Horizontal development,

Temporal,

Time-based,

Narrative-based development is when we work through the issues,

The identities that do pertain to our sense of time,

Resolving the past and the future.

Practices here can be extremely varied.

Whatever really floats your boat,

Psychotherapy,

Hypnosis,

Energy work,

Body work,

Journaling,

Shamanic journaling,

Nature immersion,

Whatever it is that resonates with you,

That enables you to engage with and ultimately dismantle,

Disentangle the narrative that our egos attach to and get fixated on regarding our story,

Means processing all that stuff.

Vertical and horizontal development are not entirely separate.

Just working with stillness and meditation will induce an engagement with the things that you are stuck in,

In time.

Working horizontally,

Working with your narrative in order to get deeper into the narrative and in order to access and actually heal and transform the stories that we tell ourselves and the identity fixation connected to that,

We have to actually become a better observer,

A more neutral and stable witness.

They go hand-in-hand in a sense,

But they are two things that are very helpful to demarcate.

We feel it's very important to understand this map at the same time.

One is the personal,

One is the transpersonal.

One is the horizontal,

One is the vertical.

One is in time,

One is out of time.

Now an amazing,

Amazing revelation on my journey was that the most profound,

The most important,

The deepest work that I was doing shared one commonality,

And that was whatever I did that enabled me to access my subconscious was the key.

And when I realized that pattern,

I always tried to find a way to deep dive into that subconscious terrain.

There is a certain term,

Depth healing or depth psychology,

Works with the subconscious mind.

Probably the most famous psychologist in history related to this is Jung.

Fundamentally,

Depth healing is defined as methodologies which work with the subconscious mind.

So I'm going to give you some examples of some unsustainable and some sustainable versions of this because if you're going to go and access depth,

Sometimes things are not sustainable.

For example,

Going on a retreat is a wonderful thing regardless of the structure of the retreat.

The idea of immersion,

The idea of leaving what's familiar,

But you can't be on retreat forever.

Psychedelics and working with power plants and shamanic traditions is another way to access depth fast,

But it's not sustainable.

Fasting is yet another unsustainable practice which does engage the subconscious mind.

Many spiritual traditions have used fasting as a way to access the emotions and the psyche by simplifying what the body is having to metabolize.

This is an unsustainable,

Effective way to get at depth.

Yet another is intense experience.

Really anything that pushes the envelope and brings up significant intensity potentially starts to push us into accessing components of the system,

Of the subconscious mind,

Which are not readily available in other circumstances.

Those are all unsustainable.

They're great.

They're specific to each individual.

If there is resonance with you,

Of course,

It's not a complete list.

Those are ways of getting at depth.

Now,

Sustainable practices are different.

Sustainable means you could be doing this every single day.

This we suggest,

Strongly suggest,

Is a baseline,

Is a thing to figure out what's your technique,

What's your way,

What's your path that enables you to have your inner laboratory accessible to you every day,

That you go into that inner space,

That you do some work,

That you make headway,

That you make advances,

And then you're able to integrate that work the next day.

Unsustainable practices don't do that.

The nature of the unsustainable ones is that whatever depth they reveal usually takes a long time to integrate.

Sustainable practices are short-term integration,

So you can step forward with them every single day.

This is what you want to equip yourself with as a primary.

Meditation is a wonderful,

Sustainable practice that does eventually lead to depth.

Initially,

Meditation may not come across that way,

But if you have a sustained meditation practice,

It will very slowly go from the shallow end to the deep end.

Energy healing is a wonderful,

Sustainable depth healing practice.

This is what we specialize in.

I highly recommend energy healing.

Energy healing,

The way we do it at Field Dynamics,

Is like taking meditation and adding an accelerant,

Adding a component of catalysis that really brings another level of engagement.

This is why energy healing is so accelerated.

Dream work is a great way to get at depth because you're working explicitly with the subconscious mind,

The realm of symbols and imagery.

Journaling can be a really good,

Sustainable practice,

Kind of expressing ourselves,

Reflecting ourselves,

And then reading that back and being able to extract or understand some of the deeper patterns.

General expression,

Art,

Creativity can be a great way to look at the subconscious mind.

And yet another is diet.

In opposition to fasting,

Which is extreme,

Modifications to the diet are ways of having a sustainable practice,

Which in the long run reveals more of the subconscious mind.

A simple example of that is the yogic tradition in which they recommend,

You might say it's through Ayurveda or the yogis in general,

A sattvic diet.

In the long run,

Balance wins the race.

This word,

I can't emphasize enough,

Balance,

Balance,

Balance.

Balance over extremes.

Sustainable practices that I'm describing are all about balance.

And balance seems bland.

Think of it as a tightrope,

Walking life on a tightrope.

Balance is the most important skill there.

With a balanced,

Sustainable practice,

You can take a step forward every day.

You can appropriately integrate what changes at a rate of transformation that is digestible.

So let's look at this in terms of what does change look like over time.

This is a great way of understanding rates of change.

So we start with an operational baseline.

An operational baseline is like,

What is your norm today?

How does your system function?

Mind,

Body,

Emotions.

And we have a baseline.

Gradual change can be hard to see because it works in incremental shifts.

So when we think of change and we have this allure to the extremes,

But how can we see that a lot is happening when we go to these more incremental shifts?

So let's just say you had a sustainable practice that makes a 0.

1% change in your system,

Right?

Let's just think of it in statistics,

A 0.

1% change.

Do you think you can notice what 0.

1% change differences in you in a given day?

The answer is no.

Not so perceptible.

But let's just say your meditation practice,

Your energy healing practice,

Changes at 0.

1% per day.

Now if you do that for 100 days,

For a bit over three months,

You'll have changed 10%.

10% in three and a half months.

Do you think you can notice 10%?

The answer is yes.

You will notice 10%.

And when it comes to extrasensory perception and sensing energy,

One of the things that we notice working with people is that day to day in an energy healing practice,

People's sensing doesn't necessarily sharpen on a day to day basis to the degree that they can notice.

But when we check in three months into a training and we say,

How is your sensing now compared to when we started,

People really notice the difference.

And that's because it is this 10,

20,

30% change.

So just at a rate of 0.

1% in 100 days,

It's 10%.

That means in a year,

It's about 30 something percent.

That's a big difference.

You want 100%?

Try 1,

000 days.

0.

1% every day for 1,

000 days,

Which is just under three years,

Is 100%.

Think about that over time.

This is really a mature way of understanding what change actually looks like.

And I think a three year umbrella is a great timeline to consider.

Yes,

You have weekly.

Yes,

You have monthly.

And seasonally.

And annually.

When you stretch into a year,

Two years,

Three years,

And you make this kind of change,

What is it like to look back at yourself and say,

I barely recognize my former self?

This is what happens when people undergo real sustainable inner work.

They don't recognize their former selves.

They change so much,

They keep regenerating themselves in a different way.

That at a certain point,

You go,

Who was that former self?

What were those behaviors?

What was that way of thinking?

What was that state of health?

What was that way of relating to the world that I no longer recognize?

I'm not that person anymore.

This is a wonderful map to understand how change happens.

Let's bring things full circle.

We do want the carrot.

It's exciting.

We need a carrot.

Let's use an analogy of chopping down a tree.

You have your sustainable practice.

You meditate every day.

You practice energy work every day.

You create abstract art or journal or reflect on yourself every day,

And you keep going deeper into yourself in one way or another.

You take the ax,

You try and chop down the tree.

You swing the ax,

It looks the same every day.

It's a big tree.

After a thousand days of swinging the ax the same way and having incremental change all along the way,

What happens?

You swing the ax,

It's the same as the 999 times before it,

And boom,

The tree starts to fall down.

The peak experience is induced.

This is very often what happens with peak experiences,

With mystical experience,

With major transformational events.

We maintain a commitment,

A dedication,

And a determination,

A perseverance towards a particular goal,

And iteration brings us into that transformational experience.

We don't know when that's going to happen.

There is no set rule or map for any individual,

But what we can do is invest in ourselves in a sustainable way.

In a sense,

Real healing isn't about chasing moments.

It's about dedicating ourselves to what's ordinary,

To the day,

To something that makes a difference here and now that I can take with me tomorrow.

When your baseline shifts,

Your life is shifting.

That's the heart of the transformational process.

Sustainable practices are ways to anchor yourself in something that becomes your primary inner laboratory.

Thanks for listening.