Reiki from the Farm™
Reiki from the Farm™
Reiki and DNA - with Dr. Martha Lacy, MD
Our guest, Martha Lacy, M.D. is a physician and Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN and is also an Usui/Holy Fire® III and Karuna Reiki® Master. Dr. Lacy discusses epigenetics and how we can alter our DNA expression.
The meditation that follows allows us to change the expression of our DNA, impacting things like Type 2 diabetes, Irritable bowel syndrome, auto-immune disease, emotional states and more. Please join us!
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email: pam@hiddenbrook.ca
Dr. Lacy's information
email: healinglightbridge@gmail.com
website: https://www.healinglightbridge.com/
Reiki Can Heal by modifying Gene Expression article
The Wisdom of the Grandmothers article
Meditation music Licensed from: Nate Miller https://www.emanate7.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/user/Emanate7
thank you to Music from Pixabay for the intro music
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Pam: on this week's podcast, I am talking with Martha Lacy [00:01:00] about Reiki, medicine and our DNA. Welcome Martha.
Dr. Lacy: Thank you Pam for having me.
Pam: It's my pleasure, and I'm so excited to introduce you to everyone else. Before we begin, though, I just want to let the listeners know that I've got some classes coming up in Australian Eastern daylight time, March 14th to 27th, I have a Reiki level one and two class, a Reiki masterclass, a Karuna Reiki class and an animal Reiki class.
And for those in North America, those are actually evening classes and the classes are broken up into six hour days. So that might be a really nice way to experience the energy. I invite you to join us. I also have level one and two, masters, animal Reiki and animal communication coming up May 3rd to 10th in the Atlantic time zone.
And that will be [00:02:00] followed May 17th to 19th by a Holy fire III Karuna Reiki class. So please head over to our website, www.hiddenbrook.ca to sign up for our newsletter and receive notifications of our classes and podcasts, or to check out our classes. And before I introduce you to Martha, I just like to begin with a brief invocation.
I'd just like to invite you all to close your eyes. Take a deep breath and bring your hands into gassho with the thumbs at the heart, prayer position and activate your Reiki energy.
If you have symbols. Go ahead and invite them to join you today.
Breathe in the light of Reiki. As it flows through you and around you.
[00:03:00] And it assists you with whatever you're going through today.
And it helps you pick up the parts of this podcast that are important for you to hear and understand to listen.
And in fact, it may improve your ability to listen to the Reiki energy, listen to yourself and your own intuition, and to listen to your body, connecting your body, your mind, your soul and your spirit.
Is there anything you'd like to add, Martha?
Dr. Lacy: Thank you for inviting me.
Pam: Thanks so much. Aho, Namaste and Amen
Friends. I'd like to introduce you to Martha. Martha is an MD, a physician, and a professor of medicine at the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She's also a board certified hematologist and her practice focuses on blood cancers, [00:04:00] including multiple myeloma and bone marrow transplant.
Dr. Lacey is also a Usui, Holy fire III Reiki master and a registered Holy fire, three Karuna Reiki master. I am so thankful that you're here today with us, Martha. Thank you.
Dr. Lacy: Thank you for inviting me.
Pam: I had to invite you Martha, after I read your wonderful article on epigenetics and the Reiki news magazine. And I'll let the listeners know that we will have a link to that article in the podcast description. And then you followed that up with another article about how we could use our mitochondrial DNA in order to connect with the wisdom of the grandmothers, our ancestral history. So tell me, how does a medical doctor and not just a doctor, but a professor, a teacher.
How did you find Reiki [00:05:00] or how did it find you?
Dr. Lacy: It is an unusual path and I actually found Reiki because I got interested in shamanism and I was drawn to that actually by a patient on the bone marrow transplant unit of quite a few years ago, there was a, a patient who is undergoing a STEM cell transplant. And we started visiting one day and he was all about getting into shamanism and he was staying at a house we have for transplant patients called "the gift of life house".
And he was finding power animals for all of the other patients that were also undergoing a STEM cell transplant. And I was fascinated. So I started studying it and then a few years into studying shamanism, I had heard about Reiki from many shamanic practitioners and I thought, "Oh, I better learn about Reiki [00:06:00] because I think it'll enhance this shamanism for me."
But then I just became fascinated with Reiki in and of its own. Because it's, it's just so powerful and simple and graceful.
Pam: That's a beautiful description.
Dr. Lacy: I spent many years learning a lot of techniques in shamanism and lots of steps and ceremonies and processes. And yet Reiki can just simply and gracefully do a lot of the same things.
And I've also found that combining shamanic journey techniques with Reiki to be a particularly powerful way to use it.
Pam: I too studied shamanism before I or maybe it was even after I began my Reiki journey. And I have always been guided to combine them as well and find them incredibly powerful together.
So tell me, Martha, how does Reiki [00:07:00] come together in your medical practice? And I know you're a researcher. I know you, you teach fellows. How does Reiki come together with that for you?
Dr. Lacy: Yeah. I work at a large academic medical center. And we have a fellowship for hematology, oncology fellows.
So that would be board certified internists who are studying to specialize in cancer. And so I work in blood cancers and I've found ways to bring the Reiki into the practice. When I was studying shamanism, I was very shy about letting any of my fellow medical people know that I was even interested in that I couldn't imagine walking into the male clinic with my drums.
Pam: I was just picturing you with a rattle, as soon as you said that.
Dr. Lacy: But [00:08:00] Reiki, I think is more of a gateway woowoo,
Pam: it's a little quieter.
Dr. Lacy: Things like acupuncture have become really fairly accepted within traditional medicine and Reiki can be explained to my medical colleagues by saying it's working with the same energy system that acupuncture works with. Chi in Chinese is the same as Ki in Japanese.
Pam: Exactly.
Dr. Lacy: It's easier for them to understand that concept?
Pam: Definitely. Yes. Did you find there was any resistance, Martha, when you. When you came out about Reiki?
Dr. Lacy: I put my toe in the water with nurses and nurse practitioners first, before I ever mentioned it to any of the physicians. I've found that nurses are very accepting.
Yes. And actually when I first started. Doing Reiki after I got my Reiki one and two levels, [00:09:00] I found that there was a nurse practitioner who had organized Reiki volunteers at Mayo clinic. And also she had a clinical trial using Reiki in the oncology patients were on the inpatient unit. So I got involved with her clinical trial and then that gave me the idea to start my own trials in myeloma patients.
Pam: And you've got something that just started, do you not?
Dr. Lacy: Yes. One of our fellows and I wrote a trial using Reiki in patients with multiple myeloma. In order to get a uniform population. We restricted it to patients who were within six months of having their bone marrow transplant and were in remission.
And we'll be enrolling 30 patients and randomly assigning them to either no [00:10:00] intervention at all, or sham Reiki, or real Reiki We're having to do it distance Reiki over zoom. And the sham and distance arms will get it once a week for four weeks. And then we'll be taking blood at the beginning of the trial before they get any interventions and again, at the end of the trial to see if they have changes in their immune repertoires.
One of the recurring themes in patients with blood cancers is that they have limitation of the numbers and types of different immune cells they have. And we're hoping we can see that at the end of four weeks, our Reiki patients will have had more numerous numbers as well as an increase in the different types and improvement in their repertoires in their immune system cells.
Pam: And when we [00:11:00] just talked for a few minutes before we started recording and you shared that with me and I can't help, but think that's going to have huge implications if it turns out the way that you suspect it might. Just the fact that Reiki may have that impact on the immune system, that many of us who are practitioners are already aware of, but being able to record that in a medical study.
I think that's got huge reaching implications for Reiki and mainstream medicine. So thank you so much for undertaking this study, and I really hope that your clients that are participating in this study. I hope that they receive some of the wonderful and miraculous benefits of Reiki.
And so you've come out, you came out to nurses and noticed that I've taught a lot of nurses and as a matter of fact I'm not sure if it's like this in a lot of other jurisdictions, but here in new [00:12:00] Brunswick, the nurses union actually reimburses my students 100% for the Reiki classes, they submit their their receipts and at the end of the year, they are reimbursed for any classes they take. So it is so encouraging to see that in mainstream medical. How did your colleagues your physician colleagues how did they find it?
Dr. Lacy: The younger generation of physicians is actually very open to it. And even the ones that are my age and older, I think are at least understanding that it sh that we should be studying it. I think there's an openness to it now that was not present five or 10 years ago. And I think people are curious about it.
If we find good preliminary data [00:13:00] in this small trial we're doing, we're hoping it will lead to longer term, larger studies that will prove more definitively where it belongs. I think part of what's intriguing about it is that cancer treatments in general have had a major shift towards immunotherapies where well, chemotherapy has not gone away.
More and more treatments are focused on drugs that intervene in the immune system. And we're finding ways to unleash the immune system to fight cancers. And Reiki would fit nicely into that if we can show that Reiki improves the immune repertoires.
Pam: Oh, my gosh. Yes. I, like I said, I realized this has an implication for cancer, but I also feel that your study has an implication in so many areas.
And so I can't wait to hear how [00:14:00] it turns out. It's incredible. I want to talk to you for a moment about epigenetics and because that was the article that you wrote, that first caught my eye and I found it stunning. I loved genetics in university, it was one of my favorite courses. I found it fascinating.
And so many of us feel that we're tied to our genetics or maybe even sometimes limited by our genetics. Just as a very simplistic example, everybody in my family has bad knees. So I just always assumed I would have bad knees and guess what? I had bad knees. But you mentioned that sometimes epigenetics is misunderstood. Can you tell us what it is?
Dr. Lacy: Sure. We all have 23 pairs of chromosomes and those are the DNA code we carry. And every cell in our [00:15:00] body has the identical 23 pairs of of chromosomes. And so you can't really change the genetics in your cells, but only a very small fraction of the DNA in chromosomes actually gets transcribed into proteins . And proteins being the building blocks of all of our cell machinery.
Pam: Yes.
Dr. Lacy: Epigenetics is really the science of learning what causes the genes to turn on and off when they do. The difference between a heart cell and a liver cell is which genes turned on and in what order they turned on and how long they stayed, turned on during embryonic development. And that is something that is happening every day in every cell in your body.
And that is very much open to [00:16:00] being intervened with and changed. So we all have the ability, I believe to influence how our genes are being turned on and off. And that's the science of epigenetics.
Pam: That's fascinating. And you also talked in your article about endogenous healing. What is that?
Dr. Lacy: Cells are all equipped with machinery that heals. There's enzymes that repair DNA and there's ways that our cells know our body knows which cells need to turn over. And when, and we replace all of the cells in our body every seven years and that's all through endogenous healing mechanisms.
And by that, Just inward. The body knows how to do it. It's something that you don't have to consciously think, Oh, it's time to turn over my skin cells today. Your body just does it.
Pam: Thank goodness. I would always forget that. I [00:17:00] believe in the article, you mentioned that you had done a journey and discovered that Reiki has the ability to intervene in this process. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Dr. Lacy: Yeah. I got most of the insights into this article when I was doing my Karuna Reiki class. And since you teach it, it's a series of different ignitions.
But the ignitions essentially are, are very similar to shamonic journeys. They're visionary States when you're getting attuned to the symbols and each one of those ignition processes over the course of the three days, picked up where the last one left off for me. And I saw in my mind's eye I dropped into the.
Drop down into my body at the cellular level. And I saw the symbols dropping in one at a [00:18:00] time. And they all looked like little musical conductors, and I could see the Reiki symbols, just telling the cells to start playing a different tune. And I was hearing beautiful etherial music in these ignitions.
And it just gave me the insight that, that the symbols act directly at the cellular level. And. I just knew, it was epigenetics because they were turning things on and off. But that was just because I have a medical background and could frame it in that way.
Pam: Exactly. That's incredible. And so can you tell us about the implications for that, Martha, what then is possible? Is it possible to alter the expression of the DNA that you were born with?
Dr. Lacy: I do believe it's [00:19:00] possible. I think by using Reiki, you can invite it in and through your intention, ask it to interact with you at a cellular level for your highest expression. And you don't actually need to tell it what to do, because I think Reiki is spiritually conscious life force energy, and the body is the seat of the subconscious mind.
It knows what it needs to do. And I think Reiki can interact with the cell machinery to turn on and off the processes that you need to do to heal the cells. But you can also use it to heal things that aren't cellular to heal things on an emotional or psychologic level as well.
Pam: Yes, it works on the mind, [00:20:00] body, emotions and spirit. Doesn't it. So I guess we can. Use it for any of that? You felt so strongly and you were guided to write a specific meditation about it, which we'll share with the listeners at the end of the podcast. But I actually sat down and immediately did the meditation that you recommended.
And I don't know. I just I feel really good. There's a lot of pain and things that decided to leave. And so it is I think that it was really really effective. And do you have any stories or any, anything that you've noticed around that?
Dr. Lacy: I mentioned that I got involved in a trial of using Reiki in hospital patients and yeah. One of them was undergoing a bone marrow transplant and he had a blood cancer and he had been through two other bone [00:21:00] marrow transplants before . And one of the nurse practitioners that I work with was also a Reiki master.
And this particular gentleman was very interested in alternative techniques. Yeah. And he was, facing his third transplant in just his mid thirties. And so we arrived at his bedside about the time the bone marrow got there. It was being flown in from Germany. And we were able to, between the two of us, give him a Reiki treatment in his hospital bed and also treat the bone marrow as it was going in.
Pam: Wow.
Dr. Lacy: And that was a very powerful experience for him. And he's now been in a remission now for going on two years, which is, I'm hoping it's [00:22:00] a permanent remission, but it's definitely impressive to me that he's doing this well. I don't know if it was because of Reiki, but I do know it was a very powerful afternoon for him and for other and for the nurse practitioner that I work with.
Pam: That's beautiful. So lovely that you could do that.
So you used epigenetics when you got your Corona virus vaccine, I think you mentioned.
Dr. Lacy: Yes. I had both shots and after I had the shots, I spent some time sending Reiki to the area where they had the injected, the vaccine and the vaccine works because it's MRNA, which gets translated by your cells, into the virus proteins.
And so I used the epigenetics Reiki meditation to improve the response to the [00:23:00] vaccine.
Pam: That is fantastic. Some great advice for our listeners as well. Thank you, Dr. Lacey.
Dr. Lacy: Yeah. As the vaccines roll out. It's a good little tip to imp, to think about. Do you get your shot? Yeah, definitely.
Pam: And you mentioned when we talked earlier that you regretted that you weren't going to be able to be a full-time Reiki practitioner, as some of us are able to be because of the other job that you have, but those two are now coming together for you. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Dr. Lacy: Yes. It's been one of the delights about coming out of the closet as a Reiki practitioner at work is it's opened a lot of doors for me and I recently been contacted by the nurse manager for the palliative medicine unit. And we've set up a time for me to teach Reiki one and two to all the palliative medicine nurses at work.
Pam: Wow.
Dr. Lacy: [00:24:00] I've also taught several of the nurses within hematology. That's my division. And I've also been teaching some of the residents and fellows. So I've now taught three MDs how to do Reiki.
Pam: Oh my gosh. That's fantastic, Martha.
Dr. Lacy: Yeah. It's really fun to see it being explored in a medical setting because like I say, I spent time at my Reiki workshops learning to do it and envying everyone who could do it full time thinking, Oh, I'm not a real Reiki practitioner until and make my living doing this. It's been really fun to bring it to my work.
Pam: Yes. Oh, definitely. It's funny because I teach a Reiki master mentor course, and the very first class talks about how not everyone needs to do Reiki full time. For many people, you chose a profession because you were [00:25:00] passionate about it and yeah maybe your passion is waned a little bit, but in essence, you were passionate about it and Reiki can blend with any profession. So I think it's blending beautifully with yours. It seems like.
Dr. Lacy: Actually, I am still passionate about my profession.
Pam: There you go. So it would be a shame to give that up and yeah, but for anybody listening, who's not...
Dr. Lacy: I do have to credit Reiki for helping me really manage the stress of my work though, because my job is very demanding and I look back and I think, gosh, now I'm much more excited and energized about work than I was even two or three years ago. And I think it's been because I've brought Reiki into my life and I'm bringing Reiki into work. And I think the Karuna Reiki especially made a huge difference in that for me.
Pam: Yeah. [00:26:00] I was going to mention that I, Karuna Reiki makes a huge difference period. Doesn't it?
Dr. Lacy: It does. And it's ways I didn't even realize it until I was getting ready for this podcast. And I was thinking back and realized, wow. I'm really not as I really do cope with stress a lot better now that I've had my Karuna Reiki training.
Pam: My husband he actually was on a podcast a few weekends ago, and I remember him saying to me, I'm already a Reiki master. Why would I need Karuna?
And I said you don't need it. It's if you would like it. But he decided to join the class because it was my very first online class that I was teaching. So I was a little bit nervous the very first time I taught online. But he was going to be home. It was during COVID, everybody was home. Anyway, it was going to be very easy for him to just do his work in the [00:27:00] evenings after class. Because his work schedule wasn't as demanding. And so he said "I might as well do it," but then he said it changed everything. He chants the symbols every day now, and he is more involved in his Reiki, but it does make such an incredible difference doesn't it?
Dr. Lacy: It does.
Pam: It does you also wrote an article about the grandmothers and how we can access the wisdom of the grandmother energy through the mitochondrial DNA? And I was so fascinated by that. I hadn't realized that mitochondrial DNA was only passed on through the mothers. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that article too Martha?
Dr. Lacy: Yes, it's, it's not strictly true that get half your DNA from mom and half from dad. You get just a little bit extra for mum.
Pam: I was [00:28:00] fascinated by that.
Dr. Lacy: Yeah, there's what we call mitochondrial DNA. And it's the mitochondrial are called the powerhouses of the cells. If anyone remembers high school biology, they talk about ADP and being converted to ATP, which is the fuel of the cells.
And that all happens in the mitochondria. But there's dNA, it occurs in little circles within the mitochondria. They think it might've actually been derived from bacterial plasmids originally eons ago. But because it's out in the cell, it doesn't get transmitted in when the sperm fertilizes an egg, it injects only the nuclear DNA.
And so any mitochondrial DNA is derived from the female line. And when I journeyed into inwardly, I stumbled on [00:29:00] this because I found myself talking to grandmothers from my maternal line, in the journey state. And they told me that there, that anyone can find them if they just journey to their mitochondrial, that's where they live.
And because everybody gets mitochondrial DNA, everybody inherits it. So it's not just something women can do. Men have mitochondrial DNA too. They just can't pass it on. So it's DNA that's been filtered through a feminine consciousness and has a feminine, energetic imprint going all the way back to the very beginning of your ancestry.
Pam: Unbelievable really. It makes me think. I remember I always had some gifts as a child, just being able to see forward in the future and stuff. And I felt a little bit uncomfortable with them. And I remember my grandmother [00:30:00] telling me, "Oh, don't worry about it, dear. All the women in our family are that way."
And it makes me think if that might have something to do with mitochondrial DNA. Yeah.
Very possibly.
It's very possible.
Dr. Lacy: And we actually have what, there's only something like 37 genes or something in mitochondrial DNA. And yet what it lacks in, in numbers of genes, it makes up in sheer copy number because every mitochondria has hundreds of these.
And so there's probably thousands of copies of mitochondrial DNA in every cell. Whereas there's only one nucleus.
Pam: It's incredible. Isn't it? It's incredible. We are sharing both of your articles as well as contact information for Martha, if anybody would like to get in touch with her in the podcast notes [00:31:00] and you actually included a beautiful meditation for anybody who wants to go into their mitochondrial DNA and talk with their grandmothers. And so I would encourage the listeners to go ahead and check that out if you would like and you've graciously Given us permission to go through and record the meditation for epigenetics.
So that is something that we can do today. We're going to go ahead into our meditation now. Was there anything you'd like the listeners to know Martha, before we do?
Dr. Lacy: Well, I think it's very important when you do this. If you want to make the most of the meditation to really be clear about an intention. If you have a particular health problem, for instance, bring it to mind and just ask the body to find what it [00:32:00] needs to do to help you with that health problem. In the article I suggested, if you have type two diabetes that's because the cells become less sensitive to insulin.
So you can use this meditation to ask your cells to be more sensitive. Or if you have an auto-immune disease you can ask yourselves to be more calm. Or if you have irritable bowel disease, you can ask to use this meditation to bring laughter and humor to the cells in your GI tract.
Pam: But that's brilliant and beautiful. I remember reading that and thinking, Oh my gosh this meditation is powerful. It can do a lot. I'm so grateful to you for writing the article and for sharing it with us.
So I'm just going to suggest to the listeners that you do that think for a moment of something in your life that could use to be healed. [00:33:00] And you mentioned that it works beyond the physical as well. So it may be emotional, mental. It may be something spiritual that needs to be healed in addition to something physical.
And so just get that in your mind and for anybody who is driving right now, I just would invite you to either pause the track or to pull off onto the side of the road so that you can be safe as you listen, because sometimes these meditations go right quite deep.
One of the things that Martha has said about this meditation is that she often does it systematically over each chakra, starting with her intentions, focused on the root chakra, and then using her intuition to tell her when to move to the sacral chakra and the solar plexus and so on. For [00:34:00] today's purposes, we're going to do the meditation for an overall issue, but please feel free to either record the meditation yourself or to listen to it and go through chakra by chakra with it if you're guided.
So I'm just going to invite you to sit comfortably. With your hands and gassho, which is the prayer position with your thumbs at your heart, and just concentrate on the space between your hands until you feel the Reiki energy beginning to flow.
Once the energy is flowing, you can place your hands comfortably on your body and you can go ahead and draw the Holy fire symbol or any other Reiki symbol [00:35:00] that you feel guided to - in front of you. And just hold that image in your mind's eye. As we begin our journey inward,
we're going to use the distance symbol to assist us in this journey. Through the distance symbol you can drop into your body now and go all the way in until you begin to see yourself as individual cells Invite the Reiki in with you, into the cells and whichever symbols you feel guided to use.
[00:36:00]And now you can set the intention to have Reiki use epigenetics and endogenous healing to restore health and vitality to whatever area of your life that you've chosen to work on today.
Allow the symbols, and the Reiki energy to interact with your cells. You don't need to direct this interaction. The symbols and your cells know what to do.
[00:37:00]Simply hold the intention and create the space for the process to unfold. And we're going to stay in this space for several moments.
[00:44:00] [00:43:00] [00:42:00] [00:41:00] [00:40:00] [00:39:00] [00:38:00]and whenever you feel guided to do and at the pace that's right for you bring yourself back. Bring your attention back into the room.
I'd like to thank you the [00:45:00] listeners for joining us today. And I'd like to thank Dr. Lacey for joining us and sharing her wonderful work. Thank you so much, Dr. Lacey.
Dr. Lacy: Thank you for having me, Pam.
Pam: It's my pleasure. Namaste. I'll see you next week, everyone.