Quantum Revolution Podcast

[Introduction to this episode, “A Journey through Spiritual Doorways: Psychiatry Informed by Spirituality with Dr. Kerri Husman”, with Dr. Karen Curry Parker.]

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Crisis is a part of growth. This is why sometimes we perceive growth as being so hard. Trauma can be a huge catalyst for growth and necessarily sometimes we have to treat trauma using traditional modalities that facilitate healing and the resolution of the pain before we can activate the lessons that trauma can sometimes bring.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: But sometimes the growth we need and the crisis we’re experiencing aren’t necessarily a result of trauma. Sometimes they’re a result of having to confront limitations in ourselves or deal with the disruption that comes from seeing life through a new expanded perspective or a new expanded personal story.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: It is a subtle thing to gauge whether the disruption a person is feeling is the result of trauma, or a symptom of spiritual growth. In the sometimes siloed world of medicine, we see all pain as problematic and often treat pain by trying to eliminate it rather than going deep and exploring the true root of pain and the messages that pain can bring.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: What if the pain is good pain? A growing pain of the soul. This is the question that Dr. Kerri Husman began to explore in her psychiatric practice. How do we treat the normal pain that is a part of growth in a way that supports and celebrates a new cycle of expansion in consciousness? As a pioneer in integrative psychiatric care, Dr.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Husman carefully blends traditional psychiatric treatment with holistic and integrative care to provide a safe path for people to explore their conscious evolution, healing and growth.

[Introduction to the Quantum Revolution Podcast]

Intro: You’re listening to Quantum Revolution with Karen Curry Parker, exploring new frontiers in consciousness, science, and evolution. Join us in intimate conversations with cutting edge scientists, spiritual leaders, artists, disruptors, and visionaries who are working towards reframing the narrative of our future by healing the rift between spirituality and science, reclaiming creativity, and laying the foundation for a new world.

And now, here’s your host, Karen Curry Parker.

[Interview dialogue with Dr. Karen Curry Parker and Dr. Kerri Husman]

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Hi, and welcome to Quantum Revolution. I’m Dr. Karen Curry Parker, and I am so excited to have my guest here today, Dr. Kerri Husman, who is a psychiatrist who also blends in, we’ll call it integrated, expanded, shamanic wellness practices in her, in the way she delivers her services. Um, it’s an interesting thing to think about psychiatry and we’ll call it shamanism.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Is that, is that a good label for you, Dr. Husman?

Dr. Kerri Husman (she/her): So that is something that I practice in my coaching and wellness practice. And, you know, when you think about even the origin of the word psychiatry and what we do in psychopomp, which is the conductor of souls. I mean, we are working on a soul level in both psychiatry and as a shamanic practitioner, even though those two things are quite different.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: I want to start was we explore the idea that you’re doing both, right? You’re doing psychiatry and you’re really working with people who are exploring and healing deep, uh, mental health issues. And you’re also exploring with people, their spiritual awakening, their spiritual practices. Maybe sometimes the challenges that happen when we have a spiritual awakening. What happened to you that you woke up one morning and said, Hey, I’m going to integrate these two seemingly quite divergent, but similar practices in my practice.

Dr. Kerri Husman : That’s a great question, Karen, and I thank you so much for not only inviting me, but for inviting these kinds of challenging questions. So I personally, When I was very small, when I was eight, I learned more about my ancestral heritage. This was long before we had Ancestry. com or other ways to find out. My family knew the lineage. And I started to ask questions as I was reading more about my own ancestry, um, wondering if this was something that I could do. I asked my mom if, I could be a shaman and my mom said, well, of course not, Kerri, you don’t belong to a tribe and that ended it right there. So I thought maybe I would go on to be a childhood, a minister for children.

Dr. Kerri Husman: So, so at home, there’d be a snowstorm here in Iowa. I would give the, give the sermon at home. I would read the Bible and create a sermon and give it to the family and make these little hymns, you know, these little hymns, the whole works, and so that’s what I thought I would do, and for a number of years, it didn’t, that immediately didn’t last long, but for a few years, I really felt compelled to, like, share these words that were so important. And then as time went on, I decided I was going to be a neurosurgeon. This was in seventh grade when I was subscribing to psychology today. And, but being left-handed, I found out pretty quickly, I’m pretty lousy at tying knots, the kind of knots that right-handed people expect. And so I still thought I wanted to do something with brains.

Dr. Kerri Husman: And then it became, uh, I, I went into, undergrad in psychobiology at Luther College and, uh, got to do all sorts of amazing things there. So thankful for that training experience. And all my psychology professors said, hey, you can’t be a psychiatrist because I really was thinking along psychiatry lines at that time even. All you’re going to do is write prescriptions all day. You’re never going to actually take care of people, heal them so they no longer need you. And I took that to heart. I said, well, gosh, I do, I do want to be a physician. I guess maybe I’ll do OB because that’s about half psychiatry anyway. True statement. And so then moved on that pathway for a while, worked with mentors, published in that field. And then I had my psychiatry rotation. as a medical student. And within 48 hours, I completely changed my path of going, why was I trying to avoid this? This is exactly where I should be. So, continued on that path, really loved doing psychiatry, worked with integrative methods from the latter parts of my residency and fellowship training in child psychiatry. And then as time moved on again, you realize you’re doing exactly what the psychologist warned you not to do. You’re writing prescriptions all day. You’re not getting to do a lot of therapy and make a difference. You’re just keeping status quo and while that’s convenient and easy, it’s not compelling. and meaningful to the extent you would like it to be. And so then I started training in integrative medicine, starting to learn functional medicine, starting to be able to bring some of those pieces in. In functional medicine training, every lecture was bringing up something about energy, literally. And we would do mindfulness exercises and meditations and even some energetic techniques in our IFM training. But the final exam, the big exam that we studied for 6 to 12 months for to take, one of the biggest exams I’ve ever taken in my life, not a single question had anything to do with energy. So that was disappointing because I thought, well, what really can I do then? So I had to keep, keep hunting, keep trying to discover. And what really brought it to the forefront, like when is the time for this to happen, is I had my stepmother and my father-in-law both had cancer. And we were using functional medicine techniques to assist them, which were great only to a certain point though. I mean, once people progress and then very quickly, I started learning healing touch and core shamanism right after that.

Dr. Kerri Husman: So I started learning these very quickly. You know, sometimes I was taking two or three classes in a month and just knocking it out. But I was started doing this on other people, actually using these techniques on others to help them like the day I would learn them. Like, on, you know, like, on the way home, I’m at the hotel and I’m working on someone by distance the first day. This is not how you’re supposed to do it, of course, but this was what needed to happen. It was essential. My, my father-in-law was able to practice engineering with glioblastoma, so half his brain was filled with tumor until a month before he

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Wow.

Dr. Kerri Husman: And that would never have happened had it not been for the healing touch and core shamanism techniques we were able to use to support his healing and wellness. No question.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: So why do you think traditional healthcare is so siloed? And I say that in response to something you said, um, you know, my background, I’m actually a certified nurse midwife. And when you said OB is, is oftentimes, or half the time, it’s all about mental health and wellness and, you know, how you think I completely agree with you.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: You know, you can almost always know the outcome, not always, but you can know the outcome of a pregnancy oftentimes just by knowing the outcome. The client’s energy and their story and their narrative. Of course, that’s not, I don’t think that’s limited to OB. So why is it that we have learned in traditional Western medicine to kind of silo it off as this reductionist sort of materialistic approach to healing people? And why are we stuck there? Maybe that’s a better question. Why are we stuck there?

Dr. Kerri Husman: Well, the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry really create how medicine is delivered in this country. Now, obviously there’s a whole lot of things you could say about that, but in a nutshell, we are given medicines to prescribe. And the insurance company expects a medicine to be prescribed to build a certain level of complexity for the session that you’re having. And that medicine is supposed to create an outcome. And when it doesn’t, you’re expected to change it, increase it, lower it, whatever. And if it wasn’t for that structure, and the structure was, you do what you need to do to help this person get well. Meaning I could pull in these techniques that are in my healing, coaching, and wellness practice, right?

Dr. Kerri Husman: If I could bring in that soul retrieval, if I could bring in that healing touch session on the table, if I could bring in some of the other things I use in coaching that are not part of psychiatry, or the sound healing in that session, wow, that would be amazing. But, and many people feel that those techniques are improving you based on their placebo effect. Now, I’m not saying that that’s entirely right or wrong.

Dr. Kerri Husman: Because the placebo effect is incredibly powerful. If you, but, you have to look at, there’s such a change in the nervous system with that experience. So, me running my hands over the top of someone, and now they’re snoring, they’re asleep, or they haven’t been able to sleep for

Dr. Kerri Husman: days, and they’re fully restful. Now if that’s a placebo effect, I guess bring it on. If that’s resulting in their body knowing how to return to its innate wisdom to heal itself, okay, we’ll take it. But, unfortunately, in the medicine world, placebo, if that’s what you’re going to label all of these techniques, isn’t really allowed or welcome.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Do, have you ever done any research on the sustainability of the placebo effect?

Dr. Kerri Husman: Well, normally, most people look at it as not lasting very long, right? It’s a short term, short lived, but, um, there are thoughts that It’s possible people can have a highly meaningful experience even if it’s under the placebo umbrella and have it be lasting over time. Now, I mean, I’m, I’m biased. I know the science behind Healing Touch.

Dr. Kerri Husman: I’ve seen the science behind shamanic healing and it’s profound.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: So when people come to your practice, let’s say if they want to find you virtually and they go to your website, you have them in the beginning, choose almost a doorway that they go through. They have the traditional doorway and then they have, you know, the we’ll call it the woo woo doorway. Right. And so when they, when they arrive.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: What’s the determining factor that helps somebody decide like what door do I go through? And I don’t mean just in terms of your practice, but in general, because I think a lot of times when we go through a process of either spiritual awakening or we have some kind of a life event that causes us to review our perspective and our point of view, oftentimes that causes us to go to therapy, right?

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: We go to counseling, we go find a professional to help us walk through this process. How do you decide? Where to go if maybe the event that you had isn’t necessarily a, what we might call a traumatic event, but it’s definitely been a disruptive event that’s causing you to really look for a new narrative to tell the story of who you are now that you’ve gone through this event.

Dr. Kerri Husman: Well, that is a great question, and I’m faced with these questions a few times a week, every week. You know, when I have someone call in and they’ve had an experience, and it really depends on a few different things. One is, you know, are they having psychiatric symptoms, right? I mean, sometimes people feel like, I’m not sure what I need right now.

Dr. Kerri Husman: All I know is I had this; I attended this energy modality class. It was highly disruptive to my life. I feel like I’m not in my body. And that could be something that’s very, relatively easily remedied with some grounding and boundary building and really working within the healing modality. A healing touch session or two might take care of that because you’re giving them some homework, some self-care techniques to practice to help them get better. and stay back in their body. It might be something simple. Sometimes it’s more complex where someone has had a spiritual emergence or possibly emergency from a psychedelic experience with very little or no integration. And, or they’ve been said, here’s a list of integration techniques. Knock yourself out. Right? But they haven’t actually been required to engage in an integrative process. And they’ve come home and they’ve gone back to their own clinical or work obligations, back to a full stack schedule, back to parenting their kids, and dealing with aging parents, and everything else. And, and their psychedelic experience, you know, from afar has, has still not been integrated. And so sometimes it’s trying to find. you know, figuring out again, is there any psychosis there? Right? For some people with spiritual emergence or emergency, there can be a little bit of psychosis and they really, really need to be seeing a psychiatrist. And so those are the kinds of questions I’m going to be asking even at screening, trying to figure out, okay, A, are you in my state where I can treat you as a psychiatrist?

Dr. Kerri Husman: B, do I need to find a spiritually, culturally competent psychiatrist or psychologist to help me? who can be treating you in another state. Thankfully, I have a network of people I can reach out to. And, and, and then I might be doing some healing work for them while they’re seeing someone for the psychiatric needs or psychology needs within their state, just because of licensures. So, so there’s always, a number of questions that are asked. Thankfully, I have people, say if I’m doing the psychiatric work and I need someone else to be providing the heat, the energy healing work or the energies, the spiritual healing work, I have people I can refer to here. So I have local people I can refer to and I have people in many states that I can refer to also.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: And what are the integrative modalities that you use in the wellness side of your practice? Mm-Hmm?

Dr. Kerri Husman: So I am certified in Healing Touch, so that’s something that is. essentially like being the mechanic of the energy field. It takes two to three years to get fully certified in healing touch. So it’s not here’s three weekends and you’re a, and you’re the master kind of thing. Um, so it’s a, an extended process.

Dr. Kerri Husman: You have a minimum of a year of mentoring and your mentor sort of stays your mentor forever after that. And you go through, Multiple energy modalities of other types that you write up, you experience and write up, you do a hundred sessions that you have written up, some of them in 10 to 12 page reports, and you read, I don’t know how many books, I mean it’s like 20, 30 books that you read about energy modalities in different categories, write them up. So you’re really, on top of all your training that you’ve done, you’re, you’re really getting to guide your own process as

Dr. Kerri Husman: well. Which is why when people are certified, it doesn’t matter. There’s two programs that certify, they’re both considered equivalent. And. I can refer to someone who’s certified and know that they know what they’re doing

Dr. Kerri Husman: because you can’t get there without, which is fantastic. Um, the other thing I do is I’m trained through the foundation for shamanic studies, which is again, a sort of a forever training. You keep training, you never really stop training and deepening your connection with the compassionate helping spirits that you work with.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: And what, what made you choose these two modalities and, and how did they stand out to you? Mm

Dr. Kerri Husman: So the healing touch techniques was an easy, um, decision because I had, I had, was working on studying for my functional medicine exam and one of my colleagues, who’s healing touch trained and an anesthesiologist, was studying for her exam too. And I had reactivation of Epstein Barr. And as soon as, um, I would, I mean, shortness of breath, cough, I mean, I was just struggling. And I called her up and told her what was going on and she said, well, you know, you need to talk to Laura and Maggie. So this is Laura Hart and Maggie Friel. They are now both deceased. Thankfully they still help. But, um, I called Laura on the phone. She answers the phone. She was awaiting my call. She knew. She talked me through a series of marma points on my body that I was to touch and then tell her when the energy shifted. She walked me through this. And over the course of this 15-minute phone call, I could breathe for the first time in weeks, and I could easily breathe from that point on. I get off the phone with this total stranger to me.

Dr. Kerri Husman: Otherwise,

Dr. Kerri Husman: I think I need to learn from her, and I think I need to do it now. And so I started meeting with Laura and Maggie. They started informally mentoring me and they were assisting with instruction. for Healing Beyond Borders, one of the two programs in my town.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Oh, wow.

Dr. Kerri Husman: These are far, you know, the number of training opportunities in Iowa is literally two, right? That’s one of them. And they’re right here. And so it was really hard not to say, I think this is the route I need

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Mm. Right.

Dr. Kerri Husman: because I got to experience it firsthand.

Dr. Kerri Husman: With Core Shamanism, it was quite different because I had not had outside. I’d never had shamanic healing that I knew of. I’d never sought that out. And I read about their program many years before I finally pushed, you know, register

Dr. Kerri Husman: for the first class. And, but I knew it was the right thing to do. I found, um, a mentor. In Illinois. So one stayed over and started having some sessions not only with her, but with another person trained by the foundation who was, um, in Iowa. And that really helped me understand what, what, kind of opportunity for miracles there really

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Mm hmm. So one of the things that I like to ask people who are kind of rooted in both the traditional world and maybe the non-traditional world of healing is when you think about the future of how we support people on the healing journey, what do you envision as the ideal way for us to work with people holistically?

Dr. Kerri Husman: Well, what’s wonderful is Laura Hart before she passed, worked incredibly hard in 2010 to 2017, 18. Um, to get pilot studies done using Healing Touch in the hospital

Dr. Kerri Husman: for different

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Mm

Dr. Kerri Husman: So for example, they have a study showing that six months of Healing Touch given weekly along with a daily, very brief body mind exercise with body taught courtesies improved people’s MOCA score.

Dr. Kerri Husman: So the MOCA and the Mini Mental. The MOCA is the test that Donald Trump took to, um, show that he was of sound

Dr. Kerri Husman: mind. Um, in his, when he was president. And this is a test that’s administered for screening for early onset or moderate or severe down the road, uh, level of cognitive dysfunction. And so this scores on this test, same thing with the mini mental, which is relatively equivalent tests.

Dr. Kerri Husman: They’re different tests, but they’re both used for the same purpose. The scores decline over time. And if you take an Alzheimer’s medicine, what happens to the scores. Instead of going, they go down a little bit slower, but if you say stop the medicine, I don’t want to take it anymore, it’s giving me diarrhea, whatever, what happens is you go right down to where you would have been

Dr. Kerri Husman: in a very short period of time, boom, you come right down, and you continue on that progression. That’s how our meds work. That’s what we’ve got to offer. Uh, with this study, there was a 2. 58 improvement, 2. 58 point improvement in the six months. Nothing does that. Nothing. Now, this is a pilot study, but it was, there was no difference between the two groups that it was administered to, and certainly this should be replicated on a larger

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Oh yeah,

Dr. Kerri Husman: That’s the kind of work that’s being done. There’s no money in it, right? I mean, this is not drug company funded, um, getting grants for this is challenging, but that’s the kind of work we can do.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: that’s beautiful. So Dr. Husman, I really appreciate you being here and sharing with us today. I know that the work that you do is very pioneering and certainly it’s the kind of work that I think many of our listeners are either thinking about or hoping for in their own treatment or even in their own practices. You can learn more about Dr. Husman’s work by visiting her website. East wind healing center. com. And again, we’ll put that in the show notes below too. So you can connect with her there. You can read about her work and look at how she’s structured her practice. Cause I think you’ve had to structure it in such a way that it’s, it’s a legal, right?

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: So to speak, um, and, and really explore the beautiful work that, that she’s doing there, integrating traditional psychiatric care with with integrative medicine, integrative techniques that allow her, allow you to create an optimal way for people to achieve wellness on many, many different levels. So thank you for doing this work.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Thank you for being here today. And thank you for sharing your wisdom and your experience with us on Quantum Revolution.

Dr. Kerri Husman: Thank you so much for the invite. It’s been a pleasure.

[Outro to this episode, “A Journey through Spiritual Doorways: Psychiatry Informed by Spirituality with Dr. Kerri Husman”, with Dr. Karen Curry Parker.]

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: We have been trained to see medicine and the treatment of disease in a strictly physical silo as a function and a manifestation of a problem in the body. Obviously, there can be a physical component to psychiatry, but psychiatry also has an inherent conundrum. Yes, sometimes you’re treating the brain, but when you’re treating the mind, where on the body is the mind located?

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: We now know that the mind isn’t just the brain. It’s also the gut and the heart and other parts of the body. And with this understanding, we still don’t really know where spirit and consciousness live. In the body, or even if they’re located on the body at all. The treatment of the mind cannot be done through a reductionist material perspective with new emerging science behind the results of healing people with shamanism, energy, psychology, healing, touch, sound, music, flower essences, and homeopathy and more.

Dr. Karen Curry Parker: Doctors need to be taking lessons from healers such as Dr. Kerri Husman, who have had the courage to explore what lies beyond the traditional treatment of the mind. We must cultivate an integrated approach to treating ancestral pain, spiritual growth, and the energetics of disease in order to optimize wellness and well-being as part of healing the whole person. This holistic approach is crucial to helping people sustain wellness and get to the root of the root of their pain so that they can clear pain permanently and begin the process of building a more aligned and vital life. To learn more about Dr. Kerri Husman and her powerful work, please visit eastwindhealingcenter.com. And if you’d like to learn more about integrating Quantum Human Design™ into your wellness practice, check out my book, Introduction to Quantum Wellness, now available on Amazon. I’m Dr. Karen Curry Parker. Thank you for joining me for Quantum Revolution.

[Outro to the Quantum Revolution Podcast]

Outro: Thank you for joining us on Quantum Revolution with Karen Curry Parker. For more information on how to change your world and to hear more about our guests today, visit quantumrevolutionpodcast.com. Make sure you follow us on your favorite podcasting platform so you don’t miss a single episode of Quantum Revolution.

We’ll see you next time for some more groundbreaking conversations with Karen and her guests. How will you impact your world, today?