Interview with Dr. Judith Orloff

MH: Would you say something about your first book, Second Sight, and then something about how that led to this current book, Intuitive Healing?

JO: I'm a psychiatrist and an intuitive. What that means is that I use all the traditional psychiatry plus I incorporate intuitive impressions and intuitive healing into my work, and spirituality-so it's an integrative form of treating patients. It's not just traditional, but it's using everything we have that's good and that can help people. When I wrote my first book, Second Sight, it was about my personal journey and struggles coming to terms with my intuitive abilities.

I was brought up in Beverly Hills with two physician parents. I have twenty-five physicians in my family-very linear, logical, rational, scientific, statistical, and all that. I was an only child, and I had all these premonitions. I would predict death, illness, earthquakes. My parents would bring friends home and I would say things like, "You can't trust them."

MH: You're good to have around!

JO: [Laughs] I am! But as a child it wasn't really appreciated because what I predicted at that point was really basically quite negative. In the beginning when people develop their intuition, and this is true of children, they often pick up scary things, and that's because on an intuitive level it's a louder signal and easier to hear.

When I was about eleven, I had a dream that a mentor of my mother's, who was running for a judgeship in Philadelphia, not only lost the election, but that also this wild-eyed woman rushed up after him and bit his hand. Well, not only did he lose the election, but his daughter-in-law, who is manic-depressive, had a psychotic breakdown, rushed up to him, and bit his hand, and then they had to hospitalize him.

So that was the last straw for my mother. She told me never to mention another one of my dreams or premonitions.

MH: That's terrible.

JO: It was horrible. I grew up believing that there was something wrong with me, that I was causing these events. I became a secret keeper-I couldn't express myself freely. It was a dread, a burden to me.

In the sixties, I got heavily involved with drugs. I tried to run from my abilities a lot because I couldn't handle that, I just didn't want them. It's not something that I am suggesting for anybody-I want to make that clear.

MH: Were you actually successful at suppressing them? Wouldn't drugs make you even more sensitive to them, break down ego barriers?

JO: Not really, it depends of the kinds of drugs that you take. I took things that would dampen my sensitivities, so when I stood next to someone I wouldn't feel their energy or I wouldn't know things about them. When I was little I couldn't go to places like shopping malls or crowded places because I would pick up other people's energy. I didn't realize at the time I was an intuitive empath, which is someone who is really sensitive to energy, picking things up, and in crowded places energies overlap. I now teach a lot of health-care professionals how to use their abilities so as not to get burnt out by this particular aspect-how not to absorb other people's energy.

So I went along a certain number of years doing drugs. When I was sixteen, I went over a cliff in a car up in Malibu Canyon and had a near-death experience. It was quite dramatic. I didn't tell anyone about that part of it, but it was at that point that my life began to change for the better. My parents were so worried about me, they forced me to go see a psychiatrist. It ended up that I got sent to an angel of a man who was able to see that a lot of my struggles were really due to the fact that I was not incorporating my spiritual, intuitive, mystical side. So he sent me to Dr. Thelma Moss at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. She was a parapsychology researcher who turned out to be my mentor and my hero, a woman who really pushed the envelope.

She tested my abilities with a technique known as psychometry. For the first time I consciously tuned in, and I was able to read her house, her family, and she told me I really had abilities but that they needed to be developed. She invited me to work as an intuitive researcher in her lab.

MH: That's how you got turned on to the psychiatric profession?

JO: Well, at that time I had no intention of becoming a doctor. I had been raised with physicians, and all my parents' friends were physicians, and I found them very boring-nice people, but boring. But while I was working with Thelma Moss, I had a dream where a genderless voice came to me and told me that I was to get an M.D. to become a psychiatrist, so that I would have the credentials to help legitimize my experiences. When I woke up, I thought someone was playing a practical joke on me. It wasn't anything I wanted to do.

The irony was that throughout my training, I strayed very far from the initial dream. I got into the traditional aspects of medicine, and I began to see psychotic people rolled in on gurneys, claiming to be psychic and claiming to communicate with God, and in the next breath feeling that they wanted to kill themselves or thinking that I was out to get them. So it was a hodgepodge of psychosis, maybe a little intuition, maybe a little connection, but it was so ungrounded, and working in an emergency room every third night for years, I was sleep-deprived and in this intense environment. I began to question whether this psychic-intuitive side was safe or appropriate to explore. Certainly none of my colleagues gave it any credence at that point.

And so, I became very entrenched in the traditional world of medical science, and I learned how to give out antidepressants, lithium, Prozac, et cetera. I had no intention of bringing any of this psychic-intuitive practice into my work.

MH: I remember that story in your book about Christine.

JO: Yes. I had a patient named Christine about six months into my private practice. She came in with a major depression, and she wanted to be on antidepressants. I put her on, and she started getting significantly better over a period of many months. One day we were having a session, and I remember looking out at the sky, and I saw this incredibly beautiful cloud just floating on by. I went into a trance state, and I hadn't been in one for years! While I was in this state, I had an absolutely clear premonition that Christine would make a suicide attempt. It was so confusing to me, because clinically there were no signs of suicidal tendencies whatsoever. I decided that the vision was nothing, and I didn't give it any credence.

Within a week or two, she overdosed on the antidepressants that I had prescribed for her, and it was just so devastating to me. She did survive, but she went into coma for about three weeks. I felt that I had done her harm by not listening to my intuition. So over the weeks I just sat at her bedside when she was in coma, I just reevaluated my whole professional and personal life. It was then that I knew that I had to incorporate my intuitions and my dreams and sense of spirit back into my practice of medicine.

MH: Do you find that when you're trying to help people to utilize the intuitive way of looking at things, that a lot of them find it foreign or difficult to grasp?

JO: I think that most people do, because they forget that they can see. So my job as a psychiatrist and an intuitive is to help people see it. I believe everyone is capable of seeing, and I think it's our birthright. Thus the second book, Intuitive Healing, can, I hope, give people a strategy for seeing.

MH: Yes, it's a primer, really, the way that you've written it. You write about five basic steps . . .

JO: Yes, the five steps that I apply in my life whenever I am facing anything, and it's what I teach my patients:

• Look at your beliefs
• Be in your body
• Sense subtle energy
• Ask for inner guidance
• Look at your dreams

If people can slowly develop these capacities, then whatever they are faced with in life, they can apply them.

I recently lost my father. It's a real-life situation that real people are faced with, where I felt that I wasn't sure if I could handle it alone. That's where my intuition came in, and where the five steps came in, and then I knew that I was capable of handling it. It was because of all the preparation that I had done beforehand. It works if people are really clear about their beliefs, if they're really clear about believing that we possess the capacity to see, and that love is the alpha and omega of being alive.

What I see as a doctor is that people don't formulate a clear philosophy or understanding through which to approach life, before they or someone else in their lives get sick, and they have negative beliefs about healing-they hate their bodies, and so on, and then it's much harder.

The second step, "Be in your body," seems so obvious, but most people just are not in it. They are either operating from the neck up, or they have had some kind of karma with their body and they hover a little bit outside it. The great travesty in Western culture is that we think the body is simply the skin, the hair, the eyes in all those magazines. That's why I suggest everyone learn their anatomy. Think about where your liver is, where your bladder is, where the uterus is, where the gastrointestinal tract is, and begin to tune in and visualize.

MH: You talk about the danger of trying to get from the mind what only intuition can yield. What is the most common mistake that people make when they do this?

JO: They see what looks good on paper, and they make their decisions based on that rather than on what their heart says.

MH: What specific areas of life do people tend to do this in?

JO: Careers and relationships. For instance, I had a client who was offered a million dollars to do a show-he was in show business. He was getting all the honors and accolades, and his body was starting to feel sick around it. He would get nauseated, he would get tired. The fight would be, it looks so good on paper, everybody wants me to do it, it looks like the best career move I've ever made, and yet my body doesn't feel good about it. What do you do then? It takes a true hero to be able to say, "I'm sorry, I can't do it."

The intuitive path is the hero's path. It's saying, "I trust my body, I trust my intuition, more than I do the glitter and quick fixes, and I know that the good thing will come along."

I had a patient who had a dream that she had leukemia. In the dream, her son was next to her in the hospital injecting cancer cells into her IV.

MH: A little conflict there!

JO: Yeah, exactly. Her son was an addict/alcoholic, she was codependent, and what the dream told her was that if she didn't really deal with him in a different way that she would get sick. This was a healing message to her. She firmly believes that she would have gotten cancer had she not dealt with her son in quite a different way.

MH: Could you say something about the mechanics of how disease begins, how some bodies are better at warding off viruses and germs than others are?

JO: That's where beliefs are so important. I firmly believe that disease manifests in subtle energy changes way before physical symptoms manifest, and if people can be trained to detect the subtle energy changes in their bodies, it could perhaps ward off more serious symptoms. How to listen to this is in Part One of my book.

MH: We haven't covered anything in the section of your book on intuition and sexuality. Would you like to mention something about that?

JO: Sexuality is a matter of being healthy and totally connected to the body. In terms of Tantra, there are energy centers throughout the body called chakras that go from the root chakra all the way up the midline to the heart chakra and then all the way up to the crown chakra, which is connected to spirit. To be whole is to have that energy flow together. If the lower part of the body is cut off, it makes it lopsided. So part of being open with energy and with intuition is learning what the lower body speaks, and then combining it with the heart and spirit.

I think the misconception that people have in Western culture is that you have to be in a relationship to be sexual. I know so many women who have been out of relationship for a long time, and they feel they have to sacrifice their erotic nature until a partner comes along. From an intuitive standpoint, that is so untrue, because the primary erotic relationship is with the earth and with spirit. And when you begin to redefine spirit in terms of its erotic side, it's ecstatically erotic as it comes through nature. Most people just don't feel it that way. You can begin to open up eroticism in your body and be able to relate to the tiniest leaf like you would a lover.

MH: There are many people in relationships where both people share the same spiritual focus, but still have their differences to deal with in spite of their common spiritual beliefs and practices. What would you say about that?

JO: Life is full of problems, but the great thing is, if you are blessed to find a partner with whom you really love, and you have that connection, then you have a strong basis through which to deal with those problems. But to go into a relationship and think there will be no problems is insanity. There are a million problems. I still believe that if someone wants to read this book [Intuitive Healing] and wants to develop their intuition and their erotic side, they could bring that into a relationship, and in my view that totally transforms what could be. I say that humbly-I don't mean to be grandiose about it. I really do think that it can transform it.

MH: Have you ever had the opportunity to compare notes with Deepak Chopra? I know that he lives in your area.

JO: Yes, and we're actually having a satsang for part of my book tour-he does these dialogues where he invites people to talk. That will be in a couple of months, and that will be fun.

Before we conclude our interview, I would like to mention that I'll be giving a workshop at Kripalu, in Lenox, Massachusetts, May 12 through 14, called "Discovering Your Intuitive Gifts." For inquiries you may call 1-800-741-7353. Also, I can be reached at my Website: www.drjudithorloff.com.

I really so appreciate Many Hands talking about my new book and getting it out to people so they can have this information available if they want it.