Bits & bytes of healthcare data – healing, Being, and the data of our humanness

TRANSCRIPT

This is Michael H. Cohen, founding attorney and president of the Cohen Healthcare Law Group, and welcome to today’s Healthcare Legal Adventure.

Healing using decisions, the masculine archetype

So, tonight’s episode is not necessarily about healthcare law and the usual issues that we deal with on this healthcare law and FDA law podcast, but more about the life wisdom that comes from the study of energy healing, psychology, working with somatic therapy from the client’s side, my own experiences in hypnotherapy, and of course accessing the rich inner realms.

I have been pushed and pulled along the path toward a decision, and I had a conversation yesterday with a trusted professional who went through a process with me during which he led me down an inexorable path toward making a life changing decision.

His view, to which I gradually came to agree during this process, was that I was putting up a lot of resistance, and that to not make a decision would mean to perpetuate the status quo, which is resistance and the struggle of the ego, which fights to maintain the status quo at all costs.

Now, this is one way to figure out your life, and it certainly can be very effective, and it’s a very active, empowering process. I call it a masculine process because it is active, and there is a pushing and a moving and a deciding which is archetypically masculine, not, of course… By that I don’t mean it’s just what men do, but I mean that it’s the yin and yang, it’s the masculine archetype which, of course, exists in both genders. It’s an archetype.

The yoga of masculine and feminine

There is another way, and it’s interesting because people talk a lot about the advent of the divine feminine, and how the divine feminine is going to heal us. I had a yoga teacher a long time ago when I lived in Orange County, and he used to say that yoga is this balance. Yoga is many things of course, the union of the head, the heart, and the hand, he would say. And also the balance between structure and flexibility.

If you are too flexible in yoga, as in life, then you flop around all over the place. And if you’re too structured, then you’re too rigid, and you need more flexibility. So they key to the yoga pose is really to balance the yin and yang, the masculine and the feminine if you will, the structure and the flexibility, so that you’re not floppy but you’re also not rigid, somewhere between.

And in fact in my law practice in giving advice, I give nuanced advice, we don’t want to be 100% on the risk side, not 100% regarding risk as intolerable, and saying no, and giving the most conservative legal advice. At the same point, we don’t want to give a yes to everything and an unqualified green light, because that’s also a mistake and can lead to danger.

We want to titrate: You’re never going to be, or rarely will people be, 100% compliant. There’s some clients that say, “I want to be compliant. I’m a doctor. I don’t want to lose my healthcare license as a practitioner. I don’t want the medical board to investigate, so let’s get everything right.” Well, yes, but then they have a business idea, and they want to make claims about a product or launch a line of cosmetics, or they want to open an integrative care center and do something different than the conventional cookbook standard of care.

And so there’s going to be risk involved, so you have to titrate. You’re never going to be 100% compliant, or totally compliant, or Compliant with a capital C. At the same point, you’re not going to be risk-free. And if you want to be risk-free, then you will always put paper down on the toilet seat, or wear rubber gloves before you touch a doorknob, or whatever your metaphor is. So you have to titrate and balance the masculine and feminine.

Now, the feminine way, or the divine feminine archetype, is more receiving, accepting, nurturing, supporting. So again, it’s the dance of the active and the supporting. That’s what I look for, that’s my approach, all things in moderation, perhaps another way to put it. But sometimes you do balance more on one end of the spectrum versus the other. You can be more legally aggressive or less if you want to back off, it all depends on many things, like the magnitude of the risk, the probability of the risk, and your own risk tolerance. I’ll talk to you about that on other segments of the show.

Making nuanced healthcare or personal decisions

Anyway, back to my process here about making decisions and truth. Truth is sometimes clear and sometimes muddled. These processes try to get a truth in a very clear way, like, “Why are you making excuses? Either you do this or you do that, make your decision. When will you make your decision?” That’s basically the process, and sometimes if you’re muddled for a long time and you’re sitting in the muddle, in the puddle, in the huddle, it’s not good. You’ve gotta make the decision, that’s a useful process.

But I would say that there are variables in a business or healthcare legal decision, and I like to study and plan, and I like to be analytical, but no paralysis by analysis, I’m also intuitive, and I can move very quickly, but I don’t shoot from the hip. I’m not a cowboy in the Wild West. Again, it’s a balanced, nuanced approach.

It’s very easy to be reductionist. And this is why when I see motivational speakers whipping the audience into shame around their choices in order to try to get them to move the dime forward transformationally. To me that approach is a turnoff. I don’t like the hard, authoritarian, crack-the-nut approach to transformation. I like more of the revelatory, the “a-ha” moment, the insight, the inner conversion, not just the conversion to a sales decision.

Spirit lifts the veil and playfully drops it

So here’s what I wrote to a colleague of mine in this light. I said, “Decisions require looking at quantum future realities. We have the gift of seeing, feeling, and sometimes hearing these different realities. As I said, sometimes with crystal clarity, and sometimes it’s a muddle. Spirit lifts the veil and playfully drops it again, so that we can all and each optimally evolve. It isn’t simple, and there are times when we must take a leap.”

Guaranteed Overnight Delivery

And I give an example. I was leaving a relationship, living in another city, and I was late getting to my flight, and in order to make the flight, I was at the airport, but I would have had to run at breakneck speed to get to the plane. And I stopped for a moment and I looked within, and my brain was saying, “Run for that plane,” and inside, intuitively, I was feeling this, this is what came to me: “I created this relationship in love, and I’m not going to leave it with a run to catch a flight.”

So I missed that flight. And that flight would’ve gone to city A, whereas in fact sometime later the relationship very, very clearly dissolved, much more clearly than that moment of exodus, that first moment of flight.

And as a result I went to city B, city B being a city in California. And so I restarted my life in California. If I had listened to my head instead of my intuition, or if I had done some process, that might have led me to the wrong door, literally, metaphorically to the wrong flight. The wrong flight and the wrong city, or at least an alternate reality.

And because I landed in California, a lot of miracles happened in my life. For one, I reopened my own law practice which grew into a law firm, has grown. Now I’m scaling, I’m in a much more entrepreneurial life, and I’m not dependent on some other… I used to be in other jobs in other law firms and in other legal environments that were let’s just say suboptimal. So now I’m in a really optimal space.

And I have a miracle with my family, I have lots of miracles. I’m not going to report this too close to home, but let’s just say that California embraced me and I’ve embraced a beautiful life here. And I’m so glad that I didn’t run for that other plane.

The point is, I had a decision to make, and it wasn’t about get over the fear and make a decision. It was about, when the moment of decision comes, look for the hidden cracks where the fear is, and sometimes waiting or pausing is the right decision. It’s not no decision, it’s just a pause.

So with regard to the decision in front of me, maybe again I’m required to leap into an unknown future. And yet, what happens is, for me, it always comes down to listening to the inner guidance. Things do crystallize, and then you do know the truth, and sometimes the truth might even be, “I don’t know with 100% certainty, and there’s a scary, unknown future, but I have the courage and I’m going to make a move.” The courage to be, the courage to make a decision, even when you don’t know.

So sometimes you’re peaceful in the middle, and it’s very uncomfortable. It’s interesting, because I was watching one of the Ayn Rand movies, part three, Atlas Shrugged, and one of the tenants there is I think one of the key players, the actress says, “Listen to your head, don’t listen to your heart.” And I think that’s very noble and rational and makes a lot of sense

But in the context of her philosophy, and it’s also the Vulcan way, and Spock has a hard time… I was going to say Scotty has a hard time with emotions running amok, and Spock has a hard time when it comes to the emotions. But listen, the guy gets sex crazed every seven years, or something like that, because he suppresses the voice of the id.

So, going back to that classic trifecta, you’ve got the ego mediating, the superego, and the id. So it’s that yogic balance, that yogic midpoint, the masculine and feminine.

So I think that this pausing and this waiting is not necessarily the voice of the ego, the serpent, the sinister twister of truth inside our being, sometimes the pause is the divine commandment. Now, no doubt this is all very subjective and discernment is required. And so that’s why I spent a lot of time with energy healing, training in the art of listening within and gathering the gems of information that present inside to my own being.

Whether I call it high sense perception, or meditation, high sense perception is what my teacher Barbra Brennan called it, or conversations with God, or simply dwelling in the most crystalline clarity that we can access. And sometimes there is bewilderment, yet at the same time I have the conviction that the unknown often is exactly the place to be.

In fact, I remember when I was studying to Barbara Brennan I was asking spirit for guidance about my career. Which, in retrospect makes total sense, but at the time it was completely unpredictable and chaotic. And I remember the teacher actually had pancreatic cancer, which can be often deadly, usually deadly, and she had staved it off somehow with these energy healing techniques for years. She was a very wise person, very wise, senior magician.

And she asked me to sit in the center of a circle of my energy, and the classmates, and ask my question to the universe. And I did, and I said, “I’m not getting an answer.” And she said, “Michael, your guides and your angels are sitting right there in the circle with you.” And those moments really stuck with me. The way that the data has to come into place. You got to have the data, it’s a technological age.

In the spiritual planes, the data means divine bits and bytes of information that come in the form of various messengers and counters, messages, dreams, things that speak to us through many people and many places.

One time, a friend of mine was driving in New York City, and she was in a very frazzle place, and she just called out to the universe, “God, are you there? Do you exist? If you’re here, give me a sign, show me right away.” And she was in this taxi, flying down the upper west side highway, and right at that moment this truck cruised alongside her, and guess what it said in big, bold letters on the side of the truck. “GOD: guaranteed overnight delivery”.

Continuing your healthcare legal adventure

You’ve been listening to the Healthcare Legal Adventures podcast. This is Michael H. Cohen, president and founder of Cohen Healthcare Law Group. If you’d like to hear more episodes, simply go to cohenhealthcarelaw.com, go to the tab that says Blog/Podcasts, and you can download more episodes. Or, visit our other website at healthcarelegaladventures.com, where you’ll find online courses, DYI forms, and other resources to help you with your healthcare legal adventure. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.