Listen to this episode to discover another path in health using ancient Chinese medical practices as well as a deep inner knowing further perfected with training in medical intuition. Learn about Holly's path and how she uses her skills and talents to help others.
Holly Scalmanini comes from a long history of meditation since early childhood. She dove into healing starting with massage and Iyengar Yoga. She then ventured to the world of Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture followed by a training to help hone her natural skills in medical intuition. Eventually she has come to combine her gifts into an amalgam of the world of Chinese medicine mixed with intuition to help others on their own paths to find health and wellness.
She is also is in the final stages of writing and publishing a book, "Making Friends with Disease" that relates to many of the topics we discuss in this episode.
This is DT Grant and the practice podcast the place where we dive deep into the hidden world of healers. Today I'll be interviewing a woman from Denver, Colorado who is a licensed acupuncturist and works as a medical intuitive as well as with something she calls five element sessions.
And now welcome Holly Scalmanini.
Hi, how are you? I'm doing great. I'm really excited about this. Thank you again for having me.
Holly and I met about a year ago when I was undergoing some health challenges after eating an excess of oysters, 40 to be exact. This is an example of my extremism, often to my detriment. Here is a snapshot of a session with Holly. What I would prefer to do is to sort of tune in with you intuitively and just sort of see what I pick up and what I'm feeling. Okay, sounds good. So I'll be quiet just for a moment or two when I connect with you.
May it be with the blessings of the divine that this session benefit both of us in our personal and spiritual growth. Amen. May I have permission to connect to your higher self?
You do.
Thank you.
The dog is saying you do.
What I'm aware of, usually the first thing that I pick up in my intuitive readings is your five element constitutional type. And so we talked in our last session about you being a wood constitutional type. Wood types tend to be good leaders and teachers and visionaries. What I'm aware of today is it feels like you need a break. It feels like you need time away. It feels like you are tired, exhausted. Does that resonate?
Yeah, I really love what I'm doing. I feel like this podcast was what my life purpose is because it's a combination of my creativity and music and health and travel, but I can't sleep.
So shifting now from that place of more of a medical intuitive reading into the place of the five elements. So as a wood constitutional type, wood types tend towards putting a lot of pressure on themselves. And I actually feel that in your energy. I can feel that aspect of putting a lot of pressure on yourself, sort of feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders. And I feel that actually in relationship to the passing of your dad, where there's almost this feeling where you feel responsible for healing what happened to him within yourself.
I definitely think about what happened to him and having the same genetics. I mean, there was a part of me that carried this guilt thinking that I was the stress that caused his death because I was the third child and I didn't think he wanted me for a long time. But when I did ayahuasca, I came to accept that he would have loved me if he knew me, but he never really got the chance to know me. I came to peace with that. There was so much other shit in my life. You know, that is where it started. But because of that, other things kind of turned to shit, but it wasn't really his death. Although as I grew older, I realized what I was lacking or I never knew what I was lacking. I still don't. What's it like to have a father? You know, and I can't have that back.
Holly and I then caught up on what happened last year.
Last year when I talked to you, I thought I was dying. I talked to this woman, Tu Bears, about it. I said the only thing I could attribute it to was these 40 oysters I ate in like a day or two, but the oysters made me violently ill and I should have thrown up, but I didn't. But I started spinning, I got dizzy, I felt really sick. And from that point on, I slowly got weaker and weaker and I felt like my body shut down and stopped absorbing everything. I remember trying to find a new primary care doctor and telling her maybe I'll just do a stool transplant. And she looked at me like I had a thousand heads. Like, why would that do anything? And nobody was offering anything to help me. I have been really interested in the idea of stool being the future of health and medicine. And basically you take stool from a healthy person and put it into someone who's not healthy and it regenerates healthy gut flora. I have my own criteria of what I think is a good stool donor. Within 10 days of starting it, I started to feel better.
Wow.
Yeah. So I did that and I can't attribute that to anything else. Nobody gave me anything else.
And now moving on to an interview. So to begin, I guess I'd like to hear a little about what led you to the work that you now do.
I think part of it is my upbringing. Of course, growing up with a mom who taught meditation and yoga, intuition was definitely valued in the home that I grew up in. I think it was a progression. I thought I was going to do public relations. I had this fantastic internship working for this big PR firm in Hollywood. And I think that really helped me to kind of look at what I really wanted to spend my time and energy on. Healers generally don't stop in one place. It is sort of continually evolving and progressing. And so one modality sort of morphed into the next, into the next, into the next. And so it started off with physical therapy and then massage therapy, yoga, acupuncture, intuitive readings, and now the five element sessions.
Regarding the Iyengar Yoga, did you do the full teacher training? Because it's very complicated and my awareness is you have to study with a certified master for years and then you have to go to India and actually learn with... it used to be BKS Iyengar himself who is no longer alive...so now his daughter or granddaughter, if you get fully certified to become a master. Is that correct?
Yeah, the certification process in Iyengar is really intense. So I had someone who was sort of the main teacher I studied with. I had the intentions of going through the certification process, but I just never made it that far. It's about a minimum of five year process just to get certified at the first level.
That's what I heard with Iyengar yoga. It's a really long arduous path. It's not that common.
It isn't that common. It's rigorous.
Iyengar was very tough and very precise. What I know about BKS Iyengar was that he struggled with many health issues. He felt yoga should be accessible to all people. And so he came up with a form of yoga using props, including chairs, blankets, ropes, et cetera, to help everyone do yoga. His style of yoga is incredibly anatomical with perfect alignment so as to prevent injury. And it is the kind of yoga that I recommend for my patients because Iyengar's rigorous training makes me trust this kind of yoga for all of my patients, especially for those who have limitations and pain. Now back to Holly.
So then you studied, was it acupuncture, Chinese medicine?
Yeah, medicine school or acupuncture school are the same thing. I went to school and graduated with a master's degree, became a licensed acupuncturist.
And you mentioned, was it an internship you did in China?
I did. I got to study at a university. I was only there for a month. They really had this great ability to understand which conditions would do better with Chinese medicine and which conditions would do better with Western medicine.
They would use it complementary to mainstream medicine in that hospital or was it only acupuncture?
It was only Chinese medicine. So acupuncture, moxa, moxibustion, which is an herb... mugwort that is dried and aged and you burn it actually on your body in different ways that can adjust the qi. There was this whole floor that was all cupping.
Cupping is an ancient technique used thousands of years ago as a therapeutic practice. Starting in Macedonia and Egypt, it then progressed to many parts of the world, including India, China, and others. In this practice, suction is applied to the skin, which in various cultures is used for different reasons, to balance chi, or for blood detoxification, or other reasons. Let's return to Holly's experience in China. And in this particular hospital, they specialized in stroke rehabilitation. so scalp acupuncture, where they use actually very long needles that they thread into these acupuncture points that relate to different parts of the brain. They'd have these huge needles and are coming out of their head, which was completely painless.
So the needles don't go and touch your brain. They don't go through the sutures.
They're on the surface extending up.
Is there a reason that they're super long if they're not going into your body?
Well, this is kind of hard to describe. You insert the needle at a particular acupuncture point, and then you push that needle so that it travels just underneath the skin above the skull. You're not penetrating.
Darcy Thomas (10:45.473)
But they're going along the skull or like around the head. Okay. And so those needles would stimulate parts of the brain. So for example, if you had a stroke that impacted the left side of your body, they would put needles on the right side. The left brain affects the right side of the body and its function and the opposite. The right brain affects the left side of the body and its function.
Darcy Thomas (11:09.281)
So you saw these results. They were showing us videos of people. So like the guy, he had just had the stroke, know, mouth is drooping, he can't swallow, left side is paralyzed. And then like seven days later, here's the things that he can do. 14 days later, here's the things that he can do. And you know, we got to observe the patients being needled. And where in China was it? It was in Harbin, which is way up north. So was the Heilongjiang University Hospital that I studied at.
Darcy Thomas (11:38.209)
Looking at certain research, especially from the NIH, I found that quality of life, motor function, and independence is improved in stroke victims with the use of skull acupuncture versus just using standard therapy of physical therapy. And now back to my interview. Was the training and acupuncture in line with your intuition?
Darcy Thomas (12:02.017)
Did you feel like you were doing what you needed to do at that point? Or did you feel like you were pushing through something that wasn't maybe naturally meant to be? The answer, short answer is yes to both. Teaching yoga and doing massage, I was having a lot of strong intuitive experiences. then going to acupuncture school, I actually remember a point where I was like, I have to turn off my intuitive skill because it's too much. really have to just completely focus on
Darcy Thomas (12:30.187)
the left brain memorization and just simplify it, which I actually think was healthy for me. An old yoga student of mine, she started seeing me right after I graduated and the intuition stuff just really kind of flooded right back with her. And so it kind of started right back up again when I started practicing. Yeah, I was just thinking, I love dancing and I hate taking classes and learning the steps, but once.
Darcy Thomas (12:54.923)
You learn the steps, then you make it your own. And it's like, have to do the classes to get to the place where you can do the dance as you want it. And the same for acupuncture, the same for medicine that I did or whatever it is. And so sometimes we have to do things we don't want to to get to the place we do. I agree. And I would say that that's sort of that balance between the masculine and feminine energies, know, the yin and yang, sort of two opposing forces that we're always seeking to find harmony.
Darcy Thomas (13:24.013)
Could you talk a little bit about the elements in Chinese medicine? So the five elements in Chinese medicine are water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. Each element has an emotion that is correlated with it. So water is fear, fire is anxiety, wood is anger, metal is grief, and earth is sympathy. So each one of the elements has not only an emotion,
Darcy Thomas (13:49.311)
related to it, but a state of being. So for water, it's power. So powerlessness for fire, it's control for wood, it's pressure. And we talked a little bit about that in relationship to what's happening for you. And then with metal, it's high standards and with earth, it's burden. And so those are sort of the states that hook us. So when you do this five elements session, can you explain what's involved in that versus medical intuition?
Darcy Thomas (14:19.383)
Throughout my whole career in the healing arts, I always tended to draw in people whose health issues were difficult to diagnose and didn't respond well to typical treatment. What I realized is that I was drawing in people whose physical issues were rooted in mental and emotional imbalance. But what I've developed over the last several years is essentially a way for people like this to work with the habitual stressful thoughts and emotions.
Darcy Thomas (14:48.333)
Yeah, I saw this question. Someone said, how can you tell if your health issues stem from mental, emotional problems or from true physical illness? I that that's really hard to discern. And what I actually see is that most of us that deal with chronic illness, it's a combination of physical, mental, and emotional, that all three play a part. But what I was saying just before, when you're doing everything right, when your issues aren't responding, that is generally a sign that it might be more rooted in the mental and
Darcy Thomas (15:17.741)
And in that way, disease can be a great gift. It can be that messenger. Yeah, you said disease is a way for your body to communicate with you. I definitely see this with many people, not everyone. So I wonder about disease and what's going on in someone's life when their health is challenged. And sometimes I think it's actual medical stuff, but oftentimes there's life stressors that manifest physically. Is that something you find?
Darcy Thomas (15:43.765)
Absolutely. I definitely agree that it's not always mental and emotional that's the cause of disease. Lots of externals can cause disease like environmental toxins, infection, know, bacteria, all of those things. What can exacerbate is then it meets our body. So then that external factor meets what's happening internally. If we already have stagnation, if we already have deficiency, then it can kind of intermix and create a unique disease presentation.
Darcy Thomas (16:12.031)
So there are things that actually cause disease and people can have physical disease without the mental emotional component. And many times there is the mental emotional component. Would you have any advice for people to help with the mental emotional components that keep us in disease states? What I would say to those is that there are ways to work with your mind.
Darcy Thomas (16:35.165)
We acknowledge that the mind and emotions can play a part in our physical body, but we're not really sure what to do about that. Once we have that realization, what do we do from there? And that's actually what I offer in Five Element Sessions, where again, we use your Five Element constitutional type as a way to understand what's happening in your inner world. We start to look at what are your habits. So what I was talking about with you, as far as the wood constitutional type and pressure, wood types tend to invest
Darcy Thomas (17:04.639)
their chi and thoughts like it's all on my shoulders. I'm the only one that's going to be able to do this the right way. Does that make sense to you? Does that resonate with you? Yeah. Yeah. When I was doing this podcast, I actually didn't want to learn how to edit because I thought if I did, I would have a really hard time finding someone who would do it good enough. So if I never knew, then it would be easy for me to be happy with someone else's work. But now I know. And now it's all on me.
Darcy Thomas (17:32.661)
And now it's all on your shoulders. And so that speaks to the behavior. So we talked about the four categories of organizing your inner world. So there's the thought, emotion, body sensation, and behavior. And so you have the thought, I'm never going to find someone who's going to do it good enough. That puts pressure on you. That creates all kinds of body sensations that we could get into that. But then the behavior that wood types tend to participate in is they tend to take on too much responsibility. They don't delegate.
Darcy Thomas (18:01.729)
So this is a very typical wood chart here. And it's helpful because once we have this organized, then everything becomes a little more clearer. Again, we're not at the mercy of that habitual thought emotion pattern. We have the ability to kind of take a step back, take a deep breath and say, is this where I wanna invest my chi? I have a choice. I have a question. So another thing that came up in my mind as my children, one of my big...
Darcy Thomas (18:30.537)
love languages is acts of service. I've realized that my way of showing love to my children is acts of service and I want them to learn to do things themselves and I'm really struggling to step back because I feel like I'm withdrawing love by not doing it for them. How very interesting. Well, this would actually speak to the second part that I do in the five element session. So the first step that we do is this organizing your inner world.
Darcy Thomas (18:57.537)
What we do with these charts is we then understand that it's the thought is what's creating the emotion, the body sensations and the behavior. So if we can zero in on the thought, we can ask ourselves how true that thought is. So you were just saying that you feel like the act of service doing things for your children is a way of showing them love. so withdrawing that would be withdrawing love from them. Is that true? No, there's other ways, but I think the big thing they would want most is quality time. Exactly.
Darcy Thomas (19:26.935)
So what you can start to do when you're in that moment of feeling like, I'm just going to go ahead and do my daughter's laundry for her because that's an act of service. You could take a moment and sort of look at that and be like, well, okay, hold on a minute. Is that really the best way to show love? Is there a better way to show love? Because when you do things for them, isn't it true that you're also sort of giving the message that you do it better and that they don't do it as well as you? That's true.
Darcy Thomas (19:55.831)
Very true. It's a mixed message. Yeah. I don't mean to be laughing, but we all do this. These thoughts are subtle and subconscious and they hang out in the background and we just react. We don't have the awareness. That's where the five elements can become so helpful. So you also mentioned you talk about the four quadrants and finding areas which light up.
Darcy Thomas (20:15.285)
And the four quadrants are mental, emotional, spiritual and physical, I believe. Can you explain more about this? Do you see things light up when you are working with people intuitively? Yeah. So one of the first things that I look at, particularly when I'm looking for health, is I'm looking at which of these four areas need attention and is whatever is happening, is that rooted in more of the physical body? Rather than science, medical intuition uses insight or intuition
Darcy Thomas (20:45.655)
to find the cause of medical or emotional conditions. I discovered a study by the NIH which reports a 90 to 100 % accuracy around finding the main issues going on in someone's body and also in describing the connection between a person's life events and health issues using medical intuition. Now let's return to Holly's approach with the four quadrants.
Darcy Thomas (21:13.975)
So if we need to continue to focus on the physical, that's where I stay in a reading. The mental quadrant is just thoughts. So the thought of, it's all on my shoulders, I'm the only one that's going be able to do it right. These are all very typical wood thoughts. And so then the emotional body are the emotions that are created from the thoughts. So the mind and emotions really play in together. The spiritual side of things.
Darcy Thomas (21:39.859)
In Taoism, there's a concept called original nature, which is our connection to the Tao, or whatever word works best for you there, source or spirit or the universe or God. We're intimately connected with the Tao. It's always there. And our stressful, habitual mental and emotional states are essentially what blocks us or clouds us from remembering that original nature or our connection to the Tao.
Darcy Thomas (22:09.249)
You know, it's usually that I'm not saying that the spiritual side of things needs to be addressed. It's usually that how are we not connecting to that source energy? Just thinking about things lighting up and to bears when I talked to her, she talked about spirit guides and that they're there. She said, sometimes I see him, mostly I hear him. So are you a visual person? Do you see things as far as intuition or?
Darcy Thomas (22:35.415)
How do you get your messages with medical intuition? Yes, I see pictures in my mind's eye. So that falls in the clairvoyant category as opposed to like clairaudience or clairsentience. Okay. I clairsentience is probably second for me. So I'll see a picture in my mind's eye or I'll feel things through my body. Okay. Interesting. I had a patient asking me some questions when I was talking about this podcast and he asked if most of my patients come to me for healing or to fix it.
Darcy Thomas (23:02.487)
And I said, absolutely to fix it because I'm a doctor and I get referrals from other doctors. And I told him, because I've been doing it long enough, I'm not embarrassed to talk about this, but I don't feel a lot. It's frustrating because people ask me, do I feel different? Do I feel better? And I'm like, I don't know. Don't ask me that. Sometimes I tell people the truth. I know when I'm done, but I can't really tell you a whole lot about it.
Darcy Thomas (23:28.767)
I exchange treatments with a friend of mine who's an osteopath and also a psychiatrist. So I clearly treat many more people than he does every day and have more experience. When we're exchanging treatments, he's describing everything he's feeling and I tell him I can't really feel a lot of those things. So when I tell him this, he says, but I feel you feeling me, but I'm not really feeling what he's feeling.
Darcy Thomas (23:56.377)
And what I do feel is very subtle and hard for me to relate to my patients. And now back to my conversation with Holly about my patient. And so I said to the patient, our head wants to know, but does it really need to know? Cause my hands are doing what needs to be done. I love that. I mean, I think I would identify most with Claire sentience than anything, but I still feel like I have Claire nothing. On another note,
Darcy Thomas (24:24.557)
You studied acupuncture and then you went for a certificate of medical intuition. What brought you there and what was that like? I didn't know those kinds of schools existed. They do. And they're more and more more common. Mainly it had to do with it. I was just picking up lots from people and it was really draining for me. I think what was mainly draining was not knowing how to handle that or what to do with that information. I worked for Kaiser for a while as an acupuncturist. I worked in their complementary and alternative medicine department.
Darcy Thomas (24:54.443)
I had a lot of infertility patients and I had this one woman who was coming to see me and I just knew immediately that she didn't actually really want to get pregnant. But she's sitting there telling me the whole story of I can't get pregnant and all this stuff. What I learned later is that she was in her second marriage and she already had kids that were 10 and 8 and her body was just done. But that's one of the distinct memories of being inundated with this intuitive imprint and
Darcy Thomas (25:18.921)
Not knowing what to do with that. wouldn't be appropriate for me to say something to her at that point. I also had a couple of mentors that were so insanely helpful for me and learning really how to get people from where they are into where they need to go. The woman who wanted to get pregnant or, but really didn't, according to your intuitive reading, I love that stuff. And it actually makes me think about Ina May's guide to childbirth. Just a note.
Darcy Thomas (25:46.505)
Ina Mae Gaskin has been referred to as the authentic mother of midwifery. And she had a place in Tennessee called the farm. Women would go to the farm and deliver babies with midwives. So back to Ina Mae Gaskin. On her farm, people would come there and in one story, the baby wouldn't come out because they were terrified of being a mother. And they would look into the mental emotional side of why
Darcy Thomas (26:16.109)
the delivery wasn't going easily. Yeah, it's kind of like Carolyn Miss or, know, she does medical intuition. She's the one who coined the term medical intuition. interesting. I didn't know that. So she is the leader. I think she shifted a bit. Anatomy of the Spirit I consider to be kind of the 101 of medical intuition. She has another amazing book called The Creation of Health, which she wrote with Norm Shealy.
Darcy Thomas (26:38.743)
who actually he just passed away. I'm not sure if you know who he is. He was really who coaxed her. So he was a physician. He passed away in July and he was very interested in the energy side of things and met Carolyn Mace. He would have a patient in the room and he would call her and just say, what do you see? And he wouldn't tell her yes or no. He would just hang the phone up. And so they started working together remotely, but she was like, I must've been doing well because he kept calling back. As Holly said, Carolyn Mace
Darcy Thomas (27:06.113)
was the first person to really write about the idea of medical intuition. Many of her books and events around speaking focus on spirituality, mysticism, health, energy medicine, and human consciousness. In her book, Sacred Contracts, Carolyn Mase talks a lot about the idea that we come to earth with a contract or a purpose that we need to live out.
Darcy Thomas (27:35.125)
And within that contract, there are certain lessons, relationships, tasks we're meant to fulfill. And everything is really set out to achieve our divine purpose. And now back to the interview. Did your meditation as a child, do you think that helped you with your skills? Absolutely. Meditation gave me a lot of self-awareness and I think that's been incredibly helpful throughout.
Darcy Thomas (28:02.977)
not just my work life, but just my life in general for me. Yeah. So when you, you see something challenging in someone's house, how do you relay that information? That's a really tough one. And I've always struggled with that because what I've been taught and what's always feels right to me is to never withhold information that whatever I get needs to be said. Otherwise I start playing God. Just me saying, think that there's a mental and emotional pattern that's creating this can create a lot of blowback. A lot of times people don't want to open that door.
Darcy Thomas (28:30.925)
Mostly people are seeking me out after they already have a diagnosis or they suspect the diagnosis. So if I do perceive, for example, cancer, which I have, there's been a handful of times where I've been like, this is cancer. You need to go see an oncologist and you need to get whatever treatment they recommend.
Darcy Thomas (28:49.481)
And I actually had a meeting about six months ago. She didn't want to hear that she was going to have to do chemo. She thought she was going to be able to do it naturally. And I wasn't seeing that for her. And that created a lot of resistance, anger towards me. What do you feel is the most helpful for other people to help them change or improve certain ailments? Everyone is individual. There's no two treatment plans that are the same for everybody. So that really depends on the person.
Darcy Thomas (29:16.885)
So Julie also talked about shamans being the bridge between matter and energy. And it seems in Chinese medicine, you work with Qi, which is the life force, sort of the energy. I guess it is sort of a similar bridge. Chinese medicine, we're taught that we humans are the midpoint between heaven and earth. And Buddhism actually also talks a lot about heaven and earth.
Darcy Thomas (29:41.291)
concept is essentially that we are as humans always trying to harmonize these essentially two opposing forces. So you have this heavenly state of being, which is original nature, which is the state of being when we remember our connection to the Tao, which I feel like is a sort of mash-up of peace and joy and love. But then you have Earth, where we perceive ourselves to be this separate identity center that needs to survive.
Darcy Thomas (30:06.079)
and earn a living and raise children and pay mortgages and navigate all the messy, ugly, uncomfortable parts of life. And so the trick really is how do we harmonize those two? That's actually really beautifully symbolized in the lotus flower. Thich Nhat Hanh had a great quote, no mud, no lotus, meaning that the lotus flower, which is eight petals and it symbolizes the eightfold.
Darcy Thomas (30:34.509)
path towards awakened mind. The lotus flower only grows in the mud. So in order to have that awakened mind, we have to have the muddy, messy, murky, difficult, painful, anguish inducing parts of life. Symbolically, what I would say is that this is also a metaphor for our human form and disease.
Darcy Thomas (30:59.777)
that disease can be that messy, uncomfortable, painful, anguish inducing part of ourselves that pushes us towards understanding our mind and therefore points us in the direction of that mental and emotional liberation. discussed some of your own challenges and when did your health challenges first come up? I can say with confidence that all of my health issues are rooted in the mental and emotional side of things. And again, that's not true for everybody, but that's certainly true for me.
Darcy Thomas (31:29.701)
And adrenal fatigue is something that I've worked with since my mid thirties when I was in acupuncture school. But I think that it was building most of my adult life. Just looking at your quote about disease as a way for your body to communicate with you. How did your work, how has it helped you? I think that my health challenges have helped me in a few different ways. One is that I actually see them as gifts now because I feel that they reflect back to me these mental and emotional patterns that I'm glad I know about.
Darcy Thomas (31:59.349)
I wouldn't have looked deeper within myself. sometimes think illness can be a sign that you're not doing the right thing. Sometimes we have to go through the motions, like learn the steps of the dance to get to the part we love. But for off track, think sometimes disease can manifest. What do you mean by the right thing or off track? What do you mean by that? I guess sometimes I feel like I haven't made the decision I needed to. But the shaman I interviewed, he said,
Darcy Thomas (32:27.585)
Sometimes we make the wrong choice, but maybe it must have been the right one because it was the choice we made. So maybe it seems wrong, but it's what we chose and that's what was meant to be. I just look at that time in my life and think if I was really in sync with myself, I wouldn't have made the choices I made. But what did that time in your life give you? It also gave you tremendous self-awareness, right? Without that time, how clearly would you see yourself? I don't believe that there's any wrong choices.
Darcy Thomas (32:57.311)
ever, even when it seems like the wrong choice, because all of those choices eventually lead us back to a place of seeing ourselves more clearly. True. You are in sync with the shaman in Peru. And if you are at that point that you only made wise choices, do you need to come here to Earth School? Do you need to be here? Probably not. To speak to what you were saying, I think it's an incredible gift to be able to look back at that time in your life and to see with clarity.
Darcy Thomas (33:26.433)
where you were and why you were doing what you were doing. I would add to that that we can trust life itself, even when it is messy and dark and uncomfortable, that that's okay. We don't have to run from that darkness. It's part of it. It's the mud. It's true. Is there anything else you feel I'm missing that you want to talk about? One thing that I would say is that original nature can be observed in everyday life. So we see original nature in young children. There's all kinds of anguish and suffering around them, but they're
Darcy Thomas (33:55.809)
happy. In Taoism, there's a saying that the infant and the sage have everything in common because they don't separate themselves from the Tao. They remember their original nature. And then as we grow up, we slowly forget that original nature. I feel that it's a matter of habit. And the more that we create clarity around those habits that like biting your fingernails or smoking a cigarette aren't healthy, but they feel soothing, we create awareness of those.
Darcy Thomas (34:25.537)
the greater our capacity to remember our original nature. And you can create that habit every day. For me, it's bird song. Whenever I hear birds, I stop and take a moment. And I say to myself, original nature, I bring it in. And that's really my spiritual practice. And so I have a daily kind of yoga meditation practice, but that always shifts. But what is consistent for me is taking in the good, creating awareness. That's how you find the diamond.
Darcy Thomas (34:54.327)
that is deep down in the murky stuff. You start to inquire and question those habitual thought patterns that separate us from original nature. So that's my practice in Birdsong. I take my dogs for a walk every day and never mess a day. Even if I feel sick, I go out and get outside and that fresh air immediately shifts my mind space and reminds me of the peace, joy and love that is life. It's inherent. It's always there. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Darcy Thomas (35:22.847)
It's been a real pleasure. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's great. This concludes the fourth interview of the practice podcast. I'd love to thank Holly Scalmanini for joining us today on this interview and for answering my questions and her thoughtful responses, as well as sharing her wealth of knowledge with us.
Darcy Thomas (35:48.683)
I would also love to thank the band Modera Kayand for letting me use their amazing song to find you. And if you'd like to know more about Holly, please go to www.thepractice-podcast.com and follow me on The Practice Podcast. Also, feel free to rate the show and give any feedback you feel is helpful.
Darcy Thomas (36:18.401)
This is DT Grant wishing you a magical and inspiring journey towards health. Thanks for listening.