Transcription of Pamela Florea for the show Musical Healing #303
Lisa Belisle: My next guest is Pamela Florea, who has been in the nursing profession for more than 40 years and has a private practice in Freeport. Over the past two decades she has worked as an intuitive energy psychotherapist, integrating sound and color healing with traditional talk therapy. Thanks for coming in today.
Pamela Florea: Thanks for having me, Lisa.
Lisa Belisle: I’m very interested in what you do, because there are a lot of people out there who are trying to make changes in th¬¬¬eir lives, which is not easy, and you’re giving them a new way to do that, I think.
Pamela Florea: That’s pretty accurate, yes. My practice integrates the principles of energy medicine, so working with the human energy field, working with the meridians, the chakras, person’s auric field, to work at balancing and creating harmony in the physical body, as well as employing traditional therapeutic interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy, for instance. A session combines both. It’s very holistic.
Lisa Belisle: You came at this after having been in a pretty straightforward nursing field for probably at least half the time you’ve been in nursing.
Pamela Florea: Yes, exactly. I have been in various clinical settings, hospital settings, but I’ve always, even though out of nursing school I worked neonatal intensive care, for instance, and very aware even early on in my nursing profession that I always had an interest in the alternative, always interested in what other things we were doing.
For instance, in neonatal intensive care, it was being aware of how the premature babies in the isolettes needed to be held, they needed to be touched, and aware that we would pipe in music into the isolettes and the incubators, which made them calm down and affected their growth rates.
Even though I was in very traditional settings, working in the operating room, allowing people to have headphones and be able to listen to music would have an overall impact on the recovery time, for instance.
Very aware throughout the 40 years, but then in the last 20 years is when I really came into my groove and I would say found my passion, being able to really integrate sound healing into a private practice, because I had gone back at that point, being able to be out on my own and independent from working in institutions. I started incorporating sound healing, for one, which is a really fascinating discipline to incorporate with traditional therapy. It’s amazing to see the progress and see people move through difficult transitions in their life more smoothly with introducing sound, for instance.
Lisa Belisle: If I was going to come see you for some healing therapy, what types of things might I be interested in dealing with?
Pamela Florea: I’ll use the example of somebody who might be dealing with anxiety, or who has a trauma history for instance and has some PTSD or chronic anxiety. My goal would be, first of all, using some cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, stress reduction techniques to get them comfortable in their body and teaching them ways to illicit a relaxation response in the body, like Herbert Benson’s work with his cardiac patients. This is just basic as being able to provide an antidote for the fight-or-flight response. A lot of people who experience trauma, for instance, are not comfortable in their bodies at all. There will be part talking through that sort of thing, guided visualization exercises to do at home.
Then they would get on the table, and I might use tuning forks on the meridians, for instance. I might use my hoop drum to really ground them and center them in their body. I have crystal singing bowls. I have different instruments and sound. It’s all about working with the energy and being able to balance and shift, and it provides a tonic to the nervous system.
Not only that, there’s a whole branch of medicine now called psycho-acoustic. Although that term may be new for some people to hear, we’ve known for centuries, since the beginning of time, how sound impacts a person’s emotional well-being, for instance. You think of Gregorian chants in churches and Tibetan monks chanting and Native American drumming, for instance. These are traditions that have been around for centuries.
Now in more modern medicine, what we’re doing is, through the use of imaging, PET scans and EEGs, we’re noticing how it impacts the brainwaves and how it impacts a person’s neurochemistry. It actually has an impact on producing more serotonin, which of course is the neurochemical that influences mood and sleep and managing pain. There’s actually changes going on on a cellular level. It’s a combination of various modalities that I would use.
Lisa Belisle: You’re doing things that go across the spectrum, everything from cognitive behavioral, which is more of a standard psychotherapeutic practice, two things that have been going on for a long time, centuries, but just haven’t necessarily been incorporated previously into the type of practice that we’ve been offering patients. Why sound? We have various senses. Some people are really a lot more impacted by something visual. I know that we’ve talked to people who do light training, for example. For you, sound was important. Why is that?
Pamela Florea: You could be in your car and listen to a song on the radio, and it just can completely make you smile and relax and just shift your mood from this difficult day at work. It’s accessible to everyone on every level, even if it’s just listening to, like I say, a song on the radio. You don’t have to go to a sound healer to feel impacted. I think it’s just because it’s so profound.
I know of so many integrative doctors, like the late Mitch Gainer, with his oncology patients in particular. I’m just fascinated by that, and also color, the frequency of color and how color influences our mood too. I’ve personally experienced the healing benefits of sound, and because I was personally impacted by that, I’m more passionate about it. I guess that would help answer the question.
Lisa Belisle: Was there a turning point where you were, I don’t know, you’re lying on a table yourself and somebody was doing something with sound and you felt just so profoundly moved that you realized this was something that you needed to learn more about?
Pamela Florea: I grew up in a big Catholic, alcoholic family. I experienced a lot of chaos, a lot of dysfunction, a lot of trauma, I guess you would say, as a kid. I was very open to being able to, and how that created stress in my own body, and as I was approaching adulthood and just wanting to deal with some of that, I experimented around with different modalities.
I went over and did some training in France, learning how to use tuning forks and the meridians. They have these huge instruments of sound that you would sit in, and then the sound would just reverberate through your whole entire being. I felt tremendous purging from that experience.
I guess that’s what would come to mind is that, I just, like it had cleared out a lot of emotional baggage and really was able to shift some perspectives and understanding about moving through things and how I could help other people be able to shift and move forward and instill hope and that you can overcome anything really.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting as you’re talking about the chaos of a large family, because as you know, I’m the oldest of 10 children. My family was as functional as a 10-child family could be. We didn’t have some of the bigger issues that other families struggle with, but it was chaotic. There definitely was a lot going on. For myself in my own life, I actually have found myself gravitating towards silence, probably as a result of early on being impacted by all of the stuff, none of which was really bad. It was just very normal. I think there is something really formative about being in a household that has a certain level of whatever noise there is.
Pamela Florea: Same. Totally relate to that experience. I’m particularly interested in, back in the mid-’90s, the CDC had done a study, they called it, and it’s with Kaiser Permanent. It was a study done with, I don’t know, 15 to 20,000 people. It was measuring looking at adverse childhood experiences and seeing the correlation between adult illness.
Those early experiences and what they call adverse childhood experience doesn’t have to be the acute trauma. It doesn’t necessarily have to be abuse of some kind. It can be the chaos you’re describing, growing up in just a huge family where there’s only so much time that parents have to devote to kids. It can be a depressed parent. It can be financial strain, of course, loss of death or illness, a parent that’s chronically ill.
The interesting thing is that I’m really interested in making this connection, and this is where I feel like I can be a bridge, is the early experiences in childhood like that, where there’s a chronic, relentless stress. It sets the nervous system in a way that’s like fight-or-flight chronically. What we’re seeing in adults is a lot of inflammatory chronic illness, because of the surge in cortisol levels. They are more prone to autoimmunity, cancer, heart disease, all the major obesity, and of course diabetes, and even looking at addiction, ways that adults cope.
I think there’s a huge opportunity or an educational piece as part of preventive medicine, because we’re not hearing about this and med students are not learning about being able to make that connection and be able to ask the right questions, because quite often, especially in the primary care setting right now, the way managed care is set up, and these limited visits, people aren’t sharing these things with their physician. They’re just dealing with what they…. Nobody’s making the connection or asking questions about what your childhood was like. There’s just not time for that, but there certainly needs to be more education, or even have it be part of the intake or the questionnaires for your annual exam.
I think that that’s a huge gap that I think we need to look at, because since that study was done in the mid-’90s, there have been thousands more that are supporting this evidence, and these people are still being followed from that original study.
Oftentimes it doesn’t even have to be a big…. Just for somebody to make that connection, for your physician to make that connection and to maybe recommend that you go see someone to talk about it or to have somebody who may be working energetically with them is oftentimes a relief. It may be the first time in their life that they’ve ever shared their experience or thought that it might even be relevant. It’s just an educational opportunity, I think.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that the reason that we don’t always think to ask about people’s childhood experiences is because we’re not really sure how we could possibly impact them?
Pamela Florea: Again, I think that, and you could speak to this too, and when you went through your training, it’s an area of discomfort, because if somebody opens up and shares something about their childhood, you have to be equipped with being able to offer resources out in the community or be able to….
I used to work for a big group medical practice in Portland and opened a behavioral health department there for the first time. I think that’s a real need, too, is being able to integrate behavioral health into the primary care setting, to be able to keep track of those clients, instead of them going out into the community, you lose track on whether they actually followed up on anything, whether they’re getting some help. I think part of it is not knowing what to do with the information then is my guess.
Lisa Belisle: Now we’ve been talking about dealing with dysfunction, but I remember you and I, we knew each other through delivering babies together when I was a resident, and you were one of the nurses who always made sure that the lights were low, always made sure that all the beeping, loud things were turned down, obviously taking care of the patient, but being aware that this was a small, fragile baby being born into the world and the mother that was doing a lot of work. Are there preventive things that we can be doing? Are there things that we can be incorporating into our lives energetically or sound-wise that can be helpful?
Pamela Florea: I think that the time-honored traditions of energy medicine, which incorporate all the Eastern philosophies, with yoga, tai chi, qi gong, acupuncture, any kind of moving the physical body, even just getting out and walking in nature, so being aware of our energy bodies and being able to work with that. Qi gong and tai chi are wonderful ways of, on your own, and yoga, being able to shift and move energy in the body. You don’t have to go to a sound healer to have an impact with moving energy in your body. I think, yeah, getting out and being able to walk in nature is a wonderful tonic to the nervous system, and you’re just sitting in nature, being able to de-stress.
Lisa Belisle: What you’re talking about with tai chi, qi gong, acupuncture, you’re talking about the use of meridians in a slightly different way. You’ve been talking about previously using sound to activate, I guess, the meridians that are used traditionally in Chinese medicine. You’re just using them in a different way.
Pamela Florea: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Another, when you talk about things that people can do on their own, for instance, chronic stress, worry, anxiety, pretty much it exists in your left part of your brain, it’s more of the worrying mind, the one that’s ruminating and constantly just fretting about life, and the more things that you can do to activate your right brain, which involves all this movement I’m talking about, but in addition, dance, singing, for instance, being in the car and singing activates the creative brain, and for instance, it’s impossible to sing and worry at the same time, so the more ways that you can incorporate more joy, more laughter, being able to counteract that left brain that wants to be in a chronic state of worry.
With my clients I’m often recommending more play and more fun and more pleasure in their life. How can they incorporate dance? How can they incorporate and make sure that they’re moving their bodies? That’s a way of keeping everything in balance.
Lisa Belisle: What I wonder is, we’ve spent a lot more time focusing on physician and provider wellness, not just physicians, but all health care providers and their wellness, which is a conversation that we weren’t even having 20 years ago. Partially it’s because we’ve had more providers across the board feeling the chronic stress of things being ramped up, shorter time frames with patients and more productivity and quality goals that need to be met, all of which are very legitimate, but it does increase a certain amount of stress, which is leading to provider breakdown. I wonder if the more providers themselves see that they need to come back to a place of balance in a healthier way, the more the types of things that you are doing will become embraced.
Pamela Florea: Do you think it’s reaching that point, in your experience?
Lisa Belisle: I think we’re still talking about provider wellness at this point. I don’t know how much we’re actually doing about it. I think it’s a little bit like the crisis, that people have to get to the place of crisis before anybody recognizes it, and then they’re still considered the outliers. I would love to say, “Yes, it’s so much better.” I think we’re still working on it. I don’t think we’ve gotten to a place of prevention quite yet.
Pamela Florea: I think some things have changed. If you think about the on-call schedule, for instance, in residencies and all of that, that seems to be improving and certainly more realistic. I know having worked in the hospitals during the time when I worked there, the demands and the rigors of the physicians who were on call were just over the top, and you had a lot of sleep-deprived physicians that were having to function the next day.
It’s part of the reason why I didn’t go into… I had contemplated midwifery instead of becoming a psychiatric clinical nurse specialist, because it was whether or not I wanted to have that on-call schedule and all of that. It was a quality-of-life decision.
I think we have to look at what is going well and what has changed. There’s an awareness there that it’s an overall system that needs to change, how we approach medicine. A lot of it is just a time management thing. It’s a lack of time to really properly address the preventive piece of medicine that is so needed. I think maybe, like in Maine here, the crisis with the opiate addiction, that is a direct correlation to how our society is dealing with stress, with what I was talking about earlier with the adverse childhood experience. That’s how we cope as adults, do we turn to alcohol, do we turn to drugs. That’s reaching an epidemic proportion.
Things like that may help us look at how we can deal with the bigger issues in a broader way, because it is about the drugs, but it’s about what is underneath, what is underneath there that is not being treated properly.
I’m not an expert. I don’t have the answer for all of that. I see a path, and however winding it is, I think that we’ll hopefully be able to get there, but I do think there need to be classes in med school about this. I think they need to start talking more about prevention and not just treating symptoms and looking at the whole person.
Lisa Belisle: I agree. As the mother of a child who’s starting med school this summer, I really hope they start these classes soon, because I want my kid to come out on the other side to not only be a good doctor, but also to be psychologically and emotionally whole, because that will make him a better doctor and a better human being. I think all of these things that we’re talking about, from your lips to God or the creator, to the ears of the greater energy I guess.
I’ve been speaking with Pamela Florea, who has been in the nursing profession for more than 40 years and has a private practice in Freeport. Over the past two decades she has worked as an intuitive energy psychotherapist, integrating sound and color healing with traditional talk therapy. Thanks for coming in today.
Pamela Florea: This was great. Thank you so much for having me.