Don Massat about miasm release therapy, his approach to schizophrenia and other diseases of the mind and spirit

Don Massat

Don Massat, born 1953, is well-known in the American alternative healing community as an extraordinary cranial sacral therapist, a visionary shaman, and the founder and director of the Sacred Journey Institute and Beyond Wellness teaching and healing centers in Tinley Park, Illinois. He is also the creator of Miasm Release Therapy, Sacred Journey Therapy, Sacred Journey Massage and Vibrational Healing Therapy. He has devoted himself to the study of multi-dimensional trauma and its effects on human behavior. Cranial sacral therapy originally developed out of the osteopathic practices of William Sutherland. With light touch and gentle manipulations of the cranial sacral system, self-corrective physiological activites take place to correct imbalances and treat a host of health problems. Going beyond the physical and emotional aspect of his celebrated mentors Dr. John Upledger and Hugh Milne, Massat has evolved cranial sacral therapy into the spiritual realm with the understanding of a “city shaman” of guided intention. His original interest in healing work arose out of his fascination with the terrible mental condition known as schizophrenia, and his early encounters with schizophrenics who are considered hopeless, treated as “a burden to society, and once diagnosed, kept heavily medicated for the rest of their lives. Massat sees them as exceptionally gifted individuals who are capable of realizing tremendous creative art work, wisdom and even channeling abilities once placed in a supportive environment where they can heal and evolve with the help of those he terms “evolved light workers.” Special contributor to Xecutives.net in the United States and former interview partner himself, John F. Walter, spoke with Massat in his Sacred Journey Institute, located in the outskirts of Chicago, about his revolutionary new approach to schizophrenia and other diseases of the mind and spirit called ‘miasm release therapy.’

John F. Walter: Did you know you had intuitive psychic and healing gifts as a young child? Or was the process of developing your special way of “knowing” the human body and the field around it a long and gradual process?

Don Massat: Well, I would definitely say that it was a long and gradual process. But, I noticed things even when I was a kid. I was a thing we call a traveler. A lot of people think of this as dreaming, like they do when they sleep at night. But my dreams were very lucid. And so I would become very aware of details in my dreams. And so I would be in a place that would not be familiar with here, but I was very familiar with the place there. I could go deeper into where I felt emotions and feelings, and I could feel relationships of certain people in these travels as if maybe somebody was a brother or a sister but not somebody I knew here. Or I knew that, around the corner, there was a grocery store, and I knew the store clerk, and it wasn’t anything I’d been to here. So, I knew that I could travel to different places at different times, and I knew these were other lifetimes. And I could go into a dream and do whatever I wanted to do, you know, in the moment. So it wasn’t like it was replaying something from what somebody would call from a past life, or something like that, it was actually taking place in the moment.

I would say at that point when I was a child, I could do a lot of these things, and I was very intuitive. There’s a part of me that, if I was focused on somebody, or somebody was projecting at me or something, I could see–I could feel–what was really going on in their head through the words. So there was a part that was, maybe you could say, very telepathic. And it wasn’t one of these things where it would be bombarding, where there would be a hundred people around and then and I was confused reading it in everybody’s mind. It would only be something I would be focused on, I had a certain reason to be collecting information from somebody, and then I could see what they were thinking behind the words they were saying, and I would ‘get things’ before they said it. I would know exactly what they would say before they said it. That happens in the circle in classes nowadays. I’ll be answering somebody’s question and before they’re even starting to question.

So, I was very well aware of these things. And I was also very aware that wasn’t going on with other children. You know, like, why can’t other people just naturally do these things? What happened to me as I really started to suppress these things, because it wasn’t acceptable, which I see happens right now with children, a lot with children, with their imaginary friends So I really internalized that and became very introverted all through grade school and high school to escape. I didn’t say very much to anybody, I kinda felt like, why did I sign up for this? And I felt like, what is going on here? And I felt like an alien, I felt like, I didn’t belong here or something. I didn’t fit here, why didn’t I fit here? Getting into athletics was a good way for me to come in and fit. And later on in college, and majoring in psychology, and getting into mental health disorder, what they call ‘mental health disorders’, I was intrigued, it’s been a big passion of mine ever since I was a young kid. So, later, I get more involved in the feeling part of the work, but, in the beginning, the real focus was on studying the evolved human, and what we can do in evolved states. The fascinating capabilities of what we can do. I’ve always felt one of the biggest things that humans experience is being limited. One of the biggest things they experience on this planet is being limited, and we don’t have to be that. And so we can explore our gifts and capacities and capabilities. Even as I’m doing the Sacred Journey Institute, and teaching, those are the two biggest things: I would say one is exploring the evolved human, and the other is exploring feelings, because it works together. As we go into the evolved human, we have a greater capacity to feel, and greater tools.

John F. Walter: That’s quite a contrast to the usual psychological interest in abnormal psychology, and learning through what’s different from the norm. One thinks of Abraham Maslow, and his self-actualization. He’s one of the few psychologists in the beginning of the transpersonal psychology movement who was interested in exploring man’s capacities rather than man’s abnormalities or deficits. So much of today’s neuroanatomical research is based on deficits.

Don Massat: Exactly.

John F. Walter: Cranial sacral therapist Hugh Milne–one of your mentors–in THE HEART OF LISTENING talks about how he too suppressed after kindergarten his capacities and gifts until age nineteen. That dreaming continued, clearly, as well as all those psychic gifts for you. For him, he really did shut it completely down, because he had a Scottish osteopathic family, but you just sort of didn’t want to show it to other people. There’s a marked contrast between you two.

Don Massat: Well, I think it comes down to the defense mechanism in surviving. Because you come in and you’re being judged–and then being judged huge in the school system. And then being judged huge as an adult, and having expected responsibilities.

John F. Walter: Right.

Don Massat: So, even if we talk a little about schizophrenia, when a child–a pre-school child–is hearing voices and speaking to spirits and things like that, it’s kind of laughed off as, well, they have an overactive imagination. And it’s okay, until they start kindergarten or first grade. All of the sudden, now they’re in a school system where they could be judged, and these gifts that they have–which are gifts–begin to become suppressed. And what will often happen is Tourette Syndrome. Tourette Syndrome is actually the same thing as schizophrenia. We’ll get into miasm and all that, but–they’re suppressing this energy. And what happens is they’ll blurt outwards where they’re actually channeling an entity in themselves and they’re embarrassed about it and trying to suppress it and as they try to suppress it, it starts to produce tics in their physical–little twitches and so forth. So that becomes really embarrassing for them as they’re going through the school system–being judged. Figure skaters have come to me who are working with that same thing of the Tourette Syndrome. Later on in life, when they’re out of the school system, is generally when schizophrenia is diagnosed. They’ll talk about schizophrenia when somebody’s at the point when they can’t hold a job, they can’t function in the family system. They’re not matching society’s norms. It’s really the same thing as a child with an overactive imagination. It’s the same thing–Tourette Syndrome. Schizophrenia. It’s all miasm.

John F. Walter: They’re protecting themselves with these powerful entities that come in you call miasms?

Don Massat: We find ways to protect ourselves as we come in here, as we come into this planet. For me, one of the protections that I’ve been fighting off all my life is fear of being judged. So, in kindergarten and first grade, this thing, it isn’t happening with your ordinary kids–they don’t travel. They’re attached to linear time. You know, everybody lives by linear time. And that doesn’t make sense to me. So instead of battling with the kids or society and there’s no environment that’s supporting me, I take on what’s called a defense mechanism. Or more miasm. So different miasms can enter the system–or defense mechanisms–mine happen to be—“if you suppress it, and don’t talk about it, you’ll suppress it, and you won’t be judged. Keep quiet, and don’t say anything.” So, I became very quiet, and I became an observer. And I studied the books of psychology, the classics–Karl Jung, Sigmund Freud–all the big guys, I studied them, but it wasn’t enough for me. And when I got through college, I actually went into the restaurant business. Into the bars. And I learned more about human behavior than Karl Jung and Sigmund Freud could have taught me–and there it was! It was all playing out. So I was the observer. And I also had this ability to know what people were thinking–if I wanted to focus into it–and how they would play with words, and how different things would play out. And how people used defense mechanisms all their lives. So it was actually a big process for me to go in and eventually develop alternative health, and produce Beyond Wellness– because that was one of the first wellness centers. Then to have a school that was that so unorthodox–the Sacred Journey Institute–to explore schizophrenia. Beyond Wellness you could call a therapeutic massage and healing center, but it really was started as a research center to explore schizophrenia. And that was even kept quiet. We brought people in and we studied the phenomena of miasm.

John F. Walter: I noticed you had a researcher on your staff.

Don Massat: Yeah. So we went deep into that, but then still, there’s that fear of being judged. It’s played out with me for a long time. I would say it’s released from me pretty well because I’ve ploughed through this, but that would be a defense mechanism, to keep quiet. And somebody else might utilize defense mechanisms in other ways.

John F. Walter: Well, you got around it. Coincidentally, I’ve been an elementary school teacher. I’ve taught kindergarten through second grade. But, for many years, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s doctrine of the developmental stage of getting rid of the fantasy life at around age seven operationally, has never made sense to me. I always felt sad. felt like the guy who had to say, there’s no Santa Claus, there’s no Easter Bunny on a systematic level. Every single American curriculum , including on the Catholic school level–has to teach kids the distinction between fantasy and reality as a standard in the curriculum. So that they—the children–really get it. Basically, it robs them of their ability to have this second sight. And it’s like you managed to dodge that bullet.

Don Massat: It’s almost taking away their imagination.

John F. Walter: Yes! And most teachers think that that is quite right, and,you know, operationally significant, but a lot of teachers believe that these developmental stages that Jean Piaget developed no longer correspond to the children of today, if they ever corresponded to our children at all. And the fact that we’re forced to teach them these reality-based standards. And the one year I didn’t teach them, I was written up for not doing it. It’s a paradox in our system. So it’s great that you bring this up.

Don Massat: It’s a big thing for me too, when I bring out a school like this.

John F. Walter: Clearly you learned more not from books but from real life experience–hands on. Especially as a bartender–I’ve been a bartender, too. I know exactly what you’re saying. Interacting with all these different personality types.

Don Massat: Games people play.

John F. Walter: Exactly. So, when did you make this decision–or was it always with you? I’m going to be a healer one day?

Don Massat: During the time period in the restaurant business, I also had a stint in Arizona State when I was there and I was taking psychology classes. And I remember going to the state mental hospital there. And I was a clinician for a short period of time there. And I had all these ideas, where I was going to help these people with mental health disorders. And there was going to be field trips. And there was going to be growth. And there was going to be all these things. And, I was very excited walking into the hospital. And I remember them showing me around different areas of the hospital. And they has a recreation area. And I kept asking about the recreation area. Because that’s where we were going really have exciting fun with all these people. And they wouldn’t show me the recreation area. And I must have asked four or five times, can I see the recreation area, what you’re doing with these people? Well, finally they took me to the recreation area. And there were ping pong tables. There was a jukebox. There was a person passed out on the jukebox. Somebody lying on the ping pong table. They were all medicated and drugged. So they couldn’t function. None of them could function. And I remember going into maximum security. II was intrigued with the schizophrenics. They let me go in there, and I would talk to the schizophrenics. And all of the sudden the voices would surface. But instead of suppressing the voices, I asked the voices what they were. And what they were doing for this person. As if they (the miasms) were something separate from them. Where the medical model was really trying to suppress something that they didn’t have a belief system for.

John F. Walter: Was this the beginning of your miasm release work?

Don Massat: This was the beginning of the miasm release therapy. And the entities, they would be inside of the schizophrenic–which were speaking in second person– it was something different from this person. I asked them what they were. Why they were there. What function they had. And they told me. And it was incredible. Just incredible phenomena that I don’t think has ever been captured. They (the scientists and doctors) were so busy trying to suppress something they don’t understand. Even later on in the restaurant business–I got stories. I guy came in. I was familiar with him from other restaurants. And every time I’d seen him I’d always seen him by himself. I don’t know if he knew me–if he knew me by name–but he knew me from other places. He came in and he sat in the restaurant by himself and he ordered something to eat. I was behind the bar in front of the restaurant. And there was some commotion in the dining room there. People were upset. He was swearing. Busboys thought he was talking to them, and people at the table thought he was talking to them. And so they were upset and complaining. Waitresses were complaining.

So anyway there was a moment when I stepped into the washroom, and I went into a stall. Nobody was in the washroom. He walked in. And he was standing at the urinal. And he started talking. And he didn’t know I was there. And he says, “You know, these waitresses are really being rude to you.” He says, “I agree. They really are being rude to me. What do you think I should do about it?” “Well, I think you should do this.” And there was a whole conversation playing out, back and forth, back and forth. I could see this person’s struggle. It was similiar to what I had seen in the mental hospital. So he actually returned to his table. And I came out. He never knew I was there. But, commotion started again. There was a lot of profanity. They even went as far as –when his food came, they (the management) took the food away from him, and told him that he had to leave. And, when he started to walk out–they were escorting him out–he was an older guy–I remember him looking at me behind the bar. I looked into his eyes. And I could see his inner struggle. Like he couldn’t help it. And I just wanted to help this guy.

John F. Walter: You empathized.

Don Massat: I empathized, but everybody around was making fun of him. “The guy’s an idiot!” “He’s a lunatic!” “Get him out of here!” “This guy’s crazy.” And he’s been kicked out of a lot of restaurants. And he’s got an inner struggle going on, and he doesn’t know how to get to this. So, I’ve studied these things, I’ve worked with these things. And we can get to this. We can completely turn it around. That was a very impacting moment. Just watching him, and looking into his eyes. Almost as if he’d looked at me, saying, can you help me? And at that time, I was in the middle of studying this stuff, but now I’m seeing it. I’m seeing the reaction of the environment around him. Actually, the reaction of the environment around him is his biggest problem.

John F. Walter: It amplified it.

Don Massat: There’s no support system for him. Even now, studying this, the doctors think the same thing. “He’s crazy. He’s a lunatic.” He’s a burden to society. It’s a big one. His family thinks the same thing. His peers think the same thing. He can’t walk into a restaurant without everybody thinking the same thing. Now, you take that same person, who’s very empathic himself, and he can feel what people are feeling. What do you think he’s feeling when the whole environment thinks he’s a burden to society? Now, twenty five percent of schizophrenics attempt suicide. And it’s not because of the voices in their head. It’s because of what society thinks of them. And that’s the secondary symptom of the schizophrenia: it’s the depression. Feeling they’re worthless. And hopeless. And there’s no cure. They’re being told that by everybody.

John F. Walter: So at the same time you had this breakthrough that led to miasm release therapy, you were studying — you were thinking–unlike most psychological theorists, about the extraordinary capacities of the human spirit. Of human evolution. When did you make that connection?

Don Massat: The two biggest things to me–and I have such a passion for schizophrenia and healing–is you take the schizophrenic, and you take the incredible shaman, the healer. They’re doing the same thing. There’s a different support system. And this one is taking him down into the darkness, and this one is bringing him up into the light. But it’s the same. They’re extremely gifted, evolved humans. And they’re misunderstood.

John F. Walter: Joseph Campbell talks about this.

Don Massat: Absolutely.

John F. Walter: How this shaman has to go through this initiation that resembles schizophrenic states of mind.

Don Massat: Right.

John F. Walter: But comes out, after a terrible ordeal, which involves not hallucinations but real non-ordinary non-local experiences.

Don Massat: What we do in the Sacred Journey Institute here, at Level Six in the cranial sacral students’ training, is connect miasm to schizophrenia– but we’re studying this all along. And by the time we’re in Level Six, we may have twenty students in the class, with all the symptoms of schizophrenia. All the symptoms of the shaman. So what we’re doing is, we’re lifting them into their abilities and expanding their gifts. They may be healers, or may be playwrights, or maybe actors, but we’re bringing out their creativity, or wherever they want to go with it. Which the schizophrenic can do. But they’re depressed. Misunderstood. They’re heavily medicated. And when you medicate them, it takes away the empathic abilities.

Don Massat

John F. Walter: From one school of thought, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to the visionary approach.

Don Massat: Right. So there’s the connection right there. I’m pulling both together and looking at it and seeing this is the same thing.

John F. Walter: How did you get from these nascent intuitions of what your life would become, through traditional cranial sacral therapy to being the visionary founder of your own shamanic cranial therapy institute?

Don Massat: I love cranial sacral therapy but there are different levels to it, and when I first started, I studied it, and I was taught by John E. Upledger and then Hugh Milne. Upledger brought it into the physical aspects, where the cranial bones can move. There are different things–physical things– that happen when cranial bones are restricted. It is very much a physical model. But Upledger was a genius. For he pulled this out of the medical model, and he knew it would be very impacting to work on somebody for maybe an hour and fifteen minutes as opposed to a doctor who might spend five minutes with somebody. He had an osteopath’s background. Upledger was an osteopath. Five minute manipulations. Boom, boom, boom, out the door. Someone like a chiropractor. But Upledger realized that when somebody is on the table, and you’re doing this work for an hour, hour and fifteen minutes, it has such a major impact on the person. And the reason is. you are allowing that person to go into an altered state, which is a very healing state. You’re taking them into an alpha state. The body can start to self-correct, and we can feel these things happen. So Upledger was major, but then there was a battle with the medical model, because he knew that the medical model wouldn’t spend the time with people that they needed to really do cranial sacral work. He pulled it away from the medical model, but kept it close enough so he was working in the physical realm, so it would be accepted. So he was one of the pioneers.

Hugh Milne came along–you read his book THE HEART OF LISTENING–and what he does is he brings it into the emotional body. That was a huge thing that he did. They’re pulling farther away from the medical model now, and even causing controversy.

John F. Walter: But Milne hedges a lot of his statements throughout the book. He says, maybe there are past lives.. And then he gives graphic examples of them. But he always, in order to not be delegitimated.

Don Massat: Or lose credibility.

John F. Walter: He has to condition all his statements.

Don Massat: Milne is an osteopath. Another osteopath.

John F. Walter: From a family of generations of osteopaths.

Don Massat: So they gotta put the bones. But one thing Milne did is, he went to South America, and he studied meditation. For like, 5 years. And then came back to the States and went to California, the Big Sur area. He wanted to start his cranial sacral practice. Well, they wouldn’t allow him to do it, because his license for osteopathy wasn’t good in the United States. So what he decided to do was go to massage school, in Big Sur, get a massage license, which gave him the ability to do cranial sacral therapy because he had a massage license. Then he started his school of cranial sacral therapy, where he took it to the next level, after Upledger.

The big thing that revealed Milne’s genius is how he used his visionary skills, which he really developed through meditation. He knew his power, and how powerful it was for the therapist, to be in a high place, because you’re affecting the person on the table. It’s never been realized in the medical model, really. It’s as if, when you are lifting yourself, you are creating a bigger space for that person on the table to go into a healing process. He focused a lot on the inner work of the therapist, which was genius again, it took it to another level. And he got pretty comfortable with where he was at. I went through his program, as I went through Upledger’s, but I got very connected with Hugh Milne in Big Sur. I started teaching classes for him, and started showing some things, where we can go more evolved with this work, and I started to introduce him to miasm.

John F. Walter: Your earlier notion of protective defense mechanisms, entities that enter the individual initially to protect them?

Don Massat: My earlier work. I would bring it in, because we were already putting people into altered states, and this is where we could bring these things to the surface. And he didn’t have a strong understanding of miasm but he knew that it was big.

John F. Walter: So he went with you along with you?

Don Massat: Well, Hugh Milne trusted me. But, as you said, he’s got this part that hedges a little bit. He had a good thing going, and he doesn’t want a controversy, so he kinda stayed where he was.

John F. Walter: Provisional.

Don Massat: So we kind of split apart. I wanted to take it to the place where there’s no limits. In the osteopathic field they’ve got their limits in the medical model. I’ve stretched it farther, because I want to go to a place where there’s no limits. And when you go to that place where there’s no limits and open up belief systems, that’s where you get to the spiritual part of the work. Opening up the belief systems, taking off the limits, that’s when you start to deal with things that the medical model can’t touch. Schizophrenia. Autism. Cancer. Any terminal disease. Depression.

They’ve got names for it. They’ve got diagnoses for it. But, they can’t touch it, because they don’t have the core of the problem. There’s an emotional core to all dysfunctions and disease. Hugh Milne knows that. You take it farther, and to get to the core you have to open up belief systems. Like phobias. Somebody has a phobia. Well, there’s a dysfunction there. There’s a problem there. Where does it come from? Well, they create medications to suppress symptoms of phobias, anxiety attacks, things like that, but they don’t make sense. So, by opening belief systems, you could go to a place where this could make sense. If you can’t get on a plane, maybe this happened in another lifetime. Maybe the memory is still in our body from another lifetime. You have to open belief systems, to get to those places, to explore the spiritual part of the work and then go to the core of what’s happening.

John F. Walter: In a sense, this is a good place to bring in the connection between heart and mind, and the field. Because you’re saying, I’m not going to make it provisional! I’m not going to put any conditions on it. Full belief. Full, open belief system–open heart–can you talk about that, Don?

Don Massat: Okay, open heart. We have an extreme intelligence in what we call our heart space. And there’s more intelligence there than there actually is in our mind. Actually, it’s never been proven that memory comes from the mind. They don’t know where it comes from. And actually it’s been proven that it comes from outside the body in our field. So I’m going to go deeper into this now. The mind is where fear originates.

John F. Walter: To make sure, you’re also talking about the brain as well?

Don Massat: The brain, yes.

John F. Walter: The nervous system?

Don Massat: Our mind and the brain is where we check in. Survival. It’s where fear originates. It’s where our skepticism and doubt is. It’s where we function. We’ve learned to function in society in our brain and our mind.

John F. Walter: From the sabre–toothed tiger to getting hit by a truck.

Don Massat: Right. So, because we’ve gotten so conditioned to do that, we humans really operate a lot in distrust. And fear. And so the mind can get away and sabotage our heart space. Now, in the heart space is where trust originates. It’s our empathic abilities. It’s our feelings. When we are empathic and our hearts are open, actually everybody becomes transparent. And when everybody is transparent to us, there’s no fear. There’s no doubt. There’s no distrust. Because we’re totally open and we’re seeing through everybody. It’s almost as if–if we were telepathic, and didn’t need words, people would be transparent to us. Now we can go farther with that, on communication. When we get communication, actually everything that enters into our intelligence comes first into our field. Now the field–a very basic way of explaining it, if you were to walk into a restaurant or a bar, and you saw two people, you might be drawn to one person or another, to some conversation, somebody you didn’t even know. Or over here you might be totally repelled. Don’t even want to go near that person.

John F. Walter: Attraction, repulsion.

Don Massat: But you haven’t had a conversation, or a word, or anything. Where does that come from? It actually comes from the field. Communication always takes place in the field before we hear anything. Did you ever think of your mom and all of the sudden the phone rings? And there’s Mom on the phone. Well, that thought that you just had went into the field and it’s picked up by your mother in the field and it was connected and that phone call was made. All communication and intelligence comes into our field , which is outside the body before it even enters, and then it comes into our heart next, and then it comes here.

John F. Walter: Can you relate that to the concept that love is the greatest medicine is often in your writing? The heart is the fundamental centering intelligence, the embodied intelligence of the seven chakras, the center of the chakras, and you teach them all in your institute. And healing the timeless Soul is crucial to healing ailments of the time-bound body. So we have this timeless soul, but a time-bound body?

Don Massat: Time-bound body is actually only a belief system. I’ll make an example of healing with the heart and the field and the mind. When we do our classes here, actually, start in early classes to teach people to step out of the mind and go into their heart space and make that a powerful space for them. Actually we’re emptying the mind of different things such as doubt that are sabotaging us and going into our true heart first. Later on, the mind is very powerful because it’s our creator. Now, if we have total love and compassion and all these positive things now, this is what we want to use later on when we’re starting to create. But, if our empathic heart is filled with fear, because we’re human, and it’s from the mind, and we’re filled with fear and worry, we don’t want to create.

John F. Walter: Eckhart Tolle speaks of the pain body.

Don Massat: We want to process those emotions out first. That’s an early part of the program. Processing those emotions out. Now, this gets more complicated and detailed, as, let’s say, your thoughts. Now you have thoughts. And there are a lot of people who are in this victim energy, and they’re always sick, or they’re always having problems, they’re losing their jobs, they’re having accidents, everything happens, cancer patients, it could be anybody, and they’re in this victim energy. ‘It happened to me again.’ Now, that thought–that they’re gonna be sick, or they’re terminal–just the thought itself goes through every cell of our body and starts to create our reality. When a doctor tells a cancer patient, well, you’ve got a month to live with a terminal disease, you’re looking at that doctor as an authority. You’re taking that information in as a thought, and you’re bringing that through every cell of your body, and you’re starting to create that one month reality.

Now, you take an alternative therapy, and you have hope that the body can heal itself, and you start to implant that into your mind, your body can heal itself. You take that into your subconscious, and what happens is that that thought of hope goes through every cell of your body and now, it starts to manifest into your reality. You start to create–and you’re in charge. IIf you are in victim energy, not only does it directly affect your immune system, and it can take you down into disease That feeling of victim goes into your field. Now what happens is that you start to draw experiences to yourself to support being a victim.

John F. Walter: In the environment as well?

Don Massat: Yeah. Because there are no accidents in life. You are opening yourself to draw experiences that support the emotions that you are putting into your field. Now, if you have hope, and, let’s say, you can pick any kind of emotion–and emotion’s the core–core, core, core–so say, you want to experience respect. I think everybody wants to experience respect. So when you start that feeling–you start to respect yourself–it actually goes directly into the immune system. If we have respect for ourself, and we bring that into our field, you will naturally draw experiences to yourself to support respect. It just comes. Because it’s in your field. So, we’re totally responsible for respect we get from people, we’re totally responsible for being the victim. It plays out in our physical, or, it plays out in what we draw to ourselves. So, two people in the same family can experience two completely different lifetimes in the same universe. In the same house.

John F. Walter: Even identical twins?

Don Massat: Even identical twins. And that’s also why cloning will never work. (Laughs.) Because you’re mixing physical genes, and you can only match appearance. Emotional body and their spiritual, everything else, will completely change, even what the person looks like.

John F. Walter: This is fascinating. What’s evoked today is this idea of neuroplasticity. What you’re saying is that cardioplasticity precedes neuroplasticity. Our feelings determine our thoughts.

Don Massat: Are the core.

John F. Walter: So let’s talk about this in terms of intention and energy. How do your evolved likeworkers help people shift their victim energy to heroic energy, to championing themselves? And when you speak of energy, are you talking about something different than Max Planck did, as quanta?

Don Massat: Energy is a very broad word that’s being used, so what we’re doing in the school is we’re starting to develop a whole other language. Like, say, when you talk about energy, I would talk about low vibrational emotions, as opposed to high vibrational emotions. There’s new words there. So we have to get deeper into what we’re talking about. Low vibrational emotions could be resentment. Anger. Hate.

So when the emotions are changed or shifted or processed out, we can actually change those cells. Regenerate cells. And you can actually cure cancer. Now these are things we learn in the school. Light workers come in as students, and they start to become light workers, but what they’re doing is their own process work. They’re shifting their own emotions. So as we are starting to release our own worries, insecurities, fears, anxieties, doubts, things like that, anger, resentment, jealousy, we start to let go of these. And we actually process them out of our bodies. They’re in our muscles. Our cells. We process these emotions out of our bodies, and we start to vibrate at a higher level. Now, physical disease cannot manifest at a high vibration. So,you have to step out of the medical model, once you get the death sentence, and that’s how light workers operate.

John F. Walter: You use the phrase ‘penetrate with light’ on the Beyond Wellness website. That’s an interesting use of the verb.

Don Massat: When you take for example insecurity. And you take confidence. Confidence will start to override insecurity, every time. So confidence is a light word. It feels good. It’s a high vibrational emotion. Insecurity is a low vibrational emotion. So, as you’re building confidence, you’re starting to take away insecurity. So as you’re penetrating somebody with light, the darkness starts to disappear.

John F. Walter: And that’s done as a transference of energy in the field?

Don Massat: It’s in the field. It starts in the field. It goes into the physical.

John F. Walter: Is a light worker someone who knows how to manipulate their own vibrational energy?

Don Massat: They’re really new words that are coming out. So I’m trying to evolve the words. So I might say evolved light worker, but a body worker is somebody who works with the body, a massage therapist does massage therapy, then they’ll say energy worker. Well, an energy worker might work off the body doing whatever they do. And then you say, light worker. Well, light worker works with unconditional love. So, they’re working now with emotions and feelings. All that energy. So we’re trying to get more specific words to describe what the light worker is. So if you talk about evolved light worker, I always like to evolve it and take it several steps farther. And in our program, we call it, Sacred Journey therapist. So this is really an evolved light worker, where were not only working with unconditional love, but we’re working with very expanded belief systems. So now we’re creating a space so big a space for this person on the table to venture in.

John F. Walter: Let’s relate that to diagnosing of a soul of a schizophrenic. You said earlier that it may not just be from childhood suppression of a fantasy life. It could be from another life. Or many lives. In the sessions I’ve had with one of your evolved light workers, Stephanie Brown, and with you, that one session, I’ve had these experiences that I cannot account for. My scientific mind says confabulation. But the intuitive part of me that wants to believe says, this could have taken place. Let’s just go with it, say it’s taken place.

Don Massat: So, are you seeing an experience that is happening to you. Or are you getting a voice telling you something? To be careful?

John F. Walter: Voices, before I had these cranial sacral sessions, one with you and many with Stephanie. Now I’m getting the whole enchilada: voices and auditory hallucinations.

Don Massat: Great. Evolving. Don’t take any meds and mess it up.

John F. Walter: My question is, in this diagnosis, how do you zero in? Everything is now. You’re zeroing in on the soul. You want to cure, in a sense, the soul. And this is my essential question. If you’re not just curing this life, but a previous life or series of lives, a series of patterns, are you curing past, present and future all at once?

Don Massat: Yes. yes. It’s going across the board. There’s two different things we’re mixing up a little bit here. One thing is the idea of miasm. Miasm has a high vibrational counterpart called luminism. In the later classes, we go heavy into luminism. And again, I’m going to emphasize again, emotions are the key.

John F. Walter: These are your terms, the way you’ve evolved these two words?

Don Massat: Yes. So the first set of terms is miasm and luminism, I’ll go into that, and this is your true schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is what we would call miasm. Miasm feeds on low vibrational emotions. And when we talked about schizophrenia earlier, we talked about a person feeling, feeling, like a burden to society. Feeling helpless. Hopeless. Psychotic. Angry. Depressed. Now just those emotions right there are low vibrational emotions. And miasm feeds on that. A schizophrenic is a Thanksgiving feast for miasm. Because of those emotions. Those heavy emotions.

John F. Walter: I want to back up for readers, because most people hearing you would get this confused with introjections, the Freudian concept that when the individual has taken in, represented in their psyche, their parents, their caregivers, even their peers, they are replicating those voices. In other words, it isn’t a protection system at all. It just came in, got stuck in memory, becomes increasingly toxic. So it’s an internalized negative self object. Your notion of miasm appears to be radically different.

Don Massat: But, there’s a relationship, to what you’re saying, because the Freudian concept is just a limited concept. We’re evolving it, and taking it farther.

John F. Walter: Like the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung?

Don Massat: Right. This is where we go now. This can get very complicated. We have physical DNA. So, you look a little like Mom, you look a little like Dad. You got features of both in your physical DNA. We also have energetic DNA. And it’s our emotions, our habits, our feelings, different things.

John F. Walter: That’s your energetic signatures?

Don Massat: Your energetic signatures. An energetic signature could be say, an energetic signature for prejudice. Okay, so we’ve got an energetic signature for prejudice that can be passed down from mom or dad or even more powerfully from grandpa.

John F. Walter: In the body?

Don Massat: Yeah. Let’s take an energetic signature from great grandpa or grandma, and it could be, racial. It could be an energetic signature from thousands of years.

John F. Walter: Countless lifetimes?

Don Massat: It can be. But when we say genetic, and that’s what Freud was tapping into, with parents and ancestral lines, we can go there, because it can be there. But, we can also expand it into other lifetimes and into other environments.

John F. Walter: Let’s look at the ancestral connection.

Don Massat: So just the ancestral thing, for example, we call that a genetic energetic signature for prejudice. So we could have that from grandpa, which, say, from a 1 to a 10, could be a 9. Heavy prejudice. All of the sudden, that signature may lie dormant because the environment here is different from the environment of grandpa. So that signature’s lying dormant, but it could also be active, unacceptable here, where it was acceptable back then. So that’s just a small instance of where, when Freud was talking about relaying something from parents, everything is learned right here in this lifetime. It’s a limited part of it, but we can evolve it and expand it into other things. Say, for instance, you come in and there’s a trauma. It could be a sex abuse. All of the sudden, there are intense emotions that are taking place. Out of fear. Out of anger.

John F. Walter: It activates it?

Don Massat: It activates it. Raises it. Miasm comes in to protect.

John F. Walter: Like an environment releasing a gene sequence, as in Bruce Lipton’s book on epigenetics, THE BIOLOGY OF BELIEF. So how does the miasm protect?

Don Massat: The miasm protects in a trauma situation. There are many different types of miasm. In a traumatic situation like that, different miasms may come in to protect. Now with miasm, just as in our physical aspect, we have defense mechanisms. If we’re being tortured, we will pass out at some point. You can only take so much physical pain. Well, in our energetic bodies, we can only take so much emotional pain. So, when emotional pain gets raised to a certain level, miasm, which is energetic, it’s an entity that comes in with its own intelligence and will suppress emotional pain. It will do it in many different ways. It could say, come in and it could affect our memory. We don’t remember the abuse. Well, if you don’t remember it, it doesn’t exist. To a miasm. But it actually does exist, in your subconscious, and it will affect your physical body. A miasm may come in and say, “Don’t trust any males,” if a male conducted the abuse. There’s many different miasms that can come in, but what happens is, this person at some point in his life may need a teacher or something who they can trust, and if it’s a male, the miasm will be pushing them away from this male who they could actually trust, because it’s a defense mechanism. Don’t trust anybody, you know? It comes to a point where it’s holding the person from personal growth. This is where miasm becomes not functional.

John F. Walter: So what originally came into a person as a defense mechanism to protect over time becomes a blockage?

Don Massat: It’s a blockage.

John F. Walter: In the body, but also in the bio-energetic field, in a sense.

Don Massat: It’s a blockage in the field and it could cause physical problems. And it feeds on our fears and insecurities.

John F. Walter: So it’s not of the soul but it knows everything about you.

Don Massat: Right. Let’s say for instance, if you’ve ever been in a relationship. Jealousy! The energy of jealousy. That’s a low vibrational energy. Nobody likes it. It pops up. Nobody can actually give you jealousy. They can’t hand it to you. Jealousy is actually an energy or an emotion that’s produced in ourselves by a suppressed feeling of insecurity. So we produce actually jealousy. Now, when miasm comes in, it feeds on jealousy. It actually has its own intelligence. It knows every insecurity about you. And so you can have an instance that happens, and all of the sudden–how many times with jealousy do you create a story that’s not even taking place.

John F. Walter: Paranoia, at a certain point. You’re not in touch with your intuition.

Don Massat: The miasm is creating that. To magnify the jealousy for food. It feeds on that. And it has its own intelligence, so it will play on your own insecurity and magnify it. Now if there were no insecurity, there could be no jealousy.

So these are things light workers are doing. Processing these emotions out. Things we’re doing with our health. Now take luminism. Could be the opposite. How many times has somebody said to you, I could tell you, say, if I represented your father. I don’t know your relationship with your parents, but say if I were your father, and I said, You know, John, you could never write a story about something that Don tells you because nobody would ever believe you, and you wouldn’t have the guts to do it. But right now, John is smiling, and he even lifted up like an inch, because when somebody tells him he can’t do something, luminism takes place, and there’s a part of you that gets stronger. That’s luminism! You have a lot of similiar energetic signatures that I have, actually. I can feel them in you when I say that.

Don Massat

John F. Walter: Let’s talk about miasm release. It’s been compared to exorcism. Why?

Don Massat: Well, first of all, let’s take the medical model. If you talk about schizophrenia, they don’t have a belief system for it. So what they do is they want to find something to make it go away. They medicate somebody to make the symptoms go away. They have no understanding why somebody would have voices in their head, why somebody would be doing these things.

John F. Walter: Tourette Syndrome. Anxiety. Depression.

Don Massat: They don’t fit in the medical model, because you can’t test something.

John F. Walter: They want to get the patients back to the norm?

Don Massat: Yes. So they want to control it, by getting rid of the symptoms. And there’s no understanding. Now, if you go into, let’s say, the Catholic religion, I don’t know if that’s where the word actually stems from, exorcism, it goes back to early Christianity, actually. By the way, Jesus was an exorcist, did you know that?

John F. Walter: I knew he was a magician, like Simon the Magus. But he also got rid of the devils. He cast them out. “Your name is Legion.” He cast them out.

Don Massat: And it was popular at that time. And the word exorcism is used, and the valuable part of it, what the Christians were actually seeing at that time, was that there was an entity that is separate from that person’s soul. It has its own intelligence. Now they’re calling it a demon, where their restrictions are different from the medical model, their restrictions are, they’re in this whole belief system of right and wrong, demons versus God, Satan, bla bla bla, it’s good and evil. And that’s where they’re limitations keep them from seeing what’s really happening. And as they’re actually casting what they call an exorcism, they’re actually feeding the miasm with their own fears. And they can be taking it onselves, because it’s food, they’re fearful of what’s taking place.

John F. Walter: Fear is just conditioning the entire belief system.

Don Massat: And actually the miasm can come to the surface, it can come back down. It’s like it’s being fed in that situation.

John F. Walter: And so when a person dies, they reach eternal life. So it’s actually been commonplace has been exorcism death. The person would die–and the Inquisition would be satisfied.

Don Massat: They’re taking it with them! They’re taking it with them, and they’re leaving some pieces for the person doing exorcism. So, that’s where they’re missing it. So the valuable thing is, they are seeing something that’s separate from that person. A person is channeling–a schizophrenic is channeling an entity. This is something separate from their own soul. Even when it’s coming out of their own mouth. Channeling in general has to be understood, and they’re channeling low vibrational energies in their own bodies. Which is valuable. You’re seeing what the energies are feeding on. And you can start working with that. So they (schizophrenics) are actually very gifted.

John F. Walter: So the early Christians and later the Catholic Church got it half right. The medical model, in your opinion, got it completely wrong, because supposedly they’re all your thoughts and feelings, they’re happening inside your closed circuit, stand alone brain. Freud writ large.

Don Massat: Miasms are defense mechanisms, that are actually protecting a person. Now, let’s take something. I don’t know if you’ve watched CNN lately with the Jody Arias trial. You know who Jody Arias is? It’s been in the news.

John F. Walter: No.

Don Massat: She’s a young girl. She killed her boyfriend. Stabbed him twenty nine times because he was breaking up with her and was about to go out with somebody else. And she comes and–boom! Now she’s going through court now, and she doesn’t really remember about the stabbing. She knows she did it. Admits that she did it. But, as you get to the part where the heightened emotions are, she’s lost memory of that part, and miasm is actually protecting her with that, because, think of the jealousy, the raw jealousy, that took place. How heightened it had to be for her to do what she did. She could not exist in that heightened emotion. She would’ve commited suicide. Or–nobody could exist in that heightened emotion, and the miasm comes in and protects in whatever we it can. You know? And she sits in court and talks about it, and her family is sitting here, and his family is sitting over there. And they’re grilling her with questions, and there are no tears and no emotions. Now, they think that she’s a sociopath, and they’re absolutely wrong, because it was a crime of passion, and all those emotions were there, but the miasm is protecting her in the courtroom. She’s probably going to get the death penalty, because she’s not showing emotions in the courtroom, but she could not survive those emotions.

It’s the same as the child who’s been sexually abused. She could not survive the emotions that took place during that event, and how many times could they not remember before they were seven years old. And miasm comes in to protect, and it often suppresses memory, and does whatever it needs to do, but later on in life, there comes a time, through therapy or whatever they’re doing, process work, where this can start to be brought to the surface.

John F. Walter: And these miasms can result in addictions, acting out, all these kinds of behaviors?

Don Massat: I’ll tell you a simple one, that was a surprise to me in class. We had a lady, twenty five years a nurse, in class. And she started to tell–she went through a big miasm release.We released something on the table for her. Big miasm release. And all of the sudden a memory came to her that she couldn’t believe that she had and she went into the circle to talk about it. And she’s another one of these people who talks from here (gestures to heart). Doesn’t say to many words, and when she says something, it’s coming totally from her heart. And she started to talk about how, when she was six years old, her little sister was crying at the bedroom window in the middle of the night. And she woke up, and she went over there to comfort her little sister. And she looked out the window, and there was a flying saucer. In the front yard. With the lights. Everything. And she saw this, and she held her sister, and I think they went back to bed, or they may have told the parents. And then it was gone, it didn’t exist anymore, it was suppressed. And they really had no memory of what took place there. And now later, through the program, she’s what?–fifty years old–through the program we’re releasing things, and she’s releasing fears. And she’s releasing, say, fear of judgement. Or anything that could be connected with that traumatic experience.

Now that experience itself could be too traumatic for a child to carry through life.And as we started to release more miasms, it ended up that, she started to remember that she was actually taken on the spaceship. And there were certain things, probes, that were put inside of her. And we were excited about, what was this? This was another Level 9 class. Things come up, oh my God. So we got her in class and we asked everyone if they would like to hear someone channel alien energy. She’s got alien energy that will come up through her. And it was easy. Alien energy isn’t like War of the Worlds. It’s really informational energy. Aliens are fascinated about how we operate, and they’re studying us all the time. And she has these energies actually inside of her. And so we put her in front of class. Put her in an altered state. And she started to channel. And all of the sudden, this is the wildest thing, her mother from another universe channeled through her and said the reason this took place was she wanted to visit her daughter. She came actually to visit her daughter.

John F. Walter: Is this physically, or astrally?

Don Massat: Physically. Alien from another universe came down to visit her daughter, brought her on the ship, and then, as they took her off the ship, what they were implanting was…. miasm. To suppress memory, so this wouldn’t be so traumatic for the child. So that she could visit the child without traumatizing the child who actually was in a human experience now.

John F. Walter: So, they didn’t know that the miasm would cause the effects that it caused later. Even as being advanced, they just didn’t know?

Don Massat: It’s like a defense mechanism for the child. But now that she’s been through a program that has expanded her belief system, and she can go to advanced levels, miasms just fall off or we can release them.

John F. Walter: Does a luminism naturally result through a release of a miasm or is this something that just comes later?

Don Massat: Well, we have luminisms, but they’re often suppressed by the miasms. So as we release miasms, luminisms will come to the surface. And they’re so euphoric.

John F. Walter: When we “awaken”, are we capable of luminisms at any time?

Don Massat: Actually, yeah. You can live with luminisms all the time. You’ll see changes in people. And actually luminisms coming to the surface. Even simple things, such as, you notice somebody in a family, who could be very judgemental about everything. And all of the sudden, as they’re going through their own process work, they’re not judgmental anymore. Just certain habits and judgements that play out in human nature that I would say is low vibrational, start to shift and change. And health starts to shift and change. And then what’s brought to them in the field starts to shift and change. And alll of the sudden it’s like they’re living in a whole other world. And they are. Bringing something completely different to themselves. Different emotions. Feelings are all changing.

John F. Walter: Now, even though this is a historical question, I think it’s important. In the development of miasm release therapy, was it trial and error? Or was it that you took that original long ago insight, and ran with it, because of your people’s inherent gifts over their inherent disturbances? When you founded the healing center, did you already have, in a sense, a notion of miasm release therapy and begin to develop it through contacts with clients?

Don Massat: What’s coming to me, right away, is I have this thing where, I see the good in people.

John F. Walter: Right away I knew that.

Don Massat: You could bring in a patient who’s so suffering–it could be the worst scenario schizophrenic, who’s struggling so bad–and I can look at this person, and I will see powerful energetic signatures that I can work with to start to build. And I can see that in everybody. So there’s a part of me that always could see people evolving. And it was exciting for me to see that evolution, of people expanding. Like, I went to massage school, and I got into evolved massage. And I went to the West Coast Esalen Institute and took it farther. And we’re doing like Sacred Journey massage now, where we’re working on people in trance states, and releasing energies on the physical level. Evolving. In massage therapy. So, we’re constantly evolving people and bringing them to their capacity and capabilities.

John F. Walter: It’s been a pleasure, Don Massat, to interview you.

Don Massat: This has been fun.

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