Ep. 36: Amy B. Scher – A Powerful Technique for Overcoming Anxiety

00:00 – excerpt from the episode
01:09 – intro (listen to discover a little more about your host. Martin will tell you a new lesser-known fact about Dr. Maya)

01:47
Dr. Maya Novak:
Over the years, talking with hundreds of injured people around the world – one thing became very clear to me. A lot of injured women and men who are experiencing anxiety that started after they sustained their injury are sure that their recent physical trauma is the cause of this. In my experience, for a majority of people that’s not the case because anxiety is the result of previous, different kinds of trauma, that just weren’t dealt with. This is just one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this topic with Amy B Scher in 2020 when she was a guest for the second time on my Mindful Injury Recovery World Summit.
I’m sure you’ll find it helpful discovering the difference between fear and anxiety and why people usually confuse them, as well as how little tweaks help with your emotional and physical health during recovery and which ones work the best. Please enjoy.

02:44
Dr. Maya Novak:
In this interview, I’m joined by Amy B. Scher, who is an energy therapist and expert in mind, body, spirit healing. She believes that we all deserve to be happy and free, which may not always be easy to achieve, but it’s always, always possible. Amy speaks from her own experience because she healed herself, as she says, from having pretty much every imaginable condition under the sun. So now, she uses energy therapy techniques, and her down to earth healing approach to help those experiencing emotional and physical challenges to move on and heal permanently and completely. Amy, thank you so much for being here.

03:24
Amy B. Scher:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a delight to be back.

03:27
Dr. Maya Novak:
Oh, I am so extremely excited about this interview because we’re going to be talking about something extremely important, and this is anxiety and fear. Now, before we go into the juicy part, can you share a bit about yourself, and especially why did you become interested in anxiety?

03:49
Amy B. Scher:
Sure. So, I don’t know if we can say I was ever interested in anxiety, but we do become curious about the things that we have to deal with ourselves, don’t we, so I guess I’ll use that word. I became interested in anxiety because I was forced to look at it for myself in the midst of a healing journey from physical illness. So, I did not have a physical injury in terms of an accident, a fall, anything like that. However, the way that I look at it, because I had so many different diagnoses of chronic illnesses, my immune system was injured. My nervous system was injured. When our immune system and nervous system is injured it is hard to heal, and this is the same in physical injury from a fall, an accident, and these types of things. It’s that our immune system and nervous system become involved in not only the sort of illness process or the injury process but the recovery process as well. And at first, with my physical chronic conditions, I was very focused on the physical cures, right. In fact, I had chronic Lyme disease, which was not responding properly to any treatments that I could find in the US, and I ended up sort of going on this journey around the world to try to find a cure for this problem in my body, which was a bacteria that had sort of infiltrated my system. Because of it, I had nerve damage, which is a physical injury. I had autoimmune conditions. I had so many issues. I was bedridden for quite some time. And on this journey, I was looking for a physical cure. As most people realize when they’re trying to heal the physical, finding a physical cure is not usually the answer in terms of the only answer. And what I discovered through trying and failing with all these different modalities and really cutting edge treatments was that if you try to heal the body and the body isn’t responding with just physical treatment, then the injury or illness is not purely physical at the core. That is when I had sort of this epiphany that I’ve done all of these amazing treatments that are supposed to target bacteria, and regenerating nerves, and da-da-da-da, and wait, it’s not working. That means that I’m missing something. The discovery for me was that the missing piece was healing emotionally, and that’s when I sort of realized that the anxiety I had had during my life was having a physical impact on my body. Now, this can happen in terms of actually degenerating the immune system and the nervous system in the case of chronic illness like I had, and it can also act as a block to healing in the case of physical injury. So, for me, looking at anxiety, which turned out to be not what I originally thought it was, was the sort of breakthrough in terms of getting back to complete both emotional and physical wellbeing, which I eventually did by picking up that emotional healing piece.

07:23
Dr. Maya Novak:
And that’s exactly the reason why you are here because it’s so important to go beyond the physical or just the physical. So, thank you for sharing this because I could not agree more. Now, when we talk about anxiety, so is there a difference between fear and anxiety, or are they completely the same?

07:48
Amy B. Scher:
So, there’s a big difference. Fear is one of the emotions that can contribute to anxiety. But in my work with students and clients, I see just as many people have anxiety or experience anxiety from other emotions – from anger, confusion. Let me explain how I see anxiety. I see anxiety as the side effect of suppressing emotions. What those emotions are doesn’t matter. Anxiety is the anxious feeling that something is bubbling up trying to come out. Any emotion that you ignore, don’t process, suppress in your body, that is stuffed down and trying to rise – bubble up and out, will cause you to feel anxious. Most people read that feeling as fear because that’s what it feels like. It feels scary. It feels out of control to have something that’s constantly pushing up against you and trying to come up in your life. But, and this will be very true in the instances of physical injury, it’s not always that you’re afraid that you can’t get better or that you have trauma or fear from the initial incident. It could be that you’re really, really mad this happened to you and you’re not allowing yourself to feel it, and you’re pushing that down. That feeling of being really, really mad all the time will create the same feeling of anxiety as somebody who’s really, really scared all the time. So, a lot of people have trouble healing anxiety because they are focused on healing fear or they don’t understand anxiety because they’re saying I don’t feel fearful, I’m just anxious or I don’t know what I’m scared off. And that - not having that distinction between fear and anxiety causes a lot of people to not be focusing on the right thing. Now that we’re having this discussion, I’m sure there are a lot of people listening who are having aha moments. Like, I’m really confused, I’m really angry, I feel abandoned, I feel discarded by society because my body doesn’t work in the same way. Those are all emotions that can create anxiety. None of those are fear. So that is what’s really important to distinguish because if you keep trying to heal fear and clear fear and release fear, and that’s not actually what’s contributing to your feeling of being anxious, you won’t feel much better.

10:23
Dr. Maya Novak:
It makes complete sense, and I’m absolutely positive that so many people are having aha moments because when you are injured, so many things are coming to the surface and many times people say but I don’t know why I feel the way I feel. So, what you just explained and what you shared is exactly what so many are experiencing. It’s everything and it’s nothing. So, it’s a lot of things.

10:55
Amy B. Scher:
And I just want to say if I can, one of the reasons it took me so long to come to the fact that I needed to deal with anxiety was because I wasn’t a fearful person. I’m not claustrophobic. I’m not afraid of bridges. And what I understood about anxiety gave me a false sense of what it was, and because of that, I didn’t identify with it for so long. And because I didn’t identify with it, I didn’t work on it. And because I didn’t work on it, I didn’t heal it. And because I didn’t heal it, my physical body was under stress all of the time from this emotional energy of anxiety and my physical body was being suppressed as far as it’s healing capacity. Because we know now in so many different ways, and I don’t think there’s now any scientists or doctors that disagree, that our emotional selves does have a direct impact on our physical body. And for me, finding that piece of, oh, there’s something within me that’s not conducive to healing on a physical level was like it blew everything open for me. And when I started working from that place was when I really healed permanently and completely, and it’s been over 10 years now. Sometimes I still can’t believe - that was it? Like, I did all these crazy expensive torturous physical treatments and it was like the little tiny thing that I picked up at the end, which was like, oh, I wonder if I should heal my inner landscape too. It was like the thing that did it. Do you know what I mean? Which is both annoying and amazing! [laughs]

12:38
Dr. Maya Novak:
[laughs] I know exactly what you mean because my experience, I experienced chronic pain, for example, and even though I’m doing this work, I caught myself going around trying to find the physical solution. And then after a few months, I needed to stop and really have a chat with myself, like you know what, you’re doing this; you should start walking the talk and really start working on also what is happening internally. And that was the key for resolving chronic pain for me, for example. So, I absolutely know what you’re talking about.

13:17
Amy B. Scher:
Yeah, and I always say to people this doesn’t mean stop seeing your doctor. This doesn’t mean you have to try to do this with no medication, no. Sometimes we use the external things to give us enough relief so we can do the deeper inner healing work, and that’s what’s really important to know. You don’t have to choose one or the other. I have a lot of clients with ongoing health challenges. They get so confused about, well, if I’m seeing an integrative doctor does that mean that I shouldn’t be – that I can’t take any medication? Or does it mean that if I am going to a rheumatologist that I shouldn’t be looking at my nutrition? No. It means doing everything that feels good, but not ignoring the self. Like not ignoring who you are at the core of this because that piece can be the difference between even what physical therapies work and what don’t. I mean, healing your emotional self can only help everything you’re already doing if you want to do other things too.

14:19
Dr. Maya Novak:
Exactly. So, in your experience when it comes to anxiety and these feelings and repressed emotions, is this connected solely to the present? What is happening? Especially when we are talking about injuries, something major happened or perhaps not major-major but we perceive it as a major thing. So, is this necessarily just connected to here and now? Or perhaps could there be suppressed emotions of decades or things that happened decades ago?

15:01
Amy B. Scher:
Yes, that’s a great question. I always tell my clients most of what you’re feeling now that you think is to be blamed on your current circumstance is old stuff coming up, which means that injury and illness allow us the space and the time and the focus to clear out the old stuff so it doesn’t keep coming back up. Typically what’s happening is when you’re injured now the feelings of being out of control or of being abandoned or unloved or whatever from your past are getting triggered.

15:34
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mhm.

15:35
Amy B. Scher:
Of course, you have very real and justified emotions in the moment, but most of our emotions in the moment also carry the weight of all of the things that happened in the past that we’re being reminded of either consciously or subconsciously now. So, my work really delves deep into healing the old stuff to help you come to a better place now.

16:01
Dr. Maya Novak:
Fabulous. Amy, how do we clear this? What can we do? Can you perhaps guide us through something that can help us move forward?

16:12
Amy B. Scher:
Sure.

16:15
Dr. Maya Novak:
We'll continue in just a moment. I wanted to quickly jump in for two things. First, thank you for tuning in. And second, I’m sure you have at least one friend, colleague, or family member who would very much appreciate this episode. So share it with them and help us spread the word. Now let’s continue…

16:36
Amy B. Scher:
My techniques are called energy therapy techniques, which work with the body’s energy system and our emotional selves. So, the body’s energy system works on the basis of – most people have heard of acupuncture or traditional Chinese medicine, and Ayurveda, there’s so many things that the energy system is the base of. But it runs on the idea that our body has a central energy system that’s connected to our physical body and our emotional body, and when energy gets stuck in our body, it starts to block or imbalance of our physical body. And so what my work does is basically use self-healing or self-application techniques to help clear some of the stuck energy and emotions in the body that are causing these blockages and making it hard for the body to heal. So, I have several different techniques, and all of them are self-application because something that frustrated me when I was going through my journey was having to run to a million doctors and practitioners, and I can say it gets costly. Not only is it exhausting, and maybe not possible if you’re stuck in bed, right, or a wheelchair whatever it may be, but it gets very costly. And in addition to that, it feels very scary to be so reliant on other people. All of the techniques I either learned or created, which is what my work is about now, are things that you can easily do by yourself. I teach at some of the hospitals in New York City, and I teach kids. So, these are very easy techniques. One of my favorite techniques, which is one that I created, is called the Sweep Technique, which basically helps to sweep any old energy out of the body and the subconscious mind that people may be holding onto. A lot of this repressed emotion and such is stuff that this isn’t our fault that we have it. We have it because we’re human. A lot of it is in the subconscious mind. A lot of it is stuck in the cells of our body. So, this Sweep Technique is a script that somebody reads or repeats that has very specific wording that I tested over and over and over – trial and error – to help guide our body into releasing this old stuff so that our nervous system and immune system can do the jobs that they’re to do. I would love if we could go through it now and everybody follow along, if that sounds good to you.

19:03
Dr. Maya Novak:
Fabulous. Please, let’s do it.

19:04
Amy B. Scher:
Okay. I’m going to read it straight from one of my books, which is called How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can. This has all of my techniques, and this is in, I think, 13 different languages now translated, and in most libraries everywhere. I also have a book called How to Heal Yourself from Anxiety When No One Else Can, and this script is also in the book. So, I’m going to read it straight from here. All you need to do is put your hands or a hand over your heart space, and we’re going to work on releasing any suppressed emotions that are getting in your way. We don’t need to know what they are, we’re just going to direct the body and the subconscious mind to help us let go of them. So, repeat after me.

Even though
I may have these old suppressed emotions
that are blocking my full healing
I acknowledge it’s no longer working for me.
I give my subconscious
full permission
to help me clear it
from all of my cells
in all of my body
permanently and completely.
I am now free
to thank these old emotions
for serving me in the past
when maybe I really needed them for some reason.
I am now free
to release all resistances
to letting these suppressed emotions go.
I am now free
to release all ideas
that I need to hold onto old emotions
in order to keep myself safe.
I am now free
to release all ideas
that I need them for any reason at all.
I am now free
to release all feelings
that I don’t deserve
to let go of this old energy in my body
… of this old energy in my body.

21:55
Amy B. Scher:
I have to say, this is a common – either people fall asleep or they stumble, which is actually really good because it means that your conscious mind is bored because the subconscious mind is working hard to let it go. So, you’re all good.
I am now free
to release all conscious
and subconscious causes
for any difficulty healing.
I am now free
to release all conscious
and subconscious reasons
for holding onto it.
I am now free
to release all harmful patterns
emotions and memories
connected to this injury
that no longer serve me.
All of my being
is healing and clearing this energy now
including any stress response
stored in my cells.
Healing, healing, healing.
Clearing, clearing, clearing.
It is now time to install
the new energy
of moving forward with ease.
Installing, installing, installing.
Installing, installing, installing.
And so it is done.

24:01
Amy B. Scher:
Take a big deep breath. How do you feel?

24:07
Dr. Maya Novak:
Very relaxed.

24:08
Amy B. Scher:
Good, that’s good! And that’s basically a really simple process to guide our body and tell our subconscious mind to let go of this old stuff we’re holding onto.

24:17
Dr. Maya Novak:
So, is this something that is necessary to repeat every day multiple times per day? Is it good that we record ourselves saying this? What is your advice in regard to that?

24:30
Amy B. Scher:
Yeah, so I give some guidelines in the book. It can be done every day. It can be done – I do say people should record it and then repeat back to themselves. In the book, I actually teach how to find specific ways to use it that are beneficial for your healing, but it can also be done when you’re feeling a lot of emotion and you don’t know what it is. I have five main techniques in the book, but this one’s a really great one to start with before you know what’s what, how you feel, what your releasing. You can do something really general, like releasing all of these emotions at once. So, I tell a lot of my clients and online students do it every night before you go to bed. Or do it every morning when you wake up. You can use it almost as a meditation and a way to just clear some of that energy when you don’t know what it is.

25:17
Dr. Maya Novak:
Fabulous advice, Amy. So, right now, I’m sure that listeners and participants feel more at ease. Now, perhaps there is also someone out there who is losing hope about their healing. What would you say to someone who is in that situation, and just cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel?

25:42
Amy B. Scher:
Yes, so there’s two things, actually, and I’ve been in that situation because my illness lasted 10 years. So, I certainly know what it feels like to lose hope because it feels like something’s going on, and on, and on, and on. The first thing that I would say is to try to find a way to find a tiny bit of relief in the moment. A lot of people feel helpless and hopeless because they’re focusing on the end result that they don’t have. If there’s a way to find a tiny bit of space or relief in the moment by feeling a little bit less terrible about the thing that you’re struggling with, that can create the momentum to feel better and better and better. So, one of the techniques I use is just to focus on hopelessness or helplessness and tap the chest area, which is where we hold a lot of energy. So, if you can kind of tap the chest. And I’m trying to hit my thymus gland, which is the master gland of the immune system that sits behind the breastbone. But this is a really good anxiety tapping point. So, just to tap here as you feel what you feel can sometimes just bring you to a little bit of more relief than you had before. Doing something small in the moment to feel a tiny bit better. If you’re stuck inside, what really helped me was to change the energy of my environment. If we’re sitting in the same room, in the same bed, in the same position, with the same stuff around us, looking out the window at the same thing all the time, we can get stagnant in our own energy and it’s very hard to make a movement toward feeling better when we’re sitting in our stuff. So, if you have the ability yourself, I would say make the bed, open the windows, change the things that are on your nightstand so they look different than the things you normally look at. Take the throw rug from your kitchen, put it in your bedroom and the one from your bedroom, and put it in the kitchen. Those tiny little silly things can change the energy of the entire room. So, doing that is a way to bring back a feeling of feeling different and more possibility in hopelessness. Again, it seems silly, but I’m a master because I was bedridden for so long, at figuring out what little movements you can make. So, release some energy and change your environment. The other thing is to know that you’re healing could show up at any moment. Some of my very, very worst moments where I thought I was going to die, where just days before a healing breakthrough when everything changed for me. It still amazes me to this day that I could have felt that bad so close to when I was about to feel that good. So, from experience, I’ve seen this many times where our worse of times, our lowest points, are right before everything’s about to change.

28:39
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm, beautiful.

28:40
Amy B. Scher:
And you don’t know when that’s coming, but to know it is coming and it comes for people in that way, can be helpful.

28:49
Dr. Maya Novak:
Oh, this is so helpful. Thank you so much for sharing this.

28:53
Amy B. Scher:
Yes, of course.

28:54
Dr. Maya Novak:
Now, what is your number one advice that you would give someone who is right now recovering from an injury?

29:02
Amy B. Scher:
I think it might have to be what I just gave because to create a little – I don’t want to go back on that – but my next book that’s coming out is about depression, and I teach all of the techniques to help heal depression. But the thread that goes through the entire book is to try to take a tiny half step in the right direction because momentum feeds momentum, basically. So, when we’re on a train going the wrong way, and we’re going to toward hopelessness and misery, it only takes a little bit of effort to get the train going in the other direction, which is toward healing. And people do make the mistake of trying to go from miserable and bedbound to all the way healed so they can get on with their life and that doesn’t work. You can’t from right here being bedbound to I’m just – I have to get better so I can go back to work and take care of my kids. That’s not the way it works. But if you can find a little bit of relief in the moment so that maybe you have enough strength to move your feet or sit up in bed, that little bit of momentum helps carry you to the very next little place, which is maybe eating at the table instead of bed. And it’s you only do it once during the week and not for every meal. But those little things, which are easier to do than get to the finish line quickly, do help move that train, that healing train in the right direction with more ease and grace. And so just take the tiniest step in the right direction, whatever that is for you. That is what I found to make the biggest difference. The smallest things.

30:41
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes. It is true that the smallest things make the biggest difference. We don’t need something huge, it’s that one tiny thing that is going to carry you to another moment, to another moment, and then all of a sudden, the sun is shining.

31:00
Amy B. Scher:
Yes. The little things really do add up. They work like little stepping-stones to where you’re trying to go. If you try to jump from where you are to where you’re trying to go, forget it. You’re probably going to metaphorically fall and stumble and be miserable and be mad and frustrated. But if you can build those little steppingstones, you do get there a lot faster.

31:20
Dr. Maya Novak:
Amy, I do have one last fun and definitely out of the box question for you.

31:27
Amy B. Scher:
Sure.

31:28
Dr. Maya Novak:
So, if you imagine being injured right now and you know that the recovery is going to take you a while, and it’s not going to be easy all the time, but right now in this moment you can choose one of two gifts or one of two options. Number one is that you go through your recovery, do everything that you can to heal in the best possible way, and then at the end, you’re going to get this gift of not being injured in your lifetime anymore. Or gift number two or option number two is that you can go back in time and prevent this accident and injury, but then, of course, you also take your chances and you don’t know what’s going to happen even a day from now. So my question here, is what would you choose, and why?

32:21
Amy B. Scher:
This is so easy for me. Okay, I choose number one and not because there is a gift of – a promise of not being injured, but because I have actually sort of lived option one, and I know without a doubt that these things, when we fully use the opportunity to evolve, these things make us better, happier people than before the injury or illness. So, there is no doubt in my mind that I’m picking option one because – and I don’t like to say everything happens for a reason, it’s meant to be – because that feels terrible when you’re miserable. But I can say, being on the other side of it, those annoying things are true in ways, if you use the opportunity to become who you really are, and more of that person. Injuries feel random. They feel totally accidental. But I do believe that there is something inside of us that when those things happen can truly benefit from them and in every single way I’ve experienced that. So, I’m going with door number one, no question!

33:43
Dr. Maya Novak:
Fabulous. And I could not agree with you more. For me, exactly what you said, it is challenging at that time, but looking back, I mean, it was the most incredible journey, my experience. Because of that, I am who I am today…

34:08
Amy B. Scher:
Yes.

34:08
Dr. Maya Novak:
… which I wouldn’t take back and like, no, I don’t like that. I mean, it’s way better.

34:09
Amy B. Scher:
Yes, of course.

34:10
Dr. Maya Novak:
Amy, where can people find more about you?

34:13
Amy B. Scher:
They can find more about me on my website, which is www.amybscher.com. And they can experience lots and lots of my techniques on my YouTube channel. So look me up on YouTube, and then you can go practice along for free. And then, of course, my books are in bookstores and libraries everywhere.

34:33
Dr. Maya Novak:
Fabulous. Amy, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for being here and for releasing anxiety and fear that people are experiencing.

34:42
Amy B. Scher:
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

34:46
Dr. Maya Novak:
Thank you for tuning into today’s episode with Amy B Scher. If you haven’t done it yet, subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you’re using to tune in, and share it with your loved ones – yes, I’m thanking you in advance with a cherry on top. To access show notes, links, and transcript of today’s episode go to mayanovak.com/podcast. To learn more about The Mindful Injury Recovery Method visit my website mayanovak.com and find my book Heal Beyond Expectations on Amazon. Until next time – keep evolving, blooming, and healing.