523. Barbara & Charles Whitfield

Buddha at the Gas Pump

Rick Archer interviews Dr. Charles Whitfield and Barbara Whitfield about their new book Dragon Energy, exploring the intersection of near-death experiences, Kundalini arousal, and childhood trauma. The

Key takeaways

• Near-death experiencers report significantly higher rates of childhood trauma, which can act as a catalyst for Kundalini arousal or spiritual awakening later in life.
• Conventional psychiatry often mislabels trauma responses and natural energy surges as mental illness, leading to unnecessary prescription of psychiatric drugs that may cause further harm.

Main topics

• Near-death experiences
• Kundalini arousal

Notable quotes

"Trauma is a way of life that people worldwide experience and they don't know. They think there's something wrong with them and they don't know what they have is PTSD."

Conclusion

The episode offers a compassionate, research-informed perspective on spiritua

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:25) Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I've done over 520 of them now. And if this is new to you and you'd like to watch previous ones, or listen to previous ones because it's also an audio podcast, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu. And for the audio podcast, there is a... tab for that on the website. Also, if you would like to subscribe to the YouTube channel, it helps us in YouTube. They give us more support if there are more subscribers. And there are two ways of subscribing. One is just the subscribe button, but the other is there's a little bell icon next to the subscribe button. And that one has more clout than the regular subscribe button. If you click that, then they really notify you every time I put up a thing. So my guests today are Charles and Barbara Whitfield. Welcome, Charles and Barbara. Speaker 3 (1:27) Thank you. Welcome to you. Speaker 2 (1:29) Thanks. Thank you. I'll read your bios here and then we'll proceed. Barbara was a researcher at the University of Connecticut Medical School with psychiatry professor Bruce Grayson. Together, they researched the after effects of people who have had a near-death experience. She taught at Rutgers University Institute for Alcohol and Drug Studies for 12 years, drug studies school for 12 years, served on the board and executive board of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, and was president of the Kundalini Research Network. She's been a guest expert on Larry King, Twice, The Today Show, Man Alive, Donahue, Unsolved Mysteries, PM Magazine, Good Morning America. Oprah Winfrey, Joan Rivers, Sonia Friedman, CNN Medical News, Alabama Public Television, IMS, and All Things Considered, National Public Radio. She also writes self-help books and provides workshops and speaking engagements on topics of recovery, near-death experiences, and natural spirituality. Charles Whitfield, MD, is a physician, psychotherapist, and internationally recognized expert on mental illness, behavioral problems, and recovery. He was an associate professor of medicine at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine for four years and then taught medicine and addiction medicine as associate professor of medicine, medicine psychiatry and family medicine at University of Maryland School of Medicine for eight years. He has been on the faculty of the Rutgers University Summer Institute of Alcohol and Drug Studies since 1978 and in private practice of medicine and psychotherapy since 75, 76. He has been voted by his peers as one of the best doctors in America every year since 1994. Barbara and Charles have a private practice in Atlanta, Georgia, helping adults who have been repeatedly traumatized, who are having problems in living, who want to come off psychiatric drugs and or opiates, and who may have had a spiritually transformative experience. So, based upon that introduction, you can probably tell that during this interview we'll be talking about near-death experiences, Kundalini, and we might want to even touch on the opioid epidemic and substance abuse and so on, which is so rampant in the United States and probably the world. And I think there's a sort of a spiritual implication to that that we can get into. So, thanks, Barbara and Charles. Speaker 3 (3:58) Thank you. Let me add to that that between the two of us, we have 24 books. Speaker 1 (4:03) Yeah. And our new book is Dragon Energy, which is our topic today. Speaker 2 (4:09) And it doesn't have to be, I'm showing the cover of it. It doesn't have to be exclusively our topic, but we'll definitely talk about it. Speaker 2 (4:18) But let's start by talking about it since you just mentioned it. What's the book about? I've already read about a third of it. Why that title? Why this association with dragons? And I suspect there's some, I think you're going to say that kundalini energy and dragon energy are somewhat synonymous, if not entirely so. Speaker 3 (4:38) Right. I mean, it's all these different brand names for the same energy, and that's the energy that pervades the universe. This is the energy that near-death experiencers talk about. In Judaism, it's called Rakh HaKadosh. Kundalini, Chi, Ki, people who are familiar with yoga and acupuncture experience this energy as part of their healing. We're calling it Dragon Energy now because we've attended Dragon Con for the last eight years and we've learned so much about the mythology of the dragon. And what we realized is that the mythology of the dragon is using this energy as a way to help us to become all that we can be. So for this particular book, I mean, all of our books talk about this energy, but for this particular book, we're using the mythology of the dragon as our blueprint for the hero's journey. And let's face it, anybody who's watching this is on the hero's journey. And if they can know more about how to utilize this energy to grow. It doesn't matter what we call it. It matters that we use it. Speaker 2 (5:48) Good. Charles, you want to add to that? Speaker 1 (5:50) Yeah. Why would cultures and countries worldwide for millennia had some kind of interest or focus on dragons? And why is it in arts and crafts and literature and film and art? Speaker 1 (6:13) why this creature repeatedly is focused upon. As dragons. Why not unicorns? Why not Bigfoot? Why not something else? But dragons, if you look everywhere, everywhere in the arts, in literature. There's dragons and like tons more than these other creatures. So what we, over these five years working with Cirulo, who is this Spanish dragon artist that we met at DragonCon, we started to learn about these aspects of dragons. And what we have come to understand is that What we present dragons as is that it's all about us. It's about ourselves. It's not about this mythical creature. So there's a reality to our almost obsession with this creature. Speaker 3 (7:16) Yeah. And if we look at the creature from the Eastern point of view, that is the energy. That is the energy behind creativity. If we look at the dragon in Europe. We're looking more at the ego and slaying the dragon. So if you take the mythology from the left and the right and you put them together, it's almost like the whole gestalt of the hero's journey. Speaker 2 (7:44) I presume that dragons were around in both Eastern and Western cultures before those cultures had any way of communicating with one another, right? It Speaker 1 (7:53) started out with snakes 25,000 years ago in Egypt. And 5,000 years ago, our worldwide cultures spontaneously started. us looking at and painting and talking about dragons instead of snakes but they're kind of the same creature evolved yeah i suppose Speaker 2 (8:17) carl young and joseph campbell would have something to say about why that image is so lively in the collective unconscious and Speaker 3 (8:26) so do we in the book good Speaker 2 (8:28) we quote Speaker 3 (8:28) them a lot Because we studied them forever. To us, Jung and especially Campbell had such a pulse on our growth, on our personal growth, our planetary growth and the hero's journey. So we talk a lot in the book about the hero's journey. In fact, you graph the hero's journey too in the book. Speaker 2 (8:49) Okay, so I think you've just said pretty much, and we can elaborate on this, that the dragon symbol, the symbology of the dragon represents kundalini energy or chi or whatever term we want to use. Pretty much everyone watching this show will be familiar with kundalini, that notion. So I'm right on that, right? Yes, absolutely. Well, Speaker 1 (9:13) you can add holy spirit, you can add great spirit, whatever. spiritual name we humans have come up with over our time. But Speaker 3 (9:24) see, our culture gives it different names and wants to own it, when in fact, this is something very, very human and divine that's all over the planet and I think should not be categorized that one group owns and the other group doesn't. It's everywhere and it's for everyone. Speaker 2 (9:45) Well, people tend to do that. You know, there are probably trillions of inhabited planets in the universe, and there probably have been thousands on each one of them, each claiming to have the sole ownership of the truth, you know? Speaker 1 (9:57) So Speaker 2 (9:57) that's the way it is. Speaker 2 (10:02) But obviously, dragons are still very popular. I mean, Game of Thrones, which I've never watched. But I remember John Oliver telling Stephen Colbert or something, he said, hope those dragons stay alive because that's what supports HBO and he's part of HBO. And Speaker 3 (10:17) if you go to Dragon Con like we do every year, there's 90,000 people celebrating the dragon. Speaker 2 (10:23) Wow. Speaker 3 (10:23) 90,000. Speaker 2 (10:25) Interesting. Now, how many of those people? actually appreciate that there's some deeper significance in terms of kundalini or something or how many are just sci-fi fans that you know want to go to i Speaker 1 (10:35) think there's a mix i think there's a mix there's some serious uh spiritual uh seekers and then there are others that are just out having fun or like to dress up like a halloween in the summer right Speaker 2 (10:49) so are there people at that conference giving talks about the sort of metaphysical aspect of dragons and then we Speaker 3 (10:56) are Speaker 2 (10:56) You are, yeah. Speaker 3 (10:57) Yeah. We've had a few professors from local universities that are talking about it, too, from a spiritual standpoint. And the artists do, because the more you paint the dragon, the more you get into the spiritual aspects of what it's mirroring back. Speaker 2 (11:13) It's interesting because, as you've just been saying, dragons are very popular in modern culture and ancient cultures. And what I observed in doing this show is that a lot of people have kundalini awakenings, sometimes after doing spiritual practice, and they know what's going on. But often... without having done any sort of spiritual practice. And it just comes on and they don't know what's going on with them. Have you dealt with people like that? Speaker 3 (11:39) Yeah. In my writings, I have 15 different triggers and I'm sure there are more for Kundalini. I don't want to say awakening because it's not complete. It's the beginning. So we call it a Kundalini arousal. And how this manifested in our near-death experience research. was when we put together, and I've emailed it to you, when we put together this questionnaire of 19 items, we find that near-death experiencers have twice as many, that's eight on the average, aspects of a Kundalini arousal than do our controls or do people that come close to death but don't have a near-death experience. So I would say childbirth, intense trauma. Helping a loved one die, these are all different triggers for a kundalini arousal. And as you probably know already, in Western medicine, if these people go for help to a psychiatrist or their internist, they're going to get put on psych drugs. And that's the one thing that we really want to make sure people avoid is getting on drugs for these kind of symptoms. Speaker 2 (12:44) Yeah, I remember one woman that I interviewed early on in the Bat Gap series who started having these Kundalini symptoms, some of which we'll, you know, maybe we'll read some of them in a few minutes. And she didn't know what was going on. Somehow or other, she, you know, she started researching on the internet and maybe she was actually researching her symptoms. And then she found the word Kundalini. And at first she thought it was some kind of disease. Oh, I have Kundalini disease. And then later on, she kind of came to terms with it. It's like if you fight it or if you're afraid of it, if you have no understanding what it is, it can be very problematic. Whereas if you realize that probably something good is happening, it can be a completely different experience. Speaker 3 (13:26) Exactly, exactly. And I have one book just on this, just on our research into it. It's called Spiritual Awakenings, Insights of the Near-Death Experience and Other Doorways to Our Soul. And in it, I talk all about the ways to befriend this process and just let it happen naturally instead of fighting it. Speaker 2 (13:45) Yeah. And I would add that on the other end of the spectrum, don't abnormally try to awaken it or, you know, favor it. I mean, people, you know, have done things sometimes to try to awaken kundalini and, you know, such as lots of intense pranayama and have perhaps awakened it prematurely and then gotten into trouble because it comes on stronger than they could handle. Speaker 3 (14:12) Right. And we've had people come in here from New Zealand and Australia that are doing that and know they're in trouble and come to see us just to get a letter to go back home for their health care people to let those people know that they should be let alone with this process instead of being hospitalized or put on drugs. Speaker 2 (14:33) Charles, you want to add anything here? Speaker 1 (14:35) Yeah, that's exactly right. And one of the problems is that. People go into any doctor's office and if they act funny like this and they put on antipsychotics or antidepressants, which are actually traumatic experiences. So our Dragon Energy book is... a kind of a reframe and update and expansion of what we've learned about trauma. And I was in the Adverse Childhood Experiences study at the CDC in 1998, and we've done some 40 papers out of that study. And it's... Trauma is a way of life that people worldwide experience and they don't know. They think there's something wrong with them and they don't know what they have is PTSD. And then they get mislabeled with things like depression and psychosis and on. Speaker 2 (15:37) But PTSD can cause depression and psychosis, can't it? No. Speaker 1 (15:41) Is Speaker 2 (15:41) it severe enough? Speaker 1 (15:42) No, PTSD is the basis of the whole thing. Trauma underlies almost all mental illness and many physical illnesses. They just get reframed or pushed by the conventional psychiatry and medicine into our conventional... the subcategories that they've made up, like depression and psychosis. Speaker 3 (16:10) And the problem here is that they would rather drug us today in medicine. They would rather drug us to stop the symptoms instead of addressing why the symptoms are happening. With a Kundalini arousal, the person is going to learn why the symptoms are happening so that they don't have to take a drug. Our medicine... Today, the structure of it is so based on pharmaceuticals when it shouldn't be. It should be based, as we know, on more natural ways of healing from frozen emotion because we weren't allowed Speaker 1 (16:47) to grieve. And the first one, the first name to give to it is that these are trauma effects. And whether you call it PTSD or whatever term. that a person or culture can understand. They can say, oh, you mean I was knocked around since I was born so much. Now I come across crazy to so many people and even with the law. And basically all I have to do is to name that and find a way to heal. In our original books, on the ones I've written, Healing the Child Within, and boundaries in relationships and so on. Those are trauma-focused. Our book, Dragon Energy, is kind of a side door or a back door to finding out about healing from all this accumulated trauma. Speaker 3 (17:40) And let me just add that in our research for near-death experiences, we found that the difference between people who nearly died and had an NDE as opposed to people who nearly died and didn't have an NDE was trauma-centered. That the people who had the near-death experiences, more than 58 % of them, reported all kinds of childhood trauma. So childhood trauma is a trigger to a lot of our mental and physical diseases. And kundalini energy or dragon energy or holy spirit is the way that that energy is trying to help us to cathart it out, to feel it and reframe it and let it go. Speaker 2 (18:22) So did you just say that people who have had more childhood trauma than others are more likely to have kundalini arousals? Speaker 3 (18:33) Yes, yes. And Kim Rang explained it very well in Heading Toward Omega and then Lessons from the Light. See, when we were kids, and I'm certainly one of them, when we were abused or we were neglected, we would go deep inside to hide. And when we would go deep inside to hide, our inner life would become much more lively. We would become who we really are in our inner life and then hide it to the world. And that's how we learn to be able to focus on alternate realities. Speaker 2 (19:07) Interesting. I just want to interject that there's a whole section on BatGap of Kundalini-related interviews that you'll find under the Categorical Index menu. And also, as you say this, I can think of several people I've interviewed who had serious trauma. Kieran Trace, Shelley Ray, and a woman whose name's evading me at the moment. She had a near-death experience in Iraq when she got blown up by a roadside bomb. And they all, all these serious, the first two were childhood trauma, the last one obviously adult trauma, but they all sort of triggered. a kundalini awakening and a sort of a spiritual upwelling in their lives sometimes many years later obviously they were abused as children but then later on they had the spontaneous kundalini awakenings yeah Speaker 3 (19:53) especially if we start doing yoga or meditating those two after about four or five years will start to show us the kundalini energy trying to burn through our blocks because we have all these blocks in our energy from when we were traumatized we've tried to forget about it But later on in life, we can't forget about it anymore. We either have to address it or we'll get sick. Speaker 2 (20:16) It almost sounds like in a way you could say, see if you agree with this, that trauma has a bright side to it and that it becomes an impetus to either actual some kind of awakening or at least to the incentive to pursue spirituality. Like if our life is really smooth and easy, we might not have that drive. Speaker 3 (20:35) Right. Ken Ring calls it the compensatory gift. Speaker 2 (20:39) A Speaker 3 (20:39) compensatory gift. Yeah, it's something to open up later in life to heal. Speaker 1 (20:44) And in Chapter 3 of our Dragon Energy book, The Journey Awakens the Soul is the title of that book, of that chapter. It's our understanding of the hero's journey. And so we go on this journey and we get knocked around. And little by little, if we're lucky or if we work hard to find out what's going on. We start to awaken and the way we start to awaken is psycho-spiritually. My Kundalini experience was in 1984 and I was still an atheist and I had just had a big trauma in my life. I just lost a job and I was by myself, 10.30 at night, and I went within. and did something I hadn't done in a long, long time, and that is I prayed. I prayed to whatever God might be up there or out there, please help me. And I closed my eyes, and within a minute, I felt this kind of warm vibrations go up my spine from bottom to top. Speaker 2 (21:55) And then I rolled over Speaker 1 (21:57) again, went to sleep, woke up, refreshed. And thought, oh, boy, I'm going to now find a job that I'm going to enjoy and be free from all the usual crap. And that's what happened. And I ended up writing many, many satisfying books about how to heal from all this trauma. It's interesting. Speaker 2 (22:23) You know, I mean, we certainly wouldn't condone traumatizing people. We wouldn't want to traumatize people ourselves. And we want to do as much as we can to minimize the horrible traumas that people in the world undergo. But sometimes people, you know, they lose faith in any sort of divine reality when they see what goes on in the world. They think, you know, how could a compassionate God allow all this stuff to happen? But as you say, this compensatory. thing. A Speaker 3 (22:49) gift. Speaker 2 (22:50) Yeah. Gift. Yeah. Speaker 3 (22:52) See, and let me just jump in here and say that the reason why we wrote this most recent book on dragon energy was because this artist that we now know so well from Spain, Cirulo, or I think they pronounce it Cirulo in Spain. He came to visit us after the first Dragon Con with his family before the next Dragon Con. And what we were able to observe as two psychotherapists was a really healthy family. These two teenagers were so loving and so kind. It was like totally different than what we hear and see here in the United States. They've been raised with all the creativity that the parents could encourage in them. And now they're incredibly creative. They just did our, we did our website. This family of four who functions around the dragon. How would you talk about that? They're just wonderful people. The kids are totally developed. I would say that their Kundalini has been active since birth, that energy. And so love can do it. It doesn't have to be trauma. Speaker 2 (23:56) Sure. And some Kundalini experts say that it can be awakened in previous lives. And then we just come in with whatever degree of awakening had happened in the previous life and it resumes from there. Speaker 3 (24:08) Right. Yeah. Speaker 2 (24:10) Well, here's a question that just came in. Might as well ask it. And I have a few other questions in the back of my head. This is from Dan in London. He asks, as a dad of three young children, I would like to encourage my children towards a spiritual life and deeper dimensions. But how can I do that through positive nurturing means and upbringing? You know, because we were just talking about how trauma can be an impetus to. some kind of spiritual aspiration, but he obviously doesn't want to subject his children to trauma. He wants their lives to be trauma-free, and yet he wants them to take on, to become spiritually inspired. Yeah, my answer would be live Speaker 1 (24:47) it, model it, so that his kids can see him doing these spiritual practices or reading spiritual literature or going to yoga or whatever it is, kind of nurturing the kids. in the psycho-spirit, healthy psycho-spiritual direction. And one of the first things is to start naming things accurately in the inside and outside world. So the three veils that our hero in our picture, in our painting goes through, if you can pull that painting up. It's showing now. All right. So this is the hero going from the ordinary traumatized life going through the three veils. The first veil is to drop our ego and get real. The second veil is to name everything correctly, accurately. So no denial. Which means no dissociation. Call things what they are, which means. No more political correctness. Political correctness is trying to take over the world because that's the way communism, socialism, and Nazism start is by censoring language. And the third veil is experientially connect to the God of your understanding. Those are the three veils. Speaker 3 (26:10) Now, to this father who wants to know about helping his children, I wrote a whole book on this called The Natural Soul. And in The Natural Soul, I was... amazed to realize that mostly what I wrote about was how we relate to our grandchildren. We didn't get a chance to do it so much with our kids because we both came from dysfunctional marriages till we found each other. But now together we are raising grandchildren, nine of them, and we adore them. And we've realized that every child deserves to be adored. That doesn't mean lose. boundaries. That means limits because limits are part of love when it comes to kids. But it also means that everything they're about is great and we adore them for who they are. We're not trying to change them. We're not trying to mold them. We're trying to help them to develop to become all that they can be. Speaker 2 (27:05) Good. One thought that was in the back of my head from our discussion 15 minutes ago that I just wanted to throw at you is, would you agree? that perhaps the reason that psychiatry is so heavy on pharmaceuticals and drugging people is that it's really based on the materialist or physicalist paradigm where the brain produces consciousness. Consciousness is not fundamental. And therefore, if there's something wrong with your consciousness or your emotions or whatever, you just have to alter the brain and you'll be good. Speaker 1 (27:38) Yeah, that's kind of a false medicine. The brain is the hardware. Speaker 1 (27:44) Consciousness is the software, and our ego is our survival aid, but our real self is the real us. And so that's what we and others have talked about. Speaker 3 (28:01) And the most important step here, I think, is to ask God for help. We can't give anybody the answers for them. But if we ask for help, just the one word help is a full prayer. Just ask for help and watch how fast it comes. Speaker 2 (28:16) Yeah, we're open to it. You told the story of how you and Charles met. You'd been single for some time. And we'll get into that whole story about your near-death experience and how your husband couldn't relate to it and all. But then you asked for help. Maybe it's time for me to have a new partner. And bingo, Charles calls. Speaker 3 (28:34) That was 10 years after my divorce. And I had gone through the research and I had gone through more therapy for myself because I realized how much baggage I was still carrying. And then on a Friday night, I was lighting my Sabbath candles and I just looked right through the two flames. And I thought, this is a direct line to God. And I said, OK, God, I'm ready. This is scary to say you're ready. I'm ready. Please send me someone smart because I was tired of. blind dates where I had to act like I wasn't smart. Yeah. And I said, send me somebody smart, send me somebody kind. And I don't know where this came from, but it just popped out. I said, send me somebody I deserve. That was Friday night. Monday night, I was on Larry King Live. Charlie saw me on Larry King when he came home from work and just happened to be coming up to Connecticut the next weekend. So he was at a conference and we had dinner. But he had been praying that week, too. You had been out where? In San Francisco and you were on the bed and you were praying, too. Speaker 1 (29:36) So we were both looking for somebody. Finally. Yeah. Speaker 2 (29:42) If anybody wants to ask any questions about this, because I know I sometimes correspond with people who are skeptical that there's. any such thing as god or there's any sort of yeah Speaker 3 (29:52) i was skeptical yeah Speaker 2 (29:53) you both were so Speaker 3 (29:54) was he yeah we didn't believe in any of this stuff we were scientific right Speaker 2 (30:01) So we have several roads we can go down here. One is to talk more about Kundalini, and there are all these symptoms that you sent me, which might be interesting to read. Another is to talk about your near-death experience and the implications of that and that whole world. Which would you like to do first? Speaker 3 (30:18) Let's do my NDE because that will move us into the Kundalini stuff. Speaker 2 (30:22) Okay, good. So tell us about it. And I joked with you before we started that you probably told this story a thousand times, and you said, it doesn't matter. fresh as ever as soon as I begin to tell it. It's Speaker 3 (30:32) like it happened yesterday. And once I start telling it, I can see it. I can