Healing in Community with Sacred Plant Medicine w/ Kathy Orah Sionit | The Holistic Pharmacy Podcast

SPEAKER_1 (0:05)

You are listening to the global network of podcasters dedicated to the pharmacy profession. Welcome to the Pharmacy Podcast Network.

Marina Buksov (0:29)

Hello and welcome to the Holistic Pharmacy Podcast. I'm your host, Marina Booksov, and I'm a functional medicine pharmacist in New York. I'm also a clinical herbalist and an integrative health coach specializing in mindfulness and empowerment. I'm on a mission to transform the way we approach healthcare by bridging the wisdom of traditional medicine with modern practice. And in this podcast, I will be highlighting guests who do just that.

I'm constantly inspired by them and I know you will be as well.

Marina Buksov (1:04)

Hello and welcome back to the Holistic Pharmacy Podcast. As always, I have a very special guest in store for you today. Her name is Kathy Orah Shahkoohi. I hope I'm saying that right. And she's a licensed psychotherapist, master hypnotherapist and intuitive healer with private practices in both Great Neck and Brooklyn, New York.

She specializes in integrative trauma work, blending psychotherapy with somatic techniques, hypnotherapy and spiritual healing modalities.

As a certified master hypnotherapist, she focuses deeply on helping clients heal from early childhood wounds, anxiety and subconscious patterning. So without further ado, Kathy, welcome to the show.

Kathy Orah Shahkoohi (1:52)

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me today.

Marina Buksov (1:57)

Yeah, I'm excited to dive into your story, your journey. So let's start a little bit about your background, where you grew up and how you came to do this work.

Sure.

Kathy Orah Shahkoohi (2:08)

So I am an immigrant from Iran. I left the country when I was 14 years old. I escaped. We emigrated as Jewish Iranians and we went through Austria for a couple of months. We had to apply for asylum. And then finally we were granted asylum to enter the United States. And I've been here since 1990, so it's been a very long time. I came as a teenager, so I had a full life that I lived in Iran. I had a childhood. I had some teenagehood. I had tons of friends, lots of memories. And I kind of had to leave everything behind in a very sudden way so that we can move on towards the next journey of our lives.

So that's a little bit about my childhood. And I went to high school here. I finished high school here in Brooklyn. And then I decided to go to college. I was kind of debating between psychology and fashion. I've always loved fashion. That's another passion of mine. And I kind of like went back and forth, back and forth. And then finally I decided to go for psychology and I got my master's in social work from Wurzweiler School of Social Work. And I graduated in 2008

Started out as a regular talk therapist, doing all the general things that all the therapists do. I had to work in clinical settings, like agency settings, just like most other social workers do, in order to get certain hours done, so we can get our licensing. So that's kind of like the road that I took and I ended up working in three different agencies. And that was very, very interesting for me because I'd always had a holistic edge. I never really, I was never really a person that believed so much in the medical system, the way it's been practiced. And everything else. So I kind of learned a lot. I had to really learn to navigate myself through that system. And I had to kind of, there were times that I kind of had to be shut up. Like, you can't say this, you can't do that. You can't talk about vitamins. You can't talk about homeopathy. It's not allowed. We could be sued. Send them to the psychiatrist. They'll be medicated. That's the best way. And so I kind of had to go through that. And which wasn't really easy for me. And I'm a pretty outspoken person. I'm very passionate. And basically, it's very hard to shut me up. So, so I definitely have my learning curve there.

So, let's see, what else? So, about 10 years ago, in 2016, I suffered from a very, very traumatic miscarriage. I pretty much had to deliver a baby at five months. And that experience really changed my life to the point that the trauma from that experience threw me into a different loop of existence. I ended up having a lot of physical symptoms, got issues, I was exhausted. I was basically carrying a lot of different emotions, unresolved trauma, unresolved emotions, that kind of like were showing themselves up in my body. And I got to a point where I literally just couldn't function. So I started out seeking holistic health and I ended up finally after doing some tests, some blood tests and all that, I ended up at this doctor's office. She is an angel and she's a holistic MD. So what happened with her was that we went through a process of like food allergies and sensitivities and you know, all the holistic stuff that people go through. And then at some point she said to me, she turned to me and she says, Kathy, I think your stuff is really very much emotion related and I want to do, if you're okay, I think next time we should do a Reiki session. And I didn't know what Reiki was. I was familiar with energy medicine and I've done energy modalities but I'd never really done Reiki before. And I was like, oh wow, okay. So if Dr. Christine Blanch is telling me that I should do Reiki, for sure, I'm going to do Reiki and I loved her and I trusted her so much. And I said, I'll do whatever you say, you know? And so we did a Reiki session. And during that session, I felt a lot of energy comes through me. And I felt tremendous amount of grief, tremendous amount of guilt and shame, and a whole lot of other emotions that I had kind of pretty much just repressed within myself since the miscarriage. And this is about a year after the miscarriage already, where I thought I had kind of moved on with life. You know, I'd had other kids and I had to be a mother to them. And I couldn't really afford to just like be feeling grief every day. I couldn't walk around depressed. So I kind of like had moved on with life, but not really. And there was so much that happened during that session. And I think what happened was that besides for the emotions, something else also shifted within me energetically to the point that I became very energetically in tuned. It was almost like she opened me up. You know, she energetically opened me up. And it was beautiful. It was hard. I'm not going to lie. You know, the whole process was not easy because when you repress stuff and you're not wanting to deal with them, and then all of a sudden, everything is coming out, then you're left with all of the emotions. You're left with what do I do now? And so that kind of like started out my journey towards holistic healing and energy and all of that.