Unlocking Healing Potential: Dr. Edward's Journey from Chronic Illness to Holistic Veterinary Medicine

Transform your perspective on healing with Dr. Edward, who takes us on a remarkable journey from a cattle property in North Queensland to becoming a trailblazer in holistic veterinary medicine. Discover how his personal battles with chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease inspired the creation of the Whole Energy Body Balance method—an innovative approach to therapeutic touch and energy healing. Dr. Edward reveals how unlocking healing gifts within ourselves can help both animals and humans break free from pain and societal constraints to reach their fullest potential. Hear about his early veterinary experiences and the unique techniques he developed for releasing pain in animals, all rooted in his fervent passion for therapeutic touch.

Dr. Edward shares his personal evolution, driven by an insatiable curiosity about life and the interconnectedness of all beings. His candid reflections on shifting from conservatism to progressivism offer a window into the mindset that fuels his mission to heal and nurture growth. Learn about his transformative encounters with practices like qigong and shamanism, and how they bolstered his commitment to physical fitness and wellness. Through stories of past relationships that catalyzed his journey toward self-awareness, Dr. Edward offers insights into exploring life's possibilities and fostering a profound connection with nature. Join us as we explore how his experiences and insights can lead to a healthier, more harmonious world.

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Whole Energy Body Balance Method

Speaker 1 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Whole Energy Body Balance podcast . I am Dr Edward , the healing vet , and I am devoted to creating health , happiness , vitality and harmony in my life and supporting that in the lives of the animals that I care for as a veterinarian and in the humans that I work with as a healer , and also in our global community of students who are learning how to use therapeutic touch , intuitive perception and energy healing to make their world a better place , to make their animal's world a better place and to make the whole world a better place , because I firmly believe that the more that we become aware of who we are and the more that we empower ourselves to awaken our healing gifts , and I believe that every human has powerful healing gifts that are waiting to be unlocked inside their consciousness , inside their being . So today this is a kind of a reboot of the podcast , which is we're moving into the renaming it the whole energy body balance podcast . The whole energy body balance method is a modality that I've created as a result of my own healing journey . I had chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme for 20 years , so I've had a long experience of chronic illness and pain and stiffness and fatigue and a whole lot of other things . But it's also been a response to wanting to find the most natural ways to help animals be well , healthy , vital and live long and happy lives , and because I've done a lot of healing work myself as a human being , working with humans as a healer is also a large part of my journey .

Speaker 1 1:58

And helping humans unlock , unlock , get away from um whatever is constricting their freedom to be who they are and that can be trauma , it can be family patterns , it can be societal patterns , it can be karmic patterns , it can be all sorts of things that get in the way of humans being able to express their full potential , their , their beauty , their love and bring their energy of creation into the world . So this is my passion , is really about consciousness . It's about waking up more and more to be more able to see and sense and feel and perceive the physical and non-physical realities of the world that we live in . And the more that I do that , the more I find I can help animals and the more I find I can help people and the more I teach people how to do that , the more I see them grow and transform and them and their animals get happier , healthier , more vital and more able to live a full , beautiful life . So that's me . I'm , in addition to being a holistic veterinarian and if you ever want a holistic veterinary consultation you can hit me up and I work with people with Zoom , all over the world . That's part of how I express my passion .

Speaker 1 3:24

Like I said , I'm a body worker . I'm fascinated with therapeutic touch . I'm fascinated with the power therapeutic touch has to unlock and release pain , tension , anxiety and trauma out of not only the physical systems and structures of the bodies of the animals and humans that I work with , but also throughout the energetic systems , the psycho-spiritual systems and in combination with that . I grew up in North Queensland on a cattle property which was both beautiful and brutal in equal measures and lots of different ways . It was a very beautiful way to grow up , but there was a lot of violence towards animals that was just accepted as the way things were done , which shaped me in a really profound way , and a lot of what I do has been a healing response to move away from that kind of power over using force and fear and pain to make animals do what humans want them to do . I'm very , very interested in exploring relationship building , deepening and creating healthy , balanced relationships with my animals , with my beloveds , with my clients and their animals and with all the living beings and living energies of this amazing , amazing earth , this , what I consider to be the biggest living being of them all that we live on , that gives us everything that we have . Basically everything that we have comes from from mother earth . So just a little bit of my life story . Like I said , I grew up on a cattle property .

Speaker 1 5:07

Um , quite early on I decided that I wanted to be a vet , went off to university , graduated from the university of queensland in 1995 , then went out into practice , had a terrible first job in this mixed practice , practice with large animals and small animals . Then , about 18 months after I graduated , I was doing a temporary job and met Dr Tom Ahern , who is a very innovative fellow who'd worked out methods of releasing pain and tension and restriction in horses' necks and spines . He would take horses that had a folium lameness that they could not find a reason for with nerve blocks and x-rays and and lameness examinations and he would release the neck , get the neck moving and the lameness would go away . So I immediately thought well about dogs and cats . They have necks and backs too . They didn't get taught anything about dogs and cats . They have necks and backs too . I didn't get taught anything about neck and back pain at university when I was starting to be a veterinarian .

Speaker 1 6:11

So I started feeling into the dogs and cats' necks and backs with more curiosity and very quickly , once I started realising that I should be looking for things , I found a whole lot of pain and tension and dysfunction that before I knew about it and before I went looking for it , couldn't find it . Now , in those days , some 30 years ago , there were no modalities that I could go off and learn how to do therapeutic touch , physical therapy with dogs and cats . So I just started playing around with touch , with pressure , with movement , seeing if I could unlock the pain and tension in dogs and cats' necks and backs , and pretty quickly I found that I could do the pain and tension in dogs and cats' necks and backs and pretty quickly I found that I could do that and we saw lovely changes in the animals that I worked with . I've been doing that ever since . In between there's been a whole lot of other things that have gone on that have fed into my skills and expertise on that level .

Speaker 1 7:03

A few years later I went and worked in the UK United Kingdom and then I became very , very unwell with chronic fatigue syndrome , had to come back to Australia , couldn't work at all for a few years . I had a lot of pain and tension . So I started exploring having body work , massage therapists , physical touch therapists work with me and I found that it helped me a lot . But I also found that energy healing , which was something that was so far out of my world as a child in very conservative community of far north queensland country community , that at first it was like this is a bit weird , but it makes me feel better . So , uh , I really wanted to continue to explore that and I went off and learned how to do it .

Speaker 1 7:49

Interesting thing happened I'd be practicing these energy healing practices and every time I practiced my little dog within a few minutes would come and run up the steps and sit on my feet . Wow , this is curious . It must be a coincidence , was my first thought . But after about 10 or 15 or 20 times of really consistently her running up and sitting on my feet , and she wouldn't necessarily run up and sit on my feet when I was writing or doing other things at that same desk , sitting in the same position but doing different things that had the same kind of sounds associated with them . So I realised that little Ticker , my lovely little snappy dog , could feel what I was doing when I was practising energy healing and she liked it and she wanted to be near it .

Speaker 1 8:31

So I then went on a quite extensive journey of learning energy healing , found that animals responded well , integrated into my practice , spent about three years in Townsville in an intuitive circle , gathering together every week and practising and learning like an intuitive apprenticeship , so to speak . Then fast forward on about five years from there and I started my own vet practice . That's where I really got into the more holistic side of things , because I had freedom to do what I want . You would maybe not be surprised to hear that most of the vet practices I worked in frowned upon this alternative , complementary , weirdo , woo-woo kind of stuff that Dr Edward was into , so I didn't really have the freedom to explore that . Then over the next kind of 15 years or so in practice I developed the whole energy body balance method through working with tens of thousands of animals hands-on . I've got a little cheat sheet here , because whole energy body balance is the theme of this podcast and it goes far beyond the modality .

Speaker 1 9:43

So I want to go through each of the words in turn and dig into a little bit of what the meaning of them is . So whole is a thing that is complete in itself . And if we look at the deeper meaning , the etymology , the meaning that this word has evolved , safe , healthy and sound . So for me , wholeness is something that we both have as a condition of being a living being , but it's also something that we need to actively seek , create and maintain , because all of us living beings are impacted by all sorts of influences , traumas , the circumstances and situations and pressures of social patterns and all that kind of thing that we grow up with . So we have this kind of incipient wholeness or potential wholeness , but I believe that it takes a significant amount of intention and work and will to really grow into the wholeness that we can express . So whole , being whole , supporting wholeness , seeking wholeness is one of the things that I'm very , very passionate about .

Speaker 1 10:57

Then we come to energy , which is the power and ability to be active and vital , the ability to do work . The older meaning is force of expression , which I think is interesting . So energy is the force that animates life . You know , we take in energy in the form of oxygen when we breathe in . We take in energy in the form of calories when we eat food , and so same for our animals . You know plants a little bit different . They take in energy from the sun and they take in energy from carbon dioxide in the air rather than oxygen . But this there is energy that is moving .

Speaker 1 11:39

I think another thing about energy that is true for me is that energy needs to be moving to be healthy . Anywhere that energy stagnates , you tend to get problems in the physical body and in the energy systems and in the emotional systems of the beings that we're talking about . So energy you need to have enough energy to do the work within the being and the consciousness and the physicality to keep the being healthy and whole and vital and able to function and move around and learn and grow and evolve . But you also need to have healthy movement of energy throughout all of the systems of the animal , of the organism , because I see us as an animal too . I think we're just a little bit kind of more able to make things than some other animals , but I really think humans are an animal organism at the core .

Speaker 1 12:36

Then we have body , which is the living form of a being , the organism , the whole of the organism , and the older meaning I think is quite interesting is trunk of man or beast . Now , I don't quite know what that means , but I think it's kind of cool . So the body , this body is physical , that we live in , but there is a very strong energetic component to the body . This body is physical , that we live in , but there is a very strong energetic component to the body . You could almost think of us as having a physical body and an energetic body . And there are complex , dynamic fields of energy and information that surround the physical being of all living creatures , including humans , that to at least some extent can be measured by scientific instruments that we have . There's a whole lot of more subtle energies that science hasn't managed to get the capacity to measure just yet , but the intuitive perceptual capacity of the human certainly can gather information about them . So for instance , if you want to look at it from a scientific perspective , we have an electromagnetic field that extends well beyond the bounds of our physical body . That's driven mainly by the electrical activity of the heart , but it's also driven by all of the electrical activity of the nervous system and , to some extent , the electrical impulses created in the fascial systems . With every movement there is also electric impulses created through the connective tissue and fascia in the body . And balance , steadiness , stability , equilibrium and what I like to call dynamic harmony and the older meaning of balance is physical equipoise Isn't equipoise a beautiful word General harmony between parts , or to bring or keep in equilibrium .

Speaker 1 14:23

So the intention of the Whole Energy Body Balance podcast is to support all of these themes that are inherent in the name through sharing information with some solo episodes . You know , sometimes I'll have something that I just want to talk about with me so that I can explore in depth where I'm at and how I'm thinking or what's going on with life and my practices , and I intend to have a whole lot of special guests where we're going to explore and the theme of this podcast is exploring , you know that's what I really want to get into is exploring lots of different threads and flavors of different practices , of different ideas , with the common kind of underpinning foundation that all of these things that we're going to be exploring in this podcast are designed to empower you , the listener , to make a positive impact and a positive difference in the lives of your animals and in the life of your beautiful self , which I think is kind of fun , and I really enjoy exploring ideas and I really enjoy having interesting conversations . It's not going to be too heavily scripted , this podcast . It's going to be a little bit more freeform , with room to jive and dance and improvise and , you know , explore the path less travelled , in a way , in conversation with people who have a deep-lived experience of one kind or another , a deep-lived experience of one kind or another which they've had , experiences where they're working to bring greater harmony , greater balance , greater wholeness , to increase the capacity of beings to have energy and that sort of thing . Now , in this podcast , we're going to have a question that we ask the speakers and I thought , even though I've introduced myself a bit , I thought that I might go through my response to this question , which is who are you , why do you do what you do and how did you arrive at this point in your life ?

Soulful Self-Exploration and Wellness

Speaker 1 16:56

So who am I ? I'm Edward . I am this strange consciousness that's inhabiting this earth suit , this vessel that my consciousness is living in and moving in and growing in and evolving in , in and moving in and growing in and evolving in . I am fascinated with growth , I'm fascinated with evolution , I'm fascinated with human potential and the potential to become more . I think that our human potential is so far beyond what most people can imagine that it's almost terrifying , to be honest . So I am a human in this body , having this experience of life on this planet . I have a deep love for life . I have a deep love for the life that inhabits this planet . I have a deep love for the intelligence of life . You know life , living beings , each different kind of living being , whether it be a plant or an insect , or an animal or a whole planet . I believe that everything in the universe is a living energy , a consciousness , an intelligence . And who am I in the middle of this ? I am a tiny little speck of curiosity and I am insatiably curious about everything . Really . I'm curious about humans . I'm curious about how to connect more deeply . I'm curious about how to love more profoundly . I'm curious about how to be in right relationship with all living energies and all living beings .

Speaker 1 18:51

Now , why do I do what I do ? I do what I do because , you know , I don't even know if I know why I do what I do , but I know that my why is that I want to make a difference , that I want to make a difference for myself , to make myself stronger and clearer and more powerful , so that I can be of greater service . I think that's probably the answer is , why do I do what I do ? I want be of service to myself , to my beloveds , to my family , to my community , to my um , my students who come and work with me , my clients and their animals , and I really want to make a difference in the world . I want to help , help everyone that I touch at least see the potential for growth and healing , even if they can't necessarily take that step , to have some kind of awareness that there's possibility for healing , for greater presence , for greater vitality , for greater awareness . And one of my sayings that I say a lot is that awareness is the key to freedom . So I suppose one of the things I do this this why is for one to gain greater awareness of myself , but so to share greater awareness with , with everyone that I can , or everyone that's interested . At least I'm not going I'm not here to force anything on anybody but that is certainly my passion .

Speaker 1 21:29

And how did I arrive at this point in my life ? Oh well , that's a long story . I think having a long , challenging , debilitating , chronic illness has shaped me and how I think and move and act in the world very profoundly . It certainly moved me from someone who was very conservative politically to someone who's very progressive politically . If you get to a point where you can't work , suddenly progressive policies make a whole lot more sense than very conservative policies because it becomes very personal . I also arrived at this point in my life through being determined and never really giving up , no matter how hard it was , no matter how painful it was . I've got this Capricornian determination that I will prevail one way or another and that I will continue to to keep applying my will .

Speaker 1 22:36

You know , um , five or six years ago I was very weak , I was very unwell , I had awful pain , fatigue . I was functioning at maybe 50 60 percent at best and I went off and and worked with someone who did qigong and shamanism and stuff like that . Now it turns out that he was a narcissistic , abusive , culty motherfucker excuse my french I have . I do swear you will get the odd naughty word on this podcast . Now I didn't know that at this time and even though it was traumatic and injurious to me to participate and and interact with this fellow . Overall , um , I learned some really good lessons from it . But I couldn't even stand in a qigong stance for more than about three minutes without my legs being in extreme pain and feeling like I was going to collapse . I could not do a single chin-up . I could do maybe three or four push-ups , and that was a struggle . And one of the good things that came out of that interaction with this guy was that he inspired me to start actually exercising and I've been exercising five mornings a week ever since quite vigorously , and now I can do 30 , 40 push-ups and 10 or 12 chin-ups and a whole lot of other things , and I can stand in a chicken stance for probably hours without my legs complaining . So I think that's a big part of how I arrived back into wellness was deciding that I was going to actually do the things I needed to do to get strong and well again and then followed through with it .

Speaker 1 24:11

I also have had two marriages with narcissistically abusive women . Bless them and the trauma and everything that shaped them . I do have compassion for them as well , but that at the end of my second marriage left me in a in a very broken state , which , um , also was very , very helpful because it it triggered me into actively seeking help and support for the first time in my life and that's when I started to really really get well , um , these days I've got the most beautiful beloved you can imagine who's kind and caring and wonderful . But I had to experience my family patterns in an intensely uncomfortable way to get to the point where I could see them and and motivate myself to actually change enough to free myself from them , enough to free myself from them . So that is who I am , why I do what I do and how I arrived at this point in my life is , I think , again , curiosity , curiosity and a devotion to caring and beauty and wanting to make a difference in the world .

Speaker 1 25:23

Now , in these conversations we're just going to explore and exploring . You know , I think , exploring possibility and exploring , um , where there's lack of freedom in your life , and exploring out in nature and going for walks . But being having this kind of mindset that exploration has value for me has been a big shaper of how I live life and how I've grown and how I've created the modality and created my business and gone on to record an album as Tree Brother , because I'm also a musician and artist . I love growing food , I love cooking . You know I do a lot of things and I love doing a lot of things . I'm someone who's really passionate about many different things and love to do many different things . But exploration being an explorer an internal explorer too , you know I think there's a tremendous value in exploring ourselves , in getting to know ourselves .

Speaker 1 26:34

Somatic awareness is a very , very large part of my ongoing practices . A simple act of self-witnessing , by continually bringing all awareness into and throughout the body and simply being present with everything that is being experienced , without judgment , without stories , without trying to fix or change anything , is probably the core spiritual and life practice that I engage in , and I engage in that as many times a day as I can remember to do it , which is quite a number most days and not so many other days , you know . But this is a really curious kind of self-exploration because I've found that the more I know me , the more intimately I explore the sensations , the activities of consciousness , the unfoldings of awareness within my consciousness , within this body , within this life . The better I know myself , the more I can meet others and the more I can know others in a very intimate sense within my consciousness . It's a really curious thing , um , the more you know yourself , the more you know everything . No , I'm not going to say that that's necessarily easy or comfortable , because it's not necessarily easy or comfortable . In fact , it can be very challenging and very uncomfortable , and there is a a need to face and embrace and assimilate and integrate all the shadows of myself , which is an ongoing practice as well , because there's no end to that , though it's not something that I want to give too much focus to in my life , because I want to have a whole lot of joy and fun and shadow work . You you can get a little bit stuck and mired in the mud of that .

Speaker 1 28:24

So whole energy , body balance is the name and the theme of this podcast . It's a beautiful thing to consider . How can you support more wholeness in yourself , in your life , in your animals , in your beloveds , in your family , in your community , in the greater world ? How can you create and maintain energy , higher levels and higher vibrations of energy , so that you have more energy available for you to do the work of life , of life , of evolution , of love , of spiritual practices ? How can you tend to this beautiful body that you live in , this living form ? How can you nurture , nourish , strengthen , potentiate and and make sure that your body is in the peak state of capacity to live life and to express your curiosity and your , your , your beautiful exploration of yourself and of the outside world and of all that this life and this planet has to offer ? And how can you support , balance , ongoing , dynamic harmony within yourself , within your animals , animals , within your family , within your community and within the world in in an empowering way ?

Speaker 1 30:06

And you know , another thing that I'm really passionate about is empowering people . Rather than you know , I've got absolutely no interest in being a guru or being put on a pedestal or um kind of setting things up so that people need me to be able to do the thing that I'm teaching . I want people to be able to find their own way to express their own selves in the most beautiful way that makes sense to them , and I will do everything I can to support that . That's how I roll , and you know there are challenges within that . There are challenges within life . This planet at this time and humanity at this time are heartbreakingly challenging in so many ways , and that is another thing that I find that I have difficulty with some days Now .

Speaker 1 31:02

Yesterday , I had a moment where I thought , god damn these humans . They're just killing the planet and they won't stop . And it could be so simple . It's not for everybody , but there's all these greedy people who are obsessed with power , trying to take everything . And you know , god damn it . Why can't we just wake up and become emotionally and spiritually mature as a species so that we do what is good for everyone , rather than playing power games and subjugation games and power over and dominance and wars and raping the planet ? I had a moment and then I thought well , you know what ? It's a beautiful day , the sun is shining , the grass is green , I can give my horse a scratch , give my dogs a pat , so I'm going to have the best day that I can here now .

Speaker 1 31:52

I'm going to make as much difference as I can within myself and within my world , and that is another kind of thing that I hope that this podcast will help you be inspired to uplift yourself in the face of the grief of loss of habitat , of the grief of humanity's violence , of the grief of these these times . Um , now I I have done some , some learning and some practices with , with shamans from the quechua , people from peru , the very elder indigenous people and they have no doom and gloom . They are absolutely confident that humans are a good species and that the planet loves humans and that if we work together to wake up and to come into right relationship with all of the living energies of the earth and the other beings and ourselves , that we will transcend what seems to be impossible and we will heal this planet and we will evolve into something spectacularly wonderful . So I choose to participate in that intention , in that kind of mindset , because it helps me live this day in a meaningful way and for me , living life in a meaningful way and for me , living life in a meaningful way is is really the most important thing that I can do for myself , for my beloved , for my animals , for my family , for my community and for this planet . So whole energy , body balance . Another key thing is that relationship being in right relationship with myself , with my animals , with my beloveds , with my family , with my community and with all the living energies of this amazing planet that we live on is an ongoing journey of discovery and a big priority in my life and and um , we may talk about that with people , as we have guests on the podcast . So that's it for me today .

Speaker 1 34:03

I just wanted to come in and do a little bit of an introductory episode . Let you get to know me a little bit . I'm dr edward , known as the healing vet , also known as tree brother in a musical sense . Um , or ed , and here I am and here are we . So I would ask you to give your pets , if you got them , a pat from me . Um , be as lovely to yourself as you are to your animals and just keep on doing what you can to make this day the most beautiful day that you can possibly enjoy . Goodbye for now . We'll see you in the next episode .