Clara: Welcome to Everyday Anatomy Part 2, featuring Dr. Irene Sanchez and a discussion on longevity.

Irene and I have been on this journey of getting to know each other for almost two decades. Irene was an acupuncturist who practiced out of a yoga studio or wellness center where I worked. Over the years, one of my favorite things about Irene is that she’s constantly learning. She uses her many different modalities to create the offerings she now offers.

Irene: Thank you. My name is Irene. I’m from Mexico. My healing journey has been interesting and beautiful, with many ups and downs. It started when I went to med school.

So, I studied medicine in Mexico, and during that time, I realized the amazing capacity of the physical body to heal. It was a beautiful journey of learning anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and how the body can heal physically. But during that journey, being a medical student, there are a lot of high expectations.

 I was very stressed; there was a lot of pressure then. I wasn’t very connected to my to my body. Like it was it was very funny that I was studying the physical body, but I wasn’t connected to my physical body. So, I had a lot of menstrual challenges all my life. I’ve had a lot of hormonal imbalances and polycystic ovary syndrome.

And I was overweight. And then, with the stress in med school, my health just started to deteriorate. I began to smoke, drink, and party to relieve the stress of med school because we also didn’t have the psychological and emotional support that I hear now. 

I went into this dark spiral, and I knew that I needed to shift my lifestyle to be of service to others because I couldn’t help others if I were not healthy. And that’s when I started also exploring psychedelics and the realm of energy healing, and I was initiated into Reiki.

I started experimenting with healing with energy, not only with drugs or medication. Sometimes, that doesn’t work. I saw this in my patients. I would give them medicine, and they would come again and again with the same illness. They wouldn’t get better. As I move forward on this healing path, I believe healing integrates body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit.

That’s when I decided to shift my path and come to Canada. I went to a Chinese medicine school because I found the frame view, the cosmic vision of Chinese medicine based on Toaism, to make more sense.

When I was in Canada, I found my spiritual teachers. Then, I started to explore the spiritual path more deeply. I studied tantra, shamanism, body-mind therapy, and many, many other modalities, which I now utilize in my personal life and my sessions for healing and transformation.

Clara: Do you see a pattern with people, like as a culture? 

Irene: Yes, there are many patterns. I found many people who found themselves in situations where they felt distraught, hopeless, and in a shadow.

I find a disconnection to spirit—to something bigger than themselves. If you connect with that unnameable energy, you call it God. God is the universe’s great spirit, the great mystery. It takes you out of this, like a narrow, narrow-minded reality.

People like me are disconnected from self and the body. They live in the head and relieve from there. So, what I offer in my offerings is to embody, come down into the body, feel, and connect, and that could mean feeling all the emotions.

Clara: I want to ask you about longevity.

I’m wondering how my movement and eating habits will affect me as I age. Are you thinking about this? Do you have any insight into what you would recommend or are doing to age gracefully?

Irene: Absolutely. It’s funny because today, I posted something about my wisdom hair and how I’m falling in love with my grace. I call it the wisdom hair. There is something to say about aging gracefully because we live in an age-phobic society. We don’t put our elders in homes and disconnect from that wisdom.

And it is very important to reprogram that in our society and culture. And because we are so afraid of aging, we’re so afraid of dying, we’re so afraid of illness. If we walk through it with grace, with surrender, with letting go of our identities of who we were in our twenties, in our thirties, knowing that we’re all going that way and we’re all going to die.

Mentally, how will we accept the changes in our bodies and hormones? That said, I am a Chinese medicine practitioner, and longevity is one of the treasures of Taoism and Chinese medicine.

Many people don’t know this secret, which is the key to longevity. Yes, you eat well and exercise. You do the first thing, you know, you go to physiotherapy or a chiropractor, but then the energy management, the cultivation of your chi, the cultivation of your life force—it’s what will happen.

Give yourself the foundation to walk through the later stages of life and feel good. 

Clara: Yes. 

Irene: So, the number one path to take is Qigong. I mean, if you can afford to go to acupuncture every week. Qigong is like doing an acupuncture session for yourself. But you do it yourself. So, having a qigong practice is essential for cultivating longevity.

Clara: Cool. I was not expecting you to say that. That’s awesome. Is there anything else besides Qigong? 

Irene: Somatic therapies. Body-mind therapy. And why? Because, again, we are talking about energy. Emotions are energy. This is something that I teach a lot to change our view of emotions as energy because everything is energy, everything’s energy and consciousness.

There are no good emotions, bad emotions, or just emotions. Like everything, emotions have a frequency and a pattern. For example, anger has a pattern of going forward and out. Sadness has a pattern of going down, joy has a pattern of going up, and fears have a pattern of freezing or going back. So, we have yet to be taught emotional intelligence or how to move through emotions.

We’ve just been taught to repress them. When we repress emotion, the energy stays in the body. It needs to complete the pattern. 

When that emotion stays in the body, it creates an erratic frequency in your body. It has to go somewhere. 

Clara: Is there a body system that you love? 

Irene: I love the subtle anatomy of Chinese medicine and how they’ve mapped our energy channels. And within that system, there are other subsystems.

Clara: I was curious to ask you about Mula Bandha, from your experience of it, of the pelvic floor, the energy of the pelvic floor. 

Irene: Well, Mula Bandha is the doorway, the portal, and the entrance. It’s the root chakra.

It is a container because it is about safety. It gives you structure so that you feel safe. Mula Bandha is related to the earth element. Ganesha is a doorway and the gatekeeper of the root chakra.

Clara: Are there other practices you recommend for strengthening or getting intimate with Mula Bandha? 

Irene: There’s a beautiful book by this Qigong teacher called Mantak Chia.

Mantak Chia has several books, one of which is The Multiorgasmic Woman. It’s all Qigong, and he teaches the jade egg practice there if any of you are interested in learning more about it. It’s super easy and very practical, which helps a lot. The other piece touches and massages that area to make it intimate. 

Clara: Everybody in this community is a movement practitioner, but are there any recommendations for movement teachers?

Irene: Your grounding is very important when you are serving and holding space for others, where you are when you are healing, to connect with the earth’s energy. 

Clara: What excites you most about working with people in your practice right now?

Irene: I’m very excited to keep supporting women in their exploration of their sexual energy.

Because I feel if more women are more connected to their sensuality, to their sexuality, they’re going to feel more good about themselves. 

So, I feel like a big part of my mission in life is to help women to reclaim their sexual power. And that excites me. 

Clara: If there were one thing that we could do every day, that everybody could do every day, that would get us closer to this mission that you have, on an individual level, what would it be?

Irene: Connect to nature.

Be in nature, somehow, somewhere, like putting your bare feet on the ground, hugging a tree, looking at your plants, and connecting with animals. And the other thing is to be kind, to do one act of kindness daily.