Two Hundred Doorways and Pleiadian Downloads: A Review of Ámanae

-- An examination of Ámanae’s “galactic” claims of transformation, including a conversation with Ámanae trainer Jesse Eustis.

By Reza Ganjavi | 11 Oct 2026

I learned about Ámanae when Christine Dürschner promoted a three-day intensive at Schloss Glarisegg in Switzerland. The advertised fee was CHF 1,050, or CHF 1,250 with a separate introductory day; accommodation and meals were additional. The organizers described Ámanae as a “galactic, therapeutic bodywork practice,” promising access to deeply held emotional material, energy and information bound in survival patterns, and profound healing. The event was also promoted as purported healing of traumas and emotions stored in the body and an energetic or spiritual dimension. These are substantial propositions to attach to bodywork sold at a substantial price. [1] [2]

These big claims deserved a closer look. What experience and supervision equip facilitators to recognize dissociation, psychological destabilization, serious mental-health conditions, physical contraindications and adverse responses? What qualifications do facilitators actually gain from this training, and how are they assessed? How are participants screened for physical and mental health conditions, and what contraindications apply? Are there crisis-management protocols or long-term adverse-event monitoring? [3]

Purported Extraterrestrial Origins

Ámanae traces its origins to Christine Day’s claimed Pleiadian experiences in Australia around 1986. Ámanae did not emerge from neuroscience, psychology, medicine, clinical trauma research or any ancient spiritual discipline. Day describes herself as a “Pleiadian Ambassador” and says she channels healing methods from these beings. Her autobiographical account describes encountering a spacecraft and Pleiadian visitors in 1994. [4]

Jesse Eustis and Jeffrey Shub

The intensive was advertised with Jesse Eustis and Jeffrey Shub as its facilitators. I had a zoom call with Jesse to learn more and get some questions answered. [5] [2]

Denial of “co-creator” title

In an Instagram promotion for the Swiss event, organizer Christine Dürschner described Jesse Eustis as a “co-creator of ÁMANAE.” The Swiss organizer’s description was inaccurate: Jesse expressly denied being Ámanae’s co-creator and identified Christine Day as its founder. He described himself as a trainer who had developed aspects of the teaching over time. [1] [2]

A healing method downloaded from the Pleiadians

I asked Jesse directly about Day’s Pleiadian origin story. He confirmed that this is how she herself explains the method. According to his account of her account, information was suddenly downloaded to her, followed by alleged visitations that helped her interpret and use it. He made clear that he could not independently verify her account.

A set of instructions from the Pleiadians, delivered as a download and supplemented by visitations, somehow became a bodywork practice marketed as therapeutic. Why should anyone accept an alleged extraterrestrial transmission as evidence about the human nervous system, stored emotion, anatomy or illness? What exactly has been independently checked? Which part of the “download” can be tested?

People may have extraordinary private experiences. The claim that those experiences reveal effective medical or psychological interventions is a further proposition. Its evidence has to be supplied independently of the experience itself. [4]

“The body remembers everything”—including more than this lifetime?

In the promotional video, Jesse says that the body remembers more than what happened in the present lifetime. He also links older emotional material with problems such as depression, back pain and illness. The video deserves attention for the funny claim it makes: a body can somehow carry memories from before that particular body existed. Where are these alleged memories stored? What distinguishes them from imagination, suggestion or a metaphysical belief? [2]

Jesse’s statement goes beyond the fact that stress and experience can affect bodily functioning. The explanation attributes memory to the organism in a way that extends beyond this lifetime and places illness, pain and emotional difficulties into a system of stored material, energy and special “doorways.” Ámanae’s official materials describe approximately 200 doorways and refer to blocks lodged in bodies for “years and lifetimes.” Those claims demand concrete definitions and evidence. [6]

Two hundred doorways: is there a part of the body without one?

In our conversation, Jesse said the system contains approximately 200 “doorways,” located at particular bodily points. He compared it loosely with acupuncture while acknowledging that it did not map onto acupuncture, chakras or another known scheme. When I asked where that map came from, his explanation was simple: Day said she channeled it.

Two hundred! An adult’s skin typically covers about 1.5–2 square metres. Dividing that surface area by 200 gives an average of 75–100 square centimetres for each putative doorway: roughly a 9–10 centimetre square per doorway. Is almost every patch of the human body a spiritual entrance? To be clear, the system does not claim its points are evenly spaced, and this arithmetic is a rhetorical illustration rather than an anatomical test. It does show how plentiful these alleged gateways are.

The joke aside, arithmetic cannot establish whether a pressure point is real or effective. The question is how these 200 locations were identified, whether independent observers can locate them reproducibly, and whether applying pressure there produces outcomes distinguishable from pressure applied elsewhere. A map said to have arrived through channeling supplies none of those answers. [6] [7]

Contemporary memory science studies memory through neuronal activity, synaptic changes and distributed networks involved in learning and recall. Trauma can produce lasting changes in physiological responses, behavior, attention and the experience of pain. The separate claim that a person’s autobiographical memories reside in special peripheral body sites—especially memories of supposed previous lifetimes—has not been established by science, and defies common sense. Publicly available Ámanae sources examined for this article did not supply any credible evidence validating the doorway map or its proposed mechanism. [8]

Pain also deserves more seriousness than a single-cause story. The International Association for the Study of Pain describes pain as multifactorial, with biological, psychological and social contributors. Emotional distress can interact with back pain and chronic pain; that fact does not establish that “old anger” is literally stored in a bodily doorway or that releasing it through Ámanae removes the cause of disease. [9]

The “fifth thing” that supposedly delivers information beyond understanding

Jeffrey Shub’s promotional reel uses a related vocabulary. He describes Ámanae as helping people learn what it means to be human, refers to physical, emotional, energetic and mental aspects of being, and invokes a mysterious fifth dimension or source of information beyond ordinary understanding. To me these claims sound nonsensical and trying to make of Ámanae what it is not. [2]

I will not even begin questioning some of the rhetoric and claims, given the irrationality of some of the basic assumptions, especially having seen so many of these so-called systems. Here we have a supposed fifth body, transmissions, and information allegedly beyond human understanding. – and as with most of these funny systems, the absence of a rational description is attributed to it being “beyond what we can understand” with the qualification that it allegedly produces intelligible, useful effects, which cannot be measured, and require spending a lot of money.

The advertising for the intensive itself moves in the same direction, promising to untangle “emotional, energetic, and informational layers stored in the body” and to “reactivate multidimensional human capacities.” These phrases can function perfectly well as spiritual metaphor. Their meaning becomes much more consequential when they are packaged together with “therapeutic bodywork,” trauma healing and claims of profound healing which are very serious claims. [1]

Intensity, reaction and the leap to healing

The promotional videos show participants undergoing striking bodily and emotional reactions: vigorous movement on treatment tables, crying or open-mouthed vocalization, practitioners holding the head or face, pressure to the torso and abdomen, and people continuing the process on the floor. The reactions are real events. Their interpretation is the disputed part.

Ámanae’s own materials explicitly cultivate intensity. The official workshop page says that in longer intensives old blocks from “years and lifetimes” can shake loose and that a process of “ego breakdown” begins. Amanae Europe says its combination of pressure and deep breathing goes faster than most bodywork and acknowledges that some people feel afterward as if “a truck hit them.” [6] [10]

A dramatic reaction can arise from many ingredients present here: firm touch or pressure, pain, attention focused on bodily sensation, expectancy, group contagion, emotional permission, ritual framing, suggestion, breathing changes and the social meaning supplied by facilitators. An intense state may feel profound and may even be personally useful. The evidence established by such a reaction is much narrower: something intense happened. Claims that a stored trauma was located, a blocked energy was released, a past-life memory surfaced, or a disease process was reversed require independent evidence.

Breathing is one concrete example. Ámanae says breath can act as an “accelerator” and asks participants to breathe more deeply or into particular bodily areas. When breathing exceeds metabolic need, carbon dioxide falls; hyperventilation-related hypocapnia can produce light-headedness, dizziness, tingling, chest sensations and other striking bodily effects. Those sensations have a straightforward physiological basis; an energetic or traumatic-release interpretation requires separate evidence. [6] [11]

What Jesse says the treatment is meant to do

Jesse said releasing “cellular memory” may happen, but that this is not the central objective. He described his version of Ámanae as an “adult initiation process,” involving feeling and expressing emotion, developing greater emotional maturity and unfolding what he calls “multidimensional” human potential.

His practical description was straightforward: the practitioner presses or holds special body points, the participant breathes toward them, and sensations, emotions, images or recollections may arise. The participant is encouraged to approach what arises instead of suppressing it. Jesse says people often “swallow” emotion, and that the work teaches them to feel and express it again. He went on to claim that feelings can remain at a “child stage” and need to be matured.

The first part is plausible as a description of what a person might experience under focused touch, breathing and social encouragement. The enormous leap comes next: from an emotional experience on a treatment table to adult initiation, mature feeling and multidimensional human potential. Where are the independent criteria for those outcomes? How long do any changes persist? What prevents the practitioner from counting practically any response—tears, resistance, silence, laughter, intense sensation—as confirmation of the model?

This also leaves a tension within Ámanae’s public messaging. Its marketing speaks of stored memories, release and healing; Jesse’s own explanatory emphasis in conversation was expanded feeling and “adult initiation,” with release secondary. Practitioners are entitled to refine a method. The public should be told clearly what is metaphor, what is an actual therapeutic claim, and what has been tested. [6]

How Jesse explains the method in practice

When questioned about how Ámanae could address the complexity of psychological conditioning, Jesse described a process involving bodily sensations, breathing and feelings. In his example, anger first emerges as sounds, develops into words such as “stop” and “get out,” and is then connected to a story of childhood abuse. The participant, in the example, speaks back to an uncle who had abused them. Jesse likened this to time travel: revisiting a remembered scene, expressing what could not be expressed then, and afterwards perhaps feeling safer.

There is a recognizable psychological idea in this account. Reworking the meaning of distressing memories, including through imagery, may help some patients; imagery rescripting has been studied in clinical psychology. Jesse confirmed that he has no degrees in those clinical fields. Other practitioners’ qualifications would need to be checked individually. The matter is very sensitive and delicate and needs to be handled with great care and by qualified people who know what they’re doing and are very well educated in the matter; that is not a requirement in the Ámanae world – which makes it very risky in my view.

Ámanae’s 200 channeled doorways, energetic bodies or sweeping claims of transformation remain unproven. The example raises questions about how practitioner prompts and interpretations are supervised, especially when a participant is discussing childhood abuse. [12]

Jesse stated Ámanae’s approach is not cathartic discharge. His account emphasizes expression, meaning and emotional maturity. It should therefore be examined on that account, while still asking whether participants attain measurable and sustained improvements, how adverse outcomes are assessed, and why pressing the designated bodily points is therapeutically necessary. [12]

Jesse argued that everyone carries some degree of psychological conditioning, including from relatively minor childhood experiences.

Trauma treatment is more than catharsis

Evidence-based trauma treatment can involve direct engagement with traumatic memories; it would be inaccurate to imply that legitimate therapy is always gentle, indirect or free of distress. Prolonged Exposure, trauma-focused CBT and EMDR are structured approaches in which difficult material can be approached deliberately. Their therapeutic claims, however, rest on defined protocols, clinician training and accumulated evidence rather than on the assumption that the size of the emotional discharge measures the depth of healing. [13]

There is also a useful caution from trauma research: emotional processing is not automatically beneficial simply because it is immediate or intense. NICE specifically advises against psychologically focused debriefing for preventing or treating PTSD, and Cochrane reviews have found no basis for assuming that single-session debriefing prevents PTSD. Ámanae is not identical to psychological debriefing; the relevance is the principle. Catharsis is an event, not an outcome measure. [13] [14]

A useful comparison comes from Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre’s 2012 book Healing Developmental Trauma and the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM). Its published description integrates bodily awareness with present-day relational patterns, self-regulation, identity, resources and psychological processing. That broader view illustrates how body-aware work can encompass the wider field of conditioning rather than concentrating on dramatic emotional release.

I pointed out that conditioning encompasses habits, fears, identification, relationship patterns, comparisons, images of oneself and others, and the accumulated movement of thought and memory. Expression of emotion can be one part of understanding this movement, but its intensity supplies no measure of how completely the movement has been understood. Jesse agrees that psychological experiences matter; he locates Ámanae’s starting point in sensation, breath and feeling. The question is what makes those specially designated bodily points necessary, sufficient or superior to sustained attention in life itself, and whether that’s even necessary if one is attentive, and whether lack of that attentiveness can be substituted by pressing some galactic doorway to extra-terrestrials LOL. [15]

When a workshop actively welcomes suppressed emotion, intense bodily sensation, memories, screaming, crying and what its own literature calls ego breakdown, basic safety questions become unavoidable: Who is screened out? How are dissociation, panic, psychosis vulnerability, severe PTSD, medication issues or medical contraindications assessed? What happens if someone destabilizes after leaving? What clinical supervision or referral pathway exists? The Swiss promotional material reviewed for this article is silent on those questions. [1] [6] [3]

Training, safety and the claim of superior insight

Asked directly about education in psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, trauma, neuroscience and medicine, Jesse answered that he had no degrees in any of those fields, while saying he had undertaken considerable independent study over the preceding decades. This is more precise than calling him uneducated. Independent study and substantial practical experience can be meaningful; specific competence for handling severe trauma, dissociation and clinical emergencies still needs to be demonstrated.

Jesse criticized conventional psychological approaches as culturally shaped by emotional “numbness” and relayed his account of asking Gabor Maté about retraumatization. That is Jesse’s report of a conversation, not independent evidence for Maté’s views and not a safety study of Ámanae. A claim that psychotherapy has limitations is a legitimate starting point for debate; it leaves unresolved the practical responsibility to screen for risk, identify harmful reactions, and measure outcomes. [1]

Adverse outcomes: no formal monitoring system

I asked Jesse whether Ámanae records adverse events and follows participants over the long term. He acknowledged that there is no official system for this. Instead, he pointed to informal continuing contact with many of roughly 80 people he says he has trained. He regards those trainees—people particularly exposed to the practice—as his main source of longer-term observations. That is a personal network of trainees, not a systematic follow-up study of everyone who has received sessions or attended intensives.

His description of possible adverse consequences was striking. He referred to heightened sensitivity, difficulty fitting into the expectations of contemporary society, painful feelings of alienation, and the possibility that former relationships might become difficult to maintain. He also described some students as becoming excessively identified with their wounded history or repeatedly organizing their lives around an identity of having been harmed. He said additional processes had been developed to address this latter pattern. He invited suggestions about harmful consequences that might have escaped his attention.

These admissions deserve more than a reassuring interpretation as the inevitable discomfort of spiritual growth. How are such effects distinguished from deterioration in psychological or relational functioning? When someone loses relationships or becomes more alienated, who evaluates whether the change is beneficial, harmful, or a combination? And could describing a suffering participant as attached to a wounded identity obscure a genuine adverse reaction to the intervention?

A credible safety assessment needs agreed definitions of adverse events, recording and follow-up procedures, information from ordinary participants—including those who leave—and some independent method of assessing results. Informal contact with committed trainees can provide anecdotes and feedback. It cannot establish complication rates, long-term effectiveness, or whether the people most negatively affected have disappeared from view.

When “the body remembers,” suggestion matters

Ámanae’s own description says that memories may arise during sessions, that a practitioner’s words may remind someone of a story from the past, and that participants may recount something “the body has remembered.” That is where disciplined caution is critical. Human autobiographical memory is reconstructive rather than a video archive, and decades of experimental work show that suggestion can create false beliefs and, under some conditions, false autobiographical memories. [6] [16]

Historical accuracy remains an open question whenever a memory arises during emotionally charged bodywork. Some memories may be accurate, some distorted, and some potentially constructed or reshaped by suggestion. Tears, trembling, pain or a powerful sense of recognition cannot adjudicate between those possibilities. The stronger the facilitator’s framework—stored trauma, past lifetimes, bodily doorways, energy blocks—the more important it is to separate experience from factual inference.

This issue came into sharper focus when Jesse offered an example of an angry participant progressing from bodily expression to a story about an abusive uncle. The example may illustrate a therapeutic use of memory and imagery. It also shows how much depends on the accuracy of recollection, the wording of the facilitator’s prompts, and the distinction between helping someone develop a new response to a memory and establishing what historically happened. An emotionally powerful story must remain open to careful scrutiny.

The disease claims cross a more serious line

Amanae Europe’s FAQ says the practice is suitable for people who have not overcome trauma and for people suffering from “dis-ease.” Asked whether Ámanae will cure disease, the site says that after emotions are released, many illnesses may become unable to remain in the body, and it attributes illness to “soul imbalances” that opened the door to disease. It also says that breathing into the doorways can make healing happen quickly and deeply. [10]

These are health claims, regardless of the spiritual vocabulary surrounding them. Psychology, stress physiology and pain science all recognize complex relationships among emotion, behavior, nervous-system function and physical health. Those relationships still leave Ámanae’s specific causal chain—unfelt anger or “soul imbalance,” disease, doorway pressure and breathing, then healing—requiring its own evidence. A responsible therapeutic claim requires evidence for the specific intervention and the specific outcome being promised or implied.

An extraordinary healing anecdote, with no verification

Jesse also related an account of a child’s serious neurological condition supposedly improving after prolonged Ámanae work. In telling the story, he acknowledged uncertainty about important details and said that he could not verify a later report about the child’s condition.

A story like this cannot carry a therapeutic claim. A genuine neurological recovery would need a documented diagnosis, independent clinical assessments, follow-up, an account of concurrent treatments and a careful approach to causation. If the claim is serious, it deserves serious evidence. The more extraordinary the claimed healing, the less adequate a chain of recollections and rumors becomes.

What I wrote when Ámanae was promoted to me

On 16 Aug 2026, I posted two messages on Telegram:

Telegram message 1 — 16 Aug 2026

Dear Christine - thanks for the message. I looked at it from a broader philosophical perspective than whether it is "my method of choice" or not. In fact, in this field of holistic change which involves all aspects of our being, psyche, heart, mind, methods largely fail because method means: do steps 1, 2, 3, and you get to a result. But that result itself is dynamic and not fixed. For the external world, methods are important and work. Just as the thought as a tool which is perfect for the external world, but when it's (mis)applied to the inner world it wrecks havoc: like brushing your teeth with a hairbrush.
The psychosomatic field is very very delicate so these methods often cause more confusion than clarity, though short-term they can empower the self and feel good. Tough field.
Best wishes
Reza

Telegram message 2 — 16 Aug 2026

Sorry Christine and with all due respect: Amanae is dangerous, and at best, a set of sensational experiences at a high cost. There's a lot more to the retention of unresolved, unattended "stuff" than in the body / cellular memory. The approach of Amanae is too partial and not holistic, and therefore, it can have negative repercussions beyond just the bank account (at the cost of more than 1,000 Swiss Francs for the 3-day session).
The assumption that bringing buried material to the surface, or producing an intense bodily or emotional experience, necessarily means change, is fundamentally false. It can be sensational, but it's problematic from multiple angles. Yes, cellular memory is very real, but it's just a part of the issue. A holistic approach towards this entire subject is at an entirely different level, and I'd have to write an essay, which is out of scope here.
There's a lot that can be done in releasing the tangled, habitual, conditioned memories - conditioning - by paying attention to everything that one is, during the course of life - as everything that one is shows itself - including the subconscious - and all it takes is to have the eyes to see - the attention - to attend to the tension - which is magical, since there's a natural law: when there is seeing of what-is, without trying to change it, what-is can change. That non-judgemental, almost passive seeing is needed since any action of will, effort, is a movement away from what-is, into what should be, or what has been - which makes it impossible to see / understand what-is.
When there is that art / quality of seeing, where the observer is not separate from the observed - there is just looking with a quiet mind - that seeing is action and can bring change, freedom, total release at all levels. All this can happen in the course of daily life, by just paying attention to the inner movements, but our education is mainly focused on attention to the outer world. Paying attention to every thought and feeling, emotion, reaction... (long story). I've done some writing on this subject: https://www.rezamusic.com/writings/essays-and-short-pieces - PM me if you'd like some good books in PDF, or if you're interested in discussing this - we can set up a group Zoom if there's interest.

Teodora Rădulescu didn’t like my post and tagged the administrator who did not take action since my post was compliant with the rules. Ms. Rădulescu advertises her service as “the safe-space for your becoming”. Perhaps she didn’t like my ideas about freedom from becoming – and not moving away from what-is!

The deeper problem: engineered experience can become another form of conditioning

My broader objection concerns the unsupported claims about energy bodies and supposed doorways, as well as the more fundamental question of psychological change. Human psychological change is easily confused with the production of a desired state. A method directs the participant where to focus, how to breathe, which points supposedly matter, what emotional history may be stored there, what “release” should feel like and what meaning to assign afterward. Repetition can make someone proficient in reproducing the ritual and in explaining each new response through its vocabulary.

The experience may create conviction, connection or temporary relief. It may also reinforce reliance on the explanatory scheme itself: I cried, therefore something ancient left my body; I felt a surge, therefore a doorway opened; I imagined something, therefore the body remembered; I felt uplifted, therefore my multidimensional self emerged. None of those inferences follows from the sensation alone. Conditioning can even acquire a spiritual vocabulary and carry on as conditioning.

Attention begins with observation of thought, emotion, sensation, reaction and conditioning as they actually arise in daily life, free of a prescribed discovery or forced cathartic destination. Ámanae’s marketing repeatedly equates access, release, remembering and intensity with healing. The nature of change deserves more scrutiny than that.

Psychological conditioning and the mirror of relationship

When I think about change, I think of holistic change. A person and their life experience might have all kinds of issues, conditionings, habits. Some of it may have gathered cellular memory. Some of it may not. Some of it may be repressed. Some of it may be what Jesse described: a person never learned to cry or express themselves. But a huge part of it is psychological. It is about memories, image-making, the whole psychological field, the whole psychological conditioning.

Some people have no dramatic childhood episode comparable to the abuse story Jesse described. They may nonetheless be caught in comparison, in the habit of measuring themselves against others, or in images of how other people see them. That was one of my questions to Jesse: what place does this vast psychological conditioning have in a process focused on bodily doorways and emotional expression? The reaction to a childhood humiliation, for example, may be visible in life without anybody pressing a point on the body.

You can pay a lot of money, feel good, express yourself, have an intense experience, and yet fundamental change may not happen. What is missing, in my view, is that holistic thing which needs to happen in daily life. You need, in the mirror of relationship, to see your conditioning, to learn, because without understanding your conditioning, seeing it clearly, there cannot be a change. The possibility of seeing it is available in daily life, without having a special bodily “doorway” pressed.

I asked whether what we call the unconscious may be so conscious, so apparent, that we fail to see it. A person can observe conditioning as it operates in the mirror of relationship. Jesse acknowledged that awareness of earlier material can arise without a bodily doorway being pressed. The possibility of seeing is present in daily life. Why assume that a special bodily intervention is the necessary entrance?

The observer and the observed

The whole sense of self, the psychological sense of self, is fabricated. It is not a continuous thing. You have a sense of self now, and the mind connects experiences and builds this image called “me”; then it tries to preserve this “me”. And what happens in consciousness is that it divides itself. Imagine jealousy, for example. The traditional approach is that this is you who is jealous, and you have to work on that jealousy. There is a division between the observer and the observed. But when there is jealousy, there is no “you” separate. There is just jealousy. If there can be observation of that, understanding of that, without division in consciousness, then some change can come about.

Understanding is seeing. It is not only intellectual understanding. It is actually seeing it in action, seeing all aspects of it—feeling, thought, sensation, reaction, everything. When Jesse asked whether this understanding includes feeling, the answer was, of course, absolutely. Everything.

There is a natural law, as I put it in my original message: when there is seeing of what-is, without trying to change it, what-is can change. Non-judgmental, almost passive seeing is essential. Any action of will or effort to move from what-is toward what should be, or what has been, is a movement away from what is actually taking place. The observer is the observed. With a quiet mind, seeing itself is action; it can bring fundamental change without the manufacture of a special experience.

Our education is mainly focused on attention to the outer world. There is much less attention to the inner movements—to every thought and feeling, emotion and reaction—as they show themselves during the course of life, including what is ordinarily called the subconscious. This is the virtue of simplicity: having the eyes to see, attending to the tension, without immediately turning the observation into another program for changing oneself.

Jesse spoke of anger, sadness, fear and joy as different forces with different functions. I told him I would not even label them or categorize them. It is not necessary. When we are talking about fear itself, there is a great deal to that subject—more than one chapter. The question is the quality of attention that can see what-is, as it shows itself, without trying to change it.

Thought, psychological time and the limits of method

In our conversation I described a world dominated by thought, the thinking machine constantly operating around “me,” the self. Thought moves in psychological time, from the past to the future, projecting that future on the basis of what it already knows. Its content comes largely from memory and experience, which are limited. Thought itself is a material process and therefore limited in its field. I referred to Rumi’s invitation to come out of the field of time and enter the field of love: a suggestion of another movement outside the ordinary machinery of thought and psychological time.

In this field of holistic change, involving psyche, heart and mind, methods largely fail because a method means: do steps 1, 2, 3 and get a result. But the inner result itself is dynamic, not fixed. Thought is a powerful tool for the external world. Apply it mechanically to the inner world and it can wreak havoc—like brushing your teeth with a hairbrush. The psychosomatic field is delicate. A prescribed sequence toward a promised state is a very different movement from understanding everything that one is as it shows itself.

When conditioned action strengthens conditioning

The very effort to become something psychologically—to become peaceful, healed, free of jealousy or spiritually advanced—can be another movement of the conditioning. The mind projects what should be and then acts on what-is in order to produce it. In that movement it has already moved away from what is actually happening. Conditioned action can strengthen conditioning. An intense experience may give the self a new image of progress while the deeper movement of psychological becoming continues.

I mentioned Byron Katie and Werner Erhard in the conversation when discussing what I call pop psychology: methods sold at considerable cost that can provide an intense experience and an immediate sense of empowerment. My point was about the pattern, rather than an assessment of either individual. The self may become more crystallized around its new experience while fundamental change remains untouched. A paid weekend can create a powerful event; it cannot by itself establish that the structure of psychological conditioning has ended.

This is also a question of directed versus holistic attention. A technique directs attention toward selected bodily points, emotional material and an anticipated result. Holistic attention attends to everything that one is as it shows itself—including comparison, fear, reaction and the very desire to become different. It does not select in advance what must surface or what the outcome should be.

There is also the question of dependence: on a method, a facilitator, a particular bodily “doorway,” an intensive weekend, or the promise of the next breakthrough. Such dependence can reinforce the conditioning it is supposed to dissolve. The art of attention is simpler and more demanding: looking directly at thought, feeling and reaction in daily life, in the mirror of relationship, without trying to turn what is seen into a prescribed outcome. The nature of change, the virtue of simplicity, and the danger of dependence deserve far more attention than sensational experiences.

Sources and notes

[1] Swiss event announcements and advertised pricing: https://schloss-glarisegg.ch/seminar_events/amanae-intensive-switzerland/ ; https://christineduerschner.net/termin/amanae-intensive-switzerland

[2] Swiss promotional reels and organizer’s accompanying statements — Jesse Eustis: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbvxYkAtvCJ/ ; Jeffrey Shub: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Db8a6z7IdqW/

[3] Ámanae practitioner training and related event description: https://www.amanaetherapy.com/trainings ; https://christineduerschner.net/termin/amanae-intensive-switzerland

[4] Ámanae origins and Christine Day’s account: https://www.amanaetherapy.com/about ; https://www.christinedayonline.com/about/ ; https://www.christinedayonline.com/about/the-pleiadian-story/

[5] Ámanae practitioner directory and Jeffrey Shub’s public biography: https://www.amanaetherapy.com/practitioners ; https://www.theurbanbarefoot.co/about

[6] Ámanae’s descriptions of its method and workshops: https://www.amanaetherapy.com/about ; https://www.amanaetherapy.com/workshops

[7] General reference for adult body surface area: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279255/

[8] Memory research: Guskjolen & Cembrowski, “Engram neurons: Encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and forgetting of memory,” Molecular Psychiatry (2023): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02137-5 ; “Brain-wide mapping reveals that engrams for a single memory are distributed across multiple brain regions,” Nature Communications (2022): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29384-4

[9] International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP): https://www.iasp-pain.org/resources/toolkits/pain-management-center/chapter1/ ; https://www.iasp-pain.org/resources/fact-sheets/psychology-of-back-pain/

[10] Ámanae Europe, FAQ including claimed emotional and illness-related effects: https://amanaeeurope.com/faq

[11] Hyperventilation and physiological symptoms: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10546483/ ; background article: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2937087/

[12] Imagery rescripting research: Kroener et al. (2023),https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37738780/ ; Visco-Comandini et al. (2025),https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejtd.2025.100609

[13] Evidence-based PTSD treatment recommendations: https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/prolonged-exposure ; https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/eye-movement-reprocessing ; https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng116/chapter/recommendations

[14] Cochrane review, single-session psychological debriefing: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD000560/abstract

[15] Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre, Healing Developmental Trauma (2012): https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/healing-developmental-trauma/ ; NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM): https://narmtraining.com/what-is-narm/

[16] Memory and suggestion: American Psychological Association,https://www.apa.org/topics/trauma/memories ; relevant empirical studies, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33586291/ andhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27892833/