How to stop outsourcing your healing and practice self honesty - a profound interview on intuition, pain and what the body knows that the mind doesn't. If you’re a client or friend of mine, I’ve probably recommended you see Taichi at some point or another when you were suffering from some unexplained symptoms (physically or emotionally).Taichi Iwano is trained as an acupuncturist (among many other things) but his technique of reading the body - speaking to specific organs and chakras - blurs the boundaries between medicine and channeling.While he used to only do in person sessions in Toronto - which meant sending friends and family on a train for a day trip - in lockdown years, he discovered he could work with the same precision remotely, even just with the voice (this was my experience with Tarot).This made clear that not only does Taichi bypass the thinking mind when he makes his highly accurate observations about the body (including exact dates of influential events), but that the body is actually a conduit to something much vaster - “the earth as a storage USB,” as he puts it.Find out more from this remarkable healer and man on the first interview and second episode of my podcast. TRANSCRIPT Natalie (0:00) Welcome to episode two of the Soul Detective podcast. When I started this, I had intended it to be long-form solo episodes. And much to my surprise, as soon as I released the first one, I immediately thought of who I wanted to have as my first guest, and was actually very surprised I hadn’t thought of this sooner. Taichi Iwano is something of a rock-star figure to me in the world of intuition. Now, he doesn’t call himself an intuitive. He’s very discreet and private. He doesn’t advertise his work, and he doesn’t need to, because his abilities are so exceptional that word of mouth keeps him very, very busy. He’s actually asked me not to include his profile picture or contact information with the public so that he’s not dealing with a lot more client inquiries from all the people I refer to him — and that all of his other clients refer to him as well. And he’s so generous with his time and energy, but is in a phase of his life where he’s looking to slow down. And everyone has that right. But I just so admire, in this day and age, seeing someone with this kind of success as a healer or a guide who is so much in their gifts that they have never needed to rely on any kind of marketing. I think that is such a sign of being on your Career Camino. It’s a term I use in my work to describe someone really being on their professional and vocational path. At the tail end of when I was living in Montreal, I was in a stage where I was really deeply debating what my career path was meant to look like. I had been out of the acting game for a long time. I’d been in the art world. And when I was in the professional contemporary gallery system, it didn’t feel right. And my friend Matt and I were co-producing a vlog for a gallery called Article — that was the name of the vlog — an interview series with different contemporary artists that were exhibiting at Arsenal Contemporain in Montreal and different galleries and museums across Canada and some in the US. And it recalled to me how I did love the world of production. And I contemplated a return into the entertainment industry. I actually left the art world, declared it publicly, and started to look at what compelled me most in that arena. And I didn’t feel very lit up by the acting dreams I had when I was younger, when I’d had success in film and TV. But I was definitely into comedy — specifically a lot of female comedians. I started working on a pilot, and I pitched a sitcom around, and I actually got it optioned, which was very exciting, but things kind of dwindled and the option expired. And I found myself in 2020 in Costa Rica, in Nosara where I live now. And I was like, “Okay, I’m going to launch this by myself. I’m going to do a crowdfunding campaign and make this pilot on my own and not wait for anybody.” And the day that I was going to launch that crowdfunding campaign was the day the world shut down with the pandemic. People were notified that they weren’t going to be working anymore. This was before they were announcing the subsidies they were going to be giving people. And so everyone got really panicked about money, and I was like, “This could actually be the worst possible time to ask people to donate money.” So the timing didn’t feel aligned, to put it mildly. And after so many years of auditioning and feeling deflated — getting really, really close, getting on the final lists, and it falling through for sometimes very banal reasons like height or coloring — I was really debating if I wanted to be in that world again the way I had so enjoyed when I was younger. And at the time I had been giving tarot readings to friends and family members because I was in such a deep-dive soul-searching phase that I acquired a lot of spiritual tools to try to understand my place in the world better. And at the time, I had people suggest that I start to charge for readings, and that’s how Tour De Soul was born — the previous incarnation of my business before it became Soul Detective, which is the current form. So I found myself back in Montreal and the world was still in lockdown. And I started to compare what an eventuality would look like in the best-case scenario in both career paths. So I imagined myself as an Emmy-award-winning showrunner. And actually, specifically, I was imagining the Oscars, because when you’re an actor or a creator in that industry, that’s considered the end-game of achievement. And then I tried to compare: Okay, what would an equivalent look like in this other, new industry that I’m in — the one of intuitive guidance? And I saw Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday and I imagined myself being interviewed by her and sharing the ideas in my book and wanting to help people. And it immediately became clear to me how much more exciting it felt to have a platform from which to share my thoughts and beliefs and the principles that have worked for me with other people, rather than the idea of being on a red carpet and being asked what designer I was wearing and gaining the statue. Now, I’m not saying that for actors their be-all and end-all is winning an Oscar. But it was pretty telling to me at the time that I didn’t even watch the Oscars, let alone dream of attending them. And in that moment, it became clear to me that I needed to shift my energy onto this other path. Now, I still love female comedians. I’m not saying that there’s nothing in that world for me to learn from and create from in the future. But I always remembered that idea: If you’re feeling indecisive, compare your two visions of success in both scenarios. And whichever vision of success speaks to you the strongest is very revealing of what you authentically desire and are motivated by. So I’m saying that because for me to interview Taichi and hear what he has to say would be what, for an actor, it would be like to interview Matthew McConaughey, for example. He is a celebrity for me. And as you can hear in this podcast, he’s very humble and doesn’t invest a lot of stock in thinking that he has an exceptional ability. But I can tell you, after referring countless people to him, that he has honed what might be a natural ability to all of us into an exceptional form. And I try to get specific how-to answers from him on how to be able to replicate what he does, but he won’t give us that convenient answer. And when I’ve thought about this interview since we recorded it, I recall, in myself, some of what he describes from when I was younger. When I was a kid and acting, I had a really strong inner world. And so when I would project myself into a scene, into a character, I was working very hard in my mind, in my imagination, in whatever in us generates energy or moves and directs energy. It felt very magical. It felt very intentional, and there was a lot of power there. And I think when that ability started to peter out, it was as I hit adolescence and I became more self-conscious, which happens to a lot of people in puberty and in the desire for belonging in high school. And so, given that I was self-conscious, my attention was directed more to how I came across externally rather than the depth and richness of my inner world, and my acting ability just plummeted. I remember at the time my agent asked me, “What happened to you, Natalie? Where did it go?” And I didn’t know how to answer him. And I think that as I was investigating spirituality in those years — the years prior and the years creating my business — I was spending a lot of time with this idea of spirit guides and our divine guidance team, meditation, channeling, self-healing. And as I was working in those frameworks, I was starting to redevelop that inner world. So I think that the clues that Taichi gives us in this interview are that we can develop our sensitivity. And it does take work, but we all have access to it. And I can confirm this as a teacher of my group readings workshops — I’ve done probably hundreds of them at this point. I was doing several a week here in Nosara the first few years. And I would get people to channel for one another. I would connect them with their teams, and they were incredible — almost miraculous — at being able to identify really specific factoids or pick up on really subtle things going on for the person, or even some predictions, even though it was their first time even exploring intuitive work. And I got some messages from strangers that were as accurate as anything I’ve ever heard from a professional medium. So I do agree with Taichi that we are all intuitive. That doesn’t mean that it’s just given to us for free if we want to rely on it more heavily, if we want to work with it. And so j
