Have you ever heard the term Barefoot Doctor before?
Barefoot Doctors – mostly women – were healers in ancient China who went about the rural regions – humbly (hence the metaphor, ‘barefoot’ – they weren’t literally shoe-less). They were medicine women and men who gave healing using acupuncture, herbs, massage, cranio-sacral style hands-on, listening (the precursor to modern psychotherapy), telling stories and singing songs as part of a shamanistic process (precursor to modern hypnotherapy) – they didn’t charge and were so popular people looked after them royally wherever they went.
In more modern times, barefoot doctors in China wear white coats and work mostly in clinics and hospitals.
But the Barefoot Doctor I want to introduce you to today is The Barefoot Doctor AKA Stephen Russell, one of the ‘second-wave’ originals, after his own teachers, RD Laing, Ram Dass, Dr Chi – at the forefront of the self-development movement in the UK and elsewhere round the world since 1997 – author of 24 books, including seminal classic Handbook for the Urban Warrior (you can go to www.WaywardPublications.com for the full list), originator of the ‘conscious clubbing’ movement in Ibiza, and creator of revolutionary music-based brain entrainment program, AmpedHEAD (go to www.Nuktrax.com for more information).
He’s a doctor of acupuncture, has helped millions of people including many famous ones such as Madonna, and members of the Pink Floyd. He lived with the Native Americans in New Mexico for 4 years back in ’79 and is schooled in the way of the shaman. He’s a martial arts and meditation master with over 50 years experience. He runs an online school of Taoism for ordinary people where you can learn all the important Taoist arts to improve your skills and your life in every way through an encyclopedic range of courses, (go to www.BarefootDoctorWorld.com).
He takes the barefoot moniker for being a humble kindly soul, schooled in all the relevant skills, who travels the world helping people. When not zooming around he lives in Andalusia in the south of Spain.
But what I’ve always appreciated about Barefoot Doctor is his ability to make the complex simple. Recently I had the opportunity to speak with him about the Tao, Wu Wei, and his latest work, AmpedHEAD.
Enjoy.
Wendy Schauer : Thank you for your time today. I so appreciate you making the time to speak with me and share your knowledge. I respect the gift that you have of taking what we in the Western world try to make more complex than need be and converting it into something that a five year old can understand. That being said, what is the Tao (pronounced dow) and what role does it play in our lives?
Barefoot Doctor : And for my part, I appreciate you giving me the time, Wendy, and for introducing me to your audience, thank you. I will do my utmost to do you proud.
The Tao – interestingly in the Tao Te Ching (Book of the Tao), the first stanza says (in my own words) ‘The Tao that can be described or defined is not the true Tao’, meaning it’s all but impossible to describe or define and that only an idiot would try.
So here goes.
Cast your mind all the way back to when you first started out as an embryo in your mother’s womb. At that point you mysteriously spontaneously embodied consciousness and life-force. You didn’t invent or create it. You embodied it. It was already there. It was and is primordial. And yet it’s not that your mother was walking around with consciousness in her womb waiting for you. Your presence there suddenly made it appear. That mysterious happening is the Tao. It’s the underlying, all-connecting, all-informing mysterious presence – consciousness and life-force (nature) at the subatomic root of every phenomenon from you and me to the largest galaxy.
And each of us are its expression and manifestation.
We are not separate from it. We don’t have to look up to the sky and talk to it in any special way. We are it. We just need to learn how to access this level of awareness. This is the main difference between the oriental notion of the Tao and the Western notion of God – same thing, different understanding.
WS : As we come to the close of the second decade of the 21st century, most of us are more stressed out than ever before. We were all told that technology would make our lives simpler, that turned out to not be true. Is there a technique or routine that you recommend that can help us calm and ‘center’ ourselves?
BD : Yes exactly – why make it easier for ourselves if we can make it more difficult, technology or not. We’re increasingly hooked on the stimulus of cortisol, the flight, fight, freeze hormone released from the adrenals. Like nicotine or crack cocaine, though the buzz isn’t that nice it’s highly habit forming. It lasts 12 seconds, so we keep squeezing the kidney region to pump the adrenals and keep it streaming through the blood.
The trick is to get hooked on the endorphin rush you get from relaxing instead.
But I don’t mean collapsing, I mean relaxing in the midst of action, like a great ballet dancer or boxer.
And that’s fundamental to the arts I teach but essentially it all boils down to stopping holding the breath, breathing freely, then letting go of gripping the muscles for no reason and allowing the whole body to soften – over and over and over again, for ever and ever.
The challenging but at the start is remembering to do it. There’s more to it than that though, which I’ll explain in the next bit.
WS : Over my almost 30 years in practice I’ve come to realize that a need that we all have in common is the desire for happiness (peace within). Is inner peace/happiness the ‘key to life’ and are there steps that we can take towards achieving this goal?
BD : Yes, according to the Taoist view, this inner peace and happiness is actually our natural unfettered state, when left to our own devices. Problem is societal conditioning that begins in earnest at school, but which begins with well-meaning parents coo-chi-coo-chi-cooing us as babies, teaching us it’s not OK to just be, that we have to do something to perform to earn the approval and hence protection of society.
But the interesting thing – and this is the most important and powerful technique in the whole Taoist system, probably the whole universe in general – is that all of that people-pleasing inner-peace, happiness-reducing activity only goes on in the front of you. The fore-brain is where you tell yourself all the stories tat explain the world to you, and you react to the stories you’re telling yourself in your belly. Very little of what you’re telling yourself bears much resemblance to actual reality but because we’re damn good story-tellers we believe them and get stressed about them to the point of it being pathological.
The big trick is to instead sit in your back. Your back is still and silent and strong and when you’re in there, your mind pulled back against the rear wall of your skull, you’re able to simply be. You’re able to observe the drama in the front without identifying with it. You see fear arising, for example but you are not afraid. This way (with training) you’re able to remain perfectly equanimous all the time, delighting in simply being, no matter what is or isn’t going on around you.
WS : What is the art of Wu Wei and how can we incorporate it into our daily lives?
BD : Yes, wu wei means effortlessly I manifest or draw unto me whatever I need to support me in my perfect happiness and peace.
It’s essentially a miracle-working skill.
It works by developing intentionality. You come into your back. You open your heart in the front. You notice and acknowledge (and appreciate) you already have the greatest gift you can ever receive – you’re alive with a body and mind to experience it through.
Anything more is bonus.
With that attitude and awareness it doesn’t matter whether you manifest things or not. Acknowledging that stops you being grasping – it gives you grace instead. And because what you seek seeks you also, it’ll be far more attracted to you when you’re gracious than when you’re grasping. It’s like you’re saying to your Tao ‘I’m game for anything but if you want me to be here doing my mission (whatever that is), you’ll need to provide whatever resources, opportunities and help I’ll need, but I’m easy either way because I’m enjoying being here so much anyway, with all the pain and all the glory’.
Then you discern your true nature’s intention – hard to frame it in words but it’s usually something along the lines of ‘let this grow more and more beautiful for me and everyone’ – you then make a symbol of it, shrink it to the size of a cent ‘place’ it behind your breastbone to be incubated by the love in your heart, and let it go and carry on as you were. And usually within no more than 90 days whatever you need will be coming your way.
WS : Would be kind enough to share with us about the new work that you are doing in the area of ‘brain entertainment’ with AmpedHEAD?
BD : Yes, thank you, I’ll be delighted to, as it’s a culmination-so-far of no less than 5 decades of focused development.
I’ve been a musician since the age of 2 – no kidding, my dad was a jazz drummer, I come from musical stock, my cousin was Stan Getz for instance – and because I learned how to heal from my aikido master aged 11, I wanted to combine music with healing, and with connecting to the Tao. Standing in church as a kid, singing hymns thinking instinctively, ‘I know what they’re trying to do here and I love it, but I’m sure I could do this more effectively’, I started exploring sacred music from the east and learning about healing sound frequencies with the advent of electronic music I was able to create powerful frequency designs, which featured in a series of LPs over the decades. I also developed the hypnotherapy skills learned from RD Laing and the shamanic way of using cadence and rhythm learned with the Native Americans and used it over the mic at club-nights over the decades. I also developed a way of running up to ten different positive affirmations subliminally at the same time and tested them in the field. Combined with developing my production skills, it all eventually resulted in AMPEDHEAD, this unique system of changing your internal dialogue to a much more positive one that will serve you far better than the random story-telling normally going on. And when you change that internal narrative it changes the way life responds to you.
The first three ‘Volumes’ of AMPEDHEAD came out in 2019 – each 6 hours long at a price of $424 each and so far amazingly considering people’s shortening attention spans and the fact people don’t buy music these days, as they stream it for free, they sold hundreds and counting – people love them.
So next stage was/is to reach the young who need it most right now by creating 3 minute AMPEDHEAD ‘MICRODOSES’, each using all the same technology and technique and each addressing a different issue – overcoming depression, overcoming anxiety, growing in self-esteem for instance. And these will start being released in 2020 on the open market to reach as many as need it, all being well.
WS : Doctor Russell, is there anything else that you would like to add? Where can my readers find you at on-line? 
BD : Yes, aside from thank you you again for this opportunity to connect, I’ve found this whole business of being at peace, manifesting whatever you need, and enjoying being alive each and every moment, works far better when you inform your whole approach to life with an intention to be of service. In that everyone on Earth, whether you like or approve of them or not, are family, hence to love them all with an open heart regardless, and as you enter or get involved in any situation, you do so wondering how you can help rather than how it’s going to help you.
www.BarefootDoctorWorld.com is the hub.
www.WaywardPublications.com is where you find the books, trainings and AMPEDHEAD Volumes.
www.Nuktrax.com is where you’ll be able to find the MICRODOSES and information on all the music side of things
WS : Thank you for taking the time to enlighten us today with your plethora of knowledge.
