Katie Fasciano conducts an in person session of Seimei.
Katie during a remote session.
Have you heard of Seimei? It’s a form of healing that originate in Japan. It addresses the nonphysical parts of the body. Katie Fasciano explains it and share her experience with this alternative form of healing and how it can benefit families.
Visit her website and also learn about the Seimei Foundation, which provides training in this technique.
Emmalou Penrod 0:00
Today I’m talking to Katie Fasciano. And she is a holistic practitioner, owner of Seimei Healing, Event Coordinator and board member of Seimei Foundation. Katie, welcome.
Katie Fasciano 0:17
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Emmalou Penrod 0:20
I am just really excited to have you on my show. I had the opportunity of meeting you and learning more about what you do. Let’s start with your your story. How did you become involved in holistic healing?
Katie Fasciano 0:44
Absolutely, yes. So that’s definitely my favorite question. It happened nine years ago, almost to the day. Actually, I found Seimei back in November of 2011. I think that is yes. 2011. And how did I find it? But I asked another mom, friend of mine, who had a child who had some special needs. And traditional medicine really didn’t have many solutions left, if any, for him. And so she kind of started exploring alternative medicines, alternative therapies. So I asked her this one day, where my daughter was getting therapy, and so was her son. And I said, “What are you doing now?” And she said, “Oh, I do this thing called Seimei. And they have an Open Night tonight. I said, “Okay, I’ll see you there tonight.” And off I went that evening, with my six year old daughter that had been battling cancer, along with her two little sisters, three and seven months old. And I showed up at Seimei that night. And I had this incredible inner knowing that I was home. And I felt enveloped in love in the room. It was absolutely incredible to have that insight. And we proceeded to go twice a week, every week when they opened up to the public. And within a few weeks, they said, “Well, we’re going to help Elizabeth to walk and run better with her session today.” I said, “Fantastic. Let’s do that.” And so after they had been working on us for a while, they said, “Okay, Elizabeth, go run around the room.”
I instantly choked up with tears, because it was the most beautiful she’d ever walked around in her life. And I said, “Okay, that’s it. I need to sign up. I need to start learning this myself.” And within two months time, January of 2012, I started my journey of learning, Seimei myself. So I’m coming on nine years now of being a practitioner of Seimei.
Emmalou Penrod 2:48
So starting out with just wanting the best for your child.
Katie Fasciano 2:52
Absolutely. And I think most parents out there can agree, you know, we’ll do absolutely anything to help our kids.
Emmalou Penrod 3:02
Yes, and a quote I’ve heard and I love is that a concerned mother does more research than the FBI.
Katie Fasciano 3:12
I could believe it.
Emmalou Penrod 3:14
Yes. Now, can you tell us a little bit about Seimei? Give us a history, explain what it is?
Katie Fasciano 3:22
Sure. Absolutely. So Seimei is a technique that comes from Japan. Seimei is a Japanese word. It translates into vital force. And this vital force is this non physical part of yourself, and everyone has it. So with this technique, we call that non physical part of ourselves a seimei, so everyone actually has the Seimei. It’s just the non physical part of yourself. And this work can be done both in person and remotely. So, thankfully that this is the case, because now with COVID, at the moment, a lot of people don’t want to be seen in person and also for my family’s safety, I’m also keeping up with remote sessions rather than in person. And it’s worked out. It’s very effective, whether in person or remote. It can help with aches, pains, tightness, soreness, emotional, symptomatic things like sadness, anxiety, stress, separation anxiety. And today I was going to specifically talk about a few clients I’ve worked with, with separation anxiety, and those clients are the little ones, the ones that are near and dear to us, mums and dads, our kids.
Emmalou Penrod 4:37
Oh, yes. And you know, I think that transition of going to school is hard enough, but at a time when there’s uncertainty and things are far from normal, I’m sure it’s even harder on our little ones.
Katie Fasciano 4:54
Absolutely.
Emmalou Penrod 4:55
So, share what has been your experience with Separation anxiety and seimei?
Katie Fasciano 5:02
Yes, yes. So I’ve had the pleasure to work with a number of children that have had issues with separating from their parents to go off to school, whether that school means preschool or elementary school, or even a bit older, if they’ve been traumatized by a life situation a life event, like a death in the family. So, I had the pleasure to work with an elementary little girl that there was a death of her best friend’s father. And after that, she was pretty traumatized. And she was worried about her own mother dying. And so she was really giving mom a hard time to try to leave to go to school. Like she would cling to mom. She was just so worried she was going to lose her own mom after her best friend lost her dad. So she came in for a session. We did the one session. And when I followed up a week later with Mom, I said, “How’s everything going?” And she said, “Well, not only is she okay, and not having any more separation anxiety. But the therapist that was working with her to help her through the emotional trauma of her best friend’s dad dying, has said that they’re going to start weaning down the sessions and that pretty soon they’re going to be done the sessions.” And Mom said, “Thank you so much for that seimei session because that one seimei session not only helped with anxiety and the separation anxiety she was having, but also helped to not need the counseling any longer either.” So she was really appreciative and I have many other stories, people can reach out, certainly I would love to give some more information.
Emmalou Penrod 6:49
Well, that definitely sounds like a very valuable option for helping with any kind of physical or emotional trauma.
Katie Fasciano 6:58
Yes, yes. It’s been a wonderful addition to my life for these past nine years. And I am so grateful that it is part of my my life, because any and all of my life experiences ever since nine years ago, have not been as traumatizing. Because I have this ongoing tool now within me that on a daily basis, I use seimei, and as I work with someone else, it also helps with my body. So any and all situations that happen, it just it takes down the the intensity of those situations, and helps remedy them and heal them quicker at a faster pace than what would normally be without the same thing.
Emmalou Penrod 7:47
Well, I got to sample seimei, when we had a zoom call, so this was remote. And I had some stiffness in my neck and shoulders, and felt immediate relief that lasted for, I think, a couple of days. And I was just amazed. So, what are some examples of how it can help physically?
Katie Fasciano 8:17
Oh, yes, absolutely. And, and also, you just mentioned that you felt that relief for a few days. And that’s what you can normally expect from seimei. Especially, if it’s something that you’ve had more than two weeks, we call it chronic. And with a chronic condition, you’re gonna have two to three days worth of relief from this remote session. But chronic usually means a few sessions are going to be necessary to have relief long term. If it’s an acute situation, meaning under two weeks, you’ve gotten an injury or a broken bone or, or something of that sort, one session can be enough to remedy the situation. So you were asking for other examples, one comes to mind is a woman was having an issue with a frozen shoulder. And she couldn’t lift it beyond a certain level. And she called me up. She had experienced a demonstration from me a few months prior with another symptom, but she was just still blown away weeks, months later, of still remembering that how much the seimei helped her. And she called me up and she said, “You know, I was gonna go consult my doctor about this, but I figured that was a very effective seimei demonstration you gave me. So I wanted to try this first.” So we scheduled her for a session, and we scheduled her for a second session. And after those two sessions, she was good. I checked with her months later. And she actually came up to me at a party and in front of other people. She said, “Has Katie told you about seimei? Look at my shoulder!” And it went straight up in the air without any effort at all. So she never needed to have any kind of surgical intervention. Seimei in two sessions was able to take care of that frozen shoulder, so, really incredible stuff.
Emmalou Penrod 10:17
Wonderful. And you mentioned broken bones.
Katie Fasciano 10:20
Yes.
Emmalou Penrod 10:20
Just aiding in speeding up the healing?
Katie Fasciano 10:22
Absolutely. There have been broken bones, fractured bones, strained ligaments that I’ve worked with pretty recently. Just last month, I was working with a woman, she just happened to mention on a zoom call, because we’re all on zoom calls right now. She said, “Gosh, I have this boot, like this walking cast on my foot, and I want to get it off. Doctors tell me, I can’t get it off for six weeks. And my other side of my body is hurting because it’s compensating from being uneven on this walking cast.” And I said, “Well, if you’d like to give me a try, we can speed that up for you.” And this was on week three. Week four, she was getting an X ray and that X ray would determine if she needed to go six weeks. Before she came to see me, she called the doctor and said, “Well, do you think I’m going to get this cast off at four weeks?” Doctor said “No, everybody goes six weeks.” So I said okay. Now it’s the next day. We do the seimei session remotely. And she was feeling, you know, the pain from from the foot was gone. And then the very next week was week four when she got her X ray. And the doctor was quite surprised, all of a sudden, it was healed to a point that she no longer needed that walking cast. And she was moving along in her progression just as she wanted. And that was thanks to seimei speeding up that recovery to two weeks shorter than the average six week recovery for that.
Emmalou Penrod 11:52
So it wasn’t replacing medical treatment, it just sped up the healing.
Katie Fasciano 11:58
Absolutely.
Emmalou Penrod 11:58
And isn’t that what we all want?
Katie Fasciano 12:00
Absolutely. Yes, we always say you need to have your your MD to help with the the symptom or the problem or the chronic condition, but the seimei is an absolute wonderful option to have as support through it. One of the things I noticed with my eldest daughter, is the emotional toll that her chronic disease took on myself and her her and our whole family. And I really noticed that traditional medicine, at least in my experience, didn’t have a really great way to manage the emotional side, the emotional toll. But once we had seimei in our lives, we could mitigate those emotional tolls and again, soften it as I was speaking earlier, even now, things are just easier and less intense. Because we have seimei to support us.
Emmalou Penrod 13:01
And that is huge. And I am sure parents can understand and agree when your child is not well, you need to deal with your own stress, and anxiety. But you also want your child healing quickly. feeling comfortable. I loved what you said about the separation anxiety. It sounds like it would work for night terrors or any childhood fears or trauma. As carefully as we want to protect our children, we can’t. There’s still trauma in life.
Katie Fasciano 13:41
And I have worked with people that have had nightmares. And with a few sessions of seimei, they no longer had any of their night terrors or nightmares. So it helps in that arena too. And what you were mentioning just before, too, reminds me of the fact that not only that child with the separation anxiety or what might be bothering them in that given day is affected but the parent is affected too. And what I do sometimes is offer to my clients, if they’re coming in with their child, I encourage them to do a session for themselves, too. And that can be two entirely separate sessions. Or that session could be just the one hour of my normal session and I break it into two pieces for the, usually the mother and daughter, but sometimes it’s the dad and daughter or dad and son that come in as well.
Emmalou Penrod 14:39
I like that because my experience has been, you need to start with yourself. Put your own oxygen mask on first.
Katie Fasciano 14:49
Right.
Emmalou Penrod 14:49
And a lot of times, parents don’t do that. They kind of forget themselves. And as you address your issues, you become a better parent. You’re more patient more calm.
Katie Fasciano 15:02
Yes, absolutely.
Emmalou Penrod 15:03
You have more energy.
Katie Fasciano 15:05
The seimei has helped me be more patient, and more calm when things can get a little tricky. I mean, I’m sure all parents can agree out there that perhaps during homework time or test studying time, it can get a little bit stressed. But it’s wonderful to have this kind of in your back pocket as a tool, because this is not unique to me, anyone can learn seimei. And as you introduced me, I also represent Seimei Foundation. And that is our teaching center. And we do have teaching centers in the US, in New Jersey, in New Mexico and in the state of Washington. And we are doing some level of teaching through zoom right now. But mostly, when it’s non COVID times, it’s in person training that we do.
Emmalou Penrod 15:55
And how long is this training?
Katie Fasciano 15:58
The training is about 8 to 12 months. Those are the classes, but to get the certificate at the end, there is a requirement of working with 300 people that you you know, in just abbreviated demonstrations of seimei, and then another 100 people, where you would do those hour long sessions of Seimei for them. So, this is a very creditable program that we have, and you need to be ready to commit to it. But what an incredible commitment that you could make and just make the whole environment for your family better. There are no tools required, it’s just a perfect basic form that’s taught.
Emmalou Penrod 16:48
You know, dealing with the non physical part of the self, which we know is there.
Katie Fasciano 16:56
Yes.
Emmalou Penrod 16:57
Which needs to be addressed. And when you say holistic, you know, our western medicine is working with the physical parts, and there are alternatives for natural remedies, but addressing also the non physical parts.
Katie Fasciano 17:15
Right, right. Absolutely. And this seimei, when you receive seimei, it allows your non physical part of yourself to be set in motion, temporarily by the seimei practitioner working with you. And that’s important because most adults, when we wake up in the morning, we have a bit of stiffness going on in our body, and we need to start walking or exercising, to loosen ourselves up. Well, what are we doing? We’re putting motion in our physical body. And with that motion comes that additional flexibility, you’re feeling better, and you have motion. So it’s loosening you up. And with your mind, when we wake up in the morning, we might be a little groggy. But once we sit down and do our crossword puzzle, or we’re sitting down and helping our kids with the homework, our mind starts crunching, it’s starting to feel better, because it’s again in motion. But this non physical part of us, most of us don’t know how to set it in motion. So with the seimei practitioner helping you, they can temporarily set your seimei in motion. And with that motion, you’re also feeling better from a non physical sense. And that’s important because mind, body, and soul, mind, body and spirit. All three make the whole human and we don’t want to just do exercise, or just do studies, or just do seimei. We want to do all three together to have a whole healthy being.
Emmalou Penrod 18:48
I agree. That sounds like a really healthy approach. And it sounds like you could help people anywhere. So how do they contact you?
Katie Fasciano 19:01
Oh, absolutely. You can go to my website, it’s https://seimeihealing.com/ Seimei is spelled s-e-i-m-e-. My phone number my email are right on the website. That would be the best place to contact me. And if something like this sounds like a fit for you to learn yourself, we have a Foundation website. And that would be https://seimeifoundation.org/ And there you can find a lot more about learning and the details to become a practitioner yourself.
Emmalou Penrod 19:38
Awesome. Are there very many practitioners in the United States?
Katie Fasciano 19:42
In the United States? We have a few 100. In Japan, where this work has originated, we have 30,000 practitioners.
Emmalou Penrod 19:50
Wow. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Katie, thank you so much for sharing your story, your experience. And teaching us. Before I talked to you, I had never heard of Seimei. And I remember as I talked to you, I thought this is something we need to be aware of. We need to know, more options, more tools in our toolbox to support families. So thank you.
Katie Fasciano 20:20
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a delight.