Category: Practice Notes

People arrive at the Yuen Method from odd directions. Someone mentions it. A search for a problem that will not resolve turns it up. A practitioner they trust says the words and does not explain them. Then they read about it online and come away more confused than they started, because most of what is written about it is written either by people selling a seminar or by people who have never had a session.

I have been a Certified Master Practitioner for years, inside a practice that is now 47 years old. Here is the plain version.

Where it came from

The Yuen Method was developed by Dr. Kam Yuen. His background is unusual and it matters: he was a structural engineer before he was known for anything else, and a Shaolin martial artist alongside that. Both show up in the method.

An engineer looking at a failing structure does not treat every beam. He finds the member that is actually carrying the load and failing, because fixing anything else is wasted work. That is the logic underneath the Yuen Method, applied to a person instead of a building.

What it actually is

It is a system of rapid assessment and correction. The practitioner tests for weaknesses across physical, mental, emotional and energetic levels, narrows toward what is actually driving the pattern, and corrects it.

The word that does the most work there is narrows. This is not a protocol. Nobody is working through a checklist of twelve points in order. The practitioner is eliminating — that is not it, that is not it, that is closer — and the session moves at the speed of that elimination, which is faster than most people expect.

What a session involves

You describe what is going on, in whatever words you have. You do not need the right vocabulary. “My shoulder has been bad since March and nothing has touched it” is a completely adequate starting point.

From there I test against your description and work outward from the symptom toward whatever is holding it in place. There is usually no touch involved at all. Where hands-on techniques are used they are specific to particular cases, and you stay fully clothed. Because touch is not the mechanism, this work carries over to video sessions better than most.

Corrections happen during the session. You are not sent away with a program to complete before anything changes.

The thing that surprises people most

The driver is frequently nowhere near the symptom.

A shoulder that will not release can be held by something with no anatomical relationship to the shoulder. An injury that healed on schedule everywhere except one spot can be held by an event that happened months before the injury. This sounds like hand-waving until you watch the symptom move when the actual driver is addressed, at which point it stops sounding like anything and just becomes the thing that happened.

How you know whether it is working

This is the part I want to be direct about, because the alternative-health field is not always direct about it.

Within one to two sessions you should expect a definite change in your symptom pattern. Not resolution necessarily — a change. The pain moves, or changes character, or the sleep shifts, or something that had been fixed for months is no longer fixed.

If that does not happen, this is not the right tool for your situation, and I will say so. I take four to six clients at a time, which means I have no business filling a slot with work that is not going anywhere. A practitioner who cannot tell you when to stop is a practitioner you should be careful with.

What it is not

• It is not medical care. I do not diagnose, treat or cure disease, and I do not advise anyone to change what their physician has prescribed. This work sits alongside medical care. See the disclaimer.
• It is not massage or bodywork. There is usually no touch.
• It is not a belief system. You are not required to believe anything for the assessment to run. Most of my sceptical clients arrived sceptical and stayed sceptical about the explanation while continuing to book, which is a perfectly reasonable position.
• It is not the only thing I do. See below.

How it sits next to the other disciplines

I do not run single-modality sessions. I assess across five levels — physical, mental, emotional, psychic and spiritual — and use whatever the situation calls for. In practice:

• Yuen Method is the fastest and most direct, and comes forward when one specific thing is holding a pattern.
• Pranic Healing is more systematic, and comes forward where the picture is depletion or congestion — long illness, a hard year, recovery that has stalled.
• Qigong is the part you learn and keep.
• NLP works the mental and linguistic level, which is more often the holding level than people expect.

The modality names matter more to search engines than they do in the room.

What people bring it to

Most often: an injury that has not resolved on the expected timeline; pain with no clear structural explanation; a pattern that returns after it has been treated; preparation and recovery around surgery; and emotional or situational patterns that feel stuck.

This work supports the body’s own healing process. It is complementary to medical care, not a replacement for it. Rodney does not diagnose, treat or cure disease, and does not advise anyone to stop or change treatment prescribed by their physician. See the full disclaimer.

A scheduled surgery is a strange thing to live inside. The date is fixed. The outcome is not. Your surgical team is excellent at the procedure and structurally unequipped to deal with the four weeks you spend waiting for it.

That gap is where most of my pre-operative work happens. None of what follows replaces anything your physician has told you. Do everything they said. This is about the part nobody was assigned.

First: the fear is not irrational, and pretending otherwise makes it worse

Almost everyone waiting on a surgery date is carrying more than they are saying. Often they are not saying it because they have decided it is not reasonable, or because the people around them keep reassuring them and the reassurance has become exhausting to receive.

The fear is generally attached to something specific, and it is worth finding out what. In my experience it is usually one of four things:

• A prior experience. An earlier surgery that went badly, a bad anesthesia reaction, a recovery that took far longer than promised.
• A family history. Someone who went in for something routine and did not come out the same.
• Loss of control. Being unconscious while other people work on you is, for some people, the entire problem, and it has nothing to do with the surgeon’s competence.
• What the surgery means. Not the procedure — what having it says about where you now are.

These are four genuinely different problems and they need different work. Lumping them together as “nerves” is why generic advice about deep breathing does so little.

Week four out: get clear on what you actually want

This sounds soft and it is the most practical thing on this page.

“I want the surgery to go well” is not a workable outcome. It is not specific, it is not in your control, and your mind cannot organize around it. What does the other side look like? What are you doing at eight weeks that you cannot do now? What does recovered mean in terms of an actual afternoon in your actual life?

People who go into a procedure with a concrete picture of the other side recover differently from people going in with a vague hope that it will be over. This is the part of my practice where NLP does the most work — it is a set of tools for exactly this, getting a well-formed outcome out of a wish.

Weeks three and two: the energetic work

This is where sessions sit. What I am doing in them:

• Assessing across all five levels to see where the disturbance actually sits. It is very often not where the surgery is.
• Clearing what is attached to the specific fear, once we have identified which of the four above it is.
• Addressing the accumulated stress load, which by this point is usually weeks deep and affecting sleep.
• Working with what the body is already doing about the underlying condition, which is not nothing.

Two to four sessions across the four weeks is typical. They can be over video, which matters when travel is difficult.

The final week: sleep is the priority

If I can only influence one thing in the last seven days, it is sleep. It affects immune function, pain tolerance, and anesthesia recovery, and it is the first thing to go when a date is approaching.

Practical, and none of it is exotic:

• Keep the schedule fixed, including the weekend before. Drifting bedtimes in the last week are common and costly.
• Get the logistics done early — the bag, the ride, the time off, the house. Unfinished admin is what surfaces at 3am.
• Stop reading about the procedure. By week one you either know enough or you are now doing something else with that reading.
• Standing practice, if you have it, is worth more than usual right now. If you do not have it, the week before a surgery is not the time to start.

The day itself

Have the picture of the other side ready, and be able to bring it up in a few seconds. That is the thing you are taking in with you. Everything in the four weeks has been building toward having something specific in mind rather than a blank.

And afterward

The work does not end when the procedure does. The most common reason people contact me after a surgery is not that something went wrong — it is that everything went right and they still are not back. Energy has not returned, or pain has changed character rather than resolved, or they do not feel like themselves in a way that is hard to explain to a surgeon whose job is now complete.

That gap is real and common, and I have written more about it on the surgery support page.

One scheduling note

I work with four to six clients at a time and my contact week is Monday to Friday, 11am–5pm Mountain Time. Because a surgery date is fixed and my availability is not, write in as soon as the date is set rather than in the last fortnight.

This work supports the body’s own healing process. It is complementary to medical care, not a replacement for it. Rodney does not diagnose, treat or cure disease, and does not advise anyone to stop or change treatment prescribed by their physician. See the full disclaimer.

There is a specific kind of frustrated that I see more than any other. It goes like this: the injury is eight or fourteen or twenty months old. The imaging is clean. The physical therapist discharged you. Everyone involved has done their job properly and by the numbers you are fine.

And it is not right. And you are starting to be treated as though the problem is that you are complaining.

After 47 years, here is what I have found is usually going on.

1. The tissue healed. The pattern did not.

An injury is not only damage. It is also a set of compensations that arrive within days — you stop loading one side, you change how you stand, you brace before a movement you now expect to hurt. Those are intelligent adaptations while the tissue is vulnerable.

The tissue heals on its schedule. The compensations have no schedule. They do not know the injury is over, and nothing automatically tells them. Months later the original damage is gone and the pattern built around it is still running, producing pain that is completely real and has no current structural cause.

This is the most common single answer, and it is why the scan being clean is not the reassurance it is meant to be. The scan is looking for the thing that is no longer there.

2. The injury is not the first event

People date an injury from the moment it hurt. That is often not when it started.

The ankle went in March. The way you were loading that ankle had changed the previous autumn, after something else. The March event was the point at which an already-compromised structure finally gave — and the treatment has been aimed at March ever since.

In assessment this shows up quickly: the symptom is in one place and what is holding it tests somewhere else entirely, usually older. This is where Yuen Method work is at its most efficient, because it is designed to find the actually-failing member rather than treat the visible one.

3. The emotional layer never got addressed

This is the one people brace against, so let me be precise about what I mean. I am not saying the pain is in your head. The pain is in your body and it is real.

What I am saying is that injuries arrive attached to circumstances. The car accident had a before and an after. The fall happened during a period you would rather not think about. The shoulder went at work, in a job you had already been dreading. The surgery that followed was frightening.

The body was treated. The circumstance was not. And because all five levels interact, an unresolved emotional layer will quite happily hold a physical pattern in place for years. Treat only the physical level and you are working against something you are not looking at.

4. Recovery got confused with identity

This is the slowest one and the hardest to say out loud.

When something has been wrong for long enough, it stops being a thing that is happening to you and starts being part of how you describe yourself. You become someone with a bad back. Plans get made around it. Other people accommodate it. There is a version of you that this injury has been organizing for a year and a half.

None of that is a moral failing and none of it means you want to be injured. It means a pattern has become load-bearing. Taking it away without addressing the structure it now supports tends not to work, which is why some people improve markedly and then quietly return to where they were. This is mindset work, and it is often the last piece.

5. Occasionally it really is structural, and it was missed

I want to be careful here. Sometimes the reason an injury will not resolve is that there is something physically wrong that has not been found yet.

If something is getting worse rather than plateauing, if there is new numbness or weakness, if there are symptoms that were not there before — that is a conversation with a physician, not with me. I do not diagnose, and I will tell you to go back and push for further investigation rather than book you a session. Any practitioner who would rather see you weekly than send you for a second opinion is not looking after you.

What an assessment actually does

All five levels get tested, together and against each other. What comes out is which level is actually holding it — and in stubborn cases that is rarely the physical one, which is exactly why the purely physical treatment was technically correct and did not work.

You will know quickly whether this is the right approach. Within one to two sessions the symptom pattern should change definitely. If it does not, I will tell you that rather than sell you a course.

This work supports the body’s own healing process. It is complementary to medical care, not a replacement for it. Rodney does not diagnose, treat or cure disease, and does not advise anyone to stop or change treatment prescribed by their physician. See the full disclaimer.

I get asked this more than anything else, usually in a slightly apologetic tone, as though it is a rude question. It is not a rude question. It is the correct question, and the honest answer is: yes, and I still suggest at least one session in person where that is practical.

The reason for the caveat is not the one most people assume, so it is worth explaining properly.

Why the distance is not the obstacle

The instinct behind the question is that healing work must involve hands, and therefore removing the hands removes the work.

But in my practice direct touch is usually unnecessary even when we are in the same room. Where hands-on techniques are used — and they are, for particular cases — they are specific, deliberate, and done with the client fully clothed. They are a minority of what happens in a session.

Most of what I do is assessment and correction at an energetic level. Take the touch out of that and you have removed very little of the mechanism. This is especially true of Yuen Method work, which is built around testing and narrowing rather than contact, and of Pranic Healing, which works with the energy body rather than the physical one.

So what does in-person actually add?

Human things, mostly, and they matter more than the technical question does.

People describe themselves differently face to face. Over video, people summarize. They have prepared what they are going to say and they deliver it. In a room, things arrive sideways — a pause before an answer, a sentence that starts and gets abandoned, a thing mentioned on the way out that turns out to be the actual point. That material is diagnostic, and video flattens it.

The first session carries the most weight. The two-hour Discovery Session is where the assessment across all five levels happens and where the plan is built. It is the session where I most want everything available to me, which is why that is the one I suggest doing in person if you are going to do any.

Some people simply prefer it, and that preference is not a technicality. Someone who feels met is easier to work with than someone who feels processed.

Where remote is straightforwardly the right call

• Around a surgery. You often cannot travel before or after a procedure, and that is exactly when the work is time-sensitive.
• Distance. Most of my clients do not live in the Wood River Valley.
• Consistency. Work that needs to happen on a rhythm should not be hostage to travel.
• Continuation. The most common pattern in my practice is one in-person session in Sun Valley to open, then video from there.

What a video session actually requires

Very little, which surprises people who are expecting to prepare.

• A quiet space where you will not be interrupted for the length of the session.
• A device with a working camera, positioned so I can see you rather than your ceiling.
• Comfortable clothes. You stay fully dressed.
• Somewhere to sit or lie down.
• Nothing else. No candles, no preparation, no particular state of mind.

Sessions are scheduled inside my contact hours, Monday to Friday 11am–5pm Mountain Time. If you are in another time zone, say so when you write in and we will find something inside that window.

The honest limitation

The one thing video genuinely costs me is the sideways material — the things people tell you without meaning to. I can work without it. I work better with it.

That is the whole of the caveat, and it is why the recommendation is a preference rather than a requirement. If one in-person session is not practical for you, say so and we will work remotely from the start. A number of my longest client relationships have been entirely over video.

This work supports the body’s own healing process. It is complementary to medical care, not a replacement for it. Rodney does not diagnose, treat or cure disease, and does not advise anyone to stop or change treatment prescribed by their physician. See the full disclaimer.

The framework underneath everything I do is simple enough to state in a sentence and takes decades to use well: illness and injury exist on five levels at once — physical, mental, emotional, psychic and spiritual — and until you know which one is holding the pattern, you are guessing.

Here is what each one actually means, and how to tell them apart.

Physical

The body. Structure, tissue, systems, chemistry. This is the level our medical culture is superb at and the only one most people are ever assessed on.

It is also the level most likely to be correct and insufficient. A clean scan means there is no current structural cause. It does not mean there is no cause.

Mental

Thought patterns, beliefs, framing, the narration running underneath a day. Not intelligence — pattern.

The mental level shows up in health as the gap between knowing and doing. Someone knows exactly what would help, has been told plainly, agrees entirely, and cannot get themselves to do it. That gap is not weak character. It is a pattern, and patterns respond to being worked with. This is where NLP earns its place in a practice otherwise built on Eastern disciplines.

Emotional

What is held and unresolved. Note the word held — I am not talking about how you feel today. Transient feeling is weather. The emotional level is what has not moved.

It is the level most often skipped, because addressing it is uncomfortable and because our system has no obvious place to send it. And it will hold a physical pattern indefinitely without ever announcing itself as the cause. If you have read why some injuries do not heal, this is the third item on that list and it is there for a reason.

Intuitive / psychic

This is the one that costs me the sceptical reader, so let me describe it in the most ordinary terms I can.

It is the information you already have about yourself and are not consciously reading. You knew that job was going to end badly. Something in you knew that lump was worth checking a month before you made the call. You do not know how you knew.

You do not have to accept any particular explanation of that to notice it happens. What matters practically is that people are often carrying accurate information about their own condition that they cannot get access to, and that a lot of assessment work is simply getting it out of them. Muscle response testing is one way of asking a question and getting an answer that has not gone through what the person believes about themselves.

Spiritual

Meaning and orientation. What this illness is connected to, what it has interrupted, and whether the life it is happening inside makes sense to the person living it.

This is the level most likely to matter in serious or prolonged illness and the one least likely to be raised by anyone on the medical side. Not because they do not care — because the appointment is fifteen minutes and it is nobody’s assigned job.

The part that matters: they interact

If the five levels were independent, you could treat them in any order and the arithmetic would work out. They are not independent. They hold each other.

That is why a technically correct physical treatment can fail completely. If the emotional level is holding the pattern, then clearing the physical level removes the symptom’s current expression and the holding structure immediately rebuilds it. The treatment was not wrong. It was aimed at the wrong level, and it will keep being aimed at the wrong level for as long as nobody assesses the others.

It is also why the same complaint in two people needs two different approaches. The symptom is not the thing. The level that is holding it is the thing, and it is not the same level in both people.

How you find out which one is holding

You test all five, individually and against each other, and see which one the pattern depends on. That is what the two-hour Discovery Session is for — not treatment, assessment, ending in a plan built for what was actually found.

Often the finding is the useful part on its own. People have spent two years and considerable money aimed at one level, and simply learning that the pattern is being held somewhere else changes what they do next, whether or not they continue with me.

The goal is that you can do this yourself

I am not trying to build a dependency. A stated goal of my practice is that clients learn to read their own five levels, construct their own path, and apply the restorative techniques on their own — which is why standing practice gets taught, why group work exists, and why the Sole Guidance project is being built.

You are not a sick person trying to get well. You are a person ridding yourself of illness and returning to the Process of Good Health.

This work supports the body’s own healing process. It is complementary to medical care, not a replacement for it. Rodney does not diagnose, treat or cure disease, and does not advise anyone to stop or change treatment prescribed by their physician. See the full disclaimer.

“Energy healing” is a category, not a practice, and the systems inside it differ from each other more than the label suggests. People book one expecting another and are then confused by what happens.

I am trained in two of the three below and not in Reiki, so treat the Reiki section as an informed outsider’s description rather than a practitioner’s. I have sent people to Reiki practitioners and I have had clients who came from one.

Reiki

Origin: Japan, early twentieth century, Mikao Usui. Transmitted through attunements from teacher to student.

Mechanism as described: the practitioner acts as a conduit for universal life energy, which goes where it is needed. Hands are placed on or just above the body in a sequence of positions.

Session: you lie down, fully clothed, usually for around an hour. It is typically quiet and restful, and many people fall asleep.

What it is good at: deep relaxation, stress load, and the state of being wound tight for months. Widely available and comparatively inexpensive, and offered in a lot of hospitals as a comfort measure.

What to know: it is generally non-directive by design. The practitioner is not trying to locate a specific driver — the energy is understood to sort that out. If what you want is an answer to why has this not resolved, that is a different question from the one Reiki is built to answer.

Pranic Healing

Origin: developed by Master Choa Kok Sui, drawing on older energy-body traditions. I studied it with him directly over five years.

Mechanism: the physical body is surrounded and interpenetrated by an energy body. The practitioner scans it, clears what is congested, and directs energy to what is depleted. No touch.

Session: more structured than Reiki. There is a defined sequence — scan, clear, energize, stabilize — and specific protocols for specific conditions.

What it is good at: pictures of depletion and congestion. Long illness, extended stress, the flattened feeling after a hard year, recovery that has stalled. Because it is systematic it is also repeatable, which matters over a course of work.

What to know: it is a discipline with a curriculum, not an intuitive art. That is a strength if you want consistency and a limitation if your situation is idiosyncratic.

The Yuen Method

Origin: Dr. Kam Yuen — a structural engineer and Shaolin martial artist. I hold Certified Master Practitioner status, studied with him directly.

Mechanism: rapid assessment. Test across physical, mental, emotional and energetic levels, narrow toward what is actually driving the pattern, correct that. Engineering logic applied to a person: find the member that is failing rather than reinforce every beam.

Session: conversational and fast. You describe the problem, I test against it, we narrow. Usually no touch. Corrections are made during the session.

What it is good at: specific, stuck, stubborn things. The injury that did not resolve. Pain with no structural explanation. The pattern that returns after treatment. Anywhere the useful question is what is actually holding this.

What to know: it is the least restful of the three. If you are hoping for an hour of quiet on a table, this is not that. You should expect a definite change in your symptom pattern within one to two sessions — and if it does not come, a decent practitioner tells you so.

Side by side

• Directive or not: Reiki is largely non-directive. Pranic Healing is protocol-directed. The Yuen Method is target-directed.
• Touch: Reiki, hands on or near the body. The other two, generally none.
• Pace: Reiki slow and restful. Pranic Healing methodical. Yuen fast.
• Remote: the two that do not rely on touch carry over to video with very little lost.
• Feedback loop: the Yuen Method gives you the clearest early read on whether it is working, which is a real advantage when you are deciding whether to keep paying for something.

Which one should you book?

Roughly: if you are wound tight and need to come down, Reiki is inexpensive, widely available and genuinely useful for that. If you are depleted after a long illness or a hard stretch, Pranic Healing. If something specific is stuck and you want to know what is holding it, Yuen Method.

In my own practice the distinction is less clean than this page makes it sound, because I do not run single-modality sessions. I assess across five levels and use what the situation calls for — often more than one thing in the same session. The modality names are how you find a practitioner. They are not really how the work happens.

This work supports the body’s own healing process. It is complementary to medical care, not a replacement for it. Rodney does not diagnose, treat or cure disease, and does not advise anyone to stop or change treatment prescribed by their physician. See the full disclaimer.