Adam Lehman, En.K. is a passionate and experienced practitioner and instructor/trainer in the field of bioenergetic healing, with a focus on integrative wellness. He is the founder and director of The Institute of BioEnergetic Arts & Sciences, an organization that provides training, certification and support to individuals interested in becoming proficient in Muscle Response Feedback (also known as Energy Kinesiology/Muscle Testing) – a technique that allows practitioners to access information from the body’s energy system to identify imbalances and facilitate healing. With a goal to provide clients, family and friends with tools and techniques to improve their quality of life, Adam invites others to join him on a journey towards holistic healing and personal transformation. Adam shares his insights with MysticMag.
Can you explain how Muscle Response Feedback (MRF) works, and how it differs from other wellness techniques and practices?
I use a tool called MRF, which stands for Muscle Response Feedback, also known as muscle testing in the field of Energy Kinesiology or Specialized Kinesiology (depending on where in the world you are). It’s important to understand that MRF is not a healing modality, but rather a communication tool that allows the practitioner to have a conversation with the body/mind of the person they’re working with.
MRF is a gentle approach that simply involves a practitioner putting an arm or a leg into a particular position to isolate a specific muscle, and then apply gentle, gradual pressure to see if the muscle can “hold” its position. In its initial form, every muscle is related to an organ or gland and its associated Chinese meridian – so by checking a number of muscles, it’s possible to get an overall “energy assessment” of the body.
Sometimes a single “indicator” muscle is used for a broad range of applications. An example might be to touch specific acupoints and see how the muscle responds. If it changes from being able to “hold” to not being able to do so, that signifies that there’s stress related to that point and opens the path to finding out more about the stress and what to do about it. When used in this way, I consider MRF to be “the voice of innate intelligence.” But a voice still requires a language – and the language of the body is electromagnetic. For this, the acupoints (from ancient Chinese medicine) provide a great language, as we know what they mean. By touching certain points and assessing the muscle response (the feedback), you now have a means of communication.
In this way, MRF provides several advantages for the practitioner…
First, it gives the body the means to communicate where blockages to healing exist in the body. These blockages can be physical, biochemical/nutritional, emotional, and/or energetic in nature – making this a truly holistic approach. People usually aren’t consciously connected to what or where these blockages are, and that’s where MRF shines.
Secondly, by working with these blockages, you have the opportunity to work with the cause of the underlying issues, not just symptoms.
Thirdly, MRF then provides the body the means to say exactly what it wants to unblock the blockages – which can come from the entire world of the natural healing arts (limited only by certain legal aspects, such as not using needles if you’re not a licensed acupuncturist). The body can indicate exactly what it wants, and the order it wants them in. Additionally, a trained practitioner knows which specific aspects of each modality to use, making it a very efficient process. Ultimately, this makes MRF the great integrator, opening up the person experiencing it to a broad range of healing modalities limited only by the practitioner’s “kit bag” and experience.
The end result of all this is that, with blockages removed, the body now can access its own innate healing abilities. In other words, the person receiving an MRF “balance” is the healer – the practitioner is simply a facilitator of the person’s healing process.
You teach aspiring and established healing arts professionals the art of MRF – can you speak more to the type of practitioners who might be interested in incorporating MRF into their work, and how it can benefit their clients?
If you are interested in becoming a health and wellness practitioner, you can learn about Muscle Response Feedback (MRF) even if you have no prior knowledge of the healing arts. MRF is accessible to anyone who wants to help people improve their health and well-being, and ultimately make a positive impact on the world. An aspiring MRF practitioner learns how to do muscle response feedback, as well as numerous techniques and healing modalities to apply as a means of helping people accessing their innate healing abilities and improving their quality of life.
For existing health and wellness practitioners, MRF is a valuable tool to integrate into their practice. For example, if you are a massage therapist, you can learn how to use MRF to gather information about your client’s muscles and expand your scope of practice by learning other techniques that are easily applied to help people with what you find. Similarly, acupuncturists can use MRF to determine which points would be best to needle. Essentially, MRF can be integrated into almost any healing arts practice, as well as being a standalone method (as described above) to help people unwind past patterns and compensations, and access deeper healing responses.
Nutritionists, herbologists, homeopaths, and anyone involved in the biochemical aspect of the body significantly benefit from using Muscle Response Feedback because it takes the guesswork out. Very often, these kinds of practitioners narrow things down to two or three possibilities that might be helpful for a person, and then use their own knowledge/experience/intuition to decide what might be best. When you can simply ask the body (using MRF), the body will tell you which is going to be the best for them.
How do you approach tailoring MRF techniques to each individual client, and what steps do you take to ensure that you’re addressing their unique wellness challenges?
As a practitioner of Muscle Response Feedback, I believe that each person is their own healer. MRF is perfectly suited for this as the information comes directly from the person with the issues. This is very empowering for them as they come to understand that they are their own best resource for healing. Nevertheless, the practitioner still has the ability to use their knowledge, experience, and intuition to assist in the process – which is what makes it a bioenergetic process.
By definition, each person is unique.Therefore, the information the practitioner gets is uniquely tailored to them. While 10 people with asthma going to doctors will all walk out with the same thing – an inhaler, 10 people with asthma will have completely different experiences with MRF, and walk away with tools to help. (This doesn’t mean they won’t necessarily need an inhaler for emergencies, but it might help them cut their need for one).
I view the muscle as a voice, a way for the body to communicate its innate intelligence. To effectively communicate with the body, I use a specific language of asking questions and understanding the electromagnetic language of the body.
This language includes knowing the meanings of acupuncture and acupressure points, which act as circuit breakers in the body. By touching these points, I can receive a muscle response that alerts me to areas of stress in the body. I then use a series of hand positions based on the concept of mudras (hand positions such as what you often see in statues of the Buddha), which is also an electromagnetic connection, to ask the body questions and receive answers through the muscle response. This hierarchical process allows me to understand what the body needs and when it needs it to start unwinding the stress.
In your experience, what are some of the most common challenges that individuals face when it comes to achieving their wellness goals, and how can MRF help them overcome these challenges?
Well, from my experience, the uses of MRF are quite broad and can apply to various scenarios. Essentially, there is nothing you can’t get answers about from the body. Of course, MRF isn’t a cure-all for everything, and I can’t legally claim that it is. But you can still get information that can help in a lot of situations.
One of the more common ways people are familiar with for the use of Muscle Response Feedback is for nutrition, asking for the body’s response to a particular food, herb or
supplement. That’s probably the thing most people associate with MRF because they’ve probably had someone say, “Stick out your arm and let’s check this (food/herb/supplement) out.”
But MRF’s applications go well beyond that. Some of the most common challenges people face regarding their quality of life are pain and inflammation. But instead of simply taking pain relief meds, which only address the symptoms (and often put stress on other areas), an MRF practitioner looks to find the underlying causes and help relieve them, allowing for deeper, longer lasting results.
Other common uses range from working with learning disabilities and challenges, neurological issues (such as stroke recovery and head injuries), and disease processes. Even in very complex health challenges, MRF can be used to help address the underlying stories and issues behind conditions like cancer, and even assist with alleviating some of the side effects of aggressive therapies like chemotherapy. Overall, there are countless ways to put MRF to use that can be beneficial for people looking to improve their health and well-being. I wish it was better understood by the Western medical community so they could integrate it with what they do. I believe it could help avoid a lot of issues people experience with medications and such.
Can you share any success stories or examples of individuals who have experienced significant improvements in their quality of life as a result of using MRF techniques, and what role you played in facilitating those improvements?
After 30 plus years of practice, there are a lot of stories! Whether big or small, it’s not always the end result, but rather the process of helping people realize and enjoy a better quality of life. A couple of favorites…
I had a client who was diagnosed with a fatal disease and was given three months to live. He was advised to “get things in order” and prepare for his passing. When he came to see me, he had been through several rounds of debilitating chemo – even though that was not an official treatment for his disease – and was barely functional. He was a very large man who had been very active and used to walking five or more miles a day and traveling a lot for work. After a couple of weeks, he was getting his strength back and starting to walk again. After a month of working with him, he was able to walk a couple of miles a day and even took a couple of business trips. He had hope and got his quality of life back. Although he still passed away in the end, he lived an extra four months, enjoying his life until the very end. So even though the ending was not a “healing” miracle story, it was one of the most meaningful to me. At the funeral, his wife sought me out and gave me a very touching thank you.
I have also worked with bicycle racers who have had crashes and physical injuries. Obviously recovering from the physical injury is important, but even more so is the emotional aspect of getting back on the bike and overcoming the fear of crashing again – as this affects how they ride while in a pack of other racers. One of my best success stories is of a woman champion racer who had lost her aggressiveness and was not winning races after a bad crash. With just one session where I worked on the emotional aspect using prompts from her body and my own
counseling, she got back on the bike and started winning races again. She was thrilled about it – and I never saw her again.
What can you tell us about Integrative Wellness Practitioner Training™/Holographic Explorer™ program?
From 35 years of trainings representing thousands of hours, I also became a certified instructor of several methods of Energy Kinesiology/MRF. After teaching many of those for a long time, I then began to develop my own programs. For example, I have a program of live workshops called the Holographic Experience that I teach around the world. It starts with two classes called Holographic Touch for Healthtm Levels One and Two. While based on Touch for Health (TFH) (which is where most lay people who get into this field begin), it expands on that by incorporating a holographic approach – which was introduced by Richard Utt, one of the great innovators of this field, with his method called Applied Physiology, and for which I was a lead international instructor of for 20 years.
The holographic model is a way of approaching the body where you’re always looking at relationships. We live in a three-dimensional world, and we experience that 3 dimensional element because we have 2 eyes and 2 ears. It’s the combining of the information from those dual sources that provides us with our 3 dimensional experience.
So rather than focusing on a single muscle and its related meridian and organ, with the holographic method, you’re always looking at a pair of those things and how they relate to each other. That relationship provides a huge amount of more information, and basically, allows you to work more efficiently and get deeper faster in terms of all of that.
The holographic experience is currently three workshops, and there will be more. I have Level 1 instructors in many countries around the world, and the books have been translated into more than 15 languages. It’s really fun for me to be able to travel around the world and teach that, but unfortunately, the pandemic took care of that for a while – it’s now starting to pick up again.
The Integrative Wellness Facilitator training actually takes place online. Interestingly, I created and launched that course just before the pandemic and then released it again during the pandemic. Over the course of seven modules, you learn how to do MRF at a mastery level, and build a kit bag of tools and techniques in all four areas (physical, nutritional, emotional and energetic). I designed it to take a complete novice from knowing absolutely nothing about muscle response feedback work or anything involving the healing arts to being able to work with people and get great results. The course is currently closed, but I’m revamping it, and in the fall, I hope to have an updated version of it along with other content that I’m creating now to expand on it into a comprehensive professional training. For people wanting to develop into healing arts practitioners, this is a unique professional program
If you’d like to join my mailing list and learn more about my offerings, as well as receive other engaging content, you can do so at my website: www.kinesiohealth.com. I’ve also just joined Instagram, so while there’s not much there yet, there will be soon! www.instagram.com/ kinesioguy.
