Carol Cobine – Acutonics® Level IV Student Practitioner — Student Profile
Carol Cobine began her Acutonics training at the Mothership in June of 2015 with Level I and II. She returned in October of 2015 to complete the Level III and IV Intensive. Most recently, we had an opportunity to catch up with Carol when she returned to New Mexico, (accompanied by her husband Ryan) to take Acutonics V – Ethics in Clinical Practice and Acutonics VI – Clinical Documentaries. She also participated in the community clinic day that we held here. She completed Points and Meridians in 2015 with Paul and Jude Ponton.
Carol was born on a military base in Fairbanks, Alaska to a Korean Mother and Polish father. Her father died when she was thirteen days old. Her mother disappeared, leaving Carol and her older brother with friends, who would adopt Carol and her older brother when Carol was 5. Only as an adult, 40 years after her adoption, did Carol learn that she has a younger half-brother and a very large Korean family within 50 miles of her current hometown. Her adoptive parents were Korean and Irish and they settled in her adoptive father’s home town of Bloomington, Indiana when she was 4. “Growing up biracial in rural America was an interesting experience in the 1970s. I never fit in. My peers couldn’t map me onto any social or religious norms of the time. My mother was Buddhist, my father was Baptist. I took kimchee sandwiches to school and wore a mix of Korean and Kmart clothing.”
As a young child Carol had a life altering experience, which she now understands to have been a shamanic initiation. “I began to have psychic experiences when I was around 7, these made my sense of isolation stronger, as there was no one to share these experiences with. I was often sick, and later, I had another initiation”. Carol laughs as she shares this: “I was pretty terrified, and tried to convert to Christianity in that moment to somehow make it stop. I am laughing because needless to say, accepting Jesus Christ into a heart that has just been ripped out and replaced with the sun simply didn’t work. The next morning, I tried harder to ignore the messages. My illnesses continued with greater intensity.”
These initiation experiences led Carol to delve deeply into understanding the nature of illness as well as the intuitive shamanic connections with spirits. She wanted to learn about people, motivations, beliefs, astral travel, and whether other people had similar experiences to hers. She was always driven to learn science and to partner this knowledge with her intuition. In college, she studied psychology, when she realized that psychology didn’t have the answers she took courses in cultural anthropology, and then in Religious Studies. “I studied the early Chinese, Tibetan, Iranian, and Indian religious history, which represented the broad movement of religions across Central Eurasia. I also studied the apocalyptic, and Central Eurasian Shamanism and sprinkled in mythology and sociology.”
While in college, Carol decided to study bodywork. She was drawn to the healing arts because of a natural ability to ground and to calm people and animals. As a young adult, she learned stillness even if she still struggled to accepted her gifts. “Massage school called to me. I knew I had a gift with touch and wanted to use it to help facilitate healing. I graduated from Harbin Hot Springs School of Shiatsu and Massage in 1995. It took me 14 years to get through college, in part because I also decided to take medical classes to inform my new love of bodywork.”
Through years of study and exploration, Carol learned that she had inherited a shamanic lineage from her Korean Mothers. “According to the records of our descent from the Altaic region in Mongolia (every Korean family maintains a family tree) the ability to communicate with the spirits of heaven, earth, and man are passed down to each generation. Mudangs were born, not taught or trained. Those who were trained could only conduct ritual, but not communicate with spirits and then guide and instruct their clients on how to placate the spirits.”
Carol used to hide the deeply intuitive, shamanic connection that she felt, and would often cloak her gifts with science. She came to accept early on that healing didn’t come from outside, but from within each individual: “I simply facilitate the process by helping to induce deep relaxation, or a respite from pain, any change in state that allows clients to begin the process of changing their relationship to their current state. Reframing, changing their perspective to the potential for healing became a foundation for my work. Acutonics naturally gets down, deeply into the core of our being, and opens doors people have never seen or acknowledged. It fosters a deep sense of relaxation and wholeness, a state in which true healing begins”.
In addition to her bodywork practice Carol has also worked as a technical writer. It was in Redmond, Washington in 2010, while doing project work for Microsoft, that she first experienced Acutonics. She considered taking classes at that time but it wasn’t until she was hospitalized in 2015 for a mysterious illness that she had a strong visceral memory of the vibrations from her earlier treatment. “I began to feel vibration in my chest, as if someone were applying giant OHM forks to my upper chest. I realized that I had felt this vibration years ago in Redmond. I couldn’t remember the name of the practitioner, but I remembered the name of the school. I knew that somehow, I needed to get to a class. I discovered that a Level I & II Intensive would take place in New Mexico in a few weeks I needed to be there. I needed to learn more about this modality whose vibration was hammering in my chest. I managed to travel 14 hours to make it. Once I made it, I knew I was in the right place.”
Like many Acutonics students Carol had a strong desire to learn more about the fundamentals and underlying patterns within Chinese Medicine. Impressed with the book Five Spirits: Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing by Lorie Dechar, Carol contacted Lorie and learned that she offered a mentorship program with her husband Benjamin Fox that is based on understanding the spirits of the Five Elements as guides to healing and transformation. “Lorie and Benjamin’s work dovetails beautifully with Acutonics. Their focus is on reorienting to spirit through the experience of the Five Spirits and Taoism. They help you tap into an understanding of the Tao, and incorporate dreams, archetypes, symbols, and the wisdom of astrology. The focus is on self-cultivation so you can bring these tools into the treatment room to support your patients. This mentoring has taught me to integrate the different parts of myself into my everyday life,” Carol stated.
Carol Concludes: “In the past, I wanted to learn more about the methods of healing work so that I had a language for communicating with my clients. While I long ago learned to be at peace with my rich inner skill set, the process of fully embracing, fully weaving these spirits into my everyday life didn’t begin to happen until I surrendered to their guidance through Acutonics. In the future, I plan to continue taking classes as they call to me: to grow my resonant group and to learn from the rich experience of the highly-skilled teachers in the Acutonics community. I plan to finish the curriculum next year and also begin my thesis. I would like to continue to offer self-care programs and eventually train to teach the Acutonics curriculum.”
Carol’s family has been very supportive of her journey. She’s been married to her husband, Ryan, for nearly 25 years. They have three children, four cats, and a beagle. Her cats love the singing bowls, and when she is doing self-care at home they often show up to ask for their own treatments. Carol relates: “Each cat gets a treatment at least once a week in addition to singing bowl attunements.” Her most famous client is also cat, Lil Bub, aka Lillian Bubbles, who receives regular treatment for osteopetrosis. Bub’s dude, Mike Bridvasky, relates that Lil Bub is transformed after each treatment. You can read more about Lil Bub here. Bub’s female dude, Stacy, is so moved by Acutonics that she will be heading to Baja in December to study Acutonics Levels I and II with Lynn Wedekind.”
“I am pushed and challenged to something more and Acutonics plays a key part in that undefinable journey. Slowly, I am learning to dance along the way”.