Learn True Health with Ashley James

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Flicka's website www.flickarahn.com Websites which display Flicka's products and services: www.theicaros.com (Chakra Soundscapes CD by Icaros) www.elevateyourstatenow.com (site for the book, App and CD) www.innergytuner.com (App which uses meditation music from Flicka's CD and videos webbed into visual enhancement as a direct way to create energetic states of peace) www.powerofsoundandmusic.com (website for the newly released book, "Transformational Power of Sound and Music." www.naturalreflexes.com (website for my Sound Therapy practice (found under services) at the Integrative Healing Institute Youtube live performance of Icaros: https://youtu.be/DRDpU54kUSc   The Power of Sound and Music https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-power-of-sound-and-music Highlights: How we can heal ourselves through music There is a way through love to heal ourselves that has been traumatized through toxic thoughts, experiences. Music expressed through love is the variable that helps things become more ordered. If we want to be in a state of loving empathy and be able to connect with others, we need to make sure the music we choose matches that. We want to choose music that is meant to heal us and make sure that we avoid music that isn’t going to bring us healing. We want to be conscious of that because music can be a weapon or can be a tool for healing.   In this episode, discover how the power of music can affect us emotionally and spiritually. Even knowing that music can have the power to heal us by just having the knowledge on how to correctly choose the music or sounds we would listen to. Flicka Rahn shares her expertise on all things music and sound in today’s podcast. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the learn true health podcast. Today’s episode is uplifting and beautiful and it touches on this blend of energy and spiritual, emotional and physical healing. Bringing it all together something that weaves throughout is music. Music can affect us spiritually. Can affect our energy, our mood our psyche and it can even affect us on a physical level. I know you’re going to really enjoy today’s episode with Flicka Rahn, who is an expert in using music to heal us emotionally, physically and energetically. I am so excited for the Learn True Health home kitchen. I’ve been working on it. Filming with Naomi since October. We launched just two weeks ago and already all the members who’ve joined are really enjoying it. If you haven’t joined yet, I highly recommend checking it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Every week I upload new recipes, new videos, new lessons. There’s over five hours worth of content already in the membership and every week we’re adding more and more. If you want to learn how to use food in a way that heals your body, you’re going to love our membership. It’s affordable. Everyone can afford it and I want you to use the coupon code LTH to get the member discount so it’s affordable and we teach you how to cook delicious food, save you time in the kitchen heal your body with food and food that your family will enjoy. There’s wonderful tips in there for shifting your life and shifting your habits in a way that improve your health. So no matter where you are on the health spectrum and no matter what diet you follow, you will get fantastic tips and fantastic recipes that you can implement to get more healing foods into your life. Please come check it out. I would love for you to see it. We’re having so much fun sharing all these wonderful recipes and videos with you. learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and use the coupon code LTH. Come join us, we’re having a ton of fun. All the members who’ve joined so far are really loving it and I know that you will too. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about so we can help as many people as possible to learn true health.   [02:57] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host Ashley James. This is episode 409. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show Flicka Rahn. Who’s a specialist in healing with music. This is a topic that’s really near and dear to my heart. My dad, he loved music. He was so passionate about it. He was in the music industry. In a unique way he designed a type of speaker that these speakers that are in like home entertainment systems. He designed a type of speaker that you only needed two of them but that they you could hear from different directions and this is back in the 80’s and 90’s. So now I know like everyone just has a tiny little Amazon device in their corner that plays music but back then he designed these speakers that he called it spatial sound that you could be anywhere in the room and you could hear a sound from somewhere else in the room because it would throw the sound around. He always played music and he always shared his passion about music with me and growing up I complained that I was only teenager that would yell at her dad to turn down the music. He would wake me up playing Fool in the Rain Led Zepplin on a Saturday morning. So I just smile every time I hear Led Zeppelin because he would, I mean he just loved he loved all music but he would play he would play everything for me and so growing up him and I would share, we would share our CD collections. We’d go to the CD store together and we just we just shared it so much that, so much of music for me it brings back these really positive memories of love and a connection that I had with my dad. For me, I found that music is healing when you can link it to something like love and you can resonate a sense of like love and connection. That helped me to heal after losing him. I’ve always had a deep connection with music and I know that it’s part of us. I think I feel like it’s part of our DNA. When you reached out Flicka, to be on the show to share your expertise around using music as a form of healing, I thought this would be a wonderful experience for all the listeners. Because all the listeners are here to learn how to achieve true health and there’s a little-known thing that is very affordable that we can all do and that’s using music as a therapy. As a way to heal. Welcome to the show.   [05:37] Flicka Rahn: Well, I’m so happy to be here Ashley and thank you for this really wonderful opportunity to share what I know and what I know works. My entire life has been revolved around music and the sharing of music and teaching of music and playing music and composing music. I taught for 25 years at Texas A&M University as a voice teacher. I also had a pretty extensive career as an opera singer. I have music published by for soprano and piano. I really have studied this. I mean it’s a never-ending study of music and the depths of how it can reach deeply into us emotionally, physically and spiritually. Yes, indeed, what you did share with your father through music was a sense of love and there is no greater force for healing than love. That is really what after I retired from the University, I became impassioned with knowing about what has been used by indigenous healers. Throughout history as healing music and specifically sound. I did a great deal of research and study about those different examples. And because I have so much experience singing and in all forms of worship, temples and churches and fellowships, I just found a lot of commonalities. That I then went on to explore at a deeper level and went and experienced even into South America. Into the Amazon to really understand the healing nature of the music that they used. The shamans in South America in the Amazon. All of this has come around to broaden my – I really laugh people say, “You’re not retired.” “No, I’m I really, I’ve just found another job.” That is creating and composing this music that specifically uses the elements of sacred music that I’ve discovered and using those elements to then create my own specific type of sound. Which I think you will be playing for the listeners at some point.   [08:38] Ashley James: Yes, I’ll definitely play your music that you’ve given us at some point in today’s interview. Did something happen in your life where you were sick or didn’t feel well and you used music, the vibration? Maybe you could explain a bit about this also that music is energy and our bodies are energy. Where we’re made up of energy and so using music as a vibration that moves through your whole body can help to correct the energy in our body. I know this is really out there but if you think about it, we’re actually we’re not solid. Nothing is solid. Everything is atoms vibrating and we’re all a vibration and energy and so is music. There’s been people who’ve shared that certain frequencies, certain Hertz have healing properties. Was there ever a point in your life where you fell ill and used music or had an experience of healing through music?   [09:37] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. But I do want to return to specific frequencies and how some are more powerfully accepted by your body than others. Let’s talk about the time, actually I was in I was in Peru and I used to suffer really pretty profoundly with migraine headaches and because I was about to experience sacred ceremony with the Shipibo Indians, I could not take any medicines for a month. I was just about at my wit’s end because I used it to help with my migraine headaches. Honestly one night, I went down there with my brother and he was in another place in the hotel and I said, “Flicka, you know, you’ve physician heal yourself, okay.” This is I mean this is where the rubber hits the road so I said, “Alright, so what I’m going to do, I will tone every note to correspond with the resonance frequencies of each of the chakras.” I did. I started at the root chakra with the pitch. Which is designated as the note C and for about 10 minutes. Then I moved up to the next chakra and I just really moved all the way up the body to the crown. By the time I had finished toning and it was about an hour that I had vocalized all of those pictures, the headache was totally gone and it never came back. That’s a powerful way because I was self-creating frequency and vibration. We know that quantum physics now teaches us this new view of reality which is which has moved beyond Newtonian physics in that, everything vibrates everything has frequency and yes, there is nothing really solid in that in the quantum world. Where I then begin to work and my knowledge and my studies is, “How do I affect this quantum world that is really at the base of what our bodies are to help people with illnesses that are –“ well, there’s lots of causes for that for the illness to appear into your physical body but they all really start at the etheric body. Which is the energetic body that is right beyond your physical bodies a lot about two inches away from your physical body. That is where I, as a sound therapist work is in the etheric body and trying to bring all of that energy into harmony and in balancing the chakras which respond to sound and vibration and to the healing touch which is really the vibration of love. Reiki has a part in that as well but by balancing and re-aligning and harmonizing the entire body, the electromagnetic field around your body then healing can take place. I have I have witnessed so much of this with my clients. Sometimes after I work with a client it in and really worked very closely with the energetic bodies, it takes a couple of weeks because for the etheric body to then harmonize the physical body. It’s not very often although in my case it was because I think I was highly stressed and stress as we know is not something that can help healing. Does that answer your question, Ashley? I’m sorry, I went on and on.   [14:04] Ashley James: It’s okay. You’ve given me ten more questions. Just that one example where you used the frequency for each chakra and within an hour your headache or migraine was gone. It’s interesting though you were reaching for the Advil or you’re reaching for the ibuprofen, whatever drug you’re reaching for every month when you had these headaches but then when you were up against a challenge, the challenge to go drug-free for a month. Then you were left with needing to like dig into your own tool belt. I think that that’s actually a really great challenge for all of us. All of us, we all have resources and sometimes we forget. Sometimes we’ll reach for the coffee, over-the-counter medication, right? The sugar, the coffee, the stimulants, the uppers and downers. Whatever over-the-counter stuff to get us through the day to mask a symptom. I love that you challenged yourself. You took on the challenge to not medicate for a month because you’re walking into a situation where the healer asked you for one month to be medication free. That is a great challenge because sometimes we know we have these resources but sometimes we reach for what’s easy just to get us through the day and if we challenged ourselves to not self-medicate, to not go for the alcohol at the end of the day or the sugar when we have the sugar craving or the coffee when we’re tired but instead dig deeper into our own tool belt of resources. Realize that we probably have or the body is talking to us. The body probably is saying, “I’m dehydrated. I need to rest. I need some more joy in my life. I need to eat fruit.” Or whatever the body is saying. The body is – and your case, your body was saying, “I need to be in alignment. My energy needs to be in alignment.” So you dug deep into your into your tool belt and you used the very tools that you have at your disposal and your headache went away. We’ve been trained that it’s really easy to reach for the over-the-counter medication or reach for those things that mask our symptoms but when we mask our symptoms, we’re actually not achieving health. Where we’re stunting our own growth and our own personal growth and development so I love that you use that as an example. When you did that though for that hour, I think you said you were at a hotel, were you singing to yourself for an hour?   [16:41] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. I was and it doesn’t need it didn’t need to be loud because even subtle, it was toning. It’s what was it was, Ashley. Toning is not really, it’s chanting without the words. It’s just singing a pitcher tone without words. It’s more like singing an alm but I would do it on the resonant pitch of each of the chakras. Starting off with the note C.   [17:14] Ashley James: Can you teach us?   [17:16] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. I think it’s really – thank you for letting me have the opportunity to do this. It’s important that that your body be, check it for stress so that if you are sitting up and in this case, I was sitting up on the bed because the breath then can be deeper into your belly. Like a soft belly breath. I would breathe easily into my belly and then just, okay, here I go. [Singing Sound] I just did that using all of the resonant pitches of each of the chakras. As I closed, did you hear as I closed into the m to the mmm sound, you can feel the vibrations in your head. It was almost like an internal massage and very calming, very comforting and very ultimately healing. That’s all toning is. It’s no big mystery. When I’m teaching people about toning for in my case, I picked a specific pitch and then I moved up the scale but I teach people that whatever tone your body wants to make is the absolute perfect tone for whatever you need your body knows. It will produce the pitch that best heals it. I always yield to the body wisdom in that case and it didn’t have to – so when I’m working with people, it doesn’t have to match my pitch. It is because we each choose the pitch that the body wants to hear or to feel. Of course, it’s frequency and frequency carries information and you can feel your heart vibrate through all of these toning exercise. It’s just wonderful. I mean you can even do this in the car when you’re driving and you’re in really bad traffic. Honestly, Ashley, I have to tell you this but when I go to the dentist and that is not my favorite place but I tell the dentist, I said, “I’m going to be toning the minute you start that drill.” and they expect it and it, number one, it blocks out a lot of those higher partials in that drill sound that makes them crazy but it also calms me down and I’m breathing slower because I’m releasing the sound slower than the breath I take in. All your listeners may try this. The next time you go to the dentist. I mean it works like a charm.   [20:23] Ashley James: Can you explain how you do that when your mouth is open, they’re drilling in your mouth or they’re cleaning your teeth, how do you do this?   [20:31] Flicka Rahn: Okay. So here I am in my studio right now and I’m opening my mouth like I have to and at the dentist, so it’s like this. [Singing Sound] so the back of my tongue is up against the back of my throat so as to not be you know, swallowing all that water they put in your mouth when they’re cleaning up but I don’t go into the sound the M sound at the end. I just I just hold one note for a long time and again, it doesn’t have to be a specific pitch. It’s whatever your body wants to sound at the time. You think about it Ashley, I mean for any really emotional response that we have to an event. Be it fear or terror, I mean there’s always an explosion of sound that we make as our species has done that to try to balance the body. Screaming when someone is afraid is very beneficial to help bring the body back into balance. Of course, when we’re really happy and laughing or singing. It’s all sound related as the body continues to try to keep itself in a balanced energetic state. That just occurred to me, sound is very connected. Our own sounds that we make to our emotional state at a time. By staying quiet if there’s something that you need to cry about is, you know, your body will take that energy and and hide it into the etheric body. It’s better to go ahead and cry or scream or sound or something so that you keep the energy moving out. Rather than pulling it in to be hidden and that you have to deal with later at some point because you will.   [22:52] Ashley James: It’s so true crying is so cathartic and letting it out, you know, we were taught in the society to hold it all in and then it explodes like a volcano, right? It causes so much internal stress but let it out. I like that you said that when you when you do this alming, your out-breath is longer than your in-breath. I recently had an interview with Forrest Knudsen who’s a yogi and he teaches how to create the heart rate variability which is now the number one way of measuring stress. It’s the most accurate way of measuring stress. They’re now seeing that it’s the most accurate way of measuring your longevity. That if you have poor hurry variability you are likely to die sooner than those who have very good heart rate variability. He said the key to achieving heart rate variability meaning very good healthy heart variability where the heart and the body is in a low state of stress is to make the out-breath be a little bit longer than the in-breath. So by you doing this, you’re actually practicing not only are you using frequency and energy healing but you are also creating heart rate variability and decreasing stress in the body.   [24:15] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. I know exactly about what you were speaking. I’ve used the breath work as well but to add a toning sound to that is even better because then you’re giving your body some vibrations and frequencies that really help with the alignment and the heart rate variability. Yes, stress is a killer. Stress is a killer and we have a stress epidemic now. My music really addresses stress in a big way. I think that most healing music from Egypt, from Tibet to India, to all of the indigenous peoples use ways to decrease stress.   [25:17] Ashley James: Now what about those who are – I have some listeners who are Christian and might not feel comfortable saying ohm because they’re associating it with Buddhism or a different religion. Could they say anything? Could they say Amen? Yes, that’s what I was going to say. Could they chant Amen to themselves? I know that in the like Catholic Church and the very ancient you know, Catholicism, chanting was a really big thing. That they would chant over and over again. I was imagining you could just take a nice deep breath and say Amen over and over again. Sing it to yourself and whatever pitch your body wanted.   [25:58] Flicka Rahn: Let’s just try it.   [26:00] Ashley James: Okay. Let’s try it. Listen listener, you try it too. Let’s all do it. Let’s do it together. Okay.   [26:05] Flicka Rahn: Remember it doesn’t matter what note you pick. Take the deep breath in. [Singing Sound] Take another breath. [Singing Sound]   [26:37] Ashley James: That’s really fun. It feels so calming. It really feels like a blanket of comfort came over me.   [26:48] Flicka Rahn: Yes Ashley, Yes. You see even with just two Amens, all that anchors you again into a feeling of full, you know, completeness and peace. I think this is – it’s a it’s a beautiful practice.   [27:08] Ashley James: If one was spiritual could imagine connecting with source, with God, with Jesus. With whomever they want to connect with. Could imagine bathing in the energy of divine love. They could you know take that take this to the next level, right? Because you’re incorporating so many senses, you’re feeling your voice, you’re breathing in and then breathing out. You’re feeling a vibration around your whole body.  It’s sound bathing but you’re feeling this vibration inside you. You’re hearing it and then you’re feeling this energy so there’s several things going on at once.   [27:47] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. Yes. You know, and if you didn’t want to close your eyes, you could look at a picture of whoever you know, a picture of Jesus or a picture of Buddha or a mandala with different colors. I mean there are a lot of ways to stimulate the senses through even sight. As also the kinesthetic and the end the oral with your ears. Yes, they’re very powerful. Very powerful.   [28:19] Ashley James: Now each chakra has a different frequency, so how do you then go up? Like if you said you could start at whatever frequency your body wanted then how do you address each chakra?   [28:31] Flicka Rahn: Okay, so in that case, I would pick the specific pitch. I would start at C and I’m getting a C for you right now. We’re going to start with a C. That’s a C. [Singing Sound] I would do that for as long as I felt like I needed it and then the next pitch is a D. [Singing Sound] E, [Singing Sound]. If you want to go down an octave, I don’t think I have a low E but if that’s not comfortable for you then you can go down an octave. There are lots of tools on apps that you can get as a tuner and they will tell you what note is C and D and E.   [29:37] Ashley James: Okay. Now I know you have a CD that people can download. I think it’s called chakra soundscapes. Is that it?   [29:43] Flicka Rahn: That is exactly it and it actually that is what I used when I was in Peru. I put my earphones on and I toned through each of those tracks. They’re eight minutes a piece so I was toning for a long time. The tracks and the sound would lead you gently into that pitch. People would enjoy that. They certainly could go to iTunes and get chakra soundscapes by Icaros. That is the name of our group and tone along. Just know that I’ve been toning along with you and actually my voice is also on each of the tracks. Yes, that would be an easy way to start to so you don’t have to find an app and know where the note C is. You could just tone along with the CD.   [30:36] Ashley James: Very cool. Tell me about Icaros. That’s your band?   [30:39] Flicka Rahn: Well, it is. It is actually two of us. It is my co-composer and when I did all this research about trying to find the common elements of sacred music throughout the world, throughout history and also through all of the sacred expressions of sound and music. I identified those elements and then I asked Daniel, who is an incredible pianist and to help me create what I knew in my mind I wanted to create. The incredible thing about the CD which if people hear it is all of the music is improvised. Which means we wrote nothing down. We went into the studio and I said, “Alright. We’re going to use C as our resonant pitch and we’re also going to play around with the major triad. For those of your folks who don’t know what that is it’s like, [Singing Sound]. I mean everybody knows that combination of pitches. Then we also used a lot of other intervals that have a very strong effect on our Western ears to help us release energy. Let me come back to that. Daniel and I did this and I use my crystal singing bowls which I have here in the studio and I used a whole set of those and we went through each of the resonant pitches of each of the chakras and his harmonies are absolutely just exquisite. I then improvised around his harmonic progressions. We both know how to improvise so this really came from just this outpouring of love that I was feeling and we both get in kind of the same spiritual space. Then we create from that space. Every time we perform, it is all improvised. We feel the audience and then really it’s a co-creative experience. The audience and us.   [33:18] Ashley James: It’s like spiritual jazz.   [33:22] Flicka Rahn: That’s exactly what it is, Ashley.   [33:24] Ashley James: I want to see you live. oh my gosh. Do you tour?   [33:26] Flicka Rahn: Yes, we do.   [33:28] Ashley James: Okay. Well, tell me when you’re coming up to Seattle.   [33:31] Flicka Rahn: I will. I will. We’re about to go to Palm Spring in about three weeks to perform. It’s not even really performing, it’s to offer the experience is more like it. Because it’s meditation to a sales meeting of Tito’s vodka.   [33:58] Ashley James: So like get hammered and spiritual at the same time. It’d be really cool if they don’t have a hangover the next day because you’re like attuning their bodies.   [34:09] Flicka Rahn: I did talked to them. I said, “You know, we have got to do this in the morning.” So I’ve done that and we’ve also gone to some conventions of doctors and holistic healers. We are going to Mexico in March for a big holistic spiritual festival outside of Mexico City. People are hungry for this now because there is so much stress, Ashley and we’ve lost touch with our hearts honey. It’s we’ve lost touch and what Daniel and I offer is a way to touch back in and make a connection within yourself to your own heart and then it’s so easy to love everybody else. It just naturally flows. That’s what we are finding is during our live performances this happens and everybody just gets up and all they want to do is hug each other. It’s just great.   [35:15] Ashley James: Oh, my gosh. If the whole world if the whole world did that. Can you imagine the amount of change that we could make? I love that that’s your mission. Back when I was 19 I stayed at Kripalu. Which is the I think it’s the largest yoga residential Center in the United States. It can house over 200 people and I stayed there for a whole month. I took their 200-hour bodywork training program. I got to experience several different types of music healing. I had a session with didgeridoos where they would play didgeridoos on my body. We lay down like a daisy, like we’re petals of a daisy and he would stand in the middle and he’d play the didgeridoo straight on top of each chakra. There’s nothing like it. I can still feel it when I think about it. It’s pretty amazing.   [36:13] Flicka Rahn: See the didgeridoo is so rich in overtones and what we call partials. What it does is totally aligned, it’s like a buffet for your body as far as a frequency and sound. I am a big believer in that and Gong’s also offered the same thing. Often times when I’m working with a client, I will put the bowl right on their body just to kind of feed that chakra. That’s what happened to you. I mean, I bet it was an amazing experience.   [36:51] Ashley James: It was very cathartic and then we also experienced on a different day we had the singing Bulls. My favorite however, was that the crystal harmonica and they let me play it. I mean I really want to own a crystal harmonica. Many people don’t know what it is but I believe it was Benjamin Franklin that created it. It was at the time more popular than the piano but it would break often in transportation but it’s a bunch of crystal bowls on a stick on their side and it would rotate slowly and you have to have very clean fingers and you get your fingers wet and you play it as the bowls spin. Oh, my gosh.   [37:30] Flicka Rahn: Oh, ethereal.   [37:31] Ashley James: It’s so ethereal right. Yes. Yes, it does. It just did something for me. I’ve had those experiences and of course, we would ohm. The whole group would ohm like several times and you would be bathing in this vibration of the whole room. I can’t even describe what would happen but I felt so full and so complete. Then often every few days they had drumming circles. Where before and after lunch or before and after dinner, there would be 20 or 30 of us drumming and the rest of us would just be dancing just you know moving our bodies to the sounds of the beat. Everyone wanted to just hug and love on each other and smile. No matter how angry, I mean I was 19. I was going through so many emotions. I could imagine very angsty and no matter how frustrated or angry or you know hormonal or whatever I was going through, I’d walk into that drum circle and I’d walk out just like my authentic self. Like all that other stuff would just peel away. I’ve had these experiences with using music as energy healing and they were profound. I’ve never had a mundane music healing session. Let’s put it that way.   [38:52] Flicka Rahn: Well, it’s like effects like. We are frequency and so when we are into a therapeutic situation where there is vibration and frequency, there’s something in us that knows this is this is who we really are. Although there is some sounds that are not healing. That tend to be very disruptive to the energetic body. I think and people can know what those are but just by your response to them. I’ve had some experience with people who are quite disturbed. Do you want me to go into that?   [39:42] Ashley James: Sure.   [39:44] Flicka Rahn: Okay. I have a degree in counseling as well as I’m a master’s in both music and counseling. I have studied a lot of the psychological challenges that  people had. There is one way of releasing a lot of pain and that’s through this action of cutting your own skin and from the person who’s doing the cutting it makes a lot of sense because it’s a focus for the internal pain that they can’t get to so it feels actually good. I’ve also experienced people also listen to extremely loud disruptive hard metal dissonant music as a way of focusing on the inner environment which is you know, really probably frightened and in pain and in trauma. It’s making those tuning, that the cutting and the listening to just really hard metal dissonant really loud angry stuff, it’s a way of putting it outside yourself rather than it being inside. I’ve seen that as somewhat therapeutic but it certainly is not the end goal. To understand why, you know, if it were me, I would want to know, “Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? It feels good but why does it feel good?” Then move on to something that is more healing because if you keep doing that disruptive music it just keeps, the neural pathways keep getting deeper and deeper and it’s very hard to then change. Put in some other to feel the release of dopamine and seratonin through like meditation or meditative music. Did any of that make sense? I’m very empathetic, I guess. To how people try to manage their pain and yes, it can be very scary for them. Yes, so-   [42:05] Ashley James: Someone is cutting or if someone recognizes if they’re at the point where they’re recognizing that they’re using self-harm in an effort to self-soothe. How can they use sound or music to help them to make healthier choices for themselves and help them self-soothe in a way that isn’t harmful?   [42:30] Flicka Rahn: Okay, glad you asked that. I am working with a neurologist now and we are exploring the sound of the crystal singing bowls in working with our veterans that have experienced PTSD and are finding it very difficult to re-enter a society. You know, where there’s not the constant threat of death. We do know that their brains have been changed by the trauma and that there are some pathways in in the brain in which see if they heard a backfire, the brain would interpret that differently then say maybe I that heard the backfire because I don’t have the associative memory. Those neural pathways have not been made in me but it in some of our brave warriors it has been. How can you change the landscape inside your own brain to move away from that reactive, the reaction. We also know that what wires together then then repeats. What you want to do is not try to make that go away but spend time and meditation so that that becomes more normal. The pathways of peace, of love, of calmness and there had been a lot of success by people who have taught meditation and a lot of breath work to veterans even over one week. They’ve seen changes and the brain has changed. There is a fantastic movie on I think it’s Netflix called Free the Brain or Free the Mind. One of the two but free the – and it recounts the study that was done with these brave warriors and also with children with ADHD. Who it seems that you know, the neural pathways in there are different from someone of a of a child who can just sit calmly. Through meditation, through breathing, through learning, those techniques those kids have found some relief. I think that weird now really starting to – we intuitively have known the stuff has worked but now there is the data, the hard scientific data that’s coming forward that’s saying, “Yes, what we thought works is working. We can really see that. We can assign some numbers to that.” I really think that’s the next step and that is where I want to go with my neurologist friend who wants to do some studies with what is happening inside your brain when you hear the sound of the crystal singing bowls? Is there something with just the specific sound with a specific frequency? We don’t have those answers yet but we will. That’s very exciting to me because I want to offer some palliative tool to people who are suffering. You know, we all suffer to some degree. Through anxiety or stress or fear and we all have that. So is there a way that we can anchor to a part of ourselves that is not in the drama and then stay observing? I mean that is a meditative technique. I’ve really tried to pull away from the drama of the ego but I think this helps. It helps connect to that higher expression of yourself through meditation, through listening to meditative music. You want to stay away from music with words because that then engages your left brain and you want to get into the right brain which is more holistic. More just stilt in nature.   [47:06] Ashley James: I mean music with words is okay, it’s just if you’re looking to heal with music, you want to avoid words is what you’re saying. What about when you’re chanting to yourself? Like chanting the word ohm, you are the instrument. The word is the instrument in a sense, right? The word is the music coming from you which is the instrument.   [47:28] Flicka Rahn: But you’re not having to analyze it.   [47:31] Ashley James: Okay. Yes, got it.   [47:32] Flicka Rahn: It just becomes like the sound you’re making and then at some point because of the repetition, Ashley. The mind says, “Okay, nothing to see here.” and it then can lift to a higher awareness.   [47:51] Ashley James: Okay. Yes, so chanting of a word becomes a meditation in and of itself and allows you to go into that higher state. I like that you mentioned becoming the observer in neuro linguistic programming. That is a technique where you become the fly-on-the-wall. The third person. Seeing your life as the third person allows you to analyze especially difficult situations where you can then kind of start to see the whole scenario instead of be reactive in this situation. What about headphones versus allowing the music to bathe their whole body? Is there a big difference? Can we listen to this music and gain the same benefit from hearing it through headphones or should we have speakers or the sound bathe or whole body and our whole body feels the vibration?   [48:44] Flik Rahn: I think that it addresses two therapeutic scenarios. If you listen to chakra soundscapes for example with headphones, you are harnessing the effects of entrainment. Which the binaural entrainment, which is webbed into my music. Both of the CDs have theta brainwave state and webbed in through binaural sound. Should I explain that?   [42:20] Ashley James: We will definitely get into binaural sounds in a minute because I think that’s an important topic but I definitely want people to understand like when should they listen with headphones and when should they make sure their whole body’s being bathed in sounds.   [49:32] Flicka Rahn: Okay. So when is the whole body’s being bathed in sound, the sound will then interact with the whole etheric body. The physical and the etheric body. That offers other benefits too because within our etheric body, we have places where there’s like stuck energy. If you want to attain a deep meditative state in your brain, it’s headphones. If you want to address the places in your etheric arc body that have stuck places or negative emotions are caught there, then listen with speakers on either side of you and just sit in the middle of it.   [50:17] Ashley James: Yes, all right. I think you already opened us up to the next question which is, tell us what binaural. I keep hearing binaural beats, right and I’ve listened to this on YouTube. What’s binaural beats? What’s binaural music? What does that mean?   [50:30] Flicka Rahn: Okay. So this was discovered I can’t give you the exact date of when it was discovered but it’s not been some very long ago because our technology has not allowed that with our earphones but binaural beat is, let’s say for example, okay so you’re hearing, it goes from 20 Hertz to 2000 Hertz. All the way through there, you’re able to hear like outside bird calls, your dog barking, that falls within that that spectrum but if you go below that 20 Hertz, you can’t hear it. The sound will be there but you can’t hear it. What a binaural beat does is it’s through the sound technology in the studio, they will produce a sound that a say let’s say 15 Hertz in one ear and then in the other ear they will produce 10 Hertz. Those are two different frequencies and pitches. You won’t be able to hear them but your brain does. Your brain can discern the difference between those two fifteen and ten as being five. Five Hertz that is way below hearing but that then measures and falls within the theta brainwave state which is very deep meditation. That’s where we see visions, that’s where we go into these altered states that really deep meditative state. That’s what binaural beats do for you but you have to listen to them through your headphones so that you get – the beat means that what you hear you don’t hear specific pitches but you may hear a beat. That’s why they called it binaural beats.   [52:35] Ashley James: What effect is listening in, so you want to still listen with your headphones because they does something to the left and the right, in the brain, right? Can they measure – you spent many years in academia teaching so I’m sure you like to look at the science of it. Do they have they ever hooked people up to machines or brain waves so they measure? Do they see that it measurably makes a difference to the brain waves by listening to this?   [53:04] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. Yes, through binaural beats then they can they can put a do some brain mapping and see that the person listening to the binaural beats has slipped into these lower expressions of your brainwave state like theta certainly alpha. That yes, that’s reproducible and provable. That is a very actually, this is the way I meditate. I put my earphones on and I listen to either my music or you know sometimes others that I really like and I will very easily and quickly go into that low meditative state. Where the deep healing takes place. So yes, it’s powerful and it’s easy and it works. I really encourage your listeners to find some music on YouTube that you really like that says it’s binaural, hook your ear, put your phones on and close your eyes and drift away.   [54:09] Ashley James: Now does it make the difference whether we put the right earbud in the right ear and the left earbud in the left ear?   [54:17] Flicka Rahn: No. It doesn’t matter.   [54:18] Ashley James: Okay. So it doesn’t matter which way we have our headphones on as long as we’re wearing headphones.   [54:23] Flicka Rahn: Yes, that’s exactly right. Yes.   [54:25] Ashley James: Interesting. I always come back to this same binaural beats soundtrack when I am trying to concentrate so if I find that I – I like to multitask. I’ve got a million things going at the same time and I’m like, “Okay. I’ve got to get a podcast episode up. I got to finish editing this and I’ve got to schedule this person.” I’ve all this stuff to do and I really want to focus. There’s this one track on YouTube that I listen to. It’s for studying and focusing and it really helps. I just put it on it’s like a two-hour long track and I I just put it on in the background it with my headphones on while I work and it really helps me to stay focused so I’ve noticed that it works for me. Then they have ones out there for like weight loss and for happiness and for sleep. They’ve figured out different binaural beats that put the brain into a certain state.   [55:19] Flicka Rahn: That’s exactly, yes, yes.   [55:20] Ashley James: Can you talk a little bit about that like how did they figure out that this specific binaural beat makes someone relaxed for sleep and this one makes people happy and this one makes people want to lose weight.   [55:31] Flicka Rahn: Well, I don’t know about the lose weight. I can tell you that if you’re calm and peaceful, you may not want to eat as much because you have stress eating syndrome but we do know about the beta state and right now I’m in beta, you’re in beta because we are actively listening to each other and thinking. Beta is not a bad state to be and when you are in high beta. This is those brainwave states are well known that you are stressed. You’re in you’re in a lot of traffic and you know you’re sweating and you’re that kind of high beta. What happens is you’re not really thinking clearly and you’re in high stress. Your body interprets that is we are threatened so it down shifts into the limbic system like, “I’m going to protect myself.” All of this is not conducive to healing. That’s beta. The next one is alpha and that’s the daydreaming place. That’s where you’re taking everything in but you’re not analyzing or paying extreme attention to something. That’s alpha. That’s also very creative place. That is where you probably go into like this lovely alpha place with your music. Now if you were to go into theta you’d be falling asleep. The different brainwave states are fascinating and they each have a signature brainwave weight that people can see on a screen. We know that these two things correspond the binaural beats and also emotional states and these different brainwave states.   [57:40] Ashley James: When you’re creating binaural beats how do you know that what you’re creating is going to put someone in alpha or put someone in theta, put someone in a more relaxed state?   [57:55] Flicka Rahn: I guess I don’t know that it will but that is when we we’re finished with in the studio, we were finished with our tracks and then I gave it to a sound engineer and I said, “I want theta binaural beats webbed into each of these tracks.” and so it was sub-audible. How do I know it will? I don’t. I mean if someone is really convinced that they’re going to stay in beta they can probably override that but if you say, “Okay. I’m in for it. Whatever.”  You just give in, you’ll slip into theta or alpha. There is also another phenomena that I know your listeners know about this. The scientific term is called isochronic beats and that is different from binaural beats. Isochronic means the same thing over and over. Isochronic, one thing over and over. This is what happens when drumming. You’re in a drumming circle you’re getting isochronic beats. If the drumming is fast then you will your brainwave state will align with that faster beat. Warriors who want to get ready to go into battle, if you can remember what was it? Braveheart. They were getting ready to go into battle and the Scottish Warriors were gearing up, they heard this loud drum going over and over and over so everybody was aligning in training to that drum. There is also a part of the brain that that loses touch with reality through that isochronic heavy drumming. This is what puts people into trance state in many indigenous societies. Through heavy drumming. It’s like the brain  pane just shuts down and doesn’t think anymore. It’s an interesting phenomenon.   [01:00:09] Ashley James: It reminds me of being in a stadium at a sports stadium where we’re all hitting the floor with our feet and then drumming starts off [Sound], the whole stadium is just banging really fast and you feel like you’re not in your body anymore. You really feel just out there. That you’re not thinking. You feel like you’re totally in the moment. It’s a very intense but very enjoyable experience. You’re right. You’re definitely not just in like regular beta anymore at that point.   [01:00:42] Flicka Rahn: Nope. You’ve lifted out and drumming can be very healing too. The slower drumming, remember that you’re going to entrain to that slower beat and that means your brainwaves are going to entrain to that slower beat and you can easily be put into alpha. If you could just imagine that whole stadium slowing down and everybody slowing everything down all of a sudden things would get really more peaceful if the drumming or the sounding slowed down.   [01:01:17] Ashley James: You’ve made this chakra soundscapes. What other and I know you have other music for meditation –   [01:01:32] Flicka Rahn: The other CD that we just released is called hymns like a hymn to Gaia. G-A-I-A. Hymms to Gaia and the subtitle is Honoring the Elements. We used the same process nothing was written down. We went into the studio and I tried to, didn’t have to but I tried to like match the water element with the sacral chakra. Which is has to do with water in your body and like the fire element was the heart and very often we see that the heart is shown as the fire of love or the fire. Then we mixed in, after we have to recorded everything then we mixed in sounds which would show these different elements like sounds of wind, sounds of water, sounds of fire, like a fireplace in a cozy cabin and then I also added the ethereal element love I saw as an element and the angelic realm. I see them as part of our energetic environment that we live in. That we may not always know or recognize but it’s there all the time. I loved doing this. We had a great time. It’s a beautiful, it’s a different experience but it can be used as for meditation as well. It’s hymms to Gaia: Honoring the elements. That’s also Icaros which is what I call. The name Icaros actually is what the sacred songs that are sung by the shaman in the Amazon. That’s what they call them the their Icaros and during sacred ceremony, I was so profoundly moved by the fact that I could actually see the sound in the air. I could see it. I saw how the beautiful songs that the shaman would sing would heal and help people manage you know to come to a place where they’re freer and more loving, more centered in themselves through this through these sounds. I jumped on board. I said, “That’s for me.”   [01:04:28] Ashley James: I love that you traveled the world to learn from the indigenous people. I studied Hoonah many years ago. I studied Hoonah, ancient Polynesian spiritual practice and learn to do their chants. Here listening to the chants or doing it myself, I definitely went into a different state. Definitely went into a meditative state but I felt my heart would vibrate, my whole chest would feel full of love and full of energy. It was my prayer to for healing. The chanting was sort of this meditation asking for healing and I would just feel that in the moment it was so it was really a connection there was a connection there with universal energy. It was very interesting my experience with sort of indigenous music for healing. Can you take us back to when you were traveling? Share some stories about or revelations you had as you were traveling and learning from these indigenous people and learning about how they’ve always used music for healing?   [01:05:46] Flicka Rahn: I went because I felt myself that I was in need of some emotional spiritual growth and healing and as I told you before the month before, I promised myself that I would do whatever it took, I was willing to go to any anything to get free. There were things that happened in my childhood some pretty traumatic things that I wanted to I wanted to let go of in a way that was loving and that made sense to me and that I could synthesize the wisdom of those experiences without carrying the trauma. This is what drove me is, I knew that I needed to be in this lifetime as free as I could. If I was going to offer what I knew I what came here to do and that is this beautiful music infused with love so I needed to be infused with love. My own love. That is why I went it was like I cannot do this music and carry any trauma or any bitterness or any resentment or any guilt. I needed to free everything so that’s why I went down to be in the jungle with the Shipibo Indians and went through some very powerful experiences, Ashley. In which I reviewed my whole life from the perspective of love and saw that everything made sense and so part of this process is experiencing those emotions and then moving through them so the motions the crying and the yelling and that was part of the release. I understood the process and I wasn’t afraid of that. What I wanted more than anything, I was not afraid of the crying or anything. I was afraid of carrying resentment and trauma. That was the biggest fear because that would limit me. That was my profound gift to myself is, “We’re going to do this.” and we did. That’s what drove me and then because I knew that the sound having known, that sound has led me into the divine places in my own heart and I’ve known that I was a little girl. That I would experience these moments of clarity where I knew there was something much more than what I was just seeing out of my eyes and I had some in spirit experience of enlightenment. I was familiar somewhat although the traumas in my earlier life, sometimes drew a veil over what I knew to be true. I not only wanted to know what I wanted to feel, I wanted to embody as much love as I could. So that means I’ve got empty out all the other stuff that isn’t loving. To be a true handmaiden of sound and frequency and love. That is what I did.   [01:09:34] Ashley James: You mentioned that you felt enlightened doing this. Can you take us back to that moment and share with us the experience?   [01:09:47] Flicka Rahn: Yes. It happened when I was probably, there are two times that I can recount which was not a part of a sacred ceremony enlightenmen. This just happens spontaneously. One was when I was probably about seven years old or eight years old. I was laying on a sidewalk in front of my house in Texas and it was just of starting to be dusk. I was just looking up at the sky and I could see the clouds but I could also see the stars were coming and starting to come out. I something left my body and I knew that I was a part of that. I knew it that the little Flicka on the sidewalk was just a teeny expression. I certainly have no words for it. I just knew I was part of this greater reality. I was an intregal part. That happened then the next time enlightenment happened and I think enlightenment is not like one event. It is many enlightenment events in which you get to sense the true-self in little bits as you can handle it. I was driving back from a funeral in Philadelphia and this time I lived in Boston. I was on actually the Connecticut Turnpike and I was listening to Pachelbel’s Canon which is a beautiful classical piece and for me it’s just very spiritual. I was listening Pachelbel’s Canon. It’s Orchestra and all of a sudden I felt totally enveloped and enclosed in this tube of light. Light that was so bright that it I had to pull over because I was so infused with this white light but it was not bright it was just brilliant and of course, I was sobbing because it was so beautiful and I don’t know how long I was by the side of the road in this white light but ultimately it left and I started crying now it’s so beautiful. I knew that that is what I was. In back of everything, apart from everything that’s what I was. I was this light and I’ve been trying to get back there my entire life but it happened on the wings of music so when I sing now or when I perform music or when I do this music with Daniel, it’s like we cross a bridge into a divine playground of beauty and love. It’s exquisite. It’s what it is. My hope my music can impart some of that reality to people because that’s what that is my intention is to be so connected to love. That is what I channel so it becomes audible love. I mean that’s my wish so if people can sense this in themselves then they will know that they are not the anger, they’re not the trauma, they’re not the fear, they’re not the crisis of the moment. That they are something way beyond all of what we hear on this and dualistic planet experience. Then to identify with that and to not be afraid. There’s no reason to be afraid of anything. There’s no reason. It’s all love. That’s all it is.   [01:14:04] Ashley James: I like the saying we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. We’re spirit. We’re energy. We’re in the Christian faith, we’re made in the image of God and in other faiths there’s a belief that were that God chose to become us to experience this world. There’s many different ways of thinking about it but when it comes down to it, there’s so much more than what we can see and touch. That what we can see and touch is the illusion. That energy is the reality. That energy is in this infinite energy, is reality and that the illusion is physical. That the illusion is fear. Yes, the negative emotions are illusions and that what’s true is love. When you said that you realize that you are that light and you’re sobbing on the side of the turnpike. That you that you were enveloped with light but that you remember you remembered that you were light. In timeline therapy it’s a technique, I’m a master a practitioner of timeline therapy, In timeline therapy, it’s you go into a light state of trance, they’re totally conscious. You travel above your timeline and when I ask people to go beyond this life so go beyond your death people see the same thing. Everyone sees they enter a brilliant light that it envelops them and is them and that you know you could call that heaven. With the afterlife when everyone imagines themselves in in this light state of trance, we all see the same thing and it’s this brilliant energy. I thought that’s just very interesting. That we all perceive when we’re not in our body anymore, the same beyond  this energy. I’ve heard so many people who can commune with angels. They all talk about this music that they hear like the angelic realm is vibrating in this music and so between I mean, there’s light. Light energy and music are all just forms of frequency.   [01:16:41] Flicka Rahn: Exactly. That’s exactly right, Yes. Everything vibrates. Through vibration comes sound and yes –   [01:16:50] Ashley James: Now you mentioned that the latest album you created was to help people release energy. Can you tell us what you meant by that?   [01:17:03] Flicka Rahn: Okay. I guess I mentioned that if there is something in your etheric body that really is a block to the free flow of electromagnetic flow. That very often that will show up as discomfort or dis-ease. So you understand what I’m saying about that, is that if you put yourself  – for example, you put yourself in that area or of the didgeridoo and you felt it. I mean you felt it in every cell of your being and I’m sure that that was like taking a sound bath that what I do too. I give sound bass once a month at the little clinic where I have see my clients and people come in the bathe and themselves they allow themselves to be bathed in these different frequencies. That breaks up the – is this what you’re referring to? That breaks up the blockages or the places where the energy gets thick. Where it doesn’t flow. So there’s no flow of Chi so to speak. A problem and if there is a free flow then the body is able to bring itself into consonants and heal itself.   [01:18:37] Ashley James: Yes. You talk about maybe the stagnation where people get locked. It’s Interesting. In Hoonah, there’s this visualization of the body as a river. Imagine a beautiful river because in Hawaii they have these gorgeous rivers and so you imagine your body’s this river and the river it represents the flow of Chi. The flow of energy through the body, through the meridian system, through the chakras radiance. Negative emotions and limiting decisions and unhealed unresolved past memories are seen as little black bags where that store that negative experience and are like a big boulder in the river. Distorting the flow of the energy and so their visualization is all these black bags may be stored in your body and you imagine a river with no stones that it flows very nicely. There’s no rapids, there’s no turmoil in the river but you put a bunch of boulders in the river and now there’s waves and it’s disruptive. Their description is you want to really work at resolving the trapped the trap trapped negative emotions and limiting decisions and negative past experiences that are stuck in your physical body. They’re in your energetic body but there actually can be triggered in your physical body and release them. Gain the positive learnings and heal from them because they cuts off the flow, it creates stagnation. We said release energy. It reminded me of that – I was a massage therapist back many years ago. I had a really interesting experience. I was receiving a massage by my instructor in in college as a demonstration. I was the demo and she was working on my back laterally by my shoulder blade coming up around my arm on the outside of the armpit basically and I began to sob uncontrollably. I couldn’t stop sobbing. The class ended and she held me just put her hands on me on the table and I sobbed for an hour. I couldn’t stop. I had no idea what was going on and I just obviously released but she, I mean, she was a massage therapist for many years so she knew it was going on. 19 years old that was my first experience with this happening and she said that, you know sometimes the body can hold on to the – can in the muscle will hold on to that little button that little trigger and but by getting massage. Massage can be a spiritual and an emotional healing tool as well because it allows you to release these trapped energies. I imagine combining energy work with like for massage therapists listening, combining energy work with your songs would really help. I’ve had these experiences. My husband had a similar experience. He went for a Reiki class and no, it was before the Reiki class. He had Reiki, his girlfriend, this a long time ago gave him Reiki and he burst into tears, sobbed uncontrollably for an hour and then laughed. He said he never felt love like that before. Just universal love and then he just became a raving fan of Reiki because it was just for him, he just never had anything that allowed him to cry and feel such release. He had no idea where was coming from. We have this trapped in our body as so many of us walk around so stoic because that’s what we were taught but there’s this there’s so much available. So many tools out there available for emotional healing for this release as you say so that we can get back in touch with who we truly are which is connected to spirit, connected to the universal energy. That we are that love and that light actually. I love that you’re creating these tools through your talents to help people achieve that. What about the day to day problems that people have with anxiety, procrastination and motivation? Sometimes people get in this cycle of stress that – we don’t feel stress, right? Stress is kind of like we don’t feel it until we break but we do feel anxiety or procrastination or we do feel sort of get that stuck this or that stagnation in life where we don’t have that motivation and then the anxiety kind of just overwhelms us so we get stuck again. What can we do to break free from that?   [01:23:46] Flicka Rahn: I think all of those reflect kind of this and most of it is subconscious but that there is some fear around that activity. We don’t know. I mean it comes up as anxiety but really if you keep going down deeper and deeper there’s some fear of what’s going to happen or me not being good enough or I’m not going to say the right thing. So what you do is you procrastinate so you don’t have to go into what you fear but you don’t really understand where that is coming from because it’s subconscious. Again, to realign yourself with your Divine self is the way out of that and to become another person and a person that is not caught up in their daily routines of being a certain way or feeling a certain way about a person or going through the same habits. You then try to create this other self that is more whole, more a happier and some of this is through your own observation. “Oh, there I am I’m doing it again. I don’t want to do that because I want my life to be about happiness and love and compassion so I’m going to choose to do this.” Sometimes it’s hard to give up Ashley, because I find that people and I know you probably find this they have an investment in being a victim or they have an investment in being hurt or bitter. There’s a payoff for them. If they really want to get well then they’re going to have to give up their addiction to those negative reactions and say, “No. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to go towards love and I meditate every day so that I continue to stay connected to this. To the divine expression of who I am.” There are times when I, I’m human you know. I get angry at drivers on the road that are doing stupid stuff so but at least I’m aware, “Oh, there I lost. I lost touch with myself.” Send that person compassion instead of the alternative but it takes awareness and it takes such an investment in wanting to be free or to be whole or to be in love with yourself and in love with the world. If people knew and this is what I am trying to do is to give you a taste of what the peach tastes like. This is the peach. The peach is the best but if somebody says, “I don’t know what a peach is. I don’t even know if I want to come over there and have a peach. I like it over here eating free fries.” That’s what I try to do through this music is to say, “This is the peach. I’m going to give you a little taste of it. Do you like it? If you like it, there’s a lot more.” That’s the deal. When I go over there and I’m eating french fries and I’m thinking, “Oh, my god. I will back off the same, “Look at you Flicka. You’re eating french fries when you could be having a peach.”   [01:27:15] Ashley James: Right. We all indulge in the self-pity and the anger and all that. It’s the human, the ego wants to have a little fun and the ego gets to have it’s fun but then to become the observer and go, “Oh, isn’t that interesting that I did that? Isn’t that interesting? What’s the payoff there? Is this the quality of life I really want? Well, no. Okay. So my ego got to have some fun. Let’s get back to creating a connection with the divine and getting back to remembering that I am loved.” Did you definitely need to become conscious of it. There’s stages of mastery. The first, being unconscious of it. We’re totally unconscious and then there’s that conscious incompetence. Where we have to keep catching our self and building that muscle and going, “Oh, look I did it again.” but now you caught yourself only five minutes into being angry instead of 15 minutes into being angry, right? Then we keep catching ourselves. My husband is a great example. He used to really have a lot of road rage where, I mean he wouldn’t like take it out on people except the people in the car would throw this, he wasn’t happy. I would catch him and be like, “You know you don’t know what that person might be having a really bad day. Maybe they just didn’t see you in their blind spot. You’re always assuming the worst.” Just reminding him and now bad drivers don’t bother him. Whereas they used to really, he’s a Virgo. No one can – everyone has to be perfect on the road apparently but now he can just he can just let it go. It’s funny because he’ll catch himself and he’ll be like, he’ll say, “Do you see that? Do you see that? Oh, that that person cut me off and I didn’t freak out. Do you see it?” so he got to the point where he’s catching himself going, “Oh, look. I didn’t do that old behavior.” or I’ll catch himself getting angry and then go, “Oh, okay. That’s not who I want to be. That’s not the quality of life I want. I’m not going to choose that.” We have to catch ourselves so in catching ourselves, we create a break state of our neurology and we’re creating a new neural pathway.   [01:29:31] Flicka Rahn: Exactly. Yes. Now I wrote about this very same thing the road rage because it happened – I’m with your husband here. I do it too. Although it’s been so long since I’ve allowed that to you know change mine. The stress hormones which are released when you get angry but I did the same thing. I mentioned this in my book. I want to make sure that we know that all of this information is in my book. That what I’ve learned to do is to say, “I don’t know what’s going on with that person but they may be going to the hospital to see a loved one or they have some emergency.” I reframe the event so that I can stay centered in myself and not get thrown out of who I really am. Because ultimately, I’m the one who pays. The person who you know cut me off they’re on their merry way but I am left with all these horrible stress hormones coursing. The adrenaline coursing through my body. I don’t like the way that feels. Some of it is self-preservation I’m going to stay loving but it’s best for me. Ultimately of course, everybody else. Yes, that is a technique I’m continued, of course we all continue to learn but it has become a lot easier is to look at the event and reframe it so that I don’t spin out of control.   [01:31:07] Ashley James: Do you have stories that you can share from people who have had positive experiences listening to your CDs has anyone shared with you results?   [01:31:19] Flicka Rahn: Yes. A lot of people have said that just listening to my CD it and it’s extremely grounding and comforting and loving. A friend of mine who actually lives in Mexico, I just got back from Mexico. She was going through extremely difficult period and she’s she is a shaman and she said that she saw into that music what it does and I can’t do that but she has that ability. She said it is very – it heals DNA. Now I don’t know that, Ashley. But I’m telling just what she said and she had been through a huge trauma in her life. She listened to it like two hours a day and she said it really helped her come back into herself because trauma tends to separate us from ourselves.   [01:32:22] Ashley James: Right. Well, trauma, they can actually test DNA and see if your ancestor had trauma. They’ve proven this. Because we’re just still we’re learning so much about DNA and epigenetics. Epigenetics means that the certain DNA that can turn on and off. Become like suppressed or can activate. It can turn on and off different enzymatic processes in the body. The best example is and I’ve said this on the podcast before but for new listeners, they did a study where they took white mice. This cute, fluffy, soft white mice and they exposed them to the same amount of bisphenol A. BPA per body weight that we would be exposed to on a daily basis. If we were to touch of receipts every day when we buy things there’s BPA on there. Drinking from plastic bottles and cans that have BPA. You might think, well, I don’t buy those things but if you eat out at any kind of restaurant you have exposure to BPA because restaurants really don’t care. They’re going to buy the cheapest things possible so their canned foods or sauces, whatever. Their condiments are going to have BPA in them. Through the food industry BPA is just leached into our food unless you eat a whole food plant-based diet where you’re buying organic and just cooking everything from scratch which is what I teach. We actually I just launched a membership called learn true health home kitchen. I teach that. How to cook whole foods so that you’re getting the purest nutrition you can to heal the body through food. So this BPA they exposed these mice to it and the mice quickly turned yellow, their fur went from white to yellow and from a nice softness to a coarse hay straw like feel and then they became obese. They didn’t really change their diet other than giving them the BPA but what it did is epigenetically changed their genes to make them become obese and to make them not be able to make beautiful fur. Then they stopped giving the mice BPA and it took several generations. They followed these mice for several generations before they just fed them water and food instead of the BPA but I think it was over three generations until the mice returned back to being white again and having the soft white fur and not no longer being obese. Epigenetically their DNA was damaged for several generations. We see this with ancestors of those in the Holocaust during World War II. Those who spent time in Auschwitz or were severely emotionally harmed during World War II. Even their grandchildren they can see when they do DNA test, they can see the epigenetic gene expressions of trauma, of stress. They have higher levels just at resting state of stress hormones. What we do in this lifetime will affect our grandchildren directly through our DNA and though the healing that we do in the detoxifying and the nutrifying that we do, they’re seeing now can actually affect our DNA for generations to come. It’s not only healing yourself that aids your healing for your children and grandchildren. I think that’s it’s really fascinating. The fact that this healer sees that your music has a role to play in healing DNA. I wouldn’t be surprised that everything is energy.   [01:36:01] Flicka Rahn: There is a study that I mentioned in my book and I’m sorry, I don’t have it at my fingertips but I’ll recount what it was. It was a study done by taking some DNA in which they put into a petri dish and they subjected it to heat so the DNA “died” or uncurled. It was essentially destroyed and then they had people hold the dish with the hurt DNA and directed loving thoughts to that, I know this sounds crazy, to the DNA and the DNA recoiled. There is a way through love to heal ourselves and to heal the DNA that has been traumatized through toxic thoughts, experiences, down regulated so to speak. That’s through this the power of love which carries probably I’m thinking a very coherent geometry. That the DNA can then reform around this coherent geometry which that’s also a huge subject that we could talk about. How they’re now understanding that this field that we are in the zero-point field is filled with information and energy but there is a uniform geometry that they’re finding that is common throughout everything that saturates everything. I don’t know if you know the work of a Nassim Haramein. He’s a physicist in Hawaii actually and has been studying the geometric shape of the field.   [01:38:05] Ashley James: Interesting. What you’re saying is reminding me of Masaru Emoto, his work. The book. The hidden messages in water where he would emit love or hate and freeze water and then under a microscope you see that water looks so beautiful in the geometric shapes are just divine when you emit love to it but when you emit hate or anger it looks distorted and polluted.   [01:28:38] Flicka Rahn: Right. Then they give the polluted water to some Japanese monks and have them love that water. They take another sample and the water has reformed into those coherent shapes. It sounds to me like love is the variable that helps things become more ordered. Are you familiar with the work of Hans Jenny and cymatics?   [01:39:04] Ashley James: It sounds really familiar but I don’t know tell us.   [01:39:07] Flicka Rahn:  Okay. So cymatics is the study of sound made visible. What he did and this was in like the early 1900’s maybe up through the 50s. He would take like a brass plate and sprinkle particulates on it or sand. Then introduce a specific pitch and then the sound would form into these beautiful like mandalas. Beautiful shapes that correspond and it’s reproducible under the same circumstances that they would always form the same shape. Then there were other researchers who put particulates in water and the same thing would happen once introduced to specific pitches or frequencies.  Snowflakes, I think snowflakes just are showing us the geometry of the field. If the field is love then that is like the rosetta stone of all of these expressions. My music is tuned to a 432 and I don’t know if you’re familiar with all of that work. It’s a way of tuning, Ashley. It will sound warmer to you. I’s a little bit not as sharp. It’s a little bit under pitch because we tuned to at 440 Hertz. Universally, all music is at a 440 Hertz but throughout history certainly in the in the Romantic period it’s a musical period and before instruments were tuned lower than 440 Hertz. Some higher but for the most part it’s 432 Hertz because when you see pitches tuned at 432 Hertz, the geometry is beautiful and it’s coherent. It’s much more balanced. Knowing all of that, all of my music is at 432 Hertz which sounds warmer so your body can accept that geometry because it matches because it’s a whole kind of sacred geometry and the fibonacci spiral and everything. All of those shapes that we see in nature are then reproduced in the sound that if the instruments are tuned down to 432 Hertz. Have you heard an orchestra that the oboe plays one note and then everybody kind of tunes off of that one note that the oboe plays? Have you ever experienced that when you go to a symphony orchestra? Well, they do and then the oboe then is toning an A pitch at 440 Hertz. Then everybody else in the orchestra tunes to that but if the oboist drops it just a little bit, just a little bit to 432 Hertz, then the orchestra would tune down a little bit and the sound is warmer to your ears. Your body can accept that because that is our natural, we are sacred geometry beings. Geometrically, we align with that.   [01:42:56] Ashley James: How does the musician know to go to – I can understand knowing how to play a C note but how do you play hertz? How do you know to go to a certain hertz? You need a device to read the Hertz?   [01:43:15] Flicka Rahn: Yes, and there are lots of tuners out now that you can get that will direct you to that 432 Hertz. Both of my CDs are tuned down to 432 a at 432 Hertz. Certainly, every note is a different hertz because hertz designates the frequency and the pitch. But you have to have a touchstone you say, “Okay. I’m going to use this as my tuning center.” The oboist, they can even use a tuner. They’ll hold up a little tuner. They’ll blow into the tuner and then they’ll go to their oboe and they’ll sure that they match that tuner. You asked me why did things change because it used to be that things were tuned down to a 432. There’s a whole conspiracy theory that goes up around –   [01:44:14] Ashley James: I want to hear it.   [01:44:16] Flicka Rahn: Oh, my god. Okay. We got into it.   [01:44:19] Ashley James: I want to hear it. So because back before TV, music was so – that’s what we did. That was entertainment. Even kings and queens five hundred years ago would pay composers. It was a status symbol to have a composer write you. That’s sort of my dream is I’m going to win the lottery one day and like I’ll pay a composer to make me as a symphony. It’s such a outlandish but beautiful thing to promote the arts obviously but just imagine if you had the ability to have a have a composer write you a song. That was such a big deal and music, we bade themselves in music so often and now, we watch TV and don’t bathe ourselves in music. This was my dad’s, that was his mission was to get people back to listening to music. That’s one of his things why he invented his speakers and promoted that. I lived it. I lived his vision. Well, my dad’s time was before cellphones but his thing was, “Why do families come home and stare at a boob tube together when they could put on music and they could talk and they could connect and they could have this loving family time.” He wanted people to return back to that. Tell me the conspiracy theory around changing the hertz in music. When did that take place?   [01:49:49] Flicka Rahn: Okay. Well, first of all, your dad was so right. There is nothing that forms bonds of loving feelings than doing music together. What would going to church be without everybody getting up and singing a hymn. There’s this energetic flow that happens through making music or listening to music together. Yay, dad. The conspiracy theory and I tend to think it’s not so much conspiracy that it’s really true. During the Second World War, before the Second World War, there were lots of composers. This very famous composer Verdi. I don’t know, it’s Giuseppe Verdi. Wrote many operas and he insisted that his orchestra tune to 432 because he said it is easier on his Sopranos. What he didn’t know is that the geometry of the body matched that specific way of tuning and if you tuned up it goes against the geometry of your body. He was a big believer in that. At World War II, there was this whole propaganda machine that Hitler got into play as a way of controlling the German population. One way he wanted to control them is to make them a little bit anxious because if you have people who are anxious they’re going to get behind a guy who says, “I got the way out for us. We’re going to go out. We’re going to conquer the world.”  but you don’t want them feeling comfortable and loving. No. You want them on edge because you can control them. Goebbels his minister of propaganda decided that all the music that they were going to use is we’re going to be up at four hundred and forty Hertz. Which makes you feel a little bit more on edge and you can go to YouTube right now and look at examples. Look up 432 versus 440 and you can hear the same piece played tuned a 440 and the same piece of music played at 432 and just subjectively experience that. That’s easy to do. That’s fun.   [01:48:18] Ashley James: You know what’ll be fun is get your get your partner, like you get blindfolded and get your partner to randomly choose whether they’re going to play the 440 Hertz which creates anxiety versus the 432 Hertz which is healing. Then you feel your body and you see if you feel on edge or you see if you feel connected and happy and content. That would be a fun home experiment.   [01:48:44] Flicka Rahn: Right. Yes. Well, subjectively, I feel better when I hear music in 400 and here, I wonder if I could do it right now because I have my tuner on my phone. Alright. So here is and I will tune so that your listeners can hear this. Here is a note played in 432. Okay. Now here is the same note played in 440.   [01:49:23] Ashley James: It does sound just like a little bit anxious. I got that, yes.   [01:49:26] Flicka Rahn: So here’s again 432. This is the calm pitch. Okay. Now here is 440.   [01:49:51] Ashley James: Hitler made all the music be played at 440 Hertz to make people anxious and so they’re not happy with their present situation in life.   [01:50:05] Flicka Rahn: Exactly. Yes. That’s the way you control people. Engender fear and anxiety and stress and they’re going to look for a way so that can go away. So he said follow me, I’ll make that go away.   [01:50:18] Ashley James: How did he know to do that?   [01:50:21] Flicka Rahn: That I don’t know, Ashley. That I do not know but interestingly enough after World War II and there is also other conspiracy theories that the Rockefellers who were invested in a lot of, I’m not sure if I’m trailing all of this correctly but I knew they were involved is that then they approached the American Federation of musicians and then the worldwide Federation to make the standard 440. Now you can say maybe they wanted us all on edge so that they could control us and that was a worldwide conspiracy I don’t know. But that is what happened so that if a flute player in the United States can go to an orchestra in Japan and they’ll tune the same way. There had to be a standard but they chose that higher standard so that so that the population would feel ill at ease and not as anchored or centered.   [01:51:31] Ashley James: That’s so interesting because we listen to classical music in the car. Often we’re driving with our son. We often most of the time, I say 90% of time we’re listening to classical music. There are some times when I feel like I should be very comfortable and at ease in this a beautiful song but I’m not. I get agitated. I’m , “What’s going on?” The music is and I have to like change it to a different classical station and I’m just wondering if that was the Hertz. Very interesting that they chose to stick to 440 Hertz around the world. Well, the thing is that if they knew they could prosper from it because when you were feeling uncomfortable in your own skin, you will seek dopamine. You will seek pleasure. You’ll spend money and you won’t spend time doing internal exploration. Becoming a sovereign individual. Becoming a higher thinker. Becoming more spiritually connected. You’re going to spend more time trying to soothe the anxiety through staying in a low level so it’s easier to control a population that’s uncomfortable or that’s in pain. Than control population of a very comfortable, happy, free thinkers so that really does make sense. We want to make sure we want to be conscious. This is why my husband doesn’t – he prefers that we don’t listen to music with words because he doesn’t want to be enslaved to the mainstream narrative. Let’s just say that. Because when you’re listening to music you’re in a state of trance and if you’re taking in words that are telling you the world is a certain way then you are a slave to that narrative and if you go dive into the history of the music industry, there’s a lot of control there. We have you just did but there’s modern-day music industry. There’s a lot of control there and so I like to listen to independent musicians who aren’t trying to manipulate us but are just trying to spread love like you are. We’re being conscious. I think I like that you really bring up a point to be conscious of the music you play because it can be used as a weapon against you or use as a tool to heal.   [01:53:59] Flicka Rahn: Yes. My business partner her name is Tammy McCreary. She also was a co-author with me. She wrote the last chapter in my book and she is a manager for artists in Los Angeles. She absolutely sees that the music that is being offered now is very detrimental because yes, you’re right. That people do, they are in trance when they listen to music and so that allows the message of the words just to be accepted blindly by a brain that is not really thinking.   [01:54:42] Ashley James: It’s hypnosis.   [01:54:43] Flicka Rahn: Exactly, Ashley. Yes, right. Her goal is to wake up the musicians and say, “You have this incredible power you’ve been given. Be very careful with this because you create the future of our young people.” I get very concerned for them. I really do. I certainly don’t listen to it but your husband is right. Don’t be enslaved by – See now, I didn’t think about that you are in a kind of hypnotic trance.   [01:55:17] Ashley James: I’m a master practitioner and trainer of hypnosis. You’re talking about that music sends you from beta to alpha, what’s hypnosis. Then you’re taking in words that have suggestions that create imagery in your mind. Even in an unconscious level those are, its slipping past the conscious mind and slipping into becoming unconscious suggestions.   [01:55:44] Flicka Rahn: There no evaluation. It just goes straight in.   [01:55:47] Ashley James: Right. You’re not using your critical thinking.   [01:55:51] Flicka Rahn: Yes, yes. Amazing.   [01:55:53] Ashley James: So you listen to something over and over again and you like really – I have a friend who listens to heavy metal and he’s just a very angry person and he reinforces it and you’ve said this earlier but he reinforces it with the music he chooses to listen to. The music we choose to listen to can reinforce our neurology. Can  reinforce the way we’re thinking and our thoughts. Create our actions or actions create our behavior and our results in life. If we want to be in a state of loving empathy and be able to connect with others we need to make sure the music we choose matches that.  Hopefully at 432 hertz. Now that we know that.   [01:56:43] Flicka Rahn: Yes, right. You know there are stations or YouTube stations that have, this is not ideal but they’ve tuned things down like the orchestral pieces. The famous ones. It’s certainly better if it’s recorded from 430 Hertz rather than to be manipulated by a sound engineer to drop it down. That’s better. So that may be interesting for you to listen to expressions of the same piece to see.   [01:57:17] Ashley James: Oh, so cool. Well, it’s really interesting is after this interview I’m rushing off with my son to take him to the Seattle Children’s Chorus where he is taking classes. He’s four years old. He’s about to be five but he’s taking singing classes. It’s so adorable to see these four-year-olds singing together so that’s what I’m doing later today. I’m about to go bathe myself for an hour in children’s singing which I’m really looking forward to. Flicka Rahn, it has been such a pleasure having you here today. I would love to have you back. This has been so much fun exploring this. Thanks for getting into the really interesting topics and this is the kind of stuff I just love exploring. I really feel like we hit the meat of it by understanding that we want to vibrate with a frequency of 432. That we want to choose music that is meant to heal us and make sure that we avoid music that isn’t going to bring us healing. That isn’t either the lyrics or the sound is not in alignment with our healing goals. We want to be conscious of that because music can be a weapon or can be a tool for healing. I love that you uncovered that for us. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:58:35] Flicka Rahn: No. I just want to really encourage people to like if you’re changing a pattern be aware. Just be aware of what you’re hearing. Go into the supermarket and be aware of what you’re hearing or if you’re out in nature the sound of the birds carry such high healing frequencies so you’re being bathed in those beautiful higher frequencies that are natural in the natural world. I think just waking up and just saying, “What am I really hearing here? What am I listening to? Is that helping me or do I feel more loving now or do I feel more anxious now?” Just maybe understand that sound can have a huge impact on you as we know. It’s sound and music. To not forget about the beautiful gift of toning and help how quickly you can move to a place of peace and just calmness by doing that. If you go to your dentist, give it a shot cool. It works. I tell you, it works.   [01:59:56] Ashley James: Awesome. Cool. I’m going to tell my husband. He’s got a dental cleaning coming up next week. I’m going to teach this to him. That’s so cool. Flicka, thank you so much. Of course, the links to everything that Flicka Rahn does, it’s going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. I’ve decided I’m going to edit this episode so listeners who are hearing this have already experienced. I’m going to sprinkle your music throughout the episode. Also, now at the end of the episode. Thank you so much for gifting us some of your music that we could include in this and if listeners would like to buy your music and buy your book, please check out the show notes of today’s podcasts. Where you’ll find the links to Flicka’s book and her CDs. Also, we’d love to see you live so tell me if you’re ever going to be up in Seattle. On your website, do you display where you are when you tour?   [02:22:52] Flicka Rahn: That is forthcoming. Let’s just put that.   [02:00:53] Ashley James: Okay. Looking forward to that. Looking forward to seeing that information on your website actually. Thank you so much Flicka.   [02:01:01] Flicka Rahn: Thank you, Ashley. It’s been delightful really honey and have fun tonight with your son. That’s great.   [02:01:06] Ashley James: I will.   [Flicka Rahn Music]     Get Connected With Flicka Rahn! Website The Power of Sound And Music Website Icaros Chakra Soundscapes Website Elevate Your State Website Natural Flexes Website Innergy Tuner App YouTube Live Performance of Icaros Facebook Twitter Linkedin   Book by Flicka Rahn The Transformational Power of Sound and Music: A Handbook for Healers Suggested Reading by Flicka Rahn The Power of Sound by Joshua Leeds

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! FROM NOW TILL JANUARY 30TH (Or while supplies last) Kristen Bowen is giving Learn True Health Listeners a SPECIAL! Use this link to order your jug of magnesium and get a FREE Magnesium Muscle Cream (worth $36) PLUS 10% off with coupon code LTH https://www.learntruehealth.com/freecream   intaction.org Babies undergo severe pain and stress both during and after circumcision. Local anesthetic (if given) are only partially effective. Risks include accidental amputation, excessive bleeding, infection, Peyronie's disease (curvature), excessive skin removal, loss of sensation, and permanent lifetime disfigurement. These are called "botch jobs." In the U.S., over 100 infants per year die from complications of circumcision, as per a 2010 journal study. Doctors and hospitals are being challenged with malpractice claims now more than ever. Every child has an inalienable right to an intact body. The foreskin is a special and unique part of the body that serves several essential functions. We believe the foreskin possesses Four Powers: Pleasure, Protection, Lubrication, and Connection (between people and with oneself.) Both males and females are born with foreskin (equivalent to the clitoral hood). Even cut men were born with a foreskin. Therefore everyone has a stake in this issue. No professional medical association in the world recommends routine infant circumcision, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The Royal Dutch Medical Association, The Royal Australasian Medical Association, and The Canadian Paediatric Society have all said circumcision of newborns should not be routinely performed.   Male Circumcision And Foreskin Restoration https://www.learntruehealth.com/male-circumcision-and-foreskin-restoration Highlights: Who are the Blood-stained Men The history of circumcision Effects of circumcision Stages of foreskin restoration What Intaction does How to properly clean a baby’s intact genital   In this episode, Anthony Losquadro shares with us the history of circumcision and which countries have the highest rate of circumcised men. He also shares with us the effects of circumcision on men. Lastly, he shares how parents should clean a baby boy’s intact genital.   [0:00] Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another episode of Learn True Health podcast. I know a lot of moms and dads listen to this show, a lot of grandparents too and some future parents listen to this show as well so this really applies to everyone. Even if you don’t have male genitals I think you will still really get a lot out of this episode. It was mind-blowing to me the things that I learned from Anthony about foreskin and about circumcision. Something that we should all know especially if you’re going to be a mom of a future boy. It’s really worth knowing this information. Please, share today’s episode with your friends and your family members especially those who are pregnant or expecting or who are planning to have children. This episode is going to be that ripple. We throw that stone in the pond and watch the ripple and watch how far that ripple goes and how many lives it can help. So, I’m so excited that you’re listening to this episode and you’re sharing it so that we can get this information out there. Now, if you’ve been a listener for a while, you know that recently I launched something I’ve been working on for a while. I launched the Learn True Health Home Kitchen, which is a membership where we teach you. We make all kinds of videos, teach you how to cook whole foods, really healthy healing foods. The focus is on using food as medicine, using food to heal the body. Well, one of our members, Emily, just shared the other day in the Learn True Health Facebook group and by the way if you’re not in the Facebook group already you are welcome to join us. It’s a very supportive community. Just go to Facebook and search Learn True Health. Emily shared her testimonial and it was so good I wanted to share it with you. She says, “I have to share. I joined the Learn True Health Home Kitchen five days ago and have successfully gone from meat three times a day to only after 5:00 PM. My kids are eating actual vegetables less cheese sticks. My daughter’s poo has, for the first time in years, been a normal consistency. I don’t plan on going fully without animal products, but this resource and community that Ashley and Naomi have put together has helped me get a grip on my fridge and put me back in control of what goes in and out of it.” She says that her husband is now back to fasting like he used to before and that since she cut out processed cereal for the last five days that she noticed that her headaches have gone away. She says that her fridge is full of whole foods, lots of plants and that for the first time in this mother’s life she says, “I am not the only one eating those vegetables in the fridge. So, she’s really excited that all her kids are eating the vegetables. She says she loves the bowls module and the resources that we share. She thanks us and she says that she’s also cut way back on her coffee intake. She noticed that she has so much more energy,  that she’s not drinking coffee throughout the day and she’s actually getting to sleep better at night. So, she’s very excited and she wanted to share her experience. We’ve had others already share since we launched it about two weeks ago that their experience in the memberships has been really positive. The whole resource, Learn True Health Home Kitchen, is for everyone. You don’t have to give up meat to be part of it. We’re teaching you how to cook more vegetables, how to cook more plants, how to get more healing foods into your diet. The point of it is that wherever you are on the spectrum whether you want to eat meat at every meal or whether you want to eat no meat at all or anywhere in between, you’re going to use the videos to learn how to use food as medicine. Naomi and I choose to eat a whole food plant-based diet. We choose not to eat meat anymore and we’re noticing that’s really healing for our bodies. I respect that everyone’s at a different part in their journey, but if you listen to your body, you can dial in your diet for you. Maybe that means eating more fruit, more vegetables, more whole foods, less processed foods, less sugar, less oil, less highly processed foods and more real food. That’s what we’re teaching you. We also teach how to cook food very quickly that’s very healthy, how to save you a ton of money eating really healthy and how to be able to cook food that is super delicious, saves you money, saves you time for the whole family including picky husbands and children. So, if you love to learn any kind of resources to heal your body in your kitchen and help your family eat healthy, then come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. You can get a free tour. There’s a video that gives you a tour. Just go to LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. That’s LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen and use the coupon code LTH for the big listener discount. Thank you so much for being a listener. I really hope to see you in the Learn True Health Home Kitchen because we are adding new recipes every week. It’s just growing and growing and it’s so much fun to see people expanding their palate and healing their body with food. Thank you so much for sharing today’s episode. Thank you so much for being a listener. Enjoy today’s episode and enjoy the rest of your day.   Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 408.   [0:06:08] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest and for this topic. I’m really passionate about this topic and we’ve never covered it on the show after over 400 episodes with all kinds of topics. When Anthony reached out to me, my husband actually saw the email first and he got really excited because the two of us are very passionate about this. It isn’t talked about enough in the society. So, I love that Anthony that you are an advocate, that you are giving a voice to the children who don’t have a voice. So, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking about something that I didn’t even think about until I was actually pregnant. I didn’t even think about it. We were in San Diego, right around the Convention Center, there was a bunch of men protesting. We were driving by and life has it that we have the right kind of timing in life. So, the red light came and we were right there at the red light, the very first car. There’s a bunch of men standing there holding signs with babies on it. I couldn’t really understand what they were protesting. They were wearing white boxer shorts and white shirts with a big red dot on their crotch. The sign says something like, “I was never given a choice.” We sat there and we were scratching our heads going, “What are they talking about?” Then finally it hit us. They were protesting circumcision. They were spreading awareness about the choice. The ability to choose whether to be circumcised or not. Well, we kept driving when the light turned green but this sparked a conversation between my husband and I. It began our dive into looking at circumcision and the pros and cons because up until then I thought circumcision was of incredibly positive thing. I mean, don’t all men get circumcised because isn’t the foreskin dirty and nasty and we shouldn’t have it. Haven’t men done this for thousands of years? Isn’t it in the Bible? Well, lo and behold. We started looking deeper and deeper. We saw that babies die in the United States from circumcision. That it actually causes a lot of damage. My husband ended up discovering that some issues that he’s had his entire life that he didn’t realize that they were actually caused by his circumcision. He said it was okay for me to share this because he said if even one man learned something from his experience or even when parent learned something from his experience, then he would be really happy. So, when we saw your email that you wanted to come on the show and share your information, oh man I was so excited. So, welcome to the show.   [0:09:13] Anthony Losquadro: Ashley, thanks for having me on the show. You really started off at a great introduction. The group that you saw was a group known as the Blood-stained Men. They travel around the country raising awareness on this issue that like what you said, a lot of people never have given any thought.   [0:09:31] Ashley James: Right. Well, at the time we were pregnant, we knew we were probably but we didn’t know that we were pregnant with our son. So, by the time we were ready to give birth we were 100% sure that circumcision was off the table. We had seen the information and we came to a very educated decision that the healthiest thing for our son was to allow him to be intact. What was really interesting is in talking to our doctors about this because we had several of them, I’m kind of an overachiever in that sense. We had midwives and naturopaths and OBGYNs that we all were working with. All of them started to share these really interesting statistics that blew my mind. That it’s actually becoming more and more common for parents not to circumcise. My husband’s concern would be that if our son was the only one not circumcised in the locker room he’d be embarrassed or something because his would look different. Well, first of all men, don’t go around staring at each other in the locker room, but he was worried that maybe our son would wonder why he looked different. Then all the doctors were sharing with us that in certain areas of the United States, it’s almost half of men. It’s something like 40 something percent of men are not circumcised. So, it’s becoming more and more common, which is good because parents are waking up to this information. I’m really curious though, Anthony, what happened in your life that made you want to become an advocate around this? Now, your website is intaction.org. Of course, links to everything that you do is going to be the show so today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Tell us your story. What happened that made you want to become the founder and director of Intaction and that you wanted to give children a voice and help raise awareness around the importance of an intact body?   [0:11:34] Anthony Losquadro: Well, Ashley, there’s a number of things that have impacted my life that kind of put me on the path that I’m on. When I first started, this issues I became aware of it when I was a very young boy. I was maybe seven or eight years old and I went to Florence, Italy. I saw all of these sculptures and statues by Michelangelo for instance. First of all, I saw these statues they’re all naked. So, I thought that was pretty crazy. The male statues, the male figures all had intact penises. I started to wonder what happened to them or why were they different from me? Why were they different from us? Something didn’t seem to add up to me. That’s when the first earliest days I started to recognize it something was being done. Growing up I always noticed on my body there was a scar on my penis that everybody had circumcised has a scar. It’s from the device they used to crush the foreskin. I could never recall anything happening to me but why was my body this way and why wasn’t anybody talking about it? So, later on in life as I began to research this issue and information became more available over the internet, I started to have a better understanding. The thing they say once you start learning about circumcision, the more you learn the more shocked you become.   [0:13:14] Ashley James: It’s so true. I’m shocked that female babies are circumcised because that is brutal. I guess in our society we accept male circumcision as normal but female circumcision is barbaric. Well, they’re actually both incredibly barbaric.   [0:13:34] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. That’s right. All of the issues that surround male genital cutting are the same when it comes to female genital cutting or female genital mutilation, whatever you want to call it or female circumcision. The word circumcision, first of all, it’s just a euphemism to really cover up what they’re actually doing. What we’re doing when we say we’re going to circumcise is we’re cutting genitals. We are cutting normal healthy body parts whether it’s off of a boy or whether it’s off of a girl. I don’t like to get into a debate who’s got it worse. Do little girls have it worse than little boys or vice versa? Deaths occur in both sides, complications occur in both sides, pain and trauma occur in both sides. So, I don’t like to say that one has a greater standing on the issue than the other. It’s human genital cutting. We need to stop cutting babies altogether and young children altogether.   [0:14:41] Ashley James: So, you started to look into it. You started to question it. What happened in your life though that made you become the founder and director of Intaction? What clicked for you? Is there a story there?   [0:14:56] Anthony Losquadro: I felt that I had a lot of experience in the business world and I can apply some of this to create change in America and to help educate Americans about why we need to re-examine this issue, but really the seminal moment for myself and for many others in the intactivist movement and we like to call ourselves intactivists, which is just a conjugation of intact activists so promoting intact bodies. In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a statement that seemed to reverse where their previous stance was and they seemed to encourage circumcision despite much lobbying on side of intactivists for them not to do this. It was almost preordained. When they decided to change the policy. They claimed they were going to study all the literature. They were going to do a comprehensive investigation on this, but I know they pre-baked the cake. They knew what the decision was going to be before they even started it. I know this because I have thousands and thousands of their emails, which I was able to obtain. I can see the deliberations between the committee members. They were going to go to a positive pro-circumcision policy statement way before 2012. They started this in 2009. They issued their statement in 2012. This incensed many intactivists like myself. The American Academy of Pediatrics, first and foremost people have to understand, they are not an organization that promotes the interest of children first. They are a doctors’ trade association. They are there. It’s all about the money, unfortunately, like many things in this country and many things in the world. I hate to say and it’s a bit of a cliché but it is all about the money. Because if you look in their policy statement in 2012, one of the things they were very outspoken on is that insurance payments must continue for infant circumcisions. So, this is a big moneymaker for hospitals and for the doctors that do them. So, this incensed many people. It incensed me. I felt like if innocent babies. Our children, have this goliath against them, who’s going to speak for them? Who’s going to help educate the parents to be able to stand up to all this pressure? I could tell you. When my own son was born they kept pestering us, “Are you going to cut them?” “No.” You’re going to circumcise him? Let’s circumcise. They pressure, the doctors pressure parents to do it. So, I felt the need that I need an organization to get like-minded people together to work together, help educate people so they could stand up to this pressure. The next generation of children, the next generation of Americans can have healthy intact bodies the way nature designed us to be.   [0:18:10] Ashley James: You let me know that in the US, over a 100 babies die every year due to complications of circumcision and it was part of a 2010 journal study. That’s unacceptable. That’s just the United States alone, right? Can you imagine worldwide, how many children die from an elective procedure that does not need to happen? Now, let’s talk about the pros and cons so people understand because I’m sure that those that are listening, this is like the first time they’ve ever heard that circumcision is not a great option. What are the pros of having a circumcision? Right and what are the cons? Lay it out for us.   [0:18:59] Anthony Losquadro: Pros, it’s oftentimes a religious or cultural custom that parents feel obligated to get or parents may have anxiety that they feel if they don’t get this done their children may have health issues later on in life. So, this anxiety may compel them to do this or throw reason and logic out the window. So, medically pros there are none. I’ll read you a statement, a policy statement from many many doctors representing over 20 international medical institutions mostly in Europe but all over the world. What they said is, “Circumcision fails to meet the commonly accepted criteria or the justification of preventive medical procedures in children. It has no compelling health benefit, it causes pain and it could have serious long-term consequences and it also conflicts the Hippocratic Oath of “First, do no harm.” So, these are medical institution representing thousands and thousands of doctors that have said this. So, I want people to understand if they think there are health benefits and they may have read things in the news media or the press or maybe they read something online about it’s going to prevent this or it’s going to prevent that. If they were to get past that, first of all, you can’t believe everything you read in the news because reporters often get it wrong and they tend to uphold the status quo. But if they were to dig down into the studies like we have and looked at this stuff, they would realize that there’s nothing there. People in Europe have stayed intact. They’re intact now, they were intact 100 years ago and they were intact 1000 years ago. They’ve had no health issues related to having intact genitals. So, why is this provoking anxiety in Americans? Because Americans have been sold this bill of goods from American doctors, the American medical system, that goes back over 100 years in America.   [0:21:22] Ashley James: Can you walk us through the history of circumcision?   [0:21:26] Anthony Losquadro: It’s a bizarre history and I’d love to. Circumcision was uncommon in America up until around the 1890s. What happened back then is it was the Victorian age. It was an era of where they tried to have greater attention to morals and morality. America became obsessed with stopping masturbation. They thought masturbation was the root of so many mental and physical ills. That they had to take all resources and all actions necessary to try to restrain this behavior. First, doctors thought that they could circumcise men to get them to stop, but then they quickly realized that was a hard sell. Right? Because an adult knows how good that feels and they’re not cutting parts off their body especially on their genitals. So then doctors then reasoned well Plan B let’s do it to babies and then we will just have to convince the parents that it’s going to be better for them. We had doctors of the time. Now, you’re going to recognize this name, John Harvey Kellogg. He was the inventor of Kellogg’s cornflakes. He thought masturbation was a serious issue. He was a celebrity doctor of his day. He wrote books. He ran a medical institution. He was one of those figures from back then that convinced parents that circumcision needed to be done. Then we had another guy who’s by the name of Dr. Lewis Sayre. He was a doctor in New York City. He claimed that circumcision prevented all kinds of things. He claimed it cured epilepsy, mental illness and hernias. He said genital irritations and masturbation are deemed to be the causes of these issues. Lewis Sayre went on to become the president of the American Medical Association. So, this is what we had going against us. This is how it started in America. As time went on and as more and more babies became born in hospitals, actually around 1940 was the break-even point where more babies were born in hospitals as opposed to being born at home. Doctors took over the birth process. Oftentimes, babies were circumcised without parents even having to be able to consent to it.   [0:24:08] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [0:24:09] Anthony Losquadro: Right. I mean back then the father couldn’t even be in the delivery room. So, they took over the birth process. Also, medical insurance became more commonplace. So, doctors could get paid to do it. Going into the late 40s and into the 1950s circumcision rates really started climbing. They probably peaked right around 1970. That’s kind of the history of circumcision in America. There’s some other things. There’s elements of racism and xenophobia. There’s always panic over illness and disease, which some in the medical industry are always happy to exploit. That’s what drove the rates up so high in America. It happened here for the most part. Europe never experienced this maybe with the exception of England.   [0:25:06] Ashley James: I’m confused. How did racism and xenophobia drive circumcision?   [0:25:11] Anthony Losquadro: Well, there was a doctor back in 1894. His name is Dr. Peter Raymond Eno. He said that circumcision of Negroes was a remedy in preventing their predisposition to raping people. When it comes to xenophobia you had the great immigration waves of the 1920s. People from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, upper-class white Americans were looking to differentiate themselves from the dirty unclean masses coming in. Circumcision became part of that. If you were able to circumcise your child that meant you could afford a hospital birth.   [0:25:55] Ashley James: Oh, they spun it. The media spun it so that it was a status symbol.   [0:26:02] Anthony Losquadro: It became a status symbol. Just like formula-feeding, that became the modern thing to do. If you had the money you could afford formula. You formula-fed your baby as opposed to breastfeeding. That’s for the peasants out in the countryside. We don’t do that.   [0:26:18] Ashley James: Meanwhile, they were damaging their children. They’re damaging their children’s health and they’re damaging their children’s bodies not knowing that it was the so-called peasants that probably their children were healthier as a result of being breastfed and intact. So, what about circumcision around the world? Is America kind of an oddity? Is this the country that has the most circumcision? What about around the world?   [0:26:48] Anthony Losquadro: In the current day with some isolated pockets if you take out people of the Muslim faith and the Judaic faith, you take them out, 99% of the men in the world are intact. So, there are some pockets here and there like for instance in the Philippines, they practice circumcision even though they’re Catholic. South Korea practiced circumcision. They still do, although it’s starting to back off. That was American influence from the Korean War when American medics were providing free health care, they kind of spread it there. Places that were doing it like for instance Australia and the UK had high circumcision rates also up until about World War II. Then as their national health services took over, they decided they’re not paying for this anymore. They cut it out of their insurance and rates plummeted, whim. Again, circumcision rates in England are very very low, Australia very very low.   [0:27:50] Ashley James: I’m from Canada and growing up I knew people who were and who were not. I had discussions actually with my friends’ moms about it because I thought it was kind of interesting. They said that they had the choice. That in the hospital it was not pressured. The pressure wasn’t put upon them but that they could choose. They could elect to have it or not to have it because Canada being a one-payer medical system. So, the government doesn’t want to pay for something it doesn’t have to, luckily. It’s still a common practice there because the United States influences these other countries. Interesting though, in the latest statistics, does the United States have the highest rates of circumcision compared to all other countries?   [0:28:51] Anthony Losquadro: I would say amongst developed countries, you have different countries in Africa that circumcise depending on their tribe and the culture. Again, the Muslim world almost universally circumcise as boys. So, you mention Canada. Also in 2015, the Canadian pediatric society came out. They do not recommend circumcision policy statement.   [0:29:19] Ashley James: Interesting.   [0:29:20] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. They’re distancing themselves even further from their past.   [0:29:23] Ashley James: Well, it’s interesting that the Canadian pediatric society is saying don’t do it and the American pediatric society, or whatever the American version, is saying to do it. It’s always look at the money. Look at the money. That’s very sad that the pediatricians in the United States are going after the money and not after the health of the child.   [0:29:50] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement, it’s vague and it’s conflicting. There are parts of it that seems to say that it recommends it. Then other parts they say, “Well, it’s not a recommendation but we’ll leave it up to the parents.” So, they kind of vaguely word it. So, it’s kind of like reading tea leaves. You can interpret into what you want. They do say that if parents want it, insurance should pay for it.   [0:30:23] Ashley James: Let’s talk about foreskin. What purpose does foreskin have? What does it do for the body? Again, we’ve grown up thinking foreskin is something you could throw into the trash the second you’re born. Like God created us as these amazing beings and His image, but definitely the second you’re born you should cut off this little extra piece that he accidentally left on you if you’re a boy. It’s just kind of crazy to think that God made a mistake when he created us so you should cut off this little part. So, what purpose does foreskin serve?    [0:31:02] Anthony Losquadro: It serves a lot of purpose. It’s a wonderful anatomical adaptation that males are born with. Incidentally, women also have foreskin in the form of the clitoral hood, but the male foreskin has what we call the four powers. That is pleasure, protection, lubrication and connection. The foreskin offers 20,000 specialized nerve endings known as Meissner’s corpuscles that are fine touch neural sensors. The foreskin protects the end of the penis. It keeps it covered and it keeps the skin moist and supple underneath. It provides its own lubrication. It’s better overall. Guys that are intact say they have a terrific overall experience because of what they’re sensing through their foreskin and with their partner. Nature doesn’t make mistakes. It put this on our body for a reason. The skin slides back and forth. That’s where most of the sensitivity is. The head of the penis is relatively insensitive. It may come to a shock for some people. I’ll even give – for the guys out there that are listening to this, they can try this. The head of the penis can’t feel hot and cold. A lot of people may not realize. It doesn’t have heat and cold receptors. You could prove this to yourself if you were to go into a guy, not you personally, but if you were to go into a shower with an ice cube. You put warm or hot water on just the head of your penis without getting anything else, not the shaft area, just the head. You put an ice cube on and you go back and forth. You can’t feel any difference. You can feel the pressure, but a guy can’t feel hot and cold.  Most of the sensation, all the different types of nerve receptors are in the foreskin. There’s a structure in the foreskin. People always ask me, “Well, you’re cut so how do you know?” I know because I can study anatomy and I can study histological studies by researchers like Taylor. They studied the foreskin and they found the structure, Taylor found the structure, in the foreskin called the ridged band. That’s like this wrinkled section of skin that goes around the foreskin. That’s where all those Meissner’s corpuscles reside in. The studies Taylor did, he found that that rich band and the frenulum band underneath, the frenulum band is that piece of skin. It’s almost like a rubber band. It helps the foreskin go back forward when it’s not in use. Those are the most sensitive parts of the penis. Those are all cut off during circumcision. So the most sensitive part of a guy that’s been circumcised, cut is around the circumcision scar of the penis. That’s what he’s got left. That’s where the nerve endings stop. It’s called neurotmesis. Its death of the nerve endings there. That’s where they can feel.   [0:34:14] Ashley James: So, the argument is that doesn’t having a foreskin mean you have a really dirty penis that is more prone to infection? Doesn’t not having a foreskin make it easier to keep a penis clean?   [0:34:32] Anthony Losquadro: I always like to say a joke when somebody tells me that. I think guys that say that, they have an over-exaggerated sense of how well-endowed they are. They think that their penis is so big it might take an hour to clean it. I mean, seriously, if you take a shower once in a while or a bath or maybe some guys just use baby wipes, I don’t know. It’s not that hard to keep it clean. Once you clean it it stays clean for quite a while. I have other parts on my body, which we don’t have to get into, they get a lot more dirtier a lot quicker. All right. Anyhow, we expect guys to brush their teeth. So, if they can brush their teeth they can’t wash their foreskin, which takes like two swipes in the shower. It’s not a big deal.   [0:35:28] Ashley James: I know. It’s a funny argument for, “Well, we should remove the skin because clearly you won’t be able to keep it clean.” It’s just so weird.   [0:35:35] Anthony Losquadro: I mean, yeah. Maybe if your life goal was to be homeless or something where you had no access to taking a bath, maybe then you should be circumcised. By then your teeth are probably falling out and who knows what other problems you have. So, I think the hygiene is just a red herring. It’s laundry list persuasion. Laundry list persuasion is when somebody’s trying to convince you of something and they throw so many different things at you that individually they have no merit behind them but they hope that the sum of all of zeroes adds up to something.   [0:36:22] Ashley James: Sounds like a pediatrician trying to make a profit, make a boat payment or something. So you said there’s four powers of the foreskin. One being pleasure. We just talked about that. That by removing foreskin. You’re removing 20,000 nerve endings and most of the sensation of a penis we’re basically removing the ability to fully feel. That’s really really sad. I imagine that’s something very similar to happens to female children when there’s female circumcision. That many of their, if not most of the nerve endings, are removed. Again, both situations I feel are barbaric. So, we’re removing the ability to fully feel and have pleasure, which we know in today’s age it’s 2020. We know that having fully feeling pleasure with our partner is not sinful. It’s beautiful. It helps to create a wonderful intimate loving relationship. It’s part of that. It’s part of a healthy relationship with our partner. So, that’s pleasure has been severely stunted. Now, protection is the next one. How is protection removed when we remove the foreskin?   [0:37:43] Anthony Losquadro: Well, the foreskin keeps, it’s like the eyelid protects the eye. The foreskin is a cover over the end of the penis that keeps it protected, it keeps the skin underneath moist and supple. There is also some antibacterial properties that the foreskin contains. There are cells called Langerhans cells. They emit a substance that is antibacterial. Again, that’s nature kind of programming this all into the mix there.   [0:38:16] Ashley James: Wow. So, we’re removing part of the immune system that protects the penis?   [0:38:23] Anthony Losquadro: Unfortunately, yeah. Langerhans cells in the foreskin that have an immune function. They’re like sentries. They’re early alert sentries. If an invader, a pathogen comes in and presents itself to that area that it alerts the immune system to respond.   [0:38:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Are there any studies or any data where we’re seeing that men who are intact with their foreskin have less occurrences of UTIs or penile cancer or any kind of infections versus those who have had their foreskin removed?   [0:39:02] Anthony Losquadro: I think when we look at European studies, we don’t see any difference intact men and men that have been cut. When you’ve been circumcised that mucosa tissue becomes keratinized and dried out. So that thick layer, that thick leathery skin that forms it’s more like skin on the rest of your body instead of being sensitive mucosa tissue. That forms a more denser barrier to infections perhaps. The foreskin in it of itself, we don’t see much difference. I don’t think that men that are intact have lower rates of STDs, but I don’t think they have higher rates either.   [0:39:45] Ashley James: Okay. So, that’s not even a point for anyone to bring up because I know that some doctors say that those who are circumcised have slightly less chance of getting HIV. Has that come up for in your research?   [0:40:03] Anthony Losquadro: It comes up all the time because the press has hyped it and the researchers that did the studies have hyped it. Yeah. Those studies, there’s only three of them that were done. There was one done in Rakai, Uganda; Kisumu, Kenya and Orange Farm, South Africa. There’s only three studies. These things have gone on and on since they were done around 2009-2010. They’re highly highly disputed by a number of academics and a number of doctors. You have to understand, these researchers who did this, they got millions and millions and millions of dollars for themselves and the institutions they work for in terms of grants from the Gates Foundation and from US government. Back then, this is before the advent really of antiretroviral drugs that is really bringing HIV under control. Before that they didn’t have that. They gave them all this money to do something. They concocted these studies. If you read their press releases they’ll say they’re gold-standard studies. When you look into their data and you look into their methodology it’s so flawed that the only reason why they got away with this is most people don’t understand it and I’ll give you an example. In one mistake, take one study so let’s say the study participants were 3000 men. So, you have 1500 that we’re going to be intact and you had 1500 that were going to be circumcised. Well, first of all you have to convince 1500 men to get circumcised, right? Because you have to tell them upfront they’re going to have a benefit. What are you going to them if the study showed no benefit? “Sorry, we took your foreskin off for no reason.” So, you take these circumcised men. Now, the intact man they said okay go back home and live your life and do whatever. Then the circumcised men they couldn’t have sex for the first month, two months, three months maybe even because they’re healing. Then the study is supposed to go say a year and a half. I don’t have the original time frame of the study but they stopped the study short. They stopped the study like after six months. So, the guy had surgery they were only exposed for a very short period of time. What makes these studies so fraudulent is that all three studies they stopped. They cut them. They stopped the study in half the amount of time it was supposed to be. They claimed it was due to ethical reasons that they had to offer circumcision to the intact group before they caught HIV.   [0:42:48] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That is so – I can’t believe it.   [0:42:55] Anthony Losquadro: They pre-baked the outcome of the study. Then what they did is they press release, big press releases. “Circumcision we reduced it by 60%. Wow, isn’t that amazing? The millions of dollars you gave us wasn’t that so well spent.” They don’t even tell you the 60% number is actually an absolute reduction from 2% to 1.2%, but they couldn’t say that because that’s not a great press release. So they say, “We reduced it by 50% – 60%. It’s amazing. It’s like a vaccine. We should be doing this. Give us more money. We need to set up clinics to do it now.” Unfortunately, these poor Africans are being pressured into doing this and it still goes on to this day. The US government continues to fund these programs. They actually pay people in the community to go out and be like recruiters to get men to come to the clinics to get circumcised. They’ll set up soccer teams. You can’t participate on the soccer team unless you get circumcised. Now, they just realize that the botched rate is like becoming off the chart. Many young African babies are being botched for life from this program. So, now they may even be moving away from doing it to the babies. All this stuff’s going on in Africa. There are some groups, intactivists in Africa, that are starting to get organized and fight back against this. If American parents are thinking that’s a reason to circumcise their son they really need to learn more about this.   [0:44:39] Ashley James: Well, just wear a condom. If you’re worried about HIV wear a condom. Only have intimacy with your partner after you’ve both been tested. I mean, just take precautions. Take a few steps but don’t cut off your son’s half of his genital because you think it might prevent him from catching HIV one day. That’s planning for bad parenting right there.   [0:45:08] Anthony Losquadro: It’s sad. If somebody is in a high-risk group then they should take antiretroviral drugs like PrEP. That will give them much much more protection than circumcision ever possibly could.   [0:45:22] Ashley James: Wow. Okay. So, you look into the studies and you see that it’s totally botched studies and just made-up exacerbated numbers so they can make money. It’s all about the money. It’s really really sad.   [0:45:39] Anthony Losquadro: If you’re a professor in an academic institution, your career is based on how many grants you can bring into that institution. Professors and these academics need to constantly be publishing and they constantly need to be trying to get grants. They found a nice juicy target with circumcising Africans.   [0:46:03] Ashley James: This is just sick and sad. All right. So, by removing foreskin we remove pleasure, 20,000 nerve endings, most of the sensation of the penis. We are removing the protection. There is a whole immune system that we are removing. Talk about lubrication. I never knew. So, it’s actually a like a mucosa like you said it’s almost like an eyelid where it’s like a kind of mucosa tissue?   [0:46:34] Anthony Losquadro: It’s a mucosa tissue. It’s naturally moist. The technical name is exudate. There’s a liquid that kind of leaks out from the skin and it provides zone emollients and moisture to both the head of the penis and to the foreskin itself to keep the skin moist and supple.   [0:46:57] Ashley James: And clean. Isn’t that also kind of like a self-cleaning mechanism like females have?   [0:47:05] Anthony Losquadro: Well, it sheds dead skin cells and the individual has to clean it. Just like all parts of your skin, you’re constantly shedding skin cells. If you don’t wash it for a long time, many many days maybe as long as a week, you would produce a substance, again I use you figuratively I don’t mean you personally. I’m from New York and that’s just the way I talk. Everybody’s a you.   [0:47:37] Ashley James: Yeah. A you.   [0:47:40] Anthony Losquadro: It would produce a substance called smegma, which is the thing everybody jokes about. That’s the emollients and the substances after they go rancid if you’ve never washed it for a very long period of time. That could get a little gross, but hey, you don’t brush your teeth you’re going to get gingivitis and your teeth will fall out too. So, it’s just a normal function of the body, which is a very easy thing to clean.   [0:48:07] Ashley James: All right. So, it keeps it moist and lubricated. So, removing that makes the skin, like you said, it becomes scar tissue, becomes hard and dense almost like leather. That’s just wrong. Okay, connection. You talk about connection. Why does removing the foreskin remove connection?   [0:48:29] Anthony Losquadro: Well, this is kind of an intangible part of having this anatomical function, a feature. It’s being connected with your partner, intact body to intact body. All that sensation. You’re both connected that way. It’s the way nature intended us to be. Circumcision interferes with that. Somebody said, “You can’t change form without changing function.” This is the way the penis was designed to function and go together with the vagina. This is the way everything works together. That’s the connection that two people can have.   [0:49:15] Ashley James: I wonder, I mean this would be kind of an interesting study to look at the numbers, but I wonder if men who are circumcised have higher rates of rape or violence or just there’s something missing. There’s something missing from their body and from their experience and maybe they’re unable to get over that frustration of not having what their bodies meant to have. I just wonder if there’s a, I don’t want to say correlation, but just statistically if men who are intact or more at peace with their body than men who aren’t?   [0:49:57] Anthony Losquadro: Well, I’m not a psychologist so just speaking on a speculative basis. I think when you look at sexual abusers or predators, I think one of the things that’s in their background is they were in turn abused in their past and they were repeating that. When you take a baby or you take a young child and you cut off part of their body, you tell them that you don’t respect their body, their integrity, their autonomy. We’re in this “me too” era now. One of the questions that comes up is how do we expect young men or men in general to respect a woman’s body, to respect a woman’s space and a woman’s dignity when they themselves weren’t respected or their own bodies were altered. Their genitals no less. In a sense really, although it’s not an intentional abuse, it’s a form of abuse. It’s happened to them.   [0:51:05] Ashley James: If you were to take that exact same statement though and talk about a female genital mutilation, if you were to say that, we would say 100%, every listener would say, “Yeah. Female genital mutilation is abuse.” It is barbaric and it’s abusive. I don’t care if it’s part of someone’s culture. Things got to change. So, we need to look that yeah, if that same procedure is happening to a boy, to a girl it’s just the same. You’re doing it to a newborn baby. It’s eight-pound baby. We’re cutting, we’re mutilating their genitals. What are we thinking? What are we doing? We need to start questioning the status quo because if we just go through the baby mill of going to a hospital and just doing what everything our doctor wants us to do, they’re doing a lot of for-profit stuff to our newborn babies that are not helping them. Removing part of their genitals is one of them. So, we need to, as parents, ask questions and stand up for ourselves and demand more from our society, demand a better look at what we’re doing to newborn babies. I just think this is just crazy.   [0:52:40] Anthony Losquadro: It is. It’s insane.   [0:52:42] Ashley James: You talk about botched jobs. This is where it gets kind of sad, really sad. But I was just reading on Facebook. I was just reading actually a friend of a friend was posting about how she’s a great mom and she regrets so heavily. She regrets the day that she circumcised her son. They botched it. He will never have use of his penis. That blew my mind. He’s like five years old. They botched it to the point where he’ll never be able to have sex. I couldn’t believe that that that actually happens right now, in this day and age, here in the United States. So, can you tell us a bit about statistics and the risks that go into having a circumcision?   [0:53:42] Anthony Losquadro: There unfortunately happens more often than people realize. Often times it gets swept under the carpet. The parents that are party, they’ve been also victims of this because what happened to their son. They want to kind of put it onto the carpet. The hospitals, they’ll just pay off some malpractice settlement deal in court just to make it go away, but it happens quite frequently. I can tell you, there was a study done in Utah using the all claims database, which is an insurance database. If you do study off the all claims database that’s considered one of the best sources of data. Researchers there found an 11.5% serious complication rate from circumcision. If you’re a pediatric urologist, the biggest job you have is repairing circumcision complications.   [0:54:42] Ashley James: 11.5% of boys, of baby boys, newborn baby boys have some form of complication. What do these complications look like? I mean, disfigurement. Are they actually slicing off, accidentally slicing off half the penis? What is the complication?   [0:55:04] Anthony Losquadro: Complications run the gamut. It could be excessive hemorrhaging or bleeding during the procedure. It could be removal of too much skin. It could be misapplication of the circumcision clamp that causes gouges or actually amputates some or all of the penis because obviously a baby is so small. If the doctor is off even a millimeter or so with this clamping device which crushes the foreskin. He can crush not only the foreskin but part of the penis.   [0:55:37] Ashley James: So, 20,000 nerve endings are being crushed in a newborn baby?   [0:55:41] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. Yeah. They’re removing the whole foreskin. So, these complications can also be infection. There could be complications that develop later on in life called meatal stenosis. Stenosis is a medical term meaning narrowing of a particular part. What happens is the urethra, which is the part that you urinate through, because of the scar tissue can tend to increase with time. You can have difficulty having urination baby or the male or the older male, mature male can have. They have to go in and kind of roto-rooter that out somehow. So, not only did the baby have to go through all this pain and trauma to begin with, now he’s got to have to go through corrections and revisions and sutures. He’s not going to have a penis that looked like the one that nature gave them. He’s going to have one that doctors had to do reconstructive surgery on. You’re talking as much as like over 100,000 botchers a year. Botchers complications a varying degree. There’s a case going on in New York right now that I was initially consulted on. One doctor did severe damage to babies’, two different babies, penises using a type of circumcision clamp called a Mogen clamp, which is still widely in use. This has the highest malpractice rate of all the circumcision devices yet hospitals continue to use it. This doctor botched two babies in a row, severe that part of the head of their penis is missing. There was a baby down in Georgia where they amputated the whole entire penis with that device and they didn’t tell the mother. Get this. The doctor wrapped the baby up and said, “Okay. Take him home.” The mother took the baby home. This was a baby of color so I guess they felt that they could take advantage of this situation, maybe she wouldn’t realize it. The bleeding wouldn’t stop. The mother took the baby to the emergency room and part of the penis was missing. The doctors put it in their refrigerator.   [0:58:09] Ashley James: What?   [0:58:12] Anthony Losquadro: So, this is one of the most egregious cases of current history. This was Stacey Willis. You can google it. This was highly reported. She ended up with a huge insurance judgment, huge court judgment. But money is never going to replace what this child has to go through, what kind of life is he going to have with his genitals missing.   [0:58:40] Ashley James: Yeah. I keep coming back to compare it to a woman. We wouldn’t do this to a woman. Why are we doing this to men? Both men and women should have equal rights when it comes to choosing. They should be able to choose. I’m so happy you’re doing the work you’re doing because these babies, these newborn babies, do not have a voice. The parents are being pressured because the doctors and the hospitals want to make money. That is sick and wrong. I know more and more parents are waking up and learning about this. So, I’m happy you’re doing the work you’re doing to allow people to know. My husband gave me permission right before this interview. I think it’s a sensitive topic. I told him I’ll tell the story without mentioning him. He said, “No, it’s okay.” Because he said it would kind of be weird if I told the story with saying a friend of mine. He goes, “It’s fine. You could tell them my story.” So, he has had issues his whole life. He’s 51 now. He has had issues his whole life and not known that it was because his foreskin was removed. Then about five or six years ago, I discovered medium.com. I think it was kind of newish or new to me. So, we were looking at medium.com as a place for me to write some health articles. My husband was looking over my shoulder and we’re both looking at the computer screen. He says, “Check this website out. It’s really cool. Medium.com. It’s a place where you can go and publish articles.” So, I went to it and of course the first thing I click on is the health section. I’m like, “Let’s look to see what the top health article is.” We click on it and the top article was not only about circumcision but about regrowing your foreskin. I thought it was a joke because that just sounds like, “What do you mean regrowing? Why would you even? Why would you want foreskin? Wasn’t it a good thing to have it removed?” So, we click on it and start reading. It was a very detailed article about how men, when you have your foreskin removed, you’ve lost the 20,000 nerve endings. You’ve lost pretty much all the sensation, but you’ve also lost this protection. Always having the organ, the head of the penis, touching things like touching your underwear, just touching stuff all the time is making it less and less sensitive. It’s sort of desensitizing it. Part of the function of the foreskin is to protect it so it doesn’t become desensitized. Even though you said most of the nerve endings are in the foreskin, but still there’s something that happens when the head is constantly touching things. So, it says that by regrowing your foreskin you can regain some of that. It kind of happened right around the same time that we saw those men who were protesting in San Diego. That helped us look into it further and look into the negatives of having your foreskin removed. He kind of got angry. He said, “I was never asked.” He started to process the emotions about it. It was really interesting to watch him talk about it and process it. He was so upset that he never had a choice and he’s had this lifelong problem with having it removed. It’s affected the quality of his life. Not our relationship because he’s done a lot of emotional work, but in his past, his past marriage, it caused a lot of stress. He ended up internalizing it and he ended up feeling shame and guilt. He ended up feeling less than and insufficient as a person. So, having your foreskin removed can severely affect, because I’ve seen it happen in him, can severely affect your identity and who you are as a person. I thought that was really interesting. So, he did a lot of therapeutic work around it. He’s really wonderful. His process has been wonderful. He ended up going through with this device that you can actually regrow or try to grow some more foreskin basically. So he’s got partially the way there and it significantly changed having regrown some. He’ll never have those nerve endings like you said but he actually did, he did grow some with this device that you wear that kind of stretches the skin and protects the penis. He noticed a really big difference in the sensation and in his problem. His problem started to become a less of a problem. The function, the functionality of it. So, I thought that was really interesting. Have you looked at the movement to regrow foreskin?     [1:04:20] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. I mean, that’s admirable that your husband was first of all able to acknowledge that there was an issue and then respond to it in a positive manner. There are many men that are doing foreskin restorations. It’s the term that it’s called. There are a number of devices available online that can assist guys who want to do this. Foreskin restoration is the means of or the process of placing gentle tension on the skin of the penis to make the skin grow back again. One of the amazing things about skin is if you put tension on it like as if a lady is pregnant, she’s going to get more skin around her belly to accommodate that growing baby inside. So, the same thing happens. Doctors or surgeons will call that skin expansion. When they have to do reconstructive surgery they will also do that. So, it’s a proven process as crazy as it sounds. It is a proven process. Men can regrow their foreskin. It does take time, it does take patience and it does take perseverance, but it can be done. Guys have done it. There’s also stages of restoration. For some guys just doing a little bit so they can get a little more slack sliding skin when they have an erection instead of for a man that had a circumcision and too much skin was removed so when he has in erections it’s like an overt taut, overblown balloon. It’s very uncomfortable. By regrowing some of the skin you can regain some of that, remove some of the tension on the skin during erection and it can have more comfortable sex. So, for some guys that’s enough. Then some guys want to continue all the way because they want the head of the penis covered all the time. They want more sliding skin. I think psychologically, they want to kind of take back what was taken from them. So, even though they don’t have all the nerve endings at least – some guys that do this successfully, doctors can’t even tell that they were circumcised before. That’s how authentic-looking it is. They grow the skin too back. It hugs the head of the penis just like an intact guy and it would fool anybody. But that’s a longer process to do that. So, there’s a range, a whole host of devices and extent that somebody wants to purchase. People or guys may pursue foreskin restoration, but it is done. I think, from what I read online, more and more guys are getting into it. It’s fortunate that these things were developed because there are millions and millions of cut men out there that are having issues. This is something that can help them.   [1:07:18] Ashley James: Right. Well, I mean it doesn’t give them back the tens of thousands of nerves. It doesn’t give them back the mucosa protection. It doesn’t give them back everything, but it does give them back something. My husband has grown about 25% of it back. He had a huge, I mean it just really made a big difference for him. He just wore this device on and off for the last few years. I was really happy to see that it made such a difference for him but not only for him in performing in the bedroom. It wasn’t even about that, although that increased for him. It was actually I noticed something in him all the time. That something about having it feeling intact, feeling more intact like you said it was about reclaiming what was taken. So, it really, it affected him outside of the bedroom. It gave him a sense of completion. I mean you’d have to talk to him but it was just absolutely there is a shift that happened for him when he started to do foreskin restoration. This shouldn’t have to be. Foreskin restoration shouldn’t even have to exist because we shouldn’t be taking it away from men in the first place or women. Circumcision is harmful and barbaric. It is killing babies both female and male causing things like excessive bleeding, lifetime disfigurement. I mean that is just sick and wrong. The fact that over 100,000 babies in the United States have these complications. That’s incredible. It’s being swept under the rug because it’s all about the profits. So, we have to look where the money is look, look where the money’s going and look at the actual information and make up our minds. Anthony, tell us about your organization. Tell us what is it you guys do besides getting on podcasts and sharing this information, what does the organization do?   [1:09:33] Anthony Losquadro: What we do is educational advocacy. We need to get all of this information that we found and that we’ve become excited about learning and try to impart that information and that knowledge and that excitement into other people. So, what interaction, one of the biggest things we do is we do public events where we have a mobile unit and we have exhibits. We have an exhibit on the bizarre history of American circumcision that we discussed and we touched on and how it got started in America with Kellogg and Sayre and all these people. We have these public exhibits out like that. We have in a 3D diorama that’s interactive that people can see what doctors actually do to babies in a hospital when they circumcise them and they put the baby in this contraption that the babies spread-eagle in. It’s really like baby waterboarding. They have the baby’s arms and legs tied down spread-eagle. Then we show them the clamps that are used. All the various equipment identical as if it was happening in a hospital procedure room. So, we have exhibits like that. We have all kinds of literature that we give out. Some literature for parents of intact children that they can give to their son. It’s age-appropriate. We do it actually as like a comic strip. It helps give young men that are intact confidence about their own natural body. That they have all these natural advantages and features that guys that are cut don’t have and that their parents were really – they should be thankful to their parents for keeping them intact. So, we have this type of literature that we give out. The biggest thing we do is we talk to people face-to-face. We just don’t sit behind computers and social media. We like to get out into the public and talk to people face-to-face, listen to their questions. I consider it like a big ongoing focus group. We hear about all these different stories. We hear from people from all walks of life, all different types of religions and faiths and cultures and what they do in their home country or what happened to them in America. We hear all these different stories. We have a great interactions with the public. Most of the time it’s very rewarding in what people come and tell us. People could thank us for being out there or glad somebody’s doing this. They support us. They give us donations. They help fund. We run a vehicle so we have to pay gas and insurance and all those kind of things. We have to print our materials. We’re all volunteers. I’m a volunteer. I’m an unpaid volunteer. Even though I’m the founder and director this isn’t a business for me. This is a passion. Passion that I want to help the next generation of people. All of the directors on our board, same situation. They want to protect the next generation of children so what happened to them doesn’t happen to someone else. So we get all this. We know that we’re saving thousands of kids and they’ll never know who we are and we’ll never know who they are. It’s happening. Circumcision rates are dropping and we’re just out there spreading the word.   [1:13:09] Ashley James: The next time you see the, what did you call those men that protest that travel around the world or travel around the United States protesting?   [1:13:16] Anthony Losquadro: They are the blood-stained men. They’re a great group.                                                                                                                                                                                  [1:13:19] Ashley James: The next time you see the blood-stained men, tell them that back in 2014, it was either early 2015 or late 2014, in San Diego. I could still see him in my mind holding that sign. So, just thank them for me. It sparked this conversation. That’s actually another reason why my husband wanted to do foreskin restoration. When we decided to not circumcise our son, which was a very easy choice to make to not circumcise once we spent only a short time looking at this information. It just made so much sense to let a baby keep all the body parts it was born with. One of the reasons why he wanted to do foreskin restoration was so that by the time our son was old enough to ask questions, he wouldn’t say, “Why do I look different from you? Why do we look so different? So, I thought that was interesting.” My husband asked his mom, our son’s grandmother, “Why did you get me circumcised?” She said, “It was so that you would look the same as your father.” I thought that was really interesting. I mean back then, like you said, they took the babies away. There was not really a choice back then, but now we do. Now we can advocate and we do have a choice now. So, for those who choose to not circumcise their children and if the husbands are worried that they look so much different because they’re cut and they’re circumcised and their son isn’t, the foreskin restoration might be an avenue for them so that they end up both looking the same. If that was a cause for concern. So, it’s going in on the other direction. I’d like you to thank those men for me for sparking this whole path for our family. I can’t imagine the amount of guilt that I’d feel as a mother if I had circumcised. I can’t imagine the guilt that parents feel who circumcised and then discovered all this information afterward. It’s so hard as a parent. I mean I’m constantly struggling with the guilt of you try to do something like oh they act up and you put them in a timeout or you yell or something and then you’re like, “Did I do that right? Am I a good parent?” We’re constantly questioning whether we’re doing things right or not. I just want to say to all the parents that did circumcise, you are doing the best you can with all the resources you have. You did the best. You could with all the resources you had at the time. This isn’t about guilt and this isn’t about shaming you are guilting you. Hopefully though, you can take this information and move forward with it. Your future children or your grandchildren or your nieces and nephews and cousins and hopefully you can help spread this information and help protect future babies. Anthony, how did you deal with the guilt after you learned about it? Did you not circumcise? Did you know all this information before you had your children?   [1:16:38] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. Absolutely. My son is intact. I had the fortunate opportunity of having this information ahead of time and knowing about people that great intactivists like a lady by the name of Marilyn Milos from California, who is an early early pioneering advocate on this issue. So, what we find is that just people, parents whether it’s myself, anybody, they just need a little bit of information, just a shred just to get them thinking about it. Once you do that, they realize, “Why would I cut off part of my son’s body? It’s the most insane thing.” That’s all they need. Just like you saw the blood-stained man in San Diego. You just needed that a little bit of a push to say, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Then you realize, “Hey, there’s no reason to be doing this.” That’s all we need to do. If any of your listeners, anybody out there, if you’re having a baby, you know someone’s having a baby or a friend, family member just say, “Hey, you should look into the circumcision issue.” That way when they’re in that delivery room or wherever they’re having their baby, they’ll have the information, they’ll have the knowledge and they’ll be able to resist the pressure if it’s from doctors or they’ll just know more. If you know more you can do better.   [1:17:56] Ashley James: If you know more you can do better. Now, when our son was a newborn I realized quickly that I had no idea how to keep his penis clean being a woman, first of all, but my husband didn’t know how to keep it clean because he didn’t have a foreskin. So, the two of us were like worried like how do you keep this thing clean? Instead of me telling the listeners, is there any advice you’d like to give or let people know how can you help a baby, who is intact, who has not been circumcised, how do you keep a baby boy clean? Because we have to obviously change diapers like 12 times a day. So, how do you keep it clean? How do you make sure – you don’t pull the skin back. You don’t like wash it. How do you keep it clean?   [1:18:51] Anthony Losquadro: This is a really important thing. I’m glad you brought it up because we almost missed it. You don’t do anything. That’s the most important thing to remember. You just wipe the outside with a baby wipe or whatever you’re using. Do not by any means pull back the foreskin. Do not allow any caregivers or doctors or nurses to pull it back because on a young infant or a young child, if that is pulled back it will tear the skin underneath. There is a sealed membrane under there. Nature sealed it up so nothing can get in there. If somebody pulls it back it’s going to tear, it’s going to bleed and it’s going to be causation of scar tissue potentially and then later on in life that guy may get a condition known as phimosis, which is a foreskin that doesn’t retract because the scar tissue is not stretchy, it’s not flexible. So, the thing to do with the baby is nothing. You don’t pull it back. You just leave it alone. You clean the outside. That’s all that it needs.   [1:20:04] Ashley James: I remember finding an article. I remember lying in bed, exhausted. Having given birth and just thinking, “How am I going to clean this? What do I do? How do I change a diaper?” I found this great article explaining exactly step-by-step what to do, what not to do. It said, treat it like it’s a finger. Clean it like it’s a finger. Obviously, you’re not going to pull the cuticle back and pull your skin off your finger to clean it. You don’t want to harm the cuticle of the finger. You just wash it or just clean it. That’s it. Then leave it alone. So, I remember having to tell, like at one point we had a babysitter. I had to tell her because she didn’t know that either. So, yeah. Not only do you need to know this but you have to actually tell everyone that’s going to change your son’s diaper to not pull it back because I think the instinct is well we’re supposed to clean this part but you actually would be incredibly damaging the organ as if you were peeling the skin off of a finger. It would be very very damaging. So, it’s actually easier to take care of then than a circumcised baby. It’s easier to take care of. You just wipe it and that’s it, just leave it alone. There’s no chance of a botched or anything like from circumcision. So, it’s actually less maintenance. There’s no concern. I remember when our son was maybe six months old he said it hurt. Oh no, he was a little bit older because he was able to talk. Let’s see. Maybe he was a year old. He expressed that it hurt to pee and I looked at his penis and it was red. So, we got him in a warm salt bath because I talked with a midwife about it who also had a son who was not cut. She said, “Yeah. That can happen sometimes. There can be a little bit of a irritation or maybe a little bit of a beginning of an infection.” So, I got him in a warm saltwater bath once and that’s all he needed and then it went away. I’ve heard that it could happen. Have you heard of this? When a young boy, if it gets irritated or infected, have you heard about doing a salt bath?   [1:22:37] Anthony Losquadro: You could treat it that way. It could be two things. It could be bacterial or it could be yeast or it could just be irritation. So, if it’s a yeast type infection just some antifungal cream would clear it up. If it is a true UTI, then an antibiotic would be given by a pediatrician. It could be that. It’s uncommon, but it can happen. It can happen with cut boys too. It’s just one of the things who stay on wet diapers and they’re constantly going. So, we try to stay on top of it and keep them clean, but sometimes the yeast, the bacteria wins.   [1:23:20] Ashley James: Right. Right. So, just like you said it could happen with a cut boy just like with a not cut boy. I guess there’s fear there for parents who have never been around an uncircumcised penis. That they’re doing it wrong or that there’s a more of a chance that it could become infected. So, you’re saying just keep it clean. You don’t need to pull the foreskin back and you’re good. Those are the two things to know.   [1:23:44] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. You absolutely don’t want to pull it back. That’s called forced retraction. The only one who should be pulling it back would be the boy when he matures and becomes a certain age where he’s going to naturally notice that, “Hey look, it goes back.” That may happen at five years old. It may happen at eight years old. It may happen during puberty. Everybody’s different, but it will naturally start to retract on its own.   [1:24:07] Ashley James: It’s his right and it’s his body to choose when he does that. That’s between him and himself. No one else.   [1:24:17] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. Yeah. One day he’ll just notice, “Hey. It goes back.” Then he’ll just normally wash it when he bathes. He can pull it back himself and wash it and then everything will be fine. But before that it’s like a sealed up unit. There’s a membrane in there that’s all sealed. Keeps all the dirt and everything out of there.   [1:24:35] Ashley James: That’s cool. So, we don’t have to worry about it as parents because by the time it comes back, he’s old enough to do it himself. We got to tell him like, “Hey, once it comes back you got to clean it.”   [1:24:47] Anthony Losquadro: Right.   [1:24:48] Ashley James: Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else that we haven’t touched on that you really love to make sure you cover?   [1:24:55] Anthony Losquadro: No. I think we had a good discussion here.   [1:25:06] Ashley James: We got it all? Okay. Awesome.   [1:25:17] Anthony Losquadro: I’m going to say your last name again. I’m going to write this down this time. I’ll edit this part out. Is it Losquadro?   [1:25:18] Ashley James: Losquadro. Okay. Anthony Losquadro, it has been such a pleasure having you on the show today. I feel like we covered a really important topic. The fact that you’re spreading this information, educating parents is wonderful. I really encourage listeners to donate if they can, to spread your information, to go to your website intaction.org. That’s intaction.org. Check out everything that Anthony’s doing. Can they follow you? Are you big on social media? How do people stay connected or learn more?   [1:25:59] Anthony Losquadro: We’re on Facebook, we’re on Twitter and we have a pretty good YouTube channel and that’s growing. We’re getting more and more into YouTube videos. So, become a subscriber to our YouTube channel. Come to our website. Join up as a member, get on our mailing list. We don’t spam you. We won’t spam you. We don’t send a lot of emails out, but you keep up to date what’s going on with us, what’s going on with the issues. We have good resources available there.   [1:26:30] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much, Anthony, for coming on the show today and spreading this information. Hopefully we’ve touched some lives and there’ll be babies born with their skin intact and they’ll keep it intact and they will never know that maybe this conversation is what helped spark that. But it’ll be wonderful to know that there’s a ripple going out right now. A ripple that is going to affect thousands and thousands of future boys to be able to live a full life with all their body parts.   [1:27:02] Anthony Losquadro: Ashley, it’s a great feeling. As we like to say, “It’s foreskin for the win.”   [1:27:07] Ashley James: “Foreskin for the win.”   [1:27:10] Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition? How we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity. Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program. And it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their life and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call. Or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. And I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctors’ offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals. There are so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people. Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   Get Connected With Anthony Losquadro! Website Facebook Twitter Instagram

407 Transcending the Human Drama, Heal Your Relationship with Yourself, Letting Go of The Unconscious Negative Belief That You Are Broken or Less Than, Learn To Quiet The Mind Chatter, Truly Love Yourself, Connect to Source, and Be in the Flow with Kerri Hummingbird "Your thumbprint is a reminder that you have a unique life journey, and only you can explore it. If you don't discover yourself, no one ever will." Kerri Hummingbird IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! FROM NOW TILL JANUARY 30TH (Or while supplies last) Kristen Bowen is giving Learn True Health Listeners a SPECIAL! Use this link to order your jug of magnesium and get a FREE Magnesium Muscle Cream (worth $36) PLUS 10% off with coupon code LTH https://www.learntruehealth.com/freecream Free gift from Kerri: Love Mastery Game http://www.kerrihummingbird.com/play   Heal Your Relationship With Yourself  https://www.learntruehealth.com/heal-your-relationship-with-yourself Highlights: How to heal your relationship with yourself How to let go of the mind chatter and negative self-talk How to shift the mindset What the listening piece is How important support is  How to practice self-mastery, emotional mastery and spiritual mastery What the Skills Not Pills movement is   In this episode, Kerri Hummingbird shares with us how she healed her relationship with herself, how switching from judgment to curiosity opened up new possibilities in her life. She also shares with us that staying away from the negative environment and surrounding yourself with positive people that believes your story helps in healing yourself.   [0:00] Intro: Hello true health seeker and welcome to another episode of Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. It’s so beautiful. We get into some beautiful healing of the heart and the mind and the spirit. It’s very motivational, uplifting and deep. I just think it’s so so beautiful. I’m really excited to bring you this interview today.  I really have some exciting news for those who love the magnesium soak. If you have never heard of this and you’re like, “What magnesium soak? What are you talking about?” Go back and listen to my interviews with Kristen Bowen. You can search them easily by going to LearnTrueHealth.com and searching magnesium or searching magnesium soak or searching Kristen Bowen. I have a little search bar at the top of my website and you can find all my podcasts easily that way. Since this is episode 407, there’s 406 other episodes that you can search through and find. My interviews with Kristen Bowen are totally mind-blowing. Just to give you a little snapshot, she was I think it was 87 pounds or 97 pounds in a wheelchair having 30 seizures a day, unable to really talk her advocate for herself. That was her lowest point. I’m not going to spoil it if you haven’t heard her story. It’s really rad. You have to listen to it. It’s pretty crazy. I love how she shares it. So go back and listen to our first interview.  One of her biggest tools was soaking in undiluted magnesium from the Zechstein Sea. Now, we absorb 20 grams of magnesium through our skin when it is delivered this way. You can put it in a foot basin or put it in your bathtub and people notice such great results. In fact, there’s over 2,000 listeners who have purchased the jugs and have used them over the last year. I’ve shared, there’s hundreds of testimonials in the Learn True Health Facebook group about the magnesium soak. It’s really amazing.  Magnesium is the most important mineral in our body, 1800 processes, enzymatic processes, require magnesium. It’s the first mineral we become deficient in. So, things begin to break weird symptoms headaches, fatigue, hormone disruption, inability to fully metabolize toxins. The list goes on and on. Sleep disruption and muscle aches and pains and also restless legs, twitching of your eyelid, twitching of your muscles. These are all symptoms of magnesium deficiency, but there are over 200 symptoms of magnesium deficiency. So, I’m not going to list all of them but you can definitely listen to my interviews with Kristen Bowen to learn more. Now, she offers the Learn True Health listeners 10% off of her magnesium soak, which is really generous of her to always give us a bit of a discount. Once in a while, she throws a big special, which is what she’s doing right now. From today until January 30th, Kristen Bowen is giving us a jar of her muscle cream, her magnesium muscle cream, which is highly concentrated magnesium in the cream. It is all-natural ingredients, it’s very safe, it’s a non-toxic and it is my favorite cream. I’ve used all kinds of natural pain creams. This one’s my favorite. You rub it on your neck if you ever have tension and the tension melts away. If you ever get a headache it is so soothing. It really really really works. She’s giving it. It’s a $36 jar and she’s giving it for free as a gift when you buy a jug of the magnesium soak. You go to LearnTrueHealth.com/freecream, that’s LearnTrueHealth.com/freecream from now until January 30th. Then once you hit “Add to Cart,” make sure that you use coupon code LTH, that’s really important because that makes sure that you get this special and the discount of 10% off. So go to that special link. That’s only going to work from now until January 30th. If you’re a listener who’s listening to this after January 30th, stay tuned because Kristen does specials a few times a year for us. You can get on my email list by going to LearnTrueHealth.com. When there’s a big pop up put your email in. I promise not to spam you I send out a few emails a month usually telling listeners about really awesome specials like the ones that Kristen provides for us.  You could also join the Learn True Health Facebook group because anytime Kristen gives us a special, I announce it in the Facebook group as well. So that’s a great place to go to stay on top of these great deals. There’s other health companies that let me know about specials. So I always let you guys know because I love these products.  So, if you’ve been a listener for a while you’ve heard of the products that I use and that have helped me get to the next level in my health. I want to make sure that you guys save as much money as possible. So, anytime I love these products I usually reach out to the company and see if I can get a discount. Usually, they do the coupon code as LTH as in Learn True Health. Speaking of the coupon code LTH, if you’ve been a listener for a while you’ve heard but if you’re new listener welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here. You should totally join our community by going to LearnTrueHealth.com/group or search Learn True Health on Facebook. It’d be great to have you join our community. I believe we’re up to 3600 members now. It’s a very active and supportive Facebook group that loves to talk about holistic medicine. We’d love to have you there if you’re not already there. The coupon code LTH can be used to save a huge huge percentage when you join the new Learn True Health membership. This is something I’ve been working on for the last four months. Something that I’ve been thinking about for years actually and kind of planning it. Then I finally stepped into action and we’ve spent the last four months filming these wonderful videos. Every week, I release new lessons. Going to keep growing and growing. The Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership, I designed it with the intention to show you how to cook healthier food and how to increase the amount of nutrition you get from your food. So, if you want to save time and save money and save your health and eat food that’s healing and delicious and nutrient-packed then join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen.  You don’t have to give up your meat, if you want to stay paleo, if you want to stay whatever you’re doing, my goal is to teach you how to eat more whole foods and more plants. Now, if you want to go 100% whole food plant-based and eat this very nutrient-dense cleansing diet, I give you the tools for how to do that. If you just want to add more wonderful fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds and whole grains and legumes into your life, you’re going to learn how to do that as well. We are dairy-free, gluten-free and we do teach how to avoid allergens.  We also teach how to make healthy food for kids because I have a small child and Naomi, who’s my friend who we’ve been filming all these wonderful videos with, she has three boys. We also have husbands and so we have many palates that we have to figure out how to provide delicious but healthy foods for. We do that and they’re whole foods so there’s no processed food, there’s no chemicals. You know what? It’s pretty amazing that even the pickiest of children are loving these recipes. So, we teach you how to feed the masses, feed your children, feed your families and feed yourself healthy whole foods and also learn how to cook more efficiently so you’re saving time, you’re saving money. I can’t believe how much money I’ve saved actually since I started cooking all my meals at home and then packing and taking meals out with me instead of buying food when I’m out. I’m saving a ton of money but I’m also saving a lot of time because I figured out how to cook in a way that saves time because I’m busy like you. Wouldn’t we like to all eat three really healthy meals a day that are delicious that didn’t take us a lot of time to cook? Then notice that the health results come that you have more energy, that you have more mental clarity that you jump out of bed, that you notice aches and pains have gone. Naomi’s mom shares a great story in one of our videos. Her arthritis is gone after eating this way for, I believe she started – it was like she ate this way for six or seven weeks and then was like, “Wow. My arthritis is totally gone. All my pains are gone. My aches and pains are gone.” That’s the kind of wonderful thing that happens when people add more plants to their life. It’s detoxifying, its nutrifiying, it’s anti-inflammatory. So there’s wonderful things you can learn. Please go to LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. Use coupon code LTH to get the big listener discount. You could just go to LearnTrueHealth.com and right there at the top of the menu it says “Home Kitchen” and click there. Awesome. If you have any questions at all please feel free to reach out to me. You can reach out to me in Facebook in the Facebook group Learn True Health Facebook group or you can email me ashley@learntruehealth.com. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with your friends. I know you’re going to share today’s interview because it really touched my heart and I know it’ll touch yours as well. Enjoy today’s interview.   Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 407.   [0:09:47] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Kerri Hummingbird on the show. Her website’s KeriHummingbird.com. That’s easy to remember. Kerri with an I. Of course, links to everything that Kerri does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Kerri, I know my listeners are going to love today’s interview. This is going to be one of those really positive, uplifting, inspiring interviews. We’ve had some pretty heavy ones lately so this is going to be a really nice break to help us, to motivate us and release the guilt and the shame and all the negative emotions. Just let it go. You have so many beautiful things to teach us today. I’m just so excited to get started. Welcome to the show.    [0:10:33] Kerri Hummingbird: Thank you so much, Ashley, for having me on. I’m really looking forward to providing as much as I can in service to your listeners.   [0:10:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. Before we get started, because we talked a little bit before we hit record, you’re going to teach us so many beautiful things about opening to being present to the flow where your brilliance is, where connection is made and letting go of that mind chatter the negative self-talk. Also discussing the idea of your identity around your diagnosis. We really do take on this idea that we are broken. Letting that go and reinventing what our identity is to see that we are whole, complete and perfect. There’s so many studies showing that your mindset is directly related to your ability to heal or your ability to hold on to illness. So, I love that you’re going to help us to shift our mindset into a healing and really just beautiful peaceful joyful place. Before we get started though, learning about that, I’m really curious what happened in your life that led you to become an expert in this area teaching us how to transcend the human drama?   [0:11:56] Kerri Hummingbird: Absolutely. Well, I actually find it ironic because I guide people now in their journeys through their psychology, through their consciousness. I do it in an alternative way. I do it in a spiritual way, but that’s not how I started the journey. I actually began the journey through exploring my own psychology, sitting on the couch in weekly psychotherapy sessions. I did that for decades trying to fix myself from this idea that I was broken, that there was something wrong with me that was making me unacceptable to the people that were closest to me, that was making me need to work on myself to be better around them. While some of that was true, there was definitely some self-mastery to learn around how to handle emotional energy, for example.  There was also just a lot of misunderstanding that I experienced in the psychology field around different personal types, different types of people and how they process life experience and maybe even the tools and practices that would support people in better processing their life experience so that they don’t have the sort of behavior that would then get characterized or diagnosed in the various ways that are out there. So, at the beginning of the 20 years, was when I was 15, I had been acting out as I don’t know most teenagers do. In this case, my mom got really scared because I did well what many teenagers today are doing is that I was doing some self-harm. The self-harm that I was doing was dating a lot of boys and I’m really not respecting or honoring myself. That was leading me to feel pretty bad about myself. I’m sure you’ve got some listeners who understand that process. Budding sexuality and this culture and trying to figure out who you are.  My experience was also triggered by my early childhood. So, I think you probably talk about in this show a lot as well. Early childhood experience and how that affects your mental paradigm and your mental conditioning and the kinds of things that come up and surface in your life. I believe now they come up for healing. So, I had an early experience at 15 of that where I felt so low about myself when my dad walked in and caught me at home with a boy that I was being sexual with. I had such an incredible shame about that not only just in the moment but it triggered a lot of other things from my history. I ended up feeling so bad about myself and my dad not wanting to talk to me and wanting me to kind of stay in my room while he processed what happened. That I ended up taking a whole bottle of Tylenol-Codeine. I ended up going to the hospital, had my stomach pumped. The result of that was my first entry into the psychology field where I had a really excellent psychiatrist actually, which back in the day psychiatrists spoke to you and tried to help you understand yourself. It wasn’t about medicine and medication. He was the first person who started to help me to understand my psychology and the emotional energy that I was processing and what I was doing with it that wasn’t in service of myself.  So there was a long journey of that. As helpful as it was to see this man, it also planted a seed that there was something wrong with me because he gave me a diagnosis. He said, “We’re going to call you manic-depressive. I would call you bipolar but I don’t want to put that on your record.” Now, I’m almost like, “Uh oh.” Like you’re really broken inside. It gave me that idea. It triggered a lot of fear in my mom. So that began a set of stories about me. That there was something really really wrong with me. My mom could instantly see that there were things from my early childhood that were very traumatic that could be responsible for making me broken. So, it started this whole path. While I am very gifted by everything I’ve learned on that journey thoroughly deeply exploring thought tunnels and self-shame and guilt and all of those things, at the end of the day, what I clearly see now is that labeling people with a diagnosis gives them some temporary sense that they understand what’s happening to them but it also can trap them like a spider traps a fly in a web. It can be very damaging to a person’s psychology to have those kinds of things happen. So, the long story short is after decades of psychotherapy, it wasn’t getting better. Because what am I doing? I’m going into the office and I’m telling my story. I’m just telling the latest version of how I’m broken because the universe keeps sending me more of that, right?    [0:17:30] Ashley James: Because that’s your filter. That’s your belief system about yourself.   [0:17:34] Kerri Hummingbird: That’s my belief system and it’s being reinforced at home with my mom who has a lot of fear and guilt over the early childhood trauma. So, it’s just a story that gets perpetuated. Then I self-perpetuate. Then I chose a partner who shared a lot of the same, I don’t know, personality traits as my mother. So, I just brought more of the same to me for 20 years in that relationship and with these weekly psychotherapy sessions basically saying I’m responsible for all the problems in the family. It’s all me. It’s me. I’m causing all the problems. That is not sustainable for a person. No person can carry the weight of that their entire life and feel good about themselves. Those two you don’t go together.  So, the culmination of that story is that at the very end of all of that paradigm, the diagnosis was I was borderline personality disorder. I can tell you when I looked it up on Wikipedia back in circa 2009 or something, it wasn’t a very friendly description. It’s sort of like you’re like Glenn Close in that movie. Boiling a rabbit in her boyfriend’s home. It was not very kind and it wasn’t true either, but I couldn’t see it then. I didn’t have the self-awareness or the belief in myself because the story was so strong that I was broken and I was the problem in my family that I didn’t see it. So, it really took me deciding, ironically enough, to be bad to say, “Well, then I guess I’m just bad if after all this time I’m still broken and you can’t fix me and this is the only method you have to fix me. Then I guess I’m just going to be bad.” I left my marriage and I walked out. That first night in my new house I felt instantly better. It was like relief. I’m not going to try that anymore. I’m just done with that. So, really really quickly what happened, this is the turning point that I really hope the listeners hear. What happened was I stopped believing the authorities about me. I started opening to something bigger that was inside of me. I switched from judgment to curiosity. When I got into curiosity, like I wonder my life might be like without all this judgment? I ended up getting some spiritual teachers that help me guide along that path. I started finding out about all kinds of alternative healing, which I also know you explore in this show which is so exciting. Alternative healing, spiritual healing, energy healing. These were things that I had no concept of before and yet that was exactly the pathway that I got to feeling love within myself, which has been about an eight-year journey now. From the end of my marriage and the rock bottom and I guess I’ll just you know go off in a corner and die to hear where I’m on your show and I’m serving as an inspiration to people.   [0:20:44] Ashley James: I love it. So, when did you first move into your house? Your new house after leaving your husband and walking away – the stories that it’s like you’re walking out of this Jell-O that you’re living in where everything was reinforcing this old belief about you and you walk out of it. Now you’re in your new life switching from judgment to curiosity. When was that? How many years ago was that?    [0:21:15] Kerri Hummingbird: That was 2011 in the summer.   [0:21:20] Ashley James: Since then you have been on this journey of curiosity. I love that you said from judgment to curiosity because it’s in the question. It’s staying in the questions that allow us to stay open and gather more information and go deeper. It’s when we stop asking the questions that we really shut ourselves off from possibility. So, you were like, “What would happen if…” Can you give me some examples of some of the first thoughts that you had that allowed you to dive into curiosity? Some of the first questions.   [0:21:54] Kerri Hummingbird: Well, I think I’ll just go to a metaphor of dieting because I’m sure that a lot of listeners can relate to the idea of dieting. So, in my experience of dieting, if you restrict yourself and you continue to restrict yourself in a punitive way, what ends up happening is sooner or later you bust open the cookie bag and you eat them. You just can’t do it anymore. You just can’t force yourself anymore to punish yourself into compliance with some goal that you have.  So, in the same way, just expand that metaphor into all aspects of your life and that’s what I was experiencing. I had so restricted myself through punishment in this belief that I was broken and I was the problem. I was walking on so many eggshells inside of myself that I was apologizing for my existence at every turn. That led to a place where I just felt so bad about myself that any little bit of attention I got from anybody I would just go for it.  So, at the end of my marriage I was cheating on my husband because men were looking at me and they were attracted and it felt good and it was the only thing that felt good and so I went for it because I’m starving. I’m starving for love. I’m just absolutely starving for love and I need to fill my cup. So, when I decided to be bad, I filled my cup for a while. I had a lot of men on text and getting really full on the attention and like, “Okay. Yeah. This feels really good.” But it wasn’t very long. It was about six months until I got connected with yoga and I went to my first yoga class. My yoga teacher was really cool, of course because I needed it to be cool. He had hair down to his hips. He played Led Zeppelin for vinyasa. I was like, “Now, this is my style. I can do this.” Pretty soon, I got curious about him. I thought, “Huh. He’s his website says he’s a spiritual counselor. Well, I wonder if that’s different than psychology because I’m not going back to a psychotherapist.” So, not to blame psychotherapists because I know the field has changed a lot but the ones that I had been seeing were keeping me and my story, they weren’t breaking me out of it and I knew I needed something but I knew I didn’t need that. So, he met with me and we had a session together. I said, “Can you help me?” And he said, “Yeah. I think I can.” So, the first session we had together I went in like I had gone into every other psychotherapy session in my life. I went in and I started complaining about the person that wasn’t giving me what I needed and then I felt bad about myself and it was all their fault. I went into that story and he stopped me. He interrupted the pattern and he said, “That’s you.” I, “What?” I felt so insulted at first, but I knew it was true. It was like he was speaking truth and it hurt but it went right to my heart and it made me wake up. I said, “Oh my God. How do I stop doing that?” That’s where the journey really began. The question, “How do I stop doing that? Because I don’t want to do that anymore. What is that? Why am I doing that? Where does that come from?” All these questions started in my consciousness. Pretty soon I got led to the next teacher and the next teacher.  Then I had a shamanic spiritual healing. That woke me up big time because I thought I was one thing. I thought I was this solid thing called Kerri like there was just one thing. When I was in the middle of this healing session, I realized, “Oh my gosh. There’s multiple aspects of me. There’s energy that can be taken out. I can feel it being removed. I can feel it go over there in the burning sage and it disappears and I’m here. This is more true. So what is all that stuff in me that’s cluttering up me? That’s not me. What is that stuff?” It’s like I instantly had this awareness that I was filled up with a bunch of gunk that was not my true self, that it was a bunch of stuff. I didn’t know what it was but it was gunk and it was cluttering me. I had that instant knowing of that. I felt different after 45 minutes. He took this energy out of my heart that had been there since my whole life, that always felt like the only way I can describe it really is a menstrual cramp but like around my heart. It would ache anytime I thought somebody hated me or didn’t like me or they looked at me funny or I felt inadequate or I was like reviewing my past performance of something at work, my heart would ache. He took it out. It’s gone. I never had that feeling since. He just removed it. I mean I thought, “Wow. 45 minutes and that can happen? I’m doing that. I don’t care what that is. I’m learning how to do that.” That’s what started me really on my path to becoming what I am today.   [0:26:53] Ashley James: Oh. So cool. I’ve had that experience before. My first time doing an NLP session with someone back in 2004-2005. I did a NLP breakthrough sessions about eight hours long. We did timeline therapy. She also did some huna work, which is the Hawaiian spiritual practice. So, she does the energy work but it was NLP timeline therapy hypnosis. We did this whole session and I walked out of there. I felt weight lifted off my shoulders that I had carried most of my life. I walked around with this weight, this heaviness pushing down on me physically. Physically I could feel it. After the session I physically felt it removed. It was just taken off my shoulders. That was also when I completed my grieving. I was in depression and grief from losing my mother two years before.  So, I went all kinds of therapists because I was seeking how to grieve healthfully. What I really saw in the therapy field, at the time every therapist I went to it was either you are broken or you’re normal. You’re either abnormal or you’re normal. There was no focus on let’s strive for excellence because I wanted to grieve in the healthiest way possible. I wanted to achieve like excellence around grieving. There was no like, “All right. Let’s make you like the most excellent human griever. Let’s do it in the most healthy way.” No it was like you’re either broken up and abnormal or you’re normal and you don’t have to come here anymore. I thought that was really interesting.  So, when I learn more about NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, that they designed it. That Richard Bandler and John Grinder back in the 60s and 70s originally designed it out of this exact same observation that they saw that in the therapy field in the United States, which culturally the people in the United States are always striving to be the best. That’s part of the American Dream. Strive for absolute excellence. Achieve the maximum. Be the best basketball player you can be. Be the best trader on Wall Street you could be. Whatever it is, be the best cyclist you can be or the runner. In those fields, that’s considered normal to want to be the best that you can and go and find a coach to help you be the best you can. But when it came to mental health, that wasn’t the perception back in the 60s and 70s. It was either you’re normal or you’re abnormal. There was zero focus on excellence, on achieving excellence around emotional and mental health. It wasn’t a thing.  So, they created neuro-linguistic programming to bring about a toolset that had people just throw out that old system of you’re either broken or you’re normal. We don’t need to put ourselves in that box. We don’t need to live in that story. Instead, we’re all human beings and let’s create the most excellent experience we can, excellent emotional and mental health we can. It’s a bunch of tools basically that you can learn to help you be in your excellence.  So, I dove into that. Actually then out of that experience, my first night walking out feeling like that weight was lifted off me that was taken out of me and off me I said, “I have to learn how to do this.” So, I went and took all the trainings and became a master practitioner and trainer of NLP and timeline therapy and hypnosis. I thought that was just, I mean that was like a whole world opened up. I couldn’t believe that just like you, this whole world opens up and you’re like I’ve been in therapy for 20 years and now it’s like, “Why didn’t someone tell me about this. That there’s a spiritual healing and mental healing on a whole new level.” So you broke free from this old system. I love that you had the really solid experience of both systems because I am sure that therapy is very effective for people. You have to sort of find the right tool for you, find the right tool for the job. Some people really thrive in seeking out Freudian therapy. 200 hours on the couch and that’s what they needed. Other people need behavioral psychology or cognitive therapy. Then you get to that point where you want to break free from the stories and you want to transform how you relate to yourself, how you relate to the world and switch over from judgment to curiosity. I love that. I love that you had that very clear transition. It’s really beautiful. So now you have broken free. How do you go back though? There’s the people in your life who still relate to you as the old Kerri? How do you transform how people relate to you?   [0:32:04] Kerri Hummingbird: Well, so that’s a very good question. The answer is that everyone is sovereign. Every person is sovereign. As such, every person’s really responsible for their own perceptions and the stories they choose to tell. Sometimes those stories they choose to tell they like to hold on to for a lot of reasons. So, let’s just explore that topic for a second. So, in my case the story that my closest people liked to tell was that I was responsible for all the problems in the family.    [0:32:44] Ashley James: That’s convenient.   [0:32:45] Kerri Hummingbird: So, that’s pretty convenient. So, nobody wants to change that story but me. Okay. So, that’s been one of the major hurdles in my life is that I’ve gotten the opportunity to heal myself all the way down to the core identity. If you think about it, your parents, your mother gives you your core identity because that’s the one whose body you were birthed in. That’s the one who is nurturing you and caring for you. That’s the person whose opinion you really care about the most as a little child. You really want your mommy to love you. All of us do. When that isn’t possible in the way that you need it, then the opportunity is to learn how to give that to yourself.  The body of work that I’m working on right now is called Love is Fierce: Healing the Mother Wound. So the work I’ve been doing in private with clients is healing that last vestige of doubt inside. That you’re worthy of love. That comes from a lot of ideas in our heads, a lot of information that comes in the form of not necessarily words but just feelings and sensations and perceptions and even psychic knowings about how our mother feels about us and about herself. That really impacts our psychology especially as a woman. I know that boys are also affected by that because I am a mother and I had a mother wound and I passed it on to my sons. As soon as I’ve become aware of this, I’ve been doing everything I can to help them to assert their own identity and have a really strong knowing that their mom’s okay. There’s just so many psychological uncertainties that get kicked up when you as a child perceive a number of things. Like if you perceive that your mom’s irritated by you. If you perceive that you’re not really wanted. If you perceive that you’re a nuisance. If you perceive that your mom’s not okay, that she’s got emotional problems or she doesn’t seem to be able to show up for you. There’s a lot of ways that this presents itself, but all of that stuff it gets in a way of you knowing that you’re okay inside of you. You actually don’t feel okay because of it. Sometimes, like you said like how do you deal with your family who wants to keep telling the same story about you? There are family systems that get constructed around this entire dynamic to hold it in place. So, when you start rocking the boat and trying to change it what happens is push back. Because if you change, everybody else in the ocean has to change. If you change the story, they either have to clutch their story tighter or they have to meet you partway and start seeing something new. A lot of people, if you change that means something in the dynamic has changed and now they own some piece of it.    [0:36:04] Ashley James: It’s like enforcing healthy boundaries.   [0:36:08] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. Healthy boundaries. Like you don’t tell me who I am. Here was the crux of my issue. My whole life and I’m only now breaking free because it’s a really deep wound. It’s like there is a splinter that gets placed inside your consciousness. Really young if you’re having this kind of situation like I experienced. Then a whole bunch of layers and stories and stuff authenticates it. Then it gets bigger and bigger and the crust around it grows. Pretty soon you know you can’t even decide, “Should I choose option A or B? I’m not sure about myself. I don’t know which one to pick.” Yeah. We don’t even know what we want or how to direct our way through life. We’re so out of touch with ourselves that we just don’t know what to do. So, this is about identity. It’s about identity and about reclaiming identity and deciding that nobody can tell you who you are, not even your mother. Nobody can tell you who you are. That you are safe in becoming curious and exploring who you really are and letting yourself do that. Along the path of doing that, I faced all kinds of things like mysterious feelings of being choked, like body sensations. I mean just old memories in my body. All kinds of fears that came up about speaking. When I started speaking on podcasts all these fears came up. I would start having really unconscious self-sabotaging behavior because I knew I was telling on mom and that was really dangerous.  There was just a lot of things that came up for me that were true for me as a little child but are totally not true for me as an adult. So, this is really the process of becoming a mature person and owning the psychology inside of you and taking ownership of becoming your own mother, taking ownership of becoming your own father and really guiding your own life and giving yourself permission to be who you are and who you choose to be no matter what anybody else says about you. Even if they’re your closest people and they’re your family. It’s that deep.   [0:38:27] Ashley James: You said that no one else can determine or can say who you are. I would take it one step further and say even your belief systems don’t have the right to tell you who you are because –   [0:38:41] Kerri Hummingbird: The conditioning.   [0:38:42] Ashley James: The old belief systems. Yeah. The old conditioning comes from the decisions that we made as children. Something happened like we got spanked and we decided that we’re not loved or we got yelled at because we did something as a child and we decided we’re not good enough, we’re not worthy, we’re not smart, we’re not beautiful, we’re fat we’re ugly, we’re unwanted. All these unconscious limiting decisions that we built as our identity and that become our filters in life that don’t let us see. That’s how the unconscious mind works. It’s how the brain works in forming our reality.  Our unconscious limiting decisions are the filters that will negate positive information. It’s called the reticular activating system. It’s a filter in the unconscious near the brainstem. It won’t let us see things that go against our belief system. So, if I believe I’m not loved and Kerri says, “Ashley, I love you.” My brain won’t accept it. I will make a decision. Either I’ll ignore it, I won’t hear it. We delete, distort and generalize. I’ll delete it entirely. We won’t even hear the person say it. Or in my brain I’ll go, “Oh. She’s just saying that because she wants something,” or “She’s just saying that because she because she thinks she’s being nice,” or whatever. My brain will negate it because we won’t allow for positive information to come into our conscious and form our reality when we have these filters.  We often then believe that that is reality when it’s not. It is a distorted, it’s like looking through a kaleidoscope but the kaleidoscope is made up of all the negative emotions and living decisions from our childhood that we’ve been filtering our life through. So, when you said no one has a right to tell you who your identity is. What I got heavily is and neither does your belief system.   [0:41:02] Kerri Hummingbird: Neither. Yeah. You have to become aware of it, which is why it’s so important to have presence. Because in presence things quiet down and we get out of the story. A lot of people are addicted to the story and I completely understand that. Remember, I spent 20 years telling my story on a couch so I get it. That doesn’t serve us. Well, let’s just say it doesn’t serve us if we want to transform and evolve. If we want to stay where we are it serves us quite well because that’s what it does. It keeps us where we are. If we want things to change, then we need to stop believing our story and start becoming curious about it. Also curious like, “Is that my story or is that something else?” I’ll give an example.  I had a first stepfather who was very violent and didn’t like children apparently. That’s the story I have about it. There was this feeling of not liking kids that got into me. Like not liking and being playful and boisterous got you in trouble. So, I experienced some of this and throughout my childhood. Well, so then recently I have my own sons, but since I woke up, I would say since I woke up since 2011, in the last four years I’ve been with my new husband who has two younger children. So, I got a chance to revisit some of this. What I noticed was that as the young children were being very boisterous, I would hear this voice in my head that said, “Damn kids.” I had enough presence of mind to go, “Wow. Where is that coming from?” Whereas before it might have just been part of the background noise and I wouldn’t even have heard it. I’m sure it was there when I was raising my children because it didn’t just pop up out of nowhere.  Wow. Where did that come from? I was so unaware of it before but it was operating me. It was driving me. It was part of the conditioning that I had in my brain. So, now that I have presence, I heard that voice. I heard it distinctly. I asked myself, “Wow. Where is that coming from?” I sat with myself for a while until the answer bubbled up. It kind of bubbles up from inside when you sit with presence. It was that first stepfather who didn’t like kids and it has made a big impression on me. That somehow being a kid was wrong and it was bad and it was annoying and all of these things. So, I think that when we have presence, when we’re willing to stop telling the story and start listening to ourselves inside we can learn a lot about what’s driving the story we’re so emphatic to tell.    [0:44:02] Ashley James: Can you teach us how if we’ve never had the ability to have presence? How do you start to formulate presence so that we can slow down the self-talk in order to process it, in order to get curious and dive deeper?   [0:44:19] Kerri Hummingbird: Absolutely. Well, there’s a number of pathways that I experienced. Yoga was certainly one of them. Working with the breath. Putting breath into anything slows things down. You’re focusing on breathing, you’re focusing on the in-breath. The in-breath, the out-breath, the way it feels as it goes through your body. For me though I need a little bit more than that because I had a very chattery mind, really super chattery. I was not really able to sit and meditate. People kept saying, “Oh. Well, just sit and meditate and you’ll quiet down.” I thought, “Oh. I sit and meditate and it gets louder.” There’s a lot of noise in there. It’s uncomfortable. I can’t sit still. I don’t like being with all that.  So for me, what I ended up doing was learning about shamanic drumming. The interesting thing about drum journey music is that the ancient people always knew that certain beats of the drum actually stimulate your brain to go into a different state of mind, a trance if you will activates a different frequency in your brain. Instead of it being beta, which is super busy busy busy, it activates theta state and alpha state, which are more relaxed. The theta state is more of a dreaming state. You can even access gamma state, which is pretty cool. That’s where you have transcendent visions. But the drumbeat and working with the drum actually really helped me to ground myself in my body and to quiet my mind. I was able to start having visions even and information.  So, you build on what you have. So, any little tiny little wiggle space of quiet that you have, whatever worked to get that you just keep doing more of that and building out that space and sort of building that muscle of quiet within you where you can listen and receive. The more you work on that muscle the greater the muscle gets. All of my training in energy healing I got certified from the Four Winds Light Body School of Medicine. A lot of that training has to do with listening to the client, listening to their energy field and what messages are coming up? What are you feeling in your body empathically from their body and their experience? There’s a lot of listening.  After all of these training and all these working with clients and channeling information for them, I started channeling in groups. It opened up in front of a lot of people. Now I wrote a book last year that the whole book was channeled. I literally sat down, didn’t think at all. The words just came out and I just channeled it. That’s a flow. I found that that’s where that’s brilliant. My friends are like, “Oh. That book is brilliant.” and I am like, “Thank you.” It’s like I feel like I didn’t do it because I just channeled it but actually in a way I did it because I was able to get quiet. I was able to open myself up to let the flow come through. That flow that’s tapped into all that is. So, I hope that answers your question but I feel like it’s a muscle. You’ve got to exercise it every day. The more you exercise it the better you get at it and then miraculous things can happen like I experienced.   [0:47:54] Ashley James: If you didn’t consciously write the book then who wrote the book?   [0:47:59] Kerri Hummingbird: I feel like it was my higher self, my guide. For that book I feel like – everyone has their own belief systems around this but I really believe that we are souls having a human experience. The human part, the ego part, can be really delicious in the fact that it gets to have all these experiences that feel really real and gets to feel pain and an excitement and suffering and also gets to have a lot of chattering mind and thoughts and gets to feel and create. There is another aspect of us though that is really timeless, eternal, wise, connected to all that is. I would call that the soul. When we can do a dance with the soul so that us the personality, the personality self and the soul self can be together in one consciousness, in one moment in the now, together in the now, then amazing things can happen. That as a personality self, there’s no way I could have done that.  The book I wrote, I just don’t see that happening in the timeframe that it happened. With the ease and grace that happened without the dance of my soul. The dance of my soul is what manifested that into being. It’s my willingness to listen.  It’s just amazing every time I let it out. I just did a weekend. I got the opportunity to do a weekend presentation at the Evolutionary Business Council. I decided to do that in the presentation, just let go. Don’t script it, just let go. So, I let go. I had written the speech. I’d written everything and I tossed it out. I just said, “Okay.” My soul I call white eagle. So I said, “Okay white eagle. Take it. Take it and run with it. Let’s do this.” It was amazing. It was like, “Whoa.” Everybody was engaged. Everybody took action. They all were like, “Yes. This is exactly right. Because when I step into that space, which I’ve been practicing in my healing sessions and with clients and groups, when I step into that space of the flow and of my soul like brilliance comes out. It’s pretty awesome to experience because that part of you is wise and eternal like they know everything. So, I don’t know. That’s just my experience out of it. It’s amazing. It’s profound.   [0:50:26] Ashley James: I know what you’re talking about but I don’t think everyone does. In the training that I’ve done with becoming an NLP trainer and even before that with Landmark Education, you get to a place where you create so much peace inside yourself. In NLP we call it generate. You just generate so you could stand there and just start talking. It’s coming from this very pure place inside you where you don’t have to think about it before you say it. You don’t have to plan. You don’t even necessarily know what you’re going to say until you start saying it. It’s so brilliant. The brilliance that comes out comes from this very beautiful authentic place inside you like it’s not ego. You definitely feel connected to God, you feel connected to spirit, your soul. You feel grounded. You feel very grounded but at the same time you just start to feel like you’re phasing. Your energy is vibrating on a little bit of a different wavelength like you’re not here, present. You feel a little bit like you’re high.   [0:51:45] Kerri Hummingbird: Yes.   [0:51:46] Ashley James: You know what I mean? You’re a little high. You’re going in a brain is in a different wavelength and it’s really beautiful. I love it. This is something that I don’t think about. I just do but I developed it over years and years and years working with Landmark and then in NLP and being an NLP trainer and then doing this podcast.  When I first started the podcast it was so funny. I was nervous I was writing. I was studying and writing down 20 questions and worrying, “Do I have enough questions to write down?” The first maybe 10 episodes I was scripted. I have my questions that I’d asked them, but I soon realized very quickly that I could not do these interviews with questions written down beforehand because the second they started talking like my brain would go, “What about this, what about that? Let’s explore this.” The interviews weren’t this wonderful flow. Their flow wasn’t there. It was totally cut off because I wanted to script it and ask these questions that were pre-created. So, I had to let go. It was like walking a tightrope and saying, “Okay. You could take the safety net away now.” I went in blind to the interviews. I went in totally blind. Just knowing a little bit about the person and their background with no questions pre-created and it was brilliant. I was so nervous. The thought came to me. It was like, “What if I can’t think of anything to ask? The answer I got was you just start talking, just start having a conversation and be in the moment with them. Be present and generate and it’ll come to you. So I started to just talk to these people as I interviewed them with no questions written down. The flow was so different. The energy was so different. It was about being present with them and the questions would just come from my higher self, would come from somewhere. So, I get it. When you’re at present in the moment and you’re listening and you’re tapped in, you generate. It’s beautiful creativity. Your identity kind of melts away. You’re not in that story anymore, are you?   [0:54:11] Kerri Hummingbird: No, you’re not. That’s really the secret if you want to change your life is you change this story you tell about yourself, you change your identity. I experienced this over the last eight years. I mean, eight years ago, think about it, I was a woman with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. I have been sleeping around on my husband with a lot of strangers at art shows when I was on the weekend doing my art shows. Anybody would look at me and say, “Yup. She’s crazy.” Pretty much. People might say that about me today but for a totally different reason and I’m okay with it. So today, I’m on podcast with people like you who are really conscious, enlightened leaders trying to help people to see another way. I’ve got an international bestseller for you know 25 weeks now running. It’s kind of amazing. It’s blowing my mind. All of this stuff is amazing to me. It happened because I was willing to let go of my identity. I mean, I was thankful to let go of it to be quite honest. I think I got to the bottom of the pit and I said, “You know what, I don’t want to be whatever I’ve been being so far. Whatever that story is that’s creating that I don’t want that.” When my yogi said, “Hey. You’re creating this.” I looked at him and some deep part of me knew that I was. I said, “Yeah. You’re right and I’m going to stop doing that.” I got fed up with my story. I think that you’ve got to get fed up with your story to the point where you’re willing to change everything in your life just to have a better story. That’s the place to be and then you can create magic. You can really reinvent yourself. I’ve really good friends who have had terminal cancer diagnosis. They’ve healed themselves through a lot of inner work, a lot of inner work, a lot of treatment options, various combinations of options but the end being that they did it because they decided they were fed up with the story that they had cancer and they weren’t going to go out that way. They made sure that they healed themselves. One of my friends, stage five cancer. That’s it, right? That’s the last stop. For the month that she was supposed to die, she only had like maybe four weeks to live or something, she imagined that she was traveling, which was her favorite thing to do. She made it real. She traveled. She could only go, she couldn’t actually go anywhere, but she pretended she was in France. She made it real for herself. She convinced her brain that she was traveling and enjoying herself in France and that tumor subsided. She actually lived. She’s alive today and she’s out speaking about it.  So, I know that people have had these experiences this isn’t like bunk, this is real. Our brains are so powerful. We have to open to that deep wise one within us in order to change our lives’ circumstances. To do that, we have to release the identity. We have to release the story about ourselves while we’re in the middle of the story, which is super challenging, to release the identity and the story of ourselves while we’re still experiencing the effects of the story we’ve been telling. That’s the challenging part, Ashley, isn’t it?   [0:57:26] Ashley James: I want to interview your friend. Can you hook me up with her information? I’m actually crying right now. In my 20s, I was at a point in my early 20s where was suffering emotionally. I’d lost my mom. I was suffering. I was in an abusive relationship in an emotionally and mentally abusive relationship, but I didn’t know it because you don’t know it when you’re in the relationship.   [0:57:56] Kerri Hummingbird: You don’t know it.   [0:57:57] Ashley James: Well, because they’re really good at making you think that you’re the problem when they’re clearly emotionally and mentally abusive. At my mom’s funeral, he pulled me aside and yelled at me for not paying enough attention to him. I apologized. I mean at my mother’s funeral, he made me feel guilty. I say the word made me feel because now I get that no one can make me feel anything. My language back then was he made me feel this way. I get now. I put myself in that position to be in that relationship and I got out of it. Then I went, “Oh my gosh. I can’t believe.” I started to look back at the whole five-six years with him and I realized that it was very emotionally manipulative, emotionally abusive and a very unhealthy relationship. But at the time, it was like you can’t see the air you’re breathing. So, my early 20s, I was in a very bad place emotionally, mentally and physically. I had a lot of diseases. According to the doctors, I was told I’d be on these medications my whole life. I was told I’d never have kids. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I had type 2 diabetes. I had chronic adrenal fatigue. I had chronic infections for which I took monthly antibiotics for. I felt like a prisoner in my own body. I couldn’t wake up in the morning. I couldn’t actually understand human language in the morning. My brain could not process human language. I was so broken. I felt so broken. Every morning I woke up with a hangover, although I did not drink alcohol because of my physical state was so sick. So, I’d wake up every morning with all the symptoms of a hangover. Feeling like I partied the entire night although I didn’t. I only started to feel normal in the evenings and that’s because my cortisol levels were so extremely low that they just started to creep up in the evenings. Then it was hard to get to bed at night because that’s when I actually started to have my brain back and start to have energy. I was eating the standard American or standard Canadian diet. In a bad place emotionally, but I was trying to get out of it. I was living in the identity that I was diabetic. I was living in the identity that I am, I have polycystic ovarian syndrome, I am infertile or whatever the identity the doctors diagnosed me with. The diagnosis becomes an identity. At first, and you said this earlier, at first the diagnosis is a relief. There’s this feeling of relief that washes over you after months or years of suffering. You’re finally given this label because then it’s like, “Look. People are acknowledging my internal suffering. I’m not crazy. They see it. This label proves that my suffering is real and others can finally get that it’s real.” But then it becomes the cage that we live in.    [1:01:16] Kerri Hummingbird: Yes. It becomes a cage. It’s exactly right. I realized in my case, and I don’t know how you feel about yours, that I realized I was the spider spinning the web around myself. I was a spider, the web and the fly.  [1:01:35] Ashley James: You’re everything.   [1:01:37] Kerri Hummingbird: Like it’s a closed system. I’m doing it to myself. So, it took a long time to unweave and unwire that. But the first decision was no matter what it takes I don’t care. Whatever it takes I’m going to be what I really want to be. So I said, “What do I really want to be?” So, I picked the first thing that inspired me. So, this is another little tip. Pick the first thing that inspires you because that’s probably true. Inspiration is true. I believe inspiration is true. For me, it was a vision I had. It was my first mystical vision. I was doing a drum journey, meditation with my drum in my little apartment I was renting. I was manifesting my home that I currently live in now. I wanted to buy this home. My real estate agent had said, “Well, they’re already under contract and they’ve been back and forth a couple times. Usually, almost always in that case, you’re not going to get the house. I said, “I know that’s my house.” So, I did this drum journey and I started visualizing, “Okay. I’m in my house. I’m in my house. I’m in my house.” I saw myself in there and I saw my grandparents who have deceased. I saw them come and visit in the house. We were talking about how beautiful it was. I was making the whole thing up in my brain, imagining it until the very end. When I’m standing in the house in my dream, in my vision looking in the kitchen, looking out the back window and all of a sudden a rainbow light hummingbird whoosh in the back window and hovers there and space expands. All I could do is just go, “Wow.” I’m not making that happen. That’s amazing. What is that? I love that. Oh my god. It’s a rainbow hummingbird. Wow. As soon as I stopped the drum journey because I was just profound, the phone rang. It was my real-estate agent and she said, “Oh. The deal fell through so they went your offer. You can have the house.” So, that really inspired me, Ashley. I got to say, that was a mystical vision experience. I thought, “Okay. What does hummingbird mean?” So I looked it up in the animal guide, animal spirits what does that mean? I had learned about animal spirits. I didn’t know about it before, eight years ago. But I looked up this guide and I said, “Okay. Hummingbird.” Everything it said, anything is possible. Yes. I’ve always known that. I’ve always known inside of me that anything is possible. There’s this part of me that was so fiercely knowing that. That’s what got me through all this hellacious sitting in psychotherapy for 20 years. I knew that anything is possible. I knew that it didn’t have to be this way. So, I kept looking for the answer to solve the problem because I knew that that wasn’t the way my life had to be. So, I thought, “Yes. That’s me, hummingbird [unintelligible] of spirit. Yes, I opened to that. Yes, I want that.” So, really shortly after that I started calling myself Kerri Hummingbird. I even changed it on social media, which at first was really awkward because my friends were saying, “What are you doing? What is that? But then people started saying, “You know what Kerri, that really is you. That is you. That’s more true. That’s actually more true than the last name you had. That’s true for you. So, it became my truth. So, what I did was I created this vision board about Kerri Hummingbird. I put it on my wall and I just kept looking at that. Any time I had a challenge I would ask myself, “Well, what would Kerri Hummingbird do about that? How would Kerri Hummingbird respond to that?” It’s like I was tapping into this more true aspect of myself, this future self even. You could even think of it that way. Tapping into the future person I am today and saying, “Kerri Hummingbird, what would you do right now because I’m not quite you yet but I want to be you.”   [1:05:37] Ashley James: Oh, I love that.   [1:05:38] Kerri Hummingbird: What do I want to be? I want to be me. I was trying to be me the whole time but I had to find me underneath all that crap that got placed on me by all the conditioning and all the stories that I told and all the stories that everybody else told. All the story story story story story story story, which is why I say presence. Presence and inspiration, that’s the place to be.   [1:06:01] Ashley James: Oh, I love. I love that. I have this technique I learned from – who knows where I learned this from. One of my passions since I was a teenager has been personal growth and development so I picked this up somewhere. This idea that when you set a goal, so for me because I’m hitting the gym pretty hard this year with my husband, and I really dialed in my diet in the last two years. I’m really really happy with the nutrition, the quality of nutrition my body is getting. I decided I want to sculpt my body in a different way. In a really healthy way but I’ve finally figured out what I want to look like and what I want to feel like in my body. So, we’re going to the gym with this very specific intention. I found some really great videos on YouTube. We’re following these exercises I’ve never seen before. It’s really cool. Actually, today at the gym, someone came up to us and said, he’s 76 years old he goes, “I’ve been were working out my whole life. I’ve never seen that exercise. It looks really neat. How did you figure that out?” So, we’re doing some fun things in the gym but. What I learned is you imagine your goal. So, let’s say Ashley a year from now. I’m imagining my goal and the person I create myself to be a year from now after spending 365 days in the gym, for example. I stand there in my mind in the future Ashley and then what I do is I look back to now. So, having achieved my goal I stand there in my body, my newly sculpted body, having achieved the goal looking back to now and I see all the steps I had to take to get here. So, it’s similar to what you’re saying. It’s like talk to your future self. Talk to the person you are. What would future Ashley say? The Ashley that’s hit the gym and sculpted her body, what would she say? She’d be like, “Get out of bed. It’s 7:30. Let’s go. What are you doing?” When I am in doubt, what do I do? What do I do here? I start asking myself, what would rock-hard-ab Ashley say?   [1:08:28] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. I love it. I mean, this is really cool because basically everybody can see that in any moment you have choice A or choice B and maybe even choice C, right? So, you could predict that there’s one Ashley in the future that didn’t do any of that stuff, but there’s another Ashley that totally did do all that stuff. So, you want to tap into the Ashley that did all the stuff in order to become the person you want to be, right? Then exactly, ask her. What were the choice points? What were the choice? Part of manifestation is doing exactly what you did, imagining yourself in the future point as if it’s now, having accomplished exactly everything you want to accomplish, feeling what you’re going to feel, knowing it happened. How does it feel? Receiving all of that, how does it feel, that accomplishment feeling? What are the things going on in your brain? Who are you being in order to be that person? All of that is really real. It manifested it. It plants a seed, but we actually also you’ve got to take the actions. So, it’s not just about dreaming it, it’s about becoming it through action. So, I love that you said you look back and say, “Okay. What were all the actions I took in order to get to that person I’m standing at now.”   [1:09:38] Ashley James: Right. Right. Because I think the New Age gets a bad rap because it’s like you can’t just imagine yourself into wealth or health, but that is the first step. You have to shift your belief system and that’s what I had to do. When I was suffering, there was this point there was this moment that occurred around 2004 for me. I was sitting at home suffering like I had every day emotionally, mentally, physically trapped on a prison of illness. There was a moment where I had this realization. It was actually watching What The Bleep Do We Know, which I think everyone needs to watch twice. So, I had the DVD. I watched What The Bleep Do We Know and tip hot tears were just constantly coming out of my eyes the entire time. I think it was around 11:00 PM I finished watching it and I immediately hit play again. I had to watch it twice. It was hitting me so hard. I was ready to receive that information. So, I watched What The Bleep twice in a row. What I got because I felt so stuck, I felt so stuck in the broken identity of the diagnosis, of all the diagnosis that I had been given. I had taken that on as my identity. I had taken on this world of suffering as my only truth. By the time I was done watching What The Bleep Do We Know twice, I got that I can choose a different reality, different from the reality I was living in. So, that moment of shifting my mindset, the very next morning, everything began to fall into place. I was applying for a loan, a loan that was going to help me to pay for the trainings to start this as a business, to become an NLP trainer. It was a no the day before. I shifted my mindset. That next morning I get a phone call it was a yes. It was like one piece after another. Everything. The housing because I had to move to the states over the summer to do all these trainings, that came into place. The transportation came to me. Everything just started clicking. Everything started clicking because my belief system was that it was 100% possible. But I went from this desperation in my mind that none of it’s possible to it 100% is possible. So, that mindset thing. You have to have the mindset first. You have to envision yourself succeeding first and then take the actionable steps. I love that you talk about you got to be present and open to the flow. Takes breaths, slow things down so that you can begin to identify the negative self-talk that you might be believing is true but it’s not. Then you have to get that you’re not broken, that you are not your diagnosis and that you can break free from that. Because I got that my mindset, I all of a sudden shifted and went, “Wow. I am not these things. This is not my box anymore.” That I was able to then take the actionable steps to heal my body and now I no longer have any of those issues. But I wouldn’t have even taken the actual steps had I not started with my mindset.   [1:13:08] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. I agree with you. The mindset is key. It continues to be key because it is a self-mastery with your mindset. There is a way of overemphasizing the mindset because it’s not the only thing. You can have an excellent mindset and then it still doesn’t shift. Then you’re like, “Well, what’s wrong with my mindset? How come it’s not shifting?” It’s because there’s stuff in your subconscious that needs listening to. So, there is a listening piece is really important. So, I just wanted to raise that up, the listening piece. Because sometimes the stuff that’s getting in your way is stuff that you inherited from your ancestry that you might not have even known those people. It’s in your ancestry. It’s a repeating pattern. We all know that we have repeating patterns in our own lives, but they also go across ancestry, across generations. So, some of this stuff is beyond you. So, that’s why it’s important to get really good at listening inside and discerning and opening up to the possibilities of all the things it could be that’s keeping you where you are so that you can shift it, really shift it, like absolutely to stop the pattern. Like you said, what you did that day that was enough for you. There wasn’t anything else in the way. So, your clear decision, your very clear decision stopped the pattern for you in that day and bam it was one moment and then you started recovering and going on your way. That can happen with everything. So, we just have to realize that this is the puzzle. So, it’s like you slipped into a thumbprint suit that had all these little hidden gems and things like a video game and you have to find it all. Well, some of it’s going to be easy to find. Some of its going to be really hard to find depending on your level of mastery. So, don’t give up the game. Keep playing the game and realize that the object of the game is to get up the pyramid. So, Maslow’s hierarchy of need. Hanging out on the bottom row on, on survival, that’s not the goal of the game. The goal of the game is to climb the mountain. The goal of the game is to get all the way at the top of the pyramid of self-actualization. That’s the goal of the game. It’s possible for everybody on the planet. What you need is support. It’s really helpful to have the help of people like Ashley that’s why it’s great you guys are listening to the show. Every week you’re getting filled up with beautiful insights that help you on your journey up the mountain, up the pyramid. Keep doing that. Keep taking the steps. You got to keep taking the steps and solving the puzzle. If you get a little discouraged, it’s fine to have a time-out when you get frustrated and have temper tantrum. That’s all good. We’re human. We’re going to get frustrated, but then practice the self-mastery, practice your mental mastery, practice your emotional mastery, practice your spiritual mastery. Practice all these things and pull yourself up the mountain and give yourself support. We are the sum of the five people we hang out with the most, right? So, hang out with different people. Hang out with people that have gotten up further up the mountain than you. Their collective energy is going to lift you up. That’s going to bring you up. So, circling back to that conversation around what do you do with your family? Well, what do you do with your family if they want to keep you stuck in the old pattern? If the only way your family will love you is if you go along with being the one who’s broken and wrong, well, I think you need a new family for now. You need to find your home in community of people that can see the beauty that you are because when you feel like you’ve got this diagnosis and your life is stuck and everything’s going wrong and nobody in your current environment is supporting you, they’re all kind of keeping you stuck in that story of you, you’ve got to put yourself outside of your condition. You’ve got to change fish tanks. Get out of that stinky water fish tank and hop on over to the next one where the water is clean and start hanging out with different people that can show you different aspects of yourself. Then when you’re really strong in your new identity and I would like to say when you’re really strong in your soul eventually, it takes a little while to get there, but when you’re really self-actualized, you can be around anybody and it won’t matter. You can really flex that muscle of being you, being authentically you around everybody and just letting everybody have their own opinion. It doesn’t matter what they think. It won’t matter to you anymore. You can love them anyway. You can love them no matter what they say or think or do about you. You can get to that place. Along the journey you need to give yourself spaces for incubation, incubation space where you can really percolate in the new energy and get strong in the new energy so that you can find your voice and find your truth inside of you without all those old stories. If you get retriggered into old stories, if you keep putting yourself in the old environment, it’s really hard to break free of it. It’s hard to get in the new energy when you keep putting yourself in the old energy. So, for a little while it’s helpful to incubate someplace positive to get filled up with good energy. Then it’s good to go back and flex the muscle because when you’re stronger and you know who you are more then you can make it even stronger by putting yourself in the challenge again so you get strong again there. Then you know where you got to do your work. So, I call it plugging up the holes. Once you get your cup full enough you can start to see where are the leaks in my ship If you could start plugging them up.   [1:18:38] Ashley James: So, take yourself out of the bad environment, put yourself in a really positive environment, surround yourself with a new community that’s very positive that sees you as the person you really are inside without all the story. Then once you’ve really strengthened this resolve within you that you have shed, you’ve healed and shed a lot of the old that you’ve become the person you know you are deep inside, you’re more authentically you, then go back to the old environment in order to see what gets triggered, in order to see what you can heal. Because you go back when you’re strong enough to be able to be unshakable and then start as you then look, “Oh. Wow. They triggered me here. I got to work on this.” Not a point of blaming them like they did it to me but a point of, “Oh. Wow. That was a button for me. I need to work on that.” While you’re doing that, you can also transmute. Begin to work on and see if you can start to create new healthy relationships with those people in your life. Maybe they’ll be ready. Maybe they’ll be ready to see, to relate to you as the authentic person you are instead of your old story. It does take enforcing boundaries.   [1:19:57] Kerri Hummingbird: It does. It takes boundaries. Also, there’s a guilty little secret that we end up having to admit to ourselves, which is that we’re also holding them in a story about who they are to you.   [1:20:06] Ashley James: Yes. Yes.   [1:20:08] Kerri Hummingbird: We have to let go of that too.   [1:20:11] Ashley James: Yes. I’m so glad you brought that up. When I heard that Carl Jung and this is an abbreviation of one of his quotes but that we marry our unconscious mind and project onto them all of our unconscious unresolved material. When I got that, I had to repeat it over and over and over. It hit me so deeply that all the while I’ve been pointing my finger at everyone else going, “You don’t get me. You don’t get me. You don’t see the authentic me.” I’m like, “Holy crow. I don’t see the authentic them.” We’ll never actually know who our husband is or who our mom is or her sister is. We never will actually know because we are projecting onto them all of our stuff and our beliefs about them.   [1:20:57] Kerri Hummingbird: Our memories. Our stories.   [1:21:00] Ashley James: Yeah. We have to forgive. Right. All of our memories and the stories. Right. So, we can be forgiving in that aspect. We can go, “Okay. Maybe I can be a bit more gentle with the people in my life that have been triggering me.” I’ve been upset with people in my life because they’re not seeing who I really am but at the same time I haven’t been seeing who they really are. So, it is a two-way street.   [1:21:29] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. I like the thumbprint suit analogy that I got from my higher intelligence because it really does explain a lot. I mean, if you’re inside a thumbprint suit that has its own perspectives and perceptual windows through which you experience life and ancestral patterns and all this information about your soul. It’s unique, right? The thumbprint, there’s no two thumbprints alike. So, we might have a little overlap in our Venn diagrams but we’re really never going to understand each other ever. We will understand overlapping pieces and feel really good about that. Then we have like, “Yay. Somebody understands me,” for like 10 minutes. Then they say something that is totally not aligned with us. Then we go all upset like, “Oh no. You’re one of them.” I mean, we’re all unique. That’s the thing is we’re built that way. We’re all pieces of the rainbow. If you think about the rainbow, look how many dots like infinite numbers of dots are available on the rainbow on the spectrum. Like infinite number of dots. So, maybe dots on the opposite sides of the spectrum, they don’t get along very well because they don’t share a whole lot in common, but they’re all part of the same rainbow. So, I love that too. So, think about your thumbprint. Think about, “Well, they’re not inside my thumbprint suit. They totally don’t understand so how can they tell me a story about me that’s more accurate than my story about me because I’m the one that’s in here all the time listening to everything. So, I think I know what’s true for me. I’m the only one in here as far as I know.”   [1:22:59] Ashley James: Are there any steps that you can give us around really seeing? When you’re in it it’s hard to see it but then all of a sudden you get it. All of a sudden you go, “Wow. I see it.” So, are there any steps or advice or homework you can give us so that we can start to see the limiting story that we’ve come up with ourselves? That this is this box that we’ve created like the idea that we’re broken. Be able to see it and go, “Oh. Wow. This isn’t actually my entire reality, it’s made-up. I made it up in my head. It’s not it’s not real. I’m not actually broken. I do have a chance to be someone who is healthy, someone who is whole.”   [1:23:54] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. So, what I like to do is I do think journaling is really helpful because you get to see it in print. Thoughts in your mind, they drift by really fast. The sneaky ones slide under the surface before you can hook them back. The ones that are really damaging are the ones that hide in the dark waters. So, whenever you grab a hold of one immediately write it down. Then that way you can explore it with your conscious mind because that’s really the goal. We want to explore with our conscious mind. If you’ve ever driven someplace that you often go and then you end up there. Then you’re wondering, “How did I get here? Oh my goodness. I don’t remember even driving here.” That’s because your unconscious mind took over for you. Well, your unconscious mind takes over for you in a lot of things. Your unconscious mind takes over for you in a story you tell about yourself. When you meet somebody new the story you tell or on these broadcasts it’s a great experience because I get asked the same questions a lot of times. “What’s your history? What’s your story in a nutshell?” So, what I like to do now is I like to play around and tell it different every time. So, I have this little task for myself or a little game or a challenge I give myself to tell the story different. So, you could try that. You could say, “Well, I notice I’m telling that same story,” and right in the middle of the sentence you could say, “Um, excuse me. I’d like to start over. I could tell a different story.” Right then and there you tell a different story. You tell it differently. So, it’s a process. It takes a lot of self-mastery and self-awareness and it takes time. But you can whittle down these pieces and become aware of what’s in the background. Like Ashley and I, I really recommend doing some alternative practices like working with energy if you’ve never tried that. Branch outside and see if you can shift it in a different way that you never expected. So, try like a lot of different things. Say yes. There’s actually a challenge where you say yes to everything. Somebody invites you something you say yes. I think that’s a great one because it gets you outside of your box of what will work and what won’t work? It’s like you’ll just say yes to everything and you’ll find out. Think about it like an experiment. I think what’s really challenging with things like diets is that we say, “Well, Forever. Forever I am going to have no more dessert.” Well, that doesn’t work very well. So, it’s easier to say I’m going to run an experiment. For one week I’m not going to have dessert. I’m going to see what it feels like. How does my body feel? How does my mind feel? I’m going to do an honest assessment of myself before and after. I’m going to see what the results are. If I get a beneficial result, I will contemplate if I want to run the experiment longer. So, it’s just a way of liberating yourself from too rigid of a structure with your goals and plans on what you want to achieve in your life. Be a little more playful with it. Give yourself some space and graze.   [1:26:57] Ashley James: Beautiful. Brilliant. Now, you’re the founder of Skills Not Pills movement. What is that?   [1:27:06] Kerri Hummingbird: Well, it’s a movement that I started because I had experienced psychotherapy, psychotropic pills in order to make me not feel, which then we’re supposed to fix me, but actually all the emotions that I was feeling in my life were stuffed under there it’s just that I was unaware of them. So, it just sort of suppressed the emotional experience underneath my awareness. When I finally came out of that fog, I had a lot of backed-up, pent-up emotional energy to process and I still had a diagnosis, all right. So, I thought, “Well, this doesn’t really work.” For me anyway. Everyone has to decide for themselves. Of course, you’re encouraged to consult with the doctor. But my idea was, why can’t we share with people alternatives to traditional Western medicine? Why can’t we share with people that energy healing is a thing? That you could shift the energy of something and it might actually just go away. I mean, why can’t we share with people NLP? Why can’t we share all these alternative modalities with people so that their first solution isn’t getting a pill? Maybe their last solution is to get a pill. Maybe there’s a whole other range of options before you get the pill. Maybe that’s not number one. Maybe it’s number 100 thing you try. So, I’m just suggesting we flip it and we stop going to the pill first because it’s easy and convenient. Because in the long run it really isn’t. Just like littering seems easy and convenient, but in the long run we have to clean up the mess on our planet. So, I think that the whole goal with Skills Not Pills is to inspire people that there’s a whole lot of other ways of going about your life challenges than just taking a pill.   [1:28:45] Ashley James: Right. There’s times when we want them to temporarily take it like if there’s a difference between being suicidal or going off the you know. If a pill can help someone just get stable, we want that. It’s not that we’re saying never, no pills. There’s times when medication can be life-saving. We always want people to be healthy. The problem is 90 something percent of the time medication is just overprescribed. It’s given for everything. I remember my friend had a panic attack. Went to the hospital because she doesn’t know what was wrong with her. They sent her home with an anti-anxiety medication. They didn’t do any tests. She didn’t even know it was a panic attack. She’s like, “My heart’s pounding. I feel like I’m going to faint. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She was very healthy, very healthy girl. We were maybe 19 at the time. She goes to hospital thinking she’s having a heart attack and they just send her home with anti-anxiety meds. Is that really helpful? Is that really helpful to just, “Here, take some meds. You’ll be fine. Just numb those feelings you’ll be fine.” So, you’re saying that a lot of the time, and I’ve actually done a lot of interviews. Listeners can go to LearnTrueHealth.com and search ADHD. There’s some interviews I’ve done where the guests have shared that ADHD meds just made it much worse. They gave a lot of symptoms. The side-effects and they didn’t get to heal it. They didn’t get to work on it. They actually chose to get off of them and then work on it and figure out how to heal. So, I love that you bring this up. I love that you’re an advocate for helping people to gain more skills, more life skills emotionally, mentally and spiritually so they can really actualize the beings that they are inside and let go of the stories and the limitations that have been imposed upon them or self-imposed I should say. Kerri Hummingbird, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Your website is kerrihummingbird.com and you have a free gift, Love Mastery Game that you’re giving us. Listeners can go to kerrihummingbird.com/play for that. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [1:31:09] Kerri Hummingbird: Yes. I really encourage everybody to take a look at your thumbprint every day and remind yourself that you are living in a unique puzzle that was built just for you. If you don’t get curious about it and start discovering all about it inside of you, it’ll never go discovered. It’ll be just the lost puzzle that never got solved. So, it’s really up to each one of us to solve that puzzle that we are, that life plan, that thumbprint suit and figure out everything about it. Look at Ashley’s life, so amazing. You went through all that journey and my life. I mean, on the other side of what you think is horrible is actually an incredible journey of discovery. So, I just welcome everybody to take that journey for themselves.   [1:31:54] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Kerri.   [1:31:56] Kerri Hummingbird: Thank you.   [1:31:57] Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition? How we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity. Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program. And it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their life and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call. Or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. And I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctors’ offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals. There are so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people. Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program. Get Connected With Kerri Hummingbird! Website Click to get a free gift! Reinvent Yourself Training, Butterfly Circle  Book by Kerri Hummingbird The Second Wave: Transcending the Human Drama

The mainstream media is owned by the pharmaceutical industry. So when you search for this information, you will never find the truth. You will only find what the pharmaceutical companies pay the media to portray. Andy shared that we can find his podcast on this platform where info cannot be censored: https://www.sphir.io Andy's Documentary: vaxxedthemovie.com IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!  

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! How To Reverse Diseases Through Whole Food Plant-based Diet  https://www.learntruehealth.com/how-to-reverse-diseases-through-whole-food-plant-based-diet Highlights: What are the benefits of going whole food plant-based, no oil, no salt and no sugar Glowing skin from eating whole food plant-based How to reverse diabetes How to reverse heart disease How to reverse plantar fasciitis How to reverse other illnesses   In this episode, Naomi Murphy shared with us the benefits of eating a whole food plant-based diet. She shares different stories that support how whole food plant-based diet has helped various people in reversing illnesses. She also shares the benefits of eating a whole food plant-based diet.   [0:00] Intro: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 405.   [0:00:13] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show a dear friend of mine, Naomi Murphy, who has been a listener of the show. She’s been my stalker. What I love about Naomi is she’s been a health warrior. She has reversed some health issues and I’ve really been honored to be her friend and be part of her health journey. Watching her recover from Epstein Barr virus and from several other issues. It’s just watching you transform has been amazing. In this last year, her and I have really joined forces together in the way we cook, the way we eat and the way we use food as medicine. When we’re all alone and were making health changes, it’s really, I felt very isolated in my past when I’m switching to a new diet or when I’m getting on a new detox protocol and there’s no one else to do it with me. That’s why I love the Learn True Health Facebook group is that at least there’s some sense of community. People can come in feel supported, feel some sense of community. So when Naomi decided to go whole food, plant-based, no salt, sugar, oil for her heart to heal her heart, my husband and I were already eating this way. So it was so great to have a friend join me. We started texting each other almost daily pictures and recipes. We’d bring each other food. So to have that camaraderie was so amazing. So I’ve watched you transform your health and it’s been wonderful. I keep saying I got to have you on the show because you’re really inspiring and you’ve done so many things. You’re so disciplined and so focused on making sure that health is first. I know that you are just chock-full of wonderful information to help the listeners today. So I’m really really excited that you’re finally here on the show.   [0:02:27] Naomi Murphy: Thank you, Ashley. I have to say it’s a little surreal to be on this side of the podcast because I’ve been a listener for so long. When I met you you told me about your podcast. I think it took a year before I even checked it out. Then my life started to change and expand because of everything I learned. I was like, “Oh my God. This podcast is amazing.” I started recommending to everyone and talking to your more because I already knew you and yes, stalked you and asked every question I could think of. Lucky for me we have become friends. I agree about eating a diet that’s kind of outside the mainstream way of eating. It is so great that others that do that. That’s really how I’ve eaten different ways before like been surrounded by acupuncture students or MD students working at colleges. Getting into fun cleanses and things like that. Now I’m a suburban mom. I’m not in that holistic community as much as I used to be. So it was great to have you to talk to. I think it was imperative almost that I had someone to talk to because I was even going against my family culture a little bit. Even if my husband wants to be healthier, not everyone’s ready at the same time to start eating. It was eating whole food, plant-based, no salt, oil or sugar.   [0:04:12] Ashley James: Which sounds really boring and hard and expensive and not delicious. When I first heard that, my thought was I can’t do that which is really funny. When I first heard about these very specific parameters like whole food, plant-based meaning there’s no animal products. No dairy, no cheese, no eggs, no meat, no fish. Lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes and beans. That and whole greens and no oil, and no salt and sugar. I just thought, “That food sounds so bland and so complicated.” But then I started hearing the health benefits and the studies. I kept hearing these doctors who are reversing major diseases. It kept just etching ion my brain this every meal, this every single meal that I eat with oil and salt and sugar and animal fat or whatever. It kept, because at the time I was doing keto because I was sold this idea that keto is the absolute number one healthiest way to eat but my health was getting worse on keto not better even though I was working with a naturopath. We go weekly to the naturopath and show them everything we ate. They’re like, “Keep at it. Add more fats, add more eggs, add more cheese,” whatever I was. We were getting, just we were deteriorating. Our health was getting worse and worse and worse. I want to eat in a way that heals me. I’ve been frustrated that I’ve done over 30 diets, several of them led by doctors. I’ve looked into science because you can find a study to say that the Oreo diet is healthy for you because there’s a lot of paid study out there. So there’s a lot of misinformation. I was looking and searching for a food, a way to heal my body with food and the keto was not doing it for me. When I kept hearing over and over and over again because all the guests that I’d interviewed, I wasn’t going out looking for whole food, plant-based doctors. They found me a lot of times. I kept interviewing them and interviewing them. I just kept hearing like cancer reversed, type 2 diabetes reversed, type 1 diabetes significantly improved to the point where they cut insulin in half easily. I heard one guy, he cut his insulin by 70%. He’s a type 1 diabetic. Because his body became so efficient, weight loss happens as a by-product of this just achieving a healthy weight. Immune health like crazy. You’re living 30 years longer and really healthy in your senior years. So I kept hearing it over and over and over again. That’s when I started to go, “Okay.” Then chef AJ, she tries to make it be delicious so I started to look at it. When I interviewed her, I started to look into maybe I could do this. Let’s try it. Let’s just do 30 days. So I decided to do a 3-day challenge. Actually, at the time, a friend was visiting from Canada. Kat Hernandez, visiting from Canada. This was two years ago. Yeah. We did the 30-day challenge. By the end of the three days I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “This food is delicious. This food is easier to make.” It’s easier to make because there’s no meat I have to think about, which I didn’t realize was kind of you know, like food poisoning. You got to really make sure that things are cleaner whereas when you’re just cooking vegetables and greens, that’s not part of the equation. After one month of just trying the challenge, I was on board because I could not believe how good I felt. I always thought I’d eat meat but after three days of eating no meat just as an experiment and eating a whole food plant-based diet with no processed foods, my body was buzzing with energy. I wake up in the morning, jump out of bed and just be ready to go. Whereas before, I just had that low-level fog follow me. It took me a few hours to shake it off. Whereas now, it’s just on I’m on. In the morning I’m on.   [0:08:36] Naomi Murphy: I think many of us are functioning under a misunderstanding, which is promoted by our government because the government subsidizes the foods that are actually not good for us. The meat industry and the dairy industry are subsidized and so they want to promote those foods. There’s science that supports eating plants or health that is available to everyone. I was just listening to T. Colin Campbell in the book Whole. He was saying when he wrote The China Study, which shows that eating a whole food plant-based diet is the best for health. It’s the optimal diet for health and it’s backed up The China Study. He said that he was really naïve. He thought that he would bring that information to people and it would change everything. It would change legislation around food and nutrition. It would change medicine, it would change everything but instead, he met a lot of resistance in his own community, in the academic community, which is why he started writing books for people to read and to have access to the information. So, I think The China Study was written in 1976 and when he wrote Whole he was 79 years old, when he read it anyway, hearing him on audible. So there’s a lot of resistance to changing our way of eating away from animal products. It’s in our language. We have to get to the meat of the matter. I always thought that the most satisfying part of my meal that really stuck to my ribs, that made me feel satisfied and full was the protein from an animal product and the fat. I thought the protein and the fat were the satisfying parts and that I needed to add some fiber and some color for healthy. My mind was blown when I cut out all animal products and I did it cold turkey.   [0:11:11] Ashley James: Yeah. We’re going to get into that story though.   [0:11:13] Naomi Murphy: Okay. I was blown away and I continue to be actually, that eating a high fiber diet in the form of fruits and vegetables, is way more satisfying than eating meat and fats ever was and I have the added benefit of never ever feeling like I’m having a food coma or I’m getting kind of ill from eating. I like to eat so I don’t eat tiny portions. I eat a big amount of good food that I make. I just feel like the pressure of being full, I don’t feel disgusting or tired or fatigued or anything. I don’t feel any and there’s definitely no hangover the next day.   [0:12:07] Ashley James: The food comas and the food hangovers.   [0:12:09] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We can spend holidays with great delight, interesting, flavorful food that makes you lose weight instead of gain weight if you need to lose weight, which I do and without trying. Just by cooking the whole food plant-based food.   [0:12:38] Ashley James: Right. Yeah. You did Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s all eating the whole food plant-based diet, your whole family including your parents, which we’ll get into your story. But you guys had a successful whole holiday season and no one felt deprived and everyone got to eat amazing, delicious foods. We filmed some of it and put it in the membership, the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership. Yeah. It’s delicious. You’re right. I’m sitting here and I’m feeling my body and we just about half an hour ago ate your amazing, made from scratch whole food plant-based side paneer, which is delicious Indian food. I feel so satisfied right now like I do not need to eat for the next five hours. I feel so satisfied and there was no meat in it.   [0:13:30] Naomi Murphy: There’s no oil in it. There’s not even an oil added to sort of make you feel satisfied and full. So it is amazing. It is amazing to me. I think it will be amazing for a long time.   [0:13:42] Ashley James: The Ashley three years ago would not believe the Ashley now. That’s how much my world has changed in the last few years. I did what your husband is doing which is I slowly adapted to the whole food plant-based whereas you went –   [0:14:03] Naomi Murphy: You went whole hog but not cold turkey?   [0:14:04] Ashley James: Right. I am now whole hog but I didn’t go cold turkey. All the meat talk. Whereas you went totally cold turkey just like my husband, right? He just woke up January 1st –   [0:14:17] Naomi Murphy: Well, I have some strong motivation. I have some strong motivation. When you guys were eating whole food plant-based, no oil, I just thought, “Well, that’s a bit fussy. That’s a bit extreme but I could accommodate that. I could cook something for you.” But I didn’t imagine that I would want to do that. It just didn’t occur to me that that would be a good solution for me because of all the ether health information I’ve been following. The way that I’d been using whole foods. I remember about a decade ago, there was a number of books kind of about using the whole food. People talked about, “Eat the chicken skin. Eat the whole thing because there’s benefits to all parts.” But what they don’t mention is you can get many more nutrients in plant foods than you can in a chicken skin. It’s just that if you have to be eating chicken, which turns out to have a lot of problems if you read Proteinaholic and if you read How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger. You can learn that there’s some significant problems associated with eating poultry that I never imagined possible actually because poultry has been considered healthier version of meat.   [0:15:45] Ashley James: Well, what’s funny in the Proteinaholic he cites a study where they showed that eating poultry is associated with weight gain. On all the diets where I gained weight and not lost weight, I was just beating my head against the wall desperately trying to lose weight, I was eating chicken.   [0:16:05] Naomi Murphy: Think of all the people eating chicken breasts.   [0:16:08] Ashley James: Thinking that they’re doing something really really healthy but of all the animals you could eat, chicken, which we associate with low fat and weight loss, is actually the one that causes the most amount of weight gain, unhealthy weight gain.   [0:16:21] Naomi Murphy: It’s also associated with prostate cancer, developing prostate cancer and I don’t remember what else. It’s very strongly associated with some serious illness. Now that my husband and I are in our mid-late 40s you know it’s just becoming a time where we’re really paying attention to health changes and really wanting to live healthfully. When you’re a teenager in your 20s you can abuse your body and you don’t necessarily feel the impact.   [0:17:00] Ashley James: Right. Now we feel everything.   [0:17:02] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So it’s interesting. I wish I would’ve had all these information when I was younger.   [0:17:09] Ashley James: I do too. I know I’m ready to hear it, which is funny because we were talking about that before we heat record, that I owned the Colin T. Campbell’s book, The China Study, in the early 2000s. I was reading it. I didn’t finish it obviously. I remember being on an airplane reading it flying somewhere. I think I was flying to Florida for Christmas and then I left it there, lost it or something. Imagine how different my life would’ve been if I had actually taken that book seriously in my early 20s. I mean, my life would’ve been very different. But I’m really really happy with where I am now. I think regret and guilt and shame are very toxic emotions. I’ve heard some people compare it to every time you feel guilt or shame it’s kind of like smoking a cigarette. If we think about, it is toxic for the body. First to stay in that level of vibration of holding on to regret, shame and guilt; and I could totally go there. I could totally feel the amount of regret of my past, right? We are the people we are right now because of our past. So let’s just transform it into a positive. I appreciate the person I am now and I’m still growing, I’m still on a journey as are you, as are we all. I can appreciate my past. If I had taken it seriously, oh my gosh, my life would be so different now. So, it’s pretty amazing that I had the cognitive dissonance to just shut it down and not listen.   [0:18:43] Naomi Murphy: Yes. I recall actively dismissing that book. Sean and I, we were talking about it when we were dating. So let’s say 17 years ago, he had a friend who ate whole food plant-based, no sugar. I don’t know about the oil and salt. It was based on reading T. Colin Campbell’s book The China Study that scientifically shows that way of eating is the healthiest. I remember saying, “Well, I’m going to pretend that you never said that.” Because it just was not workable in my mind at that time.   [0:19:28] Ashley James: We have to be ready to hear it because you were facing some health challenges. I know that listeners want to take their health to the next level. Some of them are in an acute situation facing health challenges while others are just really interesting in achieving those health goals. Let’s talk about your story and paint that picture. What have you gone through in your life? Because I know you have really healed some stuff. So, what have you gone through in your life? Tell us your story.   [0:19:57] Naomi Murphy: When I think about my relationship with food, a key memory was when I was in high school and I just wanted to be thinner. I remember depriving my body of food and then standing next to a refrigerator and eating ice cream and that’s it.   [0:20:18] Ashley James: It’s like anorexia and then binging. You weren’t throwing up?   [0:20:26] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I didn’t eat that much but my food choices were obviously bizarre and not healthful. I didn’t have a concept of a health-promoting. Though my mom was a good home cook. She was often on Weight Watchers. We ate chicken and white meat but still with plenty of oils and plenty of animal products. We did some healthy things back then. So it was that experience of being anorexic I think that made me think like I don’t really want to diet for weight loss. Any diet that I have should be about health primarily. Of course, weight loss can happen when you have a healthy diet. But I just realize that I needed to have a boundary around that.   [0:21:30] Ashley James: You mean you wanted to make sure that your diet was never about restricting portions because you saw that you could become extreme and start eating really unhealthful?   [0:21:44] Naomi Murphy: I had to be careful with it. Later, maybe about 10 years ago, my husband and I did do Weight Watchers for a short period. Or we’ve done My Fitness Pal when you track what you eat. I think that really helps with portion control. So that really didn’t trigger extreme behavior. That was good for showing me that I was eating more than I needed to eat.   [0:22:12] Ashley James: That’s good because, well like in Weight Watchers, you don’t want to only eat five points a day, right? If you have the anorexic mindset you might try to say, “I want to get under five points.” Whereas you’re supposed to be eating 23 points a day. So Weight Watchers is like, “We want to get you to this goal. We want you to eat 20 points a day.” Maybe not 23 or whatever. SO they try to keep you within parameters. Also My Fitness Pal, you may be staying 1800 calories but you wouldn’t want to be like, “I only want to eat 300 calories a day.”   [0:22:51] Naomi Murphy: But neither of those things. Those were like a short-term experience to be informative of how I could eat better. That level of calculation and also their food recommendations didn’t help me feel better. So it was not sustainable. It didn’t engage me. It didn’t feel healthy but it was helpful for portion control at that time. So in my 20s, I worked at Bastyr University.   [0:23:22] Ashley James: Which is the naturopathic clinic here.   [0:23:24] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s a college. I worked at the clinic for the college. So I was surrounded by health nuts. That was awesome and fun like the people who worked in the admin roles and also the students that we knew. So, there was always a way to learn about the different elimination diet or a cleanse. I had some depression and I just happened to mention it to one of the docs. She said, “You should come in and do an elimination diet because you have dark circles under your eyes, which indicates you have a food sensitivity or food allergy.” So I did that. Instead of having my blood tested, I did an elimination diet and slowly tested the foods. I think it was a few weeks that I did not eat any allergens and then you slowly test them. If you have a reaction you don’t eat for like three or four days any of the other foods and then you add another so you can see what response is. So that became a really long drawn out process that lasted about six months. I did find some things that I really responded to so it made me really afraid of food. So that affected my eating for a long time. I did eat such a clean diet that I did. I lost like 25 pounds. I did feel a lot better. It didn’t help me achieve a healthier diet in the long run. I mean, I did eliminate some things but I was not counseled, which I think is really interesting now about how to address gut health, which was sort like, “Why can’t I eat gluten? Why do I respond to these things?” The answer was that it may be just a problem with my gut. But then no one pushed me to continue seeing somebody to address gut health, which I know so much more about that now. So it seems obvious that they would’ve helped me heal my gut back then. But it didn’t happen for whatever reason. I didn’t pursue the appointment and the supervising doc didn’t recommend it. So I don’t know. It’s a question I have about that.   [0:25:46] Ashley James: Yeah. This is where we have to advocate for ourselves as patients. I have had that experience with a doctor kind of just say something in passing. What they really should’ve done was made the entire appointment be about that, you know. The, “Oh. You should just heal your gut.” Then like, “Goodbye.” Well, okay. How? What? Yeah. We need to advocate for ourselves. Knowing what you know now, those doctors that you were surround with every day because you work in the clinic, those doctors should’ve been screaming, “Everyone needs to heal their gut. The gut is the first thing. If we don’t have a healthy gut we don’t have a healthy anything. Everyone, everyone quick. Come over here. Eat this fermented food.”   [0:26:30] Naomi Murphy: And it is a teaching clinic so perhaps they wanted to keep more people coming in that didn’t work there or something. Maybe just have to do with being an employee and using their clinic. I wish I would’ve started addressing my gut health back then because it would’ve change everything.   [0:26:52] Ashley James: Well, you’re addressing it now.   [0:26:55] Naomi Murphy: Yes. So I have three children. I had my last child when I was 40. I became very fatigued and tired and had some brain fog. All of these things I attributed to being a mom of three children that were five and under. I don’t think that anyone would dispute that that’s a possibility. So it didn’t occur to me until my youngest child went to kindergarten and I was like, “Great. I’m ready to kick butt now.” Then I noticed that I actually felt worse. I didn’t have energy to do all the things that I’ve been waiting to do while I was a stay at home mom. That was a big wakeup call for me. I ended up being diagnosed with Epstein Barr virus. Starting on protocol with an MD, I had a little improvement but not a lot. I was overweight. So I thought, “Well, maybe if I just lose weight I will have more energy and doing this Epstein Barr protocol will be more effective if I could just lighten the load of my body.” With the permission of my doctor I started doing keto. I did keto. I followed Facebook groups and there are people that I knew at the time that were keto. I ate probably the most unhealthy version of keto whether it involves eating bacon and cheese.   [0:28:41] Ashley James: Bacon wrapped cheese and cheese covered bacon.   [0:28:45] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I didn’t last long with that. I did feel a little bit more energy from eating keto at first. Then the lack of fiber in my diet was impactful. I just felt funny like making a tofu stir fry for my family and then I ate a piece of cheese and a piece of bacon and a small serving of cauliflower or something. It just didn’t feel right. So that didn’t work for me long term. I got a better protocol that involved eating the foods recommended by Anthony Williams, the medical medium.   [0:29:32] Ashley James: Okay. Who’s the medical medium?   [0:29:35] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. My doctor also recommended his foods for treating EBV.   [0:29:41] Ashley James: So you stopped keto.   [0:29:43] Naomi Murphy: Stopped keto. So at that point I started EBV with food and it was whole food but it involved spoonful of coconut oil sometimes, plenty of meat. Anthony Williams doesn’t promote meat but I did. I did eat healthy meat.   [0:30:09] Ashley James: Well the meat your family gets, just to paint the picture, there’s a farm up in Camano Island and this beefalo which I never knew what they were until I met you. But it’s a hybrid of a buffalo and a cow.   [0:30:23] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. They are entirely grass-fed, no pesticide.   [0:30:26] Ashley James: They live a wonderful life out on the pasture.   [0:30:29] Naomi Murphy: Very small farm.   [0:30:31] Ashley James: Then your family buys like have of one and puts it in the freezer.   [0:30:35] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We fry it and no fat comes out. It’s really lean.   [0:30:39] Ashley James: Your family was looking for high-quality protein. It wasn’t really a standard American diet, although you were eating the same amount of protein, same amount of meat as everyone else. Just high quality. Here you were, you were very tired every morning. You really were fatigued. You could hardly function, could hardly leave the house.   [0:31:05] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I started having some neurological symptoms like dizziness and fatigue is considered a neurological symptoms as well. I had numbness and tingling as well in my legs sometimes in my hands. At one point like my whole right side of my body got tingly and numb.   [0:31:30] Ashley James: There were several times you thought you got a stroke because you were –   [0:31:33] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I used to constantly ask that kind of question to myself like, “Do I need to go to the ER or what do I need to do?” So that was a stressful time.   [0:31:48] Ashley James: You also had some cardiac symptom too, right?   [0:31:51] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I had some heart palpitations and some arrhythmia, I guess.   [0:31:59] Ashley James: Weren’t you having shortness of breath also?   [0:32:01] Naomi Murphy: That was later. That was later. But that’s not what I started out with. So I treated my Epstein Barr using foods that are anti-viral and herbs that are anti-viral. I did some detoxes. I did the parasite cleanse, which I’m on again from Dr. Jay Davidson.                                                                                                                                             [0:32:26] Ashley James: That’s a great episode to listen to.   [0:32:27] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I love that one.   [0:32:29] Ashley James: You got a sauna. I remember that.   [0:32:30] Naomi Murphy: I got a sauna.   [0:32:32] Ashley James: You do regular coffee enemas. You would drink the smoothie green giant like 60 oz. green smoothies.   [0:32:43] Naomi Murphy: That’s when I started with whole food plant-based.   [0:32:46] Ashley James: Oh really? But before that you were doing the juicing of-   [0:32:49] Naomi Murphy: I did juicing. Juicing.   [0:32:51] Ashley James: Anthony Williams recommends juicing lots of celery so you were doing lots of celery juice.   [0:32:55] Naomi Murphy: Right. For over two years, every morning I had a pint of celery juice. My husband was very supportive in helping make that happen. I bought celery by the case.   [0:33:06] Ashley James: Organic?   [0:33:07] Naomi Murphy: Yes. Organic celery by the case. I did heal my gut. That was amazing. I’ve since learned that you can heal your gut using all kinds of vegetables. It doesn’t have to be celery juice but that was the protocol that I was using at that time. The consistency of my application of that I think help. Yeah. Things really changed.   [0:33:39] Ashley James: So you were on this healing EBV protocol for how many years were you working on EBV?   [0:33:47] Naomi Murphy: Well, over two years but it was two years that I think I was on the whole food mostly plant-based but with plenty of oil.   [0:33:58] Ashley James: And beefalo, right?   [0:34:01] Naomi Murphy: And also eating meat. That was for a couple of years. So I did have some health improvement. But there was also some slippage eventually because I’m a mom and I cook for others. I wanted to talk about when I did have my chronic illness but didn’t really realize it was a chronic illness. I relied heavily on dairy products to feed my family. Cottage cheese, melted cheese, kefir. I made kefir that felt good using good milk with probiotic. That was something I felt really good about. I felt that protein was the most important thing to feed my kids and I no longer think that. I’m no longer worried about that. I think that if there’s any health benefit to that way of eating was at least we were eating whole foods. We were eating whole foods all along.   [0:35:04] Ashley James: As opposed to eating a bunch of cereal in front of them.   [0:35:06] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We were trying. We try. We weren’t perfect. Whole food was our –   [0:35:15] Ashley James: Unprocessed. As much unprocessed food.   [0:35:16] Naomi Murphy: As much unprocessed food. But of course, listening to those people who were saying, “Eat the chicken skin. Use everything. Get the benefit.” Maybe even back then drink the red wine because of the benefit of the –   [0:35:35] Ashley James: Resveratrol in red wine which is like just eat the grapes dude. Just eat the grapes. You don’t need to get alcohol into your system. I mean, I get it.   [0:35:46] Naomi Murphy: When my health kind of tanked, there was no alcohol involved in my diet anymore.   [0:35:52] Ashley James: Right. You’ve been very strict.   [0:35:53] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So when you and Duffy were eating whole food plant-based, no salt, oil or sugar, I remember thinking it was a little bit extreme and not something I would choose but fine for you. That’s great that you were doing it. I was supportive of you.   [0:36:12] Ashley James: Didn’t we have you over for dinner? Didn’t we have you guys for dinner and we cooked that way or did you cook for us?   [0:36:21] Naomi Murphy: I think I tried to cook for you when you came over and I made something that fit like a coconut milk soup. Like a soup with coconut. Like a Thai thing.   [0:36:32] Ashley James: Your Thai coconut soup is oh my gosh, it’s amazing. We’re going to have to film that by the way and put it in the Learn True Health Home Kitchen because it is memorable. I’m actually like I could actually taste it in my mouth right now. It’s really good, your Thai soup and it’s full of vegetables. It’s so delicious.   [0:36:46] Naomi Murphy: Well, you’re lucky because I have some on the refrigerator right now.   [0:36:50] Ashley James: I’m going to have to take some home with me.   [0:36:53] Naomi Murphy: So, my motivation for going whole food plant-based was I saw a practitioner and was told that I had heart disease. Because of the location of the heart disease that it might be affecting my breathing.   [0:37:08] Ashley James: Was this back in June?   [0:37:09] Naomi Murphy: This was July 15th, 2019.   [0:37:10] Ashley James: July 15th, 2019.   [0:37:14] Naomi Murphy: I was completely flummoxed because I have been focusing about EBV, not worried about calories, not worried about my weight, focusing on just eating high-quality food that was anti-viral. Really wanting to focus on that and then I heard heart disease, which never occurred to me as a possible problem though it should because it’s the number one –   [0:37:43] Ashley James: It’s the number one killer.   [0:37:44] Naomi Murphy: It’s the number one killer of our country.   [0:37:46] Ashley James: Statistically, if you’ve been eating the standard American diet, you are statistically more likely to die of heart disease than anything else. So this conversation is the most important conversation for everyone to have because this is the diet proven to reverse heart disease. Now, at the time you saw the practitioner six months ago, can you believe it’s been six months? You were noticing, because you go on weekly walks around your neighborhood with a walking partner with a neighbor, and you notice that you were having shortness of breath along with all your other heart symptoms.   [0:38:18] Naomi Murphy: Yep. With all my other heart symptoms and the poor circulation, which is causing the numbness and tingling. It all was attributed to me, in my mind, as part of EBV and EBV attacking different parts of my body. But this practitioner said, “You don’t have EBV. You have heart disease.” So I was like the break squealed and I changed my direction entirely. He said whole food plant-based. I went home.   [0:38:48] Ashley James: Well, first you came over to our house.   [0:38:50] Naomi Murphy: I went over to your house to talk to you about it.   [0:38:52] Ashley James: I made fresh rolls.   [0:38:53] Naomi Murphy: You fed me fresh rolls. I’m like, “This is delicious. Okay. This is a good start.” So that was strongly motivating for me to hear the word heart disease because it never occurred to me as something that I should be looking at because of my focus on the anti-viral lifestyle. So I immersed myself in information about eating whole food plant-based. Dr. Esselstyn, because he wrote the book prevent and reverse heart disease, was kind of my gateway educator which I found his interview that you did. I don’t remember in what order but I checked out the iThrive documentary. I bought the iThrive documentary because Sean’s mom has diabetes.   [0:39:45] Ashley James: Sean being your husband.   [0:39:46] Naomi Murphy: Sean is my husband. Yes.   [0:39:51] Ashley James: Just a little plug, LearnTrueHealth.com/iThrive. For people that don’t want to check out that docu-series. It’s really good. It really helped you, right?   [0:39:59] Naomi Murphy: Yes. Yes. It was great information. I learned so much about diabetes too which is important for everyone to learn about because it’s so prevalent in our society right now.   [0:40:12] Ashley James: Well, Type 2 diabetes is a byproduct of eating a high processed fat and high meat diet, which is it blew my mind. It took me a really long time to get that even though they kept saying it because in my mind, I have been indoctrinated that sugar is the cause of diabetes and it’s not. I really like how Dr. Garth Davis lays this out in his book Proteinaholic. He really does a good job laying out the studies that prove that people who are on a whole food plant-based diet, even if they eat a tremendous amount of carbohydrates they have amazing insulin sensitivity so they do not have insulin resistance. The more someone eats animal products, which is high fat, even if you eat a chicken breast there’s still a lot of fat in it. The more fat we eat, the more insulin resistance we create. That blew my mind because I had too type 2 diabetes and I reversed it with food. Now that I am eating this way, my insulin sensitivity is the best it’s ever been. My glucose is the best it’s even been, which is really exciting because I’m eating like 300 grams of carbs a da. Whereas when I was eating really low carb, I wouldn’t allow myself to more than 50 grams a carbs a day which is very restrictive. But that just goes to show because people who are type 2 diabetic who eat, let’s say they eat a potato and their blood sugar shoots up because they’re eating a potato with animal products with oil or butter or whatever. They’re like, “See, I can’t eat those carbs because my blood sugar goes up. Sugar’s the problem. Sugar’s the problem.” No. The insulin resistance is the problem. We need to heal the insulin resistance just as we need to heal the gut first. When it comes to blood sugar regulation, carbs are not the devil. We need to heal the insulin resistance and then you can eat carbs and you’re body uses and utilizes it in a healthy way. That blew my mind. That whole docu-series, iThrive docu-series really lays that out in a beautiful way. So you watched the docu-series.   [0:42:32] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. And I think one of the main things that I learn from that is that diabetes is it’s not just an epidemic, it’s a pandemic. The level of illness from diabetes that we have in our country from diabetes is so high and so serious that that’s what we’re dealing with. It’s reversible with changing the diet. It’s sort of like going back to the days of the black plague and people not realizing the cause of it so not being able to stop it. That’s how we’re acting like there is no solution and there is. So if you think at the level of dysfunction that’s going on that we can solve it but it’s sort of like an outlier information. I no longer feel that way because I’ve immersed myself in the doctors and other people that write about this and speak about it. Go back a year ago, I thought that taking medication, managing blood sugar prolongs life. I thought that my husband’s mom was doing well. She’s managing her blood sugar eating lots of dairy and meat and vegetables too and taking the medication. I think that’s she’s doing really well. But people who are managing their blood sugars with medication and a high protein diet are not prolonging their life. This is a statistical reality. So that blew my mind. That there is a way to reverse it and it’s not what all the diabetics are talking about or being taught or being told by their doctors.   [0:44:34] Ashley James: No. It actually really angers me. So I’ve helped people for the last eight years now coming up on nine years. I’ve helped people reverse diabetes and there’s countless. Like countless people who have gone to their doctor 20 years being kept on Metformin or insulin and Metformin or other drugs. Then they go to their doctor after working with me for under three months. They go to their doctor and they no longer have type 2 diabetes. No longer have it. The doctor doesn’t even ask a question. They go, “I want to go off this med. Here’s my blood work. My blood work shows I can get it off this medication.” The doctor takes them off the medication. The doctors been prescribing the medication for 20 years and they go, “Don’t you want to know what I did?” Like 99% of the time the doctors do not want to know. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to know what diet and lifestyle changes cause their patient to no longer need medication for the rest of their life. That is the definition of health. Symptom-free on no medications. That is the goal post. That is the goal for all of us to be on zero medications because we are so healthy we don’t need it.   [0:45:50] Naomi Murphy: Well. Yeah. I think it’s something that you keep showing us through your interviews is that our medical system is not centered around health.   [0:45:59] Ashley James: It’s not centered around achieving health. It’s maintaining disease.   [0:46:03] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Right. It’s managing disease, which is different. It’s different than achieving health.   [0:46:10] Ashley James: So we have to be outliers. I love to use that word. But we do. We have to be the salmon. We have to swim upstream to not be a statistic. So eating, like you said, this is kind of extreme. I get it. The Ashley from three years ago would not think that this was an easy way to eat. But now, the Ashley today is like, “This is the only way I want to eat for the rest of my life. It’s delicious and I feel amazing.”   [0:46:34] Naomi Murphy: Right. But even if people choose to eat meat, they can get tremendous health benefits just from increasing their vegetable consumption.   [0:46:43] Ashley James: Yeah. Tell them about Sean.   [0:46:44] Naomi Murphy: Especially like variety of vegetable consumption. So you don’t just add one vegetable. So yeah, I want to talk about my husband Sean. He said about ten years ago, so he would’ve been in his mid-30s. He’s a first-grade teacher. He used to teach the kids how to embroider self-portraits. So using a needle, threading a needle for 24 kids because they weren’t able to do that. They’re not able to do that in first grade. So he had to help everyone. Then all of a sudden he needed glasses, he needed readers to do that. He had heard or read somewhere about improving your eyesight by eating a lot of vegetables. So he had just increased his vegetable content, reverse that problem. We were still –   [0:47:34] Ashley James: He was still eating meat.   [0:47:36] Naomi Murphy: We were still in the whole foods of all kinds. So he just   [0:47:38] Ashley James: Eating dairy and eggs. He was still eating all that.   [0:47:40] Naomi Murphy: He just amped up his vegetables.   [0:47:41] Ashley James: Just add with more vegetables.   [0:47:43] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So he reversed that.   [0:47:47] Ashley James: I love it. Yeah. Think about it. It’s all the antioxidants you’re getting, the vitamins and the minerals and all the nutrients our bodies need.   [0:47:54] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I think Dr. Fuhrman is a big, you interviewed him, right?   [0:47:59] Ashley James: Yes. Dr. Joel Fuhrman.   [0:48:00] Naomi Murphy: Dr. Joel Fuhrman. He’s a whole food plant-based doctor. I think he recommends or says that eating up to 7% meat is healthy. I just think that for some people it’s easier to calculate 7% of your diet being meat but I think that kind of opens the door to if you don’t want to be extreme, you could just say, “Sure. I can eat meat sometimes.” It just have to be under 7% and then I can get all the health benefits of eating this way without restricting myself. I can eat whatever it is at a certain holiday, your birthday or anniversary or something if you need to.   [0:48:42] Ashley James: Yeah. I think it’s something like a one or two meals a week would contain fish or meat. Joel Fuhrman, his whole food plant-based diet, he calls it the nutritarian diet and I’ve adapted so much from him because he talks about for example onions and mushrooms. You want to eat a half a cup of mushrooms a day. He shows the studies. He correlate, he brings all the information beautifully together. He shows if you eat half a cup of mushrooms a day, even just the plain white ones, doesn’t have to be the fancy ones. Make sure it’s organic. Cooked and with half a cup of onions every day, I can’t remember the exact percentage but it was a significant reduction of breast cancer, significant reduction of all cancers. It’s a huge huge support system to the immune system. It actually has a chemical, mushrooms a very healthy chemical that stops new vasculature growing to a tumor. So if you currently have a little bit of cancer, everyone has cancer cells in their body that the immune system is cleaning out. But if you are actually, if you’re body’s developing a tumor right now because you won’t know for another few years. Because tumor takes years to really get to the point where we notice them. Most tumors grow slowly. So the body’s creating new vasculature to the tumors. Just something as simple as eating half a cup of mushrooms, which almost nothing. You can hide it. If you don’t like the taste of mushrooms, you can probably hide that in a soup. You could probably hide it somewhere. But just using it as medicine, it’s just one example that it reduces the ability of the body, it almost shuts it off, the body’s ability to create new vasculature to a tumor. So you’re just cutting it off before the tumor ever gets to grow. I mean I’d rather half a cup of mushrooms for the rest of my life than be put on chemo. It’s like that makes total sense to me.   [0:50:33] Naomi Murphy: You think?   [0:50:34] Ashley James: Yeah. I’d rather pay for it now than pay for it later. So when he, many actually of the experts that we follow, do kinds of great things where they say, “You eat broccoli because of this. You want to eat cabbage because of that. You’re healing this part of the body with beets.” Beets are wonderful for the liver and amazing actually for the cardiovascular system. They increase the nitric oxide and heal the endothelial lining of the heart and of all the arteries. So it’s like every single food we go through it. We do this in the Learn True Health Kitchen membership. You can go through. When you’re eating a food and you’re like, “I’m healing my liver right now and I am healing my eyes by eating this. I’m healing my brain right no by eating that.” You’re eating with a purpose and it’s delicious food. You know you’re healing your body. I love that a lot of these experts that we’ve been following do that. Joel Fuhrman says, I think I’ve heard 10% you’ve heard 7% but he basically says you’re significantly reducing. It’s not meat added every meal it’s maybe once a week. So some people can have that flexibility. I had to really ease into this because I was a huge believer that meat was the most important food in the entire world because I really bought the Atkins. Oh yeah, I bought it. Hook, line and sinker because people that I really really looked up to, mentors of mine, said it’s the most important part of the world. I had several mentors say that it was most. I mean I really bought, I feel like I drank the Kool-Aid big time on that. So I had to like eat one meatless meal and I kind of freaked out about before. Even just preparing a meatless meal I’m like, “I don’t know how this is going to go.” Then I was like, “Okay. That was doable.” So I really like had to ease into this whereas my husband just woke up and said, two years ago he woke up and said, “Never again will I eat meat.” Which helped reduce my meat intake because I stopped buying it for the household. So we only ate it when we went to other places outside the house. But yeah. It constantly surprised me how good I felt not eating meat. It’s okay to ease into it. It’s okay to go meatless Mondays or I’m only going to eat meat at dinner. You can ease into it.   [0:52:53] Naomi Murphy: All the whole food plant-based recipes or the way that I just eat it, it didn’t taste delicious right away but it really only took a matter of days for me. I mean, maybe a week, maybe ten days   [0:53:05] Ashley James: Well you’re an amazing cook too so I have to give you props. My husband is waving at you and giving you a thumbs up.   [0:53:11] Naomi Murphy: Isn’t that why we decided to make the website though?   [0:53:15] Ashley James: Yes. We decided to do the membership because we’re both really good cooks.   [0:53:19] Naomi Murphy: I love your cooking.   [0:53:20] Ashley James: I love your cooking. We should just hire each other to cook for each other.   [0:53:26] Naomi Murphy: I know. I know. I wish we lived closer like next door.   [0:53:30] Ashley James: Well, you never know what the future brings. Maybe we’ll be neighbors one day.   [0:53:35] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. That’d be great.   [0:53:36] Ashley James: That’d be great. We live like 40 minutes away from each other, but it’s worth the drive to come eat your food. So, that’s why we did the membership. So that we could share with you guys our recipes, which I’m still thinking about the lunch I just had because it’s so delicious.   [0:53:50] Naomi Murphy: I don’t think, like I was saying, I don’t think I could have done so well eating whole food, transitioning into whole food plant-based without Ashley as a friend. The experience that she had and the pointers. So, that’s what we want to be for everyone who joins the membership. We just want to be – if you don’t have someone in your community or in your family that’s up for it yet like you may find them, but you know in the meantime like we could all be that for each other. We could be your friend that eats whole food plant-based.   [0:54:21] Ashley James: Naomi and I are your friend. I’m here to support you in eating more whole foods in your life, eating more plants in your life.   [0:54:29] Naomi Murphy: So, I have a couple of favorite stories –   [0:54:32] Ashley James: I want to hear them.   [0:54:33] Naomi Murphy: – about healing with whole food plant-based. Okay. So these aren’t my stories, but one is someone who has been on your show and I don’t think he’d mind if I told his story, Eric Thornton.   [0:54:41] Ashley James: Yes.   [0:54:42] Naomi Murphy: Yes. Okay. So, he told me about his experience of going whole food plant-based. So, seven years ago, maybe a little bit longer now, but seven years ago he had a really serious heart attack. It’s a kind of heart attack that kills many people and it didn’t kill him. So, that’s great. So, after his heart attack he became a vegetarian and he ate an egg white omelet every morning with a teaspoon of coconut oil. He ate lots of vegetables the rest of the day and he had like a piece of cheese like an ounce of cheese every couple of weeks that would be added into his diet. Vegetarian, ate egg in the morning probably cooked in oil, other things cooked in oil but used coconut oil, obviously was –   [0:55:35] Ashley James: But no fish, no meat, no fried food.   [0:55:37] Naomi Murphy: Nope. Nope. Three years after his heart attack his cardiologist said that he needed emergency surgery.   [0:55:46] Ashley James: Because his clogs got so bad in his heart.   [0:55:48] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So he had heard of eating whole food plant-based to reverse heart disease. I don’t remember his pathway for learning about that but I know he did end up working with doctors at True North. He spoke to Dr. Esselstyn. I guess Dr. Esselstyn will talk to anyone who wants to talk to him eventually.   [0:56:07] Ashley James: Yeah. Dr. Esselstyn called him. It was actually really neat. Eric was, and I haven’t heard the whole story but Eric told me this that when he was walking into his cardiologist’s appointment to talk about the surgery, the emergency surgery, Dr. Esselstyn called him back and Dr. Esselstyn talked to him and laid it out and said, “Stop eating that one egg a day or whatever. Stop doing the oil. And stop doing the cheese.” Those three things, if he had just had stopped doing those three years before, he would have already had reversed his heart disease.     [0:56:45] Naomi Murphy: Right. Dr. Esselstyn will say things like if people who are like basically at death’s door, have tried everything he will just say, “Give me 16 days.” So this way of eating can actually arrest and start to reverse problems very quickly. So if you’re considering experimenting with whole food plant-based eating, you don’t have to change your life. You could just do a cleanse like a whole food plant-based cleanse and see what happens. Because people have reversed very serious conditions. So I’ll get back to Eric’s story. So he had angina so bad –   [0:57:27] Ashley James: Which is chest pain.   [0:57:27] Naomi Murphy: Chest pain. He had bad chest pains and he needed help walking. He needed to be pulled up out of his chair to walk. He was breathless when walking. He was weak.   [0:57:44] Ashley James: He was in his 40s.   [0:57:45] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I wasn’t sure of his age.   [0:57:47] Ashley James: I’m pretty sure he was in his 40s and also he was kind of fit because before he’d gotten to the work he does now, he was a contractor. He’s always worked with his hands. So it wasn’t like he was out of shape.   [0:58:00] Naomi Murphy: So he cut out the oil and the egg and the piece of cheese every two weeks. Just cut out those things, cut out all oils. Within three days his angina was gone and within three months he was off seven of his medications including high blood pressure medication doctor’s orders because his blood pressure was getting too low and he didn’t need surgery.   [0:58:29] Ashley James: Yes. So he decided not to do the emergency surgery and instead try the diet and the diet worked.   [0:58:36] Naomi Murphy: Now, he’s a healthy guy, walks his dogs, looks fit.   [0:58:44] Ashley James: Doesn’t have any heart issues, any heart clogs. Yeah. I mean just think about it, when you hear that the medical system, “The cost of heart disease is whatever billions of dollars.” Replace the word cost with profit. Diabetic, and I’ve heard that the diabetic costs $12,000 a year, right? I think it’s more now but to manage diabetes cost $12,000 a year. That isn’t a cost that’s a profit. There’s a lot of companies that want to protect their profits and that would not want people empowered and healing their diseases. There are scores of people out there that want you to be sick because it profits them. Not so sick you die because they want to keep making a profit. Just sick enough to be on medication and need surgeries and need stints and need their procedures. They don’t want you healthy. So, that’s another motivator for me because I want to completely blow all the statistics out of the water. I don’t want to be any of those statistics. I don’t want to you know die of any of those. I want to blow everything. Everything out of the water. I want to live to be a hundred and totally healthy and running marathons at 100. That’s a goalpost for me. So we have to navigate our lives knowing that all the marketing, all the information out there in the mainstream is designed to keep us in that box called sick and on medications. It’s our job to be the outliers and the mavericks.   [1:00:29] Naomi Murphy: Even the most well-intentioned doctor, if surgery and medications are what they have in their toolbox they don’t they’re not informed in how to keep you healthy. So it’s not that the individuals involved in the system are all but they’re just using what they’ve been taught. If our medical schools are supported by big business making money then they’re going to make sure that what doctors learn are to use their product.   [1:01:01] Ashley James: Yeah. The thing is, if a surgery can save someone’s life do it, if a medication can save someone’s life do it. Absolutely. Preventive medicine is about catching it before you need that. I’m not saying that the surgery shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that when you go to most doctors that’s the only option they’ll give you. This is my problem when you look at naturopathic medicine versus MD like going to a medical doctor. They will both look at the same blood work and drive completely different things. An MD will wait until you’re sick enough to give you a medication. An ND will say, “Okay. You’re starting to go in the wrong direction. Let’s change some things now so you won’t need to go on medication.” So prevention is what 100% of listeners can do right now. We can all prevent things by shifting little things in our diet and our lifestyle if we want to get really gung-ho about it, dive into the whole food plant-based diet because it can significantly reduce your chances of dying of a heart attack.   [1:02:06] Naomi Murphy: Right. Yeah. It’s just interesting to see what kind of results a healthy person can get. If you think you’re doing well, just give it a try. Just do it as an experiment and see if you notice any differences. But people have gotten very dramatic results and extended life. They get to live by changing their diet. So, another one of my favorite stories, again it’s not my story but it’s Dr. Greger’s story, I think what led him to a lifelong job to educate people about nutrition. His website nutritionfacts.org is an incredible resource. He does that all without any payment or any advertising because he never wants people to think that there’s profit associated with him sharing information about health.   [1:03:13] Ashley James: What was the website again?   [1:03:14] Naomi Murphy: Nutritionfacts.org.   [1:03:16] Ashley James: Nutritionfacts.org.   [1:03:17] Naomi Murphy: It’s a great resource. It’s a great resource.   [1:03:19] Ashley James: I actually really like it. I like those videos he makes.   [1:03:21] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Some are videos and some are articles. I have actually started using it because I was listening to his book How Not To Die and he would say something like some statistical information about eating chicken and prostate cancer. I think like, “Whoa. I want to share that.” So, rather than taking a picture of the book and sharing the picture, I go to his website. Everything that I’ve looked for from the book there’s either an article or a video about it that I could share with whoever it is that I’m thinking of. He has a great story. So when he was a young child, he was five or six, his grandmother was in her 60s and she had heart disease. She had had all the interventions that they were able to do. She had had bypass surgeries and I don’t know what else. She had debilitating chest pain and was in a wheelchair and couldn’t walk. She was sent home from the hospital basically to die given a couple more months to live. The family was devastated. That’s just like everything had been done possible to help her.   [1:04:40] Ashley James: Being in your 60s is so young.   [1:04:42] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. So the family was devastated. She checked herself into a Pritikin Center and I don’t know the details of Pritikin diet but is a whole food plant-based diet I don’t know specifically what else is entailed. Within a short period, she was not just walking but she started walking 10 miles a day. Then she lived 30 more years and saw her grandchild graduate from medical school.   [1:05:16] Ashley James: So, that’s why he was excited to become a doctor because he saw her heal herself.   [1:05:22] Naomi Murphy: Yes. He wanted to become a doctor to help heal people the way his grandmother was healed. So he was accepted to 17 different medical schools and he decided to choose which school to attend based on which had the most nutrition training. So he chose Tufts University which offered 21 hours of nutrition in their medical program.   [1:05:53] Ashley James: That’s a lot. That’s a lot of hours. Most MDS get maybe one or one to five hours worth of nutrition training.   [1:06:04] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So, every day while I’m cooking or eating or living my life, I ponder the fact that we have a tool to reverse or prevent disease and doctors are not being taught that tool. All of the doctors that I’ve mentioned and Ashley has interviewed, they are all outliers. They’ve all gone rogue against their profession.   [1:06:34] Ashley James: How dare they use food to kill people instead of medication. How dare they. I bet the AMA is just frothing at the bit. How dare they heal people.   [1:06:42] Naomi Murphy: I’m sure they are. They have resisted. Yeah. They’ve done.   [1:06:45] Ashley James: Yeah. We’re the resistance aren’t we? We’re going to rise up. Got my carrot in one hand and my kale in the other. So, six months ago, I can’t believe it’s only been six months. Six months ago you become totally whole food plant-based overnight. Jump on board and three days later your shortness of breath, your heart issues go away, right?   [1:07:09] Naomi Murphy: Well, I don’t know if my shortness of breath improved that quickly, but it definitely improved. So that was summer. So I was walking a lot for exercise.   [1:07:18] Ashley James: Well, within the first week you texted me and said that you’re walking partner was like, “Wow. You’re going really fast.”   [1:07:27] Naomi Murphy: Was it only a week?   [1:07:28] Ashley James: It was like a week after. Let’s go back in our text messages because I’m pretty sure you’re like, “Seven days on. I’m eating this for seven days.” Then you kind of didn’t believe you’re walking partner. You’re like maybe they’re just tired, but you’re like, “I’m not walking different. They’re just tired.” So then you started walking with your kids and your kids were trying to keep up to you whereas you normally are the one behind them. That’s when you’re like, “Oh. I am walking faster.”   [1:07:54] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I was downtown with my, he was nine at that time. He is used to walking in front of me and waiting for me and kind of commenting that I’m kind of slow. We were walking together and he looked over at me and said, “I’m trying to keep up with you.”   [1:08:13] Ashley James: He’s athletic.   [1:08:14] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Oh gosh, I’m going to cry. That was very moving for me because I do like to walk quickly. I’ve always liked to walk and hike and things like that. So, to have restrictions in my movement was something that I become accustomed to but it also was very uncomfortable.   [1:08:39] Ashley James: You don’t want to feel like a prisoner in your own body. You’re so young. No matter what age you are, you’re so young. Whoever is listening, whatever age you are you are young because there are a 100-year-old women running marathons. So you can run. We can live at it. We can have youth in our body no matter what age. Here you are, a young mother and you were feeling so restricted in your body. You were exhausted, you couldn’t walk fast, you were fatigued.   [1:09:08] Naomi Murphy: So first of all, I don’t think you should call me a young mother. I think that’s misleading. I’m already 48. I’m almost 50 years old   [1:09:14] Ashley James: But in the last few years, you started out as a mother in your 30s. I’m about to be 40. So 40 now is my mind has to be young. Okay. You could be like, “I’m a young 70-year-old.” Whoever’s listening, just say the word young in front of your age and then make it so. I am a young 99-year-old. Make it so. We need to tell ourselves. In order to be a maverick, in order to pull ourselves out of that matrix where we’re driving through fast-food joints eating fried food, on medications. We have to pull ourselves out of the belief system that age = illness and disease and debilitation because it doesn’t. It doesn’t. So you are youthful. You still have youth in you, lady. You’re a wonderful mother and you were trapped. You were trapped in a prison.   [1:10:14] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I have active children especially my younger two. I want to be involved in their life. So, I do have to be able to keep up with them and be playful and be energetic and be able to get out there and do things because otherwise like I don’t get to partake.   [1:10:32] Ashley James: Right. So the whole summer you kept saying, “How am I going to get my parents on this? How am I going to get my parents to do this?” They’re in their 70s. Your dad recently had a heart surgery from something he was born with but that it manifests later. It happens because of wear and tear on the heart. So we can decrease wear and tear.   [1:10:51] Naomi Murphy: Exacerbated. Exacerbated by wear and tear.   [1:10:54] Ashley James: Right. We can decrease wear and tear with diet, which Dr. Esselstyn points out and teaches. There’s certain foods that really helped to heal the heart and there’s foods that hurt the heart.   [1:11:03] Naomi Murphy: Right. My parents actually lost a substantial amount of weight. My mom plateaued but my dad is down to his like age 25 weight, I don’t know.   [1:11:15] Ashley James: You skipped ahead. So, you all summer long wanted to get them on it. They were kind of like, “Low carb and keto’s the way to go.”   [1:11:25] Naomi Murphy: Right. Which made me worry as I had more education around the longevity of people eating keto. Keto is good for some short-term things, which is why I wanted to mention that they did lose weight using keto. But I was worried about them and using keto in an ongoing way. So, my parents are very traditional eaters. My mom’s a great cook but very traditional in the sense that my dad has always liked meat in the dinner. Meats in the meal.   [1:11:56] Ashley James: There’s a bit of old-school rigidity. You were worried that they would not take well to this diet.   [1:12:03] Naomi Murphy: Worried? I didn’t have any idea that they would ever take to it. But I started talking to my mom at a time a very vulnerable time when my dad was having open-heart surgery. I was reading one of my books. I think it was Dr. Fuhrman. I don’t remember which one, but I was just telling her tidbits. I might have been reading Dr. Esselstyn’s book even but anyway. She heard what I had to say and she believed what I said. Instantly, sort of negative messages came up to her like what will we eat on Christmas? What will we eat for Thanksgiving? What will we eat? If you’ve transitioned to eating a different way you just simply think like, “Well, you eat delicious food that you enjoy.” We don’t have to eat the foods that we’ve always eaten if they’re made of eggs and flour and butter. We don’t have to.   [1:13:07] Ashley James: She was worried about calcium. Because we’ve been taught that you get your calcium from dairy, which is a complete marketing lie actually. The cultures that eat the most dairy products are actually the ones with the most osteoporosis and the ones that are most plant-based have the stronger bones because we’re getting our calcium from plants. She was worried about certain things.   [1:13:35] Naomi Murphy: She has some concerns that I might be irresponsible in raising my kids and not giving them adequate nutrition. Well, I can experiment however I want. I’m an adult.   [1:13:44] Ashley James: Don’t experiment on kids.   [1:13:46] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. That I shouldn’t. So she really worried about them. Then they watched Forks Over Knives and The Game Changers and I talked to –   [1:13:58] Ashley James: Which are on Netflix. I don’t know Forks Over Knives is on anymore, but Forks Over Knives is really good as an introduction. A good one. Game Changers is very entertaining.   [1:14:08] Naomi Murphy: It’s very inspiring. Yeah. It’s inspiring and entertaining. Yeah. So they watched both of those and then apparently they were sold and started eating whole food plant-based and they’re just going getting better and better. Even my dad doesn’t want to go back. He’s been great. He’s a master at smoking turkey. We always wanted papas smoked turkey for our birthday. We could choose whatever we wanted. Most of the members of my family choose smoked turkey and my dad made that for Thanksgiving as well. This year at Thanksgiving we had a whole food plant-based feast, which was bowls. We filled the table with different things like different toppings to put on grains or potatoes. It was phenomenal and delicious and colorful and wonderful. My dad just mentioned, he said, “I sort of miss making the turkey.” He likes it. He likes contributing in that way. They didn’t go whole food plant-based until fall. Already by Thanksgiving he wasn’t wishing he was eating the smoked turkey, which he is renowned for in our family. He just kind of missed being the one that made the smoked turkey.   [1:15:28] Ashley James: Well, tell him he can smoke vegetables if he wants to because I have smoked some vegetables in a trigger and it was really good. So, that’s a fun thing. He could smoke some tofu if he wanted to. Smoked mushrooms are really delicious. So, your mom though and her testimonials in our membership, the Learn True Health Home Kitchen, she had her arthritis go away.   [1:15:54] Naomi Murphy: Yes. Yes. So she has blood clots. She had blood clots after a surgery and then ended up having a blood clot and had to go to the hospital. So she’s on blood thinners and she would like to be off blood thinners. So, she is motivated to eat whole food plant-based and specifically eat some foods that are better for your circulatory system like beets and I don’t remember what else right now. But she’s trying to eat those every day. But a side effect of her trying to get to her goal of getting off her medication is that her arthritis went away.   [1:16:39] Ashley James: Being in the whole food plant-based diet her pain is gone, her arthritis is gone, they both lost weight. Your dad who has been doing –   [1:16:45] Naomi Murphy: They feel better.   [1:16:47] Ashley James: He goes to a, he does some kind of rehab gym because of the heart surgery he had.   [1:16:53] Naomi Murphy: He was the best in the gym.   [1:16:54] Ashley James: He was beating everyone else. In The Game Changers the movie they talk about how your endurance immediately goes. So athletes notice right away when they go whole food plant-based, no salt, sugar, oil that their endurance goes up immediately.   [1:17:09] Naomi Murphy: Also, so for the type of surgery that he had, the valve replacement surgery, it’s my understanding that everyone who gets that surgery is on statins for the rest of their life and is on high blood pressure medicine for the rest of their life. The last visit when he was at the doctor, the doctors are experimentally letting him off of statins. So, that’s wonderful. I think after listening to Dr. Greger there’s hibiscus and flax and I don’t remember what else. But hibiscus is as good as one of the regular high blood pressure meds, functions identically. So I think there are ways that you can by not only improving your blood pressure by eating a whole food plant-based but there are foods that you can eat or drink to control your high blood pressure so you don’t need to be on the high blood pressure medication. So, I’m proud of my parents for advocating for that and for making it happen. I’m very relieved. It’s like a dream come true when you hear about something that is so preventative of harder health conditions and your parents voluntarily do it. My mom’s even become a contributor helping us with the recipes, trying recipes, creating recipes.   [1:18:40] Ashley James: She’s really a good cook also.   [1:18:42] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. She’s fantastic.   [1:18:43] Ashley James: Yeah. Your kids, you’re allowing them the flexibility. You’re not restricting them. If they want to go eat meat when they’re out they still do what they want to do, but at home that they actually have embraced this a lot more than you thought they would. Even your oldest. You want to talk about that?   [1:19:03] Naomi Murphy: My oldest son is a foodie. He’s 13. He just turned 13. I think he’s getting to an age where he’s able to intellectualize and understand the things that I’m saying that Ashley says and things he may he overhear on podcast that I have playing in the kitchen. So, when I changed my diet he was up for changing his diet too at home and was good about getting some exercise. Walking home from school before it started raining or being cold. He lost 11 pounds. Anecdotally, I would say that his emotions were much easier for him to manage. That was a positive thing for the whole family when you have a tween now a teen who manages their emotions better wherever you are. Then there’s an improvement, a big noticeable improvement. That was great for all of us.   [1:20:03] Ashley James: Duffy, my husband, also shared with me that he felt more even keel, that he felt more comfortable in his own skin after eating this way, after transitioning. So, there is an emotional component.   [1:20:16] Naomi Murphy: I want to one-up that because I’m going to be competitive with Duffy right now and say that I actually feel happy. That’s something I’ve struggled with depression. Obviously when you have fatigue and a chronic illness that involves fatigue and different health problems and anxiety. Heart changes that the cardiologist attributed to anxiety, which I think is just a physical manifestation of a problem in my case.   [1:20:51] Ashley James: Emotional manifestation of a physical problem.   [1:20:53] Naomi Murphy: Yeah.   [1:20:54] Ashley James: You were feeling in a state. You’re feeling a state that your body was in but it was a reflection of the state of health that you were in.   [1:21:02] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s triggered by a physical situation. So, but not the other way around. I guess I just don’t think the heart problem is caused by anxiety. I think that there’s a health problem that causes the anxiety.   [1:21:17] Ashley James: We’ve talked about this and you identify your anxiety as a reflection of your current health.   [1:21:23] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I’ve experienced both kinds of anxiety, but I would like a doctor to dig deeper if their solution is or if their diagnosis is, “Well, you have a heart arrhythmia which we associate with anxiety.” That’s to me attributing it to like a mental condition that I have rather than a health problem triggering anxiety.   [1:21:48] Ashley James: Anxiety. Yeah. Exactly. Like you feel a heart palpitation.   [1:21:52] Naomi Murphy: Why do you have the anxiety? Yeah. Why do you have the anxiety? Because there’s disharmony of some kind in your body.   [1:22:00] Ashley James: You weren’t sick enough for them to do something about it.   [1:22:03] Naomi Murphy: Right. I’m thinking back. I haven’t been back to a cardiologist and I’m going to try to see a local ND cardiologist who you recommended. I don’t think he’s been on your show yet.   [1:22:15] Ashley James: He has not been on my show yet but I’ll give a shout-out to Dr. Pournadeali, who is basically a cardiologist naturopath. He’s a naturopath but he has got the status in the naturopathic community as a cardiologist.   [1:22:28] Naomi Murphy: He was the cardiology instructor at Bastyr.   [1:22:29] Ashley James: Right. He’s pretty great. I mean, he’s not specifically like whole food plant-based. He agrees that this diet is great, but he’s also really really great. He helps patients get off of meds. He likes to work with natural remedies and he’s fine with working with meds if the person needs to get on that.   [1:22:49] Naomi Murphy: But he’s also interested in healing. So I want to see him because when I saw a cardiologist I think the cardiologist just checked on my complaint, which was arrhythmia and said, “That’s the type of arrhythmia we normally see associated with anxiety.” I didn’t need medicated. Conversation over. It wasn’t from that cardiologist that I learned about my developing heart disease. I would have to go back and say, “Could you look at the test and tell me if you see anything of concern? Is there a developing heart disease?” I would assume that there would be. That didn’t all –   [1:23:24] Ashley James: It wasn’t enough.   [1:23:26] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. That didn’t manifest in one year. That it was building up from –   [1:23:32] Ashley James: Well, you talked to cardiologists and they’ll say, because I’ve had people say this, “You look good for your age.”   [1:23:39] Naomi Murphy: Right. You fit the profile.   [1:23:41] Ashley James: Your heart looks good for your age. You only have 40% blockage. I mean, they’re not going to put in a stint until it or get you on some meds but that you have to get sick enough for them to do something. That’s the really frustrating part or they’ll put you on whatever their heart-healthy diet is, which does not reverse or prevent heart disease. This is the infuriating thing. That’s why I love the interview with Dr. Esselstyn because has the world’s longest study on reversing heart disease with diet.   [1:24:16] Naomi Murphy: Any interview with Dr. Esselstyn is great because he has a single message and it’s consistent. He thoroughly knows it. He’s been touting the same diet. I think he made a little some changes involving gluten or something recently.   [1:24:35] Ashley James: Really?   [1:24:36] Naomi Murphy: No. Maybe not. He’s made some changes along the way at some point but I don’t remember what they were.   [1:24:43] Ashley James: He recently, like in the last few years, he added more balsamic vinegar because of the nitric oxide.   [1:24:52] Naomi Murphy: That wasn’t part of the original?   [1:24:54] Ashley James: He said on our interview that he’s had this new thing, which is he gets a cardiology patient to do –   [1:25:00] Naomi Murphy: That is six cups of greens.   [1:25:01] Ashley James: Yeah. Every two hours you’re eating a steamed greens with like you’re dripping it into your body. So get a bowl of steamed green vegetables, rotate between he gives you like 15 different vegetables to choose from. Steam them, put some balsamic vinegar on it and chew it and swallow.   [1:25:21] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So no smoothies. Yeah. No smoothies. That’s how I like them.   [1:25:25] Ashley James: I don’t think he would have a problem if it’s just like – I really like the quote in Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis. He says the nearly perfect diet you follow is better than the perfect diet you don’t follow. So, you know what, if you have to do one of your servings of vegetables has to be a smoothie in order for you to get it in you then do it. I know some experts are like, “Never do smoothies because you should chew your food.”   [1:25:55] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I could never eat a blender full of kale if I had to chew it all. I literally fill my Vitamix with kale with a little bit of fruit on top and I like that now. Like I didn’t start out liking that. It was a slow –   [1:26:08] Ashley James: You’re hardcore, dude.   [1:26:10] Naomi Murphy: Yeah.   [1:26:12] Ashley James: Well, you’ve healed yourself. You don’t have EBV, you’ve lost weight as a by-product. You’re even trying to.   [1:26:20] Naomi Murphy: Yes. I lost 40 pounds. I lost 25 pounds just like a lot of the docs say. Just the anti-inflammatory, eliminating dairy and sugar for a month. A lot of people who are overweight can lose about around 25 pounds in a month. That happened for me. I’ve lost 40 pounds. I can assure you that I am not trying because I am making carrot cakes. My husband wants to go whole food plant-based but he needs to really ease in. I’m trying to please my family. I’m trying to impress kids. So, I am making cream cheese out of cashews, which I wouldn’t eat if I were serious about weight loss. I’m eating carrot cake. Sometimes I eat pudding made of tofu.   [1:27:07] Ashley James: This carrot cake is a whole food plant-based carrot cake and you’ve got a pudding you just mentioned. The pudding’s made of tofu. So all these foods are still very healthy but they’re not conducive to rapid weight loss.   [1:27:19] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Also, I eat plenty of food. I never deprive myself. If I like what I’ve made for dinner I will have a couple of servings. I continue to lose and I just got below a weight that I haven’t been for a long time, 210. I’m below 210 for the first time. I have an eight-year-old child. So, I can’t remember. It was probably after my pregnancy with him I actually gained weight. That was when EBV became a problem. I actually gained weight after my third child, which was the first time that it happened. I went up from around 200 to like almost 250 eventually.   [1:28:09] Ashley James: So, the weight you are now is before your last child. So, that was eight-nine years ago.   [1:28:20] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. And I continue to lose ounces. I’m not focused on the weight loss but I continue to lose. I’m really looking forward to being below 200.   [1:28:31] Ashley James: You’re going to get there. You’re just eating super healthy food every day. You’re not feeling deprived. There’s some recipes that we put in the membership that taste amazing. Your cream cheese, which blows my mind. Your kids fight over it. I’s so delicious. The carrot cake is super super healthy carrot cake. So delicious.   [1:28:49] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It doesn’t have any maple syrup. It’s sweetened with all fruit, blended fruit.   [1:28:54] Ashley James: Yeah. But all the fibers in there.   [1:28:56] Naomi Murphy: Yes. All the fibers in there.   [1:28:57] Ashley James: I’ve actually lost just over 80 pounds. I noticed that my weight loss is consistent because my problems always been my liver. My liver gets really angry and inflamed in my past whenever I tried to lose weight since my 20s. So I’ve had this problem where I go to lose weight because my liver can’t metabolize it. It would become a distended. It would stick out of my body beyond my ribs and be very swollen. My blood work would show that my liver enzymes were through the roof. I would get an ultrasound and show that it was a very angry liver. So my problem’s always been detox around weight loss. So, I’d lose a little bit and then get really sick and then gain more. Then try a different diet. A lot of diets are focused on weight loss but not nutrifying the body and not healing the body. Whereas this one is all about nutrifying and healing the body and weight loss could be a byproduct. So, I’m finding that weight loss is the easiest with this because you’re full, you’re satisfied, you’re nutrifying every cell in your body. My liver is the healthiest it’s been in a very very long time. I’m just like everything’s getting better and better and better. Coming to your house today, we haven’t seen you in about a week, and I just noticed like your skin is glowing. Like you are, you look so vibrant. The energy coming off you.   [1:30:24] Naomi Murphy: That is an important side effect of this diet to discuss especially. As people, as we get older, you don’t even notice your skin kind of getting rougher. My skin is so soft now and continues to get even softer. I have been using a sauna so that’s probably helping. But just changing my diet, just eliminating sugar, oils and animal products has changed my skin so much. Yeah. It’s amazing.   [1:30:52] Ashley James: That’s awesome. I love it. So, your husband is slowly transitioning. Anything he noticed when he started to just eat more this way? He’s still eating meat occasionally. Still, he’s not 100% but he is transitioning more and more into this way. Just seeing how it feels, anything that he’s noticed that he’s liked that’s improved in his health?   [1:31:13] Naomi Murphy: Well, he’s had great bowel movements.   [1:31:16] Ashley James: Which is perfect. All of us by the way. That’s a side effect. Everyone has perfect bowel movement.   [1:31:21] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We talk about that all the time. We won’t go into detail here.   [1:31:25] Ashley James: Well, I have a whole episode on how to have the perfect poop. It does include a lot of whole fiber. But yes, bowel movements we should be having at least three a day, well-formed. They’re so good for detoxifying the body. If you’re not pooping three times a day and well-formed poops that you don’t have to strain at all, then you are constipated and that is damaging to your body. It has actually the potential to create cancer in the body. It also helps to regulate hormones. It’s pretty amazing that by having good bowel movements we are helping our hormones balance, we’re helping prevent cancer, we’re helping to detoxify, get rid of the toxins, we’re ensuring that our gut flora is in balance. So many good things. Has he noticed anything with energy or mood?   [1:32:15] Naomi Murphy: Nothing that he’s commented on yet because like I said, he’s easing into it. So, if he eats whole food plant-based for three days in a row that’s like a record. He’s always loved vegetables and actually that used to be kind of a concern that he brought to me like, “Can we have more vegetables in our diet?” I was telling you earlier, I don’t think I’ve said yet in this interview, that it was just so easy for me to fall back on dairy products and just trying to make foods that appeal to the kids that were –   [1:32:55] Ashley James: Here, have some mac and cheese. Here, have some hotdogs.   [1:32:58] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Moderately healthy, homemade home cooking but I just didn’t have energy to –   [1:33:05] Ashley James: Yeah. You were sick.   [1:33:06] Naomi Murphy: So, I’ve obviously done a 180 on that. Now, it’s all vegetables so he’s happy. He’s always asked for that and wanted that. So that’s a part of his diet. He just is not ready to be 100%.   [1:33:24] Ashley James: That’s fine. Wherever someone is. I just want everyone to get more vegetables. Also try it as an experiment. That 30-day challenge that I took on two years ago, it was over the summer so it might have been two and a half years ago, really was an eye-opener.   [1:33:44] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Thirty days is impressive, but like I said, Dr. Esselstyn will ask for 16 days of people on their deathbed. So you don’t need – and Eric’s angina went away after three days. So, you don’t need 30 days to kind of have a little snapshot of how you might feel different eating whole food plant-based foods you can have a week.   [1:34:10] Ashley James: Yeah. Soon after I did the 30-day challenge, Duffy and I went downtown Seattle. There was a vegetarian festival like Veggie Fest I think they call it. We were sampling all the food, all the vegetarian food. So, I’d eaten. Then they had a booth that was taking people’s blood pressure and blood sugar. That’s like a health booth. I thought, “Why not. Let’s see.” My blood pressure was the lowest I’d ever seen. I mean, in super healthy ranges but then I burst into tears and I just completely had this meltdown when they took my blood sugar because it was the lowest I had ever seen it. Low in the good ranges. I never had problem. I was always hyperglycemic. I was never hypo. So, to see my blood sugar, my glucose levels that low after he’s basically eating nothing but carbs for the entire morning. We were sampling tons of stuff, eating tons of stuff. We had eaten two hours before. I think we had breakfast or something. So, it was I did not expect it to be good, but I thought “Why not. They’re doing free glucose tests.” It was nurses that were administering it just to raise awareness. My blood sugar was so good I burst into tears seeing that number because I’d never seen it. So I wasn’t diabetic anymore but I still had not seen the healthiest ranges possible. It wasn’t achievable until I completely cut out all animal products and embraced whole food plant-based. We’ve been oil-free for a long time because one of the naturopaths we follow says oil is really not great. Although we had added back for keto added back coconut oil thinking that was great.   [1:36:12] Naomi Murphy: Dr. Wallach, he says that it’s bad because of the free radicals.   [1:36:17] Ashley James: Yes. Dr. Wallach says don’t do oil because of the free radicals.   [1:36:22] Naomi Murphy: But I think it was Dr. Garth Davis in Proteinaholic talked about how the oil coats gut biome and makes it so you can’t absorb nutrients as well.   [1:36:32] Ashley James: It starves the gut biome. There’s a few things. They’re speculating that it does, but one thing is when we eat oil it causes an anaerobic environment for the gut bacteria meaning it just coats it and it suffocates the good gut bacteria. So the anaerobic bacteria, which are the bad bacteria, thrive. So we’re creating a playground for all the bad bacteria to thrive and we’re killing, like mass-murdering, billions of cultures of good bacteria in our gut every time we eat oil. So they’re seeing –   [1:37:03] Naomi Murphy: I think this is an important piece because many people think that healthy oils are part of a healthy diet. I think knowing that just maybe not eliminating anything else besides the oils can really help your gut biome. So, I think that’s why I feel happier. I didn’t notice there’s much of improvement after having celery juice every day for two years.   [1:37:27] Ashley James: You mean you’ve gotten more of a difference out of cutting out oil than did out of drinking celery juice for two years?   [1:37:31] Naomi Murphy: Definitely. I mean all I noticed after having the celery juice for two years was that I could tolerate foods that I was sensitive to before. I had a sensitivity to salicylates found in foods.   [1:37:46] Ashley James: A ton of foods. You were so restrictive.   [1:37:49] Naomi Murphy: Especially in healthy foods and spices and things that are very healing. So, I didn’t eat those things or I ate a low-value of those things for over a decade.   [1:38:03] Ashley James: I remember when you came over like three years ago I couldn’t put any seasoning it all into the food I made because it would cause a huge allergic reaction for you.   [1:38:12] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s terrible. So, all of a sudden I could tolerate gluten, though I chose not to eat it, but I didn’t have a reaction anymore. So I thought that was cool. That felt like a superpower after being gluten-free since 1997. Just to be able to eat it and not feel like I’d taken a sleeping pill. To be able to use herbs and spices for health without any reaction, that opened up so many doors. That’s why cooking and eating is so much more exciting than it was. Though I think I did well as a whole food cook without the spices and herbs.   [1:38:51] Ashley James: You figured out how to do well with a limited amount of things to make it taste good. After you cut out oil how quickly did you notice a difference?   [1:39:00] Naomi Murphy: Well, I just felt better. I mean if before I felt this way of eating was extreme, any concern about that has gone out the window because I feel so much better. It doesn’t matter. It’s not inconvenient because eating this way is delicious, easy and totally worth it. So, I think that’s important about this diet. Some diets are so picky and you have to count your carbs, you have to write things down, you have to know about the nutrition content of everything. I just try to eat the most colorful foods in their whole form. It’s very simple. Is it a whole food? Is it come from plants? Then I can eat it. Then when I want to cheat I eat flour. I bake something with flour that’s a whole grain. So it’s not as good as eating the whole thing but that’s when I get naughty. Eat the refined version of a whole food but still I don’t have to I don’t need sophisticated tools to figure out how much of everything I should be eating. I try to eat some non-starchy vegetables like I used Chef AJ’s red line. I think everyone can check out her –   [1:40:30] Ashley James: Eat to the left of the red line.   [1:40:31] Naomi Murphy: Eat to the left of the red line.   [1:40:42] Ashley James: Dr. Greger calls them green light, yellow light, red light foods. They pretty much match up with her. Yeah. Absolutely. The last thing I want to talk about is addiction. That’s something that has been sort of a passionate topic of yours. You, for me, it’s such a pleasure being your friend. You’re so intellectual. It comes naturally to you I feel is psychology. That really, like in a former life, you were a psychologist. You have helped me so many times to perceive events in a different way that helped me heal. You have a way of making things cathartic because you can gain a really healthy perspective on human behavior. One thing that you’ve always been interested in is looking at the human behavior in psychology around addiction and noticing the addictive tendencies in yourself and in others and how these interpersonal relationships play out when our addictions come out. I think that everyone on the planet has some addictive behaviors. I think it’s part of our neurology. It’s being hijacked and being triggered by being awoken by the food industry. A good book is –   [1:41:55] Naomi Murphy: Pleasure Trap.   [1:41:56] Ashley James: The Pleasure Trap by Dr. Lisle and Dr. Goldhamer. We talked about that in episode 230 with Dr. Goldhamer.   [1:42:02] Naomi Murphy: Wow. What a memory.   [1:42:04] Ashley James: The reason why I remember is because it’s my husband’s joke. What’s a good time to go to the dentist? 230, get it? 230. So I always remember episode 230. I should memorize the other episodes that – the number like with Esselstyn. But with Dr. Goldhamer he talks about this. The book is wonderful. If you listen to the audio version of the book it’s done by chef AJ. She’s the narrator. So if you like her voice you should definitely listen to it instead of read it. So, the idea that the addictive parts of our neurology are being awoken and exacerbated by food because of the food industry. Also in society –   [1:42:49] Naomi Murphy: Dairy products and cheese have a streamlined relationship with your –   [1:42:56] Ashley James: The dopamine response.   [1:42:57] Naomi Murphy: The dopamine receptors. So it’s such a relief to remove those things. It’s such a relief. It is such a relief. So, I have noticed, and chef AJ described it perfectly, that eating whole food plant-based diet turns down the volume on compulsive behavior. So, whatever is your thing like that agitates you –   [1:43:27] Ashley James: Gambling, alcohol…   [1:43:28] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Right. Eating this way turns down the volume. I have described my experience as just merely feeling happier. I just feel lighter. I’m more amused by problems that used to really drag me down. It’s noticeable. My mom in the testimonial, one of the reasons she was willing to give whole food plant-based to try she told you, she hadn’t told me that, was that she noticed how much more even-keeled I was. So she’s known me my whole life. I can be an intense person. I’ve had strong emotional reactions to things. I had addictive relationships to different things and people. So, what a relief to have a way to turn down that volume. You don’t have to have a sophisticated understanding of nutrition to do well with that. You can eat plants. Eat plants. It’s okay to eat. It’s okay to eat brown rice. It’s okay to eat grains. It’s okay to eat those things. But just eat the plant foods and try to get some quantity of the non-starchy in there.   [1:44:47] Ashley James: Yes. Non-starchy vegetables.   [1:44:49] Naomi Murphy: There’s so much variety. There’s so many different ways to do that effectively.   [1:44:57] Ashley James: Yeah. I love in our membership because we’re making all these videos and there’s over three hours’ worth of content right now we just launched the membership yesterday. So far all the members who have joined love it and it’s exciting and I want you to join it. I want everyone who’s listening to join because it’s fun what we’re doing. Every week we’re adding new lessons. Every week we’re adding new videos and new content, new recipes. The point is, we’re creating these recipes that are delicious. Not everyone loves everything, right? So, you have three kids with three different palates. If you get and there’s some recipes in there that all three kids love. We say this, is like a home run. We haven’t found someone who doesn’t love this. So there’s certain foods that are like so –   [1:45:47] Naomi Murphy: I have one kid that has an aversion to vegetables. He has a vegetable barometer. If he sees green or if he sees anything he is turned off. So, yeah. There are healthy things that he has just embraced entirely and loved and wanted more of and that’s awesome.   [1:46:07] Ashley James: Yeah. That’s exciting. Your husband I think at one point in a video I called him picky and he didn’t like that. So I’m not going to say he’s picky because I figured out what he is. He has really high standards for food. So instead of calling him picky he has high high standards. He’s really brutally honest. If he doesn’t like something, he’ll say he doesn’t like it.   [1:46:31] Naomi Murphy: Also. Yes.   [1:46:34] Ashley James: This is a compliment by the way. So, it’s good because here we are having to cook for people who have high standards and have a very particular tastes. We’re coming up with recipes that are whole food plant-based, super healing for the body and are pleasurable and can be adaptable also for different palates.   [1:46:55] Naomi Murphy: Well, he’s also into health. So there are plenty of people that have promoted a healthful diet that involves organ meats, that involves some things. I think you’re going to have Terry Walls on your show. He really was impressed by his study of Terry Walls work. So, I think he’s a little bit like my mom worried about the calcium. Well, what if you eliminate your opportunity for healing by taking out some of the healthy foods?   [1:47:40] Ashley James: He’s saying, “Well our kidneys and eating kidneys and eating liver are healthy for you. What if I don’t eat them?”   [1:47:45] Naomi Murphy: He’s like us and many people. He loves food. So, sometimes we might hold on to some of the less than healthy parts because there are some good things. Like people who want to drink wine for health or hear that olive oil is the part of the Mediterranean diet that is most health-promoting when it’s not. Just sort of things that you might have gotten attached to and just want to keep that.   [1:48:16] Ashley James: Well, wherever you are is fine. I think it’s good though to be open-minded enough, not have the cognitive dissonance to shut down, but to be open-minded enough to look at new information that comes our way because like Dr. Garth Davis, he was fully on board with Hugh. He’s a weight loss surgeon, gastrointestinal surgeon who for a living helped people lose weight by cutting out half their stomach and telling them to eat protein. Eat more protein and he basically put them on something very close to an Atkins diet. So he was very invested. He had a TV show that ran for two years. He wrote a book. His reputation was on the line. He had to completely have a bruised ego in a sense that he had to put his ego aside and he has now come out saying everything he’s promoted for like twenty years as a doctor was wrong because he has looked at the science. He did a whole 180. Now his latest book Proteinaholic is that 180 where he figured out. He had to heal his body because he had in his 30s had cholesterol deposits in his eyes. He was losing his vision. That’s what had him wake up and go, “I need to figure out a diet that’s going to heal me.” Then he dug through the research. I listened to the audio, which is great, but I also bought the book. In the book in the back, something like 50 pages of scientific references. So it’s heavily referenced to a lot of studies. We all have a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. We all have a certain amount of we hear something we want to hold on to that like, “Oh, but dairies good for me. I was told it was good since I was a kid.” If we can just challenge our own belief system and be open-minded enough.   [1:50:15] Naomi Murphy: I would say you’ve read a book about the dairy industry like Sean has and knows that raw milk has so much more to offer than pasteurized milk. So, therefore wouldn’t it be nice if raw milk was a superfood? Because yum like it’s creamy. I mean, I’m not interested anymore but that used to be like easy to like that data, right? Because we wanted to eat that food.   [1:50:49] Ashley James: Right. So, you can hold on to studies that say this is good and that’s good or I heard this is good or even I was raised or I was raised to believe this is good. The problem is, if we hold on to our old belief systems and not be willing to be flexible, we might be going down the wrong path. The best thing to do is to ask yourself, are you getting the results you want with your current diet? With the current way of eating are you nutrifiying your body in a way that’s fully healing yourself? If you’re not then be willing to be open-minded enough to just try it.   [1:51:24] Naomi Murphy: I’m completely open to accepting but at some point in my future I may need some kind of animal product to heal something.   [1:51:36] Ashley James: If that comes up.   [1:51:38] Naomi Murphy: What I am feeling now is that every day is a stair-step up you. So, it’s easy to continue on this journey. I think this way of eating, it doesn’t feel like a diet. I think I have said several times that I don’t restrict myself that I end up making some treats. I know I’m always trying to feed you guys treats.   [1:52:02] Ashley James: Your version of treats are very very healthy.   [1:52:05] Naomi Murphy: Okay. But still. That I eat plenty of food. That it’s just a sustainable way of eating. I am completely fine with eating this way for the rest of my life. It is less expensive if you buy whole foods and prepare them at home.   [1:52:28] Ashley James: It doesn’t take that long. So, I keep saying, the membership the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership, which can be found –   [1:52:34] Naomi Murphy: There are ways. I mean, a lot of the cooking is time-consuming. Let’s be honest about that, but that there are plenty of ways that we do things efficiently like lentils.   [1:52:46] Ashley James: So fast.   [1:52:47] Naomi Murphy: Sprouted lentils. Rinsed them three times a day and then you top it with some kind of sauce and you have some fresh spouted protein.   [1:52:55] Ashley James: You’ll never ever need to buy protein powder again. It’s a whole food form of protein that also has contained youth building enzymes. My thing is that this way of eating, we are saving a ton of money. We’re actually noticing that we have more money in the bank at the end of the month. Going, “Wow. We really are saving money eating this way.” There are ways to do it incredibly fast, ways to cook. We show some nice hacks in the kitchen to speed up the ability to get dinner on the table. So there are ways to make it fast. There are some recipes that are more time consuming, but there’s a lot of ways to do it that are quick.   [1:53:41] Naomi Murphy: Well, I think just because of having to chop many things.   [1:53:45] Ashley James: Which you can do in a food processor. There’s ways to speed things up. Plenty of times I’ve gotten out of an interview and been like, “Okay. Got to make dinner on the table. Like 15-20 minutes later we’re all eating. So it’s like, “Okay. This isn’t that bad.” So we’re saving time, we’re saving a ton of money, we’re saving our health and it tastes delicious. So there’s four points. Four points. LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. There’s a coupon code for listeners. This saves you a nice chunk of money. It is very affordable by the way for everyone to join, but go join. LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. The coupon code is LTH. You can get a free tour.   [1:54:27] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We want it to be affordable for people who are raising their families and need some help.   [1:54:36] Ashley James: Yes and want to just dive in and learn this and whether you want to do it 100% or whether you want to put your toe in the water and be like Sean and just eat more vegetables. Either way is very healing for the body. I think it also depends on the severity. If you’re someone who wants to reverse a major issue then jumping in and doing this at 100%, you’re going to get faster results. When you go to LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen, you can watch the tour. Some people just buy, jump in and start learning, start lesson one. But if you’d like a tour there’s a video that gives you a tour so you get to understand what it comes with. Every week there’s new modules added. So it’s going to be this ever-evolving, ongoing thing which is really cool. If you love our aprons I talked about it in the membership. There’s a way that you’ll earn an apron. You get to earn an apron or win an apron, Learn True Health apron. They’re really cool. So, I’d love to see all you guys wearing the Learn True Health aprons in the kitchen while you’re making food that’s medicine and healing your body. My last question for you, Naomi, is if I could put you in a room with the Naomi from one year ago, what would it look like to have a conversation with her? What advice would you want to give her?   [1:55:57] Naomi Murphy: Well, I think I would just tell her to be on the path that I am right now. To try whole food plant-based eating and also to educate herself about it. I have to say that the education part is what’s given me a lot of inspiration and a lot of fire. It was it was very quickly after I started eating this way that I had a strong desire to spend my life promoting this way of eating.   [1:56:37] Ashley James: I remember. I remember you message me.   [1:56:38] Naomi Murphy: I was wondering how I could find that kind of role.   [1:56:45] Ashley James: You’re like, “Am I going to become a health coach? Do I need to go back to school and be a nutritionist?” I remember having that conversation with you.   [1:56:51] Naomi Murphy: How can I help spread the word about this way of eating because just talking to my husband about it constantly that wasn’t very appreciated.   [1:57:07] Ashley James: She’d message me and be like, “I can’t talk about health stuff anymore in the house. My husband is not allowing it. I am talking too much about health now.”   [1:57:16] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s a little bit stressful to hear about it all the time. He is enjoying. He did say this weekend I think I just said that he’s whole hog but not cold turkey. He’s all for it and he really enjoys it. It’s just hard to go all the way. That’s fine. I was highly motivated to do the 180 that I did and it’s easy for me, but I’m all or nothing kind of person. So, it would be harder for me to integrate animal products into my healthy lifestyle because I wouldn’t know how many and when.   [1:57:57] Ashley James: I think it would’ve been easier for me if I had just said, “Okay. From now on it’s just this way.” I think that would have been easier. I made the transition harder on myself by saying I’m going to do this slowly. I was really working on my mindset and I was working on a lot of old belief systems about food. That’s where education comes into play because the more we dive into the books and the interviews and the summits by these different doctors who are on a regular basis healing people with major health issues like cancer gone, diabetes gone, healing many many many people. Many many diseases across the board. Autoimmune gone. Unbelievable stories of just people. So many people healing so many different things from this one way of eating. So for me if I had just said, “Okay. Jump on board 100%.” Instead I dragged it out. My transition I dragged it out a little bit. I just ate less and less and less and less meat. That’s where I was.   [1:58:59] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So to answer your question, I think the advice I would have given myself is to not be afraid, to just be experimental, give it a try and not be intimidated. I wish I would have had curiosity about this 17 years ago when I heard about it. Because I just chose to not. I chose to not. So, I wish I would have had the courage and the curiosity to dive in. Like when I heard the term heart disease then it was a no-brainer, but before then I was like –   [1:59:38] Ashley James: You were ready to hear it then.   [1:59:39] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I just wanted to say one more thing and that is I had plantar fasciitis before. That’s just gone away completely.   [1:59:47] Ashley James: It’s gone? You hurt to walk and now it doesn’t?   [1:59:51] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It was terrible.   [1:59:53] Ashley James: That’s really cool because Dr. Wallach says it’s a calcium deficiency that causes plantar fasciitis. You’re getting way more minerals now, way more calcium now through eating a ton of vegetables. So it’s interesting plus antioxidants, the decrease inflammation in the body. But it’s interesting that your body’s reversing something that many experts would say is not reversible without therapy, like physical therapy and procedures done to the foot.   [2:00:25] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It was one of those things that I just thought of recently actually. Because if you’re starting to feel better if you don’t write in everything down you sometimes don’t remember what’s gotten better. Then I remembered, “Hey, yeah. I used to have plantar fasciitis remember?” It was such a problem but it just gradually went away. I haven’t even thought about it in months.   [2:00:43] Ashley James: I love it. Naomi, this is so exciting. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story. I can’t wait to see what our lives are like a year from now or even six months from now. It’s been six months you’ve been fully on board and you’re healing your body with the whole food plant-based diet.   [2:01:03] Naomi Murphy: Well, I just have to thank you because I have so much gratitude because I am a home cook and you are sharing your platform with me for helping get out the word of cooking whole food plant-based. I wouldn’t be able to have access to people that want that information without you. So thanks for inviting me.   [2:01:31] Ashley James: I can’t wait for all the listeners to learn from you. All the listeners need to learn from you because you’ve got so amazing. The recipes are great but also you do these cool things. You make your own teas, you make your own spice blends, you make your own seasonings, you drink a ton of healing herbs throughout the day. I want to do a video on that. You have lots of little health habits that you do that you’ve integrated into your day effortlessly that you don’t even think about. You just kind of take for granted all these wonderful things you do but other people need to learn about it.   [2:01:32] Naomi Murphy: A lot of those do make a difference. If I don’t drink the anti-inflammatory tea that I drink every day it does make a difference. So, even eating so many vegetable foods still the teas is really helpful.   [2:02:16] Ashley James: Yeah. So we’ll a whole video on hat.   [2:02:18] Naomi Murphy: I learned some tricks along the road to better health. Not tricks, I mean –   [2:02:27] Ashley James: Tools, solutions.   [2:02:28] Naomi Murphy: Some good tools.   [2:02:29] Ashley James: Right. Well, if you think about it, a few hundred years ago we would have all learned from our grandmother’s, right? These things would have been passed down. A few hundred years ago our grandmothers would go into the woods with us and pick herbs out of the woods and made different remedies with them. Few hundred years ago, our ancestors used food more as medicine, right? We lost this. We just lost this over the last hundred years. We’ve lost this connection with the earth and the ability to incorporate plants to heal on a regular basis. One of my guests, I think he might have been Dr. JJ Davidson, talked about how if you talk to old school farmers they would say that it’s been passed down from farming generation to generation. It was passed down that everyone in the family that are farmers along with their animals twice a year will deworm, will go through and do certain herbs with the animals to remove parasites from their bodies and that we knew this. As a society we knew this a few hundred years ago but we’ve lost it now because we’ve all bought into the allopathic medical system. So we’ve lost this connection with the earth. So you’re doing things on a regular basis. You’re kind of like, I’m not calling you a grandma because you’re young, but you’re like the grandma we need. This very young, youthful woman who could help us be like a surrogate grandmother. Teach us these techniques like the herbs that you use to heal in your regular every day.   [2:04:09] Naomi Murphy: Well, I’ve been a groupie. I’ve been a groupie around holistic medical providers. I worked with students and then I worked for doctors and acupuncturist. So, I like to learn.   [2:04:26] Ashley James: Now you get to teach us. Teach us everything you’ve learned. That’s wonderful. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything else you wanted to say to the listeners to wrap up today’s interview?   [2:04:40] Naomi Murphy: I hope you check out the membership. Bowls, I think bowls is something we showed in the listener community Facebook group. If you’re interested in one whole food plant-based recipe, check out bowls.   [2:04:59] Ashley James: Bowls is lesson seven I think it is. I think it’s lesson seven module one. We did a little mini-lesson for free in the Facebook group. So check out the video section of the Facebook group for the bowls video. When you become a member, go to one module one and look up bowls.   [2:05:22] Naomi Murphy: We’ll be constantly adding to the bowl items the things that you can use in bowls.  I’m excited. There are some recipes in there that are staples in providing those mushrooms. Like having some meaty mushroom.   [2:05:38] Ashley James: The meaty mushrooms.   [2:05:39] Naomi Murphy: Having meaty mushrooms stuff. When we were talking about mushrooms before I’m getting a half cup. It’s effortless really if you make a big batch of the meaty mushroom stuffing do you call it?   [2:05:47] Ashley James: Yeah. We couldn’t figure out what the name of it.   [2:05:50] Naomi Murphy: I just call it mushroom stuffed.   [2:05:51] Ashley James: Mushroom stuffed? The meaty mushroom stuffed.   [2:05:53] Naomi Murphy: So, if I have that in refrigerator I can mix that into lots of different dishes or if I’m using the beefalo that my kids are still eating because we have a freezer full of that I may put in there meatballs along with some other grated carrots or something like that. That helps us get those key nutrients that you can only get in mushrooms. You should have that and just have a scoop here and there on top of what you’re eating or in your salad. So, anyway.   [2:06:24] Ashley James: There’s a way to make –   [2:06:25] Naomi Murphy: Bowls and mushroom stuff. Top of my head right now is –   [2:06:28] Ashley James: Meaty mushrooms, meaty mushroom stuffing. It’s in the I heart vegetable section the module of the membership. It is so freaking delicious. I remember when we were making the recipe, we’re filming making the recipe. You hadn’t had any yet because I was teaching you how to make it. You’re kind of like –   [2:06:47] Naomi Murphy: This is not, it wasn’t scripted.   [2:06:48] Ashley James: No, nothing is scripted. You’re kind of like, “Okay. Yeah. I get it. It’s nice.”   [2:06:52] Naomi Murphy: It’s not a reality show.   [2:06:53] Ashley James: Then I made it. So I made it on camera showing you how to make it, showing everyone how to make it. Then you taste it. You’re like, “Wow.” Then Duffy turns the camera off and you go, “I didn’t believe you. When you said it was this good I thought you were exaggerating.”   [2:07:13] Naomi Murphy: You have lots of natural enthusiasm. So I heard that it was good. I believe that, but then it was kind of –   [2:07:22] Ashley James: “Dang girl. That’s good.”   [2:07:26] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I call it the Campbell soup of whole food plant-based cooking. That’s just maybe my personal history growing up with a suburban working-class family.   [2:07:45] Ashley James: Yeah. Get the cream of mushroom soup.   [2:07:47] Naomi Murphy: It was the cream of mushroom soup with different things. I felt like a chef with that when I was a kid. So meaty mushroom, it’s like that. It has multiple applications and it has more flavor and more health-promoting properties than the Campbell’s version. Yeah. It’s super fantastic.   [2:08:06] Ashley James: Love it. Awesome. Well, I’m excited for listeners to check it out. I’m really glad that we created this platform. We spent the last four months working on it.   [2:08:16] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s fun. It’s been so fun.   [2:08:18] Ashley James: It’s just going to uphill from here or it’s just going to get better and better and better. I’m just really looking forward to – I’m imagining myself a year from now. The health that I’m building now and the hope that you’re building now. I think we could all take a minute just to think about the body we want and the body we want to live in a year from now. Like we renovate our house, we prepare our car, right? We do things to upgrade where we live. We need to think about our bodies like our house we live in. We need to like you know we need to like put on a new roof or build a new foundation.   [2:08:59] Naomi Murphy: If you’re younger than my age, 48, you don’t have to wait until like things start to break down. It’s okay to experiment and be curious and brave about your health before someone says a devastating diagnosis.   [2:09:18] Ashley James: I love that even your parents in their 70s got such quick results. So, any age. Any age is going to get great results. We can use food as our medicine and that’s the message.   [2:09:26] Naomi Murphy: My mom’s not 70 yet.   [2:09:27] Ashley James: Don’t let her listen this episode. I just assumed I guess. Okay. I’m sorry. A woman in her 60s. Well, it still works for people in their 70s though.   [2:09:39] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Of course. Yes they’ve been great. They’ve been having great benefit and really loving it and that is just the most amazing thing ever to me.   [2:09:51] Ashley James: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you and everyone’s going to see us in Facebook lives in the Facebook group.   [2:09:59] Naomi Murphy: Wait, one more testimonial. I finally got my mother-in-law with diet with type 2 diabetes to watch the iThrive documentary and then she started fasting and is going plant-based. She’s replaced all the foods in her house with – she was eating basically keto and she’s eliminated all the dairy products and animal products from her home. She has plant-based foods lined up to make big batches. She’s already off the metformin.   [2:10:29] Ashley James: She’s been fasting on and off for the last two weeks now?   [2:10:33] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. She fasted for a week then ate a small lunch that was plant-based with no grains. Then she fasted for another week and then a standard American diet for some reason. She had guests so she –   [2:10:50] Ashley James: Decided to eat whatever they brought.   [2:10:52] Naomi Murphy: They brought over some stuff. Yeah. They brought over some –   [2:10:55] Ashley James: Did not feel good about it?   [2:10:56] Naomi Murphy: Then she ate plant-based for a few days and now she’s back to fasting.   [2:11:01] Ashley James: So after two weeks of fasting and almost solely plant-based, she is now off of metformin?   [2:11:08] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. She lost 37 pounds.   [2:11:09] Ashley James: I love it. I’m really excited for her. I’m excited for when she stops fasting and dives 100% into the diet. Although, fasting is a wonderful way to reset the neurology so that you become more neural adapted to the food.   [2:11:25] Naomi Murphy: Yep. That’s her desire because when I told her about this she really scoffed because she doesn’t enjoy vegetables. She’s getting a lot of health benefits from the fasting, but her real motivation is to enjoy plants more.   [2:11:44] Ashley James: So, if you don’t like the taste of vegetables do some water only fasting to reset your neurology. That’s discussed in episode 230 as well, which is with Dr. Goldhamer. So, yeah. I love it. Well, we’ll have to keep everyone updated with your mother-in-law and also your parents and how they’re all doing and LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. Use coupon code LTH. Thank you so much. I’m really excited to see where this goes.   [2:12:17] Naomi Murphy: Thank you, Ashley. This was fun. It was fun. I can’t believe I’m going to be in a podcast.     Join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen! Use coupon LTH for listener discount! https://www.learntruehealth.com/homekitchen   

404 Nine Things You Can Do Now To Have Fantastic Hormone Health In The Second Half of Your Life, Perimenopause Redefined and Preparing For A Healthy Menopause with Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner Jill Chmielewski "As a registered nurse, certified functional medicine practitioner, and mom of four, I bring together a unique blend of clinical, holistic, and personal experience to guide midlife mamas to greater wellbeing, one tiny edit at a time. Even the subtlest of symptoms are your body's way of telling you that something needs attention. I'm on a mission to help you get to know your body, balance your hormones, and to address the root cause of your symptoms so that you can master the wild ride from peri to menopause with greater ease." Get your free module from IIN learntruehealth.com/coach Jill's Website - https://www.jillchmielewski.com   Perimenopause and Menopause https://www.learntruehealth.com/perimenopause-and-menopause Highlights: Perimenopause and menopause Addressing hormone issues would make the symptoms go away Food and lifestyle perspective are going to shift our hormones in different ways Detoxification is a huge part of hormones and hormone balance Good circadian rhythm help with hormonal rhythm Direct correlation between lack of sleep and hormone imbalances Hormone building happens at night when we sleep Stress has a domino effect on every other hormone in our body There is no quick fix for health and hormone balance issues Periods are now considered the fifth vital sign Hormonal decline with your period is normal Estrogen and progesterone need to be balanced in order for women to feel good Balanced hormones are just as critical in midlife and late life as they were in reproductive years Hormones are needed in every cell of the body There’s a direct link between healthy hormones and longevity and also degenerative disease Perimenopause begins in the mid to late 30s   In this episode, we will talk about hormones and hormonal changes in the body (perimenopause and menopause). Know how stress and sleep affects the hormone levels in our body.   [00:00:00] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker. And welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Oh, my gosh. This was such a good interview. I’m really excited for you to hear it today. Jill is phenomenal. I’m not going to give too much away. But basically, every woman needs to listen to this. And men who are very interested in women’s health. But you know what? All the advice she gives, which is incredible for women’s health, it also applies to men. So just so you know, this is a wonderful podcast for everyone even though the topic is specifically on perimenopause and menopause. These lessons are applicable to creating health at any part in our lives. But even more important, the older we get. I want to let you know about IIN. Jill and I discussed it briefly. This is one of the trainings that she took. She’s a nurse and she has her master’s. And then she did IIN to become a health coach., the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. This is the same online school that I went to, to become a health coach. And then she went on to do other programs because she wanted to dive deeper specifically into hormone health and functional medicine and functional nutrition. If you are interested in deeply exploring food as medicine, and emotional, mental, and physical health, and balancing your life, then take IIN’s course. You know half the people that take it -and I think it’s over 10,000 people a year take their course. Half the people that take it do it for their own personal growth. And I would have done it for my own personal growth as well. But I also did it to deepen my career and my ability to do these interviews. And also, work with clients and help them. But I see that. I see that I would have just done it for my own personal growth. So if you want to really dive into something to get your health to the next level, emotionally and mentally, and also physically, consider doing IIN. It’s a wonderful year of your life. It’s about 20 minutes a day, basically. So it’s totally doable even for busy people, about 20 minutes a day. You can listen to the lectures. You don’t have to watch them. You can listen to them while you’re driving, while you’re exercising, while you’re doing laundry, or cooking. And you can absorb all that wonderful information and apply it to your life. It’s an entire year to transform your life. So I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. My listeners get $1,500 dollars off. That’s a huge chunk of the tuition. And you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach to get a free module and see if it’s right for you. You can also Google IIN and give them a call. All the people you talked to on the phone are graduates. That’s been my experience. Many of their staff are graduates. I’ve interviewed their CEO. And I’ve interviewed several of their staff members. All have wonderful stories. So if you’re interested in becoming a health coach, you should absolutely do IIN. But if you’re not interested in becoming a health coach and you just really are focusing on your health and your family’s health, IIN is also great for that. It’s a wonderful way to really deepen your knowledge and apply it to your life. So check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach and get your free module. See if it’s right for you. See if it’s something that would enrich your life. It enriched mine. That’s why I love sharing it with my listeners. There’s been over a hundred listeners who have gone through IIN and have shared with me the amazing changes in their life. Some of them went on to become health coaches. Or some of them were already in the health field and they added this like a tool to their tool belt. And others used it to help themselves and their family. So it’s wonderful. And it’s not only food. Although they do teach a hundred dietary theories and show you how to use food as medicine. But it’s also learning, emotional, mental, spiritual health, and figuring out how to get that balance in your life so that you can increase the joy in your life. Decrease the stress. And feel happy about every aspect of your life.  Feel satisfied and fulfilled and passionate about every aspect of your life. So if you feel like that’s missing in your life right now, then consider checking it out. It’s a wonderful personal growth and health program. IIN, Google it or go to learntruehealth.com/coach and check it out. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast. Please share it with everyone, all your girlfriends, especially those in their 30s and beyond, 30s and 40s and beyond. Because we want to do everything that Jill teaches us today right now. Even if you’re in your 20s, this is going to help you. Start doing all the steps. She teaches nine points today. And if you do these nine points, you absolutely will see a positive shift in your hormone health and in the golden years of your life. We want to have high, high quality of life for the second half of our life. But we have to prepare for it now. And build a strong foundation of health now. That’s what you’re going to learn today in today’s interview. So enjoy and have a wonderful, wonderful rest of your day Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 404. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Jill Chmielewski. Her website is jillchmielewski.com. Don’t worry, the correct spelling of that will be in the show notes of today’s podcasts at learntruehealth.com. Jill I’m so excited for today’s interview. You have some amazing credentials. Your focus is on helping women to prepare for menopause and to have the healthiest perimenopause possible. And really looking at that later life. I’m about to be 40. So this is, like, definitely on my mind. But looking at starting in our late 30s preparing for how to have a really healthy hormone balance for the rest of our life. And that you teach us how to do that. I know you’re launching a new digital course providing support for a whole community of women to help them with all the steps they need to achieve the healthiest hormone balance possible for the second half of their life. And I think that’s brilliant. This is a topic that really, really, really needs to get out there. Especially, because so many doctors, when you go to them, will tell you, “Oh, your symptoms are normal.” Dry vagina or weird PMS symptoms, or weight gain even though you’re exercising like crazy, headaches, just the list goes on and on and on. And doctors will just say, “Oh, this is normal.” Or, “Here, take the pill.” And just they’ll kind of sweep it under the rug or try to give you a drug instead of really – because they’re not truly educated on how to support us in achieving optimal health. They’re good at handling infections, they’re good at handling emergency medicine. But they’re really, really not good at helping us to achieve optimal health. And you are a specialized in helping women to balance hormones and have absolutely optimal hormone levels their entire lives. So, Jill, welcome to the show. And I’m so excited. You’re here today to teach us how to be super duper healthy women.   [00:07:46] Jill Chmielewski: Oh, my gosh. Thank you for that awesome introduction. I’m so excited to be here as well. And I think you said everything. I mean, you nailed it. It’s not that doctors don’t care. It’s just that they don’t know. I think that in their medical training. they’re focusing, especially our OBGYNs, are focusing on the reproductive years and helping women have babies or helping them with postpartum. But when it comes to that sort of second half, for most of us it’s probably about a third of our lives, that will spend in perimenopause or menopause. They just don’t have the education or the expertise to, maybe, help walk women through that period of life or prepare them for that period of life. So I think everything you said is right on point.      [00:08:25] Ashley James: But even though it’s like the last third of our life – and you know what? If we ate super healthy, we have the genetic potential to live to be 120. So it could be like more than half. But think about it, I love that your message and your approach is to prepare. Like preparing our 30s for things like the foundations of health, eating healthy, making sure we are fully nutrified, making sure we’re checking in on our emotional and mental health, getting enough sleep. Just these everyday little tiny things will prepare us for better health in the second half of our life. And in our 30s is when we tend to really throw our body under the bus and not listen to the symptoms of our body. And just self medicate with caffeine and alcohol and over the counter medication. Because we want to go, go, go, go, go. And we’re robbing ourselves of the quality of life in the second half of our life by neglecting ourselves now. And so I love that your message is there’s lots we can do now.  Even if we’re in our 20s and 30s and 40s, there’s lots we can do now to ensure that we have amazing hormone health later on.     [00:09:37] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. I mean, that’s so true. And that’s something that I don’t think even as a nurse – and I’ve been a nurse for almost 27 years. And I’ve you know worked primarily in women’s health. And this notion that we can do something to actually help support our hormones really never came up in any of my training until I went into the functional medicine realm. And you and I were talking before the show, I mean food has a huge impact. Our lifestyle choices have a huge impact. But I think with physicians, oftentimes, we’re looking to our physician for education about what’s next. And we kind of see the reproductive years as one segment of life. And then menopause as the next phase. And that doesn’t come until we’re, you know, 50 or 60. Well, for most of us, the hormonal changes start to happen in our mid to late 30s. We may be even still getting pregnant in our mid to late 30s. But the hormone changes are starting then that start to kick off perimenopause. And so yeah, there’s a whole lot that we can do that we need to start paying attention to much, much earlier than when actual menopause, the point at which we no longer get periods happen. So we’ll talk about, I think, a lot of it today during the show.     [00:10:47] Ashley James: Yay. Now, you were a nurse for many years. And then I really want to get into your story. Just before we get into the education part, I want to understand a bit more about your background. And what happened to have you want to become an expert in balancing hormones? So there you were a nurse for so many years. And I know you also have your masters as well. Walk us through your professional life. What happened that had you want to go into health coaching and functional nutrition coaching?     [00:11:22] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. Thanks. So I think early on, I mean, I can remember even way back in my 20s when I was working in medicine. I was working as a neonatal ICU nurse. And then I sort of transitioned into women’s health and infertility, reproductive endocrinology and infertility. And I can remember thinking at the time, that there was just such a huge disconnect. I mean, I felt the disconnect that there was, on one hand, we were just treating women who had infertility with medication. And behind the scenes, we didn’t talk about nutrition. We didn’t talk about lifestyle. We didn’t talk about any of the other things that kind of come into play with hormones. I think that was the first moment where I started to have some of those aha moments about that this was an area that I knew that prevention, and education, and looking at things beyond traditional medicine might be helpful. And I went on to have four kids really close together. I stayed home for a few years. And then I went back to work and went back into nursing for a while for several years. And what really kicked me off into going into this realm sort of alternative medicine or integrative medicine is my oldest daughter, who’s now going to be 20 this year. Struggled her whole life with asthma, and allergies, and digestive issues. And when I was pursuing conventional medicine physicians to get some help for her, it wasn’t that they didn’t want to help her. I think they didn’t know how to help her. They ran a test for celiac disease and said, “Well, you know, she doesn’t have celiac.” So kind of like sent us on our way. “She has digestive issues. We’ll just kind of send you on your way.” And so I think the mama bear in me started doing some research. And it sort of opened Pandora’s box where I knew I needed to know more and learn more to help her. And once I did and was able to help her, I started wanting to get deeper and deeper into integrative medicine. And so I started actually took my training to a formal venue. And so I went back to school. And I went to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. And when I was there, I would say about halfway through my training there, I had a lecture by Dr. Robin Berzin. And I don’t know if you know her, but she’s a functional medicine practitioner. She’s the founder of Parsley Health, which is an amazing medical practice. And she was the one that really connected the dots for me in terms of what functional medicine was. Which is I know you’ve had guests on your podcast before that have talked about functional medicine. But for listeners that don’t know, it’s really just looking at the root cause of symptoms as opposed to just treating symptom by symptom. It’s sort of looking at like, what is really causing symptoms in the body. And so she turned me on to functional medicine. And I started down that path and sort of couldn’t get enough. And I think just by default, because I was working with clients and I tended to attract women as clients, I started to see over and over and over again that when I was doing their intakes and we would sit and talk through symptoms and health histories, hormones were really at the core of the bulk of their problems and symptoms. And most of these women happen to be in that 35, 40, 45, 50 kind of that perimenopausal-menopausal range. And I started to really, I guess, just get really excited about the fact that, well, just addressing hormone issues would make these symptoms go away. And so I sort of started to, I want to say, kind of put myself in that hormone specialist bucket. But it’s something that I just love. And I think that physicians don’t always see the connection when women are being seen. They’re often looking at symptoms in a different way. Rather than looking at how a deficiency in one hormone can affect all different systems in the body. And so for me, it just sort of, I think, when I talk about hormones or think about hormones, for me, it sort of brings everything together. And you can see how hormones work so deeply in the body. And so I’ve really – this is where I feel I where I work with clients and I think that this is where I’ll probably hang my hat is really in the hormone world.     [00:15:26] Ashley James: So went to IIN. I went to IIN.     [00:15:30] Jill Chmielewski: I know you went to IIN. That’s awesome.     [00:15:32] Ashley James: Yeah. So that was that was your first. Now, you’ve done other – you have other training that you’ve taken since IIN. I think IIN is a wonderful school like as a launching pad for people who want to become health coaches. I feel like it’s the first thing people should do. And then go specialize in something. So I love that that’s what you did. So halfway through the first six weeks in IIN, like halfway through it, that’s when you saw this lecture. Was it was it a lecture in IIN or was it something you stumbled upon?     [00:16:08] Jill Chmielewski: It was. It was in IIN. I don’t know if you remembered, you probably had the same lecture, I think. It’s Dr. Robin Berzin. I think there were multiple practitioners at IIN who presented who talked about functional medicine. But for some reason, something about her and maybe because she had been more of a mainstream physician first. I don’t know, everything she talked about really resonate. All of a sudden I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” It was like all the stars aligned. And I feel like the last 20 years, 20 plus years of conventional medicine all made sense or just the body. Just it all came together.     [00:16:40] Ashley James: Yes. I feel like when I did IIN, that’s what happened to me too. So much stuff. So many of these separate pieces in my mind just came together and started making sense in a whole new way. It was really cool. I jumped into IIN because of an interview I did. It was within the first few months of launching the podcast. I was interviewing at a health coach. And it’s so funny because I never really heard of health coaches. And I’m like. “Who is this guy? He wants to be on the show. He calls himself a health coach.” And I thought that was so hokey. I thought this was something made up. Like, you just call yourself a health coach. And he was great. It was a really, really good interview. And then I said,” Well, how did you become one?” During the interview, I said, “How do you become one?” And he started talking about IIN. And by the end of it after we got off Skype, I called up IIN. I went to the website. I was really impressed by all the teachers that they listed. And then I called them and after talking to my husband, he’s like, “Go for it. Go for it.” I signed him that same day. I was like, “Dang.” I signed up that same day. And I immediately jumped into sort of watching the foundation, like the pre-course that they give you. And I was bawling my eyes out. I felt so inspired. In every single video, I felt like I had found my people. I felt like “Oh my gosh. I belong. This is so great.” So it pulled together a lot of pieces for me. And what’s really neat is during it, because every week you want to try a different diet because you’re learning about all these different diets. Food as medicine. But during it, my husband was listening kind of in the background. And he chose to go 100 percent whole food plant based vegan. He was a carnivore. He would only eat meat pretty much. And somewhere during my journey through IIN, he said to me, “I’m no longer eating meat.”     [00:18:30] Jill Chmielewski: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.     [00:18:31] Ashley James: So our lives have really changed. That was two years ago. And so our lives have really changed since IIN. Ad I’ve interviewed a lot of people -a lot of the lectures. So I’m going to have to get Robin on the show now that you say that,     [00:18:43] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. She’s wonderful. Oh, my gosh. She’s wonderful.     [00:18:46] Ashley James: So there you were. You watched Robin. And all the pieces came together for you. And then you went on to take some more courses in functional medicine – or functional nutrition specifically. Can you tell us a little bit about that?     [00:19:06] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. You know, it’s funny. And you probably – this probably resonates with you having gone through IIN. Once you know sort of this other side of the world and the side of learning the body and all these things, you just want to know more. I mean, it’s almost like you can’t stop. And I think a lot of health coaches would say, “It’s almost hard to put the brakes on learning.” Even though it’s so fun to be a lifelong learner, sometimes you just want to stop and digest and sit with it for a little while. But I think at the point I was at, I was so excited about what I had learned with IIN that I went on. Do you know Andrea Nakayama? I can never say her name quite right.     [00:19:39] Ashley James: Gosh. That sounds really familiar.     [00:19:41] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. So she has a functional nutrition program. And I did her program almost right after IIN. And I really enjoyed it. I think it was very nutrition focused. Definitely, very, obviously, a lot of biology, physiology, all that stuff. But I had heard about the School of Applied Functional Medicine somewhere in the midst of all this. And so I took just sort of like IIN, a little sample class at the School of Applied Functional Medicine. And that’s where I felt like, “Okay. This is it.” Because I think having been a nurse for as long as I have been, I have a pretty – I’ve been in the medical world for a long time. So I wanted a deeper understanding. Where I think there are people that take these courses who do not have a medical background. But it would be difficult. It’s a really big learning curve if you don’t have a medical background.     [00:20:27] Ashley James: Right. Whereas IIN, you don’t need a medical background at all. But when you get into functional nutrition, definitely you want a medical background or it would help.     [00:20:38] Jill Chmielewski: It helps. That’s right. It helps. I think if you’re a really dedicated learner, you can do it. But you’re listening to lectures over and over and over. And even I have to say, I still go back to lectures that I learned when I was at the School of Applied Functional Medicine just to get one more nugget or piece of information to kind of help me maybe solidify some of my learnings So yeah, I’ve sort of halted it now. I’m certified in functional medicine from the School of Applied Functional Medicine. And now I’m just taking it and really – I do some hormone – I definitely have done some specialty hormone courses there. And I’ve done sort of one off hormone trainings. And will continue to do that. But as they say, I think when you are trying to teach other people or educate other people, you just have to be a few steps ahead of them to hold the lantern. I meant that sort of I know a lot. I don’t know everything. But I know enough to definitely help women prepare for this time of life and to start to understand what they need to do. It’s sort of like what to expect what you’re expecting. But we don’t think about it that way. It’s like, we’ll do everything to prepare for a baby that’s coming. Or even a puppy, if we’re going to get a new puppy. But when it comes to this period of life, I don’t think we think about what we need to do to prepare for this next phase in life. So that’s sort of where I step in is really trying to help women understand the changes that are coming so that they can prepare for them. And then helping them to understand what can they do from a food and lifestyle perspective, from a hormone perspective, maybe a hormone replacement perspective. Although I’m not an expert in it but I definitely know quite a bit about hormone replacement. And also, how to find a practitioner that can help guide you through this next chapter of life.     [00:22:22] Ashley James: Do you do any lab tests?     [00:22:26] Jill Chmielewski: I kind of walk a fine line with that because it’s a scope of practice issue, where clients will bring me labs and we’ll talk about them. I can educate them on generally what labs mean. You know, “Hey, if your white blood count is this, sometimes it can be this.” Or, “If your fasting glucose is elevated, it’s probably time to start making some changes in your diet.” So I can do some – I know the information. It’s sort of like I need to practice within my scope of practice as a health coach and also as a nurse. So nurses, part of our job is to really educate patients on what’s happening in their body. And so I’m very well versed in working with labs. But again, I try to sort of keep the deep lab work to the physicians because I think that’s just – from a liability perspective, it’s just a better place to be.     [00:23:18] Ashley James: Got it. I’m in the middle of taking this course from Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. I have a feeling this might be the next one you’re going to take.     [00:23:25] Jill Chmielewski: Uh-huh. I know that program. I mean, I haven’t taken it but I know what you’re talking about.     [00:23:28] Ashley James: Yeah. Yeah. I just paused. I was doing it for a few months and then I paused it to launch the Learn True Health Home Kitchen that I was telling you about. Because we’ve been filming all these great cooking videos and we’re going to be launching it really soon. And then I’ll go back to complete the FDN. I like that it’s student led. But yeah, they teach you how to read labs. Functional labs, like not the regular ones but the hormones and stuff like that. But there’s so much you can do without labs. Because you’re looking at the lifestyle of the person and you’re helping them to fill in those gaps and help them find what’s missing. So let’s get into that. Because you got nine steps, the nine different points that we want to make sure we get to that really, really will help set us up for better health. So no matter who’s listening – the men that are still here, I love you. I have to say that. The men that are still listening are really awesome because they’re probably listening because they’re just curious. But they’re also probably listening because they want to help the women in their life, which I think is just really admirable and I love you for it. And all the women that are listening, no matter what age you are, you’re going to take some great information away. So maybe even if you’re postmenopausal or you’re 17, it doesn’t matter because the stuff that Jill teaches really is applicable to all women. But specifically, it’s really going to help women prepare for perimenopause and menopause. So take it away. What things should we make sure that we do or know to best prepare ourselves to have healthy hormones?     [00:25:16] Jill Chmielewski: Well, I think the first thing is just kind of pausing for a second and for women to understand that they are going to have to be advocates for themselves. I mean, healthcare has changed so much since I started as a nurse. And it had already sort of started its transition even back then. But long gone are the days where you sit with your doctor for 45 minutes and have conversations about your health and your mental health and your wellbeing and other things. Unless, you’re working with a functional medicine physician and they do design their visits that way. But I think these days the visits are very limited with physicians. It’s really not their fault. It’s like a ten minute slot. And I have a lot of Physician friends who are, you know, they’re burnt out. And they know that they are not able to provide their patients with the care that they need because they’re so limited by insurance and other things that dictate care. But I think women need to know, you have to be an advocate for yourself. And that means you have to start educating yourself. And you don’t have to get – it can be confusing. And I think that’s the hard part of this time in life that we’re so fortunate to have so many resources health-wise and wellness-wise. But there’s a lot of wellness noise. And so you get a little bit like, “Okay. Which diet? You know, which -” there’s so much going on. You really don’t know which way to go. So I think find, I guess, somebody who resonates with you. It could be me, it could be somebody else, who really is geared toward women. And start to learn about what’s going to happen in this next phase of life. And to your point, you can start doing this in your 20s, in your teens, just to kind of get prepared for the next step. But I think women when they feel – women are very intuitive, as you know. And so if you go to your doctor and you feel like something isn’t quite right and they tell you, “You know what? Hey, it’s part of aging.” And I hear that all the time from my clients who say, “I went to my doctor. I told them I was tired. I told them that my hair was falling out.” Or, “I’m gaining weight.” Or whatever it might be. And they’re just told, “You know what? Hey, it’s part of aging.” And I think if you understand what potentially could be happening in your body at this period of life, you’ll be a much better advocate for yourself. You’ll feel more confident standing up for yourself. And you’ll feel more confidence saying to your doctor, “You know what? I know there’s something else going on. Can you help me with this?” So I would say number one is just having women be strong advocates for themselves.     [00:27:38] Ashley James: I love that you bring up to advocate for ourselves and to build our team. I think we were raised to put doctors on a pedestal and to genuflect to them, to to bow down, and to give over our power. And especially as women, we have to look at where do we lose our power? Where do we give over our bodies to medical professionals? And where do we feel helpless? Because I think in our society, we’ve been trained to feel helpless. And that’s something that we’re breaking now. We’re breaking through that. It’s still left. Like, it’s still – there’s just a little bit of residual. So we need to look at like, are there ever any times with medical professionals where we feel helpless or we feel like we’re children again? I think it’s why we feel so warm and fuzzy about hospitals, like they’ll just take care of me. Because there’s like a child inside us that just wants our parents to take care of us. And I think that’s what we do is we project onto doctors this parental role. Like, “Just take my temperature and just give me the medicine, Mommy, Daddy. And just tell me what to do and I’ll be fine.” And this giving up of our power is  something that’s reinforced in society because of media, because of the way the AMA wants it. They want – the way the marketing is they want – and this is very setup. This has been set up for over a hundred years, if you look at the history of the AMA and modern medicine in all of their marketing, they want us to put doctors and hospitals on a pedestal. Do not question them. Even if you watch mainstream media and you watch TV shows, they’ll make fun of patients who question, patients who step outside the box. And they’re just little jabs because they want to continue this narrative that people who advocate for themselves are bad, disagreeable patients. That’s actually what they’ll put on your chart. You’re a disagreeable patient. You want to be a disagreeable patient and here’s why. If you look at the statistics of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, they are ridiculous. They’re on the rise. One in three people has diabetes or pre-diabetes. One in three people will have a diagnosis of cancer in their lifetime. I mean, it’s astronomical the amount of disease. The number one killer is heart disease. If you want to be a statistic, keep doing what everyone’s doing. If you don’t want to be a statistic, you have to swim upstream, you have to be a salmon. And that means you have to advocate for yourself. And that doesn’t mean we have to be rude. Because I think that we’re really afraid as women to be – there’s a B word. We’re afraid of that. And again, that’s society. That’s the narrative to keep women in their place. And you do not have to be rude to be assertive. You can be kind, and gentle, and loving, and stand up for yourself, and be firm because you’re worth it. And you’re allowed to fire your doctor and go find another one. You are allowed to. And you’re allowed to find a team and build the team of experts that are in alignment with your values. And that practice informed consent. And what that means i,s the doctor does not pressure you into a therapy or a medicine. If you ever feel guilted or shamed or pressured into anything by a doctor, then you need to leave that doctor and go find one that actually practices informed consent. Which means, they inform you of the positives and the negatives of the treatment, or of the procedure, or drug, or whatever avenue you’re choosing to take. They give you the entire story and they let you make the decision for you. And building a team of holistic health professionals and your MD, the whole team together and your OBGYN, building the team that empowers you and that they get that they’re not on a pedestal, then you are empowered the entire time. And then that way, you’ll also be informed the entire time. Because you can go to them and ask them questions and get them to inform you. And you can bring information to them that you hear on podcasts, or books, or read,studies and things like that. And you bring that information to them. And then if you’ve chosen your team well, they’ll be receptive to that information. Because they’re science minded, they’ll look at it and help you to decipher whether that’s a good approach for you or not based on the science. So it does take an effort to build our team. But once you have, it’s just so wonderful. It feels so great to have these health care professionals who are empowering you towards better health than just giving up your power I’ve seen so many people put on the wrong medications and they suffered for it because they gave up their power and they didn’t advocate for themselves. So I love that this is your first point.     [00:33:10] Jill Chmielewski: I mean, you said it so well. And I think it’s a partnership. So I think, thinking about it that way that it really isn’t meant to be, like you said, somebody is on a pedestal and somebody is sort of down here. We’re equal trying to – I mean the goal at the end of the day is always that this person can be healthier and can be their best self. And if you have a Physician who is open and willing, they’re going to be working with you in partnership as opposed to trying to strong arm you or tell you what to do. So I couldn’t have said it better myself. I think that was great.     [00:33:44] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, I love it’s your first step. So now step number two.     [00:33:48] Jill Chmielewski: Okay. So step number two is probably the one that is, I think women are the most resistant to, and that is lifestyle. And I mean, I kind of will buck it. Lifestyle, food, all of that stuff, kind of into one. I think that women have this very unrealistic expectation that we can skip on sleep, we can eat crappy food, we’re going to keep, exposing ourselves to toxins, we’re going to over schedule ourselves, we’re going to be 24/7 on our devices, we’re going to eat inner minivans on the go, we’re going to be stressed all the time. And at the same time, we’re going to be thin, we’re going to have great se, we’re going to beautiful hair, we’re going to have great relationships, we’re going to have this really smooth transition into perimenopause and menopause, and everything’s going to be great. You can’t have both. And I think you were talking earlier about kind of that giving somebody a pill to fix something. That we’re looking a lot of times women are saying, “What pill can I take for something?” And I think this is where lifestyle comes into play deeply. Because hormones, even if you give someone, let’s say, hormone replacement or something that may help to boost hormones. At the end of the day, biochemically in the body, the body is always trying to find a balance in hormones. So it’s going to shift hormones in the direction that it thinks it should go, regardless of what you give somebody. So sugar causes women oftentimes to make more testosterone. So different things that we do from a food and lifestyle perspective are going to shift our hormones in different ways. So we can’t just take a pill. We can’t just take supplements. We can’t just say, “I’m going to ignore the natural rhythm of my body.” Especially at this point in life and I think this is really that key point in life where everything comes to a head. If you’ve been ignoring these signs and symptoms along the way – and women often say to me, “Well, I just didn’t really pay attention.” And the thing is if you were to stop and listen, our body is constantly communicating with us. And it’s constantly sort of tapping us on the shoulder, giving us little whispers. Maybe not saying it outright but it is telling us in different forms. Like when we gained weight and we’ve changed nothing else, that’s telling us that something is happening in the body. When we’re fatigued, that’s telling us that something needs attention. If our hair is falling out, if we have really irregular periods, if we have really cloudy periods, heavy periods, terrible PMS, whatever it may be, that’s a sign that something is happening. And that’s how our body communicates with us. And it’s trying to say, “Hey, listen, I need help.” And if we keep ignoring it, which is what women often do. And I think you said that in sort of your opening remarks that, we’re running around and we just kind of ignore ourselves. We ignore it. We put everybody else first. The kids come first. The kid’s schedules. We’ll sign the kids up for a million different things. But we won’t take time for ourselves. We won’t pay attention to our symptoms. We won’t actually make – we don’t have time for those lifestyle changes. And, unfortunately, we’re going to have to make time for those lifestyle changes if we want to feel good in perimenopause and menopause. It’s truly a must. I mean, there’s no way to actually make it through perimenopause and menopause well-unscathed to the other side and feel good and actually remain with our health intact without making some lifestyle changes. So that’s a big one. And I’m sure that’s probably a hard one for, maybe, your listeners to hear. But it’s something I think we’re – perimenopause is a five to 15 year transition. And I think that’s nature’s way of giving us a very generous window of time to kind of get our act together, slow it down, start to really think about what we need to prepare for this next phase in life.     [00:37:28] Ashley James: Yeah. What we need versus what we want. I want to stay up late but what I need is to go to bed.     [00:37:36] Jill Chmielewski: Exactly. And we all do it, right? We all do it at certain times. We just have to not do it daily.     [00:37:40] Ashley James: Totally. Totally. Like, you know what? The binging Netflix or Hulu, keep it to once a month or something. The staying up until 2:00 in the morning, maybe keep it to like – you know, limit that. I think it’s really easy to put the kids to bed and then be like, “Oh, now It’s me time.” And I’m totally guilty a bit. But I see so many of my mom friends up at midnight because this is the time when it’s like, “The house is quiet, we can do things.” Or just stay awake not doing anything but just have fun. And I know that on the days that I go to bed even with my son, if we go to bed early, even go to bed like at 9:00 or at 7:00, we go to bed really early, we are so much more productive and then so much happier the next day. And I think that when we tend to stay up late and binge TV or whatever, that that shows that there’s – and I’m talking totally from personal experience – that shows that we feel like there’s a deficiency in joy in our life. You know what I mean? Because I think – what I would I do is I go, “Oh, this is my me time.” Or, “I’m going to have some fun now.” Or I’ll stay up like I did last night I stayed up working on this membership site that we’re launching really soon. And it’s temporary because we’re going to get it launched and then I don’t have to stay up really late working on it. And I’ll be able to work on it on normal business hours. So there’s times when we do it. But just this idea in my head I had to figure out, “Why am I staying up late every night?” I had to ask myself this. Like, “Why is it that I’m not going to bed at 9:00 or 10:00?” We really want to be asleep by 10:00. They show that if you can be asleep by 10:00, you get the most amount of healing done, like the lungs. I think it’s between 10:00 and 1:00 or midnight where the lungs heal. And then other parts of the body are healing. And the brain really needs to go through two full sleep cycles. And if we go to bed at like midnight, we’re not getting those two sleep cycles. And I don’t I don’t set an alarm clock anymore because my son is our alarm clock. So I don’t get to sleep in. So a lot of families don’t get to sleep in. So really, if you go to bed early – and I did this with one of my clients who would stay up late working on her business after she put the kids to bed and then be exhausted the next day. And then it was really hard for her to make healthy choices or have enough energy to cook healthy food. And it compounded and it all started with making one change. And I said, “What if you went to bed with your kids.” Because, obviously as adults, we’ll wake up before the kids. And then you did all this work. Although the busy work like the emails and stuff you were going to do late at night. You do them at 5:00 in the morning with your tea or your coffee in the morning when you’re waking up. And she did that one change. And it was the domino effect that put everything in place in her life. She had more energy. She had more mental clarity. She actually began to lose weight. And of course, inflammation. She lost all that brain fog. She found that she was more productive in the morning. Like all the work that would take her two hours to do at night, actually took over a half-an-hour In the morning. Because she was fresh. And so there’s so much to say about when you say that changing your lifestyle, like just these little changes. Like, what if you went to bed like two hours earlier and did everything you wanted to do. Just rearrange it and really put your sleep as priority. What if you just did this one change this month and just made sleep your priority? And then you could see what’s the ripple effect for the rest of your life. Because if you have the energy, then you might eat a little bit better, then you might exercise a little bit more, then you might be a little happier. And it can just compound from there. So I think that just saying something as simple as making sleep a priority, step one. So great. And then like you said, not eat crap food. But you know what? When we’re tired, it’s really hard – it’s harder – I should say, it’s harder to make better health food choices when we’re walking zombies. So I really do think it starts with the sleep. And then after you’ve got sleep under control, then it’s the eating healthier. And then you said, limit exposure to toxins. And then don’t over schedule yourself. So ask yourself, what do you what do you need instead of what do you want. And then and then don’t stay connected 24/7. Put the phone down. And go for a walk in the forest with your kids. Do that on a regular basis. Like, get disconnected. So I love that you talked about that. Because that chronic stress – stress isn’t an emotion. But that chronic stress we’re putting on our body, we don’t feel it as an emotion. But we’ll feel it when our body is at its breaking point. So we have to address the stressors. Knowing that we actually don’t feel it. We don’t feel it necessarily. But you know what we do? We do feel it when it’s gone. Like when you’re on vacation, you’re like, “Oh, my gosh. This is so amazing.” You just feel so good. That’s because the stressors aren’t there. So we can feel it when it’s not there. But when we’re habituated, were adapted to constant chronic stress, that’s our new norm. So then we’re like – I’ve had so many people say to me, “I’m not stressed. I don’t feel stressed.” But they make these changes and then they’re like, “Wow. I can’t believe how much stress I was under. I didn’t know that.” So I love that you pointed that out that this makes a big difference. Can you talk a little bit about why – biochemically, why does sleep and toxins and food and stress, why does that affect hormones and hormone health specifically?     [00:43:40] Jill Chmielewski: Well, I mean I love that you brought up sleep is that kind of first step. Because typically, when I work with clients, that’s always the first step. And I should say to that it can take – there’s no commitment. I think sometimes when you say to somebody lifestyle is something – we need to kind of work at lifestyle. They get like, “Oh, my gosh. She’s going to ask me to make a million changes at once.” And I think,like you said, slow, simple changes are really the best way to start. Because they sort of get themselves. You start one and then you do the other. I think sleep is one of the number one factors. Because sleep is when we do our critical metabolic waste cleanup of the day. We build hormones at nighttime while we’re sleeping. I mean, we’re making hormones, we’re detoxifying, we’re getting rid of things.  And detoxification is a huge part of hormones and hormone balance. We need to have really efficient detoxification to have really good hormone balance. And we need sleep – really adequate deep sleep. Really that sort of, I mean – ideally, we are – you know, this doesn’t happen. But ideally, we’re really sort of mimicking this – have a really good circadian rhythm where we are rising with the sun and sort of going to bed with sunset. Now, we don’t do that anymore. But the closer we can get to that, that’s going to definitely help with hormonal rhythm. So the women that you were just alluding to – and I have a lot of friends too, where I’ll all get emails from them. I’ll look and it’s like 1:30 in the morning, “What is she doing up?” And it’s the same – I always get emails from her at 1:30. Every night to be cutting into sleep like that, you’re really just sort of wrecking the hormonal rhythm of the day. Cortisol – there’s a lot of different hormones that are involved. And they follow that sort of circadian rhythms. So when you’re cutting into sleep, that’s a big reason why sleep in and of itself, I mean, studies – there’s probably now hundreds, if not thousands, of studies that show a direct correlation between lack of sleep and hormone imbalances. There’s so many different reasons. But I would say, just the fact that we’re detoxifying and that we’ve got just so much going on with our circadian rhythm during the day and at night has a huge impact on our hormonal balance.     [00:45:59] Ashley James: You said that we make hormones at night. Do we make more hormones when we’re sleeping? I mean, if someone were to pull an all nighter, do they make less hormones?      [00:46:08] Jill Chmielewski: They make less hormones. We make hormones at all different times, obviously, throughout the day. I mean, it’s a 24/7 type of situation. But a lot of the building happens at night when we sleep. Because our bodies are at rest. And so our body can focus on more important things. During the day, we’re running around like fools. And so nighttime is when our body can actually sort of – it’s like this workshop that’s kind of happening behind the scenes where we’re able to actually work on building hormones. A lot of our appetite hormones. Like you alluded to earlier, the appetite hormones, ghrelin and leptin, are critical that we get sleep at night. Otherwise, you do end up the next day with this sort of – we’ve all experienced that we’re up all night and you walk to the fridge every hour or the pantry looking for something to eat because those hormones are not in balance. So it’s sort of the signaling is off. So we need to sleep because the signaling is off as well. So we probably would need hours to get into all of the biochemical reactions behind it all. But I would just say sleep in and of itself is huge for building hormones, and for balancing hormones, and for ensuring that communication with hormones among hormones with each other, with different tissues of the body is happening and happening well.     [00:47:27] Ashley James: I think we could do an entire episode just on this number two – this section two. Because you mentioned toxins, toxic exposure and there’s like an entire episode right there. And I’ve had other guests talk about it. But the toxins like Bisphenol A, for example, or endocrine disruptors. And now there’s obesogens and there’s microplastics in water. Like, don’t drink bottled water that’s in plastic because there’s microplastics that are obesogens. And there’s estrogen mimicking plastics and toxins. There’s over 80,000 toxins in our food and water and air. And many of them are endocrine disruptors. And it’s scary because it could be your mattress could be off gassing obesogens. Your carpet could. Your furniture, if it has the flame retardants. And all cosmetics that are in plastic bottles, artificial fragrances and household cleaners, if they’re in plastic bottles, off gas and get into our air. The air quality in our home is ten times worse than the air quality out on the streets. And we’re breathing in these chemicals that are toxic to the body. And we don’t feel it on a regular basis. But it’s slowly disrupting our hormones and increasing our chances of cancer and hurting the thyroid. There’s so many things. So really, like you said, lifestyle is huge. And as part of that sleep, eat healthier, don’t eat crap food, and reduce your toxic exposure. Don’t  over schedule yourself. But each one of these points could be like a whole episode. But it’s so critical. So I love that you addressed this. And that this is something that takes seriously. And again, it’s that shifting our mindset as women who – I’m totally guilty of this – shifting our mindset from putting ourselves last and dragging ourselves through the mud because we have kids, because we have a husband, because we have a career, putting everyone else first because we can. And this is also what we’re taught to do in society. We don’t celebrate taking time off to nurture ourselves. In society, it’s celebrated to burn the candles at both ends. And that’s because if you look at it, women are trying to – and this is over the last, you know, 30,40 years. Women are trying to make sure that we can have a career, that we can have everything we want, and we also want to have a family. And that means the we’re still kind of like holding on to this like 1950’s idea of what being a mom is. And this like 1980’s idea of like what being a career woman is. And try to do both at the same time and it just doesn’t work. So we have to lean – what we need is we need like the 1800’s idea of what it is to be a woman where we know that we’re not an island. We’re not doing this alone. We have to do this in a village. And we need to lean on each other. And maybe that means that all of all of your girlfriends get together and you guys take turns carpooling and you take turns cooking dinners. Maybe you get five girlfriends together and each one of you cooks for the whole group. Or you get together once a week. My friend does this. She gets together with a girlfriend and they do meal prep. They do one day of cooking together and they cook all the meals. And they prep all the meals for both their families. So there’s ways that we can do it. But we have to do it together as a community. And find the girlfriends in your life that want to get healthy together and see how you can lean on – you know, lean on family and friends but don’t do this alone. Because that’s  going to help you to reduce the stress is to not do this alone.     [00:51:32] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. I mean, it’s such a great point. And I think the supporting – women with other women – and I find this and you, too, as a mom probably have seen this. I think really when a woman says, “No. I can’t do this.” Like let’s just say, of course at school, they’re always looking for volunteers or whatever it may be or signing kids up for things. When women say no, we need to respect that they just have enough on their plate. And I hear this from women all the time that there’s just this guilt that they should be doing this, and they should be doing that, and they shouldn’t be doing this, and all these things. And I think at some point it’s not selfish to think about yourself. It’s actually selfless. Because if you’re not here in good health, your whole family’s going to suffer. So you need to worry about yourself. So I think giving each other permission – because I hear it all the time where women ask another woman, “Be on this board with me. Or can you be on this committee or coach or this?” And somebody says no, and they’re like, “Can you believe she said no?” And it’s like, you know what? We, as women, need to support each other and respect that. That might just be one too many things for her right now. And that’s okay. And so taking that pressure off of each other will help a lot of us to feel less guilt about saying yes to things that we know are really outside of our bandwidth.     [00:52:49] Ashley James: Guilt and shame are as unhealthy as smoking. We have to get that to look at what we need versus what we want. I love that you said that. Because what we want is clean the entire house and do 25 things on our to do list. That’s what we want. But by the end of the day, if we’ve only done four, then we feel kind of defeated and we feel guilty or shame. And that is like we just sat down and started smoking cigarettes. It’s shame and guilt are really unhealthy. And they actually will hurt our hormones. Can you explain why being in stress mode, and guilt, and shame – these are emotions. They’re not tangible. They’re not like this is a desk This is real. So we often don’t think that emotions can affect something physical like hormones .But can you explain why there’s a real link between staying in an emotionally stressed state and having poor hormone health?     [00:53:47] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. So I think when you think about stress or when I talk with women about stress, I think they automatically think it’s just the stress of everyday living. Stress from your body’s perspective, I think there’s just one stress response and that is the fight or flight mode, which most of us have heard of. And all that is, there’s a huge surge of adrenaline when something stressful happens. You’re walking across the street with your three year old, a car comes out of nowhere, luckily, we have the stress mode in our body so that we can very quickly get our child out of the way and everybody is safe. And so that’s kind of that short term stress mode. When we’re in long term stress, which is the case for most of us. I mean, our bodies are designed to be in short term stress. Quick bouts of stress and then we go back to a more relaxed state. And I don’t mean relaxed, like you’re kicking your feet up. But you’re not in constant, constant stress mode. When we’re constantly stressed, which we are, we have to think about stress in a different way. It’s the same fight or flight response. So we get this huge surge of adrenaline. We get tons and tons of cortisol, which is our long term stress hormone. And cortisol affects all of the other hormones of our body. It affects progesterone, which is one of the hormones we make when we ovulate. It affects estrogen. It affects our thyroid hormone. It really has this huge effect. Our blood sugar hormone. So it really – stress in and of itself kind of throws us into a tailspin and we don’t even know it. And I think we often think of just those kind of overt stresses, like walking in front of a car coming out of nowhere. Or, “Hey, I got a really stressful email from my boss.” But emotional stress of maybe something that you can’t let go of from, maybe a friendship, something happened and there’s this thing kind of lingering or family member. Or it could be the stress of something physical. Maybe you have a food sensitivity or, you and I, were talking about dairy before the show, maybe dairy in your body creates an immune response and inflammatory response in the body. That’s actually stressful in the body and will also produce the stress response. So there’s a multitude of things that are constantly producing the stress response in our body. And every time we release these stress hormones, it’s like a domino effect. I mean, I think of it is like, you know, if you think of a symphony playing beautifully together, all of these different instruments. If one plays out of tune, it kind of ruins the whole piece. That’s how hormones work. If cortisol is up, up, up all the time, the rest of the hormones are going to be all over the place. And they’re going to be out of whack and out of balance. That’s why when we’re working with women, when I work with women, to help balance hormones, we can’t ignore stress or sleep. But stress is such a big factor because it literally has a domino effect on every other hormone in our body. So we have to address that.     [00:56:34] Ashley James: I love it. And it starts by doing little things. I think we could like get stressed out about stress.     [00:56:40] Jill Chmielewski: Yes. Very good. That is true. That is true. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.     [00:56:44] Ashley James: Yeah. No. It takes little changes. Like I said, try to go to bed an hour earlier or two hours early and just see what happens. Or just make those little changes. But I think starting – you’re right. Starting with sleep is the best because then we’ll have a little bit more energy and mental clarity to start making better food choices. And then we can start looking at the cleaning products in our house. And then we could just go down the list. So I know that you’re giving us this sort of checklist of things to do. Okay. What’s the point number three?     [00:57:14] Jill Chmielewski: So point three is, I think just the notion that there is no quick fix for health and hormone balance issues. And that you’re probably going to have to do some investigative work if you have had long standing hormone issues. And what I mean by that is, one of the best ways to know if you’ve had hormone issues coming into perimenopause is have you had irregular periods, funky periods, heavy periods, cloudy periods, skipped periods. I mean, periods, they’re now considered the fifth vital sign. So they are literally a reflection of what’s happening on the inside of our body. So during the reproductive years, in general, if you’re having a period pretty regularly, we’re going to assume you’re ovulating. Some people aren’t ovulating. That’s a different conversation. But in general, if you’re getting a period, let’s say, with a lot of regularity it’s pretty manageable. If you’re not getting a lot of PMS, there’s nothing really crazy and symptomatic about it. Your hormones are probably pretty balanced. Because when you come into perimenopause, your hormones are going to start changing and periods may change. And that’s actually a normal part of perimenopause. But if you are coming into it and you’ve had period issues for years and years and years and years, it’s something that requires some attention. I would say to your listeners, if you’re in your 20s, early 30s, mid-30s, and you’re having period issues and you’ve had them for a long time, you probably want to start doing some investigative work now. Because those issues are only going to get worse. In perimenopause, you can expect hormone imbalances. And again, there is no quick fix in that moment. There are things that we can do to help support hormones. It’s going to be a little tumultuous and it’s going to be a little bit rocky just like puberty was. Because we think about perimenopause as sort of like reverse puberty. It’s like in puberty, your hormones are going on the up and up. In perimenopause, they’re on this kind of slow decline. And sometimes it’s a quick decline. But in most cases, it’s a little bit of a slower decline. But I think this is that period in life where you’re going to want it sort of investigate anything that has been going on. Understand that there are no quick fixes. And that once you’ll want to probably – I think this is where building your team even before you hit perimenopause is really important. Because you want to address things that are happening now so they don’t get worse in perimenopause. And then as perimenopausal issues arise, and they will, I think there’s – I can’t imagine there’s a woman out there that has not had some type of a symptom during perimenopause. Some women go through rather unscathed. But most women are definitely dealing with hormonal issues at certain times. Sometimes worse than others. I mean, sometimes it’s going to be worse than other times during that perimenopausal journey. But I think addressing those things when you can, and then building your team, and understanding that there isn’t a quick fix. I think that’s a really good mentality to walk into perimenopause with.     [01:00:01] Ashley James: I love it. Awesome. All right. Point four.     [01:00:04] Jill Chmielewski: Point four, so kind of along the same lines. Understand that change is inevitable. Like, this is coming and you do have to prepare. So like I talked about earlier, like the puppy or the baby that’s coming, you get car seats and you have showers. And you do all these things for this baby that’s going to come because it’s so important you read every baby book. And then once the baby comes, you’re reading sleep books. Or maybe it’s some discipline books when they’re little, how to handle temper tantrums, and things like that. We tend to really, when it comes to other people in our life, will read, read, read, read. Or if somebody is second or life, will help investigate and see. Google, anything we can about whatever diagnosis they just got. But when it comes to perimenopause, we don’t prepare. It’s back to that whole notion that everyone else comes first and we come last. And I think part of it is the inherent nature of the fact that, we really didn’t even have – I don’t know when the word perimenopause sort of came to be. But I think, traditionally, when I was growing up and going through nursing school even, there was the reproductive years and then there was menopause. And there wasn’t perimenopause. So part of the issue is that, I don’t think women understand that there’s this period of time. It’s not like you’re a reproductive aged woman and all of a sudden one day you’re menopausal and hormones dropped off. But I wonder if that is how. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe that is the perception of some women. So I think knowing that you have this period of time is coming and you need to start preparing for it. And I think when you’re prepared, like anything else, you’re just going to do better. Because one of the symptoms that comes up a lot, I’ve had clients that will just be in panic mode about irregular periods. “All of a sudden, I had really regular periods and then they’re irregular now.” And they tell their doctor and the doctor sends them for a vaginal ultrasound and then a biopsy. And then they put them on the birth control pill and all these things. And actually, irregular periods during perimenopause is normal. It’s a sign of hormones changing. So I think if we can take some of the panic out of the things that are coming and understand that some of these things are normal. Yes, you want to investigate if something seems like it’s really out of whack. But irregular periods, for instance, that is something we would expect in perimenopause. And if you know that, you can prepare. So when that starts to happen, you’re not freaking out and feeling like you need to have these really crazy tests done and all these other things. So I would say preparation is probably your next one.     [01:02:34] Ashley James: I like that you bring that up that it’s a window. Because you mentioned, when we prepare for a baby, we’re having a baby shower. And I would just imagine having this like menopause shower or perimenopause, shower. Like, what if we celebrated it? Like, “I got the news from the doctor already. I’m going to have a party with my girlfriends because I’m in perimenopause.” But it’s a slow transition. Your body slowly transitioning over. When I was younger back in the 90s, Oprah, I guess she was going through menopause.     [1:03:06] Jill Chmielewski: I remember that. Yeah.     [01:03:07] Ashley James: And that was unheard of, to talk about menopause on TV. It was something that was shameful that you whisper it behind closed doors. It was not celebrated. And she brought it out into the open. I mean, she exposed a lot of stuff, hoarding, rape, incest, abuse. She exposed so much that’s in our culture as women and we felt ashamed to talk about it. And I love that. I love that she brought minute pause out into the open. I really feel that she single handedly brought it out into the open like Goddess out of the dark ages. And made it so we could freaking discuss it and  not be some this point of shame. And that it is something that we can actually celebrate. And when we look at ancient cultures, because I’ve studied ancient cultures and ancient religion, before Christianity – and I’m not bashing any religion at all. It’s just looking at the history. But before like the Crusades, before Christianity, women in many cultures were the – I don’t want to say rulers – but the older women were the healers. The grandmothers were looked to, were the elders, were the leaders, they were looked to as women who were in their power. And when a woman went into menopause or was beyond the childbearing years, in certain cultures, they were actually revered and looked at that they stepped into their power. That something happened to women when they went through menopause and post menopause where they had access to universal energy and access to healing energies. And they had stronger intuition. Stronger ability to practice healing and to guide the tribe or guide the people. So there are cultures that saw that women stepped into their power. And that was the meme that menopause meant you stepped into your power. And I’d love for us to now make that part of our idea. You’re not losing something by going into menopause. You’re gaining something. Because I think some women are afraid of going into menopause. It means we’re getting older. We’re frail. We’re going to lose our bones. We’re going to have osteoporosis. We’re just looking at the mainstream media version of it or that narrative that we just get old and weak and frail. Instead, how about we’re these super strong women that step into our power and step into our intuition. And like the light bulb goes on in our body and we become even stronger and healthier because we’re figuring out stuff. We’re taking the wisdom of our years and we’re applying it. So I’d like for us to shift that, yes, it takes about 15 years, like you said, ten to 15 years to shift into it. And in that time we get to prepare. And that we can actually look forward to it. Because there’s so much that good that happens that so many ancient cultures saw that there’s good that happens within us as women when we step into menopause.     [01:06:21] Jill Chmielewski: I so agree. I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think a lot of it has to do with, obviously, our society that reveres youth is beautiful. And aging is sort of like, “You’re kind of washed up and over the hill.” And tossing women to the side. When I think, like you said, a lot of these cultures have really always put aging women at the forefront and really valued all that their life experience can now be bestowed on the next generation and share it. And it would be really nice if we could see that shift here.     [01:06:50] Ashley James: Now, you have mentioned earlier that watching your periods as a vital sign is important. Like the quality of the period, whether it’s heavy or light. What about PMS? What about even like a week before the period, if cravings get stronger? Or if their boobs are more tender than normal? Or if they’re way more irritable than normal? Or just like, are really, really exhausted in the morning? These symptoms leading up to their period, what about that? Is that a sign that something is off balance or off kilter or is that normal?     [01:07:27] Jill Chmielewski: You know, typically, I mean, in the ideal – optimally, we would have uneventful periods. I mean, aside from the fact that when you get your period itself, your uterine lining sheds because your hormones, progesterone and estrogen, have really fallen. And so when we don’t have our hormones, we feel it in terms of we feel more tired, we don’t feel as energetic. We want to maybe kind of sit on the couch day one and day two or maybe even day three of our period. That part of sort of the hormonal decline with your period is normal. I would say the period leading up to that, so that transition of time where women say, “Oh, my gosh. I am just like out of my mind the week before my period.” Typically, there is a hormonal imbalance. And more times than not, it usually means that there’s not enough progesterone to balance estrogen. So I don’t know if your listeners have heard of estrogen dominance. That word is tossed around a lot these days when we’re talking about hormones. But estrogen and progesterone really need to be balanced in order for women to feel good. And for a really uneventful period, estrogen and progesterone, need to be balanced. And oftentimes, I think alluding back to a lot of the toxins, a lot of the hormone disrupting chemicals, a lot of those chemicals contain like estrogen mimicking chemicals. So there’s a lot more estrogen in the environment than there once was. And so women tend to have higher estrogen in relation to the amount of progesterone they have. And that’s typically – typically, again, why women would have sort of eventful periods, PMS, the bloating, the moods. All that stuff is typically more related to progesterone, maybe, being on the lower side or, maybe, not being enough to balance out estrogen.     [1:09:13] Ashley James: So if women have these symptoms and then they confirm that with bloodwork that their progesterone is low, what do you recommend they do to support the body in increasing its progesterone to normal levels?     [01:09:26] Jill Chmielewski: I mean, it depends. I mean, I think with hormones, usually if somebody has really not great PMS or they really noticed that, in general, we’re doing a hormone panel. A combination of serum testing, which is lab testing, and doing a urine test at home. Typically, we do like, what we call, a 24-hour urine, where we’re actually looking at hormones and their metabolites. It gives us a lot more information. So it’s hard to say specifically without knowing what someone’s results are. In general, I would say if somebody says, “Hey, if you were just kind of saying hey [inaudible] [01:10:00].” What would you say to somebody or group of women who have really, really significant PMS? I would say, number one, you definitely want to look at the toxins in your environment. I think a big source of estrogen coming in is going to be, obviously, in dairy. Because all dairy is coming from the milk of a lactating mammal. A lot of our [inaudible] [01:10:18] because a lot of them are injected with antibiotics and hormones. Definitely, pots and pans, plastics, the microplastics as we know, our beauty products, et cetera. I mean, they’re everywhere. They’re kind of everywhere. So doing your best to kind of start decreasing estrogen coming in that way. Because our bodies are smart. Our bodies really probably know. They know how much hormone is needed and how much should be released. So if we have imbalanced hormones, oftentimes with estrogen. it’s coming from an outside source or it has more to do with detoxification, really sluggish detoxification. Because we’re not, maybe, breaking down estrogen properly. And so we’re holding on to some of it and recycling it. For women who are constipated and they’re going to the bathroom every three days, your livers breaking down estrogen. It has to get out of your body. And the only way can do that is for you to go to the bathroom. Well, that’s going to be a problem. You’re definitely going to be holding on and recirculating estrogen in the body. So I always tell women, look at some of those kind of food factors. First, look at kind of your gut health, see what’s happening there. There are supplements that can be taken. But they’re very, very targeted to what’s happening once we see the hormone panel. From a progesterone side, you’re going to want to do things that are going to optimize isolation. And that would be things like there’s definitely herbs that will do that. But I think from a lifestyle perspective, stress is going to be huge for ovulating. I mean, our bodies are not going to want to bring a baby into this world if it’s stressed out. And even if you don’t want a baby, your body’s purpose of ovulation is to create a baby. I mean, that’s we’re primarily designed so that’s why we ovulate. So from your body’s perspective, it’s always thinking how to procreate and how am I going to bring a baby into this world. Well, if you’re stressed, it’s not going to do that very well. Hormones are going to be off. So anything you can do to decrease stress is going to improve progesterone. That includes things like exercise. Because I think we think of exercise is good. But I find with this kind of type A mentality we have and the go, go, go. And then we go to orange theory – and I’m not picking on orange theory. But we tend to be in this rush state all the time. And then we go in our workouts or like maniac workouts that actually stresses us more. We may feel relief when we leave. But from our bodies perspective, it’s just more stress. Too much exercise can definitely impede progesterone as well. So I always tell women, you definitely want to look at what you’re doing to support optimal progesterone, optimal ovulation, and things like that. And then there’s also, obviously, some herbs and nutrients. Getting the right vitamins and the right diet on board to make sure that you’re optimizing hormones will really go a long way to help with your period health.     [01:13:08] Ashley James: All right. Next point, number five.     [01:13:10] Jill Chmielewski: Okay. So this is probably my biggest beef, I think, with practitioners. Sorry, practitioners. But balanced hormones are just as critical in midlife and late life as they were in reproductive years. So I think, this is where conventional medicine and functional medicine sort of part ways. And in fact, I just received my North American Menopause Society Clinicians Guide. The Menopause Practice Clinicians Guide this year. And still, I mean, it’s 2020 – and I guess, it was the 2019 release. They’re still talking about the advice to clinicians, you know, conventional clinicians, is hormone therapy is just for symptom relief during perimenopause and not to be considered. Essentially, we really don’t need it later in life. And I think, you know – and we won’t don’t have to get into the hormone replacement discussion today But I guess the point is, hormones are needed in every cell of the body. I mean, it’s sort of absurd to think that we only need hormones for making babies. And so that’s been this sort of the conventional way of thinking. Well, you don’t really need your hormones anymore. I mean, you probably had friends as well or you know people who’ve had a hysterectomy and they’re told, “Hey, you know what? It’s fine. Just take it out. You don’t need in any way.” Well, that’s absurd. That’s absolutely absurd. You’re like castrating someone when you take their ovaries out. So it’s that same notion that these hormones, we have hormones work like – hormones work with receptors. And so it’s sort of like a lock and key type of system. So within our body, hormones swim in our bloodstream to different receptors. And they kind of wiggle into receptor. And then that causes an action to happen in the body. Whether that is, maybe, it’s swimming into a uterine lining receptor and it’s building the uterine lining, maybe it’s estrogen that’s gone there to build the uterine lining, or maybe it’s swimming up to the breast and it’s growing breast cells, or to the brain and it’s helping the brain to think more clearly. I mean, we have hormone receptors all over our body from head to toe, from our brain to our heart, to our skin, to our vagina, to our urinary tract, our blood vessels, our bones, everywhere. So the notion that once we hit this phase of life, we no longer need hormones so we’re just kind of ignore people that are having hormone imbalances is really insane when you think about the systemic effects that hormones have on the body. And we know from looking at hormones that having balanced hormones, they systemically protect our brain, our heart, our bones, our bladder, our skin, our gut, and I mean so much more in our body. So keeping that in mind, it’s not just about making babies. You knew that didn’t you?     [01:15:50] Ashley James: Well, I love that you’re saying this because we want to live as long as possible, as healthfully as possible. We want the golden years to be super healthy. Just as healthy as when we were 30. When I lived in Las Vegas with my husband back in 2009-ish, I had this functional doctor. She’s awesome. She was in her 70s and she did not look like she was in her 70s. She’s the doctor who diagnosed me with chronic adrenal fatigue. I had been feeling so guilty and so shame – like I felt so much shame for how exhausted I was. And I thought I was just lazy. Because if you looked at me, you’d think I was lazy. But really, my adrenal fatigue was so bad. And I did the saliva test with her, where you spit in a tube all day long – different tubes and then they send it off to the lab. And she had been in the Olympics twice in the summer – Winter Olympics. She had been in the Winter Olympics twice. And she said, “The only time I’ve ever seen cortisol levels this low was right after I finished the Olympics.”  And she said, “You are walking dead.” And she showed me the chart – the graph where, normally, it’s supposed to start really high in the day and go down. I would start the day lower than when people are sleeping. My cortisol at the beginning of day was lower than people who are sleeping. And it would just sort of creep up and then just barely creep up to what you would have as normal levels at the most tired part of your day was my maximum amount of energy, basically. And she showed me that and she goes, “You know,no wonder you actually have some energy and some mental clarity about like 6:00 p.m. And then it’s hard for you to sleep at night because your body is just struggling all day long to make some cortisol. And you finally have some at night.” But I was really messed up and she was the first one to show me and affirm that, “Yeah. You’re not lazy. Your hormones are way out of balance.” And what I loved about learning from her is that she became this example of health to me. She was like mid-70s. She would run – she did Iron Man’s in the desert. She would do triathlons in the 115 degree heat. She looked absolutely amazing. And she did not prescribe to the idea that when we’re older, we need to be frail. She’s in her 80s now and she just moved to Illinois to start a ranch. And she’s not ever going to stop. She’s super healthy. We’re friends on Facebook, still connected. And she believes that food is medicine. And take supplements when needed to fill in the gaps of nutrition, like minerals. And use your body in a way that builds health. And so having an example, I think it’s really good to find someone – find an older woman who’s in their 70s or 80s that is an example of prime health. And then just model that and look at her and help you shift your belief system that you can be active and healthy. And not catching the flu, not at risk of dying of influenza because you’re a senior, not a risk of having your hip break. But really, that’s not – and shift our belief system. Look in your mind and go, “What do I look like in my mind’s eye? What is my belief system about being 85 years old?” And if you see yourself in like a home in a wheelchair, that thing need to change. If that’s your belief system, if that’s sort of this carrot you’ve dangled out in front of you, you want to be imagining yourself running marathons at age 99. Because there are women out there. Go on YouTube and look up 100 year old woman running marathons. There are women that do that. And I love these videos of these women in their 90s that run these marathons. And they say, “Oh yeah. When I was 75, I started running.” It’s just like they weren’t doing it their whole lives. But shifting our mindset to have the idea that when we are 80, 90, and 100, that we are healthy and active and still using food as medicine and still getting out there. And that is the norm. That’s the idea we want in our mind to move towards. Because I think if we have a belief system that when we’re older, we become frail. Then we just kind of give in when your medical professional says, “Okay. Well, you’re in menopause so, you know, we don’t really have to look at this anymore. It doesn’t matter what kind of estrogen you have. You’re in menopause.” It’s ridiculous. Because estrogen and progesterone actually play a role in longevity. And if we have healthy hormones in our 50, 60, 70s, 80s, 90s, 100s, we’ll live longer and not die of a degenerative disease. And women who have poor hormone levels will die of a degenerative diseases. You just look at the statistics and see. So there’s a direct link between healthy hormones and longevity and also degenerative disease. I know a woman in her 70s who got her period back and actually got pregnant. What happened was, so this doctor – one of the doctors that trained me as a Naturopath. And he’s an old school Naturopath. I think he’s in his 80s now. But he’s an old school Naturopath. And he got this woman on supplements and changed her diet. And he said to her – she was 70. H said to her, “Now watch out.” What happened was she told him, “Hey, I had a period. That was weird.” And she said, “Watch out, you’re fertile now.” And she laughed at him. She’s like, “I’m 70. There’s no way”. And he said, “You got to start using protection with your husband.” Because he’d seen it before. Because some women, when they get so healthy, that you can actually reignite your hormones again. And it’s totally possible. And so she didn’t listen to him. She got pregnant and she had a completely healthy child.     [01:22:25] Jill Chmielewski: Wow.     [01:22:26] Ashley James: It is absolutely possible to, I guess, reverse to come out of menopause. So the thing is, I agree with you, it takes like 15 years or whatever. And we kind of go into and then we’re in menopause. But at the same time, I have this idea in the back of my head that we could – we’re seeing women get into menopause in their 40s now because they’re triggering it too early. So I’m not saying menopause is bad. But I think that menopause is bad when it’s too early.     [01:23:03] Jill Chmielewski: Yes.     [01:23:04] Ashley James: And it’s kind of like the body goes, “Oh, well. I’m kind of exhausted. I don’t have the nutrients. I’m stressed out. And now, I have to go into this phase because I’m depleted.”  And so we kind of want to stave off menopause as long as possible and keep our hormones as healthy as possible so we could be in pre-menopause for longer. And maybe go into menopause in our 60s instead of our 40s. But more and more practitioners are seeing women in their 40s go into menopause, not because it’s not healthy menopause. It’s premature unhealthy menopause because they’re depleted. And so I kind of want to have you talk a little bit about how can we support our health now to delay menopause until when it’s actually healthy to have it? Does that make sense?     [01:23:56] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it. I mean, it sort of sounds a little bit redundant but I think it comes down to, it’s really the food and lifestyle choices that we make. I mean, even food as we know, so much of our soil is depleted. And even if we’re eating the right foods, they may not have all the nutrients that they should have because of whatever, the farming, whatever it may be, whatever is happening. So oftentimes, we do need some targeted supplementation to help bridge that gap, like you alluded to earlier. So I think, balanced hormones are all about nutrients. Nutrients are the building block of hormones. So in theory, if we can get those building blocks of hormones in place, we will at least be able to build hormones for as long as possible. And you talked about I know with adrenal – going into adrenal fatigue. I think that’s been a really big one even if it’s not a full blown adrenal fatigue diagnosis. A lot of women are having trouble with their adrenal glands because of all the stress that we’re under. And again, not just the stress of everyday life but the exposure to toxins which is seen as stressful from the body’s perspective. Or I think there’s a lot coming out now about electromagnetic fields in our cellphones, in our computers. And we have to kind of stand back and say, “Here’s how our body was designed.” It was really designed to, again, be in this sort of – we’re still kind of primarily designed, where we have not evolved as quickly as society is about, especially in the last – oh, my gosh – think about the last even 25 years or even the last ten years. I think it was 2007 when the iPhone came out . So that’s what not – my math is not very good right now, 12 years. Just knowing that our lives have changed so dramatically since the iPhone came out where we have 24/7 accessibility, and computers, and internet, and all these things. So I think a big part of it is going to come down to food and lifestyle is probably the best thing to help support hormones and perpetuate our own internal hormone production for as long as possible before our body kind of says, “Okay. You know what? Now, it’s sort of done.” Genetics play a role, for sure. I mean, a lot of women will sort of follow suit with what happened to their mom. If their mom was 52 when she went through menopause, they may be 52. So we do see that genetics play a role there. But I think we’re seeing girls in their early 20s that have hormones of a 50 year old. I mean, it’s because of the way that we’re living. I think we’re seeing such drastic issues with hormones, probably early menopause, like you alluded to as well.     [1:26:36] Ashley James: Number six.     [01:26:38] Jill Chmielewski: So number six – we won’t go into great detail here because it’s kind of a very long topic. But I just want to myth bust the notion that estrogen is bad. I think we are – I don’t know if your listeners are familiar with the Women’s Health Initiative. But it’s a study that was done many, many years ago, that sort of put a really negative spin on estrogen. And it did not – the study did not – it was a long term study with thousands and thousands of women who were studied, really, probably for the first time. It’s one of the first studies that was done looking at hormone replacement therapy. And essentially, there was a really negative result as a result of this study. And in fact, the study was stopped early. And the women in this study had more heart disease, breast cancer, strokes, blood clots, et cetera. They were placed on estrogen but it was a synthetic form of estrogen. Not the estrogen that we make in our body, which we call bioidentical estrogen, which is available through compounding pharmacies. It was not that. It was an estrogen that’s made from the urine of pregnant horses. And it was combined –     [01:27:44] Ashley James: Sorry to interrupt. But I just want to say one thing about that, about Premarin and any kind of hormone that comes from horses. If you knew the conditions – mostly it’s made in Canada. I’ve been told about the conditions because I was a practitioner who went and saw where it was made. But they keep these horses in a factory. They’re never allowed outside. They’re not allowed to move. They’re hooked up. And they’re constantly pregnant. And then they take their babies away from them and they’re not allowed to see their babies. And if their male horses, they just slaughter them right away. And they’re tortured for their urine. So they keep the horses pregnant for their urine so they can make hormones out of them for us. And it is disgusting and deplorable to know that these hormone drugs are coming from the suffering of these beautiful horses. So it’s really, really, really bad. And if everyone saw this, no one would buy this stuff. And there are other ways. So you’re saying there are other ways. I want to point that out because a lot of women go and get Premarin or Gambino, get hormone replacement stuff that comes from horse urine. And just know that if you actually knew the conditions that lead to making it, you would not want to take this. You wouldn’t even want it in your body.     [01:29:13] Jill Chmielewski: No. One hundred percent. It’s not even – I mean, the other thing is, aside from the terrible conditions of the horses, absolutely. And I’ve read a lot about that as well. It’s made from – again, it’s the horse’ss estrogen, not human estrogen. So it doesn’t – we’re always looking for – anytime we replace hormones in the body, we want to use something that is what we call bioidentical. And that just means that the chemical and molecular structure looks just like our own hormones and acts just like our own hormones, if they came in the body. So when you bring a bioidentical estrogen on board, it knows exactly what to do. It swims to that estrogen receptor. It knows exactly what to do. I kind of consider these – I don’t even call them hormones. They’re synthetic chemicals. It’s probably the best word for them. But this study, unfortunately, sort of it had some really, really poor results but it had nothing to do with bioidentical hormones whatsoever. And unfortunately, the publicity and the fallout of that was sort of like, estrogen is bad, estrogen is bad, estrogen is bad. And so practitioners, even still Physicians – not all. I’m not bucketing all physicians. But there are still Physicians where this has been perpetuated, and they still think estrogen replacement is bad. And they’re thinking about the Women’s Health Initiative that used this fake estrogen. So kind of putting that aside, our bodies – we make estrogen and we make progesterone. So our bodies would never make something that was harmful, right? That’s part – so you just have to kind of think about it logically. So I just want to bust that myth just because I think women oftentimes will say, “Okay. I’m suffering deeply with symptoms in perimenopause.” And I can definitely relate to this because I’m 48. I’ll be 49 this year. I’ve been in perimenopause for a while. I’m kind of on the tail end. I saw a huge kind of decline last year. And my hormones are very normal for this period in time. And I chose to use bioidentical hormone replacement because I saw the numbers. I know my symptoms. I’m working with a functional medicine practitioner. Point being that, when these hormones decline, you’re going to feel it in your body. It’s not just about periods. It’s about your brain health, your bone health, everything else, bladder health, vaginal health, you name it, your blood vessels. So it’s okay to consider hormone replacement. I think there’s a lot of sort of this black cloud hanging over estrogen because of this study. And if estrogen replacement, bioidentical hormone replacement, estrogen replacement, which should never be used without progesterone. They’re always used together even if you don’t have a uterus. If they’re used properly and you are monitored properly, you can really reap the benefits. But I think a lot of women just don’t even want to go there with the conversation. They’ll just suffer through the symptoms even if they’ve made a lot of the food and lifestyle changes and nothing else has changed. And perhaps it’s time to consider hormone replacement, the word estrogen just makes them think cancer. And there’s a lot more that goes into cancer or other types of negative outcomes from estrogen or the wrong kind of estrogen than estrogen itself. So I just want women to understand that we’re not  – when we’re talking about hormone replacement, we’re talking about estrogen is not bad. Progesterone is not bad. You have huge amounts when you’re pregnant. Huge amounts during the reproductive years. So if they were bad, we would all have cancer when we were pregnant. You know what I mean? So keep that in mind.     [01:32:44] Ashley James: Well, one thing is the estrogen is a catch all. It’s a catch all for many different hormones. So we think estrogen is one thing. It’s actually not. It’s a bunch of different – like, there’s estradiol. There’s a bunch of different estrogens. I’m sure you know way more about that than I do. But I thought it was fascinating that there’s many estrogens. And that when the body wants to get – when the body is sort of like, “Okay. We’re going to clear out this estrogen.” It’s been used or whatever. The levels need to be cleared out. The liver takes the estrogen and then converts it into an inert form and puts it into the bile to be released into the poop. So we’re going to poop it out. Really interesting though. And I thought this was fascinating. I learned this from one of the guests that I interviewed that when we have constipation – and most people in westernized nations who are eating the standard American diet have constipation and don’t know it. And when you have constipation, actually the gut reabsorbs and reactivate some of that estrogen and can lead to estrogen dominance. And it’s a type of estrogen that is unhealthy now. It’s become – it’s an imbalance of the estrogens, basically. It’s now not healthy version of the estrogens within us from doing that. And so we can get estrogen dominance in an unhealthy way. You know, tummy fat can lead to increased estrogen dominance, those other things, blood sugar dysregulation. But constipation, if we don’t poop two to three times a day, we’re not actually getting the hormones out of us. That they’re getting reabsorbed in an unhealthy way. And the toxins as well. So getting enough fiber to go to the bathroom two to three times a day – I’ve got a whole episode on how to have the perfect poop. It’s a big topic. But just something as simple as making sure that we’re having healthy bowel movements will help us support balance hormones. So I thought that was really fascinating. But I love that you’re saying that estrogen is not unhealthy. Yes, you can have estrogen dominance. And that’s a different – that doesn’t mean estrogen is unhealthy. That means that there’s – it’s like the smoke, not the fire. Estrogen dominance isn’t the fire. It’s not the problem. It’s a symptom of a lot of stuff that’s out of balance.     [01:35:17] Jill Chmielewski: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. You said it perfectly. So I think just know – for women not to be scared of estrogen is probably just a huge factor right now. Because it’s important to, I think, consider and be open to all options when you’re going through perimenopause and menopause. And just get educated about it. And there’s a lot of good information out there that will help you to do that.     [01:35:40] Ashley James: I’ve had several listener – so we have a Facebook Group. There’s 3,500 listeners right now in the Facebook Group. And we have a lot more listeners that download the show. So I’m like, “What are you guys doing? Join the Facebook Group. Come on. Like, you guys are just listening. So the people who haven’t joined the group yet, join the group. It’s a lot of fun.” So there’s 3,500 very active and wonderful people in the Facebook Group. And several women have asked over the last year about hysterectomies. Several women have had either partial or full hysterectomy and they’re wondering if they should get on hormones. And I thought that I didn’t – I said I can’t offer advice about this but you should definitely find a functional medicine practitioner. And if you’re going to get on bioidentical – but people with full hysterectomies – women with full hysterectomies no matter what age, do you believe they should get on bioidentical hormones?     [01:36:29] Jill Chmielewski: I do. I do. Yeah.     [01:36:30] Ashley James: Can you talk a little bit about that?     [01:36:32] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. We really we produce the bulk of our hormones before menopause in our ovaries. Once we hit menopause, that sort of shifts. So we go from ovarian production of hormones to adrenal production of hormones, which is why – and it probably gets a little bit too deep. But that’s why, especially when we’re hitting this time in life, when we’re stressed to the max and our adrenals are already tasked with producing stress hormones. Okay. Now they got to take over whatever sex hormone production they can. It gets a little dicey. Something is going to suffer. So that’s why it can be really, really dicey to have a lot of stress at this point in life. But my point being is our ovaries are really responsible for the bulk of our hormone production. So when they’re taken out – now, there are studies that show even if you just had your uterus taken out, and let’s say, you’re able to keep your ovaries, still you got to think about it. I mean, there’s still been a pretty big shift with your sex organs that, typically, hormone production goes down a little bit. By how much? I don’t know. And I can’t recall. I don’t have the studies offhand. I’ll have to maybe dig for those a little bit. But that’s something that, typically, if you’re going to have a full hysterectomy with your ovaries removed, absolutely. Even progesterone. And a lot of practitioners will say, “Well, you don’t need progesterone anymore because you don’t have a uterus.” Well, again, if we go back to – if we understand that hormones have systemic effects in the body, just because you don’t have a uterus doesn’t mean you don’t want progesterone for your brain, and your blood vessels, and your bones, and for other places in the body. So I typically – I mean, I’m a fan of really doing hormone replacement for both estrogen and progesterone even if you don’t have a uterus. And, again, doing really good follow up. So it can take a while. I think, for your listeners to know, that when you start hormone replacement, it’s not a one and done kind of scenario. You build up – the ideal scenario is you go really slow hormones. You always want to go low and slow and build up over time. So you’ll probably need a few follow up visits. A few extra lab tests with your doctor and whatnot until you get to kind of the right level. So people kind of have to be patient and understand that it’s a little bit of a process to get hormones right. But yes, absolutely, especially in the case of a hysterectomy.     [01:38:48] Ashley James: Back when I lived in Vegas, so this is like ten -12 years ago, someone gave me a CD. It actually might have been that doctor I talked about. Gave me a CD of a lecture back when we had CDs, right? Gave me a CD of a lecture of a doctor who has since passed. And I think he was in his 80s. But he was kind of like the grandfather of hormone replacement therapy, Dr. John R. Lee.     [01:39:17] Jill Chmielewski: Oh, my gosh. Yes.     [01:39:18 ]Ashley James: So I highly recommend, like, YouTubing Dr. Lee and progesterone and see if you can find his lecture. It was like an hour long. And it was it was really interesting. I’d love to a hold a [inaudible] [01:39:32] or a time machine or something to interview this guy. Because he was really interesting. But what I loved about his story is he was a conventional doctor for, like – I think it was over 40 years. And he was the kind of old school doctor that would sit down with his patients and spend a lot of time with them. And he had this joke, because he graduated top of his class from Harvard. And he worked his butt off because his family was very poor. And he got scholarships and he worked his butt off. And he said, “What do you call the guy in medical school who came in last?” And you say, “What?” And he says, “A doctor.” He said, there’s so many doctors out there that are – even you think about it, the doctor that just barely passed who isn’t really smart versus the doctor who worked his butt off and is super smart, they’re both doctors, right? So you don’t know if you got the dud or the stud. Like, you just don’t know. And the reason why he was kind of bashing his own colleagues was that he was seeing that back then they were poopooing progesterone and putting women on estrogen only. And he actually did the opposite. Because one of his patients came to him who was in amazing health and had reversed many of her symptoms and she was using progesterone cream. And he went, “Wait a second, what’s going on?” And so he started using progesterone cream and he poured through the research and the science. And he saw that it helped so much to do progesterone cream. And then he started talking in conferences. And all of the doctors were like, “You’re crazy. What you’re doing?” And it’s frustrating because when one of the doctors or scientists figure something out, their profession will pull them back like crab in the bucket. The profession marches slowly. This is a quote from a Naturopath I’ve learned from. He says, “The medical profession progresses slowly one death at a time.” It does not learn very easily from its mistakes. And it really progresses slowly. So that’s why we have – going back to, I think, it was point one or point – yeah, point one. We have to advocate for ourselves because this profession is way behind and does not learn well from all of the information. A good example is the book Proteinaholic. I absolutely love it. I highly recommend downloading and listening to it on Audible. Proteinaholic is probably the best book I’ve ever listened to. And he cites over 50 pages – because I also bought the book. He has over 50 pages in the back in small print of references. Because he pulls together all the science about using food as medicine and why we’re actually eating too much protein. We’re actually toxic levels of protein and how it contributes to the diseases of today. So I thought it was really interesting that these doctors who are seeing the science, like Dr. Lee and Dr. Garth Davis, the one that wrote the Proteinaholic. They’re seeing the science. They’re pulling it together. And then their colleagues are poopooing it. Because they’re stuck to what they learned in school 20 years ago and what the textbook said. And they’re not actually spending time looking over the latest studies. Or even analyzing the studies to the point where it’s like, “Well, who funded the study? And what kind of study was it? What was the quality of the study?” So we really have to be careful about the cognitive dissonance that our health professionals may have, because we’re all human. And we all make mistakes. But I love that I learned that from Dr. Lee. I love that he showed me that many doctors are stuck in some way. You know, we all have blinders, right? We’re all here. We all have blinders. But that when we give up our health over – we give our health and our body over to a medical professional, we assume that they know the latest information and the best information. And Dr. Lee taught me they don’t. That most don’t. And so that’s why we have to advocate. And then he also said that, progesterone cream is like God’s gift to women. And he thought it was the world’s best thing. So I just thought that was really interesting. But we don’t want to be allopathic, which is reductionistic. So he’s reductionistic. And he was like, “Okay. This one thing is the best thing in the world.” We can’t be reductionistic and think that one thing is going to solve our problems. But we want that tool in our tool belt. So I like that you brought that up that, estrogen is not dangerous. Progesterone is great too. But we want to do the hormone testing, the appropriate hormone testing, like you said. But we shouldn’t just do it willy nilly. Don’t just go to the store, buy a bunch of hormone creams, and start slathering yourself. Because too much is just as dangerous as too little.     [01:44:40] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. And you know, hormones, I think people don’t realize that you can give somebody hormones but our body is smart. It’s going to always do what it can to regulate the hormones. So if you give somebody too many hormones, it’s going to shut down some of these receptors. It will find – there’s different proteins that can increase that kind of locks some of the hormone up. So more isn’t always better. That’s why I think it’s always – my approach is always the Goldilocks principle of hormones, which is not too much, not too little, just right. And it’s different for everyone. So it’s different for you than it is for your neighbor that it is for your best friend. Which is why you really want to work with someone who really, really understands hormones and understands the testing and the follow up and what’s really needed to kind of – and is willing to work with you to make sure that you get to a place where you feel really, really good.     [01:45:27] Ashley James: I’m really excited for point seven because so many, so many listeners in the Learn True Health Facebook Group have asked this question. So take it away, point seven.     [01:45:38] Jill Chmielewski: Okay. So the point seven, I almost have to like take a deep breath before I say this.     [01:45:43] Ashley James: Everyone just take a deep breath.     [01:45:45] Jill Chmielewski: It’s kind of my contention points with my Physician. So the pill is not – and whenever I’m saying “the pill,” I’m talking about the birth control pill. It is not a good solution to worsening PMS or erratic periods during perimenopause. We’re going back to the pill in and of itself. Patients are always told, “Here’s the pill. It has estrogen, it has progesterone.” The pill has neither. The pill has synthetic chemicals in it that are nothing like the estrogen and progesterone in your body. And in fact, most sort of functional medicine folks would kind of characterize the pill as putting you into chemical menopause. It’s essentially shutting down your hormone production. And bringing in synthetic chemicals that do not have the same actions that your own hormones do in your body So when I’m explaining hormones to people, I kind of explain – and I think I read this – I thought it was a good explanation from Dr. Lindsey Berkson, who I love. She’s a hormone scholar. She’s just awesome. And she always explains this hormone and receptor as, think about your hormone receptors as being very promiscuous. And they will kind of let anybody wiggle in on them including toxins, like estrogen mimicking chemicals. They look a little like estrogen so they can wiggle in. Those receptors are like, “Okay. You look okay.” And that’s how the pill is. They’re the same thing. It’s these chemicals that look a little bit like our hormones but they’re not our hormones. And so they wiggle in and they take an effect on ourselves, and our tissues, and our organs of our body. But not necessarily an effect that we want. I think that conventional medicine physicians like the pill because, basically, it manages “a period.” It will regulate the period. They like the certainty and the predictability of this every 30 day cycle. But what we’re missing here and what women are missing is that, it’s not a real period. It’s a fake period. It’s not the real thing. It’s not the result of your hormones. It’s really a withdrawal bleed from hormones. That’s all it is. It has nothing to do with the uterine lining and the natural hormonal actions that are happening in your body. So I think the idea here is we want to perpetuate our own hormones or our own in internal hormone production as long as possible so that we can get systemic benefits for as long as possible before deciding what we want to do in terms of do we want hormone replacement? Do we not? Do we want to do food and lifestyle choices? What do we want to do? And the pill essentially puts you into chemical menopause. So you don’t get the benefits. You won’t get the systemic benefits of progesterone and estrogen like you would if they were your own. And I think women to, back to kind of one of the earlier points, it’s like, we want this quick fix. We don’t want to deal with erratic periods. We don’t want to deal with a heavy period. It’s too cumbersome for us with our very busy life. When, again, the period is your fifth vital signs. So it’s telling you something’s up. And while it’s natural and normal in perimenopause to start having longer periods, or shorter periods, or skip periods, or heavier periods, or lighter periods because there’s hormonal fluctuations happening. It is smart to do a little bit of investigative work. And if you’re having really significant symptoms, you need to see somebody. A functional medicine practitioner who really gets it. There are ways to help, I want to say, control your period. But really help you get a better period, a less eventful period, even in perimenopause without going on the pill. So I think the pill is not the route to go. And you know, people go on the pill – I don’t want to bash all pill users – you want to weigh the risks versus the benefits. For some people, it’s more about birth control than anything else. But if it’s about period – and there’s other much better, I think, birth control options out there if you’re trying not to muck with hormones. But we won’t get into that today. But I think if we’re talking about period management and just – it’s just this irritating period that I have and recursing our periods, the pill is not the way to go. And I think, but doctors kind of tell us it is so that’s what we do. And that’s definitely –     [01:49:45] Ashley James: And they don’t practice informed consent. They do not practice. So they just put you on the pill. Informed consent, they would actually tell you all of the side effects and all of the long term, very detrimental effects the pill has. I am not bashing anyone on the pill. But I am bashing the pill. I think it is a toxic and harmful thing to put women on. And most of the time, doctors will put 15 year olds on it because they have acne or they have out of control – they have got really bad PMS or whatever. And that is not – I don’t think the pill should be used in any event. And I understand the need for birth control. Like you said, there are many really good options for birth control. And I’ve had other guests talk about this and there’s great books out there on all the different forms of birth control. The pill is probably the most toxic out of all of them. There is an IUD that has hormones that’s probably up there. But the pill has been proven to be incredibly toxic. It has heavy metals in it. So it’ll increase the heavy metals in your body. It changes the biochemistry of your brain. You become a different person. It actually changes your personality. And there have been people who got a divorce after they got off the pill. Because it actually changes your brain, people have gotten married – fallen in love and got married on the pill. Going off the pill, back to who they were before being on the pill. And realized that they married – they didn’t marry that person. Because the pill artificially makes you attracted to different things. Really. it hijacks your personality. It can send women into a different set of emotions and emotional responses. So people see complete personality changes. But when you’re the taker of the pill, you don’t notice it. The other people around you go, “She is not herself.” Because it hijacks the brain. It’s artificial. Its chemical. It’s like castration in a chemical castration in a sense. It’s very harmful to the body and very toxic. And taking it long term can increase cancer, blood clotting, you could die of a stroke. I mean, there’s a lot.   So if you could practice a different form of birth control that is non-toxic than the pill – oh, my gosh – please go for that. And please, I would just say for everyone listening who’s on the pill, look into true informed consent is seeing all of the side effects. Because most doctors are not practicing informed consent. And they are not even aware of all the negative effects. And then look at an alternative that can complement what you want to achieve. And whether it’s getting rid of acne, controlling your PMS, or actually not getting pregnant, there’s so many other options out there that are healthy. So I just hear over and over again how devastating pill is for people. And so many clients and also guests on the show have told me their horror stories that started with being on the pill. And that that actually led them to being unhealthy. And for me, I got on the pill as a teenager. And I can say that it’s one of the factors that triggered many of my health issues. So I’ve seen it in myself. I’ve seen it in others. So I’m kind of warning – I want to warn people because I don’t feel like we’re being warned enough. And this is again, that point where we have to advocate and stand up for women. This is where I feel like I’m a feminist in a sense where I feel like – I never identified as a feminist at all but this is where I feel like women need a voice. And they need to be advocated for. And this is one of those points the birth control pill is toxic and damaging. And it’s being sold to us as this, like, wonderful thing. And the morning after pill – that’s another one – is very, very harmful and detrimental to the body. And of course, there’s times when a woman needs to make their choice. And I don’t think that choice should be taken away from them. But I think that informed consent needs to be practiced where we need to know all of the very long term and harmful side effects that can occur. So we want to know everything up front. And so I think that when you’re messing with your hormones, you’re messing with your brain, you’re messing with your future, your chances of other diseases, you’re messing with your personality, your quality of life. It’s not as simple as just take a pill and not have a period or not ovulate. It’s not that simple. So thank you for advocating for us.     [01:54:43] Jill Chmielewski: Well, thanks for your chiming in. Because I think everything you said is really right on to. It is. It’s all about informed consent. And we need to know what we’re getting ourselves into so that we can make a really good decision.     [01:54:54] Ashley James: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s make really good decisions. Let’s inform ourselves. Okay. Point number eight.     [01:55:01] Jill Chmielewski: Okay.  So just sort of as an FYI, perimenopausal symptoms hide in plain sight. I think that is something where, I think, a lot of women get missed. It’s little things. It’s going to come as soft whispers initially. It’ll be in the form of, “In my mid-30s, all of a sudden I’m not sleeping quite as well.” But it’s not something that necessarily you would make an appointment to go see your doctor for. But I want your listeners to kind of start taking note that hormones start to decline. Progesterone, in particular, starts its decline in our mid-30s. So that’s the hormone that’s going to go first, followed by estrogen. And estrogen will typically go on kind of a wild ride, soaring sky high one minute and then they rock bottom the next for a while before it starts to make it steady decline down. So you’re kind of dealing with a bunch of different sort of hormonal changes that are going to happen over a period of time. The period of time will be different for everyone. So the symptoms will start at different points for different people. And they will kind of pop up. And I think they have pop up ever so slowly where, like I said, it starts with a sleepless night or two. Then maybe it’s, “You know what? I can’t lose weight.” Or, “I’m gaining weight and I’m not doing anything differently.” Then maybe it’s fatigue. Maybe it’s a libido issue. Maybe your hair is thinning out a little bit. Maybe you feel a little bit more weepy or you have a little more anxiety or a little more depression. I mean, all of these things really point to changes in hormones. But I think what we end up doing is, maybe we get to a point where we say, “You know, I’m really tired now. I’ll go see my doctor.” And we don’t even really mention the other stuff because we don’t think it’s related. Or maybe we feel like we have some anxiety so we go and we see somebody in the mental health group. And yes, there are treatments in that route. But I think if you look at hormones, they have a lot to do with our mental health state. So I think, just for your listeners to know that, these symptoms will start to creep up slowly and they matter. And so when you’re talking with your doctor, make sure you’re mentioning sort of the collective. Even if they don’t seem like they’re related, a lot of times, they are related. They may be in different body organs and different systems. And you might think, “Well, this one I should go to the orthopedic for. And this one, I should go to the endocrinologist for. And this one to the OB.” But really, functional medicine will look at you as a whole person. All of your systems are connected. And so these symptoms probably have a lot to do with hormonal decline or hormonal changes overall.     [01:57:27] Ashley James: All right. We’re in the homestretch.     [01:57:29] Jill Chmielewski: I know. We’re almost there. We’re at the final point.     [01:57:32] Ashley James: We’re almost there We’re almost there. Yes. I like it. And I like that you brought that up that it’s, again, reaffirming that we need to advocate for ourselves. And don’t just sweep these symptoms under the rug. Listen to your body. Listen to the changes in your body and don’t be afraid of them. But advocate for yourself. So I like that you – if you’re coming at it from different angles, to help us shift our mindset into a healthier mindset. I like it. Okay. Last point. Number nine.     [01:58:00] Jill Chmielewski: Okay.  Number nine. Last point is, perimenopause begins in the mid to late 30s. I think that’s super critical to understand. And we talked about it earlier. But understand that even when it comes to hormone replacement, a lot of women will say, “No way.” But Dr. John Lee was probably one of the first ones to say, “You know what? Even women in their mid to late 30s would benefit from a little bit of progesterone.” A lot of doctors will say, “We’re not even going to address hormone replacement until you hit actual menopause.” Which means you haven’t had a period in a year. Well, by that time, you’ve been going through – you’ve been on this perimenopausal journey for a long time. Hormones have been declining, symptoms may be really heating up. So understand that even though you may be just getting pregnant at 35 or 37 or 38 or 40, you can be pregnant and still be going through perimenopause. You can be just going through perimenopause. For most women, it is those hormonal shifts will begin with, like, a couple of cycles where you don’t ovulate. That’s where it kicks things off. So you can still have a period very regularly and be in perimenopause. So that’s why I really just want women to be aware that this period of life will kind of start. You almost think I just finished having babies or I’m just about to have a baby. But it does happen. It seems like it’s too soon. But the studies show that this is when hormones start to shift. So just know that so that you can start to kind of keep track of symptoms. See if you need something sooner. Maybe you need that functional practitioner sooner. I would recommend most women to start meeting with someone earlier rather than later so they can kind of help walk them through and guide them through this perimenopausal journey.   [01:59:43] Ashley James: I love it. Yes. Wherever you are, start now. Start building your health up with all these points that we brought up today. Start building your team of holistic and integrative practitioners today. Start advocating for yourself today. Start everything and little steps no matter where you are, you’re going to build up better hormone health. And hormones, like you said, I love that you pointed out, hormone receptors are on every part of your body. So estrogen levels affect your brain, affect your breasts, affect your calves. I mean affect every part of your body. Awesome. So I want to ask you is – we’ve gone through so much and this is really jam packed. But is there a question that I haven’t asked that you would love to answer?     [02:00:40] Jill Chmielewski: I mean, I think that we hit – I really do think that we’ve hit most of it. I don’t know. I can’t think of anything.     [02:00:46] Ashley James: Yeah, well, I got you to empty out. So I totally emptied out your brain. And I tapped you for all this great information. It’s been wonderful. I had you talk for almost two hours straight. This is fantastic. I know. So let’s make sure that listeners know how they can follow you. How they can keep learning from you.     [02:01:06] Jill Chmielewski: Sure. Yeah. So I know you mentioned the website. So I would say I’m very active on Instagram and my handle is just jill.chmielewski, so my last name. I do a lot of education. I really use Instagram as sort of those quick snippets of information. I do have a website. It’s just www.jillchmielewski.com. I used to do – I just really stopped seeing one-to-one clients as of just this past year. I’m shifting to – I’m going to be launching a course called Perimenopause Redefined later this year. I do on my website. I also have – I very frequently write blog articles. Very educational in nature. A lot of the stuff that we talked about today but I really try to address women’s biggest symptoms and biggest issues. I recently created a private Facebook Group that if people get on the mailing list, they’ll get that information. And that’s for just some more deep dive hormonal stuff. I kind of call it like, All Things Puzzle. We’re going to talk about everything that has to do with anything that’s puzzle related. And then I have a shop tab on my site that has – I’ve got some downloadable freebies. I’ve got a couple of paid really pretty low entry types of paid things that people can get. But I also have links to products. I’m always looking for resources and things for women because I think when we talk about, especially, toxins, women don’t know where to go. So I have links to cleaner beauty, to better cleaning supplies, to laundry detergent, to different things. I’m always adding more resources in lab testing so that women know sort of where to go to get some products that are a little bit more trusted and are clean and aren’t going to be mucking with their hormones. So they can find all of that on the website. That’s probably the best place to go for sort of everything. And there’s a tab where they’ll see they can sign up to get on my email list. And I just do about one email a week. I try not to overload anyone’s inbox because I know how busy women are. But I do try to provide some really targeted important information about once a week to the people in my community.     [02:03:08] Ashley James: Great. And I’m going to have all those links in the show notes to today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. But I will spell it for those who have a pen right now. Get your pen. Get your pen. J-I-L-L-C-H-M-I-E-L-E-W-S-K-I.com.     [02:03:26] Jill Chmielewski: Awesome. Thank you. This has been so much fun. Thank you so much for having me.     [02:03:32] Ashley James: This was great. And you should totally come back. Come back and teach us more.     [02:03:34] Jill Chmielewski: I’d love to. I’d love to.     [02:03:36] Ashley James: Wonderful. Awesome. Well, I’m excited to move gracefully into my puzzle years. So thank you. I appreciate that.     [02:03:43] Jill Chmielewski: [Inaudible] [02:03:42] if you have any questions.     [02:03:45] Ashley James: I’m sure. I’m sure I will.     [02:03:47] Jill Chmielewski: We covered everything, right?     [02:03:49] Ashley James: Yeah. Okay. Well, you’ll come back on the show and we’ll go, like, part two. We’ll dive even deeper. That would be great. Awesome.     [02:03:56] Jill Chmielewski: That sounds great. Okay. Good. Thanks so much.     [02:04:01] Ashley James: Thanks. Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   Get Connected With Jill Chmielewski! Website Facebook Instagram   Recommended Reading by Jill Chmielewski! Safe Hormones Smart Women by Dr. Lindsey Berkson           Music "Uniq - Japan" is under a Royalty Free license. Photo of the license: http://bit.ly/2sTETUQ Music promoted by BreakingCopyright: https://youtu.be/MAiHpRUbc0k

True informed consent means your doctor tells you about everything that could go wrong before giving you a drug or vaccine. Parents are not being made aware of all of the potential dangers. Polly Tommey is giving a voice to thousands of parents who were not given true informed consent and now have children who are permanently injured, disabled, or dead. Polly Tommey's sites: Follow Polly on Periscope and on Social Media: https://vaxxedthemovie.com/live-streams/ www.vaxxed.com www.vaxxedthemovie.com http://www.autismmediachannel.com http://www.autismfile.com/ http://www.autismcenteraustin.com/index.php/takeaction-home/ https://www.theautismtrust.org.uk/   Polly Tommey And Ashley James https://www.learntruehealth.com/autism-activist-polly-tommey-gives-voice-parents Highlights: What regressive autism is No eczema, allergy, asthma in the unvaccinated Effects of getting Gardasil HPV vaccine on teenagers Various effects of vaccine injury on the parents, siblings and those around them Dangers of vitamin K shot What Vaxxed movie is about What informed consent is   In this episode, Polly Tommey shares with us her family’s story about vaccination and autism. She shares the benefits of not vaccinating and also the effects of vaccinating from hearing different stories of families who have either vaccinated or not vaccinated their child. Lastly, she also talks about the movies Vaxxed and Vaxxed 2.   [0:00] Intro: Welcome to the Learn true health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 403.   [0:00:14] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Polly Tommey, who’s a mother and an activist and a producer of documentaries that have blown my mind. I am kind of pinching myself talking to you today because watching you in the Vaxxed documentary, I was crying most of the time — a lot of tears of inspiration. A lot of tears of shock and sorrow, but at the end of that emotional rollercoaster, I walked away thinking that the entire world needs to see the movies that you’ve produced and that everyone needs to have this information. What I love about your message is you’re not fear-mongering, you’re shaming. You are empowering. So thank you so much, Polly, for the work that you do, and thank you for being here today to share your story with us.   [0:01:05] Polly Tommey: Thank you so much for having me.   [0:01:08] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’d love for you to start by sharing your story, your personal journey with autism and becoming an activist.                                                                                              [0:01:16] Polly Tommey: Yes. Well, to start with, my husband and I were extremely pro-vaccine when we had our first child, Bella. We vaccinated her. Of course, you must remember this is 25 years ago. So we did not have the schedule that you have today. This was in England. We have an even less schedule, vaccine schedule than you do here. So, it was really almost one at a time because that was the schedule. So we were very pro-vaccine. We had our second child very close behind our first. So we didn’t think twice, of course about vaccinating. Now, in the morning that I took my son Billy at 13 months into the doctor’s surgery to have his MMR, just that vaccine. I went and had a coffee just so that I could be the first one to tick the box on the book to be the perfect mother, which is what I wanted to be. I wanted to do everything perfectly. So vaccinating was part of that for me. My friend warned me. She said, “Did you know there’s been this odd thing on television about the MMR? There could be a problem with it.” I said to my friend, “There’s just no way this is true because the doctor would, of course, tell me if there was a problem. So I’m going to go with the doctor’s advice. He’s got a medical degree, and I’m going to go ahead and vaccinate my son.” So we vaccinated Billy at 9:00 that morning. By 5:00 that evening – and after the vaccine, he was fine but just very very very sleepy. So I just let him sleep and gave him Tylenol and all those things that you’re told to give him. At 5:00, my husband when in to get him from his crib, and he was having a seizure. It was really bad. His eyes were rolling back. He was convulsing. His back was arched. So we rushed him into the emergency room in the hospital. We told them, “What’s happening to our son?” They said, “What have you done today?” We said, “We gave him the MMR.” They said, “That’s it.” They told us. The medical professionals told us that it was the vaccine. So, they said he would be fine, give him some antibiotics. I mean, it all sounds crazy really back to you know, talking to you about it because I can’t believe how naïve I was. Yes, we gave him some antibiotics and lots of Tylenol, and he never got better. He never woke up. He got more and more sick and ended up with an autism diagnosis at 18 months. So, that made me so angry, so furious and we started looking into why on earth would the doctors say these vaccines are safe and effective? Why didn’t they tell us that our son could have a seizure? It’s on the insert. So we started our journey really telling other parents and going on the British television, media in England talking about the MMR vaccine, which was okay for a short amount of time and then suddenly the descend ship started. That’s when we knew we had a much much bigger problem.   [0:04:10] Ashley James: How were you censored?   [0:04:12] Polly Tommey: Well, they would come and interview us about our son’s story and autism because we were big autism advocates at that time and the MMR section would be cut out of the whole. So everything would be in the interview we got them on television but not the MMR bit. A South African film rages about the vaccine but when it aired, all of it were taken out. That’s when we thought, “Yes. Oh, gosh. There’s something much deeper.” Because the minute they start censoring you for something, there’s much bigger problem behind it.   [0:04:42] Ashley James: Why become an advocate around autism?   [0:04:46] Polly Tommey: Well it started because when we were told that Billy had autism, we didn’t know what that was. Billy is 24 now and he was diagnosed at 18 months 20 odd years ago. There was no internet like we have today. It was just big old computer things. We weren’t really good on that. So went to a library to look up the word autism and it says worse form of mental illness and your child will be institutionalized. We couldn’t find anybody who has autism. Now of course everybody knows some that’s got autism or you see it down the street. Anyway, after doing an interview we got inundated with parents wanting answers to autism. How do you look after your child? How do you stop the tantrums? How do you stop from smashing their heads against the wall? How do you deal with the medical issues? Because I tell you this, autism that I live in, the world I live in and most of the parents that I meet, it’s no gift. It is no all these people that wear t-shirts saying, “Autism is a gift, embrace it,” “I love autism.” I don’t love autism. I hate autism. My son is my gift and autism was some ghastly thing that happened to him following a vaccine, following a seizure. His brain swelled. His head swelled so much. He got encephalitis and he never recovered from that. So basically, he has brain damage. Autism is a word. Regressive autism is the word that medical professionals give our children after they are injured by vaccinates. That I know for sure. The confusing thing for all the people who believe, some parents both people I’ve met their child was born with autism. That’s fine but that’s not the same condition that my son has.   [0:06:25] Ashley James: That’s a really good point that you bring up. I’m about to be 40 and when I was a child it was 1 in 10,000 had autism. I had some cousins that were born with it and they were non-verbal. So I inquired to learn more about it just to understand what was going on whereas now it’s something like 1 in 40 or 1 in 30 children but it’s not the same. They’re saying it’s a spectrum. It’s kind of a blanket statement for some form of brain damage. I interviewed a doctor, Dr. Klinghardt, who helps to “reverse autism” and help heal their brains. He says, all their symptoms are the same as autism once we detox the heavy metals and we do all these natural wonderful medicine and their symptoms gets better and better and better. Let’s say their symptoms completely go away. They’re no longer diagnosed with autism. Was that ever really autism or are we getting most of the people nowadays misdiagnosed? What do you think? Do you think it’s now a misdiagnosis and that they’re using this terminology just because the symptoms are the same?   [0:07:37] Polly Tommey: I think that they didn’t know what to do. I mean my son was only ever diagnosed back then as autism-like symptoms because they really had never seen anything like it. The autism that’s described many many years ago started from birth. So when you get those parents – I’m a great believer in the parent knows best. The parent knows it child best so if the parent says, “This is not from vaccine,” or the parents say, “My son was born with it,” or “My daughter is born with it.” Then they know. We need to respect that. The regressive autism was never around before. This is a new autism that has come from vaccines. I’ve interviewed over 8,000 parents not all about autism but from vaccine injury. I can tell you that every single one of those parents that has an autistic child all the same things as me. That their children were perfectly fine before that vaccine or that group of vaccines went in and brain-damaged them. Because that’s what it is. It’ brain damages.   [0:08:38] Ashley James: I watched one of my friends bring their one-year-old that was walking. He was walking at like nine months and he was so brilliant. Brought him in for his jabs, his one-year vaccines. He got a fever and he started to become limp and lethargic. Then he stopped walking for six months. By the time he was something like two and a half they diagnosed him with autism. She went to naturopaths and changed the diet, got him on supplements, did all kinds of things and he started to – it was like the fog started to lift. He was able to communicate again and connect again. He still has struggles. She sopped vaccinating after that. She saw that he was clearly vaccine injured. I’ve interviewed a pediatrician in Portland, Paul Thomas, who talks about in his 30 years of practice, he has zero cases of SIDS and all these vaccine injuries because he attracts parents that don’t want to vaccinate. Half of his practice doesn’t vaccinate but the other half that does choose to follow his altered schedule. The second he sees that a child has any vaccine injury he sops immediately. He says, “This child is no longer a candidate for vaccines because they’re showing signs of vaccine injury by one vaccine.” He wrote a book I think it’s called Safe Vaccines, the idea that he proposes that everyone should follow an altered schedule if they’re going to choose to vaccinate. Now I love the latest movie you’ve come out with, Vaxxed 2. Like I said, I cried. I couldn’t believe I was crying so much but tears of inspiration. It was really a beautiful movie. All the people that you interview traveling across the United States. I know you’ve traveled to many countries interviewing parents, showing what happens and what can happen and what has been happening. That these parents have been silenced. What’s so beautiful is you’ve given them a voice. Can you take us back and share with us what happened to how did you create the first movie, the fist Vaxxed movie?   [0:11:01] Polly Tommey: Yes. So the first film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe was directed by Andrew Wakefield, produced by Del Bigtree and I’m also a producer on that. My passion has always been the parents because I am one and because I lived it. So, even in the first film I interviewed Sheila Ealey who’s the African American mom. We have a very powerful interview in there. I was always the person who really was the parents’ go-to. Now, following Vaxxed when Vaxxed was going out of Tribeca Film Festival if you remember that. That gave us a platform that we could never have dreamed of that money just can’t buy. Because what they did by censoring us, yeah, I mean they censored us so much that it actually started trending. So suddenly we were on tour going to Q&As around the country. What happened really quickly is that there were huge lines of people wanting to talk to Andy, Del and myself tell us there story of what happened to them. So Andy and Del had to talk about the science. That was their thing and I ended up listening to the parents’ stories. Then I thought, “Well, this is pointless.” They’re all talking to me and that’s not going to get anywhere. So I found Periscope, a live platform to go and very very quickly it grew and grew and grew. Then we started going live on Facebook too and these stories has got shared. Now we have a huge community around the world that the minute I press the live button, they’re right there wherever I am listening to these stories. The bus became the iconic thing. It wasn’t us the people who made the film, it wasn’t the people in the film. It was the bus. People would come up to the bus they would start crying. They’d want to tell the story whether they were a medical professional, whether they were a parent, a teacher, anybody. Everybody had a story. To this day, we’ve just come back from California. The bus is parked in California now ready to go on the 4th of January. We’re going back out on tour. We’ll be going out all of next year because the demand for people to tell their stories is huge.   [0:13:07] Ashley James: How do people follow you on Periscope?   [0:13:10] Polly Tommey: So, if you go to Periscope you go to @TeamVaxxed. It will say PeepsTV, P-E-E-P-S TV, PeepsTV. You’ll see us there. You’ll see all the stories. Now there are a few fake ones. I ask you to be careful that you don’t get through on the wrong one but we are PeepsTV. Once you sign up, when I go out live, you will go out live with me when we hear every single story. It gives the person telling the story great comfort because I show them all the hearts and the love that they get around the world. It’s been a really very successful thing. What we’ve uncovered on the bus has been more fascinating than anything else.   [0:13:52] Ashley James: When I saw – so watching Vaxxed 2 you show that. You show footage of you going live on Periscope and filming these parents sharing their stories. Time and time again you can see that they were so isolated. That they felt so alone. That they felt guilty, ashamed. They haven’t been listened to. They haven’t had a voice. They haven’t been heard. Then they got to go to the bus, the big Vaxxed bus that has what is it? Over 8,000 signatures.   [0:14:32] Polly Tommey: Nearly 9,000.   [0:14:34] Ashley James: Sorry.   [0:14:35] Polly Tommey: Well, we’re approaching 9,000.   [0:14:37] Ashley James: Each signature represents either a parent or a victim, someone who has been vaccine injured. Is that correct?   [0:14:45] Polly Tommey: Yeah, or has died. Yes. Vaccine injured or has died. There are many many people that contacted me saying, “Please put my name or my child’s name on the bus,” which we do not do. We listen to every single story between myself and the other hosts around the country that are trained up to do this. We all validate by listening to the stories. So they can’t accuse us of just randomly writing anything on there. We really do listen to all of them. We know there’s way more out there. Following Vaxxed 2, it’s just like gone crazy. Everybody wants to tell the story. It seems to me, I will tell you this, it seems to me that if you had a vaccine of any kind you now have an injury of some kind. Because I have never ever heard of eczema, allergy, asthma any of those in the unvaccinated, which is one of the biggest things that we have uncovered around the bus is the undeniable health of the unvaccinated. Including in that is the vitamin K. The vitamin K seems to be a bigger problem than any of us ever thought. I mean all my children had the vitamin K. I remember thanking their midwife thinking that she was just giving my new beautiful baby some vitamins but if you actually do your research on the vitamin K, and we’ve got people testing it right now, there is synthetic full of aluminum. It’s got a black-box warning on it. It’s a really dangerous thing to be giving our baby. I’m just a parent reporting to you from the people of the world who have severe injuries and death following just the vitamin K shot.   [0:16:16] Ashley James: So you said just the aluminum and for those in the United States it’s aluminum although I love the British saying of aluminum. Aluminum sounds so much more beautiful. So you’re saying that there are heavy metals in the vitamin K shot that they give to newborns that are between six and eight pounds. These tiny newborns that they’re injecting it right into their bloodstream aluminum?   [0:16:41] Polly Tommey: Aluminum and everybody can do this research themselves. You don’t need to be a scientist or a doctor to do this. You got to get hold of the insert. The real insert not the fake insert that they give you at the doctor’s surgery and at those pharmacies. Those really are not the real insert. You can actually get it on the CDC website. They have to put it up there. They’re very very big, very long. You will need to google a lot of those words. You will be horrified once you understand what is going into the body of yourself or your baby what it is it’s actually going. It makes sense. I can’t believe that none of us did that research. I can’t actually believe that the pediatricians, the people on the front line that we trust so much do not know either about the ingredients in the vaccines. They don’t know. They had no training as what you saw in Vaxxed 2. Every single one including professor Dr. Moss and various other high high ranking doctors, they also say the same thing. Absolutely no training in vaccines other than they’re safe and effective. Here’s the schedule and they’re the saviors of mankind. That’s it.   [0:17:45] Ashley James: It’s so frustrating because like you said you felt like you’re such a good mother being the first in line, being early for the vaccines for your children wanting to make sure that you’re doing everything to help them and then trusting 100% that our healthcare providers all they need to know for our health. But they have also had information withheld from them. Who’s responsible? We got to hold some people accountable. There’s so many vaccine-injured children. Like you said, there’s even deaths. I really appreciated that you covered Gardasil. You covered the HPV vaccine in Vaxxed 2 that hundreds, hundreds of teenagers have died. That is unacceptable. Then many of them have been left paralyzed and you’ve interviewed several of them, many of them. Can you share some of those stories?   [0:18:48] Polly Tommey: Yeah. I mean absolutely tragic. When we set out on the road in 2016 on this bus, I didn’t even know what Gardasil HPV vaccine. I even never heard of it. Maybe briefly but I didn’t really think about it. I didn’t even know how to spell it. We went on road and by day two we had our first Gardasil story. After we went live with that we were inundated with people at the bus. I remember at one stop, I open the door 15 teenagers standing in front of me. I said, “Are you all here to support someone?” They said, “No. All of us have Gardasil injuries.” So one of the things that you do not see in Vaxxed 2, I mean there’s a lot of that we saw on the road that weren’t in the film. That’s mainly because you can’t put everything in an hour and a half. But a lot of young young girls 15, 16 years old following the HPV vaccine gone through menopause, their ovaries have shut down, they will never have children as they could’ve done before. Lot of girls claiming that they got the HPV, a cervical cancer following they had pap smears before the vaccine absolutely clean. Following that nine months later, they’re showing up with cervical cancer and of course the paralysis. The absolute brain on fire, the burning to their bodies. Many of these girls have committed suicide. One boy following this vaccine through the utter pain and being told that they’re psychologically ill. I just never seen anything like it. I really describe going out on that black bus around America is going into a war zone. It’s just a blood bath of vaccine injury. How people are living, it will just break your heart. These are people that work in good jobs. They get married. They want to be great parents. They want to start a life. They’re excited about life and they follow the system. They do as they’re old and then their life is ripped from them just because of one needle. It doesn’t just affect those two parents. It affects the other siblings. It affects the grandparents deeply. You just see poverty from what was a family that was coping going into absolute poverty because the parents have to be carers. Then of course you get the parents and the family members who then hit the alcohol or hit the psychotropic drugs or whatever it is because they can’t cope with the pain. You’ve just lost a whole load of people that could’ve contributed to this amazing country all because of a vaccine one moment in time.   [0:21:16] Ashley James: My frustration lies in how polarizing this topic has become and I feel as though they’ve weaponized this topic so that we would just fight amongst ourselves and not rise up to demand change. If you look on Facebook, I have lost friends. I try to be neutral, no one is ever neutral but I try to just stand in the middle and say, “Listen. Can we at least have a discussion? Can we at least bring the information, look at both sides?” What I see is that there are people who, I’ve lost really good friends because of this because I’ll share something that just brings into question vaccine injury for example on Facebook. I’ve had friends and family members get very angry and feel like they need to defend the pharmaceutical industry. They need to defend vaccines. I am somehow a really bad person that wants children to die of polio.  They’ll say these kinds of things, “Do you really want people to be an iron lungs? It’s so ignorant of you to question vaccines.” Anytime I’m seeing this, anytime someone wants to just question it or go, “Hey. It’s not right that there are vaccine injuries. Why aren’t we addressing this? Why aren’t we talking about this more? That it becomes a very polarized topic and then they get attacked. One of my friends, Green Smoothie Girl Robyn Openshaw, who has a really large holistic following is now being attacked online by I guess it’s called pro-vaxers. That she is being harassed. I’m like, “Why can’t we just ask questions safely? Why can’t we have these open discussions?” I imagine you have been attacked since this is such a polarized topic now.   [0:23:24] Polly Tommey: You know, it’s really interesting. The people who attack me are the people online. I’m out on the bus right there in open view and then there’s no one around. Where are you? Where are all these people that threaten me and they’re all hiding behind computers. Now, of course we get the odd family members and we get the odd really good friend. It’s so sad when they throw the iron lung thing at you. First of all, let’s address the iron lung thing. If you see Vaxxed 2, you’ll see Colton’s story in there. This is 2019 and we don’t have big iron lungs like we don’t have big old computers anymore. Things have advanced. They’re called ventilators, respirators. If you look around you, what is polio? Polio is this so-called crippling disease where you’re in an iron lung or you’ll get somebody say, “My father had polio and his ankles were really skewed or his legs a bit not made or he had to wear braces for two years.” Look around at the children today. There’s never been so much disability, children in wheelchairs, children crippled over with legs that don’t work. All these things parents claiming from vaccine injury. I’ve actually interviewed two people with polio, both of them said they got it following the polio vaccine. Now, of course if you do your research on that you will see that that’s probably where the majority of this has come in the first place. You really have to look down. It’s not even conspiracy theory anymore. It’s right there in front of your face. I think this is why they’re panicking the other side. Also you’ve got to remember that those doctors, take the doctor that shout and scream at us and say everyone’s going to die because we’re not vaccinating.” They’re also living with immense guilt just like family members who have vaccinated are. If you’re telling me, Polly Tommey, if you’re telling me that vaccines are as dangerous then that means I, the doctor, have potentially harmed a great deal of people. That means I, the mother, as potentially harmed my children. I don’t want to hear that from you Polly Tommey so therefore I say, “Go away and I’m going to block you and I never want to speak to you again because you want polio to come back.” That’s basically how the argument goes because no one can get their head around the fact that this is probably the biggest lie that I ever told. The doctors are being lied to. The parents are being lied to. So that’s why we have to do our research. We have to be brave and we have to tell the truth. The truth is that these vaccines are killing and hurting people. We know that not just from the parents’ stories. We know that when we look at the unvaccinated families or the families with the same parents who stopped vaccinating after the injury. So you’ve got the same parents, same genetics. First child may be fully vaccinated and autistic or brain-damaged in some way, paralyzed. They partially vaccinate the second child who has asthma, allergies, eczema maybe a bit of ADD and then they stop. They report their following children, absolutely none of those whatsoever. But remember, minus the vitamin K. The ones that are vaccinated with the vitamin K at birth, they still have injury. You’ve got to have a clean child for no injury.   [0:26:27] Ashley James: You interviewed, was it thousands of unvaccinated families or unvaccinated children? It was a lot. That’s why I’d like to go with Vaxxed 2 is that you showed the first half of the movie is interviewing so many families with vaccine injury. Then you started meeting all the families that had no vaccine injury or like you painted the picture of like five or seven and some of them were vaccinated and then the rest weren‘t. The difference is outstanding. That the children never are sick, never have asthma, never have food allergies and have never needed to see a doctor other than a wellness visit but have never needed to go in for antibiotics or ear infections over and over and over again.   [0:27:15] Polly Tommey: Unbelievable. We have one unvaccinated child. On my travel I had antibiotic for an infected toe and that is it. It’s quite unbelievable and it’s things like I’m really shocked at the allergy things. Allergy is a huge problem in this country. We are not seeing any allergies in the unvaccinated families, again minus the vitamin K shot at birth which isn’t a vaccine so it’s not part of a vaccine. The ones without that, zero allergies, zero. Unbelievable what we have uncovered. The reason why we knew the vitamin K was a problem is because I was reading the facts on Vaxxed studies, the ones that are actually out there that they refuse to publish or they published and then retract. Something wasn’t right. They were still reporting that the unvaccinated had allergies and that was not what we were seeing on the road. We looked into it more and we found the vitamin K being a huge problem. As I said, we’re nearly days of looking into that with some scientists but we are thoroughly looking into that because again, those poor parents having their beautiful newborn overthinking the vitamin K is the most important thing that they can give their child from their first day of life. We’re seeing the opposite from the roads of America.   [0:28:27] Ashley James: So you have two movies Vaxxed and Vaxxed 2. For the listeners who haven’t seen either one of your movies, can you tell us a bit about the first one, Vaxxed? What would we take away from that? Maybe share some lessons from your first movie.   [0:28:43] Polly Tommey: It’s about William Thompson, the scientist at the CDC. It was really concentrated on the MMR and him being reported without his knowledge by Dr. William Hooker in California. Oh no, he went out of California, excuse me it’s very important so it’s all legal. It’s really the breaking news of William Thompson confessing to how there was a big cover-up at the CDC. So that was the first film and of course some parents’ stories woven into that. Then a lot of parents coming in for a collage montage saying, “Hear us well. Please hear us well. My child was fine before I had this vaccine. My child has autism following vaccine.” So that’s really the essence of the first film. I think the reason why the first film was so successful wasn’t the story itself, which is good but what happens since that is these parents coming forward. If it wasn’t Tribeca and the big drama they made over that it probably would’ve another little DVD that was made and people saw in a community but that’s what happened from that. Again, from that censorship the parents saying, “I’m here,” around the world. I have traveled England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. I’ve traveled around those countries recording those families’ stories and I tell you they’re exactly the same as they are here in America just with different accents but the same outcome everywhere. It’s undeniable.   [0:30:08] Ashley James: In Vaxxed 2 you show clips near the beginning of the film interviews with Robert de Niro. I was laughing so hard because you’re saying at the beginning of Vaxxed 2, you and Andy Wakefield were saying, “That was it. They were pulling us a few weeks before we were supposed to have our big debut at the Tribeca Film Festival.” That Robert de Niro got so much pressure to pull it. I’m like, “Where’s the pressure coming from? Is big pharma really that scared of this information coming out? This little film at this little film festival that they had to put so much pressure on him. Then every time he was interviewed for the Tribeca Film Festival on local news or on the morning news or whatever news show he was on he would bring it up and he’d say, “I hope people see it. I wanted people to just get the information, decide for yourself. Just listen, see it, decide for yourself.”  The people who were interviewing him were saying, “Yeah. Yeah. You should watch it.” So I was just laughing because obviously it wasn’t him. He wanted people to see it. Have you ever talked to him or met him or heard what he thought about your films?   [0:31:35] Polly Tommey: Well, I’ve only seen the correspondence. He’s a friend of Andy Wakefield’s, I’ve only seen the correspondence between them. Andy was a director of that first film. Obviously Robert de Niro thought it was a good film otherwise he wouldn’t have allowed it to be in his film festival, Tribeca Film Festival. He says, Robert de Niro, that he just everyone to see it. Of course, he knows there’s a problem with these vaccines just like many many other celebrities and people know that there’s a problem with these vaccines. Many that do speak out don’t work again or I mean, Rob Schneider. Take him the actor. He started speaking out about these vaccines and he lost loads of contracts and lost most of his work. So people are afraid but I say to you people, you cannot money before these people before mankind. You’ve got to stand up otherwise we’ve got no future if you don’t stand up and tell the truth. Because if you look around right now, there’s very few people that are really really really healthy. Most people are sick with something and there’s got to be a reason behind that. What we’re saying is we’re not saying any of this. I interviewed a woman the other day on the Vaxxed bus with four generations of unvaccinated people in their family. She’s a chiropractor. Of course the chiropractor is one of the healthiest groups of people in the world. He told me of 200 of those members, only people have died of cancer both of them were very heavy smokers. They had no eczema and no allergies in the family. Everybody lived until they’re old aged and nobody of the 200 have been on antibiotics. Don’t you think that needs to be looked into?   [0:33:15] Ashley James: It just boggles the mind because we’ve really been raised from birth to believe that vaccines are the reasons why we don’t have outbreaks of illnesses. That if it wasn’t for vaccines everyone would have had polio or measles or chickenpox which now we’re afraid of apparently because there’s a vaccine for it whereas when I was a kid we had chickenpox parties and it was no big deal. So it’s really frustrating because there’s so much disinformation. There’s so much emotions around it because people who are anti-vax and people who are pro-vax actually want the same thing. We all want healthy children and we all want our children to live a long life. We all don’t want our children to die of something horrible. We all actually want the same thing. So we should stop fighting each other and we should start just looking at the information and looking at the positives and the negatives and weighing them and looking at what’s the best outcome. Because maybe the doctor that I talked about, the one I interviewed in Portland who wrote that book Safe Vaccines, maybe altered schedule is the best thing and his altered schedule. Maybe that after we do research maybe that is the best thing or maybe it isn’t. Maybe like your chiropractor showing that three generations without vaccine over 200 people, that that’s the best way to go. Until we stop polarizing the subject and until we start asking to all work together to respect each other and to just let’s look at the science and let’s look at the results and let’s look at the safety for our children instead of bashing each other, instead of fighting each other, instead of calling each other names. Let’s come together, pro and anti-vaxers, let’s come together and go what can we do for the benefit of our children and the future generations? It’s undeniable that these parents have seen vaccine injury. After watching your two documentaries, it’s undeniable that there is a problem. So I’m always confused when people are saying there isn’t a problem because that is taking away the voice from the parents who have seen that there’s a problem. I love that you have given a voice to these parents who feel so isolated. Who day in and day out are taking a child who’s non-verbal, who’s beating their head against the wall, who has seizures, who is in a modern iron lung as you show in Vaxxed 2. You’ve given a voice to these parents who struggle every day and have been told time and time again that they’re wrong and that it wasn’t a vaccine injury when they saw hours after a vaccine that their child begin to have seizures, begin to turn blue. I mean just really scary things. I feel for these parents. I also can get in the shoes of people who are very angry, the pro-vaxers who are very angry at the anti-vaxers because they feel threatened. I imagine they feel threatened. So, I wish we could all come together and instead of fighting each other we could actually all ask the same question, what can we do to create health for our children? Let’s look at the science. Do you have any advice for us? What can we do as individuals to help?   [0:37:05] Polly Tommey: Well, I think first of all, I don’t see the parents all the people out there fighting. I don’t see that. I take most of them are pharmaceutical paid trolls. There’s adverts everywhere for them. I could go and be one for them tomorrow if I would pass the test of who I am. But most people can. You can just sign up. You would get paid really to fight online for the sake of herd immunity or whatever online. I mean, I just ignore these people, block them. Look, the bottom line is we’re not here to fight. These parents aren’t here to fight. They’re here to warn. They’re here to say, “Look. This happened to us. We vaccinated our kids. We are pro-vaccine. You can’t call us anti-vaccine. We vaccinated ourselves and our children. We’re simply here to warn as a person standing in front of another person saying look, be careful because there’s nothing more heartbreaking if you go down the road I just went down.” Do your research. The best research you can do is go on the ground yourself and speak to those families that did vaccinate and didn’t vaccinate. Make that mind up yourself. That’s the best science you’re going to get. Most of the science studies out there are funded by pharmaceuticals. Did you know that the medical schools that the medical doctors are funded by the pharmaceutical companies? You just have to work it out yourself. Okay, we know Google is taken by big pharma, we can see that. If you google any of our websites now you have to go through the World Health Organization all that kind of thing but you can still do it by talking. There’s no better expert on what’s happened to their child or to themselves than other human beings. So go figure it out. Look at the ones that or pro-vaccine and said, “My children are fine,” and you look at them and they’re not. They’ve got eczema. They’ve got allergies. They’re carrying around inhalers. They’re on medication. That’s not okay. Go and talk to the families that didn’t. Are those children on medication? What is their family like? Which way do you want to go? Get on the ground and do your own research. You don’t even need to look at the scientific studies anymore. Scientific studies are the people that have lived it.   [0:39:10] Ashley James: Beautiful. Now, starting in January, you’re going back out on the road. For those listening who want to follow you or participate and meet-up with you, how can they do that? How can they follow the Vaxxed bus and potentially come and meet you?   [0:39:25] Polly Tommey: Okay. We’re starting off in California in Modesto. California lost a lot of its rights and can’t go to school unless you’re completely vaccinated. So we are going down to California to talk to the parents that have been injured and the unvaccinated who have been thrown out of school and to discover that. So we’re starting off in Modesto in the fourth of January. If you go to Vaxxed 2 the number 2 so Vaxxed2.com, the bus tour will be put up on there. AMC theatres were showing our film Vaxxed 2 and have just pulled it under pressure, of course like everything else. So we will be putting the film online. So watch out for that. It will be going out on the Brighteon site Mike Adams health ranger. He will be screening Vaxxed 2. We don’t have a date for that right now but that will be early in the New Year. Of course DVDs for those that still have DVD players. You’ll be able to get those on February, I think. So the world will be able to see this. They can’t stop it. They’re trying very very hard to stop it. They can’t. If you are on Facebook, we do go out live on We Are Vaxxed it’s called. That is our only official site. We go out live on there. We go out live on Periscope, PeepsTV. Periscope is where we go out live on more than anything else because it’s the most uncensored. We’re still shadow banned but you’re still be able to find us if you’re clever.   [0:40:49] Ashley James: Have you interviewed any parents who have fought this system or sued the pharmaceutical companies and won?   [0:40:57] Polly Tommey: Yes. Actually in Vaxxed 2 you remember that very tragic story of Christina Tarsell who had the Gardasil vaccine. She didn’t feel very well after the vaccine. She went back to school. She just did in her room on her own and they found her dead on her bed. We actually have that image that the police took of that girl when she was found by the police dead in bed. You will see that on Vaxxed 2. So be careful taking your children. I advise all parents to see that film first before they decide whether they want their children to see it because there is this girl that’s dead in the bed. The reason why we use that photograph and we allowed that to go out is because she won in court. They said, “Yes. She is injured by the Gardasil. We’re very sorry. One in a billion chance.” Usual sort of stuff. She’s awarded $250,000 for her daughter. But if you look at that photograph of her, you can see that is a very toxic death. It looks like a noble death, foam coming out of her mouth. It’s really really – anyone who see that section, the Gardasil section of Vaxxed 2 movie will not want. As Bobby Kennedy says in the film, “You got to be insane to give that vaccine to yourself or anyone you love.” When you read the clinical lecture or spoken to the parents, it’s just a very dangerous vaccine. History will very soon I think be able to say, “Yes. I’m sorry. We made a mistake. That’s a bad vaccine.”   [0:42:23] Ashley James: Absolutely. When we look at the invention of x-ray machine, they used to have x-ray machine in shoe stores so we can get x-rays to see if our shoes fit correctly. Our feet fit in our shoes and then they soon found that was causing a lot of damage and they stopped doing that. They took lead out of the gasoline when they realized that was hurting us. They used to spray children with DDT, which actually caused polio-like symptoms. I had a chiropractor on the sow share this, Dr. Wolfson. She shares that she believes that most of the polio was all of a sudden was eradicated back in the 40s, 50s, 60s was actually they are removing DDT. They stopped spraying that on the children. First they sprayed the children then they had this uprise in polio symptoms. They didn’t realize that it was actually DDT poisoning because it caused the same paralysis, the same issues. Then when they stopped, when they finally realized that they were causing a huge damage that they stopped it. I’ve heard from a naturopathic physician who has been a midwife for 30 years that there’s a part of Washington state where I live where the miscarriages, late late pregnancy miscarriages and then also children having injuries at birth or being born with injuries rises like one hundredfold during the spraying season. That if a mother in a particular part of Washington State is near the farms. Doesn’t even have to live on a farm but near the farms. Whatever they are spraying now is causing huge injuries. It’s silent. They’re all able to cover it up but 50 years from now we’ll hear about it and it’ll be history. It’ll be history by then. The victims aren’t being heard now. So I love that you are giving a voice to people and you’re also spreading this information. We should question everything. We should question absolutely everything. We should question at what’s – look at Flint, Michigan and now they’re testing water across the United States and finding that many municipalities have a really really poor quality water. That there’s a heavy metals in the water. We have to understand that we need to advocate for our own selves. We have to test our own water. We need to understand that our food isn’t necessary, we can’t just trust our food is safe just because some company made it and packaged it. We have to do our own research, advocate for ourselves and we should absolutely advocate for ourselves. Whatever we put in our mouth whether it’s a supplement, a drug, food, water we have to be the quality control. We cannot go blindly through those world and trust that these companies have our best interest at heart. There’s over 80,000 chemicals now, man-made chemicals that have been introduced into our food supply that many of them are banned in other countries and banned in the UK and in European Union and yet they’re still safe, apparently they’re safe here and also in our cosmetics. So we have to just advocate for ourselves, question everything and also support those who have a voice so that they can be heard. So, Polly, you have such a beautiful mission because you just want to give parents a voice and let them be heard. I thank you so much for the work that you’re doing. Is there anything else you’d like to say? Anything you want to make sure listeners know? Any websites or any resources that are really important for parents especially parents that have vaccine-injured children?   [0:46:27] Polly Tommey: Yeah. Actually there are. I would like to say something actually. The saddest thing really, most of the stories when the parents talk to me about the injury is that they and their gut knew something wasn’t right before the vaccine was going into their baby or themselves but they were bullied. You mustn’t, you can get off and walk out of that doctor’s surgery and say, “You know what? I’m going to go think about it. I’m going to do my research but I will be back to discuss this with you.” So don’t let them bully you. Don’t let them tell you your baby will die if it doesn’t have the vaccine. Don’t let them say these things. You go and do that research yourself because that’s where all the trouble started from the bullying of the medical professionals to have you vaccinate your child or yourself. So please, you are in control yourself. You’re in control of your baby and your child. You’re the expert on yourself and the baby and the child. So take control. We’ve got to all stand up and be much stronger than we’ve been and not allow these people to bully us. That’s what I would say.   [0:47:27] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much Polly. I really encourage listeners to watch your movie. Watch Vaxxed and watch Vaxxed 2 when it does come out soon. Follow you on Periscope. You just download the app Periscope and go to the PeepsTV@TeamVaxxed.  Also, all the links to everything Polly does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Regardless of whether you consider yourself pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine, or what I like to say is pro-kid, I think that your movies are empowering, Polly. I think that all my listeners want to become empowered. We want to absorb information and make the best decision for ourselves so I think that it’s in our best interest to educate ourselves. The fact that big pharma doesn’t want us watching your stuff that’s kind of scary. The level of censorship is showing us that we have to watch it. Whatever the big corporations don’t want us to see is what we need to see. We need to be allowed to see everything. We have a right. We have a right to all these information and they want to take our rights away. We have a right to our health and making the best choices for ourselves. I believe in informed consent. The doctors I’ve had on the show believe in informed consent. Informed consent meaning knowing all the facts and then making a choice. Choose to vaccinate, choose to do altered schedule, choose not to vaccinate. It’s a choice that you should be allowed to make after you have received all the facts. That’s what informed consent is. So I also encourage my other listeners to check out my other interviews that share more information about this. I’m going to be having Andy Wakefield and others on the show in the New Year to give more of the science. This interview, Polly, was so great because I know that parents out there needed to hear your story, needed to hear this information from another parent. So thank you so much for coming on the show today.   [0:49:40] Polly Tommey: Thank you so much.

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Dr. Michael Haley, a medical professional specializing in gut health, discusses the healing properties of Aloe Vera gel. Topics include the benefits of ingesting Aloe Vera gel, the importance of elimination diets, the differences between filtered and unfiltered Aloe Vera gel, and the potential dangers of excessive consumption. The podcast also explores the influence of organisms in our gut, the benefits of growing one's own food, and the dosages and methods of consuming frozen Aloe gel. Don't miss out on the special offer for listeners!

Join the Learn True Health Facebook Group! LearnTrueHealth.com/group Emily's Site: Remediesbyemily.etsy.com Healing Through Prayers https://www.learntruehealth.com/healing-through-prayers Highlights: Power of prayer Prayer are stepping stones to recovering health Building relationship through prayer Let go of fear through faith, belief, and prayer. As you build your relationship with God through prayer, you start receiving more and more good things Prayers help people to have more positive outlook One-on-one connection with God Reticular activating system You feel more joy from giving than that person will ever get from receiving Learn from the returns God’s answer is yes, no, or later Looking at all aspects of your life and bring it all into balance Life in a few years can be so brilliant, so amazing that you wouldn’t want to give it up for anything Write down who you want to pray for, what you’d like for yourself, and also something to give, if you have something to give praise about You should surround yourself and try to serve and reach as many people as you can whatever you are   In today’s episode, Emily will share with us the value of prayer and how it helps us recover our health and how it builds a deeper connection with God, ourselves and other people.   [00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 400. I am so excited to have back on the show Emily Becker. She was here in Episode 340 sharing about how she reversed her alopecia. She basically went — her entire body went bald.  And she restored herself with natural medicine and she helps families and men and women and children who have this condition. She helps them to reverse it naturally as well. So if you have alopecia, if you have hair loss, or if you know anyone who does, listen to Episode 340 and share it with them. And let them know but Emily Becker because she is definitely living proof. You should see pictures. Emily, your hair is gorgeous. And I’ve been Facebook friends with you since your alopecia days when you didn’t have any hair. And then you started to grow the hair. A little peach fuzz at first and now I think your hair is as long as mine. I mean it’s just like it’s going to be so long people are going to be climbing it. That was a Disney movie with no hair.   [00:01:20] Emily Becker: Rapunzel.     [00:01:21] Ashley James: You’re going to be Rapunzel soon. Your hair is so luscious and long. And so it was great having you on the show in Episode 340. And I’m glad you could come back to share what’s happened since. When you came on the show, you shared what your story and what you did to naturally reverse your alopecia, both diet and supplements and topical things. And since then you were just starting your business which is at home. You have formulated the most amazing organic and 100 percent natural herbal creams and salves and remedies for all kinds of skin and hair conditions. And your businesses just taken off and you do it all from home. When the kids go to bed, you’re a busy stay at home mom. I’ve been loving watching you flourish. And watching all your customers report back to you on Facebook just how much your pain cream with the CBD in it has helped them. Or you know, your face creams. And I love your face cream. It’s so luxurious. So I could go on and on about how wonderful your own natural products are. And I love that you show pictures on Facebook of the process of you making things so we see the ingredients and see how you do it. And we know absolutely 100 percent of the ingredients that are going in so there’s no chemicals or pesticides or anything like that in your home remedy cosmetics. It’s wonderful. So welcome back to the show.     [00:02:56] Emily Becker: Thank you, Ashley. I’m so happy to be here. I had so much fun last time we did this together. I’ve been wanting to ask you to come back on the show for so long and I’m grateful that you’re willing to do this in such a short notice with me.     [00:03:14] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. This week you’re like, “Can I come back on the show?” I’m like, “Yeah. What you doing this weekend?” It’s like Saturday afternoon – about to be afternoon right now and here we are hanging out.     [00:03:25] Emily Becker: Well, I was feeling inspired to thank your supporters and all your listeners for all of their support for me. I get emails and I mean, they order from me as well. But I get a lot of emails saying that, you know, they need help with their alopecia. Or that they connected with me through face and then we’ll pray together through email and spend some time together like that. And I just wanted to thank them so much for their support.     [00:03:57] Ashley James: Wonderful. Well, I love the community. The Learn True Health community is filled with really loving and caring people who want to get their health back and want to help their friends and family do the same. And so I love that you have found that to be the case as well that my listeners have reached out to you because of their alopecia or other skin issues. That they’ve also connected with you on a level of faith. I know something that’s really made a big difference to you and to your healing and to your success is utilizing the power of prayer.     [00:04:33] Emily Becker: Absolutely.     [00:04:35] Ashley James: What does that mean? What does it mean to have the power of prayer help you? How has prayer helped you specifically? Because I know you were telling me before we hit record that prayer has been something that has absolutely made a difference in your life. And for those who have not really ever prayed or maybe not to spiritual or religious, they might scoff at it. That, you know, it’s just you’re just basically talking to some Sky Daddy. Like that’s how some people feel, right? So some people, “I’ve never connected with prayer.” And then there’s other people I’ve met who say prayer has been life changing for them. That they absolutely feel that it is one of the biggest reasons why they have gotten their health back, or become successful, or been able to attain the goals that they intend to obtain. Can you give us – share us the story of what happened in your life that had you see that prayer made a big difference to you?     [00:05:38] Emily Becker: Well, prayer has made a big difference to me from the beginning of my health recovery. I wasn’t a believer as a young child or in my teens or anything. I didn’t – I always knew that there was a God but I didn’t have a relationship with Him or anything like that. And it was when I started to pray without trusting Jesus or anything like that that I started asking God to lead me to health. I stopped fearing my health conditions. I stopped fearing how I looked in the mirror and how my health was affecting me. I started asking for help and guidance through prayer. Within a month of the first time I ever prayed, I was on my way. I didn’t really see it happening when it was happening. But looking back, as I prayed, all of my prayers were answered. It was like stepping stones to recovering my health. I used to have a lot of fear in my heart and in my life. I had anxiety and I was living in fear. And as I would pray, the fear, all that, would be lifted from me momentarily as I prayed for a day or two. And then, eventually, I saw that I personally needed this holy help. I needed Jesus. This is my personal story. This is how I feel that I needed Him to help me with my burdens. I needed to give Him the weight that’s on my shoulders. And that I couldn’t do it alone. And I needed guidance. So I started trusting in Jesus. And then after that, it’s just been building this relationship through prayer. Where instead of feeling like I’m alone and praying for all the bad things to go away, I prayed for help and love and guidance. And as I did that, I started receiving blessings, gifts. I started meeting people who could help me. I started believing that I could get better. I started believing that everything was going to be okay. And as my faith and my belief and my prayer life grew stronger and stronger, the more I was able to let go my fear. I actually took – Ashley, I took your anxiety course, how to release your anxiety. And I got to tell you, I never finished. I’ve done the first 15 days three times. And it’s really similar to prayer because when – I love it. I love it. Because once you start talking about stuff that I’m familiar with, I’m like, “I got to get this other stuff ingrained in my head.” Once you set your eyes on what your heart really wants, God is listening. He wants good things for all of us. And that was how I started to believe in the power of prayer. And the things that I personally that have healed or come to me through prayer have been meeting the doctor who could help me with my hair loss. I prayed for that. And I also prayed – there’s other things that I’ll pray for and I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe I did that. Now look at this.”     [00:09:19] Ashley James: What do you mean? What specifically?     [00:09:21] Emily Becker: So I’ll pray in simple little areas of my life. Like, “I like to eat more whole foods and eat healthier. And then all of a sudden, my kids get – you know, they’re sick and I know I need to cut out the processed foods or they’re going to just going to get sicker and sicker. So it’s like, “Okay. Well, I don’t want to change my whole lifestyle but it looks like we’re going to have to. Thanks, God.” All right. So it’s not always the answer you want but he’s always there trying to give you good things. So as you build your relationship with God through prayer, you start receiving more and more good things. And then I couldn’t keep that to myself. I started praying over my orders. I started praying over my friends, my neighbors. And by praying for my friends and my neighbors, I’m able to see that, one, it’s rewarding to share that love with Jesus through prayer. Whether they know it or not, it’s really rewarding to love someone enough that you would pray for them.   I really appreciate the breath work before this interview. I am.     [00:10:42] Ashley James: It was hilarious. I shared with Emily the breath work interview I did recently. I said, “You have to listen to this.” And she wrote back a few hours later, “I just listened to the world’s longest interview on breath work.” It was like a two hour long interview on breathing. It’s breathing. We all do it. But I mean, it was amazing. And so before we hit record, I’m like, “Let’s do some deep breathing together. Let’s just, you know, get Emily a bit calm.” Because she doesn’t normally jump on podcasts.     [00:11:13] Emily Becker: No.     [00:11:12] Ashley James: And so let’s get grounded. But you shared something really interesting, just as an offshoot, I want to make sure we covered this. You told me what you do to get your kids to get sleepy and wind them down before bed that you used breathing. Can you share how you do that to get your family to calm down for bedtime?     [00:11:34] Emily Becker: Yeah. Well, yeah, when I was listening to the podcast about breath work, I was like, “Oh, I already do this with my kids.” And what happens is everybody’s excited and they won’t even listen to a story. They won’t settle down for a good book. And what I’ll do is I won’t say anything. I’ll just start breathing nice and slow and deep. And after a few breaths, you’ll start to see – just like how yawning, it’s contagious. You’ll start to see their breathing slow down. Some of them will start to yawn. And then they all start to relax. And I’ve been doing that for a while now. If I haven’t on and off, probably, since my first baby. But a lot recently with my three year old just to help her relax and get ready for bed. I’d spend – so helpful.     [00:12:32] Ashley James: So you don’t sing to her. Like, “It’s bedtime. Okay. Wind it down. Stop playing with toys.” You’re not saying anything. You just are sitting near her as she’s playing. And you start to slow your breath and take deep slow breaths. And then because she has rapport with you at an unconscious level, she starts – her body starts to copy what you’re doing and she also starts to breathe slow and deep. And then that calms her down and then she’s able to sit with you and read some books before bed.     [00:13:03] Emily Becker: And focus and relax.     [00:13:06] Ashley James: Yeah. I love that you pointed that out. Right. It’s so great because that’s actually something I learned when I studied neuro-linguistic programming is this idea of rapport that when we work with our clients, we want to gain rapport with them and watch their breathing. And first, we match them how fast they’re talking, the kind of tonality they’re using, even the words they’re using, how they’re sitting, their body language, and how they’re breathing. And so it’s this idea of –     [00:13:34] Emily Becker: I don’t want to do that with my daughter. I don’t want to get that excited.     [00:13:37] Ashley James: No, no. You don’t – right. Right. You wouldn’t do that with her. But she has a rapport with you. But for clients who you don’t necessarily have rapport with yet, we would do that to put them at ease. And then what happens is once they’ve gained rapport with us, then we slow down our breathing, and then they slow down their breathing. And I learned this trick for children. As a NLP practitioner, if I’m working with children who have ADD or ADHD, that having them match my breath at an unconscious level by slowing down my breathe actually helps their neurology to slow down and calm down. It gives their body unconscious permission to slow down. So I love that idea that we can just take slower deep breaths to tell the people around us that it’s safe and okay to slow down and calm down. That we don’t need to be in fight or flight. And that it’s time for bed.     [00:14:41] Emily Becker: Yeah. It also helps me personally quiet my inner voice. Because I’m an introvert, but my mind is constantly going. And when I start taking my deep breaths, I can relax and think clearly. And then I do that also be for prayer. I don’t do the 20 minutes breath work yet. But maybe I will, maybe, for prayer. Because it’s it really is something that helps, just as we said, helps in layman’s terms for me, seeing clearly and to slow down.     [00:15:18] Ashley James: So you had mentioned that you pray over the orders that your customers have placed before you mail them out. Have you received any feedback since you started doing that? Like, I mean, I know it’s anecdotal. Did you notice any difference between before doing that and after you started praying for your clients?     [00:15:43] Emily Becker: Since I’ve been doing this what I’ve noticed is that people come back with a new energy in their emails, a new level of faith, or they’re just excited about it. Something I didn’t notice from other people. People will say, “Oh, this is great. This is great. This is great.” The products are, right? But after starting the prayers, what I noticed is that people have more positive outlook on what’s going on. I haven’t seen any miracles. I can’t – as far as that goes. I did send a very, very, very wonderful woman who was going through breast cancer one lotion. And she wasn’t allowed to have any preservatives or anything like that inside. It had to be just raw ingredients. And she really needed a hand cream because when you’re going through cancer and chemo, the chemo medicine dries out your skin. So I sent her a big jug of lotion to put in her fridge. Well, they did the surgery. It was all successful afterwards. And the way she lights up about how amazing that simple gift has been really rewarding. I wish I could share her passion and her excitement and love about what she received. It’s really a one on one connection. And for me, it’s a three way here. Because I’m not doing this on my own. I’m doing this with God, the Father. And I’m trusting everything in him. As I do this, we talked earlier before this interview about studies and results. You can’t measure divine intervention. You can only have faith in what the results are. Because good things happen without divine intervention anyways. God wants good things for us. And then sometimes it’s his hands are placing people in your life. His hands are that positive voice saying, you know like, “You can do this today.” I didn’t think I would share with anyone that I prayed over the orders. Because I don’t do it every time there’s been a few slips where I’m like, “Oh, I forgot to pray over that order.”     [00:18:16] Ashley James: But you could backdate that prayer.     [00:18:20] Emily Becker: I have.     [00:18:21] Ashley James: It’s never too late.     [00:18:22] Emily Becker: I’ll be like, “Oh, God. Please forgive me. I can’t even remember her last name but she’s an Oklahoman. Please, Lord, let this order that she receives not just be good for her but a blessing to her.” And suddenly that has changed the feedback that I have gotten. So it hasn’t just been, “Oh, these are amazing products.” But, “Wow.” Maybe while we’re talking here, I can pull something up. I don’t want to mention anyone’s names because this is very personal information, which is why I’m hesitant to share. But I also want to give praise to God. I was a late in life Born Again Christian. So I am not well versed in the Bible. I am well versed in my faith and how He’s brought me to where I am. I know, I can look back and be like, “Wow. He really protected me there.”     [00:19:23] Ashley James: You had mentioned that and I just remembered something that happened when I was a kid. So I have to share it. I was maybe about – I don’t know – eight or nine. And I grew up in Canada, in Ontario. And we were up in Muskoka. And it was probably February. I mean, it was cold. There was tons of ice, tons of snow. And I was hiking in the woods with my friend, Jane. We were really close to the lake up on a cliff. And I didn’t realize how close we were to the cliff until I lost my footing and I began to slide backwards. And something that I guess I just picked up from all the other kids is always saying, “Oh, my God. You know, like, “Oh, my God. Like, Oh, my God.” Right? Because I was like this little – you know, I mean this little, like, nine year old probably thinking she’s like 13, right? I’m like, “Oh, my God.” And so I slipped. And I began to fall backwards and I’m sliding down this cliff. And it drops off. And there’s a few stories. I mean, it’s very, very high on to basically jagged rocks, open water, and ice. And it would have been death. It would have been instant. If I wouldn’t have died from hitting the rocks. It would have been drowning in ice water, right? It was not – I mean, there’s no way in which I would have survived that. And I yelled out, “Oh, my God.” Because I was very afraid. And that was just sort of this instant reaction. But what happened next really surprised me. All of a sudden there was a branch sticking out of the rock. And it was sort of like those cartoons where there’s like a one branch tree in the middle of a cliff with no roots. And you’re like, “How’d that get there?” And it and it caught my back. And I remember looking over my shoulder, like looking down at the rocks, and the ice, and the water. And being like – and I grew up in this area. Swimming in this area in the summertime. I never ever, ever saw this tree before – this branch. It was just like a branch sticking out. The first thing I realized is I called out God’s name. And I was immediately caught. And that was like – this is like a nine year old going, “Oh, my gosh.” And it hit me and I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” He saved me. And I was just there being held by this branch. And my friend, Jane, was like, “Hold on. I got to go get a rope.” And she ran back and got a rope and came back and I was held the whole time. And she got me out. And then I looked and that’s when she when she pulled down and looked down and I realized that, “I don’t think that was there before.” I mean, you know, maybe it was. But that was really like a very odd place for a one branch tree to grow on a side of a cliff and to be able to hold my weight and just everything. Everything, like, I could have – if I was one foot to the left or one foot to the right, I would have been gone. And so that was my first experience of hit sort of His hand and his guidance.     [00:22:39] Emily Becker: Well, literally, that’s amazing.     [00:22:41] Ashley James: Right. And you just reminded me of that. That sometimes in life, there’s just these events that you go, there is something more here than – I don’t know – we’re dead and there’s nothing. Like, there’s something more to this. And I wasn’t sure – I think I believed conceptually, like, maybe theoretically that there was a soul. But when my mom died, I actually had an experience of her soul moving through me. I held her hand as she died. And it was about 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning. All the lights were pretty much off. It was in a hospital room. And it was just a light glow of like beeping things. She took her last breath. And even the doctor lent me their stethoscope so I could – just her heart had slowed over the course of the day because she had gone into a coma. And she had stopped moving her body, had stopped – like, she was stopped responding basically to us talking to her. So we were holding her hand and rubbing her feet and hugging her and everything the whole day. But she was gone. She was in a coma. And as she died, so she died, her heart stopped, she stopped breathing. She squeezed my hand. And it was only the hand – it wasn’t like both hands squeeze, it wasn’t some kind of involuntary. She grabbed – I was holding one of her hands, she squeezed it, pulled it to her heart. And then I felt an intense energy move through me and it was the color yellow. Like if you felt the color yellow. And that was one of my mom’s favorite colors. And the entire room lit up yellow. Her soul was letting me know it was okay and saying goodbye.     [00:24:30] Emily Becker: That’s incredible.     [00:24:32] Ashley James: That was like another big experience of mine to know that there’s more here. So I’m sharing this because sometimes we disregard these amazing experiences. Because I think in the mainstream media, I don’t know if they’re pushing like an atheist agenda. I don’t know what. And I’m not trying to push any religion on anyone. But I want to share, don’t discredit things that happen and just push them to the side. Listen to these amazing miracles that could happen in your life or in other people’s lives. And let that fuel you. Because I’ve heard people have incredible experiences through the power of prayer. Even people who are not religious have used prayer. And through that have found a closer connection to their Creator.     [00:25:28] Emily Becker: Oh, absolutely.     [00:25:31] Ashley James: Health is physical. And I have a lot of doctors on the show. And a lot of times we talk about, you know, using food as medicine or supplements. So health is physical. But there’s also the spiritual aspects that we see that if someone has great physical health but has absolutely no spiritual health, that they can have a level of emptiness in their life. Sort of like a sickness on an energetic level. And a lot of times when people get really sick, they look to prayer and look to God and that –     [00:25:58] Emily Becker: Then be more positive on their outlook and they change their mindset too. They pray.     [00:26:04] Ashley James: Yes. Because there is a mind body connection. There is a kind of direct connection between the emotional body and the physical health. If we’re sick emotionally or sick mentally, we can also feel those effects physically. And same with our energetic and our spiritual body. So we want to look to heal and balance all aspects of life. So I like to leave no stone unturned. And that’s why I wanted – when you said you wanted to come on and share about your experiences with the power of prayer and how much prayer has helped you in your life. I wanted to, first of all, hear your experiences. And have the listeners hear them because maybe even if one listener can gain some huge benefit from learning from you, then it’ll all be worth it. But I know that when we align our thoughts with what we want versus what we don’t want. If we’re going to look at neuroscience, there’s a part of our brain it’s in the brainstem called the reticular activating system. And it helps us to seek out what we want. But when we focus on what we don’t want, so if you’re constantly thinking about an illness you have, your particular activating system is going to keep filtering out your experiences to only remind you of all the illness you have. And will actually delete any evidence that you might be getting better. So the reticular activating system just helps you focus on what you’re focusing on. We have this part of our brain because if we’re foraging in the woods, let’s say for a type of berry. A green berry in a green woods and it’s really hard to see. Well, the reticular activating system helps us to identify it and seek it out. So the same goes with our attitude and our focus in life. So if you’re praying about what you want to have, blessings in your life for yourself or for others, you’re actually telling your brain, your reticular activating system, to seek out and help you on the conscious level help you see the evidence and work towards achieving it.     [00:28:22] Emily Becker: I did a recent Facebook challenge with my friends on my personal page that helped people do exactly what you just said. I told them that – I gave them a little background. I said, “Sometimes I would sit and wonder if my decisions please God.” But that is assuming that God is limited. So now, instead, I wonder how God can bless my choices. So I told them to try, that their next hurdle, their next crossroad, the moment of uncertainty. And this can go for health, you know, something wrong with your health and you’d like to see better. I told him to pray for what that what you choose to do about it to me a blessed choice. And in that, you also want to have the good outcome. You don’t want to sit there and pray about what bad could happen. Anyone, right? About what good do you would like to happen? And then when that alone has brought me blessings and prayers. And that’s true even with my marriage. You’re like, “Oh, I want to be more involved with my family.” Or, “Eat more wholesome foods.” Or, “I really want to reconnect with my sister again.” All these little things. As soon as you start praying for them, as soon as you start thinking about them, as soon as it’s close to your heart, everything changes for what you want.     [00:29:50] Ashley James: Yes. What you’re bringing up is something that I talked about in my course, the Free Your Anxiety course.     [00:29:56] Emily Becker: I love that course.     [00:29:57] Ashley James: My Free Anxiety course which is available on the website, learntruehealth.com in the menu section there. But you’ve done – it’s funny. You’ve done day one through 15 a few times. You got to finish the course. It’s like the ending is good too.     [00:30:11] Emily Becker: Okay. [Inaudible] [00:30:12] stuff that I’m familiar with. And I want to have the positive rewiring [inaudible] [00:30:18].     [00:30:21] Ashley James: I love it. I love that you’re doing it repeatedly. That’s actually really great to wire it in the stuff that you’re learning. But one thing I talk about is focusing on what you want versus what you don’t want. And what you’re saying is when you pray – I think this is really important – that you catch your language instead of saying like, “Dear God. Please don’t allow my husband to get in a car crash today. And please don’t let my kids fail at school.” I mean, I know I’m being like kind of over exaggerating. But we do this where we focus on what we don’t want to have happen. And that is creating the stress response in the body. And that’s not actually helping us focus on what we do want to have happen or we do want to create in our life. And so we have to catch our language. When we say what we don’t want to have happen, we have to catch our language and go, “Oh, okay. I’m not actually saying what I want. I’m just saying a bunch of what I don’t want. So what do I want?” And then say that. So my example is – when I first learned this lesson – every year I slipped on ice and fell and bruised my tailbone. And this is up in Canada. And I learned this lesson about focusing on what we do want to have happen in our internal dialogue. And I caught myself, it’s around February, we just had an ice rain. I was walking to my car and everything was icy. And I started to feel my feet slip. And I just knew the next step would be, like, a bruised bum. And I caught myself and I heard my inner dialogue say, “I don’t want to slip. I don’t want to slip. I don’t want to slip.” And I’m like, “Oh my, gosh. I’m doing it.” I’m focusing on what I don’t want to have happen. And we do it so naturally because I think it’s part of our – I don’t know if it’s just part of our culture. Or maybe it’s a bit of, I think, the pessimists are the ones that survived. All the optimists kind of ran into bears in the woods and they didn’t procreate. So all of our ancestors were basically pessimists. So we kind of got the pessimists gene down path. Because the pessimists were like, “Well, there’s probably a bear over there. So I’m not going to go over there.” So they’re looking out for the negative things and avoided them long enough to procreate and pass down the genes. So we were taught that it’s safe to be a pessimist because you if you think about a lot of bad things that could go wrong, then you could avoid them. But the problem with that is, when we think about what we don’t want to have happen, we’re constantly triggering the stress response in the body. But we’re also telling the reticular activating system in the brain to focus on what we don’t want to have happen instead of what we do want to have happen. And so when good things actually do happen, sometimes our brain can’t even see it or perceive it, or take up that opportunity. And so in that moment, when I was catching myself slipping on the ice, I went, “Well, what’s the opposite of I don’t want to slip.” And that was a really hard one because I was so used to thinking about what I don’t want to have happen. And then I had to go, “Okay. Well, I want to say, walk safely. Okay.” So I told myself, “I want to walk safely.” I imagined myself walking safely to my car. I imagine like there’s little bear claws coming out of my boots and allowing me to walk safely. And then I did. And I didn’t slip. And I have not slipped — knock on wood. I haven’t slept since. And that was, like, 19 years ago. So to give you that idea that we can catch ourselves in prayer and also out of prayer. When we’re focusing on what we don’t want to have happen by stating the negative. Like, “I don’t want this to happen.” We have to catch ourselves and say, “Well, what do I want to have happen?” And focus on that instead. Because the reticular activating system will delete, distort, and generalize the information coming to us. So through our eyes, and our ears, through all of our senses, will delete, distort, and generalize before it reaches our consciousness. And so our reality is dependent on what we focus on. You and I, Emily, could go to a movie. And we could both walk out with totally different opinions about that movie with the same movie. But you and I saw different things and experienced different things because our unconscious mind deletes the source and generalized filters the information before we get to experience it consciously. So we have to catch ourselves and the languaging. I’ll give you one example before – as I have a question for you. So I know that you and I have the same doctor mentor. This doctor, we talked about him and Episode 340. This doctor who helped me nine years ago reverse my type 2 diabetes, my chronic adrenal fatigue, my chronic infertility, and my polycystic ovarian syndrome. He helped me reverse those with diet and supplements. And I had an opportunity to actually learn from him about a-year-and-a-half before I did. But this is a perfect example because I was listening to a podcast or some kind of radio show or some kind of alternative media and he was being interviewed. And my reticular activating system at a time, I was focusing on, “I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough money. I’m broke. I can’t have money.” I was focusing –     [00:36:05] Emily Becker: Absolutely. I had the same thing happen.     [00:36:10] Ashley James: I was focusing on not having enough money.  And so when I heard the interview, my thought was, “That sounds really interesting, but I don’t have enough money.” And so I did not pursue any of his information because it just sound – I was, in my mind, it was like a brick wall. “Well, I don’t have enough money. So I shouldn’t even pursue the information.” Now, if I had not – if my reticular activating system, if I had not programmed my brain by constantly thinking about, “I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough money.” If I hadn’t done that, I would have listened to him then and I would have gone, “Wow. I need to dive into his information further.” I may have gone to the library for free and gotten some of his books. I may have listened to more interviews with him. I may have called into his radio show. There’s so many ways I could have – he has a supplement that’s like $24. I could have afforded that. I should have got on that. And the diet that he recommends, I could have gotten that information for free. Lots of stuff, I could have done it. I could have begun my healing journey then, a-year-and-a-half before I did. But the little thought in my head was, “I can’t. I can’t because I don’t have enough money.” And then it was a brick wall and I stopped taking any action. And a-year-and-a-half later, I was in the same financial situation but I heard the information again. And my husband is the one that said, “We need to pursue this. This sounds like this could be the answer for you.” And it’s because the him that I picked up the phone and started to take action. And thank God I did. But this is a prime example of how we limit ourselves, like you said, God will present the right people in your path. But it’s up to us to see that those people are there – that they’ve been put there in our path. And luckily, that doctor was putting my path again and the information came back to me. And then my husband heard it and he was helping me see the light. But that’s the thing, we have to catch are unconscious mining and see, “Am I blocking myself from moving forward because I’m focusing on what I don’t want to have happen instead of what I do want to have happen.”     [00:38:33] Emily Becker: Well, we can run from what He wants us to do all we want, but He still wants us to do it. And He wants us to get there. I can relate to that. Because my husband is the one who’s like, “Oh, there’s a seminar.” We ordered exactly what later would have recommended for me, just guessing what we needed. We were like, “Okay. Was this is brand new? Let’s get this. This seems to be the right one.” Then we went to the seminar and then when I spoke to him, he’s like, “This is exactly what you need to do.” We went home that day and my husband is like, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to listen.” And I wasn’t able to even have a negative thought because it was just happening.     [00:39:17] Ashley James: But if you had been left on your own, you might have been like, “Oh, we can’t do this.”     [00:39:22] Emily Becker: Right. Right. And I prayed for all these good things and they’re right in front of me. I had to be the one who took advantage of the people. I had take advantage of the tools. To take advantage of the gifts.  And, like you were saying, like, financially, you can always never afford what you want. If you think about it, “I can’t afford it.” Just like this business, I cannot afford to start my business. But all I had to do is say, “Hey, honey. I’m going to take away from my family if I ask for a little bit of money.” I was like, “You know what? Okay. People are asking for these remedies. I got to ask.” It was an immediate easy, yes. But anyways, so my husband got me to that doctor, to that lecture. And then was very supportive in ways that I never thought he would be. Like throwing the gluten out of the house. I was amazed that he would even do that.     [00:40:32] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Never underestimate your husband’s desire for you to be healthy. Because I think a lot of times I never thought my husband – man, he’s given up so much. When I met him, he was on ice cream and he drink. I mean, you know, he was on Monster Energy drinks. He was on venti coffees. He was on sugar and dairy and gluten. I think, that’s all he ate. That was his diet. It was like ice cream, coffee, Monsters, and gluten – like Monster Energy drinks. That’s was his entire diet. And now, all he eats is vegetables. It’s just amazing.     [00:41:05] Emily Becker: Some incredible change.     [00:41:06] Ashley James: Right. But never underestimate the power of your husband’s desire for you to be healthy environment.     [00:41:14] Emily Becker: That’s all your inner voice. I asked my husband once I was like, “How do you not think these horrible negative thoughts?” And he’s, “You just push them out.” And I like, “You make it sound so easy.” But you literally do it just through your cores, just the way he said it. It’s like, personally for me, I see it as Satan trying to whisper into your ear just like he whispered into Eve’s at the tree. It’s like, “Eat that fruit. That’s going to be good.” And he doesn’t want good things for you. And he will whisper lies into your ear. He’s not God. He’s nothing. You can push all of that out. You got to do it over and over and over and over. But eventually, he starts to shut up. And then you can have more faith and live more positively. Before this interview, you had asked some questions about what miracles are out there.     [00:42:10] Ashley James: Well, my thing is that there’s always that part of me that thinks, “Well, what if it’s all just coincidence.” And I’m sure other people feel that way too. Because that’s what faith is. It’s blind, right? God hasn’t come down and been like, “Hello” in person, right? So there has –     [00:42:30] Emily Becker: He wants you to have a relationship with him. It’s a scientific thing. It’s not divine. Because he is more than just what he’s created here on Earth. He’s the Creator. So to have faith and healing, you can’t measure it. You can look at statistics which I’ve done, if you’re interested in that at all.     [00:42:54] Ashley James: I am interested.  I think it’s fun. Because then you start to go, “Wow. That’s more than a coincidence.” So my thing is I think some people go, “What if prayer is just coincidence?” Like, let’s say, you never prayed over for anything. When your husband would have still told you to go that health lecture and still got you on supplements and thrown out the gluten. Did prayer really do that? Or is it all just coincidence? Right? So what’s interesting is when we look at the statistics that they’ve done studies on the power of prayer. And they try to be non objective because, really, they just want to pull the information together and go, “Let’s just look and see. Is it just coincidence or is it more times than not that prayers help with the positive outcome?” So yeah, please share. And these statistics are – these studies are online. The National Institutes of Health –     [00:43:52] Emily Becker: The government page, PubMed NCBI, they’re all doctor articles. When you’re going through them, it’s really amazing to see how little faith they have. But they have the numbers. How do they come up with finding that 71 percent of clinical studies and 62 percent of the laboratory studies reported positive outcomes for distinct healing? And by distant healing, they refer to for prayer. After the studies, they’re like, “Well, you know -” they were given names of people. And how do we know that there weren’t multiple people with that name? Or, they look at it at a scientific view where God knows the hearts of  people who are praying, So they have the numbers.     [00:44:40] Ashley James: Can you go through the numbers? So 71 percent was what?     [00:44:44] Emily Becker: In one study, Dr. Crawford examined the quality of studies of hands on healing and distant healing. And this was published between 1955 and 2000 — or at least those studies were published between 1955 and 2001.     [00:45:02] Ashley James: How many studies did they look at? Or how many people were involved? So there was 90 different studies. But they split them in half, 45 of them were clinical settings and 45 were laboratory studies settings. What they found was that 71 percent of the clinical studies and 62 percent of the laboratory studies both reported positive outcomes. And that’s pretty good outcomes, in my opinion. And we also reported that the overall internal validity of the studies on healing was 75 percent for the clinical investigations. And 81 percent for the laboratory investigations. They’re able to say that these are valid studies with high percentage positive outcomes.     [00:45:50] Emily Becker: Did they split it up so that there was like a group of people that weren’t prayed for and a group that were prayed for?     [00:45:58] Ashley James: In this specific study, they didn’t have a control group. I also looked at another one with a control group. And that’s where they claim, “Well, they – ” you know, someone from the control group could have the same name as someone from the not controlled group. Because they’re – in those studies, they would get like a name to pray for, just the first name. And so they don’t consider the results valid in those situations. Another study conducted a systematic review of the literature on the efficacy of any form of distant healing as a treatment for any medical condition. And it included 23 trials, which totaled 2,774 patients. They met the inclusion criteria. And they were all subjected to analysis of these studies. Thirteen, about 57 percent, yielded statistically significant treatment effects favoring distant healing. And then nine of the studies showed no superiority of distant healing over control interventions. And only one showed a negative effect for distant healing.     [00:47:13] Ashley James: Well, that still sounds better than drug trials where people, like still die. And the drug still gets approved. Only five people died in our study drug approved, right?  Interesting. Like, you’re throwing out numbers like 71 percent, 62 percent, 57 percent. These are all more than 50 percent. Anyone would take these numbers to Vegas. Interesting.     [00:47:43] Emily Becker: We can rely on prayer. But sometimes we got to know what God wants us to do. We got to trust what God wants us to do.     [00:47:50] Ashley James: I like that you brought that up because you said earlier that things come to you through prayer. And that’s how you know or that’s how maybe you’re figuring  out what God wants for you. I always thought prayer was a one way street.     [00:48:05] Emily Becker: No. He wants a relationship. And he doesn’t – we’re not here to fill his plan. He has his own plan. But He can use everybody in ways that you won’t even know. Even people who don’t believe in God, He’ll place them in your life to help you get to the next step. And He wants good things for everyone. If He has chosen you to do something, it’s going to happen.     [00:48:33] Ashley James: Sorry. You’re reminding of Jonah and the Whale.     [00:48:36] Emily Becker: Yeah. I thought a lot about that today, too, before this interview. I was just like, “You know, you can run and run and run. But His will be done.” And a lot of ways – a lot of where I am today, when I first started running a business, I would be like, “God. I need this. I need this. I need this. I need this.” and what I’ve realized is that He wants the favor – I don’t know if this is the right words. I don’t want to be held accountable for this. But He wants retort. He wants us to have this relationship where when He gives me everything that I asked for that He wants people to hear my praise for him. And through that I, personally, am a tool for connecting other people with Him and strengthening their relationship with Him by giving praise. I would ask, “I just really want to help this person and get them to feel better.” Well, a lot of the times, I’d be like, “I need $50. I need $130 to make this happen for this person.” And the condition of I want and I need and all that stuff wasn’t being blessed. He wasn’t doing anything for me. He didn’t want to have anything to do with that. And when I started to ask, “How can I use this to praise you? Can we make this work together so we can help these people? Can I start this business so I can help these people? And then also bring people closer to you, God. And somehow, for me, that’s where I started to become successful, just being open and being myself. I’ve thought about doing a YouTube channel of like, “Let’s be real.” I’m not a good person. I fall all the time. I swear. I’m not the person to look to.  But I feel like God who wants me to share my story to help other people to come to him to prayer. And praying has changed my life so much that God can use a doctor to restore someone’s arm. And that’s an amazing gift – ability. Something [inaudible]  [00:51:08] and I’m not going to be that doctor. I’m going to be a different tool to help people get better and to strengthen their relationship with Him.     [00:51:19] Ashley James: I like that idea, what kind of tool can I be to help others? Helping us get out of our ego. When we’re in service, they’ve looked at mental health and volunteering and service. And they see that those who are suicidal and depressed, like clinically depressed, when they volunteer, when they actively on a regular basis volunteer, it lifts depression, it creates joy. And there’s even studies to show that it increases longevity. That the more that we give ourselves, it fulfills us, it brings us joy. And it also decreases our stress. Surrounds us with a community. Because when you volunteer, most of the time you’re also around others who are volunteering, you create a community, you’re part of a community. But those people end up living longer, happier lives. And so giving of ourselves to help others actually helps us more. It’s like that it comes back to us more. I heard, I think, it was Neale Donald Walsch. I went to one of his weekend workshops about five years ago. And Neale said, “You know, carry around some extra money.” Like, he says he carries around 20s. And he calls it his walking money. Now, he’s a millionaire. So he gives away 20s all day long. Anytime he sees someone in need, he gives them a 20. He says, “You know, maybe for you that’s $1. Maybe have like $5 in your wallet and that’s the $5 you’re going to give away to people this week.” And he goes, “Don’t care if they’re going to buy alcohol with it. Don’t stop the flow. You’re passing on. You’re blessing someone. And let them – you know, maybe they’re going to go buy food with it or pay for their shelter or buy new socks. Whatever they’re going to do with it is their business. You’re just blessing someone in need.” And so anytime he finds someone in need, like maybe someone is struggling to pay their grocery bill, he’ll like jump in and pay for it. Or he’ll pay for the person behind him at Starbucks, who knows, or someone who’s homeless. But he’s always looking to help. And he says, “You give that person like $5 or $1 and you notice how good you feel.” He says. “It’s like a high. You feel more joy from giving than that person will ever get from receiving.” And that’s probably why that client of yours, she loves that cream that you gave her. But you have twice as much joy out of the act of gifting it to her than she’ll ever get from receiving it. And so the business that you’re doing in that, you’re helping clients. But when you do, the charity work you do it is giving you so much purpose and joy. And so when we can connect with others and ask ourselves, “How can I be a tool to help others?” And focusing on that, the ego can’t live there. The ego melts away when we’re in service.     [00:54:48] Emily Becker: Yeah. How can we serve each other? And that can go from your relationship with your husband or your sisters or your neighbors and people you don’t know. Just when you put their needs first, it’s so rewarding. And that goes for my customers too. And I’m not perfect. I’ve had mistakes. I’ve had refunds. I’ve had fallouts. But you can’t let that bring you down. And you just got to keep serving. Because not everyone’s going to like what you have to offer. And you, personally, are always – we’re human, we make mistakes. And you just find ways that you don’t hold on to that. You continue to serve. You continue to help people. And just work hard for others.     [00:55:38] Ashley James: Right. Well, every business has returns. And as long as you learn from the returns, like a broken bottle in shipping or something, you learn from it. And then you give great customer service. And you don’t let ego get in the way. Then you’re growing as a business. You’re a real business now. This isn’t a hobby. So you’re going to have these bumps. But as long as you learn from them, your business will keep improving.     [00:56:06] Ashley James: Speaking of praise — well, not praise. But speaking of my business, I am now a legitimate company with the Department of Wisconsin revenue. Anyways, I’m a real business now. And I have taxes to pay. And I am the owner of Emily’s Remedies. I’m no longer just doing this as myself. I have the business. And that might not seem like a whole lot different. But for me, it’s this huge blessing. I am functioning more as a company. And that’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And to operate less as a hobby and more as a professional. Because everybody deserves that professional quality. And as a hobby, I was pushing out orders from three days to a month. And that’s no way to treat a customer. Since this business, it’s been my goal to get orders out right away. To start bringing what I have to my community – my new community since they moved. And just to treat people with – and you have a responsibility of people’s money and their expectations of the product. Every single jar, everything that I make, all the soaps that I’ve introduced are made with the same quality as the very first one I ever made.     [00:57:31] Ashley James: For yourself.     [00:57:33] Emily Becker: For myself, yeah.     [00:57:33] Ashley James: And for your family and the people you love. You know, I wish every business owner was as conscientious and caring as you. You put your heart and soul into it. And we can hear that. And I like following you on Facebook to see – every time you put post orders, every time you mail them out, you announce it. And you don’t rush when you make your products. You make it so that the quality is there. But you do rush – once they’re in the jars, you do rush as much as you can to get the packages out because you want people to get their orders as fast as possible. And you put so much into it. This is exactly what it’s like to start a business from the ground up. And I know that we’re going to see you, like, on Shark Tank in a few years or something like that. You’re going to keep growing and we’re going to see you continue to expand. And you will always keep the same amount of hurt as you did with the very first bottle or jar. And that’s what we want from every business owner is this conscientious business. This is what we want from every single business owner, to have a love of their customer and a love the quality of their product and to never compromise either one. And that’s why I love buying something from you or from someone who is doing it with their own hands. And you’re investing with their own time and energy to be able to create the quality products. Knowing that it’s pure ingredients. So I love that. I love that you’re this example of the kind of business owner that we all should be that takes the time to give great customer service and really, really cares about each customer.     [00:59:23] Emily Becker: Yeah. I really love having a connection with my customers because every order and then I said or – I mean, you know, most of the orders I get, I am like, “Oh, please give me all feedback. I want to know everything that’s bad. And I want to know what other ways I can help the these people who are ordering.” Because I love when you start having connection and conversation with your customers. You get to know them hen you can serve them better the next time. And that’s my favorite part is just this expanse of connections that I’m getting. And it gets a little bit hard sometimes because there’s a lot of people who want to talk to me. But I’m so grateful for all of them. And I try my best to be there for all of them.     [01:00:13] Ashley James: Can we go back to when you first started to pray? You weren’t really – I mean, you said you believe in God but you didn’t really have a relationship with God. And you weren’t really, like, Christian. But you’re very sick. You had your alopecia and your other health issues that you talked more about in Episode 340. Can you remember the first time you prayed for your health?     [01:00:39] Emily Becker: I remember – okay. So I was living in fear in my head. And I knew my husband was a very strong Christian. And I would be like, “Oh, can you please pray for this.” And wake him up and like, “I’m scared.” Just I don’t know where. Like, I can’t sleep or whatever. And I say, “Can you pray for me? And he would. And that’s when I realized I need to take responsibility and action for myself. I sought help. I called a woman who helped me learn how to pray. She’s an incredible woman. And she taught me to say things that I used to be afraid of saying. Like, “In the name of Jesus Christ, please give me this.” Or, “In the name of Jesus Christ, evict these thoughts,” and stuff like that. And that’s when she was teaching me how to pray. Because before, if I tried to pray, it was like, “Please don’t let this happen to me, you know, like evict them.” Instead of someone of faith and courage and confidence.   [01:01:47] Ashley James: You’re focusing on what you didn’t want to have happen.     [01:01:49] Emily Becker: Yeah. So she taught me how to pray. And I can almost remember the day, I want to say it was January 4, late at night, in 2012. I started to pray that ,”God -” instead of that I wouldn’t be bald anymore. That God would bring me healing. That was my first prayer. I would still sometimes break down and be like, “I don’t want this to happen to me.” But now and then I’d remind myself. I knew all the things that were negative. I don’t like looking at – I’m like, “I don’t want to be – when I look in the mirror, God, I want to see someone beautiful.” Instead of praying for that, I wanted healing. And then within a month, my husband was like, “This doctor is in town. We got to go to the seminar.” Just like, I wasn’t even thinking, “Oh, he’s going to help me with my hair.” I wasn’t even hopeful. I was like, “Oh, yeah, we got to go get healthier.” Maybe my husband was more conscious what was going on. But for me, it was just being like someone taking my hand and guiding me. It was then – oh gosh – that was that was really hard because I used everything. Even the good things, I was fearful of, you know? But I was like, “Okay. God, please, I need you in my life. I need your help.” I started praying for healing. And then after that, it just all started to happen. And then after practice and just experience, I stopped focusing and praying for things not to happen. I started praying for all the good things. And then when I was going through this prayer stage of learning how to pray, I had this unbelievable desire to cleanse both physically and spiritually of everything that was eating away at me. I even did a private – I did my own baptism. I was just like, “I need to be washed.” I got in the bathtub. I was home alone. I looked online, I was like, “What do I say to be baptized?” And some people think you need to have someone there to do it for you. And I did that later in life where I was baptized with someone. But I washed myself clean. And then I started to work on evicting those negative thoughts. And for me, it was a spiritual experience. As I cleansed my spiritual being, I was able to work towards healing my physical being. And as I prayed to God for healing and for all these burdens and weights to be lifted from me of my past and from my health, he was more than willing to do it. And sometimes it was, God it’s a yes. The answer is yes, no, or later. I find a lot more that he has a later in there, in my personal experience. It’s like, “Okay. This is what your heart wants. We’re going to work on you to help you get there.” That’s how I am here today with a business, with long hair, with confidence, feeling beautiful, and just a completely different person, really.     [01:05:20 Ashley James: Beautiful. I love the transformation that you’ve made since 2012. It’s beautiful. You’ve grown your health spiritually and attended your health physically, and mentally and emotionally. You know, you’re looking at all aspects of your life and bring it all into balance. And if we were to go back and talk to Emily from 2012, she would not believe that the Emily now could be possible. Right?     [01:05:52] Emily Becker: Yeah. Absolutely.     [01:05:56] Ashley James: And so no matter how bad it gets in life – and that’s something I really want us to teach the young generation, Generation Z I believe they’re calling it or Zed, between the ages of 10 and 24. Because in the last ten years, suicide has risen to be the second cause – second leading cause of death among –     [01:06:19] Emily Becker: Isn’t that horrible?     [01:06:21] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s risen. It’s something crazy like 52 percent or something. But it’s totally skyrocketed because of social media, because of the way our culture has changed drastically over one generation. They’re left feeling devastated if one bad thing happens or online. Because the bullying is constant. They feel isolated, alone. And how they’re feeling right now is it’s like how they’re going to feel for the rest of their life.     [01:06:54] Emily Becker: Yeah. You don’t feel like anything good could happen when you’re developing. Everything is forever. And if you’re being bullied, you feel like this is how you’re going to feel forever.     [01:07:12] Ashley James: And it isn’t. The Emily that was depressed, and afraid, and scared, and afraid of everything even good, like you said, back in 2012, that Emily could not perceive of the Emily you are now. And yet you worked on it bit by bit. And you addressed your health on all levels, meaning physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. You addressed it on all levels. And you looked at, also, getting outside of your own head and helping others. And look at what you’ve evolved. And that’s what we can all do. Wherever we are in our life right now, no matter what our age is, no matter what our health level is, the person we are now is nothing compared to the magnificent person that we can become. And we are [inaudible] [01:08:08] right now. But we can become this unrecognizable –     [01:08:13] Emily Becker: You realize how magnificent you are.     [01:08:15] Ashley James: Right. The sky is the limit. But for those who are depressed, who have anxiety, who have fear, who have thought of suicide, life in a few years can be so brilliant, so amazing that you wouldn’t want to give it up for anything. Like, it could just be so amazing. And you can grow that even in chronic illness. Because I know, Emily, back in 2012, you thought that’s how your life is going to be for the rest of your life. And doctors will tell you that you’re going to have this condition for the rest of your life. Many people are suffering with a chronic condition and they’ve been told by doctors that they’re going to have it for the rest of their life. And that doesn’t mean they have to suffer though. That doesn’t mean you know –  we can reverse diseases. We can manage them. We can gain health. Even in the face of terminal illness, we can still increase the quality of life and bring in joy. So it’s always more. You can always get better. But we have to look at every aspect of health. So not just diet. Diet is great. And emotional health and mental health and spiritual health looking at it all and start by asking, by praying, by asking and focus on what you want. Can you give us some steps for those who maybe are rusty at praying or haven’t prayed before? And have been inspired by what you’ve shared and they want to start praying. Can you share some steps, like how do we pray?     [01:10:00] Emily Becker: I went through the same thing. I had no idea how to pray. What I find to be useful is some people like to do affirmations. And I’ve never – I’m so busy that I don’t go looking for someone’s [inaudible] [01:10:16]. What I like to do is, I like to get a piece of paper. What I’ll do is, I will write down who I want to pray for, what I’d like for myself, and also something to give, if I have something to give praise about. And I’ll write it down and then just the act of writing it down, gets your mind to start to think about it. And then when you’re ready, for me, personally, it’s that moment like after the kids go to bed. I’ll be like, “I have this on my heart and mind.” Or the next time I see that piece of paper – I leave it right at my nightstand. It’s usually just one thing. One does five things. But really, you can just start with one thing. It can be something simple like, “God, I’ve been really struggling in this area. I want to start to have more energy for work and for my kids and for my husband.” So it can be something as simple as having more energy. And then when I wake up in morning, I see that paper. I look at it and I’ll be like, “Oh, yeah. That’s important to meet God. God, this is important to me. Can you please help me?” So from this interview, I reached out to you because I want to thank your supporters. I can’t talk to everybody. So I wanted to reach out to all my customers somehow. Because I get a lot of emails and I also want to let them know that I’m thinking of them. So for me, that’s what’s on my heart. And so I’m going to pray with you if that’s okay, Ashley.     [01:11:52] Ashley James: Sure.     [01:11:54] Emily Becker: And just to give people an idea how to pray. Because sometimes we don’t pray because we don’t hear it and we’re not around it. It’s not something we exercise. And someone else starts. I like to give praise. I like to acknowledge God as God. I like to give thanks  for the good things that he’s given me. And then I ask for what’s on my heart. And then I can clear it with trust and confidence and faith. And a lot of how I got this is from the Lord’s prayer that Jesus Himself prayed. The people are asking, “How do we pray?” And then He prayed. He told them to pray the Lord’s Prayer. And you can Google that. But I’m going to do my own prayer. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for this opportunity to be with Ashley James on the Learn True Health podcast. And for bringing this opportunity to me. Thank you so much, Lord, for all the all the people who have reached out to me. We’re grateful for a relationship. I trust that they are grateful for me. And I am so grateful for how you are using them to transform me. Lord, I thank you for this opportunity to be on a podcast praying. This is incredible 2020 or 2018 to be here giving praise. I ask that my supporters know that you want good things for them. And they can rely on you and that they will continue to come seek your help. And to be blessed by the things that are given to them. I ask that you place people and tools in their lives to bring them health and healing, both spiritually and physically. We pray these things in Jesus Christ’s name your Son, amen. And it can be a lot shorter than that.     [01:13:57] Ashley James: I hear that you started out with a lot of gratitude.   [01:14:00] Emily Becker: Yes. Yes. I do. And it helps me to condition my heart to not be selfish. Because I told you about that in the past where I tried to be helpful to people. But I was never grateful. And that changed. That also helped me in my prayers and my growth.     [01:14:30] Ashley James: So you would help people but then you weren’t really – there wasn’t gratitude there. So it was still, maybe, selfish intentions. Which when we’re living – when we’re coming from, the selfishness, we’re coming from the fear. We’re afraid of the lack of – so how much can we really help others when we’re focusing on how little money we have or little time we have or little energy we have. How much could we actually help others? And then if we go to help others, then we resent them because they’ve taken off our precious time, money, or energy. And so it becomes this ego of resentment and feeling like they should be more grateful for what I’ve done for them because I had to sacrifice my time and whatever. And it doesn’t become rewarding. Because we’re coming from ego. And our fear, we’re coming from this fear of a lack of. And when we bring gratitude and we become grateful for the money we do have and the time we do have. Even though we have a little bit of it, right? What do we have and become grateful for it and thankful for what we do have and ask for help. And ask for – you know, focusing on the positive direction that we want, the outcome to go in for ourselves and others. Coming from that, that kind of bounty focusing on – because you know what? Even though I could be perceiving myself as not having a lot of money, I am so fortunate to have a roof over my head. I’m so fortunate to have food in my fridge, to have the electricity on, to have the heat on . I could spend the next hour talking about how grateful I am for all the things I do have that other people don’t. And I could take a little bit of my money at the end of the month and see if I could help someone else become a little bit more comfortable. Maybe handout blankets. I could go to a thrift store and buy clean used blankets and go hand them out to the shelters. Or I could go through all my closets and things that we’re not using and donate it to the battered women’s shelter. You know what I mean? We can help people become more fortunate. Right? So it doesn’t mean it has to be a sacrifice for us. But if we’re focusing on the ego and all the stuff we don’t have, then from that perspective, we can’t actually be of service and help others. But I love that most of your prayer is actually gratitude and grounding yourself in how grateful you are for what we have.     [01:17:19] Emily Becker: Hold on, I’m just breathing. I’m practicing the breath work here. And I am so grateful. Well, I mean, as much as I’d like to win souls for Jesus, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here – well, I think, as Christians and as anyone you should surround yourself and try to serve and reach as many people as you can whatever you are. If you were a doctor who could sew a finger back on, you wouldn’t want to only surround yourself with other doctors. You’re going to want to help everybody you can. You want to find the person who’s got the missing finger. You want to be that tool for them. And I think it’s a great opportunity for me to be able to be this tool for some people. And that said  alone, I have so many who are tools for me. I have family that have really helped me along the way spiritually. Just like the 2012 me, I don’t think I would have known I can be who I’ve become without them. I don’t – there’s a purpose for everything. And I have a lot of more confidence and a lot more things. And for me, it’s a spiritual growth.     [1:19:09] Ashley James: I love that you’re willing to learn. And I love that you’re vulnerable enough to come share with us, share your experience. So in your prayers, have you ever felt the God is talking to you? Have you ever gotten a message?     [01:19:25] Emily Becker: Oh, yes.     [01:19:26] Ashley James: Can you talk a little bit about that? So I was raised Anglican. I have friends that are Mormon. And they’ve shared with me that in the LDS church, they incorporate fasting, meditation, deep, deep prayer. And the elders in the church are going to make like a decision about something that they fast and they do deep long meditative prayers. And that they receive answers. And that shocked me because I was kind of raised to believe that it’s a one way street. That you just – you know, you recite the Lord’s Prayer, you do communion, you basically state where you believe.     [01:20:12] Emily Becker: [Inaudible]  [01:20:12].     [01:20:14] Ashley James: Right. Right. I believe in the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. You just repeat these things that you’re taught to say in church. And that you pray. But there’s no God talking to you. Like, it’s a one way street. This is just how I was raised. And then I started to hear from other people and other religions or other – I don’t know -some people believe Mormonism is totally separate from Christianity. Others believe it’s just like a division or flavor of Christianity. But basically, I’ve heard from many different people, that they were raised differently than me, that in different churches that they’re actually receiving messages. And so some people would say, “Well, that must be Satan.” Or other people say, “Well, that’s just your brain. That’s just your brain filling in the gaps. That’s nothing.” So this is again where faith comes in, right? Because what do you believe? And there’s no – no one can prove it or disprove it, right? But what is your experience? So your experiences your reality. And your reality is not my reality. But that’s where faith comes in. So I was really surprised to hear from many people that they’re actually receiving information when they do go through prayer. And a dear, dear friend of mine who’s had two near death experiences, he’s died twice. And he has recollection – very clear recollection of meeting God both times. And he receives information when he prays. And he is a wonderful being and I love him. And he gets filled with – he says he’s filled with the Holy Spirit. He gets goosebumps. And he is dead on. He actually has been – I don’t want to say prophesizes. But he’ll be told things or know things before it happens. And he’s very, very Christian. And so he’ll get goosebumps. His whole body is filled with goosebumps. You can look at his skin, it’s all goosebumps. And anytime he goes to make a decision in his life, he prays and then he gets filled with goosebumps. If that’s the direction you’re supposed to go in. And he says anytime, let’s say, he really wants something. Like he really wants to buy this car and he prays about it, but he doesn’t get filled with the Holy Spirit. But then, he buys it anyway because it’s like ego. His ego really wants it. The car breaks down immediately. It’s like every single time. But whenever he makes a decision no matter how – like buying a house, like big, big decisions, or little decisions, anytime he makes a decision and he’s filled with the Holy Spirit and when he’s praying, and he goes for it, it always works out. And he goes, it’s like 100 percent success rate. So like I hear from these different people as I’m talking to them but their experience of prayer and it’s very personal. So I just wanted to hear from your very personal experience when you pray, how does God talk to you?     [01:23:17] Emily Becker: This is very personal. Well, I get all – I when I asked for things, a lot of times what I receive – and I think it’s because I’m still trying to figure filter out language here. But I’ll ask for things, I will get a clear yes or no or a jumble sentence that I don’t understand. I don’t think my confidence, my faith, or that I’m ready for his answer is what I get. But I do get a lot of yeses and noes. And as you pray, I’ve actually invited – you can invite the Holy Spirit into your home. And I did a lot of that. When I was going through my fear phase, I would pray and ask – I would welcome the Holy Spirit into my home. And you can feel that physically, just like you said, your friend feels it. You get chills. And there’s this new atmosphere in your home that’s brighter and lighter and warmer. And that’s what I experienced. I have family who’s – oh, I wonder if I need his permission. I won’t use any names. But I have family who – when he challenged me to do something because he had an incredible experience. He said he was able to pray from the third heaven. And honestly, I don’t know what that means. But he was able to pray and be in heaven just for a moment and looked down on earth. And he challenged me to try that. And out of fear and understanding, I haven’t done it. I think a lot of times that’s why I can’t understand all of the messages from God is that I still am growing in my faith. How much do I honestly trust them with take full control of everything. And it’s a process.  And I have prayed for – I’m trying to think – because I go through phases where I pray more often and speak – just like you do with any relationship, you go through phases where you connect stronger at times with someone. I was praying in private. And I would ask – I wonder what it was. Sometimes it helps to remember what you’re going through. I know what it was. Okay. My husband had – we went through this long process of getting his remote work approved.     [01:26:42] Ashley James: To work from home for his job?     [01:26:44] Emily Becker: Yeah. For his job. So we could move out of the cities and into his hometown. And when he did that, I started praying. And I was like – I even asked, I was like, “God, will his remote work be approved?” And I got a single word answer yes. But then I was so impatient. It just was such a long, ongoing process. I’d be like, “Okay. God, when is this going to happen?” And then I started to lose faith that it was going to happen. And then I asked again, I was like, “God, is his remote work request going to be approved?” And I got another yes. And I was like, “God, can you please make it, you know, next week?” And then I get that garbled and I don’t understand. And then my own thoughts and wouldn’t be able to raise receive anything. But from that alone, I learned to just be patient. I think before earlier in this interview, we talked about how a lot of his answers in my personal experience have been later. Because God wants miracles to happen but sometimes He’s setting everything up like a domino effect to give you your answer. Well, He already has His answer but He’s setting it up so it can happen wonderfully for Him and be good for you. I asked once – you know, this is really personal. And I don’t know what the results are going to be because it’s – the prayer hasn’t been answered. But I prayed once for my father-in-law’s eyes  to return sight. And he has gone through all different kinds of health adventures, I would say. He’s done every diet. He’s done everything even that I have done to try to restore his sight. And it’s only gotten worse over the years. And I’ve been personally praying that he would be able to see. And once in faith asked God, I was praying for him. I was like, “God, my father-in-law, will he be able to see again?” And I got us cleaning straight answer yes. And now, in faith, I don’t know what to do. It’s like, “Okay. Well, is it going to be that he’s going to be able to see again when he gets to heaven?” Or, “Is he going to be healed on earth? Are we going to see this miraculous healing?” And I don’t know what the answer is. But I’m going to continue to pray for him. And to just wait and see and trying to receive God. And you had – I know I sidetracked a little bit. You had asked if I’ve heard God. And the answer is yes. And sometimes I don’t understand what he’s saying. And sometimes it is a very clear message. And as far as the tingles and the chills, I get them right now when you were talking earlier in truth about the kids being depressed. I could feel that chill and that truth. And God is the Creator of all things that are true. And when you can – you have to have faith. And I don’t know if everyone gets the same tools. Because there’s some people who have reported having out of body experiences. Well, not all of us are going to have that. Not all of us are going to have the same relationship because we all have a unique relationship with God. He’s going to give us different gifts when we ask for them, or when we try to use them, or whatever the situation is. But when you do, you want to do it and to serve Him, I think, is the keys. How can you use these gifts to serve Him. And for me, I think a lot of how he wants us to serve Him is to praise His son and to just keep growing in our relationship with Him.     [01:32:21] Ashley James: Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experiences, Emily. Is there anything left unsaid or is there anything you really want to make sure that you shared in this interview today?     [01:32:33] Emily Becker: Oh, honestly, Ashley, I shared way more than I thought. I felt so called to be on this. I don’t know. Try praying. And I love hearing from the Learn True Health community. They’re just incredible whether they’re asking for prayers or they’re just, like asking, for an inch cream. I love hearing from them. And they’re not all – the ones that reach out to me aren’t all Christians. I get all kinds of emails from people. It’s just really fun. I love it. I love hearing from everyone. And if you want to say something and you want to start a conversation, let’s start a conversation. That’s how we’re going to grow. We need to be ourselves and to relax a little bit in these awkward conversations.     [01:33:46] Ashley James: I like that, relax a little bit in these awkward conversations. Just today on in the Learn True Health Facebook Group, I was having a good discussion with one of the listeners about an episode. She felt as though lately the podcast is more biased around diet in terms of being whole food plant based. And I pointed out to her that I had just a few episodes ago done an episode about a diet that is pretty much 100 percent meat based. But because I had then a few episodes later had an interview with Chef AJ, who’s vegan, that then it might upset people who aren’t vegan. Or vegans might get upset when I have someone on that promotes a meat diet. Right? And my –     [01:34:30] Emily Becker: [Inaudible] [01:34:30] show is that you have everybody. That’s what I love about your show is I can – whether or not I agree with – you had someone on for mushrooms. They mentioned whether it is – gosh – [inaudible] [01:34:50] but something else. Essentially an herbal drug. And even though I disagree with the use of that –     [01:35:04] Ashley James: Are you talking about microdosing psilocybin?     [01:35:07] Emily Becker: I think so.     [01:35:08] Ashley James: Yes. Microdosing psilocybin, it’s not for getting people high. It’s microdosing. And it’s a really interesting interview. And I am not – again, I totally agree with you, I’m not promoting taking street drugs to hallucinate or anything. But I did. I did an interview on some kind of shaman ritual in Peru, Ayahuasca. I was having a brain fart. I did a whole interview on Ayahuasca. And it’s like I’m not saying everyone should go do this or everyone should go – I’m not saying everyone should do one diet or another diet. If we just open our minds and take in information from different people and different points of view, listen for the gold. Because you can learn from someone who eats a different diet than you? It doesn’t mean that you should go eat that diet. And we can learn from people of different spiritual faiths to help us strengthen our faith. Because maybe you hear something and you’re like, “Wow. This makes me want to go investigate something more.” It’s not about converting anyone. I loved that you said, like, saving souls. Although I love hearing like – I do love getting emails from listeners. And I’ve gotten several of them having them say, “I’ve never gone to a Naturopath. And now I’m seeing one.” Or two listeners have written me and said, “I was in med school. I’m just going to become an MD. And now I’m going to become a Naturopathic physician because of your show.” So those are the kind of like – I like to save people from allopathic medicine when they could be using holistic medicine. I love hearing that kind of conversion. I really want to empower listeners to find their health and build their own health by gaining the goal that they can gain from every single guest. Because the guests don’t have to have the same point of view as you. But that doesn’t mean – let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because when guests might believe in eating meat or not eating meat and you don’t agree with them. It doesn’t mean that that everything they say is not valid, right? And so we have this tendency right now in our social media day and age to do these mass generalizations. Where if someone voted for someone that we don’t like, all of a sudden it’s a master analyzation. We don’t like any of their decisions. How could they be trusted because they believe in this one thing. And that’s how we’re manipulated, unfortunately. So we need to put our bias aside and say, “You know what? It’s okay for other people have different opinions. And I can learn from everyone. Everyone matters. And I can learn from everyone because I’m listening for the gold. I’m listening for my own lessons. And I think that especially when we pray and ask for help that that helped might come in the form of hearing some little gold nuggets of wisdom from other people of other faiths or other diets or other health practices. And it doesn’t mean we have to adopt what they do. But we can learn from everyone. I know my listeners do that. They’re listening to people – a variety of people so we can all learn and grow. So thank you for coming on the show. And this might be controversial to talk about prayer and God and Christianity and just faith and the power of prayer. And the idea that we can set our intentions by focusing on gratitude. That we can volunteer our time to improve our happiness. That we can free ourselves from anxiety by focusing on what we want instead of we don’t want. These topics are incredibly beneficial. And for some people it might be controversial and that’s okay. It’s okay to be controversial. But our intention is to help people. Not to hurt them. So let’s just keep helping people. And keep having an open mind. And so thank you everyone for listening. And thank you, Emily, for coming and sharing your story. I really, really hope and pray that today’s episode has helped people, has helped the listeners to give them some new tools. And maybe just opened up their mind to start thinking about their healing practices and maybe incorporating gratitude and prayer in them. That’d be great to see what happens in their life if they do.     [01:40:01] Emily Becker: Thank you so much for having me here. I am also going to give you and your listeners a 10 percent off if they ever shop at my store online, emilysremedies.com.     [01:40:13] Ashley James: Okay. Awesome. Well, the links to everything that you do are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcasts at learntruehealth.com, emilysremedies.com. Thank you, Emily for coming on the show. This has been wonderful.     [01:40:26] Emily Becker: Awesome. Thank you, Ashley.     [01:40:28] Ashley James: Yeah. And you know, I know you were nervous and you did a stellar job. So good job.     [01:40:34] Emily Becker: Awesome. Thank you.     [01:40:35] Outro: -to optimize your health. Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   Get Connected to Emily Becker! Etsy - Emily's Remedies Remedies By Emily Facebook – Emily Becker Facebook – Remedies By Emily Instagram Twitter Check out other interviews of Emily Becker! Episode 340 – Natural Remedies For The Hair