Dr. Kelly Brogan
Appearances
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Truly, what would it be to live in your body where it's never a problem? Your insomnia is literally not a problem. Your diarrhea is not a problem. There are no problems. right, that your body is expressing, to reprogram on that level means that you have come into an orientation towards yourself that is like a radical yes. Having a random illness that has an ICD-10 code allows you to what? Take...
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
But when you allow it to exist and move, and again, I used to be really, I did Kundalini yoga teacher training. I used to be really into more cathartic expressions, right? Like punching the pillow, screaming, and there's an absolute place for that. But the kind of maturational development I'm now interested in, there's almost nothing to see from the outside in.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And that kind of alchemy can only happen when there's a really strong container, like a kind of a this movement happens and this motion occurs and you are, I call it self-husbanding, but you are, you're there in devoted presence. And it was interesting because the last thing I'll say is that I have a colleague, Yolanda Norris-Clark, and she is a, I would call her like a birth advocate.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And she wrote a book actually called Portal. and we were talking on my podcast about it, and she was talking about how her more profoundly blissful births out of her 10 babies, yeah, there was like nothing to see, right? There was no moaning, no screaming, no like movie level like catharsis, right? And that kind of being with, right? So you're not getting it out.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
You're not even really moving anything. It's just becoming something. you-ness, right? And that reclamation of your vital force, it's yours. You came here to embody it. That's literally why you incarnate. It is yours. So that embrace of it, that approval of it, that integration with it opens up exactly the experience of creative inspiration and fun and play and pleasure.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And the most important thing I would put on the list these days is a relaxed system, that isn't otherwise available through the the habits that we have of relating to ourselves with and through rejection.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Yes. And this has been the through line, I guess, in my work from the health reclamation side of things. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune, so-called autoimmune condition called Hashimoto's thyroiditis, what feels like a million lifetimes ago now, after my first pregnancy. And I was a completely, like total normie, like a completely...
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
in the matrix like card carrying cult member of the allopathic medical system. And somehow I had this dissonant inner opportunity arise that, you know, where I just said, I don't want to take a prescription for the rest of my life. Like I am not interested.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
This feels like the million-dollar question, and I love just diving right in to the deep end. Yeah, to talk about the shadow of fawning and just the hollowness that ultimately characterizes a life built on the good girl archetype. My primary qualification, I mean, you mentioned that I'm a psychiatrist. I was a neuroscience major in college.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And I also had a lot of patients at the time who were on Synthroid and were taking a thyroid support medication and they just didn't ever really feel well. So I also had that disincentive. And so that set me off. My investment in not taking a prescription for the rest of my life set me off on
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
on this path to exploring what my other option was, which was to stay with myself, to be on the team of my own body and to see what the message was like, why the hell is this happening? Like, what does it mean in my narrative that I have developed, um, you know, these symptoms postpartum and that I could, you know, view this as, um, my body is broken. Something is wrong with me. I need to fix it.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So colluding against the body, typically with the conventional medical system, is so programmed into our awareness that I actually have quite a small group of colleagues who have broken out of that.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So it's so rare that even if you understand a lot of victim dynamics in relationship, so you understand the zero-sum game of a romantic partnership, wherever you are finger-pointing and blaming your partner, you're fundamentally undermining the capacity that this union has to offer you the experience that you want. A lot of people can start to get that. How can I stay on my partner's team?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
How can we repair in this relationship? more coherent way. Well, often that invites you to learn self containment and emotional mastery and taking responsibility and the kind of shadow integration you and I were just discussing. But for whatever reason, applying that same rubric to the body is very, very, very challenging.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And I could come up with all sorts of metaphysical reasons why that is the way it is. But most people, when they experience some symptom, I mean, whether it's like a migraine or something more, they find a lump in their breast or their hair is falling out. They need it to stop. They need it to go away.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And they come into their child energy that says somebody outside, help me, fix me, like make this experience of being in this body this way, stop. And so what happens is you end up in that victim triangle, like you end up colluding with a rescuer of some variety. And this could be literally a supplement to
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So it could be anything that you have decided has the power to fix you and to make what your body is doing stop. You collude with that against yourself. And so that self-betrayal, that triangulation against the self ends up being the foundational premise from which you are then trying to inhabit this body when challenging emotional things are happening relationally, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So I like to rewind, I guess, back to the basics. And I do think that coming into an understanding of the body's wisdom. And I don't say that like Hallmark party, right? Like, like I like truly, what would it be to live in your body where it's never a problem? Your insomnia is literally not a problem, right? Your diarrhea is not a problem. There are no problems anywhere. Right.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
That your body is expressing to reprogram on that level means that you have come into an orientation towards yourself that is like a radical yes.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
I have been very invested for a long time in cracking the code of human behavior and attempting to validate so many aspects of our lived experience through psychology. You know, the microscope and my primary credential is that I am many decades into good girl programming and have in so many ways achieved the promise of what is on offer through the sort of.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Well, it's interesting because I was one of the first like 300 in the world psychiatrists to specialize in medicating pregnant and breastfeeding women. Like when I was, you know, in my conventional avatar, I... believe so much in the pharma model that I actually prescribed to pregnant and breastfeeding women. That was my specialty, right? All kinds of meds.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And I had many, many, many, many women who were multiply diagnosed, which means that they had comorbidities like autoimmune conditions, lupus and, you know, rheumatoid things and bowel things. And of course, Hashimoto's extremely extremely common in the population that I was working with.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So when I was diagnosed, like I said, my no thank you was informed by what I already saw to be on offer from the system that I was aligned with. Okay. So I was not in a rejection moment yet. And my, I don't know, call it sacred laziness, whatever it was, whatever led me to not want to deal with taking a prescription was led me to a naturopath. So I went and I saw, I was in New York at the time.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
I saw a naturopath and, you know, I was very identified with my like academic self at that point. And she was not like burning sage, no crystals. Okay. It was like not that kind of vibe. And that was perfect for me. So this was like a totally divinely ordained experience. And she was extremely academic, brilliant woman. And, she started me on a new diet. Okay. So I'm Italian American.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
I grew up, you know, eating literally cheese and bread and McDonald's. I've always been naturally like thin, which sounds awesome, except the shadow of it is that you end up treating your body like a rental car. I mean, I never exercised a McDonald's. Like I drank six cups of coffee a day. And this was the relationship that I had to my body because I was never invited to
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
to have any other kind of relationship, right? So literally decades into my incarnation, I'm still figuring out what my body wants, right? So I changed my diet. And I did it because I had a why that felt more compelling than eating the bagels and pizza or whatever. And the why was the liberation from... the burden of like taking this prescription, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So I committed and I committed like hardcore. And I watched in the space of, I don't know. So I went on, you know, like armor thyroid, nature thyroid kind of a thing. And if you know, you know, so there's like all these different, right? I'm sure a lot of the women listening know what I'm talking about. All these different kinds of glandular versions of the prescription or whatever.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And within about a year or so, I came off everything and it's been decades now. And I, well, not decades, a decade, almost two. And I have never looked back. By cleaning up your diet. Well, that was the primary thing that I did, okay? When I started to apply this to my practice, I recognized that there was like... something bigger at play.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Because I cleaned up my diet, I put this into remission on paper, and then I was given a book called Anatomy of an Epidemic by a colleague. And I read this book because I had already had this experience of dissonance. In medical school, we don't learn about nutrition. It's like, who cares? That's not important. We're here to talk about actual legitimate things.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And because of my experience, I was opened up to consider some of what I hadn't Which is that you could put a condition like this into remission, which is that, you know, nutrition matters. And I read this book and this book was about essentially the ways in which medications and specifically psychiatric medications are driving. disability, like mental health disability.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So it's basically an indictment of psychotropic medications, the same ones that I prescribe. So I say all of this to illustrate that I was at this moment of like a fork in the road of my story as a woman. And I ended up like
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
external validation that is available for women today, thanks to, you know, the feminist agenda. You know, there's so many ways that we can come into a sense of security. And I've achieved so much of that, that I don't have any sort of like any farther to go up the summit of the mountain. Like I can't quite tell myself like, oh, it's still over there.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
starting my activist career on the back of that book, where I was so ignited by this and the simultaneous experience that I was having of healing myself without the system in spite of the system that I took my sword aloft and I dedicated the next, well, I don't know, decade of my life to helping women come off of medications and exposing the dark side of all these medications. So
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
what was actually going on there, right? Like what actually was being invited through this diagnosis in my life story? Why might I have had to have experienced that? Right. And in your case, I would say like, I'm sure there is some relevance to the timing of your initial diagnosis.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And the moment, if there is one that you decide, I want to, you know, enter through the portal and come out the other side, med free, which again is, There's no better or worse. It's just an adventure, right? Like you might try that adventure at some point. There will be significance to that moment, right? And so for me, this moment was like,
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
the individuation journey for me, fighting the bad daddy, right? And bad mommy, I call it, you know, mommy medicine, daddy government, right? Like becoming a notorious, internationally notorious, like anti-pharma activist. Like that was my adolescent phase of individuation that was ignited by this very experience that of course manifested in my throat chakra, if you will, right? So it all had to
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
be this way. Like it literally needed to be exactly, I wrote it this way. That's what I believe anyway. And so when I saw, when I could see and appreciate the significance of it, it helped me to neutralize any poor me, no fair energy that might've been living underneath the the impulse to heal this, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Because the victim threads that come through our identification with our diagnoses are very real. They're there for a reason. And alchemizing those into, it had to be this way and I couldn't have designed it better is a part of the narrative evolution of, and reclamation of the diagnosis. So anyway, all that is to say that because I now have this
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
purpose that had somehow effervesced out of this diagnosis, I developed a protocol to help women move through this experience. And I started to recognize pretty quickly that, yeah, I can prescribe the diet I recommend. I can prescribe the detox I recommend. I can prescribe the like, here's how you send your nervous system a signal of safety, contemplative practice I recommend.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
But what really needs to happen here is you need to be defragged in your programming. You need to like have the opportunity to expand the permission field of what you can believe. Okay. And that's where my mentor, Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, who came in and divine timing to offer me. And I would even say like anoint me with his belief field and,
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And the gaslight just sort of spontaneously resolved for me in an instant where I saw, you know, it's not here, right? Like whatever that strategy is that says, if you secure approval, and approval, by the way, is not only like, you're nice, we like you, right? So approval is also collective approval, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And his, if you don't, if anybody listening doesn't know who he was, you know, he was arguably one of, in my opinion, the most important clinicians to exist in our lifetime, where he had 27 years of validated clinical practice putting into remission terminal cancers and neurodegenerative and other degenerative illnesses with long-term remission.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
I'm talking stage four pancreatic cancer with 34 years of survival. It's an unmatch in the conventional world. And he did this for decades. And I had the opportunity to be mentored by him in the last year of his life. And he translated to me. this like unshakable alignment with the body. And that the restoration of that is the framework within which all of this healing happens, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
That's how you get to the place where whatever is going on is not a problem you're eradicating. So. when women come off of these medications, be it thyroid or otherwise, if they do so from the get this thing off me kind of energy, it's like if you leave a toxic relationship with a big fuck you, you know, all y'all know what happens.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
You're taking that guy with you sometimes for years of your life, okay? Hating him and wanting him to be punished and hoping he's miserable, like lying in a ditch, right? So when you can, you know, come in peace and go in love from these experiences, you can integrate the memo, right? You can integrate the message. And so the impulse has to be, in my opinion, from that place.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So my specialty became taking women off of medications. And I did that for many years. And it only worked because it was not, these meds are bad, let's get rid of them, right? It was like, I'm actually ready to look at myself now. I'm actually interested in what this is all about. And I'm here for me. I'm here for it. And so usually there's some kind of a ritual.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And again, I have my bias, obviously, because I have my own protocol. But there's some kind of a ritual initiation of the I'm here for me energy, right? Which I would call a masculine energy. You show up, you commit, you choose, you follow through. you exercise that kind of integrity of attention and discipline.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Discipline's got a bad rap, but I, you know, I'm of the, you know, the school of thought. There's an etymological interpretation of discipline that is to say it means, you know, the gaze of the teacher who loves you, right? So how do you show up like that? the good father? How do you show up like the devoted husband? Right.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So I like to invoke these archetypes so that you can almost have this lived like theater inside yourself. And you can feel like what that's like to show up for yourself that way. And it's not self-flagellating. It's not like I better stick to the diet or else I'm a shitty person. Right. It's, it's a different kind of energy. Devotional, more from love. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And a presence.
Healing + Human Potential
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It's like a sacred presence that, of course, is anathema to most of us in today's society because of our collective wounds, right? Like we are entrained to look outward to assess things. our own inner safety, right? And there's a reality to that. It's called neuroception, right? Like, yeah, assess the outside. But until you've initiated yourself in this way, again, this is my bias,
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
You're going to see a perpetrator where there's a pile of laundry, right? You're going to see like a unicorn where there's a leaf. You're going to misperceive on both ends of the spectrum. You're going to develop relationships predicated on that. You're going to fight your body in all sorts of wild ways that end up destroying any capacity you had for wellness and vitality, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So you could argue my credentials, for example, are one of the ways that I have secured approval, even as I've stirred the pot in terms of controversy and other ways that I've been challenging, pushing the envelope, so to speak. But that approval will take you to a place where you're watching right, in this dissociated way, you're watching what you are achieving.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Like you're going to... develop all sorts of complexities. And it's not to say those are bad and wrong. It's just, it's a path and it's a kind of adventure that you're going to take and you're going to have until it's not compelling. And you're interested in like the real, um,
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
courageous adventure, which is to just be with yourself, show up for you and to pattern disrupt all of that programming that, um, it really narrows the bandwidth of what you're allowed to believe and be, and even hope and dream for. Like it puts such a low ceiling on all of that, you know? So there's a big metaphysical component to this that, um, You know, you can't prescribe.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
You have to just arrive in the right container when it's your time. And you will, everybody will, you know, if that is the journey you're meant to go on. And obviously I offer one of those, but there's many different ways to initiate
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Yeah. So I had a couple of experiences with patients. Again, once I started to focus my practice on helping women come off of medications, I had a couple of experiences of women who were completely discontinued off of all their meds. Obviously, there's an end date then to our time together, right? And they were ready to
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
fly the nest and go off into the, you know, wild blue yonder and live their lives without doctors and without appointments and without prescriptions and, you know, walking it over to CVS kind of a thing. And in these instances, there was like a very dramatic regression, like out of seemingly nowhere where I could start to appreciate again, because in these instances it was so dramatic.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
I could start to appreciate like, oh, they're not ready. They're not ready to shed the sick identity. There's something that they're collapsing back into even though I'm trying to push them out the nest. I guess that's when I first started to explore what kinds of needs are being met by an illness that we've otherwise been told is a random, unfortunate illness
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
You're watching what you're securing. You're watching what the many products of your efforts. You're not actually there. Like you're not actually the one experiencing this. And so probably the place where this often comes home to roost is in our relationships and specifically romantic relationships and partnerships and marriages, right, where you can
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
you know, emergent phenomenon of just having a body, just having a flawed human body. You know, it gets sick sometimes, shit happens kind of a thing. And this perspective obviously is very confronting for a lot of people because the, well, for the very reasons we're talking about, because having a random illness that has an ICD-10 code allows you to, to what? Take
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Literally zero responsibility for the experience. And so the victim posture is built in to that diagnosis that says this thing happened to you and too bad, so sad. So most you can do is just be a good patient, take your meds, show up to your appointments. And you know, this is just, this is just life. So the defiance of that victim is,
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
that victim posture, I think comes through the appreciation of how being in the victim actually works. Like it meets our needs the same way, you know, drinking alcohol, even if you understand yourself to have a problem with drinking alcohol, it's meeting needs, it's working. And as long as you are in rejection of that thing and,
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
or obviously embrace of it, like you're not going to be able to see the relational aspects, right? So what is your relationship to your symptoms and your illness affording you? Well, usually to really reduce it down, there's yeses that we get and there's nos that we get. So the yeses that we get through a diagnosis are usually in the realm of connection, compassion, attention,
Healing + Human Potential
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And the no's that we get are in the realm of boundaries, right? So where if you have this thing, you often don't need to learn how to say no. The other day I was thinking about this because my daughter asked me, I have teenage daughters, and my daughter asked me to drive her somewhere. I didn't feel like driving her somewhere. I live in Miami. The traffic is actually unhinged recently.
Healing + Human Potential
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I don't even know what's happening. Everyone from LA and New York is moving here. And for me to take her somewhere 15 minutes away would have been like an hour of something and driving. And I really didn't have any good reason not to drive her. And I had this immediate thought that if I had a migraine...
Healing + Human Potential
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or a cold or really bad, really super bad menstrual cramps or something that I could just be like, oh, I can't, I'm sick or whatever. Right. And then what would I get? I would get, first of all, off the hook. I wouldn't have to do this thing. I inexplicably didn't feel like doing or explicably didn't feel like doing. And then I would get, you know, her understanding.
Healing + Human Potential
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and I might even get like a kind of softness and gentleness, and maybe she would be like extra nice to me or whatever. I'd get all that stuff. So I'd get the not doing the thing that I didn't want to do, and then I'd get extra bonuses, right?
Healing + Human Potential
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So when you think about like anybody who has a chronic diagnosis, or it's not even just chronic, because I could tell you lots of stories about like, you know, things I, weird things I manifested right before I would like, start traveling with my daughters as a single woman, which I had like a lot of blocks and resistance to doing.
Healing + Human Potential
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And so I would like develop a weird like dental pain or something like right before we're about to like take off to Paris or whatever. And so it was almost a way for me to construct subconsciously, of course, a way for them to be like, to lower their expectations a bit. And if I mess something up in a reservation here or there, like it's okay, don't bother mama, she's got this thing, right?
Healing + Human Potential
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you can find yourself really at that glass wall of intimacy and recognize that there's like a yearning in your heart for something different and just have no idea like how it is. How do you penetrate the glass? Like, how do you get to the other side? How do you touch someone's, skin through that kind of a barrier. And I guess the moment that you recognize it's an inside job, it's up to you.
Healing + Human Potential
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So when I look at it through that lens, I'm asking these questions, right? I'm asking, what do I get to say, do, and be because of this, right? What do I receive because of this? And then what do I not have to do or say or be because of this, right? So what is the utility in this seemingly obvious futile experience. Like what actually is it conferring?
Healing + Human Potential
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What needs are being met that I just don't have the maturational, um, awareness or practice to otherwise ask for these needs and these boundaries. So I find it to be part and parcel of having these symptoms, especially if they're persistent. And so when you identify that there's a part of you that feels it needs to be this way, that feels you need to have The panic attacks.
Healing + Human Potential
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You absolutely have to have, you know, the digestive issues. You have to have the allergy.
Healing + Human Potential
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You see it differently. And again, that's confronting for a lot of people who are interested in looking at it that way. And it's not a problem. It's more compelling.
Healing + Human Potential
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And it just applies as equally, maybe even more so because there isn't really a collective awareness around this co-creative experience that we have with our own bodies. That is, you know, that... that mainstream, I guess. Yeah, it's the downside of vitality and wellness is very real for most of us.
Healing + Human Potential
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There's just like that wide open space of I can do anything because I have a healthy body is paralyzing, you know, in most cases.
Healing + Human Potential
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So when I think of hormonal health, and obviously this is like my training, I think of it on a spectrum from stress physiology to sexual physiology, if you want to call it that, reproductive physiology. And they're intimately related. So anybody who knows about, you know, cortisol and progesterone knows that there's, you know, a toggle between like...
Healing + Human Potential
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This is a time of crisis and not a time of procreation. And this is a time of procreation and harmony, right? So that toggle, that biological system attunement and alignment is operative beneath our very complex patterns of relating to our lived experience. And that is also why I have come to appreciate this experience of safety in the system. as being the ultimate goal, right?
Healing + Human Potential
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Whether it's the resolution of a condition that has a name and a diagnostic code, or whether it's coming into a more expanded experience of your day-to-day or sexual pleasure, the imperative is the same. Your system has to slow down has to soften. And there is a kind of quieting that happens.
Healing + Human Potential
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There's a relaxation that happens in the whole system before you are ready to hold more pleasure and to work with challenges as alchemical possibilities. And so when you're
Healing + Human Potential
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Nobody else can deliver you there. And your partner doesn't have to change. Your employees and your job doesn't have to change. There's no amount of money you can manifest that's ever going to make this feel better that you finally get to that place where you're like, all right, I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and take responsibility for my experience as an embodied woman.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
pushing your system to experience peak erotic adventures or to have more pleasurable sex, before your system has the capacity for that, you're going to go into dissociation and freeze and a kind of shutdown that I actually think is in many ways more eerie than fight or flight. So that functional freeze that a lot of us live in is, I call it living behind a glass wall. It's...
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
literally zero responsibility for the experience and so the victim posture is built in to that diagnosis the defiance of that victim posture i think comes through the appreciation of how being in the victim actually works, like it meets our needs.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
It's this sense of what could be happening in a moment, and it's just totally unavailable to you. It's just completely inaccessible, and you don't really know what that is. It's like you become a ghost in your own lifescape. And so when you're insisting on a certain kind of erotic access before your system is ready for it, it's pretty rapey energy, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
It's like putting pleasure on the body rather than allowing... pleasure to be an emergent phenomenon. You know, I'm a big fan and I've attempted to translate Betty Martin's work where she teaches about the wheel of consent and waking up your hands and your skin to the pleasure that's already there. And a lot of that work involves understanding
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
boundaries and consent, including even with your self, right? So it's like, it's like a simple thing, like, right? Like I can, I can touch my own wrist or my own hand and I can feel the touch of my hand. I can focus on the feeling, right? So I'm using my hand like a tool, right? Right. Or I can flip my attention and I can focus on the sensation of the hand that is doing the touching.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
That is for most of us totally dead. Right. So that the taking for I'll speak for women, if I can, the taking of touch is something that has been registered in the realm of taboo. And so this alignment with our desires, this ownership over what it is that we want, this experience of self-mastery to the extent where we can translate our pathways for pleasure to another experience.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
i mean it's like most of us are literally in our 40s maybe beyond just beginning to think about this for the first time in our lives you know i used to do this hand exercise with my daughters when they were like tweens because i was like you need to start to understand are you giving touch are you taking touch right like what's actually happening because otherwise there isn't um any responsibility taken
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
for what it is that you want and where it is that your pleasure derives from. And you take that into the bedroom where you start to have a kind of sex that is mostly performative and you're mostly externally focused as a woman on his pleasure and the evidence that you're doing a good job as a lover. And meanwhile, many would argue that your responsibility is to be inward.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And what the hell does that actually look like? And so, you know, that's how there's like thousands of us, millions, you know, in our 30s and 40s trying to figure out what it means to be a woman. Like, what do we even... doing here? How do we approach this seeming dilemma of having it all and yet feeling so little of that havingness?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Your responsibility is to attune so completely to your own felt experience that you can express that even more fully and more fully and more fully, right? So how the hell can... Nobody's even home, right? If you're so externally focused and you're watching yourself, like be the sexy woman, do the sexy things, you're in your trauma, right? Like you're in your...
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
I'm a little girl and I've learned how to do it the right way. Am I doing it the right way? And you're not actually home in your body to feel what's happening. So it can start with some very, very basic practices. I can pick up for a couple minutes a day an object and I can touch this object and I can focus on the sensation that the object gives my hand.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
rather than what the object feels like, okay? So it's using what I would say is the masculine gift of your attention to access your feminine pleasure. And that kind of maturation, there's no way to shortcut the basics and to come back into this very rudimentary, almost like baby bird level of exploration.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And that is the kind of thing that grows your system's capacity so that when you are dedicated to bringing more pleasure into your life, more erotic energy, meaning more life force, you're not applying that same task and goal oriented kind of psychology to the experience of unlocking your body's like innate potential.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And when you start to titrate into it in this way, you'll eat a mango and it'll be like a quasi-orgasmic experience. And you'll decide to take a minute to actually focus on that, put your phone down and be with the inbuilt pleasure. The last thing I'll say is there's a really simple practice that I like to recommend that has to do with peeing. Right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So like the good girl programming would say like, I'll be right back. I'm going to pee quick. So my biology is secondary to your needs. Okay. And the pattern disrupt of that, it's just epic. It's massive. It's everything to say like my biology, my needs that are basic physiologic needs at this point are actually my primary responsibility. And I'm going to regard them with honor. Okay. Respect.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And I am going to go to the bathroom. The end of the sentence. Okay. Not with any sort of adverse. And I get there and I have this opportunity to experience the inbuilt pleasure of literally peeing. Going from the discomfort, if there is, of having to pee to the relief of having peed. And it's an arc that is built in there, right? So I can focus all of my attention
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
for that minute or whatever on that physiologic experience. And I can start to see that when I align with my needs, I listen, I offer my body proper guardianship. I have inbuilt pleasure that gets unlocked here and there and everywhere, right? And it doesn't have to do necessarily with G-spots and clitoral stem. And it's just literally being in this body can be pleasurable.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
I can experience a breeze this way and a taste this way. And my senses are become not only a portal through which I can start to reclaim myself from that good girl programming, but also a portal through which I can begin to expand into probably what I know on some level is my birthright as a woman, which is just the pleasure of being
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Oh, thank you. It's really wonderful to have, you know, such an aligned conversation. And it also is very delightful to me, like how many women are coming to these similar conclusions that, you know, the hustle, the achievement, the success, the man, the money, you know, the beauty, it's bereft if you're not home to experience it, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And if you can't hold it, you're just one of those lottery winners, right? Who loses it in six months. And that there's a maturation being asked of us that involves some confronting decisions and an exploration of our priorities, you know, and that's a whole other conversation.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
But a lot of what I've recognized is that my priorities are fundamentally and have always been in the safety realm, right? They've always been that I want to feel safe in my body. I want to feel safe in my relationships. And I want to really, especially as a reformed activist, like I want to feel safe in the world. And so, you know, if I am the nexus and locus of control, um,
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
For that safety, it's a very different life experience than if the safety has to come from the medical system, from my partner, from the government or whatever it is, the systems that I'm feeling oppressed by. So that ultimately is the nature of the reclamation. And yeah, so... Let's see.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
I have a system that, of course, you know, based on everything in my own life experience, that is designed to bring you from the physiologic to the relational levels of safety and is two six-week programs. And my intention is really to create this initiatory experience for women to begin learning
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
their next chapter, you know, to record scratch their story of complaint and struggle and bitterness and resentment and frustration and to ease into a complaint free life. It ain't easy. It's truly a practice and involves readying the system. for that level of unbothered experience and fulfillment. And so that's what I have, after a decade in the game, packaged up and tested and have on offer.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And the entry part of that is a program called Vital.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So you mentioned earlier that this is a nervous system matter. And I think that that took me a long time to recognize. And I feel like now, again, it's in the zeitgeist. We're starting to see that this isn't a will-based operation, right? There's no way that you can learn how to be a softer, more abundant woman. This isn't something you put on your to-do list.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And it's not something that you just sort of like... pray for or put on your Pinterest like manifestation board or whatever. You have to have a literal system, right? The neurophysiology must be aligned with having more, right? Because there's all sorts of ways that having more has been tagged as dangerous, right? And the having can be literal, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So like monetary assets and evidence that you are in a certain kind of class, right? But it can also be intangible, right? It could be more love, more erotic energy in your life. It could be more of a sense of belonging. And our systems will contract around that expansion when presented with the opportunity.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
If we are still in the programming that says, you know, I would, I would refer to it as a mother wound, but that says, stay small for me. And when we take that programming into our adulthood, we end up living in, especially as women living in, in comparative dynamics, right? Where we assess other women and we
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
sort of hierarchically organize ourselves in ways that are not native to a woman's sensibilities, right? Women are not natively hierarchical. We are collaborative and yet our wounding and you could, you know, get more conspiratorial around it.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
The societal agenda that serves the fragmentation of women, you know, and women of women and men, and even of women and children has delivered us to this place where we now reflexively assess, right? Like, How do I measure up against her? And that's why one of the deepest portals that I've accessed in my own reclamation process as a woman is the judgment of other women.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So there was a time several years ago where I could have drawn up a scroll of all of the ways that I... I judged women, right? Whether they were too overtly sexual or flirtatious, whether they dressed inappropriately, whether they were, you know, shallow or lazy, incompetent. Those were like huge ones for me. Ditsy, like, you know, all of these ways that I kept woman, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Like a woman who's not doing meaningful work in the world, who's not contributing. All of the ways that I judged these women, And again, sometimes I would admit to that, but often it would be like an internal little experience I would have while like scrolling on social media. Ultimately, those were little portals for me to make contact with dimensions of myself that were not allowed to belong.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And it's like at a certain point, like who cares what the origin of that is? That's just the reality, right? Like I was not allowed to be like perceived as attention seeking, for example. because I was very, very aligned with attention-seeking behavior being wrong and bad.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So what happens to especially that little girl inside of me who just wants to put on the fucking tutu and run around the room and have all the eyes on her, right? She doesn't get to exist. And so what happens is she ends up pulling the strings behind the curtain, you know, like Oz, and... I feel this conflict. And you referenced it earlier. It's often felt as shame, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
I feel this split inside of myself of the rejected parts of me wanting my attention, right? And that is so expensive energetically. It ends up being such a drain. And I would say the fullest expression of that drain is what we call illness. But it ends up being so costly that...
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
it is responsible for the stuckness that is a kind of like Sisyphean hell that we find ourselves in as women where that stuckness, that silent scream of this can't be it, right? Like what is my life, right? Like what, did I really come here just for this? Really, I think that that's like the
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
Well, yeah, and I should offer a bit more context, which is that my initiation, I guess, to this work, which of course, this is like young Ian. I mean, this is like many, many people have been speaking about this concept before me, but of course, until it's like embodied, it's not yours to really own an experience.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
But my greater context for this was that I began to represent myself publicly, right? So I already had a public platform, but I had a public platform as like a credentialed wearing activist and intellectual academic. And I began to represent this other side of me, I guess, publicly and specifically on social media. And this other side of me,
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
we'll dance on a pole in a bikini and we'll create like a little video mashup with like a costume and the soundtrack and like my own little editing and we'll find no more delight in anything in the world. Like that would be the most pleasurable thing I could possibly do to create that little piece of my own artwork. And of course, the feeling that I had was that inner girl, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
That little girl who said like, hey, do you like what I made? It's like my fingers were wet from the paint still. And I went through a whole phase. And that's not to diminish it to suggest that like, oh, it was just a phase. It was a literal maturational process that I moved through where I exposed this aspect of myself and I was...
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
understandably, I received a good amount of pushback and judgment and cancellation. And I think many of the people who were following me were like, what are you doing? You're embarrassing yourself. You're confusing us. And maybe even worse, you're undermining the mission and you're recklessly endangering those you purport to be here to support and help. And
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So in that sort of like witch burning experience that I had, it went on for, I don't know, six, nine months. I was able to, you know, it was a fork in the road. Right. So I have, I have a big mouth. I know how to use it, especially when I feel affronted. Right. And that's how I survived a lot of my upbringing. And so I could have. you know, gone to bat, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And I could have really showcased my skills and made sure I got my audience to see how wrong these people were for judging me, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So the defending posture, I could have adopted that. And for whatever reason, instead, I decided to make a spiritual practice of this. And every single time I came across a comment in real life or on social media, so the anonymous,
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
condemning voice, I would try it on. And ultimately I called this simple practice wearing the villain crown, where I would just make a very short practice, like literally would take minutes. This isn't like some elaborate thing. And I would try on the possibility that I am what it is that I'm being accused of. being. And so it was just kind of a way to take the piss out of it, right?
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So to experience the worst case scenario and the privacy of my own body in my own home with nobody watching and to start to titrate into the possibility that I am more than my behavior, right? And that requires a kind of fluidity and plasticity in what I am defining as the codified rules for my behavior.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And only through that portal, at least for me, could I make contact with the meanness that is not the doctor, that is not the mom, that is not the this, that is not the that, and start to develop some literal neurophysiologic resiliency.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
So that portal trained me, but it was also something that came into my field after I had a very strong foundation of my, you know, health and body and my orientation towards self-care, right? So that's why I do think that there is, there's an order of operations. And when you start to do this kind of work, right, shadow work, reparenting, and you're literally
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
nervous system does not have the capacity to hold these energies. I mean, shame feels like an immolation. It feels like there's like a fiery cavern that's opened up that you're literally going to get like sucked into. And you kind of like hope to, right? Like, please, can I just disappear? And like, I'll feel anything but this.
Healing + Human Potential
The Truth About Women’s Health + Mind Body Healing | EP 69
And our elaborate sets of defenses, also known as our personalities, are designed to mitigate even the slightest of those sensations. And when you just let it rip, right? Like you just let it happen, you'll discover the arc that most of the time we never even visit with. We just feel the very, very tip of most of our emotions and associated sensations.