Your Body Can’t Heal What Your Mind Won’t Allow with Britt Lefkoe

 In this episode of the Gutsy Health Podcast, Juanique Grover talks with guest Britt Lefkoe about one of the biggest hidden barriers to healing: your mindset.

So many people spend years cycling through diets, supplements, and protocols, yet still feel stuck in pain and fatigue. Juanique and Britt unpack why this happens, explaining how stress, self-worth, and unaddressed emotions silently block the body’s ability to repair — even when you’re “doing everything right.”

They explore how the nervous system translates mental and emotional patterns into physical symptoms, why unresolved emotions often resurface as illness, and how long-held beliefs may be keeping you sick. You’ll also learn practical tools to retrain your nervous system, shift your mindset, and finally create the conditions your body needs to heal and thrive.

This isn’t about quick fixes — it’s about removing the invisible roadblocks between you and lasting health.

Key Takeaways & Timestamps

• 02:45 – Why mindset is the foundation of healing
• 10:18 – The nervous system’s role in physical symptoms
• 18:33 – How emotions sabotage (or support) your health
• 25:47 – The connection between self-worth and healing progress
• 36:12 – Practical steps to rewire your mindset for lasting change

Ready to do the inner work alongside the physical healing? Join the Gutsy Health Academy for step-by-step guidance on mindset, nutrition, and protocols that actually last. Learn more here.

Transcript

Britt Lefkoe (00:00)
this life that I have, right? We don't want life to feel like a curse. We want it to feel like a gift. And when our bodies, you know, start to act out, I think often it's because life feels a bit like a curse and we don't often acknowledge that to ourselves, but it feels hard. When the call comes, it's like, how do we want to answer? We answer by changing, by showing up differently.

Juanique Grover (00:23)
Welcome to the Gutsy Health Podcast where science meets soul and healing becomes reality. I'm Juanique Grover your guide on this transformative journey to reclaiming your health, vitality, and freedom. This season, we're diving deep into the order of healing, starting with mindset and working through the layers of what it truly means to heal. Each episode is designed to empower you with tools, knowledge, and hope so you can become the self-healing advocate you were meant to be. For more resources, free classes, and downloadable quizzes and guides, visit

MyGutsyHealth.com. Let's rewrite the future one step, one insight, and one courageous choice at a time. Now let's get gutsy. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Gutsy Health podcast. This episode is being released a little bit later in the week. Trust me, it's well worth the wait. I'm so glad you guys are here listening because I have been dying to do this episode for literally months. I had

Britt Lefkoe on the podcast. She was my first, she was my opening episode this year when we opened Mindset. And now she's helping me kind of close this chapter of the order of healing. If you've been following along with the podcast episodes, we've been following the order of healing. And today's episode, we're going to be talking about the calling of illness. When illness calls you, are you heeding to that call? Are you leaning in and are you leveling up in a way that no other journey can help you level up in?

Before we go into it and before we officially start this episode, I want to remind everyone that the Gutsy Academy is open for enrollment and it ends on August 31st. If you're listening to this live, you'll have less than two weeks to sign up for the Gutsy Academy. So sign up now. You are going to have incredible coaches like myself, Britt Lefkoe. She's going to be coaching us for three weeks in the mindset course aspect.

Gina Worful, you all know her and love her, but she's literally creating a new course with Gutsy, a Mastering Mindfulness mini course for all of the students that you guys will have access to. We have Kelly Clark, who is a cooking coach and a dietician who's going to teach you how to cook. You can do one-on-ones with her and schedule that with her if you want. We will have Dr. Rodgers do a couple calls with us.

If you have more advanced illness questions or hormone questions, like you're gonna be so supported throughout this transformative journey of learning how to heal yourself. So make sure that you sign up because this is gonna be the last time in a couple years that I open up the Academy. So make sure if you've had your eye on this, now is the time to jump in. You won't want the you a year from now regret that you didn't start today. So make sure that you join.

But without further ado, guys, Britt Lefkoe is not only my best friend, but she is this incredible belief systems coach. She drops Mount Everest statements in 10 words or less. She blows open people's beliefs, like blows them to smithereens. They're stuck beliefs that they have about themselves and like, she'll always say, give me an hour. She's like, I need just one hour and I'm gonna help you change that. And she does.

I've worked with many coaches, many therapists, and no one even comes close. Like on a scale of one to 10, Britt's a 20 and everyone else is a five. And I'm not joking. Like I'm not even over exaggerating here. Like she is amazing. so Britt, not only are you brilliant, but people don't know what you've been through. In fact, I didn't know what you had been through. You've seen some shit. Like you've been through heavy

hard stuff in your life that you keep revealing to me in tiny little increments, which makes sense because you have built so much deep wisdom, probably from these hard experiences. They've shaped you. Like your genius is always there, but these experiences that you've had, and it's not just like one or two or three, it's like 20 or 30 or 40 very traumatic experiences that we don't have to, like you can share whatever you want. The more

I get to know you and the more you open up to me, the more I'm just in awe that one, you're still alive, two, that you're sane, and three, that you are this remarkable human that I get to love every day. And so with your experiences, not only have you experienced deep sadness and abuse and trauma, but you yourself have been on an illness slash healing journey. And you said something to me last week when we were in Vegas together, you were like,

I had to become so ill to break open. And I was like, that's our podcast topic. That's it. Because there is a gift that illness gives us that when sometimes when we get sick, we stay in victim. We're like, why is this happening to me? And that's not the question. The question is, how is this happening for me? So without further ado, I would love for you to once again, blow our minds and our hearts open as to the wisdom of illness.

and how illness is happening for us and how it's a calling to a higher version of ourselves. So welcome.

Britt Lefkoe (05:46)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. I've been on an 18 year health journey and I've had so many different chapters. And I think the way that we manage illness often mirrors the way that we manage ourselves, our lives, our relationships. Mine started with a lot of denial, which makes sense because that's how I lived. I would deny

my needs, would deny my feelings, I would deny my experiences. So of course I denied my health. It was just another thing to overcome, just like all of the hard things in life that you go through. At the time, my worldview was, overcome it. You you have to be stronger than it, get over it. And so I did that for a long time. That didn't lead to healing. It just led to being in the emergency room every 15 minutes, right? It was like I went through a time when I collapsed.

passed out in a swimming pool in the middle of swim practice when I was in college, I passed out in dressing room, I passed out on an airplane, they had to emergency land the airplane. I was so unwilling to be dramatic, because to me, to listen to your body, to listen to your needs, needs were dramatic, emotions were dramatic. So the way that I engaged with my health was the same way that I engage with everything in my life. And that was a really long chapter. And I've watched as

I've used my health as a lens of trying to better understand where I'm stuck. And I've asked myself questions like, how does being sick serve me? Right? Are there places where I don't allow myself to be taken care of, but maybe if I was sick, I would, or does it give me an excuse that if I fail, well, I didn't really try because I was sick or does it allow me to play small or does it allow me to rest? And I tried to work through it from that lens, but I found I didn't make as much

as when I looked at the mirror, like how do I treat my health and how does that mirror the way that I treat myself? And I think again, like one of the biggest things, know, Juanique, you said victim, it's like where are the places where we're in victim? Where are the places that we're in blame? Where are the places that we're in denial? And the more that we can open that up and the more we can see it as a lens, the more like truly comes to the surface.

And I think that's been one of the most transformative pieces for me.

Juanique Grover (08:09)
Illness has taught me to soften. I didn't realize how rigid, how maybe cruel is too harsh of a word, but it almost feels appropriate how cruel I have been towards myself. How much I self-abandoned, how much I self-sacrificed. When Tristan was going through his cancer journey, I remember having a thought of, wow, my nervous system is so wrecked, it's probably going to kill me by the time I'm 40. ⁓ well.

Like I had this massive realization about myself, like I am the most toxic human to myself. Okay, that's fine. But then a year later, I have this massive health crisis, which forced me to face all of those corners, those dark corners of self-abandoned, self-denial, self-abuse almost. Like it almost felt abusive to absolutely deny my needs, deny my wants.

and think that I was loving the people around me by doing that.

Britt Lefkoe (09:11)
Yeah, 100%. I feel really similarly where my relationship to myself felt really abusive. There was a part of me that almost wasn't surprised that as I looked back, I didn't understand. I saw 50 million doctors and did every protocol under the sun and nothing made a shred of difference. I was an anomaly to every doctor I saw. Everyone thought they could help and no one could. It was one of those journeys for sure.

But that's been one of the biggest things that I've realized is the lack of kindness and the lack of care that I had for myself. And I relate so much to what you said about a softening. It's like, I was so soft externally. I've always been really soft externally, but that softness didn't extend to myself. You know, the conversation that you and I had, one of the things that I have reflected on a lot is how effective my coping strategies have always been.

I was not the type of perfectionist. Like I'm not type A. So I don't come off as a perfectionist. My perfectionism, I was able to kind of hide in a lot of ways. My people pleasing was so wrapped in like love and conviction that it felt really healthy. I wasn't one of those people who was like, oh, and you know how like all these bad things happen to you or how people judge you. I'm like, people really didn't judge me. Like everyone just kind of loved me and my life was really great.

But living inside of it, like I felt like I couldn't breathe. I had great relationships, but I didn't rely on anybody. I didn't trust that anybody loved me. didn't trust that anybody was going to be there for me. I think what finally, you know, I started to realize over time is like, as effective as this is, like I'm suffocating. I was somehow willing to keep suffocating, but with health, I couldn't take it anymore. I was like, I can't, I can't.

I am unwilling to wake up every morning being like, my God, how am I going to do this day every day for years and years and years and years to wake up every single morning and just be like, I literally don't know how I'm to get through the day today. That broke me in a way that all of the other patterns didn't. I mean, I had so much denial. I had so much that I was fighting myself on and I was willing to just keep being a perfectionist or just keep being a people pleaser and keep suffocating.

until I was like, I literally can't live like this. And it was my health. I think that that truly started to break me. And so I was angry at my health. I felt like my body failed me. I felt like I couldn't trust it. I felt all of the things when the reality is, I think that our bodies are the thing that like, it's like our mind tries, our heart tries, our life tries, our friends try, our families try, and we don't listen and we don't listen. We don't listen. And our body is the last line of defense. Our body's like, fine.

If you're not going to listen to anyone else, I'm going to make you listen to me. And we've got options either, like you said, we fall into victim and we give up or it's our call to action and we step up and we say, you know what, like, this is not going to be my story. This is not going to be my life. And we change our habits. We learn how to invest in ourselves. Something that I never did. Right. But my help asked me to rise. Hey, can you learn that you matter?

Are you willing to invest in yourself to spend money on things that you wouldn't have spent money on? My body asked me to change my patterns. Hey, are you going to learn to rest? Right? Otherwise I'm going to take you down in an airport. I'm going to take you down in the swimming pool. Like I will literally take, are you, are you listening? Are you listening? There's a quote that I love so much that says, don't be afraid to fall apart. It's just an opportunity to put yourself back together the way you wish you had always been. And I think that in so many ways.

Our bodies are showing up being like, I will break you, but it isn't because I hate you and it isn't because you're unworthy. I will break you because I'm so committed to who you're becoming. I am so committed to the version of yourself that you can be that I will break you so that you can rebuild yourself the way you wish that you had always been. And I think that is the call of the health crisis.

Juanique Grover (13:23)
That is so beautifully put. I want to know before we dive into the health crisis, like how do we get there? And why is it mostly women that have these health crises? Because there's something about our programming that gets us to a breaking point. Like if you look at a man and you're like, hey, you're going to lose muscle soon and your testosterone is going to go down and your libido is going to go down and you're going to have a hard time having erections.

They'll be like, take my money, what do I need to do? Like take everything, take my car, take my house, like take my damn money, like fix it. But when it comes to women, we're like, you know what, let me make myself smaller. Let me make myself smaller. Like I'm not worth investing. I can't spend the money. I can't tell you how often this happens. You guys, as the owner of a wellness clinic, women will get on the phone. They'll get excited talking to my front desk. They'll be like, I need a schedule to meet with Dr. Rogers. I think he has the answers.

And then a price is put out and they're like, I need to talk to my husband. And then they never called back. If that was a man, he would have no problem scheduling the consult, getting the answer, feeling better, being his best self. But with women, we gatekeep ourselves. We are actually like our own worst enemy when it comes to our healing. In fact, we self-sabotage our healing without even knowing it. Where and why does that happen? Where does it come from?

Britt Lefkoe (14:49)
I think it comes from a few different places. One of them is societal. This idea is not mine and I can't remember the name of the wonderful woman who I learned this from, but she was talking about how she like helps women with money. And she was saying, when men ask the question, how do I become wealthy? What they're told is earn more, build, grow, invest. It's all about accumulation and growth.

And when women ask, do I become wealthy? The advice that we're given is save, budget, restrict, right? So in general, it's the same thing, like with the gym and weight, it's like men's like bulk up, eat more protein, right? Eat more calories, workout, get bigger. With women, it's eat less, constrict your calories, diet. So I think part of it is very cultural that there's a lot of shame around women's spending, especially with a really old narrative that it's the man's money that like,

he makes it and it's very common that it's the man who says like, I bought this house, rather than like, while I was working, either you were also working or you were like raising our children and making it and providing a life so that I could work and make this money, we're a team. And I think that's changed a lot in certain families, but a lot of that older messaging still exists. So I think women often feel guilt because the assumption is it's not my money. I didn't earn it or I'm not supposed to. ⁓

And I think part of it is that societal message of, I'm supposed to budget, I'm supposed to save. And so there's a shame. I think there's also this idea that women overspend, which there are some women who spend a lot of money. There's a lot of men who spend a ton of money, right? So there's a lot of shame around spending with women. So I think a lot of it is societal. But the other thing I want to look to is our families, right? I think very often we watch our mother's sacrifice. We watch our mother's

you know, not take care of themselves, not do the things. I will say one thing in my family that I'm so grateful for. My mom takes care of herself. My mom never didn't do the things that she wanted to do. My mom would take a bath, close the door. We knew we weren't allowed to go anywhere near there. That was mom's time. She would read a book. So I saw an example in my family of a woman spending on herself and taking care of herself in that way. And I think that's very rare.

I don't know a lot of people who, for most people, love a sacrifice. And I think that's a huge thing that people come from. And then I think the third one, and this was the trap that I got caught in, which is that I'm not worth it, and I get my worth and value from giving to everyone else. And so if I break that narrative, what if my worth goes away? It's a little bit of murder. It's a little bit of fear. It's a little bit of...

trying so desperately to make sure that the love and the care is still going to be there. And so I think that story, it's like, well, I'm the one who takes care of everyone. I'm the one who gives, I'm the one who, and that identity is incredibly limiting and constricting. And it prevents us from actually doing the things that we need to do. And so I really just want to come back, Shaniq, for a minute to this idea that if illness is the call, what is the answer? If the call comes,

How do we respond to that call? And it isn't just one thing, it's everything. It is taking stock of what are my thoughts? What are my feelings? What are my behaviors? What are my habits? Is my habit to put myself last? Is my behavior to take care of everyone but me? Are my thoughts that I don't matter? Are my emotions fear and anxiety? It is an opportunity to really shift. And I think a lot of that does start with our behavior. It starts with investing in ourselves. It starts with

putting up boundaries and saying yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, right? It starts with making those changes to carve out space for us so that we can ask some of these deeper questions of what am I not seeing and what am I not feeling and what do I need to change within myself and to be able to actually enjoy this life that I have, right? We don't want life to feel like the curse. We want it to feel like a gift. And when our bodies

you know, start to act out. I think often it's because life feels a bit like a curse and we don't often acknowledge that to ourselves, but it feels hard when the call comes. It's like, how do we want to answer? We answer by changing, by showing up differently.

Juanique Grover (19:16)
I think for myself, especially, I'm an extremely stubborn human. And if you tell me like, go just do the yoga class, just take better care of yourself. My programming, my deepest programming, my nervous system tells me that all of that is dangerous. There's no ways I can embark on that transformation. Illness forced me to slow down. Like illness literally was like, if you don't do this, you won't be around to see your children. You won't have

the brain power, the brain function, the emotion, or even the emotional power to help your children grow up and become the people that they're meant to be. It almost felt like this like gun was put to my head and it's like you need to decide because the clock is ticking. And truly like the words you said, it took illness to break me to change. That's how I felt. I felt like I had that stubbornness where I was like, no, I

I'll damage my life force until I die. Like, that's fine. And life was like, no, you actually can't do that. That's not your calling. You have to choose another way and we're going to help you see why. Before I would walk around in pain, I'm like, I'm not going to spend money on a massage. Like that's so self-indulgent. That is so selfish. When we need to like pay bill and save up and all these things, like I can't spend that money on myself or I can spend that money on that treatment that will bring my inflammation down tremendously.

It was impossible, like impossible, Britt. You should have known me before all of this happened. I could not take care of me. It was not in my DNA. It just wasn't a thing. It's nothing that I'd practiced. It's nothing that I'd seen modeled to me. It was completely foreign and uncomfortable in every fiber of my being to look after me. What was comfortable?

was being the sacrificial lamb all the time and taking care of everyone else. As long as they're happy, then I'm okay. Then I feel safe. Not, feel good, I feel safe. What we don't actually understand about our nervous systems is that our nervous systems will choose that which is safe over that which is better or healthier for us. And so safe is what's familiar. I was familiar with self-sacrifice. I was familiar with hemorrhaging my life force.

from both ends, right? Like burning the candle at both ends kind of thing. Like that's what I was familiar with and self-care felt unfamiliar and therefore a threat to my nervous system. And so there was no way in hell that I was gonna do it. There was no way I was gonna invest in it and start taking care of myself and doing the work. Illness broke that in me. It shattered it and was like, you now have to create a new human. I remember...

I was so ill, Ryan was out of town and I called Gina. was like, I need an emotional support human. Like I'm falling to pieces. And she came and we were on a walk. And I remember this walk, was just, I was having muscle weakness and twitches and tremors all over my body and my brain could barely think. And I just like, I just, I was in hell. I was like, I was in hell in my body. And I remember Gina saying this to me. was like, Shanique, I promise you.

There is a better version of yourself on the other side of this. Like you just need to lean in. I promise you, she is there. You just need to lean in. And what's interesting is I am gutsy mom. Like I say healing happens, hashtag healing happens. Like, you know, your body is a self-regulating organism. I learned that from you like almost five years ago. And I've been using that on this platform ever since. Your body is a self-healing, regulating.

organism, it is designed to heal itself. And when I was in the epitome of my health crisis, I lost hope of that. I was like, I don't know if that is real. I don't know if that is true. And it took people like you and like Gina and like the Gutsy Academy and to like hear the messages that I have told people for years. I had to hear it on repeat over and over and over again to even trust the process. It's so different creating the process, but then to have to walk it.

and trust it? Terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. Now I'm like, okay, now let's put my money where my mouth is. Let's make sure that this works. And so for people that are on this healing journey, that have completely lost hope in the process of healing, lost safety and trust in their body, who have been on the medical merry-go-round and can't get off, how do we help those people?

How can we help them create a mindset shift around the being broken? I am broken and I'm unfixable and this is all that I have and there is no way to heal.

Britt Lefkoe (24:08)
So I've got a bunch of different thoughts. The first one is the idea of I'm broken. I would just shift to what I'm doing isn't deep enough that like I haven't yet broken. So I can't rebuild. Like trying to rebuild without allowing yourself to break. You're still just juggling around the same stuff. So if you're still self abandoning and you're still self sacrificing and you're like,

Yeah, but I'm not getting better. Of course you're not better because you're not actually changing the underlying thing that's causing it. Your body is responding to something deeper. If this idea, right, if our theme today is we have to be willing to break so that we can rebuild ourselves the way we wish we had always been, then we have to actually be willing to break. So we have to be willing to break patterns, break habits, break beliefs, break behaviors, right? Break cycles. So

It's the breaking that allows for the shifting. so for those of us, me included, who have said 400 million times, I'm broken, it isn't working, it isn't working, it isn't working. We're not rebuilt. We're not in rebuild mode yet. We're trying to skip over. We're trying to skip the break and jump to the rebuild. And breaking doesn't mean shattering on the floor and becoming dysfunctional and giving up. That's not breaking. It's a cracking. It's a cracking in the armor, right? It's a cracking in the patterns. Again, you're not breaking all of yourself. It's like,

You're breaking the patterns that you use to keep yourself safe. You're breaking the behaviors that you use to keep yourself safe. You're breaking everything that you think is safety. I think if I really go down to the core, I'm going to say something that like goes against everything in the personal development space, and I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this, and I'm totally fine with it. I don't think safety is a valuable paradigm. Survival is a mechanism in our body. is animalistic. Safety is a human construct. You're either alive or you're dead.

Period, there is no safety. I don't buy the safety thing. There's things that are pleasant and unpleasant, scary and overwhelming. Let it be the full range of human experiences. The minute we call it unsafe, we give our power away. It's not unsafe. You're either alive or you're dead. As long as you're here, you're not unsafe. Either it's pleasant, it's unpleasant, it's comfortable, it's uncomfortable, it's terrifying. Great, let it be terrifying. I don't think we need to label it unsafe.

So all of these mechanisms, these behaviors, these thoughts, these feelings, they're all trying to create safety. They're trying to create something that doesn't exist. If safety doesn't exist and we're putting all of our effort into safety, that effort is being wasted. So safety is not a good target. Safety is not a good, if you want to feel safe, don't fall in love. You want to feel safe, don't leave your house, right? It's like safety is not a good target. So all of these things are self-protective. They make us feel safe. They keep us small. They keep us stuck.

They keep us afraid. They keep us from actually making changes. So I think the mindset shift that I want everyone to have today or to be open to having today is that we don't want to feel safe. Safety is self-protection. And self-protection is what we're already doing, right? Our life is filled with a host of things to protect us, right? To not be vulnerable, to not share, to not put ourselves first, to not ask for what we want. That's safety, right? That's our idea of safety. That's not working.

So what if we say, I'm either alive or dead, and as long as I'm here, can I pick something better than safety? Can I be brave? Can I fight for connection? Can I choose worthiness? Can I look for sovereignty? Can I follow curiosity? Can I express creativity? Those are things worth living for. Safety is not it. And so these things that we're doing to make us feel safe are blocking us from everything that makes us come alive. We're not here to be safe. We're here to come alive.

The world is not meant to be safe. It's meant to be messy. And so coming alive again is wrapping our arms around vulnerability and bravery and love and sovereignty and curiosity and creativity and the things that will actually allow us to make the changes that we want to take. That is the breaking. Breaking is not about being weak and it's not about giving up. Breaking is about choosing aliveness over safety.

and realizing that the patterns that keep us feeling safe prevent us from coming alive.

Juanique Grover (28:23)
that's so beautifully put, there was a quote that I shared last week, enjoy the process of becoming. To me, what that means is that there were times throughout my healing journey where I was terrified to be alive because my body felt so unsafe and everything felt broken and inflamed. My brain felt inflamed and like, how do I overcome this inflammation? Because my brain was telling me was I was not safe, like I was broken.

and it's going to get worse and worse and worse. But it's interesting because I put together these clips of videos and photos for this reel for the saying, enjoy the process of becoming. And I realized that life was still being lived while I was feeling terrified. And I look back and I'm like, look how much life was being lived. And what I focused on was I'm not safe. I am broken. I am scared.

All that time, even though I was feeling that and I was robbing myself of joy in the moment, yes, my body was feeling inflamed and broken and I was still living. I wish I could go back in time and give myself that download and be like, look at all of these epic moments that you're having in spite of the inflammation in your body, in spite of you feeling anxious or depressed or sad, you were still living.

and you were choosing life and you were choosing congruence. And it was in that choosing that could help accelerate your healing. But what I want to ask is for people that are listening to this, they're like, well, I've lost safety. How do I choose to slough off the wanting of safety and choose breaking and becoming and doing the hard thing?

Britt Lefkoe (30:15)
So the story of broken is self-protective. It allows us to not get our hopes up and not get disappointed, right? We're just trying to not feel the things that we don't want to feel. It's just resistance, right? During that time, Juanique, you know, same for me and my story as well, instead of saying, I don't feel safe, I don't feel safe, if we were honest, what we would have said is, I feel grief. I feel grief. I feel really, really deep grief. I feel...

maybe afraid, but I feel like even fear is a cop out in this case. It's like, the truth is, I feel grief and I'm afraid to get my hopes up and get disappointed. I'm afraid to believe. So it's just self-protective, right? Again, that seeking of safety is self-protective. What we're saying is, I can't handle getting disappointed. You can, actually. I can't handle the grief. You can, right? We are capable of things that we in a million years never would have dreamt that we would be able to do. If someone had told you,

five years before Tristan had cancer, you you're gonna go through, your husband's gonna get cancer and you're gonna lose him with two young children, you would have said, no way, I couldn't handle that. No way, and then guess what you did? You handled it. That's what we do. We handle the things and we do ourselves such a disservice when we say, but I don't feel safe, we're robbing ourselves of the full human experience, which is, this is hard and I feel grief and I feel sadness.

That is the truth. And when we process those emotions, they move through us and they don't get stuck. Fear is a loop. It'll go forever and ever and ever and ever. doesn't move. Emotions move. That anxiety is not an emotion. It's resistance to emotion. The reality is that we can handle getting disappointed. That's how we build resilience. We get our hopes that we get disappointed. We get our hopes that we get disappointed, but we keep going. We focus on what we're committed to.

So the question is, are we committed to trying to feel safe, which we never will, or it goes away, it doesn't last, it's not a place you go. So are we committed to feeling safe or are we committed for life? And we don't get to have both. And I again, just want to share that you shared in the beginning that I get this in a really personal way. Like I want to feel safe too. Of course I do. We all do. But the reality is,

When I want to feel safe, I push away my loving husband who wants to be there for me because for me, safety is not intimacy. It's keeping people out. It's control. But that's not going to make my life better. That's not going to help me to heal. That's not a part of my becoming. If I want to feel safe, I keep people out, but that's not what I really want. So the work that I've done on vulnerability has all been about if I want to feel safe, I will not have anything that I want. And so safety has to be.

a thing that I let go of. so instead, I have to seek something more beautiful. I have to seek something more alive and more aligned with my values and with who I'm becoming. And so I just want to say for every single person listening, of course you want to feel safe, right? Of course you do, but that's not what you want most. Like never in the world have you watched a kid singing and dancing and playing. I mean, like, you know what I want right now? I just want to feel safe. Right? It's like safe is the...

thing that you want when you feel unsafe, but it's reactionary. Safety is not intrinsically valuable. It's just a reaction to unsafe. So safety is fueled by fear. It's fueled by scarcity. It's fueled by unsafe. You cannot have safety without unsafe. Right. So the whole paradigm is broken instead, right. Of feeling into the fear and trying to overcome the fear. Can we feel into the desire of what it is that we actually want? And then I want to say one more thing that just came up for me.

When you are being brave, bravery is not a feeling. When you are being brave, you do not feel brave, you feel afraid. There is one prerequisite to bravery and it is fear. You cannot have bravery without fear. So we watch someone else being brave and we go, they're so brave. But what we don't realize is that person is so afraid and they're just putting their feet one in front of the other. They're doing the thing. Bravery is an action, not a feeling. And I think we do ourselves a great disservice when we say, but I'm afraid. Of course you're afraid. That's a prerequisite to bravery. Good. So be afraid.

Don't talk yourself out of the fear to be afraid is how we be brave. The same thing. It's like when we are at the gym and we're lifting weights, you're doing your last rep. You don't feel strong. You feel weak. Weakness is how you build strength, right? Strength doesn't feel like strength and bravery doesn't feel like bravery. They feel like weakness and fear. So our job is to seek fear and to seek weakness because that is how we build strength. And that is how

we act courageously in the world, right? So that's what I'm saying. Like safety undermines strength and safety undermines bravery because it asks us to not focus on the fear and to not be afraid and to not act any way. let us be afraid and let us be weak and let us keep moving because that is the becoming, that is the process of becoming, that is how we build the person that we are becoming. And that is ultimately how we realign our lives with coming alive rather

than this courage-less, bravery-less place that we get stuck.

Juanique Grover (35:39)
my God, the things that come up for me and that is the safe thing someone will do is go from doctor to doctor and put all of their chips in their hand, right? And be like, doctor, tell me what to do. I trust you. And then that doctor lets them down. And then they do the same thing where they give up their power. They give up their, you know, an opportunity to learn the healing tools themselves and be like, doctor, tell me what to do. You tell me because

How scary is it to actually, one, admit to yourself that your healing is actually all you? I think that's probably the scariest step for most people where they're like, I am the reason I am sick and I am the reason that I will get better and that terrifies me. And so what do we do? So we'll avoid it to feel safe and we'll go to a doctor that we believe knows better than us, is smarter than us, has the answers.

and then we'll get let down and then we'll go to another doctor who knows better than us. I put it in air quotes, knows better and we hope that they'll give us the other thing and then we're let down. And I think one of the bravest things I see women do honestly is they join the gutsy academy. They slough off these old patterns, they face their demons and they step into this higher version of themselves that are these bad-ass self-healing advocates. But it wasn't easy. It was the brave thing.

They were scared doing it. It's scary. It's scary investing in yourself. How many women have said on this podcast or even in my DMs, like, I was scared to pay for another program that was going to let me down, but they did it anyways. They took that leap of faith and they believed that this was the answer that they were looking for to help themselves become the self-empowered advocate. And they did it. And they were proud of the person that they were on the other side.

I guarantee you the majority of people that sign up for the Getze Academy, they're terrified. They're scared of letting themselves down because it's easier, it's safer for a doctor to let them down. But if we let ourselves down again, how devastating would that be?

Britt Lefkoe (37:46)
I think one of the things that I want to say is, I wouldn't say that we are sick and become well because of us, because I don't want people to blame themselves. It isn't that it's because of us. What I want to say is, maybe a shift would be that we are the ones who love ourselves the most. And so it's our job to heed the call and then it's our job to surround ourselves with people who can support us and equip us.

with the knowledge and the information and the support and the cheerleading and the emotional support for this journey. Because it isn't, it's all on me. That feels heavy. But what it is is I love myself the most. I'm the one who has to lead the charge. But if I commit to me, then I can create an environment where other people can commit to me too. Right? So like using Gatsi as an example, if people are saying, I commit to me,

You can't commit to someone who hasn't committed to themselves. You can't care about someone's journey more than they, right? You can't go knock on people's doors and tell them that you're there to make them their own self-healing advocate. But if someone commits to them, you say, you've got you, guess what? Me too. When people commit to themselves, you jump on the bandwagon and you bring an entire team of people to support them. So I think what's scary is that idea that I'm sick, it's my fault, it's on me, and now it's up to me to make it better.

We're not ready for that yet. I don't know how to do that. So if it's up to me, I'm screwed. In contrast, if I say, I love me the most, I'm the only one who can make this commitment. I'm the only one who can make this commitment. But once I make this commitment, I can pull in all my people to support me. I can ask my friends and my spouse. I can sign up with Gutsy. I can have an entire team of people who do mindset and nutrition and order of healing and teach me all of these things.

so that I'll be equipped. So I'm not doing it alone, but I'm the only one who can make the commitment.

Juanique Grover (39:41)
I love that. You know what's interesting is even as you're saying, when I can call all these people in to help me, even inside me through his practice of care and self healing, asking for help is so hard. So hard. So I felt resistance as you were saying that I was like, who I have to ask people to help me? Like, how crazy is it? And you said it before earlier in the podcast, like we have to break old habits, old patterns, the old version of us.

to call in the new version of us.

Britt Lefkoe (40:12)
And if you want to be safe, you won't ask for help because it doesn't feel safe. So if your goal is safety, don't ask for help. If your goal is breaking patterns so that you can put yourself back together in a way that is aligned and organized and healed, then we have to break these habits. I don't, I get how hard it is. mean, again, this has been, it's been almost 20 years in the making for me, right? I have worked tirelessly on my health for 20 years.

It doesn't have to be that hard for everyone else, right? I'm on this podcast because I don't want anyone else to do it the way that I did it. Like, please don't do it the way that I did it. Please learn from me. Please learn from me. Like, the transformation, Janik, that I've seen in you, like, I do remember you when, before, you know, we called you the Black Panther. It was like, you didn't take care of yourself at all. You didn't ask for help. You didn't share. Like, I tried to become friends with you and I was like, absolutely not. There's no room for me, right? You were so guarded and closed.

But through getting sick, you know, it opened these tiny little things and those open conversations and those conversations open more conversations and just the way that you've watched me transform, I've watched you transform. And what we're trying to do is distill everything that we're learning from our experience so that other people don't have to do it the hard way. Like in how many years it's taken you, how many years it's taking me, like it doesn't need to take that long.

For everyone. again, like if I had to say, if there was one thing that I could say to me, I mean, God, at every phase of my life, when I was young, when I was a teenager, I got sick. When I was like 17, 18 years old, one of the things that I would say to her is again, like, if you want to feel safe, you're going to feel safe. You're going to go to feel safe and you're not going to have anything. You're not going to have anything you want. Don't feel safe. Don't search for safety. Ask for bravery. Right? Don't ask for safety.

ask for bravery. And I would have been practicing and I was practicing and I do give that to myself. I was practicing bravery in a hundred million different ways, but the bravery was going to the wrong places. It was going toward these self-protective mechanisms rather than trying to crack. The last thing I wanted was to break. The last thing I wanted was to break. And now the only thing I want is to break. It's the only thing I care about is breaking because I know that the more that I break the patterns and the beliefs and the cycles, the more

space there is for me to actually come alive. And as I come alive, I heal. don't need to be sick anymore. I don't need the messages. I don't need the call, right? It's like the phone keeps ringing until you answer it. And the more I answer it, the less I hear it ring. And so that's the journey. And I just want to encourage everybody. Of course, we want to feel safe. Of course, we want to feel comfortable, but there's a lot of different ways that we can comfort ourselves through the fear.

We don't need to get rid of the fear. We just need to learn to better comfort ourselves and then redirect instead of asking what's wrong with me or why don't I feel safe or how do I feel safe? Can we ask what would make me feel alive? How can I comfort myself right now? What do I want most? What cycles do I want to break? What patterns do I want to break? What is the me that I want to become? Those are the types of questions that are going to facilitate our healing. And then once we commit, you can allow in

the support and information from people who know things that you don't and allow them to help carry you through this process.

Juanique Grover (43:41)
That was so beautifully put. Don't do the safe thing, do the brave thing. Right? Like do the hard thing. And how brave of you. Like how brave is it of these women and these men that become self-healing champions? Like self-healing advocates. It's incredibly brave. So if you're listening to this podcast, we see you. You're being brave. Everything you do, like every podcast you listen to, every Instagram reel you take notes from, like every

health influencer that you follow, you're doing brave things, you're doing hard things. And so I see that in you. And I really honor that in you. What a beautiful, beautiful thing you're doing. How brave it is to answer the call of illness. Unless you are walking this journey, people just have no idea what a calling it is. And so if you are on that journey, if you are trying to heed the call and you just don't know how to do that, let us help you.

We are here to help you. We have answered that call. We answer that call every freaking day, let's be honest. And we continue to, and we help other people do it. So you don't have to do this alone. The purpose of community and the beautiful thing about our world that we live in today with technology is that we call in people that are experts in these areas, people that have watched these paths, and we ask them, what is your roadmap?

how do I get now from point A to point B? Because I want to move towards point B. I want to move to health homeostasis. And I see you've done it. Show me your path. And then they show you. And then you do it. But you do it through skills of body intuition, mindfulness, breaking old patterns, breaking old beliefs. Like, it's a journey, right?

If you're ready for that journey and if you're ready to go deeper into that call, you can listen to a hundred more podcasts and try to piece it together, or we can streamline it for you. We can make it really, really easy and support you in the process with us as coaches and with a beautiful community of like-minded people who are on similar journeys to you. I can't tell you how beautiful the Gutsy Academy was for me three years ago when I was in my healing journey crisis.

and I was just walking right along with students. Like I was a student in the academy, even though I was teaching the information, I had to walk it as well as talk it. And the community for me was so, so empowering. And it really helped me get through some of my darkest days. And that's why we do this in community. And I want to put something in perspective before we wrap this up, because a lot of people are like, well,

Let me just schedule a one-on-one with you, Juanique. Yeah, you can pay me $400 and spend one hour with me, but you can join the Guzzi Academy for three one-hour appointments with me. And you get 30-plus hours with me. You get three hours with Britt. You get eight hours with Gina. You get eight hours with Kelly. You get a beautiful community of like-minded people who are uplifting you along the way. You get weekly check-ins with all of us. And that's for three hours of...

one-on-one time ⁓ with me, I personally much prefer healing in group. If I were to take all of my one-on-one clients and get them into the Getze Academy, actually, I try to do that all the time. I'm like, just during the Getze Academy, don't reschedule with me, join the Academy because there's so much power in a group setting like this. There's a reason why we have created it the way we have because it has all of the aspects that are missing from one-on-one consultations. And so,

Back to my original point though, if you are ready to heed that call, if you're ready to choose you and to level up into the person you're meant to be and to find oneness, because again, your body is a self-regulating organism. It's actually in a very intelligent needs suit. And it's always just trying to bring you back to yourself. Are you ready to heed that call and return to yourself again? So...

With that, Britt, do you have anything you want to say before we close this episode?

Britt Lefkoe (47:56)
The only thing I'll say, I really do just want to second how powerful community is that I think often we feel like healing is fixing and a lot of healing just happens through love. As cheesy as that sounds, like being loved, being connected with, being seen, being known, it's such an important piece of it. And I think one of the reasons why my journey has taken as long as it has is because that's the thing I resisted. I did everything. Again, I went to every doctor.

I spent a week at the Mayo Clinic running tests. I've done literally 20 years of everything. And the one thing I didn't let in was the community and the love. And I think that's where the most healing has happened for me. And it's something I think about all the time. My one-on-one clients, I don't have a community like Gutsy. And I want that for my clients. I wish that they had that because it's so important. And investing in yourself and in

This process is a really big piece of it, but I think the community is just such a huge transformation for people. So yeah.

Juanique Grover (49:01)
I have to second that. really do. Honestly, healing should feel in flow. It should feel gentle. It should feel like it's coming from a place of love. And I think what people report most on is they're like, I can't believe how gentle this process was. It's like, yeah, it's not a battle. We're not battling your body. We're befriending it now. And probably the first time you've ever done that. So, Britt, thank you for bringing that up. Thank you for being on this podcast today. And listeners, thank you for being here. Hopefully we'll see you in the Getty Academy or we'll see you at next week's episode.