Live Your Extraordinary Life With Michelle Rios

Reclaiming Wholeness: Chronic Pain, Trauma, And The Courage To Heal

• Michelle Rios

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What if your body isn’t broken—and never was? Dr. Karen Shanks joins us to rethink chronic pain, complex illness, and the cultural stories that keep us stuck. Drawing on 40 years in internal, functional, and integrative medicine, she lays out a humane, evidence-informed path that treats you as a whole human, not a malfunctioning machine. In her new book: Unbroken: Reclaim Your Wholeness, Dr. Shanks explores why imaging can look “normal” even when pain is real, how labels can end conversations that should be starting points, and why uninterrupted patient stories often reveal more than a battery of tests.

We dig into trauma’s imprint on biology and behavior, showing how the nervous system’s drive for safety can shape symptoms, immune signaling, and energy. Instead of chasing downstream fires, we turn upstream to the terrain of healing: sleep quality, protein and nutrition, strength training, breath, relationships, and the narratives we repeat. Dr. Shanks makes the case that the body is always seeking the best equilibrium possible—and that small, consistent changes can shift that equilibrium toward resilience at any age.

Midlife gets a reframe too. Rather than a glide path to decline, it becomes an opportunity to build capacity with smarter inputs and kinder self-talk. You’ll hear practical presence practices—like a two-minute hand-to-heart check-in—to send safety signals to the brain, listen for what the body needs, and let your next steps surface without a rigid protocol. If you’ve ever felt dismissed by a “nothing’s wrong” verdict or trapped by a diagnosis, this conversation offers a way back to agency, clarity, and momentum.

Listen now, share it with someone who needs hope, and tell us: what belief about your health are you ready to let go of? If this resonated, subscribe, leave a review, and pass it along so more people can reclaim their wholeness.

Connect with Dr. Shanks:
New Book: https://www.karynshanksmd.com/unbroken/
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/karyn-shanks-md-9ba2a520/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KarynShanksMD/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karynshanksmd/

WAYS TO CONNECT WITH ME:

SPEAKER_02:

This episode of the Live Your Extraordinary Life podcast is brought to you by Transformational Coaching with Michelle Rios, created for high achievers just like you, who've checked all the boxes yet still wonder, is this really it? You've built success, but deep down you're craving more, more meaning, more freedom, more joy. You're ready for your next chapter. One that feels fully aligned, deeply fulfilling, and unapologetically yours. Through my transformational coaching, I'll help you break free from the patterns and beliefs keeping you stuck, clarify your vision for life and business in this next chapter of life, build unshakable confidence and self-trust, align your mindset, energy, and actions so success feels authentic and easeful, and create extraordinary results without sacrificing yourself along the way. If you're done playing small and you're ready to rise, visit Michelle RiosOfficial.com backslash coaching to learn more and apply. Your extraordinary life is waiting. Are you ready?

SPEAKER_01:

The healing's there, the wholeness is there. So what you need to do is find it. First and foremost, we can't really accomplish anything. You know, whether you want to learn to play tennis or you want to tap into your healing, you have to pay attention to yourself.

SPEAKER_03:

Hi, I'm Michelle Rios, host of the Live Your Extraordinary Life Podcast. This podcast is built on the premise that life is meant to be joyful, but far too often we settle for less. So if you've ever thought that something is missing from your life, that you were meant for more, or you simply want to experience more joy in the everyday, then this podcast is for you. Each week, I'll bring you captivating personal stories, transformative life lessons, and juicy conversations on living life to the fullest, with the hope to inspire you to create a life you love on your terms with authenticity, purpose, and connection. Together we'll explore what it means to live an extraordinary life, the things that hold us back, and the steps we all can take to start living our best lives. So come along for the journey. It's never too late to get started, and the world needs your light. She's a physician, an author, and a pioneer in the field of root cause healing, with over 40 years experience helping clients recover their lives from chronic complex illness. She is board certified in both internal medicine and functional medicine, and a founding diplomat of the American Board of Integrative and Holistic Medicine. She is also trained in trauma-informed psychotherapy through Dr. Gaber Mate's Compassionate Inquiry Professional Training Program. She is the author of Heal, a nine-stage roadmap to recover energy and the wisdom of COVID-19: How to Rejuvenate, Reclaim Hope, and Heal in a New Post-Pandemic World. Her latest book, Unbroken, Reclaim Your Wholeness, is due out on November 11th. And I am so excited to hear what she has to say. Dr. Shanks, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Well, let's dive right in. Why don't you give us a little bit of background on what was the driving impetus for your latest book, Unbroken, Reclaim Your Wholeness?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh boy. And it was a driving impetus. After years of working with people with chronic complex illness, after having my own journey with a variety of chronic problems that were misunderstood and walking the journey of healing with so many folks who felt like they had slipped through the cracks of conventional Western medicine. I wanted to understand why. Like, why are we so sick? Why do we stay so stuck in being sick? Why, when we go to the best medicine on the planet, why can't they meet our needs? Why just why? It's not because they're a bunch of bad docs. It's not because it's a bad system of medicine. It has more to do with just how we've learned as a culture and as a world and a planet and as people to see ourselves and to understand ourselves. And so what I try to do is develop a story arc that explains where all that misunderstanding and dysfunction came from, and then give people a new perspective, like a bird's eye view of the latest science and the oldest wisdom as it comes together that shows us who we really are and what our potential really is to heal, to grow, to go through incredible transformations, and to give people not just a roadmap, but also practical skills that they can take into their lives and begin to work on opening that potential that's already inside them. So I say we're already whole, really already healing. But we have to understand ourselves as those dynamic, incredible, exquisite beings and learn to unleash that. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_03:

Yes. Let's talk a little bit about root cause and chronic illness because I think this is a place that's so rich for conversation. And I share this with my dad, who I'm very, very close with, who has had chronic back problems. I mean debilitating back problems for the better part of 30 years. And the interesting thing with that, and I don't discount how painful this chronic experience has been, and he's had surgeries and many things, and nothing seems to alleviate it. An interesting thing happened, Karen. I'd love your take on it. He had three MRIs done recently, and he sent them to me, and I did what any Gen X daughter would do with access to tools like ChatGTP and others. I said, let's take these reports. We haven't yet met with a physician, but let's have Chat GTP just tell us in layman's terms, what are these MRI results saying? The interesting thing is, while they did find some pinch nerves in his neck, beyond that, what the MRIs were showing was that he had normal wear and tear and age-related issues, a little bit of arthritis, a little bit of bulging discs here and there, but no underlying spinal degenerative disease that would explain the excruciating pain he actually experiences. And the interesting thing is when I sent it back, I said, Dad, just take a read of this, and here are some questions you should go over with your doctor. He stopped and he said, Wow, I'm so blown away by the fact that it didn't find something bigger. And I feel very relieved of this one, because the story I've been telling myself is that it must be super serious. And I said, right in there, he has been telling himself a story about what's happening. And again, not discounting, he experiences a lot of pain. He spends most of his time when he's not physically working on different things on his back with a heating pad with various amounts of anti-inflammatories going through him, surgeries, the whole nine yards. Nothing seems to clear it up so much so we went to visit my son in college, who's a freshman in college. We had to get him uh mobility assistance to cross the campus because it was just too much walking for him. Right. And I was like, that's incredible. So I'm just curious because again, I think a lot of of the root causes of chronic pain often stems from unhealed trauma and stories we tell ourselves. But I'd love your take on those experiences.

SPEAKER_01:

Pain is very complex, and like you say, it is really it has influences from like every aspect of our lives, and the pain experience itself begins to evolve because pain is a safety signal and it stops us in our tracks and it scares the bejeebis out of us. And then that becomes a belief, and then that it you know it just keeps going, right? So it is well known today that chronic pain is this uh huge emotional, physical, psychological experience. And within many clinical settings of conventional West Western medicine, it's still focused on like its damaged tissue. We forget all about how complex and multifactorial the pain experience is and the pain itself is, and it's looked at through this very small reductionistic lens, right? And medicine will pull out the tools that it has, its imaging, right, and uh examinations and try to fit it into a little disease box. My guess is I don't know if his docs have had a chance to look at that imaging, but they probably said there's not much we can do for you now, and miss an opportunity to look at the richness of the pain experience and all the ways that your dad could be helped profoundly if you haven't already investigated that with him yourself. There are so many resources for people with chronic pain, but you're not gonna find him in the halls of a conventional orthopedic or back clinic or neurology clinic in the United States.

SPEAKER_03:

You just hit on something very, very profound. I don't even think he can get an appointment anytime soon to see any of those doctors, which is the new piece of the equation. And that really lends itself to this next question, which is why do people feel broken when they're experiencing chronic pain and illness? And why does that belief get actually in the way of their healing?

SPEAKER_01:

Because we're not broken and we're told that we're many parts, many problems. That's what I've come to learn is a widespread, deeply entrenched cultural narrative throughout the Western world. And you can trace that narrative back to the 16, 1700s, when Rene Descartes declared, and he was, you know, well respected. He was such an authority in the fields of math and philosophy and everything. Back then you specialized in everything, you know. And he said mind and body are completely separate. And the body is beholden to the laws of physics. And it's so you, you know, we have to understand its parts and fix its parts. And that was the cornerstone of Western medicine, biomedicine, as it evolved from that time, a time when science was exploding. And it's still true today. We still think of ourselves as many parts, many problems. Even though we don't all believe it, you and I understand that there's a more holistic way to think about ourselves. It is more accurate. There's a huge body of science that's growing, that's been around for a while that shows that, you know, we're just these dynamic, complex mind, body, spirit, planet, you know, beings. If you look at the English language, there are no words that capture that. We don't even have words to talk about ourselves in that way, right? We can say body and we can say mind and we can say spirit.

SPEAKER_03:

That's an example of how there are layers that we just affix to something versus the complexity of the integrated experience of being.

SPEAKER_01:

We can't even have an a conversation that really captures the integration of all of our exquisite parts. And I hate that. Like I don't even like to say the word part, like talking about human beings, but that's how we think of ourselves. So if our body is a machine composed of parts and we start to hurt or something's going wrong, well, we have a part that's broken, and we have to go to the expert on human parts, which are the docs. That was my medical training. I learned how to put people into a disease box. I became a fantastic diagnostician, but it didn't really capture the totality of who people were, what they were actually experiencing. You know, I learned a very reductionistic, superficial, not root cause way of taking care of people. And I had to be reading.

SPEAKER_03:

Look at the symptoms and then pinpoint where that's coming from and treat that versus the underlying cause that could be correct.

SPEAKER_01:

Generated, always looking downstream. What's right in front of us right now? The heart attack. We can treat the heart attack, we can put a stent in the coronary arteries, we can do a bypass surgery, we can put use the drugs that support um heart function, but we're not even getting close to the upstream causes when we do that. We're fixing something that's already a train that run off the tracks. And people feel better in the short term, but we leave them incredibly vulnerable.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, that leads right into what role do you think that personal agency plays in the healing process?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's everything, and we don't have it. You know, when you go to the doctor, you barely have time to tell your story. In fact, most people don't get to tell their story. So it's a show that's run by the docs, the technology, the disease model of understanding what's wrong with people. To have agency is to recognize that your needs go way beyond how they're understood by um conventional Western health care most of the time. They're great docs. Really, this my book is not about slamming Western healthcare. It actually has a very important role to play. It's genius at helping us survive those acute, catastrophic, life-threatening problems. Absolutely genius. But it really doesn't know how to understand people with chronic issues because it just doesn't know how to widen its lens to look at the whole picture of what's going on when people are suffering.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, and I think the other thing that happens when you're in that state of suffering, you give up your agency often because you just want somebody to alleviate the pain or the discomfort, the experience that you're going through. So there's almost this please tell me what's wrong, not give me tools to help me. That's right. Right. Because it seems so unlikely without training that we could be able to do that. But that's what I love about your book is the importance of the human being and spiritual being understanding their role in the healing process is profoundly essential versus get out of my own way so someone else can diagnose me and fix me is something I think fundamentally requires a cultural shift that we haven't yet fully made.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we haven't fully made it. And I think in order to have that agency, which you were asking about in the first place, people have to really reconnect to themselves as having the wisdom to know themselves. And I think people get inklings of it. They know, they don't feel seen, they don't feel like their needs have been fully understood, they walk out of the encounter, or maybe it's a situation, and this is a story I hear a lot from my clients where they're sick as hell and they're told there is nothing wrong. I mean, they are blatantly told there's nothing wrong with you. It's heartbreaking, but they walk out and they know that's wrong. It might take them a while, it might take them a few years to look in a different direction. You know, we believe in Western healthcare, hook, line, and sinker as a culture. A lot of us are beginning to understand that there are deficiencies there, and we're beginning to shift and look for other avenues to get our needs met. Man, it takes a hell of a lot of agency to really advocate for your needs in any arena of life. It's hard, right? But it's really hard when the way you're seen is as I I always use the little phrase, many parts, many problems. Like you're not a person, you're certainly not a whole person. We certainly don't want to know anything about how you're feeling because we don't have time.

SPEAKER_03:

We don't have time to hear your story. And yeah, and yeah, I know you would say if people aren't feeling seen or heard, and if we're not listening to their story, we're missing an opportunity to help them in the healing process. Talk more about that.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, there are studies from like the 1950s and 60s where the researchers looked at what happens if you listen to the story without interruption. How close does the physician get to the diagnosis versus, you know, other avenues for figuring out the diagnosis? And it turns out that listening to the story alone is like insanely effective. Like we can get at the diagnosis 95% of the time by just hearing the story, but we have to hear the whole story. And that takes time. And there was a time in history that the time when these studies were done, there was more time to spend with people. Now there's like no time. Another interesting uh set of studies that comes to mind is that if you let your patient tell their whole story as they want to tell it without any interruption whatsoever, it's less than two minutes. It's like not really that long of a time. Usually people, and that's not always true, but that on average, a person, if they're not interrupted and derailed from their agenda and what they want to tell you, a little two-minute dialogue. That's not very long. We can give people that, can't we?

SPEAKER_03:

I hope so. I really do hope so. All right, let's talk a little bit about this strikes very close to home, but our cultural obsession with productivity and perfectionism and how that really contributes to what we see and know, which is compound burnout and disconnection, and how that plays out in what we see chronic illness and pain and what have you, because they usually go hand in hand over a period of time.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, it's a cultural narrative that success is defined by how much money you make, how many hours you work if you sit around and rest or read a book, you're lazy. I mean, that's our culture, right? This is also when we look at individuals, it's a trauma response, right? It we're either traumatized by our culture, who's telling us to live in a way that doesn't serve our true needs and support our true needs, allow ourselves to get to know who we really are and what our true potential is, arises from a sense of unworthiness, right? We're looking for outside sources of validation. We try to be as productive as possible. We mistake achievement for intrinsic value and worth, and we're constantly pursuing perfectionism that is completely unattainable. That's me. I mean, I'm a work in progress, I'm healing, but guilty. Yeah. And it's still there. And there are times when I'm really hit over the head with how there's still this dis sort of uneasiness that comes with when I just want to take a day off or, you know, just rest or, you know, I'm learning, but it's really entrenched and it's really devastating. This kills people potential as humans.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, yeah, 100%. You know, it gets us on to completely wrong tracks too, right? Like a lot of people end up not in their full potential because they go down a track that may I don't want to say it's quick or easy money, but like known way of making it or traditional or accepted, fill in the blank. And you actually have some squandered gifts as a result of like going down the cookie cutter factory, you know, retreating our authenticity. 100%. All right, let's talk about the medical paradigm's role in contributing to this disconnection, burnout, and chronic illness. Let's understand better how this Western medical paradigm contributes to this.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it sees us as our bodies as machines comprised of parts. It studies our smallest parts. It looks at the underlying process by which medicine pulls together the knowledge that it uses to help people or to understand a disease, is by asking very simple questions about very small aspects of somebody's experience and looking at the smallest possible parts, and then, which is the strategy that science uses to make observations and collect information about whatever it's studying, and then conclusions are drawn about that. So that is a fantastic method of observation if you're looking at that is beholden to the laws of physics, but it's really complicated and dangerous to take what we believe we've learned from that kind of observation and then apply it back to complicated human beings, right? Like we take a bunch of people with a certain, you know, set of symptoms and biomarkers, and we say this is the disease, and we give it a name. And then when somebody who's suffering comes to the clinic and has that set of symptoms and biomarkers, we say they have, you know, whatever, rheumatoid arthritis. It's okay as a starting place, it's a hypothesis, it gets us started. It's like, okay, there's some autoimmune phenomenon going here, there's inflammation, there's joint pain, but it stops. And the thing about humans is that, you know, they are more than the disease label. And every patient is completely unique if we look at them as they are, if we look at their history and and all the things that are going on with them. And in functional medicine, which I'm trained in, we like to set that disease box aside and just ask the question, you know, what's going on with this person? What are their unmet needs? Let's look at all the things. Let's look at, you know, their entire system's biology and let's look at their relationships and let's look at their lifestyle habits and let's look at all these things. Let's look at their timeline from birth to now. And then let's tell that story. It's messy, it's complicated, it takes time. Then we figure it out. And a lot of people with that diagnosis who are traditionally prescribed a very set protocol of treatments and drugs, don't need that protocol of treatments and drugs. They need to get off gluten. They might have Lyme disease, and you can have rheumatoid arthritis positive antibodies in the setting of Lyme disease. So it's like conventional medicine in trying to shift from dealing with acute and life-threatening problems to more chronic, complex problems is just barking up the wrong tree. It's like doing a terrible disservice to the planet. Did I just say that?

SPEAKER_03:

You did. And I love the part where you basically said, look, what conventional Western medicine does is it gets us to a starting point of a conversation, but it doesn't go far enough.

SPEAKER_01:

That's right.

SPEAKER_03:

And instead, it's usually the end of the conversation for most patients. And then that's right. Okay, you have this protocol prescribed.

SPEAKER_01:

Done. We're done. And that doesn't make any sense. You know, as soon as I started to step away from uh conventional Western medicine and study other ways of looking at people, which made so much more sense rather than looking at them as diseases and that look a certain way under the microscope, and we treat this disease with these drugs, but look at them as living, vibrant, you know, real humans with this incredibly complex systems biology that interacts with every aspect of our life. It's in our ecosystem. Our ecosystem, our planet, our cosmos, everything. That's who we are. And we need a completely different system of medicine that gives us the time and space to let people reveal who they are and reveal what their needs truly are.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, that gets me to the next question, which is how does trauma influence chronic illness and prolonged suffering? What's that role that trauma plays? We know that it obviously can impact people, but could you better unpack the role it played?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so the human organism's number one priority is safe. Like it'll divert all our resources, all of our behavior, all everything toward safety before everything else. So when people are traumatized, there's a whole cascade of phenomena that occur to bring that person to safety, changes in their genetic expression and their biology. Everyone knows about the autonomic nervous system and its role in trauma and just being anxious and scared all the time and not being able to breathe. And so there all that complex biology that goes along with trauma that is indeed meant to bring us to safety, moves us out of being in a an optimal state of our being. It moves us out of an equilibrium of resilience and robustness and into an equilibrium of suffering, of disease, of whatever. It's just how our organism works. But it's always an equilibrium. So I think trauma and the experience of trauma as being an equilibrium point as well. And there's always something we can do to shift. We know so much more about trauma and healing trauma today than we did, than we have ever known. And we understand that trauma is really a much wider experience that most people have some history of trauma, whether it's as a result of things that happened or the result of things that should have happened that didn't. And then there was no repair. So we're getting good at understanding who's in under that umbrella.

SPEAKER_03:

And um which is almost everyone. It is. Oh, absolutely. I haven't met anyone with no trauma. Like, they don't think it's trauma because it doesn't fit into this, like maybe narrow definition of like acute abuse of some sort. And you're like, no, but that was a very traumatic experience that went on for a really long time. Right.

SPEAKER_01:

Or my parents just didn't get me. My parents didn't get this very sensitive part of me. So I had to shut that down. And I did it unconsciously. I didn't mean to. I did it. And then as an adult, I'm at odds with this part that I've kept hidden that is part of my authentic being that needs to be a part of my experience. Yeah. So it really does a number on our biology and the way our genes are expressed. And there's research that connects like uh trauma, childhood trauma, adult trauma, to just about every disease and disorder that we know of. And even if people aren't overtly sick, there's always suffering, you know. So it's a huge piece of the human experience and a huge part of our healing.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, here's the good news, I think. And I really want to get your thoughts on this, because I think this is where your training as a physician, as someone who's looked at chronic disease and suffering over a long period of time. Let's talk about the body's ability to heal itself. Okay. Because I think we immediately something happens. I think people kind of fall into two camps. Either I get sick and I go right away to a doctor, or I get sick and I don't want to go see a doctor because you're like, I'll be fine. Everything will be fine. But when it becomes a chronic and we're either in and out of doctors going, what is wrong with me? What is wrong with me? But again, letting go of the personal agency to figure out how to co-heal oneself, or ignoring it because you're like, oh, this is just something I've always dealt with. It just is what it is. And then you suffer anyway, and your own mindset is it can't be somebody once told me there's nothing they can do. And so that's a story I now tell myself every day.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I like to teach people that we're always healing, and we're always healing to the very best of our ability, no matter what the circumstances. That's just a law of nature. Everything will reach its best. I like the word equilibrium because we're so dynamic. You know, our human experience is, you know, which includes, you know, our biology and everything else, is operating at this dynamic place, an equilibrium, a balance, if you will. And it's all our bodies are always achieving the very best equilibrium possible given the resources, energy, support experiences that we have. Always. That's just like a that's a law. And because it's an equilibrium, we can shift it. And we can shift it in all kinds of ways. So we've learned that there's what I like to call the terrain of healing, which is all the parts of our lives that interact with our genetic expression that can lead to shifts in that equilibrium of healing. So we can shift it from an equilibrium of suffering, of pain, of chronic illness, can shift it toward an equilibrium of resilience and robustness. And that terrain is composed of all the things you'd guess, you know, like our lifestyle, you know, what we eat, sleep, rest, the stories we tell. Are they limiting? Are they, you know, are they in our way? Do we have a bunch of survival biology going on inside us? Are we anxious? All the time. And also things like, you know, the quality of our relationships and, you know, love and how we deal with our feelings and all of these sort of domains and aspects of who we are impact our physiology and can help us shift that equilibrium of suffering. And so there is really a very clear roadmap that we all can use. We can sort of choose what part of our lives we feel. And most of us know what part of our lives need help, right? Forget the disease, forget what the doctors told you. Not that you don't, you know, keep yourself safe, right? But start to work on that terrain and shift that equilibrium of healing of who you are toward something that's more sturdy than perhaps where it is right now. Those are all inroads that we have, inroads to healing that we have complete control over.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, that leads me to the next question, which I think a lot of our listeners um appreciate here. Or not complete control, but we have a lot. We have a lot of agency, more than we give ourselves credit for. There you go. So I'm very curious because so many of our listeners are sort of in that midlife um arena, and there tends to be this knee-jerk reaction to hitting midlife, like after 40 or after 50. It's all down road, downhill from there. And I will tell you, I am so anti that. I'm like, no, no, here's the thing. I am healthier today than I probably was in my 20s emotionally, mentally, and physically, because I have a lot more knowledge. And frankly, I'm willing to invest the time in a way that my 20-something persona felt if it wasn't immediate gratification, I probably wouldn't invest that hard in it because I was, you know, the weekend road warrior for exercise, not an ongoing, it needs to be continuous and ongoing, what have you. Let's talk about the body's ability, because you talked about it's always healing to heal and be in states of healing as we age. We all know that at some point we are gonna die. I'm hoping it's way down the road, and I'm gonna work hard to make sure that is the case for me. But barring being at the end of life, is the body, regardless of age, in that conhealing and regenerative state? Yes. Love that answer.

SPEAKER_01:

It is, but we have yeah, talk about cultural stories. We're a little stooped over. And there are, you know, science tells us all kinds of things about what becomes more difficult as we get older. We need more protein, we need more strength training to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and have strength. And there are things that we have to work on more robustly. There are our needs do change, our hormones change. And there are unique considerations for aging, but to put limits on how we can feel and what we can do and what our potential is is I'm not willing to do that. I don't think there's any justification for that whatsoever. And most of the things that we consider to be normal parts of aging, they're normal, but they're not our destiny. It's not written in stuff. Not inevitable. No, we but we get what we put into it, right? Right. So if you don't exercise, you are gonna get weak. And a lot of other bad things that happen when we don't move. We lose the capacity to make energy, we lose the capacity to detoxify. We our bones get weak. We feel less safe because we're our cores are weak and we're but our bodies are weak and we don't trust our feet on the ground, you know.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, a friend of mine said, Hey, you know, people our age, we're not in our 20s anymore. And I said, Hold on, I'm just gonna back that train up for a minute. My cells are listening, so stop that. I lie to them every day, we're doing great. You know, I do think that there is this cultural perception that at a certain age, the body is just in decline and that the body doesn't have the ability to come back as easily as it did when it was younger. And I do think to some degree, if you're not investing in your health, if you're not eating that protein, if you're not moving and exercising and getting sleep and being aware of how hormones influence your body, then sure. But if you're doing those things, who's to say? I would like to think that my body's constantly looking for ways to repair itself after I'm lifting heavy weights, right? That's the whole point.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely, absolutely. There are things that become more difficult to repair. There are limitations that come with getting older, and especially when we get into the, you know, the last couple of decades. But our potential during those years is still far greater that I think than any of us can possibly imagine. Probably beyond what I have in my head, which is I'm just have been just as poisoned by cultural stories. I feel like I've, you know, I've kicked some of those out. And and I like you, I'm in my 60s. I feel that I feel amazing. I feel stronger, more balanced, more energetic, more present than any other time in my whole life.

SPEAKER_03:

And for those of you who are listening to the podcast versus seeing the video, Dr. Shanks not only is incredibly wise, but she's also very beautiful. So, you know, beauty is no expiration date either. She looks fantastic.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. That is a really important topic, and it's really important for people to who are in midlife to just think about what stories do you believe about your aging? If they're disparaging in any way, mm-mm. No, I think it's time for an upgrade. You're going to be incredibly pleasantly surprised and happy.

SPEAKER_03:

My 18-year-old said to me over the summer as we were getting ready to kind of set him off and launch him into college, God mom, he's like, sometimes you act just like a kid. Like, I don't remember you being like this when I was little and you were always on the road because I was traveling on planes, trains, and automobiles in an earlier part of my career. And I just looked at him, I said, Really? Thank you. I have worked so hard to get to this point of adulthood where I realized that I did not have a youthful childhood. So I'm living that now. So thank you. I'm actually doing what I set out to do, which is incredible.

SPEAKER_01:

At my age. Yeah. And that your son, 18 years old, saw that in you. He's paying attention.

SPEAKER_03:

I didn't think it was a compliment, but that's okay. I saw it as a compliment and I reminded him right away. And I said, Hey, that's good. You haven't had to grow up as quickly as I had to. Um, so this is all good stuff for me. All right, let's talk a little bit about the language of the body and why it's so often ignored. What is the language of the body?

SPEAKER_01:

We're not trained to self-observe. We're not trained to be in present time. We're always looking out there, we're always perceiving what's going on out there. If when you pay attention to your body, and some of it you notice because the body can really, you know, scream what its needs are. You're there are sensation, feeling, there's shifts in energy, there's symptoms, what we call symptoms. Something hurts. There's pain, there's, you know, whatever. I think of that as the language of the body, telling us what we need, what's going well, what needs our attention. But it's a language we've disconnected from. So we don't really know what to do with it a good bit of the time. It's that's something I'm still working on because sometimes it seems obtuse. And maybe there was a time or there, you know, indigenous people who wasn't so obtuse to them because they lived that. That was all those experiences were their guides for healing. But you know, we're so disconnected from it, we don't know what to do with it. But I think as we learn to just check in and pay attention, we can start to develop a relationship with our bodies and a relationship with those parts that are showing up as sensations and feelings and shifts in our energy and have conversations with them, even like okay, feel a little tight. I feel some fear in there. I'm right here. First of all, I like let that part know you're there. I think that the body is a really alive, living, breathing, feeling entity, a really wise organism. And I think once we let the body know that we're paying attention, it's gonna tell us a lot of stuff that we didn't notice before. So I think it helps to actually, you know, ask who are what are you? Who are you? What do you need? It's an in-road to understanding ourselves and understanding what our needs, what our unmet needs are.

SPEAKER_03:

All right, let's talk about three first steps that listeners can take to shift their approach to chronic illness and begin their journey back to wholeness and healing.

SPEAKER_01:

The healing's there, the wholeness is there. So what you need to do is find it. First and foremost, we can't really accomplish anything. You know, whether you want to learn to play tennis or you want to tap into your healing, you have to pay attention to yourself, right? You have to learn to pay attention to yourself. And that's not something we're trained to do or taught to do in our culture very often. We have a lot of distractions in our lives that keep us from looking within. So you have to find a way to connect to yourself, connect to your body, and be in present time. And I will say that number one, that's how you get to know yourself, get to know what you need, get to know what you want, get to know who you authentically are, get to know what you need in terms of healing. But it's also the way your podcast is has the words extraordinary life in it. That's how you get to have a relationship with the extraordinary world and your extraordinary life is by being in present time, right? Which is, I think, the easiest way to be in present time is to be in your body and to just pay attention to check in. And it can be easy, it can be two minutes. My favorite exercise, which I do throughout the day every day, as I just check in and I'll literally put my hand over my chest because that sends safety signals to my brain, you know, that tactile information right to the heart. And I'll close my eyes and take a few big breaths, usually with a big old loud sigh, and I'll say, I'm right here. And those are words that also send safety signals to the brain. So it's like I'm creating a container of safety in my body, and then I can ask, you know, what do you need? I don't always get an answer right away, but I feel like that checking in really grounds me. And then I think that's a very dynamic way to not only be in present time and in your body and to check in. It starts to build that relationship of, you know, just being in your body and being able to pay attention. So having some kind of presence practice, whether you're writing, you're walking in the woods, and you're taking in what's and you're feeling the ground underneath you and you're hearing the thing. It doesn't matter what your presence practice is. It just needs to be something, you know? That would be the first thing. That's a hard thing. But then that thing will lead to what to whatever else. In the checking in process, you're gonna be told what you need to do. Okay, I gotta stop going down those social media rabbit holes that are so distracting, and I don't get to sleep on time and so much noise. Yeah, and so then there's your second thing. So I don't have to tell you a second and third thing because your inner wisdom is gonna tell you through the checking in process, you know. So I don't have to give you a protocol, you know what you need to do, right?

SPEAKER_03:

So true. And I think, look, for people, everybody, it's gonna be slightly different. But for me, I never would have been able to tell you this a few years ago. But I walk into a Pilates studio, I get on a reformer, I'm quiet, it's darker, I'm working out and pushing myself, but it is a place where I actually can check in with myself. I'm breathing slower. I'm listening, I'm tracking my heart rate, I am allowing my mind to slow to focus on the move I'm in and nothing more. I'm not thinking about dinner, I'm not thinking about walking dogs, I'm not thinking about due dates or deliverable, just being in that moment. And that if you had asked me if several years ago that I would have found it in some sort of exercise, I don't think they would have. I would have been like, no, I have to think too hard to do that. But for me, it's the opposite. It's allowing me to just reconnect as I watching my breathing slow down, moving a very deliberate movement with a muscle that we're focusing on. And that's for me very grounding in the present moment.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, that's a great presence practice. And you've made it that way. Not everyone would do that. Some people might have their earbuds in and they're listening to a podcast. You know, and that's great. That's still pulling you out of, you know, you're not worrying about other things. I'd say that's still a presence practice. Absolutely making it. Wherever people need to start, I'm a hundred percent on board with, you know, however they need to be to begin.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, and I think a friend of mine said it so eloquently, and she said, you need to be where your feet are. Yes. Be where your feet are. Don't worry about where you're gonna be in 20 minutes or in two hours or in two days or in two months or in two years. Be where your feet are in that moment.

SPEAKER_01:

But keep in mind your brain has a different agenda because our brains like to go back, like to go forward, right? So that's the human brain. It's having compassion for ourselves that we are wired that way and practicing that present moment embodiment because it takes practice with our crazy wild brains. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03:

All right. Well, Dr. Shanks, it has been an absolute pleasure. Her new book, Unbroken Reclaim Your Wholeness, is out on November 11th, 1111. I hope you all will check it out. Dr. Shanks, before we wrap, where could people find more information about you and your practice and what you do?

SPEAKER_01:

Go to my website, www.karenshanksmd.com.

SPEAKER_03:

We'll also include the links in the show notes. Until next time, go and live your extraordinary life. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please take a moment to rate and review. If you have recommendations for future topics, please reach out to me at Michelle RiosOfficial.com. Lastly, please consider supporting this podcast by sharing it. Together we can reach, inspire, and positively impact more people. Thank you.

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Michelle Rios

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