Reclaiming Inner Authority: Women's Health & Radical Self-Trust | Dr. Marissa Heisel | 187

What if the authority you’ve been taught to look for outside of yourself has actually been within you all along?

In this powerful episode of Manders Mindset, host Amanda Russo sits down with holistic doctor and former midwife Dr. Marissa Heisel for an expansive conversation on women’s health, pregnancy, midlife, and the radical act of self-trust. With more than 26 years of experience working with women and families, Marissa shares how her journey from conventional medical aspirations to holistic care reshaped her understanding of healing and why so many women feel disconnected from their own bodies.

Together, Amanda and Marissa explore the cultural conditioning that influences pregnancy and birth, the medicalization of menopause, rising childhood anxiety, and the hidden impact of modern screen culture. At the heart of it all is one core message: reclaiming inner authority isn’t just personal, it’s generational. When women trust themselves, everything shifts.

💡 In this episode, listeners will discover:

🌀 Why women’s health has become increasingly medicalized
 👶 How disempowerment can begin during pregnancy and birth
 🌿 What “radical self-trust” truly means in everyday life
 🧠 The connection between stress, technology, and rising childhood anxiety
 🔥 Why symptoms may be signals not problems to suppress
 🪞 The difference between identity and inherent worth
 🌎 How reclaiming inner authority creates ripple effects for future generations

⏰ Timeline Summary

 [3:05] The childhood mohttps://www.instagram.com/elemental.healing_arts/ment that sparked a fascination with healing
[8:30] Walking away from conventional medicine
[15:10] Disempowerment in pregnancy and birth culture
[26:00] Your body as your best medicine
[34:40] Technology, anxiety, and modern childhood
[46:10] Trauma identity vs. true self-worth
[55:00] Final reflections on authority, trust, and generational change

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To Connect with Dr. Marissa: 

Website: https://elementalhealingarts.life/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elemental.healing_arts/ 

Transcript

Meet Dr. Marissa And Her Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologues and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers, and a variety of other people, where your host, Amanda Rousseau, will discuss her own mindset and perspective, and her guest mindset and perspective on the world around us. Manders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Welcome to Landers Mindset, where we explore the power of shifting your mindset to shift your life. I'm your host, Amanda Risa. And I am so excited to be here with Dr. Marissa today. And I am so excited to delve down Ho Joni and down the holistic health route and discover a little bit about how she got to where she is today. Thank you so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_03 1:00

Thank you so much for having me here.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

I appreciate it. Absolutely. So who would you say Moissa is at the core? Oh, that's a really good one to start off with.

SPEAKER_03 1:13

Thanks so much. At the core, at the core, I am a number of things. I'm a holistic doctor trained in midwifery as well. I'm a mama of two young adults and three additional bonus stepkids. And I'm somebody who really has learned a lot from my own practice over the last 26 years about women's health and the intersection of women's health with the way that we live our lives and the way that we both are disempowered in the world and can find a way to re-empower ourselves in the world, especially as the world feels like it's changing so much right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

It really does. Can you take us down memory lane a little bit? Tell us about your upbringing childhood, however deep you want to take that.

Early Life And Medical Crossroads

SPEAKER_03 2:07

Yeah, sure. I mean, I I was raised pretty conventionally. Like I didn't eat particularly healthy. There was always junk food in my house. There were a lot of medical doctors in my family. So I wasn't raised in a holistic lifestyle or a holistic health perspective. I broke my leg really badly when I was 10 years old in a skiing accident. And that was the first time that I was absolutely amazed at the healing capacity of the human body. Like the fact that you can cast a bone for however long it takes, and in a child that, you know, can sometimes take weeks to a couple of months, and it heals was mind-boggling to me. So I was a ballerina for years and years. I was going to be a ballerina. And all of a sudden, I wanted to be a pediatric orthopedic surgeon. That was what I was going to be from the time I was 10. And that stayed with me through high school. And after my first degree, when I was seriously about ready to apply to medical school, I don't know what happened, but there was some bolt of lightning out of the blue that basically said to me, You're sure you want to dispense drugs and do surgery for the rest of your life? Like, are you sure that's what health is? And I have no idea where this voice came from because, like I said, that is not how I was raised. I'd seen a chiropractor a few times when I'd hurt myself, but that was really it. And I decided to pay attention to that voice. And I started really exploring, you know, what did I want to be? And who did I want to be and how did I want to show up in the world? And I explored at that time chiropractic, naturopathy, and midwifery, and decided on chiropractic and went through and became a chiropractor and worked as a chiropractor for a couple of years, and then realized that even chiropractic kept felt kind of limited to me and went back into midwifery. And by that point, I had one child and then a second child. And midwifery is a beautiful, beautiful profession, but really challenging if you have kids and not the most supportive now ex-husband, might I add. And so I went back to chiropractic and most of my focus was really on women and children's health. And in fact, I limited my practice after a little while to only seeing women and children. But my approach toward health had really sort of like blown open. And it was not physical health or physical adjustments only. It was really mind-body-spirit medicine. And I started learning more and more. I started learning herbalism and homeopathy and essential oils and energy medicine and found that I had this real capacity to put my hands on somebody and see and feel what was going on in their body, in my mind and in my body. So my intuitive abilities kind of blew open. And that's what I practiced until about five years ago. And then took most of my practice online and started doing more programs and consulting.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Now, I want to backtrack a chad. You mentioned having this shift where you were like, do you want to dispense medications? Now, when you had this epiphany or whatever I want to call it, did you make that shift right away and just not go to school, not pursue that?

From Chiropractic To Midwifery

SPEAKER_03 5:28

I was just trying to think. My first degree was actually in English lit, believe it or not. I got freaked out by, you know, higher level sciences and decided I'm going to be a lawyer and did my first degree in English lit. And then, you know, after the four years of that, sort of gave my head a shake and was doing a minor in science to go back to my original plan of I'm going to be a medical doctor. And somewhere in there, something happened. I remember sitting in a lecture hall in my science minor years, a couple of years, and I don't know what happened. I was literally ready to apply to medical school. And something just was like, uh-uh-uh. You know, in part, it might be that as a kid, I'd had a lot of digestive issues. I always had stomach issues. I was always at the pediatrician or always being assessed at the hospital for sick children or something like that. And nothing ever helped. And so I don't know if that was playing in the back of my head. And it sort of reared its ugly head again when I was in university, this stomach stuff. And I don't know if there was this like maybe something else is beneficial that you haven't really thought about. Sorry, I don't know what my camera just did. Let me just try and fix that. I don't know what it was that initially did that, that took me out of this medical mindset. But thankfully it did. And so when I started assessing chiropractic midwifery or naturopathy, at that point, what I had done was to give myself a year of briefing room. I had started a master's program in child assessment and counseling. So I was in the first year of a two-year program and really debating what I was going to do next. And I decided on chiropractic and I thought, I'm going to apply. And if I get in, I'm going to go. I'm going to leave the master's program. And I got in. And I was like, well, let's go see. And so that's that's really where it started. And I was really never a conventional chiropractor. I was really never a let's just adjust your spine for this. I, from the time I graduated, really had this greater sense of what healing and health could look like and bringing in a lot of different modalities to achieve that. I also graduated knowing that I really wanted to work with pregnant women. This was a few years before midwifery, but I knew that as well. And I started seeing that when I put out the intention, things started flowing. So I had a lot of pregnant women in my practice, even really on or really early on. But after a couple of years of chiropractic, I was, I was, I was ready for, I knew that I needed to bring in more of that holistic pregnancy and birthing perspective. And that's where I went into midwifery for five years.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Now, what was it about pregnant women that you wanted to work with them?

The Birth That Changed Everything

SPEAKER_03 8:25

You know, it's really funny because at the time, I at first it was just a calling, just a higher sense of purpose. When I was still in my final year of chiropractic, I was actually studying for my board exams. And one of my patients who I had become friends with had asked me to attend her birth. And it was a home birth with midwives, and I get the call at six in the morning, and I showed up at her house, and things were going haywire. She had spiked a fever, which, as it turns out, her body tends to do when she's stressed, but she was having a hard time communicating that. So this beautiful home birth that was supposed to be a water birth ended up in hospital, and then the hospital became a C-section. And I remember, first of all, having to go out into the hallway with one of the midwives and say, tell me that this is your opinion and not just the obstetrician on call, and I will go back in there and help convince her that this is needed. Because she was utterly, the mom was utterly opposed. And the midwife said, No, we need to do this. And then I remember her, the mom, feeling utterly disempowered afterwards, like like she had failed. And this was the first birth I'd ever attended. So here I am. She's got her whole birth plan. It's going to be a home water birth, and it ends up being in hospital, and then it ends up being a C-section. And that was the first time that I really ever recognized that we can have the best-laid plans. And our bodies and our babies are going to direct what's needed. And for me, somehow, that became this call to wanting to be more deeply involved, to working with women at this time to make sure that whatever the outcome of the birth was, she was going to feel more settled in herself, that she had done the very best she could and to make sure that she didn't feel as though there had been any abuse of the situation. Because unfortunately, one of the things that obstetrics and pregnancy and birth are really known for are these highly disempowering times for women. Like highly, highly disempowering. And I wanted to see if I could be part of a shift in that through midwifery.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Wow. That's that's so beautiful that you ex got to experience that though. And it it almost seems like you got to witness the calling like come into your life almost in that moment. Yeah. Very much so.

Industrialized Birth And Disempowerment

SPEAKER_03 10:59

Very much so. But it was it was interesting because I was I was training in midwifery and only in midwifery for about five years for a number of reasons. There were there were aspects of it that I was struggling with and definitely aspects that my ex-husband was struggling with. And so I didn't end up staying in midwifery. But what I what I came to realize was that industrialized birth feels like it is very contradictory to a woman's deepest sense of self and deepest sense of knowing. And I saw too many women whose birth plans went out the window. And really, I sort of started to shy away from birth plans because it felt like, again, birth felt like it was out of our control and we almost needed to be able to surrender to that without having prescribed plans. But what I did see is that for women for whom things did not go the way they wanted, or where there was a lot of sort of top-down hierarchical control that was being imposed on her, the the early relationship with her baby was also very much affected. And so for me, part of leaving midwifery was also I was I was really struggling being in hospitals at that point. Like I my philosophy toward women's health was becoming much more, much more holistic as I went through. And I really needed some distance from the medical model.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

So that makes sense. Now, you said you left that five years ago?

SPEAKER_03 12:29

No, no, quite a while ago. I left that, when was that, around 2008, and went back into chiropractic practice, but started doing other things, started really diving into more integrative medicine, bringing in more other aspects of holistic healing and giving and helping people to have more tools in their toolbox that they could use for themselves at home, really bringing in more of the consciousness and the self-awareness, breath work, essential oils, herbs, all those sorts of things, so that people could create for themselves what felt like their approach to wellness and to holistic health. And so I started becoming more about coming up with protocols initially, and then over the last six years, probably, it really started becoming more root cause medicine, doing a little bit of a dive into German new medicine, other aspects of medicine, looking more and more at breath work myself as a means by which people can really connect to their inner selves and their inner strengths. And so I'm kind of, I'm not a jack of all trades, but I bring a lot of different aspects of healing into the work that I do. And these days, most of my work, like I said, is online. It's consulting and programs and really focusing on helping women specifically, both with raising healthy kids naturally and that women's health at midlife, coming from a place of believing that they are their own best medicine, that we are our own best medicine, that what we have experienced in our lives, the good, the bad, the challenging, the trauma, all of it has brought us to where we are today. And that when we give ourselves the gift and have the courage to really dive into who we are, that so much healing is in that energy already. And I've been challenged a couple of times. Does that mean that you don't think people should go to the medical doctor? No, I don't. It's not what I'm saying. Because if you have diabetes, you certainly need to be, you know, getting your insulin. And if you're having, you know, major health concerns and chronic health issues, you might need to come from a pharmaceutical or medical approach. But I believe that so much of our own healing lies within us. And we have really outsourced all of our own authority to supposed experts who I have unfortunately not seen have our best interests at heart. You know, a very industrialized healthcare system does not tend to have our best interests or our children's best interests at heart.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

I agree with you on that. I really do. I'm curious, you mentioned a few times, and obviously I'm sure this is just an opinion, but about how women are so often disempowered during the bothing process and after and leading up to it. Why do you feel like that is?

Building A Holistic Toolkit

SPEAKER_03 15:31

Because I think that women are really vulnerable at those times. You know, for over a century, since the early like 1913 specifically, the conventional medical system is really operated on what I see as a fundamental lie that healing comes from outside interventions rather than supporting the body's innate wisdom. And I see it as a carefully orchestrated system designed to create dependency at the two most transformative phases of a woman's life, both when she is becoming a mother, pregnant, and becoming a mother, because women still are the primary health decision makers for families. Because if you can disempower a woman's trust in her own body, it will also likely ensure that children do not have a natural trust in their own body so that they it ensures lifelong compliance to an external system. And fear-based messaging around children's health creates the most compliant consumers. There is nothing that is more terrifying to a parent than the thought that something might happen to their child. And that fear becomes all-encompassing. Once a mother doubts her instincts about her child's well-being, she'll doubt everything about her own body, about her own capacity, about her child's ability to heal. And it creates dependency from birth right through life to ensure that adults will automatically seek external authority as well, rather than rely on their own inner knowing. And then again at midlife, just as women begin to reclaim their authority through their life experience and they're approaching what is truly our most powerful phase. Truly, the system strikes again by medicalizing menopause, by pathologizing power and convincing women that our bodies are broken and need fixing rather than evolving into their most powerful form. We suppress our natural innate wisdom that women have always had and increase intuition. We decrease clarity, we increase the necessity to rely on these external experts. And we create midlife fear and anxiety around aging that keeps women seeking this external validation and intervention. So, and I've seen it over and over and over again. I've described before how women at midlife are told things like, and this is in cities and small towns that I've worked at, worked in things like you don't need your uterus anymore, so why don't we just remove that? You know, so this concept that women's bodies can be taken apart because it's not needed, because you're not having another child at 55, so we'll just or 45, or the number of women in rural settings that I worked in who in their late 30s were being told, well, if you're having menstrual issues, we can just remove your uterus, was mind-boggling to me. And so when we start saying that the way to heal a woman's body, heal with big quotes around it, right? That the way to heal a woman's body is to remove parts of it, we've got a serious problem going on. And it is my personal opinion, but it's a personal opinion born out of 26 years so far of of direct patient and client interaction.

Women As Their Own Best Medicine

SPEAKER_01 18:58

So that's intense. That's alarming. It is. What do you think is is a way to turn any of this around for women? Yeah, that's a very good question.

Why The System Disempowers Women

SPEAKER_03 19:11

I think it's a couple of things. I think it's helping. So the work that I do these days is to really help women reclaim their personal sovereignty by untangling from these cultural scripts that taught them that they were powerless. The truth is that our bodies and our intuition really already know what we need. And my work isn't about handing out, at this point, it really isn't about handing out one more protocol to follow. It's about guiding women out of a state of really systemic dependency and into a state of what I'm calling radical self-trust and inner authority back to trusting ourselves, to seeing symptoms as signals that our body is sending us as opposed to disaster, to seeing our emotions as intelligence and seeing midlife as a season of clarity instead of decline. And then from others, that same trust extends to their children. It's about reclaiming the confidence that we already know what's best for our children, even when the system tries to override our authority. When women root ourselves in this kind of embodied sovereignty, we raise children who trust themselves to do the same. So the next generation and the generation that follows breaks this cycle of, you know, pharmaceuticals from the day of birth right through death. And I think it's actually about more than just personal healing. You know, healing work is my way in because this is what I've done for 26 years of my working life. But I really see it as cultural transformation that women reclaiming inner authority and raising the next generation from a place of really deep knowing is what will ultimately shift us away from dependence on these external control systems and toward a future where humanity leads itself with clarity and resilience and freedom. And I think we're standing, as I said to you before, we started recording on this precipice of like humanity about to tip over into technocracy. I had a midwife, one of my midwives, who then became one of my midwifery professors, was one of the senior midwives in the province of Ontario and Canada at the time. And she used to say, just because we have technology doesn't mean we need to use it. Now she was specifically referring to birth, but I've looked at it and held that in my head ever since. We've become such a technocratic society where women would come into my practice to see me for half an hour and sit their iPhone or iPad in their baby's car seat from the age of six months. And by the time that child was 18 months, they could scan, like flip through to find their own videos and their own music on YouTube. Where we've become this society that relies on these devices as a sort of panacea for everything. And I think we're at this real tipping point where we need to really reclaim. And remember our human curiosity and creativity. We need to reconnect our children back to the natural world to play out of doors. And I think it's a tipping point that we're standing at. I really do. It's affecting everything about our health, everything about our children's physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, chemical health. And if we ask ourselves the simple question, are we healthier now than we were even 10 years ago, 20 years ago? It's a resounding no, we're not. We have young children under the age of 10 with diseases and illnesses of midlife. These things are not, you know, and it's not a coincidence and it's not an oops, and it's not a, we are in trouble. And, you know, it's really interesting that health these days, so many people want to politicize health as though it's a right or left question. Maybe the delivery of health is, maybe public health is, but health itself is completely apolitical. It's bipartisan. It has nothing to do with a political party or, you know, either end of the spectrum. Human health is in decline. It is in serious decline. And we are in trouble. And if we pretend that we're not and we try to make it a political thing and pit people against each other so that everything becomes this battle, as opposed to being able to sit and really explore what is going on right now, we're going to end up in a place that I don't think we want to be. It's not the direction that we're heading, it's not making us happier or healthier. It's not extending our lifespans. It's not making us more vibrant or more vital. It's not doing any of those things. And so I'll joke and say, you know, I'm not advocating that we go back to Little House on the Prairie times. And yet, there's something to be said for the like living a life of greater simplicity in a complicated world, right? Like definitely in a complicated world, a busy, complicated world. But we have to reclaim our own North Star to know who we are and what we stand for in order to see what is trying to pull us off the path and not just blindly comply and nod our heads like, yes, that's the easiest route to take. Because the easiest route is not, again, making us happier, healthier, live longer lives, making our children more mentally and emotionally stable. It's not doing any of those things.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

So I completely agree about we're not healthier than than we used to be in any in any aspect. And the technology from AI to like all of these different things. I know they have their benefits, but it's just even like you mentioned the six-month-old watching the phone or watching the tablet is mind-blowing to me. The amount of like young toddlers or babies that have a screen in front of them. Like, it's mind-blowing to me. Even outside of what is going into our bodies, there is no way that is healthy. That constant screen time. Even years ago, before we had these phones, and I'm pretty young, but like you don't have TV time at certain times, you know? Right. I don't know. You know, like it's mind-blowing to me. Like, you do homework before you have a screen in front of you. Like certain little things that little rules I had growing up. It's like these kids today, and I sound like I'm so much older than I am when I say stuff like that, but it's mind-blowing to me that you'll have like this three-year-old that'll be on the screen for hours and hours a day. Yeah.

Reclaiming Sovereignty And Radical Self‑Trust

Tech, Childhood, And A Tipping Point

SPEAKER_03 25:49

And the argument for it is that women are overwhelmed and wearing too many hats and doing too many things. And I get it. Like, Lord, I get it. I was a, you know, I was a full-time mom and a doctor and ran another business. And I get it. But if we don't, but this is where I come back to. We need to know who we are and what we stand for. And we need to have an understanding of the things that we're doing. You put a device in front of a child who is six months old, whose brain is literally still hardwiring. Literally. And they've got this inflammation flowing past their eyes and their brains that they cannot begin to keep up with. Cannot. And it changes their neurology. In 2011, I opened, I had, I had sort of moved away from having a private chiropractic practice, and I opened a new one in 2011, and I saw this alarming new trend of childhood anxiety and depression that had not been there even five years before. And it was like, it was insane. It was both in a major city and in a rural area. I was seeing kids who were literally incapable of dealing with really the simplest emotional challenges. And it was around 2010 that smartphones became this ubiquitous, like everywhere kind of thing. And young kids started having either their parents' old cell phones or cheaper versions of smartphones. And there was this spike in anxiety in women as well, in women and in children. And in fact, I had left midwifery at this point, but midwives were sending patients into me for chiropractic care. And at the time, I was living in a large city and I was doing neuro and biofeedback. And so I was assessing people's brainwaves on their first visit. And there were all of these women who were either pregnant or had just had babies or were of reproductive age, whose brainwave patterns looked like, I kid you not, guys who had just come back from serving overseas, diffusing incendiary bombs. Like literally looked like that. And I called up the person who was the researcher who I had got this equipment from and went, like, what am I doing wrong? Because I can't be seeing this. Like women in their late 20s to mid-30s in downtown Toronto whose brainwave patterns look like service members who have just returned from war-torn countries. And we went through it together and we realized that what I was seeing was not incorrect. What I was seeing was women who were under so much stress that their brainwave patterns literally looked like guys who had been diffusing incendiary bombs overseas. And these women were getting pregnant or about to have children. And those babies' brains were hardwiring in utero to that woman's stress level. Now, this is not to blame women. There's no judgment or accusation here. It was just this like this first mind-blowing acknowledgement of what in like the heck are we doing to ourselves? And then what I started seeing was these children who were so overwhelmed. And the medical response was put them on med, put them on antidepressants and SSRIs and all sorts of other things. And what started to occur was that the most there's a capacity in medicine to dispense drugs for reasons other than those drugs were researched. So, for example, you have guys on medication for erectile dysfunction, and that drug turns out to also be helpful for X. Well, a medical doctor can then just dispense that drug for X without needing any additional research. The population with the most highly prescribed off-label use of medication was toddlers for mood disorders. Three-year-olds for mood disorders. What's three-year-olds, two-year-old, three-year-old, four-year-old has a mood disorder? We started to see that around 2011-2012. That, I mean, you want to talk horrifying. And so again, if we don't know what it is that, if we don't understand anything about human physiology, about the brain, about the repercussions of the actions that we're taking, with no judgment of parents or mothers at all. Because these things are given to us and sold to us as this, like, this is brilliant. This cell phone is going to make your life so convenient and so much easier. You'll be able to stay in touch. You'll be able to, but there's no understanding of what it's doing. There are some amazing researchers these days who are looking at what these devices are doing to the brains of teens and the anxiety in the teenage population these days. Like, absolutely amazing research going on. The problem is that it starts from like six months when people are putting like smartphones and pad like tablets in front of their children and thinking like, I just need a break. I'm overwhelmed and I need to make dinner and I need a break. And I get the needing a break, but it's what we're doing that's problematic. So, you know, for me, it's not, you know, when I talk holistic health, it's like this huge concentric circles that keep widening and widening and widening of we have to start with women really reclaiming our own power and our own inner authority, where we stop looking outside of us for the answers. We go back to simpler times and creating community doesn't have to be a big community, but creating community for support. We have to become more knowledgeable about the things that we're doing in our lives and how it's affecting both our health and that of our children. And we have to find a way to be strong enough to say, no, I'm not accepting that as the only way to ensure well-being for myself or my child. And part of that is finding a way to not let fear run our lives. And so the work that you do, for example, would be a huge part of that, finding a way past the fear, through the fear, and not letting and the fear is everywhere these days. I mean, I refer to it as fear porn because it is everywhere about everything: health, war, government, taxes, finances-I mean, you name it, the opposite, you know, political party than the one that you adhere to. It's it's everywhere. And we are so deeply, and fear changes our brainwave patterns again, and our breathing patterns, and our heart rate, and our coherence, and our ability to resonate with the person standing in front of us, and the ability to listen without, again, this like loggerheads battling, you know, and name-calling and finger pointing and doxing and all of that. But we're so stuck in this like crazy, like mind machinations that we're not in our bodies. And women are deeply embodied beings. Like, look at our look at our hormonal cycle. We are so deeply tied to our bodies, and yet somehow it's like we become cut off at the net and we just spin in our head. And there's like layers upon layers upon layers of this. But my work, like I said, is really about helping women to remember who they are so that that systemic programming, that enculturated programming can be broken, and we can return to a time where we focus on what is really needed for human well-being.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

And now, do you think women reclaiming and retaking power over their lives would help in terms of the kids and them giving them a tablet or a screen or a phone or whatever it is? I think it has to start with us.

Anxiety, Neurology, And Screens

SPEAKER_03 34:21

Yeah, with parents in general, but it has to start with us. Because if you if once you've already given that child the screen, the tablet, whatever else, and you ask them to voluntarily surrender it, that's challenging. And there is a whole screen-free movement going on. And people who have done this with teenagers who have found a way as a family to collectively get rid of these things and re-embrace like living life as a human being as opposed to a technological being. The easiest way to do it is not to start, of course. And so I think the more that we can educate ourselves and inform ourselves, not just from a mental perspective, but almost a spiritual one, not a religious one, but like really understanding what these things are doing to our well-being, then I do think we start to introduce what childhood used to be. Like my kids are now 20 and 23. We would go to restaurants and we went out fairly frequently, and I would carry pens and crayons and markers and paper. And if I didn't have paper, they'd start taking napkins and they would sit there and they would draw and they would write. And they were only 20 and 23, they're not in their late 30s. So they're officially Gen Z. And yet they their childhood was still spent playing and hiking and traveling and drawing and writing, and they never, they never like we don't need to sit our kids in front of a television or a tablet from the moment they're born. We have to find other ways, which is about managing our own needs and our own stress levels, which is where the whole women's help piece comes in. Because we really do live in a society these days, at least in North America, I think in Europe as well, where we feel very isolated and we feel very overwhelmed. And our tendency is to resort to scrolling endlessly. And what easier way than to hand our child something to do the same.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

That makes a lot of sense that it's gotta start with us, you know, so then it can ripple outward, even then giving the kids something else, like you mentioned, like pens and paper to draw with, to write with.

SPEAKER_03 36:46

We've replaced, and it's really interesting, we are more frightened of allowing our children to be outdoors in our own backyards than we are of predators online. And so people see danger being outside, but not allowing your child to have unrestricted access to the internet. And I should add that I'm the co-founder of an anti-human trafficking organization in Ontario, Canada. And so when I talk about predators, like they're very real. Trafficking is very real. It is a real risk. And children are being solicited constantly when they're online, constantly. And if they don't have the internal authority and knowledge of what is safe and what is not, they are in danger. And somehow we've decided that that is safer, this unrestricted access, than letting your child go climb a tree or slide down a slide. And I'm like, I how how did we surrender our authority like this?

SPEAKER_02 37:50

But we did. And and again, we're in trouble.

Toddlers, Off‑Label Meds, And Harm

SPEAKER_03 37:55

Our kids are in trouble. Their physical, mental, emotional health, and well-being is in trouble, but there are ways through it. And it starts with having the courage to actually explore the things that we do without maybe even having a philosophy behind them, you know, like it's just this acceptance of this is the way we do things in this house, without maybe really sitting and thinking about it. And so it's a return to this radical responsibility for every aspect of our lives. The decisions we make, why we make them, who we follow, who we give our authority to. We need to rewrite this and not be looking so much at what other people are doing on our social feeds, what political parties are or are not doing, what's happening. We need to start with looking in our own homes. And what's brilliant is that there's more research going into that now, but I'm seeing even Gen Z researchers starting to talk about this and writers about the things that they've lost without even having experienced them, the experiences that they wish they had had, but not been able to, because they're there's this one writer, her name is Freya India. She writes on Substack. She's early 20s, and dear God, this woman is brilliant. She talks about how their first experience of love is porn, how their first experience of life was lived online, how the actual capacity to live in the world as a sentient human being has been determined by what they see on their screens. And she talks about missing a childhood that she never even experienced. My 20-year-old daughter talks about wishing that she had been born in the 80s because she feels like that was a time when children were still living children's lives. And I'm a little older than you. So I like I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, and and it was, you know, I would be 14 years old and out way too late with friends and playing tag as 14-year-olds in the pitch black through like backyard neighborhood. And then we'd end up at someone's basement and hang out. But there was no, there was, there was connection. There was an understanding of what our friends were going through if they were struggling. I didn't know anybody at that age who committed suicide. I didn't know anybody on psych psychiatric meds. It's not, I'm not idealizing the time because there were issues then too, different issues. But we have the capacity to return to some of those simpler times. But we need to know first, as parents, as women, who we are and why that's important. And it really does start that that disempowerment that I've seen starts in pregnancy that early that you can't really do this without medical assistance. That kind of belief system. And I'm not suggesting that women go out into fields and birth their own babies, if you feel called to it, you know, but that's not what I'm suggesting here. I'm suggesting that we need to be able to have healthy boundaries and a really clear sense of self. We need to learn to trust ourselves and our bodies more than we trust these experts outside of them. We need to know what our own inner mechanism is to deal with stress. It can be really easy. You know, it it really can be following your breath as the first response. And then there can be other knock-on responses if you need them.

SPEAKER_02 41:53

But we have to relearn these things.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

I liked your comparison of like parents these days are more willing to give their kids a phone than they are to let them out in the backyard, which is a little a little mind-blowing to me because even outside of something as serious as trafficking, like online bullying is a a big thing. Like, and even before technology got to what it is today, like growing up in my era, like I was born in the 90s, but like fortunately, I didn't internet wasn't a thing the whole time. I was I was alive and I was growing up, but once it was, like, that was where people weren't afraid to say anything to you, you know, like your next door neighbor. Okay, maybe somebody doesn't have the best next-door neighbor, but on average, like the neighbors down the street, I felt safer with, even like myself, even as a kid, like even as a teenager, as like an adolescent, they aren't even online with some of the things that these other kids or even strangers will say. Yeah.

Replace Fear With Responsibility

SPEAKER_03 43:07

And this is you as a woman born in the 90s, and me as a woman born in the 70s. But there are kids who have just gone through this. There are kids in their late teens and early 20s who are talking about their experiences and saying this needs to change. And if they're older teens and in their 20s, they now can take responsibility for themselves and find a way through it with assistance from whoever they need assistance from, whether it's parents or or guidance or something else, but it's the even younger kids that we need as adults, we need to find a way to shift what we're doing because it's harmful. Unknowingly, unwittingly, without trying to, it is harmful. And one of the challenges is that when we Have done something that is harmful. We seem to be living in an era where we don't want to look at it. We'd rather be blind to it and let it continue than acknowledge that we need to take responsibility. And when you know better, you do better. And we maybe didn't know. Like, there is no reason as adults that we can't look at choices that we've made and say, I did the best that I could at the time with the knowledge that I had. And I'm giving myself the grace to shift, to change this now. I'm giving myself the grace to change my belief system, my ethics, my not maybe not your ethics, maybe not ethics and morals, because I actually feel like those are pretty deeply rooted and should be. But but the way that we are in the world sometimes gets disconnected. And again, that's when I talk about that knowing who you are, that sense of inner knowing, that North Star, because we get so disconnected from that, those inner ethics and morals that we're doing things almost mindlessly, like we're on autopilot. And we don't want to look at whether the things we've said or the choices we've made could have been harmful to ourselves or others because we're not great at taking responsibility right now. And so we'd almost rather just keep doing what we're doing. It's really okay to say, I've learned and I've grown and I'm making a different choice now. With the knowledge and the experience that I have now, I am making a different choice. And you can say to your kids, like, before I separated from my ex-husband, I was not being the greatest mother that I could be because my own pain and overwhelm was intense. And my kids will say to me now, like, I remember you being really angry back then. And off they, yeah, I was. I was. You're absolutely right. It was not my finest moment. And it's okay to acknowledge to ourselves and to our children when we've messed up, because they need to learn that themselves. They need to experience that themselves. To know how to say, that wasn't spectacular, but I'm doing better. Like I'm trying differently now, or I'm trying harder, or I've learned more, or I'm changing what I've done, or whatever. There's nothing wrong with that that shows growth and expansion and a willingness to be very human.

SPEAKER_01 46:23

I completely agree with that. I even if it's not 2-0 kids, like even if somebody listening to us doesn't have kids, I think that is so such a powerful reframe, you know, like acknowledging you've learned, you've grown something about a belief or something the way you show up or something you do is different. You know, like life is is ever evolving and changing, you know, and I think I think there's so much beauty in that that we've grown in some aspect and something along the way, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. I'm curious. I ask a lot of guests this, and I'm sure you've had many considering our conversation so far, but I'm curious what you would consider your biggest aha moment that you've had.

SPEAKER_02 47:14

Oh, wow.

Predators Online And Real‑World Safety

SPEAKER_03 47:17

There are a couple. The first one is is when I recognized for myself, I guess, what healing could be. And it was it was a very personal moment. When I broke my leg at 10, it's kind of a whiplash accident on skis, ridiculous. My body needed release, and I whipped forward and I hurt my neck. And I ended up with migraine. And I had migraines that, you know, lasted from the time I was 10 until I was in my early 20s. And I'd seen chiropractors and I, you know, seen a neurologist to make sure it wasn't anything worse and all the things. And I was in chiropractic college, and one of the offer year students had started learning some craniosacral therapy. And she's like, Let's why don't we try this? So I'm lying on the table and she's doing some craniosacral therapy, and all of a sudden, it was like this inner vision completely blew open. And I saw myself pretty much lying, like suspended over the deepest, darkest black chasm that you could begin to believe. But it wasn't frightening. And I realized that it was this like inner vision. I don't know how I realized it, but you know, when you just know, it was like you've got this inner capacity to see. And from that point on, I would put my hands on patients and feel what they were feeling inside their bodies. And I started being able to even do it from a distance where somebody would say, I'm experiencing this, and I could see what and where it was. And so for me, it was the start of a, like I said, my intuition kind of blowing open. But even more than that, this recognition that our connection to each other is so much deeper and more powerful than just words and vision, that we have a capacity to feel each other even at a distance. And it informed my entire chiropractic, my entire practice as a doctor from that point on, because it was so much deeper than just hearing what they said or looking at them or feeling something physical. It was feeling inside what they could feel to some extent. So that was one of the big moments, like aha moments for me of who, what our true capacity is as human beings. Which I now, and this is now like 28 years later, it's now so much more than that, where I think that so much of who we are and what we're capable of as human beings has really been, I'm gonna say hidden from us because I believe that we are so much more powerful than we have any idea of, to be honest with you. So that's a big one for me. And then truthfully, you know, parenting children, it's like non-stop awarenesses and ahas about yourself and how you were raised and where you need to find forgiveness for your own childhood and your own parents, and how we're all really sort of stumbling in the dark and doing our best. And we need to have a huge measure of grace for ourselves and other people around us who are hopefully, you know, hopefully, we're talking about healthy people, also all doing their best. And that's been just this one nonstop, you know, 23 years of of learning and growth and and something that I would not for a moment change, like any of it. The times that I messed up and the times that I didn't, and all the choices that I made. And I guess what it all comes down to is this real recognition that everything in our lives has brought us to where we are right now. And we might not be proud of everything, and some of it might have been painful, and some of it might have been traumatic. But I also see this real tendency right now of people to kind of get lost in their trauma and see it as their identity. And so having to address it is something that feels like it would then destabilize who you are as an individual instead of being a gateway and a springboard into like a huge expansion into health and well-being.

Community, Boundaries, And Simpler Living

SPEAKER_01 51:33

So I relate to that a little bit about seeing people I identifying a little bit with their trauma, you know, like almost, I don't know why this example is coming to mind, but like even like people who are vegetarian so don't eat meat, like I feel like a lot of them really embody that identity, you know? And sometimes the trauma is similar. Like it's maybe not the first thing somebody will tell you, but it's depending on what it is. Sometimes it's one of like the first five things you're hearing about this person. And that to me, it was like, oh, like they some them telling you this at their core, you know, like the that back to that first question I had asked you. And it's like the it's who they consider themselves.

SPEAKER_03 52:27

Yeah. And you know, I think I think what a lot of that is, is that we have been taught to identify who we are with what we do in the world or what we've experienced, as opposed to really having a deep core sense of ourselves. So yeah, even your first question took me a little aback, but but if we identify with the work that we do or the schooling that we did, or where we live, or what our political affiliation is, then anything that changes that feels completely destabilizing, completely, as opposed to knowing that what you do in the world is not a measure of your worth in the world. That the measure of your worth in the world is literally the fact that you're here. Not how much you contribute, not how much you make, not what your work is, none of that. You are here and standing on this earth plane, and you are inherently valuable. Every single one of us is inherently valuable, equally inherently valuable. There's no such thing as elitism here. It's like we are all inherently valuable because we are here. If we can start with that, then it's okay if our work changes. It's okay if we give up our, you know, denomination, it's okay if we give up our political affiliation, it's okay if we, you know, if you're a lawyer and you choose to surrender your license, it's okay. It's all okay because that doesn't determine your worth. And if we can get to that, to this core deep belief of that, then your trauma does not define you any more than what you do in the world. It's something that has happened, it's something that created part of who you are. You adapted to some extent based on those experiences, but it's not, it doesn't diminish your worth on this on this earth plane, which then really levels the playing field too.

SPEAKER_01 54:41

I think that's that's key, you know, is realizing it doesn't diminish anybody's worth, you know, being alive as you said it that makes you worthy. None of the other stuff matters. Yeah. Now I'm curious how things have transitioned for you now, running things yourself and like doing stuff online compared to what you were doing before.

Identity, Worth, And What Defines Us

SPEAKER_03 55:09

Uh well, it's been an interesting five years, like it really has straight up, buddy. 2020 to 2025 is like uh eyes wide open. What just how much life have we lived in the last five years? But my family decided to leave Canada. We're living in Central America. I, you know, run a business online now, um, with people from all over the world. I can really, it's it's interesting living in Central America, how it feels like you you live life and work is secondary, whereas in North America, it really me feels like we work in order to live. And it doesn't feel that way here. And so, you know, I live in a really beautiful place, and when I want to, I can go outside and get in the pool and go for a hike, and I still work, but I give myself a lot of grace and a lot of leeway to sort of reframe when I want to, where I want to, what I want to, you know, I have deadlines that I need to meet and appointments that I've made and those kinds of things. But life feels like it's more about living life as opposed to meeting these, you know, very defined moments, which I think we all really need to do. Um, life is life can be very expensive and very challenging depending on what you're doing. And this, you know, getting up and going to work and coming home and eating dinner and going to sleep and doing it again the next day. We've come to believe that that's living. And again, I think that's this very outside in kind of approach. And we have houses and rent and mortgages, and food is expensive, and so is gas and all of those things. But the importance that we put on certain things versus others feels like it's this very outside in kind of control. And I feel like moving to Central America shifted that a little bit for me. So that's one of the things. I also really love what I'm doing. Like I really love creating programs and writing and you know, creating newsletters and doing guest podcast appearances. And one of these days I really am going to get my podcast and running, getting there. Wow, is it a lot of work? And and learning new skills and all of those things, which I think we should be doing our entire lives, like learning new skills and doing all the things.

SPEAKER_01 57:38

So think enjoying myself a lot more. That's amazing. When did you move to Central America? Three years ago. And it's it's different than Canada.

SPEAKER_03 57:49

Yeah, there is definitely a period of adjustment. First year felt like, oh, we're here. This is exciting. Second year was like, what in the name of God have we done? And third year was once again, like we we moved within the country and we really like where we are, and we got out of a city and we're in a more natural environment, and it's good. But it was just like again, it was this willingness to explore is what we're doing right now, is the life that we're living right now in Canada, doing what we're doing. My husband's also a chiropractor, like running our practice, doing the thing. Does this feel like it's our highest and best good right now? Is this lighting us up right now? Is being in this country lighting us up right now? And the answer to all of that was meh, you know. So we chose another path, which is not without its own significant growth. But that's the thing. Like, do we not want to be choosing growth in our life all the time? So we did.

SPEAKER_01 58:49

I love that. And I love the questions you mentioned there. Does it feel like it's best for my highest and greatest good? Like, does it feel good to you?

SPEAKER_03 58:59

We tend to make decisions from what we feel like we have to do. We have to do this. Well, do you? I don't know. You know, in 2020, we had just bought a new house in a city. We really did not like the feel of the city in mid-2020s. We sold the house, we moved to a rural property with six acres, planted 80 organic fruit trees, like we're really loving the property and the outdoor life, and still then felt like this still isn't feeling right. And it's okay again to question and to make changes. And you can look back after and think, like, was this the right change, the wrong change? If you want to, but that's kind of crazy making. Instead, we can probably acknowledge that everything that we've done in our lives has brought us to where we are right now, and we make choices from the best of our ability at the time, and it's okay, like nothing has to be forever. We can continually revise and revamp and choose again. What else is possible?

Moving Countries And Redefining Work

SPEAKER_01 1:00:04

I I love how you mentioned nothing has to be forever. You know, I say that a lot. I have said that so many times on so many different episodes to so many different people, you know, like whatever it is in life, you know, like if there's something you want to do, if there's something you want to try, like you want to try running your own business, worst case scenario, if it doesn't work, you go back and get a job. Like, right, you know, yeah, if you don't like it, even at that, because I've had so many guests that are like, I was worried about the what if, and then I finally, and it's like, what if you go back to what you already had, you know, if the thing you try doesn't work, if the thing you do you don't like, you know, like you shift it.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:47

That's fear thing again, though, right? The fear of change, the fear of the unknown, the fear of what if it's not great, the fear of it, it's everywhere. It's so all-encompassing. And we are made for so much more than that. We're made for so much more than holding ourselves back and being fearful of every decision that we make. Can you live your life as if as if it's all gonna work out beautifully? Not to be Pollyanna and not to, you know, not know what's going on in the world, because there's some serious stuff going on in the world, but there's been serious stuff going on in the world for sure for five years, and then all the time before that. And if we want to make ourselves crazy and be completely incapacitated and unable to move forward and unable to take a breath, you focus on the negative as opposed to what do I want to create in the world?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:43

I love that. I loved this conversation so much, Mars. I really appreciate it. Thank you. You're welcome. Have you heard of a man named Jay Shetty? Yes. I'm a big fan of his. He's got a podcast called On Purpose, and he ends his podcast with two segments, and I've borrowed those segments, and I end my podcast with those segments as well. The first segment is the many sides to us, and there's five questions, and they need to be answered in one word each. Okay, I will try. I can do this. Okay. You yen. What is one word someone who was meeting you for the first time would use to describe you as? Welcoming. What is one word someone that knows you extremely well would use to describe you as?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:40

I think warm. Questioning.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:53

What is one word that if someone didn't like you or agree with your mindset would use to describe you as? Probably bossy. But what is one word you're trying to embody right now? Trust. Second segment is the final five, and these can be answered in a sentence. What is the best advice you've heard or received?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:24

The way you do anything is the way you do everything. Why was that the best?

SPEAKER_03 1:03:36

It comes back to our integrity and knowing who we are and aligning with that so that as we move through life, we act from that place of internal integrity and alignment.

Choosing Growth Over Fear

SPEAKER_02 1:03:47

What is the worst advice you've heard or received? Probably something along the lines of just needing to sit down, shut up, and follow orders. Why was that the worst?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:08

Because again, it leaves no room for internal authority or knowing. It it relies on the belief that something outside of us knows us better, knows what is better for us, has some form of authority over us that I don't believe as human beings we ever need to subscribe to.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:27

What is something that you used to value that you no longer value?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:35

Um I think it's the word authority again, but it's it's this sense of um it's the sense that somebody's worth is connected to a degree, their work, their their financial whatever. I don't I don't think that's the case anymore at all.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:58

If you could describe what you would want your legacy to be, as if someone was reading it, what would you want it to say?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:07

That one's tricky. Let me think. Let me think for a second. I think I'd like to be seen as somebody who questions everything, lived true to my own knowing, with a willingness to adjust, and truly love working with women for their own health and that of their children, that it it's an actual sense of feeling a place of service and love.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:54

Kind of rough, but something like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:00

Create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? And I want to know why.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:08

Yeah, okay.

Rapid‑Fire Reflections And Wisdom

SPEAKER_03 1:06:14

I think it would be that nobody has the right to control the behavior, the words, the thought patterns of anybody else. Which does not mean that I think a lawlessness is appropriate for harming another person. But that if we can each live from a place of um if we can respect other people's lives and property enough to give them the right to live as they are and we live as we are without concern about what they say impacting us. If we know ourselves deeply enough, then other people's words don't don't affect us. It's tricky. It's it's going back to a little bit of the 1970s and 1980s, sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And that's not where we live right now. Right now, it's the thought that words are somehow as pain-inducing as you know, something physical. I think if we know ourselves enough, if we believe in ourselves enough, and if we know that we have inherent value in this world, somebody else's impression of you, thoughts, words, it's just their impression. It's not who you are. Yeah. I love that. Well, thank you so much, Moses. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you. You're a fabulous, fabulous interviewer.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:50

Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. And I do just like to give it back to the guests. Any final words of wisdom, anything else you want to share with the listeners.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:05

No, I think, you know, other than recognizing that you are the ultimate authority in your life and your own well-being, and that when you trust your own inner wisdom and do the deep work to address root causes, you become your most powerful healer and begin to live a vibrant, joyful life, no matter what, no matter what's going on around you. You have the capacity to do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:34

I completely agree. Well, thank you so much again. And thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Meand's Mindset. In case no one told you today, I'm proud of you. I'm voting for you. And you got this. As always, if you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five-star rating, leave a review, and share with anyone you think would benefit from that. And don't forget, you are only one nine-step shift away from shifting your life. Thanks guys, until next time.