Heal and Stay Healed with Kelly B Haney
The Heal and Stayed Healed with Kelly B Haney podcast is for anyone who is sick and tired of being sick and tired, particularly those with autoimmune disease or other chronic illness. It's for those who are ready to truly heal, and more importantly, truly STAY healed.
Through my training as a Certified Nutrition Coach, but mostly through insight gained from my personal experience with overcoming severe Ulcerative Colitis, I want to equip you to get better, stay better, and to become healthier than ever.
I've been able to stay completely autoimmune flare-free for well over a decade, and I believe that if I can do it, then you can too! Our bodies want to heal. They know how to heal. We just have to give them the support that they need.
I'm honored to walk alongside you as you take the next step in your own healing journey. Let's heal and stay healed together.
Heal and Stay Healed with Kelly B Haney
Transformative Healing and a Whole Body Mindset with Paul Blanchard
In this thought-provoking episode, I’m joined by Paul Blanchard, founder of Whole Body Mindset. Paul shares his unique perspectives on healing, mindset, and the importance of genuine human connection in our fast-paced world.
Paul emphasizes that healing is an autonomic process and that our bodies innately know how to heal when given the right support. He introduces the concept of the "Whole Body Mindset," which involves three interconnected aspects: the thinker mind, the heart mind, and the gut mind, and explains how trauma, shame, and unhealthy attachments can hinder personal growth and healing.
Towards the end of the episode, Paul vulnerably shares his own experience with a severe autoimmune-like thyroid condition and how making difficult decisions to realign his life, along with an ancient Ayurvedic soup recipe, led to a remarkable recovery.
Throughout the conversation, Paul challenges listeners to consider alternative perspectives and approach healing and personal growth with curiosity and non-judgment, offering a holistic approach to understanding the interconnectedness of our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Paul's free Assessment for Thinker Mind Patterns can be found here: https://www.wholebodymindset.com/habitfinder
Website: www.kellybhaney.com
Email: info@kellybhaney.com
Instagram: @kellybhaney
Facebook: Kelly B Haney Wellness
Welcome to the Heal and Stay Healed podcast, where we talk about healing and, more importantly, staying healed from chronic disease and other ailments and issues. We'll cover all the crazy things about health and life the good, the bad, the ugly and the hilarious. My name is Kelly and I'm a survivor and overcomer of severe autoimmune disease, and I can't wait to share with you what I've learned so that you can heal and stay healed too. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. Welcome back to another episode of the Heal and Stay Healed with Kelly Bihini podcast. Thank you so much for joining me Today.
Speaker 2:I have a special guest with me and he is Paul Blanchard. Paul is the founder of Whole Body Mindset and is a deep integration coach. He has spent the better part of the last two decades studying, researching, practicing and coaching over 10,000 hours with thousands of clients in all aspects of the human experience. Paul has built successful businesses for himself and clients in countless diverse entrepreneurial endeavors. In the professional world, most people know Paul as a business coach, but those who have engaged with him have discovered so much more and that is a great lead-in to this time of discovery with him. Let's get going. Welcome, paul, to the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you, good to be here, kelly. This is going to be awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, I have been eagerly anticipating this conversation and I am curious to see what comes up in our discussion today as we get going. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do in your service to others?
Speaker 1:Sure, so I'll give you kind of the quick chronology. I've been a coach, a speaker, a consultant in different ways, shapes and forms for just about two decades now. I started my professional career in my early 20s at a credit repair law firm and that was short-lived. When I realized I didn't want to work for somebody else and my dad, who's been an entrepreneur all his life, I said what should I do? He said you should get into real estate. So I joined a real estate investment group that specialized in real estate education. That led to coaching and consulting people who wanted to get into real estate, who wanted to leave their corporate environment, and walking them through the mindset of that, because I've always been intrigued by that world. Then that led to 2008, cleaning my clock and I landed in a space that I actually kind of made fun of from stage as an entrepreneur, and that was higher education.
Speaker 1:Something in me was like you should go back and finish your degree because I quit my job and quit college at the same time. And so I did, and it was more not for the credential, it was more for the discipline of finishing something that I had committed to, and so I did that. That led to working for the university that I attended. That led to being asked to be the director of a management institute run by Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, and I got to know him really well and we built an MBA program that became one of the top 25 in the world. And then we got that to a place where it was cruising and sailing and doing awesome and I felt like there was probably time for the next chapter.
Speaker 1:And all of my dad just catching up on life and told him I was moving on to something different, wasn't quite sure what it would be and he said, well, actually I'm looking for a partner in my company, somebody that I could trust, and I was like, oh, good luck with that. And he campaigned for good four or five weeks and I eventually caved something about. It, felt like it was an important step, and so we moved from DC back here to Utah and partnered with him and then that partnership came to an end in July of last year and I went on to just continue to grow and expand my experiences there into what is now a whole body mindset where I do business, executive and entrepreneurial coaching, but with deep integration. I've found that there are just some realities to our biology, our neurology, some realities to trauma on a molecular level, shame and unhealthy attachments on a biological level that make the game very difficult of life and business and whatever else.
Speaker 1:And I've said to my clients for years that professional problems are just personal problems in disguise. I just didn't realize how deep that goes, and so that's a lot of what I do to connect the dots to relationships, businesses. Growth is deep integration and a big part of deep integration is creating space for what you're integrating and the way you create space is healing. So that's kind of what I believe kind of led you and I to this conversation.
Speaker 2:So yeah, absolutely Well. Thanks for that recap. It sounds like you've had a lot of adventures along the way, for sure. Yeah, yeah, healing. Something that I tend to focus on is the physical healing, but the more I travel along this path of my own personal healing journey, the more I have come to understand just how I would say equally important but I'm beginning to think, even more important it is to really take a cold hard look at your emotional and spiritual, of course, as well as your mental health throughout this journey as well. So I want to kind of leading into my first question for you, focusing on those of us who have experienced chronic illness or autoimmune disease, like myself.
Speaker 2:What I have found along the way, especially as I've started talking to more and more people who have experienced autoimmune disease, is there's some commonalities among us in regards to our personality and disposition. We tend to be more anxious and stressed. We probably weren't taught to handle or process our emotions very well. We may hold on to anger and resentment tightly, and we typically carry the burden of unaddressed trauma as well, and as a result of all of this, we can live our lives in a way that's pretty steeped in negativity, and we carry a lot of that negativity in our negative emotions around with us and I firmly, firmly believe that these negative emotions play a major role in what leads to our disease onset and then in subsequent flares. So, all that to say, you and your vast experience having to talk to so many people over the course of your career, how would you go about helping someone who says, yeah, all that sounds like me, the negativity issue, all of those things sound like me? How would you point that person in the direction of growth and healing?
Speaker 1:It's a good question. It can be really difficult in terms of pointing anyone in any direction. A healing journey, I believe, is borrowing a more clinical term autonomic. I mean it's more than automatic. Healing happens. We don't have to tell ourselves to heal. You don't have to sit there and have an intention for your blood to coagulate and scab over and scar it's.
Speaker 1:I believe it's very similar with our internal process. Just like breathing is autonomic, our digestive system is autonomic. It's part of the kind of pre-wiring of us. I believe healing is the same thing, but there are things we can do that can make it hard to breathe. There are things we can do that can make it hard to digest and there are things we can do that make it hard for the autonomic process of healing to occur. And so when someone comes, I think letting them know that you don't have to learn how to heal, if anything, in some regards you're going to want to learn how to get out of the way so that your body can do its thing, and that's a certain part of you to get out of the way because obviously you are your body. That's one of the aspects of you.
Speaker 1:The other, I would say, in terms of a direction is to start learning how to abandon direction, learning that autonomic process happens in a non-dual state. It is when we can reach an environment that can be as non-dual as possible, meaning there is no right, no wrong, no good, no bad. There's just curiosity, witness container, because when we start trying to tell what needs to be healed, why it needs to be healed, when we start trying to tell what needs to be healed, what is right or wrong or go to bad or how to fix it, it often makes it worse. Or we get an addictive drug of relief and assume like, oh, we're healed because we got relief, when in a lot of cases it's because it felt like our trauma or our pain or our shame or our unhealthy attachments was punching us in the stomach and we did something that altered our state. And now it's just flicking us in the ear and we're like, oh, I'm healed. It's like, no, we just shifted it temporarily, it's going to come back. And the body tends to communicate with us with a feather or a hammer and it's up to us in certain regards and that's up to us in terms of collective decisions and momentary decisions, which one we'd like to listen to.
Speaker 1:You talked about the physical element, and that's an interesting way to put it, because the softer stuff is just as physical as the autoimmunity and the stress-based pathology, cortisol pathology and so many other things. That's all physical. It's just interesting to me. We usually separate it as like spiritual and physical, and in a lot of cases the spiritual is just a more sensitive physical. That's really what it is Like. Quantum is like. The scientific word for spiritual, spiritual energy is quantum energy, but it's actual energy, it's actual elements, if you will. And so, yeah, those would be the two things of healing's autonomic. You don't need to learn how to heal. Your body already knows how to do it. You're just going to want to get connected with your body and be able to start dancing with all the parts of you so that it can do what it wants to do anyway.
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree more. That's a big, big belief that I have is that our bodies innately know how to heal. They want to heal. We just have to listen to our bodies, pay attention and then give ourselves the support that is needed in order to foster that innate healing.
Speaker 1:Can I launch something into this space we're in right now, because a lot of your audience, I would imagine, is drawn to you because of their autoimmune or their terminal challenges or whatever it is that they're going through in their physical health. Something I've found to be really helpful for someone to shift their perspective around, whether it's rheumatoid arthritis, hashimoto's, some of these big Crohn's, whatever these bigger commonly known ones and many others is what if?
Speaker 1:What if? Which I find to be a disarming way to get to the brain's logic center without locking it down to be like, nope, that doesn't work. What if? There's nothing wrong with you. Your guidance system just got a little louder. I believe that health in its purest form is simply alignment spiritually, mentally, emotionally, cosmically, whatever. Whatever your cup of tea is and how you process this ever-expanding universe, it's alignment. I remember talking to a client once who has Hashimoto's and her biggest struggle was the exacerbation of the struggle, because she saw it as something that was wrong with her. She was broken.
Speaker 2:Yeah, unfortunately that's a pretty common feeling with autoimmune disease. Our bodies are quote betraying us and we may find ourselves believing that message that we are broken. Hey friends, it's Kelly here. With a quick interruption, I am looking for those of you out there who are willing to share your personal health story, your battle with autoimmune disease or another chronic illness, and how you have overcome or are in the process of overcoming your particular disease through natural methods. I would love to talk to you, get to know you and maybe even have you as a guest on the show. If you are interested in helping to inspire and heal others by sharing your story, or if you just want to chat, please reach out to me at info at kellybhainycom. That's K-E-L-L-Y-B-H-A-N-E-Y. Now back to the show.
Speaker 1:And when we do this, suddenly we realize, okay, our body goes hey, kelly, that doesn't allow you to be in alignment, but that makes it really tough for you to hear your soul, or that makes it tough for you to dial in your intuition, or that makes it tough for you to express your gifts. And then it got a little louder. And it got a little louder and then it got really loud. We went to the doctor and the doctor said oh, you've got this autoimmune disorder. And it's like what if that was always the programming? It just wasn't as loud and we actually brought in a little bit with all deference to how unbelievably challenging, unbelievably wearing down those experiences can be, and we just tried on a little bit each day or a little bit each week. What if I just got to go? Okay, this is just my alarm system and it's just gotten a lot louder, so I can hear it that my body's saying eat this way and you will feel better. Eat this way and you will be better. Eat this way and you'll be guided better. Don't work out as hard and you'll actually feel better. Don't do this as much. And we just see like I can't do what I used to do. No, it's just the signals are a lot louder. I don't know, for whatever it's worth, I just think that that doesn't make it all better.
Speaker 1:That non-duality we were talking about actually neutralizes the anchoring of positive and negative. I think that in a healed place there is no positive or negative, there's productive, and productive has both. Even optimism is not the exclusion of negativity. It is simply the bias to making the most of whatever is here, which in every case has some element of negativity. The research of trying to be more positive in life is actually detrimental if your focus is being positive, because then you're just telling the negative to be quiet because you decided it was negative.
Speaker 1:But what if the negative wasn't bad? It was a signal trying to say, hey, and we've decided I'm depressed. What if that was just a signal saying, kelly, it's really hard to keep being this version of yourself and yes, that can get clinical, and yes, having certain tools and deeper interventions for that, tons of sensitivity to that. But I'm just saying if we can have a brain that one little thing goes wrong and we can immediately feel like everything's going wrong, like all the dominoes are falling, why couldn't we do it the other direction, where we could just shift our mindset a little bit, see something just a little bit better and let the dominoes fall the other direction and feel like so many things are going right, so many things are going better. I think that's part of the power of exercising the other side of those muscles and just getting to see what's wrong with me not as what's wrong with me, as just what is guiding me has gotten louder.
Speaker 2:That's really powerful, and I've thought about it in different terms of just breaking it down to something very simple.
Speaker 2:Our body is always trying to talk to us, our body is always trying to get our attention and we live in a society that is so loud and so go, go, go, and so you must do this, you must do that, you have to be this.
Speaker 2:Be that, when you say being out of alignment, that really resonates with me, because I think the overwhelming majority now is out of alignment, just the way that our society has gotten a little out of control on a lot of levels.
Speaker 2:And when you look at the statistics autoimmune disease skyrocketed over the past two decades cancer, diabetes, all of these lifestyle illnesses. And then looking at mental health diagnosis, as we said, about depression, anxiety, adhd, all of these other issues, and it's I think we have to stop and look at our culture and society as a whole and take a step back and be like you know what. Let's just assess things, let's see where we are. Technology is a wonderful thing, but it's also brought a lot of not so wonderful things upon us. We don't know what it is to rest anymore. We never get a break from work or social media, either one and again. When you say out of alignment, this is what's coming to my mind, like we, just as a whole, are out of alignment right now. Thus, we should not be surprised by the skyrocketing statistics of what manifests into disease.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's a couple of things to consider there and again, these are not claims. These are not saying this is what it is. I think one part that is interesting to consider is how much of these statistics are going up because of more diagnosis, not because of their showing up now. More tools, more medical access, more it is better to be a poor person today than it was to be a poor person 30, 40, 50 years ago. It still sucks that we have so many resources, creating a massive spread and imbalance in the world. I'm all for that conversation, but I'm just saying that, in terms of access to finding out you have cancer is way up.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Then it would have been 30, 40, 50 years ago. So that's interesting as one part of it. I think that's something to consider, not as the total explanation that, oh, like there isn't things happening that's making kids more autistic. It's just that we have more names for more diagnoses. No, I'm just saying let's at least let that be on the table and let's consider, you know, like I'm not here gonna, I'm not gonna argue with someone like is climate change real? Like I'm pretty sure like just the realization that there are seasons demonstrates that our climate changes.
Speaker 1:Is there some really bad things happening to the earth? I think there's a lot of evidence that there is, and I think there should also be on the table that we actually have no fricking idea what to do about it. And there's a lot of really interesting ideas that claim to because they were allowing to let all of this be on the table and go through it with civility and discussion, without contempt and having to pick a side, and so one piece is that I think okay, well, let's, let's take a look at that side of the equation, and there's 360 degrees to this, and that's just a couple of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was a good example with the reasons for the increase in disease, and I appreciate the reminder for not necessarily assuming well, it's all obviously because of this. That's a good point that there can be multiple explanations or factors that play some degree of a role in it, and I agree with you that we need to be talking about these things, all of them.
Speaker 1:And we need to be talking about how to talk about it better. Yes, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because right now it feels like, well, it's easier just to not talk about it and let these things happen and just accept that they're happening and put our heads in the sand. And obviously that isn't going to benefit anyone. No one's going to grow from that. So again, I'm generalizing when it feels like that's what we are doing as a society at large and that I don't know which is more unhealthy in the long run. Is it more unhealthy to claim to a side and a position so tight, or is it more unhealthy to bury your head in the sand? I don't think either one of them is great. I think the point that you made is really important for us to be thinking about, and that point is that we should be thinking about these things and looking at them from all sides and, of course, now we're bleeding into a lot of different categories.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, yes, right, more options to see things. That polarity is part of what's, I believe, contributing to the additional autoimmunity and unhealth and dis-ease and all that stuff is that those feel like the only two options cling harder or bury your head in the sand Well, said Like that and that's the violence that we experience inside ourselves, that we have to pick sides and jump to one or the other and then we hold on to one so tight and then life rips us into the other one and now we do the same thing and hold on to that one so tight, and I think that is taking such a toll on our system alone. People didn't realize that's the reason for the non-dual that I was talking about, because non-dual is in between those two, where you can be calm and alert. Most people can't embody both of those at the same time. Some alert, it's got to be hyperarousal. If I'm calm, it's got to be hypoarousal. Our nervous systems are losing the middle ground and that's where healing can occur. That's where connection can occur. The things we're craving as human beings occur in that middle ground. So I think that's a big part of the healing we're looking for as a society is being able to slow down enough to rebuild that middle ground. You can see these I forget the philosopher that calls them epics, but you've got these epics in life.
Speaker 1:We had a foraging epic. That was our early society, where we foraged for things. We could only eat and experience whatever we could go gather, whatever we could kill. Then we had the agricultural epic, and the agricultural epic allowed us to be able to plant and create. That was amazing. Then we had the agrarian epic, where we could plow and we could leverage things to create. That was incredible. Then we had the industrial epic. Right now we are in the technological epic and it's moving real fast, I think. I think it's at least interesting to consider. The next epic is consciousness. It's also the only one that I can see emerging that doesn't end with all of us being blown to smithereens or totally wrecking our planet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's hope it's consciousness.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, in the technological epic the currency has been data. In the consciousness epic, I believe the currency will be connection. And something that I believe kicked it in a high gear was COVID, that isolation. It woke us up to how starved for genuine human connection we are. We told ourselves stories it's because we're wearing masks and we're alone. I think that was a contributing factor, but a contributing factor to exposing the lack of genuine connection that we had when we didn't have some of our coping mechanisms available, that that pandemic restricted for quite some time. Like connection is as healing as any medicine that's ever been invented.
Speaker 1:Not that I'm going to tell someone going through chemotherapy just focus on connection, You'll be fine. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying as an undercurrent of the health of human life. We're built neurologically, biologically, for significant connection.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think of the blue zones.
Speaker 2:If you're familiar with Dan Butner's work, who talks about the, I forget how many.
Speaker 2:There are cultures all over the world that have the people that in this modern day live the longest, like centenarians.
Speaker 2:They live to at least 100. And that's one of the biggest things that these cultures have in common is their community, their sense of community and how important that is to them, and that, to me, speaks volumes, because if you're going to live to 100 and still be agile, healthy and strong, I want to know what you're doing and a lot of them. It seems like it's mostly about the community, but that just always is a part of their life and that doesn't diminish as they get older or just because they get older, and that tends to become more important the older they get. So that's really interesting and, to link it back to COVID, I agree with you completely that that was an awakening on so many levels, for so many different things, and if we're looking at the silver linings, that's certainly one of them that now we've all collectively, most of us for the first time in our lives, have experienced what it's like to feel isolated, and we don't like that feeling. I certainly didn't.
Speaker 1:But could I add, to notice our isolation at the level like when we were just talking about auto immunity being not something new. That came on. Just your body got louder. I think the isolation we felt during COVID we have been feeling for quite some time as this world has gotten faster and faster and over and over stimulated. It exposed that. It made it louder. You know, one of my favorite books on marketing called positioning. One of the opening lines is for the first time ever, we're living in an over communicated society.
Speaker 2:That book was written in 1981.
Speaker 1:It goes on to state how many pages of news, how many pounds of newspaper are printed every year, how many pages of books are printed every year, and their astounding numbers. And that was 43 years ago.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:So that's? I don't believe that's the enemy. I don't think it serves to go. Yes, technology is the threat. Social media is the threat. You know, I've got three daughters 16, 13 and 10. They have their challenges and it could be so easy to go. It's because of social media? Yeah, I don't believe it is. I believe social media is exposing the real challenges and, in some cases, really fast.
Speaker 1:I literally was just having this conversation with my wife the other day because we had a tough conversation with my 16 year old. She's experiencing some really difficult things. I felt the instinct she should get off social media and then we got to talk and I was like, okay, I think there could certainly be some considerations for moderating that. However, what we ultimately want is her to learn to regulate, because there is nothing she will experience on social media that she won't experience off of social media throughout her life. There is something to be said with how fast it comes at our kids and stuff, and I'm all for moderation to an extent, but not as a substitute for you learning how and being able to teach your children how to regulate their nervous system, because otherwise then they got off of social media because of a restriction, and as soon as they're in college or they're in a place where they no longer have the restriction, some kind of rebound, whether into social media or something worse.
Speaker 1:You could say drug substances, alcohol, whatever. It just shows time and time again. That's what happens when something that we think is helpful is delivered to the child as a restriction. It's like squeezing a stress ball. It just expands somewhere else later on or in that moment. But when we go, wow, okay, what if social media? What if gluten? What if whatever? What wasn't the enemy, it was something we're going to want to notice. What is it exposing that I can work through?
Speaker 2:We're talking about a lot of alternative perspectives and different ways of looking at things, and I think so much about healing in all forms Just comes down to mindset. And speaking of mindset, I do want to ask you to share your personal understanding of mindset, because I know you view it as involving three parts, and I think it's really powerful. Can you share with us about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I spent a lot of years as a coach believing that mindset was the neocortex. It was our thoughts, it was our thinking patterns and all these different things. And I realized through a lot of deep personal work, a lot of amazing mentors and programs and experiences that I've had over the years, that there's actually a lot more to it, so a whole body mindset. I believe that mindset is a set of minds, like a tool set or a furniture set, and primarily there are three of them. There is the thinker mind, the head mind, which is the neocortex. Those are our thoughts, that's our conscious mind and our subconscious mind. And then we've got our heart mind, which is the mammalian aspect of us and our biology. And the thinker mind is based in thoughts. That's all it is. It's just ideas, it's just concepts, it's not anything tangible and real in terms of what it produces and where it operates, which is why it loves to be everywhere, but right here and now, because it can be. It can be everywhere, but right here and now. The heart mind, the mammalian aspect, is only present and that's going to be the emotions, the zest, the passion right. Then we've got our gut mind. That's the reptilian aspect of our biology and that's the sensations, that's the survival part of us, the baseline that you were talking about. If you want to remodel your house but it's on fire, you should probably take care of the fire first, unless you want to total makeover then just let it burn. But in most cases we'll want to put it out first. And that's the gut mind, interestingly enough, in embryo. If we want to talk about sequence, when we were in the womb the heart was formed first and it actually borrowed the tissue to the brain and the gut to be formed and created. So you could say the heart is the mother of the mindset. But they're all three very important to dance with and alignment. They all speak a little bit different language. There is some segmentation in that the heart mind and the gut mind are totally present and the mind is usually totally not.
Speaker 1:But in our society, one thing that I'm pretty confident about is that the mind is overreaching, not because it's malicious I believe each one of these have a natural benevolence to them but because we started getting more domesticated as human beings and in doing so we started getting more disconnected from the earth and from nature and from grounding and different things, where, even if your grandpa was an asshole, at least he worked the land and woke up with the sun and went to bed with the sun and that regulated quite a bit without him even realizing it. And now very few of us have work or jobs or labor or anything like that. We're up before the sun is up and we're working out in some fluorescent lit gym with overstimulating music and we're staying up late because we couldn't get off Tik Tok or that Netflix thing. And I'm not here to demonize any of that. I have been doing this for years and I binged suits in like four weeks. I was a laborer with suits on Netflix, but when it got me, oh it got me. But I'm not here claiming some altruistic superiority.
Speaker 1:But, with that said, all three of these are really important to understand and the brain is the one overreaching because it's trying to do the heart's job and the gut's job. It's trying to tell you how to manage your emotions and it's labeling them and limiting our understanding of them. It's trying to tell your gut what is and isn't a threat and it creates a lot of mixed signals, which is why today, a child has a similar biological response to a certain Facebook comment. That would have required a lion to be in front of you gnarling its teeth, like similar survival response, similar fight or flight response from that and that comes from the overreaching which then creates overcompensation and the heart brain then creates over sensitivity to getting hijacked by the gut brain. Because, at the end of the day, the gut brain has the master switch At the base level survival. The gut brain gets hijacked, heart brain gets locked out, head brain gets round out, limited, very much so. Or sometimes the heart brain just blows up and everything feels huge and massive and crazy. But the gut mind can lock you down. It gets triggered. Ooh, it is.
Speaker 1:There's not a lot you can do other than recognize there's an invisible fire right now, because that's the thing when most of us get hijacked we don't realize we're hijacked, we can't see the flames, but if you know how to look for the smoke, you can at least go. I need to take a breath, I need to resource, I need to slow down, I need to step away from this situation. Whatever, you need to be able to regulate so that you can then get back to working through all three, and it is the alignment of all three. If you are theological, religious, it's the alignment that connects you to God. If you're more spiritual, it's that alignment that connects you to the universe, to source, whatever it is. If you're absurdist and atheistic or agnostic, it's that alignment that connects you to self and all of the above, and allowing all three to dance for them, to not create a hierarchy, is super important.
Speaker 1:And so I worked a lot in the neocortex and you can manipulate the thermostat with the neocortex for a little while. If the thermostat set at 70 degrees, you can use the neocortex to cool off the room with a fan or heat up the room with a fire in the fireplace. But eventually the thermostat gets to a certain point that it kicks on countermeasures, that outlasts the fan, that outlasts the fire in the fireplace and bring it back to 70 degrees, and that thermostat gets set in the gut brain first, then it gets expressed in the heart brain and then we can explore it and support it and find more to bring into who we already are with the headbrain. And so that total mindset, that whole body mindset, is the only thing I've found that actually creates transformation. And short of that, I realized and not wasting my time it's easy to go with what you know now and be like, oh, if I'd only known that then that was part of the progression. So I don't think I was doing anything destructive or bad because it wasn't the correct way. It was correct way for where I was operating and the people I was helping. It was helping them get a little further along too.
Speaker 1:But now, realizing not but, and realizing now that changing thermostats, like manipulating the thermostat, is not sustainable it's exhausting and learning what the primary hijacks of this dancing alignment is, which primarily are trauma, which blocks up the gut brain, shame, which blocks up the headbrain, and unhealthy attachments, which blocks up the heartbrain. You've got the gut brain blocked by trauma that locks you out of you. You've got unhealthy attachments that lock you over the heartbrain, locks you out of your relationships, and you've got shame that locks you out of a healthy relationship with the thinker brain that locks you out of building your businesses and your dreams and whatever else it is. And so being able to build from that base level up is phenomenal, it's fantastic and it's sustainable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really beautiful. Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for all of the powerful commentary today. There's so much here that I know I'm going to be thinking about for quite a while Before we wrap up. I know that you recently experienced something in your life personally that really challenged you, and it may encapsulate a lot of what we've talked about here today. If you're willing to share about that with us.
Speaker 1:I had an opportunity I guess we'll say last year to have a autoimmune experience. It didn't turn out to be one, but I got a baptism by very painful fire. For about three months they thought it was Graves' disease.
Speaker 2:It turned out not to be.
Speaker 1:But the only difference between what I experienced and what someone who may have had a manifestation of their Graves' disease would have experienced is mine seems to be better now, but everything that I read about sounded like it. My doctor even tested for it and my endocrinologist that I met with eventually was like hey, I don't know if you have Graves. So I was misdiagnosed because your doctor tested for the wrong antibodies and she said it's not dangerous that she did that. It's very common because they have very similar acronyms, very similar letters oh geez.
Speaker 1:Not being a specialist, it can be difficult to remember which or which, but it was unequivocally the most horrendous experience of my life, going more than 30 days with about an hour to an hour and a half of sleep every night, and then the rest of the day, no nap, no tiredness. In terms of my nervous system, it was so overcooked and yet continued. To find a way to keep cooking was wild. So my the only thing they can narrow it down to is a episode of thyroiditis which is like going to the doctor for strep and they're like it's not strep, it's viral. What does that mean? We don't know, but it's up in a few weeks, you know, kind of a thing. So they said we have some theories but it's not going to matter because it's not an auto immune disorder. But like all the manifestations were were such, it was a really unique opportunity to kind of experience a massive explosion of an auto immune like response in my body and to walk through that. It felt like years, or those three months and in the aftermath has given me an opportunity to have conversations like this with clients who have Hashimoto's or clients who deal with rheumatoid arthritis and have an added empathy and perspective.
Speaker 1:I'm a big fan, my one of my favorite modern day philosophers, ken Wilbur, and he talks about how anything we want to consider of the trans personal nature, which might be the mystical nature of life, the, the meaning making of like, oh, this happened because of, or you know kind of a thing, law of attraction all the way to you know what someone might call witchcraft or whatever. I love his proposal that he he as much of a brilliant doctorate level acolytion he is, he won't deny that. He won't say that stuff is not true. The spiritual nature of life, the meaning making of life, the oh yeah, that that accident happened so that this could happen, so that I could meet so and so that led to this, you know, versus, it was a coincidence all the way to you know more paranormal stuff or whatever of like my ancestors came to me and taught me these things. He doesn't dismiss any of that. It says it's super important that when we go into the trans personal, that we consider it as if I'm going to think about this as if it was real, as if it was true, because it gives you an opportunity to explore that without becoming attached to it, and so there's a part of me that that does seriously consider, as if that happened for me, to be able to experience things that I wouldn't have been able to experience and to understand things that I wouldn't have been able to understand otherwise, around auto immunity and the impacts, the pathology of stress and cortisol, and if we got a little bit deeper, being out of alignment with your soul, cause I I continuing the as a filter.
Speaker 1:When I came out of this ordeal, at the end of those three and a half months or whatever it was, something didn't fit anymore in my life and I think it would probably be more apropos to say something.
Speaker 1:I'd noticed something that wasn't fitting and it probably wasn't, hadn't been fitting for a while and it was where I was at professionally. I'd been in a partnership with my dad for about nine years at that point a little over nine years and the combination of deciding to end that partnership, a ancient Ayurvedic soup recipe that someone had told me about years prior and just popped back in my head towards the end of this ordeal. I had gone from hypo or hyper to hypo, and so, between this soup, making some difficult decisions about my professional life and about my boundaries, and different things, it was two weeks, kelly, two weeks. I had had labs done, hypo still in rough water, trying to get back to a youth thyroid, trying to get back to a healthy homeostasis, and I made some significant decisions about the alignment of my life. And this, this soup recipe that was, you know, that was passed down from the lineage of Buddha's physician like it's wild. And I got labs on two weeks later and my thyroid was perfect and my endocrinologist was on the floor like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'm sitting there going, okay, that's cool and I could see a lot of corny places. I could go with that. I could see a lot of annoying places and I'm going to go there too with that as if filter. I'm not going to stand up and say it was the fact that I chose to end this partnership. That just wasn't an alignment. It wasn't bad. I didn't get a no, don't stay in business with your dad. It was. If you really want what you're claiming to want, you may want to take this off ramp.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. Wow, that's quite a powerful story and it's fascinating to hear you look back on it and hear what you've been able to take away from it and what you've gained from it. I really appreciate your vulnerability and openness in being willing to share that story. That's really inspiring, mm-hmm. Well, thank you. This has all been so great. My goal with this podcast is always to leave people with takeaways and things to think about or perhaps consider differently, and you certainly did that for me today, with many new perspectives to look at, and I imagine others listening feel likewise. So I really appreciate you being here and giving us your time.
Speaker 1:My pleasure and thank you for creating such a fun space to be able to explore this stuff. I've found that that has a lot less to do with just me and more to do with the space that you allow and what you allow me to see and feel, what I can see and feel from you, and that collaboration, that dance, and you've been fun to dance with. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode with Paul Blanchard. If you are interested in learning more about him and his work, check out his website at wholebodymindsetcom slash habitfinder. There you'll find a free tool that measures the patterns of your thinker mind. I did this myself and was nothing short of blown away by what the results told me about myself, so highly recommend. Thank you so much for listening. If you received value from this episode today, I humbly request your support by subscribing, downloading, rating and reviewing the show, and please share this episode with anyone who you think may find value in it as well. I am truly honored to walk alongside of you as we heal and stay healed together.