Episode 19: Living with Multiple Sclerosis: The Healing Layer Nobody Talks About

Healing Beyond the Body: MS, Nervous System Safety, and Remembering Wholeness with Dana Wylder.

This LifeVision Lab podcast explores “healing beyond the body” as integration across physical, mental, emotional, nervous system, and energetic layers. The host interviews Dana, who describes living “from the neck up” due to an unsafe childhood, running away, addiction, perfectionism, and later an abusive relationship, leading to chronic disconnection from her body. After symptoms began during her second pregnancy—amid grief for her firstborn son—she was diagnosed with MS, told she’d be in a wheelchair within 10 years, and initially responded by trying to “overcome” it. Over time she realized relentless problem-solving kept her ego’s “manager” active, and that healing required acceptance, safety, and somatic regulation rather than force. They discuss being-before-doing, inspired action, boundaries, meditation, sound and biofield work, limits of talk therapy, and using symptoms as a compass for alignment, ending with gratitude as a foundational practice.

00:00 Introduction — A Gentle Invitation to Come Home
02:14 Dana's Story — Living From the Neck Up
06:41 The MS Diagnosis — When the Body Refused to Be Ignored
13:19 Radical Acceptance + Radical Responsibility
17:08 The Layers of Healing — The Koshas
21:57 Sound Healing, Plants & The Shared Field
27:32 From Understanding to Embodiment — Quieting the Mind
31:39 Nervous System Safety — Healing From the Body Up
41:00 Wholeness — The Gift of the Compass
43:30 Closing Invitation — Gratitude as a Practice

Get in touch with Dana - https://energyovermatter.com/
IG - @energy.over.matter

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Life Vision Lab podcast. Before we begin today, I want to invite you to do something very simple. Just notice your breath, no fixing, no changing, just noticing. So many of us are moving through life carrying more than we realize. Emotionally, physically, energetically, and often we're trying to heal by doing more, thinking more or fixing harder. Today's conversation is a gentle invitation to do something different. To listen, to remember, to conform to yourself. This episode is for anyone who has tried everything and still feels like something's missing. For those who sense that feeling is deeper than symptoms, and for those who are curious about what exists beyond the physical body. Today we are exploring feeling beyond the body, feeling as an integration, feeling as a remembering onness rather than fixing what is broken. We will be talking about the layers of healing, physical, mental, emotional, nervous system, energy, and how each layer holds information, memory, and wisdom. I'm so honored to be joined today by Dana. Dana is someone who brings both lived experience and deep presence into the healing space. Her work bridges the physical body, the nervous system, and the energetic field in a way that feels grounded, compassionate, and deeply human. What I love about Dana's work is that it's not about bypassing or quick fixes. It's about listening to the body and honoring the what's the word? Intelligence within us. Dana, thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

Thanks so much for having me. I love having these conversations.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Yeah, me too. And I'd love to start by going back to the beginning of your journey. For a long time you were living from the neck up, is what you say. Suppressing emotions, silencing intuitions, surviving by disconnecting from parts of yourself. Can you share what life felt like during that time and how your body eventually began to speak?

SPEAKER_01 2:14

I mean, during that time, I definitely never really felt safe. I never felt like it was okay to be in the world I was in. And I never really felt like I belonged either. I remember even as a child, always kind of having a suitcase packed and being ready to leave if I had to. And actually did do that several times, ran away from home and later moved out very young and then into another toxic situation with an abuser where I never really had needs and I never really got to express what it was that I wanted and need because my whole life was in service to keeping the chaos at bay. And I think that kind of taught me over time that my body wasn't really a safe place to be in because my environment was not a safe place to be in. And all of those signals, they were so loud and they were so upsetting that I really suppressed them and I really tried to ignore them and kind of outrun them. And, you know, I did that through a lot of different mechanisms. And I think the overarching thing I would say is escapism. And the escapism kind of evolved with me throughout the years. And when I was young, it was that sense of fleeing from a situation. And I mean, I can remember even at school with small things, the teacher not giving me another sheet of paper to fix my artwork, and I would flee the school. So I mean, it was just it followed me everywhere. I had this like fight or flight, and it was always to flight. And then later it was getting into drugs and into alcohol and into really numbing myself in order to make it through. But then even having this false sense of that was something social still, because the rave culture was fine. You're dancing, you're doing something, you're connecting with people, but it's never really in an authentic way. It is still suppressing yourself. And as I got older, you know, I got rid of those addictions because, you know, my mind was still very strong. And when you have a really strong mind, you think you can overcome everything. And so I kind of outran the escapism. And I ended up now really pursuing higher education and pursuing a career in corporate world. And I started running marathons. And I mean, everything I did had to be done all the way. So even in those signals and those things that were happening, I was never just being with myself, I was doing now and chasing perfectionism. And I would say all of these things are based on the same inner feeling that you're not enough, that you're not okay, that the only way you're going to be approved by, whether it is addictive parents or whether it's an abusive relationship or whether it's the outside world, it's by conforming your needs, suppressing your emotions so that you can please everybody else and what everybody else expects and wants out of you. And that's at the cost of listening to yourself and being connected with yourself. And, you know, sometimes these things come to us in perfect synchronicities and meaningful ways. And I think MS, if those of you that are not familiar, it is when the body and the mind stop communicating with each other because the nervous system is damaged. So all those years of me trying to escape my physical body, it became a reality which I was now trapped in. Because even though I'm not doing drugs, I'm not trying to escape, I'm starting to meditate, I'm starting to, I trained to be a yoga teacher. But now my body is still saying, no, now we're not going to allow you to live in this body anymore. Now you only just are in the mind. And so, you know, it mirrored really what was going on, except that, you know, in a full full circle moment, I now had to use my mind to figure out how to re-embody in safety back in through the nervous system. So it's kind of like undoing all the things that I had done earlier, uncovering, you know, what how I even titled my book, right? It's unlearning so that you can relearn.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

And I love how you've articulated that. Um, it's just such a unique way that you, you know, weaved it together. But what you're describing is something so many people experience, including myself. But we rarely have a language for it. That's why I was so amazed with the way you articulated it, right? That quite disconnection, the body carrying what the mind cannot process or the other way around. And then you said there came a moment when the body in a way spoke loudly by just giving up.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Right? And you were given a progno uh prognosis that many would have accepted as final. But something in you refused to surrender to that. Can you take us to that moment? And what were you thinking? Like specific thoughts, and what did you go through, the emotions, and what shifted inside of you?

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Yeah, so I mean, I had my symptoms that started, and I think the first really ones that we're telling was during my second pregnancy. And that was just like not feel it's such a weird thing to describe that I could feel my clothes on my body. And that's only happens when you things change from because normally we all have clothes, but we're not aware of them touching us. But when your skin starts to change us in and parts go numb, parts get oversensitive, those small signals all of a sudden were very loud to me and very noticeable. But I was grieving from the loss of my firstborn son at the time. And so every time that I tried to talk to a doctor or talk to somebody in my life to say, I think something's wrong, people either wrote me off and said, Oh, it's all just in your mind. Or I think the doctors would just say, Well, I can give you an antidepressant if you want, or you can go off of work. But nobody really even addressed like that, maybe the physical things might be related to something emotional. I had taken a lot of courses in university about brain and behavior. So I was familiar already with what MS is. And I think the mistake we all make when we get anything, we Google it and it gives us all these worst-case scenarios. So I kind of had contemplated MS already, but it was actually an optometrist because I lost vision in one eye and she looked in my eye and said to me, Oh, have you ever heard of optic neuritis or MS? And it made sense right then. And I got an MRI. And so I had this time between when I first got diagnosed through the MRI, because in Canada we have a very long wait time for our medical system. So I had a long wait time until I actually seen a MS specialist. And during that time, I did some research on my own because I am an at this is part of my doer A-type personality, is that I researched everything because I thought, you know, I can solve this. This is just another thing to solve. And, you know, in the beginning of the MS, I was very much trying to overcome it. And I think that when I went to the doctor for the first time, what kind of saved me from the poor prognosis is I never really believed them. So when the doctor said to me, you have MS, the outcome is going to be 10 years till a wheelchair. So keep your benefits and try to have somebody that will look after you. And I had a brand new baby and I'm in an abusive marriage, and that's just not possible. I'm thinking, I can't leave this baby with this person, and this can't be how life turns out. So I'd asked the doctor, I read studies that said you could reduce lesions. And they he said, Yep, that happens sometimes. And I'm like, and I've also heard that you can not get any new relapses or lesions. He's like, Yes, that happens sometimes. I'm like, okay, that's a cure. I'm gonna cure myself. And he laughed. He's like, it's not a cure, it's progressive, it's lifetime, prepare to get worse. And I never really accepted that. And although I never accepted the outlook that they said to me, and I thought that I would problem solve this and overcome it. And I think that was very helpful to me. But again, on the journey, because we're always evolving and we're learning more, I came to actually realize that that overcoming nature actually was gonna hold me back at some point. Because once into hypnotherapy and into mindset and deeper into healing, I started to realize that there was all these parts of ourselves. And there was a part of me in my life that had developed that they call a manager personality. And the manager in me was always managing chaos. So, first of all, alcoholics and drug addicts, then abusive relationship. And so I always had something that, and that part of my ego that developed was helpful throughout my life because it served a purpose. It was keeping me safe because I believed that as long as I controlled everything and managed everything, I would be safe. But once I didn't have anything to manage, I've left my marriage, I'm happy, everything is good. All of a sudden the MS is there again. And I'm thinking, well, why is it still coming up? I've thought I've solved all these problems, I've done all the work, and it's still here. And this is when I started to really realize that perhaps this idea of overcoming the MS gave that manager part of me another job that it had for life. Because as long as I had the diagnosis of MS and I had to overcome it, I had to solve a problem, then that part of me never had to dissolve. That part of my ego could stay there with me because it had a permanent job. And it was as soon as I started to really realize that part of myself and just say, maybe I need to stop doing anything and just start being with the emotions, start being with the diagnosis, start just being okay that there's no expectation on the outcome, that it doesn't matter whether it got better, got worse, stayed the same, no matter what, I was okay. Because that spiritual part of me, that that divinity, the higher self, is perfect, was always perfect, and and will continue to be so perfect after this life. And this body is temporary, this life experience is temporary. And as soon as I started to really integrate some of those things, you know, and I thought when I got my teacher training certificate in yoga, I understood those things, but there's something about crawling on the floor that really dissolves your ego. And I'm still teaching yoga, but I can't do tripos, I can't stand up. And you have to really address all of a sudden all these parts of yourself that says, why am I still valuable? Why am I still okay as a human being, even though I can't do any of these things that my old avatar, our ego, related to my myself, my true self was, those were never my true self. So as I kind of realize some of these things along the evolution, I think that's when true healing can really happen, is actually once you stop fighting against yourself and your body.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

Accepting that that moment, right, of the diagnosis and what your body's actually going through. And this episode is extremely special for me, Dana, because I have a friend who was diagnosed with MS last year, and um 100% took a toll on her, but I think it took a big, huge toll on her friends, us, because we know who she is as a person, and we knew how it's gonna um how it's gonna affect her even more after the diagnosis. And so um we all went through our own journey once her diagnosis came about. And so for me, this episode is extremely special because again, the I guess the ego in me wants to find all these solutions to heal her and get her to a better place. But what you're basically saying, and what I fear so clearly, is how your healing journey began in the physical body by accepting, right? That by accepting the diagnosis, by accepting that you just had to learn to be. And that whether it was yoga, running, breath work, all of that had brought you back to that same thought of accepting.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

Yeah, well, I mean, radical acceptance comes also though with radical responsibility. So it's kind of like it's both things, like, and everything is dual, right? So it's like at one point we don't want to identify with the label, so it's not so much as saying to yourself, okay, I have MS and accepting this faith that you're going to just be maybe in a wheelchair or that things are gonna look bad because our mind is very powerful. So if we think that and then we believe it about ourselves, I believe we will get sick. So it's not necessarily about just the label and identifying with it, but it's this a deeper kind of acceptance where and I guess one of the ways and I learned this through neurolinguistic programming, a different way to look at things that you need to start with being first. So you just be with yourself. So be with the negative emotions, be with you know whatever uh arises in you, be with the pain in your body. So even that is just a signal, it's just temporary, it's your body trying to communicate, and that's how your body does communicate. So your mind thinks in language, but the body speaks in sensations and emotions. So you listen to them, you accept them, you just be with them. And once you've been with yourself and you made quiet, and I think meditation, yoga, these are all beautiful practices to do because it quiet everything down. So you have a chance for that, the intuition, the subtle self, you know, the higher self to come through. But once you've been with that and you've accepted where you are, then you get inspired action because we are in a 3D body still. So we need action. So it's not to just say, well, I've just accepted my fate, I've been with myself, I'm okay regardless of what the outcome is going to be. But because I still have a desire to be better, I'm going to act by doing. But the doing is not a hamster wheel anymore. It's not this frantic, I'm just doing because I feel the need to do. It comes out of the quiet of just being with yourself. It's inspired. And like inspiration, really, when you look at the etymology of the word, you're in. And then a spirit or prana, it's the spirit, you're breathing, right? So when you're breathing in this life energy because you're being with yourself, you begin inspired to act. But that action now brings you to a place of having, right? And the having now is going to be more aligned with this vision you have for yourself because you didn't just jump in at doing frantically like I was before. I I just I was okay. I had to be with myself first, you know. And then when you're, you know, and then even when you think about behaving, so you're be having. Yeah. So you're gonna still do some action there. It's not to say that you should do nothing. You need to be responsible for your how your journey turns out. It's just not as simple as people think that you just jump in and I'm just gonna do the diet, and I'm just gonna do all this pharmacological drugs, I'm gonna do all these things, and I'm gonna be fine somehow. No, sometimes you got to sit and just be with the uncomfortableness of what got you to this point and being responsible that I know it's a hard thing to say, and I don't want to, especially for your friend that's maybe newly diagnosed and still, I would hate to make it feel like I'm saying they're responsible for their sickness because it's hard to hear in the beginning. I know for myself, you know, it was difficult. But over time, once I've lived with this now for 17 years, I understand how much response how much responsibility that I have in getting sick. Because I was born healthy and I got sick. So there's there is a responsibility in that because I obviously did emotional behaviors, physical behaviors, food, toxic people, toxic news, job that I didn't love. Like I do all of these things and I got sick. But in that acceptance of it and the responsibility gives you the freedom to know that you can choose differently. So you can unpack and undo the things that you did to get you sick. You just turn it back around and and start peeling off the veils, right? You do eat better, right? Because my book is uh based on the koshas and yoga, so that you have all these layers of your body, a physical body, and then they get more fine as you they they come inwards. So we have a physical body, an energy body, mental body, wisdom body, and then finally the bliss body. And my healing actually went very much through those cycles without me even knowing what the koshas were. It was just this natural way it kind of progressed.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Because you body intuitively sort of went through the motions, right?

SPEAKER_01 17:37

When you start in this, and then you start to realize that you know you can't heal if you're only doing something at one place there. And I think that's the problem for most of us is we get stuck in the physical body where we just we only do those things and we stop there. But we need to understand how the body is being a projection of the mind. And and where is the mind coming from? From consciousness, from our soul, from source. So you you can't just heal only one part. You have to, you know, this is what holistic healing really is is to look at yourself as this multidimensional being. And when you start to come to those higher, those higher sources of you know, vibration and frequency at the higher level. I almost think that once you get there and you really refine that and you get in tune with it, if you make some mistakes at the lower levels, it's you you have some wiggle room and forgiveness and you can kind of do a couple mistakes there. Right. Because that higher vibe that you're living in kind of permits it. It's once we really get the bottom level, right, the physical body wrong, that we can get disease and you know, ultimately death, even if we get that wrong. Um, so it's kind of like, you know, it's a multifactorial, you know, kind of layered healing.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

And I think through meditation, because I got certified as a meditation teacher as well, Dana. And I think for me, I always believed in it. I think even growing up, because I come from a Hindu culture and there's a lot of chants and rituals, etc., that we do on a day-to-day basis, but never given a meaning to it before, right? Like, how does it impact you? What's the science behind it? And that's what interested me. And so when I did go through meditation teacher training, I think it was proven when we were in class and actually training together, you could feel the energy different. And they say that the more you meditate and cleanse every day, your energy has such a wide, I guess, area that it spreads that's always 16 feet wide. And so the number of people you can affect around you makes a difference, right? And then you start bringing changes into people's lives. So to your point, when you meditate, it's not just you, it's it's people around you too that start um seeing change in their lives. So I I completely hear you, and I think our body intuitively knows. I think we just unlearn it and come into this life as humans to relearn it. Right. I think that's that's just the problem.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

Absolutely. And like to speak to that, you know, that that shared field. I I teach sound bath classes and yoga classes, and I love being in the front. Like I play singing bowls, like we always start with like some qigong yoga to kind of open the flow, do some pranayama, a meditation, and then everybody lies with eye masks on, cozy and blankets, all the lights out. And I I play all the instruments for them. And at the end, always though, because I, even though I love teaching people these things, I like to give people things that's free and they can do at home. And there is no better healing, sound healing tool than your own voice. And not just through mantra and chanting, but also just the words you say and your internal dialogue too. It's not even just out loud, it's the thoughts you're thinking have a lot of intention. And when I do that at the end of class and everybody's facing towards me, and I have them say like vowel tone, and as they're all coming up through all the different tones associated with the chakras, it is amazing to me that always when we get to the heart chakra, that all of a sudden everybody tones exactly. No matter if like if it's male, female voices, that sound just comes. And when I get to be at the front, it's they actually say conductors live the longest of all the trades. And I think that's because the instruments play towards them and they make figure eights with the their figure eights are really energetic and it's for energy healing. And I think because they're doing that, they live longer. And now that I teach the classes and everybody tones towards me, I the the vibe in the room, and like I wish that they could all experience being the one that sits in the front and hears all of that volume coming towards me because it is palpable. I feel it vibrating in my body and I love it. So, I mean, it is. We do share the field. And something else interesting, and I know this maybe doesn't have to do with healing so much, but on the nature of just consciousness and this shared field, I'm reading a book right now called The Secret Lives of Plants. And this fascinated me that a guy named Baxter, and he wasn't a mystic or like any kind of spiritual teacher, he was a CIA interrogator. And he did uh lie detector tests, the machine they put on you. He put it on a house plant because he was just bored one day. And then he thought about burning the plant's sleeve, but he didn't even get up to get the matches. Just the thought alone made the plant respond. And so then they they picked up tests and they've been doing these tests for decades now, showing how plants have consciousness and that just intention. And all of a sudden it makes you look at life differently because it's not just the morphic field of other humans that we're influencing with our vibration, but even the plants are witnessing us.

unknown 22:41

Right.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

And I just thought, even now, when I'm just sitting in my house and I think, even if I'm in a bad mood and it's like, well, I'm not spreading that to my kids or to my partner, but now I just worry about my plants. And every time my plants get like a little like brown on their leaf or something, I'm thinking, well, am I even having bad thoughts when I sit beside the plant? Like, what am I doing now? And it makes you all of a sudden take such responsibility in life. Like when you understand the connectedness of everything, it really does make you take responsibility, even to not be absent-minded. Like, never mind just that you were intending to be bad, because hopefully none of us are intending to be bad. But even though exactly, like just like that, even just those inner thoughts we're having are broadcasting still to everybody else. And that's going all the way full circle back to the doctor's irresponsibility when they're telling me, Oh, you're going to be in a wheelchair in 10 years. Because their words with the lab coat on and the authority that they have in the society we live in, it's very powerful. Powerful. So I hope that your friend is looking outside to all different kinds of things and that she can do because there are so many things that you can do to heal yourself. And the thing is, whether it's MS or whether it's depression, anxiety, just disconnection, the causes are the same, and so are the solutions. Because really, when it comes down to it, it all just is that internal your thoughts, your emotions, your interactions, your limiting beliefs, and how those things translate into actions in the real world. You know, because when we think better thoughts, we eat better food. I hope so too.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

You're right. And I hope so too, Dana. She's amazing with her food, and she's amazing with just how rather she'd gotten better with her boundaries, right? I think that's something that she's learning to have a lot of boundaries with uh with people and with things around her: energy healing and yoga meditation. And in fact, I'm pushing her to come with me for a meditation retreat organized by Dr. George Dispenza. So fingers crossed. Hopefully that all the time.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

And I really hope I'm gonna get the name of the scientist right here. But he's the one, Albert Fitzpop. So he is the one that discovered, like he's the one that said, Oh, we're light beings, because he discovered that every cell has like a biophoton of light that comes out of it. And with whatever machinery he was using to detect that, he could tell the difference between a genetically modified tomato or a regular one, whether the egg was pasture-raised or a hen house, and they could see. And so they started looking at the human cells and thinking about how light is coherence and it's a communication between the body and the cell. And that way that's how things can be faster, even than your nervous system or your hormones, because light is the speed of light, it's way faster than anything else. And maybe that's even the way we're communicating with the plants, right? Like that, they could maybe prove that too. But what one of the things that was interesting is when they looked at cancer cells, cancer cells, like because normal cells have like a very nice round membrane, and there's a nice small field of light coming off of them. And cancer cells were like jagged and disharmonious, which makes sense when you think about the fact that the cells are not replicating, the signal's not right. But MS was a was an anomaly, and MS cells were the only ones that the cells broadcasted huge amounts of light. So, what it said to me, knowing my whole life, because I think that everything is like as above, so below the macro and the micro, that if my cell also has poor boundaries and it's spilling out its energy all the time, did that ever match me as a person? This I talk fast, think fast, move fast. I'm always doing and overcoming this manager personality, but always having poor boundaries still and taking on other people's dramas and other people's needs. And so the fact that your friend is dealing with MS and boundaries is coming up. I think that there is something very profound and insightful about the boundary work because it actually showed in the cells of MS patients.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

Wow, that's wild. And the fact that I even raised it with you, right? It's it's amazing how synchronistic these things are when we start talking about and we get into the flow and I bring up things that make so much sense. But thank you for that, Dina. That's you've definitely put in a lot of work into learning and you know doing a deep dive. I'm gonna actually ask you a very it's probably a basic question for you, but there are a lot of people who are listening who don't know how to shift from or the difference between understanding something and truly embodying it. So, can you give a little deeper for me, double-click on that and get deeper on on how we can go about that?

SPEAKER_01 27:32

So, I mean, I think this is even when you are making the transition between the mental body and the wisdom body. So it is this difference between acquiring more knowledge and then really actually understanding or discerning it. So we all are capable of taking in lots of information. We take in the news, we read papers, we read books, we watch TV, we have these conversations. But I think the difference between embodying it is not necessarily that you're taking some information and trying to make yourself understand it. It's landing on the things that you just know to be true. Right? It's something, somebody will say something to you, and it's the most simple statement, and you hear it and you don't need to fact-check it. You don't need to have somebody explain it to you. They say it and you're just like, oh, that just made so much sense. It just like landed inside me on an instinctual level because it wasn't just my mental body, it was like my physical body understood. Because, you know, they say that every all the information contained in the cosmos also contained at each cell of your body. So your body knows all how to heal, it knows how to come back into homeostasis and balance, it knows what is true and what isn't. It's just that our mind becomes so over-dominant in our society, and we believe that we can think our way out of things, but sometimes our mind is what gets us in the problem. So you don't solve the problem with more mind, right? You solve it by quieting the mind, which is why meditation and yoga work is because once you quiet the mind and you get back into the body, and even when I look at like hypnotherapy, because I do that as a modality with my clients as well, that you're putting somebody into trance so that you're going into the subconscious. And the subconscious, I don't really see it the same way other people do as like two parts of your mind. I actually see the subconscious as the body. It is the body because I came to this not through reading, I came through this through embodying it because I had meditated for years, and my experience of meditation was I'm trying to calm my mind, but in the process, I feel my body more. I get uncomfortable, you kind of want to move, you fidget, you get hot, you get hungry, like your body starts to talk to you. And the first time that I got hypnotized by somebody, I realized, oh, they put your body to sleep so they can talk to your mind. And it was a complete opposite. And I'm like, okay, so meditation and hypnosis are almost the opposites because one is the conscious mind, you're trying to control awareness of your conscious mind, and the other part is that subconscious, which I would say is not another part of your mind, it's the body speaking. Yeah. And that's where you're getting the emotions and the sensations and these other things, which is why when you do hypnosis, we talk in metaphors, because it's supposed to be something that's painting a picture as opposed to like just language itself. So I would say, yeah, to answer your question, quieting yourself, you know, and then that's why meditation works so well. You quiet it, and then those truths really hit in a deeper way, like a gut level, you feel it, you know that it's true, and you didn't get it from learning, you got it just because it is true.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

And and I think what you uh mention is so powerful. Healing does not happen when we push harder, it happens when the body feels safe enough to soften. And I think the mind's job is to keep us safe by creating all these stories and the shoulds and coulds, etc., that the body actually doesn't feel safe, right? So, like you said, meditation really quietens the mind. So the body then feels safe enough again to start communicating with us, and that's just so powerful to hear. And eventually your journey brought you into that, into the emotional body and the nervous system, when it was trauma, stole memory, regulation to safety. That was sort of like the process. This is when many people feel overwhelmed or unsure where to begin. What shifted for you when safety and compassion became the foundation rather than effort or feeling?

SPEAKER_01 31:39

I mean, and I think I started the wrong way, like most people, because I was doing it with my mind and I was trying to say, okay, you're safe, it's okay. And I would do these practices like looking at something, and because they say, okay, if you look at something in your environment and like, you know, you breathe and you go, okay, I'm in the room, I'm in the chair, I'm here, I'm in my body, it's safe. And, you know, momentarily maybe it makes you calm down a little bit, but it doesn't really signal anything to the body because you have two different nervous systems, uh, efferent nerves and afferent nerves. And so only 10% of the information of your of your nerves comes from the brain down. So there's only a very small amount of you that can mind over whatever's going to happen. 90% of the information comes from the body into the mind. So, and that's the way the vagus nerve works. The vagus nerve and the enteric nervous systems come from sensation, pressure, temperature, proprietalception, like where you are in space, which again was why yoga also helps because you're you're embodying this pose. But in order, you need to get the signals to come that direction. And so this is why things like breath work really work, diaphragmatic breathing. This is why like yin yoga, safety on the floor, where you're doing things where there's no reason for your nervous system to be overactive because it's calming, right? And you're doing like, and this is why I love sound healing and frequency-based tools, because when I'm doing biofield tuning and say I play a tuning fork to somebody, I don't I don't need to know. All I do is hold that mirror up of the dissident sound that the fork is making, and your nervous system hears that it's out of tune and it wants to be better. So it goes, oh, that's what I sound like, that's not right. And then it starts to entrain back to the original blueprint, which is safety, because we were all born. I mean, unless you're born with something genetically wrong, the rest of us were born healthy and then, you know, things happen to us. So when we go back to that original blueprint, and there's so many ways to do it that don't involve the mind. And I that's why I think, like, you know, I use magnetic field therapies and somatic work and tremor release, fascia release. Like I have such a wheelhouse of modalities because again, even when you're dealing with these alternative modalities, it's still not one size fits all. Everybody comes to you and what they need is different. Yeah. So you're gonna listen to the body, and the body's gonna tell you because something's still in the body, it's too fast and too quick. And especially like for people that have been, you know, sexually assaulted or molested or terrible things have happened. Sometimes getting them into their body can actually trigger them again, too, because it's a little too much too quick.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

So you're always gonna respect like I've noticed when I'm like high stress and and I got trained sound healing as on sound healing as well. And I notice every time I'm really stressed or my nervous system is on an overdrive, sound healing doesn't work for me those times. It has to be quiet, it has to be, you know, somatic practice where it's really peaceful and quiet. And that sort of brings me back into that safety space. So yeah, I can totally relate to everything.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

Well, I think in my my sound baths, we always start with moving the body first, right? We always do that, that, and then we do the pranayama, then we do the mind, and then we do sound healing. Because I've noticed the same thing too, especially people that have high anxiety. Sometimes certain frequencies actually really irritate them. And you can see that it actually is making them tense.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

So it's like I like to it does repulse, right? Like you get repulsive when you hear that frequency because it's mirroring it back to you. That's so good for you.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

So when your body is out of tune, the sound is out of tune because it's it's like the two tuning forks when you hit one and the other one. Well, if the tuning, if your body's out of tune, the tuning fork is going to bring out of tune too. And it does it and it can sound irritating. It's actually when I do biofield tuning, like private sessions one-on-one, it's one of the ways in which I I know when I've hit an oscillation or something in the field, because the tuning fork goes from a pleasant sound to all of a sudden it's it's you know, irritating. Like there is no about because because it's it is irritated. It's hit something in the field that it's like it's icky and sticky, it doesn't like it. But you got to hang out there, right? You're hanging out there for a little bit to dissolve whatever it is until you get it to sound nice again. And, you know, but you know, still, even though it can be uncomfortable a bit, I still think it's a gentler version than, and again, this isn't I don't like to dismiss other people's modalities. Just for myself, I found sometimes talk therapy was re-triggering. And so I didn't want to talk about it. I I'd rather to just go straight into the body.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

And I think you get to a point because I've been through a lot of modalities, I've tried so many different modalities. And to your point, when it's talk therapy, I think it helps in the beginning, but when you keep having trauma show up in different ways and you keep peeling the layers, you realize talk doesn't really help you beyond the point, right? You just have to be and find different modalities to help you overcome it because it's so deep that talk doesn't really touch those deeper parts of the world.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Also, I mean, I and what I think it is useful for is awareness though. So because sometimes we need to understand what our what patterns keep showing up for us. So I know my own patterns now at this point because they've shown up lots of times. And unfortunately, when you have trauma and you've had a lot of trauma in the body, my trauma, my nervous system is so loud now, and it's it's at such a huge like it it responds so quickly because it's always scanning the environment. Right. And so that means my body also had to speak loud, my mind also speaks loud. So the idea is to quiet it all back. But those energetic patterns, they keep getting given to us again as an opportunity to solve them because we didn't do it the first time. So, yes, when we're young, it's way too much for us to handle, which is what causes a trauma. And I wouldn't expect any child to understand, you know, how to overcome these things, but they get given to us again by we pick partners that are similar to our family life, right? Because we have to solve that thing we we grew up with. And then we maybe divorce that partner or leave them, but we get another one that's the same because we didn't quite learn the whole lesson, right? And the toxicity kind of follows us in these energetic patterns. So the talk therapy is beneficial in the beginning because it gives you a sense of like, well, what is it that I keep repeating? What is this pattern? And that's good to have the awareness of it. But once you understand what it is, what we need to do is once it arises again in your life to have tools that are actually going to switch you out of that and bring you back into safety quickly. So I still get triggered. This is not to say that, you know, because I've written a book and I and I heal other people that I'm not still fallible as a human. I still have my energetic things that trigger for me too. And they come up again still. But now I quickly identify as soon as I start going into that pattern. I go, oh, okay, I understand what this is. I understand why this person or this situation is making me feel so uncomfortable or so reactive. And because I'm so quick to identify that, I can now bring all these other tools in to release it, to let go of it, so that it moves through you quickly, which is the goal, really. Like, you can't stop the human experience, right? No matter how much healing we do, more bad things will happen to us because you know, the external world will keep spinning around us, people will die, we'll lose jobs, you know, bad events in the globe will happen. But we learn over time to stay in our center more and how to get, if we come off center, how to get back to center. And this is why, I mean, and your friend maybe will get there at some point too, that MS becomes kind of like a gift because for me, I use it as a compass now. Every time my eyesight gets weak or my balance gets a little off, I immediately know now, okay, course correct. I'm off path, something is not aligned, and I know how to get back quickly. Where some people live like in low level discontent and anxiety or depression their whole life. And they the there's never um a strong enough carrot in front of them or a stick behind them to motivate them to move. So they just kind of stay there in that in that place forever throughout their whole life, and they never have to really examine their choices and what actions they're doing to where they want to be. At least for myself, even though it was terribly uncomfortable and unpleasant, a lot of it. Um, I I at least had my roots grow deep enough that my branches could also equally grow high. And now I have this barometer that stays with me constantly as a reminder to stay on path.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

Okay, that's beautifully put. Thank you, Dana. And today you no longer see yourself as broken, which is the best place to be in, but you see yourself as a wounded healer who found her way home. What does wholeness mean to you now? And how has this journey changed the way you live and lead? I mean, you did say it in some ways, but I like I'm curious to know when you said you go through your own challenges and your own triggers, etc. on a given day. You just have a way of coming back home to yourself quicker.

SPEAKER_01 40:58

So, what does that wholeness mean to you? I think the wholeness really means for me that you're that you are just okay. But I really am just okay. So, you know, I I like I said when we were talking about that, the whole process of being, and then you do inspired action to have. But I have no attachment to the outcome of what's going to happen, and I have no expectation of how it will be delivered to me. And I'm just okay with that, with the unknown that there's Joe Dispenza again, like in his meditations. But you really have to get to a point where it doesn't really matter to me now if I have an MRI and it comes up with a lesion or it stays clear, or if the symptoms return or they don't, because I'm just okay with however life is going to unfold at this point, because I'm okay with myself now. And I really understand that I am this perfect being and this soul that transcends just this body and just this one experience I'm having right now. And when I start to see myself in that relationship with my houseplants and with my people, my students, the people I'm healing and myself. Life is so beautiful and it is tragic, and that's okay. But the tra you, I guess what it is is really being okay even when the times are bad. Like I am grateful even when things are not okay, because I understand now that that struggle and the strife is here for a reason. It's teaching me something. This is a moment that I'm going to become better on the other side of it. And it's it's just temporary. This too shall pass. So it doesn't really matter because the same way the happiness is fleeting, the pain is fleeting too. So just be okay with yourself. And because you are okay. You're perfect. We're all perfect, we're all okay. And you know, some of us are gonna have a life that looks different than other people. We all have, you know, our own pain and our own, you know, beauty in life. And your story is your story, and just be okay with living it. And however it unfolds, and the more you're okay with it, I would say the the more that you're at that frequency of acceptance, love, and light, the more those experiences of positivity will resonate and they'll find you.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

Right. And so as we begin to close, Dana, I want to offer this to our listeners. Healing is not linear. I think clearly throughout conversation, we've learned that there is no right order, there's no failure in needing support, your body is not broken. It is communicating. Basically, it's just a form of communication that we need to learn or train ourselves to understand. And if there's one invitation you can leave with someone who feels stuck or disconnected right now, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 43:39

I always give to everyone of my clients this one practice. If you could change, I think the one thing that's most foundational for everybody right now is gratitude. I think gratitude is the highest frequency that we can live at. It's accessible, it's easy. And I don't care where you are on your journey right now, even when I was crawling and needing care and I had to be, you know, full. Taken care of and fed and groomed, I was still grateful in that moment. And it's not toxic positivity. I'm not saying that you shouldn't feel the bad emotions to feel them. That's okay. Sometimes life sucks. It's okay. Cry if you need to. But then find the reason to still be grateful because in that moment, I was still breathing. So I'm grateful that I can breathe. And I have a house under the roof over my head. I have a floor to lie down on and a pillow that I can even lay down on. And that I still had a mind that was capable of trying to problem solve my way out of it. I was grateful for Joe Dispensa because he was playing on the TV while I laid there and I couldn't do anything else. And then all of a sudden, I mean, even right now I could snowball. I could just start talking about gratitude and it would just snowball because that really is the place where if you can just find that and that inside of yourself, and this will lead you to the it's okay in this holistic version because there is always reasons to be happy and reasons to be grateful. We just sometimes we get stuck in negativity and in cycles, and we just need to kind of snap ourselves out of that and just say, even in this moment, you know, what are all the reasons why life is still beautiful and I'm here and this is happening, and why can I how can I be grateful for it?

SPEAKER_00 45:13

Beautiful. Thank you, Dana, for your your wisdom, your honesty, and honesty, your presence. And to everyone listening, I want you to remember this healing is not about fixing what is wrong because really there isn't anything to fix. It's about restoring what has always been whole. You are perfect, you were born perfect. It's about finding an acceptance to realize that you are perfect as you are and listen to what Leah is calling you next and trust that your body already knows the way. And until next time, be gentle with yourself. Thank you. Thank you, Dana.