Told She Had 6 Weeks to Live — Here's What She Did Next — A Rise Up Story with Charlotte Phelps

“You’re fine” can be one of the most dangerous phrases a person hears when their body is clearly struggling. I’m joined by Charlotte Phelps, founder of The Alchemy of Being, to unpack her rise-up story from high-achieving banking life in London to a health crisis that culminates in a terrifying warning: her gut may rupture within weeks. What follows is not a neat wellness slogan, but a grounded, human account of what it takes to keep pushing for answers when symptoms are real and tests keep landing in the “normal range”.

We talk about the long build-up: insomnia, hives, digestive breakdown, pain, and the quiet stress of managing your life around your body. Charlotte shares how an unconventional biofeedback session points to a specific parasite that traditional routes miss, and how functional medicine testing helps her finally understand the gut health, hormone health, thyroid and adrenal stress connection behind what she’s experiencing. Alongside the medical journey, we explore the emotional reality of overachievement, the limiting belief of “not good enough”, and why a crisis often becomes the moment we finally choose ourselves.

We also get practical and philosophical: why self-advocacy matters, how stress isn’t just “in your head”, why sleep can be more healing than another workout, and how even the wellness world can slip into comparison and one-upmanship. Charlotte explains what she built with The Alchemy of Being: a curated wellness hub and “wellness wiki” to help people find credible options and a starting point before they hit breaking point.

If this conversation shifts something for you, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s been told they’re “fine”, and leave a review so more people can find these stories. What’s one choice you could make today that gives your body a better chance?

And if you want to see more of Charlotte and/or explore her fabulous website click this link.

Transcript

Welcome And Meet Charlotte

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi and welcome to Rise Up Stories. My name is Vicky Ross. I'm your host here, and today I have a fabulous. I always have fabulous, by the way, but today I've got the fabulous Charlotte Phelps who is a good friend. I've known her for I think it's about 11, 12, 13 years.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

I think you'll find it's 15 now.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Wow. I know. Okay, 15 years. I think people are starting to see a theme that I forget how long I've known people, but that's alright. So yeah, she is a fabulous friend. She's an amazing human. She's the founder of The Alchemy of Being, which I'm going to let her tell you a little bit more about that later on. But Charlotte's got an amazing rise-up story, which I would like to share with all of you and inspire you to pivot your life and rise up and take control and create what you want. So welcome, Charlotte. Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure having you. I I love just talking to you anyway.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Yeah, we are going to be careful that we don't just gnatter, aren't we, here? So uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Well well, we've already decided that we're going to have to have some more podcasts with you because we're not going to get it all in in one session. But that's okay because that's that's something for us to look forward to and all that. So, Charlotte, we've already discussed what we want to talk about on this podcast. So cast

London Career And Mysterious Symptoms

SPEAKER_00 1:30

me back to the beginning of that story, your story about your pivot, your rising up.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Yeah, do you know? I think it's um it's weird, isn't it? Because you can only see the beginning of the story once you've almost reached the pivot, if that makes sense. Um at the time, you're just experiencing a living, living life. But um I would say my my rise up story probably started when I moved to London after university to start my career, right? I was uh I joined a graduate scheme at one of the largest banks and sort of became your stereotypical 20-something who thought she could have it all, work hard, play hard, and all of those sorts of things. But within about 18 months, two years of starting, I just started feeling not quite right. I was having lots of little weird sort of symptoms that were affecting my quality of life, whether it be sort of, you know, digestive challenges or skin issues or energy issues. Um, I very quickly became an insomniac. The wonders of the wonders of London life. And over time, these kind of these kind of grew to the point that I would go to my doctor and I kind of go, this doesn't feel, this doesn't feel right, you know. And luckily, because I was working for a major bank, I had lots of lovely private medical insurance, so I could kind of ask for any tests or whatever. And everything just kept coming back saying it was normal and I was within normal range and it was fine. But my life experience of that time, it was getting more and more impactful. You know, my feet were so painful that wearing shoes was incredibly hard. And so, you know, I was one of those people who wore trainers and kept their high heels because we still had to wear high heels in the office at that point, you know, in your desk drawer because I physically couldn't really walk in them. It was excruciatingly painful. Um, I would have hives on quite a large part of my body for long periods of time. So what I could wear in the office would be very dictated by which bits of me I needed to um, you know, cover up. Yes, you know, the bloating in my bow would become so bad, I would buy two sizes of everything and take the largest size with me to the office to change into at lunchtime so that no one could, you know, because I didn't want to look like I was bursting out of my clothes. I didn't want to feel uncomfortable. And as I as my career progressed, I was I was there for 11 years and I did very well, you know. My my last role there was I was chief, uh one of the chief staff to a member of the boards, you know. So I had quite a speedy trajectory up the up the ladder, shall we say. And that coincided with my health getting worse and worse and worse.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

And can I just ask, did you at that time think that it was all kind of stress work related?

SPEAKER_01 4:17

I didn't have the ability to know that at all. I didn't really understand stress. You know, I I came from a place where you you, if you had an issue, you went to the doctor and you just the doctor told you if you were okay or not. And if you were okay, you carried, you know, you carried on. Now, during that time, so I did get diagnosed with a few things during that time. I had a genetic condition called Elostanos syndrome that was diagnosed. It discovered that I was uh wheat intolerant, which was, you know, very uncommon like it is now with the whole gluten thing. And so there were certain things that sort of became tangible knowledge, but it didn't change anything. You know, you got kind of got a stamp put on you, and then they were told, there you go, it's fine.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

You're like, no, but I still, I still don't have to, you know, living my life still isn't it. And I still have to change clothes and I still can't walk and I can't sleep, but I'm fine. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

But I'm fine. Yeah, and it was and it was the it was the weirdest, you know, the weirdest things. And then it kind of came to a head when essentially peristalsis in my bowel stopped. And so I was having to do daily enemas because I couldn't pass anything. I, you know, I was having real issues with energy regulation, with breathing, with anything that kind of involved the adrenal or thyroid system, all of those sorts of stuff. My menstrual cycles completely stopped. And I was in my 20s, and you're like, this isn't normal, and all that kind of thing. And whilst they attributed some things back to EDS because your body works slightly differently, it certainly wasn't everything. And there were some things that, you know, didn't didn't kind of add up. And I was just like, this just isn't, this just isn't right. And I must have been the most annoying patient ever because I was, you know, retest, retest, do something else, try something different, do something else, try because it was just like, I don't know anyone who has to do what I have to do to get through the day. I don't know anyone who got up at 4 a.m. to do an enema, patch a spare set of clothes and an extra share of shoes. No one did that.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

No, and and my question, or as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking, and you were with private medical aid, so you had that kind of invertebrach is a luxury to go test a little bit more, test a little bit different, do something else. I w I wonder what this journey would have been like had it been straight pure NHS kind of journey.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

Well, yes, exactly. And what I and I didn't have any knowledge to be able to assess if what the doctors were saying was valid or true or how relative it was, right? I just had to take everything on

Tests Say Fine While Life Shrinks

SPEAKER_01 6:50

on face value. Yeah.

unknown 6:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

And so this kind of came to a head. So I'd just gone for the big job, right? And so it was the height of summer, it was really hot. I'd gone for my interview, and because of the rashes, I was covered head to toe in hives. That a what's the person who looks at your skin? Dermatologist. A dermatologist had done biopsies all over my body, right? And come back and told me that yes, it was hives. And I went, cool, what am I reacting to? Oh, I can't tell you that. I can just tell you what the rash is. So I was like, well, that's unhelpful. It had been, you know, a four-month process, and I've been given absolutely no information at all. And I still had the hives, right? So it really didn't help. So I covered myself up in the height of summer with a high polar neck, long-sleeved top. I don't really wear makeup. I had about an inch of makeup because I had a rash all over my face, and I went off to this interview. Um, and I went I met up with a work colleague for a coffee afterwards, and I was just like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. It literally is just ridiculous.

SPEAKER_02 7:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

And he kind of said, you know, I don't know if this would be helpful in any way, shape, or form, but like my daughter's friend's mum does this alternative stuff by acquire feedback. Maybe she could help. And I was like, I'll try it. I I was just, I was at, you know, at my wit's end. I'll try it. So I trickled off down to Kent actually to go and meet this lady. And you know, everything was very odd because she attached electrodes to my head and my feet and started passing energy frequencies through my body. And based on what the body absorbed or the body didn't absorb, by the difference between the frequency at your head and at your feet, they were able to determine what was going on. Oh, wow. And she basically says, Oh, you've got first of all, she was able to tell me how I was feeling, which is very freaky, because obviously now I understand the emotions have energy, but back then it didn't make any sense to me. And it's like, how did she get inside my head? That's really creepy. And then and then she said, You have a parasite. And it's not a human parasite, it's actually a canine parasite. Now I'd had parasite tests loads of times based on all the bowel issues I was having, and nothing had ever come up, they'd always come up clean. I'd even been to the, you know, the Institute of Foreign Medicine or whatever it's called, acute medicine in in London, and had specialist tests done then, all came back negative. I was like, okay, that's interesting. So I went back to my doctor and I said, I believe I have this specific parasite. Can you test for that? Yes, we can. Excellent. Do a test. It came back positive. They gave me one tablet after 10 years. They figured I must have picked it up. I spent my gap year working in India. That sounds so cliche, doesn't it? Teaching English to Tibetan refugees. And I lived in a refugee camp and we had appalling, you know, sort of uh sanitation, drop toil, you know, big shared drop toilets full of rats and wild dogs and all sorts of things, right? So hardly surprising you pick up something. So I'd had this canine parasite for by then about a decade, and it had slowly been rotten my gut. So on the basis of that, the doctor agreed to refer me to a specialist and specialist to look at my to look at my gut.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

And he tried to do a colonoscopy, but couldn't because my bowel was too damaged. So he did X-rays. And he looked at the X-rays and he was like, I don't think I've ever seen a bowel kind of this this damaged, if you like, that I can see the damage on the x-ray. It's quite, it's quite rare. And he said, and actually, it's it's really pretty dire that even though we've now killed the parasite, the damage that has been done, because I also lived off ibuprofen for that decade. It's an anti-inflammatory, right? So when they keep saying you got this inflammation, blah, blah, blah, I was popping them like candy, and essentially that rotted the gut too. So I had the parasite and the ibuprofen eating my gut all the time, doctors telling me I was fine. And so he basically said, I'm really sorry to tell you this, but I believe that in the next six weeks your gut will rupture because it's now so thin and so damaged. And it's highly likely that you won't survive that. And if you do, you'll be bedridden for life.

Biofeedback Leads To Real Diagnosis

SPEAKER_01 11:00

Yeah. And it was like in one split second, from you're fine, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine, to you can have to live. You're like, what the, you know, kind of thing. In my head, it was like a collision of I knew something was wrong, and how the hell did it, how the hell did it get this far?

SPEAKER_00 11:18

You know, so you get the vindication out of that, but a little bit too late.

SPEAKER_01 11:23

Yes, exactly. So he gave me the six weeks and and a follow-up appointment for seven weeks, because that's the genius of the NHS. Um I was like, cool, so if I survive, I can come back and see you again. If I don't, you get a free hour. I mean, how does, you know, how does that kind of work? And at that point, the the late the lady who did the biofeedback on me had referred me to a gentleman called Dave Hompez, who was a functional medicine doctor. And I started talking to him, and he had run a whole set of different tests, which had clearly shown up that whilst I was in the medical normal range, I was like, you know, right at the very bottom. So for something like your thyroid or adrenals, a doctor will tell you you're fine until you drop below six percent. Because at six percent, that's when essentially there's nothing they can do and you have to be on lifelong drugs, right? But above six percent, in theory, it's recoverable. So I was at six percent. And also, he also explained to me what happens in the gut in terms of how hormones are created, both for your menstrual cycle, which is why I didn't have a menstrual cycle for your thyroid, how your energy levels are based on the absorption of amino acids and the breakdown of food. But if you've got a damaged gut, you're not really absorbing things well, you're not breaking down food properly. If you're not having a natural movement of the bowel, then food is staying in there and it's sort of festering, which creates a lot of candido, which creates a lot of yeast infection, which creates a lot of gas and other things, and all the bloating that I was experiencing. But you think these things are fairly straightforward. Didn't strike me as anything particularly special or odd when we actually when Dave started explaining it to me. And what became very clear to me during that phase was that there were definitely things that I could do. But I had this kind of like six-week thing ringing in my head. So I did what all sensible people do. I went to Texas. Um and I I literally uh phoned my friend who was living in Texas, and I said, like, life is really overwhelming. I just need to get out. And I flew out to Texas, and she checked me into this beautiful little ranch where I sat on a swing porch, a swing, yeah, a swing on their porch, which was like my ideal, you know, I if I want if I could come back at any period in life, I would be a 1950s

Six-Week Prognosis And A Pivot

SPEAKER_01 13:45

wife living in Montana with a you know, a porch and a swing, that kind of thing. And I sat there and I read a book that I'd been given, which is called Conversations with God by Donald. Yeah, Donald Walsh, yeah. And and I contemplated what I really wanted. And that was when I think that was my pivot moment, because at that point I said, I want to live. Oh wow. I want to be here. I was 31 at the time. It's like I am not done. I need to do this, and I therefore needed to release all of the beliefs that I'd had that medicine was going to save me, or that the medicine and the medical profession were there to keep to give me a quality of life. Whereas they're not, they're there to keep me alive, very different levels, like big H elf and little H elf, totally different levels. And that if I was going to survive, I needed to do that for myself.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

And I believe now to this day that that moment I made that decision. And and you know, when we talk about Joe Dispenser and all that kind of stuff, I made a very clear, belief-changing decision that changed the chemistry in my mind. It changed, you know, it changed everything.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

It changed who you were.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

Absolutely. Absolutely. And in Joe Dispenser's words, you became the person who lived that was healthy, that didn't have the sick body. You changed absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

And it made me it made me inquisitive. You know, my experience with Sarah and the uh the biofeedback, my experience with Dave and the functional medicine, it made me curious. It's kind of like I'd always been told that this is what health was and this is what medicine was. And I'd met two people with completely different approaches to those things who had told me stuff they couldn't. And it opened up my mind. And then I met two other people that most definitely

Bodywork That Unlocks Buried Emotions

SPEAKER_01 15:40

contributed to the ability for that belief to take place and me to be here. One, you've interviewed Ben Barnett. So I I had just got back from the doctor. In fact, I'd left I'd left my doctor's appointment, gone back to work because I had to run a board meeting because the COO was on holiday. And I remember talking to one of my colleagues afterwards, and she was like, Are you okay? Because you didn't speak in that meeting. And I went, No, do you know what I don't think I am? And she said, Well, go home. Don't come back till you feel better. And I never went back. Oh, wow. And I went home that day and I was, I don't know, scrolling through emails or something, and I saw an email from a clinic I'd been to to have a colonic irrigation a couple of years previously when I was trying to get my bowel moving. And they said they had last-minute appointments with Ben Barnett. And I thought, well, massage, that'd be nice. So I tootled off that afternoon to give myself a little bit of respite for massage and met, you know, Ben. And that massage is not a massage, it just isn't, right? I cried throughout almost the whole thing because the guided visualization he gave me was just so accurate. It's like he was inside my head. And I remember saying to him at the end, I said, Do you do say the same thing to everyone? Because I didn't really understand what he was doing. I was very new to that world. And he said, Why? And I said, Because it's like you were inside my head. You voice things that I've always thought that I've never dared say. And I saw Ben every week for a year. Oh, wow. And I count that with the literally, I call it therapy without the need to talk. My body did the talking and then helped my body release those things. And that was the most phenomenal experience. The other person I met was an intuitive healer, a clersentient healer, in fact, uh, that David introduced me to, that I met over Zoom because she was in Australia. Sorry, it wasn't Zoom, didn't exist then, Skype. And that was a very weird experience as well. So I get on for the first time in probably about eight months, because one of the things that really changed after I got sick was my body needed sleep in a way that it'd never done. I'd been an insomniac for 20 years. And I couldn't sleep for the 12 hours before I went on this Skype call. And I remember getting on the Skype call and Adrienne saying to me, Oh my god, you must be so tired. And I remember thinking, I must look awful that she thinks I'm that tired. And I was like, Oh, why do you say that? And she said, Well, I'm a clairsentient healer, which means I manifest your symptoms in my body and then I heal myself, and that heals you. And for the last 12 hours, I've been in agony. And she started off at the tips of her toes and went all the way up through the body to the top of the head and told her every single thing that she could feel that I had.

SPEAKER_02 18:27

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

And there was like, there's like no way. There are things there. She told me what every scar I'd had, every operation I'd had. She literally told me what my body was. And there were things that there's no way she could have known because Dave didn't know. So Dave couldn't have told her, you know, those kinds of things. I was literally like flat jawed at the end, like, what the hell? And then she said, But do you know what's wonderful about this? Is it actually the same problem manifesting itself on each sort of energy meridian of your of your body, which I didn't understand. She had to explain meridians and all the rest of it. She said, But it's just one, it's just one issue. And if we solve that issue, then everything should disappear. And I was like, Cool, what's the issue? And she says, You don't believe you're good enough. Which I now understand is one of the core main limiting beliefs in the world. But she went through and explained to me how this all worked and how it it sat in

The Core Belief Behind The Pain

SPEAKER_01 19:15

different energy levels.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

And again, I was just can I just stop here? Because what is interesting is that on the outside, if you looked at like sort of your career trajectory and all of that kind of thing. Yeah, there was there was no evidence that you had the belief that you weren't good enough, and yet everything in your body screamed at it.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

Correct. And her view was very much like you are that because you have that belief, you have had to be an overachiever to compensate for that belief, but you never completed the cycle. Yeah. So it was, you know, and again, it was very internally competitive within my family, right? I have two older brothers, they were both very successful. So whatever they did, I had to trump. So my brother got a scholarship at 16, I got a scholarship at 13. My brothers were in the sports teams at school, I played for the county. My brothers didn't do music or drama, I had to do both music and drama. My brothers did three A levels, I did six A levels. Do you know what I mean? It's just like everything was a one-up one-up. But I never ever did it to quite the level they did, you know. So I remember I got a C in GCSE Spanish, I think. And my brothers were like, Oh, we don't do C's. And to me, that was just like boom, I've got to, you know, I've got to do a step change. So, you know, they came out of university and got great jobs in the city. So I had to come out of university and get Jake jobs in the city. Everything was a was a one-up, one-upmanship. And and can I not anymore?

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Yeah, no, no. But but again, and and and why I want to just stop here and just reflect on what you've said is because people sometimes go, there had to be some really obvious trauma that created the belief that you're not good enough, or you must have had abusive parents, or and sometimes it is, and sometimes you know, with people they've had trauma or they've had issues with parents, or you know, divorces and things like that. But sometimes it's something so subtle and so innocent, but for whatever reason, so you know, I always then look at it and go, There has to be a bigger picture, the the the spiritual picture, you know, you always hear about you know spiritual contracts and soul contracts and things like that. Of what do you what do you come to experience and overcome and learn? So in in your story, that seems very, very evident.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

For sure. And and definitely in the in the years that followed, as I became obsessed with understanding, you know, what happened and why I still survived and all those kinds of things, I've explored all of those, right? And so I know because you actually helped me break some cell contracts when you read my Akashic records many years ago, but also you know, I I know what it was that created that that sort of gap for me. And It was something very, very simple. So I I was born shortly after my parents returned from the Middle East. And my mum took a job at a school, a residential job, right? And that was, you know, because my father had left his job in the Middle East to come back because they didn't want to have a daughter in the Middle East in the 70s. And the provision of accommodation was a two-bedroom. And I had two older brothers. But the school agreed to give up one of the one of the boarding rooms for the girls. So essentially they gave up a whole sort of, it was a private school, so they gave up a terms fees, yeah, and give the room. But my mum couldn't put my brothers in there because it was a girls' boarding house. So they were there, which in my little head that doesn't, you know, before the age of seven, you don't have logic and rationale and you can't discern these things. It was mum and dad and my brothers over there, me over here.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Wow. So if you think about what does what's the message that it translates? Is that your parents chose them and not you?

SPEAKER_01 22:57

But actually, they didn't. They they chose me, right? Yeah. I mean it was amazing. I had an intercom. I had an intercom. So I would stand up in my cot, press a button, and shout, Mummy, I want you for her to come, right? So it's amazing how adaptable we are, whatever. But it was just that simple. That my brothers were next door and I was down the corridor, created a separation that drove a competitive streak and nature in me that was a huge contributor to ultimately

Childhood Roots Of Not Good Enough

SPEAKER_01 23:25

driving myself to burnout, essentially, right? With the help of some parasites. But yeah, so so Aidy said, you know, that's fine, we can we can get rid of this belief. And we did it using meditation. Again, which was wasn't alien to me. I had an uncle who was big into meditation, but it was always sort of seen by our family as a bit like he went to India, he came back meditating. It's a bit weird, right? So but yeah, she taught me to meditate, and I did it 15 minutes at sunrise, 15 minutes at sunset. And seven weeks later, I went back to the doctor and he did a colonoscopy in my bowel, and that he could find nothing wrong with it. Wow. Like 100% have not had a bowel issue since 15 years there, not had an issue. Wow. 16 years there, not had an issue. And I I entirely put that down to choosing to be something different, choosing to look at it a different way, opening my mind to be willing to consider that there are alternative ways to explore things, and putting myself first for the first time ever. Right. Because both my brothers gave my mum hell. Why aren't you forcing her into hospital? Why aren't you forcing her to do that? And my mum just went, She will find her own path, you leave her baby. Right. And not that I knew that at the time, but they but they truly went, she knows what's best for her, she will she will find her path. And that freedom, that openness, both in my mind and in the you know, in the support that I was given,

Meditation Practice And Sudden Healing

SPEAKER_01 24:55

100% created the space for me to step into a well person, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

And so much so before you carry on, what I want to ask you, and I want you to talk a little bit more into, you said something very, very, very important. You said, I chose me. A lot of people feel that if they do that, they are being selfish, they're being that you know that they're not nice people, they have belief systems that good people, right people, the right thing is serve yourself, in fact, become the doormat and let everybody else do what they need to and serve yourself last. And it seen it seemed as a bad thing that you become selfish. And you you intuitively chose that, and it was like one of the best things that you ever did. Tell me a little bit about it.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

And I totally agree. And in in my life up until that point, I had I had been that person, bit yourself last at all all times. I guess in some ways it was easier, right? I was single, I lived on my own, so I didn't have to compromise a huge amount of things. I had a good job and they literally paid my sick pay for it for a year to allow me the space to recover, which I would like to say is is due to the quality of the work I've done for them for a decade, right? But still, it's not something you probably wouldn't get today, anyway. So I was I was incredibly lucky to be given an opportunity to be able to put myself first in that in that way. But ultimately, it was some work that I did with Ben to release those uh those beliefs that I had to put myself last and all that kind of stuff. It was the work I did with AD to release the belief energetic holding on. Yeah. And essentially I got to rewrite what I believed was okay, what I believed was appropriate. And in that moment, if I wanted to live, there was no other choice. And the saddest thing is, is whenever I look now and I I hear people talk at conferences, whatever it is, about their transformation stories, it's all it always strikes me as most people only get to have that when they get to the point where they have no choice but to change.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

But you know, you know, Joe Dispenser talks about it and he goes, Normally it takes a crisis for people to step into like, what do I need to do for me? So it could be a cancer, it could be a divorce, it could be a bankruptcy, it could be you need some extreme for you to step back and going, okay, so I I now see that I've been for the longest time compromising myself, holding on, praying, ignoring, you know, all the signs, the signals that are there until the point of collapse, and then, you know, I've got no choice. And he goes to the people, why wait for the crisis?

SPEAKER_01 27:50

And yeah, and I do believe that's hugely culturally driven. The other thing that had a big strike on that was understanding what my body, what my body was doing, what those choices were doing to my body by through the functional medicine lens, right? So Dave taught me, taught me about stress and how that works on the body, and how what you need to do to regulate stress, because I had to work that out because I had to let my adrenals recover, right? So I had to remove all stress from my life, which meant I had to have a really honest assessment of what caused stress. And and to do that, you had to understand the difference between physical stress, emotional stress, mental stress, spiritual stress, you know, all these types of facet, and understand that it's your body doesn't put them in nice different buckets, it puts them in one big bucket, right? And of course, that there are certain things that I had naturally which were like sort of low-level chronic, you know, consistent. So you're actually managing a really small, you know, wedge of capacity, if you like. And so if I wanted to allow myself to heal, I had to be selfish. Yeah. You know, physically, structurally. And I think because I am an analytical science-based person, being able to ground that in choosing to say no to another social event, choosing to stay at home and sleep, rather, go to the gym, whatever it might be, I could justify all of those from a physiological perspective, from a mental perspective, you know, I could justify that to myself. And that allowed me to not feel like I was doing it out of what we consider to be, you know, bad morals. It wasn't, it was actually helpful to me. And if I wanted to give to people, because I do, I still love it, I still put lots of people first, but you can do that only when you are well and healthy and at your optimal, then you have a lot more to give. So I guess I flipped the I flipped the message that rather than putting yourself last, if you put yourself first, you have a less leaky bucket full of more love, full of more time, full of more energy that you can then give to others. If you're if you're always last, then you have no energy and you're wiped out, and what you're giving is a fraction of what you're actually capable of giving.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

It's that that good old metaphor that they use that oxygen masks should go on you first.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

Yes, exactly. And you know, hence where I now rabbit on to people, and I know I rabbited on to you about this about why sleep is better for you than exercise, right? Because actually, if you think, you know, when you understand exactly what your body needs and what it does, then quite often making the right choice for you may look like you're being selfish, lazy, or whatever it is to someone else, but actually, no, I'm just filling

Choosing Yourself Without Guilt

SPEAKER_01 30:35

up my bucket so that tomorrow I can unleash all sorts of love and support across the world.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

So yeah, so and it's interesting because you know, if you look, if you look back at humanity, we we weren't built to sort of wake up at six and have breakfast and then go to work and work and then come home and cook dinner and watch a bit of TV and then go to bed. We weren't built that way. We were built to have moments, bursts of activity and and moments of contemplation.

SPEAKER_01 31:04

Well, entire seasons of contemplation, really, if you if you overlay the passing of time.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Community, you know, all it it's just the way we live today.

SPEAKER_01 31:14

We live in a very unnatural world, and unfortunately, because our belief systems are predominantly you know pre-programmed in us by the age of seven, so much of it is set by culture, and therefore it is passed down from generation to generation, yes, but not in the way that it's right, not genetically, but but culturally and and based on those on those belief systems, which is why I love so many of the things I've discovered in the years to come that you can go, yeah, we can change that now. You know, that just wasn't something that we that we understand, you know, we understood then, you know, neuroplasticity and how to get into your subconscious and you know the the benefits of breathing and meditation and all these other wonderful things that you know, if I'm honest, if I hadn't had that experience, I never would have been forced to open my mind to be able to see the most phenomenal things. And so whilst it definitely wasn't easy, and you know, it took me, I would say, a good 18 months to get back to a place of health, but I didn't die, and that was the you know, that was the first one. And those 18 months of getting back to full health and deciding what what healthy meant to me, right? And I think that's one of the other things that we really struggle with in the modern world is you know, so many people tell you what healthy should be, what you know, what wellness means, whatever. And it's like, no, you have to decide what's right for you. And and so, you know, I can stand up in front of people and they'll look at me and go, well, she doesn't, you know, she's not the epitome of wellness, she's not a size eight, she's not muscular, she's not this, she's still got wrinkles and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, yeah, but you know what, for what my buddy's been through, it's perfect exactly as it is, because it's it does what it needs to do to sustain me.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

But isn't it sad, Charlotte, that there's just so much that we have painted of what is success, what is health, what is beautiful, what is acceptable. And especially, and you know, I say this because it's especially for us women. You know, what is a beautiful woman? What is acceptable? I see so many women that are from like say age 45 onwards, they're fighting their hormones, they're having like an absolute bloody war with the hormones, oh, but they still need to be a size 8 or a size 10, and they still need to, you know, be energetic, and they still need to do all these things. It's just ridiculous. Rather than us really, really loving, accepting, praising ourselves and and supporting each other, we criticize, and you know, we I can say that, yeah, men put a lot of, and and I'm I'm again I'm not being male-female, right and wrong, but you know, there is that stigma of what men expect of us, but I find that most of these things come from a woman to a woman. Oh, yeah. Women will sit and tell you.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

No, absolutely. And and it's one of the things that over time, as I've sort of explored more into the alternative space, is it used to be really kind of open and do what you need to do for you, and it's all cool. And now even that's becoming hierarchical. It's not just do you do yoga, it's what kind of yoga, you know. And it's not just do you meditate? It's just like, you know, do you do you meditate like this for this long in this environment while doing a handstand? You know, it's kind of like there's a lot of one-upmanship that as these things become less woo and more mainstream, which is fantastic. And just to be very clear, I am not anti-Western medicine at all. I just believe I just believe there's a shelf of all options, and currently Western medicine has a little too much space on the shelf, right? We just need a few more options up there. But it does, it just I'm I I get really frustrated about the fact that this this old mindset is now intruding

Wellness Culture And The Comparison Trap

SPEAKER_01 34:55

onto what's supposed to be new age and hippie and sort of like let people be people, and it frustrates the hell out of me because it's just such a load of because it's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:06

But it's it's it's through the comparison that people can get a gauge of where they are. So, for instance, if I want to know if I'm spiritual enough, I need to ask you, you know, like so so how long do you meditate? And then you'll say, Well, I meditate for 30 minutes every day. Then I can think to myself, oh, thank God I'm more spiritual because I meditate for an hour and a half. You know, and I do it, and I do do it standing on my head. So, you know.

SPEAKER_01 35:30

Very proud of you.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

I do not.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

But yes, no, and I do. So there's there's a I don't know if there's a freedom. I have I maybe I have more of a freedom because I had the crisis, because I had that trauma point. Um, I care a lot less about what anybody thinks, and and I and I do think that that is a huge, a huge freedom that a lot of people don't have. And sometimes you only get that freedom because you got to the point where you had no choice but to give yourself that freedom.

SPEAKER_00 36:03

Yeah, and I think when you allow yourself to step out of the competition race, let's put it that way, and to just know that there is nobody to compete with because nobody's running your race. And doing something that nobody seems to think about, nobody is in competition, you know, and I hear it so often with my clients, with people that you know I work with, to go, oh, but so and so, or I'm this age, or I should have. And I'm like, in comparison to what or who? Yeah, where what are you competing with? What are you comparing yourself with? Because there's actually nobody else in your race.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

So there's no, I mean, I to totally agree. I mean, you know, from from the outside looking in, my life is nothing to be aiming for, right? I'm 47, I'm single, I can't have children, I have a dog and a cat. I live on my own in a terraced house, you know, I don't I don't have lots of money. I don't, you know, and it and it's like, but you know what? It's exactly the life I chose for me. Yeah, right. It's your life. And it doesn't, and don't get me wrong, there are times when I'm like, oh, I could really do some money to get rid of the mold in the living room, or you know, actually, I would love to be able to go on that holiday with with with so and so, whatever. It gives me a lot of freedoms that a lot of people don't have. I miss out on things that other people do have. But I am a hundred percent aware that the life I live is as a result, a direct result of the choices I have made. Yeah. And I am accountable for that. And if I don't like it, I can do something to change it.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

Yeah, you're not a tree you can get up and change.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

Exactly. There are, you know, and I think a lot of people feel like they have to do certain things, or they have to do it in a certain way, or they have to feel a certain way about it. And that is just really it's really soul destroying. And also it's really bad for your health.

SPEAKER_00 38:09

It's really, really bad for your health.

SPEAKER_01 38:10

Because so much of mine was, you know, I went, if I if I could look back now, having understood who I probably have always been deep inside, I never would have gone in for a corporate career, ever. Yeah, yeah. Right. But I did that because that was what I perceived was the thing I should do. Yeah. And so, and I and and I don't think it is any surprise to me that I started getting ill when I spent time in that environment.

unknown 38:37

Right?

SPEAKER_00 38:37

No, of course not. It's you know, I I was talking about this with Ben, about how the body isn't capable of ever lying to you. It cannot lie. It cannot. So when we are doing something that is not right for us, and it's not because it's wrong, it's just not right for us. Right. It it will start kicking off. It bucks. And we have been taught to just ignore the signs and the symptoms.

SPEAKER_01 39:03

And we've seen this a lot, haven't we? Uh with lockdown and the change in working pattern. Some people thrived

Listening To Your Body’s Truth

SPEAKER_01 39:10

working from home, not having to go into the office, but other people, it kind of really destroyed them. You know, I've got friends who literally are the a fraction of the person they used to be because they don't have that network. You know, they're extroverts, they need to be around people to get energy and being stuck at home on their own, they just never really get the get going, right? Whereas for other people, it's perfect, right? And they can't run and they've sword.

SPEAKER_00 39:35

I had the best time. I loved it. I love it. I was in Greece at the time, and we lived on a house that had, if if you walked around the perimeter, it was half a kilometer and was full of olive trees and wildflowers. And you know, every day we used to walk with our dogs and our cats, by the way, they used to follow us in our pyjamas because of course nobody was out. And anyway, nobody could come and visit. So we would walk out in our pajamas, two or three lamps, and look at the flowers, and we used to like check out and go, Oh, look, this is a very poisonous wildflower that we have in our garden.

SPEAKER_01 40:10

Don't need that. Yeah, but no, I think you know, and and and there should everyone should be able to see examples in their own lives of things that when they do it, it gives them energy, it makes them feel good. And when they do things, it sucks their energy and they feel bad. And you're like, cool, do less of that and more of that. You know, I wish people I like to keep these things quite simple.

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Yeah, I wish I wish people were taught right from from like the day they're born, through their parents, through the system, that we're not all the same. And we, you know, it's like Ken Robinson, he talks about it. We we can't all have the the stamp of the the year that we're born, and therefore, because you're all now 12, you all should be doing X. And rather learn to celebrate how different we are, and how you know we we we all function differently, and we should embrace that and love it and contribute who we are to society because we are perfect as we are.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

It is, and and in many ways, there were it's because you know, a lot of the structures and systems around us aren't designed for that, right? Because they're actually designed the opposite. If you think that you know the education system in the UK was designed to make factory workers, you didn't want diversity, you wanted singular focus, and so that's what it does. And until you break that down and change it, that is what you'll continue to get, right? And it's why so many people struggle, I think, with the way that the health system has matured, because you don't, you know, you used to have, you know, your local doctor and you saw the same person every time, whereas now you're uh a faceless name on a list, right? Um, a great example of this, a mutual friend of ours, Sally, really wasn't feeling herself and was really off. And she'd been, you know, kept going into the doctor's surgery to get an update. Nothing was really changing. And I was trying to guide her to ask for very specific things, like I want a blood test that checks this, because I was just like, something needs to shift here. And unfortunately, self-advocacy is a skill that not a lot of people have. Anyway, she was sitting in the waiting room, and a GP that has been at the surgery for 40 years and has known Sally for the 40 years she's lived there, walked in, looked one look at her and went, Oh my god, you're anemic. What's going on? Because he knew her well enough to be able to see the difference in her, right? And we don't really have that unless you're very lucky and you do live in a you know a small village and there's only one doctor's surgery and there's only one doctor, whatever. But for the vast majority of us who lives in towns and cities, you we've we've become so assuming that we're all the same. Yeah, that it doesn't really matter who you see, and the context and your background and your history doesn't really matter. They just look at the thing that's right in front of them, and that's really, really dangerous, which is why so much of the passion for learning I had after my experience came from the understanding the uniqueness of myself, particularly because I told I had, you know,

Self-Advocacy And Better Health Options

SPEAKER_01 42:55

a genetic condition and various other things. Like, what does that what does that make me different to the baseline? But also the number of options there are out there. And so actually, if I want to, I don't know, get fit, but I hate running, there are a number of other options. If you want to improve your cholesterol, but you don't want to take statins, there are a number of different options, and that's the bit I love about where we are in the world today.

SPEAKER_00 43:22

Which is also what I mentioned right at the start that you're the founder of the alchemy of being, which is why you created that, because you knew that there was a lot of ways and different ways and diverse ways to handle the same issue, to make people comfortable to find their way. So we are running out of time. You're definitely going to be coming back, but just quickly tell us a little bit about the alchemy

The Alchemy Of Being Explained

SPEAKER_00 43:45

of being. So that Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:47

So as as you said, I suppose it became my passion project throughout my healing journey itself and what that incited in me. I've I've I pulled together a huge amount of information over the years. And In conversations with people, I realize that actually it's really hard if you are, you do have a health niggle or something about your quality of life that doesn't fit for you, that you want to do something about, it's really hard to know where to start. It's really hard to know. And a lot of people, as you've said, don't know what good looks like. They don't know what it should feel. So the alchemy of being essentially is like a wellness hub, if you like, where you've got a choice. You can use it to do some learning about yourself. There's an expert, there's a section on there called Be the Expert in You. And it kind of helps you learn a bit about yourself, your sleep, your digestion, your energy patterns, all those kinds of things. And then once you understand perhaps what the problem is that you're trying to solve, it then gives you a much broader range of options to explore. So we've created a wellness wiki that has about 250 different modalities on it. And it's structured to help give you like an objective but rigorous analysis. So what is this? Where does it come from? What's its basis from a neuroscience or a physiological perspective? What should good look like? What the good practitioner do? So that you can kind of quality control things. There's a resource center in there that's got a podcast like this one. And you know, lots of things from quite often the people that we've all found we've used, whether that be Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenser, Greg Graden, Greg Braden, Tony Robbins, John D Martini. You know, there are loads of people in there put all of the stuff that we've used ourselves. So Vicky is one of the alchemists on that site. So I picked her brain for insights. Ben, who she interviewed, is another one. And there are about six of us that we just basically download this is the stuff we've found useful on our journey to help create a starting point for people. And we never claim to say this is the answer, we never claim to say that this is what you should do. It's just a place of curated content to try and speed up your journey to get to a place before you've reach a crisis point. As yeah, yeah. Yeah. Excellent. And it's um it's the alchemyofbeing.me because it's all about the uniqueness of you.

SPEAKER_00 46:08

Well, I'll put the link in the in the show notes. So anybody who's listening to this and would like to know a little bit more about you and the alchemy of being, they can find you there. They can Charlotte. I I could talk to you for years. Never mind.

SPEAKER_01 46:23

Yes, we can we can talk about many

Final Wisdom And How To Connect

SPEAKER_01 46:25

topics, and I'm more than happy to come back and talk about anything you'd like.

SPEAKER_00 46:29

Excellent. So you're definitely going to be back, you know that. Treat it as a given. Thank you. But for today, thank you so, so very much for your time, for your wisdom, for sharing your story. And what's the one thing that le you know, like as we end this program, what's the one thing that you would say to any person who is in a crisis, whether it's a health crisis like what you had, or whatever, but what is your little piece of wisdom, your little advice, your tagline, your I don't know, your charlotteness?

SPEAKER_01 47:02

My charlotteness. Actually, I have a tattoo that covers my my little which you can't see because this is a an audio thing, but it was actually a quote from from the conversations with God, which I want, which is you have to make a choice to take a chance if you want anything in life to change. For me, I think that is it's really about making that first clear choice. Everything after that becomes far easier.

SPEAKER_00 47:29

It's a choice to take a chance to change. Yeah. I love that. I love that. And do you think that's the one?

SPEAKER_01 47:38

Yeah, so when I when I when I didn't die, I got my first tattoo, which is three little interlinked C's, because that was like I'm here because of that.

SPEAKER_00 47:46

The choice, the chance. What? Yes, make the choice, to take the chance. I love it. And it's about putting yourself first. It is to do that. Thank you so much. I love that. You're more than welcome. I'm gonna stay with it. I wish you all the way best, and to my audience, thank you very much. If you enjoyed what you heard, there's gonna be lots more stories, there's also individual rise up podcasts. I've got a fantastic, beautiful membership group where we talk about all sorts of things to do with the mind, with spirituality, with practical things that happen. If you'd like to know more or if you want to join us, the link is in the in the notes. And if you want to work with me or know what else I do, because I do loads of things, again, you can get in touch with me. The link is in the notes. So I wish you all the best, and here's to your success.