The Surgeon Who Learned to Listen with Dr. Beth DuPree | Ep. 009

Dr. Beth DuPree has held a scalpel for more than thirty-five years — a breast cancer surgeon, board-certified in general surgery, the kind of physician who led a cancer center to national accreditation and served as a hospital vice president. Every credential the system can hand a person, she earned. And then she did the thing the system rarely forgives: she started listening to her patients in a way that changed what she believed medicine was for. 

Somewhere between the diagnoses and the margins and the survival curves, she came to a conviction she now says out loud on any stage that will have her — healing is not something we do to a person, it's something we awaken within them. That's a quiet bomb to drop inside a profession built on intervention, and she's spent the second half of her career living it out loud: master-level Reiki practitioner, board-certified in integrative and holistic medicine, trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy, author of The Healing Consciousness and Shifting Gears. She is not a fringe figure who stumbled onto the woo. She's an establishment surgeon who walked straight toward the soul and never once apologized for it. 

That's why I wanted her — because it's the same both/and I've spent my own life refusing to resolve. We talk about the moment the surgery couldn't reach what she was seeing in her patients, about what it actually looks like to awaken something in a frightened, newly diagnosed woman rather than just act upon her, about what it cost her to hold precision and presence in the same set of hands inside a system that wanted her to pick a lane, about meeting pain as information instead of an enemy to numb away, and about survivorship — the loneliest stretch of the whole journey, the after that no one prepares you for, when treatment ends and everyone else exhales and the person is left standing in a body they don't recognize with no map. 

Full disclosure: she's the physician behind a pain patch that got me through a torn rib cartilage I wouldn't wish on anyone, so I'm not a neutral party here. I'm a patient who was helped, sitting down with the surgeon who learned to ask a different question. Her terrain is the operating room and everything that begins where the cutting ends. Mine is the cell. Same refusal to choose.”

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Imagine a surgeon. Picture the hands, steady, trained, certain, the kind of hands you'd want holding the scalpel on the worst day of your life. Now imagine those same hands learning to rest on a frightened woman's shoulder and do nothing at all but transmit something the textbooks have never named. That's the woman I get to introduce you to today. Dr. Beth Dupree has been a breast cancer surgeon for more than 35 years, board certified in general surgery, an academic leader, the kind of physician who led a cancer center to national accreditation as a center of excellence and served as a hospital vice president. Every credential the system can hand a person, she earned. And then she did the thing the system rarely forgives. She started listening to her patients in a way that changed what she believed medicine was for. Somewhere in the operating room, between the diagnosis and the margins and the survival curves, Dr. Beth came to a conviction she now says out loud on any stage that will have her. Healing is not something we do to a person. It is something we awaken within. She wrote that conviction into two books, The Healing Consciousness and Shifting Gears, and built a foundation around it. She trained in Reiki, in integrative medicine, in psychedelic assisted therapy. She stepped back from full-time surgery, not to retreat from medicine, but to go further into it, into survivorship, into the nervous system, into non-narcotic ways of meeting pain. Full disclosure before we begin. She's the physician behind a pain patch that got me through a torn rib cartilage that I wouldn't want to wish on anyone. So I'm not a neutral party here. I'm a patient who has been helped, sitting down with the surgeon who learned to ask a different question. Looking forward to this conversation with Dr. Beth Dupree. I'm Dr. Naisha, and this is Tend the Terrain, where we stop drowning in information long enough to recognize we're starving for something much deeper. Health doesn't happen in isolation, it happens in a terrain. The biology, the rhythms, the relationships, the meaning you're still making. All of it shapes whether life expresses its vitality or quietly begins to unravel. And each week I sit down with scientists, physicians, farmers, artists, patients, and systems thinkers. People who talk about bodies, but also about land. About healing, but also about grief and belonging and what it means to become human again. This isn't a show for quick answers, it's a space for better questions. Pull up a chair. The amazing Dr. Beth Dupree. And before we were really rolling, we were trying to figure out it has been at least two decades that friends and colleagues have tried to bring our worlds together, and they finally collided last year when Dr. Beth was part of an event that I co-facilitated in Tucson. But now we've become even more. We've become friends and colleagues, and we look forward to see where this next path goes. This is why I'm excited to introduce the rest of you to her, though, because Dr. Beth, as I mentioned in the introduction, trained as a surgeon. So, Doc, you trained as a surgeon. You you literally cut it all out. You know, you moved on to the next room. That is obviously a very sacred and useful skill, and you were incredible at it. But somewhere along the way, you started to see that surgery just wasn't enough. So can you take us back to that moment? What were your what were you witnessing in your patients before, during, and after the operating room that standard of care couldn't hold? And when did it become impossible for you to unsee?

SPEAKER_01 4:23

It my path started early on, and it really was, I'm gonna say it was instigated by some of my closest friends who were doctors and had medical challenges. My girlfriend Chris, um, who in 1995, I believe, was diagnosed with ALS. My girlfriend Lauren, same time almost, was diagnosed with a very aggressive brain tumor. So I have a radiologist, an orthopedic surgeon. I had my head of pathology diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, and a urologist who was a real dear, dear, dear man, diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. And so four colleagues in Western medicine, all around like the same time. And Western medicine failed all but one. Um, I I lost my girlfriend Chris to ALS, but she taught me so much along the way about healing. I lost uh Chris, uh, my pathologist to metastatic colon cancer and Bill to um melanoma, and then my girlfriend Lauren, who literally the first surgeon we saw, he was a dork because he basically gave her uh her her timeline of how long she would live. It was like 18-month prognosis. God willing, she's now 20-some years later. Um she had surgery, chemo radiation, but she introduced me to Reiki. I didn't know what Japanese energy healing was. I had no clue. I was, you know, they've nothing heals like cold steel surgeon. And that introduction to Reiki back in the early 90s um not only impacted me, it impacted my kids because they did the training, my husband. And through the years, a lot of the anesthesiologists and other doctors have thought like I was kind of on a different, I had left the reservation of Western medicine. Thank God I did. But those were the beginning seeds that got planted. But I will say that, you know, I I I went through my certification in integrative medicine, did more aspects of energy healing, but the biggest blow to um my Western medical career and where I just decided it was time to just tear down the walls and start again was during COVID. As I call it the shit show of COVID, because I was forced to take a vaccine that I knew better than to take. I was in a health system that dishonored me, that dishonored the women in our community. They weren't truthful about things that happened within the health system. And in 2020, I did my first plant medicine journey with psilocybin.

unknown 7:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

And once you see, you cannot unsee. Once you recognize that the things that have been shown to you in your career are not as they should be, um, you can't go backwards. And I, you know, I continue to operate as a surgeon. I'm still a surgeon, I'm, but I'm mostly focused on survivorship, functional medicine. And I've said along the way, you know, I'm far more aligned with my osteopathic friends and my naturopathic friends than I are and with my allopathic friends because Western medicine treats symptoms. We cut, we poison, we burn, and we are really good, I'd say, at acute medicine, but we suck at chronic health care. And most of the problems that we face in our healthcare world are chronic problems that are being treated by attempted acute solutions. And so uh going back and understanding what functional medicine is, what the root cause of a disease is, is it's my next chapter. It's the chapter of my career now that I'm really blessed to be able to move full force because you know what? Nish, I'm 65 years old. I am fully board certified in everything that I wanted to be board certified in. I'm certified in psychedelic therapy, but the most important thing is they can't silence me and they can't cancel me because I can't be canceled at 65. I am entitled to my beliefs, I'm entitled to uh to discuss things that I know to be true about vaccination, about root cause of illness, and I am working really, you know, tirelessly to bring other aspects of healing into Western medicine. In addition to plant medicine, using bioelectric technologies, vagus nerve stimulation that I talked about at the conference, using ion cyclotron resonance, which got thank God I met Ann Shivis at the conference on stage. I mean, that was divine intervention, putting us both there.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

And bringing these technologies in that are going to disrupt the status quo. We are going to disrupt how Western medicine views health and well-being by bringing actual um solutions to these problems. And it rocks the apple part of Western medicine because it's the uh it's the pill for the ill society, you know, where Rockefeller medicine has got to be busted down and cracked wide open. So that's where I am.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

I love this. It's a couple things that I just want folks to hear very loud and clear. Last month, my I get I have a membership or a subscription to Scientific America, you know, which is typically a little more conservative leaning. And the front page of that journal and a huge section of the article is talking exactly about what Dr. Bath is speaking to here, that the future of medicine is quantum biology. And so those energy things that she's talking about, they may sound very esoteric, like the Reiki or these ionic these um patches that we're gonna talk about here as well in a moment, and some of these other methods are not woo. This is where medicine and technology is going. And you are not um you're you're you are a um you're leading the you're leading the charge into this. And so I would say that you've clearly been someone who sees things long before your colleagues do, and instead of waiting for it to become commonplace, you just charge ahead. That is clearly your your path since your friends in the medical industry woke you up to these all these years ago. And then I appreciate the other thing you said, which is so critical before we move to the next question, is once you saw from a variety of things, so friends coming through this process, especially your friend who's 27 years out, later the experience directly with standard of care in 2020 that just was completely out of resonance with you, and then a medicine journey that made you see things in a way that you said very clearly, you can't go back to the old way. This is what we always talk to our patients about. We cannot heal from the same environment in which we got sick. The same is true for practitioners. We can't support or be of service to our patients if we return to methods that no longer fit, you know, in a coherent way with the journey that our patients are on. And so is there anything else you'd like to say about that piece? Because I feel like you shifted your own energy, but you also showed up meeting your patients in a very different way through these decades.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

What's been what's been really wonderful is I still maintain a very, very strong reputation as a thought leader in Western medical breast care because I am an early adopter. I've adopted genomics of tumors, genetic testing, I've adopted minimally invasive technologies, state-of-the-art, optical coherence tomography. Um we I was the first to image breast specimens in the operating room with a with a device that's now FDA cleared for intraoperative margin assessment. So I've not abandoned my Western medical roots. I I say I get I'm in the fence in between the worlds where I get to shift back and forth where I'm not gonna throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are some wonderful and amazing things. There are some breast cancers that absolutely need to have chemotherapy, but there are more breast cancers that aren't going to benefit from it. So why are we gonna put someone through a treatment out of fear and not out of empowerment? So being able to uh create a hybrid model has allowed me and is affording me the opportunity to have my colleagues who are there, they're they're peaked, their um, their curiosity is peaked for everything. Because I I looked back 2004, I gave my first talk at the American Society of Breast Surgeons on integrative approach to breast cancer care, and there were some old cremudge guys that were saying, you know, Dr. Dupree, you're going way out on a limb. And I said, Well, I picked a very strong branch, and someday you'll be on that branch with me. And now one of the past presidents of ASVRS, Dr. Jay Harness, is the like Maven and leading the charge on exercise oncology because when you exercise, your body is pushing its own immune system to surveil your body better. So I feel like I'm really lucky to be not seen as a fringe character in cancer care, but as someone who people are paying attention to and going, Oh, oh, she took two groups of women to Mexico to do plant medicine, half survivors, half other cancer doctors. And, you know, across the board, they've all come back and said, was one of the most impactful spiritual experiences of their life. And so I'm not getting rid of it, I'm not telling my patients, oh, don't get treatment.

unknown 14:01

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Go do plant medicine. It's as part of the process, as we come up with a plan of action for you, plant medicine may be something that helps you heal those aspects of yourself that are playing the old programs in your brain that need to have a new place to be filed, because we don't need to play those old programs that no longer serve us.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

That was a little like mic drop moment right there. You know, and you've said this over and over in your books that healing isn't something we do to a person, which is what our I think our standard of care colleagues, and actually, I think even in the integrative and functional medicine space, we have this belief system that it's something we are doing to impart the wisdom in this body. You are so clear now that it's something that is to be awakened within the person that you're working with. And so that's quite a bit of a bomb to drop inside a profession that's built on intervention or a belief system that we somehow have the answers. Um, so on this, you know, show here on this podcast, you know, we say the body isn't broken. No. Simply responding intelligently to its environment. So when you have a woman sitting across from you who's newly diagnosed and terrified, what does it actually look like to awaken something in her rather than just to act upon it?

SPEAKER_01 15:24

The approach that I have found works the best is to number one, present the data on the tumor, tumor size, grade, stage. And before I go into treatment options, I have a side of my consult that looks at nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, all of the factors that are under our control in a way to prevent recurrence. And what that does is that sets the stage to basically say, I plan to get you past this cancer diagnosis, but these are the things, this is how you change the microenvironment. In um autobiography of an uh autobiography, oh it's Dr. McKenzie's book. Um it the oh God, I'm I'm losing the name. This is my senior moment. Um we'll find it, we'll put it in the shop. When you when you when you talk about when you talk about the soil and the seed, yeah. The seed, the seed is planted in your body, and it has to have fertile soil to grow to create a cancer. And if all I do is take out that seed that's grown into the plant, even if I can get all those roots out, that soil still needs to be changed. And this is the whole idea of what you talk about, the terrain. The terrain is the microenvironment that our body program runs off of. And so if we don't look at how to shift our consciousness, how we think, Bruce Lipton, epigenetics, how we think impacts how our body responds. So setting that stage for a patient that they're going to be healthy, whole, and complete for a long time, and I don't say these are things that are broken you, I'll say these are opportunities for improvement. If someone doesn't exercise and their BMI is a little too high for their height, I say, listen, you can grow four inches, or we got to find a way to drop 20 pounds because we got to get rid of those circulating estrogen. How do we change your diet? How do you learn to eat clean? How do you stop drinking toxins like alcohol or smoking or whatever they're doing? And then looking at all the other aspects of psychosocial emotional well-being, because a lot of patients, their doctors want to put them on anxiolytics and antidepressants, and I'm like, please avoid it at all costs. Then I'll go back and I'll focus on how we physically treat the cancer, all right? And as they're coming through their treatment, I make sure that when their Western medical treatment is completed, like whatever it is, I get them back to the office and I call it a cliff appointment because now they're on the cliff. Because everybody else is like, your cancer's done, um, go on with your life, just go back to and you can't go back to what you're doing. It's all different. Everything's different, it everything changes. And so by looking at the long game, as I call it, starting the long game at the beginning is big. And I have a foundation that provides healing services, Reiki, massage, guided imagery, nutritional counseling, spiritual counseling. I have a trauma program where when I do an ACES score and I find out that someone has an ACES score of six because they've had a really difficult childhood. You know, ACES scores are four or more, have about a 200% increased incidence of cancer. So if we don't address those aspects, the soil is not going to be um prepared to continue to grow that individual's soul. It will be potentially available to grow more seeds of cancer, and we don't want that to happen. And so everything in how I look at cancer over the years has just been a progression. But it's the clarity that I have now about it is, you know, I can cut out the cancer, but if I don't cut out the fear, and if I don't help you cut out those things that are resonating in your body that are creating a dis-ease or disequilibrium, other things will get to you, whether it's psychosocial, emotional, whether it's another cancer, whether it's another disease. But we all have opportunities to heal at whatever level. And I am really grateful for my experience when I was in Arizona because you know, bless the thing that breaks you down and cracks you wide open. And that was what my hospital experience out there did, because I never in a freaking million years would have ever gone and done psilocybin because I'm I was so anti, I thought it was a drug, but psilocybin is a medicine, is a plant medicine that God gave us. There are many beautiful plant medicines that are out there that in the appropriate set and setting play a really important role in cancer care. And, you know, if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would say number one, I couldn't spell psilocybin or ayahuasca, uh, but because I was, you know, spelling challenged. But I now know that there is a place for multiple different healing modalities within this space. And we need to kind of get out of our own way as Western medically trained doctors to allow our patients to find their path of healing. That's important.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

I love this. And what I think is so remarkable what you're saying is there isn't a single path. There's only the path that meets that person where they are. And sometimes those tools come from a toolbox of standard of care. Sometimes those tools come from something we co-evolved with since the beginning of humanity, and sometimes that comes from something somewhere in between, which you have been exploring the edges of that your whole career as well. And one of those edges has been in the management of pain, which I think is such, oof, I mean, it just gives me chills to think about this because pain we often think about as a very physical experience, but it's a lot more than that. And so your recent work is really focused in this area, especially in non-narcotic ways of meeting it. This bioelectric and these integrated tools that you advise on now. So, you know, for me, pain is just like, you know, cancer, they're messengers, right? And so pain is one of the places where our whole culture defaults to override it, to silence it, to push through it, to medicate it. But you, you spent years asking what pain is trying to tell us instead. And so, what have you learned about meeting pain as information rather than as an enemy to be defeated?

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Yeah, I got it, I got introduced to um Signal Relief, which is a non-narcotic pain patch back in 2021. And I wasn't looking for it. I had done a documentary called The Healthcare Cure. Found it by accident. Didn't think it would work because I thought it was snake oil. And I was like, how can a patch with micrometals, blah, blah, blah? Anyway, suffice it to say it did make a difference. Um, it is amazing, and we've done the research. We're actually doing a prospective randomized placebo controlled trial right now for menstrual cramps. So if you know anybody, um, because we I I really want to prove this in women's health. We've we did a pilot study with endometriosis just to make sure that we were able to help that pain, which we could, but um the the the whole idea of when our body's in pain, it's telling us something. In in the acute setting post-surgically, I know that I know I can use these pain patches because they don't put anything into the body and they work great for my patients. When patients have chronic pain, there's a couple layers of this. Number one, if I can put a pain patch on them and alleviate their pain, it's blocking that sigma going back to their brain. But what's causing that low back pain? Is this the weight of the world on their shoulders because they have a CFO who's stealing money from their company and they're feeling that pain? And once they get rid of the CFO, their pain stops. And that just recently happened to a colleague of mine who, you know, he didn't realize that there was a monkey on his shoulders, right? The other thing that I'm doing right now is um Ann Shivis, who I lovily met through, thank you, God, for letting me meet her through you. We are using ion cyclotron resonance to actually get to the root cause of the pain, where we're putting patients on this tech new, it's a medical technology in Italy. We're bringing it here as a wellness device, but we're using the combination because we're putting people on the mat, well hydrated, moving ions, helping to alleviate chronic pain, and then using the pain patch in the interim of sessions in order to break, in order to break that cycle and you know, eventually get to the root cause of the pain. But we have so many people in this country who are being over-medicated with narcotics, with non-steroidals, with acetaminophant. Like we're we're just we're beating up our livers, our kidneys, and you know, our our pill for the ill society. We've we've got it, we've got to shift what we do because unfortunately, if we don't, we're gonna have many more addicts, and we're gonna have a lot of people who burn out their liver and their kidneys by taking pain meds. And so the this bioelectric world for me is so important because we're using the body's electrical system to create a shift internally and bring our body back into homeostasis. Homeostasis with everybody's happy, everybody's yeah, everybody's cool, calm, and collect, and the body knows how to function. We just have to remind it how to get back there.

SPEAKER_00 24:57

I love it because it makes me think about um clinic shifts I did many moons ago. I did a re uh kind of an interim residency at the um Mesa Valley Lutheran Pain Clinic, you know, in the hospital setting, and they were doing things. So where Dr. Beth is talking about this sort of these patches, back at those days, we were using CRM-guided CT scans to inject um procaine and whatnot into spaces or stelic ganglions, which were basically doing at a much more invasive level what you're describing, which was to block block or disrupt that that that cycle and sort of re-reirate. So knowing that we have these less invasive, way less, you know, um problematic tools to use is so so remarkable to me. And I think you hit the you know the the nail on the head in that in this country, in the United States specifically, we're the only country that's losing longevity. Never mind.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Oh, yeah, we're we're we're going backwards.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

Exactly. I've a I've a pain. What you're talking about pain of either pain of an accidental overdose or an intentional overdose, and the pain of hum being a human on this planet is often creates physical pain, not just emotional pain. And so what Dr. Beth is talking about here is really a tool for humanity's current crisis, which the scientists are calling the era of despair. So, is there anything you'd add to that discussion?

SPEAKER_01 26:25

I I the thing that really did it for me, and I you'll read my second book. In my last chapter of my second book, I had another angelic intervention, and I was kind of told by the by the tribunal of spiritual beings that I would be introduced to a frequency technology that not only would treat and bring the body back into alignment with frequency, but could also basically um rebuild and remodel and regenerate tissue. And so when I read some of the papers from Italy that Ann shared with me with Dr. Alberta Garoli, they were able to regenerate a femoral head of a person that had avascular necrosis with 12 weeks of ICR. And so that got that got my attention because I'm like, okay, I'm supposed to pay attention. It's because of that that channeling in 2019 that I got involved with the pain patch, that I've been doing the transcranial, that I've been doing the transcutaneous vagus stuff. And then Anna Alberto came in January, so just like you know, eight weeks after I met her with you. And that first day in the office, before we even did our training, I had a nurse who was suffering with chronic regional pain syndrome, CRPS. She was on uh narcotics and anxiolytics. She couldn't even hug, she couldn't touch because her body was so inflamed. And after I figured out what I had to do with her breast stuff, I went to Ann and Alberto and I said, Listen, this lady is in so much pain, like I can't even get near her. So I said, How about I bring her down the hallway and you guys give her a go? Because what have we got to lose? Wow. Literally, after 36 minutes, she hopped off the mat, she hugged me for the first time. She was able to, we she's weaned off her bed. She was just in today for a little tune-up, but it's changed her life. And it was that day that I said, All right, I'm all in. Like, I've got to help you guys bring this to the masses. I I don't even know that you've experienced it yet, Nation, but you need to because Anne, Anna and Alberto are they're very passionate about this. It's a beautiful wellness technology for the U.S. But we're gonna do some critical studies because someday I could see this getting through the FDA for certain indications. And I'm really excited to be part of it because I I've always wanted to be part of the solution and not stay part of the problem.

SPEAKER_00 28:53

Which again, this speaks volumes about your history. I mean, everyone's hearing this theme that has come through that Dr. Beth sees an opportunity and pivots. You know, you have I didn't have time to do that.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

I believe me, I did not have time to add one more thing to my plate. But when the universe brings something in front of you and it's legitimate and it's life-changing and it's game-changing, if you don't pay attention, you know, the universe is gonna smack you and make you pay attention later. So um I was all in.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

Oh my gosh, so big. You know, you alluded to in the beginning of the work that you do now is no more sort of the you're moving further away from the triage place and moving more into survivorship work. And so this is the part, like you mentioned, we ring the bell and we're told that that's the end of the story. And I love how you call it the cliff. Like you're now walking people to that, you're walking people away from the cliff or to the cliff, depending on the way you want to look at it. But that is such a critical piece because survivorship is probably one of the least supported aspects of people in healthcare, in my personal opinion. And so you stepped back from that operating room sort of triage space to go deeper into survivorship. And the, which is, I would say, is probably the loneliest stretch of highway for someone coming off of this journey, you know, and it's like the treatment ends, everyone else around you is exhaling, all of the support that rushed around you while you're going through treatment, you know, is gone and you're just left there way more vulnerable than ever. So you are helping people start to understand their capacity. You're helping people understand that there is no specified finish line. So, can you talk to us about what does real survivorship ask of a person and what does it ask of us, the clinician, that we may be deaf to at this moment?

SPEAKER_01 30:52

I think clinicians need to recognize that survivorship has to begin a diagnosis. Patients have to be brought into the fold of survivorship, knowing that they have to do the hard work for treatment, but that survivorship, it's the little changes that they make along the way. We're doing a we're actually going to be having my foundation open a survivorship clinic down the street from my office. We have one little room in my office right now, but we need bigger spaces because the clinical trial we did with the mind vibe, the non-invasive vegastem, our data is amazing. And I need to be able to offer that to more people. So I need more rooms and I need more chairs and more places because now that I've done the research, once you know you can't unknow it, and you've got to be able to provide it. So making sure that we as clinicians are always looking for opportunities to inspire our patients to live their authentic, best, healthy life and supporting them in any way we can. It's hard enough to go through cancer, but it's even harder when you're living with chronic pain or a deformity of a breast or lack of um sexual function or a dry vagina, um, something as simple as sex and intimacy. Like we should be focusing on that, not avoiding those conversations. And so I, you know, I don't ever have to do another operation again as long as I live. But I'm not done focusing on survivorship because when we get really good at helping our patients with survivorship after cancer, we will then unlock the keys to preventing cancer overall. Because if we were doing these things to begin with, there's no need to get the cancer to wake you up to figure out how to live your best life.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

I love this. You know, I wrote a blog recently or in my Substack about the concept that there are so many people that are so terrified of dying that they simply are.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

They don't live. They don't live. Yeah, it's Tibetan book of living and dying. That's what it's all about. It's if you if you live your life afraid of living, you've I mean, I grab the brass ring every time I turn around. You know, I told you, I'm I'm flying to Charlotte to help my kids get settled in a new home to prepare for their twins. I want to be here with my kids. I want to be here for my kids. I want them to know that I'm doing what my parents did for me, which was they may not have all my parents may not have had all the money in the world, but they had time and energy to put into making sure that I and my husband were able to, you know, provide a safe, stable home, provide good food for our kids. We the family unit has been so undervalued in our society. Moms have been devalued. You know, helping my you know daughter-in-law be successful at breastfeeding this year has been, it's one of my greatest accomplishments in the last 14 months because she really had a tough time at the beginning. And I'm hoping that my other daughter-in-law, who's about to deliver twins, it's not gonna be easy to breastfeed twins, but damn it, we're gonna make it happen and we are gonna be successful if that is what she's called to do and she really wants to try this. Yeah, I need to be there to give her all of my energy in that time. And so I may take a step back from my survivorship stuff for six months, but that's six months that I'm gonna be investing in my beautiful grandsons as they, you know, are born and develop.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

I love this. And you know, you speak so much. I mean, this is really about community, right? And it is where we've left um our modern day parenting is very much also in a silo and very left alone. And so what a gift that you are tending the terrain of the family unit in a way that was also almost a bygone era of these relational, tribal, communal ways that we all actually raise children from for millennia. So I love that you're bringing that full circle. And though you may step off the stage, if you will, of very direct survivorship care, you are ensuring the next generation has a fighting chance, which I think is really remarkable.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

And so it's been one of it's been one of the greatest gifts I've gotten from my plant medicine, my plant medicine training, because in the my instructor slash psychologist, slash shaman in Mexico who trained me, learning from the indigenous culture about the value of every generation and the time and energy that you put into your children and into your grandchildren is that is the timeless investment in the world because it's the unspoken language of love, of connection, of community. And I think that we need to rekindle this and make and bring this up to the forefront because our world's so divided that if you don't have a solid family to start with, then how do you go out and you know walk through the world of crazy every day?

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Yeah, I I think that's so important to illustrate the importance of this, of this part of how we contend our own terrains and that of the community around us is if you didn't come from a really strong foundation of support, like you talked about those adverse childhood event scores, those elevated scores, you can certainly create your chosen family. You can find community and other ways or be part of or create, you know, or a creator of community in a more thoughtful and intentional way. And so, Beth, I love that you brought that up. In closing, I've been asking all my guests, and I'd love to ask you this: what are you currently doing? And maybe you've already touched on a lot of it in our talk today, but what are you currently tending to in your own terrain?

SPEAKER_01 36:43

I have spent several years tending to my psychosocial emotional terrain through plant medicine, through many of the different modalities that I'm working to bring to the world. But over the last two years, I have really focused on my physical well-being. I found out I had osteopenia two years ago, which was a surprise to me. But I have been rucking with 21 pounds on my back three times a week. I'm lifting weights, I'm doing my calcium, my vitamin D3, K2. Um, I was on hormone replacement for a short period of time until I found out I probably shouldn't have been. And I am planning to have a normal bone density after my ICR treatments in the next few months. And the reason that that is so important to me is I have a buttload of grandbabies coming, and I need to be able to be crawling on the ground, playing with them, swinging, jumping, hiking, swimming, doing everything else. So, my terrain right now that's the most important that my soul resides in is this physical body, which doesn't need to act old at all. It gets to stay young because I'm treating it as it is young, and it's going to stay healthy so that I get to be the best Baba ever, because that's what I'm going by, Baba.

SPEAKER_00 38:03

This is the best, and I got chills. That's one of my favorite responses yet, Dr. Beth. And hopefully it's a motivation, whether you are, you know, someone well before your years of conception or well beyond, or chose to never conceive. Like in my world, I have 39 nieces and nephews, nine great nieces and nephews, four godchildren, two great godchildren, and I want to be around long enough and strong enough to basically kick their butts up and down, rucking up mountainsides into my elder years as well. Oh, I love this, Dr. Beth. You are a force to be reckoned with, and I am so grateful our paths, after all these years, have finally connected, and that there's so many little like spokes coming off the central hub of this that our paths will continue to cross, I'm sure, over and over. And I cannot wait to see what you and Anne are coming out with and what you're doing with the pain support and the survivorship work, but most importantly, the work you're doing for your own body so that you can steward the next generations um into being. So thank you for being with us today.

SPEAKER_01 39:10

Thanks for the opportunity, and uh, we've only just begun, my friend.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

That was Dr. Beth Dupree, a surgeon who spent a career proving she could hold the scalpel with the best of them, and then spent the rest of it proving that the deepest healing begins where the cutting ends. What stays with me is her refusal to choose precision and presence, science and soul, the hands that operate, and the hands that simply rest and listen. Her books are the healing consciousness and shifting gears. And the foundation she built carries that work forward. Go find her. And if you're somewhere in the after right now, the part no one prepared you for, let her remind you that healing was never something done to you. It's something still waking up inside you. Thanks for tending the terrain with me today. Whatever stirred in you, don't rush past it. Let it compost. Because when we tend the terrain, life knows what to do. See you in our next conversation.