When Your Body Keeps Sending You Signals with Tammy Scarlett

Tammy Scarlett didn't go through one hard thing. She went through several: breast cancer, divorce, a capsule rupture from her implants that left her sicker than the cancer ever had, all within a few years of each other. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she realized they weren't separate events. They were the same message, delivered louder each time.

She just wasn't home enough to hear it.

Tammy is the founder of the Women's Wellness Network and a student of holistic health whose work was born not from theory but from necessity, figuring out her own path when the conventional answers ran out.

In this conversation, we get into the real stuff.

We talk about:

• What it means to walk side by side with your own life instead of actually living it
• Why the body starts sending signals when you've been disconnected too long and what happens when you keep ignoring them
• The moment Tammy asked herself what her part was in the demise of her marriage and why that question changed everything
• One surprisingly simple language shift that rewired how she thought about what she wanted, and 
• How to start identifying your blind spots by looking at how you respond when you're in fear, fight, flight, or freeze.

She also talks about GUS, her name for God, universe, spirit, and the slow, deliberate work of learning to hear her own voice again after years of dismissing it.

Her parting message: figure out how you show up in fear. Start there. Everything else, your relationships, your choices, your healing, flows from that one piece of awareness.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello heroines and welcome back to another interview. Today I am bringing to you Tammy Scarlett. Tammy and I have known each other for a little bit, and she is the founder of the Women's Wellness Network, which we will hear a little bit more about. But Tammy, welcome.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Thanks, Alex. It's so nice to be here. It's been a while, of course, since we got to have a conversation and be in interviews together and all that kind of stuff. I've kind of taken a bit of uh break, a personal um growth period, I guess if you want to call it that. And uh expanding myself, expanding my networks, and uh expanding my reach, I guess ultimately.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Oh, but it's good. You know, sometimes we need to do that to be able to, we kind of have to take a step back so we can take that bigger step forward. So tell us a little bit about who Tammy is.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Oh my, well, okay. Tammy. Tammy's a whole lot of a whole lot of things. Um, I'm currently studying to become a doctor of holistic health, and that has taken up a bit of my time, but it's so interesting, and I feel like I've already, you know, done a lot of it and kind of I have a really good understanding about the things that we've gone through so far. So it's um uplifting me in a way that I didn't anticipate, you know, because usually when you start studying something, it's like drudgery and oh like stress and I gotta remember this and whatever. But it's totally not like that. It's fun and and it's uh it it's it's also helping me be creative, I think, in other ways. Because then I'm, you know, I'm improving myself, I'm evolving, but it's in a way that's um interesting to me, not just, you know, you have to do this work if you want to do this thing. It's like, oh, you like this work. So let's let's see what we can do with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

And it makes a difference, right? When you actually enjoy the topic versus when you are studying something because you have to. I'm sure if you have to study like econ 101 right now, probably not your favorite topic.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

No, oh my goodness, no kidding, right? And I think that's the thing, like um, well, especially women's wellness, because I'm a woman and I've been on this crazy health journey, um, you know, going through breast cancer and then right on the heels in between, um, you know, finding out getting a divorce and navigating that path and then bursting out on the other end, you know, full of bim and vigor and like excited for life, right? Like, let me get back to living, let me do some things. And I was doing that, it was great, you know, learning all these things and taking courses and uh becoming an integrative energy healer and you know, just different things. And bam, you know, there has to be something else that happens. And, you know, I've always been, I always try to just, you know, just keep going, just keep going, just keep going. But I started to realize that there was really some big uh blind spots in my world. And I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me because I was continuously having accidents and things were happening to me. And I I thought, I don't want to live like this anymore, I can't do this anymore. So when I said bam, I had had full reconstruction after uh breast cancer and had to have the implants removed due to a capsule rupture. So the natural capsule that your body puts around the implant itself burst, and in between the implant and my natural capsule was all of this goo and poison. Yeah. So that was a really um a terrible eye-opening uh experience. You know, when you go through cancer, it's like, oh, well, you know, we're gonna do this protocol and we're gonna do this, and and these are this is the information, and it's pretty set out. Um had I done, you know, know the things that I know now, I would definitely do my cancer journey different. Um, but it was so much easier than when I had the rupture, because when the rupture happened, there was not a lot of information out there, and the people that I did, you know, connect with whole uh not holistically, um allopathically, didn't have information and they didn't know what to do with me, and they didn't know, they just didn't know. And that's a very scary position to be in when I was a lot more sick with that than I had ever been with cancer. So it was scary. And I thought, you know, I need to do something, I need to make some kind of uh change in the world so that there's somewhere for people to go, somewhere for people to um be able to connect with me at least, if nothing else, because I'd had to figure out, you know, a lot of things for myself. So making the woman's wellness network was just one of those passion projects that was born because of necessity, um, you know, a little bit for myself. I think, you know, I really wanted to pull the information together because let's face it, things are still gonna happen in life, shit's still gonna go down, right? Things are still gonna come up. I want to have people around me who I can either go to that I know that I can go to because of these awesome interviews that we have, um, or I can navigate that the group myself to pick out little things that you know would be helpful and find different details that maybe I missed while you're in there, because there's so much content, it's you know hard to figure out uh, you know, what do I need at this very moment? So having all that, all that all the resources and things in there, and then being able to just be uh a figure that somebody could ask a question to is so so important. You know, I always want to have my door open. I always want to, you know, it's an open world for me. If you have a question or a concern or something that um you just can't figure out on your own or you want a different opinion on, um ask me. Like I, you know, I've been down the road in a lot of different areas, and I really feel like I have you know some good advice and some good knowledge and some wise old wisdom sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

And that's the key, right? Is you've been through so many different things that you can and you can help people through their own journey, but even if you don't have personal experience, you know enough people that you can at least point them in the right direction.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Yes, absolutely. Oh my goodness. And I mean the the basis of my whole um, I don't even want to call it coaching. I don't I don't like to use that word, but you know, my guidance that I give people is to really help them to get back into their body because that was like my biggest issue. I was not living in my body, I was not present. Um, you know, that's probably part of the reason the things that happened with my with my marriage, also, right? I really wasn't I was doing all the things that I thought I should be doing, and you know, that that perfectionist uh uh thing where you you know you're you believe you're on a pedestal uh and you need to keep everything you know going well so that you don't fall off of it. And that's just not a good place to live from. And uh it's a lot of pressure. It's a too much pressure, yeah. We don't need that. And and I mean, really, we do it to ourselves, you know. It's just a matter of how much do you want to take on and and take responsibility for. Um, but if you're not living in your body and things keep happening, you know, I was I I mentioned, of course, I mentioned um cancer, I mentioned divorce, I mentioned the poisoning. Um, but also in that small period of time, uh I'd fallen off a bicycle and broke my ribs. Um yeah, I'd fallen downstairs and uh displaced my sternum. So there's like, yeah, like and and and things are like, hey Tammy, hello. Like, are you home? Are you listening? Um we're trying to send you these signals. Uh Gus was working really hard, but I was I didn't know Gus's name then, I guess. So, those of you who don't know, Gus for me is God, universe, spirit. I like to just lump it all in there because it's all the same thing, in my opinion. Um, so just really not living in my body, not being connected to anything except all these things, you know, the pressures and the all the negative stuff. And I see you formulating something there. I was just gonna all the negative stuff, but even that is something because when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, it was trick triple negative breast cancer that they diagnosed me with. And the first thing in my human mind is like, oh my word, I've been so negative in obviously three key areas in my world, and now I've caused myself to get this cancer. Which is, of course, isn't correct. That's not how how the um how it's you know determined. Um, that diagnosis isn't determined by three negative aspects of your of your being. But when I started to look at it in that way, it made me realize, shit, I am not in my body. I'm I don't even know. I don't know my body, I don't know anything about it. I don't know, you know, all the things that I had gone through, you know, even just traumas. Um when you're you know younger and you don't have control of situations in your life and things happen. Um, just really going back to that space and realizing, ugh, I think I've been out of my body since then. And, you know, I raised two children and did all these things, and and still I wasn't present. I wasn't as present as I could have been and should have probably been with my own self. Present with the world, but not with myself.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

The image that came to my mind as you tell some of your story is of you walking side by side with you, but not being you.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Yeah. Yeah. It's like now I understand more about the threefold flame, let's just call it that, within ourselves, right? So we've got our masculine side, we've got our negative our feminine side, and then we've got our, you know, our whole wholeness, which is both things connected together, which brings us to a completely different um understanding and behaviors in the in the way that we are in the world and the way that we perceive things and perceive ourselves. So that is really what you just said is true because I was walking with you know Gus on one side and Gaia on the other side, and I wasn't hearing either. And it's like I was completely out of touch, not just out of balance. I was like way out of balance. Obviously, you don't get uh diseases like cancer without being out of balance. And I I think that's you know one of those things that we could probably work a little bit better at the prevention of, you know, in the world, it never used to be as prevalent, and we know we have all these stressors and all these crazy things going on, and of course, in our food and and in our in an environment and you know, all that stuff. But when I was diagnosed and I went through the genetic testing to make sure that um it wasn't that, uh, even though I do know now, you know, you can have the gene, but it doesn't mean it's going to get turned on. And I think that's, you know, that's part of the that's part of the understanding and the learning that I wish I would have known before. But having you're right. So what is the what are the factors that make it turn on? And that is the thing. That's the the chemistry inside your body, the way you feel about yourself, the way you think about yourself, the way you think the world is around you, those are the things that cause the disease and the issues. It's not anything else, it's it's all inside. It's an inside job, whether it's good or bad, right? And uh, you know, it manifests into different ways. And if you're not, you know, noticing, then you end up, you know, not being fully in your relationships, not being present with your own health, not being present in your own world, you know, like ending up in accidents or falling downstairs or falling off bikes, which is interesting because what you said in the beginning when we started chatting was after your divorce, you wanted to, and after I believe your cancer, you wanted to go back to living.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

So it's just interesting that you were living before, but living took on a new meaning for you after you went through that. So tell us a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Yes, which is also so interesting because you know, in my understandings of what happens when you die, or that, you know, those paths that take you to the other side, um, I breached them in different ways. So my fear of death wasn't really, I didn't really feel like I was going to die. Like because I knew, you know, different aspects about that, I won't get too much into that part of it right now, but uh deep down in me, I knew I wasn't going to die. So I thought if if I had this, if I've been, you know, blessed with this situation, this challenge, what am I gonna take from it? What is it that I need to receive from it? Why have I been given this? So, first of all, it was definitely learning how to get back into my body and realizing that that was a thing. And it took a long time. Like even after I started the work, um I became a life coach and still just kept, you know, journeying through that my own healing transition. Um, it took a lot. Like it took again the rupture to happen for me to still realize I was still missing some vital pieces of the puzzle. And now at least I've figured them out. So um seriously, it would be, you know, every at least every two years, something really dramatic and drastic would would be happening in my world. And after the rupture, I thought I I can't do this anymore because I, as I said, it was far worse than having the illness with cancer. Even through the chemo, the the 28 courses of radiation, like all of the things were nothing compared to that rupture. And if I can do something to help somebody else, you know, either not get cancer or have a better understanding of what it means to have, you know, the implants put in, maybe get a better um relationship with their own self so that they don't have to put those in, so that it doesn't have to be uh a topic, an issue, uh whatever. Um because there are other options. It's not just that's implants are not just the only thing. And I didn't know that at the time either. And you know, I'm gonna take it back a little bit here because I was um, you know, living in this blissful lala land, if you want to call it that, um right before up until like my marriage was breaking down. And I knew it was happening, I could see it happening, and I was always um sort of informed that it was going to happen. And while it's going on, I'm still like not there. I'm still like not, you know, saying the things I should be saying. I'm not um participating. I'm just letting the universe carry me along down this, you know, into the rapids without paying attention. You know, you just okay, I'm gonna hold my breath and hope like hell. And I almost drowned when I was a kid. So that's not some, I don't, I'm not saying that lightly. I mean, it's like, you know, that you you throw yourself into that and it's like, am I gonna be taken out? You know, is this gonna be the thing that takes me out? Or because you get to that point where you're, you know, feeling so low and feeling so um without assistance or without help. And the way my marriage uh unraveled, um, there was a lot of close people um that I could not trust anymore. And that just broke my heart. Again, you know, I just had it broken from my husband, um, but just you know, friends and things that I knew that knew what was going on but didn't share. And I was one of those people who had that knock on the door um with a stranger coming to tell me what was happening, and right, so it's just like the trust levels just kept falling and falling and falling and falling. And you know, when when it comes to your own healing, so I was already not trusting anybody, you know, because of the divorce, because of what was going on. I live in a small town and everybody knows everybody, and um, you know, it's uncomfortable. Let's just say that. And I didn't want to, you know, start poking around and asking people things when I wasn't comfortable, you know, receiving information from them because now I don't have a good feeling about them. So it took that, it took this really long journey of trying to figure out how to just at least trust myself. Because if I couldn't trust anybody else and I wasn't going to talk to anybody else, I just I'm just gonna have to learn how to how to do it. And that I think was the most difficult task um I've ever been charged with um learning how to trust myself and really give myself the permission to lead me. So that's when I got reconnected with Gus. That's when I started to, you know, really listen and to understand how disobedient I had been. And it's not, you know, it's all of the things, you know. I was a rebellious child, I didn't have a very good um home life, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it just carried on through my life. And going back and doing the work and seeing, you know, where I uh damn, I could have done better here. Ugh, that was me. Ugh, oh what why did I do that? You know, all those things you start to realize it was me. I made all those choices. I was the one who put me in all those positions. I was the one who, you know, I either didn't stand up to something and give myself courage in that moment and then carry all that crap inside of me, or I, you know, felt unloved and then didn't speak up and carried all that inside of me too. So care, like carrying all that stuff eventually it ends up in something like cancer. It's heavy. We're not supposed to carry that stuff, we're supposed to, you know, have people that we can, you know, give it out to the world, put it out into the universe, and uh have it healed and and carried away so that we don't have to take it with us. And I think that's the beauty, you know. I I got I didn't get married to get a divorce. I can tell you that. Um, and I, as I said, I did everything in my power to make that not happen. Um, but at the same time, now I realize, you know, there's so many different avenues and aspects that I can perceive and conceive now because of that position of being in divorced, of because of having cancer, of because of being poisoned. Like all of those things have, as terrible as they were, um, really helped me, you know, shed my own stuff. It really helped me understand how I got into that position and what I needed to do to get out of that position. And now what I can do to help other people either not get there, you know, figure it out before you start having to go down there. Because I think most people they can look back and go, oh, uh that was me, that was me, that was me. Um, and you can just start from there, right? I mean, it's all in the past, it doesn't matter. It's all it's not gonna, you don't have to carry it forward. It's just go back and see what's there because it's super interesting to discover who you are. And then, you know, the treasure, the gold, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is this now, like me now. I feel like uh I'm probably the happiest person that I know. I don't let stuff sit sit with me. If there's an issue, I'm gonna bring it forward. You know, it's time to really just stand up for ourselves and be strong for ourselves. And I think you know that's where I came. That's how I got here.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

And you know, it it sounds to me like um you have you were talking about before you were walking with Gus and Gaia to each side of you, right? And it feels as you went. Through your journey, that you started taking responsibility and ownership for yourself. You started making your choices based on the things that you wanted either for yourself or do you that you wanted to see happen in your life. And I feel like that's the turning point is that when we get back behind the wheel of our car, instead of being a passenger in the car and letting everybody else drive a car.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

Yeah. It's very true. I feel like you mentioned that. And it's and it's the slow integration of Gaia and Gus to me. It's the slow integration of learning where my masculine is wounded, learning where my feminine is hiding. Like what are those things and those aspects of me that are there? They've always been there. They've always walked with me, but you know, no, I don't want to hear that. Or or that's not right. Or no, that that can't be me. Or you know what I mean? Like tuning that tuning that Tammy voice out, I think is was the key. I I saw this, I saw this video the other day, and this woman, she's riding along, and she's you know, I had this conversation with my brain, and she calls her brain Becky, and she's like, Becky, that's enough of that. So we're not gonna talk about that right now. We don't need any of that. So I'm like, I need to pick a name for my brain because that really is the thing. But if if I'm not this 3D person who came into this world and was born and named Tammy, Tammy belongs to the brain in my head. It doesn't belong to you know who I am as a spirit, as a soul. It's you know, it's I'll be a different name in the in a different lifetime. So yeah, it's just really interesting. I I I love that uh separation of those two uh aspects of myself. And you know, when you pile them up, you know, you've got my Tammy brain, and now I can have my you know, my higher self, my higher blessed self, where Gaia and Gus meet. Come together. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

It's interesting because if you've ever read the book Positive Intelligence by Sharmi, I can't even say his name, and I can't think of it off the top of my head. But anyways, the the book is named Positive Intelligence, and his whole premise is that we all have 10 saboteurs that live within us at different degrees, and we all have a judge, and then everybody else, or everybody has you know, an avoider, a people pleaser, a perfectionist, a hyper-vigilant, a victim, and all kinds of other things. But one of the ways that you can start to dismantle those things is by giving that entity a name and basically telling it to shut up when it comes up because its opinion is not relevant here, right? Because it's it gets in the way of us kind of showing up for ourselves because it's that voice of fear.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

Yeah, totally, yeah. There's your amygdala, then there's my Tammy brain, and then there's my higher self. And yeah, if you can't get past that level to even hear your own reasoning, uh yeah, you you just end up in big trouble. You end up with disease, you end up having accidents, you end up doing stupid things, you end up breaking your ribs.

SPEAKER_01 25:59

Um so um earlier in the conversation, you talked about blind spots, and that you found you had all of these different blind spots. How did you identify what they were? Is there something like how did you get to know you had those blind spots? I'm just thinking for our heroines, we all have blind spots. Um, and for somebody who's not who hasn't yet figured out what theirs are, kind of like how would they go about doing that?

SPEAKER_00 26:33

Well, I think generally you can start right with the fight, flight, or freeze and see which one of those you are, because that's like a real, you know, like I said, right there, amygdala is at the bottom. It's the first thing that's going to put up the the roadblock. So knowing that, how you how you respond, you know, do you run away? Do you um you know just avoid things? Or do you, you know, be become a bully? Do you become a manipulator? Or uh do you say nothing? Do you shrink and hide? And uh yeah, I did a lot of shrinking and hiding. I didn't even know that I was doing that. So I think that the the first very first thing that you can do for yourself is to just at least acknowledge that and see how you do that and show up. Because then at least the next time that happens, because you know, things happen all the time, every day, and it's a matter of putting it into practice when you realize, oh, I'm doing that thing. Oh, I'm doing that thing. Okay, hang on, let me do it a different way. Let me reframe it, let me step up a little bit, let me use whatever it is that it's that is being called that I'm you know keeping from coming out. Um, do I need a voice? Do I need to say something? Do I need to speak up? Or do I need to actually really take a step away, not running away, but just you know, taking a time out? Um or the fighting thing, the manipulating, or you know, bullying trying to bully somebody into your your opinion so that it goes your own way, you know, worrying about having the control. So where do you fit into that um thing? And I think that's one of the easiest things we can figure out for ourselves because we all have it.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

And adding to that, I think showing up in our own life with intention versus just on autopilot makes a difference.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

Right. Well, uh that's the thing. It when especially when you're not in your body, when you're disembodied, let's just call it that, um you you skirt around all of those three kinds of aspects of fear, and you've become a become a a master, let's say, of utilizing the ways that you can uh you know work through it. So it's I think as soon as we recognize that we're doing it, then we at least we can start to see that we're doing something, you know, detrimental to ourselves, and having just having the awareness. And if and if you in if you have that intention set out right from the beginning, hey, I want to see these things that I'm not seeing about myself. Um start being an observer, start watching, start noticing the things, how you are in conversation, how you are with certain people, how you feel about something before it happens. You know, what is that level? Because a lot of people work themselves into a great big tizzy over something that, you know, it really is nothing. You know, it's just those you get yourself all ginned up and you're all these past experiences and and maybe things you haven't dealt with come screaming up. They come like flying up to the surface, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:50

And I would add to that do it from a place of curiosity versus a place of judgment. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

Yes. Oh my goodness, one hundred percent.