An Unexamined Life Leads To Illness

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

So, you know, I’m always interested, like, you know, I’ve got your bio, I see all this amazing stuff and consults doctors and nurses. We’re like we’re all about like the labels and stuff. But so and I think it’s important, but instead of labels, I love to know more about your story, and I would love for you to just share a little bit of like what where you come from and where you kind of came up with the hurt study so that people can have a great foundation for understanding everything else we’re going to be talking about.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Sure. There’s not a person in this field that doesn’t have a story that brought them here. And I definitely said that. So I started out as a registered nurse at the age of 19, and I gravitated immediately. I was a skydiver marathon runner. And of course, I wound up in the intensive care unit and Balloon LifeFlight like the whole the whole adrenaline junkie thing.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Right, right. 

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

As my step and I got married in the decade of 20 to 30, had four children. I was on that track, a perfect mother, perfect wife. I drove myself harder than I’ve ever seen anyone. I mean, it was when I look back at that little version of myself, I just want to hug her and say, Oh, sweetheart, you just didn’t know, you know? You just didn’t know. And it was it was that, you know, wakeup call that a lot of our patients describe it. You know, I was 30 and I woke up one morning all of a sudden sick. Right. Which, of course, is not a thing, you know, all of a sudden get sick. And it had been 20 years in the making, but I hadn’t stopped and slowed down enough to pay attention to all the quieter warning signs that my body had been giving me and all the ibuprofen I was taking. And I mean, I got acne when I was in my 17th and 18th year. I took Accutane after a long string of antibiotics, you know, like this, that sort of thing. 

And I was born and raised inside the Western medical paradigm. You find the symptom, you put the drug with it, and that a boom by a bang, you move on, don’t stop. Right. And so that morning when I woke up with this ten extra pounds of puffiness and redness over my joints, it was like someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer Bunny. I was just flat and I thought, okay, I better go get seen. And I got in and my in the course of the history taking process, the physician who was seeing me asked if I had a family history of autoimmune disease, and I said, Well, yeah, actually I think my grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis and he was wheelchair bound at the time of his death and he died at the age I am right now, which is 57. And he didn’t know anything about what we’re about to talk about. 

And so she said, well, you know, she tore off two prescriptions from her pad. Here’s a prescription for methotrexate. Here’s another one for a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Come back when you’re worse, not when. And we’ll change your meds, which is exactly what people are being told all these years later. Right. I mean, crazily so. And the same question that my patients always ask their rheumatologist, I asked, hang on, hang on. I’m very, very disciplined. I make my own food. I’m very healthy. Is there anything else I can do besides this? No, I’m afraid it’s genetic. You drew the short straw, right? And that’s it. So on my way home for the very first time in my entire life, I started wondering if there was a different way of thinking about things out there. Like, I really hadn’t even heard of Chinese medicine or Vedic medicine, anything. I always tell my patients, like if an herb had bitten me in the bottom, I would not have recognized it. I just didn’t do any of that stuff, read about it, know about it, and so I got home and I looked up on PubMed. Is there another way of doing things here? And that’s of course where we keep our Western medical science. And I found a very compelling article on yoga and autoimmunity, and the next day I was in my first yoga class. And, you know, as they do, the yoga instructor has you hold those postures, walks around the studio talking about it. And he mentioned enough about this term, Iar Veda, which is the 5000 year old medical arm of yoga that comes out of the same body of texts called the Vedas. 

And he said, just enough that I was intrigued. And I went home and I look that up on my dial up modem computer and asking Jeeves instead of Google. And so, you know, I just remember thinking, oh, this is interesting when I read that we’re not all the same. And in fact, there is no one way of doing things for each person. And we are all supposed to be fed and watered and walked and slept differently, depending on our own unique composition constitution that was brand new. I mean that so revolutionary to this one right at that time in my life. And I remember thinking, Oh, and then this one even went further. This is like sat me back in my chair and I read autoimmunity and digested anger and I remember, 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Wow.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Wow. I never even, you know, first of all, that was like, I don’t even understand this concept. You have to digest your feelings and your experiences and your memories. The same you would digest an apple. I don’t get that, you know. And so I read further, dug further. And of course, you know, it all made so much sense. And I became a yoga teacher. I started learning how to meditate. I started really paying attention to the feedback of my body, like what my tongue look like with my right, everything. And yeah, one day I was meditating and this word autoimmune was dancing in front of me and early meditators, you know, it’s like you’re not supposed to have thoughts. And so I kept trying to swat it away and come back to no thought and, you know. of course

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Not possible. But yeah.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Exactly. And so, so then I finally surrendered and thought, okay, so this is obviously here for a reason. Let’s look at it in audio. Oh, that means I’m doing this to myself now. That’s interesting. That means I’m killing myself and it’s decidedly acceptable manner. Well, 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Right. 

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

I don’t want to die right now, so is there a time in my life that I did? This was a very interesting question. Is there a time in my life that I actually wanted to die? So I started going back in my little memory trail and letting my mind wander through that thought process. And as I got to my ten year old girl version of myself who was being sexually abused by the vice principal of the elementary school that I was attending, I looked at her and I thought, Oh, you did one out. You wanted off this planet. I was a Navy pilot. My dad was out to sea. I had tried to tell my mom, but I lived a really sheltered childhood in the Navy. We didn’t have a television and we lived a lot of years in Japan, and I don’t think I even knew the word sex at that time or abuse or molestation or anything like that. And so I just remember telling my mom I didn’t want to go to school or, you know, which was unusual behavior for me because I loved it. And she just didn’t have the words for me to really get what was happening. 

And so I just remember going, Oh, this has to be connected. This has to be connected to what’s going on today. And sure enough, science is later said that to us that we can actually influence and program ourselves to a certain message. And I had done that. In fact, we know that autoimmunity can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years to finally come to full ICD ten code diagnostic right category of disease in AI or Vedic medicine. They talk about these layers of progression of an imbalance that finally gets us there and that out of the six layers of progression, we don’t pay attention until we’re at a step right where we actually have a real problem. And so I remember thinking, you know, this problem needs to be healed if I’m going to do anything about what’s going on in my system right now. So I’d already done the things like Head Out Sugar, you know, the things that we tend to talk about a lot, right? And I wasn’t all the way better. And when I went and started healing this within six months, my IRA was gone and it hasn’t been back. And I never did take methotrexate or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. And so.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

So you’re-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Talking like the thing that I said, I need to go back to school and all of those letters behind my name now that you talk about are that investigation. I always would say when a patient would come in and stump that chunk, the chump would go back to school. 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Right. Well, one of the things I think is so great and I kind of joke about the letters after your name because obviously you’re highly accomplished in that. But for me, the piece is what you just said is diving in and saying, okay, what part can I control? Because the other people are just leading me in this lifetime of just suffering and without hope. And then it’s like so empowering to go back and look at those pieces. And I think it’s just so incredible. So many of us where you mentioned that it’s like, you know, kind of poof overnight it you know, it just happened. Well, realistically, you were in layer five. So what happened between one and four and a half, right?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yeah. 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. So I just think I just want to highlight that for everyone. I just think it’s so empowering to hear that it’s not just that you can, wherever you’re at, you can sort of put your stake in the ground and stand up for yourself and then say, Where am I at and what can I do? And the other part that really strikes me is this has been coming to my mind over and over Keesha over the last little while as you kind of rewrote your story. And so I find that really interesting as like going back to the ten year old girl and finding out where in your life you could change that story because like neuroscientists.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Don’t do that because it’s really important what you’re highlighting.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. Yeah.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

You know, quantum physics now talks to us about the fact that time is not linear, you know, the way that we experience it. And like, if I have a whole bunch of windows right here, if I look outside, there’s snow everywhere. There’s a jumble of nature. Right. And nature has no straight lines. Like you can’t look outside and see a straight line unless it’s manmade. And so as humans, we’re constantly trying to straighten everything out, make it linear, be able to understand it and figure it out. But actually, nature is not like that. 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. 

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

So we’re going counter to nature when we’re trying to always straighten stuff out and time is one of those. And so one of the things they talk about is that we have our whole lives you could think of, I conceptualize it like a cell of time and that we’re in this cell of time and we have access to the one that was conceived as in utero. And we have access to the one that will take its last breath in this body. And they’re all there with us all the time. The DNA that is present from throughout the entire incarnation of this human body is there the whole time. It expresses itself differently. So we can talk about that, but it’s still the same. And so all of that there, you can actually go to the one that’s younger that was wounded. And when you heal that one, the way that I talk about this, I’m writing a book around it right now is that the child is the mother of the one that you are today and or the father unless you go back. 

So it’s the old one that’s coming, right. Which is not going to be any different than where you are right now unless you go back to this young one and heal that one. Heal them because the brain of a child in the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed to where 26 years old. And so when we go through events and have feelings and emotions and experiences from a child’s space, and then we live a life that doesn’t go back and examine what the belief systems of that child, right? The wise mind of the child does the best it can at the developmental state. It’s in. And a child is self centric. We’re little narcissists. That’s the we’re supposed to be right where we’re trying to figure out how to be humans in a world governed by big humans. 

And they’re telling us, like, here’s how you do it. You’re doing it right. You’re doing it wrong, you’re good, you’re bad. And so when we move through adolescence, there’s a psychological step that’s called removing, removing. It’s shifting your locus of control from external research caregivers, teachers to internal, where you start taking full responsibility for your story, your behaviors, and the outcomes. Full 100% responsibility. A child has zero autonomy and cannot do that because they are not fully responsible for all of that. So you’re learning how to empower yourself when you go back and examine your story, right? So the unexamined life isn’t worth living. 

Was that a long time ago? But I would say the unexamined life will lead to illness. And it’s because the wise mind of the child did exactly the best that it could at the developmental state it was in. But that’s not where it stops. So it is up to us. It’s our responsibility. It’s our sacred duty actually to each other to go and evolve past those things and beliefs we created as an upset child, because we’re all contributing to what Rupert Sheldrake called the Morpho genetic field. Right. There’s information that we’re providing out there all the time. So the more that we do this healing of that little one, the more that we’re creating a world that is beautiful for our children to be in. But if we’re all children that are upset all the time, then what are we teaching our children? Right. 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Okay. 

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

So this is really an interesting I remember one day giving a talk from stage to a bunch of doctors and saying, Oh, it just struck me like as human as we are, the auto immune disease on this planet, like we are an autoimmune disease. Right? How do we become other than an autoimmune disease for the planet that we live on with each other? You know, like we talk about the microbial and the importance of the microbiome and how that ecosystem starts to get along and how it governs 80% of our immune system. And, you know, what we eat is so important that we are the microbes on this planet for something quite larger. And so when you think about it that way and you go, Oh, we’re not getting along, we’re polluting our ecosystems, we are the ones causing the leaky gut of our planet. And so here we are, right? What do we do with that? We have to go back and heal our little child cells.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

It’s so interesting you say that, because I just had a conversation with Dr. Hemal Patel about like the latest research on meditation and the there. And when you see that just blew my mind. And that is because he literally they’re finding that meditation like and you can define that fairly loosely you know but that sustained focus has actually been shown to change the microbiome in as little as a week. Right. And it’s like, so what you’re saying and it’s a great because it’s like it’s like we’re this mind that’s living that it’s almost like our body is living within our mind because we can’t keep thinking of our brain as distinctly. Right? But now we’re impacting the whole world. And it’s just funny because I love how all these things come together, because as you’re talking, I’m like, I keep telling my daughter that she’s almost as mature as me because like, because I’m kind of like a 13 year old boy. 

Like, all I want to do is goof around and, you know, I get my things done and I’m like, wait, maybe I have to go back to 13 and I keep saying this, so maybe there’s some wisdom in that. And then I’m like, Wait a second here. I keep saying that like, you know, the environment is but you know, like James Allen said you’re environments but a look you’re looking glass and it’s like I’m always like whatever’s going around out side of my world I need to look inside and when in power or my patients but this kind of just takes it to the next level. So as you’re because and this is the thing I mean the purpose of this summit for me is to cut through the bullshit, to be completely frank to everyone watching. It’s like there’s so much baloney out there. You are so powerful and so worthy of healing and receiving love. And that’s what we’re here for you to do. And what is this thing, Kiesha about like and I mean riff on that any way you are because this is just like these are my favorite conversations where we, we don’t even follow anything, any plan. But this expression of the same DNA is something I hear in my head to I say to people all the time, because everybody wants to know what their empty EGFR and they’re happy and they’re seeming like this is all crap, right? You can change a maybe a smidgen, but so if we can dove into that, like how can we have different expression of the same DNA?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

That’s the I always talk about to my patients because I do genetic testing on all my patients. And the reason for that is I think of each of us as unique puzzles. And if you’ve got a puzzle that doesn’t look how you want it to look, well then let’s go figure it out right. And that we’re all different. And so there’s not going to be one protocol that’s for every single person. So I think about four corner pieces of the puzzle. One of them is genetics. The second one is gut health. What we’ve been talking about. The third one is toxic burden and your body’s ability to get rid of said toxins. And those toxins aren’t just viral bacterial, parasitic, fungal, organic pollutants. You know, all of these things molds, they’re also the toxic thoughts that you carry around from the inside. 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. Yeah. 

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

And then the fourth corner piece is trauma and everybody’s had trauma. So we can talk a little bit about that and trauma effects, how those genetics express themselves. And so I look at genetics simply because I want to see I think about genetics and your report as your family lineages, adaptation to life on planet Earth. So you’re doing a check in and saying this could be potentially a barrier. How do we do a little detour around it? How can we epigenetically shift things now that the epigenetic shifts that have the most power are the changes in your own perceptions? So perceptions. This is where people always get lost, right? Is in in the biochemistry, molecular medicine, you know, let’s dove into the Krebs cycle. Let’s look at methylation. Let’s look at what seemed like the things that you were just talking about. 

But the thing that activates all of this is your perception, right? If you perceive yourself as not good enough, fast enough, strong enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, whatever enough is for you, successful enough, then. Then you’re going to be sending a certain set of messages to your neuron through your neurotransmitters, your brain chemicals, to your adrenal glands, who are going to say, oh, no, where is zero? Again, being chased by a lion. This is very reminiscent of an early childhood experience. I’m not okay. Every time you send an I’m not okay message, you send cortisol out of your system, breaks down your gut wall. A different set of microbes live in that like they love that acidic hot tub of a leaky gut. They love it. You send them a glass of wine and they’re really happy. Now they’re in the hot tub drinking wine and having a party. Right. They follow that up with a donut in the morning and oh, my gosh. And then they can really get going when you pour some coffee on top of it. They love that. Right. But the thing that you’re that’s activating your choices of your food is not your genetics. It’s your perceptions. Oh, if I get my worth from productivity, which the entire over culture that we live in, in western industrialized society, productivity is king achievement, success that looks a very specific way. So if you have bought into that and that’s the only thing that makes you feel like you are worth taking up any kind of space on the planet or I see in a lot of women, if you’re caregiving everyone around you to the exclusion of yourself, then you’re going to make choices about what you eat that are going to, Ooh, I’m tired. Therefore I need to have this coffee. Oh, I’m so wired up from such an exhausting day. I need to have this glass of wine. This actually, this is just your perceptions, right? That’s it. 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. 

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

So shifting your perceptual space is everything. It’s the. It’s the ground zero of root cause that gets missed all the time. So we talk about the functional medicine matrix, which I teach all the time. I teach it to my health coaching students. We’re talking about, again, like an awesome molecular medicine style of approaching things at the bottom of all of it though. And the thing I’m always screaming from the castle walls is it’s your perceptions, though, right, that get every single one of these biochemical responses moving now in what I loved several years ago, I started studying like who has the best technology for mastering the mind? And I started looking around and I landed on the Tibetan Buddhists. I was like, Oh my gosh, these guys have studied this for so long, I want to really learn this and it’s true. 

They have like I went from really diving into all the aspects of yoga and really learning that from a deeply, deeply philosophical space into, okay, I think we can get even more detailed here. And the Tibetan Buddhists, they talk about 17 different steps of perception, like just just if you’re looking at my turtle neck and saying, oh, is that burgundy or maroon? Right. So you’re you’re you’re just looking at this one little piece of information through one of your six minds is how they talk about it. Six minds, not just one. Your I mind your nose, mine, your mouth. That the five senses plus the one size is it all. And we can only take information in one through one of those channels at a time. So you look at color and so you’re going through 17 steps to come up with the word burgundy. Okay. 17 And you’re doing it in these just crazily quick. Like if you’re looking at a Super eight movie, these go together like this looks like a stream. 

And so of consciousness, right? So if you slow that down, which is what meditation does, is it allows us to get those frames slowed down. And they talk about in that 17 steps that you’re going to think about things and perceive things the same way forever as you’ve always done them based on these patterns you set up in response to trauma as a child, you will shape the way that you perceive forever unless you go in and change it in the adult mind. And so in the midway in those 17 steps, there’s this one they call the doorway or Gateway, the karma, which is here, if you can open it up. I think about it like an elevator door. Just open that up, create a space. You can look at it finally instead of having it happen in the background like a computer program that’s just always on. And you can say the way that I think about that, I can question it and I can say it’s just because I’m having it as a thought doesn’t make it a good thought, right? Or a pearl of wisdom. And in fact, 94% of our thoughts we’ve had over and over and over again. So I get to examine that and then say, I would rather think something differently. I’d rather do this differently. I’d rather move out of a place where I’m constantly in my amygdala looking for, am I okay? Is everyone liking me? My respect, you know, like, do I get respect? Do I get my needs met in the way that I’ve always done it? Instead, you can relax that limbic system down, right? You can pull in to who you really are at core, which is divine consciousness, a child of God, however you want to phrase this, and then you can rest in that reality and let go of the early strategies. So that’s really interesting. 

See, you know, the letters behind my name were based on an early strategy. If I could just figure this out, you’ll be safe. All right. Of course. My sexual abuse happened in a school system. It’s. It’s a no brainer. The vice principal was telling me, you know, this is because you’re a bad kid. And so I’m sitting there trying to figure out, what am I doing wrong? If I can just figure this out, I may survive. So I became a perfectionist, a people pleaser, and intellect became my currency. It was everything. And so that’s the thing to remember is like those ways of being come from an upset child. And they are not a tenable way of living, a happy life of liberation, freedom, peace.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Right. And I think one of the things you said, too, is that the child is not autonomous. Right. The child the child requires the support of the people around them. And that you were placed in the care of someone where there should have been a safe place. Right. And that’s and so, again, like that’s like you didn’t have a choice back then. So you can but you have a choice now to change that and the way you perceive it. And I think that one of the things that jumps out of me, too, is for our sort of and I think this is everyone, but especially in like Lyme and Bartonella and mold everybody. I’m so sensitive to everything. I’m like, you know, I keep wanting to say this word idly. I don’t know why, because it was kind of my upbringing, I guess that. 

But it’s like, yes, you are more sensitive. But like as you’re talking about the 17 layers of perception in these six minds, I’m like this like it’s almost like the, you know, the research behind why I’m always like being more sensitive is good because you have more ways to look at things. And it’s actually a gift that you can kind of peer into where change might happen. And it’s like then I’m like, oh my, I keep saying I’m a, I have the emotional sort of maturity of a 13 year old boy. I’m like, Wait a sec. So these are really these clues that come up. I mean, are and I try to tell people, I believe that your body is always 100% there for you. It may not be manifesting the way you want, but it’s not going out and betraying you on purpose. And I think that that’s a lot of the trauma.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

That’s not even betraying you that’s the thing is that idea that.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

It never.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

It betraying you or failing you is incorrect. We get one body and it serves us for our entire lifespan and how often do you look at the body it really, really lovingly like you would your newborn child and say oh my gosh, what a miracle you are. Thank you for being here. You know, instead of like, why aren’t you doing this? What you know, and always nit picking it. Oh, man, as I’m oh, man, look at these jowls. Oh, these wrinkles. You know, it’s just like constant berating of this amazing, miraculous vessel that you get to inhabit. And the other thing is like, there’s this entitlement thing that we all have that the body is supposed to behave in a specific way. We’ve never been promised that ever. No one has ever said that. 

You get a body that lasts until it’s 100 years old and you die in your sleep without any suffering or challenge throughout the course of that lifespan. And yet people somehow think that that is I don’t understand it. And again, I was on a stage that that Paleo effects when that download and I said, oh my gosh, I just had something come to me, oh, I would love to hear feedback from all of you afterwards if you know, like, where did we ever get the idea that our children are supposed to outlive us? Where did we ever get the idea this the thought. Yeah, like, but we, we have it and we agree on it as a culture, right? If children die, it’s somehow you’re being robbed or they’re being robbed of life. And yet we’ve never been told that anywhere. That’s not a thing. It’s only our kind of revered expectations we placed on life. 

And it’s an entitlement. It’s not a realistic expectation. It’s an unrealistic expectation. And our unhappiness only comes when our expectations are not met. So if you have an expectation that your body is supposed to be full throttle, you know, turbo engine that goes and never stops, even though you don’t put the right fuel in it, you don’t take it in for Chekhov’s. You don’t do the things that it needs, right? An unrealistic expectation is a better picture of our cars than we do our own bodies. And so that’s one thing that, you know, that came to me that day on the stage where I went, Oh, my God, where do we get this from? Like, why do we think these thoughts and they cause us pain. It causes pain. If I live a righteous life, I won’t ever be challenged. That’s another one that I hear a lot. You know, these expectations of life and God and each other and our own bodies that are based on nothing, like where do we get it? It’s entitlement. And it what it does what entitlement does is it erases gratitude and appreciation for what is.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

It’s just so profound because it’s like the thing I think about is where does all this come from? And to me going back to your internal versus external locus of control, a lot of a lot of what you were just talking about. I remember hearing growing up in the Roman Catholic Church and it so much of this is well known to be in order to control other people. And there were certain rules that were set in place. Maybe at some point to protect you, just like when you were a kid. But we are adults. You know, many of us who are most of us who are listening at the moment are probably some of us might be kids and welcome. But, you know, we love you, too. We love all of us. But it’s like it’s like literally to control other people. So we can choose to say whether or not that rule is protective for us and is applicable. And it’s like when society agrees on this whole thing, you know, it’s like, I remember this thing. 

My mom always told me, be careful crossing the road, look both ways and be careful because there could be a car coming. And I was like, Well, that’s probably a reasonable thing to do because I like being alive and I don’t like being hit by cars as far as I can tell, and dying. But the thing that I remember from her was there was this angst about letting us go because we could die. And it wasn’t. And I got this some part when I was later closer to teen age time, I was like, It’s a little less about me. And it’s a lot more about her feeling that if I died crossing the road when she wasn’t there, that she would have failed something. And I was just like the the torture that she creates for herself, worrying like that. And I’m just like, I love you so much. I’m going to just take care of myself. But

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yeah, I mean, in and I work with parents all the time about staying in your own lane and letting your kids have their own lives in. It’s not letting it’s really getting out of their way because they’re going to have it anyway. That’s what they’re here for. And really staying in your own lane where you care and you love it and you pay attention to your own life and what it means and what your mission and purpose and self-actualization looks like. And it’s not enmeshed in your children. Your duty, your sacred duty for them is to get them safely into the place where they fly from the nest, and then they begin living their own. And that’s very difficult for a lot of parents who have found their own sense of happiness, peace and self-worth into how their children are doing. And so that enmeshment creates problems for both ends.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

It’s interesting because my wife and I try so. Well, we try we yeah, we try because it’s funny because as you say that I’m just thinking about like just being like an open, honest person, right? And it’s like our goal is for our daughter to not become like a kid the way everybody says not to become our daughter, but to blossom in who she is and find a way to keep her safe. But in this crazy world, the way everything’s going. You know, 13 now we have some things coming up and it’s just like, how do you balance those parts? And one of the things is like that her the wisdom of our children is so amazing to me. If we only listen. She’s got a little things going on in her life and she’s got things she wants some help from us for. But the vast majority of things that she’s really upset about are the things in our lives that we’re kind of not addressing, right? So when we’re not truly, fully living our lives, that’s the thing that most negatively impacts the people around us that we’re guiding. And it’s like, Wait, so again, from external control to bringing it back in. So just the wisdom and just like, you know, just so many times today, it’s just like hit right at the core because this, you know, and I hope it has for many people because that is when when you get hit in the core like that, you know, it’s truth and it might be painful. I mean, one of the questions I always have and because I know this comes up for a lot of folks with chronic illness and just the human just living on planet Earth is what do we do when we hit that, where something hits us and we’re like, Oh shit. It’s really hard to look inside.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

I believe that I have a graphic in my book, Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle. It’s my favorite drawing, and it’s a dog chasing its tail, T-A-I-L and then a brain chasing a spinal cord. And it’s the mind chasing its tale, T-A-L-E its story around and around. And it’s very difficult for the mind that comes up with the problem to solve the same problem with the same mind. And so this is a place where having guidance, a mentor, a therapist is really essential. Somebody that is a stage of development passed you and has been there done that got the t shirt and can show you know the Chinese say if you want to know where you’re going, ask those that have already gone and are on their way back. Right. So it’s that it’s making sure you plant medicine right now is all the rage. Right. We talked a little bit about that off air. 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Right. 

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

And the use of ketamine and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, which I’m certified and and use in the appropriate places when people want it for healing their trauma. Now, sometimes what I’m finding, and this is very interesting because it’s representative of our culture at large, is that people will say, oh, I need to go do ayahuasca, and then they’ll go to an Iowa State retreat or I need to go to Costa Rica. And, you know, whatever it is, do the medicine. And there’s an expectation that somehow the plant medicine and the substance that they’re going to take in this scenario or setting is going to move them or change them like a magic wand. Just like I can still funnel coffee and wine into myself at different times of day, and my body is going to be fine if I take a whole host of supplements, right? It’s the same idea as it’s a Western medical model. Once again, being applied on plant medicine. And it does not work. And it’s ridiculous. And I’m finding that there’s a lot of plant medicine junkies now who love to swap stories about these incredible insights that they had, but they are not doing it under the guidance of somebody that’s got a developmental stage ahead of them that is trained in facilitating integration with them. 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. 

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

You know, and so plant medicine without proper facilitation and integration is it’s just the same as anything else, going to see a good movie where you’ll, you’ll get a lesson from it go, oh, that was cool, you know. But then does it actually go in and are you doing the hard work of getting to that core hits me in the gut and I need to look at this and then do I have steps to take to actually open the doorway to karma in the perceptual field and make the shifts? And that is not a blinding insight. You know, light switch on and off. That is step by step by step, learning a new way of being, learning to get over yourself, learning to know that your desire to be a self, your ego right, is in your way and to learn how not to crush it or kill it, but to love it into integration so that you’re in wholeness, right? So self-compassion, I think, is like the magic ingredient that is missing in our culture. 

And so that’s where I always start, like when I’m working with plant medicine, journeys with people, I’m not sending them into the Cosmo’s by the throat like, you know, working with mother. I immediately like go into that, know, I go into her opening space with them so that they can first do attachment disorder healing. They can first learn to attach to their small inner one, right and bring that one along with them in the journey. And they have access to their older, wiser self that can come and inform them in this journey. Because when you’re done with your session of medicine, your retreat, you want those to be by your side while you’re going and operating in your life. You don’t want to have like the magic of a retreat and then back to your normal self where you just revert into these very, very well-worn grooves. 

So it’s a really interesting thing that I’m seeing right now in the plant medicine world, too. It’s a little bit frustrating because, you know, we’re all looking for the magic wand.  I get it. We want it to be easy. But this is I think human life is a magic schoolhouse. You know, this is the place where we’re meant to learn this stuff and we actually need to apply ourselves. And this is where, you know, I talk about lazy mind is the thing that gets us in trouble. I’ve had a bad day. Therefore, I’m going to have Ben and Jerry’s. I’m going to binge watch Netflix, I’m going to relax. But developing awake awareness so that you’re not hyper vigilantly looking out here to see if you’re safe, loved and worthy, but looking in here to know that you are safe, loved and worthy. 

That’s the energy right part. And you’re doing that with such love and tenderness and caring compassion that it brings tears to your eyes because you’re so grateful that gets Lyme to disappear. I have Lyme disease. You know, from long ago I worked for the Forest Service. I’ve been bitten by at least 25 ticks. Right. Bull’s eyes. You know, back before we knew any of this stuff, I worked in the Forest Service when I was a teenager. I mean, you know, and it can flare if I and it hasn’t for many years, but if I allow myself to get burned out and drive myself the way I did in my twenties that I was talking about. Yeah, then Epstein-Barr is a big issue. Wine can be an issue. All these chronic illnesses are part of a spiritual deprivation of self to self.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

You know, I couldn’t say it any better because it’s just like, I mean, this is totally my language. This is my personal and professional experience in this realm of healing. And as a human being who’s always wanted to explore and get so inquisitive about, I mean, how powerful we are. And it’s like, you know, it’s kind of like Marianne Williamson’s quote that comes to mind. And it’s one that I, you know, it’s kind of like it’s not our darkness, it’s our light that we’re most fearful of and afraid of. And but I just think it’s to me, it’s so empowering and I’m just so grateful for this conversation that we can bring this information to such a deserving and worthy community of people and that Lyme disease and Epstein-Barr and chronic fatigue and micro toxin illness and casts really are labels that can be helpful in certain places. 

But for the most part, let your practitioner work with the label. Let go of the label and do the inner work. Yeah, and just it’s Keesha. I’m just like, oh, my God. Like, I just this is just like why I’m on the planet to have conversations like this and share it with other people. And I’m just so honored to have this conversation. And as we kind of close, I mean, because I would love to do this for the next like 80 hours because it’s just like this is why we’re all here, right? Is to do this work. But how would you kind of land us and and, you know, if you want to kind of summarize all this work for people so that they can kind of be grounded. And then also, if you wouldn’t mind, I’m sure there’s going to be everyone’s going to want to learn how they could learn more about your work, your books, and how they might be able to work with you if this has resonated with them.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

The thing that I really love to start people out with is just a really simple process, right? And we always think everything has to be so hard, but it doesn’t. A very simple process of staying awake in your waking hours for the next however many hours you’re going to be awake. Right? I used to say 24 hours and I was like, oh, no, you’re going to sleep for that. Please. You know, for for 24 hour period in which some of it you are sleeping during your waking hours, you are fully awake, you don’t go into lazy mind. You don’t go to sleep to your own thoughts and you really observe your own thought processes for that one day, just one day. 

And notice the tone that you speak to yourself in and and about and to others. The tone, the content of your thoughts. Because you remember 94% of your thoughts are recycled. So what is the ruminating thing that you have that intrudes in your day? So look for those things. Look and see if you believe yourself to be a passive observer of your own thoughts because you are not. And that’s one of the big myths that I’d like to debunk for people, is that actually you’re not a passive observer of your mind. You’re meant to be the master of your mind. So just like if you were watching something on a screen and you didn’t like what you were watching, you would change the channel. You can do the same thing with your own thoughts. You just have to bring that energy that you want to expend to that, right? So just watch that and you can do a little practice where you have a little baggie of white pebbles and a little baggie of black pebbles or dark pebbles. And at the end of your day, for every thought you’ve had that has been life affirming, put a white pebble in the middle. For every thought that you’ve had that’s been more life destructive. Could a dark pebble. And in the beginning you’ll see that there are a lot of dark pebbles to white pebbles. It’s pretty fascinating. And as you go through the next day, because now you’re doing the pebble exercise and now you’re starting to attune to yourself and not expect everyone else and everything else to attune to you. 

You’re tuning to yourself. Then you’ll notice that, Oh, I’m having a dark pebble thought and you’re not going to want to see that. And then I’ll and so you can go, oh I’m going to ship that. Yeah. I remember last summer I saw this beautiful hummingbird as it was out at the bird feeder. And I just enjoyed that so much. So I’m going to make that my screensaver today. I keep coming back to Hummingbird, right? So you get to insert something if the operating system goes down and it wants to crashed into a whole fiery burning heap of trouble, put a screensaver in there like a404 area hummingbird. Right. And joy and like pick from places in your life that you have felt joyful and you have there are places in there, you know, people will often say, I haven’t had anything joyful in my life. And I say, well, that’s inaccurate. 

That’s not true. And so, you know, the Cherokee have a story about that, right, where the little boy goes to his grandfather, the chief of the tribe, and says, Grandfather, how do I become a good man, not a bad man? ” And the grandfather says grandson each has within him a white wolf and a dark wolf. Whoever you feed the most grow as the strongest. And so if your train of thought is always in a rubble on fire, then, you know, you know that you’re feeding more to that. And so you get to slowly, slowly by thought shift that. 

And you know, you can even picture in solving the autoimmune puzzle in my book. I have another graphic where it’s the train of thought, you know, going down or getting robbed by the automatic negative thoughts. You can shift the track and you can bring it over here and you can say, this is the journey I would like my mind to be on, not that one. And that takes effort. It’s not a passive engagement, it’s an act of engagement. And sometimes that’s difficult to do if your adrenals are off, if your hormones are off, if you’re microbiome is defunct. That’s why we do work inside the biochemical arena also. So we work on them together because you’re not separate mind body, they work together genetics. So that’s why those work corner pieces of the puzzle are so important to do at the same time.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Awesome. That is such an amazing practice to become aware in that particular way. And I love how you call B.S. there’s not goodness in all of our lives because you can find it.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

You can, you can.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

So awesome. So how can people find you if they want to learn more about what you’re doing and everything?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

drkeesha.com. D-R-K-E-E-S-H-A.com and solving the autoimmune puzzle is a great entry into what I’ve just been talking about.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Awesome. Well, Dr. Keesha Ewer, thank you so very much for sharing all this bad wisdom with us today. And thank you. And in this like the hope, you know, and the gratitude and the love and just like really I’m so honored to be part of sharing your message and getting this in front of everyone so that we can help change the planet by changing ourselves. So everyone, thank you so very much. Lots of love from both of us to all of you and lots of healing and joyful thoughts. And we appreciate you being here for this episode of The Healing from Lyme Disease Summit. I will see you next time.