Awakening Your Own Healing System

Introduction and Tom Moorcroft's Background 0:00

Welcome. This is too sad. Very exciting show, as we say. Another edition of mycotoxins and chronic illness. And today, I'm gonna have the pleasure of talking with, Tom Moorcroft. Tom, I've known a long time, and, he is a man who has done a lot to help teach us how to treat chronic tick borne diseases. And he is a man who, has a lot to offer and a lot of good ideas about how to include your whole body in this process. And, and the other parts that need to come along in order to have a whole healthy and full, meaningful life.

So if we'll, we'll have, how to find him. His office is in Berlin, Connecticut, which I understand is not far from Hartford. And, so welcome, Tom. Glad to have you with us again. And, you know, so we were just talking, and one of the things that really excited me about what was. But some of the ideas that you've been working on are dear to our hearts, which is, you know, detox and, you've got some interesting ideas. So here, let you just get started and I'll keep you rolling with more questions.

That's great. Thanks so much for having me, Erica. It's, such an honor to be here and to be able to have an opportunity to share all this information that we've all gleaned, you know, helping others with chronic illness recover. And, you know, I always like to just start to say, like, you know, if you are suffering with a chronic illness or a chronic condition, I get it right. Like I've been there. I had, you know, chronic Lyme and the PCOS and heavy metal toxicity. And, you know, what was really interesting was the first six years of this.

Everybody just told me I was crazy. And then they're like, oh, no, no. Well, you're we found out that you're not crazy because none of the meds work so well. You know, you've got ADHD like, well, no shit, I've got ADHD, right. That's like a superpower and stuff. Right? And then ultimately it was like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and they just kind of they throw medicines at you. If it doesn't work right away, it's all over. And so the reason I start here is I, a friend of mine gave me a DVD.

She had brought it, bought it for her son who had a seizure disorder that was really very, difficult to control. And she thought yoga would help him. But she picked up an Ashtanga yoga DVD, which is like, sort of where power yoga comes from. Right? And so she's like, he can't even do it. He can't. He can barely, like, stand up some days. So this is a gift for you. And I just was like, I've never done this. I tried yoga once in college for a gym class, and I didn't quite like that. At 8 a.m., you know?

And all the cute girls were flexible and I was in horrible pain. So as an athlete and I never did it and I, I took it and I said, why are you giving this to me right now? And I go, wow, I've been studying all this osteopathy and this medicine. I know this isn't a coincidence. And the long and the short of it was I started to do this and it was very challenging. But as I did it, my body started to open. And at the time I didn't know this. But now with everything I learned, I was really slowly, gently and in a really controlled way, opening up my natural detoxification pathways.

I was opening up the flashes and I was letting the lymphatics work. I was pumping the muscles and all of this was movement on breath. And so a lot of people are familiar with power yoga and, you know, or Ashtanga itself, they think it's it's almost like competitive. But when you actually go back to the roots, Eric, it's actually a lot about movement on breath. And if you can't breathe fully and deeply, you're too far. You're pushing too far beyond your body's capacity. So from the from that point on, I learned to really pay attention to my body.

And the combination of doing this yoga, whereas gently opening up my body because it was all being driven by the breath and the breath was doing the opening, allowing the natural energies to open. I started to detox, detoxify at a very slow rate in the beginning, and ultimately it it was like Quantum Leap Detox, but I wasn't ready for that in the beginning. And so that was really a lot of fun to sort of see that. And then as I went down the journey, my body started to reject all the normal foods I was eating.

So like, this is back in the day where you didn't know a lot about nutrition, and Coca Cola was a food group and stuff like that. And that's what my whole family, Jake and I just started letting it all go because my body just naturally is like. So I went from six cans of soda a day down to like four and then down to three and two. And ultimately I remember the day I was like, I figured I should have one soda a year just so that I could have a soda and say I had it. And it was so disgustingly sweet and chemically, but it was like over a course of about two and a half, two years or so, my body shifted away from that because I let the not that natural healing process work, and then at the very end of all of this, I still needed about 25% help from the doctors.

When I and I finally was able to meet somebody to help me get it fixed. And but I'm just it's just really cool that like most of my healing, which I say about 75% of my personal healing from Lyme and all this other stuff actually occurred before I met the doctors who actually did the treatment. So I pretreated my body by allowing the natural healing process to open up and allow detoxification to start on the slower and then gradually quicker basis. Oh yeah, that is, you know, listening to you, it just is such an inspiration and reminder.

And, you know, as I've been doing this summit, you know, I mean, the last one and especially this one.

Yoga, Breath, and Early Detoxification 5:54

So many of the healers that are were ill, that's what got them here. And but they were, again, highly functional people who got ill somewhere in their training or, and, and the path for all of them. And I'm just thinking of, of another fellow who was a path for his daughter was the detox, you know, was finding that way in. You know, the bugs are bad, but they can be dealt with if the body is ready and it's whole. So it's just. Yeah, it's so true. I mean, when you said that, what reminded me of is I'm Doctor Andrew Taylor, I'm an osteopathic physician.

And it's it is like the first truly unique, you know, US medicine medical based practice. I mean and so chiropractic and naturopathy grew out, up around a similar time. But this is a gentleman who is a frontier MD by training. Right. And he would go around and he saw were given like arsenic and strychnine. And he's like, that's dumb. Why don't we just stop giving stuff that hurts people? We used to think it was okay, but now it's bad. And then, oh, by the way, why don't we add in some some manipulation?

Because it actually helps the body heal quicker. And they all thought it was nuts. So in like 1892 he had his first class. He had women, he had blacks, he had Native Americans. He had men like everybody. Like if you were interested in supporting healing in another human being and learning about this amazing healing temple we have, he was like, come on in. It's you're here to learn. And one of the quotes he talks about is essentially and is that like within our body, we have all of God's pharmacy.

Right. And so he was a he a lot of his work is is very flowery or flowery religious talking because his dad was a preacher and a lot of the MDS back in the day were also they were a doctor and a preacher. So that's kind of where he came from. But it was so interesting because we have the reason that heroin works and the reason that morphine works is we have opiate receptors. The reason that marijuana works is that we have cannabinoid receptors. We didn't, like go, oh, this drug in our body made a new receptor.

We actually have the ability to do this. And it's like when you look at meditation, first we need to have good sleep in order to even be able to really get a good experience, because we need to be creating great melatonin. And melatonin is broken down like DMT and all these other cool things. But part of the thing about meditation is we're breaking, we're using natural products in our body, and we're sort of allowing them to, you know, break down in such a way that you have what we call a spiritual experience.

But it's all because the universe, God, life, whatever you want to call this amazing force that lives and breathes us divinely created this, this body, and we have all the receptors to have spiritual experiences, religious experiences, sexual like it's just all in there already. And sometimes, like if you broke your leg, maybe it wouldn't help you with a little extra morphine. But but we don't need this. Like for the chronic illness crowd, the body has so much more that you could harness, right?

We talked about placebo being like a third of medical outcome, so we have to control for it. I think it's actually closer to 70 or 80% of our outcomes. And you need a doctor for 20%. Yeah. So that's just a thought. No, no, no. I you know, when you start off in medicine, as we were talking earlier, we before we hit the record button, how much has changed? As doctors, we love the quick response, you know, like, oh, give you a drug and look at that. You know, I always I always say, like, you know, somebody comes in with heart failure in the E.R.

and you give them some Lasix. So a medicine that makes you plot and somebody who can't breathe and is blue in 20 minutes, they're relaxed and talking to you. You know, it's chilling out. Yay yay. But you know. But that's teeny little bit of what we do. And that's not healing. That's just getting out of the way and preventing someone from dying. But when you have chronic illness, it's about marshaling your own resources. You know, come to us because we got lots of doodads to help you. But what Tom is talking about is the heart and soul of healing.

Yeah. You know, an Eric, like I got to say, like, I spent a good amount of effort getting better on my own because I was. It was in a corner. Like, I didn't know I couldn't find someone to help me and a friend at the. You know, it's a coincidence, but it was more divine intervention. But then, like when I look at how I met my doctors, if I hadn't paid attention to my intuition and my gut, I would have not have changed around one of my schedules in medical school that landed me in their office, where I was like, oh, you're seeing people like me.

I know what all these people have, and it's what I have. So what do they have so I can get better, right. And but but I still needed them. But the difference was I had done all the pretax detox, all the life changes that they would have asked me to do. And so when I finally took the medicines, I finally took the herbs and I got the detoxification support protocol. It work like this because I had already done all the work and my body was ready to receive the healing. Yeah. And that's what I hope that people get from this summit, is that, you know, when people are home listening, a lot of this stuff that, you know, can get presented, well, you know, so I said, don't do this at home, you know, but the heart of what we're talking about today and many of the other people we've had, is what you can do at home.

This is the beginning. Get started. I said that you always like to remind people you came up that in the pre talks because it's like, you know, yeah, you got to go slow because I think the point you brought up right in the beginning is that when you started with the yoga, you listen to the basic concept of doing what your breath allowed. You didn't do your normal cowboy thing of pushing yourself to the point of exhaustion, which you might have done a few times, but I you know me well. There's a little cowboy in here.

Yeah, yeah, but but I figured. But but it sounds like you found that place when you realized you had to listen to your body instead of listening to that, I think I should. You know, what's really cool about what you just said was it's 100% dead on to things like I couldn't do any more than I was doing, like I was tapped out, right? And a lot of people, like, I think in the chronic illness world, I think there's two main groups of people. One is if you don't stop, you're going to drop. So you have to rest. And then there are people like me who we're if we stop, we'll never get up.

We don't feel well, but we don't look like the other group. And it's like. And it's like, not a one's better than the other. It's just like I was on adrenal overdrive for like, the entire, like for most of the 13 years of trying to get better. And a quick side note, I have been asymptomatic for over 13, 11 years at this point, and I have tried my best to do the cowboy thing and burn myself out a little bit, and it doesn't come back out. So, I'm pretty sure it's done, done right. And I've been able to live a really rich and full life since then, thankfully.

And the reason I throw that out there now is I just want people to know there's hope. I mean, I was undiagnosed for eight and a half years and I was able to get better. Yeah. And I think that is the the crucial, crucial thing is I, I, I just know how hard it is because I've listened to so many people who've spent, you know, their money, their families money, and years of trying and just keep hitting the wall because, you know, and it's like, so hard because, you know, that the hope is that no matter what's happening to you, we are learning.

I think if you look back, you know, on what was offered to you now 20 something years ago, okay. And what we know today, I mean, it is I mean, when I started this, it was, you know, kind of, you know, least for the medical world, it was antibiotics and, well, more antibiotics. Well, one gave work. Maybe five will do it for you. Right. And but this is where it really came for. I mean, yeah, like I tell my patients are like probably at least a couple times a week. I never had the chance to do this.

I would have done it, but it didn't even exist when I was sick. And despite all that, I still got better. You reminded me of something that I don't want to miss over. And it's interesting about more and more antibiotics is when I was in, medical school with this case presentation competitions at osteopathic conferences, and the first one I ever did, I did this one, I called it the day I learned to listen. So everybody's like, oh, well, I found erectile dysfunction, and I did this and I fixed it, or I, somebody rolled their ankle and I clicked their ankle and they were better.

And I was like, look, I decide. I sat down with a patient one day and I actually listened to what they told me. And then I listened to what their body said, and then they got better. But it wasn't about the miracle of like the maneuver or the protocol that we used. It was all about. I had a moment in time where I said, you know what, five antibiotics is sometimes necessary, but maybe there's something in addition to that that could help my patient if I just shut the hell up and get past their words and get past my words and listen to their heart and what their body is trying to tell me, and listen to my heart and what the hell my heart's trying to tell me.

Listening to the Body and Chronic Illness Recovery 15:30

Because the medicine is here for a good reason, right? We need some. There's a time and a place, like you said, acutely. And sometimes in the chronic state. But it was just really interesting. Like, people didn't really get it. They were like, you learn to pay attention to the body. I'm like, I'm at an osteopathic conference. We're talking about paying attention to what the body's telling us. And then a couple like a year or two later, I did another one. I did one on, a seven week old who had fallen off the growth curve.

He didn't Osteopathic treatment. She pooped all over her dad, who was a jerk. And then she got back on the growth chart and they're like, oh my God, this is amazing. And all this words and everything. And I'm like, that was a great save. But did you miss the part in the first one? That said, before you can do the fancy miracle look and stuff, you have to go deep in yourself and deep with your patient to find out what the hell is really going on. That that is so true because we have such a, a large, large repertoire of possible.

I mean, that's what this summit in new ways mean. We present this. I mean, we could do probably 80 interviews, different interventions, at least. Okay. And and that's why people will spend their fat, their money and money. Because they keep trying. And you nailed it. Is that when we are lucky enough to be present and to really hear on both sides, and to create an environment that allows the patient to really see what resonates with them, you know, we improve our odds quite a bit, quite a bit. You know, one of our mentors, her teacher, there's a guy, a gentleman by the name of Robert Fulford, D.O..

Yeah. Yes. Bob Fulford is pretty much a legend in the osteopathic community. And through our mentor, Paula Estudio, who I came along for the ride. I mean, she picked my wife out of a crowd one day when we were first year students and said, we need to have lunch together. And so thankfully, I was already married to Jill and she still likes me, so I got to come along for it. But Doctor Fulford said, as long as you get them breathing properly and their energy flowing, it doesn't matter what you do, it'll work.

And Paula adds on, like, kind of almost like just a different way to say it is, is lunch. As long as you treat people from the higher vibrational frequency of love, anything you do will work. So that and what's really interesting, because I know you wanted to really dive into this today, is we're talking about we need to breathe. We need the natural energies to flow, which includes the detoxification pathways. And we should use a little more of this thing in the center of our chest and allow that energy that drives that to reach out and embrace all of us.

You know, I'm, I'm just laughing because, there was, we had a conference years ago, and I was a small live conference. So we had, you know, Doctor Schiano and a bunch of others there, and, and but I invited the head of, infectious disease at Kaiser in Northern California at that time. And it was we actually had some of the event people. Anyways, we had some interesting people there from across, but and at the, you know, we had dinner on, the like the last there's like three and a half nights and you know, he just said to me, you know, the only reason this works is because you, you actually you listen to people I know.

Shit, I know, but but I, I, I took that as an insult back then because I, because, you know, I said no, wait a minute. We actually actually helps to treat these folks. But but you are but you know, that is the yin and yang of this is a yes. Is that if you don't if you're sitting there with the practitioner and you're feeling like you're fighting an uphill battle to be heard, you know, they might have a magic wand for you, but if it doesn't work immediately, it probably isn't going to go, you know?

Yeah, it's it's like if the if you if you're sitting with your practitioner and you don't feel somebody on the other end of that, then again, it would if you did, they just have to sit your ankle. It still might not be a great place to be. But yeah it would probably be done. Yeah. Get it done. But if you have a chronic problem this is about your flow. And that's going to happen from the book. And it's just and it's a shame that they acknowledge the fact that you're listening to the patient, which then suggests that they're not.

Hell no. Because to be honest is because, you know, if I've been, you know, going to see your Kaiser doctor, it's, you know, seven minutes and if you hang for 15 minutes, they're kind of annoyed already, you know. Right. You know, and they're good folk. It's just it's this that's the way the system is designed because anyway. Right. But let's but but the thing I want to really get to, I mean because I, I just love I mean, this is the most, probably the most important part of any kind of thing. You've got to listen to your heart.

And, how can you mobilize that your system? Because you've done a lot of work in that area. I just like to hear. Yeah. You know, and it's interesting and it kind of comes from, what what the, the infectious disease doctor kind of said to you is people need to be heard and they really need to know that someone else is being empathetic. And I think about if we kind of structure it on, on a sciencey way, if we look at poly vagal theory. Right. And for anyone who may not know, we talk a lot about sort of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system.

So we've got that fight or flight and we've got the rest heal, rejuvenate, spend time hanging out with your friends and your family and chillin. And that's kind of our typical thing. We say a one's up, one's down, and they're always in this teeter totter balance. If we look at Fight or Flight and the sympathetics, the fight or flight suggests that like if a sabertooth tiger comes out of the woods while you're around the campfire, if you decide to stay and fight, you think you can win. And if you decide to run away, you think you can actually get away.

So in either event you can be successful. But when you're when you have chronic illness or you've been chronically betrayed by people not listening to you and not validating your personal experience, which is different than believing that you have the the. Sometimes doctors think there's a difference between like agreeing with the patients date self diagnostic name. That is not the same as acknowledging that they are truly going through suffering ING. Wow. So excellent point. Keep going. I just want you to know that practitioners out there that is so important and people all the time come in.

I have my Lyme in my Bartonella are acting up. I'm like, okay, that's really great. I understand this. Can you share to me how that manifests itself in your life? Can you let me know not only how it manifests in your life? How does it impact your life? How does it impact your family and your kids? Because usually, like I, you know, I have some people come in, tell me their life, and Bart is acting up and they're dead on. I have other people have their Lyme, and Bart's been acting up for five years and six doctors, they come in, they have mold toxin that no one's looked at.

And lo and behold, yes, they had Bartonella, but it wasn't the primary problem. So I try to let people express the diagnosis they believe they have, but most importantly, tell me what the symptoms are, how they feel it, and how their their community experiences it. Because then you find out what's really going on. Yeah, yeah. And so for anybody who's been experiencing that right, Eric, we go to the other side. There's this newer kind of idea in the parasympathetic where we do have that parasympathetic, the joy, the rejuvenation, the rest.

It's kind of more of the vagus nerve coming down to the heart. But there's this other part that kind of goes below the diaphragm, more to the gut, which is really where this becomes super important, where if the saber tooth tiger is so close to you that you don't think you can run away and you don't feel you're strong enough to win, what is your only mechanism for survival? And typically it's called freeze. So I learned about this when we, before I realized what cats like to do when you let them outside.

What a long, long, long time ago. And you would see your cat would grab the chipmunk, and the chipmunk was scurrying around, and as soon as it got grabbed, it would go limp. It would completely freeze because its only survival mechanism at this moment in time was to play dead. And then as soon as the cat got bored and let go of it, it would run away. And humans can do this with this sort of dorsal vagal response that goes down to the gut. And unfortunately, if we feel frozen, we get numb. How many of our line mode patients start to look at the ground and not look at you when you're talking to them?

How many people withdraw socially? How many people during the pandemic have gotten way worse? Because not only do they start to, because of their frozen state in their preexisting nervous system condition, pull away, but now they're being mandated to pull away. So it's like that double whammy thing from back when I was a kid. And and unfortunately they get you get stuck. But when that happens it also suppresses your immune function and it numbs you to pretty much everything around you. And then you kind of get the people who walk in to Kaiser or anywhere else are.

There's well-meaning people and they're like, I don't understand what's going on with you, and you're taking too much time. So maybe you should go see, you know, Gordon or Moorcroft or something, or. No. First the psychiatrist. Well, true. We come after. But what's really interesting when you look at Stephen Porges, his work, and he's the guy who really pulled all this out, how do I get myself out of a frozen state? You talk to other people, you sing, you do something that brings positive emotion into your heart, and I'll add to it.

This is where fake it til you make it is really good. You got to get some gratitude for anything and find a thing that you love, or you used to love, or you plan to love in the future when you're healthy and just spend five minutes a day with it in your heart. And the idea is we want to get the energy of that. You know, when we had a gut reaction, thought curled up, that's going to be a thing. But I want to bring your energy up into the heart, because once we get into the heart, that's how you then express to the world.

And that's one of the ways that porges with a lot of the they do, a safe and sound program. But there's all kinds of stuff is like start turn on the music, nobody's around, sing some dumb ass song that makes you laugh and just scream and have a good time, you know, vocalize. Call up an old friend. But it's really about getting out there and doing something that's socially interactive at a level like my yoga that is appropriate for you in the moment. Yeah, yeah, I think that the appropriate for you in the moment, the gratitude for anything.

You know, everything in the body is habit. You know, we we we can't be you know, spun to you know, you don't want when your heart is spontaneous, it starts getting really uncomfortable. But you know, it's habit. It beats kind of the same way all the time. And if you can learn anything, it's easier the next time. Everything about the body is like blowing up a balloon. And so that's where six misbehavior gets you into trouble. But it's physiologic totally. What happens. But so you have to now use those powers that humans have of finding opening your heart a little bit of gratitude.

And I can and I can only imagine what that must be like when life is all about

Polyvagal Theory, Gratitude, and the Heart-Gut-Brain Connection 27:30

just surviving through the next painful moments. Well, and this is this is the hard part, right, Eric? Because I just told you, like, hey, be grateful even though you're in a frozen state, the way to get out of your frozen state is to kind of work on the opposite of it. But you do all these things at the same time. And one of the things I tell people is like, don't like, have gratitude for micro things, like people come in, they're like, I've worked with them for six months or 70% better, like, but I'm still got this and this and this.

I'm like, yeah, you do. And how much better you want like 70% better, but blah blah blah. And I'm like, hold pause for just a moment. If the universe or God just gave you 70% improvement in your health in six months and you said, that's not good enough, do you think you're getting any more of that? So I'm like, look, if I get 1% increased abundance, I'm like, health, abundance, money, abundance. I literally one time this is like ridiculous. I got I remember this really clearly. I got like a 16 or $18 check and my email just said, oh, you got a thing for, you know, I signed up to try out some organic wines or whatever.

And so I signed up under my own affiliate. So I got a commission on myself, and I was like, I was looking at that 16 bucks and I go, oh my God. Two week or two months ago, I got one for $4 and I said it wasn't enough. I literally went back to a $4 email. I apologized to it. Then I had a party. Then I went to the $16 email, and a couple weeks later I got a $69 check. Then out of the blue, I got $187 check from somebody else who had done work for a year and a half ago. And yes, I recorded like three hours of videos and they sent me a check for $187.

Probably not a lot, but I was so thankful. And then all of a sudden somebody else sent me something. And then I got a consulting opportunity out of the blue. That, and it just kept growing. And when that occurred to me, when I had that experience, Eric, I went back and I go, this is what happened when someone gave me the yoga DVD. I said, I don't even know why this is in my hand, but it's a new possibility. Thank you. Then I put it in the DVD player when we actually had those things, and I hit play and it hurt like hell for like three weeks.

But I only did what I could do with the breathing. And every day I said thank you because this hurt actually hurts as opposed it's it's a sharper, a liver pain than my typical fibromyalgia pain. And it was horrible. I was like miserable. I could literally put my fingertips to the tops of my kneecaps when I was bending forward. That's how tight I was. And it was like, but I just said thank you. This is a crazy because it's something different than my norm. And every time I said thank you for something new and different, something new and different and better came into my life, and I would invite everyone who is a practitioner to teach people this and practice it in your own lives.

But anyone who's watching, who's suffering like we've got some more science to talk about. The heart and the gut and the brain and memories and brain detox. But the important part is supercharged this shit yourself. Awaken your own inner healing mechanism by just saying thank you to something infinitesimally small. Because when you make a habit, like Eric was just talking about, of it, because it's like with with illness, when it came, you're like, oh, what's that? Oh, it's that upset. And then every focus of your day becomes about trying to find a way to get around this, say, hey, you know what, for these 10s, I'm just going to look at a new opportunity and being grateful for it.

And then I can go back to my other story if I want to try on a new story of thankfulness for the minute stuff, because I can guarantee the more minute stuff you say thank you to, the larger and larger and larger that minute thing becomes. Until it becomes this huge shift in the way you think and the way your body heals itself. Yeah. Thank you Tom. I mean, that's that's just. Yeah. Words of true wisdom and and especially in being thankful for for just feeling different because that is one of the things that I have found to be, you know, so hard when people have been ill for a long time.

Is that different, even if it's not bad, is often preceded this bad. Right. And it's being able to just like to stay present for it. Don't label it, don't compare it to the old one to say thank you. This is a new sensation, you know, because when you've been in pain a long time, the those pathways that amplify pain are so up regulated that even that different can often be misinterpreted as pain. And so just yeah, if the heart open, you know, you'll no pain, it will hit you, you know. But. Right.

So and and for anybody who wants to like I 1,000% agree but it or I should say. And what I would say to anybody who's like, oh I want son, I just want like a brain detox hack. Right. Because like, my brain's not working. I can't be thankful because my brain's not working. Well, guess what? If you look at your gut, right. We just said if we get more dorsal vagus, we get more in that frozen state that so many of us who have had chronic illness. Experian at one time or another, or a lot, when you get that and it tones down your gut, any imbalance in the optimal function of the gut feeds back along the vagus nerve, up all the way back into the cranium.

And it there's we talk a lot about the limbic system in limbic retraining and all this gratitude and thankfulness for small stuff feeds back to your brain. Because if your vagus nerve in your gut is off, when it goes back to the brain, it messes with a part of the limbic system called the hippocampus. And the hippocampus has a lot to do with emotional memory, but also short and long term memory creation and retrieval. So if your word finding issues, executive function stuff, if you can't make short term memories or you can't pull back stuff you already know, hippocampus in the prefrontal cortex work back and forth, back and forth to to be able to make new memories and to retrieve them.

But it's governed by the vagus nerve coming out of your gut. So now if you're eating better, if you're if you're calming down and detoxifying through proper bowel movements, if you're getting yourself out of the stress state by focusing on this gratitude in the heart, we got a couple things going on. One is there's going to be less negative going up the vagus from the gut. But as soon as you go back into the heart, now we have the ventral vagus or the heart centered vagus nerve. And when you open up the heart, that will positive feedback to the brain, which will allow you to remember more.

So everybody wants these. What's your best brain detox supplement? I go, well, look, there's no supplement that can detoxify your brain better than the natural stuff inside of you. And I want to open up those pathways. But the beginning part of it is just by opening the heart and the gut. And that is. And that's yours. You know that. I think that that is the beauty that is your natural ability. Right? Yeah. And, you know, another way to look at it is the breath control. So much detoxification in your pelvis, your abdomen, your chest and your arms and legs.

Yes, it's muscle contractions that do a lot of detoxification. But in that middle cylinder it's so much breathing allowing that diaphragm in your pelvis. The diaphragm of your breathing, your thoracic diaphragm to push down and soothe. So breathing deeply does a couple things. It's going to suit the solar plexus region, which is going to also help do what we were just talking about from a mechanical perspective. It's also going to it's a natural flusher of all the toxins in the in the gut. And we know so much of the immune system lives down there.

So it's breathing is detoxification, it's life, it's immune support and it's relaxation. And the other cool part is if you just do five minutes a day, if you do nothing else, pay attention to your breathing for five minutes a day. I don't care what part of it is. It could be your nose, your throat, your mouth, your eye. Wherever your chest rise, just pay attention. And if some other thought comes into your mind, that's cool to say. Thank you so much for these five minutes. I'm going to go back to my breathing and what you're usually going to find is that's going to open up, and it's going to allow the breath to get naturally deeper.

You don't even have to try and then you're going to feel a little more relaxed. And if you do this a little before bed, this will help you get to sleep better. Because if we look at brain detoxification, I know we were talking as we started about the lymphatic system. So I told you, arms and legs are muscle contractions and movement in the middle. Chest, abdomen, pelvis really pressure gradient changes from breathing up here a little bit of gravity a lot of a system we call lymphatics. So if you can see a cranial osteopath who can help you get everything moving in your head, well, that's all well and good.

But most importantly, your brain detoxifies primarily in deep sleep. Upwards of 90% of the overall brain detoxification occurs while you're sleeping. So if you want another brain detoxification hack or figure out what's keeping you up at night your screens, your lights. Maybe you're stressed out and you just need to do that breath awareness meditation. But every time you get 3 or 4 or five minutes of extra breath, sleep at night, that's a little deeper than it was the night before. And I went through this myself.

I know this this is literally how I healed my brain. It was crazy. And, you know, we just didn't have the science to know why. But every time you're closer to that deep sleep, your brain detoxification pathways open up even more. And then you can start to notice that. So as you get better, if you notice here, we'll do the opposite. If you have a bad night's sleep, how good your brain the next day. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So it's really cool to be able to say hey, if I do a little something that's going to boost my immune system, it's going to help my vagus get more in heart centered, which is going to help my memory, which is also going to help me calm down and relax.

It's also going to help me sleep better, which in turn helps me drain my brain better naturally, because that's where sleep is. So the body is amazing. It just if you literally you could just do 5 or 10 minutes notice. I just added another five minutes there to your daily breath awareness right before bed. You know, it's just and there's many, many like you said earlier, there's options, many ways to help you sleep better, many ways to meditate and de-stress. But it's just like the lymphatic drainage system is so sleep critical that it's just but it.

But the nice part is like, I feel like I when you come to see me, I'm like, take this supplement, take this supplement, take this supplement, this medicine, this supplement. And then when you take that medicine to counteract that, up that medicine. Now I have to give I can give you another supplement and you're just taking things. When I do one thing, I breathe right before I go to bed and I can help all of these things by spending five minutes a day. And that gets me pumped because it's free. Yeah, and it works.

And it works. Well. It works and we don't have to. I mean, what I love is. Yeah, no, I hate that place when you when you suddenly realize that that the helpful supplement has become a shopping bag full of helpful supplements. I mean, that that's never a good sign. I mean, you and and and we see it. And when people get sick, it's this, desire to protect yourself that begins to run amuck. And one way. And people, some people go to the magic world of the next supplement that's going to protect me, you know?

And I think it's just a mess. But sleep, I love it. So sleep opening your heart, taking care of your gut. If we do those three things, you're all going to be better, right? Man? I mean, seriously, that's not a joke. That is the truth. It's just that it's hard getting there. And I think we all have to respect that. And that's why I love where time is bringing it back down to, like, just just like breath awareness. You don't even have to do fancy breathing. Just start with notice, fairness, notice, pay attention, feel your body because it's it's hard when you've been ill for a long time.

The body is not this place that is, You learned to kind of push it away sometimes, you know, like you say, time in order to, like, be the person who keeps functioning, you have to learn to ignore. And now, you know, come back in. I think one of the things, too, is when I use the word betrayal before, I mean, I think people are betrayed purposely and most commonly, accidentally by the conventional system where they just it's not set to listen. But a lot of people, chronic illness, seem to have a sense that their bodies betrayed them.

And having spent, I've been in medicine in one way or another since 1995, and I can tell you that I've never seen any evidence of a person's body not trying. Its. Damn this in the moment to compensate perfectly and to do its very best for them. And you know, so healing is always perfect. It might not be complete yet, but your body is in such a state of perfect compensation in every single moment. It's like when people go to the hospital, it's crazy, man. Like you're just like they're the people who end up dying of some like, sort of end of life illness, even right up until the moment of death, like 98, 99% of every other, every organ system in their body is working great.

And it's just happens to be this one little spot where it's time and there's some part that we don't know. But what I want people to know is your body is doing everything it can in the moment, just like your mind and your heart are finding the right doctors, watching this summit, getting all the things that you can together. You're making the schedule for your supplements and your medicines. You're doing everything. Maybe the homes are being remediated. Your body is literally doing that 24 over seven to its best ability to give you the best life possible.

And it might have been dealt a shitty henna cards, but it is still 100% on your side each and every time. And I just think it's so important, Eric, because otherwise, if your body's betraying you, what do you have left? It's not. It's on your side. Love it, love it because it is. You know, this is where it will take a whole other talk point. We I keep talking about the so-called cell danger response, and I never have to go through that to have a talk, or we actually go through what it is piece by piece, but oh my God.

Right. Just the idea of that you're when you're ill, you're stuck in a loop of self-protection on the cellular level. And it's not a bad thing. It's doing it to protect you. It's just needs some different signals. And that's why what Tom is telling us about opening your heart, breathing. Leave room for something to shift. Because our drugs don't necessarily change the signaling pathways that need to be changed, but nature does. You know, when our body gets the right signals from the world and from its internal milieu, it begins to change back towards health.

It knows that the danger is gone. The problem that we stay sick is that that there's times that that invade that danger. And our body's response have stayed stuck in a, in a dialog and in sometimes that dialog doesn't need to continue a little bit of silence, follow your breath. And that silence can allow the system to realize that, it has another option. And it's so true, so important, because we all are stuck in the let's fix it mode. That mode, I mean, me especially, I want to fix you, but we gotta remember that your body isn't broken.

It's just it's dealing with a problem. And our job is to let it know that the problem isn't as big anymore. And it can dance a little differently. You get. Yeah. You know, it's so interesting. So it's almost like what that movie Inside Out where. And like, if you've ever read about internal family systems therapy, like they talk about like these parts of you and whatever. Right. And but what's really interesting is your body reacting the way it's reacting in a given moment is trying to protect you.

And sometimes these habitual patterns, we create a protection for ourselves. We're very valuable when we were four, but when we're nine, maybe not so much, and maybe when we were 21, we had to do certain things. Or like in my case, I was 23. But then like 13 years later, I was I had to move on from the 23 year old because I was 36 and that part of you that keeps trying to pull you backwards literally is there. Because in a given moment of time, it was there 100,000,000,000% for you. It's time just happened to be six years ago, you know.

So so if we open up to the possibility that we can have a new potential in our future, we can say, thank you so much for having my back and now my body and every iteration from each week or day or month or whatever it is of chronic illness. It's been holding me up and pushing me up, even if it didn't feel like it in the moment. So yeah, it's I love it. No, no. And this goes back, you know, I, I hate the, the, the overly computer analogies, but the one that really works was the one that Neil coined, that you, Nathan, years ago was rebooting.

Yeah. No. Is that, you know, I mean, because we we talk about this all the time kicking around and, and and and it really is that simple. Those of us who aren't very good with computers just know unplug it and plug it back in. And that all and all the garbage from those programs that you loaded that aren't serving you anymore, that aren't you're not using, not being on the top. And unfortunately, it's easier with the computer. But, well, we can, but we have a choice to upgrade our operating system.

This thing will show up and go, do you want to up, up or, upgrade tonight? Yeah. Yes or no. And it's like now the wait. Now if we go back to like the, the way the nervous system functions, it's repetitiveness. Yeah. Or very once every once in a while, something major will shift, like we have a pandemic or we have like 911, but usually those things are kind of a negative thing. But when you make positive change and you rewire the way your brain talks to itself and your nervous system talks to all your organs, it happens with small, repetitive change over time, and there's a huge time lapse in a positive way.

Meaning if you screw up today, no harm, no foul, you can just choose to wake up tomorrow and every morning wake up and just see. The thing is, like, if I wake up in the morning and I go, hey,

Breathing, Sleep, and Brain Detoxification 46:30

I've got chronic Lyme disease or whatever, or I'm going to feel like shit today. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if I wake up and I go, hey, you know what? Today I might feel 1/1,000,000 of a percent better. You at least have a half a chance to get in that moving that direction. And every time you program your nervous system with something new and different and positive, it's going to start to wire that way. And then you're going to start to think that more. And then as soon as you start to think it, because the way the brain works, we all of our results in the world, our physical manifestation, health results, our relationships, our business results, whatever have to do first, we create it in our mind and then we create it in the physical plane.

So neurologically, we wired the thought process of health. Then the body can go to work and manifest the physical part of health. And it will and it will do it for us in the positive and the negative. I you know, I you know what is so key? What you said right there. I'm sorry to interrupt, but what Eric just said is so key. Are you walking through your day? You say, oh, I can't do that. I can't do that. But you're spending are you spending 90% of your day doing a negative health meditation? Yeah.

Well, and, you know, and you can see the evidence of this in, in food allergies is a great example. Chemical sensitivities is that, I mean, people when they keep losing foods, you know, and they are their mast cells are probably reacting to more and more. But but what controls that? You know, your brain controls everything on some level, you know, and when you know, when you when there's inflammation it begets inflammation. And and so you will lose foods. But if you can also regain as you get more comfortable in your body and it's, it's hard because the, the, the effect of the reaction to the food is to some people lose.

So disturbing that the, the need to protect just seems so strong and so don't go with the food. But I love the way Tom is saying, but go with a prayer of gratitude for something else and just let the brain relax. We don't always have to go through the front door. I always tell people like, you know, it's you don't. You don't have to attack the thing that you're most afraid of, you know, don't say thank you. Yes, this is an abundance play because I honest to God, I and I'm good at people probably hate me for saying this, but I'm telling you the truth.

I have never met a healthy person who has a shitty relationship with money. Ever. And the reason is because, and the reason I choose money here, I could put in relationship. I could put in any other word. But money's objective and it's very highly emotional for people. They either got a lot or they don't. And and we all know. Right. But abundance to the universe, abundance to the life force that lives and breathes, each one of us isn't separated by to money category, health category, you know, sexy partner category, really good kids category.

Great foods that I can eat it. It's just abundance. And when you say yes. So what Eric was saying, if there's a challenging area of your life and everything we've been talking about doesn't feel like you can hit it head on, definitely don't go through the front door like you said, go find somewhere else in your life that's a little easier. That doesn't hit, that doesn't sting is bad because it like you take the food, you're going to have the reaction. Let's work on another part that will come the side door.

And when you welcome abundance in money or abundance and friendship or abundance in some other area of your life, that's the first signal to your body that, oh, I'm welcoming abundance now so I can let in a little more health. I can lead in a little more food, so it doesn't even have to have anything to do with health. And if you don't, if you don't believe me, that's awesome, because I don't want you to believe me. I want you to say, hey, you know what? What he just said, that kind of bothered me.

Maybe a little bit. Or maybe it it piqued my interest. So maybe it's a new possibility that I could try on for one day. And after you try it on for one day and you don't drop dead because you want to welcoming abundance is not a problem. Try it for a week and then try it for two weeks and start to see in your life how things will change and you don't have to do. This is not about hammer and nail. This is about being creative. Like a friend of mine says, you know, we have when you want to get great results, you can be a warrior, right?

And the warrior fight it head on. Or you can be a wizard, and a wizard is someone with the motivation of the of the warrior, but who also wants to figure out a new, different, and potentially much more fun and quick way to the result. And I would just challenge everybody to play around with being a wizard a couple minutes a day, try it a little bit different, because you still are going to be able to when you do that, and you're welcome, that abundance, you're still going to be able to take your supplements, you're still going to be able to talk to your doctors and your other providers, and we're still going to do all the same things.

It just might work that much better, more. You might just be a little happier and get a breath, a deep breath instead of zero. You get one instead of zero, you get a half. And then it just keeps growing. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, it's it's I have a tendency to, I get yelled at a lot for I always focus on what I call my failures, you know, I mean, like the in my blood cell and also in my patients, you know, the ones who like, just can't move. But, you know, the things we have to remember is that the vast majority of people, and even in them, it's just a failure of all of our imaginations, you know, that's what it is.

If we can just see a new way in, you know, and and prayer is the beginning, you know, I'm not, you know, I mean, whatever you believe in, I don't know, I it just doesn't matter. It's just having faith that there's a possibility and saying, thank you. Yes. You know, simple things. But let's I think before we before go, I really want to get to a little bit of your thoughts because this has been an amazingly beautiful riff. I know. Right, I know, but your thoughts on, you know, just on the connections, I say, I said, this is because I said this is something that that the party that the visa has has talked a lot about to me over the years.

Just on how much the nose and the brain are connected. So I just, I love your thoughts and I'm so glad I, I'm like, how are we going to get ourselves back over to that one? Because I want to talk about it, to pick us up and put us there because I want to go there. So a lot of what we've been talking about are opening to new possibilities, and one of the new possibilities would be to think about it a little bit differently. So what one of the things that we find is if we look at patterns in pandas, right.

So pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome or another way to say is it's an infection or a toxin triggered autoimmune brain inflammation. And we see it with kids. We see a lot of behavioral changes that are acute in adults. We see a lot of executive function issues. But you can see nuance that rage in OCD in adults too. So but when we look at it, pandas was the original description of this, phenomena triggered by streptococcal infection. So if we look back around 2015, they were doing some studies and they said, well, how does pandas get triggered?

Because it's not the infection doing it. It's an autoimmune reaction to the infection that's causing the brain issue. So what the researchers found, de Le Pen in a group and his group found that the first infection of the nasopharynx, meaning the nose in the throat with strep. We had these things called T helper 17 cells or 17 cells. They would come and they would say, oh, good, this is this is group strep and let's kill it. And now your immune system knew what that was. And if it got a second infection, it would mobilize the troops, so to speak, a little more quickly.

But with recurrent infection, multiple, multiple. They found that these T helper cells that are already to protect you against strep would just congregate in your nose, and then they would go up in the, nasal lymphatics into your brain and the nasal lymphatics are actually where 20 to 30% of the brain detoxification dirty water removal process occurs. So the nose call it about 25% of all brain detox comes through your your nasal lymphatics. Right. So then if we go back the other way these are your own immune cells against strep are going back to your brain.

They cause breakdown of the blood brain barrier. They cause all kinds of inflammation. And there are these really cool cells called microglia, which are support structures. But they're very they're very much like the immune system of the brain. So if an infection gets in your brain, say like Bartonella, it's supposed to gobble them up. But they got all goofed up with this recurrent strep infection. Right. So then I started looking at I go, well, well, Bartonella actually likes to go inside of the microglia, right?

So that's a problem. And how many of our Bartonella patients are really sensitive and you can't treat their Bartonella really well until you work on their mycotoxins illness or their mcats. Right. And so then I started looking at the research in the nose on, and we look at Richie Shoemaker, talked about mark ons and many others. And then Doctor Brewer talked about nasal sinus biofilm that were fungal in origin in your nose. So I started thing I'm like and I've not seen anybody research this Eric.

Like actually like put it in a mouse and see if you get the same T helper 17 cell response. But it's just that's how our body works. So if it happens in strep y and that's just recurrent infection from going to school. What if you had a colonization in you and now you have all these t h 17 cells for whatever the molds are you have, they go back and chronic micro toxicity in your nose could be creating autoimmunity and brain inflammation. And what we see from a clinical perspective is as we open up the nose and we open up that now we have less of the pro-inflammatory.

So the symptoms brain starts to work a little better then nasal passages open. We have more drainage down that nasal lymphatic. And it now it looks like we were doing some magic in. What we're really just doing is typical anatomy and physiology 101. This is how the body functions. So then if we wrap it back to what we've been talking about, one of the ways to open up your nose really well is the thing called, you take a breathing and essentially right. I haven't played with that one. I know that's always an oldie but goodie.

Yeah it is. And it's like literally so. So now if you want to create more nitric oxide in your body. Right. And that is a something that vaso dilates. It opens up our blood vessels, venules even our lymphatics. What what is the best way to do that is literally to slow your breathing down. And have jet get now in the beginning stages it's breath awareness. If we just slow our breath down carbon dioxide goes up a little. We start to create more nitric oxide in our nose. Now if you're really feeling comfortable and you can breathe well, you can go look up, you take your breathing and you kind of like our breathing so slow that you get a little bit of this, what they call comfortable need for air.

But what you're doing is now you're more nitric oxide in your face. But the cool part is it's made in those same sinuses that are all gummed up with this mycotoxins biofilm.

Nasal Health, Nitric Oxide, and Chronic Inflammation 58:30

So we're opening them up locally, but it's also going throughout your whole body. So people who breathe slower usually have better circulation. So now you've gone from improving brain detoxification by breathing, which then allows you to sleep better, which then improves your brain detoxification more because the drain is now open in your nose when you do the feces stuff. And what I just said, put them together. Nose is open. The process of opening your nose to a higher degree allows you to relax and sleep better, which then allows more drainage to come out, which then calms your gut down, which allows you to heal your gut.

Then your supplements get absorbed better. They get into your brain and now they have somewhere to freaking go. I don't know, but that's the way my brain works. I love it, I love that I think the reason I love these supplement and supplements. I love these, these summits, is that each time you know who I am, whoever I talk to, there's, you know, there's just so much to learn. And the thing is, is that that you take a breathing is something I remember years, a year. I mean, I remember using it years ago and I forgot about it.

It also ties in with another thing that someday will for really sick people is, you know, that they actually have hypoxia using a hypoxic later to actually transiently, you know, because it does it for I have one I have. Yeah. No, because it's it's like, you know, we're looking for ways again, this is the, the whole point of giving sickness in health is transient stress is good for us is what how our body thrives. It's this signal to get rid of this sicker cells and the older cells and grow and heal.

But when we have chronic illness, then that got a little bit. That pathway got stuck. And if we can only unstick it. And the way to unstick it is with simple natural, oh my God. And that is been, you know, and again and I come from that medical background where all I want you to do 20 years ago was find the right drug for you, you know, and, you know, I knew better. I mean, the place, you know, I want to I knew better. I always wanted to do it gently and holistically. But when you see really sick people, you want to give them a magic pill.

Why wouldn't you want to fix them? And it took a lot of time to realize that I couldn't fix that way. Because, you see, the thing is that sometimes you can and that is always what seduces us, is that the few people who've been sick for ten, 20 years and they come in and I give them the right antibiotic and they get better. I always go back to that because they exist, you know, that's what I call. But unfortunately, that's not who we see day in and day out, you know. Well, you know, and so it's all about coming back and finding a way to return people to so they can begin to turn on that healing, that internal healing, as you said in the beginning, use those those endogenous opioid cannabinoids and and let your body have some space.

And you just described and you take off. Breathing is something you can find online. You can read about there's I'm sure there's YouTubes and how to do it. Check. Yeah, literally, like Patrick McEwan does. Unblock your nose in five minutes. He has a couple now. Or he does, but it's it's so good. And Eric, what you're saying, it's so great. It's like, do all of it, but cut yourself some damn slack. Yeah. Stop trying so hard. Like to push your face through a wall. Yeah. So there's this. Really? If you've ever read this, there's this great little book about quantum leaps called You Squared.

Oh, do you know this? Oh, I tried this. It's really thin. It's basically chapters are like 2 to 3 pages price preach it writes it. Right. And in the, in the, prolog or the intro or whatever you call it, he goes, I as I'm writing this book, I'm sitting at this and he describes this fancy hotel like cottage places that but he's in a little cottage and he sees this fly, and the fly just keeps banging up against the, you know, the glass to get outside. And he goes, I've watched this thing fruitlessly pound against the glass and, and it's going to do it till it's last breath expires, when if it would just turn around and look over the other side of the room, a ten foot flight, there's an open door that to there to it's freedom.

And so so many times we're like, we're this close to it, right? We're so up against it because it's every moment of our damn day. What I want you to do, everybody, is to go like this and have just a little bit of space so that you can actually turn and see the doors open over there. And I don't know which direction your door is. It might be up or down or sideways, and you might have to walk through a few hallways to find the open door that lets you out. But my point is, if what you're doing is working awesome, keep doing it and do what we've talked about as an adjunct.

But if you're getting stuck and it's not working, realize that no matter how hard you and your body are trying, maybe in the moment you just need to turn and look for a different open door. Yeah, new possibilities. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, that's a beautiful, beautiful summation of why we're doing these summits is we'll just there are a lot of doors out there and, you know, and the and the in your heart. It's funny just to the last little thing I have to say, just plenty I do that is I bought this mask one time in Mexico and, it was a demon and it was a very special demon.

It was the demon that it man that hides men's joy and it hides it in your heart. How cool, I think. And that is, you know. So start here and move out and as Tom said, just try to find a new perspective, because if you're banging your head against the wall, we all know that it doesn't work. And believe me, between Tom and I, we've learned a hundred

Closing Thoughts on Healing, Faith, and New Possibilities 1:05:00

God knows how many different ways of healing, you know? And the hard part is, is finding what's going to work for you. But you listen to it, Tom is saying, is if you find that space to breathe and listen inside. It will come. Yeah. Have faith. And a lot of times when it comes, have faith, you know, find someone that you that the more you feel and hear, the more you can say, hey, I'm going to be objective with do I resonate with my provider? Do I resonate with a certain treatment? Do I resonate with the support group?

Or is this taking me down a path I don't want to go down? You have that choice because the more you resonate and hear, the more you're going to be able to objectively choose then members of your team, which includes the supplements and the medicines that are right for you. Right. And then we start to go quicker and just know that if you have the inspiration to be healthy, you have to have the ability to achieve it. There's nothing that has ever been divinely inspired by God, the universe, life, whatever it is for you that you don't have the ability to achieve, it doesn't mean it's going to be easy.

It could be, but it might not be. But if you have complete faith in the process and you do the necessary actions each time, that what you need may not show up to that last possible minute, but it will show up. And I guess I would love to share a quick quote while this is, you know, sort of a, you know, a uniquely, American early 19th century philosopher and, and he said, by thought, what you want is brought to you. So, so many of us say we know what we want. Be real clear what you want, because you actually do make it be clear, focus on what you want, your health.

And also, focus on what you're going to be doing when you're healthy because health is boring. The focus on I want to, I want to I'm going to like, you know, I want to be healthy. Why do you want to be healthy? Like, healthy is great, but what are you going to be doing and what are you going to be feeling like? Because by what you think and you have emotion behind the result is brought to you, but it's through action you receive. It is the end of waddles. Quote. So by thought, you bring it to you.

By action, you receive it. It works both ways. But what's really cool is if you're thinking it, it's bringing it closer. And if you're doing it, it's rapidly coming. So it's it's a give and take. And also, Eric, I do want to say it sounds like we need to have a conversation about autophagy and our this Sunday. Yes, yes, yes. I guess because we are thinking we are thinking these same things. But so I want to thank you with my buddy that, you know, especially practitioners, that Doctor Moorcroft has an amazing course if you're interested in Lyme and treating Lyme or treating any tick borne diseases or really probably any chronic illnesses at this point, he's got it.

And it can be overwhelming when you first start out. Yeah. And he's got a course that I think you will find really helpful to help get you started on the path. Awesome. Thank you, Tom. And just blessings. So thank you so much. So honored and grateful to be here.