
Discover the chemical that will age you the fastest and stop the flow

Founder, Peak Human Labs

Founder and Medical Director of the Academy for Integrative Medicine Health Coach Certification Program
Discover the chemical that will age you the fastest and stop the flow
Dr. Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-Cā
Full Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background 0:00
Hi everyone. I'm Doctor Sanjeev Goyal, and you're listening to the advanced Anti-Aging and Technology Summit. And today I have Doctor Kisha Urs with me. Welcome, Kisha. How are you? Delighted to be here. I'm great. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm going to just start off with your bio so people can get to know who you are. Doctor Kisha, yours is an integrative medicine expert. That's, doctor of sexology, family practice, NP psychotherapist, herbalist and board certified in functional medicine, diabetic medicine, and is also the founder medical director of the Academy of Integrative Medicine Health Coach Certification Program.
She's been in the medical field for over 30 years, having after conducting the heart study in 2013, healing unresolved traumas. What her stands for. She developed the heart model for understanding how past childhood trauma impacts adult health. This led to the creation of the unbroken online program for patients to heal their own trauma, and the Mystic Medicine Deep Immersion healing retreat. She leads at her home on San Juan Island in, I don't know. I'm sorry. What? Washington. I'm so sorry. Washington State.
I know that, okay. I don't know why. I don't know why I do all of these off by heart. Doctor Keach is a popular speaker, including at Harvard. And from the stage, and the bestselling author of Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle The Woman's Guide to Reclaiming Emotional Freedom, Vibrant Health, The Quick and Easy Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, Anti-inflammatory Recipes for seven ingredients or less for busy people. That sounds awesome. And your videos and your libido story of a workbook for women who want to fix, find, fix, and free their sexual desire.
You can listen to on, Mystic Medicine radio show and find our programs at doctor kisha.com doctor and ksat.com. So welcome. Thanks. A lot of interesting things that I want to talk about. So maybe let's start off with how did you actually get into this field. Because I can see that you start off as a family practice. And so I assume that must have been maybe I didn't actually I started out as an RNN, and so I started out as a registered nurse in, in the hospital in the ICU setting doing thoracic ICU.
And, you know, high intensity adrenaline junkie used to skydive, run marathons. And then when I was about 30 years old, I, you know, this is how my patients describe it to I all of a sudden got sick, which of course was not what would happen. But just overnight, I wound up with 10 pounds of extra puffiness all over my joints, and they were red and inflamed, and it was like someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer bunny. And I got in to see somebody and in the course of the history taking process, she asked me, have you ever had any history in your family of rheumatoid arthritis?
And I said, yeah, I think my grandfather had that. He died when he was 56 and he was in a wheelchair. And I'm 56 today, you know, not today on my birthday, but I'm 56 right now. So he died at the age that I am right now, not knowing any of the stuff that we know today, you know, around this stuff. And so she said, well, okay, here are two prescriptions, one for
Personal Autoimmune Diagnosis and Trauma Discovery 3:25
methotrexate and one for a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Take these. And when you get worse, not if come back. And you know I heard the when and I went, well hang on just a second. I'm really disciplined. You know, I, I run, I make all my own food. I'm, I have these four amazing children I'm raising and I, you know, we they get everything healthy. And I said, is there anything else? And she said, now I'm afraid you drew the genetic short straw and it's like a death sentence. It sounds like it's it. Right.
Close the book, put it on the shelf. That's the end of the story. And, you know, by doorknob, you know. And I was like, okay, so I went home. On the way home, I remember thinking, there has to be a different thing that my model of medicine offers. And at that time, I knew nothing about any of the stuff you read in my bio. Nothing. And so I went into PubMed and started looking for, you know, what is there for something besides methotrexate for RA? And I started finding some pretty compelling, studies on yoga and autoimmune disease in those days.
And so I'd never been to a yoga class. I went to my very first yoga class the next day, and in the course of the, you know, time where you're holding your the asana, I, the teacher said something enough that it piqued my interest about this. Your Vedic medicine thing. And so I went back and I again dial up modem. I asked Jeeves about your Veda, and, you know, I don't know if you're old enough to remember. Geez, I do, I do, I'm pretty. I've pretty much updated myself. Yeah, yeah. It's so, you know, the thing that I learned about your Veda when I was reading through the information I was finding was.
Oh, I kept saying that. Oh, this guy that I remember that was 30 years old, that died of an am I, that was a marathon runner. And we knew no reason why he should die of an am I at that age when he wasn't smoking? Drinking, you know, like none of the Jama seven big things for heart disease. And yet he he died right in the in the ICU bed when I was taking care of him and things like that started clicking in. I started seeing it as these patterns like, oh, these guys know that we're not all the same.
And then they also this thing I read said autoimmune disease is undigested anger. And I remember sitting back in my chair and thinking about this concept of having to digest your emotions and thinking, I've never heard of such a thing. And that's interesting. And then I was learning to meditate with this, you know, with all of the stuff I was exploring here. And one day, along this, you know, in this month period, I started thinking about the word and my meditation autoimmune. And I thought, oh, this means I'm attacking me.
Okay, okay. That must mean something here. And so when is the first time I wanted to die? And that was a really interesting question. Like, how come you want to die? Because you don't right now. So was there a time in your life you did. And so I started going back. I call the kind of breadcrumb trail back in my memory, and I found I landed on this ten year old little girl version of myself who was being sexually abused by the vice principal of my elementary school. And I remember thinking, when I saw her in my mind's eye like, oh yeah, my dad was in the Navy.
He was out to sea at the time. I had tried to tell the people in my life what was going on, but I didn't even. I was raised with no television, so I don't even think I knew what the word sex was, or molestation or abuse. I don't think I even knew the vocabulary of what was happening, and I didn't understand it. And so the things I would say to my mom were, I don't want to go to school. I'm afraid, you know, things like that. I would cry and I was like, I loved school before that. And so this, this, I when I saw that and I made that connection and that meditation that day, I thought, this has to have something to do with my right.
This is 20 years ago, but I'll bet you this is connected. And sure enough, now we know through some of the science, like the adverse childhood Experiences study, that higher your aces score, you know or that past trauma component, the higher your risk for all the chronic illnesses we see in our culture today. And you know, you know, when I when I got that, I went into it and started really delving in and healing that trauma. And my my rheumatoid arthritis was gone within six months. And it's never been back.
Oh, well, yeah. So how did So so how did you make that? What did you do that how did how does it get into remission like that. Like just take us a little bit on that journey. Yeah. So the piece around that undigested anger that was huge that just that, you know, guidance to that concept, I started realizing I'm not an angry person. I don't consider myself an angry person. I'm a people pleaser. I'm a perfection ist. I'm a pitta dosha in the Irish Vedic lexicon. Right. And I have this past trauma.
So I always say, you know, autoimmunity has these four P's, and I could, I could identify that those were belief systems and behaviors I had set in place when I was a child in response to this trauma, and they probably weren't serving me anymore. Like, I could reflect, you know, and in, Tibetan Buddhism, there's this idea of the mind witnessing the mind. Right. And I was beginning to learn to do that, like, oh, I'll bet, right that this people pleasing thing that I do on this. Right, there's perfectionism where I just try give myself, you know, to my personal records all the time, like my watch was my was drove everything from running to everything.
And I just realized this level of nervous system arousal, sympathetic nervous system arousal. I started learning the the physiology and what could happen as a result of that. And that that constant hypervigilance of my mind, always looking to see if I was safe, good enough. You know, all of those things, right? That that was creating a level of energy that was being spent that my body wasn't able to use because it was so focused out here. Then it was being taken from the bank account, so to speak, and I was in deficit.
And so then I can go back and go, oh, acne. You know, I took Accutane, you know, multiple duties when I was a child. And strep throat and so antibiotics I could start pulling together some of these physical things that had happened to, oh, you're a sugar addict, because every time you come home from school, it with a, you know, a horrible thing that had happened, there'd be this lovely homemade dessert cooling on the counter for dinner that mom had made, you know, and that was that was my comfort.
So then I was a complete sugar addict. And so I could start to peel these things apart in relationship to this early trauma and what the behaviors that had emerged from that, that were really not working in my life. And I could start to to soften them and ramp them down and really change them. And so I always say this is the ability to do this just takes a willingness to self confront, like, okay, what what is it that's motivating you to want to be the best at whatever you do? And you're the you're the one you're competing against.
Not everyone else. Okay. You know. Oh that was I have to actually be perfect to survive in this classroom. You know, in the school, it wasn't even. I have to be perfect to get respect or love. It was to survive. And so I could see that, and I could see the level of energy that that took and that it was probably wiping out my mitochondria and it was causing my genetics to express in a way that my genetics had their aura. My grandfather had it. So I was like, oh, it's not really about my genetics.
It's about the things that I'm doing that are triggering them to express in this way. So way ahead of what we knew about epigenetics. I was starting to be able to figure this out. So what was what drove me back to school? You mentioned for just for the for the listeners again, like, this is just people pleaser perfectionism. I'm just trying to catch up on some of the keywords you kind of mentioned. Yeah. What a piece. Yeah, I always I always see this in my patients with autoimmunity and I, you know, now I've taken care of thousands of people with autoimmune disease and how, you know, help them reverse it.
And I always say there are these four P's that are present and start looking for them for yourself. Perfectionism. And most people that are perfectionists don't really see that they are because they have this bar that's way up here and they're like, are you kidding? I'm not a perfectionist. I'm this far away from that.
Healing Through Self-Reflection and the Four P's 12:22
I'm like, well, the fact that you're measuring that is actually what I'm talking about, you know? And then and then people pleasing, women get 80% of the autoimmune diseases. I mean, we by far more autoimmunity than men do. And, you know, I think that's cultural. Or there's a legend in the literature, you know, like, what is that about? And I think part of it is we have more estrogen receptors and we have more estrogen reproducing and, you know, chemicals in our environment, we have that part. And then we also have this thing in our era of women feeling the need to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and look hot at the same time.
You know, it's just perfectionism driving ourselves. We have to be supermom, super wife, super everything, and we're not wired to be able to do that, you know? And we will eventually wipe out the, you know, exhaust. Like, what are your radio calls your, your oh, just, you know, it's your life force, vitality. And you'll just like it's like kicking the bucket over. Right. You don't have any more. You die. So it's good to really think about it like like a bank account. Where are you putting anything into that account as you're withdrawing?
And so that's that piece around women culturally. I also think we tend to, care give a lot more than we realize. And if you don't have your self on your to do list at the top of it, and you're caregiving everyone else and then wanting someone that you're caregiving to turn around and witness you and say, oh, I see you need something, then that can cause a lot of resentment. I use the Enneagram a lot, and I see a lot of the ones and twos on the Enneagram with autoimmune disease in my practice. So which are perfectionists that are also exceptional caregivers, but they don't put themselves on their list, right?
So they exhaust themselves with it. So I saw that you have a like you also an expert in and helping women with their libido and and helping people, busy people. So it sounds like this could also tie into what. Yes. What you kind of put it together like this piece of helping people with that because that is this tight end, right? Yep. And I would have all these women coming into my practice and, and they would say, you know, I need bioidentical hormones. I understand, you know, my, my daughter, my friend, my sister, you know, that you prescribe that for them and they feel fabulous.
And I want some of that, you know, and so I start asking questions like, well, why do you think you need to be on hormones? And, and then I would get this sort of like common thing. Well, I don't have any more sexual desire. My poor husband is so patient. Bless his heart that you know or, that ship has sailed. I don't really care if it's gone, but it's it's kind of a sign that I think something's wrong, you know, these kinds of things. And. And then I would ask the follow up question, like, well, do you like your partner?
Or I would often get women just bursting into tears, you know. Oh, I do, I love him, but, you know, I live in Seattle area where there are a lot of engineers and, there are a lot of emotionally sad women here because that, that mat of, you know, an emotional need and then more of the left brain kind of analytical and a lot of and I started thinking about that like, oh, that's interesting. This, this is not going to come back with hormones. You know, this libido that's gone away and left you. And so I was getting a lot of stuff like that.
Or you had an affair five years ago. I forgiven him, but I haven't had wanted to have sex with him ever since. Each one of these things are a story that has nothing to do with hormones. And so I, I started looking in the medical research and not finding anything for what I was seeing. So I went back to school and I got my PhD in sexology because I was wanting to really explore human relationships and dynamics and the impact it was having on women's libido. And what I discovered was, oh, the same concepts in this hurt model also apply to autoimmune disease and hypertension and obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Like it just means you are draining your bucket dry when you have this trauma and in a traditional medicine thing, would you say that you're saying that sympathetic nervous system, overactive ness examined, the cortisol excess cortisol levels and adrenal fatigue, perhaps. Exactly. Is that how. Yeah, they all of that. The really interesting thing about that is that all of that is driven by perceptions. So we tend to go in when we're talking about that on and on a neuro biological level. We'll talk about the adrenals and the hypothalamus and how the thyroid, you know, is governed by the pituitary.
And then and, you know, we'll go through this whole thing about how it all happens, but we don't put in the most important part of this. Oh, and by the way, that cortisol wipes out, you know, starts to break apart your gut wall. And then you can have just biotic flora and then and then that's going to affect your mood and your weight. And we we do this access right. The hypothalamus pituitary adrenal gut axis. But we don't talk about what's above it which is your perceptions. Your perceptions govern the entire thing.
And so if you think yourself overwhelmed, then all of that gets set into motion. If you think yourself unsafe, not good enough, not fast enough, whatever it is, then if you feel rejected, if you feel betrayed, all of this is about your perceptions and the thoughts that I started studying. That's it. Right? The whole thing. That's the only thing that starts your adrenals going is you. Right? Is, you know, tell us that was your restarts. I was your, Yeah. Your your studies wasn't it was in particular the impact of cognitive, the thinking you created on, on those early events, the beliefs you put in place and then the adaptive behaviors that your child brain remember, our brains are not fully developed over 26.
Libido, Relationships, and Emotional Roots 18:38
We don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex. So we're 26 years old. So with our child brain, which is more of that limbic system, right? We formed beliefs and meanings and adaptive behaviors for what was happening for us. And it doesn't need to be capital T trauma that I'm talking about. It can be failing a test or not getting to the top of the rope and pee in front of everybody, or not getting picked for the ball team, whatever it is, right? Then you're going to create an adaptive behavior in response to that, which will drive everything.
Once you do have a prefrontal cortex. Now, when you get into adulthood, it's those moments when things aren't working that you get an opportunity to kind of sit back and go, oh, oh, that, that meaning that believe that behavior that's not really serving me anymore. And I can see now that was really smart of my child self to do that. It really got us through it. But now we can do something different. And so that's all perceptual. You had this, Asian study piece talk a little bit about that. Like, what is the study?
Yeah, the aces study was conducted between 1995 and 1997 by the centers for Disease Control and the Kaiser Permanente and Kaiser Permanente, being big health insurance HMO in the United States, had a weight loss clinic, and it was really successful. You know, in the numbers of people that were able to lose their weight. And and the director of the clinic started noticing that several people that were of kind of a higher percentage than was comfortable. I suppose that's what brought it up. We're dropping out before reaching goal weight, in spite of being successful at losing weight, and started going back and interviewing those people and finding out that most of them had sexual abuse in childhood.
And so this instigated this great big study of over 3500 Kaiser Permanente enrollees with the CDC in Kaiser looking at what they call adverse childhood experiences. And they asked a set of ten questions of all of these participants, you know, the largest study of its kind and said before the age of 18, did you experience any of these things? And it would have been sexual abuse, domestic violence, emotional abuse, abandonment, neglect, having a caregiver addicted to a substance or mentally ill or incarcerated or divorced or dead, you know, big capital T traumas, the higher the you know, if you did a quick mark reach, that was an ace score of one, two, three, depending on how many you experience, the higher that aces score, the higher your risk.
For every single chronic illness we see, including heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disease, and then also and it could affect sexual desire also true and see at school and work and your level of desire to engage in self-care activities. This is a big one that hit home for me. It's one that I don't hear a lot of people talking about, but it's the one that made so much sense to me. If the belief that you had after you went through trauma when you were a kid is, oh, I must not be worth taking care of.
Then as you get into adulthood, this is the patient that gets in front of you that says, I'm good for a while and then I'm bad. I'm off the wagon, I self-sabotage. I can't seem to stick with a diet. I can't seem to do this. This is because of this piece. Oh. I must not be worth taking care of. And none of this is conscious. It's all back here in this child brain said I am not worthy or I am. Which what is this? What is the statement? Is that like, I'm not. I'm not at all any of the above, right?
I must not deserve protection. I must not be worthy of love and protection. I must not be worth taking care of. You know, depending on how high the trauma is, it's going to be a more deeply ingrained belief around that. And so that has to be healed. Now, instead of going at it from a cognitive behavioral therapy approach where you just change your behavior, your behavior is happening with executive function in your adult brain. But if you were triggered back into a child space, you don't have access to that, which is why the bag of Doritos opens at night while you're watching late night
Stress, Perceptions, and the ACEs Study 23:08
TV or a whole package of Oreos goes missing and you don't know how that quite got into your body. You know, that kind of thing that will happen sometimes with our patients or an exercise program. You're on it and then you're off and you can't figure out, you know, oh, like I went on vacation and now everything, you know, it's gone down in flames. This is the kind of thing that I started making this connection with. So the higher the aces score, the more likelihood of all of these things that we're talking about happening.
And it's triggered by perceptions. And the tell us about the, the heart study. So the heard study, I got curious about why the findings were the way they were and the Aces study, you know, like, well, how does that happen? So the things I just described between child brain, adult brain, that's not illustrated inside of that Aces study that came out of the hurt mom. Yeah. So what I discovered was you first have some experience. So we're little humans trying to figure out how to be a big human in a world governed by and dominated by big humans.
And in that space, we are told if we're good or bad, you know, that's that's how it works when we're getting when we're growing up by our caregivers. And so and that very black and white way of being as we're growing up, we're learning the mores of our culture, how to stay alive, like how to be a good human from the people that are teaching us, that all of us go through experiences during that upbringing where we don't have a very a very well attached. Well, you know, grounded caregiver in our pocket, 24 seven where we go off to school or we go, you know, anywhere without a parent that and then even our parents sometimes are not well attached and well grounded and mentally great.
And so we'll have experiences that occur, like maybe you had three friends out on the playground one day, and the next day they're talking bad about you, and you've just been left out of the group like stuff like that. We are wired biologically to know that if we're stuck on the outside of the firelight circle from our tribe, the sabertooth tiger can eat us. So these are experienced as traumatic events for us as children. These things that just occur is life. You know, the lunch room? Not sure. Can I sit at that table?
You know, and so it sounds like, this sounds like everyone's experience. It's everybody. And it has trauma. Everybody. What makes somebody trauma becomes trauma. And their I mean, becomes outwardly manifesting and maladaptive behaviors and other people maybe not as bad. How does that how does that happen? That's the very interesting thing that I, I love to talk about is because everybody has had trauma of some kind, whether it's I call it lowercase t or capital t trauma. And the maladaptive part that you just said in the hurt model there are two branches.
So the first thing is you have that event, you don't understand what just happened. You have an emotion. So you're going to have an emotion. Maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's fear, maybe it's anger, maybe a sadness in that sympathetic arousal that will follow that emotion. Usually in childhood it's freeze. It's not fight, it's not flying. You're right. You don't have power. As a kid. It's usually freeze. So then that gets frozen in your body, you know, in that that place where, wherever now you hold your stress there around that thing, and then you have a meaning you create about that moment.
And we're all going to be different about the meaning that we create. And so from there, we're going to do this adaptive behavior response. For that moment. Some people's adaptive behaviors are going to work for them their whole lives. And they may run them as patterns until they die. And they may be culturally acceptable, like overachieving. We're very rewarded as adults for being overachievers, and so that may never show up as something that could be causing some problems. And so it's the moment in adulthood where you come up against something.
And Joseph Campbell calls it the hero's journey, right? You get you where some big challenge occurs. Those are the moments you get to go back and reevaluate these things where the challenge is there. You don't have the skills to get through that challenge, and you have to go find a mentor and Joseph Campbell's hero's journey right. And in my case, it was functional medicine and Vedic medicine. And because my paradigm didn't have my answers. And then I got to confront what is in my own being, that's that set this up, and then I get to integrate that and come out.
And now I have a different and an evolved state of being. And then we keep doing that throughout our lifetimes. So it's when that pattern or that strategy that you have isn't working for you, that you start to notice it. Sometimes, like I said, people are adaptive and it's no, it doesn't feel like there was a trauma there and they can get all the way through until death. And they're still running the same pattern because the culture accepts it. So what is the, So it looks like the healing I want healing journey is probably all different, but what are your recommendations?
Or like, you're saying mentorship, perhaps, or, you know, I mean, how do you how do you recommend that we should start to address these unresolved trauma that we are. It depends on if it's causing you trouble. Right. The question you just asked is a is a very relevant one, like you're the summit that we're talking about here is anti-aging technology. And one of the things that ages us the quickest is unhappiness. And I always say the toxin that's present, there is resentment. And that resentment actually is the most toxic substance on the planet.
And it's not manufactured by corporations and dumped into the air, soil and water. It's manufactured right here. And if you're bathing your mitochondria in resentment and the hot tub of resentment, you're going to get sick. And that's what the ACS study shows. Like there is a direct correlation to your aging process. If you have an ACS score of six or more, studies show that you live 20 years less than somebody that doesn't have an ACS score. This is huge. 20 that's very important. How could our viewers understand the ACS core just is that is that there's a site out there where they can do their own test on that and get them.
Yeah. There is I have it in my book, Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle in the very beginning. And then I have you take the quiz and then I say, and now you have a number and that means just it's just data for you. Just like the number on your scale, it's just data. And well, you know, here's what we're going to do with that number. And you can switch all this stuff just because you have an ACS score of six or more doesn't mean that all the things that are shown in the research have to happen, because what they're showing, what they're pointing to is this is what happens if you just keep going in the same way.
But if you do this intervention, right, like I did, if you if you get in there and you heal that up and it doesn't mean you have to go in and relive it, it's actually not that hard to do this work. So, you know, and so I guide people in that process and in while I'm looking at their genetics, while I'm helping them with their toxic load of chemicals and healing their Epstein-Barr, and, you know, all of those other things that are also aging them. Right? While we're healing of that gut. Oh, we're doing that.
You know, how much and how do they know how much resentment they have? How can one know that I know it? You can look at it and you can say, how often am I reactive in my mind? How often to my reactive. So in other words, if the politician that's in power at the moment causes you reactivity and you get what's causing my stress, you're going to end up. I was getting very stressed out by the previous president. I would be calm now. It's surprising how much impact this has had, I know.
The Heart Study and Trauma Patterns 31:28
So he was an amazing teacher for this, for me, for being able to help people to to not react, stay in the space of grounded, anchored, calm and equanimity and make the the life choices that you want to make to change what you don't like out here. But it doesn't have to drag your nervous system with you. You can still be an activist. You can still, you know, stand for what it is that you want to be on this planet without resentment, without anger, and the anger and the resentment are literally going to kill you and take you and Aids you like smoking does.
I mean, it's really crazy. It really does. You know, and and I love I love that 25 years ago I read this thing, you know, IRA medicine says autoimmune diseases and digested anger because it's undigested anger is the thing that causes the lines between the eyebrows that we call the liver line. You know, it causes it causes the downturned mouth. And these decreases here that actually indicate you're not absorbing your nutrients very well. And you can look at your tongue and you can see all the yellow stuff in the back.
That's a coating that's saying, I'm not digesting my food very well, because when you're angry, you're a zebra being chased by a lion and your own mind and your own perceptions. And if that zebra is being chased by a lion and it's fearing for its death right now, it knows it's not safe to stop and poop right now. So your digestion shuts down, all your reproductive hormones shut down because that zebra knows it's not safe to reproduce right now. And so if you have like a politician on your tail, right, if you're always in a place like that where you perceive that things are not the way you want them to be, and then you bring your body with you, your body is going to age faster than it needs to do.
Right? Okay. Just complete, throwing it out there. Question. What about, impact of psychedelics? And, and healing. Have you had any, I have had a lot of experience with that. And I absolutely love the role, and I love to talk about it because I as as yoga came over to the United States in North America from India, right? Years and years ago, our culture shifted from, a practice of eight limbs, you know, where you're actually taking these yamas and the, as the do's and don'ts of life, which mean non reactivity, learning how to meditate, learning how to focus, learning, you know, learning how to really have union with what's sacred.
We took it and we made it an exercise program. We took the third limb of yoga, the asanas. And we made it into a workout right. And yeah, we're doing the same thing with psychedelic medicine. Exact same thing. What we're doing is we're saying, oh, you know, when I take this plant medicine and I work with it, it slides my left brain aside. The analytical brain that's judgy. You know, that's actually has to have proof. That's like this. We we slide that aside. We let our right brain come forward and have these beautiful visuals in a playground of, oh, wow, there's more to all this than I thought.
But we we think we're passive observers in the process. And and then I would I'm witnessing now is our culture doing the exact same thing it did with yoga where people are going on yoga retreats in order to feel better and reduce their stress in their own heads. But they're not. Integrating with the lessons from the meditation cushion and the mat are when they're upright, they're still honking at everybody in the traffic. They're still eating the Oreos, they're still getting angry at the politician, and they're not realizing that, oh, this, this thing that I get to, you know, somebody needs to actually be means to be put into every breath of my, my life.
Same with psychedelic medicine. You need to integrate. And so that means not taking it all the time, not seeking these great big, you know, events that then you share with everybody and talk about and say how cool it is, but then you're not actually saying, okay, what do I need to confront about my own being, my own personality strategies and patterns that I can shift. And so sometimes, like, I remember working with ayahuasca in the jungle with my daughter, I took her on her, and every one of my kids, I took on a little vision quest, and we worked with ayahuasca for just a jumping in there.
How old was it that you recommend taking your kids or, or making the ayahuasca journey? Because that's something I'm thinking about for my kids. Who is 17. And so all my kids were between 17 and 18 when I would take them on their vision quest. And so seven seven ayahuasca journeys over a 12 day period with the people, you know, and so that they
Psychedelics, Integration, and Inner Healing 36:38
there was a lot of stuff that came out of that. And I remember when we were in the airport, I said, I probably don't need to work with mother. I again, for a long time because so much came through. I knew I had to work on this for a long time. And it was it was five years before I, you know, before I worked with it again. It was like, that's enough. There's so much that I have here that I have to now put into integration. And so instead of chasing the experience, right, it's important to then apply it.
And so what I do with my patients is I actually, you know, help them integrate. And so I'm a watch mirror which is called San Pedro in common. Yep. San Pedro. Yeah. Yeah. But it's what uma and and so that's one that I'll work with with people as well as some other things. And, and then integration is the most important part of the entire experience, you know, so opening up the heart, letting the, the left brain take a backseat, all of those things are really important so that you can learn how to find the one in there that you have abandoned.
Instead of looking out here for all of the things that have abandoned you, where are you self abandoning? Like when a whole pan of brownies disappears, you've just self abandoned. You went, you disassociated, right? And so it helps you to know where are the boundaries that you have to have with yourself first. Then you start applying that here. So leaky boundaries means leaky gut you know. And so that's in the hypervigilant mind means a hyper vigilant immune system. And so it's working here first not out here all the time.
Yeah. Well okay. That's very powerful. Tell us about the you run the Integrated Academy of Integrative Medicine Health Coach certification program. Who needs to know about that's like who's this for. And anyone that this is speaking to that is really interested. Like I found that I have probably some of the most intelligent patients of anyone in the world, you know, just they would come in with notebooks that were highlighted and tabbed for all the members of the family. And, you know, they asked me such intelligent questions and they had watched a zillion summits.
I call, I call my program. It's for the summit junkies. And they had all this information, but they didn't know how to apply it to them as individuals. And so what I do is I teach them, you know, as health coaches, how to take food sensitivity testing and stool testing and adrenal and hormone testing and Sibo breath test, you know, and how to work with that information, along with the emotional component, the emotional healing. Like, why are all those things off that's going to have to do with your perceptual field?
First and foremost. And so now how do you heal them both? Because you don't just heal your perceptions and not pay attention to your gut. You have to heal at the same time. Yeah. No, it's that's exciting. We're just about to end soon. How would you, what would be the, message you want to get out to the whatever from today's kind of talk, what's the main thing they should take back with them? The. There's so much there. I have what I'll take and I'll tell you the second, but I'll be here for you how you put it together.
Yeah. So the whole thing I was talking about with resentment, you know, and draining that bathtub of resentment that your cells are bathing in, that has to happen in a stepwise process. If you don't jump from, I call forgiveness, like the free medical tool, you don't have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on it. It's it's free, but you don't have to that immediately, that you have to go through this process of actually digesting what has happened in your life. Again, not having to live through it.
And a lot of people that have had trauma say, I don't remember my childhood. Is that going to get in the way of me healing? I say, absolutely not. What we want to find are what are these meanings that you created. You don't have to have the images of whatever went on that you wanted to forget, and that's why you don't remember your childhood. So it's it's really taking the parts that you have disowned about yourself, you know, the, the parts in there that have protectors around them now in your ego structure and being able to fall in love with them.
Like I read a, Tibetan Buddhist meditation book one time. I'm a I'm a master's of divinity student right now in a Tibetan Buddhist college. So I'm reading a lot of this stuff. And in the beginning of it, the, the, the one that was translating from the Tibetan lama, he, the Tibetan lama had liver cancer and the his student who spoke English. He was giving these teachings before he died. For Westerners. And he said the attendant would come and get him and wake him up at like one in the morning and say, Lamas ready for you, you know?
And he'd go in there and the lama was in this abject misery and pain, but he was beaming love, because he would call his cancer the mother that was teaching him compassion and about impermanence. And he said that, you know, then these teachings would come out of him. And he was so in love with his cancer because it was teaching him all of this wisdom. Right. And so the guy that was writing the book said in the foreword of it, I couldn't imagine with my own weak mind being able to do that. And I remember reading that term weak mind and just bursting into tears and thinking, in my entire life, I have never allowed myself to think that I could have a weak mind.
It's always had to be very intelligent. That's what I lead with, you know? And I thought, there's one in there who has a weak mind, who just stays hidden from the world and me. And so this process of learning to fall in love with the part of you
Integrative Medicine Coaching and Closing Message 42:38
that you don't want anyone else to know about, that you've hidden away from you. So I brought that one out and I was like, oh, hi, little weak minded one, you know, and and that lets resentment go because then you're not impatient anymore with somebody around you that you might judge as having a weak mind. It makes judgment go away. Then you're not reactive and you're not unhappy. You're not angry. We have resentment a lot against our self like parts of ourself as our. Yeah, right. But we have that we don't want anyone to see and we don't want to know about ourselves.
You know, we all, all humans have the same personality, but we do. We do the traits differently from each other. Like we're all cruel, we're all kind, we're all jealous. We're all tolerant. We're all we have all of it in us. Right? But it's whichever one that we spend the most time feeding that grows the strongest. And so, you know, you can see somebody outside of you and like the politician that you're upset with in Canada, that created a lot of stuff here. And you can see that one and you can go, oh, what is it about that one that's bothering me? That's within me.
And so there's a whole process that I take people through where you begin to find that one that you've you project out here and you go, but that one is like that, you know, but then you don't react to it in the same way when you can have compassion for it. So at the same time, you can also work to make sure it's not leading your country. So, you know, like it's it's two things, right? You have to fall in love with all aspects of how we show up, and then also work to have the world that you want to live in at the same time.
And sometimes we think of that as an either or. Thank you so much. That's so helpful. It's I think it's what I've taken away is that, that apart from the, you know, medicine part, which is, you know, tests and medications and things like that and supplements and all that, there's a whole emotional aspect and spirit aspect of what you deal with. And I didn't really, really think about too much about the connection. I think you really helped me bring that. And I think our viewers to get understand the critical importance of that, of that whole piece.
And, I really appreciate that. Thank you for your time. Thank you for the pleasure. All right. Thank you everyone. This was Doctor Kesha. He was, with us on at advanced Anti-Aging and Technology Summit. I hope you enjoyed the interview today.
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