Childhood Trauma & Chronic Illness

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Welcome to this episode of the Mycotoxins and Chronic Illness Summit. I'm so happy to have with me today, Doctor Keesha Ewers. Today we're going to talk about trauma, leaky boundaries, leaky gut, and the connection to mycotoxins illness. So will you please introduce yourself to our audience? Sure. It's so, so good to be here again. My name is Kisha. Yours and I have, a PhD in sexology, and I'm, family practice, advanced registered nurse practitioner, or IR and PE with specialty in integrative medicine.

I'm a psychotherapist, including using plant medicines for healing trauma, MDMA certified psychotherapists, and, certified conscious dying to and the founder of the Academy for Integrative Medicine health coach certification program, and the author of Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle and the Quick and Easy Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook. It's so great to have you here, Keisha. I love all the myriad of beautiful things that you have explored in this life, and then explore with your patients what you learn, what you give to them.

So thank you for all that you do and thank you. I, I, like you have a passion for writing. It's the only reason we're here. It sure is. Yeah. Thanks for being here. So tell us about how you came to this work. You know, I was a, 19 year old registered nurse in a kind of high intensity. High adrenaline. I was an adrenaline junkie, you know, life. LifeFlight and intensive care unit and balloon pump team. And I just loved all of the high intensity stuff. And I was running marathons and having children and raising four small children when in my early 30s, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.

And, you know, that was that was really remarkable because just like my patients will come to me and say, all of a sudden, I'm sick. That's how I experienced it, too. And of course, we know that's not true. It's not all of a sudden takes a lot of years to have a fully developed ICD ten code. You know, illness, right, takes a long time to get there. You have to have that diagnostic code attached to it. But I had been in balance for a really long time and just didn't know the language that my body spoke in.

I didn't realize that it had been trying to tell me over the years. I would just I used a lot of Advil. I took Accutane when I was 19 for acne. You know, I would use antibiotics for, repeat of kind of chronic ear infections and strep throat. So I was always treating something. When I would get run down, I would get an instant sore throat. I get pain in my feet because of all my running. And I would just pop Advil, you know? So my body was trying to tell me that it was having troubles

Autoimmune Illness and the Search for Root Causes 3:14

and I just thought, you know, you were only 19. So yeah, between the ages of 19 and 32, I was diagnosed with. All right, okay. Yeah. And I had four kids in that period of time. And I had to have my gallbladder out because I had polio, cystitis. And, you know, I mean, just a lot of things happen. I had my tonsils out in that period of time, and it was all in them, the sort of Western medical paradigm. Right. Like, this is causing me trouble. So let's take it out and get out of what's going on underneath it all.

And you know, what can we do to get to the root cause that that wasn't even in the the language of what? You know, I'd been trained in. And so, you know, I didn't realize that all of these were signs of an imbalance that my body was trying to get my attention with. So I, you know, when I was diagnosed with RA, I had gone in that morning, I'd woken up just overnight with ten extra pounds of puffiness all over my, my body and my joints. And I was red, inflamed and a lot of pain. And it was like someone had just taken the batteries out of the Energizer Bunny.

That's what my friends used to call me was the Energizer Bunny. And so I did. And the doctor said, do you have a history of autoimmune disease in your family? And I said, well, my grandfather, I think, had rheumatoid arthritis, you know, and my grandfather died at the age I am right now. I just turned 57 yesterday and got the birthday keys. Thank you. Yeah. He died of this disease in a wheelchair. Right. And so she said, well, that's what you have. And, you know, like here, here are two prescriptions.

One is for methotrexate and one is for a very strong non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Come back when you're worse. Not if you get worse. And we'll take your meds. Right. And I just and I stopped her. I said, well, hang on just a second. Is there anything else that I can do? I'm very disciplined. I make my own food, you know, I'll do anything. And she said, now it's genetic. That's it. So I just remember driving home and thinking, there has to be a difference, a different paradigm out there somewhere than this one that has any answer to the question I'm asking.

And so I started exploring. And so that's how I really got into this. I found, PubMed article on yoga and an autoimmune disease. I went to my first yoga class the next day, and the yoga teacher said, just enough about this word I your Vedic medicine. And I went home and research that, and the internet told me that I Veda 10,000 years ago said that autoimmune disease is undigested anger. And I remember sitting back in my chair and thinking, I'm not an angry person, and yet I have an autoimmune disease.

And then realizing that maybe that was actually part of the issue, that I didn't allow anger, I didn't recognize it, I didn't I wasn't able to track myself, and it was just all being stored in my body. And then maybe I was very disconnected from my, you know, my head, from my body. And maybe this was part of my problem. And so I learned to meditate and, and started training to become a yoga teacher. And in that process, I remember having the word autoimmune just kind of dancing in front of my third eyes face.

One day when I was meditating and thinking like, oh no, I mean looking at this word, you know? Yeah, that means I'm attacking myself, right? Right. That means I'm killing myself, literally. And I and I just remember thinking, well, when's the first time I wanted to die? Like, why am I killing myself? Because I don't want to die right now. And so that was a very important way of framing it for me. And as I, as I went backwards in my, my meditation looking for that time period that maybe I did want to die, I found a ten year old little girl version of myself that was being sexually abused by the vice principal of the elementary school.

I'm so sorry. And and I remember looking at her and thinking how she wanted off the planet. She wanted to die, and my dad was out to leave, you know, out to sea in the Navy. At that time, I tried to tell my mom that something was going on, but I don't think I had the right words. And, you know, I just didn't know what to do and was confused. And so I remember looking at that little girl and going, oh, I'll bet that this time period has something to do 20 years later with what's happening right now with my body.

And sure enough, science tells us that that's true, that what is lutely is connected and so luckily, what I did was dive right into trauma healing because I realized it had to be connected. And within six months, my aura was gone. And it's never been back. What? What a moving story. Yeah. Sad. And you hear that and I'll say, oh my gosh, that's a that's a moving story to tell her terrible story. And then they'll say like if they didn't experience sexual abuse and I'm I'm just praying that no one that's hearing my voice has the unfortunate truth is 1 in 4 people have that are reported. Right.

Which means there's more.

Trauma, Brain Changes, and Leaky Gut 8:43

But the thing of it is, is that story includes what we can call a capital T trauma. But there are lowercase t traumas too. Every human has had trauma. So sometimes when I tell that story, people will think, well, I had a really good child, that I never had any. Those things happen to me. So this isn't relevant to me, and I just want to kind of bring everyone back into the conversation and say it's relevant to everyone because our wherever our bar is set, our level of trauma is the worst trauma we've ever had from right?

I mean, condition, whether it is sexual abuse or some kind of psychological or emotional abuse or or self-induced. Yeah, it it's something it's happened each human it's the Buddhists say every human is suffering. We're all in the same boat. The suffering might look different. It does look different for each person. But we do have that in common. Exactly. Yeah. And that's exactly true. And and research tells us you know with looking at there was a study that I looked at in my doctoral work where I went, oh my goodness.

You know, because I'd already seen a lot of Pet scans of brains, fMRI scans looking at brain architecture changes to in response to trauma that had been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. So, you know, a diagnostic code of PTSD, this is what the brain looks like. It's kind of like the old 80s commercial. This is your brain on drugs that the egg dropping into the frying pan, right. This is your brain on trauma, right? That's amazing. The scans were the same like for for every human that had had PTSD that that was scanned.

There was some form of a shrinkage in the prefrontal cortex up here, which is your adult brain that helps you make executive functions, like who to hang out with, how to spend your money, what to eat that you know, all of your your day to day adult functioning and a growth in the child part of the brain. The limbic system in the right sided amygdala, like the volume was increased in that limbic system, obviously, in the Midwest with PTSD. Well, a study showed that when they gave the participants, personal stress inventory to take, you know, that's the one where you say, have you moved in the last year?

Have you gotten married, gotten divorced, gotten a job, gotten laid off, had children, had an empty nest? It, you know, like all of it. Right. All of the normal stresses of a regular human life, right? When people reported themselves as being chronically overwhelmed and having a high personal stress inventory, which there's not a human in my world that, you know, that comes to see me, that doesn't have high perceived stress. Me neither. Right. It's kind of the life that we've we've generated in our era, right?

It's very fast paced. It's very productivity oriented. It's very achievement oriented. And, you know, it's very materialistic. And so that actually changes the brain architecture the same as PTSD. If you think of yourself as overwhelmed and overscheduled, you get the same brain changes as somebody that has PTSD. It's crazy. That's the lowercase t trauma, right? Yeah. It makes so much sense because we have we all have these stressors and they're cumulative, right? Some of us from the time we were born all the way up.

And so it's like this constant, effect on our brains, neuroplasticity, whether it's a capital T or a small T, we can have many small T's and they, they add up and, and can equate a few large T's so easily. Exactly. Biochemically, physically. Right. So then that increases your that, you know okay. So you have this perception that you're, you're stressed out all the time. Then your brain messenger chemicals your neurotransmitters will send the message down to the adrenal glands that you're a zebra being chased by a lion and you're about to get eaten for dinner.

The adrenals will respond as if you are a zebra being chased by a lion and about to get eaten for dinner. So cortisol goes pumping out into your system. Your reproductive hormones come into silence, your digestive system comes into calm and quiet, and you have cortisol going out there to increase your heart rate, increase your blood pressure so that you can get away from said lion. And but, you know, if we're constantly perceiving ourselves as unsafe, not good enough, not beautiful enough, not smart enough, enough, whatever it is not safe, not safe, not safe, not safe.

Then what will happen is that cortisol will break down the lining of the gut. So you wind up with leaky gut. And if you wind up with leaky gut and that immune system which is supposed to do this, it's supposed to do this. It's not misbehaving. It's supposed to go after anything that it reads as not you to. Then foods that you eat a lot are coming through that gut wall. The immune system is marshaling an attack against this thing that it's reading is not you. It could be blueberries, broccoli, salmon, and coconut oil.

Right? Is guilty. And you might end up being, you know, hyper hyper reactive with your immune system. Well, guess what happens when you're exposed to mycotoxins. You're going to, you know, have an exaggerated response to it. Yes. Yeah. This is where mast cell activation happens. And intense clearance the chemicals and histamine. Yeah. And then there's research also that shows that stress causes immune dysregulation. So we have people who have it's just not going right. Right. Yeah exactly. Hyperactive immune system with the mast cells and the autoimmune conditions of ties it right back to what you started talking about, the autoimmunity and the stress.

Then at the same time, they're not able to mount the appropriate immune response to kill off the infections. Right. And so we loop it we loop it back to one of the most important pieces being trauma, whether it's big T or small T right. Live effect over time. The way that I always think about it in my mind, because I'm very visual is, I used to play chess with my dad and, you know, if you if you keep leading with those pawns, it's like you're lymphocytes, right? I'm throwing him into the fray to fight off broccoli.

Right. Then when the big bad guy comes along, Covid or baa or herpes, you know, or chicken pox virus and you're wound up with, you know, this varicella or lovely shingles. Right, right. And there's nothing left on the board. Yeah. Yeah it's true. It's so many different illnesses can come about then at that point because it's true. It might sound telling the audience at most it might sound like we're joking when we talk about being, being sensitive to broccoli. But it's true. There are a lot of patients out there who are sensitive to the things that are supposed to be most benign.

I'm not joking. Like she's not joking in and dad in my in my practice. And people will look at their food sensitivity tests and say, oh, I thought sweet potatoes were supposed to be good for me. Or I thought, coconut oil is good for me, you know? And and the problem is, is that when you have a what's good for you list that someone's written in, in a book, you know, a functional medicine book or, blog post, your body has its own individual reactivity that's going on. And so, you know, there's really nothing that your body's going to say is good for it.

If it's got this whole immune dysregulation going on,

Personalized Healing and Childhood Patterning 16:58

you know, it's it's asking and biting first before asking questions. And so that's what we want to do is we want to calm down. Right. Ask questions first. Yes. So it's not a one size fits all treatment protocol at all. Not at all. So we're really doing personalized medicine here, working with patients in their food activities, but also taking it even further. Where does the trauma lie and how do we heal that while we're working with the biochemistry of the person as well? I mean, it all really starts like that.

That cortisol response from the adrenals starts here, not down in the adrenal glands. Right? Right. Perceptions. Right. So working at that level is essential. Like sometimes practitioners will specialize in teaching emotional freedom technique for example, or somatic body healing Chandler release exercises, shaking different things. You know breathwork these are all fantastic to to relieve that that overload in the nervous system. However, if we're starting with vagal nerve toners, you know, things like this, we're we're missing it because we have to start here with what is even activating it.

Can we stop the activation process in the first place rather than trying to slow it down? You know, so that's that's where I see a lot of this going awry. It's great to stop your nervous system from getting overwhelmed, but what about preventing it? Right? Right. So tell us about ways that you that you begin to help patients heal their past childhood trauma. So one of the ways that I work with people is to first explore what were the meanings and beliefs they created in response to, working inside, growing up inside of their family or caregivers of origin, whatever that look like for them.

And we we really just start exploring what are the meanings that each person made up about these different events that occur on the human growth and developmental. Right. Chronicle flying. You could say we're not linear. And so the way that I always think about it is because we're not linear and quantum physics tells us time is not linear. The person that we're going to be when we die is available to the person we were when we were first born. And so wherever we heal trauma in this moment, we're healing the past and the future.

And that's powerful okay. That's absolutely believe that two bio sentences. Yes. Centric design. Yes. Quantum physics. There's a great book by Robert Lanza called Bio Centric Design. That's really great. That shows the scientific proof of that. Right? Where a lot of mystical, spiritual practices throughout time have set that now are science is showing it, which is very, very cool. So I start with where you are today. You don't have to go back and relive trauma. You don't even have to remember it.

I start with what's going on in this moment today that might be getting in your way. Do you have unhealthy relationship patterns or relationship? Do you have an unhealthy relationship with your body or with food? Or, you know, your aging process, whatever it is, what whatever's going on, we start there and then I help you unlock, you know what, the pattern where it started, and then we heal that part where it started and then it unfolds itself and unwinds. Yeah, I love the starting with today, because a lot of the times people think that they need to relive their past trauma in order to heal it, but I think it's really important to meet time as it comes to us.

And so people do spend a lot of time living their life in the rearview mirror. What happened? But what happens when you're when you're looking back like this and you're trying to move forward, you're just going to keep crashing into the same patterns that you always have been. So, you know, there you are, right? Exactly. So meeting time is it comes knowing that is going to heal the past and heal your future. Because now you're shifting your patterning so that you don't have to live in that certain way.

And I love that you brought the word patterning because people don't recognize, yeah, patterns until maybe we help point that out to them. Right? I mean, you know, you're you're surrounded with the pattern behind you, right? And your sweater is made from a specific pattern, and your earrings have a specific pattern. And, you know, we can I talked about chess earlier. The chessboard has a specific pattern. And then the pieces go on the chessboard in a very specific pattern. And when you learn how to be good at pattern recognition, you know, you start to understand that these patterns are if you just change one part of it, it changes the entire thing.

So going forward and you just have to make one little adjustment, you know, and and all of a sudden you have a different pattern. Right. And then when they change the patterning of their of their mental and emotional state, their physical does follow. Yes. We need to help them with medicines and herbs and, and other therapies. But but often the healing starts first in the mind and in the spirit for sure. You're saying because I, I often will get an email or a question on my Facebook life's weekly about what should I start with?

Should I start with my body? Or should I start with my mind? And our response is always the same there's no way to separate them. So if you if you have a terrible adrenal fatigue and gut dysbiosis and you don't address that, then whatever therapy we're doing won't stick. If you aren't addressing the mental emotional patterns, then it doesn't matter. You can spend a ton of money on supplements and food protocols for the dysbiosis and the adrenal and hormone imbalances that if you're not addressing this mental emotional piece, then that won't stick and you'll just keep having to stay on the same stuff over and over and over again.

So you have to bring them. I call it the four corners of the puzzle. They all have to be dealt with at the same time. You know that you're toxic load and burden that's in your mind, your heart, your body and your spirit, and then your gut health and all of the microbiome, and then also your stress and trauma. And those all three will impact how your genetics express themselves. So those four all have to be really looked at and and brought along together. What do you tell people when they say, oh, I'm fine emotionally?

I don't need help there. How do you open that door? I usually say, if that was you, you wouldn't be sitting in front of me. Yeah. Because your your body is the canvas of the mind. Exactly. And I mean, I want to repeat that again. Like your body is the canvas of your mind, so you don't have disruption in your body unless you've got some kind of patterning going on mentally, emotionally and spiritually. So that all has to be looked at as a holistic view. Right. And then it's not to say that anybody is, not good enough or it's anybody's fault.

It's none of that. It's just the in fact, it's the opposite of that. We're human. You're human. And that is part of being human. It's part of the experience here, of being in this body, on this planet, with these, for the first 26 years of your life, you don't have that prefrontal cortex in your brain fully developed. Right? So when you're when you're when you're going through your human growth and developmental stages as a child, then you know, you're born into a world that's governed by adults, and they're teaching you how to become an adult by in, you know, influencing you and teaching them, teaching you their value system.

Right. They're telling you if you're doing it right or wrong or if you're good or bad. And so as you're growing up as a small one with no autonomy and no power, you're right. Trying to be good, trying to do it right, trying to figure out how to become a big human in this world of giants. And, you know, there's you're always going to make up meanings that are self-centered because we're narcissistic until we're 26 years old. Just by definition, it's the way. Right. So any any meaning you made up as a child needs to be reevaluated in adulthood with a fully formed mind and brain, you know, because you may have, like when I was ten and going through that sexual abuse, the meaning I made up in response to that was,

Mold Exposure, Boundaries, and Relapse 26:38

I have to be perfect if I'm even going to survive this, because this vice principal is telling me it's because I'm a bad kid. And so the behavior that I used is an adaptive response at a ten year old developmental stage was perfectionism, right? So I have to be perfect. And so when I was 30, I was darn perfect at being perfect. I drove myself like nothing I've ever seen before, you know? I mean, I drove myself to perfection. And of course, that's not a tenable way of living life, and it's not a good formula.

And so it's impossible to attain, first of all. And so if I believe that if I'm not perfect, then I'm not going to survive, then indeed, every time I'm imperfect, then my survival issues are going to go off. Which right not attainable way of living life. And my body proved it to be true. So what I had to do is go back and reevaluate that and make that realization and go, oh, right. And so one of the ways that I self-soothe, that constant drive for perfectionism and that constant nervous system overload of panic and terror of being at school was my mom made beautiful homemade desserts every night for dinner for us.

And when I would get home, they'd be cooling on the counter and I would have a piece of whatever it was that we were having for dessert after dinner as my after school snack, and that signaled, like the sugar hitting my system signaled safety. Right. So then I made that connection in there. So then you can't go along, you know? And later on, ten years later, 15 years later, 20 years later and say, okay, so now I'm just going to quit sugar, right? That's not going to work. No. The motivation the under underpinning it right has to be healed.

And so that, you know, is a huge sugar addict. When I was diagnosed with. All right. And so you know, all of us had to get healed at a root level. Right. But I cut all of the pattern right. I call these fundamental childhood decisions. So we make them in these moments of our trauma, whether it's a big trauma like what you went through, Keisha, or, or something that somebody else might consider small, for them. Right. It was big for them. And then we we need to find ways to self-soothe, especially when we're, when we're little.

So we find those ways. Right? I'm going to be perfect. And oh, that's sugar. It makes me it makes me feel safe. It most of my mom. And so we develop these patterns and we hold on to them. But those patterns, they serve us in those moments. Of course, it served you in that moment to have that slice of sugar, right? And to drive yourself to perfection. It was the tool you had at that time. But then as we get older and more experienced in the world, we still trail trail long behind us, our fundamental childhood decisions.

But they likely don't serve us in our adulthood anymore. Right? And that's when we start to see our systems crash. The physical systems, the emotional systems, when those childhood decisions acceptable to mold toxicity to our sacrament, we're more than you. All right. To that. So I mean, you know, I healed my area. I'm I'm 57 now and it was in my early 30s. So, you know, over 26 years ago and several years ago, it was probably five years ago. We had to have our furnace replaced. And when they took away the wall that our furnace was connected to in our basement, there was this, like, black mold eating and rotting the supporting beams of our house, well, living in black mold for years and didn't know it.

And it was coming from the upper storey like three bathrooms had it. Our master bathroom. And then and then other bathrooms all the way down. And so we, you know, of course, we spent $80,000, you know, had to having to get it remediated and getting our bathrooms replaced and putting the new furnace and all of that. But I remember being struck by that and thinking, gosh, you know, I didn't get an autoimmune flare, I wasn't sick, my energy was fine. You know, I was functioning and working and doing everything that I do today.

I love it. And in my 30s it would have put me down. And so that's what I'm saying. Like over the years I've learned all of this. My God is healed, my boundaries are good and strong. And, you know, so it's it's definitely what I think of as critical mass. Like if there are too many things that are on that scale, tipping it and it capsizes your boat. My boat was nice and stable, so adding some hold on to it didn't do anything. So, but years and years ago when I was exposed to some mold, I was so sick I got asthma.

You know, I was very sick. Rashes, Isaiah rashes around my eyes. Like I could tell if there's mold within 100 yards of me. You know, back when I had RA and so it's it's very fascinating because it isn't just about the sniff you carry or, you know, life. It really is about where is your balance? Are you grounded? Are your are your boundaries solid, right. Right, right. It's not just about this one exposure, not about the when tick by. Oh, now I have Lyme disease or oh, I have a mold exposure. I have mycotoxins illness.

And I have a history of Lyme disease and I have Epstein-Barr. I have all of it. Right. Yeah. And so it's about what is I love how you say about what's in the boat, what what fills it, what's our terrain? Understanding the whole terrain. Right. So, you know, it's, and so we, we read it, we read it all of our house. Right. And so my books and then a year ago, my dad died on Valentine's Day, and, and, and this family drama erupted like that week with my brother that I had never, I would have never looked for.

It was just like, so unexpected. And, I mean, he cut me out of his life. He doesn't talk to me. So I lost my brother and my dad at the same time. And it was this huge trauma that I didn't even understand. He, you know, he's angry about something that happened when I was 16. You want to talk about it? There's like, I don't even know what's going on for him. And so I lost my niece, my nephew, my brother, you know, like, and and my dad, he showed up at the same time. Oh. What was in three months, I was a and a positive for the first time.

So I had reversed my RA 26 years ago. And so, you know, I, I was not surprised. I did all my blood work and I was tired, you know, of course I was grieving. I was so sad. And I had my blood work done. I did all the tests I do every year around my birthday, and I was a in a positive. And I went, oh my gosh, I know exactly what's happening right now, you know? And so I went back in and started doing some really heavy therapy and let it, you know, like being able to let this go, having good boundaries until, you know, it took about six months and then it went negative again.

So, you know, and nothing about my diet changed. Nothing like, you know what I mean? It was all trauma. It was all this big emotional stuff, upheaval.

Self-Love, Language, and Daily Awareness Practice 34:28

So yeah, this stuff is powerful, powerful, so powerful. And then you are living proof to our audience, right? That that we can live in our highest potential. Yeah, we can, because the traumas are going to keep coming. That's part of life. But oh, how do we keep our, our baseline clear? Right. So that when they do come, we know how to recognize them and then heal them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you deserve it. I mean, you know, each one of you, you're worth it. You deserve fighting for it like you're worth fighting for.

You're with protecting. And so your, your current age level and your older, wiser yourself. Right. They they're there to support you and love you and heal the one that's hurting that other part that that maybe unskillful one, you know. And so that's, that's an important piece is to, to integrate the one that feels so sad with the loving aspects of yourself. And so that's another piece that I do a lot with my patients is help them heal their not just their attachment wounds from childhood, but really get in touch with the older, wiser version of yourself that can hold space for that when you don't feel capable of it, right?

A lot of people forget that they have that space, or forget that there is a possibility of self-love in there. And I think that for it, not just the possibility, if you're going to get well, you have to love yourself enough to do it. Yes. And so we do work around that. Also is the glue. Yeah. It holds together. Yeah. Yeah. So is there anything else that you want to tell the audience. Anything that you feel isn't spoken about enough? I think we've covered a lot. I think so we have you covered a lot.

You know, people often ask me what's one easy first step that people can take, you know, and, I like to say to starting with really watching your language for 24 hours, like watching the words that you use in your own mind, about your world, about your life, about yourself, the tone that you use, what's the nature of your language and your discussions inside. And just don't judge them, good or bad. But make a note about it. There's a Buddhist practice, but I really love where you take, you know, a bag of dark pebbles and a bag of white pebbles.

And at the end of each day, sit in your room and and wherever you've had a so-called negative thought. I always think of it as a thought that maybe isn't life supportive. Right? Loving right you and it's towards others or yourself. And you put that a pebble, a dark pebble on the floor, and then any time you've had a thought that is, that's life. Nourishing, supportive, right. Regenerative. Then you put a white pebbles, and if you do this really well, you'll start. You'll notice that at the end of your day, you might have a really tall pile of dark pebbles, not very many white ones.

But once you bring that awareness and you start really watching for that, you can change your channel any time in your own thought stream, and you can start learning how to make that a big high pile of white pebbles and no dark pebbles. I love that because it's it's it's a way to show people that they do have control over their reactions. So we might not have control with with what comes at us in this life. Sometimes we do, many times we don't, but we have control over our response internally. And then externally in the world.

And once people see that, they get excited, oh, I can switch that thought, I can change that. I can approach my life differently and it's a it's a really beautiful, simple practice. And in, you know, the practice of course, is to do it without judgment. Right.