Mastering The Big 3: How You Move, Eat & Think

Stacy McCarthy

Thank you, Tom. I’m so thrilled to be here with everyone.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. And like you said, I yoga changed my life. And I think it’s not just yoga. I think it’s really the lessons we learn from yoga. So today we talked about, you know, maybe our conversation will be talk about mastering the big three, how you move, eat and think. And, you know, I just love where we’re coming from because these are the basics. And as an osteopath, I learned both. I grew up this way, but then I learned that we really want to ignite that self healing power within you and then use the doctors just when you need them. So, I mean, but what brought you into this path of teaching so many other people at such a high level and motivating so many people to reconnect with their breath in their body?

Stacy McCarthy

Well, I think the biggest thing is, just like for you, yoga changed my life in such a dramatic way. I came from the fitness industry initially. That’s what I was teaching. And, you know, that’s a lot of no pain, no gain type of mentality. And it was there was no real connection to a deeper part of not just my physical body, but even the deeper part of my mind, my emotions, my spirits. And when I found yoga and when I say yoga, I found the right teacher. And that can make a real difference. In your experience, something just clicked. I already understood the physical body, but the way yoga does, the physical body is really, really different from exercise. So maybe I’ll start with the difference, since much of what I teach comes from the ancient, ancient lessons of yoga, centuries old, and where it meets modern science, and the difference between yoga and exercise or yoga and sports, let’s say exercise is sports. 

So the real difference is that exercise sports, these are designed to do something very specific if you are in a sport. I was an athlete, my kids were athletes, my husband was an athlete. What we’re doing is some sort of repetitive type of thing to develop us, to be good at that sport. Exercise. Much of exercise is repetitive type of things to, you know, get the strong abs or the strong core, whatever it is you’re working towards in your exercise. You know, these days it’s very specific things people are doing with, you know, the best booty or the strongest abs or whatever it is, the latest trend. Whereas yoga is really a system of healing. It’s healing the whole person physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually. On the physical side. It’s not just your musculoskeletal system. It’s just not your muscles, your bone bones. It’s your tissues. It’s your circulatory system. It’s your hormonal system. It is your respiratory system. It is looking at the body as a whole physically. It’s looking at you mentally. What’s going on up here in your head and how do we work with the nature of the mind? 

The nature of the mind has a lot of fluctuations. A lot of times you’ll hear an analogy is that the mind is like a monkey that’s swinging from branch to branch. It’s always going somewhere. And so yoga’s looking at how can we find better focus and concentration and increase the tensile strength of our mind. It works with our emotions and at the deepest level it’s helping us work with our spirit is helping us find that place of lasting peace of who we really are. So I think a lot of times we forget who we are at our deepest, deepest level. We have all these stories in our head that are telling us who we are, and all those stories in our head tend to be, unfortunately, many times negative worry, tension, fear, judgment, embarrassment, disappointment, complaining, the all of it. The list goes on. And those are all stories based on really our perception and our experiences and what yoga does through practice is it brings us back to our true self, our authentic self, our soul self, which is a state of being of abundant joy and unconditional love. And so we forget that we start to get all caught up in our head and all of our stories, and we forget who we are and our deepest self. So that’s why it’s so, so transformative. That’s why you had that transformative experience. That’s why I had that transformative experience because we’re reconnecting to the deepest part of our inner self and finding lasting peace. And so what I teach are specific, actionable techniques and rituals to help bring us back there.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

And yeah, I just love it because it’s, it’s that reconnection that was a surprise for me. I was just trying to find some. Somebody gave me something. I’m like, it hurts. Everything in my body hurts. And no matter how much I sleep, I can’t sleep. And I knew that meditation wasn’t for me. Like I had the preconceived notion because whenever I did try to stop Monkey Mind, it’s like I kind of had like, you know, 75,000 orangutan mind going on and just bouncing from everywhere, right? But what I learned was that it was like that reconnection allowed Lord it to be a place where I didn’t have to try as hard. Like I feel like this is one of the places we we we are I experienced challenge and it sounds like a lot of the folks that I work with who have Lyme and other conditions are challenges like this desire to make it stop, to control the pain, to control the mind. How does yoga help us address that and how do your teachings sort of help us have a better understanding of how we should actually approach those things?

Stacy McCarthy

Well, first of all, I love that you said that, you know, when you promote yoga, it’s like the meditation thing was not for you. That was me as well. And so there’s many types of yoga and we have, you know, people are different. Some of us need to move. Some of us need to be still. For me, it was the same the thought of being still and meditating. There was just no way. And so the yoga that you and I practice is a moving meditation. It’s training us, it’s training our mind to be able to eventually be still there. And if anyone here is practice yoga, you know, at the end of a yoga class, you take something called Shabazz and Shabazz. Is that deep relaxation where you’re supposed to lay there and be still for me, that was the hardest pose. I’m like, How long do I have to wait here? I’m uncomfortable, but that kind of hurts. Do we just have to wait here? Very, very difficult. And other people are like, Oh, that’s my favorite pose. But it took me a long time. I needed my body will need it. It was uncomfortable, it was gripping, it was holding. It was holding so tight. And do the work of breath and intelligence of the poses. I learned how to soften those hard edges. And so for many of us who feel that way, this thought about sitting and like being still here. That’s too difficult. The practice can help lean you into that by helping where you’re gripping, you’re holding so tightly in your body how to start to soften some of those hard edges in the body. And when you begin to learn how to soften the hard edges of the body, you start to have these little mini breakthroughs. And the reality is, is the other thing that happens with people is maybe one day it feels, oh, a girl pretty good today. It was still hard, it was still uncomfortable, but it felt pretty good. And then you’re like, the next day you want to have that same feeling.

But the next day you go back and you’re gripped in your heart and you’re tired and it hurts so bad. And so we have to also teach within this a bit of balance of mind, of letting go, of the expectation that tomorrow is going to be the same as today. Maybe tomorrow will be very nice, but maybe it won’t be so. Just as much as we’re working on freeing our body and I’m clenching this hardness that we’re holding on to, we also have to give our mind some space as well and not hold on to Will. Yesterday was terrible. So today is going to be no, maybe today isn’t isn’t so terrible. Maybe today was okay. But then don’t take that. Well, tomorrow is going to be okay to just look at things as they are. So when I’m working with the mind, I’ll give you an example if it’s that maybe this will help. We’ve all heard of the proverbial, you know, glass of water half full or half empty. You’re either optimistic because it’s half full or you’re pessimist because it’s half empty. 

Well, through the practice of yoga and through the teaching of working with your mind, we’re not looking at this proverbial glass of water is half empty or half full. The way we’re looking at it is crystal clear. Nothing added. We’re seeing the water as it is. It’s water. It’s just water. It’s clear. And so we’re working with the mind to see things as they are without the cloudiness of our own perceptions and thoughts and so this can really help, especially in the feeling of Lyme disease, of just being with what it is, not adding in all of our perceptions of what it is. Oh, you know, today my back really, really hurts. I’ve got a lot of pain in my back. And rather than adding in all these stories about the pain in your back cannot just be when I have this pain in my back right now, can I just notice that this is a pain in my back when I move this way? Oh, the pain is more intense. Oh, when I move this way, maybe it’s a little less. It’s pain in my back. It’s not this huge story that I’m never going to walk again. This is it. It’s over. I’m never going to get better. These are all stories you’ve added in and you’ve made the water cloudy. So we’re practicing. Not only am moving the body, but also and strengthening our mind.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

It hits home so much, Stacy, because that to me is one of the biggest things. It’s not to say that the pain in the back doesn’t exist. So I just thought I would just want to help people understand. They don’t need to add more to it. You know, and this is one of the biggest challenges because we talk a lot in the summit about trauma and a lot of trauma. I mean, really just boils down to it’s almost like the difference between pain and suffering. Right? You know, pain is there. Suffering is we decide that the pain we’re experiencing the moment shouldn’t be there.

Stacy McCarthy

That’s right.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

And I think that.

Stacy McCarthy

I think perception. Right. That is based on your own stories that you’ve put in. And by the way, there’s a great acronym for Pain Pain I n and pain. When you are feeling that pain, pay attention inward now. So rather than those external stories that you’ve created, can you just come back in and pain? I have pain right now. This is pain right now. Wherever it is. Maybe you’re feeling it everywhere. I’ve pain in my body right now. There’s pain in my body. And take some deep breaths. The pain is here. I’m going to take some deep breaths. Paying attention inward now and not trying to create all these additional little stories to that.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

I think it’s so powerful because for me, when I stop creating more physical pain, I actually found I had more energy. And I actually, believe it or not, very quickly found I had less pain than I thought I had. And then I had no pain and I’m like, Wait a second here. But I just had pain. And I decided I had, you know, like mentally I was able to decide I had more pain than I actually physically was experiencing. And then I was able to heal the physical pain I was actually having.

Stacy McCarthy

Isn’t that amazing how we can create a story in our mind that is so much bigger and so much more vast than the reality of the situation? And so this is, again, just coming back and seeing the reality of the situation without our own additional perceptions and everything that we’re adding to it, that we’re not adding anything more to that water, to the crystal clear water, but we’re just seeing it as it is and this is really a big part of the journey of strengthening your mind and the practice of yoga, strengthening the mind through, for many of us, the movement of the body intelligently through the body.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Well, I love that the intelligent movement, because I’m coming from a background of Ashtanga yoga where it’s very well held, which is where sort of power yoga comes out of. And for those of you may not know, it’s known as very physically demanding and people get injured quite a bit trying to achieve something. I wasn’t so much I will say, and because I want to get to the part about talking to you, there’s a lot of people with Lyme listening right now who can’t do Ashtanga yoga. There’s probably very few who can, but there’s learning in here, so don’t worry, guys, we’re coming to that part. But the part that was really interesting when I started yoga, I could barely put my fingertips below my kneecaps and then like six or eight months later, I could put my chin below my kneecaps, which is like physiologically, seemingly impossible. But the part that I learned was I learned a breathing technique as part of it. And then the breathing made me always say, if the breath wasn’t full, I was pushing my body too hard. So I always had this litmus test. And for me in the teachings that I received that would prevent me from going too hard because my Lyme folks and everybody was, you know, Lyme or bartonella or mold toxicity, like, I want to not go too far because I could push it. So when you’re looking at folks who are working with you, Stacy, I mean, what are some of the ways that they can kind of not push too hard and know that they’re not, but also give themselves license to maybe get a little uncomfortable because there were times where it didn’t feel good, like in the moment it didn’t feel good. But I’ll tell you, a couple hours later and a couple of weeks later, I was feeling like a brand new human being.

Stacy McCarthy

Well, two things with that. One, that the first thing that I will say is your breath is going to be your guide. And in any practice of yoga you’re not looking to force. There should be no forcing. There should be no struggling. Yet you should work intensely, intensely, with breath and focus. There is a huge difference. We are in a society of no pain, no gain, no pain, no gain. And yoga is no pain. No pain. Now, is it completely uncomfortable for 99.9% of us with or without Lyme? Yes, yes. Because it is uncomfortable to put ourselves in these positions. And that’s part of it. Not only is it bringing balance back into your body, but it is teaching you how to be with the pain and breathe through it. So when we are cutting ourselves in whatever position that we’re working towards, we’re pausing, we’re breathing, and we have something in the practice we call our edge. Our edge is really that place that if you go even a little bit further, you’re going to hurt yourself. 

But if you back off even a little and you’re kind of slacking off and depending on how you’re feeling and every single day is different, whether you have Lyme or whether you don’t have line, every day we come to our mat is different, could be based on the thoughts we had, what we ate, how we moved the day before. All of these things factor into when you get on your mat. So every day is different. But if we come to it and we know we’re aware of our breath, Oh, I’m here. I’m breathing fully. I’m breathing, Kali. I’m drawing within. I’m breathing fully. Maybe I go just a little bit further. Ah, too far I’m now noticing I’m holding my breath, I’m gritting my teeth. I have a really ugly look on my face because I’m so uncomfortable. These are all ways that we are looking at training our bodies to soften into it while working intensely. So in yoga we have something. And I teach again from the ancient text, but it’s in English. It means that every single yoga pose, every way we’re moving, needs to have a balance of both strength and surrender or strength and sweeten this. 

So this is really a metaphor for life. There’s a place in our body where we have to find the stability and the strength, but then we also have to find that place where we can let go and soften. And it’s a beautiful metaphor for our life, but also within the yoga poses. So everything was in every yoga pose that we’re learning is giving us a lesson for life. Yoga is a lesson for life. It’s a science of learning how to live our life with a little more freedom. So we start to feel better in our body, and then we start to feel better in our mind. This physical body is a beautiful gateway towards the mind.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

You know, it’s so interesting because as you’re talking about this, I’m just remembering I started to the breath that I learned big became such a routine that when I had a stressful situation physically or emotionally, I would start doing the breathing kind of automatically. And I was like, Wait a second, here it is. It really the practice is something that I was able to involuntarily essentially take into my everyday life that made it’s just such a, you know, a big difference because now I wasn’t I felt like once I kind of moved past a lot of these things that are released, a lot of the old tensions, I was able to actually protect myself against inadvertently bringing on new tensions and emotions into my body because I had that weight automatically when you get tense, you have it. It’s pretty wild, but you do it for a while.

Stacy McCarthy

It’s very profound. And we had the same teacher and he used to have he is from India and he didn’t speak a lot of English, but he used to have this phrase that was quoted often and it said, Do your practice. All this coming, do your practice that you have to put in the work. You’re going to have to do the practice. But then one day I remember he said he put in a little different word. He didn’t always put this in. He put in is a broad. He said, do your practice properly and all is coming. It means that we practice intelligently and we’re practicing with breath. And when you’re practicing consistently, then in every situation you’re taking what you’ve learned on your mat out into the world. And it’s showing up again and again. Maybe when and when, when you’re uncomfortable in the body. And look, my husband’s lived with Lynn now for way too long. And so I have been the spouse of someone with mine. And so I see it from another perspective. I’m also a healer. 

And so you find yourself your physiology shifting. When you don’t feel well used, shoulders start to cave in, your heart becomes closed off, your eyes are down, your breath becomes more shallow because you’re not feeling good in the body. But even if you get on your mat every single day, the days you don’t feel like it, the days where you’re like, I don’t even think I can get out of bed, then lay in bed and do it. Or if you can get up and just stand on your map and just stand there and start to align the body, just start to align the body, roll the shoulders back, let your heart be exposed and rise up from the ground. That just that’s what I do in every one of my classes. And the first thing we do is we align the body. And just by aligning the body, the energy starts to flow. We start to work with your breath. We’re starting to move energy in the body. And it’s amazing just doing that, just aligning proper posture, just standing there, aligning proper posture, and now bringing in your breath. If that’s all you do, that’s all you can do. That’s enough. Keep doing that every single day, though. Don’t stop it. So this is practice. Practice. So you can have all the theory in the world. The other thing he used to say all the time and again, I said this at the beginning, the teacher doesn’t fall far from the tree. You know, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. So when you have a good teacher, you end up being a good teacher. But you just say 99% theory, 99% practice, 1% theory that you and I talk. We can sit here, we can share so much about theory. But the reality is you have to get up and you have to actually do it. You have to put these principles into practice or they do not work.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Was funny. I want to one of our other teacher, my other teachers and we were talking about earlier, but I went to a workshop and he’s like, like, why can’t I do this? And he goes, here, let’s try it. And we tried it and I couldn’t do this one maneuver. And he’s like, You’re way flexible enough, your way strong enough, your breath is fine. Your, your body’s or your energetic massive locks are fine. I have no idea. So don’t worry about it. And I was like, Wait a second, I’m supposed to do it right? And I find that in our community here, like so many people are trying to compare themselves to other people, so many people are trying to do it right. But a couple of things that really strike me with what you just said is, in fact, I would love to do a word count for how many times you should get on your math today. Right. And so to me, the mat can be a rug. It could be a rug on a mat. It can be your floor, it can be your bed. But maybe we could touch on a minute. 

And because I think you’re starting to dove into how anybody can do this because you’re mat, which is a yoga mat, but to me, it sounds like you’re talking about a ritual. It’s the ritual of respecting yourself and getting in tune with your energetic self, which can be done if you can’t move out of bed. In fact, a quick side or a quick little story this past weekend I got after my daughters, she had a ski competition. I got superbly nauseous. I anybody who knows me like I never thought I mean, I probably had about 30 minutes of nausea in my entire life. And now I’m getting, like, ultra nauseous and I’m like, what is this? And I’m like, I feel a little achy. I’m like, You know what? You guys hang out here. I’m going to go back to the hotel, the Airbnb, because I need to rest. And I literally slept for like, you know, 18 hours and every it was crazy. And every time I would get up and roll over, if I was a little uncomfortable, I lay on my back and all I did was breathing a breathing exercise. And I’m like, I can’t. I’m no medicines, no nothing. I couldn’t have a sip of water for 24 hours. I felt so bad. And I know all these are breaking all the doctor rules. You got to take your supplements. You got to have your drink glass of water. But my body was just like, stay in bed. 

And every once in a while it said, connect with your breath, connect with your energy. And then when you feel like you can’t do that, roll over and go back to sleep. And I woke up the next day and I could actually go to her second day of her competition. And then I was like, I need to go back and take another. I took a several naps that day and then, you know, I wake up today and I’m like, Hey, I’m doing all right. I got to get back on the water. But every time throughout this, I just focus on the breathing. And I learned this from yoga. So, I mean, I think that this is maybe we can talk a little bit about ritual and maybe the definition of yoga, because I think a lot of people think yoga is like doing some fancy pose where you get your legs behind you, which is fun when you can do it, but you don’t need to do it.

Stacy McCarthy

Yeah, well, it’s two things. Okay, so let me give you a quick definition of yoga now. And this is going to be a very user friendly definition of yoga. And then I’ll talk a bit about ritual. So so a lot of people think yoga is what you said. Most people think yoga is about touching your toes. That’s what Western media has really dumped on us over and over again. Young, flexible. And the thing is, yoga is not about touching your toes. Yoga is about touching your soul. And it’s about what you’re learning, the journey your having on the way down to touching your toes. That’s the beauty of yoga. So just very simple, simple ways yoga is returning you back to really your true self, this connection to the deepest and most profound part of your inner self where there’s lasting peace and the poses we call these asanas and what they are, they are a body awareness technique aimed at liberating our consciousness from old ways of being, doing and acting. But the real power of yoga and this is what I’ve said and I’ll say it again, the real power of this ancient science is it’s ability to connect us back to the deepest part of our inner self. So it’s a return to self and it’s all and it’s 5000 years old.

These techniques have lasted this long. You tell me something else that has lasted this long and has this kind of crazy popularity as this date and time in our lives. So so is what we’re learning by doing these postures. And now and when I say yoga, like every single day, I don’t care. You’re just all you can do is lay in bed. I was just in Mexico, and I got Montezuma’s revenge. If anyone knows what that is. Terrible belly stuff. Not fun at all. I couldn’t. I was there at an event. I couldn’t get out of bed every 2 hours except to go to the toilet. So I did what you did, Tom. I laid in bed breeze. I worked on my breath. I focused on my breath. Here it comes again. I throw up, I drop it in there, and I breathe, you know. And I had all the ickiness, all all of all of those things that come along with it. But I breathe. So if all you can do, if that’s what you have in you today, that’s it. You breathe. If the next day you have more, you can lay in bed and bring your knee in and just lengthen your lower back. That’s what you’ve got to do. But you do it every day. So. So this brings me to ritual. So the reason I teach what I call the Big Three Master, the Big Three, how you move, how you eat, and how you seek. It’s because most people’s habits, both good and bad, fall into these three areas. 

If you really take everything that we do somewhere, it’s falling into your movement patterns. It’s falling into what you’re consuming, both sort and the so a ritual. A ritual is coming to your habits consciously that you’re conscious of what you’re doing. So let’s take a habit. We’re developing a habit maybe first thing in the morning. You always have your cup of coffee, you don’t even think about it. You just kind of like going around coffee and you go, It’s completely unconscious. But when we come to something consciously, maybe you’re deciding, Hey, I want to shift from that coffee in the morning because it’s probably not the best thing to put in my gut after it’s been detoxing all night during my sleep to stick, you know, something very acidic into my gut. Maybe what I should do is have something that is a little bit better, some, you know, warm water with maybe a little lemon in it that is a little more alkaline and a little bit better for my gut. It’s kind of break that detox. So these are things that are conscious that you’re bringing to these patterns that you have. These habits are shifting it more consciously into a ritual that every morning you do that as you start your day. So these are the things I teach in each of these areas how to become more conscious of your habitual patterns so that you start to shift yourselves in these three areas. And when we shift ourselves in these three areas, we start to see the change happening. But again, it takes practice, it just takes some discipline and devotion to have change. But when you’re in enough pain, you are usually willing to do whatever it takes and so these are this is that ritual that we’re talking about.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

So good. I mean, I think so many of the things I kind of use the term sometimes like are you constantly throughout your day doing a positive meditation or a negative meditation? And so many of us, it’s so easy to, you know, from the protective perspective, to focus on the pain, to focus on the symptoms. But when we’re focusing on it again, it’s not for me. It’s not about what’s bad in the world, you know, not being there. It’s just that there are also good things at the same time. And I think the more I focus on that. And then what one of the things I really one of my goals of this entire summit is to put, you know, information and options and little techniques and speakers in front of everyone that they can take the power back. I mean, so much of what we’ve done in Western healing is you go see the surgeon heal with steel, you know, get the knife and cut it open out, cut it out or go get a pill for it. And I mean, so much of our medical autonomy has been given away. 

And so that’s why this is such an empowering conversation for me to be part of and to share everyone, because I do want to bring it back to you have the ability to do all these really cool things for yourself, like your breathing or warrior, you know, whatever you can do for today, you know. So I just the ritual of doing it over time and consistently and then not beating yourself up, it’s interesting and I don’t know what your experience that I found that I sang at yoga is interesting. You know, you practice Sunday through Monday, you don’t practice on Saturday and you take the noon, the full moon off. I’m like, Wow, this is really complicated. Why can’t I just do it every day? And it was like this lack of attachment to practice and also respecting the gravitational pull of the moon, which has a ton to do with our own water. And for me, I don’t know, just like this, learning to for a change will listen inside. Like when I was a kid and listen and love my body the way I did as a child.

Stacy McCarthy

Yeah. So a couple things. One, I will say with Western medicine, I think Western medicine is excellent for Humpty-Dumpty. You fall, you break the leg. Western medicine is great for that and for Humpty-Dumpty, but for a lot of other things, we’ve got to take some self responsibility for it and we’ve got to take some action for it. So and the part with Ashtanga is very Ashtanga is very connected to nature, to the universe, and bringing us back to Mother Nature. And so that is one of the reasons that full moon and new moons that we take that off. We practice six days because it’s also sometimes what happens with people. They find something and they become so attached to it that it starts to actually affect their psychology that, well, what happens if you can’t do it now? Are you depressed, are you sad or whatever? So it teaches this practice of non-attachment six days a week you practice, you’re disciplined, you’re devoted to it through this self-discovery, one day a week, take it off, non-attachment. And so my teacher, the same teacher that was the founder of the Ashtanga Vinyasa method, I. The other thing they have in and in his background is that when you lose something of great love to you, that you give up something that you love. So here he is. He’s the founder of this specific type of yoga. He lost a child and he gave up his personal practice of this type of yoga. 

He continued to teach, but he gave that up. And so this is the practice of non attachment that if we get so attached to something and so let me read like this back to Lyme disease. If you get so attached to the way something was, then you’re always going to have this feeling of never quite right because this is the way it was rather than this is the way it is. I see it clearly now as it is, so something is never really good or bad. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad, but you have to wait down the road. So if you if you talk to you like when I talk to my husband, who, you know, from Lyme disease, a lot of times he says that the very best thing was the worst thing that ever happened to him literally in bed. Couldn’t get out of bed, literally. But it was also the best thing. It rethought his journey of health. It rethought what was most important in his life. So you have to ask yourself right here, right now, however you’re feeling, maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. You don’t know right now what is going to be. We only know that down the road in hindsight.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Well, it’s interesting, too, because when I think about my healing journey, in the beginning, I was like I started to say, I lost 13 years of my life. That was like, oh, I know that that’s not a good one. And then I was like, I kept almost saying it, and now I’m like, My life was a certain way for 13 years, but it led me to yoga. It led me to all these. It led me to being able to help so many people. And I don’t know what would have happened. I mean, you know, there’s so many things that happened that we’re not sure of. And we just I think it’s funny, our brains assume that if everything goes the way we think it’s supposed to go, it will turn out the way we think it’s going to turn out. But everything can show up the way we wanted to, and then all of a sudden it’s not there anymore. So I don’t know how like I can compare a fictitious planned out life to the one I’m actually living.

Stacy McCarthy

Well, the problem is, is we’ve been taught that life is linear. You know, we go to school, we get an education, we graduate, we get a job, we get married, whatever it is that we’ve been taught, you know, then you retire and then you’re old. But whatever it is, we’ve been taught that life is so linear. Life is not linear. Life is in the transitions. We don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s going to be transitions all over the place. And our work is to figure out these rituals that are going to help us through these transitions because life we’re living life in the transition. Most of life happens in transitions. What do I mean by that? Like we look, we we grow up. We can’t wait to graduate college. But college, you know, the transition is this part of our life that most of our life is going along. And then there’s still going to be a bump and then life is going to go along and there’s going to be a bump. It’s not going to be linear. And so I’ll give you an example and I’ll give you also a tool that I use because about the sink part that I teach. So in 2020, December 23rd, 20, 22 days before Christmas, I’m riding my electric bike. We live in a place where you have to go pick up your mail. I do it all the time. Ride along. Beautiful day. I live in San Diego and so you can ride your bike. 

And December I’m riding along. I’m kind of humming a beautiful song to me. And all of a sudden I felt the front wheel wobble a little bit. That’s the last thing I remember. I woke up in trauma care and my face had been bashed in the whole right side of my face. The front wheel had fallen off. I went over the handlebars. Bah vase face first onto my face. The asphalt and tar was embedded so deep it was into my bone. So I, you know, I went through the whole ordeal, a lot of different things. And I noticed like three months later that my mind was a little bit different. And what I mean different is I have always been a fairly positive person and but I what I noticed was I would walk around and I kept finding the negative in things. So, for example, we have a beautiful garden where I live and I walk along rather than seeing the beautiful flowers and trees, I would go, Oh, that tree’s dead. It’s going to be taken out. Oh, look at that. That that’s going to be green down. That’s dying over there. Oh, that’s dying. I was finding the negative everywhere. And part of it was I when I fell, I had an injury right up to my eye. Now they had to cut a bunch out over this area.

And what I realized as I was seeing the world through angry eyes and so I was like, rather than seeing the world as it is, I was seeing it through my new perception, my new story. I was angry through the eyes. And so what I did is I created a mantra and a mantra as a mind vehicle. That’s what mantra means. So I created this new mantra that went like this. I see everyone and everything with abundant joy and unconditional love, including myself, my health, and my healing. Now I sometimes have to say that mantra 50, 60 times a day. I catch myself, I walk around and I’m like, Oh, that’s up. I see everyone in everything with abundant joy and unconditional love, including myself and my healing and walking. So it was constant and slowly through the process, I started healing my I started healing this pain within me. So when you are feeling this, you need these rituals, you need these techniques, and you have to practice them. You have to catch yourself. Because, again, life is not linear, it’s not linear. You are going to have all sorts of different bumps along the road and transitions.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

While I hear you and I think so many people out there here on this one, I mean, something happens that for a moment we think shouldn’t happen to us, you know, and it change everything. What a powerful teaching. And, you know, I think one of the questions that I have is how why are so many people like? Because there’s a lot of people are going to hear this. They’re going to I’m going to start doing that. And if you guys want to know more about does the science of, you know, mantra, does my vehicle really work? Yeah, it does work. And you know, I talk about this all the time. We have a lot of summit interviews and science behind this is the bottom line is it works if you make it a ritual, so do it. But Stacy, what happens to like when good people really try to implement this and they find it hard to stick to good habits and rituals? I mean, is there a reason for that? And are there any tricks for kind of helping them, you know, get that, install the habit, install the ritual, if you will?

Stacy McCarthy

Yeah. So we look we all deserve to have vibrant health. The challenges is that a lot of times life gets in the way. We get busy and we don’t prioritize us, we don’t prioritize ourselves, and we don’t set up systems in place that prioritizes. So it’s so interesting. It’s like you’ve got kids or something. You’ve got all of these systems going when they go to school, what they’re going to do homework. You’re like, you prioritize things for them. But when it comes to yourself, many times we don’t create the systems to make ourselves work. So I’m big, big, big on creating systems for you, for your healing, for your health and making that a priority because you already know this, that if you don’t feel great, however you feel is how you act. So if you don’t feel great, you know how you’re acting on the outside is going to show up, how you’re feeling on the inside. So you have got to put some things in place for you, for your healing, so you start feeling great on the inside. So systems. 

So when it comes to movement, you should have a place for that movement, a time consistently every day for that what that is or whatever it’s going to be for you. If the yoga doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. But something for you that is movement. I believe yoga can work for everybody because everybody can breathe. As long as you can breathe, you can do yoga. So something whether it’s in bed, I do bed yoga every morning and yoga before I get out of bed. It’s probably you know, it’s simple, simple techniques with breathing very, very simple. But something in place that you do the same time every day. If you want to get on a yoga mat, you’re going to do a class. Then you have your yoga mat set up at the same place and you practice at the same time. Consistently, you make that a priority. So systems for eating, if you want to add more more foods, more whole foods, less inflammatory foods, make sure that your kitchen is set up for that. Our kitchen is set up for more non inflammatory foods. So we have our juicer ready always in place. 

We always have fresh that we squeezed in place, ready to go. We always have giant salads pre-made in our refrigerator, so they’re easy to grab. We have our smoothie maker ready to go. It’s right there. And we have our system that we’re keeping our diet and what we eat with as little inflammation in the body as possible. Because if you have Lyme disease, you need less inflammation in your body. And I know, Doctor, tell me, we talked about the, you know, inflammation in the body so I won’t go there. And then you need a system for how you think. So I have specific mantras and, meditations every morning, every evening. Very simple that you can do before you get up in the morning, before you go to sleep, to set your mind, to set that mind vehicle. And when you have these simple systems in place and you dedicate yourself to it, and again, I said, this takes discipline and but let that discipline and devotion be back to finding who you are the healthiest, happiest, most abundant and joyful person that you are put. Make that a priority. Make that your number one priority. So, yeah, these are systems for all these areas that are very simple. They’re they’re not difficult. They’re simple.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. Oh, I love it so much, Stacy. Just the simple rituals that you put yourself first. I find that one of the biggest messages that I like to share is that you are worthy of healing and you are worthy to be back in touch with your self and the love yourself unconditionally. And that’s conditioned out of us and everything we’ve talked about. It just seems to be like such a simple approach to coming back to yourself. So I just want to say thank so much for sharing this with you. I feel like we could I mean, I could talk to you about yoga forever because it’s like life, right? It’s really like that unity in it. But it’s for me, it’s at this whole conversation is about a simple, effective, scientifically driven, ancient lead to figure it out. It’s so funny that like all this stuff for figuring out in 2000 and 2020, that actually works. People have known for thousands of years because they paid attention. So I’m sure there’s going to be a gazillion people watching who are really interested in learning where they can learn more about you and the work that you do so they can incorporate some of this into their lives.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

So for anyone looking to reach out to you, what’s the best way to connect with you? Well, I.

Stacy McCarthy

Believe I offered like a3a free complimentary e-book for you. It’s called Master the Big Three. It’s got some simple tips on some rituals, how to set up some systems. And then I also just launched a master, the big three, three day detox. Super simple. If you’re looking for a place to get started, it’s got three days of anti-inflammatory recipes that we’ve got, the shopping list, the whole thing. You’ll do that at home to get the inflammation out of body. It’s got three yoga practices, all levels that you can do. They’re 30 minutes long. If that’s too long. Yeah, just get on your mat. Stand there, do what you can, and you can use this for as long as you want. It’s three days of yoga practice, three days of breathwork, different breath works to teach you how to increase the clarity and vitality to your mind. And then three meditations and I guide you on those that you can use. So it’s really designed that very simple. They’re short to help your healing. And, and I promise you that if you do this on a consistent basis, you are going to feel better. You will. And it’s just step by step. You may step back a little bit, but then there’s going to be a step forward now.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

But so great. And thank you so generous with your time and your knowledge and your heart and with all these nice, lovely bonus gifts. And I’ll make sure everyone that we do, you’ll all be getting that pdf download, but also in our website, with all the summit resources, we’ll make sure you get direct access right over to Stacy’s information and the reason we’re having this conversation is really the only reason I’m better is because I followed the same path that we’ve been talking about it when no one else could help me. When the doctors told me I was crazy, when I had chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and bipolar and all this stuff that nobody knew where it came from. I started yoga and I was about 75% better before the opportunity to meet the doctors that I thought I needed all along was there. And so when they were able to give me that present of we actually know what’s the last piece holding you back, my body, and more importantly than just my body, my soul, my heart and my mind were willing to and ready to accept it and work with it because we had already done all that work. So it you know.

Stacy McCarthy

I do, I do.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

It’s just like so, Stacy, I mean, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for being here with us, everyone. Stacy McCarthy, check out all of her information in our summit notes. Go check out all of our stuff. Because seriously, it’s the only reason I’m still here. So Ashtanga yoga and all the branches of yoga are here to reconnect you with your self and reignite your self-healing mechanism. And so it’s been an honor to talk with you today. Stacy, everyone, it’s been an honor to have you here with us. Lots of love. You are worthy to receive the healing and I’m Dr. Tom Moorcroft. Thank you again for joining us for this episode of The Healing from Lyme Disease Summit. And I’ll see you in the next interview.