Heal Autoimmune & Regain Control of Your Life

Introduction and Michelle Tooleu2019s Background 0:00

Welcome back to the reverse Autoimmune Disease Summit. Everybody of course this is 4.0 reverse autoimmune disease. And we're talking about the autoimmune detox today. And I'm really happy to bring a new friend and colleague of mine to you. Her name is Michelle Toole. She's the founder of Healthy Holistic Living. She started the website in 2006 to share her exploration of natural and alternative health solutions. When mainstream medicine offered only basic symptom relief for a mysterious neurologic condition that within weeks took her from running the New York City Marathon to being bedridden and giving up her position as executive director of a social services nonprofit in Arizona.

Her journey as an information seeker resonated with thousands of readers, as she followed a holistic path and experienced profound improvements in her physical, spiritual, and mental well-being against the illness that took 20 years to diagnosis multiple sclerosis. That's where to today, we see that Healthline named healthy, holistic Living, is one of the best holistic health blogs of 2020 and now has over 2 million passionate followers. Welcome to the summit, Michelle. Thank you. I appreciate you having me here.

You know, I'm going to get into your story, but I just want to tell our viewers that I'm doing a little comic relief this morning because just before I got on to zoom with Michelle, I ate some paleo German pancakes with fresh blueberries. And I now have purple teeth. And that's when I smile, which I do a lot and laugh, which I do a lot. You guys see blue teeth. So. And I thought it was kind of a funny way to start an interview. So, Michelle, you and I. I was I can't remember which marathon I was training for, but I wound up all of a sudden bedridden, which is a very interesting, way of thinking about autoimmunity, because, of course, it's untrue.

It's not. It doesn't sneak up on us all of a sudden. It's been happening for years and years and years. But it is how we experience it, you know? So going from training and running to all of a sudden I can't get out of bed is quite a change. So I'd love to have you tell us a little bit about your story. Sure. Yeah. It was an enormous change. I mean, as you know, somebody who's, you know, running marathons, to go from that huge transition is life altering, to say the least. And, for me, it, you know, upon reflection, sure.

There were a lot of signs. Yeah. But definitely, in that moment, I was actually out on a training run, and I was, I don't know, maybe on mile five and the left side of, my body went numb and the right side of my body went weak. And, you know, I stopped running, and I'm kind of, you know, a little bit in shock, you know, made it back home. And it was just from that day forward, everything just cascaded, you know, I mean, it just everything that could blow up every auto immune response your body could have had.

I mean, from going into massive allergies and sneezing. And it was just this unfolding and unraveling of my entire life in a month, you know? And so I didn't end up initially bedridden right away. It was just a cascade of events. And as you're struggling to kind of hang on for the ride, you know, you, you enter into kind of a new world first. It's just complete and utter fear based because you have no idea what's going on. Then you go into the medical system and you go into shock that they don't know what's going on because you actually believed, you know, at 32, I had no understanding that that illness is still a mystery.

That's how old I was, too. Wow. That's kind of what I know. I know I was on my way to go to the Disney World Marathon. Bags are packed. Oh, no. I already done my 20 miler. I was taking off the next day. I had actually was heading to the Disney World Marathon. Yeah, I was heading to it and had to cancel it and got an MRI instead. But I've same here. My partner ran it and I was in getting an MRI right. They were running and that I don't, I don't even know what year that would be 20 years ago.

Sudden Onset and Medical Misdiagnosis 4:20

But yeah, 2000, 2001 right around there. And, yeah, we had that was the one I was training for was the next one was the Disney Marathon. That's weird that we have a lot of alignment. But anyway, you know, it's pretty interesting. And my doctor, when I went in that day, had the answer. She said, do you have any autoimmunity in your family history? And I said, yeah, I think my grandfather, who died at age 55, which I am right now, had rheumatoid arthritis and was in a wheelchair, and she just, like, closed the book, put it on the shelf, said, well, it's genetic, my dear.

You've got rheumatoid arthritis. And here's, you know, here's methotrexate prescription. Here's a nonstarter. The anti-inflammatory drug. When you get worse, come back. Wow. When? Not if. Right. And I was like, time out, time out. I'm really disciplined. Like I just ran 20 miles the other day at 3 a.m. like I do. I do this stuff. I make my own food. You know? She said, no, it's just you just do the short end of the genetic lottery, right? That's it. Well, yeah. And that that's your first introduction, you know, you were lucky in that sense, I think to maybe lucky and maybe unlucky.

I don't know, because I don't believe a label necessarily serves us. We believe that it does. At the time. I'm grasping at things, I think it was helpful because I had an answer to start with, rather than some. I don't know what's going on with you, which would have been terrible right? So I had a place to start going into PubMed, with a name and a face to put to it, and I was able to reverse it within six months. I haven't had rheumatoid arthritis since then. Right then, I think having that label was really important, which is why my patients, when I do diagnose them with a specific ICD ten code related disease process, sometimes burst into tears because they're happy to have an answer.

But then I'm the one saying, wait, now I don't want you to latch onto this, right? This isn't actually what this is. It's it's your immune system attacking you and whatever target tissue is the name. But actually, there's something else we need to be dealing with here. Right? And I arrived at that point. Yeah. Not having a diagnosis. It was just this, you know what? It's it's an interesting process. And it unfolded and it's very dramatic. When you go from high functioning to zero and literally ended up on disability for somebody with my mindset and how I come to life.

Yeah. Crushing. Yeah. And, you know, the emotional experience with, with the onset of anything, it's really trying and, and, you know, one of the things for me is I always say is I lost all my eyes, you know, I was a runner. Yeah, I was an executive director. I was an athlete. You know, I was all these things. Your identities, all of my identity, had been stripped away in my mind. And and then you had no new word. Okay. Which is I have arthritis, or I have an autoimmune disease, or I have. So I was just floating in this space with no eyes, no identity, no sense of self, and I am sick, and that's all I know.

I'm weak. I'm weak, I will, and I struggled because I didn't attach to those things, but I certainly I lost friends, I lost jobs, I lost everything. They had to move because I wanted. We were out in Arizona. We flew into people I Hopkins to see if they could help. And you deal with a lot of doctors that have, their first instinct. If they don't come back with a test, they don't have something definitive. Is it necessarily, a physical reaction? So they're looking for emotional looking for all these components.

And unfortunately, there's trauma associated with that. So now you're having new trauma on top of what you were already walking through. So, you know, it became clear to me after I was put on a slew of medications that weren't working and had just unbearable side effects. And one of the biggest challenges for me was dealing with pain, you know, and how to deal with what I felt was pain. That was excruciating. How how do I just get to the mailbox or get to the kitchen, or get through an hour each day?

And so all of this is swirling around you as, as life is going by. And so a year went by and they felt that it might be I had a, a nine inch cyst wrapped around my spinal cord, and they thought that might be why one of my legs wasn't functioning completely. That would be a good answer. I would have had surgery. Not a wise decision, at the time. And it triggered a huge, flare. Ended up bedridden, and then, you know, you're just curled up because you're spot, you know, so there's another cascade on top of everything else on the bones.

And that's really where I was bedridden and just lying there one day. And I thought a couple of things kind of floated to my mind, which is, you know, a sense of value for myself. And, and I would say to myself, you know, I'm valuable enough just simply to exist. I don't have to be an I don't have to compute. I don't have to be anything other than where I am dealing with what I have in front of me. And I read, I started reading, and I knew I had to take myself off all the meds, pain medicine, everything, and I just started doing it one at a time.

And now, mind you, at the same time, I've tried every single alternative health practice you can think of Chinese medicine, teacher, you name it. There isn't anything I haven't tried. Gave everything a good period of time. So you're also going to all this at the same time. And pain was still my dominant.

Pain, Identity Loss, and Early Healing Steps 10:20

And so I read a book on pain, and I wish I could remember the name of the book, because it helped me understand the relationship between your physical experience and your thoughts and your emotions, and your sense of self and well-being and and disease. And so, the book had talked about how pain is, it grows. You can make it grow, you can make it swell, you can make it have a life. And if you're on it, explain kind of phantom pain and the idea of interrupting pain signals. So I was trying to make things as tangible as I could so I could shift them in some capacity.

And so pain was my first thing that I started with. And I remember learning at one point that you can put pain, you can have pain and put it over here and sit beside. And one of the things that we do when we're sick is we we dialog with every experience for having so having pain, we go, oh my God, this I'm in so much pain. And so you are, you are kind of reinforcing that network that no pain. It's my pain and it's my own. It has a side. So you you once again you you become you identifying right.

And you tend to grab them because you've lost all your IQ. Right. So, so you're it's a reactionary pattern. And so I realized that I was really actually feeding the pain. And it was getting louder and louder now. There certainly was a trigger. There was something that initiated the pain cycle. But I now then embodied that and carried that to I now own that and had a relationship with that and a muscle memory it well and a muscle memory. So so not only is the neural pathway to the muscle memory, you have all of this experience and literally you could have an out-of-body experience and still have the pain because you've created that cycle.

Right? I started it's not what you know. You know, it's a hard dialog to have with people. They're like, But I'm not causing it. I understand, but you're saying it's my fault? I've heard that a lot. It's this is not about blaming and shaming. This is not about follow this. It's not about any of that. It's like natural consequences to actions. And that's simple for my brain. It help to make it physical. Yeah. Because I didn't want to have a reactionary emotional experience, which is it's not my fault.

Right. So after reading the book, I just said, okay, let me put this in a physical box box so I can maneuver through this. And I was able to get the pain under control. I was able to do sensory experiences to an interrupt signals, you know, when you begin to to understand that and then kind of change that neural pathway, you know. And so that was one of the the starting points for me, along with at the same time, I read, Molecules of Emotion by Candace Parker. And this right there, it said so not first.

It was my first introduction to mitochondrial. You know, how it's, the understanding of your relationship to emotions and neural pathways. Everything in your body, you know, and I felt, you know, obviously something there is something physical happening. It was really, really clear to me that one, I'm on a team on my own here. And by myself I have. If I want something different, I'm going to have to figure this out. We're going to have to figure out a path. I knew food was essential. I knew that those were the obvious things, you know, to cleanse your diet, remove all the toxins, you know, feed your cellular health that I didn't need anybody to teach me about.

You know, is a really good like, just to hear if everyone could track that. I always say start with food because it's the thing you can control the easiest start with it. Start with a physical. Start with something tangible. Yes. Empowered. Again, you feel like you have the ability to do something right, but you don't end with it. No, it's so much more. Well, I tell you, you know, for me, you know, people say, well, do you think you healed from mess? I, I, you know, I think it's ongoing. I think there are layers and everything.

And it may be 20 years now and 20 years later, something different happens. But what I do know is that I arrived at a point of having to kind of create a system for myself and a better understanding of of living differently and living wholly and and really living in the moment. And for me, the idea of, there are things that cause pain, cause disease, resistance, resistance to your current experience and having the emotional, spiritual and physical reaction to that is the perfect feeding ground for disease.

It's the perfect soil to grow disease and maintain disease. There's another aspect to that. I love what you're saying because that, you know, there's a saying what you resist persists. But there's also this piece around, you mentioned that they didn't use the word. And I kind of want to point it is that people will often feel betrayed by their bodies when the eyes start going away. The roles, the the hats, the, you know, the identities, when, when disease changes that then they feel betrayed by the body that they're living in.

And so when when you're resisting your body, that's what autoimmune disease is. It's you at war with yourself. Right. And there's no winner. And so you know that after resistance will often come. This huge resentment to the body, to the medical profession, to other people that are alive and well and doing what you used to do, you know, like resentment to me is the most toxic chemical that there is on the planet. And, you know, it's not produced by big corporations and thrown into their soil, and water is produced here.

And then you yourselves sit in the hot tub, you know, you're bathing yourself in that and that resistance, that that feeling of betrayal, that resentment, that's that space where you have to move, you know, take the plug out of the bathtub, let that drain, and then start bringing in some appreciation and gratitude for what is right where you can heal. Yeah. So that's why I say it goes way beyond the food that you're putting in your mouth and goes into how you're digesting your emotions. What's your food for?

Thought like, what is that? What's that happening right now? Right. Well, and we store it. Yeah. We're not trained. We don't grow up learning that emotions are kind of a natural reflex, and they should be flowing through your body. We're not taught that. We resist them. We resist them. And, you know, and we're taught that not only do you resist them, that you either embrace them or start analyzing them because they must be attached. Some horrible story in your childhood that you need to let go of. So.

So what? We just keep storing and storing and storing and the natural flow of the body for anything. Energy going through you, emotions going through you, food going through you is in and out. Yeah. And when we we stop that again it's the fertile ground for disease. You know our I firmly believe and always believe that that our natural state is health. Yeah. And so emotional constipation is just as bad as physical constipation where you say okay. Yeah. Well I think that I had the perfect I created the perfect environment.

And I absolutely believe that I'm a co-creator of what my experiences and I absolutely believe that I was a participant in creating in us and in my experience, in any autoimmune disease, that's my belief system. But I, I walk that direction because in that belief, it allows me to also be empowered to understand that I can change that. And if I believe it happened to me, I'm powerless. Right? And so I have to I have to own that. It's not saying that I it's my fault or I did this to myself or any of that, but I created the groundwork for it to come out and be expressed.

And it's been a great experience because I wasn't living. Me. Yeah, I wasn't living me, and living me is letting everything flow through me and letting everything have energy. Every experience we're taught to fight disease, mainstream culture, every promotional out there you get cancer, fight it, fight, exploit it. In the war on drugs, the fight on cancer, the yeah, it's all that kind of language. But I'm always telling people like, I've been fighting with my weight my whole life. I'm like, well, there's, you know that language right there? You.

So I developed a little, like, I do little tricks for myself. And there's one, you know, one is stop resisting. Two is accept. We we tend to believe if we accept the experience that's happening around us, we allow ourselves to be a victim of it. And that's not what I mean by accept, right?

Emotions, Resistance, and the Root of Autoimmunity 19:40

This is the current reality. That's unfolding. That's what I mean. If I'm dropped in the middle of a warzone, I have to accept that I'm in the middle of a warzone. Yeah, right. So you stop resisting, you accept, and then you create. That simply is the path to almost every experience, whether coming out of disease or creating business or relationships or anything. Because if we resist, we shut down. We're not accepting reality for what it is. And that's the majority of our cultural training. You fight, you thrive.

You succeed now there because you're a tenacious human that might have the fight in you. You might be able to overcome cancer. You might be overcome an autoimmune disease. The chance of it cycling back is really, really good or manifesting in another disease. Right. And 75% risk when you have one auto immune disease that you're going to get another one I'm going to got because you're just that genetically, you know, corrupt. It means that the very root cause that allowed the other one to blossom will pay her.

Well, I mean, I don't go into groups, I never have. I don't dialog about symptoms in disease. Well, one, when I didn't get the validation of a disease, I accepted. Clearly this is happening to me. This is what I'm physically feeling. I accept that and and I don't need validation for that. Yeah it is. It is my reality. It's not somebody else's reality. And if they can't see what's happening or they can't figure out a test to see what's happening, I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to wait for that.

Either we wait for that, or we group together with other people that are waiting for that or can validate that space, and then we just stay there, like on a spin cycle, you know, and we get our eyes back, we get five, ten more eyes. So we feel a part of a community, we feel validated. We feel supported. All the things we couldn't manifest for ourselves or couldn't get from doctors or a current family. We're doing that, and I can tell you when you're in that cycle, you are not going to let go of it because it's now your identity.

You have race, disease as a part of your emotional, spiritual and physical experience. Social structure too. That's huge. And when you identify with social structure and you feel compelled to be a part of that, you know, you you really just stepped into a minefield in my that's my experience. And that doesn't mean that groups are powerful and helpful in a lot of ways. But if all we're doing is, oh, do you have this symptom? Do you have this symptom? We're going to stay here together. I have a private group called the Reverse Autoimmune Disease Institute.

And, you know, it's it's 5000 people strong. And one of the things that I make sure doesn't happen in that group is the sharing of symptoms. As a reality. You know, that that no, this actually is the same thing, that thing going on with this person and this person and this person and that root cause piece is where we go, right? So let's make that not your reality anymore. And I think that's really important because if your social structure develops around your disease process, then you're going to just continue to concretize it or solidify it.

If, if we want to have all the friends that are around us, that everybody's broken so we can all feel better about our site, right? You know, I mean, I, you know, I went out at the law and I knew, you know, at the time the information available on the internet was really limited. I'm sure you experienced that. Oh, I had a dial up modem, and I was asking Jeeves that that was how I, I information exactly what I had to dial up. And I think recall had was on the internet at that recall, I wasn't even a blink in the eye yet.

So yeah. Yeah, it was, you know, pre everything. So finding out information was real. I mean now I mean having you know like doctors around you and Terry Rawls and all these people are making such profound headway. And I just think, you know, I can't be bigger cheerleaders. Yeah. So you guys, because the isolation and the sense of trying to meet the roadmap, you, you know, had to create for yourself, for all of us. Yeah, yeah, it was was huge, you know, an overwhelming the thing that is that, I do want to point out to people is that there isn't a roadmap that's right.

For every single person. Right? Yeah. There's no one autoimmune paleo diet. That's right. That's going to work for every single person. We each have our own individual gut microbiota and health. We have our, level of toxins. We've been exposed to and what those are in our own organs of detoxification, how well they work or don't work. We have our own genetics, you know, and we have our own trauma. And the way that we deal with stress, like every single person has their own unique puzzle. But there are some basic things that we can start with, right?

We can start detoxifying the pantry and what we're putting in our mouths. And so we can start looking at this piece up here, you know, do I feel betrayed my by my body? Am I resisting? Am I fighting and my angry? You know, I are Vedic medicine. One of the very first things that I learned when I went on the internet and started looking, was I found out your data, I found a a research article in PubMed for people with RA and yoga, and I'd never practiced yoga. I could barely bend over and touch my toes.

I was so hamstring bound I tied it bands. I mean, I was a runner, and in those days there wasn't a yoga studio on every corner next to a Starbucks. You know, it is very different and, I learned learn. I went to the yoga class the very next day, and then he talked a little bit about this word, I Veda. I went at home, looked it up, and I found out the autoimmune disease, according to your Vedic medicine, is undigested anger. It was so revolutionary to me. Yeah. I was like this high intensity, adrenaline junkie ICU nurse who had never even thought of any of these things that we're talking about today.

I, I had like, this drive and ambition, and I was a perfectionist, and my personal record was always against me when I was running and, you know, just always driving, you know, and I think back to that 30 year old woman and I just go, sweetheart, oh, honey. Yeah, excuse the cultural pressures, you know, so. But I mean, even more than that, it's like, what was it about you that you felt that you had to prove something so constantly? You know, I can go back to my childhood and look at that and go, oh, there it is, you know, and and then heal that, like that, that pressure.

I just think about that pressure that I put on myself and I think about my immune system and I say, oh, yeah, I was constantly at war with myself and didn't even realize it, you know? And I think for me, it was a natural consequence of losing all the eyes, because I allowed myself to sit with that without really identifying or reattaching to anything. That was the healing for me. Not so significant. What was the trauma that caused me to live that way, which I'm not an advocate of having to identify that little tiny box somewhere and open the box.

As much as I'm just sitting here completely without anything, and I'm accepting that and accepting me without anything, this, that person that was on top of everything, it's nothing like I'm laying there. I'm like, oh, to the island of here. Hey, you know, I'm using a wheelchair. I'm bedridden. Brushing my teeth is the highlight of my day, you know? And you just think you just shaking your head. But I allowed myself. And it was painful. Brutally painful to have no eyes, so no identity. You know, I'm in a master's of divinity program right now just for fun, because Tibetan Buddhism, I think, has sort of like the, the technology that it's the most advanced on this planet for training the mind.

That's really amazing. And so I'm in learning it right now because I've just been astonished. And one of the things that, that there's a huge focus on is really accepting that there's suffering. If you don't understand that everything's impermanent and that everything that is born is going to die, everything created is going to deteriorate and that impermanence is part of life in our culture. We are not taught this from the time we're knee high to a grasshopper. And you know that that idea, our ego identification.

And I have a Ted talk that I was supposed to give. But then Covid hit and it's all in disease as the the graduated path to expansion of consciousness and evolution, because it does stop us and it acts as that teacher for this is not you, right? Right. This is not you. And. And what? Who are you without that, you know. And can you find that and access that? And it has nothing to do with achievement and productivity. We're such a productivity oriented society. And so that that what you're pointing to is that right?

Food, Triggers, and Personalized Healing 29:20

That you accepted the impermanence of all that is. And I realized that it's inconsequential. Yeah. All you do is within what I call to you. Yeah, me. If somebody or whatever term someone wants to use that, that had its inherent value that I am whole and complete, I don't need to be broken to fix myself to be a value. And that is our path. We come in, we struggle and strive and overcome so we can be seen as having been involved or achieving or whatever. And and the path is really the opposite. We are hoping arrive.

And it is to realize that all of that is important. And even with the illness, you're not broken. Yeah, there's no you hole you can't heal, there's no breaking happening. Right? There's nothing. And and when it can no longer touch you because that's really what happens is it becomes over here. Right. You know, and then it's, you know, even if I can't change it, I'm okay. And and you begin to realize this, you know, this, this idea, this scale we've created, which is kind of this up and down, really is just if you, if you let it all just go, this one and, you know, you're no longer resisting because resisting is about forcing it down that path of value, ego based path that if I don't, I'm not whole.

I'm not broke and broken. This just this dissolve disappears and it all dissipates. And it's all about, you know, just experiencing there's no good, there's no bad. You know, even all through that, the, the horrific moment, you know, I, I liken to the idea of being on a ship, crossing the ocean to the New World and the exhilaration of the ups and downs and the fear and all of these things that make it this epic story. Right. And I'm really just having an epic story. And if I end up in a wheelchair, it's just the epic story, part of the epic story, right?

Yeah. And so, yeah, I'm exhilarated to see what I present. And that's what experience I have next with whatever or whatever my body is doing. You know, I had a I had a patient not not too long ago. That is one of several over the years, you know, that have come with the same story where they had a near-death experience and wound up going into this beautiful light with unconditional love and was met by a couple of deceased ancestors. And and then came back into the body, made a choice, and came back and then started having anxiety because in in the case of the, you know, this last person, it was because he's also, an athlete very attached to the physicality of his body and he was having an existential crisis about, well, who am I if I don't have a body?

Wow. And, and this shows me that I'm going to be without a body at some point, and this body I really like and I'm attached to. And so my work with him was to actually align, like, okay, you know, the impermanence of this body is real. And it is going to die. And, you know, can you grieve that and at the same time hold intense appreciation and gratitude for how it's serving you in this moment? No matter how that is, it may be in a wheelchair and maybe that the left side doesn't work and maybe that the vision is not there.

But this body is still functioning in a way that's carrying your consciousness around on this planet. And can you no matter what level or degree that that is, love it with that same unconditional grace that you felt when you were beyond it, you know, and pull that light into this dark period of anxiety. And it was amazing because it just sort of like reattached and anchored this resource place of, oh, right. And and then not resisting, you know, that this body is going to go, bye bye. It's going away.

Right. But your consciousness, as you've already witnessed, moves forward, you know, moves on and, you know, so whatever that means to you in terms of your spiritual, paradigm and languaging and all of that, you know, there's enough very compelling I know my work in hospice and in the intensive care unit in my earlier years, you know, I had so many people have stories like this, and I've had three near-death experiences in my own life that really does bring to bear like, oh, yeah, this body is impermanent.

And so therefore, how much appreciation and gratitude can I hold in this breath that I'm breathing right now, that it's not gone? Right, right. That changes your biochemistry or changes the feeling of betrayed to grateful right. Which is a completely different thing. And I always say, like, humans are so entitled, we think our bodies are supposed to behave in a certain way. But whoever promised that no one ever said, you're getting out of this with your body intact. Hard to, you know, one of the challenges that I found with with communicating with readers and followers on healthy, holistic living was, was maneuvering somebody's thought process not to see this as overly emotional or overly spiritual kind of dialog.

Here we are whole beings, and to be able to somehow marry the idea of the physical experience you're having with our responsibility to emotions and energy and life and in nature, how really this experience truly happens. I mean, you know, you can we can get into a delightful dialog about quantum physics and how, you know, it really proves it out, you know, and how we and we might be having existence on a million different planes right now, but you people, when you begin the dialog, right, how do you take this information and break it down to somebody who is a little more resistant to some of this dialog?

You know, to really embrace that? It takes all of it. We know the food and realistically it's a path. You know, that's pretty clear with with that that end, you know, you do have guidance. You have to start having a clear relationship with your body from a physical experience. You have to understand what a symptom means to you because it is very different, as you said to somebody else. So when this happens to my body, when a muscle doesn't fire, is that the beginning of another episode or can I reconnect to my brain that that is our response?

Is it a deficiency in magnesium? Is it the caffeine that I had earlier? Is it the fact that I'm having sugar, you know, like it's late, many different possibilities. Yeah, there it is. And you have to create when you reach a plateau of healing, it's your responsibility now to create kind of what I would call mental roadmap or punch list. One. Certain things start happening. I immediately know that I need to shift gears slightly because I'm so aware of what's going on in my body, I will know when my right calf is not firing.

I call this being in a collaborative relationship with your body instead of a combative one. You're listening right? You right? It's what I feel. You now have to start having a relationship with yourself, right? That's it. If you avoid that relationship on a physical, mental and spiritual level in any way, shape or form, it's not likely you're going to heal right? I think about it like I have four children. And so, one of my young when they were young, right, pulling up my pant leg or my, my running clothes and saying, mommy, mommy, mommy, you know, and I'm maybe doing something and saying, hang on, hang on.

And then they'll escalate, right? And then if you actually say to your body, how come you can't just. Right, right. Then you've basically taken that toddler and smacked them across the face and said, shut up. You know? Which hopefully as a parent, you would never do, you know. And so and it's like, can you have that same loving, inquiring, you know, with compassionate curiosity, hey, sweetie, use your words. What's happening for you right now? You know, like the same way you would do for your child, you do for the body.

If you can drop into that kind of compassionate curiosity and that level of self-inquiry, your body's just trying to give you information, right? And it will respond when you respond in that way, right. Where it's a two way communication, like, oh, I hear you. You didn't like that sugar. I see that I have restless leg right now. I can see you're telling me this is not great, right? Okay, I won't do that again. Instead of this, like victime deprivation, everybody else gets to have sugar. How come I can't have it? Right.

Well, that's a that's a whole nother dialog. I, I really feel strongly that we've been programed to, to the idea of deprivation. I mean, I'm utterly fascinating. Yeah. And and for whatever reason, I've never felt that. So I'm lucky that they hear when I don't have something, I have no sense of deprivation. I don't want to point to that to our listeners. Like, please like view that as I do. You do you feel it in a deprivation mode because it's it's just your body asking for what it needs. Right? It's it's not asking you to deprive yourself.

It's saying that's not the right fuel for me and I'm same as you. I did not feel deprived. Yeah. No. And and I felt, a sense of empowerment when I could physically do something. So, so as I was listening to dialog, I'm thinking about the different types of personalities, linear thinkers, kind of emotional thinkers and different things. And some of the terms you use might be more relatable to an emotional thinker versus linear thinker. But, you know, for me, I think both ways and I understand both is important.

But I also go about things in a linear fashion. And so turning things into a physical experience, gave me that sense of empowerment. So being able to, you know, address my body and not necessarily from a compassionate point of view, but a very, very technical point of a car. This is, you know, I'm a mechanic. What do you need? You need oil. You need this. So a lot of times I'll find myself when I dialog with people dependent upon how they receive information in their language. Do I discuss in an emotional way?

Do I discuss it in a linear way? Very tangible way. It doesn't matter because they all get us to the same place, right? You know, but I think this is where we lose a portion of people that like to live on the surface and stay away from those emotions when we don't invite them into a dialog

Body Awareness, Magnesium, and Closing Remarks 40:40

that starts with those tangibles, and then we work our way down, you know, that that we miss a broader section of people, you know, so I always strive to do that because I found starting with pain when I could really shift that, I thought, And I do understand there's an emotional component. I do understand, you know, after reading Molecules of Emotion, how literally your cells are altered by your emotions and translate into a physical expression in our body. I understood that, but I had to figure out something like you said, start with food.

It's very tangible to right there. You're going to feel a huge difference, you know, in the idea of feeling deprived, you, you know, for one minute go. That's a cultural training, that is cultural training. If you don't get to go to McDonald's once a week as a child, your kids will feel deprived. I remember that dialog I had when I have, my daughter, we originally adopted her, and somebody in the family had said, you know, I can't believe she's six and have never been to McDonald's. What are you doing?

You're depriving her. That was passing, this utter sense of deprivation for some external thing that we're not providing for that. And your value system is cultural, and your system means something. You know, I just. And that so self-harming it is. Thank you. It's abusive. Like I don't have that. It's not fair. I don't get the new iPhone. Whatever it is that you feel a sense of deprivation, you just causing harm to yourself. I think about it as rat poison. Like. Yeah, depriving yourself of rat poison.

Try and put it in that context like that. Simple, right? The bread that's brought out in the table at the restaurant, when you're when you're first learning how to do this and you haven't first said, don't bring any bread, you know, and it's right out. Pardon. That is hard I understand that. But yeah I mean the smell comes up, but then. Right. And so so it's like first, first learn how to say please don't bring the bread. And then if it's there, if there's someone else at the table that says, well, I want the bread right then, then picture as rat poison, you know, like for you it's rat poison.

You know, in my genetics I'm really darn near celiac. So it's rat poison. It makes it easy for me because it's a tangible I can actually think about, like, oh yeah, when the mice come and they get those little balloon things out of those plastic boxes and they take it back to the nest, they all die, right? But it smells good and it tastes good to them. What a horrible thing, you know? And and that's actually exactly what's happening right here, you know, and so it's very linear. It's very technical.

It's like yeah, that's what's happening right there. Right. And so that made it really easy for me because I used to make homemade bread. And I love the smell of it. It triggers something in my mind about comfort and love. Oh, you know what? That's so. And then if I could think about the mice bringing the little blue nodules back to their nest and like, oh, okay, our genetics and my family can't manage that. That's little blue nodules. Yeah. That's interesting. I took the other flip side of the coin, which was the idea that I could create a sensory experience almost of if I was consuming it.

So the person at the table that I go ahead, have it and I'm like, what? Tell me all that I've heard of people doing that. Yeah. And so for me, I was flip because I realized after realizing what I can do with pain, with disease itself, with any symptom I had, I realized that I could create a sensory experience that was satisfactory, that allowed me to believe that I was satiated and satisfied by that experience. You know, it's like traveling in your mind. Whatever it is, you, you know, you pine for things and you begin to realize if you give yourself a moment to experience that same you're pining for in that moment, you become satiated, right? Well, there you go, folks.

You've heard two ways of managing bread on the table in a restaurant, and they're both like, what works for you? And that's that's so important, right? What works for you? Yeah. Yeah. Really finding little tricks. Yeah. Because we're through this experience because our mind and our ego will tell us something that's not true. Yeah. You know, and in my case, gluten. You know, containing foods didn't make me sick. That's what people will often, you know, I'll hear that. Like, oh, I don't get digestive things with it.

And then I say, well, the autoimmune illness you have, it means it's making you so, you know, but it's not as overt. Oh, I get bloating. I get diarrhea like a celiac response, you know what I mean? I didn't get that stuff either. But I had RA, you know, so so eating bread didn't instantly correlate in this mind to, oh, this is making me sick. And so I do want to throw that out to people like, it's not necessarily going to be something that you will notice right away. It's going to be something that contributes to the leaky gut and do the way that your immune system is responding to what it's seeing out in there.

So, I wanted to kind of talk about that a little bit too, because oftentimes people will say, well, that bread if I just have it once a week, you know, but if your genetics are gluten intolerant and that's not going to work now, do you ever slip in the script here? Sorry about this. Do you ever feel like the idea that you can put the body in such a state of homeostasis and healing that you override that genetic component? Or do you feel like that genetic component will always dictate what I always think about, like a scale?

And I tell people, once you have a cushion where you've reversed your illness and there's no longer anything happening like you, you can you then get to play with like, what are the things that are on that scale? For me, I was able to translate bread into rat poison so effectively that it's not one of the ones. So I'll choose something else and I can play a little bit and kind of see it. And, you know, I have 25 years of experience with this now. And I can kind of tell like, yeah, no, that's not going to do it.

Right, right. And so there are other things that I will play with over bread, just because I really am like one snip away from celiac disease. And it's like, why do that to my body when it's clearly stating, I would rather not have that as fuel? Thank you very much. You know, but there are other things that I can do and play with, that will play with that cushion a little bit. Right. Well, that is a really good point, because what I realized when, when I decided to clean up my diet and I built a healthy home, I did, you know, it was just a stone unturned because I'm, like doing this on my own.

I'm like creating a roadmap. I'm like, I'm I will clear all obstacles. I'm like one at a time back. Right. And my life now is not nearly as regimented. And I'm so in tune with my body that we have we have that relationship. So when I take that step, you know, I know if there's resistance, I know foods should be picked up or should not be picked up. And I know when I'm edging a little close to that cliff. And now we need to pull back. So there's it's so much more flexible. And what people need to understand is when they go into this and they they accept healing as an option for themselves, you will arrive at a place.

It's not as regimented. That is true. That isn't so overwhelming that your whole life revolves around you, right? And control and the driver's seat. And you will be living life and it won't even feel like you are imposing this. That's a really, really, you know, beautiful place to be to when you get there. And it takes some time. It's not a light switch. You're not like, I'm sick or I'm not sick. You know, it's it's definitely this spectrum, right, of where your vitality is. And, you know, it's effortless.

Now for me, sounds like it's effortless for you and I. And my body trusts me. Yeah, it knows that I like you. Think about attachment disorder. Children are the ones where, you know, parents paid attention to them sometimes or not. And then not not other times or not at all. You know, they're all these. You can have that same disordered attachment to your body. My body? Trust me, it knows I will listen all the time. I think that most people have that disorder I go to. I would say it's cultural of people. It's cultural.

And and again this goes with emotions. It goes to our body. Everything is outside of our control except for success or failure. Right. You know, and if you fail, you didn't try hard enough and you succeed. You did something brilliant. Yeah. It's that narrow definition that you get outside of your life is already feels out of control. You might as well step out of that box. Yeah. You know, and this is a great place to end. Yeah I love that. And is is the first time I've talked about disordered detachment with the body.

And I love that I like it. So you have you have a gift the magnesium solution how to Fight Mean Stress and Inflammation e-book. Would you like to tell our viewers a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. One of the core things that I did when it came to my house was taking care of the fundamentals for my body. We all know magnesium deficiency is just, you know, 80% of people around cesium deficient. And then the number of symptoms that can arise from that, from anxiety, depression, pain, insomnia, insomnia, cardiovascular disorders, all kinds of things.

It was a simple thing that I could do to know that I am providing the nutrients in my body. That's a necessity. You do that with vitamin D, there's just certain core things that you really need to to go ahead and add into your life and the quick, you know, summary of the company that I now I'm co-owner with my core essentials is is actually my best friend had you know, knew a friend. His wife had fibromyalgia. He created a formula that was highly effective, that was maybe magnesium based for her and, got us all together and they came up with a formula for me because, you know, even though I deal with residual pain, and I have my areas that I'm still working on, I, I like adventure.

And so I had set myself up to climb Machu Picchu and Rainbow Mountain in Peru, and these guys three little heads together and came up with a formula for me. And it was absolutely amazing, beautiful. You know, we do have a lot of alignment. I take groups over there and doing a pizza all the time. Oh, you and the Inca Trail? No creek in history is my absolute mission, but I need to be there somewhere because Incan history is brilliant and interesting. Of three Incan history. Yeah, fascinating. And I went there with that intent, and we toured everything.

And I don't know if you've done Rainbow Mountain yet, but absolutely staggeringly beautiful for me. And of course, at the time I had some stuff going on and I'm like hiking. And of course, I went 20 year olds and 28 year olds, and I'm a good hour behind them, you know, doing my thing and in my head gone. What did you do? You know, because I did my trip to two days before and I thought, there's no way I'm going to be able to do Rainbow Mountain. And I covered myself with this little secret formula.

The guys came up with, and I was just good to go. And so, yeah, I made it up. And the my moment was when we were coming down, all the kids were throwing up because they hiked too fast. I was just like, okay, one for the 50 plus hours, you know, the tortoise wins the race again. Yeah, we really began to sell. We developed some products that were around pain relief for people that are dealing with not only magnesium deficiency, it addresses that, but we really address inflammation and pain mainly for the neurological muscular.

And we're finding that the formulation is wonderful for people with disease, with new disease and different diseases that they struggle with. And then of course, the backs of magnesium sleep at night like a baby. Yeah. So and we love the topical because, you don't have any digestive problems with it. I don't do well taking magnesium. So anyway, it's it's another thing that's kind of come out of all of this for me. Beautiful. Which is just been a fun adventure. I can't say I've loved every minute of it, but.

Well, Michelle, thank you so much for taking the time to share your wisdom with everybody. And, I really look forward to reading your e-book and knowing more about everything that you've been talking about. So thank you. So thank you for having me. With pleasure. All right, everybody, until next time, be well.