Autoimmunity: Why You’re NOT At War With Yourself

Introduction to the summit and guest 0:00

For. Welcome back to the reverse Autoimmune Disease Summit. Oh my gosh. We are on version 5.0 everybody. So this particular version is healing the energy body. And of course everything is energy. So there's just nothing that we cannot talk about when we're talking about healing the energy body. My guest today is doctor Rob Downey, who witnessed his first exceptional clinical outcome in response to functional medicine in 2006, when his natural medicine mentor turned around a severe autoimmunity case via Whole Foods, probiotics and safe, potent anti-inflammatory botanical supplements.

When he asked her whether getting Institute for Functional Medicine training would allow him to speak the language so he could understand what she was doing, she responded. If you get the f m training, you'll help people the way I do. And he never looked back. This is, that's where my certification is, too. And it's such a good training. So I'm so glad that you listened to your intuition and data and. Yeah, it changes. I mean, when you think about how we were trained and then and then changing that paradigm completely to get into the, the story, the root causes, it's it's pretty mind blowing, isn't that?

Thanks, doctor. Keesha, it's such a privilege to get to spend time with you today. And and to, spend time with our participants. And it was utterly transformative. It was a watershed or sea change moment in my life. And the only things I'm probably equally grateful for are the people that love me, including my wife and friends and the beautiful places in nature I get to be.

Reframing autoimmunity with compassion 1:51

The magnitude of it's just incredible. And yeah, yeah. So let's talk about autoimmune disease from a functional medicine perspective. Great. What a great opportunity to discuss it with, a master which is both exhilarating and a little intimidating. Yeah, I know, you know, we both have stories of revisiting our disease process, right? Yeah. And no two people are alike. And so it's, you know, you're master of this path to life. Well, that's really gracious of you. I would say that my my thinking in this has evolved quite a bit over 16 years in functional medicine and it's so neat getting to talk about this today, because this particular conversation goes all the way back to the case that did motivate me to get the functional medicine training.

This person who I had conceptualized based on my conventional medicine training as having irreversible disease. So that very first case, the person was put into my schedule because I worked at an integrative clinic, I worked there because I was receptive to integrative medicine. I didn't have the training. And then here's this person in my schedule with deformities of the hands due to psoriatic arthritis and failing the third drug and getting recurrent pneumonia, and looking at losing their job and getting circumstantially depressed and just so poignant and, and and looking at me with that look in the person's eyes, the look was you're the integrative person.

You're going to you're going to help me. And I'm so glad that my response was to say, I'm going to get you to the integrative person who will help me. So the person that became my mentor, a master trained naturopathy doctor, and an absolutely radiant human being, six months later, this person have 50% resolution. When I ran into the patient in the hallway and so now when I think about it, I realize that there's this incredible plasticity and all of these systems of the body, including the immune system.

And that's been the part for me that I it's just such a great natural high being part of somebody getting back on track with getting along with their immune system and optimizing the function of the immune system, including the immune system, no longer mis recognizing the self as the as the target. The one big change for me, in the last year or two, I realized I was using combat or military language. This attack on the self. And no surprise, Jeff Bland, the father of functional medicine, always comes along and takes some idea and refines it in a way that's incredibly challenging to me and takes a long time to digest.

And I saw him interviewed and he said, we always teach people that in autoimmunity, the immune system is attacking the self. He said, I'd like us to think of this, that our immune system is doing its job right, and then ask ourselves what? What's next? And I suppose today's conversation may be most powerful if we look at the inadvertent problems we're creating in this military or war combative language, because then potentially we frame the problem in a way that's inherently got a fight flight energetic motif, which doesn't serve us as we try to get to harmony.

It's like the war on cancer, the war on drugs or on anything. Yeah, yeah. Polarization. Right? Right. And instead of miscommunication, well, the, the, I thought about how to frame this for our participants. And so I thought of these two phrases, and it doesn't bother me if people do or don't join me, but feel free if you want to. And so if I say this phrase, my immune system is attacking me, and we just stop a second and feel that energy of that statement, and then we contrast it to the statement, my immune system is doing its job, and we feel the energy of that.

They have a different energy. And so to me, the the deeper manifestations of that are that we start from a place of compassion

How the immune system recognizes threat 6:32

for an overworked immune system, living in a world that's not designed for even compassion for ourselves, living in a world we're not designed for. And I think then, that compassion informs a different character to the answers. I suspect people move more quickly toward elegant solutions that are simple and harmonize with who they are, and they're less prone to ending up to wanting to go to medications right away and less prone to mischaracterizing the immune system as the enemy. If we say our immune system's attacking us in a subtle way, it does sort of shame the immune system energetically.

I don't think we want to do that. Yeah. And you know, let's why don't we go through the biochemistry and the physical, you know physiology of what, what we're talking about when we say that the immune system is actually just doing its job. Very good. So our immune system has these these signatures. It's looking for for self versus other. The most sort of black and white construct we can make of the immune system is it's teasing out what what's it expecting to see. And it's worth noting also that parts of us change quickly, like our, Kara Fitzgerald's doing all this brilliant work on methylation, which changes second to second hour of our day to day.

But our immune system changes over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. So when we think about then, the one I love is a conversation you and I got to have before we talked about sugar. And then sugar gets stuck to other molecules in the body. The the molecules get glycosylated. Well, now they look alien to the immune system because pre agricultural people didn't have a bunch of molecules running around with sugars stuck to them. And on and on are toxic exposures. I suspect a lot of your audience is very sophisticated.

And so they've got a lot of the puzzle pieces to pull together that chronic environmental toxicity, the products that, come into our bodies or get put onto our skin, estrogen mimics, etc., the air, the water, our thoughts and how those then expect affect genetic expression or gut barrier integrity. We end up with the cells and tissues, being tagged or modulated or modified in ways, all of which are attracting the attention of the immune system. Those things don't look quite right. And the immune system's job is to say, I'm going to antibody tag this, in which case a lot of molecules end up running around the body.

Antibody tagged and clogging the liver. Or I'm going to engulf this in a white cell, or I'm going to release an inflammatory cascade to deal with this threat. So in rheumatoid arthritis that happens in the hands and asthma it happens in the lungs. Eczema it happens on the skin. Multiple sclerosis it happens in the brain. But if we had the luxury to be the immune system or be an immune cell, we'd just be looking around and saying, wow. There's a lot of work to do here. And so for me, it's helped me have what I think are better conversations with my patients and people that rely on me as somebody who can hopefully inform their journey to not only heal, but heal as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Let's just be really compassionate toward the immune system and do the things that we need to do to turn over immune cells quicker via autophagy. So we get some bright, fresh, new ones that don't have the old residues of misunderstanding. Let's do the lifestyle things that our immune systems are relying on to be resilient. Let's live with it. That, this is immune system. Over. Well, not so much.

Supervisor analogy and collaborative healing 10:42

Let's let go of attacking the self because it's a great way to understand autoimmunity, but I don't think it's a great way to heal it. Yeah. And you know, the the idea that if somebody is doing their job and it's in the job description and you don't like what the outcome is, then it's probably important to go to that somebody, have a collaborative conversation. Right. Like, right. You know, and instead of just like, fired, right. I'm glad you brought that up. My worry in choosing is this way of priming the pump for today's conversation.

I hoped very much it will be helpful. And at the same time, I worried that the concepts might be elusive in a way that was unhelpful. And so I thought of something like, if any of us who have been an effective supervisor, we go talk to the person about, are you aware of your job description? Are you aware of the details of your last job report? How are you doing? How's this feeling from your end? And, how can you be successful at this? Any of us who've done a supervisory role will often hear things like, oh, well, I just ended my marriage.

Or from the worker. The employee, my marriage just ended. My dog died. I injured my shoulder. I didn't understand my job description I had. I'm being bullied at work. I don't get along with my immediate supervisor. So that compassion. Another way to frame it is, my favorite one, actually, is with adolescents. Here's two phrases we can contrast. One phrase is, my adolescent took the keys to the truck without my permission and bent the fender. And then the other phrase is my adolescent is individuated and maturing, and they're the same thing, right?

But again, one of them recognizes that they're doing their job, and the other sort of frames them as as misbehaving. So. So this can feel like, well, wait a minute, doctor, when this is advisory, when, you know, the one that I wanted to add to what you're talking about, like, because a lot of us have served as supervisors, you mentioned is how can I best support you? Yeah. Right. Right. For you to be able to do your job in the highest good for everyone, right? Right. How can I ask you? And I don't think the body gets asked that by us very often.

Like, you have been really working hard for X number of years without a lot of gratitude or any bonuses. So. I am just noticing that and I would like to repair that right now, you know, how can I best support you? Yeah. Well, I mean, the energy Redbull drinks that you have in the break room aren't really helping me at all. Is there a way that you can put something in there that's a little less, you know, toxic? Okay, sure. You know, we can put in worm, you know, a lemon water and all kinds of thinking through you. Oh, that'd be great.

You know? And it's it's like both a really collaborative, compassionately curious way of communicating with. Yeah, worse, if you take that into your your family structures and your friendships and your work environments and you know, your schools everywhere, it's going to work a lot better. And that includes with you and your systems. I love it that I get to have the conversation with you, because I know enough about you that, there was a presumption that this would resonate and I would get to learn something today, which is a wonderful benefit for me.

The part I'd like our participants to think about is this feels so subtle. This can feel like, you got to be kidding. I can feel like this is going to make a difference. But the reason I think it makes a difference is if we add to the conversation what Doctor Heidi Hanna calls the hustle and the grind. And so study her big study on stress. The number one answer for why people are pinned by circumstance and they feel that they can't move forward, is the hustle and the grind. And so if we say, well, what's our response to that?

We got a rally, or if we got a rally, we got to get revved up. We got to get revved up. We're more likely to have that cookie. We're more likely to have that second or third cup of coffee. We're more likely to then stay up late with Netflix to then wine, or not meditate, or go out in the forest for a lark, or sleep for at least eight hours. Yeah, so I think there's this subtle fight flight thing happening where we're very hard on ourselves. Again, we're sort of harsh supervisors of ourselves, or we're the coach that says, well, we're going to get injured today to get the win at the expense of long term physical performance.

Whatever. Not a football game. Yeah, yeah. And so so we're almost certainly then if we say, okay, what if ever that coworker we're talking about our, our, our autonomic nervous system, what she would probably say if we're in fight flight mode to solve our problems, we're actually not healing. That's the irony. As we rally, we're in fight flight. What's that energy? Our system doesn't care at all on an energetic level about immunity, recovery, restoration, fertility, assimilation of nutrients. When we're in subtle levels of fight flight mode to achieve our objectives.

Stress, hustle, and the fight-flight trap 16:50

And I'm probably reflecting to some degree from some personal grief that I had to get over that I was doing this, and I couldn't help my patients until I helped myself. And I'm really struck by when we become curious about what we need for restoration and for peace. Then we start asking ourselves questions about do we have permission to be at peace in the forest? Do we have permission to put our feet on the earth and be grounded? Do we have permission to put that lemon water in and sit with it for 30 minutes and just feel the blessing?

And the folks I see recover from autoimmunity are in that peaceful, curious place, and the folks that I see have the greatest trouble appear to be in a state of recalcitrant anger. So I start having these connect the dots feelings that this is perhaps more important. Or it's the kind of 301, 401 level work you're doing with your audience. Now, that may be a very important time in their journey to be asking some of these questions. And this is just to get a couple of details and, and really flesh this out a little bit with color.

This is when you take a protocol and you have to do that perfectly. This is when you take a diet, call it a diet, make it into a diet and then set it up as a deprivation of I can't have I can't have. All right. These are these are the places where the healing does not occur in those spaces. Yeah. Right. Right. You had mentioned that sugar was enough of an issue for you and one of our prior conversations that you needed to take it with the seriousness that an alcoholic would take alcohol. And that's, to me, such an interesting one to pass, because there is a way to engage that with curiosity that if the sugar creeps in, we're compassionate and we get back on track, and there's a very rigid way to approach it with a sense of failure.

Right. And I've experienced enough of both that I've gotten more attuned to which energetic space my patients are in and around things like that. And so I think it's also off the wagon. I need to go down in flames now, right? I had a little bit of this. So now I can have a whole sourdough bread loaf. Well, perhaps it's empowering. I saw Dean Ornish say many years ago somebody asked him what to do when people, when people when their food plan is an optimal. And he said, just just start again. Yeah.

And and then Mark David said that he doesn't know anyone that eats perfectly. And then I thought, well, Mark Hyman might eat perfectly, but then I thought about his ice cream and cookies in the summer or his, revelation that if, if, Ben and Jerry's Chunky monkey was good for you, how much of it he would eat? And I thought of David Perlmutter saying those grain brained mean you'll never have another slice of pizza. Some people might choose to go 9010. And I realized a bunch of the luminaries are acknowledging that our bodies know the way and and, yourself included.

And so it seems to me we can think that there's these folks eating perfectly for their immune system, and we just need to be like them. And the irony is that that might be one of the greatest traps of all, because we're going to do this concept called Second arrow. We're not only going to suffer the immuno disruptive consequences of the sugar in the glycosylation, but we're going to put the second arrow into ourselves of guilt and shame, which is also immune to inflammatory. Right. So the immediate compassion and then even saying, well, why did I do this?

But, you know, what? Did I get a dopamine hit from the sugar? Okay. So what else can I do to get dopamine now or from now or tomorrow morning when I feel the same, same way? And this has been alien to me too. But I get to benefit from all these thought leaders. And so now I'm doing this. I'm saying, well, I got my dopamine hit from the gluten free chocolate chip cookie today, but tomorrow it's going to come from sitting in the sun, with my, you know, mushroom, drink from for somatic and it's really cool to me feeling that gentle evolution.

It feels right and I feel great in response to it. And there's a sustainability to compassion based practices based in understanding why we do things. It feels far more sustainable than any shoulds. I've ever repeatedly, applied to the Teflon of my misunderstandings. I call this the detox three talks roller coaster. You know, you you can you can actually stop buying tickets and don't get on.

Mindfulness, awareness, and the gut-brain-spirit connection 22:08

Don't get on the roller coaster any longer. But that's that will come at a time when that evolution is right for you. And that's the thing is, everyone's different. And you know how long it took me to get off that roller coaster is not going to the same as what it takes another person. And so, you know, it's just really having a lot of grace around this, a lot of patience, a lot of willingness. And that's what I think is one of the most important words in all of it to develop self-awareness and observe.

Like what? Track your own self, right. I just happened right there. What was I feeling? How old do I feel when I feel that, you know, and and then, oh, is this something that I learned to link when I was very young to bring me peace and maybe that kind of grounding that this brought me then is unhelpful today, and I can think of a different way to do it, you know. And so that's just that's just basic problem solving instead of shaming and getting into a no, an emotional spiral around it. Everything you just shared there makes me flash on mindfulness.

And this fork in the road, as it were, where as these things arise, if we've been doing our mindfulness practices, whatever they are for us, then we can kind of see these things arise illuminated by how we're feeling in the moment and not not push them away or attach to them. But some of this stuff is so emotionally painful, it's it's Genesis is often and I wish I had the attribution here, but I heard the most pithy phrase the other day. Our childhood wounds are the mothers and fathers of our fate.

And so I think for realizing now, based on your work and others work, that, that we'll, we'll run into these habitual things that we did, we so many of us don't realize it's an action in itself to just look at it in the light of consciousness, just to stop and be aware. And so good news for our participants is you don't have to then go run three miles or go prepare a gluten free bread or something. If you just stop and be aware of what you're experiencing and be curious, that in itself is beneficially immunomodulatory.

I think that might be some of the some of the best news of all. So can we talk about the connection between the gut, the brain and spirit? We're talking a lot about consciousness, which gets left out of the conversation a lot. And I, I think we've, brought it into the spotlight is an important one to talk about. Love to do that. I think they I think they rise and fall together. And I love I love the physiology of that. I think all of us in functional medicine are enamored of physiology. So I think about the piece in the brain, which comes from parasympathetic rest and digest rest and restore nervous system tone, then running the software to the gut so that we assimilate nutrients and we have good gut barrier integrity.

Thus little or no leaky gut. And then that positions our gut to help our brain stay healthy and happy. As the gut barrier rises and fall, so rises and falls the blood brain barrier. So we're doing a favor to our our brain barrier integrity by helping our our gut barrier. And I think that the spirit on a spiritual level, we're wired for safety. Again, borrowing from Heidi Hanna, I feel like all of these conversations can be subtitled Another day. Of standing on the shoulders of Giants. So when she says we're wired for safety, our our spirit needs to feel safe to do its most brilliant dynamic things that it does for us about where is the opportunity, where is the service? What's my highest self?

What can I let go of? How can I grow even our spirit, letting the universe in to do those amazing Jungian synchronicity type things it does when we're in a state of service and peace and gratitude and abundance. And then I love it that any of these three pieces of the triangle all can undercut one another. So they can be vicious circles or vicious cycles, but they can all support one another. So sometimes my gut restoration and repair patients think that supplements will reboot the brain, which reboots the spirit, and others will have a spiritual breakthrough.

Which reboot reboots the brain, which reboots the gut. So I love it. The people can, from my perspective, they can take any point of entry and good things will happen. So we're talking a lot about finding peace in this journey, and we live in an era that I think can be universally defined as not very peaceful. So how do we encourage people to be able to stay peaceful when outside circumstances or not? But something I think about a lot, I presume I'm going to be thinking about it or reflecting on it a lot for the rest of my life.

I'm not sure there is a more important question in my lifetime, and I've seen huge benefits to my patients and the people that are on the learning journey with me. If we if we ask more and deeper questions about that. The biggies for me lately are the the news like what's happening in the world is important for us as citizens, but I think we get way too big a dose. And then I think those of us that are intuitive or empathic can tolerate an even smaller dose. And I'm very concerned that I've never heard a single.

Staying peaceful in a chaotic world 28:38

I think this might have even been part of our last conversation. So I have to apologize if I'm being redundant, but I've never heard the news anchor man say or anchor woman say today. This many kids were nice to their dog. Today this many people took a walk. Today this many people took a meal to their neighbor who was recovering from surgery or just got out of the hospital. So I'm super concerned now that the world is much better than the news. And luminaries like David Perlmutter in Brainwash are saying this that in many ways, we live in a much better world than we ever have lived in.

I, I also think about I was part of homeschooling for a while, and I read world history to my kids. Humans have done brutal, weird things to one another for a long time. Yeah, so that's the dark side of, this is what I point out to my children. I go to generation by generation, and my dad did the same thing for me when I was crying, when I was pregnant with my first child, and I got another drive by shooting in Dallas, Texas, where I lived. And he said, Kisha, you know what was happening when when I was born in 1945, you know, and I gave him an article snippet of The Horrors.

And then he said, what about my mom? You know, on the 1930s? And, you know, again, another world war and, you know, and he just kept going backwards and and he said, this is the way of humans and on this planet. And so who you're bringing into this world right now at the onus is on you to help them become, you know, a vessel for service to be of aid to this world. And I just thought, oh my gosh, what a beautiful way of putting everything in the context and perspective. Yeah. And not just getting, you know, kind of it went kind of like I have a meditation idea that's from mouse to eagle, and it's like I was taken from being the mouse and running around and seeing only the horrors that were right there, you know, and to being the eagle that had like, this larger freedom and perspective and could dive into whichever current right by choice.

And it you know, I think that's so important for us to remember we're not mice. I don't know if anything more important because it's an existential it's an existential challenge for so many of us now to say, I must reconcile myself to this for there to be a path forward, because I think the magnitude of the the information is inherently goes right past fight flight and to freeze faint. Right. I mean, it's so profoundly distressing. We feel frozen or we feel dissociated. Yeah. So to me, the the most important part of being peaceful is realizing that there's this sort of holographic or cognitive distortion and type issue of of what's actually happening in the world is sort of beyond our comprehension.

And by electing to focus on the parts that we sort of heart intuit matter most and that we're true stakeholders in, that would be what a dear friend of mine calls strategic withdrawal, which is we strategically position ourselves for our heart and our mind and our existence to be a light to others by humbly acknowledging that it's just too much to to drench ourselves in horror. Yeah, I had to ask my husband to stop relaying the news to me. I said, I don't watch it for a reason, and I don't look at it on my phone first thing in the morning the way you do, you know?

So we would take our hikes in the morning. He would be full of the news of the world. And I would say I don't want like I didn't get on my phone this morning for this reason. I don't need it to be conveyed to me. Thank you. You know, I, I, I just keep myself really. I don't watch any media. That is horrifying. I don't, you know, and and people might say, well, that's very Pollyanna, but I actually find out what I need to find out. You know, it just so happens and so, you know, and then it keeps my energy system really clean.

That to me is a I can comment from just having, made a 97% reduction in my news consumption since the last time you and I talked. I'm sleeping again. So there's a 1 to 1 correlation there. And Natasha Salahi, the, sensitive doctor, taught me that if we're empathic or intuitive, then we, which many healers are, then the are the folks that are relying on us for that healing energy. We may not have the bandwidth for some of that other stuff, and I, I, I don't ever want to feel like I'm undercutting my citizenship or my degree to be informed, but the the abundance of the information relative to our need for the information appears to me to be about 10,000 fold to one.

I mean, right, we got a skewed ratio here. So, I'm not struggling any more with whether or not I'm a good citizen. I'm I'm still picking up plenty of the major right, major storylines. And I think I also think about which things I need information on because it's part of my job. So I just did the last Institute for Functional Medicine update on Covid, and I tracked that through CDC, centers for Disease Control and, New York Times. Perspectives I find to be a helpful companion to that for me. There's many good sources, of course, but, so I think there's a balance here, but I'm just so pleased to be getting the dose right.

I also had a person I think is brilliant. Tell me to just, not feel like not be so hard on myself and feel like I have to solve these problems, but instead to just put my feet on Mother Earth and give them to Mother Earth and get a recharge. And I'm going to explore that a lot more. Yeah. When I can't sleep now, I'm going to push the dose. I'm going to do it more often, and I'm going to see how many these things I can give to Mother Earth. So yeah, there's a mystical part of me that in Peru they call that, Russia.

And in the Andes, where I was trained by teacher, you, you literally take your hands on, on the top of your knees, your legs, you know, and and put your feet hip width apart. You lean over and you just think about, like, all of the dark thoughts and, and feelings that are congesting for you and feel really heavy and stuck energy. And you kind of do the lion pose and yoga, you know, in this way. And you lean over and you just like you're vomiting and on to the earth and, and the idea is that, Pachamama

Grounding, releasing, and healing through Earth connection 35:48

then takes all of that and makes it into fertilizer and grows beautiful vegetables and fruits and flowers and, you know, and and that, that she really can take on is that, you know, she's the stabilizing, rising force underneath us. And if we're disconnected from her, we forget, you know, that we can ground that way, we can release this. We don't have to be that container that she can actually transform it and make it into something beautiful that feeds lots of other beings, you know? And it's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's so beautiful. And I'd like to say that historically I trusted that. But given how revelatory it was for somebody really prescient and wise to tell me that I needed to do that, and just go ahead and do it, it was humbling and also just incredibly reassuring. And it feels to me like, okay, another watershed moment, this is letting go of beating up on myself that I have to be able to carry this and going ahead and saying it's okay to let this go. And then the same person said, and then Mother Earth can go ahead and give you a recharge every time you get to.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's science even tells us about that charge that we get, you know, and it it really does impact us. And this teacher that, you know, was teaching me this practice said there's there's arrogance and believing that you have to hold everything. And I went, oh, well that's an interesting step further. Right. And the thinking that somehow I'm just that important that I have to hold that, you know, so I so much sense to me that makes so much sense to me. And it's so humbling.

And none of us, I don't think my all speak for myself. I don't like to run into my own arrogance, but some of the most important growth steps I've ever taken in terms of being a healthier human being, a happier human being, have had to do with hubris and arrogance. Yeah, it creeps in somewhere, probably as a protective mechanism for the underlying fear and anxiety and, and so I was just suffering so much and not sleeping so much due to the sex essential overwhelm that I just felt. I remember saying after after hearing from, Marissa Rinaldo.

Yeah. Go ahead, give it to the earth. Okay, great. I'm out of here. I'm going to go do that right now. Yeah, and then again tomorrow and again the next day. And she encouraged me to go ahead and do it at lunch. Even just to let go of the, the mornings, you know, realizing that a bunch of the folks I take care of just, their energy is really, a struggle for them, their energetic imbalances. And then I think empaths and intuitive and healers sort of are to some degree, we're tuning in. We have to tune into that radio station to be of service.

So then there's a consequence, if we feel beholden to carry that out of maybe a kind of self-flagellation or something, we can instead give it to Earth. The Earth, we can serve better, right? So there's this out. Yeah. Because ultimately it is. And that's doing the healing. We are not the healers. We are not the ones, you know, we're just channeling to another version. Right? We're just the heckle, the telephone, the communication vessel. You know, it isn't us. And so that's the thing that when he said that it clicked.

Then I went, oh my gosh. Yeah, okay. I can see that. I can track arrogance there. You know, this isn't even about me. And so, you know, it's like, yeah, okay. I'm in like going and dumping out the trash. All right. Right, right. Yeah. Right. Well, and that, that lack of ego so that then this healing experience is I find that they happen more and more often, the less I identify them with me and realize I get to be a participant in this experience, not a source. Yeah. Let's say now it feels like there, as far as I can tell, there isn't any perception at all that I'm the source.

I feel a sense of transparency around there's some sort of, greatest good that wants to happen that's co potentiated by a person who wants to be the facilitator and a person who wants to be the recipient. Yeah. Feels a little bit like Reiki. And I love it that sometimes where the recipient sometimes or the facilitator or that feels like part of the beauty of life to all in, in all of it we're mirroring each other and what do we need to learn.

Closing thoughts and free gift 40:38

So you know if we're willing to. Yeah. Be it that way. So yeah. Well, it has been such a pleasure to spend this time with you. Thank you so much for sharing even a fraction of your wisdom in the past. Thanks for all the light you bring, doctor Kiesha I love getting to be in a you too. So you have a, a free gift. You you ran a really beautiful summit, called the Healing Habits Summit and have a an e-book. I think that you put together a guide of healing habits. Yeah. So that will be available. And it's 15 pages and it's healing habits from a functional medicine physician.

And it's deliberately provocative and quirky and fun and has different things each page, which is so great, so great. So I think people I think people will dig it. And a lady who's really gifted and does a lot of this work is the is the one who made it beautiful. So I gave her the ideas and she made it absolutely gorgeous. Lindsay Griffin, who is based out of New York and so I'm always I feel attribution is another part of grace and graciousness and gracefulness. And so she took something I felt really good about and made it made it great.

And, I hope people really benefit from it and enjoy it. Thank you. All right, everybody, we've got Doctor Downey, contact information here. And that really beautiful download that you can take advantage of and really learn what he's up to and the work, the beautiful work that he's doing in the world. Until next time, be well.