EPI 51 - Your Body Knows Best The Science of Self Healing

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Welcome back to The Habit Within and today's episode we are going to talk about the power of self-healing and the hidden forces behind your health. So, and last week, did you check out that episode? Because there I shared the story about how I was diagnosed with ductal cystic carcinoma in situ breast cancer and how I chose a different path than the one that was laid out before me and how five years later my cells are healthy. But let's be real, it's one thing to hear a story like this and another to believe it yourself and I totally get that.

So today I want to take you on a deeper dive. We'll dive into the science behind why the actions I took worked. We'll talk about what actions I took and why they worked and it's not just about wishful thinking.

I didn't just sit and wish and pray that things would change. It is truly about biology, our biology, human biology, neuroscience and the undeniable intelligence of the human body. Look, have you ever had that moment where your body told you something before your mind could even process it? Maybe you had that gut feeling and now some people have the feeling in their gut, some people it's a lower in their sacral area, some people they might feel it in their heart space, but you have this feeling that something isn't quite right or that you need to go a different direction.

Or maybe you've had some aches and pains in your body and a few days later or even maybe a few weeks later it's gone. No one intervened, it just disappeared. You no longer have those aches and pains anymore.

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Or maybe you've had moments of just pure clarity where you're worried about something and then spontaneously it just all made sense. You didn't have to consider it anymore. It had resolved.

So what if I told you that your body has been healing itself all along. That you are constantly wanting to go back into what is called homeostasis. Your body is always working to come back into balance.

Your body wants to survive. It wants to be healthy and whole. There is a whole lot going on in there, inside your body, even on the outside of your body, that outer layer of the skin.

And all this stuff is going on inside without you even having to think about it. So what would happen if you did put a little bit of intention on it? Before we go there I just want to geek out a little bit. I just want to remind you guys of 11 different systems in our body.

We have the skin, the skeletal, the muscular system, the nervous system, the lymphatic system. It goes on and on and on. And these systems are interacting with each other and they're independent of one another.

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They're all doing these things at the same time. Countless essential functions all at the same time. And I don't know if that doesn't blow your mind.

Then I don't know what will. Because that blows my mind. It is incredible to think that right now, me sitting here, all of these things are happening without me even having to control them.

And it really doesn't even take belief for it to happen or not. Because it's just happening. It's still happening.

It's happening right now. Yep. Right now.

Even right now. So today we're going to dive into what I believe is the real story behind self healing. That it's not just this theory.

It's not just about science. But it's the very force at work inside of you right now. And this doesn't even have to do with belief systems.

It doesn't have to do with religion. It doesn't have to do with spirituality. To me it just seems like the facts.

The forces that are within you, inside of you, are acting with intelligent design or not. It's still working. You still get the benefits whether you believe it or not.

So let's think of our bodies as the symphony orchestra. So each organ, cell, and system play their part to create this perfect harmony. And these professional musicians that are in this orchestra, they don't actually need a conductor.

They already know their cues. They know what to do when the strings swell and the percussion keeps the rhythm and the melody begins. But what happens if outside noise drowns out the music? It can throw off the whole entire performance.

It can throw off one section of the orchestra which throws off everything else. So the question isn't really whether your body can heal. It's what noise needs to be silent so the symphony can play as it's meant to.

And you don't have to take my word for this. Like we spoke about last time, think about the last time you got a small cut on your finger. Did you have to think about healing? No! You didn't have to tell your body to heal.

Although there is some science that even says that if you tell your body to heal when you get a cut immediately that it will start the process sooner. Okay, so you don't have to think about your body sending platelets and the immune response and all of the stuff that starts to help close the wound. It just happens.

Or let's think about the last time that you had a cold and whether or not you take the Sudafed or the decongestant or the cough suppressant, you are going to heal regardless because your body is in the process of resolution. We cough because we're getting fluid out of our lungs. The worse the cough gets when you're hacking up little pieces, that's because your body is doing its job by getting out the mucus build up in the fluid within the lungs.

It actually means that you're leading more towards resolution. Of course, unless you still have very high fever and you're fatigued and all that stuff, but that's a different story for a different time. The majority of us, 99.9% of the time, that's the natural progression of healing from a cold.

But we think that we can heal more quickly when we do certain things, but let's look at a cut. If we put Neosporin on a cut, because I know that's a really common thing that people do, instead of just keeping it clean with warm water and soap, what we do is people tend to layer Neosporin on their cut when actually some of the wound experts say that if you get Neosporin on the edges of the wound that it delays healing because that skin is so delicate and it's doing this job of the natural healing process that I can actually irritate that delicate skin causing the wound edges to slow down healing. And if you just, you know, kept with cleaning it with warm water and soap, then you'd be just fine because your body is healing from the inside out.

It's working that process. And sometimes our interventions can delay the healing. So back to my story about when I was diagnosed with ductal cystic carcinoma in situ.

I was immediately met with a flood of voices and opinions, right? That's what happens, right? You get this diagnosis, you're in the doctor's office for a reason, and of course they're going to be, of course opinions are going to be shared. And so I heard a lot of them from doctors, from loved ones, and a lot of the worst case scenarios. It was very urgent that you have to act fast, you have to act now, this is what you should do, this is what you shouldn't do.

And again, I completely get it. That is their job. That is their role.

And as being a physician assistant myself, I understand that the best intentions were there. That the intentions were pure. But something in me hesitated.

And not necessarily out of fear, but out of something deeper. I just had this intuition, this knowing, that gut feeling that we were talking about earlier. And actually, to be quite fair, it was a little bit out of fear.

I was more fearful of this process, of the urgency that was behind it. It didn't feel right to me. That piece of it, that's what felt artificial in a way.

Because in all of my rotations that I did, working with emergency room physicians, that there really isn't this true thing as an emergency. I worked with this one woman who said that her cortisol, so her stress level, was the same with a gunshot wound as it was with looking in an ear, like doing an ear exam. Because where she worked in this inner city hospital, gunshot wounds were a nightly occurrence as were ear infections.

So for her, they were one and the same. So the urgency that we see and perceive, and the urgency that a physician might feel in a real urgent emergent situation, there's time. There is time to breathe.

There is time to go to the restroom. There is time to take a little snack break until you enter into a room. So my point is with sharing that, is that I believe that urgency leads to poor decision making.

It comes from this place of all in the head, and not from a full body response. So I did what few people do, and I recognize how hard it is to go against the grain. I recognize how hard it is to go against what the experts are sharing and telling you.

But I had to. I had to completely press pause. I had to listen from within.

I needed to do my own research. And what I found, y'all, shifted everything. Shifted my world dramatically.

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When I was in that period of one to two years of really healing my nervous system, before I received the diagnosis, I had already began to heal. I already felt like I was beginning to heal. It's kind of going back to the cut example.

When you get to a certain stage, you're like, yeah, I could put a bandaid on this or not. Like, it's fine. It doesn't need any more attention from me.

I really don't even need to clean it out anymore, because you see that there's like a scab that's formed. That's kind of what I was feeling at that point. And around this time, too, I started reading a lot of personal development books.

And I started my own online business, which for any of you who are entrepreneurs out there, you know that starting your own business, being self-employed, is your crash course, your boot camp into overcoming some of your most deepest core beliefs about who you are and what you're capable of. Especially when you have to show up online and have your face as your kind of personal brand, if you will, if you're doing any sort of coaching or mentorship, that's an important part of it. And I tell you, it magnifies any insecurities.

So again, I was already in this process of healing and of growth and of development. And I was really grateful that pre-diagnosis, I was already doing extensive research on and asking really hard questions that were going against what conventional Western medicine were saying. I was looking at what really is the role of genetics on addiction and how do genetics play a role in breast cancer, considering all of my markers were negative, and I have a negative family history of breast cancer.

So I was really digging into the research about this. I was also looking at how habit formation happens, how change, sustainable, lasting change happens, really was deep in that research that I hadn't learned when I was in my master's in science and physician assistant program. And I became obsessed with it.

I became obsessed with what does healing and transformation, how does healing and transformation really happen? And looking at this molecular biochemical level of healing. And my mind was blown when I read the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza and Dr. Bruce Lipton. Dr. Bruce Lipton, he's a cell biologist, and he discovered that cells don't just respond to genetics.

They actually respond to our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. What? And Dr. Joe Dispenza, his work on neuroplasticity and self-healing has shown me time and time again that the body-mind connection is not just a theory. It's a biological fact.

And as we talked about last week in the book Mind Over Matter, you know that spontaneous healing isn't just a miracle. It is a pattern. You need to read these books if this interests you at all.

So when I started applying these principles, not just reading about them, right? Right? Just like this podcast, I don't want you to just listen to them, but I want you to truly embody the words that I'm saying. And I want you to notice what changes like I did. And what I noticed that changed was not something that happened overnight.

It was not a magic pill, but it was real. And it was tangible. And I saw these shifts in my health, in my mindset, and in my energy.

And then five years later, my cells are healthy. But this all happened pre-diagnosis. So I was already primed and ready.

I was already on the healing path by the time that diagnosis occurred. So now I really want to share with you what I did after the diagnosis. I want to take you deeper into the science behind why I chose certain actions.

Okay? So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to start this off by saying your body cannot heal in the same environment that made it sick. I do not know who said that.

It sounds like something that Dr. Joseph Spenza or Bruce Lipton would have said, but I can't find who originally said that quote, but it makes so much sense. It's along the same lines that they say in business, but the saying, what got you here won't get you there. So if you want to increase your productivity in your business, then you have to hire more people.

You have to learn different skills. You have to get systems in place in order to get to that next level. We could apply that to your health goals, like to weight loss goals, or to building muscle.

So what got you to this point won't get you to the next point. You're going to have to lift heavier weights in order to get you to the next step. So to shake things up a bit, you need to put your body in a different environment so it can start to heal.

And in Dr. Joseph Spenza's work, he shows how stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline can shift your body into survival mode. And a lot of us are living in this high cortisol stress state, and we don't even know it. And when our bodies are focused on survival mode, when that's what they're doing in there, this redirects the energy away from healing and into fight or flight.

So if you're living in a state of worry and fear and stress, especially under the urgency of the Western medical world, your body will prioritize short-term survival over long-term repair. And we're looking for this long-term repair. So because of this, and because of the work I had already done pre-diagnosis, I knew that I needed to focus on the internal state of my body before I was going to look at anything external like supplements or treatments or even different lifestyle changes.

Because the deal is, I had already been doing yoga and nutrition and all of the things, juices, smoothies, all of the things prior to my diagnosis, but I only had recently started working on the inside job. And so yeah, basically I made it my J-O-B to really get out of stress mode. And I did this through breath work, tapping, meditation, visualization, hypnosis, going to bed early, making sure I got plenty of sleep, not drinking alcohol, all the things, and all of which have been shown to lower cortisol levels and activate the parasympathetic nervous system so I could get into the state where healing actually happened.

As I've said before in my podcast, you can google any of this information if you feel like you need more to back you up to make this feel substantiated. In a study published in 2016 in Psychoneuroendocrinology found that mindfulness and deep breathing reduce inflammation and increase immune function. Another study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience showed that people who practice meditation had significantly lower levels of pro-inflammatory genes.

The second biggest thing I did is I stopped viewing my body as broken and started seeing it as capable. But here's something powerful, the placebo effect isn't just about fake medicine. As we talked about in the last episode, you guys know this, they use placebo to measure the efficacy of a treatment that has an active medication in it.

But what I really want you to get with this is the placebo effect is about the body's ability to heal when it believes healing is possible. Again, doesn't that just blow your mind? So in The Biology of Belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton, he explains that our thoughts influence our biology at a cellular level y'all. Y'all and the way this happens is our beliefs send chemical messages to our cells.

Remember I was telling you that we have so much going on within our body. We have so many interactions that are occurring all of the time and chemical messages are just one of these things. They either promote repair or they reinforce dysfunction.

And to relate this back to the placebo effect, in Dr. Joe Dispenza's You Are the Placebo, he explains that when you take a sugar pill, believing it's medicine, that that produces the exact biological response as if you had taken the drug. And why? Because the belief alone triggers the brain to release these chemicals that match that expectation. Whether it's pain relief or immune response or even dopamine.

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Y'all, now if a belief in a pill can create physical change, imagine what your daily thoughts are doing right now. And we will explore all of that in next week's episode, but I just want to give you a little drop, a little hint, a little carrot to join next week's episode. But when I was viewing my body as not broken, as this capable healing being, then I had to make this conscious choice.

So I had to redirect my thoughts. I had to make a conscious choice that I was going to see my body as something strong, powerful, capable, adaptable. Something that could restore itself to homeostasis.

So every time I spoke about my body, it was with trust instead of fear. And trust me, it was really hard to do. It was not a simple task for me to continually redirect my thoughts away from fear and into trust.

I was a medical provider. I saw what cancer does to people. I've diagnosed people with cancer.

I've seen what it does within my own family. So to reprogram this on a subconscious level, that I could shift my biology in real time, it did take a massive trust fall. Now there's a Harvard study that backs up the placebo effect that I want to mention, again for you naysayers out there, that even when patients know they're taking a placebo, they still experience measurable healing benefits.

I remember we talked about that study last week where it was migraine medication and on one of the pills it said placebo medicine and it still helped people with migraines. Again, it's that belief alone triggers the physiological changes. So fascinating.

So the third thing I did is I created an environment that supported my healing. So our cells are listening. I really truly believe that our cells are listening and they respond to our food.

They also respond to our surroundings and even the people that we interact with. And this might be going out on a limb for a lot of you, but the field of epigenetics really shows this. And Dr. Lipton was the one who pioneered this field of epigenetics and it shows that really the genes are not our destiny.

So even when we're like, I have poor genes, X, Y, and Z, it's not your destiny. Stop saying that. You have to redirect your thoughts into something more powerful because they respond to the signals that they receive.

So I made three key environmental changes. I removed toxins from my diet. So I had already quit drinking at that point.

And alcohol is very inflammatory on the body, especially my body. I can feel it as somebody who didn't drink for five years and then now has reintroduced alcohol for the past couple of years. I definitely notice if I have a glass of wine that I'm more inflamed the next day.

My joints feel more swollen and overall I just feel puffier. Most of the root cause of nearly all chronic conditions are due to inflammation in the body. I went through my beauty supplies.

I removed all toxic ingredients from my face wash and shampoo conditioner to my mascara. So I limited exposure to negative energy. And I know that's going to feel very woe to a lot of you or some of you out there, but maybe not.

You're listening to this podcast, so maybe not. But the emotional toxicity felt just as harmful as the physical toxins. So chronic negative emotion triggers our immune system.

It leads to a state of chronic stress. So if we feel like we're not being uplifted or we hear from people who are like, oh, how's your breast cancer? Like, what are you doing? You're not doing anything. Well, isn't that bad? If you hear that constantly, then that's going to have a suppressive response on your immune system and on your mood.

But surrounding yourself with uplifting conversations has more of this healing frequency. And they show that. They show that you have a chemical response when you're around people who uplift you, that you have a more positive chemical response in your body if you're around nature.

Y'all, it's science. It's not all woo. I also prioritized sleep, which wasn't a really that hard of a thing for me because I love my sleep.

But I would make it a point to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. So I had really good deep sleep, and that worked really well until I hit the depths of perimenopause, and then that changed everything. But sleep is so important.

It's not just about rest. It really, that's where cellular repair occurs. The National Institute of Health, by the way, confirms that deep sleep activates the glymphatic system, which removes toxins from the body and brain.

So prioritize deep sleep, high quality deep sleep. And that, I believe, really made a huge difference as well. The other thing that I did is I went to an acupuncturist, and I used this in the changes because this ties into having that positive energy, that positive, uplifting, healing energy.

Because my acupuncturist fully believes in the intelligent design of the human body. And every time I would walk in there, I would go into this deep state of relaxation. I believe that healing and recovery were occurring at her clinic, and I still do.

I still go to her once a month. I was going to her once a week for a while, and then twice a month, and then now I just go to see her once a month. But immediately when I go into her clinic, into her space, lay on her bed, I'm out.

I am in such a deep state of relaxation. And I truly wish that all medical clinics and hospitals could imbue this sense of wellness and wholeness, because I think it would really change the world, for real. A funny aside is that I had already made an appointment with her for facial acupuncture prior to my diagnosis.

And when I walked into her office and told her my diagnosis on our very first visit, the way that she held me in that space, I will always be so grateful for her. I again, again, feel like that's when the healing was already occurring. She just entered my life at such a beautiful moment.

And she did offer supplementation, and of course did acupuncture, which opened up some channels. But the environment of being in such a healing supportive space, I believe was extremely beneficial too. Alright, so the takeaways here is I know that not everyone listening is facing a health challenge, but here's the truth.

This process isn't just about healing disease. It's about transforming the way we live and interact with our own bodies every single day. So here are three ways you can start applying this to your own life.

First, I want you to identify when you're operating from fear versus trust. Are you making choices from a place of fear? Whether it's about your health, or your career, or your relationships, just notice where stress and doubt might be keeping you stuck. And when I use this word stuck, it's where you stay in the same pattern over and over and over again.

Two, I want you to rewire that inner dialogue. So start paying attention to the thoughts you're feeding your body every day. Start using affirmations like, my body is wise and always working in my favor.

Say it often and with belief. If you can't believe it on this grand scale, then when you're saying it, say my body is wise and always working in my favor, then you can think about how when you got your last cut that your finger healed without you having to do anything. Miraculous.

And then prioritize rest and repair. And maybe that for you is trying to get periods of restorative sleep. Maybe that's meditation.

Maybe that's time in nature. Maybe that's just deep intentional breathing. Whatever it is for you, whatever feels like you're able to slow down and rest, that's what I would love for you to place your intention.

And really ask yourself, do you feel like you are in this constant state of stress? So my final thought here is, I wasn't rejecting medicine. Every single step I took was backed by science, but it was also backed by this deeper understanding, partnership, and relationship that I was choosing to create with this human design, with this miraculous body that can heal spontaneously. And so that's what I really chose to do is take the science with me, take what I have learned, and then how can we build that confidence and partnership up to where I can heal? So I ask you, what's one shift that you can make today to get your body out of the stress mode and into a healing state? Like I mentioned, maybe it's five deep breaths.

Maybe it's shifting the way you talk to your body. Maybe it's allowing yourself to rest. In the next episode, I'm going to break down the energetic side of healing.

How emotions and frequency, even the words you use, affect your health on a deep level. And most people do not realize this. As always, if today's episode resonated, please share it with somebody who needs to hear this.

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And always take a moment today to tune into your wisdom with the head, because your body is already listening. And I'll see you next time.