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529: From Burnout to Balance with Sarah Finger’s Chopra Yoga Training

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Yoga is more than just stretching and striking a pose—it’s a powerful science of healing, balance, and transformation. In this episode of the Learn True Health podcast, we sit down with Sarah Platt Finger, director of Chopra Yoga at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, to explore how yoga impacts not just the body, but also the mind and emotions.

Sarah shares how simple breathing techniques and mindful movement can lower stress, improve heart health, and create a deep sense of inner peace. Whether you’re a seasoned yogi or a complete beginner, this conversation will inspire you to integrate yoga into your daily life for better health and well-being.

Ready to discover the science-backed benefits of yoga? Tune in now and take the first step toward a stronger, calmer, and more resilient you.

Highlights:

• Sarah Platt Finger, director of Chopra Yoga at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, shares insights on yoga's impact on emotional, mental, and physical health.

• Yoga is a science of balancing the nervous system, not just a fitness trend or religion.

• Breathing techniques (pranayama) help regulate stress, improve heart health, and enhance mental clarity.

• Scientific studies support yoga’s ability to lower blood pressure, cholesterol, and stress while improving flexibility and muscle tone.

• Holding yoga poses builds physical resilience and mental strength, training the nervous system to manage stress.

• Meditation is a core component of yoga, promoting deep relaxation, emotional balance, and self-awareness.

• Yoga helps individuals reconnect with their body, making them more mindful of their diet, posture, and daily habits.

• The Chopra Yoga 200-hour certification program teaches yoga foundations, breathwork, meditation, and how to integrate yoga into everyday life.

• Alternate nostril breathing (a yoga technique) balances brain hemispheres, calms anxiety, and enhances focus.

• Yoga is accessible for all ages and fitness levels, offering modifications for individual needs.

Intro: 

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have with us a very special guest. She's the director of Chopra Yoga at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Her name is Sarah Platt Finger. She's an author and an expert in yoga and a wonderful teacher. This was an amazing interview to converse with her about how yoga can help you on the emotional and mental level, as well as the physical level. She brings some great science to the table. 

It’s really interesting how a simple practice of breathing and moving that you can squeeze into your busy day can affect in a positive way your hormones, your mental clarity, your energy, your sleep and even your heart health. So today we're going to talk about that and before we do, I want to make sure  that, if you'd like to study this program, it's an online course. It's a 200-hour Chopra Yoga certification and it's taught by Sarah Finger. There's a few other teachers, including Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Sheila Patel, board-certified physician and expert in Ayurveda. When you take this course, you will learn Ayurveda, meditation, breathing, physiology and, of course, stretching, the wonderful practice of yoga. But there's science behind it, which is really cool, that certain positions that we get in and hold isometrically and breathe while we're doing it not only strengthen the heart, but it lowers and balances blood pressure and it strengthens our muscles, tones our muscles. It’s such a nice break from running on a treadmill or a bicycle or  going to the gym and doing the hamster wheel. It's such a nice break and what I love about it is you can do it anywhere. You can integrate it into any aspect of your day to improve, enhance your body's healing function. It's like a special golden button you can hit inside you that turns on super healing mode. 

So I love that through taking this online program, you can learn the tools to access your own healing mode, and a lot of practitioners because I know a lot of practitioners listen to my podcast. You can integrate this with your clients, with your patients, and we talk about that as well. If you're interested in looking into it, you can even schedule a free appointment to talk about whether this is right for you and to learn more about it. You go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That's learntruehealth.com/coach. Of course, the links will be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com and wherever you listen to this podcast when you go to that link learntruehealth.com/coach, it's going to take you to IIN's courses. Not only will you see if you scroll down, it's in the third row, it's called the Chopra Yoga 200-hour certification, which is what we're going to talk about today, but you also see the course that I took, which is the health coach training program, and I absolutely loved it. It was wonderful. 

It's such a phenomenal experience if you're looking for your own personal growth, for your own healing and health and ongoing healthy relationship with your overall life, health and joy in every aspect of your life. About half the people that take it take it simply for their own personal growth and health, and the other half take it because they want to integrate it into their business or that it practice in some way, or they, too, want to start being a health coach and taking on clients and they teach you how to do that. They hold your hand, teach you how to do the business as well. So if you are interested in becoming a health coach and actually doing it as a business, this is a wonderful resource for you. So go to learntruehealth.com/coach and check that out. But they also have other certifications. This is what I love, because the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, they actually coined the term health coach and it's the oldest school online. But before it was online it was in person. So they've been teaching for many years and they merged recently with dr chopra and all of his trainings and so together they offer so many wonderful courses. You could take courses on Ayurveda, meditation, mindful eating course, hormone health, gut health, and a lot of these courses actually weren't available to the public until you became a health coach, but now they have altered them so that if you're just interested in gut health or you're just interested in detox, there's a whole course on detox and it's very affordable, and for the larger courses they have payment plans. They want it to be accessible to everyone. 

The most important thing that I want you to know is that they offer a really big discount to all my listeners all the time, no matter what. It's the biggest discount they'll ever offer, so you don't have to wait for a sale. If you're interested to take the courses, use my discount coupon code, which is LTH as in Learn True Health, or if you decide, instead of signing up online, which you can do, you can call them to sign up and speak to one of the health coaches there. All the staff that answer the phone have taken at least the flagship training program, the health coach training program, but many of them have dived into the other courses so that they can share their experience with you, and their sales staff are not in any way. They don't pressure you. They're just here to help and they can talk to you about your goals and answer questions you may have. But if you mentioned my name, Ashley James, the Learn True Health podcast or the coupon code LTH, you will get that great discount. 

You can go back and listen to my interview with the founder of IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, Joshua Rosenthal. I've interviewed him. I've also interviewed the new CEO, although not new anymore, she's been around for a few years, but she's the CEO, the current CEO. I've had her on the show and I've had over a dozen of the faculty. The wonderful teachers and professors and doctors have come on the show and taught and it's it's just been such a blessing to work with them, because what they're doing is helping people to access true health through all the tools and everything that you can learn to find a balanced life to nourish your whole being, and so I encourage you to go to learntruehealth.com/coach and check it out. 

You can just keep scrolling and looking at all the different really cool courses. You're probably going to go, I want to take all these courses but if you're interested in what we talk about today the Chopra Yoga 200-hour certification definitely sign up. It starts a few times a year. The cohort does it, you do it together as a group and no matter what time of year it is whether you're listening to this now or in December or in April or wherever it is when you sign up it unlocks the beginning of the course. So you get to actually start the course, no matter when you sign up, and then you get to do basically the pre-work and then the whole cohort takes off together three times a year. So no matter when you sign up, you'll be able to access the training and begin immediately, which is wonderful. If you're interested in becoming a health coach, like me, definitely click on the health coach training program, which is the very first option on the page. You'll see it and you'll gain access to learning more about it and it will take you to a free webinar that will teach you more about it. But there's lots of resources on that page. See a sample class as well If you scroll down the page. Once you click on the health coach training program option, you can scroll down, it'll say sample class and you can sign up for a free sample class. It's very inspiring and it'll give you a good idea as to what it feels like to take this course and what it looks like and how it works.  What I love about their trainings is that they hit every learning style. 

School was really difficult for me. I'm an excellent learner. If you've listened to my show, you know that I retain a lot of information. I love learning. I'm an auditory learner, so for me, like if I hear something, I'm really going to remember it well, and some people remember things better by reading and some people remember things better by watching videos, whereas others remember by doing. There's different learning styles and  sometimes teachers, when we're in school they're not as great at hitting all of the learning styles, so some students fall through the cracks or feel very disenfranchised. 

In IIN, I never had a problem as a student. I really struggled in school because the way the teachers taught wouldn't necessarily hit my learning style or if you struggled in school like me and then. But then as an adult you're like why is it? It's so easy for me to learn when I want to learn something, when I'm on my own, when I'm diving in and I'm doing my own research, but when, when I was sitting in a classroom with 30 other kids, it was like I could beat my head against the wall. It was so frustrating. So I know everyone has a different experience with school, but what I thought was really refreshing is I did not have any problems with learning when I went through the year-long health coach training program through IIN and they also have a six-month program, accelerated program as well, and it really fits into your busy life. It's about 20 minutes a day. 

If you're going to dedicate 20 minutes a day for a year, then you will absolutely love their health coaching program, similar to the 200-hour yoga training program, the Chopra Yoga program. You can dedicate a chunk of time each day or a larger chunk a few times a week and you're able to be flexible to fit it into your life. We talked a little bit about that in the interview. But if you're interested, go to learntruehealth.com/coach, scroll down and see the title that says the Chopra 200-hour yoga training and click on it and from there it's a beautifully laid out website with wonderful information that gives you all you need to know. Like I said, if you want to check out the Health Coach Training Program, click on that, because you can gain access to videos and a whole sample course as well as a webinar. So there's lots of resources on that page. So enjoy today's interview. 

If you have any questions about my experience as a student at IIN or what I've been able to do since graduating many years ago and how wonderful it's been working with them and interviewing them and them as a company, I just love them. There's just very, very high integrity and that's why I continue to share their message with you, because I feel that you, as the listener, would benefit from taking their courses. Of course, I'm not a mama bear, but I want to be very protective of my listeners. So there's something I don't believe in or don't trust. I'm not going to talk about it. I'm not going to bring it to the table. I really do trust them and I trust that they'll take care of you. Have yourself a fantastic day. Enjoy today's interview. Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Together, we're helping to turn this little ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible to learn true health.

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James, this is episode 529. 

Ashley James (0:12:53.161)

I am so excited for today's guest. We're going to have such a fun conversation today. Our guest is Sarah Platt-Finger, who is the director of Chopra Yoga at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and co-founder of Ishta Yoga LLC. Deepak Chopra called Sarah, our wonderful guest, an extraordinary teacher of yoga that has called enormously to my well-being. How amazing! You also co-authored a book with Dr. Chopra, Living in the Light: Yoga for Self-Realization.

I've had some wonderful experiences with yoga, and I just want to say right off the bat, I am also a Christian, and I know some Christians want to stay away from yoga. So this episode, although it might not be for everyone, that's okay. Yoga really served me, and it actually really, really helped me. I'd love to talk about that. I think there's a place for practice for everyone. I don't think we have to say that it's a religion.

Right off the bat, I think we can look at the health benefits of yoga. One of my closest, dearest friends—just love her—runs an addiction recovery center in Woodinville, Washington, Bajra Recovery, and she gets incredible results helping alcoholics and other people who have addiction to other substances recover. She gets extremely high results and she incorporates and attributes it to yoga. She says yoga is a big part of her system to help people fully recover from addiction and get their life back.

I believe there's so much here for mental health, emotional health, and physical health. I think it's really important for us to keep an open mind and look at what we can gain from this conversation—what we can gain from yoga to support our overall well-being.

Having said that, Sarah, I'm so excited to have you on the show today because we're going to learn more about what it is to take your yoga teacher training program, and it's online, so it's accessible to everyone around the world. Welcome to the show.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:15:07.992)

Thank you so much, Ashley. It's really a pleasure to be with you. I'm excited about this conversation of redefining what the practice of yoga is.

Ashley James (0:15:18.604)

Exactly. I think that like a lot of people if they haven’t experienced it they don't know. There's so much evidence to show we're actually going to get into the science. This is what I'm really excited about. We can talk the talk, but let's show where the rubber meets the road. You're bringing today some studies today to show the science behind the health benefits that we can gain from yoga. Before we do that, some people don't even know what it is. So let's start with: What is yoga?

Some people imagine, we all know like Lululemon, spandex. We know that, okay, we stretch and maybe some people sweat, but beyond sweating, stretching, and maybe some breathing, what is yoga?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:16:00.603)

Such a great question. Yoga is a Sanskrit word that means union. I don't think of it as a religion. It's not even really an exercise or a fitness trend. I really think of yoga as a science. It's a science and a lived experience of balancing the different aspects of our being, our nervous system. The more solar and lunar energies, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, the physical poses, which are called asana, the Sanskrit word for it. 

Yoga did originate in India about 2500 or more years ago, which is why a lot of the verbiage we use to explain the concepts of yoga comes from this ancient language, Sanskrit. It's this practice of unifying the different disparate aspects of ourselves to experience who we really are, who we are beyond or behind our physical body, our thoughts, our identity, our sense, our emotions. What is that seer, the witness, that is able to experience the whole, the rising and subsiding of life experience, and not be changed, not be afflicted, if that makes sense? So it is a practice of essentially returning back to the aspect of yourself that's unchanging.

Ashley James (0:17:57.085)

When I was a teenager, I don't know if you remember being a teenager, but it was pretty intense. I just remember a lot of really intense emotions. My mom took me to yoga classes with her. I remember going in feeling angsty, stressed out, just very, very anxious, very angry, like just these bursts of anger, which I'm not an angry person, like hormones, man, puberty.

Going in, just feeling all riled up, ready to kind of snap and start a fight and coming out back to myself, feeling back to my center. It really helped me through the mental, emotional turmoil of puberty. 

I studied Hatha yoga, which was a really big shift from the regular yoga classes I was used to because my yoga teacher, who’s from India, told us to keep our eyes open. She said she was more, she was very militaristic. So you became very aware of your posture, how you hold yourself even outside the yoga class. It was this awareness of your strength and where you hold your shoulders, where you hold your neck, how you hold your shoulders back.

How you breathe, how you can let sort of that strength and energy flow through you and have that strong calmness inside. When you say yoga means unity, I think of the unity where you come into alignment with yourself, where you're not scattered, where you're feeling like your emotional, mental, and physical body are doing really well together and in alignment together. That's what it feels like for me.

Then I went to Kripalu and studied there. Spent over a month there and did Kripalu yoga, which is different. Every time I would choose a different type of yoga, it was very, very different, yet the outcome was very similar. I found more strength inside me, physical strength, but then I found more of this like being on a balance beam and being unshakable emotionally.

So as opposed to feeling like someone could look at me the wrong way and I could cry. That would be me going into class, and then afterward it’s like, I am unshakable. That has a lot to do with calming the nervous system and tonifying the nervous system. So we're not caught up in that fight or flight all the time, which we really, really need to do on a daily basis to optimize our immune function and optimize our body's ability to heal itself. 

We need to ask ourselves to come back into that healing mode, the parasympathetic rest and digest mode, which we are almost never in these days. We're always caught up in that stress response, and stress isn't an emotion. That's a really important thing to know. Because so many people go, "I'm not stressed." I'm like, I bet you are. When was the last time you were in rest and digest mode?

Because we really don't feel it. We feel the effects of it. So then, down the road, you live in stress mode. Down the road, your body breaks down, and we have all these diseases that are really attributed to years of stress. So that's why I love that if we all took this training together, this online training, and we learned how to turn on healing mode, how to turn on rest and digest mode on a daily basis and did it, we'd be protecting our nervous system, protecting our immune system, protecting our mental and emotional health. There's so much we could get out of it. So that's why I see that there's value in this.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:22:03.613)

Absolutely. This is the human nervous system and its real power. There's a power in our nervous system and that we are able to dial it up and dial it back down. These ancient practices that we have to adjust our energy, sometimes we do need to dial it up. Sometimes if you're feeling depressed and unmotivated, you might need practices to energize you and awaken you. Yoga can do that. It can also give you practices, which the majority of our culture need, which is to down-regulate the nervous system. So we start from a baseline of homeostasis.

You're right, most people are not familiar with that state. It's almost like a foreign concept to be in a space where your heart rate is in its baseline, your brain waves are more slowed down, your blood pressure is in a healthy space, and you're able to explore the world and see the world as it really is.

Sometimes we like to use this analogy of a lake, that your mind and your thoughts, the fluctuations in your mind, which in Sanskrit they're called vrittis, are kind of like ripples in a lake. As we become more hypervigilant, as our nervous system gets heightened because of external stressors, daily pressures, et cetera, those ripples become more and more fluctuating. Like a lake, when you have a lot of activity, you're unable to perceive the images, the reflections that you see in the lake with clarity.

It's the same thing with the mind. When we have so much turbulence and fluctuation in our mind, we're unable to perceive things with clarity. So it's like you see a quarter in a lake and you think it's a big fish. It's the same thing with our relationships, with our decision-making processes. We're not always in a clear, coherent space to be able to take actions and make choices that are for our highest good because we're so busy fighting that sympathetic nervous response.

Ashley James (0:24:46.619)

The fight or flight is meant to keep us alive, but only for a very short period of time. We're only really meant to be in it when being chased by the bear, we run away from the bear, we're good. Or there's a fire, we get away from the fire, we're good. It's supposed to turn off. Then we're supposed to be, 95% of the time we're supposed to be in rest and digest mode, but it has actually been reversed.

Now we're in that fight or flight almost all the time because you look at your phone, there's going to be a trigger. You look at the news, there's going to be a trigger. You look at your bills, there's going to be a trigger. You're driving. We're driving these death machines around. It's wild. We have no peace. I just came from the country. We went out, we drove out into the mountains, into the Okanagan Highlands of Washington and there's no cell service. This is just to give you, paint the picture. You can't see anyone. It's crazy. You're on top of these beautiful rolling, gorgeous golden mountains, sprinkled with forests and you can't see your neighbor. No, you see more cows than your neighbor. It's just gorgeous. There's no amenities, there's no restaurants, there's nothing. It's just you and the wind and your thoughts.

I would sit there and think, our ancestors, this is how they lived. Even like the Bible, you think about like this is, we had our herd of goats or our sheep and we had our fields and we had our thoughts and we had nature and we looked up at the stars and we breathed and we were at peace in the world most of the time. Then if there was a wolf or a bear, that's when we went to stress mode. Now it's the opposite. Now we are not at peace with nature. We are not in tune with our body. We ignore our body. Then we wonder, where did it all go wrong? We don't listen to the whispers. Things just start to break really poorly. But it actually started 20 years ago when we entered stress mode and didn't leave it.

So this is why we've got to stop what we're doing because what we're doing isn't working. When we look at the statistics of the disease rates, looking at one in three people will have cancer. One in three people will have diabetes, pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity. 70% of adult Americans are on at least one prescription medication. Many people are on pain meds. We're sick.

We need to look back at the root cause. What's going on? Our body is almost never in healing mode. When we're in stress mode, our body shuts down healing. It actually just shuts it down so that we could do immediate survival things. That's what I love about this practice, even just sitting there and breathing. I believe it's called asana, breathing. Is that it? Did I say that wrong?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:28:00.303)

No, you said asana correctly. That's the asana's physical poses.

Ashley James (0:28:04.067)

Okay. What's the breathing?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:28:05.908)

It’s Pranayama. 

Ashley James (0:28:07.700)

Pranayama, that's right. So breathing, which I teach breathing to my clients because they’ll come in hot, and I'm like, okay, I've got one thing for you to do. They're like, my gosh, I feel so much better. We just took eight slow breaths. We took eight slow breaths. It takes like two minutes, and they're like, I can't believe how much of a difference that would make. You don't need to carve out these 90-minute yoga sessions every day. How about just giving me two minutes of breathing?

I’d love for you to guide us through a pranayama. This has been a bit like maybe 20 years since I studied yoga, but I'd love for you to guide us through one at some point in this interview because I want everyone to experience that. If you haven't ever experienced it, I want you to experience it. We don't need to use beautiful, fancy, foreign words. It is breathing with intention in order to bring calm to your body, in order to turn that switch on in your body that tells your nervous system you're safe and it's okay to go back into healing mode.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:29:25.317)

Correct. The interesting thing about the breath is that it's really hard to tell our minds to be quiet, or tell your heart rate to slow down, or your digestion to start to function more optimally. These are all functions of our autonomic nervous system, and breathing is included, but the breath is one of the only maybe two functions of our nervous system that's happening but that we can also control. So we have the power to shift the way that we breathe.

By shifting the way that we breathe, we automatically impact not only those other nervous system responses but our mind, the quality of your mind. I could say, stop thinking.

Or stop thinking thoughts. By using thoughts to quiet thoughts, that's a very hard formula, but breath molds and shapes our mind and the activity of the mind. So in that way, it's really an immediate and very profound response and impact that we have to shift the present moment. Like you said, it really doesn't take a long time. You can do three to five breaths and, in a moment, re-regulate your nervous system and just change your whole outlook.

Ashley James (0:30:54.729)

You mentioned if every child was taught just simple breathwork to regulate their nervous system. Every child in day one kindergarten, we're going to do some breathing. Then every time there was a child who clearly was in anxiety, the whole class did two minutes of breathing. If everyone was just taught Math is important, English reading is important, and learning how to regulate your nervous system and calm your nervous system so you get full control of your mindset, your brain back—that would put people back into a learning state. What not everyone realizes is that when we go into fight or flight, when we go into that stress mode, you don't feel stressed, so you don't know it, but we actually lose critical thinking.

We lose the higher function of our brain. Our brain goes more into that survival mode, and optimal learning does not happen there. But think of our children and the environment they're in. If your child goes to regular school, we homeschool, so it's a little different. I probably need to have a big reminder somewhere, like breathe, breathe. Just imagine if the children were taught this, how much of the time are children in stress mode and not in learning mode? Because it is a tumultuous experience to be in these very busy classrooms, very overwhelming, constantly feeling judged, constantly bullied. It's not a healthy place to be. It's not really a productive learning environment. That's where we came from. All of us survived that, or we have our scars and our wounds from our early childhood education. We never learned. We learned to cope. We turned to drugs. We turned to alcohol. We turned to addictions. We turned to other coping mechanisms. We turned to TV. Think about what you turned to when you got overwhelmed when you were a teenager. What kind of coping mechanism did you turn to to help regulate your nervous system?

So many of us turn to even sugar, substances outside of ourselves instead of learning how to regulate our own nervous system. Can you imagine if the entire planet just learned to pause and breathe when they felt themselves come out of that rest and digest mode? When they start to feel like, my heart rate's kind of rising, I'm kind of feeling antsy and anxious, I'm starting to get tunnel vision.

That they learn to just pause and breathe. Just that alone would shift the entire world. This is your ticket, this is your key to taking back control of your life. That's why my friend Jessica has such a high recovery rate with her clients when she does her coaching, when she does her mental health counseling for addiction, because she teaches the alcoholics and those addicted to substances when they come to her, she teaches them how to regulate their nervous system through yoga, and they walk out of there feeling strong inside, and feeling like they have control because now they have the button to push to down-regulate and control their nervous system. I want you to do some breathing with us for sure.

Before we get to that though, do you have any studies specifically around your nervous system, around the effects of practicing yoga on our mental, emotional health, or our nervous system control?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:34:49.738)

Well, there's definitely studies that have been shown of the heart benefits of yoga that lower blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and there's another study that found that practicing yoga improved lipid profiles. Yes, as well as in patients with coronary artery disease, lowers excessive blood sugar levels in people who have diabetes. So there's all kinds of studies. One study, there were several small studies that found that yoga has a positive effect on cardiovascular risk factors. So it does help to lower blood pressure in people who have hypertension. They think that's because it restores baroreceptor sensitivity.  That's what affects what allows your blood pressure to move from high to low blood pressure. Some of that can be based on some of the asanas that we do. For example, when we go upside down for an extended period of time, it can open that baroreceptor and shift your blood pressure from an increase to a more decreased state. So that's an interesting thing.

There's also been research that shows that small groups of individuals who are more sedentary, who hadn't practiced yoga before, that after eight weeks of practicing yoga at least twice a week, for a total of 180 minutes, participants had greater muscle strength and endurance and flexibility and cardiorespiratory fitness. So I think that aspect that you said about feeling strong is also a part of the practice. We've spoken a lot about the re-regulating of the nervous system and moving from that state of hypervigilance into more of rest and digest. But I think it's a really important key to recognize that the power of the physical poses and of being able to, and there's all kinds of benefits in holding poses for an extended period of time, that they do also increase your muscle tone, your cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, the fascia intelligence in your body, and that holding poses for an extended period of time on top of the physical benefits of it, it builds resilience in our minds, where we are able to kind of hold and experience, perhaps feelings that might feel uncomfortable or irregular or more challenging. If you think about holding a pose where you're in a semi-squat position for an extended period of time, that requires strength and endurance. 

When we can hold that and breathe at the same time, we are increasing our muscle, strength and power, and at the same time using the breath to quiet and calm the nervous system down. These two components of strength and ease and surrender really create this resilient response in our bodies that we can move through challenging situations. Sometimes yoga poses are challenging situations that we experience in life. That's how I like to think of them. Any given situation can make you feel excited, elated, free, or you can have other situations that make you feel fearful or anxious or angry. Any shape that you create with your body can also evoke those different responses.

It's not about how do you run away from those responses, but how do you hold that in your field of awareness and learn how to move through it and get on the other side of it? That is the experience that we take with us from yoga. The yoga experience is, yes the practice, the class is on the mat, so to speak. The yoga mat, that's where you do your downward-facing dog or any other type of part of the practice. But when you step off of the mat and into your life, you're carrying with you all of the residue of that practice. It's like information that you can recruit at any given moment, like that stressful talk you have to have with your child or your friend or a coworker. You hold this pose for an extended period of time and you get through that, then you can say to yourself, "What, I can get through this too." So it's really about applying some of the benefits that we receive on the mat, off the mat into our everyday life.

Ashley James (0:40:22.263)

I love that you said that because just recently I took my husband to actually his first yoga class, he had never done one. The next day I was like, wow, why are my shoulders so sore? What is going on? He looks at me, he goes, we were holding ourselves in a static pose, holding ourselves upside down. It wasn’t like I was holding my whole body weight. It's like you do a downward dog and then you're basically what that looks like for those who don't know what that is. You bend at the hips and put your hands on the mat like you're making your body into a triangle. Then, we were doing basically what looked like yoga burpees and doing these movements of pushing up and getting up and getting down and getting up and getting down. But the next day I was like, I feel like I just did some major weightlifting and I love weightlifting. I love seeing how much I can lift. I love that feeling of strength and I was surprised cause I hadn't done any weightlifting in the last few days. I feel like I just did some major kettlebells, what's going on in it. It was so cool how much I got out of that class because it's, it's just you and your body weight. 

I noticed how much of my internal dialogue happens. Can I do this pose? Like, I don't know if I can do that. I'm going to try it. Wow. I'm doing it. Okay. Hey, I have more balance than I thought I did. You notice how much you criticize yourself, how much you doubt yourself. Then you notice, if you take on the challenge of something you think you might not be able to do, and then you're like, hey, I'm, I'm not doing this perfectly but look, I did some of it. Standing up on one foot, just increasing your balance. I mean, many of us don't do that on a regular basis and should. But when it comes to growing older, we need to develop and build and protect our balance now so that when we are older, we can prevent falls.

It's a real thing. That's a real risk. Dying from falls is a painful and slow death. Falling and breaking your hip, for example. God forbid it happens to any of us. But if you could prevent that by honing and dialing in your body's ability to have strength and balance.

I also love that yoga is really for any age, that it can be adapted to any age and to build us up no matter where we are. I know a lot of seniors do chair yoga. It's like wherever you are, it can meet you wherever you are, which is really cool.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:43:28.030)

It can build wherever you are. It's so important that you said that because where it meets you, where you're at, and a good teacher will provide those different options for their class. Where you have a version where you can step it up or you have a version where you can modify or dial it down a little bit.

This practice of self-study, like understanding yourself, really listening to the feedback you're getting from your body of how much is too much or not enough. My rule of thumb is if you feel something happening and you can still breathe, that's your edge. That's where we want to go and where we want to be in the practice where we feel something happening, but we can still breathe steadily in and out through the nostrils. That's where transformation happens. That's where growth happens.

That's where great opportunity is where, like you say, we realize how capable we are. The body often has so much more strength and power and capability than our mind might give it credit for. I mean, just watching the Olympics, it's just incredible to see the potential of the human body. I'm certainly not a proponent of acrobat yoga, that's certainly not what I'm talking about, but it's more about, again, listening to what is your edge? What is your place where you start to feel like you did, the strength in your upper body or in your legs and just this sensation arising. In that sensation, there's so much information. We spend so much of our day up in our minds, planning tomorrow or reflecting on yesterday or last week and what am I going to do about this or that? 

But to really be present in our bodies, that is a skill set and really a power that we can take with us as we age. As we notice the shifts or deteriorations, like understanding how to ourselves differently. There was another study about mindful eating and the correlations between yoga practitioners and their ability to just make healthier choices in life because you're becoming more aware. You're just in that connection with the physical responses that you're having in any given moment where you can listen, and then you respond accordingly. I often say in my classes that it's like yoga is a dialogue. It's a conversation you're having with your body. We're often like the dictator of our body. You've got to do this and you've got to do that and listen to me. But when we can have a conversation, we can let the wisdom of the body respond, and it creates a whole new experience for ourselves.

Ashley James (0:46:43.159)

I love that. The Institute for Integrative Nutrition, which we had mentioned at the beginning, I took their year-long health coach training program. I've also interviewed the creator of IIN, Joshua Rosenthal. I've interviewed the wonderful new CEO. I've had several, at least a dozen, of the faculty on the show.

I loved my experience with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I was surprised to find out that about half the people that take the courses there are just doing it for personal growth. The other half are doing it for the career they want to either enrich or get into. But I was surprised at how many people do the courses just for their own personal growth. But it makes sense because I got so much personal growth out of my experience there.

Now IIN has partnered with Chopra, and so through IIN, yoga training is offered. Is it similar to the IIN Health Coach Training Program? Is your 200-hour yoga teacher training also for personal growth? Or do you find that people do it because they want their personal growth, and there's a percentage that actually wants to go out and teach yoga? Can you tell us a bit about that?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:48:11.495)

Yes. I see this a lot, that people embark on a yoga teacher training not because they want to teach, but because they want to learn and grow themselves in their own practice and understand the practice in a more nuanced, intimate way. Folks who sign up for the training will certainly get that experience. But then this other thing happens where maybe 50% are doing it for their own personal reasons. Then by the end of the training, like 30% of those 50% decide, actually, I do want to teach. I'm getting the bite. Something sparks inside of you when you start to practice teaching, or maybe you practice teaching friends and loved ones. You see how the act of teaching is such an elevating experience.

I'm sure you experienced this when you did your course and worked with your own clients. You see that in sharing the gifts of the practice and seeing other people respond in such positive ways, it actually fuels and feeds you. There's a real nourishment we can get from watching other people grow and transform from the practices you have shared with them. It restores a sense of meaning in life that many in the world have lost in the moment.

To have meaning in feeling like I'm helping to change someone's life in maybe subtle ways. It could be something simple like, "I had lower back pain, and now it's gone," or "I wasn't standing properly, and now I have better posture." Like for me, it's sometimes those real micro shifts that make all of the difference.

So once you experience the joy of, and I do call it sharing. I think sometimes the idea of teaching feels overwhelming for some people to think that they are going to teach yoga. That's why I say we share the practice. We share the teachings with other people because it's a shared lived experience. I can only teach what is my own lived experience, and I share that with people. They take from that what is useful to them and pass that on.

So it's not about a hierarchy like, "I know more, you know less." It's like, "This has been my experience, and I share it with you, and you can take from that what suits and serves you." So yes, it really is an empowering experience.

Ashley James (0:51:03.701)

I like that you pointed that out because I've met so many wonderful, talented, knowledgeable people who don't believe in themselves and who say, "I'm not an expert. I couldn't teach this." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? You have so much to share. You have so much to give. People would be so blessed to learn something from you." But they're like, "Who am I? I'm not the expert here."

We've been, I think, brainwashed or traumatized from the education system to believe that you have to have a PhD before anyone could even possibly listen to you. It's funny because you get there, like even people earn PhDs. They're still like, "I thought something magical would happen where I feel like an expert. I still don't feel like an expert." I'm like, "That's because it's all up to you." It's in your head. Like, if you don't believe in yourself, a piece of paper is not going to make you believe in yourself. 

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:52:11.703)

It's about connection; because there are some people who might have those high credentials, the PhDs, and are they then able to connect with other people in a way that helps them to understand? So it can go both ways. That's why, yes, I think this power of connection is really important, especially if you are in the field of wellness and you're wanting to share and help other people, that we do it in a way that's authentic. It is grounded in science and facts and a lived experience, but that we also do it in a way that is like we're seeing each other, we're watching, we're witnessing, and in this space of in it together. That's the healing.

Ashley James (0:52:59.554)

Do you have any more of that science to share with us?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:53:04.290)

Since we were talking about breath, I think we can talk a little bit about nasal breathing and the importance of nasal breathing. There was a great book by James Nestor called Breath, if anyone has read that book. But it really substantiates a lot of what the ancient yogis knew, which was that breathing through the nostrils not only helps to extend and lengthen the breath, which calms and quiets the nervous system. There is also an air filtration that happens when we breathe in through the nostrils through these little hairs called cilia, which are in the nostrils. When the air passes through the cilia in the nostrils, it has a purifying effect, so it sort of filters through some of the toxins that are in the air that we breathe. Then it also increases the nitric oxide. 

Nitric oxide is what helps the oxygen to circulate through blood into the different organs of our body. Nasal breathing increases the amount of nitric oxide that we're able to produce. So it helps with our blood circulation and the oxygenation of our cells and our organs. So that's really interesting as well. 

Of course, we also know that from each nostril, this is more energetic, but then scientists found that nostrils correspond to an opposite hemisphere in the brain. So the right nostril corresponds to the left brain hemisphere, and the left nostril corresponds to the right brain hemisphere. When we balance the flow of air through both nostrils, it creates a balance in both brain hemispheres, which increases creativity and our ability to think outside the box and be a little more innovative. It helps to calm the nervous system and quiet anxiety as well. So really interesting facts around the benefits of nasal breathing.

Ashley James (0:55:38.962)

I think everyone is feeling a little calmer because they all started breathing more deeply through their nose, closing their mouth if they caught themselves breathing through their mouth.  I think everyone's going, wow, I'm now breathing a little deeper through my nose since we started this conversation. I certainly did.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:56:01.733)

It will help with mental alertness too. Sorry to interject, but just that, your ability to concentrate and listen is also an effect by nasal breathing. So hopefully that helped as well.

Ashley James (0:56:13.139)

Well, everyone wants that and yet they run to Starbucks or sugar or something for mental alertness when we could all just breathe through our noses. Look, we have this built-in system to regulate our nervous system, but I just feel like we all stepped away the last hundred or so years. We all stepped away from how we're supposed to live.

We live such an artificial life that we're now coming back. A lot of people are now interested in coming back to learning about their body, learning about their health, because we have to, because modern, quote-unquote, modern medicine, like drug-based medicine, doesn't have the answers for helping the body heal from chronic illness. They just have more drugs. But they just suck at healing chronic illness because we don't have a drug deficiency.

We need to come back to the root of healing, which is coming back inside ourselves, getting ourselves into that rest and digest mode, regulating our nervous system. I love that through the process of the practice of yoga, it can just be a few times a week. Busy people can fit it in. Listen, my friend has five kids and I think three or more grandkids. She's and she runs her own business. She does yoga on a regular basis. She is a busy woman. I know many very, very, very busy people who are able to fit it into their life because it gives them so much more than it takes. It might take a half an hour, a few times a week, or 45 minutes, a few times a week, but it gives so much more and it lasts like you can see the lasting effects of it. I love that then it helps people to become conscientious of what they're eating and they start to get more connected with their bodies. So they go, wow, that meal really served me. I feel really good. I'm going to eat more like that or wow, that I feel really bloated and slow and sluggish from eating that meal. I think I'm going to do less of that. 

We come back into our body, have more, I keep saying awareness, but that's we're so unaware, we're so numbed out. When we turn to caffeine, sugar, alcohol, these are numbing agents. TV, we're just numbing ourselves. Social media, we're numbing ourselves. This practice allows us to come back in and then we get so much more. So the course you teach though, can complete beginners who've never done yoga take your course? Or do you have recommendations for them to go do some classes before they come?

Tell us who can take your training and I'd love to hear the transformations that people go through when they take the training.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:59:12.359)

Yes, I'd love to share about it. Well, the course starts with our Yoga Foundations program, which is just that. It's basically the foundations of yoga. What is yoga? What is asana? What does the word "Om" mean? What are these scientific reasons behind some of the practices, just sort of demystifying the practice to help give a better understanding. Again, I worked a lot with Deepak Chopra. He's a scientist and a doctor in his essence. So a lot of what we bring to the table are some of these science-based experiences and also how the practice is affecting us from that physiological perspective.

So the Yoga Foundations is open to anybody, absolute beginners who have never done it before, anyone listening to this podcast like, "Yoga, what's that?" You can do that course, which is about a 15-hour course and includes some of the yoga poses and some of the philosophy and the breath pranayama practices, just to give people a basic foundational understanding of it. Then from there, they do the 16-week, it's a 16-module course. The foundations program is evergreen, so you just take it in your own time. There's no live component to it. But in the actual certification program, which is accredited by an organization called Yoga Alliance, they kind of oversee the standardization process of yoga schools throughout the United States and internationally as well.

That is over the course of 16 weeks and people come in, there's an e-learning component that is self-paced. Then there are a few webinars that happen, two live sessions throughout the week, one of which can be done as a recording, one of which is live and in person. Those in-person live sessions are really where you get the opportunity to practice teaching with your peers. They're done in smaller groups. You can ask questions. You understand more the anatomical aspects of movement and biomechanics and what's happening in our joints when we do some of these shapes. Why are some things easier for some people and more challenging? Our bones are not identical. They're shaped differently. The way they move is different. So it's why it's so important that we say and share that yoga is not a one-size-fits-all practice. It's not the same for everybody.

So understanding where your limitations are and where you might need to adjust a pose to suit your individual needs is really fundamental in your ability to come back to the practice and make it sustainable. So many times people come to me and say, "Yes, I tried yoga, but I'm not flexible enough or I'm not thin enough or I'm not strong enough." So I couldn't, it was always like not enough. It made me feel so truly sad because there is no measurement. If you can breathe and you have a human nervous system, you can experience yoga. It's really that simple.

What we teach our teachers is to be able to share this practice with a larger population, and a multitude and a different range of anatomies and constitutions and backgrounds so that it's not just for a select group of people, but for a greater mass. So yes, there's a real range of studies that we bring into each week, both philosophical and anatomical and experiential.

Week over week, we focus on a different focus or topic, a different category of poses, different breathing techniques. We also bring in some hand gestures, which are called mudras. Hands, interestingly, occupy about 30% of our motor sensory cortex in the brain. So what we do with our hands lights up different parts of our brain and can affect and impact the way that we feel. Ancient yogis, they knew this. So you can create different gestures with your hands to affect your concentration, to calm yourself down, to help you feel inspired. So that's part of the practice as well.

Ashley James (1:04:12.885)

I love it. At the end of yoga classes, a lot of times there's a moment where we can go within, have a few minutes of meditation. Meditation is so personal and there's so many different ways to teach it. One of my best friends is actually a guru in Kriya yoga, which is not stretchy yoga. It's all up in the head, but he's written a few books on meditation and it just fascinates me because you can hook yourself up to machines and you can measure it and you can go deep into the science of it. But we can see that by lying there and just breathing and just being at peace with yourself for a few moments that your brain enters these wonderful, healthy brain waves that show us that we're actually unlocking creativity, that we're unlocking our potential. We certainly are in that rest and digest. It's a superpower we have to go into that rest and digest mode where the body is in that super healing state. It's so wonderful for our emotional health and our mental health.

I know I keep saying that, but it's like, this is what we get. So for those who don't have very much or any experience with meditation, it sounds boring. It sounds scary. People have different perceptions. I know in your class, you guys do teach some meditation. What do we get from taking your course? Do people end up feeling confident around their ability to have a healthy meditation practice, maybe you could talk a little bit about that, especially for people who don't really have an experience of meditation.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:06:15.298)

I'd love to talk about it, and thank you so much for asking about it because it is sort of one of the limbs of yoga. Yoga has eight limbs that we talk about, and one of them is meditation, and it tends to be bypassed in modern Western society as something separate from yoga. We think of yoga as the poses and meditation as something else, but meditation is an integral aspect of yoga. To be able to merge, to come into union, you have to be able to sit and be still and be with yourself for an extended period of time. That's what meditation is.

We do have a whole module on meditation, which is based of Deepak Chopra's lineage of meditation and what he learned from Maharishi Mahesh years ago. It's a mantra-based meditation. A mantra can be anything; it is like a prayer. If you say something over and over again for an extended period of time, whether it's om shanti or breathe in, breathe out, or peace or thy will be done, whatever words resonate with you, there is a physiological response. The relaxation response that happens when we attempt something over and over again, we do something repetitively, and we attempt to let go of outside distraction.

Meditation, by the way, can also happen when you swim, when you walk, when you knit, when you run. You're doing something repetitive and keeping your mind focused on it for an extended period of time. But the yoga practice goes a little bit deeper. There's that state of meditation where you're kind of in the flow. That's where, yes, you're no longer distracted by limiting beliefs or thoughts that can make us feel inept or unworthy. These thoughts, whether they're in our conscious or unconscious, they kind of govern us.

Sitting in meditation for an extended period of time, you replace those thoughts with something else, whether it's a repetitive sound, a mantra, a prayer, something that resonates with you. That triggers our nervous system to calm and quiet down, the healing response to happen on a physiological level, where brain waves slow down, the nervous system, blood pressure decreases, digestion increases, all of those great effects. But on a mental, emotional, dare I say spiritual aspect, what it does is helps us to understand ourselves as something other than our physical shape, form, body, other than our thoughts, other than our emotions, other than our fears, and return back to this all-pervasive, the word that you've come back to a lot, awareness.

It's like coming back to yourself as the sky. When we understand ourselves as the sky, we then can see when stress happens and other perturbances in life that yes, it comes, but it also goes. It doesn't have to define us. We don't have to identify ourselves as the scared one, the stressed one. It's like I'm experiencing stress, and the stress will also subside, and I can come back to that sky-like nature.

But the importance of doing it on a daily basis cannot be overstated because it's Pavlovian. I love that we're talking so much science because we can bring it in. When you do it over and over and over again, the mind then knows you can take one or two breaths and then come back into that state of peace and relaxation and then take that with you throughout your day. But just as we practice or have our habits of making the bed and brushing our teeth and other daily hygienic practices, yoga and meditation are like the mental spiritual hygiene that we have to do on a daily basis to take care of ourselves.

Ashley James (1:11:03.366)

You said something about when we meditate, we have this moment where it's a break. We have this moment where it's almost like we're plucking ourselves out of our human experience, where we believe we're so stuck in our physical body, we believe our reality is the reality. You can look at politics and how people react, and you realize like everyone really is walking around with the hubris that their version of reality is the reality and everyone else's reality is wrong. It's kind of ludicrous. We're all kind of crazy and stupid, what do I mean? Because your reality isn't the right reality. Everyone has a different perception through the lens of their experiences and their beliefs and their limiting beliefs, their negative beliefs.

I'm so frustrated by the friends I have that believe in the bad things about themselves, like they're not good enough, they're not loved, they're not worthy of love, they're too this or too that or too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, whatever. When we're wrapped up in that, our self-worth is so poor because we believe the lies we've told ourselves or the lies other people have told us when we were young, we're walking around with this belief system like a prison. If just for a moment, we can pluck our consciousness out of that and have this other experience over here where you are not what your dad believed about you, what your mom believed about you, what your teacher, your first grade teacher believed about you. You are not the negative beliefs that you have. You have self-imposed limitations on you, your entire life, and you've put chains on you willingly and the suffering that you choose. We don't want it.

We complain about the chains we put on ourselves because we don't even realize that the belief systems, that actually we can choose a different way because we believe our reality is the only reality. We believe in this prison we put ourselves in. When we learn, and this is through personal growth, dive into personal growth and you will learn that you are amazing. You can let go of these chains of limitations and you can grow. If you're not good at something, you can get good at it. Pluck yourself out of that experience of who you've been. People are living in a body that's hurting and that's there. They believe they'll always have that. It's not true. You don't have to always have that. Or it doesn't have to be your prison.

But when you have that moment where you're somewhere else, like if I plucked a goldfish out of the water, I don't want to torture fish here, but just imagine for a moment this goldfish is not tortured by taking it out of the water. But if I plucked the goldfish out of the water and it saw the air, it saw the water for the first time and it went, "Holy crow, I live in water. I didn't even know that. I thought everyone lived in this. This is whatever was always around us. I didn't question it." Until we have a different experience. We look down and we go, "That's the reality I've been choosing to live in."

So I love that experience of meditation, that it doesn't have to be this long like I have to sit there for 45 minutes and it's so boring. But when you have that moment, like breathing eight times slow and deep, if you have that moment where you are not living in that limited reality, that prison, that suffering, then you can go, "Wait. Why am I choosing that to be about me? Why am I choosing that? I don't need that. I can let that go."

Sorry, go on. I was going to say that I also heard there's a growing concern for suicide. I just can't believe how many people jump off the bridges here onto the I-5 and it happens so often that I have to check ways to make sure that, unfortunately, I have to check to see if there's a giant backup because it's so common that someone's jumping off a bridge to kill themselves. I have a friend whose child killed themselves and I've been hearing more and more that suicide is on the rise.

I just had a wonderful guest who tried to kill himself, and right as he was passing out, realized he didn't want that and he prayed, "Please give me another chance." He woke up in his own vomit and he said, "Enough is enough." Thank God gave me another chance. Most people who do survive suicide, they say like at the last minute, "I changed my mind."

If we just had that tool, like the meditation tool, to know that you're suffering and it is so painful, you want to end your life, it is so painful, but I promise you tomorrow, it's going to be better. I promise you, no matter how hard it hurts and how much you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel right now, I promise you that you will find the light again, that your life is worth living and there's people that love you.

I believe that teaching this yoga, teaching the breath work, and teaching meditation gives people the tools so that they don't do something like end their life when the suffering is so hard. So that's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing that these tools are essential for children, that they're essential for all of us.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:17:31.358)

Yes. It's one of the beauties of the practice that you are doing. There's a great quote from one of the classical texts of yoga called the Bhagavad Gita. It says, "Yoga is the journey of the self through the self to the self." It's like you are doing the practice. You are the map that you're exploring, and your expansive self, your consciousness, is the end destination.

I think there's also something really empowering about that, where it's like nobody else can do it for you. You have to be the one that's going to choose to come onto the proverbial mat and do the practice. But at the end of the day, you are the one that's going to have that transformative experience, as you said, to get out of that cage.

I thought of this—you inspired me—about this analogy that we use a lot about a drop. Each individual kind of spirit or soul or essence or person is like a drop from the ocean. Each drop seems separate. It has its own distinct location and shape and form, but when you look at a drop, you see that it has all of the qualities of the ocean within it. When a drop goes back into the ocean, it becomes the ocean. It's no longer a drop. That is the true experience of yoga.

It's us as our own unique individual drops merging with this ocean of intelligence, which is actually the intelligence that we really are. To be able to immerse ourselves into this ocean of intelligence on a daily basis, to have that direct experience of it, and then take it with us as we go throughout our day. But we have to go back every day and experience it or on a regular basis to really know the true nature of our being.

Ashley James (1:19:59.234)

I love it. I can see that whatever religion we practice, we can incorporate that. Like for me, I see it even in church when we get into this rhythm. My church is one of the kind of churches where everyone stands and dances and puts their hands up. I was raised Anglican, and you don't do that. You don't do that in the Catholic church, Anglican church. Protestant—like, we're just kind of stiff and sitting there. But the church I go to now is alive, and the Holy Spirit is there.

We get into this rhythmic singing where we are in this meditation, singing "Amen" over and over again, singing "Jesus" over and over again. Together, there's this union where it is 100% meditation. My consciousness of my grocery list, what I'm doing later that day—just everything—goes away, and you're just in the moment. Prayer is meditation. It doesn't have to look like someone with crossed legs, sitting there with their fingers together. It doesn't have to look like that. Your meditation can fit your life.

I love that you said that knitting can be meditation. There are activities that you do that you love. Walking—we can do walking meditations where we're focusing on our breathing and focusing on the rhythm of the walking. When everything melts away and you're just being, then you're meditating.

So I love it. I love that we're realizing that yoga isn't this weird foreign thing. It's actually introducing us to the skills that we haven't developed yet but that are part of who we are.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:22:05.010)

Of humanity, it's like the technology of the human body. What is available to us? We say, there's an app for this, there's an app for that. In the technology of our human body exists the potential to adapt, to change, to expand. It's really phenomenal what the capabilities that we have.

In this vessel, this technology that we have with us throughout our entire life, we're constantly trying to escape it and get away from it. But it's like, no, the miracle is here. It's this. So yes, it's quite different.

Ashley James (1:22:54.762)

I'm reminded of Romans 2:15, learn to be conscious of your own consciousness. This is where this isn't something foreign. That's the coolest thing. I wish it was the manual that we came with. When I studied neuro-linguistic programming and timeline therapy and NLP, neuro-linguistic programming is a combination of behavioral psychology and cognitive therapy. It's a collection of tools. Similar to yoga, it's a collection of tools. I was like, man, this is like the manual we should have come with. It is learning how to unlock our own potential. Then I studied acupuncture and acupressure and understanding the meridians of the body. It was this whole other layer of, wow, we have this nervous system we barely tap into in the West.

We just don't even understand that we have the ability to affect our health through acupuncture, acupressure, through understanding our nervous system more. Then yoga is this other layer. It's like you tap into your own physiologic gifts. You tap into it. It's like the light switches. It's like, you want more mental clarity? Here, let me show you nasal breathing.

You want more strength and balance, and the last 25 years of your life, the last 30 years of your life, could be filled with strength and balance? Here, let me show you this switch over here. Let me show you mental health, more emotional health. Here, let me show you the switch over here in your body. That is why I love that journey of personal growth.

So anyone can take your class. Tell us a bit more about how these classes work. They're obviously online. You talked about how most of it can be done at your own pace, and there are a few live classes you have to attend, which is great. It's actually really rewarding to do that. But when does it start? How many times a year does it happen?

If it's starting in a few months, I always tell people, if you want to do it, sign up and do it because they oftentimes will give you pre-study work to do to unlock some stuff. So actually, the course starts the moment you decide you want to do it.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:25:23.638)

Correct. Yes, our next course starts October 22nd. We have about three courses with three cohorts happening per year. Once you do sign up, you have access to that foundations program, which is a great start. It comes with some classes and some digital learning of some of the yoga poses, some of the breathing techniques.

Additional, as I mentioned, information about the sort of classical philosophy of yoga. So all very integrative and interactive for you to get started, to just chew on some of the information. Yes, then it starts in October. It goes over the course of 16 weeks.

Although there are some additional months that you have to complete it if you need that extra time because life happens. We know that a lot of people doing our course are parents, they have full-time jobs, they might have multiple responsibilities, and sometimes things happen where they need to take a pause. We try to accommodate for all of that because really, at the end of the day, this course is about learning how to live this practice. We're not interested in necessarily creating yoga teachers that are not kind in the world or don't have a level of awareness in their everyday life. It's so much more important that you understand the gifts of the practice and live them. That's one way that you teach it. It's just like you embody it and you bring it into the strangers you meet on the street or who you buy your coffee from, et cetera. Yes, it's a very integrated practice. Was there another question to that?

Ashley James (1:27:28.514)

No, so it happens several times a year. When, if this sounds good to you, sign up and do it even so that you can get all the pre-study work, and it unlocks the stuff so you can start learning. There's a discount. Love that IIN gives my listeners a discount. I asked all the way back when I took my training seven or eight years ago.

I think it was actually seven years ago when I graduated from IIN. I asked if I could get a discount code because I knew I would be telling everyone about it. So you guys are graciously giving 25% off, and that's with coupon code LTH. So people can actually sign up online. Of course, the links to all of that will be in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com.

They can also call the Institute for Integrative Nutrition if they'd like, and they can ask questions and sign up there. I know that IIN does offer payment plans. Anyone can do it. Don't let limiting decisions stop you. If this sounds interesting to you and you want those mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual benefits, for me, it's personal growth. Personal growth checks off all those boxes.

It's like, for me, personal growth gives me physical health, mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, and energetic health. Just knowing I can breathe through my nose and get more mental clarity. I quit coffee again, so I'm like, man, am I ever breathing through my nose right now?

That's wonderful. So listeners know that no matter what, they can do it. Busy people can do it. If you're on a budget, you can do it. You make it accessible to everyone, which is wonderful. I definitely want to make sure that we give us enough time for you to teach us the pranayama, the breathing techniques. I want everyone to experience it. Before we get into that, was there anything else, any other studies or science, or anything else that you wanted to make sure that we touched on?

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:29:42.369)

I think I just want to also say that there's a lot of this, we went into a lot of the depths of the practice. But the two things that are so important that we have throughout our experience are how to stand and how to breathe. These are the two things that we do every day in our life that we don't always know or learn how to do. 

One of the things that is a big part of this program is understanding what's called Tadasana, mountain pose. That's the template of every other pose. It's essentially standing anatomically correct, balanced in your feet, aligned in your spine, tall through your torso, spacious in your chest, and with your head and neck just floating easefully on the tip of your spine. If we can all learn how to stand in our own body and hold everything that arises in that experience, it's like we come back to our truth. We stand in our truth. We rest in our truth. Then we can communicate from that place and build relationships based on that. So just the importance of that, and that's a very simple yoga pose, but I think it's one of the most powerful ones—standing and then breathing. 

There's lots of studies around how we stand affecting the way that we interact with other people and the different hormones that are released when we stand and when we take on a more empowered stance. It actually creates these feedback loops for us in our brain that enable us to hold experience differently and that other people respond to us differently.

So I just wanted to share that as a closure around something so simple in the way that we hold ourselves up. It's also, just to add to it, it’s a choice. We can choose how we organize our bodies in space, how we choose to stand in the world. It makes a difference in how we move throughout the world. I think there's a real poetry in that.

Ashley James (1:32:41.397)

Wow, that is so true. Our confidence can be shifted by how we hold ourselves. There was a Ted Talk on that about the superhero pose where, like, surgeons would put their fists on their hips, pull their shoulders back, chin up, and just smile or breathe, and it would build their confidence.

What's interesting when you study NLP, the first thing you learn is that your state—so your state is your physiology, your emotional state in the moment, and your mental state. Like, what are you thinking to yourself? Are you thinking, I suck? Or are you thinking, I love myself? What are you thinking? Your mindset. But your state directly impacts your behavior.

Your choices directly impact your results in life. If you're walking around with your shoulders hunched, breathing shallow, just that physiology calls forth negative thoughts about yourself, negative thoughts about your life. When you pull your shoulders back and your chin up, you've changed almost nothing about your circumstances other than opening up your breathing. But because you changed your physiology, you now shift your mindset and your confidence, which will change your behaviors, and that changes your results in life.

Something as simple as doing that mountain pose and being aware, conscious of your body in space—like, I am standing here, and wow, okay, I can pull my shoulders back a bit. I can bring my chin up a bit. I can breathe a bit more. Being aware— is your neck way shot out in front of your shoulders, or are your ears in alignment with your shoulders? Would your chiropractor be proud of you the way you're standing? Just coming back into that consciously shifts your emotional state, shifts your mental state by shifting your physiology.

I love that you brought that up because that's such a powerful, simple tool to unlock—to understand that where we are in space, our physiology directly impacts our state. It's wild. Amazing.

Okay, I want to make sure you do some pranayama with us, some breathing techniques. What it does is it makes your heart rate variability healthy and it turns on that healing mode. So if everyone wants that supercharged healing mode and also gives you mental clarity and gives you creative thinking, then you want to do this. I'm so excited. Let's do this. Take it away.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:35:46.211)

Great. Okay, so perfect. Yes, I think since we talked a lot about nasal breathing, I'll share with you alternate nostril breathing, which is a really powerful breath technique that balances the flow of air through the right and left nostril. As I mentioned, it corresponds to the right and left brain hemispheres, which also energetically relate to our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system responses. So it's really creating this balancing effect of these activating, energizing, solar-based energies with these pacifying, quieting, lunar-based energies that we have in us.

In addition to all the great benefits of nasal breathing, that it calms anxiety, quiets nervousness and restless chatter of the mind. It helps us to be more clear in our minds and to pull our sensory stimulus inward. We're no longer—80% of our energy goes through the sense of sight—so when we close our eyes and practice this technique, it actually allows all of the sensory stimulus that's moving outward to move inward. This is called prana, the name for the life force energy. The healing energy can go into our brain and heart and help fortify all of the systems of our nervous system activity, but also that healing response.

What we'll do is sit comfortably on our chair. If your feet are on the floor, just make sure that they're evenly rooting onto the floor. If you're sitting on a cushion, you can place a cushion or a blanket underneath your seat if you're on the floor. Sit up nice and tall with your spine so that we have this balance and ease in the lungs and the diaphragm as we move through this breath technique.

We're going to begin. Before we take the hand gesture, I'll invite you to take a slow breath in through both nostrils and breathe out through both nostrils.

Just do that one more time. Breathe in through both nostrils and exhale through both nostrils, just taking a couple of reset breaths.

Now take your right hand and place your thumb over your right nostril and your ring finger over your left nostril. We're using our thumb and ring finger to manipulate the nostrils.

Then you can either keep your pointer and middle fingers folded down toward your right palm, or if it feels okay, your pointer and middle finger can press up into the space between your eyebrows and a little bit above. So again, the thumb is over the right nostril, the ring finger over the left nostril, and the pointer and middle fingers are either folded in toward your palm or pressing up to the midbrain region.

Once you have that hand gesture, breathe in through both nostrils and breathe out through both nostrils.

Then, blocking your left nostril with the ring finger, inhale through the right nostril, hold and block both nostrils for a moment, and then release your left nostril and exhale.

Breathe in through the left nostril, keeping the right nostril blocked.

Hold and block both nostrils gently, no force. Then release the right nostril with your thumb and exhale through the right nostril.

Breathe in through the right nostril.

Hold and retain the breath, blocking both nostrils.

Release your left nostril and exhale.

Inhale through the left.

Hold and block both.

Exhale through the right.

You can take one more round on your own, breathing in, retaining, and switching to the opposite nostril.

Inhale through the same side you just breathed out of.

Hold and retain.

Exhale through the opposite side.

Now keep your eyes closed if that's comfortable for you. Rest your hands down on the tops of your thighs.

Just notice the air passing freely through both nostrils.

Notice any shifts you feel in your mind, your heart rate, and your nervous system.

Gently drop your chin toward your chest and blink your eyes open to a point a little bit in front of you somewhere in your space. Take in that point with your gaze and then slowly float your eyes back up, taking in the rest of the room.

You might notice shifts in how you perceive the world around you.

That's alternate nostril breathing.

Ashley James (1:43:06.617)

That's wonderful. There are so many more techniques that are available and that they will learn from your 200-hour yoga teacher training through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Like I said, all the links to that will be in the show notes of today's podcast, learntruehealth.com, along with the wonderful discount that they're offering my listeners.

So if that intrigued you, you're going to love the training. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us today. I would love to have you back any time you want to go deep into any of these topics. You talked about the eight legs of yoga. We didn't even get to go down the rabbit hole of all these other aspects. But I feel like we really touched on why someone would want to try this and practice it because it offers them access to control their body, control their state, increase their immune system, increase their heart health, and increase their longevity. There are just so many reasons why you'd want to have these tools in your tool belt.

You are the master that teaches these tools, and they'd be learning from you. They'd learn from many wonderful lessons and teachers, and your teaching is so kind, gentle, and thoughtful. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:44:55.225)

Thank you, Ashley. It was truly a real pleasure of mine. I'm really honored to be on your show and thank you for the wonderful conversation. I look forward to being with you again.

Ashley James (1:45:05.357)

That would be great. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. Listeners, make sure that you check out the links that are going to be in the show notes of today's podcast, LearnTrueHealth.com.  We will see Sarah Platt-Finger again on the show soon.

Outro:

I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. Wasn’t Sarah wonderful? I can’t wait to have her back on the show. After we finished the interview, she started telling me more about the different areas of yoga that we didn't even go into and cover and how deep we could really go with this conversation. I felt today was a great foundational, just laying it all out, especially for those who didn't really know a lot about yoga or maybe just had heard about it through the media but hadn't experienced it. Maybe took a few classes, but there wasn't any real depth to the knowledge. I wanted to lay the foundation, then when she comes on again, we can go deeper with this discussion and learn more about the science behind it, the philosophy, the history, and the different aspects of yoga and how we can utilize that to strengthen our life and strengthen our healing, strengthen our emotional, mental, physical, energetic health, and even spiritual health.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Please share this episode with those who you care about. If you are interested in taking the course, go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach. You can use coupon code LTH. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, or you can email me at ashley@learntruehealth.com

Get Connected with Sarah Platt-Finger

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Living in the Light

Check Out My Latest Book: Addicted To Wellness

https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

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https://theredpillrevolution.com

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528: Reclaiming Health Sovereignty and Freedom

https://learntruehealth.com/reclaiming-health-sovereignty-and-freedom

Mainstream health beliefs are crumbling under the weight of profit-driven agendas. Join us as we challenge the status quo with John Gusty, co-author of “Red Pill Revolution,” who exposes the hidden priorities of industries from healthcare to music. By embracing the radical philosophy of anarchy, John redefines personal sovereignty and health autonomy, encouraging us to break free from the societal structures that prioritize conformity over well-being. His journey, including working with music legends like Bon Jovi and Kanye West, reveals the double-edged sword of fame's allure and its darker undercurrents.

Highlights:

• Challenging Mainstream Health Beliefs
• Navigating Fame, Fortune, and Integrity
• Examining Societal Narcissism and Anarchy
• Uncovering Medical Misconceptions and Realities
• Navigating Medical Misconceptions and Realities
• Navigating Healthcare Costs and Corruption
• Awakening to Systematic Corruption
• Choosing Natural Health Over Pharmaceuticals
• Uncovering Healthcare Industry Corruption
• Empowering Health Choices for Change
• Preparing for Systemic Vulnerabilities
• Building Holistic Health Networks
• Unlocking Optimal Health Through Supplements

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. 

Today we have a really interesting and fun conversation with John Gusty, co-author of the book Red Pill Revolution. If that rings a bell for you that’s because I had another one of the authors of that book on the show recently.  Episode 526, Proof Versus Toxic Propaganda: Navigating the Lies of Modern Medicine and How to Break Free to Achieve True Health with Dr. Jeremy Ayres. If you haven't already, check out that interview.

This interview is a little bit of a different perspective. We have with us John Gusty, who is not a doctor, but he is  you and I and that he is disenfranchised with the mainstream medical system. He takes a little bit of a different approach to it. He's a proud anarchist, which I always assumed that anarchy meant violence, that it was disrespectful, that it was chaotic, that it was something that tore things down, that it didn't promote love and peace. My viewpoint of anarchy is, of course, what I have seen in the media, as we all have, and John talks about that from the philosophical standpoint of anarchy, which I think actually a lot of us could agree on a lot of the points that he brings up today. It's always good to do thought exercises. It's always good to stretch our own belief system, challenge our belief system or even strengthen our belief system by hearing what we don't agree with, and that's okay too. It's okay. It doesn't hurt us to listen to different viewpoints. 

What John shares today, though, is about helping people have their anonymity, helping people have their sovereignty, especially when it comes to their health, and how the mainstream medical establishment, the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, even the music industry, which is where he originally comes from how it all is designed to control you, to profit from you and, in many cases, profit from your illness. I know I'm preaching to the choir. He does have some great ideas for solutions, and you can check out his book, the Red Pill Revolution, as well as what Dr. Ayers discussed two episodes ago on the membership site, where they actually do have doctors that are holistic doctors that discuss natural solutions, their website being  naturallybetterforyou.com.

I want to make sure you know about my book. It's not just any book. It's not going to sit on yourself, it's not going to collect dust. My book is where rubber meets the road. It's action. It builds you up and gets you quick results. So if you're tired of waking up cranky, sore, exhausted, if you're tired of having poor sleep, if you're tired of having brain fog, poor digestion, if you're tired of having that excess weight that kind of almost feels like water, just like your fingers might be hard to squeeze, your fingers and your toes and your ankles, at the end of the day, your body retains water. 

There’s so many things that I could mention, simple, actionable steps in my book will help you to get to the root cause of and alleviate, because the actions taken in my book the 33 different challenges that you can take on even in a busy life, will support your body's ability to come back into balance and heal itself. You will have more energy, more mental clarity, better sleep, better digestion, better sex. You will feel excellent after going through my book and you can skip challenges. You don't have to do all 33, but I do recommend that you take on at least one of the challenges each week and you could take a week off. You could do one week a month. You could do it for eight days. You don't have to do it for seven, like it's up to you.

I lay out what I have seen work after working with thousands of people for over 12 years, after I have interviewed over 500 holistic health doctors, and what I have seen work to support your body's ability to heal itself, I put in this book and I made sure it was an action-oriented book so that you can get results  away.   

Go ahead and go to learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness, or go to Amazon and type in Addicted to Wellness by Ashley James. Get the book and start doing the challenges. Please feel free to join me in my Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, and share with me your experience, your journey. I'd love to hear from you and if you're looking for answers that are more personalized, please feel free to reach out to me. I do free 15-minute consultations. I do health coaching. I get results and if I don't feel that I'm a good fit for you, I will refer you. I've got a wide list of amazing healthcare professionals that are holistic, that get results as well in different specialties. If I don't feel like I can help you or I know someone who's better suited for you, I will send you to them. 

So please feel free to reach out and chat with me. I want to help you. Go to learntruehealth.com and in the menu you can select Work with Ashley James and you will see the options at the very top for free consultations or, if you'd rather spend a 90 minute one session with me, you can do that. If you'd like to hire me as your health coach, you can do that there as well. 

Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Together, we're going to help as many people as possible to learn true health. If this podcast has made a difference for you at any point in time in your life, please consider leaving a five-star review on Spotify and/or iTunes. That really helps me. A written review as well, if you can, on any of the podcast directories that you listen to my podcast on, mainly iTunes. I know they let you leave a written review and I have hundreds of written reviews, but every time someone subscribes, downloads, leaves a five-star review and also a written review. It boosts my podcast, which helps me to reach more people, and that's my mission, is to help as many people as possible to learn true health. 

So thank you so much for helping me by sharing and also by leaving a positive five-star review. Thank you, enjoy today's episode. 

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 528.

Ashley James (0:07:53.282)

I am so excited for today's guest. This is gonna be a really interesting conversation. John Gusty was in the entertainment industry for over 30 years, working with some of music's biggest names, and his wife was originally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Was this a misdiagnosis, the way your bio says originally diagnosed? 

John Gusty (0:08:18.184)

Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Ashley. I think this is going to be a fantastic conversation as well. We could probably kill the entire episode just talking about the word diagnose because that's a huge subject. I think any diagnosis should be treated like an opinion because that's true, at least when we're talking about the medical industrial complex. If anyone is getting diagnosed within the medical industrial complex, I would take it as one man's or one woman's opinion. It's always best to seek multiple opinions before making an informed decision.

Ashley James (0:09:03.422)

We're definitely going to talk about that more. So you were in the music industry for over 30 years. Do some name dropping. What are some bands that I'd be impressed that you worked with? 

John Gusty (0:09:13.228)

Oh, my goodness. Well, I was blessed to be in the Bon Jovi inner circle for a good while. Worked on the Keith Urban team, worked a little bit with Kanye West around the Graduation album period, worked on the Dolly Parton team for a good while. I'm kind of the “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” of rock and roll. If I told you some of the people I've counted as friends and neighbors who went on to international fame, it would sound like I was name-dropping.

I came out of a pretty vibrant music scene in Tempe, Arizona, so you've probably heard of names like the Gin Blossoms, the Meat Puppets, and the Refreshments. Then I moved to Athens, Georgia, which was another very rich musical scene. The guys from REM were very good to me, my projects, and my friends. The B-52s hail from there as well.

I've seen it happen to many people. I've seen people go from unknown to internationally known, and it's interesting how that affects even the most stable people. The unstable people? I think we all know what happens to them. But fame and fortune is a funny thing.

Ashley James (0:10:58.640)

Well, and is it just the getting fame and fortune causes some mental hiccups, or is it also that the industry is incredibly toxic? It's both, yes. 

John Gusty (0:11:11.966)

It's both, yes. I think especially these days where society is just marinating in narcissism. 

Sometimes you're just drowning in narcissism. It's hard to get away from it. Now everybody's a star, everyone's a public figure, but pre-internet, it was a powerful thing to stand up on a stage, do the Jesus Christ pose, and have thousands of people literally screaming for you.

Even the most stable person—I'll tell you, the guys in REM could not be more normal, stable, just good people—and I watched the toll it took on them. It will mess with your mind, and how could it not? 

Jon Bon Jovi started when he was 17 years old, and since the age of 17, he's lived the life of a good-looking, talented man who has had everything he's ever wanted. He's a good, solid dude. There's actually an interesting documentary series on Hulu  now that chronicles Jon Bon Jovi. I just watched it the other night, and I think he did a really good, honest job with it. There's a lot of that interview where he talks about the mental toll that fame, that kind of attention, and that kind of ego takes on a person—even the most sane people. So yes, fame and fortune is a weird thing.

Ashley James (0:13:03.093)

So that in itself, ? On top of that, you have a very toxic industry that's looking to profit off of these artists. I see what comes out of Hollywood, for example. Now we have a lot of actors who started as children talking about how they were sexually abused in order to get a role, how even teenagers or those in their early 20s, both women and men, were asked to perform sexual acts on the director or somebody else in order to get a role. It's coming out just how disgusting and sick it is. There's a lot of manipulation, and the carrot at the end of the stick is this fame and fortune they're holding out in front of them. So yes, I can imagine that the music industry is equally as corrupt.  

John Gusty (0:14:02.969)

Well, as is the medical industry, as is the food industry, as any. I mean, it really comes down to this, and this is something that, once I accepted it as a reality, it really helped me move forward in this wacky world that we live in without being angry all the time.

The realization is this: anytime there's an audience, anything or anyone that garners an audience—whether it's a singer, a brand of lemonade, a TV show, or a band—anybody or anything that can command and garner an audience, that audience's attention is powerful stuff.

I guarantee you  now, Ashley, you and I could make a blood pact and go, “We're going to try to garner an audience and keep the evil forces from attacking us or coming after us.” I swear, if we get an audience that reaches a certain size, dark—let's just call it dark—dark people and dark energies start becoming attracted to your power to pull that audience. They need that attention; they need that reach.

So entertainment, by definition, is going to be filled with sick, dark, predatory energies, people, and intentions, by the nature of the fact that anything that pulls an audience is going to be co-opted or attempted to be co-opted by those dark forces at some point.

Ashley James (0:15:59.245)

I have a personal belief that we're in a spiritual war, and I've seen it.

I see it in the medical industrial complex. I see it in every aspect. We are bathed in this milieu of trying to take over your life and your mind and have you vote. The evil of the world is constantly trying to gain your focus and get you off course.

Their biggest strategy now is to get you to believe it's no big deal—it's no big deal that there are artists on stage at concerts dancing in demon costumes and performing satanic ritual things. It's no big deal, it's just for fun, it's no big deal.

John Gusty (0:16:50.981)

That's the essence of gaslighting. I'll tell you, years ago, I think I was probably born this way and just didn’t know. I didn’t know the terms or the directions to find these things. But earlier in life, I discovered an amazing community of people that identified as anarchists, and I really fell into that community.

That was the first time I was around people who, if you refer to yourself as an anarchist, you're really just adhering to two principles: no masters, no servants—which I think we can all agree on. I mean, if you believe in masters and servants, then you believe in slavery, and I don’t think many people actually believe in slavery. So, no masters, no servants and you have to adhere to the non-aggression principle where unless you’re defending your own life or the life of someone else, there’s no reason to become physically aggressive with anyone. There’s always a better way to work things out than through force.

When you are amongst other anarchists, the whole essence is you want to be accepted for your beliefs, and so you have to accept other people for their beliefs. Immediately, there's no walls between anybody, because you can have two people standing in a room, and if they're both anarchists and they just disagree on everything, they're going to peacefully disagree.

When I started taking that more anarchistic approach to life, which was boiled down in modern-day terms, it's you do you, and I'll do me, and unless we're hurting each other, truly hurting, I'm not talking about offending or inconveniencing, I'm talking about hurt, if I'm causing you harm or you're causing me, unless that's happening, then you do you, I'll do me, and we can peacefully coexist. The only place that I see that happening is within the anarchist community.

But it also let me let go of a lot of anger, because I think a lot of us are or were or will continue to be angry because we're just wanting to be heard and understood, and I think that's the essence of the narcissism that you see with social media. Social media by definition is narcissistic. Because I'm telling you, Ashley, let's go back 15, 20 years ago, if you and I were friends and I showed up at your front door at 10:30 at night, knocking on your front door, and you answered it, and you're what? I had a picture of my dinner, and I was, hey, I just wanted to show you this picture of the dinner that I ate tonight. You'd be, dude, it's 10:30 at night. I don't care. I love you, but I don't care what you ate for dinner.

But people do that all the time on social media. It's, hey, look what I ate for dinner, look where I'm at that you're not. Look at my feet with the beach in the background, and you're not. I know people will go, oh, it's a great way to connect with family and stuff, and you're , it is. But that's not 90% of the reason why people put stuff up on social media. People put stuff up on social media because, if we're all being honest, we're wanting people to go read me, look at me, watch me.

And, okay, sometimes in marketing you want to do that, but in everyday life, when you're doing that, that's just pure narcissism, and we're marinating in it.

Ashley James (0:20:49.356)

I've never thought of anarchy in that way. I always consider maybe I have to go look up the definition of anarchy, but I always thought it meant people who want to create chaos. I'm thinking the Dungeons and Dragons version of your chaotic neutral and your chaotic good, and I'm just thinking anything with the word chaos to me is anarchy. That's just how the mainstream media creates it.

John Gusty (0:20:11.300)

That's how your Fox News, your CNNs, your cable news religions, that's how they portray it. Because the last thing in the world that they want, and when I say they, I mean the statists, the corporate statists, their biggest enemy, is individuality and personal creativity. So they need you to conform. They need you to fall in line and do what they want you to do. You can't. Anarchy is their biggest fear or enemy, because in anarchy there isn't—again, I'll phrase it another way. I'll just ask you a really simple question, Ashley: do you think that person A has the right to walk up to person B and declare non-consensual authority over that person?

No, of course not. Of course not. But we're going to watch it in just six short months. We're going to watch our friends and family all take part in the next season of America’s Next Top President and they’re going to willingly go back into this. It's an abusive relationship. It really is. Let's stick with the abusive relationship analogy—how many times does he have to cheat on you? How many times does he have to hit you? How many times are they going to talk about education, the economy, foreign policy? Nothing, ever. The religion of statism—I dare you to cite one example that the religion of statism has improved. Name anything that ‘s improved.

Has food gotten cheaper or healthier? Is water cleaner or free? We're the only species that I know of that puts a paywall between us and water, which is essential to even be alive. But I mean, nothing ever gets better. But we're going to watch. We're going to watch our friends and family go and ask for more of that abusive relationship.

Ashley James (0:23:51.496)

When I was about 11 years old, I was sitting in the back seat. I actually have a memory of this. She popped this tape that her friend lent her, and it was a health lecture by this doctor, and my eyes were opened that day. My eyes were opened, and I didn't know this guy's name. For years I didn't know his name, but what he said stuck with me.

He grew up on a beef farm in Missouri, and he watched as him and his family fed nutritional pellets to the calves and to the cows that contained many vitamins and minerals in order to keep those animals super healthy so they never got sick. He said to his dad, why do we give animals nutrition to keep them healthy, but we don't eat them ourselves? His dad said something like, shut up, boy, and get back to work. But he ended up actually putting the calf pellets in his pockets and munching on them, and he found that some of his health issues at a young age went away when he started to eat the calf pellets because he had a nutrient deficiency. He wasn't really aware; he was just going, well, if it's good for the calf, why can't I have it? Then he started to see stuff get better.

He went on to become a naturopathic doctor and a research scientist and a large animal vet, and he has a degree in pathology and soil agriculture. Just a really amazing research scientist. I found him—this is God's path for me—I found him years later, and he became my mentor, but I heard his lecture when I was 11, and it shaped how I saw the world because he said the system is corrupt. It is designed on purpose. We keep animals healthy so that your burger only costs $2. If we treated animals the same way we treated humans, your burger would be $100.

So it's a for-profit industry. Both systems are for-profit. Keep animals healthy for profit. Keep humans sick for profit. Everything is designed for profit, and as long as you understand that, if it's profitable to keep you sick, you will never find healthy food, you will never find doctors that are even trained to help you be healthy healthy, because, since over 100 years, doctors' education has been dictated by the pharmaceutical industry, and this isn't whack job. This is proven history.

John Gusty (0:26:36.978)

No, I mean Rockefeller. Rockefeller came in. In fact, if you haven't seen it, one of my favorite documentarians is a gentleman by the name of James Corbett and he has done many documentaries but he has one called Rockefeller Medicine where he meticulously goes through the timeline and it's all referenced. It's not conjecture. It's all factual stuff and you can go see it for yourself. 

But I mean, he absolutely came in with the intention of setting up the allopathic system because, let's remember, these people were oil people to begin with, and the pharmaceutical industry is all oil-based products—it's all petroleum. He bought his way onto university boards to where, today, you will not find a university that isn't plugged into the Rockefeller system.

So he kind of single-handedly created this allopathic system and squashed everything else—all the natural, homeopathic, traditional stuff that worked. That's the key  there: it worked. But he set up a system that has only three tools in its tool belt.

They're going to cut you, they're going to burn you, or they're going to drug you. It's surgery, pharmaceuticals, or radiation. That's all they’ve got. You could go into a doctor today with a sore elbow and just say, “Hey, my elbow hurts,” and I guarantee you're at least going to get drugged. You may not get cut or burned, but they're going to drug you, as opposed to trying to figure out, well, why does your elbow hurt?

Ashley James (0:28:36.348)

They're not trained to support the body's ability to heal itself. Now, doctors—a lot of them have their hearts in the  place—but their training has shifted the lens through which they view the body and medicine.

In college, one of my professors was a retired surgeon, and he up and down adamantly talked about how the body cannot regrow cartilage once you have arthritis. He got so angry, and I thought it was super interesting because, at that point, I didn't really have an opinion either way, but he was so adamant: “You cannot regrow your cartilage when you have arthritis. Just remember that.” I’m like, “OK, weird, but OK.”

The guy I was dating at the time had a really bad injury when he was a kid. He shouldn't have been able to walk, yet he was. It was a biking injury that left him with no ligaments in his knee. He shouldn't have been able to walk, but he did martial arts and strengthened his legs so much that it was his tendons that kept him going. He could twist around on his knee, which was really gross. He had lost a lot of cartilage from that accident, but he took copious amounts of glucosamine, chondroitin, and any kind of joint support he could get his hands on. I watched him get better. I watched his knee get better.

I'm, oh, that's interesting. Why is this doctor so angry about this and so adamant? You cannot heal yourself, you cannot heal yourself. He just, over and over again, wanted to pound into our heads that we couldn't heal ourselves.

Then I watched it happen. Now I've had many, many of my clients over the last almost 13 years regrow their cartilage and their body. Your body can heal itself, but doctors are taught that your body cannot heal itself on many levels, and so they want to pass that on to you.

John Gusty (0:30:42.573)

Yes. They only know what they know, and they're coming at it. I take issue with the whole being told you have something. I mean, I got told you have arthritis. I don't believe that arthritis is a thing that you have. Everything is balance and toxicity.

I'll give you another dumb analogy. If you had a wall in your home that you could tell was compromised, something was up with it, sagging or whatever, and you call in a professional and I come in as the professional, okay. Now, if I told you that your wall had termititis, and we had to go through this whole big protocol to address your wall's termititis, your wall doesn't have a condition, it doesn't have termititis, it has termites, and you have to go in and address the termites, which is not a long-term thing. You address the problem and then what. You don't have termites anymore, but a doctor would tell you that that wall has termititis, and so now, for the rest of your wall's life, you're going to be thinking of it as having this condition, and you see what I'm saying.

That kind of circles back to the topic of diagnosis. People get told that they have these conditions, and I'm not saying that conditions don't exist, but I hope my wall analogy made sense. The wall didn't have termititis. Termititis isn't a thing. Having termites is a thing, but termititis is not a thing. It's just a word that I made up.

Ashley James (0:32:30.455)

We have symptoms. Actually, that's the language of the body. The body is expressing to us, “Hey, there's an imbalance here. Here's the symptoms,” and if you could read the symptoms—which my doctor that is my mentor, he talks a lot about this—the body speaks in symptoms, and we need to give it the nutrients it needs. We need to stop doing the things that are causing more damage. There's certain foods that cause more damage, certain lifestyle choices that cause more damage. We got to stop doing that. So stop putting fuel on the fire. Give the body all the nutrients it needs, healthy food, and start doing the lifestyle changes that support the body's ability to heal itself. Then get out of your own way because the body wants to heal itself.

And don't identify—I think with diagnosis, the problem is we identify as the diagnosis.

Like I'm an alcoholic. Well, how long was your last drink? Thirty years ago. OK. So if you have to wake up every day—I mean, if this keeps you sober, then keep saying you're an alcoholic—but you haven't touched alcohol in 30 years.

It's saying, “I'm a diabetic.” Well, what's your A1C? Well, my A1C has been a 4.9 for the last 15 years, but I cured my diabetes 15 years ago, but I”m still diabetic. It’s not your personality. It doesn’t define who you are.

John Gusty (0:33:51.263)

I think it's even worse than that. Ashley, I'm sure you can appreciate, if somebody gets told they're ugly, rare is the person that can shake that off. For the rest of that person's life, it's always going to be there. That someone told them that they were ugly, and they're going to wear that internally, and some people may become obsessed with it and really start to believe that they're ugly.

That's what happens when someone gets told, “You have cancer.”

I don't advocate violence, but I'll tell you what: I would love to line up every doctor ever that looked another human being in the eyes and told them that they have X number of days or months to live or years to live. The audacity of putting that in somebody's head is beyond cruel, mean—I mean, it's, again, the audacity.

So people wear that, and it’d be one thing to be told that you're ugly or you're dumb. Okay, well, that's going to stick with you a long time. But if you get told you have cancer, you’ve got six months to live, imagine. You’re never going to shake that. People will wear that. Any of us, and for being honest, we know how powerful the mind is. If you get told  something, that you have something, you become obsessed with it, and you can't shake it, and you start wearing that internally—you’re going to manifest it.

If you believe that you have a stomach ache hard enough, you're going to have a stomachache. You'll eventually get a stomachache. So, again, it's so cruel that people get told they have things.

That wall didn't have termititis. It had a problem with termites, and it's easily fixed, and you can fix that problem. Then what? That wall is perfectly fine.

Using that wall as an analogy for a person—that wall doesn't have to walk around for the rest of its life thinking that it has something, because it didn't. It had a temporary situation that needed to be addressed, fixed, balanced out, and nurtured.

Ashley James (0:36:17.119)

When you went from working in the entertainment industry to having your wife be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. What happened that had you completely shift gears and now you work on in this world of helping people to to wake up, to choosing natural health? 

John Gusty (0:36:40.534)

I think I've always been the way that I'm wired. I'll put it this way—I just don't like BS. I really don't like it. If you're going to take part in the art of BSing, at least be good at it, because there are some people who are really, really good at it. There are some politicians, preachers, and others who are really good at getting up in front of people and just BSing them, and it's a gift. Salesmen have to do that all the time.

I got to the point where I've been a relatively healthy person my entire life. I definitely would never go to a doctor at this point. I'd never put myself inside of a hospital. But earlier in life, I didn't have any issues, so I didn't interface with the medical industrial complex at all.

Then, when I got involved with my wife, Dawn—she's my girl—we became a couple, and her issues became my issues. I'm also a digger and a question-asker. I'll get in and start digging and asking questions. My wife is completely the opposite. My wife is a used car salesman's dream come true, and I love her to death. She's very trusting. She just trusts.

I started going to her medical appointments with her because she was walking with a cane at the time, and things were kind of getting progressively worse. Partly because I'm her husband, and partly because I am who I am, I saw her not asking questions. So, I started asking questions. I quickly became her general contractor. I went to every appointment, kept all the notes, asked the questions, and led the initiatives.

It became very apparent, very quickly. You mentioned earlier that there are very good, well-intended people who work inside the medical industrial complex—I get it. I think there are very good, well-intended people who work inside the government school system that really just want to teach and take care of kids. But once you get inside those systems, you realize, “I'm not allowed to teach, I'm not allowed to discipline. I just have to read this script.”

That's exactly what people inside the medical industrial complex are doing. They're just reading the script. You don't even see a medical professional anymore without a tablet in their hands because they sit down with you and go through these algorithms. If this, then this, then this. Their diagnosis is whatever that algorithm spits out. They have to for legal reasons, stay in certain lanes. They're not allowed to be creative, adventurous, or bold. They have to stick to these pre-drafted narratives and lanes.

Mostly, it's for legal reasons because you can't just have doctors doing crazy stuff, and nobody wants to get sued. I saw that, and it just made me mad.

When you take your car to a mechanic, the goal is to get your car fixed. We can all relate to that. We're all over that mechanic in the garage.

Yes, I want my car fixed. The mechanic comes back and goes, “Well, I told you it was this problem, but once we got in there, we found another problem.” They can take you over, show you the carburetor, and you can make a decision whether you want to replace it.

We treat cars and car repairs that way, but we don't treat our body and our body repair and maintenance that way. At least here in the States, we've been raised and programmed, if you will, to just blindly trust the people with white coats and letters after their name, as if they have some divine bit of knowledge that you or I don't have.

I said earlier in this podcast that I wish people would treat diagnosis more as an opinion. Dr. A may diagnose you with this, but Dr. B might see something completely different.

Ashley James (0:41:47.635)

Misdiagnosis is very common. They've done studies on this. It's so common that you should seek multiple—not just a second opinion—multiple opinions. A really important thing to say is to go outside of the network, because a lot of times people get a second opinion by a doctor in the same clinic, hospital, or the same clinic or hospital network. That second opinion doctor will never contradict a doctor who is basically being paid by the same boss.

John Gusty (0:42:19.711)

Well, I'll tell you another trick too, and this is something that I've done for years: just go in as a cash pay. First of all, it's way cheaper. I mean, whenever you see dollar amounts on any sort of medical bills, those are insurance numbers. Let me tell you a quick story. I've got two boys, and both of them were avid soccer players.

One of my sons, one time his knee got twisted up and we had to go get an x-ray. I knew where the radiology place was, so I called them up and said, “I need to make an appointment.” They asked, “Who's the referring doctor?” I said, “There is no referring doctor. You're a radiology place, ? That's the service you provide.” “Yep, okay, well, I want to make an appointment.” So they made the appointment. We went in there. First thing they asked me when I got in for the appointment was, “Can I see your insurance card?” I said, “There is no insurance card involved in this. This is an x-ray. Do you use your auto insurance to buy new tires or put gas in your car or get your oil changed?” No, the insurance is for major, catastrophic things.

So we go and get the x-ray done. I come back out, go to pay the lady, and ask her for the price. She has to look up the price, because, of course, they don't have a menu of prices. They don't actually deal with the prices; they just pass it all on through the insurance. So she comes up with the price: $39.95 to get an x-ray done.

Then, after I pay her, I said, “Hey, let me ask you something. If I had whipped out a Blue Cross Blue Shield card or whatever, what would have been the copay on that?” She said $75. It's $39.99 cash, but if you had insurance, it was only $75. I could tie you up for the next hour telling you similar stories that have happened to me. So, pay cash. Not only is it cheaper, but when you pay cash, you are in charge. Once you put something through insurance, you're not in charge. The insurance company dictates what you're going to have, when you're going to have it, how much of it you're going to have, if you're going to have it at all. So keep the insurance out of the equation. Pay cash, you're the boss, and it's cheaper.

Ashley James (0:44:43.247)

Oh my gosh, I've had that experience too. I called up a local clinic and started asking about their cash prices. I was amazed compared to what insurance charges, and then you're paying every month. I also like that there are health shares out there for big stuff. They're cheaper.

I have a whole episode actually on health shares. It's definitely worth getting when you want to unplug from the corrupt system but also be protected in the event of big things. I'm very discerning when it comes to allopathic medicine. If, God forbid, I broke an arm, I want to get it casted. I want to get it.

The hospital shine is putting you back together in the event of an accident. There are a few types of infections they do really good at. But the problem is that we're taking our bodies to them for everything, and they are not trained to help you get optimal health. That is not in their wheelhouse. So it's like you're taking your car to your plumber for everything. It's like you take everything to your plumber. Sometimes the plumber fixes it because it's plumbing problems, but we're going to the same type of doctor and type of medical system, in which they're only really good at emergency medicine. That's where they have the best outcomes, but they have the worst outcomes in reversing heart disease to the point where someone doesn't have heart disease anymore, reversing diabetes, reversing all kinds of major, major chronic issues. They don't do that, they just medicate.

John Gusty (0:46:41.539)

If you look up, use whatever search engine you prefer. If you look up, the leading cause of death, now, when you take out medical malpractice and hospitals, which are always going to be the leading cause of death, when you take those out of the list, whatever list comes up, look at what's up there. It's either heart stuff or respiratory stuff. If we—I'm not going to say we, because I'm not part of them and I don't think you are either—but if they're so gifted, if they're so knowledgeable, if they're so skilled, how come the leading causes of death are what they are? If none of this stuff is getting any better? They're just like the politician's state. Nothing gets better. In fact, it gets worse. We are in mass. Not healthier than we were 10 years ago. 

Ashley James (0:48:05.848)

As a society even less healthy, it’s going downhill. 

I could use cholesterol as an example. Back when I was a kid, they started bringing out these cholesterol meds and started saying fat's bad, cholesterol's bad, must lower cholesterol. I watched an interview really interesting documentary. There were two doctors that were responsible for deciding what the new healthy level of cholesterol, total cholesterol, should be. What's the new healthy level?  They had to choose a number so low that they could convince the majority of the population, the adult population, to get on statins in order to perform the experiment in the United States. So they made an arbitrary number. They actually looked  much lower and they didn't go and say well, what happens if we lower someone's cholesterol too much? What happens then? 

Because we've been brainwashed for over 30 years that cholesterol is bad, cholesterol is bad. Well, cholesterol is a catch-all phrase for many different types of lipids. There's good, there's bad. But what we don't understand is why is it bad and what causes it to be bad. There's this whole other area of cholesterol that if we don't have it, we gain dementia, because 70 percent of the white matter of the brain is cholesterol. The cells, every cell in your body, every cell wall is made of cholesterol. Your sex hormones and stress hormones are made of cholesterol. So to say that we need to lower all total cholesterol in order to prevent heart disease. Well, how did that experiment work? We now have way more dementia, we have way more neurological problems and we have more heart disease, not less.

John Gusty (0:49:43.776)

Ashley, are you suggesting that the corporate complex would do something intentionally to dumb people down. 

They would actually. You talked about those two doctors, they were straight up forming a marketing plan. That was a marketing plan. A marketing plan to push statins. So that's a double win for them because they get to sell more product. But in doing so, they're literally dumbing and causing the population to take part in practices that damage their brain.

Ashley James (0:50:23.877)

Up until I believe it was 2012. So, I mean, 2012 was three blinks of an eye ago. People who were on statins either every three months or every six months, needed to get regular blood tests to make sure that the statins they were taking weren't damaging their liver too much. See how statins work if they bruise the liver. So, when you take statins, they're supposed to lower your cholesterol. Well, people, unless you're vegan, which I’m whole food, plant-based, along with my husband. So, we don’t eat animal fat. But here’s the cool thing: my body makes cholesterol, my body makes it, my liver makes it. I could go on a potato diet. There was this one guy who ate potatoes for a year. His body made cholesterol the entire time. So, we make cholesterol, whether we eat it or not.

Your liver? It's so vital, it's such a vital nutrient to your body. Your liver produces it. We have these people who now, they're eating burgers, so they're eating eggs or whatever, so they're gaining cholesterol in their diet, also on top of their liver making it. Their doctor says, well, we need to lower your cholesterol. They could eat less cholesterol, but no, let's just continue eating the same amount. Here you have a pill. So, what the pill does is it bruises, it punches. Imagine just punching your liver to the point where your liver ceases to function correctly, damaging the liver so it stops producing as much cholesterol. They had to have you go back and get blood work on a regular basis to make sure that we’re not killing you too much.

When I heard that, my brain exploded. Then, knowing that most people who are on cholesterol meds die sooner, die younger, have dementia way early on, and neuropathy is one of the very common side effects. Once you’re in your fifties, they start pushing the cholesterol meds on you regardless. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it pushed on people who had healthy cholesterol. Well, let’s prevent it from happening in the future. Let’s just lower your cholesterol more.

It is one of the biggest scams that is right in front of our face. In the last four years, they didn’t even try to hide it. They’ve been so blatant. It’s been disgusting to watch them push experimental drugs on us and we see the results now, but they’re trying to cover that up and pretend it never happened. But here we have cholesterol, it causes the seniors. So after, let’s say, you're in your 60s, you're on cholesterol. You’ve been on cholesterol for five years, 10 years. You no longer can feel your feet because you have peripheral neuropathy. What happens when you can't feel your feet? You fall more. When you fall more, you break. Maybe you can break a hip and yay, then they get to make money off of you because they get to replace your hip. It just goes on and on and on. One intervention leads to another, leads to another. They’re banking on you having side effects that can give you more drugs for those side effects. 

John Gusty (0:53:37.362)

Another interesting thing, because we'll always end up back at talking about the pharmaceutical companies.

Another interesting search that you can do is do a search for the top criminal fines paid of all time. Look at the list, and you’ll see I think Pfizer’s on there three times, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, it's all pharmaceutical companies, which by definition, pharmaceutical companies are criminal. Go and search for top criminal fines paid, and every single pharmaceutical company you see on that list is, by definition, a criminal organization, or they wouldn’t be paying criminal fines. I mean, Johnson & Johnson's talc powder has been causing newborn baby girls to have ovarian cancer since the '40s, and that stuff is still on the shelves to this day. It's cheaper for them to just pay those lawsuits off, the ones that are tenacious enough to even keep those lawsuits going, because after a while, most people just give up or they run out of money. But I don't understand how there can be many of us left.

Ashley James (0:55:12.298)

Who are awake? 

John Gusty (0:55:13.904)

I haven't bought food. I don't buy my meat, my produce, or my dairy from stores. I haven't bought food from stores in many, many years. It was a decision I made when I really wanted to start eating as clean as possible. But I do go into stores. You’ve got to buy paper products and stuff like that. So I go into stores quite often, and I always pay attention to the crowd at the pharmacy.

I do not understand. I was just in there yesterday, and there was a big old line at the pharmacy. It's 2024. After what took place from 2020 forward, I don't understand how there can be many people left who would even want to walk up to a pharmaceutical counter, knowing what we know now. I mean, all of the lawsuits and how blatant they've become.

They don't care at this point. They know that there are enough people out there—call it still being asleep, whatever term you want to put on it. They know that there are still enough people out there who feel that they need those pharmaceuticals to get them through the day. I don't know.

To me, I've always noticed that the reason why most people take pharmaceuticals is for pain, for anxiety, or to sleep. Those seem to be the big three reasons.

Ashley James (0:56:49.387)

This really frustrates me because within one month, I can help my clients that come to me with those problems. We can get you within a month. You'll be either in significantly less pain or out of pain if you do what I say. I'm going to give you a list of things to do. You're going to go do them, you're not going to be in pain, you're going to be sleeping amazing, and you're going to have lots of energy. We're going to solve that depression problem and especially anxiety.

I have a technique I teach. I can help you turn off your anxiety in less than 90 seconds. I mean, if you Google my name and anxiety, you'll find lots of interviews where I teach the technique for free. I have a whole system that can get people out of anxiety, feeling amazing, sleeping great, lots of energy, no pain, and there's zero drugs involved. But we're masking the symptoms.

The body is speaking. Imagine if you took a child and the child was saying, “I'm hungry” or “I'm tired,” and instead of you feeding it when it's hungry and letting it sleep when it's tired, you told it to shut up and shoved a pill in its mouth. That's what our body is crying out—like a little child saying, “I need this, and I need that.” You're saying, “Shut up, take this pill.” We're going to suppress that symptom, we're going to suppress it and keep suppressing it.

But the problem is people don't know. They don't know because they've been raised in a system, and it's Plato's allegory of the cave. If you're raised in a system where we trust the white coats, it's a really feel-good, warm, fuzzy feeling. It’s like we're still children, looking for a parental figure. It's such a warm, fuzzy feeling: “If something happens to my body and I'm afraid because I don't know what to do, I can just go to this doctor, and they're going to take care of me because they know what to do.

John Gusty (0:58:47.933)

Why do you think that there's still people at this point? I'm just curious if you had to put some sort of explanation. What do you think might be going through the mind of someone who still trusts that after? 

Ashley James (0:59:05.470)

I believe people choose what's cognitive dissonance. I believe they’re choosing their reality because the alternative is too traumatizing to actually wake up to—that every system of government, every system that we are surrounded by, that controls our lives, can’t be trusted. It’s too scary. When you start waking up to how corrupt governments are, and especially the military-industrial complex, it’s not just our government; it’s every government. It will bring you to tears if you really are fully aware of the atrocities to humanity, in education, and we can go down that rabbit hole, just like the medical complex, our education industry has been rigged for about 100 years as well. It is designed to separate the children from the family and have the government raise the children instead of the family unit.

We’re breaking up the family unit on purpose because we are controlled sheep, we are controlled cattle, if they can take the children away, they are away from their parents and being taught in these brick-and-mortar buildings. They spend more time with strangers raising your kids than you do. You get to raise your kids and influence your kids.

I have a friend who says, “I’m okay with putting my daughter in public school because we have a really good relationship, and I believe that the time I spend with her, I can help shape her.” Okay, so the hour you spend at night with her, the quality of the one hour versus the seven to eight hours she’s with strangers, and then your weekends where you’re doing chores and catching up on life—that’s when you get to influence your child, versus what they’re going to learn from their peers.

It sounds like I’m going off-topic, but what I’m trying to say is they’ve replaced their God with worshiping this system that they live in. When you realize that everything is corrupt and everything is evil, for me, it’s like going to Mexico. Here, you’re innocent until proven guilty. You go to Mexico, and you’re guilty until proven innocent. You need to switch your thinking. Every system is guilty until proven innocent..

It’s a bit freeing once you come to that realization that you have to stand up for yourself. You have to be a label reader, an investigator. You have to research things. There’s this one guy—I don’t remember his name, but I love his videos. He takes pictures of aisles at Walmart or Target, and like for example toothpaste, he does this one video analyzing the toothpaste aisle. “Let’s see what is actually healthy versus pharmaceutical.”

When you go through every single aisle, the pharmaceutical companies that you say are the criminal organizations that pay out the most criminal fines are the ones that are also producing everything you’re putting on your body—your shampoo, your conditioner, your lotions. Unless, like me, you shop with very independent and very healthy companies, you cannot go walk into Target or Walmart and buy anything to put on your body. It is made by a pharmaceutical company, and it is full of petroleum, and it’s disgusting.

I’ll tell you a quick story that’s super interesting. My husband’s uncle is a PhD, was a professor, and he’s from Boulder University, he invented a mass spectrophotometer. I’m sure I’m saying that wrong. Let’s say add a company that’s making pharmaceuticals. There’s this powder, and they’re like, “Oh no, which powder is this? We don’t remember. Is this powder to make Tylenol pills? Is this powder to make statins? We don’t know.” It would be able to tell you. You could have it touch or read out any pill, and it could tell you what it was because it reads the molecular structure of it and could tell you exactly what it is.

He designed it to sell it to pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies as a way to stop accidentally overdosing, misdosing, or giving the wrong drugs, because that is one of the things that kills people. They said after he met with the lawyers—literally every single pharmacy and every single pharmaceutical company—they all said the same thing: “We realize that if we implemented your machine, we would significantly reduce deaths and injuries because we will catch the mistakes. But we don’t want to because it is cheaper for us to wait until someone sues us and pay that than prevent the deaths.”

When he saw that, it was like, “Oh, okay, the system doesn’t actually care about preventing deaths or helping people; they just care about profits.” He ended up selling it to the pulp and paper industry, and it significantly reduced the amount of chemicals they use in making paper. So he helped the environment, which was neat. But he designed it to help save lives, and the pharmaceutical industry said, “No thanks.” They’d rather wait for someone to die and then pay the lawsuit.

John Gusty (1:05:11.037)

Back to that Johnson & Johnson example I cited earlier with the talc powder. Since the 1940s, it's been known that stuff causes ovarian cancer, and it's just cheaper for them to pay the lawsuits. So why in the world? I will always go back to the abusive relationship example. Why would anyone want to continue in that abusive relationship? Unless, like you said, it's just easier to turn a blind eye to it and go, “He's not cheating on me, he loves me.”

Ashley James (1:05:52.983)

There's certain personalities who just couldn't be bothered. That sounds like, oh, not going to the store to buy your food. No, I'd rather just go to the store, buy my food. I know that I'm eating some chemicals. It's okay, I just couldn't be bothered. I have friends like that. Not a lot, most of my friends are like me, but I have friends like that. I have family members like that who are awake a little bit, but no, that's too hard. I don't have enough time, energy, or mental capacity. I'm okay living in this corrupt world and just kind of going about my business. You and I, there's about 10% of the people that we're called mismatchers. You tell us not to turn left. We feel compulse to turn left. You know what I mean. We're like the salmon swimming upstream. You have to be the salmon these days to not become a statistic. 

I've said this dozens of times on my show. But if you're tuning in for the first time, look at the statistics. One in three people have cancer. One in three people have diabetes or prediabetes. Look at the rates of diseases. If you want to get that Darwin Award to become one of those statistics, go ahead and keep doing what the masses are doing.

Statistics are what the average person is doing. Go through that drive-thru, go eat that fried food. Definitely don't exercise. Stay up late, drink beer. Do what everyone else is doing, and you will become a statistic. Congratulations, there's your reward.

I can talk about that because I did it. I did all that, and I gave myself diabetes. Then I got to ungive myself diabetes and reverse it. I had five other medical issues that I resolved using lifestyle and natural medicine. I see that you can turn this quote-unquote diagnosis, this disease, on and off based on your choices. But you have to be a salmon, you have to swim upstream, you have to do the opposite of what the average person is doing. You are more likely to not become a statistic. Go to bed early and wake up early. Go for that run, jog, or walk. Drink plenty of water instead of coffee. By the way, if you drink plenty of water, you won't need coffee. You'll be on top of the world because reduced water intake leads to reduced energy production. Then we end up going for caffeine, alcohol, and sugar, which reduces our ability to produce energy even more. That keeps us on that vicious cycle of being addicted to these over-the-counter substances that are socially acceptable to be addicted to but that deteriorate our health even more.

I know I'm on my soapbox because this is one of my favorite topics, which I see is yours as well—helping people awaken to the fact that they have the power. The power is in their hands. But this starts with our thinking. It starts with that mental shift that you are in control. Yes, it's hard, but you can. There's a wonderful actress, and it's funny, her name is escaping me right now. She was in Taxi. She has red hair and a photographic memory. I met her twice. She's amazing. It's so funny I'm forgetting her name because she has a photographic memory.

She's red-haired, and she was in Taxi. She has this great speech about this: choose your hard. Sitting on the couch drinking your beer, you're choosing your hard. Your hard is giving yourself disease. Because if you're sitting there thinking, “I don't have enough energy to go for a walk,” Mitochondria produce more energy when they're stimulated by movement. If you go for that walk around the block, you'll actually be stimulating more energy, and you'll have more energy afterward. You might be fatigued from going for a walk, but if you do it every day, twice a day, for seven days, you're going to feel like a new person. It's also an antidepressant. So choose your hard. If your hard is getting your butt up and going for that walk, that's your hard. Choose your hard.

If you're choosing not to do healthy things and just go with the status quo, the hard you're choosing is the diabetes or heart disease that you're choosing. You’re choosing your hard. If it's too hard for you to shop organic or to source healthy food, then the hard you're choosing is disease. There's always a hard. Choose your hard, and it creates mental toughness. I'm in the middle of doing the 75 hard, and it is amazing. I highly recommend it. It's choosing a transformation.

So we talked about the mind shift. Now let's talk about, well, what can we do instead? How's your wife? Let's talk about this story. This opened this up for you. Seeing your wife's diagnosis opened this up for you, and you went down the road of how can we heal our bodies naturally? How can we take control and stop giving away our personal power to these industries that want to leech money out of us and keep us sick? So what happened? Tell us the story. What happened? How did you help your wife, and how is she now?

John Gusty (1:11:13.664)

Her situation is really complex because, unfortunately, for too much of her life, she was one of those people who trusted and listened. I do believe that a lot of what we are dealing with, even to this day, is damage caused mostly by pharmaceuticals. So we're having to go in on top of whatever was the original issue. We're dealing with a lot of damage caused by her not knowing better and just listening early on. It is breathtaking the amount of pharmaceuticals that were thrown at her.

I started to save all the prescriptions that we never went and filled. I had a stack of them. It didn't take long for me to realize and see the abusive relationship that she was in with the medical-industrial complex. What I did was whatever I could to help her out of that relationship. We got to the point where she wasn't taking any of their pharmaceuticals, she wasn't seeing any of their doctors, she wasn't eating any of their commercial corporate food, and she wasn't drinking any of their commercial corporate water.

Like you said—I love the whole “Choose your hard.” I think the hard that I chose was to go towards the simple and natural in everything.

I'm in the middle of writing a piece now, and it's called Are You a House Cat? I'll just give you a brief summary of what it's about because it kind of answers this whole thing in one, hopefully entertaining, little story.

Think about it. Let's use the example of a house cat. Do you know how many house cats there are in this world that have never been exposed to natural sunlight? The only sunlight they get is what's coming in through the windows, and the windows have UV coating on them, so they're not getting natural sunlight.

How many house cats have ever in their lives, had natural, living water? If they're a house cat, they're only drinking tap water or, at best—or worse—bottled water. How many house cats have never actually touched the ground? Those cute little pads on the bottom of their paws aren't for fashion purposes. Those are connection points, just like the bottoms of our feet or the bottoms of anything’s feet. They've never touched the ground because they've been in the house all their lives and have never actually gone and touched the grass or some actual wet ground.

So you've got situations where there are these animals that have never been exposed to natural light, never drank natural water, never touched natural ground, and, to top it all off, they're not eating food, they're eating feed. There's a difference.

A cat would be eating meat, cartilage, muscles, and soft bones. It would be eating squirrels, mice, or birds. It wouldn’t be eating corn-based cat chow.

Ashley James (1:15:15.591)

What they would be eating would be raw and have the probiotics in it. 

John Gusty (1:15:21.797)

So using that example of a house cat that's never had natural light, natural water, natural food, or touched the ground, if you can imagine that house cat situation, imagine how many humans are in that exact same situation. We've been taught that the sun is bad, so we wear sunglasses, and we tint our windows. We've been taught that the sun can give you cancer—that's a whole other topic, and we don't have to get into that. But people aren't exposed to natural light, they're not drinking natural water, and they're not consuming natural food.

We are walking human batteries. We are electrical beings. We have to discharge. We're holding charge all day long because we're like an antenna. We have to discharge, which is why anybody that's ever walked on a beach or stuck their feet in some water can almost feel their body just going, “Ah,” because you're discharging. You're gathering charge because of all the electronics and frequencies that exist in the airwaves around all of us at all times. Especially people living in really densely populated metropolitan areas are just in charge.

For us, really, we chose our hard, and our hard was going passionately towards the simple and the natural. Do you want vitamin D? There's this thing in the sky called the sun, and we try to be in it as much as possible. We have lots of ground, and we touch it all the time. When we do eat, we eat natural things in their natural form. I don't eat things that come out of packages.

I had a wise person tell me one time, before you shove something down your pie hole, take a look at the shape and the configuration. If you're about to put a triangle chip that is fluorescent orange, ask yourself, “Does that exist in nature?” Well, of course, it doesn't. So you probably shouldn't put it in your mouth because it's not natural.

That's helped a lot by what we didn't do, improve her situation probably more than anything. It's probably the reason why she's still alive today—we stopped with all pharmaceuticals and we didn't listen to the corporate narratives. We listened to the natural narratives.

When I say scientific, I know—that science is a discipline. Science is not a group of people. Science is no different than fidelity or honesty. It's a discipline, and there is a way to do something scientifically. So we run things through that metric: is it scientifically and biologically sound, what we're doing?

We just don't listen to the corporate narratives—for food, for medical, for anything. Really, not listening to them. Or, I think you've heard this probably a million times in a million different ways: if you want to know what to do, listen to what they're telling you to do and do exactly the opposite.

You will most certainly be better off for it each and every time. But in all seriousness, it was really what we didn’t do and what we stopped doing that started to turn things in a better direction for her.

Ashley James (1:19:32.756)

I love it and everything you said, though, because if someone's hearing this for the first time, you sound whack-job crazy because they're hearing it for the first time. But my listeners, this probably isn't the first time they've heard that we should get our bare feet out on grass and touch. We should actually be in contact with sunlight, direct sunlight, and be in contact with the ground every day because there's actual science behind it.

I have several interviews, one with a cardiologist, talking about the benefits of getting in touch with the earth. We release excess electrons that are stored artificially when we are constantly grounded by wearing shoes, being on carpeting, and being in a car. We are so far removed from our natural environment, and we think our artificial environment is our natural environment because we were raised in it.

It's like a lab rat trusting a lab more than it would a forest. We trust our artificially man-made environment, which is riddled with toxic things that are not healthy for us. When we look at EMF, we look at off-gassing. All our furniture, carpets, flooring, and paint are off-gassing for years. If you can't smell it—”Oh, I can't smell the paint anymore, so it's fine.” No.

The stuff in your house is off-gassing formaldehyde and many other chemicals, and you're breathing it in. If you can smell something, your liver is processing it. If you inhale and smell a scent, like when you go through a nail salon, you're smelling acetone.

Your liver, within 15 minutes, is having to break it down and having to process it. What you inhale through your nose, it's actually being absorbed into your bloodstream. So we have to understand that our artificial environment is hurting us. Like you said, the water we drink, the air we breathe inside our home, which is 10 times more pollution than being outside and in your downtown area, and then we've got mold. The list just goes on and on and on. We need to look at every aspect of our lives, become that detective. Choose the hard, but make it fun. It can actually be really fun to detoxify your life and question everything.  you said, question everything. In some cases, do the opposite of what they're telling you to do. 

John Gusty (1:22:18.518)

Well, I think you mentioned it earlier—the body does not know how to work against itself. All the body is doing is trying to recover from all the crap that we do to it and expose it to. So, again, if you move towards the simple and you move towards the natural—back to that house cat scenario.

I think most people that have cats, when their cat starts getting to be about 10 or 11 years old, they start thinking of their cat as old. Most people get 10 years or so out of a cat.

The cats that I have had—and I'm not a cat person; I'm definitely a dog person—but I have taken a few cats in my time, taken them out of bad situations, and brought them onto my property. They're indoor-outer. They come and go when they want to, and I'll tell you what—they're outside most of the time. They only come inside at night to sleep, and first thing when the sun's up, they're out.

What they're doing is laying in the grass and, interestingly enough, facing the sun. That early morning sun is super healthy, and animals know it—dogs know it, cats know it, cows know it, insects know it.

I haven't had a cat that hasn't made it. Well, the last cat I had made it to 24—nice—and probably would have kept going. But it was a cat that we had gotten from somewhere else, and if I'd had it since birth, I bet we could have been closing in on 30.

Ashley James (1:24:03.994)

So you started waking up when you were following your wife through her health journey and started making these changes. But now, this is what you're doing. You're helping awaken people to their body's ability to heal itself.

Tell us about it. Tell us, what is your message? What are you here to share? You've got a few websites we want to mention.

What do you do? Are you a consultant? Do people hire you? Or what are you to sell us?

John Gusty (1:24:42.000)

I'm not here to sell you anything. I am a content creator. I love to create content. I can do audio, video, and graphic design. I'm a writer, and that's just coming out of the entertainment industry. I just kind of became a jack of all trades because I got tired of waiting on creative departments to get stuff done, so I started learning the skills to do it myself.

I love to create content, and I think we have to choose your hard. I talked about that. I think we also have to choose our purpose, and I've come to realize that my purpose is to help continue the art of conversation. Especially in the past three, four years, there's been a lot of us that have been made to feel that we're not allowed to talk about certain things or say certain things, and there's massive worldwide peer pressure—social peer pressure. A lot of people are afraid to express things that they feel, but they don't want to be publicly shamed for feeling these things. If they just let it out, they'd realize there's millions of others that feel the exact same way.

That's why I think the whole worship of the state is very dangerous, because they prey on that dynamic. So I create content. With my wife's journey, I developed what's turned out to be a lifelong friendship, relationship, and business partnership with a gentleman by the name of Dr. Jeremy Ayers, who I believe you're going to be talking to, if my notes are correct.

Jeremy's over in the UK, and he is someone that I encountered. I was at a convention in Acapulco years ago and crossed paths, and we just had enough common ground that when you meet somebody, and it just clicks. Well, we just clicked. He fully invested himself in my wife's situation and has never let up. It's probably been 10 years now that we've been together as friends and business partners, and he has helped a lot of people deal with dis-ease.

A couple of years back, we started a company called Naturally Better. If you go to naturallybetter4u.com, and you can spell that however you want—however, I prefer the way Prince would have done it, with the number four and the letter u.com.

But naturallybetter4u.com, there's a little taste of our world and what we do. Earlier, you'd mentioned what are some things that you can do to take back some of the sovereignty and individuality. If you go to that page, there are a couple of downloads there, and one of them is the Naturally Better Red Pill Revolution Anti-Dependency Suggestion Guide.

I had a lot of fun putting this together, and it is chock full of things. My goal with this was to have even the most seasoned skeptic look at this and go, oh, I didn't know that, or oh, that's interesting, that's cool, I hadn't heard that one before. Hopefully there’s lots of that in this guide. It's just things that any of us can do in our everyday life to stop giving away our power, our attention, and our money. We are so much more powerful as individuals than a lot of us give ourselves credit for.

I think one of the biggest things that people need to hear—they need to hear other people say it, so I try to say it a lot—it is okay to say no. It's totally okay to say no. You can be tolerant of lots of things, but tolerance does not mean acceptance. There's lots of things that I'm tolerant of, but I will not accept them. I'm tolerant of hospitals, but you will never catch me in a hospital. Not even if you were in a car accident.

Ashley James (1:29:26.539)

Not even if you were in a car accident?

John Gusty (1:29:30.751)

Then I would have to be unconscious, and someone else would have to bring me in there.

Ashley James (1:29:34.087)

I mean, on one hand, I think that might be a little extreme because you might be putting yourself in danger if you have internal bleeding or broken bones, stuff like that. But on the other hand, there's a part of me that's, yes, I get it, because you increase your risk of other interventions. You get put on that conveyor belt, and it's harder to get off—MRSA and all the kinds of things that you can catch while you're at a hospital.

But also, I have watched hospitals kill my loved ones. It was the hospital that did it.

But at the same time, if you are internally bleeding, I'd want a surgeon to try to save your life. It's better than just accepting death. But that's just me.

John Gusty (1:30:23.132)

Yes, if that was the case, then I would hope that my conscious self or maybe, if I was unconscious, those around me that know me would hire the services of someone to do that. Maybe those services would be performed in a hospital, but they would be performed in a hospital that I'm paying cash for.

See, I think my biggest aversion to hospitals, and maybe this is new information to some of your listeners, is that when you enter a hospital, you're literally entering another legal jurisdiction, and you're giving up. You are literally giving up all of your rights. That's why you have to be discharged from the hospital. You are legally admitting that. You're admitting yourself into a hospital. So you are now there, you're in their care and their legal jurisdiction, and I will never give up. I will never give up the rights to me and my body and my decisions to anyone else. I would only enter a hospital if I had my legal ducks in a row and that the hospital was well aware of it before I even walked in through the front doors.

Ashley James (1:31:38.345)

More people need to know that I did an interview with, oh gosh, I'm forgetting his name, Grace's dad, Scott. Oh sorry, it's slipping into my brain, but it's Grace. If you google Learn True Health, or if you do an internet search or go to learntruehealth.com and search Grace, the hospital killed his daughter, and he has proof. He is now on a rampage to hold them accountable and to share this information because senior citizens and the disabled are far more likely to be killed by hospitals intentionally. I know that sounds crazy because it's like, who is out there killing grannies? It is proven.

John Gusty (1:32:34.949)

It's insurance company driven. You've already identified me to your audience as nutbag crazy, so why not continue in that direction? But I implore anyone to research this. The insurance companies—if you noticed during the nonsense of 2020 forward—the biggest casualty rate was in the older demographic. There is enough, and I'm sure that the gentleman you cited earlier, the Grace one, is aware of this too. The insurance companies—a very sound and logical case can be made—at least in part, used this event and have for a while now, although not as blatant as it's been lately, but have been using the hospital apparatus to see to it that the older demographic is killed off, if you will. They got paid because of the payouts.

Ashley James (1:33:47.445)

Yes, they got paid too. That's exactly what we talked about in episode 476. I looked it up—it's Scott Shara, episode 476 of Learn True Health Podcast. But that's not news to those who have had it done, who've seen it. You are so susceptible. Just like with pregnancy, you are more susceptible walking into a hospital than with a home birth. As long as there are no complications beforehand, you are more likely to have an intervention-free birth. But when you walk into a hospital in labor, one intervention is designed to lead to another, which is designed to lead to another, and it's all designed to make money for the hospital, not for the best outcome of the child.

We spend the most on health care—the United States spends the most on health care—and we have some of the worst outcomes. Tell me how that is still even acceptable. But you and I are pulling our hair out because we see the truth. We've run out of Plato's cave, and so many are still entertained by the shadows in Plato's cave and unwilling to come out and break their chains and come out.

John Gusty (1:34:59.136)

You know what, Ashley? I have confidence that our friends and family, if they just vote a little harder in November, all of this will get fixed. I'm sure of it. Don't you have hope? 

Ashley James (1:35:10.217)

Now I'm starting to see why anarchy is so appealing. Not from the standpoint of the mainstream anarchy. I don't believe in violence. I definitely believe in being vocal and standing. Vote with your fork, vote with your dollar, use your choices to vote with where you want.

So don't see an MD. See an ND, a naturopath, an old-school one, not one that's been trained in the last 15 years. Go find a 70-year-old naturopath, a 60-year-old naturopath. Find holistic doctors. Choose to set yourself up with, just as you would research and find the best plumber, the best mechanic. Find your holistic team that supports you and educates you. The root word for doctor is doceri, which means teacher. Your doctor is supposed to be your teacher, not the prescription pad holder. The word doctor doesn't mean drug dealer. It means teacher. When was the last time your MD sat down and educated you and taught you how to support your body's ability to heal itself? Well, that's why you're listening to this podcast.

I'm not a doctor, but I just play one on TV, so I love this conversation, and I know you and I could keep talking for hours about it. But what I want is to have the audience walk away with some actionable steps. It's like the movie They Live where you take the glasses, you put the glasses on, you see the aliens. That's basically it. You're going to walk around and start questioning everything.

I was raised watching TV in the 80s and the 90s and watching the commercials for fast food. If there's a commercial for the food you're eating, stop eating it. That's one thing. If they ever had to market something to you, stop doing it, stop buying it, stop eating it. I told my son, never, ever buy laundry detergents. If they have to spend money marketing something, never buy it. It's not healthy for you. There's no money in making you healthy and creating health things. So you have to, just for one, never buy something that they market to you.

But think about the marketing that made you feel so good and that got into your subconscious as a child—Tony the Tiger and all the sugary cereals we got marketed to. We walk down those aisles and we have a trust. We look at General Mills and we look at Nestle Quick. We look at all these companies and we trust them. Why? Because they pumped garbage into our heads since day one to trust them. We have to start to question the marketing that they used when we didn't have critical thinking. So it got past our critical thinking into our subconscious. Now we're walking around trusting the system, and we have to pull ourselves out. So you have to start questioning everything.

Don't eat or use products that are marketed to you. Broccoli doesn't need a commercial, so it's healthy. It passes.

Give us some actionable steps now. We've got naturallybetterforyou.com. You've got some great giveaways—the anti-dependency and post-vaccine detox protocol. I know a lot of people want to know about that because I have a lot of listeners who have shared with me they regret getting a few of the shots, and now they want to prevent whatever or help their body detox. When people come to me and ask, “What can I do? I just got this shot, what can I do to detox?” I'm like, “A time machine.” Because, as far as I know, that's the only way to prevent the destruction that we allowed to our bodies—or those people did, not me. I would never let them come at me. They would have to hold me down, kicking and screaming, which they actually did to several children and teenagers.

There are videos of teenagers kicking and screaming, and it's disgusting, and it's so sad. Then we want to just shut down, and we want to go back into our safe matrix. We want to go back into the matrix and stop questioning everything because it's too painful. It's too painful when you open your eyes to see the atrocities that are all around us. But we have to just move through it and go, “I have to choose, on a daily basis, everything that could support my body and the bodies of all my family, the ability to heal ourselves.”

That is everything you eat, breathe, wear, drive—everything. Every aspect of your life can be looked at, and you can make healthier choices.

Oh, you also have a Facebook group, the Red Pill Revolution Facebook group. I'm sure that would be interesting to go join. Tell us, what's some homework? Give us some advice on actionable steps we can take. I know you're not big into telling people what to do, but suggesting—giving some suggestions.

John Gusty (1:40:38.956)

No, I don't like telling people what to do, but I love sharing knowledge, especially knowledge that I know has worked for me, and if it has worked for me, then there's got to be at least somebody else out there that it would be helpful for. I would say this: two things. One, although it might sound strange at the moment, I would make it a goal to get to the point where you can someday walk into a grocery store and just be offended by what you're seeing. I'm not a prude or anything, and I don't spend time in adult bookstores, but you could put me in the raunchiest adult bookstore, and it still is not going to offend me as much as standing in your average grocery store and looking around at what is there. It's food porn—it's toxic food porn—and it's not even good. If it was good, that'd be one thing, but it's not. Then you see what people are putting in their carts. Look at the stuff, and I happen to think it is okay to be judgmental. It's human to be judgmental. We're judgmental all the time. You use good judgment, or you can use bad judgment, but being judgmental is a human quality. Look at the people that are pushing these carts that have soda hanging off the side and Little Debbie boxes and stuff, and take a look at the person pushing that cart. Again, it sounds a little rough, but usually, those two situations match up. The person pushing the cart full of crap usually looks like what you would think would be the result of putting all that garbage in you.

Get to the point where you can walk into your average store and just be offended. This is probably one of the biggest things that shaped the way that I live, is to pick something—something easy. I think I've said it in the past. An easy thing would be eggs. Pick one thing. Let's use eggs as the example and just say, from this day forward, I am never going to purchase eggs from any store ever again. I mean eggs, regardless of where you live. You live around somebody who's doing chickens, and it's not that hard to find.

So go and find the best eggs that you can find and pay attention to not just the eggs or how they're packaged or how cute the little shop is that you're buying them from. Go even further than that. What were the chickens eating? What were they raised on? Where are those chickens? What does the farm look like? Who are the farmers? Start really going to the source on things—produce, meat, eggs. When you do that, you absolutely will end up with a better, healthier product that you are exposing yourself and your body to.

But the big thing is you are going to start forming relationships with the producers, the people who are doing the work, who are growing the food or raising the animals or making the soaps or baking the breads. You have a chance to go and ask them questions. Well, what are you using, or how are you doing that? You can get to the point where you are 100% confident. These eggs that I'm eating, I know where they came from, and I know that they are nourishing my body. There's no chemical. You know because you've gone and you've taken the time, you've chosen your path, and you've made those relationships. Those relationships, I'm telling you now—I don't buy eggs anymore. I go see my friends. Buying the eggs is just a secondary part of the trip. I go see my friends, I go to their beautiful farm, I see their children, and I pet their animals. You could just go into a Kroger and buy a pack of crappy eggs that are going to hurt you. Would you rather do that, or would you rather have this? 

It's such a much more enriching experience. Buying eggs for me anymore turns into going to a beautiful farm and seeing these people that I love very much, that I've known for years, who have become family to me and I to them. What started out as an egg purchase has turned into just so much more in my life—new people, new friends, new family, new knowledge that I have. Just through the people that I buy my eggs from, I learned about beekeeping, which I had no knowledge of before, but they also have hives, and so I got to watch that process. Now I know that, and I would have never known about beekeeping had I not been purchasing my eggs from these people. You see what I'm saying? It's the gift that just keeps giving.

At some point, whether it's a natural occurrence or whether our friends at the state do it on purpose, at some point those electronic devices that we all love so much and those little plastic cards that we have in our wallets—because nobody uses cash anymore—those things aren't going to work. It’s not going to take a natural disaster. It’s not going to take much; it's just going to take the systems going down, or what if they get intentionally shut off and you can't go get your crappy eggs from your crappy store or your crappy meat from your crappy store? What if you can't do that? I'll never have that problem because I know where my eggs are coming from, and the farm never closes.

Ashley James (1:47:02.971)

Exactly, and you've got those relationships. That's smart. It's smart. You don't have to build an underground bunker. I mean, you can if you want. You don't have to become a prepper. Just start building a community and stop relying so heavily on a system that is very vulnerable. Our our food system can break so easily, and we've seen it teeter a few times. All it takes is a strike—the truckers stop trucking.

I've seen this in Canada twice. I'm originally from Canada. I live in the States now, but I've seen it twice in Canada in recent years where the ATM machines stopped working for a day. You could not use your card, you could not take money out, could not use your card for a day. There was a big system blackout or whatever. Americans aren’t really tuned in to what happens in other countries.You guys may not know but there's been a huge movement in Canada in the last year and a half where millions of Canadians went to Quebec, the capital of Canada, and were protesting—very calmly protesting. There were children. They brought bouncy houses. It was the coolest thing. Who brings bouncy houses to a protest? Canadians do. I was so proud of Canada.

There were millions of people. There were over 100,000 truckers there. They brought all their trucks. They completely clogged up all of Ottawa. It was because the Canadian government was forcing vaccines on truckers. Truckers aren't ever around anyone. Even if you believed for a moment that these vaccines could prevent the spread of COVID—which we knew the whole time, those of us who were aware of this information, and I have amazing guests including PhDs, research scientists, and doctors who were all screaming from the rooftops and were being shot down and silenced. They were saying, “This is unproven, unsafe, and will not prevent the spread of covid and we’re saying it. We know now it’s true—the devastation is true, unfortunately. For the last four years, we were shut down and silenced for spreading the truth. The truckers and many Canadians stood up and said it's not fair that you force this upon us, it's not fair that you force this upon the truckers. There was this massive shutdown in Canada because Canada was protesting.

John Gusty (1:49:59.410)

What the banks did in fixing the money?

Ashley James (1:50:03.978)

This is exactly what I'm getting to. Trudeau, the Prime Minister, actually, at one point, he's on camera saying, “I know I'm going against the Canadian constitution, and I don't care.” He shut down. There are moms who donated. If you donated any money, it wasn't just shutting down the banks of the people who protested. If you were a mom who had a mortgage to pay—say, a single mom with four kids, had a mortgage to pay, donated $50 to one of the truckers for food or gas or whatever, just because she believed in the cause—her bank account and everything was frozen.

This was thousands and thousands of Canadians who had their bank accounts just frozen overnight for donating to a good cause or for saying something on social media that showed they supported this. This is just what's happening with China. If you think it's never going to happen here, I want to say something so lovingly to you: please pull your head out of the sand.

We can't blindly just trust. We see it in other countries happening, and it is coming our way. The only way it doesn't is if we stand up and fight. But we have to be awake enough to stand up and fight.

So I love your idea of making sure that you have set up relationships that support you. I have naturopaths that, if I needed to go see them or text them or contact them, I don't have to just jump on an antibiotic at the first sign of an infection. I've got herbs and homeopathy. I've got a network of homeopaths, herbalists, acupuncturists, and naturopaths, and my system is set up there.

I love that you set up your food system so you have relationships with people that grow food. So in the event of anything, you have a network. You're not just going to be completely reliant on the local grocery store that could lose their food supply for many reasons. It's a very fragile system.

John Gusty (1:52:10.298)

Yes, I think again you kind of get back to that whole concept. I keep pushing about being in an abusive relationship. I went through the entire nonsense of 2020 and forward, and I just kept doing whatever it was that I was doing. My life literally didn't change one bit. I kept a smile on my face, and I went wherever I would normally have gone. I did whatever I normally would have done.

Interestingly enough, it probably was because I kept a smile on my face and I wasn't out looking for confrontation either, but to this day, I've never worn a mask. I certainly didn't get the MAGA jab or any of the Brandon boosters. I didn't play into any of that nonsense because I'm not part of that religion. So, in my mind, it didn't apply to me, and I just went on about my business.

I don't have any Karen stories to tell you. I had one person, one time, ask me if I would put on a mask, and I just said, “No, thank you.”

Ashley James (1:53:21.198)

Well, I think you lived in a state in which that was much more easy. I lived in Washington. Washington and New York, I think, were among the worst. It was pretty crazy.

John Gusty (1:53:33.126)

I'm in Tennessee—in Middle Tennessee, so I'm outside the Nashville area. Nashville's a big city like any other place, and if you went into Nashville, you noticed people masking and social distancing and all, but Nashville's real easy to get out of, and so, you go 20 minutes in any direction, and you're in the wide open spaces, and this is just a simple thought, and maybe it's something, it's kind of a little nugget that I've carried with me since then. 

Every single time that I looked around and watched how the humans were behaving, the staying six feet apart and wearing their face diapers and getting all jabbed up and everything, the birds kept being birds, the dogs and cats kept being dogs and cats, cows, everything, trees, everything else carried on as if just another day. Because what? It was just another day. It was all that. What we witnessed was proof positive of one, how powerful fear is and, two, just how easily herded some human beings can be, because it was very visual. You could see the people who were being compliant.

I was in a Home Depot during the middle of this, and they had these big plexiglass barriers between the cashier and you, but there's a big hole in the middle of it so you could use the card machine. The lady that was ringing me up had two masks on, so she was real serious about this, and I asked her, I was joking, but I didn't think she caught the joke until after I tapped on the plastic thing and I said, “Hey, I said these are kind of handy. Do you guys sell these?” She goes, “No, why would you want one of those?” I said, “Oh, well, for fleas, flea control, flea and pest control.” She goes, “They're going to climb over the top of it,” and I went, “Exactly,” 

I was trying to be sarcastic and jabber in a lighthearted way, but she answered it for herself, but I don't know that it ever connected. I don't know. Anyways, but we saw it. It was visual, and so it's again, going back, if I could leave the listener with anything, it's do your best to go back to this, try to get back to simple and natural, and you're going to find a lot of truth there, and you're going to find a lot of effectiveness there, and you're also going to find a lot of safety there, because most of the things that cause human beings harm or peril are toxic, man made things, and I've never heard of anyone dying of broccoli.

Ashley James (1:57:00.851)

Being offended by grocery stores, a good friend of mine texted me a few months ago, just angry, just livid, because she got it. She woke up in that grocery store that day and had that epiphany and was just pissed off. She was shopping for her kids and everything has sugar and artificial dye, everything is laced with MSG, everything has dairy, and she's just going down the list.

When I say dairy, there's a big difference between getting raw milk from your neighbor's cow and what they process with the pasteurized process, homogenized, powdered, all that stuff. I'm sorry, but there's a certain percentage of people that can handle cow dairy or goat dairy, if it's from your own goat that you love so much and you raised and you have a great relationship with that goat and you want to drink its milk and you find you're healthier for it, then do it, go ahead. But thinking that the dairy you're drinking and getting from your grocery store is healthy, it's not healthy for the cow, it's not healthy for the environment, it's definitely not healthy for you. It's so disgustingly processed. 

I have whole episodes. I actually have two whole episodes on that subject alone, but I can get off on so many tangents. She was livid by all of the chemical crap in the food. Most food in the grocery store is not food.

It was Mary Lou Henner, by the way, who said, “Choose your heart.” I'm sure you could find a YouTube video of her if you type “Choose your heart” and Mary Lou Henner. She gives a great, great talk on that. So she got angry and she texted me. She goes, “How do you do it? I am livid, how do you do it?” I'm like, yes, I get it.

You have to shop the perimeter of the grocery store. If you're going to be in grocery stores. I actually shop around to a lot of different, more natural stores. I also order a box from farms that gets delivered straight to me. So that's fun too. But shop the perimeter of the grocery store. Don't go down the aisles. Don't buy processed food. If you want to have bread, make your own. That's a big fad now. If you want to, I make my own yogurt with cashew. I make a cultured cashew. If I want yogurt, you get interested in making your own products. Think about the pioneers. They had to make literally everything, and it would be great if we started developing our own skills to be able to do more for ourselves instead of relying on a manufacturer to make the lowest quality product. Eating at restaurants is another thing.

Restaurants choose the lowest quality ingredient. They're paying the least amount that they can pay and it's not healthy at all. It's designed to taste good and jack up your dopamine. It's a drug. It's  going into an opium den. 

John Gusty (2:00:22.167)

Regardless of what restaurant you eat at, with very few exceptions, it all comes off of a Cisco truck. All of it. 

It doesn't matter whether you're at restaurant A or restaurant B, all that stuff came off of a Cisco truck. Speaking of gross, you were talking about pasteurized dairy. I heard somebody one time refer to once milk that you buy in the stores. Pasteurized, some of it's ultra-pasteurized. At that point, when pasteurization is just not enough, ultra-pasteurization. But you get to that point and it's just pus and mucus. I was never a big dairy guy anyways, but that's all I needed to hear is… hmm, yes, pus and mucus. Well, enjoy that and enjoy your nice tall glass of pus and mucus. Oh, thank you, Louis Pasteur, you just gave us so many gifts.

Ashley James (2:01:22.776)

Well, the industry ran with it, of course, because if they can shelf-stabilize something and make it last longer, of course killing all of the healthy microbes in the process, they're all for it because it makes them money. So we have to question everything, and that's the takeaway. Question everything. Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. You'll probably end up living much longer and much healthier.

John Gusty (2:01:50.275)

It is okay to do that because I'll give people under 30 a break. But if you're over 30 years old, none of us have ever lived a day. We've never spent one day of our lives when we haven't known. We were literally born into the meme that we know corporations and politicians are dishonest, self-serving, and profit-driven. We've known that. The dishonest politician and the profiteering corporation, those are memes. Again, we were born into that, so we know it. We know it instinctively. Why do we continue to not just trust them, but we let them nourish us, we let them medicate us? We've turned over. I'm even against the term healthcare. 

Ashley James (2:02:47.298)

Oh yes. That's the marketing  there. 

John Gusty (2:02:50.634)

You know what healthcare is, being alive. Do you think a bird wakes up in the morning and thinks about its healthcare? Its healthcare is staying alive that day. Stay alive, get some water, get some food and stay alive—that's healthcare and it's that simple. Get some water. Make sure it's good water and doesn't come out of a tap or a bottle. Make sure it's good living water. Get some good living food and stay alive. You do those two things. Chances are you'll stay alive

Ashley James (2:03:28.786)

Thank you so much for coming on the show. So many directions. We could do this for hours and I have a lot of interviews that touch on these different topics, going down these different rabbit holes. So listeners can definitely keep listening to the episodes but also plug into John and go to his Facebook group. I find it ironic that you have a Facebook group.

John Gusty (2:03:53.792)

I don't. To be perfectly honest with you, I lead a Zuckerberg free life. 

Ashley James (2:04:01.398)

Oh, you don't. So who runs your group? 

John Gusty (2:04:04.274)

Well, we have a team, the Red Pill and the Naturally Better team. There are those that jump in that cesspool because there are still people that exist in that cesspool that are truly looking for good information. 

Ashley James (2:04:23.750)

Yes, exactly. It's okay to use the system as long as you understand. The system is evil, corrupt, and out to suck your money from you and your life force. Great, so listeners could go to theredpillrevolution.com or naturallybetter4you.com and check it out. Thank you for this fun conversation, in which I hope everyone remembered their tinfoil hat. I know I certainly did, and I say that jokingly.

2005 was when I learned about Codex Alimentarius, and that kind of sent me down this rabbit hole. In 2008, I learned about 9/11 and fluoride and kept going down the road, and then GMO, and it just kept going deeper and deeper. So, almost 20 years now, I've been awakening to the atrocities and the toxicity around us, and I see that this system is designed to suppress us, keep us sick, and keep us cattle, and I am not a cattle. I rage against that, and I hope you do too. I hope you become the salmon swimming against the cattle, and that you look into how to make every aspect of your life healthy and maintain your anonymity. So that's what we're going for. Yes, creating those communities to support each other, which I think is a good suggestion.

John Gusty (2:06:10.974)

Thank you. Thank you, and next time we talk we can dive into—I think tinfoil is a conspiracy because I've never seen it on the shelf. I've only ever seen aluminum foil. I've never seen tinfoil on the shelf.

Ashley James (2:06:29.538)

Awesome, John. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been fun. 

John Gusty (2:06:32.357)

Ashley, thank you so much. This has been fun. You run a tight ship and I love your show and I hope something in all of this was helpful to your listeners, and I'm just super proud to be a part of it. 

Outro:

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