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Highlights:
Do you have breast implants or other foreign objects placed in your body? In this episode, Sarah Phillipe shares the dangers of having breast implants. Sarah enumerates different signs and symptoms of breast implant illness, the best way to remove the breast implants, and what could happen if the breast implants weren’t removed properly. She also enumerates different things that need to be addressed to recover from breast implant illness fully.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode really blew my mind even more so than I thought it would. If you’ve ever had plastic surgery or implants, you definitely want to listen. For those who haven’t, I still think you’re going to get a lot out of listening to this episode.
In this episode and in others, I’ve shared a bit about my journey, and one problem I really struggled with was detoxification. In the last five years, I’ve been focusing heavily on supporting my liver and on doing heavy metal detox because I discovered that was the underlying cause of a lot of my health issues. I want to point out a few things that really have helped me because if you have an illness that you think has stemmed from having implants, and of course, listening to today’s episode you will definitely gather more information to help you come to some really good conclusions and give you some directions that you’ll greatly benefit from.
For me, what’s really helped—actually doing this podcast has really helped because I followed a lot of the advice of my guests. When I interviewed Dr. Klinghardt—that’s a really good episode to go back to. He specializes in helping people who have difficulty detoxing for those, for example, who are on the spectrum, for those who suffer from mitochondrial disease, from Lyme disease, from heavy metal toxicity. He discusses a few things that we can do on a daily basis to support the body’s ability to remove heavy metals and toxins and support the liver and the emunctory systems of the body.
I began to implement what he recommended and found I had fantastic results. So one is doing almost daily sauna therapy, and I chose to invest in a Sunlighten Sauna. They do have a payment plan program, and I opted in for that. It’s like a credit card payment, and they ship you a sauna. You can get a wooden one, it’s about the size of a closet. It fits into a corner of a room, or you can get the portable one that folds up. You can tuck it away under the bed or in a closet. I did actually interview the founder of Sunlighten Sauna, so you can go back and listen to that episode.
The reason why I chose Sunlighten is they have a fantastic track record for being 100% non-toxic, and also they have a full spectrum system. So it is not just far-infrared, it’s near-infrared and mid-infrared, which shows that there are so many other benefits. For example, a decrease in pain and an increase in collagen production and elastin. There’s a youthful look that we can achieve by using the Sunlighten Sauna. But for me, it was about the heavy metal detox, which I’ve had fantastic results working with, and also decrease inflammation in my body.
The next was the Platinum Energy System, and I have interviewed Kellyann Andrews several times. Of course, you can listen to those episodes. The Platinum Energy System allows us to pull out heavy metals from our feet, which I know sounds so crazy, but she sends the water off to the labs and has graphs and charts and shows that it does pull things out. What’s really neat is I’ve given treatments to my friends, and the sludge that comes out of people when they’re in this system smells like the chemicals they’ve been using to clean with.
Someone who’s a swimmer in a Platinum Energy System and the water will smell like chlorine, will smell like pool water. It’s really crazy. But what’s awesome is anytime I feel sluggish, down, sort of toxic, I jump in the Platinum Energy System and within 30 minutes, I feel amazing. So I’ve had a great experience with it, so have my friends and my family. So you could check out those episodes with Kellyann Andrews and learn more about the Platinum Energy System.
And then the third thing I learned from Dr. Klinghardt is eating chlorella and spirulina, specifically chlorella because chlorella will naturally and very safely—in a gentle way—chelate, bind to heavy metals in the body. Now he does discuss how to eat them. Chlorella is a crop, not a supplement, so people think oh, I don’t want to overdose. Are you going to overdose on broccoli? Yes, to a certain point. You wouldn’t want to eat 20 pounds of broccoli. That’s too much. But you’re not going to overdose by having two cups of broccoli, right? You’ll feel full, but you’re not going to overdose.
So for chlorella, they dehydrate it, press it into little tablets, and you chew it. In our family, we call it the green crackers. But you want to take 30 of them at a time. So you can put them in your smoothie, or you can chew them and drink water. You do that ideally before a sauna, but you can do it every day, and that helps the body chelate these heavy metals. If you don’t eat enough of them, there becomes a problem because it kind of stirs up the toxins, and there’s not enough to bind to it. So you actually want to eat more, not less. So between 30 and 60 of these little tablets, and they also are a great source of amino acids and other nutrients.
I interviewed the founder of ENERGYbits, Catharine Arnston, who has a wonderful story about how her sister used chlorella and spirulina as part of her holistic protocol to recover from breast cancer. That’s what had Catharine Arnston start ENERGYbits because she saw that out there, most of the chlorella and spirulina in the market is tainted with heavy metals and lead. That’s why I really don’t want you to go to some website like Amazon or some store and just buy it because most of the brands out there are toxic. If you look at the bag and somewhere on the bag it says California regulation says this can cause cancer, well that’s because there’s lead in it because of how they very cheaply process the chlorella.
There are only two companies I know of on the planet that processes their chlorella and spirulina so purely that there are no heavy metals in it, and the one that I like better because I think it tastes better is ENERGYbits.
Now all these companies I mentioned I’ve asked them to give a discount to our listeners. So Sunlighten Sauna, which I absolutely love Sunlighten. Definitely give them a call and get more information from them if you want to support your daily detoxification. By the way, their benefits to sauna are amazing. Type sauna into learntruehealth.com to see the episodes or hear the episodes on that. I did have a cardiologist on, Dr. Kahn, who talks about how much he loves Sunlighten Sauna because it helps to tonify the cardiovascular system and will lower high blood pressure. That’s just one of the amazing factors. I happened to do it because I wanted to support my body in detoxification, losing inflammation, and weight loss. But other people do it for other reasons like a reduction of pain and inflammation or to support the cardiovascular system.
When you do call Sunlighten, you can mention that you heard about them through learntruehealth.com, through the Ashley James podcast.
When you talk to Kellyann Andrews about the Platinum Energy System, make sure that you mention my name because she does give a fantastic discount to those who are getting the Platinum Energy System. And then as far as the ENERGYbits, use the coupon code LTH and you will get the discount that they give for the listeners as well.
If you have any questions about this, and of course, those are my three biggest things but I do other stuff on a daily basis to support my emunctory systems, but those are my big three.
The fourth one I could throw in is on a daily basis I do take the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. Those supplements turned my life around. I’ve been taking them for 10 years. I was very sick. I had many, many health issues, and that was the biggest turning point for me. I had been on all kinds of supplements before, never saw a difference until I got on the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. It’s all about quality. It’s all about giving your body the raw building blocks it needs in the bioavailability it needs. So you can go to takeyoursupplements.com and check them out. They will talk to you for free and help you. Their health coaches will talk to you absolutely for free and help you get on the right protocol.
So those are my four big tips for detoxification, but if you do have any more questions about that you can always reach out to me. You can go to our Facebook group. Join the Facebook group. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and ask away. I’m there every day answering questions. Other guests that have been on the show are actually in the group as well answering questions, other holistic health practitioners, health coaches are there, and just passionate people like you and me who are out seeking true health through holistic means. We’re all there to support each other.
I just hope that you get so much out of this episode because truly, this information is not in the mainstream and it should, but luckily it’s here. Enjoy today’s episode. Please share it with those you care about so that we can continue to spread this information and help as many people as possible to learn true health.
[00:09:54] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 457. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Sarah Phillipe on the show. Her website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Now, if you don’t have any breast implants I still think you should listen, even if you’re a man—we got a lot of great male listeners—you should still listen because this is such an important topic when it comes to understanding the immune system’s response to materials placed in the body.
I interviewed Kristen Bowen and I’ve had her on the show a few times. She’s the one that created my favorite magnesium soak, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I talk about it all the time. The coupon code is LTH for those who want to get that magnesium soak. She went down to 97 pounds, having 30 seizures a day, in a wheelchair because they put things in her body when she had surgery, and they said these things were harmless. Now we know years later that we could have an autoimmune response to even what is thought to be inert items. I’m sure Sarah is going to educate us on that.
Obviously, the person who would benefit the most from listening to this is someone who’s had plastic surgery performed on them. However, I think everyone should listen because understanding what the body goes through when we’ve had surgery and if something’s been left inside us is so important, and then how to recover from that. Sarah, welcome to the show.
[00:11:36] Sarah Phillipe: Thank you so much, Ashley. I’m really happy to be here and to be sharing this really important information with your audience.
[00:11:44] Ashley James: Absolutely. I had a listener reach out and say that you’re amazing and that we absolutely had to interview you. Now, before we get into learning about this, I had never heard of breast implant illness, although I’ve heard of autoimmune responses to objects being placed in the body. I have a dear friend—my best friend’s wife—has had issues with not breast implants but with other plastic surgery items being placed in the body. The doctors guaranteed it was safe and absolutely nothing wrong would happen and she almost died.
So it’s one of those stories that you just don’t know until it happens. The thing is that what you’re going to teach us is that it can be something where it creates a chronic illness not something sudden but someone can have it for years and not realize that it has to do with the breast implants. Before we get into that though, can you tell us about your past, about your history? What happened both personally and professionally in your life that led you to want to be an expert in this topic, illuminating this topic, and helping us better understand it?
[00:12:58] Sarah Phillipe: Sure. It was a place going from a place of pain to purpose really for me like a lot of us who are in the holistic health space, right? We have experienced something, a decline in our health for a particular reason or a multitude of reasons, and modern medicine hasn’t been able to help. So that leads us down this functional medicine or holistic health path of just wanting to discover the root cause.
For me, I had always wanted larger breasts. I mean, this really came from childhood, which is interesting. You don’t always think about a desire like that coming from childhood, but it really started in this pivotal moment in my life when I was a young girl. Someone really important to me—and I don’t think she had ill intentions, of course, but—unknowingly said to me you’re going to be 4’11” just like me, but don’t worry, you’re going to have the Johnson boobs. So it was that really pivotal moment for me where I just realized how important breasts are, and I had no understanding of that before that moment.
That really stuck with me and it really shaped my perception about my body as I matured and didn’t get the Johnson boobs. I put a lot of worth into the physical appearance. I didn’t really realize who I was on the inside, not just who I was on the outside and. I think there were some driving factors there that led me to make that decision to get my breast implants placed.
I had them placed in 2011. Prior to that, I was working in a very busy teaching hospital, night shift—very hard on my body. I was pushing my body to the brink at the gym. Tons and tons of heavy weight lifting, cardio, cyclical dieting, and just really a lot of stress. When I got the breast implants placed, that for me I believe was really the straw that broke the camel’s back. Everything else had kind of set the stage for the fall. That was just my tipping point. That just overflowed my bucket.
Within six months I started developing symptoms, symptoms that I had never had before. I didn’t have a symptom to speak of before that. So while my body may not have been healthy, it wasn’t expressing itself in symptoms yet. But within six months, I had all kinds of symptoms. I was developing chronic fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, I had brain fog, difficulty concentrating, poor word retrieval, memory loss. I would have to read something probably 10 or 15 times to really absorb the information and be able to tell you what I read. Muscle aches and pains, joint pain, hair loss, weight gain, temperature intolerance, low libido, heart palpitations, shortness of breath. I had night sweats. I had insomnia. My mind would just race and race and race all night long. I had hormone imbalances.
I ended up getting diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. My thyroid was low, my thyroid hormone was low. I was very sensitive to light, sound, and chemical smells. I had lots of GI symptoms, so gas and bloating, loose stool, really painful abdomen. The more I ate the more my belly hurt. I knew there was something wrong. Lots of food intolerances, these things were never a problem before.
So I went down this path of trying to figure out what was going on. I went to medical doctors who always told me, your labs look fine. Maybe you need counseling or maybe you should spice up your sex life.
[00:16:52] Ashley James: Wait a second, wait a second. You had a doctor say that to you?
[00:16:55] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.
[00:16:56] Ashley James: You had this whole host of symptoms. You were suffering daily and you had a doctor—was it a male doctor?
[00:17:04] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.
[00:17:05] Ashley James: And he said to you, you just need more sex.
[00:17:07] Sarah Phillipe: Well, yeah. I mean, with the low sex drive complaints and low hormone, he was just thinking maybe I needed to spice it up a bit.
[00:17:16] Ashley James: Oh, so it’s your fault that you have low hormones and low libido, and if you just spiced it up and were more active in the bedroom, that would raise your hormones. I wonder what medical journal he got that from.
[00:17:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, very interesting.
[00:17:33] Ashley James: I had a doctor say that to me once actually. This is why I want to just emphasize, it’s so frustrating as a woman to have all these symptoms, all these medical problems, and not be taken seriously. the hubris of the MDs training. Anytime I get on my soapbox where I talk about MDs, there’s a lot of them that are really well-intentioned, right? But we’re talking about the ones that you saw. You went to so many specialists and they were like well it’s in your head, you just need to have more sex, or whatever. I mean, all this is just ridiculous.
They’re just making stuff up, and the hubris of their training is that they can’t be wrong and they can’t say I don’t know what it is. Let me go find the answers for you. Let me go peer through medical journals. Let me go think about things that it could be that I don’t have training around. Most of them don’t do that. Most of them just are listening to symptoms to give you a drug, to send you on your way, and not looking to heal the root cause. This is my biggest frustration. You want a doctor that’s a detective. You want a doctor that’s holistic, that’s going to look at you your whole life and go okay, why is this happening? And not blame you. It’s your fault. You’re not having enough sex, or it’s all in your head. You just need to go for a walk and see a counselor or whatever. I mean, that’s ridiculous.
You had all these symptoms that gradually started over time after your breast implants, and a really good diagnostician would have traced it back and seen okay yes, you were working really hard long hours and that deteriorated your health. But then, what was that one point where it all exacerbated, right? So what happened in your story that you clued in that it was your breast implants, or was it a specialist that finally figured it out?
[00:19:37] Sarah Phillipe: No, you know it’s interesting because I even eventually went down the path of looking for more functional medicine types of physicians. So I worked with a functional medicine doctor that I found locally and was diagnosed with SIBO and treated for that. That didn’t get better, of course. Multiple rounds of rifaximin and still no results.
Then I found a holistic health practitioner who was a chiropractor working with a lot of people with Lyme, mold illness, and just different really chronic conditions, and so I thought this would be the perfect person for me. I point-blank asked him do you think that my breast implants are a problem? Do you think they could be creating all of these symptoms and the reason why I’m not getting better having done all these things because I had done a lot. I’ve made a lot of dietary changes, a lot of lifestyle changes. I’d really been trying to figure out how I could recover my health, and he said no. I think that if we can get Lyme under control because he had anecdotally kind of diagnosed me with Lyme. If we get the lime under control, then you’re going to be fine. The breast implants won’t be a problem.
[00:20:49] Ashley James: I have a question. Why did you think it could possibly be your breast implants?
[00:20:55] Sarah Phillipe: I think I just had this gut instinct, I had this intuition. At the time, I mean this was a long time ago. Nobody was talking about this back then. There were no Facebook groups, no websites, no podcast interviews where anyone was talking about breast implant illness. So it was just kind of this little voice in the back of my head or just in my gut telling me that it could be the breast implants and just having that medical background, I understood that something inside of me that doesn’t belong there maybe could possibly make me sick and cause all this downstream dysfunction.
At the time though, I didn’t have enough concrete evidence. That wasn’t enough for me to just go on a hunch to have them removed. It took me a long time to get to the point of deciding to have them removed. I mean, many years of going down this rabbit hole. So, yes, I had the intuition, but I didn’t trust my intuition initially.
[00:21:52] Ashley James: This is so interesting because this is a very similar story. We’ve had many people come on the show and share, many practitioners come on the show—these are professionals, these are scientists, these are doctors—and they too have a similar story where they were sick and when no one else knew what it was, their intuition was sort of whispering I feel like it’s this. Then they would second-guess it, and how often do we do that? How often do we second-guess? If your intuition says bring an umbrella and it’s a sunny day, or bring a sweater and it’s a warm day, how often do we second-guess that first voice? That first voice is the quietest, but that’s the truth. That is our truth.
We have to quiet our mind, stop second-guessing ourselves, listen to that gut instinct, and then find practitioners that’ll listen to us and listen to what our gut is saying. So then what happened? It took many years. What happened that had you go, wow, I think I’m right?
[00:22:58] Sarah Phillipe: I’m pretty grateful for the whole experience that I went through because it really ended up leading me down this journey of becoming a health detective, so to speak, becoming a holistic health practitioner so that I could try to figure out what was wrong with me and how to fix myself.
I was no longer really in alignment with modern medicine or conventional medicine because I saw that they couldn’t help me, they weren’t helping me, and they didn’t understand why I was not doing well, why I had all these symptoms. So I knew I had to take a different approach.
That led me down this road of becoming a holistic health practitioner, completely changing everything about my life and the way that I was living. I did a lot of work on myself. I did a lot of detox work, addressing the gut, and working on all these different things that we do in holistic health in general because a lot of these things, regardless of what the source, is there’s only really a handful of things that create chronic illness in today’s world. So they tend to be fairly similar across the board, it’s just what is the source, right?
So for me, it got to the point where my husband and I were trying to get pregnant, and we had been trying for a couple of years without success. I had ended up going to a gynecologist who specializes in endometriosis because I also had a hunch that I had endometriosis. Four or five years before that I had an ultrasound and they couldn’t find anything and sent me on my way. This particular specialist did an MRI and we discovered it was stage four. So I had bowel involvement, I had vaginal wall involvement, I had my left fallopian tube completely blocked. So there was a lot of inflammation in my pelvic floor and just my uterus, ovaries, and all of that.
So I just knew like I had been really thinking about it a lot and kind of in my mind mentally preparing myself for it and also talking about it out loud with my husband just to prepare him for it because I knew I was going to make that decision. So it came down to the fact that I wasn’t able to get pregnant, and I had been thinking in my mind if these implants are this toxic to me and causing all this dysfunction in my own body, what are they going to do? Even if I do get pregnant, what are they going to do to a growing child in me, in my uterus? What kind of problems could that pose to a growing baby, and what about breastfeeding? Am I going to pass all these toxins along to a baby who’s breastfeeding? I just didn’t want that for my future children, and it was really that whole experience with infertility that led me to finally making the decision to explant.
So I did. Once I made that decision, I had my implants out about two months later.it was really quick once I finally committed to it.
[00:26:05] Ashley James: Well I take it they put you under to take them out, you weren’t awake during the procedure, right?
[00:26:15] Sarah Phillipe: Right.
[00:26:16] Ashley James: So when you woke up, did you notice the difference right away?
[00:26:21] Sarah Phillipe: I wouldn’t say that I had much of a difference right away. I mean, I had definitely made a fair amount of improvement, which is the work that I had been doing before my explant. So for me, I feel like I probably felt a little bit more alive, happier, just my outlook in life was improved. I felt lighter and brighter, and everyone else could see that in me. They just felt like when they were having a conversation with me, that I just came off a bit different. I just came off less intense, just calmer, more peaceful. Probably that’s because I didn’t have this chronic source of toxic exposure just overwhelming my detox pathways that can definitely create a lot of irritability, anxiety, and rage even—I’ve seen that as well. So a lot of different symptoms can come from toxic overload.
So those things I noticed right away, but I did a lot of work post explant as well. It wasn’t just this miraculous healing story for me. I had to actually go and do a lot of detox work, a lot of gut work, dealing with infections things like that because there’s the downstream effect of having breast implants, and it’s not just about removing the source. There’s more work to be done after that.
So over time, I would say it took me about a year of work before I felt pretty darn good, but I also needed to have a second surgery in between that time. So I did decide to go ahead and have a laparoscopy for that endometriosis. That surgery was a far more difficult recovery than the explant. It was a six-month recovery because I had to have a bowel resection, part of my vaginal wall was cut out. I had a fallopian tube removed and a lot of clean-up there. It was an eight-hour surgery. So that recovery was quite challenging, but I’ve never felt better and I’m really glad I did it. I wouldn’t say that excision for endometriosis is appropriate for every situation, but for mine, it was just so invasive and it had taken over so many different organs that it really needed to be done.
So after those two surgeries and doing a lot of work, I would say about a year after that is when I felt quite good. And then about two years afterward is when I really hit the point where I felt better than I had in over a decade.
[00:28:55] Ashley James: Amazing. May I ask you a personal question?
[00:29:00] Sarah Phillipe: Mhmm.
[00:29:01] Ashley James: Have you guys had kids?
[00:29:03] Sarah Phillipe: We haven’t had kids yet, we have been trying, and it’s been a long time. We’ve been trying for probably four or five years now. I’ve lost count. But for me, the interesting part that was a huge blocking factor for me was my mindset, just my beliefs about what my body was capable of. Going into a fertility specialist or an endometriosis specialist like I did, it can be really disheartening to hear really discouraging words like your chances of getting pregnant are this, then your age, and then you’re only having one fallopian tube now because we had to take it out, here are your chances. So I think that was such a mental block for me.
So over the past year, I’ve actually done a lot of mental-emotional work—working on healing past traumas, working on my belief about what my body’s capable of, and shifting that belief. And I know I’m going to get pregnant. I know my baby’s coming, but I didn’t know that before. I had doubts, disbelief. Even when I would say out loud, I know it’ll happen at the right time, I don’t think I really truly believed that. Our thoughts are so powerful. Even if we don’t speak it out loud, our cells are listening to whatever our thoughts are and responding as if it’s true.
[00:30:37] Ashley James: You’re a nurse and you’re a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. You have many credentials. You work with clients, but you’re also working on yourself. When I hear that of a practitioner, that’s the practitioner I want to see. I want to go to the practitioner who is working on themselves mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, energetically. Who acknowledges that emotional, mental health is as important as physical health. Spiritual health and energetic health play a role in overall health and vitality.
Now, I got to tell you, I was told by an endocrinologist that I would never have kids, never—0% chance that I would have kids, and my husband I tried for six years. So I just want to let you know absolutely, 100% possible. And it was holistic medicine alone that helped me to become fertile. My issue is not yours. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, not what you had. However, I’ve seen so many women with so many different complications using a really holistic approach to be able to conceive healthfully.
Once we got everything in order with our diet, nutrition, lifestyle, mental, emotional health—when we got all of it together, and for us the last step was adding just some Chinese herbs that our Naturopath was like, okay, these are the last thing. We’re just going to put this in place. Then we had to decide to watch for ovulation because, in the past, I didn’t ever track it because I was told I never had it to begin with.
When we saw ovulation, we’re like, oh my gosh. We did it. We’re ovulating. Our very first detection of ovulation we conceived our son, and now we’re pregnant again. We’re having a daughter. And it was both on the first tries. For that to go from six years of really trying but also not having a regular cycle, not having everything lined up, but using supplements, diet, herbs, and all that.
I love that you’re looking at every aspect, and the belief system is so important because if I didn’t believe, then I would have never even gone as far as to ask my Naturopath for help in that area, for herbs, and I would have never even been conscious ever looking for when I ovulated. It’s like our belief system has us look for the evidence, has us look for the evidence that something is possible that we then can act upon. That’s why it’s so important to work on our belief system and to clean up past traumas so that we can believe in ourselves and we can believe in our own body’s ability to heal itself.
My understanding of your situation with breast implants is that it was a toxic accumulation over time that affected all the systems. Is that because what is leaching into our bodies when we have a breast implant are endocrine disruptors? Can you maybe explain what kind of chemicals are slowly leeching into our body?
[00:34:11] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. Breast implants are a stressor on a couple of different levels, and one of them is that they’re a chemical stressor. It’s not just silicone breast implants, it’s saline also. Saline breast implants most people think are safer because well it’s just water, it’s just saline water. But it’s not true. The shell of the saline breast implants are made of silicone, and so silicone in and of itself is a neurotoxin.
There is evidence that it chelates neurotransmitters in the brain. We’re exposed to a lot of different sources of silicone these days. If you think about different kitchen utensils, all of the silicone that is in our personal care products, our makeup, our skincare, and things like that. There’s a lot of silicone out there, and there is one researcher who believes that it’s actually silicone toxicity that we’re dealing with when we have breast implants. That it’s a cumulative effect of not just the breast implants but all the different sources of silicone that we’re exposed to. And of course, breast implants are a pretty significant source of exposure, and they’re living in the body.
But beyond that, there’s a lot of different cytotoxic, neurotoxic, carcinogenic chemicals, and heavy metals that are really inflammatory to our cells, tissues, and organs that are in silicone breast implants specifically. So there are 37+ different toxic chemicals and heavy metals in silicone breast implants. This means things like methyl ethyl ketone, cyclohexane, acetone, xylene, phenol—these are all neurotoxins. And then they contain things like dichloromethane, toluene, benzene—those things are carcinogens. And then you have things like talcum powder, formaldehyde, lacquer thinner, printing ink, and metal cleaning acid.
What are these things doing in breast implants? And then you have heavy metals like aluminum, tin, lead, and platinum. I actually developed some kind of reaction to my platinum wedding rings and I could no longer wear them. My finger just was like on fire every time I put it on. When I got my breast implants removed, that never happened again.
[00:36:35] Ashley James: Wow.
[00:36:36] Sarah Phillipe: So, that was a really interesting correlation there.
[00:36:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. So wait, have you ever taken these breast implants and had them analyzed by a lab to read out all of the heavy metals that are leaching into our body from them and all the chemicals? Is that information available for people to see? I bake with silicone, like it’s safe. Wait a second.
[00:37:02] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. It’s not non-stick Teflon, right?
[00:37:06] Ashley James: Yeah, well exactly. I’ve always had that little intuitive voice we talked about, that little voice which I told it to shut up because I wanted the silicone baking pans because I thought they were so cool. I didn’t have to use oil. I’m like, look, they’re so much easier to clean. Oh my gosh, that little voice my heart was like this does not sound healthy. This sounds like it leeches stuff. Come on, don’t go for the silicone. Don’t buy into it. So, man, my little intuitive voice was right, my gut was right. The stuff we use in our baking in our kitchen that’s made of silicone, are you saying that this is also off-gassing or releasing chemicals into our food?
[00:37:55] Sarah Phillipe: I haven’t looked at studies on that, but I would say it’s a safe bet to assume so.
[00:38:01] Ashley James: Well I mean, if medical-grade silicone that they put in women is leeching stuff, can you imagine what the non-medical grade stuff in our kitchen’s doing?
[00:38:09] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. There have never been like studies in humans examining what happens at body temperature with these implants, right? But there have been some animal studies that have shown that when the implants are heated to body temperature, that they do bleed out into the body. It’s called gel bleed. So, yes, they are a solid material but when they’re heated up, they do bleed into the body and the breast area is so full of dense lymphatic tissue that it’s like a highway for these chemicals to start traveling throughout different parts of the body. Not only is silicone toxic to the body, but there are some researchers out there that believe that it is considered an adjuvant connected to certain autoimmune conditions.
So basically, it’s a trigger that can trigger certain autoimmune conditions. Autoimmunity is also partly genetic. It can trigger whatever your genetic susceptibility is. It can look different from person to person. It’s not always going to be the same autoimmune condition.
[00:39:12] Ashley James: You’re touching on exactly my next question to you, which is some women swear they have no problems with their breast implants. I have a friend, I was surprised to hear that she had breast implants because I honestly thought they were natural. She’s so gorgeous, but she was like are you kidding me? I was flat as pancakes. She said she breastfed successfully with them. She’s very happy with them. I knew my interview with you was coming up so I started asking her questions. I’m like, how’s your health? Do you think you’ve had any negative impacts?
Well, I know she’s been focusing with her doctor—she sees a Naturopath—on brain fog, and she is a night owl. She has insomnia, and she cannot handle any stimulants. So even a little bit of coffee would drive her nuts, but I don’t know if that was how it was before the breast implants. But she says other than that, she’s in really good health, nothing to complain about. I thought, man, what if the accumulation of toxins being solely released is just exacerbating those issues?
[00:40:24] Sarah Phillipe: I get this question a lot of the time about will everyone get sick who has breast implants, and I tend to think of them as a ticking time bomb. From my perspective, why wait until your health spirals downhill because, usually, what I see is one of a couple of scenarios. Either someone has had a lot of different sources of toxic exposure as a child, kind of like a long history of toxic exposure. Maybe mercury amalgam fillings in the mouth, maybe they were born via a C-section and not breastfed, or maybe had a lot of antibiotics as a child and then they have amalgam fillings placed. Maybe they get breast implants and the breast implants are just that thing that overflows the bucket.
And then I see another scenario where someone maybe had a pretty healthy, pretty uneventful childhood. Not a lot of toxic exposure, a healthy diet, not sick a lot. Maybe they got breast implants and have had no problems, and it’s been decades and they’re thriving. And then maybe later on in life, they experience divorce, loss of a loved one, or a car accident. And then maybe they have root canals and end up developing cavitations, which are infections in the jaw, and something ends up becoming the tipping point.
So there’s a lot of these different types of stressors that accumulate, build up in the body, and tax the body’s ability to cope with more. At some point, there can be something that becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and then someone develops a lot of symptoms. Symptoms don’t happen early on when there’s dysfunction occurring. They’re one of the last things to occur. And when symptoms start happening, it’s usually that the body has been breaking down for quite some time and the symptoms are just the body’s way of communicating to you that it is time to start waking up and paying attention to what’s going on.
[00:42:25] Ashley James: What about MTHFR? How much does that play a role in this? I have a friend who has just the most severe form of MTHFR. I tried to say to her, there are phases of it, or I was trying to explain that you could have different snips like the 25%, 25% on each side, or 50% on each side, or 75% percent, and she has 100% which means she says her body only can methylate 23% and everything affects her. That she walked into a store and inhaled some perfume, she’d have a migraine. Anything that her body has to detox something, she’s down and out for the count. So she has to lead the cleanest lifestyle.
Do you have something like that where their liver cannot process phase one and phase two of detoxification properly? Everything gets backed up because of that. So someone who knows that they have any variant of MTHFR would definitely not be a candidate for having anything implanted in their body, which could then slowly over time increase toxicity, that it would just put this added stressor on the liver. Have you seen a link between those with MTHFR and breast implant illness?
[00:44:03] Sarah Phillipe: I have, and I think I’m a little biased though because the women that come to me that I work with are women who are quite ill even after their explant surgery. So I tend to see women who do have a lot of struggle regaining their health after having their explant. Usually, there is an MTHFR gene mutation or two. Well, I’m heterozygous for C677T, but I don’t have a really, really down-regulated methylation activity in the body. My body is methylating fine.
So in my mind, it goes back to the difference between what your body is able to handle versus what you’re exposed to. I kind of liken it to either a two- or a four-lane highway at rush hour, which one is going to be moving more traffic? Obviously, if you have more lanes, the traffic’s going to flow better. And if you have fewer lanes, the traffic’s going to get jammed up a lot more easily.
So I think it’s not all about the MTHFR. It’s really about the fact that we’re living in a very, very toxic world dealing with far more than our bodies were ever designed to cope with, and then we add something like breast implants on top of that and it can be devastating. I don’t think it’s just our genes, it’s how the environment is interacting with our genes.
[00:45:34] Ashley James: I hesitate to use the word mental illness because there’s such a stigma around it, but what kind of emotional problems arise in women who have had breast implants who are experiencing this toxic load? We talked about insomnia and brain fog. Does it increase depression, anxiety? You talked about anger. Can we talk about the emotional aspects because women who are more likely to get breast implants are more likely to see a doctor for emotional issues and then be put on drugs for that as well further increasing the toxic load? I love that highway analogy.
Based on how much you’re methylating, based on how much you’re able to detox, let’s say you only have two lanes, the breast implants are adding more cars. Any pharmaceutical drug is adding more cars. Even some herbs the body has to then process adding more cars, right? What’s in our air, what’s in our water, what’s off-gassing from our carpets, right? If you go get your nails done, your hair did, and whatever kind of cosmetic products you use—all these chemicals. There are over 80,000 man-made chemicals made in the last 50 years that our bodies were not designed to have to handle, and here we are having to handle it. It’s all adding more cars to the highway, thus slowing it down, causing a backup, causing a toxic load in the body.
We need to start, obviously, removing those loads. But for someone who begins to have that load build, they may not recognize physical symptoms as a problem. For you, someone said you have Hashimoto’s, you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, you have this problem, you have this physical problem, you have this physical problem. So they were addressing them. You have Lyme disease, and all these different doctors, because they’re looking for what they specialize in and they’re seeing symptoms. Oh, these symptoms match so we’re going to treat you for this. It doesn’t seem as obviously connected to the breast implants.
But what about emotional issues? If you’re someone who’s never really been prone to anxiety or maybe just minor anxiety and all of a sudden you have panic attacks to the point where you’re being put on anxiety meds, or you have depression, or you have insomnia, or these emotional issues come up. Can you talk about the emotional side effects of breast implant illness?
[00:48:09] Sarah Phillipe: Absolutely. It’s very, very common. I see a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, a lot of panic attacks, and a lot of feelings of overwhelm like you just can’t handle any kind of stress whatsoever. To me, that really signals the fact that your body is completely overloaded, and any kind of stimulation just is overwhelming for your body to try to cope with. Any kind of stress whatsoever triggers that stress response.
For me, I experienced this pretty significantly. It started off with just a very irritated nervous system to where when I would go down into the garage to do my workouts, I had to have complete silence like no music. I cannot work out with my husband in the garage because his heavy breathing irritated me. In between my sets, I would have to sit down and gather myself because it was so incredibly stressful on my body. Any kind of additional stress was just throwing me over the edge. It made me very irritable, really hard to recover from stress, and even a difficult conversation, I couldn’t handle that. I would blow up and start screaming and yelling because I couldn’t handle one more thing.
So for me, the anxiety, the anger outbursts, heart palpitations, symptoms of anxiety, of chest tightness, feeling like I couldn’t take a deep breath. When I would go out into public, that was really hard for me because any stimulation from a crowd would just send me into this downward spiral. And even just being around family, if they were being loud and rambunctious. I have a husband with triplet brothers, so you can imagine there’s a lot of wrestling going on and stuff like that, a lot of competition. When we would all get together, I sometimes would just have to leave the house because I couldn’t handle even the audible stimulation. That to me was overwhelming.
So those types of things that I experienced are really, really common. No one understood what the heck was going on with me. People thought I was crazy.
[00:50:34] Ashley James: Well, this makes so much sense because it’s almost like inflammation on the brain. It’s inflammation of the nervous system having to handle this toxic load. But at the same time, a lot of what you just shared sounds like the autonomic nervous system being stuck in the sympathetic mode of fight or flight. There are ways of measuring that. We can look at heart rate variability now.
I’m just curious. Let’s say breast implants, if having them puts the body in a state of stress like just triggers the autonomic nervous system so that we’re in fight or flight, which would then easily explain why would people have insomnia, why would they have that irritability, why would they have outbursts, why would they be on edge? And then you’re being told by a doctor it’s all in your head, you’ve got to go see a counselor.
Well, no. The root is in the body. Our physical body and our emotional body are connected. So when we have emotions, yes, of course, sometimes we get to come at it from healing traumas. We also have to come at it from looking at what’s going on in the body that’s putting us in this state, and it sounds like you were in fight or flight. Have you been able to measure that at all or look into that at all with your clients to see if they are kind of stuck in fight or flight?
[00:52:02] Sarah Phillipe: Well, when I did my own testing back when I was really, really sick, my neurotransmitters were completely tanked. I didn’t really produce a whole lot of neurotransmitters, which when you’re dealing with a lot of different sources of stress, you need norepinephrine and epinephrine in order to cope with that. That gives your body energy and the ability to either fight or flee, and I didn’t have that ability. I didn’t have those neurotransmitters at the adequate level that I needed them, which of course resulted in a lot of symptoms.
My heart rate variability—and this is true for a lot of my clients—was very low. It was like a deep parasympathetic more than a fight or flight. I think a lot of us that are stuck with these chronic symptoms and not getting better, it’s more of this deep parasympathetic that we’re just not coming out of. And it’s more of a result of the mitochondrial function and how the mitochondria are really just going to bat for you rather than producing energy for you. So they go into this battleship mode rather than energy production mode, and that takes away from your cells and their ability to function, which your organs are made up of cells so you have different organs not functioning as well as they should. Hormone production takes a back burner, neurotransmitters take a back burner, things like that that are just required for someone to feel good, right?
So that’s really a lot more common than fight or flight. I think the longer you’re dealing with chronic illness the more your body just goes into this deep parasympathetic mode and your mitochondria are just shut down. It’s like hibernation.
[00:53:48] Ashley James: Right, total exhaustion. That makes sense. I had chronic adrenal fatigue and I can relate to that. It’s like you’re walking dead. The overwhelm was real. Any stimulus was overwhelming. That makes sense. So what part of the breast implant harms the mitochondria? Is it a direct causality, or is it somewhere cascading down the way?
[00:54:17] Sarah Phillipe: I think that it’s on a few different levels. I think the toxic exposure, so toxins are one stressor that can definitely shut down the mitochondria, and they’re very delicate, right? They’re the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, so they’re very easily damaged.
[00:54:37] Ashley James: Well, they’re bacteria. I mean that’s the fascinating part is that just like our gut bacteria can be easily harmed, so can our mitochondria because they’re bacteria. We really have to take care of them because they’re what keeps us alive, they’re what creates our cellular energy.
I was fascinated by interviewing the woman who cured her MS using this theory that the MS was a mitochondrial disease, and then she ate a diet full of all the nutrients the mitochondria needed and removed all the foods that could harm the mitochondria. Lo and behold, she went from practically being months away from being dead to being able to walk again, then ride a bike, and ride a horse. I am having such a brain fart right now, I’m going to blame pregnancy brain, which I can. I’m allowed to. But she’s quite amazing, Terry Wahls?
[00:55:41] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, I know Terry.
[00:55:42] Ashley James: The Wahls protocol and her TED Talk. She gave a TED Talk I believe is 2012. I love that she shows pictures of her in her special wheelchair that would have her feet higher than her head because that’s what she had to do. The doctors were basically saying that she was months away from death, and she stopped it and reversed it. She went to all the best doctors in the world for MS. They wanted to give her chemotherapy, they wanted to do all these things to her, and she just sat down one day and her goal was to live long enough to see her kids graduate high school. She sat down and thought, okay, well this is a mitochondrial problem. How do I heal my mitochondria?
Isn’t that interesting that it just takes one doctor with that detective mind we talked about to stop thinking inside the box that they’ve been trained to think in and start looking at the body and going what’s going on and how do we support the body with nutrition?
So here we have this toxic overload. You said the mitochondria is incredibly sensitive, and just the toxins from breast implants can cause some issues for the mitochondria. What else in this big picture is affecting the mitochondria?
[00:56:57] Sarah Phillipe: Well, you also have the fact that breast implants are foreign objects. They don’t belong in the body, and so that is a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s chronic inflammation recruiting inflammatory cytokines. They’ve been able to show even through just doing cultures on the implants the fluid inside the implants if they’re saline, and then also the capsule and the fluid around the capsule in between the capsule and the implant.
They’ll do cultures for those things, and they’ve been able to show 10+ different bacteria that are growing between the breast implants and the capsule themselves. It’s like a petri dish, basically, for all these different microbes to start growing, and it can be even a low-grade growth of these microorganisms that is just this chronic source of immune stimulation. Your body really can’t get those things under control because it’s got this foreign body that is like this big distraction. Your body’s trying to go to work to address that foreign object.
That’s the reason that it creates a capsule around the implant. It’s scar tissue. It’s trying to wall that implant off so that it can protect your body from that exposure. But unfortunately, our breasts are not sterile. There’s a lot of bacteria even within the breast tissue, and it’s a perfect environment for all kinds of different microbes to grow, wreak havoc, and thrive in the body that kind of goes undetected by the immune system.
Part of that going undetected is the fact that they create biofilm around themselves to protect themselves from the immune system in general. The biofilm is the biggest problem with regards to breast implants and different infections, the causation, and the connection there. So we’ve got lots of different types of toxins coming from breast implants, which sets you up for this perfect storm situation because different unwanted microbes thrive in toxic terrain. They use toxins and heavy metals to create their biofilm, and some things like parasites will feed off of those things, will feed off of heavy metals, and candida as well will feed off of heavy metals.
So you can have a lot of downstream dysfunction going on as a result of breast implants being in place. Chronic immune stressor because they’re a foreign object, and then a chronic chemical stressor because of all the different toxins that can bleed into your body from that exposure.
[00:59:46] Ashley James: That is fascinating. The body creates scar tissue around the breast implant. I mean, any woman who’s been pregnant or breastfed knows about mastitis. The breasts are designed to make breast milk that has all these good bacteria in it. We’re giving healthy bacteria and an immune system to an infant, so of course, it’s not a sterile environment inside the breast. To think that anything skin deep, anything below the skin is sterile is silly.
Putting a foreign object there, then it creates scar tissue around it, and then there are bacteria that are growing like a bad culture that can develop in your gut. Imagine the bad cultures developing around your breast tissue, and they themselves—even if it’s a low-grade constant low-grade infection—any kind of microbial presence as they die off creates toxins. Essentially, whatever they poop out is a toxin. That’s why we feel so crummy when we’re coming off of a cold, flu, or food poisoning. It’s actually the toxins left behind the poop and also the bacteria that are dying. All the toxins left behind make us feel so horrible because it is such a stressor on the body to have to handle those toxins.
So not only is the body having to deal with that slow constant release of whatever’s in the breast implant, which you’ve mentioned some items that don’t sound too savory. And then it’s also dealing with any kind of bacteria or any kind of microbial buildup around the breast implants because it’s so hard for the body to get to that area to clear it out. And the immune system’s all kind of revving up and having to work on that.
I’m sure you’ve looked at the meta-analysis. Statistically, women with breast implants, do they have a higher likelihood of developing cancer?
[01:02:15] Sarah Phillipe: That’s an interesting topic that I haven’t delved a lot into, but I do know that there is a connection between breast and someone women who have breast implants and a higher incidence of colon cancer, which is interesting, right? Not breast cancer. The theory is because the implants are putting a lot of pressure on that area.
[01:02:38] Ashley James: The immune system looking at it.
[01:02:41] Sarah Phillipe: I tend to think about it in a different way with regards to colon cancer where a lot of the toxins we’re exposed to end up going right to the gut. That’s one of the ways we eliminate through the liver and then dump it into the gut for elimination. So I have to wonder too, how much of the toxicity component is playing a part in the development of abnormal cells in the colon?
[01:03:04] Ashley James: I had this explained very scientifically once, and I’m going to try to do it in my layman’s terms. These 80,000 chemicals that are in our environment, our food water, and our breast implants, all that, the body doesn’t recognize these. So the liver gets rid of them but then the colon will reabsorb them if we don’t poop three times a day. If we don’t have enough fiber to bind to those the toxins in the bile and let’s say you have a little bit of constipation, the body does not see the difference between bile just to reabsorb because bile is costly, so the body wants to reabsorb it and reuse it. But there are these toxins that are in it. The colon doesn’t go oh wait, I shouldn’t reabsorb these because I’m actually just reabsorbing all the toxins again.
This is why it’s so important whenever you’re doing certain detoxes and certain parasite cleanses to consume binders. People eat clay and they eat activated charcoal, or they take a lot of fiber in their diet. If you’re going to do one of those cleanses, I highly recommend doing it with a practitioner that knows what they’re doing. Don’t just randomly buy stuff.
I really like Dr. Jay Davidson. I had him on the show twice. I really recommend listening to those two episodes. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and search Jay Davidson for those two episodes. He explains a bit more about the binders and stuff, but here we have the body reabsorbing all the toxins the liver worked hard at to get rid of. So no wonder if the colon wall is being bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing these toxins. That makes sense.
[01:04:58] Sarah Phillipe: I absolutely agree that people out there in the world should not be attempting to do detox work on their own without a trained professional. I think that’s so important. I’ve seen so many women just make themselves so much worse.
[01:05:13] Ashley James: Can you explain a bit why? Because a lot of listeners, myself included, have attempted our own detoxes because we read an article, we hear from a friend, or maybe we listen to a show, and then we just go to town and make our own version of it. Going out and getting a colonic is fine, or going out and doing sauna therapy and eating chlorella, that’s fine. But if you have, for example, Lyme disease and then you decide to take all these herbs to kill it or something and you don’t have the right dose or you’re not preparing the body, all the emunctory systems correctly beforehand. You don’t have something to break down the biofilms. I mean, there are just all these things to focus on before we go to just kill the parasite or kill the infection, which can make it much worse like you said.
Could you give an example? Maybe teach us a little bit. We have women who are listening, let’s say they have breast implants. We have some women that have breast implants, and we have women that don’t have breast implants, and maybe they’ve already had them removed. How do we recover from breast implant illness?
[01:06:29] Sarah Phillipe: Well, that’s a loaded question.
[01:06:33] Ashley James: Give us the starting point. Where should we set ourselves up mentally? What should we start really looking into focusing on doing because you’re a detox expert? You’re an expert on breast implant illness, so let’s talk about the women who do have breast implants first. So they have breast implants, you’ve now opened their eyes to the possibility that this may be putting a major stressor. They can’t pinpoint exactly, oh it’s definitely causing this, or it’s definitely causing that. They’re starting to hear all these things that it could be causing, now you’ve got their interest. What can we do to support their health?
[01:07:16] Sarah Phillipe: With regards to healing in any situation, with regards to any root cause, I think the very first step is removing the source. We can do a lot to support our body with good clean water, clean food, good nutrition, exercise movements, good sleep, and things like that, but without removing the source, we can never really truly heal.
Removing the source means getting the breast implants removed, and there’s a very specific way that needs to be done to protect you. So I would look for a surgeon who has lots and lots of experience with explants, ideally even a surgeon who no longer places breast implants because they’re more likely to believe what you’re going through is real, believe that the breast implants are a problem, and do everything in their power to remove them properly so that you have the best chance at recovering your health.
[01:08:23] Ashley James: When you say remove them properly should they also remove that scar tissue capsule the body has built around them?
[01:08:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yep, absolutely because within that matrix of the capsule is going to be a lot of the different toxins that are found in breast implants because they bleed into that capsule, and also biofilm, bacteria, maybe even mold, mycotoxins, and things like that. So really important to get that source out. That’s what I mean when I say properly is that ideally, it would be done on block which means that the implants on the capsule are removed together as one unit rather than cutting the capsule open and taking the implant out first. A lot of really reputable explant surgeons who’ve been doing this for years and years will be able to remove your implants on block.
The ones who say it’s not necessary or I’m not comfortable with that, I’ll probably look elsewhere because you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. It doesn’t even matter if it’s saline or silicone, especially with silicone, you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. With saline, you tend to have an idea because it’ll start shrinking, or it’ll just go flat. But you can have a slow leak and it can change in size a little bit but not significantly enough to notice.
You don’t want to have that capsule cut open and risk whatever contents are in there spilling out into your chest cavity and then getting into the lymphatic system and traveling throughout the body. So that’s why it’s important to have them removed on block so that we’re protecting you from that exposure. And then if they can’t be removed on block or if any speck of capsule is left behind, the surgeon should go in and remove every tiny piece of capsule that’s in there. Sometimes that means scraping the ribs, sometimes that means removing a little bit of your own tissue to get it out, but that’s an important piece.
Having any capsule left behind is just going to be a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s a little bit harder to recover from. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible because I don’t like absolutes, but it’s definitely more challenging.
And then once the implants are out, once you give your body enough time to heal from that surgery, I think that’s important to allow your body to rest, recover, and heal from that generally for about a month. As long as there are no complications, no hematomas, no seromas, no infections, no wound dehiscence, and things like that. As long as everything heals properly, then about a month after that, you can start doing some work on detoxing your body, addressing infections, and things like that.
How I like to look at each unique person, and you could do this on your own, is I have people write me a self-narrative of their life from birth until now. It doesn’t have to be a long novel. It can be really a timeline of you plotting every different type of stressor you’ve encountered in life starting from birth. It can be physical, it can be chemical, it can be mental, emotional, it can be structural, it can be any type of stressor. I like to have people do that because it’s really helpful for me to be able to see how you got here, and then we can work backward with trying to figure out how we’re going to start incorporating some of these things into the plan for how we’re going to address them.
And then I always think that functional lab work is helpful to look for other hidden stressors because not only are there going to be downstream effects of having breast implants like different types of microbial imbalances and toxicity. There are also going to be potentially other different types of hidden stressors in the body that may be unrelated. Maybe you had some health issues prior to the breast implants going in. Maybe you had ulcerative colitis, SIBO, candida overgrowth, or things like that. Those things also have to be taken into consideration.
A lot of hidden things that people most people don’t think about or don’t even know exist to know to think about or look for are hidden infections in the jaw. If you’ve ever had any tooth pulled or a root canal, there is a significant chance that you have cavitation in the jaw, which is an infection in the jaw. That’s another source of low-grade chronic inflammation stimulating the immune system. We discuss to release their own toxins into your body that travel throughout the bloodstream. That can be one thing that keeps people sick. Amalgam fillings, silver fillings in the mouth—that’s another chronic source of toxic exposure.
We have to look for other sources beyond breast implants because it’s a cumulative effect. As far as healing goes, I think it’s important to always start with supporting the downstream detoxification pathways, which means you have to be pooping two to three times a day—that’s a priority. If you’re not pooping, you’re not detoxing. Dr. Jay Davidson talks about this a lot, you have to think about the detox pathways as a funnel. The bottom of the funnel is the gut. You need to be removing your bowels regularly, that’s waste, that’s toxic waste. The more it sits there, the more it’s going to be reabsorbed back into circulation.
The next above that is going to be your kidneys and liver and then your lymph above that. So if you’re someone who’s going out and getting lymphatic massages but you’re not pooping every day, how are those toxins going to get out? You’re probably going to feel a lot worse after a lymphatic massage. That’s the order of things and making sure those are well-supported and functioning the way that they should, proper hydration and minerals.
When the body is ready, I think you can start addressing more of the gut—working on balancing the gut. Whether that looks like just introducing probiotics that can help balance the gut or whether that looks like going after specific pathogens like parasites, fungal overgrowth, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—whatever that looks like for you, it’s going to be different from person to person. But addressing the gut I think is a helpful place to start after that because when you get into deeper detox work, you’re going to be dumping toxins into the gut and that can be very irritating to the gut. We want the gut to be in a good place before we start doing that.
And then I think the next step—from my approach anyway—is oral chelation. Using true binders, strong binders that are able to get past the gut lining, get into your cells, and bind onto toxins strongly and long enough to be able to get them out of the body. So a lot of the binders that people are using out there, a lot of the time I see people using one product like a zeolite and nothing else. That’s their detox. If all you’re doing is using something like zeolite, yeah, that will bind toxins but you also have to think about the source.
Some zeolites are not tested for heavy metals, and that’s another source of toxic exposure to you because that’s a natural curator in the environment and so it can be contaminated and adding to the level of toxicity. And then if all you’re doing is binding and you’re not supporting other pathways, you’re going to burn out, you’re going to crash. You’re going to burn through your methyl groups, you’re going to burn through glutathione. That’s assuming that your detox pathways are open and working well.
[01:16:09] Ashley James: How do you test—as a practitioner—your clients’ detox pathways?
[01:16:16] Sarah Phillipe: It can be a little tricky to test for those things because we don’t have a really solid test that says, yes, you’re methylating really well or you’re glutathione stores are adequate. But I generally look at a comprehensive blood panel. There are some clues we can pick up on there about methylation and glutathione. I like the organic acids test as well. There are some clues there we can look at for methylation activity, glutathione, and things like that.
As far as kidneys and liver, you’re not going to see anything show up abnormal on blood work until there’s pathology, until there’s a disease, so you won’t usually see that. I generally go by just how someone is feeling overall. If they’re feeling unwell, generally speaking, the detox pathways are not well supported. They’re probably congested. Usually, once we start supporting those pathways, people feel quite a bit better pretty quickly just being able to eliminate things.
[01:17:28] Ashley James: So you’re listening to people instead of telling them it’s in their head, they need more sex. You’re listening to how they’re feeling, and that’s very important. That’s why I like going to naturopaths over medical doctors because naturopaths will look at the same labs but they have a totally different way of analyzing the labs.
If you go to an MD, you’re lucky to spend 15 minutes with them. If you go to a Naturopath—a good one, I mean there’s bound to be good and bad doctors out there regardless of whether holistic or not. Find a good Naturopath that’s been practicing for a long time, and they sit down with you to six for 60 to 90 minutes to go over your comprehensive labs. They’re looking for, are you out of optimal ranges, and how can we get you back in optimal ranges? So their sensitivity to the lab. So if they look at kidney function, they’re looking, are you even remotely nearing towards not optimal? The red warning bells are going to go off in their head if they see signs that you are even in low normal.
Whereas an MD is waiting for you to be so sick they can put you on a drug because they don’t have any other tools until you’re sick enough for them to give you a drug to “manage,” not cure your symptoms. Whereas going to a holistic practitioner like yourself, a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, going to a good Naturopathic physician have so many tools. They’ve got diet, herbs, lifestyle, all these things that scientifically are backed and proven to support the body to get back into optimal ranges. But we have to look at the labs differently. We have to look at them from the standpoint of are you in optimal health, are you creeping out of optimal health?
And then of course listen to the client and believe them when they say, I feel this way, I feel this way, I feel this way. Believe them and go, okay, and take that into account along with the labs for understanding the whole picture about the person. That’s why I like going to like yourself, a functional medicine practitioner or a Naturopath, that spends enough time with you that they can really get the full picture of what’s going on in your life and they can do that detective work.
I know almost every episode of my show, over 450 episodes, has been kind of a commercial for seeing holistic practitioners because I spent years beating my head against a wall seeing medical doctors just being given drug after drug and I was so sick. If I stayed in that world, if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I don’t even know if I’d be alive. But if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I’d still be on monthly antibiotics, I would still be infertile, my weight was out of control so I imagine I’d probably be one of those people on gurneys. My type 2 diabetes was completely out of control. I had really bad polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, and adrenal exhaustion so bad I could barely function. It was getting worse and worse and worse, and that was in my 20s.
If I had stayed that way and kept seeing MDs, I would just keep getting worse and keep being put on more and more drugs. I don’t even know if I’d be here. I’m so grateful for holistic medicine and for just snapping out of it and going I reject this entire system. I will gladly go to an ER if I need emergency medicine like I have a broken arm or something, or I have an infection that I can’t handle. I would gladly go to an ER—allopathic, reductionistic medicine when they take you apart, look at your little organs, and don’t look at you as a whole. That is fantastic for saving your life if you’re in a state of life or death. That’s where they shine. I don’t want to go to a Naturopath if I have a broken bone that needs to be reset and put in a cast or whatever.
But when it comes to chronic illness, that system of medicine is causing more chronic illness than healing. It perpetuates chronic illness, and it also perpetuates the idea that if you have, for example, an autoimmune problem, you will always have it. I was told I’d always have diabetes. I was told I’d always have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I’m sure you were always told that you would have the conditions that they diagnosed you with. And all of our listeners who have been to enough MDs who have had enough health problems have been told, oh, it’s because of your genetics. You will always have this. Or it’s because of your age or because of whatever. They tell you with such hubris that you will always have this condition.
Here we have Sarah teaching us that you can go see her and she’s going to look at your labs in a different way. She’s going to listen to you, listen to your symptoms, and she’s going to help you completely change your lifestyle, your diet in a good way. Sometimes that’s a little overwhelming and scary for people, but holding your hand doing it. I’m a health coach so I know. I’m not going to throw the kitchen sink at you but get your body to the point where your body is so healthy you feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your life.
You can’t get that from MD medicine. You can’t get that from pharmaceutical-based medicine to feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your entire life from causing more toxins to the body. It all starts with the mindset, and I believe you talked about this before. It really does start with the mindset. We have to change our mindset, completely rewire our mindset to go into this new way of thinking. Believe the body can heal itself and then act accordingly.
[01:23:50] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, absolutely. And I believe that the body was designed with this God-given innate intelligence to self-heal if we take responsibility for our health and take the actionable steps needed to get it back. That mindset component is so huge, and I think it even bleeds into how we think about our condition and how it happened.
With women with breast implants, I think this is so important because a lot of women with breast implants who are sick and they discover breast implant illness, the feelings—initially can become chronic—are of shame, guilt, regret, and then also anger towards the medical system. Why didn’t I know about this? Why wasn’t I told? There’s a lot of anger towards doctors and the medical model, and I think that’s not a healing mindset. We have to get out of the victim mentality in order to heal.
[01:24:59] Ashley James: I think it’s good to bring that up. I think it’s good to address. Anger, if held on to, is toxic. But anger that is processed is healthy because if we bury it, we don’t process it, or if we just try to stick it somewhere without really processing, working through it, healing it, that’s also holding on to a toxin. I know because that was me. But actually facing the anger, being with it because there are two forms of anger. You can take a negative emotion, it’s a negative emotion about the past.
For every time you’ve been hurt by someone you felt angry about it, that’s a gestalt in your neurology that you’re holding on to. That’s a chain of all of the events from your past, and that’s incredibly toxic because that gets reanimated inside our neurology every time we relive something that brings up anger. But anger in the moment about something that’s happening, let’s say, to us which I understand I don’t want to go into victim mode either, but something that’s happening that is violating our boundaries.
Anger is our body and our mind’s way of saying my boundaries are being violated. You got to do something about it. And if we take action to stop our boundaries from being violated and then process the anger, work through it, heal it, release it, and don’t hold on to it, don’t stay in it, but acknowledge it. Acknowledge, yes, my boundaries are being violated.
Once we take action towards not allowing our boundaries to be violated like firing the MDs that no longer help you and hiring new doctors and new practitioners that are going to serve you. That is an actionable step because if you’re staying in victim mode, you’re going to stay with your captors, you’re going to stay with the people who victimized you. But taking all the actions to ensure that your boundaries are healthfully enforced. When anger comes up go ask yourself, is this anger because my boundaries have been violated, or is it anger from the past? And work through it.
Getting to that point, I think anger is healthy when it allows us to see that we have been down a path that’s hurt us, and now we’re seeing all the things that did hurt us. As long as we can go, okay, I’m going to enforce my communication, my boundaries, my research, everything. My mindset is now shifting. I am asserting myself, I am advocating for myself, and I will only put medical professionals on my team that is in alignment with my values and my boundaries, and just acknowledging that that anger was a motivation to get you there.
But don’t stay in it. Don’t say in victim mode because like you said, that shame, guilt, and that anger—we turn it inwards and start beating ourselves up, why did I do this to myself? Why did I let this happen to me? That is really unhealthy, so we have to let it go. I love that you’re acknowledging that because I think there’s so much emotional process work we have to do if we’re coming to terms with a choice we made in our past that has led us down this really negative route and now we’re looking to reverse it. So we also have to reverse and heal all the emotions associated with it.
And then what about everything that led up to a woman choosing breast implants? I know it’s unique for each woman, and I don’t have breast implants so I can only imagine that for me to choose to get breast implants, I would have had such an insecurity—and this was just me, I’m not saying all women—that I needed to get them so that I would stop feeling that way about myself. Do you also look at that and look at what happened emotionally that had you want to get them, and is there anything to heal there?
[01:29:11] Sarah Phillipe: Certainly. I think there’s a lot of reasons why people get breast implants, and it’s not always vanity. For some people, it is a decision after having a mastectomy from breast cancer. For other people, they went in to have a lift after they were done having children and the doctor convinced them that they needed to have breast implants.
[01:29:37] Ashley James: Good salesmen. He had a boat payment.
[01:29:42] Sarah Phillipe: And then for other people, they were like me and just really had a lot of insecurity. The breast implants made them feel a lot more beautiful, sexy, or worthy. I think there’s a lot to think about, and I think it really just takes doing a bit of digging, reflecting, and processing everything that has happened. I really don’t think that this kind of thing happens to us. I really think that it happens for us. Personally, I can’t speak for everyone but for me, I really feel like I went through this partially to really discover who I really am inside as a person, as a human being beyond just the physical appearance. There’s so much growth that happened as a result of that, and I will say I’m probably not the same person that I was 10 years ago.
Secondly, I think it really has taught me how I should be living just to maintain my health, to keep my health for life and rather than just struggle through life with a lot of symptoms and bounce around from doctor to doctor, this surgery and that surgery, and all these different prescriptions like most Americans. But it taught me how I should be living in order to really live a healthful vibrant life full of joy that we deserve.
I think that we can take this experience and really learn a lot about ourselves, about who we are, and about how we should be living. It can be a positive experience once we can get to that place of going through those emotions of whether it be anger, sadness, regret, shame, or whatever, and acknowledging those things, and then letting them go, moving on, moving forward, and not looking back. Continuing to take the next right step each day towards your future.
[01:31:51] Ashley James: I’m sure you’ve been asked this, is there a safe alternative to breast implants? Wave your magic wand.
[01:32:02] Sarah Phillipe: I’m sure they’re working on those things as we speak just based on the uproar that’s going on with women right now with regards to breast implants and how they’ve contributed to poor health. So I know there are probably things in the work that we don’t know about, but one other thing that I do know is there is always the option of having a fat graft. There are a couple of different techniques that I know of. One is a fat flap technique basically where they take fat from underneath the armpit or potentially underneath the breast and rotate it around to make a breast out of it.
I think that’s a great option, however, with regards to breast cancer patients, I don’t know if that’s a safe option. We don’t have any long-term studies showing that that’s safe. And then there’s liposuction with fat transfer to the breasts. That also has its own wrists. It’s an aggressive surgery. The cannula that they use—if you’ve ever seen a video of liposuction, it’s pretty darn aggressive and it’s superficial layers that they’re working with. How much does that disrupt the lymphatic system, how much is that impacting your ability to detoxify and remove waste products, and how and how much is that impacting your ability to get nutrients to the cells?
I think that there are an upside and a downside to any option. Personally, I will say, I did have liposuction with fat transfer at the time of explant. Had I known now what I didn’t know then about lymphatic and how it really can impact the lymphatic system, I probably would have made a different decision. It didn’t really even stick for me, so my breasts are pretty much the same size they were as before I had my implants placed. That’s the other downside of it is that you don’t know if it’s going to stick because once you remove the blood supply of the fat, the fat dies. So whether or not it reestablishes the blood supply quickly enough in its new place is a whole nother story.
So I’ve just gotten to a place where I’ve learned to love and accept myself for how I was created, and see the beauty in that. So that’s my hope for most people so that we stop trying to alter our appearance and realizing that you are beautiful just the way you are, and you don’t need to alter your body to be beautiful.
[01:34:37] Ashley James: Yeah. Do the emotional work to get to the point where you love your body. You love every square inch of it. There’s no such thing as perfection. There’s so much healing to take place. Look at what a damaging society it is that as girls growing up, we are developing these belief systems about what we should look like. This is not a new discussion. If we look at fashion through history, we can see that we have been subjected to basically being cattle for men but also for society and for other women for the acceptance of society. How we appear externally is going to determine whether we’re accepted or not. This is of course the mind of a child, the mind of a little girl analyzing the world.
I believe that at our core, we have this need to be accepted because that’s part of how we survived, however long we’ve been here. Thousands upon thousands of years, we are a tribal people, and if you got exiled from the tribe, that was death. Being part of the tribe and being accepted and loved, and the first acceptance is being accepted into your family when you’re born. Feeling as part of a family, then part of a community, part of a school system, part of a church system, or whatever you are in growing up. If you are bullied, if you are judged, if you are pushed aside, if you’re feeling unworthy, unloved—all these things are processed in the mind of a girl growing up thinking that her physical appearance played a role in the rejection, and the hurt and the trauma from that.
If only I put on makeup, do my hair, and look as sexy as I can, and spend all of my waking moments up making myself look good and appear nice, then I will be accepted. This is what the media tells us. Really, the most beautiful thing about a woman is true confidence. You kind of get to that point, I’m 40 now. Somewhere around 35, 36, right after I gave birth I kind of went screw this. I am not playing this game. I’m living for me. I’m living for my loved ones. I’m not living to look good for anyone. I’ve lost shallow friends over it, great. I’ve made some deeper friends because of it.
I know that there are women who are in industries where they have to look good in order to get a raise, in order to get a promotion. This is the sad part about society, but we need to analyze how we grew up, analyze the world and realize that we internalized this idea that our looks need to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted, and then we do something like give ourselves implants or do plastic surgery causing further harm.
I love that right at the beginning of the show, you brought up that this is as much of a physical healing journey as it is in a mental and emotional one, and to work on all aspects of it.
[01:38:29] Sarah Phillipe: Right. Women today, young girls today, gosh, I would hate to have grown up in today’s world as a younger girl. When we were young we had magazines, billboards, commercials, movies, and things like that. But now, everywhere you look it’s in your face all over social media. Having a constant connection to social media the way people do today is a recipe for disaster for young girls. We’re in the midst of this body positivity movement and loving and accepting all different shapes and sizes. But at the same time, we have that message, we have the other side of a different message, which leads us to do all of the things that we do that leads us to have our eyebrows tattooed on our face and have eyelash extensions, get breast implants, get Botox, get lip injections, get cheek implants, chin implants, and butt implants. We’re trying to create this body or this look that doesn’t really exist in real life naturally.
[01:39:47] Ashley James: Right, and Hollywood and the media have done us no justice. I read an article recently, really interesting about young children. It was doing a cross-section of the young children who are questioning whether they were born in the right body. What I found interesting—and I really didn’t know this because I thought maybe just from what we see in the media—that it’s more skewed towards boys wanting to be girls. But in fact, the statistic was something crazy like closer to 90% of these children were girls who felt more like they were boys. They’re all in the questioning phase, but no wonder. No wonder In this world where we have to achieve this level of perfection.
If I was a girl now, I’d rather be a boy than have to live up to this idea of what it looks like to be a woman. It’s a total false, it’s made up, it’s not real. That’s not what it is to be a woman. But it just seems a lot safer, it just looks a lot easier to live life as a boy, right? No wonder there’s so much confusion. The way society is, the way the media is, the way social media is, we’re making it impossible for women to feel comfortable in their own skin, unless they do their own work. Unless they go within, they reject the external input, and they go with it and they love who they are on the inside, how they were born, and just be with themselves. Instead of trying to change who they are, just go within and do the emotional work.
I just thought that it was really interesting that this level of confusion like very young children. I see that it makes sense that we’re trying to falsify what it is to really be a woman. Not us but the media making it very confusing.
I love the work that you do. You’re exposing something that allows us to analyze our entire life and our body image, and then support ourselves on a level of detox, emotionally and physically. So tell us about how people can work with you. What does it look like to work with you as a practitioner? Obviously, you do it through Zoom or Skype. What does it look like to work with you?
[01:42:33] Sarah Phillipe: I’ve worked with women all over the world, and that’s really thanks to technology today. The women that I’ve worked with, it’s always been one-on-one. We work together for a minimum of six months. It really involves teaching women the tools that they need to heal themselves, and I think that’s really empowering because you can take that information and use it to help your family and keep your family healthy. So it’s not just about how it’s helping or impacting you, it’s about even the next generation. Teaching people how they should be living for a healthy body and a healthy life.
Once dysfunction has occurred, how to restore function. What things we need to look into, what things we should address and what order, how to go about it, and all of that. I’m teaching women these things. I’m not doing the work for them. I can give someone the best plan in the world, but if they can’t implement it or if they’re not able to implement it, then they’re not going to get well. I think education is the most valuable thing because they can use that information for the rest of their lives.
Soon, mid-year or so, probably around June, I’ll be shifting how I work with women and it’s going to be done in a group setting. We’ll be doing an online group program.
[01:44:02] Ashley James: That’s great.
[01:44:04] Sarah Phillipe: It’ll still be the same exact thing that I do now, it’ll just be in a group and a lot more connection and shared experience. I think that’ll be really valuable for people to go through things like this together. Because a lot of women who are going through this don’t feel like anyone really understands them. No one understands, no one gets it, people think I’m crazy, people don’t believe me. This is really great to connect with other women who are going through it at the same time that you are and be able to connect on that level and have that shared experience. Know that there are other people that you can talk to that get it and that understand what you’re going through. That’s what I’m working on putting together now. It’s basically my brain in an online program.
[01:44:48] Ashley James: I love it. Would people still be able to like do labs with you and get a consult?
[01:44:53] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. The way I’m setting it up is we’ll have weekly or bi-weekly group calls and then there will be an option to have a one-on-one call scheduled with me.
[01:45:06] Ashley James: Great. Awesome. Is there anything else that people or women should know? I mean, men can get implants too. I was surprised that there are calf implants for men because they’ll work out in the gym forever but they don’t get that definition of their calf that they really wanted, and so they’ll get basically the silicone implants or something put in their calves to make them look more muscular. There would be a percentage of men that would be experiencing all these same issues but to male physiology. Is there anything else though that future students and clients should know when it comes to working with you about this program?
[01:45:51] Sarah Phillipe: One thing that I’m always telling potential clients is that you have to be mentally and emotionally mindset-wise prepared for the work. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes because usually, the people that come to me are the people who’ve gone from doctor to doctor to doctor, no one has been able to help them, and I’m kind of like their last resort. I ask a lot of my clients. It’s not always easy. There’s going to be bumps in the road. Healing is never a straight path, so you have to expect that it’s going to be challenging and it’s going to sometimes require that you step outside of your comfort zone because the way that we heal the body is not the way that you’ve been taught by modern medicine.
[01:46:47] Ashley James: And when you have those bumps in the road that’s feedback, that’s actually good. When you feel bad that’s good because you bring that to Sarah and then she goes, oh okay, then we need to make these tweaks. She understands, but you have to be vocal about how you’re feeling.
That’s something that happened to me. I was doing methylcobalamin injections back in December. My B12 plummeted and then my iron plummeted as a result during the pregnancy, and so I took some methylcobalamin injections. I was feeling great for the first three injections, I was amazing. It was like two a week. I was like, oh wow, I feel normal again. I feel good. This is great.
And then about two or three weeks into the injections, they would make it so I was totally out for the whole day. I was in bed. I’m like, what is going on? I talked to my midwife who’s amazing. Absolutely amazing, she’s been my midwife for over 20 years. She looks at me and she goes well, Dr. Ben Lynch, and I’ve had him on the show by the way so I was just really impressed that she starts off by quoting him. “Well, Dr. Ben Lynch says that methylcobalamin shares the same pathways as insulin, and if you don’t need any more methylcobalamin, then it’s actually reducing your capacity for your body to use the insulin.” She’s going on and on about all the pathways and I’m looking at her like I should have you on the show.
So she told me, okay, I want you to do this instead. I went from I felt good but then I started feeling really bad, then she adjusted it, and I felt even better. That’s the thing is you have to be in communication with your practitioner. The practitioner—a good one like Sarah—who knows what to do with that information.
So yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also then on the other side of the challenges is incredible rewards. But they have to be willing to put the work in. If you say stop eating gluten, they have to stop eating gluten. Or if you say you have to stop eating sugar, you have to stop drinking coffee, or whatever like some vices. You probably are going to have to give up some vices, but on the other side of it is how much do you want that amazing health, that vitality?
[01:48:55] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly, and I think that leads to another really important point is that people need to have a strong enough why. They really need to get in tune, in touch with their why. What is the reason that you want to get your health back? What’s the reason you want to work together? When someone says because I want to be healthy, that’s not a why. Why do you want to be healthy? What is the driving force that keeps you motivated to take the next right step each day in your healing journey? What do you want to be doing with your life that you are not able to currently do because of your symptoms, because of how much you’re struggling?
For most people, it’s a struggle just to get out of bed every day. All the other things that they want to be doing with their life they’re not doing.
[01:49:43] Ashley James: Yeah, and the guilt and the shame that builds up from that. I want to live a life free of guilt and shame and be able to get out of bed. You’re like, yeah. Okay, great. Now do everything I tell you to do.
[01:50:00] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. So I think that’s important because it keeps you motivated even when things get hard.
[01:50:05] Ashley James: Absolutely. Sarah, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Your website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Are there any resources you want to send us to or homework you’d like to leave us with to wrap up today’s interview?
[01:50:27] Sarah Phillipe: Well, I have one resource that I find really valuable. It’s something that I use with all of my clients to just assess where they’re at and assess progress. It’s my neurotoxic questionnaire. It’s divided up into four different categories, each of them looking at a different type of toxicity. The first section looks at heavy metals, the second section looks at symptoms connected to general chemical toxins, the third category looks at some connected biotoxins and mycotoxins. Those are toxins that come from living organisms like mold, bad bacteria, parasites, and things like that. And then the fourth category is looking at symptoms that are connected to a combination of heavy metals and general chemical toxins. That’s really helpful.
And then your total score you can look at where you fall into the range of mild, moderate, or severe neurotoxicity, which is important in determining whether it may be the thing that helps you make the decision to explant, or it may help you assess that even after explant you have some work to do. And then it helps you reassess progress as you go through your journey.
[01:51:44] Ashley James: How can they find that?
[01:51:46] Sarah Phillipe: I can share that link with you to share with your audience, or you can also find it on my website.
[01:51:55] Ashley James: Awesome. I’ll make sure the link is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you Sarah for being on the show today. It’s been such a pleasure, and I’d love for you to come back when new exciting information comes out about breast implant illness. You’re welcome. I know you’ve got your ear to the ground. When really interesting stuff comes out that we all need to learn more about, please come back on the show.
[01:52:27] Sarah Phillipe: Of course, I’d be happy to, and thank you so much for having me, Ashley. It was such a pleasure and I really enjoyed our conversation.
You Are the Placebo by Joe Dispenza
https://reversingbreastimplantillness.com
Become a Certified Health Coach Through IIN just like Ashley James! Get their Valentines Day Special! Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach
Contact Dr. Vienna Lafrenz www.natural-therapeutics.com
https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-windows-to-true-health-iridology-and-tongue-reading
Highlights:
Dr. Vienna Lafrenz is a wealth of information. She’s back on the show to share even more information to improve our health. Dr. Vienna talks about looking and checking our eyes and tongue as an indicator of how healthy we are. She also shares how she was able to change the taste of food by collecting saliva on the seeds before sowing.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. Dr. Vienna and I had such a great time going back and forth discussing some very interesting topics that you may not have learned about or dove into, or maybe you’ve heard of it but you really haven’t heard about it from this angle. So you’re going to learn more about how you can analyze your own body in order to help direct what you’re doing with your health. It’s all very, very, very interesting stuff.
As you’re listening to this interview and as you listen to all my interviews, if you think to yourself you would love to do what I do—you’d love to become a health coach—please check out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Just google IIN and give them a call. You can also go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach, and there you get a free module from IIN that will allow you to see if it’s something that’s right for you.
Now, I’ve interviewed the founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and I’ve also interviewed their most recent CEO. Both interviews are fascinating and I’ve had actually several graduates on and several of their professors or teachers on as well. So you can go back and listen to all my interviews with those folks. You can always search my website, learntruehealth.com, to find episodes.
What I have found fascinating about IIN is that about 50%—it was something like 54%, it was very close to 50%—of students that choose to do the year-long health coach training program have no intention of becoming a health coach but want to do it for their own personal growth. Going into it, I wanted to add this tool to my tool belt. I was already in the health coaching space, to begin with. I’ve been doing coaching for years, and I wanted to just continue to learn and grow as you as a listener continue to want to learn and grow that’s why you’re here. You’re here to listen, learn, and grow.
What I found through the program is I did receive a lot of personal growth. All the work that you learn to do with your clients you do with yourself as well as you go through the program, so that was very gratifying. That was very rewarding.
So if you’re someone who just really loves personal growth or you’ve just decided it’s the beginning of a new year and you go, I’m ready. I’m ready to take my life to the next level. I’m not satisfied with certain areas of my life. I want more joy and vitality in certain areas of my life, then you might want to just do the program for your own personal growth. You’ll be getting great tools in your tool belt for yourself, your communication skills. It’ll improve your relationships. It’ll improve your relationship with your own body, your health, your spirituality, and your level of joy and vitality. So go ahead, check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach and just get the free module. See if it’s right for you.
Now, I did negotiate with IIN that all my listeners get a fantastic deal, and I know that in the month of February they were running a special. They might still be running it so you can give them a call and check that out. But they give us always—they always give the Learn True Health listeners—an extra special deal, so make sure you mention my name Ashley James and Learn True Health podcast to get that special deal. They do have a payment plan. So if you’re someone like me, I did the payment plan. It’s like a credit card payment basically every month.
What was really interesting is when I enrolled, the woman who helped me enroll who, by the way, when you call them, everyone that answers the phone has been through the program as a health coach themselves and can really help you better understand the program and there’s no pressure. It’s not like a sales pitch. It’s just people genuinely wanting to help. What I thought was really interesting is they encourage you. They said the best graduates pay it off completely before they have finished the program because, for those who choose to be a health coach and want to do this as a career or add to their career in the health space, it’s a year-long program. After the first six months, you begin to take on clients. You can actually have it all paid off by the time you have graduated and have a successful health coach business up and running.
Now, if you do want to do IIN, you heard about it through me but you have questions or you’d love a bit of mentorship, I’m absolutely here for you. Please feel free to give me an email, ashley@learntruehealth.com, or you can reach out to me on Facebook. We have our great Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. Reach out to me. I’d love to support you in your success. The world needs more health coaches right now. The world needs more holistic-minded practitioners right now.
What’s great is IIN is a stepping stone. You can go with that. You can go into focusing on functional medicine in terms of hormones, fertility, more mental and emotional health. There are so many different avenues that you can go, sports medicine. There are health coaches now that are being hired by insurance companies, hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices, or you can work independently like me. So the sky’s the limit. That’s really exciting. So go check it out. IIN, google it, give them a call, see if it’s right for you. But definitely get the free module by going to learntruehealth.com/coach.
Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you care about. I constantly hear from new listeners who say that their friends or family have turned them on to this. For new listeners, welcome. It’s very exciting.
Now we’re about to reach our—is it our four-year anniversary? Has that time just flown? I can’t believe it. We launched in March of 2016, and so we’re approaching our anniversary which is really exciting. We’ve helped millions of people through all the downloads. Help them to get better health, and that’s my goal is to help you to achieve the true health that you’re seeking.
If practitioners or doctors have told you what you have is genetic, what you have is because of your age, because of your sex, or because of whatever, and you’ll always have it, you have to be on some drug for the rest of your life. If you’ve just been put in a box and told that you’ll always be sick, you’ll always feel this way, please find a new practitioner. Keep listening to this podcast.
I was told that I’d never have kids. I was told that I would be diabetic for the rest of my life. I was told that I’d be sick for the rest of my life, and I finally broke away from all those MDs who kept me in a box, who wanted to just keep me medicated, who didn’t have answers for my true health. I went and I sought natural medicine. Through my journey of health, I was able to recover all those diseases, and now this is why I do what I do is to help you do the same.
So if you have any friends or family in your life who suffer needlessly and don’t want to suffer anymore, they want to put the work into their body to heal—even if they’ve been told they’ll always have that condition and they want to get to be as healthy as they can possibly be—keep listening, keep sharing. We’re going to get you there. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s a very supportive community to help everyone achieve true health.
[00:07:30] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 456. I am so excited for today’s returning guest. We have Dr. Vienna Lafrenz on. Vienna, you were on episode 450, so not too long ago. Many listeners have contacted you to work with you, and you have had some really great experiences with our listeners.
This is the common thing. So I’m letting all you guys know—all the listeners know—that I’ve had other guests reach out to me. I hear from many people, including Vienna, that the listeners of the Learn True Health podcast are just simply amazing, wonderful people. This is something I commonly hear. I’ve never heard a guest complain about when a listener contacting them, let’s just put it that way. We’re all in good company here.
Vienna, today we’re going to continue our discussion, which I’m really looking forward to because where we left it off last time was you were going to teach us how to assess our tongue. So we could look in the mirror and we can learn more about our health, and that’s really exciting. Also, get into a bit of your iridology.
Since we had you on the show, your clinic—you work with people remotely around the world but you also have a physical clinic. You moved to Republic, Washington and you’re in a beautiful space there. So if anyone lives near the Okanagan Valley or in the Okanagan Valley, they can come to see you in person, which is really exciting. Congratulations on the move of your clinic. Natural-therapeutics.com is Vienna’s website.
Now, just to preface, for the listeners who didn’t hear episode 450, Vienna lives on a mountain with six feet of snow in Washington and she’s on satellite internet. So sometimes it may sound like we’re talking over each other, that’s because there is a delay on the line. So we’re not trying to talk over each other, but we’re going to do our best. We had a wonderful discussion last time, and we’re going to continue that great discussion this time. Welcome back to the show.
[00:09:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Thank you, and I do have to say, the listeners that you have on your show are so amazing. They all have the same interest at heart, and that is to get their best health possible in the best means there is. It’s wonderful. They implement things, they follow through them. It’s wonderful.
[00:10:06] Ashley James: Right. Now, for listeners who didn’t hear episode 450, I urge you to go back. I mean, you can listen to them out of order. You could listen to this one and then go back to 450. But I have to tell you, there is a story about a woman who had parasites crawling out of her body, literally running away from this woman’s body because the type of work that Vienna does makes parasites not even want to be in your body. So if you geek out on that kind of stuff like I do, you’re going to want to definitely work with Vienna and absolutely listen to episode 450 as well.
Today we might get into some really cool stuff, probably not as gross as that, although I’m not grossed out by it. I think it’s awesome because if there’s something you can do naturally that has no negative side effects, it makes parasites not want to live in your body anymore, sign me up. Before we talk about tongue assessment, which I think is so interesting, since we had you on the show, you worked with several of our listeners. And without obviously disclosing their identities or their names, are there any stories of success that you want to share with us?
[00:11:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Oh, absolutely. So I have several actually. One in particular that really stands out is a person who had 20 years’ worth of chronic pain—daily, daily, daily pain. And with that, of course, the cognitive issues with it because as we know, the brain shrinks with as many years of pain that there is, which is reversible of course. But this person was having a ton of brain fog, memory losses, and forgetting people’s names, even for getting phone numbers of relatives and such. But the chronic pain was the biggest thing where there was no joy anymore. Basically waking up every morning thinking okay, what am I going to deal with today?
As we started working on the biofeedback, identifying some of the areas where the pain was coming from, and truly finding the source of where the pain was coming from—not just the symptoms, just the side effects, or the emotional component, but truly finding the root cause of where the pain came from—was actually a nerve. As we did the biofeedback on nerves and worked on different pathways, neuropathies, and things like that, the pain went away to the point where this person was originally going to go in for surgery. But because of COVID and the fear of going into hospitals right now or whatever, or even just the availability of getting surgery right now, they were so far down the list that basically said okay let’s just do it one more time. Let’s try one more thing and really good results. That’s one big thing. Also got them back into dancing, which was really fun and phenomenal.
The second thing would be digestion. Digestion is a big thing with many of my clients. Not understanding why their body is not responding very well to different types of diets, cleanses, detoxification, or things like that. And then seeing it manifest in the skin. So I’ve had about three to four of your listeners call me about digestive issues, and again finding the root cause behind what is causing this digestive issue including allergies—unbeknownst allergies or symptomologies of allergies that are showing up, and being able to implement some of the food back into their diets that they had been craving and missing for so long.
So really just finding out the digestive process and what’s going on, and of course, the constipation that goes with that. I had two that were maybe having a bowel movement once a week, which of course was a big concern for me. Once we got started, it’s now regular.
[00:14:16] Ashley James: Can you specify what regular is? Because people sometimes think once every three days is regular.
[00:14:21] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, exactly. And they say, oh, I’ve had this constitution my whole life. That is not regular. If you work in any kind of hospital or nursing home, if somebody doesn’t go for three days, that’s a sentinel event where there’s something wrong and they could land in the hospital. Regular means if you have three meals a day, you should be having about three bowel movements a day, and that has to do with the amount of transit time that it goes to the digestive process.
From the mouth to the anus is the transit time. And so if it’s taking two days to digest food, there’s something going on within the digestive system. It could be anything related to a virus, bacteria, slow peristalsis of the intestines that could be leading to that, even just toxicity. It could be parasites. It could be a lot of different things. Yeah, enzymes.
[00:15:15] Ashley James: Not enough fiber, lack of minerals.
[00:15:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, the types of foods, the chemicals that are in our foods. If there’s a lot of prefabricated foods that you’re eating where it’s not raw, live foods.
[00:15:32] Ashley James: I love that, pre-fabricated foods. I’ve never heard it put that way. That makes you think that there are microplastics in the food. It’s been pre-fabricated.
[00:15:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, isn’t there?
[00:15:47] Ashley James: Oh, absolutely. Just this week an article came out that said that for the first time ever, they’ve discovered microplastics in the placenta of babies. I mean, this is really sad. This is really sad. So the more factory food we eat, the more microplastics we’re consuming. There are microplastics in the ocean right now, so when we consume fish we’re consuming microplastics. Like you said, if you focus on foods that are whole, living, alive, like something I can identify—there’s an apple, there’s broccoli—you’re less likely to eat prefabricated foods with microplastics and chemicals. I love that saying. That’s great.
[00:16:33] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: They’re even finding plastic in white rice. It’s pretty crazy. So you just have to be really careful about the types of food you eat. If you think about it, we’re 99.99999% energy. So the foods that we consume should have a high level of energy in them.
[00:16:52] Ashley James: You just said something that I really, really want to touch on. You just said that we’re almost 100% energy. People go, well, over 70% water, what do you mean? Can you just elaborate? From the standpoint of physics, chemistry, and quantum physics, why are we almost 100% energy?
[00:17:14] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, think about it. So, we’re 99.99% energy and 0.001% matter. So what that means is what do you think transports the lymphatics, the blood, the water? That we’re 75% to 85% water—what do you think transports that? Energy. So the heart can conducts energy to the blood, to the water, to the lymphatic system. It gets it to move. The environment that we’re in, our whole auric being surrounding us is all energy. The physical part is really just the sack that we reside in, which is a meat suit comprised of skin, comprised of bone. But even that has energy in it as well.
When you think about it, the whole body is comprised of energy—from the organs, how they emit energy, how they respond to energy, as well as the blood, the lymphatics, the brain. The brain, yes, has this spongy type of gelatinous fibers within the skull, but it is also energy as well. It needs energy to conduct all the neurons, the fibers, and the hormones that are going from one organ to another. It’s all being done by energy. If you think about the meridians, the chakras, those are all energy vessels that that move the energy from one location to another and can be so influenced from the outside world to the inside world to the emotions to everything—that it’s all energy.
[00:18:58] Ashley James: I was really surprised when you did the quantum biofeedback machine on me remotely back in February, so 2020. I was sick as a dog, in bed, gasping for air, with a fever, sore throat. I mean, you could say all the symptoms of COVID, although, at the time, I know a lot of people in the Seattle area that all had these same symptoms but no one knew what COVID was. My Naturopath diagnosed me with strep throat, although I think I’m just one of those people that will always test positive for strep throat no matter what. I’m a strep carrier. It’s like, okay, but strep throat doesn’t normally do all these other things.
So I’m lying in bed and I’m really suffering. You did quantum biofeedback with me, and I felt it so much so that within the three-hour session—I fell asleep during the session, I woke up and my suffering had ended. The fever broke. I could breathe again. It took me a few days to recover. It was a really bad sickness I was going through, but I was on all kinds of supplements and stuff like that for my Naturopath. What I just noticed is how quickly things turned around.
Similar to my son going through the same energy work, I could feel it. I was in the same room as him because we did it in person with you and I could feel it. What’s described to me is that the mom always has an energetic cord-like umbilical cord attached to our children. As he was getting the treatment, I could feel it. The second you turned on the machine, I didn’t know when you had turned it on. I don’t know how this machine works. I’m just sitting in the room and all of a sudden I felt like I was being electrocuted but in a good way. I don’t know how to describe it any other way other than like my body was buzzing in a very odd way. I’m like, “Okay, is it on now?” And you’re, “Yup, the program’s running. We’re doing it.” And I can feel it.
That we can do something with energy remotely, with an intelligence and an intention for healing on such a deep and specific level is phenomenal. It’s just amazing. And since learning more about it from you, I’ve heard from a few other practitioners who are deep into this kind of work and they all have a very similar experience.
We’re raised in society to believe that most people—it’s almost like atheism when it comes to the medical realm in terms of not believing that anything—if you can’t see it, if you can’t measure it in a lab with blood work, if you can’t see it on an ultrasound, an MRI, or blood work it doesn’t exist. MDs, if you go and tell them symptoms but they can’t find proof of those symptoms, a lot of times MDs will say you should go to a psychologist. It’s all in your head. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but we can’t measure it, so it doesn’t exist. There’s this entire realm that’s missing.
Whether you get into spirituality, religion, or energy work, we can’t ignore the fact that we are almost 100% made up of energy and thus we would be affected by energy. To bring it back to your point—which is what you were saying is we’re made up of almost 100% energy—of course, the foods we eat would not just only affect our physical health, of course, they’d affect our energetic health as well. The energy transfers—the heart does, the brain does—because when we eat foods that are alive, that have energy in it as opposed to prefabricated factory foods, which are very low-frequency foods, it just makes so much sense, right?
So when we’re eating, we’re consuming energy. But more than just calories, we’re consuming the living energy of that plant, which is actually measurable. I’ve had episodes about that where there are scientists that can measure the frequency of plants versus dead meat, for example, and that we receive a lot more frequency and energy from plants.
So this idea that we can raise our vibration, that we can heal digestion, that we can heal emotional health and physical health by focusing on energy and frequency very specifically is in our diet but also with the therapies that you provide, it’s phenomenal, and this is something that’s so missing from the medical world because the medical world is blind to it. That’s really sad, but this is why we’re listening to you and this is why we’re here learning about this work, so I’m really excited.
If I sound out of breath, it’s because the baby is pushing on my diaphragm right now. I feel like I’m just running a marathon just talking. I’m 31 weeks pregnant and the baby has taken up the entire breadth of my diaphragm. I apologize if I sound out of breath, but I’m quite happy with the baby kicking my diaphragm at the moment.
How did you help? So was there was a listener who was having digestive problems and only having a bowel movement once a week, which is really scary. What happened after they worked with you?
[00:24:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay, one of the first things we always ask during our sessions is okay, tell me about your bowel movements, how are they looking? And of course, many are a little skeptical at first and not really open to talking about that as openly as I am. And then after a while, they get to be very open about it because now they can have something to look forward to. When I see that they started having bowel movements on a regular basis meaning at least first thing in the morning they may be having one or two bowel movements.
So this person went from one bowel movement a week to now three bowel movements in a day and takes the time to really look at it and say oh, wow, look at the color. Look at the texture, that it doesn’t sink. It’s right in the center. It’s one whole form. I mean, they really break it down for me, which is nice. That tells me that they’re integrating the information that they’re learning, and they actually see the value of their digestive process and how important it is to tell you exactly what’s going on based on how it looks. So that’s been fascinating.
Just the fact that they’re realizing that they don’t have to wait a week to have a bowel movement, that they’re having one every day, and then how good they feel. They feel lighter, they feel more energetic, they’re not as depleted. That’s the amazing part. But to go back to when you were talking about how you felt as a parent as the receiver while I was working on your son is one thing that also helps with the quantum biofeedback is the energy of the person receiving it—how open they are.
I have huge results with people who are empathic, that are very open to energy, that are very receptive to it, that also understand it. If you have somebody that’s very closed to situations, to information, very guarded, they may not do as well until they actually start to feel it. But there’s also an in vitro aspect of it to where as a mother, you could be a surrogate for your son while I’m working on him because of that perinatal connection that you make during the time that he was in your womb. That connection will never go away as I’m sure you’ve already seen that already. That’s why you responded so well is that you are an energetic person, an energetic being, and so your body just craves energy healing, which is exactly what this biofeedback does.
[00:27:31] Ashley James: I was really skeptical. I like to say on my show I’m the most open-minded skeptic. I guess I just don’t want to be sold snake oil. Does that make sense? But I also don’t want to close myself off from the amazing possibilities out there because, in my heart, I’ve always believed that our Creator—in whatever way you see God—is this amazing scientist.
I think science is our way of understanding God better because when you look at, when you really, really, really study, for example, single-cell organisms. Just really go and look at YouTube videos of single-cell protozoa swimming, and there are some videos where the microscopes go to the point where you can see the mechanics because these things are almost see-through. You could see the mechanics of their tails, and it’s like a machine. It’s an intricate complex machine, and yet it’s a single-cell organism that can propel itself through fluid and respond to stimulus. How in the world does this incredibly complex, intricate, and beautiful single-cell life form just happen? Because chemicals and explosions occurred billions of years ago. It’s just this idea. So for me, it’s never sat well this idea that everything happened randomly. I really feel that there’s so much to this world we don’t even understand.
The fact that we can use energy work to heal, and you can use it on children who don’t understand. My son didn’t know what was going on, so you can’t call it a placebo effect when he had results. You can’t call it a placebo effect when homeopathy helps newborn babies and pets. How is that a placebo effect? The reason why I bring up homeopathy is it sort of goes in the same category as energy medicine because it’s not molecular medicine, it’s energy medicine.
So we have these great results, and I had a two-part interview on frequency-specific microcurrent. That one is a good interview to go listen to. I asked the woman my first question and an hour later I get to ask her my second. It was the most amazing first hour because it was just her telling the story, which will blow your mind, and it’s all about how her very, very specific form of energy healing using frequency specific microcurrent, which is a machine you can find in a lot of physical therapy clinics. I’m sure you’ve worked with this as an occupational therapist, but done in a specific way.
When you’ve changed the frequencies. For example, when someone has nerve damage, you change the frequencies and it will stimulate the body to heal that nerve really fast, like super, super, super fast to the point where while people are on the table, they’ll stop having pain or Parkinson’s people will stop shaking. I mean, just really, really cool results. It’s energy and it’s frequency.
Yes, our bodies can heal when we figure out exactly what they need on an energy and frequency level. This is what’s so exciting is that so many people are walking around looking for the drug they need, looking for maybe the diet they need or the drug they need, and yet there’s this entire world that’s really, 90% of the healing is all these different forms of energy and frequency healing and medicine. We’re stuck only being sold on the 10% drug-based, physical-based medicine.
[00:31:40] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: See, if we took the time that we take in taking the drugs or the prescriptions, going to the doctors, getting them refilled, all that kind of stuff into the food preparation. What I mean by that is for the people like out here in Eastern Washington, everybody plants their own garden, we harvest our own food, and all that kind of stuff. If we have excess, we give it to people, we exchange. It’s about surviving out here, livelihood. So everybody plants their own gardens.
One thing we did this year that was quite different than the past was as we were cultivating our seeds and we were planting them into the garden, we would put the seed in our mouth and collect the saliva on the seed, and then we would plant that seed. So then what happens is our DNA is now going into that seed, and then the food is then now grown more nutritiously, more specific to what our innate needs are based on the saliva that was put on that seed. What we found was when we grew our garden, we had the most plentiful garden you wouldn’t believe. The cucumbers, the zucchini, the tomatoes, the peppers, and our lettuces were just amazing and quite nutritious. It had different flavors to them. My husband’s would taste a little different than mine. It was really, really interesting the difference in that.
You can actually have some fun with how you can influence the quality of your food, even the preparation that takes place. If you go to a restaurant, for example, and you see the cook in the back that’s cooking. He’s angry, he’s yelling at everybody, and all of that, I don’t think I’d want to eat that food because there’s a lot of anger, which is an emotion, which is energy put in that food. I’d much rather take it from somebody who’s singing in the background, who’s singing in the kitchen and having a wonderful day at work, and putting all that love into that food as it’s being prepared.
My husband does the same thing. When he cooks a meal, he puts this beautiful music on in the background. He puts some loving energy into each stroke of the knife or whatever he’s doing to make the food much more energetically loving to ourselves as we eat it. The environment is everything. But the food just tastes better when you put love in it. I’m sure you know that because you put a lot of love into your food.
[00:34:16] Ashley James: One of my favorite books as a young adult, as a teenager was Como para agua chocolate, which is Like Water for Chocolate. The movie didn’t do it justice, it’s a beautiful book. The author went on to write a sci-fi novel, which is even better, but it’s a sci-fi novel about healing, about emotional healing. About a society that when you’re sent to prison, they believe that you commit a crime because you really weren’t surrounded with enough love and understanding. The prison they send you to is a place where people surround you and give you love and understanding until you process why you did that crime and you really heal on an emotional level, and then you grieve for the victims. It’s very interesting. I don’t remember the name of that book, but a really interesting thing to get into.
But one thing about Como para agua chocolate is that this woman, when she would cry, her tears would go into the food and then everyone at the table would cry. When she was in love and her sweat fell into the food because it was hot and she was in love, all of a sudden, everyone was lusty and in love. It painted this picture in my mind as a young teenager about how the mood that we’re in can be contagious. And also, when you’re feeding people, there’s that energy exchange there that occurs.
Now, when you said that you held the seeds in your mouth, you’re not saying your literal DNA went into the literal DNA of the lettuce, but you’re saying your energy, the energetic DNA affected the lettuce on an energetic level, right? Because it’s not like that lettuce is now part human.
[00:35:58] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: No, no, no, no, no. Thank you for clarifying that. It’s similar to like—I think you had Viome on where they take a sample of your feces and then they make vitamins based on what your excrement is. So the same thing goes. The theory that I’ve formulated in my brain is that when you take the seed, then you stick it in your mouth, and your digestive enzymes from your saliva get onto that seed, then when you plant it in the earth the nutritious needs that your body is needing—whatever you’re lacking—will then grow into that vegetable.
We found that between the ones that were done by my husband and myself, it was the same seed but he had a different color than mine, it grew differently, or things like that. This is a little experiment that we did. We saw that—it was the same from the same batch of seeds in the package—produced a different vegetable—vibrancy, color, consistency.
[00:37:12] Ashley James: It’s so cool. I want to know what influenced your desire to do this experiment.
[00:37:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, when you think about how do you best describe how does biofeedback works with taking a saliva sample, hair sample, or something like that? Well, how else can you show the influence that could have? The digestive enzymes, the saliva, your own characteristics, your own constitution, how can that affect things? So I thought, well, what better way than to see how will my DNA, my saliva influence a growing thing? Now, I’m not going to swap saliva with my dog just to see if it would influence my dog. So I thought what better way than take an inanimate object that we think of as inanimate—this seed—then place it in the mouth, then plant it, and see what would make a difference.
When you’re sitting around a table talking with friends and then this idea comes up, it’s like, hey, I bet that would have an influence so we just tried. Lo and behold we saw a difference.
[00:38:20] Ashley James: They say kissing your baby and also giving a bit of your saliva to the baby, or kissing their cheek—I don’t know if it’s pheromones. I have actually no idea why it does this, but that changes breast milk. Also, their saliva on the nipple of the mother changes the breast milk will change the immune cells that the breast milk is making for the baby. It’s a biofeedback loop between the baby and the mother so that the mother’s body knows how to formulate breast milk to support the immunity of the baby at the time. I thought that was really interesting.
Now, the experiment I’d like you guys to do this year is I want you to do a batch where you don’t hold the seeds in your mouth. There needs to be a control. The lettuce over here just put in the ground, don’t do anything with it right, and then the lettuce over here is the one the seed you held in your mouth, maybe did a prayer, do some love to it, and your husband does the same, and then you guys compare. Because it’s all going to be in the same sunlight, same soil, all come from the same seed packet. It’d be interesting to see if you notice a really significant difference from the plant that received your energy signature before planting it versus the one that received nothing.
[00:40:01] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, we actually did do that because we truly did want to make it an experiment. That’s what was so amazing for us why we were able to see such a huge difference in the crop was the one that we didn’t put any of our salivae on, it was lifeless almost. The color was different. It wasn’t as vibrant. We didn’t have as much of a harvest from it either. Once we would clip, it didn’t always come back as far as like in some of the lettuces and stuff, and also the reseeding of it. We didn’t see huge pollination. We didn’t see a lot of the seeds going to pollination. The yield was much smaller with those that we did not put our saliva on.
[00:40:56] Ashley James: That’s interesting.
[00:40:58] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Now, I’d be interested though to see how our food would influence other people that ate our food. Think about that. I mean, I’m not saying that our DNA is going to change theirs. This is another example and this kind of leads into the iridology piece is that when animals like cats, for example, I have two mama cats right now who are both producing little kittens. When one mama cat is feeding the other mama cat’s kittens, we noticed that the color of their iris would change.
[00:41:34] Ashley James: What?
[00:41:36] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, and what I mean by that is not that the background color, which is the main color, but speckles in the eyes would show up, or we’d see little lacunae that would show up in the iris that wasn’t there before. That’s when they start picking up the other mother’s genetic characteristics. It’s pretty cool the way you can see that happen.
You can also see if there’s something wrong with the animal-based on where color changes occur in the eye. If you start to see more dots or you see lines starting to appear—white lines or things like that—that’ll tell you that there’s inflammation in a particular area so let’s check that area out. It will tell you whether they’ve got some problems with their liver. Same thing with humans.
Animals have the same characteristics that humans do. Their eyes change when they have an injury. That’s actually how it came about was a little boy that was 11 years old found an owl that had broken its leg. He saw the there were some color changes in the eye of the owl as it was healing. It was kind of fascinating to see that happen. I see the same thing in my dog. I look at my dog’s eyes and I can say, oh yeah, she’s got some issues going on. We need to work on that. It’s pretty cool.
[00:42:57] Ashley James: When you look at your clients when they’re with you in person do you see a big difference from the beginning of a session to the end of the session, or is that something that changes more gradually over time?
[00:43:11] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It doesn’t always happen that quickly. It’s usually gradual over time, and it depends on what it is that we’re working on. I’ve kind of switched my focus because usually when I’m talking to people and I’m talking to them live, face to face, I look at their tongue a lot because the tongue will tell me things. But now I’m also starting to look at the eye even more, and it really depends on the type of light I have to see the eye to see if I can actually see the little spots or the little lines in the eye that tell me something, or the rings, or even just discolorations that are occurring. Or if they’ve got some bloodshot eyes, that’ll tell me a little bit of what’s going on in the sclera.
People have caught on to the fact that I look at their tongue, and so now they kind of block their mouth when I’m talking to them. Well, now they have to block their eyes if they want me to not look at their eyes to tell them what’s going on. But I can look at their eye and say, are you having some digestive issues? They’ll say, well, yeah. How’d you know? Oh, you got this little speck here that’s telling me that you’ve got some digestive issues. Looks like you might have a little bit of heavy metal going because of these little rings that are showing up or things like that. It’s pretty cool.
[00:44:19] Ashley James: Now, iridology—I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t it a fairly old, widely studied, and it’s practical but it’s repeatable. It’s a science.
[00:44:41] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It is.
[00:44:41] Ashley James: How old is it? For those who’ve never heard of iridology, which is being able to basically to look in the different aspects of someone’s eye and see what organs and what systems need help. Can you tell us the history of it?
[00:45:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, yeah. It goes way back to the 1800s even. Even way before then, they even have pictures of drawings within cave dwellings and stuff like that of the eye. But back in the 1800s, the one that I was referring to earlier Dr. Von Peczely I believe was his name, was the 11-year-old boy that found the owl that had a marking on the owl’s eye that was depicted kind of by where the leg is, which is in the lower part of the eye. As the bird was starting to heal, he started noticing the change in the eye and the color of the eye change.
I don’t know if that was the main reason why he went back to medical school, but he went to medical school and became a doctor. As he started seeing more and more of his clients and more and more of his patients, he started seeing that the eyes were reflecting what was going on in the body. As the body was healing, the eye was healing. So he could actually see that significant change.
Now, whether it can change from the beginning of a session to an end of a session, typically not because basically, it depends on if it’s a congenital thing because you can actually see things that you’ve inherited from your parents, or if it’s something that is an acute, subacute, or chronic, or even a degenerative issue. But the beautiful thing it’s similar to biofeedback in that it can predict. It may not be something that you have right now, but it’s a precursor, so it’s leading up to it.
Just like biofeedback identifies things that are symptomatologies and energies that are leading to dis-ease, the same thing goes with the eyes is that it leads to dis-ease as well. It’s kind of like here’s something that’s coming on, and if you don’t do something about it now, this could end up being something that you’re going to have to deal with later that will take the quality of your life away. That was the first thing, but then there was Dr. Jensen who is an American iridologist who really brought the science and the use of it in the homes. He made it so that people would understand it.
And then there’s also another physician out there, Verghis, who actually put the behavior. So he made behavior iridology. What are some of the emotions that show up, the personalities that are showing up within the eyes? You can see if somebody’s an extrovert versus an introvert based on the amount of fibers that are showing up. You can tell if they’re a right-brain or left-brain person by the amount of activity in one eye versus the other. It’s really cool, so it helps you understand. If you’re interviewing somebody for a job, you can actually look at their eyes and say, is this somebody who is more of a creator person or more of a left-brained person that’s more focused on let’s just get the task done. You can actually hire somebody based on where their brain is activating and working the most.
[00:48:17] Ashley James: That’s really fascinating.
[00:48:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s quite fascinating.
[00:48:20] Ashley James: So I’m a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming, and as part of that, we really study how to understand people’s personalities in a passive way. Because if one were to choose to—let’s say they are a headhunter for Microsoft, for example. They’re the recruiter for Microsoft. It’s illegal to give personality tests in America and in several other countries. There are certain countries where it’s not illegal. I’m sure it’s a lot easier to do hiring in those countries, but in the United States, you’re not allowed to do a personality test because it could be considered discriminatory.
I mean, I’m not going to discriminate against an introvert or an extrovert. It’s like if you’re hiring an accountant that’s going to be in the basement never surrounded by anyone else, you really want to hire an introvert. They’re going to be a lot more focused and happy there. You don’t want to hire an extrovert accountant. They’re going to be miserable. So there are just certain personality traits that are best if you understand the job you’re hiring for it’s best. Or if you’re dating. If you’re examining potential mates, even meeting new friends, or hiring a babysitter or a nanny—certain things you want to know about that person.
In neuro-linguistic programming, we learn how to read people, gain rapport with them and read people, not in a malicious way at all. Although, Hollywood loves to paint the picture of NLP in a very malicious way because that sells movies, TV shows, or whatever. But neuro-linguistic programming is simply becoming so observant that you can understand more about human behavior and all the signs are right there for everyone to read. If you can look into someone’s eyes and you study your iridology, you have the ability to understand their health, also their emotional health, and also their behavioral tendencies. I think that is really powerful.
This is something that would interest me. For example, being a mom, and again I saw studies recently, some articles published about how they see the differences in brain patterns that women actually see a larger spectrum of color than men do. That is they believe because we can detect micro changes in the vasculature of our children such that we will see if they’re developing a fever if they’re developing a flush. The capillaries around their cheeks, are they more white, are they more dark? What’s going on? That is all playing a role in telling us are they in a state of stress, are they going into a sickness? We have to look at our children all the time and judge, especially young ones who can’t talk to us.
I don’t know why the scientists found out that moms can do it more than dads because I mean, all power to the stay-at-home dads, right? But for whatever reason, we have been designed to be able to see, adapted, or grew in a way to be able to see and detect even further more minute changes in the nuances of how the body is expressing itself. So reading eyes is something that I think moms who are like crunchy moms who are into holistic health would be really excited to study more about. And then also the tongue, and I really want to get into talking about the tongue too. It’s kind of hard to teach people iridology through an audio podcast, but maybe you could direct us to resources that the layperson could study.
[00:52:31] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Absolutely. For example, when you were talking about this whole connection with the child and things like that, why do you think that they say that moms have eyes in the back of their heads? Well, they do.
[00:52:45] Ashley James: I have freaked my son out so many times. My son’s almost six. Now, he was an early talker. When he was 18 months old he knew the alphabet backward and forwards. We would just do fun games with the alphabet, he picked it up, and he could say really complex words. He could say avocado before he was two. By the time he was two, he was talking full sentences. He’s always been really communicative, which makes sense given who his mom is. And also, we talk to him all the time. We talk to our son all the time like an adult. We don’t do baby talk. We talk to him all the time, engage with him all the time, and he’s very communicative.
So at a really young age, I’ll be in the kitchen, our son will be in the living room, my back is turned to him, and I’ll say, “Stop doing that. You know you’re not allowed to do that.” He’s like, “How did you know?”
[00:53:47] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Right. If you think about that, so you do actually have an eye on the back of your head because when you think about where the pineal gland is actually located in the brain. It is actually towards the back of the brain, and that is where your sense of intuition is. That’s also where all the hormones, the hypothalamus, the thalamus, and all that are coming through. So basically, I mean, not only are we emotional and hormonal beings but we’re also seers and feelers and key into that energy. That’s why that sense of intuition is so strong. When you feel somebody approach your child you say stranger danger, that this is not a good person. That was because we were designed that way. That’s one of the beautiful things about the differences between men and women is we were given that that intuition.
So, of course, we have the eyes in the back of our heads for that reason. That pineal gland is actively firing [inaudible 00:54:43] stranger danger, do not approach, stay away from my child kind of thing, and me as well.
But there are certain things that you can actually look for in the eye that can give you an idea of some things that would just be something to follow up with. For example, if you see rings in the eyes meaning circular rings on the outer of the iris towards where the sclera is, if you see a white ring around that, that typically, first of all, is one of the signs of old age. You’ll see that in some of the elderly, but it’s also circulation. So kind of looking at that. That’s also a condition of the skin. The aging of the skin is part of the aging process. Maybe too much sun, not enough hydration, that kind of thing. It’s all about melanin as well.
But what most people don’t realize is there are truly only two-colored eyes—there’s brown and there’s blue. I have green eyes so I’m like wait a minute, where do I fall in that. Well, there is a mixed color, and that’s called a biliary. That’s where the greens and the hazel’s come in. Typically, the hazel would be like a brown, but it has some discoloration around the pupil, which could be toxins, it could be genetic things that have come in, it could be that you have a very strong constitution. If you see some strings in the eyes that are emanating from the pupil, that’s usually your constitution. They liken it to different types of fabric.
For example, the strongest constitution person will look like satin, meaning that the color of the pupil is very tightly woven. The striations coming from the pupil are very tight, so they have a very strong constitution meaning their digestion is going to be very strong, that their body’s going to be strong, everything’s going to be strong. Then if they have a very loose-looking pupil, meaning that they’ve got openings and stuff like that, not only does that mean—and the previous person would be more of an introvert. If you think about that type woven, very tight with their time, tight with personality, things like that. They’d be more of an introvert.
Whereas the one with the eyes that have a lot of light coming in them, they have open areas that we call lacuna that make them look very like a flower. Those are very extroverted people that also are very much emotional type. They tend to be more of a right-side brain dominant. They tend to be more spontaneous and creative, but you also want to see if there are color changes within the color. So if you have a blue eye but then you have some brown specks in it, typically that means that there’s a psora, which means there are some toxins and stuff going on within that area.
So there are certain things that you can look for in the eye that might change as a result of things. If you hurt your ankle, you’re going to see a change in the bottom of your eye where the ankle is located, and you might actually see a speck. That spec might show that the body is trying to heal. You can actually see long-term phase versus acute. You can tell based on the color if it is an acute episode and if it’s going to convert it to long-term. You can actually stop it at the acute level before it even goes chronic. That’s the thing that I love the most about this is to be able to detect. It’s like a timescape. You can see, okay, you’re in the acute phase of this. If you change this now, it does not have to be a chronic disease later. That’s what I love the most.
If you see some white colors, let’s say you have a blue eye and you have some white striations in there, oftentimes that may mean there’s a kidney imbalance or there’s too much acid. It’s in the acute stage of the disease. It could also mean that you have a very hard life that we need to look at the psychological aspects of it. They may over rationalize things. They may have a hard time forgiving.
Yellow tends to mean that there is an adrenal imbalance. Oftentimes, the emotion associated with that would be fear, anger, or worry. So of course, if you think about that, it does influence the adrenals.
If there’s a bright orange color to it—so you can see some of that sometimes in the hazel eyes the bright orange—oftentimes that’s a pancreas imbalance. You’ll see that a lot with people who have diabetes, and oftentimes it’s a lack of grieving. They haven’t had a chance to grieve for something, whether it’s grieving for their loss of independence in their life, their ability to enjoy the food that they’ve wanted to, or even grieving of lifestyle, people who have left, or even childhood issues.
If you see dark orange, oftentimes, that would be a pancreas or gallbladder issue, or sometimes there’s something going on with the gallbladder. If you can actually catch this in advance, then you might be able to save your gallbladder at some point because it’s an early indication of something going. Usually, that’s a long-standing lack of joy that somebody’s had. So you might see some of this in some of your friends when you see some of these emotions showing up, and then you see some of the conditions like with traditional Chinese medicine, typically if I see something going with the pancreas and the gallbladder, I’ll also see hip issues or knee issues going on as well because it goes right along that gallbladder, or they might have headaches as well.
Then if there are reddish-brown specks in there, that could be a spleen or blood weakness. Typically you’ll see that in the tongue as well, and I can explain that when we go into that. But that’s typically irritability or depression that the person is having some issues with.
And then if you see some light or dark brown specks in there, that’s usually a liver imbalance and a sign of chronic disease. You can see the color spectrum. White, they’re in the acute phase. It’s more of a lymphatic thing. As the color gets deeper and deeper into the texture, then that’s the progression of the disease process. You can also just look at your own eyes and see some of those things as an indicator.
[01:01:14] Ashley James: The location matters though, right? Like you said, the lower part of the eye was the leg of the owl, for example. So you’re seeing these different colors in the eye, and the location also plays a role. I think studying it would be fascinating as a layperson, but I also think going to an iridologist and one that has been trained both in the physical but also the personality and the emotional to get a full sort of reading of what’s going on. I think that’d be a lot of fun.
And then doing the work like you said if, for example, heavy metals come up. I spent the last five years doing heavy metal detox and really noticing a huge difference in my labs. All of my labs improved, my liver improved, my blood sugar improved—all the functions of my body—my hormones improved. Everything improved because I was doing that, and of course eating an even healthier diet because I can’t say I was eating unhealthy before that. I’ve been pretty consistently eating as healthy as possible for the last 10 years. But in the last five, I’ve been really focusing on everything I can do to support the body and removing heavy metals.
Man, it would have been really interesting to get sort of a camera like a really close-up camera shot of my eyes five years ago versus now to see. I know I made these changes, but then to also have that confirmation to see that the changes took place over time in my eyes. That would be neat to go maybe once a year or something and get a picture of your eye and then see those changes as you do the work.
[01:03:05] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Oh yeah. You can see a change within a month. You can actually see it within a couple of days. So for example, I did a fun thing. The other piece of it is I’ve been having some of my clients who I’ve been seeing for biofeedback sending me pictures of their eyes, and they’ve been really, really good about that in that they can then send me an email of their eye, and they have to specify right and left—open that eyeball is as high as they can.
So typically, I’ll have them keep their eyeball open with their fingers while their spouse or whoever takes a picture of it, and then that way I can get a really good picture, of course with the flash off. so there’s no glare coming from it and making sure you’re not getting a glare from windows. But then I can actually blow that up and really look at it and then get a really good idea. There are over 90 areas of the eye that we look at. That’s why it’s very important you do go to an iridologist for that.
The beautiful thing is that you can actually see the changes from one aspect to another. So for example, before each full moon, I do a fast—three to four days before a fast and even before the new moon. So I’m usually doing a fast two times a month. So I’ll do my fast so. Before I do my fast I’ll do a picture of my eye and I’ll analyze it and take a look at it. And then I’ll do my fast and then after my fast I’ll look at that and go wow, look at that. You can actually see a difference within that time frame—that four days. You can see a difference in the eyes—the clarity, the color.
You might have had some people say like for me, I can be green eyes one day and blue eyes another day. Sometimes it depends on the color I wear, it sometimes depends on the mood I’m in. It’s kind of like I got motoring eyes or something like that. They could turn the little color so the yellow will come out more. But my eyes, when you look in the camera, are actually blue—a very pretty blue. But when you truly look at it with the naked eye they’re green, and that is because of the coloration that I have around the pupil.
[01:05:09] Ashley James: My dad was the same way. My dad had these hazel eyes that could be green, they could be blue, they could be brown. It was almost like golden brown, and they would change. I mean, the most change I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes my dad had that, and I thought that was fascinating, considering my mom was just pretty much always blue. I was like, what’s up with my dad? I thought that was really interesting.
Now, I love fasting. I’ve had several episodes on fasting, and some people who’ve never heard of therapeutic fasting think you’re crazy. Why wouldn’t you want to eat when you have access to perfectly good food? Episode 230 of my podcast, so I recommend listeners go back and check that out. Episode 230 talks about water-only fasting on a therapeutic level, and the results that you can get.
Back in 2012, a Japanese doctor discovered that the body goes through on day three of a water-only fast. It’s somewhere around hour 30 it kind of ramps up. The body digests pathological tissue, cancer—and I’m not saying this is a cure for cancer, although it has been documented and this is something that we talked about in episode 230. But the body will digest scar tissue to the point where people have seen scars go away during long fasts. Fibrous tissue, so women with fibroids, women with very thick breast tissue, women with fibroids around their uterus or their ovaries, they’ve seen a significant improvement.
It’s just fascinating because if you weren’t into health, you would probably never go—unless you had to for a colonoscopy or something—skip a meal, right? And yet, we are designed, we have a self-cleaning mechanism. It’s like you put your oven on the self-clean setting. Even my washing machine has a self-clean setting, and I just thought that was so funny our body has a self-cleaning setting. That if we don’t eat for three to five days, our body goes through this huge cycle of self-cleaning and breaking down pathological tissue. That is absolutely amazing. There are so many health benefits.
So you fast twice a month. Why do you choose to fast around the new moon and the full moon? What is your reasoning behind choosing the amount of days, like you said, about four days? Why do you choose the amount of time and the timing?
[01:07:50] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The number of days was really random—three to four days. First of all, I always like the number three, so that’s one of the main reasons. But I always choose the lunar cycle because that’s when many things are more active in the body. That’s when a lot of things will actually start to show up. For example, that’s when parasites are much more active in the bodies during a lunar cycle. So if I’m wanting to clean my body out of any kind of parasites that may be remaining because we do all have parasites, it’s just how active are they. Then what better time than the lunar cycle? So why not use mother earth to help us heal?
So the more in tune that we get to all of these different frequencies and vibrations of the world, of the earth, then our body responds so much better to it. Why not do these drastic changes during lunar cycles and during these full moon episodes because that’s when your body’s going to be much more receptive to it. And I’ve noticed the difference between a fast in between, during a full or a new moon, and it just heightens everything. It heightens the meditations, it heightens the interaction that you have with the world, your senses become much more interactive. When you’re cleaning your body out, then it opens up every sensory system within your body to become much more viable, much more vital. That fast during that time just speeds everything up. My meditations get deeper, everything gets deeper.
[01:09:26] Ashley James: Very cool.
[01:09:27] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So why not do a fast during that time?
[01:09:30] Ashley James: What’s really neat about even just a three to four-day fast, and the fact that you do it twice a month is fantastic. What’s really interesting is that people are often afraid that it lowers the metabolism, which slows down the metabolism. What studies have shown—they’ve repeated these studies—is that when we lower the caloric intake, let’s say you decided to go on a 1,200 calorie a day diet, and then you did that for three months, and then you went back to eating 2,000 calories, you would start to gain weight from the 2,000 calorie diet.
Let’s say you always ate 2,000 calories and you were always consistently the same weight. If you lowered your caloric intake significantly like to 1,500 or 1,200 calories, and then went back to eating 2,000 calories, which was seemingly healthy for you for years, all of a sudden now you’re gaining weight. What they find is that by eating a lower calorie diet, our metabolism slows. The body goes into a starvation mode and goes, okay, we’re in famine now. We need to conserve energy, and so we’re going to convert everything to fat to survive. We’re going to really sluggish slow it all down, make less heat.
This kind of flies in the face of all the diets out there. All the mainstream diets tell us to eat less. That creates more customers for more diet books because now we are in this perpetual cycle of, and I’ve been on over 30 diets in my life and I know. The more dieting you do, even healthy ones like the Mediterranean diet, so healthy. The Zone diet, and the doctors, all this stuff. All those diets out there cause the metabolism to slow.
Now, everyone gets results in their first month. You shift your way of eating and oh, I lost 15 pounds. Well good. Some of that was water weight from removing inflammation because maybe you stopped eating sugar, you stopped eating junk food, fast food, or whatever. You’ve changed your lifestyle. But in the long term, it slows the metabolism, which is really bad so that you can’t actually eat a healthful diet without the body going into fat-storing mode.
Now fasting—and I’m not talking about intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is something different. The jury’s still out about it. Some people have really negative effects from intermittent fasting, some people have really positive effects. When I work with clients that are pre-diabetic or diabetic, I do not get them to do intermittent fasting right away. It’s not the best for everyone because in some cases, it causes the body to go into a state of stress and actually maintain a higher state of glucose. Although, like I said, with some people, intermittent fasting is amazing for them. I don’t think it’s a good thing for everyone. I think it’s kind of a try it and see and notice how you feel and notice how your body responds kind of thing. But with the fasting that you’re talking about, which is a three- to four-day water-only fast, that—in a most fascinating way—speeds up the metabolism.
My husband did a 17-day fast last year. He does a few fasts every year. The metabolism will stay fairly high, and here you and I think well you’re not eating so wouldn’t the body conserve energy? Well, no. It actually does the opposite. The body goes, I really need to go find food. We got to go forage. We got to go walk miles and miles to find food. Let’s ramp up the metabolism, and so things actually ramp up. Now that you’re not having to spend all your energy digesting, now the body is spending all that energy healing.
It’s very exciting this idea of incorporating fasting, and I like that you mentioned doing it around a new moon and a full moon because you’re ramping up your own metabolism, but also you’re supporting a very healthy stimulus to your immune system, and at the same time, you’re starving the parasites. I think that’s really neat that you’ve adapted that. How long have you done this habit?
[01:13:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, we’ve been doing this for, I would say, about nine months now, and we’ve been seeing a huge difference with it. First of all, it’s that interaction with mother nature. It’s really listening to her rhythm, responding to it, and allowing our body to succumb to that rhythm because when we do, that’s when true healing occurs and that’s when we really get a good response back from the fast itself. But it also gave you freedom. What I mean by freedom, how many of us are so stuck to the time that we eat? It’s 9:00 AM, it’s time that we’re supposed to be eating. At 6:00 PM we’re supposed to be having dinner. Based on how about how do you feel, do you even feel like you want to eat? Are you even hungry even, or is it more of a craving, is it more of something else?
[01:14:40] Ashley James: Or is it thirst.
[01:14:42] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, thirst is one of the biggest reasons. A lot of people think you have to drink water throughout the day to stay hydrated. I personally like to drink a 25-ounce glass of water first thing in the morning on my way to work and drink the whole thing, then I drink another one on my way home, and then I have some during the day. But then I really get a good flush and then it stays there because the biggest mistake most people make is they try to drink their water throughout the day and then they don’t get enough water in. Whereas if you start with a really nice big glass in the morning with some lemon in it, some apple cider vinegar, or something like that to really get that cellular structure to become more alkaline, then you’re doing much better that way.
But then, the other piece of it is the freedom that it gives you. So let’s say that you’re going on a trip somewhere and you’re on a plane. You’re thinking, there’s no way I’m going to eat this food. But you’re like, but I’m going to be hungry. When you go through a fast you realize I don’t have to eat because I actually have gone three or four days I’ve gone without eating anything.
The first time you do one you’re going to have a major headache. It’s going to feel like your head is about to explode. I keep thinking that’s all these toxins that I’m releasing. It’s parasites, it’s all these things are saying, let me out, let it out, and they’re wanting to come out. They do, they eliminate quite drastically. After that first or second day of the headache, which happens the first time you do the fast. When you do your second fast, the third fast, and the fourth fast, you don’t have those headaches anymore because your body’s saying, oh yeah. Okay, that’s what she’s doing. We’re in this. We know what to do now. She’s not going to starve us completely.
But think of the yogis that have gone 40, 45 days, 60 days, 7days without food. The body is very, very smart. I’ve heard of a lot of doctors actually saying that it’s actually healthy to have a little bit of fat on you. The reason for that is, for this reason, there’s a fat store in there that if there’s a disease, a virus, or something that comes into the body, it’s going to go after the fat first and not the organs. So when you see somebody who’s extremely thin, we’re talking like anorexic thin, they tend to—when they get sick—it starts to attack the organs more because there’s no fat to go for.
I always like it when I see my clients with a little bit of meat on them versus real thin because of that reason. The same thing goes with COVID. I’ve noticed with some of the COVID clients that I’ve been seeing through biofeedback, those that have a little bit of meat on them respond better to the biofeedback energetically, and they respond faster to the healing process. Whereas those that may be thinner, and I think part of that is because of the parasites. I think the parasites are greatly impacting or interacting within the person that is being exposed to COVID. That’s what’s making it change so much is the parasites within the body are making the characteristics of COVID change. That’s why they’re having a hard time keeping ahead of it, I believe.
Parasite cleanse, parasite cleanse, parasite cleanse. Do your foot spas that I know that Kellyann and the Platinum Energy System. I have one of those and I love it. That I do also at the end of my fast is I do a nice little foot spa too. That takes the dredges, the rest of the stuff out that that I didn’t quite complete with my fast. That was probably a long answer, wasn’t it?
[01:18:35] Ashley James: No, no, it was great. It’s all very interesting. Once you start getting into looking into parasites, you’re going down the rabbit hole chasing the white rabbit.
[01:18:51] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes.
[01:18:56] Ashley James: I’m going to mix up my metaphors, it’s like Dorothy going down the rabbit hole.
[01:19:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: She could be going there too.
[01:19:03] Ashley James: It just keeps going and going. I had a man on the show who’s married to a woman who is very famous, and I’ve also had her on the show. Of course, pregnancy brain, I’m not going to remember anyone’s names right now, I apologize. But she’s famous for the book she wrote in the ‘90s called Guess What Came to Dinner. She’s written a bunch, but she’s famous for parasite cleanses. I’m like 15 years old or 12 years old, my mom brings this book home. I’ve been into health stuff my whole life I just. I just decided to rebel. In my teen years, I decided to rebel and I paid for it in my 20s, basically, and I spent my entire adult life having to recuperate from all the damage I did to myself in my teen years rebelling against all the cool stuff that I was into and I still am.
We did a parasite cleanse with my family and we all got tested, and we had three parasites. We had two parasites from owning cats, and one parasite that we picked up from Mexico. This is in the ‘90s. Then we did a parasite cleanse and then we didn’t have them anymore. Reading the book, Guess What Came to Dinner, was like oh my gosh. And then to have her on the show I was just starstruck. I’m like you’ve been part of my whole life.
[01:20:25] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Are you talking about Hulda Clark?
[01:20:26] Ashley James: No, not Hulda Clark. She’s another amazing one. Anyways, her husband who I’ve also had on the show and he came on the show twice. His first time on the show—it was a two-parter—he shared that he about his cancer journey and how he was like in the middle of this weird chemotherapy that was killing him. He escaped the hospital in the middle of the night because he really realized that they will kill me in here. He escaped the hospital, and he’s like I’m just going to do something natural because I don’t want to go through this treatment anymore because the treatment’s killing me. And then he ended up completely healing his body using natural medicine, and it’s been his journey. That’s how he met his now wife who’s famous for parasite cleanses.
So he came on the show the second time to talk about—he has this YouTube channel where he interviews people who have overcome cancer naturally and what they did, and so that’s a big eye-opener. But one guy he interviewed got on an anti-parasitic over-the-counter medicine that you buy for animals. It’s been on the market forever.
[01:21:43] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Ivermectin.
[01:21:44] Ashley James: And his cancer went away. They’ve had over 60,000 people part of this—there’s a blog or a forum where they all gather online and they all share their experiences. He goes through and talks about five different reasons why it strips the coating on the tumors so that the immune system identifies it. I mean, it does like five different things. Again, you can’t say this is a cure-all because there are people out there who it didn’t work for. I’ve never ever, ever seen anything that was a 100% success rate when it comes to cancer, and I believe that’s because cancer is not just one thing.
When I interviewed the Italian doctor, Dr. Simoncini—for whatever reason I never forget his name. He’s fascinating. He was a surgeon, and he’s not a holistic doctor at all. So I always find it interesting when I interview doctors who’ve been kicked out of the mainstream realm for finding a cure and they’re not holistic doctors. Now they have to go around and hang out with all the holistic doctors because they’re the only ones that believe them.
So Dr. Simoncini, as a surgeon, cut open a tumor and said, “Why do tumors look like cottage cheese? Why do tumors look like candida overgrowth?” So he took a dying patient who was on their death bed anyway and they had a catheter set up to deliver chemotherapy right into the vasculature of the tumor.
So he made up a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and water, which is baking soda and water, and that is a very alkaline mixture right. He says, well, this is what you would do if you had a yeast infection. The person was going to die anyway. They’re on their deathbed. He pours it into the tumor and the person lives. The tumor melts away, and he freaks out. I said, “Well, okay. What’s your success rate?” Because he does it all the time. This is his full-time job is he goes around basically installing catheters into the vasculature of tumors then pouring these sodium bicarbonate solutions into the tumors. He says about 70% of the time. I mean, 70% is better than any. Think about it, there’s no chemotherapy, no radiation that gets 70% of all kinds of cancer.
[01:24:17] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Let’s talk about side effects.
[01:24:19] Ashley James: Yeah, don’t even get me started. I’ve talked to oncologists and there’s commonly, if you’ve had chemotherapy, you have a 2% chance of developing secondary cancer from the chemotherapy. Similar to radiation, and the statistics vary from treatment to treatment. That’s just one side effect. But my point is that if all tumors were candida, then why wouldn’t this work 100% of the time? That’s because I believe that—I mean, based on talking to all these doctors that that help patients no longer have cancer, no longer have tumors—it’s not always one thing. There are multiple reasons, and we have to look at all these different aspects. We have to look at parasites.
When interviewing Viome, I’ve had two people on the show talking about the Viome company, which I love. If anyone wants to get this stool test, it’s phenomenal. I did it and it’s so informative. It’s a few hundred dollars, and it’s a home test. You can do it at home and you mail it in, and you get a coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health—gives you a discount.
What I love about Viome is it’s going to give you the information you can’t get anywhere else because blood tests don’t show this. It’s showing the genetic expressions of the microbiome in your body and the chemicals they’re making from the food you eat because there’s a pharmacy in your gut. So it gives you this whole missing link of information. But what they said is there are new studies that just came out recently that show that tumors have their own unique microbiome. We can begin to detect tumors before they even become tumors because we can detect the microbiome of cancers.
That leads me to think, just wrap your brain around that, what if the microbiomes are creating the tumors or stimulating the tumors? What if there are parasitic personality traits that a certain kind of microbiome is like a parasite and then the body is reacting to it. I mean, there’s this whole world that opens up, and unfortunately, science progresses one death at a time. We have to really push for research in this regard, but the research dollars only go towards something that’s going to make people profit because the medical system’s a for-profit industry, which is super frustrating.
So if any listener out there wins the lottery, please figure out how to invest money into helping to get these answers solved when it comes to what truly is, what truly are these diseases? How come 70% of cancer just resolves itself after being treated with sodium bicarbonate solution, according to Dr. Simoncini.
[01:27:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, think about it, don’t most diseases grow in an acid environment? And then if you add on top of that, I bet he would probably improve his rate of improvement or cure if he also addresses the emotional components of cancer and look at the traditional Chinese medicine aspects of what organs hold, what memories, or what emotions. Typically that’s the one that’s going to get the disease. That’s when you look at the whole person. That’s what I absolutely love about what I do in integrative medicine is I integrate the two sides of the world.
I integrate the medical side and the natural side and make them all make sense to the point where we can all work happily in the same play yard. But it’s addressing the whole person, not just the physical symptoms, the dis-ease, but also what got them there. They have shown that cancer actually starts growing seven years in advance before it’s even detected. If you can actually see the formation of it before it even starts, whether it’s through your emotions, the ones that you’re holding, the personality, the worry, all of that, that would actually help to reverse it in addition to any of the natural remedies. I love the idea of baking soda. I mean, that’s amazing. I take baking soda every night before I go to bed.
[01:28:55] Ashley James: I asked him about that. Why can’t we just drink it? The thing is that the body has a buffer system. Drinking baking soda is not really going to get the alkalinity and the concentration it’s needed for a tumor. If you’re on an empty stomach, it doesn’t hurt to drink some baking soda just like if you’re on an empty stomach or you’re about to eat food, it doesn’t hurt to drink some apple cider vinegar. When you first wake up in the morning, it’s very helpful to drink lemon juice because even though lemon is acidic, when the body interacts with it on a cellular level, it has an extra hydrogen molecule that binds to—there’s a chemical process. I heard it and it made sense to me, but then repeating it I feel like I’m not doing it justice.
In one of Ty Bollinger’s first docu-series where he goes down to—
[01:29:47] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The Truth About Cancer.
[01:29:48] Ashley James: Yeah, The Truth About Cancer. It’s like season five, basically. It was back in season two of The Truth About Cancer where he went to Mexico. I don’t think it’s in Tijuana. It’s Mexico, and he worked with the Gerson Clinic. They explained the process that happens in the body that when we drink certain juices like lemon juice—even though it’s acidic—putting it in the body actually has a process it goes through on a cellular level which then alkalizes. I found that fascinating.
We want to do it safely. You don’t want to alkalize your stomach acid when you’re trying to digest it. The first half of digestion in the stomach is acidic, and then right near the end, the body turns it more to neutral so that it can empty it into the small intestine. So when you take a digestive enzyme or apple cider vinegar, do it at the beginning, don’t do it at the end of a meal. Don’t eat and then an hour later, I forgot to take my digestive enzyme. I might as well take it now. Because if there’s hydrochloric acid in it, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
You got to drink the apple cider vinegar in the beginning, or you take the hydrochloric acid digestive supplement in the beginning, not at the end. And then definitely don’t drink carbonated beverages during a meal. Any kind of fizzy beer, club soda, anything that’s carbonated that’s fizzy during a meal will lower stomach acid, will help to neutralize stomach acid, which is not a good thing during digestion. You certainly don’t want to drink baking soda during a meal either. But in between meals, go nuts. There’s my little safety rant for alkalizing, and I like to just get it from food as much as possible. Get your greens in, get your berries in. The body knows what to do with it when it comes to balancing out alkalinity.
[01:31:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I don’t know if you ever listened to Dr. Zach Bush, but I absolutely love the man. He talks a lot about getting the nutrition from your food versus supplements and versus the other things. He basically says the supplement industry has taken over the pharmacy in that there are so many supplements out there that people are so confused as far as what it is. What they should be taking and how much, and is there an overload.
I prefer to get your supplementation from your food because that is truly your life force. There’s a life force in that food. There’s a life force in the eating of it, the preparation of it, and the growing of it. But yes, there are times that you have to take supplements. It’s like you said, it’s not one of those end-all-be-all. You can’t just have this cookie cutter for everybody. It’s got to be very individualized. But the more we can get it from our food, the better. That’s why I really don’t like diets per se. Maybe it’s the word itself because the first three letters is die. For me, that’s kind of like do I really want to do that? Plus, does it really stick?
I’d much rather find a lifestyle plan, something that you can maintain your whole life versus just times that you want to fit into a dress, fit it into a pair of pants, or do something. You’re facing this life issue and now you got to drop the weight. How about you find something that is doable in your system that is like your ability to grow your own food or things like that that you can live with, that’s a long-term thing, that becomes a habit. That your body is growing with and fortifying with and so on, versus all these trendy little diets that keep showing up.
Let’s find it from the food and then take the pressure off. Because usually when you’re on a diet, there’s something that you’re having to eliminate. Usually, that thing that you’re having to eliminate is something that you really, really like. Now you’re going through this stress of not being able to ever have that ever, ever again, which you know you’re going to have again. But it’s that whole thing of the all or none. Like in ayurvedic, we talk about using different colors to enhance your food, to get the most nutrition from your food, and things like that. As well as the emotion that you put into it and the enzymes.
Why people have cravings is usually because we’re missing a taste in that food, whether it’s a sweet, a sour, or a salt. It’s missing. And so if you get all the flavors in your meal, you tend to not have the craving anymore because the taste buds have picked up that craving, that texture, that flavor, or that taste. All the taste buds on the tongue have been appeased. They’ve been relieved. They’re not saying, hey, I was left out so therefore I’m going to crave more of that, so the salt side. So then you start craving salty foods. So bring all those foods in. That was probably a tie into the tongue because I know we were really wanting to talk about the tongue.
[01:35:00] Ashley James: We’re going to get there. About diet, 10 years ago I went gluten-free—barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Now, once in a blue moon and I mean once in a blue moon, I will have something that has gluten in it. Not a huge detrimental thing happens if I have it once in a blue moon. I had such a profound change in my health in the first month of cutting it out. I’ve shared this on the show before, so I apologize to listeners for hearing me say this again.
I completely removed barley, wheat, rye, and oats, and my husband did at the same time. So there are 12 foods that we choose to cut out, and it was other things that are a little bit easier like no nitrates or nitrites. So if you’re going to have deli meat, you don’t have any nitrates or nitrites. No fried food, no oil in a bottle. So when you’re cooking you don’t cook with oil, and there’s a reason. I mean, I can go through and explain each one, and I have in the past in other episodes. But there are 12 foods that do harm to the body, and there are scientific reasons why.
You can be a vegetarian, you can be a paleo. I mean, you can be any lifestyle. You can be eating a diet from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and it’s just removing 12 things. And then there are of course things you can replace it with.
No barley, wheat, rye, and oats were the biggest shift for me. I lost 25 pounds of water weight. This wasn’t fat. This was all water weight. My rings, which were custom fit for me sort of flying off my fingers, same with my husband. He dropped water weight, which was inflammation, and his wedding ring started flying off his hand which was custom-made for him. We had been married at the time for several years so we never had that problem.
We decided to wait a few months. So we waited about six months to get our rings resized because what if it just bounces back? I didn’t want to [inaudible 01:37:10] it off it anymore. So six months of our rings flying off our fingers we were like okay. We got to a point where we had to tie elastic hair bands around our fingers to keep our rings on. When we realized, well, we’re not going back to eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats so we’re not going to gain all this water weight back from the inflammation of these foods. Our body isn’t going to all of a sudden bounce back so our rings are going to be fine.
So we went and got them resized, and that’s when we found out that my husband went down two whole ring sizes and I went down one and a half ring sizes. That was such a profound difference for me that I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. For me, there are so many others. If I want grains, there are so many replacements for grains.
Just last night my midwife—she’s amazing—made flourless brownies, and they are to die for. There are less than five ingredients, and they’re so good. The main ingredient is cooked chickpeas, and you would not know, but these are the most moist, dense, delicious brownies you’ve ever had, and there’s no flour in it. It’s high in fiber and protein. The first ingredient is chickpeas, the second ingredient is peanut butter, and you can have other nut butter if you want or seed butter. You can add either dates or maple syrup. You can do dark chocolate. Anyway, hers were delicious.
What’s so neat is that when you get creative in the kitchen, you don’t miss these things. But I like that you brought up that when people “diet,” they remove something suddenly from their life, and all of a sudden they’re missing that flavor profile. The fun that I’ve had the last 10 years as I’ve adjusted my diet because now I eat more whole food plant-based, as close to nature as possible. The fun for me has been how do I maintain that balance of flavors but find the healthiest version possible?
About five years ago, I went completely sugar-free like I did a sugar detox, and I had to read all the labels. I love hot sauce, I can’t tell you how many hot sauces out there have sugar in them. I absolutely love hot sauce, but it took me a long time to find a variety because I kind of get bored with hot sauce. I want a different hot sauce. I want to be able to choose different hot sauces, and so many of them have sugar in it. I found two, three, or four over time. I had to go to different stores to find one that had zero sugar and also zero of the other really gross ingredients that can be in processed foods. How did you put it, in prefabricated foods?
So I try to find the most natural artesian hot sauces with no sugar. But I really went to the extreme of absolutely no added sugar and my palate changed. I stopped craving sugar. I was always eating something with sugar in it, and I got to the point where I don’t want things that are that sweet. Even dates for me are too sweet, but I’ll go for some fruit. I’ll go for sweet potato, and that has an amazing sweet flavor. You can even make a chocolate mousse out of blending…
[01:40:36] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Avocado.
[01:40:38] Ashley James: Yes, you can do it out of avocado and raw cacao powder. But you can do it also out of—because I like to feed my son this because he’s allergic to avocado—I can feed him baked caramelized yams, take the skin off, blend it with raw cocoa powder. The sweetness of the yam—you don’t add any sweetness in. If you want to change the consistency you can add nut milk to it like coconut milk or something. But it tastes rich, chocolatey, velvety, and delicious. Then you feed it to your kid and you’re just sitting there laughing because you’re like, hahaha, I’m getting to eat something super healthy. They’re like, haha, my mom just fed me chocolate mousse. This is awesome.
You can have a lot of fun replacing those things as long as you acknowledge, like you said in Ayurveda, it’s about getting that balance of bitter, astringent, sweet, pungent, salty. There’s one more word that they incorporate in the flavors.
[01:41:45] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, I wasn’t sure which ones you already covered. One of the biggest ones that people always come to me about is I’m craving sweets. I usually recommend that they just get a bitter spray. You can buy that bitter you make your cocktails with, or you can get them at a health food store that may have a little flavor to them and you spray them on your tongue.
[01:42:06] Ashley James: Swedish Bitters.
[01:42:07] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, you spray it on your tongue and there goes your craving.
[01:42:13] Ashley James: And it’s really good for the liver.
[01:42:14] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, well that’s the part is why? What is it? What emotion is driving that craving? You got to get back into the motions as well, but also then what is lacking in the diet? What’s lacking in emotion? What’s lacking in that aspect? I’ve thought about creating on the bestseller list of creating this diet that’s called the love diet. That should solve this question.
[01:42:41] Ashley James: You should do it.
[01:42:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I should. The question is, is this loving to me? That’s always going to be the question. So there’s really no food that you’re going to have to look at, but it’s really just saying when you look at this food, is this loving to me? Meaning is it going to feed me, is it going to nourish me, is it going to make me more vital, is it going to regenerate my cells, is it going to be something that helps my mind become clearer, my thought become clearer, my breath, whatever? Is this loving to me? And if it’s not, then put it away and then identify why am I not wanting to be loving to myself by the food that food selection that I’m choosing, the amount of water, the type of beverage I’m choosing to drink?
Am I choosing a Pepsi over water, why? Is this Pepsi loving to me or is the water more loving to me? And some people may say well I get more enjoyment from the Pepsi. Well then let’s find out why are you getting enjoyment from that sugar. What’s missing?
[01:43:39] Ashley James: Well, enjoyment isn’t love, right? It’s kind of like going on Tinder, getting a date and having really, really empty sex. Sure, we can have a romp around for an evening. I remember before I met my husband feeling so empty. I mean, sure, sex is great with someone. But there’s not that connection that love, that intimacy that you have with your spouse. I end up feeling shame and guilt, and that’s the same thing.
Yeah, I could go to McDonald’s and sure I’m in the moment—by the way, McDonald’s is disgusting. Once you start eating super healthy, you can’t go back to those foods. I could find some kind of like pizza or whatever, some kind of gluten-free pizza. I could find something that is delicious at the moment or some kind of fried egg roll. At the moment it’s delicious—yum, but then I might feel gross, my digestion slows, maybe I don’t get to poop three times a day. I feel sluggish, I get brain fog. It’s kind of abusive. It’s not loving. It’s kind of abusive to go and have a bunch of empty dates, have a bunch of them sexcapades, and then just feel empty and shame. It’s kind of similar. Or go drinking every night. You’re getting that fulfillment at the moment, but is it really loving yourself? Is it an act of love for you? And no, it’s not. It’s a form of abuse. I think you’ve got to write that book.
[01:45:22] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, when you’re asking people to love you, if you don’t love you either like if you don’t love yourself, then how can they love you? How do they even know how to love you if you don’t even know how to love yourself? If we really start with loving ourselves first, then we teach other people how to love us too. That’s really what it’s about is teaching people how to love us. Sometimes that’s setting the boundaries, that’s setting limits. That’s saying no, that’s not acceptable in my love field, let’s say.
When you eat the foods that are loving to you, you become much more loving. If you make decisions that are much more loving to you, then you are much more loving to yourself and then you exude that out in the energy kind of like we started this conversation about in the very beginning was about energy. When we exude love for ourselves that love exudes out. What else do we attract? We attract love back, so we get more loving people in our relationships. We can get more loving people in our atmosphere, in our gang, in our crew, in our team, in our tribe—whatever you want to call it. More loving things come to us. More loving opportunities come to us when we’re more loving for ourselves.
When we’re more self-destructive, we get more self-destructive things, more self-destructive friends, more self-destructive ideas or things. So you go down that forbidden path. Well, I’m just going to have 1 bite that then leads to 20 more bites that lead to the whole cake being eaten, and then you go down that deep dark despair. They even show it in movies where somebody has a heart broken, so what do they do? They go to the store and buy all this chocolate, they sit in their own little pajamas, they eat, cry, and do all that stuff, and then they feel horrible the next day when they’ve recovered their heart.
So let’s just tune into the love of our heart and what’s loving for ourselves, eat things that are loving for us, and get rid of those that aren’t. One of the things that I like to show people, especially in biofeedback, is how to do muscle testing on themselves and see, is this food, is this medication, or is this supplement healthy for you? When you get to teach them how to do that, I see people in the grocery store now that are out there muscle testing themselves on food before they buy it, and I love it. It’s like, yes. I love it when I see that happening. I see their bodies swaying. I’m like, oh, yeah that’s a good one, and then it makes them have better choices.
When some people are saying I don’t think my medication’s working for me anymore. I think I may be taking too much or something like that. Then I’ll say, well, let’s take out your prescription and how much you’re supposed to take. Now, what does your body say? I’m not saying this is for everybody, and it should always be under your care of a physician as far as whether you’re coming off your medications. But it’s just letting you know intuition-wise how in tune are you with your body. If your body’s saying I think I’m getting weaker on this stuff. I don’t think I need as much possibly. Maybe I can start titrating myself down, then I say then go to your doctor and start talking to them about can I start taking myself off of this? If so, what would be the best route to do it because I really feel like I’m not needing as much anymore or something like that.
[01:48:39] Ashley James: Oh, man, I can’t tell you that’s phenomenal how many times clients have come to me with really weird symptoms, and I say okay give me the list of meds you’re on. Not all my clients are on meds, but sometimes they come to me on meds and then I just have them sit on Google with me and we go through. Again, I’m not the prescribing doctor, I’m definitely not a doctor, and I don’t tell people they have to get off their meds but I ask them most of the time. I’ve only ever had one client say, no, I believe in medication and I want to be on it. I’m like, okay, this is your choice. But I want you to know the fullest of the side effects.
So my question to them as I ask, do you want to be so healthy your body no longer needs this medicine? Now, that doesn’t always apply. There are some cases where people like for example, type 1 diabetics will require some amount of insulin. It doesn’t mean they have to be on the amount of insulin they’re on now because I know a type 1 diabetic who cut it down by 75% by changing a few things in his diet, not major. Just a few things, minor things.
He did cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats as well, and he started taking a type of mineral supplement that did include chromium, vanadium, and other minerals because that helps to resensitize the insulin. Basically, insulin receptors don’t respond if there’s a chromium deficiency, and this was discovered in the ‘50s. That a doctor in California—I forget which university but in the ‘50s, and you could look at this on Wiki. A doctor could turn type 1 diabetes on and off in lab rats by starving them of chromium or by giving them chromium. So chromium is good, but it’s not the only thing. There are other things like B6 is incredibly important. There’s a whole process that B6 goes through when it comes to blood sugar regulation.
So there are multiple nutrients, and there’s this whole world of how people have been able to completely rid themselves of type 2 diabetes with diet alone, which is 100% doable, documented, written about, and I’ve had interviews about. But as far as type 1 is concerned, people can get so healthy that they can lower their amounts, and of course they know they’ve been taught how to measure themselves. But if you’re on an anti-anxiety, antidepressant, something to that regard, a high blood pressure med, a water pill, or a cholesterol med, and then you change your diet to be healthier, you do all these other healthier things, and not have your medications checked. It’s kind of like, but your body is getting healthier. What if you could have a reduced amount or completely have yourself taken off of it?
So that’s the goal. That the goal is to get so healthy that your body no longer requires that intervention or would require a minimal amount of intervention. What I do is if I have a client with a bunch of symptoms who are on medication, I will have them go on Google with me and we look at not the shortlist but the full list of side effects and we go down the list. They will start freaking out because they will go, oh my gosh. That’s the reason why they put me on this one. That’s the reason why they put me on this one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients have epiphanies because they thought their bodies were breaking down further into the disease they were diagnosed into when it was the many of the side effects of the meds they were put on.
If your doctor isn’t willing to help to work with you either to find a different drug, to find a lower dose, or to get you so healthy you no longer need it. If your doctor’s not willing to work with you to get you healthier, to get you to not have symptoms and side effects, you can fire your doctor and hire a new one. They work for you. Don’t ever let the hubris of a doctor and their ego scare you into following their advice. Find one that is supportive of your health goals to be the healthiest person possible.
It drives me nuts when people give over their personal power to a doctor. I know there are really good MDs out there who really, really, really want you to be healthy. They’ll take advanced courses, they’ll become functional medicine practitioners, they’ll go take extracurricular courses, and they want to help you either get on a different drug, get on a lower dose, or get you so healthy you no longer need it.
That’s why I said there are so many good doctors like that out there that if you are stuck with a doctor who’s like nope we’re going to keep you on these meds no matter what. We’re not changing them no matter what because there many doctors out there that say diet doesn’t matter. You still have to be on this cholesterol med. It doesn’t matter that you’re eating a whole food plant-based diet and your cholesterol is lower. We’re going to just keep driving it down lower even still. Because cholesterol medication bruises the liver and stops the production of about 30% of our cholesterol, which is required. The liver makes it because the body needs it. Lots of books out there about that.
[01:53:59] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The liver is so key to emotion. In traditional Chinese medicine, the liver is where happiness is, so happy liver happy life. If you think about it, the liver is what filters everything. When you see someone who is not the happiest type of person, that’s pretty negative, angry, and very reactive, typically I’d want to say we got to work on some liver stuff here. Do a liver cleanse or something like that because the liver is processing everything from environmental toxins, to internal toxins, to our own emotional toxins. I mean, I feel like liver is one of the most important organs we have in the body.
[01:54:42] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you and I could talk for hours and you get me all riled up. You get me on my soapbox so I get so excited. I want to talk about the tongue, man. Something happened to me it must have been about a year ago or so. It feels really recent but then when I think about it I’m like that was like over a year ago. Where all of a sudden, my tongue—and my tongue when my Naturopath says stick out your tongue or I go to acupuncture and they’re like stick out your tongue, I kind of stick it out with pride. I’m kind of like, oh I know I’m so healthy and you’re going to look at my tongue and you’re going to be like impressed.
Well, all of a sudden, just over a year ago, my tongue did the weirdest thing out of nowhere and it had cracks in it like lines running down it like it split open. I had a geographic tongue and it really hurt for three days. I was kind of freaking out.
But I have a friend who’s very much into energy medicine. He did energy work with me and he said this is an energetic problem. I’m not going to get too much into the details, I might freak people out, but basically, he helped me to resolve that, and then gradually my tongue healed. But super weird that it just came on suddenly and all of a sudden I had really, really deep fissures in my tongue out of nowhere. It felt more of an energetic problem and then we resolved energetically. But everywhere I looked online was like well people think it might be a virus, people think it might be a nutrient deficiency, but we don’t really know.
So you can read the tongue and weird obvious things like once people stick out their tongue and if there are cracks down the middle, geographic tongue, or if there’s tongue separates and it looks like the Grand Canyon on their tongue, that means something. Let’s talk about the more obvious because the people who look at their tongue and they’re like well, my tongue just looks like a tongue. There are no lines, there are no bumps, it just looks like a tongue. I’m sure you could probably point out things for them, but the more overt like if you look at your tongue and it’s doing this weird thing over here, tell us about that first.
[01:57:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay. So first of all, I want to touch on that geographic tongue because in the geographic tongue, there are actually two different types. There’s one that’s a surface geographic and then there’s the one with the deep fissures like you’re talking about. The deep fissures is definitely an energetic issue that needs to be resolved, but there’s also a geographic tongue where on the surface of the tongue you’ll actually see where the papilla are. On the actual surface, you’ll actually see the geography of the mapping of the tongue. So the tongue is mapped geographically based on where the organs are.
So for example, the tip of the tongue is where the heart is, then right behind that tip is where the lung is, then on the sides of the tongue is where the liver and gallbladder resolves, then right down the center is the stomach and the spleen, and then right towards the back of the tongue is where the kidney, bladder, and the intestines are located. So when you’re looking at the tongue, similar to the eye, you’re looking at geography. If you see any changes within that aspect or that area of the tongue, then you go, ah, we’ve got to look further into that.
So when we’re looking at the tongue, we’re looking at the color first and foremost. The color tells us so many different things whether there’s inflammation, if there’s blood deficiency, if there’s too much cold, too much heat in the body, you’re looking at the color. So one of the first things I look at is if it’s a deep red tongue like it looks like a raw steak, then that’s a lot of inflammation in the body. That person is dealing with some pain issues, they’re dealing with a lot of maybe inflammation of the organs. That there’s some great illness going on there.
If it’s a pale tongue, then that means they’re very deficient in blood or in the yang aspect of things. They tend to be a little cooler, circulation tends to be their hands are cold, their feet are cold. If there’s a purplish color to the tongue—and a lot of people will say, well I don’t see the purple, because it’s very subtle—purple is a stagnation of blood meaning there’s an injury somewhere. Typically, when I see purple, it’s affecting the muscles and the joints, pain in the muscles and the joints. If it’s blue, then the person’s really, really cold. They’ve got a lot of coolness in the body itself, and so that means the organs are also running cold.
I look at the color first. I always look for a coating as well. it’s normal to have a little bit of coating, but the coating is also based on what is the color of the coating and the consistency. So how thick is it? So if it’s really thick, then that means there are pathogenic issues going on? They probably have some candida, some yeast, parasites, those kinds of things. If there’s an absence of coating, that means that they’re they’ve got a yin deficiency so they don’t have enough heat in the body. If there is a white then there’s cold present, so that means there might be coming down with something.
One of the things I used to do with my kids was if they didn’t feel like they wanted to go to school and they wouldn’t want to act like they were sick, I’d always say let me see your tongue. If that tongue didn’t have any coating they’re going to school. They can’t pull, they just can’t.
[02:00:26] Ashley James: Did you look at their eyes too?
[02:00:27] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Of course.
[02:00:30] Ashley James: You’re like let me look at your eyes, let me look at your tongue. No. Do you have a test today? You’re going to school.
[02:00:35] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I was looking to see which direction they went because if they were having to create something, they were going up into the right brain. If they were telling me the truth they’re going to the left. That would tell me if they’re lying, so I look at that.
But also the moisture of the tongue. So if it’s really wet, then that means that there’s a lot of internal damp going. If they’re dehydrated it’s going to be really dry, too much heat going on in the body. So for example, if I see the tip of the tongue and it’s really red, then there’s heat in the heart. So that’s a really good way to look at that. I’m trying to think of what that state would be, but too much heat in the heart would be like a heart condition of some sort, not where you have congestive heart failure that would be the tongue on the tip would be wet and it would be of a different color not heat. I look at that.
The crease down the center of the tongue typically means there’s something going on with the spine, so they’ve had a long-term spinal issue. So if I see that deep crease down the center I ask them, so tell me about your back. What’s going on with that? And they’re like, how do you know about my back? Then I’ll say, well, you got that deep crease going on, so they’ll tell me. But if there are more lines in the middle of the tongue, that means it’s a new thing. It’s more of an acute episode. If it’s a decrease and it’s been a long-term thing, I tend to see a deep crease on someone who has scoliosis, for example.
If I see bite marks on the outside of the tongue where the liver and the gallbladder are located, and typically I mean by that is where the ridge of the outside the tongue is, if I see bite marks there, either that’s a spleen deficiency where the blood is not coursing through the body as well, so there’s usually a pain issue or something going on with the blood. They need a blood cleanse of some sort, or they’ve got some pathogens going on.
But typically, if it looks like they’re biting their tongue, that means they’re not absorbing their food. So either they’re not eating their food enough—chewing it enough, or they’re needing a digestive enzyme. Their body’s not developing that enzyme. It could also mean they’re having difficulty processing protein like meat proteins, for example. So then their body is not being able to bring up enough of the digestive enzyme to break down that particular type of protein, so we may need to look at that instead.
The best way that I do this is when I’m doing my biofeedback with somebody and I’m doing my first session with them I’ll say, okay, let me look at your tongue, and then they stick their tongue out. So I cue people that the best way to see what the health and status is of yourself is first thing in the morning before you drink any water whatsoever or drink anything, go look at your tongue—
[02:03:45] Ashley James: Or brush your teeth.
[02:03:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: And then scrape your tongue. Yeah, or even brush your teeth. Always look at your tongue first before you do anything, and that’ll tell you exactly what’s going on—how much bacteria you’re developing throughout the night as you’re sleeping. What the color is, just how much of a coating you have. And then before they drink any water I ask them to scrape their tongue.
What I mean by that is not with a toothbrush where they scrape it back and forth while they’re brushing their teeth because then they’re just pushing the bacteria or whatever is on the tongue deeper into the papilla kind of like when you had those creases and those crevices. Imagine if you were to take a toothbrush and scrape your tongue that way, it would push it deeper down into those crevices and then you’re going to get a great outgrowth of bacteria.
So I basically recommend that they scrape it. You can get those tongue scrapers. There’s a metal one, bamboo, or you can even get the plastic ones. I say just grab a spoon, a big old tablespoon from your drawer and just use that and then you just scrape it and then rinse—scrape, rinse, scrape, rinse, and keep scraping until no more of this stuff comes off. Whether you floss your teeth or you brush your teeth first and then floss, but then you floss and then do an oil pulling. The oil pulling will do the last little bit of pulling out all the rest of that bacteria that you might have missed and that’ll help a lot. So I usually recommend doing that.
[02:05:13] Ashley James: Explain oil pulling for those who don’t know how to.
[02:05:16] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay. So oil pulling, you just take a coconut oil—whether it’s the fractionated coconut oil or the solid oil. You just take a teaspoon or a tablespoon of it, then you stick it in your mouth, and you swish it around. It’s going to melt because your mouth is very warm. It’s going to melt it and then you swish it for five minutes. Most people, if they can’t tolerate five minutes, just two minutes then and then you spit it out. I want to caution people, do not spit it down your drain because it will congeal and then you’ll get a clogged drain. I don’t want husbands or spouses mad at me because they got a clogged drain now because of the oils going into the drain.
So typically, spit it in a garbage can or something that you’re going to dispose of, and that’s the best way to do an oil pulling.
[02:06:07] Ashley James: What about sesame oil? I’ve heard use sesame oil, so why coconut oil?
[02:06:12] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I like coconut oil because people like the flavor of coconut oil, and if you like it you’re going to do it. Whereas sesame can be very seasoned or a taste that most people have a tendency to try to acquire, but either oil would be good. I also use MCT oil, that medium-chain triglyceride. That’s also a very good oil to use as well.
[02:06:38] Ashley James: It’s not like that coconut oil has more anti-microbial properties than another kind of oil, it’s just a matter of taste?
[02:06:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, yeah. First of all, it’s availability. I try to make suggestions based on availability for most people. Taste and acquireness of taste because if they’re not going to like it they’re not going to do it, and how readily do they have it. So yes, I do like coconut oil for that reason—the anti-micro microbial, which is why the MCT works so well, why it’s so good for pulling the bacteria and the virus stuff out. But the sesame, yeah. I have sesame oil and I use it myself. I use it actually on my skin quite a bit, it’s wonderful. I love the taste. I also put it on my popcorn too.
[02:07:30] Ashley James: If they had any oil, I mean any plant-based oil, not canola oil. You throw that canola oil out. If you have oil in your house, you just throw that out. But if you have olive oil, any kind of oil as long as you like the flavor you’re swishing it around your mouth. And of course, saliva comes in also so your mouth is now full of saliva and a little bit of oil. Your mouth feels so clean after you do oil pulling, it’s really interesting. It really does.
[02:08:03] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: And I also encourage the use of bentonite clay, and I like bentonite clay especially with the brushing aspect of it. So most people don’t really like the flavor of bentonite clay because it’s clay. So I usually suggest that if they have a fluoride-free, aspartame, or sugar-free type of toothpaste that they really like, then go ahead and put the toothpaste on the toothbrush and then dab it into your bentonite clay. And the bentonite clay goes further into pulling out that bacteria.
If somebody has gingivitis or really bad cavitation or things like that in their teeth, which if most people understood the dental aspect of your teeth, they’re all associated with an organ. Each tooth is associated with an organ. So if you have an infection going in one of your teeth, it’s probably affecting that organ or it may be coming from that organ.
The eyes, the tongue, everything about us is so fascinating. There’s always a map to something, and so the teeth are the same thing. So if you have an infection in the teeth, bacteria, or gingivitis then you’re going to have a lot of health issues. That’s where you find a lot of hidden things that aren’t being tested in the medical field. That’s why 85% of the people that come to me say I’ve gone to every specialist there is and nobody’s been able to find anything wrong with me except saying I need a psych eval, kind of like what you mentioned. I always go to the teeth, I always want to look at the teeth. That’s the second or third thing I look at is the teeth too.
[02:09:44] Ashley James: Eyes, tongue, teeth.
[02:09:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: But the bentonite pulls it up. Well, ears, everything else.
[02:09:48] Ashley James: Poop.
[02:09:49] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, poop, you name it. Nothing is left untouched or looked at.
[02:09:57] Ashley James: I mean, once someone when someone’s gone to you they’re like what do MD? You go to an MD, they might see you for 15 minutes if you’re lucky. They barely look in your eyes ever, and it’s like how much information are they actually gathering? Well, they’re not trained to. And again, there are good MDs out there—the ones that really go for extracurricular courses and stuff—but traditional MD training, you don’t really look in someone’s eyes, tongue, mouth, ears, discuss their poop.
But as a doctor, you’re supposed to be a detective. Only looking at the objective versus also considering the subjective, and only looking at labs. That’s just one piece of that picture. You’re missing out on so much. So I really do love that you’re incorporating many different medicine modalities from around the world that show us windows into our health, not just physical but energetic, emotional, and showing us that they’re more than just a meat sack. It’s quite interesting.
[02:11:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I love learning. I’m kind of a nerd.
[02:11:22] Ashley James: You’re in good company.
[02:11:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I got a look at that. Yes, in fact, that’s what I find with most of your listeners is that they’re very learned. Many of them are like oh hey like I’ve learned a lot from some of my… and that’s the thing about healthcare. That’s the thing about being an integrative doctor is that when you stop learning, you should stop practicing because we should always be open to learning something.
[02:11:46] Ashley James: Right, same with teachers. I think if teachers stop learning they should stop teaching. We should always be expanding and always be excited. If you’re burnt out in your field you’re not serving. If you’re in a field where you service people, which there are very few fields where you don’t in some capacity service someone or service someone’s needs. But if you really are burnt out and you’re not growing as a person in that field, if you’re not growing and interested, you’re doing your customers a huge disservice and also yourself because being stagnant is akin to being in purgatory. Being stagnant, everything gets clogged up.
Find what you’re passionate about and then dive into it and it’ll radiate. When you’re passionate and you’re absorbing information, you want to help others. But like you said, you surround yourself with those like-minded people. When I cut out sugar and fast food, I noticed that I wasn’t surrounding myself with people that love to go to bars, drink alcohol, eat fast food, and eat sugar.
There were even some moms that our son was hanging out with, there’s a bunch of kids, and there were some moms who were really excited. We’re going to go to McDonald’s next. I’m like, okay, have fun. Bye. She was all excited, and she was a nice person don’t get me wrong, but she wanted to go to McDonald’s like every day and she did every day with her kids. She wanted all the other moms to meet there so that all the kids can play in the play area.
My husband, he’s so great. He goes, our son will never enter McDonald’s because I don’t want him breathing in the heterocyclic amines from the fried food. I look at my husband and I’m like I love you. I love you so much. I was even willing to go. Okay, well maybe we’ll just let him play in the play area, which is disgusting by the way. The McDonald’s player is disgusting. I mean, you want a kid to be a kid and just have fun. My husband’s like, no. He’s not even going to breathe in that poisonous air. What are you talking about?
So you just end up surrounding yourself with people. Over time, I just found these crunchy moms that some of them are more crunchy than me if you can believe it. I had one mom reading labels more than I read labels. I didn’t think that was possible. It’s just raise your standards, find people that are in line with your health goals, and surround yourself with those people. So I just noticed that over the last few years, my friend base has really changed in a good way. I don’t throw people away, it’s just people that naturally will gravitate away from and gravitate towards depending on your focus.
Going back to the things you were talking about when you talk about loving your body like truly, you look at that food, is this loving me? Not is this giving me instant gratification and pleasure, but is this loving me? Because if there’s a component of like well I’m going to have great pleasure eating it and then there’s going to be a period of shame and guilt afterward, that’s not love. That’s not loving you. That’s not nourishing you. That is creating healthy boundaries. That is learning how to create healthy boundaries within oneself. And when you learn to love yourself as authentically as you have illustrated, we find it easier to then inform others of our boundaries as to how we want to be treated.
This is getting into the idea of that there are no villains or victims. Coming from the standpoint of if you believe there are no villains or victims because we choose based on all of our conscious and unconscious choices, we choose how to tell people how to treat us. We are the ones that choose to be in social situations. Now, this is not like a black or white situation. This is just an exercise in thinking to give us new access to information. So if we come at life from a standpoint of I am empowered in my life, I am responsible for my life and my choices, then what we do is we say to ourselves in this life that I have—sorry, my kids playing in the background it’s distracting me. I’m trying to focus here. The pregnancy brain has taken over. I’m surprised I made it this long.
[02:16:37] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: A sparkly thing.
[02:16:40] Ashley James: He’s playing with the jack in the box and I’m just like, ahh.
[02:16:48] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s kind of funny that you were talking about McDonald’s, you know jack-in-the-box.
[02:16:52] Ashley James: Oh, right, right, right. Well no, the old toy. He’s playing within the background. It’s so funny my brain just goes oh. In terms of enforcing boundaries, this is what’s so exciting about enforcing boundaries, and if people want to get into this deeper, go look into non-violent communication and you can find hours of videos on Youtube. The man who invented this passed away, but his family created a foundation. You could pay something like $12 or $20 a month or whatever to gain access to thousands of hours of his training. There’s a lot of great lessons you can learn, but the focus is this. If you identify as a victim, you give up your personal power because you’ve given up your ability to say I am at cause in my world, I enforce my boundaries, and I teach people how to treat me.
So when we decide to not identify as a victim but instead go okay, things have happened to me and I get to now choose how to train people how to treat me. I am in control in that I will teach them how to treat me. That is a measure of self-respect and love that will come more naturally when we start to do things like you said—choosing foods and even routines in our life like going to bed at 9:00 PM versus midnight is an act of self-love. It creates a discipline that is enforcing a boundary that says I love myself so much this is my personal boundary.
And so then if you decide that your bedtime is always 9:00 PM. You get into bed, you read for an hour, and you go to sleep. And then someone wants to go drinking with you or do a behavior that would keep you up late at night, then you get to decide, am I going to teach these people in my life that this is my boundary and for them to respect it. And then you teach them and you show them this is my self-love. Over time, it gets easier and easier. But at first, people will abreact, will push against you, and try to bulldoze your boundaries.
[02:19:16] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Or shame you.
[02:19:17] Ashley James: Every form of manipulation, right? So when we go into health stuff and then we have friends and family that don’t understand it, then they really try to get us to go eat and behave the old way. That’s why I love it if we keep coming at it from how Dr. Vienna said everything you put in your mouth and every health choice you make, ask yourself, is this authentically loving me? And that will help open you up to understand boundary setting on a whole new level when it comes to your health. Then you have to teach people gradually over time how to treat you in this new way where they will respect the boundaries of your self-love instead of trying to manipulate, hurt you, or have you stumble or fall.
They’re all doing that unconsciously too. They’re not like hahaha, how am I going to make her get off her diet? It’s largely unconscious, but our friends and family will try to bulldoze our boundaries at first. This is why I like nonviolent communication because they teach you step by step how to, in a loving way, hold a boundary in place and not let toxic behaviors continue.
I just wanted to incorporate that into what you said.
[02:20:34] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, and I agree with all of that. You summarize it very nicely. When did we start making time so important? Okay, you didn’t develop to develop this illness overnight, so then why are you expecting recovery overnight. So allow yourself the time to heal, the time to develop that habit, the time to develop that good behavior because oftentimes, what happens is January 1st, everybody’s starting on this new year’s resolution, which I don’t believe in. Every day should be a resolution. But you start this new year’s resolution. Oh, I’m going to not eat sugar for however long, and then two days in you eat sugar. Then you go through the shaming of yourself, your psyche, everything. See, I can’t hold myself to anything. I’m just weak. No, you start out with I’m strong, doing the I ams. It’s a very powerful two-letter word—I am—and really working on that.
But then it’s also really thoroughly enjoying the process, thoroughly enjoying it and finding out what’s the root cause behind that emotion. So many times, in the two-hour sessions that I have with people because really, that is about what it takes for people to just even open up is you find out the past hurts, the childhood hurts, the childhood traumas that made you the adult you are today. And so when you could go into those childhood traumas and you can heal that child, then guess what, the adult heals too.
When the adult is healed, then that adult makes better choices, then they start to love themselves more, and then they become better parents because then they see, oh my gosh, I told myself I was never going to be like my parents and here I am, I’m becoming like my parents. Not like their parents were bad either, it’s just the way in which we were perceived or the way in which we were taken. But I see a lot of those childhood traumas that affect the choices they make today.
So when we could go back and heal that, and that’s where I feel true healing comes in, where the true aha moment comes in. Because when you ask the question were you a child that got to be heard, or were you the child that could be seen and not heard? When they tell me I was the one that could be seen but not heard, oftentimes there’s that thyroid, there’s the immune system going on where they have a thyroid issue because of that or they don’t have a voice.
So they tend to be a victim because then they choose partners that are similar to that to where there’s comfort because back when that emotional intelligence was being developed in that childhood, that’s what they lean into as an adult. Therefore, that influences every decision they make, the friends they hang out with, the choices they make as far as the companion they want to be with for the rest of their lives.
It’s not until you actually start to heal yourself to where you actually start to find that root issue that is making you destroy who you are internally, externally, emotionally, psychologically—all of that. Once you find that thing—that one thing—then you can actually build on it, and that’s where the true healing starts to begin and you start to see it physically. When people start to rebuke and when they start to sabotage possibly, it’s because they see this person who has made all of this wonderful effort.
I have this one friend of mine. She has lost over 100 pounds and she’s done it the right way—with healthy food, with exercise, with walking, and you could just see the total vitality that is emanating from her. You can see this vitality of wanting to exercise. Everybody says, well if you just get off the couch you could lose some weight. Do you know how much it takes to have an extra 40 pounds on you, and then to have the motivation to lift those 40 pounds to go exercise? Yet you got to have that internal motivation, and that internal motivation is the love of life.
I saw this friend of mine who doesn’t allow himself to eat sugar very often, but when he does, he thoroughly enjoys the moment. Anybody who is around him gets to see him thoroughly enjoying it just from his facial expressions. When he takes that bite of that—he might only just take one bite of a cheesecake, for example, but the facial expression. Your mouth is almost drooling just watching him because he’s thoroughly enjoying that moment.
So if you’re giving yourself a moment to have that one bite of that one thing that you said I could never have again, but you take such sheer pleasure in enjoying it—let all your taste buds break down every ingredient of that food, of that I item, then you don’t need more because now you’re fully engulfed, almost an orgasmic experience that you’re having right now with that food because you’re allowing yourself to truly enjoy it. That’s how every meal should be taken.
We tend to dilute it with beverages, with entertainment, with conversation, with our phone in front of us, our TV on, or something like that takes away that pleasure. But if you just take that one little plate of food, you take a bite of it, you close your eyes, and you let your taste buds taste every little taste or every little essence that’s in that food, you won’t need as much food to finish. You’ll be very nourished, you’ll feel gratified after your meal, and it would be one of the best meals you’ve ever had because you went in full-blown with every sensory perception there is in there.
[02:26:38] Ashley James: I love it.
[02:26:39] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So thoroughly enjoy it.
[02:26:40] Ashley James: And make it be an act of self-love the fact that you’re not binging. Even like you said, people will eat and they’re not even conscious of the food that they’re eating. They’re just looking at their phone, watching TV, or whatever, and they’re not even experiencing it. They’re not enjoying it. When you do really, really, really enjoy it, you don’t have to just blindly overeat. You can really get the satisfaction out of each bite, and slowing down to chew your food—like really chew 20 times kind of thing with each bite—really helps digestion. We talked about this last time that you and your husband do. But there’s this amount of being conscious.
Sometimes people go unconscious around their finances, or they go unconscious around their budget. They go unconscious around food. Wherever we go unconscious in life, we don’t really have healthy strategies, I’ve got to tell you. Look at an area of your life that’s been in your blind spot that you’ve really been unconscious of, that you’ve been neglecting, and look if you have healthy strategies holding that part of your life up, or are you kind of like being a teenager where it’s just instant gratification, looking for pleasure, and not really worrying about the consequences.
So it does take that emotional quotient, that delayed gratification and being conscious of that one area of your life. Shine light on it not to grow shame and guilt, but shine light on it and build healthy habits around that area. I’ve got lots of episodes on building healthy habits, and of course, listeners can go to learntruehealth.com, use the search function there, and type in healthy habits. I’ve got several episodes all about doing that. Like you said, don’t rush it. What’s this idea that we have to do it right away? It has to all be done right away. Start. Start and get conscious.
If it’s something like getting conscious about how much water you drink. Getting conscious about the foods you’re putting in your mouth and staying conscious during a meal. Getting conscious while you’re moving your body in a way that brings you joy. Getting conscious about things around your body, your health, and your emotional state, and getting conscious about your eyes, your tongue, and those kinds of habits that you pointed out. How we can manage our oral health in a way that’s going to bring even more vitality.
But getting conscious allows us to make really positive changes in a much more rapid fashion, and then also bringing that learning about how to enforce healthy boundaries with others. Because once you start making changes, sometimes other people in our life don’t like it. It’s like crab in the bucket. I don’t know what it is. I want to protect you as the listeners in a healthy way to be able to not allow the people that love you to squish your efforts. Tall poppy syndrome I think it’s called in Australia.
When you’re just sprouting, when you’re just like a little baby sprout in the garden, it’s so easy to squash the plant as opposed to at the end of the season, when the plant’s huge now and it’s hard to squash it. So that habit is very delicate at first right, so protect that habit as you grow it and don’t let others around you squash it. Continue to protect it and also teach others that these new healthy habits are your self-love. Watch it flourish and watch it grow.
Dr. Vienna, Lafrenz, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. You and I could go on for hours and hours, as we often do. Your website is natural-therapeutics.com, and of course, links to everything that Vienna does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything that you want to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[02:30:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, first of all, I want to say thank you to the listeners who have reached out to me in the past from the last podcast because we’ve developed some wonderful friendships from that, and I’ve learned a lot from them as well. The way that this iridology piece would work is they would send me a picture of their eyes and then I would spend some time analyzing it, and then we’d sit down and actually go through it together.
Don’t be afraid of your tongue, not only with the appearance but also what comes off of it. Speaking our truth and like you were saying, standing up for ourselves and making sure that people are aware. I think truly, the consciousness, when we become more aware of our environment, aware of our feelings—developing our awareness actually adds to the consciousness piece. And so that heightened awareness of what is driving this craving? What is driving this mood? What is driving this reaction? And what is driving the reaction from another?
So if you have someone who’s close to you that might be trying to sabotage you, what is driving that? Maybe they’re envious of the fact that you can stick to something so strong as cutting out sugar and they want to do it themselves. Oftentimes it’s a mirror that they’re looking into, and so you can help others. That’s what I like.
[02:32:19] Ashley James: I’ve seen this so many times. I had a boyfriend who we were together for like five years. I started to do a lot of personal growth work and that really threatened him. He tried to sabotage me every step of the way, it was really interesting. It finally came out, I finally sat down with him. I’m like listen, we need to talk. What is up with your inappropriate behavior around my choices? These are healthy choices I’m making. What are you doing? I pulled it out of him and he said to me I’m afraid you’re going to leave me because you’re going to grow so much that we’re not going to see eye to eye. It was all of his insecurities that came forward, and I think that’s really common.
I like watching the show My 600-lb Life, not because of the health advice. Please, please, do not watch that show for health advice. It’s awful health advice. My 600-lb Life, you’re following people who are morbidly obese, and then they do things like gastric bypass surgery and eating a very bad diet like low-fat yogurts that have sugar in them. I mean, it’s just really weird. But they’re eating less than 1200 calories a day.
Oftentimes, they go through periods where they fail and then they go to counseling. I watch that show, they follow them for a year, and then they have another show where you follow them for a second or third year. The ones who make it, every single time—you watch a few seasons of this you start seeing a pattern—there’s going to be one or more enablers because these people were over 600 pounds someone had to bring them food. Someone had to keep bringing them the food. The enablers, if it’s a husband or a boyfriend, most of the time end up leaving the person one once they’ve achieved their goal weight or when they’re on their weight achieving their goal weight because they couldn’t handle the person getting healthy, getting their life back, and not being dependent on them.
I know it’s a really overt example because it’s oftentimes it’s covert in our life, but it’s very overt when you watch that show. And then for those who watch that show, if you do watch the show, please read the book or listen to the audio version of the book by Dr. Garth Davis called Probenazole. He is a weight loss surgeon who saw that he was gaining weight and losing his health on the same diet he had all of his 600-pound patients on.
He had to go back to the drawing board because he realized that everything he was doing was wrong and really not helping people in the long run. So his book is all about the actual science of eating healthy for health, for reversing disease. Now he doesn’t have to cut people’s stomachs out because he has a program that is about nourishing the body based on science. So I love his book Probenazole, and I highly recommend listening to it.
I like watching My 600-lb Life because you see the psychological changes that occur when someone is making major, very overt changes, and how they learn how to enforce boundaries and love themselves, and how other people sometimes end up moving away from them or moving towards them based on whether they were there to actually support or whether they couldn’t handle it.
It’s a very interesting thing when we start to make these changes in our life, know that some people are threatened by it, and that’s because they’re afraid you’re going to leave them or they’re afraid that they’re not going to be needed anymore. It’s all insecurities. The thing is if we live through fear, fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s best to get it out in the open and come from love, which is what you teach.
[02:36:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: When I was working as an occupational therapist, I specialized in people with size. What I found in many cases is the enablers didn’t know any other way to express love, and that was to feed them, to provide them the pizza, to do all those other things. They didn’t know any other way. So then that’s when it comes down to let’s have a conversation about what other ways you can show love because you don’t always want to discourage the relationship to end.
In many cases, when you see such a loving relationship, you don’t want to encourage them to leave their partners or things like that, but how about let’s work with a partner too. I’m not saying that that’s what you’re saying. What I’m saying is let’s get everybody involved and let’s show a different way of love.
So if this person is on this path of wanting to eat healthily, then let me show you another way you can demonstrate love. How about giving them a foot massage, a little reflexology, back massage, or just a little effleurage where you’re doing a little bit of soft mobilization which also circulates the fat and gets us the cellulite to disperse as well. Let’s show other ways. Whether through essential oils or other means. When you can give them that other avenue, then they can be part of the solution versus part of the problem. Then they also then can say, oh, so there are strategies to get around this. Once they learn how to love that person, they’ll start to learn how to love themselves, and so then it’s a wonderful thing.
[02:38:01] Ashley James: Beautiful. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show again. And of course, listeners can work with you. You help people gain profound results, and I feel that you’re affordable considering everything you offer, so I highly recommend listeners all around the world can work with you remotely. And of course, if they’re in the Okanagan Valley in Washington, they can go to Republic and see you in person as well, which would be fun. Natural-therapeutics.com is Dr. Vienna Lafrenz’s website.
Well, we’re going to have to have you on the show again at some point and hear about how your garden goes this year with your experiments that you’ll do this time. Maybe sharing your food with others and seeing how it affects others, that would be very interesting.
Man, I’d love to study the microbiome of different plants and the contrast that the microbiome has based on whether you held the seeds in your mouth or not. I think that would be really interesting, or the frequency. There are machines you can hook up the plants to and see is there a different frequency of energy or is there a different sugar content? Is there a different nutrient value? It’s all grown in the same soil, same sunlight, same amount of water, but what other changes can we see, and what are the changes can we see in other people?
[02:39:26] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Also, the ones that were my seed for example, if I went through a depression or something like that, would it affect my plant? I bet it would. I think that’d be fascinating.
[02:39:38] Ashley James: Right. Fun.
[02:39:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So if I stop growing will my plants stop growing?
[02:39:47] Ashley James: I like to see the chain of custody. I like to think about the chain of custody of my food. The farmers, were they treated well? Was it a local farm, family farmers? Were they people who were happy with their job, or were they working in really poor conditions? Then there’s the distribution center, how those people had to handle your food. And then it goes to the grocer, unless you can source it straight from the farmer, which would be awesome. All the grocers that work there for minimum wage, are they treated well? How’s their level of happiness, and how long does it sit on the shelf? What country did it come from? How long did it have to fly?
So it’s the environment, how many weeks has it been since that apple was picked or months because apples can be stored in a way that it’s been months? How long has it been out of the soil basically dying slowly, and how many hands came across it? This is just talking about whole foods. Imagine if it’s these factory manipulated pseudo food, how many hands and how many chemicals had to go into that food? So if we can get the closest to the source as possible and be the one that influences the plant on that level, I mean that is such a cool experience to have even if you’re just growing microgreens inside your apartment, you know what I mean?
It’s such a cool experience to have to be able to influence directly, grow directly, nourish your body, and have zero chains of custody. You, you’re the chain of custody, that’s it. That is such a cool experience for your body to go through.
[02:41:51] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I noticed a big change when I moved off-grid for several reasons because when you’re talking about the chain of custody, when you’re looking at electricity when you’re looking at the water when it’s coming into your house, where did it go through? What chain of custody did it go through? How many households did that electricity go through? How many households did the water go through? How many different way lines did it go through to get to your house? So based on that, how much anger, how much frustration, how much toxins, pollutants, and all that is going into the water, into the electricity?
Here, in my house, I have a well that’s 800 feet down. I know exactly the source of where that water is. So there’s my custody right there, it’s right from the well itself. There are no other pipes it’s gone through, through the city, or anything like that. It’s come straight from the earth. So that water is so healing.
[02:42:45] Ashley James: There are no pharmaceuticals in your water. And because your water actually is so deep and under pressure, it’s likely that it’s structured water. I’ve had an interview about structured water.
[02:42:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s got minerals, absolutely fabulous minerals.
[02:42:57] Ashley James: So good. I love well water, I just love it.
[02:42:59] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So when people come to my clinic, they don’t get water from the city, they get water from my house. I take in a gallon jug of water every day with my freshwater that people get to drink when they come to my clinic because I want them to have my live water. It’s fabulous water. The same with electricity. I know where it’s coming from. It’s coming from my solar panel. It’s fabulous. It feels good. That’s another topic.
[02:43:22] Ashley James: Well it is, it totally is. I have a whole interview, I have several actually but one specifically of I think it’s like a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He talks about how most houses have dirty energy because of the grid. It’s not aligned correctly, and the transformer in your neighborhood is not aligned correctly. If a home is not wired correctly, it actually goes back as a feedback loop and affects the rest of the grid. So it’s very rare to have a house that doesn’t have dirty electricity. It’s very rare to have a clean where the electricity is at a frequency that is normal and healthy and within healthy ranges.
His clientele, he goes and he helps. There are certain things he can do with someone’s house, and sometimes it takes replacing a transformer. But most of the time, there are things he can do within that home in the wiring to make the electricity clean.
There’s so much when it comes to health, and we always like to go down these rabbit holes. But basically, get back to nature as much as possible. One thing at a time. I don’t want to overwhelm people. One thing at a time. Choose something to do today to love yourself and keep doing it.
[02:44:37] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yup, and what’s the trigger.
[02:44:38] Ashley James: Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming to the show. As always, it’s been such a pleasure.
[02:44:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Thank you, Ashley. I always love our conversations. Like you said, they always go down a rabbit hole but that rabbit hole’s wide and big.
[02:44:54] Ashley James: And we all fit in it together.
[02:44:57] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Lots of topics, lots of topics. So thank you.
WakeUp: Miracles of Healing around the World
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza
Become a Certified Health Coach Through IIN just like Ashley James! Get their Valentines Day Special! Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach
Dr. Bradley Nelson's websites:
http://www.discoverhealing.com
http://www.drbradleynelson.com
http://www.emotioncodegift.com
https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-emotion-code-by-dr-bradley-nelson
Highlights:
We all have emotional baggage but does yours cause you physical pain? In this episode, Dr. Bradley Nelson talks about the Emotion Code and how it can help release trapped emotions and alleviate the pain that is caused by emotional baggage.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so thrilled that you’re here today to learn from Dr. Bradley Nelson and his Emotion Code, how you can heal physical illness through healing the emotional body. He has just thousands upon thousands upon thousands of testimonials on his website. You can check out hundreds of thousands of people around the world that have had amazing results, so you’re going to love today’s interview.
Now, I got to tell you about a special that’s happening right now. If you’ve been a listener for a while, you’ve heard me talk about the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. That’s the online health coach program that I took to become a health coach. It’s either a six-month program if you’re a full-time student. Or if you’re like me you’re a busy mom or dad or just busy with school or career and you just want to be able to become a health coach but fit it into your very busy life, then you would take their year-long program.
It adds up to about 20 minutes a day of videos and audios, and over the course of that, you learn over 100 dietary theories. But more importantly, they teach you how to be an amazing health coach from the standpoint of counseling, of that emotional side of health coaching because really, everyone knows to drink more water, go to sleep early, but why don’t we, right? What’s going on there? You teach your clients how to create new healthy habits that stick and how to go through the emotions to get to the point where you’ve increased their joy and vitality in every area of their life, and that’s something that IIN will teach you how to do as a health coach.
Now, I was surprised to find out because I’ve interviewed the CEO and also the founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. It was very interesting for me to find out that about half the students take their year-long health coach training program just for their own personal growth because the program offers so much more personal growth. So if you want to become a health coach just for your personal growth you can absolutely do that by going to IIN, or if you want to become a health coach, you can also go to IIN. They’re having a great sale right now for the month of February, so you’re going to want to call them and check it out.
They already offer a great discount for my Learn True Health listeners. So when you call IIN, just mention my name, Ashley James, and Learn True Health podcast. But right now they’re giving my listeners an even better deal for Valentine’s day. And of course, isn’t that so appropriate? This month we’re all focusing on the energy and vitality of love, just bringing in more love and joy into our life and focusing it on maybe a bit of that romantic love. But also the familial love, the love for friends and family, especially the love you have for yourself, so let’s do some self-care.
If you want a free module from IIN, you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach and check it out. If you want to learn more, just give them a call. Just google IIN. Their phone number comes right up, and those who answer have actually been through the program so they can help you.
Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health.
[00:03:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 455. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Dr. Bradley Nelson. I absolutely am thrilled to introduce you to his technique, and you should get his book The Emotion Code. You can also go to one of his websites, which is emotioncodegift.com and he gives you some great free goodies. Dr. Bradley, I’m really excited to have you on the show because in so many cases I’ve seen where people can heal their body on the physical level when addressing emotional blockages. And when going in and healing things on an emotional, mental, and even spiritual and energetic, everything comes back online. The vitality of the body and the joy comes back online.
I’ve seen so many people with chronic pain when they address the emotional side of their chronic pain, even though for years they’ve been going to chiropractors, getting acupuncture, or maybe even getting injections of some kind of steroid. But when they address the emotions, the pain went away and it’s absolutely fascinating.
I even had a woman on the show recently talk about her Ph.D. thesis was scanning people’s brains while they did emotional work and saw that the pain would actually leave the body. She could see it in the brain, and that sometimes, that chronic pain was in the emotional centers. It lived in the emotional centers of the brain, and how fascinating is that? And this is something that you specialize in is helping people to heal on the emotional level like we should be focusing on.
We focus on healing the body physically, we should be focusing that much effort if not more effort on making sure we’re healthy emotionally. I’m thrilled that today you’re going to teach us more about your technique, the Emotion Code. Welcome to the show.
[00:05:23] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s really great to be here.
[00:05:26] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now, you have this really fascinating story that led you—both personally and professionally—to where you are today. I would love for you to share with our listeners so they can fully understand what happened in your life that had you become the healer you are today.
[00:05:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, it really started when I was seven years old I was really sick with the measles, and I’d overheard my parents talking. I knew that the plan was I was going into the hospital the next day and I was going into something called an oxygen tent. You know how it is when you’re a kid and you overhear your parents and they don’t think that you’re listening, but you are. So I knew the plan.
That night, I was lying on the couch. My parents had made a bed for me on the couch so that I could be near their room. I’m lying there on the couch just feeling really sick, and everyone else has gone to bed. My parents came into the room and my mother said to my father, “Honey, will you kneel down with me and say a prayer for our boy here so that he’ll be able to get well,” and so they did. Knowing my dad, I’m sure it was probably the first time that I ever heard my dad pray. My dad was a really great guy but he just was very private in that way.
Anyway, here they are, they’re kneeling down by the side of the couch. My dad is praying for me that I’ll be able to get well, and in the middle of this prayer, I had this unbelievable thing that happened. It started at the top of my head and it went whoosh through my body to the soles of my feet, and I was healed just instantly.
Now to go from being really sick one moment to being completely well in the next moment is just so bizarre, so impossible, and so unforgettable that I remember that like it happened yesterday after all those years. So I held my tongue until my dad was done praying, which didn’t take long. When he was done I said, “I’m better. I’m totally better. I’m totally better.” And they said, “That’s fine, go back to sleep. Tomorrow you’re going into the oxygen tent.” But the next day proved it. I was totally well.
So I filed that away. What I learned from that experience was that there is a higher power that we can draw upon, that higher power goes by different names, and I don’t think that it really matters too much. I think that we all have that capacity that we can ask for help from that invisible higher power, so that’s what I learned.
Fast forward about another seven years, things tend to run in those seven-year cycles, right? I started having these pains in my back that were so extreme they’d come out of nowhere and they would take my breath away or put me on the ground. I mean, it was like being stabbed with a knife or being run through with a sword or something. It was really extreme. My parents took me to the hospital and they ran all these tests on me. My parents were told that I had kidney disease, that it was about 50% fatal I found out years later from my mother, and that they had nothing to offer. There was no medical treatment, and my parents were told that my kidneys were either going to survive or not. If they didn’t survive, I wasn’t going to survive basically because they didn’t do kidney transplants back then. It was a long time ago.
My parents decided that they would take me to see some alternative doctors, some holistic doctors. Now, these doctors were actually a couple of old-time osteopathic doctors. If you go to an osteopath nowadays, in most cases it’s like going to a medical doctor. They prescribe books and so on, and there are some of them who still do some of the things that the old-time osteopathic doctors used to do. Their profession was a lot like chiropractic is now back in those days.
What happened was I think in the early 1960s or maybe the late ‘50s, the medical profession basically came to the osteopathic profession and said, look why don’t you just join us and we’ll make you like us and you can prescribe drugs and so on, and so they did. But these two, it was a man and a woman and I never really knew for sure, but I think they were kind of fond of each other. They may have a relationship, I never knew. They stayed out and didn’t want to have anything to do with becoming allopathic medical doctors, and so they stayed out of it.
They practiced out on the edge of town in a wheat field in a trailer house. I remember sometimes going there and there would be a busload of people that would just be leaving. People in other states would charter buses and come out and have treatments from these people. They were really really amazing people, really great healers. Dr. Alan Baine and Dr. Ida Harmon were their names.
So my folks took me to see these people. I can remember scraping the mud off my shoes trying to get into their trailer, and it was such a different experience from being in this big multi-million dollar clinic where they ran all these tests, where they couldn’t help me, they had nothing to offer. These people started working on me and right away I started feeling better. The pains right away were less severe, less frequent. And within about a month, I had pretty much forgotten that I’d never been sick. My parents took me back to the hospital and they ran all the tests on me, and as I recall they ran the tests twice. They said, “Well, that’s a spontaneous remission. Whatever we did must have helped.”
I was only 13 years old, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew that these people had actually helped me. So I decided at that time this is what I want to do with my life. I want to be a healer, and if I need to practice out on the edge of town in the middle of a wheat field in a trailer house, hey, that’s fine with me. Because those doctors seemed to know what was going on with me, and they seemed to know what I was doing. As far as I knew at age 13, doctors that were found in trailer houses out in wheat fields on the edge of town that seemed to be their natural habitat of doctors got results.
[00:12:25] Ashley James: Man, I want to see a doctor in a treehouse. Just imagine what they could do for you.
[00:12:33] Dr. Bradley Nelson: I did see a doctor in a treehouse once. It was in Hawaii. I’d hurt my back and found a chiropractor. I remember I was waiting in his office and it was on the north shore of Oahu. He actually climbed up the tree and then all of a sudden hopped into the open window from the tree into the waiting room. I thought, okay, I’m in the right place.
[00:13:01] Ashley James: This is my doctor.
[00:13:05] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Exactly.
[00:13:06] Ashley James: What kind of things did the osteopaths do to you? I mean, I’m imagining some form of almost like osteopathic or chiropractic adjustments, but what else did they do to help you heal your body so that your kidneys functioned again?
[00:13:22] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, mainly they were realigning my spine and they ultimately ended up giving me various different kinds of potions and concoctions that they had put together. But that’s mainly what it was back then. I had misalignments going on in my spine that were interfering with the communication between my brain and my kidneys that weakened my kidneys. They started realigning things for me. It was amazing how well it worked. I mean, really, the change in my body was something that was very obvious to me, something that I could really feel. That’s what happened back then.
So then, time went on and in 1980, I spent a semester at Brigham Young University Hawaii campus, which is in Laie on the North Shore of Oahu. That’s how I met that chiropractor that came in through the window. Anyway, I took a class in computer programming, and man, that was just something that I just immediately took over my life—computer programming. I became a computer programmer, and as time went on, I used to do consulting.
I had a business, I called myself the Computer Tutor, which I thought was really clever. Back in the early ‘80s when people would buy computers for their business and they’d have absolutely no idea what to do with it. It would just sit there. They’d hire me to come in and look at the business, program things, and get things set up. So that’s what I did, and I really, really loved that. There was something about computers that appealed to the perfectionist in me. If I wrote a program and it wasn’t actually perfect, it wouldn’t work. That had a great appeal.
So what happened was time went on. At the time, I was going to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah eventually and studying various different things. But I was about six months away from going into the MBA program to get my Master’s in Business, and I had decided that’s the direction I was going to go. I had this dream of going into the healing arts years before, but I kind of lost sight of that.
So my wife and I went back to Montana where I’m from and we were sitting around with my folks. It was Christmas time 1983. Out of the blue, my dad said to me, “Are you sure that you don’t want to go to chiropractic school because it seems like such a great career and you’ve always wanted to do it?” I said, “No, I’m going this other direction.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you think about it one more time?” So I said, “Okay.”
So my wife and I made up a pro and con list, on the one hand getting an MBA and going to work for some big company, and then on the other side going into the healing arts. If you’ve ever done a prone con list like that, I mean, there were appealing things on both sides, and doing that exercise didn’t really help me. But having learned years before that there’s a higher power that you can draw upon, that night I got on my knees and I prayed. I just said, “Father in heaven, if you have anything to say about this, help me to know what to do because I’m kind of in the middle of the fence now. I could go either way and be happy.”
So that night I was awakened three different times. When I would wake up it would almost be like I’d been having a dream, but it was an unremembered dream. I would wake up and my mind would be full of all these thoughts of how great it is to be able to help people naturally, heal people naturally, serve people, and so on. I would think, well, yeah. That’s true. But then, on the other hand, the computers and then I’d fall back asleep. That happened three times that night, so I’m still not convinced the next day and still don’t know what to do.
So that night I’m on my knees again and I’m praying and asking God can help me to figure this out because I still don’t know what to do—kind of thick-headed, apparently. That night, the second night, I had this experience where I was awakened again three different times like the night before, but on the second night, each time that I was awakened, the thoughts that I had when I was awakened, the feelings that I had were—if you can imagine—really exponentially more powerful each time. So that on the second night on the third time that I was awakened it was overwhelming at the thoughts of service to mankind, humanity, and the whole planet. I mean, it was absolutely overwhelming. And right then, I heard a voice that spoke to me as clearly as I’m speaking to you right now, Ashley, and it said, “This is a sacred calling.” And I thought, okay, I get it. Thank you. So that was it. I never looked back.
When I got into practice I figured well, God’s gotten me into this, maybe he’ll help me now. So I developed this habit, and the habit was that before I would go to work on someone I would just take a moment and just ask for help. I just say, “Father in heaven, please help me to help this person. Help me to know what they need in Jesus name, Amen,” basically like that. And it was a totally private, totally personal habit. Nobody ever knew that I was saying a prayer for them, but I was, and it was just a momentary pause really. But I’ll tell you something. I absolutely know for a fact that that higher power—whether you refer to it as God, Father, Jesus, the Creator, source energy, or whatever you want to call—is real, knows what we’re doing, and is aware of our lives.
There were times back then when somebody would come in to see me and I didn’t know sometimes what to do. I didn’t know how to approach this problem, I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to help this person. And in response to that silent prayer, the information that I needed would just flood into me like an avalanche of understanding. Sometimes it would be a totally different way of looking at things than I’d ever either ever considered before, and that nobody else had ever considered before either.
So basically, I was in practice for 17 years in a brick and mortar practice and for about another two and a half years in a distance practice. I had that habit all those years and nobody ever knew it was a totally private thing. Now I teach it as part of what I teach to people how to use the Emotion Code, how to use the body code. It’s part of what you do and what we teach people all over the world that it’s an important thing. Whatever you believe, it’s not a denominational thing. It’s just that if you believe in a higher power, well then, you’d be silly not to ask for help because you can get it. It’s available for the asking.
So one of the most powerful things that I learned during those years was that all of my patients—no matter how old or young they were, no matter what they were suffering from, whether they were dealing with migraine headaches, neck pain, back pain, knee pain, infertility, asthma, digestive problems, depression, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, PTSD, eating disorders, or self-sabotage of some kind—I saw the gamut. All of those people had something in common, and it was that they were suffering from what you might call emotional baggage.
We use that phrase emotional baggage, right? And we usually use it in reference to somebody else. We usually say things like, that guy’s really got a lot of emotional baggage, and it’s true. The thing is we all have emotional baggage, but what I learned is that our emotional baggage is actually a real thing. That our emotional baggage is a lot more concrete than we have ever thought. To understand how this works, you have to understand what the body really is.
If you look at your hand, for example, that hand looks pretty solid. You can slap it down on your desk. It makes a nice thunk sound. But if you were to put your hand under a big microscope like say an electron microscope, and if you were to keep zooming in and zooming in and magnifying your hand more and more and more, pretty soon you’d be looking at cells, then pretty soon you’d be looking at this parts of the cell, then pretty soon you’d be looking at the DNA, and then pretty soon you’d be looking at individual molecules. At somewhere between a million and maybe 850 million times magnification, eventually, you’re looking face to face at a single individual atom. If you keep magnifying a little more, you see inside the atom. There’s really nothing in there. It’s empty space. Our bodies are pure energy.
Now, we think of energy and we think of the matter, and we think that they’re different, but they’re really not. Albert Einstein said that there really is no matter. That all that matter is energy that has had its vibrations slowed down enough to a point that we’re actually able to perceive it. And so that’s what our bodies are. Our bodies are made of pure energy.
Some quantum physicists actually figured out recently that because our bodies are energy, you could easily put all 7.8 billion people on earth into a little box the size of a sugar cube and there would be room for even more. That is if you could take all of the empty space out of these bodies of ours.
It’s a strange thing really, our existence and these bodies of ours. That they are really more of a force field than anything else. But if you talk to any quantum physicist, they’ll all tell you that that is absolutely the truth about our existence, which is hard for us to wrap our heads around but that’s the truth of our reality, the truth of our existence.
So anyway, sometimes we feel intense emotions. Sometimes our parents are arguing, we’re little, and we’re crying ourselves to sleep at night. Sometimes we’re in high school, we go through a breakup, and it’s devastating. Sometimes somebody close to us dies or is sick, or sometimes we have a bad job. I mean, who knows. We have all kinds of things that go on, and we experience all kinds of emotions, and emotions are a tremendous gift. If we didn’t have emotions, I don’t think our lives wouldn’t be worth living. I think our life would just be a flat line.
So we have these emotions, and we have positive ones like joy, happiness, and so on, but we also have negative ones. It’s the negative ones that tend to cause trouble for us. Think about a time in your own life when you were really upset about something. Maybe it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it was today. Maybe it was last week. Were there things that you went through in your life that was difficult? Did you ever cry yourself to sleep at night, were you ever abused, or did you ever go through anything that was difficult to bear? The reality of it is the vast majority of people, with few exceptions, have gone through emotionally difficult things.
Now, the problem is when you’re feeling an intense emotion of anger or maybe it’s resentment, frustration, grief, or sadness—whatever it might be. When you’re feeling an emotion like that, if you’re feeling it powerfully enough, your whole being—that whole energy field that is who you are—can be resonating and vibrating with that particular frequency. Sometimes what happens is that emotion can be too powerful, and it can actually then become lodged in the body, and this is emotional baggage. We refer to this as trapped emotions.
A trapped emotion is a ball of energy that is from about the size of a baseball to about the size of a softball, and these become lodged in the body. They can lodge anywhere in the body, and then they will cause a couple of different effects. They will cause physical effects. Pain is one of the big effects that they tend to cause. Again, when I was in practice and I had all kinds of people suffering from all kinds of different problems, I found that emotional baggage or trapped emotional energies were often at the root of all of these problems.
So to give you an idea of how this can work, there was a man that came in to see me many years ago. He had really severe low back pain. It was a 9 on a 0-10 scale, he said. He rated himself. If it’s a 10 you go to the ER and he was a 9. He was in a lot of pain, and I tested him using the Emotion Code. And with the Emotion Code, what we’re able to do is we’re able to very simply, very easily tap into the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is where all the good information is. It’s the part of you that is keeping track of everything that’s ever happened to you in your life. It’s the part of you that remembers everything you’ve ever done, every face you’ve ever seen in a crowd, everything you’ve ever eaten, tasted, touched, or smelled. All the emotional energies that have gotten trapped in your body.
I’m testing him and I find he has trapped emotion, the emotion is anger. Testing a little bit further, I found this had occurred about 20 years before, and he immediately spoke up and remembered what had happened. He said it was a work situation. He had been falsely accused of something and was really angry about it. That was the emotion, that was what created this trapped emotional energy in his body. So I released that trapped emotion, and his pain level went from a nine to a zero in the snap of a finger, boom. It was gone. It was unbelievable. He kept bending over, walking around in my office, twisting this way that way, and exclaiming he couldn’t believe it. It was like a miracle really, and I was grateful that it worked so well. Why did that happen?
There are two parts really to this story, but the first part is the pain relief that this guy got. Why did that happen? Well, you see, when you have a trapped emotion, it literally is a ball of emotional energy. What it’s doing is it’s residing somewhere in your body, and it’s distorting the normal energy field of your body. When the normal energy field of your body is distorted, that’s all your body is ultimately an energy field. This guy had a trapped emotion of anger. It was in his low back, and after 20 years of having all of those tissues distorted by that anger energy, eventually, it was causing severe pain. With the release of that trapped emotion, the pain was gone because that distorting force that that emotion was creating in those tissues suddenly was gone.
Well, the story didn’t end there. A couple of days later he came back in to see me for a follow-up visit. He said to me, “My back pain is still gone. I still can’t quite believe it, but I have to tell you something. When I came here I had another problem that I didn’t tell you about. For as long as I can remember, I’ve basically been what you would call a rage-a-holic. I’m always yelling at my wife and my kids. I’ve got to watch road rage. I’ve been to anger management several times, it hasn’t really helped me. I’m just an angry person. I’m just kind of on edge all the time.
Since you worked on me and you released that emotion of anger, I feel really different. Things that would set me off before don’t set me off now. I feel kind of relaxed and I feel a certain level of peace. How did you do that? How does that work?” At the time I said, “Well, I really don’t know. I just work here.” But here’s what we believe, okay. Think about this, and this is I believe the actual truth about emotional baggage.
This guy’s got this ball of energy, this ball of anger in his low back, which seems very strange but I’m telling you that’s how this works. It’s distorting the energy field in his low back until eventually, it’s bad enough that he comes to see me. But overall of those 20 years, it has altered his personality because when a situation would come along in his life where he might tend to become angry, he would become angry much more readily, much more easily. Why? Because part of his body is feeling that emotion of anger 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You see, every emotion is a frequency, it’s an energy, and it’s a particular vibration. Because part of his body was already vibrating at that frequency—that vibration of anger—it was easy for him to fall into that resonance. That’s why after 20 years, he believed that he was an angry person until that trapped emotion was released.
That’s a great example you see of what our emotional baggage does to us and how it affects us. It’s such an incredible thing. Sometimes people have physical injuries that leave them with pain for years and years and years, and by removing their emotional baggage, sometimes that just disappears even though it was a physical injury in the beginning.
In fact, just a couple of days ago—we post a new testimonial every day on our site. We have far too many that we can actually post. Our site is at discoverhealing.com, by the way. I’m looking at our site and there’s a testimonial I want to share with you.
This was from February 2nd this year. A woman named Sabrina from Valbonne in France said, “Twenty years ago, I had a big car accident with two whiplashes in a row. It was very painful and for years I had substantial neck problems and vertigo. The agony became worse over the years and, because I had children, I could not get any rest. Eventually, five years ago, my body collapsed with neuralgia and I had to stay in bed for days.” Neuralgia is nerve pain. “The pain was so intense that I went to see several doctors and chiropractors, but it did not help very much. Sometimes it was so excruciating that they could not even touch me.
Then I heard of the Emotion Code and it was like a miracle. I healed myself! Today I can play tennis, run, look after my kids, and work once again. This method saved my life! Many thanks! I want to share it with everyone who is in pain because I know how much things can improve!”
There’s a great example of that, right? Somebody who had a really bad car accident 20 years ago and using the Emotion Code on herself she was able to, apparently, get out of pain. She says it saved her life.
[00:34:35] Ashley James: I’d be curious to know—and maybe you wouldn’t know maybe from her but from others—was the trapped emotion about the car accident or did she create the car accidents because of a trapped emotion? The reason why I bring that up is one of my past mentors was getting in a series of fender benders until she realized that she was creating them. It was other people hating her, but there were so many. It was like 12 of them. So many of them that she realized because she was very spiritual and did a lot of emotional work herself—master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming. She saw in herself when she went back and went okay, why am I creating this? What’s my belief system? What’s going on.
She realized that she was creating them because of the emotional distress she was having around her job and how much her unconscious was fighting her because it was completely going against her value system. Staying in that job was going against every fiber of her being but she kept shoulding herself like golden handcuffs, like I should stay here. So she was creating these disruptions to basically not go to work, but there’s a lot of emotions around her work, around feeling neglected and abused. So she had to work on that, get away from the job, work on the emotion, and then she stopped creating car accidents.
But she thought isn’t this interesting that some people—if you get out of victim mode in life right, and I really always have to preface this when I talk about being victim versus being at cause. I’m in no way saying that rape victims created it for themselves. This is just an exercise, it’s a mental exercise.
But if you can take on the mental exercise of being at cause in your world versus being a victim of things that have happened to you, then from the standpoint of being at cause you can go, so why did I create that? And not for blame but more for what’s going on at the unconscious level that I put myself in this position to be in this accident? Even if someone else hit me, what’s going on? Can I own this from the standpoint of what can I learn from it? How can I grow from this and what is there for me to learn here? Is there something that happened in my life that had me put myself in this situation?
Because all of our conscious and unconscious choices have led us to where we are today. And so if we own them and then we can learn from them, then we can look back and go, oh maybe this is connected to the emotions that were happening, the turmoil, or the unresolved issues that were happening prior to the accident.
I just wonder if in her situation, if she couldn’t heal fully from the neck pain because of emotions that created during the accident like feeling the injustice of being in a bad accident, or was it that she was having issues with motherhood, with her husband—whatever dissatisfaction in her life, whatever stuff was happening before the accident, still her body was holding on to that pain from the injury for years later because she hadn’t worked on it.
So I would just be interested to know what is the root cause? In a lot of cases, when it comes to an injury that lasts for years, is the root cause prior to the injury oftentimes, or is it the emotions from that injury itself?
[00:38:19] Dr. Bradley Nelson: It depends. If I had to bet, I would say that probably there was some emotional baggage that helped to precipitate the accident. When we have trapped emotions, what they do is they send out—they’re continually broadcasting their vibration out into the universe. And so then that tends to draw things to us that tend to create more of that.
The other thing that happens is when you have an injury—the intense emotional experiences that you go through after that for years or decades—will often tend to become trapped in that area and make the distortion worse. A great example of this is a guy that I worked with many years ago. This guy came into my office, his name was Steve and he came in with his wife. He had a really severe tennis elbow. I mean, his arm was in a sling and he couldn’t turn the keys to start his car. It was so excruciating. I was barely able to touch the area, there was so much pain there.
So I started working with him and doing the normal chiropractic things and I wasn’t having too much success with it. So at the time, I was just learning about the emotional side of this, I was learning about trapped emotions. So I asked his subconscious mind, and we use muscle testing different types to get answers from the subconscious, and it’s all taught. We teach it very clearly in the Emotion Code book.
So I asked his subconscious mind, is there a trapped emotion that is contributing to this tennis elbow? And the answer immediately was yes. What I found was that he had a number of trapped emotions that had become lodged in that area of his elbow during the years that he was in high school. Now he was about 42 years old when I was seeing him. So he’d been out of high school for a long time, but it was funny because every trapped emotion had to do with a girl who had basically rejected him.
It was so funny because his wife was sitting there, and I’m muscle testing him and he’s saying, “Well, let’s see. Was it Sheila?” His arm would go down, “No, okay. Was it Cheryl? No. Shawna? Oh, yeah. That one’s strong. Yeah, Shawna. Yeah, she dumped me.” And so it was all these trapped emotions about that.
Here’s the thing, he was on the tennis team in high school. So what’s happening is as he’s dating these girls and they’re rejecting him, he’s also playing tennis and he’s incurring micro-trauma to those muscles that are being used the most. So that’s where the trapped emotions would lodge. The interesting thing about it is I think there were six different trapped emotions that needed to be released. The story’s in the book actually. It was so funny.
But the amazing thing really is that every time we’d release a trapped emotion, the pain level would just instantly drop. The pain level just kept dropping and dropping and dropping with the release of each trapped emotion until finally, we cleared the last trapped emotion and the pain was completely, completely gone. He couldn’t believe it. He took the sling off and he’s moving his arm around. I could go in and I could press deeply into those muscles, there was no pain anymore. I remember that was the first time that I had seen this phenomenon where you can have more than one trapped emotion in one place.
But that was a great example to me of how trapped emotions can accumulate in an area and can eventually cause just extreme pain. What we find now is that about 90% of all the physical pain that people have is actually due to their emotional baggage to trapped emotions. We’ve got almost 7,000 practitioners of the Emotion Code now in 80 countries around the world, and we’re all finding the same thing. That if you’re in pain, there’s a very high probability that that pain is actually due to some emotional baggage. It’s actually really simple.
[00:43:02] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’m a master practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming timeline therapy and hypnosis. Back in 2005, my mentors were enamored with the book Healing Back Pain.
[00:43:22] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh yeah, by Dr. Sarno.
[00:43:24] Ashley James: Yes, Sarno. So what he discovered—unfortunately, he has passed away. I tried to get him on the show but he had passed away. Well, he was working, and I don’t think he was a medical doctor. I mean, this was back in 2005 I read the book. But he was doing work with hospitals and looking at the records and more administration work, looking at all the administration stuff seeing that all these back surgeries these patients were still having pain. Oh, we got rid of their bulging disc. We surgically removed it. Why do they still have pain? Why are they still on disability? Why are they still on these drugs?
So he started to look at stuff and found that—I can’t remember the statistic right now, I wish I could remember off top of my head, but it was so crazy something like 70% of all the MRIs they do, there’s some form of a bulging disc and yet people are asymptomatic. He’s like, how can we have someone who has a bulging disc that has no pain, but when people have pain in their back we always assume it’s a bulging disc. So we do these scans, then we blame the disc, and then we remove the disc, but they still have pain so it’s not the disc. So what is it?
And then he just dove in like you did, figuring it out. What he saw was that there was ischemia, which is a cutoff of blood flow to the muscles when there was an emotion withheld. So I had a client come to me, this was 2006. So still, a long time ago. She was a long-distance runner, she was in a lot of pain, she was very fit, and she was in her 50s closing in on her 60s.
She said, “I’m on Tylenol—three every day—and I really don’t want to be on it because it’s not exactly good for you.” I started talking to her. I was like, “Well, how long have you had the pain?” She’s like, “Oh, you know a few years maybe four or six years.” And as we kept going back in her history, it’s like her brain couldn’t fully accept or remember. It actually had been more like 15 years that she had been in pain and been on these drugs. She’s like, “Oh wow, I didn’t realize how much time had passed.”
I got to the root cause because guilt kept coming up as we talked, and what we figured out was she’s catholic and she had an abortion. She felt so guilty about it and she said to herself, “I have to pay for this guilt with pain.” She actually said that. She wouldn’t allow the doctor to give her pain medicine during her abortion, and she said, “I have to pay for it with pain.” And she did, but what was interesting because I was also in Canada, I was a registered massage therapist and worked in sports rehab, in sports medicine.
Before we started our session I said, “Can I palpate your back?” because she was pointing towards the quadratus lumborum on the left side, and I palpated. On the left side, it was hard as a rock ice cold. Now, this was in Florida. I was living in Florida at the time. I mean, it’s warm. On the right side, it’s flush, it’s a very good color, it’s warm and palpable. But on the left side, it’s like I’m touching granite. I thought this was interesting. This is ischemia. The whole muscle is just not letting any blood flow in, and that’s incredibly painful. Of course, when bands of muscle cause ischemia around the innervation of the nerve, it will create just incredible pain. Sometimes the pain will travel to different areas, but it’s very painful.
As she gets into talking about guilt, the pain goes up. I keep asking her where is your pain level? Now, I mean, my session with her was like six hours long. Sounds like your session would have been like six minutes. Your program sounds like maybe it’s more effective in that it sounds a lot quicker. But by the end of it, we released the negative emotion of guilt at the root level. I said, “Where’s your pain?” and I’m kind of expecting it to be less. She’s like, “It’s gone. It’s gone.” She’s like jumping up and down. She’s like, “How is it gone? How is it gone?”
So she goes back to her hotel room and I didn’t tell her to do this because I’m not a doctor, but she flushed all of her meds down the toilet. She was on three meds, one of them was an anti-anxiety med. She came to me the next day she’s like, “I took myself off all my meds. I’m not on the pain meds. I’m not on the anti-inflammatory meds. I’m not on the anxiety meds. I feel like a million bucks. I feel amazing.” And her pain was still gone. “Can I touch your back?” and her back on both sides were warm and palpable.
That was the most amazing thing for me to see that someone physically that their muscles that were holding—I mean like you said, the size of a softball or a baseball. Her entire quadratus lumborum, which is quite a big muscle, so bigger than a softball was hard, ischemic, cold, and holding on to guilt for 15 years. That to me just blew my mind. How many people are on meds, emotional medication, and also physical medication, and suppressing and putting a band-aid on and just pushing it down and pushing it down and pushing it down and then poisoning their bodies? And they’re not free of it.
That affects every area of their life just like one of your clients whose anger spilled over into every area of his life. Her guilt spilled over into every waking moment of her life, so just to be free of that. I’m so excited that people can learn your technique through your book and they can also then train. Can anyone become a practitioner of the Emotion Code?
[00:49:23] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yes, anybody can become a practitioner. There’s really no prerequisites. It’s a simple program. It’s a six-month program, most people do it in about half the time. If you’re interested, there’s more information there—discoverhealing.com is our website.
Listen to this one because it never ceases to amaze me. Here’s one that came in from a guy named Robbi Cuijpers from Posterholt in the Netherlands. This was posted on the third, so today’s the ninth. Anyway, he said, “One night I woke up with a terrible toothache. It was around 2:00 AM and I couldn’t sleep anymore. I was suffering so much I was about to call the emergency desk and go to the hospital. It felt dreadful. Then suddenly the question popped into my head, “Could there possibly be some trapped emotions causing this horrible pain?”
“So, I gathered all the willpower I could find, jumped out of bed, and started sway testing for trapped emotions.” That’s where you stand up and your body will sway forward for yes and backward for no. “And yes, I had some trapped emotions that were causing the tooth pain. With the release of each emotion, my toothache instantly subsided. With the fifth and last emotion released, the pain was practically zero.
I then went to bed feeling on top of the world knowing the power of The Emotion Code.”
[00:50:43] Ashley James: That’s amazing. I love it. And the unconscious mind controls all of our muscle movements. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen it where you can ask your unconscious mind questions and it can control the micro muscle movements of a finger or an arm, or like you said, the sway test. If someone is in a wheelchair, there are other ways. You could do it because the unconscious mind controls the muscles of the body. You can communicate with it, which not that many people know.
I was always afraid of my unconscious mind when I began to study, learn more, and dive into it, and then once I developed a relationship with my unconscious mind, it was actually the most rewarding thing because it’s you, it’s the rest of you. It’s the rest of you and your unconscious mind. It’s just you, it’s just more of you, but it’s the rest of you that loves you. Your unconscious mind adores you, loves you, wants to keep you safe, wants to keep you healthy.
I mean, trying to understand John E. Sarno’s philosophy behind why the unconscious mind creates this ischemic pain? I’m not saying it’s always ischemic pain because like you’ve mentioned it can be injuries and joints and things like that, although I’d love your opinion. I guess the hypothesis is that the unconscious mind wants to resolve these issues and so it’s bringing it to your attention.
[00:52:06] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, that’s exactly how I look at it. Yes, the symptoms that we have are really just the subconscious mind trying to get our attention so that we can open a dialogue and figure out what’s really going on. What the underlying cause of our problem really is. What is it that’s unresolved? What do we need to deal with that we’ve never dealt with? I love what you said about the subconscious—that it adores us and it is the rest of us. It’s absolutely so true. That’s what it is.
It’s not just pain. Listen to this one. This is another one. This was posted on February 8th, I guess yesterday. This woman Susan from Utah wrote and she said, “My husband, John, recently went through radiation therapy for prostate cancer. One of the side effects has been a terrible itching that would not stop after his therapy. His radiation doctor said that John could be allergic to something new but didn’t think the medication he had prescribed was doing it. John went to a dermatologist and was told that all older men get dry skin and that was it. I had recently read the Emotion Code and I tried it on his itching. The next day he completely stopped itching! In his eyes, this was a miracle!” You never know. Try it on anything.
[00:53:25] Ashley James: Right. Well, the thing is, all day long we have emotions. All-day long we have experiences, and how often do we actually sit back and unpack those experiences, process those emotions, and digest them like you would digest a very healthy meal? It’s like we’re taking care of our bodies, and so many of the people who are listening would sit down and eat a beautiful very nutritious meal, chew each bite until it’s fully digested, and really give themselves, bathe themselves in nutrition. Give themselves the time, the space, and the peace to digest their food because they know nutrition is so important.
And yet when it comes to our emotions, we treat it like we’re going through the drive-thru and just scarfing it down and not even tasting it and then just throwing it back and expecting our body just to deal with it. Just deal with it. It’s so funny that we’re treating our body like we’re eating fast food when it comes to our emotions, but we take our physical body so seriously and we don’t take our emotional body that seriously.
I also believe there’s a stigma, and it depends on your generation. I see the younger generation. I’m 40 years old. I’m turning 41. Hopefully my mid-life is years to come, but I look at the younger kids and I see that they’re more open to counseling and therapy because there’s not a stigma for them. For the older generations, there was a large stigma around going to counseling. The thing is that working on your emotions is like going to the gym. You’re just going to the gym for your heart and your mind and just find the right trainer. Not every trainer out there is going to be the right trainer for you. Not every counselor is going to be the right counselor for you.
But I have clients who say that their sessions, working with their therapist have been the most rewarding thing possible because it’s just the place they get to digest, absorb, process, release, let go of, and understand their emotions and how they react. And then they notice that they stop just reacting and spewing onto their family and spewing onto their kids. They actually catch themselves, they take a deep breath, and they’re able to then come from a place of communication that has love and has respect because they processed all the stuff that happened last week, last month, last year instead of just bottling it up and then spewing at people.
This particular idea of sitting down and respecting our emotional and physical body by working with the Emotion Code I think could be so rewarding.
Now back to my question about ischemia, is it always muscles? Is it always ischemic pain, or do you find sometimes there’s bone pain? I know you mentioned that man had tooth pain. That could have also been a referral pain from a trigger point. Do you think it’s always ischemia though, or have you seen it where there’s absolute evidence that it’s not created in a muscle?
[00:56:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, yes. See the thing about it is trapped emotions can lodge in different areas. They can really lodge anywhere. They can lodge in a specific organ. So the way that we look at it is a little different from Dr. Sarno’s, and I have tremendous respect for what he did and the consciousness that he was able to create for people that this kind of thing goes on. But trapped emotions can lodge in different places. One of the most fascinating things that we see is that they will often form into a wall around the heart to protect the heart from being broken, and we call that a Heart- Wall. That’s one of the most interesting things that we see.
With the Heart-Wall, it’s not necessarily that we see the ischemic pain so much. Although sometimes, people do have that. But there’s a whole another dimension to it. Anciently, the ancient peoples believed that the heart was the seed of the soul, the source of love, the source of romance, the source of creativity, and really the core of our being. Even now, after all these thousands of years, anywhere you go on earth, if it’s Valentine’s day or if someone is romancing you, they’ll give you a box of something tasty that’s probably shaped like a heart. So these are ancient ideas.
I mean, the word heart is mentioned just shy of a thousand times in the bible, for example. There are these scriptures in the bible that say things like God doesn’t look on the outward appearance of a person, instead, he looks on the heart. There’s another one that says that as we think in our hearts, so we will be. In the west, we’ve never really paid much attention to those old ideas because medicine is still very mechanistically oriented, still very rooted in Newtonian physics. So the heart is just a muscle and we know it’s a muscle. It just pumps blood, that’s all it does, and that’s how we’ve looked at it for many, many years.
But in the last 20 years or so, there has been new instrumentation developed, and new studies that have been done that show some amazing things. For example, they found that when one person is feeling love or affection for another person that their heartbeat will become measurable in the brain waves of that other person on an EEG. They found that their heartbeats will synchronize. So there’s this connection going on between all of us that we have not necessarily been aware of.
But what we discovered, what was actually shown to us back in 1998, my wife had a dream. She asked me to help her decipher her dream. As I’m trying to do that, all of a sudden I have this experience that I can only describe as a waking vision where the room that I was in suddenly disappeared and I’m looking instead of this incredibly beautiful hardwood floor with this understanding that my wife’s heart is underneath this floor.
Now, this is one of the strangest things that I’ve ever experienced, and I don’t take drugs. I don’t even use caffeine anymore. I’m very straight that way. But anyway, this lasted for several minutes. I told my wife what I was seeing and understanding. She didn’t know what it meant either. We prayed, asked God to help us figure this out.
We started muscle testing her, and what we found was that when she was two years old—because she was born into a very volatile, very dysfunctional family—she, at some point around that age, thought her heart was going to break and so she started building a wall around her heart. This wall was literally made from layers of her emotional baggage. So she’d had this wall around her heart all of these years. We asked if we could start removing these, and it took us a couple of weeks to take down this wall one emotion at a time.
When the last one was removed, all of a sudden, things really shifted for her because for one thing, whatever group of friends that she’d ever been with, she never really truly felt like she belonged anywhere like she was always the odd person out. She always felt kind of expendable until that was removed, then suddenly, she felt like she belonged. The depression, the anxiety that she had to deal with decreased dramatically.
Initially, when we discovered this, it was really shown to us. It’s very much a God thing trying to get this out into the world this understanding. Initially, I thought it was maybe just her, that she was the only person on earth that had this. But what we find now is that about 93% of people have this phenomenon going on, and it’s called a Heart-Wall.
The most recent testimonial that I have about this—we’ve got about 10,000+ testimonials on our site. We get new ones every single day. We’ll pick one every day and post it. This one came in on February 4th. This is from a woman named Fawn. Apparently, one of our practitioners from Ohio said, “My most meaningful experience using the Emotion Code is with a client named Paul. He is a 70-year-old man who had such a horrific and abusive childhood that he built a Heart-Wall to protect himself. He never married or even had a close relationship. He has had many acquaintances but no close friends.
After our Emotion Code sessions, he is now transformed! He went out and got his motorcycle endorsement at 70! And now he is actively looking for a lady to enjoy it with him. He simply shines! The transformation is the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed.”
Think about this, 93% of people have this phenomenon, this Heart-Wall phenomenon going on. What it does is it interferes with your ability to give and receive love for one thing, but also to really create the life that you want because the best ideas that you’ll ever have are not in your brain, they’re in your heart. And the heart we know now is really a second brain. The heart is filled with gray matter and white matter, it really is a second brain.
In fact, when scientists a number of years ago looked at the communications along the nerves between the brain and the heart, they found the vast majority of communications were going from the heart to the brain, and they were expecting it to be just the opposite.
What one of the first people that I saw after we worked on my wife with this was a nurse that came in to see me. She was 38 years old, and she came in because she had this terrible neck pain that she’d seen a couple of doctors for—they haven’t been able to help her. As I was talking with her she told me that she was single. She had not dated in eight years and was never going to date again.
So she’s 38, hasn’t dated in eight years, she’s basically celibate. She was an attractive person. I said, “Well, why do you feel this way? What happened to you?” She said eight years before, she’s really deeply in love with this guy who dumped her and broke her heart. That was it. She hadn’t dated since then. So I tested her and found, sure enough, she had put up a wall around her heart from that breakup. There were three emotions, three layers making up this wall. We cleared those emotions one at a time, and when the last one was gone, instantaneously the neck pain was gone—instantaneously.
When we see instantaneous pain relief like in this case and like in the case with the guy that I told you about in the beginning that had the anger from 20 years before, I think there’s more going on than just the ischemia. I think if those arteries and veins open up a little bit, it’s going to take a little bit of time for things to shift, but we see instantaneous relief of pain in many cases. That’s what happened to her.
That’s not the end of the story though. She left the office feeling totally fine and didn’t come back for three months. When she came back into my office—I’ll always remember this—she looked great. I said, “Hey, you look great. I haven’t seen you for a while. How are you?” She said, “You know, my neck’s been fine since I was here. You cleared that Heart-Wall for me, that really works. About two weeks after I was here, I found out my childhood sweetheart has been living right around the corner from me for almost eight years. We’re dating and we’re in love, and I think he’s going to ask me to marry him.” Wow, what a shift. Holy smokes.
[01:06:04] Ashley James: You got me fascinated when you said that it can manifest in the organs. We often hear anger in the liver and fears in the lungs or the kidneys. If someone has something with their pancreas, an illness with their pancreas because, with type 2 diabetes, it’s not necessarily a pancreatic issue. If someone has a known illness with an organ or like fatty liver disease or they have a traumatic brain injury, have you seen people take something—either acute or chronic—that’s in an organ that’s been labs diagnosed, been tracking it, seeing that yes there’s an injury or there’s a disease state and they worked on the emotions that were there? Have you seen people, their bodies heal to the point where they’ve been able to heal organs?
[01:07:16] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yes. For example, one of the most common examples of that that we see is actually infertility where we find trapped emotions, for example, in the uterus. By removing those trapped emotions [inaudible 01:07:35] conceive. Think about all the different organs. The first thing that you have to understand is that every disease process that people experience has an emotional component every single time. In our experience now, doing this for 32 years, there’s always an emotional component.
If you identify the emotional component and you release that emotional baggage that’s affecting that area, then yes, things turn around. We’ve seen it happen over and over and over, so yes. In fact, trapped emotions can affect very specific parts of the body. For example, you might have a trapped emotion affecting your pineal gland, maybe the hypothalamus, or the pituitary. You might have trapped emotions that are affecting the thyroid gland. See all that this does really is it just removes the encumbrances that are in the body’s way of being able to function like the body wants to.
The body wants to be healthy, it wants to function normally, but when you’ve got emotional baggage, those are encumbrances, those are blockages to really being able to heal and to function normally. In fact, here’s a really dramatic story that I haven’t thought of for many, many years. But in talking about this, it’s reminded me of this.
There was a woman that came in to see us once who had fibromyalgia, which is this pain that you get all over the body that is very difficult, no known cure, and so on. I was able to help her with that, and then she told my wife and I about her daughter. What had happened with her daughter was that her daughter had gotten married about six months before, but her daughter suffered from vaginismus, which is the tightening down of the opening of the vagina.
She and her husband, still after six months, had not been able to have intercourse. They’d never been able to consummate their marriage. The marriage is starting to show signs of stress, and so she asked if we would look at her daughter. So we did so. Her daughter came in and we checked her. My wife found something that I don’t think we’d ever seen before, and I don’t think we’ve ever seen it since. But this girl had what we ended up calling a vaginal wall.
So in the sense, if you think about a Heart-Wall, if you feel like your heart is going to break, you’re feeling a physical sensation like there’s an elephant sitting on your chest, or maybe like you can’t breathe. There’s a physical thing going on there. The subconscious mind will put up a wall. The wall is an invisible wall to us, but to the subconscious, it’s very, very real I think. My wife’s Heart-Wall, the symbolic material was wood. She grew up in a house with hardwood floors.
So the subconscious will always choose some kind of material, and we’ve seen heart wall symbolic materials everything from plastic to glass to iron. But anyway, this young woman had a wall that her subconscious mind had put up in that area of her body to protect herself, and then she told us that she had been sexually abused at some point as a child. So anyway, we cleared the trapped emotions that were creating that, and it was the next day her mom called us and she said, “Guess what? Everything’s working. Thank you.” And in fact, she said, “Her husband is coming home. He’s spending his lunch breaks at home now for a catch-up.”
[01:12:02] Ashley James: I had a friend who had that and she had to have surgery. She had surgically had her vaginal opening altered so that she could have intercourse. It’s very interesting that she had the same condition. She spent years doing everything. Obviously, she didn’t learn about the Emotion Code. It would have been a lot easier than having surgery.
[01:12:31] Dr. Bradley Nelson: That was their next step really. Their next step is surgery. But luckily, we were able to avoid that.
[01:12:37] Ashley James: I’m just going to throw this out there, I like to get weird. What about people who are in a coma who has maybe dementia. Maybe children who are nonverbal autistic or adults who are non-verbal autistic. Is there any way to do this technique with people who can’t clearly communicate with you?
[01:13:05] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh yes, absolutely. It’s not a problem at all. The reason why is because the subconscious mind never sleeps. So it doesn’t matter. People can be worked on when they’re asleep, when they’re in a coma. In fact, let me tell you a story. This is actually in the Emotion Code book. We have twin boys. My wife and I had seven kids together, and then she had a daughter before we met. So we have a total of eight, but we have twin boys that are 31 years old now. When they were four years old, we thought that one of them had a problem with his hearing because he wouldn’t speak in full sentences. His brother on the other hand was a total chatterbox, but he wouldn’t speak in full sentences. We just didn’t know what was wrong.
So we took him to a hearing specialist thinking maybe he was a little bit deaf, but his hearing was totally fine. At that time, we were really first learning about trapped emotions. So one night, we decided to work on him when he was asleep. Now, in the book, we explain how you do this. It’s a simple process, but we worked on him when he was asleep and we found that he had an inherited trapped emotion of anger from my wife’s father.
So in other words, when my wife was conceived in the womb, there was emotional energy of anger that was passed from grandpa. When we conceived this little boy of ours, that energy was passed to him. So we cleared that, released that. He’s asleep so we’re working on him when he’s asleep, no problem, subconscious never sleeps. We cleared a couple of other trapped emotions. The next morning at breakfast, guess who will not shut up. My wife and I are just looking at each other like a couple of owls like we just cannot believe what’s happening.
We all have emotional baggage, and getting rid of it is so important. If you think about it, if you’ve got a heart-wall and there’s about a 90% chance that you do, then what that’s doing is it’s interfering with your ability to give and receive love and your ability to really create the life that you want because your best life and the best creative ideas that you have are actually in your heart, are not in your head.
The beautiful thing about the Emotion Code is that it’s really, really simple. Anybody can do it. Kids can do it. We have kids that are having great success with it in different parts of the world. You can learn how to do it yourself, you can use it yourself, use it on your own kids, you can use it on your husband, on your wife, on your children, and so on.
[01:16:25] Ashley James: Can you do it with babies?
[01:16:27] Dr. Bradley Nelson: You absolutely can do it with babies. You can even do it with babies before they’re even born. When they’re in the womb you can work on them.
[01:16:35] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That is so cool. I’m 32 weeks pregnant so I better start reading. Can you do it with animals?
[01:16:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: You absolutely can do it with animals. In fact, let me see, there was a story that I was just looking at here on our site. Let me see if I can find that really quick.
[01:16:56] Ashley James: I consider myself an open-minded skeptic, like a really, really open-minded skeptic. I wouldn’t be prompted to ask that question if I hadn’t had an experience where a friend of mine asked me to do emotional work on her dog and I’m like I’ll try.
Basically, the dog’s parents are splitting up. The two owners were going their separate ways, and the dog was picking up on the tension and it was a wiener dog. All of a sudden, his back legs stopped working. He became paralyzed, and the vet said this is common with wiener dogs. But there was no trauma. He didn’t fall down, get kicked, or hurt. He didn’t bump himself. He just all of a sudden, his parents are splitting up. There’s tension in the household, and now he isn’t working.
So I sat with him, I held him in my hands, and I just started my heart communicating to his heart. All of that information came flooding to me. I’m like, okay, let’s fill you with love and get you to see that your parents love you. You’re going to be in their lives and you get to have two homes now. They’re going to share. Your parents are getting divorced but you still have them. They’re not leaving you. They’re just leaving each other. The three of us were talking to him and telling him that, and then he got up and started by his tail and his legs worked again. We’re like okay, that works.
I’ve had other people on the show who are healers. One guest of mine helped a horse with her fertility issues. She was having miscarriages basically and this horse wasn’t able to conceive. So he did emotional work with the horse and the horse was able to heal from the emotions of all the sadness from the lost pregnancies. And then the next one worked and she was able to get pregnant. I’m like, okay. You know what, there’s something very interesting going on here. Of course, animals have emotions. If you’ve ever had a cat or dog, you make a connection with them, and there’s more there. There’s love, there’s acceptance, there’s joy. They have some very interesting emotions.
There are so many studies done now where they can actually see that animals have emotions. I’m not doing a debate as to whether they have a soul or not, or whether they go to heaven or not. I mean, those are all very interesting conversations to have. But the fact is that if we as humans can—and we’re animals too—but if we can heal physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, energetically by using the Emotion Code and working on our emotions and healing them, why not animals? I love that you said we can work with babies.
I just imagine the parents who have autistic children who are non-verbal could be doing this with their children. How beautiful is that? Sorry, you had a testimonial about working with animals?
[01:19:55] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh, right. This one just came in. This is from a woman named Beate in Germany. This came in on the first of February. She said, “Lilly, the dog of a family friend, suddenly no longer wanted to go up the stairs in her home and only managed to do so with a lot of start-up and motivation from her owner. Nothing seemed to be wrong physically. By the time my friend shared this with me, sitting together in a cafe, it had been going on for a long time. So, right there I connected remotely with Lilly the dog, and released a few of her trapped emotions. When my friend got home that afternoon, Lilly ran up the stairs without any complaints. A few days later, when her “fear of stairs” came back, I was able to solve a few more things. Now Lilly has no more problems walking up the stairs.”
And what’s interesting about this one too is that this was done at a distance. Of course, that’s because this is energy medicine really in its purest form. It’s not bound at all by distance, and so that’s a fun one, huh?
[01:20:59] Ashley James: Right. When you start studying quantum physics, you realize we’re all in the milieu together. It doesn’t matter if we’re 1,000 miles away or 1 foot away from each other. We have this energetic connection. I just love that. It blew my mind. It completely changed my life. My life took a 180 after I saw the movie What The Bleep Do We Know because I went like oh my gosh. This energy. Stop thinking in terms of chemicals and matter. Think in terms of energy. It’s all about energy. So that just makes total sense that emotions are energy and having them trapped in the body, very interesting.
You lived and went to school in Hawaii for a while. I studied Huna because I thought of the ancient Polynesian technique. I wouldn’t even call it a religion because it was more like their lifestyle. It was how they breathed, how they loved, how they healed, how they fished. Huna was their philosophy for living, and in Huna, there’s a belief. Now, this is hundreds or thousands of years old, who knows, but it’s an ancient Polynesian belief system about living and life.
They believed that emotions would become trapped in the body like black boulders stored in bags inside us. Like if you looked at a river and saw a river with no boulders would be calm, but a river with many boulders would be turbulent. So they had this idea that the more trapped emotions you had, the more the chi was turbulent within you and was thrown off. So I’ve always carried that imagery in my mind. So of course we would want to heal and release these emotions.
Now you’ve talked about getting the book the Emotion Code, but you’ve also talked about this course. Could someone who was very passionate like I am wanting to do this to all their friends and family, let’s say, and themselves and obviously the family being receptive, would the book be enough? Would it suffice, or should someone who really wants to do this technique with their animals, their kids, their husband, and their friends—should they take the course? Who should take the course and who should read the book?
[01:23:24] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, the information is definitely in the book. People all over the world are reading the book, putting it into practice, learning how it works. If you really want to master it or if you want to actually charge people for sessions, then we do want you to go through the certification program. The certification program that we have is an online program, and it’s available—you can go to discoverhealing.com. It’s actually on sale right now. It’s not an expensive program. It’s all online. You go through at your own pace. Most people will go through it in about three months, the record is two weeks. It just depends on how motivated you are.
But the nice thing about that is that it gives you rails to run on. I mean, think about it, I know that you’ve done this because I’ve done this and I think so many people have done this where you go to some really great course or something and you buy some materials and then a year later you come across it when they’re still shrink-wrapped. You think, oh yeah, I really wanted to learn that.
So the certification program gives you some deadlines, enables you to really learn it well, and get a lot of practice. You have a student advisor that helps you and gives you any kind of feedback that you need. But it also is all in the book. I mean, if you want to learn it from the book and use it on your friends, family members, and so on, by all means, go for it. It’s all in there. But if you want that added experience of getting certified, then yeah. If you want to do it for a living, then we want you to do that for sure.
[01:25:12] Ashley James: So why specifically? Because we have a lot of health coaches that listen to the show. I’m sure they’re all perked up and already on your site ready to sign up because this would be a great adjunct to health coaching. What is different in the live course that’s from the book? Are you teaching them how to work with people, what to look for, or the precautions? What is it that you get out of the live course that really helps you work with people on a professional level?
[01:25:44] Dr. Bradley Nelson: The course, in part, consists of 10 different recordings. They’re basically presentations where I go through with two of our top practitioners that have been doing this for many, many years. We discuss and kind of bounce things off of each other in explaining things. So what we try to do is we try to explain all of it from the very beginning in a way that makes it very easy for everybody to understand. That’s part of it.
You’ll gain insights from certification that you won’t get from the book. But also, in the certification program, you have homework. Your homework actually is the book itself. We supply the text of the book and the book on audio for you. You’ve got homework and then you work on yourself, and you’re one of the people. There are, I believe, 20 people that you have to work with, but you can count yourself as one of those people.
As you’re working with people and you’re releasing trapped emotions, you’re recording everything that you’re doing online on our site at discoverhealing.com in the back end at a location that’s just for you for this, and you record all that information. Then as you’re doing that, you do have to work with some animals, you have to totally clear the Heart-Wall from a number of people. What it does is accelerates your ability to do this because it’s like coaching. I mean, nobody really gets to the Olympic level of any sport without having a coach. It’s not possible.
That’s kind of what this program does. You’re able to see videos of other people doing this and sample sessions that are actually done that our practitioners are doing. You learn how to do this the right way. You learn how to do it better at a distance and so on. And then you’re quizzed on everything. There really is no final exam. You basically pass off each part of it as you go and so each part builds on the next part. But we have lots and lots of people doing it. It’s a great program. We consistently get very, very high 90% feedback from everybody doing it, that it’s a great program.
Anyway, the book itself if you’re just wanting to explore this a little bit maybe, you can go to emotioncodegift.com. There you can download the first couple of chapters of the book for free. We can give you those for free, you can try those out. If you want to get the book, the book’s available on Audible if you want to listen to it, amazon.com of course, Barnes & Noble—are they still in business? I think they are.
[01:29:09] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s Borders that went under.
[01:29:12] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Borders, yeah. What about B. Dalton? Are they still? I can’t remember.
[01:29:14] Ashley James: I was so bummed. Where I lived in Vegas—Henderson, Nevada just off of Stephanie, there was a Barnes & Noble and a Borders practically beside each other. That would be my favorite Saturday afternoon activity. I’d go pour through all of Barnes & Noble and then I’d pour through all the Borders. They would actually have different books depending. I would always go with the self-help, personal growth, and spiritual sections. That was my shtick. It was funny.
My husband’s and my second date we did that. We went to Barnes & Noble and Borders. I pointed out every book I ever read and he bought every book I ever read. He walked to the register with his hands full. He spent hundreds of dollars, and I looked at him. I’m like this guy listening to me. He’s serious. This guy’s serious. Oh, man. That was cool because he said he was into personal growth but then he was like putting his money where his mouth was. That was pretty hot I’d have to say. But we’ve been married for almost 13 years. I pretty much knew almost instantly that there was something special there. So yeah, I miss Borders.
Barnes & Noble’s around. I still do shop there occasionally. I love that you have an audiobook. I’m absolutely getting your audiobook because I love listening to audiobooks. I’m excited about that. Any listener can listen to your book or read your book and begin to immediately apply these techniques. They don’t have to take the course, but if they want to do it professionally they should take the course because they’re going to get it on a much deeper level.
That is so exciting. While I’ve been interviewing you I’ve made a list of at least 12 friends, clients, and family members that I want them all to get your book. I imagine all the listeners have done the same. No wonder you’re so popular. This is so needed in this world.
Dr. Bradley, I really want to have you back on the show. I’d love for you to continue to dive into this topic and explore it. Today was just to get us an introduction, get our foot in the door, and of course, everyone’s going to go get the book. I’m going to definitely go listen to your book, but I’d love to have you on the show you know after I’ve finished the book, and then maybe we can go deeper a bit into this topic. I know my listeners will absolutely love that, especially since they’re all going to go out and get your book too. And of course, they’re going to go to emotioncodegift.com and get the gift you’re giving out.
Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[01:31:51] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, I would just say that we’re living in this very unique time of the earth’s history where the world is in this transformational process. To me, it’s almost like the earth is in labor. It’s trying to give birth to this new world where so many of us want it to go. A world where people are living from their heart, and a world that is just so different from the world that we’re used to where darkness has so much influence over so much that’s been done in the world. This work, the Emotion Code, is part of this transformation. It’s just a little piece of it.
Think about when you read about somebody that is hurting someone else or has done some terrible thing, you can bet that there’s a Heart-Wall there because you see we feel with our heart. That’s why if someone is really hurting us or we’re really deeply grieved, we feel it in our chest, we feel it in our heart. And the brain that is in our heads doesn’t really feel. I mean, using the brain that is in our heads, the extension of that has created the world that we’re in now in many ways where we’re still using war to settle differences between nations, dropping bombs, blowing people up, and all kinds of crazy things, which seems to the logical mind to be perfectly appropriate.
But eventually, we are moving now towards a world where we’re all going to be living from our heart, you see, where love is going to rule the day. This work is about helping us to get there. It happens on an individual level. Get the book, learn how to do this. You can work on yourself, you can work on your family members, you can do so much healing not only for your own family that’s alive, but when you remove emotional baggage that has been inherited and passed down your line, you’re releasing it from them as well. We might want to talk about that next time because I’ve got some great stories I can tell you about that.
[01:34:11] Ashley James: Let’s do that. Awesome. Let’s have you back on the show and we’ll talk about inherited emotions. I have some amazing experiences about that as well. Again, an open-minded skeptic, wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t experienced it with my own experience. It’s pretty amazing, and it’s been documented actually. They’ve scientifically proven that the stress from trauma is passed down. They’ve been able to measure it, which is just so fascinating. But you can get very specific, and very specific trauma, very specific emotion that can be passed down for generations.
So it’s up to us to stop that, to heal it, and to allow the healing to go in both directions for past generations and future generations. So I’d love to have you come back on and we can talk about generational healing. I’d also like to ask you about past life healing if that’s ever come up because that is something that will challenge us in a very interesting way.
Dr. Bradley Nelson, I had the absolute pleasure having you on the show and can’t wait to have you back. It’s truly a gift and an honor to be in this day and age when we are birthing a world and we heal ourselves, heal thyself, help heal our friends and family. And if enough of us are going to tip the scales, we can help birth a world where love, peace, and consciousness are the things that we strive towards, the things that we resonate—coming from the heart instead of coming from the mind, like you said.
[01:35:50] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yeah. We’re going that direction. Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s been really fun. Let’s do it again.
https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-emotion-code-by-dr-bradley-nelson
Highlights:
We all have emotional baggage but does yours cause you physical pain? In this episode, Dr. Bradley Nelson talks about the Emotion Code and how it can help release trapped emotions and alleviate the pain that is caused by emotional baggage.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so thrilled that you’re here today to learn from Dr. Bradley Nelson and his Emotion Code, how you can heal physical illness through healing the emotional body. He has just thousands upon thousands upon thousands of testimonials on his website. You can check out hundreds of thousands of people around the world that have had amazing results, so you’re going to love today’s interview.
Now, I got to tell you about a special that’s happening right now. If you’ve been a listener for a while, you’ve heard me talk about the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. That’s the online health coach program that I took to become a health coach. It’s either a six-month program if you’re a full-time student. Or if you’re like me you’re a busy mom or dad or just busy with school or career and you just want to be able to become a health coach but fit it into your very busy life, then you would take their year-long program.
It adds up to about 20 minutes a day of videos and audios, and over the course of that, you learn over 100 dietary theories. But more importantly, they teach you how to be an amazing health coach from the standpoint of counseling, of that emotional side of health coaching because really, everyone knows to drink more water, go to sleep early, but why don’t we, right? What’s going on there? You teach your clients how to create new healthy habits that stick and how to go through the emotions to get to the point where you’ve increased their joy and vitality in every area of their life, and that’s something that IIN will teach you how to do as a health coach.
Now, I was surprised to find out because I’ve interviewed the CEO and also the founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. It was very interesting for me to find out that about half the students take their year-long health coach training program just for their own personal growth because the program offers so much more personal growth. So if you want to become a health coach just for your personal growth you can absolutely do that by going to IIN, or if you want to become a health coach, you can also go to IIN. They’re having a great sale right now for the month of February, so you’re going to want to call them and check it out.
They already offer a great discount for my Learn True Health listeners. So when you call IIN, just mention my name, Ashley James, and Learn True Health podcast. But right now they’re giving my listeners an even better deal for Valentine’s day. And of course, isn’t that so appropriate? This month we’re all focusing on the energy and vitality of love, just bringing in more love and joy into our life and focusing it on maybe a bit of that romantic love. But also the familial love, the love for friends and family, especially the love you have for yourself, so let’s do some self-care.
If you want a free module from IIN, you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach and check it out. If you want to learn more, just give them a call. Just google IIN. Their phone number comes right up, and those who answer have actually been through the program so they can help you.
Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health.
[00:03:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 455. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Dr. Bradley Nelson. I absolutely am thrilled to introduce you to his technique, and you should get his book The Emotion Code. You can also go to one of his websites, which is emotioncodegift.com and he gives you some great free goodies. Dr. Bradley, I’m really excited to have you on the show because in so many cases I’ve seen where people can heal their body on the physical level when addressing emotional blockages. And when going in and healing things on an emotional, mental, and even spiritual and energetic, everything comes back online. The vitality of the body and the joy comes back online.
I’ve seen so many people with chronic pain when they address the emotional side of their chronic pain, even though for years they’ve been going to chiropractors, getting acupuncture, or maybe even getting injections of some kind of steroid. But when they address the emotions, the pain went away and it’s absolutely fascinating.
I even had a woman on the show recently talk about her Ph.D. thesis was scanning people’s brains while they did emotional work and saw that the pain would actually leave the body. She could see it in the brain, and that sometimes, that chronic pain was in the emotional centers. It lived in the emotional centers of the brain, and how fascinating is that? And this is something that you specialize in is helping people to heal on the emotional level like we should be focusing on.
We focus on healing the body physically, we should be focusing that much effort if not more effort on making sure we’re healthy emotionally. I’m thrilled that today you’re going to teach us more about your technique, the Emotion Code. Welcome to the show.
[00:05:23] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s really great to be here.
[00:05:26] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now, you have this really fascinating story that led you—both personally and professionally—to where you are today. I would love for you to share with our listeners so they can fully understand what happened in your life that had you become the healer you are today.
[00:05:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, it really started when I was seven years old I was really sick with the measles, and I’d overheard my parents talking. I knew that the plan was I was going into the hospital the next day and I was going into something called an oxygen tent. You know how it is when you’re a kid and you overhear your parents and they don’t think that you’re listening, but you are. So I knew the plan.
That night, I was lying on the couch. My parents had made a bed for me on the couch so that I could be near their room. I’m lying there on the couch just feeling really sick, and everyone else has gone to bed. My parents came into the room and my mother said to my father, “Honey, will you kneel down with me and say a prayer for our boy here so that he’ll be able to get well,” and so they did. Knowing my dad, I’m sure it was probably the first time that I ever heard my dad pray. My dad was a really great guy but he just was very private in that way.
Anyway, here they are, they’re kneeling down by the side of the couch. My dad is praying for me that I’ll be able to get well, and in the middle of this prayer, I had this unbelievable thing that happened. It started at the top of my head and it went whoosh through my body to the soles of my feet, and I was healed just instantly.
Now to go from being really sick one moment to being completely well in the next moment is just so bizarre, so impossible, and so unforgettable that I remember that like it happened yesterday after all those years. So I held my tongue until my dad was done praying, which didn’t take long. When he was done I said, “I’m better. I’m totally better. I’m totally better.” And they said, “That’s fine, go back to sleep. Tomorrow you’re going into the oxygen tent.” But the next day proved it. I was totally well.
So I filed that away. What I learned from that experience was that there is a higher power that we can draw upon, that higher power goes by different names, and I don’t think that it really matters too much. I think that we all have that capacity that we can ask for help from that invisible higher power, so that’s what I learned.
Fast forward about another seven years, things tend to run in those seven-year cycles, right? I started having these pains in my back that were so extreme they’d come out of nowhere and they would take my breath away or put me on the ground. I mean, it was like being stabbed with a knife or being run through with a sword or something. It was really extreme. My parents took me to the hospital and they ran all these tests on me. My parents were told that I had kidney disease, that it was about 50% fatal I found out years later from my mother, and that they had nothing to offer. There was no medical treatment, and my parents were told that my kidneys were either going to survive or not. If they didn’t survive, I wasn’t going to survive basically because they didn’t do kidney transplants back then. It was a long time ago.
My parents decided that they would take me to see some alternative doctors, some holistic doctors. Now, these doctors were actually a couple of old-time osteopathic doctors. If you go to an osteopath nowadays, in most cases it’s like going to a medical doctor. They prescribe books and so on, and there are some of them who still do some of the things that the old-time osteopathic doctors used to do. Their profession was a lot like chiropractic is now back in those days.
What happened was I think in the early 1960s or maybe the late ‘50s, the medical profession basically came to the osteopathic profession and said, look why don’t you just join us and we’ll make you like us and you can prescribe drugs and so on, and so they did. But these two, it was a man and a woman and I never really knew for sure, but I think they were kind of fond of each other. They may have a relationship, I never knew. They stayed out and didn’t want to have anything to do with becoming allopathic medical doctors, and so they stayed out of it.
They practiced out on the edge of town in a wheat field in a trailer house. I remember sometimes going there and there would be a busload of people that would just be leaving. People in other states would charter buses and come out and have treatments from these people. They were really really amazing people, really great healers. Dr. Alan Baine and Dr. Ida Harmon were their names.
So my folks took me to see these people. I can remember scraping the mud off my shoes trying to get into their trailer, and it was such a different experience from being in this big multi-million dollar clinic where they ran all these tests, where they couldn’t help me, they had nothing to offer. These people started working on me and right away I started feeling better. The pains right away were less severe, less frequent. And within about a month, I had pretty much forgotten that I’d never been sick. My parents took me back to the hospital and they ran all the tests on me, and as I recall they ran the tests twice. They said, “Well, that’s a spontaneous remission. Whatever we did must have helped.”
I was only 13 years old, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew that these people had actually helped me. So I decided at that time this is what I want to do with my life. I want to be a healer, and if I need to practice out on the edge of town in the middle of a wheat field in a trailer house, hey, that’s fine with me. Because those doctors seemed to know what was going on with me, and they seemed to know what I was doing. As far as I knew at age 13, doctors that were found in trailer houses out in wheat fields on the edge of town that seemed to be their natural habitat of doctors got results.
[00:12:25] Ashley James: Man, I want to see a doctor in a treehouse. Just imagine what they could do for you.
[00:12:33] Dr. Bradley Nelson: I did see a doctor in a treehouse once. It was in Hawaii. I’d hurt my back and found a chiropractor. I remember I was waiting in his office and it was on the north shore of Oahu. He actually climbed up the tree and then all of a sudden hopped into the open window from the tree into the waiting room. I thought, okay, I’m in the right place.
[00:13:01] Ashley James: This is my doctor.
[00:13:05] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Exactly.
[00:13:06] Ashley James: What kind of things did the osteopaths do to you? I mean, I’m imagining some form of almost like osteopathic or chiropractic adjustments, but what else did they do to help you heal your body so that your kidneys functioned again?
[00:13:22] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, mainly they were realigning my spine and they ultimately ended up giving me various different kinds of potions and concoctions that they had put together. But that’s mainly what it was back then. I had misalignments going on in my spine that were interfering with the communication between my brain and my kidneys that weakened my kidneys. They started realigning things for me. It was amazing how well it worked. I mean, really, the change in my body was something that was very obvious to me, something that I could really feel. That’s what happened back then.
So then, time went on and in 1980, I spent a semester at Brigham Young University Hawaii campus, which is in Laie on the North Shore of Oahu. That’s how I met that chiropractor that came in through the window. Anyway, I took a class in computer programming, and man, that was just something that I just immediately took over my life—computer programming. I became a computer programmer, and as time went on, I used to do consulting.
I had a business, I called myself the Computer Tutor, which I thought was really clever. Back in the early ‘80s when people would buy computers for their business and they’d have absolutely no idea what to do with it. It would just sit there. They’d hire me to come in and look at the business, program things, and get things set up. So that’s what I did, and I really, really loved that. There was something about computers that appealed to the perfectionist in me. If I wrote a program and it wasn’t actually perfect, it wouldn’t work. That had a great appeal.
So what happened was time went on. At the time, I was going to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah eventually and studying various different things. But I was about six months away from going into the MBA program to get my Master’s in Business, and I had decided that’s the direction I was going to go. I had this dream of going into the healing arts years before, but I kind of lost sight of that.
So my wife and I went back to Montana where I’m from and we were sitting around with my folks. It was Christmas time 1983. Out of the blue, my dad said to me, “Are you sure that you don’t want to go to chiropractic school because it seems like such a great career and you’ve always wanted to do it?” I said, “No, I’m going this other direction.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you think about it one more time?” So I said, “Okay.”
So my wife and I made up a pro and con list, on the one hand getting an MBA and going to work for some big company, and then on the other side going into the healing arts. If you’ve ever done a prone con list like that, I mean, there were appealing things on both sides, and doing that exercise didn’t really help me. But having learned years before that there’s a higher power that you can draw upon, that night I got on my knees and I prayed. I just said, “Father in heaven, if you have anything to say about this, help me to know what to do because I’m kind of in the middle of the fence now. I could go either way and be happy.”
So that night I was awakened three different times. When I would wake up it would almost be like I’d been having a dream, but it was an unremembered dream. I would wake up and my mind would be full of all these thoughts of how great it is to be able to help people naturally, heal people naturally, serve people, and so on. I would think, well, yeah. That’s true. But then, on the other hand, the computers and then I’d fall back asleep. That happened three times that night, so I’m still not convinced the next day and still don’t know what to do.
So that night I’m on my knees again and I’m praying and asking God can help me to figure this out because I still don’t know what to do—kind of thick-headed, apparently. That night, the second night, I had this experience where I was awakened again three different times like the night before, but on the second night, each time that I was awakened, the thoughts that I had when I was awakened, the feelings that I had were—if you can imagine—really exponentially more powerful each time. So that on the second night on the third time that I was awakened it was overwhelming at the thoughts of service to mankind, humanity, and the whole planet. I mean, it was absolutely overwhelming. And right then, I heard a voice that spoke to me as clearly as I’m speaking to you right now, Ashley, and it said, “This is a sacred calling.” And I thought, okay, I get it. Thank you. So that was it. I never looked back.
When I got into practice I figured well, God’s gotten me into this, maybe he’ll help me now. So I developed this habit, and the habit was that before I would go to work on someone I would just take a moment and just ask for help. I just say, “Father in heaven, please help me to help this person. Help me to know what they need in Jesus name, Amen,” basically like that. And it was a totally private, totally personal habit. Nobody ever knew that I was saying a prayer for them, but I was, and it was just a momentary pause really. But I’ll tell you something. I absolutely know for a fact that that higher power—whether you refer to it as God, Father, Jesus, the Creator, source energy, or whatever you want to call—is real, knows what we’re doing, and is aware of our lives.
There were times back then when somebody would come in to see me and I didn’t know sometimes what to do. I didn’t know how to approach this problem, I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to help this person. And in response to that silent prayer, the information that I needed would just flood into me like an avalanche of understanding. Sometimes it would be a totally different way of looking at things than I’d ever either ever considered before, and that nobody else had ever considered before either.
So basically, I was in practice for 17 years in a brick and mortar practice and for about another two and a half years in a distance practice. I had that habit all those years and nobody ever knew it was a totally private thing. Now I teach it as part of what I teach to people how to use the Emotion Code, how to use the body code. It’s part of what you do and what we teach people all over the world that it’s an important thing. Whatever you believe, it’s not a denominational thing. It’s just that if you believe in a higher power, well then, you’d be silly not to ask for help because you can get it. It’s available for the asking.
So one of the most powerful things that I learned during those years was that all of my patients—no matter how old or young they were, no matter what they were suffering from, whether they were dealing with migraine headaches, neck pain, back pain, knee pain, infertility, asthma, digestive problems, depression, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, PTSD, eating disorders, or self-sabotage of some kind—I saw the gamut. All of those people had something in common, and it was that they were suffering from what you might call emotional baggage.
We use that phrase emotional baggage, right? And we usually use it in reference to somebody else. We usually say things like, that guy’s really got a lot of emotional baggage, and it’s true. The thing is we all have emotional baggage, but what I learned is that our emotional baggage is actually a real thing. That our emotional baggage is a lot more concrete than we have ever thought. To understand how this works, you have to understand what the body really is.
If you look at your hand, for example, that hand looks pretty solid. You can slap it down on your desk. It makes a nice thunk sound. But if you were to put your hand under a big microscope like say an electron microscope, and if you were to keep zooming in and zooming in and magnifying your hand more and more and more, pretty soon you’d be looking at cells, then pretty soon you’d be looking at this parts of the cell, then pretty soon you’d be looking at the DNA, and then pretty soon you’d be looking at individual molecules. At somewhere between a million and maybe 850 million times magnification, eventually, you’re looking face to face at a single individual atom. If you keep magnifying a little more, you see inside the atom. There’s really nothing in there. It’s empty space. Our bodies are pure energy.
Now, we think of energy and we think of the matter, and we think that they’re different, but they’re really not. Albert Einstein said that there really is no matter. That all that matter is energy that has had its vibrations slowed down enough to a point that we’re actually able to perceive it. And so that’s what our bodies are. Our bodies are made of pure energy.
Some quantum physicists actually figured out recently that because our bodies are energy, you could easily put all 7.8 billion people on earth into a little box the size of a sugar cube and there would be room for even more. That is if you could take all of the empty space out of these bodies of ours.
It’s a strange thing really, our existence and these bodies of ours. That they are really more of a force field than anything else. But if you talk to any quantum physicist, they’ll all tell you that that is absolutely the truth about our existence, which is hard for us to wrap our heads around but that’s the truth of our reality, the truth of our existence.
So anyway, sometimes we feel intense emotions. Sometimes our parents are arguing, we’re little, and we’re crying ourselves to sleep at night. Sometimes we’re in high school, we go through a breakup, and it’s devastating. Sometimes somebody close to us dies or is sick, or sometimes we have a bad job. I mean, who knows. We have all kinds of things that go on, and we experience all kinds of emotions, and emotions are a tremendous gift. If we didn’t have emotions, I don’t think our lives wouldn’t be worth living. I think our life would just be a flat line.
So we have these emotions, and we have positive ones like joy, happiness, and so on, but we also have negative ones. It’s the negative ones that tend to cause trouble for us. Think about a time in your own life when you were really upset about something. Maybe it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it was today. Maybe it was last week. Were there things that you went through in your life that was difficult? Did you ever cry yourself to sleep at night, were you ever abused, or did you ever go through anything that was difficult to bear? The reality of it is the vast majority of people, with few exceptions, have gone through emotionally difficult things.
Now, the problem is when you’re feeling an intense emotion of anger or maybe it’s resentment, frustration, grief, or sadness—whatever it might be. When you’re feeling an emotion like that, if you’re feeling it powerfully enough, your whole being—that whole energy field that is who you are—can be resonating and vibrating with that particular frequency. Sometimes what happens is that emotion can be too powerful, and it can actually then become lodged in the body, and this is emotional baggage. We refer to this as trapped emotions.
A trapped emotion is a ball of energy that is from about the size of a baseball to about the size of a softball, and these become lodged in the body. They can lodge anywhere in the body, and then they will cause a couple of different effects. They will cause physical effects. Pain is one of the big effects that they tend to cause. Again, when I was in practice and I had all kinds of people suffering from all kinds of different problems, I found that emotional baggage or trapped emotional energies were often at the root of all of these problems.
So to give you an idea of how this can work, there was a man that came in to see me many years ago. He had really severe low back pain. It was a 9 on a 0-10 scale, he said. He rated himself. If it’s a 10 you go to the ER and he was a 9. He was in a lot of pain, and I tested him using the Emotion Code. And with the Emotion Code, what we’re able to do is we’re able to very simply, very easily tap into the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is where all the good information is. It’s the part of you that is keeping track of everything that’s ever happened to you in your life. It’s the part of you that remembers everything you’ve ever done, every face you’ve ever seen in a crowd, everything you’ve ever eaten, tasted, touched, or smelled. All the emotional energies that have gotten trapped in your body.
I’m testing him and I find he has trapped emotion, the emotion is anger. Testing a little bit further, I found this had occurred about 20 years before, and he immediately spoke up and remembered what had happened. He said it was a work situation. He had been falsely accused of something and was really angry about it. That was the emotion, that was what created this trapped emotional energy in his body. So I released that trapped emotion, and his pain level went from a nine to a zero in the snap of a finger, boom. It was gone. It was unbelievable. He kept bending over, walking around in my office, twisting this way that way, and exclaiming he couldn’t believe it. It was like a miracle really, and I was grateful that it worked so well. Why did that happen?
There are two parts really to this story, but the first part is the pain relief that this guy got. Why did that happen? Well, you see, when you have a trapped emotion, it literally is a ball of emotional energy. What it’s doing is it’s residing somewhere in your body, and it’s distorting the normal energy field of your body. When the normal energy field of your body is distorted, that’s all your body is ultimately an energy field. This guy had a trapped emotion of anger. It was in his low back, and after 20 years of having all of those tissues distorted by that anger energy, eventually, it was causing severe pain. With the release of that trapped emotion, the pain was gone because that distorting force that that emotion was creating in those tissues suddenly was gone.
Well, the story didn’t end there. A couple of days later he came back in to see me for a follow-up visit. He said to me, “My back pain is still gone. I still can’t quite believe it, but I have to tell you something. When I came here I had another problem that I didn’t tell you about. For as long as I can remember, I’ve basically been what you would call a rage-a-holic. I’m always yelling at my wife and my kids. I’ve got to watch road rage. I’ve been to anger management several times, it hasn’t really helped me. I’m just an angry person. I’m just kind of on edge all the time.
Since you worked on me and you released that emotion of anger, I feel really different. Things that would set me off before don’t set me off now. I feel kind of relaxed and I feel a certain level of peace. How did you do that? How does that work?” At the time I said, “Well, I really don’t know. I just work here.” But here’s what we believe, okay. Think about this, and this is I believe the actual truth about emotional baggage.
This guy’s got this ball of energy, this ball of anger in his low back, which seems very strange but I’m telling you that’s how this works. It’s distorting the energy field in his low back until eventually, it’s bad enough that he comes to see me. But overall of those 20 years, it has altered his personality because when a situation would come along in his life where he might tend to become angry, he would become angry much more readily, much more easily. Why? Because part of his body is feeling that emotion of anger 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You see, every emotion is a frequency, it’s an energy, and it’s a particular vibration. Because part of his body was already vibrating at that frequency—that vibration of anger—it was easy for him to fall into that resonance. That’s why after 20 years, he believed that he was an angry person until that trapped emotion was released.
That’s a great example you see of what our emotional baggage does to us and how it affects us. It’s such an incredible thing. Sometimes people have physical injuries that leave them with pain for years and years and years, and by removing their emotional baggage, sometimes that just disappears even though it was a physical injury in the beginning.
In fact, just a couple of days ago—we post a new testimonial every day on our site. We have far too many that we can actually post. Our site is at discoverhealing.com, by the way. I’m looking at our site and there’s a testimonial I want to share with you.
This was from February 2nd this year. A woman named Sabrina from Valbonne in France said, “Twenty years ago, I had a big car accident with two whiplashes in a row. It was very painful and for years I had substantial neck problems and vertigo. The agony became worse over the years and, because I had children, I could not get any rest. Eventually, five years ago, my body collapsed with neuralgia and I had to stay in bed for days.” Neuralgia is nerve pain. “The pain was so intense that I went to see several doctors and chiropractors, but it did not help very much. Sometimes it was so excruciating that they could not even touch me.
Then I heard of the Emotion Code and it was like a miracle. I healed myself! Today I can play tennis, run, look after my kids, and work once again. This method saved my life! Many thanks! I want to share it with everyone who is in pain because I know how much things can improve!”
There’s a great example of that, right? Somebody who had a really bad car accident 20 years ago and using the Emotion Code on herself she was able to, apparently, get out of pain. She says it saved her life.
[00:34:35] Ashley James: I’d be curious to know—and maybe you wouldn’t know maybe from her but from others—was the trapped emotion about the car accident or did she create the car accidents because of a trapped emotion? The reason why I bring that up is one of my past mentors was getting in a series of fender benders until she realized that she was creating them. It was other people hating her, but there were so many. It was like 12 of them. So many of them that she realized because she was very spiritual and did a lot of emotional work herself—master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming. She saw in herself when she went back and went okay, why am I creating this? What’s my belief system? What’s going on.
She realized that she was creating them because of the emotional distress she was having around her job and how much her unconscious was fighting her because it was completely going against her value system. Staying in that job was going against every fiber of her being but she kept shoulding herself like golden handcuffs, like I should stay here. So she was creating these disruptions to basically not go to work, but there’s a lot of emotions around her work, around feeling neglected and abused. So she had to work on that, get away from the job, work on the emotion, and then she stopped creating car accidents.
But she thought isn’t this interesting that some people—if you get out of victim mode in life right, and I really always have to preface this when I talk about being victim versus being at cause. I’m in no way saying that rape victims created it for themselves. This is just an exercise, it’s a mental exercise.
But if you can take on the mental exercise of being at cause in your world versus being a victim of things that have happened to you, then from the standpoint of being at cause you can go, so why did I create that? And not for blame but more for what’s going on at the unconscious level that I put myself in this position to be in this accident? Even if someone else hit me, what’s going on? Can I own this from the standpoint of what can I learn from it? How can I grow from this and what is there for me to learn here? Is there something that happened in my life that had me put myself in this situation?
Because all of our conscious and unconscious choices have led us to where we are today. And so if we own them and then we can learn from them, then we can look back and go, oh maybe this is connected to the emotions that were happening, the turmoil, or the unresolved issues that were happening prior to the accident.
I just wonder if in her situation, if she couldn’t heal fully from the neck pain because of emotions that created during the accident like feeling the injustice of being in a bad accident, or was it that she was having issues with motherhood, with her husband—whatever dissatisfaction in her life, whatever stuff was happening before the accident, still her body was holding on to that pain from the injury for years later because she hadn’t worked on it.
So I would just be interested to know what is the root cause? In a lot of cases, when it comes to an injury that lasts for years, is the root cause prior to the injury oftentimes, or is it the emotions from that injury itself?
[00:38:19] Dr. Bradley Nelson: It depends. If I had to bet, I would say that probably there was some emotional baggage that helped to precipitate the accident. When we have trapped emotions, what they do is they send out—they’re continually broadcasting their vibration out into the universe. And so then that tends to draw things to us that tend to create more of that.
The other thing that happens is when you have an injury—the intense emotional experiences that you go through after that for years or decades—will often tend to become trapped in that area and make the distortion worse. A great example of this is a guy that I worked with many years ago. This guy came into my office, his name was Steve and he came in with his wife. He had a really severe tennis elbow. I mean, his arm was in a sling and he couldn’t turn the keys to start his car. It was so excruciating. I was barely able to touch the area, there was so much pain there.
So I started working with him and doing the normal chiropractic things and I wasn’t having too much success with it. So at the time, I was just learning about the emotional side of this, I was learning about trapped emotions. So I asked his subconscious mind, and we use muscle testing different types to get answers from the subconscious, and it’s all taught. We teach it very clearly in the Emotion Code book.
So I asked his subconscious mind, is there a trapped emotion that is contributing to this tennis elbow? And the answer immediately was yes. What I found was that he had a number of trapped emotions that had become lodged in that area of his elbow during the years that he was in high school. Now he was about 42 years old when I was seeing him. So he’d been out of high school for a long time, but it was funny because every trapped emotion had to do with a girl who had basically rejected him.
It was so funny because his wife was sitting there, and I’m muscle testing him and he’s saying, “Well, let’s see. Was it Sheila?” His arm would go down, “No, okay. Was it Cheryl? No. Shawna? Oh, yeah. That one’s strong. Yeah, Shawna. Yeah, she dumped me.” And so it was all these trapped emotions about that.
Here’s the thing, he was on the tennis team in high school. So what’s happening is as he’s dating these girls and they’re rejecting him, he’s also playing tennis and he’s incurring micro-trauma to those muscles that are being used the most. So that’s where the trapped emotions would lodge. The interesting thing about it is I think there were six different trapped emotions that needed to be released. The story’s in the book actually. It was so funny.
But the amazing thing really is that every time we’d release a trapped emotion, the pain level would just instantly drop. The pain level just kept dropping and dropping and dropping with the release of each trapped emotion until finally, we cleared the last trapped emotion and the pain was completely, completely gone. He couldn’t believe it. He took the sling off and he’s moving his arm around. I could go in and I could press deeply into those muscles, there was no pain anymore. I remember that was the first time that I had seen this phenomenon where you can have more than one trapped emotion in one place.
But that was a great example to me of how trapped emotions can accumulate in an area and can eventually cause just extreme pain. What we find now is that about 90% of all the physical pain that people have is actually due to their emotional baggage to trapped emotions. We’ve got almost 7,000 practitioners of the Emotion Code now in 80 countries around the world, and we’re all finding the same thing. That if you’re in pain, there’s a very high probability that that pain is actually due to some emotional baggage. It’s actually really simple.
[00:43:02] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’m a master practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming timeline therapy and hypnosis. Back in 2005, my mentors were enamored with the book Healing Back Pain.
[00:43:22] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh yeah, by Dr. Sarno.
[00:43:24] Ashley James: Yes, Sarno. So what he discovered—unfortunately, he has passed away. I tried to get him on the show but he had passed away. Well, he was working, and I don’t think he was a medical doctor. I mean, this was back in 2005 I read the book. But he was doing work with hospitals and looking at the records and more administration work, looking at all the administration stuff seeing that all these back surgeries these patients were still having pain. Oh, we got rid of their bulging disc. We surgically removed it. Why do they still have pain? Why are they still on disability? Why are they still on these drugs?
So he started to look at stuff and found that—I can’t remember the statistic right now, I wish I could remember off top of my head, but it was so crazy something like 70% of all the MRIs they do, there’s some form of a bulging disc and yet people are asymptomatic. He’s like, how can we have someone who has a bulging disc that has no pain, but when people have pain in their back we always assume it’s a bulging disc. So we do these scans, then we blame the disc, and then we remove the disc, but they still have pain so it’s not the disc. So what is it?
And then he just dove in like you did, figuring it out. What he saw was that there was ischemia, which is a cutoff of blood flow to the muscles when there was an emotion withheld. So I had a client come to me, this was 2006. So still, a long time ago. She was a long-distance runner, she was in a lot of pain, she was very fit, and she was in her 50s closing in on her 60s.
She said, “I’m on Tylenol—three every day—and I really don’t want to be on it because it’s not exactly good for you.” I started talking to her. I was like, “Well, how long have you had the pain?” She’s like, “Oh, you know a few years maybe four or six years.” And as we kept going back in her history, it’s like her brain couldn’t fully accept or remember. It actually had been more like 15 years that she had been in pain and been on these drugs. She’s like, “Oh wow, I didn’t realize how much time had passed.”
I got to the root cause because guilt kept coming up as we talked, and what we figured out was she’s catholic and she had an abortion. She felt so guilty about it and she said to herself, “I have to pay for this guilt with pain.” She actually said that. She wouldn’t allow the doctor to give her pain medicine during her abortion, and she said, “I have to pay for it with pain.” And she did, but what was interesting because I was also in Canada, I was a registered massage therapist and worked in sports rehab, in sports medicine.
Before we started our session I said, “Can I palpate your back?” because she was pointing towards the quadratus lumborum on the left side, and I palpated. On the left side, it was hard as a rock ice cold. Now, this was in Florida. I was living in Florida at the time. I mean, it’s warm. On the right side, it’s flush, it’s a very good color, it’s warm and palpable. But on the left side, it’s like I’m touching granite. I thought this was interesting. This is ischemia. The whole muscle is just not letting any blood flow in, and that’s incredibly painful. Of course, when bands of muscle cause ischemia around the innervation of the nerve, it will create just incredible pain. Sometimes the pain will travel to different areas, but it’s very painful.
As she gets into talking about guilt, the pain goes up. I keep asking her where is your pain level? Now, I mean, my session with her was like six hours long. Sounds like your session would have been like six minutes. Your program sounds like maybe it’s more effective in that it sounds a lot quicker. But by the end of it, we released the negative emotion of guilt at the root level. I said, “Where’s your pain?” and I’m kind of expecting it to be less. She’s like, “It’s gone. It’s gone.” She’s like jumping up and down. She’s like, “How is it gone? How is it gone?”
So she goes back to her hotel room and I didn’t tell her to do this because I’m not a doctor, but she flushed all of her meds down the toilet. She was on three meds, one of them was an anti-anxiety med. She came to me the next day she’s like, “I took myself off all my meds. I’m not on the pain meds. I’m not on the anti-inflammatory meds. I’m not on the anxiety meds. I feel like a million bucks. I feel amazing.” And her pain was still gone. “Can I touch your back?” and her back on both sides were warm and palpable.
That was the most amazing thing for me to see that someone physically that their muscles that were holding—I mean like you said, the size of a softball or a baseball. Her entire quadratus lumborum, which is quite a big muscle, so bigger than a softball was hard, ischemic, cold, and holding on to guilt for 15 years. That to me just blew my mind. How many people are on meds, emotional medication, and also physical medication, and suppressing and putting a band-aid on and just pushing it down and pushing it down and pushing it down and then poisoning their bodies? And they’re not free of it.
That affects every area of their life just like one of your clients whose anger spilled over into every area of his life. Her guilt spilled over into every waking moment of her life, so just to be free of that. I’m so excited that people can learn your technique through your book and they can also then train. Can anyone become a practitioner of the Emotion Code?
[00:49:23] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yes, anybody can become a practitioner. There’s really no prerequisites. It’s a simple program. It’s a six-month program, most people do it in about half the time. If you’re interested, there’s more information there—discoverhealing.com is our website.
Listen to this one because it never ceases to amaze me. Here’s one that came in from a guy named Robbi Cuijpers from Posterholt in the Netherlands. This was posted on the third, so today’s the ninth. Anyway, he said, “One night I woke up with a terrible toothache. It was around 2:00 AM and I couldn’t sleep anymore. I was suffering so much I was about to call the emergency desk and go to the hospital. It felt dreadful. Then suddenly the question popped into my head, “Could there possibly be some trapped emotions causing this horrible pain?”
“So, I gathered all the willpower I could find, jumped out of bed, and started sway testing for trapped emotions.” That’s where you stand up and your body will sway forward for yes and backward for no. “And yes, I had some trapped emotions that were causing the tooth pain. With the release of each emotion, my toothache instantly subsided. With the fifth and last emotion released, the pain was practically zero.
I then went to bed feeling on top of the world knowing the power of The Emotion Code.”
[00:50:43] Ashley James: That’s amazing. I love it. And the unconscious mind controls all of our muscle movements. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen it where you can ask your unconscious mind questions and it can control the micro muscle movements of a finger or an arm, or like you said, the sway test. If someone is in a wheelchair, there are other ways. You could do it because the unconscious mind controls the muscles of the body. You can communicate with it, which not that many people know.
I was always afraid of my unconscious mind when I began to study, learn more, and dive into it, and then once I developed a relationship with my unconscious mind, it was actually the most rewarding thing because it’s you, it’s the rest of you. It’s the rest of you and your unconscious mind. It’s just you, it’s just more of you, but it’s the rest of you that loves you. Your unconscious mind adores you, loves you, wants to keep you safe, wants to keep you healthy.
I mean, trying to understand John E. Sarno’s philosophy behind why the unconscious mind creates this ischemic pain? I’m not saying it’s always ischemic pain because like you’ve mentioned it can be injuries and joints and things like that, although I’d love your opinion. I guess the hypothesis is that the unconscious mind wants to resolve these issues and so it’s bringing it to your attention.
[00:52:06] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, that’s exactly how I look at it. Yes, the symptoms that we have are really just the subconscious mind trying to get our attention so that we can open a dialogue and figure out what’s really going on. What the underlying cause of our problem really is. What is it that’s unresolved? What do we need to deal with that we’ve never dealt with? I love what you said about the subconscious—that it adores us and it is the rest of us. It’s absolutely so true. That’s what it is.
It’s not just pain. Listen to this one. This is another one. This was posted on February 8th, I guess yesterday. This woman Susan from Utah wrote and she said, “My husband, John, recently went through radiation therapy for prostate cancer. One of the side effects has been a terrible itching that would not stop after his therapy. His radiation doctor said that John could be allergic to something new but didn’t think the medication he had prescribed was doing it. John went to a dermatologist and was told that all older men get dry skin and that was it. I had recently read the Emotion Code and I tried it on his itching. The next day he completely stopped itching! In his eyes, this was a miracle!” You never know. Try it on anything.
[00:53:25] Ashley James: Right. Well, the thing is, all day long we have emotions. All-day long we have experiences, and how often do we actually sit back and unpack those experiences, process those emotions, and digest them like you would digest a very healthy meal? It’s like we’re taking care of our bodies, and so many of the people who are listening would sit down and eat a beautiful very nutritious meal, chew each bite until it’s fully digested, and really give themselves, bathe themselves in nutrition. Give themselves the time, the space, and the peace to digest their food because they know nutrition is so important.
And yet when it comes to our emotions, we treat it like we’re going through the drive-thru and just scarfing it down and not even tasting it and then just throwing it back and expecting our body just to deal with it. Just deal with it. It’s so funny that we’re treating our body like we’re eating fast food when it comes to our emotions, but we take our physical body so seriously and we don’t take our emotional body that seriously.
I also believe there’s a stigma, and it depends on your generation. I see the younger generation. I’m 40 years old. I’m turning 41. Hopefully my mid-life is years to come, but I look at the younger kids and I see that they’re more open to counseling and therapy because there’s not a stigma for them. For the older generations, there was a large stigma around going to counseling. The thing is that working on your emotions is like going to the gym. You’re just going to the gym for your heart and your mind and just find the right trainer. Not every trainer out there is going to be the right trainer for you. Not every counselor is going to be the right counselor for you.
But I have clients who say that their sessions, working with their therapist have been the most rewarding thing possible because it’s just the place they get to digest, absorb, process, release, let go of, and understand their emotions and how they react. And then they notice that they stop just reacting and spewing onto their family and spewing onto their kids. They actually catch themselves, they take a deep breath, and they’re able to then come from a place of communication that has love and has respect because they processed all the stuff that happened last week, last month, last year instead of just bottling it up and then spewing at people.
This particular idea of sitting down and respecting our emotional and physical body by working with the Emotion Code I think could be so rewarding.
Now back to my question about ischemia, is it always muscles? Is it always ischemic pain, or do you find sometimes there’s bone pain? I know you mentioned that man had tooth pain. That could have also been a referral pain from a trigger point. Do you think it’s always ischemia though, or have you seen it where there’s absolute evidence that it’s not created in a muscle?
[00:56:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, yes. See the thing about it is trapped emotions can lodge in different areas. They can really lodge anywhere. They can lodge in a specific organ. So the way that we look at it is a little different from Dr. Sarno’s, and I have tremendous respect for what he did and the consciousness that he was able to create for people that this kind of thing goes on. But trapped emotions can lodge in different places. One of the most fascinating things that we see is that they will often form into a wall around the heart to protect the heart from being broken, and we call that a Heart- Wall. That’s one of the most interesting things that we see.
With the Heart-Wall, it’s not necessarily that we see the ischemic pain so much. Although sometimes, people do have that. But there’s a whole another dimension to it. Anciently, the ancient peoples believed that the heart was the seed of the soul, the source of love, the source of romance, the source of creativity, and really the core of our being. Even now, after all these thousands of years, anywhere you go on earth, if it’s Valentine’s day or if someone is romancing you, they’ll give you a box of something tasty that’s probably shaped like a heart. So these are ancient ideas.
I mean, the word heart is mentioned just shy of a thousand times in the bible, for example. There are these scriptures in the bible that say things like God doesn’t look on the outward appearance of a person, instead, he looks on the heart. There’s another one that says that as we think in our hearts, so we will be. In the west, we’ve never really paid much attention to those old ideas because medicine is still very mechanistically oriented, still very rooted in Newtonian physics. So the heart is just a muscle and we know it’s a muscle. It just pumps blood, that’s all it does, and that’s how we’ve looked at it for many, many years.
But in the last 20 years or so, there has been new instrumentation developed, and new studies that have been done that show some amazing things. For example, they found that when one person is feeling love or affection for another person that their heartbeat will become measurable in the brain waves of that other person on an EEG. They found that their heartbeats will synchronize. So there’s this connection going on between all of us that we have not necessarily been aware of.
But what we discovered, what was actually shown to us back in 1998, my wife had a dream. She asked me to help her decipher her dream. As I’m trying to do that, all of a sudden I have this experience that I can only describe as a waking vision where the room that I was in suddenly disappeared and I’m looking instead of this incredibly beautiful hardwood floor with this understanding that my wife’s heart is underneath this floor.
Now, this is one of the strangest things that I’ve ever experienced, and I don’t take drugs. I don’t even use caffeine anymore. I’m very straight that way. But anyway, this lasted for several minutes. I told my wife what I was seeing and understanding. She didn’t know what it meant either. We prayed, asked God to help us figure this out.
We started muscle testing her, and what we found was that when she was two years old—because she was born into a very volatile, very dysfunctional family—she, at some point around that age, thought her heart was going to break and so she started building a wall around her heart. This wall was literally made from layers of her emotional baggage. So she’d had this wall around her heart all of these years. We asked if we could start removing these, and it took us a couple of weeks to take down this wall one emotion at a time.
When the last one was removed, all of a sudden, things really shifted for her because for one thing, whatever group of friends that she’d ever been with, she never really truly felt like she belonged anywhere like she was always the odd person out. She always felt kind of expendable until that was removed, then suddenly, she felt like she belonged. The depression, the anxiety that she had to deal with decreased dramatically.
Initially, when we discovered this, it was really shown to us. It’s very much a God thing trying to get this out into the world this understanding. Initially, I thought it was maybe just her, that she was the only person on earth that had this. But what we find now is that about 93% of people have this phenomenon going on, and it’s called a Heart-Wall.
The most recent testimonial that I have about this—we’ve got about 10,000+ testimonials on our site. We get new ones every single day. We’ll pick one every day and post it. This one came in on February 4th. This is from a woman named Fawn. Apparently, one of our practitioners from Ohio said, “My most meaningful experience using the Emotion Code is with a client named Paul. He is a 70-year-old man who had such a horrific and abusive childhood that he built a Heart-Wall to protect himself. He never married or even had a close relationship. He has had many acquaintances but no close friends.
After our Emotion Code sessions, he is now transformed! He went out and got his motorcycle endorsement at 70! And now he is actively looking for a lady to enjoy it with him. He simply shines! The transformation is the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed.”
Think about this, 93% of people have this phenomenon, this Heart-Wall phenomenon going on. What it does is it interferes with your ability to give and receive love for one thing, but also to really create the life that you want because the best ideas that you’ll ever have are not in your brain, they’re in your heart. And the heart we know now is really a second brain. The heart is filled with gray matter and white matter, it really is a second brain.
In fact, when scientists a number of years ago looked at the communications along the nerves between the brain and the heart, they found the vast majority of communications were going from the heart to the brain, and they were expecting it to be just the opposite.
What one of the first people that I saw after we worked on my wife with this was a nurse that came in to see me. She was 38 years old, and she came in because she had this terrible neck pain that she’d seen a couple of doctors for—they haven’t been able to help her. As I was talking with her she told me that she was single. She had not dated in eight years and was never going to date again.
So she’s 38, hasn’t dated in eight years, she’s basically celibate. She was an attractive person. I said, “Well, why do you feel this way? What happened to you?” She said eight years before, she’s really deeply in love with this guy who dumped her and broke her heart. That was it. She hadn’t dated since then. So I tested her and found, sure enough, she had put up a wall around her heart from that breakup. There were three emotions, three layers making up this wall. We cleared those emotions one at a time, and when the last one was gone, instantaneously the neck pain was gone—instantaneously.
When we see instantaneous pain relief like in this case and like in the case with the guy that I told you about in the beginning that had the anger from 20 years before, I think there’s more going on than just the ischemia. I think if those arteries and veins open up a little bit, it’s going to take a little bit of time for things to shift, but we see instantaneous relief of pain in many cases. That’s what happened to her.
That’s not the end of the story though. She left the office feeling totally fine and didn’t come back for three months. When she came back into my office—I’ll always remember this—she looked great. I said, “Hey, you look great. I haven’t seen you for a while. How are you?” She said, “You know, my neck’s been fine since I was here. You cleared that Heart-Wall for me, that really works. About two weeks after I was here, I found out my childhood sweetheart has been living right around the corner from me for almost eight years. We’re dating and we’re in love, and I think he’s going to ask me to marry him.” Wow, what a shift. Holy smokes.
[01:06:04] Ashley James: You got me fascinated when you said that it can manifest in the organs. We often hear anger in the liver and fears in the lungs or the kidneys. If someone has something with their pancreas, an illness with their pancreas because, with type 2 diabetes, it’s not necessarily a pancreatic issue. If someone has a known illness with an organ or like fatty liver disease or they have a traumatic brain injury, have you seen people take something—either acute or chronic—that’s in an organ that’s been labs diagnosed, been tracking it, seeing that yes there’s an injury or there’s a disease state and they worked on the emotions that were there? Have you seen people, their bodies heal to the point where they’ve been able to heal organs?
[01:07:16] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yes. For example, one of the most common examples of that that we see is actually infertility where we find trapped emotions, for example, in the uterus. By removing those trapped emotions [inaudible 01:07:35] conceive. Think about all the different organs. The first thing that you have to understand is that every disease process that people experience has an emotional component every single time. In our experience now, doing this for 32 years, there’s always an emotional component.
If you identify the emotional component and you release that emotional baggage that’s affecting that area, then yes, things turn around. We’ve seen it happen over and over and over, so yes. In fact, trapped emotions can affect very specific parts of the body. For example, you might have a trapped emotion affecting your pineal gland, maybe the hypothalamus, or the pituitary. You might have trapped emotions that are affecting the thyroid gland. See all that this does really is it just removes the encumbrances that are in the body’s way of being able to function like the body wants to.
The body wants to be healthy, it wants to function normally, but when you’ve got emotional baggage, those are encumbrances, those are blockages to really being able to heal and to function normally. In fact, here’s a really dramatic story that I haven’t thought of for many, many years. But in talking about this, it’s reminded me of this.
There was a woman that came in to see us once who had fibromyalgia, which is this pain that you get all over the body that is very difficult, no known cure, and so on. I was able to help her with that, and then she told my wife and I about her daughter. What had happened with her daughter was that her daughter had gotten married about six months before, but her daughter suffered from vaginismus, which is the tightening down of the opening of the vagina.
She and her husband, still after six months, had not been able to have intercourse. They’d never been able to consummate their marriage. The marriage is starting to show signs of stress, and so she asked if we would look at her daughter. So we did so. Her daughter came in and we checked her. My wife found something that I don’t think we’d ever seen before, and I don’t think we’ve ever seen it since. But this girl had what we ended up calling a vaginal wall.
So in the sense, if you think about a Heart-Wall, if you feel like your heart is going to break, you’re feeling a physical sensation like there’s an elephant sitting on your chest, or maybe like you can’t breathe. There’s a physical thing going on there. The subconscious mind will put up a wall. The wall is an invisible wall to us, but to the subconscious, it’s very, very real I think. My wife’s Heart-Wall, the symbolic material was wood. She grew up in a house with hardwood floors.
So the subconscious will always choose some kind of material, and we’ve seen heart wall symbolic materials everything from plastic to glass to iron. But anyway, this young woman had a wall that her subconscious mind had put up in that area of her body to protect herself, and then she told us that she had been sexually abused at some point as a child. So anyway, we cleared the trapped emotions that were creating that, and it was the next day her mom called us and she said, “Guess what? Everything’s working. Thank you.” And in fact, she said, “Her husband is coming home. He’s spending his lunch breaks at home now for a catch-up.”
[01:12:02] Ashley James: I had a friend who had that and she had to have surgery. She had surgically had her vaginal opening altered so that she could have intercourse. It’s very interesting that she had the same condition. She spent years doing everything. Obviously, she didn’t learn about the Emotion Code. It would have been a lot easier than having surgery.
[01:12:31] Dr. Bradley Nelson: That was their next step really. Their next step is surgery. But luckily, we were able to avoid that.
[01:12:37] Ashley James: I’m just going to throw this out there, I like to get weird. What about people who are in a coma who has maybe dementia. Maybe children who are nonverbal autistic or adults who are non-verbal autistic. Is there any way to do this technique with people who can’t clearly communicate with you?
[01:13:05] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh yes, absolutely. It’s not a problem at all. The reason why is because the subconscious mind never sleeps. So it doesn’t matter. People can be worked on when they’re asleep, when they’re in a coma. In fact, let me tell you a story. This is actually in the Emotion Code book. We have twin boys. My wife and I had seven kids together, and then she had a daughter before we met. So we have a total of eight, but we have twin boys that are 31 years old now. When they were four years old, we thought that one of them had a problem with his hearing because he wouldn’t speak in full sentences. His brother on the other hand was a total chatterbox, but he wouldn’t speak in full sentences. We just didn’t know what was wrong.
So we took him to a hearing specialist thinking maybe he was a little bit deaf, but his hearing was totally fine. At that time, we were really first learning about trapped emotions. So one night, we decided to work on him when he was asleep. Now, in the book, we explain how you do this. It’s a simple process, but we worked on him when he was asleep and we found that he had an inherited trapped emotion of anger from my wife’s father.
So in other words, when my wife was conceived in the womb, there was emotional energy of anger that was passed from grandpa. When we conceived this little boy of ours, that energy was passed to him. So we cleared that, released that. He’s asleep so we’re working on him when he’s asleep, no problem, subconscious never sleeps. We cleared a couple of other trapped emotions. The next morning at breakfast, guess who will not shut up. My wife and I are just looking at each other like a couple of owls like we just cannot believe what’s happening.
We all have emotional baggage, and getting rid of it is so important. If you think about it, if you’ve got a heart-wall and there’s about a 90% chance that you do, then what that’s doing is it’s interfering with your ability to give and receive love and your ability to really create the life that you want because your best life and the best creative ideas that you have are actually in your heart, are not in your head.
The beautiful thing about the Emotion Code is that it’s really, really simple. Anybody can do it. Kids can do it. We have kids that are having great success with it in different parts of the world. You can learn how to do it yourself, you can use it yourself, use it on your own kids, you can use it on your husband, on your wife, on your children, and so on.
[01:16:25] Ashley James: Can you do it with babies?
[01:16:27] Dr. Bradley Nelson: You absolutely can do it with babies. You can even do it with babies before they’re even born. When they’re in the womb you can work on them.
[01:16:35] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That is so cool. I’m 32 weeks pregnant so I better start reading. Can you do it with animals?
[01:16:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: You absolutely can do it with animals. In fact, let me see, there was a story that I was just looking at here on our site. Let me see if I can find that really quick.
[01:16:56] Ashley James: I consider myself an open-minded skeptic, like a really, really open-minded skeptic. I wouldn’t be prompted to ask that question if I hadn’t had an experience where a friend of mine asked me to do emotional work on her dog and I’m like I’ll try.
Basically, the dog’s parents are splitting up. The two owners were going their separate ways, and the dog was picking up on the tension and it was a wiener dog. All of a sudden, his back legs stopped working. He became paralyzed, and the vet said this is common with wiener dogs. But there was no trauma. He didn’t fall down, get kicked, or hurt. He didn’t bump himself. He just all of a sudden, his parents are splitting up. There’s tension in the household, and now he isn’t working.
So I sat with him, I held him in my hands, and I just started my heart communicating to his heart. All of that information came flooding to me. I’m like, okay, let’s fill you with love and get you to see that your parents love you. You’re going to be in their lives and you get to have two homes now. They’re going to share. Your parents are getting divorced but you still have them. They’re not leaving you. They’re just leaving each other. The three of us were talking to him and telling him that, and then he got up and started by his tail and his legs worked again. We’re like okay, that works.
I’ve had other people on the show who are healers. One guest of mine helped a horse with her fertility issues. She was having miscarriages basically and this horse wasn’t able to conceive. So he did emotional work with the horse and the horse was able to heal from the emotions of all the sadness from the lost pregnancies. And then the next one worked and she was able to get pregnant. I’m like, okay. You know what, there’s something very interesting going on here. Of course, animals have emotions. If you’ve ever had a cat or dog, you make a connection with them, and there’s more there. There’s love, there’s acceptance, there’s joy. They have some very interesting emotions.
There are so many studies done now where they can actually see that animals have emotions. I’m not doing a debate as to whether they have a soul or not, or whether they go to heaven or not. I mean, those are all very interesting conversations to have. But the fact is that if we as humans can—and we’re animals too—but if we can heal physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, energetically by using the Emotion Code and working on our emotions and healing them, why not animals? I love that you said we can work with babies.
I just imagine the parents who have autistic children who are non-verbal could be doing this with their children. How beautiful is that? Sorry, you had a testimonial about working with animals?
[01:19:55] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh, right. This one just came in. This is from a woman named Beate in Germany. This came in on the first of February. She said, “Lilly, the dog of a family friend, suddenly no longer wanted to go up the stairs in her home and only managed to do so with a lot of start-up and motivation from her owner. Nothing seemed to be wrong physically. By the time my friend shared this with me, sitting together in a cafe, it had been going on for a long time. So, right there I connected remotely with Lilly the dog, and released a few of her trapped emotions. When my friend got home that afternoon, Lilly ran up the stairs without any complaints. A few days later, when her “fear of stairs” came back, I was able to solve a few more things. Now Lilly has no more problems walking up the stairs.”
And what’s interesting about this one too is that this was done at a distance. Of course, that’s because this is energy medicine really in its purest form. It’s not bound at all by distance, and so that’s a fun one, huh?
[01:20:59] Ashley James: Right. When you start studying quantum physics, you realize we’re all in the milieu together. It doesn’t matter if we’re 1,000 miles away or 1 foot away from each other. We have this energetic connection. I just love that. It blew my mind. It completely changed my life. My life took a 180 after I saw the movie What The Bleep Do We Know because I went like oh my gosh. This energy. Stop thinking in terms of chemicals and matter. Think in terms of energy. It’s all about energy. So that just makes total sense that emotions are energy and having them trapped in the body, very interesting.
You lived and went to school in Hawaii for a while. I studied Huna because I thought of the ancient Polynesian technique. I wouldn’t even call it a religion because it was more like their lifestyle. It was how they breathed, how they loved, how they healed, how they fished. Huna was their philosophy for living, and in Huna, there’s a belief. Now, this is hundreds or thousands of years old, who knows, but it’s an ancient Polynesian belief system about living and life.
They believed that emotions would become trapped in the body like black boulders stored in bags inside us. Like if you looked at a river and saw a river with no boulders would be calm, but a river with many boulders would be turbulent. So they had this idea that the more trapped emotions you had, the more the chi was turbulent within you and was thrown off. So I’ve always carried that imagery in my mind. So of course we would want to heal and release these emotions.
Now you’ve talked about getting the book the Emotion Code, but you’ve also talked about this course. Could someone who was very passionate like I am wanting to do this to all their friends and family, let’s say, and themselves and obviously the family being receptive, would the book be enough? Would it suffice, or should someone who really wants to do this technique with their animals, their kids, their husband, and their friends—should they take the course? Who should take the course and who should read the book?
[01:23:24] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, the information is definitely in the book. People all over the world are reading the book, putting it into practice, learning how it works. If you really want to master it or if you want to actually charge people for sessions, then we do want you to go through the certification program. The certification program that we have is an online program, and it’s available—you can go to discoverhealing.com. It’s actually on sale right now. It’s not an expensive program. It’s all online. You go through at your own pace. Most people will go through it in about three months, the record is two weeks. It just depends on how motivated you are.
But the nice thing about that is that it gives you rails to run on. I mean, think about it, I know that you’ve done this because I’ve done this and I think so many people have done this where you go to some really great course or something and you buy some materials and then a year later you come across it when they’re still shrink-wrapped. You think, oh yeah, I really wanted to learn that.
So the certification program gives you some deadlines, enables you to really learn it well, and get a lot of practice. You have a student advisor that helps you and gives you any kind of feedback that you need. But it also is all in the book. I mean, if you want to learn it from the book and use it on your friends, family members, and so on, by all means, go for it. It’s all in there. But if you want that added experience of getting certified, then yeah. If you want to do it for a living, then we want you to do that for sure.
[01:25:12] Ashley James: So why specifically? Because we have a lot of health coaches that listen to the show. I’m sure they’re all perked up and already on your site ready to sign up because this would be a great adjunct to health coaching. What is different in the live course that’s from the book? Are you teaching them how to work with people, what to look for, or the precautions? What is it that you get out of the live course that really helps you work with people on a professional level?
[01:25:44] Dr. Bradley Nelson: The course, in part, consists of 10 different recordings. They’re basically presentations where I go through with two of our top practitioners that have been doing this for many, many years. We discuss and kind of bounce things off of each other in explaining things. So what we try to do is we try to explain all of it from the very beginning in a way that makes it very easy for everybody to understand. That’s part of it.
You’ll gain insights from certification that you won’t get from the book. But also, in the certification program, you have homework. Your homework actually is the book itself. We supply the text of the book and the book on audio for you. You’ve got homework and then you work on yourself, and you’re one of the people. There are, I believe, 20 people that you have to work with, but you can count yourself as one of those people.
As you’re working with people and you’re releasing trapped emotions, you’re recording everything that you’re doing online on our site at discoverhealing.com in the back end at a location that’s just for you for this, and you record all that information. Then as you’re doing that, you do have to work with some animals, you have to totally clear the Heart-Wall from a number of people. What it does is accelerates your ability to do this because it’s like coaching. I mean, nobody really gets to the Olympic level of any sport without having a coach. It’s not possible.
That’s kind of what this program does. You’re able to see videos of other people doing this and sample sessions that are actually done that our practitioners are doing. You learn how to do this the right way. You learn how to do it better at a distance and so on. And then you’re quizzed on everything. There really is no final exam. You basically pass off each part of it as you go and so each part builds on the next part. But we have lots and lots of people doing it. It’s a great program. We consistently get very, very high 90% feedback from everybody doing it, that it’s a great program.
Anyway, the book itself if you’re just wanting to explore this a little bit maybe, you can go to emotioncodegift.com. There you can download the first couple of chapters of the book for free. We can give you those for free, you can try those out. If you want to get the book, the book’s available on Audible if you want to listen to it, amazon.com of course, Barnes & Noble—are they still in business? I think they are.
[01:29:09] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s Borders that went under.
[01:29:12] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Borders, yeah. What about B. Dalton? Are they still? I can’t remember.
[01:29:14] Ashley James: I was so bummed. Where I lived in Vegas—Henderson, Nevada just off of Stephanie, there was a Barnes & Noble and a Borders practically beside each other. That would be my favorite Saturday afternoon activity. I’d go pour through all of Barnes & Noble and then I’d pour through all the Borders. They would actually have different books depending. I would always go with the self-help, personal growth, and spiritual sections. That was my shtick. It was funny.
My husband’s and my second date we did that. We went to Barnes & Noble and Borders. I pointed out every book I ever read and he bought every book I ever read. He walked to the register with his hands full. He spent hundreds of dollars, and I looked at him. I’m like this guy listening to me. He’s serious. This guy’s serious. Oh, man. That was cool because he said he was into personal growth but then he was like putting his money where his mouth was. That was pretty hot I’d have to say. But we’ve been married for almost 13 years. I pretty much knew almost instantly that there was something special there. So yeah, I miss Borders.
Barnes & Noble’s around. I still do shop there occasionally. I love that you have an audiobook. I’m absolutely getting your audiobook because I love listening to audiobooks. I’m excited about that. Any listener can listen to your book or read your book and begin to immediately apply these techniques. They don’t have to take the course, but if they want to do it professionally they should take the course because they’re going to get it on a much deeper level.
That is so exciting. While I’ve been interviewing you I’ve made a list of at least 12 friends, clients, and family members that I want them all to get your book. I imagine all the listeners have done the same. No wonder you’re so popular. This is so needed in this world.
Dr. Bradley, I really want to have you back on the show. I’d love for you to continue to dive into this topic and explore it. Today was just to get us an introduction, get our foot in the door, and of course, everyone’s going to go get the book. I’m going to definitely go listen to your book, but I’d love to have you on the show you know after I’ve finished the book, and then maybe we can go deeper a bit into this topic. I know my listeners will absolutely love that, especially since they’re all going to go out and get your book too. And of course, they’re going to go to emotioncodegift.com and get the gift you’re giving out.
Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[01:31:51] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, I would just say that we’re living in this very unique time of the earth’s history where the world is in this transformational process. To me, it’s almost like the earth is in labor. It’s trying to give birth to this new world where so many of us want it to go. A world where people are living from their heart, and a world that is just so different from the world that we’re used to where darkness has so much influence over so much that’s been done in the world. This work, the Emotion Code, is part of this transformation. It’s just a little piece of it.
Think about when you read about somebody that is hurting someone else or has done some terrible thing, you can bet that there’s a Heart-Wall there because you see we feel with our heart. That’s why if someone is really hurting us or we’re really deeply grieved, we feel it in our chest, we feel it in our heart. And the brain that is in our heads doesn’t really feel. I mean, using the brain that is in our heads, the extension of that has created the world that we’re in now in many ways where we’re still using war to settle differences between nations, dropping bombs, blowing people up, and all kinds of crazy things, which seems to the logical mind to be perfectly appropriate.
But eventually, we are moving now towards a world where we’re all going to be living from our heart, you see, where love is going to rule the day. This work is about helping us to get there. It happens on an individual level. Get the book, learn how to do this. You can work on yourself, you can work on your family members, you can do so much healing not only for your own family that’s alive, but when you remove emotional baggage that has been inherited and passed down your line, you’re releasing it from them as well. We might want to talk about that next time because I’ve got some great stories I can tell you about that.
[01:34:11] Ashley James: Let’s do that. Awesome. Let’s have you back on the show and we’ll talk about inherited emotions. I have some amazing experiences about that as well. Again, an open-minded skeptic, wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t experienced it with my own experience. It’s pretty amazing, and it’s been documented actually. They’ve scientifically proven that the stress from trauma is passed down. They’ve been able to measure it, which is just so fascinating. But you can get very specific, and very specific trauma, very specific emotion that can be passed down for generations.
So it’s up to us to stop that, to heal it, and to allow the healing to go in both directions for past generations and future generations. So I’d love to have you come back on and we can talk about generational healing. I’d also like to ask you about past life healing if that’s ever come up because that is something that will challenge us in a very interesting way.
Dr. Bradley Nelson, I had the absolute pleasure having you on the show and can’t wait to have you back. It’s truly a gift and an honor to be in this day and age when we are birthing a world and we heal ourselves, heal thyself, help heal our friends and family. And if enough of us are going to tip the scales, we can help birth a world where love, peace, and consciousness are the things that we strive towards, the things that we resonate—coming from the heart instead of coming from the mind, like you said.
[01:35:50] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yeah. We’re going that direction. Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s been really fun. Let’s do it again.