my name's Kent and today we're going to go over how to unlearn irritable bowel syndrome using pain reprocessing therapy I'm going to introduce Michelle and then I'm going to turn over the conversation and okay so Michelle wiegers is a certified professional life and mind-body Coach she's writer and poet who discovered her creative voice and mind-body coaching work after recovering from over 25 years of chronic pain fibromyalgia sciatica mecfs pots IBS and symptoms associated with ehlers-danlos syndrome she creates restorative healing experiences with individual clients and through her online course how we heal chronic pain and fatigue and and now I'm going to turn it over to the host of the podcast our power is within Chad Smith thank you chat Smith yay thanks Kent we'll start out with uh Michelle can you talk to us about your experience dealing with abdominal symptoms such as irritable irritable bowel sure yeah so for me my actually my earliest TMS symptoms mind-body symptoms were IBS so I didn't have the diagnosis that young but as a child I had um you know some of the growth symptoms like constipation diarrhea nausea bloating hiccups and burps um just overall gut distress and um so those were experiences that um I really I've really dealt with my entire life it didn't really come to the Forefront um as far as a major life issue until I was in college and so I went into like a lot of testing with the gastroenterologist um I was diagnosed with IBS in college told at that point uh GIS were saying don't eat tomatoes onions oranges like all the acidic things I think now it's like different don't eat dairy don't eat gluten don't eat sugar whatever um there's actually a really funny story um and I think it's helpful I want to tell the story because I think it'll help potentially if you're dealing with these symptoms so um part of my one of my IBS symptoms was to Hiccup and then to do this little burp like hiccup burp very strange um and so I would do that I was in college and I'd have Spanish right after lunch and so I had a Spanish minor so I was taking Spanish class and um hiccup burping through it and so my Spanish Professor would always call me la barracha which means the drunk so he's always like accused of me of being drunk in class which of course I wasn't and so I was like well I just ate lunch and that's why I Hiccup and burp but I never really questioned why I didn't do that at breakfast why didn't I do it after dinner I only did it at lunch but when I look back on that situation I can see now it was an experience of anxiety because I really hated the class oral participation in Spanish because I was feeling like nervous about speaking in Spanish so that's what we start to do we start to question our assumptions and conclusions around what's causing the symptoms but I'm getting a little ahead of myself so um so I had a definitely influx of symptoms in college um and that gut distress was really a constant issue for me um out of college I started to see a naturopaths I went to like the traditional route I went to naturopaths um I was diagnosed with all kinds of things like leaky gut candida overgrowth a long long list of food intolerances I basically had to eat like a really strict strict paleo diet if you familiar with what that avoids like food restrictions around gluten dairy no sugar no heavy carbs or any any like starches starchy vegetables I mean I was like very limited in what I was allowed to eat all to help not only like the gut distress but I was told that those things were linked to my other symptoms like chronic fatigue syndrome fibromyalgia pain a lot of other symptoms that have been mentioned that I've had so those um that mix of being told that food was causing all this these problems and these diagnoses like the actual IBS diagnose gnosis that um that really created a lot of anxiety around me in me and especially in real as relates to certain foods so that's really kind of a brief overview of my symptoms okay how did you teach yourself because you're talking about how you over time learned that then these Foods were essentially bad for you so how did you learn to be able to eat these Foods again and how do you help other people to do this yeah so this is kind of a hard question to answer in some ways because it's going to be different for different people there are different Pathways um into this work as the way that I say it but I will say for me um starting with belief system around what you're what you believe is causing what so for me recognizing that the root cause was not food it was anxiety or the root cause was fear or the different difficult emotions stressors trauma that it was holding down in my body on um that's what my brain was trying to protect me from so the brain sends all kinds of mind-body Sensations including all the IBS Sensations as a way to kind of try to protect us from the experience of anxiety or um difficult life situations or memories or the like so I hold anxiety in my gut and I think it's a pretty common human experience to do that um my when I'm nervous my gut bloats so um that was I think that was why in some ways it started there um but the key I think is to start to see symptoms rightly so then you can address the experience of anxiety so when we're blaming food or an IBS diagnosis we're literally covering over the anxiety or distancing ourselves from it um anxiety or difficult emotions like anger fear grief loss um deep Rage which I was also holding so I also had a harder time recovering the IBS symptoms for me because I had such an intense amount around the actual Foods amount of fear around the foods so um I had gone to a naturopath who um you know she worked with me convincing me that the food sensitivities were causing all these problems and so I I literally had a very intense fear and anxiety around food I didn't I wasn't super aware of it um but I was often like the gluten police in my kitchen I have a fam large family four kids my husband and it was only after I was healing he was like oh yeah you're super intense about gluten and I was like oh really he's like yeah he's totally freaking out like don't put your weight in my almond butter or whatever like I was so I was I was intense about it and very fearful about it and that fearful pathway it perpetuated the symptoms and I really had I was locked in that fear about it so for me also when I learned I should say what I learned about mind body recovery I was very disabled I was using a cane I was about to get my own wheelchair I was life was very small and so for me food um issues weren't the most important symptom to start with I wanted to like walk again without a cane and have enter enough energy to cook or take a shower or be out of bed you know I'll go to a store so one of the reasons why I didn't get really around to IBS symptoms at the beginning was I couldn't work with all those symptoms all at once it's too overwhelming I mean I think it's a lot to ask so I had to take symptoms one thing at a time so um anyway um there's something else I was going to say about that question in the way that you go about oh so the other piece of it too is that it's sometimes harder to reverse irritable bowel type symptoms because um and I'm going to get to this in a minute but for for many of us it's a it's an experience of a higher level of anxiety than some other kinds of symptoms and it can be um you know we know that mind-body symptoms are coming from this repressed when we repress life experiences repress emotions or suppress them and kind of like skirt them to the side we're literally holding these life forces of um what emotions are in our lives are really like the Life Energy and force of Being Human and we're trying to like contain it in this shell that's really not meant to hold and hold all that in so that creates a lot of inner turmoil which um and that can be related those emotions can be related to trauma um either in childhood or early adulthood that can be related to our current life stress what's going on in our lives and even how we treat ourselves and for me um as a child I went through a sexual trauma and when I look back on why IBS started in college was like the first serious romantic relationship that I had like no wonder my gut was like freaking out and I'm still married to my husband the same guy that I had a serious relationship with in college and so I look at that now and I understand yeah it wasn't food I was freaking out internally about a relationship and it was showing up in my gut and eventually showing up another symptoms so um the other I didn't mention these tools that's the last thing I know everybody this is a long answer when I work with clients um with a variety of Sensations and symptoms including IBS what can really help um Chas you asked me like how did I start to add food back um is to not try to do it all at once in a really intense way but to to really use the tools of graded exposure somatic tracking really um embodied affirmations and when I say embodied like you can throw around an affirmation like I'm safe I'm healthy no go away you know IBS symptoms stop but if if you say those things and they don't like and they kind of like Ping off of you and you're like yeah I don't really believe any of that it's not really something that you're like Believing on a gut level embodied way and so finding affirmations that are really starting to soothe that anxious part of you and bring a sense of calm starting to bring a sense of safety um creating safety is pretty much everything in mind body recovery and there's a variety of ways of doing that but when we create safety and we resist the temptation to like push and and um really kind of stronger ourselves into healing um we we learn how to like create a lasting recovery and so when we we have a willingness to stop blaming flu triggers stop blaming IBS symptoms even or a diagnosis even stop leaving old things that practitioners have told us of why these symptoms are here that's when we start to release those things that are kind of holding those symptoms and we can really start to create safety um there's a lot more I could say I guess I will say that the other piece of it is that not everyone has to do deep emotional work to heal to recover um can't refer to having a book here he read in the book and it like made his symptoms go away um but for some of us and I'm included one of the reasons IBS symptoms was harder for me to reverse was because it was coming from this um place where I really need to process difficult life experiences and I needed to find ways to like name the emotions around the trauma and stress that I'd experienced um in my life and really to name anger to name Rage fear loss and to not just name them but then Define and explore ways of processing them and releasing them out of my body that's really where eat e-a-e-t comes in which is emotional awareness and expression therapy um which is another arm of this recovery but anyway um that was a really long answer hopefully I touched on all the pieces of your question Chaz yeah yeah absolutely um a quick follow-up to that is out of curiosity do you find with clients you we talk we're talking about stomach symptoms and IBS um or other various stomach symptoms and you mentioned you know food triggers which is something we often do learn in this uh Journey like oh this food's bad this food's bad that food's bad and we start developing that relationship with these foods but have you experienced anybody who has the stomach symptoms but actually has no fear of food and doesn't associate any food as the trigger well that's a good question because I do have um I've had some long coded clients who had some severe um gut symptoms and I know there are some who haven't like necessarily tied it directly to food but I think it was the assumption that it was like a long covet experience but then I have another uh long coveted client who recovered um she was limited to literally 30 Foods she ate and nothing else so she um but I'm trying to think yeah I guess I think because so often the gastroenterologists approach to dealing with IBS is what are you eating that's upset in your stomach and I mean not to blame them like they're dealing with a stress-induced symptom and they're looking for a you know a cause um so yeah I don't I'm not sure that I do have a really concrete example of that um is that something you've run across yeah yeah yeah yeah so I was just curious um but do you find that okay so do you find that unlearning symptoms like IBS or stomach conditions is different or harder than unlearning something like a muscular pain yeah so that is that's a good question there's a um when I so when I was working through when I was first introduced to this approach I started with Dr Schumer's unlearn your pain book it's a friend of mine had recovered and I started there and I got through a certain um portion of it and then I was like I cannot do this work alone I need to work with someone else this is way too much for me and it was and so um I ended up working with an istdp therapist and um she taught me the difference between striated muscles muscle anxiety smooth muscle anxiety cognitive perceptual disruption and the fourth one is conversion so motor conversion so those are different levels she taught me in this event that there are different levels of anxiety on different intensities but um a striated muscle anxiety is really the experience of muscle tension in the muscles that are in our skeletal system and they're really under voluntary control so I can like move my arms and hands if you think about your limbs and your neck and your head like you know you can you're under control and you can voluntarily like freeze them or move them um a lot of those types of striated muscle anxiety the way that shows up in the bottle body is through muscle spasms and um causes symptoms like fibromyalgia pain headaches back pain like neck shoulder chest hand foot pain it can also cause Panic like hyperventilation with dizziness um tingling in the hands shortness of breath I've had a variety of those symptoms I um I re-looked up what these calls in Hidden from view this is a book by Dr schubener and Alan Abbas and um it's a phenomenal book for practitioners and well for anyone but um they describe it in depth in that book and then smooth muscle anxiety it's really how anxiety shows up in the involuntary muscles that aren't under our control I think sometimes those can be more difficult to nail down so I can't like talk to her to like pot symptoms or gut symptoms in you know the IBS symptoms and say hey stop like stop bloating but I could I literally did tell my physical like extremity pain to stop and it started to work when I was recovering so in a sense um the smooth muscle anxiety affects these different parts of our bodies cardiovascularly a respiratory system our GI system um Urology neurology um some examples would definitely be IBS like we've been talking about um chest tightness which causes of course a lot of fear and anxiety I've um a number of clients who've recovered from pots and that's a common symptom in pots um it's just you know issues with your chest um anyway there's a number of I can I can share more let's see reflux vomiting um abdominal pain Interstitial cystitis which is a real attention in the bladder um reynard's flushing um all those kinds of things I will say that an even deeper level of anxiety that I experienced is something that we're often your vision is impaired where you can get like blurry vision and that unconscious anxiety is really called the cognitive perceptual anxiety so I never had motor conversion and that's when your your body instead of like going super tense everywhere which is the striated muscles response of anxiety the motor conversion really your body just like Falls slack and you can I don't know if you've experienced this anyone listening but where like your legs will give out on you or um you faint even having like poor memory like mental disturbances as far as like your memory going blank um tunnel vision that kind of thing so these are different what's interesting and what I think can help bring a lot of hope at least I I hope it does for you is to recognize that this is how anxiety shows up in our bodies and for so many of us with mind-body symptoms especially if you're like me where you've had like years and years of like now my body's doing this now my body's doing that why do I have all these different weird symptoms and you know sometimes you're like really can stress really cause all of these symptoms that's crazy and it does seem crazy but when you start to understand how anxiety shows up in these different muscle groups of the body and what's really physiologically and medically normal to have stress show up this way I think it gives us like it opens it creates an opening for us to believe that this is mind body and a way forward for how to treat it because then we start treating the experience of anxiety instead of treating all these symptoms with these like pills and all the things that we do right thank you so much I really love and appreciate that answer I I feel like I my I've personally and also I know so many people who yeah the stomach symptoms can sometimes linger or be one of the harder ones to overcome and it as I listen to you explain this it really makes sense and it it makes sense why I when I first found Dr sarno's book I also was able to just eliminate the the muscular pain almost instantly like I had no fear around it instantly and started exercising and resuming activity but the gut stuff was like I couldn't wrap my head around that part that took a lot longer and just believing alone wasn't enough and so as you explain this difference it makes sense and I've never heard it explained that way I love how you broke that down if you wouldn't mind um putting the name of the book in the chat for anybody who might be interested in that particular book um and let's see here and I do just want to say right now that someone says also thank you for acknowledging that rewiring IBS symptoms and reintroducing foods can take longer than rewiring other symptoms I've been retraining for three years and I am now focusing on how I can reintroduce food slowly and with more success so yeah so it definitely I think is helpful to hear how you explain that for for people I'd love to say thank you I'd love to say a little more about into reintroducing food slowly thank you um for this comment um I do think that um one we we have the opportunity to change our assumption and relationship to what's causing what which I mentioned but recognizing that there's there's um we get to rewire reframe start to re-understand our relationship to food and as we do um those week I was actually just meeting with a client today about this and I was inviting her to make a food list of um the foods that feel accessible to her to try again in the fact what I meant by that was like basically I was asking her to make a list of the ones that caused the least amount of fear in her so which ones feel like oh yeah they're they they usually cause symptoms but oh I want to try that so start with like three on that level and then recognize and told her like if you've got the food that's like oh no that one like I don't know if I'll ever be able to eat that again and you have a lot of fear around that don't start with the largest biggest roadblock so to speak don't start with the biggest most intense experience of fear the link that you have but try to introduce them more slowly and the graded exposure approach that um Dr stupner taught me and his practitioner training really it starts with a level of imagination where you imagine yourself eating that food you imagine yourself you picture you can like look at a picture of it or actually I've actually had clients bring the food and put it on their desk next to their computer screen and I'll say okay you're near it how do you feel because it's really interesting and curious to to explore what Rises up in you emotionally around fear or anxiety even being near the food you'd be surprised at what people find and so then we we move forward with really imagining eating the food following even like visually like closing your eyes and like picturing it going down and what is your food what is it finding and I know this sounds maybe a little bit wild but to be able to use the imagination because when you're picture doing it it can trigger a fear response which teaches you what's actually neurologically what's wired it's the fear that's keeping that perpetuating the symptoms so when you can move forward and actually trying that food not like eating a whole plate of whatever it is let's just say bread if you're if gluten is your thing not even a whole plate of pastel at once but can you try like a little like single piece of pasta or a small little piece of cracker that kind of thing and just with affirmations with that sense of um greatest exposure where you you start a little bit of it and you go in and you picture yourself and join it with ease with comfort sharing yourself with embody affirmations there's nothing wrong with me this food actually doesn't pose any danger for me and I can access it and eat it without symptoms and you just do that in a gentle titrated way that in time you teach your brain this food's safe not to be afraid of it got this you're not gonna have pizza or whatever right yeah yeah that's so true and I love that you brought up the imagination Factor because and not that this will work for or happen for everybody but sometimes it's such good evidence that we really are on to something and that it's more mind body because um some people just imagine eating a food and actually have a reaction and if you actually just imagine eating it and have a reaction that is like ding ding ding absolute evidence that it's not the food you know it's like if if you're reacting and you haven't even put it in your system it's showing that it's actually your brain's perception that and of the food that is the problem so I think that's a really helpful tip somebody is asking if lactose intolerance can also be Mind Body syndrome yeah Kent do you want to speak to that I see you made a comment just from what I've heard in uh basically lactose intolerance is similar to celiac disease in which it's not something you can unlearn generally speaking but you know in theory just like with wheat there's people who who may think they have celiac disease who don't and have a reaction to wheat that could be unlearned in theory that could be possible of dairy where you think you have lactose intolerance but it's more of a learned a learned reaction to eating dairy and so I actually would be curious to know Michelle have you ever like worked with somebody dealing with lactose intolerance and trying to assess whether it's more of a hardwired intolerance or something that is changeable yeah that's a good question not specifically lactose intolerance as a solo food sensitivity um I think everyone that I've worked with has had like a long list of foods that they were sensitive to and um there was a lot of I'm I'm thinking I'm thinking about different clients um yeah I would say I don't have the experience of someone just having lactose intolerance I do think that um Dairy I do know that Dairy gluten sugar um uh legumes certain there's certain categories of foods nightshades there's certain categories of foods that practitioners whether they're Western practitioners the GI docs or naturopathic Chiropractic that kind of um approach do tend to say those are like you know if you go on an Elimination Diet those are things are taken out and um so could lactose intolerance be Mind Body syndrome absolutely I think it could but like Kent said if you have an actual Sensitivity I mean there's hope cultures there's whole Asian cultures that are sensitive to lactus like that's not a my you know so um in that sense I think it it would take some experimentation and I think graded exposure would be a great tool to use okay and prop most likely as somebody who has its sensitivity to Dairy has sensitivity to other food types too so you could start with those other ones and if you only have lactose intolerance and no sensitivity to other foods that would be an indication that you're in lactose intolerance is more likely to be like a hardwired kind that can't be reversed or unlearned would be my guess not not available at this at all but that's generally how we tend to think about neuroplasticity my husband is lactose intolerant and he he jokes were not baby cows who shouldn't be drinking milk but like you know everyone's different in that sense so but he doesn't have the Mind Body symptoms in the gut so if you are lactose intolerant and you're seeing it as a as a reason to cause a host of different symptoms that's where I would start with you as a if you were a client so it's like let's look at your symptoms what symptoms are typical of lactose intolerance and as your long list of symptoms outside of the window of that right how the body like does it fit the way the body shows up usually with with medically speaking with symptoms so that's something to explore too yeah and I'll add in that my experience something that I've learned is if it's something that you were born with they say that it's likely an actual like allergy that probably can't be unlearned but if it's something that you developed at some point in your life even as a child then I personally would say experiment with unlearning it because I do believe almost anything is possible and I've actually like heard stories of people with quote-unquote lactose intolerance rewiring their brain to be able to handle all types of dairy so yeah I would say if you if you developed it as like adult onset or child onset there's a reason that you developed it and you'd never know if there could be like an emotional component or something happened at the time you ate it and the Brain perceived it as a threat just the way it can perceive anything else in the world as a threat in a moment of stress so um yeah I guess if somebody wanted to like eat dairy that bad it wouldn't be it wouldn't be a bad thing to experiment with unless it was like life-threatening you know the symptoms but I love how you mentioned Michelle like to start with what symptoms are actually presenting right because one person can have like there's generally like a certain set of symptoms for something that's really specific like an actual allergy and if you're having completely different symptoms or reactions that could also be an indicator um okay I want to get into a couple of the questions that have been submitted so far so the first one is uh what can you do when your nervous system is all messed up causing excessive malnutrition difficulty swallowing no saliva tears or sweat and a stomach that isn't seem uh working my body thinks all foods are the enemy and it's messed up I see it as a vagus nerve issue how can this be related to MBS I know it came from severe stress over mold in my house where I was passing out and now I'm having to rent a room with money I don't have and it's become a mess thank you for that question um I think your question can apply to all of us because to one level or another when you have Mind Body symptoms show up it's a nervous system dysregulation so when you when we deal with difficult life stress currently or from past trauma or even in how we're treating ourselves in injuries that we get and then the brains perpetuates the symptoms all of those things trigger the danger signal in our brains which kicks in the fight flight or freeze response and when the brain as that danger triggered and that fight five degrees responses is kicked in but the brain goes into protective mode um trying to protect us from difficult emotions and that's how symptoms get created and Jupiter talks about um this in his course um as practitioner training that I took and when those symptoms are created then we become fearful worried and focused about the symptoms we're experiencing experiencing and that that fear worry and focus on the symptoms themselves re-triggers our danger signal and we get we get stuck in this fear symptom fear Loop um that's hard to break so I I hear you in your question about all of these symptoms you're dealing with and um that the dysregulation and really the breakdown of relationship with our bodies that can happen with these severe symptoms can be really challenging describing you're saying that the um your body thinks that all food is the enemy and that's like a really strong statement that I have been there in that sense where you're like really struggling with that relationship and wanting to I would really encourage you to take small steps towards rebuilding a relationship with yourself and with your body and maybe that seems like a vague response but even if it is a vagus nerve issue the vagus nerve can be soothed through a variety of different tools um especially Peter Levine in somatic experiencing has a lot of vagus nerve exercises that can help regulate the system um and that's related to mind-body syndrome and TMS because because it's it's still related to how we understand why we understand we're having symptoms that we are and so we really want to understand the goal becomes to really start to understand what what stressors are triggering us what triggers our symptoms and then how we can create safety in variety of practices and when I say variety of practices I'll give some examples because I didn't before breath work is incredible for regulating the nervous system the regulating breath in particular when you breathe in for like a certain number of counts let's say four to five and you breathe out exhale or even longer it activates the parasympathetic nervous system in our brains which reduces the experience of anxiety we want with MBS symptoms um and even and vagus nerve issues we want to get to this place where we're reducing anxiety so um breath work um expressive writing is a huge tool for many people and recovering um really breath work involved with movement so um combining that that could be yoga or gentle stretching anything that really brings you a sense of calm and um that's where I would start um but when we're in survival mode I just want to say this work is really hard and when we're in survival mode and we're just trying to put our pieces together you might not have the capacity yet to do this work but we can trust that in time we might and um you know when we're really under a lot of money Financial stress or living situation stress those are times when maybe we don't have as much capacity as we we might once those situations become more regulated um I don't know if that feels helpful um or if Chaser can't have anything to add but I don't but if whoever asks that question if you want to ask a follow-up question feel free to put it in the chat I felt like it was supportive all right I'm going to go on to the next question if anyone has any follow-ups remember you guys can ask at any point uh somebody did ask you Michelle if your alignment and structural issues related to EDS resolved as well such as joint subluxations ribs that go out of place upper cervical spine that goes out of alignment she she or he says when I get things aligned by a body worker it helps my symptoms dramatically and I can feel with my hands when my rib is out of place or in place for example so I'm having a hard time fully convincing myself the best I've been able to come up with and I really do think is is this plausible is that when my nervous system is out of whack it manifests as a body that is physically out of alignment what an incredible Insight I'm just gonna go with you there Karina and saying like sometimes our bodies present with certain symptoms for a reason and I want to give you an example for my own story and then I'm going to answer your question when I was diagnosed with EDS ehlers-danlos syndrome I was diagnosed by a geneticist in Dartmouth Hitchcock I live in New England on um and you know I'm hypermobile my body bends in ways it shouldn't and of course that was causing my pain no it actually wasn't now if you have EDS diagnosis I might be rubbing you the wrong way right now I'm not sure but it wasn't I'm so glad that I was wrong because the pain that I was that was perpetuating my body was actually Mind Body due to stress difficult emotions as I've already mentioned but what happened to me within a month of my diagnosis I literally walked into the hospital in August of that year within a month I was using a cane and barely walking and I tell you that part of my story to say I look at it now and I was absolutely terrified to walk into my own future because so many people with EDS are wheelchair-bound are um aren't able to work and I was terrified by the time we returned five months later six months later we returned with my kids my four kids and we all tested them all for EDS with the same practitioner I was wheeled into the hospital because I couldn't walk anymore that's how much fear took over my body now at the time my interpretation was like oh my gosh I'm so glad I have this diagnosis now I understand why my feet are doing this and why I can't walk but it wasn't actually what was happening so it was it was the diagnosis itself creating such an intense fear in me and because it's a genetic connective tissue disorder I have four kids and I'm looking they look pretty bendy and flexible too crap they're going to be stuck with a life of pain is what I was thinking right um they all Bend and they all have ads and none of them have symptoms so anyway uh just speak to your I'm sorry to go off on that story but I couldn't not say it in relation to what you're asking here because EDS is a hard thing and it's really more more commonly diagnosed now than it used to be um I still can do things with my hands like my thumb touches my arm like my elbows go backwards and my knees and you know I'm a very awkward lanky person if you see me in real life because I've got a bendy body but what I recognized is that actually the area the sublux the sublux supplications that I would have would be my mostly my right knee would pop out of joint and I'd have to slam my slam my leg straight to pop it back in when when I um had that diagnosis I was told I should never do yoga yoga has been one of the primary things to help me heal and continue healing in mind body recovery and I had to work with my fear around that joint going out so again for me it was a fear thing when fear was higher when I had the expectation it would go out um than it would but what's also true for me is that I'm not exercising walking regularly building strength in my likes then my joints are more wobbly so there's a structural component where I need stronger muscles to keep me in line there's also a fear component which I had to work to undo so hearing you say you're having a hard time feeling convincing yourself but the best way you've come up with it is to really think about it that like your nervous system is out of whacked and so your body is out of alignment I think there's something there and I would really explore the deeper emotional roots hmm I think that your answer was awesome Michelle I feel like your story was so pertinent and I'm glad that you shared it isn't it crazy how sometimes the diagnosis can be more um harmful than the actual initial symptoms you know especially when it's one of those diagnoses that feels like a life sentence absolutely yeah uh okay and the next question it's not so much a question but I actually really think you might have something you'd would like to say to this Michelle it's uh it says I began my TMs Journey with hip pain and and my pain has moved into feeling anxiety in my stomach nausea and sinking feelings are now my Norm I get caught up with how to feel my emotions that I know I am repressing I'm doing istdp but it is hard work yeah thank you for sharing um hip pain has been one of my longest symptoms on um everything else for me is completely better but if I press my finger on my hip I can still have a little bit of pain but it's not something that I mean I'm physically active and I do yoga and I do um you know exercising like normal physical life I never take naps like I'm back to myself but there is something about for me and I don't know um I don't know your history or your story but sometimes when we look at the kinds of trauma that we've been through um there's this whole region in our bodies the pelvic Bowl the pelvic floor hips buttocks um lower gut where um sometimes we have that held there because of there's certain I mentioned sexual trauma there are certain kinds of trauma that are really held up in the body if you've ever read the body keeps the score something that I read when I was recovering by basil Vander call because it's an amazing book to talk about how that happens so um this work can be intense and I hear you like getting caught up with how to feel your emotions um knowing that there's a lot of Oppression going on I think that's where putting all the support structures in place that you can is huge and for me I mean I worked with an istp therapist for um two years pretty much almost weekly I did have like a three month break in there um and um we went places I didn't know we I had to go and I I mean I laugh about it it's not funny but I also think that um the amount of healing that this work can open up in our lives is definitely about reducing symptoms and but it's also so often it invites us into a much deeper emotional healing that leads us to things in our lives we never dreamed of so I know it's hard work but I encourage you to keep going and to create as much safety for yourself as possible caveat on istdp therapy is there some I've had clients who've worked directly with istdb therapists and it's not been a good fit it is not a cure-all approach and some practitioners the way they practice it it's too forceful it's too intense and it ends up being re-traumatizing so if that's someone's experience I would just encourage you to find someone who's really going to be aligned with you that help you feel safe as you're recovering um the last thing I'll say about you know um anxiety starting with hip pain and then moving into your stomach and the sinking feelings is I would encourage you to to develop a somatic tracking practice where you're starting to really listen to the symptoms because if you think about it and I talk about this a lot with clients um my experience and the way that I describe it in my course I have by the way I have a recovery course called how we heal chronic pain and fatigue and I now I have a self-guided version of it um but um the top layer really tends to be our physical symptoms these symptoms of the brain is creating and for so many of us I want to say 100 which maybe seems ridiculous but I've never met a client or a student who doesn't have anxiety as the next layer so if as your symptoms are reducing anxiety increases for you that's pretty much every almost everyone's experience maybe not at 100 but um so the top layer physical symptoms the next layer is anxiety and doesn't that make sense because the reason these symptoms are showing up is because the danger signals being triggered and the fear response is is kicked in the fight flight or freeze or Fawn response that's an anxiety producing response so we have anxiety the deeper the third layer that not everyone has to go into but some of us do and I was one of those people am still um as far as being present to our deeper emotions the deeper repressed emotions and so getting into that layer it's a wild Journey because it's it's we're accessing the subconscious and the subconscious doesn't really appreciate us knocking on the front door and being like hey let me in like there's a lot of different ways to go about that um I I think creativity actually opens up a lot of possibility for us to access the subconscious in ways that we can't in um other ways but I'm getting off onto another topic um thank you for sharing I want to encourage you to keep going with this work and can can continue to create as much safety as possible for yourself recognizing that that could include finding a better aligned practitioner or it could include you know developing more support structures in your life so okay thank you Michelle um I have another question uh somebody asks what is the balance of using medications and injections Etc and also doing this work could my continuing to go to pain management Chiropractic and other things be sabotaging my efforts with TMS I am so glad you asked this Maria um so I have a couple thoughts Sarno and schubener both encourage you to stop all well Sarno especially said stop all treatments you don't need them and they're gonna inhibit your your recovery um and I want to say that because if you're believing that this medication injection all the different supports that we put in place to get through chronic symptoms right if you're believing that you need those you're solidifying in your brain the neural pathway belief that this is a physical symptom but if it's a mind-body symptom it's not a physical symptom you're physically okay you're medically okay that's why by the way I will say the very first approach to this work is to get ruled out get Major Medical diagnosis and causes ruled out by your medical practitioners because not only does that of course you want to find like a root cause that is Medical in case it's there but those kinds of tests to get all the major things ruled out it can create safety it can help us realize okay I actually am medically safe and so if I am do I need this cortisone injection what am I covering up I mean you can ask yourself uh let's just say you know injections a really common one is cortisone for back pain is this cortisone injection gonna cover up the emotion stress situation stressful situation happening in my life that I don't have to feel to be present to because it's kind of it's Patty knit right but what I also want to say is that I I encourage I feel like a broken record and you probably think I am in saying that creating safety is utmost importance because when we feel afraid it increases anxiety and it triggers our danger response we want to have move forward in a safe way so if you have like five or six different practitioners and supports and you're new to this work ripping all them out all at once could really trigger you and be really terrifying because they've been supportive people in your life so um doing it in a slow tight shirt slowly tightered away could be really helpful everyone's gonna do that differently though some of us are super intense like me and we're just gonna like Dive In The Deep End and deal with the consequences and other of us are going to try to do this you know cut things back slowly when I tell clients they've got I never by the way give medical advice so that was not a medical advice to you and I would never I would never encourage any client or student of mine to change their medication or other Medical Treatments um without the supervision of their practitioners their doctors so that's utmost importance the other thing that I will say is that you can look if you're certain that the symptoms of Mind Body but you have too much fear around letting go of a chiropractic adjustment if you can look at it as a bridge to get from where you are now to where you're ready to let go of that then that's okay but what if you can look at as a bridge where you say okay I'm not fully ready to not do this but will I be in two months one month two weeks and so can you start to get yourself ready to say this is no longer serving me this is oftentimes those practitioners are perpetuating our um our physiological interpretations of our symptoms and that's what can be really that can stand in the way of us really embodying the mind-body approach and so we want to be listening to and reading and studying and practicing mind-body science and mind-body tools on working um you know listening to podcast like chasses and others like really like um saturating ourselves in this approach that's a long answer I'm sorry for it's long-winded it was great thank you okay you guys we're gonna do one more question and then we're actually going to um have Michelle lead us through a tool called somatic tracking for some of you that might be familiar and for some of you that might be new so we'll have her answer this last question and then you guys can stick around and we'll spend a few minutes doing this somatic tracking tool together [Music] one I would encourage you if you don't yet have a therapist walking through this with you to access that because whenever we have anxiety or depression and it's those are both common Mind Body symptoms they can also be chemically related um and I'm not going to speak to all of that right now because I'm not a medical practitioner primarily but whenever we have anxiety or depression flooding us to where it's affecting our everyday lives in a severe and um really impairing way it's a sign for us to get weekly support and I would encourage you to get weekly support from a trained therapist that's what I tell every single client I work with in Mind Body coaching and my students in my course because when we want to work with this mind body work we need a certain level of capacity like you need to have to be in a place where you're able to work to you know do the practices and and and study and learn and when we're really in a very scary dark depressive state that's often not a place where we have a lot of capacity so I that's my first foremost to keep yourself in a relationship that's going to help you stay safe and it's going to teach you how to regulate again um I will say um my therapist talks about depression uh and I think this is a really interesting description as anger turned inwards her experience of depression when it's a emotional based and not a chemical based is that we have a lot of anger and we can't express and release it and so we turn it in on of ourselves and it really causes a lot of depression um that's a fascinating perspective whether or not that's something that you relate to but if you're working with this with long covet using the techniques in the breath work and your fatigue was improving and then now you're depressed I would explore with a therapist not alone um the the role of anger and and the symptoms that you're experiencing um so yeah I I think um I think the way we recover does affect us and if we're getting too overwhelmed and um we can really re-trigger ourselves so providing you know accessing all the support that we need in therapy or in coaching support whatever we need I think that's it's good to recognize that it's really ours to to heal in a way that's going to be that's going to work for us for my body symptoms I do want to mention too um that my my how we heal course it's a course that teaches this whole approach with a lot of teaching and tools and handouts um I wanted to give everyone here if you're interested in an approach like that and you're really wanting to explore it um a hundred dollars off the course for the next two weeks if it's something that would be helpful and supportive for you um I can put a link in the chat um to there's a special discount page if you're interested in that or if you just need other resources or tools I have a lot of free resources on my website as well and Kent has a ton of free resources although this might hurt film um website so there's a lot out there to explore in what he's really curated on his way website too thank you Michelle all right so I think we will cut the questions uh there and I think everybody's questions got addressed either via Michelle or in the chat by Kent um you guys like we've already said we're all accessible so uh you have my email you have access to me uh can't put his information there for the film Michelle's got her contact information so if you have other questions or you want resources there's lots of options out there and with that I think we're going to turn it over to Michelle to guide us through a somatic tracking experience sure thank you so much for hosting this Chaz and Kent for inviting me tonight it's been a real privilege and I really consider it an honor to speak about this work and if this tonight has created any small little window of Hope for you that you can recover my biggest encouragement is to follow it that's an opening that's been created for you and maybe you didn't have that opening before so I'd encourage you to follow that explore this approach in an unpressured Safe Way and um and I want to encourage you that healing is possible it absolutely is um so thank you Lynn for saying that really appreciate you showing up and everyone else too um so we're going to go into a very brief somatic tracking I'm going to try to keep it in brief um this is something that I do with clients a lot you can access a variety of somatic tracking online as well um I have a somatic tracking in my course too so not I just want to mention that not everyone is ready to go directly into the body I was very very disassociated for my body and I'm not sure that somatic tracking would have helped me as much in the very beginning so if you'd identify with being feeling like very distant from your body you have a hard time being present with what you feel this may not be your best practice so I'm going to just say that as a caveat so it but if you'd like to try it I'd love to have you do it with me um so you can start and if you feel comfortable um keeping your video on you can but if you want to do it with me and you want to like lay back and like feel comfortable just like closing your eyes you can turn your video off if it's more comfortable for you um so I would like you to close start by closing your eyes and just start to notice your breath you might even slow it a little bit if you're familiar with a regulating breath or other breath work you could inhale or four to five to six counts to your comfort level and once you're at the top you can pause and then exhale or four to five to six even up to eight nine ten follow your own body's rhythm of your breath for a few Cycles when you breathe out longer I already mentioned how that can really calm experience of anxiety and so during this short meditation if you ever feel a spike of anxiety or a desire to like oh I can't do this no way kind of rising up in you ignore everything I'm saying and just return to your breath and go back to your breath to bring a sense of calm so in somatic tracking what we're doing is we are trying to attune to Sensations in the body without fear our goal is to change our relationship to the sensation so oftentimes we use this when we're actually experiencing a sensation so what I'd like you to do is just as you're continuing to breathe you don't have to count you can you know whatever you want to do as far as that I want you to kind of just scan through your body you can start with your head and kind of move down or just kind of be present to whatever is rising up in you and choose a physical sensation you're experiencing now and that physical sensation could be a dull ache a sharpness it could be tingling numbness it could be um any you know what we talked about in the gut as far as like nausea or bloating just choose one sensation and use your breath and I want you to breathe into that sensation like you're giving it air you're giving it space and just notice that so oftentimes when we have unpleasant Sensations in the body we have a tendency to like want to run away from it of course we're like ah stop the pain or whatever the sensation's going on right we want to distract ourselves from it but what somatic tracking us is to do is to be present to it so simply watch it you can continue to breathe into it if you want picturing your breath expanding that sensation on the inhale and then on the exhale so with this practice you're not trying to change it there's really no goal except to attune to it it might decrease it might shift it might stay the same and any of that's okay all you're doing is being with it watching it telling yourself these Sensations are safe your brains learn they're dangerous and that's why the brain is creating symptoms in this area for you so in somatic tracking you get to teach your brain that this sensation's safe just like I referred to the Eds pain in my knee I had to learn that that area was safe so breathe into the sensations and as you watch them Let It Go of any kind of ulterior action like you really are just paying attention out of a sense of curiosity even watching it with ease like huh that's interesting look what my brain's doing in my body wow like fascinating um one visual that I learned from I think was Alan Gordon um said you could watch it like you're lying down in the grass looking at the sky watching clouds shift by and you know you can watch a cloud shift by and it turns into all these different shapes you're like whoa there goes that one that's the same kind of very light ease that we can observe our bodies both in that same way so picture yourself watching clouds kind of just roll on by if Sensations are increasing decreasing staying the same any of that's okay it's really just like shifting clouds because medically speaking when you have Mind Body symptoms moving through your body you are physically safe you are no longer in danger so you can develop this space using in somatic tracking you can use an affirmations visualizations the breath itself just reduce fear and attend an attuned to it so I'm going to briefly this is like the fastest smack tracking ever usually when I do it with clients it's like a 15 or 20 minute experience I want you to just notice now the sensation maybe you noticed when it started it was super sharp or dull or whatever you noticed in the beginning what is it like now has it shifted stayed the same just get curious if it shifted how fascinating is it that we can use a short seven minute time to just attune to ourselves and in that tiny little window our Sensations can shift that is the power of attention without fear that's sort of mixed teaching and a mind-body meditation this has been very untraditional but what I want you to do is just return to your breath you can breathe into the area that you were picturing for a couple more Cycles and as you do reassure yourself this practice of just paying attention to the sensation in your body is actually starting to create new neural Pathways Links of safety instead of links of fear and when you're ready you can open your eyes return to the room if you want to put your camera on you don't have to um that was literally the fastest amount of tracking I've ever LED and I want to say that um if I was leading you all with you know one-on-one I would pause and have you state like what was the sensation like and describe it below the detail and then we continue to attune to it and then we see how it shifts the other piece that can happen for this is that sometimes you can attune to a sensation and you can get an emotion rise up or you're going to have an image come to mind a color and so it can be a really um intuitive and creative tool as well to help teach you what's inside the sensation but I'll stop there because I know we're a little over in time um I do want to say like my course if this approach is new to you and you're like a little overwhelmed on where to start it can be really helpful and I really am excited to offer this 100 off to anyone here um for the next two weeks and if you just have a question reach out to me I do work someone asked me directly if I work with clients one-on-one I do as my schedule permits um and that's something that we can explore so you can find my website and reach out thanks so much awesome thanks so much everyone have a good night thanks Ken thanks Michelle take care foreign