BEST SELF WORLD SUMMIT Kelly Brogan, M.D.

Transcription

1 BEST SELF WORLD SUMMIT Kelly Brogan, M.D.

2 Overview INTRO Dr. Kelly Brogan is a holistic women s health practioner and New York Times bestselling author of A Mind of Your Own. She is also a medical doctor with numerous prestigious degrees who boldly traded her prescription pad for a recipe manual specializing in a root-cause solution approach to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms. STORY Kelly shares a personal awakening process that transformed her from skeptic to believer in the power of alternative medicine. Her work is a call to arms for women dealing with depression and other ailments that can be cured with lifestyle choices. TAKE-AWAYS No stranger to activism, Dr. Kelly Brogan is on a mission to help people regain freedom from meds in order to reclaim a natural state of vitality. You ll nd out why she spent years in medical school and subsequent years un-learning all that she was taught. Interview highlights: How a grassroots movement saved her book from pharma-funded media outlets Navigating the nuances of force vs. flow Viewing self-care as the greatest form of activism available to women today Why she wouldn t change anything in the world right now if she could Before I stopped prescribing, I had never once cured a patient. Dr. Kelly Brogan Page 1

3 Interview by Kristen Noel Welcome to the 1st Best Self World Summit. We're thrilled that you've found your way to us and us to you. I'm your host, Kristen Noel, editor-inchief of Best Self Magazine. The Best Self World Summit was created with one intention: Connecting the dots of our whole selves body, mind and spirit so that we can shift out what is not working in our lives and into what is possible. The wisdom and insights from our diverse experts and thought leaders are sure to ignite your mojo, vibrancy and power to bring forth your best self. Dr. Kelly Brogan is a Manhattan-based holistic women's health psychiatrist and New York Times best-selling author. She completed her psychiatric training and fellowship at NYU Medical Center after graduating from Cornell University Medical College and has a BS from MIT in Systems Neuroscience. She is boardcerti ed in psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine and integrative holistic medicine and specializes in a root cause solution approach to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms. In other words, she has the science to substantiate her diet-based approach to resetting patients in her psychiatry practice. Kelly Brogan is a doctor who boldly traded her prescription pad for a recipe manual. I had the distinct honor of sitting down with Kelly for a Best Self cover story when her book, A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives, was literally hot o the publishing presses. I'm thrilled to reconvene for another chat and to learn about where this journey has continued to lead her. Kelly, for anyone who isn't familiar with your fabulous book or your work, I'd love it if you could begin by sharing the story of what happened when that book was first released. Tell us about the grass roots movement that led me to you. Page 2

4 First of all, it is a total pleasure to speak with you. You're one of my favorite people to dialog with about these subjects and I'm so excited that you're putting together all of these di erent inspirational minds for this Summit. I hope to contribute what I can to this story, having come from a very di erent mentality and mindset and training. We're talking about this a year later, believe it or not, and what had been sort of unfolding when we spoke last around my book launch was, in many ways, not a surprise to me. That's because I had been steeped in some of the darker aspects of the activism world, which is essentially a discovery process whether it's environmental activism or pharmaceutical or legal activism. At some point, you come to discover that industry is very good at protecting its interests and that they will go to great lengths to capture regulatory agencies, the media, and elements of the governmental branches. I was already very aware that what I had to say about what I had discovered and learned what I would call, the truth about psychiatric treatment was not going to sit well with pharma-funded media outlets. Why was that? All of the mainstream media outlets whether we're talking about The Today Show or 60 Minutes or Dr. Oz, or even some that present themselves as being progressive and unbiased like NPR or PBS, or The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times any of these outlets are in some form or fashion beholden to the orthodoxy, and specifically, to pharma dollars. Upwards of 70% of television commercials are pharmaceutical commercials that are directly subsidizing the programs. All you have to do is sit down in front of a TV for 10 minutes to corroborate this. It's sort of an old model and that's why, fast forward a bit, come my launch date when we heard back that I would not be allowed to appear on any single mainstream television or press outlet, I wasn't surprised. Page 3

5 Harper Collins [publisher] had invested quite a pretty penny in my book and so they were apoplectic in some ways; they've never had this experience before. That's because, while they worked with many authors who have had radical opinions, to my knowledge, they haven't worked with someone who feels as strongly as I do about the pharmaceutical industry in general, without apology and without caveats. They hadn't had that experience and perhaps they were surprised to learn what would come with it, which is that we cannot utilize their outlets to promote the book. What unfolded was really poetic, a con rmation that we're in a powerful and special time for grass roots awareness. It is the silver lining of all of the challenges that digital living has brought to our lives and the ways we feel wired, literally and figuratively, to social media and our inboxes and our computers. The silver lining is the democratization of information: Now, with a couple of clicks, we can come together and share information in a way that was not possible even ve years ago. All I had to do was tap my activist friends and colleagues and say, "Listen, you know my work. If you believe in this, if you believe it should get some air time, then let's do it." Within the space of a week, it was on the top 20 list of books on Amazon and strangely, ended up making The New York Times list. That was so exciting. I was sitting on your couch when we got that news. I remember staring at my computer screen watching one of your videos thinking "This is a story that has to be told," so it was no surprise to me that you were able to accomplish that in such a short span of time. It was interesting because it's almost like it slipped through some sort of crack or something because now, a year later, I don't even know what to make of this. There is not a single review of this book in mainstream press, not one not a negative review, not a neutral review, nothing. It's like it never happened. Of course, one perspective is that ignoring it is a strategy. I'll take that. Page 4

6 It's a fascinating story and a fascinating journey. What I also love so much about your story is that really so much of what you're guiding people to do is go back to basics, really reconnecting to their own intuitive voices and listening to the cues that their bodies are sending out. You have said that the holistic community has known, but discounted this for being woo-woo. Then here you come with all your science and all your Ivy League degrees, things that are hard to argue with. Listen, I have been every shade. I absolutely came from a mindset and an upbringing that said, What is quanti able is real and everything else is bullshit. That's the mentality that I brought into my practice as a physician. It was very much an unbalanced masculine energy where I said, "I can master this. I can force any and every pathology into submission and I'm going to use these science-derived chemicals to do it." From there, I very briefly dabbled in what I call green pharmacy, which is sort of this idea of the best of both of worlds. It's like a little sh oil with your Prozac or a little probiotic with your antibiotic, but it wasn't long before I realized that I was really interested in going for gold. I was interested in really radical outcomes. I was sick of just managing patient's experiences and symptoms. From my own personal journey and awakening process, I knew that something really beautiful was possible, so I began to try to understand how to cultivate that. My bias has become that once you can get clear on a physiologic level once you can quiet the white noise of your body's signals of disharmony, whether that's fatigue or headaches or irritable bowel symptoms or achy joints or preoccupation with hair loss or acne or disabling PMS then you have this opportunity to connect to a kind of emotional clarity that allows you to feel on a sacral level a yes or a no around every single decision you have to make. This kind of intuitive processing of information is an a rmation of our culture, because we have, in many ways, determined that the only way through any obstacle is through applying the force of our will accompanied by our intellect. What I have learned, as someone who has done it that way, is that there is an alternate path a sweetness and a ow. Of course, dozens of people before me have discussed this, but it's still like discovering it anew for the first time. Page 5

7 Once you touch it, there is no going back. There is only this ever-deepening awareness that there is a right way to live life and that right way involves shedding all of the fear that your mind is going to throw up to distract you from your felt guidance and your felt direction. Now, this is very much outside the realm of much researched human health, because in science we don't even acknowledge what we can't measure. The soul, the spirit, any sort of meaning to our health experiences is very much dismissed as being tangential, if not a total exercise in quackery. What I have to show for this conviction are my outcomes taking women o of years of psychiatric medications that they have been told they would need in perpetuity. I still default to measurable outcomes, but the truth is that the lives that they are living in this space of deep joy, gratitude and an embrace of shadow, an embrace of the darkness, is nothing that we can even describe in words, let alone quantify. I want to know something about your personal journey. What was the impetus to go from conventional western medicine to more of a holistic integrative approach that led to psychiatry? As I mentioned, I come from a very conventional mindset. My mom is an immigrant and anyone with immigrant parents knows that there's a special premium placed on following the rules and becoming a doctor or a lawyer, getting good grades, and making a lot of money. The American Dream. So that was my mindset during my rst pregnancy and postpartum, which happened during my fellowship after a residency training. I was specializing in, believe it or not, medicating pregnant and breastfeeding women with psychotropics. It's called reproductive psychiatry. At the time, I wrote prescriptions every single day for pregnant women. I knew the available literature really well and I would sit down and talk to them for a couple of hours about the risks and bene ts. Of course, the only risks I talked to them about were the risks of coming off of medication. Page 6

8 It was nine months postpartum when I was diagnosed with my rst health condition. Up until that point, I had been living a totally unconscious life: Never exercising, eating McDonald's and candy every single day, dyeing my hair black, taking birth control, experimenting with whatever random meds were in the cabinet. [Laughing] You forgot the pizza and the soda, I read about that in your book. My diet knew no bounds because I never gained weight, which sounds great except that then you get to abuse yourself even further, because you don't have that parameter keeping you in check. But I had this feeling and this voice that said, "I don't want to take medications for the rest of my life, that's what other people do. I don't want to deal with that." It was from that mindset that I went to see a naturopath, which to this day strikes me as nearly comical. I'd only ever been largely dismissive of alternative medicine. It was nothing more than a window dressing to know about, only because many patients were knowledgeable themselves about it, so you had to know something and have an opinion about it. After I went to a naturopath. I put my autoimmune disorder into remission in the space of months. That s when all these red ags were raised for me because I hadn't learned that was possible in my training. As a very righteous person by constitution, I was angry. I decided I'm going to gure out the truth for myself. Like, why was I not told that this was possible and why was I never told that diet had anything to do with anything? I mean, I was literally never told that diet had any relevance to chronic disease. Of course, that was the linchpin of how I achieved this document and outcome of remission. I've always been a science nut and I just changed my search terms and I went back to PubMed.gov and I went on a multiyear rabbit hole of reading primary literature. Thankfully, I was already very comfortable with that world. I began to unlearn what I had learned. Tell everybody how much you research on Saturday mornings. Page 7

9 It's still my day! I spend four hours every Saturday reading abstracts and papers because I get alerts. Anyone can do this, you can go to PubMed.gov and you could sign-up for any alerts that you want and you can learn about any of the primary papers. There are a million caveats when it comes to the nature of science today and who's funding it and who's potentially making sure it's published or not published. It's a highly imperfect realm but somehow, there is a growing body of literature that supports a very di erent story than what we are being taught in medical school, and what we are being explained through pharmaceutical advertising, and then by default, what doctors are being indoctrinated into. The literature I've become most fascinated with tells a story about our interconnectedness with the natural world, our potential to totally regenerate our native resiliency. It tells the untold story of medication and pharmaceutical risks. As I'm hearing this, I'm just imagining all those years of studying and education and how frustrating that moment must have been when you realized, "Wait a minute, hold on, how come I did not have any of this information? How come no one ever spoke about this?" To that point, tell us how much nutritional training most doctors have. One hour. Literally one hour, but that was years ago now and perhaps it's di erent today. I'm not sure if it's really di erent, but it's part and parcel of the system within which the medical education paradigm operates. It is driven by prescription-based interventions and you cannot quantify or standardize nutrition interventions, so they're not patentable. It's remains outside of the realm of expertise of this medical system. Conventional medicine is simply one perspective based on foundational beliefs and assumptions that may or may not resonate with your sort of orientation in life. That would be ne if we could present it as one of many di erent options for how to approach health and wellness. But that is outside the industry orthodoxy. Page 8

10 When I rst picked up your book, I was already on this path to understanding the notion of food as medicine. Your book profoundly resonated with me; I have not been able to ippantly pop an Advil or look at any over-thecounter drugs the same way since finishing A Mind Of Your Own. In the book you said, "Before I had stopped prescribing, I had never once cured a patient." I really applaud you for saying that, as depressing as that is to admit. When I began to turn over these stones, I rst turned over the stones that were most relevant to me personally. I had Hashimoto's disease I p u t it into remission and then began to research the sacred cows from my perspective. As someone who has always identi ed as a feminist, I have vocalized my endorsement and support of things like the Gardasil vaccine, elective C- section, things like birth control pills. But now I wanted to know if there was more to the story. I felt I had been misled. I was incentivized to begin to research things that otherwise, I would have accepted on their surface as being great gifts of modern medicine. I found the same story over and over again, which is that when these products come to market with varying degrees of long-term research, some of them are fast-tracked which means they have an embarrassingly small number of volunteers who have been assessed and have been exposed to these di erent medications. When they come to market, they have to make back a ton of money. What sells, particularly in this country, is fear. I have a lot of theories as to why that is and they relate to how we have lost touch with the fabric of community-based living. We really are an every-man-for-himself country. In a way that makes us very vulnerable to fear-based marketing. We are driven by that, whether it's fear of an infection, fear of a pregnancy, fear of suicidal depression, or fear of a heart attack. The other side of that is that we want comfort and ease. Right now, right here. Page 9

11 Exactly, immediately. Anything that promises to make things easier; we'll think about the risks later. These two inclinations a desire to experience an easeful life and the fear that surrounds any potential adversity can lead us to make myopic decisions that are potentially a good idea for the short-term with total negligence about long-term implications or e ects. They both are predicated on this very distinctly American perspective which is that su ering, pain, grief, discomfort, distress are all bad things. We don't want any of that. Exactly. Avoid them at all costs, they are meaningless badness. What I've come to understand and appreciate is that everything, ranging from a really uncomfortable headache all the way to the death of a partner and everything in between, provides opportunities to grow and evolve. Every ancient tradition has been telling us this since the beginning of time. It's embedded in Eastern philosophy, that su ering is an opportunity for deep growth, and that the edge of your comfort is where you begin to evolve. This idea has been lost and I think understandably so because of the nature of our culture and our capitalistic leanings. What I found is that every single one of these drugs comes with a price that is obscured by a promise. What I've come to understand is that there, literally, is no free lunch with pharma. There is never going to be a situation where you take a medication or you engage a pharmaceutical product like a vaccine, for example, without there being repercussions. What we've come to learn is that the placebo e ect is actually one of the major drivers of the outcomes. If you believe in these interventions, again whether it's chemotherapy or Prozac, if you deeply believe in them, it's possible that you could have a perceived benefit. As far as we can tell, those beliefs don't protect us from the adverse e ects. For instance, if you don't know it's possible to develop depressive symptoms because of your birth control pill, then most likely you're going to end up on an anti-depressant because of the depressive side e ects of your birth control pill. Then, your anti-depressant is going to have other side e ects. It's a domino effect. Page 10

12 It's all about informed consent. Your doctor can only provide the information that that doctor is aware of. That's why the Internet is an incredible asset to the empowered patient the average gas station operator has the opportunity to learn more about mitochondrial dysfunction than a physician on Madison Avenue. There is big pharma, there are lobbyists, there are doctors prescribing meds who do we trust? Ultimately, you can only trust yourself. I know that sounds very mercenary, like every man for himself, but it's not that. It's that we need to learn how to get back to that place of self-awareness. It's been robbed of us. We've been co-opted, we've given it away, but we can get back to making decisions from that place of self-authority where there's no struggle associated with it. You just know you're doing the right thing and you don't care if your neighbor never talks to you again because of it or your mom throws a t. You just know you have to do it and you do it. You're protected by this force eld of empowerment. That's pretty much what I want for every single woman. The irony in my practice is that, for my online program I start out with a very heavy hand. Arguably, even a paternalistic energy, whereby I expect things to be done a certain exacting way. It s almost an authoritative energy that I bring to the dynamic. It's in service of a certain type of experience that I can almost predict, with certainty, what will be brought to the lives of these women or people who embark on this particular adventure. From that place, they get clear enough to be able to discern what it is that will guide them to the next step. Then I completely let go of the reins. It's this particular path that I've come upon that seems to work in terms of initiating people to their own self-authority. You connect diet and its e ect on depression. Let's just talk about that so people know what it is that you're talking about. What is your protocol and what it is that you ask your patients to do? Page 11

13 There are many years of research behind it, but I'll summarize it in just a couple of sentences. Essentially, I put my autoimmune disorder into remission through dietary change. At that time, I was not doing co ee enemas, I was not meditating, I don't believe I was really exercising. I was really focused on a very simple set of interventions that focused primarily on sugar, dairy and gluten elimination and a focus on organic. That's pretty much all I did and I put my Hashimoto's into remission in the space of months. What I know about Hashimoto's and the nature of autoimmune disease is that we have come to appreciate the role of gut integrity and the role of the microbiome in signaling immune reactivity in the setting of a trigger. Gluten can sometimes be that. In the case of Hashimoto's, uoride can be that, and certain kinds of stress can be that. It helped me to see that through dietary choices I can impact the microbiome and I can change in ammatory messages. I can begin to in uence the immune system simply through what I am eating. Within 72 hours you can literally change your microbiome. I would label many di erent "mental illnesses" as coming under this umbrella of in ammatory disorders. If we look at depression, there are 20 years of literature that framed depression as an in ammatory response. It's called the Cytokine Theory of Depression. Researchers abandoned the serotonin theory years ago because six decades is enough trying to prove something that can't be proven. Most of the focus now is on looking at depression as a disease of modern civilization. But when examined as part of the in ammatory response system, depression is basically a way for the body to say, "I don't like this. Something that you are exposing me to is not jiving with what millions of years of evolution have prepared me for. I'm going to say no." That s the case whether your body is saying no to industrial chemicals, plastics, mercury, GMOs, pesticides, or medications. Page 12

14 Whether it's lack of sunlight exposure or a lack of movement or chronic stress or a synergy of them all, there must be a way to send a signal of safety to the body to begin to resolve some of these syndromes of chronic illnesses. It's really the same approach when we're talking about things like heart disease and autoimmune conditions and even cancer. That's why my entire life changed when I had the opportunity to work with the now late Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez. For those who don't know who he was, in my opinion, he was the most important gure in modern medicine. There is just no one who has able to achieve the documents and outcomes that he did for 27 years for bringing terminal metastatic cancers and nerve degenerative illnesses, including Lyme Disease, into a complete and total lasting remission with a diet and detox-based approach. My work with him taught me that if we can send the body this signal of safety through multiple different avenues, it will work it out. I became very interested in the physiologic imbalances that can masquerade as brain fog, anxiety, depression, irritability, chronic fatigue, and insomnia. They really reduce down to just a couple of buckets. Blood sugar instability, gluten and dairy intolerance, medication reactions, and single nutrient de ciencies like B12 if you're meant to be eating animal foods and you're not, for example. Simple stuff. I wondered why we weren t starting there. Why don't we drain the bucket and see what's left? What's left is probably going to be in the psycho, spiritual, emotional realm and then, you're going to be in a much better position to examine big things in your life like, "Am I with the right partner? Am I at the right job? Should I still be talking to my mom? Do I really want to have a baby?" All of these big life questions that we seemingly compartmentalize, because we just don't have the bandwidth to destabilize ourselves. We don't want to experience the discomfort and we think that struggling is a bad thing. What I've observed time and time again with my approach, is that when we rst focus on physical healing, even for only a month, there is this quieting of the white noise. Page 13

15 There is a reclamation of a kind of energy that then can be devoted to the rest of the work that has to be done in moving through a process of rebirth. What I found is that for many women, coming o of psychiatric medications serves as that opportunity for self-initiation. There is dark night of the soul built into that, where things seemed to fall apart. One of my patients said to me, "When I rst came here, I thought I was a vegan, an atheist, and a Democrat. Now, I have no idea who I am and it's so uncomfortable." I hear that sentiment echo back to me all the time and I actually think it's a really healthy. I want to say this diet protocol is not some hugely restrictive, crazy juice plan. There's actually quite a bit on it. Okay, having to give up the co ee and the wine, that might be a little difficult... part. Especially for my New York patients. It's hands down the hardest We can instill so much faith in the power of the pill, yet we have the power to repair our own microbiome. How have we gotten so disconnected from trusting ourselves and how do we reroute? It's about working from our minds. We ve shifted away from a matriarchal society where there was this understanding that we all have di erent gifts. Women, especially, have the gift of intuitive guidance and creative expression. That power, if it is not properly placed in a social structure, can potentially be very threatening to a system that seeks to control and dominate all elements of the unknown. That's essentially what has been emerging, as there has been a shift in balance towards patriarchal cultures and societies, particularly in the past 300 years. There have been some impactful thinkers, people like Jake Hart, that reinforce this idea that we just need to apply more force and we will always get a predictable outcome. Page 14

16 I actually believe that modern day obstetrics is at the root of a lot of the ills of modern society. As recently as the 1800s, there was this idea that a naturally birthing woman needed to be controlled, her wildness needed to be tamed. When you can convince a woman to be afraid of her own body and her own native capacity for inbuilt self-initiation, you've done something quite extraordinary and you've, in many ways, derailed the trajectory of an entire population. You have women defaulting to their minds that are very susceptible to fear-based interactions with reality. Those women then are raising children and they are still having this in uence that they've always had on the social fabric. It's a very big knot we have to untie, but the good news is that it really comes down to a very simple commitment. That's why I've become passionate about self-care being the greatest form of activism available to women today. All you have to do is commit every single day to a level of self-care that actually feels uncomfortable. Make psychic room for it, make logistical space for it, even if you have to recon gure some elements of your lifestyle around it. I have many opinions as to what that self-care should look like. I believe it should look like detox, meditation, and a high-level of integrity around food intake. I believe it should look like fun and sensuality and prioritizing time together in community. It may look like di erent things to di erent people, but self-care needs to be the cornerstone commitment of every single day that you wake up. You don't really have to gure anything else out because you will begin to be guided in this way. You will begin to know intuitively what needs to happen. Page 15

17 You'll begin to make decisions from a space of responsivity rather than reactivity. You'll begin to have experiences that my patients can attest to, that would be described as synchronicities where you're just in the right place at the right time: you read just the right , you run into just the right person on the street. You can look back at the unfoldment with a smile on your face, knowing that it needed to happen exactly that way for you to end up exactly where you are, which is exactly where you need to be in order to get where you're going. This is a very feminine approach to life where you trust fundamentally in a greater order. There's no room for fear in that. The word ow comes to me when I'm listening to you talk about taking pills, denying pain, being afraid of being afraid. We're so wound up and we're resisting. It's not just about the diet, it's about getting out of our sedentary lives and getting away from processed food and getting away from all the unrelenting stress. Connecting the dots is the new form of self-empowerment. Yes, absolutely. That's why we have to discard this notion that selfcare is indulgent or sel sh or something for the hippie fringe to engage in. It's not reasonable at this point to expect to continue to function in a helpful way or even a high-performance way, if neglecting your organism is all that you care about. It's just unreasonable given how much we have polluted this planet and the nature of our resilient but ultimately, delicate system. It's just not reasonable to think of our bodies as machines that are expected to operate under duress. This is a mentality that has essentially gotten us into this place where 50% of Americans are taking medication. It's time. I think people feel the bankruptcy of a lot of the mythology underpinning conventional medical orthodoxy and they're looking for something that feels more resonant. That new story, if you want to call it that, is kind of like a remembering. What it felt like to feel really good. Page 16

18 And free. It's a kind of a freedom that's available to you, but my mission is to include the shadow elements and to make room for curiosity around symptoms, around sadness and grief and anger. We have to have a space to experience these because if the mandate is get your act together so you can punch the clock tomorrow and make lunches for your kids, there will never be room. There will never be a good time to move through whatever portal of grief or sadness is necessary for your own humanity to be authentically legitimate. There's never going to be room for it if we don't begin to make sociocultural room for suffering to exist. At any given time, a good percentage of my practice is actively suicidal. I don't actually believe my patients want to be dead; I don't think I have a single patient who actually wants to be dead. I do believe that that kind of hopelessness is an important element of a surrendering. It's like throwing up your hands to your ego and your mind and just saying, "I don't know, I can't see how to move forward and I just know that what is happening now needs to die." I never respond with fear. I'm not afraid of anything really, and I never respond with fear to my patients. Which helps their transformation, sometimes within hours, because there is a space for them to just get real with the intensity of those emotions. Could you walk us through one of your great stories about someone that's come to you and what you took them through and how you helped them reset? Sure. I've had a lot of criticisms, naturally, and I've been accused of cherry picking literature and I've been accused of writing anecdotal reports and I will cop to all that. What I believe is that one single case that ies in the face of dogma de es it. One single case of a woman who was on ve medications for six di erent diagnoses who is now really healthy and o of medications without a single symptom, should force us to go back to the books and examine the entire paradigm. Page 17

19 I've actually begun to devout a lot of time to video, interviewing these patients and their outcomes for my online course, Vital Mind Reset. Amazingly, the outcomes from the course are seemingly more rapid and robust than even what I get in my own practice. Somehow, I'm interfering with the process when I meet with people in person. I don't know what that's about but I've taken to video interviewing them. Don't take it from me, don't take it from my book, don't take it from my telling of it. Watch these women and let them tell you. I have a number of those stories on my website, but I will say that whether it's a diagnosis of schizophrenia, disabling OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), panic disorder, suicidal depression, or psychotic mania, I have undone them all. One of my beloved patients was video-interviewed with me I only had three appointments with this woman. She was probably one of the sickest women I've ever worked with in my entire career, including when I was working at Bellevue Hospital for 10 years in New York. She came to me with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, eating disorder, PMDD which is Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. She had developed psychotic delusions, digging holes in her face. She was actively suicidal; she had attempted, very seriously, multiple times. Multiple hospitalizations. She was at the end of the road. She'd been on just about every medication in every category. She was headed for a day treatment program, which is basically institutionalization. She came from Kansas with her husband and they were ready. They're like, "Listen, we've exhausted all avenues. We'll go woowoo, let's see what happens here." Exactly. Once you go woo-woo, you'll never go back. Page 18

20 No kidding. People tell me, "What you do can't be for serious illness." Actually, the sickest women that I work with are the ones who get better the fastest. Why? Because they're the most desperate, because they are the most ready and readiness is the most vital ingredient to this kind of medicine. I read her the riot act. I said, "Here's what I'm going to recommend to you. You stick with this to a tee or I'm not having a follow-up appointment with you. I'm not risking my practice for one patient when I have hundreds of women I believe I need to help." protocol? Did you have her go o her meds and go on to this dietary She had already been tapering o of her meds, but we stopped all of her as needed meds, because they were actually making things worse. I have other patients that I have to taper o of medications over longer periods of time. She wasn't necessarily one of them but she was highly symptomatic when we met. Long story short, now it's nine months later, I just got her case report approved for publication in PubMed. Wow, congratulations. It's thanks to her, because I only met with her three times and she had a total spiritual awakening. In fact, she's thinking of opening up a center to help support people come off of medication. You, with all this western training, had to walk through the darkness of your own Hashimoto's, post-partum, and bad diet. All roads lead to here. Certainly. In my experience, it actually got more challenging than that. The death of my mentor was the hardest thing I've ever had to deal with in my entire life. After that, my activism and experience at the grassroots activism level, particularly in the vaccine awareness arena, has been very spiritually challenging for me. Raising children in this world has been a deep process, so it's continued. I don't want to paint the picture like, "Oh, you had your awakening and then it's rainbows and unicorns." It's not? [Laughing] Page 19

21 Yeah, right! Some of us need to be hit by cosmic two-by-fours, so to speak, and I'm certainly one of those people. My ego is very strong, my mind is over-developed, and I have a lot of work to do when it comes to having a more balanced perspective about good things and bad things, and having a more balanced perspective about the role of challenges to really teach us what it is that we need to know. That's how I've come to be able to help my own patients embrace things like insomnia, for example, which is a crazy-making symptom. Some symptoms are important to embrace, because they will actually reveal another layer of themselves. We need to have faith in the process, to trust that symptoms are not arbitrary, and to learn how to support your body, mind, and spirit through this process in a way that makes you really feel fearless. It makes you feel like you have just what it takes to get through pretty much anything. All this revolutionary work that you're doing is really peeling back the confusion and the layers and all of the stu that we piled on top of our innate sense. Exactly. If you had a magic wand to wave and could change anything right now with respect to your work in this eld and the world that we are leaving for our children, what would that be? Nothing. I wouldn't change anything. That's a re ection of my spiritual work, because I would have had a billion answers for you even two years ago. I would have known exactly how I wanted to be and how fast I wanted it to be and exactly the parts that were missing. Page 20

22 The very humbling truth is that I actually believe everything is exactly as it should be. That includes what's happening on the political stage. It includes what's happening in industry. It includes what's happening even in terms of our civil liberties and our freedom. Everything is exactly as it needs to be for us to come home to the fabric of our connectedness, to come home to ourselves, and to come home to a type of enlightenment that I actually believe is at the core of our very beings. So actually, I wouldn't change a thing. Which is a beautiful message to leave with people because you can just settle in. We don't have to be changing everything about ourselves, about our feelings, about the world. I'm going to close this with a quote that I have from your book, which I loved: "Cultivate your intuition and combine it with this newly-discovered knowledge and you will no longer be dependent on any medication, any doctor, or even any system. You'll be in your power. This is the new medicine. It's a revolutionary paradigm that makes the old one obsolete." Yes. It's a nod to Buckminster Fuller. It's an amazing quote and it's so true, right? Why ght? And that's what I tell my patients all the time because, once they awaken they went to go out and proselytize and they want to ght with their neighbors and their aunts and their friends. Don't do it. Take it from me, as someone who's tried. All you need to do is you. All you need to do is take care of you every single day and never waver in the commitment. It's really all you have to do because you will radiate an energy that will be so intoxicating and magnetic that the people who need to be inspired by you, they'll come to you and they'll ask what you're up to. They'll ask what you think about this, that, or the other and you'll have your influence in that way. In the meantime, the path forward will be always revealed to you. That's why it boils down to that very simple commitment that was ultimately revealed to you. This new paradigm is a new way of being that. In fact, it's quite an old one. Page 21

23 Well, I am so grateful that we spoke today because it's always amazing to listen to you, to learn from you, to be inspired by you, and most of all, it's about your ability to spark what is possible. Thank you for being such a trailblazer, for forging a path and most of all, for staying the course and being a beautiful human being in the messiness of the whole experience. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Oh, thank you so much. It's so wonderful to have this level of discourse and thank you for creating a platform for it. It's so needed and it's part of creating the possibility for more and more people to be attracted to what it is that we're espousing here. I love what you said: to be more YOU. That's really what it is. To be more you, so let's leave it with that, sister. I love you and I love the work that you're doing. Back at you. Thank you so much. I want to thank everyone for listening in. My greatest wish is that in some way today, you gleaned a spark of inspiration to ignite a shift in your beautiful life. Something that has re-infused you with a sense of possibility, because when we connect to our whole self that is when we can truly bring forth our greatest gifts into the world and the world needs your best self. For more inspiration and information, please visit summit.. Page 22