Know Thyself - E7 - Dr. Christian Gonzalez: Doctor's Advice to HEAL your MIND, BODY, and SPIRIT

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Naturopathic Doctor, Christian Gonzalez shares how to truly heal thyself. Everything from the food we eat, to the habits we create, to the thoughts we think - all make up the pillars of our health. Dr. Gonzalez empowers us with the knowledge to take our vitality into our own hands, and live a better, longer life. We dive deep today on many topics, for a true overview of what it looks like to live a healthy life.   ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 5:07 Eat the Rainbow 8:06 Intuitive Eating 12:29 How & When We Eat 16:19 Gut Health  24:58 Water 30:13 Natural Light  36:46 Get Better Sleep 43:50 Nose Breathing 48:53 Household & Environmental Toxins  1:02:16 Mold 1:05:40 Shoes Off 1:08:19 Hot & Cold Therapy 1:13:20 Movement 1:18:10 Sick Care vs Health Care 1:31:04 Emotional Awareness 1:37:32 Healing Trauma 1:50:36 Power of Community  2:03:55 Purpose  2:13:44 Breathe  2:14:45 Conclusion ___________   Dr. Christian Gonzalez:  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doctor.gonzalez/ Heal Thyself Podcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Rm0LCI8RfQHV4UwbzOE8p?utm_source=hoobe&utm_medium=page Heal Thyself Podcast YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCztQQ--xORWtJCwHmaa_buA?utm_source=hoobe&utm_medium=page Website: https://docgonzalez.com/?utm_source=hoobe&utm_medium=page   ___________   Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg   Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927     André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/   Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I am supposed to feel this good physically. I am supposed to feel this connected to my partner and myself. I am supposed to feel deeply connected to a source bigger than me. That is our right. The more you are emotionally free from those repressed unlovable emotions, the more that you know you've integrated those parts of you that are unlovable. Because you've changed your energy. Because what happens is when we express those emotions, our frequency changes.

Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome back to the Know They Self podcast for every single week. We have the opportunity to sit down. with somebody I admire, I respect, and sometimes a dear friend of mine, which today is also the case. Dr. Christian Gonzalez is my guest today. It's going to be a very potent episode. So I'm really looking forward to this. And I really look forward to the times I get to just sit down and have an excuse to sit down for an hour and a half with my friend and dive into the various topics that we'd love to dive into. Dr. G is a naturopathic doctor. He is the host of the heal thyself podcast,

which is hilarious because this is the Know Thyself podcast. Together, we are helping the world heal themselves and know themselves. And it's just an honor to walk this path with you. So first of all, thank you for being here. Thank you, Andre. For having me. Yes. Appreciate being here.

You know, interesting, to heal thyself is to know thyself. Yeah. And to know thyself is to heal thyself. It's one and the same. It's one and the same, man. So what an honor to be on another thyself episode or show. Yes, yes, sir. And so that's really the topic of today.

What we're going to dive into is what does it mean to be a healthy, vital individual, especially living in modern society? We're going to be diving into mind, body, and spirit. What does it look like in our lifestyle and the choices that we make and how we show up in the world and how we can heal ourselves to show up as a vital, healthy individual? There's a lot to dive into today. And I just want to kind of preface with the audience. The modern society in which we live really sets us up to have to take a lot of extra

precautions that we normally wouldn't have to if we were really connected with nature. And Jay Krishna-Merti, who I love, has this quote that it's no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. And that's a very potent quote for what we're going to dive into today because there's going to be many different avenues and a lot of it could somewhat, you know, come across maybe overwhelming. Like I got to apply all these different health things and tips. And hopefully that how we go into everything today can make this feel approachable for people.

and also just be a resource for people to come back to, to gain awareness and to the various different things that contribute to being a healthy individual and to healing yourself. And so take it baby steps for the listeners. Take it piece by piece, take notes, and don't feel like you have to apply everything at once that can be super overwhelming.

So let's dive right in. Yeah, let's dive right in. What I will say is before people get overwhelmed, just know that one, we have all these sophisticated mechanisms on our body to keep us healthy. Yeah. Our very nature is to be in balance and healthy.

So it stands to believe when we work with the body, it will create health. So not to get overwhelmed and know that we're resilient. We're super resilient. We can literally just put so much burden on our body every single day. And still our body's like, I love you. I'll get you back in balance. Don't worry about it until it doesn't. But building resiliency, knowing resiliency is the key.

So we'll go into it. I'm very excited to have this combo. Yeah. It's funny because I feel like most of it. of the solutions to healing yourself are embarrassingly simple. And we just live in a society where we have so many different things that are, you know, dragging our system through the mud, so to speak. And it makes it much harder to be in our natural vibrancy, like who we are, our healthy individuals. And especially for some people that go on the path of a healing journey, it can become an addiction

of sense of like never-ending progress, trying to always attain some, you know, nirvana of health. and we're not meant to be healing ourselves our whole life. We're supposed to be living, but we need to get ourselves to a certain pitch of vibrancy in order to be really effective in what we do and just to have a happy life. So let's go into it. Let's go into it.

I'm ready. Amazing. So mind, body, spirit, right? I think we can start first with the body. Let's start with the densest, go to the most subtle. There's so many different avenues and factors that go into becoming a healthy individual when focusing on the body. Focusing on just one of the three will really leave us feeling lack

because if we want to heal our mind but we're not treating the body with the respect that it deserves, then we're going to hit a ceiling, a glass ceiling, what we can do in terms of our level of health and vice versa. So there are, let's chunk it up. There's many different things that go into feeling vital in your body from the food that we eat to the water that we drink to the air that we breathe to how we move to the exposure of light that we have to the quality of sleep that we get so many different things and so why don't I start I'll just say one we'll refine it and go to the next. All right.

Cool. Amazing. So I think food is one of the biggest ones. Obviously what we're putting in our system is major. There's so many different sources that have conflicting evidence of what to eat. But I think that there's some overarching things that everybody can agree. for example, eating organic, eating local, the sourcing, the quality. When it comes to eating nutritious diet, what are some of the factors that you really promote and look at?

Anti-inflammatory, very important, utilizing the colors of the rainbow and fruits and vegetables as a basis, right? And a lot of people are like, well, no, I can't because I've been watching, you know, these posts and these videos and these blocks saying fruits and vegetables are deadly and they're going to kill me. I would just want to add clarity. We have an abundance, abundance of research on fruits and vegetables being some of, if not the most healthiest foods in the world, right? From everything from heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, we're talking about some of the most deadly diseases known to humanity. Oh yeah, and fruits and vegetables are helpful at prevention, at reducing inflammation,

at feeding our gut, which it will be a whole other like slice of this convo. So what I tell people and when I was practicing is like fruits, vegetables, colors are the rainbow. First think about that. And at the day go, okay, did I get red, orange, blue, green, violet, a little bit of yellow. Did I get those colors in? Okay, no, I could have done a little bit more. Let me add a yellow bell pepper or something tomorrow. Or let me add a tangerine tomorrow, right?

As long as we start thinking like that and maybe even going food shopping and when we look at our cart, does it look like a rainbow or do you just have a bunch of green? Do you have just a bunch of blue? Maybe just a bunch of purple? No. Creating that rainbow of colors is an awesome rule of thumb to start with. Utilizing spices. Like here in America, you know, you go out to eat and a lot of the food is really bland. Because we in America don't utilize spices in American cuisine.

But you go to different countries. I mean, my partner is half Indian. And she is like spicing everything. And I love spices. But coincidentally, not coincidentally, these cultures, knew the importance of utilizing these spices like turmeric, cayenne, right? Herbs like basil, oregano, thyme, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, right? They have different constituents in there, like polyflavinals, flavonoids, polyphenols.

All these things are so important at feeding our body, feeding our gut. And they're right there in our pantry. All we got to do is open up and go, oh, maybe let me add a little bit of X, Y, and Z. So spices, fruits, and vegetables are automatically the quickest way at going, here's an approach towards anti-inflammatory foods right now that I can take. First and foremost. Now we can get into the conversation of like, should I be eating meat? Should I not be eating meat?

I've never been one to be on a poll or dogmatic saying, this is the way. I know it works for my body and I know what has helped other people. But this is where it's your responsibility to tune into your own self. Yeah. Right? There's so much noise on the internet and on Instagram and on blogs. How tune in are you to yourself? Can you eat a meal and go actually when I added in that, when I added in those cloves, that really did a number on me. When I added in a little bit of onion powder, I don't know. I shouldn't have had it. Can you differentiate what foods are really causing you not to feel good in your body and good in your body? Because if we're going on autopilot and we're just scarfing down food, you know, from, okay, this dine in restaurant and okay this drive-through and then coming home and making some food for yourself then you're on autopilot your body's like what the hell are you doing you're giving you signals i'm telling you hey man hey lady like i don't feel good with like bananas are good on paper but man i don't feel

good with bananas right are you tuning in then tune into your body see how you feel maybe eggplan is good for you but maybe your twin brother really can't eat eggplant maybe they can only eat raspberries or tomatoes or something so tuning in is so important too That's the fundamental place to start that I would say for people. Yeah, I love that. I think as you go on the journey of really healing yourself, you also raise a level of sensitivity that you have, right? You talk to the noise that we have.

It can be like sematically, physically. We have, we're kind of numb to really listening to being able to listen to our body and what it's telling us. Yet a dog or a cat knows what to eat and what not to eat, but we have to read all these papers and research to know it feels good in our system. So it's been a journey for me also stepping back from the dogmatic lens of, you know, I've ate a plant-based vegan diet for about six, seven years. And even just more towards recently being not really like changing my diet a whole lot, but being open to experimenting with different types of plant foods and seeing how that feels in my system, realizing garlic and onion don't really sit well with me. There's so many different things.

Certain fruits don't do well with my system. And that's a beautiful teaching. And then also just how you spoke to the colors and, you know, keeping it simple, but eating nature made food instead of man-made food, right? We live in a pandemic of just processed junk that's in all of our supermarkets. And it's funny because it goes without saying in the health world, but people still don't understand that, like, I look at shopping carts when I go food shopping. And there's mostly like packaged, processed foods from the middle aisles. When it should be reversed, their carts should be 50% or more. like, oh, wow, look at this abundance of fruits and vegetables.

Like, oh, bok choy, I haven't had this in a while. Let me get two heads of it so I can really start making new dishes with it. And it's funny that you said about animals. Like, I throw some spinach at the floor and my girlfriend's dog will sniff it and walk away. The dog doesn't want spinach. I threw a piece of meat and we eat it up before I can even look up and look back down at it, right? But for us, like, when I was in school, we were learning so much about the power of like cruciferous vegetables. right, sulfur-rich vegetables and detoxification and antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties.

I'm like, yeah, I need to eat more Brussels sprouts, more kale, more broccoli, more cauliflower, more bokchoy, onions. These are all foods that are like on paper, densely nutritious and like bang for the buck are amazing, especially even for hormone detoxification. My body hates them. My body has a sulfur, like a big problem with sulfur rich foods. And the more I try to convince myself otherwise, the more of my body's like, okay, you ain't listening. Let me break out more skin issues like psoriasis.

Anytime I eat told for rich food, it is one of the most aggravation, aggratory things for me. So what I tell people is like, are you tuned in? Because I was reading studies and I was like, oh, I have to have this. I was being told by teachers, this is so good for you, especially for detoxification. I was like, I got to have it. I want to detox. I need to detox. So again, ealing into your body.

Are you tuned in? Are you sensitive enough to know that like just the addition of that ingredient really did you over? Yeah, I love that. I'm sensitive to how much we have to go into today. But one other thing I think is really important to touch on as well is we, I think overly focus on what we eat sometimes in the West and East and Arabita Chinese medicine. I've studied a lot. They really put importance on how you eat when you eat. And so it's like are you watching YouTube going through TikTok while you're eating?

You're not present for your food. And, you know, the times of day that you're eating, right? And frequently, like we're snackers, you know, we eat throughout the day. And my body at least has done so much better with just doing two meals a day. One in the, like, one around like 11 or 12 and then another at like six or seven. And I have a good fasting window and I feel like so much energy. I don't feel drained after I eat. Is there anything that you want to say?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Well, two things. 100% how we're eating is completely out of the body, right? So many of us sit down, eat, we're having conversation. We love going out to eat and talking to people. We love going out to eat and maybe sitting with ourselves, but then taking out our phone and going through YouTube and going through Instagram and reading emails. Or sitting down and being in front of the TV.

All those things are tuning you out of your body. Unfortunately, and I love community and eating with people. But I also rather eat alone and tune into my body and go, okay, here I am. I'm chewing my food. It's pulverized. I'm swallowing it. I feel it going down my body. body, I can rest and relax into it. Why this is important is because in the parasympathetic mode,

you're releasing this really important chemical called acetylcholine. That is stimulating blood flow to the stomach, blood flow to the digestive organs. It's increasing the chemicals that are breaking down food and it's increasing the chemicals that are absorbing. It's increasing absorption into the vessel. So when that's not in action, we have the antagonistic chemical core called norepinephrine. That's the sympathetic one. And what turns out? it on is anytime we're outside of the body, hearing noise, tuning to the car's honking, tuning into our phone that's already stimulating on a lower level. It's not like a lion's in the room, but on a lower level, noraphenephrin, which is doing the opposite. So imagine,

you're like, I have this really nutritious meal, but I'm on my phone. I have this really nutritious meal, but I'm watching Netflix. Are you really getting all the nutrients out of it? Because it stands to believe, yeah, no, you're not. Because your body's like, no, this isn't safe for me to be eating. Right. It's not just what you eat, but how you digest. Exactly. Exactly. It's how you eat. It's so, so important. And then when it comes to, like, snacking during the day, it's important if you have digestive issues or gut issues. If you're snacking between meals, you're not allowing full digestion. It's something called a migrating motor complex. That's sort of like the sweeper of the intestines. It's like, oh, we're going to just clean this all

out and get ready for the next meal. That completely stops if you're snacking. And that takes about three hours to activate between meals. So we're talking about like, eat your meal, drink your water, and go about your life. Go about a fast. Do you know, do the things you need to. But if you're snacking and picking, you're sabotaging that complex from being created or from activating. And then the next meal, it's the same thing. So your body's always just digesting. So no wonder you have a lot of energy. Because your migrating motor complex is an action. It's cleaning out your stomach. And your body's going, oh, I'm ready for the next meal. So by the time you're ready at your second meal, your body's like, I've been good.

Like, let's get this going, right? Versus like, I'm exhausted. Now I got to, again, break down more food. It's a process. It's a semi-traumatic, although very natural traumatic process because we're using so much energy to do it. Amazing. Anything in terms of the gut. I mean, for me, my personal journey, a big shift was around 19 when I found out I had Candida and I got answers to why I was bloated all the time and foggy headed and I was because I was eating gluten and then processed wheat and just, yeah, bread and the Western processed way that we have it here. I've gone to Italy and actually been okay in my system. But we don't realize how much our microbiome determines the quality of our overall happiness and health and life.

So if you want to touch on that. I can touch on it. That's a whole damn show. I mean, we can go for literally eight hours on everything today. And we have a mutual friend, Dr. Mary Party, who does a great job of getting into like the details and nitty-gritty of the gut. But I will say this, it's an ecosystem that is in a delicate balance. And the more species of trees and plants and flowers that you have there, the healthier it is. The less species, the less diversity, the more you have things like all those weeds growing, like candida or parasites or bacteria or pathogenic bacteria.

Those are provoked by various mechanisms or various things in the diet, right? So we're talking about like things like gluten, which for you was very inflammatory, pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics and food, antibiotics in general, right? All of these things are sort of like an atomic bomb to this beautiful, diverse, lush rainforest every single time on a small level if you're eating crappy foods. It happens over time. But sometimes if you take six-month course of antibiotics, that's like an atomic bomb. But really important is to understand diversity.

So if you're eating fiber-rich foods, and a lot of people aren't eating enough fiber, and I wouldn't recommend, okay, I'm not eating enough fiber, now I'm going to eat 60 grams. You will get bloated. You will be burping. You'll be passing gas nonstop, and you'll feel terrible. You're going slow like five grams per week, really slow adding in fiber. That fiber is literally the buffet for those species of bacteria. And it's the best buffet.

It's their favorite foods. And when as soon as they're eating, it's like a huge rave of excitement. and like, you know what, we're so happy. We're going to break these down and give back to the body. Let's give back to the earth or whatever, however they see the body. And they give back to us these incredible chemicals called short chain fatty acids. These are some of the most anti-inflammatory chemicals in existence that we know. And it's crazy, the symbiotic relationship.

I feed you, you reduce inflammation everywhere, especially the affinity is for the brain. Right. So if you have brain fog and you're eating fiber-rich, foods and your gut is breaking it down. You're bringing that anti-inflammatory mechanism to the brain. You're getting more clear-headed. Your body's responding, right, bi-directionally from the gut to the brain, brain to the gut, gut to the brain. You're strengthening your gut and not allowing for weeds to be growing because it's so strong. So really important is like, it's been for many years since I've came into health and wellness. Gut health was like trending. Now it's already. Now it's like,

all right, we know it. But it's like, how do we do it? One of the most important things is getting back to eating and feeling safe. Number one, if people's like, I have gut issues, I'm like, are you chewing your food? People like, I have gut issues. I'm like, are you feeling safe when you're eating? First and foremost, let's see, let's just start there. Right. And you could say that, yeah, I feel safe. I'm in my home. I'm in my house while I'm eating food. But energetically, you don't look like that. You're like ravaging, shovel you down like you're like for survival. For sure. And that's not energetically what you're putting into the food and how you're digesting. So it's like one thing to say, yeah, I feel like I'm safe. I'm in my house, but energetically, you're not representing what it means to be safe.

If people are saying, I don't have time to meditate, okay, let's just take that at face value. You have time to eat, right? So can you make eating an experience for yourself? Can you stop everything, go, let me have a relationship with the food. Let me at least bring awareness to this is literally giving me life. If I don't eat this at some point, I ain't going to have life, right? You look at the water, this is giving me life. And then see how good the food tastes.

I ate an apple once on the way to New York City after my phone died. I don't know why I didn't charge it, but it died on the way to New York City. And I was like, what am I going to do? I'm like, I'm just looking at the New Jersey Turnpike, looking at the buildings. I'm like looking at my fingernails.

And I'm like, oh, I have an apple. And I ate the apple. And I actually extended me eating the apple over 20 minutes. I've never had a better apple in my life. And to think, that was just literally a run-of-the-mill apple that I grabbed on the supermarket like a few days before.

And it's because I was so calm. and I was so at peace. And the apple literally, I felt the apple bringing me life. I'm like, holy shit, I feel the energy. I feel the apple. That's all live food. That's all like healthy, whole food will do that. And that experience is like you're right.

That's your connection to food. Yeah. And the nutrients that you got from that apple because the ability that you had to digest it, also if you apply that to all the food you eat through your day, the amount and quantity of food you eat, I feel like would drastically come down. Dude, that was my breakfast. Like I had an apple. And usually for me, I'm like eating oatmeal on an apple

and like maybe a protein drink. At the time I was really working out. So it was, you know, my body was like, give me more protein. I ate an apple and I was like walking around New York City, cutting and weaving, juking and bobbing across everyone, getting straight to where I needed to go, doing everything in the morning.

And then I was like, oh, yeah, lunchtime. An apple. An apple has never just satiated me for six hours. But do you see the difference? Like, sometimes we don't need to eat as much as we are eating. Right? Our body can assimilate those nutrients. We just need to give it the chance. Yeah. And fasting has been a profound tool for me. We, you know, throw these terms to things that we've just ancestrally always done, right? But now we need terms like, yeah, we do intermittent fasting and even doing like three day, five day, have done a 10-day water fast. And I think we need in today's culture, especially with all the different toxins that are around us to be able to cleanse our system to research. set our palate, reattune our tongue to nature's food and the sweetness of fruits and

vegetables where a lot of people, it's like they need heavily processed food to like have good taste. And then just energetically also to raise the sensitivity of your system to learn to listen to your body again. We need, I feel like in my personal life, cleanses, have needed cleanses to really to get to that place. Yeah. And what is it look like for you? What is it looking for someone else. If we're tuning into our body, we know what the cleanse looks like for us. For me, it's social media cleanse because I'm always on it. Right. Right. So at some points, I'm like, oh, God, like I know how I feel when it's too much. I feel icky in my body. My stomach hurts. My hands start burning for some reason. It's like my body going like too much, too much phone,

too much phone. And I got a headache. So I'll put the phone down and that's my detox. And like, I won't use it for the rest of the day. I might not even use it the next day or very seldomly. food-wise, yes. Again, like what you mentioned, you mentioned something really important is reattune our palate. We have these hyper-palatable foods where food scientists are hitting the bliss point of fats and sugars where they literally have hacked our neurochemistry or brain chemistry to go, whoa, I can't just have one. I want more. Give me another one. Actually, I'm done, but I can't stop think about how I want another one next time I go to supermarket tomorrow. That is not by mistake. We are designed, though.

if we're really tuned into our body for a pack of blueberries to have a very similar effect on our body, being like, oh my God, these blueberries are fucking delicious. They're so good. I'm satiated. I feel the energy of the blue. That is something that a pack of, you know, blueberry flavored cookies will never hit.

It's the, this gives me life. And we did a, I'll say it really quick, we did a, I think you were there when we had the experience where we were closing our eyes and we had the headphones and we were really going into a meditative state. And then we had in our hand a chip and a blueberry. And me, I couldn't even tell that. I was like, which one's the blueberry?

But I ate the chip and it was like a burst of like a tidal wave of flavor. Yeah. In the first. It was like a siete, nacho flavored chip. Nacho flavor sioux. Okay, yeah. Within the first 10 seconds, I was like, whoa, this is good. And then it was crazy.

It was like remarkable how I went from one point to the other. It went from like flavorful to dead. Then the flavor just went away. and I was just eating dead mush. Then we cleanser our palate. And then we tried one blueberry, or a great blueberry, I think it was. And I bit into it. And I was like, oh, no, my body had a full body chill.

Blueberry never did that for me. But that's because we were in the state of what, feeling safe in our body. We were at peace with the food and connected, even though we had blindfolds on. And I ate it and I was like, blueberries are crazy. And that's life.

That's the life that's in food. Right. Yeah, you're experientially feeling what the difference is between just mouth pleasure and what's giving you life. So amazing. All right. Next one. Water. All right.

This has been big for me as well. From the quality of the water that we put into our system to the showers that we take and how that gets on our skin. When you think of living in cities nowadays, right, if we're not having proper filtration, if you're drinking tap water and poisoning. yourself with all the pharmaceuticals and heavy metals that are in our waters nowadays. Yeah, is there anything that you would like to touch on with water? Yeah, don't drink from the tap. I don't care what city you live in. It's unfortunately adulterated, even if it's not purposely chemicalized. Right. A fluoride, big problem. Antidepressants, birth control, PCBs, dioxins, phallates, PIFs, heavy metals. They're in our

water. These are chemicals that we know in our water. Environmental Working Group has an amazing water database where you can type in your zip code and see all of the chemicals in your town. I did in my hometown. And there was at least, I think it was 21 different East Brunswick, New Jersey, 21 different chemicals that were above a certain amount. So some were 200 times the amount, somewhere of 10 times the amount, some were 50. But it was crazy to see that these chemicals are in the tap water. Now, a lot of us still drink tap water, believe it or not. Like I had a friend moved from New York and he's like, oh, man, I drank tap water in New York all the time. They said it was clean.

It was a new concept to be like, maybe we should filter the water. The filter, for me, as long as it gets rid of everything and you can remineralize it yourself. There's different filters that have live water. There's some that just take out most of the chemicals but leave in the minerals. for me it's like does it clean out the chemicals yes or no if I have water then I can add minerals I can do fancy stuff like vortex to water bring it back to life great

as long as you're filtering it just start filtering your water and stay away from plastic water bottles not only from the environment but for your damn hormones when I was in college I had 8 10 30 packs of like Evian and Danin and aqua whatever it was called aquafina and I was just running through them not even thinking about the implication

to the environment and my health. But that is a sure fireway to be exposed to BPA and phallates to the most like highly hormone disrupting chemicals in existence. And what do we see in most people? Harmone disruption, both male and females. So really important is moving away from plastic. Would you say what is like the most affordable way to get into that right? Because you can buy, I have under the sink filtration system from ion faucet.

I run it into for me water ionizer using Kagan machine. And then from there, I kind of have another station where I let it sit overnight to where the molecular structure can be reshaped by the vortexer that I have in a soma Vedic. And you can get into all that, right? For people, I feel like distilled water is a place where it's got nothing. And then you can remilitarize it, put some salt in it. Or is it Quentin that those mineral. Or Kintan or Elm. I like them too.

Or just eating, you know, even adding like real salt or Himalayan salt or Celtic salt, just something. you have a very advanced setup and you value water, you know, and that's a reflection of you. I have something similar to, right? Yeah. But it's literally just like, if you're coming into it, I did a whole show. It's called the Water Shove. And episode one was literally going about all the filters out there. Cheaper, affordable ones, more expensive ones, why this one might be a little bit better

than more expensive one, but where you start if you're on a budget. and then really like the ones that are like the gold standard. Amazing. I go over all of them on the Water Episode 1, Water Episode 2, I go into what's in our water. Got it more so like the Negritty. So yeah, it just depends on you. What's your budget?

There's some that are like, there's some filters that are like 400 bucks, 500 bucks, some are like 100. You know, in college I had the $100 one. Amazing. And just so for everybody who's listening, we are going to be, you know, shotgun approach, going over a lot of different topics today. And you've done deep dives into a lot of these wisdom bombs that you do.

So if there's a particular topic that we dive into today that you want to go deeper on, go check out Healyself, search it up on YouTube, Apple and Spotify, find whatever we want to, and then you can dive deeper into these topics. Shower is another one. I just wanted to touch on briefly just because it's not just the water we drink, but the water that we put on our skin and how much we absorb those. So having a good quality shower filter is a major key. Yeah, I got a lot of questions about which one.

I still have to research the top ones. It's funny because I just moved into a new place. and I found a shower filter that I didn't use like two years ago and I was like, oh, I got to put this one in. There are, you're right, if we're putting it in our body, some of these chemicals are absorbent through the skin. But more importantly is if you're taking a hot shower and then you're steaming and then you're breathing in

a lot of these volatile chemicals, that's going to be the route of entry more than the skin. So, yeah, that's actually going to do a show on that very soon. Boom. Amazing. Okay, let's talk about light. We could do another two-hour podcast just on light. There's so many different from how detrimental blue light is to the importance of getting early morning sunlight

to cutting off blue light in the evening after the sun goes down to blue light blockers and things that we do. So to red light therapy, which I'm a big fan of. So yeah, let's cover a few of these. Yeah, light is the language for our hormones, right? It is the language for our brain chemistry. It is language for our body.

It's literally the input of where our body is in the time of day and what to do with its rhythm. That's why we can really confuse ourselves when we get inputs that are not supposed to be there at different times, which is parallel to how we live in modern society, right? We utilize bright lights at night. We utilize blue lights at night. I grew up watching TV. I remember my parents used to watch 10 o'clock news. I had no blue blockers. I was sitting Indian style just watching like how bad the world is, you know, and then going

to sleep. No wonder I had sleep issues when I was a kid. But yeah, the input of the sun in the morning and the wavelength of color that you're seeing and being transduced to the eye to the brain is very particular versus the one that you see midday versus the one that you see in sunset. Although sunset is similar to the sunrise, both or all three are going to tell your body different things. And all three are very important. And I had different light experts on the show. And I asked them, how much should we be in the sun? Like how often?

Most of them are saying at this point like two hours a day minimum. Two hours a day, which is crazy because I was like, okay, I probably get one hour a day like of dedicated light. You know, just like all my walks. So then I started batching things that I could do outside during the day. So I'm like, I'll take this call. Maybe I'll do two calls in a row. And then I'll be 30 minutes of me walking. Maybe I'll do, I'll drink my drink outside this time instead of like in the middle of my kitchen.

So what I'm saying is for all of us, how much light are we getting? I can almost guarantee most of us are not getting enough light. I can guarantee most of us are not getting sunrise light. How many of us really wake up sunrise and see it? But even if you're not seeing the sunrise, are you getting at least outside early without your contacts, without your glasses, letting the light hit your eyes? soon as I wake up, whenever it is, I immediately, like, move out of bed, take off if I have socks on, if it's gold, or just go to the patch of grass or somewhere where I could put my feet down and look at the sun. I could have had a long night and woke up at like 9 o'clock or really, you know, go to sleep early and wake up at 7. The sun is so important at telling my body, okay, now it's morning, really shoot out that cortisol.

That cortisol being released within 20, 30 minutes of seeing it is essentially. for the day. It's an essential rhythm for your body saying, I'm awake, I'm alive, let's go. It's also essential to get you to bed earlier because your body is knowing when that boost is happening, signals throughout the day. So later at night after you see sunset, cortisol is dipping down. And then you create a space in your home, which I hope a lot of us do and I encourage a lot of us. Start turning down bright light. If you have blue blockers, put those on. See how tired you get. You'll get tired within three hours after sunset. You'll start feeling like, holy crap. I'm like, it's like nine, I'm tired. And imagine how artificial exposure really

artificially mimics things in your body where you're staying up till 12 and you go, I have all this energy. Right. Right. That's not natural. I know it because it happens to me. When I put blue blockers, I'm tired by nine, by 10, I'm out. I try to watch like a stranger things or something the other day and I had my blue blockers on. I fell asleep with my mouth open. And my girlfriend's like, hey, hey, hey, she's like, are you watching? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm watching. It's good. I'm fine. She's like, you're sleeping. I was like, no, no, no, no. it's good, it's good. For some reason, men can't admit when they're... Right, right, right. Do you know what I mean? It's so funny. But that's a thing.

Like, can we create an environment where we are mimicking and telling our body it's dark out and then inside here, we were by a campfire. That's what we were illuminated by ancestrally. Can we mimic that in our life, right? The more we do that, if you have sleep issues, number, number one thing to start doing is giving yourself the time at night to tell your body it's dark, wind down, create a sleep ritual, blue blockers. I have like warm night lights in my closet, so I don't have to turn anything on throughout my house really. And that's setting the stage for me to just be like, out.

By 9 o'clock, I'm out. That's how we got to do it. We have to start respecting lights so much more and making sure that we get it. I love it. So valuable. It's been one of the biggest game changers. And for everybody that's listening right now, my invitation is to take it out of theory and put it into practice.

Tomorrow morning, if you wake up and typically what you do is first go on your phone and you're just chilling in your bedroom for 30 minutes before you get out of bed. Don't do that. Put your phone in a separate room. Wake up and just go for a 20, 30 minute walk, listen to a podcast, listen to an audiobook, or just listen to nature if you can and just go for a walk and see how much better you get rest that night because you're also triggering right, the circadian rhythm to set you up for night. secret melatonin properly at night time, which is huge. And one thing I'll say is you have about 20% drop in melatonin for every hour after sunset that you're exposed to blue light. So three, six, let's say, let's say, let's say just three hours, 60% drop in melatonin, right, before you go to sleep. Let's say four hours someone's up.

Eyes really naked, not protected, watching blue light, you know, on our phones, you know, and 80% of our melaton, then we're going to sleep and going like, I didn't really get a good sleep. Like I fell asleep, but I didn't feel like I got a good sleep. Of course, your melatonin is so depleted. And it is one of the most healing underrated hormones. That's your anti-cancer hormone at night. Anti-cancer, anti-microbial, anti-inflammatory. This is what's rejuvenating our body at night.

It's like it's keeping us young when it's secreted. And we are unintentionally reducing it over and over every single hour after sunset. All we got to do is put on blue blockers, lower the light in our house, start a nighttime ritual, chill with the phone at least two hours before, and you're good. Big major key. Major key. Put into practice. Yeah.

Easy. Theory to practice. So, yeah, light, huge, huge major key to dive into. That also leads us nicely into sleep because they're so interconnected. For me, I've also noticed that if I get, you were just touching on, if I go to bed at 12 and get nine hours of sleep or eight hours of sleep versus if I go to bed at 10 or nine and get the same eight, nine hours of sleep, they're completely different. I'm a different person the next day.

Like mentally so sharp, ability to recall information, so much there. It's night and day difference. And what you're speaking to about the melatonin secretion is a big reason for that. Yeah, we're programmed to be asleep about three hours after sunset. Right. So you'll notice, again, going back to the light, if you have your blue blockers and you have the brightness down, maybe you set a bunch of candles in at night, which is even like a next step, which is actually really powerful.

you'll notice that about three hours after sunset, your body's winding down and it's like, I'm ready to go to sleep. My melatonin is popping off. That is a key to understand because if we're allowing that space between like sunset setting the stage for that, we're going to be going to sleep at a time that is around 10 or 11 o'clock. That's why if you stay up to 1 and then you wake up at nine, it ain't the same. It feels different, right? And it's because you're not in your body's rhythm. Now, a lot of people go, okay, well, what about not everyone is biologically made to fall asleep at the same time, right? Dr. Michael Bruce wrote that book saying that there's four different archetypes. And actually, I do believe there's variations, right? Some people actually can fall

asleep at nine o'clock. I don't think I've ever, I haven't done that since I was like 11. And we shift throughout life. Some people can stay up till 12, one, and still be like, and then go to sleep. But if you look, if you read his book, the large majority of us, a large majority, I think it was over 80% of people in the world are meant to go to sleep, right around 10, right around 11, the latest, and then getting eight hours of sleep or so, and then waking up at a reasonable time. That's why the work structure is made that way, because the majority of us are built biologically. Now, there are outliers. We know that biologically with just in general.

Some people fall asleep way earlier, way later. I was never, I would never been the person to wake up at 5 a.m. Even when I tried. I was like, you know what? I'm going to be like a go-getter entrepreneur guy. And I'm just going to like, man, I was up at like five. I did it for a week, man. You should have seen me.

I looked like a thriller, Michael Jackson zombie by Saturday morning. I was like, never again. I was like, my body does not want it. I'm not an early, early person. I'm not a late late person like 7.30, 8 o'clock. Man, my body's ready, like up and running by 8. So just you got to tune into your body. Like that's a theme here.

Or what is your body telling you? If you give it the space with the lights, reducing brightness, candles. If you give it the space, then what's your body communicating? Not artificially. What's your body communicating to you? Yeah. Amazing. So cool.

In terms of sleep, we touched on light a little bit. We talked about timing of going to sleep. a few other ones that are important. Temperature. Another hack is putting a couple of bricks under the headboard of your bed. There's a few different things that we can dive into.

So in terms of getting good quality sleep, what are some of your key factors? The ritual is really important at winding down your nervous system. Telling your nervous system biologically, that saber-toothed tiger, it's not here anymore. Right?

So you're safe to sleep now. So whatever ritual it is for you could be an Epsom salt, bath, could be a light stretch, could be reading with a small dim light, could be breathing, could be meditating. Whatever is your thing once the kids are asleep if you have kids, do that. You only need 20 minutes of it, 30 minutes of it. If you can, take an hour as long as you don't have your phone. If you put your phone to the side, two hours, even an hour, you know, minimum, away from you before you go to bed, just notice how much better quality sleep you already get.

On top of that, if you woke up and saw the sun when you woke up in the morning, like put your feet on the ground, maybe even you even saw the sunset, watch how much better quality sleep you get. Temperature is very important. You'll notice that you get colder at night, you know, when it's like kind of the same temperature in the house. And it's because your rhythm. Once melatonin is being released, your body is cooling down. So that means no working out late at night, right? That's not the time you and I have saunas, not the time to do the sauna. Right?

you can take a shower, you know, and it's interesting when you take a warm shower, since you're not in there, not really raising your body temperature so much, you reflexively drop when you come out. And that drop after a warm shower will make you cold and it'll help you get to sleep. So actually, I am a fan of like warmer showers before bed, not searing hot and not being in there for like 45 minutes and it's raising your body temperature. But really just letting it superficially warm you up. And yeah, some brick pads or whatever. I have. I actually have a pad that has saved my life under the bed and it cools it down. Those pads are amazing. I keep my thing at like 73, I think 74. Holy moly. Like I haven't sweat in my bed since. So look into getting a pad over your bed. And when they sponsor your podcast, we'll talk about them.

There you go. Yeah, there's a couple. I'm happy to mention. I use Uler. There's eight sleeve. There's a couple different ones that I put mine at 65 and also the AC in the house. Wow. go, you stay cold.

I stay cold. And then I just put blankets on it. I'm like, I sleep good. Damn, you put it at 65. Okay. Yeah. My 75 and I'm like 74, 75 and I'm cool. Like I tried 65 when I started when I was shivering.

I was like, it is cold in my house. Everybody's body is different. But that was also a big thing in my past relationship. Women and men's body temperatures typically vary a lot. Like it's common thing that couples argue over is like the AC or the heat in the house. the cool temperature pad is nice to like also separate. A hundred percent. Mine is a human radiator.

Yeah. And it's like if without that pad, I would sweat if I got close. So that's why first of all, that's why I got a king size mattress. So we're on opposite sides of bed because when it was a smaller bed, I used to sweat because of the radiating heat. But now we have the two.

And then she puts her temperature. She's happy with hers. I'm happy with mine. We wake up. We love each other in the morning. Yes. Amazing. Another quick hack is also,

I don't know if you like, have you ever raised the headboard of your bed? It's promoting like lymphatic drainage and like a lot of the juices that your brain kind of flushes out through your system helps, has helped me. And I, you can, the simple hack is putting a couple bricks under your headboard. I heard some people talk about that. No, never, never. Under the headboard, so like it's slanted a little bit? Yeah, so you're like sleeping at an incline a little bit.

Interesting. I actually got one that's like made for this pad that I put under the bed that makes it at an incline that's like typically for people with acid reflux. Yeah, that's what I was just thinking. That's the only thing I heard of. Yeah. But no, that's been interesting.

For me, also, eye mask and mouth tape. So let's go into air. Let's go into nose breathing next because I think it flows nicely with this. Game changer. Bro, game changer,

man. I, my girlfriend says if there's a robber who comes in, we're dead. Right? But little, little does she know I'm energetically attuned. Right?

I can feel the door open, right? But man, I got an eye mask, I got ear plugs, I got mouth tape. Sometimes on Tuesdays, when the trash person is coming through the alleyway, I put on my damn headphones, noise cancelling. I'm telling you right now, and I sleep with my arms crossed like Dracula. You're like in a coffin. Bro, it is like a scene.

People have taken pictures. It's like a thing that my friends know. Anyway, the mouth breathing is a major way for you, if you're mouth breathing at night, for you to wake up very much so unrested. It could literally be the issue while you're waking up unrested and not rejuvenated.

Mouth breathing is causing multiple signals to be sent to the body. One, I'm not safe, right? Because what happens when you're running away for a bear or a tiger? You're breathing through the mouth to gasp in air. You're not nasally breathing. You're not running away being like,

I'm going to nasally breathe and be mindful of my time and space and my location. Right. You're getting the fuck out of there and you're breathing, right? That's what's happening when we're breathing. Our brain's going, we're not safe. Our blood vessels are reacting accordingly. But when you're breathing through your nose, there's a mechanism that actually dilates your blood vessels. Right. So you're getting all the nutrients to your body, all the anti-inflammatory chemicals to the parts that really need it in the body.

More oxygen as well. More oxygen, right? Nitric oxide. So now you're oxygenating your brain, your body, You're getting nutrients. But most of all, your body goes, I'm safe. Okay, time to get into deep sleep. Mouth tape has been amazing. For me, the two things that Mouth Tape has helped too with is the pooling of blood under my eyelids. So I used to have dark spots, especially in school.

It was like kind of raccoony. One, because I wouldn't sleeping well. Two, because my place had mold. And three, because I wasn't mouth taping. And really difficult because it's like I look never rested. And even when I felt rested, I looked not rested. And it's because what happens is when you're mouth breathing, you're getting your pooling blood under your eyes.

Interesting. In particular. But also cavities. Yep. I haven't had a damn cavity since I've been mouth taping. That's crazy to me. And I would get cavities. I'm talking about I would eat so healthy in my adult life.

I would brush my teeth. I'd floss and I'd still get a cavity. I'd be like, I don't understand what's happening. When I was a child, I always had cavities. But I, like, crazy and, you know, but now it's like I mouth tape. And it's literally just me ripping off some three. tape and I just put it on or having a mouth company for mouth taping whatever I have put it on and I'm done like I'm nasal breathing and I feel great in the mornings I feel good sometimes I feel

great if I do all the things without the phone listen I practice what I preach I try to but I'm also human too sure right but when I do there's an opportunity to feel great I love it yeah it's a game changer for me also just I grew up also just having a bunch of science tennis issues and allergy problems. And I actually had, I forgot the name of the surgery, but I had deviated septum so they had to go in and shave some stuff down. And breath, the book, Breath by James Nestor is an amazing resource to dive deeper into this topic. But also the, if you don't use it, you lose it, you lose it. So if you're not using all of the space that you have within your nasal cavity, you're going to lose it. It's going to atrophy. It also changes the facial, your facial

structure changes if you start nose breathing. Yeah. We've seen them. So it's very classical. facial expression. And it's really because the reason why, what you'll see is a deviated chin, usually the teeth are sort of like bucked out a little bit. You'll see under the eyes are really sunken in. The face is sunken in and their head posture is forward. And we've seen people like that.

Like I can think of people in how my high school look like that, right? And it's mostly because those are real mouth, breathing, they have such issues, nasal breathing. But why do these, why does the body express like that? It's literally just to accommodate respiration. Right. So the head tilts forward so the trachea can move forward. So there's more air that's coming because the more that the head was tilted back and the chin that's deviated, it's tifting that it's impinging on it. So that's why the face, the body morphs to breathe. Poster is your posture is is half because you're bending over and texting all day and, you know, like in a khyphotic position.

Yeah. But it's mostly for respiration. Your body will accommodate your posture to breathe. Yeah. Literally, because your body's, I got to survive. So if we got to have a humpback or we have to have our head forward posture, it's because of that. Amazing.

All right. Cool. Now what we're breathing is also important, right? We think that air is just air, but really we live in these buildings where there's a lot of EOCs and off gassing and we don't have air purifiers or we're not letting breeze come through our house. It's a huge way to build toxicity up in the system. So let's talk about air quality. Yeah, this is what I've particularly been vocal about for the past few years. You know, when I came out of school, I talked a lot about food and nutrition because it was most

accessible, most relatable. And then the reason why I started talking more about air quality and how it's affecting us is because I saw two things that were contributing to cancer in a major way that no one was talking about. And that's what brought me into like environment. medicine and the other one we'll talk about a little later. Well, the environmental medicine is so important because how many times has your doctor gone, hey, did you get a new bed in the home or a new couch or what laundry detergent are you using? What about cleaning products? Do they ever ask about that? Because it's very, it's not even theory. Those things can cause asthma. They can be the cause of asthma in you and your children. Your child develops asthma. When does your allergist ever say?

you know, it might be the fir tree outside. That's what it is. Maybe they'll say that. They will never say, is it the cleaning products? And they're quick to prescribe you some sort of And they're quick to prescribe you and you'll take out buterol and then you'll be on an inhaler Instead of like maybe mom don't use bleach, but we don't know, right? So this is what I wanted to bring to the collective is going, hey, there's stuff in your home that is affecting your health first and foremost And they're being sold and they're being sold without thought and we're buying them without thought and we're them in without thought. We've equated clean to like a chemically synthetic fresh lemon grass or chemically synthetic fresh citrusy smell. That's the stuff that's making you sick.

Right. So if we bring awareness that no, actually clean doesn't have a smell. Clean smells like air flowing through my house. Then we go, ooh, wait, no, now I have a new perspective of what it is. Then all of a sudden, that plug in that you have, you're like, why do I have this? It smells terrible. you throw it away. All the perfume that you may be putting on, all the scents on your clothes, on your laundry, on your bedding, you go, oh, this doesn't feel good to be breathing in because then you start tuning into yourself again. You tune into the air in your home. You tune into really what clean air smells like. It's funny, you start spraying all of this stuff. Let's say I've spray all this cologne and all of these scents are coming out from the plugin. If I have an air purifier,

it's going to be going off because it's cleaning out the chemicals from those things that you're putting on your body and breathing in. So so, so important. The question is like, okay, what in the home? Easy interventions. You're cleaning products. Look at them, right? Look at are they chemically synthetic? Do they have chemically synthetic smells, dyes, colors? If the answer is yes, then start moving them away, right? You don't need Ajax. You don't need Lysol. There's so many other clean ingredients, alternatives. It's a booming market now. There's people who see product share and they're like, yeah, okay, I'm jumping in. I want to on the market share and they're making money.

So now you have options. Back when I was talking about this, people were like, well, there's only like one or two brands. Now you have options out there. So clean products, cleaning your house, air purifiers in the house, opening your home, opening your windows, even in the winter, getting airflow a little bit in the house at least and then your bed. If you're sleeping on the bed, your bed has to be high quality, period.

And what does that mean just so people know they can look for a search? So high quality, yeah. So, and I'll go over. First, the problem with conventional bedding, let's say, let's take a temperate. They have multiple chemicals, right? The polyurethane chemical is breaking down and you're breathing in those breakdown products. And they don't just break down within the mattress. They off gas, right? And sometimes you can smell it. I know a lot of people can relate to this. You've opened something from a box, right? Let's say a mattress topper. and it smelled like chemicals. That's off-gassing.

The thing is, not all chemicals are off-gas have a synthetic smell. The scent, yeah. Right? So mostly what the experience will be is like, all right, let's get this new bed. We have a temporepetic bed. We open it.

And whoo, that really smells. Like, let's put it outside. Yeah, honey, let's do it. Let's do it together. We put outside for like a few hours. We bring it back in. It's gone. We're good.

The problem is the majority of those chemicals don't have a scent and they're going to off-gast for the life of the temperedic. and for the life of you coming home, taking a shower, coming into bed, putting your face on the bed, and breathing in those chemicals literally for a third of your life. For a third of your life, hours in a day, right? And we think about, we don't really think about how that implicates us. But it can. I call it a slow drip. Right. If it's a slow drip,

and there's a big bucket we have, but it's one drip, we don't really think about it. But what what happens when we do it for 15, 20 years? And then all of a sudden, we have bone cancer, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, right? And then we go, where does cancer come from? I don't understand. And we never had it in our family. And I always been eating healthy. It's because a lot of us aren't paying attention

to two of the biggest things when it comes to cancer. This, which is your environmental, your home, the time you spend most of your day, what is the quality of air? And then the other thing we'll talk about later. Amazing. So good, so good. And so air quality, another start only statistic

is I've heard you say multiple times that air quality outside is usually 10 times cleaner than indoor air quality. 10 to 100 times cleaner. Your indoor quality, like let's say we have all that windows closed, the doors closed in this house, and then, you know, the camera crew goes, we need to bleach. We really need to bleach everything. All right. We need to use all.

This place needs a good cleaning. Let's take out the Ajax and the Lysol and the mist are clean and start scrubbing with the Swiffer. If we had that process happen over an hour, we just cleaned up everything with your chemicals. it'll be about 100 times more dirty than the air outside, which is crazy because a lot of us are like, whoa, pollution in the air. We don't think about our home. On average, this is literally straight from the EPA,

at least 10 times dirtier is the air in our home. It's insane. So easy hack there is one, open the windows, get a fan to circulate the air in the home. Exactly. You can get fans that actually will be sucking the hair out of your home and bringing it outside, which is really cool. Get an air purifier.

Right now, like there's so many companies that are out there that are like heppa, ultra heppa. They're affordable now. You don't have to get the $600 one, $1,000 one. You can get a $200 one. I mean, like for my dad, you know, when I went back home, I went to Coles and I brought three purifiers and then I ordered another one for him,

but he needed something in the home and his new home. He didn't even know. And I just had him all going in different rooms and it's better. And he breathed better, you know, and he feels better. It's insane. is like as you start to implement many of the things that we're talking about, they accumulate in your ability to be more of a sensitive being to see like when you walk into a space,

ooh, I smell like the air quality here is not resonating with me. You can pick up on things like mold. That's a big topic. Let's go into the various different environmental toxins that we have as well because we touched on a little bit in terms of air quality. But there are so many things from the clothes that we wear to the bedding in the bed that we sleep in, do the pots and pans that we use, the cleaning products, all of these things accumulate into that big bucket that you were saying that drips over time. And the more poisonous things that

we have in our life, we'll fill up that bucket quicker. Yeah. Okay, I'll just go over some of them to watch out for. Heavy metals, very important because even in organic food, heavy metals can be there. So it's really good to start familiarizing yourself with what foods traditionally have high heavy metals. Rice is traditionally high in arsenic. If you're eating rice every day, you have to start questioning that. peas are traditionally high in lead. Shellfish are traditionally high in mercury. So all it takes is Google,

what foods are high in arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury. You can look at other ones like maybe cobalt. But yeah, like look into those heavy metals. It was like the big heavy metals, which we're inundated with. The really, really toxic ones, the ones that really affect our energy cycle

of creation, energy in our body. there are monkey wrenches on each step of that cog. You might find if your energy is really poor. And heavy metal is another thing that's slow drip, right? It builds up in our body over time, but it has an affinity for our tissues, particularly the brain. So a lot of people who have access or who are exposing themselves to heavy metals start feeling those issues over time. People who work in heavy metals start having cognitive defects really fast. So heavy metals, heavy metals, heavy metals.

PPA phallates plastic, as I mentioned before. very important to start detoxifying out of your house. Stop using plastic. Stop drinking from plastic, right? The shower curtain that you have is it made of plastic, right? Can you get a non-pVC one? Think about the things that are plastic that you're being exposed to. Microplastics, which are also in food like fish that we're seeing, right?

Microplastics and some of the cosmetics that you're using. All you have to do is start bringing awareness without getting overwhelmed. Just go like this. What a clean cosmetic look like? start Googling that. Right. What's clean lipstick? So easy if you just can't pronounce

the things on the back of the label is probably not good. It's probably not good, right? PIFAS is another one. Now this is an important one to consider. PIFAs are a family of polyfluorinated chemicals. It's not just one.

It's hundreds and hundreds of chemicals. And I always tell people to watch the movie Dark Waters because it's a really good movie and Mark Ruffel is a great actor. But it highlights, what happened in a small town in Ohio, or rest of Virginia, I forget,

and DuPont was at the time making Teflon. Now, Teflon is super hydrophobic material that's used. Teflon is the best non-stick that you're going to ever find. There's nothing that ever compared to it on cookware. It's also some of the most toxic stuff you can ingest. And the runoffs were going into this town's water system and making their farm animals sick, and they were growing tumors.

They were getting cancer. And then it was making the people sick. So this lawyer who was working for DuPont or big corporation said, what the fuck? He's like, this ain't right. He started representing the people. And for years and years, he fought against that company. PIFAs are in our cookware in Teflon. So anything, this is so important for us to understand, anything that is water resistant, moisture wicking, water repelling.

Think about rain jackets. It's the same chemical that's used on your pots and pans or your skillet. Athletic wear. Athletic wear, yoga pants. The investigation found it concentrated in the crotch, especially in yoga pants. Why is because when someone's sweating, they don't want that area to have a huge sweat mark. Same thing with sports bra in the nipples. Why?

Because when a woman sweating and running or whoever's wearing sports bra is you don't want your nipples, just, you know, like being exposed. I love how you just had to make sure that. Yeah, whoever's wearing. All the men that are wearing sports bra is feeling. included there. Yeah, exactly. Whoever's feeling good about sports bras. But like imagine the travesty that like a woman who's wearing a sports bra all day, right, just not even working out, but like going to air one and then going shopping and comes home and breastfeed your child. These are chemicals that take

12 years, seven to 12 years, on average to be detoxified from the body. That's why they call forever chemicals and they stay in our environment forever. So what does that mean? Pay attention to moisture wicking. Pay attention to materials that are, you're wearing that are water resistant. right like I had these underwear that were like dry fit what do you think dry fit is it's the same chemical the same membrane that's used if you have teflon throw that away throw it away you know there's so many better I talk about cookware I'm going to be talking more about cookware again cast iron stainless steel cast iron high quality stainless steel ceramic but but but I'll say one thing about ceramic there's a lot of companies that are using non-stick ceramic now and the non-stick materials they're

they're not Teflon. It's one, not as good as Teflon, but also not as chemically toxic as Teflon, which is great. But I call it the fast fashion of cookware is this trend of non-stick ceramic cookware because what happens is unfortunately they last for about 12 months, 13 months. You pay $150 for a skillet and ain't going to last more than two years. So they're finding that I challenge everyone to go on marketplace, Facebook marketplace, type in cookware, a lot of the things you'll find are nonstick ceramic. Why? It's because it's not lasting and people are done with it. They're like, oh shit, this is like breaking or it's not sticking. The nonstick is not working anymore. So I'll go into

that more, but pay attention to anything that's moistureworking. Really important chemical is the Phafas. It's also found in your water. That's which brings us back to detoxifying your water or filtering your water. And I think mold would be one of the major last ones. And mold is, is, it's insidious. When it's everywhere, 50% of the homes have water damage with mold growing. A quarter of us cannot break down mold properly. Quarter people where there was, there are thousands of times more toxins in your body for mold because we're not breaking it down, those mycotoxins in the liver, which is interesting because it's a genetic mutation. I have that genetic mutation, which is why when I'm in a home that's moldy, my body's like, oh, here it is. Like I'm a little

canary in the coal mine. Sometimes my friends bring me to when they're looking for places, hey, you want to come check it out for mold? And I'll just sniff it. And if I feel high, because it makes me feel high, it goes right to the brain. Those mycotoxin causes brain inflammation. It's like I take a shot of alcohol. Interesting. Well, then I know that there's mold. At this point I could tell where in the room mold is. I was in my old place and I text, I message the guy and I go, hey, was there a problem with mold in my room and they didn't answer for a long time? And then I go, it's in the closet. I know it. I can even tell what part of the closet's on. Interestingly enough, I put up a story and a girl who used to live in the home in Venice saw me my story and she goes,

hey, I used to live in this home. And she goes, I just want to let you know. I know you're sensitive to mold. There was water damage. I go, where? In the closet? And I asked her what wall and it was the exact wall. So like mold is a problem. If someone has a child, a family of four, and one of the kids has asthma, sinus issues, like you had consistent sinus issues, maybe their mouth breathing. And also it might be their mouth breathing because they're nasly congested and because they're exposed to mold. It might be that mold in the house, statistically speaking, will affect one in one and four of you in the family. So it stands to believe, bring awareness to water damage. Start taking mold seriously.

Start looking under your sink. Is there water damage? Is there buckling of wood somewhere in your home? Do you know, remember having water damage? It wasn't remediated. Did you just have dehumidifiers there? You know? Or did you rip out the panels and see,

holy shit, there is mold everywhere because you would not believe how many people find mold when they start looking. You have to get that remediated, especially if you're moving into a home. Mold, mold, mold is one of the things that I believe is driving disease that no one knows about.

And I really mean that. If your doctor says, I don't know. We thought it was allergies. We don't know what's happening. You have to look at mold because it can be respiratory. It can be every system. Respiratory, musculoskeletal. It can be your hormones are disrupted.

Mold, brain, gut. It can affect every one of your systems. Mold in the body. It depends on how your body reacts. We'll call the inflammatory reaction that is specific to you, which is crazy. Okay. Great. There is so, I mean, just kind of like to.

cap that wherever you are in your home, where you spend the majority of your time to just look around and see what are the things around you made up? What are the ingredients from the rug that you have to the couch that you have to your bed, to the posse and pants, your cleaning products, all these things that we touched on. Everything that is around you that you use, that you can breathe in and that you put on your skin and that you ingest is going to have an effect. And if they have toxins, accumulate over time and you can test for some of these things. But a lot of the times they're probably be really subtle and not be able to be picked up on until there is a big, you know, dense, gross disease that or illness that formulates. Okay, shoes off. Why is that important?

Shoes off? Oh, yeah, very important. My grandma was right. Your auntie was right. And it's because you just track, you track pesticides. You can track heavy metals. You can track obviously bacteria. But most important thing for me is pesticides. We have, and I'll live with a dog. and I love her but she is furry and she rolls around in the grass so it's very important that she's cleaned every time before she comes in the house

she's brushed and her paws are clean if you have you can't just let your dog run around unless you're living in a place where you know pesticides aren't used but we live in Venice and the city uses it on the concrete it uses there's people with perfect grass your neighbor with perfect grass most likely is using glyphosate

and there was a study that shows that dogs are one of the main things that track that glyphosate life of safe back into the house. There's people who have dogs, I'm going to want to hear this, but we had an expert on all of these studies and chemicals and saying that dogs who run around with pesticides in the backyard or in the neighborhood increase your risk for cancer if they're not clean properly. Very important. Same thing with shoes. Same thing. Same idea. Take off your shoes. Take off your shoes. Connect to your ground too. And that's even an appropriate reception thing.

Like stimulate your feet to be feeling the ground too. But really, it's just trying to. It's just And if you don't want to take off your shoes and don't want to clean your dog, you got to clean your home. You got to clean it regularly. Vacuum, dust. Dust is where a lot of these chemicals stay. Make sure you're cleaning it. Very important. Okay, great.

No shoes a lot in my house or Christians if you ever come over. Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I'm like a shoe Nazi. I'm like just watching. It's funny because I've had some parties in my house and people take off their shoes, but there's like, there's a, yeah, there's some, especially like women with costumes. They have like these awesome costumes. They have like these awesome boots.

And I'm literally just like swallowing as they're just walking in. Like it's a runway with all with like all these pesticides coming out. And I'm like, okay, it's fine. I go, let me just come into my body. We'll have it clean tomorrow. Everything will be fine, you know? Don't let yourself get to that point like me. Yeah.

It's important to like everything that we're touching on. And this is why I preface. Like it is a lot. Right. When we're not living in nature and we're not living the way that we used to, there's a lot of things that we've got to be aware of. If we want to and you have the desire to be a healthy, vital individual. That's going to look like different things for many people. But these are all

super important factors to at least be aware of. And then implement slowly, start to bring awareness in your life, start to have these conversations. Let's do this kind of content. Be very important. Okay. A couple more things just because, I mean, this has been a whole podcast on its own, just going into the body, right? And I want to still touch on some other things. But a couple other things real quick. External hormetic stressors like hot and cold therapy, game changer for both both of us. Yeah, yeah. So why is doing the sauna?

Why is getting cold water? Why is that beneficial for us? Yeah, it's exactly what you said. Hormetic, meaning that we are stressing our body in the right ways. We are actually built and resilient to expand our resiliency, right? We are built to expand how we handle all of the stressors. And actually, we're very comfortable. Think about if we lived in, think about if we lived in the woods, right?

There was no industrialization. There was no homes. And we found a cave in the woods and we were in the same tribe. You and I would have to go out and either forage for berries or hunt. And some days it would be cold as fuck, right? And some days our feet would be stepping on twigs and we'd step on something. We'd be like, ah, man, I'm injured today. Right.

These are all stressors from the environment that build our resiliency, right? We're very comfortable with our temperature, right? We get in our car. You know, we go to our job. Everything's controlled, temperature control. This is why things like sauna add these stresses of like, holy shit, it's hot. And also, holy shit, I'm freezing. Really important because those stressors activate particular proteins that protect us.

They activate proteins to protect our genes. They activate proteins that are anti-inflammatory to the body. They activate proteins that activate our immune system, right? There's a neuroimmune connection in a cold plunge, right? So when we go in, our nervous system going is like, whoops, sympathetic cortisol boosting up. But when you get out, it's communicating to your immune system going, hey, strengthen yourself. This is why I always said, like old school, they knew. Like, if you're sick in those sanitariums, you're exposed to cold, right?

That was a reason because your immune system is strengthening more and more. That's due resiliency and teaching it. Same thing with the hot, right? You're exposing yourself and building up these proteins that are very, very specific to that hot, overwhelming infrared. You're like, whoa, it's really like, this is a lot. Really important to start building those up because not only do you feel better, but you're strengthening your immune system. You're strengthening your detoxification system.

And you're strengthening most of all your resiliency, which is making you stronger to environmental stressors, which you're inevitably going to be exposed to, like chemicals in the home. Amazing. And cold, cold, cold plunge, game changer as well. Cool, yeah, man, that was it. Like the noraphynephrine shot up is,

that's why people are like, whoa, that's like my coffee for the day. You actually feel great, too. I am high. I am straight floating. Like before I wake up or before this podcast when I woke up, I did my morning practice. I went for a walk. I prepped a little bit for this podcast. I did my son.

I did my cold plunge laying out naked in the sun after the cold plunge. And I'm straight floating like on cloud nine. You cannot give me enough coffee to feel that good. Dude, you're doing it right. That is you're connecting to your nature. You're connecting to the overheating. You're connecting to getting cold. You're connecting to the sun hitting your full body.

You're connecting to the walk hearing nature. You're doing all the things that are connecting you to you. It's crazy how good we're meant to feel. And it's crazy how we have adapted to not feel good. I think that's normal. It's insane because when you tap into that, once you do the movement, you get naked in nature, you do hot, cold therapy, you apply a lot of the things we're talking about. You feel this exuberance for life. It's like you become online.

And in comparison to how normal we live our life, it's not, it's become normalized to be unhealthy. I agree, man. And you've also inspired me to set up that sauna my new place and hurry up and get it going and fill up that cold tub because I will say it never gets easier to go in that cold tub ever. As much as I used to it I am,

I always have the, maybe not today. What excuse can I find to not get in that cold-ass tub? But every single time, inevitably, I feel better. You know, try to get in 11 minutes during the week.

That's all you really need. You know, get a two-minute session here, three-minute session here, maybe a one, maybe a four, whatever works for you, but consistently, you're going to tap into that exuberance, which is like amazing when you're feeling good in your body, because then you start bringing to yourself and others your gifts, right? You feel physically good. Like, I have the resiliency. Like, what do I do? I have all this energy. I kind of want to dance. I haven't danced in a while. Actually,

I'm a pretty good dancer. I express myself through dance. Yeah. You know, and that's when you start unlocking yourself and giving it to others. Amazing. And you start to build momentum for feeling good in your life. You go in this upward trajectory where, you know, one of the things that is beneficial for your mind getting into the cold plunge is not wanting to do something like getting in 30, 40 degree water, but doing it anyways, you build this resiliency and discipline within your mind that, uh, overrides the system of saying, I don't want to do this, but I'm going to do it anyway. Yeah. That has so many implications for the rest of your life and how you build the business, you go into work, your relationships, you're able to deal with stressors and face

adversity and be okay with it. That is the mental, emotional, spiritual side of the damn cold punch, man. That thing is a lesson in itself. Amazing. So before we get into the mental, emotional, spiritual side of things, one last thing that is super important that we have to touch on is movement. Because if we're not moving, we live very largely sedentary lifestyles. That is a huge contributing factor to our organs not working properly. We sit down in these hunch positions going on our phone and working on our laptop all day. We become these little lab rats where we're not connected to our for essence, which has historically been to move, to walk, to run, to throw, to squat, and to exercise. And exercise is really a modern day of getting back to what we normally have always done,

which is various forms of movement. We both have been training functional patterns recently. The past couple of years, it's been great biomechanically moving our body, how it ancestrally has and the benefits that have come from that. Yeah, just touching on how important it is for exercise movement. It's essential, man. It's a pillar. Yeah, probably one of the biggest. We're probably one of the biggest because that's how we adapted. If you think back to us as human beings, we walked and walked and walked and walked. And then we go, oh, there goes a wild boar or there goes the berry bush that we were talking

about, right? Or there goes new land and let's explore the curiosity. That our bodies are biomechanically made in like the most perfect way to move. And it's actually the life essence for us. You go on a walk every morning, that is essential, right? Everyone should be going on a walk at some point in their day, if not multiple times a day. That's why measuring your steps is essential. If you need to be measuring your steps, no, if you're hitting at least 10,000, 8 to 10,000, you're giving your body what it needs.

And what does it need? Again, anti-inflammatory, right? You're increasing blood flow to the body. But for me, one of the most important mechanisms of movement is the lymphatic detox. Right. Lymph doesn't move by heart. Lymph doesn't have a vascular system to start pushing it. Lymph only moves by movement, right? So the lymphatic system is our sewer system. That is where all the stuff in our body is being held and released and moved. That's why when we're sick and overwhelmed, our lymph nodes start swelling up because we're backed up. We're inflamed. We have all these bugs that need tending to. When we move our bodies, we're actually. activating the lymphatic system to start training, right? And that is essential. So, sedentary is the opposite of detoxification. Moving is the pro detoxification. So if you can walk, if you can exercise, you don't even need to go to the gold gym and do pull-ups all day. You don't need to

go to go to gold gym and do bicep curls. All you need to do is understand that your body is made to move and move in ways that are athletic, right? This is why we do things like functional patterns. Shout out to them because biomechanically coming back to a place where your body is taught to move. I think for me, and I have no affiliation with them, but that exercise has created a space within me deeper than physical, right? Because it's aligning the parts of your body. It's aligning your posture. It's aligning your biomechanic movement. So now I'm moving in flow with how my body wants to move. We're still working on it. But that flow, and especially when it comes to fascia, moving the way that it wants to, sliding against the muscle.

muscles is essential for deeper parts of you like emotion. Interesting. And we're going to get into that, how our emotion is trapped in our fashion, how to release and all the things. Beautiful. Movement, go on walks. Find variance in positions throughout the day when you're working. Stand, sit, squat, lay, change it up.

Inversion is another big one as well. Find a way to either put your legs up against the wall, get upside down. I have these silks I put in my house where I can hang upside down or just hang from a pull-a-bar. way. It's not inverted, but that's a great way to also move a limp. I haven't inverted, man, but I'm going to, you got me thinking about it. You're the second person who said it, so I got to start inverting some way somehow. Knowing my clumsy ass, man, I'm going to be falling off those silks real quick. We'll do it after this. Do it after this. Yeah, yeah. It's not that hard.

We're just getting to a handstand on a wall. All right. Deep breath. That was a lot of information. That's just the physical. That is just the physical. And we really just still honestly scratched the the top of the iceberg with that. But notice, almost everything that we talked about was not spending thousands of dollars. Yeah. It's literally changes that you can make today. Yeah. These are very simple things that we can apply.

And you can get into the deeper biohacking things, but you don't need to. There's so many ways to create simple changes in your life that will drastically impact the level of vibrancy that you feel in your life. Before we go into the mental, emotional, spiritual, I want to just ask you a little bit of why you got into all this in the first place. you're somebody that I know is somebody that's deeply authentic. You care so much. You have such a heart focus and doing this work. And your story I know is very impactful for how you kind of got into this place and why you decided to go down this path of learning all this things because you

can really be of service to the planet in a profound way in helping people heal themselves. So let's touch on that first to get out of the head a little bit into the heart and go from there. Yeah, great. I love the movement. I love the flow of this, man. It's, well, I've always been a sensitive person since I was a kid. Been environmentally sensitive. Been sensitive to movies. Been sensitive to kids getting picked on. It always,

I always felt connected to wanting to do things. And I probably got it from my mom. She's always been hypersensitive too. And that stuck with me. As much as I try to hide it in the closet and be like, nah, man, I'm tough, right? Like my idea of what toughness meant has changed over the years. And for me, my sensitivity has been such a powerful driver for me.

And that sensitivity has created, for me, a connection in wanting to have people feel, like truly feel who they are in every way from the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual is for people to step into like, God, like have that moment where they're even close to crying and be like, I am supposed to feel this good physically. I'm supposed to feel this connected to my partner and myself. I am supposed to be feel deeply connected to a source bigger than me. Like that is our right. And like what are we doing as humans if we're not feeling that every day?

So for me it's like because I feel so connected to my mission and people, this has been the thing that I, it's not even I want to do. It's like I'm doing it. That's it. It's like this is all I can do right now. for you. So that's why I've been driven and there's been instances in my life that has added more fuel to that fire. When my mom passed away, I was like, okay, you know, the person who's given me the sensitivity to humanity has left and transcended. And now it's more of a

responsibility. That's when I got the responsibility. It's like I want to help people. How do I help? Now it's like I feel now I can be a responsible voice because I've been through a process and I know what it means to lose that part of you, but also the why. There was so much things physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually that could have happened in my mom's life, but happened perfectly, but was there for her to heal that I didn't know about. So now it's like that force. It's like, wow, there's people who are suffering out there.

We can give them this information now and drive them to that place where maybe they prevent that if it's in the cards for them. Maybe not. But at least they have the information to do something with it. And I'd be remissified and do that for humanity, for people. Like, here's your information. You can heal on every level. Here's how.

Yeah. We have a sick care system today. We don't have a healthcare system. And the system that we do have is amazing for acute injuries, but for chronic illnesses has really failed us. Do you want to share a little bit more about the impetus becoming a naturopathic doctor? Your mom passing from cancer was a big reason for getting into this. And shifting to the,

realization of I need to get this information out there because when my own mom has been in the hospital and I go and I see what they're what they give them and from everything that we talked about, they're doing the opposite, right? It's an extremely sterile environment. They're not getting sunlight, right? These harsh lights, the food that they give them are chemically not organic food and filled with sugar and it's it blows my mind every time I see somebody that is getting health advice, nutrition, not lack of a nutrition advice and the way that we, we go about healing people with chronic illnesses is, it's really sad. Yeah, there was a moment that led up to the moment.

But then the lead up, it was for me just being displeased with having strep throat all the time every year at the same time. And not being asked about like, well, what are you eating? What is your stress level like? You know, like what is your environment like? Quick side note. Same. I had strep throat all the time. It was a problem every year.

And I had, I got my tonsils taken out. I had a tonsillectomy. And I wish I would have had more insight before that would have happened. Right. But it was such a big deal in my life. They said those were the biggest tonsils that they'd probably ever seen. I have a picture. They're huge.

There's like golf balls in the back of my throat. And if I had known what I known then. Right, right. If you knew, yeah, exactly. So I was leading towards that way because I kept getting it. And the last time I actually, and this, the last time I saw this conventional doctor, not just shout out to conventional doctors because if I go to the hospital, you know, I need you, you know. But this conventional doctor was like, she came in, she opened in my mouth,

she put the light, she sat down, she wrote a script and left. It was, I kid you not, I kid you not, two minutes max. And I didn't, I couldn't believe. I was like, what is this? Is this medicine? And that stuck with me for so long. I went to dental school. I was going to go into dentistry. and in dental school, that's when I found out my mom was sick with cancer. And I was like, okay, here I am, I'm going to work on teeth, you know? And shout out to all Dennis, because we need you. But for me, I was like, I don't know if I want to do that. I feel like I want to do something else that involves speaking to the world.

But I didn't know what that even looked like. There was no such thing as a podcast back then. Right. Right. I still had a BlackBerry, you know? I didn't even have a BlackBerry. I still had a flip phone. and the moment came when my mom was diagnosed with cancer,

and I was driving her to her radiation appointments. She had already gotten a double mastectomy. That means they took both her breast tissue out on both sides. She had drains. She lost her hair. She was skinny, and then radiation came. She was already on chemotherapy. And I remember talking to the doctor,

and there was a nutritionist that came in, and they said she was losing weight. She has to take these drinks. and they gave me boost and then the other bag insure. And I'm looking at these drinks and I'm just staring at them while she's talking to the doctor. And I reach and I look at it and I start reading the ingredients. And for me, at this time, all I knew was like bro nutrition. Fitness, sugars, right, fats, protein, not even enough about quality.

But all I knew is that that big ingredient list was a problem. And all I knew was when I read sugar and corn syrup solids and soy isolate. I was like, something doesn't sound right. And all I knew is when I get home, I'm going to do some research. And when I research these ingredients, I go, why are they giving this to cancer patients? And in that moment, the disconnect into sick care versus preventative care care, that's when it happened. I was the disconnect. Like, wow, medicine isn't what I thought it was.

All my life, I thought medicine was the way. And then I thought in that moment, medicine is not only not the way that we think it is, but it's not helping us. I couldn't believe it. So instead I said, I'm going to make my mom the same drink with the same exact macronutrients with healthier products coming from Earth. And I did. I did. And I was making her, her drinks every single day for her to gain weight. And she gained weight. And what I did with those packs and I threw them away. And in that moment, I was like, shout out to boost and insurer, one for bringing that realization, but shout out for not doing a good job. So I'm going to shout you out for doing that too. But like, but still it was like,

that's the moment it happened. I was like, we're not doing right by cancer patients. And then it trickled down and it said, we're not doing right in general, this whole system, the paradigm, the tools, the well-meaning doctors out there who are going, I'm going to med school and I really want to help people heal. And then they realized throughout med school, holy shit, my tool belt is not for healing. You don't know how many conventional doctors who are now in functional medicine go, I was so, at my third year, I was like, what am I doing? I'm not helping people, you know, and thank God for things like Instagram and the connection of like the rise of functional medicine and naturopathic medicine for bringing awareness to people that like, well, we're not preventing care.

We're not asking about environment. We're not asking enough about stress. We're certainly not talking about enough food. I mean, I met, I met two doctors the other day and one of them was going to me. They were on my podcast. One of them goes, you know, we had two hours of nutrition in four years of med school. That's grossly less than the average, 23.9 hours. But still, that's the average 23.9 hours.

That's not even a day. It's not even a day of nutrition in medical school. Nutrition, the fundamental for your health. It's fundamental for physical health. So you see the disconnect. Why? You ask, most of these books are written by pharmaceutical companies. So the driving force in medical school is for you algorithmically to find out with disease and diagnosis,

what is the medication that you can give. That's it. That is the driving force in medicine. So if the driving force is medicine is a sick care model, what the fuck are we doing? Yeah. What are we doing as doctors? What are we doing as a society going, I'll settle for this because there's nothing else? What are we doing when we have Hashimoto's but not asking why do we have autoimmune disease, right?

What are we doing? That's the problem in health care. And that's why I went into naturopetic medicine. You know, I took my DATs. I studied with people taking the MCATs. We all studied together. took the same courses. I could have taken the MCAT and I could have done well in that, just like I did on the DAT. That's a dental exam. It's the same test minus one thing.

And I chose not to because I didn't want to. I said I'm not going into this. I'm going into something that is coming for the people. And that's what happened. So powerful. For everyone that's tuning in, I'm sure everybody's had their own experiences with the medical system and the system's in place. And it's not, you know, have compassion for the people that are in them that mean well, that their hearts bringing them to be of service, right? And it's just a system, like you said, the pharmaceutical companies are writing the books that inform how to heal each other, how to heal us, working with symptoms and not preventative measures. So I think it's something that needs to be talked about more.

And I think with the advent of social media and how interconnected we are, like you said, it's coming to lay. A lot of people are waking up to it. They're seeing the hypocrisy with even just the things that have happened with COVID, and people pushing different medications and various different things. It's truly mind-boggling. Yeah. And mind you, like there is an absolute place.

I will not argue for medications. They will save lives. And this is not what I'm trying to say. And I think I made it pretty clear. And medications will help. But you can take a medication. Meditation. You need meditation too.

You can take a medication, but you have to ask yourself, is this to be all end all? why aren't we getting to the root of the why? Because there's a lot of medications that are given to you like candy that are not addressing the root cause. And there are herbs that do the same exact thing, if not better. There are agents that do the same thing, if not better, vitamins, minerals, right? Orthomolecular or just all of these products that are out there for us that we can do for ourselves and food. But really, it's deeper than that. It's like, what about all the things we talked about on the physical level.

First of all, are you doing those. And if you aren't a medication, you have to be doing those. So then the goal being, the best doctors out there are the ones who give the medication, or not give the medication, but the best doctors who give the medication,

they go, okay, now here's a plan to get you off of this. That's the best way a doctor should be practicing. Here's the plan. I'm giving you medication. Here's the plan in three months from now for you to not use this anymore. Ask yourself if your doctor has done that to you.

if you've been on medication for a long time, ask yourself, what is your doctor not addressing? Because they're certainly not addressing something. Yeah. It's so important. I think you touched on it great. And it is important to give the credit to how the system does certain things, right? But you see so many stories where it's two minutes in, prescription, you're out, take this drug, just take it forever. You'll be fine.

You won't be fine. You're going to have a lot of other issues that come up. And like I said, for acute injuries, very important. I cut my hand a few weeks ago, had to go to urgent care, got eight stitches. is great. So thankful for that system, for chronic conditions, for long-term health. It ain't it chief. It ain't it chief. Absolutely. All right. As you go, like the physical is super important. Just equally as important is the mental, spiritual, physical, emotional side of things. Because you can do, quote-unquote, all the things right. You can go on the walks. You can eat the right healthy food. You can get

sauna cold plunge. You can get the right light exposure. Yet there are many different psychosomatic elements to becoming a healthy individual, to healing yourself. We have, there's many, we could literally do an eight-hour podcast on each of these different topics, but just touch on a few in terms of the mental, emotional side of things. The subconscious programs that we hold in life that keep us in our in authentic self, playing as a secondhand version of somebody else. We're walking around as in somebody else's ideas of who we think we should be, from our family to societal conditioning.

And you can get all of the physical health things right. But if you do that and don't look at your mind, you're going to become the best version of a small, limited version of who you could be. And so it's really important to take a look at, and there are many different modalities from various types of therapy, to taking in content, to emotional release, to the rise of psychedelic medicine,

to gain insight into awareness of what are these different programs and stories that we hold within ourselves that are keeping us stuck. So you've been on an amazing journey recently going on to Portugal to learn emotional release. And so let's touch on this. This is a big umbrella of information that we can cover as well, but it's so vitally important. Yeah. And this is us going deeper, right? And we can do all the physical things if we're carrying around these repressed emotions, which we've been holding in since childhood, then what are we doing for our true health, right? Because a lot of us will never feel good in our bodies if we're just eating well and working out and doing saw and cold plunge, but holding in grief or anger or shame, guilt, right? And we know when we feel it.

it's the same feeling as like you putting on a shoe and it fits, but there's like a tiny little pebble in there, you know, and you're like, oh, you know, I could walk, but it's just uncomfortable. What about when you're walking from miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and all of a sudden your foot starts blistering? It's the same feeling. And we all know it whether or not we do subconsciously

or consciously bring energy to it. We subconscious are holding in those deep emotions. So the question is like, okay, like how do we get in touch with those? and a lot of us experience what we call those superficial emotions. I call them Wednesday afternoon emotions, right? Like we are comfortable with the emotions that we deem lovable. I can get like fired up and I can get angry. I can even cry a little more uncomfortable, but it's lovable to me, right?

Society accepts it. It's okay. I've convinced myself that a man can cry. When I was younger, I didn't. But I have my emotional set that I'm comfortable with. Then I have these protectors that often show up to protect me from the emotions that are deeper, the emotions which I haven't shown in 25, 30 years, the emotions that parents, teachers, society, partners, and myself have deemed unlovable.

If you show this emotion, you won't be accepted by society. You won't be accepted by your parents. You won't be accepted in this relationship. And you certainly won't be accepted by yourself. And those are the emotions that are driving our experience, our human experience. Why? We know how to heal from a cut, right? We don't. don't even really think much. We just expect our cut. We expect your cut on your finger to heal. And it did. But it's not like every day you're like, oh, there's my platelets at play. There's the matrix being built. There's the scabbit. I feel it being, you know, we just expect it. Right. And that's the intelligence of the system. So too does our body know how to heal intelligently from emotional wounds.

But we don't know or understand the mechanism. We don't provide the space for it. And we don't provide the space for it. But what happens is this. our body wants to heal from those emotional wounds and does so, but it doesn't do it by a scab. It does so by attracting the people, the places, the things, the situations, circumstances that are triggering you

to re-experience those unlovable parts of you. And sometimes, oftentimes, through life, they build more dramatically, more emotionally charged, stronger to the point where you're like, I'm in a relationship again, and it's really triggering this part of me, so too you get so mostly charged that they surpass those protective mechanisms

and you authentically feel those unlovable emotions and express them. This is why oftentimes people will be like pretty happy and like people pleasing and like looking good and being like, okay, everything's fine, everything's going to be fine. And you feel like they're going to burst. That's because their deeply unlovable emotions are pushing against their protectors. And when you see that person burst, sometimes it's disproportionate. You're like, it's just a flat tire. What's happening?

It's because they've surpassed those protective mechanisms. That is how the body is allowing you to heal emotions. Unfortunately, what happens is right when they're about to come out and surpass those protectors or protectors go, no, I got you. No, no, no. Come back online. I got you. Take care.

Don't worry about it. And we swallow it. And we go through life, swallowing the expression of those unlovable emotions to the point where we can't do it anymore. We know this because we keep attracting the same people, the same people that trigger us. we keep attracting the same situations over and over that trigger us. The more you are emotionally free from those repressed unlovable emotions, the more that you know you've integrated those parts of you that are unlovable.

And the more you see your life being less triggered. You're going to stop attracting the shitty boyfriend. You stop attracting the boss who really talks down at you and now respects you because you've changed your energy. Because what happens is when we express those emotions, our frequency changes. And then we start attracting new people. new places, new things, new situations. We'll still have some other emotions that we're holding in.

But guess what? That big one that runs through us starts attracting new experiences because we've healed that emotional wound. The scab has turned into new skin. That is the mechanism of what happens in our emotional lives, which we are completely blind to and no one's talking about. Ooh. Good stuff.

That was powerful, man. I think intellectually a lot of people can say that they know this, right? I love, you know, we have these big tea little tea traumas that we operate that happened in our life in terms of relationship dynamics they can show up in many of different ways you attract them you become a vibratory match to these experiences repeatedly coming in and you can either work out a thousand things with one person in a relationship or you can work out one thing with a thousand people in relationships meaning uh this relationship didn't work out and some just naturally that kind of contract ends and it's time to move on but

if you have like a shadow material that you're not willing to look at you from relationship to relationship from experience to experience you're going to see it in different ways and it's going to keep coming until you reconcile the deeper seated emotion that you haven't fully felt Joseph Campbell says blisses any emotion fully felt and so what has been your experience now working with people and doing sessions to help people really tap into this primal essence that we've put under the rug this these emotions that we're afraid to feel a few and that don't feel unlovable. It's been incredible to see the importance of co-regulation.

It's more difficult to do things like this by yourself. Trauma's happen with other people. They don't oftentimes happen when you're walking as a kid and go, I feel traumatized by my own thoughts, right? Your own thoughts come and they go. But usually it's when someone does something to you, quote, unquote. So it stands to belief the healing needs co-regulation. you need to feel safe around another.

And that's why the practice we did together allowed space for safety. Yeah. To heal the trauma, to allow you to feel that bliss of anything that needs to be felt. You need safety first. And what I mean by safety is like, I feel safe not only in my own body to allow that subconscious emotion. And subconscious, not in the brain, subconscious is your body. What you attract is through frequency. And that's coming through your subconscious emotions to allow.

those emotions to come up. And also, we're doing that with another. There's someone right behind me right next to me who's like safe. I can feel safe. It doesn't matter if it's me. Right. It is me there. But your vision of me could be your dad. Your vision of me could be your mom. Your vision to me could be just completely forgetting I'm there. But you know that there's another energy near you that allows you to feel safe in another's energy, which is opening the space for your body to feel. when we're in the safety place, that true place of true safety through the techniques that we did together, it opens a space for you to feel emotions and or see visions, which you did, that are talking to you as your subconscious, as your body. Right? So in your visions, you had particular things happen. That's exactly what your body wanted to communicate with you.

And it allowed you to experience some emotions that your body wanted to experience through visualization. that's the gift of the practice that we're doing. So what I've seen in people is a few major themes. More people are more angry than we know. Almost every person has some anger. And it won't maybe come out overtly as angle, but it could be a behavioral compensation as being the nice guy, but there's a deeper anger that you have felt.

So doing this practice, I've been able to feel people the moment they come through the door of what they're holding. I've done enough where I'm like, ah, that's anger. Yeah. That's your compensation. to be like super pleasant.

Right. That shout out to super pleasant people. Some people are authentically super pleasant. Most people I'm seeing super pleasant is a compensation mechanism for I'm just fucking angry. Yeah. Right. So these people, they're coming, they're laying down. And all of a sudden I'm like, where that pleasant person go?

Because now it's activated. And that true deep, unlovable emotion, which they deemed anger. And some of us deem anger lovable. And they just can show anger and shout out to those people. But this particular person I'm thinking of was like, there it is. Yeah. There it is in the stomach. There it is in the liver.

I can feel the tension in the liver when I push. Like I can feel the fascia holding it in right there in the liver. And then when it's expressed, you feel the liver again and it's like jelly. Yeah. That's crazy. That's crazy that you can feel the change in the body when the emotion is expressed. The other thing that I see is a voice. Most people almost, I would say at this point probably eight out of ten people

have so much trouble hearing them. themselves. And because a big part of the work that we do, and I do with this, is allowing yourself to breathe, hearing. Some people don't even allow themselves to go, ah, you'll hear, uh, or, right? And you certainly won't hear the expression of an emotion as ah, or, or, like, anything. They're just so uncomfortable with this bottleneck that is their throat. Yeah. And you, just in the way that you like express that shallow exhale. When we see a dog or an animal go through a traumatic experience, you see them viscerally shake it off. But for us, whatever the programming that we have, we stuff it down and just let it stack. Like put it under the rug, put it in the corner in that

closet where we can't see it and just pretend like it doesn't exist. But you allowing creating a space where people can really just be and allow what needs to come up to come up and to listen, so much healing comes from that. Yeah. And that's the thing. It is exactly what your body needs to express in that moment in time. So for some people, a lot of people, they're not ready to get in that unlovable emotion. And we just go through the Wednesday superficial emotions. They cry. They'll sob some more. They'll get a little angry. And then they're done for the session. I go, okay, we did it. Now you need to come back for another because oftentimes what happens after those, their protectors come in. You don't know how many people I've seen, especially women, because I see a lot of

women come in, they're hyperventilating. And I'm like, oh, there it is. It's coming. The process is happening in the body and then they'll take a deep breath and then they'll stop. They'll stop the hyperventilation and stop the crying and then to them they're like okay now I've gotten through this but in reality what happened is the protector goes I got you you're not safe to express even though we've created so much safety in the body see how deep this habit of protecting yourself happens where they go I got you and they stop the hyperventilating but I've but the people who do allow that process to happen Holy shit. When that process reaches their throat and they start expressing with sound, the house shakes.

But they come out of it. You even see they engage with you differently. Their eyes engage with you differently. Their nerves in their face are so much more relaxed. Their face is more relaxed. They feel like a new person. Why? Because they completely, they completed their re-meeting of themselves as that emotion.

It's like, this is what I say. It's like there's a piece of me stuck by a string to my stomach. And it's in this closet, right? And I'm walking around my house for 38 years and doing washing the dishes, watching stranger things on Netflix, eating my food, having housewarming parties, living life. But there's this closet I passed by and I'm like, oh, what is it in there? I forgot about this closet and I hear a noise, right?

And oftentimes it'll start like a knocking really hard. And I'll be like, oh, and something's coming. Let me just put on the mute button over the closet. I can't hear it anymore. But we don't ever pay attention to that string connecting us to that thing in the closet. What this practice does is create safety and space. So not only do you see that there's a closet there, you're brave enough to open it. And your protectors that are coming in and stopping you from opening it, move, move away. And then you open the closet and then you literally see that in that closet was just an unlovable version of you. and you look at each other in the eyes and go, holy shit, you're anger.

You're me as angry. And I'm remitting you and it's okay. I love you. And wait, what's this string? We've always been connected. I've always felt not whole, but now I feel whole. And it's because we in society have deemed only positive emotions and just maybe crying or angry some negative ones we deem negative to be showable.

That's it. And everything else, like I am helpless. Like how many people have you heard on the floor to their knees feeling I'm helpless? I don't know what to do. I just don't know. I feel helpless. How many people have you heard say, I feel shame. I feel really shameful that I thought about that.

How many people have you really felt grief from the pits of their stomach from the bowels of hell grief? No one really goes there, right? Why? Because those are unlovable emotions, unfortunately for most of society. And imagine remitting those emotions. And you go, wait, I can be all of that. And guess what that is? That's unconditional love.

Unconditional love is a container for all the positive and the negative emotions that you deem lovable and unlovable and being able to authentically express them for yourself and allowing people, this is how you love another, allowing people to express those things within themselves. That is how you love someone. So powerful. The visual I get is unless we shed awareness on these parts of herself, there is an element where it feels energetically parasitical. It's almost like you have a leach on yourself that's sucking energy from you. Life force energy is being drained without you even knowing it. After a certain amount of time, you don't even notice that a leach is there. Until you pull it off, it's painful at first when you rip it off.

But then you have so much more energy when you have a leak that is now filled or a hole in the bucket that's been patched. Right. Exactly. That is the best way to put it because the girl who came in and said, I don't cry, haven't cried in 20 years. This is what she said to me. Young girl. I was like, how old are you? You know?

She's like, oh, I'm 30. I was like, okay, you haven't cried to you with 10. I was like, could it be the story is it's not, I don't cry. It's I don't cry because I don't want to feel the emotions that are under those tears. Right. Literally, in an hour, she cried like a mom who just found her child dead. Wow. Like, this wasn't like crying.

This was like 1991 tears that are ripping through her. Yeah. But when she sat up, she didn't even say a word. She looked like a more complete version of herself. because it was, well, all I felt in her energy and her face was acceptance. Like, I cry. I am sad, right? I am angry.

And allowing that to be a part of you is the most beautiful thing because that's the energy that you're kind of reconnecting with. You don't have to hold down that proverbial beach ball underwater anymore. You're like, fuck this. I'm angry. But guess what? I'm also joyous and happy and loving. I'm actually really in grief.

I'm actually really helpless. I am helpless. But I am motherfucking loving and joyous too and peaceful. See what I'm saying? Like the polarity is you with you. You're not just the positive. That's the beauty in this type of work. And it's powerful.

And it's something that we need to do because especially in various spiritual communities where it's good vibes only. It's all love and light. No, homie. You got a lot of repressed shadow material that you need to work here if you want to actually embody that.

Yeah. vibes is the shadows and darkness too. Bad vibes only too. Yeah. Right? Like all of the vibes always. All of the vibes always. Oh man. So powerful. So powerful. Thank you for bringing a holistic understanding to what it means to heal thyself. Because so many people that are doing the good work, maybe go narrow vision on just one. And when you can have a holistic understanding of the mental, physical, spiritual elements of how it all contributes to being a healthy individual. you become somebody that's immensely capable to actually helping people physically get results and change in real time. So I love the session that we did in preparation a few days ago.

I came in for an emotional release session and it was beautiful. I had a deep vision of myself as an elder like 70 years old and then also a younger version of myself as a kid and I got to like talk with them. And just having that space be held is so much of what it's like 90% of the workers just showing up, taking that pause energetically. take some deep breaths and then utilizing breathwork, visualization, some touch therapy, somatic work. You can really move through some beautiful stuff. Yeah. And that's the power of it. For me, it's like there are so many somatic releases out there. And breathwork is amazing.

During breathwork, we cry, right? We just sometimes even get angry. But to get deeper than breathwork, you have to be able to witness yourself. right that's the power of this exercise what we did was you witnessing yourself as blank over and over and over and over and over through the whole exercise and the more you witness yourself as blank the more you tell the body it's safe to be that and the more you're safe to be that the more you reconcile and reconnect with that version of you that's the key it's it's powerful and then you all of a sudden you walk and you live your life how you have been as you become more

sensitive, you can then pick up on within other people, somebody that's showing up that really needs validation and they're showing it in some way. And they're not being themselves. And then you start to distance yourself. Maybe you isolate yourself a little bit more and you recalibrate like, no, actually, I want to be around different types of people that are tapping into who they truly are. And you become a vibratory match to a different life completely. A lot of people who have trouble when they go through these processes of health and healing myself is that they're like, oh, you know, friends back from town. I don't feel good around them anymore. This really even harder is like this partner of mine. Like I mean with her or him for so long, it just doesn't feel right anymore.

You know, sometimes as you move through yourself, you need to let go, right? To allow space to invite. And that's the power of it, right? It's like, that's you. That's your journey in life. The more you are authentically you, not only the more you do you feel that you can bring in more people particularly you, the more you see the people in your life, we're like, doesn't align with me anymore. Yeah. And that's actually where I wanted to go next, because on the other side of moving through a lot of these things, these emotions that we feel unlovable, you start to get more of you online. We all have our own unique fingerprint version of our soul's expression, right? Whatever that looks like. And I've been able to witness you just by proximity and being friends

over the past couple of years, you unlocking more of your authentic voice and your authentic expression. It feels good to physically express yourself vocally, fashion-wise, all the different elements. And then you get to really play in this human dimension. It gets to be a fun game instead of showing up in a way that you think you should. We should all over ourselves. And so what has been your journey finding your own authentic voice expression? What does that look like? Holy moly. Most of my life was in fear. Fear was the overarching actually released from me when I had my emotional release. Fear of everything. Fear of being me. Fear of my dad. Fear of expressing myself as a man. Fear of stepping up and speaking my truth. Fear was like the emotion that needed to be perched.

That's why I believe in this work because I did it. I felt it. And because fear was the overarching emotion that was held in for me, most of my spiritual experience was not letting in who I am. right and most of it was like well who am i and it was a lot of the answers were based on who what society made me right like very superficial like i am this guy and i'm living from this town and i'm a doctor and i'm all these things and it's like no but who am i right and i started becoming more alive within myself through community and and actually seeing through the mirroring of where I am in my life, the authenticity of the people that I was bringing in, right? Someone like you, in your authenticity, man, you're just like, here's how it's unfolding for me.

I'm going to do it on my time, how it is, and I'm going to express how I want. I'm going to address how I want, right? You can feel people who are real. And I started attracting people who are real. I'm like, therefore, I don't feel fully me, but I must have a realness to me. So then I started seeing how people were expressing themselves. I go, this friend, wow, they're really into their fashion vibe. Whoa, whoa, this friend's really creative with music.

I have some musical thing in me. I don't know, maybe it's just dancing. And I started being sparked by relativity. And that's the beauty of this physical experience is relativity. We get to see that which we are and that which we are not, not only inherently, but also what we want to create and not create. And I started creating myself based on what I felt. And much like a machine trying, like remembering like, oh, I am like learning

about itself through others and through experience, I started really feeling into like what is authentic for me. And I was like, you know what? Why do I wear black and gray and brown and even earth tones? Like, why do I wear? I'm wearing earth tone pants right now. But like I looked at my closet and it's funny because I had a mushroom experience and it was literally saying the same thing that I was feeling.

It was like it brought me to my closet and I was looking around and I purge all of the things fashion-wise that didn't resonate with me. I have some pieces that I'll wear like sometimes during the week, but really when I'm out and expressing, holy shit, like these are the clothes that are me. Yeah. They bring me life, right? Like I've always loved shiny, glitter, sparkle, king, royalty. Like as a kid, I always love like capes and robes. I was like, why as a 38-year-old man it's finally like giving myself permission to wear this? But now I do. And guess what? I feel authentic in that. And then I said to myself, you know, I really love like acting and poetry and writing and performing.

Why was I always scared to act? Well, I remember in high school, I wanted to go into drama. And I remember someone saying a comment that it was just for homosexuals. And I instead went into football. And I played athletics instead. But I remember something like, it was like a bunch around the like my guy friends. So like, oh, you want to do that. You know?

And I was like, oh, shit. Okay. Whoa. Guess that's not safe in the tribe. I won't be accepted by the tribe who was my friends in school. So instead I played football with them. I played basketball. I played lacrosse.

All the things that like, and I wasn't even that good at athletics. Like that was just something I did versus something that I wanted to do. And what I wanted to do was perform. So then I started seeing others around me who were not scared to perform. I started seeing people who were using their voice. And I'm like, wait, that person's not that good of a singer, but they don't give a fuck. What's happening here? I was like, wow, that person's really talented at writing.

and I started attracting, so then I gave myself permission, and then I started blooming into my performance art. So again, it's like, for me, it was through community. For me, it was through relativity that allowed me to see that which I wanted to create within my life. I knew that, like, inherently I was sensitive and I wanted to heal the world and heal people. That's deepened me. I already had my sense of purpose. Now it was like, how do I want to play in this world as this avatar that is Christian, Dr. G,

you know, whatever else you want to call me like, that? That was the most important part. And that made me feel so much better authentically. Because now I do things unapologetically. Like, except sing. I'm working on the singing part. I know I sound like two drunken alley cats on a Wednesday in a back alley. And you're just like, shut up.

I'm trying to go to sleep. And you know, but like I'm really trying to, and I have a voice lessons next month because I know the importance of what singing means to me. Yeah. Even though I ain't that good. My girlfriend can sing, but I'm not that good. But still, like that's. important for expression for me and I'm going to do it. However I sound. I love it. See what I mean?

Absolutely. I think the whole journey of healing thyself and knowing thyself why we said in the beginning it's one and the same. That's really why we're here. We're here to remember our true essence, our liberated nature and how that shows up and why we're attracted to people that are authentically themselves. You see them on big stages performing or whatever it is or maybe just somebody you know in your life in your school or wherever you go to work. We are attracted to authenticity because it is a rare gem in today's day and age. Everybody for the most part that we're walking around like we talked about is not they're coming across and they're operating as somebody that they're not. And so to raise your energies enough to shed awareness to become healthy, vital and find your authentic voice and

expression, whatever that looks like, could look like freestyling. It could look like singing, playing music, painting, poetry, the clothes that you wear, even the way that you take in information. there's so many different avenues to shed light on. And then you become a magnet. People become attracted to you. And you attract people that are authentically themselves. And this is, you know, with this whole thing, we've been blending into like the spiritual side of things.

But then you start to attract community and tribe that are matched to you energetically. And these are things that maybe not as much as the physical of what we touched on are quote unquote quantifiable, saying, hey, you eat more blueberries. you'll get, you know, more XYZ, nutrients, vitamins, minerals. But the felt experience is still very much there. I just, I can't put into words how much community has brought into my life. I can't say that it's filled this one bucket, you know, but I know how important it is for me and how good it feels. We are hardwired to belong and to be in tribe and to have authentic connections.

And when we're starving that part of ourselves, we are going to feel starved. Plain and simple. And so how important has community been to you? It's been everything, man. It's a pillar of health. I'm writing a book. It's coming out end of the next year. And one of the pillars is community.

One of the pillars is social connection. And we're hardwired for it. It actually is the reason why we can feel safe, right? We feel safe. That's why through this emotional release, it's co-regulation. We feel safe with people. We need to feel safe with people first and foremost. If we want to digest our food, we got to feel,

connected to the food, look around, feel safe in the environment. But most of all, we have to feel safe around people. If we're out to eat and we can connect with our food and actually like tune in with the people around us, we have to feel safe with everyone else around us too. Look who's that stranger walking in? Oh my God. No, that person looks suspicious. Okay, I feel safe with you though.

No, we have to feel safe all around as a community. If we look at the meta part of healing, it's like communal and then global. And all are just integral layers. of us. It's all the same. It's just like saying like cells, organs, right, systems. It's all the same. It also spirals upwards and goes community globe. They're just, they're just holographic versions of the same thing, you know? So it stands to believe the more we heal ourselves, the more we heal our community, the more we heal the globe. Yeah. But we need to heal ourselves first. And that's why the authenticity piece is the fountainhead of healing.

It is to authentically be us, we have to become aware of our subconscious emotions what's holding us back. Right. And to reconcile those emotions, you allow space to express yourself more truly. To express yourself more truly, you need to embody who you are.

Who the hell are you? Well, your anger, your happiness, your peace, your shame, your shame, your helplessness, your envy, your everything. The more we allow that bliss of what you said, the quote of who we are, the more we can step to authentically embodying that. And the more we authentically embody that,

the more we are unconditional love. The more we are unconditional love, the more we're walking around earth reminding people of who they are. And the more we're doing that, the more we start healing our community and our globe. That is our God-given right to embody who we are. That's why we're here.

otherwise we'd be in the spiritual realm and I'd be floating to you and be like hey Andre I'm love and you're like I'm love and then we're just love no we're here to embody who we are in the physical form through relativity going I am not that therefore I am this and reminding others authentically through authenticity of who they are and they go I'm triggered by Andre being so grounded and peaceful all the time man why is he's just not like more emotional and yelling all the time well because I'm And Andre has done work and grounded himself and found peace and patience and, you know, the love for himself. Oh, maybe I'm not triggered. Maybe I just see myself in Andre. Maybe Andre is reminding me of that which I need to integrate into myself, right, to really embody who I am. So I can start reminding others back home in Nebraska who they are, right? This is what we're here to do to embody with our own special gifts, you know? Your propensity for groundedness is more than mine.

I'm a little bit more kooky and all over the place, right? but we have propensity for gifts of how we show up and what are really strong attractive points are. And that's what we're here to do, man. And it's like, if I can be here and inspire people through words, through that being my gift of how I put words together and how I flow with words and rapping and maybe performing, you know, and it triggers someone go, I am triggered by Christian wearing a kimono and a crazy hat. And what colors is that? Is he even straight? Is he gay? What's going on? like, or just being like, I'm fucking attracted to this thing. Whatever he's doing here, I want more of that, right? Through my gifts, I'm attracting certain people through your gifts.

You're attracting certain people. But Jesus Christ, what we're here to do is just be that love that we are. It's it. The whole expanse of who we are. Imagine the world embodying who they are without any apology, where we would be. Right? I'm a writer. I like to build gyms.

I like to dance. I like to sing. imagine the world where people were just being themselves. Jesus, like stop doing and just being who they are. World would be different in the snap of the finger. It's so beautiful, beautifully put man. I think that we're getting close to. We've been going for, I don't know how long.

It's been great. Also, another thing that I just want to touch on is, like, how important it is to find what that is for you, finding your purpose and finding your mission in life, to, like, draw you out of bed in morning and have something that you're excited about. because spiritually you are going to feel just caged in and suffocated if you're not waking up and being able to go into something that you're excited for. Now, this is a big topic and it's important to have compassion and patience for ourselves on our path, right?

There's been many times in my life where I've been lost. I didn't know what I wanted to create. I didn't know I wanted to start a podcast called Know Theyself and have these conversations at a deeper level. I felt the essence of seeking and curiosity that was always there. But there were many times where I was doing things and affiliated with people and doing businesses that were not in my highest excitement. They were not truly what I felt like the world needs and I wasn't utilizing my skill sets. It's so important. And I love the Japanese term.

Most people have kind of probably heard by now as Icky Guy, which is the four kind of contributing factors to really finding your purpose and your true higher calling in life, which is can you find something that you're good at, that you enjoy doing, that the world needs and that you can get paid for. And if you can find something that in that kind of Venn diagram, a crossover has all those different elements, you're going to be able to show up in the world fully alive. We need more people that are just fully alive in what they're doing in the way that you're speaking to. So it's a process. It's a journey. It's important to have patience.

And to inquire, self-inquiry, finding silence, get into a quiet place as much as you can to see what are the things that I really like? Maybe you just haven't tried enough things. But once you start going on this journey, you start discovering more parts of yourself. and then you get to share yourself so much in my journey of finding myself has now been in the sharing of myself. Coming onto this podcast, coming on to more forms of expression, I'm discovering. Like, hey, I really love this. I really like doing this.

I'm going to keep on pulling that thread more and more. And then you get closer into this place of that center of the icky guy where you're like, wow, I'm living my purpose. And to be able to say that, to mean it and to feel that piece within yourself is one of the most rewarding parts that you can get to on your journey. Exactly, man. And then once you hit that, you know, you feel like the feel good guy, not the icky guy, right? Like you're just like, I hit it, right? It's like, and I would say this is like, if you have something you're good at and you enjoy doing and the world needs and you can get paid for, maybe if you have a well-established job and you don't want to leave, create a hobby. At least do a hobby that is in a line with that. Right? Let's say, let's say I'm a banker or like I'm really high up and, you know, Morgan Stanley or something, right? And I do really well. And I'm actually good with numbers. Like I enjoy it. You know, it's not like what I'm here to do. But I know that like I weave baskets like a motherfucker. Like I kill it. Like I've been weaving baskets. I was little. My grandma taught me, you know, like, and it brings me so much joy. Well, we're on these baskets. I just moved into a place. I need something to store this, this and this. Right. Can you create? Can you create? create a hobby. Can you maybe on a Friday, leave work earlier on the weekends, just make a basket a month or something. Start bringing more purpose to your life because that is the fuel of your life force, right? Like you're able to create what you're here to do. Oh yeah. And share it with others.

Oh yeah. And get compensated or in however way you want to. That's a gift. Yeah. And the compensation, that'll kind of just take care of itself. Whatever you find mastery in. I remember I was in Nigeria and I actually met somebody, I saw somebody that was a master basket weaver. Bro, I knew it. There's someone out there. There is someone out there. It was mesmerizing, seeing him weed these baskets and how quick he could do it and how beautiful they were. And there's utility in that for the world, whatever it is, whether it's something like basket weaving or public speaking.

There's a way in which the world will reward you financially, monetarily, for just being in your zone of genius. I didn't think, let me tell you something. I came out of school. I was going to work. I was going to open a practice, have a brick and mortar practice, see patients all my life. That was,

I knew I went to help people. And helping people was, that's it. That was fine. When I was doing that, through time, I found myself getting more and more exhausted. And going,

at one point, like, I remember the phone rang and they said, I heard my voice like, oh, with Dr. Gonzalez? And I go, fuck,

another patient. And I go, the moment I didn't want any more patients, there was a big problem. Yeah. But that's because at the same time I was coming into my own with performing and my voice and my words and talking.

My mom was still live and she was hearing this podcast. She'd be like Christian did not stop talking. From the moment I came home until he went to sleep, he just told stories and went and went and went and went, right? And it brings me life to share and to put into words, probably why his podcast is long because I can't stop talking. But really, the thing is this, I knew that my gift was not wanting to help the world.

That was something that was part of my passion. It was mission. It was mission. But my gift that I was given in this world, people were like, you know, you're so good on the fly. And you're like in class, like when you didn't know the answer, you would just bullshit your way out of it, right?

Or like you always had, you're so quick, you know, that I could rap, I could freestyle. And then when I started doing like some small performances in college, they'd be like, that was really good. I was like, I'm supposed to be in front of the camera. Like I would jump at doing the talks in residency. I'd be like, no, I'll do the talk. They're like, are you sure in front of all the docs?

I said, yeah, me, me, me, I'll do it. And I loved it. So then that's when I was like, I need to be in front of a camera. But I'm a doctor. I can't. I can't have camera. And then opportunity starts sprouting up. And then the fear of like, how am I going to make money doing this?

How am I going to make money being in front of camera? Because this is a time when there was like some podcasts or some content coming out with it. Like, it wasn't like how it is. And then like you said, it just fell into place. And now for me, I think like triple of what I would make as a doctor. That's crazy. That's crazy. And all I'm doing is something that is easy for me.

That's our opportunity to make more money than you can ever think of that you can be making because you are in your zone of genius, sharing it with the world with purpose and service. That's the key. You have to be serving others and your gifts. And the irony is that we all have gifts that serve others. We all have gifts that serve the world. The question is, what is your gift? And it's probably the thing that people have told you throughout your life.

And you're like, what? That's just like regular, easy for me. But it's not easy for everyone else. And that's the gift. Yeah. And it's powerful to also ask the people in your life. That's a good measuring stick. Ask the 10 or five most people that are closest to you that know you the most in life

and ask them, hey, what do I do better than anybody you know? What do you feel like is my unique gift? Get those reflections. And then you start to pull in that string. Whatever is meant for you in life, you can't force. It's just, it's there. And you have to get whatever is in the way of that out of the way. And then you start to have your gifts come online.

And then opportunities start to open where you can turn what your gifts are into a passion or creation for the world. And it can be an offering. And it doesn't have to overtly be philanthropic work. It could be singing and how inherently inspirational that is and the lyrics that you use. it can look so many things. It doesn't have to be like being in a soup kitchen. Whatever your gifts are, finding a way to be of service with that is going to have much more utility than you may be physically doing manual labor for somebody in a village. So finding whatever that is is huge for finding yourself on your spiritual journey and the level of vibrancy that you have.

And share it because it's your gift. It's like people are going to accept it and not accept it. But it's your gift. to. Right? And that's, it's, it's, it's, it's our right. Like, we have to share that. Like, this is what, if we're coming to this world and we have a gift, what a travesty and tragedy would be to die, not ever once in your life sharing that gift with one person, right? Much less the world. But imagine how you feel and the power of what you do to the world when you share that gift with every single person, unapologetically, be like, hey, this is how I sing, hear me sing. This is

how I act. Oh, this is how I basket weave and this is how I make sequins on a kimono. Whatever it is, please just share it with the world. We need you. All right. This podcast has been very profound. I didn't know. We went into a lot of depths and covered a lot of ground. And again, I just love the holistic understanding of the way that you've articulated a lot of things that just within myself gave me insight and made me think of things differently. So I'm sure a lot of people that are that are tuning into this feel that as well. We probably should do another podcast at a certain point because we can keep going, but I feel that we've covered a lot of ground, a lot of material for people to digest.

They could probably chunk this up into a couple of sittings. They could probably rewatch this and get something new every time for multiple listens and watches. So we covered a lot of the physical ground of what it means to be healthy, to move, to expose yourself to nature, to release the emotional ties that we have within ourselves. and to find a real spiritual calling and how all of them are really proper ingredients for us to blossom in life. If you give a plant, the right nutrients,

the right amount of sunlight, the right amount of water, it's going to blossom to its full potential. So you don't need to, you know, create all this unnecessary stress and anxiety saying, what is my purpose? I want to fulfill my potential. Just give yourself the right ingredients.

And we covered a lot of what those are today. Is there anything else that's on your heart that you would like to share today? Yeah, I don't know. What's coming up is just really take a moment to breathe. A lot of us are really running around and holding in our stomachs and just breathing from our chest. Just take a moment to breathe. We did it before the show and maybe putting in a practice where you can, you know, park at the meter before you go into a place.

Just go, okay, hold on, hold on. Two minutes, two minutes. Just breathing will completely. completely change your nervous system, anxiety, mood disorders, your connection to yourself, your connection to others. It is like the most accessible gift that we have is just to breathe. So make sure you're just breathing however it is. Just breathe into your stomach and let it out. You know, so much of the stuff we start holding on to. Easy stuff. I love that. I think that's probably the biggest thing that you could do to change your state in the moment. Take a deeper breath.

Take a longer breath. Hold on the inhale. Hold on the exhale. Hold on the exit. exhale, really reset your nervous system. Bro, thank you so much for coming on the show. First off, before we close out, just where can people find you? People, for sure, I'm sure, have been loving the information that they've been getting and can really feel who you are and how you're showing you up in the world. So where can people get more, Dr. G-L-G-E-E-E-L-E-Z? This is, heal thyself is the podcast, and the Instagram is at Dr. Dot Gonzalez,

G-O-N-Z at the end. Doctor spelled out. And, you know, I'm sometimes on the podcast circuit. sometimes I'm going under into my cave again. You know what I mean? But we have a book coming out next year. Pretty much on all these things, free interventions that get you back to your nature

with the fountain head being your authenticity and emotional expression. And we have a few. I mean, I'm seeing emotional release clients. Those are booked out. But you can look on my bio if you want to come. There's some small like appointment openings. But yeah, man,

it's a matter of like I'm open to how everything unfolds. I'd love to have a show, travel the world, experience things, but you taught me patience. So in due time, as things unfold, I'm happy exactly where I am, to be honest. I love that. Thank you guys. You've taught me many things. For everybody that's been listening today, just thank you. Thank you for going on your own journey, for honoring your path to heal thyself, to know thyself, the world desperately needs more people following this path. And so if you made it to the end of this podcast and you listen to the whole thing, congratulations. That's amazing. I would love to know if you did. And if you did, if you're watching this on YouTube, put in the comments below, reach out on socials. We'd love to see. There'll be

plenty of clips. We have a YouTube, a Know Thyself Clips channel where we chop all the, you know, this long form podcast into, you know, short, snackable pieces of 30, 60 second, five minute, 10 minute pieces of content where you can go and so check that out. Links are in the description as well as everything where you can find Dr. G will be linked below. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Until next time, be well. Blessings.