The Resilient Mind - Your Body Isn’t Broken - It’s Trying to Tell You Something | Dr. Kelly McCann

Episode Date: October 23, 2026

Dr. Kelly McCann is a triple board-certified physician in internal medicine, pediatrics, and integrative medicine, and the founder of The Spring Center in Costa Mesa, California. She has spent nearly three decades working with some of modern medicine’s most complex and misunderstood conditions, including mold toxicity, chronic infections, mast cell activation, and nervous-system dysregulation. Drawing on both rigorous clinical training and a master’s in spiritual psychology, her approach treats the mind, body, emotions, and spirit as inseparable rather than isolated parts. Her evolving life’s work, The Unforgetting Project, is a healing philosophy built on the premise that illness, at its deepest level, is the body asking us to come back to ourselves.Connect with Dr. Kelly McCann: 🌐 The Spring Center: https://www.thespringcenter.com 🌐 Personal site: https://www.drkellymccann.com 🌱 The Unforgetting Project: https://www.theunforgettingproject.com 📷 Instagram: @drkellymccannExplore tools from past guests of the podcast. Some links below are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you:💓 HeartMath: https://www.heartmath.com/resilient🧠 Muse: https://choosemuse.com/resilientmind🌿 Brain Ritual: https://www.brainritual.com/THERESILIENTMIND🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why does that matter and what happens if someone tries to go through a healing process while the nervous system is still activated? If the nervous system is stuck in a trauma response. Thinking in terms of the felt emotions, can you feel them by yourself or for depending on the individual they might need to have a container? A lot of people need a container because it's so foreign. What is the question you would ask them and what is the first practice you'll invite them into? In Western philosophy, we think that the mind is supreme, that the mind is us. What was that personal experience like and how did it change what you believed was possible in medicine? What if the symptoms your body has been producing, the fatigue, the brain fog, the pain,

the mystery conditions that no one can quite explain aren't evidence that something is broken? What if they're actually your body trying to tell you something important that you have, haven't been willing to hear yet. My guest today has spent nearly three decades at the frontier of some of the most complex, misunderstood, and frustrating modern conditions of modern medicine, including more toxicity, chronic infections, mass cell activation, nervous system dysregulation. And what she discovered goes far deeper than biology. Dr. Kelly is a triple-bodified physician in internal medicine, pediatrics, and integrative medicine. She's the founder of the Spring Center in Costa Mesa, California, a graduate of Tallinn Medical School, and she completed

her fellowship at the University of Arizona's Center for Integrative Medicine. She also holds a master's in spiritual psychology, and that combination of hard clinical science and deep inner work is exactly what makes their approach unlike anything else in a field. A evolving life's work, the Unforgetting Project, is a healing philosophy built on a radical premise, that the mind body, emotions, and spirit were never separate to begin with. And that illness at its deepest level is the body asking us to come back to ourselves. Dr. Kelly, welcome to the resilient mind. Thank you so much, Simba. I'm so happy to be here with you today. And I am excited to have you here. So the Spring Center came to life after you personally battled Lyme disease, mold exposure, and brain fog.

You weren't just studying these conditions from the outside. You lived them. What was that personal experience like and how did it change what you believed was possible in medicine? So I would actually say that the Spring Center came to life somewhere before I really got sick or in the middle of the journey somewhere because I have battled with a variety of different things throughout my life. Probably the worst one was immediately after residency, but I didn't know what was how. happening at the time. It was probably mold exposure in eastern Oregon, I'm sorry, Western Oregon. And then I moved on and recovered and then came back to California. And it was while I was in California that I, after I had opened the spring center, that I started becoming sick again

with more chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia type symptoms. And at that point, I had been studying environmental medicine, environmental toxicants, and how they impacted our health in a fellowship with a mentor of mine. And one of my colleagues said, hey, you know, there's this doctor, Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker, who's teaching people about mold. And if you have these certain genetics, which I think you do, mold might be an issue. And so I started learning about mold and started testing my patients, treating my patients for mold, applying what I was learning to myself to my patients, because I was never fortunately disabled to the point where I couldn't practice. So I continued to practice this entire time, even though I was having my own struggles with things. And then some of the

people didn't get better. And I realized, hmm, there's something else. I realized I needed to learn about Lyme disease. It turned out, you know, I grew up in upstate New York. I spent lots of time in the woods as a kid, I was a tomboy hiking and backpacking and rock climbing. And somewhere along the line, maybe at that time or from my mom who probably also had lime, maybe congenital lime, the lime popped up because the mold had suppressed my immune system. And so now I was learning about another possible root cause for people and working through my own issues, learning how to deal with mold multiple times. It's not just been one instance of mold. It's been multiple times with mold and lime and barternella. And then I started getting really sensitive to things.

I developed a lot of allergies and sensitivities. And this is where my awareness of mass cell activation came on the stage and was learning from Dr. Lawrence Afrin about mass cell activation. And so it was really this symbiotic dance that I was doing with my own patients that I would discover something in me, treat myself, find it in them, and then continue to have people show up at my door who were needing the next thing that I was discovering, oftentimes inside of myself. And you trained both in conventional medicine and simultaneously you've studied acupuncture, herbal medicine, meditation, energy work. Most physicians choose a lane. What did you realize in terms of expanding what you were studying that conventional medicine alone couldn't give you?

And when did you realize that those two walls needed to integrate? Probably from the very beginning because I've been walking in two lanes my entire life. I didn't know I wanted to be a physician when I was a little kid. I thought I wanted to be a singer. And yet I also had this really deep quest for understanding. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What is this all about? This drive for spirituality and quest for understanding. I remember reading stories about shaman who could walk on hot coals and not be burned. And I thought, I want to know about that. I need to understand that. That seems out of my world. It blew my mind, you know, completely. out of the realm of a possibility. And that and then this quest for knowledge and understanding on a more like scholarly level. I studied library science.

I wanted to understand the mind and the brain and how it worked and how it categorized information. And yet there was this deep spiritual desire for a quest for meaning. And they didn't overlap for a long time. So I had my like interest in herbals and spirituality and, you know, acupuncture. I had a meditation teacher before I applied to medical school. And I actually wanted to go to medical school. I'm sorry, actually wanted to go to acupuncture school.

It was eventually where I came to. And yet I was doing all these undergrad classes to go to medical school or, you know, do some sort of PhD program and neuroscience. And I had a conversation with my parents. said, we really think you should try and go to medical school. And I was like, but I want to go to acupuncture school. It's more holistic. I can really like help people, body, mind, energy, spirit, all that. And, and they convinced me, okay, I'll apply to medical schools, mom and dad. And if I get in, I'll go and if I don't. Then I'll get to go to acupuncture school and do what I want, right? I got into four medical schools and I was like, okay.

I got to go. So I did the conventional medical training at Tulane University in New Orleans. So I was always looking for, how do I do this spin a little bit differently? You know, New Orleans is just this amazing place of culture that doesn't feel like anywhere else in the United States. And they also had a school of public health. I found a massage school. I pursued healing touch. And so I took a couple massage therapy classes and some healing touch classes. I studied in public health.

We did a variety of different trainings in what at that time was like holistic health, alternative health. So I tried as much as I could to continue to blend these worlds with the other students who were equally interested. But it was always this dichotomy. at that point, conventional medicine versus these all alternative things, although that was never my heart. And so it really wasn't until I graduated from residency and was like, I'm done with the requirements. Now I can go be myself. Now I can go create the practice and learn all the things that I really want to learn. And that's when I really dove deeply into how to actually practice medical acupuncture, how to actually understand herbs and

supplements and I did the fellowship at the University of Arizona's program in integrative medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil. I was one of 35 people in the last residential class actually to train with him and all of the people that he had brought together in that program in Tucson. And then I started my own practice. I went out after that and started my own practice here in Costa Mesa. And you specialize in notoriously difficult diseases to diagnose and treat, so things again like more toxicity, chronic Lyme, mass cell activation, autoimmune diseases. And a lot of your patients often can be dismissed, misdiagnosed, or told that their symptoms are psychological. What is conventional medicine missing when they encounter these conditions? It's a really good question. I think,

I think it's the paradigm in which we're viewing the body as broken and dysfunctional, rather than recognizing that the body, mind, and spirit, and emotions. I really think that it's body, mind, emotions, and spirit are intertwined in such a way that we cannot separate them, but conventional medicine keeps wanting to separate them. And we see them as separate, and we see this, the, the organs and the systems is separate. I mean, this is how medicine is functioning right now, right? You have a problem with your heart. You go to the cardiologist. You have a problem with your bowels. You go to the gastroenterologist. You have a problem with your ovaries and uterus. You go to

the gynecologist. If you have a problem with the brain, you go to the neurologist. If you have a problem with your thoughts, you go to the psychiatrist. And nobody ever looks at the whole picture. That's the purview of the primary care doctor. But all they're doing, as busy writing referrals for all the body parts that are not not functioning, right? And you said something that I found interesting, because most of the us, we say mind, body, spirit, but you say mind, body, emotion, spirit. Can you explain a little bit more why the emotions part is important to also include in that triad? Thank you for asking me because this is the crux, right? In Western philosophy, we think that the mind is supreme.

that the mind is us. I think therefore I am. And the body is the vehicle for the mind. And the emotions cloud the rational mind. So if we think we are who we think, and the body is just a vehicle. And the emotions are kind of a pain in the neck, right? How do we get to spirit?

Like we can't ignore the body so much, but we often do. Actually, we completely do. And so we think that we can have this relationship between mind and spirit and just dismiss our bodies and dismiss our emotions. That is actually root cause of so much suffering because the body and the emotions that are contained in the body is the map of how we find ourselves. It is those two things together allow us. to eventually come home to our selves, to our authentic self, to discover our spirit. We can't get there from the mind.

There is actually not a way to do it. I don't think. In my experience, particularly as a medical doctor, seeing this from a medical perspective, right, we have this perception that our bodies are against us. I want to go to, you know, a basketball game, but my body's too tired. I have a headache. I have to stay home. I want to go do this or do that.

or I, but I'm too fatigued. I have all these symptoms. I have pain. The pain is against me. It is preventing me from carrying out my will and my desire, which is my from my thoughts. What if the body isn't against us? So it's a whole paradigm shift, reorientation to our relationship to our bodies. If our bodies are actually on our side, which they are, all they try and do is keep us alive, right? Physiologically, when you are in, you know, when you're septic, what does the body do? It floods the body with cytokines to try and kill the infection. It is trying desperately to keep us alive, whether we're super sick or whether we're healthy. And we have trauma. What happens then? We still have sensations. We still develop some symptoms. And underneath those symptoms are,

unexpressed emotions. And I love that framing, especially as the body being a voice, like that needs to be listened to, and really thinking about the symptoms is not failures, but as signals. So for someone who might have been at war with their body for years, what can help them start to make that shift? It starts with a willingness and reasonable curiosity, meaning, can I consider the possibility that everything that I have been interpreting through the filter of againstness is not actually true. What if we recognize that our bodies have actually never really abandoned

us? And what happens if we choose not to listen to our body? Well, you know, the body only has so many ways that it can communicate. And in many ways, I think about it like a toddler, right? Mom, mom, pay attention to me. It's tugging by having small sensations, a little bit of discomfort. Pay attention to me. Dad, dad, hey, I'm trying to get your attention. And what happens when we ignore a toddler? They get louder and louder and more insistent. And all of a sudden, they're having a full-on tamper tantrum? Oh my goodness, right? And we cannot ignore them anymore. And this is what happens in chronic illness. It starts with this slippery slide. I have headaches. I have joint pain. I feel fatigued. Sleep isn't doing it for me anymore. Now I have more symptoms. Now I'm anxious.

I'm depressed, et cetera, et cetera. And we just keep layering on the symptoms as the body tries desperately the body tries desperately to get our attention. And there's a concept you have of total toxic load. Yes. Could you explain to us what that is and how we can maybe become aware of it, but also how we can maybe expand our understanding of how all these little stressors can add that load on our body? Yes. So the body is very resilient and yet we are living in a time on the planet where things are very toxic. There are a lot of chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals, flame retardants, plastics. We are drowning in plastic and then the chemicals attached to the plastics. So we've got the actual physical pieces of.

of the plastic we have allates and parabins and heavy metals are there too and flame retardants. And some of these environmental chemicals, we cannot get out of the body without a great deal of money or difficulty like plastics, microplastics, nanoplastics, and a number of the flame retardants. There's only so many detoxes that you can do to lower the burden because some of those things just don't get out. But the question is, you know, if you've got all these buckets, you've got mold, in environmental chemicals, you've got Lyme disease and all the infections, EMF, stressors, etc. The question is, why are some people impacted and other people's less impacted?

And why do people's presentations look different one from another? Even in household members who live in the same place, dad might have a certain constellation of symptoms. Mom has a completely different constellation of symptoms and the kids, yet again, and look different still. Why is that? Why is that? The case, that's because the root cause is the disconnection from the body, emotions, and spirit.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, the more connected we are, mind, body, motion, spirit, the less symptoms we might exhibit. And the more disconnected, then those symptoms can be louder. Yes. And, you know, some people might take offense at that. Like, I do all the work. I go to church. I have a great relationship with God. I meditate. You know, I do all the things. Yes, I'm sure you do. And are you doing those things from here? Or are you actually allowing the emotions that have been held in the body to express? And there's a big, big difference. And how can we tell the difference? Well, if you just got pissed off at what I said, It may be that there's some emotional excavation that needs to happen. And if someone is listening to this, because I'm thinking if I'm a listener and this is the first time I'm hearing this, mold, toxicity, EMFs, it can sound overwhelming. Absolutely, yes.

And so where can I start to maybe recognize whether I'm affected, most of us are affected? But if those things are impacting me and where I can start going as a potential first step. I think it may be more helpful for the listeners to like separate these two conversations, even though they intertwine at one level. So I'll put on my doctor hat and we can talk environmental chemicals and all of that. And then I can put on my unforgetting project hat and we can talk about the interface and then go deeper into the unforgettable project. Because, yes, it is confusing. You're like, what are you saying?

Because I drink out of plastic water bottles and I haven't resolved some trauma, I'm going to be a mess. No, no. No, that's like, that's not going to be helpful. So I do get a little bit of existential angst when I think about all the chemicals on the planet and how much destruction has occurred to our beautiful planet. And I think that that's oftentimes where we need to pay attention. So it's recognizing that the conveniences of modern life are not necessarily the most healthy ways for us to live in a symbiotic relationship on the planet. Right.

So if we're eating fast food or not organic food, if we're purchasing lots of plastic and plastic, in plastic bottles and plastic bags and we're not really paying attention and just kind of doing our day, doing our life. There's one way, there's a couple different ways in. Many of my patients, because they are sick, they have already walked through, I have to eat organic because I have to avoid adding to the total load. I need to pay attention to my personal. care products. I don't want to be slathering chemicals on my face and my body that are, you know, potentially toxic to me. So we start with our daily habits. And then, you know, okay, you've heard me talk about plastic now a couple of times. Drink out of glass. I have no investment in this company,

but they make nice glass water bottles or, you know, make some conscious choices to change little things in your life. And usually it starts with the things that we have most power over, which is our food and our personal care products. And then you start to think about how you're cooking your food. Are you cooking your food in non-stick pans that are old and have been chipped and scraped? And now you're getting more flame retardants in your body because of those choices to use a non-stick pan. They're convenient, but you're far better off with, you know, cast iron or stainless steel or glass or ceramic

to be able to cook your food because then it's not going to get in your food and get in your body. And then, you know, kind of from there, it's like as you gain more awareness of these things, you can make different choices in your life. So that's where I would invite the vast majority of people to start. And if you're already doing that, fantastic. And then you move to the next steps. It's like, okay, well, now let's look at our clothing. Polyester? Polyester's plastic. Is there a way that we can start

to? And this is where I am at. You know, like, I still have yoga pants that are not made from non-plastic. So I'm not there. I'm right there with everybody else. And, you know, slowly have to change over my wardrobe and make different choices for myself or decide that, you know, I want that latex bra more than I want a cotton bra because let's just be serious. Like a cotton bra is just not going to cut it these days. Anyway, whatever, whatever your choices make. But I'm going to eat organic and I'm going to do these other things that I know are healthy for me and I'm going to try and balance that out.

Does that all make sense? No, it makes sense. I'm like fighting the urge to look at the fabric. of my clothing right now. But I'm never considered it. Yeah, and there are more and more like awareness, companies that are aware of the textile industry and the dyes and the chemicals

that are used on the materials. And that's relevant. It's all about that total load. Every time we wash our polyester, little plastic particles get in the, the water. Then they break down into microplastics and they break down into nanoplastics and they get in then the fish and along with all the other chemicals. And so unfortunately, being a pescatarian these days is a dangerous endeavor. There are so many chemicals in the environment today and the seas are

terribly polluted. Not to say that it's that much more polluted than everything else, but I think, yeah. So when we start to look at this as a global issue, like we have been asleep, then poor, poisoning our mother, Gaia, what the heck? And it's hard because we have so many other things on our plate. We've got to make a living. We have to take care of our kids. We have to take care of our parents. How do you have time to be an advocate and do all these things? It's hard. So you just put one foot in front of yourself and say, okay, this week, I'm going to, you know, change out my conventional vegetables to organic vegetables. And that's what you're doing that week. But if you do a little something for 52 weeks, then you're a different person. You're making huge habit changes that are more sustainable than feeling overwhelmed. Like I've got to change everything tomorrow. And I love that because I always think about the book. I think it's called the compound effect.

We talk about small things that might seem insignificant in the moment. But if you do them consistently, the compounding effects of them is quite, significant. Yes, absolutely. Yes, what he said. One of the things I found intriguing is about the Unforgetting Project. I find the name striking in itself. So Unforgeting implies that it's something we once knew and then we lost. What did we forget and why does it matter now? So, yes, I did it purposefully because what I observed is that when we come in as babies, we are love. We are joy. We are happy. We are free. Free from judgments from others, free from judgments of ourselves. We just are. Right? Babies cry when they need

something, when they're hungry, when they got a poopy diaper, when they're hurt or scared. But otherwise, they're free. We know. They know. Babies know who they are. And I believe they're connected to Spirit Source, God, you know, themselves, their higher self, their authentic self, whatever. Languaging works, you know, in your spiritual worldview. I think there's plenty of room for us to recognize. That's why we love babies. They're so alive. Right. And then what happens? We're taught. This is what it means to be a good girl. This is what it means to be a bad boy. Do not cry. Do not show your emotions. Do this. Do that.

And we get taught. Even if we have the most loving, well-intentioned parents and we grow up in a nurturing environment, there will be times that we have a perception, that we are not okay, that who we are is not okay. because we're not perfect. No parent is perfect. Even when you're trying your absolute best because most parents do, we are going to have perceptions based on our worldview of what we're learning where things are not okay. They're like little T traumas, right? They're not necessarily huge T traumas, although plenty of people on the planet have terrible big T traumas. What those things do is they cause us to forget that connection to spirit. And as you're saying this, I'm reminded of a video that I think I saw last week of it's a concert

and there are some kids that are singing. And the youngest kid is like carefree, goes up to the mic, starts belting, is dancing around. And then you can hear the laughter from the audience, but you can see the older kids. that I think are like maybe seven, eight, laughing, but almost embarrassed. Yes. And it's like, at one time, we were that carefree. But now that embarrassment is the realization that there's this perception that we need to manage and then just experiencing that as we grow into our teenage years, as adults,

how we think, how we act. It's almost like we are always trying to fit into a specific perspective and we forget. We do. Absolutely. that's exactly correct we forget who we are we are taught who we are how bright we shine is not okay right we're all taught that every single one of us and the unforgetting is peeling away the judgments of the others placed on us judgments that we have of ourselves that no longer serve us They are no longer in alignment.

They're no longer because they never were us, right? That's the thing. They never were. We took them on because we were little and we needed love and we needed to be cared for. We wanted to earn their love. And if that meant putting ourselves in a little tiny box, then we would do it because the love and that care was more important for survival than the love of self. but at some point the love of self speaks up, and it speaks up through the voice piece of the body,

saying how you are now being in the world is no longer serving you. And you describe the remembered self, this truer, more whole version of a person that emerges through the healing process. What does that look like in practice? And when an individual arrives at that remembered self, What is different about how they experience their body, their life, and the sense of who they are?

The process is very, very simple. The actual unfolding can be very hard, very painful because it asks us to experience all of the emotions that we have squashed every time we've been asked to not be ourselves. So every time there's been a judgment against self from other, perception of judgment, perception of you're not okay, all of those feelings that were suppressed, repressed, unfelt, now have to be felt. And I'm thinking in terms of the felt emotions, can you feel them by yourself or for depending on the individual they might need to have a container? A lot of people need a container because it's so foreign, right? We spend our lives putting ourselves in a little box. Oh, I mean, especially as a recovering people pleaser, right? I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.

I don't want to step on any's toes. I don't want to be seen as mean, right? These are good qualities, but that also means that I could potentially be a doormat. Being a dormant is not my life's truth. Right. Nobody is supposed to be a dormant, but we choose to take on beliefs about ourselves roles that we think we should fill in order to get love,

be okay, not be judged, not be in pain from outside. Or oftentimes what happens is it becomes, internalized, right? And I'm thinking, yeah, if someone has been behaving a certain way when they start connecting to who they are, that authentic version, them remembering themselves, the discomfort of maybe setting boundary or speaking up or acting in a way that the people that they've grown up with might have not seen can cause discomfort from all sorts of areas. Yes. And what I will say is that when we it's not the authentic self at that point it's the body and the emotions that are needing to be expressed and and and this is where I find we get stuck so when um and there are a number

of different modalities and now ways in but for a long time we had we had talk therapy cognitive behavioral therapy and we're going to talk about the problem but we're not actually going to feel about the problem. And then we've got all these wonderful coping mechanisms. So I'll use sadness and grief because it's something that I'm pretty familiar with. Like starting to feel the emotions. Say, you know, I'm sad about something. And I might feel it in my chest.

I might have a tightness there. I might feel like a stinging behind my eyes. These are the sensations in the body that I'm noticing. And then I explore the emotions underneath that. Or it could be an external event that, you know, somebody calls me a terrible person. And I actually believe that inside of myself that I'm a terrible person. And so what is that going to do to me? That's going to make me feel ashamed.

And then I might locate that in my body and feel that sensation. And then underneath that, there's the shame. shame and I'm going to let myself feel the shame. But shame is really, really hard to sit there, right? That is like the worst, most uncomfortable. Some people can sit in sadness. Some people can sit in anger, but sitting in that motion and not thinking about the story, not bringing the thoughts in because here's where the mind derails the emotional expression. I'm so sad. I'm so sad. My heart hurts. It's so heavy. Why did he do that? Why? Why? God, right? And you can see, like, I'm here in the body and all of a sudden I'm out here in the emotion. I'm in the psyche. Like, why, why, why? Why? Why me?

Whatever it is, right? And so we go back and forth and back and forth. And guess what? The emotion never resolves. It's never allowed to fully be felt because emotions work like this. Emotion, right? We have to energize and allow the emotions to come up to crescendo and then to decrescendo. And oftentimes they do it in 30 to 90 seconds. 30 to 90 seconds, you can feel the full gambit of the emotions. I don't know about you, but if you ever had a good cry, it doesn't last forever. You cry and cry for a couple minutes and then you're like, okay, I need a tissue, right? Or when you're angry at something, you rage, and then you kind of settle down. When you come back after the emotion is expressed in that quiet, oftentimes you find another emotion, but if you do that enough up and down

and up and down, whether it's rage or fear or terror, anguish, whatever it is, eventually that's where you find the authentic self. And what it feels like is quiet, stillness, calm, connection, a deep sense of knowing. And I'd like to talk a little bit about identity. Okay. And with some patients with chronic illness, they might fuse their identity with their diagnosis. And I think for individuals without the chronic illness, they might fuse their identity with a past event that has happened to them. So how can a person, A, become aware that they might be identifying with their diagnosis and what can they do to disidentify if that's even the correct terminology?

Sure. Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. So I think because we separate from, we learn to, we have learned, we have forgotten who we really are, we try to anchor ourselves in something. because we're not fully anchored in our remembered self, right? So we might latch on to a diagnosis. We might latch on to another person. You know, moms become identified with their kids many times and live vicariously through their children.

Some guys love their sports teams and, like, they live and die with their sports teams. And we'll fight for their sports teams too. Yeah, yes. And, yeah, and completely identify. I am, you know, a charger fan or whatever it is, whatever, you know, whatever kind of fan you are. And same thing with patients. I, I am a cancer survivor. I am a rape survivor or rape victim or, you know, whatever it is. And I'm not saying that how we're helping people manage things is inaccurate. I'm simply saying there's an opportunity to go deeper. And to say things like I have been diagnosed with Lyme, I have been diagnosed with Bartonella.

I am not, you know, I don't have Lyme. It doesn't possess me. I don't possess it. I have been diagnosed with it. That's one first layer of languaging. But also kind of starting to think, it's really about the perceptions and the languaging, starting to think about it that way. Like, I am experiencing pain.

I am not that pain. I, you know, I mean, I think with a lot of meditation practices, it's the observer, right? So you become more of an observer and trying to change the perspective a little bit. But that's still all up in here in the mind. And my encouragement for people is that may be. The first step is to kind of wrap your thought process around it, change the languageing a little bit. And then I would be offering the possibility of experiencing something different,

which is where we come back to the whole body-againstness concept as the way in. Yeah. Connected to that, you do talk quite a bit about nervous system regulation, being at the foundation of healing. So before the protocol, supplements, before any interventions of any kind, why does that matter? And what happens if someone tries to go through a healing process while the nervous system is still activated?

So if the nervous system is stuck in a trauma response, and I am not a trauma therapist, I am a medical doctor, I haven't done any specific training and trauma. But, you know, what I see in the vast majority of my complex chronic illness patients is that they were abused. They have a traumatic experience or multiple traumatic experiences. Or it could have been abuse of neglect, not physical abuse or sexual abuse. Neglect is just as big a trauma leaves just as big a scar and people. And it's those things that allow for the.

the unfolding of the physical, mental, emotional aspects of chronic illness. So if you have trauma at the root and the nervous system stuck in fight or flight, feeling emotions is scary and processing emotions is scary because the nervous system thinks that everything is bad and wrong, right? So we have to like give the person more tools so that they can work with their nervous systems. I think of about it as a way in. and befriending the body and reconnecting with the nervous system part of us in a very kind of physiological level. And if someone is listening to this and suspects that their body has been trying to tell them

something, maybe they're always tired, they have reoccurring illness, anxiety, symptoms that don't quite fit a clean diagnosis, what is the question you'd ask them and what is the first practice you'll invite them into. So usually I need a little bit more, I like to have a little bit more information for exactly where they're at because how I frame that question depends on their perception, right? So, for example, is it possible that what you feel is anxiety or, you know, like, let's try migraine. Migrant is more tangible sometimes.

So is it possible that there's something about the migraine that your body wants you to know? Because things can show up in any form. It chose to show up as a migraine. So really, again, kind of appealing to that curiosity, are they willing to be curious? Are they willing to be open to having a conversation? Even years and years ago, this was 15, 16 years ago when I was first starting. starting my practice, I had a young man who had a migraine. And he came to the clinic that day with a migraine. And I was in my University of Santa Monica program at the time. And so I turned down the lights

and I said, would you be willing to do an experiment with me and to have a conversation with your migraine? He was like, okay, okay, Dr. Kelly, whatever. And I set up a chair apart from him, like across from him. And I said, in this chair where you're sitting now, you're yourself. And when you move to that other chair, sink in to the awareness of your migraine. And I want you to speak from that point of view. And let's see if your migraine has anything to share with you. And so he did. He was willing to do this. Big guy. Six, five. Like, I just, you know, he was willing. I don't know. I felt like I could ask him and he did it. So he was willing. went back and forth and back and forth. And what he found out was that he was furious at his father

when his father told him that he wasn't okay. And he was holding all that anger in because it wasn't okay to be disrespectful to his dad, even though that was how he felt. And he was actually able, through that process to have a conversation with his dad, tell his dad how angry he was, and to start to understand where his dad was coming from, that his dad wasn't telling he was telling him he was bad or wrong, his dad was trying to help him understand how hard the world was going to be, that he, if he expressed his emotions, he might be bullied. If he expressed his emotions. He might be, it might be dangerous for him. And his dad didn't want that for him. So his dad actually wasn't judging him. His dad was doing the best that he could at loving him and trying to prepare him for

being in the world. And his perception was, my dad pushed me down, made me feel small. But here's the kicker. His dad didn't do that. He did that. He forgot who he was. He took on what he perceived to be the judgments of his father and made them his own. And when he actually let that anger out, and today I would do the process a little bit more deeply, but he was able to forgive his father, to understand that his father did the best that he could, and he forgave himself for believing that his father didn't love him. And after that experience, his migraine lifted. One of the concepts that I agree with and I truly believe, but I know that it's sometimes

challenging to put our head around, more pun intended, is when you say that he was doing it to himself, like kind of how he was perceiving that. Yes. So here's what happens. We learn in order to get love. I need to do this. In order to maintain love, I need to do this. And then eventually, we don't need somebody else to tell us that because we have learned that we need to tell ourselves that.

Many of these concepts actually come from Don Miguel Ruiz. If you've ever read any of his work, if not I would, the four agreements, the four agreements. I would recommend that, yeah, because a lot of these foundational. concepts I actually think, I agree with him. I use different terms. I have a different way of accessing things and processing things, but I think some of the worldview concepts are in alignment and in his writings as well. Yeah, so that would be useful for people to read that. What is your vision or the impact you hold the Unforgetting Project has? Well, honestly, this is paradigm shifting. And what I mean by that is up until now, we see the body is against us. We,

you know, where I started, we see the mind as supreme. The body and the emotions are like a pain the neck and we pray to God and we hope that, you know, we can live from a good place. Most people want to be good people, right? When we think that we can get there, we can make our minds, make us do that, be a good person, use our will, push ourselves to do that. And what I'm offering is, what if the way to be authentically ourselves is through the body by experiencing the unresolved, unexperienced emotions and underneath that, get to that deep sense of knowing who we really are. And when we learn that, when we tap into that, We have access to our intuition. We have access to our purpose. We have access to knowing how to be,

having a better understanding of what means it, what does it mean to be loving to myself? What does it mean to be loving to other people? Not from thinking or like discerning or whatever, but from a heart-centered place. And not, yeah, not from thinking about what is a heart-centered place, from knowing. Four listeners who want to connect with you and learn more about your work, where can they find you? So I have a brick and mortar practice in Southern California called the Spring Center. It's thespringcenter.com.

And I actually have licenses and almost a dozen other states so people can become patients, even if they don't live in California, if they live in the state. where I'm licensed. You can follow me on social media at Dr. Kelly McCann, two L's, two Cs, two ends. And I also have a personal website, Dr. Kelly McCann.com, where I have blogs and more information about myself and mostly my clinical work. And then there is the unforgettingproject.com, which is where all of that, repository of information is right now we have a foundational program it's a nine week live online

zoom program and i just started my second cohort i'll start another cohort in may if people are interested um and it's about two hours and some change because i always run over and um and then There are other events and workshops. We'll eventually be doing some retreats on that website as well. And then I do have a membership. So once people have gone through the program, they can join the membership to continue to deepen their work. And then lastly, there is the possibility of doing unforgetting journeys with me

where it's a one-on-one container of three to four hours, ideally in person. And ideally folks who have already done a decent amount of internal work and they're wanting to go a step deeper. So, yeah, that's where we're at right now with the Unforgetting Projects. What do you hope listeners leave this episode with? With some new perspectives, hopefully. I mean, I think that this has the potential to change how we practice medicine. I had a participant do a number of journeys with me, and she's a therapist. She's a clinical psychologist.

It's done a lot of psychoanalysis work and a variety of other modalities. And she said to me, Kelly, I have never experienced anything like this in any of the other trainings that I have done. There's nothing like this on the planet. It needs to be in every single psychology and therapy curriculum across the globe. So that's just one person's opinion. And I need to get that in writing. But yeah, I mean, it's changing the way that we think about ourselves and how we are in the world. And who doesn't want to just feel free to be themselves and to feel free from judgment like that little boy dancing and singing?

because he didn't know that he was being judged because he had not yet experienced the pain of judgment, had not experienced the pain of judging himself like the older children. They knew what that pain felt like that's why they were embarrassed for him because they were judging him like they had been judged. But what if we start teaching people how to actually just be who they are and love themselves without judgment? Amazing.

If I love myself and I don't judge me, how can I possibly judge you? Or if you judge me and I don't have that judgment inside of me, it bounces off of me. Dr. Kelly, thank you so much for your perspective, your expertise, and sharing your message with us. You're so welcome, Simba. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.