Miracles Beyond Medicine: Overcoming Devastating Loss & Chronic Illness With Dr. Carolyn Ross MD

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life.

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Of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your Conscious Pivot.

Hey, everybody, it's Adam. I'm clearing my throat right at the start. Oh, my goodness. Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I am so happy to be with you here today for always the. The same reasons, and then new reasons, too. So the same reason is that if you're listening to this, you're watching this, I'm speaking, I'm here, we're here together. It means we're alive. It means we're alive. We're alive. We're alive. That is so such incredible news. I mean, we take it for granted. I take it for granted. Moment to moment, each day, how much of a celebration it is that we're just alive, that we have a breath to take right now when there are people everywhere who are taking their very last breath in this moment. So this is a sacred moment. This is a sacred and a holy day. And to be able to spend it together for however long we'll be together is a blessing. I am also blessed to have great people in my life, great family, great friends, great colleagues, great people that I get to work with, and I get to introduce you guys to somebody that is great, great in my life. Beautiful lady, an amazing doctor, incredible professional, somebody that's committed her life, a significant part of her adult life, to helping people, men and women, who are dealing with some very serious issues. And some of these issues are known, and oftentimes, a lot of these issues are hidden, and that's part of what makes them challenging. So I want her, as always with our guests, this beautiful lady will introduce herself, will tell us something that she wants us to know about her and her life, and. And then we'll get right into her Pivot story and go from there. So buckle your seatbelts, everybody. It's going to be a great podcast today. So without further ado, Dr. Carolyn Ross, welcome to the Pivot podcast.

Thanks, Adam. I'm so happy to be with you.

Way cool. Will you share something about yourself that you'd like people to know?

Sure. I'll share the easy stuff first. As you know, I'm a physician. I work with people with addictions and eating disorders. I've been in medicine for over 30 years, which is telling you something about myself, which is how old I'm getting to be and still glad to be alive, as you said. So I'm a mother. I have three sons, one of whom I lost in his 30th year. I'm a grandmother, a granddaughter who just turned 17 this week. Those are the best things about me, I think. Yeah. I'm a sister. I'm an oldest of. I'm the oldest of five children of an African American family. I have two brothers and three and two sisters. And my family is super important to me.

Wow. And you're also somebody who's an entrepreneur, right? You're a businesswoman?

Yes, I've been in business. I've been in the business of medicine most of my career, and now I'm doing a startup business. My startup business is an online coaching program for people with food and body image issues. So people with obesity, binge eating disorder, food addiction, and so on. I'm starting this, what I think is an exciting opportunity for people to be able to access really expert care online and expert information. We know that the Internet is full of information, but it's not always, you know, good information. So I want to be the purveyor of good information in this area because so many people are struggling with it.

And by good information, you also mean accurate?

Yes. Expert and accurate. Absolutely.

Oh, my God. You mean everything that's on the Internet isn't accurate?

Yeah. I just saw a really great article about how everything. How much has changed in the field of people dealing with weight issues or obesity, binge eating disorder, etc. And, you know, in my years in medicine, physicians came out and took a hard stand about this and talked about the importance of eating healthy. And at first it was low fat. That's what you have to do. And then it was, oh, oops, we made a mistake. It's not low fat. Then it was low carb. That's the way to go. And then it was, oops, maybe that doesn't work. And then it was get rid of all the sugar in your diet and high fructose corn syrup and all that stuff. And, you know, after a while, I think all of us kind of become pretty jaded about, you know, but also more than jaded, also confused about how to eat, what to eat, and we lose our natural ability to just enjoy food. And so I think even in medicine now, doctors are coming out and saying, look, we've made a Lot of mistakes. We don't know as much as we thought we knew. And we need to really get some real research up in here, you know.

Yeah, let's bring some real research up in here.

Right.

I don't know. I don't want to make a generalization. So correct me if you think this is inaccurate. Doctors can sometimes not want to. I mean, it doesn't seem like doctors are often the ones to say, hey, we've made a mistake. It doesn't seem like that level of humility is typically. Is typically baked in to that. To that. To that. You know, I don't want to call out the profession. I just feel like it's. What you're saying is that there's been information and misinformation and then the owning of the fact that that creates trust issues. Like in. Right. Don't you think it creates trust issues?

Absolutely creates trust issues. But I think you have to understand, if you're in the profession of medicine, you've been steeped in this kind of understanding that knowledge is everything. And I think what we've lost in medicine is the recognition that there's a lot of art in medicine that needs to be practiced. And that research isn't always valid because sometimes, for example, in the area of obesity research, you can get 50,000 people who have a certain weight and a certain BMI, and then you track them for 30 years. If you were to do that and see, oh, well, the ones who have a higher bmi, you know, higher weight, also have higher risk for diabetes. But what that leaves out is, what about the people like, could we take 50,000. We take 25 of those 50,000 people and just let them be active, normally active, and eat healthily and see what happens then. So then you see, is it about the number on the scale or is it really about lifestyle? And I think the newer research is showing that most researchers assumed they had the assumption that it was weight. So when you start with that assumption, you're already going down the wrong track. You're already biased in favor of a person needs to lose weight. And that's what doctors. It's been hammered into doctors over and over and over. We've got to get our patients to lose weight. And so it's a hard thing to change. It's a hard thing to shift. You can go back 50 years when there were commercials on TV showing doctors advertising cigarettes in their white coats, and they were smoking and saying, camels, that's the one to use. And these are doctors. So again, doctors at that Time were told, oh, there's no risk of cancer with cigarettes. And, you know, we bought that. You know, I won't say the word, but we bought that bs and now we've bought into the weight is bad. You know, certain foods are bad. And that's probably going to turn out to be BS too.

Yeah. Interesting. And food is. I mean, it's such an essential thing. Right. I mean, we know there's very few needs that we have, but among the things we call trouble needs. Because I'm always, like, on the lookout for scarcity language. Because I'm a mind. Much of my training has to do with mindset. Yeah. When you hear the word need, right. You actually need food. Like, you really need food. Food is. My dad used to say to us, food is medicine.

Which is.

Was Michio Kushi. And then before Kushi, it was somebody else. I mean, I love the.

I say that all the time, too.

Do you say that, too? Wow.

Your dad and I have something in college. Yeah.

Learning is remembering. That was Socrates who said that. So somebody some time ago figured out that food is a thing that helps us to regenerate. We regenerate our bodies and our minds and our hearts and our souls through what we ingest, whether it's the ingestion of information.

Right.

The things that we hear and see and learn, and also the intake of the food, physical substance we call food is there. I'm gonna. I'm gonna put you on the spot here, and I didn't plan on asking this, but I do want to ask you, what's your philosophy? Do you have a. Do you have a philosophy of eating that you could call a philosophy? If it's that?

Yeah, I have a philosophy that everyone who eats should enjoy what they eat. And actually, you know, I actually did a 2C back in the day. It was a CD set with Andrew Weil, and we titled it the Joy of Eating. Well, and it's really. That is what I believe is that every meal should be a great meal for you. And maybe it's a small meal, maybe it's not like the most gourmet meal, but it should be a great meal in terms of its flavor, its texture, its effect on your body. And I think that's what. What we've lost in all of this. You should do this. You shouldn't do that kind of stuff. Or this food is bad and this food is good. People don't even enjoy what they're eating anymore. As a matter of fact, Adam, there was a big study on this where they compared enjoyment of eating in, I think it was six or eight different countries. There were countries in Europe, and then they compared them to the United States. In the United States, people have the least amount of enjoyment of eating of any of the other countries. They said that people in this study really just didn't enjoy food to that degree that they do in France or Spain or Japan even.

Or Italy.

Or Italy. Oh, my God. Yeah. Italy is the home of Joy of Eating.

Exactly. We were in Positano and some other places last summer, and man, oh, man, we sat for hours.

I know.

The Joy of Eating. In fact, what's beautiful. I don't know if this URL is available for you or if the book title interests you at all, but I just. And there was the Joy of Sex years ago.

Yeah, that's right.

Right. Big phenomenal success. I'm curious whether the Joy of Eating has been written and you're an author, so I want you to share the titles of your title, of your newest book, and maybe also one of the ones from the past so that people can get out there and get your book. But the Joy of Eating might be an upcoming title.

That's a good one to look at, too. Yeah. Because I don't think it's. I think it is innate. It's something that children do. If you watch children, little children eat, you know, they just put their hands in the cake and grab. You know, they. They are fully immersed in the experience, sometimes even smearing it all over their faces, you know. But when a child eats a strawberry, you know, they're like, oh, you know, so exciting. And actually, I was in Positano in May, as you know, and we went to a little grocery store there, and they just had a, you know, like a pint of strawberries. Beautiful, perfect strawberries. But the difference was, compared to the strawberries here, every single one of them was perfectly ripe. Every single one of those strawberries had the beautiful strawberry flavor. So some of them weren't under ripe, some of them weren't overripe. I mean, I have a thing of strawberries in my fridge now, and half of them are dying, and the other half are still not, you know, not ripe. And. And we got that pint of strawberries, and me and the woman I was staying with, we just. Every morning we would just sit there and eat strawberries, which I remember from my childhood, but something I rarely do anymore, and I think that's what we need to get back to, is that enjoyment.

That's amazing. Would you give us the Names of the first of all, the book that's coming out September.

Yeah, the book that's coming out September 1st is called the Food Addiction Recovery Workbook. And I know there are a lot of people in this country and around the world who identify with being a food addict. So I really get into. In that book, I really get into talking about what that actually means and that it's not so much about the food, it's really about our own ways that we use food and how food, you know, it solves a lot of our problems, whether it be, you know, the problem or stress or the problem of sadness or loneliness, etc. So it's. It may surprise a lot of readers, but I think it also will be that validating for people who consider themselves to be food addicts as well. Yeah.

Beautiful. And the other books you've written, you don't have to talk about all of them, but I really want people to be able to get those resources.

Yeah. The first one was the Binge Eating and Compulsive Overeating Workbook. And then the second one was the Emotional Eating Workbook. So these are all workbooks, including the Food Addiction Book. It's a workbook. And the good part about that is just that people can go through some of the same processes in the privacy of their own homes that I use with my patients, in my office and with the online coaching program.

Yeah. Fantastic. So what's the best way for people to get the new book?

For example, it's available at Amazon. It's also available on the publisher's website, and that's newharbinger.com but you can easily get it at Amazon. They're already doing pre orders for it.

Fantastic. Beautiful. All right, so let's do this. I want to dive into your pivot. And when I. It's always curious and even makes me laugh when I say your pivot, because it's no one pivot for me. Not for you, not for any of us. But it's so profound sometimes what we can learn from other people's, their reinvention stories or those pivotal moments in their life. So would you share one or as many as we will have time for some. So I would love that.

Sure. Yeah. I've actually had many more pivots than I expected to happen. Like, you know, once you go to medical school and you become a doctor, you think, oh, I'm set. You know, I'm set for life. I'm going to be a doctor, and I'll talk about one in particular that Was probably the most, the biggest in my life in terms of upheaval for me. And that was around the beginning of 2000, 2001. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. And at that time, I had a large women's center clinic in San Diego. And when I say large, I had a 5,000 square foot lease, you know, which I renovated. I had 15 employees, et cetera, et cetera. So it was a big deal. A lot of overhead, a lot of responsibilities. I loved what I was doing, but I was beginning to get burned out. And I don't think I really paid much attention. I just thought, you know, just keep your head down, keep working, you'll figure it out, it'll all get better. Have you done that before? I'm sure a lot of people do that. I talk to patients all the time who are doing the same thing and don't recognize that really what was happening was a call to action for me. And so when I got sick, I got so sick that I couldn't work for two years. I literally could not work. And I couldn't work because my brain wasn't working. So I would forget the dosages of medications, I would have trouble remembering to do stuff. And so, you know, I didn't want to hurt anybody. And I decided at that point, you know, it's time for me to step aside. At that time, I didn't even know if I would ever be able to come back to medicine. And having been at that point in medicine and been in, you know, really intense practices where I had close relationships with my patients and all of that, it was a huge loss for me, you know, to get up in the morning and not put on the white coat, not be called Dr. Ross. All of those things just were surprisingly traumatic. It was like grieving, you know, I had to go through that process of grieving just what I thought was going to be my life, you know. And so there I was, basically in bed for two years and I didn't know what was going to happen next. Financially, I thought I was completely prepared for this, but my disability company refused to pay me disability even though I paid on the policy for 25 years. They didn't accept the diagnosis. Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia was not an acceptable diagnosis in medicine in 2000. And so I had very little money coming in. I had a six year old son to support on my own. And the stress of the financial strains was added to the stress of being sick. Trying to figure out, like, what am I going to do with my life? Like, how am I going to support myself? So to make a long story short, you know, I went through a pretty incredible process. And one of the things that was a surprising help to me is people started when they. I would go to these meetings of alternative medicine practitioners because my doctor didn't know what to do for me. And when I was in those meetings, I would hear stories about people who had had miraculous cures, you know, from lung cancer, from things that in western medicine we don't consider curable. And what was exciting was I thought, well, you know, if somebody can cure themselves from lung cancer, then maybe there's hope for me. And so I started talking to these people and I would call them up and say, you know, I heard about your story. Can you, can you tell me more about this? Because I need inspiration. I really need hope that I can get better. And so I met these incredible people who were really just normal. They were normal people. They weren't, you know, super special or anything, but they. They had had these miraculous cures. And each time I met them, I would listen to their stories. And as I listened to their stories, I heard seven things that they repeated over and over. And one of the things is the one I just said, which is that illness is a call to action. And when I started to hear this illness is a call to action, then I started to ask myself, what am I being called to do? And I realized at that point that what I had been doing was finished and I needed to look for the next step. And that was one of the seven things that I heard. I wrote about this actually, in the very first book I ever wrote, which I self published. And it's called Miracles Beyond Medicine. But those people helped me so much to learn about how to use my illness to pivot. And I don't know if people have talked about this before, but oftentimes when you have an illness or serious injury or something that just throws you down, it is really that chance to pivot. And so over time, you know, I started feeling a little bit better and I decided to do a fellowship in integrative medicine because these alternative practitioners have helped me so much, and I wanted to be able to help patients in that way. So I was very fortunate, although it surprised the heck out of me. But I applied to the fellowship with Andrew Wiles program in Tucson, and I was accepted. And that was like my lifeline. I mean, literally my lifeline. So my son and I picked up, we moved to Tucson. We still laugh about it. To this day, because I think I had $20 in my bank account left and, you know, didn't have. We barely had enough money to pay for a Motel 8 in Tucson. And of course, the people in the fellowship didn't know any of this. They didn't know how. They were my lifeline, you know, but that was the beginning of how my career changed. I did the two year fellowship, you know, I did get a. Eventually got a settlement from the disability company, and then I started refocusing on integrated medicine. That's kind of part of the story. There's a second part. I can add to it if you want.

Well, I would love for you to do that. I'm riveted. So that's why I'm. I normally am not the best listener. I'll just call it out, really.

Adam.

I know, Shocking. Thank you for that. But I am riveted by that story. And so, yes, I want you to share part two. And so this was a catalyst, and you talked about the chance to pivot. The getting knocked down was a catalyst for you to pivot. And so how do you define pivot? Because I think a lot of people, I don't mean that sort of, that you've given it a lot of thought, but in this moment, how would you define it? Because a lot of people think of a pivot that is a change as something that is negative, that somehow it means something didn't work, something. So now I've got to change. And change is uncertain and change is scary, and you don't know what it's going to bring. So it's something people resist. And we know what you resist creates suffering and on and on and on. So how do you use that word, pivot? That the chance to pivot, what does that mean to you?

I don't know that. I think more of the chance to pivot is more in hindsight, because I do think you do go into the belly of the beast when you are, you know, when you are going through something like this. Oftentimes it takes a massive amount of suffering to get people to actually change. And this was what it took for me because I was so wedded to my Persona in San Diego as this innovative women's health doctor. I had received all of these civic awards for my work and all of that, and my patients loved me. The day I was moving out of my office, one of my patients came in unannounced and said, Dr. Ross, Dr. Ross, I heard you were closing your practice. Are you okay? Because in her mind, it would have taken something like she's dying in order for her to close her practice. Do you know what I'm saying?

Yes.

So that's the perception they had. It's certainly the perception that I had that I would never have changed. So I think it's really hard when you're in the middle of that change to see it as positive. For me, you know, I think so.

It's normal. I just want to. So it's normal to be in the middle of it, to be in the belly of the beast and to not in that moment have the hindsight and the wisdom even to see it as positive.

Totally. That's why I said that the people who had. Had miracles were so important to me because here I am so sick I can't get out of bed and I hear them say, I got better. So I didn't know. I didn't feel in my heart it was possible for me to get better because I was that sick. But when I heard one person after another after another say, you know, here's what had happened for me, and I heard their stories, it enabled me to have some hope. And so I think that's. That was part of what helped me to see the opportunity in all of this, was hearing their stories.

So, yeah, Randy always reminds me of that. It's being in the belly of the beast is what pivot the book is all about. I mean, so you and I have such a simpatico. I mean, we knew that probably from the moment we met, but there's such a similarity. I remember writhing in pain in my office the day that it closed. My office. And it wasn't a, you know, I'd had my near death thing. I was in the hospital thinking, I'm having a heart attack. It turns out it's an anxiety attack. I didn't have, I didn't go through what you went through. I mean, that's why I'm riveted because you really, you really got. Got into the belly. I went to the place where I was hating. I was hating life. Like, I woke up in the morning and put my feet on the floor and I'm like going, shit. Like that's the first words out of my mouth is shit, right? And I can't believe this is me, this is what I'm doing. And yeah, I was making a lot of, of money and all that. And like you said, from an ego standpoint or from a outward, you know, like the way people would look at it, the way look they looked at you, people thought you were at the pinnacle of success, right? You have a very good thriving practice. You are a doctor, you have defied the odds, all of that stuff, right? I'm same thing. I'm a lawyer, multi state practice, multi millions of dollars. And I hate life, I'm hating my, who I am. And the pain was so excruciating that I was almost sickened by myself. So I was making myself sick and thank God, I mean, part of my pivot didn't result in either my screwing up my marriage or screwing up my health or diving because I'm not an addictive personality anyway. So I just didn't do those kinds of things and you know, go buy a Ferrari and drive off with a half age, you know, girl or something. But I was so miserable on the inside. And then ultimately when I close my practice, I'm lying on the floor writhing in pain and crying because downstairs is a shredded truck for two days shredding my files. And I realized that this was the, you know, the end of something significant. As you closed your office, I can only imagine you just realizing in that moment that it was the end of a chapter.

Well, you know, having the women's centers was a dream that I had conceived of 10 years before. So it was for 10 years I worked, you know, for the first five years I worked toward that goal and, and then develop these beautiful facilities and this wonderful practice. So it really was a dream that I had fulfilled and it was a dream out of nothing because at that time there were no women's centers other than what they call women's centers, which were mammography centers. But mine was a full on practice for women to get their healthcare needs met. But like you inside, I was miserable. I was so tired, I was exhausted. I didn't have enough time to spend with my son. You know, I felt just incredibly stressed with all the responsibilities I had. You know, on the outside everybody saw, oh, she's just a hard working, competent physician. But on the inside I was dying. And that's, you know, that's what it took for me to make the pivot is I had to get really sick.

So yeah, this is really important for people listening to hear this to get this. So a couple of big takeaways. One is that when you're in the belly of the beast, which some of you may be right at this moment, we all are on some level, right? I mean, life is about change. It's the only constant, it's the only thing we can count on. So being great at change and great at Having perspective and even being able to know that there'll be a time when you're at the top of another staircase or another. You know, let's use that analogy. At the top of another staircase, looking back down, you can see how all the stairs logically fit together. When we're at the bottom, looking up into the darkness. Very difficult to see that, to have that perspective. So let's just for a moment, imagine ourselves all in the process of change right now, wherever we are, and fast forward a year, three years, five years from now, look back down that staircase, to be able to see that logical progression of things fitting together, this orderliness to the universe.

But even you can't. Even if you can't imagine how it's going to turn out. I think what kept me going was just having the feeling that somehow it would turn out. You know, I could just say to myself, I don't see where it's heading. And I honestly, I could not have seen what happened next and next in my life. I had no clue. And yet I did feel like I had to just put one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, and move forward into that darkness that you're describing with the sense that there is a light at the end of the tunnel somewhere. It may take longer than I had hoped, and it certainly did. But I was going to tell you about part two, which was, again, the most unexpected things that happened to me. And that was. My middle son had suffered with severe mental illness since he was just 18, and he had just crushing depression. And he tried everything from medication to exercise to taking vitamins to meditation. You know, he was extremely proactive in his own. On his own behalf, and yet he could not get through it. It was just one bout after another after another until when he was 29. The first year, right after I'd left to go to the rest, the fellowship in Tucson, we got word that he had died. He was 29 years old. And that was probably an even more crushing blow for me than being ill or being under financial stress or anything. I can't describe to you if you've not lost a child. It's hard to describe, but I felt like I had left my body. And it was so, so. And it was so deeply painful. It was the most painful thing that I ever, you know, ever experienced. And it really brought me into a sense of perspective about everything that I was seeing as wrong in my life. Because when you get to that place where you lose the thing, the person that's most valuable to you, where you, you know, your heart is broken to that degree, it really puts the rest of your life in perspective. Whether it be my career, which, you know, was always my number one focus, now became like, who really cares about. You know, I honestly really don't care anymore because I am so devastated. But what that led to was an even better pivot than I could have expected, because after I left the fellowship with this broken heart and this desire to do something to memorialize my son, to not make his death meaningless, and I was given the opportunity to work with people with mental health issues, addictions, and eating disorders, and I just felt that if I could keep one mother, one father, from losing their child, from either depression or from addiction or eating disorders, then that would be a tribute to my own son, and that would help me to heal. And that's exactly what happened. After I left the fellowship, I serendipitously got this position at Sierra Tucson, working with an incredible team to help patients with eating disorders and addictions and depression. And I remember so many times in that year after my son died, sitting front of terrified parents whose daughter or son had been admitted to the program, and they were, you know, had overdosed on heroin, and they, you know, had all of these frightening experiences, and I could sit across from them and talk to them and say, I honestly, I know how you feel. I know that terror. I know what you're going through, and, you know, do my best to help them move through that and change their perspective on the situation as well.

Real compassion.

That's. I think that's what my son's death brought me. You know, I've always been an empathetic person, and I've had a lot of loss in my life, but this one was crushing. It was literally crushing. And I think coming out of that, I did have a different level of compassion and depth. I think more of a depth of compassion.

I think what you said earlier is really profound. That in the pivot process, part of it is just. And this is, you know, this is levels of our. Of our own self acceptance. This will come back every single time. For me, no matter what the subject, what it is that we're talking about, it'll always come back to self love and self care. Because wherever we are, meeting ourselves in this moment, in the belly of the beast, whatever that is, the good, the bad, the ugly, the ability to care for ourselves and love ourselves enough that moment to not judge, but simply to be willing to take the next step. Right, because that's what you did. You just kept One foot going in front of the other in a time when, like you said, looking into the darkness could never have predicted what would have been, what would have come. Never. But to have just enough faith, you know, that mustard seed is right, that mustard seed to be able to just take that step forward and to look at if, again, I think we can't know. But in listening to you and I, hopefully people that are in the middle of that and haven't written a book about it or haven't experienced some of the devastating things that you have and you've been speaking about, for them to have a little voice in their head that might say, yeah, but I can, I can ask, what is the, what is the opportunity, what, what is the creative opportunity here for me, for the growth? Because when you talked about the miracles, is there. I don't, I don't know if there was a book that was written about that or those seven things, but.

No, I wrote in my first book that I self published, it's called Miracles Beyond Medicine. I wrote about my own journey, healing and the miracles that helped me along the way.

Yeah, the seven. Is there seven.

There's, there's seven things that the people who had miracles told me about. I heard when they spoke about their story. Seven things.

And one of them was that illness is a call to action.

Yeah. Give you one more one. The other one was that having to do that, there's many roads to healing. So as a western trained medicine doctor, you know, I didn't have a lot of experience with. I had some experience, but not a lot with healing through other methodologies or through spirituality or whatever. And so the people I heard about had done lots of different things to get, well, everything from, you know, going to Mexico and being seen in clinics there, to reading certain books about spirituality, to using certain rituals and whatever they, they had used had worked for them. But if you say, oh, well, he got cured from lung cancer using fill in the blank, well, maybe we can use that on everybody else with lungs cancer. That's not how it works. And that's what I figured out. And oftentimes my colleagues say to me, well, you healed from chronic fatigue syndrome. Tell us what we can tell our patients. And the only thing I can tell them is it's a journey and it's a very personal journey. There is no one thing, there's no magic that works there. You have to find your way through the journey. And for me, it was spirituality, it was, was grief, it was supplements, acupuncture, Phoenix Rising, yoga, all sorts of Things, many of which I had never heard of. But I did what I was drawn to do, and that's what healed me.

Yeah, it's an integrative approach.

Yeah. But it's not satisfying to Western medicine, because we, in Western medicine, we want to say, okay, Carolyn just took this one pill. Even if it's a supplement, she took this one supplement, and that's what cured her. I probably took a hundred supplements all at the same time, and that's not what cured me. It was this plus this, plus that, plus that and time and patience and, you know, all of that. I'm not a super religious person, but during that time, there was spirit scripture that really helped me to have faith, and that was the 23rd Psalm. So sometimes before I would go to bed, I would, you know, I would say to myself, the 23rd Psalm or the Lord's Prayer, because those just gave me a sense of comfort. And even though that's something from my way, way childhood Southern Baptist past, it still gave me comfort. And so I didn't scoff at it because it made me feel good just for a little bit of time.

You know, the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

That's right. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, boy. Well, listen, we're. We've got a little time left, and there's two things I wanted to cover, and one has to do with rituals and practices that support you. But before we get there, just for a second, I am. Because I know you, and we're friends. We work together. I think you've had a more recent pivot that might be helpful for people to know about and would empower folks. And it's not a health pivot, so it's not that related kind of a thing, but something different many years later. And we're always pivoting. And I think this is part of the. The great learning, and not just the learning, but the. The appreciation for the importance of our growth and to have the humility to know that we always have to stay up, that growing is a part of our. Of the evolution. And so to not resist growing and all that kind of thing is incredibly important. So would you share that more recent pivot?

Sure, yeah. Just as a little bit of background, you know, I'm back practicing medicine and having gone through so much, you know, pain and loss in the last 10 years. And being a doctor, I think you train yourself not to show your emotions, not to really be too vulnerable. You have to kind of like. I think there's part of what we learn in medical School even, which is, you know, you're in charge. You're not the one who's crying when someone dies, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So that had become sort of a Persona for me. And what I wanted more than anything was to regain some of my ability to live from my heart. And so I was given a challenge by my mentor, whose name is Hashtag Adam, to do something which on the surface is really simple, and that's to do some Facebook Live posts. And it. I just about had a panic attack thinking about doing those. And then I started, you know, realizing what's going on here. And just numerous conversations with people, and they'd say, well, what's the big deal? You speak in front of people all the time, blah, blah, blah. So to make a long story short, I was given an opportunity to speak at a community center on addictions. And as I was sitting in the audience listening to the speakers who preceded me, I started to feel like there was an opportunity for me to actually speak from my heart. And I had all these notes about what I was going to talk about. And I got up on the stage, and I was literally shaking. Like, my legs were shaking. My voice was really shaky. But I started by saying, you know, just what I said to you right now that I'm a doctor, I don't usually talk about my personal experience with that addictions, but today I'm going to do that. And I talked about the effect that I have two brothers who I've been really close to, one of whom just passed away a month ago. One was a heroin addict, one was a crack addict. And I talked about the experience of being their sister, of being a doctor and wanting so badly, you know, to really help them. I just felt like, wow, you know, all of the skills that I have, and I'm out helping all of these other people. Why can't I help my own brothers? Why can't I get them to stop using? And, you know, it was. It was really a powerful experience for me to share my story with the people in that room. I'm sure many of whom have. Have been family members of people with addictions. But for me, it was really a breakthrough because I was able to, you know, speak from my heart and just let the. Let the shaky legs do their thing.

Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Thank you.

Thank you.

What's a ritual or practice that keeps you going one step forward?

Staying grounded? That's my biggest ritual. You know, I do it in various ways, but mainly for me, it's staying in my body. So feeling the sensations on the inside of my body. And whenever I find myself feeling anxious or. Or distracted or stressed, I try to come back to feeling the sensations inside of my body so that I can stay grounded and therefore aware of what's really going on. I also am part of a group of people who kind of meet on a regular basis every other week. And we talk about things like being in the now and being aware, and how can we, you know, how can we improve our lives and live from our hearts and live from the place of being in the now? So that's something that sustains me, is having, you know, that regular connection with people who are on the same path as I am. I do meditate from time to time, not as much as I used to, but that's always available to me. And then I've been able to.