What Is Your Body Trying To Tell You?

You might hear something when you start to tune into your body and say, well, what is that pain associated with?

Hi, I'm Kaya Perowne, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. We often overlook the importance of self-love and tapping into our own intuition when it comes to healing and creating our best health. After the birth of her first child, Dr. Cynthia Lee had several mysterious and debilitating symptoms arise, and she spent several years forging a path to healing. In her conversation with Dr. Hyman, Dr. Lee shared how tapping into her own.

Intuition played a key role in her recovery. And it's just amazing the kinds of things that people can recover from. And now you've written this great book, Brave New Medicine, which is a really fabulous story about how you as a physician understood that there's a different way to heal your illnesses and your autoimmune disease and all this weird nonsense that.

We don't know how to deal with in medicine. There was this strange sense that because I understood chronic diseases, I mean, I was an internist after all, an expert in chronic diseases, that I was somehow immune to it. Had I known about functional medicine or even integrative medicine at the time, it would have been a much smoother path. But because I had to rebuild the paradigm from the bottom up in order to even get there, it took me many more years.

Yeah. So how did you come out of it?

So the first thing I did was I went back to basics. And so I did not suddenly just start seeing an acupuncturist or start trying energy medicine or anything that's really alternative. I was like, okay, no, I'm a doctor.

You- didn't start off with crystals?

No, I didn't. And oh God, meditation was like pulling teeth. So, no, I went back to basics. So what I ended up doing also was distancing myself from the diagnosis and the prognosis because it was more despairing. I would say the name of your.

Disease isn't the cause of your disease.

Right, exactly.

Dysautonomia just means your nervous system isn't working. Chronic fatigue syndrome just means you're tired all the time.

Right, right, exactly. It doesn't tell you why. So when my thyroid was out of whack, it wasn't just my thyroid. It was my whole hormone system, which is tied then to the digestive system, which is tied to the immune system.

Like it suddenly started making- the bones.

Connected to the thigh bone, Right? Yeah, exactly. And the body is connected to the brain.

Which is actually amazing in medicine that our entire training teaches us the opposite, that there's all these organ systems, right? We take the GI system and the liver and the lungs and the brain and the heart and the hormone. And you go to specialists for every different part of you and nobody connects the dots.

Right. It felt very overwhelming. And so that's when I ended up I actually did.

You need a navigator.

I did. And you know, I had a very unconventional navigator was we had a visit from some friends of ours who ended up staying with us. And we had known them for years, but they'd never stayed with us. And we knew that the wife, Pia, was also clairvoyant. And she said, I can teach you how to develop intuition, which I had never heard of. I did not know that intuition was something like music or art. Like you can develop it. Yeah, you can. You can practice it. And she was very pragmatic about it. And she said, no, no, this doesn't mean you're gonna be clairvoyant, right? But it just means that you can learn to open this other side of your brain that has probably been closed off for a long time because of your training and your upbringing.

So.

She taught me how to do that. Well, she taught me what I needed to do to begin to practice to open up to that. And a lot of it was so basic. A lot of it was just silencing my analytical mind. and being in my body. And that second part was the heart, well actually they were both really hard. They were both really hard. Silence, analytical mind, being in my body, because my body was so uncomfortable. And so she said, you can only heal something that you are connected to. You can heal something you're detached from. So that was healing on multiple levels, both that I had to inhabit my body, which was probably one of the biggest steps in terms of healing, not being afraid of it, but going into it. And then also learning how to read sensations as messages and not just symptoms that were making me miserable.

You always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body if you listen to it.

Absolutely. And I really learned to use intuition to guide me. like how do I choose what to do next? Is this the right diet for me? Is gluten really, is it something that I can return to or is it something that I really need to stay off of strictly? So it began to, it made that navigation much easier for me. And it's something that I encourage my patients to develop if they're interested. It's simple. It just takes a lot of repetition and quiet listening.

There are tools waiting within all of us that can help improve multiple states of disease. We just have to open ourselves up to them and be willing to dig deeper. Dr. Hyman further explored how we can begin this process and cultivate greater self-love.

In his conversation with Dr. Andrea Pennington. You might hear something when you start to tune into your body and say, well, what is that pain associated with? Well, it's because you're overworking. or because you were hanging out with those people that you know you don't have any business hanging out with. Like, you start to get underneath the chatter and underneath the symptoms and the pain to the deeper meaning. And that only comes the more that you're willing to listen and face it.

-There was a research study, I'm sure you know about this, where they had people journal for 20 minutes a day. Not like, I went to the store and bought milk, but what's going on underneath? -Yeah. -You know, what's really up below in their hearts and their minds or souls. and they just 20 minutes a day, and it was a randomized control trial where they looked at people who just wrote about whatever they did that day versus what was really deep inside. And these people with rheumatoid arthritis and asthma, they got better on objective measures over the course of three to six months, which is kind of bizarre. I mean, how can you regulate asthma and rheumatoid arthritis, which are real diseases, which people suffer from, but how do you do that with just writing in your journal? And that's the power of this process. And I think that's a really important piece that is hard to do. People actually, I think, don't know how to write what's inside. They don't even know how to listen to what's inside. How do you get people to sort of begin to listen to that other higher self voice? 'Cause there's a unconscious voice that we can rant and rave and blame and not own. And you're inviting people to do something quite different, which is to Listen to that other voice in your head that's whispering, maybe faintly, how do you get it to be loud and clear?

Well, I take people through an attunement meditation. And in the beginning, just like with the first step of the cornerstone process, I invite people to take five deep breaths and just become aware, aware of whatever's going on. So if there are thoughts, if there is some little chatter, even if it's the mean snarky chatter of self judgment, or it's your laundry list or all the things you've forgotten, just become aware of it without judging it and let it pass without grabbing hold and going down the rabbit hole with these thoughts. And as we invite people to do this, we ask them to only start with like eight minutes a day because of course the studies show that you can literally impact your brain in eight minutes. We lead people through this attunement meditation process, which starts off with allowing anything that comes up to just be without judgment. And then we start to tune into what would it feel like if there was a loving presence that said it was okay. That said, you know what, yeah, you are feeling like everyone's taking advantage of you. I'm so sorry you're going through that. What if that compassionate presence was just saying, I see that and I'm here for you.

Instead of that inner critic.

Exactly. And again, you might still be in the, well, this isn't fair, that's okay, but if you can invite compassion in, little by little you'll start to feel that compassion towards yourself. And as we tune into the compassion, that is typically when people are willing to let go of a little of the intense ego struggle of this should be my way or this shouldn't be happening. And it's like, well, what if we opened up our mind and said, okay, whatever's best, let me be guided by that.

As Dr. Hyman regularly says, our body is the smartest doctor in the room. In order to hear what it is telling us, we have to take time to meditate, reflect, and practice self-love. These tools are at our disposal any time of day. We just need to utilize them. If you enjoyed this mini episode, please consider sharing it with a friend. Thanks for tuning in!