Long Covid - What is it and How to Break Free with Amber Walker | Ep. 119

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Holistic Inner Balance Podcast. I am one of your hosts. I'm Dr. Nicole.

And I'm Hadlee of Happy Healthy with Hadlee.

And if you struggle with symptoms in your immune system, it's a type of anxiety that we call immune system anxiety. This is absolutely a must-listen-to, must-watch podcast episode because we are having a conversation with Amber Walker. And I discovered her reading her book, and it's called Mast Cells United: A Holistic Approach to Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. And she is an absolute expert in terms of mast cells, COVID, all things immune system related. And then that juxtaposition between what's happening in our immune system. Yeah. And what's happening in our emotional well-being and our brains. And so this is going to be a great conversation, and you can learn about her by clicking on her links in the bio. So be sure to follow her on her Instagram, and she has a bunch of offerings that she'll tell us more about if you want to learn more. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about her. She is trained as a PT and a DPT. It's a physical therapist And she's passionate about public health, chronic illness, patient community. And she at one point was completely sidelined by mast cell activation syndrome. And she has been on a healing adventure, a healing journey, and has regained the ability to return to her career activities, her outdoor adventures. And she's done that thanks to the help of a comprehensive medical team, naturopathic treatment. And she is an absolute advocate. She has all sorts of wisdom on her social media. And so definitely check out her stuff. And I hope you really enjoy this conversation because I know that Hadlee and I have sure been looking forward to it.

I'm so excited for you guys to hear about this. I know that you're going to get so much out of it.

Awesome. All right, well, let's jump into the interview.

Let's do it.

So we're going to talk today about long haul COVID and what it is and healing from it. And you have a pretty powerful story. So I'm curious if we can just jump into what long-haul COVID is, especially for those who are a little bit newer to this topic. Do you mind sharing that?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, essentially long-haul COVID is defined in the literature and the research as either developing symptoms or continuing to have symptoms 3 months after the initial viral symptoms happen. So 3 months later, and then typically they persist for at least 2 months after that point. So 2 months or longer of having what we would call chronic or long haulers, long COVID. There's so many names that we will use for this. Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 is a lot of the terminology in the literature. But I think for today we could just keep using long COVID. It's easiest.

Yes.

And it is extremely common. It is extremely common. In fact, a lot of the research, there's different guesstimates on this, but I believe 1 in every 5 people, 6 months after having COVID, will have that, meet that criteria for the definition of long COVID. And then when you look at people a year out, I believe it's like 10% or 1 in every 10 people will also still be experiencing those symptoms. So—

Wow.

A global, If we look at kind of this, the last several years and what's gone on, that's a really big deal.

Yeah, that's significant. And there's a, I imagine, a spectrum of symptoms. What are they kind of encompassing when they're looking at that and saying, oh, okay, well, this is diagnostic?

Well, I think the top ones in the literature tend to revolve around fatigue. Shortness of breath comes up a lot in the studies. Sleep issues come up a lot. neurological symptoms are very, very common. There are a lot of patients who end up developing dysautonomia, or a lot of times they're diagnosed with something called POTS, which is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. So that's something that commonly goes hand in hand, although I don't believe that's an official part of the diagnostic criteria. There are a lot of conditions that tend to overlap, and once people discover that they are having long COVID symptoms, they often get diagnosed with a bunch of other things like mast cell activation syndrome, for example, or they might find that they're having more issues with hypermobility or hypermobility spectrum disorders or something like hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, something like that. Also very common. So once you kind of start to go down, it can be a bit of a rabbit hole because then a lot of times there's a lot of other labels or diagnoses that get kind of tacked onto that with it.

Yeah, I'm kind of envisioning like a pile of different things that now has Had kerosene and fire put onto it. So you may have a tendency towards, or maybe a genetic predisposition towards something, but then you had that epigenetic shift that caused some of maybe these latent kind of things to start to express themselves.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of patients, when you start to pry a little bit on the history, at first they're like, I don't know, I was pretty healthy, I was doing pretty good. And then this happened. this was, this was the big event. But when you start to talk and be a little bit of a detective about it, it turns out if you go back and look at the timeline, generally these patients did have some things that happened maybe in their youth, maybe when they were teenagers, maybe in their 20s, 30s, depending how old they are. And this was kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back for them. But a lot of these patients do have a lot of historical signs and clues if you really start to be a detective about it. And that's where it's really important to be thorough. A lot of times our conventional system doesn't give us enough time in a visit to really go deep on this stuff to uncover these clues. But I think that's huge with these patients is starting out by getting a really good history, having a nice thorough initial session to kind of collect some clues.

Yeah, I refer to those as like keystone events. If you like take your timeline and, you know, for those who are listening to this conversation and maybe you haven't had a doctor or a clinician who does that deeper digging, is you can do that on your own by mapping out your life on a timeline and then writing down moments or events or illnesses or circumstances or triggers or traumas or whatever it is, anything that sticks out that, that could have changed either the way that you had to exist in your family or your body or your culture or your environment, anything that was noticeable. And starting there can be game-changing. And oftentimes I've done that where I, I'll just bring that to my own doctor and be like, look, this is kind of the timeline that I see here. Hadlee, I sense that you're resonating with this.

That's so good because I've, like, you know, gone to doctors and, like, told them all of the things. But I love having that map to just be like, here you go. Here's all of the things that I can think of. And then they don't have to spend as much time trying to be like, okay, so then when did this happen? And when did that happen? And yeah, that's great. I love that idea.

Amber, when you're— Sometimes too, there's, there's just so many procedures, things that people have done, surgeries that they might not necessarily connect dots with until they start to actually map that out on paper and go, oh yeah, I had that shoulder replaced on this date, or oh, I had that root canal here, or whatever it might be. And then that ends up for a lot of people being a part of the picture. I also see a lot of individuals who've had breast implantation done or You know, how many people have had wisdom teeth removed?

Just going to say that.

Yeah, right.

Like, like, yeah. Oh yeah, I had this too.

Not just Mercury.

It's so minor.

Yeah.

Because it's like, oh, it's a lot

deeper.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. So it is kind of a— I don't know if I'd call it a fun exercise, but I think it's an important exercise to look at the timeline and kind of zoom out a little bit and really go back to Infancy even, or even conception, preconception times. And looking at family line a little bit can be helpful too.

And during pregnancy, what was going on during that as well? Yeah, absolutely.

And vaccine schedules. I know that a lot has changed from when I received majority of my vaccines in the '80s versus what people are receiving today in the standard vaccine protocol. Looking at that, especially because we're talking about the immune system and you're giving an immune system something that it has to respond to, even if it isn't fully developed. And so what are, what are the effects of that? And so having a conversation about how you may respond could be an important part of what do you do to treat it?

Exactly. Exactly.

So what comes next? So you have a client, they come to you, you do that deep dive, you're, you're kind of identifying some of those keystone moments, maybe some of those root causes. What do you do next?

Yeah. Well, this has kind of evolved over time. I, I thought maybe I could take you guys along with one of the first patients who came down to Mexico for a week-long retreat here and what we did with her because she had a pretty powerful response. And I kind of built my foundation or my model for working with Long COVID based on that experience. But, you know, backing up, I would say I, I started more telehealth with people. In fact, as luck would have it, the very first day that I opened my practice, focusing more on functional natural medicine, nutrition, holistic wellness. It was literally the— it was April 1st, 2020, and like the pandemic was just starting. And I actually came down with COVID symptoms that very day. Probably not coincidental, but at the time I thought it was. And I ended up getting myself quite sick, actually. I had, I think, fevers for maybe 10 weeks, and then I had about 10 months of long COVID symptoms. And so it was at a time in my life where I just felt like I'd healed from a lot of different things that I had been labeled with and had really figured out things for myself and was excited to share tools with my patients in this new practice. And it was kind of like, oh, whoa. Well, I saw it as an opportunity to really dive deep within myself and figure out as a sort of a guinea pig for myself, well, what appears to be the root mechanisms or root issues here going on for me? And maybe that will help if any of my patients have this happen too. So I kind of started playing with ideas based on my own experience. And then, oh, for maybe a couple years after that, I was working a lot in telehealth and starting to figure out trends and noticing a lot of clues and things that were helping people. And then about a year ago, I started having patients come down to Mexico, and they would come down for a week, and it would be just a 5-day intensive where we'd really focus on a lot of different themes. And that's when I really saw people's healing accelerate in terms of long COVID, because I think when you work in telehealth, It depends on the situation, the circumstance, and how often people are able to meet. But sometimes you're meeting once a month, or maybe if you're lucky, twice a month. But sometimes it gets spread out even longer, 2, 3 months between sessions. And so it's really hard to cover a lot of these important foundations in that manner. So I think it is helpful to commit as a patient to really focusing on this for a certain timeframe and going a little bit deeper and really devoting more attention to it to see the The quicker results are the better results with the approach. But I'd love to share with you just sort of what— this patient gave me permission to share a little bit about her case publicly. So maybe a little bit about what I did with her and kind of the foundations with her that seem to really carry over into other cases.

Yes, please. We love that. We love the case studies and the story. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I think it can be pretty powerful. And all in all, when I looked back at kind of what we had done that week and how we put it together, we had done 20 different things, 20 kind of categories of work. I mean, it was an intense week. It was several sessions a day together, that sort of thing. And basically, we started working together on Monday, and on Friday she left and she said, I no longer have long COVID. Like, I don't have the symptoms. And that really blew me away. I mean, it blew my mind because I believe in all this stuff. Absolutely. I wouldn't be doing it. But we hadn't worked on detox. She didn't start supplements. She'd only been there 5 days. We hadn't done anything. physical focused. The bulk of what we had done, the majority of what we had done was all energetic, emotional, spiritual, nervous system based. So that was, that really stood out to me. I thought, wow, we're really onto something here. This is so fascinating. So essentially I consider long COVID to be more of a nervous system issue with like a side of toxic burden, if you will. Mm-hmm. But what we did after we got her through her history and some detective work is we started to look at how we were talking about long COVID, just even how— what language we were using around it. I think that there is so much fear about this topic and with the lockdowns, with everything that happened. And I think part of this fear depends on where you were during the pandemic, what culture you were in. I think that played a bit of a role. I definitely see some differences in Mexico where I live now compared to where I spent the majority of the pandemic, which was the United States. But I think that if we can take away that fear and kind of take away the power of this label of a virus, that can be really empowering for people. So that was something that right away, day one, session one, we started talking about her understanding of the virus and this virus, and we've started to reframe it as this perfect storm of inflammation in her body. And that moment was a tipping point for her, but that her body had all the tools it needed to heal from this and reverse this completely. So I think that's an important pause that we don't always do as we kind of run off to the like, are we going to order tests or labs? We're going to do this and that, but kind of slowing down for a moment and really taking some time to reflect on that, that piece is important.

I love that because you're giving this beautiful Love and honoring back to the body. I feel like oftentimes we look at our bodies like they're broken, that it's failing me or it's attacking me or it's out to get me. And what I love about what you're talking about is you're taking away the power of the label of it's a virus, but rather it's a perfect storm of inflammation in the body, the nervous system issue with the site of toxic burden. I love that because it's so honoring.

And I think it's empowering. And this process is all about empowered surrender, if you will. You know, it's, it's, it's definitely important to, to be an advocate for yourself and to be validated and to be seen and heard. And that's all part of the process too, you know, when we're working with, with our patients, but At the same time, to recognize that there, there is an explanation for this. We know what it is, we know what to do with it, and it's going to resolve. And I think a lot of times the narrative is like, oh, you're going to need to manage this, you're going to have to live with this.

For the rest of your life.

This— it's like this learned helplessness kind of concept, or, uh, well, some of this is genetic. So, you know, I mean, well, I don't agree that some things have a genetic component. I, I don't disagree with that concept, but I I don't think— I think that we put too much emphasis on that versus, like you were saying, the epigenetic piece. So it's— it can be really empowering to just kind of help people zoom out and step away and realize that they're not— they're not crazy. They're not losing it. This is very real, very, very real what's going on in your physical body. But there's also reason to have great hope and to know that you will not only get better, but I want to see you thrive. I want to see you get— take your health to a level where you never imagined it was possible that you could feel that good in your body. You know, this is sort of like an opportunity if we kind of reframe it like that. This is an opportunity for us to not only heal kind of the surface of these symptoms that are signaling things, but if we can go a little bit deeper even and shift your body and your brain's understanding of what it feels like to thrive, what that vitality can feel like. I want you to feel better than you did when you were in your 20s kind of thing. I mean, that's— those are the kind of conversations I think are really important to have with people. And at first it could be a little off-putting or triggering. I've been there as a patient, you know, had several decades of inflammation. And at first it was a little scary to look at like long-term dreams and goals again, to think that I could get there again. It was almost like triggering like that protective part of that autonomic response was like, oh, I don't think I can go there, you know. And so, but I think it is really important to start right away with that kind of verbiage and language and really helping people reframe the way they're talking about it, the way they're talking about their symptoms, the words they're using to describe it. A lot of patients talk with such finality about things, and whether they're saying my long COVID, my mast cell activation syndrome, my POTS, you know, that piece, but Yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of things that are helpful when we're looking at how our body hears our thoughts and what our body does with that and how important it is whether we're saying something out loud, maybe we're describing our condition to friends and family. I always talk with patients about like, if somebody asks, how are you? A simple question like, how are you? How do you respond to that? How have you responded in the past? And that's okay, but let's learn from that and maybe let's shift the way the verbiage you're using to describe that. And maybe instead of like my long COVID this, you could say, Up until now, I've really had a lot of inflammation in my body, but I'm on the path to healing. I'm on the path to recovery. I think that can be really, again, that empowering piece of it.

Well, and I love how, because you had mentioned before that people will say, like, oh, yeah, I was healthy up until this point. I was doing fine. But then you're like, well, actually, there were things that were happening before. And I love how you said that. I want you to feel better than you felt before you got this, before this happened. And sometimes it's hard because people, it's been so long since they felt that way, or maybe they haven't felt like they have thrived in their bodies. But it is totally possible, which that's the exciting thing. And I love that that's part of your message because it is so empowering. It's so hopeful.

Yeah, the science says so. We can prove it. And I think that the language— this is, this is really in alignment, Amber. I love, I love this. I'm like, my heart is like just bouncing up and down with joy. Is this is the language that I use in Panic Proof, is that this is an explanation. There is an explanation for this, and it's going to resolve. Because I, in the title of my book, I talk about ending anxiety forever. And then the first thing that people say is You can't end anxiety. You can't not be anxious. And I'm like, well, what's the difference between like winning the lottery and what happens in your body and being panicky and anxious? Is the chemicals, the pathways, the signals are the same. The difference is context and the meaning that we give to it. And you're talking about a major paradigm shift in how we interpret the data from our bodies and what we do with it.

Mm-hmm.

And I, I really wanna emphasize that point because people listening to this conversation may say, oh, this is fantastical. This isn't really real. But the truth is that the science backs up what you're describing and what you're saying. I just think the medical profession has been really hammering it hard. Like, you can't say cure, you can't say resolve, you can't say anything like that. You just have to say symptom relief. But the problem aren't the symptoms. The symptoms are clues as to how to solve the problem. So I really love that you said that, and I wanna make sure that that's Thank

you. Yeah, I think even I run across a lot of patients who use the word remission a lot for these different conditions or putting long COVID into remission. No, that's not what we're doing. We're doing radical healing and transformation here, you know? And I think that's, that's so, so important. And it's hard. It's hard in the culture a lot of us are surrounded in. It's hard when we look at the media, and it's hard when we look at even just social media. I always encourage patients to be really selective about how they're engaging with some of those things out there, because I think that sometimes we can get fed messaging that kind of perpetuates this process, and that's not always helpful. So sometimes social media fasting or kind of stepping back a little bit from it can be helpful as well.

I

was just talking about this with my clients actually this past week about not only you know, not only taking like breaks from social media, but also being so clear about who you follow and what you follow.

Mm-hmm.

And like, and something that I realized is whenever I, whenever I feel like activated by a post, I will, unless not always, but a lot of the time, I will just automatically unfollow that person because it's like I can engage with— it's not that I'm like trying to bypass the information, but like, I can engage with that information from a place of nervous system regulation rather than from a place of like triggering while I'm scrolling through social media. And I think that that is so important. So like taking a step back and being like, okay, when I'm on here and I like get like really mad about something or really activated about something, like, is that actually serving me? Like, that's not being informed. That's just dysregulating ourselves.

Exactly.

Yeah,

exactly. Yeah, it takes a lot of intention. And I think a lot of times— I know you guys have talked about in other episodes the autonomic nervous system pathways and fight or flight versus freeze and what's going on. But a lot of times when we're in that chronic freeze, which tends to happen when our body is really inflamed or when we've had traumatic life events, it's— we've— we kind of fall into that pattern. And that's where the doom scrolling can happen and some of these other things where we consciously might know, like, maybe this isn't the best way for me to spend the next X amount of minutes or hours, but it can still happen. So I think it does take setting some strong boundaries with yourself and asking yourself some really hard questions. And that's something that part of the emotional healing journaling and work I have a lot of patients do. Some of the hard questions are things like, in what ways do I benefit from having this label? this identity? In what ways is this actually serving me or making me feel safe? In what ways am I self-sabotaging myself from reaching that, that, you know, ultimate level of health? You know, I think there's, there's a lot of hard conversations in all this work, and it's not stuff that happens overnight, but it's, it's all important. And I actually put together— I have a little journal I just put out that has about 50, I want to say 53, 54 questions kind of along these lines that I work with patients on, and they're questions that I also bring into my— when patients come down to Mexico and we work on this concept of healing from long COVID. So I think we could talk a whole episode just on that piece and kind of the emotional healing work that can be useful and coupled with some limbic system strategies. But I'll try to not ramble too much longer on that. Why don't we talk about maybe the next thing that I tend to do when we're working on healing from long COVID with patients. I was curious if you guys have ever heard of cranio-biotic technique.

I haven't heard it termed cranio-biotic. Are you— is this different than nasal cranial release?

Yes, it is different. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about it. This is a technique developed by Dr. Tony Smith, who's based out of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. And he's brilliant. But basically, he worked with a few other doctors to figure out these different neurovascular reflex points that were correlated to different types of health stressors in the body. These points are in different locations around the chest, the trunk, some of them are in the abdomen, the neck, throat, face, head area. Basically, it's using autonomic response testing or muscle testing and then applying pressure on one of these points to determine if it appears that that patient is having that particular health stressor as something that's stirring up this pot of inflammation. Because like we said, it's not just one thing, it's this perfect storm of inflammation that's going on here. With this technique, what I do usually if I'm working with people in person, we'll start session 1, we'll do some screening with this. We're trying to bring up the lights on the autonomic nervous system response and get some clarity, almost like a sense of triage of what are the types of things that appear to be stressing out the physical body right now. That's part 1. That could be something like SIBO, C. diff, chronic strep or staph infection, parasites, Candida, H. pylori. There's viral points. There's points for things like toxoplasmosis. There's a whole— I think there's 25 or 26 points that we screen. There's mold points. Trying to triage and figure out, okay, if we do all these labs, you're probably going to come back having dozens of things show up on the labs, most likely, as most of us are in this imperfect toxic world we live in, right? So what— it's one thing to know if you've had exposure to those things or if those things might be present, but it's another thing to know what is your body trying to signal us is really the biggest root issue here, the biggest, you know, group of root issues. So once you figure that out, then you can actually figure out which organs— there's a way to test the organs and see where these stressors might be more concentrated in that particular patient's body. And then you can use the negative charge of the back of the hand over certain points on the head to signal the body while you're putting pressure on the stressor point and the organ point. So you need 3 hands. This is where the practitioner can come in to help signal the autonomic nervous system to clear that. Hmm. So right off the bat, I see that to be really helpful for taking down some of the noise. A lot of times it feels like, at least in these cases that are really complex, that The autonomic nervous system is like, I know this and this and this is going on, but I don't know what to do with all of this. It's just like, ah, what do I do? And so it's kind of helping the system go, okay, focus on this here, focus on this here. Let's like kind of calm down this activation pattern and help your system clear it naturally. And then if at the end of the week we do a few sessions of that and things haven't cleared on their own through that signaling, then we can go into our functional medicine tools for that. Then we can go into some other work for that. So that's kind of the— The first part of the process that I like to work on in terms of helping people with the long COVID piece. And it's a pretty powerful tool. I mean, I, I first had it as a patient and then was wowed. And of course had to go to their, you know, certification programs and all that and learn how to do it myself. But as, as we often do as practitioners.

Absolutely. Yeah. We have a life-changing experience and we're like, I need to know all the things. Yes. And you call that Autonomic nervous system recalibration or autonomic nervous system noise reduction. What would the name of that step be? Because I love steps.

Well, I think that's all part of cranio-biotic technique. So that technique itself is kind of a several-part process. You're first identifying the what, then you're identifying the where in the body, and then you're doing the signaling as a way to help the autonomic nervous system sort of recalibrate to that.

Beautiful. Yeah.

So that's all under that umbrella that Dr. Tony Smith developed, that technique.

Awesome.

So that's something I love to utilize with people, and there are ways to utilize that via telehealth as well, which is pretty cool. And then we generally next will go into more of like a customized nervous system program when people are here. So that tends to look— well, it's always customized, but It's generally using principles to help people understand the different aspects of something like polyvagal theory. So kind of what type of state is my nervous system in, in a given moment? And that concept of neuroception and figuring out, am I more in fight or flight? Am I at the top and kind of that ventral vagal calm, happy place? Or am I more in that dorsal vagal pathway of freeze? And so we'll do some work on just identifying what that looks like for patients. Identifying their patterns and their tendencies, identifying what tools they already have in their toolbox, because a lot of times patients are already self-soothing in really awesome ways. So it's not like reinventing the wheel necessarily. It's just kind of bringing up some awareness about this and how to use it in a practical way. There's so many good programs out there for the nervous system that people will come and they say, I tried DNRS or the Gupta program or Primal Trust. A lot of people have been using that one lately, or there's so many out there. But I think the only downside to some of the way those programs are developed is that they aren't always customized. And so if you're following along on videos at home, maybe breathwork is actually really triggering for you. Maybe it triggers a trauma response or something, or, you know, not every exercise or intervention for the nervous system is helpful for every single person. And so this is where we get to be creative. We get to have fun with it. We get to play with things and figure out what's the most helpful for somebody. And in this work, I The other thing I find really important is making it small and bite-sized, because a lot of these programs are like, watch these videos and do these practices and meditations for an hour a day, which if you have time, that's amazing. Right. Most of the people I work with are busy parents or they have a lot of other things going on, and it's just, uh, and it can be very taxing and draining. So trying to find like, what are 2 or 3 things that we can do that are going to help soothe your autonomic nervous system in like 20 to 30 seconds, maybe 2 minutes tops. Talking like really tiny things you can sprinkle into your day. And these might be top-down or bottom-up. I know you guys have talked about that in previous episodes too, where sometimes they are things that— I would say the majority of patients I work with tend to do a little bit better with bottom-up. So a little bit more somatic-type practices, whether that's with light touch. That tends to be the first place we'll start. But that's a big part of the work, I think, is just helping show the autonomic nervous system that it's safe in subconscious ways, kind of shifting where the system is, is kind of sitting is very, very important. So that would be kind of the next part of the work. What do you— I'm curious your thoughts on that and how you guys integrate that too.

I love that. I mean, that's— I'm, I'm all about the physical touch, like just bringing ourselves into our present moment by just being like, oh yeah, I'm here. Here's my body. I'm here right now. I'm not in the future. I'm not in the past. I'm just here. And I find that touch is the most tangible way to do that. Breath is great too, but it is slightly less tangible than touch. So yeah, I love that you said that. That's wonderful. Yeah, the bottom-up approach. We're all about it.

I had a practitioner once who talked about with the breath that the movement of the belly is more important than the breath itself.

Yes.

Wow.

And so placing your hand on your belly and just practicing pressing it out and allowing it to draw back in and pressing it out. And it could be that you have vagus nerve activation, which is part of that you know, moving the belly in and out, but also you're feeling your root, you're feeling your core, and you're feeling the, the motion of that. As opposed to lots of us, we like try to breathe and then we get air hunger, or it's like up in our shoulders. We're only using the top percentage of our lungs and we get hung up on it, or we hyperventilate. And so she's like, don't worry about where the breath is actually going. Just pay attention to the motion of the belly. And I really like that because I tend to overanalyze the breath and feeling like I'm doing it wrong and get hung up on it. And how many counts was that? I need to hold longer. No, just feel your belly, your belly breathe.

Same. And then I get more like nervous and anxious and I'm like, this is actually dysregulating me further.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So true. I love that. Oh my gosh. My, one of my big mottos is less is more.

Yes.

You know, I think sometimes we just complicate so many things about healing, and the simpler sometimes the better for a lot of people. And even patients— there's a lot of patients who don't prefer a light touch or breathwork, or their systems aren't ready to go there yet. And, and there's definitely some value, I think, in also including things like practices for energetic boundaries. A lot of patients tend to feel like they're empathic in nature, and so They tend to take on a lot of emotions and things in the world around them, and that can play into this kind of these patterns that they have with their autonomic nervous system big time. So sometimes some of the things that we start with are very, very simple energetic boundary practices that seem to really be powerful for people. So it's kind of— I love this work because no 2 cases are alike. Everybody's different. So we get to kind of have fun and explore. And of course, If people are in Mexico, we've got the ocean right there and the sound of the waves. And obviously it's a nice environment to do nervous system work in the first place. So that can be helpful. Yeah, totally. But the other thing I love is sound healing. And that's something that I'll usually integrate with people if they're open to that or if they haven't tried it particularly. I mean, I think like Tibetan bowls, there's so many ways to use sound for healing. But what I tend to do with patients who have had long COVID symptoms is we'll use something like the Safe and Sound protocol. Which is something we start together, or we might start via telehealth, and then they kind of go on their own and do it. It's a program that has 5 hours of music, and there's actually 3 different kind of categories depending on what your experience is with music and where you want to start. But basically, it's specially filtered music. This is a program that was developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, if you've heard of him, and he's brilliant. But he's—

Yes.

Put together this program quite a while ago, originally for kids. And then they started doing more research on it. There's tons of peer-reviewed research behind this program, which is great, but they've started researching it in adults and all sorts of different conditions. Even, I think they just did a study on EDS last year about this. So a lot of different types of people who would benefit from this type of music, but basically it has specially programmed frequencies and tones in the music that impact our middle ear muscles, like our tensor tympani or our stapedius, those teeny tiny middle ear muscles. And it's sort of like strength training for them, and it helps them put a certain amount of tension on the eardrum and recalibrate things as part of our social engagement system. So we have these 5 cranial nerves that go from the brain to different parts of the body. And by working on these different nerves, it's not just the vagus nerve, which is very important, of course, but there's some other nerves that are also really important to be mindful of. And we can use some tools therapeutically to help the system shift and recalibrate. It's almost like the reset buttons. Instead of being in tune with background noise or scanning our environment like, oh, got to keep myself safe, what was that noise, is somebody going to sneak up on me, which is all subconscious programming, right, that happens after trauma, this music helps our system recalibrate what our ears are scanning the environment for so that we can rest more in that ventral vagal place of peace, connection, calmness, etc. So I found that to be really powerful with people as well, and a great intervention for patients who have had symptoms after having COVID.

There's a lot of research about the vestibular ocular reflex and how that plays a huge role in trauma and PTSD. And so there's this really interesting practitioner, his name is Adam Petty, and he lives in Phoenix, and he's been trained in EMDR, and he's doing research on the relationship between music The VOR, which is interesting because it's in the inner ear, as you're talking about, and how attenuation of that can actually heal trauma much more quickly and effectively than just standard EMDR with the bilateral dual awareness processing. So I'm so interested in what you're talking about, is, is integrating that Safe and Sound protocol with what we're seeing in the literature about the Vestibulo-ocular reflex.

Wow. Yeah, that's fascinating. I just wrote that down. I'm going to do a deep dive on that after we get off this call.

Oh, I'm writing all of this stuff down. I can't wait to nerd out on all of this.

Thank you for sharing. That's, that's amazing. Yeah, I think it's, it's all connected. It's, it's pretty wild once you start to dive deep. You never go back. You just keep going deeper.

Yeah. I'd love to connect you with Adam. We need to get him on this podcast. He's a brilliant, engaging, wonderful person. So I'll make an introduction.

That would be fabulous. Thank you so much.

That's great. So with your clients, so you've given us 3 steps, the emotional healing. You talked about the cranio-biotic strategies, the customized nervous system with polyvagal neuroception. Are you in ventral vagal, dorsal vagal? Different strategies and approaches, music, touch. And so I want to circle back to your client that you were introducing us to at the beginning and make sure that we're inserting her into this because I'm so— you have me like on the edge of my seat excited to hear her story too.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, she came over. She lives in Europe and she is a mother and a very successful businesswoman. And basically had been through some pretty big health stuff a couple of years prior to coming down with COVID and long COVID symptoms. So she had had breast cancer and had been through treatment for that and surgeries and quite a lot for that not that long ago. And so when she showed up, she hadn't really tapped into a lot of nervous system work yet. And I think that those— sometimes those are the people that tend to have like these Like, I feel better in a week kind of experiences is when they haven't explored, or maybe they're more open-minded to doing that kind of work. She hadn't explored the physical kind of more natural medicine side of things either. So we got to really explore both together, which was just a lot of fun. And she was very open, receptive, and all the homework I gave her that week. I mean, even though we're spending a lot of time together each day, she was very, very compliant and excited to explore all of these things. things. But she had never really looked at the nervous system that way. And so, we found some exercises that worked really well for her. And in her case, it was more like touch-based that she did really well with. She had never heard of the SSP or these music-type programs. And so, we got her started on the SSP, but not until the— I think it was the last day, kind of like prepared her to start it because it's not just here, take this music and go like magic wand. It's let's learn how to use this and let's learn how to set yourself up with some practices. You know, to get yourself ready for this and to know how to use it, you know, to see the most optimal results. So that was something we kind of sprinkled in at the very end for her. We worked on the energetic boundary piece like we talked about, but we also worked on a lot of scar stuff. She had some scars from her breast cancer surgeries and some other scars from different life events. And so we were able to get in and do some hands-on work on that in conjunction with some emotional healing and emotional release work that I know she said at the end that was really powerful for her. And she felt that was helpful. We can store a lot of emotions in our scars, just like we can store them in our organs or our spine or all sorts of places. And so that part for her, I think, was, was a pretty big impact in terms of helping her system feel more grounded and safer too. And kind of processing some of the things that she had maybe compensated for up to that point by just diving into work and, and being a parent in this Really successful career. She was also a very successful athlete, triathlete. So she was kind of doing all the things, but hadn't really let herself slow down up to that point yet. So we did a lot of work on just like letting herself be still and even looking at her training program and how to back off a little bit, because she was, I think, overtraining as well, uh, as a coping tool. And so trying to find the right amount of physical activity to do, the right amount of movement was really big in that particular case. We also explored some work with the tuning fork called the Sonic Slider. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but—

Yeah.

It's a tuning fork that vibrates at the Schumann resonance, which is a particular resonance that I find to be one of the gentler, more comfortable ones for patients as we're starting to kind of do work, especially if people have had a trauma history. So we did some work with the tuning fork. We did some work on limiting beliefs and using the tuning fork in conjunction with affirmations and statements that we're helping kind of reshift some of those limiting beliefs and giving the body a bottom-up way to work on that piece. Because I think affirmations are awesome, but a lot of times we just say them out loud, but we don't have anything cross-body going on or we don't have anything somatic going on. So to rewire the brain, it's a little harder that way. But I always have people do, you know, cross-body things with tuning fork. I've got all sorts of things I've made up over the years. So I can't really give you a website link to that one. It's just all floating around my brain somewhere.

But got to buy your book.

Happy to share it. Yeah. But there's a lot of different ways you can play with special tuning forks and that kind of piece. I think with some of that limbic rewiring can be really powerful for people. Yeah.

And when you say cross-body, that's like the bilateral stimulation that we've discussed before too. So if anyone wants to go back and listen to some of the strategies we have, we have some strategies. Past podcast episodes. Yes. Amazing. Yeah. We don't have the tuning forks with it though. So that is— that's super cool that you use the sound with the crossbody stuff. That's really cool.

And even just hearing the tuning fork vibrate, if patients aren't comfortable putting it on their body anywhere yet, just like putting it to the side of an ear. There's so many ways you can really play with that because it's literally

vibrating your body.

Yeah, and affecting the energy field around you.

Yeah.

So you can also do some work with drawing toxins out or drawing emotions out in the way you use the tuning forks. There's some really great videos with, um, I believe her name is Eileen. She's the creator of the Sonic Slider, and so you can find her website, and she has a ton of YouTube videos and trainings and tutorials on how to use that particular tuning fork. But, you know, there's so many wonderful ones out there, so I think that the— I don't know how much of it is an exact tuning fork versus just using it in conjunction with other practices and in a way that feels safe, in a way that feels grounding, and in the right dosage. You can overdo any of this stuff, right? Mm-hmm. Just like trauma work, you can't peel it all open at once. You got to go like step by step, peel that onion layer back a little bit. So that's something that's important to keep in mind. And I think we were just lucky with this patient case that we found the right the right speed and the right quantity and dosage. That week she was here to dive into all this stuff. And then we also did some work on physical components. I do have training in functional medicine, so we definitely talked about if we were going to order any labs, if we were going to just rely on the muscle testing. She ended up doing a visual contrast sensitivity test, which is an online visual test to look at whether biotoxins are impacting the optic nerve in the eye. So biotoxins, that gives us a clue about things like mold. 80% of the time, if that test is positive, then we're a little more suspicious that mold toxins might be impacting at least the nerve function in the body. And so interestingly, since COVID happened, that test also has a little COVID screening at the end of it, some questions, and they believe that long COVID cases tend to fail that test pretty consistently. And I've also seen that pattern, but to me it's not really a diagnostic test as much as it is Like a little marker for us to track progress over time if we're going to work on some of the physical detox pieces. So some of these functional medicine labs out there are wonderful, but you could drop quite about a grand on just getting some baseline tests with people. If we can use our intuition to maybe get a couple baseline clues, sometimes that's the most powerful for people. I would say though, if patients have never explored the impact of toxins, Or looked into that, it can be really helpful to see that on paper and to have some clarity on what exactly the system is wanting the most support for. So I'm not against that testing, but I let everybody decide for themselves. Yeah. So in this case, let's see, I believe she didn't want to do any of the labs, but she did the VCS test. We did the muscle testing, and then we came up with a plan for her focusing on detox and drainage support. We talked about topics. We just sprinkled in little conversations throughout our week about clean foundations like clean air and water and food and stress management because she had a lot of stress with her job, sleep hygiene, bowel support, making sure she wasn't getting constipated, just toxin avoidance principles, those sort of things. We talked about the environmental piece. She was suspicious there was mold in her place that she was living in, but she had never really looked into that. And so part of my question with this case was, okay, well, she just flew across the world to do this thing. She left her house. If she was in mold at home and now she's maybe not in mold in this week in Mexico, maybe that's why she feels so much better this week. But it was interesting because in this particular case anyway, she flew back home, had them look into mold. There was some found, but she didn't really remediate. That process drew out and she continued to get better and better. I mean, she felt like she no longer had COVID when she got home. And then she was like, I didn't know I could feel this good. I didn't know I could perform this well as an athlete. things kept getting higher and higher after she got home in spite of the mold in her house. That was really interesting to me. That's not always the case. Wow. Not always the case. I do think that the autonomic nervous system is a very powerful player and those limbic pathways are very powerful players in terms of what's going on when people are in mold. It's a very complex dynamic relationship. There are some parallels I've seen Every single person I've worked with that's considered themselves to have had long COVID has had either historical mold exposure or active current mold exposure. And usually they were in some kind of a toxic burden load when they developed symptoms of long COVID, whether it was radon. Sometimes it's radon with especially a lot of my Colorado patients. Mold is very, very common. But I would say I never want to have mold goggles on, but I do think it is an important topic with these patients. to work on. And for some patients, you know, it's like, well, what came first, the chicken or the egg kind of thing. But I do think there is something unique to things like mold or just elevated toxins in general and how that impacts our autonomic nervous system and our limbic system and might throw us into some of these patterns that then result in these chronic symptoms. So I do think that is a relevant topic for most of the patients with long COVID. It's one that you don't— it's a slippery slope. I mean, you don't want to do too deep of a rabbit hole and become super hypervigilant and Mold, I've lived through it. I've been there. It's not a light or easy topic. It's not a fun topic at all. But I do think that it is important to explore gently and see if there's anything, any clues there that might be connected to the symptoms and the patient's health and their whole family's health for that matter.

When you've seen the VCS test showing up, and so you're suspecting there could be mold and it could be affecting the nervous system because you're expressing the That's looking at the ocular nerve. Is that what you said?

It's the optic nerve. Yeah.

You said the optic nerve. And so what do you feel like has been the most effective thing for you for helping that when there's mold in nervous system? Because a lot of people, they do all sorts of mold detoxes and it's just really sticky. It's just hard to get any sort of movement in that. What have you found?

That's such a good question. I think it depends on the extent of what's going on and what— if the exposure was historical, how much is happening. If I have somebody who's living in an 1800s home, historical building, and there's like black mold growing on the walls, it is really hard. It doesn't matter what they try for the nervous system. It doesn't matter what they try for detox supplements. It's pretty hard to move the needle on those ones when there's such a high inflammatory burden. But there's a continuum. There's some people who can still live in a little bit and heal and heal very well. I think that in some of these cases, what I found, there's different categories of subgroups. But I'd say some of these patients with that history of mold exposure or active mold exposure, there is also something going on with parasites that seems to Coincides. If there's any 2 root issues that I'm big on in the sense of helping these cases, I would say it's probably those 2 areas. If I'm going to spot treat anything, it's going to probably be mold and parasites because of just the clinical wow cases I'm seeing of working on those things and how people's lives tend to turn around when we work on that stuff. I do think that is important. For some of my stuck cases or patients that feel like they're stuck, I should say, that have tried it all. You know, they've tried all the parasite cleanses and all the detox protocols and all the detox work and all the autonomic nervous system programs. Sometimes what they need is something that's more emotional, spiritual. And so we'll do something like Mind Body Spirit Release, which is something that— Another wonderful program that I cannot take credit for that was developed by Tracy Southwick. And it's a way to help the body release subconscious imprints of emotions that have kind of piled up throughout our life and help the body clear those when it feels ready to bring them to the surface and clear them. So it uses a laser and we do some muscle testing as part of the process to figure out what specifically are the emotions. Is it emotions that are trapped in an organ or a body system? Is it emotions that are trapped in a scar or the spine? Is it connected to limiting beliefs, or maybe there's some emotional, um, emotional tension related to a person, like a relationship, or a physical place, or an event that happened. Um, there's so many different categories that we test as part of that technique. So I do find that that can really move, move the needle quite a bit in those patients that if they're open to it, and that, that's you know, a big question is if people are open to that type of work, it can be extremely powerful. I've seen amazing, amazing things with, you know, something that's not a one and done generally, like we'll peel back some layers, but we might work on the same intention or the same, same thing for a number of sessions before people start to see things really shift with that. In other cases though, people will like, we'll do an emotional clearing and the next day they'll release tons of parasites and gallstones for the first time. Like their body was finally able to just let go of that. stuff. So it's, it's another angle, another technique that I love to utilize. And in this case that we're talking about, this, this initial one that came to Mexico, we didn't use that in the week she was here. We have used it since she's returned home. But that is something that I do like to bring in, you know, for those cases, if people are open to that.

That's absolutely fascinating. And so Tracy Southwick, it's called the Mind Body Spirit program, you said?

It's MBSR, Mind Body Spirit Release.

Awesome. I haven't heard of that. This is so good. You're such a fountain of brilliance. This is so good.

Seriously, all of the, all of the resources. I'm so excited to dive into all of these things.

I have pages of notes. I've been like, yay.

Yeah, that's great. Well, I'm happy to bring awareness to this stuff because I think it's, it's so easy to spiral or to feel stuck or defeated or frustrated. And I've been there. And really, my biggest goal is a message of hope for people and to look a little bit outside of— think a little bit outside the box. Because I think that I've had an interesting journey as a practitioner. I was very mainstream. I was originally a doctor of physical therapy. It's very mainstream trained. Everything had to be evidence-based. And then I went into more of the functional medicine world and then kind of more holistic, natural nutrition, and then more into energy work. And so I've been lucky to explore a lot of these things over the years, and there's no blueprint, there's no protocol for this stuff. It really, really has to be customized to the person. But I do think that looking at all the angles and not just looking at the body or not just looking at the nervous system— like, some patients have done heavily one angle but not the other, you know. I think both is really important. Looking at our spiritual, mental, emotional health, as I know that you guys have so many amazing resources for that in your your episodes that you share, so, so important. So putting it all together is where I see the biggest, the biggest bang for the buck with these patients and just kind of helping them get back to feeling like they can play again, feeling like they can be creative again, feeling like they can be back in community again. Because for a lot of people, that was such a big thing with this pandemic was this and that, the fear around it. So Kind of coming out of that piece is really quite powerful for people as well. I have some patients I work with via telehealth that still have not left their homes since the pandemic started. And so, and they won't go to the mailbox kind of thing, like their, their systems are so traumatized from this. And so we start with little baby steps, like let's just stand outside the front door for 30 seconds today, and next week you're going to walk to the mailbox and back, and then in a couple weeks you're going to walk around the block. And the next month you're going to go to that outdoor concert. And then the next month you're going to go to that restaurant. Like, you know, kind of working people back into— with the right tools, of course, and the right strategies to keep themselves grounded. But realizing that this— how much this isolation impacted people and might be feeding into what's going on with these long COVID mechanisms.

I

love that you said that too, like with the right tools to keep them grounded doing that stuff, because I think a lot of times we think that, oh, we just need to get out of our comfort zone or whatever. And like, just take— and you even said like taking those baby steps. But throughout even the baby steps that we take, we also have to regulate our nervous systems to feel safe doing it so that we can then feel safe to take the next step. I love that you said that.

Yeah, yeah. It's not just push through and You know, get to the other side. It's meeting the system where it is and finding the right tools for that person in that moment and being gentle with ourselves and recognizing it's not a linear path and there's going to be bumps on the road. And that starting to look at our symptoms as signals— I know you guys have talked about that in past episodes too. So many things resonate with me, what you've already spoken about. But all of that is, is really, really important. So zooming out, I like to say, you know, I think sometimes we just— We get, whether it's our siloed nature of our healthcare system or just kind of zooming in on our symptoms or zooming in on certain things, we can sometimes lose sight of the simplest things that make the biggest difference. So that's a big piece. And the last thing I forgot to mention, I think, for this patient case was we also did a little bit of work on her spine. So, you know, being a physical therapist and having that background, there is a huge connection with the spine, especially C1, C2, C3, like the upper parts of the cervical spine in the neck. And the autonomic nervous system and what's going on there. So that can be a piece that I'll— if I'm working with somebody via telehealth, I'm going to refer them out. The craniosacral therapy is probably my favorite thing to refer out for because that tends to be the gentlest and the most profound for people as we're working on these other things. So that's probably my favorite thing to, to have people try.

Can you tell, can you tell our audience what that is for those of, those of us who, or those of them who haven't heard of it?

Yeah, I don't know if I can eloquently describe it. Um, I know it's It's working with a practitioner who's evaluating pulses and, and the flow of fluids and different things in the body and the alignment of your cranial bones to figure out if your alignment gets slightly off, that will completely impact things like cerebrospinal fluid flow, which is that fluid that bathes the brain. That'll impact our whole body, our whole system, or it might impact our vascular system and some of these other networks. So it's doing really soft, light touch. It's almost like barely there pressure. So it's nothing like chiropractic treatment or some of these other modalities that people have tried for their spine. It's very relaxing. I usually fall asleep on the table when I get it done. But sometimes it involves some pressure around the ribs or other parts of the skeleton as well. But usually the head and the cranial bones are kind of the foundation, I believe, for the technique. I'd love to get certified in it someday. It's been a really great tool for my own health, and a lot of my patients love it too.

That was a good explanation. That was brilliant.

That's a really good explanation. Yeah, I actually have one booked for 2 weeks from now, and I am so excited. Oh, nice. Yes.

Like when you get a massage, though, I hate when I fall asleep in it because I'm like, I want to know what she's doing. And then when I fall asleep, I'm like, shoot, I did it again. I didn't get to experience it. Yeah. She's like, fall asleep because your system is like getting the reset button through this. And I'm like, okay, that makes sense. But one of these days, maybe I'll stay awake through it.

I love it. Your science mind. I want to know. I want to know what you're doing.

Exactly. Exactly.

And so for those who are listening that feels like you've tried everything, I think that what's coming to mind is the image of a car. And in order for a car to run, you have to have good spark plugs and an alternator and tires and all sorts of things. And so sometimes maybe we change out our tires, but we need a new battery, and so the car doesn't go. And so we take those tires off. Well, that didn't work. And we put in a new battery. Well, we don't go because now we don't have tires. So then you take the battery out and you're like, maybe it's the spark plugs. And so if you're feeling discouraged and you feel like you've done all of the things, it may be that you're close, but there's just like a little bit of a pivot or a little bit of shift that needs to take place. And what I really appreciate is that you do encourage, Amber, that zoom-out perspective that's like, okay, mind, body, spirit, how can we make sure that we're supporting you as a whole person? And are there obstacles to cure? Which I really think is important, is underdiscussed, is do I have limiting beliefs to, oh, well, you can't heal from anxiety, or you can't heal from long COVID, you can't heal from whatever. Or do you have— is there something that's— I'm afraid of what it would be like if I was better, or staying sick? I had a patient once, and she had been coming to the clinic where I was working for a decade. And I remember once I asked her, what would it be like if you got better? Like, if you— what would your life be like that would be different? And she's like, well, I can't get better because then I would lose my health insurance.

Mm-hmm.

And I was like, oh my heavens, like we've been hitting our head against the wall trying to figure out how to help this person. But there's a huge obstacle to cure, not by her own creation per se. This is a systematic obstacle to cure. But I think that there's a lot of reality to that. And I appreciate that that was one of the first things that you said, Amber, stepping out the gate is what kind of emotional psychological work is a part of the process. But it's not the only part of the process. It's just part of the process. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. So such, such an important topic that I think when I first started practicing with people, I was a little hesitant to have those conversations with people because it's uncomfortable. You know, it's for all of us, it's uncomfortable to do any kind of like shadow work. And it's, it's, it's a little bit tricky sprinkling in these concepts sometimes. And sometimes they're much deeper rooted. For some people, it's Well, they're, they're getting these physical signals because there's an energetic thing going on with them and their partner or their friend or somebody in their life, and they have to put up a boundary with that person to heal. Sometimes it's more an energetic thing going on, or move physically, move away, or, um, yeah, there's, there's so many scenarios. I think for me, even getting out of a relationship that was wonderful but wasn't the right fit for my nervous system was a big turning point in my personal journey of just finding a new normal and a new level of health. And I think I probably had some unhealthy, you know, maybe codependency or some unhealthy patterning related to my identities and my diagnoses with that man that I, for me, had to step away from that to see that. So it's so complex. We're so complex as humans. And it's It's never just one thing, but as long as people are open to keep exploring this stuff and putting it all together and zooming out, like you said, instead of spot treating, I think that can be really helpful. I always try to help people find, you know, what is your surfing? I'm a surfer, so that's like my happy place. Like anytime people are like, visualize your favorite place in the world, immediately I'm on a surfboard in the ocean. Like it's just, there's nothing like it for me. So, you know, I don't think people, for people to heal, they need to fly here to Mexico and start surfing or anything like that. But I do encourage people to figure out like, what is your surfing? What is surfing for you? What is that thing that like takes all the noise away that just feels so grounding and so peaceful to you and so nurturing for your health, so nourishing for your health? What is that thing? And a lot of times that's a triggering conversation at first because people are like, I'm not doing those things right now. And so finding little ways to sprinkle in little glimmers of that as people are healing until they feel like they have the energy to get out and do those kinds of things again, finding other, other activities that might be similar to that can be really helpful. For this patient that came down, you know, hers was actually she really loved electronic dance music. Like, that was just her place where she could just be herself, and she just, she loved it. And so that was part of her plan when she got back home was, you're going to go to a concert every week, you're going to go to a show every week. Like, this is, this is part of your, your homework, you know. Is we're gonna like pencil this in somewhere, not pencil, we're gonna pen it in somewhere so that, so that you explore, explore that piece of healing as well. I think it's really, really important for people. So finding that version, whatever that is for you, and in whatever way, shape, or form it is, depending on, you know, a lot of the people I work with are parents, and they have very busy schedules, but I think it's still possible to sprinkle those things in.

You

have to be intentional about it though. You have to really set some good boundaries with yourself and others in order to do that.

That's so brilliant. Being intentional to fill your own cup, because oftentimes we're just pouring out and we live in a world that's just harder. Our world is harder in a lot of ways than maybe it was in the past. So being really mindful to fill your cup with EDM or surfing or whatever it is.

Yeah. And having it be something that there doesn't have to be like a— it doesn't have to be a means to an end. I think a lot of times we think, oh, well, if I do that, it has to be for something. I have to like succeed at something or whatever. And like, can we just do it for the sake of doing it because we love it?

Yeah. Yes. The last thing I would say about this case that just came to mind as we were talking about EDM actually was That she was very open to microdosing with mushrooms using psilocybin, and so that was actually a part of what she explored once she got back home that she told me was also very helpful for her process. So I know that that's become a hot topic in a lot of the healing communities out there, and there's a lot— probably do a whole episode just on that. But I think that, you know, there's, there's different ways to use plant medicine. But I think the most important thing is working with somebody who knows what they're doing in that arena.

I love that. That's so— yeah, I would love to have a whole conversation on that and see what the research is saying that it's actually doing. Would be fascinating because microdosing is so different than what I see a lot of people doing with the macro journeys.

Yes.

Yes.

Hadley, I'm curious, what is your surfing?

It's acting.

Yeah,

that's what I was thinking. What's yours?

I don't know. I, I, as you were saying that, like, like, so pure, so bliss. I'm not sure.

I was tearing up because I was like, that's— it's acting for me. It's literally— yeah.

How cool is that?

Yeah.

I

wanna, I wanna see you act.

Soon. I've been— I've been—

Send me a video.

Yeah, I'll send you some,

some videos of me wiping out on waves.

Perfect. And

I'll let you know when I find my acting surfing.

Yeah, you will. You will. And it changes. It's not— I wouldn't have said that 10 years ago. I would— it would have been something else, or I might not have known, you know. So I feel like it can change quite often too.

Oh my gosh, such a beautiful conversation. And so people are gonna be really eager to learn more about you and to get in touch. I connected with you on Instagram, and so tell us your favorite ways for people to find you.

Sure. Yeah, I'm not great with Facebook, not gonna lie, so probably Instagram is a little bit more consistent. I have a couple of accounts there. One is called Masked Cells United, which is more of my like author page connected to some of the books I've written. But the clinic page is called Origin Wellness Clinic, O-R-I-G-I-N Wellness Clinic. That would be the Instagram handle for that. And then the website that has a lot more information about Long COVID resources as well is probably the best one to point you to would be originwellnesscolorado.com. So I originally started my practice in Colorado before I moved. So it's a little bit misleading. I will change the URL at some point. But for now, originwellnesscolorado.com is probably the best way to connect if you're interested in learning more about, you know, becoming a client. I also offer— I still offer long COVID type weeks in Mexico if people do want to come down and do that, just not during hurricane season. So the rainy season, we take a break. But otherwise, every 1 to 2 months, there's usually a week blocked off when patients want to come down. And then I'm actually about to start up a group for long COVID that's virtual. So we'll be meeting on Zoom calls once a week for 10 weeks. Oh, that's great. And I'm really excited about that because it's going to put together basically everything I do when patients come down for a week to Mexico, but in a slightly different format. I'm excited to share that with the world because, you know, it's not realistic. So many people can't travel. It's expensive time-wise, logistically, you name it. Uh, so while I absolutely love hosting people here and I always encourage that, I think that this group is going to be a nice way to put things together in a A little bit faster than what you might get if you became a client and we're doing one-on-ones. It might take a little bit longer to get all the information. So

I wanna go on this retreat. So you guys—

Yeah, you should come down.

I would love that. That one part of Mexico.

Next time we meet, let's do it in Mexico. Yeah.

Yes.

Sounds great.

Happy to show you around. It's been one of the best decisions I ever made for my life. So

what part of Mexico are you in?

I'm in a little surfing fishing town called Punta de Mita, which is near Sayulita, if you've ever heard of Sayulita.

I've been a couple times.

Oh nice.

Yeah.

I love it. It's around the corner from there. Yeah, it's about an hour from Puerto Vallarta.

That's where Todd proposed to me actually. Oh, is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, special place. Yes.

Good energy then. Yes.

Yeah. Oh my gosh, one of my favorite places ever. I love it there.

It's pretty magical. I showed up with a backpack. And a one-way ticket thinking, uh, a month or two, and then 3 years later I'm still here. So.

Oh, that's amazing.

Just

fell in love with the community. Yeah, it's a really awesome place. So.

All right, we're all gonna go. Everyone who's listening, HADS, let's go.

We're doing it.

We're doing it. Everyone, thank you so much. Amber, thank you for being a part of this conversation. I could talk to you for days. So very grateful for such a wealth of knowledge.

Yeah,

thank you. Likewise. And I just am so grateful for the way you guys are empowering people through your podcasts. So keep up the great work.

Thank you.

Huge, huge resource for the community. Thank you.

Awesome, everyone. We'll see you next time.

Thank you.

Sweet. We'll end it there. That was so fun.

Do I hang up yet? Okay.

My mind is blown. So many good things.

Yeah. I hope I didn't go too long. I tend to ramble. I forgot to give you my disclaimer at the beginning that I might start to go off on some tangents. And if you guys have to go somewhere, you better rein it in.

I

am so here for all of your stories and your wisdom. I'm going to nerd out, and I'm going to definitely connect you with Adam. I feel like that would be such a good synergy.

That would be really awesome.

Yeah. He is so kind and so warm and so smart, such a great healer and really eager to connect with other thought leaders. Yes.

I very much appreciate that.

So I'll text him today, ask him, I, could I give him, do I, I think I have you, we've been emailing, so could I use your email address?

Yeah, absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Awesome. Good. Yeah. This sounds awesome. Well, thank you, Amber. You're the bomb. You're— I'm gonna buy all of your books. They're all—

Seriously, let me know when yours is like ready to go so I can help share it.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's—

yeah, I just ordered this now to the— Oh, is it pre-order?

Yeah, we're doing pre-orders.

Okay, fun. Is there an ebook? Can I read it here?

You could definitely, and it's getting, uh, they— I have a contract in South America, so they're getting it published in South America. So yeah, so Brazil, and then I think there's a couple of other places that are publishing it there. But you know, you know English, you can read it there. But yeah, it'll be—

I prefer— I mean, I have a couple books in Spanish, but I'm like 20% of the way through them because I, you know. Yeah, yes.

Or I can send you a copy.

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh,

I can't wait to check it out. I, I was— that was the podcast I was trying to listen to when my like technology was being all weird, so I like didn't get through the whole podcast. Hopefully it'll work later so I can finish learning about it.

Now that the obstacle— we've gotten the message out, and so now the universe will be like, oh, okay.

Yeah.

All right, now there you go. Perfect.

Yeah. And Hadlee, I want to learn more about Ayurveda. Gosh, I have so many questions I could ask you guys, but I know that's not the— oh my

gosh,

we know why you asked me here. But yeah, I've got a couple mentors here that are really into it, and I'm trying to learn from right now.

But awesome.

Just starting to crack the surface of it a little bit with a lot of curiosities.

Oh my gosh. Is one of them Kate Stillman?

No, actually.

No? Okay. Well, she—

They're Mexican. They're Mexican friends.

Oh, okay. Okay. She lives in Punta Mita, and I learned from her. That was why I've been to Punta Mita a couple of times, because—

Wait, wait, wait.

Yeah,

maybe I don't know her last name, but I know Kate. I feel like I know.

Is it Yoga Healer? She is.

It's funny because I like half the people I know here. Their last names like Surfer or like Sayulita because I just right. You don't know each other that way.

So she does paddleboard surfing.

My best friends, some of them I'm like, I don't think I know their last name.

Yeah, I love it. Oh my gosh, that's great.

I'll have to look for Kate Stillman. Put that on

my

list too. I have to connect with her. That's awesome. Yeah, there's there's some really talented local healers here, and there's there is a there's an Ayurveda school, I think in Puerto Vallarta, I believe.

Oh, okay, cool.

And so yeah, I've met so many locals who have gone through that program, and I'm like, oh, I kind of want to do it. I mean, yeah, my Spanish is good enough. I would do it.

Oh yeah, totally. Yeah.

Oh my

gosh, oh my gosh, you're amazing. I'm so glad we're connecting. I feel like you're a soul tribe sister.

Totally. Yes, this was one of my favorite interviews.

Yeah, perfect.

Oh good, well, I'm glad, and I'm glad it was novel. I I was like, gosh, I don't know if anybody— you've probably had people on talking about the SSP and CVT and all these acronyms. Hopefully it's new stuff. Yeah.

No. Yeah. So many new things. So many new things. It's really good.

So we'll stay in touch, my friend. I'll let you know when the episode drops and we'll send you some stuff that you can share.

Thanks for having me on. This was so much fun. And yeah, looking forward to further connecting and of course seeing you guys down here soon when you come visit.

Yes, please. All right, see you guys.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye.