Why You Can’t Heal in Fight-or-Flight (And How to Finally Feel Safe)

Hi, everyone. We're going to give everyone a moment to hop on. Get your audio connected. We want to say. Oh, I see a couple familiar faces. Hello and welcome. Welcome to Rooted Reboot. I'm Paige. I will be your host throughout these next three very exciting, transformative days. So whether you are live with us right now or catching the replay, know that this video space has been created for your healing. So I want to go through just what you can expect today. We're on day one. Today is all about setting the stage for healing. So we're going to explore awareness, nervous system tools, the truth that your symptoms are not your identity. So that's all today. Day two, which is not until Wednesday. Day two is all about food is medicine. This is near and dear to my heart. I have a master's degree in nutrition and food as medicine is so true, so powerful. So Mona's going to share all the nutrition guidelines that she's been using with her clients. What to eat, what to avoid, how do you eat in alignment with healing. And then day three, Day three is on Friday. This is all about creating your healing blueprint. So day three, we're going to integrate everything that you've learned to help you reclaim your power and start to move forward from any of your past limitations. Okay, before we bring Mona on, just a couple logistical items. We ask that you please remain on mute. Please know that these sessions are being recorded and you will have access to the replays. We are going to hold a Q and A session near the end of today's call. It's about an hour and a half today. If your question isn't relevant for today's topics, feel free to hang tight, jot it down, and save it for maybe day two or day three. If for some reason we don't get to your question today, just know that we will respond to it the next day or the next time. Please know that we are not providing any medical advice on these calls. These teachings simply are just a reflection of Mona's decades of work with clients, and they're meant for educational purposes only. Our team, including Esther, are here to support and help answer any questions about the program. So if any questions arise at any time, put them in the chat. Esther just welcomed everyone in the chat. If you can't join live, no worries. Recordings are available and we are going to be doing some giveaways. So all of the session details, the prompts, the journaling exercises, these are all outlined in your companion workbook. So those can be found on the companion gauge page that's@monashsharma.com reboot. Maybe Esther can put it in the chat as well. And then you guys were emailed that. So go back and find the email. But make sure you got that companion workbook up because we are going to be filling that out today. We want to encourage you to be taking a few moments each day to journal and reflect and jot down your questions. It's really important that once you start to hear this information through that you actually apply it. This is just bits of information until you actually go and apply it. And Mona's team has been amazing at putting together these resources for you guys to apply it. So get your notebook ready, get your companion workbook ready. Let's get cozy. Let's get this journey started. I do want to just briefly have Mona come up. I want to share my experience with Mona before she starts taking the floor. But I've gotten the pleasure to know Mona for several months now and Mona's story is one that is very empowering. Her healing story is one of my favorites to listen to because I've been in this space for several years. I've heard a lot of pain to purpose stories and Mona's really speaks very loud and clear to me. It's really what drives her passion and her purpose. And I find that she is just a wealth of knowledge. She has so much wisdom. She walks the walk, she talks the talk. And just being in her presence is so grounding. And you will notice that just being on this call, you're going to feel more at peace. I find there is so much information out there with health. I call it information overload. And so many of us, we have lost the art of knowing. What do we do with that information? Like I said, it's just information until you know how to integrate it. And it's with Mona's wisdom that we have the opportunity to integrate it. And that's what we will be doing today. There's some pretty cool things that we're going to be introducing as well. Like Mona has an AI. A Mona AI that I've been playing, I've been talking to this weekend and I'll share more of my experience at the end today, but it was really, really neat to see that. So it's just an honor to be with Mona today. I know you guys are going to learn a lot. And Mona, tell us a little bit about your, your healing story and why you're here.

Thank you, Paige, for that amazing introduction for everyone here. My team is amazing. I don't think I'D be able to do this without them. So it's also just more fun to do this with friends. So thank you for that. I guess first I'm seeing all of you. I'm going through all the pages. I'm so grateful that so many of you showed up today. Thank you so for your time. It just means so much. Drop in the comments. I want to see. What city are you in? What part of the world are you joining from? I'm so curious. I see so many familiar faces. I see some family. I see so many of my previous clients. Amazing. From the Netherlands. Wow. Wow. Ireland. Good golly. Denmark. I see my family. Portland. Lexington. My goodness. This is incredible. So I guess this is a perfect segue. You know, I have a full confession for you all. I feel like I've kind of been in hiding since COVID And this is because if you guys remember what was happening at that time, the Internet just got really, really loud of what you should be doing, how you should be eating, what the perfect wellness protocol was, your supplement protocol. Even as a practitioner, I would show up online and just feel completely overwhelmed. And as a nutritionist, I really questioned, where's the ethics in this? How do we show up to heal? And God, when did healing get so complicated and loud? Does anyone else feel that way? Show of hands? Yeah. Like, even as a practitioner today, that's how you feel now? I just. I feel a little bit overwhelmed, and I find myself drifting. And this is the beauty behind my story. I launched this podcast called Rooted in Wellness, where I wanted to merge these ancient healing rituals that helped me survive and live with modern medicine. There's so much beauty, but when I drift too far into modern medicine, I get kind of crushed, overwhelmed, and I. And set back that I go back into my ancient roots. So a lot of you know my story already, but I think it's worth sharing again. So I've been a holistic nutritionist, and I'm going to point out in Canada, we do things a little bit differently. I'm a registered holistic nutritionist. We have to write board exams and get a registration number. And I say that because there's a lot of schools in the US that give you this designation. And as a result, we have a lot of people going online with, you know, a certificate program giving some pretty major health advice, which we're not allowed to do. I will give you recommendations and, of course, guide you towards the things that I know that I've worked over this past 15 years. But prior to that, some of you Might share my story. I worked in the corporate world. I happen to have come from the luxury cosmetic world. So I worked for a handful of luxury cosmetic companies. Sounds amazing on paper. And I'm sure if my purpose was in a different light, I'm sure I could have had a lot more fun with it. I was traveling the world doing makeup for celebrities and for fashion shows and training everybody that's in the retailers that you guys go to buy your cosmetics from. But at the end of the day, it was a sales job. And it got to the point where I was waking up in cities, not knowing what city I was in, constantly on airplanes, the fashion industry, some of you might know, this is a very cutthroat industry.

So.

So I felt no sense of friendships with the people that I work with. And I suffered from debilitating anxiety at that time. I was working out hardcore. I was dieting hardcore. I was on the Atkins diet, restricting everything. My girlfriends called my house the house of free. Gluten free, fat free, carb free, everything free. Probably very much so. Fun free. But that's who I was. And still I would wake up with anxiety. Still I would wake up with sadness. And these heart palpitations started out of the blue. I would bend down to pick up a pair of socks, and all of a sudden my heart rate would go up to about 210 beats per minute. It was really scary, and it made no sense. I was really healthy on the outside, but my heart was just not having it. It got to the point where I went for a run one day and I almost hit the deck. I was completely, almost blacked out. And I went to the doctors and they said, well, let's put you on this beta blocker medication. Like I said, I wasn't interested in root cause healing. So I took the beta blocker prescription and it caused everything to slow down. So, in a sense, it did work. My heart rate did slow down, but I became completely lethargic. I didn't want to move. I became such a hardcore introvert. I had a hard time having a social life, and I ended up gaining £45. £45. Later, I went to the doctor. It's like, okay, hey, this isn't working for me. None of my clothes fit. I feel completely sad, overwhelmed, and lethargic. And they said, well, well, let's take you in for heart surgery. So I was in my 20s when I had my very first heart surgery. And imagine this, like, I was awake for the whole thing. Imagine being in an operating room by yourself in your 20s, you can see your heart on a big monitor. There's wires that are going through your groin and through your neck. They were inducing me with adrenaline, with caffeine, to induce these palpitations that I knew, like I said, would only happen if I was up and moving my body. And what they ended up doing was two ablations. Ablations mean they go in with something that's incredibly cold. It feels like fire going off in your chest. And they burn off an electrical node within my heart. They did two of those, that. That procedure. And unfortunately, I woke up the next morning and my heart was sure enough pounding all over again. It didn't work. And so I said, well, I guess we got to go back in for round two. So just a couple months later, I went in for my second heart surgery. I was 24 years old. And they did two more ablations without even wondering, like, why. Why did I have all this electrical issue with my heart? And they said, well, Mona, good news. We found where we can do another ablation. But the bad news is that it's right next to your sinus node. And there was a chance that if they burned it off, that I might have to wear a pacemaker for the rest of my life. So all of a sudden, I'm visualizing, okay, what is happening? I'm in my 20s. I'm identifying as somebody who's sick, who has a heart condition, who's on prescription medication. And now I'm going to have a battery pack under my skin keeping me alive. Like, what is happening? And it was one of those moments when my life flashed before my eyes. I knew that there was a better way to heal. Growing up, the irony of all of this story is that I understood Eastern medicine. My father, who's Indian, and my mother, who's Danish, some of you know, you've heard me talk about my amazing mom. I've only known her to. To suffer from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. I hope no one in your family has rheumatoid arthritis, or their hands and their feet are just completely deformed. And as a result, though my mom, she's a Scandinavian woman, she, come hell or high water, this woman was going to try to slow the progression of her disease. So the motto in our house growing up was, eat it, it's good for you. Drink it, it's good for you. And my mom found an ashram for my dad and all of us to go to. I highly. I say this all the time. I wish all of you can go and experience an ashram one day. These are spiritual centers where you go and you practice yoga and meditation and breath work every day. You're eating so many foods that come from the earth. You're living in community, you're living outside in nature, connecting with others who are kind of going through similar struggles. So imagine on the surgery table. I'm thinking back to this time of my life and it was just this aha moment. I knew what I needed to do to heal. I needed to go back to my roots at the ashram. And that's exactly what I did. I threw in the towel in the corporate world temporarily. I went back and I became a yoga teacher and a meditation teacher. Only for my own hero, my own personal healing. But when it was there, the weight fell off my body. My heart palpitations started to completely go away to the point where they were non existent. I started eating more carbs than ever before in the past like five years. But it came from the earth. Sweet potatoes and, and rice and squashes and stuff. I wasn't exercising hardcore. I stopped dieting, I stopped doing everything hardcore. My body came back into balance. And part of my journey with my clients and seeing their success over the years is I teach them how to do the same thing. Shut down all of The Hundred or 200 Running open tabs that are happening within our mind so that we can actually listen to the body and tune in. You know, some might call this nervous system regulation, but the point is, is that if your body doesn't feel like it's, like it's safe, it doesn't know how to heal. And going back in time and I wonder how many of you have had experiences where you go to your doctor and there's no investigation. Do they ask about your personal life? Do they ask about your struggles? Do they ask about your stress? Do they ask about how long you've had anxiety? For me, anxiety was my blueprint. I, I've been anxious since I was a little girl and it wasn't by fault of anyone in my family. It's just I witnessed something that happened and it caused me to relax. So from that moment growing up, whenever there was a stress response in my life, my body, its training was to go back into that residual fight or flight or freeze mode and hold everything in anyone else here repress their emotions. Sound familiar? Do we stuff everything down? We show that everything's great on the outside. Yeah. One of the best experiences of my life met with a spiritual teacher and she said, Mona, you're So calming and soothing on the outside. But tell me, why are you a ticking time bomb on the inside? And for the first time in my life, I felt seen. And this was the instigation to the journey and learning everything that I had to do. So, yes, western medicine, medicine saved me, but eastern medicine really guided the way. And something that you should know as well. In terms of my heart surgery, I don't know if anyone here has had an ablation. Over 350,000 ablations are performed in the U.S. young adults are getting it. And yes, it's saving people's lives, especially people who have afib. But why are so many people developing electrical dysfunction in their heart to begin with? We have to ask the deeper questions and understand why. So my mission ultimately is to guide you to the same healing. So today, if you don't have one already, but grab a pen and paper or even grab a phone. And in your notes section, on your phone, I want you to create a personal health section, my health. And in that, I want you to answer this question, what concerns you most about your health? And you can, if something comes to mind, think about it. Now, this is all available in your workbook today. But just ask yourself, tune in, what concerns me most about my health? And I want to also ask, and you guys can throw this into the chat as well. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being really high levels of stress when you wake up or typically, what's your standard? On a scale of 1 to 10, what level of stress do you live with every single day? And if I were to step into your body, for those people here, those very few who might say you're at like a level 2 or 3, have you adapted to living to high levels of stress that if I were to step into your body would probably feel like a 6 or 7 or a 10? Some stress is really good. It's great for us. It actually builds our body's resilience. But as we're going to get to today, it's chronic, consistent daily stress that fuels inflammation, which is the instigation of disease. Look at these numbers. 6, 8, 9, 5, 10, 8. These are pretty high numbers. Another 10. All right, we're going to fix that. We're going to fix that on this call. So before I hand it back to you, Paige, I just want to say, like, if there's any questions throughout this journey over the next three days, you might feel overwhelmed or intimidated to ask. Feel free to set like an anonymous setting. You can send the question to my team and they'll take care of it. And I just want you to know, in these next three days, my intention is to pour into you. Pour everything that I can into you. That's why I started this academy. I recognize that there's so much work that's. That has, like, just paid off for my clients in terms of their healing journey. And I see the transformation. I wish I could give that to you in three days, but I'm certainly going to give you a glimpse of what that entails.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Can you tell us a little bit about why regulating the nervous system is the most vital first step that you use with clients? And maybe you could walk us through a tool to get us regulated.

You got it. Has anyone here done yoga? Maybe you feel that yoga is too hard for you? Yeah, I can't do it. Yoga's too hard. I can't be still for that long. Well, that's exactly why you should be doing yoga. And this isn't a talk about yoga or to preach about it, but it's about one of the longest standing, ancient healing rituals known. And we focus so much on just the asana practice where we show up and do poses. But if you were to go to India today and do yoga class, and if you were to go to the ashram that I grew up with, the Sivananda ashram, you spend 45 minutes sitting with your breath. Your breath is yoga. Your breath is the driver of your nervous system. And I want you all to hear this. Your breath, which no one has trained you how to use properly, it's actually the remote control to your mind. Okay? Because no matter what your diagnosis has been, what your lab results have been, or what your personal health goal is, you cannot heal your body in a state of stress. Remember my story. I was hardcore everything, doing everything to the T, but I was on the fast track to inflammation. And the way that I'm going to teach you today is how to shift your breath so that you can get a sense of returning home. And home is your body. It's within your body. So we've got to really integrate the mind to the body instead of keeping them separate. Okay? So what we're going to do next is I'm going to. I'm going to get you into an embodiment practice. Okay? Breathwork is the fastest, most accessible tool that we have. You can do it in any environment. You can do it with your eyes open, with your eyes closed. You can do it in traffic, you can do it in line at the bank. You can do it. When someone like your boss is pissing you off, you can just embody it. Okay. But it's going to take some practice. Okay. A lot of us, we haven't built that resilience muscle. Okay, so what are we doing in breath work? We're lowering our stress hormones. So cortisol is a big buzzword. This way, this. These days, lowering our cortisol, we're activating our vagus nerve, which I'm going to talk to you about next call. It tells your body that you're safe. When your body's safe, guess what happens? Your digestion improves, your metabolism for fat loss improves, mental clarity improves. And you're creating this biochemical space for healing to just begin. So it's no longer woo woo. All right, so over the next three days, I'm going to give you a few different options. But. And bear with me, for some of you who are waiting for the food protocol or the healing protocol, I promise we'll get there. But I. I really just can't stress enough. The most important thing that we're doing today is teaching you how to come home into your body. All right? So wherever you are, I want you to sit back and get comfortable. And I want you to notice just your posture to begin with. So often in our life, we're moving forward. What about your posture? Do you notice that your neck is constantly creeping forward into action and activation? Or are you resting back into your parasympathetic so that your body can feel a sense of ease? So notice your posture. Squeeze your shoulders all the way up to your ears. Squeeze them all the way back and down. Take a long, deep breath in. Inside out of your mouth. Some of you might want to close your eyes at this point. You can look around. Just tell yourself, I'm safe. I'm just being guided by Mona. If closing your eyes never feels good, then just gently soften your gaze and look down towards the ground. Just give yourself permission to be here with me right now. I've got you. All right, Your breath is the gateway. So we're going to do a couple of rounds of the 4, 7, 8 breathwork technique. You're going to inhale for the count of four, holding for the count of seven, and exhaling for the count of eight. If you fall out of this, don't even worry. You just hop back in. Some of this might be new. For some of you, you're just remembering. So whenever you're ready, take a nice exhale. Just let everything go, and then we're going to begin. When you're ready, inhale. One, two, three, four. Hold the breath. One, two, three, Four, five, six, seven. Exhale. One, two, three million four, five, six, seven, eight. Good job. Keep going. Inhale, two, three, four. Hold the breath. One, two, Three, three, four, five, six, seven. Exhale. Relax the shoulders. Two, three, four, five, Six, seven, eight. Release any control. Just for a moment, notice what's come up in the mind. Did your egoic mind take over telling you to be distracted? What is she doing? I don't want to do this. When is this going to be over? Or can you come back into the body? All right, try have the attitude of, let's just see what happens. Let's go for another round. Relax the body. Exhale when you're ready. And we begin. Om 1 om 2 om 3 om 4. Hold the breath. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Exhale. 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8. One more. Inhale. 1 ohm 2 om 3 om 4. Hold THE breath. 1, 2, 3rd, 4, 5, 6,7. Exhale. 1,2, 3, 4, 5,6, 7,8. One more. INHALE. Om 1 ohm 2 ohm 3 om 4. Hold THE breath. 1, 2, 3, 4,. 5, 6, 7. ExHale. Oh 1 on 2 ohm 3 ohm 4, 5, 6, 7,8. Release all control of the breath. Let your breath regulate and come back to whatever feels good for you. If it feels good to yawn, let it go. Just notice the state of your body. Is there resistance? Was it hard to breathe at certain points? Was there some tension on the holds? What we're doing is we're shifting your system into chasing, into tuning in. So just remember that breath is the gateway. Without any judgment of what happened, just take note of how it felt. Whenever you're ready, you can open your eyes and come on back if you haven't already feel okay. Some emotions coming up. 478 is exactly what I do at night, Carol. Also to fall asleep. If I have a monkey mind, it's incredibly powerful. So this is an ancient healing tradition that Dr. Andrew Weil brought to the table and he kind of made popular and it's just highly powerful for learning how to shift your state.