Chinese Medicine Expert: Are Your Stuck Emotions Poisoning Your Body?

The next level of detoxification is the energetics and the emotions, not just the physical organ. If you haven't addressed the suppressed anger of your life in some way, shape or form in your genetic past or your lived experience, do you think your liver is actually going to let a lot of those toxins go? It's going to stay stuck.

Dr. Kevin Preston has developed a heart based approach to health by blending traditional Chinese medicine, modern techniques and emotional intelligence to treat otherwise unresolvable chronic illnesses.

We live in a society now where detox has become necessary. And I would say this is true for almost every patient. I've seen the liver, the kidneys and the spleen need to be addressed. And this does require taking a breath and slowing down or sitting with somebody and having some reflection. And if you take a deep breath and feel into your body, where do you feel like your system needs more love? What are you holding that you don't need to hold anymore?

Part of detoxification is becoming the person that can fulfill your dream and your purpose. Because in the process of that, whatever trash is looming around will get cleaned up. How do we begin that journey? Man, what a whirlwind it's been since we podcasted last. Two and a half million people heard your voice on the last episode, which was not planned. I didn't know was that gonna explode that big. But. But it was just a candid conversation about your daughter.

Yeah.

And it was so meaningful and so impactful and I thought this is a great way for us to check in every year as brothers, as men. If people didn't Hear the last EP, just give them like the 30,000 foot view of who you are. Don't go into too much detail, but, you know, who are you now a year from, from then? How do you describe yourself if somebody just meets you?

I do feel like a new person.

You are, man.

You know, we were talking about that before is both of us feel quite renewed. And what a fascinating journey. And so I would say, you know, still a big part of my day to day is Chinese medicine. That's that background, background in science. And I love getting into all things, you know, detox, biological medicine, health and wellness, of course. And then I lead events and do retreats and really everything that I do is centered around helping people heal whatever is in the way there and get some activations along the way so we can be our fullest selves.

And yeah, the time is now. I mean, it's always the time is now. Uh, but definitely 2025 when people are watching this, hearing this. There's a new person in the White House here in America, and there's this new hope on life. I feel like with RFK in the White House and Big Pharma being truly threatened in a way that I don't think they've ever been threatened before. So, in other words, we're poised for a really radical shift of the battleship. And you don't shift the battleship overnight. Like it takes a long time. It's hard to turn a battleship. And the way that things have been going in our world, not just in America, but also Canada, where you're from, there have been people in power that have had a narrative and really casting Watiko over millions and millions of people. And I wonder, the people that show up in your clinic, the people that need the detox, not just the physical detox, but also the mental, emotional detox from the straight up onslaught and mental slavery that they've been in from this narrative that has been going so strong for so long, is there a common thread? Have they lost connection to their soul? Have they lost connection to nature because they show up to you when they're really sick?

Yeah, it's interesting that I'm seeing both. So what's really interesting, especially the past couple years compared to any other time in my career, and I've been practicing about 16 years now in the clinic, is that I'm seeing a lot of people struggle, if I'm being honest, mentally, emotionally, physically, like they're, they're, they're in it. And I'm also seeing a lot of people have the biggest breakthroughs and insights about their life that they've ever had. And so it's fascinating to watch people sort of coming in, or they've just come through a really, really tough season of their life, and they're just starting to, you know, come up to the surface. And you can see a renewed essence, a new vitality coming through them and new lens on everything. Often because of the challenge, you know, because of the difficulty, of course. And so it's really interesting to see a full spectrum right now. One of the common threads, I would say, is there's a lot of intensity.

Yeah.

On, on any of those levels, like intense breakthroughs. And they come in and they're just hearts blasted open, new relationships, new jobs, quitting jobs, you know, stepping out of circles that maybe they were in because it doesn't resonate anymore. And then certainly I see a lot at the physical body level too, that they're maybe manifesting an illness of some Kind. And it's forcing them to look at the things that are not working anymore. And that's where a lot of my work lies. There is where can we shed a light on what is that that's going on and at what level is that going on? And some people kind of need a wholesale change. And it's always an interesting conversation from the outside looking in. It's easier for me. Right. You know, I have my own stuff, too, that I need reflection on and support with. But when I'm looking at it from the outside looking in, I can sometimes see it's. It's every quadrant. And in some cases, they've already done the heavy lifting, you know, and then it's more refinement. So there's a lot happening right now.

When you say heavy lifting, do you mean, like, they've been looking at their nutrition and their sleep and just the basic fundamentals? Like, in other words, when do people actually show up in your office?

Well, that's evolved a ton. And so if I look back at the early parts of my career, it was like, physical pain, you know, because in the early days, I was doing tons of acupuncture, and acupuncture is quite well known to be great for pain and circulation or help with sleep or stress. And so I saw a lot of that, a lot of physical injuries. A lot of athletes I used to work on, like pro stunt performers and Olympians and all kinds, like, a lot of the physical performing side. And then I started to see that it was really good for the mental, emotional part, too, which is what we're trained in in Chinese medicine. And a lot of the athletes would come back and they'd say, hey, my focus after that treatment was next level. Can you do what you did last time? Because I don't think I ever felt so mentally clear. Oh, by the way, my groin feels better, too. Or, you know, my quad, that was spasming. That's done. But they were coming back for the mind. And then I started to see that evolved into the emotions that they're saying, you know what? I'm more. I'm calm, I'm sleeping better, and I usually have performance anxiety. You know, I do my meets or my competitions or whatever, and I find I'm. I'm more calm at the start of those days. And, yeah, whatever you're doing, keep. Keep doing it. So there's been an evolution of that. Whereas now I've seen, you know, if we look at the last decade, way more people are coming in for the mentally emotional Part.

And it shows up from a physical symptom or an illness. Traditionally or not always it might.

But they're also knowing that they need to address relationships or they need to address their unwillingness previously to look at their emotional life. Yeah. And kind of get down to the heart level. So I would say a lot of the last few years has been any evolution into the heart, more so. And people might be struggling with that. Like, they don't know necessarily what they need. They just know that they need something that's beyond just the physical. So I would say there's been quite an evolution, and we have more access, you know, and if you look at all the podcasts you've done as well, like, it's. It's hugely educational on all of those levels and all the things that you talk about, whether it's emotions, finance, spirituality. So we're also in a renaissance, I think, where there's way more accessibility of stuff that we didn't really get straight access to before. So people are actually paying attention to that.

That's why I think you're thriving. And I want to talk about your event you did with Eisenstein and Bush, which is like, I wish I was there. It's so cool. But before we get to that, I feel like this renaissance you're talking about is palpable. And it's because we have digital connection. We have so many tools that our dads and moms and grandparents never fucking had.

Yeah.

Like, we are so blessed. We're so blessed with just this media, this podcast. Like, we have everything that we need in a device right here at all times. We could be doing personal development at any moment on the toilet or, you know, at sprouts or, you know, at a stoplight. Don't look at your phone when you drive. But yes, like, we're in this renaissance because of this technology evolution, but yet our bodies and our minds and the way that we connect and heal and just grow as human beings in community, that. That hasn't changed much since we were, like, in caves. Like, if you look at the technological curve, it was like a hockey stick. I think Moore's Law and Ray Kurzweil talked about this in his work, where I think it was 15 years ago or 20 years ago, something, the technology evolution just, boom, exploded. Now technology is, like, thousands and thousands of times more powerful than human beings and our rational thought, but yet we still need these basic fundamental blocks of just being a human. Dude, how do you see us holding those two worlds? Because in order for a detox to occur, there has to be honesty about where we are. And I think where we are is completely overloaded from a sensory input perspective because of technology. And also at the same time, in a total paradox. We're humans. We need sleep, we need love, we need food. We need basic stuff like how do we juggle the two worlds?

Well, I think part of what you might be speaking about here is embodiment. So. So the influx of massive amounts of information is higher than it's ever been, ever. And I think we've had enough access to information now for long enough in some cases for who, anybody that's taken it in that they also realize that's not enough, though. You can't just cognitively fill up your, you know, frontal lobe and expect that to change your life. It helps. It puts people in a driver's seat that maybe they weren't in before, but in my own life, for me and with patients, that's my main focus now for a bunch of years, is how do we take that information and get traction? How do we actually embody that? And they. They put it into their lives day to day. Because you could listen to a thousand podcasts, and it may not have any tangible change on your life outwardly if all you're doing is just kind of sitting with it mentally. But what I find, even if you steep in that, you know, and that's why it's really important who you hang around with, that you can have concepts and ideas, and eventually we start putting some of this stuff in in practice, or you start to try to put up a boundary with somebody, or maybe you start to name your needs with your partner. Our friend of hey, I. I feel this way about this thing, but maybe they listen to 50 podcasts about attachment and somatic therapy and nervous system regulation to get them to a point where they could then enact something different. So that, I think, is where we're getting bigger change, and that is starting to get an exponential curve as well, and I believe is really going to increase exponentially. The next few years is the embodiment that we have enough info that we can actually put it into our lives and make a lot of change. And that kind of feels like what you and I have both been doing. You know, we were chatting earlier of, wow, a lot's happened in the last year since I was here for both of us, and if I had to look at anything, what did I do differently? I was taking action and embodying the things that I've been learning for many, many years. And of course, it's not overnight. Right. But I feel like I got a lot more traction in my system because of that.

Yeah. Well said. There's this concept that I developed, and of course, I pulled it from all my teachers, so I credit all my teachers, what I'm about to share, but it's this arc of wellness. We gather. We're in the gathering phase. We're listening to podcasts, we're going to school, we're getting certs, we're whatever. We're getting an info in. That's that hockey stick of tech. Then the most important part in the arc of wellness is right at the top. It's. We actually apply it. We actually do it. We do the detox protocol. We do emotional inventory with ourselves and relationships. And then eventually, if we apply enough, then we have this filter to figure out what gets into our body and how can we actually embody it. So we gather, we apply. We embody. But I find man and I fell into this trap a lot of times. I'll apply, and I'll kind of skip the gather, the application phase, and I'll go right to embodiment and sell myself a story that I'm embodied. I think I'm a lot better now, a year later than I was when we podcasted last year, for sure. I really love to learn in public, which is what this podcast is. It's me learning right from amazing people like you. But what is that? There's got to be something about the way our psyche works where we want the hack or the shortcut. Even if you look at biohacking as a whole. Right. People want the hack to get better bio, better biology. There's. What is that? Where we just want to take the shortcut. And how does it actually turn into a long cut? It actually turns out to be a much longer path when we want to shortcut the gathering and the application, because we all want embodiment.

Yeah. I think there's two things that come to mind. One is we want to avoid feeling things, and we will often skip a lot of different steps to avoid feeling grief or sadness or pain or guilt or shame or whatever's there to be felt. And I've done that many times. And I'm like, oh, I'm about to have to feel these things that are stuck in my body and my mind and my. In my experiential learning. And that might be hard and painful, and I would rather tiptoe around the garden and end up on the other side and feel pretty good about myself. So I think there's that. And then I also feel like there's this place that I think there's two words. I can't remember where I heard them years ago. And it's earned wisdom. And I've heard another quote, too. I'll try not to butcher it. It's like wisdom is the thing you get after you needed it. And it's often from going through experiences that, looking back now, that even though I have had some challenges or difficulties like anybody else, I wouldn't rather have skipped them with my viewpoint now, because of the wisdom that it brought me. And it was earned. It wasn't skipped, it wasn't biohacked. It was like raw life. But it has made me a better father, a better practitioner, a better person. I'm more in my body because it forced me to be. I wouldn't say it forced me, but we have a choice, I think. And so there's those two things that if you're willing to feel your feelings through fully, you're going to come out the other side with some level of wisdom, that if you skip that, you're not going to arrive at that same place in the same way. Like, I believe life will keep bringing you back to that thing until you feel it.

Yeah.

Through people, through experiences, through whatever you want. So I started learning, like, oh, I could try and skip all of these things, but I'm going to get pulled back to where that last watermark was, no matter what. And I could be really stretched out in front of that and think, I'm winning. I made it past those things. But that elastic band will pull you back at some point until you've actually met whatever that is.

I think you're right. I think it's because we live in a society that likes to intellectualize healing instead of somatically, energetically, emotionally heal. Because that shit's really scary and crunchy and bloody and really hard. It just is not. I'm not here to glorify spiritual growth. It doesn't need to be glorified. It's really hard. And it's like, once you go down that road, there's no going back. And by the way, would you even want to go back?

Most people wouldn't, probably.

Would you want to go back to the person you were five years ago?

No.

No way. Right. Because you've been afforded all this wisdom, like you talked about. I love how you said that the wisdom is what you needed when you were going through it, essentially, and you earn it afterwards. I think it's Because I'm listening to this audiobook right now from James Clear, Atomic Habits, and I love it, but it's very intellectual. It's very like top down thinking. And I wonder if we could combine like habit formation with like B.J. fogg and James Clear and Charles Duhigg and all these great behavioral scientists that understand why we do what we do. If we could infuse spirituality into that and, and real emotional intelligence into that, into that, like an emotional inquiry from a spiritual place and also an honest place, I think that could change the world, man. I'm not, I'm not downplaying his book. I think mental is one part of the Pentagon which we, we need to nourish ourselves, but we also have to detoxify from that because if we start attaching to just one side of ourselves, then the other side start to suffer. What do you make of that?

Well, I think we're also in an evolutionary time that is huge that things are changing so rapidly. And you could look at technology and AI and say, well, that's what's changing. But I always think everything is a mirror. So what is the mirror on that side? What's changing in our evolutionary biology and our bodies, our genetics and everything else? Rapid evolution, Some of it's being forced because the amount of toxins. But I also feel like there's going to be a mirror for that too. As above, so below. So it seems like we're moving from a place that was so mentalized as a human species and we're, we're being taken into our feeling body more. And you know, for anybody listening, I'm a fan of the Gene Keys. Richard Rudd is the author. And they talk about this time that we're in and Human Design talks about this too. Like these three time segments of 1987, 2012 and 2027 and 2027, according to some of that mythology I'll call it, it's called the solar plexus mutation of humanity. And what that means, in my own understanding, I don't understand all of it is we're coming more out of the mental plane and we're coming into the feeling plane more, the solar plexus. And you know, solar plexus is emotions, intuition. And I think a lot of people are finding, I've seen this with patients and with myself. If you're only staying on the mental plane, it doesn't work anymore in the same way the things that were successful or you had. Yeah, some, some level of efficiency or effectiveness with it doesn't seem to Quite cut it anymore. The. The feeling and the emotion and. And I'll say the hearts of issues has to get brought onto the table as well. That if we only stay in the mind, it's not going to take us very far anymore. And I feel like we're in such a. A change of that too, which is maybe why so many of my patients I'm seeing are coming in and they are needing to feel the emotions that have been buried for a long time or suppressed or stuck through medications or all the other types of behaviors that we have as humans and addiction of all sorts of. I think a lot of it is to avoid. Avoid feeling. But we're being evolved while we're evolving into a space that we have to. Yeah, I don't think we're going to have a choice anymore because the. Look at where we've got to only on the mental plane, kind of destroying the planet and not kind of, you know, all these different things that we could point to. It's not even, you know, up for interpretation. Like, look at. Look at what is happening in just, you know, real life. So what is the evolution of that? It's the heart, it's the emotions. It's trusting our intuition again, which in some ways the paradox is that is where we came from. If you go far enough back.

Yeah, a return to nature and a return to realness is what I hope. I trust that the good side of technology is giving us at least that's my optimistic view and that's the view that I hold in my psyche and with my family and with my group. So at least that's real for myself and us. But for the people that are stuck in anxiety, depression, like, I've been there, man. I've definitely been in like the lowest of the lows. I've never. Knock on wood, I've never wanted to kill myself or leave the planet, things like that. But I've been completely decimated by my own creations. And that, when I look back with the wisdom I have now, was a byproduct of me believing the stories I was told by my mom and dad. And I love them or society or school or just all these extrinsic sources of input and motivation, which really, we're intrinsic beings because the intrinsic is. I believe what you're discussing. Right. The way that we feel things, our ability to feel something is a massive skill set. It's like a muscle, you know, the spiritual connection to God and the way that we either allow ourselves to be a river or a dam, the Way energy flows through us. I mean, that's why you do what you do with acupuncture, acupressure meridians, how energy moves through the body. A lot of this stuff can be so scary for people because let's be honest, it's just not something they ever learn in traditional school at all. There's no classes on emotional intelligence in kindergarten, middle school, high school, college. Unless you go to one. Maybe as a sidebar or something. It'd be great if there was like emotional intelligence PhDs. Maybe there are. Maybe I'm proven wrong right now, I don't know. But I feel like what you're doing with your in person groups and how that dovetails into how people come in to see you, it's all pointing people back to nature and realness in the body. Yeah, I mean, there's nowhere else to go. It's like we're, we're all the smartest, I guess you could ever believe because we have all this information. But. But it's not living in us, it's just neck up.

Well, and that's, I think, why the mind could only take us so far. Because if you have the mind operating, you know, think of how many times you know, and I'll speak for myself, where I would fall into harsh judgment about myself and my mind would tell me all kinds of stories about being, you know, not good enough. This, this place, you know, having insecurities, inadequacies, like all the different things that can be quite collective. And you know, a lot of us may feel that at times or self doubt and everything. Where does that come from? It comes from the mind. I don't really feel like the heart has those aspects. The heart isn't like judging the heartbreak that you felt your mind might be. And you said it earlier, our minds want to really intellectualize and make it logical while they don't love me. Because this and this and this, like it wants a reason. And the heart's like, no, let's just feel this, this is real. This is the depth of the, the being part of human. And there's no skipping that. But the mind would love to, you know, have all kinds of reasons and excuses for everything, even for successes. Well, it's because you did this and this and this and I don't always know. So I question my mind quite a bit. My mind questions me plenty. And I feel this interesting dance where the more I can root down into my body, either into like solar plexus or the root, or just even feel my feet on the Ground, feel the Earth. Because I don't feel like Mother Earth is in her mind too much. I feel the heart of the Earth just is. The Earth isn't judging us. So there, there's like this opportunity that we have now to shift gears a little bit and see if more of us are operating from that heart field spectrum and the wisdom of the heart. What would happen then? I don't think we could make the same decisions as a species operating from that place as we can with our mind.

I wonder what's so special about the 2027 year? Because you talked about gene keys. Why 2027? Do you know why? That's the year of like where it pops.

I think from my understanding that was, you know, a transmission of channeled information through, you know, constellations and all the cosmic energy that we have or cosmic information that comes through certain people on this planet at different times and sort of the, the prophesied aspects, I also think has been well rooted in a lot of indigenous cultures that they would write about. And they knew that we were coming into a huge time of change. And I've read different books over the years or different transcripts and things that I got a hold of of, you know, different cultures, different tribes and they didn't have contact with each other. But there is an undercurrent of them speaking, hey, about this great change coming and a time when a lot would come to the surface to be cleansed and purified. And when you look around, I think that's definitely happening. And what's the mirror to that? This is what I'm seeing in the clinic individually with people, the amount of things that they have coming up to be cleansed and purified, I think matches the collective energy on the planet. At the same time, of course, our bodies would have to go through that too. Wow.

And then you look at things like EMF or tap water or food. You know, shout out to Consumer Reports. They did an independent test on lunchables in schools recently. It's on the screen right now. And because of parents vote and actual third party real science rooted in truth, Kraft Heinz had to rip all the lunchables out of schools.

Wow.

I mean, it's a huge, it's a massive win. Like, I don't think people understand how big that is. And this is also right before RFK becomes the commissioner, like the leader of Health for America, which I believe America is not healthy. If you look at most countries, I think we're like 17th or 20th or something. It's not good for how much money we have. So we're totally out of alignment. We're totally top down thinking, I think you're right, man. The only way we're going to evolve is not with our minds anymore. It's just not possible. We've done enough mentally. It's gotten us in trouble.

Yeah, it's kind of fucked us over. Run those loops.

In many ways, I'm not discounting the mind. The mind's a beautiful servant. Yeah, the mind can create beautiful things, but it's a double edged sword. Like the mind can also really harm us and others if we allow it. So then how do we close the gap as Hawkins talks about, for some men, some people, the biggest gap in the world is between the head and the heart. So how do you believe that we both, in your medical experience and also with your people in person and just your own life, how do we close this gap between over intellectualizing and being in our head and also just being so flowy and so feminine, so watery that we're just in our heart all day? There's got to be a middle way. How do we close the gap between head and heart?

Perhaps what I'm feeling and what I'm doing right now is slowing down would be one step of, oh, I'm really going to just sit with that for a moment. I'm actually just going to feel that because I could feel my mind wanting to jump in with like 10 things.

Yeah.

And if I've learned anything the past bunch of years working on myself and working with patients, could I take a breath before I auto respond to something? And this is true maybe for arguments or work with co workers or spouses or, you know, any, any of those places where disharmony can come up or conflict or politics. Before we answer, could we just breathe and see is there something deeper than all of the past programming of my mind? And I notice it in my daily life, and I've been working on this for quite some time, that something will come up and I can feel my mind like instantly judge it. But maybe now I don't follow that too far and I'm aware, oh, there's a snap judgment happening right here and it might be like really minor, it might be nothing, you know, But I also can see if there's been a lack of awareness around that, then you can spiral in that direction really, really quickly and then you're missing all this deeper wisdom that is in our bodies already. And it makes me think of kids too. You know, we're both parents, especially in the early years when you see them, like, they're not in their mind too much. They're just present in the moment, and they will respond to each of the things that come through their experience right in the moment. They don't necessarily take it in, at least not right away, and then speak about it, you know, days and days later about how they felt and everything else. They usually have an instant response, but it's so pure. It's. It's just real. So maybe we could become a little bit more childlike in a healthy way. Not the. The shadow side of the inner child. Subconscious kind of running, you know, your adult life.

Yeah.

More of the. The purity of being present and slowing down, of just taking in a moment together. And if we stepped into that a little bit more, I think it'd be easier to drop into the body and drop into the heart of. Oh, there is some wisdom here.

This has been a big theme for me, is exactly what you're talking about. Watching children and how they process just life. My son, when he has a conniption fit or when he's upset about something, he actually has no blood in his prefrontal cortex at all. Like, he's just fully in his body, just experiencing it. And my go to has been like, well, how do I get him to stop doing that instead of pausing and just letting him do it? I'm getting better. I'm getting a lot better at just letting him do it. But it's challenging because. And Teal Swan talked about this when she was in the studio. We want to stop our children from feeling things that we ourselves are not comfortable feeling 100%. So our children remind us about how much work we get to do to actually be comfortable with grief or shame or sadness or anger and even joy, too. I see some parents, and it crushes my heart. I'm like, their kids. They'll be out in public, and their kids are just playing and laughing and expressing themselves. And you can see the parent go, okay, Charlie, all right, that's enough. They're not even comfortable with their children expressing joy or ecstasy. So I think children can be this. We need to put children at the center again. And you know what's going to happen? We do that. We're going to put families at the center. We're going to put emotional intelligence and interrelating at the center, and then everything's going to come from there. And once we start putting children and mothers and family at the center of our focus, I feel like if we did those three things, there would be a Ripple that would spark out into making capitalism even more conscious and making us as a species even more conscious if we just focused on that. Because it would be impossible for me to make those three things a focus. And unless I wasn't being honest with the parts of myself that were blocking that from happening. In other words, we start anywhere we can. I think that's a great place to start. I wonder how that would impact your medicine work and live events and transformational experiences if people had already done that much focus work on those three things. Imagine if they showed up with those in mind, how much things could change so. Right. I mean it could change overnight.

Well, and this comes back to where we started in general is the embodiment. So in our day to day lives we have infinite possibilities every moment. And you mentioned it, like how to respond to your son or how we might respond to phone calls or emails or all these other things. I find things are so rapid right now that is pulling us away from that slowness and the deeper wisdom that's available all the time. And then we're, we're getting hyper stimulated and that is what engages the mind over and over and over again. That doesn't allow us to get a little bit deeper because the, the mind's not the enemy either. Yeah, but if we're not in our bodies, then the mind could just run away with all of it really, really quickly. And you know, then people find themselves in all kinds of difficulty health wise too, usually because the mind has run away with them. Yeah, it's told them all of these stories about their worth and everything else. And you know, I'll share one of my patients I saw the other day and he's showing up, you know, he's doing his work. And I am seeing way more men in the clinic the last few years as well, which fills me with a lot of joy, a lot of hope and you know, I see that we're catching up. You know, we're catching up with men being willing to look at the emotions and feel them through and realizing there's a lot there to unpack because the programming for many masculine has been don't feel your feelings. You know, we talk about it a lot more now, which is great. And you and I can have these deep, heart centered conversations. Many of my friends were in that same thing as well, where we're willing to go there and look at that and talk about it. But it was this interesting moment where he had come to the event that we did, you know, about a month ago. And I had led an exercise that was like, okay, you know, find something just in this moment, something simple that you. You like or love about yourself. I can't remember exactly how he said it. And so he's sitting in front of me sharing this, and he said, I realized in that moment I couldn't find anything. And it really kind of rocked him because he's like, I couldn't find anything that I liked about myself. And there's definitely some emotion there. And he said, you know, I got home that night, I was kind of a wreck and frustrated and angry and, you know, these things. Coming up with that realization that he's like, I've been living most of my life that way. I haven't loved myself. I. I don't like anything about myself. And he has dealt with a chronic autoimmune condition. And I think, oh, no wonder. That inward focus of, you know, if you sat a kid in the corner and constantly told them how much you didn't like them, imagine the impact or an animal, any. Anything. It's going to have a direct impact, but we don't notice when we're doing it ourselves. And it's taken him some work, and I'm so proud of him for this. To be able to voice that and acknowledge it and have the awareness around that, even just that will shift the energy in his system in a huge way. It's like opening up the doors and windows to something that's been locked off for ages. But he's like, oh, man, I've been living this way for 30 years and I didn't even know. And just imagine taking a breath on that and then coming back around to, well, let's just feel that and sit with that. That's okay. How many people feel that way or how many people have avoided feeling that to the death? And then they're wondering why the physical body is struggling so much.

I think that's why a lot of bars and clubs, like, if you go downtown to Austin here, millions and millions of dollars are made there every month from alcohol and partying. And it's like, what are you guys even celebrating? It's like a pseudo celebration. They're not celebrating anything. They're actually escaping. And it's not a judgment. It's just an observation. I was stuck in that cycle in my 20s in Pacific Beach, I would just go party and drink, and I reflect on those times for my own wisdom, and I'm like, okay, I actually wasn't celebrating anything, but I was acting like I was celebrating. I was acting like There was something to party for, but really it was this cover behavior or this cover emotion for an enormous addiction to pornography and just things that I did not want to feel, which was a total paradox, because that was feeding the pornography addiction itself.

Yeah.

The stuff I didn't want to feel. I just wanted to feel this, ah, life is good. You're okay. You're safe. People want you to be successful. That's all I wanted to feel. But it took this roundabout way of me getting there, and I'm even still learning that more and more and more because I just didn't have the awareness, man. So I'm not shaming or judging that past version of self, but I wish I could plant a little seed in the pocket of anybody watching or listening and be like, it doesn't have to be this hard. If you're listening to this conversation, you already know the stuff we're talking about. It already is resonating in some level in your body anyways. So it's like, put down the behaviors that are actually causing you physical harm because you're trying to hide from something that you don't have the faculty or the courage to feel yet. And I say that with total respect. No, I'm not dogging anyone, because I've. I've been there for a long time in the past, but I think we're at this nexus now where people are realizing there's this huge movement in millennials where they don't want to party anymore.

Yeah.

Have you heard of this and seen this?

I've seen it.

They. There's a lot of research that, like, bar sales are going down and all the things where modernity's clutches would come in and make money off of men and women, they're scrambling because they're like, how do we get people into clubs again? How do we get people drinking again? How do we get people to Vegas again? A lot of the hotels in Vegas are suffering. I celebrate this because it means the tide is turning. Yes, the tide is turning. And we're interested in things that actually feed us instead of the stuff that poisons us that eventually we'll have to detox. And that's. And that's a whole nother conversation.

Well, and this is the earned wisdom part, is our society's tried these things out, and to a large degree, people are starting to wake up to that. Doesn't work actually, that well. It might work for a time.

It works for a minute.

And I'm not saying to not live your life like, you know, do your thing and with the information that we have available now compared to what we had before, you'd really have to work pretty hard to skip the information that's available that points to. Alcohol's not that good for you. We know this. And look at all this other stuff that's now available for connection, for being real, for feeling your feelings. And I think in some ways, it's performance based on. Because if somebody does actually work through their feelings and sit with some of that stuff, they start feeling the other side of the grief and the shame and everything else, and they start feeling happy and joyful without substances, without alcohol, they already feel liberated and celebratory, and they find themselves in an organic state like that. Suddenly, it's like having some success in the emotional intelligence actually leads to wanting to do that more. Yeah. Then when you start looking at alcohol or other behaviors, it's suddenly less appealing than, Wait, I. I actually feel pretty happy right now. I'm not wanting to escape with where I'm at. This organically feels pretty good. Why would I actually. I don't want to lose the state that I'm in instead of trying to escape the state that I'm in.

That's so good.

Yeah.

And then law of attraction really kicks in, because people want to be around you. You're actually vibing. It's funny, I've heard this phrase, your vibe attracts your tribe, which I think is really true. Like, that's why you and I vibe, because we see life through a lens of growth, and it doesn't mean that we're, like, cool or better than anyone else. It's just we're a little older, you know, we're in our 40s. So, like, we've been down that road where we went to go meet the hungry ghost and realized that it just fed a well with no bottom. And you. You do that enough, and health problems come, you know, and then you start spending money on health and life. God universe forces you to shift your funds because you just can't go out and party and you can't spend the money in places where you're trying to hide from yourself.

Yeah.

And I think that's really important because, gosh, that was such a large part of my life. Of course it brought me here, so it's. It's all right.

Yeah. No regrets. Right.

It brought me here to you and this podcast and. And everything that I have and everything I'm working on. But I do. I do wish that someone hears this and realizes there's another way. Like, it doesn't have to be that way. And the way it can be can actually be a celebration of health, you know, truly celebrating your health in all the five ways that I talk about. So I. I wonder for somebody that's really kind of gunked up this conversation of detox, because I know that's something in your practice that you deal with a lot. And there's a lot of pseudo healers on Instagram. I'll clean out your worms from your body. You'll poop a thousand worms if you buy my Supp supplement pack. And whenever I see that, I'm like, can somebody just tell us the truth? You know, what is the truth of detoxification? What is it meant to be? And how do we begin that journey?

So I think there's several things to unpack here, so I'll try and keep my thoughts coherent in the detox process. One of the sad things, perhaps, is that we live in a society now where detox has become necessary and common. Really, really common. And when you think about it, like, it contains the word, like detoxing is. There's toxins in that conversation.

Yeah.

Which means we've developed so many toxins that we need to detox from. So just naming that is like, okay, here's where we're at in society and humanity. There's a lot of toxins available. Our bodies are going to have to respond to that in some way. We are built to detox a lot. But when you stress your detox pathways over and over and over again by overwhelming amounts of toxins coming in, they get fatigued. Like anything else, they need a rest, they need a break. But if we don't give the body a break of incoming toxins, it's not long before those filters get stuck. So we. We can't really talk about detoxing without maybe talking about the liver first. And I would say the liver is probably under the most strain as a collective society than it's ever been before because of the amount of toxins. The liver is one of the main filters of the whole system. And even in Chinese medicine, the liver was looked at as the main organ for stress modulation. And each of the organs in Chinese medicine, many people probably know this now, are consistent with an emotional counterpart. So the liver is anger, frustration, huge amounts of irritability. The liver also governs a lot of smooth flow of emotions for the entire system. So everything we just talked about, of needing to evolve as a species into feeling our feelings more. No wonder the liver is under so much strain, because it's Being asked to do a lot. It's being asked to process, I would say, our cumulative trauma as a culture, as a society, as well as massive amounts of chemical toxins in every way, shape and form that they come into our bodies through food, through air, through water, medications, all of those things. So when I look at the liver, I think, oh my goodness, we gotta help you out. You are working so hard right now. How can we get behind the liver and support it? This is also, I think, one of the reasons why children and young people, the youth, are showing up with fatty liver disease. Non alcoholic, fatty liver. Are you kidding me? The only reason that would happen in my view is a huge amount of unprocessed emotion from our ancestors and our genetics and massive amounts of toxins being put into the body at alarming rates that of course the liver would have to buffer itself in some way. It's just a response.

The cheetos don't help. The liver is like, what are you giving me right now?

What is this? Yeah.

What is yellow number five? What do I even do with that? Right, so once it gets stuck in there, then what? We take a breath collectively. Individually. I mean, it starts with us. Yeah, right, so detox is one human at a time.

Yeah, it does, it starts with us. So you know, there's many, many things and, and we could go into the details a little bit more if you want, but let's go. I would say the liver, if we're starting there, there's this interesting thing. I've been thinking about this a lot the last couple years. So just like you said, like online right now, I see it rampantly. There's, there's a lot of knowledge out there for detoxing, which is amazing and it's not the full story at all. Because your liver is only one part of this beautiful orchestration of biology, that it is part of that sequence toe that if you only focus on the liver and perhaps if you pushed on the liver pretty hard by doing tons of liver detoxes because you saw online that that was the thing to do, or I'm saying it too. You got to detox the liver. Like hang with me. Don't, don't take action just yet. You want to consider that the body as a whole is one unit. So if you push on something, there's going to be a response or reaction somewhere else. So you want to take a holistic approach and take a wider lens. What else might be going on here? And this is, I think, why some people that have done deep liver Detoxes and liver cleanses have only gotten so far because they didn't work on the rest of the body. And the other counterpart to this that I've been finding fascinating is if we go back to the energy and the emotions of the liver, anger, in this case, let's say you do a huge liver cleanse. Herbals, you know, homeopathics, some castor oil packs, like all the different things that are available. If you haven't addressed the suppressed anger of your life in some way, shape or form in your genetic past or your lived experience, do you think your liver is actually going to let a lot of those toxins go? It's going to stay stuck. You might offload some. But if the higher up chain of command, from a mentally emotional point of view, the physical is the last one, if that is not addressed on some level, that liver is probably still going to hang on to quite a bit of toxicity. I'm not saying don't do it, but the next level of detoxification is the energetics and the emotions, not just the physical organ.

That's a really good starting place. So I can reflect back to when I've done coffee enemas and even when I use like super clean water, mold free, completely clean coffee. When I would do the. And I haven't done one in quite some time just because intuitively I feel like it's not good for me to do right now. I'm just listening to my body when I would do them. Sometimes I would be very angry that day and I would be like, what is the problem? Like I enjoyed the rush of the caffeine, you know, that it bypasses the portal vein. It goes in. Supposedly, I guess through some scientific research they can validate this. I wonder how you feel where it actually can clean out some of the colon and some of the lower gi. But I would notice that I would be irritated on some of those days. And so from my own anecdotal experience, I can totally dovetail on what you're saying with the liver and anger, because there'd be no other way for me to describe it as I had an edge when I did, when I detox through the coffee enemas that I normally would not have had. Yeah, what is that?

Well, that's part of the liver detoxing. Some of the anger, it's clearing it. So this is the benefit of looking at like both ways of clearing and detoxing, doing nervous system work, somatic therapy, like all the different things that are available to help process the Mentally emotional aspects that are seen and unseen in the body. And so, you know, for example, say somebody comes in and maybe they have high blood pressure or something like that, liver can be involved. Or, you know, they've, they've got some stress, they're frustrated, they're irritable, they're not sleeping well, they're waking up between 1 and 3 in the morning, which is the liver time. And all the organs have a 24 hour cycle. So if somebody's waking up between 1 and 3 in the morning, it's often the liver is really congested or irritable or inflamed in some way. So that's a way to. And you can look this up online. There's a 24 hour clock. You can see all the organs on there and maybe get some clues about your symptoms. But if we come back to the.

Liver, that's such a great resource.

Yeah. If you start working on the liver, it's probably going to release some of the stuck emotions there. And so what I would say is like, don't waste the opportunity for the anger. And so if it comes up, you were aware. Oh, I'm. And a lot of people may not even be aware, like their spouse or their friends might be like, hey, dude, what's, what's going on?

I'm a jerk today.

Yeah. And so if you have a moment to slow down and take a breath, you could go into it a little bit more of what am I actually feeling here? And why might this be stuck in my system in the first place? Oh yeah. There was that time that this thing happened and I didn't stand up for myself or I didn't put a good boundary in place and it really felt taken advantage of and I got really angry about that. But I didn't do anything with it. I just buried it down because I didn't want to deal with it at the time or I didn't have the skill sets or I didn't understand. But when you understand, then you can actually process it. And you know what, maybe later that afternoon you have a bunch of grief and tears and it starts opening that entire pathway. You've now just given that physical detox that you did. Way more capacity and it'll be way more effective because you're looking at both sides compared to just one or the other. Because we do need physical support too.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. So from a supplement perspective, and none of this is medical advice, right?

Yeah.

From a sup perspective, is it like I've heard chicory root, I've Heard of like walnut, licorice. Where do we start with supplements for liver? Knowing that we also get to fill in the other side of the coin with letting our emotions go and being aware of those emotions. They're equally important to the supplements is what I'm hearing from you. But just a handful of supplements that could really logistically start to slowly and safely detox the liver. What would those be?

Maybe one of the first ones. And yeah, you mentioned it's not medical advice.

I hate that we have to say that.

I know, it's.

You're literally seeing patients in a clinic and we have to go this.

I did learn some things.

Yeah.

So before I answer that, I also want to just remind everybody that we're holistic beings. And this is one of the things I've loved about Chinese medicine is you always treat the whole person. Because so much of the time we like to pull one thing and apply it to that aspect of the body and ignore all the rest. So whatever I say, I just want people to take it in. That one thing is not good for everybody. And something they may help somebody else and be really effective actually may be a little bit hard on somebody's system.

Yeah.

So I've seen that with liver detox, it's just, you know, over the counter stuff or things you could buy online or you know, get from your herbalist or something like that. It may or may not be appropriate. In some cases where the liver was so congested and stuck at a really deep level, then they would get on a liver cleanse or some kind of protocol. It might actually inflame and aggravate the liver to a large degree because they need really deep care there and they need to go away slower and they need to take it in a much gentler approach kind of fashion to be able to open it up slowly. Because if you come in pretty heavy handed with some of the detoxes that are available, that might not suit a your constitution or it might not serve you in your time of life. Just like you said, I don't feel that coffee enemas are the best for me right now.

Yeah, they feel too intense.

And that is actually really deep wisdom and intuition that I often coach people to like listen to that. And if I say, hey, do this thing, I think this could be good for you. I tell my patients if that doesn't feel right, tell me, let's get curious about that and let's slow down of why might that be? And it's like, oh, you're going into a massive job interview next week. You're thinking of quitting your job, and I'm saying, hey, let's get in there and start doing a pretty big detox. And, like, I'm a little bit nervous about that. I'm like, oh, hey, thanks for telling me. That's good advice. Don't do that. Yeah. Or you're going into, you know, a really big push in your career or something like that. Maybe do something a bit more gentle. Take your time. So if I was to recommend something that generally would check the boxes for a lot of people, it may not be appropriate for everybody, but for the liver, I love milk thistle. Milk thistle is detoxifying for the liver, but it's not too harsh for most people. Fairly gentle as far as herbals go. It's also mildly protective for the liver cells, so you get a bit of a regenerative nature happening there and a bit of detoxing. So I'll say, for me, that has been an herb that I've used from time to time in my life where I felt I was getting a little bit of congestion there, or maybe just from a preventative point of view that, hey, I could take this and I could take it for a few weeks, or I could even take it for a few months based on my own feeling, my own intuition, and my own intellectual understanding of some of the herbal medicine, that the ultimate way to do some of this work is to work with a pro, work with somebody that understands the whole body, that can give you an outside perspective of, hey, you know what? I see that we got to do some liver work, but let's actually get the lymphatics up and running a little bit. Let's get you doing a bit of breath work. Let's actually get you seeing a somatic therapist because you're holding so much rage and anger right now. Your liver is like a clenched fist that I could try and soften with some herbs, but you're probably going to have a much greater and faster effect, even maybe addressing the nervous system. And then let's start processing some of the physical stuff. Let's do some acupuncture, get a massage, maybe get some lymphatic massage or drainage and, you know, jumping on the trampoline a little bit. Or there's all these other modalities that are pretty widely accessible if you look online. Yeah, there's a lot of information that you can take in, but don't jump on everything right away. Feel your own wisdom and intuition. I think that's actually where we're at in society right now is we need to start coming back into contact with our own wisdom.

Yeah, it's funny. I asked you an intellectual question. I'm like, so, Doc, where do we start with the supplements on the liver? And you're like, well, do all this. Feel it. Which is the common thread in our podcast. And the one way that I've always thought about this is, like, if we have so many systems in our body that are all designed to be in harmony with each other, they're all designed for homeostasis, right? This middle point, this Goldilocks zone in us, what's the sister of the liver or the brother of the liver? Like, what's one of the systems or one of the other organs that really matches nicely and plays nicely with the liver to where you might start next?

Yeah, great question. So there's a few ways to look at this as well. The spleen would be the one that's talked about a lot in Chinese medicine, because these represent two beautiful, different elements. The liver is wood element, and the spleen is earth. And to have good balance, you know, it's like a tree standing tall in the forest. It needs good rooting into the earth, and they support each other. So all of the things that support a tree come up from the earth, but a tree can also hold the earth in place so it doesn't erode. Or, you know, if you imagine a riverbank, there could be a beautiful, strong tree there. It's going to anchor that in and hold that and support it really well. So you can imagine the liver and the spleen toggle energy back and forth and mutually support each other physiologically. The spleen is completely tied into the lymphatic network of the entire body, which also happens to be a massive detox pathway and entire system for everything. So between the spleen and the liver, those are really, really key organs, and those happen to be the two organs that tend to come out of balance the most in Chinese medicine. From a quantitative analysis point of view, we'd call it liver and spleen. Disharmony would be one of the translated sayings, and that may not mean anything to anybody out there except for Chinese medicine practitioners or people that have studied.

I get it.

But if there's a disharmony between those two organs, they're going to affect each other. So if the liver is angry and irritable and there's a lot of congestion or that filter is blocked up quite a bit, it starts dragging on the energy of the spleen a lot, and it will exhaust the spleen energy and suddenly it's not going to be able to keep up with how much energy your body actually needs. So opening up the liver a little bit, getting it moving, getting it flowing, offloading some emotion, processing some emotion, will actually take some pressure off the spleen. And what that actually does physiologically is it helps the lymph move through your body a little bit more easily and actually helps you detox more effectively.

What's the primary function of the spleen? What's its job?

Well, I'll speak from a Chinese medicine point of view first. The spleen builds chi, so it builds vital force energy for the body. So the idea is you, you know, breathe in air, you take in food, goes through the digestion, breaks down the nutrients and a lot of the. We call it clear qi. In Chinese medicine, it's all these cool terms, I can't believe I still remember some of them. But it takes that clear energy and it passes it onto the spleen and the spleen puts it into usable form of vital force that then can be used throughout the whole system. The spleen also has a massive impact on digestion, which is I think in large part why we have so many digestive issues collectively now, from toxins and everything else. But the spleen's role is also to help manage the mind of all things.

That's fascinating. How does it do that?

So from a mechanism point of view, and again, I'll reference Chinese medicine, you know how I mentioned each of the emotions are connected to a different organ, so we'll round them out for everybody. Kidneys is more fear, lungs tend to be more grief and sadness. The spleen is overthinking also translated to excessive contemplation. So, you know, we're weaving this back together as a society. The mentalization of so many things. The spleen's exhausted because we are calling on that energy way more than we ever have before because we're on screens 24 7. I don't think there's ever been a time in human history where you have like 10 different ways to communicate with people, which is beautiful in some ways. Yeah. But if you're checking your text, your WhatsApp, your Signal, your Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, whatever that is a lot of work. For the spleen to remain intellectual a lot and take in a lot of stimulus, it needs to feed that. Where do you think the energy comes from? It comes from your body feeding the mind.

Yeah.

So if you're exhausting the mind with over stimulating it, overthinking yeah, the spleen's like taking one for the team and the spleen's becoming exhausted, which then starts blocking up the lymph flow of the body because stuff starts accumulating there and it starts getting stuck in a bad way.

You know what's really wild too is I'm flashing back. I did a pretty intense NLP training with Scott Jackson and he was taught by the work of Claire Graves and a lot of neuroscientists that really were the good side of nlp. People think that NLP is Richard Bandler, but he was just the messenger. I didn't think he was that great of a guy. But in nlp there's this well known fact, and also with neurologists, that your body can only process 126 bits of information per second, yet there's 11 million points coming at us. And when you put a phone in your hand, there's probably millions more. You know, perception, unconscious projection, colors, sound, shape, I mean, you name it. So we're already, we're already completely over maxed anyways. We I think get more stimuli in a minute than our grandparents did in a day of their life. So it makes complete sense both from a Chinese medicine standpoint and also from a neurological standpoint that we're just like completely maxed. We're so maxed, like the bathtub of allostatic load is pouring over. Yeah, we just can't, we can't increase our stress capacity anymore. Unless we just go to the forest for five days and then we come back. We might get filled up in a day. So it may seem. I don't want to paint a bleak picture, but it seems like the more we talk about detox with you and you map these emotions for us, which is so profound. I had no idea about the spleen in the mind. I mean that makes hardcore sense. But I wonder where we go from here because it can seem like a losing war for people that don't have the courage or the confidence to know that we're all going to be okay and we can figure this out and everything's figureoutable. Right. Especially if you match yourself with a practitioner. It's totally healable and figureoutable. I just want to say that from a place of hope. But how do we start to do that process? And we haven't even talked about all the aspects of detox yet anyways. But I'm just thinking like with the cards are essentially stacked against us, we need to reshuffle our own cards. How do we do that?

Well, you mentioned it just a moment ago is that the cup's pretty full. And this is why I think autoimmune disorders are skyrocketing allergies, inflammatory kind of responses overall for the entire body. It's because if the cup is full, you can't really tolerate anything new coming in there. It's already full.

Yeah.

So then the body has no choice but to respond in an inflammatory sense because it's trying to clear itself. So both on a mentally emotional side and a physical side, which is why we need to do both now. It's not enough to just do one or the other, because I have worked with many people where maybe they've done hours and hours and hours of counseling and somatic work and many, many different things that have been hugely helpful. Emdr eft all those different things. And maybe they actually need some real deep organ work now, like physical and even hands on. And you can do liver massage. You can see people for visceral massage, organ, you know, like internal organ network. I have practitioners I work with all the time they're out there that know the fascia, that know the meridian lines and they can get in there and start rearranging things. And it's kind of a cool feeling to have somebody say, hey, your, your stomach has kind of pulled up and over and have you had digestive issues a little bit lately? And oh, maybe you went through some stress and all the fascia and your torso like just tightens up, you're not breathing deeply. Maybe after you come through that stress or whatever it was that season ends, you come into a better state of harmony. Go get physical work done and have those organs actually attended to, get some hands on, get some acupuncture, because it can actually help physically open those spaces up again. You'll usually get some emotional release happening and then you're coming back into harmony. So just being aware of sometimes going back and forth and I'll have patients come in that depending on where they're at in their journey or what, what work they've already done or who they've seen, I might dive into all kinds of treatment with them or I might say, hey, I can help you a ton, but not just yet. You're going to actually get more work from what I'm going to do. If you do a little bit of work over here, like, let's work on your nervous system. Have you addressed your nervous system at all? And then that can actually open up like really beautiful elements of the physical body to, to more easily release, like it doesn't have to be so hard all the time. So, you know, pick the low hanging fruit first. It'll get your feet wet a little bit and then you can start diving in a little bit more.

Yeah, but it sounds like the, the road starts with a trusted mentor because it's such a specialized body of knowledge that even if somebody was, let's say somebody's really intelligent and they're a great student and they want to become their own doctor, you can go that path. It just seems like that path is longer and maybe more painful.

Yeah, we can't do things alone. And believe me, I tried. I was the hyper independence, you know, from an ego point of view or whatever, it's like, oh no, I got this. I, I can take care of everything that I need and you know, just go, go, go all the time. And I don't need support from other people in the same way. And yeah, that works in some ways for a while, but it didn't get me that far. And then I started realizing like, oh no, I do need, need help. I do need support from other people. I do need, you know, a place to ask questions, a place to be heard where I, I can actually share. I'm a practitioner. I hold a lot for a lot of people. Where am I going with my stuff? And so I have amazing people in my life now and I do that regularly because I know that I can't answer all of my own questions all the time. And I need reflections, I need people to help direct me back to maybe where I'm, you know, forming little gaps. So if we slow down, the right pathway usually starts to emerge. We gotta come back into trusting our intuition, we gotta come back into trusting our instincts as our body's telling us all the time. We're just often not listening. So of a life right now that has a myriad of millions of options. You can look up anything. People often get overwhelmed intellectually or mentally of, well, I don't actually know what to do. It's like, hang on a second. You probably do, but you're gonna have to slow down to actually tap into that answer. So again, take a breath, feel your feet on the ground. Where are you getting pulled? Has anything I said, you know, pulled you more than others? Maybe the liver you're not actually jiving with too much. Maybe it is the lymph or the spleen that needs a bit of support. The other one I want to talk about, you know, to, to go further on the detox front. And I would say this is true for Almost every patient I've seen, the liver, the kidneys, and the spleen need to be addressed. Those three organs are really, really powerful. It's not that all the other organs aren't important. They are, and I would say the lymphatic network overall, even though Chinese medicine didn't name the lymph network, it's involved in every organ system but liver, kidneys and spleen. And so the kidneys is the fear. And when we look at our society, especially last few years, what was like, incredibly prevalent, massive fear. So people's kidneys physically, and the fascia around the kidneys can actually start lifting and taking them out of an optimal position, which actually affects the filtration rate and capacity of your kidneys. Not only that, it stresses the, out of your adrenal system. And, you know, we've seen that in society, adrenal fatigue and people just on the go all the time. So there's a cool practice that you can do. You can do it on your own or you can get support. You could do it with a spouse, your lover, friends, you know, depending on what kind of connection you have with those around you or practitioner. The kidneys, after a little while, really appreciate physical support. So you can have somebody just laying on a couch, laying on a treatment table, and you literally just put your hands under, obviously with consent and good communication of what's going on. And if you're hearing this and you want this support, ask somebody that you love or that you trust to be able to do this, or a practitioner, or imagine that you're doing it for yourself and you just slide one hand, or you could put both hands under the low back where the kidneys are and just wait. And it might take a minute, it might take five, 10, sometimes 20 or 30 minutes, but you'll start to feel that energy just melt. If you're holding space well, without agendas, without expectations, without thinking that you're a healer or, or, you know, I don't even think of myself that way, really.

I'm.

I'm a human being that's just holding up show space for people. But I'll just rest my hand there for as long as it takes for the kidneys to start feeling supported because they're holding so much and working so hard and, and there's legitimate fears at times. You know, I have fears too, that physical support is really powerful. You don't even have to say anything. Just hold your hand for as long as it takes for the kidneys to like, oh, man, they just let go A little bit. Oh, you mean they're. They're being held now? They don't have to hold everything. What do the kidneys do when they start to feel held? They start to relax. What does the adrenal system do? It starts to come out of fight or flight. It starts to come out of the sympathetic mode. We start to breathe more deeply. And you can get that person, you could just say, hey, try and breathe into my hand a little bit. Breathe more deeply. And those kidneys will actually start changing their physiological position in the body and they stop being so tight. And often what happens is an emotional release follows that and the rest of the body starts to relax and people sleep better. And for something so simple, they got supported and the organs got supported directly. Just being held at the end of the day. I think a lot of people are needing to be just held right now.

Oh, yeah.

Without an agenda. You know, this loving, neutral space of one human to another without judgment of like, hey, let me just. Let me just hold you for a minute, bro.

What you're saying makes so much. I love this podcast so much. You're. You're like going into my psyche and allowing me to remember all these memories that I've. That were really beautiful memories. I was a personal trainer, like year seven, eight in La Jolla, California, and I used to do this clock tower stretch with people where I would put my hand on their lower back and I would have them do circles with their arms. And there was this older woman that I was training, and she just starts bawling. And I was like, I didn't even know how to hold Spam. I was like 28 years old or something. I didn't know what the hell was going on. So with my personal trainer mind, I was like. I think I said something like, hey, it's okay. You can just let it go. That was what naturally came out for me. And she just cried. She looked around and make sure nobody was watching her. And she cried and cried. And that's when I. Something really clicked for me where the body doesn't just keep the score. The body is the library. You know, the body holds every word, every sensory input, every trauma, every memory. I've heard people say the body is a living library. I agree. I agree. And what you're saying, with your own research and academic expertise and also just clinical expertise of you doing this for so long, I can. I can connect the dots back to when I was a trainer, working with this woman and just having her stretch and just pushing on her back and Having her spine pop and just giving her that openness, just allowing her to be held for a moment and be open. And it was so profound that I started to actually think, do I need to be held? You know, do, do I need to be held? And, and how much in life do we need to hold each other? That for whatever reason we're just making up excuses as to why we can't. It's too much work. I don't have enough time. What about tomorrow? What about dinner? What about this? Can we just hold each other? Can we just hold each other more? And can that be medicinal itself? I think the answer is, hell yes.

It might be one of the most medicinal things to be held in a safe way, in a safe container. And for those of you, you know, I'm feeling your audience right now that might feel really alone and they might say, I don't have anybody to hold me right now. And I can feel the emotion at times where I felt that way. And you can meet yourself too, you know, we need others. But if this is you right now and you're sitting in the chair listening, you're land, just make yourself comfortable and imagine that the 5 or maybe 10 or 20 or older version of yourself shows up and says, hey, I got you, I'll hold you. And just envision yourself coming to step in and put your hands on your low back and breathe into that. And I like doing this as a practice for myself when I've been in those moments, but also for that wisdom, because that 20 year old version of Kev, he's been through more than me and he's got even more answers than I do. And so I might ask them in a scenario like that, hey, you got any other advice for me right now with this thing I'm moving through or this thing I'm struggling with? What do you think? And you'd be surprised what happens even just through that loop of connecting in that way, both physically but emotionally.

I bet it's pretty profound when, and obviously for confidentiality, you can't name names or even, maybe even specific scenarios. When you have somebody that gets held for the very first time in a long time and they also get the medicinal support from, you know, the anatomy and the supplements. Like when you're really healing a person from all sides, the transformation that you must see must bring you to tears sometimes. I mean, it's got to be so, so good, so nourishing for you as the practitioner to see it happen in real time. What was that like? What's that like? For you it is.

Yeah. Some of the most, like, satisfying, gratifying work I can imagine. Even just one person, you know, And I'm doing big events these days and retreats and things, too. And seeing a person transform in front of you in real time or, you know, maybe we've been doing treatment for a little while, and they come back, and sometimes I don't even recognize them. They look 10 years younger. They quit their job, they got a new job. And they have, like, a lightness in their being and they have color back in their face, and their eyes have that fire back again. And they sit down and we look at each other and I'll say, okay, how are you doing? And sometimes they just start crying and. Or the biggest grin. And I'll. I'll cry, too. And like, okay, you don't even need to give it words. I can see.

Yeah.

That you are a different person now. And the way they walk in the room and the way they carry themselves and the way they start communicating and speaking, I. I don't know if there's anything better as a practitioner. Yeah. To be able to just witness that. That, like, how grateful I am that I've been on this path of, you know, healing, you know, for myself and many, many people, and, you know, you can't help but just want to share that with others.

See, this is what's different about you than compared to the traditional Western doc. And I'm not here to shit on Western docs. If I break a leg, I need to go to the hospital or, you know, there's a time and a place for Western. So I'm not here to say it's all bad, but they get. They get like three minutes with a patient, six minutes or something, and then they have to move on and put in insurance codes, and that's how they get paid. That's how they support their family. So I have huge compassion for the stress load that they go through. Many doctors are super sick, Western docs. Very, very sick people. But I always ask myself, whenever I get advice or care or support from someone, do I want what they have? Do I want the body they have? Do I want the life they have? We were talking about this at the table today. Do I want whatever the person has imbued their life with? Because otherwise, if they're a great doctor, but they're unhealthy and their wife hates them and their kids don't want to spend time with them, that's going to infuse into their care for me. So I think we all get to be really selective and really careful, really aware of who we're choosing to be our practitioner. Do I want their life? Do they have pictures of their family, you know, in their office? Are they a loving person? Does their staff like them? Everything feeds into everything else. And, and what's different about you that I really love and respect, man, is that you do the work. You do the work because, you know, on some level, I'm sure, or maybe on every level, that that goes into your patients, that goes into your people that you meet in your in person events, you were sharing with me about some super deep work that you had done on yourself. And I thought it was so profound that it's totally worthy of sharing. And it was about the way in which you found the center for the event that you did with Zach Bush and Charles Eisenstein. So I think this is part of the detox conversation. I mean, we'll totally circle back around and hit any other missing part of detox. I'll make sure we do that. But in order to really help someone detox, you yourself have to be clean. Otherwise, energetically or somatically or even unconsciously, you may be projecting your toxification on the person that you're helping. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, you're helping them. But walk us through this story because it was so profound. We were in the sauna today, total truth. And I was just sitting there and I felt like I was there with you. And it just made me realize that this is what every practitioner must do. They must go down this deep route for themselves. Otherwise they could be either not serving their patients or they could definitely serve them at a higher level. So, so how did this event even come online? What was the name of it? And. And how did you get Zach Bush and Charles Eisenstein to the event? These are huge names. Really significant weight that these men hold. How did that even happen? And then go into the story of how you found the center. Because it's very. It's very fascinating.

Well, and just before I dive into that, I do want to say, like, for everybody that's listening, doctors and practitioners of all kinds, like, they are people too.

Yeah.

And if we just allow them to be human, that they're going to have good days and bad days as I do, as well, that I may not always be at my best. But what I've learned is the more work that I've done on myself or addressing my feelings, my. My energy, my emotions, whatever it is, and show up really, intentionally, the best I can. Each day I remind myself, like, why am I here? What's Kevin showing up in this space for? Am I just here punching the clock? Am I just putting in hours because this is my job? Or do I have an opportunity to change some lives today and experience some miracles and live a really gratifying and holistic life? And I want to embody that the best I can all the time. And it's a work in progress. But I've also learned the more I do that, the more I'm willing to face my own stuff, the greater I can hold space for others, the less I have to say, the less I need to do, and the more healing happens. Like that just. It just shows up in the space.

All right, so before you go on. On the screen right now is a graphic that came through on this podcast. I hate that phrase, divine download, brother. I'm not saying that that's what it was, but it did come from my own soul. And it was this phrase that. Leaders hold lanterns. You're not here to shine light on everyone else, because then the part of you stays dark. You're not doing your work. You hold a lantern, my friend. You hold a lantern up, so it shines light on you, and it shines light on everybody else. That's the real leadership that this world needs. So I think that's. You are an embodiment of that phrase, leaders hold lanterns, and I do my best to do that, too. We all do it in our own way of life. So it's a huge, huge weight that I feel that I get to express this to the world, because I think the old adage of, like, I'm here to shine light, brother. I'm shining light on everyone else. Well, then you're staying dark. You're just holding a flashlight, shining on everybody else. That's spiritual passivity. That's spiritual narcissism. Spiritual bypassing, in my opinion.

Yeah.

So I just had to say that because the way you described it, it's like, it's so obvious when we hear it. Yet we've been so conditioned to believe that as long as you're shining light on others, then you're okay. It's actually not true.

Yeah.

You shine lighting yourself too well. And that allows you to shine light on other people.

Yeah.

And be in honesty.

I've been there, I think, which is the earned wisdom, perhaps, that I would just focus on everybody else before and not myself. Don't worry. I'm good. Let's help you.

It's a Beautiful place to hide.

Oh, it's amazing. I could hide the most amount of material for decades in that space. So I've been on a journey to not hide so much inside myself. And I would say in part, that is why the event showed up in the way that it did. And so if we rewind, you know, several years. I've been doing retreats for a bunch of years now, smaller ones, you know, 6, 8 people, 10, 15, 20 people, and started having the vision for maybe like a one day event, you know, instead of four or five days with a small group of people, what if we did a big group of people for one day? And we did that, I got some support. We, we did an event. It felt like it went really well. I got to test it out and see, do I even like doing this? Do I even want to be on stage, what's happening? And I got to see a lot of connection happen. I got to see a lot of fun. I led some processes, we did some cool things, the feedback was great. Some healing happened, which was the idea, and really beautiful connection. And I love people coming together in really good community and healthy connection. That's a big part of it for me. Maybe we'll segue on that in another podcast in the future of like, my own loneliness is often what had led to me wanting to connect people because I was trying to solve that for me. So there's a few layers in this. So I did an event and it went well. And I could feel this, this deeper vision coming through of where, where should I go with this next? And just trying to be open and listening without too much of an agenda of I have to do this. It's, it's just organically showing up inside. So I had this vision that, oh, I want to do a bigger event. I want to do like two days. And what if we could do something really impactful and create some miracles and, and have proximity with each other and deep connection for two days? What would, what would happen? Would that be even greater? And I just have these questions of curiosity. So as I was envisioning that, you know, making some notes, cultivating that in meditation and just trying to deeply listen to what was trying to come through me. I had just finished leading a retreat with a good friend of mine and on the drive back, I was riding with another friend of mine and we're chatting about this vision. We were chatting about life, we were chatting about many, many things. And we're coming around the corner on this highway deep in the Kootenays, in B.C. and I see a bear coming out of the woods. And I could tell, you know, I'm focused on the road, but I could tell that's. That's a big bear. It stopped us because it walked right to the center of the road. And it was a grizzly bear. And we were silent. Our conversation stopped abruptly. We're both looking at this grizzly bear and it turns its head and it looks right through the windshield at us. And it's just a moment suspended in time that I'll never forget because I felt the gaze of that animal, that sentient being, the wisdom and the energy and everything else, and I. I couldn't move. I'm just in my truck, paused, foot on the brake, staring as it's staring back at us. And then the moment passed and it turned around and it walked back into the woods the way it came. We didn't talk after that for probably like 20 or 30 minutes. Like, it was just silence because I think we could both feel the moment that it happened, something happened. And so we're driving. Finally, we strike up conversation again much, much later. And I'm starting to share about this event that I have this vision for. And then we start talking about where should we host this event? You know, where's. Where's this going to be? I don't know. And, you know, we're just tossing around ideas. And as we're driving by the highway, there's a huge venue. It's an indigenous community center. It's beautiful. It's a big roundhouse. It's like 30,000 square feet with giant logs and a living roof. It is. It's beautiful. I've driven by it many times, but it didn't grab me in the same way it did that day. And we literally both looked over at the same time while we were in conversation of where to host this event. And I think we both said it maybe at the same time, what about that place? So we end up getting in touch with the people that are in charge of that building. Beautiful humans. And we went to look at it. They said, yeah, you know, come. Come and check it out. Let's. Let's talk. And there's grizzly bear footprints stamped in the concrete outside leading into the front door of that place. And I got the message, this is where I'm going to host this. I knew it immediately. We walk in, and I just felt so much energy move through my entire body with that. Oh, yeah, here's a place that's beautifully built for this purpose. It feels like this is meant to happen. And so we ended up doing an event and we called it the New Human. And again, those were words that came through when I was just sitting with it asking, you know, I'm starting to put plans in place for an event, I think I gotta call it something. And you know, talking to my, my guides, my, my angels, whoever, you know, helps me out and saying, hey, I, I need to call this something. We gotta start marketing this, we gotta start telling people. And it didn't come through right away. It came through maybe a period of a weeks or something like that. I can't remember if it was a meditation or I might have been walking in the forest and said, you know, the New Human. And admittedly I, I actually didn't really love that name at first. For whatever reason, probably my mind resistance and you know, thinking it should be something maybe more exciting or, I don't know, more dramatic. But eventually that, that settled deeply in my system and I thought, okay, we're going to call it that. So we, we did one. Mark Groves came and spoke at that first one we did last year. That was a beautiful event. We had a few other amazing speakers there too. And it went really well. And I could feel this, this growing energy coming through that, oh, I think there's going to be more. I think we just started something. And so we did another one, just a one day event in December last year. And that was a deeply powerful event where I think a lot of us, me included especially cleared a lot of what wasn't serving us anymore. And I think that cleared the way for so much more.

And when you say you cleared what wasn't serving you anymore, that's a really interesting phrase because it could be so many things, you know, like there's a lot of stuff that doesn't serve us that we outsource our power to unknowingly. But what's really awesome is that I have felt this many times in my life as soon as I make a decision and I'm just convicted to that decision. I can feel it in my bones, like it's an embodied decision. Some person goes, something new comes in like pretty much in a day. I mean, it's happened multiple times. But I shared with you something that, that happened even with our team. It brings in something that you could not have even imagined. Could you have ever imagined when you started your Chinese medicine practice and your care for patients, that you'd be sharing a stage with Dr. Zach Bush? Like, was that even a thing for you? How did that come to Be.

I don't think I even envisioned myself on any stage anywhere. Originally. There was this vision that came in maybe five or six years ago, six years ago, I think. And I started having dreams about it. And there was a dream that I'd get occasionally and sometimes during meditation, and it would be me on stage in front of a lot of people. And it scared me a lot. And I definitely pushed it away and I just thought I was projecting some other vision of other people or whatever it might have been. I'm like, no, no, I'm not that guy. I don't want to be on stage. Vision. You got the wrong person. Move along, please. But it wouldn't, it wouldn't leave me.

Yeah.

And one of my dear friends, Emily, we were in a retreat setting in 2018 in Sedona. And yeah, she's very connected and intuitive and, you know, I could say a lot of things about her and, and we're sitting outside by the pool having a one on one session and she's like, so tell me about that dream you've been having. And I was like, what are you talking about? I hadn't shared it with anybody. She's like, you know the dream where you're on, on stage in front of a lot of people, My face probably went white. I'm looking at her of what? And I, I could feel my heart beating. I could feel probably the, the rush of energy through my system of, oh, I'm deeply uncomfortable right now. First, how do you know that? I haven't told anybody. Second, Yeah, I can't get away from this vision either. So what is that? She goes, don't worry about it. All that's in process. Just keep doing what you're doing, keep being you and, you know, don't even worry about it. Don't be so scared. I think is maybe what she said. I don't remember everything she said, but I remember part of that and that vision. And so here we are, you know, six years later. The things I get visions for, a lot of them have happened and I, I don't even know why or how necessarily. I can't tell you all the, the intellectual reasons. But I, I'm gonna circle it back to being a lantern or, you know, one of my mentors said, you know, be the lighthouse. You know, just shine your light from within. And anybody that is in that radius, they can choose whatever they want to do with that light, you know, me included. And so I think for quite a while now, I've been holding that light and holding that Vision and the best way I can and my humanness and my else. But I am addressing things when I can, and I. I'm not shying away from some of those fears and insecurities in the way that I used to. And I think part of it is because I'm not hiding as much anymore, because I'm not hiding things from myself as much. And I believe that casts a frequency and a resonance, you know, signature of vibration that goes out in these visions. Just one, like one of my favorite books, the Alchemist.

Great book.

When you're following your heart and you're following your pathway, your destiny, the whole universe conspires to help you. And so, through a series of these beautiful events and working with other amazing humans, you know, Mark Groves included, that these connections start to happen. But I also started to have belief in myself of, maybe I can hold this frequency, maybe I can actually hold this vision. And when I started believing in that, for me, that's when these things start showing up. And then pretty soon I'm on the phone with Charles or having a Zoom call with those guys, and then. And not only that, but they said yes. And I thought, well, I trust their intuition. And I think I shared with them. I'm doing this anyway, and I would love it if you would come and join. But I think they could probably feel the conviction in me. I'm going to do this event in whatever way. And I don't think I was actually overly attached. I was excited. You know, I've had a vision of working with both of them for quite some time, and, you know, been following them for years.

Yeah.

That I've been deeply inspired by many people. And you included all the guests that you have of. Yeah. I'm going to carry on in my pathway in the way that I need to, and I'm going to have to face some of my fears. I'm going to have to face some doubts and insecurities. But is this really authentically alive within me? And I'd have to check in quite a bit because there's a lot of times I did want to quit or I wanted to pack it in. It felt like too much or I wasn't. It wasn't going to be successful, or it's too risky. But that test is like, do you trust this vision or not? Are you going to show up or not? Yes or no, Kevin? And I chose yes, and I kept choosing yes, and then I got yeses from other people. And suddenly, then there we are on stage, hanging out and delivering something. That felt really powerful to me.

This is just this beautiful reminder that. And it's just again and again and again, I'm getting hit with this message and the people that listen. Every week, you know what I'm about to say, because everybody's been saying it for the past, like, six shows. When you reorganize yourself and you're clear in what you want, the world completely changes itself. To meet who you are. It's an inside job. It always has been. Whether it's like healing the relationship with our parents, our grandparents, our lineage. When the healing happens inside of us, everything reorganizes itself. It's so true. Like, you just shared yet another on a stack of many others of how this is tangible and real. This is not just mental fragments or spiritual. Woo. Although everything's spiritual, you are literally sharing yet another piece of evidence that I hope y' all are feeling. Oh, my God. I know I'm feeling this when I choose. When you choose to reorganize the way that you feel about your conviction for your purpose or your gift, and you're super strong about it, everyone else just believes you don't have to say anything because you've already reorganized the matter in yourself. And then anybody that's aligned with that matter, then you make meaning together. It's so beautiful, man. I mean, it's so inspiring. It's. It's exactly. Please rewind this and watch that again with what you just shared, because that's ev. That's literally everything. If people get one thing from this conversation, I think whether it's purpose or healing, it's. It's that. That's the juice. That's totally the juice. Because it's always been an inside job, yet we think we need something outside, or we. We intellectualize that we need something outside. But it's just so wild. So when you got on stage with Zach, was it like a surreal moment where you were watching yourself talk to him, or what did it feel like because he had been in your field for a long time.

Yeah. I'm just, you know, sitting with all of this and, like, feeling it in my body of. I probably had this desire or vision that I wanted to work with Zach, you know, maybe for five or six years now.

Yeah.

And I think what I started to wonder was, is it going to happen? Is it not going to happen? Going to keep holding the vision? It's not like I wasn't taking steps or trying, but it wasn't showing up in the way that I thought or in the timeframe I wanted.

Right.

But I did just keep showing up and putting one step in front of the other. But I also think I needed to go through quite a few other experiences to bring myself into a level of frequency that would then resonate with the Zach or resonate with everybody there from a greater place of service. Because I think if I rewind, you know, and I'm still. I still have moments about this where maybe my mind convinces it's. It's about me, but it's not really about me. So I think one of the main aspects that probably truly brought this forward was I did just genuinely want to be of service, because I know what it's like to help people heal and see miracles and transformations, and that inspires me all the time. But I don't need that for myself as much as I just want to share that with the world now. And if it comes through me in whatever way or, you know, a group of people, I'm happy to build that and, like, hold that space, because I know what can happen in those spaces. You just have to build the energy, and they'll. They'll show up in it if you've. If you've, you know, cultivated those spaces. So I think it took me that amount of time to declutter my system, to come into more authenticity, to not be hiding. So much so that by the time I did stand on that stage, I could just be me and I could feel calm and grounded and excited, and it felt natural.

Yeah.

It didn't feel like I had jumped, like, 50 timelines or I had hacked the system or something. It just felt like this is part of the river flow of my life, and I'm just going to keep paddling and. And, you know, not try and fight my own processes and wherever I need to. I just want to address it in the. The best way I can. And when I up, then I'm going to, you know, face that in the. The best way that I can. And so I picked up Zach from the airport when he came in, and we had the best day together and just being human and being guys, and we went swimming in the lake, and we went hiking, and we did some meditation, and we just. We had fun. And it was the joy that was coming through that man and me that got to activate and ignite that. So by the time we got into the event, and I didn't have as much time with Charles because his plane was delayed and he missed a connection, and I love that man as well. Like, these are really loving human beings, and that was actually the, the prerequisite, even though I didn't state it necessarily. This is a vision I was holding that every single person. I had a couple of my dear friends on stage, Mike and Courtney as well, and we had a beautiful singer, Zoe was there and my other buddy Mike, sound bath guy, that everybody that was on that stage, the prerequisite was that they would have to be very open hearted and really care about humanity genuinely not an act, not a show, that that is what they are and who, what they live and breathe and that that comes through them completely organically. And that was what we experienced all together. And I think I've finally come to a space where I can hold that more myself more often of let's be of service and can we make the planet a bit better? And if we can, let's do that.

So what'd you have to clean out to hold it?

Inadequacy. And I would say that's still in me, but less so because for years and years I had such low confidence, low self esteem. I'd have visions and things, but I'd be too scared to hold that, that I wouldn't take action on anything. The fear got to me. The fear ran that. So I guess the fear in some way I needed to come to a space where I could just invite it and sit in a room with it and then face it, look it in the eyes a little bit and it's like, yeah, I understand, but you're not in charge anymore. You're gonna have to take a back seat now. I need to start driving my own life. You can't drive anymore. You've driven us into a place that doesn't seem very good and I don't feel very good about. So thank you for doing all the things you've done. But get in the back seat. I'm going to take the wheel and let me see what I can do with it.

What's the origin of that fear? Like, I know for me, the origin of fear around speaking, which held me from even launching a podcast. I sat on this podcast for like three years before I started it because I had the same thing. I'm like, well, why should I care? And I don't have anything to say. And all these stories that I believed. So I'll just pass the question to you. What was the unconscious evidence that life had brought your way? Childhood, young adulthood that gave you the permission to not follow your dream? And then how did you break free of that coupling where you actually did?

I feel like it took no Small amount of courage to look at the things I didn't want to look at previously. And looking at them one at a time. All those things that we try to keep in our blind spot, you know, something that comes right into our front vision and it might be uncomfortable or scary or whatever it is. And then we'll just kind of push that over to the side and we'll push it back into the blind spot. And then it's like, oh, yep, pretty clear sailing. But you know it's there. You can feel it.

Yes.

You know, these are the. The hungry ghosts. We talk, they're doing push ups in.

The corner just waiting for you.

They're there and if you don't address them or face them, they start building up. And then you might start feeling health issues or you might be depressed, you might be deeply uncomfortable day to day, you might start feeling anxious and not sleeping because there's a buildup happening. And you know it. We know things. And whenever I ask people questions, like deep questions, and they say, I don't know, it's not that they're lying, but it's often that they do know, but they don't want to look at it. And I have lived it because I've experienced that. That's how I know it. I was a pro at that. Keep it hidden, keep it in the background, put that in a box. But sooner or later, that energy has to come out somewhere and you either get to a place of deep dissatisfaction in your life, in your career, your mission, or you're not on your mission and you start to feel the sting of that life starts to deliver you things physically, mentally, emotionally. And just getting you to look at.

It, it's like this existential weight. The way that I've used to was like this every day when I would wake up and I would go to this like, quote, safe corporate job, I would feel the existential weight of me not doing what my soul was asking me. It was fucking suffocating.

Yeah. So I can laugh now.

I can laugh now.

Yeah.

But I mean, I had to really be suffocated in order to breathe.

Yeah.

Like, did you have that too?

Yeah. I felt an immense amount of pressure and also this, like, this deep knowing that I wasn't where I needed to be.

Where did the pressure come from?

Myself.

Okay.

And probably my soul, you know, the Dharma, your destiny, it's calling you all the time, whether you're listening or not. And the further you get from that possibility of really having an unauthentically led life and what that means to me is that you're on track with your soul's blueprint, you're on track with your destiny, and that you're in the flow. And I do find that when you're in that, things become a bit easier. It doesn't mean they're always easy. You still need to take action. You still need to face things and show up. But stuff starts lighting up around you in a different way. The synchronicities start showing up and you're not fighting it. It felt like I was fighting the current for so long. And you know what? Eventually you're just like, I'm exhausted. I'm not getting anywhere. Why? And it's actually in that surrender sometimes that you start to actually listen and the flow of life takes over and starts taking you to those places.

Wait, hold up. You mean it's not just good vibes only? I can't just wear a T shirt that says good vibes only and cut all the people out of my life that cause me any pain or self reflection and get to my dream?

What the fuck? You could, Josh. You could do that. And you would probably be brought back right to the space that you would need, where you last just address something.

Yeah, yeah. We did this really big podcast with Paul. Check. And the man can talk. I mean, you're a great speaker as well. And it's funny that you ever doubted yourself on a stage because, you know, you're on a quasi stage right now. And anyways, Paul was sharing that young states that the unfinished business of parents will be lived out by children. And I wonder, my lineage, you're giving me this cool space to reflect in where I'm like, huh? Where in my lineage did someone want to express themselves in the way that I am now? And how am I honoring them and healing my whole lineage? By doing the thing that my heart and my soul wants me to do. And not just pie in the sky, but like, truly, truly, truly, to the best of my ability, following what that voice is inside of me that wants me to go in this direction. Have you ever considered this? Like, have you thought about anyone in your tree, maternal or paternal, that wanted to do something like you're doing now and by the fact that you're even doing it?

Yeah.

It heals that line forwards and backwards.

Absolutely. I think about this all the time, but.

You do.

I do. It's like, how can we honor everybody that's come before us? What if I showed up and just gave it everything? Would that be honoring? Or what if I let the Fear dictate my decisions in life. How would my ancestors feel about that? How would my great grandfathers feel about that? And it's not from, like, a judgment or pressure, but if I feel the support, if I imagine, you know, everybody that's come before me is. Is cheering me on and saying, hey, thank you for being in this family. And I'm like, thank you for allowing me to be in this lineage. How can I be of service to this lineage and therefore, you know, be of service to the world and. And how can I carry the baton forward? I would feel more courage and bravery knowing that they're standing behind me and saying, you know, go for it. Even if you fail, what then? Is there even such a thing as failure? By whose standards and by what judgments would we consider something a failure? I'd rather try. And I think actually that's how these events came to be. I was terrified, you know, I'm going to invest a huge amount of money. I'm going to invest money that I don't even have, that I might put myself in a challenge, you know, financially, even more so than what I had experienced in the past. But if I didn't do it, I wouldn't know. And all those things that it cultivated, it shaped me into who I am now is just by putting that stake in the ground saying, I'm going to do this event. And the person that I need to become en route to that event is, was what's going to unfold. And believe me, I went through a lot of stuff leading into these events, typically, because anything that would need to be burned off or cleared out or realigned in my system would absolutely happen. Because I think the intention, the energy that we would build would not allow anything other than, you know, showing up in as much purity as possible. So I knew I'd need to meet some things, and I met some stuff along the way that was challenging and, you know, friends would leave my space or huge amounts of judgment and projection. And those are all things I didn't really anticipate but had to work through and, you know, judgment of self and like, oh, yeah, why am I doing this? And then you'd really have to kind of distill that down to get to the root of, is this true path for me or not? Yeah, it feels like it. I'm gonna do it.

Don't you find this to be true? That whenever you're about to uplevel really big, the world, God, universe will bring you something totally out of left field to test your resolve on the up leveling, I have felt this. I felt this time and time and time again. It's like I almost expect it. I want to be careful with my language. I don't want to always expect it. But when things happen, like, for example, recently, the dishwasher, the washing machine, and some other plumbing issue happened all in the same week. And I thought to myself, well, this is the worst possible time for this to happen. I'm super busy this week. And so I had to manage all these things on the side and show up for interviews and show up fully here while managing all of the contractors and appointments and my family and my health practices and everything else and my team. I'm not saying this because I'm a victim. I just find I wonder how you feel about this. I know y' all can feel this, like, whenever you go. Whenever you're about to go from, like, level one on the video game to level two and become, like, the real main character, it's like the game tests you so much, your car will break down. You'll not sleep the night before, you'll get in a fight with your wife or your husband, your. Something will fall through. It's like, I think that's when most people quit. Yeah, that's like, a mentor and friend of mine were talking about this, and he's like, you know, the difference between successful entrepreneurs and people that aren't is just that they have a resolve in their heart to not quit. They just won't quit. Not from a place of, like, faking it till they make it or forcing it to happen. There's these moments of. Of empowered humility, which is, when you came to the house, I told you that. I'm like, dude, you have the same empowered humility that you had a year ago. And I can feel your life experience wrapped in you, too. It's way different because you've had to say no and yes to a lot of things that kept you in line with your purpose, and that's not easy. Yeah, because the bigger the dream sometimes, the bigger the challenge. Have you seen this play out not just in your own life, but I see it in everyone's life.

I definitely see it with patients, for sure, where they are about to have a giant breakthrough, and they'll come in and they're struggling, they're being tested in some way, and they start to maybe doubt that they're on the right path, but they're so close.

This doubt will just creep in.

Yeah, it's right there. And for myself, I've started To almost cultivate this belief of if you're not feeling at least, you know, once in a while that you want to quit, you're probably not stretching yourself. You're probably not pushing that edge. You're getting out of the safety zone. You know, you're getting into uncharted territory. And it's, you know, for most people, it's the unknown that is the scariest. We want to have certainty. Our mind likes to be predictable and, you know, create all these boxes and everything that we, you know, convince ourselves that, oh, this is the best way to operate is keeping me safe, but it actually might not be, you know, and so there's definitely times along the way with anything that I've done, especially when I'm expanding, that there will be some moments of, oh, man, I. I, can. I do this. Can I pull this off? And I'll have that. They're less now because I. I have more belief in myself. I. I feel more capacity in there. I'm more resourceful because of all the experiences. And, you know, we talked about this earlier. Today is, you know, the age that we're at where you. You do cultivate a bit of life experience, and there's. There's a better capacity, there's a little bit more wisdom, and that convergence can be really fun and empowering, and we're still human. But that's a bit of a benchmark or a barometer for me in my life is, do I feel uncomfortable? How uncomfortable do I feel? And is it so much? I'm not bypassing my intuition because that'll be there too, and might redirect us in a healthy way. But I'm starting to get the flavor of, is this my mind and my programming saying, no, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. And then I can feel my heart come through and show up and say, oh, no, we're on this path. Let's fully get in there. And then everything opens and shows up, and it all changes, and you land on the other side of, oh, okay, that wasn't that bad. And it was fun.

You know why I love our podcasts together? Because they're fractal. Like, they allow me to go back. Like, I just thought about this loop that we had started, and we get to close about detox. I've never, ever felt or said this on a podcast before. Part of detoxification is becoming the person that can fulfill your dream and your purpose, because in the process of that, whatever trash is looming around will get cleaned Up. Yeah, there's a huge, energetic part. Yes. The biological. The kidneys, the spleen, the liver. This is all incredibly important that. Honestly, I defer to your expertise on. But. Or I'm sorry. Yes. And if we. If we're not living our purpose, and it could be the. To be the best father, the best mother. Living your purpose does not mean you have to go on a stage in a Native American center and, like, be blessed by bear medicine. That doesn't. That's not everyone's story, you know, that's your story. But what I'm saying is, and I wonder how you feel about this as we have the courage to face the fear and. And live our purpose for real. No bullshit. Like, really getting clear on what that purpose is and then developing the skills and the courage to go there, to really, really go there and feel it. That's part of the detoxification that humanity is calling for, is for people that are living their lives on purpose, that are living their dream, they want. That are clear on their dream, and they're going for it. Because the last thing I'll say is like. Like the shirt. This is from Alex, Zach, my buddy. Love over fear. And I've been saying this for a decade. Way before I met him, I put it on one of my iPads. I had it engraved on an iPad. I just love this phrase. It's actually on the ring as well. It's on my ring with my love for Kerry Michelle. It's written on the inside, Love over fear. Because I used to let fear control me, and it still does at times, but it just used to just devour me. And the way that I think it's made sense for me, and I truly wonder how you feel about this. There's this acronym, F.E.A.R. false evidence appearing Real. Which can be true if you feed that. But on the other side of it, I think it's really empowering to say, well, fear could actually be for everyone's attention responsibly. That's it. For everyone's attention responsibly. And everyone meaning all the sides of our psyche, all the sides of ourself, for everyone, for every self. I really love that it's just a total reframe on false evidence appearing real. Because how actionable is that? False evidence appearing real? It's like, okay, well, I know it's real for everyone's attention responsibly. That, to me, holds significant weight. When I look at the fear dragon that can come in, it's like, no, I'm going to be really Aware of what's happening, I'm going to go right to it. I'm going to face that, I'm going to get in there with it and I'm going to act responsibly. I think that's so much more empowering. And I wonder how you've played around with words and fear because they seem to hold significant weight for most creators.

Yeah, they sure can. I would say even the word fear is changed significantly for me because even the word would have me sort of contract a little bit.

Yeah.

And then really the. The truth, even like your shirt. The moments that were in, I asked myself, am I coming from love or fear right now? And where's that decision coming from within me. And you know, even on the detox side, this completely connects. Everything you said, I agree with 100%. It's like the. The detox is often of the mind. And the biggest way I did a distance session for one of my clients. This is months ago. I had a feeling that she had a lot of parasites going on in her system. She had that feeling too. And we were going to build a remedy in the way that I do it. Custom herbal formulas or homeopathics frequency remedies to target that. And let's offload some of that stuff. But in the call, it was just a call. We ended up unpacking some really deep seated beliefs and fears that she was holding and help rewrite that story. And she felt those feelings come up and it was challenging and uncomfortable and she faced it. I was helping guide and support and hold space for that. I can't even really remember now all the things that took place in that visit on the phone. But the next day she messaged me and she said, hey, I don't know how to say this, but like, I cleared some worms out of my system physically this morning. Less than 24 hours after that session. I hadn't even given her the herbal remedy formula. Detox for clearing parasites. We did it in that session because she cleared what I would view as a parasitic belief about herself that was really deeply rooted in fear. And as soon as that shifted and changed, the physical manifestation of that was no longer needed in the body. It was no longer required anymore. And the body's like, oh, we're done with that. Went all right. Release. And she cleared things physically that were very visible. Yeah. So we don't always need what we think we need.

It's so funny. We were doing the cold plunge and I'm like, I feel like I have a parasite. I told you that, and I've been feeling that for a while. I'm curious if it's a parasite or if it's a belief. I genuinely am curious about that.

Well, the parasites are often manifesting physically to show up, to bring attention to whatever that might be. Yeah.

Well, I'm open to it, but I'm here on the podcast in full public saying definitely, by the time this comes out, I'll let y' all know, because I just really love learning in public. I do. It's so great, because then I can lead in public. It's like we're only as liberated as our darkest secrets.

Yeah.

You know, if there's something that I don't even know that I don't know, it's a secret. If there's something that I know that I don't want to share, that's a secret, too. So I. I don't think we can ever be liberated in this world unless we are honest with ourselves and our secrets.

Absolutely.

That's it, man. That's really at the core of what we're talking about with Detox. I know we didn't get into the super, super deep biology, but I think we hit on enough to where people can begin to detox. But what do you think we missed? We covered a lot of ground about detox because, gosh, it's so connected to all these sides. We didn't even have time to talk about the financial and the spiritual. That'll be another podcast.

Sounds good.

That'll be another podcast, yeah. What do we miss about Detox? What do you feel like we didn't.

Cover for the body to be in highest frequency and highest resonance possible? Whatever's held on to for baggage does need to be addressed in some way. So do the physical detoxes. You know, see a practitioner, get support, but get support and do the mental emotional detox as well. And that will exponentially change your body's physical capacity to do the clearing work that it's needing to do. And you'll see the evidence of it. Just like the example I gave. I didn't do a physical treatment.

It's so powerful.

But the physical responded powerfully. And that can happen.

Yeah.

The other thing is to trust your body in the places that it needs support, because we can get in the mind and, you know, all the things that we shared, liver, kidney, spleen, lymphatics, all those are important physiological systems for detox, like they are. We know that the parts of your body that need the most amount of love, though, is maybe a Question I'd be really curious about. So when somebody slows down, and this does require taking a breath and slowing down or sitting with somebody and having some reflection and, you know, this could be a question. Maybe you'll sit with, you know, around parasites or anything else. And if you take a deep breath and feel into your body, for all the people listening, where do you feel like your system needs more love? It could be energetically. It could be a physical location. And then you just get curious on what else is there? Why might that be? And there'll often be some answers that start to show up and that can give you the direction that you're looking for.

Yeah. What came up for me was rest. Rest. And maybe a lot of parents feel like this. I know you did when your kids were young. Maybe you still feel it now. I don't know. It's this capacity. The earlier we talked about allostatic load. And so stress capacity is really big because if you have a bigger tub, you can hold more water. And so I'm really looking at how can I hold more without breaking the tub? That's the question. I. I'm going to get more clarity on through. Through being quiet? Yeah, through being quiet. Well, how can I hold more without breaking it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I might pose another question. Just curiosity, please. What are you holding that you don't need to hold anymore? What if you could hold less?

Yeah, I think it's a worry. That's what I feel right away. It's worry that someone is going to try to come and take it from me, and so I have to fight for it. The IRS is going to come, or a person's going to come, or somebody else is going to quit. On my team, it's worry. So what's the antidote to worry? Trust. Just trusting life. Trusting life and trusting God and letting go of the worry.

No, I can. And thank you. Thanks for sharing that. I feel that, yeah, there's some experiences I've been through where some of my worries and my greatest fears were realized. It happened. Now I'm on the other side of a bunch of that stuff, you know, a handful of years. And I'm grateful that that happened. Even though it was a tremendous fear and I'm not trying to manifest, you know, more challenging, different. Believe me.

Yeah.

You know, effortless flow is what I'm aiming for. I'm willing to show up and take action, but it showed me that I was holding a lot of stuff that wasn't serving me anymore. Including the worry. Including the fears and Then being liberated of a lot of those things that I was convinced that I needed showed me what was actually most important to me. And for me personally, that was obviously a lesson that I needed. Not everybody needs that lesson. We all maybe need other things. But for me, I needed to see in some way what was truly important, what was an actual priority and a primary place I wanted to spend my time and energy and focus on as a human being. And I got to see that in a really powerfully distilled way, in a challenging way. That has been this beautiful gift that has, you know, carried me through many, many more challenges, but with a lot more grace and a lot more clarity. And I feel so much more free as a result of that, because I don't carry the same worry anymore.

That's life. Sure is learning how to dance with it. Thank you, man.

Yeah.

Thank you for coming out to Texas and sharing your wisdom. I asked you this a year ago. I wonder how you'll answer it now. How do you feel? What do you know? What have you learned about what wellness really is? It's been a year. You probably learned some good stuff. You shared a lot of what you've learned. Pretty profound. How would you encapsulate or how would you describe or Define wellness in 2025 for you?

For me, I think it's how I'm feeling in this moment that I feel pretty calm, and I feel grounded and settled, and I feel like I'm more inside me. I'm in my seat. I'm in the driver's seat of my system, and I feel like my soul and my energetics and all the things that make me me, I'm more in there. And so to me, that is wellness compared to other times in life where I wasn't really in there too much, but I feel like I'm more in there. I can tell there's, you know, there's more for me there, too, but I feel like I've finally come to rest inside this vessel at a greater level than what I experienced before. And it feels really healthy, and it feels really freeing. And, you know, I feel more clear mentally, emotionally. And I'm stronger physically, too, actually, which is completely related to that and healthier.

Thanks for sharing your gifts, man. Yeah, thanks for coming on the podcast. I look forward to round three in another year.

Yeah.

All right, y' all go to drkevinpresson.com is the website.

Dr. Kevinpresson.com and we have a new website for the events. Newhumanevents.com is rocking now, too.

Okay, well, until we see you again on round three, we're both wishing you love and wellness.

Thanks, brother.

Talk with you all soon. Bye.