YOUR Pain Teacher: How To Liberate Repressed Emotions That Create Disease

Don't get rid of your pain before you understand why it's there.

Pain is the teacher. When the pain teacher comes, it's your opportunity to listen. It's your opportunity to learn something.

Any emotion that's not been fully integrated, that creates an energetic blockage somewhere in any of these systems, any of the organs, whether it's fear, anger, grief, if it's not dealt with, eventually it manifests physically. If you don't have balance and flow in the system and it's stuck, that's where issues come from. Any number of symptoms. Mentally, emotionally, physically. It means something's blocked. Which is why I've always loved acupuncture, because acupuncture was designed to unblock meridian flow, unblock blood circulation. So when you do treatment, all you're doing is giving the body a little bit of support to unblock the places it's stuck, which are often emotional, and they get stuck physically in the system. And that is why a lot of times when I'm doing acupuncture, people cry. People feel huge, energetic shifts in their body. They feel a thousand pounds lighter. When they leave, the tension leaves their muscles. You've unblocked so much of that flow in their system, their body can function again again. It can breathe again. It can move energy and oxygen and minerals again and get it into the cells and the muscles.

Kevin, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much.

You came from Alberta, which is a land I've never been to, but you said it's like Texas.

People say that Alberta is the Texas of Canada, and I can speculate why, but that's where I grew up. Yeah.

Oil fields, lots of space, things like that.

Yeah. Lots of farming, lots of ranching, and lots of oil field.

Yeah. It's interesting, this concept of medicine, we know that it's not God and science, for some reason, have been combined in the past couple years.

Yeah.

We've heard these phrases, trust the science. And I'm like, well, isn't it really trust the money? And so with all this confusion around trusting and messaging, it's like this podcast today. How do we trust ourselves? How do we trust us and the intuitive faculties that we have? This is why I want to jam with you. This is why I'm so excited. And also, shout out to Mark Gross, our mutual friend, and he's been on the pod. And so I saw how great of a podcast you two had created together, and I was really stoked about this for a lot of different reasons. Number one, I've had my own journey with energy and the way it manifests in disease or in sickness in my own body. And also shout out to my mentor, Scott Jackson. He introduced me to this book. It's on screen if you're here with us on Spotify or YouTube. It's called the Psychic Roots of Disease. And you have actually taken this book and you've integrated a lot of wisdom from this book. And I'm sure this is how you teach some of what you teach to your patients, right?

Yeah.

Essentially, the synopsis is like, what's going on with our emotions and what's going on with spiritual forces or epigenetic expression or lineage? This all lives in our cells. It literally and figuratively expresses itself through us. Chinese medicine is interesting. So you're a doctor of Chinese medicine now. How would you describe yourself for somebody that doesn't know you? They're just, like, just experiencing you for the first time.

I love helping people find the medicine inside their bodies. And really, that's a big part of what I teach in the clinic, or whether it's events or retreats or any of those facets, is we have this, like, really remarkable inner pharmacy that is far more advanced than, I think, any other pharmacy on the planet. It's like the most untapped, technically advanced system. It's all in here. And whether it's emotional or energetic or spiritual or physical, there's always a story there. There's always a reason. And so I've never been satisfied in lots of areas of life, which, you know, continues to have me dive in, research, learn more. I learn something with every patient, and I always think that there's a reason, even if we can't see it, even if it's not obvious. Right now, we just got to expand the scope a little bit more, A little bit more, a little bit more. And eventually, if you make the circle big enough, you will find the patterns of illness or the patterns of wellness that are encompassed in somebody's system.

What do you mean, make the circle bigger?

What do you mean by that? Well, you know what happens. And, you know, I've listened a lot to your podcast, and, you know, we. I think we have lots of resonance with how we feel about medicine in general. And it's not that one medicine is better or worse than the other. It's just I like harvesting the best of the best of all the tools available.

Yeah.

Chinese medicine just logically seemed like this thing that was, you know, thousands of years old, it would have some staying power. So what I've seen in conventional medicine is you have all the specialties that one person is specialized in, one area of the body, whether that's endocrinology or nervous system or gastroenterology, whatever it is, cardiovascular, they only look at that system. That's a really small lens to look at. And so somebody might have heart issues going on, and it doesn't mean it's coming from there. So what if you expand the scope? Oh, maybe they got a lot of gut. Because in Chinese medicine, the heart and the small intestine share a paired meridian. So if you have something going on in the small intestine, maybe that's affecting your heart, and the heart is actually fine, but the symptoms are showing up there. But it's maybe gut related. So if you only look at the heart, you'd never see what was going on in the gut. And maybe there's something going on in the gut because of something going on in somebody's relationship. You know, I'll leave clues though, right?

Like all these. All these little individual tests or I guess, perceived silos. But you and I know, and this is what we're going to unpack today in this podcast, the way that things are connected inside of us and also outside of us. So if I have skin issues, if I have digestive issues, if I have foot issues, if I have tension in my neck, whatever, all these things are connected essentially to. To one or two or three. I don't know, maybe one root cause or multiple root causes. But. But I'd love your thoughts on this. Like, in. In traditional Western medicine. And by the way, I'm not here to demonize that either. Like, if I break my leg, I definitely want to go to a doctor. I want them to heal my leg. You know, they're good at that. They're good at, like, acute injuries, car accidents like these. We need Western medicine in some way.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, because of the pharmacological intervention with, like, insurance companies and doctors and just absolutely the trillions of dollars that are being harvested from Americans and Canadians and just people in the world, there is this myopic lens where it's either this way or that way. There's this false dichotomy that's been created in medicine. Yeah. Where if you have this condition, you take this pill, if you have this ailment, you do this thing, it's just simply not the case. There is another lens that you bring, which is a more holistic lens, maybe the lens of Chinese medicine, maybe the lens of naturopathy. Describe this lens for us about how you see what you do in comparison to Western medicine.

I think, number one, when I go back a bunch of years, I've been practicing for 15 years now, eight years in school, which I never planned on, by the way. I didn't want to be in school. It just sort of worked out that way. And I just kept following that guidance or that intuition of, there's more to learn here, there's more to learn. And I just, you know, kept going deeper. And so now looking back, I can see that I'm very results driven. And I've just wanted to get results in a really healthy way where the body doesn't have to pay the price. Because we do see that in medicine of different types where maybe it does help a symptom, but you're going to pay for it in other places in the body.

Antibiotics for sure.

Yeah. And I just thought, I think there must be more to this picture. What's the internal ecosystem of the body? What's going on in there? What's the terrain like? And when I really take that bigger lens approach, everything is connected in the body. Everything has a source to it. And my role in how I view patients coming in is helping them shine a light on those places that have landed them in my office in the first place. And it could be anything. It could be that they hate their boss, you know, and that's created a bunch of tension in their abdomen and their diaphragm and they're not breathing at work anymore. And pretty soon their blood flows down. Now they got brain fog and they come in and there may be quite a mess. And so as we unpack the layers, I see the body that way. That everything, every cell that is in your system, it knows what's going on in every other cell. It's not these, like, separate parts of the system that don't have anything to do with anything in the environment or internally. Everything has to do with everything there. It's all connected.

Dude, Chinese medicine is so fascinating. That book that I already referenced, let's just start off, because I'm gonna go personal, because that's the best way to do it on any podcast. But nose and sinuses, the conflict is cold for rhinitis or sinus infection. Stinking conflict. Not wanting to smell something, that was absolutely what was fueling a lot of my sinus issues. My relationship needed to go through a death and rebirth process, and thank God it did. People have already heard that episode. We actually had Margo, our healer, and Kerri Michelle, my lady. And so the audience has already heard that. And so it's beautiful that we're here now. But I'm curious for you, man. When we look at the psychic roots of disease and also the deeper work you do, this broadening of the lens that you talked about and connecting the dots of ailments and disease in that lens, have you been through something personally where you were shown something that was causing a physical malady? In other words, were you having an emotional dysregulation or even a spiritual or a psychic or emotional issue that came to light for you as a doctor?

Yeah.

That you actually got to heal yourself and then share that with other people? Let's start there.

Yeah, I can share some basic ones. And you mentioned rebirth and death cycles. I've kind of lost track of how many of those I've experienced.

The spiral just keeps going.

It doesn't stop. And everybody, everybody talks about this, right?

The spiral, the healing spiral, it never stops. It does come back around.

It does come back around. And what I would say, even just on that note, is that we get more skills and tools each time we come around and it lands differently. Or maybe we can move through it with more grace or without the, the cosmic two by four to the head. Maybe it's more of a slap on the wrist or something and you get the lesson. And so I have found, it seems like as I become in my own ego, you know, more aligned in my, my life, aligned with what I'm here to do, you know, what I am wanting to share with the world, then there doesn't seem to be as big of a, you know, slaps cosmically or, you know, and sometimes there's these micro adjustments as well. As long as we're listening.

Yeah.

But this, this example that I'll use, I've seen in the clinic literally thousands of times. So as a kid, I had strep throat and ear infections all the time. Had tubes put in my ears when I was 2 years old, you know, they weren't draining properly. All the, the typical sort of aspects of conventional medicine, which I'm grateful for. And then I ended up being on antibiotics a lot, which, as we know now, when I look back is like, oh, yeah, that destroyed my gut and hard on my liver, hard on all the organs. And then I would have it again and again and again. And pretty soon one round of antibiotics wouldn't work. Oh, then two rounds, oh, you're a little bit better. And then a week later I'd be off and then back on again because I still have the ear infection. And so when I What I understand now that bacteria never really left. It just got more robust. And at the same time, Chinese medicine views antibiotics as a cold toxin. Cold toxins are super hard on the organs, hard on the spleen, hard on the kidneys, hard on the liver. Without even getting into the modern aspect of microbiome and how that affects the gut, they knew that anything coming into the body that was a cold toxin would have big consequences. The spleen in Chinese medicine builds chi, like, it builds vital force energy. So if you're giving something to the body regularly that damages your vital force, that's going to be a problem for the immune system for repair, for recovery, for all of those things. And so over the years of taking so many antibiotics without knowing what damage that was doing in a lot of the research now, oh, yeah, that can contribute to depression, anxiety, adhd, like you name it. Almost any symptom is fair game there. Gut dysbiosis, of course, immune system dysfunction, autoimmunity. So all the while I was getting all that treatment and, you know, from loving people, the doctors were trying to help me. My mom was working on helping me. Being a nurse like that was just the toolbox that we were taught had. I probably stopped dairy and cleaned up my diet, even though we felt like we were eating, you know, grew up on a farm, had a lot of our own food, we drank so much milk that when I look back and think, oh, that's a recipe for immune system stimulation. And then just the recurrent antibiotics, my body couldn't recover.

Wow.

So by the time I was 20, I would have like a low grade sore throat almost all the time. And it's because that bacteria never left. It was so robust. And if I rested and was really vigilant, I'd feel pretty good and would kind of be gone as soon as I didn't get enough sleep, got a bit stressed. Oh, I'd feel it coming back. So I started realizing that I was in a constant tug of war with streptococcus bacteria and my internal terrain not being robust enough to actually clear that out completely. So that's actually what really led me to seek a little bit deeper with, you know, testing and understanding viruses and bacteria and understanding the overall balance of the body. And I got myself sorted out using a lot of the tools that I use now. So knock on wood, like, a sore throat is so rare for me and it's been that way for years. And I can be run down, I can be stressed and tired and everything else. I still don't get a sore throat anymore, because I've worked all that bacteria out of my system and rebuilt my biome kind of from the inside out and address things in my life that needed to be addressed. And that's an ongoing spiral process, of course, too. So the amount of times I've seen that with patients in the clinic that now have autoimmune disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, you name any kind of auto inflammatory kind of condition right now, strep bacteria actually seems to be the cause of a lot of that. But you have to look at the bigger picture is like, what was the history leading into that? And then how to reverse it so.

Some people can handle dairy. Okay. But I'll be the first one to say that I cannot. Well, I'll be the first one to say on this podcast, not the first one to say in the world, lots of people, millions and millions of people can't do dairy. So I did the 23andMe test maybe eight years ago, and it said in the 23andMe that for my genotype that dairy was not good. And I flashed back to this memory I had that I've mentioned before. But it's important to say this. Like, when I was a kid, I would every day be at school having diarrhea, hunched over in the toilet, like, hurting. And my parents, God bless them, they never knew. They just didn't know that giving me cereal with milk was making me sick. And neither did I. And when I was listening to you talk, I was like, wow, there's so many similarities with you and I. I had lots of antibiotics. It developed into recently what even became Marcons. Multiple antibiotic resistant staphylocations.

Yeah.

And so I have completely removed dairy 100%. Even raw dairy or grass fed dairy. How many people do you think have this blind spot when it comes to dairy? Because for some people who have a terrain that can handle it, no big deal, like, it's cool, you can have your pizza, you can do whatever you want. But for me, I have to be really vigilant about that because I noticed that when I have dairy, it increases my sinus issues. We even had a physician on the show when we talked about our sinusonic that we partner with. And he said that, you know, dairy is the number one culprit for people that have massive sinus issues, specifically rhinitis and chronic sinus conditions. When a lot of these people remove dairy, they all of a sudden clear the fog.

Yeah.

And they can actually function. Well, what's actually going on there from Your lens, a holistic lens and also a Chinese medicine lens when you remove the dairy and how that helps to calm down inflammation and allow the body to have more energy again, like, what's the science on that?

Well, I think it's important to distinguish when I think of dairy in general. I'm not, I'm not trying to harp on dairy, that all dairy is bad or anything. There is in many things. But when I think of my dad, for example, growing up on a farm, rural Alberta, they had a cow, one cow, and that cow would eat grass, the garden, you know, vegetables, produce, whatever, loved. Pretty healthy.

Yeah.

Soil was good. Everything it was eating was enriched, wasn't GMO or anything like that. So you can imagine that dairy quite different than what we have today. And depending on the breed of the cow, Jersey cows have little different proteins than Holstein. And we can get into that a little bit. So there's, there's this bigger lens as what is the cow eating, how is it raised, how is it being looked after? And that does have a direct impact on the inflammatory proteins in the milk or, or the lack of them.

Yeah.

And different places on the planet. I hear it all the times from my, my patients. If they go to Italy, they eat tons of bread and pasta and cheese and everything else, totally fine. Come back to North America, U.S. or Canada, it destroys their gut and they get flammy and everything else. So what is that about? The cows are not being fed. The same things are being fed in North America, which is often like hugely GMO crops of corn and soy and wheat that has been sprayed with millions of pounds of Roundup. And so when you look at what filters down all the way into the milk and we can say, oh, it's the dairy. There is aspects of proteins and dairy for some that, you know, it's a little bit hard to digest or inflaming.

Yeah.

But all the food and all the layers going into the cow to produce that milk, that is way different than it used to be. Way, way different. And the volume that we're asking modern cows to produce these days, it's nuts. Like, they, they're giant.

Have you seen these, have you seen these CAFOs?

Yeah.

Controlled animal feeding operations.

Yes.

I used to live in SoCal and there's this place called North Norco. And when you drive up, like you're going to, past these huge mega dairy farm CAFOs, the stench in the air was so foul that everyone has to roll their windows up. And then you look at the real data on it, these cows stand in their own excrement. Their entire lives, they're funneled into these machine looking structures. Almost like it looks like something from George Orwell's book where there's just this massive machinery squeezing milk out of them. It's insane. And then, and then it's packaged as like wholesome milk, vitamin D enriched and good for you. It's such bullshit.

Yeah.

Like, yeah. Please share this podcast with somebody that literally doesn't know what we're talking about, because this, this one thing could potentially shift someone's life. Just this one little nugget. We're going to get into way more nuggets, but this one's really important, man. What the cows eat goes into the milk and then we eat that milk, we become whatever the cows ate.

Oh, 100%. And so from a Chinese medicine lens, the spleen is hugely involved in digestion and they kind of have like five main yin organs. Not that all the organs aren't important, but the yin organs in Chinese medicine kind of hold this extra weight and extra function for our bodies. The spleen, I'll come back to that again and again, really is involved in digestion. And the spleen doesn't perform well when they call it dampness and phlegm and milk in general, like the dairy, especially unhealthy dairy, it will add to that inflammatory kind of phlegm building in the system. And so that's often why people get mucusy, they get sinus congestion, brain fog, all these other symptoms when they have too much dairy because their body's not breaking it down properly. There's lots of reasons that could be for as well, not just milk related. And then that builds this congestion in the system and it gets sticky in there, it starts to like drag on their body. Their circulation isn't as good. Like everything just like slows down, down. It gets stuck. And I remember some of my teachers saying, if things are moving in the body, that's good. If it's not moving, that's not good. And so when you look at different foods that create that, that stagnation of stuck energy in the system, it's going to give some symptoms in some way or another. And I also think too, just working with so many autoimmune conditions over the years, almost every patient that I've seen that has ventured down the autoimmune conditioner, whether it's Lyme disease, MS, you name it, I've kind of seen all the different, different labels of, of autoimmune conditions. Yeah, most of them have Already figured out. Not all of them. A lot of them have figured out that if they eat a lot of sugar, dairy and wheat, they feel horrendous. And when they stop eating that or they cut it way back, they feel better. Now there's a lot often going on in their body that their system can't really integrate that in the terrain. Like I still have dairy, just not very much like compared to growing up where you're drinking like 20 liters a week of just, you know, 20 liters.

Of milk a week?

Yeah. Well, you get to the fridge, you know, teenagers have two younger brothers, older sister, and you're in that kind of 12 to 18 year old rage is like, go to the fridge, open it up, whatever's there, jugs of milk and just chugging, you know, a liter and then putting it back in and away you go. Because you thought this is supposed to be healthy.

Yeah.

This is like strong bones, you know, calcium, all those things.

Maybe it was because your cows were healthy.

It might have been.

They weren't being pumped with, with hormones and antibiotics, right?

Yeah. Well, then somewhere that shifted. But even just having like huge amounts of food coming into the body where my gut was already suspect because of the antibiotics, I wouldn't be able to break down the milk nearly as good. So then it would just congest in my system and get inflamed. Prime breeding ground for strep bacteria. Boom. Sore throat again. And just being in this mystery of why does this keep happening? I guess it's a lack of antibiotics. You just, you know, keep pounding that. And I had bad acne as a teenager probably because of all the gut stuff. Guess what? I got three months of tetracycline antibiotics. Do you think that was healthy for the body? And it was. I'm sharing that with love that we just didn't know. Sure. You know, my mom was trying to help us out, the doc was trying to help me out, and this is the toolbox that maybe this will help your self esteem. You're getting bullied or made fun of. Like I wanted my skin to clear up. I didn't know if I, you know, knowing what I know now, there's no way in hell I'd ever take that stuff. I would have done a million other things.

So knowing what you know now, if you were to plant a seed in the pocket of somebody 18 to 25, like let's say somebody out there is dealing with acne and dealing with issues. It's not just the dairy. That's just one of the Lines inside of the big lens that you look through. There's other things to consider as well. Symptoms. I wonder how you feel about this. Symptoms are essentially just clues that are pointing to the root 100. So when somebody has a symptom, it's like, okay, is it really the forward facing thing or is it something much deeper? How do you go about, it's such a complex question. How do you go about going from symptom to root? What does that even look like?

I think one of the elements is like the first thing I do with a patient in the clinic is we just sit down. Kind of like you and I were sitting down before this podcast of just being human together. That yes, I have a license to practice Chinese medicine and I do detoxes and all these other things. But I'm also a guy that just cares about people and cares about their well being. And I think that's maybe the first step is sitting down with somebody and opening up that space is how are you today? How are you actually doing in your life right now?

And they probably say, I'm fine, how are you?

Yeah, that's what people say at the grocery store.

I'm fine, how are you? Yeah, I've said that a thousand times today. It's like, what?

Yeah, well, and then sitting there. But if I'm in full presence and that's, I think one of my greatest roles I can offer is just being real and authentically asking them. I do want to know how you're doing in every area of your life. Let's begin. Usually within five minutes they're crying and I, I often was confused by that and I'm totally fine with that. But it's because they haven't had other people be present with them, especially doctors. And again, this is not against doctors or practitioners. Like it's not an easy thing to work in health. Sometimes it's, it's a big, you know, I have so much pressure, huge amount of respect for anybody that works in medicine. You're dealing with people health. That is like the, the closest thing that is like holding the most amount of weight in people's lives sometimes. So lots of respect there. But as soon as you become present with somebody and you're asking from an authentic heart based place and they know you care, everything just starts opening and flowing and melting and they'll start sharing what's going on. So I don't get into my mind too much and I trust people to tell me what's happening for them. And I may ask different questions, but People often know, but they often haven't been given the time or the space to feel into their own body. And so there I am shining that light back to them of I'm here listening, tell me what's up. And they may share about their pain or they may share about their gut issues or whatever it is, but I'm always listening with a really broad lens of my intuition, of my intellect, of wisdom or experiences. Of all the thousands of patients that I've seen, I like to be open because I don't know where it's going to go. And if I have a preconceived notion of what it is for them and my mind can't get off that track, then I'm going to try and pigeonhole them into that diagnosis.

That's so good. We just did a podcast with Dr. John Laurence and he was talking about Andrew Huberman's views on Melatonin. And he was sharing that Andrew Huberman's views were a bit skewed because Andrew Huberman got nightmares when he would take Melatonin. So he's not a proponent for Melatonin. So what you're saying is true. It's like if anybody, especially a doctor, comes into a space with a preconceived notion about their own personal experience with a medicine or a way of being or a treatment protocol, in other words, it didn't work for them, they might unconsciously project that onto the patient and potentially rob the patient of the dedicated healing path they deserve.

100% well. And sometimes I don't actually read the intake forms until after or later on in a visit because I don't want my mind to get too wrapped up in what's going on there. And I noticed over the years I would like, I would read it and the information would be helpful because you don't really want to go in without any idea of what's going on.

What's your name?

Yeah, who are you and what's. Oh, you've had this 20 year thing that I should have known about. And so I'll take it in, but I like to take it in lightly or I'll trust my feeling that for some reason I'm not supposed to read that at that time and I'm just supposed to talk to them and let's see, let's see what comes up. And yeah, people, when they have an opportunity to dive in deeper with their body, they may know. And this is the other thing that I see is that so many people have been trained through the system to not connect with their body, to not know what's going on. And I'll say, what do you think it is? And they'll say, well, I've shared this with other practitioners, but they all said it couldn't be that. And I'm like, try me, what is it? And they say, well, I was traveling to 20 years ago and I got bad food poisoning. And I'm like, let me guess, you never felt the same since, did you? And they say, well, no, but they all said that's too long ago to have an impact. And I think, no, of course it's going to have an impact. And then we get into different layers of testing. In my clinic, I'll often find bacteria, viruses, toxins. And this is sort of where I guess a bit of reputation as a psychic or something comes up. And yes, I am intuitive and I'm really good at reading patterns and I'm good at talking to people and even just the, the practicality, it's not special necessarily. When did this happen? Oh, I remember I went to this place, this thing happened, I got sick and I haven't ever really felt the same since. That is a really logical thing to go back to is, well, what was that? Oh, you picked up E. Coli because you ate contaminated food or water or something, or you picked up a parasite that is so relevant. And a lot of these things just get overlooked. Or you had an accident, trauma, emotional physical trauma, something like that, you never felt the same after that. Then we have to go back to that point. That is a moment, a key moment in their history that has led them down this road. And so I always think I'm like some kind of investigator, like hunting the symptoms, hunting the clues. And you can rewind back to these key pieces, even if they were five years old or as an infant, how is your labor and delivery with your mom? And all of that is relevant. All of that should not be overlooked.

And what's even more gonna bake everyone's noodle is that what if it's even pre lifetime or in utero or some kind of epigenetic expression of our lineage. We were chatting before we hit the record button. Like, there's so many things out there, you know, Mark Wolin is someone that we, we share some, some different connection to and the way that we show up in the world. Like for example, if a child is born with type 1 diabetes, it's, it's challenging, right? And so some, some minds might say, oh, well, that person's just born with it, but that there's something else. Because what about the expression of the DNA and the epigenetics of the mom and dad or the grandpa or the greats or the great greats? For example, like my grandparents coming in, my great great grandparents coming into Ellis island from Sicily, or, you know, trauma from our lineage, there's so many things that affect how we show up in the world. So is it always emotional? This is the big question.

Yeah.

Is it always emotional knowing that everything in the body is essentially frequency or vibration? Right. Everything is moving, everything is somewhat transparent on a cellular level. Is it, is it always emotion or can sometimes the body create emotion and can they feed into each other? It's a very complex question.

I love that question. So Chinese medicine, maybe we'll go there first. They always look at the emotional counterpoint to the organs. So if we go back to the five yin organs, lung, liver, spleen, kidneys, heart, every one of those organs has a different emotion associated in Chinese medicine theory. So spleen would be overthinking, excessive contemplation, which is modern phenomena. So the idea would be if you spend every day, all day, all night, like ruminating in your mind, thinking about things, obsessing about things.

Sounds like most people.

Yeah, most people, especially today, that will damage your spleen in Chinese medicine theory because you're taxing that energy system too much, you know, and this is where the unplug happens, where if we're off our phones, we're in the forest, everything comes down. That is medicine to the spleen and kidneys is more fear. So let's, you know, weave this together a little bit. If your ancestors went through horrendous fear, that memory, that imprint, that epigenetic nuance could be imprinted in their body and passed forward to you. That baby may have kidney issues, actual physical kidney issues. And people think, ah, this is just an abnormality. This is just luck of the draw. You could argue any number of things around that. But my lens, I would wonder, did they have a traumatic birth? Was there a huge amount of fear in the room? Maybe it was scary and the mom got so scared she didn't know what was going to happen. Maybe she thought she was going to die and maybe lose her baby. That's tremendous. Fear could get baked into the organ system, and that's nothing against the baby or the mom. These are just things that happen to us as humans. Or maybe it went further back. Maybe that mother, maybe her parents were, you know, Holocaust survivors. Tremendous fear. There's a lot of research about this, of course, that could trickle down as, like an adrenal issue, a kidney issue, because it's in that complex. But it doesn't have anything to do immediately with that person. But they're carrying that lineage of that energy that is just looking to be into the light. It's looking to be resolved. And I think that's what I've learned about energy. It will find a way to find the light. It's like a little seedling or a plant that's growing. It's going to find a way to bust through that soil to get to the sun. And it usually shows up through symptoms in the human body. It shows up, especially with kids, as behaviors. You know, it shows up as these things that are subconscious and that could go further back, because in a lot of the testing I've done in the clinic, I've worked with tons of kids, and, you know, they're two years old maybe, and I find all of this toxicity and heavy metals and sort of strange or odd unusual things. And I think, where have they been? What's. What's going on?

Yeah.

And they'll talk to the parents like, we haven't been anywhere. We have. You know, it's super clean and everything else. And I'm like, let me test you guys. Then I test the parents. Dive in a little bit deeper. I may find the same toxicity. And in a lot of cases, I've worked with tons of families. Sometimes I've been able to test the grandparents. Guess what? I find it in the grandfather or the grandmother. So I know it goes back at least that far. But we have this bio accumulation of toxicity now that those kids might have more because it's compounding through the fetus and development. So we have all the good stuff of energy and emotions and genetics that, you know, build a human. There is some of these things that make their way through chemicals. Strep, bacteria, all these other things. They can make their way into the fetuses as well. It's not a compartmentalized thing. So a lot of this does happen in utero, but the story maybe began way before that.

That's so well put. There's even some recent data on glyphosate being found in babies.

100%.

It's like, well, where the hell did that come from? Well, it came from the GMO Twinkies. Mom was eating, God bless her soul, like, she didn't forgive her. She didn't know. But literally, there's gl. How could that possibly be that there's glyphosate and fluoride being found in placentas and in babies when the babies haven't ever eaten that food. It's so wild to think how everything is so interconnected and how that could be ignored. A good metaphor would be if the cow ate the grass or if the cow had antibiotics. We're eating that.

Yeah.

If energetically, emotionally. We had a trauma that got infused into our system. And by the way, on the screen right now, there is a study, I believe it was done in Africa, don't quote me, but it's a very like long term study. And it was on rats or mice and they would stress the father to the point of like deep trauma. The father would breed with a non traumatized rat. And they tested the trauma response in five generations of the rodent. And it was found in the fifth generation. That trauma response lived in the body of the offspring of the rodent. How wild is that? And how could anyone, how could anyone argue with the science or just the knowing.

Yeah.

That trauma and the things that we consume energetically and physically are not completely passed on for multiple generations. How could that, how could that not be core science that everyone knows about and that is fully being declared as, as true science?

Yeah.

What are your thoughts?

It's actually illogical to think otherwise. And this is maybe something that's been lost in medicine is when a patient comes in and they tell you what's going on with them and you immediately brush it out of the way because of the training you've had. That's a huge disservice. That is a huge disconnect. And you know, one of the stories that comes to mind, my dad had bad asthma as a kid and they had, you know, an old, old house, you know, post war time. He was born in 1952 and they had this coal furnace in the basement and the vent and the heat that came up from that, he slept by beside it on the little pullout couch. And so you can imagine that cold dust, because those furnaces were not sealed up, they were not airtight. There's still a chimney that goes out the side. But you can imagine all that coming up right there. And growing up on the farm, being in grain bins and grain dust and everybody's like, why does this kid have asthma? And you think now it's so obvious. The guy's lungs are full of toxin debris and coal dust and grain dust. How could, how could he breathe at all? And so the practicality being brought forward, if there's a lot of poison being put in food and then we eat that. What the fuck do we think is going to happen? It's this, you know, this weird thing or weird concept that the bodies should be okay with poisoning. It's not. It's going to have symptoms.

I resonate with what you said because these medical practitioners and doctors, anybody that wants to be of service from others, it starts out pure. And actually most movements in the world start out pure. Even MeToo or feminism or gosh, even maybe Chinese communism, who knows, in some leader's heart they were like, this is the best for the people, right? So what happens along the way is they start to develop this bias where anything that goes against their training, it's almost like they would lose their opportunity cost. The pain they went through, the time they spent on the education itself, it would say, somehow diminish that. But I'm here to say, and I wonder how you feel, isn't that the point of learning? Yeah, that we discard based on new truth that we learn. And who cares if what we learned isn't true anymore? Isn't that the whole purpose of learning?

It is. I think it takes. This is the humility of working in medicine and also being human. You know, I think we both can. You know, the rebirths, the death cycles, all the different things that we go through as human beings, beings. It's a humbling experience sometimes. And so what I've taken to, to say in terms of medicine and my current belief structure about what illness is, this is my current position because I might meet somebody next week that changes my mind on a bunch of things I think I know right now, or I might have a new skill set develop in my own system or my psyche or my intuition, and it opens up something different. Now I see the world different again and again and again. And so I think being fluid enough and grounded at the same time to be, you know, be that tree. And, you know, they talk about this in the wood element of Chinese medicine. It's like a tree, deep roots, very solid. But if a tree is too rigid, it'll snap in the wind. And I think that's we're seeing a lot today is there's like such rigid structures that don't account for any change or flexibility. And medicine could be one of those paradigms. Sometimes there's such rigidity in the thought process. Some of the research will take 20 years to hit the clinic where MDs are now employing something that's actively being researched right now that is very well studied, very well understood. People won't maybe access that for two More decades. That's because of the inflexibility. And I know that there's some. There's some health in that, too, that we want to really be clear about, what we're saying, why we're saying it, because we don't want to, you know, say one thing this week and a different thing the next week. It's confusing. That does happen nowadays, too.

Oh, you mean like the mask mandates?

Yes.

That's a whole nother podcast.

Oh, yeah, we could wear.

They don't work. Sorry.

Well, and anytime that starts happening in life in general, or if I find myself being that way, then I need to take a step back and be like, what is. What's happening for me right now? Oh, I'm on. Then I'm off. No, it's this or it's that. And, you know, you. Where you kind of just get really wiggly with trying to sort something out mentally, there's usually a bigger picture to look at. So if we're patient, we, you know, pause, step back a little bit, look at the bigger picture, then there's usually something more to be seen there.

There's always more to be seen. And, you know, it's interesting, when you were talking, I was visualizing Alan Watts. I used to listen to Alan Watts in the shower, and I guess you could say the beginning of my spiritual journey and my, like, my young 20s and more of the things I'll never forget is, he said, I give myself permission to be new five minutes every time.

I love that.

I always give myself. I am not the person I was when you walked in that door. Because of our interaction, because of what I'm learning from you, because of this podcast and because of my own life experiences. And so how do you juxtapose those two things? I think that can be challenging for people in medicine, renewing one's education, renewing one's awareness and consciousness about what truly yields a result for people. Because essentially, that's what. What you want to do. You. You. You want to strive to give your patient a. A result, a great result. Right. But yet, how do you hold those two worlds together?

I think one of the elements is the diagnosis, the word that somebody's given often before they've ever got to my clinic. And the second they walk in the door and they're like, oh, I have this. This is my illness. In my mind, I actually visualize the word of that diagnosis being pulled away from them and set over in the corner. It's not irrelevant to me, but it is kind of irrelevant because that does not tell me what's going on for them. It just tells me the symptom picture that they likely have, you know, rheumatoid arthritis. Let's use as an example, they have a lot of joint pain, likely some swelling, maybe some bone degeneration, but generally speaking, they're going to be in a decent amount of pain a lot of the time. And they've been put in this autoimmune category. But that has nothing to do with what's actually taking place in the cells in the organs, in the psyche. And so I kindly set the diagnosis aside because I don't want that to limit my thinking either. And the next time I see them, a month or two later, I don't want to keep that diagnosis overlaid on them. Oh, this is the patient with rheumatoid arthritis. What does that do for them? That's not going to help them. So if I see them as a living, breathing, divine being filled with light and energy that has obstruction in their system for some reason, then we can illuminate that. Then we can get down to the root issues a little bit further. And they may eventually walk out of there without rheumatoid arthritis, because that is possible. We're a dynamic system. And so whenever that that concrete diagnosis comes down the pipe to somebody, you're going to have this forever.

Yeah.

How do we know that for sure they're a dynamic living system. How can we predict that it is going to repeatedly be the same? You cannot with accuracy say that. You can say, statistically speaking, if you don't change anything, this will likely continue. But what if we change the whole equation of what's going on their body? Would it change the diagnosis or their symptoms? Yes, logically, it has to change. It's almost like math. If this is the equation or the diagnosis they've been given, if you start changing variables on the other side of the equation, it will change it. It has to. Actually. It can't not change it.

I've been through this personally, so chronic sinus issues for the majority of my life. And this year actually I got results back after. Before I did a sinus procedure and I got teed off to this practitioner that does chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And about halfway through talking with her, I was like, okay, I'm actually not going to work with this person and I'm not going to go down that route. My intuition is telling me something else which I've shared with you now. It's the stress of relationship of being a new dad of running a business. It's that aspect that's actually giving me a higher allostatic load. It's not necessarily the sirs, the cris. And I realized that she was doing the absolute most loving thing she could in that moment, but she was holding a hammer that, oh, with these symptoms, you definitely have sirs. You definitely have this chronic inflammation response syndrome. And I thought to myself, this is not right. This is actually not right. And I went a different direction now. I could have, if I wasn't lucky and fortunate enough to do, like, 700 podcasts and learn from the best people in the world, I could have possibly believed her. And I would be spending tens of thousands of dollars down a rabbit hole that would essentially lead me back to the very questions that I'm answering now. And that is, how do I decrease my allostatic load? How do I look at the honest picture of what's really going on with me in my heart? What am I lying about? What am I not telling to other people? That's totally out of alignment with my own truth? What am I missing in my own psyche? What are the parts of me that I'm not willing to look at? That's actually what makes me have sinus issues or sickness or anything else. Now, that might seem super fucking woo, but it's proven. Not just from my own case, but I'm sure from you working with patients. Like, there's got to be maybe even one that pops up in your consciousness right now where there could have been a traditional treatment path based on the symptoms that the patient was expressing, but you intuitively felt like it was something else, and you chose not to go down that, you know, multiple tens of thousands of dollars route because of the symptoms that they were expressing. Like, what's. What's something that's happened for you and a patient in that way.

There's probably thousands of, you know, examples like that where by the time patients see me, quite often, they have already seen at least one specialist, sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes more. And they have maybe a myriad of labels associated with what's going on in their body. But the more I look at this, the longer I practice. The name of a diagnosis doesn't mean anything. And what I mean by that is it's just a name that is grouping common symptoms together for people. Chronic fatigue syndrome is not an illness. It's a way to classify people being really tired and generally sore and in pain and depressed and not feeling well. But that is not a disease. Fibromyalgia is not A disease. It's a name that was coined to classify people that were in chronic pain. And so when we start deconstructing that and deconstructing that, the inflammation that's showing up in anybody's body, there's an underlying cause that often isn't looked at. And so from a traditional medicine point of view, everything is suppression for treatment, mostly emergency medicine. That's different. I've had knee surgeries. I was grateful for anesthetic. I was grateful to not be awake for those surgeries. But then afterwards, the anesthetic that stays in the body gets stuck in the liver, stuck in the spleen, maybe some in the pancreas, some in the cell tissue. That's where I would be doing lots of work and have done work to clear that out of the way. That that could be a beautiful integration of medicine, is use what we need for what we need, but then clean up the terrain, you know, then clean up the rest of the body, because you're going to clean up some inflammation with that, too, too. So whenever we don't look at what's being covered up, we're missing a big picture there. So whatever the sinus inflammation is, because of your knowledge and because of what you've learned, I'm going to dig deeper. That is maybe something that is challenging as humans, because it might be a humbling process. And this is why a lot of people maybe don't look deeper, because they don't want to find what's there, because they likely are going to need to change things in their life, sometimes significantly. They might need to change relationships, work, career completely. They may need to address family drama, family trauma, their own traumatic experiences. And I have the biggest heart of compassion for that, because it's hard. And I think that's why a lot of people are struggling today, is because that. That next step, the unknown of diving into your own depths, it is scary sometimes. It takes so much courage to do that, but it yields the most incredible results if we're willing to.

For whatever reason, when people come to you, like you said, they've already been to many specialists. I think they're more willing to kneel at the altar of humility because they've had so much suffering.

Absolutely.

Because they're essentially at the end of their rope where they're like, okay, Dr. Kevin, I'm ready to just heal. Like, please help guide me.

Like, there's.

There's a surrender. It's actually quite beautiful.

Yeah, it is beautiful.

I'm not negating people's pain like I've. I've been through many pain cycles, and I think that's just part of living, because we go through pain cycles.

It is.

But there's something actually so fucking graceful and so beautiful when someone just decides to surrender and be like, what's the truth? Like, what is the real truth? I was getting my haircut yesterday, and this lady was next to me, and she's like, I heard you have a podcast. And she's like, I'm launching one. I'm like, tell me about it. And she goes, oh, well, we're just three ladies hanging out. And I'm like, oh, well, how are you being of service? And she said, well, we're just trying to figure out who we are. And I'm like, well, the challenge with that is that sometimes when you go down this. The route of figuring out who you are, you have to see the mass that you've put on. And she said it was like a glitch in her hardware. And she said, oh, well, we don't really worry about that. We just share what we're up to. Total bypass. And I thought, wow, this is just not that I'm better. It's not that I'm better than her. It's just that I've been through maybe more unique suffering that's allowed me to have different consciousness and different things come up. So how do you deal with that? I mean, I'm sure when a patient comes to you, they're not like the lady at the. The hair salon. They're. They're actually really open to something different because they've eaten so much of what hasn't worked.

Yeah, there is some. There's the gift in. In having some of those experiences. And so, yeah, like a perfect example, maybe somebody's dealt with an illness for 20 years. They've seen 50 doctors, done so many things, spent thousands and thousands of dollars. Sometimes by the time they show up in my office, they're frustrated. Maybe they have developed resistance to even being there, but they want to take one more shot.

Yeah.

And I'm sometimes the last, you know, resort guy that they're seeing. And they have. That. They're like, no pressure if this doesn't work with you, like, I'm. I'm done. And they are feeling suicidal, and I have so much compassion for that because they've suffered for so long without hope. And one thing leads to another to another, but I still see that there's beauty in that journey. And sometimes they say, especially after we get treatment or I offer them some illumination And I'm real with them. And we're diving in. And I usually say to patients, hey, between the two of us, we can figure out quite a bit. You know, health is a team sport. Let's dive in together. And the greatest, like, listening skills that I can bring are going to help bring a lot of healing. And then sometimes they'll say, oh, God. Like I. And they have a bunch of grief coming up, like, I wish I would have met you 10 years ago or 20 years ago.

Yeah.

And I say, well, I trust in something greater than me. There. There's a reason you didn't, but there. There's a reason you're here now. And all of the experiences that you've been through in medicine and practitioners and everything else, you learned so much. And a lot of people that are in chronic pain, they have so much gratitude for when they're not in pain. And that. That contrast and that duality of they know what it is like to struggle.

Yeah.

So when they feel good and they start to feel better, the amount of. Yeah, I guess it is gratitude that they have an appreciation for what they have. And it's not in cars and, you know, homes and finance and everything else. It is health. Health is the great common equalizer among humanity. And I've worked with people that have, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. I've worked with people that I treated for free for months because they were on EI or didn't have a job because they were so ill they couldn't work for years. And I'm just guided to help where I can, and doesn't mean I'm perfect. I got a lot of my own issues I'm working on. But that humanity piece, when you're sitting with somebody who's been through so much and then you start to uncover those layers, there's so much depth to us. And so the gift that they have then is the appreciation for life and the wisdom and experience of having maybe, you know, seen 50 practitioners. They've learned a lot.

Yeah, there's a. There's a gentleman in my men's group, and he's battled with mold for a long time, and he just had another exposure. And he's just like, you know, the old me would have said, why me? But the me now with the journey I've been on, it says, oh, what can I learn? And there's such a maturity there. Like, it almost. It makes me emotional just to think about that, because there's so many people suffering with such a myriad of different ailments. That if that could just be one thing that's taught in medicine, like forget about going full woo with Western medicine. I don't see this being a class at Stanford or whatever.

Yeah.

But potentially if I wonder how you could see this working out. If there was something from the Chinese medicine and from the holistic world, if there was just one emotional intelligence piece that could be brought into Western medicine knowing that we can't change the world overnight, but if there was just one emotional intelligence or self awareness or consciousness practice that could be taught to physicians, you know, what would that be?

That would be to trust your body. And so when a patient is telling you something, to really listen in a new way or a new perspective, that if you assume for a moment that that patient knows their body really well and the symptom that they're reporting is something that they feel very deeply internally. If you imagine that there is, you know, spirals or these like, you know, concentric circles around them of that causes sitting there waiting to be discovered, you could reflect so much more accuracy, I think back to the patient and even for doctors to trust and know their body well, because so many people have been taught to be disconnected from their system. And I think in our system, especially in Canada and you know, maybe the US is quite similar in some ways. The doctors are under a lot of strain. They don't have time or five minutes.

Per patient or three minutes per patient.

If I spent five minutes with somebody, I could probably peg some things because I'm quite intuitive and you know, I've cultivated that muscle over, you know, 20,000 hours or whatever it is. And would I do a better job if I had 15 or 20 minutes or half an hour? What if I had two hours with that person and I had the depth because of what I've cultivated within me to be able to spend that much time with them, to gather so much information and data that they would leave that visit knowing way more about themselves and I would know way more about them, the likelihood that the patient and the practitioner would be able to come to some beautiful solutions would drastically increase. But the system isn't built in that model. It's built for, you know, a few minute increments. So the amount of disconnect I think that doctors probably have to be in to survive a day like that is monumental.

They're getting paid by codes. They're getting codes, only codes, minutes attached to them.

Yeah. And it's just one after the other. So I feel like a lot of doctors are very dissatisfied. I've Treated a lot of doctors over the years. They probably don't tell people that they come to see me, but they do. I've seen a lot of practitioners and we have all these beautiful conversations. A lot of them are not feeling really happy. Happy and healthy because they're working in a system that doesn't support their health either. That they can't sink into a deeper layer within themselves because they don't have time to do that with the patient. Where does that leave them at the end of the day? Overworked, burnt out, not getting good results. And it's not a result. I hate to say this, but I'm gonna. It's not a result based process. Whereas if somebody comes to see me, they have to pay. And then I'm on the hook for results. And I'm okay with that because I'm gonna show up and do my best. And I don't always get it right. Mistakes too. I can't cure everything, but I'm going to try and I'm going to show up as best as I can. But if I didn't have any connection to the results and I'd be busy no matter what you can imagine the motivation would go away pretty quickly. So you can kind of see that it's not a results based system.

Dude, they deserve so much compassion. I think there's been a lot of beating up of traditional physicians. They deserve a hug.

Yeah.

And a handshake.

They probably need a hug more than.

Maybe a cocoa and a turkey sandwich fireplace or something. They deserve some love. I want to shift because we're not going to be able to fix the medical system today. At least not in this moment. Maybe in some ways, like you mentioned earlier, the plant that you talked about growing through the concrete. I think that chaos is seeking order now. It is in our lifetimes. It will seek order in some way of the traditional insurance medical pharma triad. Really like the triad of pain that just continues to perpetuate itself. Yeah, but. But there's. There's some more intuitive faculty that we can lean into that will yield the result that will actually change us and then the system. Because we can't change the system. We have to change us first. And I'm curious how you feel about this because there's lots of schools of thought about like what are the true emotions and where do those true emotions live in our bodies. And I know that you have some expertise on organs in our BREATHE program. Breathwork IO there's many students that I've taught and I just touched on the organ map. I don't know in depth like you do, so I would love to learn. So some schools of thought say that there's only five main emotions. Love and joy, anger, fear, sadness, guilt and shame. Five categories. Do you believe that's true? And if so, how do those manifest in the organs? Through symptoms.

So a couple things I want to touch on here, and I'll come back to the emotions in a minute, but I really feel like we are this really important bridge generation that I didn't grow up with technology, but we learned how to use technology, and we have old school ways of thinking. And I don't want to project, so I'll say I have old school ways of thinking and I have new school ways of thinking. And there's something about spending a lot of time with people in Sarta, like age category, age bracket, where we've touched into things in the world and we see things in a really big way and we want to be of service. And we've understood how some of the older patterns don't serve anymore. And when we talked about generational elements, a lot of us that are willing to do the deeper work and look inside and look at family patterns and situations that maybe don't serve us anymore, it's hard work, but it feels like it finds a lot of us. And so a lot of my patients, a lot of the people that come to retreats, sometimes they think, how come I'm the one in my family that's having to heal all this generational trauma? And I think, what a gift. Even though it's hard that it's finding you that is, that seedling that, that plant, that energy that's seeking its way is like, oh, this person can. This person holds enough energy, enough compassion, enough love in their heart to heal so many generational aspects. And this bridge that we're in now where, you know, a lot of us are not necessarily in survival mode anymore. I'm grateful for my folks for that, you know, for working really hard for my grandparents and all the strain and struggle so that I can dedicate so much of my life to being of service that I'm not in fight or flight all the time. And I can do research and I can determine where illness comes from and then bring that back to people. And so that definitely ties in with the emotions that we actually can hold so many emotions at one time. We can. We can hold it all. And that I can. I feel I'm getting emotional just listening.

To you about that.

There's lots. Yeah, I'M getting emotional, too.

Yeah.

There's so much that we can hold as people. And when I think of my ancestors, you know, my grandparents, the stories I've heard from my dad were. They were poor, you know, and they. They struggled, and life was brutal at times, and how hard that was for them, that is fuel for me to not only honor the emotions that they never got to express, you know, the emotions that they never had a chance to sit down with a somatic therapist or do some breath work, that they just went back into the field and back to work or back into, you know, just survival mode because they actually maybe didn't have food. I can feel all of that ancestry and all that memory in my body all the time. And so when I'm sitting with somebody, I know what a gift it is that I get to do the work that I get to do and that I get to ask them, tell me about your emotions and what you're feeling. And all the people that never got asked that before. That is a huge amount of energy that's, like, moving in our generation because we're aware of this stuff now. Our past generations, they just weren't. They didn't have time. They weren't gifted that opportunity. So that's why I say, like, we're in this bridge time right now, this really obviously key time on the planet where all of this trauma, collectively, the emotions are coming up. And the whole list of emotions that you named. What I'm finding in the clinic right now, and for me as well, is all of that is coming up now all at once. And what I've come to understand about myself, too, is I can feel gratitude and joy and bliss and. And I can feel grief at the same time. And I think a lot of us were taught that wasn't possible. You got to choose. You're either happy or you're sad right now. You can't be both. That doesn't make any sense. And it's like it doesn't. Sure, logically, but the body doesn't care what's logical. We can hold various emotions in our body at any given time.

That was such a beautiful expression. You were feeling it. I was feeling it. I feel the exact same way that you do, actually. And it came through on a vision quest a couple years ago where no food, just water for four days out there. And when I came back, that's essentially what I shared in my own words. What you just said is, I can. What a disservice it would be to my grandfather on both sides My grandmother on both sides. What an absolute disservice and disrespect it would be for us to not be the one. Like that scene in the Matrix where Neo is, like, shown he's the One. And at first he couldn't handle it. He was like, no way. And he went back, and then he answered the call again. And then when it came really down to it, he put his hands up to the bullets and he just simply said no. And the bullets fell. Not because he was angry, but he had made a decision in himself. It does not make you better or me better or anyone better. That answers the call. It's actually, to be honest, it's a hell of a lot harder to answer the call to do the healing. It's way harder. Way harder. And it's no disrespect to people that shun away from the healing or that don't want to do the healing. But like you said, we're the One, and we truly are the One we've been looking for. It's just. It's become a platitude in the media. You're the one. Be the hero of your own story. Wipe all that bullshit aside. What you just said is so profound. Because if we have the courage to answer the call and if somebody's watching or listening and you feel this in your throat or your heart or your stomach or even your perineum or just anywhere in your body, if you're feeling the excitement or the pull towards what we're talking about, fucking go for it.

Please.

We need you. We have to have you, because you are being called, just like so many of us are being called right now to do the hardest work. It's the hardest fucking work. It really. It's not glamorous. It's not sexy. It's really fucking hard. Like, spiritual awakening and growing your consciousness is challenging. The most challenging thing that you'll ever experience. But it's so worth it. Oh, my God. The love and the ability of presence and, like, how I get to lead my life. And I know there's other waves coming of healing, but how I get to lead my life, it's beyond anything I could have dreamed of in 2015 when I was, like, praying to God, should I be here or not? Like, this is worth it, but you have to have the courage to answer the call. So now let's go into the emotions. Let's do it.

The.

These emotions are guideposts. They're guideposts like that. That little sapling you're talking about trying to poke through. That's all these things are. They're little mechanisms that are trying to guide us.

Well, in the themes with emotion, you know, the categories that you mentioned in Chinese medicine, like I mentioned, each one is connected. Lungs is more grief and sadness. Kidneys is more fear. Spleen is that busy. Mind that excessive contemplation. Liver is more anger, frustration.

Yeah.

So I see that pattern a lot nowadays, because the role of the liver in Chinese medicine is to govern smooth flow of qi through the whole body, like smooth flow of energy and all of the emotions. So there can be a lot of.

It's our main filter.

Oh, it's such a huge filter.

It's the cabin and the engine filter at the same time. It's. It's literally like the filter that filters everything, right?

Yeah, it does filter everything. It filters toxins, it filters emotions. It governs so many things. Luckily, it is a robust, powerful organ. I once had a patient years ago who had some. Some rare liver disease going on, and they end up removing 90% of his liver and they left 10% of it in hopes that it would grow back. And it did. In five months.

Holy shit. Yeah.

Like, the liver regenerative capacity, it grew.

All the way back.

Yeah. And the function. The function was better, dude, that's. Than it was before. They're so wild. So not all the organs can do that, you know, and these interesting things about the organs, like the heart doesn't get cancer. Other organs do, but it doesn't. Why is that? The liver can regenerate, like, powerfully. Why does it do that? Because it needs to. We've evolved that function and that skill to be able to take in things, metabolize them, turn them into, you know, neutral substances, and then clear them out of the body. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. So the liver's job right now is probably more than it's ever been. The amount of toxins that we're exposed to is high. It's. It's incredible. But it's also the emotions that we're talking about, the ones that don't get processed. So a lot of my teachers, my Chinese medicine teachers, a lot of, you know, mad respect to them, all of them were born and raised in China, you know, learn from different lineages. And then they're trying to teach this guy, you know, in. Totally. Yeah, this, you know, farm kid, Chinese medicine. And I didn't speak the language, and it was, you know, it was challenging at times. And. And so I have so much gratitude for. For all the Learning that the emotions are not bad inherently, but what they would teach us is the unexpressed, unprocessed emotions. That's where blockage comes from. And blockage or obstruction in Chinese medicine, is that that buzzword? If you don't have balance and flow in the system and it's stuck, that's where issues come from. Any number of symptoms, mentally, emotionally, physically, it means something gets blocked. Which is why I've always loved acupuncture, because acupuncture was designed to unblock meridian flow, unblock blood circulation. So when you do treatment, all you're doing is giving the body a little bit of support to unblock the places it's stuck. And that is why a lot of times when I'm doing acupuncture, people cry. People feel huge, energetic shifts in their body. They feel a thousand pounds lighter. When they leave, the tension leaves their muscles. You've unblocked so much of that flow in their system, their body can function again. It can breathe again, it can move energy and oxygen and minerals again and get it into the cells and the muscles. So it's taking all of the things that have been stuck, which are often emotional nowadays, and they get stuck physically in the system. So what I've come to see in the clinic over the years is that any emotion that's not been fully integrated that creates an energetic blockage somewhere in any of these systems, any of the organs, whether it's fear, anger, you know, grief, if it's not dealt with, eventually it manifests physically. I don't think I've ever seen a case like fibromyalgia is a good example. A lot of pain, physical pain. Every single one of those cases I've seen, there's so much suppressed emotional pain that it eventually has to express physically because that energy is trying to find the light. It is trying to be resolved, and it will continue until it is. And as soon as you realize that, and the saying that was told to me years ago is, don't get rid of your pain before you understand why it's there.

Just letting that land for a second. Pain is the teacher. I don't know if you've spoken to him yet, but you absolutely have to. His name is Paul Check, and he's taught that in his work for Czech HLC when I did it, like in 2010, when the pain teacher comes, it's your opportunity to listen. It's your opportunity to learn something. So we live in a society right now where there's band aids and, like you said, suppression Instead of actually allowing the pain to come through and teach us something. I mean, how many times could I have actually shortened my own pain curve if I wasn't trying to get the pain away from me, If I was actually just open to the pain? A massive resource for this. Everybody, please download this. The Untethered Soul. Michael Singer.

One of my favorite.

Okay, yeah, do it now. Like, it's so good. Because a lot of what you'll be guided on in that, and I'm sure in a lot of your teachings is similar, is that the pain is actually a signal. It's coming through for you to learn something from it, for you to hear something from it. So if I'm having. For example, if I'm having liver issues, what am I not willing to face in my life? What am I angry about, that I'm suppressing or that I'm not sharing with my partner or with myself? Like, that is a clear connection there. Liver, because I would assume. And I wonder how you see it. Does it start at the liver or can there be, like you had mentioned the different ones, and I was actually looking this up before. The heart can also hold hate as well. In Chinese medicine, lungs are grief and sadness. Kidneys, fear, sinuses, as we talked about in the book. A stinking conflict. Something that I don't want to smell.

Yeah.

Which I'm. I've dealt with and I continue to deal with from love. You know, it's like, all right, finally I have the path. But the main body filter. The main body filters the liver. So do you. Do you tend to always start at the liver? When you're looking at symptomatic expression, does it filter down from there, or. Or can you sometimes just go right to an organ and start to feel that and. And heal from there?

I would say nowadays you can almost always go to the liver first. And even in Chinese medicine, they've known this for a long time. The liver disharmony. There's lots of different names. Liver, fire, liver, Qi, stagnation. Very common pattern, because stress is what affects the liver the most. And it's usually the first organ affected by stress. And so that's where that blockage can come in. So an example would be maybe somebody's under a huge amount of stress. Any number of reasons that starts to congest the liver energy. Maybe the liver function starts to wane a little bit. It's not filtering as good. Then all of those toxins that you're taking in, known and unknown, they don't get filtered out as easily anymore. Then suddenly that starts backing up the liver more. And so you can see over time, both of those, like, not dealing with the stress affects the function of the liver's ability to regularly detox day to day. After a few years, five, ten years or more, even sometimes months, the liver is full of toxicity. And then it starts affecting other organs. Because if you have a filter that's stuck, everything starts backing up from there. Now your digestion's off, now your mood's off a little bit. You're a bit short tempered, you're snapping at your kids or your spouse a little bit more. And you don't want to, but you can't help it. There's this like irritation in the system that's often coming from the liver being stuck. So things like milk thistle and you know, this is not prescriptive by any means, but milk thistle is an herbalist that's well known to be helpful for the liver. Protects the liver, helps detox it. It's pretty mild. A lot of people can generally take it without much, you know, side effect. And they can take it for a long period of time because it's not harsh.

But that's not a band aid. That's actually something that's going to bring up more emotion to be dealt with.

Yeah. And so this is the key is beautiful that you're sharing that is when you start working on the liver, anger will usually start to surface or frustration. And that is often where people get scared or they stop and they turn it back in and shove it back down again. And that's precisely the time to reach out, get support, work on what it is that's being held there. And you know, as I've detoxed thousands and thousands of livers, there's definitely been cases. I remember this one case in particular, years ago, her liver was on fire. Like with some of the readings I was doing with testing, it was so jammed up, like it just looked like it was ready to, to explode. She was very grouchy. She said it herself, I am not a kind person. I don't want to be this way, but I'm just so irritated all the time. And I'm like, yep, your liver is so stuck. So we started working on the liver. But one of a key example was Epstein Barr, which is what causes mono. She had got that when she was 15 and we were talking about it and I was going to work on it with her and target the liver, target the viral piece and help move, move that through and help integrate that. And when we started doing that treatment. Guess what happened, you know, two, three weeks later, she's in the clinic, and she's like, kevin, I am so angry. I think. I think I'm gonna kill somebody. I was like, really? Are you like, oh, you know, I was pretty young then. It was early in my career, and I was kind of a little bit scared because she. She was just like.

To give her a pillow to punch.

Oh, like, fuming. Right? Just. And so we started talking, talking about it, and I said, okay, how's this coming up?

She.

I started taking the remedy you gave me to clear this virus and the liver. I've just gotten so angry. Like, I. I can't stand myself right now. And so I remember asking her. I was like, wait, how old were you when you had mono? And she's like, I was 15. I was like, what was going on in your life at that time? She's like, well, I was getting bullied at school. My parents are getting divorced. And I was, like, so angry. Oh, my God. Oh. And so as I was working on the liver and that time capsule of, like, virus infiltration into the system and pulling that out, it pulled all of that, like, stuck emotion, the anger, all the unprocessed material from when she was 15 years old brought it to the surface. We worked on it. We talked about it. We helped alchemize and transform a lot of that. And a few weeks later, she came in and she said, I wouldn't have said I was an angry person, but now the way I feel is so different. I was angry, and I'm getting along with my kids now. I'm not yelling at them. I'm way happier. I can't believe that I lived like that for so many years, because she was, like, 35 years old at the time. So it was 20 years of. Of that stuck pattern, just building and building and building to the point where. Yeah, then she was on antidepressants, and she was on medication and struggling with all these things. And so, yeah, as we got all that stuff out of the way, she came off the medications because there was no need to for it anymore. She processed that.

How powerful. Let's just give respect to our organs.

Yeah.

How powerful was it that her liver held 20 years before it finally waved the white flag? Oh, my God, how resilient. And people are like, oh, be careful with babies. It's like, babies are so resilient. We're so resilient. But, yeah, we do have to honor when the white flag is being raised. I wonder how you process the Alchemy with her. I know somebody's thinking that right now.

Yeah.

How did you help to process that anger through the liver? How did you alchemize that?

Well, I think the first stage was just having a conversation of me tracking. Let's, let's get curious. That's the other thing in medicine, if we can be curious in our lives in general or as practitioners, as doctors, get curious with what somebody is sharing. So there she is, fuming mad, red face, angry. Thought maybe she was gonna, you know, come at me a little bit because I gave her a remedy that then produced this anger, even though that's not exactly how it works. And just doing a little bit of breath, coming back into presence in the clinic and then identifying, oh, 15 years old was a really hard time in your life. Interesting. Can you share more about that? And then she started sharing a little bit more. And then some tears came and just even identifying where some of the pain point could be or where there is an initial trauma, an initial blockage, you know, on the mentally emotional level, that would clear a lot. You know, as soon as we're aware of something, that energy can start to move. If we're not aware of it, it's not moving. And so that alone created quite an opening and her just being able to share and me asking questions, drawing that out a little bit more. Then we did some acupuncture to help open the liver up a little bit more, calm the body, calm the immune system, calm the nervous system. I do think I recall, yeah, inviting her to maybe seek a little bit of counseling to dive into that specific time of her life a little bit more. Yeah, maybe some constellations work to really just unfold more of the care and attention that that time in her life would need and require. And just bring more love to that place and don't suppress it anymore. Just acknowledge, yeah, that that was hard and I did not get the support I needed at that time. Now you're 35 years old, you can get the support you need to bring love back to that 15 year old girl that was really, really struggling in every way.

There's a lot of different tools that you're talking about. I'm probably going to miss a few, so please add them in. But acupuncture, there could be acupressure or massage therapy, right. To help start moving things, organ massage, stuff like that. Then supplementation through milk thistle. Then actually having a dedicated person who cares that can hold true space. And also different lab work to show you what's needed as Far as attention, what are the other ways that you can start to hone in on essentially what you're saying? An emotion that just wants light. That's really what all these things are doing. I always find it fascinating when people are like, I got to get like this huge $5,000 blood panel. It's like, really, isn't that just going to be a mirror to show you things that you probably already know and that could be essentially sussed out with the right practitioner anyways? How do you draw the line of that? And then what are the other pieces of. Of that scaffolding, if you will? Yeah, that once you've identified the anger or the sadness or the grief, and you start to see that manifest in lab work through the organ itself, how do you. How do you make sense of all that, essentially?

Yeah. What I love trying to remember, especially because I'm in circles of a lot of spiritual work, heart work, you know, nervous system work that we can't forget about the physical body. And so massage, acupuncture, acupressure, chiropractic, like hands on work. The body needs that too.

Yeah.

It's not just about the mental emotional picture. It's both. Because we live in this vessel, we. We have to give our body love and care and attention. And sometimes, like, it needs that touch.

But what if I just wear a shirt that says good vibes only? Won't that help? What if I'm just.

That cares everything.

What if I'm just hyper positive and I'm so bypassing everything that it's just all positivity, love and light? Won't that work? Won't that work, Kevin?

I find that it might work for about five minutes, and then a person walks out on the. And they're right back in that deep unconscious, like patterns or behavior that you're walking around with like boatloads of anger.

It's not all love and light, y'. All. No, that's not the truth. That's not what we signed up for.

Well, and there's so that shadow work, we can call it shadow work. Inner child work is another one. You can do past life regressions, you can do constellation work. Really my point in saying is, you know, give the body lots of love. See what resonates. Find practitioners is another key. Find a practitioner that you feel resonance with. Yeah, I'm not for everybody. And I tell patients that if you don't feel that resonance and connection with me, I'm not going to take that personally because I want that to be a part of it and maybe we're just not on the same wavelength or have the same vibe. It's okay. But please find somebody you do resonate with because you're going to get better results. Especially for a lot of the deep hands on work or counseling or talk therapy. Somatic work is a big one that can yield profound results. I've done a lot of somatic work. What I mean by that is working with the nervous system directly in a really beautiful way where somebody that is gifted with heart energy, with their presence can help you slow down enough to access what's deeper. And so in my own experience of doing somatic work with different therapists and people that I know and love, they'll just help slow me down. And when we slow down, there is so much there available. But the slowing down can be so uncomfortable because we're used to being so distracted, busy, productive. I'm a busy guy, yes. I practice Chinese medicine and I like to create balance. And I, I'm a very productive human. I have a lot of things I want to do. I'm way better about slowing down now. And I notice when I do then I can slow down more and more and more. And when I do, guess what's there, Some level of emotional dysregulation, some level of, you know, trauma that is now ready to come to the surface because I've given enough time and space for it. So when we are doing the deep work, don't forget about the body and whether that's blood work and looking at other aspects like very relevant too. But then allow yourself to go into the, the past. Yeah, there's so much there for us if we want to tap into it. And you don't have to do it all at once. You can do it layer by layer, especially depending on where you're at. Like I can usually do pretty deep dives now because I've cultivated lots of sort of neurochemistry in my body to be able to handle that. I still might be wiped out from it or have to have a nap for an hour or two after a really deep somatic session. But I can go back again and again and go deeper and deeper. Whereas for, if you're just starting, that's fine, you can titrate that, you can just touch into a level that, hey, there's a little bit of movement there. Okay, pause, slow down. Let's just leave that for today. That's good for now. And then come back again and again and just like play the long game. Don't just try and like bash your system needlessly. Cause that. That can lead to a lot of dysregulation too.

For whatever reason, I just trust when I get little hits like this. I'm. There's a story there's another podcaster out there. His name is JV Crumb. And when I met him, when I first started my podcasting journey, he was super driven, but he was like, really just. He felt very inflamed and he was overweight and he was just super high energy all the time. And even I can look at my consciousness back then in 2016, 2017, and I was like, huh, there's something seems wrong with him. Like something's up for him. I don't know what it is. Five or six years later, he did this full podcast series about how his unconscious delivered him these memories and of him being sexually abused. And he wasn't willing to share it because literally, the unconscious doesn't give us things. That's the beauty of the unconscious. It doesn't give us things unless we're really ready to move through them.

Yeah.

There are certain things that are so just packed down and repressed in the unconscious that it won't allow us actually out of self preservation. It's actually a beautiful. It's actually a beautiful mechanism.

It is, but it won't.

The unconscious won't allow us. Us to work through a memory that's so painful that it would actually put the body into a state of. So hardcore sympathetic that it might kill us or it might be perceived as killing us.

Yeah, it'd be shock. Or it would be shock.

I've even heard Byron Katie share about this as well. Her whole work of the five questions came from her own sexual abuse. So what do you make of this, like, when the time is right for healing, that we actually have the courage to do it. And the body will tell us at that perfect time.

Yeah.

When it's actually time to heal.

Yeah.

What's your sense on that?

Yeah, my. I can feel all that energy moving in my own body because I've had that experience of, you know, doing lots of deep dive work.

And then all of a sudden there's.

Something that emerges that I had previously not recalled or not remembered. And I think, oh, oh, that's. That's hard. I'm feeling a lot of emotion on that. And I'm grateful that I'm at the place where my body's wisdom is saying, now he's ready to deal with this layer. You know, he can deal with this now. But previously, no, it's going to wall that off. And so that's the, you know, kindness and gentleness part. Remembering that with our own journey, remembering that with the nervous system. The nervous system needs kindness and gentleness. Forcing healing. I've tried that. It can maybe work short term, but it always doubles back on itself because the, the pressure or are coming from a place of fear versus the open hearted love like for that deeper part of yourself. And all the previous versions I've been. And the compassion I have for that guy at 25 and at 20 and at 15, he was doing his best. He was trying so hard. And I love all those elements of self and some elements I still struggle with. I still, I'm not super happy with different patterns or behavior, but if I force it or I'm really harsh or judgmental towards those parts. And having kids has actually been one of the most helpful things. I have a. A son and daughter. If they hurt themselves or they were having a hard time or got bullied at school or they're disregulated, I don't go into yelling, shaming, judgment. And then why would I do that for myself? And so having my son as a mirror, as an example of what would I do for him, I would just scoop him up and put him on my lap and hug him and let him feel my strength and my heart that he could regulate that way. So when I've done deep dive work on myself, finding a version of myself at 8 or 9 or 10 or something that went through something challenging, now I'll imagine taking that child into my arms and just holding him. And that shifts the nervous system in a really big way that then I can kind of reintegrate those parts that I was ashamed of or had judgment of or I had pushed or walled off to the side. And it brings up so much more spaciousness in my own body then I can be present. When I'm working with somebody that has those same things, I can invite them in, I can invite them to be present in that. And then we get to move through all those layers. And so just being patient in the healing journey, it's hard but worth it, you know, it's. Yeah, the. The intelligence of the body is miraculous.

Trevor hall song you can't rush your healing. You can't. Well, you can, but it might double back like you said. That was so brilliant. I love that. So for all the parents watching, listening, rewind that whole section. There was a moment maybe four or five months ago when Carrie and I were really in it, like really in the thick of the sapling, poking through.

Yeah.

And. And my son was up again. He's. We've been really working with him. He's. He's 2.4 years old. He's almost 2 1/2, and my daughter's 6 months old. And he, like you said, he really teaches me so much about myself. Like how I am to myself is how I am to him. It is a crystal clear mirror. There's no dirt of confusion. He was up late. It was like one in the morning. And he was like, I'm hungry. I'm hungry. And we were just utterly exhausted. I mean, like, maybe two weeks of just straight sleep interruptions. And I. And I yelled at him and I was like, nova, hold on, I'm getting you something. And then right after I did it, I felt like this wave of sadness where I was like, damn, how do I talk to myself like that. I actually had a moment of consciousness right in that moment. And I immediately turned to him because it startled him. And I said, daddy, so sorry. I'm so sorry. I know you're hungry. Let me get you something to eat. But I realized, like, that is just. That's a micro of the macro of self. The micro of my behavior is the macro of how I actually speak and treat myself.

Yeah.

And that was a huge. I mean, since that time, I have been incredibly vigilant on how I speak to him. And there are occasional times when, like, he's running in the street, I'll be like, no, that's okay.

Yeah.

But. But for other things, like, I'd love for you to go into that just a little bit more because this is a very practical tool.

Yeah.

Whether somebody's a parent or not, they can learn this skill set. So I gave the example, you gave the great example of how you treat your son and how I treat my son. How can people do this when they don't have kids? How can they imbue this inside themselves?

I think that we have to give ourselves that grace and kindness. I'm talking about when we do yell or when we do something to not carry that shame for very long, and then we get to speak to it. So I noticed that in my own aspects of becoming a parent and these old patterns that I was running and then when I look back, would I do some things differently? Yes, I would, from what I understand now. But that version of Kevin didn't know any different, and he was doing his best at that time. So if we can remember that, that generally speaking, like, we want to offer the Best. Especially as parents, do we always feel like we're offering the best? No. But maybe in that moment of two weeks of no sleep, that was your best to not carry that guilt or shame. Shame that we're gonna get things wrong. We're gonna want to redo things. We're gonna learn from that. But then being able to come and speak to it, and depending on the age of kids, you can do this. There's been times where I was embarrassed by my own behavior of parenting, that it took a lot of humility to go to my son or go to my daughter and say, hey, I am not proud of the way that I spoke to you. I'm really sorry. And they're like, oh, Daddy, that's okay. And then that, like, grace that they give me brings up, like, emotion right away of, okay, I don't have to be perfect.

Yeah.

I don't have to get it right all the time. But I can name and speak and, you know, share what is alive in the field of energy. And just naming things can be really powerful. That as a parent, sometimes we hold our cards pretty tight. And I've seen this with myself and many others. You don't want the kids to see you sad or angry. You don't want the. You know, put that on them or whatever. And so there's been times we've been driving, especially in the past. My kids are very, you know, beautiful and intuitive, and it takes, like, half a second. My daughter and I are pretty telepathic. And she looks over at me, and I can feel her looking at me, and I'm like, oh, she's picking up what's going on for me. And I was thinking about something that I'd been struggling with and ruminating on, and she felt it right away and says, dad, are you okay? And I look over, and my first response, you know, she was pretty young then. And I said, yeah, yeah, fine. How many times have we heard that, yeah, I'm fine? And then it was about a minute later I realized, oh, that's an old pattern. Hang on a second. And I looked over and I said, honey, thanks for asking if I'm okay. I am okay. And I was thinking about something that I have been finding a little bit challenging, and I'm still kind of working my way through. Thanks for noticing. Because if I say I'm fine, then I'm giving her inaccurate reflection. She knows that I'm thinking about something and I'm struggling or I have a. I'm having a low moment. And then if I Tell her, no, I'm fine. You're wrong. That disconnects her from her knowing. She knew. And so I'm trying to even still practice that catching of what do I say as an auto response to somebody who's incredibly intuitive? It's like, hey, how you doing? And you're like, yeah, 100%, never been better. Then they're wondering, I wonder why he's lying to me. I can tell he's not okay right now. And then just giving myself permission to say to my daughter, like, you're right. I'm struggling in the moment. I've still got me. I've got you. It actually allows them to soften in some way of like, oh, good, we just named that thing. Yeah, we all felt it. We spoke about it. That's okay to be here, actually. And sometimes there's times where emotions have come up and then their emotions come up and we actually get to move through it together. Like. And it's been profoundly healing to just be open enough to share that we don't have to be perfect, because otherwise we can raise kids that feel like they need to be perfect and they can't show their emotions to us either.

And that is how you heal generational trauma.

Yes.

By just that example you gave. It doesn't always have to be this deepest breath, work, shamanic journey, which occasionally it does, but that's how you do it. And that's actually the practical wisdom that I hope everyone feels today. What you just shared, because the same way that you spoke to your daughter, how old was she then?

She was probably six or seven.

That's amazing. I haven't gotten to that stage yet where my. My son's faculty is still coming online in that way, but he's already so smart and he speaks so well, and he's not even two and a half. I'm like, whoa, it's amazing to witness, but that's how we do it, man. That's a beautiful reminder you just gave us to. For generational healing to occur. There's small bricks and there's big bricks.

Yeah.

That brick right there is so important because it gives them the capacity and really the permission to feel their own stuff.

Yeah.

And then they don't have to suppress with their kids. That's how we do it. And thank them, because I know we're feeling them. Thank you to our ancestors for all they did. Because my grandpa, my grandma on both sides, my dad, my mom, they literally just truly did not know how to do that.

Yeah. Nobody taught them.

So we can't shame them. No. Or blame them. They actually just did not have the awareness. It just wasn't even in their field.

Yeah.

It wasn't even there for them.

Yeah.

So that's how we do it, man. Amazing. Amazing. That was going to ask you some more questions. I hope you have time.

Let's keep rolling, man.

We're gonna keep going. I promise y'. All. This is going to be good. This is not. Not just filler, you know, the shadows that we've been talking about. It exists in Western medicine. It exists with you and I, which we've been exploring, and I think that's how a lot of things move and heal. But also it exists in Chinese medicine, too, I'm sure, because medicine is an art, and art is what's practiced. I was sitting with this this morning before you came to the studio, and I was thinking about, you know, Chairman Mao and the Communist regime and, you know, 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. There was this chain of events that led to communist overthrow in 1949. And, you know, Mao is responsible for 80 plus million deaths. And the way that possibly Chinese medicine was impacted by communism in China. How do you. How do you see that with your intuition, with your education, Looking back and connecting the dots to now, if there was a shadow of. Of. Of Chinese medicine impacted by the Communist regime, truly, like one of the most brutal things on earth right now, that's still. I just can't even believe that people wear suits and smile with a trail of blood behind them. It's just so insane that we can allow this to continue.

Yeah.

What do you make of that? As a practitioner of Chinese medicine, I.

Think going back to the Cultural Revolution in China, I believe that was 66 to 77. Maybe don't quote me on that, but talking to some of my teachers that were born and raised in China and lived through that, that they lost a lot of the esoteric lineage of Chinese medicine, like a lot of the deep wisdom that had been passed generationally because they. They were trying to almost be seen as more Westernized. And so there's this interesting thing that's happened over the last 30, 40 years is, I think, to be seen as legitimate in the world, like becoming more Western in China. And then the east, sorry, the. The west here, like, we've almost become more Eastern a little bit that a lot of us are into, you know, Buddhism and breath work and meditation and yoga and all these things. So there's been this interesting kind of swap in the planet a little bit. And so in in the history of Chinese medicine. And obviously it's like thousands of years long. A lot of the energetics were like pulled out of that. And so the Chinese medicine that I got taught was I believe, sort of the watered down, mechanized, like western version of an Eastern tradition. Not that we still didn't learn really, really good ideas about, you know, acupuncture, meridians, but there is so much more. So I ended up doing, I've taken so many courses now, but over the years I got into this course called classical Chinese medicine versus traditional Chinese medicine. And some of the people that were teaching that were saying the difference between classical Chinese medicine and traditional Chinese medicine is everything. And that was eye opening of. What do you mean? Yeah, like I, I think I've, I've learned straight from like Chinese speaking medicine doctors that were trained and, and born in China. You mean I'm missing a whole bunch. And they were saying, yeah, all, all of it. You're missing so much. So as I dove into that a little bit more, what some of those teachers were teaching was the things that had been lost or very held, like in, in secret because they needed to be protected. And then finally coming to the light and saying, hey, this is time to teach this stuff now. We can't keep this secret anymore. And so some of those practitioners, I didn't meet them in person and you know, being in China is something that I would love to go and do. I was scheduled to go to China years ago when I was doing my doctor program and we ended up having my daughter instead. And so I, you know, stayed behind and became a parent. But I got to learn firsthand from some of my colleagues that went of some of their experiences. And then years later studying classical Chinese medicine where they would get into the energetics even more than what I was taught. And these aspects of some of the guys that were still doing treatment that are like 115 years old and seeing pictures of them and they would say, oh, the younger doctors who are actually like 85 years old, but they look like they're 60 tons of energy, you know, the beautiful little beards and like happy, full of that like chi and vitality, because you could see it in their eyes, you know, and we call that the shen, the spirit. You can see that through somebody's eyes. And they would have so much energy just in their presence. And doing acupuncture for four or five or six or eight generations that have been passed down. That's kind of where I'm going in the future of wanting to learn from those people by osmo. Osmosis. And if you're 115, you've learned some things.

Yeah.

You've learned how to master some energy and not just be unhealthy, but be beautifully radiating energy and wisdom at that age. There's. There's magic in that, and those are things. We just didn't get exposure here or we didn't get taught those things. So it's. It's coming. I'm. I'm, you know, developing that in myself over time. But I would love to learn more. More about the classical, you know, history.

The classics are always the best. The new music that's out there, I don't even know what it is.

It's not.

It's not music. It's. It's like. Feels like satanic at times. The classic music, classical guitar, classic rock, classic Chinese medicine.

Yeah.

All these. All these classics. That's why one thing that. That makes me feel sadness at times is the fact that our society just does not create a beautiful space for elders to share their wisdom. It doesn't.

Yeah.

Like in Native American culture, the elders were prized. I mean, they were. They were literally put on pedestals, and rightly so. They were imperfect beings, but they had radical wisdom to share. A couple weeks ago, we shared here with. With Margot and Carrie. You know, she's in her 70s, and she's been through an incredible journey in her life. And so that's what I'm committed to, part of this podcast. And our mission is giving elders a space to share their yield, unique, sacred wisdom, because they so deserve it. And in our society of sound bites and TikTok, which, by the way, TikTok is owned by the Chinese Communist Party. Didn't know if you knew that. Now you do. So think about that the next time you use TikTok and you see what's being fed to you. Maybe choose something else. Maybe choose something more conscious. But I wonder. We've covered so much today, man, this has been a beautiful podcast, like, truly an epic podcast that I think I could personally listen to twice myself. So I know that everyone else is feeling that too. We covered a lot of ground and shadow and work in Chinese medicine. Maybe you could leave us with this conversation about your retreats, because the retreats, I think from what I know, I'd love to learn more. There can be a place where people can take a lot of these tools and resources and actually practically use them. Who are the types of people that go to your retreats and then what are your retreats?

All about, I think, just, you know, sharing a little bit. We've done lots of retreats with, you know, 10 people, 15, 20 people. And one of my colleagues, I have done a lot of work with Courtney. We had a retreat series called the Collective Hearts and the idea was it was all about the heart work. And one of the things she would say, she's a somatic therapist and has done many, many other layers of training. If there's enough safety in the field, healing can happen. If there's not enough safety, that thing in the body is not going to want to emerge because it doesn't feel safe to do so. So a lot of the energy that goes into producing and designing events on every level, safety is a big one. That there's energetic safety, there's energetic integrity, there's integrity on the mentally, emotional, spiritual levels, the physical levels. And so I spent a lot of time leading up to any events or retreats that I'm doing consciously, like building in those layers. And how are we going to create that? How are we going to create an environment in a space that feels so solid and protected and safe that so much healing can come forward? And you know, being a Tony Robbins fan, I've done lots of Tony Robbins events in the past. And what that showed me is like how much, you know, he talks about if you want mastery in something, you got to have total immersion. And so that always came back to my mind is if we want to have health mastery tree, sometimes you gotta have total immersion, you know, get out of your day to day. And not that we can't do a ton in the clinic in an hour or two visit, that can be life changing as well. But if you imagine, if you focus on your health and your healing for a whole day or two days or three days, because I've done events that are like one day kind of mini retreats or two days, or we've done like five and six day ones. If you dive in at that level, out of the normal, you know, environment that you're in, out of your work, out of of these different things where you are just focused on your healing, the deep work inside for days in a row, it is so profoundly powerful at the level of depth that you can get to. That's really why I wanted to do that in the first place, is, you know, get myself out of the office. I love adventure. I love being in places in nature and mountains by the ocean, creating these like, you know, beautiful experiences that would allow the softening to happen at the nervous system level that would allow us to access things that normally somebody's not accessing. And, you know, if you've been in a room with hundreds of people or even like 20 people, if everybody's sort of flowing and vibing at the same frequency and wanting to be there and wanting to do deeper work, the things that can get accessed are unbelievable. And some of the most profound experiences I've had have been with, like, groups doing meditation or breath work. There's this combined, like, auric energy field that happens. It's kind of unexplainable. I know Dr. Joe does a lot of these work, this type of work as well, where they show that you can actually change the energy field. So if you put yourself in a scenario like that, even if you're just hanging out, you're probably going to get some healing. And that's what my intention is with some of the events that we do. And, you know, especially the one we've got coming up, it's called the new Human. We're doing a winter solstice event up there. And.

And what do you have in. In 2024?

So 2024, we're going to have new Human events as well, and some of those are still being scheduled. I'm also working on a trip to Iceland to be announced and a trip to Tofino. I don't know if you've ever been to West Coast. Vancouver island, the ocean, the trees, the old growth forest. I've done several retreats. They're super powerful. I know our buddy Mark Groves did a retreat there back in September 2023.

Oh, cool.

There's a reason that some of us love to gravitate to these powerful places, because tuning in with nature, that does half the work for us. And then you can access way more. And so that's kind of the intention is to provide, like, small, kind of more intimate experiences. And then we do, like, bigger events where there's hundreds of people, and we can still do incredibly deep work in those spaces because we've built the space for it. And the intention.

Yeah, you're going to, like, the most beautiful spots in nature. So, like you said, half the thing is done just by showing up.

Yeah.

But then also what you do there. There is something magic about that field. I did a breath work with my buddy Fish from Somatic breathwork a couple weeks ago, and I was like, oh, I just want to do a light breathwork, you know, like, nothing too deep. 30 minutes in, I'm screaming, I'm purging. I'm like, what happened? It's because I was in that field. So, you know, don't discredit if you're watching or listening. The power of trusting your intuition. If you, if you want to do some work, don't block out what that work could actually transform into. It could be something so amazing. Where do people go to sign up or learn about the events?

Yeah, my website's probably a good spot. I'm on Instagram a little bit, too. It's just Dr. Kevin Preston. Doctorkevinpreston.com Same on Instagram. And we're posting all the things that are showing up as they emerge. And yeah, I'm deeply inspired, especially at this time on the planet, like we've talked about about. It is such a key time in our history of that energy that's available for massive growth and transformation, then, you know, if we're willing to show up and that things happen, well, we're here.

We're willing. Thank you for being here, man. This has been epic. From my heart to yours. Thank you for being on the show from Kevin and I both. We're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon. Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you love this video, hit subscribe. Subscribe.

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