Dr. Natasha Fallahi is The Sensitive Doctor.

She is a MindBody health expert, functional medicine practitioner, and Certified Autoimmune Coach specializing in an intuitive approach to living and healing.

She helps sensitive people connect with their intuition, overcome trauma, and heal so that they can harness their own magic, tap into their superpowers, experience true wellness and finally feel at home in this world.  Her approach is especially effective for people experiencing anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, vague pain, brain fog, food intolerance, chemical sensitivities, Hashimoto’s, and autoimmunity.

To learn more visit https://www.DrNatashaF.com/ https://www.ClubSensitive.com

Head over to https://rebelhealthtribe.com/kit to get a free download of our loaded quick start guide to help you along your healing journey.  If you like us, subscribe, review, and share us with your friends, and come join our Rebel Health Tribe group on Facebook.

A Podcast Launch Bestie production

we are live with this episode with Dr.

Natasha philosophy.

Dr.

Philosophy.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

It's always a pleasure chatting with you, Michael.

Yeah,

this is going to be fun.

Um, this is a long way to follow up from the first time we recorded

together as part of our auto-immune masterclass a couple of years ago,

with your presentation, flair care, which I loved and made a mental

note, have her back and talk more.

So here we are.

Um, for those who don't know you, you were my neighbor here recently.

Actually, you guys moved.

Did you move?

Like the week we moved here to Berkeley,

we just

crossed in the month.

It was October last year

19.

Yeah.

I was there for over a decade and then

I'm going to see Titus in Natasha.

And then I get here and I'm like, Hey gee, do you want to have dinner?

And he's like, we live in Sacramento now.

So there was a couple of other people too, who moved here and we got here.

I think we chased you out of town.

So you're in the Sacramento area now.

Right?

Still Northern California.

Still go to Berkeley a lot, but.

Just move it a little more north.

Um, if you don't know about Dr.

she is known as the sensitive doctor.

She's a mind body health expert, functional medicine practitioner

and certified auto-immune coach specializing in an intuitive

approach to living in healing.

She helps sensitive people suffering from chronic illness and trauma connect

with their intuition and inborn gifts.

So they can feel at home in this world.

Her approach is especially effective for people experiencing depression,

anxiety, chronic fatigue, vague pain, never heard that term.

And it's very fitting, uh, brain fog, food intolerance, chemical,

sensitivities Hashimoto's and other autoimmune conditions.

I think I covered all the bases there,

the list of things I dealt with and had to find my way out of

how you determined your specialty.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

I mean, it was, it was kind of being in the shoes of the person who's

experiencing that and then finding the other side of how to address that.

So my, the people that I work best with are the people who are

going through this journey with.

Great.

And did you grow up in Cincinnati, Ohio, which I learned before we

went on air shout out to Cincinnati.

Um, did you grow up wanting to be a doctor?

Not at all.

So it's kind of ironic because, uh, being the first-generation daughter

of Persian immigrants, it was kind of like my life path to be a

doctor or a lawyer or an architect.

And I really resisted that my whole life.

Um, and you know, I was always getting involved in more

creative and arts-related things.

Um, and so I actually set out to be an artist and a graphic designer, and that's

what my undergraduate studies were.

Um, I did all of that, like multimedia studies and I was loving it.

Um, but really the reason I became a doctor is because my health and my life

fell apart and I couldn't function.

I couldn't even do.

Anything, like, not just the things I loved, but I couldn't really even

get up and take care of myself.

So that began my journey looking for answers, just to feel well again,

and in that process, I learned a lot.

I saw the dark side of healthcare.

I saw some amazing things that I had never been exposed to growing up in

the Midwest of the United States, um, in alternative and holistic medicine.

And I just became so fascinated with and curious and would always

ask my doctors and practitioners and therapists, all these questions

about the behind the scenes stuff.

So both through my own healing, experiencing it and transforming that way.

But also just asking why, why is this stuff working?

When I had always been told, you know, it was just.

You have a symptom, you get a pill, you kind of squash that symptom.

And then that's what health is.

Um, it became really interesting for me to see other perspectives of what health

means, um, and how to achieve that.

So I never set out to be a doctor, but through that process of just, um,

seeing how my health and life were transformed, and I really reached the,

you know, my highest potential, the life that I wanted to live and the fact that

there was just all these fascinating things that I didn't feel like.

Well, um, expose like they were, you know, hidden gems.

In my opinion, I went and, uh, made a huge life and career change and went to

study and became a doctor of chiropractic a functional medicine practitioner.

Uh, I studied energy medicine.

Um, help me out with the, I did all of these things because

they're the things that really.

Changed my life.

And I just wanted to incorporate them and teach more people about

them.

I can definitely relate to that.

Everything that I teach now is like stuff that I've been through.

And it's, I've tried to teach stuff that I've learned and haven't been through like

book learned and then try to teach it.

And it never works the same.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, it's, I think there's a lot of people out there who are

incredibly skilled with that, but the fact that I started out as a really intuitive,

sensitive person, um, I can just get deeper into that experience and get much

better results and a much more pleasant kind of journey when I can connect with a

person personally and empathetically and really know what they're going through.

So, um, you know, it's, there's, you know, the book-smart,

but then there's that inbox.

Embodied knowledge, that wisdom that we have.

So I definitely think that wisdom has another level of power in

terms of being able to help yourself or help other people.

Sure.

And I think it's been lost a lot in conventional modern medicine, quite a bit.

There's the wall between the doctor and the patient a lot of times.

And, um, same thing in the therapy world.

It's, it's, there's a wall between the therapist and the client

or the doctor and the patient.

And, um, I think the most effective relationships there take place when

that wall is more of a screen or, you know, it's, there's a connection

there because they can feel that you understand and, um, I just want to,

before I forget your graphic design and art background has served you well,

and that you always have the prettiest slides in the slide shows, but, um, it's

funny cause I try to do design stuff.

I'm on Canva and I think of you and I get bitter and I'm just like, why don't I

have training in this little commercials?

It's like, oh, everybody can make the most beautiful little thing ever.

And then I get it.

And it's like a stick man.

And then letter.

Yeah.

Actually that's something that took me awhile to really love and embrace about

my life and myself, because I always felt like, you know, I was always having

to divide my life between like this creative world or kind of understanding

health and sciences and things like that.

And it really, um, took me a while for all those pieces to

come together and appreciate every experience that I had in my life.

And that point in actually.

Understanding that every experience you go through is an opportunity to go deeper.

Kind of see where, where you are perceiving and experiencing things in

the world and transform and bring it all together in a way that it's uniquely you.

I think that's actually a huge part of the healing journey that.

I dunno, we can say conventional medicine or like healthcare kind of leaves out.

And that's why when I, um, you know, talk to anybody or even through

my own journey, a lot of it is really diving into your own story.

And your story about yourself, your story about the world around you about

what's possible and understanding that every piece of your story has

contributed to where you are today and also, uh, lies the nuggets of wisdom

that can help you find the path for you.

Because I don't think health comes from one, end all be all solution for everyone.

Like everybody needs to get on this diet, or everybody should be doing this

type of exercise or, you know, having these certain lab markers look this way.

It's really about how your entire being your mind, body, spirit, um,

all of that connects and integrates with everything you do in your life

and finding balance in all that.

I definitely agree.

And I love the approach, um, that encompasses so much and actually looking

at the individual, I often shy people away from doctors who have their protocol.

Like they're just go in and get the protocol and they they're like a protocol

factory and just pumping people through.

And here's your protocol go?

Here's your protocol go?

And it's the same protocol.

And, uh, I just haven't ever seen that be very successful.

Yeah.

I think there's a certain art to healthcare and a certain, I mean,

there's the science of it and you know, but there's the art, the application of

how you actually apply those concepts.

And then there's another factor of just the philosophy of healthcare

and what people really believe is possible and how things function.

And, um, when, you know, somebody is kind of stuck in one model of what health

looks like, they get really limited.

Maybe not in the sciences, you can go read another book about it, but you get really

limited in the art and application of it.

And even the philosophy of understanding, like what is possible.

So that's a, you know, a big thing that was life-changing and mind

expanding for me through this process.

And, um, I really try to bring a lot of openness and understanding to people

where they're at when I meet them.

And also, you know, kind of ushering people into a space

of greater understanding your consciousness about their own

health and their own possibilities.

You were in school when you started to not feel well, or did

you finish your art and graphic design work or where, where did that come on?

Yeah, if I really go back to the beginning of where this all

started for me and it, you know, it really put the pieces together in hindsight,

It started from forever ago and, you know, being a child growing up, I was

always just kind of sick all the time.

I had a lot of allergies.

I missed a lot of school.

Um, I was kind of, you know, I see now I was like a little moody or

irritable as like a toddler or a child, but that's because now I

understand I had imbalances, I had inflammation, I had food sensitivities.

Um, and so.

I grew up just thinking of myself as sort of a weak or, you know, like unhealthy

or sick child, like a frail child.

Because if, for example, my sister caught a cold, I would

catch that cold, much harder.

It would last much longer.

Um, the whole, you know, experience for me was always much more stressful.

So I see now that really, it was all the way from the beginning.

I was always sensitive.

I always experience things in a heightened manner.

Um, and I didn't, you know, it just seemed kind of like, oh, well, that's, you

know, her personality or that's her mood.

She's just kind of.

You know, a little more moody child.

Um, and, and then it kind of progressed.

And when I got into, you know, middle school, high school, where

you start having some sense of identity, I thought it was just the

fact that I was the emo artsy type.

Right.

It was like, oh, I'm supposed to experience a little bit of depression

and a little bit of anxiety.

And, oh, I have lots of skin issues and acne, but that's just puberty.

So it was like, those issues were always there.

Now that I look back on it and the energy issues, the chronic fatigue, the gut

issues, they were all kind of always like lingering there, but it reached a

breaking point when I was an undergrad.

So probably 20 years old or something where it just, you know, like we, I talk

a lot about our resilience, like this cup our buffer in stress resilience.

So as we have stressors that cup keeps getting more and more full

or that bucket gets more full.

And the more stressors we have over long periods of time,

that bucket will just overflow.

And that's where someone might have, you know, a, a mental breakdown or they'll

have like a disease pop-up or, you know, get diagnosed with something because that

buffer of, of stress has taken on too much and they haven't found ways to offload it.

So that's how that happened to me around 20.

And I fell apart.

I was an undergraduate, I was always an excellent student, like

straight a student, got scholarships.

And it just got to a point where I couldn't function.

I was having what I know or I came to understand where anxiety attacks.

I had severe depression.

My hair was falling out in chunks.

Um, my skin.

Bad.

Like, it was always bad, just really bad acne, eczema, hives, those sort of things.

Um, but overall just, I felt off, I felt weird and different and I didn't

understand what was wrong with me.

So my mind went to worst-case scenario.

I thought there's something there's something majorly wrong.

So I started then seeking answers from doctors.

I would go to a GP and they'd be like, uh, you look fine.

There's nothing wrong with you.

Like, this is in your head.

You're making it up.

Just go back and enjoy your college years.

And then I was like, okay, that guy didn't know anything.

Or that lady didn't know anything.

So I'm going to go to a specialist.

So I went to neurologists, I went to gastros.

I went to all these different doctors and they just kind of looked at me and

thought, well, you know, this isn't, this isn't anything that's obvious.

You're like a 20 something year old, young woman who looks fine.

Um, there's nothing really obvious going on.

So they really put it on me.

The word hypochondriac came up a lot.

I got a lot of suspicion or questions about like, do you do this a lot?

Do you go to doctors a lot?

Do you track things a lot?

And in that whole process, nobody at that point thought to run a lab test on me, or

like get any sort of information around why I was experiencing these kind of vague

symptoms, um, that couldn't be pinpointed.

So that all kind of reached a dead end.

And I thought, well, I know there's something wrong.

So that's where I started seeking alternative healthcare practitioners.

You know, I was really at a breaking point that my GP was like, if

you go any further, it's going to be really hard to come back.

So they sent me home with some antidepressants anti-anxiety pills and.

I started for a week taking them and things for me got so much worse

and it amplified my anxiety attacks.

And, um, and thankfully that same week with the prescription, they recommended

that I go to a, um, therapist, a talk therapist, but, um, the nurse practitioner

in the office, she was, she was kind of hip to this alternative stuff.

And she's like, you know, this therapist, she does some things that

are a little bit more out there, but just trust me, go check her out.

And when I got to her office, I realized she was doing things like

not just talk therapy, we'd talk about stuff that was up for me.

But then we started doing.

Chakra work and energy medicine like in her office.

And I had no idea what shoppers were at that time.

I didn't really know that there were these energy fields or understand

how I was actually experiencing them and feeling them my whole life, but

I didn't have a vocabulary for it.

So as soon as I got introduced to that, it just felt amazing to me.

It almost felt like, oh my gosh, this is the magic that I always

hoped existed in the world.

And being able to kind of have a guide and a mentor to teach me about my

intuition, my wisdom, and my own body was, um, really where I started to like.

The head down a completely different trajectory in my life because now

I knew there was people and there was actually ideas and systems that

I had never been exposed to growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Midwest

of the United States in the 1990s.

Um, and so, you know, thankfully now a lot of that stuff is a lot more, um,

out there and mainstream and people have a lot more access to these ideas, but.

It just became so fascinating.

Um, and that same week I started seeing a holistic chiropractor and she also

did energy techniques and she looked at me and assessed me from like a

mind body, a biochemical perspective.

And she looked at all those aspects and really starting to connect the pieces

for me that we are holistic beings and something that goes imbalanced in our

body can have an impact in our mind.

Um, as something, an emotional experience we have can manifest as some physical

symptoms, like a rash or things like that.

So, um, yeah, the, you know, law, that's kind of a summary of like the long

story, but it's like, it, it was always there and issue for me, but it wasn't

until I was exposed to understanding.

How my illness and my sensitivities were showing up.

And then that there were routes to kind of channel that.

Um, and just to kind of sum it up years and years later, I found all of

that was kind of the effects of Ms.

Diagnosed.

It just completely missed auto immunity.

I ended up being an auto-immune person who had auto-immunity to

my thyroid, to my guts, to like actually a lot of tissue in my body.

I had multiple autoimmune sensitivity antibodies, um, but Hashimoto's

and celiac and all these things were a part of the picture.

I never had a name for it.

That's but it's just very clear.

Those were the symptoms that I was experiencing.

Um, but I didn't start with that diagnosis.

I just started with the experiences I was having and then the holistic approach

started to unwind that and reverse it.

Um, so in hindsight, I, I realized that the power of, you know, these

alternative practices or what we talked about, you know, the, the inside of

healing, how it, how potent they can be for legit, you know, disorders

or diseases or things like that.

They're not just for people who are, you know, experiencing

emotional pain or things like that.

They actually also impact these very, um, you know, intense

pathologies that happened.

So, so the therapist was kind of your gateway then?

Yeah,

it was simultaneously the same week, the therapist and

the chiropractor I was seeing, they were, yeah, they were kind of really

quick.

You saw them

both.

Yeah.

Cause the, the, you know, I mentioned this nurse practitioner

who she sent you also to the, yeah.

She referred to me, um, kind of, and was like, you know,

here's this, here's the prescriptions.

Um, I don't want you to get like in a deeper hole than you're in

now, but also start exploring this.

So I started exploring kind of that somatic approach and the

mental, emotional, and energetic approach all at the same time.

And it was just incredibly transformative.

Are you still in touch with any of

those people?

I'm not in touch with them because they were all in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Oh,

okay.

I'm wondering if that therapist knows what you

do now.

Um, I've reached out to them in the past.

I've sent them like books I've written and I always, um, you know, thank them

and cite them when I'm talking about.

But yeah, I, you know, I was in undergrad, in, in Boston and I had to,

I actually just dropped out and I quit life for that period and moved back

in with my parents and Cincinnati.

So that's really where my journey

started.

Okay.

So you didn't have like a onset, like, oh, I was fine yesterday.

I feel bad.

Now it was like learning to adapt to life as the sensitive, vulnerable, more

likely to be sick kid that became the sensitive, vulnerable, more likely to be

sick young adult, but then it got a little more crashy like you were exhausted.

Couldn't really keep up with schoolwork.

Yeah.

You probably had a lot of pressure.

You mentioned at the beginning that as a child of Persian immigrants, I was going

to be a lawyer or a doctor or something.

So I'm guessing I might be just totally projecting this, that there might've been.

A little bit of concern when you were starting to realize you couldn't keep

up with your schoolwork, even though you were already in school to be art, right?

Yeah.

I was doing graphic design multimedia, but yeah, you're spot on.

Um, and I think that that's a really interesting, I still need straight

A's right.

Yeah.

And so there was probably some fear there of like, I can't keep up with

this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's, um, you know, it's, it's also that idea we have about ourselves, but

I, what I found that was, you know, a big part of my understanding of my healing,

my health, my illness, and also the people that I work with is a lot of times when

people have chronic illness or autoimmune development, there's a lot of these like

character traits that I noticed, um, that, you know, we could say it's the chicken

or the egg, like whether one started, but this is why I'm fascinated with mind-body

medicine and psycho neuro immunology.

Because when I look at my.

Client base and my audience, which is like tens of thousands of people that I

interact with on a, on a regular basis, they're all Hashimoto's or autoimmune,

or just identify a sensitive and paths, a highly sensitive people, but there is a

really strong consensus and correlation to these people, having personality traits,

for example, perfectionism, which is something I identified with, um, always

wanting things to be done really well.

Um, also kind of being a little bit, I don't want to say pessimistic and that

you don't experience joy and you're not happy, but you kind of are really

critical, like critical of yourself, critical of the quality of things or

the way other people perform stuff.

And often it comes from a place of wanting the best for yourself and others,

but it turns into hyper criticism.

Um, there's also a lot of times I see a common personality

of like a personality trait.

Trust issues, like not really trusting you don't it really starts with

not trusting yourself, which was my experience because I got so sick

so often and I was like weak child.

I had this unconscious mistrust of my body and that created a disconnect.

Um, and I've worked with some, you know, energetic or spiritual practitioners who

have described me in that my, my body, my soul, my spirit has, is literally

like outside of my physical body and tethered to it in the sense that it was

so painful to exist in my body, that I disconnected at a very young age.

And that experience of disconnect I was very loving and emotional

and had a lot of, you know, intense emotional experiences.

So I don't mean disconnected and just

not, you built a backdoor in here.

Yeah.

Your system.

There's a whole line in psychology of, uh, survival patterns and character

styles and those types of things.

And one of them is the leaving pattern or it's called . And it's the same

as what you described as like the definition to a T it's the early

life experiences that are too painful that lead the person to kind of,

yeah.

And it's, you know, I really kind of doubted all of this in my own healing

journey, because I think there's a lot of understanding of how blatant

trauma or abuse or these sort of, you know, blatant experiences can cause

that kind of disconnect in a person.

And I didn't have any of those experiences.

I had, you know, a nuclear family and I was always really supported and loved

by my parents and did well in school.

But it was more about that internal experience that I was having where

I was just having chronic pain.

Like I was, it was.

Stuff hurt.

Like the tags of my clothes irritated me because my skin and

my nervous system were so inflamed.

So even as a kid, I was weird with like textures and, um, you know,

always having like gut issues as a kid.

Like as soon as I was starting to potty train, I had severe constipation issues.

So like a week would go without using the restroom or having a bowel movement.

And that created this, you know, traumatic experience that isn't

necessarily identified as a blatant trauma when we look at our history.

Right.

But, um, that's where sometimes people, if they don't necessarily have.

Trauma that they can identify.

They haven't necessarily looked at this spectrum of what trauma can look like.

Um, and I talk a lot about that actually have this whole thing within flare

care, in my programs where I talk about the trauma quadrant, where, you know,

sometimes something can happen all of a sudden, or it can happen really slowly

over time, like insidious like comments or behaviors that you experienced.

But then there's also those objective traumas, which I think,

but then there's subjective ones too, where it's like to some people, a crowded,

you know, music festival is really awesome and exciting and invigorating.

And for somebody sensitive like me, that's really overwhelming and can

be traumatic in those situations.

So, you know, when I look at it that way, that's a big part of what I

explore with people too, is their, their past traumas and redefining what

it meant for them in their story to.

Kind of experience their life.

So, you know, those, those traits, I see those commonalities, you know,

like they, they tend to have been very perfectionistic, carried a lot

of like responsibility or weights, or just like worried about things a lot.

Um, we're highly attuned to.

People around them.

Maybe you picked up on your parents stress like financial stress or whatever,

as like a kid, when you didn't even know what it was, you just picked up

on it and had no tools to, um, you know, even understand or manage it.

So I see these kinds of qualities where people, yeah, they're highly critical.

They're really perfectionistic.

They have a hard time asking for help.

They have a hard time like setting up loving boundaries and it often

leads to these chronic illnesses.

And in order to address and reverse and heal from these chronic illnesses,

yes, we need to sometimes look at diet and infections and, um, you know,

anything like gut health, adrenal stress, those sort of things that are

more in the functional medicine realm.

But if you do all that and you don't address the way that you process

chronic stress or a trauma that you had in the past, There's no way you

can achieve that level of vitality or wellness when you have these patterns

running and in your subconscious,

I have found that to be true as well.

And that's actually where I'm studying now and focusing all my, my energy

and effort is on that side of things.

Cause I have seen, I wasn't a quick believer, like I didn't flip like this,

like you did when you were in that office.

And you're like, oh my God, this is the greatest thing I like.

I toast in the water for a long time of, well, I don't know are maybe, and so

now eventually I made my way over there.

But, um, so when you started feeling different or better, it seems like

it was pretty quick with the two things that you introduced the

therapist and the chiropractor.

There was definitely a noticeable shift a little bit.

And so when you started feeling well, This would have been your early twenties

when you started this alternative weird stuff, uh, you started feeling well.

That was pretty much the first time you've ever felt.

Yeah.

And that's, and this is crazy.

And I think I showed you this

because it's different than a normal arc, but

yours is more like a bottom line and then they go, oh, there's this?

Oh, you can feel like this.

Yeah.

And in my flare care presentation that I did in the auto-immune masterclass, I

have the visual of this and I, I have this visual on my blog and I showed it a lot.

But I came up with this chart system where it was like really

this chronic illness experience that I see over and over for myself.

And others goes through these four phases where the first

phase I call it mystery symptoms.

And this is where people are experiencing what I experienced

for the first 20 years of my life.

It's like, oh, I don't know.

Sometimes I get diarrhea or sometimes I have breakouts or

sometimes I'm knocked out and I don't want to wake up for days on end.

Those are just like these back and forth symptoms as your body is, you know,

kind of experiencing these imbalances.

And they're just building up.

The second phase is what I call rock bottom.

And every single person that I've talked to or worked with knows exactly

what that rock bottom is for them.

Um, they can describe it.

They know that, you know, they don't even want to think about it or go back to it.

But usually in rock bottom is that crisis point, you know, where people are like, I

need to do something about this because.

You know, there's no, there's no two ways about it.

I have

to addicts, like it's very similar.

There's a moment where it's like, okay.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's usually where people usually where they'll get a diagnosis

because they're starting to go see doctors and run tests or, you know,

just ask what what's going on.

And usually that's the point that somebody will get a diagnosis.

I didn't get a diagnosis at that point, but I think it was cause I was young

and like healthy looking, um, that they didn't think to diagnose me with anything.

Um, but that's usually where someone will get a diagnosis.

, if they stay in the conventional medicine model, often they will

just start to do symptom relief.

They'll take a pill or they'll, you know, do something to just manage the pain.

And they just have ups and downs, ups and downs.

But what happens is if that point when somebody is at rock bottom and they start.

To enter into what I call phase three of root cause healing.

This is where they can start to have that upward trajectory of

understanding what the root causes was.

Was that.

Uh, functional medicine related thing.

Like, was it an infection that sent them to rock bottom or, you

know, a mold toxicity or whatever, or was it a buildup of sensitivity

and chronic pain and trauma?

Like it was for me.

So looking at where those triggers were for you and how

they manifested as your unique symptoms, you can start to unwind it.

And that is where people start experiencing better days.

And then they slowly over time just start feeling overall better and better

until they reached the fourth phase, which I call new normal and new normal.

If you're looking at this on like a chart of like feeling great, a pie and feeling

really crappy down low, you're just like upward trending and in new normal.

This is where you have a new baseline of operating.

So your normal day is actually usually so much more vital and vibrant than

your normal starting out in phase one.

When you were just like feeling

quote unquote for your symptoms, even kind of got out of

control.

So that to me is the coolest thing.

And that was like something that I, it took me a while to actually change

my idea about myself, because I, when I was a new normal, and I hit

new normal, and I was in it for a while, I started to go, you know what?

I'm not actually the weak sick person that I always thought I was like, other people

are catching colds and I'm around them.

And I didn't catch any cold this year or.

Oh, my gosh, my hay fever and seasonal allergies didn't show up at all this year.

And I see other people having allergies and all of a sudden like me, the

sick child who was like knocked out with asthma and allergies, I

don't have a single single symptom.

Um, and so it was, it was really kind of just shocking actually.

Cause I had this belief system of myself being like, I have to be Uber careful,

and I'm still weak, even though I'm doing all this healthy lifestyle stuff.

So in that new normal part of that was reframing and reshifting

kind of my own understanding.

Of what's possible for me and understanding that I actually transformed.

I'm not, I'm like I was in a cocoon, a little butterfly, and

I came out, um, as a, you know, more expanded version of myself.

So I didn't turn into a different person.

I'm still essentially who I always was, but now I have this greater

capacity to make choices or to, you know, function in ways that I

never thought were possible for me.

I never thought I could be an early morning person, wake up, have energy

throughout the day, without any crashes, without needing to take long naps.

And then, you know, cook meals for myself, feel energized all day and then get to

the end of the night and still feel well.

Um, and that was not something that I thought was within the possibility.

Of my life experience.

I was like, I'm, I'm just the F the frail weak person.

And I'm going to be that my whole life.

And so going through that auto-immune journey or, you know, health healing

journey that I call a phase one, two, three, and four, getting to new normal

is to me, the goal, like it, it never ends, but when you're there, that's

when you really understand on a deep level, how you're interacting with

yourself and the world around you.

And I want people to understand too, cause we talked

about this in the other presentation.

It's not like now all of a sudden everything is rainbows and unicorns.

So you still take care of yourself.

There's still times where you overextend and then all of a sudden, cause your

presentation was flare care because you have flares or you have, and it's

when you get overextended, when there's a stressful period, when there's

this type of thing that you don't deal with or whatever it is, and you

pile too much of that on your cup.

Um, so it's still being mindful.

And so the, the new normal does involve.

A different way of living than you were living before also, it's

not just the, I feel awesome.

It's the, I feel awesome because I am living in this way, which I'm

guessing becomes easier to stick to when you're feeling really well.

Yeah, it does.

It definitely does.

Like when you have more energy, you have more capacity in your own life.

It's easier to make decisions that, you know, you know, you'll feel good.

You won't reach for a sugar high just because you want that dopamine hit.

Um, so it's easier to make the choices, but you also have a little bit more

buffer, a little more leeway in that if I travel, um, you know, like prior to travel

restrictions, my husband and I would like to take some international trips every.

You know, you're and visit different cultures.

And when I'm in Europe, for example, I will eat things that I don't in

my normal lifestyle, and I might have a flare up because of it.

I'll eat some, you know, bread and cheese in France and, and enjoy it

and really not feel guilty about it.

But it's because I spent, you know, regular days of my life just creating

a bigger buffer so that when I have a stressful event, whether it's an

unexpected, emotional experience, or I choose to indulge in something that

I know is going to cause a little reaction in my body, I'm not going

to fall apart and just going to have a little dip in my new normal line.

And I know I've learned over the years, the things that I can do.

To make those choices wisely and get myself back where I need, like for me,

that's getting bodywork and getting a chiropractic adjustment like immediately.

And if I'm feeling flared up doing an infrared sauna, I'm sweating it out, doing

things that are very sematic reasons of getting, you know, energy work as well.

And getting back to an anti-inflammatory diet and bone broths and, um, taking some

supplements like turmeric and vitamin D and these sorts of things, fish oils

to get me back to that baseline of my new normal, um, cause I learned those.

I learned those in phase three of root cause healing.

And so that's what I think true health journey is, is it's an

education process of learning about.

Yourself and your unique response, your, you know, that bio individuality,

because your symptoms, your weak links are going to show up differently than

someone else's for me, it's skin stuff.

It's like my gums start getting weird if I'm having a flare up, um, for

other people it's like brain fog or

even notice things more subtly too, like, cause you mentioned

somatic work a little bit, that you were doing bodywork and think the more in touch

we get with that connection, like you can feel things when they aren't quite right.

Where before, when the baseline is like in the mud for something

to get your attention, it has to be a pretty severe thing, which is

already a pretty far progressive.

Down the road.

So now it's like a little thing is off and you notice it.

And then it's like, oh, what did I do?

Oh, I was up until 1:00 AM last night.

And that's why I feel this way.

And so, yeah.

Now I remember I used to, I worked in the service industry for 10 years,

so I was a bartender and a server.

And I barely remember what it's like to be hung over because it's been

so long since I did those things.

But now all I have to do is like, stay up til midnight once.

And then the next day I'm like typing words wrong.

I'm sending emails to the wrong people and I didn't have a single drink.

I was just up late at night.

And it's incredible because I used to stay up that late every

night, literally every night.

So then I would be like that all the time and I wouldn't notice it.

And now one day and it's like, yeah.

And I think that's a big part of that reconnection process.

When I talked about disconnects.

I mean, really that's what happens with.

Stressful or traumatic experience is that people start to disconnect whether

it's what I described earlier, where your entire spirit disconnects and tethers to

your physical body, or it can actually be these compartmentalized disconnects

within your body, like little areas, you know, where you'll just like you have a

stressful event and you store it in like your shoulder or your liver, or, you know,

I think these are really amazing concepts that some traditional medicine has really

eloquently, um, put into practice like traditional Chinese medicine when there

is, you know, stress or deficiency in like your lungs, it has to do with grief.

That's where you store it.

Or your liver is anger.

And, um, even an aerobatic medicine or traditional person

medicine, there's these ideas.

You know, our, our emotions, aren't just up here in our brain or our minds,

they are experienced are our whole body.

And if we want to look at that from, I guess, a more Western perspective,

there's a lot of research in mostly the psychoneural immunology

field, where they're looking at.

When you have a thought, when you have a feeling, when you have an experience,

you're sending off a whole cascade of chemical events in your body, like

hormones, cytokines, like pro-inflammatory cytokines, just from a negative thought.

Um, and so they're starting to both from, you know, an Eastern or a traditional

medicine perspective, but also from a Western medicine perspective, really

start to put some reasoning behind.

Um, how w how are these things are connected, so you can store stuff and

disconnect compartmentally throughout your body for lots of reasons.

And that's one of the main reasons why I love sematic work to release and unwind

these traumas, because, um, I actually love, I really love talk therapy.

I know some people don't or, um, sometimes people are like, oh, that

doesn't really get you anywhere.

I think it's wonderful and lovely, but I also think that sometimes

you don't need to talk about it.

You don't need to re experience it, and you can just.

Lay on a table, for example, and get some energy work done, get a

chiropractic adjustment, have releases, energetic releases where you're

actually reconnecting your body, right?

You are building sematic maps in your brain, in your parietal lobe,

in areas that are having that.

Interoception that proprioceptive ability for you to experience, um, you know,

stuff physically and sensation wise.

So bodywork is really powerful in actually transforming the

way that our brain perceives our body and the world around us.

So that's exactly what you start to notice.

What you describe Michael, is that when you start doing this healing,

you become more in tune with your own body, your own wisdom, and you can,

you kind of get like the spidey sense.

You've got super powers to be able to pick up on things.

Um, and an example people might relate to is the.

If they've ever gone through like, you know, healing diet work or done an

elimination diet or these sort of things.

Um, they might've had experiences where prior to that, they were

just eating all kinds of stuff.

And then sometimes getting bloated, sometimes having diarrhea and not

really knowing, just being like, oh, I must have eaten something bad, but

when people really start to understand how a food or different groups of foods

are affecting them, they can almost sense before they take a bite of it.

Or like at the first bite being like, oh, actually I'm not going to have any

more tomatoes tonight, or I'm not going to have, you know, shellfish because I

can sense that this is giving me that icky feeling, but much faster than, you

know, waiting for it to actually get.

All the way through their systems.

So, um, that's, to me the, you know, the best outcome of that phase three

root cause healing is you just, you dive in and you immerse yourself and

you start to really like learn things in an embodied fashion, not just from

your head, but it's like this wisdom in your body that goes, oh, I know this

feeling and I know how to kind of unwind this feeling or, um, it's just really

awesome to me, that that to me is the ultimate goal is not just to like, quote

unquote, reverse a disease or put auto immunity into remission, or, you know,

run a lab test and have perfect numbers.

It's to give somebody that empowered experience of kind of knowing how they're

interacting with themselves in the world and allowing them to make those decisions.

That's beautiful.

I don't have a single thing I can add to that.

So, um, well I think that pretty much covers your.

Your story from what I understand and the functional medicine.

And so you, you, you, you saw these people, you started doing some things,

you started feeling better, you got your, like new normal and you were feeling good.

And then why'd you choose chiropractic school out of all

the options of where to go?

Um,

I think of my experiences in healing and the

things that just transformed me, the chiropractic adjustment.

We're hands down the most powerful, like when I would get an adjustment, I would

actually immediately feel physical relief.

The pain would go away.

The, um, it actually was the thing that I credit with, you know,

reversing my depression and my anxiety.

Within a couple of months, I started experiencing a blip of joy again,

and it was really those adjustments.

Um, and I understand now that I've studied it more, that the impact

that an adjustment and bodywork.

On my second neuro immunology and my brain and my nervous system and reconnecting me.

So it makes sense.

Um, I'm not saying it is the,

we wonder it was impactful for you.

So that was your first step.

And then did you learn about functional medicine when you were in

chiropractic school or was that after?

Yeah, no, it was my first quarter.

I didn't know anything about functional medicine before.

Um, my

chiropractic programs.

Now,

some of them, some of them teach, uh, bits and pieces of it,

but it's more, it was more adjunctive.

I was doing it on the weekends, so it was more seminars and certifications

I was doing on the weekends.

But, uh, yeah.

And, um, just a lot of, you know, like Dr.

Kharrazian was a huge, uh, influence and mentor in terms

of understanding these and Dr.

Vish, Donnie, and.

You know, like all these people, even Dr.

Tom O'Bryan and Dr.

Kayla, like all of them were really impactful in terms of introducing

me to functional medicine.

Um, it was recorded

with Dan for the first time.

Like he was one that was always on my list and I never got in

touch with him, uh, this Dr.

Kailash for, and he's like the sweetest man.

That's like so genuine.

And so just wanting to help everybody, it was, it was really

a treat.

So, yeah.

So I didn't, I didn't know about any of that.

Like my, when I was healing and I actually achieved my new normal

before ever knowing I had auto-immune.

It was just through chiropractic and chakra energy work.

But chiropractic was the thing I did at that point, my rock bottom,

I was doing it three times a week.

Um, and so when I, um, I thought I had like totally healed.

I was like, well, I'm all better.

So I went to school and I was like, this is so cool.

I want to learn how to do.

For other people, it's like magic combined with science and I want to do it all.

Um, and it was my first quarter in school that people were like,

you gotta go to this lecture.

It's all about the thyroid.

And I was like, I literally thought to myself, the thyroid, like,

why would anybody spend three days talking about the thyroid?

How random?

Like, I've never, I've never even thought twice about that, Oregon.

Um, well it would be hold, but that first weekend I went, I learned

about the thyroid and I was like, cool, this sounds interesting.

Let me run this lab on myself and see what a normal person looks like.

So I ran that lab on myself and that was my

first 400 and

oh yeah, my antibodies were through the roof.

Um, we had partner palpation during the seminar and of course my partner

thought he felt a nodule and I was like, what are you serious?

And lo and behold, there was a nodule.

Um, and so it was this, I mean, this is crazy to me.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's the crazy thing that I had gone through all of this, and it

took me going to my doctorate program, going to an adjunctive seminar and

then deciding to run it on myself to even screen for Hashimoto's.

So I'm such an advocate for people just screening, especially women sensitive

women who have cold hands and feet who have any fatigue issues who have any gut

issues just screen and just, you know, run your thyroid antibodies because that set

me on a different, like a new trajectory.

So I was still doing the bodywork, the energy medicine, the shocker stuff,

but that point I started to integrate.

What I call the young medicine, right?

It's the more masculine energy of like investigation and data and all of that.

And I started running labs on myself and changing my diet, doing protocols.

Um, and I mean, what that did for me was take my new normal baseline

and like shoot it through the roof.

Right.

It just made me feel even better.

So, um, the fact that I was able to reach new normal just from somatic body work and

energy medicine and talk therapy, to me spoke to the power of it, because I know

you hadn't even learned the Hashimoto's yet.

You hadn't even learned the auto-immune, the functional medicine.

Yeah.

I was still eating gluten and dairy and like loading up on that stuff

on a daily basis, even though I was incredibly sensitive to it.

And I was still functioning at a higher baseline than I ever was in my life.

So I.

The bodywork and the energy medicine for keeping my system in balance.

But when I introduced the functional medicine, I made diet changes.

I went gluten-free and dairy-free, I felt like a superhero.

I was like, oh my gosh, I can feel even better.

And anything that I still had lingering, I was just, I was so much

more highly functional than I had ever even thought I could experience.

So now, you know, we talked about this before we went on air, but we were

talking about kind of that new approach to healthcare, um, which is what I love.

It's where I came in the door to medicine.

And, um, but it really has to do.

Stuff that's more traditionally feminine energy.

And I don't mean that in terms of like men, women, but just the idea

of being more intuitive, um, tapping into wisdom, nurturing, surrendering.

Um, and so that was what bodywork was for me.

That's what energy medicine is.

Um, trauma work, mindset, thoughts and emotions.

All of that is really about showing up being vulnerable, receiving care and

kind of experiencing things that way.

So that was my approach.

Then when I felt amazing through that, I shifted to this young approach

where I was like really doing diet and protocols and supplements and stuff.

Um, but I never let go of that inside.

And then I brought it back and like integrated the two.

So I think.

Really for big picture healing.

It's important for people to experience both.

And a lot of times, if people feel stuck, then maybe they want

to try that other side of stuff.

You know, even though they might be resistant, like you kind of mentioned

resistant to like, oh, it took me a while to really think this was having an impact.

But if somebody is a very data oriented, evidence-based science,

uh, kind of, I'm gonna fix this type of person, which is the young side.

Um, and they want lab tests and they wanna, they want the exercise

program and they want to say, I can do this in six months.

Um, sometimes that might be what's holding them back because that imbalance, that

polarity, that imbalance of energy towards one side is going to be a stressor.

You need balance.

So sometimes those people are the ones that most need to just like lay down

and get a massage or a Reiki session.

Um, and they.

We'll start to see the shifts that they had been working

so hard for and vice versa.

If somebody has really done so like myself, just done all the end stuff.

And even if you're feeling great, like it it's really beneficial to

just give it a go and try some of that young, like run some lab tests.

If you've only ever seen, you know, energy medicine, practitioners or

people who haven't really looked at the physiology and the data,

um, and just bring it all together.

So that to me is what mind body integration is.

And that's kind of how I think of myself.

Like the sensitive doctor approach is fairing out.

And I think you're, you're really hip to this too.

Michael is figuring out where a person is and what matches best to them in

order to move the needle, um, without just like throwing every possible

wellness.

Well, it's, it's overwhelming.

I mean, we've gone through it with Mira, with her autoimmune flares.

There's so much, it could be, that's trying to trigger this.

It's trying to do this.

And I've got, I've been the one that goes down the rabbit holes and I'm

chasing 27,000 leads at the same time and trying to figure out all the things.

And sometimes it's a really simple shift that moves the needle.

Yeah.

And so we tend to, I think in our society, value, complexity, over

simplicity as a general rule.

And so they want the complex protocols and the lab tests and things like

that more than the simple, like, why don't you try and turn on your lights

and your screens off by eight 30 and little things and, and, or journal,

like write how you're feeling or share how you're feeling with somebody

at themselves, anybody who's listening.

Like it doesn't mean that you have.

It's been thousands of dollars on, you know, massages and

therapist and labs and all of that.

Just to achieve that, like you're saying, there's simple things and

simple things in that young approach are exactly what you described.

Like get on a good circadian rhythm and turn off your lights.

When the sun is incredible.

What happens exactly?

Like when the sun starts to go down, um, you know, turn off any

artificial lights, don't look at your screens, just set boundaries in

those kind of very structured ways.

Or even if you don't move much, just walk, you don't need to join a fancy

gym, just take a 30 minute walk everyday and see if it changes anything for you.

And on the flip side of the union stuff, there's a lot of free stuff

you can do for very forest bathing.

You can just sleep more.

That's an emanating thing in therapy, just honestly, your body uses the time during

your sleep to detox and to regenerate.

So.

So if you need extra regeneration and healing and detoxing, it's,

don't feel guilty about sleeping more because it'll only be for a period

of time and then you won't need it.

Um, you know, absent salt, bath, that's a great yang thing, set up

some candles, journal, all of them,

very cheap stuff, giant thing apps.

It's like three bucks.

And so, yeah, when she's coming out of her flares, even now, still,

and she's been pretty much out of this one for five months or so

that it's 10 or 11 hours of sleep.

It's not seven or eight and it's, she can get by now on eight or nine,

but like it was 10 or 11 hours of sleep became what was just needed.

Um, when you're coming out of a flare or in a flare.

And to, to give that to yourself without feeling guilty about it, your body will.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I think that's a really important factor too, is to never really bring.

Um, kind of that like negative or like guilt or shame energy

to anything you're doing.

If you're gonna, you know, enjoy a piece of cake for your birthday or, you know,

sleep longer or whatever, don't reprimand yourself for it because, and he does

things is saying guilt free cookies.

And I'm like, all cookies are guilt-free,

that's what triggers that psycho neuro immunology

is bad.

Yeah, exactly.

If you think what you're doing in your

body.

Right.

Absolutely.

Um, and you know, so, so having that mindset, that experience of the.

I'm really coming from a place of abundance and joy, and I'm making

this choice willingly, we'll have different outcomes that somebody

is like, I got to go do my exercise protocol now, or I have to eat this.

I, you know, like this is my, what my doctor told me.

I have to eat.

I'm really coming to a place where you're making these choices from your

true, like, you know, intention is actually going to have better outcomes

than if you feel like you have to do it, or you're forced to do it.

Um, so like, you know, if you need to sleep more, just be graceful

with yourself about that and, and know that it nothing is forever.

So if you feel like, oh, I'm not getting enough done or whatever, it's really

mainly just for this period of time.

Um, when I made diet changes, you know, I used to eat very, very high carb.

Um, she's pretty much bread and cheese all day, every day.

So when I started to make diet changes and I was doing more of a paleo blueprint.

I was eating an insane amount of meat, but I think it's, you know, this idea

that my body was so pro, so deficient in proteins and amino acids, that I

was like, this is crazy that I'm eating like big steaks and chicken and fish

and everything like a football player every night and years down the line.

As my gut healed as my nutrient status improved, I eat probably

80%, whole veggies now.

And I have a little serving of me and I feel super great.

So it's, you know, you need to remove judgment from your experiences in that

healing journey to really be open and understand that, um, everything is

dynamic and shifting all the time.

So bringing kind of bringing shame to it is only going to counteract anything

you're trying to do to improve your.

I couldn't agree more.

And I think that that's, that's a perfect stopping point for us.

We're at about a little over an hour, I think, or right around an hour.

So, um, thank you for sharing all of that and your journey mixed in with what

you've learned also as a practitioner, what you've seen with your clients,

because yes, we're all different and in a lot of ways were the same.

So it's, there's these foundational principles that apply across

the board and then how to fit those into the individuals.

Pegs is kind of our holes.

Pegs go in holes, um, is, is the, the nuance to it.

But when people develop this level of body awareness and, and just

self-awareness that the puzzle doesn't have to remain so complex to figure out,

and the cues become stronger and more.

Audible and more visible and more noticeable.

So, um, we'll have all the links right below in the show notes and right below

this, um, if there's one you want to share, we'll have everything you gave us.

Everything that they can find you at will be below.

But if they want to go right now, where would be the best place to go?

Uh, just a second on my website, Dr.

natasha.com.

I'm on Instagram, I'm on social, so people can find me there, check out the

design skills too.

And I mean, if you email me, sign up for my newsletter, I

legitimately personally write people back.

I don't have a robot or a computer, like I love to connect with in your experience.

So, you know, I, I'm not doing this because I think it's like, you know,

a cool career or, you know, whatever.

Like I had some idea about wanting to be doing this with my life.

I only do it because it was transformative for me.

Um, and I may be really bright and vibrant and smiling right

now, but there were years.

Where I was in the darkest pits of depression and difficulty.

So if that's where you are to, um, understand that, you know, there are

people who know that feeling and there really is so many options for you to

start to slowly experience, um, really that inner potential that you have.

And, and, um, you know, I think it's, sometimes it's really hard

to look at people and think, oh, well, I'm not even like them.

I I'm, I'm never this, you know, bright, or I don't have that much energy and you

can't imagine it for yourself, but I just want to remind people that where I am

now is something that I've never imagined or thought was possible for my life.

Um, and.

I think that that is it's taken me over a decade, decade and a half to even

get to this place of understanding.

And it was all baby steps.

So be gentle and reach out for help.

If I didn't have my team of chiropractors and energy workers, um, you know,

I couldn't have done it myself.

Yeah.

There's no shame in that either.

I have a ton of support right now with all the stuff that we're doing and if

I didn't have it, I would be a mess.

So it's, it's, um, it's what they're there for and that's why they do what they do.

So thank you for sharing all of this and for the work that you're doing,

I always enjoy connecting and I hope you guys found this one valuable.

I think there's a ton of nuggets in here that you can take and use

in your own journey and really relate to, you know, if you're, if

you're the person out there who.

I think that's me.

I've always felt like crap and I can't feel like that.

Well, it's definitely possible that you can, and maybe it's

time to re-imagine what's, what's possible for you in the future.

So thank you for offering that perspective.

Yeah.

Thanks so much for having Mike, Michael, it's always a pleasure

to chat with you about this stuff.

I know we really, we really see idol on the line.

Yeah.

Thank you.

We'll talk.

We'll do another presentation soon.

I got another master class later this year that we haven't announced