Dr. Keesha Ewers, FMD

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MASTERCLASS: Healing the Autoimmune-Trauma Connection Through the Chakra System with Dr. Keesha Ewers, FMD
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1:02:24

Welcome, everybody. I'm doctor Keisha Ewers, and, welcome to the Healing the Autoimmune Trauma Connection through the chakra system. I am really delighted to be here. Alright. So let's get started.

I am doctor Kisha Yosh for those of you those of you that don't know me. I'm board certified in functional in Ayurvedic medicine. I'm a family practice nurse practitioner with an integrative medicine specialty. My PhD is in sexology. I'm certified in 5 different trauma based psychotherapy modalities, certified in energy work, a certified conscious dialing dying doula.

I do, in the Andes, I was initiated as a watchkumara. And then I'm a certified yoga and meditation teacher and a masters of divinity student right now, currently. And I'm the founder of the Academy for Integrated Medicine Health Coach Certification Program. So all of that actually combines, to create this system that we're going to talk about this evening. So I don't know how many of you have heard my story.

I'll just tell it briefly. When I'm 55 right now. And when I was about 30, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. This is my family. I had 4 little kids and a puppy when I was diagnosed.

And like many of my patients, I experienced this as an all of a sudden kind of moment where one day I was training for a marathon and the next day I had overnight gained £10 of puffiness all over my joints. They were red and they were inflamed when I woke up. My friends used to call me the Energizer Bunny, and it was as if someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer Bunny. I was just flattened and in so much pain, and it was the most, unrelenting exhaustion I had ever experienced in my entire life. And so I got in to see a doctor, and and I had been experiencing some joint pains, but I was taking a lot of Advil to cover it up as I was running.

I thought it was just all because I was running. And, you know, when in the course of the history taking that the doctor did while I you know, that morning when I got in, she asked me if I had any family history of autoimmune disease and specifically rheumatoid arthritis. And I said, oh, yeah. I think I I think I do. My grandfather, I believe, was wheelchair bound with rheumatoid arthritis, and in fact, he actually died at the age that I am with it.

So she said, oh, okay. And and, you know, in her history taking, what she was saying is, is it genetic? And if it's genetic, then genetic? And if it's genetic, then that's the end of the story. And so she wrote me 2 prescriptions.

1 was for methotrexate, and another was for a very strong, nonsteroidal anti inflammatory drug. And she ripped them off the pad, and she said, get these filled. And when you get worse, come back. And not if you get worse. And I said, well, hang on.

Hang on. I'm I'm really, really disciplined. And I I make my own food, and I'm happy to do whatever else. Is there anything else? And she said, no.

I'm afraid there's you know, this is a genetic thing. You and you've drawn the short end of the genetic motto, my dear, you know, and, that's the end. And she left the room. And I remember on my way home thinking there has to be something else than than just medications, you know, to fit my symptoms. And genetics can't be the end of the road.

And my model of medicine that I had been trained in up to that point, I was an ICU nurse at the time, basically had no answers for me. And so I had to move outside of that model, and I went home and I started looking at research. At the time, it was on a dial up modem. And I found on PubMed an article that talked about yoga and its efficacy for people with autoimmunity. And so I went to my first yoga class the next day, and that yoga teacher in my very first yoga class said the word Ayurveda and talked just enough about Ayurvedic medicine, which is the sister science of yoga from India, that I was interested and went home and looked that up.

And what I discovered was very interesting because Ayurveda says that autoimmune disease is undigested anger. And I remember thinking, but I'm not angry. You know? And and then I thought, well, maybe that's a problem. Maybe the fact that I don't recognize, acknowledge, permit anger inside of myself, and then I'm a people pleaser and a perfectionist might have something to do with this disease process that I'm experiencing.

And so in during the course of yo learning how to become a yoga teacher and learning how to meditate, I actually, one day in meditation, asked this question. I I saw the word autoimmune dancing in front of my 3rd eye space one day in meditation, and I thought, gosh, you know, autoimmune means I'm killing myself. Why am I doing that? And that was a very important question because then instead of saying, like, how quickly can I get out of the suffering, it was Mark, why am I doing this? You know, why is my body turning against me?

And that's what autoimmunity is is anger turned toward oneself not being digested. You know, the body is attacking itself, and then, of course, there's no winner in that kind of a situation. So within 6 months, my autoimmunity was reversed, but some of it was, you know, a a large part of it was because during that same meditation, I started going backwards in my memory to ask myself when's the first time I wanted to die? That was really an important question. And I found this little 10 year old girl version of myself who was being sexually abused by the vice principal of my elementary school.

And I remember looking at her in my mind's eye going, oh, she wanted to die. She really wanted off the planet. She was trying to tell people what was going on, but probably not with the right words and felt probably responsible for what was going on because he said it was because I was a bad kid. And I thought this must have something to do with this autoimmune disease of me attacking me. And, you know, this is when I give speeches from stages now to other doctors and medical providers about the impact of emotional trauma on the immune system, the hormonal system, the microbiome.

You know, I'm I list these statistics about these are the these are the things that our patients are not being asked, and yet they're also the reason our patients aren't getting better. So this webinar is designed for those of you that are health coaches or medical providers, you know, Sarna working with other clients. And this webinar is also designed for people who are curious about the impact of their own emotions and their past stressors or trauma. Everybody's had trauma. You'll hear me say that a lot and we'll talk about what kinds of trauma I'm talking about and what that does to the aging process Sarna the immune system and the hormonal system and the microbiome.

And why I had a question that came through, from somebody, and my apologies. I'll I'll look it up afterwards. But, from somebody in the UK who said, I work with people in the National Health Service and, you know, that have had trauma, and I really like vagal nerve stimulation to kinda get that first initial swamping that's happening so that that that we can start working together, and that is absolutely a really great way of using it. But these days, vagal nerve stimulation is kind of being portrayed as just the thing that's all you have to do. And so I'm gonna take you through this webinar and show you how it's important to really get underneath what are the meanings and beliefs to be able to track your own hurt so that you can tell, right, why that swamping happens and get it to be prevented rather than to get it to tamp down.

And so some of the things that we think about that are great treatment modalities Sarna actually fantastic, but therefore the after effect of the reactivity. And what we're doing is learning how to get behind that so that we can prevent it and learn how to rewire all of those meanings and beliefs. And this is one of the places that I think that functional medicine is failing us. I say that from stages as my I'm a faculty member of the Institute For Functional Medicine as I'm teaching doctors about adrenals and hormones and trauma and saying, you know, we can't just give this lift service. You can't say to your patients, well, you have to reduce your stress.

Because, you know, oftentimes that stress is a special needs child or a pandemic or joblessness because of the pandemic or, you know, you name it. There are a 1,000 of them that we can't control. And so what this webinar is for is to help provide tools and an understanding of how to change your relationship to stress rather than being told you just have to reduce your stress. To me, that doesn't make any sense at all. And we want to also understand that you have the ability to be in charge of your nervous system reactivity.

You can actually change how it's reacting, and we'll talk a little bit about that too. So, while reversing autoimmune disease absolutely has to do with food, and it absolutely has to do with toxins and genetics. But this piece around the emotional reactions and the nervous system and those pathways interact with all of those other things, and we have to be able to address all of them at the same time. So we're gonna talk about the freedom framework puzzle solving tool that I use for that. So I always think about each person, each of you, myself, as a unique puzzle.

And when we're solving for x, any disease, right, it can be obesity, it can be cancer, it can be autoimmunity, it can be depression. There are going to be these four corner pieces of the puzzle that are present for every single person, but they're going to look differently. So each of us, you know, this this first corner piece of the puzzle that says digestive health. Right? We each have our own level of leaky gut if we have autoimmune disease.

If you have autoimmune disease, you have leaky gut, intestinal permeability. But it's gonna look a little different, and that microbiome mix and ecosystem will be a little bit different for each person. We each have, as our second corner piece of the puzzle, our our own exposure to toxins and then also our own body's willingness to let go of those toxins, so our detoxification pathways. Those are all unique to each one of us too. And then our 3rd corner piece of the puzzle, we each have our own genetics, and then those interact with each other differently.

Right? So there's never going to be one diet that's right for everybody or one food plan or one detoxification measure. You know? It's we have to actually address this on an individual level. And then everybody has trauma, and I always call that the missing piece of our puzzle.

So this piece around trauma is really fascinating because every single person has had trauma. Science is telling us now that too. We call it the adverse childhood experiences study, but those are the capital t traumas, the ones that we think of when we hear sexual abuse or domestic violence or psychological, emotional neglect, abandonment, having a parent or a caregiver addicted to a substance or incarcerated or dead or mentally ill or divorce. You know, these big capital t traumas for children. So those are important, but what I discovered is that actually and there was a research study done by a group called, headed up by Mol.

And what they discovered is that people that report themselves very high on the perceived stress scale and then have an fMRI scan, it shows that the brain architecture is the exact same in the person that has PTSD. So we we have the same changes depending on what our level of stress is, And it's not some sort of quantifiable scale out there. It's our own highest level of stress is going to be that big trauma for us. I remember doing therapy on a woman who was the 3rd of 3 sisters, And she was so upset and traumatized. And when we got down underneath that, it was because she'd never been bought anything new.

Her parents always gave her the hand me down clothes from her 2 older sisters, and so her meaning that she made up was that she wasn't worthy and that they didn't care about her. And that was her big trauma. And, you know, you can't you can't compare those. Right? That was her biggest thing, and it was causing all of the the havoc and the chaos in her biochemistry that somebody that would have PTSD for something else.

So these are those 10 big capital t traumas that I was telling you about that the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, looked at. And, of course, this was the largest study of its kind conducted by the Centers For Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente back between 1995 1997. And they were they said, you know, to all these over 3,000 participants that were enrollees at Kaiser, before the age of 18, did any of these things happen to you? Everything that they said yes to was an ACE score of 1. If they had 2 or 3, right, the higher the ACE score, the higher the risk for these kinds of things, behavioral changes, physical and mental health issues.

So all of the physical chronic diseases we see in our culture, all of them. Higher risk, the higher the ACE score including autoimmune disease. And then what I found the most compelling was, yes, behavioral changes happen too in terms of lack of physical activity, more risk for smoking and drug use and alcoholism and missed work and quitting their education or sexual promiscuity, but also an unwillingness to take care of self. So the higher the ACE score, the higher the risk for negative outcomes and the lower the desire for taking care of self, for engaging in self care. And I don't mean things like, you know, getting a mani pedi or a massage.

I'm actually talking about being able to be mindful and doing doing processes like meditation that develop an observer's mind and help observe what's going on for you and being able to say, oh, I am the one that's creating that reality. Let me get in there and let me help shift that. So there's there's a higher level of lack of self awareness and lack of movement in the mental emotional arena as well as physical and a lack of mindfulness, a higher desire to have other people respond to emotional well-being. And this is the making of an empath, which I found really fascinating. I started looking at the research around being an empath because I self identified as an empath also.

And, yeah, we it really makes sense that people that are empaths often have early trauma because you have to think about, oh, if you have early trauma, that means you have learned how to be really hypervigilantly aware of everybody in your environment and everything in your environment and how to read them, how to track them, to know what's gonna come next. And so there's an outward facing energy rather than a self observation. It's observation of everything out here, which creates empaths. So trying to control the outer world to to attain some sort of safety, you know, this this oh, if if I can control or make mom or dad happy, then I'll be safe. So that actually leads to what I call leaky boundaries, and leaky boundaries leads to leaky gut.

Any of you that are medical providers on this webinar or health coaches, you think about and from now on, I'm just gonna say medical providers, health coaches too. It's it's really fascinating because you'll find that your clients will come and say, you know, if there's something happening in their lives, it's impacting election. And we're seeing a lot around the pandemic. Right? Where the field Rupert Sheldrake back in, you know, a few decades ago called this the morphogenetic field, the field that we pass information to each other on.

Well, empaths are very tuned into that because they're outward Pimentel. And so they they're taking in the energy of all of the stuff that's happening, but they're usually not aware of that if they haven't developed self awareness. And so it's impacting them on this really big scale. So I put in this little slide about, you know, these are signs to know if you're an empath. You have a lot of empathy.

Closeness and intimacy can sometimes overwhelm you. You have really good intuition. You don't do well in crowded places. You have a hard time not caring. What's going on?

You know, it's all the empaths. I I have a lot of patients that are empaths. I'll just say, please stop watching the news. You know? Please turn that off because you have a hard time not caring.

You know? People tend to come to you and tell you their problems. You have a high sensitivity to sounds and smells and sensations. You need time to by yourself to recharge. Don't like conflict.

You often feel like you don't fit in and you tend to isolate. You have a hard time setting boundaries. You see the world in unique ways and sometimes find it tough to cope with overload and feel overwhelmed by it. So that is one of those signs that you're an empath. Okay.

And then what? Right? All that energy is coming in and it's affecting your adrenals. It's affecting your hormones. It's affecting your microbiome and your immune system.

So the way that I teach my clients and my students, I run the academy for integrated medicine health coach certification program, and I teach people to do what I do, you know, to combine that physical, emotional, mental, and Pimentel, all those layers together so that you're assessing it as a whole. And I did a study back in 2013 called the Healing Unresolved Trauma Study because I really wanted to know why the ACEs study came up with the results it did. Like it said, the higher your ACEs, the higher your risk for all these chronic illnesses. But why? Why did it happen that way?

And so what I do is I teach people how to track their hurt, to track your own hurt so you become a tracker. Right? So this healing unresolved, trauma study came up with the hurt model, And this is why the ACEs study came up with what it did. So up here in the left hand upper corner, in the past, you had an initial hurt. Now remember that you are biologically wired, that trauma will will actually be any form of rejection or betrayal.

Right? So we're children with undeveloped brains until we're 26. Our prefrontal cortex is not fully developed till we're 26 years old. And as we're growing up in childhood, this is why I say all children have trauma, it's we're trying to figure out how to be adults in a world that's governed by adults. So we're tracking those adults to see how to be good or what's bad.

So we'll have this initial hurt in our past childhood time. And that's going to be some form of rejection or betrayal or, you know, something that's happened that we can't actually explain. And it's it's kinda devastating for us. You know? So what we get is we we get that stored in the body, mind, heart, and on our story, and we bring that into the present.

And then in the future, what it does is it creates a button that can be triggered again and again and again by anyone that comes along that triggers that same belief that we put in place back in that childhood time. So when we have that initial hurt, this this gold emotional hurt loop is what we do. We we have a first felt sense an of an emotion. Okay? So maybe I always use mine as an example because it's super easy to track.

So if you can track my hurt with me. I'm 10 years old. I'm in 5th grade. Right? And in the corner of the classroom, the intercom goes off to say the pledge of allegiance every morning because I'm a navy brat.

And the secretary uses the intercom also to make announcements. Right? And then every once in a while, really infrequently, every once in a while, I get called to the principal's office. But like Pavlov found out with the Pavlovian experiment, every time that thing went off, I would go into freeze, okay, and terror, just panic. So the first time this happened, the emotion that I felt was panic.

And then I go into most children go into freeze because we are not little beings with autonomy. We're powerless when we're small. And so most of us can't fight, and we can't usually flee from whatever is going on. So for many of us, it's freeze. And then the meaning that you create becomes the most important part of this.

So the meaning that I created was people that say that they want to take care of you that are in authority can't be trusted. K? And I always laugh because it still comes up in the airport periodically with TSA. I can I can feel myself get a little hypervigilant? And so my meaning was, oh, people in authority can't be trusted.

And the belief that I put into place was he's telling me it's because I'm bad, so therefore, I need to be really, really, really good. Okay? And so in order to stay safe, I have to be perfect. And so the behavior that I adopted as an adaptive behavior strategy to the meaning I created and the belief I put in place was perfectionism. And I was really good at it until I was diagnosed with RA at the age of 30.

So for 20 years, that's how I engaged with life. And then I got this opportunity to reexamine all of that. Okay? If you don't reexamine it, this over here is the left, this red circle, you keep doing your maladaptive thing. You know, whatever it is that you decided back as a child, you keep doing it and it leads to automatic negative thoughts.

You ruminate over things. You have judgment, and you keep relooping, and that leads to disease eventually and broken relationships and, you know, all kinds of things. If you have willingness to self confront and to really learn how to set boundaries with your own self and your own mind and its ruminations and all of its meanings and beliefs, then you can actually get some freedom. So first, you may have to do some trauma release therapy. And there are several different things in here that I use that I've listed in here, and they're part of this, chakra system that I put together.

So I did this in 2013, and I created the chakra program in 2020 after working with hundreds of patients on this. So what it really means is willingness. Right? And so if you're a medical provider listening to this and you're wanting to learn it for clients, you have to ascertain whether or not they're willing to do it. Alright.

So we have to have healthy digestion not only of our food, but also of our feelings and our experiences and our memories. And that's that willingness that's to go back and start digesting those things that never got digested that are showing up in the body now as illness. And remember, the leaky boundaries leads to leaky gut. And I talk in much more detail about this in my book, Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle, and in its companion, the Quick and Easy Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook. I dive into this really deep.

So one of the things that I started to understand long, long ago is that we will not fully heal unless emotional wounds are healed too, and that an integrative approach is really vital. You can't just pay attention to emotions, and you can't just pay attention to the physical body, which is the health coaching program that I do is why I created it. It was so that people would understand that and be able to have tools for both. So what I teach my students, and I want you to ask these things of yourself, you know, if you were to think about, like, I'm interviewing myself. What's my libido level?

What's the quality of my relationships? And are are they fulfilling? Am I pretty happy? Are they conflict free? Are they drama free?

Where are my areas of stress? How many ACEs do I have? I have the ACEs quiz in the front of solving the autoimmune puzzle. Where do I fall on the perceived stress scale? You can find that on Google.

What are my experiences of rejection? That kinda gets you started with this process. And then when you're looking at the assessment of yourself or a client, you're looking at affect. Like how do you hold your face? I've heard this term that my daughters use, rest resting bitch face.

I think that's really a lovely term. It's so colorful. Right? Where it it just says what it is. How if if you were to just be resting and you caught a look at yourself in the mirror, do you look pretty happy?

Or do you have a a resting face that looks sad, aggravated, stressed, angry, consternated? Right? Do you pull your eyebrows together and have lines here? What's your affect? Or is it just flat?

A flat affect usually indicates anger turned toward oneself, numbing out, disassociating. Anger turned towards oneself is depression. Arousal. What is that arousal level? Are you are you reactive?

Like, oh, you know, that didn't work, and then you go straight into the races, or are you pretty grounded, pretty calm, and it doesn't take much to flap you? Or are you hypoaroused? Like, it takes the fire alarms going off, and you have no reaction. Okay? And I'm gonna show you a thing I put together for my students, and it's really great for people that are interested in doing this for themselves too.

It's a little handbook that I put together with some people I made up that have levels of all this. What's your voice number? Is it calming? Is it even? Or is it monotone?

Or is it super excitable? How about your eyes? Do you make eye contact? Do they twitch? What are your vital signs?

What's your language? Are you using language internally toward yourself that isn't very kind? Is that going out towards other people? And then what's your level of self mastery of your personality shadow type? So this is one of the things that I give to my clients before I see them is looking at their health story.

You know, I'm doing a health map worksheet. And this is on my website on doctorkeisha.com where it says work with me, download this, and you fill it out. And it's always very illustrative and educational for my patients, because over in the left hand side, it has emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical. So you wanna really find what are those triggers in all of those. And then you go from prenatal all the way to your current, and you just fill in a timeline about things that have happened along the way.

My parents got divorced. I had my tonsils out. I had chronic ear infections. We found out I was allergic to dairy. Whatever those things are.

Okay. So this is the trauma triage tracking table. How do you like that? And this is in this little you don't have to memorize this at all, especially if you're not as much of a geek as I am. I'm a real nerd when it comes to information.

And I had someone put this together for me, that was an artist and could put it on paper in a way that was beautiful. And it is, really interesting because a lot of times when people think about sympathetic nervous system versus parasympathetic, they don't realize that there Mark, gradients in here where you don't want parasympathetic to be all the time either. You want resilience. You wanna be able to move between the 2. If somebody is trying to mug you in a dark alley, you wanna be able to respond and engage.

So we're gonna go through each of these little, characters in detail here. So we have fatigued Faye, who is parasympathetic nervous system, and she is, you know, at level 1, which is very hypo aroused. Right? So the arousal is too low. Her affect is depressed, and she she alternates between cools.

She has low everything. K? So her variable digestion, she gets stuck emotionally in shame and sadness and grief and hurt and has a lot of kind of self loathing and isolating. No libido. Doesn't really have great access to her prefrontal cortex, which is the adult brain.

And integration is not that likely, which if you're a medical provider, is important for you to understand. You're not going to dump a ton of information on Faye. She's too hypo aroused in all of her system to be able to take anything in. So you wanna do this gas pedal very gently. You want to have her attune and create a calm, safe place Sarna give tools for calming first.

Okay. Find Fiona is in that nice ventral vagal parasympathetic nervous system level 2 where she's engaged and her arousal is low. So but she can still turn it on when she needs it. She's warm. Her blood pressure and all her vital signs are normal.

She has healthy digestion. She feels pleasure and joy and calm and peace, and she has a possible libido and ability to connect socially. She's likely to integrate, so you can actually put the gas pedal down if you're helping her a little bit Mark. And you can add in some inner child repair. So find Sarna.

I will have her or him, print out a little picture of a child that is her or him and put it somewhere where it can be seen all the time. I have mine by my computer. And that just reminds her to be able to connect to that little child if she's starting to feel triggered. K? So focused fanny is sympathetic nervous system level 1.

She's alert. Arousal's moderate. She's kinda cool. Things are starting to increase. She's slowing down her digestion because there's a lion chasing you and you're a zebra.

You know it's not safe to stop and poop, So you're going to make sure your digestion goes down. Right? Emotions are gonna be a little bit more heightened. Excitement, anxiety, anger, maybe be able to do some variable connection, premature ejaculation if you're a man, possible access to the prefrontal cortex, likely to be able to integrate so you can put that gas pedal down, and you can add in some boundary setting exercises. Frantic Frida is a little bit more.

Right? She's on high arousal now. And she's in that fight or flight, and everything's elevated. She's got fear, rage, or panic. She doesn't have any libido because she's a zebra being chased by a lion.

It's also not safe to stop and have sex right now. She doesn't really have that much access to her prefrontal cortex. She's not likely to integrate. She's too aroused, so you gotta put on the brakes. And so I, you know, I give worksheets or I give, EMDR, brain spotting.

I get things to kind of calm down. Frozen Fran has now gone all the way into freezing. And so now everything's overload, need to escape, unlikely to be able to connect very well, and in no way that there's going to be integration so heartbreaking. And we do a lot of immersion retreats for this person to be able to come in and do 247 with us for a little while. Flaccid Felicia, Shivan vagal collapse.

And this is, you know, overwhelm, hyperarousal. This is this is paramedics' time. Okay? And this is medical intervention. So it's really important to be able to recognize where you are and to be able to track it and to know then what what you need or what someone you're working with needs.

Because again, it's not just zebra being chased by Allison and then there's one reaction. Right? There's going to be this variation. So the methods of healing that that we use in my practice, I do something called medicine wheel work. I I'm certified in EMDR and brain spotting and clinical hypnotherapy and the enneagram and somatic therapy.

And then I use the chakra system as a scaffolding to identify what needs to come first, next, next, next based on that trauma triaging tracking map that I just showed you and my early research in 2013. So you can tell, like, someone that's hyper aroused, you can't give them meditation. That's just not gonna work. Or someone that's hypo. Right?

You can't give them meditation. So if integration is unlikely, then when you teach them some sort of meditation, they're they're going to say, well, I can't do this because I can't. You know, I've had I've tried, and I can't do it. So then it makes them believe that they can't do that, but it just happens to be that's the level that they're in in their arousal. So integration is so essential, and we want to achieve that brain rewiring.

K? And and, again, we don't just use the emotional work. We also need to go do the functional medicine testing alongside it because if those adrenals are in phase 3 fatigue and cortisol is flatlined, then it's going to be very difficult to achieve integration. If hormones are crazy imbalanced, you know, in a man, they don't have any testosterone, A woman's estrogen dominant or normal hormones, you know, then they're not going to be able to integrate. And because integration is so essential, it's important to be able to track microbiome, you know, the gut health and neurotransmitters of the brain.

What's dopamine doing? What's serotonin doing? Is there PEA so that someone can actually focus? You know? And being able to bring those into balance, know the genetics that are getting in the way, and be able to do that emotional work at the same time.

So So you really wanna personalize that nutritional plan based on the data the body's giving back, you know, the exercise plan based on the data the body's giving to you, the therapy plan based on what you're seeing as you're doing that tracking, and then supplementation follows. So like I had said before, brain changes are very interesting. You know, you can see over here on the left an optimal brain with the prefrontal cortex, which is your adult executive function that's intact. Anyone with PTSD or reporting themselves high on a perceived stress scale, this is what's likely. Where they don't have that prefrontal cortex intact, it changes the architecture of the brain so dramatically that it shrinks in volume in the front and grows, especially on the right side in the amygdala, in the part that's saying, am I safe?

Am I safe? Am I safe? A hypervigilant mind makes a hypervigilant immune system. So where we start is with calming and safety. We have to have a foundation of safety.

So I have a process that I use called creating a calm, safe place within. And then, like, the person that asked me the question about, well, what do you think about does do vagal does vagal stimulation have any utility? Well, of course, it does. Yeah. This is where it would come in.

Right? Where we're trying to establish that space of there's hyperreactivity and hyperarousal, and we wanna get some calming. So emotional freedom technique or tapping is great for that. Breath work is great for that. Guided meditations can be good for that.

Chanting, prayer, contemplative work, journaling, depending on where people are. And that can that can help to bring that calming. So absolutely, yes. But, again, what we're wanting to understand is we wanna get underneath so there's no more flooding anymore. And you can achieve that actually.

I used to be so hyperreactive. So Ayurvedic medicine gives this really beautiful framework of helping us see this. It's called the pancha koshas. Pancha in Sanskrit means Shivan koshas means layers. And so one of the things that they said 10000 years ago is that we have more than just our physical bodies.

And and I think most of us that are here, you know, there are 348 people right now that I think can kind of agree on that. Yeah? That we have this physical body that we can see. We feed it. We water it.

We take it for walks. We put it to bed. It contains our DNA, our our organs, our tissues, our cells, our body systems. But then and we know this from, like, Korean photography, you know, that we have the second layer that's our energy body. And it's called different things in different frameworks.

Like, Chinese medicine calls it chi. Japanese medicine calls it chi. We call it the electromagnetic energy field. Yoga systems refer to chakras. And Ayurveda talks about nadis and srotas and prana.

So these that section there, that energy body is actually the connector to the mental and the emotional body. This is where we have our fears and our doubts and our motivations and those early beliefs and meanings from the hurt study. Remember that? Those are stored right here in the Manamaya Kosha. So this energy body, the chakra system that has 72,000 chakras, not just 7.

72,000. We're everywhere where there's a nerve that crosses. Right? That connects us to our Pimentel, emotional body and all of that field of what we've stored over the years of being on this planet. So we don't get access to the wisdom, the higher consciousness, or the bliss part of us, the connection to the divine or what Mark Jung called our collective unconscious.

We don't get access to those 2 if we're all bunged up in these others. And so part of the purpose then is to be able to clear all of that, not just do a detox of the liver or gallbladder or intestinal tract. Right? Gallbladder or intestinal tract. Right?

So the triaging trauma from an integrated perspective using the 7 wheels of wellness, I go into detail in that little booklet. This is just like a little high point. But this is what I based my program off of is we now know through human growth and developmental, science that we have Ericssonian stages of things that we're supposed to achieve. Right? So that wheel of wellness or the first chakra would be our root, and here's where the imbalances are.

This is just kind of light. We have a lot more information that we go through. But the trauma is going to be around attachment attachment disorders. Right? Here's the digestive system where it's going to be, prominent.

Our adrenal glands will be affected, and the location is at the base of the spine. And then it happens that wounding from conception to 6 months of old at 6 months of age. So we go through and talk about this with each one of these chakras based on those human growth and developmental states. And then another thing that I end the program with is the understanding that when trauma is transcended, that actually allows for growth. So trauma is not bad.

Right? Everyone has it. And so categorizing it as somehow something that, yes, it has caused suffering. But in Joseph Campbell's way of thinking, right, it's the call it's the call that we have where we have something that's beyond our scope to handle, and then we have to go find a mentor. We have to learn how to work with that.

And then we start to integrate that, and then we become expert at it. And then we come back as a teacher for others that can that need that. And for a little while, we're in that space of peace, and then it happens again where we have separation again and a call to action. And should we choose to accept it, we'll so we that's that's the the hero's journey is what we're doing all the way until we die from the time we're born. And so if we're willing to say, oh, this is part of life and not be upset about it, then what will happen is our egos will also develop, not just the body.

And we'll go through different developmental states and stages as we do this work. And so you see me do spirals all over the place because people will come in to see me and they'll say, yeah. I've had this Hashimoto's for 20 years, and I've done I I read your book, and I see that trauma is part of why I probably haven't gotten Siebecker, but I've done so much work around this trauma, whatever it is that they're identifying it. I say, yeah. And that's gotten you to where you are today.

And the fact that you're sitting in front of me with autoimmunity still means that there's another layer. Right? The spiral just keeps going a little deeper, a little tighter until we get into that, oh, and this is called the unitive state where we are so aware of ourselves and the disease process itself is seen as a gift that is part of our, our development. So we have these different and I go through these in a lot more detail in that program, but it's interesting to just know that. Right?

That we go from our black and white thinking state as children, and then if you you have this map you can follow where you can watch your ego start to develop and and grow and expand and then eventually dissolve into the cenative consciousness state. Turns out that only 1% of humans ever reach unitive, but most of us say that we're there because we can we've had glimpses of it. We know what it feels like to be there, but the way we don't stay there a 100% of the time. So we but we know where we're we wanna be all the time. Right?

And so the more of this work we do, the more we get it really solidified inside of us, the more we get more of those glimpses of that. So the disciplines that I teach to my students and clients is, you know, Ayurveda, some of the things I've shared with you, the Enneagram, emotional healing tools, functional medicine testing, nutritional protocols, functional sexology. I'm the mother of functional sexology too. And developmental psychology and really mentoring through that process because, you have to find Pimentel to be able to do some of the stuff that can point to, oh, here's the next place on the map. So a little more detail, the science, we go deeper into learning how to track your own hurt using the hurt model and go beyond, like, the adverse childhood experiences and really learn that freedom framework.

So first chakra issues, when there's insecure, inconsistent attachment, then these trauma wounds from conception to 6 months of age, you know, the adult trauma patterns will center around survival and safety. And I definitely had a big wound in in that time period. And many of us don't just have one. We have several, and people Dr. to make this very linear.

But remember, I have spirals everywhere because, it'll it spirals. It's not I lay it out as linear because the chakra system has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 that most people are familiar with in in the yoga system that was brought to the United States. So I use that just to help kind of use it as a map. But it's it's more of a spiral than it is a line. Okay?

So the parts of the body that respond to this perception, remember that everything is about perception, that survival is threatened Mark the adrenal glands, And then that sets up that sympathetic arousal network. And if those things happen really early on, then by the time someone reaches adulthood, that's pretty burned out. Right? There's a lot of adrenal fatigue, a lot of, it's called pregnant alone steel where where progesterone is not being made. Cortisol is being manufactured out of the raw materials used to make progesterone usually.

So then there's estrogen dominance, and we wanna be able to look at all that because trauma work won't stick if those adrenals aren't healthy. And no amount of therapy works if safety is not first established. So the second chakra, the sacral chakra, represents creativity and desire and connectivity, and this is where there's wounding between 6 to 18 months of age that can be shame and guilt, and the body parts will be the perception of being victimized. And this is gonna be around that masculine and feminine. And so over time, the feeling of victimization leads to this resistance to life.

And being able to heal that involves really choosing life because the trauma pattern of resistance to life is going to be collapsing energy. And this shows up with people, and you can see it in yourself if you know, see if this resonates with you, where things are too hard, feeling too overwhelmed a lot, being late all this time, and dysfunctional relationship to money and time actually is a sign of resistance to life. 3rd chakra patterns is solar plexus. Right? This is self empowerment and power and empower.

And when there's wounding between the ages of 18 36 months of age or 3 years old, then this will involve blame and persecution and rescuing. So we go through a lot of things around that, go deeper into it. The parts of the body that respond to this perception of being blamed, you know, will create defensive patterns. Right? It's not my fault.

It's not my fault. And in in order to fill self worth, there's trying to prove. You know? So I call it the d's, denial, defensiveness, deflection. And so then we get blood sugar imbalances, liver and gallbladder issues, and over time, others that are that are, you know, to blame for your dissatisfaction leads to not only the the pieces that I just talked about about fatty liver and blood sugar imbalances, but also relationship dysfunction.

It's It's very hard to be in relationship with somebody that can't listen and and, gets defensive all the time. 4th chakra is the heart chakra, which represents love both given and received. And when there's wounding between the ages of 37, this will be fear of loss and abandonment Sarna numbing out to prevent that overwhelming sadness and grief that accompanies great loss. My dad was in the navy, so I had a lot of wounding on this one when he would go out to sea when I was a child. It was really overwhelming, and I learned how to leave my little body very easily.

And then sexual abuse just kinda cemented that on. So the parts of the body that respond to the perception of loss and loneliness and abandonment are the thymus, which actually regulates part of the immune system and the stomach. And so this continual fear of loss and abandonment can lead to codependent relationships, which, of course, creates a trauma pattern of attracting and staying in abusive relationships and narcissistic relationships and a lot of resentment. And I always say that resentment is the most toxic chemical that you can bathe yourselves in. Far more than anything that's being manufactured and dumped into our air, soil, and water, this is manufactured on the inside of us, and we make it the hot tub that our cells bathe in, and that is the most toxic substance.

So learning how to, break those patterns and heal this is really important. The 5th chakra is the throat chakra, which represents self expression. We often attribute this to thyroid disease, right, and, autoimmune thyroiditis and Graves. Wounding between 7 12 years of age can result in these trauma patterns that lead to the repression of self expression, And this is, of course, the esophagus and the thyroid. And over time, this can create a trauma pattern of either trying to speak too much to get attention or never speaking up and advocating for self.

Just not a good balance or a good relationship with one's own voice and advocacy for self. 6th chakra is the 3rd eye. Represent seeing clearly what can't be seen by the physical eyes and wounding between the ages of 12 18 can, result in trauma patterns that involve a perception of being invalidated. And, again, this can be defensiveness on a different level that involves projection and judgment. So we're projecting disowned parts of ourselves that we don't want to see in ourselves on others.

We're recognizing it in everyone else, but not ourselves, and it can lead to depression and anxiety and unhappiness in adulthood and bad dreams and nightmares and a lack of focus and headaches and really not being able to figure out what you want out of life and to get it done. And, this, of course, you know, it has a a pattern that is not being seen or not being heard, not not validating yourself and expecting others to do it for you. The 7th chakra, the crown chakra, represents self actualization and the realization of divine nature and what I call luminous self, and this is wounding in adulthood. Oftentimes, people will say, is the wounding just in childhood? And I say, well, no.

Absolutely not. Definitely can happen in adulthood and interrupt that adult ego development that I showed you earlier. And this can create skepticism, grandiosity, narcissism, again, attachment stuff from an adult perspective, spiritual abuse, spiritual bypass, addiction, and it really is marked by a lack of self awareness. And the parts of the eye, you know, the the pineal gland in the eyes can be affected, which, of course, the pineal gland is we think about as our spiritual center, and it also produces melatonin which is responsible for sleep. So there can be a lot of disrupted sleep and neurotransmitter imbalances and a lack of fulfillment, spiritual fulfillment, physical, emotional, mental fulfillment, which impairs happiness.

I I'm doctor Kishi Ewers, and I am so honored to have the opportunity to guide you through life changing program called transforming your trauma in 7 steps. So whether you're here to deepen your personal healing journey or to enhance the work that you do with others, this program is designed for you. We're going to explore this word trauma, which everybody has trauma and trauma simply means life experiences that you've had from the time you entered the planet that you didn't yet have the skill set to navigate. So it can be one event or a series events, but all of us have had a lot of little traumas and some of us have had big capital t traumas. And they're not something that you get rid of, right?

You don't get rid of your trauma. You don't heal your trauma. Instead, what you do is you learn to digest your trauma just like an apple. You have an apple and you look at the apple, you can't get the nutrients from the apple. You can draw the apple.

You can become an expert about apple. You can write about the apple, but you'll never get the nutrients from the apple. You just talk about it. Write about it, play with it, throw it up in the air. You actually have to take a bite out of the apple, chew it up, and then let your body extract the nutrition that it needs from the apple and get rid of what is no longer necessary in that apple to move on.

Trauma is just like that. We need to digest our trauma so that we can get the nutrients, the wisdom from it. So as we go through these life experiences that we don't yet have the skill set to navigate when we're young, We have formed an intricate pattern, a webbing of meanings and beliefs that we made up at the developmental stage we're at with the child mind that we had that made sense at the time, and then adaptive behaviors that go with those meanings and beliefs. But when we're older, it's an operating system we've actually Pimentel outgrown, but maybe haven't gone back yet and changed it. And this impacts your body, your health, your mind, your spirit, your emotional world, your nervous system, and you can't go in at just the nervous system.

And you can't just talk about it with talk therapy, that doesn't work. You don't get the wisdom from it. So you're going to learn methods for unraveling this intricate webbing and pattern. So it's said that when we perceive, we bring in information to the eyes, ears, nose. Right?

All of our 5 senses. And then our mind synthesizes that information. That's called the perception. It's not just information coming in though. We also have what we've created in our memory system, the way we've perceived that we send out into the world.

And then we look for what fits that filter. So your eyes don't see what's in front of you. Your eyes see what your mind is looking for. So we wanna change that. We wanna integrate these tools in your daily life to bring profound transformation, digestion, wisdom.

Right? So this journey is about more than just understanding trauma. It's It's about rewiring your mind the way you perceive not your brain and your nervous system, but your mind. Right? And we wanna get to that at the root.

So you can reclaim your vitality and step into your true nature, not a bunch of false masks that you created as a child that are coping strategies that were so smart at the time that they were made. So every module builds on the last and guides you through each of your energy centers, healing and bringing wisdom as you digest. And you'll learn to navigate your unique healing spiral and release the burdens that you've been carrying all these years. And really embrace your authentic self. So this isn't just knowledge, it's integration.

It's a commitment and an investment to yourself. And you're the most important ingredient in the process because healing starts from the inside out and it begins with you. So over the next 9 modules, we'll uncover the connection between trauma and chronic illness like autoimmunity, adrenal fatigue, hormone imbalances, gut imbalances, weight problems, emotional burnout, and even cancer. And also relationship problems like codependency, people pleasing, highly sensitive systems. And in this integrative approach, you're gonna discover how to release old patterns of relating.

You're gonna learn to stop being a people pleaser and a perfectionist to the root causes of autoimmune disease, by the way. You're going to learn to listen to your body with curious compassion and be collaborative with it instead of being angry when it doesn't look or feel like you want it to. And then you're going to master some soulful practices like boundary setting, and grounding and self compassion that will help you rewire not just your perceptual field, but your nervous system and create lasting resilience. So whether you're a coach, a health care provider, or simply someone who knows you deserve better health and happiness, this program will equip you with the skills to heal and thrive and to contribute positively to the world around you. So here's the beauty of this work.

It's not about being perfect, or fixing something that's broken. You're not broken. It's about coming home to yourself, peeling back layers of that trauma, belief systems and meanings, behaviors you created from unmet expectations and aligning with who really are underneath those coping strategies. Those that you created to get your needs met as a child, a very smart child, by the way. Alright.

So let's take a moment and set your intentions. What are your intentions for this journey? What brought you here today? What are you ready to release? And most importantly, what are you really ready that you want to welcome to your life?

This program is dedicated to reducing suffering for you and those whose lives you touch. So let's commit together to healing and growing and making peace with ourselves. If this message resonates with you, I invite you to take the next step and join me in this program. Together, we'll build a foundation for a healthier, freer, more aligned you. Tools are here just waiting for you to pick them up.

And you deserve this transformation. Take this first step with me and let's create a life of freedom, vitality, and joy, and one that aligns with your true essence. Thank you for trusting me to walk this path with you. Let's get started.

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