EP37 – How Gut Health Impacts our Mental Wellness

Matthew J. Brownstein hosts Cara Bradley in this special episode of Illuminated Mind®. Cara Bradley is a leading authority of mental fitness having led thousands through her signature body-first strategies including mindful movement, flow state and nervous system training and gut-brain optimization. She is the author of On The Verge: Wake Up, Show Up, and Shine, and founder of the award-winning Verge Yoga Center.

Welcome, everyone to the illuminated mind podcast. My name is Matthew Brownstein. I’m the founder of the Institute of interpersonal hypnotherapy and when the lead instructor is there now, this again is the illuminated mind Podcast. I’m happy to welcome my guest Kara Bradley. So welcome, Kara.
Thank you for having me.
We spoke recently and let me read your bio and then talk about why invited you on to the show. So carob Rafi is a leading authority of mental fitness having led 1000s through her signature body for strategies including mindful movement, flow state and nervous system training and gut brain optimization. See is the author of on the verge wake up show up and shine and founder of the award winning verge yoga center, cache shares her decades of mental wellness and performance training with organizations and Premier sports teams, including the M L. S. l, a galaxy and Villanova University men’s basketball, she creates mindfulness courses for wellness brands, including mindful.org, Muse, insight, timer, ravenglass, and happify. She is the host of the mental fitness podcast daily whispers and, and in 2020, was named one of the top 12 most powerful women in the mindfulness movement by mindful magazine. So I’m happy to have one of the top 12 Most Powerful Women on the show. But here with us, so yeah, we were talking, we connected and we realized we have interesting perspectives on how we approach wellness, I come at it from the mind first, right mind is really the essence. And you seem to come at it from the body side of things. So I wonder if you just want to start there talking about your approach to wellness. Tell us about you. Let’s let’s start with that. Who are you? What do you do for people?
Yeah, well, thank you, thank you for that intro. My background really comes as an athlete, I was a skater, professional figure, skater and rollerblader. And I spent most of my life just in my body, moving my body and understanding how to compete and train to compete from my body. And so as I progressed in my own inquiry of my own personal practices, it always came from a body up approach. And I went on to open a yoga studio, I ran the yoga studio for 16 years and have always taught some type of physical discipline, and also a meant also mental disciplines when it comes to competition and performance. So I think for me, you know, I, I certainly completely respect the mind first approach. And I’m certainly not saying there is one way because it’s a two way highway. But I do feel that our body kind of gets its second rate when it comes to thinking about our own mental wellness, mental fitness. So I just put on my pom poms as the cheerleader really, for the intelligence that is streaming through our body all the time, and how to really become fluent in the language of that intelligence of of sensation and impulse.
Love to go more into that how we become fluent in listening to our bodies. And you also focus a lot on the gut brain connection. So how does maybe you could blend the two in your next response to me here is I know we listen to our bodies, and why is the gut connection. So important?
Yeah. Yeah. So that’s a big question. I’m going to start by by sharing that. When I developed the methodology for my yoga studio vert yoga, it was really about how can we settle busy minds by moving and breathing the body. And so oftentimes, in meditation lineages, there’s a talk of the body mind, synchronizing the body and mind synchronizing in a way that the two are working hand in hand, there’s a synergy and a coherence to it. And so when I was developing this yoga methodology, I recognize that if we were to move rhythmically move the body rhythmically breathed the body in that same rhythm. So there’s the synchronizing of the body, and mind through breath, movement, and, and rhythm. What happens in a matter of 10 to 15 minutes is that the busy mind starts to quiet down and the body mind the person just feels more awake and aware and So my investigation it’s been, you know, I’ve been a teacher for for decades now. And my teaching, especially yoga has been like a laboratory for me, to finesse and to experiment with how do we, how do we allow for people to have this direct experience of what we talk about in mindfulness as calm clarity, you know, whether the body is calm and the mind is awake and clear. And so I’m getting to your gut brain question is because I’ve spent so much time understanding how to regulate the nervous system, that when I started to learn about the gut, and the gut brain connection, and the really the gut as the almost basement of our body, if you will, and the the information that’s coming from our gut, through our nervous system and immune system, up to the brain, it’s like this whole new territory, and the science is fairly new. I mean, you know, the, the Ayurvedic Yogi’s have known this for a long time. And traditional Chinese medicine have known this for a long time in a functional medicine practitioners. But now we have Western science saying, yes, our gut health, and because of the information that’s coming from our gut, and I’ll get into that, in a moment, our gut health directly impacts our mental wellness, our ability to be focused, our ability to feel happy, and joy, our ability to stay motivated, really is rooted down in the gut. So for me as this, you know, nervous system regulator, if you will, I’ve spent so much time there, to go down another layer. I feel like in many respects, I’ve been living in a house, I didn’t realize there was a basement. And then all of a sudden, I found the trap door to the basement, which was the intelligence from the gut. And it really blew open my work in a big, big way. So I can get into a little more of the details about the gut brain access. But I just wanted to give you this overview of, of how I journeyed all the way down to the basement.
No, I appreciate you going there. I do want to dive deeper into the gut. Because again, we have possibly different perspectives, how we approach although my background is Yoga very well, still is and I still practice daily. So I’m like fully with you. And then the hypnotherapy model, and I talked about if I were to bring up the gut, I might say like, well, in this lower region of your body, like maybe your third chakra area, you’ve been bearing a lot of emotions, there’s memories and negative beliefs that are stored there. So if I said gut, I am having a background in Chinese medicine, I look at how the emotions are affecting the organ systems. What do you mean by gut? Are we talking about like the amount of probiotics in the system? Are we talking more physical? Or are we talking that there’s mental emotional energetic blocks in that area?
Well, I think both but my area of investigation has been more on the physiological gut microbiome. And I believe that there’s every we’ve been calling our gut the second brain for a while now. And in many, in many scientists are actually starting to call it the first brain. But what we understand up from gut brain science now is that we have something called the gut microbiome, which microbiome really is like an ecology, and it lives in our lower intestines, in most of it, and the gut microbiome is this ecology of bacteria, viruses and other non human entities that we don’t even, we can’t even get there yet. We’re we’re really still very busy on bacteria. For the most part. What we’re learning now in, in, in research is that our these bacteria, and there are 1000s of strains of bacteria, you can call them probiotics, right? That may be easier for some of you to understand, there are 1000s of strains of these bacteria, that all have specific purposes that we didn’t know, up until the last decade. And we can now trace some of these bacteria to certain illnesses and to certain remedies, if you will. So when our gut is imbalanced, or what’s called in dysbiosis, it’s just a fancy word for saying it’s imbalanced. There may be more unhelpful bacteria then helpful bacteria we’re gonna have it’s going to wreak havoc on our physiology. And so we’ve got the gut with all these bacteria and viruses. And what we know now is that 90% of the serotonin in our system is produced in the gut 70% of serotonin being a feel good neurotransmitter or hormone, right? So we’ve got serotonin in the gut, dopamine 70% of our dopamine, which is the neurotransmitter really helping us stay motivated and excited about life, norepinephrine 70% of that is produced in the gut, and that is for focus and attention and staying on task. And then GABA, which is a hormone or relaxation hormone that helps us to have that calm, that calm Avila calm clarity we spoke about before. So what we’re learning and I’m not a scientist, so I can’t get into exactly how it’s all happening. But what we do know is that when we have a healthy gut, those, all of those happy hormones are flourishing. And then we go up the chain, now we’ve got the highway between the gut and the brain, which is primarily the immune system. So if there’s inflammation in the body, which a lot of us have inflammation, that communication channel is going to be more staticky. And then we have the nervous system. And a lot of our vagus nerve, which many of you may know is the wandering nerve kind of starts up in the head and goes through all most of our organs, and actually goes down into the gut. So we’ve got the nervous system as a major highway. So whenever there is stress, which most of us have, right, maybe there’s poor food choice, or even just one meal, environmental toxins, and pharmaceuticals, can all throw off the delicate balance of the gut microbiome and the signaling between the gut and the brain. So when I learned about this as a yoga meditation teacher, and performance coach, for me, it was a huge light bulb that went off. Because having trained people, every day, for a decade, I just recognized have recognized that, you know, we know what to do, but we still can’t get ourselves to stay consistent or to do it or to go long enough, or to be curious enough. And I’m like, Why? Why. And when I realized that for most of us, we just we have a lot of static in our system. So that clarity that we’re all seeking is actually in some ways, deterred by our physiological state.
So no matter how much yoga or meditation you do, and of course, my field is hypnotherapy. So we’re working to get the mind clear directly. I would think imagine, no matter how much we optimize it, like you came into it and said, Well, I’ve been doing yoga, but there’s this whole gut thing I didn’t realize is going on, it almost seems like no matter how much you meditate, if you got issues with your gut, you’re just not going to be at the highest level of functioning, is that you talk about people having beneficial behaviors, like why don’t they do it? In the hypnotherapy model, we will talk about the subconscious mind right in line below conscious awareness. Yet the body is the subconscious mind, right? And if there’s this imbalance in the gut, then obviously, we’re no matter how much we do. We’re not even if we’re motivated to do it, we’re not going to function as well. But I hear you saying even improving the gut will improve motivation. So I guess my question is, what do we do about this? Let’s say we put the science aside, we just agree with you, we believe what you’re saying, what do we do to improve the gut?
Yeah, no, and that’s a great question. And I’m so thankful that you just said what you said, Matthew, because that’s how I, that was my aha, there’s no amount of yoga that one can do. I mean, certainly, it’ll reduce stress, which will improve the the environment, but if we’ve got static in the body, and most of us do, because of stress and inflammation, there’s just not we’re going to be living with three with like a three G communication system instead of 5g. And so yeah, so starting at the gut level, like I said before, there’s four ways that are this this ecology gets thrown off and in imbalanced, stress, food, environmental toxins and pharmaceuticals. So I am from the school that it’s food first. I mean, if we can we have the most control over what we put in our mouths if we can eat a diverse diet, and oftentimes it said, eat the rainbow, eat 30 different types of fruit and vegetables a week. and you’re going to be feeding your, all those bacteria, an array of different types of prebiotic fibers. So that’s like, the easiest thing we can do is just get really clean on, on how we’re eating, you know, limit, we all know limit the sugars and flours and processed foods and and stick as much as you can to that rainbow. So that’s the first thing. And then we have stress. And as you and I have both dedicated our lives to is really to have help people understand how to not manage stress, but actually just become resilient to the stressors that are out there. Because it doesn’t look like life is slowing down anytime soon. I mean, the speed of change just continues to accelerate. So how do we through practice, like we’ve been teaching, help people to maintain more autonomic coherence, this is a word I like to use, which is really, when our nervous system is in balance, and we feel relaxed, but awake. So stress is the second. And then of course, the other two environmental toxins, and pharmaceuticals. I mean, sometimes we just can’t help it. You know, we’re certainly not here to say, you know, to tell anybody what to do. But those are two other things that we can focus on, to at least give the gut microbiome, a good chance of flourishing.
And somebody like me, who really wants to live in a really do work to live at that optimal level of functioning, I very peaceful lifestyle, I eat and pick up wealth, maybe not last week, but generate impeccably well. So let’s say somebody’s like, while I’m doing all this stuff, live and move somewhere where I know there’s no environmental toxins or as minimal as possible. Yeah. So if you’re living the best possible life, how do you know? Like, I think I’m doing everything you’re saying. But I don’t know if my gut is it is optimized. And if I’m in true coherence with, if that’s the right way to say it, with my gut, I know often the Heart Math people talk about the brother. So I’d like you to go deeper into coherence as well. Because usually it’s you talk about the heart, brain, coherence, Natoma gut brain coherence, I love to go deeper into that. But maybe the first question is, how do we know that we’re optimized in that system than that way?
Well, I’ll give you my own story. So I wasn’t sure I didn’t know that I was. I was suffering from the burnout of running my yoga center. I mean, isn’t that crazy? But it’s the truth has. I read you know, and the thing is, when you’re in the business, you know, it was always felt I had to hide and and hold it inside. So So I was suffering from my own version of burnout. And I was introduced to a company that has really been at the forefront of the science of the gut brain connection. And they formulated some very simple protocols that are specifically geared to improving the connection, the highway, the gut, and then the highway. So for improved cognitive functioning. And so, you know, I’ve done a lot in my life to experiment and explore different practices and protocols. And so I gave this, this a shot. And within two weeks, this was for me, the big aha, I felt my brain fog lift. I woke up one morning, and and I couldn’t believe the how clear crystal clear, I felt. And I’ve been practicing meditation for 20 years deep dives into, you know, these practices. And I didn’t know it until I was out of it. And I you know, I think that happens for so many of us, you know, we’re like that frog in the boiling water, we just don’t realize the pressure cooker that we’re living in, until we’re out of it. Go on vacation, an extended vacation or or do something in you know, in your physiology that shifts things. And for me, from that day forward, I realized, wow, like there are so much that we could be doing at the basement level to be helping us all. So that’s where that’s where I stand is just helping to educate at this point.
Are there resources because I’m still interested in this Alright, how if I want to know how optimized my gut is, you mentioned company I don’t mind you offering a plug now just so often listeners, yeah, can know, how do we get better at this?
Yeah. And you know, I think that we all just need a little bit of help. You know, it’s hard to do it alone. Like you were just saying math. You’ve got it, you know, all those variables you’ve looked at, right food environment, peaceful lifestyle, you know, we can do as well much as we can, and then a little boost every once in a while, you know, to help us to see where we were, is helpful. So the company is called Amari global, the mental wellness company. And they’ve been on the forefront of research to sit offering natural plant based protocols based on Chinese medicine based on Ayurveda and other indigenous practices to say, okay, how can we feed the gut microbiome, the right things to decrease inflammation, to improve stress, resiliency, and then to optimize the communication channel between the gut and the brain. So I’ve been working with him for a few years. And there’s also a great book out called mental fitness. It’s about optimizing the body, the brain and the biome. And it’s written by Dr. Shawn Talbott, who is the Chief formulator for Amari. And I think the book is fantastic, because it really from a very beginner place really helps you to understand how what we’re learning in science and how the gut brain access works. And, you know, one, one thing that just came to mind that I learned about early on in my research, is that in olden days, right, I don’t know what, I don’t know how many years ago, this was, I want to say more than 4050 years ago, when people had severe mental disorders, I guess they call them back then there was actually a practice of severing the vagus nerve down in the gut level, which was like, Oh, my gosh,
yeah. Yeah. Well, they do that with hysterectomy is right, that whole thing was called hysteria. There’s this condition. And they were removing the uterus. That’s one of the one hysterectomy comes from, as I understand it, because they were just thinking, Well, you have to cut this out, which is again, why I started looking at it more from the mental science, and maybe there’s quote, hysteria, because maybe there’s past traumatic events. And again, I know that it does affect the physiology, yet to not go too into there. Because there’s so much value in what you’re talking about. If you’re eating really bad foods, if you’re an environmentally toxic area, if you’re stressed out, if you’re filling yourself with medications, obviously, your body’s not going to function as well in the body and mind are not the same thing. But they are intimately connected, right. So yeah, thank you for the resources. So Amari global, there’s protocols there, and then the book mental fitness is a way to dive in. Can you talk more about the coherence theme, since we touched upon it? Whether it’s why do you focus more on gut brain instead of Heart Math that’s always talking about heart and brain?
Yeah, well, I think before I knew about either one of those, I was, again, very intentionally designing a way of moving and breathing bodies, in order to shift them into autonomic coherence. So probably most people listening by this time understand our stress response, we’ve got the sympathetic response and the parasympathetic response, our sympathetic response being more of our fight or flight freeze response. And most of us these days are just sort of stuck in a chronically sympathetic state, only to maybe find ourselves in the parasympathetic state, at the end of the day, you know, after class a wine or you know, asleep. And so what happens when we actually balance our systems is that we’re moving in and out of sympathetic and parasympathetic throughout the day, that we’re not in this jacked up perched, perched state of attack all the time. And so when I started to develop this methodology of moving and breathing in rhythm and stillness and silence, to help people become familiar with themselves in a state of relaxed alertness. And you know, coming back to, you know, meditation and mindfulness, we often talk about this state of calm clarity or relaxed alertness when we’re both relaxed and awake at the same time. And so, when I started to develop these types of movements for people, I started to learn more about cohesion coherence, and that’s when I learned about Heart Math, which is working at the heart level, to evoke a sense of gratitude and gratitude we know has a real physiological effect, and that that helps the heart and brain to start to sync up. So if you think about coherence, I often think about Thinking synchronizing or harmonizing the body, the brain, the gut, the heart. So the gut brain coherence, I actually haven’t heard it spelled out that way. So you may have, you may have coined a new term there, which I like a lot is, again, just syncing up our systems for greater, calm clarity in our lives or flow.
I didn’t know we’re inventing something I thought you were referring to. It’s like got coherence, but you were actually were referring to the heart brain coherence. And yet, in Chinese medicine, there’s the three burners, lower middle and upper and called Chow. And the lower jaw was essentially the gut region. The middle is the way I see it is more of the heart region, the upper Zhao could be considered the lung region, but I see it very much as the head. So you have like the lower chakras, the middle, which is the heart and the higher chakras and the really, they all need to be in coherence, right. You can’t have the lower chakras out of balance with the higher chakras. You mentioned in talking points quick was your term intro, I don’t know if this is spelled wrong in Ontario, ceptin. If that’s the proper pronunciation, I’d love for you to explain that. That word in Ontario receptive awareness. And so yeah, please explain that word. And then in that same bullet point, you said and quick state shifting practices, I’m very interested in the practices, like what do we do? But yeah, maybe you could explain that concept of interoceptive. Awareness?
Yeah, well, you said it perfectly. interoceptive awareness is our ability to, to read our body’s physiological states as information for what may be happening in the world. And it’s, I kind of did a long winded way of saying is recognizing that gut tension may be may mean something in your environment, or throat clenching. Or your when your heart starts to race, and you don’t know why, or your breath goes shallow. So there are all these ways that our body speaks to us, like I said before, through the language of sensation, those are some of the more obvious ones that people can relate to pretty quickly. You know, when we when we want to tell the truth, and we can’t get the words out our our throat, or actually, it goes through the vagus nerve, again, down into our throat, but our throat clenches are tightened. And so interoceptive awareness is a way of understanding the physiological changes in our body moment to moment, just like we would, in a meditation practice, start to notice the changes in our mind or thought patterns, moment to moment, our bodies are constantly surfing, the different stimuli that are happening inside and out. So interoceptive awareness is that ability to become more fluent. And it’s one of the reasons why I love the quiet movement practices, like yoga, or Qigong, or tai chi, or some of the other martial arts that allow for the mind to settle where there’s not a lot of external stimuli, and where you get to have a conversation with your body, with your breath, with the nuances that are happening. And so I think it’s an unexplored area that that I’m in love with, and I love teaching.
Yeah, the idea of listening to the body, you know, like crucial, and anybody who meditates and stops and be still the rallies, alright, there’s stuff in there. And a lot of people are afraid to do that, right? Who wants to sit with themselves when essentially they hate themselves? But again, that’s going into the deeper mind, part of it. I’m curious about can you offer one quick shift technique that you had mentioned in that bullet point? What can we do if we’re out of coherence? We stopped, we listened to her body, we realize, alright, my throat is tight. My heart’s locked up, my gut is not feeling good. What do we do?
Yeah, that’s great. I call these many wins, many win practices. And it’s not to belittle them at all, because I think they’re incredibly powerful for us. I often will teach them to leaders, that in any moment, we can do a quick stage state check, read what’s happening, make some few changes that I’ll tell you about in a moment, to be able to step into a room more coherent, more open, more available. So oftentimes, you know, we can just feel, even if we’re just not breathing, you know, let’s say you’re about to get on a zoom call and you know, it’s going to be you’re going to be asked to stand and to speak about something and so before the meeting your heart is like you could feel it pounding out of your chest. What we can do many stay Each shifter is first, you know, for some just sitting and being quiet and still, for even two minutes research shows has the capacity to, to shift our state from from a more alert stress state to a more coherent state. For some people silence and stillness doesn’t work, it actually makes them more anxious. So if, if that’s the case, then you can go outside and take a slow rhythmic walk. Rhythm is another understudied phenomenon, I believe that has incredible capacity to shift us. In fact, Dr. Bruce Perry, he is one of the few out there that have researched rhythm. And he has said that rhythm can take us from a high anxiety state into a more balanced state pretty quickly. So even if it’s, if it’s drumming, if it’s music, that you know will just settle you it doesn’t have to be new age, you know, it could be rap, if it’s rhythmic, and it and it allows your you to find your ground and find your feet, then that is a really essential practice. So what we’re trying to do is just move some of the body parts, if you will, into more balance. And that will help then, for us to be more mentally clear and calm.
So if you can go for a walk, sit still and listen, some rap music your mind, make that shift that I can even three things they’re starting with go for a walk first, and then because then you can get away and sit still. I know when I first started public speaking, I was 23 years old. And I remember that feeling my heart beating out of my chest, I would relate that against we’re talking about like, is it mind first or body? First, I relate that very much to self esteem. And I’m just curious your thoughts to look at it from the mind side of it just directly. negative beliefs we hold about ourselves. So my heart was beating out of my chest, maybe I don’t know the exact specifics, but beliefs like I’m not good enough. They’re gonna think I’m stupid. Nobody wants to hear what I have to say I’m too young. You know, whatever those negative thoughts are? Is there anything from your model that you that helps to address that directly? Because no matter how many probiotics I take, God, no matter how much I know how to sit and breathe, which I knew how to do at that time, I still have realized, I’ve got a lot of subconscious programming that’s causing my heart to pound no matter what I do, that I’m always still fighting against that. Any words away? Yeah,
well, I can offer my experience. And also, you know, I think a little bit of what we’re learning about in the research. And I think it was Amy Cuddy, who did that infamous TED talk about just power poses. And what I’ll say to that, whether it’s true or not, because I know there was a lot of controversy around that is that when we are in a depressive with depressed state, that doesn’t mean you’re depressed, it could just mean you’re in a down state, we tend to hunch our shoulders are caving in at our chest, our breathing gets limited becomes limited and erratic. And that will throw off the physiology and the nervous system. So to answer your question, you know, our, I believe that our thoughts and especially if they’re repetitive thought patterns, like I’m not enough, I don’t have enough, you know, letters after my name, or I don’t know what to say, or I never show up big enough for any of those things, you know, I’m thinking about some of my limiting beliefs is that I would, I would imagine, and I just say that because I don’t know if there’s research behind this, that there are correlating physiological patterns. And I say that because having taught yoga, and many of my students I had for a couple of decades, and I saw their confidence, their availability, change as their body opened up as well. So when you start to release the tension and the physiological patterns, it changes our breath and the breathing changes, changes how we how we think.
Yeah, certainly, and I couldn’t agree with you more as far as having practiced yoga and meditation and Tai Chi and Chico for years that my personal transformation did have a lot to do with starting from the inside out like the mind first, but also doing those practices that mites to me it sounds like from the outside in and honoring how important that is right to stand even in like mountain pose and yoga or warrior pose in yoga, right? It’s not just physiological, right? You’re stepping into your power there and realizing you’re stronger than you think and pushing your limits. So yeah, I hear you and the value of both. I think in my field. I definitely whenever I’m on a podcast, I emphasize is focused on the mind, you have to heal the mind. Yet, it’s so important to remember those of us who practice yoga in these disciplines. There’s tremendous mental benefit from doing that as well. So yeah, thank you for those thoughts. I want to look at one other bullet point, you kind of covered here how rhythm, movement and breath can evoke coherence, anything more you’d like to share about that, since that was a third main talking point?
Yeah, I think this is one of my favorites really, is this whole idea of rhythm. I mean, if we go back to our, our babies, or when we were babies, how we were soothed, was through rhythm. I mean, babies crying, just, you know, in child’s pose, and rocking themselves to sleep is a way of soothing ourselves and nurturing ourselves. And we did it naturally. So if you can find a way to integrate rhythm into your life, and it could be on an instrument, it could be on a walk, or rowing or swimming or sweeping the floor. I mean, you know, really, it does not have to be anything that involves money, or equipment. We have the natural ability to find rhythm in our lives. Even just listening to the birds in the morning, something just so soothing, is that is listening to their rhythm. So I believe it like I said before, it’s under research and is extraordinarily powerful. To help us come back into that steady, rhythmic brain wave heart rate coherence.
Yes, thank you. Yeah, there’s so many things that I use in our field like in hypnotherapy, even just the pendulum back and forth. We use a metronome sometime to induce hypnosis, or I’m thinking of some music that I play this is Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Yeah, so just finding way So even for a lot of my listeners who are hypnotherapist to get the rhythm perhaps in the music or hypnotic programming recordings. Just even that alone might be a good tip. I would imagine with you coming into podcasts like this, you have, you’re no longer running your yoga studio, I believe. But tell us where you’re at now, should people be reaching out to you their services that you offer? Somebody’s like, Oh, my God, she could help me so much. What are you offering now that might benefit others?
Yeah, well, right now I have a couple of courses out on mindful.org mindful movement, I have a new course coming out beginning of 2023 on movement, and really on establishing new relationship with what movement means in your daily life. And I do represent this company Amari global as, as an affiliate, so perhaps I can provide a link for you in the show notes. And then care. bradley.net is my website, I do some individual mentoring. And I also do some group mentoring, when it comes to body mind practices, really just helping people integrate body mind training into their daily daily life in a way that feels comfortable to them. I think there are so many ways that we can do this. And so I love mentoring people and and helping them find their unique way to do it.
That’s great. Thank you is there so many of my students who approach it from the mind side, like I’m always pushing, especially meditation, but I cannot mention Yoga and Tai Chi. And I’m not sure how many of my students who’ve gone through the hypnotherapy training actually end up doing that, because again, we focus so much on the mental side of it. But yeah, you seem like such a wealth of knowledge resources for taking care of the physical side of it in a way that doesn’t involve medications. And, you know, on the doctors, it’s much, much more holistic approach. So beautiful. Any closing words of wisdom, anything you would share with any listener to perhaps benefit their life from last word?
Well, I so appreciate you and your expertise and the approach that you take as well. I think, you know, we are multifaceted gems, and there are so many different entry points. And I think the important thing is to investigate and get curious and play and some things we can become proficient at, and some things we can dabble in, but I certainly have been a meditator for most of my adult life. And so it’s not just a one way you know, one way Highway. It is a two way street for me as well. And I couldn’t have I couldn’t have come to the body first approach without deep investigation of of my own mind.
Yes, thank you so much. I really appreciate your wisdom then. Yeah, to that this talk emphasize the need for both right that you started with the mind and realize, hey, the body is pretty important here. Yeah, when you started you’re like, I was thinking no matter how much I meditate if my gut is out of alignment, it’s I’m gonna be fighting gasps myself in that way. Or or if my god is perfectly healthy, but my subconscious mind is filled with negative beliefs, negative emotions, negative memories. I’m fighting against that no matter how perfect my My gut is so thank you for the dialogue I’m sure was quite beneficial for anybody listening and yeah I look forward to connecting with you again
thank you very much for having me
no thank you okay