Overcoming Deep Emotional Trauma - Unusual Approach

0:01 This program is designed to provide general information with regards to the subject matters covered. This information is given with the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas. At the end of the day, it's not about what you have or even what you've accomplished. It's about what you've done with those accomplishments. It's about who you've lifted up, who you've made better. It's about what you've given back. Thanzel Washington, Welcome to Inspire Vision. Our sole purpose is to elevate the lives of others and to inspire you to do the same. Rachel Lamb, Welcome to the show. Thank you, happy to be here. Hey, I'm really excited. You know, as we were talking a little bit earlier, I read an article about you and what you're doing and in the newspaper, and I thought, wow, that is so cool. I just really want to have you on the show. I'd love for you to share the audience who you are, your bio. That's not who you are, but what your bio is. Be very specific about that. And then once you've done that, what I'd like you to do is kind of share your story.

1:26 What I find fascinating is that as people get to that level where they're really really helping other people in different ways, there's always an intriguing story behind what brought them to that point. So bio and then I'd love for you to share your story of what brought you to this point in your life, of what you're doing for others. Yeah, that's great. So I you know, I do a lot of things, and really my whole life has kind of had me in a space where I'm in a helping position for other people. And I'm currently I'm a part time adjunct professor at Weber State University.

2:12 I teach in the psychology department. I also am academine assisted guide, so I was trained in kedemine assisted psychotherapy. I've been doing that work for about three years, been in a different few different clinics, done private work as well. So that's that's an interesting, little bit fringe kind of thing that's becoming more popular and people are certainly taking advantage of and then I am also a plant medicine integrative guide, so I work with some different plant medicines, happy to talk about those. And I work in a lot of spiritual spaces to work with people who are seeking healing from trauma. This is this is who seems to come to me. I actually don't advertise, I don't do anything. I just get recommendations and I work with people who are in need.

3:04 And starting from my very first ketemine clinic I worked at, I just seem to get paired with very severe, high trauma folks and have seen incredible healing from some of these modalities, which is why why I'm still here and why why I'm you know, improving and furthering my own education and in training and all of these things. So I'm also a mom. I'm a mom of a fifteen year old girl. Also do some freelance writing and things like that to try to put some things out there specific to mental health, specific too systemic oppression, racial, you know, systemic oppression and things like that.

3:45 I'm also a biracial person. I'm half Chinese. I have an immigrant father who came here in his twenties and then a kind of blue collar white American mother and so so there's a lot that adds to this whole mix of things. Yes, and how did you come to this point? Yes, I so as people here with other stories like this, I had a breakdown. I had a breakdown. I have suffered from depression on and off my whole life. Now I'm a forty four year old person. When I was a teenager and suffering from some of those symptoms, nobody was talking about this.

4:30 Nobody was talking about mental health. My mom didn't know about such things, you know, in a way that she could help me. So I have been a sufferer on and off for my whole life, you know, have been in and out of therapy, have been on and off medications. Was in kind of my full time career. I got my PhD in twenty thirteen, and I went into full time academic research. Enjoyed some of it, did not enjoy other parts of it, and I ended up in a really just high stress place that a depressive episode essentially hit me really really hard.

5:10 It was the worst one I've ever had, and that was five years ago. So that led me to quit my career. Essentially, I couldn't do the work I was not getting very good help. At the time, I was living in Switzerland. I had taken some job as overseas, and so we had to move back. We had to come back to the US. And so when I came back to the US in twenty eighteen, I was severely, severely depressed and severely suicidal, with a child who was at the time ten years old, and my ex husband and you know, trying to trying to work with me and work through all this. I realized that I was not doing a good job at self care. I was not taking care of myself emotionally. I wanted to help everybody else and I wanted to do all the work, and I ran myself completely just spread so thin, I was burnt out, I was hot, you know, in a state of high stress. I typically don't have anxiety with my depression episodes, but this time I had severe, severe anxiety with it, and so I got help. I took time off. I had the luxury of doing that.

6:26 My husband at the time worked and supported me that way, and it took about it took about a year. I have worked my entire life since age sixteen up until I was age thirty nine, and I took a year off. And what I did is I went to therapy twice a week starting. I bounced around amidst trying to get myself steady. And I started doing yoga and meditation every day. And I can tell you I was not motivated it would. I didn't think it was helping me. I just had nothing else to do. There would be days where I would be like, I could go to bed for the rest of the day, or let me do my fifteen minutes of meditation. And so I spent a year. I spent a year healing. And when I wanted to get back into the workforce, I did not want to go back to academic research. So I looked for teaching jobs and I reached out to some people I knew in mental health, and I said, how do I get into mental health? Can I get into mental health with a PhD in psychology that's not clinical and I don't have a license? Can I do that without going back to school for another degree that I don't really want to get? Right. So a man at the time who was a therapist, he said, I'm working at a Kenymyane clinic.

7:46 He said, you've a PhD in psychology, Come on over. We'll train you to be a guide. And so I didn't know what Kenemy was. I said, what's that? What's you know? I don't know anything about this. And he told me, you know this, it's a it's a psychedelic medicine. It's actually dissociative. He said, you know, it used to be known as a party drug. And I said, oh my gosh, you know all these you know, I'm like thinking, this is weird. So I jump into this world and I started to learn. I got trained, I started reading some of the actual research on it. It's fascinating research on all of the psychedelic delic medicines out there right now. It's like, no, the effectiveness of these is like nothing that's yet been seen in mental health. So I was kind of hooked in from that standpoint as well, because as an academic, I read the actual medical article, you know, I go through and I'm like, let me know about this, and it was so the work was so natural for me. The work was very very natural for me, and it was really just sitting with people while they take the medicine and go on a journey, go on a trip, and support them however they need. And a number of many things can happen when people are in such states, and so I seem to have this knack for just being in that space with people and holding space with people. My trainer at the time, she was like, you should keep doing this, and I said, I like this work. This is work that feels fulfilling.

9:13 Now it's not work I can do full time. I don't think anybody should do this full time because it's extremely intense. So this is why I sort of have my feet in a few different spaces right now. It's part of my own way to keep balance and then just keeping up on my own healing and self care, you know, doing the things that I need to do. I can't do this work. I can't do this healing work if I am not well. It's kind of like, you know, I have to keep my cup filled. I can't pour from an empty cup, those kinds of things. And so so that's kind of how I got to this place, and then from there have met a lot of folks in the communities around the whole world, to be honest, that are using different psychedelic medicines and plants in clinical trials and in indigenous you know, spaces and other countries where you know, there's different legalities and things like that, and so I've just been pretty plugged in as much as I can be since since starting with ketamine a few years ago. Well, you know, and I find that fascinating.

10:16 You talk about the research. I mean when when I was first looking at you know, having having a chat with you and I, you know, I saw that you were involved in quote ketamine clinic, and it's like, erwell, immediately what comes to my mind, is ketamine illegal really causing all sorts of problems within our country as well as others. And so I got on the internet and I said, all right, I want to I want to research what this is all about. And all of a sudden, here this is, you know, back to the Vietnam War and all of that. All of a sudden, scientists were finding that ketamine made a huge difference in in healing people and then getting into the whole aspect of mental health and how it really was starting to help people also, and it just it caused me to look at that from an entirely different perspective. And then you talk about the different psychedelic plans and so forth, which I find fascinating and yet you know, what I think for the audience is they're hearing us talk is kind of out there, you know, it's a little bit outside of the norm. And so what I want to do today is really help people to understand, based on your experience and your knowledge, what is it and how is it helping and why do we not need to be afraid of that approach, but also how do we make sure that we approach it in a

11:50 healthy, intelligent way rather than finding ourselves caught up in an addictive way. So, lots of things, lots of things there. So, first of all, ketamine is completely legal. Ketamine is used as an anesthesia in ers, for often the elderly and children because of how safe it is. It's one of the safest drugs out there. It's actually ketamine is considered I think a Schedule three. A lot of the other psychedelics are still considered Schedule one drugs, which is political. That's not because of the characteristics of what they have. And one of those is that they are not addictive. They are not addictive like opiates are. They're not addictive like alcohol is. So there's definitely stories of people using street ketamine. People on the street partying using ketamine.

12:46 You can get addicted to anything by the way, I mean you just shop and gambling, you know, So in that sense, like you know, just like any other thing that you can get into, you know, there's a risk in that. But ketamine is in particular, is very very safe. All of the psychedelic medicines, especially the plant based ones, are very very safe and they are not addictive. And so there's a lot of there's been a lot of just a bad reputation out there that started in the seventies, you know, that started with folks we're doing this research in the sixties, you know, fifties and sixties into the seventies, and everything got shut down. Nixon sort of shut everything down, and this War on drugs all these things, so that that's a whole other aspect of this. Ketamine is one hundred percent legal, and ketamine has been approved for I think they call it non like non label depression. So the research on ketymine right now is very positive for people who have treatment resistant depression. That's one of that's kind of the first place I would say where there's been a lot of work done. There's also research on ketymine and other psychedelics for addiction for PTSD works being done with veterans using psychedelic medicines. There's MDMA is another psychedelic that's in tons of clinical trials right now. Psilocybin mushrooms are another psychedelic that are in clinical trials, and Oregon it's looking like it's probably going to be the first

14:16 state that's going to have psilocybin clinics, just like we have ketamine clinics. So there's this ball that's been rolling. There's been very rigorous research that's been going on for several years now. So compared to and I'm not kidding when I say this, compared to the pain pills people get prescribed, these are extremely safe. These are actually extremely safe medicines. Now you do have a you you do enter into an altered state of consciousness with these medicines. So I'm going to just stick with ketamaine. I've worked with ketamine a lot, and it is legal right now in Utah right absolutely, Academy clinic all over Now, the way that I was trained in what I've seen out there, it really is beneficial. I would say it's actually necessary to have a guide.

15:11 There are kademine clinics that I see that sit you in a sterile room that looks like a dentist office, gives you drugs and goes into another room and monitors you from an iPad. And I do not think that is good practice. It's legal practice for now, but that that's that's not what I do, that's not what I learned. And so when you come into academy clinics. Academy clinic I was just working for. This has closed down since, but the owner's kind of restructuring and figuring some things out. I our model was to sit with people the entire time. One person will be with this person the entire time, which might last up to three hours. You can have a two to three hour depending on which depending on how you do it. You can get it via IV, you can get it via intramuscular injection, or you can get it via lozenges. So I worked primarily with lozenges at this last clinic. I worked with intramuscular injection and lozenges prior to that. So our model is to have a person sit with you and if you need to talk, you can talk a lot of times because you're in this altered state. You process trauma through your body. It's one aspect.

16:34 So you might hit flight flight and your body will have a response. Your hands might go ice cold, or you'll have to go to the bathroom, or you'll feel sick to your stomach. These things are all happening partly because you're in this altered state of consciousness that's letting your brain sort of be a little bit free. People will say, you know, your ego kind of goes to sleep. You kind of quiet down, your ego goes your protector. You quiet down your ego a little bit, and you can kind of process these things. So when you hit fight flight in these things, it's not like it happens like so PTSD. For instance, therapy is really hard to help PTSD because when you get triggered back into the trauma you fly into fight flight, you can't think anymore. Your brain's been hijacked. You've been hijacked essentially by your amigdilo, which is the part of your brain that is triggered with fight flight. So when you are unpsychedelic medicines, this is all very very different. You can hit kind of a trauma place and you don't have that same fear. You don't have that same like fear that kicks in.

17:45 You can have scary trips. I don't want to miss I don't want to mislead people with you. Don't just come and get high on drugs for two hours and feel happy and great. That can happen. You can have a very blissful, peaceful experience a lot of times with ketamine. Your first one or two will actually be kind of like that. And the way we talk about it is that the medicine sort of working on you and preparing you. These don't work on you like a benzodiazepine, for instance, Like you don't take like you take a benzodiazepine and it works on your brain immediately and you start to calm down. Psychedelic meds ketymine included, they are a catalyst for you to process and heal whatever it is that's inside of you. So it's different in that way and how it works. But you may have any number of situations going on. You might be crying and bawling and you need someone to hold you and hug you, and that's what I do. That's what I do as a guide in that moment. So I'm also trained in some energy work. I'm trained in some I practice chigong that might have been in the news circle, but I practice chigong every day and I use some of that to work on people as well. So I'll use you know, you can call it somatic therapy, like very gentle like pressure and massage on the hands and feet. It's to help ground people. If you do have some anxiety rising in a psychedelic journey, you can be help, you can be grounded, you can be kind of pulled back a little bit. And that's sort of that sort of part of this dance that I would do with people moment by moment, just with whatever they're needing. So in any case

19:21 that it can be a very I mean, I have seen very, very beautiful experiences. This is why I keep doing this. And I have had so many clients that are like, I've never touched your drug at all, but I have had depression or anxiety or PTSD or compet PTSD, you know, for decades, and I can't get help, and I want to try this, like it's legal. I'm ready to try something different, So you don't, you know, there's a lot of I think, just misconceptions and things like that out there about these medicines. But I mean I just encourage people read the research yourself. I mean, you know, like you went and you looked it up, You're like, oh this is interesting. Uh Like this is different. This is not how we thought about you know, I know, twenty years ago, if somebody said special K to me, I would go, oh, yeah that party drug. Isn't that a horse trank light? You know, you just random stuff on the street. And here now it is. I mean, it's being used very very effectively for all kinds of all kinds of trauma related depression, anxiety, P two, you know, all these things, which I do think at the root of all of those things is trauma, is unresolved trauma. And so I see this whole kind of world of medicines that we have and practices, you know, the guidework that comes with it. The other piece of this that is missing in some places is integration, what we call integration. Our clinic did

20:51 integration. It was kind of mandatory. You have to do integration after you have journey or after you have session, and that's meeting afterwards when you're not compromised and you're in your normal state of consciousness and talking about what happened, and talking about how to incorporate what you learn from that experience and what came from there into your actual daily life to have new practices and to make those new practices have it, you know, to make the healthy practices have it. So this should all be involved with all of these medicines. In my opinion, it's not always. So people should definitely do their homework, be careful. If you're going to seek this out, look for places where they offer guides for you. Sometimes it's a therapist, sometimes it's a licensed therapist that's also trained to guide. And then if you dip into other spaces, you know, in other places where you have access to different plants and things, that's often done with a shaman or you know, an indigenous healer, people on native reservations, you know, to do some of this work, do your homework and talk to people and get a sense feel them out.

22:03 If they feel wrong, don't go with them. If someone feels safe to you, you can continue on that path of learning and seeking out kind of what you need. So it is I think there is a little bit of a different caution people have to take because there's still a lot of things that aren't regulated, and there's still conversation in the community about who gets to be a guide. People will tell me, well, you shouldn't be a guie because you're not a licensed therapist. And I'm like, there's one hundred thousand years of shops doing this work like that didn't take credics or whatever. You know what I mean, you know, I laugh. I laugh about Rachel because you know, it's like, here, you are a PhD. Now, admittedly you know it had to do with some you know, the research.

22:49 I have a daughter. Unfortunately I wish I was. Yeah, and you know, yeah, it doesn't matter because what any of us know that have gone through that process of education, okay, is that the reality is is that once you've gone through the schooling, you can then with that interest in, with that curiosity, study and all of a sudden that you become as proficient in other areas without quote the degree. And as you say, you have to be careful as you're seeking help, because there are some that just jump right into it. There are others that such as yourself, that have really taken the time to learn, to study, to be trained.

23:36 And guess what it's It's like you know you have your PhD in that too. It's just that you can't legally quote say that you do what. I don't know you any therapy because I'm not. But you guide, you guide, yes. And so one thing you mentioned Safe Harbor Ketamine clinic that's no longer open. It's no longer open. Yeah. We stayed open for about a year and three months, so we serve a lot of people. It was a lot of beautiful feeling that we saw there, and the owner just a couple of months ago she decided to close down. So Saber is no longer We're hoping it will come back. Okay, you know what I want to talk about, and this is where my mind goes, so you know, forgive me, But where are you going? You know, as I've been, first of all, meditation. I love meditation. I started that a number of months ago and now as I walk and I do a walking meditation, sometimes I'm just listening to music that's kind of that HEMI sync that my understandings. That helped your bringing to become more more focused and appropriate there.

24:51 But I've also been listening to some interesting books. One one of them in listening to is Eckhart Totally is a New Earth, And in there he talks about and you said some keywords that really struck me on this. He talked about consciousness, he talked about ego, and as you're talking about these psychedelic quote psychedelic drugs, you know, what came to my mind from a scientific standpoint is that what's really happening is that people are getting rid of that ego. People are getting into out of that unconsciousness that we all live with every day, and they're getting into a consciousness because you're eliminating at that moment that that awareness, you know, and all of that type of stuff that normally happens where we're writing our story, where we have all those memories, where we have all those emotions, and all of a sudden, in my mind, you're helping them get to that point through the psychedelic aspect to where, for instance, you know, Totally was talking about doing that. In fact, I'm listening to the book because I do it on autible. As I'm listening to that, I'm going, all right, you know, I love the theory, I love everything you're talking about, but guess what you're not really talking about. How does an individual step by step accomplish that to

26:23 some degree. And so as you've been talking about these things, what comes to my mind is literally what you were doing with the psychedelics is helping people to reach that type of state in a way that they can start to eliminate some of those past memories, some of those past emotions. And particularly what I love is, as you say afterwards, then you get into while they're conscious, you're actually talking about how can they then incorporate that into their lives. What are your thoughts? I really I love all this this, These are all the things I love to talk about. So I'll talk a little bit about trauma because I really think that's where we have to start. So to start so young, all of us, you know, the world is hard work. This world is hard, and there's challenges, and there's hardships, and and we're we're all traumatized. We're all traumatized in some some way people who suffer real severe kinds of traumas starting in childhood. A lot of this is abuse. It's sexual abuse. There's a lot of sexual abuse out there. It's physical, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, it's neglect. Neglect is horrendously harmful on a developing child's brain. People say neglect is actually worse than abuse on the on what it actually does interesting, so different ways that

27:53 you can talk about this. You know, I'll bring us to adulthood. So you're a little for your old person who is getting sexually abused by a family member. This is a very common thing I see in high trauma. Yes, so you dissociate typically when you feel trapped. So your your body goes through some different things. First you have fight flight. Now, fight flight pumps blood to your limbs and raises your heart rate and does the things for you to actually move. That's what it's for. If you're a small child and eat in your mind or physically actually physically, you are trapped in a place where something is being done to you that is abusive and harmful.

28:47 Fight flight. When that doesn't work because you are trapped, you downregulate. This is out of something called polyvagel theory by Stephen Porges. You downregulate and you go to what's called mobilization. You shut down. Animals actually do this in the wild. This is what playing dead is. Like a possum playing dead, their body literally goes into this immobilization state because they're about to die and their last line of defense is to play dead. So the ways this seems to manifest in people is we dissociate, We go somewhere else in our minds, We shut off our mind from our body. And there's different there's different models that can explain kind of what this means. One model it comes out of something called internal family systems. I actually really like this model of therapy because I think it resonates well with how to deal with trauma. They call it kind of, you know, a piece of you, a piece of your personality, a piece of your psyche, of your piece of your personhood at that time goes into hiding, kind of gets lodged away somewhere in the subconscious. And so this little person that's been abused grows up to become, you know, a twenty two year old woman, let's say, and has a bunch of intimacy issues, has fear of men, or you know, if it was a male abuse, or or has you know, has all this stuff and can't have a good relationship. It doesn't do well in relationships. Now that little four year old isn't hiding, That little four year

30:18 old needs to be rescued. Actually, that little four year old needs to be found, healed, and integrated back into the self. So if I use another model, if I use like a spiritual shamanic model, the soul, that the soul splits away at that point, so same thing that's still going to affect you when you grow up. You don't know that this is over here because you're that's in the subconscious that you don't have awareness of. And so you can have that soul be returned and integrated back into your personhood, into your now soul. And so the thing that I think, and it doesn't have to be psychedelics, altered states of consciousness allow you access to what's out here because of what it's doing in your mind and brain, and so you suddenly you're like, oh my gosh, you know, I found I found my little girl, I found I found that little person. Prayer, you know, contemplative prayer, breathwork, holotropic breath work, intense deep meditations, trance, all those things actually take you to altered states. Dreaming is an altered state of consciousness. Psychedelics take you there real fast and in a space with a person, a guide who then might be able to talk you through. You know, let's say you meet that four year old.

31:45 I mean, these are things that happen in your journeys. You know, you have a trained therapist guide whoever that can say, oh, you know, do you see her? Can you imagine her? Can you imagine that little girl? What does she look like? Describe her to me? And this is when people will just start crying. They'll just start sobbing because they haven't interacted and connected with this part of themselves for so long. So you have those kind of things that get kind of drudged up in your journeys. And then afterwards, again that integration part, you say to the person, Okay, this is what happened. You know, I'm a person I take very careful notes. I go through every moment I can have recorded and can remember. I want to talk to the person the next day, within a day after so we can download all that information together and then we go, Okay, here's how you continue to connect to that four year old. You know, I did this myself. I'll share a little personal story and I actually didn't do this with plant medicine. I did this with my therapist here in Utah who was trained in art therapy and drama therapy, and she she was an energy worker, so she was kind of a little bit on the fringes, right, still a license therapist, but a little bit on the fringes. And she talked to me through she had me do a role play, a guided imagery role play where I reunited with other selves of mine that

33:17 had I had sort of gone into hiding for my own trauma, and I reconnected with them and I had a little post it. I kept it in a book I read every single day that said, have you checked in with your six year old? So it's there's a lot of really creative ways that you can take what happens and integrate it. You know. It's some people are like, well, you just seem like you're talking to yourself. Yeah, I am. That's okay, That's that's what I'm doing in that case, I'm talking to myself. So, you know, the positive language, positive messaging, like the rewriting. I talk with my clients. I talk a lot about we have to overwrite that default programming that that trauma did to you, that told you you're unworthy, that told you you're a burden, that told you you're not you know, you're you're not worth living or you don't deserve good things that those are bad programming, Like that's bad program those are bad messages. So part of integration is repetition of good messaging, talking to yourself in healthy ways and doing your self care. That's different for everybody.

34:22 For me, it's doing chiegong every day. It's meditating a few times a week, it's doing yoga a few times a week like that. Those are parts of my you know, eating a healthy diettata, all the things. I mean when I when I start working with people who are really severely traumatized, we are like one thing at a time, We'll just folk you will focus maybe on one thing at a time and work up from there. But it's all of that. It's all of that, the pre, the during, the after. It is for me, it's all part of the healing process. And if any bits of those are missing and you're gonna you're gonna be less effective basically, right, if you get if you go have a journey, if you go do ten yahuasca ceremonies in Peru and have no integration and no practices you change in your life afterwards, you're probably going to end up back where you were I mean that's yeah, yeah, and okay.

35:15 Chigong, I don't even know what that is, and a lot of people don't know what that is. Explained to the audage, what that is is out of traditional Chinese medicine, and most people have heard of tai chi, so she ei chi chi and chikong chigong spelled a little usually differently, I mean in English or whatever. She is energy she is, you know, is the energy flowing through your body. Essentially, our bodies are running off of electro chemical impulses that go from our central nervous system toward back and forth back. You know, we have electricity. This is this is life. It's all running through bodies. So let's call it energy. Chikong is thousand plus five thousand year old practice. I don't know how old. It's very very old. That operates off the traditional Chinese medicine's model of the body's energy systems and how they work. So chiegong involves evolves certain kinds of movement, so it involves touching parts of your scalp, maybe your ears. So if anybody's people who know what acupuncture is, usually right, acupuncture the same energy system traditional Chinese medicine. So a lot of times when you get acupuncture, you will get it in your ears because there's a bunch of energy points in your ears, because the energy flow aligns from here down into your stomach or your liver or your organs, your different body parts. So it's it's

36:47 all a solely different kind of system. You might there's some pressure points and hitting your body. You'll see people if you you're you're in Highland. I wonder if you if you see this in Thailand. I lived in Singapore for a little while. There would be Asian folks in the park slapping their arms against their body and bringing their arms around, and you know they're typically older people. It's kind of like this funny thing. I'm head of that direction. I'm headed right there. It's patting your body, it's hitting, moving and kind of putting pressure on different energy points throughout your body to basically remove blockages. So what I mean by that is like your energy kind of can get stagnant. When you go to a Chinese medicine doctor, they talk about like like your energy is stagnant, like it's not flowing. So you can do these actual external pressure things and movements to have the energy flowing better.

37:43 When the energy system of your body is flowing efficiently and effectively, it allows your body to heal itself better. We are all healing ourselves all the time. Our body's regenerating when you are under high stress, when your body hasn't been moving when you are you know again, it's it's, it's, it's. I think stagnation is just the best word I can think of it. You feel sick and tired. You don't actually physically heal as quickly. Mental health stuff is harder. So Chiegong is a practice of energy movement for yourself, for you to make the energy in your own body flow better so that your body can just do what it's supposed to do, which is heal.

38:31 Oh and I love that, you know what I love though. One of the things that you said that I think is so important is this concept of integration, because you're right. So often, you know, we go through this whole process, whether it's with a therapist or whatever, of discovering what those inner stories are and so forth, and then that's it. You walk away and it never goes away because you've never learned consciously and mindset why to integrate those things into our lives. What what I find fascinating And I've heard it said in a few different ways, and the way that you've said it, you know, as we become aware of that little child, for instance, with the trauma situation, as we become aware of that little child, and as I've learned a little bit more about meditation, is like, as you become more aware, more conscious of those things, somehow the effects of that trauma goes away and you don't experience that anymore. And one of the things that you're saying is as you are, you know, as you're becoming more aware of that, you have to add to that some type of integrative practice in order for it to remain away. Could could you just very briefly explain what you mean by that? Yeah, lots lots of good stuff there.

39:58 So it's one of the ways that I understand healing is when you can take a trauma and start to weave it into your current story. That's really really scary to start out, and a lot of people when they start talking about it, they'll hit fight flight and then they shut down. And so there's that aspect where once you can have the conscious awareness of what's there, that's a big step to get to for a lot of people, because a lot of people have repressed memories. They for a long time. Stuff starts to creep up and it's like, oh my god, nope, nope, there's a lot of denial. This is just part of the whole process, you know, when you're kind of working with people in this way. So the awareness, you know, you can't do anything with it if you don't know about it, right, So the awareness has to come. It gets there. It's hard, it's difficult, and that's part of the reason I think of having that. You know, you need a safe person. You need hopefully safe person that is in your family, that maybe lives with you as close to you that can be a support for you during a healing time.

41:07 I tell a lot of my clients like, you're on your healing vacation, just don't you know, don't try to do too much, don't put too much on yourself, because this is actually really hard work. And integration, sorry to tell folks, is hard work. Everybody that comes to me and I'm like, you're going to work really hard, and this is going to be super hard. FYI. When you actually really want to address your trauma. It's going to hurt and it's going to be hard, but you're going to do it with a person. You're not going to do this alone. And so so I think, yeah, people have to have I mean, people are desperate a lot of time when people want to quick fix because they've been dealing with their stuff for so long, you know. Sometimes I mean you just like and the reality is you have to work. You have to work for this, so you have to actually do the meditation right, You actually have to do it every day. And I'll work with people to say, you know what, put it on your calendar. Let it be an alarm on your phone that reminds you, oh, I have to practice this every day. Because when you practice it every day or regularly in some way, that's what creates the new brain connections that will stick. Repetition of these experiences is going to be all habits and things stick. So, just like what you're saying, you go to the therapy office and you learn all these great things, but then you don't go home and do any of it.

42:31 It's going to just start to fade away. You know, maybe you come back the next week or in two weeks, but you really have to take that on and do whatever. A little bit I tell people, you know, it is overwhelmed, especially when you're decrest and anxious in all these things. One thing, you know, walk Just walk for five minutes a day. That's it. Walk for five minutes a day and look at your surroundings. That's all. Notice the colors, notice the breeze, notice the temperature. It is a lot of it's training for helping them train themselves to be in the present moment, to be mindful. Yes, yes, and so be mindful or be conscious or whatever that happens to be. So, as we're getting near the end of one of the things that I want to ask, and this comes to my mind. You know, at least my experience has been there's so much that it's like, all right, I'm going to overcome this. I'm going to overcome this. Okay, done, done, and then go back to regular life. And my question for you is is this a eternal experience to where once you are starting to experience that freedom from those traumas, that freedom from those limiting beliefs, the freedom from whatever messages you got as a child or whatever, is it done or is it really wise to continue the meditation to continue that integration, because that's what helps

44:07 to maintain that sense of freedom and piece as you say, yeah, one hundred percent. And the thing that I that I that I usually will say to people is like because they're like, Okay, I'm gonna done it, work really hard, and then I'm going to be done and I'm going to go back to normal. And then I'm like, no, then you're going to be done and step into your new life. Then you're going to be done, and you're going to step into your new way that you are. And I bet you you're going to keep up your practices because you're going to have felt how much they've helped you. That is just a little bit what happened to me personally. I actually so my story I tell about meditation.

44:47 I did it on autopilot robot for four months every single day. I don't know what in me had this diligence at least to do that every day. But I did a Zazen meditation that I learned out of a book, which is just a sitting meditation. It just happened to be. I was working through a book on you know, mindfulness and a workbook on acceptance. Commitment therapy, and I learned this strategy out of there and I tried to do it and I started, and I was like, I'm terrible at this. I can't get rid of my thoughts. I can't do anything, you know. I was just and I just I just did it. I just sat there and I did it, and I did it for fifteen minutes a day. I would set a timer and I make myself sit there. And then all of a sudden, four months, four months, I did this every day and felt nothing like it wasn't working. I was also severely depressed, suicidal, seeing therapists and bouncing around on Western meds. Four months hit and I was like I woke up with dan. I was like, I need to meditate. I was like, oh, I finally sunk in, Like I had done it enough that it finally created the habit for me. I'm like, oh, this is helpful. I feel the helpfulness of it now now. Other things like if you start doing a little bit of exercise every day, you'll notice the day you skip it. That's what happens to me now with Chiegong. So with Cheegong, I used to do yoga every day.

46:13 I kind of shifted into cheekong. I know a couple of different forms of it now that I really like. If I'm in a hurry, if I wake up and I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna do my cheekong later, I feel it. I feel that. So I think when you start healthy practices, it's not to kind of like get over your thing and be done. I think it's to live because they're going to feel good to you and you're going to want to do them going forward. So I love that, And that's a great conclusion to our conversation today, Rachel, this has been fascinating. I'm just fascinated by what you're doing, your own journey and the thoughts that you have, and particularly even from you know, we can call a scientific aspect, but the reality is helping people understand that, you know what, you can't just go and get it done and then you're over with it. That this becomes a new life, a new experience, and if that's what you want, then it takes that energy and that desire and that willingness to actually create that new life for yourself. How do people find you? Because the clinic is closed, so how do people find you if they need some help. Yeah, I mean I am happy to you know, share info. I have a I have an email address I use for business which is just Rachel dot Lam dot PhD at gmail dot com that people

47:43 can get to me through that through LinkedIn, through my weaber email that I'm just sort of it's it's there's a lot of in the community word of mouth that gets passed around and things like that. But no, I'm happy to share that info on here. And then I have a business number that I use as well that do you want me to share it on here? I'm happy to share it on here. Now you don't need to share it on here. I was gonna look at I have to look it up. I don't have a memorized but yeah, right now I am in some different mixes of some new things coming up, So I'm trying to see which direction to go. I don't know if I want to put my foot a little bit deeper in the university and maybe see about doing some research on the psychological end of this healing work, or go back. I have some potential opportunities to go work with ketamine again and that I'm looking at right now, and and also just continuing I'm in my own training for learning different techniques in indigenous practices with plant medicine, and so I'm keeping myself kind of open to what's next and part of my own journey. But yeah, people can just email me or look me up and and find me. Saw me. They'll find They'll find you on the internet. R A C H E. L L A M. And if they google that, they're going to find you, Rachel.

49:15 This has been wonderful and and thank you. You know, what I find so fascinating is how certain individuals experience things in their lives and it becomes a motivator. And you know, even though they've gone in a certain direction here you get your pH d and research and so forth, and it has certainly aided you in being able to develop into the situation that you're in now. But what a wonderful blessing to have individuals such as yourself that are willing to do that and spend the effort and the time and then give back and do what it takes to help other people to live a better life, a happier life, and to overcome some of those traumas in their lives. And experiencing that piece I love it, so thank you, Thank you for saying that. I take that, I receive that, I take that to heart.

50:08 Thank you so much. Happy to be on here and just spread the word. Well, I appreciate it. Folks. I hope this has been fascinating for you, and please, please please look at this very carefully, very cautiously, and yet look at it and see if this type of approach can be of value to you, particularly if other approaches have not been of value. So anyway, thanks for joining us, or look forward to having you join us again soon