Consciousness Explored – Episode 10
The Power of Somatic Healing (Laura Bautista)
Laura Bautista: In somatic work, in nervous system healing work, when someone goes into their trauma, they can actually very easily end up in a helpless place where the trauma got stored, time stopped for that nervous system. That’s actually what it feels like and what happens. But when you can restore agency through anger, it’s really a cool thing.
Melissa Deal: Hello, and welcome to Consciousness Explored, where we delve into the human experience and consciousness. I’m your host, Melissa Deal. In each episode, we’ll be diving deep into ways to expand our consciousness and the impact that our understanding of consciousness has on every aspect of our lives.
On today’s episode, I’ve invited Laura Bautista. Laura is a board-certified holistic practitioner and high-performance health coach. After healing herself from years of severe autoimmune conditions and other health issues, she began teaching others how to advocate for themselves and find the same level of health and freedom. Laura will share her incredibly inspiring personal journey, and then we’ll dig deep into how expanding our consciousness can lead to miraculous changes in our health and overall physicality.
Laura Bautista: My parents are from the Dominican Republic. They moved here when my mother was pregnant with me. So they’re immigrants moving to this new country from Dominican Republic to New York City. And I was born in the Bronx. I was born and raised in the Bronx. And most immigrant families, I would say first generation kids have a lot of pressure, right? And there’s not a lot of choices for going outside the box. What are you going to do? You going to do business or are you going to be a doctor? Like, those were my options, and so I chose business because at the time, I thought it was much easier.
My parents sent us to Catholic school, so I went to Catholic school K through 12. And they were very strict about certain things, but they also wanted us to expand and open our minds. My father was more strict, and my mother was, I love you no matter what. You can do anything you want in this world. And she was also quite religious. She had her own, like, relationship with God that wasn’t necessarily tied to Catholicism, although she would call herself Catholic. So I learned a lot from her, how to make your spirituality personal. So I grew up as a really spiritual kid.
I was naturally curious, and I always knew that I was here to help people. When I was like, three or four, my older sister Lorena told me; she was one year older than me, so she was about five. She told me that there were aliens living inside of my body and they like to hang out inside of my eyes and they like to watch my life. So I better make sure that’s not boring and that everything gets the right amount of time, equal amount of playtime with different things. And I believed her for a really, really, really long time.
And so my life was just this cartoon. It was just making every moment really count. I think about this, like, brilliant child in all of her presence and all of her, like, innate imagination. That’s one of the things that shaped me, for sure.
Melissa: Laura describes her childhood and adolescence as pretty normal for growing up in the city, except that she seemed to get sick a lot. She had chronic digestive problems, frequent colds and flus, random skin conditions, and general immune issues. By the time she was a young adult working and starting out in life, she had grown pretty accustomed to always dealing with one physical ailment or another. She had normalized living with less-than-ideal health until something happened that she couldn’t normalize or just brush off. And life, as she knew it, changed forever.
Laura: At 21 years old, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called multiple sclerosis, which many people have heard of. And it’s an autoimmune disease. It’s neurodegenerative in nature and in the western model, there’s no cure. I woke up one morning, I was 21 years old, and my fingers were all, like, gnarled up, and I couldn’t stop straighten out my hand. It was like a claw when I woke up. And I couldn’t straighten out my fingers without pressing the fingers flat. And it felt like there was like electricity, like electric shocks flowing through my arm.
My dad is a medical doctor. I come from medical family, so lots of access to healthcare, had the best insurance that you can have, always worked administratively in hospitals and in Western healthcare. My father being a medical doctor, we got in to see a medical doctor right away. The diagnostic process for MS involves MRIs. It involves EEGs, where they put these like, little electrodes up to your brain, and it involves a spinal tap, so a lumbar puncture, which is one of the most excruciatingly painful things that I think a human can go through, at least in my life. It’s the most painful experience I’ve ever had; physical body wise.
Results came back. Everything was supportive of MS. And one thing that I think is really significant, and I see how much it impacts people today, is how that information was delivered to me, the diagnosis itself. My mother drove me to the doctor’s office that day. We’re going to get the results from the lumbar puncture, the MRIs, and all of the things. I’d never met the doctor before, but he was like a top guy in the hospital that I was going to.
And we sit down, he has my results in front of him, and he looks at me, and he goes, well, get ready because everything in your life is about to change because you actually have this diagnosis called multiple sclerosis. Never goes away. It’s one of those things that you’re never going to get better. But if you take these medications, there’s a chance that you might not get worse. And there’s also a chance that you could go blind, end up in a wheelchair, lose control of your bowels, and lose your sex drive over time.
All of this was delivered in one shot. And so as soon as he said this, I start crying, right? The immediate shock. And then there was tears. And with the tears, he looked at me and he said, you need to stop crying and think about your questions. What are your questions? We don’t have a lot of time together. I was just, like, stunned. My mother’s standing there. My father was also there, who’s a medical doctor. Imagine having a medical doctor with you at the doctor’s office, right? They know all the questions to ask. They know they can make things happen faster. That’s just the way it is in the model.
And yet getting this information and feeling completely shattered, completely disempowered, but also confused about what this meant for my life moving forward. And so with that diagnosis came a huge life change. I had to start taking daily injections, subcutaneous. So they had to use this, like, really gnarly, like, needle gun thing. It was, like, very shocking to the system. I developed all sorts of anxiety from the unknowns of this autoimmune condition. I would have to be hospitalized at least a couple of times a year because there were times where I couldn’t even stand upright for very long.
In fact, I would have to have my mother kind of, like, stand up right outside the shower to make sure that I didn’t fall down, because there were times where it felt like the right side of my body was carrying my left. There were no answers. There was no hope at all in that system. It was basically this. This is just the way it is for you now. And then the medication wasn’t helping. It wasn’t working.
So my father couldn’t believe that his daughter had this condition. And he started looking into all of these different alternative models of medicine and found people like Dr. Terry Walls, who is a medical doctor who ended up with MS, got diagnosed with MS. She ended up all the way in a wheelchair. And then through functional medicine, she created her own protocol and today is walking and teaching tons of people how to heal themselves. So he put me onto her, put me onto this other doctor, Mark Hyman, who’s another functional medicine guy, teaching about the gut brain connection. If your gut is in balance, well, that’s going to wreak havoc on your brain and all the communication and all of the systems and how they interplay.
Melissa: Laura dove into further research of her own, determined to find a way around the morbid prognosis she’d received. She became passionate about alternatives to the Western medical model. Her passion grew along with her curiosity and sense of self-worth as she began to discover that there were so many more options for her than she had been told. She went back to talk to her doctor, only to find out that he was no longer there. So she decided to meet with the new doctor. That appointment is what Laura refers to as her no more moment, and probably the most important catalyst to her transformation and healing.
Laura: We sit down and I tell her, I say, listen, the injections are killing me. Like I’m not doing them anymore. And she said, okay, well, there’s this clinical trial drug that actually is doing pretty well. It’s a pill form, so you won’t have to take the injections anymore. And so we’ll get you started on that. And I’m like, alright, fine. And then she says, however, the only side effect is this pill will slow down your heart rate. And so we’re just going to have to add on some other EKGs and some other testing. I could only imagine the face that I gave her in that moment. But then I looked at my father and I said, let’s, let’s just go.
And so we left that day and that was it. And that’s where I found all of these people healing from all of this stuff that I had heard my whole life. You have to either take a pill for that forever, get surgery, or just be sick. So this just sparked so much inspiration in me. And from there, I, man, I just, I didn’t stop. I just kept studying, I kept applying to myself, using my own body to learn through, and then learning from teachers and schools and training companies, from all of these different modalities because what I know now is that the body only heals when it is calm and from an implicit place, calm. So beyond mindset. This is from feeling like a new sense of hope, a new sense of possibility, a new level of consciousness.
Melissa: Thank you so much, Laura, for sharing your story. I have really been looking forward to this episode because I know I can totally relate. And I believe that so many people will be able to relate to this, especially if they’ve been subjected to Western concepts of health. I really can’t wait to go into all this with you. But first, could you explain to us how you personally describe or define consciousness?
Laura: So, consciousness, to me, it’s the aspect of us from which we move. It’s the aspect of us that kind of drives our intentions and what we think is possible. It drives our agreements with life and with other people, which ultimately manifests our reality. So to me, consciousness is really, it’s like the ether element of reality, because from there is where everything else, you know, really stems from.
Melissa: That’s great. That’s great. I love that. So let’s start out talking about why consciousness matters when it comes to our health because I think it really does matter. And I’ll begin a little bit from my own perspective of where I’m coming from with it. And then I want you to add on and go into it. But for me, I don’t really participate in Western medicine. If I get hit by a bus and I’m bleeding out, take me to the ER because I think there’s a lot of value in acute emergency care.
But that’s not what we’ve done here in the west. We’ve elevated, you know, Western medicine to a level that it has not earned or deserved by any means. So for me, being able to heal non-trauma related issues requires that expanded awareness, that expanded consciousness to be able to take into consideration things like the energetic body, epigenetics, trapped emotions, things like that. Can you give your take on that? And from your experience and your perspective, your feelings about that.
Laura: I totally agree. I really loved how you said it’s elevated to this place, that it’s not earned, it’s not deserved. And where success seems to really come from is this place of being able to go beyond that. But you can’t necessarily reach a goal or get somewhere if you don’t even know that it’s possible to get there, right? Which in this model, it’s not even available. And how can you build a bridge to walk towards something, right, if your consciousness isn’t even attuned to it?
What if the answer is not, this is just the way it is for you now? What if that’s the answer? But what if you’ve never heard that before? What if you’ve never heard of someone who has similar issues or roadblocks as you, but has overcome them. And it’s interesting because it’s your beliefs, right? Consciousness directly informs your belief system, right? And from there, your intentions and your agreements and where you’re going to show up in life, in the healing process itself, right? You can start something, and you can feel amazing.
One of the first things that I did was I started with green smoothies. I started making kale and strawberry smoothies with, like, organic frozen fruit and vegetables. I was so depleted nutritionally that any increase in vegetables and fruit and real whole foods like that can make an incredible transformation. And so I’m on this. Oh, my gosh. This is amazing. This is so cool. Then I get to a point where I hit a roadblock, and I’m like, okay, now I’m here. But then, now there’s all this stored trauma coming up for me. What do I do with that?
I see that with clients a lot, too, where they’ll do the nutrition, they’ll do the testing, they’ll do the supplements, they’ll do the energy work, but then they hit these trauma roadblocks, and that really impacts the biology, you know, it really, really does. And then it also impacts progress. And then they’re brought back down to this kind of lower vibe, lower consciousness place where it’s much harder to move from.
The consciousness is informing the body. The nervous system is informing your thoughts. So when someone is, like, feeling rocked or off their path or, like they’re not making progress, the answer is usually not more of something. The answer is usually reconnecting to this place of higher consciousness, right? And then in life, we get to define what those access points are.
Melissa: Good. And let’s go ahead and get into that and talk about somatic experiencing a little bit more about trauma leading to physical conditions in the body and your work with somatic experiencing.
Laura: When I started health coaching and really when I started even healing myself, it’s all about root causes. It’s like we have these stressors that have impacted us largely in some way at some point of our life and trauma is one of those things. Big trauma, what we would commonly relate to; big T, right? Big traumas, where these big, chaotic events happen to you, kind of catastrophic events. Before we even talk about somatic experiencing, we’ll kind of define trauma because sometimes people will hear the word trauma, and they’ll be like, oh, I don’t have trauma. I had a good childhood, or my parents, they’re still together, and all of these things.
There’s a couple of definitions that I think are really significant that really changed my life to know. So the first definition is trauma is the body’s perception, experience of too much too fast. So like a shock to the system, right? Emotionally, physically, right? There’s car accidents forms of trauma. There’s something being taken away from you, but it’s really the perception of that too much too fast. And then the other definition that I think is really important is it’s also not enough for too long. So that’s things like contact nutrition as a child, being heard, being seen, these kinds of things.
When these things are left unresolved, what we know and what we’re learning more and more about is that these experiences where the body perceived so much stress in the system, these experiences can cause a trauma response, which is, for example, the freeze response. You may have heard of fight or flight.
Melissa: And fawn.I’m a fawner.
Laura: Freeze happens when fight or flight no longer feels like an option. That’s when freeze happens. And that is the body’s protective mechanism of making sure that it’s not too much for this body because the main function of the autonomic nervous system is it’s for your survival, right. That’s why fight or flight exists. When it becomes a problem is when the body is thinking that not being able to find your keys is having to run away from a bear like that, the response is the same. Or when you get an email and you, I don’t know, it’s something that you’ve been avoiding, and you just freeze up, right?
Freeze is a spectrum, but it’s one form of a trauma response that when freeze happens, for example, for whatever reason, whatever shock that it happens, digestion shuts down because all of the energy needs to go to your arms and legs, right? So that you can GTFO, right, and get out of there. So when that happens, but you’re not in a place where there’s actual danger, but there’s this freeze pattern that keeps coming online, and your digestion is constantly shutting down, for example, having constipation issues or just not going to the bathroom regularly.
So many people have these issues. Oftentimes, it’s related to the nervous system. And if you support the nervous system, all these other things like start to come online. The colon, being the main drain, can start to come online and get rid of all these toxins that are setting people up for chronic diseases. All these things communicating with one another. It’s one body.
Melissa: Yeah, but that is one thing that really have created a huge problem in our system, compartmentalizing and specializing as though these parts of the body work independently of one another and isolating. Let’s fix this kidney as though it functions in a void by itself.
Laura: We even have this mind body term, like, when did it all get separated?
Melissa: It’s crazy how it happened and how we don’t pay attention to that. And what if you don’t even know that you can be curious? What if you know that you are going to be scorned and laughed at and ridiculed and treated like an idiot if you even dare to get curious about your own body. There’s something very wrong with that.
Laura: When I first got into this stuff, I was angry. Like, I was pissed. I didn’t know all this information. I was like, how could I not know this? And how come people aren’t being told this? So I had this very different level of consciousness where I was moving from with my work. And it was this kind of anti-place, like anti big pharma. But I started to really realize this actually isn’t what feels most congruent, it isn’t my role. I just kept studying many modalities outside of the Western model that are solution focused.
And that’s really the only way I think that it can be sustainable that the reason people have symptoms is because of the cumulative stressors in their life and in and around their environment and how the genes are reacting to that. And are the genes moving toward a place of health or are they moving toward a place of disease process? But again, nobody tells you that. And that’s what’s cool about root cause medicine and epigenetics and all of this is that it’s not medicine. When we have these trauma responses, the nervous system, which regulates things like blood pressure, your heartbeat, saliva.
Melissa: Chemistry and hormones.
Laura: Yes. And so when this gets disrupted or slowed down, or the body thinks it needs to fight or be in a stress mode for too long, it depletes these other systems that need energy. It takes energy away, and people will feel that, right? In the form of fatigue, in the form of just not feeling like themselves. They don’t have vitality anymore. The good news is there’s a lot that can be done. I’m living proof.
Melissa: And that leads right into my next question, so that’s fantastic. I do want to take a quick aside and say that as far as your step in the anti this, anti that, and the anger, I believe that’s a really important step from powerlessness to empowerment.
Laura: It’s really cool to watch yourself evolve. In somatic work and nervous system healing work, when someone goes into their trauma, they can actually very easily end up in a helpless place where the trauma got stored. Time stopped for that nervous system. That’s actually what it feels like and what it happens. But when you can restore agency through anger, it’s really a cool thing. So that’s a very important point.
Melissa: One thing that we haven’t talked about, but we’ve skirted around it and everyone does it, we all do until we know better, is normalizing symptoms. Let’s talk about what that is, that process and what that leads to.
Laura: So, normalizing symptoms. The phrase that comes up here for me is, and you may have heard this before, I’ve heard this in a couple of different ways, but that common does not equal normal, right? So if you’re a woman, when you’re a child and you’re a little girl, or it’s preteen and you’re learning about your period, what do you learn about? Learning your period sucks. It’s really painful. You’re going to be really emotional and, oh, it’s just, oh, you’re PMS-ing, right? That’s totally normal. Bad PMS is not normal. It’s incredibly common.
But it’s really a big sign of health, right? This is a monthly cycle that your body does. And so, no, you don’t have a birth control deficiency, right? Oftentimes these young girls are put on birth control to regulate their period. And then birth control has, like, really insane long term side effects. Even some, if they just take it for a short period of time, because not all of us are the same. So this normalizing of pharmaceuticals, this normalizing of a pill for every ill, you got a headache, take a pill, you got a stomachache, take a pill. You get constipated, take a liquid thing. This is just really dangerous. It’s a slippery slope. And it feeds this consciousness, right? Long term.
Melissa: It’s the consciousness part that I wanted to get to because it’s fascinating how we can be so dissonant in a lower consciousness. So you have, the majority of the world does not behave that way, does not treat symptoms and pills and medication in that way.
Laura: Right.
Melissa: We’re a minority.
Laura: Right.
Melissa: Who believes that we have the best with no, zero evidence to support that, since we’re the sickest and fattest. So the dissonance that’s required to maintain that state of consciousness is remarkable to me.
Laura: It really is. It’s incredibly mind blowing. And as I get older and as I continue to explore beliefs and belief systems, I’ve always been so curious about what motivates people to act and what makes them think. And I think many good practitioners will say this, right? It’s not just what you’re taking in food wise, but it’s also what is feeding your consciousness.
Melissa: Yeah, absolutely. And what you allow in and accept as truth in your field of consciousness does become your beliefs, whether you’re doing it on purpose or not. So you know what? Let’s go there. Let’s talk about placebo effect, for example, which is greatly minimized in the pharmaceutical industry and medical community overall and is definitely not, I would say, not accurately represented for the impact and importance that it truly has.
Basically, we tend to think a placebo effect as some sort of elusive phenomena when it’s really simple and it’s just a fancy word for belief. It should be called the belief effect. So let’s tie that in with prognosis and diagnosis, if we can. What impact have you seen beliefs have in your experience working with people?
Laura: Yeah, that’s one of those game changing moments when you realize that a diagnosis can be helpful, right? It can. But not believing your prognosis, which is basically what they say, will happen to you, because what is a belief? A belief is a thought that you’ve thought over and over again. And now it’s true, right? I see so much progress stem from playing around with beliefs, and I also see where people can be really stuck and hindered because that’s just where they are. And that doesn’t mean you can’t change that because sometimes trauma can keep you stuck in a belief system, and there’s a lot that can be done about that.
Melissa: Have you seen, in your practice with people and working with people, some examples of how opening up their consciousness, changing those beliefs, has led to changes in their health and their physicality?
Laura: Yeah, it makes me think of a couple of clients. One of them is recent, and she’s 26, and she was diagnosed with MS, and she’s lost a lot of her mobility. Her family is quite supportive of her healing, but she has some family members that are constantly just, like, talking about how sick she is all the time, how, oh, should you get your wheelchair? They’re feeding this, oh, you’re going down this kind of path.
And with our work together, not just our work, but really where I’m inviting her to, like, feed more, she’s starting to realize, wow, my body, there’s a lot more that I can do that I have never been told. And when I start implementing these practices and these kind of like, different things, I start to feel better. And one of the things that happens, right, this transformation is really experiential. It’s like she woke up one morning and she put up all of her Christmas decorations. She hadn’t done that in, like, a really long time, like, maybe years, because she didn’t have the stability. She wasn’t able to stand for that long.
And I had another client who had a similar experience with walking around Costco. But once they did it once, it gives me so many chills. And same thing with this trauma work, right? Some people are really, really traumatized, and they have a lot of anxiety, and they can’t even really get through a day without some sort of doom and gloom. I have this other client who has just got an attachment wound, meaning she was adopted, and she felt that she wasn’t wanted in some way.
So as we’re working on this wound and really proactively working on it, she’s feeling like a completely different person. Like, what happens is one of my mentors says it the best. She says trauma is an energy problem because it just sucks the life out of you. So when you have these experiences, these new experiences, rewiring the brain, that is higher consciousness.
Melissa: I’m really fascinated by studies I’ve seen of subconscious beliefs really contributing to chemical and hormone production. It just blows my mind because just the amount of control we do have, the amount of agency we do have.
Laura: Where focus goes, energy flows. Right? And so when we’re focusing on something, you’re right. We have so much power if we have the tools to switch that focus. So I did a lot of things to like from the multiple sclerosis specifically, there was nutrition. There was cleaning out my gut, detoxing my entire environment and all of my products and all that stuff. But the final factor, the real shift, was when I learned how to calm this body. And I had no idea the cascade effect of that. And I started real simple. I started with Deepak Chopra meditations.
And I know now that there was just something about that was bringing this sense of inner calm, which was impacting my hormones, my neurotransmitters, and my body’s ability to function in the way that it is innately designed to do. All of these things that get in the way, right, that’s all that they’re doing. They’re barriers to healing. And the good news is, there is a way to move them away, to change the terrain, to make this a body where disease no longer stands a chance.
Melissa: Because it can do all that on its own, given the correct environment and the correct information.
Laura: Exactly.
Melissa: Yeah. And when it’s receiving information that it’s okay and that it’s safe. But when we accept and normalize things like, that’s just life. Life is hard, life is stressful. You got to do this, you got to do that. And we say that’s okay with us. It’s not normal. There’s nothing normal about it. Those are choices certain people in certain parts of the world have made to accept as a system and a lifestyle. But there’s nothing remotely normal about it or our bodies would be adaptive to that.
Laura: Exactly.
Melissa: Because it doesn’t, it’s not normal. Okay, well, I guess I’ll hop off my soapbox here for a minute, or I’ll just get all lemmed up and keep talking and we’ll have to start wrapping up here soon. So I wanted to just quickly talk about some of the work that you do with somatic experiencing. Could we touch on that?
Laura: Yeah. The core of my practice to begin with was, like, nutrition and lifestyle changes. And people got really far with that, coaching, accountability, they got really far with that. And then I started to get really interested in supplements and muscle testing, which is a way of seeing how does the body respond to the nutrients that it needs, right? And so I got certified in a bunch of things and learned a bunch of things about functional medicine and clinical nutrition.
Then I learned about this, setting the body up for proper detoxification before you even do anything else biologically because most people will try to jump into the expansion or jump into the heavy detoxing before the body’s even ready. So once I learned about that, wow, amazing. I couldn’t even believe it. It was like blowing my mind. And with all of these people, amazing progress for months and months, years even, sometimes. But then there was a big portion of people who couldn’t hold the transformation. They would just fall apart because if something in their life would happen, you know, some big stressor in their life, a relationship fell apart or anything, right? And then everything fell apart.
The eating habits would go out the window, the anxiety would come back, a lot of their symptoms would come back. And they would take all this responsibility for this, quote, failure. And then I’m like, there’s no way for this many people, there’s not something else going on. When I realized that resistance, procrastination, ruminating thoughts, overthinking, all of these things that are just so familiar to me and so familiar to so many of my clients. It’s not a mindset thing. This is not about bad mindset. This is not you need more Tony Robbins in your life, but this is more about an innate pattern that has been coming up your entire freaking life, and you know it.
And so instead of chastising yourself and continuing to make yourself wrong, my curiosity became, what is the wisdom behind this? Resistance, procrastination, inability to move forward. So I started looking into what it was. Started reading some of Peter Levine’s books. Peter Levine is like the guy, right, with somatic experiencing, and Gabor Maté. Started learning about trauma and reading Bessel van der Kolk’s, right? The Body Keeps a Score. And just learning all of these things, I realized this is the next level of training that I need.
So I’d never even had a somatic experiencing session in my life before I joined the training. I saw the training, and I was like, I have to do this. And I started the training. It’s three years. It’s super intense, super amazing. And what we’re doing is we’re helping people process trauma. We’re helping people process unresolved emotions in a safe and contained titrated way. You can’t rip trauma off like a band aid. We talked about, there’s, like, big T’s, which are these, like, big, huge experiences, and then we have this kind of smaller t’s, which might really impact one person, but for someone else, they’re like, what is that? That doesn’t, why would that affect you?
So it’s a range. Somatic experiencing in a session, what a session might look like, if someone might come and have a specific thing that they want to work on. Or they might just say, I don’t know what my unresolved trauma is, but I know that there’s something holding me back, and I want to explore. And what’s so cool is that with the way that we’re trained, we don’t even need to go and rehash the whole story. It’s very different than talk therapy. We don’t need to rehash the whole story because sometimes that can actually be re traumatizing.
What we do is we work with whatever sensation that comes online when you think about the thing that you might need to work on, right? That kind of dread or sadness or a little bit of anxiety. And then we help to start move unresolved emotional charge out of the body, through the body. This creates a lighter environment within and it helps people just move through life in a completely different way, and it complements every other thing that I’ve ever done. So it’s been incredible.
Melissa: Oh, that’s fantastic. I love somatic work. It’s just so powerful. Well, as we wrap up here, Laura, what is one thought that you’d like to leave with the listeners as it relates to our health and expanding consciousness?
Laura: I think that I may have already said it in a number of different ways, but when you’re exploring possibilities and when you can access a new one, that is what will bump you into that level of consciousness where you can start to actually move toward the thing. So if you’re ever feeling lost about where you’re going or what needs to happen next, instead of forcing your brain to come up with an answer, see if you can connect to one of the ways in which you feel like your highest self. You feel like your most conscious self.
Whether that is meditation nature, somatic work, whatever it is, once you can access that higher level of consciousness, everything gets easier, because otherwise, we just are running around trying to add more things to our plate where the answer comes through with much more clarity and potency when it’s coming from that place of who you really are. And I think that is what I needed to realize, ultimately, is who I really am. And then trying not to forget and laugh with yourself as often as possible as you watch yourself evolve.
Melissa: That’s a good one. I love that. I do that, too. I’m so grateful for you joining me today.
Laura: Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome. This was really fun.
Melissa: I agree. I really love this topic. Well, can you tell us where listeners can find out more about you, the work you do, and just what you’re up to?
Laura: Yeah. Thank you for asking. If you’re someone who’s struggling with an autoimmune issue, on my website, which is called rootyourradiance.com, there is a free gift there, and it’s the top questions to ask if and when you get diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. So you can really have yourself set up to ask some questions and to get some answers from a root cause perspective. So that’s one way that you can learn more about me. You’ll automatically be added to my email list where I send podcast episodes. You’ll get access to all of the free classes that I offer. And if you’re on Instagram, I am @thelaurabautista on Instagram.
Melissa: Okay, great. And that’s root R-O-O-T your radiance dot com. And we’ll definitely have all that information in the show notes. Alright guys, stick around for my takeaways from today’s show.
As you can probably tell from my enthusiasm during my interview with Laura, this topic is really important to me. I too have healed myself of a number of chronic conditions and autoimmune symptoms, and I just really relate to Laura’s experience with our current system. Knowing what I know now, I cannot adequately express how utterly ridiculous it is to me that we’ve allowed and indulged in this toxic system. We call it conventional medicine, as though it is orthodox, traditional, normal, when it is anything but.
Most of us grew up conditioned to believe that Western medicine was the best, most highly advanced healthcare in the world. That what we call advances in medicine were actually advancements in our health and well-being. Many of us have felt so grateful to live in Western societies where we have access to this incredible care. Many of us believe maybe the system is broken, but we believe that the science and the medicine are solid. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s akin to believing in Santa Claus, wishful thinking based on programming and lack of information.
Let’s just briefly go over the origins of our current Western model so that we’re all on the same page. At the turn of the 20th century, doctors and medical schools in the US were teaching and practicing holistic medicine. And natural remedies were considered conventional because they’d been around for thousands of years. Around that same time, scientists discovered petrochemicals, which is basically just the ability to make all kinds of chemicals from crude oil. The discovery of petrochemicals caught the attention of a man named JD Rockefeller because he owned 90% of all oil refineries in the US.
He saw an incredible opportunity to monopolize the oil, chemical and medical industries all at the same time. He enlisted a man named Andrew Carnegie to help him make it happen. Together, they devised a plan to embark on a smear campaign of all holistic, natural and traditional medical practices, along with medical education. You can look up the Flexner report if you want more information on that campaign.
Once the new paradigm of a need for new chemicals and drugs was firmly planted, Rockefeller established the General Education Board, donating more than $100 million to the creation of new medical education facilities, creating curriculum that was streamlined and homogenized to demonize traditional healthcare and promote only patented chemicals that would be called medicine. He lobbied for legislation for medical licensing standards to fit his new model, making it impossible for traditional medicine to continue to be practiced in the United States.
At that same time, he and his contemporaries gave enormous grants to scientists to determine which chemicals it was in plants that were responsible for healing, so that they could create similar, but not identical chemical compositions that could be patented because you can’t patent plants. And let’s face it, folks, if it can’t be patented, there’s not a whole lot of money in it. Perhaps the most important move he made, though, was to promote a system based on symptom relief and not prevention or cure. Thus, the new Western model was born and became wait for a problem to occur and then treat the symptoms, never the cause. That way you have repeat customers.
It was a brilliant business model established by a very successful businessman. However, it was never about medicine. It was never about health. It was never about finding cures. It was never about understanding the human body and how it works. It was always a business model, one that was intended to create a highly profitable, long term and successful business using crude oil, and created by a man who owned all the crude oil.
So here we are, 100 years later, still producing 99% of all pharmaceuticals, with crude oil churning out doctors who know very little about how the body works, virtually nothing about nutrition, herbs, or any holistic practices, and certainly nothing about the energy body and how the energetic and physical systems work together. So we end up with a nation of legalized drug dealers, many of whom went into medicine with a very sincere desire to help people heal and live better lives, having no idea they were being duped into participating in a highly unethical business model.
The system is just as destructive for doctors as it is for patients. In order to become a doctor, one must be indoctrinated into the standards of the business model, not the standards of human wellbeing. They are required to commit to grueling hours and countless sacrifices to their own health and well-being, after which the issue of sunk costs keeps them largely in a tug of war of cognitive dissonance. To add to their plight, the system has burdened medical professionals with 100% responsibility for patients.
Not only is that insane and unethical, but it’s disempowering for the patients and an expectation of doctors that is literally impossible to honor. Maybe that’s why the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer, is the Western medical system. Maybe that’s also why nine out of ten doctors do not recommend becoming a doctor within this system. The good news is that we don’t have to hand over our health and well-being to the century old schemes of long dead robber barons. We have too much access to truth to excuse ignorance on this subject.
Every single disease and condition has a metabolic thread, and there is no pill for metabolic health. There never will be. There is no genetic profile that dooms a person to poor health, nor one that cannot be altered. The fact is, every disease and condition will cease to exist in the right environment. And isn’t that basically what our metabolic health is? The environment we create for our body? This is not about patience against doctors. We’re all in this together. This is about doctors and patients both being honest with themselves, taking personal responsibility, and understanding that continuing to participate in a business model that is designed to prevent health will never yield a higher standard of health and wellbeing.
Don’t get me wrong, our system is fantastic for acute medical trauma and emergency care. But more than 95% of all doctor patient interactions do not deal with acute physical trauma. They deal with chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and high blood pressure, all of which are preventable and curable, just not in the current Western model of medicine.
There’s a terrific book I recommend by Dr. Lissa Rankin called Mind Over Medicine, Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself. I’ll leave a link in the show notes. Lissa is a New York Times bestselling author and a physician who walked away from the Western model to find true healing for herself and her patients. It’s a fantastic read. I loved when Laura said, it’s our state of consciousness that informs the body. When we’re in a state of consciousness that includes fear, anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, resentment, emotional and mental stress, those thoughts and emotions wreak havoc on our nervous system, which directly impacts our body’s ability to heal itself and keep itself healthy.
Our bodies are 100% self-healing, but not from a state of consciousness in which we are functioning almost entirely in the sympathetic nervous system. From that same state of consciousness, we will pump our bodies full of toxic chemicals that we call medicine that further impede the body’s ability to maintain a healthy state, all in an effort to help our bodies do what they would do naturally if we were operating from a higher state of consciousness and functioning in the parasympathetic nervous system. Of course, operating from a higher state of consciousness requires curiosity, openness and a willingness to take personal responsibilities.
Our bodies are not working against us, ever. Every cell in our body is constantly working for us, and when it doesn’t feel like it, we need to get curious and figure out how we can better support our body. That’s our job. No one can do that for us. No doctor, no pill. We are designed to heal ourselves and we have to stop participating in this narrative of powerlessness that leads us to accept these destructive, backward systems that lead to chronic physical, mental and emotional suffering. No industry, corporation, system, paradigm or person is above scrutiny and we would do well to question ourselves when we are so emotionally attached to these paradigms that don’t serve us, especially when they are quite literally destroying us.
Thank you for listening to Consciousness Explored. Consciousness Explored is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Making It and Neuroscience of Coaching. A special thanks to Laura Bautista for generously sharing her time and gifts with us today. In the show notes you’ll find the link to her website, rootyourradiance.com.
If you’d like to reach out to me, I would love to hear from you. I personally read and answer all of my emails. My contact information is in the show notes or just below on YouTube. To make sure you don’t miss great episodes coming up on Consciousness Explored, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It really is the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thanks and I’ll see you next time.