Day 2 Habit Challenge: Newsflash Broken Bones Hurt

In this episode of the effortless brain-based habit change series, Megan continues to share more about her story of being stuck in the cubicle and how she possibly wanted to break her arm to get out of it. In this episode, Dr. Alex and Megan are here to help us achieve compassionate transformation around our emotional body, mental body and spiritual body. 

Follow through with this podcast as Dr. Alex discusses more about fragmentation and how she and Megan share resources and insights so you don’t have to go through the same path and so that you can go a little bit faster and achieve what you want in life.  

Are you ready to experience compassionate transformation? One person is going to win $500 for fully participating in the Habit Challenge so make sure you’ve signed up and joined the effortless brain-based habit challenge at https://www.zestyginger.com/habit/

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Megan Blacksmith  00:01 

Hi there, everybody. Welcome to part two of our series. 

Dr. Alex Golden  00:06 

Hello, everybody. 

Megan Blacksmith  00:08 

Alex and I are here together. So this is the effortless brain based habit change series. And hopefully, you listen to part one, because this is the kind of thing where you gotta go part one, part two, part three, part four, Part Five, the lower bound for my solo series, a lot of you responded that you understood why you need to go in order. So this also would be great if you went in order. So go on back. And if you’re just jumping in here, and you didn’t even know we were in a series, there is a workbook and there is a place to opt in for that where you can get the details at zestyginger.com/habit , I highly suggest going there grabbing the workbook, which is going to help with your transformation. And we also have a very cool $500 cash prize happening for one person who turns in the workbook by Sunday. So go check that out and get the details link is also in the show notes. All right, so day two, we are here in this world. And we have decided what we help women with is compassionate transformation. And the idea that healing comes from wholeness. So remember how I mentioned that I felt stuck in that cubicle? Well, I’m going to share more about that later today. And in this cubicle, I felt so stuck that I wanted to possibly break my arm to get out of to get out of it, to get out of regular nine to five life to get out of all the things I felt I needed to do. On top of being a mom. And it’s so fascinating. Because when someone let’s say I had, I’ll just jump to the end, I didn’t break my arm. Luckily, let’s say I had broken my arm, when someone has a physical injury, and you can see it and there’s a cast, and there’s something on the outside of them that shows they’ve been through a struggle, they’ve been through a trauma, they’ve dealt with something tricky. We’re very, it’s very easy for us to have awareness of this and for us to jump in and help people and to give them compassion in their transformation in their healing, to give them some space to give them resources to help meet their needs to heal. And yet, let’s say you went through something that was just as rough. And this was just as rough. But from an internal place. This caused a lot of trauma. But on the inside, no one can see that you have a physical broken arm. We are here to not only help women transform in the physical plane and their physical body, we love for you all to have amazing hormone health and great skin and hair and your cycle to be smooth and your heads to feel amazing and never have any pain. We’d love for that. And we are here for helping with the compassionate transformation around your emotional body, your mental body, your spiritual body, the things that maybe can’t be seen things that took a hit early on or took a hit recently. And there, the the resources, the compassion, the space is still necessary. Even though you don’t have a cast, we wouldn’t expect someone who had the same level of trauma or or pain, or struggle or injury to jump up, you’re not running up to the person with a broken arm and saying, Hey, let’s be done with this. That was a week ago. You’re giving them time. And we are here to also give you time and space and resources to heal to get to the place for you to heal yourself for your body to do what it needs to do. Because healing we believe comes from wholeness, wholeness, and we believe that we can help speed things up for you. That’s also part of our mission. Because, unfortunately, and fortunately, Dr. Alex and I have both been through some rock bottoms and some personal struggles. That led us to a lot of insights. Luckily for you, we’ll share those insights so that you don’t have to go through the same path so that you can go a little bit faster. And we can have a little more compassion and then a lot of compassion, because we’ve been through it. 

Dr. Alex Golden  04:15 

Absolutely, Megan. So you bring up a phenomenon of phenomenon that’s incredibly important. And this phenomenon is called fragmentation, blindness. This is where things happen to us. The arm breaks, the cycle goes away, the fertility issues come up, the pain develops, the the trauma happens. All of these things can happen and we begin to fragment the most fun foundational level and it happens very, very gradually, which is what allows fragmentation blindness to even set in. What is really cool about this is that we We already talked about the antidote. Right? When we talked yesterday about getting perspective, perspective is the cure for blindness, right? Vision, clarity, all of these things allow us to see where the fragmentation lies, and therefore, where the wholeness and the healing is available to us. And the choices, the thoughts, the beliefs, and the actions that we can take to step into more of that identity. And that fragmentation happens slowly and insidiously. Right. So our stories, like Megan said, include all of these. So for me, many of you know my story, I grew up in Russia, and I’m grew up in the Soviet Union as it was collapsing. And there was a lot of collective trauma that I was born into Lack of food, lack of resources, lack of health care, quite honestly, lack of living when the median life expectancy is 55. And to grow into that world, introduce me to a lot of opportunities for at the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level, to begin to begin to fit myself into a box that kept me safe. And that allowed me to function within the structure, the family, the culture, and the community that I was living in part of. So while I had a beautiful little family unit that I was a part, of course not. Like all families, there’s issues, there’s an authenticity, there’s not saying what you mean, there’s saying yes, when you really mean no, there’s lying when the truth feels uncomfortable. All of these things that happen within family dynamics, I had to and within that, that set up an environment where I really felt that I wanted to get love by being the good kid, right. And all the good kid had to do was get rid of all the stuff that got her in trouble, that got her hurt. And little by little, I began to see that the more I peeled off and put behind the wall, the easier it got to play the game. And that really got me through a lot of the sexual trauma that I underwent, when I was a child. It allowed me to section that part of myself off, address the things there while it off, and then go on with my day, right? Be the clumsy kid with the bruises and run around and do whatever, and be wild and be too much until I heard enough time sit down. Don’t talk to the other kids. You’re disrupting the class. So I peeled off a little more, because it still wasn’t really enough and fragmented, I got so much that I couldn’t really even see those parts anymore. By the time I got to America, it was so much easier to step into the American classroom not knowing any English and say, maybe if I don’t stand out, which was hard because I was the tallest kid in the class. But maybe if I speak a little less, maybe if I study people’s face and their tone, I can figure out their emotion. And if I know their emotion, then I can peel off the part of myself that is bothering them. Right, I won’t be a bother, they will be happy. And I will get the love that I need people pleasing at its finest to be honest. But it was keeping me alive that coping strategy. And that fragmentation is the reason that I got to go in there and be a little foreign kid and make friends and fit in. And quite honestly, some of that fragmentation really worked. It really allowed me to say, I’m gonna push that down because I can’t handle it. And maybe someday, I didn’t even really have that conscious thought. But I think in my heart, I’ve always dreamt of wholeness, because that’s who we are. And that’s what we know ourselves to be. And even as a kid, especially as a kid, because are smart. I knew that. I knew that. I only forgot that later on. So that’s where we kind of pick up right. Adolescence became the science of picking and choosing which box of myself I was going to pull out to present to someone else. Were they going to see the rebel because I needed significance. Were they going to see the good kid who got all A’s and was good at piano and was responsible? What are they going to get the little smartass the one that my parents had to deal with? When I felt to control that I needed an outlet for certainty, right and sometimes cuz I would have missed up. Sometimes that kid that was the rebel that really wanted to stand their own identity wasn’t met with love wasn’t met with support. And that fueled smaller and smaller boxes, it wasn’t that I got smaller, it’s just that the boxes that I poured myself into really where, and they were so numerous, that by the time I got to medical school after developing severe chronic pain all over my body, I had a business that no one in med school knew about. I had, I had med school that no one in my crunchy spiritual community knew about. And my parents didn’t really know I was doing business, right. And all of these things worse, were kept very, very separate. And very, very, very discrete from one another, to the point where that fragmentation blindness was the reason I really couldn’t see which way to go at all. Right, I had gotten perspective I want to heal, I want to be a doctor, I want to help I want to serve. But I didn’t know how. All I knew was that I felt terrible and tiny, and small and scared. And that I was just really living off the hope that I could just read someone’s energy and face and tone enough that I could act as such. And that would be good enough. And maybe I thought, it’s the people, right? I need to change the people Oh, it’s what I’m doing. Maybe it’s how we’re running our business, all of these things, does rolling over and over and over and over in my head. So I was jumping from thing to thing, feeling angry, numbing out all the time, right, as I get that dream had nowhere to go. It was hard to make it through every day. And that vision of helping millions of women, it hurts so bad to be that far away from it. And every single step along the way, where I got fragmented, hit every single part of who I was, on the physical level, every thought, every belief, every emotion that I suppressed, that was negative that was eating away at me. That undermined my identity. All of those things were registering my brain, right that painting I was desperately trying to heal the fertility. I was desperately trying to restore couldn’t happen. Because my body knew I was not living a life that was authentic to who I really am. It didn’t feel good to not even see the other side of the wall sometimes. And I knew that it hit my emotions. I got angry around this time in my life. I was pissed. I thought, man, I’ve been trying to do this right the whole time. And I am just getting my butt handed to me time and time and time again. When does this stop? And of course I’m thinking that right? So that’s the mental body. And I just thought, What am I doing here? It looks great. On the surface. I’m married, I’m going to med school. I have a budding business. I’m writing books. I’m posting I’m traveling, I’m doing masterminds? What is the deal? Right? What is the deal that I feel so lost, and so disconnected for who I really am. And I’m spending my wheels, so much effort and not much resolution. And this is where I’m going to kick it over to Megan, because her story picks up here. 

Megan Blacksmith  13:50 

That fragmentation, right that that fragmentation it was like for me I didn’t actually break my arm. And yet sometimes that fragmentation is a little piece of your soul a little piece of your heart is broken off because you know you’re not doing what you’re meant to be doing. You know you’re not reaching your highest potential. You know, something that little sine there’s just something not right. There’s something more here. There’s something else I meant to be doing. I had that feeling there. I was right you remember I’m still working in that cubicle. I’m doing that job. That job that engineering job, the one that was supposed to make me smart and cool. The one that everybody suggests I go for because I was good at math. I’m in that job and I’m every morning I would lay on the floor with my one year old baby. Just thinking how can I get out of this day? What can I do? What could I do that wouldn’t be that painful but could get me a leave of absence? How can I stay home because many, many days when I woke up, I would be in a full blown panic attack. I would be lying next to my little girl on our floor mattress all Montessori style, right hoping to be this holistic mom and do things a different way and be in this great space. When really internally that soup, my everything inside of me was just sending me into a state of total anxiety and panic attack. And all I could do was lay there and hope, just hope that she wouldn’t turn to me and need something. Because there was no part of me in that moment who had any resources to give to her. Because my whole body was spinning, my brain was spinning my thoughts. were spinning the anxiety, though, what am I doing? How am I going to do this? How am I even going to move? How am I even going to go to work? How am I going to pay the bills, the things were spinning, there were too many things that I felt I was in charge of. Eventually, the moment would pass the things would pass I’d be able to get up off the floor and I would go into work yet again. Not breaking my arm, not getting a leave of absence just pulling my body into a place there needs to go doing the next thing. You can do this just go in overtime. The other signs that things were imbalanced the intrusive thoughts started to come in. I remember being on a boat. We lived in San Diego at the time. And I took my daughter and I went to Catalina Island was so awesome and beautiful. And we rode a ferry there. And the idea of riding a ferry sounds fun. And I love boats. I grew up on a lake and I love boats. And another moment I did not love this boat. This boat was huge and totally safe. And in my mind, I was about to fall off. My baby was about to fall off. And I had all these exact images of how this was going to happen and how I wouldn’t be able to jump over in time. Because even if I did the boat was going for so fast, I wouldn’t have gotten to her and she can’t swim. And I am far far far from the edge of anything the rails are high, there’s a glass there’s it’s totally safe. And I would just be creating these thoughts, these stories, these images of what could happen, it would send me in such a spiral that I would be debilitated and just stuck to that spot. And this trip, we’re supposed to be taking this beautiful trip, this trip with my family this fun, that excitement, this vacation was not a vacation at all, because I was trapped inside my own mind. It was eating itself. And again, just like on the outside, it’s pretty cool to be an engineer, it’s pretty cool to have a baby, right? All these things that I thought would make me happy. I’m still in a place where I’m like something is not right. Something’s not aligned. In my body, I definitely knew that and also in my life. So as many of us do in this moment, and maybe you have done we start to look for resources. And luckily, I was listening enough and open up enough to my own intuition that when a friend said, Hey, I just started this program with a holistic nutritionist. She’s pretty awesome. Maybe you should check her out. And I had no idea what this meant. And I no idea if it meant was meant for me. I had no idea if it could help me with what was going on. But I heard her and I saw that she had had eczema rashes and the things she’d been physically dealing with or had were gone. And I said, Well, that looks like a good sign. So I called her up. And I found in that moment I had no idea that holistic health and nutrition and food and what led to mind and body and what led to supplements and what led to what we put on our skin. I didn’t even know that this was a thing. I didn’t know that this was a whole area, a whole internet rabbit hole that I could go down. So I found this that just slow baby steps of understanding what worked in my body and how I needed to be hydrated and how gluten really wasn’t my friend at the time, these small steps started to give me a little more energy. With that little more energy, I could do the next level the next layer I could dig in a little bit more. And when I found functional lab work and I checked my brain chemistry for the very first time. It was all over the place. And I was so excited because this was the first time that my lab work lined up with how I felt there was some kind of explanation and answer for how I felt because I had been to multiple doctors in the postpartum period. I had been taken multiple tests and bloodwork and every single time I got the you’re in the regular lab range, thumbs up you’re You’re doing good mom and you’re not overweight, and it’s not your thyroid. And that was about all I got. And I’m, I’m looking at my body. And I’m knowing what had just gone through my head that morning and the craziness that I felt. And I have someone looking back at me in a white lab coat, who I trust and I believed had answers telling me that what I’m experiencing in my body does not show up anywhere else, and I’ll see any year. And I felt so dismissed in the moment and not just dismissed by the person but dismissed by myself because I was questioning my I was questioning. And you all have heard this is this just in my head, like nothing on my lab work says anything is wrong? How could this be possible? I know people in the world have more than one child. And at the rate I was going, there was no way in the world I was going to do this again, this postpartum period had taken me down. So I kept going, and I kept looking for different answers. And luckily seeing that brain chemistry, seeing my brain chemistry, it started to line up. It started to line up and there was a six to nine month plan for me a protocol, some simple things, I could do some simple things I could change, there was a place for me to see, hey, you see this ratio, the serotonin to dopamine ratio that’s totally shifted the other way around. It’s totally inverted. Yeah, that’s why you’re dealing with this specific symptom. That’s why this area of the test, that’s why you’re so exhausted, and even showed on there for me that there was a sign of it, or an inverted ratio as well that had when I used to have an eating disorder disorder, and I had no idea how I couldn’t be doing this. How could I be bulimic and throwing up my food when I know so much intellectually. And I would try to scare myself out of actually doing that by reading books that said, it’s going to destroy your teeth. And even though I knew the information, I couldn’t change in my body, I couldn’t get myself to do something different. So I was finally seeing, hey, there’s her real reason here for the things you’re doing Megan. And there’s not only a real reason, there are things to do about it. I felt validated, I felt like my story and how I felt on the day to day and what I was experiencing on the inside inside my brain was showing up, other people understood and there was something to do. Because I had had the vision that I wanted to get out of the cubicle, I had the vision that something needed to change. But my brain chemistry was not in a place to make that change. So sometimes you get through one layer in one step of the process. But without the next you get stuck. So now that my brain was on board, and now that my body was on board, and now that I’m starting to see the vision, and I’m ready to shift to something new, I decided, if this is a job that somebody else can do, I can do it too. And I decided to get out of engineering, I decided to go back to school, to become a health coach to become a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioner. And I’ll tell you, because I hear this over and over and over again, I don’t have the money to make changes in my life, and I have a small child like I don’t have enough time to do it. I do know, I do know that there’s a time that time is a real thing with small children, and you do have to make a choice. And money is a real thing. And you do have to make a choice. And I also know that when you’re ready to change, like when you really really know and you feel it, you will make it happen. With a one year old, I was working a full time corporate job. I was going to health coaching school for a year and also FDN certification at the same time. And I finished those both within a year, I had two certifications. I had started seeing clients and I was still going to my my daily engineering job with a small child. A baby really. So when you know you want it, you will make it happen. And I’m sure you’ve had this happen before where you are like why am I like this? What’s going on and you’ve seen an opening, and you see a shift and you’re like I’m not going back. I am definitely not going back and I will do anything to make this happen. And even more, I was ready to do anything for that small baby. I knew she was going to grow up in this world and have the same stuff and she was going to go to the same doctors and have the same, the same understanding of hey, there’s nothing on here and I wanted her to fully understand how her body works, how her emotion works, how her mind works. So as I shift shifted this I realized, okay, now I have a new layer of understanding. But the next level came up. My brain was on board, my body was on board, I realized that there were beliefs in the way. There were beliefs about whether I could do this because I had never had business. So the next step for me was to actually get to those beliefs, the beliefs that would be stopping this meat from actually stepping into this vision. 

Dr. Alex Golden  25:31 

This happens a lot. Ramin? Absolutely, where we get going, we pick the thing we’re doing, we’re all on board, and we’re even doing it. And sometimes what happens, and we know this game, well see if you can relate, most people can. So I challenge you to do so is that, you know, I’m doing the business. But I really can’t reach out to that person to make a connection. They’re big, who am I to do it? Or I Yes, this, this is the time I’m going to have endometriosis surgery, I’m going to do this plan. I’m working with this provider that I really align with. I love the framework and the plan that they have set with me I understand what it is, and then says, how about you never stick to diets? And, of course, who’s going to feel good about themselves with that as the background? How empowered how motivated is someone to start the diet, continue the business, do the hard stuff, have the failed launches? And keep going when your own brain says? Who are you to do this? Who are you in the world? You are small, and the world is big. And there are so many beliefs that really are an extension of that. And if you’re listening along and saying, Yeah, I know a lot of this equation, I’m really here. I’m here with you guys. But man, I tell myself, I’m going to do it and I’m not going to do it. Come back tomorrow. Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about this tomorrow is where we begin to see how to really get the stuff out of our way. Because it’s I’m going to spoil the surprise for you. It’s not actually in your way, come back tomorrow to hear what that means. But those things that you think are in your way are there for you. And we’re going to explain that not from a you should love your traumas, you should be thankful for abusers and none of that it says I am here to become who I intended to become and who I choose now to become. What does that look like? Not from somebody else but from you yourself? We’re going to break that all down. So come on back. 

Megan Blacksmith  27:59 

Alright, see you tomorrow. Bring your sticky notes.