I am so excited to have Dr. Erhlich here. I am a big fan and have been for many years. So, please join me in welcoming founder and medical director of Neuroveda Health here in Seattle. Dr. Ehrlich is a doctor of nursing practice, family nurse practitioner, and certified functional medicine practitioner with deep training in Ayurveda. Her work integrates conventional medicine, functional medicine, and aurvedic principles with a focus on complex chronic conditions, neuromimmune health, longevity, and whole person well-being. We're very grateful to have you with us today and to share your expertise on the muscle brain connection. Please welcome Dr. Jillian Erlick. Thank you. The mutual is the respect is very mutual. So thank you for the lovely interc uh introduction. Okay. So today we're talking about the muscle brain connection and there is more and more research coming out about this. So and if we did this talk a year from now we're going to have a lot more studies and research that we can even cite. But what we are finding is that the muscle is really a repository for so much of our identity, our mitochondria, our energy source and kind of our perception and sense of self. We think already that about the brain, you know, about the heart, who I am. We point to our chest, our heart. We can we've we've had this introduction to the GI tract and the microbiome as like so definitive for who we are and our levels of inflammation. And now our attention in the in the world of functional medicine and neuroimmunology is turning towards the muscle and we're learning more and more about it. And really it is the singular greatest thing that we can do for ourselves in this moment and as we age is to maintain our muscle tone, our flexibility and our muscle strength. So aka longevity, libido and happiness. I tried to put some alluring things in that title. It's sexy. That's sexy. Muscles are sexy. I mean, come on. I know. Nobody want Nobody gets turned on looking at like a GI tract or a brain even, you know, just like a raw brain on a dish. Nobody's like, "That's great." But when you look at muscle, we've got shape and form and structure and movement, power. So, we're going to talk a little bit about this in three ways. What is muscle? How does muscle interact with the rest of the body? And then how do we activate our muscles for longevity, libido, and happiness? And I'm coming to you from a slightly different perspective than you might be used to. So we've already started kind of broaching that topic. But my practice is really a mix of Ayurvedic medicine which is the traditional medical system from India. It's a 10 to 10 to 14,000 plus year old system of medicine from India. functional medicine which was started in the early 90s. spearheaded by Dr. Jeffrey Bland who was a nutritionist. but now with over 5,000 I think it's 5,000 certified practitioners around the world and growing and it's a systems biology approach for looking at health and medicine and then modern neuroimmunology and the reason that I say this is because as we continue to have leaps in our understanding and our science we find out more and more information that I would say verifies Ayurveda as a medical system but also ties these three things together and in a lot of ways they mirror different aspects of each other. And so that's why we I'm letting you know transparently that we welcome. Come on in. Letting you know transparently that we use all three of these approaches as we're talking as in what I'm talking about today. And so these foundations Oh, I just talked about them. so we're looking at a systems map for neuromimmune well-being and longevity, Ayurveda, functional medicine, modern neuroimmunology. So what is muscle? Don't we all look like this? So, mant.
Oh, impressive. So, the cell, there's three types of muscle cell in the human body. And I just want to run through what these are. There's skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle is striated, which means it has it's formed of these little fibrous lines. And it has slow twitch fibers that are rich in oxygen and mitochondria which is what produces ATP or energy and that can sustain activity and it's got fast twitch muscles which can respond quickly but not sustainably. So, you know, pulling your hand away from a stove is going to be a fast twitch, whereas going for a run or being on the Mindeo, being in a SynapFit session is g you're going to need both those fast twitch and long twitch fibers of your skeletal muscular system. What's important here is that skeletal muscle can oxidize. It can rust. So, if we don't have enough oxygen, if we don't have the right kind of nutrients, it can actually kind of rust inside of us. is literally called oxidation. and so that is one way which we can in which we can age before our time. We've got smooth muscle cells. Smooth muscle are the involuntary fibers without striation, without those little lines. And they're they line arteries and organs like the bladder, the kidneys, the GI tract, the iris of the eye, right? It's got to be able to constrict and dilate. and it makes goosebumps on the skin. So a lot of our experience that we might not think about as we voluntarily move through the world is due to our smooth muscle. It can exist as a sheet or intervate individual muscle cells. So we can get very fine motor control. And if you think about like how much fine motor control you can get with an eyeball like how you know how how tightly you can look from one spot to the next spot to the next spot like a lot of that is very tight control. And that's part of what our smooth muscle as well as our stri our skeletal muscle is doing as we move our eyes. And then our third type of muscle cell is cardiac muscle cell. And it's involuntary but striated and found only in you guessed it the mioardium. So the muscle of the heart itself. It's very specialized. and it keeps our heart beating and blood flowing to oxygenate all of our tissues. So these are the three types of muscle cells that we have in our body. And I think that, you know, when we're in kindergarten, which is like such a great time of life, and we're drawing pictures and we think about, you know, this is the muscle system, we think about muscle tissue. But what we have, what we realize now, and what I want to emphasize today is that it is not just our muscle tissue that makes our muscles that makes our muscularkeeletal system. It's not even just our muscles and our bones. There is so much more that goes into this. And that's where things get interesting. So suddenly we're kind of shot right into the muscle microclimate, right? And so I'm not going to go through every little word. There will be no spelling test on this slide as requested. But I want to emphasize that as we look at a single muscle cell, you can look at a a single strided muscle fibbral that comes out, fiber that comes out. And then even this can break into smaller pieces of sarcimeirs, myio myophibbrals, the meosin and the actin which are the actual pieces that kind of hook together to create a contraction that makes the muscle happen. and you can look at those little all those little heads of the muscle. We can also see the mitochondria and the cycloplasmic reticulum. So there's all these different and then all of the and then the capillaries. And so there's all these other components that come in muscle that actually make it functional. So to throw some muscle cells into a jar doesn't do much. When we just think about our body as muscul muscle tissue and I think about like this muscle right here, it does nothing without everything around it supporting it and connecting it. So when we think about using our muscles in a SynapFit session, we can't just think, oh, it's our striated fast twitch or slow twitch muscles. We need to be really celebrating, honoring, respecting, and thinking about our muscle microclimate. And part of that microclimate, the part that makes the energy are called the mitochondria. Ra, can I see a show of hands? for people who have heard of mitochondria, no mitochondria, I feel like it's a sort of, not so much. Great. So, I'm going to tell you some really exciting things about mitochondria. That's so exciting. This might just be me. I'll openly admit that. but mitochondria, they are the energy producing organels. They're embedded in the cycoplasm. They're embedded within each cell. and mitochondria have there's a few interesting things about them. One is that they have a double cell membrane. And we think that that's because when we all crawled out of the cosmic ooze together, they were their own organism. And then we engulfed them. And now we work now they work for us. And we think that because they have a they have their own cell membrane and then we gave them one. So they've got this double it's not a great it's a pretty picture but it's not a great picture because there's another whole membrane that goes around this and then this inner membrane. And also our DNA does not code for them. We can't make them without their own ring of DNA. And ring DNA is what bacteria have not human beings, right? We have that like fancy little double helix. And so and we only get our mitochondria from our mothers or fathers. Mothers or fathers. Mothers. Mothers. Mothers. We only get our mitochondria from our mothers. It is completely matrinear. So all the mitochondria that power the sperm to fly into the fallopian tube. They drop off and fizzle out. And then our mothers pass to us are mitochondria that we carry for life. And they don't replicate by our DNA, right? Because we can't make them. they actually divi they reproduce by fision or fusion. So they either like glom together or they glom apart and that's how we actually add our mitochondria and they are very much a use it or lose it. So if you need more energy and you slowly build that stamina like with a SynapFit session I'm doing well right. So if they if you are building that stamina then you will actually do the fision fusion thing to make more mitochondria and if you sit on a couch if you sit in a chair like I do all day you know seeing patients and typing on a computer I am slowly weakening my mitochondria they are you know fusing together and becoming less and less and less. So exercise again is a key component to developing the mitochondria to enumerating the mitochondria and mitochondria they are how we make our energy but there's also new research coming out about how they function like a signaling molecule which is so they share information about reading the millu of the environment the environmental context of the body and then they give instructions about how we're doing mitochondria are fascinating I didn't even read these fun facts So we cont we the human body can contain upwards of a trillion to one quadrillion I should I think it should be one jillion but it's one quadrillion mitochondria they're higher in concentrations in more metabolically active tissues like the muscle the eyes and the brain and the cardiomyioytes may have upwards of 8,000 mitochondria in each cell of the heart of the heart muscle kind of amazing so let's talk about now some muscle body connections because I think I've hammered that point home that it is the environment, the microclimate. So, let's talk about how does that microclimate interact with the larger being. So, there's a couple of key connection points for receiving and for signaling out information. So, the neuromuscular junction, so that is how we move our muscles. It requires our nervous system to send a signal across that little synaptic cleft and to send typically acetylcholine epinephrine, adrenaline, you know, all different sorts of neurotransmitters that then hit the muscle and the muscle responds by doing its movement. The muscle has no kind of independent thinking, right? It everything works from the nervous system. The second piece, the second connection is that is looking at the myioines. So muscle contractions result in various types of myioine production. And these are proteins that communicate near and far. And I say here myioines equals endocrine. Endocrine system is our hormone system. Hormones when you think about what they actually are. What a hormone means is it means a molecule that's secreted in one place in the body and acts in another place. So the neuromuscular junction, you know, these are just little neurotransmitters that come across right here. They they are produced here. they're sleep here and that's it. But endocrine system endocrine hormones like thyroid, it's a signal from the pituitary and the hypothalamus, the thyroid stimulating hormone that comes to the thyroid gland that produces T4 and T3 that travels to every cell in the body and says, "Hey, do this, do that, don't do that, do this." And so all over the body, it's this long range communication. And myioines are proteins which function kind of like hormones produced by the muscle cells. And I'm telling you if you go to anybody in your community right now and you say oh my god our muscles make hormones. They're going to go what? But I swear to you in five years they'll be everybody will be like and then just it'll be totally normal. So this is kind of where the science is going. And this is listing so some of these you know and they don't really you don't really need to know the names. There's just there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different types of myioines. So our muscle is consistently sending out signals. So when you're in your SynapFit session, one of the things that you can think about is you are making your muscles happy. And that is that is differentiating the types of communication cells and proteins that they are sending out and communicating with the rest of your body about how you're doing in that moment. And there's inflammatory regulation. So muscles both pro-inflammatory for muscle growth and remodeling but also anti-inflammatory signaling for whole systems resilience. And so our muscles are also constantly giving us feedback about inflammation or anti-inflammation. Do we want to upregulate interlucan 6 and interlucan 8 or do we want to upregulate 10 interlucan 10 which actually puts the stop on the inflammatory system. So these are ways these are three ways with these pro and anti-inflammatory mediators. So that's the immune system. the myioines which are the endo part of the endocrine system essentially and then this neuromuscular junction that connects every muscle cell every nerve in the or I guess not every nerve every muscle cell has to connect to a nerve in the body
okay so these effects are near and far and I just wanted to give another perspective of this because I feel a little bit like what I'm saying is not well known in science at this point and maybe I sound like a crazy person this is our signal Oh, if I need to repeat a question or to get more crazy. So, you can see how the muscle is going to send out signals. They're going to not that are going to talk to the rest of the body. This is who's on the other end of that phone line. So, it might be tumor cells and we might be sparking apoptosis like destruction of tumor cells. We might be talking to bone and increasing healing increasing form bone formation and mineralization. We might be triggering a decreased inflammation in the liver or we might be making doing gluconneogenesis making some glucose with our muscle as it signals the hpatocytes. It might be sending a signal to the atapost tissue. So this is going to decrease our fat mass. I mean maybe not mine because at this point seems like nothing but increase thermogenesis. So increase heat production browning. that's kind of how fat metabolizes. there different brown fat and yellow fat increasing lipolyis breaking apart lipid. So our muscles are going to talk to our fat tissue. Our muscles are going to talk to our brain. They're going to decrease stress and depression. Has anybody ever had the experience of feeling good after exercising? Yes. That's so increasing cognitive function with this brain derived neurotrophic factor. And that is the one of the things that I brag about with these SynapFit sessions and with Mindeo is that with the triad of compression cooling compression and the intermittent exercise you're really producing a lot of this brain derived neurotrophic factor. And while that doesn't create new neurons it does create synaptogenesis. It helps those neurons in our brain to connect in new ways. So it can help us be creative as we age which I think is the one of the keys for happiness. I think a lot of depression is rooted in kind of an inability to have neuroplasticity. So cognitive increasing cognitive function and decreasing stress and depression. Maybe the our muscles are talking to our pancreas and so maybe it's triggering GLP-1 production which every you know everybody loves. And in fact, I don't know if anyone saw that New York Times article from a few months ago, but it's like the junk food industries are freaking out because the GLP ones are changing our taste buds and we're not buying can we're not buying junk and trash like we used to, which I mean, hallelujah. So, u but looking at our pancreas, looking at our gut and our GI tract, the release of GLP-1, looking at our immune cells, decreasing inflammation, increasing uh what is that? cell attraction and increasing activation of some parts of the immune system which are going to help us keep ourselves safe. So this is who's on the other line of the phone. So every time you move your muscles and especially if you're exercising them and pushing them a little past kind of what's you know me doing this every time you're working a little bit you're going to be creating that muscular remodeling and this is who is listening. And I want to pause for a second and talk go back to the mitochondria just a little bit. Raise your hand if you've heard of the cell danger response. Cell danger cell danger response. Oh my god, you're going to love it. So So Bob Navio, who's a very nice guy. he's a pediatrician and a mitochondrial specialist down at uh University of California, San Diego, has put together this hypothesis. And if you are feeling bored and you want to really stretch your brain, you can read his some of his articles. And he talks about the cell danger response. And he basically says he started this conversation about mitochondria being signaling molecules. And he basically states that they perceive threat. And when they perceive threat, they transition their little signaling. And so instead of producing ATP or our energy adenazine triphosphate, they actually divert those signal signals outside the cell to create to function like cytoines to alert to create more inflammation as a way to protect us. But when those when these mitochondria are trying to do their due diligence to protect us, they're not producing our energy. And so that that creates that sick behavior. You know, when you get the flu and you don't care about anything or anyone and your puppy comes to you and is like, "Hi, I'm so cute. I'm your puppy." And you're like, "Meh." Like, that is that that is part of what's happening with that sick behavior. And he notes that mitochondria need to go through they need to transition three times through cell danger response level one, level two, and level three in order to come back to full activity. And if our healing response gets interrupted for any reason, like we're we have to go back to work and we're too tired or there's another trauma or now we're traveling or now we're exposed to something toxic that our mitochondria gets stuck in one of these cell danger response level one, level two or never level three never come back to center and then that's when we have chronic disease including all of these chronic diseases. And what he says is that when you finish something like the flu, you need to give yourself a period of healing. Or if you have something like an autoimmune flare or a cancer, you know, if you have a surgery, we're not just about having a surgery on the arm. Oops, me get my microphone situation. it's not just about having like a surgery on the arm. You have to do some level of healing after that. And he says everything we know in medicine is our first book of medicine. And really what we need to start engineering is our second book of medicine. Of course from my perspective we already have that and it's called Ayurveda. And out of their eight branches they already have one called rayana which means restoration and rejuvenation. So this mitochondria I think is really important because we injure our muscles a lot. They're one of the primary things that we injure in life and it's because we use them a lot. We bump them. We overuse them. We strain them. It's not just our muscles which are part of our connective tissue. It's our ligaments and our tendons. It's these structures of our body. So, it's important to remember that our mitochondria and our muscles have this innate relationship with all of these chronic conditions. So, wherever we look, muscle is playing a role. Wherever we look, we see ourselves back, you know, our muscular tissue. And what that means is that we can actually use our muscle as leverage. It is. Oh, it's true. This is true. I should put that on every slide. This is true. This is true. And it's birectional. So, as we work to take care of our muscles, they work to take care of us. What's good for muscle is good for brain. What's good for brain is good for muscle. Muscle is an entree point for longevity, libido, and happiness, and pretty much anything else you want in life. And we see this confirmed in the literature. And so I brought a few articles because I just think they're fun to see when you're like ah this is all well and good but really I mean I could put on this slide true it this is true. So for longevity when we look at physical activity patterns and all cause mortality in US adults with osteopenia or osteoporosis this cohort study found that those who moved died less. We can look at it for libido. The effect of core stability training on post u post postpartmother's sexual desire. I mean new moms it's like the last thing you're thinking about is like get you know get back to having some sex. But what we find is if we help them with core stability and muscular strength their libido improves. They return to their life and to wanting to be part of life more. And we look at this with happiness. So, chinurine pathway metabolites as mediators of exercise induced mood enhancement, fatigue, resistance, and neurop protection. So, when we move, we we change our mood. Okay. So, where are we going to start? Let's get practical. I know everybody just wants to go out there and we should just go jogging at the end of this. So, we want to start with reality. So, remember this is about whole body muscle movements. There are many ways to launch. And so looking at life as it is, looking at ourselves as we are is the best place to start. So there is a difference between being sedentary, being active and exercising. And I think it's important to recognize this because people feel like it's okay to be, you know, sit still and then just get up for a half an hour a day and go do a cardio workout and then come back to sitting still. And that's not really what we were engineered for evolutionarily speaking. So overall, we really should be thinking about moving as much as we can in our day, walking around, doing things with our arms and our legs. That's how we really evolve. and then the exercising, I think of exercise is where we push ourselves, where we are out of breath, where we get a little sore, where our heart rate rises. And so we want to be mixing up our active non-sedentary life and our exercise. But it's important to recognize that those are different. And sometimes it's a matter of just one click every three months. So I have one nearly bedbound patient with myalgic and sephilomiolitis or chronic fatigue syndrome, ME CFS. And it has now taken her four months to get to 15 minutes of she lays on her back on the couch and she got a thing with her feet. So she lays on her back and she straps on some oxygen and then she lays on her back and over the last number of months she's gotten to 15 minutes and she's increasing by one minute a month. But we want to encourage those mitochondria to keep doing their fision fusion things so that they reproduce. We also don't want to create so much inflammation with tissue remodeling which is also what's happening with exercise when you're sore from exercise which is diminished in the SynapFit sessions the way it's structured with the cooling and the compression. so we don't want to tip over the edge necessarily, but we also don't want to stay just in a safe zone. We need to keep pushing ourselves. The reality is how much time do you have? If it's possible to be five minutes, start with five minutes, both for repetition and regular, even if this is one big adventure trip a week or five minutes daily. But we want to try to keep doing this again and again and again. And the reality is like what is going to help you the most? Just think about, you know, one time I was in my early life, I was struggling to like drink enough water. I just never wanted to drink water. And so I got myself a cute water bottle and I had found a really nice rock on the beach and I shoved it in that water bottle and I thought, "Oh, there's my friend." You know, I got to help my friend and they're going to help me. So I just would fill my water bottle with that rock in the bottom and then I would drink that water. So whatever. And that's why I put this picture of a dog because sometimes it's something that has to be appealing enough to trick ourselves into doing whatever it is that we should be doing that we don't feel so naturally inclined to do in that moment. So figure out what helps you stay on track. Oh yeah, there's my water bottle story. Or an app some, you know, apps are like helpful for everything. There's like those apps that if you drink water, you can log it and you're watering a plant. And if you don't if you don't drink water or log it, then you kill your digital plant. And people feel very bad about that. Silly because it's a computer, but you know, whatever work. So, we want to be kind to our bodies. Movement is lifelong. Recommendations will change with the seasons, the years, the stages of life. So, we are not looking for one exercise routine that you're going to continue forever. We're looking to customize, use your body in fun ways. So what's the best type of movement? I mean for this baby it's not going to be skydiving. You know what I mean? Let's think about what is appropriate for us in the here and now. Not all bodies are ready for all activities. So if you have POTS or postural orthostatic tacocardia syndrome and you get dizzy if you're standing up too much then Mindeo is perfect because you're actually seated strapped in and watched. And so I send a lot of patients here for that. Rowing can be really good if you get dizzy when you're standing or you need to be kind of shellacked in a seat. biking, Pilates is nice because you're on the floor often on your back and you're not going to fall. Swimming also no falling. So, think about what is the best type of movement for you here and now. Yoga is always a good bet with support. And I want to just call this out because yoga is the root, the Sanskrit root of the word yoga is yoke. And we're yoking together or linking together the body and the mind. So any activity that you do where you link your body and your mind is yoga. And that's what is believed in India. It is not necessarily a proprietary like ayangar yoga or descatar yoga. It is those are folks who put together sequences of poses that have gotten very popular. But anytime you link your body with your mind, it's yoga. You're doing yoga. And so people who have injuries, the way to prevent injuries or people who have ER stanlo syndrome or hypermobility syndromes or connective tissue disorders, there's a lot of questions about whether it's yoga is appropriate for folks with hypermobility. And I would say absolutely yes. Because if your mind is present in your body, you will do the right thing in your body. Sometimes in the US, people go to yoga to show off their form versus develop their form. Like you go to yoga in India and everybody it's like grandmas with all kinds of bodies and and long big long t-shirts and sweatpants, you know, it's not like the Lululemon like see-through pants. So, you know, that's very much like an American phenomenon. So, yoga is always a good bet because you're linking your body and your mind and we want those to be linked together. We want to be able to listen as a listener on the other end of those muscular signalings and get any treatments that you need to be safe. So, if you need braces, if you need compression, if you need that can help with POTS as well. If you need like tight bike shorts to for pelvic congestion syndromes or if you need braces on your ankles, if you need a brace on your knee, this exhibit you're a plant. Oh, osteoarthritis. Yep. Yep. Or like an SI joint belt to help keep your SI joints stable. So, whatever you need to keep your body stable, intact, and attentive, then use get those treatments. And there's lots of treatments that exist. There's prolotherapy, there's stem cell therapy which might be helpful or PRP or all sorts of different things that we can do and then get the supports that you need as you need them. So supplements can support energy and joints and we have our clinic has a little full script. Here's the NVH exercise support. So there's some different exercise supplements that can be helpful. Physical treatments to rest and recover. So upgrade labs Mindeo, NeuroVeda Health there's lots of different massage and counter strain there's tons of different treatment options and then the SynapFit sessions and I took this to upgrade labs so you know when I did the doctor and so when we understand supports the options are nearly infinite for starting to move and for angling for performance though you know I I am not going to be an Olympic anything. Maybe a bob letter. That looks fun. But, you know, but that should not stop me from doing all the different things that help me amplify and optimize my performance in my life. And so, supplements, I have lists here. not every person should be on every one of these, but I wanted to give kind of a suggested range for things to think about. Everybody gets drawn to different things. And so, you may you might be a person who wants to do some branch chain amino acids or some lcarnitine. You might be a person who wants to do some dribbos or some true niogen. These are all things that actually help the mitochondria and that help the muscles. And then we've got a bunch of I we have an IV lounge at Nervea Health and so you can come get these a lot of these IV as well. So that way they bypass the GI tract and that way there's no question about what's absorbed into your system directly and these physical treatments. So I just have this long list again here with Mindeo SynapFit that went to upgrade labs also. on a plant and so shockwave we can use for pain. Tol therapy is a dextrose injection that can help essentially for if laxity is the problem. I have some patients who have a lot of hyper mobility and like their shoulders like fall out of their joints while they sleep. you know they can't lift because they'll just their shoulder will fall out of the joint. So prolotherapy can help tie that down. proteinrich platelet injections, PRP, they draw blood and they pull out the nutrative factors and then they can inject it right into the joints to help build a scaffolding for new tissue. exoomes is pulling out the extracellular vesicles with a bunch of also good cellular signaling molecules that can help joints to repair. Stem cells we can harvest out of your atapost tissue and then inject IV or into your joint. massage. Ayurveda has Has has anyone had an Ayurvedic massage? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yeah. Oh, they are divine. You're miss you're missing out. Should feel FOMO right now. High recommend. Yes. So, it's a lot of oil because in Ayurveda, we're not just massaging your muscles, we're massaging your nervous system. And oil is one of the ways to really bring your mind into your body to help with connection and relaxation. Physical therapy. There's lots of different physical therapists. lots of different types of physical therapy out there. Breath work training because breath work is one of the ways that we can connect our autonomic nervous system, our fight orflight system to our physical body. And so while we often think in the west of breath work being like box breathing where you inhale, hold exhale, hold or four seven8 breathing, sometimes they call it inhale for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight. Is that what it is? I don't even remember. Right. Or any variation. Yes. Yes. Yes. But there's a whole science called pranayam which is breath work. That is part of Ayurveda, part of yoga. And so there are all different kinds of breath work that can help with strengthening the antacarana which is the equipment of respiration. So if you look at Ayena who's a famous yogi, if you look at his body, he was a sickly 14-year-old found yoga and then did pranayyama for I think like 80 more years. I think that's actually pretty close like 80 more years and he had usually we have a one to two size ratio like we are one distance this way and two distances this way and he was a one to one he had a huge barrel chest because he had really developed that unpakarina that that respiratory equipment. So breath work is not to be trifled where with yoga and pilates and sound baths. You were just talking about sound bath. You had a nice experience the other day. Yeah. Yeah. Mindeo, raise your hand if you've heard of Mindeo. And then nature, playing outside, the cortisol, right? So in Japan, in Japan, there's a whole science of forest bathing, very well advanced, called shin yoku. And that forest bathing is really important for lowering cortisol, lowering blood pressure, allowing our body to reconnect. And it really dives into that cell danger response. And that second uh book of healing, how do we do restoration? Upgrade has some technologies. They're over in Belleview. So, Ayurveda would also recommend some periodic deep dives. So, as we think about how do we cultivate our muscles during our everyday life, then periodically we should do some deep dives for quarterly or annual cleansing, rights of passage, quieting the mind. And here are just two ways to think about that. Of course there are so many there is deep dive cleansing. So Ayurvedic punch karma or we have plasma feresis at our clinic which is where blood is pulled out of one arm run through a machine to actually pull out heavy metals and plastics and imogloabbulins. So it changes that cellular signaling and then the blood warms goes back into the other arm. And so we can do a series of that. If if you haven't heard about plasmais at this point you may well in the next few years. We're using it's been used for 50 years for really deep autoimmune disease like gon beret and ITP and myastthenia gravis and we're now finding it helpful for Alzheimer's for arresting Alzheimer's and for long COVID and then all the really dorky biohacky sorry if anyone's a dorky biohacky person sorry if anyone's listening but folks are are are loving the plasma feresis for longevity so more and more you'll see more and more research coming about that ayurvedic punch Punch karma is the traditional detox and reset and I think of that punch karma as a process that would resolve that cell danger response. I recommend every person do punch karma every year. Kesha yours who's a nurse practitioner on the east side and a mentor of mine for a long time found Ayurveda looking for alternatives to rheumatoid arthritis treatments. she found it in the PubMed literature. She did punch karma four times in one year. It's about a week-l long process. and her rheumatoid resolved. Her her metrics, her labs all normalized. her joints that had been changing and aching all normalized. and her pain went away. So it can be pretty. I have an MS patient now who's in her uh she's I think she's in her early 40s. she's a pharmacist. She's doing all the right things. She looks great. She looks like a regular normal person, but she has MS. and she did all the things she was told and she still continued to have what's called the MS hug, which is this feeling that you're squeezed around the middle. And she had some foot drop and some left leg pain. And Punch Karma resolved those symptoms. It's pretty amazing. And then she had a bunch of stressors in her life. Her mother passed away, her mother-in-law passed away. Just a lot of going on. And she did it again. The symptoms started to come back. She did punch her camera again, resolved. So, and she just finished her third in the last year. So, this can really hit the reset button for both the body and the mind. And I re I recommend it for everybody. And then rights of passage because it's not just about resetting the body, it's also about resetting the mind. And this can look like almost anything. This can look like getting together with family. This can look like spending three days swimming in the San Juans in the ocean in the winter. This can look like fasting. This can look like ketamine. We offer ketamine assisted psychotherapy at our clinic which is used now as a psychedelic and I'm happy to answer questions if folks have want to talk more about ketamine but you can absolutely use psychedelics and other mechanisms and products and molecules for uh rights of passage. So this what we've talked about today. I'm going to drink of water. Get a drink of water. So what is muscle? Muscle is not just those three types of cells. It is also the myioines, the mitochondria, the microclimates, the vascular system. How does muscle interact with the rest of the body? Extensively, extensively. It is sending and receiving signals constantly and activating and activating muscles for longevity, libido, and happiness. We start with reality. We aim to be along a working edge. We continually try to be in alignment with yoke in the body and mind. We add supports as needed and we plan for regular deep dive, detox, cleansing, rights of passage, connection. I should add connection here. Connection is one of the primary things that keeps human beings aligned at the table. So again, this is uh that's my face and here's our clinic down in Westlake. here's how you find us. We do have a podcast if you're like, "God, I want to listen to her talk more." We have 105 episodes on our podcast and we interview mostly clinicians of all kinds. So doctors talking about uh micro gal inflammation in the brain and dietary things and who do we I just did one on methylene blue. I just did one on the mi screen or the mitochondrial efficiency screen. So the mi screen is a new test that looks at how the mitochondria are functioning which I'm pretty excited about. so lots of different topics on the on the podcast Neuroveda podcast and we're on all the major platforms. this is we were talking a little bit about it when we came in the Nurva way. These are the kind of the nine things that I think Ayurveda can offer western medicine. So nature of self and for nature of self meaning that we are not structures we are energy. We are more space than we are thing. And so if we stop treating ourselves like we are like we can mechanically fix this. If we recognize that we can fix this with a change of information, then we're going to get a lot further in medicine. Eating and elimination, which is the science of agny or the fire, digestive fire. and amma, which is the metabolic waste we produce, which looks like a coating on the tongue and aching in the joints and confusion in the mind and insomnia at night when we have amma. And how do we clear that? We're not eliminating clearly. understanding rhythm because when we get back into into track with the daily life with the rhythm of the sun, the rhythm of the moon, the tides, the dal and it uh infra inferian cycle then we can use that for our health remedy and recovery. How do we access health care? What do we use health care for? Ojis is really the juice of life. so it's another Sanskrit term that keeps our immunity and Ayurveda immunity actually means tolerance because when you are immune to something it doesn't bother you. So it doesn't mean that you don't interact with it. It just means that it doesn't affect you. You are immune. You are tolerant right? vital connections ecology environment where does our food come from and food systems are so important. Dharma and legacy work. What is our p what are what are we here to do? and then aging and awakening. We all have these roles in life. And then this is just a little bit more about who we have at our clinic and what we do. And I think that's that's the end. Thank you. Thank you for listening.
