Show Notes
Dr. Keesha Interview
[00:00:00] Charna Cassell: Welcome back to LaidOPEN Podcast. This is your host, Charna Cassell. Today's guest is Dr. Keisha Ewers. She's an author and the founder of the Academy for Integrative Medicine and Functional Sexology. Welcome Keisha.
[00:00:15] Learn how to live embodied If it's about to unwind Uncover new tools and start healing Leave trauma and tension behind Isn't it great laid open Let all your desires come true How can you live laid open Imagine yourself brand new. Imagine yourself brand new.
[00:01:01] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That was delightful to meet you and to be here. Thank you.
[00:01:06] Charna Cassell: Yeah. I've really been looking forward to this conversation as, I was mentioning, cause I think that you could be an excellent resource for our listeners and for my clients. And I want them to have a better understanding of what you offer. So thank you again. You help people with autoimmune disorders and are trained in everything from Ayurveda, hypnotherapy, EMDR you work in so many different ways and that's evolved over the years.
[00:01:36] Charna Cassell: So, I know you started in Western medicine as a nurse. And I'm curious how the evolution of your awareness of how much trauma could inform and affect people's health evolved.
[00:01:50] Dr. Keesha Ewers: that's a really good question because I was a 19 year old brand new baby nurse when I started really gravitating towards the more high intensity. intensive care units, emergency room, life flight, you know, all of, I loved, I was an adrenaline junkie. I was a skydiver. I I ran marathons. During my twenties, I had four children and I was very driven perfectionist people pleaser
[00:02:17] Charna Cassell: Mm hmm. Mm.
[00:02:18] Dr. Keesha Ewers: About the time when I was 30, I woke up one day and the way that my patients describe it too, which isn't accurate, by the way, where it's sort of all of a sudden you're sick, right? I woke up one day with 10 extra pounds of puffiness all over my joints. I was red and then I was inflamed and it was like someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer bunny.
[00:02:40] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I was just flattened and I hurt and I was exhausted and I got myself in to see a doctor and she asked me in the history taking process if I had a family history of any kind of autoimmune disease. And I said, yeah, my grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis. As the story goes, he died at the age of 58 in a wheelchair with it.
[00:03:04] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I'm 58 now. And he apparently was like really sick. And she said, well, okay, this is genetic. And she gave me two prescriptions. One was for methotrexate, another for a non steroidal anti inflammatory drug. And said, come back when you're worse, not if. And I said, well, hang on. Is there anything else I can do?
[00:03:25] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I knew the side effect profile of both those drugs. And I didn't want to take them. And she said, no, sorry that you just drew the short end of the genetic straw, you know, and uh, we'll see you and however long it takes for you to get worse. So I remember on my way home thinking, there has to be a different way of thinking about this outside of the model that I've been born and raised into.
[00:03:48] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Now mind you, we didn't have like, people weren't on the internet, we didn't have cell phones. I had a dial up modem for my internet at the times, but the, what is it? It was Ask Jeeves instead of Google. The search engine. That was what I was looking for. The search engine was after you. So when I got home, you know, I did go to the internet, but it was not proliferated with everything we have today just to kind of set the scene, right?
[00:04:17] Charna Cassell: Right. Totally.
[00:04:18] Dr. Keesha Ewers: be, you know, but people that are 20 years younger than us couldn't even imagine how it all sort of came on. But in those days, we didn't have the information on our phone at our literal fingertips. About the connection between trauma and disease. We didn't understand trauma is such a uh, buzzword now.
[00:04:39] Dr. Keesha Ewers: It wasn't then. And so I didn't have any clue that this was connected in any way, shape or form. And so when I went on the internet that day to think of like, is there a different thing? I was sort of thinking like herbs, you know, is there like an art? Or something. And I found an article on yoga and autoimmunity and went to my first yoga class the next day.
[00:05:00] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And that yoga teacher said enough about this word, Ayurveda, which is the sister science of yoga, the medical part, 10, 000 year old model, right? Then I went home and looked it up. And what I found was this really interesting statement. 10, 000 years ago, Ayurveda said that autoimmunity and cancer. Our undigested anger.
[00:05:26] Dr. Keesha Ewers: It was my first glimmer into this idea that perhaps the way that I took on early childhood experiences, the beliefs I made up about them, the adaptive behaviors that I had in response to them, which were now maladaptive. Somehow has something to do with the condition that I was experiencing today. Now, in mind you, I was 30 at that time.
[00:05:55] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And when I started asking these questions, you know, like, Oh, I wonder undigested anger. To me, I wasn't an angry person. Like this is any sense to me. Right. And you know, and then I really started going quickly into, well, maybe that's a problem, you know, maybe the fact that I put on my running shoes and run miles and miles has something to do with, you know, Me not actually processing emotions, right.
[00:06:23] Dr. Keesha Ewers: But just blowing off steam.
[00:06:25] Charna Cassell: Yeah.
[00:06:25] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Yeah. Which is our way, right. You know, in our culture. And so I really got to this place in my inquiry, you know, of like the word autoimmune means I'm doing this to myself where I started asking. Is there a place in my life that I wanted to die because autoimmune means I'm literally killing myself and I don't want to die right now.
[00:06:49] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And when I searched and went backwards in my timeline for that, like, is there a version of me that wanted to die. I landed on my 10 year old version who was being sexually abused by the vice principal of the elementary school I was attending at the time. And I looked at her and I thought, Oh, you did want off the planet.
[00:07:10] Dr. Keesha Ewers: You didn't understand people in general, like what, you know, and. My dad was out to sea. He was in the Navy. My mom, when I told her I didn't want to go back to school, I didn't have the right words really to tell her what was going on because I didn't actually understand it either. You know, of course she sent me back to school.
[00:07:28] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so I really got it like this. This is probably where this started. And it turns out science supports that, that has come out since that, that indeed, there's a profound connection. Yeah. Between early trauma, but not just the capital T kind that I'm talking about, but also lowercase t trauma, the betrayals, the rejections, the heartbreak.
[00:07:53] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Those, you know, are connected to our adult health and it turns out I conducted a study in 2013 to our sexual vitality and libido. And my PhD work was around that question. And that was just fascinating, you know, as this all unfolded, my RA went away within six months. It's never been back. I never did take those medications, you know, and there's just so much freedom in my system now from old story, resentment, frustration, you know, the byproducts of protective mechanisms we put in place for ourselves, the variety of different flavors, you know, the releasing and the dissolving of those.
[00:08:40] Dr. Keesha Ewers: leaves for a more resilient system, both physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally.
[00:08:49] Charna Cassell: Yeah, you know, and despite things like I'm sure you know about Gabor Maté's work and some listeners do which validates the same concept, right? Around you know, unresolved anger, unexpressed anger and how that can manifest in the body. And it's such a tricky subject because we don't want to say like, you caused your cancer because that's not,
[00:09:12] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Thank
[00:09:13] Charna Cassell: you know, it,
[00:09:14] Dr. Keesha Ewers: because people will hear it that way. Right. And I love it when people bring this back around, because that's, this is really important to talk about.
[00:09:22] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Yeah, it's outside of the black and white thinking of a child, which is the construct thinking you're good or you're bad, right?
[00:09:29] Dr. Keesha Ewers: There's a flame and there's a shame is outside the construct of blame. It's more into natural consequences of action. That has nothing to do with fault, right? So protective mechanisms that come up, like internal family systems of the identifies and Richard Schwartz did not like invent this by any stretch of the imagination, but you know, Freud, Young, Steven Kessler, like, you know, there've been a lot of people that have identified how we get in touch with our character styles our different.
[00:10:07] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Protective mechanisms that emerge to protect the innocence of the psyche of the small one and that protective mechanism, whatever it is that we chose to attach as a meaning and a belief, and then an adaptive behavior of that moment becomes maladaptive in adulthood, if it's still running us. And so, you know, it becomes this really beautiful opportunity when you're presented with something like the breakdown in a relationship or, you know, a pattern that keeps repeating itself in at work or with yourself, self neglect, self abandonment by, You know, addiction, things like this are a disease, you know, really important. I believe they're like the Joseph Campbell's hero's journey where it's the call to action, right? That's a moment where you get to then go and reinvestigate what that child chose in that moment, who was so smart in choosing what they chose because here you are alive and surviving, right? Like it was perfect.
[00:11:17] Dr. Keesha Ewers: The wise mind of the child, it was just beautiful in their adaptability. And right now you have a more fully developed brain from 26 years old on, you now have adult prefrontal cortex fully developed that can go back and heal what that child experienced in a different way and reframe the story that you're carrying with you and how you're telling it and take the wisdom from it and let go of what no longer serves.
[00:11:49] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That process is called the digestion of trauma. I always say we're not transcending our trauma. We're not healing our trauma. We're not getting rid of our trauma. None of those things, right? We're digesting it. We're taking the nutrients from it, and we're getting rid of what we don't. Need anymore, right?
[00:12:07] Charna Cassell: Yeah, well, and there's also this piece of how our physical or emotional pain that may show up. It's like that, that 10 year old that didn't get to speak back then is suddenly going like, okay, in order to move forward and be a resourced individual and to grow into a whole self, you need to also not forget about me and you need to listen to this piece.
[00:12:32] Charna Cassell: And, you know, it'll. It'll stop you in a way like you were saying, it may be if it's an extern in your external world, you lose your job, you lose your partnership, like your mother dies, something like that, you pause and you take stock of what's happening in your life and what matters and so often we neglect our internal world unless we've had that modeled for us to pay attention.
[00:12:56] Charna Cassell: And so health issues are usually the thing that has us turn inward if we. You know, find the right resources.
[00:13:03] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I think it felt like the Roadrunner with Wile E.
[00:13:07] Charna Cassell: uh huh.
[00:13:08] Dr. Keesha Ewers: an anvil from the cliff on the Roadrunner who's just like speeding along and they're like meep meep and then it goes blap like It's just like the anvil just got dropped on you and you get to kind of go Oh, am I supposed to be listening?
[00:13:23] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Is there something that I haven't been paying attention to right?
[00:13:26] Charna Cassell: right. Well, and it's in, right, it's in that place of stillness and quiet. and reflection that our own internal wisdom arises. And so if you don't already have a meditation practice, you know, or if you do, it's like, if you don't make the time to create that then, you know, our bodies will force us.
[00:13:49] Charna Cassell: One of the things that, you know, you mentioned, and then I want, I also really want to hear about the HIRT study that you did more about, you know, you were mentioning a little bit about it. But What's important, I think that is becoming more known but a lot of people don't know about the ACE study,
[00:14:04] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Yeah.
[00:14:05] Charna Cassell: adverse childhood experiences, and I remember when I was, it wasn't until I was in grad school, and I've been dealing with health issues since I was 10 years old.
[00:14:14] Charna Cassell: I'm like chronic things. That I found out about it. And you know, and I had a nine out of 10 on, almost an A plus for
[00:14:23] Dr. Keesha Ewers: always been an overachiever in that too.
[00:14:26] Charna Cassell: faculty.
[00:14:27] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That's what I always say. I'm like, I overachieve in everything. So including.
[00:14:31] Charna Cassell: Totally. And so if you want to just speak to that a little bit, and then also, you know, the study that you then later did in your work.
[00:14:45] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Yeah. So the ACEs study was game changing, you know, by having that research brought into the Western medical model, which vehemently You know, has tried to separate mind from body and you know, those two shall not. In fact, we call we even in our research, we call qualitative science, soft science and quantitative where it can be measured.
[00:15:15] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Right, as hard. And the way that we do our studies, we love double blind, random controlled, where we don't know who's in each of the groups, you know, that so nothing can get contaminated interrelated reliability, you know, these variables. And the problem with that is, is that the assumption. Is that all humans are the same, which is where we go off the rails right from before we even leave the station we're
[00:15:44] Dr. Keesha Ewers: off the rails
[00:15:45] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Because we're not the same.
[00:15:47] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so what we like to do then is take a big gigantic, you know, File of people as big as we can, right. And use an intervention and then study what the outcomes are. And we really like to be able to measure whatever that is so that we can take that and extrapolate it to all other humans. Now we've had so many problems with this, you know, we have high fructose corn syrup in our food now, because we decided back in the seventies that Fat was bad, you know, and Dean Ornish came around and said we need to make sure that we're not feeding fat to the population because here's what happens.
[00:16:28] Dr. Keesha Ewers: We get heart disease and cholesterol, right? And it turns out that genetically there's 10 percent of the population that's true for and 90%, but that's not true for, and his population that he was studying, it is true for because he's a cardiologist. So people that were coming in, we're having heart disease, right?
[00:16:45] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so it's a very fascinating. way that we tend to look at things. So when we look at the ACEs study, the cool thing about this was that we knew who was in the study. We weren't doing double blind, random control. This started because Kaiser Permanente had a weight loss. Program that went through, you know, so now we've got a whole bunch of socioeconomics, we've got different gender, different ethnicities, geographical demographics that are different because Kaiser's all over.
[00:17:21] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so in these weight loss programs, the, they started noticing that it was very successful, but there was a percentage of people that were dropping out early in spite of. Being successful. They weren't reaching the goal and staying with the program. And luckily someone got curious. And was calling people in and saying, so why did you drop out, started asking the right questions and found that most of them had been sexually abused in childhood.
[00:17:48] Charna Cassell: Yep.
[00:17:49] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Now that was fascinating little bit of information to extrapolate from a weight loss program. And the, in that time this study was conducted between 1995 and 1997, got curious again and partnered with the centers for disease control. And they had the biggest cohort study that had ever been done.
[00:18:11] Dr. Keesha Ewers: of this kind on Kaiser Permanente enrollees across, you know, the organization. And they asked them 10 different questions about before the age of 18, did you experience what they called these adverse childhood experiences? And they range from domestic violence to sexual abuse, psychological, emotional abuse and neglect, having a mother abuse that you were privy to, having a caregiver incarcerated or mentally ill or addicted to a substance or dead, right?
[00:18:46] Dr. Keesha Ewers: So these were, they considered aces and they are what we now, you know, I delineate between capital T trauma and lowercase e trauma. Cause now when people hear trauma, they tend to think in terms of that, well, I'm, I had a great childhood. I didn't have any of that happen, which is like great and fantastic.
[00:19:03] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And everybody's had trauma. And so it's, and we'll talk about, I have a little map I can even show you about, you know, what came out of the HIRT study around this. And so what was really interesting about this, and that data has been mined in a million different ways, and, you know, the first pass on it was two thirds. of this cohort had at least an ACEs score of one, which was like, that was revolutionary information. This is where we now understand that this is just reported trauma, right? That oftentimes Right. I give talks to doctors for the Institute for Functional Medicine, and I'm talking about the endocrine system and hormones and adrenals.
[00:19:51] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And I say, you know, like you can't even go by these statistics because this is just reported, which now we know is probably 25 percent of it.
[00:20:02] Charna Cassell: Right. Right.
[00:20:03] Dr. Keesha Ewers: So it said that the study investigator actually broke down in tears reading this you know, this was. The internal life of so many people. And it wasn't being asked in medical visits ever. So, you know, going back, they started recognizing that the higher your ACEs score, the higher your likelihood to have any of the chronic illnesses that are rampant in Western culture, from cardiovascular disease, autoimmunity, to cancer, to genetic expression toward disease rather than toward more life sustaining vitality and longevity that if you have, you know, in terms of longevity and ACEs score of six or more, you're more likely to live 20 years less than a counterpart that doesn't.
[00:20:58] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And, you know, on and on, like in this way, the most compelling finding that I found that isn't really talked about very much, but I, it just sort of stood out in neon lights to me is that the people with ACEs scores are less likely to engage. in regular self care. Instead, engage in regular or intermittent self neglect.
[00:21:23] Dr. Keesha Ewers: If you felt neglected in your childhood, then you're more likely to look to be cared for from someone outside of you and engage in all kinds of dysfunctional power moves like caregiving. In order to write. So in the enneagram, I'm a type two, right? And that is like there. We have these any types, these personality styles that are just strategies for the ego to get his feet to that, right?
[00:21:46] Dr. Keesha Ewers: They're not who we actually are. But along this journey, I started learning that about myself and
[00:21:52] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Getting it like, Oh, you know, this is what's going on. So the ACEs study was really a game changer for helping us understand. Now in my book, solving the autoimmune puzzle, I have the ACEs quiz.
[00:22:05] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And I say at the end of it, now you have your score. This does not mean that these findings, these outcomes are written in stone for you. They are not. Knowing your number is like, I do a lot of backpacking. And so I usually use this metaphor. If you're at the trailhead and you've got your backpack on, you're filling out the little card about where you're going for the next three days.
[00:22:27] Dr. Keesha Ewers: You know, this is where you're starting. You have a map about where you're going. That's it. That's you know where you're starting and you know where you want to go and you now know where the pitfalls are and you can Engage in healing this so that you don't have those outcomes.
[00:22:44] Charna Cassell: Yeah. The, one of the things that I think is important that you talk about in your book that relates to the adverse childhood experiences is your is your autoimmune mindset,
[00:22:56] Charna Cassell: right? There's the beliefs there, right? So I'm not worth protecting. I wasn't safe. I wasn't, I'm not lovable unless I'm perfect.
[00:23:04] Charna Cassell: And. And so, so many of those, the strategies for survival evolve out of those experiences. But it doesn't mean that we can't change our mind. We know about neuroplasticity at this point. We know that it's possible to, that, but you have to start to see that those are just belief systems and they're not facts about who you are.
[00:23:27] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That's precisely it and it isn't a matter of just Deciding to do that because it's not that quite simple,
[00:23:34] Charna Cassell: right?
[00:23:35] Dr. Keesha Ewers: right? There's a nervous system activation that happens that immediately triggers, you know, a felt sense in your body. And for every five minutes, you're upset. It takes your body eight hours to recover during that eight hour recovery.
[00:23:50] Dr. Keesha Ewers: You might be off on your little train of thought that you created a long time ago, like what you were just saying. And unable to pull the train back in the station. And so the runaway train of thought thing is, you know, where we go to the perceptions, right? We start healing at mind level, not brain level.
[00:24:11] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I love, I always say like you stick the word neuro on the front of anything. And it's so sexy, right? The brain is super sexy. Like we neuro anything. Everyone's like, Oh yeah, the brain going to the brain level. But actually, that's the, that's not it, right? Once you're the brain is, that's a runaway train.
[00:24:32] Dr. Keesha Ewers: So we want to go in at mind level, which is not brain. Mind is in everything, right? We have heart mind, we have body mind, we have spirit, we've got our mental mind, which actually activates the brain.
[00:24:50] Charna Cassell: Yeah.
[00:24:51] Dr. Keesha Ewers: It is from place that we, the brain then goes, Oh, we're not safe. Okay. You know, and then sends a series of cocktail neurotransmitters to the rest of the body like the adrenals and says, we're not safe, right?
[00:25:04] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Do that. Do your thing. And then you go into your thing. And when you keep doing that again and again, it breaks down your gut wall. It gets you into adrenal and hormone fatigue and imbalance. It then gets the immune system involved, and now you're more at risk for all those things that are connected to a higher ACEs score, right?
[00:25:26] Dr. Keesha Ewers: There's a process along the way, but it happens first with mind.
[00:25:32] Charna Cassell: Yeah.
[00:25:33] Dr. Keesha Ewers: So important.
[00:25:34] Charna Cassell: recently I was in Mexico. And I had a leg injury while I was there and I was there for Day of the Dead and there was a parade that I was watching the parade and I was holding my camera up like this to record and somebody came up and pressed his erection against me.
[00:25:53] Charna Cassell: You know, and I was in this very vulnerable place of not being able to physically even walk quickly and my hands were full and it happened so fast and someone else might be like, that's not that big a deal. But what that did was it just recreated this sense of, it triggered a sense of powerlessness that's very young in me.
[00:26:17] Charna Cassell: And what followed was a couple weeks of, like, extreme fatigue, my think, you know, the, because my thinking. activated that level of fatigue in my system. And I've also healed my own autoimmune stuff. And so I share this because, you know, and I've bounced back from that, but without having those tools, you can get like stuck in the groove, like a groove in a record, and you just keep spinning.
[00:26:43] Charna Cassell: And you know, and I came back with a quote unquote parasite, what, you know, something that was going on with
[00:26:51] Dr. Keesha Ewers: You are more susceptible now.
[00:26:52] Charna Cassell: right? Your system is, your system's more susceptible, it's more vulnerable. And so I've been taking care of that. And what I find is like the, what someone might call restriction in my diet was actually having me say no to a lot of external plans, slow down, be completely present.
[00:27:11] Charna Cassell: With my self care throughout my day, and a lot occurred and shifted in one week. Right. And so I share that because I feel like it illustrates a lot of this, which is. the body's wisdom, even though it may seem like discomfort, was having me stop and slow down. You could call it a parasite, but it's also a little friend that was asking me to like attend to myself, you know, it's like a boundary crossing happened.
[00:27:42] Charna Cassell: And how do I re, you know, show myself this young part of me that was assaulted as a child, that I can hold my boundaries and that I can make her the, you know, my first priority.
[00:27:57] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That's a beautiful tracking of all of that. I, that happened to me in India. I had a male massage therapist, like rub his erection up against my arm. And at first I didn't know what was happening, you know? And then I opened my eyes, I looked over and I was like, Oh my gosh, you know? And then I felt completely trapped, right?
[00:28:16] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And froze. And that's the thing that I love for people to really hear is when you're a child, fight, flight, freeze, faint. Does not happen for us only freeze because we're non autonomous beings in those days. We don't have power, right? We're little ones being taught how to be big ones by the big ones. And we're being told if we're doing it right or wrong, good or bad.
[00:28:43] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so we freeze, you know, we don't fight. Right. And so that free state happened same. And now I have a male massage therapist that comes to my house every single week you know, has for years. And I noticed that I keep my hands and it's completely plastered to my sides. I never let anything, you know, be where it could, and, you know, He's so trustworthy, you know, but so when I notice I'm doing that, I'll, what I do is I gently go get my little girl.
[00:29:16] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I say, this is not that right. So that I don't have any vigilance. Why get a massage if you're going to be hypervigilant. Right. And so when you notice that vigilance, you go get the little one, you check in and you say, this isn't that you're not powerless anymore. I can take care of this, you know? And so this is a really great example that you just gave.
[00:29:37] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And, you know, as adults. I was an adult woman frozen in India and the same, there's a cultural shift right there, right? There's like a, I'm not even sure what to do with this. My hands are full. I can't move through the crowd. I'm in a, you know, in a massage room, you know? And so it's a place where you start practicing thought by thought, how to shift from the perceived powerlessness because an erection at the end of the day doesn't hurt us.
[00:30:09] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Right. And that's what I got back to my room in that hotel in India. I went, okay. And I went and I taught that little girl, I've got this. You do not have to, you don't have to deal with this because this isn't that you weren't being assaulted, right? Someone was getting his jollies and you immediately took action with the, you know, like I brought my body back in a closer energetic space and like that from now on, I promise that I will use my words.
[00:30:42] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so you don't have to be the one that's front and center has always happened from now on, you know, but that first free state, I think is an important one as an adult, so that you can start tracking that. Right.
[00:30:55] Charna Cassell: Right. Exactly. Yeah, that habit. It's, you know, your reptilian brain is assessing, am I strong enough to fight? Am I fast enough to run? Or do I need to freeze in order to survive this situation? And when you freeze, you're breathing less with less oxygen in your system. You're numbing your system out, which makes sense if you're really afraid.
[00:31:16] Charna Cassell: And so there's brilliance to that strategy. And, you know, one of the ways that I work with clients is I use martial arts based practices to help people rewire their brain through their body and thought out that freeze. And so it's like if you were through repetition, I use a hiking metaphor right you're like you're creating.
[00:31:36] Charna Cassell: a trail the way a new trail off you're going off road and you're stomping down the grass to create a new neural pathway that will over time override the trauma neural pathway but what I want to say about that is even though I have all of that training and I have as a result of that been able to protect a group of women on the street who's who are being you know like a man's coming up or That I've been able to, in many situations, automatically, physically take a stand and do, you know, like, say no.
[00:32:07] Charna Cassell: In that situation, especially in a foreign country when you don't speak the language,
[00:32:13] Dr. Keesha Ewers: it for me too.
[00:32:14] Charna Cassell: that was the thing, was that I was like, my brain, you know, and I, you know, no is a universal, like, he could have, and I moved quickly enough, I kept turning a little bit, but then I moved fast enough that he then took off. But. I went back and googled, like, how to say stop, leave me alone, don't touch me, like, I didn't have those words in that moment, and so it's just such an interesting
[00:32:37] Dr. Keesha Ewers: off in Spanish.
[00:32:39] Charna Cassell: Exactly! Get the fuck away from me in
[00:32:41] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That's right.
[00:32:42] Charna Cassell: I know how to say some other things, and other curse words, but I don't know how to say that!
[00:32:47] Charna Cassell: And, but it's just so interesting because You know, even if your body is trained and you've thought a certain thing out, it doesn't mean that you're, it's like, oh, I took that on as an experience of like, oh, yeah, I am. I'm vulnerable. I'm a vulnerable human. And that's especially when you've been a tough kid, you know, There's something important about not disowning your vulnerability and being able to integrate that and I feel like that's what my particular autoimmune situation was teaching me.
[00:33:20] Charna Cassell: You know, like, that's, that was almost like a 20 year period of unwinding that. And so I think it's important. It's like, okay, so we can be strong, you know, we can be a lot of things and it's like, how do we accept all parts of ourselves and not When you freeze as a kid, you can really feel a lot of shame and blame,
[00:33:39] Charna Cassell: and, and that's a huge part of why so often people who have been raped feel shame, Like, what could I could have done this, I could have done that, and it's like a little less intolerable than powerlessness. We'd rather shame ourselves. So, yeah. So coming back from that, it's like, okay, how do you not get stuck in that place of feeling shame or blame for what you could have done differently?
[00:34:05] Charna Cassell: And actually hold, like you demonstrated. Hold that little one and be like, I will protect you. You're,
[00:34:12] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I work a lot. Like I, I hold retreats and do a lot of plant medicine, I do retreats with and without depending on what people want. One on one, you know, working with people using psilocybin and Kana and MDMA and different things that will do different plant medicines do different things.
[00:34:29] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so, but one of them is interrupting the default mode network, which is. Really focused on I me my, you know, and am I safe? Am I okay? Am I lovable? Am I worthwhile? You know, and interrupting that and putting a gap in the automatic thought rumination loops that Create when we're small in response to real trauma, you know, like betrayal, rejection, heartbreak, you know, all of that. And being able to now at the, we have to remember that as adults, we also have developmental milestones to hit. We only think about that in childhood, but Suzanne Kutgruder took some of Lovinger's work in the sixties and, you know, really put this really clearly how we as adults go through specific developmental stages.
[00:35:26] Dr. Keesha Ewers: The final one that we can attain is unity consciousness.
[00:35:32] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Less than 1 percent of humans ever get there. And part of that is that desire to be constantly scouting for safety
[00:35:43] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Keeps us locked, right, in an energetic developmental space that doesn't recognize That not only are we victim at times in life, but we're also perpetrator
[00:35:57] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And that we have hurt people mindlessly and maybe intentionally throughout our lifetime. You know, and to be able to move into a space where we can recognize that this is part of the human condition, that we will have experiences of trauma, heartbreak and betrayal, and that develops what we call the false self or the ego or what we think of as our personality and actually identify with, you know, and that keeps us in a lot of resentment and bitterness and hyper vigilance.
[00:36:31] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That is a recipe for disease. And so that's why I say it's not just about changing your mind. It's about really engaging in the willingness that has to be first, right. To be very compassionately curious in self confrontation. Like, Oh, I'm starting to realize that every time I'm unhappy, I'm suffering or I'm upset.
[00:36:55] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I am present. Now, I mean, I remember when that happened with me, I was just like, You know, and so I talked a lot about unmet expectations, which are created by who, you know, by myself. And so, you know, it's like, oh, maybe the way that my mind is working the way I perceive is causing my own suffering, not my history. Not my parents, not my deadbeat friends who are flaking out on me, maybe, you know, like whatever the government, the president, you know, name it.
[00:37:31] Dr. Keesha Ewers: It's not actually what's causing my suffering. It's the way that I am with it. And so then that can take you into a space, you know, on the yellow brick road to get to there is healing and really confronting that, being able to do the integration process. And then that creates liberation. And the by product of that, instead of being frustration and bitterness is compassion.
[00:37:56] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And you get in touch with your true nature, which was never absent anyway. And it, you know, in Christianity, it's called Christ consciousness can be called your Buddha nature. It's your vast luminous of pure awareness. It has a lot of pains, but it's the part that carries on after you're done with this body and it dies, right?
[00:38:16] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That's, It's called Mindstream, nature of mind. There are so many ways of being with that, but that part. Cannot be harmed.
[00:38:25] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Never was harmed.
[00:38:27] Charna Cassell: Yeah.
[00:38:28] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That part doesn't engage in harm, you know?
[00:38:32] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And from there you get wisdom.
[00:38:34] Charna Cassell: Yeah. Yeah. I think of wisdom coming from embodied and visceral experience and knowing versus reading a book on something. And that takes practice and that takes, oh, not just consciousness from reading something, but from putting your body into a regular practice and opening,
[00:38:53] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I
[00:38:53] Dr. Keesha Ewers: agree.
[00:38:54] Charna Cassell: And I love that you said all that because I want to shift.
[00:38:57] Charna Cassell: I mean, there's so one thing actually that I feel like is important to name, which you basically pointed to was how our identity can be so invested in harm that happens to us, as well as perfectionism, right, or whatever it is. It's like, I do this so well. You know, I'm a firefighter and I'll save you.
[00:39:20] Charna Cassell: And it's like, your identity gets invested in this one thing. And then you have blind spots to all these other ways that you're causing harm to yourself or others.
[00:39:29] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Well, apart of that, like if your worth comes from being X, right. Firefighter or some other,
[00:39:36] Dr. Keesha Ewers: You're a mom, a whatever,
[00:39:38] Dr. Keesha Ewers: a, you know, a dad, if you're, if your worth comes from fill in the blank, you know, Every single thing that we can lay our eyes on is impermanent. Everything we've ever experienced is impermanent.
[00:39:53] Dr. Keesha Ewers: All of the hurts you've had in the past are already gone. They're impermanent, right? Your joy and happiness is also impermanent. Everything's impermanent. And so if we start hooking to something that's external and attached to that as being our X factor for happiness, it's going to cause suffering because it's impermanent.
[00:40:16] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so the, that, that lesson will often come through where the person that has the role of being the rescuer, you know, as like a nurse, a firefighter, a doctor, you know, like whatever it is, police officer, and then has something turn that upside down, maybe an injury
[00:40:37] Dr. Keesha Ewers: In the case of police officers, there's been now a lot of backlash, you know, and negativity and same with the medical community, you know, like they're not beloved anymore the way that they used to be.
[00:40:49] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so if your worth was attached to that right now, it's going to cause suffering. And if it's not, then the impermanence of all of the things that surround it can be held softer, loosely. Right. Cause your worth is intrinsically, your value is intrinsically present within, and it's not subject to anything that you've experienced or anything outside.
[00:41:18] Dr. Keesha Ewers: So that requires a lot of diligent practice.
[00:41:21] Charna Cassell: yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be focused because we're such a doing culture, to be able to orient towards beingness. And to not just love ourselves, but to love others for their beingness their essence. It's a very different thing. And one of the ways that I talk about sexual trauma is not just about sexual assault or child sexual abuse. It's really all the ways that we have physically shaped ourselves or twisted ourselves or shut our vitality down because we live in it. It's like you could be a person of color in America, you could grow up with a mentally ill parent or a drug addicted parent like There are these different circumstances where we're tracking for safety, as you pointed to, and then we squeeze ourselves down to be safe and to try to be as connected as we can.
[00:42:09] Charna Cassell: And in that process, you're squeezing down not only your vitality and your life force, but also your sexual self expression. It's like, how do you be fully self expressed when you're like twisted into a pretzel and holding your breath or, pulling in narrow, hunching over to be less visible?
[00:42:26] Charna Cassell: And So I wanted to talk to you because I know a huge part of your work is about helping people access their vitality. And so what is sexual liberation and vitality to you?
[00:42:39] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Yeah, it might surprise you and your listeners what I'm about to say,
[00:42:43] Charna Cassell: Ooh, I love it. I love being surprised.
[00:42:46] Dr. Keesha Ewers: when I started studying uh, your Vedic medicine there's a word called OJUS in Sanskrit that I now call OJUS, but your life force vitality. And they write about it in the Vedic you know, lore as, you know, a golden drop like honey that we have the amount that we have when we're born.
[00:43:08] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And when we burn through it, we die. Like that's it. Right. Chinese medicine has a similar, you know, Chinese medicine came from and so there's a similar like gin and it's, There are practices then to make sure that you are preserving OGIS, that you're reengaging with OGIS, that you're making sure it's very hard to , you know, restock your OGIS. So when I was searching about as a researcher looking for a word in the English lexicon that medically would be relevant, I could not find
[00:43:45] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Because we just don't have it. And so I came up with libido. Because libido has, you know, comes from Desiree, which is a Latin word that means from the stars and I was studying women at the time and women's sexual desire you know, what I put in my dissertation was, it's not desire for sex. Sexual desire is the energy that's required the OGIS, the life force vitality for you to make a choice about how you want to spend it. So you, you know, it's creative force. It doesn't necessarily need to be used sexually the way that we think about it, right? So it's engaging with life in the way that your human design is designed for, what your life purpose is, what you consider important.
[00:44:35] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so it may be that you have, you know, Your book that you want to write, or you want to be the very best grandparent or parent or whatever, you know, lawyer, doctor, whatever, name it. And that energy that you want to have at your disposal for lighting up, right. Being passionate about your gift to the world that has to be there.
[00:45:02] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Right. And so in Eastern practices a lot of the, um, practices that have been translated to Westerners. You know, sometimes it'll be like, be a celibate, you know, and you'll see people that are, which I do not disagree with, like not making a judgment on that at all. I think it really depends on like your karma and Dharma and why you're
[00:45:25] Charna Cassell: Mm-Hmm? . Mm-Hmm.
[00:45:26] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And I've noticed that in certain spiritual communities, there'll be dried up husk people that are spending their days in spiritual practice, but they have zero vitality. In other words, their OGIS is not present,
[00:45:41] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And they're just burned out versions. And so then they don't have that soma that's talked about in the literature that, that glowing, right?
[00:45:50] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That vitality. So when I came to my research, it was how do we translate that? And you know, because I'm a nurse practitioner and a medical model for people to understand. And so I use the word libido and I think about it like, you know, a dummy light on your dashboard. We pay really close attention when the gas gauge goes down, we pull off, we go get gas for our car.
[00:46:17] Dr. Keesha Ewers: If the oil light goes on, we make sure we, you know, we know our engine will burn out. But for our bodies, we tend to not do anything except drink coffee or
[00:46:27] Dr. Keesha Ewers: energy drinks, sugar, if our little light is starting to dim. And so I noticed that libido is one of the first things to go offline when the body is starting to go into imbalance.
[00:46:40] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And when the last to come back, because it's the seventh layer of what we call the tissue layers or tattoos. That has to have proper digestion of emotions, experiences, memories, and food in order to get good supply of blood and plasma and muscle and tissue and fat, and all of the layers before reproductive tissue. So reproductive tissue is the last one. So you have a lot that can go wrong before you get to that real essence of vitality for life. And I have a colleague that's also a sexologist Tina Sellers, who worked at the time in a Christian university and she and I were discussing sex positivity in Christianity, like does the Bible have sex positivity, and I'd never run across it except for like, You know, songs of Solomon and she went into the Torah to find this really amazing story
[00:47:44] Dr. Keesha Ewers: and it was in Jerusalem and the Holy of Holies in the temple the rabbis went in and were praying and saying, you know, like, can you remove. This sexual energy, because people are depraved, you know, they're just like committing adultery and doing all the wrong things with the sexual energy. Can you just get rid of it so we can be happy and we can be, you know, devout and make sure that we're following, you know, what you want us to do.
[00:48:16] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so, you know, God came and said, are you sure? And they were like, yeah, thank you for showing up and doing this. And so they the rabbis noticed like this. Lion of fire going over the wall of the temple in Jerusalem and into the desert and into the night and they were just like, all right, great. They went back out into Jerusalem, into their community and we're just so celebratory.
[00:48:39] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And then over the ensuing days and weeks, they started noticing chickens weren't laying eggs anymore. Artists painting builders weren't building right. There was nothing being created. And everything like no babies, but also no animals were reproducing. So they went, Oh, and so like, darn it. So they went back into the Holy of Holies and they started praying again and God showed up and said, so yes, you know, and they said, can we just like half of that back?
[00:49:12] Dr. Keesha Ewers: It's like, no. This is energy that binds you with me. It is co creative, co emergent energy in the universe. You co create with this energy. And so you have all of it or you have none of it and it is yours to use responsibly. And so, you know, that's kind of the way that I think about it is like, this energy is really important and can be used in any way you deem and be super intentional and super conscious.
[00:49:45] Dr. Keesha Ewers: So that's in line with your human design, with your karma, your Dharma, right. And you're using it responsibly.
[00:49:53] Charna Cassell: I love that. I love it because I ask a similar kind of question, like I ask about sexual freedom with most of my guests and everyone's, how they've lived their life, their filters, have them express and describe that in such different ways, and I just so appreciate the depth of how you held that, so thank you.
[00:50:14] Charna Cassell: That's great.
[00:50:16] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Yeah. So freedom to me is freedom to have the energy. Is it responsibly and expressively in the way that matches what your alignment with universal power is.
[00:50:27] Charna Cassell: totally. Yeah, I feel compelled to share with you that I had a Vedic astrology reading years ago. This is so I was born in Nepal and I was going back to work doing trauma and resilience education with teachers at an orphanage. And so this, I got this reading shortly before that. So that, that was impending.
[00:50:49] Charna Cassell: And this guy was like, your Dharma is doing sacred sexuality education with women and children. It's like
[00:50:57] Dr. Keesha Ewers: hmm. You're like, all right, I'm in alignment.
[00:50:59] Charna Cassell: like everything he said about my drama. I was like yeah, that's I'm on the path and that felt really validating. So
[00:51:05] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That does
[00:51:05] Dr. Keesha Ewers: feel so good,
[00:51:06] Dr. Keesha Ewers: doesn't
[00:51:07] Dr. Keesha Ewers: it? Yes, it feels
[00:51:09] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Good. Well done.
[00:51:11] Charna Cassell: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. You know, I feel like there are people out there who are not pro astrology and this and that. I think Vedic astrology is particularly fascinating because it's also so detailed as it also relates to your health.
[00:51:24] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Yes.
[00:51:26] Charna Cassell: I had an Ayurvedic doctor I was working with who, you know, explained why I'd gotten shingles on my face versus my stomach because of my chart.
[00:51:35] Charna Cassell: It's
[00:51:35] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Yes.
[00:51:36] Charna Cassell: So, so interesting. But anyways, I feel like it's helpful to gain perspective, as you were saying earlier, that, you know, you can be at the beginning of a backpacking trip looking at the trail going, this is where I am and this is where I'm going. And it doesn't necessarily it's not like you have no choice.
[00:51:55] Charna Cassell: and that you have no will, that it gives you some information about your vulnerabilities or your tendencies, but that you can make choices to correct those things, or to work on those things and evolve in a different direction. So I'm curious if there is a practice of some kind of exercise that you would like to lead our listeners through
[00:52:16] Dr. Keesha Ewers: sure. I love to have, I call it mouse to Eagle if you have an opportunity that you can close your eyes, do this, you know, if you're driving, you can just listen to me. It's, I'm not going to guide you through a meditation, although you, it is a meditation I do, but you can just visualize this for yourself.
[00:52:36] Dr. Keesha Ewers: When you think about yourself as a, you know, we of all human, of all animals, actually spend more time in the nest than any, we have more opportunities then to get screwed up 18 years, probably where we've got all these like developmental milestones that can get arrested and wounding. And, you know, all of these things, right?
[00:53:00] Dr. Keesha Ewers: So this is the way we're designed. It's not. It's not meant to be, this is the human condition. It's not meant to be any other way. You will have trauma, heartbreak, betrayal, rejection, trauma. That's just how it goes. Now may not, it's going to become an all kinds of flavors, right? And it may not be big capital T trauma and good.
[00:53:20] Dr. Keesha Ewers: That's wonderful. When you're a child, there are so many ways. If any of you have children, you can think of all the ways that a child can get hurt and die, right? There's so many ways. And so you can think about a mouse on the forest floor and a little mouse as you look around and your little nose twitching or whiskers are twitching and picking up information, there's a hyper vigilance in that mouse on the forest floor.
[00:53:48] Dr. Keesha Ewers: It scurries and scuttles from one safe place to the next. And it knows and it's constantly looking for the hundreds of predators that are there, above, below, on the same surface. That mouse is food for many, so many things can happen to this mouse. And so it darts from one place to the next in safety, always aware and hypervigilant of its vulnerability.
[00:54:22] Dr. Keesha Ewers: As children, we are the same. There's so many ways, you know, enough water in a bathtub. We can drown. We can go play in the traffic and get hit by a car that we can choke. We're so many ways, and we're being told by our adults. If we're doing things right or wrong, which also send us into like, Oh no, I'm not doing it right.
[00:54:42] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I'm bad. I'm wrong. And then there's also overt neglect, abandonment and abuse that can happen. So mouse consciousness is very vigilant and it's very oriented towards safety. The beautiful thing that happens is as we grow and develop and really, you know, take on that adult brain of the prefrontal cortex, where we can make more informed executive function choices for ourselves, less limbic system orientation.
[00:55:13] Dr. Keesha Ewers: We move into Eagle where we can soar with these really wide, beautiful wings. We can find a current and we can just glide on it. We can see the forest above. We can even see the mouse on the forest floor scurrying around. And our nervous system, because we are predator now, we are free. We can just rest in our sovereign power. We have autonomy. Yes, there are things. We will die. Everything dies. And we have these really beautiful opportunities. Yes, it is. to engage in something much larger than, are we okay? Like the mouse. So as you find yourself in mouse consciousness, shift to Eagle, just do that with your imagination, move from mouse to Eagle and float on that current, surveying the forest floor, letting that little mouse know it's okay.
[00:56:25] Dr. Keesha Ewers: You're watching over it. You can see it. Right. You're friends with it and you're protecting it and just play with what it feels like to have those great gorgeous wings that can take you anywhere that the sky allows you to. So that's like a shift in energy, right? There are literally 8. 1 billion humans on the planet.
[00:56:58] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And we're all different. There are all these templates of being human. And if you don't like the one you're in, you can borrow different aspects of different templates. You can do the same thing with the animals. You can do it with non human intelligences. You can find your favorite tree, drop in and feel what it feels like to be that rooted, grounded, right?
[00:57:20] Dr. Keesha Ewers: . There are an infinite number of possibilities of how to live your next breath. Play. Just play with it, right? We get so locked in to achieving and doing and producing, we forget to play.
[00:57:36] Charna Cassell: thank you so much. it's one of my favorite practices. Actually, it was a profound thing. The first time I was in a training and invited to move through space as different kinds of beings. It was like, whether it was a a deity or whether it was an animal and how easily I had that access and could shift into an expanded state.
[00:57:59] Charna Cassell: And I think it's so important and, you know, it's why it's like a, the concept of a yantra in, in, in Hinduism or like using, Oh,
[00:58:11] Dr. Keesha Ewers: I keep this at my desk, and it's my little girl self,
[00:58:15] Charna Cassell: Yeah.
[00:58:17] Dr. Keesha Ewers: between two forms of Tara. Green and white, right? Who are active and still,
[00:58:24] Dr. Keesha Ewers: and she is Tara, right? And so, it's just like this visual reminder. It's so beautiful. Yantras, like you're talking about, deity practice.
[00:58:36] Charna Cassell: Like putting your attention, whether it's visually looking at something or imagining something in your mind's eye. And I even use it like with clients, I'll be like, you have a friend, if you need to access more grounding, do you have a friend who you perceive is really grounded? And it's like, feel those, you know, those steel toed boots on your feet move through space as this friend.
[00:58:56] Charna Cassell: You know, and so we don't realize that we're not trapped inside these physical bodies and these energetic forms like we have so much more access than we realize, but you have to be introduced to a concept to have access to it. And so when you guided us through that, I also, and I just felt, I felt so much gratitude.
[00:59:18] Charna Cassell: I felt a lot of gratitude for you. And I felt a lot of gratitude for being a woman, which was absent in that moment when I was alone on that trip. And I normally love traveling alone, but I just, I felt snapped back into Eagle Perspective and that felt really good. So thank you.
[00:59:37] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Good. Good. Good.
[00:59:39] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Good. That's why community is so important. Right? Is we are reflections of one another. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's so beautiful.
[00:59:51] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Or, I mean, being here with your heart. So fully.
[00:59:56] Charna Cassell: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:59:57] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Sometimes people will feel very. They'll drop into a place with story that says, I wasn't allowed to play. And when I invite play, it'll be, well, I was never allowed to play.
[01:00:10] Dr. Keesha Ewers: And so it's like, well, that's mouse. Mouse is also not playing. So can you invite a different experience for your child self?
[01:00:22] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Right. When I used to teach children's yoga, I have four kids, so I was
[01:00:26] Dr. Keesha Ewers: really, a lot of stuff, right? I used to teach children's yoga and I was always inviting them into different postures that were not human, right?
[01:00:37] Dr. Keesha Ewers: It's like, how can you borrow a bear? Like, what would that feel like? You know, and children that have a lot of trauma, don't play. They're very hypervigilant. They're watching. Play is not safe. So you can invite your adult self. It does not matter. You can start now,
[01:00:54] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Right? Invite your adult self to just go into your living room and put yourself into a posture that might represent an animal, a tree.
[01:01:06] Dr. Keesha Ewers: Something different than you sitting in front of a computer, feeling and constricted around the fact that you didn't get to the play when you were a kid, right? It's like, Oh, take your kid now, right? Go do something different now. Right? And that's the invitation of the eagle. Whenever we have a lot of bald eagles, Pacific Northwest, and you know, they're, you know, They're regal, noble and playing, right?
[01:01:33] Dr. Keesha Ewers: It's like this real beautiful grace. And so, yeah. And
[01:01:39] Charna Cassell: it. Thank you so much. Oh, I'm so excited to know that you're a resource out there.
[01:01:46] Dr. Keesha Ewers: what a beautiful being you are.
[01:01:50] Charna Cassell: Thank you. If you've found this podcast helpful, share it with anyone you can, any way you can.
[01:01:57] Charna Cassell: Please rate, review, and share it with friends so others can find our community of healing. You can also follow me at Late Open Podcast on Instagram and Facebook, and read more about my work@passionatelife.org. You can also sign up for my newsletter to stay informed. This has been Laid Open Podcast with your host, Charna Cassell. Until next time, may this podcast connect you to new resources and empower you to heal
