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Podcast 339: Emotional Health

Martin Pytela and Scott Paton talk about the emotion side of illness. How does your Subconscious Mind affect your health?

We are not good at expressing our feelings constructively. Be open to new possibilities.

We talk about Joan Kaylor: http://www.joankaylor.com

SCOTT: Welcome everybody! This is the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet! I am your co-host Scott Paton, and joining us, as usual, is the health coach at our founder, chief bottle washer, and fearless leader, Martin Pytela! Hey Martin, how are you doing today?

MARTIN: I am feeling really good today, and I would like to remind you of the story ‘how can you tell a pioneer from the settler?’

SCOTT: How can you tell the pioneer from the settler, Martin?

MARTIN: Pioneer is the one with the face down in the mud with the arrows in his back.

SCOTT: Reminds me of the ‘don’t shoot the messenger.’ That segways very nicely into one of the things that we want to talk about today, and this might be a difficult thing to talk about or listen to. Sometimes people want to hold on to their illness. There are many sides to illness. Like some people say the illness starts outside the physical body because it is a spiritual thing, an emotional thing, a mental thing first, and then it gets into the body, and then we have to deal with it. But of course, if you just cut it out, or take some drugs or whatever, then you’ve gotten rid of the physical part, but the cause is outside of the physical body, and it is going to come back again and again and again. And oftentimes, particularly in people with fibromyalgia, they have this pain, and it is very, very physical, and it is really hard to see any spiritual, emotional, or mental background to it. Of course, it is quite possible that for you specifically, it really is just a physical thing, and there is no emotional aspect to it. Everybody is different and unique.

MARTIN: I always like to start with the end in mind. I am often  reminded of Stephen Covey in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and just how fantastically clever and good and on point it was. And one of his seven winning strategies was: ‘begin with the end in mind.’ So the end here should be harmony, health, happiness. Also, reading this book here, this book by John Sarno, he talks about how the subconscious mind creates diversions, so that you, at the conscious level, don’t have to deal with the unacceptable issues that are buried in the subconscious mind.

He calls it The Rage, the rage against what happened to you, and how you would like to attack or obliterate or blow up or do away with, and it could be your mommy or daddy, or brother, sister, the creator, the world, the classmates, whatever. Anything and everything that ever happened to you in your life that you couldn’t deal with, that you were powerless to deal with, had to bury into the subconscious, and it never got released. And now the subconscious would like to do something, you might think things like “I want to strangle you,” or something like that, but you are not allowed to say that to mommy, so you bury it. And then maybe later in life, this psychological whack-a-mole pops up somewhere else.

SCOTT: And it doesn’t look like the same thing! So then you think: “well obviously I’ve got a good relationship with my mom, it has nothing to do with mom, it is that woman over there!”

MARTIN: Right! Many people end up with this ‘lollipop moment,’ where you are a three years old child, and you are having dinner, and your sister is finished eating, and mommy gives her the lollipop. And you say: “I also want a lollipop.” And mommy says to you: “You can and will have your lollipop when you are finished eating your dinner.” But all that is skipped and erased in your mind, the only thing that remains now is you didn’t get the lollipop, so you think: “I am unworthy, I am unlovable, they never give me what I deserve, I got no lollipop, I was not given the lollipop when I asked for it.” And now you are a 30-year-old professional, who still has unresolved issues of the lollipop.

SCOTT: And it shows up in different ways in the body.

MARTIN: Yes! I remember when I started dealing with my chronic problems. I fell apart when I was 25 because the mercury toxicity rapidly accelerated my decline. I just went to crap. I was crawling on all fours to get out of bed to the toilet because I couldn’t walk at 25. And I was: “Oh my God, is this where it is going to go? Am I going to just be in a wheelchair on drugs?” It looked like that! But I started dealing with the stuff. I didn’t know what was all buried in there, but I was an inquisitive kind of fellow, so I started digging in. I wanted to know, so by the time I was about 33, I had a whole lot of answers about how messed up I was, and how I could undo the messed-up-ness. I know you did a whole lot of soul searching yourself, right? Anyway, I decided that I was going to become a hypnotherapist, so I got myself certified as a clinical hypnotherapist because I wanted to get the education, I wanted to know what’s in the subconscious mind. I was like the little boy who wants to cut the frog open and see what’s inside of it. I wanted to cut open the subconscious mind and see how it operated. I am now able to see a lot of my stuff. But I am so far from perfect, you know, the more I know, the more I know how little I know.

SCOTT: I was watching a friend of mine on a Facebook Live talk, and he said something really profound. Somebody asks him: “Who is your hero?” And he says: “I have lots of heroes, but my number one hero is me 10 years from now, that person that I am going to be 10 years from now, that is my hero.” So 10 years go by and the same person comes up and he says: “Who is your hero? You are now 10 years older, are you your hero?” He goes: “No. I am nowhere near being the hero that I wanted to be 10 years ago, but I am closer and my hero is the guy I am going to be 10 years from now.” And he says it never ends, you can always grow, you can always ask yourself: How can I get better in the next 10 years? And that is what I want to do!

MARTIN: Yeah. it is a beautiful story. I remember one of my mentors said: “You are either green and growing or ripe and rotting.”

SCOTT: Right! (laughing)

MARTIN: I have met many 65-year-olds who have been vibrant and full of curiosity and still interested, still asking questions. And then I met many 44-year-olds who were finished growing, they already knew all the answers, their mind was closed, and they were done. They may think they have 20 more years of experience, but it is actually one year of the same experience repeated 20 times.

SCOTT: You reminded me of something that happened to my best friend when I was in my early twenties. Before I tell you what that is, let me tell you something. Couple of people have asked me: “Scott, you are 60 years old, are you going to stop? Are you going to retire?” And I am like: “Are you kidding? I love doing this! I love getting on with you, Martin. and talking about all these interesting things that we talk about, I love the work that we do together, and I love the other stuff that I do, my other projects and courses that we put together! I have no desire to retire like my grandparents or my parents did.” And now I am thinking: where did that come from? 

All of my family has headed towards retirement, and been retired when they’re 60 or 65, so this is what my family dynamic says to do, and Scott is going: “No way!” I had never thought of this in the last 40 years, but my friend’s father, I was very close with him, he was a Danish guy who used to live on fishing boats in Denmark, on the North sea. He was tough as nails. And when he came to Canada, he became a janitor. Within one month of him retiring, he died. I was so close to the family, I knew what he was thinking, he had put this thing off for as long as he could, and his family said: “No, you have to retire.” His work was his whole life, well, it was not more important than his wife, and it was not more important than his son, because if it was, he would have stayed and never retired.

MARTIN: I would call it the identity. Our personal identity is when we are invested in being the job that we do. Then if the job ends, I guess we end too.

SCOTT: Yup, that was exactly the way he looked at it. He was perfectly healthy, and then he was gone. It wasn’t like he was sick, and it took him 10 years to slowly fade away, he was just: “Nope, I am gone.”

MARTIN: Yeah, those are beautiful tangents, thank you for sharing the story, Scott. Let’s go back to talking about the pain in the body. The pain, I think, is a diversion created by the subconscious mind as an outlet for an unacceptable rage that cannot be expressed. And in my estimation, when I was trying to intellectualize the stuff, I imagined that at least 80%, if not 90% of all chronic disease is actually caused by that first and foremost, rather than the other things which we at Life Enthusiast fiddle with. We fiddle with the environment, toxic load, nutrition, stagnation, lymphatic system, and so on.

SCOTT: The story can be different for everybody, but the process is probably very, very similar. Because we do see people who have a lot of chronic pain, who try the EFT tapping, pendulum swinging, meditation, and all this stuff, and all of a sudden they find themselves learning how to deal with some of their issues, and getting better. I sometimes think that when we have these health crises or even just a small health issue, it is really our body trying to tell us something, the subconscious mind. One of the things that we are trying to tell people is to be open to the fact that there is more than just the physical body that is in pain. There is a pain in the emotional body, there is a pain in the mental body, probably in the spiritual body, and it is showing up as a physical issue because that is the only place where you can actually feel it.

MARTIN: Yeah, it is like the computer, there is all sorts of stuff going on on the inside, but only when you print it out you can take it to someplace else.

SCOTT: Right, that is right. We really want people to be open-minded. Just because you like something, or you think something, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world likes it or thinks the same way. You may have tried something and it didn’t work, and there can be a million reasons why it didn’t work, and somebody else can try it and it does work. This comes down to what we talk about all the time with metabolic typing, there are certain people and when they eat a certain food, they feel energized and good, and there are certain people that eat the same food and they want to go to sleep, or they get depressed or want to kill themselves, or they have road rage. We react differently to different foods. If you don’t think you react to food, try to have five beers and then try to walk across the room. What we put into our body has a big impact on us, but what we put into our mind has a big impact on us as well! And so just because it didn’t work for you or you are not open-minded enough to try it, or you don’t want to try it, doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t work for somebody else. What we find is that people hang on very, very tightly to their sickness.

MARTIN: Because it is a part of their current self-image.

SCOTT: Yes, it is who they are.

MARTIN: Yes. They think like: I am the person who resents the thing that happened to me back when, and I will not let it go, I will carry that with me forever, and that vibration will give rise to cancer. I am not defining myself as me and cancer, I am just defining myself as having those grudges, and they will create cancer, or whatever else it may be. And it is not just grudges, it is just whatever is down there in your mind, you don’t even have to know. I remember being on a massage table, getting deep tissue massage, and some part of my body was being worked on, and suddenly tears were just running out of my eyes, I was just bawling. I could never know what I was bawling about, that was never revealed. But the therapist said: “well, this is good, this happens to a lot of people, it is just a release!” I have just released a stored memory that needed to be released, and it brought all these emotions with the release.

SCOTT: So we could look at these little stored memories and stored emotions as blights on a tree or something. If they just stay there, then pretty soon they’re going to kill the tree. But if you, being the orchard caretaker, come along, see the blight, and you work it out, then you are going to have a healthier time and a healthier life.

MARTIN: Yes! And I guess all of these things are essentially blocking the expression of bliss or blocking of the joy. (Maureen shows up) Oh, hi Maureen! Do we want to show my wife to the world?

MAUREEN: Hi, Scott!

MARTIN: This here is what I live for. This is what I’ve spent nurturing for all these past 40 years.

MAUREEN: Alright.

MARTIN: So just in case you are wondering, I am happily married. So let’s just get back to it! There was this session Scott and I did with Ashok Gupta from London, who is a phenomenal guy, who explained to us how the amygdala in the brain works, it is a particularly tiny piece somewhere in there, and it actually gets physically changed, and starts creating processing in the brain that causes the response to be not relative to the stimulus.

SCOTT: He explains it in a really good way, let’s put a link here to that interview, so you guys can check it out. He said something like: if you take a hammer and you hit your knee a few times, it hurts. But if you keep hitting it, what happens with most people, after a few minutes, the body says, ‘okay, this is not life-threatening, I can ignore it even though it is still painful.’ So don’t pay so much attention to it and you can keep living your life. But people who have fibromyalgia, that pain is really bad and it doesn’t stop, it continues and continues and continues. And doctors can tell them: “It is all in your head.” Well, yes it is actually, but not the way they mean it!

MARTIN: Every autoimmune inflammatory condition has multiple components. We have been identifying them to people, toxicity, malnutrition, stagnation, and the invisible stuff, we can call it trauma, for example, the unresolved trauma. You can have childhood trauma, but you also can have electromagnetic trauma that is ongoing right now. You could have a cell tower half a block from your home that just keeps radiating you, or you could have a wifi repeater in your classroom, this has been documented time and time again, as soon as they shut off the wifi in the school, children settled down and started being able to focus on things. And also food! The common problematic foods like wheat, dairy, all the industrial foods, refined, fried, packaged in a box or a can.

But mind over matter, 9 times out of 10, it can be overcome, it can be suppressed, and I can demonstrate it. Go watch a hockey game that you are really into if hockey is your thing. Whatever event, concert if you will, and for the next two hours you will forget that your arm is broken, that your heart is broken, that your fibromyalgia is in a flare, your brain will focus on the game or the concert, and exclude all else.

SCOTT: I think sometimes that is why so many millions of people are into it, and so many people are into performance arts for example, because it gives them that opportunity to express themselves. You can yell and be loud and let all emotions out, including anger and frustration. We can’t do this everywhere we want, when we express like that on the street, like when you had a couple of too many beers and you start throwing stuff against the wall and yelling, the neighbors will call the police and they will take you away before you can hurt somebody.

MARTIN: Well, anyway, there are tools that can help us resolve that trauma. Neurolinguistic programming has totally answered it. It is validated, available, it really works, it just has a bad rep, because people can’t believe that it takes only a heartbeat to go from before to after. You can have a phobia before, and then after the phobia is gone, you can just play with the spider or a snake or whatever your phobia was about. But it could be worse, I believe that you can cure a child molester by fixing his associations about what is a turn-on and what is not. The same way you can rewire a person how they feel about snakes, you can rewire how the person relates to their sexuality. I don’t know this for a fact, but it is possible that what you find attractive, whether it is inappropriate, or culturally wrong, or whatever, could be rewired. The mainstream hasn’t really bought into it, so the numbers don’t support my theory very well.

SCOTT: Well, we also have a society that believes in punishment and not a cure for anything that we don’t agree with.

MARTIN: Oh yes, that too. The war on drugs is fighting the emotionally distraught person who is seeking an outlet from the moment of hell that he has been through, a person that is willing to snort something or inject something just to not feel the pain. They don’t want to feel the pain. They will use alcohol, they will use whatever, cocaine, marijuana, sex, work, you name it. They want any distraction only to not feel that which is too painful to feel.

SCOTT: But when you avoid processing that, it gets suppressed and then comes out like cancer, heart attack, or chronic illness.

MARTIN: Yeah, malfunction. Soft tissue damage, where the chi, the energy, the prana, the life force, stops flowing freely, and then pain develops. That is why acupuncture works a lot, because you stick a needle into a spot, where there has been an impediment to free flow of energy, and you release that blockage, flow is restored, and pain is gone.

SCOTT: The only way I can lift my hand is because there is a whole bunch of energy going into my muscles and my nerves. And we have a hard time when we talk about the type of energy you talked about. The whole idea of our bodies having these lines of energy seems crazy to some people. It has only been like 5,000 years of practice by Chinese medicine, you would think that would be enough for us to believe that.

MARTIN: It is well-researched, and people who understand it well can tell you that this spot over here, right here, this very spot, is the spot that deals with headaches. So when you massage this spot, your headache will go away. What the heck?

SCOTT: And there are hundreds if not thousands of those spots on the body.

MARTIN: Yeah, and there is the energy flow. There are wonderful methods available, the Body Talk, the quantum healing, Reiki, hypnosis, rapid pain elimination by Dr. Amendolara, or you can have the Gupta method. Gupta is affordable, that is like 200 or 250 bucks for all the materials that are enough information to teach you what you need to be doing. Now, of course, that will require a commitment, it is a process, it is a six-month process rather than the one-afternoon seminar that will get you fixed, but six months isn’t bad if it means you will be free of pain. So, people, take it from an old master, there is such a thing as ‘it is all in your head.’

SCOTT: And you can get it out of your head, and you can make a difference. We’ve come across a lot of people that are very closed-minded, and they’re hanging on to a lot of things. And you can tell when the reaction is irrational, right?

MARTIN: Yes, they are yelling back at you: “You know nothing! You cannot walk in my shoes! You have never seen what I’ve been through, how dare you!”

SCOTT: Yeah, like you are really unique. There are only 7 billion of us, I think somebody has gone through what you’ve gone through. But that is one of the things that we really noticed online, somebody posts something and it gets people to divide into these two groups, and it is like a war!

MARTIN: Yes, support, and disagreement.

SCOTT: Right. And when you commented something like: “here is why I think that this is okay to do, and here is why I think this isn’t okay to do,” the reactions were like: “you are very judgmental, Martin, I just can’t believe that you would even think that, how could you even think that? I’ve been doing that for 25 years. I have had my problem for 24 years, but I just don’t see how you could possibly be so mean and nasty. I don’t want to have anything to do with you.” One of my friends says: What is the most expensive thing that you can own?

MARTIN: A closed mind.

SCOTT: A closed mind, yeah!

MARTIN: Did I guess it right?

SCOTT: You did! You know, we have this closed mind, and there is no opportunity for possibility. Let’s say for example that I am smoking and I have a tumor on the back of my head, and I smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. Someone says: “well, you know, maybe it is because you are smoking a pack of cigarettes, and if you stop smoking, maybe the tumor would go away.” And your reaction would be: “No way. You just hate smokers. You are just another one of those blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” instead of saying: “well, you know, maybe I should look into that, maybe God or the universe or whoever brought this person into my life to give me a wake-up call.”

I spent three weeks in Turkey, and one of the people that I got to know very well was probably in her seventies, and she had two beautiful dogs and a beautiful cat, and she just had surgery on her shoulder, because the tendon in the shoulder had gotten really, really thin. She loved to garden, she was very active, and now her hand was in a sling for six weeks, three weeks before I got there, and then she would start to see the therapist and her arm started to get better. And she smoked! And she gave this beautiful speech that, I think she must’ve practiced every day for the last 40 years or so, about why she smoked. 

And maybe she saw something on my face that looked judgmental, but I could not help thinking: there is this woman who loves digging in the garden and doing all these things, being really active, just had surgery, just started feeling better again, going to therapy, and I am wondering if in two or three years they’re going to have to do surgery again, and I wonder if it is possible that the reason will be all the poisons and toxins in her smoking. I didn’t say anything, I was none of my business, but that is what goes through my head. She says things like: “I have good lungs.” Who knows? You can’t go back 40 years, not smoke for 40 years, and then compare yourself to the smoking version of yourself, right?

MARTIN: The good thing is that if you stop, it only takes a year before you are back to as good as new because the body does have this homeostatic self-repairing autopilot system that is aiming towards balance and health, rather than the opposite of that. As you were saying it, I am thinking: ‘damn, I haven’t exercised enough in the last two years.’ I have been putting other things ahead of that. Choices, choices, choices. And I am thinking: ‘well I might be aging faster because of that.’ It is just self-reflecting on that. I am not perfect, I just happen to know a few answers about a few things. And those I am happy to share because I am quite certain I know those well because I’ve learned them the hard way. So here we are telling people: “Yes, we can help you with nutrition, detox, exercise, and understanding, but please be aware that the larger reason for the illness is invisible, vibrational, and solving that is a huge thing.” So EFT, for example, we know Joan Kaylor, she’s helped so many people fix their holes, right? And she’s not the only EFT practitioner out there, of course.

SCOTT: But she’s very, very good, I’ve done some courses with her. Here is one of the things that you have to understand: There are 8 billion people on the planet. And not everyone is willing to look into the dirty, dark places of their psyche. When you do any of this type of work by yourself, you usually go to a very comfortable level, you do not go deep at all, you just deal with the stuff that is obvious to you. You will not go deep enough, because you cannot go deep enough alone, you can’t see it. Our eyes look out, they don’t look in. You think: “I get along really good with my sister, I have no issue with my sister.” You sometimes really need the help of an experienced professional to uncover what is hiding deep in your subconscious mind. You also need to know that you are not on this journey alone, that we live on a wonderful planet, and the planet keeps bringing people into our lives that are there to help us with our growth, and with our healing. We are often so resistant to the healing because it might be very difficult to realize the problem is actually in our own mind and not somewhere out there.

MARTIN: Right. You can go a long way on self-care.

SCOTT: That is right, and as you are going along in that way, you are going to meet people! There are lots of support groups, for all sorts of different things. And you find the one that really helps you with your growth, and you stick with it, and you keep going. I think the biggest thing is the fact that there is hope. It doesn’t have to remain this way. You just have to believe that you can change, and then start taking steps. If you are like: “I don’t think I am ever going to get well,” it is going to be pretty hard for you to get well. But once you think: “I just need to get these things figured out and worked on, and I am going to be okay,” then you start taking your steps. The door gets open when you take the steps, the door stays closed when you just stand in one spot. That has been my experience.

MARTIN: Yes. Indeed.

SCOTT: Cool! So, thank you very much for joining us, everybody! Martin, if somebody wanted to talk with you a little bit more about their specific issues, are you willing to take their call?

MARTIN: I am always willing to engage with you! You can check out our website, Life Enthusiast, read our blog, listen to our podcast, and of course, if you want to talk to me directly, I answer the phone every day from 8 am to 8 pm Pacific Standard Time, call me at (866) 543 3388!

SCOTT: Thank you, Martin! You have been listening to the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet! Thanks for joining us, everybody! We will see you next time!

Author: Scott Paton