Ground & Root Podcast

Healing Starts Within: Stress, Trauma, And Cancer Care

• Dionne Detraz • Episode 22

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What if the turning point in cancer care isn’t another protocol, but a deeper conversation with your own nervous system and story? 

In today's episode we sit down with Integrative Psychiatrist Tracy Peng, MD to explore how stress, trauma, and suppressed emotions shape the cancer journey and why mental health support is a core part of care. 

We unpack the data on confidants and outcomes, the Adverse Childhood Experiences link to cancer risk, and the common pattern of people pleasing and emotional suppression. Tracy also shares tools for accurate narrative, grief work, boundaries, and nervous system regulation to restore coherence and inner wisdom.

Here's some of what we're covering:

• emotional stress as a driver of disease and what to do about it
• how integrative psychiatry supports cancer care
• confidants, anxiety, and outcome differences
• unhealed trauma mirroring nonhealing wounds
• childhood coping patterns and adult triggers
• ACEs research and cancer risk
• reconnecting to inner wisdom over quick med checks
• acupuncture, tapping, bodywork, and food as stabilizers
• grief as a core skill for resilience
• composting anger into clarity and action

Listen to learn how to create a care plan that includes your emotions, your body, and your soul. And if this resonates, subscribe, share with someone who needs it, and leave a review to help others find the show.

More about today's guest & how to connect with her:

Tracy Peng MD is an integrative and holistic depth psychiatrist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. She practiced at UCSF’s Osher Center for Integrative Health for over 20 years, which is where she met and became a fan of the luminous Dionne! She has worked extensively with patients with chronic or terminal illnesses and has a special interest in spiritual and mindfulness-based approaches to the mental health care of women with cancer. She is a graduate of the End-of-LIfe Care Practitioner Program offered by Zen Hospice Project (and later offered through the Metta Institute).

👉 Tracy's Website: www.tracypengmd.com

PLUS Resources shared on today's episode:

👉 Screening tool for Adverse Childhood Experiences 

👉 https://www.rachelremen.com/  

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Ground and Root Podcast. I'm your host and holistic cancer dietitian Deonda Trez. I am really excited. We have a special guest with us today, one of my former colleagues. We talked, we were just talking about how it's been like almost 10 years now since we were working together, but we used to be office mates at the UCSF OSHA Center for Integrative Medicine. We have Tracy Penning with us today. She is an integrative psychiatrist who is transitioning now into private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. And she does incredible work in the field of integrative medicine and psychiatry, as well as supporting women who are moving through a cancer journey. So she has so much knowledge to share with us today. We are going to dive into a little bit just to, I'm going to give you high level and then we'll let Tracy get going. So for this month, and if you listen to last week's episode, then you already know this. For this month, we are really looking at stress as a driver of cancer and disease in general and what to do about it and the different kinds of stress. And one of the things we talked about in last week's episode was just how certain events in our life, right? Certain emotionally charged events, whether that's happening in childhood or in our adult time, can leave wounds, can leave trauma in our body that is creating this long-term chronic stress. And how we can help enhance our healing, help enhance our recovery by really infusing this as part of our healing plan, right? Instead of just treatment, just food, all these things are really important. We still have to look at the emotional components as well. And Tracy is definitely an expert in this area. So without further ado, thank you so much, Tracy, for being here with us today. It's so good to have you.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Why Mental Health Belongs In Cancer Care

SPEAKER_01

It's such a joy to see you again. I know. For me too. For me too. It's been too long. It's been too long. I'm glad the podcast was a reason that I could bring us back together like this. Yeah. I know. Okay. So, Tracy, tell us a little bit more, just about you, your experience, the work that you do. Give us more info.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So I started meditating right before I started medical school, basically to help with my own healing and my own suffering in my life. And partway through residency in psychiatry, I had a very dear visionary mentor who died of a brain tumor, a malignant brain tumor. And it just really tilted my worldview and my experience. And then I ended up training with Zen Hospice Project in a program called the End of Life Care Practitioner Program that was run by Frank Ostaseski and Angie Stevens, and had just very luminary faculty like Rachel Naomi Reman and Ram Doss and Frances Vaughan, Angeles Arian. And so I really started learning from people who had really integrated their spiritual lives with their practice in healing others. And it was really inspirational for me. So I really started with my focus on hospice and end of life, which is the opposite from how people with cancer experience it. They start with a diagnosis, and then that's something that may happen later on, or maybe not from that particular cancer. Yeah. So I just was immediately immersed in the very kind of ultimate aspect of psychiatric care in terms of like death and transformation. So really that's what I've been doing as an integrative and holistic depth psychiatrist in San Francisco is really facilitating a lot of personal transformation in the patients and focusing on state of mind for people who are not necessarily looking for deep transformation. And so I see a variety of patients. I do see quite a few cancer patients, but also a lot of people who don't have cancer. And it's just really opened up, I feel like, what the, you know, what the modalities are that can be useful. And there's so much there that people can gravitate towards and plug into as resources along their journeys. I think the people can be surprised working with a psychiatrist when they have a medical illness, that having a psychiatrist as their main mental health care support, somebody who has medical training has been to medical school can be very comforting, I think, for people. And I think often they don't realize that coming in that psychiatrists are the only mental health clinicians that go to medical school and have that kind of medical training that's just part of the foundation. But it comes in really handy. It comes in really handy. So I've had people come in that are in their cancer journeys where I've never seen a psychiatrist before you. I never needed a psychiatrist before, but they get it, like how useful it is, though those skills and that experience that psychiatrists tend to have.

Paths To Psychiatry And End Of Life Work

SPEAKER_01

So I'm curious, Tracy, like how does somebody, how does somebody even know to be to get in touch with you? Is it something that's brought up with their doctors as a referral? Like this might be really helpful, or is it somehow in the journey they realize that they need some extra mental health support because the cancer experience itself is so difficult and challenging? I'm just curious how, like, what is the path, right? Like how do people get in front of you?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, there are many paths, but those are two that are very common is an oncologist or a primary care physician will just notice this patient is really anxious or they're stuck in some way, or sometimes people are depressed. And so they they will make the referral. Definitely that that's one pathway. Sometimes I had a patient recently who was like, My daughter is a physician, and my other daughter is a therapist, and they looked you up. That's awesome. You are the one that you know that they that my daughters think I should see. So it really runs the gamut in terms of what gets people to feel like, oh, this is the right step for me right now. Um, but it's actually some discomfort of some kind spurring people forward. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. That makes sense. Because I feel like too, this is something I've seen in the people that I work with where sometimes they're coming into the cancer journey already with like traumas and stressors from their past. And sometimes not, right? So the people who are coming with this history may have already worked with mental health providers and that feels a little bit more familiar. And of course, we would just continue that journey through this healing experience too. Whereas others, if they don't have, if they haven't had that history, it might not be on their radar, which is another reason why I really wanted to bring you on because I feel like when you're advocating for your healing journey, like a big part of it is pulling together a team that is going to support you through it. Right. And sometimes we forget the this meant the mental health component that is equally important. Yes.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. And I think the mental health component is very natural because if you think about how people are feeling when they first get diagnosed, that's very stressful. It's very anxiety provoking, or when they're getting biopsy results or cancer marker blood test results or scan results. There's just a natural anxiety that is just so often a part of the journey that I think it's really just foundational to a care team for most people, if they think of it. And also, I think there was a study done a long time ago that was looking at breast cancer, like breast biopsies, and they had divided them into people who felt like they they had emotional support or someone with confidant and people who didn't feel like they had anyone to talk to. And it was like the biopsy results from the people that felt they had a confidant were way more often negative for cancer than the ones who felt like they had no one to talk to. And so it just there's just really so much just emotional support that is needed and just so obvious. Yeah.

How Patients Find Integrative Support

SPEAKER_01

Isn't that crazy? Yeah, for people to particularly if you've never heard that information before, that can be mind-blowing. Right. And that is really why I wanted to spend a whole month talking about just emotions and stress and nervous system, because I think we're really undervaluing how much this can enhance your experience, everything from physiology enhancing your immune system and all of this, but then also just to your resilience and like emotional wellness as you go through, which could very well be one of the most challenging things you've ever done in your life. Okay. So people are coming to you. So guide us a little bit around what you've seen, like your experience around the importance of not just for biopsy results, which could be very helpful, right? But also just like, you know, supporting emotional health, supporting, going deeper, supporting mental health. What has been your experience in seeing like how is that actually benefit someone as they move through a journey?

SPEAKER_00

Sometimes there's there are these dramatic stories. Like I had someone come in two or three years ago with breast cancer and had a non-healing wound that kept having a wound dehiscence where it kept opening up and was getting hyperbaric oxygen and all the state-of-the-art treatments. And as I talked to her, it just was so interesting because there was this buried trauma from about a dozen years prior where her kind of teenage son had died as a result of a hazing incident, and then her whole community had turned against them because they didn't want their own kids to have to face consequences of behavior that had resulted in their peer dying. And it was like so symbolic of a buried wound that wasn't healing because it didn't receive kind of attention and the kind of healing ointment of just being able to tell the truth and having the people around you be okay with the truth being spoken. And just after working with me for a couple months, I think it healed. I was just like, wow, these very symbolic things can have very real medical outcomes that I think we underestimate walking through life. Because then we tend to focus on the biological, like the genes or the diet, or the chemo, or that we're all so focused on the physical and the biological on that level that I think sometimes we miss the big picture of what is going on in the life of in the journey of the soul that's making their way through this incarnation. Yeah, yeah. That's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And cancer is sometimes that permission slip to actually go to those places that we don't want to, or we've been avoiding, or but it's that hasn't been safe to, or hasn't felt like you have resourcing to and this is where having a professional to guide you through that is going to be probably necessary, if not just really helpful, to process some of those really difficult emotions.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And I think you probably remember working next door to me, Deon, that it is true that there's a lot of there's heavy content and there's heavy things that come up that people do explore and free up the energy that's stagnant around it just by being willing to face it. But there is a significant amount of laughter that comes out of my office every day. But I people have commented to me, like, I did not think a psychiatrist would have loud laughter coming out of their office. So it's a freeing up of energy that's tied up with things. It's not to make you feel like you're identified with this one horror, the most horrible thing that ever happened to you. It's not about being like, oh, now I'm damaged and I'm a victim and I knew it. It's not that it's freeing up the energy, allowing that to open up and heal, like an abscess, I would think, you know, on an emotional level. Like it does need to be opened up and drained so that it can heal. But the process can be smelly and messy, and it's just part is part of, but it's part of the journey, but it can really help things to finally start to heal on a fundamental way.

Confidants, Anxiety, And Outcomes

SPEAKER_01

I mean, and laughter can be a really good way to move energy too. Yeah, it doesn't always have to be tears, it can sometimes be laughter that yeah. Absolutely, because life is funny.

SPEAKER_00

We have these bodies, they're very awkward. There's like it's just like when you go through a cancer treatment, like right, right.

SPEAKER_01

No, it's so true. That's such a good perspective. Okay, I'm curious because one of the things I I touched on in the last episode I shared was around some of the research around emotions in cancer and how we're seeing some, just some like correlations or kind of predictability around, particularly around not, how do I want to say that? Suppressed emotions, like unresolved, right? Like where I'm not expressing my anger, I'm not expressing my resentment or my grief, just sort of like the bearing versus the letting it out and really seeing how I feel about something. I'm curious. So, in your practice, in your experience, are you is that also what you're seeing? Or what are some of the things that you're seeing that are coming up that seem to be underlying or some correlations?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I mean, there is all of that information on, I think it tends to be more breast cancer, like it just around people pleasing and not speaking about negative emotions or putting a happy face on things when and burying a lot. And and especially if people come from contexts where being honest and open about how you feel about something is really not welcomed. Uh, that could have been a very adaptive survival strategy for earlier periods in life and maybe still necessary, but it does the body keeps the score. The body does not, it I believe it kind of lodges in your cells, yeah, and hangs out there and accumulates. And so you may be keeping the peace on the day-to-day level by not speaking your to your experience. There is a silent cost, is my sense. And then some people do decide to start setting different boundaries and to start speaking up more when they feel emotionally unsafe with people in their lives, or not inviting certain people to things that uh where the where, especially if the person being invited makes them feel unsafe emotionally. People start making different decisions, and sometimes the people around them initially are not super happy with it. Yeah. Because they're used to you being a certain way or being yielding in certain ways, and all of a sudden you're checking in with yourself. Like, does this work for me? Maybe for the first time. And no, you're saying, I that's not gonna work for me, maybe for the first time. And so there's an adjustment, I think, for everyone in that kind of growth process of just retraining the people around you to respect you more and your space and your emotions. Yeah. Because sometimes the anger is really appropriate. That like a boundary has been crossed, there's been disrespect expressed. Or I had a patient that we were talking like this on Zoom, and she was in the office, and all of a sudden, halfway through our session, her husband comes in, I have a printout, and just basically like kicks her out of the office. There's just no sense of she's having a private session right now. A printout can wait for 20 minutes. There was just no respect. It was clearly like a default kind of way of relating.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Unhealed Trauma And Physical Symptoms

SPEAKER_00

And it was very helpful for me to see this is the dynamic at home. Um she started speaking up. And it's been this partner is not abusive. She's had others that have been where that were speaking up in that way could have been physically unsafe. But in this situation, um, it was more an uncomfortable transition, but a very positive, healthy reset that allowed both of them to grow. Yeah. But you also have to think about your situation because if you're in a partnership where someone could get physically violent with you because you set a boundary, that's that's cost too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And what I know this is something too that we've talked about separately, and I mentioned it a little bit on the episode last week. But some of the ways we've learned to cope or manage our stress response, like to stressors in our life, is happens in very early childhood, right? And so that also what our childhood experience could very well be affecting us now and just like how we react to things, right? You see this too. Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, definitely, yeah. And maybe less so for people who have been in effective psychotherapy in the past, you could that that's changeable, that's mutable. We can grow and learn at any time. And I have people in their 80s, some of my Medicare patients that are like, I've never told anyone this, but I hated my mom and did. But it's like that growth is happening late in life, and it can happen anytime. So, yeah, I do think that the coping often it does get set in motion in childhood. And then if we don't get help to retrain it or to change it or to shift the trajectory, it can just be the default.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Yeah. And I know you've shared with me too before, even just research around negative adverse childhood events happening, and then actually increasing our risk for cancer later in life.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, almost double, almost double. So if you have there's an adverse childhood experiences screening tool, it scores it on a scale of zero to 10. And it questions about parental divorce and childhood, different types of abuse, like emotional, physical, sexual abuse, losing a parent to mental illness, that those kinds of questions, where if you have four or more of them, then your risk of cancer, developing cancer later in life is almost double. So 1.9 times the risk. So it's baked into and also many other illnesses, both mental illnesses and substance abuse and physical illnesses like autoimmune illness as well. So do you have some theories as to why you think that the main theory is about being in fight or flight or freeze, but basically having norepinephrine, epinephrine, and cortisol bath baths in your body repeatedly throughout childhood and having it be almost a repeat, a repetitive default feeling of being unsafe. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, it is encouraging to you because I can imagine if you're listening to this right now and you're like and you're identifying yourself and what Tracy's saying, that could be that could create some anxiety too, because you feel like Yeah, you're like, what do I, but what do I do? My childhood was 40 years ago or whatever. And so the fact that you just said that that is all mutable, like it is all, it can all be addressed even later in life, I think is really encouraging, right? That's saying like it's worth looking at because it's not set in stone.

Laughter, Energy Release, And Healing

SPEAKER_00

Oh, absolutely. And I have a patient in her 80s who told me we were just doing some work on her feelings of rejection and being left out and just a lot of grief under there from childhood and like first marriage. And so she just was open and felt a lot and kind of cried a lot. And then like months later, she's like, when I didn't get invited to this thing that would have used would have triggered me in the past, I felt nothing. I did not feel triggered or left out or excluded because my sense is that she'd finally accessed the inner child parts of herself that felt so excluded and left out or rejected as a child and really brought them into her own sense of, I love you. I love even if you weren't loved then. And then it's not, it doesn't get triggered so much later on. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Kind of like back to your original example too, of just let allowing the wound to heal. And then once it's healed, like we can move forward. It's it doesn't mean it's going to continually be reopened. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And that's the whole point. And my whole, I mean, you got I'm a very outlier type of psychiatrist. Like the business model of psychiatry is 15-minute med checks to check on your antidepressant. And that is a useful tool. That's not how that's not the paradigm that I'm working from, obviously. And but it can be really helpful to just open things up just enough. And then my whole care philosophy is about helping people connect with their own inner wisdom because it's really often right there. It's right there. It's just been it's got all this stuff in the way that might have to do with childhood trauma or traumas that you've been through as an adult, or just the culture of not non-truth telling in in public life that we're seeing. If you can move things out, like people just have their own inner wisdom. And that is like the best, the most efficient therapist. Like I it's great if I know things and can share things, but when people, somebody this week was like tuning in with her own wise mind, and the advice that she had for herself was just so spot on and better than anything I could have generated. And just the fact that she could connect with that inner wisdom, I think is very empowering and should be empowering. Power writing. It shouldn't be like, oh, Dr. Peng is the expert and I don't know anything. That's not what I'm working from. Like I don't think most people need to be quote unquote fixed, but sometimes there's a reconnection with your own inner wisdom that can be extremely helpful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I love that so much, Tracy. That's why I love you and your work so much. Because we just we resonate on that level. I feel like I'm constantly encouraging people to just check in on what feels true for them. Because there's particularly in the world of nutrition or supplements, or it's like there's just you're inundated with so many options and conflicting things. And should I do this? Should I do that? And sometimes it's just exactly like what you said. It's let's just take a minute to check in with your own inner wisdom. Like what feels right to you? Let's start there. Yeah. I love that. I love that you're doing that. So good.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. It's so much easier too. There's so much on me.

SPEAKER_01

Right. It's empowering for the patient. And it's yeah, less, less pressure on the provider. Win-win. Crystal ball. I love that. Okay. So what are, let's say we've gone to the heart of some of the wounds. Let's say we're some of the some of the trauma, some of the blockages have surfaced. Yeah. And we're you open them up, clear them away. What are some of your tools? What are some of your favorite tools for helping people do that?

Suppressed Emotions And People Pleasing

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. The foundational one is an accurate narrative of what happened, you know, because especially if you're talking about childhood trauma, little kids when they're on overwhelm and they're in fight or flight and they're bathed in cortisol and stress hormones, they they don't lay down narrative memory or explicit memory. It's usually all implicit memory, just like impressions and sensations, maybe smells or sounds. And so for that, for those folks, it's just what happened to me? What happened to me? Because often those people will come in and initially might say that they had a happy childhood. You just dig a little bit, you're like, well, it doesn't sound so happy. And so for that, accurate narrative is the first thing. A lot of people really benefit from mind-body practices like mindfulness meditation, yoga, qigong, like things that really connect you to your own sense of fundamental well-being, which is really a human birthright, I think. But if you've ever been to a yoga class and just lying in shavasana at the end and felt that sense of sort of peace, that the practices that kind of lead you into that territory can be extremely helpful. And yeah, and then some people really benefit from hands-on body work, uh like craniosacral therapy or different massage, different types of hands-on work. Uh, I tend to like, I like working with the acupuncture meridians in in emotion in emotional freedom technique. I really like these fear points here on the acupuncture meridians. Um, but you might actually want to see an acupuncturist or an Ayurveda practitioner. Yeah, lots, many tools, nutrition, just healthy whole foods can be extremely helpful if people are crashed out on soda. Yeah. My personal favorite ice cream.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, right, like blood sugar dysregulation is gonna directly impact your mood and like capacity to do this work, right? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And if you're hypoglycemic, you're gonna feel anxious and kind of jittery. For sure. So yeah. So smooth smoothing those things out. Yeah, the main thing is the willingness. And obviously, you're gonna need an oncologist if you have cancer, but I do have I have one patient that's thinking about not wanting to do Western treatment or wanting to reduce the Western treatment doses, and that's really taboo out there. And it and most oncologists, I think, are really nervous about that. And I think it might be because of not having other tools to offer. If what you have to offer is key chemo and radiation and surgery, then when somebody goes, This is taking a toll on me that I can feel it's hard to just be like, well, then you might die earlier. Maybe I don't know. There was I did you watch the telepathy tapes? There were some episodes. Yeah, so it was like a research psychiatrist, I think, who was used to be at Johns Hopkins, but now is I think in San Diego or maybe Portland. And she she started she started researching nonverbal autistic kids and the telepathy between them and their parents, their caregivers. And it just branched out into all sorts of woo. And she's such a research-oriented person that she really wants to study is it what's happening? Do you know what is this? And so there was there were some episodes recently that were on energy healing about cancer cells as being cells that kind of are are like narcissistic or like the billionaires in society that are like hoarding the resources like the blood flow of like the blood supply and like having a bad impact on themselves and everyone else and the whole organism. And she was they were talking about it as a lack of coherence, and so they were more talking about it as could it be affected by energy healing where you're sending a coherent field to those cells of like get back in balance with the rest of the organism as opposed to the reharmonize almost, right? Yeah, battle kind of imagery that a lot of guided imagery people use, about like sharks or gobbling up the cells, getting the cancer cells and things like that. She was talking more about like marinating it through energy healing in in a coherent feel that kind of gets all the cells actually more back in balance and on the same realizing that we're they're all on the same team. And instead of some hogging the blood supply and over over-dividing, and then others like starved out of existence.

Childhood Coping And Adult Patterns

SPEAKER_01

Actually, I really love that that visualization because particularly if we go back to the basics of cancer cells are our cells. There, it's not like a virus or something that came in and is foreign to our body. It's like a healthy cell that went rogue more. So, can we reharmonize it back to a healthy homeostasis? That's beautiful. Is she still doing the research or like where is she on this project?

SPEAKER_00

I want to know more. Yeah, it's a podcast. You can just look on YouTube. Yeah, it's a podcast.

SPEAKER_01

Telepathy tapes, is that what you said? Okay, we'll make sure it's in the show notes. We'll link to it, people, so you can listen.

SPEAKER_00

I don't I haven't listened to all of them, but uh the energy means I was like, this is really interesting. Fascinating. Groundbreaking in terms of ideas of what illness is. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01

And it expands also, which is certainly one of my goals of this podcast, is to expand our understanding of the why, like the understanding of what's behind it. And that there are these different layers and levels and right, and maybe energy and coherence is like a big piece to it. Yeah. Oh, I love that so much. Okay, we will definitely learn more about the about this research. This is good. Now, in the very beginning, when you were introducing yourself and just like how you came into this work, you did mention your experience with meditation and mindfulness and how like from the beginning that's been blended into this work for you. I'm assuming this also expands into spirituality. And I'm curious, like, what your take on that piece to the puzzle is.

Adverse Childhood Experiences And Risk

SPEAKER_00

Well, for me, that's foundational. I for me, that's that's completely bedrock. With like the bottom of the pyramid. Without that, I don't really know what I'm doing. Yeah, things don't really make sense to me. But it's not like I talk about that with every patient. Do you know what I mean? But yeah, it's just like the biggest picture or like the deepest picture of what is going on in this incarnation. And what is my soul here to learn this lifetime? Is the question for myself and for everyone that I'm working with that I'm thinking about. What is the developmental learning here that this soul is trying to achieve? And yeah, and I think there it also is a force or a way of being that is so healthy and uh in harmony with the givens of life, that you know, just like the acceptance of the fact that when you're born, you automatically have earned a death. Like it's just a part of how things work. And in Western culture, especially, there's just this denial of we want to celebrate the birth and then the death, we want to pretend like it's never gonna happen, resisted. And so, actually, a lot of energy and fear gets stored over there that I think could be really helpful for that to be freed up and not to like focus on your death all the time, but freeing up the energy that's there that's resisting that that fact of life can really help us have get that energy back and then be able to be more present because we have more of our energy here instead of locked up in resisting something that's inevitable.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So the part of the spirituality. And then for me, what I've noticed with the people that I've my spiritual teachers and organizations that I've been a part of that have been helpful and wholesome for me is that there's a lack of materialism. Like they just understand that there's they're that the energetic of what's happening is the most important thing. And the money is just a secondary priority. And something about that purity is uh makes them very trustworthy in a way that much of kind of our economic systems and the people that are grifting, there you just know this isn't a trustworthy way of being. This is an extractive way of being where you're just trying to get from others or to deal profit off of their other people's labor, etc. So at its best, obviously there's been lots of corruptions, even the Catholic Church with all of the molestation, there's a lot of caveats there, but at its best, spirituality and spiritual practice is just a tremendous resource for being with life as it is.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Is that something that you? I mean, I know you mentioned you don't necessarily name it that, but when you're working with someone, how do you like how do you present that? Or how do you encourage that exploration to help them find some peace around the spectrum of life and there that we will all die at some point?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. It's really different, it depends on what people gravitate towards, do you know? So yeah, some people just I feel like I work the best and most deeply with people who are just gravitate towards some sort of spiritual practice or spiritual orientation naturally.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Even if they've been very abused and had a lot, a lot of difficulty and damage done by other people. But if there's a sense, like I have one patient that every time, every time she gets into like feeling confused or not knowing what to do, all we have to talk about is the golden river or the aloha spirit. And those the either of those phrases really helps her connect in with her own life force and her own her own spiritual nature. And then it always just it's almost like a little chiropractic maneuver to alignment, like realignment, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so that, but I think it's different for every person. And I'm always curious about what's going to be the through line, what's gonna bring someone into their own sense of, oh yeah, my wholeness. Oh yeah, my eternal nature. Yeah, yeah.

Rewiring Triggers And Inner Child Work

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. In some ways, we're lucky that there are a lot of paths towards that, right? So that you can find what resonates with you most. But I think what I'm just to reflect back on some of the to like to summarize some of the main points you said, really the spiritual, the spirituality, this connection to wholeness, the spiritual connection is the foundation that having some kind of practice there is gonna help hold the rest as you start digging deeper into things. And then I love your idea, the what you said too, around just maybe you can re I'm probably forgetting the exact phrasing about like just the accurate timeline, like, or not, maybe you didn't say that. What did you say about like recalling the yeah, accurate narrative? Narrative. Thank you. Accurate narrative, and then the other various practices we can bring in to just for like life force and to help move energy.

SPEAKER_00

And then I actually have a I have quite a few patients that we do like meditations on YouTube together during our sessions, like finding the one practice that really helps them release difficult energies, stuck energies, and come into a sense of coherence and regulation. Often rest. So we find the practices that are the most useful for people. And quite a few of them are grief practices, because I think that is actually a that's a life skill that we are not taught that is absolutely just foundational for getting through life, especially as we get older and have medical issues. If we don't know how to grieve, can't grieve, or are gonna let's just bury it and move on state, then we tend to lose our humanity in certain ways. And yeah, it's just very difficult to make it through life in a way that's open and available if we haven't learned how to do grief work.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I agree. We so easily, well, I shouldn't say so easily, maybe that's not true for everybody, but more easily learn to love. But like with love comes grief. That's like the other side of the coin, right? Is whether that's just the loss of an important relationship, a death of somebody, or just a transition into something new and different, and the rest is left behind. It's like love and grief really is we need to be prepared for both, right?

SPEAKER_00

They absolutely come together. Like one of my spiritual teachers, Adya Shanti, says, All true love sheds a tear. That's just how it's baked in. It is baked in. And so if we can shed our tears in a way that's that's healthy and that shed our tears with all those who are left behind, that it's the human journey to do that.

SPEAKER_01

Um yeah, that's such a good reminder.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Do you there are I know a lot of different resources out there that can help people in this realm? But obviously, we will share Tracy's like how to connect with her in our show notes. So if you want to explore some of this more one-on-one work with her, you definitely can. But do you also just have some favorite resources? Like you mentioned, YouTube to find meditations, or what are some resources we can share?

Inner Wisdom Over Quick Med Checks

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I love YouTube, yoga practices on YouTube, Qigong practices on YouTube, meditations on YouTube. There's so much out there. I I don't really, I don't really want AI in my life. I just feel it doesn't have a chakra system and it doesn't have auras, and it doesn't, it's not, it doesn't have it, it's putting together the pieces that have already been put out there. And so I don't really particularly myself want that. I want real live humans with chakra systems and with auras with with a heart. Right, right. That's a good reminder too. Yeah. My own personal preference. But yeah, I think there's so many people out there that are just wonderful healers. And I think really just following your own sense of where you're led is the most important thing, and following your own intuition about who might be helpful for you during what stretch of your journey.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

That's the most important thing. And also asking around friends and family, like who helped them? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Do you have any favorite books or authors on the subject?

SPEAKER_00

I always loved Rachel Naomi Reman's books, Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessing. Just really saturated with love, those books. Yeah. I Lissa Rankin has some good books on like the sacred medicine book that she wrote. I think she and her partner also have a book coming out that's on called Relations Sick, that's on the physiological toll that is taken by narcissistic abuse. Yeah, just there's really a lot. Yeah, there are a lot of good, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

That's a good starting point. Yeah. Like that gives people a good place to start. And then you can go into the whole, full world of support in that realm. Yeah. Tracy, before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to add or anything we didn't cover that you feel would be important to share? Anything else that's on your heart?

SPEAKER_00

I think it's there's so much going on in the collective these days. And I think so much, so much anger that is there, it comes from a clarity and a and an outrage that makes sense. But I think like grief, it's also we need to learn how to compost that anger instead of aiming it at other people or the earth or organisms or your dog, do you know? And so there's something about composting our anger down into the earth that's actually very important as a life skill. And then what you're left with is clarity, which that's the useful part of that is clarity and action. Yeah. So trying just trying to make sure the anger stays constructive.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. That we don't keep it inside. Yeah. We don't suppress it, but we mutate it into a form that's not destructive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

We compost it. We make sure that it gets, yeah.

Tools: Narrative, Mind Body, Nutrition

SPEAKER_01

That's great. I think that is a very appropriate place to end our conversation. Tracy, thank you again so much for being here. I'm sure people received a lot of useful insights. And like I said, in the show notes, you'll find more information about how to connect with Tracy, plus some of those resources that she shared. If you'd like to dive deeper into this work, which I would suggest that you do. I do think it is a very important piece to the healing puzzle. And I time and again, I and before this really became front and center for me, as an integrative practitioner, I knew that sort of surface level, this was important. But I was like in the world of food and nutrition. And that was where my brain was. Until eventually it just hit me that I kept getting clients to a certain place in their healing journey and we would hit a wall. And we couldn't get past that wall. And then it finally dawned on me that oh, there's like this whole energetic field that's like blocking the rest and from emotions, from stress, from all these different things. And so then it was like, okay, actually, this is probably the most important place to start to really open up the energetic field. So then all the other things we bring in have more impact. Yes. Right? They do deeper work.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, they do. And you are always a natural, I think, in terms of warmth and caring and sort of emotional support for patients. You're always just very natural at that. And so I think you actually did quite a bit of without realizing it. Yeah, quite a bit of supportive psychotherapeutic work without realizing it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And well, but now I'm saying now it's like an actual stance that it is very important, everybody. And we want to make this an intentional piece of your healing plan. So I hope that resonates with you. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. Please remember to share this with others who could benefit from what you're learning here. And I will look forward to seeing you again on next week's episode. Bye for now.