How Nervous System Regulation Can End Chronic Suffering with Beth Winkler

Are you living in a state of constant "fight or flight"? For many, chronic pain, headaches, and burnout aren't just physical injuries—they are signs of a nervous system that has forgotten how to feel safe. In this episode of the Will Power Podcast, we sit down with Beth Winkler, a Physical Therapist with 30 years of experience and a private practice owner, who shares her personal journey from 12 years of chronic pain to total recovery through brain retraining.

Beth breaks down the emerging science of neuroplasticity and nervous system regulation, explaining why we can’t "think" our way out of trauma and why "microdosing safety" is the key to lasting health. Whether you are a leader looking to show up stronger for your clients or someone battling persistent symptoms, this conversation offers a roadmap to getting back in the driver’s seat of your own healing.

Key Takeaways:

• The "Stress Bucket" Theory: Understand how physical injuries, overdue bills, and past traumas all fill the same neurological bucket, eventually leading to symptoms like back pain or panic attacks.
• Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Healing: Why talking about trauma isn't enough; we must use the body as a "translator" to communicate safety to the brain’s fear center.
• Neuroplasticity – The Science of Hope: If the brain can learn a pain pattern, it can unlearn it. Beth shares the fascinating "Reverse Bicycle" analogy to explain how neural pathways work.
• Microdosing Safety: Why 5 minutes of regulation 3–5 times a day is more effective than an hour-long session once a week.
• The Power of Processing: What "feeling your emotions" actually looks like in practice and how it dissipates physical symptoms in 60–90 seconds.

Resources Mentioned:

• Book: The Way Out by Alan Gordon
• Book: The Way to Integrity by Martha Beck
• Research: Dr. John Sarno’s work on Mind-Body Connection
• Podcast: Bialik Breakdown (Mayim Bialik)
• Podcast: The School of Greatness (Lewis Howes)

Connect with Beth Winkler:

• Website: Magnolia Physical Therapy
• YouTube: Search "Beth Winkler" for educational tools and guided meditations.

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Transcript

Why Brain-Body Work Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back, Rocket Stars. If you've ever felt overwhelmed and anxious, not into address mode or battling a headache or burnout or brain fog in this conversation, it will be a game changer for you. Bath Winkler breaks down how the brain and the body work together and how chronic address rewires your system. We're gonna talk about simple tools that can completely regulate reset and calm even on our busiest days. I would tell you from personal experience that this is gonna be an important conversation if you know anyone who struggles with chronic address and just can't seem to kick it. But when it comes to leadership at Rockstars, we have to start by leading ourselves. And that starts with leading our health. So if you want to show up stronger for your clients and take better care of yourself, this episode is for you. Beth, thank you so much for being on Willpower. Why don't you set the table a little bit and explain to the audience who you are, what you do, and why you do it. And before you begin, I just want the audience to know this is one of my favorite people on the planet right here. So Beth, please uh let them know who you are.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Uh thank you so much, Will. Um and Ditto. Uh so I I'm Beth. I've been a PT for over 30 years. That feels really weird to say. But um, and I've been a practice owner for 20 years, a physical therapy practice owner. And I initially, you know, got into PT uh really on a whim. So I won't get into it, it wasn't this really great story like I had a major accident or you know, something that really um you know strung at my heartstrings for the PT field. I just missed my sister, and physical therapy looked like a great major. So I went to Northeastern.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Nice.

Concussion, Chronic Pain, And A Breakthrough

SPEAKER_00 1:36

I got the full picture just from that. That's cool. Um and then started my private practice back in 2005, one month before I came to Katrina, because the the owners that I worked for um two, two to you know, one and then left them for another company just weren't listening to what I had to say. And I I felt like I had some really good ideas. So I said, I'm just gonna do it myself, and if they can do it, I can do it. I had a great partner. And um, you know, along the way, along that journey, obviously lots of up and downs, ups and downs with Katrina and um and with COVID, but in the midst of all that, I got a concussion um while my son was in the bathtub. So he was one year old, one year old, and I came up and hit my head really hard. And um I had an injury that was lasted 12 years of chronic headaches and chronic pain. And I really physical therapy was wonderful. I mean, it it you know, I had helped so many people doing physical therapy, you know, treating them with physical therapy, but for whatever reason it wasn't sticking with me. And I knew there was there was more to learn. And so I dove deep into the research. I, you know, started diving into the neuroscience of pain, and you know, within, you know, within about six months to a year, totally reversed my symptoms using this. I mean, really honestly reading one one particular book, The Way Out, by Alan Gordon on a vacation, and my symptoms were 80% less by the time I got back, and I was like, there is really something here. And so I started calling, you know, patients back in, saying, let me let me try this with you. And so I kind of dove into more of the brain science and working with the brain and nervous system regulation, and that's really where my passion is now is working with people with chronic persistent symptoms. So training my therapist to use this to help with their treatment plans, but also training students. I teach at the PT schools here in Louisiana, and um just want to get the word out about this because this is an emerging science. And, you know, our you know, Laura Ma Mosley and David Butler were kind of the the pioneers in our field with this, but it's expanded so much. And I I think I think both sides are missing the boat. There's the physical therapy side that we're still working with the body and some with the some with the brain, right? Like pain neuroscience, how is pain produced? And then there's the psychology and the you know, the psychotherapists and the mental health professionals doing a lot with the brain and trauma repair and all of these things, but no one's really integrating the two together. And I had the body piece, but I was missing that the brain piece. And same thing with the therap, the, you know, the psychotherapists and the mental health professionals, a lot of them aren't working with the body. And the body is where the like the body is where everything is held, like all the stored trauma and all of the, so our you know, our prefrontal cortex, which is our thinking brain and our fear center of the brain, they don't speak the same language. So we can't we can't think our way to healing trauma or to safety. We have to work through the body to do it. That's the translator.

Bridging Bodywork And Psychology

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Okay, so let me let me dig, you know, double tech double click on that a little bit because um I understand a lot of what you're talking about. I'm very familiar with elements, but this is the way that you're talking about it is very new and different. And I'm honestly surprised I don't know your your your superhero background story because I didn't know you had that concussion. You did you had mentioned you'd had some chronic pain that this resolved, and that's how you got into it. But does it does this treatment help more than like physical pain? Because I know people who've had severe concussions who struggle with depression, anxiety, different like more emotional symptoms. Does this assist that? Or is that different?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

It can it can definitely help. Um it's the at the root of it is nervous system regulation. And so when we get into chronic fight or flight, you know, our stress, think of it like a bucket. In go, stress, injuries, overdue bill, past traumas. So when that bucket starts to overfill, um, we get stuck in this fight or flight mode. And when we're stuck there, the nervous system has a really hard time coming back down. So it starts to get um it starts to get over-protective and oversensitive.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

So this is a stimulus to create an over-physiological response, which creates pain or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

Exactly. So the bucket is the same, whether it's a traumatic, um, you know, uh a physical injury or an emotional injury. The bucket's the same, they're not separate. So when it starts to overflow, like you could start with panic attacks, or it could be back pain. It really, it it just depends. So at the core root of it is nervous system regulation. And when we regulate the nervous system and get out of that fight or flight, we start creating more joy, less stress, less fear, um, less pain, more mobility, more perform, you know, higher performance, not just physically, but um, you know, prefrontal thinking and executive functioning. It's just it really is at the core. You know, just like exercise is so good for your muscles and your heart. These nervous system regulation activities um I think are are to to the nerves, what exercise is to the heart. Okay.

Nervous System Buckets And Overload

SPEAKER_01 6:52

This is really big. Uh, audience, just bear with me because this is hitting more of a personal chord, so we're gonna keep double clicking on this. But I'm sure people who are listening, any one of you who are listening, rock stars that have any physical pain, especially if you've had concussions, anything brain related, this is really big emerging science. And for some background, I have a son who's uh suffered from a very severe concussion who that was in the sixth grade and he's still struggling with symptoms. Um and I don't know if you knew that, Beth. Are you aware of that? Yeah, but I and so I didn't neck recognize the connection between what you do and what he's done, but we have put tons of money and time into him because um you know, at first we didn't even know he had an injury. He had this really bad concussion, and it was a s it was at school. It wasn't until we got the school notes years later that we learned he was knocked out for out like for a few minutes, like three to six minutes. And then um they did an MRI, everything was fine. Um and then he just all of a sudden could he was a straight A student, started failing at school. Um and then later we had a functional MRI when he was 21 and found out that he had these uh parts of his brain that showed up, they were so concussed, it showed up like a like a he had had a stroke. And so he's been doing this, has been my whole world around like helping him in the brain world. And so chronic pain is one thing he's never had. Very common with concussions is like severe headaches and those types of elements. Um in his case, his physiology, physiology's been fine. It's more like but but you talk about um the fight or flight regulation, that sympathetic response, that's him. In social groups, his social he's so sensitive to being in a social environment that like it's just becomes this physiological panic thing for him. And oh wow. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Well, the the beauty about the nervous system is because of neuroplasticity, like medical experts call it the science of hope, because with neuroplasticity, we can unlearn a lot of these patterns, right? So there was a study um done by this engineer. Well, it was an experiment, really. He took a bike and he made the handlebars so that when you turn the handlebars around, instead of the bike going right, it actually went left. So whenever you tried to turn the butt handlebars right, the bike went left. It took him eight months of daily practice to try to learn how to ride a bike this way. Like that's how strong the neural patterns of riding a bike are in us. And he would take it to all these different schools and different, you know, and no one could do it, except for his son, who was like six, right? When when our brains aren't really informed, toxicity, yeah. Exactly. But the you know, and that that's a long time. But the the the beauty of that though is if we can unlearn how to ride a bike, we can unlearn pain patterns too, and we can unlearn nervous system dysregulation patterns too. So it's not just like, okay, let me do a breath work exercise to just for an example, to help me feel better in this moment, right? Like you can, that's that's important too, but you're teaching your nervous system and your brain that safety is the default, and when you can do that enough times, we call it microdosing safety. So you don't want to do like an hour once a week, you want to do five minutes three three to five times a day, or so that we can constantly sprinkle it in so that the our our our threat meter go you know goes from threat to safety, and when safety is the default, like that there's the the brain doesn't need to do anything, it there's nothing to protect.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

So there's no like in immediate panic attacks or those types of things. So yeah, crazy. So how does if someone's who's listening is struggling with these types of symptoms, how do they get help for this type of thing?

Neuroplasticity And Unlearning Patterns

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Yeah, so um, I mean, there is there's some really good books out there. Um, you know, uh for pain particularly, the one that helped me the most was The Way Out by Alan Gordon. But also, um, I mean, I do one-on-one sessions now. I'm looking at creating some courses, some entry-level courses that people can learn this information because I think there's so much misinformation out there. There's there's a lot of new terms and new um kind of techniques in this nervous system world. I mean, people are, you know, you go on TikTok and it's like the best Vegas nerve exercise. And yeah, you know, it's just it there that there's so many people trying to get get in on it, which which is great because it helps, but it does it does create a lot of confusion because I mean, just for the type of type of pain I'm talking about or symptom, we call it a neuroplastic symptom. It's basically that the nerve, the central nervous system is driving this symptom, right? As opposed toceptive, which is like, okay, I cut my finger, I sprained my ankle, the tissues are have damage, sends a signal up to the brain.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Neuroplasticity, neuroplastic pain is different. It's pain that persists for longer periods of time, and it's actually they did functional MRIs, and chronic persistent pain lights up in a different part of the brain. Yeah. And acute pain does. It lights up in the anterior cingular cortex, which is guess where we process emotions. So there's definitely um something going on there. Um, but I lost my train of thought. I was on a good, a good role there.

Microdosing Safety: Daily Practices

SPEAKER_01 11:58

I I think you know, we talked about a little direction for this beforehand. I'm blowing it out of the water because this is so important. You know, when we talk about so because like our our main focus on this show is leadership, but you can't lead when you're not healthy. No. And and by the way, it's hard to lead when people you love aren't healthy too. So people who are listening to this who are experiencing the pain or drag of suffering through this or having someone in their world suffer through this, this is very hopeful because most people who just need a physical therapist or like a simple solution, that's not hard. As a physical therapist, I used to see people with chronic pain and I felt I felt useless. Yep. Are those patients that are those patients that you're starting to help now?

SPEAKER_00 12:43

Yes, they're getting better. Wow. They're getting better. It's it's amazing. Yeah, I mean that this is this is part of my um my my talk a couple weeks ago, but like so Howard Stern.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

You heard TED talk, by the way, guys. My TED talk ago. It was you talking to your mom. This is a TED talk. So Meth is the authority on these things. So yeah, keep going.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

So Howard Stern had debilitating back pain. And it wasn't until he read Dr. Sarna's book, who was the very original like doctor in the 80s who got made fun of, basically, when he said, you know, people who have chronic pain, back pain, they're they're not processing their emotions. They're not so he he read that book, he came across it in a public library, and he credits that to his full recovery.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Same thing with Michael Porter Jr., depicted as the number one draft pick in the NPA NBA, had three surgeries before the age of 23. Like, and the surgeries did not change his pain at all. He had he um, it wasn't until he learned like how to move in a safe way, but also had done a lot of emotional processing. Um, and it's easy to do. You do that? Are you doing emotional processing or does that go to somebody else? I'm doing it, I'm teaching people how to do it. So if if someone has a significant trauma experience or history, um, that's out of my wheelhouse. But the thing that that most people don't understand is, I mean, I remember even just a year ago when people would say, Well, you have to learn how to process your emotions. You're not processing. I'm like, what does that even mean?

SPEAKER_01 14:16

That's what I think.

Getting Help And Avoiding Misinformation

SPEAKER_00 14:17

What does process an emotion look like? And it's like it looks like just feeling it. Like instead of shoving it down or pushing it away, if fear comes in instead of ignoring it, because it's gonna go it's gonna go somewhere, you feel it. That's why they're called feelings. You feel them in your body. Where do you feel the pain? Where do you feel the fear? Where's the sadness? Oh, it's in my chest. Okay, notice that. And it just 60 to 90 seconds and then it dissipates. And that's what it looks like. It looks like journaling, writing things down. It looks like, you know, EMDR or um parts work, you know, all of those types of therapy, types of therapy for the for the mind. You know, this is like the top-down approach, um, along with the bottom-up approach, working through the body to to help release some of those patterns, is um the one doesn't work without the other. You know, they're they're so intertwined. And here's the here's what I love the most about this work is it puts the person in the driver's seat. They they don't have to continue to come see me once a week to dry needle their suboccipital muscle to get rid of their headache. You know, it's it's I have the tools, and when I have a flare-up, here's my toolbox and I know what to do. I can breathe. I have all these meditations, uh specifically pain reprocessing therapy guided meditations, which is a very powerful tool. Um, a lot of vagus nerve exercises to get the amygdala to calm down. Um, it puts them back in the driver's seat. And once their pain is gone, they're like, I just feel better. I mean, I had a patient, she had six sessions, she had hip surgery, seven years of chronic hip pain, had hip surgery to repair a torn labrum, even though I was like, come see me first, please. And she was like, No, I'm gonna go have the surgery, but everyone, you know, they'll do it at their own time. And finally she's like, I give up. I did the surgery, my pain is still here. I'm so angry, I'm so mad. Six sessions of we call it brain retraining, you know, nervous system retraining, whatever. There's like a million names you could call it, but um so six sessions of that, and she was walking, biking, and swimming pain-free after seven years. And her so that the kicker was she goes, Beth, my wine allergy went away. Every time she drank red wine, she would get a rash almost all over her whole body. She's like, I stopped drinking, and so her she was preparing for her son's um bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah, I get him confused. Preparing for her son's party, and I said, Okay, at the end of the party, I want you to have a full glass of wine and don't care about what happens, just do it. And she's like, I did it, and and then she's like, I've continued to do it and have no symptoms at all.

Evidence, EMDR, And Emotional Processing

SPEAKER_01 17:10

Amazing how the mind really creates these physiological experiences, and we think they're unconnected. You know, you mentioned EMDR therapy earlier. I've done a whole series of that. I did that in an effort to like be a guinea pig before I introduced a family member to it. And I had all this unhealed trauma I didn't know I had. And it all just started with like, all right, so let's just get you calm and relaxed, and then like let's think about what do you want to work on? And okay, what do you feel? Where do you feel that how do you feel when you think about it? Where is it in your body? And then you start chasing down those physical symptoms. It's um, I almost feel like a hundred years from now, they're gonna look back at where we are now, like, man, they were just beginning to understand this very powerful under like to them, it's gonna be like, how could you not see that?

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Right, totally, yeah, yeah. And I I just think that there's yeah, there's there's a whole bunch of reasons why people don't want this therapy out there because it's it's cheap, it empowers people to get off medication and to not have surgery and yeah, big farm's gotta be really upset about this. Right, right, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

So, okay, so you've been doing this now for a long time, and um just as a side note, uh this wasn't the main focus here, but I know there's people listening going, how do I learn more? So we'll put um Beth's information in the show notes. But can you just usually do this at the end? But could you just share with them how to reach out to you if they need to learn more about this?

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Yeah, so I do have a YouTube channel that has uh I created that for my patients really because I was educating the same concepts over and over again, and it was just a tool for them to go back and review. Um so there's a lot of educational tools on there. I have a few guided meditations as well that are free. Um but if you want to reach out to me, you can um you can email me at Beth W at Magnolia Therapy L A.com.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

So, Beth, you know I'm grateful that we we dove into that. As we're looking back at your evolution as a leader, you know, there's this thing that I feel like you're chasing. It's you know, progressing, it's motivation. People would call it lots of different things, right? But uh in your mind, one of the things that you mentioned earlier was your your ability to start hy hyper focusing on what you call your superpower. So what is define a superpower? When you said that, what did you mean?

SPEAKER_00 19:31

So when I think of my superpower, um, I think of the thing that makes me jump out of bed in the morning. You know, like this is the thing that I not that I I don't only love doing it, but like I'm good at it, right? And I think the two the two go hand in hand.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Yeah, you're really good, but you're passionate. So it's something like a topic or a a skill that you're just naturally gifted at, but you're also like super excited about.

Tools That Put Patients In Control

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Yes, and I think um, I mean, you know, not to get too spiritual, but you know, I think we were all put on this planet with certain gifts and abilities. And I think when we're really on target with that ability, it's like things just start to flow and happen and and come to you, right? And when you start to get off path from that, that's when you know stress starts to come and you know things things things don't seem as fun anymore. And that's that's kind of where I started to feel, right? Like I knew I had all this information, I knew that I recovered using this information and I wanted to share it with as many people as I could, right? But I still had to um, you know, uh check people's time cards and you know, um go check the um, you know, make sure I had to do social media posts for magnolia and things like that. Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Yeah, the thing that paid the bills was there, and you have passion for that too. It's not that you don't, it's just that your pat your your um superpower is evolving. So it used to be quantified within the realms and the walls of magnolia, but you started kind of bleeding outside of that a little bit in terms of like going above and beyond that.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Yeah, exactly. Like I I've never I love physical therapy, and this is definitely a part a part of it, but I just have such a there there's almost this sense of urgency, and and and and I like it and I don't like I always feel like like oh someone beat me to it or whatever, but I think the sense of urgency is um that there are so many people suffering and they don't have to. Right. Right? Like I mean, with with you know physical therapy, like you know, we we all have you know the the 80% of patients that do great and do wonderful, and there's amazing physical therapists everywhere. And you know, um, but you know, that 10 to 20 percent that we all know, those 10 to 20 percent of people that we couldn't really fix. Yeah, right, air quotes fix, right? You know, I can improve their mobility, increase their strength, but to change their pain, you were like That was never a goal, like pain-free. If someone's had pain for 20 years and um and to be able to see that shift, and I I truthfully will, I'll tell you this like I would pray for it every night. I was like, just help me figure out how to heal myself. And I promise I'll help others. I promise if I, you know, I will I will share this information. So it's almost like this contract I had.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

Because I think for a lot of people, they can relate to this idea of going through suffering and overcoming it and being kind of really good at at least empathizing with others. If we go through loss of a loved one, we become really good at helping console others who've lost loved ones. We have the the we develop a power, a capability when we when we have to endure something that's painful. So I love that you and and and please bring God all into this discussion. I think it's great that you were praying for it and you got this like, hey, help me. And then and then how long after that prayer did you get or prayers? How you know, did you get your your answer in that?

Surgeries, Stories, And Real Results

SPEAKER_00 23:03

I mean, it it took a little while. It took a couple years. It took about two to three years. Um, and I think it was also to teach me patience and also to, you know, I I look back at it, it's like if that would have happened at that time, I wouldn't have had the had that time to to to grow my leaders at Magnolia or to be able to have the infrastructure for Magnolia to be able to pursue this this new thing, you know. So it just happened when it was supposed to happen.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

It gave me sprinkles at a time here and there, but and now that the because and it's like all kind of converged all together. We talked about that earlier. Magnolia is one of the biggest, most important companies in your area. Now you're there's some space for you to extend beyond that and start building that brand and that messaging around this uh body and brain connection thing. So for you, um, if you had to quantify your superpower in language, how would you describe it?

SPEAKER_00 24:02

I would say it's taking concepts that are already out there and putting them together in a very digestible um package, if you will, because there are so many aspects to healing, right? Like we talked about the body, we talked about the brain, um, then there's this whole thing about belief, you know, um belief is it and hope is a huge piece of it. Um so kind of putting all of those things together in in a in a in a package that's very um digestible and understandable for for patients. You know, there's there's there's so many, you they've heard, especially people who have been in persistent chronic pain. I mean, they've heard so many. How many diagnoses do you think someone has had if they've had pain for 20 years? Absolutely. I mean, probably over five or six, you know, and it's like, what do those even mean? You know, so it's like to be able to when I talk with patients about this, and it's it's it's so understandable. They can relate so much. They can't relate to, okay, degenerative disc disease. Well, I have a disease. What do you mean? Like, no, everyone has degenerative disc disease over the age of, you know what I mean? Like, so it's just about debunking some of these myths and um taking some maybe complicated, uh like neuroscience principles and putting them into an easy workable format that they could do and see results and feel better.

Leadership, Purpose, And Superpowers

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Yeah, it you reach out with what you're doing here, and I think this is true for anyone who's trying to discover what their superpower is, like in your case, the application is easier to see than the defining of it with language. The application is that you're def you're helping a very select group of human beings, a small percentage of people who suffer from a disconnection between their brain and their body. And that's what it looks like is hope. It looks like a miracle in some cases. The output looks like those elements, and I'm sure your TED talk will go greatly into those details. In terms of what makes Beth unique in this journey, I think that's an interesting question to explore just because there might be others, like you said, who are in this space. There's very few others, but there are others, like the people who've written these books that you read and who taught some of these elements. But everyone in this case, I'm sure, has a different flavor, a different unique capability around it. And I I think that you know the the greater point of me bringing this up, Rockstar, was because you know, Beth talking about her superpower. I want to ask you, as you're listening to this, what's yours? Like what have you suffered through or are suffering through that has given you a unique capability to help other people? And that's what we mean by superpower. Because superpower you could define as like, I make money, you know. No, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a unique capability in helping others, usually learned through trials that we go through. I'm sure some people just have some innate talents, but it's amazing how the refiners fire is really what sharpens these powers that we have. And I think they can look like a lot of things. You know, I I've I know there's there's a power I've seen people in that I've worked with, Beth, who have the power to empathize like no other. I've had people who are just really great listeners, to a life-changing degree, great listeners. I've had so there's no small superpower, right? We always can we always think of them. But what do you yeah, what are some other examples of superpowers that come to mind that you've seen in other people?

SPEAKER_00 27:32

I mean, you know, some well, well, to back up a second, you know, when I would I would start to compare myself to, you know, the Alan Gordons of the world who wrote the book The Way Out, like, you know, the scientists and the people who did all the research to to be able to um validate these treatments, you know, that that's not me. I'm not a scientist, you know. I'm I'm way too impatient. Like I don't want to wait two years for a study to come out. Like I want the answers now, right? So um I think you know, don't discredit your superpower. You know, there's no superpower. I love what you how you said it. There's no superpower that's too small because I'm not coming up with any life-changing, you know, uh device or you know, I'm just taking information that people have already researched and studied. I applied it to myself, it worked, and then I applied it to my patients, it worked. So it's just a framework that I created. I'm not inventing these exercises, like they've already been invented.

Defining Your Unique Superpower

SPEAKER_01 28:31

Yeah, I feel like a superpower is really the product of individual talents combined to around the uniqueness of that person's passion. Because when you said that, what I heard was research, learning, right? You suffered yourself, like experience, so there was an understanding, and then you were humble and like learned from others, and then you had you took action, you organized, like those are all talents. You know, one of those things we call executive functioning, right? Um, that's that that's a very great capability. It's a combination of those things that does actually change the worlds of the people you work with, right? So yeah, everyone who's listening can do that. I I have a virtual assistant that works with me who who her super talents, her super power is a combination of high attention to detail, organization, knows how to like tell me when I'm crossing lines. All of those things individually describe like an experience, but the output is my life has been amplified what I would call a miraculous degree, because I don't know how else to explain it. So I think there's something really special about understanding what a superpower is the way that you've experienced yours. Because you are you are touching the lives of others. It just came from this thing called leveraging talents and and hard work. I think that's the other thing is you you have worked hard, even though you've it's been easy for you in a sense, but in other ways it has been hard, hasn't it?

unknown 30:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

Hard work at least. Yeah, it's you know, and especially when you're coming coming out with uh concepts that most people don't really understand. You know, I had a I had a patient, she came to see me, she's like, I was so excited to come see you. Someone referred me and I was feeling so much hope. And then I went to see my my surgeon, and he was like, that doesn't make any sense. And then she just she goes, I was so deflated the rest of the day. You know what I mean? Like, no, no one really gets this yet. So, like, nope, no one gets me yet. You get me will no. So when you're talking about when you're talking about this, it it can feel a little lonely because um people don't really understand yet. They're like, what do you mean you do a couple of meditations and the patient's pain went away after 20 years? Yeah, I mean it does sound too good to be true, but when you understand the science behind it, it makes so much sense.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

Yeah, it's so funny. It's like uh science is so mathematical, and it's like things, but things that we understand with science now used to seem like miracles and impossibilities 20. Look at 200 years ago, we're gonna talk about these things that you can climb into that will go into the air and fly you around the world. You're like, what kind of crazy madman? You know, you're just in your head, or it's like, no, it's science. It's like the there's a science to the brain and the body, which is why you language-wise, you're very particular about mind-body, which is something you said is like typically more in that eastern world of like more describing an emotional experience whereas this is actual science of brain and body. And so it's gonna take the rest of the medical community to catch up to it. I had a uh good friend of mine who's a pl uh orthopedic surgeon, Beth, tell me that um he thought I was stupid. He's like, he was really nice about it, kind of. He was like, he's a good friend of mine. He wasn't mean, he was just like I was talking about how I was trying to create value was the words that I used. And he goes, create value. You guys are just like always out there, you business owners are out there creating value. He's like, so so so small, so stupid. And I said, Hey buddy, the reason the reason you don't understand that and you think it's small is because you go, he's a he was an orthopedic surgeon, I'm sorry, he's a brain surgeon. I said, You go to work and he's a traumatic brain surgeon. You go to work, there's no questioning what you do in terms of value. Right. But someone who makes cakes can easily lose their way in the making of cakes and understanding the value they create, but uh, you know, a really good cake uh designer can create the feeling of a wedding. Like they can actually like there's an emotional experience. So we and so when it comes to the brain and the body connection, the science is there. It's just gonna take years, I think, right? It's so frustrating because it's so obvious. I I know you see it every day with your patients.

Standing Firm Amid Skepticism

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, people would catch on sooner than later. They it they're slowly they're slowly catching on. I actually listened to a podcast this morning. It was the Lewis Hose, he was interviewing that Dr. Ayman. You know, he's the um the guy who does all the functional MRIs. He just wrote a book about the brain and pain. Yes. Um, and he talks a lot about this stuff. Um, where Sanjay Gupta just did one and he doesn't talk about safety at all in his book. And I'm like, you're missing the point. So um, you know, slowly the mainstream is coming around.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

Very so very much so. Well, Beth, this has been such a phenomenal conversation. Thank you for sharing your talents with the world. I am so excited to see you living in this space, and just personally, there's an energy about you that was immediate. It's not it's not just because you were on TV this morning and you got especially dressed up. I like this just your tonality. It you've always had this higher tone, but there's something extra lifted. It's it's it's someone who's living their purpose right now. It's really inspiring. So thank you so much for doing all that.

SPEAKER_00 33:51

Thanks, Will. It feels that. I feel that appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01 33:54

Okay, let's do some rapid fire and wrap this thing up. So, so let's talk about one of the best books you've read in the last year. Just any book that you've read that's been impactful for you on any topic.

SPEAKER_00 34:05

Oh my gosh, in the last year. Okay, okay. Um so I am a big fan of Martha Beck. And um she is like she's a life coach, Oprah's life coach, but um, she has some really great um, I just love she brings a lot of comedy into her. I I'm I'm nonfiction. I'm like a nonfiction, like self-help junkie. Um, but it's called The Way to Integrity, and it's really one of my one of my favorite books. And I I've probably read it four times already. So um I probably have read it twice in the past year.

SPEAKER_01 34:37

My gosh, that's impressive. Okay, what's a what's a podcast that you like?

SPEAKER_00 34:42

Um, I like listening to Maya Mbialik's podcast, um, The Breakdown, okay, because she has such a science, a science-y brain, um, but she brings on a lot of um a lot of people with like near-death experiences. And so it really does kind of bridge the gap and and questions a lot of is this science? Is this you know spirituality? And um, it's just it's just really it's really creative.

Momentum, Media, And Mainstream Shift

SPEAKER_01 35:09

Okay, awesome. Well, well, if there is one person, a living or dead, that you could have lunch with in the world in who's ever existed, fictional or real, who would you have lunch with?

SPEAKER_00 35:20

Oh my gosh. Um well, this this might sound sad, but it's not. But it would, it would be um, it would be with my brother David, who passed when he was he was much younger in his late teens. Um, I would love to have lunch with him again because he was just super, he was wild. Let me tell you, he was wild. Um, but I can only imagine the adult that he would have turned into. But um, yeah, that's who my person would be.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Oh, I love that. I love that piece of it. Okay, very cool. Well, um, I think that's it for today, Beth. Thank you so much so much for being on the show. Um, once again, guys, look to the show notes. If if you're wanting to learn more about chronic pain, or especially if there's concussions or any of those types of elements that come in, this is the person you're gonna want to talk to. Um, so Beth, thank you again for being on the show.

SPEAKER_00 36:07

Thanks, Will. Appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

All right, Rockstars, that's it for today. Thank you again for tuning in. As always, this is Will Humphreys reminding you to live with purpose, lead with love, and most importantly, never give up. Until next time.