134 Healing from ME/CFS & Lyme Disease and the Road Back to High Level Athletics with Carly Wynn

00:00:00 Chazmith: Hi. Welcome to Our Power Is Within Podcast. I'm your host Chazsmith, and my mission for this podcast is to inspire you to take your power back and realize that you are the healer that you've been looking for all along. We are all capable of healing in mind, in body, and in soul. 

00:00:25 Chazmith: Before I introduce today's guest, I was actually excited to share with you that this episode is brought to you by CFS School, founded by Jen Mann and Cardin Rabin. If you're not familiar with Jen and Cardin, check out recent episode 119 where I get to pick their brains, hear about their personal health and healing journeys, and discover how CFS school was birthed. CFS school is a nervous system healing program including an integrative brain retraining approach, polyvagal therapeutics, trauma resolution techniques such as somatic experiencing tools and inner child work and parts work. It is designed to help guide, support and empower you on your self-healing journey to heal from a variety of mind body disorders, some including chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, pots, autoimmune disorders, sensitivities, and more. There is a self-study option that is perfect for people who want to go at their own pace. While the program is set up in 12 modules, I personally found it super helpful to tune into what felt most supportive and spend more than one week on some modules where I really wanted extra practice. However, if you are someone who wants more guidance and live support, sign up soon for discovery call for the next live cohort, which begins at the end of June. Links in the show notes. 

00:01:44 Chazmith: So I had so much fun talking with our guest today, Carly Wynn. At one point in her life, Carly was a high level professional athlete and at some point she found herself incredibly sick with what she thought was over training syndrome. And it was just over a year later before she started to realize that there was more to her story than that. Carly is incredible. Her story is so inspiring and what she has already accomplished and the stride she has made in her healing is so motivating. Carly now has a goal as she continues to heal, that as she heals there will come a time that she will be even more fit than before she got sick. I love this goal and I have no doubt that she will achieve it. I love her mindset and I feel confident you will, too. So please enjoy. 

00:02:32 Chazmith: Carly, thank you so much for being here with me today. 

00:02:38 Carly: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. 

00:02:40 Chazmith: Yeah, I'm so excited  to finally get to connect and chat with you. I know I've been following along with your story for a little while now. How did I define you? Through CFS school? 

00:02:50 Carly: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

00:02:52 Chazmith: I found you through CFS school so that's exciting. Okay. We are gonna be basically focusing on your recovery story and I think a great starting point because it's kind of the most common question you get from people is everyone wants to know what did you heal from? What were you recovering from because that's how they connect or relate or can feel that inspiration and confidence that they can heal to if there's some commonality. So could we start there with just sharing what you focused on healing and recovering from through your journey? 

00:03:23 Carly: Yeah. Absolutely. So I have been recovering from a general crisis of resiliency,  diagnosed as ME CFS with suspected other contributing factors such as chronic Lyme disease and reactivated Epstein Barr virus. All of that kind of started for me with over training syndrome OTS. That was the stressor that sort of let all these other things kind of get unleashed. And then in more recent months, in the last year or so, I've been functionally recovered from all of that, but I'm still working on just kind of like cleaning up the leftovers of having such a dysregulated state in my body. I'm not yet in a fully resilient feeling sort of state. So it's all just about resiliency and it's just been varying shades of crisis of resiliency. 

00:04:16 Chazmith: I love how you explained that. Did you make that up crisis of resiliency?

00:04:21 Carly: I mean yeah, I think the concept that like these sorts of mind body illnesses are all about resiliency is that's not my concept, but that's kind of how I came up with describing what has gone on for me 'cuz like no single diagnosis really seemed like it fit and there's just a lot that goes into it. I initially settled on ‘disautonomia’ as sort of like the biggest umbrella, but then I just felt like crisis of resiliency is an even bigger umbrella. So yeah, that's how we got there.

00:04:51 Chazmith: I love it. And you said something else too that you thought that this was brought on through something about over-training. What did you call that?

00:04:59 Carly: Overtraining syndrome? I was a professional endurance athlete before I got sick and over-training syndrome is basically exactly what it sounds like too much training, not enough recovery and it just leads to a cumulative stress on the body that can't be recovered from with your standard one day off a week or one day off every couple weeks kind of procedure. So typically for athletes who have OTS, the first protocol is three to six months of a complete cessation of exercise just to give the body time basically to clean up oxidative damage and other physical damages that are typical for training. And so for me that was the start of things too high of a training load and too little recovery coupled with a variety of other emotional stresses at the time just kind of put me in this state that I couldn't climb out of. So I just needed to take a ton of time off. The difference for me was that after 12 months completely off from exercise I was only getting sicker. And so that was when the other diagnoses started coming in.

00:06:03 Chazmith: So that is actually a thing. You didn't make that term up to overtrain. 

00:06:07 Carly: No, I made that up. No, that's, that's actually...

00:06:09 Chazmith: Okay. Yeah. Well what's really funny is I try to always do research on anyone who I have as a guest on the show and I was checking out your blog and your website, all the things and I found a article that you had written I think on over training syndrome. And you talked about that in there. And I have a friend who is a very high level endurance athlete also and I see that path, she's on that trajectory. So I kind of sent that to her just saying, Hey thought you might enjoy this cuz she's been telling me like I'm trying to realize that like I know rest is actually important too and I'm trying to get outta the mindset that I always have to be training hard and I say all the time, don't let yourself learn the hard way like so many of us. And so I sent that to her.

00:06:52 Carly: Yeah, well the thing with training hard is that it doesn't do you any good if your body doesn't have the resources to adapt to it. So for every hard workout that you put in, you have to give yourself the resources which includes rest, obviously sleep and time away from exercise and food and all of the things that help a body build back up from damage. Those things you get stronger and fitter and faster in your recovery, not in your workout. In your workout you get weaker because your workouts are breaking you down. It's easier to sort of conceptualize if you think about a sort of muscular workout. So if you are gonna go to the gym and lift weights, you are creating little micro tears in your muscle fibers, you're not making your muscle fibers stronger. And so then what makes them stronger is then you rest them and you give them the resources they need to rebuild from that damage and then you come back stronger so you can tell your friend, there's really no point in you doing these hard workouts if you're not appropriately recovering from them, you're not going to get fitter that way.

00:07:51 Chazmith: Yeah, I have a huge background in CrossFit so and I was coaching for a long time, that was the one thing I had to constantly drill into the athletes was listen, I know it's fun to be here and like I'll work out together and have the community aspect but oh my god you have to rest. That's just where the magic happens.

00:08:08 Carly: I work as a coach and I tell people that the biggest part of my job is telling my athletes to stop exercising.

00:08:16 Chazmith: Yeah, it's so hard, right?

00:08:18 Carly: Yep. 

00:08:19 Chazmith: Because for a lot of people it becomes almost like an addiction.

00:08:22 Carly: Oh wicked. For sure. 

00:08:23 Chazmith: Yeah. Okay, so I have an interesting question. I'm gonna guess and you can tell me if I'm wrong and we're gonna go into like the modalities and the programs that supported you on your actual healing but you got sick and then you got sicker and then you started, then you kind of found something where you're like, oh my gosh this is it. This is gonna help me get better. At that point in your life, through all the sick part, did you still have this mindset that I'm gonna heal and I'm gonna get back to exactly where I was? 

00:08:48 Carly: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, for sure. The goal through all of my OTS recovery was to go right back to my ski career. I was still planning to return to that level of racing as I got sicker and time wore on, I just started to feel like it's just like timeline wise, not gonna make sense for me to go back to that level. I'm gonna have aged out of it and like staged out of it in my life and not sure that it would be, it's not that that wasn't what I wanted to be doing, it's just that at this point I'm not sure it's what I would wanna go back to. So the goal to go back to high level ski race and career dropped off after a few years of illness. But yeah, I've always thought through all of this that I will heal and I will get back to being able to adapt and I have actually long defined full recovery for myself as being more physically capable than I was before I got sick. The idea there being that I think I have always sort of struggled with suppressing my mind body communication and those, the symptom expression that comes with that has held me back in terms of how well I can work with my body and what I can ask of my body. And so the idea was that full recovery is going to look like finally having healed those relationships and being able to have a more productive relationship with my body that's going to allow it to be more physically capable than it was before I got sick.

00:10:15 Chazmith: Right. Which is awesome. I completely agree. I tell myself all the time and you know mindset's huge, right? And our power of belief and I always say I'm literally going to be the strongest version of me after all this. I'm gonna be so much healthier, so much fitter, so much stronger than I ever was before because before I might have been strong on the outside but I was obviously crumbling from the inside out and there's so much more to what is strength or fitness than just like how we look or how we're performing in any given moment. 

00:10:47 Carly: Yeah for sure.

00:10:48 Chazmith: That's really awesome. And so now you've probably through all this healing everything you're just saying right now you probably have a little bit of a different relationship than in general like I'm guessing that at this point even if you got to that even stronger version of yourself, you would probably approach your sport differently.

00:11:08 Carly: Slightly differently. Not a ton has changed in my relationship with sport. I think the biggest thing that would be different is a lot less of treating my body like the enemy. There was always a mentality through my earlier years in athletics, like I was constantly having like a little bit of a fight with my body and it wasn't like an overwhelming kind of vibe but when you're training at that level and asking that much of your body, it doesn't take very much going wrong for things to really start to go off the rails. So just that very little bit of antagonism towards myself and feeling like my body was working against me, that is the one thing that is really different now. And at this point my relationship with my sports is very similar to how it has always been. Just kind of less that particular feeling. And right now I'm still working within some constraints that come from not feeling like I'm back to full resiliency. So like my outward expression of my relationship with my sport still looks different because I'm not ready to be training at that level again, but I want to be and when my body's ready for it I think I will have a pretty similar relationship with my sports just minus the self-hatred.

00:12:22 Chazmith: I love that. Well sure and I mean it'll come from a place of like loving your body, which means you'll probably also honor rest when you need it more. 

00:12:30 Carly: Yeah, for sure. I think being careful about rest days was always a pretty huge part of my athletic life before I got sick. It would maybe be a better story if I could say like I was doing all these things so wrong and I would do everything so different now, but it's not really that cut and dry. There were just like a few little things going a little bit wrong and like I would make those small adjustments and it would make a lot of difference. 

00:12:57 Chazmith: Yeah well that makes sense 'cuz they always say it's all it takes, like whether the trajectory is going down or up, it's the little things like a 1% change over time can yield a really big result. 

00:13:08 Carly: Yeah. For me it was a real snowball effect a couple of decades of just a few things that were just a few too far off center and over time it just got way off center and you know, I ended up really sick but it wasn't necessarily because there were a lot of things going very wrong and there were just a few things going a little bit wrong over the course of a 20 year athletic career you get pretty far off of where you wanna be.

00:13:33 Chazmith: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. One degree makes a difference. Do you... in the time that you said you got sick and you're like okay I'm just gonna take a break, I'm gonna rest and recover and then get better and get back into it, but you said that that turned into like this 12-month period where you were essentially sicker. Knowing what you know now and everything you've been through, when you look back in hindsight, do you understand why that might have happened?

00:13:58 Carly: Yeah, I think at the time I really took it for granted that the body heals itself. I didn't ever think about why the body heals itself or what the body might need in order to continually do that. My body always had healed itself from injury, from training, from sickness and I just couldn't understand what was going wrong, why I wasn't healing. And I think I understand that pretty well now. But at the time I didn't have any conception that the nervous system needs to think that it's allowed to do something other than just keep you alive in order to do anything other than keep you alive. If the nervous system is perceiving states of danger and stress so advanced that keeping you from being imminently eaten by a tiger is like the only goal, like it's not gonna do anything else if it thinks that's the the only goal. So I didn't even really know what nervous system regulation was at the time and I just had no understanding of the fact that my body needed to be able to get into rest and repair states to recover by not exercising more. I wasn't doing any more like mitochondrial damage, I wasn't creating any more oxidative stress so I wasn't getting sicker in that way but I was getting sicker because the body harbors pathogens all the time. The healthy immune system just keeps under wraps and with the advanced stress state that my body was in, those pathogens were starting to run the, so I was getting sicker in a pathogenic way even if I wasn't getting sicker from a, you know, oxidative stress standpoint and I wasn't getting any better because I couldn't get into a rest and repair state. So I feel like I understand what is a pretty simple concept now that I just had no real functional knowledge of at the time.

00:15:45 Chazmith: Yeah cuz we only know what we'd know, you know? Yeah. We only know what we know. It's funny how when yeah your nervous system is dysregulated, simply not doing something and simply sitting on a couch is not necessarily restorative. 

00:15:57 Carly: Yeah. And that was the part I really didn't understand. I really just thought if I stopped exercising my body would just heal itself and it might have done if there weren't pathogenic components. That one's hard to say. The problem is like all bodies have pathogens in them. So it's kind of hard to remove that, that element of it. And it's totally possible that even with a completely pathogen free environment, I wouldn't have been able to repair even the mitochondrial or muscular oxidative damage that my body was needing to repair just from the OTS itself. 

00:16:33 Chazmith: Yeah, that makes sense. And we don't have to get into all the details but I am curious in that year, and let's start with timeline. What year did you get sick and have to take a break?

00:16:44 Carly: 2018 was the onset of over-training syndrome. I started late that summer August of 2018 taking first just a few weeks off at a time and then when that didn't work I started taking a few months off at a time. So I exercised a little bit through the end of 2018 but it was mostly a rest period and the 2019 started with just full rest, no activity at all.

00:17:09 Chazmith: Do you feel looking back now that that played a role in your emotional body and your mental state? Because here you are this competitive athlete, you are happy with this life, you love your sport, but now you can't do it and yet you're resting and you're not even getting better, you're getting worse. So do you think that added stress to the nervous system? 

00:17:30 Carly: Yes. But it was a trade off because I was living in a very high stress environment while I was training and I had a lot of emotional and mental stresses on my plate not even related to my training in my sport. And so being forced to take a long break from sport forced me to make a big change in a lot of other areas. I moved, I got myself into a completely different environment so I traded some stresses, certainly, I got rid of some of the stresses of my living environment but I, any athlete who's listening will just be crying, like remembering a time that they had to take time off from training. It's like the worst thing ever when when you're used to exercising it just feels like the greatest catastrophe ever to have to take even just like a week off.

00:18:15 Carly: So that, that definitely was hard. But I will say it got easier after about a month I got used to not exercising and then it wasn't nearly so hard. So really just the first month of not exercising was like the worst. I think from that specific perspective of like how hard is it to not be exercising? The first four weeks were the worst. Then of course a year later when I still wasn't healthy, that's when the mentality of chronic illness kind of started. If like why am I not healing? What is wrong with me? Like I didn't have those thoughts for the first 18 months or so because we thought over training syndrome was what was wrong with me and it had a very simple answer. So that was a very different kind of mental situation to realize that I've got something else going on.

00:18:59 Chazmith: Yeah, that makes sense. And so at that time, during those like 12 months, were you seeking support to help you heal in any capacity through western medicine or through doctors or like detoxing or anything like that? Or were you really just resting? Just resting?

00:19:15 Carly: Yeah, it's not really that complicated. Like you just wanna do all the same things that you would do on a typical rest day or a recovery week or an easy volume block in training. Nothing special, just not exercising, continuing to prioritize sleep, nutrition, all the sort of stuff that I normally was doing to take care of my body. Mobility work, breath work, foam rolling, just like normal stuff. There isn't usually a ton of need to do a whole lot else. The body just needs time usually with OTS to recover from the oxidative damage that an aerobic workout induces that a body normally kind of cleans up in between workouts as long as you're giving it enough time in between stimuli.

00:19:54 Chazmith: Yeah. But then at some point when you realize you're actually getting sicker and did you start to  start Googling things and doing research and looking into what you could do differently? 

00:20:04 Carly: Yeah. Then the rabbit hole search really started  around about early 2020. I'd been completely without exercise for a year and with pretty low exercise for almost a year and a half and I was getting sicker just starting to develop some weird symptoms that I, at that time I didn't necessarily know that they all went together. I just thought like oh a lot of weird things are just going wrong all independently. And I started at that time doing a little research into mitochondrial damage, trying to figure out why a body might not heal from oxidative damage or mitochondrial damage. The sorts of things that sort of stemmed from my basic understanding of over-training syndrome. I started trying to educate myself. I wasn't really coming up with a whole lot that was particularly helpful. I learned about the cell danger response in that research phase and that kind of made sense. That started to maybe turn me onto the idea of nervous system involvement but I didn't really turn up a whole lot in the initial sort of self-education. And it wasn't until late 2020 that I was sick enough that I started involving the doctors and the medical search began.

00:21:27 Chazmith: And then when would you say was where the real healing began? Which is like, you know, and then tell me about what program or what tools you found most supportive and how you stumbled upon it. 

00:21:39 Carly: Yeah. So I stumbled upon most of the things that would end up helping very much by accident it feels like. So when my foray into the medical system began, I didn't bother with the medical route for very long honestly because it was incredibly frustrating.  I wasn't getting anything helpful and I was getting a lot of really not helpful things. But the one great thing that came out of it was my primary care physician diagnosed me with me CFS because he didn't know what else to do. Like it was a real just like catchall, he'd tested me for every rare cancer and deficiency and disease he could think of and everything looked fine as per usual with this sort of thing. And so he didn't know what else to call it. So he diagnosed me with ME CFS and referred me to an experimental treatment for hypochondriasis. So that ladder was not useful at all as you might be able to guess. The MCFS diagnosis was really useful though because I immediately took it to Google and just started looking for MCFS recovery stories, which was a good call in retrospect because I think if I'd gone down the search of like what is MCFS? Do people recover? Like that wouldn't have been any good. I just went straight for like tell me about people who recovered just like it never entered my mind that people don't recover from this. So thank god for that. 

00:23:06 Chazmith: That's amazing. 

00:23:07 Carly: Ignorance on my part. It seemed like. So, I...

00:23:11 Chazmith: That was Brilliant. That's like super smart. I didn't even ever think to like do research like that at first, you know, and then--

00:23:17 Carly: Oh it was a total accident.

00:23:19 Chazmith: I mean...

00:23:18 Carly: Like I say it just ignorance. I didn't know how serious of a diagnosis that can really be so I just got very lucky. So that was how I found Liz Carlson of Heal with Liz and I just started watching her recovery stories and so I pretty quickly was like, yeah, okay, people are recovering from this clearly they're not doing it like with a pill but like there are other ways to recover from this. So that was a huge help getting that diagnosis. I pretty much ditched my doctor at that point kind of felt like he had provided as much help as he was going to in that diagnosis and so I really took matters into my own hands then. And then it was a series of, again, more lucky breaks really that led me to things that started to help and I, I can go into detail of what those lucky breaks were if you want, but they are mostly just luck.

00:24:11 Chazmith: Sure. Alright.

00:24:14 Carly: Well, the first real concrete tool that provided noticeable help was the Wim Hof method. And I came by the  Wim Hof method completely, I don't even understand how my brain did this. I was sitting on the couch doing nothing 'cuz I couldn't do anything. And this idea just popped into my head like feel like I remember reading an outside magazine about this guy that like breathed funny and then jumped in cold water. Like I just like couldn't. I dunno why it popped into my head, it just did. And so I looked him up immediately and I tried round of the breath work, like right then this is all happening on a timeline of like 15 minutes and it immediately helped clear my brain fog. It was amazing. It didn't make it like completely go away but it shifted it so noticeably it was the first thing I had ever done that like definitively shifted a symptom.

00:25:19 Carly: Oh my gosh. And that was the real start of the healing because then I had proof like I can shift these symptoms, there's something workable here. 'Cuz at that point I was two years in, nothing had helped the OTS, nothing was helping the other symptoms, no amount of doctors and tests and diagnoses were helping. So to finally see something that was like this just made an instant change. It was just a huge breath of relief. And also then I could think a little clearer, right? Like I was so much more able to help myself once I had this reliable tool for lifting the brain fog a little bit 'cuz you know, brain fog, it's so insidious like you can't do anything to help yourself when you can't see out of your own brain. Like it's such a very frustrating symptom. So to have something that helped lift that so I could have my brain back for a few hours at a time, whew, that was a huge turning point for me. 

00:26:19 Chazmith: I love that. And so you just did the breath work, you didn't just go do breath work and jump in cold water?

00:26:23 Carly: I didn't start with the cold water for a while. I did just the breath work for probably five or six months before I tried the cold exposure. I just had sort of an intuitive feeling that the cold was gonna be too much of a stress. It didn't feel like a friendly thing. And I think even when you're fully healthy, like jumping in cold water never feels like a very friendly thing. But I don't know my intuition was just saying don't do it. So I didn't do it. I was having a lot of temperature regulation issues at the time. Fairly common symptoms I think. So it was a bit of a no brainer to not mess with that further. But yeah, just the breath work and you know, I didn't know why it was working but in retrospect I have a little better understanding of what was going on then.

00:27:12 And I think what was probably happening is that the Wim Hof breathing or other forms of TMO breathing activate a sympathetic state and my brain fog was most likely caused by a freeze state. So getting into a fight flight state was actually helping me get out of the freeze state and that was temporarily shifting that brain fog. But it's not a perfect fix for that reason, right? If you're stuck in a fight flight state further activating that is not going to help at all. And moving between freeze and fight flight wasn't ultimately really helping my nervous system resiliency, but it was doing something to shift what I assume was brain fog induced by a freeze state.

00:27:53 Chazmith: Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, I think it's good that you point all that out because I know that so many people like myself, you know we hear something and we're like, oh that worked for her, I'm gonna go try it right now. But it just always goes back to like healing is so individual and we have such different places where we're at and so one, it's not one size fits all and everything doesn't work for everyone. So somebody who doesn't suffer as much with like freeze but they are stuck more in this chronic fight or flight, they might not find value in doing something like Wim Hof you know, and just like the cold water, there's a point where it can be so profoundly healing for so many people but some people they're just their system, they're depending on how dysregulated they are and where they're at in their system, they might not be ready for that, you know?

00:28:34 Carly: Yeah, for sure. And it depends a lot on the type of dysregulation, the state that is causing your symptoms. So it's not like I knew any of this when I started the Wim Hof, I just tried it and it worked and I got lucky. But I do actually hear from people a lot with questions specifically about Wim Hof because they've either tried it and found it overwhelmingly triggering or they've heard that it can be triggering. And that is my typical explanation for why I think that happens. If you're already stuck in a fight flight state, it's probably just going to exacerbate that If you're stuck in a freeze state, it can maybe shift you into a fight flight instead. Which as I say, it's not fixing the problem but it did help lift the brain fog for me.

00:29:13 Chazmith: Yeah, well we do have to go pass through fight flight too to get to ventral. 

00:29:17 Carly: Yeah, for sure. And you know, there's something to be said for just getting your nervous system to move at all. So, there's definitely something to be said for that. And now that I'm much more regulated, I do think that the breathing and the moving through that sympathetic activation is helping me actually build resiliency at the time. It's hard to say how much it was helping, I tend to think it's probably wasn't helping build very much nervous system resiliency, but it was getting that brain fog to lift for a little bit, that's really, that was so clutch at the time.

00:29:47 Chazmith: Yeah, I can imagine. So then what happened after that? So you're doing Wim Hof and then what else like kinda helped you on this journey and really got you to the place where you're like, you know what my goal is, I've gotta build resiliency. 

00:30:00 Carly: So two separate avenues happened. I forget the exact timeline around then my memory from that time is actually not very good, but two separate paths kind of unfolded then one was very much an offshoot of the MCFS recovery stories that I was pursuing. Just every story had a few things in common and some form of nervous system regulation was in everybody's story. Some form of like really shedding all the parts of one's self and life that aren't aligned and reconnecting or connecting for the first time perhaps with a true self, with a fundamental essence of yourself. That was another super common theme. A lot of people talked about that particular journey in vaguely spiritual terms that really spoke to me. So from that line, from watching Liz's videos and kind of finding more resources through her and through the people she interviewed, I got myself into some educational spaces about the nervous system.

00:31:01 Carly: So I  took a few classes, this was during the pandemic so I, there were a lot of online classes available at the time that had never been available online before. I took a class with  Bessel Van Der Kolk's Trauma Research Foundation and learned about some basics, what I now know is bottom up regulation. I didn't understand the bottom up, top down vernacular at the time, but I learned some body-based ways of kind of hard wiring straight into the nervous system. Some ways to connect with the vagus nerves and somatic exercises like creating feelings of safety, some exercises for releasing trauma from the body, that sort of thing. Found some other really great resources. Jennifer Mann, one of the founders of CFS school, I found her Instagram and she, at the time, this was before CFS school, but she was sharing a lot of information on polyvagal theory and more somatic exercises, a little bit about like inner child work, that sort of thing.

00:32:01 Carly: So I found her educational resources to be incredibly useful and so through these kinds of resources I just started educating myself on how the nervous system works and how we communicate with it. So I had a really robust practice of bottom up tools for the most part, tapping somatics, breath work, vagus nerve stimulation, that sort of stuff that I was doing on my own kind of I trial and error. I took all these free resources that I had found through the internet and just tried a whole bunch of them and stuck with the ones that induced some sort of shift, the ones that I could really feel doing something for me, just scraped all the rest. And then I started with a top-down approach through  traditional therapy. So I was doing talk therapy with just a normal talk therapist and then I started EMDR brain spotting and hypnotherapy as well to try to get a little more deeply into the nervous system. And so that was my first kind of foray into the top down regulation. So all of that is really just the one avenue of regulation basically. The other avenue was another completely lucky break. I had a friend who recommended alternative healing therapy called Biomagnetic paratherapy or Biomagnetism and she had used this  therapy for various minor health concerns of hers and just thought it might be worth giving it a try. And that is a whole other world that that's its own deep dive to get into is biomagnetic

00:33:42 Chazmith: What is it? Can you explain it in any kind of simple way for everyone listening?

00:33:46 Carly: I can try for sure. It is somewhat similar to acupuncture. It works with the body's energy meridians. It uses magnets instead of needles and it also relies on muscle testing or applied kinesiology. So if anyone has ever seen an old school chiropractor, chiropractics sometimes still uses, definitely used to use frequently muscle testing. It's a way of reading the body energetically. So it's all based on some sort of melding, I would say of energy healing and some like yet not understood physical interaction. It's not exactly clear exactly how or why biomagnetic works,  but it definitely falls squarely in the camp of energy healing and alternative sorts of healing. And so yeah, you use muscle testing to read the body's energy to determine what imbalances and or pathogens might exist and then you place magnets on the body in pairs to try to rebalance whatever those imbalances may be or to facilitate the body in clearing out pathogens essentially.

00:34:52 Chazmith: Interesting. And did you find it supportive alongside all the other work?

00:34:55 Carly: It's been two years now since I began Biomagnetic and I still haven't found a way to express how helpful it was. I think,  for me, a big part of why it was so helpful is because I had Lyme disease in 2017 and my doctor didn't really think that pursuing the chronic Lyme route was going to be very productive for me when I was sick. So I didn't push for that. But in hindsight I think that chronic Lyme could have been just as accurate a diagnosis as me CFS and the particular line of Biomagnetic that I found myself in was a Lyme specific treatment protocol. And the reason for that is because I was living in Vermont, which is just like Lyme city. So naturally the practitioners there had developed biomagnetic into a Lyme specific protocol. So one of the reasons why it was so incredibly effective for me is likely because I had Lyme disease and I was in a treatment specifically for Lyme disease. So yeah, it was transformational, it took a long time but it wasn't like taking an antibiotic where you feel better in a week. It took a year of treatment. But yeah, it was absolutely transformational for me.

00:36:17 Chazmith: Wow, okay. So you did it for an entire year?

00:36:20 Carly: I did it for an entire year and I still use it now kind of on an as needed basis. And so my story of the last 12 to 16 months is a different genre of story for sure. I haven't been sick, I've just been cleaning up the mess from having been so sick, but I'm still using biomagnetic for that. So like I had a cold, I had a couple of colds in the last six months that both just like really knocked me flat, just like more sign that like the body isn't really quite ready to be able to handle like normal stresses and I use magnetics alongside all of my normal regulating tools for those as well. I found it very effective personally, at least for helping my body get rid of these pathogens for helping my body heal itself. The way I would, you know, describe magnetics is it's kind of like a cast in that if you break your arm you get a cast, the cast doesn't heal the body, the body heals the body and Biomagnetic works very similarly that the magnets aren't healing the body, the magnets are somehow supporting the body and healing the body. But yeah, it's been absolutely indispensable for me. It's been a really big part of this journey. So I got very, very lucky that I found just your run of the mill funky sounding, alternative healing practice that just happens to be a perfect fit for my body.

00:37:41 Chazmith: And do you feel like now going through everything you've been through that having the nervous system regulation tools was, do you feel like they supported one another? Do you feel like the biomagnetism would've been as successful had you not done anything at all to manage the nervous system or do you feel like it needed to be both? 

00:38:02 Carly: So this question really gets right at the heart of it, right? Because I love magnetics and I'm training to be a practitioner and it was life changing for me, but I always feel like it's a difficult part of my story to share because I don't want people to hear this and think that if they can't see a practitioner or that if they don't have Lyme disease or that if biomagnetic they try it and it doesn't work for them that like that they can't heal just because it was such a huge part of my journey. And so I think that that question really gets right to the heart of that, that the two worked very much together. I think that ultimately enough time and enough nervous system regulation I hope would've gotten me all the way to where I am now. Clearly people out there are doing this with nothing more than brain retraining and nervous system regulation and that blows my mind 'cuz it's so inspiring, it's so amazing and I feel like I had so much help with Biomagnetic, but I do think all of the, the regulation and the retraining routes would've gotten me there eventually.

00:39:06 Carly: But the Biomagnetic helped me get there faster and they were very much working together because the, the biomagnetic wouldn't have been able to function if my body didn't have some small amount of healing capacity and it had the capacity that it had because of the regulation that I was doing. Furthermore, I do feel that the biomagnetic, although it does a really good job with symptom alleviation or maybe helping the body temporarily clear pathogens, it isn't improving the body's resiliency. It isn't working on the nervous system. So you could clear your body of every imbalance and pathogen it's ever had using biomagnetic, but then the next time something happens, you're not any better set up to deal with it. So the two absolutely had to go together. For me, biomagnetic worked better because of the regulation and the biomagnetic alone wouldn't have been enough to get me able to handle normal life. The regulation is 100% necessary to be able to handle new stresses that come on board if I don't wanna just be a walking magnet for the rest of my life. 

00:40:14 Chazmith: Yeah, no that makes so much sense and I ask that because it's like so many things, you know a lot of us can look back at hindsight and think, oh my gosh, like even some of this medical traditional Western practices, even if it was functional medicine, even whatever it was like supplementation, detoxing, all these things that essentially could be valuable but maybe we just did it in the wrong order. It comes down to if I'm really dysregulated and I try these things and they don't work, that could have been a role and why it didn't work. You know, and needing that regulation to support the body's capacity to heal and then handle these different practices or these different tools to support it if that makes sense.

00:40:54 Carly: Oh yeah, absolutely, for sure. If you receive a resource but you don't have another sort of Core Source that your body needs to make use of the first one, it's just as useless as not having it. And Biomagnetic definitely could have been that way for me if I hadn't had supportive regulation going with it. It's hard to say 'cuz I did so I only know how it went. But yeah, I think it would've been a lot less effective without the other stuff. It probably certainly would've taken a lot longer. And then the regulation is entirely necessary for moving on for not just constantly being in treatment. If you imagine like being on an antibiotic or an antiviral to treat something like borrelia, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease or Epstein barr virus, the two that were likely, you know, my pathogenic components, I wouldn't wanna just have to be on antibiotics or antivirals for the rest of my life. Like it's fine to get help from those things in the same way that it's fine to get help from a supportive therapy like Biomagnetic or acupuncture or anything else that people are finding useful on the side, but ultimately you need to rebuild so that you're not entirely reliant on those things and that's why the regulation is entirely indispensable.

00:42:01 Chazmith: That makes so much sense. So all this time, are you still just kind of taking the tools that you've learned through your education and implementing them that in a way that feels right for you? Or did you ever actually do any of the programs that guided and supported you? 

00:42:15 Carly: Yeah. So CFS school came out I think in late 2021 and at that time I was already following Jen. I loved her content, her bottom up work in particular was fantastic for me. And so I knew that I would probably like CFS school, I was already familiar with the vibe just from being familiar with Jen's content. But at the time I was starting to see real progress with my combination of biomagnetic and my own primarily bottom up regulation. And then I was still in therapy primarily doing e MDR and hypnotherapy. I think at the time I forget the exact timeline of the various therapeutic techniques that I was using. But anyway, the therapy was really my only top-down regulation. I had looked at DNRS and decided it felt like too many cooks in the kitchen. Like I kind of felt like I already had enough going on.

00:43:06 Carly: So I had decided against DNRS at the time CFS school came out late 2021. I put it kind of in the back of my mind as like a thing to come back to. But by March of 2022 I was feeling pretty good. At that point felt pretty much functionally recovered. My world was still extremely small. I was just starting to like experiment with like branching out of my previous window of tolerance. So I felt very healthy but I wasn't doing a whole lot. So I decided okay, I'm gonna give this a few months to see like I'm gonna start expanding my window of tolerance, I'm gonna start exercising again, I'm gonna travel. And I started jumping back into my life and I continued with the bottom up  regulation drills. So all of my body work, somatics, breath work, tapping, et cetera. But I stopped with the Biomagnetic for a few months and then about four months into that sort of phase, I started having some symptoms again. So at that time I started back up with the biomagnetic,  this was mid 2022 and I started thinking about joining CFS school because what I really felt like I needed was more effective top-down work. So I had the physical body support with the biomagnetic, I had the bottom-up regulation and that was going really well but I don't know, I just felt like I was stalling out with my MDR. I stopped seeing that therapist, kind of felt like we'd done everything we could. I started hypnotherapy and brain spotting and that also helped. But I just felt like I needed those sorts of tools that I could do by myself. I wasn't loving, you know, I'd have two one hour sessions a week and we'd just be getting into something good and then it would be time to go and it's just like this is not how I wanna do this.  I need to be able to do some of this top-down stuff for myself. 

00:45:02 Carly: So I joined CFS school  last fall.  The idea being I will tune up my already pretty robust bottom up resources and I will learn, I'll get some guided help for like how to do DIY brain retraining, inner child work, self-directed trauma resolution, that sort of stuff. And so that was what really prompted me to finally join CFS school. So yeah, I have been in CFS school now for like six months, seven months, somewhere in that area. And most of the work that I'm doing from that program is that sort of stuff, the brain retraining and the trauma resolution. 

00:45:42 Chazmith:That's awesome. Do you find it supportive? 

00:45:43 Carly: Yeah. Oh definitely. So CFS school does a really good job of explaining what's going on with mind-body illness and those concepts, I don't feel like I learned anything new. I had already done a pretty robust deep dive into that for myself. The bottom up body-based tools, I love learning new ones but honestly I feel like I have enough of them so I enjoy taking in the new resources. But those aspects of CFS school were about at the level that I thought they were gonna be at and that I didn't really learn a whole lot new from CFS school because I'd already learned most of this stuff from Jen anyway. So a lot of the bottom up stuff was stuff that I already felt sufficiently versed in the brain retraining support and the inner child work, the self-directed trauma resolution model that CFS school teaches. It's such dense work that I feel like I am barely scratching the surface, like just barely. And I've been doing this stuff for several months now.

00:46:47 Carly: So yeah, it's an incredible amount of work and CFS school walks you through it in such a slow, very much hand holding kind of pace that it is extremely easy to go very deep into a rabbit hole. So it's the sort of thing that like if you wanna spend the rest of your life working on this stuff, CFS school gives you the tools to be able to, to spend the rest of your life doing this kind of work if you want. So obviously nobody really wants to spend their whole life doing that. But yeah, I've taken that question way off the deep end. But yes, I find it very helpful, very supportive and definitely prompting me to do a lot of stuff that I would not do of my own accord just for funsies. 

00:47:29 Chazmith: Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. And then the goal obviously is to continue to build the resiliency so that you don't need to do all of the retraining forever.

00:47:37 Carly: Yeah. For sure. The goal is to use these tools to regulate and retrain so that then you only need to use these tools on an as needed basis. I do think when it comes to people talking about where they're at in their recovery, the one thing that I feel like I have learned about this type of mind body symptom expression is that our mind body system is always communicating with us this way. So mind body symptoms are always gonna be there and they always have been there for those of us who have found ourselves very sick and diagnosed with things like me, CFS or fibromyalgia, other forms of chronic pain or chronic illness, our symptoms have finally reached a peak where they are so interruptive to our lives that we call them illness. But these sorts of symptoms are there all the time.

00:48:26 Carly: If you've ever had sweaty palms when you're nervous or a headache or stomach ache that come on in stress, or if you've had like a major upset in your life, a major trauma or a loss in the family or something like that, and you just develop like a nose bleed or something totally random for like the few weeks after or something like that, those are all mind body symptoms. If you've ever had back spasms that, you know, spasm for a month and then all of a sudden it's just gone and you don't know what brought it on and you don't know what made it go away. All of that is just a mind-body system talking to us.

00:49:02 Carly: So one of the other resources that was really helpful for me through this is a woman named Nicole Sachs and her work is called The Cure for Chronic Pain. She has a website and a podcast that are fantastic and she likes to say there is no cure for the human condition. And so these types of tools that we use when we are quote, unquote sick, we can use those tools through our whole lives to stay in a regulated state to deal with the stresses of life as they come up. Because there is no cure for the human condition and you're always going to have mind body symptoms because that's how your mind body system communicates with you.

00:49:38 Chazmith: Right. Yeah. The goal is to allow them to be acute, come and go, not persist and persist and persist and never go away.

00:49:46 Carly: Exactly. To hear the communication that the body is trying to give you and to act appropriately based on it, to make a change, to get yourself out of danger, to get yourself into a more aligned state or to tell your body, nope, you're misreading this one. Like we're fine. Let me regulate you and now, I will retrain this association so you no longer think that you're in danger every time you go to the dentist or whatever it is. You know, that type of retraining to tell your body. Nope, this one's actually not dangerous.

00:50:14 Chazmith: Yeah. 'Cuz it gets confused sometimes the brain does. 

00:50:18 Carly: Yeah, exactly, for sure. The brain and nervous system, it's only job is to keep you alive. And that kind of goes back to the idea that the body is not the enemy. So like it's only job is to keep you alive and it is crushing it like it's doing a great job at you not dying. Look at how not dead you are today.

00:50:40 Chazmith: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Even if you're in bed. So where are you at today in terms of just recovery status? Like tell me what kind of things you're back to doing and living and what kind of ways you've been able to add stuff back into your life that you couldn't do for a while.

00:50:57 Carly: Yep. So I've considered myself functionally recovered for over a year now. And so what that means is like I can do pretty much everything and I go through periods where I'm entirely symptom free, but it doesn't feel like full recovery because I still have a lot of signs of just like shaky resiliency. So like I've said, I've had a couple of colds that have just totally whacked me and maybe they were just really bad colds, but colds never used to whack me like that before. This whole crisis of resiliency. So I take that as a sign that like, yeah my body's still just not totally sure how to deal with incoming stresses. So when it's not receiving those incoming stresses, it's pretty smooth sailing. But even in those times there are signs that the resiliency is still down, such as when I'm exercising, I'm not adapting well to exercise still at this point. So this harkens back to our initial conversation about how training, stress and adaptation work, but it's clear that at this point I don't quite have the right resources or I'm struggling to get into a rest and repair parasympathetic state to adequately recover from my training. So I am not seeing like strength of fitness adaptations as quickly as I would expect or I need so much more recovery time in between workouts than I ever used to. So I'm sort of in this phase of trying to find the sweet spot with my exercise in particular where I will be appropriately balancing the stimulus and the recovery to actually prompt some adaptation. So that's been a real mystery through this year of how to improve my capacity to adapt basically and and learning about where my body is at because before I got sick I had a pretty well oiled machine kind of dialed in as to how much training stimulus has to go with, how much recovery.

00:52:51 Carly: Obviously, I was messing it up a little bit, but I still had a pretty good guess and now I just don't like it. I'm in a totally different body and I'm trying to figure out where is this body at right now? How much recovery time and how much resource does it need to recover from an hour run or whatever it is because it's all different now. So I've been functionally recovered for over a year. I've been back to exercise for over a year. I'm currently still in a state where major stresses such as exercise, such as just general day-to-day stress illnesses, those sorts of things just knock me down a lot more than I feel like they need to. And so that's what's telling me resiliency is still low, but I mean I feel great. That does fluctuate a little. I go through periods of symptom expression still, but they don't make it so I can't do stuff. They just are, it's just not pleasant, you know, I'm just, I'm so tired of feeling just vaguely ill, you know, and I do still go through those sorts of fluctuations, but you caught me in a really great phase. I'm feeling really good. I've been seeing a little bit of progress in some exercising lately. So it's all a work in progress. But yeah, that's the summary of where I'm at functionally recovered, not totally resilient. Working through those kinks, trying to build that resiliency so that, you know, normal things don't knock me down quite so much. 

00:54:14 Chazmith: Yeah, it makes sense. I can really relate to what you just said about how you're just kind of like in this weird like you're feeling good but like there's just things you know that are all, you know, that's how I feel. I don't know how to really put it in words like okay feeling a lot better but not quite where I wanna be. And it's like so black and white and so clear when you're kind of really sick and you can't do any of the things. But then when you start to feel better and build your capacity, and you can do some of the things but you can't find that balance or rhythm where it's consistent yet. It's a tricky place. It's a tricky place to be.

00:54:48 Carly: It is tricky. I feel like I can do pretty much everything. The question is just like what's my body gonna think after the fact? And so I think I wanna speak right now to all the athletes out there or anyone who maybe doesn't consider themselves an athlete but still finds this sort of thing inspiring. In the last year, I mean I exercised almost every day of this winter. I believe firmly that one should take off days. So I have had regular off days as for a healthy athlete's diet, but I've skied an unlimited amount this winter as much as I want to. Last summer I did a couple of pretty majors like multi-hour 20 plus mile mountain runs. Like that's where my capacity is at. The question is what am I gonna do with that stimulus? Because if I'm sort of in a state where my body tolerates it, but it's not adapting to it, it's not like bringing it in and saying like, yes zing makes me stronger.

00:06:46 Carly: You know, it's just like, all right, if you wanna do that that's fine. But that's all I've got so far. So from a capacity perspective for people out there who are just wondering like, will I ever be able to get out of bed again? Or maybe I'm outta bed but will I ever be able to run again? Like I really want people to know that like yes, you definitely can because I definitely have and I don't want people to misconstrue my very niche frustrations with my lack of adaptation. I don't want that to get confused for like I can't do these things cause I can do the things they're just not, something's still not quite right.

00:56:23 Chazmith: Right. You're not doing the thing and then quote unquote crashing and spending weeks in bed.

00:56:30 Carly: Oh no, not at all. I haven't had a crash in a year and a half plus longer than that now, but yeah, about a year and a half, maybe 18 to 20 months, summer of 2021 was my last kind of bad phase of crashes. But yeah, no I don't get post exertional malaise, I don't get anything. I feel fine. I just, every time I go out I expect to feel fitter and stronger because of all the training I've been doing and I'm just not so... It's interesting, it's just a sort of deadening of that adaptation and resiliency. And so I guess to say it in polyvagal terms or chronic illness recovery terms, terms that people are probably gonna be quite familiar with, all of these activities are well within my window of tolerance. But that doesn't mean that I have the resiliency required to do anything with them.

00:57:20 Carly: I see it as a very elastic thing, like doing the thing within the window. The window is plenty big, but there needs to be some sort of elastic notion going on in there to rebound me from these things and make me stronger and make me faster. And it's like that's the part that I'm still missing. And that comes back to the regulation. That's what's really got me thinking. I've gotta figure out how to help my body just feel safe enough to put some resources into adapting. For some reason my body still thinks it's not quite safe enough. The window of tolerance has expanded but it doesn't feel safe to dedicate these resources to getting the rebound from any of these activities.

 00:58:04 Chazmith: How interesting.

00:58:06 Carly: Yeah, it's kind of funky. 

 00:58:07 Chazmith: So you're just kind of still experimenting with it and figuring it all out. 

00:58:11 Carly: For sure. It's definitely still just a big experiment. Part of it probably just is trying to find the right amount of training stimulus. This takes the conversation in a very training specific direction. But probably a lot of it just is like, I'm used to thinking, you know, one to two hours of aerobic exercise six days a week is well within a reasonable amount that I can adapt to and perhaps shocking after four years of being completely sedentary and on and off, you know, house slash couch bound perhaps like my fitness is just low enough that that much exercise is functionally over training. Again, I don't think of it as over training cuz it's so much lower of a training load than I was used to, but it's totally possible that nothing's really wrong with me at all. Everything is back to functioning 100% perfectly and I am just over training again. We know that I'm prone to this behavior so that is a definite possibility in all of this as well. So it's a huge amount of experimentation. How much is just learning where my body's at, how much of it is a need for continued resiliency, building and regulation. It's all just a huge trial and error at this point. 

00:59:28 Chazmith: Yeah. I hear you. I think there's something to be said if you have like that athletic background, especially for you being such a high level athlete. I've talked to this about with other people, especially my little  playful movement class I used to do where we start to, it's hard to sometimes remember based on our expectations, what's actually normal verse when we're still kind of beating ourselves up thinking we're not performing or not doing something when in reality we're actually exceeding what would be normal. 

00:59:57 Carly: And normal is such a moving target. Everybody has a different sort of normal and so the reality is like the types of workouts that I'm doing right now, it might be the sort of thing that someone who has a different background in sport than like elite endurance athletics might look at that and be like, when I am healthy I don't wanna do a workout like that. That's way too hard, right? But it doesn't matter because like for me that's healthy and that's a capacity that I've had before and I know I can have again. So I don't wanna look at it like, oh I'm already, I'm doing so much by somebody else's standard. I don't wanna look at it like that anymore than I wanna look at it and say, well I'm doing very little by the standard of this Olympic athlete.

01:00:39 Carly: You know, it's not really about what other people consider to be a reasonable standard, but it is tricky to learn, like to learn about one's own new baselines. Yeah. And so for me being, you know, an athlete my whole life and then being completely sedentary for over four years, just discovering where my fitness level is at is its own totally brand new realm of discovery. And so it's a very fine line between I need to learn where I'm at right now and work with where I'm at right now versus I don't wanna accept this as mine now. This is just where I'm at. This is where I'm gonna be for the rest of my life. I still want to be a stronger athlete than I was before I got sick. And I'm nowhere near that. So in the acceptance of saying, this is where I am now and this is what I'm gonna work with now, I don't want to also resign myself to being here forever. And that just kind of speaks to the difference between acceptance for the state that you're in and resignation that you'll always be there.

01:01:39 Chazmith: Yeah. I think you're gonna get there, but I think it's okay. I think you can be where you're at today and know that you, because you have the history that you have and the experience and the education and the knowledge and the practice, you can be where you're at today and I have no doubt that you're gonna get to even stronger than you ever were. 

01:01:56 Carly: It's a slow process, but I think like taking the time, the pressure cooker off helps a lot and that was kind of the primary reason why I initially year or two into illness decided, yeah, I'm not gonna go back to being a professional athlete, in part because the writing was very much on the wall that it wasn't really gonna be realistic in any sort of way. But also I just really wanted to, I didn't wanna have to give it up, but I, I knew that the time constraint of like, okay, I'm 30 years old, how long do I really have to continue to get back to a high level like athletic career after having been sedentary for this long that was forcing me to like be on a deadline constantly and I wasn't ever gonna heal on a deadline. So one of the very nice things about where I'm at now is there is no deadline. It's like the first time in my life ever that I haven't had a deadline for my athletic goals and for my training. And that is extremely necessary. It's the only way to truly be able to hear the body from me when I'm on a deadline and on a training plan it becomes a lot harder to hear what the body's actually saying. It's not that I'm only hearing the timeline and the training plan, but I'm hearing those components so loudly that it's very hard to hear the body. And right now all I hear is the body. So I'm in a much better position for being able to make forward progress than I would be if I were under some sort of imagined deadline for it. 

01:03:21 Chazmith: Yeah. That makes sense. So what else are you up to these days? What are you doing now? You've accepted that you're not going into professional high level athletes again as a career. So what are you doing with yourself as far as that? Do you have kind of some goals or new direction?

01:03:34 Oh yeah. I have a whole stack of athletic goals to stay in that particular vein. Yeah, while I was a ski racer, I always believed that when I retired from ski racing, I would shift back into focusing primarily on running and blasphemous as this is going to sound to any skiers out there, road running is gonna be the focus at some point because I just have a very strong desire to break my 5k running PR and that really needs to be done on track or maybe a road. So I'm gonna be in pursuing that goal. I'm gonna be a road runner functionally, which is gonna be a massive change from being a cross country skier. But that's the only real performance goal that I have. It's been my goal for a very long time. I feel as committed to it now as I always did when I was a ski racer, thinking that I would pursue that goal when I retired. I feel just as strongly committed to it now. So that is the probably many years down the road dream at this point that I am hopefully laying a foundation for. So that in the athletic realm in particular is the A performance goal. Otherwise in the athletic realm, it's just like, I just wanna be fit. I just wanna be out there. I love just being out there and I've got half of it now I can be out there. I just don't feel that fit. So that's what's next in the athletic realm. I'm coaching, I've been a ski coach and a running coach for a long time now. I work mostly remotely and I do training plan design and the like behind the scenes kind of number crunching, bugging people to fill out their training logs, that sort of thing. So I've had my own coaching business now for seven or eight years.

01:05:24 Carly: So I did that through my ski career and have just continued with that and I'm training to become a biomagnetic practitioner. So yeah, that's in its incubation kind of phase. I've completed my first round of training and I'm getting ready to start seeing friends and friends of friends in a very informal way. I need to get some practice. Muscle testing requires a lot of practice. So I'm, I'm vaguely easing into that. I do see myself eventually just being a healer, being a biomagnetic practitioner full-time, but that also is kind of a long road and a journey at this point. 

01:05:57 Chazmith: That's exciting.

01:06:59 Carly: Yeah, I'm very excited for it.

01:06:01 Chazmith: It's fun to have these kinds of goals, like you said, with no specific timeline or no attachment to when it has to happen but just these things to look forward to.

01:06:11 Carly: For sure. You know, I lost a lot in the athletic career in gaining this freedom from timeline that I have now. I lost a lot for sure, but there's a lot that's just really nice about where I'm at and there's a real privilege in being able to take things at whatever pace my body is ready for when it comes to healing specific stuff. And, and with the biomagnetic, there's an enormous privilege in having found what I really feel like is my calling and not having any pressure on that timeline either. I like my work as a coach as well, and so there isn't any rush to switch careers or something like that. I felt like I was delivered biomagnetic at the time in my life that I was finally ready for it. And learning to be a practitioner is kind of going the same way. And yeah, that lack of timeline, being able to just take things at the rate that the universe delivers them to my doorstep at, it's a real gift despite the trade-offs that came with coming into a life that is so free from a timeline.

01:07:06 Chazmith: That's awesome. It's good that you can see the gifts. All right. So I ask everybody this question, if you were told that you could only share one message with the world for the rest of your life, what would you want that message to be?

 01:07:20  Carly: Oh, no. I only get one?

01:07:24 Chazmith: Only one, one message for the rest of your life. You can only spread one message to the whole world. What would that overarching message be?

01:07:30 Carly: Oh, no. Trying to think how I could possibly combine these two into one, but they're just very different. So.... All right, well I'll go with the more elaborate one then. The other one is four words long. So  I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier, that the body is not the enemy and we're not in a fight with it. Even when we're extremely ill, whether you are, you know, an athlete and fighting with your body or whether you are sick with these symptoms that have had you in bed for 10 years, you're not in a fight with your body, you're working together with your body and your nervous system's. Only job is to keep you alive. So that refrain from, I need to work against myself, I hate myself. There's something wrong with me into, no, no, everything is working. My nervous system thinks that I am in tremendous danger and it is therefore shutting down everything else so that it can just focus on keeping me alive. What a good friend, like what more could you possibly want from a friend whose only job is to keep you alive. So yeah, that would have to be the message that I would pick. The body's not the enemy. You're working with it, it's doing a freaking fantastic job and it becomes so much easier to feel safe in the moment that you are in. Once you reframe the way you relate to your body into that way. And once you start feeling safe in the moment that you're in, you start regulating.

01:09:05 Chazmith: I love it. Thank you. And just for funsies, what was the other one that was forward long? 

01:09:10 Carly: Check yourself for ticks.

01:09:13 Chazmith: You're hilarious. Oh my God. Okay. And Carly, how can people connect with you?

01:09:22 Carly: My website is carlyoutside.com. Carly is C-A-R-L-Y and there you can find out about my coaching. It was initially my coaching website, but it now has a whole wing of dysautonomia regulation, ME CFS, chronic Lyme related healing things. And then I'm on Instagram, Carly_outside_thebox, there's a little underscore between outside and the Carly outside underscore the box. And on Instagram I have been talking about my experience with CFS school, so that's been a lot of fun. I've connected with a lot of people that way. Other self healers and people who are considering joining CFS school and just a lot of people in that realm. That's been a lot of fun. I think those are the best ways to find me. Those are really my only online presences.

01:10:09 Chazmith: I love it. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your story and your messages. And yeah, I just, I really enjoyed getting to chat with you, so I'm really excited that I got to do this and get to share it with everybody who will be listening. For

01:10:24 Carly: Sure. Thank you. It's always a lot of fun to go on a deep dive about mind body healing.

01:10:29 Chazmith: All right, friends, as always, I hope you enjoy today's episode with Carly Wynn. She's a joy, isn't she? Ah, I love her. Have you had a chance to check out the new website yet? If you do get a chance, remember to check it out at our power is within.com. And while you're there, click the blue microphone icon to leave me a voice memo. Tell me something good, or tell me something that's a struggle or anything in between, anything on your mind that you feel that you wish you had someone to share with, because I would love to listen and be there. And if you have any guests or topics that you want to hear on this podcast, send me those details too so I can do my best to make it happen. And until next time, make this week great.