00:00:00 Erika: First of all, it's a journey. Like all of us say the word journey and it is. It's because it's a journey. It's not a destination. I think first step first with my clients is helping them recognize like we're not trying to get to a destination of healed. Okay. We are just becoming an active participant in our healing daily.

00:00:29 Chazmith: Welcome to Our Power Is Within Podcast. I'm your host Chazmith and my mission for this podcast is to inspire you to take your power back and realize that you are the healer that you have been looking for all along. I believe that we are all capable of healing in mind, in body, and in soul. Today's episode is sponsored by Primal Trust Academy and Community created by Dr. Cathleen King, a dear friend of mine. 

00:00:58 Chazmith: Primal Trust is a membership site that helps you find freedom from chronic illness and trauma. It's quickly growing as one of the largest worldwide online healing communities. The membership access includes Regulate, which is a level one comprehensive program to self-regulate the brain and nervous system, focusing on both a top-down and bottoms-up approach. There is a Level 2 Mentorship where we go deeper into the inner work of attachment and trauma healing, and an all-new Level 3 program that I am so excited about called Expansion and Integration. And this Level 3 is all about supporting us as we emerge back into life after a period of chronic illness, burnout, or dysregulation. 

00:01:47 Chazmith: And I don't know about you, but I know that after my 18 months of doing DNRS, I really could have used some re-emergence support. I had to learn the hard way. I'm sure many of you can relate, but I love that this is an option now in the Primal Trust community for us. In addition to all three level programs, there's also daily live classes, study groups, forum support, and so much more. So click the link in the show notes today and use the code OPIW for 5% off. 

00:02:26 Chazmith: Our guest today is Erika Bustos. Erika's journey of holistic healing started back in 2016 after she received an RA or Rheumatoid Arthritis diagnosis while in grad school. Today we talk a bit about her story, the big changes that this experience led her to, and what some of the biggest takeaways or lessons that she has learned over the past seven years that have not only helped her navigate her healing journey, but has helped her clients as well.

00:03:02 Chazmith: I really love her gentle and compassionate approach to healing. I think you will notice as you listen to this interview how much more subtle and calming and relaxing everything feels in how she approaches her healing. For me, the biggest takeaway and theme I kept hearing was less pressure, less demands, less strict, less judgment, and more gentle love and compassion. I really enjoyed this chat with Erika and I hope you do too. 

00:03:38 Chazmith: Erika, thanks so much for being here with me today.

00:03:42 Erika: Thank you so much. I'm very excited to have this conversation.

00:03:46 Chazmith: Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too. I love getting to connect with new people. And I know there's so much that you have to share with us. So I'm really excited to just dive into this. For everybody who's listening, I kind of do generally start with just having you share with us what you have primarily healed from or are still recovering from.

00:04:07 Erika: Yes. So in 2016, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called rheumatoid arthritis, which your immune system basically mistakenly, I guess that's the general consensus in the medical field that it attacks your joints. Right. So I was dealing with rheumatoid arthritis or I like to say experiencing symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. And I also was dealing with probably 40 plus chronic symptoms, which were not related apparently to rheumatoid arthritis. But to me, it was just all clear symptoms of leading up to dis-ease in my body.

00:04:48 Chazmith: Wow. You don't have to obviously go through all 40, but what were some of the major ones?

00:04:53 Erika: Oh, gosh. I mean, it goes from like anxiety, panic attack, depressions, digestive issues, vertigo, dizziness, brain fog, numbness and like random parts of my body. I had, you know, a regular heartbeat. I fainted like I literally had everything. My hair was thinning like my gums were bleeding. All signs that my body was saying, you need to stop and slow down. And I guess I can get into my story of what caused all these chronic symptoms, which led into a disease.

00:05:32 Chazmith: Yeah, let's actually go there. Because I'm sure that in the moment, you didn't know what was causing them, right? Most of us don't. But my guess is through all the work you've done, you can look back hindsight 2020 and see, oh, these are all connected in some capacity. And you probably have a clear understanding of What did bring on so many of the symptoms and struggles?

00:05:54 Erika: Yeah, what's interesting is that when I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 2016, I was actually in graduate school to become a marriage and family therapist. So, you know, I'm learning the DSM. I'm learning all these mental disorders as I'm experiencing anxiety and panic attacks and depression myself. So my undergrad was in psychology and then I went to school for marriage and family therapy. But when I got diagnosed, That was the first year of me starting school. So I had already started to dive into holistic alternative treatments like through diet, like adjusting my lifestyle and mindset. 

00:06:36 Erika: And so during my first year, I kind of was like becoming disconnected from what I was learning in graduate school. It wasn't connecting to me because I was actually physically and mentally starting to feel better just by like prioritizing my sleep eating better having a movement practice and so I kind of got disconnected from that and so by the end of my first year of graduate school before I started my internship I was like this doesn't feel aligned to me anymore which is a really big deal for me because I was such a overachiever perfectionist needed control I was very focused on you know what society expected of me because I was a first generation college student. 

00:07:22 Erika: I had been through like a lot of trauma childhood and adulthood trauma and chronically stressed out, but I was operating from these, what I know now or what they call them, or I call them as survival parts. So anything that gave me a sense of safety and security, but obviously was making me unwell. And so, at the end of the year of graduate school, I was like, I don't feel aligned with this. I need to fully invest in my healing to see this where it leads me if I really want to heal because I knew that school was still a major part of my stress.

00:07:59 Erika: No matter how much I prioritized my sleep and ate well and did all this, I was like, I am chronically stressed out, and I am chronically symptomatic, and I cannot put myself through a few more years of school. And then after that, it's like you have to acquire a certain amount of hours to get licensed. It's a whole thing. It was a lot for that time. I just made the decision like I just need to invest in my health. And that was a very big deal for me because I had like worked this graduate program up in my head to be the biggest thing ever. So that was really the first step that I took that was aligned with my true self. It all kind of started in that first year of graduate school, leading me to everything that I now know.

00:08:49 Chazmith: Wow. And so you just think that that combination of childhood trauma, adult trauma, the stressors, these behavior traits like perfectionism and overachievement, that all was this chronic building of stress that started being expressed in the body's cry for help, leading eventually to the rheumatoid arthritis.

00:09:12 Erika: Yep. A hundred percent. So it was kind of this allostatic load in my nervous system building of just this chronic stress that had no relief, no resolution starting from childhood. And on top of just like the survival parts was also, I guess that can be part of survival parts is coping strategy. So I was drinking a lot of alcohol, I was using fast food to give me a sense of pleasure, and just everything about my lifestyle was not conducive to health whatsoever. And I always laugh when I think back of myself in graduate school. 

00:09:51 Erika: I'm like, you literally are trying to help people when you are so dysregulated, which I didn't know that term then because it's not we're not in my marriage and family therapy program, we didn't really look at mental disorders from a state of a nervous system. So it's very interesting now, having learned all this stuff in the last seven years, to like put into context what I was learning in school and how it really, it's not to say that these therapies and approaches and methods that therapists use are not effective. I just see chronic illness, whether it's of the mind or the body, as a result of our nervous system and they're not separate as we most people see it, right?

00:10:37 Chazmith Yeah, absolutely. Side note, did you ever go back to school?

00:10:41 Erika: No, I did not go back to school. Honestly, the year after I left, I continued to invest in my health. And then a few years later, after. So I think 2019 is when I decided to just get a health coaching certification and just see where that led me. I really wasn't thinking like, this is going to be a career. I'm going to turn this into a business. I was just like, "Oh, this is interesting." Health coaching was kind of getting popular. And it's funny because I had always considered myself such a like, I need to follow the research.

00:11:16 Erika: I was very analytical. So to think about myself going into health coaching program. my prior self would have really judged this and like, Oh, what's a health coach like how they don't have a license, they don't have a degree, like what do they know? And now I really value human experience over research. It's not to say those things aren't important, and they can't guide us. But fundamentally, we discredit our human experience and our inner wisdom and our somatic intelligence, which can tell us more than any book or research article out there.

00:11:51 Chazmith: Yeah, that is so, so, so true. And our own experience over what somebody else's experience is per se.

00:11:59 Erika: And I guess that kind of when I think back when I started on my healing journey, it all very much started with diets and protocols for autoimmune diseases. So at that time, like the autoimmune protocol was popular, which is very like you're eating a very limited and restricted amount of food to quote unquote, not cause a inflammatory reaction and so those diets and those protocols actually perpetuated my survival parts of perfectionism and restriction and self-criticism because it's like if I ate anything outside of that I would be like "Wow you don't have enough discipline or you're not committed to this healing" And so I learned through that process and I don't take anything back in the last seven years because it's all been part of it and it's given me the tools and the insights to be able to help my clients. 

00:12:51 Erika: But I kind of, you know, I approached it like that from that perfectionism. I need to control everything I need to eat. It needs to be perfect. I don't eat fast food. Like I had all these standards in my head that I was still living up to because I was still dysregulated when I started on my healing journey. So everything I was doing was still from a stress response. And so now that I am in a regulated state, right, dysregulation regulation, you can go in and out of that, right? But predominantly regulated, right? So I now can look back and say, wow, these protocols, these diets are not going to be effective if the person is in a chronically stressed out state, if their nervous system is dysregulated.

00:13:35 Chazmith: Yeah, it's about there's things that could benefit us if we approach them in the right time, under the right circumstances, aka regulated. And it's a bummer because some things do get a really bad reputation because sometimes people try things and they get worse. And it's like, well, it might have actually had a positive impact if you were regulated, if you approached that nervous system regulation first, and if you approached this diet or this protocol from a different mindset with less stress and tension around it all. I really relate to what you're saying because I always say that part of my healing journey was to unregiment my life. Some people say they need to get more regimented and I'm like, "I have to unregiment my life. I am so overly strict with everything." I said that, but then what's really funny is I started a program.

00:14:36 Erika: And again, like you, I didn't realize it in the moment until I was looking back. "Oh, I actually was approaching this program with all those same behaviors, you know, those same survival patterns." So I was approaching this program from this mindset of perfection and overachievement and beat myself up if I don't do it perfect or if I miss a day or set a story that if I don't do it perfect, I can't heal. And then that became my reality. And it was only far down the road that I was able to look back and say, "Oh my gosh, like I can't heal from the same place I got sick. And I'm taking this healing journey in the same way." And so it doesn't even have to be diet or detox protocol. It can be a brain retraining program that you show up and approach from these same old patterns.

00:15:27 Erika: Oh, 100%. And yeah, that was something I was going to talk about, too, is how there are these like brain retreating programs out there. There are these even maybe even nervous system focus programs out there where it can still perpetuate a person's survival parts. And what people don't understand is like the brain perceives and processes information differently from one person to the next. Right. So if they're predominately operating from their survival brain they are not gonna receive that information. As well right so, they're going to go to the extremes of it. Right. I need to do this 10 times a day if I don't do it this amount of times or, you know, if I still feel this way, something's wrong with me. 

00:16:12 Erika: So really what led me to where I'm at with my coaching is I don't have a program. I don't have a protocol. I have a process in which I help my clients individually understand their nervous system so they can learn to regulate in a way that is gentle and sustainable for them, right? Because I have a lot of clients that in their 40s, they have kids, they have a full-time job. So it's unrealistic and a lot of pressure to the nervous system to be regimented and very routined about things. But at the flip side, it's like routine, you know, equals consistency and consistency equals progress. But you have to know your own self, right? Like if you're a person that's maybe predominantly in a dorsal dysregulated state, right, you may not have a lot of structure to your life right? Like you just kind of maybe completely overwhelmed and you don't do anything so that's not gonna be helpful either right?

00:17:18 Erika: Or then you can be in this sympathetic state where you are very rigid and structured and so a program that perpetuates that might not be helpful or effective to you. So that's why I really have come to understand myself in the last seven years, but also three years working as a coach. I see all these patterns in my clients. And so I've really learned to understand what it is to show them what they need, not what I need or what I think is going to be regulating for my nervous system. And what's surprising is so many people discredit, like I said, their own inner wisdom, their own somatic intelligence, because we live in a society that's like, take this supplement, take this, do this, do my protocol. 

00:So people are totally disconnected from their own sense of empowerment, right? So what I am helping my clients do is lean into that. Trust that you know what to do. And they're late 50s, right? And they don't even have any basic understanding of the nervous system when I ask them, like, what do you naturally do that eases that stress activation in your nervous system? They'll say like, you know, I feel good when I go on walks with my dog or I feel good when I'm being intimate with my partner or something like that. Right. So it's like we kind of know what we need. We've just distrusted that for so long because that is the narrative, even in the holistic community that are trying to sell a product.

00:18:05 Chazmith: Yeah, it's so true. I know. You can give your power away to regular doctors and then to alternative doctors and then you can give your power away to programs and protocols and all the things rather than coming back into that inner self, that inner wisdom and knowledge.

00:19:05 Erika: Yep. 

00:19:06 Chazmith: I'm curious for you because you did mention too sustained regulation and I think that's a big one because I've noticed myself and from people I've chatted with that what can happen sometimes as we're in this self-healing community And this journey is we find tools or programs and we do get more regulated, but it's not sustained regulation. So it's like one big stressful event and it like can throw us out of balance again. And let's talk about first your personal experience. Like what really supported you to build the sustained regulation?

00:19:47 Erika: Yeah, that's a very good topic to dive into. When I started on my holistic healing journey, right, that's the way I had framed it at the beginning. And I still believe it is holistic because I've incorporated, you know, many aspects, uh, you know, between nutrition and mindset shifts and somatic work, you know, all this stuff. Right. But when I started, it really just started with simple diet stuff, right? It was diet, right? It was kind of the surface level things that I was doing, okay? Then, you know, as you research and you Google and you try to find other answers, you just start trying stuff, right? 

00:20:27 Erika: So I started going to Bikram Yoga. I started listening to Dr. Joe Dispenza. So I started doing meditation. I started doing visualization. I stopped drinking alcohol, which was the other, the huge source of my dysregulation or what was keeping me dysregulated. And so over the last seven years, it's just been a combination of stuff. And I really don't believe, honestly, I don't believe in a linear approach whatsoever. human beings are multifaceted. Like there's layers, right? Cause it's like, I was practicing mindfulness, but I was doing meditation and then I would do breath work. And then I would curate my friend group to people that made me feel like safe and comfortable and supported me as I was sick and having a healthy relationship with my partner, someone that understood and supported me and leaving my graduate program and fully focusing on my health, right?

00:21:24 Erika: So it had been this combination of stuff and I was never consciously trying to regulate my nervous system because in 2016, that information was not as available as it is today, right? So like, it was kind of an intuitive process for me, right? Knowing at the heart of it is the stress, right? At the heart of it is trauma. I knew those two things existed. And stress is really just a mobilization of energy in our body. That's all it is. And trauma is our perception to that event that gives us a sense of we feel helpless and not in control of but it's really the same kind of activation in our nervous system that's happening. So I had these two things, right, like chronic stress from external stuff like school and work and all of that and then I had this internal stress that was living in my nervous system which was unresolved trauma. 

00:22:26 Erika: So I had all of that and I had realized these elements of trauma and stress and I knew all that. So I was consciously trying to deactivate the stress in my nervous system, but I wasn't really looking at it from a nervous system approach, right? It was just more of like, how do I feel my body and how I feel in my mind, which now I know the nervous system is the communication between the brain, the mind and the body. So I have been doing all of this stuff not consciously thinking about regulating my nervous system and then in 2020 kind of when the pandemic hit I read Doctor Nicola Paris how to do the work. And that's really when I started to learn about the nervous system in regards to chronic illness. 

00:23:17 Erika: And so when I read this book, I was like, "Oh my God, this is all this stuff that I had been naturally kind of intuitively doing for myself." And everything just clicked for me. I was like, this is exactly it. Because I always knew, okay, the stress, the trauma, my mindset, my perspective, my attitude towards healing, I knew that was all very important because I worked really hard on limiting beliefs and like visualizing best case scenario because my brain had always been worst case scenario, right? 

00:23:50 Erika: So I had done all this stuff and then reading that book totally changed my whole outlook on everything. And I was like, so mind blown because I'm like, yes, this is the missing link that I just quite haven't put words to in that way from a nervous system perspective. So once I read that, you know, I just started reading other books, the body keeps score and like just diving into this nervous system and chronic illness and how they're interconnected and reframing the way that I've been helping my clients and reframing the way that I've been helping myself purely from a nervous system perspective has excelled my healing and has excelled their healing.

00:24:34 Chazmith: Wow. Do you still have any symptoms that you are healing from or do you consider yourself recovered from RA?

00:24:44 Erika: This is another interesting topic, I guess, to explore is that I have completely let go of black and white thinking, black and white mentality about healing. So when I first started on my healing journey, there would be times where I'd feel really good and then I'd get symptomatic. And then I would go into the self-criticism and self-blame and say, what's wrong with you? Like, you shouldn't be feeling this way, right? Like high expectations on myself. So it's a day to day process with my body. Sometimes my body physically has no symptoms, right? Mentally has no symptoms and sometimes, depending on what's going on in my life, right? Again, we're multifaceted human beings. 

00:25:26 Erika: There's triggers that can cause us sometimes to be symptomatic, and that's okay. That's just the language of the body saying, "Hey, something needs to be resolved, there's something here." So If I am symptomatic, I lean into it with curiosity and self-compassion, right? The fundamentals of like mindfulness. And I don't really criticize it or I don't judge it because I don't have any expectation on myself to be completely healed or whatever we want to say. Because the fact is, whether you have a chronic illness or autoimmune disease, your body is going to be symptomatic. It's going to respond, to life in many different ways, right? Like you can get a headache, you can get congestion, you can get an upset stomach, like things happen.

00:26:16 Erika: And that's okay but it's when you're in the chronically symptomatic state, which becomes the problem, right? So I would not say I am chronically ill, right? Even though I have this label of rheumatoid arthritis, I don't feel like a chronically ill person. Do I experience symptoms time to time, depending on if I haven't gotten proper sleep in a few days? if I maybe drink some alcohol, whatever that is, right? It's okay, because I know I come back to homeostasis within my body, right? I've completely shutted that perspective and I embrace if there are symptoms because I think we're taught to see symptoms as these enemies when they're really just messengers. 

00:27:03 Erika: And there's many reasons for these messengers, right? So I don't get into the, Oh my God, the why is this happening to me? This, you know, this shouldn't happen to me. I simply just go, "Oh, okay, there it is." All right. And I kind of just approach it moving forward of like, okay, maybe I need some rest. Maybe I just need to clean up my diet for a second, whatever that looks like, right? But it's not with urgency anymore. It's just like, okay, it's intuitive. It's just what I know how to do for my body.

00:27:36 Chazmith: Right. Yeah. Rather than like that, I could see that feeling of urgency, like pressure, like, oh my God, something needs to change. I'm doing something wrong. What am I not doing right? That beating yourself up and then approaching it from that kind of fear-driven, fear-based mindset. It sounds like you're not, what you've let go of is like the fear around the symptom.

00:27:55 Erika: Exactly. And when you think about a dysregulated nervous system, right, it's usually in a fear or stress response. So that's how I know I'm regulated is that before every little thing was a threat to my system, right? Like, "Oh my gosh, I get a new symptom." And it's like, what's happening here that I'm googling symptoms and I'm freaking myself out. Now, it's just like, okay, literally genuine curiosity of like, "Oh, there's a symptom here." All right. 

00:28:24 Erika: There's just this natural knowing of what I need to do to support my system, and it goes away quickly. So I'm not chronically inflamed. I'm not chronically dealing with all of the issues that I had before digestion, vertigo, dizziness, numbness, like those things, no, they don't exist chronically. But I will never say that I am 100% symptom free. Like I said, it can go months, it can go a year, no symptoms, but a symptom might pop up and I'm like, okay, right? So lean into that. What's going on? What do I need? And then just move forward.

00:29:01 Chazmith: Yeah, right. It changes the entire experience of it. You mentioned somatics. Did you ever get into learning anything about specific somatic practices and do you use somatic practices for yourself?

00:29:16 Erika: Yeah. So like I said, the whole seven years, I would say the first four, yeah, like the first four years, right? It was just kind of like this general lifestyle that was supporting my nervous system. And then once I started learning about the nervous system in regard to chronic illness, then I started, you know, learning about somatic experiencing and all of that. And I do believe in my own life, I have practices and I share that with my clients just literally general stuff like taking a sigh, letting out a yawn, like easy, gentle. This is what I'm all about. 

00:29:56 Erika: I'm not trying to make the healing experience for my client complicated because I know there's these buzzwords, right? Somatic work and even nervous system regulation and brain retraining. It's like We're going back into the thinking brain, right? We're getting analytical, let's get into the feeling. What is natural and intuitive for us, right? So a somatic practice could really be, like I said, just walking outside, just sitting on the grass and feeling the sun on your skin. It doesn't need to be anything big. It's these simple everyday things that could be easily incorporated into our lives to bring us back into safety and connection.

00:30:38 Chazmith: Yeah, I love that. Because that takes the pressure off to a feeling like, I've been here, I know people who've been here, where you feel like, oh, my God, healing is a full time job. And you start like you're doing brain training, and then you learn about semantics, and you try to incorporate that and this, this, and then you want to do all of it at the same time. And now you're spending like hours a day just doing all these tools to try to get better.

00:31:00 Chazmith:  And that if you work and all those things and then you feel like you don't have the time to do all the stuff you think you need to do to heal, it can feel like a lot of pressure and that can be really stressful and activating in and of itself. So, I like how it was actually quite earlier in the conversation you mentioned seasons for things. Like, okay, there was a season where I really invested in meditation practices and then visualizations. So allowing things to come in waves and then maybe you did something over here and then you've done this and now you're like, "Oh, I want to revisit that." That's what feels right for me right now. And then you go back and circle around and revisit the meditations from an entirely new place because of all the work you did in between.

00:31:45 Erika: Oh, that's exactly it. You know, it's about Flexibility right and that shows you where my nervous system is at okay? Because I see a lot of people online and I know they have good intention But I could see how to a person without an already stressed out nervous system how they would perceive that information and it can make them feel more in an urgent state or more like fearful, "Oh my God, if I'm not doing this brain retraining thing, then I'm not going to ever get healed." Right? 

00:32:18 Erika: So my coaching incorporates elements, the essence of brain retraining, somatic work. It has the essence of there, but I don't talk to my clients and say, we're going to do a brain retraining exercise. We're going to do somatic work, right? It's so natural and so intuitive for me and for them that they don't even know they're doing that work. Right. Because I really want their nervous system to feel finally relaxed. Oh, we can just sit outside and that's okay for me. You know, that's enough for me, right?

00:32:55 Erika: Like or I can just simply extend compassion to myself in a moment of criticism. And that is regulating my nervous system. It's really these gentle things that I have found to be the most effective. Prioritizing our sleep, having some type of movement practice. And again, it can look different from day to day. If you feel like straight training, you can do it, do it. If you feel like going to a yoga class, okay, if you feel like just simply stretching, that's okay to having the freedom to like flexibly adjust our, quote unquote, healing routines and habits and whatever. And like not putting, again, a sense of urgency on it that is going to keep us dysregulated.

00:33:41 Chazmith: Yeah. Do you have any kind of daily rituals, like foundationally speaking that you tend to commit to on a day to day basis?

00:33:51 Erika: Yeah, you know, that's interesting too, because again, for many years I had so many things that I felt like I had to do in my day to like quote unquote, healing and supportive. And I think now that I'm genuinely in a regulated state and it's been for a while, there's not anything that I consciously have to think about again, because I've reprogrammed my brain. I know what to do when necessary. If I feel like, say for instance, you know, if I do feel a little inflammation, right. I'm like, okay, I have a past where I get cold plunges and go to my infrared sauna, right?

00:34:32 Erika: So I'm like, I'm going to go do that today. If it's during the day and I'm working all day and I'm staring at the computer, I'm like, I need to go on a walk. I just need to get outside. I just need to move that energy, stare at some trees, like ground myself and realize life isn't just this blue screen that I'm staring at. So it's all just, to me, the place that I'm specifically at now is like, there's not anything at the forefront of my mind where I feel like I have to do anything, if that makes any sense. But for a lot of people that start again, you do have to bring things into your conscious awareness because you are on autopilot.

00:35:12 Erika: So you have to recognize, "Hey, these are my habits, these are my patterns. These are my coping strategies." Okay? And then you have to consciously decide to do something that is going to help you break out of that autopilot. But where I'm at now, I honestly think the biggest thing for me on a day-to-day basis is just self-compassion. The moment my thinking brain wants to judge and criticize me for anything that I've done, I go, "Oh, no, we're not going to do that. That's not necessary. I'm a human. I'm a coach. I'm a business." But at the end of the day, I'm a human with a living, breathing experience. And it's okay to feel sad. It's okay to feel defeated. It's okay to get frustrated with what's going on on social media or whatever that is, right? And just extending that self-compassion to myself, it dissipates that stress quickly.

00:36:01 Chazmith: What point did you start to realize, holy shit, all these symptoms are just fading away? Like, oh my god, I actually feel better. So not to say that you claimed this 100% healed state, but when did you really start to notice that everything was shifting?

00:36:18 Erika: So again, it started with the mental symptoms, right? Like noticing my anxiety and my depression and my panic attacks were not as prevalent. What's weird is, again, I was initially starting my healing journey thinking about the physical symptoms. I'm not even thinking I can heal my anxiety or depression or panic attacks because I was like, suicidally depressed before I got diagnosed. So that's how severe that was, right? So I just kind of accepted, "Oh, this is just something that I live with and manage," Right? Somehow manage. And so I wasn't even thinking about those things. But in retrospect, as my anxiety and my depression and panic attacks started to go away, my physical body started to feel better. So again, the mind, brain and body are not separate. And the way that I see it is like looking back to myself in graduate school, I was seeing the mind, the brain, right, is this total separate entity than my body. 

00:37:28 Erika: We go see therapists to deal with our trauma or anxiety and then we go see a rheumatologist to go deal with our inflammation. So it's like we see these separate things and we're treating them separately and it's like really it's a whole. Our mind and our body are a representation of what's going on in our nervous system. So That's been the greatest gift of all, is not living with depression every day of my life. I haven't been depressed, I don't know, I would say four years. Compare that to when I got diagnosed at 28. I had been living with depression, I would say, most of my life. manifests itself differently when you're a child than when you're in adulthood, right? But to know that I am not consumed by depression and anxiety and panic attacks anymore, to me, is better than anything else because that was more limiting to my quality of life than the physical symptoms.

00:38:34 Chazmith: Absolutely. Yeah, that makes so much sense. Speaking of the mental side of things, was there any point in your journey these last seven years that you actually had to go deep dive into your traumas to do any healing around them from a mental perspective or emotional perspective? Or did you release the trauma that was just a byproduct of all the mindset work?

00:38:56 Erika: So essentially trauma, right? A trauma affects us to where our nervous system is responding in the present moment as if whatever traumatic incidents happened is happening now. So everybody has their own way of reframing it. But for me, the trauma is something that is playing out in our everyday life, even though it happened 10, 15 years ago. So essentially through practicing meditation daily, practicing mindfulness, right? Bringing my full awareness to the present moment, recognizing, "Hey, I'm safe. There's no threat, there's no danger." Because predominantly, most of my life, economically, emotionally, mentally, physically, all the things, there was legitimate danger. 

00:39:48 Erika: So now that I've been out of that for the last 10 years since being with my husband, and creating our own life and, you know, not being constantly triggered by that and actually being in threat. I have been able to bring my nervous system back into the present moment and say, we are safe, we are connected. That is the essence of what's been going on for me the last seven years is like all these practices, like I said, nonlinear just kind of brought my nervous system back into the present moment and said, "Hey, we don't need to live by the emotions and the chemicals and the stress hormones of our past." Like that's not necessary. That's unconsciously happening. Right. But now I'm observing it from my present understanding of this. And so all of this, like I said, has been unconscious and it's only come into my conscious mind within the last three years and reframing it and understanding what exactly was going on in my body and mind for so many years.

00:40:54 Chazmith: How would you handle a really stressful situation today differently than how you would have handled it four years ago? Some major life stressor happens, some unexpected event, whether it's financial, something with a person, a pet, just anything.

00:41:11 Erika: Yeah. So when you're dysregulated, right, your nervous system is perceiving everything as this like big threat to us. Right. So it's like even the slightest inconvenience can really set people off. Right. You're not rational anymore. Right. You're reactive. Your emotions are very high. Or if you're in that hyper arousal, they're not there enough. Right. So there's that fine line, which is our ventral vagal state is when we are able to be appropriately responding to life stressors, right? So because I was predominantly fluctuating between hypo and hyper arousal, I was either super reactive to life or just not reactive at all. There was no in between. And it's funny that you asked me that because before we got on this call, the tip for my iPad, I don't know where it is. It like fell off somewhere and I can't find it. 

00:42:07 Erika: So I'm like, "Oh, I'm gonna have to buy a new one." But basically, I use my iPad to write everything in it. So I thought about my old self when I was severely dysregulated. If that would have happened before I got on a call like this, I would be freaking out. I'd be like, "Oh my gosh, like can't write things down." And what if I forget what I'm going to say? And that whole narrative where the stress really takes over your whole mind body. And then right now, before I got on the call, like I said, I realized I couldn't find the tip to my pen. So what I do, I'm like, okay, I look around, I don't see it. So I'm like, All right, I'll just have to order one on Amazon. And I just quickly I got my water. I came back down and I'm like, okay, let me do this podcast with her, right?

00:42:55 Erika: So that's a very clear indication of dysregulation versus being regulated. Right. It's like I can appropriately respond to life situations without letting it activate such a high arousal. So that's just a small little example, but my old self really would have been like beating myself up. What did you do? How could you lose this? Like you have something important. I just think about myself back in school. "Oh my gosh, I was so self-critical." And like I said, perfectionist, I had to get straight A's. If I got an A minus, I'm not joking you, if I got an A minus, I would be ruminating on it for like months. after. I'd be going to my professor and be like, I don't know why I missed this question. Like I knew it. So like things just easily roll off of me. Right? And it's like I'm able to quickly regulate myself in that moment and go, this is not a life or death situation. It's going to be okay. And not just thinking it, but like literally feeling that in my body.

00:44:01 Chazmith: Right. So it sounds like sometimes there might be somebody who's like, they get called overly emotional because they get very emotional about things. It sounds like the quote unquote overly emotional person might just be a dysregulated person.

00:44:17 Erika: Yeah. I mean, our emotions are very high intensity when we're in sympathetic and when you're in that dorsal vagal, like shut down. you're kind of numb, you're disassociated from your feelings. So when you can feel it and move through it and quickly come back to a regulated state, that's the essence of nervous system regulation is having the resiliency to flexibly move through states, but come back to that ventral vagal equilibrium homeostasis.

00:44:49 Chazmith: Yeah, so it can shift. Somebody who is like feeling that erratic type of emotional response to things in life, it can be shifted.

00:44:57 Erika: Absolutely.

00:44:59 Chazmith: 100%. What are your favorite mindset tools? Because it's one thing to go, "Oh, these are my patterns, these are my old habits, these are my old beliefs and it's easy to become aware of them." And it's a lot harder to actually change them.

0:045:14 Erika: Yeah. So an exercise that I like to do with my clients is helping them understand their autonomic story. So we all have stories deeply embedded in our autonomic nervous system where we respond to life in certain ways because of the story of our nervous system, right? Because of maybe past trauma so for instance like I'll have my clients go through a sequence of like my autonomic story is maybe they're going into sympathetic. My brain makes up the story that what like, say somebody is yelling around them. So they feel their self getting tense, so my brain makes up the story that I am somehow like a part of this or like I did something that literally it's not consciously, but the autonomic story is telling their nervous system when they hear loudness or people arguing that maybe they're to blame, right? 

00:46:14 Erika: So they, yeah, responsible. So they start going into this sympathetic state And then I asked them to say, how is their body responding? So my body wants to like, run away from that situation. And then putting into context, like, that whole sequence of events, and why their autonomic system is responding in that way. So they can understand that, hey, I'm not just a hypervigilant, anxious, or depressed person, there is a story there from my past experiences that has come into the present moment. To influence the way that I'm reacting and behaving in my life.

00:46:54 Erika: So it's kind of helping them understand from both like the thinking brain and also from their nervous system perspective, putting into context why we think the way we think, why we behave the way we do. Why do we have these habits? Why do we have these coping strategies and when you can do that and you can reflect on that story it Dissipates that the energy activation that's going on in the sympathetic nervous system because it goes "Oh, it's not now right that was something that my nervous system learned in the past" But just because people raise their voice or whatever that is does it mean that that's the truth and in the present moment for themselves? So I think it's a good practice to like, listen to our autonomic stories, right? Like really write it down, see it as a little story, because that's all it really is. Just because we feel something and think something doesn't mean it's true, right? In the present moment, it was maybe it was true 10 years ago, but it's not the truth in the present moment.

00:48:01 Chazmith: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's so it's really good to with compassion, talk to your brain and your body and just reminded that you know.

00:48:08 Erika: Yeah, I am safe. I'm safe. Everything's okay. No one is upset at me. I always tell my clients to sit and think about where they are in that moment. Look around for cues of safety and connection. Okay, I have this comfortable bed behind me. I have a soft pillow. I have this glass of water. Retraining their brain to focus on cues of safety and connection.

00:48:35 Chazmith: Yeah, definitely. I want to talk to you about one thing that I know you've talked about on Instagram, and I've had people ask about this, and that is this idea of long recovery. Because I do know there are people, yeah, they do have this capacity to be symptom-free in six months or one year or eight months or somewhere in between. And I think sometimes we create this expectation on ourselves that we should also, that fancy word should also heal in this specific timeline. And I think that sometimes when we are on the long haul journey to healing, sometimes it can feel challenging to remain hopeful. We could start to feel like we're doing something wrong, or sometimes we even just lose motivation because we feel like we're doing all the things that's not really working. But I wonder if you could share any insights for anybody who's listening who has been on that long journey and just give them some advice or feedback or insight.

00:49:33 Erika: Well, first of all, it's a journey. All of us say the word journey, and it is. It's because it's a journey. It's not a destination. I think first step first with my clients is helping them recognize like we're not trying to get to a destination of healed. We are just becoming an active participant in our healing daily. That's all it is. So the moment you let go again of these structures or boundaries or whatever, you know, our brain, our thinking brain has come up with. There is an immediate relief there because we're like, "Oh, I don't have to get to this big finish line." Like the healing is in my everyday life. It is a active process. 

00:50:21 Erika: Anyone who is telling you just do this, this and this, and then you're healed, you know, I would be weary of their information because it's like healing really is a choice daily for me. So if I was to go back to my old patterns and habits and like truly default back to those, I would be back to feeling chronically sick. But it's a choice that you make consciously for a period of time until it becomes your new autonomic programming, right? Your automatic Programming. So I don't know where this kind of came about in the healing community of like, it's actually some destination point. 

00:51:01 Erika: I'm like, it's all a process. It is. And the moment you really accept and embrace that healing is happening, even when you don't feel good, again, it relieves so much stress and tension from us to be like, I may have a symptom here, but I'm still healing because I'm actively working on it daily. And there's layers to that. I didn't fully acknowledge the effect of trauma until the last three years of my healing journey. I didn't start off like, let me dive deep into my trauma and heal all my trauma. That's not where it started. It's been a natural progression.

00:51:42 Erika: And if you commit to this journey, you'll continuously uncover layers of that. And that is unique to you. So somebody else may not have all the layers that you have and that's okay. It's not to mean they're better off or worse than you, right? It's just the level of commitment that you're able to put into this journey is really what matters at the end of the day. It doesn't matter how well you do it or how much you do. It's just the intent behind what you're doing for yourself and you have to figure out what that is individually for yourself.

00:52:18 Chazmith: Yeah. Do you have any tips for if people are lacking motivation to keep going?

00:52:23 Erika: I think motivation comes from understanding. So if you don't understand what's going on in your mind and your body, it's easy to just give up. So if we're just focusing on food and that's not giving us the relief, then we're just going to give up. So we have to like keep educating ourselves. We have to keep exploring and we have to keep understanding that mind body connection for ourself. And that gives us the motivation. 

00:52:52 Erika: So honestly, I would say just educate yourself, explore, read, listen to podcasts, figure out what's speaking to you because the growth may not be happening because you're trying to force yourself into somebody else's idea of what healing looks like. Maybe that's not what you need. So you need to figure out what do you need. And the only way you can do that is educate yourself and learn to understand your body and your mind.

00:53:20 Chazmith: And explore and experiment. And also to preface what you said earlier, to not always assume that because a new symptom is showing up that you're doing something wrong. That's such a big one. It's so easy to get a new symptom and instantly think you're doing something wrong or what you're doing isn't working. And then you urgently shift gears when indeed it might've been absolutely doing everything it was supposed to be doing. 

00:53:44 Erika: Exactly. Love that. 

00:53:46 Chazmith: Yeah. So you've mentioned several times that you have your own coaching practice. Do you coach anybody or do you have like an ideal client or who do you normally focus on? Maybe it's men or women or only autoimmune or any chronic illness. What is your ideal?

00:54:01 Erika: Yeah, so when I first started, I considered myself like an autoimmune holistic health coach. And so I was very focused on working with people that just had autoimmune diseases. And then of course, as I've learned to understand the body and the mind and the nervous system, I'm like, “Oh, these are my body disorders.” And that the diagnosis or the symptom is not really what matters to me. So then At the start of this year is like I'm a mind body coach that is essentially what I've been doing the last three years of my client so no specific diagnosis they don't even have to have an illness they can just have general chronic symptoms that are undiagnosed I think that has been. more expansive for me to not just work with people that have autoimmune diseases, right?

00:54:51 Erika: So now I've been able to get men, which is not something before I really worked with because a lot of people that have autoimmune diseases are actually women. 

00:53:02 Chazmith: Yeah.

00:55:03 Erika: So that kinda like narrowed the people that I was able to work with. And so now that I've expanded, I can work with men, I can work with women, I can work with someone that just has chronic digestive issues, someone has psoriasis, it really doesn't matter the symptom or the diagnosis.

00:55:21 Chazmith: Generally, how long do you see your clients, and I'll use the word lightly, but need to work with you? What is the general time frame where you feel like they have enough grasp that they feel confident and ready to support themselves on the journey?

00:55:38 Erika: And that's exactly what I do is help them become their own self healers, right? Cause I don't want anybody to be reliant on me or rely really on anyone. Obviously I'm here as a resource to help someone go down the path of becoming their own self healer. But the goal is to like set them up with a foundation so they can sustainably live their life, not dependent on thousands of supplements and medications and, you know, all of that stuff. 

00:56:09 Erika: But I typically three months is like the bare minimum. But I would say most of my clients work with me for at least six months. And I have a handful of clients that have been with me for a year and over a year. So it depends on where they're starting when they come to me. Right. So if they don't really have any understanding, maybe they haven't even done anything really to support their healing. And they've just reached out to me like, Oh, this sounds interesting, right? 

00:56:40 Erika: There's a lot more education that needs to be happened before we can actually get to the tools. Like there'll be practices and like adjustments that they can make to their life while they're learning. But say someone comes to me and they already kind of have a basic understanding, right? Like I have someone that I just started working with a couple of months ago that has come from a popular brain retraining program that one was very expensive and two wasn't customized to them. So they were telling me like, I reached out to you because you give customized support and that's what I really wanted and needed. 

00:57:17 Erika: So they already have a lot of the foundation. Now it's like, well, how can we personalize that information to you? Because that's what it comes down to. So again, depending on those things, you know, three months could be like, okay, I feel like, and not to say three months is like I'm healed, right? Three months is like, oh, I have a good understanding of my mind and my body and how the nervous system is the pathway between my mind and my body, all of that, right? It's not like, I'm healed and now in three months. I always tell people in consultations, I'm like, I'm going to be realistic with you. Like the amount of healing that you experience is going to be dependent on the work that you're putting into yourself, not what I'm able to provide to you. 

00:58:02 Chazmith: Right. 

00:58:03 Erika: And that's hard for people to understand because we live in a such a quick fix society, right? We're used to like the yo-yo diets, yo-yoing diet, whatever you want to call it. And we're like expecting this extreme change to happen in such a short amount of time. And I'm like, look, I've been on this journey for seven years. I have fully invested into this process. And yet it's still not linear. But guess what? I have a very good understanding of my mind and my body. I'm very in tune. I know how to trust it. I'm not scared of the symptoms. I understand my symptoms. And that is honestly the best place to be.

00:58:42 Chazmith: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. How can people connect with you?

00:58:47 Erika: Well, my Instagram account is just Erika Bustos. It was previously healing arthritis holistically. And I branched out of that and I was like, what am I going to make my name? So I, is just literally the word just dot Erika Bustos. And then my website is erikabustos.com. And I have a podcast that we've recently ended, but there's like 75 episodes available if you're like interested in my personal journey and some of the kind of ways that I've helped myself heal in the last seven years, which is obviously not something I can say on this podcast. There's a lot more depth to it, but you can find that it's autoimmune in you. So you can find that on like Apple podcasts and Spotify and basically any of the podcast platforms.

00:59:36 Chazmith: Fantastic. I'm gonna ask you one more question. I ask everybody. And that is if you were told that you could only share one message with the world for the rest of your life, what would you spend your life sharing?

00:59:46 Erika: I guess it would go back to our conversation of just be gentle with yourself. So much of society is built on criticizing ourself and holding ourself to high standards and I just feel like just being gentle with yourself and understanding like this black and white mentality, right? This like all or nothing mentality is not going to serve you, your health or your healing whatsoever. Just your quality of life. Even if you don't even have a diagnosis, right? Like even if you don't have an illness, being gentle on yourself is the most healing thing that we could possibly do. It's free and it's easily accessible. So just be gentle on yourself.

01:00:33 Chazmith: Thank you. I love that so much. It's so true. Thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate getting to chat with you and learn so much from you today and share it with everybody who will be tuned in. So thank you. Thank you.

01:00:44 Erika: Thank you. I'm honored to, you know, when anybody asks me to be on their podcast, it's very nice to like be in this position where I can share my journey and hopefully inspire others to take it account, you know, some of the things that I've learned and all of your people that you've probably had on your podcast, you know, we each have our little wisdom that may be small, but profound.

01:01:08 Chazmith: Yeah. Yeah. And I always think the right message falls into the right ears, the right time. 

01:01:15 Erika: Yep. Absolutely.

01:01:18 Chazmith: All right, y'all, that's a wrap. As always, I hope that you got some new insights that will support you on your healing journey. And remember, as Erika reminded us, this isn't about some destination, it's about the journey. So make it your own and honor your truth along the way. If you find value in this podcast, please consider supporting future episodes for as little as a 99 cents per month. And until next time, you know the drill, make this week great.