Bedbound to Thriving: Recovering from ME/CFS & Severe Chronic Pain with Yasmin, 151

00:00:00 Chazmith: Welcome to Our Power is Within, a weekly podcast to inspire you to take your power back and realize that you are the healer that you have been looking for all along. We are all capable of healing in mind, in body, and in soul. I'm your host, Chazmith. This episode is brought to you by Primal Trust Academy and Community, created by my dear friend, Dr. Cathleen King, who has been featured on the podcast four times now.

00:00:40 Chazmith: Primal Trust is not just a do-it-yourself program. It is an online community and your one-stop shop for all things related to brain retraining, nervous system regulation, and somatic practices, for those with trauma and chronic illness conditions. It is growing quickly as one of the largest worldwide online healing communities. And it is co-led by Dr. Cathleen King herself, as well as other Primal Trust graduates.

00:01:06 Chazmith: In addition to the main program's Level One Regulate and Level Two Primal Trust Mentorship, you have daily [form of] support, peer led study and support groups, and a variety of daily live classes to help support your healing. Couple classes to name a few examples are the Somatic Movement classes or the Functional Neurology Class. To learn more, check out the links in the show notes and use the code OPIW to save 5% off your first month and sign up today.

00:01:34 Chazmith: Our guest today is Yasmin. She has a really powerful recovery story and she is here to share it with us today. `We deep dive into her journey all the way back to childhood and what may have led to the development of her chronic illnesses. She shares with us what worked and didn't work for her and why. We talk about the lessons she learned along the way, the struggles she overcame. And so much more. We also learn about what's next for her and what her future plans are now that she's feeling so much better. So please enjoy. Yasmin, thank you so much for being here with me today.

00:02:09 Yasmin: I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me onto your wonderful podcast.

00:02:15 Chazmith: Yeah, absolutely. I know we've been in communication for a while now and waiting for this lovely chat we're about to have. And for anyone who's listening, we just went through like an hour of technical difficulties to make this happen. So here we are. And we did.

00:02:32 Chazmith: Okay. So, Yasmin, if you've ever listened to any of my recovery story episodes, I don't like to spend a ton of time talking about symptoms. But what I do like to do is start with a little overview, like a very brief overview of what you have healed from. Because as I often say, there's people who are listening. They're looking for specific people who've healed from specific things that they resonate with or that they've also suffered through. Because I think that we tend to find most hope when we hear, "Oh, I have this and they have that, and they don't have it anymore." So could you kind of just go with that for now and just share with us, like a really brief overview of what you've been healing from and/or have healed from?

00:03:14 Yasmin: Yeah, so I originally had a diagnosis of CFS/ME, but with that I had a lot of chronic pain develop later on in my journey of having CFS/ME. So I don't tend to like to associate myself with a diagnosis per se, but for the purposes of this, I think it's helpful, like you say, to give people a bit of background about what diagnosis I've actually been dealing with.

00:03:42 Yasmin: And I wasn't diagnosed with anything like fibromyalgia, but I did have a lot of extensive pain associated with the ME/CFS. And the chronic pain is the thing that I have healed completely and I'm just so overjoyed that I've completely healed that. And the fatigue symptoms are still a little bit lingering, but it has improved drastically from being completely bed bound to now, three years later, being able to live a full life. 

00:04:11 Yasmin: So I'm just so happy to share my journey with people and to give a little bit of hope to other people if they're bedbound now or are in the process of improving from bedbound and are riddled with chronic pain, that there is hope. It is completely possible to heal and don't give up on yourself.

00:04:29 Chazmith: Fantastic, thank you so much. So I wanted to then kind of get into talking about where you're at today, looking back on your life, what do you now understand to be part of the cause in terms of what developed your chronic illness in regards to your childhood trauma?

00:04:50 Yasmin: I believe that my childhood experiences massively impact my nervous system and actually from around the age of six, I started experiencing chronic anxiety and where I would get like, tummy aches and all sorts of nervous symptoms about going to school and just in general day to day life. So really chronic symptoms like anxiety started happening for me from a really young age. And that was born out of the fact that I didn't really have any major traumas in my childhood, but my family life was very chaotic and I didn't really have a safe person that I could turn to for support with my emotions. And my mom was very dysregulated and my parents did the best they could, but they were working with the resources that they had in themselves and they had a lot of their own childhood trauma and experiences.

00:05:53 Yasmin: So having quite an absent dad, he was working all the time and stuff, so he was quite avoidant. And then having my mother, who was just severely dysregulated a lot of the time and the roles were almost reversed, so I was often tending to her needs and looking after her instead of it being the other way around. So I never really had a caregiver to show me what true regulation looked like. So I believe that I spent most of my childhood and early adulthood in a chronic fight or flight stress response and that initially started to manifest as anxiety. And then over time, I just got to the point where in my system, I couldn't maintain that high level of fight or flight all the time anymore and my system just completely crashed and went down into freeze.

00:06:42 Yasmin: And that happened after my parents got divorced. So I think I felt completely abandoned by my dad, who was pretty much the closest I had to a safe person to run to if things were going wrong for me. So he left and then I was left with my mum and all of her upset and I had to support her through that, but no one was really thinking about me and how it was all impacting me. So I think that just all accumulated into my body, just saying, no, stop, I can't do this anymore.

00:07:18 Chazmith: Yeah, it's crazy to think for a six year old to have anxiety, right? Like six year olds should just be out playing and living this carefree life experience not already riddled with anxieties.

00:07:28 Yasmin: I know, I had so much pain as well, even from that young age in my belly, I would really feel it in my body and so I would be saying to my parents, like, "I don't want to go to school, like I've got a tummy ache." And they were quite aware in some ways, like they knew that it was not that I had a bad belly, but that it was like some sort of psychological thing that was impacting me. So they sent me to a hypnotherapist. 

00:07:54 Yasmin: And that didn't really help because it just ended up suppressing it even more into my system, because it made me fear everything more, which has been a big part of my journey, actually, in coming back to my body and not fearing the sensations that my body is giving me and being able to be with that without fearing it and without it having such a hold on me and giving me unnecessary symptoms.

00:08:21 Chazmith: Yeah, because I'm thinking, as you like, saying all that. I do see how hypnosis can absolutely be a really productive, powerful tool given the right circumstance and the right time. But as a young child to go to hypnosis, I don't see how it can resolve something when the environment hasn't shifted, right? So maybe it could resolve something, like from some past experience, it could shift something, but if you're still growing up in this chaotic environment that's dysregulating, then you're just going to default right back. So I don't see how that could create the lasting impact or result that one would be looking for. Unless you did the hypnosis and that they also changed the entire environment that caused the distress to begin with.

00:09:02 Yasmin: Yeah, right. Because my parents were still acting the same. They did that classic thing of, "Okay, what can we do for her?" Rather than looking at themselves and what they could change themselves to help me. And I think when you're that young, your brain is still developing and you're not necessarily able to respond so well to things like hypnosis at such a young age. I think that's quite difficult when you don't yet have your full mental emotional capabilities on board.

00:09:29 Chazmith: Yeah. I mean, they say you're kind of still in a hypnotic state, right? Like just kind of being conditioned and this sponge that's taking everything in around you.

00:09:37 Yasmin: Yeah.

00:09:38 Chazmith: Very interesting. Okay, so I feel like that story is a story that a lot of people will probably be able to relate to, right? I remember there was this point in my journey where I felt like there was just so much going on physically and I felt so on edge that I thought, "God, what happened to me as a child? Is there something big that I just don't remember?"

00:09:57 Chazmith: And then the more I dived into all this self healing and this work and inner child stuff and looking at my childhood, it became so clear that it wasn't about the big thing. And we hear this all the time. It doesn't have to be the big T, trauma. It really is this culmination of all these little things. And just like you said, growing up in an environment that you had nowhere to feel safe, no one to feel safe with, that over years and years and years can create a massive impact. And like you said, you just ran off steam in this fight or flight state for so long until your body just said, no, can't do it anymore. And it just down into freeze, which is such a common experience that so many people have in the chronic illness community.

00:10:40 Yasmin: Yeah, for sure. But I mean, I didn't recognize that as really what was at play until about ten years into my chronic illness. I did all the sort of supplements and nutrition and everything to get myself to a place where I was feeling a lot better. But it wasn't until I really crashed down to being bed bound in 2020 that I really was like, "Okay, I need to approach this differently." And even then, I still tried to go into detox protocols. And I convinced myself in my mind that I needed to detox all these toxins and pathogens out of my system in order to recover.

00:11:22 Yasmin: But I couldn't tolerate them because my nervous system was so dysregulated that I was just adding another stressor to my body that it just didn't need. And so I think people can become quite resistant to doing the inner work because it requires a lot from you, right? It's not something that's easy to do. It's much easier to just pop a pill and be on your way and say, "Oh, I hope that this is going to help me to feel better." But actually to take a step back and look at your life and look at your past and what wasn't so good in your life and to actually go towards your uncomfortable sensations and feelings, that takes a lot of courage and a lot of grit and determination.

00:12:08 Yasmin: And I think a lot of people can relate that it's not necessarily always the first thing that they run to when they start a healing journey. And it's a shame because you can shave off so many years of healing and suffering and everything if you do start there. So that's one thing that I hope with sharing my story and from listening to podcasts and your podcasts and things as well, is that people can get that message that you can start there, it's okay to start there, don't put it off.

00:12:38 Chazmith: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I'm curious when you bring up things like detox protocols or supplements and all this and you mentioned and this is a common thing too, like, "Okay, you're right, that's like a route so many of us take and sometimes we're, like getting sicker." And as you said, because the nervous system is so dysregulated that you're not actually in the state of health to be able to benefit from these protocols, they're more taxing to the system.

00:13:02 Chazmith: But through the journey that you've been on, and as you've done some of the deeper healing work in the mind body realm and you've regulated your nervous system, did you ever actually find a need to go back to some of those tools, like the physical tools? Or did you find that you felt so good that you actually realized now your body was healing on its own and didn't need that stuff?

00:13:24 Yasmin: Yeah, so I think with everything, with healing, I think everything is a balance, right? So I think my personal view is that your nervous system or your autonomic nervous system, it affects all the [autonomic] processes in your body. And so it's incredibly important to get that on board because if you don't have that functioning well, then everything else you try to do just isn't going to be as effective or really work at all.

00:13:52 Yasmin: But once you do have that on board, then the other things that might also help you can also come into play and be a bit more effective and you're not as necessarily so sensitive to them anymore because you've got more regulation on board in your system. But what I like to work with mostly is working with the foundations. So supporting your body in its own ability to heal. So getting a good night's sleep, eating a nutrient-dense meal, just getting all the inputs in place that your body needs to feel its best because, yeah, you can regulate your nervous system loads, but if you're just eating junk food, then you're not going to feel that great ultimately. So I think all of these things are really important.

00:14:36 Yasmin: And then if you do get to a point where you just need that little bit extra to get you over the hump of healing, then actually doing a few detox protocols or a few supplements can be helpful. But it really should be the last thing because so much healing can happen without it. And I really don't think it's something you should jump straight into. But things like Lyme and things like that, they can attack your central nervous system. And if the trauma that is in your body has allowed them to proliferate then sometimes you do need that little bit of extra support to just get that to come down and you can't out regulate yourself from that.

00:15:13 Yasmin: Or for example, amalgam fillings that have mercury in them, like that's going to be impacting your body. It might be helpful to get them removed, for example. So I think a balance between the two is really important, but always to start with the nervous system because if you don't then everything else is going to be pretty futile

00:15:33 Chazmith: Right. Now speaking of building capacity in the nervous system, what ways did you find how you were able to do this for yourself?

00:15:41 Yasmin: Yeah, it's a great question actually, because a lot of practices I tried really didn't work for me. And so I think I did four different nervous system healing programs and in all of them, lots of people got great success with them, right? And it's not like I didn't get any success from them at all, but not in the way that I was looking for or hoping for it. It always felt like something was kind of missing. And so I think that just speaks to how individual people systems are like, some people respond to some practices better than others and everyone has their own unique makeup, their own unique past experiences and everything. So just to say quickly is that if you don't feel like it's working for you, if you feel like something is missing, then it probably is. And just to keep looking until you find what really resonates with you and when you find what really works for you, the healing will be quick, it will happen quickly, much quicker than you might ever think or dream is possible.

00:16:43 Yasmin: So for me, I found that doing a lot of brain retraining was kind of sending me around in circles and it was suppressing that survival energy that I had in my system further down and it wasn't allowing it to come up and out. And so that created more anxiety and more fear about my symptoms and that was ultimately more unhelpful and it actually made me worse at one point as well. Whereas when I did more somatic based practices where I went towards the feeling and I was gradually able to titrate and build up through something called pendulation where you access something like a resourced state.

00:17:26 Yasmin: So if I notice my connection with my body on the chair below me also tuning into maybe an unsettled feeling I have in my belly, then I'm able to find safety whilst being with what is going on for me with the uncomfortable sensations and gradually doing that more and more every single day and learning to be with that without fearing it was the most critical thing I did in my healing in order to see progress. And it sounds so simple. It sounds like it's too simple for it to have much of an effect, but really the beauty of it is in its simplicity. Does that make sense?

00:18:06 Chazmith: It does, absolutely. And so it sounds like you did some somatic experiencing work.

00:18:11 Yasmin: Yeah, for sure. Somatic Experiencing, Somatic Touchwork and Feldenkrais, those three different modalities were the things that had the biggest impact for me.

00:18:21 Chazmith: Did you end up doing this with a coach or in a program or just totally on your own through your own research?

00:18:27 Yasmin: So I did Irene Lyon's Body SmartMind Program and yeah, there's numerous practices in that program that you can use to work in this way. And she actually uses all three so, Somatic Experiencing, Somatic Practice, the Touchwork and Feldenkrais. She combines all three in all of her… she calls them neurosensory exercises. And in those, you just kind of follow along to the audio recordings. They're not really meditations because they're very thematic in nature, but you listen to it as if, you know, like a guided meditation.

00:19:03 Chazmith: Okay, very cool. Was this the fourth program you did or was this the fifth program after the other four that didn't work?

00:19:10 Yasmin: This was the fourth one, yeah.

00:19:11 Chazmith: Okay, all right. And so that was it for you. Like, all the other things to some degree helped you, or in some cases didn't help you, and then you tried this program and it was that combination of tools that just really supported you to overcome the chronic pain.

00:19:26 Yasmin: Yeah, it really did. And because I was able to get out of my mind and just go completely into the body, like I wasn't overanalyzing anything anymore. I was just literally surrendering to my body and in little bits, connecting into what was difficult for me to feel, be that emotions or I prefer to think of symptoms as sensations because it just feels a bit nicer to your nervous system to talk about sensations as opposed to symptoms.

00:19:55 Yasmin: And it was just so powerful. And whilst doing that, it allows your survival stress to come up and out. So all of that anxiety that was bubbling underneath the surface, that was there behind the freeze that I had been experiencing with my fatigue, it was able to come up and out in little bits. And this allowed me to get a lot more flow and space in my system again and allowed my energy to start flowing and I started to get a lot more energy and the fatigue started to lift. And I can go more into detail about a really potent experience I had with using the Feldenkrais work to completely heal the chronic pain after one exercise. It was insane.

00:20:43 Chazmith: Yeah, let's talk about it.

00:20:45 Yasmin: Okay, so Feldenkrais is something that I wasn't aware of it before I discovered Irene Lyon's work. And I think people are much more aware of somatic experiencing and what that involves and what that entails. And Feldenkrais is quite different. It works quite differently to other somatic healing methods. So basically it's around movement. So it's really good for using if you've got limited mobility or if you've got chronic pain, that's limiting your mobility in any way because it works directly with movement, but it's all really slowed down. So, for example, if you take a practice where you're imagining what your body does walking, so you would tune in and you would feel your feet on the ground and you would then think in your mind, what would your body need to do in order to take a step? And you would be imagining yourself doing it before you take the step.

00:21:43 Yasmin: And then when you do it, you do it really slowly and you're connecting in with how you feel in your body, like if any difficult sensations are coming up, or emotions, and you're focusing all of your attention on the present moment in the action that you're taking. So it brings you into the present and it allows you to develop a new sense of curiosity around how your body can move and how it functions by really slowing it all down. And with intention and awareness in that way, you can get really deep rewiring in your system. So I did this practice and it was a 30 minute practice, but I only got about 15 minutes through until I started experiencing intense pain in my legs. And so that was my cue to stop. Like I'd reached my capacity. I didn't want to send my system into overdrive.

00:22:35 Yasmin: So often when we do practices like this, you can get a flow of sensations because it needs to come up and out in order for it to be fully released from your system and to complete that survival response. So I got all this chronic pain and I was like, I thought I'd got this chronic pain in my legs when I walked too far because it was too much. But I realized I'd only taken maybe three steps in this 15 minute practice, but I got this chronic pain so badly. So I knew in that instance that it was all mind-body related and it wasn't, obviously I felt the pain fully and properly, like it was real.

00:23:14 Yasmin: But I knew there wasn't anything wrong with me. It was just from that mind-body dysregulation that it was there. And so I didn't freak out about it because I just knew what was happening and I was able to just take a naps and salt bath, and get an early night. And then the next day, I woke up and it was completely gone and it never came back ever since. And I was able to increase my steps to about 6,000 to 10,000 a day after just doing that one practice. So it was completely mind boggling for me because I was like I just stood here and focused on how my body moves and now it's gone.

00:23:51 Chazmith: And first it came back intense and I think it's important to also notice how you didn't go into a fear state when it came really intense like that, rather more just this observer. Like you were in a place of just observing and noticing and then you went and you stopped and you supported your system by taking a bath and resting, but without the fear. Because I can only imagine that if we end up responding in fear, we could keep ourselves stuck in that spiral, essentially.

00:24:16 Yasmin: Yeah and that's why doing the somatic work, to actually build that capacity in my system, to be with those uncomfortable things, was really important. Because if I hadn't have done that, then I would have just gone into a fear spiral and I wouldn't have been able to handle the pain that had flared for me. And I would have thought, oh, this isn't ever going to work. Like I'm going backwards and going to a whole sort of catastrophizing loop that your brain can get into and those sorts of situations. And I like to refer to Irene's analogy of having a swimming pool and having all of the balls in the swimming pool. Have you heard of this before?

00:24:54 Chazmith: No.

00:24:55 Yasmin: No, okay. So she talks about the swimming pool being your body and then all the balls in the swimming pool are your trauma or whether it's big T or little T trauma, so it could even just be chronic stress or having a fall when you were a child, things like that. And all of these accumulate in your swimming pool, in your body and when there's so many in there they can't move and nothing flows, nothing works properly. But when you start to build capacity in your system, then you can start to grow the size of your pool.

00:25:28 Yasmin: So you can grow the size of your pool so there's a bit more space for the balls to move around. And as you grow the size of your pool, balls can start to leave and that's an organic trauma release. So you might experience that through like your body twitching or shaking or doing something like that and then it passes through your system. And then the more and more balls that leave the pool, the more and more space and flow there is in your system for your body to work and function optimally.

00:25:57 Chazmith: Right.

00:25:58 Yasmin: So does that make sense, that analogy of creating capacity and space and flow in your system so it can start to work optimally again?

00:26:07 Chazmith: It does make sense. And I wonder, could you break down some more in-depth of the tools that somebody listening would use to help build that capacity in a practical way, so that anyone who's out there listening says, "Okay, that sounds good, I want that, but how do I get there?"

00:26:22 Yasmin: Yeah, sure. That's the thing, right, is finding the right tools so that you can actually get to where you want to go. So it involved a lot of orienting, so a lot of somatic experiencing work as well. So orienting just to your surroundings, looking around, seeing what you can see at the same time noticing the connection of your body with the ground below you and just really getting into the present moment, getting out of your mind and just seeing that you're safe where you are. And with this sort of somatic work, it does really seem too simple, but it's so, so powerful.

00:27:00 Yasmin: And then you can do that pendulation that I described before, connecting in with what's uncomfortable. You can think about giving it a name and describing it and talking to it a bit, seeing if it has anything to say to you like, "I'm scared" or" I don't want to be here," "I don't want to do this," things like that. So you can start to connect into it and befriend it a little bit so then it doesn't feel quite so scary anymore. And then when it starts to feel like a bit too much, you just come back into your environment, look around, feel where you are, feet on the ground and it really can just be that simple and it can integrate that into your day to day life.

00:27:43 Yasmin: It's something that you can do when you're just out and about and you're finding it all quite challenging to your nervous system. There's too much stimulation going on, then you can just look around. It's not something that you have to do any big movements for or anything and you might feel awkward about doing that in a public space. It's literally something you could do without anyone noticing you're doing it. And I think that's the beauty of it is that you can reintegrate these practices into your day to day life like that. And it becomes more like a lifestyle then of just gently regulating yourself wherever you are, whatever you're doing, like I'm doing it now and it's super helpful.

00:28:22 Yasmin: And then there's other practices you can do, like somatic touch work where you send your intention and awareness by touching different parts of your body. And it's like you're giving yourself that love and attention that perhaps you never got or didn't get as much of or enough of when you were growing up. And that can really help to build the capacity and to get those organic trauma releases to happen as well.

00:28:48 Chazmith: When you were going through all of this type of work, did you have any epiphanies or just realizations as you were going into the sensations based on what came up? Like, "Oh, this emotion that I didn't even realize I was dealing with or that was underneath the surface."

00:29:04 Yasmin: I think something that we can find difficult to tap into is thinking about anger, right? Like, a lot of us don't like to associate the fact that we're angry or we're frustrated about something. Like, anger can feel quite scary to the system. So I realized that actually, beneath a lot of the anxiety I had was a lot of frustration and a lot of anger. The predicament I found myself in and to be left by the medical establishment with no answers.

00:29:39 Yasmin: And so it was really important for me to realize what was lying behind the anxiety. Like, the anxiety wasn't the endpoint. And to be able to build that capacity, to be able to work with the frustration, the anger that's there. Because it's a lot, right? Like, working with anger, it involves a lot of energy. You have to be able to be with it and move that energy through your systems without it getting stuck. So anger work can't really be an entry point, I don't think, but you can get there with it and release it and feel pretty liberated once you have.

00:30:14 Chazmith: Now, what are some ways that you would work with anger? Because I guess to go into the sensation and have a relationship with it, to understand what the sensation is trying to tell us, what it's there for, like, what it's to key us into, say, anger, as you said, for an example. "Oh, okay. So I realize now that there's actually a lot of anger or frustration." So knowing that, being aware of that anger and frustration in the background is step one. But then what do you do with that from there?

00:30:47 Yasmin: Yeah, so I like to work with it somatically and so thinking about, okay, how is this feeling in my body connecting into how the emotion feels in the body? Like, where is it being stored in the body? And is there any way the body wants to move in order to kind of get that energy out of the system?

00:31:09 Yasmin: So some people like to talk about just hitting pillows and things, but I don't think that's really going to be that effective unless you're connecting into how your body feels whilst you're doing it. Often that can involve slowing it down or lifting your arms up really slowly and imagining what you would do. Like, if you're going to punch someone in the face, for example, this is called annihilation work, and it sounds, like, horrible, right? Because you're imagining, like, you're punching someone in the face, which obviously we wouldn't want to do in real life.

00:31:41 Yasmin: But if you can just imagine it and complete the action thematically and complete it slowly whilst connecting into how your body feels whilst you're doing it, then you can get that anger out of your system and process it without having to do something destructive and get yourself into a bad situation like a fight or something which you obviously don't want to be in. But we need to get this anger up and out otherwise it's just going to build up in our systems and create a lot of dysregulation.

00:32:13 Chazmith: So you're actually working with slowing it down to release it rather than just moving fast or shaking it out or something.

00:32:21 Yasmin: Yeah. I find with somatic work going slowly, it's hard to do, especially with something as energetic as anger because there is so much energy behind anger. The temptation is to want to do it really fast, but when you slow things down, you can really connect into how it feels in your body in a much deeper way than you can when you're doing something really, really quickly.

00:32:46 Chazmith: Right. And you learned all this in Irene's program?

00:32:50 Yamin: Yeah, yeah. That came from Irene's program too, yeah.

00:32:54 Chazmith: Yeah, and did you do this, like did you ever have her, give you one one-on-one sessions or did you work with a lot of this just on your own?

00:33:00 Yasmin: No, I worked with it all on my own. I haven't had a one-on-one session with a practitioner. I think you can do a lot of healing on your own. I think the co-regulation can come from the guided audios to guide you through it so you don't feel so alone and you've got that soothing voice there in the background and it kind of helps to keep you on track. So I guess it's kind of like having a practitioner there with you but you don't have them physically there with you. I think people's systems can work differently. Like some people might need to work a bit more one-on-one with a practitioner to get the same results.

00:33:38 Yasmin: But some people don't find it so safe to be working one on one with someone and they might actually find more safety just doing it on their own, in their own space, without fearing someone judging them, which a practitioner wouldn't do anyway. But that fear can still be there for people. I think that's something I relate to as well is that just having my own space to do it when it feels right for me, not like the scheduled 1 hour slot with a practitioner needing to make the most out of the time and feeling extraly vulnerable with them.

00:34:10 Chazmith: Yeah. So you actually learned then like, "Oh, you're feeling anger," and you learned how to actually express it in a slow mindful way.

00:34:20 Yasmin: Yeah.

00:34:21 Chazmith: That is so cool. Now was there ever a point that you found value as far as to allow this survival stress to come out and release? Did you ever find value in doing because I'm pretty sure I follow her online and I'm pretty sure she does something where she teaches almost like where you do this shaking. I can't think of what it's called, but where you actually can create this kind of trembling or shaking in your body to release energy. Do you know what I'm talking about?

00:34:49 Yasmin: Yeah. So I guess that just comes up a bit more organically when you're doing any of the practices. So that can be the trauma release. And I've experienced that for up to 30 minutes, my arms trembling or my legs or whatever. And I could imagine it could feel scary if you didn't know what was going on. But it's not something that you're making your body do, it's just something that is happening as a response to the practice that you're doing. So if you have built the capacity to be with it, then you can allow it to happen and complete and to come out and on the other side of it, you can feel so much better, like have so much more energy in your system. It's really quite amazing.

00:35:30 Chazmith: That's awesome. Okay, so we've been talking a lot about how you've been using the somatics specifically as a tool for healing the chronic pain and getting your nervous system capacity built up. But I know that you also had some other huge wins. And so I'd love for you to touch base and talk about the ways that you desensitized yourself from mold sensitivities, for example.

00:35:53 Yasmin: Yeah, that was huge for me in my healing as well, actually, because I got myself so convinced that I was riddled with mycotoxins and I had mold illness. I had all the lab results, I had all the tests that I was living in a moldy house, that I had all of these mycotoxins in my system that matched up with all my symptoms. And so I was utterly convinced and petrified of the environment that I was living in and I was utterly convinced that I needed to move out of that environment and I needed to avoid mold and I needed to detox from it in order to recover and heal. And I did move out of mold because I had got myself so dysregulated in that environment that it just didn't feel safe for me at all.

00:36:42 Yasmin: So part of it was leaving because no matter how much rewiring I did on my system, I couldn't feel safe. Now some people can get to that point and they can heal whilst they're still in living in the mold. But for me, I felt like I needed that clean break and we were looking at buying a house anyway, so it was kind of like the perfect opportunity to do that. But I was really adamant that when we moved, I couldn't just live this life of mold avoidance. Like I just couldn't do it. It seemed completely crazy to me.

00:37:14 Yasmin: People getting people to come into their house and taking all their clothes off and showering and just like trying to avoid any exposure. I just thought that sounded super dysregulating and I would just be living my life in constant hyper vigilance. So when we moved to this new house, which was about a year ago now, that was when I really started on my nervous system work and my nervous system healing. And that's where the brain retraining really played a huge role for me and actually made a big impact because every time I had that hyper vigilance, that thought about mold, or is there an exposure in this house, always that mold growing in the washing machine, or what about, in the shower or the sink?

00:37:59 Yasmin: And I was surprised at how many times throughout the day, my brain was going to mold, mold, mold, mold, mold. Like I was so hyper focused on it and had so much hypervigilance around, it was insane. And so what I did was every time I had those thoughts crop up, I just did a brain retraining practice every single time. And I might not have done a full brain retraining practice every time because it was so often just doing a short pattern interrupt, just to interrupt the thought and focus on my surroundings, where am I now bringing in those thematics and that orienting a little bit created so much safety in my system.

00:38:41 Yasmin: And over time, over the course of about three to four months, I think I noticed that I just wasn't really having those thoughts anymore and they were just slowly decreasing. And now, like in our house, some mold growing around the plug hole because it's impossible to avoid things like that from happening. And I don't worry about it, I don't react to it in any way. I know that's, pretty minor amount of mold. But we also, after about six months of living here, we unpacked all the items that would have been on the no list for healing from mold or bringing from a moldy place to a clean environment.

00:39:19 Yasmin: So we put up all our pictures and we got all our books out and everything, and I just didn't have any reactions to anything at all. And I've since gone on to visit family and friends houses where they've got pretty extensive mold issues. And I haven't had any reactions in those houses at all. Whereas before I would literally go into a room in a house that had mold exposure and I would have pain all over my body. I would be so fatigued, I would get migraines, I would get skin infections. So all just from doing that rewiring work. I wasn't reacting in that way at all anymore. She was amazing. So liberating.

00:39:56 Chazmith: It's so crazy, right? And I think how many of us probably have those nonstop hypervigilant thoughts about whatever it is, whether it's like, whatever the thing is that we're afraid of, for you is mold. So you just got to this point where you took the fear sensation away from the thought about mold and then the brain just no longer could perceive it as a threat.

00:40:16 Yasmin: Yeah, exactly. So I had like limbic system impairment where I was just hyper-focused on it and it had just been wired into my system because we'd been living in this house for a couple of years and I wasn't really seeing a lot of improvement in my health. And so I was just so utterly convinced and wired for that threat. And that's the beauty of neuroplasticity, right, is that you can completely unwire everything and put new, more helpful pathways in to make big change in your body.

00:40:45 Chazmith: Yeah, but just noticing it's like how you said, so important to notice when these little hyper vigilant thoughts pop in and to interrupt them over and over again.

00:40:53 Yasmin: Yeah, that was really the key.

00:40:55 Chazmith: I also know that something you do, aside from, like somatics work, is muscle testing. You use muscle testing on yourself to really help you. Can you explain how you're able to do that and how it supports you?

00:41:07 Yasmin: Yeah, sure. So muscle testing is fascinating because it gives you a way of tapping into your subconscious mind through the autonomic nervous system. So it basically comes from kinesiology. I don't know if you've heard of kinesiology before. You basically can see the muscle response to stimuli, so you can notice whether there is stress on or around the body from something. And so in this way, you can check to see if you have any emotions or limiting beliefs or any specific traumas that are impacting your body in a negative way.

00:41:44 Yasmin: And you can also do this for toxins and pathogens, if that's something that you need to release. But your body will show you what it's ready to release through this muscle testing method. And so you can identify things that you might not otherwise be aware of in your conscious mind that might be holding you back in your healing. And then you can work on releasing those through energy clearings where you basically send intention down to your cells to signal them to start releasing. And you'd be amazed at the power of intention because you're literally just communicating to your body that it's safe, it's ready, it's okay to release and it just taps into its own ability to heal and release what it no longer belongs in the system.

00:42:27 Chazmith: So what form of muscle testing are you actually using or that you find most supportive for you?

00:42:33 Yasmin: So I use a pendulum, so I don't actually have it with me right now to show you. It's like a little necklace that swings from side to side so it responds to twitches in the finger essentially in response to any stimulus that you want to find answers on. So you can have, like clearing lists where you can find out what emotions are there stored that need to be released. And then when you hover it over an emotion, like written on a piece of paper, then it can say yes or no and it swings in a certain direction.

00:43:04 Chazmith: Wow, I never thought of using it in that way. Like writing things down on paper and then using it over it.

00:43:10 Yasmin: Yeah, because people can use it with supplements and stuff, but it's like the writing is enough. Has an energetic imprint in the writing, so it will pick up on it.

00:43:20 Chazmith: Interesting. And you find that this is usually really effective. Like accurate?

00:43:24 Yasmin: Oh, yeah, super accurate. I think it takes practice and you need a proper framework to work with. And this is something that I've been trained in now as well, so I can do it on other people, but with a bit of practice that it can become pretty easy and pretty straightforward just to see what the answers are and really unblock. Like discover blocks to your healing that you might not have otherwise discovered and then to be able to release them and let them go and just feel the wonderful benefits from it. Because after I've done clearings on myself like this, my hair stopped falling out. Like I had all hypothyroid symptoms and my hair was really falling out. And after I did these clearings on myself, it just completely stopped.

00:44:07 Chazmith: Now, what are you referring to when you say you do a clearing on yourself?

00:44:11 Yasmin: So you combine intention and then you also use the magnetic energy over your meridian line. So you just move the magnet over your meridian line to help access your energetic body and to clear what's in your energetic body. And that can lead to a physical detox as well. And you know, it works because you feel it working on your system and you might feel tired whilst your body's processing. You might feel really thirsty or you might feel emotional. You might feel some of the emotions sort of like passing through your system.

00:44:45 Chazmith: Is this like the emotion code?

00:44:47 Yasmin: Yes, very similar to that, yeah.

00:44:49 Chazmith: Okay, so you actually have like a magnet and you do this energy clearing with a magnet over your meridian lines?

00:44:55 Yasmin: Yeah.

00:44:56 Chazmith: With an intention to release a specific emotion that you discover through the muscle testing.

00:45:01 Yasmin: Yeah, exactly.

00:45:03 Chazmith: Very cool. That's awesome. All right, I'm going to ask you one more question about kind of the healing journey and just your insights from what you've learned through this. You use a lot of visualizations to manifest your dream life. Let's talk about that.

00:45:17 Yasmin: Oh, yeah. So I love the power of visualization. I think it's so, so powerful when it's used in the right way. Like, I used the pattern interrupt and those sort of things on the mold sensitivity. And the somatics was really important for releasing and working with the stored trauma. But the visualization is so powerful, I found, for bringing into your life what you really want and to actually be able to get over barriers to achieving that. So I would use visualization combined with, like, a somatic anchor.

00:45:51 Yasmin: And this was actually something I got from CFS school, which I really love. So I would visualize things that I found difficult and that I really wanted to be able to do again. Like driving, for example. I had so much fear and a block to driving that I just visualized over and over and over again being able to drive and how I would feel whilst I was driving and how that would feel in my body. So if I would feel happy and if I would have, say, some warmth in my chest and really tapping into the senses around how that would feel.

00:46:27 Yasmin: And my somatic anchor is just holding this point here between my little finger and just holding that there whilst I was visualizing. And so whenever I would need to just tap into that state again, I could just hold that point and it would all come flooding back to me and it would give me a sense of safety in the moment. So I found visualization, like, that really great for increasing activity, so like for increasing walking and things like that as well.

00:46:55 Yasmin: But I also used, have you heard of Envol app? No? So it's a meditation app and it's so, so great. They've got loads of visualizations in there and they've got one that's called dreams come true. And so it's a 30 minute meditation where you basically visualize what you want to come true in your life. So be that you being more healed or living in a certain place or working in a certain career, whatever it might be, you can literally visualize this in the meditation. And it's so powerful because the frequencies that they use in the meditation help you to lower your brainwaves to get into, like a delta brainwave state. And that really helps with the rewiring in your system for it to go really deeply in, for it to really cement in.

00:47:46 Yasmin: And then it, just things that I was doing on just started to come true. Like I got my dream house and my health started improving, like I was building up my activity, my walking and my driving whilst doing these meditations and visualizations. And then I visualized sitting here at this desk in my living room and working and helping other people heal from chronic illness, which is all things I'm starting to do now. So, yeah, going out on family trips and just spending beautiful moments with my son and my partner and just being well enough to do those things. And sure enough, if I did the visualizations enough, they would come into fruition.

00:48:25 Chazmith: That's so cool. You have a son, how old is he?

00:48:27 Yasmin: He's three.

00:48:28 Chazmith: Three, okay, all right. Oh, so you had him right around the time you really started getting a lot better and healthier.

00:48:36 Yasmin: No, so I had him and then I got really bad and then it's been past three years that I've yeah, so he's nearly four.

00:48:45 Chazmith: Okay.

00:48:46 Yasmin: Yeah. I pushed myself to the extreme after having him and it completely sent my system into overwhelm and that's when I got a lot worse. And it's really been a beautiful journey of coming back into regulation with such a young child and being able to pass that on to him has been such a blessing. Because if I hadn't experienced these health challenges, then I don't think I would have gone on this journey and been able to have that experience of parenthood and stuff with him in the way that I have had.

00:49:18 Chazmith: Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Parents who have gone through this journey and come out on the other side and understand all of this stuff about regulation and co-regulating and all that, they're a gift for the kids these days. That's a gift.

00:49:30 Yasmin: For sure. I only wish I could have done it all before I had him. But life isn't perfect.

00:49:37 Chazmith: No, it's not. Now, you said you used to visualize helping people and sitting in your office and doing this kind of work that you're now starting to do. So what are you up to now?

00:49:47 Yasmin: Yeah, so I train to be a holistic health practitioner, working on both the trauma and the nervous system side, as well as working more with putting the body with detox if that is needed. So I learned how to do the muscle testing and how to do the clearings that we spoke about.

00:50:04 Yasmin: But what I'm really excited about is that I am developing my own online healing program, which is called Revitalize. And so it's got three different levels. The first level is nervous system and foundations because I believe that's where you need to start and not everyone will need to go to the other levels, but if they do, that extra level of support is there for them as well. So level two is minerals and drainage. So opening up your drainage pathways and just rebalancing the minerals in your body so that your body can work optimally at the cellular level.

00:50:39 Yasmin: And then if you really need it, we can do the more one on one work with doing the muscle testing and the detox clearings and any supplements that somebody might need in order just to get over that last hump of healing. So, yeah, I've got those three levels and I'm currently working with a few people, but I'm not opening myself up to other clients at the moment because I just want to get the program all sorted and ready to launch so people can join the waitlist if it's something they're interested in. And I combine all the approaches that I learned on my own healing journey and all the different methods to create something that's super potent and powerful for people.

00:51:19 Chazmith: That's awesome. Good job. Congratulations. And we'll definitely have links in the show notes for people who want to connect with you and learn more about that. So I'm going to ask you my final question that I ask everyone. Okay. If you could only share one message for the rest of your life, what would you spend your life sharing?

00:51:35 Yasmin: One message. Wow, that's a difficult one, right? Because there's loads that you can say when you've been on such a deep healing journey, but the one message I think would be is just to trust yourself to know that healing is possible for you, that just never to give up. Like, if it feels like it's not happening, just keep going and keep going and keep going. Because healing is reserved for the people who never give up, for the people who keep showing up for themselves day in, day out.

00:52:07 Yasmin: And the healing happens in the little consistent actions you take every single day, as opposed to anything big and grandiose that is a one-off. It really happens in the small day-to-day ways that you show up for yourself and look after yourself.

00:52:21 Chazmith: Thank you so much. And thank you for being here and sharing your story and your wisdom and everything you've kind of gained through this experience. And, yeah, I look forward to seeing how everything unfolds as you launch your program.

00:52:34 Yasmin: Thank you so much. It's been an absolute honor to be interviewed by you on your podcast, and I look forward to hearing the episode when it comes out.

00:52:42 Chazmith: Yay!

00:52:43 Yasmin: Yay!

00:52:45 Chazmith: Friends, thank you so much for being here with us today. Every episode, my hope is that in some way you are inspired in your journey or you learn some insightful new way to support you in your healing. Make sure to give Yasmin a follow for so much free content and valuable support through her Instagram Channel.

00:53:06 Chazmith: Tune into the podcast channel on Sunday for the next weekly challenge and join me for some fun. Please share this episode with a friend or on your social media platform and tag me. Help me spread the message that healing is for everyone. And until next time, make this week great.