What if we expected nature and what is supposed to happen instead of resisting life like we've been taught and programmed to do? This is the Tales of Recovery. I'm Grisalvis, your host, and thank you for joining me today.
This is what is coming through at this moment is realizing how life flows through us and the energy that that we spend or that i spend resisting it resisting sometimes the suffering sometimes the pain sometimes the you know inevitable inevitability of death of gray hair of wrinkles, breakups, and kids that don't like you, you know, your own children, or problems with the spouse, just things that are going to happen in life.
I was recently in India, and I went to Varanasi because I wanted to see where the crematories are and the way that the Indian people deal with death. It's a very, very normal process for them. People, literally, we were walking down the street with, you know, men chanting, carrying their body, walking it into the crematorium. There's three meters worth of firewood and they lay the bodies on top and they start to cremate them. They start to burn them.
You don't see the body burning. It's not like you see, you know, the ears falling off or the body melting because it has all these beautiful covering and beautiful colors of cloth and material and they put wood on top of it too. It's very beautiful, actually. And you see the way that the Indian culture accepts the fact that people are leaving their body and moving elsewhere. Everybody goes to Varanasi. Varanasi has a story. It's a town, a place near the Ganges River in India.
And their belief system is that if you die near the Ganges or if you get burned there or if you have to die somewhere far away, but they bring your ashes to there. So the Ganges has this power to allow you to get to nirvana or wherever is your next lifetime.
And that might be their belief system, you know, I don't know if you go wherever you go afterwards, but they allow this natural pattern of understanding that when a flower falls off the plant, it's going to die and it's in his life, it's over. And you let it in the soil and the soil takes it away into the elements and eventually something else will come through, you know, another tree, another plant, another flower.
And the nature of death is something that we completely resist because it wasn't taught to us. So what were we taught in this culture, this Western culture, is that everything needs to be easy, or at least we think it needs to be easy. And if it's not easy, we're doing something terribly wrong. The death isn't coming, that you can prolong your life as long as you can, as long as you have, quote unquote, safety. And they sell safety to us like there's no tomorrow.
And it's not a new thing. I remember being young, hopping around in the car of my mom's car back in the from the backseat to the front seat. You know, they didn't have seatbelts when I was growing up. All of a sudden they had seatbelts. I think the trend started, at least, you know, make it legal. It started around, you know, when I was in high school. I remember getting a ticket for speeding and having to go to traffic school.
And they showed us these horrible videos of what happened to somebody who was in a car crash without a seatbelt and then whether you had a seatbelt so I started wearing it and anyway it took years but now I don't even think about getting in the car not putting on my seatbelt and not just because I might get a ticket but because it's quote quote safe and when I was in India what I saw and you know the traffic and the people driving there's a lot of motorcycles there I literally saw a family, mom,
dad, the little baby in the middle, a kid in the back and another in the front of the motorcycle, five people in the motorcycle. Mom is riding sideways and eating a corn as she's holding the babies. And this is one family out of hundreds. Nobody, maybe one or two people were wearing a helmet, but there was tons of people just going in the traffic, you know, beep, beep, beep, making noise, telling them who's coming. I saw no car accidents, no motorcycle cycle accidents.
I was there for a month. I didn't see one accident. And I thought these people in the United States would be going to CPS and they would be getting arrested and going to jail. Because we're. All into this safety culture. And maybe I'm comparing extremes, but I'm trying to make a point here of what we think we need and what we think is safe and what we think we need to consume in order to avoid the reality that we might get sick.
Like I did in India, I got a bad stomach ache, you know, and I kind of had anticipated that it would happen. But one of the things I I realized is how much I'm like, oh, the L-glutamine and you have to have the leaky gut syndrome go away and eat only bone broth and no gluten. And if I eat these meals, I avoid inflammation. And yes, I want to eat things that are good for me, but it also gets to be a little bit on the exaggerated side of it.
And when I went to India, I said, I'm not bringing the protein. I'm not bringing anything.
I'm just going to wing it. I mean, I had some charcoal and some sodium bicarbonate soda baking soda i think it's called in english you know to alleviate symptoms in case i got an upset stomach of course everybody in the group one by one maybe not everybody but a lot of us got you know you're just clearing energetic patterns you're different time zones way different temperature lots of different spices and after a couple
days it was gone but i was pretty tired for like the first week when i got once i got sick and it was an impediment for me to enjoy. I still enjoy it, but I realized how tied I am to the idea that I have to always be well or else. I have to always have a purpose. Sensation or else. It's just, I did something wrong and I'm judging myself for it. And I didn't do the right thing and I didn't take the right probiotics. And then they start blaming it outwards.
Like there's no meat in India and I'm used to eating meat. Or there's no eggs in this restaurant because it's Rishikesh and it's vegetarian because it's right by the Ganges River. They don't even have, I mean, just whatever external source of complaining, complaining instead of honestly just, I mean, it took me a little bit and then I realized sometimes. Sometimes this is just the way life is and it's not comfortable and it sucks.
But what sucks more is fighting it and resisting it and being all upset about it. You know, I texted my friend when I, actually she sent me a message, one of my friends from Mexico City, when I was over there and she was like, how's your trip in India going? And I was like, day three, day four. And I was like, dude, it's so fucking hot in my stomach, you know? And oh my God. And she was like, dude, you're just getting a cleansing.
It's Korea. It happens at the ashrams all the time. You just have to, you know, throw yourself into India, surrender to it and just allow it and the colors and the beauty. And then I was like feeling like shit going, fuck you. What the hell are you talking about? This is a virus. What do you mean energetic cleansing? Blah, blah, And then, you know, after a while I sat with it because I did sit and meditate every day in front of the gangas because I was right in there.
You know, we had a room that was facing the gangas and I thought, you know, what if she's right? What if I'm just resisting all this shit and trying to control? And I knew I didn't want to control things, which is why I didn't bring the protein powder and the beef jerky and this and that. I was just like, I'm just going to do whatever is over there.
And I mean if I go back I would definitely bring some bone broth powder or something that I would be able to you know hook it up for my stomach when I wasn't able to get anything else over there but, the the point is I don't I I realized how much we try to control and resist the reality, You know, I have been, for the past month, leaving, you know, I'm not going to dye my hair anymore. I have these gray hairs that I'm leaving because I'm 54 and the gray hairs are coming in.
Like, why am I going to be dyeing my hair for? I mean, for who? So that I can pretend and look like I'm 20? And this is the point of this whole podcast here is that we have a training, we have a programming of resisting what's happening. And you may want to dye your hair. You may want to bring bone broth to India. It's fine. That's not what I'm talking about. The thing is, like.
Is getting in the way of us enjoying what is here instead of judging it and complaining about it and trying to control it and trying to think that I did something wrong. Like I didn't do anything wrong. I went to India in my body, you know, I got sick and this is what happened. And one of the things that pre-programmed it is that, you know, growing up in Mexico, you get antibiotics for everything. You get a little cold, oh, antibiotics.
You get a cough, oh, antibiotics. So by the time I was in my 20s, I had so many years of antibiotics because I had these allergies that would turn into sinus infections because I didn't know. It was, you know, digestive issues because of stress and because of, you know, the situation at my house and life. And you can blame it on the food, but honestly, I eat that same food now. So I think it was more of my emotional space inside of my body that was causing these allergies.
So, so many years of antibiotics. One time the doctor tells me, you know, you're going to need this, these little levadura, what are these called? Like these little yeast bottles to drink so they can cover the, your stomach because your stomach is going to be fucked forever because of so much antibiotics, which is not true. My stomach is fine now, but they've plant these seeds, these people of quote unquote authority, right? The medical people.
And so there's that little message in the back. My stomach is fucked forever. I'll always have a stomachache, you know, and years of therapy and going to, you know, finally an allergy doctor and then hitting up the Eastern medicine and the acupuncture lady who told me, no, you just have to take these digestive enzymes and meditate because, you know, the liver and the anger and all my stomach issues went away. My digestive issues have been fine for years.
However, there's this idea in my mind and it comes up when there's something intense tense coming up like a big trip across the world to India and that I start getting stressed out about it or judging myself about something that I ate you know at a party and I shouldn't have eaten that oh my gosh and because of so much control and so much of this programming of what should be and what shouldn't be allowed and so today I'm allowing if I don't have you know little madonna square abs
that i'm 54 and that you know as long as i feel strong i don't need to have the cut cut cut abs to do for what so i can show it off to you and you can think that i'm super cool i mean i want to be strong and able to move and travel and you know and recover like i did in india i recovered i was there a month and i recovered without having to go to the doctor without having to go anything i mean some of the friends that i met there had these pretty cool Mexican drugs that help me.
You know, with the stomach, in three days, I was back to normal. And of course, I did bring ibuprofen, because when you have a fever and everything hurts, fuck it, man, sometimes you just gotta take them. I've been very, very strict about, I never take this. You know, do the essential oils, sit in the sauna, go on the cold plunge, drink more water, which is great.
All of those things, I love them. Grounding. But when you're going to travel, or sometimes when you're not traveling, it doesn't even matter if you're traveling or not. The idea is this resistance to what, quote unquote, needs to, should be, should be, should be. You know, these shoulds of how things need to be.
And it's all beliefs. leaves. And my stomach, you know, today I was talking to Manjeet, who's one of my mentors for the Compassionate Inquiry training that I've been doing now for a few years with Gabor Matis and Saddaram's school on somatic body-based therapy, right? And understanding how to heal through what you're feeling in the body and those memories that you're avoiding to feel, you know, to be able to connect to them in a sense of, in a space of safety.
And I was complaining to her, like, like, yeah, my stomach. And she asked me a couple of questions. She asked me, well, first of all, we got to the point where I had believed the authorities of the medical system that my stomach would always be fucked. And then I realized, but it actually isn't. I've been to naturopaths and therapy and eating the herbs and my stomach is fine. Unless I eat, of course, a whole bag of Cheetos.
Nobody's stomach is going to be fine after that, unless you completely are bypassing all the poison you're eating. But in general, you know, I believe this story. And she's like, how, you know, one of the questions you ask yourself is when was this in compassionate inquiry is how old were you when this belief system stepped in? And, you know, of course, you're little because your parents told you you couldn't do this or you couldn't do that.
And, and feeling helpless because you have no choice when you're four or five years old and they take you to the doctor to stick up, piece of wood down your throat to check your tonsils and, you know, or, you know, we're even worse, man. Touch your hair in there when you're a little kid and your parents are just stupid and they're thinking, it's fine, it's the doctor. And so ever since we're little, we get this power to trust our intuition, to say no, to say, I don't like this, taken away.
And then the culture feeds into it. And like, you have to look this way. You have to be skinny. You You have to not have gray hair. You have to not have any wrinkles. You have to never, you know, be stressed out or, you know, or be poor or be this or be that. Like there's so many things that culture tells you what is okay, how you can be and how you shouldn't be. And it adds up. And it robs us of our liberation. But most of all, it robs us of our trusting our intuition.
Intuition because what to get back to what Manjeet had said to me she said what if your stomach instead of like you know oh it was like oh my god I was sick and my stomach was messing me up and what if through this through this you know five six day ordeal in India with a upset stomach and tired and whatever what if it gave you what if what if that's how you discovered, that it's all a belief because the way the session started is I told her you
know I think I have this belief, and everything is a belief. I think I have this belief that I can't eat gluten or eat this or eat that, or that I'm going to get sick in India because my stomach is weak. And that I'm this weak little thing because the doctor said I was weak, when in reality, I'm strong. I'm strong as fuck. My blood work is fine. I go to Ashtanga. I go to the gym. I have energy. I do what I want. I'm living a life that is full and empowered.
And we're having these ceremonies. We're hosting an amazing retreat here in October, women's retreat. If you want to join, let me know. There's some space available. So I have like all of these really cool things, but deep down the program in them, it's like this little belief that says, you're weak, you're weak, and your stomach's going to get upset. And when I caught that and I told Manji, she's like, well, what if your stomach is what helped you discover this?
So instead of me beating myself up about, oh, man, I got sick, it was like, wow, thank you, stomach. Because now I understand that it was this belief that I'm weak, which gets in the way of me just accepting, yeah, man, sometimes you go to India and you get sick for a few days and then you're fine. Or, yeah, you know, when you eat a shit ton of gluten, well, your stomach's not going to be good, but whatever, you know, you get over it. Then the next day you eat something different. friend.
Or yeah, man, you're going to get some gray hair and you're not going to look like when you were 20, but that's expected. That's okay. I don't have to have this belief that we get to set out, you know, get set out there to pasture or to some old foggy home just because, you know, you don't look like when you did when you were 20 years old, you know, or that you lose all your strength. Because one of the other things that was a belief is when I was injured doing CrossFit.
I used to really work out punk rock hard around 44, 43, 44, 45, all the way to 47 when I got injured. And the physical therapist said to me, you can't ever do squats. You can't ever do CrossFit. Your spinal cord, blah, blah, blah, which is when I got even more 100% into yoga, feeling much, much stronger, much, much better. I mean, I went in kicking and screaming first because I really wanted to keep doing the CrossFit until I realized how violent that was really for my body.
But after so many years, I've started lifting weights again. But I always thought, well, I can't ever do a squat because, well, the physical therapy guy said. And today, I went to the gym with my son and I actually did some squats. And I was like, okay, I'm not as strong as I used to, but of course I can fucking do squats. I'm not going to exaggerate and put 100 pounds on each side.
But I believe what this dude told me, just because he's wearing a little white coat and he is, you know, the physical therapist. And I think that we have the capacity to self-heal and to reorganize those belief systems that are inside the brain. It's not even just quantum science and physics. It's actually, you know, it's a reality that we don't believe because of these other beliefs that have been programmed about how incapacitated we need to be.
Who benefits from these incapacities? The government, the systems of oppression. People that are in charge and that want more money. You know, in the 1900s, the whole Rockefeller family and this other family, I forget their name, they wanted to use this, you know, keep using some of the... Had a lot of oil. So they wanted to use the, and I'll get Manjeet on here to talk in the next couple episodes. Hopefully she can make it to give more details about this.
But it was more like these people wanted to use their oil products in some of the medicine stuff. So they created Vaseline and these other gross things that we're not supposed to be putting on our bodies. And they banned so many hospitals and universities that were teaching how to use herbs to heal and Eastern medicine, acupuncture and stuff, because they didn't want, you know, they wanted the monopoly on their own toxic products so that they could make money.
And a lot of people didn't follow. There's a lot of Woken people. There's a lot of naturopaths and different healing arts. But the reality is that the majority is Western medicine. And we all believe that that's, you know, that's how it is. And if they tell you to get this vaccine, oh, okay, I'll do it. And if they they tell you to get this surgery, oh, okay, I'll do it. And if they tell you to take these pills, well, it must be real.
And if they tell you you're going to die in three months, you were like, okay, I'm going to die in three months. Where there's this other book, I think it's called Well Again After Cancer or something, where this radiologist realized how the people that were coming to get radiology with cancer were telling him, yeah, the doctor said I had two months, so they would die in two months. The doctor said I had six months left, they would die at six six months.
The doctor said I had three months left. They would die at three months of getting radiology. However, some of them said, I can't die because even the doctor said I had six months. I have little kids and I have this, my parents are going to be so sad if I die. And I have this project that I need to finish. And so they wouldn't die. And so he started to get curious about it, this radiologist, instead of saying, well, what else are you doing?
Or blah, blah, He was like, no, I think there's something to people believing what's going to happen to them or what they need to do, you know, in order to. To a point where they would need to get to. And so he wrote this whole book and this is a long time ago. I mean, there's a lot of other books about it now. You know, there's the biology of belief. There's tons of human consciousness development and quantum science stuff about how you can heal yourself.
And we're so blocked, right? We're so blocked and programmed to thinking, well, yeah, maybe that's once in a million, maybe this and that, but it's, you know, what if what if what if it's true what if we can have more power inside of our bodies to trust our intuition to trust our guts to trust that we can listen to what we want and to what we think is right or wrong and that we can not feel this oppressive weight of oh well but what if the doctors are right
or what if the government says and is right or what i mean i'm not saying we're going to go be assholes and, you know, and break all the rules and all the laws. What I'm saying is our bodies are our bodies. And there's things that are going to happen to our bodies, like gray hairs and, you know, saggy cheeks. And sometimes, you know, your heart might slow down when you get older. And death is coming, you know. But what if we're okay with knowing that death is coming?
So then we have so much aliveness and color and brightness and devotion ocean every day like they do in India. There's a reason why they're praying all fucking day, because they know how precious life is and the gratitude for this one and that deity and this one. And, you know, we're going to do an offering for this guy and that guy. And it's all praise and worship all day long. Why? Because they're connected to the reality of death. And so they river life.
River? Revere? I don't know if I said that right. I certainly took out the poetry out of it. It's, it's the thing. It's like, I'm aware of my limitations and my, you know, and my, and also how I can keep moving. I'm aware of so many lies that I believe that I, I'm trying to set aside and not believe them anymore. And I'm aware of how somatic this is, because it's one thing to think, oh, I don't care.
I'm just going to leave gray hair because that's how it is. And then it's another thing to look in the mirror and feeling your gut. Oh, oh shit, girl, maybe you should go get that little cover it up gray hair shampoo because and you know, that's like a feeling in the throat and the shoulders and the stomach. And I have to put my hand on my chest and my belly and just say, it's okay. You know, you're strong, you're gorgeous. Your spirit is brilliant.
Little gray hair. I don't give a fuck. You know, I don't. And I also have no rules about my life. If I decide I decide to dye my hair purple or black in a month or in a year, I will do it. I don't, there's a whole thing is about not having these exclusivities or these controlling ideas, which is what the whole point of this is, is, you know, these limitations that we put on ourselves.
And so part of this waking up, part of this awareness is, is beginning to trust every time, trust a little more because it's a process that doesn't happen from one day to the next. We begin to trust that I can say no, I can leave my gray hair, I'm going to allow the fact that I love life and I'm going to just be so grateful and have so much worship in my heart and days because life is amazing and I'm going to die. And I understand that death isn't this horrible thing, it's a natural thing.
But it's one thing to say it and then another to feel it. And from the saying it to feeling it, that's the work. That's the work of somatics, of practice, of sitting with the mushrooms in ceremony, of sitting in circle with other women or men that are in the same journey that you can connect to and talk to and feel like, okay, okay, this guy's a little bit further ahead of me and this guy over here, this chick over here, I can help her.
And understanding our humanity and how we're all evolving and learning to let go of these limitations of these... Shoulds and these authorities that suck. We all know the authorities have always sucked. If you look back, the king and queen or the religious leaders that oppressed the poor, and over there they're eating their fancy meals, and over here the people are starving. And it's just, what?
And thousands of years later, these authorities are, these political figures telling you what's what's legal, what's not, what you can eat, what you cannot eat. How can they make mushrooms and marijuana illegal? But alcohol is legal because alcohol fucking dumbs you down and gets you sick. They control you better when you're sick, not when you're awake and thinking your own, or entrusting in your own body, making your own decisions.
And these hierarchies of the medical community, they work for us. They work for you, these doctors. So coming in and just taking their word for it, how about you get a second opinion, you ask them, you know, how did they come up to this conclusion, and just to know that you have choices and options, and you can, you know.
Take the study of the herbs, and see how these herbs help your body, probably just as, much as Advil, I mean, unless it's an emergency, like when I was in India, I take chamomile tea every day, I've had it for all my life, my dad was drinking the chamomile tea since he was born, and, you know, he went to 88 and he loved it. That tea's amazing. And hamaika and ashawanda and all these other herbs. And without rules again, because, you know, in India, it was so hot and the
electrolytes just weren't cutting it for me. I just had to drink a Coke. And I was like, oh my God, Coca-Cola. I don't drink soda. Fuck that shit. Give me that Coca-Cola. It had real sugar. And the Cokes in India actually have a six month expiration date, which is interesting. It saved me. It gave me, you know, the sugar that I needed. It helped my stomach. I kept on going. I mean, I wasn't going to just, oh no, I have to go home and find the tea and not be traveling.
So there's just to be flexible and allowing and to not be caught up in the rules and regulations is just, you know, it's the most beautiful thing, I think. I have discovered through my body today. Through the body is how we find the truth. I have an embodiment, amazing, beautiful retreat coming up for a woman, October 4th, 5th, 6th. Send me a message if you want to join.
It's going to be live music, me and my band singing for all of you guys, holding you in a sacred, safe, secure space for you to process what you need to process, celebrate life, celebrate pleasure, process your grief. We will go into the ancestral sweat lodge to heal and connect to intergenerational healing of trauma in a softness, in a most compassionate way. We will sing together. We will dance together. We will meditate.
We'll do restorative yoga, have beautiful farm-to-table meals created by my friend Sergio, who's going to teach us how to ferment, how to make fermented foods for digestion, which is better than taking Tums or Pepto. It's just a natural way of healing yourself and connecting to your body and to the sisterhood, to another group of women that are coming into a space of just letting it go and being free of all the bullshit and rules that have us oppressed and sick.
So if you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, if you want liberation, if you want to join me, I invite you to come to the Sacred Self Love Retreat in October here coming up. This is Grisalva as you're listening to Tales of Recovery. Thank you so much for being alive and present and for your energy. We could do this. We can do this. Life is amazing.
Life is great. and even when it sucks then we can just remember that this is normal and expected just like that and as we know that then we can even now cherish and enjoy every other little moment and just savor life right here right now in this present moment awareness aho ashe thank you for listening be well.