Latest / Healthy Happy Wise Wealthy / Dr. Colette Sinclair on Trauma, Healing, and the Science of Emotion
Transcript
- Dr Collette Sinclair [Mary Meyer] Welcome back to Healthy, Happy, Wise, Wealthy. We have with us today Dr. Colette Sinclair, and I'm so excited to have you on, Dr. Sinclair. I want to introduce our podcast sponsor, Mindiii, M-I-N-D-I-I-I. They are an IT company that helps keep data safe on the back end of the website and for businesses, can build hardware, apps, all kinds of things like that. So, Dr. Sinclair, let's go a little bit into your background. Beautiful backdrop. You're in Encinitas, California, so, not too, well, it is a little bit far from Reno, but it feels close. And you have a PhD in clinical psychology, integral health, is kind of all one. And you have come up with, it's right there, just the emotional posture methodology. So, so curious about that. Can you tell us just a little bit about how you got from the clinical psychology and how the work just transitioned into all the work you're doing with, with kind of, it seems like, focusing on emotion. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Absolutely. So, I am currently in Dana Point, but my brick and mortar is in Encinitas. [Mary Meyer] Okay. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] And just trying to create as pleasant an atmosphere as I can. I think our environment so much sets our emotional tone. And one thing that I would say is, nature is so nurturing. So, any time, you know, before I lived in this beautiful house, the best I could do was go and put my feet on the grass or touch leaves on a tree or even just hold a tree trunk. So, those are the practices that I used to implement to support my own energetic health. The way I came to develop emotional posture is number one, I was a very high achieving young lady. I was trying to overcome some challenging circumstances. I grew up with a lot of adversity. So, on the ACE scale, any clinician will understand this, but I had a very high ACE score, which means that I have had a lot of adverse childhood experiences by the time I made it into adulthood. So, you know, I worked very hard because I was very much of the mindset. If I'm a hard worker, I can overcome these circumstances, and I certainly did. And I found myself in a beautiful position in my mid-20s where I was, you know, a clinical, a regional psychologist and working in the field of psychology and working with at-risk youth, you know, and developing programs for at-risk youth. And I was working with all these little traumatized people, you know, and some of them were incarcerated and some of them were, they were experiencing circumstances that it's like, they were a victim of circumstances, you know, and their behavior was a result of, you know, the experiences that they were having and how they were reacting to those experiences. And so what was cultivated in me was a lot of deep empathy and care and compassion. And what I noticed is what these youth would respond to. And, you know, this is very consistent with Gabor Mate's work in terms of trauma and how it affects the brain and the nervous system and the full, you know, how our body is functioning is that these youth, what they would respond to is connection and love and non-judgment. So regardless of me and my appearance and how I came in, you know, very professional, very buttoned up, highly educated, nobody knew where I was from, you know, but I would come in and I would work sometimes into institutions, you know, like detention centers, and I would work with these very traumatized young men and young women that had horrendous backgrounds. And I was approaching them with love and deep care and compassion. And these kids would respond to me, and they wouldn't respond to other people that had been working in the environment for a couple of decades or whatever. So, and I would see these kids transform, and I'm just going to say within the field that I was creating, this field of love, it was a frequency of love, it was a frequency of acceptance, it was a frequency of compassion. Now, at that time, I did not know that that's what I was doing, okay? But this is how I got my start. Now, fast forward, you know, I was working within these very dysfunctional systems that were very invested in keeping people broken and sick. And so, at some point, I decided that in order to work in a way that was most aligned for me, I needed to go into private practice. And along that way, I had other trainings, you know, I started out as a master level psychologist, and then I got a diplomat in orthomolecular medicine. And it was at that point that I really understood how we could support the system differently, how we could actually get the nervous system to behave differently in response to, for example, like organic matter, like with mega doses of minerals and other things that you could really see a person show up completely differently. So I was like, I was getting kind of sold along the way in terms of the level that people can change, you know? And so when I went into private practice, I started seeing people that were pretty extreme cases in terms of their trauma or their extreme cognitive dysfunction. And this was because, you know, I was trying to build a private practice. So I was taking the cases that within the group, nobody wanted these cases. They were like, I can't help them. Let's see if you could do anything with them, right? Yeah, you seem to be a miracle worker, you know? So I would take getting one because I was like, well, if they're a person and they're hurting, I want to help them get better, you know? And so I would do my best to see people get better. But essentially, I started seeing these amazing transformations in people that had been given these stable diagnoses, and they were no longer presenting those symptoms or that collection of symptoms. So that's what I was noticing over the years. Fast forward, I, you know, very much leaned into cognitive behavioral therapy. So it was all about retraining the mind, developing new neural pathways. You know, I was always doing the progressive work. That's very much who I am as a professional. But at some point, I realized that really emotions were the key. Because if you could get somebody to change their emotional state, you could actually change the chemical state in their body. And this was the fastest transition that I was going to witness. And it was the fastest transition that they were going to witness in their own life. And so when I started doing that work, I did not have all of the vocabulary to put with it. And then at that point, I had said, you know, I wanted to quantify everything, you know, because that's what psychologists do. We want to measure everything. We want to quantify it. We want to test it. And we want to create frameworks for it. And so I was kind of building this out in my mind. And I needed a way to validate and what I was seeing on a regular basis in my work. And that's when I created a clinical trial for the emotional posture method. And I saw that over very few exposures, people were actually able to change their dominant state. And that's when I decided, I have to tell everyone about this. I have to write about this. I need to publish this. I need to speak about this. Because, you know, as humans, we are told that we are limited, right? Like we're limited in terms of how much progress we can make, how much we can change, and how much we can even transform our life. That these limitations are imposed on us from the time that we're very small. We are conditioned into this limited thinking. And it's just not the case. It's just not true. So I am just one little voice in the world that's trying to share the message that we are not limited. We are expansive. We actually have the tools and the technology through our central nervous system to change just about anything in our life. And so what we need to do is we need to be able to understand how to harness that power, how to harness that technology, and how to upgrade the program that is running our life. And the program that's running our life is our dominant emotional state. So emotional posture is our energetic position in the world. And the energetic position in the world is determined by the emotion we're experiencing most frequently. [Mary Meyer] Yeah. So the book... This is so great. The book says, gratitude, acceptance, ease, forgiveness, compassion, and love. Those are the emotions that you state. So I am very much so ecstatic that you're actually talking about people coming out of traumatic situations. So I was talking to you a little bit about this before because every time I've... I feel like I've dove into this stuff in various levels in various parts of the last 20 some years of my life or more. But every... There is still this... I feel like this disconnect between traumatized people here and people that are just rocking it out with their positive emotions over here. And there doesn't seem to be that. And I just feel like I've been both. And so as someone who knows and also having adopted teenagers from another country that were severely traumatized. So as a mother trying to heal from children who are traumatized to me who lived through the divorce process, I was in a state of terror. I feel like it was beyond fear but terror for a long time. And just trying to do... I feel like I just tried everything to break it. Like anything I could think of I did. But it was still there. So the one thing, and I read in your book, so I'll ask you about this one, was that you talk about emotions being part of our bio field. So I think the thing that really started shifting for me is a bio field tuning. I might even have a tuning fork here on my desk. I don't. But I started doing that and that created some shifts for me to be able to do that. So dumping into even a deeper well, what is a connection between what is the bio field and emotions? And how does that connect? [Dr. Colette Sinclair] May I touch on a few aspects of what you said? [Mary Meyer] Yes, please. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Okay. So first of all, I think that anytime we experience shock, our system, our system starts behaving differently. And depending on the level of shock, so for example, if we perceive that our life is under threat, then that level of that shock is such that it is extremely hard to regulate our systems again. And then there's the other piece, which is most people don't want to talk about trauma because of the stigma attached to the trauma, right? People don't want other humans who can provide the connection and help. We don't want other humans to know that we've been mistreated because we're afraid of rejection, right? We're afraid that we won't belong, that we won't be good enough, all of those common themes. So there's so many emotions, right? So we have a belief and it creates an emotion, right? And that emotion, let's say it's fear, right? I'm going to be rejected. I'm not going to belong. They're going to think I'm not good enough. That emotion feeds into our biofield. Now the biofield, it's an energetic field. So it's something, well, some people are trained to see this field, but this is an energetic field that extends beyond our body three to nine feet. To some people, it's 15 feet out depending on how expansive they are. And what's creating that field is all the things that we can't see. It's our actual thoughts. It's our emotions. It's the electrochemical state that's being created in our body. So for example, if you have high, you have a lot of positive emotions, you have a high electrical charge on your cells. So your field is more open and more expansive. And you are absolutely right that there are lots of things you can do to positively impact that field, which is why sound healing is so big right now. And it's, I mean, from what I recall, I want to say, 2012, sound healing is when I was aware that sound healing started to come on the scene. I'm sure it's been around much, much longer, but this is when it started to get trendy, at least in Southern California, where you started seeing the introduction of sound baths. And it's like people are like, what are you doing? It's how our body responds to the vibration that's being created. So it can be created through the tuning forks, through the crystal bowls, through the gongs, through the chimes. But we are vibratory beatings, right? And if we were vibrating, like right now, we have a dense vibration because we are in a physical body. But if we were vibrating very high, even higher, we would not appear in these dense forms. So the more our vibratory rate changes, the way that our cells behave changes. The information that can come into our biofield changes. So if we can impact ourselves through this vibration, right? Then we can actually allow new information to enter in and we can feed into our biofield and then also the collective field, let's just say, we can feed different information into that field. So a lot of times when people are traumatized, they don't have access. To information. And I don't mean basic information that we Google. I mean the information that's available in the collective field, right? In the formless substance that's all around us that we all have access to at any time. So what I talk about a lot is, hey, how do we access that? And what I say is it's through the technology of our nervous system. It's through the technology, the medium of our emotional state. So I say all the time that our emotional state, it determines our spiritual access. And what I mean by that is what is available to us, right? What information is available to us? What is changing in our perceptual field? If we're experiencing high level emotions, you're going to see things that you didn't see before. When we're in a dense vibration, the information is limited because we're constricted, right? Our nervous system is constricted. Our brain function is constricted, you know, and we're just slugging around these bodies. We're just dragging our bodies around. It's miserable, you know? But you touched on something else and please tell me if I need to come back to the biofield because I definitely will. But you said something else that was very important to me and it's another kind of piece of work that I talk about often. And it has to do with emotional tone. So there's your individual emotional tone, which is like the tone of the nervous system and how fluidly you can move in and out of an emotional state. But more importantly, okay, for any leader, for any, especially like a mother, okay, because a mother, you're leading your home, you're leading your children, you're leading your family. The emotional tone that you set in that environment, it determines those interaction patterns. And it determines you're actually, you're not just feeding them with supper every night. You're feeding them energetically. You're giving them information without speaking. And it's so critical because when we hear this phrasing of like holding space, a lot of times we don't think about what does that mean? Okay, I can sit with this person's emotion. Okay, there's that. And there's, what is the energetic environment that I am creating? And how is that conducive to the growth, the healing, the learning of either my children, my family, my employees, whomever it is that you interact with or that you're responsible for? [Mary Meyer] Yeah, there's so much in this. In some ways, I just feel like this is everything. But you know, I've thought things like compassion, gratefulness, love, these are things that have like, they've always been part of like maybe a, there's always been an understanding that this is good, that these are the emotions we should go for. And you know, like if you have the spiritual or religious upbringing, there's going to be that like, are you grateful? Are you in a state of love? Are you, you know, that kind of thing. But it's, I think it's more recent where we've taken it and gone. There's a science to this also. Like we can see there, there's a change in your physicality. I know in your website, in your book, those are connected to heart rate variability. So you can see a difference in your physical health with your emotional state, which is I think, you know, kind of what you're, you're saying. Yes. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Definitely. And I will also add that, you know, I was raised, I had a religious upbringing, and gratitude was never a topic in my home. And love and treating others with love and those were not topics. In fact, what I saw was a lot of hypocrisy. And I recognize that at a young age, and I have nothing. I think that anything that we can do to bring more love, more compassion, more acceptance, more gratitude into the world is, I think that is the right position, is to create that harmony within ourselves and within the world. But I do believe that it's a, we often make the mistake of assuming that if people were raised, you know, with religious belief systems, that their behavior or their understanding of these qualities that are so helpful to all of humanity, that they're going to be accurate. When oftentimes, what I saw more than anything was judgment and condemnation. And, you know, so that's just my little, I have to, I just need to deliver over there. Okay, so emotion. [Mary Meyer] Can I riff on that too? [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Yes, yes. [Mary Meyer] Well, and I am a Christian, and I have seen people acting kind, loving, caring, and being all the things that you hope and want. Someone who says this is how you get to God or creator is. I also know exactly what you're speaking of, and it is, I just feels like it, I could start swearing on it. I don't want to swear on here, but like, I know it. I know exactly what you're saying. And I think of all the ways people can be harmed, saying I'm harming you because it's the way God wants it to be, is like the purest form of harm in many ways. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] It's very confusing for children. Yes, when the parent is quoting the Bible and then creating violence. Yes, it's creating violence. [Mary Meyer] Yes, I just, I know what you're saying, and I know what you're talking about, and I have people in my family who kind of do both, who are fabulous, and who are not great. So thanks for that. I mean, we might as well just say it. There's no reason why we can't just say it. Yeah, because it's very real. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Yeah, I think that kind of open, honest, those open, honest conversations are so necessary because we all know it. And if we don't have these conversations, then we're just adding to this collective denial. You know, but I wish the whole world would be more Christ-like, you know, in the sense that, as far as I know, Christ was the perfect living example of unconditional love and compassion and forgiveness. And forgiveness is such a key piece. You know, forgiveness, I often say it's the linchpin because you can create these initial foundational states that are much easier to grab onto. Like, and what I've noticed, what I've noticed in terms of like, you know, the trends and let's say the progressive trends in the health and wellness movement is that, you know, some of these states have been unfolding over time. For example, the first thing that came onto the scene was mindfulness. And then we had to make mindfulness palatable. We had to make yoga palatable, right? Because there were so many people that were saying, this is not acceptable. This is contrary to the prevailing religious belief of this country. We don't accept it. It's not acceptable to have yoga in private Christian schools. You know, it's not acceptable to go within, to be mindful of meditation, right? This was another one that we had to make this connection within ourselves, this unification in ourselves that goes on with meditation and the state of gratitude and mindfulness. We had to make it palatable. We had to make it acceptable for society, okay? And so we've been in the process of doing that for, I would say, I would venture to say, a little under 20 years for sure 15, okay? And we're there. We're there because now the words meditation, mindfulness, gratitude, it's very mainstream, right? But I wish that everybody could grow up with gratitude in the home because that truly would be transformative if we were able to go within ourselves and to generate this state of abundance and I'm going to create that selective attention where I'm only paying attention to everything that is wonderful in my life. That alone creates a massive shift. That one skill alone is tremendous. But going back to forgiveness, so those are the base, right? So we have a gratitude, acceptance and ease, right? And I'll just to shoot up the scale here in terms of acceptance. You know, we want to create, we want to control reality as humans. We want to control all of the things that are uncontrollable or uncertain. And I would just kind of defer, if I may, I'll just defer over to Mel Robbins' work with the let them theory. What she did is she made acceptance. She brought that into the collective consciousness. Now, I don't know that that was her original goal when she did it, but that's what she did. And it's beautiful. It's amazing. People are now dropping the rope. People are, oh yeah, let them. I'm just going to let them. You know, like this is now mainstream. It's so mainstream that people are not resisting as much anymore. And we have to do that. We have to stop resisting in order to get into those states of ease. You know, and in ease, we're not forcing things anymore, right? We're allowing. And so when we make the active choice to allow, more things can come into our life. And we free up all that energy to attract what we actually want because we're not fighting anymore. So we've got these foundational postures, right? And once we get there, things are feeling pretty good. Life is feeling pretty good. Like it's very different from that traumatized state, that wounded state, that unhealthy state, that state of loss. When people have a loss, they focus on that a lot. But forgiveness is the game changer. Okay. So forgiveness, I'm going to circle back to our conversation on Christianity and Christ like love. So Jesus Christ was the perfect living example of forgiveness. He was persecuted. Hey, he was persecuted at every turn. And right up until the end, right up until the end before he died, persecution existed. He still said, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. He showed forgiveness until the end. And what that did was it liberated him. It, well, actually it liberated the world. Liberation is what he did. And if we could all just decide that they don't know what they're doing, everybody's walking around in their own reality. And yeah, a lot of people are causing harm. Most of the people, because their frequency is so low, their level of consciousness is so low. They're walking around in destruction. They're destroying relationships. They're destroying people. They're destroying homes. They're destroying business. They're destroying the world. You know, this is what's happening right now. Now, the nice news, the good news is that even a few of us, if we can manage to elevate our frequency, we have an impact on a lot of other people. So this is why it's so important that people start to take individual responsibility and say, you know what? I'm going to focus on my own, if you want to say emotional posture, if you want to, but basically, the energetic position that I'm taking in the world and my own innate power, right? I'm going to take responsibility for what I'm creating regardless of what other people are creating. Then that's how you have influence in your home, on your family, workplace, community, and et cetera, et cetera, expanding out. So we have the ability, you and I, we have the ability to counterbalance the scales for the masses, the majority that are functioning in fear, in anger, in grief, in apathy. That's the majority of the world, pride. People are lucky if they're at the level of pride because when you're at the level of pride, you can focus on, oh, you know, I want to have a nice home, I want to have a nice car, I want to look good, I want to, you know what I mean? You can shift your focus to things that are benign that are not going to hurt others. Whereas if you're living in guilt, you're going to hurt others, right? So what people are doing, how they're impacting us, it's a reflection of their energy, their energetic position, their frequency, their consciousness. It's all the same. You can exchange any word you want to exchange in there. You can fit emotional posture in there if you want. They are a reflection of their limited energetic state. So we have to forgive them. [Mary Meyer] So to riff on that, and I really, first of all, I really do appreciate that there is no shallow end of the pool with you. So, we're all the way from the start, we're in the deep end. I have experienced a lot and I feel like this is really a thing and we're going to go back to Christianity since we're talking about it. And I appreciate your willingness to talk about it because it feels like it's never talked about. What about when they say it's a forgiveness is the cover up and just the smooth over for the thing that happened. So someone did physical violence of some kind, but instead of them coming clean, being called out on it, maybe going to jail for it because it's a crime. Just forgive. We're just forgetting. So it's a smooth over. And if you don't do that, you're excluded from the church, from people, whatever. So the spiritual bypassing and almost using it as a hammer, you must forgive or we're gone. And forgiveness means no accountability for the person who did it. Thoughts on that? [Dr. Colette Sinclair] I'm so glad you asked this question because this is a common, it's a misunderstanding and it's a very common misunderstanding. So I'll start with saying that forgiveness is not for them. It's not for the organization. It's not for the family. The forgiveness is for you. You make the active choice to forgive the person that's created the harm for your own liberation, for your own freedom, for your own health because identifying with the harm, as long as we don't forgive, we have an identity around the way we were treated. We have an identity around the harm that we experienced. And that keeps our frequency, our energetic state, it keeps us locked into that harm and the identity of somebody that experienced that trauma or that abuse or that harm. And so what we want is we want to constantly upgrade. We want to evolve as a human being. We want to learn and grow and evolve. And in order for us to get those energetic upgrades, we have to stop identifying with the hurt and the harm. Now, that does not mean that it didn't happen. It doesn't mean that that person got away with something. I very much believe that, what I know actually, it's not a belief, it's a knowing. People don't get away with anything. And it may look like they do in the short term, but I promise you, I've worked with thousands of people at this point in time. And not to mention my own lived experience, which we could probably take up a season of podcasts with the experiences I've had in my life. However, what I've seen is that people, whatever they create energetically, it calms back on them. Now, we may not see it. We may not actually see it in our lifetime, okay? But sometimes you do. Sometimes you do, especially when you let it go and you see how that person's life unfolds, when you hear about what ends up of them. Sometimes you do see what they have created with their destruction, with their violence. But as long as we hold on to that hurt, we actually keep it locked in place. We are keeping that past trauma alive. And we are also keeping ourself in that victim mode, which I don't mean you're a victim. I mean that if you revisit mentally and emotionally, because every time we have a thought, we experience that chemical reaction as an emotion. We experience in our body that victimization. And that keeps us from expanding into our potential what we're actually supposed to be, which is maybe a help, maybe a healer, maybe a unifier. So it's actually a very conscious choice that we make. And it can be a difficult choice. I have had to forgive things that I consider to be, if I'm going to put my little judgy hat on, I consider some things to be unforgivable. They are horrible, horrible, horrible, shall we say, sins. And I have made the active choice to forgive these things, never ever for them, always for me, because I want to be free and happy. And I know that the more free I am and the more happy I am, the more I have the ability to help others to be free and happy. [Mary Meyer] Sure. So the magic question for me, how do you take someone who is nervous system and is so locked down from what they've experienced, the trauma of it, and their learning is hindered too. And how do you take that, I've been this person, I've been the person being the helper, I've been the person being victimized, I've been the mother helping me adopt the children who have been through the stuff and the birth kids who've been through the stuff. So how do you do it? How do you help someone from where their nervous system is just a knee-jerk reaction, nervous system to stuff? How do you take them to this state? [Dr. Colette Sinclair] So first of all, I would say you have to believe that they can heal. You have to actually believe because a lot of times people, doctors, you know, parents, people that are, you know, they're well-meaning, they believe that you can only get so much better. Okay? But if you go into that interaction or that relationship with a deep belief that that person can fully heal and fully recover, it's totally different because now that person's potential has changed, you know why? Because your energy, your reality has influenced theirs. And if you're at the healing frequency of love, you definitely have the ability to influence other people's reality. So there's number one, do I actually believe that this person is capable of restoration, is capable of full healing? So you got to work your mind around that. And then the second thing is, you know, your level of awareness, right? So it's different if you're speaking about like yourself and the attunement that needs to go on individually versus helping someone else for in the work that I do with people and the work that I do with leadership teams, what I do is, I do an evaluation, right? I'm looking at the energetic health. I'm looking at the symptoms. I'm looking at, I'm getting a lot of baseline data and the coherence piece is one of the pieces of data, but I do other things too. This is very boring. This is the boring clinical aspect of what I do, which is labs. So I'm looking at, what is the condition of their biochemistry? I'm looking at, what are their coherence patterns? I'm looking at, what are their clinical symptoms? What's their brain function like? I look a lot at executive functions. How much access do they have to their brain? So if I was going to approach something clinically, I do the pre-work measurements and then I scaffold. I have this process of scaffolding the person's awareness, their consciousness, and training in these emotional states and helping, I help the person to create these shifts in their chemically in terms of what we're putting into the body and how the chemistry is behaving and how their access to the brain function, that's the orthomolecular medicine piece. And then once the body is feeling better and the nervous system is behaving, you start to train the nervous system. You train it into these coherence states and there's a lot of different tools that I use to do that. And from there, now we start to work on reprogramming the thoughts, reprogramming the beliefs, reprogramming the dominant emotional state. And then at the end, what we do is we do all the post-test measurements. So that's like the clinical process that I follow. Now, the practical process that I follow. If I'm just running into somebody and we're just having a chat and we're not going to interact again and I have 20, 30 minutes that I'm chatting with that person, it's a very different process because there's an energetic exchange like you and I right now. There's an energetic exchange. We are sharing information that is not verbal. So I'm looking at that information. I'm taking it in. I'm synthesizing it and I'm making decisions about what is most helpful in terms of increasing your awareness and your understanding and shall we say, infusing understanding into your biofield. So what I say is I'm very fluid in the process that I have in terms of what people are available for and what is delivered. You have to very much meet people where they are, right? So for example, let's say an 18-year-old traumatized young man came to see me and he doesn't have access to, he's very reactive. His nervous system is in a chronically reactive state. He can't think. I have to work with him on that level, right? So we're not talking about, hey, let's think through a situation. No. We're talking about how can we get your body to where sometimes your body is relaxed and then how can we build on that relaxed state? How can we support brain function? Again, through the orthomolecular medicine piece, we've got to support brain function. We need to tonify the nervous system because your nervous system has been hijacked, chronically stressed in a chronic sympathetic state for, I don't even know, how years and years and years I would imagine. So I would say in general, it's a process of scaffolding. You meet a person where they're at and then you scaffold their health, their consciousness, their energetic position in the world, their energetic posture. You scaffold it up. And the beautiful thing is that there's no end to the energetic growth you can get. So somebody, you know, I've outgrown mentors, right? If somebody outgrows my work, guess what? The universe is going to bring them the next mentor so they can continue growing. And really, what we get to decide is what do we want our level of growth to be in life? What do we want it to be? And I think the first, as I said, the first thing, the first decision to make is, you know, is exactly that. How much do I want to grow? [Mary Meyer] This is so profound. I feel like there's so many levels of this that it's like there's some simplicity, but the simplicity is the is the avenue that gets there. And maybe we miss the simplicity and I don't know. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Yes, it's very, it's very elegant in terms of the approach because the six postures that were selected. First of all, what I saw is that these are the emotional states that create the biggest impact, the biggest change in people's life. But also, if you look at these energetic states, they are all, they are all emotions that every single human can relate to, right? We can all relate to, you know, I don't, I don't, for example, with compassion, right? Do we choose to see human suffering? Do we choose to help? Or do we choose to look away and to be self-absorbed? Right? With, with forgiveness, do we choose to let go or do we keep it alive? Do we keep that hurt alive, which keeps us locked into this? It actually, I will add, it keeps you tied. If this doesn't motivate you, I don't know what will. It keeps you energetically tied to the perpetrator. Like for me, I do not want to be tied to anyone who's hurt me. I want to sever those, sever those ties or if I'm going to use more new age language, cut those cords, right? But what are we talking about when we say cut those cords? We're talking about the energetic ties that are binding us to that person. And it's through the hurt and it's through our choice to not forgive them and to identify with what's been done to us. [Mary Meyer] So, okay, let me ask you this. Ortho, molecular, medicine, right? I had to look it up because I didn't know what that meant. But so it's basically, you take labs and whatever they're locking in, you give them more and it might be supplements, vitamins, minerals. With my kids, we did some kind of test. I mean, we used a QR machine, went to someone who did some stuff like that. And so they did take a lot of B vitamins and then some omegas and that did help. What else have you used those and what else have you found if someone is in trauma are there things that help nourish the body to help? [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Well, omegas and B vitamins will help just about anyone, okay? So that's one thing to know. There is a particular, actually there's a couple of different Bs that do not interact well with certain biochemical types. So I do advise to create, to go to somebody who has an understanding of biochemistry when you are using nutrients to treat a person. And but the omegas are helpful for a variety of reasons, but primarily because of the way that those specific fats support myelination, which is the conduit for not only all of our nerve fibers, right? But also that creates the myelin sheath that creates the neural connectivity in the brain. So the omegas are so good and also the fats have a very, they have a very settling effect on the nervous system. So those are great. Omegas are great. I recommend any omega that has a high DHA, the highest DHA possible, which is the specific omega that is good for the brain. But as I said, it is not always the case that people are deficient in omegas and B’s. What I see, what I would say is to have that biochemical assessment so that it is data-driven, right? I think it's very important to kind of take the woo woo out of treatment and to say, what do the numbers look like? And then how has this treatment impacted those numbers? And people are going to feel it right away. They're going to feel if something's working for them or not. But it's very, I think, satisfying and objective to have those numbers ahead of time and then to see how things are corrected and how they change. So the other piece that I would say about the bees is that when people have been in a chronically stressed state, especially the body, it burns B12. When the body's stressed, it pulls on the B12. And we only get B12 from food. Okay? So it's not something that we make on our own. So when those reserves are depleted, our body continues in this high-stress state, but we don't have anything to draw from. The body now starts looking around because it's so intelligent and it goes, well, I got to keep going. I got to maintain this high-stress state. What do I do to maintain this high-stress state? And sure enough, it starts taxing the adrenal glands, putting out adrenaline, putting out cortisol, and also just maintaining norepinephrine to the degree that it can so that you can maintain that stress state. So the number one piece that is free to get people out of that high-stress state is diaphragmatic breathing. So if you have zero resources and you can't afford an assessment and data and blood and supplements, at least start a routine of diaphragmatic breathing. And what I like to recommend is breathe on the hour. So every 60 minutes, and sometimes the easiest way to do this is to set a timer. So if you set a timer for every hour on the hour, your timer goes off and you go, oh, okay, it's time to do my diaphragmatic breathing. And you could do it for one minute. If you don't have a lot of time in your day, you can stop for one minute and do diaphragmatic breathing. Then you go about your day. You know your timer's going to go off in another hour. Here's the biggest problem. And certainly, please, you know, obviously don't wake yourself up in the middle of the night. You know, you need to solve the sleep. But, you know, during waking hours, train yourself in this way. The biggest problem that I see, Mary, is that most people are not willing to do it consistently. They're not willing to, every time, you know, on the hour, to proactively retrain their nervous system. They're lazy. They don't want to spend one minute out of every 60 minutes. They don't want to spend one minute doing it. But it's free. It's accessible. It's in you. And guess what happens? If you can get this practice of diaphragmatic breathing down, you have more access to your brain. You have more access to your prefrontal cortex. Your system starts to change and your system starts to down regulate. And once your system starts to down regulate, well, guess what? You start to observe different things. You might start to, you might decide, you know what? I don't need to make this specific purchase. I'm going to actually go over here and I'm going to get the labs that I want instead. Like, your brain starts to work in terms of what you prioritize. But when you're in that sympathetic state, you can't prioritize. You can't think. All you see is lack and why you can't do something. So this is an ongoing challenge for people like me that work with clients or let's just say clinicians or practitioners is that we see people in this state where they don't think it's possible for themselves, where they can't imagine accessing services, right? And so they're going to be funneled through the insurance channels and whoever the insurance company says is, you know, available to treat them so they don't have to pay out of pocket. And guess what? Most of the people on those insurance panels are people that are willing to accept the lowest form of payment. And so these are people that are not highly skilled. So now it becomes an accessibility issue, right? How do people access this higher level of care? I'm saying so many things in this podcast that are completely politically incorrect. I'm sorry. Please edit them out or don't. But what I'm saying is that's one reason why your podcast and other podcasts are so important is because you're making information available to people. And when you can start to understand yourself differently, you can behave differently in the world. Your choices expand. [Mary Meyer] Yes. Can you give us an example of diaphragmatic breathing? [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Yes, thank you for asking. Yes, absolutely. So diaphragmatic breathing, I don't know if you can, let me just lower here. Okay, so your diaphragm is sits right here, right below where your ribcage comes together. And essentially, think of it as like it's just below the lower lobes of your lungs. So when you're doing a diaphragmatic breath, what you should see is you should see that lower part of your stomach, you should see it expand and push out like a balloon. Okay, so I like to say when you're doing a diaphragmatic breath, when we're in that sympathetic state, when we're in that fight or flight state, we all start breathing like little fish. Okay, like we're like walking around with our mouth open. We're having using our nose anymore. We're bypassing our brain entirely. Okay, so what I say is breathe deeply through the nose as deep as you can and as full as you can. Now in that deep breath, your diaphragm should expand out like a balloon. You should actually see it expand. You're going to hold it there and then very slow and controlled out through the mouth. And then it should be like an empty balloon. It's completely deflated. There's nothing in there. And then again, deep and full, you should feel it expand and then slow and controlled. When I say slow and controlled, it's probably taking four to six seconds to fully exhale to where your diaphragm is empty. Now, if you're doing this on a one-minute timer, I'm obviously, I'm accelerating this for your podcast. But if you're doing this on a one-minute timer, you might get in four to six breaths maybe, depending on how you're doing it. If I do a diaphragmatic breathing exercise on the hour, for me, I might get two to three breaths because of the way my system is trained. Other people might get six or eight depending on how quickly they're going and how full, how much capacity they have, how much capacity for air in the lungs and in the diaphragm. So when you're expanding the lungs out, you will see the diaphragm balloon. And that's how you know if you're actually doing it. But just remember, in through the nose, out through the mouth, I want to see my diaphragm balloon out. [Mary Meyer] Yeah, I think I haven't thought a lot about the diaphragm since doing choir and voice stuff. Back in college, you know, because if you're a singer, you do a lot of diaphragm and you understand that. But so what you're saying is that the diet, this kind of breathing will get the nervous system regulated back to where we want it to be. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Yes, it's the quickest way to communicate with your nervous system. And if you're in a really traumatized state, you can't access higher level emotional states yet. You have to just down regulate the nervous system first. So once we start to train, retrain the nervous system and we start to have periods where we feel relaxed, you know, we start to like after the diaphragm, if you're doing that once an hour for a few days in a row or even a couple of weeks, you are going to feel like you can now try push into some of these emotional postures. You will, um, you will then have a different ability to access things. But the other thing is, you're gonna have some like more clarity, more things are gonna come into your awareness that you didn't notice before because your brain function is gonna change. We're going through the nervous system, through the lungs and the breath. But eventually what happens when the nervous system starts to regulate, our brain function changes. [Mary Meyer] Yes, that is true. So nervous system, brain, health, that all that stuff. And I would say also for anyone, this is the first podcast I've listened to, I just feel like there's every time I have a guest on, it's something along the same lines of what you've said in different facets, right? They're talking about different things, but all these different pieces do come together, like the breathing, the posture. That's another thing in your book. You talked a lot about posture. So what are your thoughts, any thoughts on posture? [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Well, yeah. So the reason I called this book emotional posture is because it's our energetic position in the world. It's what energetic position are you holding? And how is that influencing reality for you? And to what degree do you want to influence your reality? So, but yes, there are many, many studies on how posture influences brain function, how it influences mood, how it influences, you know, the chemicals that we're making on a regular basis that help us to feel good, how it influences our ability to learn, how it influences how we feel about ourself, our body image. So, absolutely. But I would say on a practical level for your listeners, guess what? When you walk around with good posture, so your shoulders are back, you actually are allowing more room in your lungs for more breath and more oxygen. And that is actually what animates us. That's what feeds every cell in our body is oxygen. It's, that is the spirit, that is the substance that's all around us. Everything that's alive requires oxygen. So, just think about how much oxygen am I getting into my system right now? And if I want an easy way to increase that capacity, I'm just going to stand up straight and I'm going to broaden my shoulders here and I'm going to allow more space in my chest. You know? And in terms of the diaphragm, I'm sure you're well-versed in these energy centers in our body. And the diaphragm, it sits right over our solar plexus. And the solar plexus is the, it's the center of will. That's where our will resides. Strength of will. So, you know, if we bring a focus and attention to the solar plexus or the diaphragm, that alone is going to increase our discipline, our commitment. So, sometimes we have to, in my book, I talk about healthy habits. We have to force ourselves, I don't like the word force, but we need to be committed to a change. And if we're committed to that change, yes, it's uncomfortable. But if we're committed, you can make that change. You can get through that new period of discomfort, and then it becomes natural. And so, that's very much what this work is about. It's about changing our set point. Changing the set point that we're currently living at, whatever that may be. And a lot of people have done a lot of work. A lot of people have read a lot of books. They've done a lot of interventions. You know, they've done a lot of different methods clinically, okay? They still don't feel good. And that's where this work comes in. It's like, I'm sure you have. I'm sure you have done a lot of things. But until we change our set point, the point that our system is constantly defaulting to, we cannot actually make a meaningful change. Because we are just being run through that that default program. [Mary Meyer] Yeah, that is so good. Such good wisdom. We're at an hour and I want to respect your time. I think I could ask you questions for another 6, 7, 25 hours. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Oh, well, thank you. [Mary Meyer] Because there's nothing that everything here is simple and also completely not simple. So, I really appreciate the whole way that you allowed us to tie together trauma and all these, all use ascended emotions, right? That the joy, peace, love, you know, acceptance, forgiveness, all those things. I threw some extra words in, I think. But can you tell us a little bit in just some other thoughts in closing and then tell us a little bit about the book and when you can come back on again? [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Yes, absolutely. And I'm happy to do so. So, I would just say, so, you know, a lot of us have it wrong, right? A lot of us walk around in life and we think, I'm waiting for my circumstances to change before, you know, I can change my emotions. So, we allow, we give our power over and we say, what's happening out here determines my emotional state, determines the emotions I feel on a regular basis. My work turns that on its head. My work says, my emotional state determines my perception of circumstances. And if I stick with that long enough, guess what I promise you? Your emotional state's going to change your circumstances. I promise you. But it is a habit that we can cultivate. So, my biggest encouragement would be that, you know, people understand that they are powerful. They are uniquely positioned to create the change that they want to see in themselves and in their day-to-day circumstances. And all they have to do is be willing to be studious enough and disciplined enough to create those new habits so that they can see that change become a reality. [Mary Meyer] Okay. So, it's not just a metamorphosis that just is like you'd have no interaction with. You'd have to interact with your healing. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] So, we all have, we all have, well, you have to, you have to actually, it's a choice. You have to, and once you make the choice, the universe will support you. You will be supported and you will get everything that you need. But like, for example, the posture of ease, that has a lot to do with trust. Right? Trust allowing. And that's hard because we are so used to, like we live in this finite world of what I see is all there is. Right? So, it's very much like we are humans, but we can train our mind. We can train our energy. So, do we want to allow ourselves to behave like a lower life form. Right? That's just everything is happening to us. Or do we want to say, no, I am a, I am a gifted, powerful creator in and of myself. Right? I've been, that's a gift. I was given that gift to create. And I'm going to create something different starting today. I'm going to create something different in my body. I'm going to create something different in my mind. I'm going to create something different in my immediate environment and maybe later in a larger, broader environment. So, that's the power we have. But a lot of people, what's really interesting, fascinating. In fact, to me, a lot of people don't want that responsibility. They don't want it. People do not want to be responsible. Because comfort, even if it's horrible, even if it's violence day in and day out, it's what they know, which is the status quo that I talk about in my book. So, the way that the book is lined out, it's like very much structured in three parts. And the first part is like a teaching component. Like, this is what your nervous system does. This is what posh, this is why posture matters. This is, you know, some of the laws that allow this work to exist, that justify this work, that validate this work. And then the second part of the book is the actual states, the actual six energetic states, and the laws that support those states. And then the third part is like bringing it all together. Like, how do I integrate this information to make a meaningful change in my life? I will say, anybody who reads this book is going to have a change because it's going to support new awareness. There's going to be something in the book, maybe not every chapter speaks to them, but there will be something that's going to resonate with them that's going to create a shift in their thinking, that's going to create a shift in their life. So I personally think everyone should read this book, but, you know, what it really boils down to is the people that, you know, want to take responsibility for their life and their health and the people that don't. Unfortunately, we do live in a polarized world. Yes, so I would just say, you know, if anybody wants to find me, they can find me easily. Just, you know, ColetteSinclair.com and under ColetteSinclair.com there's like a lot of different tabs, if you will. So like the coaching programs that I do for the people that I train in this, those are available. But also the work, you know, that I do with integrated mental wellness, which is the practice that I founded and I'm still actively involved in. And that's where people can get, you know, the biochemical assessment. They can get the treatment with nutrients. They can even see a therapist or a coherence coach. That's all available there. They can also buy the book. They can read the research, again, that validates this. So there's a lot of different products, if you will, available on ColetteSinclair.com. If people want something easier, they can go to my Instagram, @Dr.ColetteSinclair, on Instagram, and you're going to see just a steady stream of, you know, quick, short content that, you know, hopefully is educational and hopefully is motivational. And anybody can find my book on Amazon or BarnesandNoble.com or any of those digital platforms, but you can also find it on the website. Well, the website, actually the website will take you right to Amazon. [Mary Meyer] Oh, yes, yes, I clicked on that. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Because everybody, everybody has Amazon now and everybody loves Amazon. [Mary Meyer] Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you again, Dr. Sinclair, for your time and your wisdom and just so much here to unpack. So I hope everyone goes, I'm going to keep reading the book for sure. I'm a quarter of the way through. So I'm going to finish it and then we'll have another conversation, hopefully too. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] I will look forward to that, Mary. [Mary Meyer] Yeah, thank you. Alright, we'll enjoy the rest of your day. [Dr. Colette Sinclair] Thank you. Bye.