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Transcript
- 00:00:30 Getting to know Niki Gratrix
- 00:03:00 Important role of stress and trauma in maintaining energy
- 00:07:45 How does trauma and stress affect our biology and biochemistry
- 00:10:45 How trauma affects our behavior
- 00:14:00 Steps to addressing emotional trauma
- 00:15:15 Using NES Health to address unconscious emotions
- 00:28:30 Processing emotions through a dream state
- 00:31:00 Tips on working through the emotional healing process
- 00:33:10 Wendy’s personal emotional struggle and what she learned from it
- 00:36:30 How negative emotions can promote physical health issues
- 00:40:40 How bioenergetics can get to places nutrition cannot
- 00:44:15 Trusting that the body knows how to heal itself
- 00:46:00 How antidepressants and medication work against healing trauma
- 00:51:30 Learning to slow down and have a heart-centered life
- 00:55:00 Reconnecting to the feminine energy
Harry Massey: Welcome to the Supercharged Podcast, where we help you to enhance your energy, health, and purpose.
Wendy Myers: Bioenergetics is truly the future of medicine.
Harry: Imagine having a body charged with energy and a mind quick as lightning. Is that a superhero? No, that’s you, supercharged. We’ll be talking to experts who have studies the physics of life so that you can have energy for life.
Wendy: [00:00:30] Hello everyone, my name is Wendy Myers. Welcome to the SuperCharged podcast.
Today, we have Niki Gratrix on the show and she is going to be talking about emotional trauma and how that dramatically impacts our health, and tips on releasing emotional trauma. She has so many good tips, and some that may surprise you. This is a very very compelling interview that I am so excited to share with you. Niki Gratrix is an award-winning, internationally-renowned registered nutritionist, mind-body expert, and health writer, helping people to optimize their energy. In 2005 she co-founded one of the largest mind-body clinics in integrative medicine in the UK with patients in 35 countries, where she worked as Direction of Nutrition until 2010. The clinic specialized in treating chronic fatigue syndrome, won the award for Outstanding Practice in 2009, and later published a preliminary study in 2012 on its results with patients in the British Medical Journal Open. After finishing her degree in economics and international politics at the University of Warwick, Niki started her working career as a Chartered accountant. After a sevenyear career in financial services, she left to work in an environment with more heart and meaning, and in a way, she could more directly help and serve others, and we’re very glad she did.
[00:03:00] We’re going to be talking today about emotional trauma and how that affects your energy levels and your stress levels and give the listeners some tips about using bioenergetics to address emotional trauma in such a profound way. I mean, for me, using bioenergetics has helped me improve my emotional life and release trauma in ways I didn’t really expect. As a result, today I’m so much happier and just so much clearer and more focused, and just have more energy and, just generally, a happier person. Let’s talk about how important is stress and emotional trauma in maintaining abundant energy?
Niki Gratrix: [00:07:45] It’s such an important aspect. Emotional trauma, I believe, especially emotional trauma from childhood, is probably the most underexposed factor for probably all chronic complex illness today. The poster child adult illnesses related to emotional trauma are fatigue-related illnesses. For example, if you have a high level of trauma in childhood, you have a six fold increased risk of developing illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and there are huge studies. I always talk about the Adverse Childhood Event Study, a study of over 17,500 adults done by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, which showed that if you had very high levels of adverse childhood events, you have an increased risk of seven out of the top 10 causes of death. With trauma, we’re talking about things like parents separating in divorce, physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, physical or emotional neglect, things like domestic violence, substance abuse, mental illness in the family, or incarceration by family member, for example. In that big study, 67% of all adults have experienced at least one of those things, that they found in the study. That was also an underestimate. They ignored things like asking about whether you’ve been … Maybe you’ve experienced bullying, or maybe you had a traumatic birth, for example, or maybe there was financial trauma in childhood, as well. Also, we inherit trauma inter-generationally, and that’s proven in the science, as well. You can look back at your own childhood and not necessarily have anything, but what about your parents or grandparents? For example, third generation survivors of the Holocaust victims have the same physiological and psychological expression as their grandparents who were in the Holocaust. That’s found in all parts of the world, where there’s been war or famine. You’ll see it go down seven generations. That’s a huge factor, and also there’s a huge amount of what we call silent trauma, which is where people are not always able to self-report. In that big study that I mentioned, where they were looking at 17,500 adults, people were asked about, were you emotionally traumatized as a child?
Well, if you were, A, how do you know, because how do you know how your parents or caregivers were meant to behave? Especially emotional neglect, where the very essence of that is people are disconnected from their own emotions, so they wouldn’t know that they’d been traumatized, and 50% of all adults have attachment trauma, which is another huge study, as well. Really, the bottom line is everybody is affected by adversity in childhood. That sets us up for how we’re going to respond to the inevitable stresses in adulthood, as well. In childhood, if we have adversity, it affects our resilience to trauma for the rest of our lives. We’ll talk about that when we talk about mechanisms, but just a few other statistics, as well. If you have a high level of ACEs, you have triple the risk of heart disease and three and a half … sorry, triple the risk of lung cancer and three and a half times the risk of heart disease. If you have six adverse childhood events, ACEs, as we call them, you have a reduced lifespan of 20 years. This is all from this huge CDC study. If you had just four ACEs, you have a 400% increase of developing depression in adulthood, and Alzheimer’s. You only have to have two ACEs to have 100% increased risk of autoimmunity. I just did an interview recently, where I did a bit of research and found out you only need a couple of adverse childhood events, and you have a twofold increased risk of having major depression during menopause. It just goes on and on. It’s everything. It’s mental health. It’s illnesses that are female-dominant illnesses. It’s cancer. It’s heart disease. It’s everything. The bottom line is just saying, there is an emotional component to every ailment and illness. All of us practitioners need to be addressing that, and anybody who wants either to be supercharged or especially if you have fatigue, you have this six fold increased risk of developing fatigue in adulthood with emotional trauma in childhood. It’s the most underexposed risk factor. I’d say it’sprobably more important than toxins, but they usually go together. They usually gotogether. One of these … I should just say, it’s not true to say that smoking causes lung cancer. It’s a contributing factor, because there are people who smoke all the time and don’t get lung cancer, right? It’s a huge contributing factor, and that’s how to consider adversity and unresolved trauma and emotional trauma. It’s one of these huge contributing factors, but you normally need some toxins thrown in, and what’s happening is, and we’ll talk about mechanisms about what trauma does to the body, but it reduces your ability to detox. It suppresses your immunity. It does all these things that then set you up for reacting with illness to the trigger in adulthood. That could be a microbial trigger, it could be another emotional trigger, or it could be a toxic trigger, if that makes sense.
Wendy: Yeah, so let’s talk about those mechanisms. How does trauma and stress affect our biology?
Niki: [00:10:45] Yeah, so how does childhood autobiography become adult biology? These huge studies by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente triggered some major research. One of the things that they found is essentially it’s all to do with this HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, and it’s about the stress responses, this fight/flight response that we have to stressors in the environment. What happens when we have either a one-off shock or we have this intermittent but chronic stress, like being around an unpredictable parent constantly, what happens is that … They’re actually calling it, it kindles the brain, which means it triggers the brain to get stuck in a chronic stress response, even if the external stress is taken away. We have a reduced threshold of what triggers a stress response in us, in response to a stress, and the whole system’s reset, so we are more responsive to stress, and we have a higher stress response for longer, since the day the trauma happened. Essentially, one researcher said that, or one science writer said, it’s like the child is marinating in inflammatory cytokines all the way through since that time there was a reset, because we know, when the HPA axis gets triggered into a chronic stress response, all these biological changes take place, which eventually lead to increased inflammation, and, of course, inflammation is obviously correlated with so many chronic complex illnesses. When we talk about an illness like autoimmunity being trigger, well actually it may have started 20 years earlier, when this system reset happened. We know, one of the most robust findings in the science of psychoneuroimmunology, where there are huge papers looking at this mind-body HPA axis connection, is that emotional, negative emotions, trauma, and so on suppresses immunity. It’s one of the basic understandings of psychoneuroimmunology.
We’ve got suppressed immunity. We’ve got being stuck in the chronic stress response, increased inflammatory cytokines. It changes our gut, so when we have trauma in childhood, studies have been done, where they took … With mammals, they would separate the mother and the baby, recreating attachment trauma. It changes the intestinal permeability. It changes the gut colonization. When you’re stuck in chronic stress, it reduces your digestive enzymes, so you’re not digesting properly. In essence, when the system reset happens, you are less in the state of the parasympathetic rest, digest, detoxify. You’re in the stress fight/flight response, so all of that rest, digest, detoxify aspect gets down-regulated. You’ve got, worst, you’re not detoxifying and you’re not digesting properly. That’s the foundation of illness, right?
Wendy: That sounded about like me before I started NES last year, about a year ago.
Niki: [00:14:00] Yes, so it’s the major impact. That’s one way it actually is working to change the biochemistry. Trauma also affects our behavior, so it’s worth mentioning that these big studies, the Kaiser Permanente/CDC study actually started in an obesity clinic, and they found out … They had this obesity clinic in Kaiser Permanente, and it was for people who were quite seriously obese. They were on this program of weight loss, and they were doing really well, but then they would have a 55% dropout rate, and the researchers were like, why is that? Why are people doing really well, and when they start losing the weight, they get to a certain plateau, and then they would drop out. They found out, by mistake, that a lot of the people in the study were reporting they’d been abused in childhood. It was odd, and the researchers weren’t expecting it. One woman summed it up, when she said, “Being overweight was a protection mechanism against unwanted male attention.” Now, that is a case where you’ve got a protocol, which is a healthy thing, a healthy dietary protocol to lose weight is a threat to her survival and her existence, because she has unresolved abuse in childhood. You see the adult with fatigue and people with chronic stress and chronic fatigue syndrome. They have a different type of expression of their trauma, where, for example, if they have attachment trauma, they may have learned to get love and be okay by being an achiever type or being an over-giver, where they constantly discount their own needs, or a perfectionist type. They were frightened into this achieving whatever it may be, so that earning love instead of being a human being and knowing that you’re already deserving, and that can be a real threat to their identity to just … They don’t really know how to slow down and stop. They’ve forgotten how to do it, because they were never trained how to do that, and it was downplayed, and it wasn’t important. They never got their needs met. When you start saying, “You need to relax,” it is a threat to actually their identity. It’s the same way as telling somebody, “You need to lose weight,” and actually it becomes a threat to them, just to give you an idea. It affects behavior in that way, where it’s basically sabotaging behavior, so we could have great protocol advice about what to do, but we don’t stick to it, because we keep sabotaging it, because actually we don’t feel safe doing it, and also beliefs. Trauma affects our beliefs unconsciously. We all know that the placebo effect and positive thinking has such an impact on biology. It changes our biology, with 33% of the effectiveness of all drugs are now placebo, right? We know it has a physiological change. When you have a strong positive belief thatsomething is going to happen, you’re going to get better, that changes your biology. With emotional trauma, it’s often unconscious. It’s feelings and beliefs that we’re disconnected from and may not be aware of, things to do with, for example, feeling shame, or not feeling that we deserve health, for example. That’s where the mind, the power of the mind, will actually sabotage, as well. Those are some of the ways that it translates into an expression of illness. It’s biochemistry, it’s behavior, and it affects our beliefs, as well.
Wendy: Yeah, so let’s talk about the steps to addressing emotional trauma.
Niki: Yeah
Wendy: [00:14:00] Where do people start? I mean, I’ve had about probably 10 years, over the course of my life, of talk therapy, not because I’m crazy, but because I just … I really love self-help stuff. A lot of women do, a lot of the female listeners. I love the feeling like I’m taking care of myself emotionally, and one of the ways I did that was starting as a teen going to therapy and talking it out, but the problem with that … I think that a lot of what drives us emotionally, we’re not consciously aware of. That is part of the problem with talk therapy. It’s great. I mean, a lot of people need that. They need that connection, especially a lot of people that are socially isolated today, and people do sort out their problems that way. I think that, for me, I’d been there, done that, and I still felt I had all this emotional baggage that I wasn’t able to address, because it was unconscious. That’s where, for me, bioenergetics came in, doing a program called NES Health, in identifying and addressing those unconscious traumas that are drivers of behavior.
Niki: Yeah, you’ve made a really good point. This is very interesting, when we look at what is an emotion? Is an emotion, is it purely … Are our emotions driven purely by neurotransmitters? Are emotions just expressions of hormonal balance in our body? Are emotions just biochemical? We’ve got all this research coming through now about the gut and how that affects how we feel, right? When we have dysbiosis, we have this increased risk of anxiety and depression, and they’re even looking at probiotics to help people with PTSD, posttraumatic stress disorder. We know that emotions have this physical component, but emotions are also energy. That’s why it’s one of the most interesting areas. Like you, I’m a big fan of bioenergetics, because I can address the emotional and the physical health by using bioenergetics. What’s bioenergetics? The study of energy in living systems. It’s fascinating when you consider emotion as a … It’s a thing. It’s electromagnetic. It has charge as well as having this physical component. I often say, you probably … There’s now this infamous video of Cyril Bourke with the miHealth device, a pulsed electromagnetic frequency device. He’s holding it about five or six inches away from a 5000 pound bull, and he’s sending out a magnetic wave, and the bull is immediately calmed down. That’s direct proof. You can go and look that video up online, or we can give it out as a link, showing that emotions aren’t just biochemical. They’re also electromagnetic. I think that’s where there are some amazing things, proof, other proof that emotions are energetic, as well. You look at some of the most successful interventions for trauma. They’re on the energy sides. They’re energy psychology, things like neurofeedback, which is changing brainwaves in response to feedback. EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing … There’s no talking involved with that. That’s changing waves again. EFT, emotional freedom technique, that’s actually tapping on the ends of acupuncture points on the face. What we see is some of the most effective treatments are working at the energetic level. What’s the most interesting, especially when we start to talk about working with things like NES, Infoceuticals, and, as I mentioned, the PEMF device, you can work energetically with people, purely energetically, where you don’t do any talk therapy or even start … You let go of the story. With using energy, you can just create an emotional release. You can move stuck emotions by just pure energetic work, because emotions are frequency. You can use sound therapy. You can use light therapy. You can used pulsed electromagnetic frequency, like the PEMF device, and you can use electromagnetic even currents. Electromagnetic currents will work. There’s another great video people could go and look up online. If you just look up trauma bear on Google and YouTube, there’s a video on there that’s Dr. Peter Levine, who’s the brilliant expert in Somatic Experiencing. It’s another form of trauma release. He shows how, in an animal … It’s actually the video of a polar bear actually going through trauma, because he’s being chased by some people who are going to shoot him to actually help him, shoot him with just a tranquilizer, and they’re going to cure him. They’re vets. After the bear slowly starts to wake up, you’ll see his entire body is actually shaking. That was the trauma release. It’s an electrical charge release, so it’s a nervous electromagnetic frequency release. What happens, when we don’t … When we have a trauma, what’s happening with most people in trauma is that that electrical release doesn’t happen. Instead, we go into a freeze response. When we’re in freeze, it fixes and ties up the whole nervous system. The body’s in a tense state, and we start to get pain. We start to get chronic pain, for example. Also, when we’re stuck with frozen trauma, there is just … The body’s gone stiff, and it’s holding itself. There’s trapped emotional stuff, and the nervous system is stuck in this fight/flight response. That takes tremendous energy away from life and living. That’s why, when you see with chronic fatigue people, there’s a lot of frozen trauma going on. That’s tremendously depleting to be holding all this trauma, and all that muscle tension, and the nervous system chronically stuck. Actually, you can see in adults … There’s some practitioners who see, when they start working in releasing emotional trauma, you actually see the body releasing and shaking, and it’s the entire nervous system letting go of that electrical charge. Emotions have charge. They have frequency. That’s one of the reasons why … For example, I mentioned you could use sound. You could use light. You can use magnetics. You can also use frequency imprinted on water, which is what we use in NES when we have, like I’m just holding up here, this is an Infoceutical, so we know that we can … It’s possible, if we know emotions have frequency, we can find out what frequency they are, and we can imprint it on water. Thirty years of heart math have shown that, for example, they can look at a heart rate variability result for you, and they’d have a 75% chance that they’ll be able to tell you what emotional state you’re in, just by looking at your heart rate variability, for example. We know this now, with the work of Peter Fraser, where he’s actually decoded certain emotions, and we can print it on water. The beauty is, this is a gentle way, when you work with pure energy, of releasing energy without retraumatizing the person. It’s just a release of feeling. One of the things we need to do with emotional stuff, emotional trauma, is it does need to be felt to be released, but it doesn’t have to … We don’t have to attach a story. We don’t have to make a drama. We don’t have to cajole it. We don’t have to negotiate with it. When we work energetically, and this is what I do all the time with my clients, when I’m working with Infoceuticals or a PEMF device, they often will certainly one day … I have to coach them, so they need to be prepared, where they might suddenly feel very sad for a day. They don’t really know why. It’s just come up for no reason. I coach them around that and say, “You know what? There’s nothing to do about this. Emotion is just energy. It’s just an energy release. There’s no meaning. There’s nothing else to talk about it.” It’s a very interesting way to work, and it’s a very gentle, nontraumatizing way to support people, when you purely work on the frequency level. You’re actually bypassing the mind completely, which can be … Sometimes we do, like you said, we need the talk therapy. Sometimes that is needed, and it’s appropriate, but people should know you can also work purely energetically and just you can be releasing out of the body and having it an emotional detox. I call it the emotional detox. Yeah, I love bioenergetics for that reason. It’s why I work with NES, and why I use the Infoceuticals and the PEMF device, and so on, with my clients.
Wendy: Yeah, so let’s go into that a little bit deeper. Why don’t you tell people a little bit about what is NES Health? How does a NES Health scan … You do a little scan. At home, you would order one of these little scanners. You do a scan, and you see a lot of information in your scan, which you then review with a practitioner. Tell us a little bit about what you see, in regards to our emotions, in that scan.
Niki: There’s a tremendous amount that you can see going on emotionally in an energy scan. Because both emotions and the physical body are energy, everything’s energy, you’re bound to see all the energetic aspects of organs and systems and so on in the scan, but there’s also the mind screens. The mind screens in the NES scan will literally pick up trauma that has registered on the brain and is connected to different parts of the body, which is the brain hologram screen. The people might now know, but that’s actually based on the work of German New Medicine and Dr. Hamer’s work, where he was a doctor, originally a doctor, who … His son was actually murdered, and within a few weeks, he developed cancer. He realized that the trauma of what happened with his son was directly correlated with his cancer. Then he did huge amounts of research correlating what he could see were different parts of the brain being impacted by trauma on the energetic level, which would then correlate to different parts of the body. He did thousands of scans, and Peter Fraser, who created the NES system, actually incorporated all of that work into the scan. It’s reiterating what I mentioned, that trauma is energetic, as well as having a physical aspect. What’s brilliant about the scan is it’s possible to read the frequency and be able to detect and pick that up. It’s definitely going to pick up things that you, as a client, may not have been aware of at all. I’ve had cases where we might see something in
that brain hologram scan come up for somebody, and they just don’t really know what it means at the time, but it’s flagged. I had one client, where she kept on getting terror coming up. She couldn’t really work out what was going on, and, because that came up in the scan, she started to investigate. This is what a lot of us don’t do, is we don’t talk sometimes to our own parents and our grandparents about not only their experiences, but also what we may have gone through in early childhood. This particular client said she asked her mother, “Is there anything that happened to me in early childhood, where I would’ve had terror?” She was already in her 30s asking this. Her mother said to her, never told her before, but said, “Oh yeah, I remember very early on,” she had actually got some kind of bug or virus. She was only … She’d only just been born, and they placed her in an isolation unit for about three weeks. When mum came back, the baby was nonresponsive to when her mother came back, so there was a real attachment trauma. It would’ve been terrorizing for a little baby that young. She only developed one kidney after that, which is interesting, because in Chinese medicine, we have this strong correlation of fear with the kidneys, so that was very interesting, as well.
Wendy: Yes, and isolation with the kidneys.
Niki: Yes, so this is the sort of thing that we see that gets picked up by the scan. It’s part of a … Sometimes people know when they see something in the scan. It’s showing up a particular generic statement, and then the person needs to look at that and go … They either know what it is right way, or they might not know what it is yet. Sometimes people won’t know what it is, but they just need to do the protocol, because it’s going to clear through anyway. They might just … It might be something that actually is not of that great importance. It may have been somebody said a negative thing or did a negative thing when we were five or six years old that actually traumatized us at that age, but it wasn’t an important incident in itself, but we can clear it through anyway, because we can work with the frequency directly. The person might just have … I often get clients with having vivid dreams, for example, and that’s part of the processing of clearing through, or they might have a day where they just feel sad for a few days, and that passes. I just always say, “This shall pass, too. You don’t need to do anything about this. Just feel it, breathe, and release.” Just feeling, breathing … Take some extra time out, when people are having the emotional releases and know that there’s nothing to do about it. That’s the point. We’ll often … Some other people will get memories coming back, too. Not always, but sometimes people have insight into something or a memory. Other times, I mean, I’ve been through a process of going through a lot of … I had a lot of spleen work to do, which is linked with the worry, mental, mental worry.
Wendy: I had that, too. I had the spleen keep coming up. I don’t know why.
Niki: [00:28:30] Yeah, it was that all night … just angst all night. It’s funny, because you’ll just forget. Then I was like, the next day, I suddenly realized, oh, I’ve been taking spleen, so it was the Infoceutical on the spleen. That’s often what you’ll see. What’s amazing with clients and with NES is you’ll see someone, for example, talk about recovering from their IBS, but they’ll talk about how they felt different as a person. That’s the key thing. I know when somebody’s gone through real healing, when they’re actually saying, “I don’t feel like the same person I was before.” They talk about their feelings. “I don’t feel as wound up. I don’t feel as angry. I feel calmer. I feel more confident.” They’ll always be saying that, and then they’ll talk about the physical symptoms disappearing, as well. Yeah, it’s a beautiful way to work, when you’re working that way, and it’s gentle, as well, so we’re not going to certainly send some people into a huge re-trauma or anything like that. It feels very safe.
Wendy: Yeah, I think some people can maybe worry about that with NES, but with any kind of real healing and real progress on your emotions, you do have to confront maybe some unpleasant emotions. I found, personally, and processing a lot of emotions happens when you’re dreaming. That was very profound for me, after I did the NES Health Practitioner training, then I realized that I started having really vivid dreams, as soon as I started on my own NES Health program, because you’re just processing all the stuff. That’s what dreams are for, processing your emotions, filing them away in various parts of your brain. That’s a good side effect, I think, of NES. I like dreaming and having vivid dreams. Luckily a lot of this stuff happens while you’re dreaming.
Niki: I was going to say, if you’ve got a big fear of something, and then you have the dream about that happening, much better to have that manifest in the dream state than actually magnetize it in your life. That is the other thing about emotions. They are magnetic. They have charge. They impact what we’re bringing into our lives, so, yeah, I totally agree. If you can process something energetically without having to sometimes manifest it physically, because that’s what’s actually happening. We often will … I often talk about this a lot with my clients, as well, when we talk about clearing out emotions. You could … Sometimes when something happens to us, and it comes into our life, and it triggers like somebody believes us. What we have is a huge emotional release. Well, the reason it happened is we needed to release that emotion, because it was blocking us, all right? We’ll bring in events and things, especially when people start to clear their emotions … We can bring in things that will, if you have a fear of something, it might manifest, because you’ll release the fear. I’d much rather do it in my dream sleep though. You know?
Wendy: [00:31:00] Yeah exactly, but for me, I’m like, “Bring it! Bring it on.” I don’t want to stay stuck where I am. I don’t want to continue to go through these ruminating negative thoughts. That was a big problem I had in the past was constant ruminating thoughts that would just circle around and around, like this broken record. I don’t want to be in that state. I want to move forward. To deal with a few negative emotions, on a very temporary basis, that then pass, I’ll take that any day, rather than staying stuck where I am.
Niki: I couldn’t agree more. It’s good for people … It’s good really to get the word out there about emotional detox, because it also, in that way, it’s a little similar to physical detox, right? We know it’s worth it to go through a little bit of a healing crisis on the physical side, because it’s temporary, because we can also manage it, and we can reduce it down by cycling things like supplements, whatever it is, that we’re taking, but also the same with emotions. We have this need, I think, in the West, to just have a totally linear, “I take this, or I do this, and I immediately get better.” It’s like, well, it doesn’t quite work like that. It often does require a connecting into maybe feeling some stuff that was repressed or that we disassociated from, because it was too painful at the time, but when you’re doing it in this safe environment, when you know what to expect, and you’re working with a practitioner, you can just have that emotion come up and it not devastate you. You realize, you can be telling yourself, this is just a feeling and it’s energy and nothing else, and energy moves. The only way I’ll block it is if I try and run away from it. I try and I go into my head about it. It’s one of the biggest things that … It’s a real trap. This is one of my pitfalls of emotional detox. A big emotion comes up, and then we turn it mental, and we turn it into a big story. Then we go and do something about it. It’s like, nope, you’ve missed it. There’s no need to do that. Just let the emotions come up and release, and just take time. That’s almost like a kind of emotional meditation, you know? You’re feeling it and allowing it to flow through. Actually, you’re just accepting it, breathing, and letting it flow through, accepting, breathing, and letting it flow through. That’s all that’s needed. I think that sometimes in our to-do, doingness society, we forget. We don’t really know how to do that. Nobody’s really given us the manual, but that is actually how you would help support the emotional release, is just … A lot of breathing helps, and the usual things, Epsom salts baths and lots of water, the same way you would with physical, as well.
Wendy: Yes
Niki: Those are good tips for people.
Wendy: [00:33:20] I suffered from depression through most of my 20s and really learned a lot of different techniques to deal with that. One of them was to not get depressed about being depressed, more about thinking about letting that emotion roll over you like a wave, and then it passes, and that was always just really helpful for me, is to recognize that I am not a depressed person. This is not who I am. It’s more just a temporary emotion, and then that usually-
Niki: [00:36:30] If people got that … It’s not only depression. The other thing we do is, for example, when we realize … Here’s another example, a bit more on the mental side, but we might realize we’re being judgmental of ourselves. When we notice we’re being judgmental of ourselves, we get judgmental about the fact we’re judgmental, so we’ll do the very thing we’re trying to stop. It’s the same with fear, and then you get afraid because you’re feeling fear. That’s leading to a panic attack. Yes, it’s very important to be able to learn to keep that slight centeredness through the feeling coming up, because otherwise we just spiral it, and we make it bigger. That’s a really good tip. It’s a really, really good tip. People get judgmental about being judgmental. People can feel shame. That’s another one. One of the worst feelings is probably when you connect with shame, because it’s a kind of self-loathing of yourself. Guilt is feeling bad about something you did. Shame is, “I am bad,” different from something I did, so it’s probably the lowest emotion. Then, when we feel that, we realize we have that, usually it’s semiconscious, but it’s around in a lot of us, who have self-love deficit disorder, 50% of adults have attachment trauma in childhood, so that’s the self-love deficit part of that. Then we can feel ashamed about the fact we feel shame, so there’s a cutoff point we need to … If we can get that, that’s, “Oh, okay, this is just passing through me. This is just a feeling. It’s just energy, and it’s not the totality of who I am.” It’s a real healing when somebody can get to that stage. That’s where a lot of calm meditation and breathing and daily exercises of meditation and breathing exercises, to keep that centeredness through stormy emotions, is a good thing. By the way, I would say another tip as well. If you are … Sometimes when we do breathing, and we might be taking something like Infoceuticals, as well, to bring things up, sometimes it can get too intense. The feeling is overwhelming. If you’re breathing into it and you’re wanting it to release, you’re accepting, breathing, releasing, and then it’s actually getting too much and it’s not dissipating, I actually tell people, “Go and do something else.” Actually get up, go and distract yourself, do something else, because it’s still processing even while you’re doing other things. Then what you’ll find is you can come back to it. Once you go quiet and you start breathing, and you do centered breathing again, you’ll feel it come back, but each time it’ll be less intense, because it’s clearing through. These are more tips of just how to deal with emotions when they’re coming up, as well.
Wendy: I think another really important point of our talk is you want to clear negative emotions and traumas, because they can cause physical health issues, and they can promote physical health issues. A lot of people don’t understand that. When you’re going to a medical doctor, even a functional medicine practitioner, they’re working biochemically. Doctors are working with drugs and surgery. The functional medicine practitioners are … It’s an upgrade, but working with supplements, still trying to elicit a biochemical response, physical change in the body, and that missing the point or missing a large aspect of how our body works is we have an energetic field that we need to address energetically, and you can’t get that with a conventional medical or functional practitioner. If you don’t address emotional traumas, it can affect your physical health. Can you talk about that?
Niki: Yeah, I mean, that’s the huge point. You can go so far. You can go to some degree, like we mentioned if somebody does have dysbiosis, you could play around with neurotransmitters and balance neurotransmitters. You could work on a metabolic level. For some, that will balance their emotional state, and that’s all you need to do. For many people, it doesn’t go far enough and especially when you get this nervous system reset. Remember when I mentioned trapped emotions is a blockage and a disturbance and a distortion to the energy field, and the energetic aspects of the body is what is the blueprint for the physical body. What’s happening in the field is telling the biology what to do. If that’s got distorted information … This is this idea where if you’ve got distorted information in your energy field, you will constantly, for example, you might need to keep taking tons of vitamins and minerals, because you’re not actually absorbing and utilizing them properly, because there’s a distortion, say, in the stomach field, that’s happening at the energetic level. One of the places where shame and guilt get stored in truckloads is in the stomach, in the digestive area. It’s a distortion in the energy field, and the energy field is telling the biology what to do. It’s the blueprint, so just turning us back. When the Human Genome Project was done, they only found that humans had about 20,000 genes, which was a big shock, because we have like two million different proteins in the body, right? Everybody thought we’d have one gene for one protein. It’s like, “Where’s the missing link?” The missing link is it looks like, how do … Genes just aren’t the only information that tells proteins how to specialize and how to become liver cells and kidney cells and how to repair. There’s this strong electromagnetic field around that is telling the proteins how to differentiate and regenerate. When we have a distortion in the energy field, one of the biggest distortions in the field are chronic negative emotions and low emotions, and Chinese medicine’s known that for thousands of years, right? It’s probably one of the oldest mind-body systems. It’s vital to clear the energetic level to allow the biology to repair itself, because it’s like that’s the information that … The building block might be nutrition, good diet, and the supplements. That’s the raw materials to rebuild, but you need the information for the raw materials, to tell them how to do that. You need to go and become a liver cell. You need to be a skin cell. You need to go and rebuild and repair the digestion. It’s the foreman, and the foreman will get, if the foreman’s got distorted information, that is going to … Nothing you would do on the biochemistry will work as effectively. I remember … There’s a brilliant energetic practitioner, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, right? He has this brilliant axiom that for an equal amount of unresolved … No, what he says is, “For an equal amount of bacterial or microbial infection, there’s an equal amount of stored toxicity, and for an equal amount of stored toxicity, there’s an equal amount of unresolved emotional trauma.” He was saying that in 1984.
Wendy: Wow.
Niki: [00:40:40] He often says you’ve got to … You can’t just do one without addressing all of these, because they’re all interconnected. You often find you can only get … Sometimes you may only get so far with a biochemical detox. You get so far. You get stuck. Nothing else is coming out. Time to do some energy work. Time to do the psycho-emotional. Try and do some energy clearing work, and then you’ll find the biochemistry starts to work better again. This is what I discovered with all my clients, is that I needed this multifactorial approach, but don’t just throw out the biochemistry at all. It’s still important, but the energetic is hugely important, and we’ve got these tools that enable us to correct at that level, which is superb. Bioenergetics can get to places that nutrition can’t.
Wendy: I felt like, for me, and probably a lot of listeners, I had reached a point in my life where I was eating a spectacular diet. I was taking the highest quality supplements. I had been detoxing for five years. I was exercising, meditating. I was doing all these things to take care of myself, and I still just didn’t feel like I was operating at the level in my health and emotional life that I should’ve been. I was concerned that I had all this emotional stuff going on, that I didn’t really know how to address. NES Health gave me that answer. It came right at a time that I needed it the most. When you ask the question, the answers will come. I’m really, really thankful to NES Health and the CEO, Harry Massey, of NES Health, for providing this just incredible tool to help people. I know a lot of people listening feel like they’re doing so much for their health, and they just feel like they want to go to that next level. I really think that NES Health provides that answer.
Niki: Yeah, it’s superb. One of the other brilliant things about the system specifically is that you can work remotely, as well. A lot of the systems that, especially energy testing systems and so on, like kinesiology and so on, some of the most advanced forms of that, you need to be in person with people, and often you need two practitioners. It’s this very intense work. I could’ve … I did all of Klinghardt’s training, actually. I still think he’s superb, but I didn’t take on his system. I wanted to do NES, because that allowed me to be able to have clients all over the world and to be able to get this energetic scanning and the treatments out there, no matter where people are. A lot of my clients are fatigued, so they can’t get out of the house, some of them. All they need, we post everything to them, as long as they can get online and are fairly okay on a computer, they’ve got access to superb healing technology. Yeah, I love the
system, and it’s great.
Wendy: Yeah, and I love that it’s designed like that, to help people in their own home, because, like you said, there’s so many people … They don’t have access to care in their area. If they’re in Egypt or they’re in rural Montana or what have you, there’s access to quality health care for anyone in the world, using NES.
Niki: Yes, yes.
Wendy: Do you have any final tips to offer the listeners in regards to emotional trauma and addressing that?
Niki: You know, I would only say that trust that the body knows how to heal itself, and quite often all we need to do is set up the right support network, give the right information to the body, have the building blocks like good nutrition available. The body will do the rest. We need to do our part. The body’s still a mystery ultimately, and science doesn’t really understand. We haven’t even talked about the aspects of quantum physics here, and there’s huge implications of all that, too, but the beauty is we don’t need to understand it for the healing to take place, and that the body does know. When we break a leg, and we go to hospital, all the doctors do is set it. They just stick the bones together. They don’t do anything to make the bones heal. The body does that, right? What we’re doing is we’re creating an optimal environment. We’re providing the nutrients. We’re providing the information necessary, and we’ve got us doing our part, so it’s a co- creative process with the body. It’s a balance to not over-controlling and knowing when to just step back and go, trusting my body knows how to heal itself. When I send the right … Our own engagement, as just in our own psychology about the Infoceuticals are great tools, but ultimately the engagement ofyou as the person setting a clear intention for what you want as your outcome, fully engaging with that in an optimistic, committed attitude, and a belief that it will work is a tremendous, probably 50% of the story, right? That’s the other thing I would say, that the trust is needed, and that commitment, and the knowingness that it’s possible, that recovery is possible, that supercharged energy is possible.
Wendy: [00:46:00] Yes, absolutely, yeah, because when you go to a conventional doctor or psychiatrist, you’re really only going to be offered medications for any kind of emotional issues you’re going through, depression or anxiety. For me, I’ve been on antidepressants before, and they’re a Band-Aid. They’re really just covering up symptoms and not addressing the underlying root cause. For me, I’m done with Band-Aids. I want to address the underlying root cause, to get rid of the depression, get rid of anxiety or any kind of other negative thoughts or ruminating thoughts or physical reactions in my body, because of these emotional trauma issues, and just to release them and let go of them, so they’re no longer an issue. I think so many people get stuck in that cycle. They’re just not aware that there are so many unbelievable, cutting-edge modalities out there that really are light-years ahead of what the medical mainstream community are doing.
Niki: Yeah, that’s so true, and you mentioned antidepressants. So much works against what we need to do to release trauma, because it will stop the down emotion, because it numbs you out, but it also stops you from feeling the joy. You can’t access the joy when you’re essentially being numbed out by something, which is the BandAid approach. That’s not to say … Sometimes it’s highly appropriate for people to be on that medication, and definitely don’t just come off it. If you’re listening and you’re on it, make sure you go and see your medical doctor before making any changes, because if you are on a prescribed antidepressant, you know the safety point there. Ultimately dealing with the root cause, it would require a gradual reduction of that medication, because part of releasing trauma, it’s learning to …
Do you know what it is? It’s actually learning to feel again. It’s a form of awakening. It’s when we’ve released trauma, we need to feel again.
Wendy: People don’t like that, though.
Niki: I know, because it hurts.
Wendy: Yeah.
Niki: [00:51:30] They come out, and they live in their head. They’re somebody who is living in their head, and they just have a body there to take their head to different routes, and they live here, because it’s too painful. It’s been too painful further down, too painful to be in the physical body, too painful to be in their female organs and have that consciousness and feeling there, because of trauma from the past. It’s one of … Learning to be a sensual being is learning to be human and learning to enjoy life, and it’s the reason we’re here is to feel again. That’s the other thing. I was just talking to a client. He was actually asking me, would this work… Would this actually help with sex life, as well? I said, “Well, this is part of the learning to feel again, is part of this awakening and connecting.” We’ve all got so much baggage, and we think about what we’ve put in our bodies physically, and the stuff that, over decades, that we’ve built up toxin-wise. Just think about all the end result emotional stuff, because who’s really doing a lot of that work? You’re bound to, especially if you say you’ve had a really busy time, where you’ve been externally focused, and I always find this … You might find the same, but I’ve found this. When I’ve had very external, busy work during this time, it’s painful coming back into this, like, “Oh, there’s that emotion I didn’t process. No, no, there’s this horrible feeling.” I remember, I had many years of working intensively hard, actually running a clinic with the chronic fatigue clinic, and when I finally stopped and took a break, I was actually numb for about six months. I was doing two hours of breathing a day, and all I could feel was numb. I’d had a 12- year career in accounting and finance, and banking before that, and hadn’t really connected into that either, so we were talking about, wow, 20 years of unconnected baggage. I can tell you, to start with, I didn’t even feel anything. It was numbness. There’s stages, and then I kept going with it, two hours a day. I did it through a lot of breathing work and sensing and feeling and connecting, and stuff comes up when you do that. I would start to feel into different parts of my body and would start to … Memories would come up. Things would be … I’d be connecting to things from the past, because I was breathing into the kidney area, and then I would breathe into the stomach area. Part of clearing emotional trauma is it’s an awakening process, an awakening to feeling. It’s not a thinking thing. It’s a feeling thing. We live in very disconnected times. This is part, this is really … We’re getting to my core message, really. To me, it’s about bringing the heart back into health care, because this disconnect, the disconnection from that feeling state means we lose our inner compass. It means we don’t listen to messages from the body, because they’re not being listened to. It means that we push through things like … The number of clients that I’ve had dealing with chronic fatigue, who, they were totally disconnected from what their body was telling them: time to relax, time to slow down, time to breathe, time to connect. If you have no feeling in the body, because you’re constantly disconnected, you don’t know how to pace. You don’t know when to switch off. You don’t know how to relax. This connection to feeling and being guided by feelings, both intuitively feeling, in terms of what we do in our lives, whether we take on projects … Is it a time to relax, calm down, spend quiet time connecting with our body, or is it an external busy time? It’s like understand the seasons of life. You can’t have summer all year round. Actually, maybe there’s some places on earth where you can, but most of us … Those places where it’s winter year round are not the best idea, but you know what I’m saying? There’s natural cycles in the body. Winter is more of a time where we can take more time connecting with ourselves. This is probably … I’m glad we’ve come to this point, because it is my core reason to actually what I do is to have people start connecting back to their feeling state, because the feelings … If that’s not happening, you’re on your direction down towards illness, if you’re not connected to it, but also we need a more heart-guided, heart-centered life. When we slow down, funnily enough, things speed up. Especially when you connect to the heart, you end up magnetizing things to you. You’re letting things come to you. While we’re chronically doing, doing, doing, we’re all exhausted doing that. That’s part of my mission, is training people in their general lives how to stay connected to the heart, and, yes, that does mean slowing down. It means taking 20 minutes, maybe twice a day, to do nothing, and people don’t know how to do that.
Wendy: I don’t have time for that.
Niki: You see.
Wendy: I don’t have 20 minutes twice a day. I’m joking.
Niki: Okay, I do know. I totally … I almost took you serious, though, because I do have clients who tell me that. I’ve got clients now telling me that, and I hate to say it, but I almost say to … I don’t say it to those people all the time. It’s not always right, but I can say it here in a more general sense, that that person isn’t sick enough yet to start doing 20 minutes of calming.
Wendy: Yeah, your body is going to force you to stop, at some point.
Niki: Yes, and this is the other message. I’m thinking of these people who I’ve been working with, and who’ve got this, as well. When you slow down, and you connect with hearts, and you feel, and you start to get centered, it changes what you’re doing, so you have this insight. You’re not wasting more time on that project. “Oh, that’s the person who’s causing me a problem. I get rid of them, and my life gets easier.” When you stay connected to heart, you’re staying connected to your emotional sense of self. You start to get insights about what will actually make life easier, and things would flow, and then you’re in the flow better. Most of us aren’t doing that. We’re in this frenetic mental state all the time. Clearing emotional trauma is an extraordinary awakening experience. It totally changed my life, when I had literally a spiritual kind of an emotional awakening. I could never live my life the way that I did when I was in my 20s, as a finance and banking person, being totally oblivious. When we slow down, we notice things. We allow things to come to us, rather than chasing all the time. How cool would that be? Because think about how exhausted we all are when we’re not connected to our feelings. Our feelings are a source of information about the world around us. When you’re not connected to that, you miss signals. You miss easy paths. You miss seeing the danger signs of something coming your way that’s going to cause problems. You get disconnected from all that, so life gets harder when you’re not in your heart, and also it just becomes generally depressing and sad when you’re not connected to heart, because you’ve had to step out of that, because it was too painful, but that reconnection is a reconnection back to joy, and engaging with life again. I have a lot of clients that have disengaged with life, and they’ve become fatigued, because they got burnt. Bad things happened, and then they just contracted. Their systems contracted, and they needed to go, to just shut off basically. What we do, when I work with those types of people, is we’re gradually getting the heart to open again in a gradual safe space, and we also show people how to do that safely, to reengage with life and open up again,and to start to feel again, because as humans, we’re meant to be sensual beings, and we’ve become mental beings.
Wendy: Yeah.
Niki: [00:55:00] I think that is probably, at its core, the mental is … We’re overly masculine and mental, and the feminine energy, which is a feeling, sensing state, has been disconnected. If I had to say, if there’s one thing about chronic fatigue, it’s that female-male imbalance on an energetic level. It’s too much externalized mental doingness, and this disconnect from the more invisible, energetic feeling sense in the body. That’s how … You could describe the entire illness as that. That’s part of what I do in my coaching and in my training courses and in my programs and things, is also training people how to get back into their feminine. We need the feminine energy back, don’t we? Don’t we need that-
Wendy: Yes, yes we do. Yes we do.
Niki: Don’t we need the feminine? We need females. We need the women. We need what … The essence of feminine needs to come back into health care and life in general. That’s, yeah … It was great to connect with you on that, because that’s probably my number one mission.
Wendy: Well, tell the listeners more about where they can find you and learn more about what it is that you do and the services that you offer.
Niki: Yeah, so people can check out my website, which is nikigratrix.com, N-I-K-I-G-R-A-TR-I-X dot com. I have a free eBook on there that you can download on the seven steps of healing emotional trauma. I know you can get it totally free, and once you sign up to that, you can stay engaged with what I’m doing, because I talk about this on a lot of different summits. I’ve got one coming up soon on immune health, and so on. I’m always doing work like that, but also I do programs like three- and six-month programs where you can work one-to-one with me, where we do NES scanning. I also do questionnaire analysis, and we work the range … I work with a range of things, so I emphasize, of course, nutraceuticals, essential oils, all personalized, and then coaching on the psychology side, as well as keep people on track. I’ve got some big announcements coming up soon, as well, so stay in touch. I’ve got some programs, some other types of things, I’m launching.
Wendy: How exciting!
Niki: Yeah, to help people to create community, to create a community going forward and everything. Check out my website. We bring stuff out all the time.
Wendy: Well, Niki, thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean, you’re such a wealth of information. I’ve talked to you several times, and we’re friends. I always love picking your brain, and you just have so much information, so much to offer people in healing themselves from emotional trauma, so thank you.
Niki: Thank you, Wendy. It’s a real pleasure, and thank you for all the amazing work you do with your interviews and doing such important work that you’re doing, as well.
Wendy: Thank you and, everyone, thank you so much for listening to the Supercharged Podcast. You can watch this video on getsupercharged.com, and listen and watch other videos and podcasts that we have on there. So excited to be starting this podcast and that finally been doing it. It’s been in the works for a while, and with my cohost, Harry Massey, who’s the CEO of neshealth.com. Thank you so much for listening, and please leave us a review in iTunes if you’ve liked what you’ve heard today. We’d appreciate it so, so much. Have a wonderful, energetic day. Please keep in mind that this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please seek a medical practitioner before engaging with anything that we suggest today on the show.
