(00:02) we have been duped by feminism sexual Liberation and anti-depressants we have been told that we are powerful and free now as women but we feel tired wired and bitter we’re mostly eating right exercising and meditating wrangling to-do lists and arranging playdates and yet there’s a haunting holess beneath the huge complaint what if I told you that there is a huge Storehouse a reservoir of energy inside of you that has not been tapped that you could feel light and pulsing excited and alive in ways that a wellness lifestyle
(00:49) cannot deliver that you could trust yourself that the world could feel safe and that unexpected and expected Delights could start to illuminate your path no coach therapist doctor or Guru required just you learning to get real present and attentive with you I feel like I’m here to matchmake your inner parts for the greatest love affair ever written I want to help you learn first where you’re buying eggs from the hardware store which is the source of all pain I want to help you master entering through the upset which is the
(01:27) only spiritual practice You’ll Ever Need and to get real comfortable putting on your villain Crown which is in my opinion the key to True power and then you’ll attune to your inner yes so you can live the life defined by the specific pleasure of who you are I am so excited to announce my latest book called The reclaimed woman which is available for pre-order now so if you head to the link in show notes you can learn more about bonuses events and companion offerings and I cannot wait to see your gorgeous face on the
(02:07) [Music] path I’m Dr Kelly Brogan you may know me as a New York Times bestselling author of a book with an exploding pill on the cover Renegade psychiatrist P dancer or honorary member of the disinformation doesn’t what can I say I’m a born provocator I’ve spent most of my recent life exposing deceptions connecting dots and discovering the secret places my inner victim is still waiting to be liberated and now I feel called to help you reclaim all of your parts your health your sexuality your power and your expression so that you can finally
(02:46) truly own yourself I want to ignite in you that inner knowing and the pulsing Vitality that lives beneath your disempowerment disconnection and resentment so that you can audaciously courageously and playfully alchemize your struggle into the specific pleasure of who you are this is Reclamation radio a soulfire production hi I’m Dr Kelly Brogan and welcome back to Reclamation radio so I’m going to make you wait until the end of this podcast for a highly ridiculous personal story about my food Journey so today I would like to talk about the
(03:31) phenomenology of our personal relationship to food and nutrition and I want to do so through a lens that I haven’t applied yet so if you know my work on nutrition and food you might have heard me talk about my mentor Dr Nicholas Gonzalez and how he was a proponent of 12 different diets based on our autonomic physiology and that a parasympathetic dominant individual would eat totally different things than a sympathetic dominant individual and you might have heard that I am a gluten and dairy hater that I have a highly red meat-based healing
(04:19) protocol in vital mind reset and both of my books and that I’ve been a vegetarian myself for a few years so it’s been a whole thing I recorded a whole podcast on the best diet to eat eat that’s not what we’re talking about here I am very interested in the psychospiritual maturation process what Young may have referred to as the individuation journey and often we see the evidence of our maturation through our relationships right so romantic relationships relationships to those in our family of origin even friendships and platonic
(04:57) Dynamics as we learn what it is is that we are no longer willing to participate in also known as our boundaries we begin to learn what it is that we want how it is that we feel love and connection and the kinds of relationships that fulfill us and sustain us this is a process it’s actually an inner Journey towards the realness at the core of ourselves and I found that this journey and its trajectory can be simplified into the Reclamation of No and then the Reclamation of yes so the restoration of a sense of individuality and boundaries
(05:42) and then the release of Life Force energy vital force energy Eros creativity impulsivity desire pleasure all of these things can be liberated into the space of uness after it is that you understand what it is that you are not you reclaim yourself from merger so in these stages if there are stages that are archetypal I have looked at in human relationships I have seen you know that we move from unconsciousness right we move from merger we move from compliance everything’s fine nothing to see here it’s all good you have no sense of why
(06:23) it is that you’re doing something for somebody else or with somebody else it’s just sort of what you do then there’s often a rupture of empathy where you begin to see oh this person actually isn’t me and doesn’t have my best interest at heart perhaps and from that rupture there is often a phase of defiance Rebellion separation a real no and along the path comes sovereignty which is non-referential it is non- oppositional and you get to a place of real neutrality around that which you were formerly potentially codependent on
(06:57) and then in rejection of you come to this place where everything on the outside you release to its beingness and you focus on you so I have not applied this to the food Journey right to what it is to develop a healthy relationship to food and nutrition so for many of us we begin our food Journey with that merger right that unconscious experience of food as just something that is around you put in your mouth and you eat it and you don’t think about it either tastes good or it doesn’t you’re hungry then you’re full and food plays this
(07:40) transactional role often so it’s used as a source of reward sometimes as punishment and none of that is intentional none of that is conscious for most of us the classical journey is that you don’t really examine your nutrition until and if you get quote unquote sick so you have an experience of feeling powerless in the face of your so-called illness your diagnosis and for various reasons you find the path of nutrition as healing that is why 100% of my patients ever came to me they had exhausted the resources available
(08:21) through the allopathic system and they knew there was a better way and that Better Way involved personal choice and lifestyle change so as you enter into this post rupture landscape there is a pretty big no there’s often a lot of anger that helps you to rise out of the potential Despair and powerlessness and dependency and helplessness of feeling afraid of whatever your body is doing of whatever your symptoms are manifesting as and that sense of you know often like Injustice around the system right so a lot of people who’ve had adverse effects
(09:03) related to medications or have experienced the failure of the system itself they come to nutrition with this sort of guns blazing like I’m going to beat this thing right like I’m goingon to I’m G to heal myself and it’s a very goal oriented energy it’s what I would describe as a masculine energy right and there’s a lot of no in it right no I am not doing what I was doing before no I’m not taking your meds no I’m not going to be sick there is a rejection of the status quo and there’s not really typically a vision for what is wanted
(09:42) it’s just a certainty that whatever is going on is not for you so in that terrain there is an opportunity to bring your inner masculine your inner father to the scene and this is a lot of what I observe happens with my program vital mind reset is that your inner man comes online and there is finally a sense that someone is home and really a sense that you’ve got you it’s like that big buff strong dude who is just like wrapping his arms around you from behind and saying baby I’m here don’t worry about a thing and this inner masculine is
(10:22) responsible for the Reclamation of choice initiative organization follow through and the experience of committing I joke that it’s like actually giving a about yourself finally and the maturation of that masculine is a ritual often and it can’t be undone right so once you have that experience your whole system I call it is sent a signal of safety your whole system feels your inner masculinity come online and there is regeneration and restoration of your Your Inner Harmony now the trouble is that there are Fierce boundaries that
(11:06) are often required there’s discipline that is required and many of us in the health and wellness space can get trapped here and we can really arrest our development psychos spiritually and we can even probably regress in some ways there’s a term called orthorexia which refers to this neurotic and self-defeating obsession with the details of what are healthy foods to eat right so as you come into the experience of boundaried nutrition and the Reclamation of Lifestyle Choice it is the case that you can demonize and reject certain foods so
(11:51) how do we get to you know this next phase of liberating and maturing the feminine right so what is it to them experience the pleasure of eating what is it to trust your intuition around eating so in my rubric starting with intuitive eating would likely have you eating you know donuts and drinking wine for dinner so that experience of discipline that sort of personal boot camp is how you show your system that an adult is finally here that’s my belief anyway and then there is this experience of trusting your intuition maybe within
(12:31) the boundaries that have been pre-established right so in my journey which I’ll talk more about in a minute you know there would be times where I would crave like radishes and I would walk around with like a bushel of radishes and a little salt shaker in my backpack for weeks at a time there was a time I ate broccoli Rob by The Bushel probably for six months of my life and you know those are all in the bounds right so trust your intuition but don’t get like too crazy and don’t you know get off the plan kind of a thing is
(13:05) there another step right what does a sovereign relationship to food look like and how do you mature and evolve the voices inside of you that say that certain foods are bad how do you get to the place where there is not an eroticized taboo where there isn’t a single food out there that that your inner child is still longing for right a single food out there that you would say you know on my deathbed I’m going to eat that again where your experience of the foods that you’re not eating is that you actually just don’t prefer to eat them
(13:44) so is it possible that a sovereign relationship to food is predicated a Fierce and loyal allegiance to your preferences as the only guiding force you prefer it that’s what you do you don’t prefer it that’s not what you do and there is no need for rules right in human relationships I have found that there is a phase where boundaries and space and distance and this does not work for me is really essential and then comes a time where it’s actually quite easy to interact with the same people you needed all that space from and the
(14:22) charge is drained out and you can assess in real time is this working for me or not and there isn’t a need for this infrastructural understanding of yes and no the rules aren’t necessary any longer and of course as I have mentioned many many times in this podcast and my work when you get to the place where you don’t need to make something bad and wrong in order to not choose it or to say no to it that is the definition of sovereignty in my opinion because you have reclaimed your power of choice and you don’t need to validate it by
(15:00) entering into the victim triangle so in this model your boundaries are loving preferences exercised by the Deep self they’re not actually against they’re for you they’re not against anyone else so to illustrate how this can look not that I’m there I will tell a bit of a tale about a recent experience vulnerable experience that I had okay so in a nutshell I was a processed and junk food addict for most of my life like really excessive one and if there’s such a spectrum and when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s I cleaned up my diet so that
(15:48) looked like initially eliminating gluten and dairy very very strictly including butter and evolved to essentially the diet that I pr in my books and vital mind reset which is like an ancestral diet right and I engaged that in 20010 I have not knowingly had gluten or dairy since and have like rather strict relationship to The Dirty Dozen organic foods and processed sugar and you know I just it’s just how it is it’s just how I be and I go I travel all over the world and and order off the menu and I’ve learned how to like finesse the question
(16:34) and not you know feel like an entitled Diva when I’m at a restaurant and I know how to be cool about it and you know my friends know it’s how it is right and my diet began to shift as I talk about in my previous podcast in 2020 and I started to shift my relationship to meet and then I did a water fast which I’ve also shared a lot about and while that was one of the deeper spiritual experiences of my life and this was a water only fast it was a n-day fast I am not sure that I experienced because it wasn’t perhaps like a 21 or 40-day fast
(17:14) you know my my friend Andy calman who inspired me to do it did and has done since 26 day fast perhaps it was not long enough however now almost a year later I can’t say that I’ve had necessarily physical benefits and and perhaps quite the contrary and part of the explanation for that is that it was quite stressful for me in those days it was emotionally stressful it was physically very stressful to be alone and not eating stress I mean you know the demand was just at the capacity of what I could meet to have about that
(17:46) and when I reintroduced Foods I reintroduced some of my favorite foods like eggs and avocado and salsa verde and it’s possible you know that my system tagged proteins perhaps in those food S as associated with this stress environment and that my system became you know on high alert since then because I’ve had you know not my usual relationship to my like totally quiet perfect gut function since I changed my diet in 2010 anyway all that is to say that I showed up for a one-on-one family constellation the other day with amly
(18:26) who is my friend who I do this work with and who will also be participating in my first I’m just going to do a quick plug for this my first inperson event in November called audacious embodiment she’s amazing and we talked about you know this and related matters and she was explaining to me how in family constellation there is this concept that gluten is the father energy and dairy is the mother energy and that when you’re in rejection of these Foods right versus preferring not to eat them there’s something there also I know you know
(19:01) even through German new medicine that this concept of an allergy is related to situational conflicts psychic conflicts that arise in the setting of the consumption of these Foods so that’s sort of where I got this idea of what might have happened at the tail end of my waterfest so we discussed what it is to get to a place where I am not any longer in rejection of certain food s right so there aren’t foods that are on the no way noow list there are simply foods that I prefer to eat and ones that I prefer not to and that may change
(19:38) moment to moment so this is not the way I’ve lived for over a decade and it’s a very new paradigm and also makes sense right in the rest of my perspective and approach that there is a maturation of this process that it is not static and so she encouraged me to speak to my body right so this is sort of obvious and I took the time to do it because of her encouragement so I sat down I talked to my body and sort of like Parts work you know I spoke to my gut and I saw like this image actually of a watermelon interestingly was sort of like
(20:16) representing my gut and that was one of the foods I broke my water fast with also and I asked you know like what’s needed and felt into you know what’s what’s being held energetically and emotionally by this area of my body and the memo that I got was you should go buy uh Brier’s ice cream and eat it okay and by the way I have you know daughters and I have raised them you know there we have only organic food in the house there’s no processed sugar there’s no gluten dairy you know I taught a master class on victimless mothering and you
(20:53) know probably mentioned this here as well I have just begun to as if it’s my role but to empower my daughters to make their own decisions around food and it’s very challenging for me to be out with them and to you know watch them choose to order something that I don’t approve of right but I’ve I’m committed to resolving the conditional access to Mama’s love when we make the right Holistic Health Choice as children a phenomenon that I see a lot in this space so anyway that’s been going on in the background as well and so when I
(21:27) heard this about the Briar’s ice cream I thought well that’s funny and I’m not doing that and Brier’s ice cream was like one of the Staples of I would say my like tween and well pretty much like my whole life until I changed my diet but the dimensions of my childhood that I recall and tween and teen years and especially the what is it called like Napoleon or something like the strawberry vanilla and chocolate like three flavors but also the mint chip and I remember it as being like ridiculous delicious and of course like vegan
(22:02) sugar-free ice cream it’s just not I’m sorry like if you have a company that vins excellent vegan sugar-free ice cream please let me know so anyway I just sort of was like tickled by the idea and then went on with my life and maybe I you know talked to my girlfriend about it and just sort of was like I don’t know what to make of this it’s interesting it seems to me like I should be potentially more restrictive with my diet at this point rather than like less you know it seems like you should be really unrestrictive with your diet when you’re
(22:32) feeling 1,000% symptom free fantastic right which I felt before I did the Water Pass PS anyway no mistakes so I think it was the next day or within 48 hours and this is how family consolation works by the way too this literal magical things occur in your life after you you do this work so I was packing to move and the moving guys were coming and my daughters were not in the house and I went into my eldest daughter’s room to ready like the couple of boxes that were in there because we took almost nothing with us and I go into her room and I
(23:06) notice on the ground is a napkin and the napkin has two duts in it it’s just like on literally on the floor and I pick up the donuts and I recognize them immediately as timen’s Donuts so I didn’t even know timens was still around however you know if you were 80s 70s 80s 90s kid you know timin Donuts so the briers was pretty high up there but if I had to pick one thing that was a junk food that represented my like hedonistic relationship to snacks it would be these Donuts I used to buy them buy the carton and I would dip them in coffee and I
(23:47) drank like six cups of coffee a day in my 20s and these Donuts appeared in my house okay so it doesn’t get more on the nose than that so I didn’t have to go get the the Briar because the timens appeared literally in my house two days after I had this experience of opening to the possibility that there is a softening that’s required of me that there is a rigidity and dogmatism that is not serving me and is potentially at this point keeping me in an immature state of or a less mature state of masculinity and arresting the
(24:21) development of my feminine right so of my relationship to my impulses my desires my pleasures and the way that my inner child holds the access points right so could it be that there are dimensions of my little girl that are longing for maybe even like obsessed with these eroticized taboo foods that are holding all of this vital force energy so I know you’re on the edge of your seat but here’s what happened I picked up the donuts and I already have done the work where the fact that they were in my daughter’s room like it
(24:56) didn’t trigger me at this point and I’ll tell you you know her take on this story later so I was just going to throw them out and I was drinking a chai latte at the time which is not even something I normally drink I’m a matcha girl and it looks like coffee right so coffee is a good example right I haven’t had coffee like at all since 2007 there is like not a part of me that has any interest I’m not interested like coffee breath and everything that comes with it nothing about it me it’s not like I’m like oh
(25:30) coffee so bad I’m never going to touch it’s just not what I prefer right so anyway that’s for me that feels like it doesn’t have energy stuck there right anyway so I have this chai in my hand and I realize that I have an opportunity to eat these Donuts so I do that I made like a little ritual out of it and I ate not one but two timin’s Donuts ladies and gentlemen Dr Kelly broken reporting Live From The Scene so so they were and I dipped them in the chai which looks like coffee right so I was like brought back to this scene and they were
(26:06) absolutely delicious I have no idea how old they were and it doesn’t matter because all the preservatives in there they could last for you know an era and at the end I had this like really funky film like waxy film all throughout my mouth oh my God gross and so it was not entirely Blissful it was not entirely ecstatic it was also gross gr and so it was this like very balanced experience of something that had I not Revisited it might have continued to hold this idealized charge and the attachment of some dimension of my inner child and
(26:46) what’s funny is that when I told my daughters this story she said I won’t even eat those because they’re so gross so that’s why they were sitting there somebody gave them to her and she wouldn’t even eat them so so on some level at this point she already has that level of discernment because I didn’t you know I certainly didn’t and at this point perhaps I’m developing it but there was something liberated for me where I not only moved through like this experience of foods and by the way I felt like fine afterward have I like
(27:23) gone out and bought them no it’s just sort of was an experience and now it it’s done and there are probably like a handful of other foods like that that are in this you know sort of glass cabinet of Thou shalt not touch these ever again and I just sort of like in some dimension of myself am in Devotion to them like obsessed with them right so through this experience I have softened those rigid reflexive like firm No Boundaries to come into an understanding that my impulses and my intuition hold very valuable information for myself and
(28:03) directions and I have proven to myself that I am this resilient so I know that many of you have these stories you probably have these stories with Pharmaceuticals and with other things that become Taboo in the health space that come into this framework of good and bad that we know holds the energy of a certain po ity that can get charged and if you’re in defiance of one end of the pole you are also in its erotic caress as I call it so I can’t say that I’m like going in the deep end of eating all the junk Foods at this point however
(28:46) I do think that it’s just a dimension of the healing through a strict food protocol conversation that I would like to put on the table no pun intendent all right see you next time
