00:00:02 Rosemary

Overall, this theme that’s emerging from this conversation is we need to shift more from our thoughts to paying attention to the impact of our thoughts on our body.

00:00:16 Dr Chris

We very much have come into a society of a pill for every ill, and this pill will fix me. In naturopathic medicine, we’re about what’s the root cause. If you visualize a tree, there isn’t just one root to a tree. There’s many roots to a tree. So you can have a few root causes to your mental health concern or autoimmune disease, or cancer, whatever the condition that is affecting the physical body. The ground for healing, the soil for healing is regulation and settlement of this nervous system. Because in Canada we talk about the top five things that get Canadians at the end of the day: Heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, pulmonary issues, mental health. That’s five things, not necessarily in that order, but what’s behind all five of those? Stress. But why don’t we just say, say the five things that get Canadians at the end of the day are stress and stress? Yeah. And everyone’s different in their capacity and their resiliency and their ability to handle, not only physiological stresses, but mental and emotional and spiritual stresses. I look at my depressions as the way that my soul was calling me home.

00:01:40 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry. Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast. I’m here today with Dr Christina Bjorndal. Am I saying that correctly?

00:02:05 Dr Chris

You are.

00:02:06 Rosemary

Thank you. She is a naturopathic Dr. a best selling author, a teacher, and a retreat leader. But that description alone leaves out some critical elements such as your background in corporate marketing, your love of nature, and actively enjoying the natural beauty of your local environment. So I’d like to ask you to introduce yourself to our listeners. Coming from the inside, coming from the heart, who are you?

00:02:31 Dr Chris

This is the.existential question, isn’t it? Who am I? Yes. So I am someone who walks through the world wearing some wounds, and that has deepened my inquiry into self through my journey with myself, and the diagnoses that I’ve had… and I’m going to use the word, overcome.

00:02:57 Rosemary

Beautiful. Thank you. Now the theme of this conversation is psychoneuroimmunology, which is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, the study of the effect of the mind on health and resistance to disease. I’m wondering what you’d like to add to that definition.

00:03:17 Dr Chris

So psychoneuroimmunology to me means your thoughts affect your physiology, your thoughts affect how your body functions. And it’s, originally coined by Candace Pert, In the 1980s, she wrote a book called The Molecules of Emotion. And for me, it offers opportunity and hope for people, because it’s because of this piece that there’s cognitive flexibility, that we can integrate into our lives. So you’re not just this fixed entity. Your brain isn’t a lump of cement. It’s got more of a plastic quality. And so psychoneuroimmunology then lends into this other concept of neuroplasticity, which means exactly what that word means. Plastic, right? Your, your brain, your body for that matter, has a plastic or bendy, pliable quality to it. You’re not fixed in the sense of I’m using that word fixed in the terms meaning the term of concrete. It’s not game over, right, until it is. So then it’s just this to me, another word for it, for simplicity’s sake, it would be to say just that it means hope.

00:04:31 Rosemary

Yeah, I like that, and I love your metaphor because when I think of concrete, I think of grey matter. And maybe we should be thinking of Silly Putty instead.

00:04:40 Dr Chris

Yes, exactly. And that’s probably the colour of the brain, is more the colour Silly Putty I would imagine, than this dark gray dull…

00:04:48 Rosemary

Yeah, solid entity, yes. And I love that because, that… we’ll talk later about change your mind, change your life, it’s all in that realm. Which has sounded very New Agey, very theoretical, but you’ve studied the science behind that, and I’m going to be really excited to get into that. Now, I asked you before we began recording about your intention for this conversation, which is how we begin every Compassionate inquiry session, and I wonder if you’d like to share that?

00:05:18 Dr Chris

Yeah, my intention is to share a message of mental health. So no matter how dark, deep, difficult, challenging the circumstances may be in your life, or that you’ve gone through in your life, you can find a place of healing. It is actually possible to get to this place of healing when we integrate a mind, body, spirit or holistic approach. So that’s the intention is just to keep coming back to that word of possibility and hope for people.

00:05:53 Rosemary

Beautiful. Thank you, now I’d like to speak about your background just a little bit more to frame up our conversation about psychoneuroimmunology. You went back to school to train as a naturopathic doctor When you were 33 and had already spent over 10 years climbing the corporate ladder, mainly at HSBC, which for people who don’t know, is the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, a heavy duty corporation, What motivated this change of direction?

00:06:21 Dr Chris

Yes. So this was really pivotal. So I had a lot of struggles in my mental health leading up to working in the corporate world. And what culminated this change in the career was after a suicide attempt I had which left me in a coma with kidney failure. I was on dialysis and I came out of this coma. Well then I can tell you I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t joyous, that the ER doc took extreme measures to save my life. In fact, I think I was more depressed that it didn’t work, and that I was still here. Now I, obviously I am, I have changed that viewpoint now, but at that time I was really not enjoying where I was, who I was, what I was doing. And as I was recovering, a friend gave me a book to read called Return to Love by Marianne Williamson. And in that book there is a quote on surrender which goes along these lines. Surrender is not about breaking out of anything. It’s a gentle melting into who you really are. So you take off the mask, or you let down the armor, and you discover that all God needs is one sincere, surrendered moment where love matters more than anything, and nothing else matters at all. And so I’m reading this book, that has the word love in the title, and there’s the word love in that paragraph that I just cited. And it dawned on me that, goodness me, what does that word even mean? And also because I did not expect to survive that attempt. I’m a recovering overachiever, so I really did not expect to survive. And so here I am. I’m thinking how am I going to navigate my way forward now, from this? And I didn’t do this to be handicapped. I’m on dialysis! Like it was just so much for me, and so I had to reconcile. Why am I still here? And how am I going to move forward from this deep dark… the bottom, right? And what does this word mean? Love? What does it even mean? Anyway, I began the self inquiry into OK, there’s got to be another way to navigate this. And the diagnoses I had received until that point in time had been bulimia, depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder type 1. So I’ve had some psychotic events. 

The change was precipitated by me seeking another way to navigate my mental health. I ended up moving into – again thanks to the same friend that gave me that book to read – she was a nutritionist and she was always encouraging me to look at nutrition, to look at naturopathic medicine. I grew up very much in a Western model family, so those concepts were foreign to me. Even the word depression, I didn’t understand it except for in the economic sense of the word, because I was a commerce student. I went to see a nutritionally oriented psychiatrist. I went to see a naturopathic Dr. And lo and behold, I took the prescriptions that they gave for me, along with the Western prescriptions, which when I was doing those on their own, I wasn’t well.  You don’t have suicide attempts when you’re well, right? Anyway, I had my first year where I felt free from depression and anxiety, which I had not experienced in the decade or more prior to that. A light bulb went off, and I thought to myself, there’s got to be something to this. There’s something to this. So let’s explore it further. And I just continued my inquiry into naturopathic medicine. And then I eventually got up the courage to leave my job, because it was a very sought after position. And every time I did dip my toe in the, hey, I might be making a career change, water or enter that conversation with someone, they would say, why would you do that? Really? Why would you leave when it’s… Why would I stay?

00:10:31 Rosemary

You said something about when you worked in the corporate world, you wore an “Everything is OK on the outside, but I’m dying on the inside mask” – every day. Was that pivotal in your decision to finally leave? And what was that doing to you wearing that mask every day?

00:10:50 Dr Chris

So that mask was literally sucking the life out of me. I did not feel I could be authentic as a woman working in a man’s… a very sort of old boys network. This was at a time when affirmative action was coming online in the 90s. They were hiring women, but men weren’t happy about that, that we were seated around the boardroom table. So I felt a lot – of that I had to hide who I was  – and that I had to be more like a man in terms of suppressing emotions and not showing any vulnerability or instability whatsoever. Not to mention that my psychiatrist said, hey, Chris, don’t tell anybody about your diagnosis. He was saying that from a place of protection of me, because in mania, one of the symptoms can be excessive spending. And here I am in high net worth, private money management, right? We don’t want to be taking risks on people’s life savings. So I felt that the way I interpreted that statement was, oh boy, this is a deep dark thing that is not to be shared and it needs to be hidden.

00:12:03 Rosemary

So did it show up as shameful? Is that how you took it?

00:12:06 Dr Chris

Yeah, absolutely. Shame and also embarrassment. Thankfully, actually, during that decade that I worked at HSBC, I never did have a manic episode. There was just depression. And so to the point where I wondered, was I misdiagnosed?

00:12:24 Rosemary

And that is, that’s entirely possible. And it’s interesting what you said earlier about understanding depression only from the economic perspective. You had your own Great Depression – like 10 years. That’s a long time. So you also said that you discerned that adoption trauma was at the root of your mental health challenges. How did you figure that out? How did you put those pieces together?

00:12:50 Dr Chris

Hmm. Yeah. So it’s always interesting when people ask when did things begin, right? And so for me, I am adopted and I put that together actually in a session with Gabor Maté. He interviewed me for his book The Myth of Normal, and when we were having this interaction, he asked me about anger. And my response was I don’t do anger. And his response was, let’s talk about that, because what we ignore or don’t want to look at can mean that there is something actually to look at. So what preceded the question about anger was, he asked me why so much depression? Why so much depression, Chris? And what emotion might you have depressed in you? And then we got to this place of anger. And so he asked me when it came, when I mentioned about adoption, he asked me, how do you think you would have felt right coming out of the womb? And asked me some questions that actually I did not have the answer to like when was I adopted? At what age? I didn’t know the answer to that. I knew I was adopted early on, like within the first three months of my life, but I couldn’t tell you whether it was 3 hours, 3 days, three weeks or three months. So he sent me home with some homework to look into that. But basically we talked about that wound, that can happen, and then how you then are wired as a result of that initial experience. So it was quite impactful and very powerful to make that connection, because I walked through the world from a very young age, thinking that… with the belief that I wasn’t wanted. Not for lack of my parents trying, but because the way I learned that I was adopted when I was young, five years old, it was explained to me. But the way I processed it in my brain was, I’m with these people temporarily. And I wasn’t wanted. So what do you do with that? What do you do with that?

00:15:05 Rosemary

Understandable. Understandable, because as little children, things are either, like… things are forever or they’re not. They’re temporary. So, gosh, and I was curious when I learned that you’d been interviewed by Gabor for The Myth of Normal, I was wondering what that experience was like. It’s it sounded like a Compassionate Inquiry session, that conversation.

00:15:28 Dr Chris

Yeah, it it  – was not knowing that was what was happening, but you know, at the time. But of course, yes, it was. It was very impactful and very helpful to have that conversation with him.

00:15:41 Rosemary

Wonderful. Now I’m just going back to your bio here a little bit… after undertaking additional training in mind body medicine. You’ve got your naturopathic Dr. certifications and you took additional training in mind body medicine, including cognitive behavioral therapy, orthomolecular medicine, compassion focused therapy, mindfulness based therapy, and Gestalt therapy. What specifically attracted you to Compassionate Inquiry? Because that’s a lot… that’s a lot of training.

00:16:15 Dr Chris

That is a lot of training. So what specifically attracted me to Compassion Inquiry was the two co-founders, Gabor Maté, who I’d been following and learned about in my naturopathic training with his book When the Body Says No. And my husband actually did a retreat with Gabor in 2006. I was there as well. So we spent a weekend together at Hollyhock and he was writing In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts at the time. And then Sat Dharam Kaur is a naturopathic doctor who I studied with for her Healthy Breast Teacher Training. So both of those two teachers were very impactful in my life. So that’s what really drew me to it. And also it… my own search for healing within myself, and to help further guide my patients to healing. Because I started mentioning that I went to see this nutritionally oriented psychiatrist, Doctor Abram Hoffer, who is considered the father of Ortho molecular medicine in Canada. And for people who don’t know what ortho molecular means, it just means right molecule for your individual needs. He worked with two foundational people. One was Linus Pauling who won two Nobel Prizes, which is incredible. Gosh, to win one in your lifetime is incredible, let alone two. So he was a very well regarded scientist and another named Humphrey Osmond, who was influential in the psychedelic movement back in the 1950s. So Abram Hoffer himself was a very prominent Canadian psychiatrist. And then I was seeing a naturopathic Dr. And that was all the physical level. That was all physical level. So what I mean by that is nutrition, nutraceutical botanical remedy versus psychiatric prescription medication. But, that got me, as I mentioned for at least a year, I felt depression free. Then I tapered off most of my medications, remained well until I didn’t. Had another depression, another suicide attempt. So here I’m thinking, OK, obviously there’s more to the puzzle here. And that’s what caused me to pursue the mental, the emotional, spiritual, and the subsequent training in how to work with the mind and the body connection.

00:18:40 Rosemary

I suspect you’re someone who will probably never stop training. Yeah. Quintessentially curious, it’s your nature. So that explains that. Now you said in something that you wrote, CI taught me to pay attention to what was going on with my patient and also what was going on within me while I was with my patient. That attention shift was pivotal to my internal spiritual growth and healing. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that.

00:19:10 Dr Chris

Hmm. Yes, so in naturopathic medicine, in my training, we were taught to really… everything, it’s about the patient and especially in one of the modalities in naturopathic medicine is homeopathy. And in homeopathy, it’s about being a keen observer of everything that the patient’s doing, movements, hand gestures, tone of voice, cadence of speech, etc. So you’re really taking in a lot. There was not the emphasis though on what’s rising within you, though. And this word of being activated or triggered. And that can happen when you bump up against… yourself. And another’s perhaps your limitations meeting theirs. So with CI, it really helped me to pay attention to what is rising within me. And to help clear those wounds, if you will, so that those tender points aren’t touched and I can really truly be this vessel of presence with another and hold that space for them. Because if you’re not aware of what’s going on with you in a session, then the session becomes about you.

00:20:33 Rosemary

I’ve had that experience. I know it well. Yes, and it’s not helpful for either of you, the patient or yourself. So, are there any other ways that having a Compassionate Inquiry perspective influences your work with your patients?

00:20:49 Dr Chris

Yeah. So actually the training is incredible. And I was mentioning to you prior that at first my teacher in the cohort said that, OK, we need to bring a trigger every week to class. And now when I first heard that, I thought to myself, well, that’s going to be really challenging. And of course, I could not wait to get to class each week because there was many things for me to… that I felt bumped up against during the course of a week. So when you can deepen the inquiry into yourself, your spirit, your soul, your journey makes some sense of, your thoughts and the connection to that emotional realm that happens within this container that is your body, you learn to lean into the space between the stimulus and the response and allow stillness to lead the way, ultimately to love. That is what the Compassion Inquiry process has taught me. And as you mentioned before we hopped on the recording, that all parts of you are welcome here, right? And if someone, as I mentioned, who is wearing this mask, there were many parts of me that weren’t welcome. Now, I was just going to say, when you chop those parts off of you and you disconnect, then you’re not whole.

00:22:25 Rosemary

Now you become a Dali-esque version of yourself. Floating parts connected with perhaps strings. That is an uncomfortable image. I’d really invite you now. I’d love to hear some stories, your own or others, that really illustrate how this connection we’ve been discussing about what we think and how our body responds to our thoughts, can either increase or decrease our health and vitality. They’re just going to illustrate for our listeners what exactly psychoneuroimmunology is all about.

00:23:00 Dr Chris

So to frame that, I’ll just mention that there’s these four areas to all of us. So physical, we’ve mentioned mental, emotional, spiritual, and if you can visualize those as concentric rings like a bullseye: spirit at the centre and then the emotional, mental and then physical. But this is fluid. There’s no silos within the human body, so everything is flowing and interacting within each other. So, I mentioned that I started on that physical level and I did well for a period of time, but then I didn’t. And so part of that was because no one, and this is a key thing as well that Gabor highlighted in the interview that I had with him, which was, did anyone ever talk to you about trauma –  with all the practitioners that you’ve seen? And as amazing as they are, did anyone… did that word come up? And I said no, not once. So recognizing… and his definition of trauma is it’s not about the event, right? It’s about the beliefs you made as a result of that experience. So the thoughts and the emotions, they are intertwined sometimes, and it happens, your thought leads to an emotion, which leads to another thought, which leads to an emotion, which leads to a thought. We can go round and round and this is where people are often stuck when it comes to depression and anxiety. And if we visualize a triangle with mind, body, spirit at those points of the triangle, Mind is another word for your thoughts. Body is where you experience the emotions. And so we have… that’s where we’re stuck in this thought emotion cycle. But we need to bring in this concept of spirit. And by spirit, I’m not referring to religion. I’m referring to one word. Do you know what it is?

00:24:56 Rosemary

Wholeness?

Dr Chris:
Breathing.

Rosemary:
Breathing, very good. OK.

00:25:03 Dr Chris

Yeah, yeah, but breathing leads to wholeness.

00:25:05 Rosemary

Yeah, yeah, we don’t do too well without breathing.

00:25:08 Dr Chris

We don’t do well at all. The difference between me and you and the person listening and a cadaver.

00:25:14 Rosemary

Is breathing.

00:25:16 Dr Chris

Life flow, yes, and in other traditions, right? It’s prana, it’s chi, it’s in Western medicine, it’s breath. The first step here in the psychoneuroimmunology connection is to recognize your thoughts. We need to enter this circle that we’re stuck in, this spiral, either spiraling down to the depths and darkness of depression, spiraling up in anxiety, or completely off into psychosis. That’s the full range of human experience. That’s the full range of human experience. I’m not saying it’s comfortable. I’ve been in both extremes of that spectrum, but I can tell you it didn’t serve me to hear from doctors that it wasn’t normal. That did not help me in my journey. That just caused more suppression, more shame. The first step is to recognize, we enter this circle from the thought perspective. What are you thinking? What is the nature of your thoughts? Understand that thoughts create neuropeptides. Neuropeptides affect the hormones that get produced. Those hormones that get produced, in turn, affect how you feel. We’ve got a little bit of a chicken and an egg problem here. Your nervous system, the autonomic nervous system has two branches, sympathetic or parasympathetic in scientific terms. In other words, we can use, so, we can use danger or safety, stressed, relaxed, sabotage, support, hurt, help, critical or kind. I could go on. I’ll leave it with ego versus soul, or fear versus love. You can only be in one state at any given time. So the question becomes, what state are you in any given moment? Knowing that states are changeable and flexible. When I ask my patients if we add up the parasympathetic:sympathetic to be 100%, on average, just tell me where you’re living. Is it 60:40? What is it? Most people say 70% to 90% in the sympathetic. That’s a problem because, one of the premises of Naturopathic Medicine is nutrition. Nutrition only happens in a parasympathetic state. When you rest, rest and digest. It’s… you don’t digest when you’re stressed, so it’s all about calming the nervous system with the breath.

00:27:56 Rosemary

That’s the key point. If I may interrupt for justice a second, because you could be a type A personality. You could be you, as you described you before, any of this enlightenment. You’re eating the right foods. You’ve done your research, you’ve seen how much protein and carbs. You could be eating the best diet, but if you’re not in the right physiological state, it doesn’t matter because you’re not resting and digesting. So all of that good, probably pricey nutrition is just passing through you without benefiting you at all. That’s a key point.

00:28:32 Dr Chris

It’s a huge point, and it’s one of my pet peeves about the health industry. Everyone’s focused on the foods you’re eating. And don’t get me wrong, it is important. It is. But the state in which you eat that food is more important. It’s more important and many are chomp chomp swallow eating on the run. And guess what else we forget? Digestion starts, not when food hits your mouth. It starts with a sense of smell, when you’re cooking that food.  Which is another thing that’s lost in our society.

00:29:06 Rosemary

If Uber Eats drops something at your door, you don’t have much time to smell it before you’re literally inhaling it. I get it.

00:29:13 Dr Chris

Yeah, and remember, I had an eating disorder, had/have an eating disorder. So there were a lot of cracks in my nutritional foundation, and this is so important for people to understand, because you derive your neurotransmitters, the key ones in mental health, that people focus on,  serotonin, dopamine and GABA. You derive all three of those from essential amino acids, which is one little book I wrote, The Essential Diet Eating For Mental Health. It’s just a… really like just it’s just a two week menu plan. However, it’s ensuring that you’re getting these essential amino acids, keyword essential. If you don’t get them from the outside, you can’t make them inside of you. There’s just… we’re just not wired that way.

00:29:53 Rosemary

And all the positive thinking in the world is not going to affect that fact. Yes, fair enough.

00:29:58 Dr Chris

So back to psychoneuroimmunology, we have to create some change in some way if we want to have a different experience than what we’re having, right? And the thought and the emotion connection is so important. And so for myself, this first step is, recognize again, what are you thinking? This was taught to me by my naturopathic Dr. Then the next step is once you have awareness that you might be spiraling, then refrain. i.e.stop, by relaxing into the breath. And I want to highlight the breath as well. Here with our inhale through the nose, we hit a spot, a very thin membrane between the brain and the nasal cavity. In the sinuses, there’s a little pouch called the sella turcica which houses the hypothalamus and pituitary. 

Those are the master glands in the brain that are the puppeteers, if you will, to the hormones. When we inhale through the nose, we give a little bit of turbine wind action stimulation, gentle touch to that part. And when we use our diaphragm to fully inflate our lungs, sitting underneath the diaphragm on top of our kidneys is our adrenal gland, which in response to stress, is producing a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol then feeds back up to the brain and signals, hey, it’s either safe or it’s not. Stress is stress. So getting married and getting divorced – same thing. So it’s our brain that will make the interpretation of whether those are good or bad. We’ll make that differentiation. Hopefully, it’s a good thing if you’re entering into marriage.

00:31:36 Rosemary

Yes, and if I can interrupt again, just for a second, that’s a key point too, the impact of the breath on the body. Because I’ve consulted naturopaths on and off for years and I tend to hold my breath a lot. I have an old pattern of not breathing well and regularly, and I’ve had issues identified with my adrenals and not one of those individuals has asked me about how I breathe, or made an observation about my breathing patterns. So yes, thank you for that.

00:32:09 Dr Chris

Well, you’re welcome – to really hit this home. The Latin derivation of the word inspire means to impart wisdom to a human soul. It’s just so beautiful, right? And so the first thing we look for when a baby is born is the breath, and then the last thing we look for when someone passes is the last breath.

00:32:33 Rosemary

And in between we ignore it.

00:32:36 Dr Chris

That’s right!  Somewhere between the first and the last we forget how to do it. So when you recognize that you’re in a thought that’s maybe not kind to yourself, that’s critical, that’s negative, whatever it is, let’s refrain. And the way I do it, I like to put the right hand on the belly, the left hand on the heart. And the reason is we want to connect with the body. Right side of your body is the Yang side. Belly button is a Yin area. You were connected in the womb to your mother through the belly button. Where your right hand is now represents the 1st and 2nd chakras. This has to do with your sense of security, rootedness, connectedness, groundedness in the world. Left side of your body is the Yin side in Chinese medicine, this is the healing side. I suggest to connect it with the heart, which is a Yang organ. So we’re balancing Yin and Yang energies here. Heart here is the 4th chakra in Ayurvedic medicine. Has to do with the meeting of the mind and the spirit  – also here in the heart centre – there’s more electrical activity happening here than there is here in the brain. Super powerful. And coming back to digestion, there’s more serotonin receptors between these two hands than there is in your brain. There is a bidirectional gut-brain relationship here, very important for people to understand. And lastly, if we are using that diaphragm and really elongating the breath, you want to feel that right hand move when you take a breath. 

So what I have patients do is we look outside the window, at something in nature, cloud, tree, flower… whatever you happen to see out your window. We put our hands here and I say let’s just take 2 deep breaths and we’ll just stare at this thing in nature. So we do that. I come back after the two breaths and I say to my patient, was anything going on upstairs when you were taking those two deep breaths? And they usually say no, like shocked, no. And I say, here’s the thing. The ego is a busy place. It’s busy throwing off opinions, comments, suggestions, ideas, judgments, some of which are helpful, most of which are not. We just interrupted that thought-emotion cycle. We got in the gap, the space between. So now let’s enter this next moment with a rephrased thought that can perhaps serve you. So what was the problematic thought, and what could be a rephrase? Now I want to highlight this because, for me you mentioned this earlier – change your thoughts, change your life. I was resistant to this for many years, and I do feel that I struggled – probably a decade longer than I needed to  – because of my resistance to that one thought. Change your thoughts, change your life. Why? Because I felt you were telling me that I was causing… intentionally my depression, that I was to blame. Also, I felt like saying an affirmation was like spraying whipping cream on a pile of baloney.

00:35:54 Rosemary

Sorry, that’s that’s a picture. Thank you.

00:35:57 Dr Chris

Yeah, usually I swear, but I thought I would keep it. Use different B word so I used baloney instead, but you can fill in the gaps there.

00:36:05 Rosemary

Got it.

00:36:05 Dr Chris

Here’s what is important for people to understand because I know many people are in my camp, in that resistant camp about changing your thoughts, change your life. And here’s the thing though, in psychoneuroimmunology, nowhere does it say you have to believe the thought. If we can just be curious and open and perhaps just be neutral in our thinking. Right me, the rephrase, the common problematic thought was I am unworthy, I am unwanted, I am unlovable, I’m not good enough, I’m not good enough-itis then the rephrase would be I am worthy, which that’s hard. That was a stretch for me to believe. So the neutral thought is just I am, and we don’t fill in the blank.

00:36:51 Rosemary

Yeah, Yeah. I think everybody could agree with that. We all can say I am… and it’s.

00:36:57 Dr Chris

Truthful because you’re here, you are. The key point that we have to understand though, to connect this to psychoneuroimmunology is when you say I am worthy, is your nervous system stressing out with that thought? The neuropeptide cascade is different, than the neuropeptide cascade with I am unworthy, and in time you will create different hormones and lo and behold, you will feel better. So there you go.

00:37:26 Rosemary
And I appreciate you saying that. We had a guest on a few weeks ago, Doctor Louise Taylor, and she shared the story of, I think it was Louise Hay affirmations, and she said exactly what you did. I repeated these things to myself even though the thought came up after every one, that’s bullshit, she said. But I kept saying them until I believed them. And I think that probably is the rigor that’s required. And for those of us who were brought up, Western mindset, logic rules. Everything has to be proven. This is stepping out of our comfort zone. This is putting us in a place that we’re not used to. And what you said too… I’m going to extrapolate a little bit and correct me if I’ve gone too far. Especially at times such as we find ourselves in right now, where there’s so much polarization, life is so uncertain… If we watch the news, not only are we probably very dysregulated, but we’re constantly bombarded by shocking information. This has changed, that has changed. So are you suggesting that if we choose to not mull on what we’ve heard, think something else, that we can somehow avoid going deep into stress or depression or anxiety that paying attention to current events can cause?

00:38:55 Dr Chris

So the word avoid, we want to be mindful of that word because… So what I would say is with respect to the circumstances of the world, keep in mind that we just came through a pandemic. Feels… goodness me, it’s already been five years. So I exited stage left from the news many years ago. My husband is a CBC junkie. So I do still hear it. And for people who are listening, because I know that there’s, you know, people who are not Canadians. So that just stands for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. So if you’re a person that wants to be informed of what is happening around the world, then be mindful of what you do with that information, and how it affects your nervous system. So how do you feel after you watch the news? I’m too deep of an empathic person to feel settled after I watch the news, especially right before I go to bed. Because guess what? Cortisol also inhibits, It inhibits melatonin and how is one of the most important ways for us to regulate our lives, is with our sleep. So we have to be really careful with that. So I would say be in the world, but not of the world.

00:39:58 Rosemary

Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. Thank you for that feedback. Yes. And again, avoid – leads to wrong making and blame and judgment. So thank you for catching that. Overall, this theme that’s emerging from this conversation is we need to shift more from our thoughts, to paying attention to the impact of our thoughts on our body. And that’s something that people complain that they’re too busy, they’re stressed. Some people have to take two jobs to survive in these economic times. Like there is this business, there’s this fast pace. That’s why the food is being delivered at the door with no time to take in the aroma and get our gastrointestinal tract ready to digest. It’s so fast. But I think if people can incite curiosity and just play around with this a little bit, maybe they don’t believe it. But if they can just play with it and be curious and experiment for themselves. Do you recommend something like that for people who are a little dubious about treading this ground?

00:40:57 Dr Chris

We very much have come into a society of a pill for every ill, and this pill will fix me. And in naturopathic medicine, we’re about what’s the root cause, and recognize that if you visualize a tree, there isn’t just one root to a tree, there’s many roots to a tree. So you can have a few root causes to your mental health concern or autoimmune disease or cancer or whatever it may be. Whatever the condition that is affecting the physical body, the ground for healing, the soil for healing is regulation and settlement of this nervous system. Because in Canada we talk about the top five things that get Canadians at the end of the day: Heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, pulmonary issues, mental health. That’s five things, not necessarily in that order, but what’s behind all five of those? Stress But why don’t we just say the five things that get Canadians at the end of the day are stress and stress.

00:41:55 Dr Chris

And, everyone’s different in their capacity and their resiliency and their ability to handle not only physiological stresses, but mental and emotional and spiritual stresses. I look at my depressions as the way that my soul was calling me home. I felt often, that I was caught between two voices, the voice of the egoic mind of the world, telling me to succeed and strive. So that’s pulling me in this one direction. And then the other voice that was telling me that this isn’t serving you. And eventually, I listened to the whispers, you know, of my soul that were saying that there’s another way to navigate your healthcare, Chris. And that voice is within us. But this egoic voice is often a little louder and tends to drown out this other voice that can rise when we get into that space of stillness.

00:42:51 Rosemary

It’s the voice that’s accustomed to commanding our attention. And this, what you’ve just said ties into a quote that I’d like to share, quoting you. As we heal ourselves, the opportunity to expand our empathic presence is available to us. It is in this expansion, the capacity to hold the space between two hearts, that healing happens. It has been a gift to me to learn this process and to deepen and extend my ability to be loving in the moment with others. Fundamentally, I believe love is medicine. So you stepped out of the known, proven, familiar Western world into this deep abyss, and you found your footing in that new world.

00:43:38 Dr Chris

Yes, thank you. We’re all on a journey and there’s going to be some potholes, right? There’s going to be some hills to climb. There’s going to be some fun hills to go down too. But it’s really, I think for me, I didn’t feel that I could share or speak to, as we talked about earlier, this condition at all. I didn’t tell anyone… if my psychiatrist did not ask me point blank, do you have a plan to take your life this weekend? I wouldn’t offer it up. As patients, my advice to someone who’s listening, because we’re all patients at the end of the day. My advice is we can’t read your mind and so if you can just share that your truth. And again, that requires a few key things. It requires safety between the clinician and the patient. It requires connection and vulnerability and there’s many things that need to be established. It requires space and time. I remember going into my doctor’s office and five minute appointment and one complaint only please per visit.

00:44:45 Rosemary

Muffle your complaints, but just bring one. I laugh, but that’s actually not funny.  I’m wondering you’ve generously shared your story as the model for what you’ve been through and what you offer your clients. I wonder if you could just paint us a little picture of the ‘before’, Doctor Chris before the transformation and Doctor Chris now. I’m sure it’s a huge contrast.

00:45:10 Dr Chris

You mean like before? Like when I was working in the corporate world and now.

00:45:15 Rosemary

Yes.

00:45:16 Dr Chris

Oh goodness, yeah, really. The Yin and the Yang. When I was at the corporate, Chris, if you will, I was very buttoned up. You were never gonna see me sweat. I will always perform for you. I will always overachieve and out beat. The other guy, you tell me to jump, I’ll ask you how high. That’s how I operated very much in a suppressed state. I’ve heard Doctor Maté speak of this and other spiritual teachers. A beach ball. If you try to push a beach ball under the water, it’s going to bounce up in your face. And that’s these emotions that we hold. So the after – the clinician Chris, is one who is truthful in my expression, and vulnerable with my patients. I’m not above them. I’m alongside you. I might be one perhaps little inch showing my hand and extending my hand, to maybe help you take a little step up perhaps or over or around or wherever we’re going. You’re really the ultimate healer here. It’s not me. Right. 

00:46:26 Rosemary

It’s just that you’ve already done the journey, so you’ve walked the path ahead of those who you lead. That’s beautiful. Now I want to speak about your books. Amazon describes your best selling book Beyond the Label. 10 Steps to Improve Your Mental Health with Naturopathic Medicine as “an inspiring and empowering guide to emotional freedom from a naturopathic Doctor who took charge of her own life and mental health.” Would you like to share a bit more for our listeners what they could expect if they purchased your book?

00:46:59 Dr Chris

The reason I wrote the book was because there wasn’t, there wasn’t a book out there that spoke to actually healing some of these, these labels that, we can wear them like it’s us. And so I wanted to help people move beyond that diagnosis to this place of wellness and wholeness within outlining the 10 steps that I feel are important. If we look at it like you’re building a health house, so the body that you’re in is your home for your soul during this experience on the earth. And so the foundation of a house is.. we’ve got cement, right? We’ve got to clear the trees, etc. So the foundation for me is nutrition, sleep, movement, and then managing stress. That’s the foundation of your house. The next level of your house is… relates to this managing stress. What we’ve been talking about today, looking at our thoughts, managing our emotions, being with our emotions, how do we behave and react in the world. Or our ability or inability in my case, to set boundaries. Then we want to look at the role the environment plays from three perspectives. We’ve talked about one of them, which is neuroplasticity. The other two are epigenetics versus genetics. That means genes hold the gun lifestyle pulls the trigger and the quality of the air, food and water. There’s chemicals that can be disrupting receptors in your body. You might be making neurotransmitters, no problem, but can they get into the cell? Then compassion, and then you got to build your house. You’ve built your house. Where are you going to plant it but planted on a property that is rooted and grounded and based in love. Wrap it all up in love. So this is where self compassion comes in, right? Basically, what is good for you, like truly good, in one step for yourself. If you can just pick one thing. Is it more water? Is it more fruit, more vegetables? Is it protein…just pick one thing, start somewhere because I know it can seem daunting, right? It can seem daunting. I know it was for me. It can seem daunting, but just dial it back for yourself. You don’t have to get from zero to 100, you just have to get to 0.5.

00:49:22 Rosemary

Yeah, there’s no high marks for overachieving in this realm. That’s a null game in this world. You touched on this before. You wrote the Essential diet eating for mental Health also Moving Beyond, which is a journal for self discovery. That sounds interesting. Can you say a bit about that?

00:49:40 Dr Chris

So journaling has really been my way of conversing with my soul and also conversing with the egoic mind. I would always write out what happened, what was upsetting me, what’s weighing on me. In the spirit of Louise Hay, who I also had the pleasure of meeting, I would always finish with something positive, and gratitude. Let’s not under-emphasize the importance of having a gratitude practice can also shift the needle for you. Some of these simple things we just discount. My journals were often my best friend and I really feel that this is a lost art or skill or tool in the hedge of technology, putting pen to paper, there’s nothing like it.

00:50:28 Rosemary

I agree. I agree 100%. Now, I understand that you serve both people seeking physical and mental wellness support and also healing professionals. And I’m curious, do these very different groups come seeking similar or different types of support? Do they bring similar or different issues because they’re quite distinct.

00:50:49 Dr Chris

So I think they’re distinct partly because of the way our society’s structured from the egoic perspective, because really at the end of the day, we are all just people. We’re all just people. And so the label of doctor is an egoic label. I’m a human. I’m a human, so there’s differentiation, though it’s important. So patients will seek my care and clinicians will also seek, not only my care, but they’ll seek my guidance. And how can I help guide? Because, as you mentioned, I’ve seen you said I’ve seen nature by the doctors and no one talked to me about how I was breathing. So I recognize that I fell into a little bit of a space between the medical world, where there’s the doctors and the naturopathic doctors, and then there’s therapists and the counselors and therapists and counselors, they don’t know as much about the role that nutrition can play. And then the doctors, they don’t know as much about the role managing your mind and psychoneuro…. So there’s a bit of a gap. And I feel like naturopathic medicine for those of us who have additional trainings, Sat Dharam Kaur and Alison Creech and Kate Haslett, and there’s quite a few naturopathic doctors in the Compassionate Inquiry program. We bridge that gap, yeah.

00:52:10 Rosemary

It’s almost as if there needs to be a new title for the work you do, so that people seeking this full mind body support can recognize your qualifications, and spot you and seek you out. So we’ll put that out there for someone to invent – we definitely need a new category of physician.

00:52:33 Dr Chris

Yeah.

00:52:34 Rosemary

Now I wonder, just for the listeners, everything we’ve discussed today, Dr Chris’s books, all the books we’ve talked about, her website, all of those will be in the show notes. So I’m wondering if you could share a little bit about the courses you offer and the retreat you offer that looks phenomenal… out in Canmore?

00:52:52 Dr Chris

The courses that I have were, there’s one for patients called Moving Beyond and there’s one for clinicians. So the clinician course was birthed out of this need to help clinicians deepen their skill set into this mind-body-spirit piece. So very good at the physical level, very good at telling you what to eat and the blood tests to do and functional testing, etc. But where they fall down a little bit is in this, how do I have conversations about thoughts and emotions, boundaries, etc. So that’s where the clinician course was sparked.The patient course came out of the book and patients reading the book and then wanting to work with me, but me not being able to see everyone because there is only 8 hours in a day that I’m willing to work. As a recovering workaholic, yes, and very perfectionist type of person. At one point I had a very long, lengthy wait list. And that’s why I want to train more clinicians because then they can then help more if I work with one patient. Perhaps the ripple effect might expand to their family and their circle of influence. But with doctors, they’re seeing lots of patients too, right? Yeah. So that’s where the courses – how they came about and they’re there for people. You can do it self study just if you read through it and you’re interested please just reach out to me and I can explain how to navigate. I was doing group programs and I haven’t decided when I’m going to do the next group program. So there is the self study and available, option available. And also you can go through the program and then have a call with me or to if you have questions or need some guidance or support. And then I’m working on a directory as well – of clinicians that have taken the program and the training. So you can reach out to them as well.

00:54:46 Dr Chris

And then OK, so the retreat, I call it the Mind Body Soul Retreat and I just love it. Kate Haslett is also a Compassionate Inquiry practitioner and she’s one of the Co facilitators as well as Doctor Julie Sapp and Jill Bullock, who’s a mindset teacher and yoga instructor. And it was really – the most healing happened at a profound rate for me when I attended retreats. The ability to be in a container, to step out of your life and to really be held in nature, in particular, with other compassionate souls. It was just so impactful for me in my own healing that then I wanted to offer the retreats, or a retreat to people as well. So that happens in October. So if that’s of interest to you, the landing page is there for you.

00:55:37 Rosemary

OK, great. And that will all be in the show notes. So we’re coming to the end of our time together. Dr Chris, is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to speak about?

00:55:48 Dr Chris

I think the one thing I want to mention is just about the emotion side, because we talked about the thoughts and bringing awareness to OK, what is the nature of the thought I’m thinking? Is it serving me? But where is it pushing me into that in terms of my nervous system state? And work with that  – everyone who’s listening. And I just want to mention the emotions too, because those two drive each other and the emotions. So there’s a lovely book by Jill Bolte Taylor called My Stroke of Insight. She’s a neuroscientist who had a stroke, and she realized that emotions themselves actually are only going to live for about two minutes. The pure essence of the emotion, but it is in fact our thoughts that drive them perhaps – to live forever, in the case perhaps of bitterness and resentment. And forgiveness is another important step in the healing journey as well. 

I often hear people say I’m afraid of my emotions or even with, as I mentioned with, Gabor, I said, Well, I don’t do anger. The you’re a vessel, you’re a container, and all these emotions exist within you like a slinky in a sense. They can come and they can go. They can rise and they can fall, but understand that your emotions, in a sense are – can be like waves. Some of them can be like you can feel like you’re being washed over by a tsunami. So you’re the ocean though, right? And as the ocean, you can hold that wave as it rises within you, it will fall back into you.  You are the container. They’re not to be afraid of… And I will just quote Jeff Foster here. He said healing. And then you can insert anxiety, depression, sadness, whatever it is you’re working on for yourself or that you want to heal within yourself. Let’s just say sadness, healing sadness. So sadness doesn’t want to be healed, it wants to be held. So if you visualize your emotions like children and for three-year old knocks on your door and they’re hungry and they’re cold, you’re not going to slam the door in their face, I would hope, right? You’re going to welcome them in and these emotions need to be welcomed and held by you, felt by you. That’s part of the journey. And, then for people like myself who have really had this elevation and escalation and experience of psychosis, there’s a lot of emotions up there, right? And so I’ll just say this last piece that when I stopped disowning this aspect of myself, stopped hating, if you will, because I did hate psychosis. Once I started loving it, it stopped showing up, stopped calling for my attention.

00:58:43 Rosemary

Though the metaphor of children is very apt because children want our attention. Thank you so much.

00:58:50 Dr Chris

You’re welcome.

00:58:51 Rosemary

Thank you so much for being with us today, Dr Chris. And normally, I would close by inviting you to share a Pearl of wisdom, but in homage to Louise Hay, maybe we can invite you to share a Pearl of inspiration with our listeners, something for them to put a full stop to this conversation.

00:59:12 Dr Chris

I would say that the essence of you is love. And if you can find a way to lead and enter the conversation with yourself from a loving perspective, to shift that inner voice from that critic to someone that’s gentler and softer and kinder, and take that helping hand and allow that to lead you to the essence of you, which ultimately wants to be whole. And all of you is welcome.

00:59:51 Rosemary

Doctor Christina Bjorndal, thank you so much for being with us today on the Gifts of Trauma podcast.

00:59:58 Dr Chris

Thanks for having me, it’s great to be here.

01:00:04 Rosemary

If you’ve been listening to our podcast and are curious about the compassionate inquiry approach developed by Doctor Gabor Maté and Sat Dharam Kaur, consider joining the Professional Training Program. It’s open to all healing professionals, including naturopaths, physicians, body workers, coaches, and therapists. In addition to learning how to use compassion to support your clients in their most vulnerable moments with greater empathy and authenticity, you’ll also deepen your own internal process. If you’re interested, look for the link in the show notes. Applications close March 30th. 

The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen on Apple, Spotify, all podcast platforms, rate, review and share it with your clients, colleagues and family. Subscribe and you won’t miss an episode. 

Please note this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for personal therapy or a DIY formula for self therapy.