Heal with Grace

Grace Secker

Heal With Grace is a podcast that invites listeners into the world of holistic healing. Hosted by Grace Secker, a trained holistic psychotherapist, yoga therapist, and nervous system coach, each episode delves into the interconnected realms of mental, physical, and spiritual health. The podcast offers a unique blend of personal stories, professional insights, and practical tools for healing.

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S1 · E139
Tuesday · 25 min
139. What I Wish Every Therapist or Coach Knew About the Nervous System
This one's for the therapists, coaches, and practitioners. (And honestly, if you're a listener who's ever sat across from a provider who didn't know how to help you stay. This episode is why I made it.) Here's the gap I want to name. Most of us were trained beautifully in one half of this work. We learned to hold space, build the therapeutic relationship, sit with hard feelings, work with trauma histories. What we were never taught is that the nervous system is actively generating physical symptoms in a huge portion of our caseloads. Some physicians in this space estimate close to 40% of people walking through a primary care door have symptoms driven this way. Those are the same people landing on our couches, in our rooms, on our Zoom calls. And a lot of us were never taught to even assess for it. I know I wasn't. So in this episode I'm walking through the difference between regulating a nervous system and rewiring it, and why almost all of us were only trained for one. Regulation is state management. It's the longer exhale, the feet on the floor, the co-regulation. It's foundational and it matters enormously (a nervous system that never gets to feel safe cannot do deeper work). BUT if regulation is all we do, we're managing the danger alarm instead of updating it. I also get into how the brain learns a symptom in the first place, what neuroplastic symptoms actually are, why "your pain is real AND the signal is coming from the brain" is the most important thing you can say to a client, and what changes on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon when you finally have a map for the client whose GI tests keep coming back normal. And I'll tell you what this did for me: it didn't just change my clients' outcomes, it changed how it feels to do the work. I stopped doubting whether I could help. Resources mentioned: Free neuroplastic symptom assessment tool Free practitioner masterclass, Tuesday, September 8 MindBody Integration Method practitioner training, launching this fall How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E138
August 18 · 45 min
138. Healing Chronic Pain That Hasn't Budged in Years with Dr. David Schechter
If you've been living with chronic pain that won't go away -> the kind that hasn't budged in years, no matter how many doctors, scans, or treatments you've thrown at it -> this conversation is going to give you something most appointments never have: a reason it makes sense, and a real way forward. Dr. David Schechter has been treating chronic pain through a mind-body lens for decades. He trained under Dr. John Sarno himself -> the physician who started this entire field -> after walking into his office as a young medical student with knee pain that wouldn't quit. What Sarno told him that day changed the direction of his career. And what happened at that Monday night seminar might sound a lot like what you've been waiting to feel: a weight lifting. In this episode, David breaks down the difference between acute and chronic pain, and why anything past the 3-6 month mark means your nervous system is involved -> no matter what your scans show. We get into the concept every patient needs to know: the nocebo effect. Because the words a doctor says to you ("you have a horrible spine," "you'll need surgery in five years") don't just describe your body. They can shape your pain. Language, as David puts it, is the software of the brain. We also talk about what it takes to heal symptoms that have been around for years, not months -> the persistence, the doubts worth exploring, and why focusing on capacity instead of pain changes the trajectory. And he shares two stories I can't stop thinking about: patients who saw more than twenty physicians, and finally found their way to neuroplastic healing because AI pointed them somewhere no doctor had. If your pain has been dismissed, mislabeled, or just plain stuck -> this one's for you. Find Dr. David Schechter: Website Books: The MindBody Workbook Think Away Your Pain ATNS Practitioner Directory How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E137
August 11 · 26 min
137. What I’m Doing to Prep My Nervous System for Travel
You know that feeling when a trip is coming up and your brain starts running a whole side operation at 3am? That's what this episode is about: how to calm your nervous system before a trip, instead of white-knuckling your way through the two weeks beforehand. Grace is leaving for a three week trip and instead of packing her schedule and trying to get everything done before she goes, she's doing the opposite. She calls it her grounding period. No hard workouts. No last-minute house projects. No pretending the anxiety isn't there. Just noticing it, writing it down, and letting it be there without making it mean something's wrong. She also tells the story of the time she went straight from an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica to a flight to Europe, no integration time, no rest, and how that taught her more about nervous system regulation than almost anything else has. Plus the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual prep she does now, what she actually does when a flare hits mid-trip, and the realization she just had about jet lag that's going to blow your mind a little. Resources mentioned: John Sarno / mind-body pain literature How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E136
August 4 · 26 min
136. Your Chronic Pain Is 100% Real and Here's Why Your Nervous System Is Still Behind It
If you've ever had someone tell you your pain is real and then in the same breath tell you there's nothing wrong; this episode is for you. Here's the thing the medical model never made room for: both can be true at the same time. Your chronic pain and illness are real. Completely, 100% real. And your nervous system is still driving it. That is not a contradiction. That is how pain actually works. Symptoms are not a damage meter. They’re a danger signal. Your brain's best guess about how much threat your body is under. Which means two people can have the identical MRI findings and one of them is in agony and one of them is fine. And a person with completely clean scans can be in the worst pain of their life. The finding does not predict the feeling. That's not a flaw in the system; that's the system doing exactly what it was built to do. Grace breaks this down in this episode with two groups: people whose testing comes back clean (negative testing is not the end of the road — for a lot of you, it's the beginning of the real answer), and people who do have real positive findings. Both have nervous system involvement. The nervous system is the volume dial on pain, and it decides how loud the signal gets turned up — regardless of what the scan shows. There's also a sharp test in here worth knowing: pain that moves around from your shoulders to your hip to your jaw is not structural. Tissue damage doesn't travel. A dysregulated nervous system does. And pain that eases on vacation — if a beach touches it, it's nervous system. Save this one for when you’re flaring and need to hear it again. Resources mentioned: - Dr. Schechter — mind-body physician [GEL: link to his previous HWG episode] - PRT practitioner listserv - Practitioner masterclass - Mind-Body Healing Method program for nervous system healing How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E135
July 28 · 44 min
135. What to Do When Healing Feels Stuck with Karden Rabin
If you've been doing the breathwork, the journaling, the somatic work and you're still stuck — this episode is the one that explains why. Karden Rabin didn't arrive at this work as a patient who got lucky. He arrived as the practitioner who thought he had the answer. Twelve years as a bodyworker — craniosacral, structural integration, myofascial release, the whole thing. Then a seven-month horror show of back pain landed him on John Sarno's book. And he couldn't unknow it. He's now the founder of Somia International and the HEAL Program and the author of The Secret Language of the Body. What he brings to this conversation is the frame most people in this space are missing. Every technique you've been using; breathwork, brain retraining, journaling, somatic exercises is doing the same thing. It's interrupting and updating a protective pattern your nervous system built when it believed you were in danger. Most of those patterns aren't dangerous anymore. They're just on loop. The game isn't collecting more tools. It's recognizing the pattern and updating it toward safety. He also reframes something a lot of people in this work need to hear: calm isn't the goal. Calm is a dependent state; it's what happens when two things are true. You feel safe from danger (yin). And you know you can handle danger if it shows up (yang). Most people who've done a ton of inner work have a lot of yin. They're missing the yang. Not more softness - the felt sense that if life gets hard, you've got yourself. We also go into the "I can't" — the deep freeze that lives underneath most type A behavior, right before the double espresso and the push-through. And why dissolving it is completely different from powering past it. Resources mentioned: - The Secret Language of the Body by Karden Rabin and Jennifer Mann - Somia International / HEAL Program - John Sarno — Healing Back Pain How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E134
July 21 · 29 min
134. Nervous System 101: How to Know If It's Behind Your Chronic Pain or Illness
There's a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from understanding everything and still not changing. You've read the books. You've listened to the podcasts. You can explain neuroplastic symptoms. You might even be fully bought in. And you're still sitting in your body going — so why isn't this working? That's what this episode is about. Here's the thing most people in this space haven't heard yet: insight and regulation are two completely different skills. They happen in different parts of your brain. You can have a life-changing realization about why your body does what it does, and your nervous system can sit there completely unmoved by it. Because it doesn't speak the language of insight. It speaks the language of experience. If a symptom has been in your body for more than six months — the pain, the fatigue, the gut stuff, the dizziness — your nervous system is involved. That's true no matter what your labs say. No matter what specialists have or haven't found. No matter how many times someone has told you they're not sure what's wrong. Your nervous system and chronic pain or illness are connected in ways the old medical model just never had room for. Grace shares from her own journey in this one — including a stretch where she went deep into the physical route, got caught in protocol after protocol, and realized she wasn't working with what actually mattered: the emotional state, the belief patterns, the stuff her body had been holding. The shift that changed everything for her wasn't more understanding. It was structure. A repeatable, sequenced framework for actually practicing regulation — not just knowing about it. This episode is for you if you're somewhere between knowing and doing. If you've absorbed all the education and your body still hasn't caught up. If you're wondering whether the nervous system piece is really what's going on for you. The map doesn't move you. The road does. How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E133
July 14 · 44 min
133. How Childhood Trauma Shapes Who We Become and What Clinicians Want to Know
If you've ever heard that childhood trauma and chronic illness are connected — and immediately thought "but was mine actually bad enough to count?" — this episode is for you. Dr. Monica Fitzgerald is a licensed clinical psychologist, trauma researcher, and director of the Center for Resilience and Well-being at the University of Colorado Boulder. And she breaks something open in this conversation that I think a lot of people need to hear: the big T and little T framework? It's outdated. What we now know is that the small, ongoing, repeated things — the criticism, the dismissal, the not-quite-feeling-safe — can wire your nervous system just as powerfully as a single event. Sometimes more. She walks me through the three E's of trauma: the Event, the Experience, and the Effects. That second E is the one that changes everything. Two siblings can grow up in the same house and have completely different nervous system responses. Because trauma isn't just what happened — it's the meaning your system made of it, in the body of the person you were at that age, with the resources you had. We also talk about the backpack most people are carrying. Full of moments that made them question themselves, doubt their own experience, feel like they needed to be more or better to deserve love or safety. That backpack doesn't stay in the past. It shows up in chronic pain, in not trusting your body, in handing your healing over to every provider and hoping they fix it. And it starts to get lighter when you stop going at it alone. Monica's closing thought is something I'll be sitting with: we're not built to do this alone. None of us. And if a therapist you've seen has seemed overwhelmed by your story — that wasn't a sign your story was too much. It was a sign that wasn't the right fit. RESOURCES MENTIONED: - Dr. Monica Fitzgerald: Resilient Families Therapy - Center for Resilience and Well-being, CU Boulder How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E132
July 7 · 20 min
132. How to Actually Start Regulating Your Nervous System
You've probably done a lot. The podcasts, the books, the breathwork, the therapy. You might be able to explain how your nervous system works better than most people can. And you're still not where you want to be. That gap — between knowing and actually healing — is exactly what this episode is about. Understanding and healing are two completely different skills. Understanding lives in the mind. Healing lives in the body. Your nervous system doesn't respond to insight. It responds to experience. You can have the clearest, most accurate awareness of what's keeping you stuck — and your body can still be sitting there completely unmoved by it. Grace calls this the map versus the road. Insight is the map. Regulation is the road. And a map, no matter how accurate, no matter how detailed, never moved anyone a single inch. She also goes into something a lot of people skip: you don't have to trace every trauma back to its origin or have everything figured out before you start. The work doesn't require perfect understanding first. It requires actually doing it. And there is a structure to it — it's not vague. It's sequenced, repeatable, something you can actually follow. If you've been circling the information for a while and wondering when things are going to actually shift -> this one's for you. Resources mentioned: Free mind-body masterclass training Practitioner training waitlist How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E131
June 30 · 25 min
131. How Andrea Reclaimed Health Anxiety and Bladder Symptoms
If you've been told your interstitial cystitis is something you just learn to manage — this episode is for you. Andrea spent two years cycling through doctors, prescriptions, the IC diet, and specialists. Her symptoms started as IC, then added vulvodynia, then joint pain. Different labels, same pattern: her nervous system running on constant high alert. What finally shifted things wasn't a new protocol. It was the moment she fully, 100% believed her mind was driving her symptoms. Not a little bit. Not "maybe." All the way. She talks about what that actually looked like in practice — stopping the elimination diets (which were making her more hypervigilant, not better), cancelling a specialist appointment, quitting the IC Facebook groups, never going back to medical Reddit. Not from giving up. From finally understanding what was causing her symptoms. There's a moment in this conversation where Andrea describes going from counting the minutes between bathroom trips — giving herself gold stars for every three hours — to just... not. Not tracking it. Not thinking about it. That quiet shift in mental focus was the first real sign something was changing. She also talks about the tools that helped. Heart coherence meditations. Channeling the feeling of vacation. The Eras Tour. Music. Not because they're magic, but because they showed her nervous system what safety actually feels like — and it turns out, you can practice that. One of the things she said that stuck with me: "This was never just about the symptoms. I needed to change the way I approach life." That's what this episode is really about. Resources mentioned: Andrea's Instagram: @instinctualmothering and @socialboob How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E130
June 23 · 43 min
130. How to build Self Trust in Healing with Dr. Rita Gupta
You've been to the specialists. You've done the tests. And you still feel like nobody really knows what's wrong — or how to fix it. That's not you failing. That's a gap in medicine that mind-body medicine chronic pain practitioners are finally starting to close. Dr. Rita Gupta spent almost 20 years as a primary care physician watching her patients get sicker despite everything she offered. The referrals, the labs, the medications. She had access to every record, sat with them through every specialist visit. And she was watching people not get better. That wore on her. Then she ruptured a disc in her neck and was told surgery was her only option. She didn't take it. She turned inward -> toward integrated medicine, mind-body work, pain reprocessing therapy, mindfulness. And she eventually left conventional medicine entirely to practice the kind of care she couldn't offer inside the system. In this episode, we get into something that doesn't get talked about enough: self-trust as medicine. Not as a mindset hack or a feel-good concept. As an actual biological process that shifts your nervous system, lowers your threat response, and creates real relief. Here's what changes when you stop trying to force your body into submission and learn to be with what's there instead: your threshold expands. The loop breaks. Your values become a compass instead of a source of grief. Dr. Rita says it plainly - every time you can sit with a sensation without collapsing, you're building something. Not ignoring it. Not giving up. Building. Resources mentioned in this episode: - Alan Gordon / Pain Reprocessing Therapy - Ellen Alden's Long COVID community - Dr. Rita Gupta's website How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E129
June 16 · 20 min
129. How the masks you carry impact your health
Most of us never decided to start performing. It just happened, early, quietly, because we needed to belong. And your body has been carrying the weight of every single mask. This is a solo episode, and it's one Grace has been sitting with for a while. Not about somatic tools or specific nervous system signals — about the deeper question underneath all of it. What does real healing actually require? Here's what doesn't get said enough in the mind-body space about people pleasing and chronic symptoms: your body isn't malfunctioning. It's been watching you override yourself for years, and at some point, it stopped whispering and started screaming. That's not a breakdown. That's your nervous system saying she has to come back. What you think of as your personality? A lot of the time, it's just the most successful coping strategy you found before you were old enough to choose differently. The path forward isn't a massive overhaul. You don't have to quit your job tonight or cut everyone off. It's a thousand tiny moments where you choose truth over performance. Every single one of those is a message to your nervous system -> she's back, it's safe to be her. How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E128
June 9 · 41 min
128. The Root Cause Behind Chronic Symptoms in High-Achieving Women with Ashley Novak, FNTP
Ashley Novak is a Certified Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), Restorative Wellness Practitioner (RWP), and Holistic Lifestyle Coach with a BS in Biochemistry. As the founder of Seeded Sage Wholeness, she takes a root-cause approach to women's health — specializing in gut health, hormones, fertility, and acne. Ashley's work lives at the intersection of functional medicine, ancestral wisdom, and women's empowerment, helping her clients move from chasing symptoms to truly understanding their bodies. She co-hosts the Yoni University Podcast and is passionate about reclaiming women's health intuition and building a legacy of generational wellness. Follow her journey on Instagram @itsashleynovak. In Ep 128 we go deep on the bridge between functional medicine and nervous system work. Why you can have the diagnoses, all of them, AND still need to start with your nervous system. Why Ashley calls it the "scab that never heals." What created the wound first, before the parasite, before the H. pylori, before the mold? Almost always stress. We get into the "yes and" approach. Yes, the parasite is real. AND your body is freaking robust -> something weakened it before the parasite could take hold. We talk about why the women in Grace and Ashley's worlds are so often the highest functioning, the eldest daughters, the recovering perfectionists who do not realize they have been in fight or flight for 15 years. We also unpack what women's health research gaps mean for fasting, sleep, fueling, and the ADHD reframe. (Women were not included in medical research until 1993. That is recent. That changes everything we have been told about female bodies.) And we land on the free basics most people are still bypassing -> water, sleep, walking, sunlight, saying no. Not because the supplements are wrong. But because the body cannot use them until the basics are in place. If you have been to every functional practitioner, gotten every test, taken every supplement, and you are still stuck -> this episode is the missing piece. Connect with Ashley: - Ashley Novak, Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner - Instagram How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E127
June 2 · 20 min
127. What I'd Focus On If I Were Starting Over Healing Chronic Pain & Illness
If you have been at this for months. Or years. Doctor after doctor. Protocol after protocol. Nothing fully landing. This is the episode I needed when I was you. In Ep 127, I am taking you back to the early stages of my own healing. The crying in waiting rooms. The maxed-out credit cards. The functional practitioner who handed me a brain rewiring pamphlet that I dismissed because I was not ready. There are six things I would do completely differently if I were starting over. These are not protocols. These are the patterns underneath all the protocols. Education first. Stop frantically searching. Build tolerance for discomfort. Chase trust instead of relief. Repair your relationship with your body before it feels better. Stop looking for the perfect approach. Each of these took me years to learn. Some of them took specific clients of mine in the Mind Body Healing Method to teach me. If I can save you even a fraction of that time, this episode did its job. If you find yourself constantly switching practitioners every 5 sessions, panic-searching at 2am, or treating your body like the enemy until it "earns" your love -> pin this one. Come back to it the next time you are about to swap programs. Your body is not broken. You are not broken. You are missing the patterns under the protocols. How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E126
May 26 · 41 min
126. How Callie recovered from IC/OAB/IBS and manages OCD
If you have been told for years that interstitial cystitis or overactive bladder is just something you have to live with, this is the recovery story you need to hear. Callie Krajcir suffered with IC, OAB, IBS, and vulvodynia for 25 years -> and got her life back in 2-3 years through nervous system work. Not the IC diet. Not another supplement. Not another procedure. Callie is a bladder dietician, the vice chair of the Interstitial Cystitis Association, and runs Road to Remission, the leading recovery program for IC and OAB. Here's the part that catches everyone off guard -> she's a dietician who has stopped prescribing the IC diet to almost all of her clients. In this episode she and Grace get into exactly why, and what they're seeing instead. They also get real about the OCD piece, which Callie was finally diagnosed with at 28 after two years of trying to figure out what was happening. She talks about relationship OCD, emetophobia, the fear loops most people in the pelvic pain community are stuck in, and why ERP (the gold standard OCD therapy) works on the exact same nervous system mechanism as PRT for chronic pain. If you have been white-knuckling through every flight, every meal, every plan with friends -> scanning for bathrooms, bailing at the last second, terrified of strawberries and seltzer water -> this one is going to crack something open. Callie's honesty about what "healed" actually means when your symptoms used to be daily is worth the listen on its own. Resources mentioned: Road to Remission with Callie Krajcir (IC / OAB recovery program) Callie's Instagram + podcast NoCD (OCD-specialized therapy company) How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E125
May 19 · 36 min
125. How To Heal Chronic Symptoms: 5 Phases That Actually Work
If you've been told you need to "regulate your nervous system" and you're still wondering what that actually means, this episode is the one. Today we're walking through how to heal chronic symptoms from the inside out -> the five phases I take every single client through inside the Mind Body Healing Method. Most of us start this work doing one thing. Maybe a lot of somatic exercises. Maybe a ton of brain training. Maybe just reading book after book about the nervous system. And then we wonder why our symptoms aren't shifting. Here's what I've learned. It's not that any of those tools are wrong. It's that they were never meant to work on their own. Your body can't soften when your brain is still sounding the alarm. And your brain can't update if your body never gets to feel safe. They go together. I'm walking you through Recognize. Rewire. Regulate. Integrate. Reclaim. Each phase is doing something specific -> changing your relationship to the signal, retraining the thinking brain, expanding what your body can hold, releasing what's been stuck for years, and then building a life you actually want to be in. We talk about why somatic work alone wasn't enough for me, why I waited to add body-based work until after brain training in my program, and why the integration phase is the part most people skip -> the one I think is the secret sauce. If you've been in this work for a while and you're still stuck, this is the episode that will help you see where the gap actually is. RESOURCES MENTIONED - Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) - Liana, in-program therapist + coach How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E124
May 12 · 36 min
124. 7 Signs of a Dysregulated Nervous System Most People Miss
If you have been chasing test after test and the doctors keep telling you everything looks fine -> this is the episode where you find out why. Today Grace walks you through the 7 signs of a dysregulated nervous system that almost nobody connects back to chronic symptoms. You are not making it up. Your pain is real. Your bloating is real. Your fatigue, your dizziness, your reactions to food and smells and weather -> all real. They are also exactly what nervous system dysregulation symptoms look like when your brain has been stuck in danger mode for a long time. In this episode Grace breaks down what neuroplastic symptoms actually are, why "normal labs" are usually a green light not a dead end, and the checklist she walks every new client through in their first few weeks of working together. She also talks about why the labels you have been carrying around (IBS, MCAS, chronic fatigue, hypermobility flares, IC, OAB, migraines, fibro) are not life sentences, and what shifts when you stop identifying with the diagnosis and start training your brain. If you have been doing the supplements and the elimination diets and the protocols and the PT and you still feel stuck -> the missing piece is your brain and your nervous system. Real talk: not everything is neuroplastic. But if even a few of these 7 signs land hard, you are in the right place. And there is a path forward. Grace is hosting a FREE live masterclass on May 13th to take this one step further. SIGN UP HERE How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E123
May 5 · 26 min
123. How Your Personality Traits Keep Your Nervous System Stuck
If you've ever caught yourself thinking "that's just me -> I'm an anxious person," or "I've always been a perfectionist, it's just how I am" -> this one's for you. In this episode, I'm walking you through the 6 personality traits that show up over and over again in people with chronic symptoms. Anxiousness. Pressure. Perfectionism. People pleasing. Catastrophizing. Black and white thinking. These aren't who you are. They're learned patterns. Which means they can be unlearned. I'm digging into how each one keeps your nervous system stuck in threat mode, where it actually came from (hint -> it's almost never random), and the small shifts that start to loosen the grip. I'm also sharing the moment my therapist called me out on my own perfectionism in grad school -> and the light bulb that finally went off for me. If you've been doing the work, listening to podcasts, reading the books, and you still feel like something keeps pulling you back into the loop -> it's probably one of these. Maybe more than one. The good news is, naming it is half the work. Once you can see the pattern, you can step outside of it. You don't have to fix your personality. You just have to give your nervous system a different message than the one it's been getting for years. Resources mentioned in this episode: Sign up for my FREE Live Masterclass happening May 15th : How to know if your symptoms are nervous system driven and what to do next Pain Reprocessing Therapy How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E122
April 28 · 50 min
122. Are You Putting Pressure on Yourself to Get Better? With Lindsay Vine
If you've been doing all the right things and still putting pressure on yourself to heal faster, this conversation might land deeply. Grace sits down with Lindsay Vine, an ME/CFS and long COVID recovery coach who spent seven and a half years navigating her own healing journey, including a period of being fully bedbound. Lindsay now works one-on-one with clients and teaches mind-body and neuroplasticity courses within the healthcare system in British Columbia, Canada. She also co-created the CFS Programs Guide, a searchable resource covering 34+ recovery programs to help people find the right fit without the overwhelm. Together, they explore how the pressure to "get better" can become the very thing keeping the nervous system stuck. They discuss the role of goodism — the deep need to be seen as good — and how it drives people to turn recovery into another achievement to get right. Lindsay shares her own turning point of shifting from valuing achievements to valuing who she is, and they talk through what it looks like when brain retraining feels fake, why positive psychology alone isn't always enough, and how doing less can sometimes be the real healing move. They also break down the three pathways that keep people stuck — worry, pressure, and self-criticism — and what to pivot to instead: gratitude, focusing on wins, and self-compassion. This episode is for anyone who's ever thought, "I should have figured this out by now." Find Lindsay: Website Post Viral Podcast CFS Programs Guide Listen to Episode 14: Healing ME/CFS Using Brain Training and Nervous System Regulation How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E121
April 21 · 30 min
121. 6 Ways To Create Safety in Your Nervous System
In this solo episode, Grace breaks down what it actually means to create safety in the nervous system — moving beyond the vague advice of "just feel safe" and into six specific, practical approaches that listeners can start using right away. She explores why a dysregulated nervous system keeps responding to non-dangerous things as threats, and why safety isn't something you can think your way into — it has to be felt in the body. Grace walks through the power of accepting where you are instead of fighting it, how suppressed emotions keep the system stuck in chronic activation, the role of spiritual connection in co-regulation, and why authentic self-expression may be the deepest safety signal of all. Drawing from her own healing journey and clinical experience, she gets honest about what it took to stop performing okayness and start actually feeling it. This episode builds on her popular earlier conversation with Vanessa Blackstone in Episode 24, going deeper with concrete examples and practices. An episode to save and return to — each practice builds over time, and different ones will land for different people. Referenced episode: Ep 24. How to Create Your Own Authentic Message of Safety with Vanessa Blackstone: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2346801/episodes/15170620 How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website
S1 · E120
April 14 · 36 min
120. How to Recover from Migraines, POTS & GI Issues Through Your Nervous System
Kayla Jacobsen is a licensed clinical social worker and mental health therapist based in Minnesota, where she works at a small group practice supporting individuals navigating anxiety, chronic pain, trauma, and traits associated with being a Highly Sensitive Person. Her approach is relational and holistic, shaped deeply by her own healing journey with chronic migraines and a sensitive nervous system. Through the Mind-Body Healing Program, Kayla experienced meaningful shifts in how she relates to her emotions, beliefs, and symptoms — work that continues to inform how she shows up with clients today. In this episode, Kayla shares what it was like to have migraines starting at age 10, cycle through Western and Eastern medicine without lasting answers, and eventually realize that information-gathering had become its own form of avoidance. She and Grace explore how perfectionism, shame, and suppressed anger were quietly driving her symptoms — and what actually changed when she stopped trying to fix her migraines and started relating to them differently. Kayla also talks about what this work has opened up in her therapy practice, including how she now invites conversations about physical symptoms into sessions and incorporates more experiential, nervous system-informed approaches with her clients. Find Kayla: Psychology Today Willow Creek Counseling How to work with Grace: Practitioner Training-Mind Body Integtration Method Founding Cohort Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms Work with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's Connect with Grace Connect on Instagram Check out my website

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