842: From Severe Disability to Complete Wellness With Lauren Vaknine

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this podcast shares an incredible journey of healing from complete severe disability to total wellness. And when I met today’s guest, I knew I had to have her on the podcast for her to share her story and her process because she’s helped many other people go through similar healing journeys. I’m here with Lauren Vaknine who’s a leading master holistic health coach, a wellness educator, a writer, speaker, and has her own podcast, the popular Recondition podcast, as well as she’s a mom. She’s a leading voice of wellness in the UK, and she uses the experience and knowledge that she gained during her three-decade-long journey from severe disability to complete healing, to help women heal and transform their lives using a wide range of holistic healing arts and techniques in a unique whole person approach. And we delve into some of these today, but I encourage you to just really lean in and listen to her story, which is absolutely incredible, but also the parts that actually were most impactful for her that may be ones that are part of the journey for you or that you haven’t explored yet. She gives a lot of great advice and also incredible understanding in this episode. So let’s join Lauren. Lauren, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Lauren: Thank you so much for having me, Katie.

Katie: Well, I’m so excited to get to chat again because we got to chat together for your podcast. And I love the work that you’re doing in the world. And I got to also watch your TED Talk, which I actually love that they took it down because to me that indicates that there were some powerful things that you said. And you’ve also been on quite the incredible healing journey. I’ve had my own healing journey, which I’ve shared on this podcast, but I feel like yours was absolutely amazing. All of the things that you went through and what you learned from that, and now how you are turning that into transformation for other people by sharing your story. So I feel like this conversation cannot start without the background of your incredible story. And I would love if you would be willing to start there and kind of give everyone listening some context for the continued conversation we’ll have.

Lauren: Absolutely. And first, thank you for having me on. I’m such a OG listener of the Wellness Mama podcast. So it’s really great to be here. So I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis just before my second birthday. I started having symptoms at around 18 months, which showed up right after the measles rubella vaccine. It was just before the MMR was released. So it was a lighter dose almost. And it showed up right after that. I got a virus and then my ankles swelled up with inflammation. And my parents didn’t know what it was. The doctors didn’t know what it was. It was the mid 80s. And, you know, autoimmune conditions in children weren’t so recognized then. And my mom kept hearing the words growing pains, it must be growing pains, or it must be, and they kept throwing things at her. And just intuitively, she knew that it was she says now, kind of the words systemic or autoimmune, she didn’t have the terminology for it then. But she kind of knew it was that something along those lines. And eventually, it was diagnosed as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

And my parents had really no education in alternative, complementary, holistic, anything. To be honest, my parents had no education in anything. They both left school at 15. And yet my mom was raised very spiritually. And she had this incredible intuitive pull. When the doctors were saying that the only treatment available at the time was very high doses of oral steroids. This was actually right around the time where pediatric rheumatologists had decided that the best way to treat childhood arthritis was very, very high doses of oral steroids. There were no other drugs available at the time. And they said that if you go in hard with it, it will knock it on the head.

And everyone was following this. And my mum just had this, she calls it the niggle, this niggle that she had that was telling her that she couldn’t put this stuff in her two-year-old. And everyone was kind of going at her, you know, what are you doing? Get her on the drugs quickly. The doctors were telling her that if she didn’t, I would be at risk of my joints being damaged or deformed. But she didn’t bow to that pressure, and she took her time, which I think is the first lesson in parenting. You know, don’t make any decisions from a place of fear. And I don’t know quite how she did it, but she did. And she took herself to the library, cause there was no internet. And she emerged three days later, having decided upon homeopathy as a treatment plan.

And they didn’t have much money, but they gathered what they could. And they took me to a homeopathic dietician here in London. And they did the best they could with that for a while and completely opted out of the steroids. I was still being monitored at hospital and the doctors were continually telling my mom she was a bad mother, that what she was putting me on was voodoo, and that it would damage me, I would have damaged and deformed joints and all these things a lot of fear. So I don’t really know how my mom kept that resolve, but I owe everything to her that she did.

And we kind of went along like that for a while. And we stayed with homeopathy. And what we were noticing was that the homeopathy wasn’t curing me. I wasn’t free from arthritis. But the older I was getting, and I went to a group physio and hydrotherapy class with the other kids with arthritis. And it was the same kids week after week, year after year. And I was having maybe one flare up a year and the flare ups were not great. And I’d also been diagnosed with an associated eye condition the following year when I was three, which was an inflammatory condition. And I was on steroid eye drops for that. And so there were traumatic events happening and I would have to have the knees drained, the ankles drained. I would have steroid injections into the eyes. There was quite a lot of trauma.

But next to the kids who I went to my physio class with, as we were getting older, we were noticing differences. So the older we were getting, the more we could see deformities in their joints. And obviously they were all on very high doses of steroids, so they have very round faces. Their limbs weren’t growing properly, so a lot of them had shorter arms and legs. And then they were getting secondary conditions, and they were being put on more medications. And then as we got older, the girls weren’t getting their periods. And they were all short. They were all a lot shorter. They weren’t growing properly. And I was not cured, and I was not healed necessarily, but I was growing properly. And I looked normal, which is so important for a child. And perhaps more importantly than any of that, my immune system was really strong. So when you’ve got an autoimmune disease, your immune system is constantly, as you know from thyroid stuff, your immune system is constantly battling itself. And mine wasn’t, I wasn’t getting every illness going where the other kids were. And we put all of this down to the homeopathy.

Now, why wasn’t I cured? Why wasn’t the homeopathy curing me? Which is at this point, the question that people always ask. It was because at this point, we didn’t have all the missing pieces. We didn’t have all the answers yet. My parents were doing the best they could with the minimal resources they had and listening to the homeopath. And we were, you know, I’ve been using fluoride-free toothpaste, and this will interest you based on your wellness brand, since I was a baby, because in the health food shops and where the homeopaths were, it was all fluoride free. So all that stuff was stuff we were already doing back then. But we didn’t have all the answers when it came to diet and nutrition and stuff like that. There were a lot of missing pieces, but I was growing normally.

And by the time I got to high school, I was having my best years. I was having maybe one flare up a year. And it was very possible for me to hide it at the time. And in high school, that was my ultimate, you know, I need to be normal. But when I left high school and I went to performing arts school, I had a massive flare up that seemingly came out of nowhere. My knees, my ankles swelled really badly, and the eye was getting worse and worse. And we went back to the ophthalmologist and they said, well, what we haven’t realized has been happening is because of the steroid eye drops and the years of inflammation, you’ve got one cataract growing over another, over another, over another, and it’s pushing against the optic nerve and it’s making the pressure drop dangerously low. And so we need to get these cataracts out and we probably need to remove the lens from your eye, but we can’t operate while there’s still so much activity in the eye. So you need to take this chemo-based drug that’s going to get all the inflammation down and make everything possible.

And I was 17 going on 18. And I was literally looking at my parents saying, well, you know, what is this homeopathy done for me my whole life? Clearly nothing. I was this kind of very rebellious teenager at this point, rebelling against, angry at the world because my life was coming to a stop. And I was meant to be going to university and all these things I had to put on hold. And I said I was going to take the drug and I did. Before taking the drug, I had arthritis in my knees and my ankles. Within three months of taking the drug, I became extremely sick. I couldn’t hold down any food. I had ulcers all over my body. I started losing my hair. I was nauseous all the time. I mean, I was really, really sick.

And then within 10 months of taking the drug, the arthritis spread to every single joint and body. And at the end of those 10 months, I had no use of any joint in my body. I couldn’t grip cutlery to hold, to bring food to my mouth. I couldn’t bend my elbows to bring the food to my mouth. I couldn’t chew food. I couldn’t use my legs. I couldn’t even sit up straight because my hips were so stiff. And my mum wheeled me into the rheumatologist’s office, and this rheumatologist had been with me since I was four. And she didn’t bat an eyelid at the fact that I was in a wheelchair. And I had an epiphany at that moment that. Oh, she expected it to go like this. She doesn’t know any other way. And her answer to me about what the medication had done to me was it works for 70% of people and for 30% it doesn’t work. And you fall within that 30% category.

And I was only 18 years old, but I knew in that moment that first of all, I’m not a statistic and there must be more to what makes the human body and mind work and not work than statistics. And there must be more to what makes a medication affect someone so badly and not affect someone else as badly. And I made a decision in that moment that that wasn’t going to be my life and that disability wasn’t going to be my story, wellness was. And my mum wheeled me out of her office and I vowed to make it happen. And I went on a very, very long journey to make that wellness a possibility.

Katie: That’s quite the journey. And it sounds like you got to begin to tap into your own intuition that your mom had modeled for you in that moment when you were 18. And I can see so many similarities and I’m guessing many people listening have resonated maybe on a smaller scale with parts of that story. But for me, it was that my mom, I think also had sort of that intuitive knowledge, but only had the conventional lens from which to operate. And so I had recurring strep throat as a child and had taken dozens of rounds of antibiotics because that was what you did. And that was a thing I later got to heal from.

I love that you use the word like pieces and that you like finding the pieces of your own story. I think that mindset is such a powerful place to begin to understand from when we’re working through something going on with our health. Because like in your story, you illustrate like it would be so awesome if there were just a doctor who could give us that silver bullet and it would fix everything. But never have I heard a story from someone that it was just a one simple cause, one simple answer. Someone else can give you the answer. I think for each of us, it’s that N of one study of ourselves and finding our own pieces that can be quite the journey. And that’s why I don’t like to directly share exactly my protocols for anything, because I realize they’re not going to work exactly the same for anyone else. But I think the foundation of that, the learning to do the experimentation to find the pieces that are going to work for each of us is a really important part of the journey. So I would love for you, if you’re willing to share some of maybe what those pieces were for you and how you found them, how you trusted your intuition to try them? Maybe any hard lessons you learned along the way and then how they all eventually came together.

Lauren: All of them were hard lessons. And it’s only in hindsight that we’re able to see that they were amazing lessons and they happened for a reason. Even that piece where I didn’t listen to my mom and I went ahead and took the drug, I think. You know, in parenting, we realize that we can model things for our children, and they have to come to it themselves. And I think I, that was a lesson for me that I would take on later, you know, now as a parent, knowing that I had to come to it, my mom couldn’t force me to do anything. And by the way, we I also had the continuous rounds of antibiotics every time something went wrong, because my mom had that piece of the puzzle about let’s treat her with homeopathy. And I would go to the homeopath when something was wrong outside of the arthritis even, but my mom’s default was still, oh, she’s got a throat infection, let’s get some antibiotics. Let’s use the antiparasitic. And so that was still the norm for us. And that’s where the missing pieces were, and that it wasn’t a complete holistic approach.

So to go to your question. I think the first part was understanding that as well as the pieces to healing, the pieces of understanding the root causes were integral to the healing journey. And of course, you only find all that out later on. So I always say to people, it’s never just one thing that’s going to heal you. And it’s never just one thing that’s triggered it. It’s always a culmination. So I mentioned earlier the vaccines, that was definitely a piece to the puzzle in that it triggered the autoimmune response. But there were many things leading up to that that would have made my constitution personally react to that. Because why does some people not react to vaccines? It’s a constitutional genetic thing. What’s in your DNA that makes you predisposed to that?

So as an example, when we’ve done the digging, when my mom gave birth to me, she got an infection. We still don’t know what this infection was now, but she got an infection in the hospital. And she couldn’t breastfeed me and she couldn’t even hold me for two weeks. So there was none of that passing of the microbiome. Now, assuming we know now that I have a predisposition, a genetic predisposition to autoimmunity, we know now that I have MTHFR gene mutation, another missing piece of the puzzle, not being breastfed and having that essential microbiome passed on just from the touch, that was going to affect me where it might not affect another child. And so all those pieces leading up and then the vaccine was kind of the catalyst, but it wasn’t necessarily the full cause. It was just a catalyst among others that triggered the autoimmune response.

So in terms of what I did to heal, so that’s where the journey really begins at 18. And there were many things along the way that I did. And it took me a whole decade, but I started with nutrition. And I always like to say that there were two things I started with because I like, I don’t ever want people to feel daunted because my journey was a decade long journey. And that was because I didn’t have all the pieces in one place. And with the work I do now, I try to facilitate that for people to put everything that enabled, that enables the healing of a whole person in one place so that they don’t have to take a decade to heal like I did. But I started with nutrition and meditation.

And the first thing actually before nutrition was probably the meditation. A friend of my mom’s came over to my house when I was in this state of complete disability. I had to wait for people to come over to take me to the toilet, to feed me, everything. And if my mom was at work or my dad was at work, they were sending other people over. So my mom’s friend, who’s a healer, came over with a cassette tape, a literal cassette tape. It was 2002 of Brandon Bays, The Healing Sands Meditation. And I heard this meditation, I’d never been exposed to meditation before. And my grandparents were spiritualists. So I’d always been around healing. And, you know, my mom had taken me to spiritual healers and psychic surgeons my whole childhood. I’d never experienced meditation. And I was lying there listening to Brandon Bays healing, soothing voice. And all of a sudden, it felt like something was possible. It felt like healing was possible, because I felt relaxed in a way that I didn’t know was possible. And she’s talking about using the energy to heal the body. And something just shifted in me and my belief that I could heal.

And so meditation became a huge part of my journey. I was 18. I’m 40 now. And I’ve been meditating every day since. I mean, give or take, like maybe the days I gave birth and stuff like that. But so I started with just those guided meditations, wherever I could get my hands on them, Wayne Dyer, you know, like whoever I could get my hands on. And then I went to the Buddhist center in London and I studied Buddhist meditation and then I studied chakra meditation and then I studied transcendental meditation. And then I started going to the Hare Krishna temple here, was doing, you know, chanting. And throughout the years, I’ve kind of cultivated my own practice. And we can get on to kind of my spiritual practice later, because that’s kind of, I feel the last missing piece of the cherry on the cake.

And so then I moved into nutrition and I started realizing that everything I ate was going to have an impact on my body. And I didn’t have any books or any guidance. Now you go to bookshops and you see health and self-help and it’s just every diet you can imagine. And I didn’t really have any of that. And I honestly, to this day, don’t know if this was an intuitive thing or if someone told me or if I was guided, but I just cut gluten, dairy, and sugar. And that was the first thing I did. And I think that started making a huge impact just because I was raised on a Mediterranean diet and lots of oily fish, lots of olive oil, lots of, all great stuff like that. But with that was also Diet Cokes and, you know, sugar free cordials and, you know, that kind of stuff. So I think coming from that place and just doing those things of cutting gluten, dairy, and sugar made a huge difference at that time.

And then discovered probiotics and started learning about gut health. And so that kind of all spiraled from there. And listen, eventually it really, obviously my knowledge on nutrition evolved and I learned different things. And I learned about raw milk as opposed to simply cutting dairy. But commercial dairy, I still don’t go near. And I learned about why cutting gluten was important and why it was so inflammatory for my gut and what my gut, how my gut was connected to the rest of my body.

And through learning about the gut, I started learning about the brain. And so then that took me into the next phase, which was the mental phase. So I was dealing with the physical. And I actually moved at that time, a friend of mine, there was a really synchronistic thing that happened where my mom worked with someone who was seeing this doctor, a holistic doctor in Israel, who was, he was a doctor that had studied Chinese medicine and had combined seven different types of holistic therapies and integrated them into one. And she was basically cured from Crohn’s disease by seeing him. So my parents took out a loan to get me to go there to see him and to have treatment with him. And I was there for six months. And I did come back. After three months, I was riding a bike. I mean, it was like it was miraculous.

And I came back and I was 20, 21. And I was like, I’ve lost all these years, these important years of my life. And now my body works. I’m going to go wild. And so I did, I was drinking and I was, you know, living life and trying to get acting jobs and not looking after my body at all. And then within a year, the symptoms all came back like with a bang. And but that was the best thing that happened to me. Because that was the moment that I realized, hold on, I can’t go back to this doctor every time I need a treatment and I can’t hire different people every time I need. What am I going to do? Go back there once a year and stay for six months or even three months. So that was the moment I realized that I had to stop outsourcing my health and I actually had to take responsibility for my own well-being. And as you put it, be my own primary healthcare provider and take responsibility.

And I think that was the most important lesson in my entire journey, that I could not keep outsourcing my health to any, as amazing as they were. And I could still utilize the support of homeopaths, naturopaths, whatever it might be. But at the end of the day, no one was coming to save me. I had to save me and I had to make a choice that I was going to heal and that had to start with me. So that was a really great moment, a kind of pivotal moment in the journey and then it was after that when I moved on from realizing that I couldn’t just focus on the physical there was the emotional, mental, and spiritual as well and then all those came into play and I can go into those if you like as well.

Katie: Yeah, that’s incredible. I love that line about you realizing you couldn’t outsource your health. I think that’s an important one. I also really honed it on when you said, when you had that switch happen internally, that you had hope that it was possible to heal. I think that piece is often overlooked. So often if we believe that we are sick and that that is the reality and that it will not change, I feel like our body will follow that mindset, that path. Whereas even that small switch into just hope, even a tiniest bit of hope can begin such a positive cascade. And I think even when it comes to food, for instance, like I had experiences of eating what on paper would have been the most perfect diet, quote-unquote, but I was afraid of everything. And I thought like I had so much fear around it that those things probably didn’t even nourish my body in the way they could have. And so I love that you brought this into now. You walked us through the physical layers and then the mental layers. And I know there were more for you, but I’m curious how you began to access those and to tangibly shift them. Because it seems like I hear many stories from women, especially we can do all the research, get it, understand the physical side, take all the supplements, eat all the right foods. But then at some point we’re confronted with those deeper layers. And those seem a lot harder sometimes to figure out for ourselves because there aren’t easily Googleable answers to those questions. Requires a little bit more. So I would love for you to share how you navigated that.

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. And such an important part because, yeah, I was doing all the things for my physical health at this point and taking all the supplements. I was kind of saving money here and there to work with naturopaths. And I was still working with my homeopath and at the time had an incredible homeopath and we were working really closely and she was giving me reiki and I was you know doing all the things for my physical health and it still wasn’t you know really I wasn’t, I was getting better for sure, I wasn’t fully head to toe disabled at this point but I wasn’t an able-bodied person either.

So then I started tapping into what came next. And the first thing that I realized was that I had trapped emotions. And there was this kind of emotional element to it. And what is going on internally with a child that has grown in, an adult that was a child that grew up with an illness that was never the same as everyone else that had lots of differences. I was very much defined by this illness in school, and even by my family, and by my extended family, it was always a conversation. And so I started going deep into somatic healing, into processing traumas through and out the body, into understanding how much trapped emotions were affecting my physical health, which led me on to energy work and understanding the quantum element of everything that was happening to my body. And I have to say, Katie, I think that energy is, you know, and understanding energy is potentially the biggest, I mean, it’s arguable, of course, but understanding how our thoughts affect our physicality. I mean, it’s mind blowing just what our thoughts have the ability to do to our physical body.

And so as soon as I started understanding that I was able to start processing these emotions through and out the body, using tools like somatic healing, the Emotion Code, easily accessible things as well by using just books to help me understand it. As time went on, and technology was improving, there was podcasts, and finding experts in the field and reading up and just educating myself on, it was a journey of intensive self study. I did eventually study nutrition and life coaching and a bunch of things. But I have to say that the things that I learned the most from were the things I went and studied myself, and learning about epigenetics, for example, you know, understand, and I’m sorry, I’m going back on myself. But finding that missing piece as well, you know, understanding that, you know, what I spoke about before, why my body reacted to those medications where maybe someone else wouldn’t, was an epigenetic component to it and understanding why, like what my genes were doing. So as time went on, putting all these pieces together.

Then that piece of the emotions and the trapped emotions and the energy led on to me understanding that I needed to rewire my brain out of disability thinking, right? So I have now removed the trapped emotions and I’m continuing to do that. And I’m processing the trauma and learning how to move on from that. But then I still have these thoughts in my head and I’m still operating from this kind of victim consciousness of, yeah, but they don’t understand. And no one understands how hard it is to be in pain all the time. You know, yeah, my illness, my arthritis.

And so one of the first things I did was stop saying my arthritis. And I always advise people to do this when people come to me with any number of health concerns or anything, my anxiety, my diabetes, my cancer, my ADHD, remove the my. Remove that element that you think it’s yours. Because as soon as something becomes part of your identity, you exist from that place. You’re operating from that place. And so you create the energetic environment for that thing to be true. And so I started rewiring my brain out of disability thinking. And that was another huge piece of the puzzle.

Katie: Oh, so many good pieces in what you just said. And I think that shift out of the disability thinking or the victim thinking or the whatever is for each person listening a little bit different, I think so powerful. And also, at least in my experience, a difficult thing to learn to rewire because it becomes so ingrained. You don’t even, it’s like you are in the water. You don’t realize you’re in the water because you’ve always been there. It’s so hard to become aware of that, which seems like it’s the first step. But then even with awareness, it’s a rewiring that seems very conscious and certainly not overnight. I’ve heard, of course, experiences of people who had a dramatic and an instant shift in all of that. But it seems like for most of us, it is a journey to learn how to rewire that.

I know in hindsight, I could see, I had a similar story with the thyroid and the victim and the disease and my illness and my thyroid issues and my body is attacking itself was the thing I said a lot. And I can look back in hindsight and realize I also, that served a need at the time in some ways in that it let me have a little bit of space to rest, not much because I was still a mom, but it was an excuse that let me rest when I absolutely had to. And it also was a time that I sometimes was taken care of, which in childhood, I felt like there were times when I wasn’t. And so it was serving a psychological need, but there was a way to access those through not having to be in a state of disease to do it. And that was a quite difficult journey.

And I love that you said you removed the word my and no longer made it part of your identity. I think it’s helpful to reframe anything that is like just a word that was given to us now. Like I don’t, I don’t have Hashimoto’s. That was a word that was given to me in the past, and I no longer have that word, but I would love to hear more about how you actually learned and then were able to cement that shift. Because I know from at least my experience, that was not an easy thing to figure out and certainly to make a habit.

Lauren: Yeah. So firstly, just to go to your point of, you know, sometimes you need that because it gives you that almost excuse to rest. I would say I agree with that. But at the same time, when you, so I tell people who are healing from anything, you’re not suffering with this, you’re healing from it. So if we need to tell our loved ones we need rest, we can always say, I’m healing right now and my healing requires me to rest. My healing requires me to be nurtured and looked after. And I feel like when we use the word healing, it’s so much more powerful than even when I work with a lot of people with cancer and we use the term we’re healing, you know, they’re healing from cancer, not suffering with cancer. We’re not a cancer survivor. You’re not fighting anything because even that fight, you know, we have so much at the moment, the fight on cancer, the war on cancer, the war on viruses, the war, you know, we don’t want to be warring with ourselves. We want to use positive terminology.

And that’s not to say that we don’t honor the emotions and the trauma and whatever’s going on. I’m a big, big advocate for helping women honor everything that’s happening and has happened to them, even ancestrally. On my course, we even have, we go through pretty much everything you can imagine. I’ll talk about that later, perhaps, but to the point that we even go back and heal what’s happened ancestrally because we could be holding that too. So it’s not that we’re not honoring what’s happening. It’s that we are honoring it and then we’re learning to process it out of the body.

So you’ll ask how I did that. I think journaling was a massive part of my journey because I feel I’ve always found that it’s very challenging to heal anything without the awareness of it and without the awareness of what our minds are actually doing. And for me, journaling has given me that insight into what’s going on in my mind that I might not even consciously know until I write it down. It’s like that Joan Didion saying, I don’t know what I think until I write it. And that’s so true for me with journaling. And I know even for my husband, it’s been a massive thing for him in all the kind of self-development tools that he’s adopted over the years. Journaling is the thing that brings him back every time. So I think if nothing else, journaling gave me the awareness of what I was doing and the terminology I was using. And how I was thinking about myself.

And journaling actually led me to some of the most important insights into how I was using this disability mentality and what I call the victim consciousness. And that’s not to say we’re not all victims of something, we’re all victims of something. But when we exist from that victim consciousness, it’s very hard to heal it. I realized things like, and this is super profound, I only felt completely accepted and valued and fully understood as a child when I was in a hospital. So, you know, and I came to that through journaling, realized I was a very intense, very difficult, uptight child, probably now understandably. But no one really got that. No one understood it. And it was, you know, why are you so difficult? Why are you so, why can’t you just be happy? And I used to think, I don’t know. I don’t know why I can’t be happy. I wish I could. And then when I was in hospital, everyone would cater to my every need. What do you want to eat? What can I buy you from the gift shop? What do you need? So my safe place became the hospital. So obviously I’m going to hang on to this disease in some warped subconscious manner, because that’s where I’m accepted. And that’s what’s defining me. What’s going to define me, if I don’t have it? So getting to the roots of all these very powerful things that my subconscious brain was holding on to was such a huge part of it.

And honestly, there are super expensive therapists and courses and all sorts of things. But awareness is key. Once you realize these things, and you can do that just by journaling yourself, you know, just having that awareness gives you the ability to start processing it. And I think using tools like Dr. Bradley Nelson’s The Emotion Code, Dr. John Sarno’s work was hugely transformative for me. Dr. John Sarno did a lot about processing all our emotions, knowing that trapped emotions can cause physical disease. You know, they can metastasize into disease. So work like that really helped me. Over the years, I did work with different practitioners as well. But I think that the key was learning how to acknowledge what the issues were. The ones that were really hidden deep that I couldn’t get to without either the journaling or some help with, you know, from some practitioners I was working with.

And then I think one of the biggest, I mean, there have been many lessons, but a very big lesson in my journey has been that we can hold on to these traumas and we can use them to kind of further our story and hold on to these stories. But actually, trauma and stress are things that can be removed from the body. I can’t remember who says this. One of the great, it might be Dr. Gabo Mate, but trauma is not the thing that happened to you. It’s what happened to your body as a result of the thing that happened to you. That might be Peter Levine, actually who created the somatic experiencing, which I love so that was another thing that I learned. And so what I learned was okay I don’t need to hold on to these traumas and use them as part of my story and keep going back on them and back on them once I’ve processed them through the body and I’ve actually removed them from the body, I can make a choice to move on I don’t have to hold these, I don’t have to keep talking about you know my trauma this and my trauma that and this is stressful. Again, it’s not to say I wasn’t honoring it or I don’t believe in honoring it, but I believe that removing them from the body and making a conscious choice to move on enables us to regain our personal power and we move it then into a place of empowerment. And so I think that really was the key.

Katie: Well, I certainly echo the recommendation on the Emotion Code and on somatic work. Those were hugely influential for me as well. And I think what you said in that last piece is so important as well. I love seeing that we’re now becoming as a society seemingly much more aware of how trauma can affect the body. But I do wonder if sometimes that then replaces the old story and then trauma becomes the story and the identity. And I think there’s a freedom in realizing you can keep the lessons and the strength and the resilience and the beauty and all the great things that you learned and had as a result of the trauma without having to stay in it. You don’t lose those things. They were part of the journey. And while it resonated when you said you realized the hospital had become your safe place. That would be such a counterintuitive thing and probably so incredibly profound to realize. And no doctor or therapist could probably have given you that insight. You had to go meet those parts of yourself internally to find that. And then I’m sure to integrate that after.

And I would love to also weave in, if it’s applicable here, something else that I read in your bio and researching for this interview, where you talk about divine feminine healing. And I sense that there’s a bigger, obviously, this could be a multi-part conversation on its own. But this is something that seems like it’s kind of rising to awareness in the collective consciousness right now in society. It’s talked about a little bit. And I wonder if just like trauma healing, this also could get a little bit confused or integrated, but becoming part of the identity and non-helpful way. I also suspect this is something that many people maybe have not heard of or don’t have an understanding of at all. So if you’re willing, would you explain how you got into divine feminine healing and what it is and how that was impactful for you?

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. And it goes back to your point of, you know, we’re kind of replacing the old story with the trauma story. And the reason I think it goes back into it is because you know, our female ancestors, most of the time, unless you came from, I don’t know, like some, some really open, conscious group of people, they, you know, on the whole, they just had to get on with it, right? And they didn’t have much choice. And they went through a lot, most of our female ancestors had to be very tough. And, you know, I have a Moroccan grandmother who I don’t know, she’s not here anymore, who had 10 children. And, you know, she just had to get on with things. From the other side of my maternal grandmother, also, there was so much of this having to move forward, regardless of what, and that brought with it the opposite of what we’re talking about now, which is, you know, in England, there’s this saying everywhere, and you’ll find it on mugs and on everything, keep calm and carry on. It’s the stiff upper lip, you know, British way of being. And it’s, it’s actually hiding, keeping the emotions and the traumas within the body. And so that was the old paradigm, the very, oh, you don’t need therapy, what do you need therapy for? Come on, move on, get on with it. And now we’re at this, everyone’s having therapy all the time. And we’re just talking about it all the time, instead of processing it. And there’s a happy balance in the middle.

And so much of that comes from connecting back to the divine feminine, which is the essence of every woman. And part of that is integrating this ancestral healing and really kind of breaking those intergenerational ties and the traumas that we are carrying within our own bodies, within our own DNA, our ancestors’ traumas imprinted on our DNA. And there’ve been mice studies that show this, that literally show that we carry the traumas and into our own lives. And a lot of our behaviors could be as a result of that. So going back to ancestral healing and healing intergenerational wounds is super important.

And so my ancestral healing was what led me to the divine feminine work, but in realizing that there’s been so much in history that has oppressed and suppressed women. And in order for us to be well, we have to actually be standing within our true authenticity. And I, so much of my work comes back to, you know, it encompasses so much the physical healing, the emotional, the mental, but how can we heal anything without truly knowing who we are? And so many of us as women, and especially as moms have to do that whole thing of getting on with it, regardless of what’s going on. And I know with so many of my clients, they come to me and they don’t know who they are anymore, or maybe they didn’t in the first place, because, you know, so much happens in life. And, you know, many of my clients maybe got married young or had kids young before they truly knew themselves. And so we kind of have had society oppressing us on one side, and then we’ve oppressed ourselves on the other side, not willingly or knowingly, but because all these life things have happened that have stopped us from getting to know ourselves.

And the divine feminine work is about regaining that access to self, to capital S self, to stepping into our true authentic power, which looks different to every woman. But it’s about authenticity. It’s about really just tuning in with who are you as a woman underneath all of the things you were told you are, or you might even think you are. And, you know, I went really deep into inner child work and shadow work in my journey. And shadow work has informed a lot of, you know, my own work and what I do with clients. And it’s also informed so much because, you know, what I told you before about the hospital, for example, that’s shadow. That’s, you know, the part of me that was living in the shadows that I had to acknowledge that this little girl that was that only felt accepted in a hospital. She’s still there. She’s still there in the shadows. And in doing that deep work and that’s hard work that’s like cry on the bathroom floor kind of work you know. But that enabled me to gain this access back to my true essence, which enabled me to truly step into my femininity. And I mean that from, you know, the divine feminine sense. Not you know how you know that the word can get taken in you know many different ways but me as a woman and what that meant for me. And how I can show up in all my power as a woman. And, yeah, it can be taken in many, many different directions, but it’s very powerful work.

Katie: I think the keep calm and carry on circulated here in the US for a little while as well. And I love that you brought a balance to that. It’s not that we need to pause everything and only do therapy and become the story of that or that we ignore it all and move on. It’s that we learn how to integrate all of those pieces back to the finding your own puzzle pieces analogy. And I have found, and I know this is your work as well, it is a far-reaching and far-ranging path to do that. And those pieces are so different for each of us. I also can think back to the woman I was when I said things like, my body’s attacking itself. And I had this story of Hashimoto’s. And before I figured out or found that first glimmer of hope and how overwhelming it felt and how impossible it felt and how even when I would hear stories of other people having found healing and seemingly like these amazing recoveries, I would doubt it. Or I would think, well, that’s great, but it’s not possible for me. And so I would love, you’ve given us so many of the tangible steps and the inner steps. And even what you just said about shadow work, I think is so valuable. And inner child work has been absolutely profound for me. But I wonder if you have any words for the woman who maybe is where I was all those years ago and feels like, well, that’s great that these people figured it out, but it doesn’t seem possible for me. Is there any like words that we might find helpful or first steps, or maybe just a little bit of openness in a resource you could point her to, or what would you say to the women who feel those feelings?

Lauren: So, I think what it comes back to for me is energy. Health is a frequency, wellness is a frequency and our thoughts and our feelings and all our actions and our behaviors hold vibrational frequency. And so everything we’re thinking will have an impact. And I think knowing that for me was such a great reminder that I am the master of my destiny. And I know that woman. I was that woman. I mean, you know what you were saying before about it’s so hard to come out of that story when you’ve known no different. I was diagnosed when I was a baby. I literally knew no different, like literally knew no different. So I always like to say to people, I just hope that my story gives hope because if I can do that, having never known anything different, having been as disabled as it gets. I mean, I was in a wheelchair on my wedding day. And I could still heal.

And so I never, I guess I never finished the story, but it took me 11 years. And at the end of that kind of a decade-long journey of discovery and self-study, I did heal, I finally got myself to a state of wellness, which was 11 years ago now. And I’ve been able to maintain that because all the things I was picking up along the way, although none of them were working on their own in isolation at the time, all of them combined together now are all continuing to keep me healthy. And I think that’s where my story is often unique, because a lot of people will hear from that they’ve healed and we’re hearing from them a year later to be able to hear from someone who 11 years later is still I’m in better health than I’ve ever been at 40 years old and feeling strong.

And so I think the number one thing is keeping that sense of hope and faith in something that is beyond us. And that’s where it comes back to frequency. I had to have a belief that there was something else that was going to happen, that something else is around the corner, that I’m going to be introduced to someone who might have another missing piece for me, that I’m going to come across some resource that’s going to be another missing piece for me. And eventually it’s going to all come together. And it did all come together, but it wasn’t because I was introduced to someone or it was because I decided that I was going to get well. And I never faltered on that. I mean, obviously I had bad days where I was like, this is too hard. And I cried a lot. I’m not saying that I was this stoic person was like, no, I’m doing it. It’s all good. I was not at all. I had really weak moments, but I kept that faith that I would heal. And so I think that, I just, I do believe in miracles. Because I think that the body is such an intelligent organism. And I’ve seen people heal from the most crazy things. And I just think for the woman listening who’s maybe in that dark place, just know that I truly believe that anyone can heal from pretty much anything. And we just have to keep that faith to keep that going and know that healing is a frequency, and we can make a choice, but we just have to stay in that choice.

Katie: So beautiful. And you mentioned that you have worked with many people on this journey. Where can people find you if they’re interested, if you are still working with people and or where would you point them toward resources online if they want to continue deepening their understanding on any of the things you’ve shared today?

Lauren: Sure. Yeah. So I have a membership program for women. It’s called The Rise Membership. And I created it as this one-stop shop that I was looking for that never existed. And it’s a membership program that’s hosted on an app. So it’s so it’s really user friendly. I created it with busy women in mind. I created it with myself in mind, knowing that when you’re healing, and you’ve got kids and or you’re, you know, working and whatever it might be, and you need something that’s accessible.

So it’s got 14 modules of all the things I’ve spoken about from inner child work, shadow healing, trauma healing, emotional intelligence, brain training. So that whole thing about, you know, bringing ourselves out of disability thinking. Ancestral healing. We’ve got the health optimization element in there as well. Modules on nervous system regulation, everything you can imagine that you would need to get to a place of wellness. And then on top of that, we have monthly group coaching calls with me, which I run myself, where we go deeper into the spiritual and health optimization so that everyone feels that they get some personalized support. We have a monthly Vox a day. So the ladies get to voice note me once a month asking anything. And it literally, the great thing about what I do is because I believed that healing, if you want to heal one part of you have to heal the whole self. That was my biggest, that was the journey. And so I created this with that in mind. So women work with me from every walk of life and coming to me with every life situation you can imagine from wanting to heal physical illness to wanting to heal trauma, to wanting to uplevel their careers, to wanting more confidence, anything. So the messages on Vox a day range so much. And I love it’s my favorite day of the month. And there’s a whole load more features within the membership. And it’s a really kind of very personalized, warm place to be with a gorgeous community of like-minded women. So that’s my main offering. I also have my own podcast, as you know, Reconditioned. And I post on Instagram daily wellness tips. So yeah, that’s basically where I am.

Katie: Lovely. I will put all of those links in the show notes for any of you guys listening on the go. You can find all of that at wellnessmama.com. And I’ve enjoyed following you on Instagram as well. So you guys go give her a follow. You post some great content on there and I love getting to curate so even our social media gives us those little like insights and tips and little boost of positivity. But this has been such a fun conversation and absolutely incredible, the journey that you’ve been through. And I love that you are now transforming that into helping other people go on the same journey. I have so much gratitude for the work that you do and for your time today. I’m so glad we got to connect here. Thank you so much.

Lauren: Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this chat with you.

Katie: And thank you as always for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.