664: Keep Being Love: How Healing Happens, Acupuncture & Mind, Body, Soul Connection With Diana Lane

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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this episode is all about ways to keep being loved, how healing happens, acupuncture, mind, body, soul, connection, holistic healing, and so, so much more. I’m here with Diana Lane, who is a Stress Reduction Specialist and Holistic Health Expert. She was a pre-med heart surgeon, turned acupuncturist, herbalist, and Reiki master with over 18 years of experience in the medical field. She specializes in women’s wellness with a focus on adrenal fatigue, stress, digestive dysfunction, and hormonal health, and has a private practice in Austin, Texas. She’s the perfect blend of science and woo, incorporating acupuncture, herbalism, the esoteric arts, functional lab analysis, body work, nutritional consulting, sound therapy, guided meditation, and much more in her multifaceted medical practice, which we talk about a lot today.

We also go through her journey of backpacking from China to Thailand and learning everything from traditional Chinese medicine to Tai Chi along the way. And how she went from a premed heart expert who had a focus of wanting to help people by healing hearts, to her multimodality acupuncture and holistic health practice that actually does just that now, too. We talk about what acupuncture is and how it works. How it works with energy and electricity, using water and metal to conduct electricity throughout the body, and how it can increase ATP, the scientific backing that supports acupuncture, as well as if it’s safe for moms, for pregnant women, for families.

We then get to go deep into what she says about why you have to feel it to heal it, and the mind, body, soul connection, which I think and I have seen firsthand in my own life, just how much that carries over into physical health as well. We talk about EFT. We talk about where thoughts go, energy flows. We talk about how to keep being love and how healing happens and so much more. She’s definitely a wealth of knowledge. This was a very fun conversation that I think touched on some of the not talked about enough aspects of mental and emotional health as well, and that mind, body, soul connection. So let’s join Diana and jump in. Diana. Welcome. And thanks so much for being here.

Diana: Thanks, Katie. So excited to share with you today.

Katie: I am excited too, and I’m excited to learn about acupuncture and also maybe get to delve into what you call the mind-body-soul connection and go lots of different directions. Before we jump into all of that, though, I have a note from your bio that you spent some time backpacking between China and Thailand and studying that type of medicine. And I would just love to hear more about that because I have kind of been on a research tangent of some of that lately, so I have a lot of personal interest there.

Diana: I love it. When I was getting through grad school studying acupuncture and Chinese medicine, I knew that I needed to get to the roots, right, to go back to Southeast Asia, to go to China to study in the hospitals. And they had a program through school that was like a five week, 5K investment kind of thing. And I thought, you know what? I could probably expand this experience and get a totally different viewpoint. If I just go into this on my own, I can go a lot further, a lot longer. And so I decided to backpack from China to Thailand, and I spent about a month in China. So I started up in Beijing. If I did this again, I would hire a translator. Started in Beijing, worked my way through the Great Wall in Tiananmen Square, and then went out to a place called Wudang Shan. So this is Wudang Mountain. And I had found this in my research to be the birthplace of Chinese medicine and an ancient art called Wushu. So this is an ancient martial arts technique, and it was just calling to me. I didn’t know exactly why. I didn’t know anybody from there or anybody who had been there.

And so I went to Wudang and sought out a school with a master Yuan, who’s a very famous Tai Chi and Qi Gong and martial arts master there and studied in his school, had really tough, stringent, long day, bare bones training in Qi Gong and then also went up into the mountains. So I had real rough and tumble kind of Wudang City experience in training and then went up with the monks in the mountains, where we woke with the sunrise and ran down to the Purple Cloud Palace to chant and greet the sun. We met their grandfather, who lives in a cave and drink tea. And he just told me stories in Mandarin, which I definitely did not understand, but just loved the experience and then spent a lot of time just really cultivating, the art, the training, the practice. Learning different healing sounds, learning about the way nature is so enhanced in an environment where they live in unison with it. They’re very aware of the elements and how they’re affecting us. It’s this really profound experience.

And from there. I was able to go down to the hospitals in Guangzhou where they have the Chinese Medicine hospital and the Western hospital in one. So everything is happening in conjunction together. So a patient will get done with a stroke, right, which is a pretty big event. And once they’re through that stabilization period, they go right to the acupuncture ward. They spend the rest of their recovery in the acupuncture ward, and when they go to pick up their prescription, they pick up their herbs. So there are a lot of really unique experiences in that facility and training with that hospital like appotherapy. They have a whole bee Acupuncture section and just so cool to really be in it, in the environment, in the experience, in the birthplace of this really potent medicine, and learning from some of the great masters of our time. It was such a blessing. And then the rest of the journey was the journey of the soul, right. Thailand and scuba diving and elephants and tigers and really getting that kind of otherworldly experience and the other cultural influences from being outside of the Western space.

Katie: I love that there are places where they have, instead of trying to create a dichotomy, created a both and approach. And I think that’s valuable and I think we are hopefully going to see that more, even in the Western world. But so many overlaps in our story in small ways, in that I took Mandarin in college and I would say those are the only classes that ever I felt like my brain hurt. That was extremely, extremely difficult. But it sounds like such an amazing, cool experience for you. I’ve also been a beekeeper since I was about twelve years old. So that’s incredible that there’s a place using appatherapy actually at scale. That’s incredible. And it sounds like this was obviously a life shifting experience for you and that it sounds like you shifted from premed into a much more holistic approach. And you do acupuncture and you have a multifaceted holistic practice. But I would love to hear the story of how that shift happened for you and maybe just touch on some of the work you do now.

Diana: Yeah. This journey had started many years before. I actually was in the thick of it. I originally wanted to get into taking care of myself. I have a history in the ballet industry and unfortunately at the time established some really unhealthy habits. I had multiple eating disorders by the time I was 15. I was like so tiny and still felt like I wasn’t small enough. And so I started going, okay, I’m starving myself, I’m not eating well. How am I going to maintain this life as a ballerina if I’m sick and can’t get out of bed? So I started with nutrition, right? How do I nourish myself in a healthy way where I can stay ballerina thin? Which that industry has changed a lot, thankfully. But at the time, there was a lot of pressure, and I’m not this prima ballerina body type by nature. So I got into nutrition, and people started asking me questions about it. And people were like, when are you going to go into practice for this? You know so much. And I kept telling them, I just really started studying this for myself. So then the spark was lit. Well, maybe I could help other people with this.

So I started looking a little bit further into nutrition and quickly realized that I was low hanging fruit. A lot of modern medical practitioners don’t necessarily respect nutritionists. They’re not always revered in the medical industry and world. So I said, okay, well, how do I change that? How do I get to the top, right? How do I really emphasize the nutritional aspect all the way through the medical field? So I was like, I’m going to become a doctor, obviously, and what better way to help the world than by healing hearts? So I wanted to be a heart surgeon. I was dead set, which is a very competitive industry. There are not many female heart surgeons, but I was determined to be this call it “Diana from the block” story. Grew up single parent, poor household, was on my way to go to Ivy Leagues in a theater school for University of Washington, which is the next step into Yale and Harvard and all of those. And I was in my cardiac rehab internship.

So it was the last couple of semesters of school, and they’re like, okay, let’s put you in the field. And I realized so quickly that people were getting worse and not better. I started asking questions in the rehab program about lifestyle interventions, about conversations around alcohol and cigarettes and fast food, and more or less was told, that’s not really your job. There’s extracurricular classes they can take. Get them on the machines, make sure they’re taking their prescriptions. Probably see them back in six months, lifetime expectancy of five years. And I’m like, that person had a heart attack three weeks ago, and I can’t say anything about their McDonald’s cup they threw out on the way in. Something’s not right. So call my mom crying on the way home. This isn’t it. This is how I help the world. And she said, find it. She said, if this isn’t it, you’re just about to finish your bachelor’s. Figure it out now.

So I went into everything I had registered for a class at Evergreen, which is a great school, total Pacific Northwest hippie vibe. Got to look into everything, and it included ayurveda naturopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, osteopathy, physical therapy even, because I just wanted to be of service in the healing space. The more I learned about acupuncture, the more it made sense. We are conglomeration mind, body, soul. The things we eat, the things we think, the things we see. Surround ourselves, our elements, right? The dampness, the heat, all of these things affect us. So the more I learned, the more it made sense and it just became such an obvious path. Probably the best decision I made. I’ve been honored to watch Western medicine also change and begin integrating a lot more. Even just recently I got adult insurance and did primary care and I’m in this whole medical facility thing. And she actually talked to me about the five pillars that she tells every single patient now, which is nutrition and breath work and sleep and hydration and destressing. So I was really impressed to watch this. And I feel bridging the gap is so important. So I’ve studied a lot of integrative medicine, functional lab analysis, nutritional response testing, and have seen really incredible changes in my clinic, oftentimes when they’ve been to every doctor, every specialist, and have gotten minimal or not long lasting results. So really honored to be in support of that way and helping bridge that gap.

Katie: I love that story, and the metaphor stands out to me of your desire to like, what better way to help the world than to heal hearts? And you now metaphorically do that. I feel like through your work, which is so beautiful, that you found your path that probably is much more effective for helping even those initial patients, but also can reach many more people in many other ways. And I would guess most people are familiar with acupuncture. But for anybody who doesn’t fully understand it, can you explain maybe a little bit about the process by which acupuncture works and maybe some of the conditions you see the most?

Diana: I love talking about this because I am still a complete health nerd at heart. So I always say I’m the perfect blend of science and woo because sometimes things get a little too out in the metaphysical and they’re not always as tangible and easy to understand. So when I’m explaining acupuncture, what I tell people is we are conducting electricity. Nobody can deny the existence of electricity and energy in the universe. So we are using metal, tiny little super fine needles that you can bend. They are not hollow like we experience in most of the Western world. They’re solid silicon needles. We insert them just barely into the surface of the skin most of the time. So we are using water and metal to conduct electricity through what’s called meridians in the body.

Now, all of this stuff is scientifically proven. You can use CT-scans, which are light imaging, to actually see the areas of less electromagnetic resistance where, lo and behold, the acupuncture points exist. So we’re using these tiny little flags to wake the body up, to send a stimulus to the brain. And what happens is these neuromuscular junctions tell the brain to release different kinds of neurotransmitters, including oxytocin, endorphins, encephalins, cytokines, natural killer cells, nitric oxide locally at the insertion site. There are so many physiological and scientifically proven actions just from this stimulus in the body.

Now, different points on what we call the meridian systems. Similar in some ways to the circulatory system, but quite different. It’s just a pathway in which energy flows through the body, then can create messages to help the brain heal. The other thing I always like to explain is Chi. Chi feels like this really nebulous concept, right? There’s not even a direct translation for the word Chi. The symbol, the character is the steam on rice. Like, how do you even quantify that, right? This magnetic and magical steam on rice? Well, in the Western world, it’s ATP, it’s Adenosine Triphosphate. It’s the driving force that’s pumping the blood.

So when people start making these connections, you can watch as their awareness and understanding really comes full circle. It’s a comprehensive medical system has, withstood 5000 years, the test of time, the fall of the Chinese empire where they burned all the books. And still this medicine has remained and is becoming more and more of a mainstay in even our Western medical models.

Katie: That was a beautiful explanation. I’m fortunate now that one of my really close friends is an acupuncturist. So she doesn’t practice anymore. But it’s been cool to get that exposure. My actual first exposure to acupuncture was when I was pregnant and had a baby who was breach and actually ended up birthing naturally, birthing two breach babies who were just determined that they were going to come out breach and it worked out just fine. But that was how I initially found acupuncture because there was a lot of what I read said this is really helpful for a lot of women in getting a breach baby to turn naturally. But it brings up the question with many of our listeners being moms, is acupuncture considered safe for moms and for expectant moms?

Diana: Yeah, this is a great question. And I answer this all the time because I work with a lot of women in my practice and acupuncture is completely and totally safe from a licensed acupuncturist. I highly recommend it because there are some people who are doing weekend courses in different professions. And I don’t necessarily think that would be the best route. They’re much deeper, stronger stimulus approaches. But acupuncture is safe all the way from pre to postpartum. I have helped my pregnant patients get pregnant, not personally, but helped them and their partners get pregnant by utilizing acupuncture to help fertility, to also help the retention of placenta during pregnancy, so to prevent miscarriages to nourish the body.

Now, there are some forbidden points in acupuncture that you’re not allowed to use when a patient is pregnant. But even that research on that says there is only a handful. They’re very easy to avoid. But even the research on that, it’s some of the ones used to turn the breach baby, right? You’re trying to get things to move down and out, so you wouldn’t want to use those during the first, second or beginning of the third trimester because it can be very stimulating.

That being said, we can also help when it’s time for the baby to arrive because sometimes people are getting either encouraged to or pressured to induce or they’re maybe running a little late and so there’s a lot that Acupuncture can do to help get that baby moving. I’ve done a couple gentle induction ceremonies with patients who really did not want to get the pitocin and everything like that and so we were able to actually have their baby arrive that night. So we had done acupuncture, had her scheduled for another one a couple of days later and she messaged me at like 2:00 in the morning. It was like contraction started, we’re headed to the hospital. Whatever you did worked. So it’s great to have those success stories and it’s completely safe throughout childhood, child birth, conception, pre and post and really great for postpartum support as well.

Katie: Well, and it makes sense if it’s acting on the energy systems of the body that it would be supportive also in whatever the body is naturally wanting or needing to do in that moment. So that to me makes a whole lot of sense. What do you feel like the bulk of your patients are coming in with? I would guess only as their initial thing that they’re wanting to work on because I think when you take a holistic approach you realize it’s all connected and probably they end up going down many paths and working on many things. But what brings most people to you in the first place?

Diana: When I first started my practice and I think for most acupuncturists, pain is the overall, right. What human does not experience some pain in their life? But as my practice has evolved I’ve really honed in on my specialties. So I work with a lot of women on hormonal and digestive dysfunction. And then, of course, that caveat is typically the adrenal fatigue and the stress. So that’s most of my patient load. And then it’s really funny because I’ll be working with a patient and she’ll refer her husband who had no idea about any of this. And then we start working on some unique digestive or skin conditions. But really it’s the hormonal health, the digestive health, the stress-reduction and the self-care.

Katie: And I know you also talk about people having sort of what you call a healing team and I love this concept because I say often on this podcast that at the end of the day we are each our own primary health care provider. And I think the best outcomes happen when we have informed patients who view themselves as their own primary health care provider and who understand that it’s our daily choices that really contribute so much to overall health but who can work with practitioners who have a very specific body of knowledge, who are their partners in that experience. Rather than I know there’s all these stories of doctors just being the authority figure and patients not feeling heard. And so I love your concept of a healing team. Can you talk about that a little bit and how you help patients build that?

Diana: Yeah, I mean, integration is really key. There is no one right answer, even in a complete system like acupuncture, that’s taking every nuanced detail into consideration. There’s still so much benefit from bringing in other practitioners. I am constantly referring to chiropractic, to massage, even to physical therapy if needed. And I will refer back to their primary cares and say, go ask for this testing. Because it is so important as a patient to empower yourself with knowledge. You have got to take your health and wellness into your own hands. Because as we’ve seen, there’s a lot going on in the medical world and practitioners only have so much capacity. They’re also holding space, especially primary care physicians, for who knows how many other patients in just that day alone.

So when you can come in with the support of your healing team, with your acupuncturist, maybe even your Ayurveda practitioner, your chiropractor, your mental health therapist, please get support mind, body, soul, because there is no linear path to healing. It’s more like this and all over the place. So it’s really essential to come in with a well-rounded viewpoint, with data and information, so that you can say, hey, not only do I want to test Iron, but I want to test Ferritin as well. Or not only do I want to test TSH, I also want to test pre-T3 and T4, anti-TPO and thyroglobulin to test for Hashimoto’s. And a lot of times you’re not getting the complete picture if you’re only working with one practitioner. So I always say, have a healing team, find people you trust and also know that no two practitioners are exactly the same. You could get a treatment from me and get the exact same treatment from a colleague of mine and have a completely different experience. So also make sure that you have a rapport and a vibe with your practitioners because that can change everything.

Katie: Yeah, that’s such a good point. And I always remind people as well, at the end of the day, we’re hiring these practitioners to help to be our partners. So find one that you’re willing to work with. You’re asking this person to be your partner in your health. You need to have that report. That’s really, really important. And like many people, I had the experience in the traditional medical world of some of those things you just mentioned with lab testing for years with my thyroid, where they would test only one or two things and be like, no, your labs are normal. Which is a whole other conversation about what normal is and lab values to begin with, but it took a long time and finding those right practitioners to even start to be able to learn to ask the right questions, to get the better answers that eventually led to healing.

And I think there’s also a deeper level here when it comes to healing that you seem to touch on a lot in your practice and in your work and also certainly just in your ethos as a person, which is that mind-body-soul connection that we’ve mentioned a few times. And I think this seems even more important for women. It seems like women especially can see things show up in their body when there’s a disconnect in any of those areas. And I remember reading the book years ago The Body Keeps the Score and kind of just that light bulb going on of realizing that those things that we categorize as separate whether it’s mental health or emotional, spiritual, whatever those things are, they really, actually are not just not separate, but intricately connected to our body as well and vice versa. And I know that this is an important part of your approach as well. So I’d love to just sort of tiptoe into that realm and hear your approach and how you take all of those into account.

Diana: Yeah, that’s really a great inquiry. I think one of the biggest detriments to modern medicine was the separation of mind and body. When we took the mental health field and kind of extricated it to its whole own thing, we started losing this idea that we are one being, right like this is still connected to this. And the detrimental impact of not acknowledging the way our thoughts and our inner processes can affect our body was really harsh for the evolution of medicine. So it’s one system. We do a lot of deep emotional work. I’ve taken courses in Hakomi, I’ve also taken psychology courses in undergrad so that I can understand a little bit more about the inner workings and then adding things in like neuro-linguistic programming and training from things like landmark and stuff like that to create a more comprehensive system. A lot of my patients come in and we talk about their life, their emotions, the things that are going on with either a diagnosis or a death in their family, or the successes and the progress that they’re making. And it really becomes this beautiful synergy when they’re able to go, oh my gosh, I realize that I’ve been holding on to this thing in here and of course I’m going to have pain in this associated area or because I haven’t sorted through wounding from childhood wounds with my father. Of course the right side of my body is going to feel unsupported and unprotected, so we’re able to dive in a lot deeper.

And again, I do always refer my patients to mental health practitioners as well because it’s so important to have people who are trauma informed, who understand the grief process. But there’s a lot we can do with the energetics of emotions through acupuncture as well. I utilize something called Esoteric Acupuncture and I call it kind of a fifth dimensional acupuncture because it is this conduit, right? It’s this mind, body, soul, and then the bridge between earth and sky. So this really intricate way to look at the way different symbols, different geometry and different points can affect the psyche as well as physical.

Katie: It’s so exciting to me to hear people actually having a very specified approach to taking all of those into account. And I do. I love your team mentality and how you make sure to help people bring on team members to help in all of those areas and you also support them in all of those areas. I’ve talked about it a little bit on the podcast before, but that ended up being a really big key for me in my own physical health that I ignored for many, many years. I think I’ve tend to be more right brained and systems oriented, so for many years I would rely only on the empirical. And I was trying to get all this lab testing and following all these spreadsheet approaches and taking every supplement and doing everything on paper, quote unquote perfect.

And it wasn’t until I actually was willing to look at the spiritual emotional, mental side that the physical even started resolving, because what I realized, maybe from a physiological perspective, the explanation was that I had unresolved trauma, that though I didn’t realize it was a tremendous source of underlying stress. So that track was just sort of always running for me. And if you want to talk about only the physical side, that means I was pretty much always in sympathetic nervous system dominance. And I was not shifting into parasympathetic probably at all, very rarely if I did. And when I started dealing with that, it was like the layers started releasing and it certainly wasn’t an easy process, but it made such a profound impact in my physical health. And after almost a decade of doing everything I knew how to do, from talking to all of these incredible experts from around the world on this podcast, the physical things weren’t helping. But when I resolved the emotional side and the trauma, all the physical stuff was much more profoundly helpful. And Hashimoto’s went away and 80 pounds fell off effortlessly. And all those things that I had been fighting for so long, I learned to make peace with them myself and they started to resolve. So I think this part is not talked about often enough and it’s not a pill that we can take, which makes it harder for a lot of people to be willing to try it. And I think doing some of that work, it might be one of the more challenging things we face in this lifetime. But I also think it’s profoundly connected to all aspects of us, including our physical health.

Diana: Yeah, I always tell my patients, you got to feel it, to heal it. You cannot just keep shoving this stuff back down because we’re not taught how to feel. So these situations will arrive. It’s like a little scary. Let’s just shove it back down and deal with it later. Well, these emotions are coming up because they’re ready to be processed. There’s another famous saying in Chinese medicine that the issues are in the tissues. So we shove all of this stuff into our body. We become these containers for emotions, experiences and memories. And then that stuff gets stuck in the fascia, starts to wire certain plasticity levels in our brain, where we’re thinking, oh, this is my trauma or my pain. And you said it, Katie, really unraveling. What is at the core of this? What emotions am I not looking at? What am I kind of putting on the back shelf and just leaving there to fester? Right? And then these issues become worse and worse over time, and then they eventually will come out as long standing chronic illnesses, autoimmune diseases, and it is. It’s the whispers becoming whales. It’s your body just asking to be tended to and cared for. And this is so important for the mamas in the world and the women in the world, and also really important for the men, too. Men are expected to be so strong. And I think that there’s a really beautiful transition into more awareness around mental health in general, and then especially for our mamas and our dads and men out there as well.

Katie: Yeah. And what you just said about the mindset piece, too, and how we think of that, I think is also really key. I remember years ago thinking with autoimmunity and the way it’s explained in normal medicine, thinking like, oh, my body’s out to get me. My body’s trying to kill me. And what I realized is, I think our inner language is so important and the language I was using, our body pays attention to everything our mind says. And the language I was using was negative, and it wasn’t asking questions that led to healing. It was like, why is this so hard? Why can’t I lose weight? And I feel like if you ask your subconscious those questions, it does its job and it answers them like, oh, well, you have thyroid disease. Oh, well, you had six kids. Oh, whatever. It’s going to give excuses.

Whereas when I shifted to a more positive internal questioning line of questioning and was very cognizant of what statements I put after the words I am, like, even basic stuff, like I stopped saying I am sick, and I started saying I am healing. And instead of asking, Why am I not getting better? I would ask, how can I best support my body? How can I move toward because I also think one of my lessons in that was the body’s natural state is health, and the body wants to move toward healing, and it’s. Not ever out to get us. I think Dr. Cassie Huckaby said that so well. She’s like, if your body wanted to kill you, it could do it in less than a second. Your body is always on your side. If your body’s struggling with something, it’s trying to tell you something. So if we can ask better questions about how can I best support this, how can I get out of my own way or what things could I remove that are putting stress on the body right now? I think it also leads into that conversation on mental health and emotional health and all these things that I love are now being talked about at a wider scale because I think they are so, so connected.

Diana: You know, we get to choose the roommate in our mind. We do. Sometimes it will be that crappy intrusive roommate where you’re like, why am I talking to myself like this? And working on that rewiring and that repatterning of mindset is essential. I teach my patients a lot of EFT. It’s the Emotional Freedom Technique, also known as Tapping, because what you’re doing is you’re working on neurophysiological changes, where thoughts go, energy flows.

So if you’re working on loving and accepting yourself anyway, I know I’m in pain, but I love and accept myself regardless. These kinds of brain training can create really long lasting changes because you’re rewiring the brain, you’re changing that “I am in pain” or “I am this” and remembering. I tell my patients this all the time. You are the great healer. Your body knows exactly what to do. Homeostasis is your natural state. Sometimes we need to nudge ourselves back into a healthier version or a new platform of that homeostasis. But I am not here to heal you. I am just a guide on your journey. And your body really does know what to do. Not always easy. Like you said, some of those things come up and the layers are sticky and tough to process, and then they’ll give way to other deep healing crises that need to happen. But that is part of the journey. It’s unraveling from these traumas, unraveling from these old ways of thinking and being and just changing yourself from the inside out and in relationship to the outside in.

Katie: I’m so glad you brought up EFT. I know you probably have some resources on this. I’ll put some links as well in the show notes. That was something that was helpful for me in kind of mirroring with the process of learning how to accept emotions rather than judge them or resist them. And that idea of what you resist, persist. And so instead of trying to fight emotions, learning how to accept them, I feel like tapping gave me a tangible way to do that. I felt like I was still doing something even though I wasn’t trying to fight my emotions. And I think it’s also as a mom, it’s a really valuable tool to use with our kids when they get in a pattern of being stuck in something or anger just to have something physical to do often helps kids really rapidly with that pattern interrupt.

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And another area I think that springboards perfectly from this is I often ask people in preparation for podcast if they were going to give a TED Talk in a week, what would it be about? Because I feel like that shows me what are they actually most passionate about. Like, what is the topic that, if they could share with the world for 15 minutes, what would be the most important thing? And I loved your answer to this because you talked about the topic of keep being love and how healing happens. And I think everything we’ve talked about sort of builds into that topic, which I think is starting to enter the mainstream conversation a little bit more. And I’m really excited to see that. But I think that is so incredibly profound, and I don’t want to take the word from you. I would love to hear your explanation of why that would be your TED Talk.

Diana: Yeah, this question really got me thinking because I’ve been working out, what would that look like? My goal is to do a TED Talk next year, and so it was kind of a perfect opportunity for me to really dive into that. And in the process of this journey of self-discovery, this idea of keep being loved has been so omnipresent for me. It was like this download out of the universe one day. I had read a book a few years ago called A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield, and it was so potent, and it talks about when the discomfort arises. Can you learn to love that too, all of this stuff in life, we typically tend to shy away from discomfort, disease, these challenging things. We want it to be fun and easy and light, and that’s wonderful, but there is so much growth that happens when you can learn to really sit with discomfort.

There’s even a scientific study where they took two plants in the exact same conditions. Everything exactly the same, same environment, same soil. But they stressed one of these plants a little bit. They just gave it a little bit of extra dehydration, a little bit more drought than the other plant. And wouldn’t you know, the plant that experienced that little bit of stress was actually able to grow stronger, hardier, faster, and much more effectively than just the plant who kind of had this sweet, easy, simple upbringing, right? So I got into this idea of what does it mean to be okay with the discomfort and what does it take to really heal, not just for myself, but for others.

Because, as fate would have it, helping other people on their journey, both in the clinical space and I host transformational events as well, can bring up a lot of stuff, both for the attendees, for my patients, and for myself. Like, I am not absolved from doing this work. I might seem like sunshine and rainbows, but it’s been a really big and challenging journey. I have definitely had my drought patterns make me really strong. And I got this idea of how do we heal? How does healing happen? What does it actually take to get all the way into this process? And not just for myself, but for others? And this idea of just to keep being love, to radiate love in the body, to radiate love to other people, to radiate love to our food, our water, our Earth. And it was just so profound for me. I said, okay, I’m going to write a book about this someday. This is it. This is the notion of this radiant essence. There are studies on water that if you tell water nice things, makes these beautiful crystals. If you tell water or expose it to mean, harsh, intense, heavy metal music, the crystals are jagged and all over the place and more intense. And we already know that we are made of water.

So this idea of being love embodying love and shining that back out into the universe, because healing happens from deep within. I have an incredible tai chi professor, and he would just say, tell yourself you are a big body of love. And he would have this smile on his face and just be doing these Qi Gong exercises going, I am a big body of love. And that stuck with me so profoundly because I could feel myself, my frequency, my energy, the little atoms and particles and neutrons and electrons starting to change the way they were interacting with each other.

So this TED Talk would be about triumph through the tribulations, right? We are not absolved from the hard experiences in life, even when we are being love. I started out the pandemic. My mom had been battling cancer for about nine years, and with her, it was such a potent process. She was so strong, so radiant, really embodied that essence, even in pain, even through the treatment, even after a ten year struggle. And granted, there were some times that were really hard for her to still be a radiant, bubbly, strong person when she was feeling like crap. So I really feel blessed to have shared that experience with her. And she passed away in the beginning of the pandemic, and it was the one thing that I always remembered her impressing upon me is that I have the power within me to create the life that I desire, that I can keep working towards my goals.

We grew up in Mexico. Poor, uneducated, unhealthy state. Sorry, Mexico, I love you so much. But it’s true. And she really taught me how to get through these struggles, to find my footing and to be that embodiment of the person that I would want to see in the world, really, that be the change kind of essence. So bless her heart and soul, she left such an impact in community, radio and on me, just giving unto herself, really being this person who provided a lot of support for other people and embodied this idea of being love. And I really cannot say enough about what it means in the family system to be sharing these messages with your children, to be teaching them how to sort through their emotions, to tap through things, to name them, and to be that pillar of light, because we’re going to struggle along the way. We’re all going to face things at some point, whether it’s within ourselves or within our family members, where they’re struggling, they’re facing some health news. That is not ideal sense of just being loved.

I had to really learn that because part of my mom’s trauma that she was unable to process was with cigarettes. She used cigarettes as a crutch, as an outlet for her stress because it was the one reliable thing that was always there for her. And I struggle with that a lot, because guess what? I used to be a cigarette smoker, too. Now it’s been 13 years. I’m way through my healing process. But when you grow up in an environment like that, it’s really easy to pick up those habits. And so there were times where I good copped with her, I bad copped with her. I fought with her about it. I hid her cigarettes and threw them away and tried to do all the things. And I remember we got to a point one day where I said, it’s okay. If this is your thing, if this is what helps you be okay, just tell me right now, and I will love you regardless. I will love you if you choose to smoke cigarettes for the rest of your life. That’s a really powerful conversation with her, because she needed that acceptance, right? Like, oh, how much of our trauma comes from just not feeling loved or accepted.

So learning to just love her through this and be totally okay with her making that choice for herself was so potent. And that’s where this idea of just keep being love, even if it’s not for me, even if I don’t understand, even if I’m okay with being that person who fought with her not till the end, but for a long time about her cigarettes. I was supposed to be that for her. And then I was supposed to just love her regardless. That would be the theme of my TED Talk.

Katie: Well, first, I’m so sorry for the loss of your mother, but it also sounds like you guys had a beautiful journey together through that, and that now you’re also carrying on that journey in the ways that you touch all of your patients and help so many people, which I’m sure is a beautiful legacy to what you learn from her.

And I love what you said at the beginning as well. I actually have the words tattooed on my right wrist, Amor Fati which means love of fate or love what is which has been one of the harder parts of my journey as well of not just acceptance, not just gratitude, those are great and I think very important steps. But I think that stepping into actual loving what it is, especially when it’s the bad things or the things we would put in that category of not fun, comfortable experiences of life that are positivity, I think that is where growth can happen so beautifully. And it took a long time and that was actually maybe the last layer that was the hardest to let go of for me is to look back at the pretty severe trauma that happened to me in high school with sexual assault. And I felt guilty for a while when I started letting go of that and especially when I started feeling grateful for it and when I started realizing all of the ways that that had created ripples in my life that now allow me to have greater context when I talk to people or to help other women. And learning to actually love that experience. Not that I would have chosen it, but to see the beauty in it and actually be able to say I’m grateful. Not just grateful, but I love that that happened because it was an important part of the life. And I think that also speaks to it’s easy to categorize life as like the good things that are happening are the path of life and when bad things happen, that’s a deviation from the path. But really it’s all on that path of life. And I think to your point, when we have the acceptance and the gratitude and then even love for those things, we allow them to integrate and become something that helps ourselves and helps other people as well.

And I love how you talk about just that phrase being love and that also seems to loop back to some of the other things we talked about with kind of that overused oxygen mask mentality. But it has to start with yourself, with self-love and making sure that because you can’t pour from a supply that’s running out but love is an endless supply. So if we can tap into that and come from a place of self-love, then we get to become that beacon and that piece of unconditional love, hopefully for many, many people we meet, I think in a small way that touches on that. What are some of the ways that you nurture that in your own life and maybe in self-care practices or ways that allow you to keep being love for so many people that you touch?

Diana: I love this concept of the I think called kintsugi where the things break and they meld them back together with gold and it makes it even more beautiful. Like these pieces that have been broken and then fused together are the epitome of radiance, right? Even where there’s cracks, the cracks allow the gold. There’s a light in. So for me, it’s often a process of self-reflection. I try to find the golden things, even if something’s challenging. What is the lesson? Why did this happen for me? So that I can understand a new layer of myself. I do a lot of personal self-care, so I’m also doing acupuncture, doing chiropractic, going to a mental health practitioner. And then I spend a lot of time in nature living in gratitude for the environment that I’m in, for the people I’m surrounded by, for the opportunities that arise.

Because it’s not always easy to just be love. Sometimes there’s frustration and irritability and disappointment and sadness. And then I take a step back and I go, okay, why? What is this here to teach me? And how is this serving a purpose in my life? Because even in the darkness, it’s like this kind of cliche but beautiful concepts. You have to have the rain to have the rainbows. I know I’m going to get through this, and I know my patients are going to get through their things as well, because this is the journey of becoming. It’s peeling apart the layers, figuring out what’s working in our lives, getting down to the core of what’s really important. What does this say? This is our compass. What does this heart say? What is calling to me?

So trying to stay in aligned with the things that are important, with my values, setting good boundaries, that is something that is super loving, is learning how to set boundaries not just with yourself, but with other people. So it’s this process of refinement. I used to be very all accepting, right? Like, oh, we’re all just on our path, we’re all doing the best we can, trying to figure it out. And then I brought in this new concept of discernment, like being really discerning about the people, places, things, environments, ways that I’m loving and allowing myself to be loved and then getting a little more clear. What does that look like to me? What am I okay with? What are areas that I need to tighten-up in my own life? And what are ways that I can be more in integrity for the people I’m showing up for? So that refinement, that discernment, that self-care, those are all the essentials to being love.

Katie: And as we get closer to the end of our interview, although I could talk to you all day and would love to do that at some point, maybe talk about where people can find you and what’s next for you. Because I know we got to go on into a little bit of a lot of different topics, but I know you have much more exhaustive work related to all these things. So where can people find you and keep learning from you.

Diana: Yeah, being an in person practitioner has been incredible. I will always be somebody who is of service in that way, and as I’m sure most practitioners and even patients of practitioners know, it’s time to grow. So I’ve been really working on expanding these offers, these ways to share self-care and messages of being love to a broader audience. So I am working right now on something called Self-Care shortcut series where I’m interviewing experts and putting together educational info along with guided meditations, digital downloads so that people can really empower themselves so that you can hear. From the health and wellness experts, some of them who you may have heard of from on these podcasts to get more information so that you can dive into what’s going to happen for you in your life. And so for me, the next step is to take this message, to spread it further and farther. You can find me online at moonmedicinemagic.com, @selfcareshortcuts.com is in the works, but the Instagram is there. We’re sharing inspirational information. There will also be snippets from the series shared in there and I believe there will be some links for that as well. So @moonmedicinemagic and @selfcareshortcuts. You can find me online.

Katie: I love it. I’ll make sure those links are in the show. Notes for all of you guys listening on the go, a couple of last questions I love to ask. The first being if there is a book or number of books that have profoundly impacted your life personally and if so, what they are and why.

Diana: Yeah, I mean, A Path with Heart is always my top recommendation. That book by Jack Kornfield really came to me at a potent time and taught me a lot about this concept of really being in the sacred heart space, sitting with the discomfort and learning how to love that too. Obviously. Like The Prophet, The Alchemist, also incredible books. And when I think way back, I remember being influenced by Bhagavad Gita when I was very young. A lot of these are journeys into self and soul.

Katie: I will include those links as well. And lastly, any parting advice for the listeners that could be related to all the things we’ve talked about or entirely unrelated life advice.

Diana: It always boils back down to the basics, like get adequate sleep, proper hydration and nutrition, get outside, do the things you love, especially when it comes to working out, and do things to love on your body. This is a whole system, so allow yourself to be the beauty and the mess. There is no right way to do this life. Just keep aspiring to be love. Take care of yourself and the people around you and don’t forget the basics.

Katie: Diana, this has been such a fun conversation. I’m so glad we got to connect and chat. Thank you so much for sharing your time today.

Diana: Honored to share with you and your community. Katie, thanks so much.

Katie: And thanks as always to all of you 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.