How Our Beliefs Shape Our Reality with Ean Wood
In this episode of The Live Well Podcast, I’m joined by Ean Wood who lives a life dedicated to personal development. We dive deeper into how our reality is shaped by our beliefs, and that through this understanding we can have the ability to co-create our lives. We’ll also explore how to uncover areas of your life where you might currently be blocked, and how to use this awareness to move through those blocks.
In this episode of The Live Well Podcast, I’m joined by Ean Wood. Ean lives a life dedicated to personal development. His current passion lies in helping others through group facilitation, weekend retreats, online courses, and 1-on-1 coaching. Through his unique life experience as a commercial fisherman in Alaska and a professional snowboarder, he has learned the mental fortitude to push through tough times and face his biggest fears. Adding to the trifecta is a lifetime immersed in mental health and holistic healing. He now seeks to use knowledge and wisdom from his life experiences to help others reach for their highest potential.
Together we dive deeper into how our reality is shaped by our beliefs, and how through this understanding, we can co-create our lives. We’ll also explore how to uncover areas of your life where you might currently be blocked, and how to use this awareness to move through those blocks.
LISTEN BELOW (AND DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE SO YOU'LL NEVER MISS OUT!)
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SHOW NOTES:
0:00 Intro
2:40 Who is Ean and how he got here
2:50 Growing up with a father who suffered from mental health issues
4:58 Learning about the impacts humans have on our planet
5:39 Ean’s epiphany
7:14 His ripple effect for the planet
9:37 The barriers and blocks of people who want to take care of themselves
9:54 We are a species completely obsessed with thoughts
11:30 We have a tendency to believe what others tell us about ourselves
15:27 How to bring awareness to the beliefs that were ingrained in us
22:35 How to move through to bring in new habits
23:00 How to get the attention of the intellectual minds of others
25:25 Connecting medicine with the strength of the human mind
30:58 The realm of thought
32:14 Sometimes our thoughts are the puppet strings for us when wanting to feel a certain way all the time
33:44 The hard part
34:25 Daily habits to strengthen new ways of being humans
35:22 Dealing with our childhood traumas that still live within us
37:05 Ean’s way of strengthening observation and awareness
37:25 Other ways to practice awareness of self
38:27 Ean speaking about making meditation fun for yourself
43:27 How to connect with Ean and where you can find him
Head over to Ean’s website to learn more and check out his offerings
Connect with Ean on Instagram
If you loved this episode, I'd be honored for you to give me a rating on iTunes. This helps me to get content out to others who are interested in getting control of their health through diet, lifestyle shifts and personal empowerment.
If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell and I'm so excited that you're here! I am a RN & Functional Nutrition Practitioner that helps those with autoimmune disease, hormone imbalance and gut issues heal without overwhelm so you can feel better in your body in a way that honors your unique needs and feels sustainable for the rest of your life.
If you suffer from:
Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm
...and aren't getting the support you need, I’m here to help guide you! My job is to clear the overwhelm, help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and co-create a sustainable path forward to help you reach your goals and feel better in your amazing body. When we work together you can’t fail.
In my health & nutrition coaching programs I support you in the quest to get back into balance by listening to your story, understanding your needs, getting to the roots of imbalance in the body and co-creating a sustainable path to healing together. These sessions weave together functional nutrition and science, lived experience, mindset shifts, and intuitive guidance for a unique and full-spectrum approach to nutrition counseling and holistic health.
I always offer free 20-minute discovery sessions to get clear on your major health concerns and identify what’s standing in your way. Click the button below to set up your free consultation and we can create a plan of action specifically for you.
The 5 Traps Keeping You Stuck on Your Healing Journey
Clients often come to me feeling really overwhelmed about all of the conflicting health advice out there and like they've jumped around from intervention to intervention with only minimal success. They feel confused about what step to take next and feel like nothing has worked for them. Supporting health has come to feel like a full-time job and the pressure of putting the puzzle together all on their own begins to mount.
Over my last 9 years working in healthcare I’ve seen time and again places where we tend to get stuck. There are five “traps” I commonly see people get stuck in (sometimes for years!) keeping them from where they want to go on their healing journey. By shedding light on these five common traps, my hope is that you’ll know what to look out for and avoid getting stuck in them!
The 5 Traps Keeping You Stuck on Your Healing Journey
Clients often come to me feeling really overwhelmed about all of the conflicting health advice out there. They feel frustrated and like they've jumped around from intervention to intervention with only minimal success. They feel confused about what step to take next and feel like nothing has worked for them despite big efforts. Many begin to feel like supporting their health has come to feel like a full-time job and the pressure of putting the puzzle together all on their own begins to mount.
Over the last 9 years working in healthcare I’ve seen time and again places where people tend to get stuck when embarking on any healing journey. There are five “traps” I commonly see people get stuck in (sometimes for years!) keeping them from where they want to go. By shedding light on these five common traps, my hope is that you’ll know what to look out for and avoid getting stuck!
1. Information overload
We have a plethora of information available these days about how we can support our body using things like nutrition and lifestyle shifts. Information is power and it’s amazing to feel like we can take some control ourselves! But the flip side of this readily available information is that there’s so much of it, and a lot of times it can be conflicting depending on what source you’re reading.
When we are constantly receiving and taking in information we can get ourselves into a state of information overload where we feel overwhelmed and confused. I’ve seen a lot of people get stuck in this place and have been there myself early on in my journey with autoimmune disease and it doesn't feel good!
The antidote to information overload (or the information trap) is to make sure that you are not just consuming information all the time but are also taking the right action. And I totally get it - we want to consume information cause we want to learn and do everything we can to feel better. It's wonderful to learn all of these empowering things about our health! In order to get results and figure out what works for our own unique bodies, however, It’s important to make sure that we are also putting things we’re learning into action and assessing how things affect us. If you feel like you are constantly taking in information and don’t have a clear sense of what actually works for your body, a conscious break from consuming information and focusing more inwards on what information, cues, signals and insight your own body is giving you is a great idea!
2. Focusing on food as the sole pillar of health
Food is information. Food is fuel. Food has the undeniable power to support our bodies, but when it comes to healing, food is not everything. What often happens when we start to delve into a healing journey is we start with food as the main pillar of health.
If we continue to only focus on food as the single pillar of health, then when our life and health don’t improve as we want them to, we feel like the only option is to restrict more and more foods.
We may then wind up feeling like we only have five foods that we can eat without having symptoms! Focusing on food as the sole pillar of health can sometimes bring us to a place that feels really frustrating and restrictive and strains our relationship with food and nourishment.
Food is a very important pillar of health, but it is not the only one. Take a quick inventory and see if you feel stuck in that place. If you do, try “zooming out” a little bit and looking at all of the other pieces of nourishment in our lives and things that determine our health such as stress, sleep, our relationships, our mindset and our beliefs about ourselves and our health to name a few.
3. Ignoring digestive health
We’ve all heard the saying that we are what we eat, but really we are what our bodies can do with what we eat. So, really, we are what we digest, assimilate, and absorb.
Like I described earlier, food is typically the first entry point into healing and takes a lot of focus for a good reason. You might be eating a beautiful diet, but finding that digestion is off, you’re not breaking down and absorbing food or you’re still having a lot of other downstream health issues despite eating well for your body.
In addition to what you’re eating, it’s also important to consider how your body breaking down and absorbing that food. That has a lot to do with just the health of the digestive tract and the digestive tract is so important because it's where food meets our physiology.
I talk a lot about digestive health because it’s so key to overall health and any healing journey. I have an online program I created specifically for people getting stuck in this trap because I see it so often. The Love Your Gut Program is a self-paced online program that really helps you move through this and understand not just what you're eating, but how is your body using that fuel and how can you support a healthy digestive system from top to bottom!
If you feel like you’re eating really well but you’re still feeling stuck, make sure you’re also tuning into your digestion and how your body is utilizing that fuel.
4. Skipping over the foundational elements of health
The fourth trap that keeps many of us stuck is not spending enough time in foundational areas of health before moving on. We tend to look towards “higher-level” interventions which might be things like herbs, supplements or protocols to treat a virus or an infection. The trap I see people fall into is trying some of these higher-level interventions without feeling like they've really got a strong foundation or baseline.
Make sure you check in on some of those foundational elements. What's your stress like on a daily basis? Are you going to the bathroom regularly? Are you sleeping regularly? Do you have afternoon energy crashes? And do you feel like the foods you’re consuming work for you on a daily basis? Are they being broken down and absorbed well into your body?
You have probably done so much good work in those areas and learned a lot about yourself, but they’re things that we will have to continue to tend to through our entire life. Sometimes you might spend more energy on one than another, but these foundational pieces of health are never pieces we’re completely done with. Remember to keep asking yourself some of the basic foundational questions and building physiological resilience before skipping over them and considering higher-level interventions.
5. Jumping around between different protocols
The fifth and final trap that I see a lot of people get stuck in is jumping around from different protocol to different protocol. And again, I've done this one myself too! You might try something like a gluten-free diet, and while it helps with your digestion, you still have joint pain. So you think, “Okay, well someone told me about Keto, I'm going to try a Keto diet!” And then that might make you feel a little bit better in your body, but it doesn't feel sustainable. So then you might try an Autoimmune Paleo Diet or GAPS or any other number of protocols looking for the one to resolve all of your issues.
Have you ever felt like this? I find that this is a really frustrating place to be! You’re always switching gears. You feel like nothing's working. It seems like you’re trying everything and you feel like you’re just throwing things at the wall and hoping they stick.
To avoid and move out of this trap it’s helpful to instead ask yourself about any intervention or protocol, “What did this tell me about my specific body? What did I learn in this experiment?” Ask yourself what you’ve learned and how you can use that information to move forward from a more informed and empowered place rather than jumping to another protocol or strict template.
The foundation of everything is tuning in to your body and learning from the information you gather from it along the way. I want to tell you that no matter where you are at and how many times you’ve gotten stuck, it is possible to be healthy, to have energy, to feel good in your body, and be able to do the things you want to do!
I hope this helps you get clarity around what to look out for along the way to avoid these common traps and start putting the pieces together for sustainable and vibrant health!
PREFER TO LISTEN? TUNE INTO THE LIVE WELL PODCAST BELOW (AND DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE SO YOU'LL NEVER MISS OUT!)
Click here to listen in iTunes
Click here to listen in Stitcher
If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell and I'm so excited that you're here! I am a RN & Functional Nutrition Practitioner that helps those with autoimmune disease, hormone imbalance and gut issues heal without overwhelm so you can feel better in your body in a way that honors your unique needs and feels sustainable for the rest of your life.
If you suffer from:
Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm
...and aren't getting the support you need, I’m here to help guide you! My job is to clear the overwhelm, help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and co-create a sustainable path forward to help you reach your goals and feel better in your amazing body. When we work together you can’t fail.
In my health & nutrition coaching programs I support you in the quest to get back into balance by listening to your story, understanding your needs, getting to the roots of imbalance in the body and co-creating a sustainable path to healing together. These sessions weave together functional nutrition and science, lived experience, mindset shifts, and intuitive guidance for a unique and full-spectrum approach to nutrition counseling and holistic health.
I always offer free 20-minute discovery sessions to get clear on your major health concerns and identify what’s standing in your way. Click the button below to set up your free consultation and we can create a plan of action specifically for you.
Cultivating Resilience
Do you feel like everything you eat affects you negatively or causes symptoms? Do you feel stressed out and easily irritated? Do you feel like if you stay out late once or veer off of your healthy plan, you pay for it for a week?
If so, you might feel like your body lacks resilience, or the strong baseline it needs to make it through the day. Whenever we think of cultivating resilience we usually think of someone being resilient or strong in spirit. Resilience, however, can also be seen as a physiological trait. A basic definition of resilience is the ability to accommodate change. This post explores resilience and how we can begin to cultivate resilience physiologically.
Cultivating Resilience
Do you feel like everything you eat affects you negatively or causes symptoms? Do you feel stressed out and easily irritated? Do you feel like if you stay out late once or veer off of your healthy plan, you pay for it for a week?
If so, you might feel like your body lacks resilience, or the strong baseline it needs to make it through the day. Whenever we think of the term resilience we usually think of someone being resilient or strong in spirit. When we say someone is resilient we usually mean that they remain strong in the face of adversity and are able to withstand life’s challenges.
Resilience, however, can also be seen as a physiological trait.
A basic definition of resilience is the ability to accommodate change. This can be change in our lives, families, communities or change in our bodies and organ systems. Resilience can further be defined as the physiological response to change as mediated by the nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system.
At a recent event I went to Dr. Jeffery Bland, the founder of The Institute of Functional Medicine, gave the example of a hummingbird to illustrate this concept of physiological resilience. When you look at the hummingbird it appears stationary, but when it’s slowed down you can see all of the hard work that’s going into keeping that bird in one place!
That’s an example of what’s going in in our body to keep us at homeostasis or a healthy baseline. As Dr. Bland illustrated with the hummingbird analogy, there are a number of different stressors that can influence our ability to stay at a healthy baseline. These can be stressors such as nutrient deficiencies from a suboptimal diet, our environment, daily stressors like a busy schedule or work deadlines, lack of sleep, relationships and support systems etc.
Whenever we have symptoms, feel out or balance or have a diagnosis of disease in our current medical system we look for ways to get rid of the disease. To eradicate the symptoms. If we have chronic sinus infections, we want to kill the bacteria. If we have autoimmune disease, we want to shut off an overactive immune system. While this approach is sometimes necessary, if we don’t also address the reason why we got the sinus infection or the autoimmune disease in the first place and work to build resilience in the body and inner terrain, we won’t actually get to the root of the problem.
If we take biologic medications to control the immune system or antibiotics to treat the sinus infections but we don’t work on proper nutrition, hydration, sleep, stress management and taking care of the body, it’s difficult to build that thick baseline for the body to be able to handle change and daily stressors of life and avoid recurrence of disease or symptoms.
So, how do we begin to cultivate this resilience?
Whenever I work with clients we put a lot of focus and attention on the critical importance of strengthening your baseline so you can eat a more diverse array of foods that don’t send you into a flare-up, work a full today without feeling like you’re totally exhausted at the end, and move your body and exercise without feeling like you have to recover for days afterward. If we try to move forward without first establishing a strong baseline, it’s a whole lot harder to achieve sustainable outcomes.
I’ve seen many clients attempt to skip over these pieces or think they’ve already done them only to find themselves stuck in a cycle of being “on or off the wagon” still feeling so up and down with their health after many years. Once we go through, step-by-step, the ways to create a strong, resilient baseline for that specific person, clients instantly see the puzzle pieces that were missing for years.
Cultivating resilience means that we work through the foundations of giving the body the proper nutrition and hydration it needs, work on how the body is absorbing and utilizing those nutrients through supporting gut health, and tone the nervous system by reducing and managing stress. We also work on mindset, who you are as the person eating the food and moving through your day, and give you all of the tools you need to feel strong, resilient, and less reactive to this wild ride that is life!
What a relief.
Watch the video below to learn more about cultivating resilience and leave a comment to let me know your thoughts on looking at resilience through this lens!
PREFER TO LISTEN? TUNE INTO THE LIVE WELL PODCAST BELOW (AND DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE SO YOU'LL NEVER MISS OUT!)
Click here to listen in iTunes
Click here to listen in Stitcher
If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell and I'm so excited that you're here! I am a RN & Functional Nutrition Practitioner that helps those with autoimmune disease, hormone imbalance and gut issues heal without overwhelm so you can feel better in your body in a way that honors your unique needs and feels sustainable for the rest of your life.
If you suffer from:
Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm
...and aren't getting the support you need, I’m here to help guide you! My job is to clear the overwhelm, help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and co-create a sustainable path forward to help you reach your goals and feel better in your amazing body. When we work together you can’t fail.
In my health & nutrition coaching programs I support you in the quest to get back into balance by listening to your story, understanding your needs, getting to the roots of imbalance in the body and co-creating a sustainable path to healing together. These sessions weave together functional nutrition and science, lived experience, mindset shifts, and intuitive guidance for a unique and full-spectrum approach to nutrition counseling and holistic health.
I always offer free 20-minute discovery sessions to get clear on your major health concerns and identify what’s standing in your way. Click the button below to set up your free consultation and we can create a plan of action specifically for you.
Heal vs. Ideal
This post shares how we have to go through the "heal" to get to the "ideal." If we feel like "heal" is where we are going to be forever and we don't like it, we bust through it and don't spend enough time there in order to allow our tissues, immune systems, and selves time to truly heal in the way that’s needed. I hope this concept of "heal vs. ideal" will help put the health choices we make into perspective.
Heal vs. Ideal
When we're dealing with health issues we might find ourselves doing things like elimination diets, avoiding alcohol, going to bed early, etc.
We start to make these changes and then might begin to think, "Oh man this sucks! If I have to live like this forever it's not worth it!" This may then lead us to abandon all of the practices we were doing simply because we don't want to live a life of "restriction" forever.
And then we find ourselves back at square one with all of our symptoms still there, trying to find a more sustainable way to be healthy.
Have you ever felt this before? It can be so frustrating! And a cycle I see many of my clients get stuck in.
I worked with a client who had Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) who was finding that intense exercise was causing her to flare-up and have more pain. She knew she had to reduce exercise, but it felt really challenging because being active and outdoors was a big part of her identity.
Instead of taking a break from strenuous exercise, she kept pushing through her pain because she wanted to keep living her life which is something we can all relate to. What she was noticing was her pain was getting worse and worse.
In our work together we spoke about this concept of "heal vs. ideal" to help put the health choices we make into perspective.
For my client, the "ideal" place of where she wanted to be and how she wanted to live was being able to hike and do more strenuous outdoor activities. This "ideal" place is really about where we want to be which might include eating many diverse foods, being able to have a cocktail when you feel like it, exercising how you want to, etc.
What I want to highlight is that we have to go through the "heal" to get to the "ideal." If we feel like "heal" is where we are going to be forever and we don't like it, we bust through it and don't spend enough time there in order to allow our tissues, immune systems, and selves time to truly heal in the way they need.
When I work with clients in 1:1 coaching we move through the "heal" place effectively and with guidance so you can move more quickly towards the ideal - where you ultimately want to be.
To learn more about this concept watch the video below or tune into the latest episode of The Live Well Podcast!
If you are looking for support to break the cycle of feeling “on or off the wagon” and finally find more ease and sustainability in your life, I can help! I always offer free 20-minute discovery calls to see if we’re a good fit for coaching and how I can help you identify and break through the blocks standing in your way towards vibrant health. Click here to schedule your complimentary call today!
Click here to listen in iTunes
Click here to listen in Stitcher
If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell and I'm so excited that you're here! I am a RN & Functional Nutrition Practitioner that helps those with autoimmune disease, hormone imbalance and gut issues heal without overwhelm so you can feel better in your body in a way that honors your unique needs and feels sustainable for the rest of your life.
If you suffer from:
Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm
...and aren't getting the support you need, I’m here to help guide you! My job is to clear the overwhelm, help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and co-create a sustainable path forward to help you reach your goals and feel better in your amazing body. When we work together you can’t fail.
In my health & nutrition coaching programs I support you in the quest to get back into balance by listening to your story, understanding your needs, getting to the roots of imbalance in the body and co-creating a sustainable path to healing together. These sessions weave together functional nutrition and science, lived experience, mindset shifts, and intuitive guidance for a unique and full-spectrum approach to nutrition counseling and holistic health.
I always offer free 20-minute discovery sessions to get clear on your major health concerns and identify what’s standing in your way. Click the button below to set up your free consultation and we can create a plan of action specifically for you.
