Manders Mindset
Hosted by Amanda Russo, The Breathing Goddess, who is a Breathwork Detox Facilitator, Transformative Mindset Coach, and Divorce Paralegal.
Amanda's journey into mindset and empowerment began by working with children in group homes and daycares. She later transitioned to family law, helping people navigate the challenging emotions of divorce. During this time, Amanda also overcame her own weight and health challenges through strength training, meditation, yoga, reiki, and plant medicine.
Amanda also shares her personal journey, detailing how she transformed obstacles into opportunities by adopting a healthier, holistic lifestyle.
Discover practical strategies and inspiring stories that will empower you to break free from limitations and cultivate a mindset geared towards growth and positivity.
Tune in for a fun, friendly, and empowering experience that will help you become the best version of yourself.
Manders Mindset
85: From Eating Disorders to Empowerment with Courtney Moore
Join us on a truly inspiring episode with Courtney Moore, a remarkable woman who turned her tumultuous upbringing into a journey of profound self-discovery. Growing up with the pain of losing her mother and navigating a challenging relationship with her father, Courtney recounts her experiences of running away from home at 15 and finding unexpected sanctuary in boarding school and college. Her story is a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the transformative power of alternative healing.
Courtney opens up about her struggles with eating disorders during the 90s, a time when nutritional misinformation was rampant. She shares raw insights into her battles with secretive and emotional eating as a way to exert control in an unstable environment. Courtney’s journey to recovery, aided by the community and structure of Overeaters Anonymous, sheds light on the importance of support systems and healthy coping mechanisms. Her reflections underscore the complex relationship between socioeconomic factors and food availability, offering valuable lessons for listeners grappling with similar issues.
Discover how Courtney’s path led her to embrace the world of alternative healing, becoming an acupuncturist and bodyworker. Through her experiences, we explore the profound impact of acupuncture on the nervous and endocrine systems, and how integrating yoga and mindfulness can be life-changing. Courtney’s dedication to holistic practices not only brought about her own healing but also equips her to help others on their journey. This episode is a heartfelt exploration of overcoming adversity and finding one's purpose through self-reflection, community, and holistic health practices.
In this episode, you'll uncover:
- What happens when trauma, resilience, and healing intersect
- The true nature of eating disorders and the subconscious desire for control
- How alternative healing methods like acupuncture can transform your life
- The role of community and support systems in overcoming personal challenges
- Practical insights into integrating yoga and mindfulness for holistic health
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Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers and a variety of other people where your host, amanda Russo, will discuss her own mindset and perspective and her guest's mindset and perspective on the world around us. Manders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life, will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.
Speaker 2:Hello, beautiful souls, Welcome back to another episode of Amanda's Mindset. As always, I'm your host, Amanda Russo, and I am here today with an amazing guest who has many similarities to me in terms of our previous mindsets around eating. We also touched upon previously how a lot of our eating habits and patterns are often unconscious to us and Helen. I'm going to delve into that today, and I am here with Whitney. Thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, I'm so excited to be here with you, Amanda. So can you take us down memory lane and tell us a little bit about foundation upbringing, family dynamic.
Speaker 3:However deep you want to go with that, yeah, I'll give you the thousand foot view and you can let me know if you want to go deeper. My mother died when I was one. I was a baby so I don't remember her. My dad I'm pretty sure is on the autistic spectrum, was on the autistic spectrum. He just passed last year and so we moved a lot. I think he had a lot of trouble keeping a job and so we moved twice a year. Every year he would move to a new school for a new academic contract and then we'd move back to the Northwest for the summer. We did that every year Until I was 15 and I ran away from home.
Speaker 3:I just I didn't feel safe at home and my dad and I fought a lot. It was just time for me to leave. I consider it such a blessing. I feel like my angels really got me out of there and then I ended up going to boarding school, and in boarding school and college is when a lot of things with eating really came to a head and when I started to do a lot of healing work.
Speaker 3:It was like the first 15 years of my life were just a lot of trauma and a lot of wounding. I really didn't feel loved. I think was the core aspect of my childhood I was really loved. I know now my dad loved me immensely, but I didn't feel loved and I didn't feel connected to him, and so I was really lonely and I was really self-critical. I was always figuring like why am I not loved? What's wrong with me? Something must be deeply wrong with me for me to not have this experience that everyone else seems to be having.
Speaker 3:In college I thought about pre-med for a hot second, but I decided Western medicine was just about drugs and surgery, which are great tools, but not the tools I wanted to use. And so I ended up going to massage school and then from massage school I went to acupuncture school and now I work doing kind of alternative healing. I do acupuncture, body work, herbs, I do some psychic work, but like the archetype of the wounded healer really speaks to me. That's clearly like the path that I'm on. Okay Now really speaks to me.
Speaker 2:That's clearly like the path that I'm on. Okay, Now did you have any siblings? Just me, just me and my dad, and so when you ran away, then you went to boarding school was that right away.
Speaker 3:So I ran away from home and I started living with a friend I'd been staying like two nights a week with, and her family was great. I had another friend who actually had a room for me in her basement because I was spending a lot of time there also. And then I had a third friend who was being raised by a single mom who was sort of like more the merrier, like come on in. So I bounced between their three houses. I looked into becoming an emancipated minor, but I was going to this LaSalle high school. That was kind of a dick move. They were like they can't be a student here if you're emancipated minor. And so then I was like OK, well then I have to figure out how to transfer high schools. And now this is getting very complicated. And then my dad wrote a really nasty letter to one of the women I was staying with, one of the moms, basically threatening to get the police involved.
Speaker 2:And so I went back home, and that's when I started applying to boarding schools.
Speaker 3:Oh OK. So now did he miss you? Oh, I'm sure he did so. My mom died from breast cancer. She had it originally when she was 27. It came back when she was pregnant with me, when she was like 37 38. I learned much later in life, in my late 20s, that she had actually made arrangements for me to live with her brother and his wife and kids, who live in North Carolina. My aunt has a son from a previous marriage. My aunt and uncle had a son together and then they waited to have their second kid because they thought I was going to enjoy their family. So there's a big gap between Sam and Karen, and Karen's actually named after my mom, karen. So I just felt like everyone just abandoned me. You know what I mean. I felt like everyone just like left me with this weird guy. Why is no one witnessing what I'm going through over here? But that arrangement had been made.
Speaker 2:Oh, I did. I just wondered how you went to like boarding school was right after you left.
Speaker 3:Oh, you asked me, did he miss me? So he couldn't let go of me. You know what I mean. Like mom had made this arrangement for me to go and he couldn't lose her and me at the same time. And so again, like I know, my dad loved me so much. He was just a busy single parent. He was autistic, which means he wasn't great at communicating or tuning emotionally and he was really overwhelmed with raising a daughter. I think you was really overwhelmed with raising a daughter. I think Single dad raising a daughter is pretty tough. So I think he was just stressed out. He had a really rough temper. So he was just stressed out and angry all the time, which, now that I'm an adult and watching my friends parent kids, I'm like, oh yeah, that's real. Being stressed out and angry all the time is totally a normal parenting experience.
Speaker 2:So now, when did you find out that you were supposed to go?
Speaker 3:with the uncle. I visited my aunt and uncle after I graduated grad school. I was probably like 28, 29. And it just kind of came up in a conversation. It was really healing for me to know that my mom had thought that through, at least tried to make plans for me.
Speaker 2:I bet that's beautiful though. Okay, and so now you said the stuff you're eating. When did that start to develop?
Speaker 3:It's such a good question. I can see how I used food as a comfort from a really early age. I remember sneaking chocolate and cookies a lot when I was in first, second, third grade. I would just go to the cupboard and start sneaking those foods, which I think is really normal for a kid. But it escalated through middle school where if I had any feelings in middle school I always have a lot of feelings I just went to eat my feelings away. You know I was totally unconscious. I mean it was simple sugars, like I would eat a lot of bread or I would eat a lot of chips or I would just eat a lot of ice cream. I do remember feeling around middle school, early high school, that I wasn't in control of it, like those binges were things that just happened and afterwards I would feel so shitty about them, but it was almost like I wasn't conscious in the moment, like I was on autopilot.
Speaker 3:I did become a vegetarian when I was 10. And I think that's related to all this, because a vegetarian diet especially if you're not being conscious about it, which as a 10 year old I was not is so much sugar. You know, it's about it, which as a 10-year-old? I was not. It's so much sugar, it's just a lot of carbohydrates and not a lot of healthy proteins.
Speaker 3:It was the 90s. We were all doing the low-fat thing, so I was just eating a lot of sugar, a lot of simple carbs, and I do think that sets you up for this binging cycle. Fat is what now I know all this. Fat gives us more sustained energy through the day. Protein is really critical for all of our biological functions and if you're not getting the fat and protein you need, your body's just going to say well, give me what you got, give me more calories, because I am a growing teenager and I need more nutrition. So I think that might have also been related to the compulsion behind the binges. It's like something in me was really driving me to just put more food in my mouth, but I could not deny the emotional component on top of that for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it was fascinating to me when you said 10, because I became a vegetarian myself. I can't remember if I was 13 or 14. So I was very uneducated about it. So, again, like a lot of the carbs, because you don't know the importance of protein, the importance of all these other nutrients.
Speaker 3:you know which is yeah and especially the so easy just to slip into, like bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, chips, you know, like the. Those are maybe some cheese, if you're lucky, you're getting some fat and protein from cheese, but outside of that those are the easy foods that kids are fed you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember being in way at one point like we'd have rolls from the grocery store and I would just eat a roll instead of putting it like eating a sandwich. Yep, just the bread. Yeah, Because it's just the quick. And it's interesting how you mentioned to me it's unconscious, Because for so long it took me so long to realize that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for me it really escalated in high school, where I started. We were also pretty poor, so we didn't have a lot of food in our cupboards that I could sneak. I mean literally there was like a box of cereal and a loaf of bread, and so when I was in any situation where I could sneak more food you know, at a friend's house who had a really full stock pantry I remember being in like school kitchens and no one was around and I could, like go into the fridge and start grabbing things that were in there I would sneak so much food and it would have to be sort of rushed and hurried and secretive and hidden. And I think all of that played into this also, where it was like, oh yeah, when you eat, it's like in private, it's a secret thing that you can't tell anyone about. It was really desperate. I'd just be eating like fistfuls of cookies or grab pieces of cake. And that continued for a long time, this habit of just stealing, sneaking food and eating it so quickly and privately. And then it became an obsession. I was always thinking where else can I sneak some food from? Where else can I eat three candy bars and no one will know about it and that definitely escalated in high school and college, like with the dining halls.
Speaker 3:I think I really worked hard to keep up this front of like what people see me eat will be normal. So I'd have like a normal meal around my friends, or even like a light meal, like oh, I'm not hungry, I'm going to skip breakfast today. But then I would take food from the dining halls back to my room and just like pig out there. You know and again it was, it's so hard to describe it if you haven't experienced it but that compulsive eating, it's like you don't stop to chew or taste, you're just like swallowing and it just like puts up the brakes, like you cannot put more food into your body. It's a horrible experience and it feels, you know, I feel a lot of shame around it because I feel like I should have more self-discipline, like what is wrong with me that I can't stop eating this food in front of me. There's something weird going on here, and so it was very hidden and secretive.
Speaker 3:Years later I got into 12-step groups over Eaters Anonymous and I remember there was this lovely woman who said I don't think people with eating disorders have less self-control. I think we are constantly trying to control our environment, we're just using the wrong tools to do it. I really think there's something to that. It was like my. Whenever I felt out of control emotionally, whenever there was, you know, stuff content from my past that needed my attention and I was like I do not have the resources to look at that right now, I turned to food. I turned to this tool that again has been around since I was like six or seven years old.
Speaker 3:If you don't feel good, food is here for you and in some ways, I feel like it's the drug that's most accessible to really young people. Dr, you know, drugs are a coping strategy people use to feel better about themselves or to feel better about life, and they're, like you know, escaping something into the drugs, into the alcohol, and when you're a child, that's often not available to you, but food is there. I feel like sugar was the drug that I had access to. That continued to be my biggest Achilles heel. Even when actual drugs and alcohol were available, I was not nearly as interested in those as I was interested in using food.
Speaker 2:I was honestly thinking the same thing when you were talking about that, because to so many of us, whether we're a child, regardless of the upbringing we're in, most of us have access to some sort of food, even if it's not a lot. You know, like you mentioned, you had just the basics, but you had access to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly so I really like that. You mentioned about trying to control it, but controlling it in the wrong way. That makes a lot of sense. Now I'm someone who I struggled with the binge for a few years of my life and then it switched to. I actually went to the doctor's office and I got on the scale and when I found out what my weight was, I was like no more. So it was the opposite. I was so controlling over it and I didn't consider it an eating disorder because I wasn't making myself grow up and I wasn't not eating, but because I was that vegetarian. I was eating fruits and vegetables, that's it. Or when I was having family dinner, I would eat as little of like pasta that I could, and the excuse was well, I'm a vegetarian, so I'm not eating the chicken, I'm not eating the this, and it was just so unconscious to me again, like for so long.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and I definitely fell into those patterns too by the time college rolled around. The food restriction was a really big thing for me. And so I remember sitting in bio 101 and the margins of my notes were all calorie counting. You know, I tried to memorize how many calories were in all these different foods and I would tally up how many calories I ate. I got really into obsessive exercising. I was a grower, I was on the routine, but I would go to the gym, even you know my off hours, and just like study on the treadmill, study on the elliptical, because I felt like I could.
Speaker 3:Again, I couldn't actually control my food intake. I tried so hard and the more I tried to whittle it down, the bigger those binges became. And then I had to go burn off all those calories and then I'm like stuck in this cycle of like restriction, binging, trying to get rid of it. I did start purging and then same thing. So it's like restriction, binge, purge of some kind, restriction, binge, purge, over and over and over and over again, and it's such an awful and impossible cycle it's really hard to free yourself from that because I don't know what leg of that you stop. If you stop the restriction, you're terrified that you're just going to like gain weight because you're getting so many calories. If you stop the binging, well, you can't really stop the binging. It's just a response to everything else. Like I've had a choice to stop the binging, it wasn't a choice that I fell. And then same thing if you stop the purging. That was my sort of like gateway to healing was I stopped purging, I stopped obsessively exercising, I stopped making myself throw up and then I just sort of like got it down to just trying to restrict and having these binges and honestly I don't know if I'm jumping the gun here. I still don't know how I got out of that cycle. I remember very clearly committing to not purging anymore and that was a really big step for me.
Speaker 3:And then I got really into Bikram yoga, which is all kind of addiction. People will tell you that's like a cult. I was doing Bikram yoga five times a week. It's heated, it's intense. The teachers yell at you. All of a sudden I binged less. I'd obviously done a lot of internal work at this point too. At this point I'd been doing therapy for a few years. I was more aware of psychological factors that were behind my behaviors, but a lot of it, honestly, I just chalk up to grace. I do not know exactly why I was able to stop this cycle, but somewhere around age 23, why I was able to stop this cycle, but somewhere around age 23, I was Hallelujah.
Speaker 3:And then it's just the long road of learning how to feed yourself appropriately. What does healthy eating look like? I think for a lot of vegetarians and vegans, there is that element of control underneath what they're doing, which wasn't for me originally. When I was 10, it was all about animal rights and sort of like. You know, my mom died from cancer, so it's like oh, maybe meat's connected with cancer, I'll stop eating meat. But I do think a lot of the people I interact with now who are especially vegan, there's definitely at least a subconscious or partially conscious bias towards how can I restrict my food more and more and more?
Speaker 2:Why do you think that is?
Speaker 3:why do people have that, or why do you think that's associated with veganism?
Speaker 2:Yeah, why is it associated with veganism?
Speaker 3:Because it's acceptable, right? If you tell people you're vegan, they just accept that you're making this choice for many possible reasons. It could be health, it could be ethics or morals, it could be some other viable reason why people choose that lifestyle. And then you get to be very restrictive and choosy and people just have to kind of bow to it. Right? No one can argue with you. Well, you just need to eat meat. Right now it's like no, you're a vegan. Okay, you're not going to eat what I've prepared for you. You're not going to go out for burgers with us. You're not going to do X, y or Z.
Speaker 2:That makes a lot of sense because I've thought about that, even because I was a vegetarian for five years, so it was a pretty long time, but I never really fully understood, like why. But that makes a lot of sense because they have this, this mindset, this identity, that they don't do this so, like everybody else, is going to follow that I was a vegetarian for 15 years.
Speaker 3:I was vegan for about a year of that. Honestly, I know a lot of people choose that lifestyle for really great reasons. You know it's better for the planet. We could have a long conversation about whether it's better for our bodies. At this point I don't think it is, but I understand why some people make that choice for their bodies and for their health. I'm a huge animal rights advocate. I think the way we treat our animals that are raised for consumption is horrible. I totally get some of the reasons behind that also and I don't know if it's the chicken or the egg but people who make that choice become more and more interested in how they can control their food intake.
Speaker 2:I've noticed. I noticed that even with myself when I was one. So you mentioned a few times a 12-step process that helped you. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just 12-step, like Alcoholics Anonymous. It's the same program and you know there's Alcoholics Anonymous, there's Al-Anon, there's Children of Adult Alcoholics, I think there's Codependence Anonymous. There's a bunch of off. There's Children of Adult Alcoholics, I think there's Codependence Anonymous. There's a bunch of offshoots of that 12-step framework.
Speaker 3:The one I went to is called Overeaters Anonymous and it's specifically for anyone with food stops. So even though it's Overeaters Anonymous, oa, it's also for bulimics, for anorexics, for hypergymnastics, for anyone who is having an unhealthy relationship with food and eating. I learned so much from it, I got so much from it. I really think there's a healing that happens in group settings like that. That's really unique and special. And, again, because so much of my overeating was done in secret to be around other people and owning this behavior and being around other people who behave this way, because I definitely felt like I was the only freak who was doing this. It was really, really beautiful and I met some really lovely human beings who were struggling with a lot of the same internal dialogues or just issues that I was having.
Speaker 3:I could not recite the 12 steps to you right now. I know the first is that we admitted we were powerless over food. And I think the second is we give it over to a higher power, and that higher power could be your own higher self, it could be the group as a higher power, it could be God, however you conceive of God. But there's this higher power element. And I don't remember the third step I know the fourth, I'm pretty sure is you make this complete and searching moral inventory and you kind of assess how you have hurt people, how you have shown up, and eventually you make amends for all those hurts you've done.
Speaker 3:It's a really beautiful program. I know it's a little controversial these days. It's lost some popularity, I think partly because of the higher power thing and partly because it's a little bit more rigid, but I got so much out of it. In a lot of 12-step programs you're encouraged to have a sponsor. There was one point when I had a sponsor and it was great. Whenever I felt like I was going to binge, whenever I felt like I was out of control, there was this person I could call, who knew exactly what I was going through and could talk to me, and not even talk to me and are like I'm going to make you stop this behavior, but really like someone who could witness me and talk about my experience and love me and accept me, even if I did choose to do the binge after all. Yeah, it was really powerful. It's been a while since I've been to a meeting, but I definitely recommend those meetings for anyone who wants that sort of group support, as they're getting out of a dynamic that's not working for them.
Speaker 2:Approximately how old were you when you went to OA?
Speaker 3:I was when I was in boarding school, somehow the administration caught wind of my behaviors and mandated that I start therapy, and this lovely dorm parent suggested I look into Overeaters Anonymous. I think it was the summer between junior and senior year I started going to meetings and loved that, because after boarding school, in between the school years I'd have to go back home and live with my dad for the summer and that was really hard. Then I didn't have the support I had from the dorm parents and my therapist and my friends, and so having meetings to go to was a really beautiful way to continue that support and those conversations.
Speaker 2:Were you hesitant at all to go to OA?
Speaker 3:I'm sure I was just being a teenager. But I'm sure I was just being a teenager. But Miss Baker, my dorm parent, dorm teacher, she really set it up well for me. I think she found local meetings, she got me some of the literature and I guess it was just so desperate that anything seemed like a solution I should give an option to.
Speaker 2:You know I should try out whatever options I had had, and approximately how long did you go to?
Speaker 3:OA for. So I think I started when I was 17 and I probably stopped when I was like 23 or 24. You know they have a lot of books too, so I had the books and, kind of like, would read through the books on my own, even if I wasn't going to meetings.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And what would you say the biggest thing? It was that it helped you with. I really think the biggest thing was just having a space where I could be seen in't sort of like the lone weak person who had this problem. But recognizing that this was something a lot of people, and especially a lot of women, face and, yeah, I guess knowing that some people could successfully claw their way out of that pattern too, gave me some hope claw their way out of that pattern too, gave me some hope.
Speaker 2:that makes a lot of sense because, you know, I even like you mentioned a few times, like the binging or the poaching, it's done in private, you know, and I think not all, but like a lot of addictions, even like I know I've never gone to aa, but I've struggled with alcohol addiction at points in my life and it was something that was a more public thing because it's more socially acceptable. You know it wasn't. I didn't have that lone aspect, jose, as much with that. Yeah, totally. I think that's great, though, that you had the sponsor, because even like you mentioned, whether you made the choice to do it or not, you still had somebody to talk to about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think for me, especially since loneliness was such a root of how unhappy I was I felt so alone and I felt so unseen in my home the idea of community or a group being a big part of my healing makes so much sense. I finally got some of that connection and acceptance and visibility that had been missing for so much of my life.
Speaker 2:Okay, so fast forward to college. And now I was eating for you there.
Speaker 3:It was really rough. So I did that mandatory therapy. I did mandatory therapy at my first high school when I ran away. I did mandatory at my second high school when they found out you know these eating behaviors. And then in college they found out about my eating behaviors and again I had to do more mandatory therapy. So, yeah, it was just. It was rough. It was such an obsession. It was just something I thought about all the time. It was just always top of mind. It was like food and weight and sneaking things and calories. I was just always thinking about that.
Speaker 3:I was so unhappy with my body. I wasn't huge, but I was definitely what I would call kind of like pudgy, bigger, curvy, and yeah, I just hated my body. It wasn't comfortable. My body wasn't proud of my body.
Speaker 3:You're at an age those years 16 through 22, are like supposedly a woman's prime as far as her beauty and a lot of the females around me really were blossoming and we're so beautiful and we're having a lot of fun dressing in beautiful, revealing clothing and really showing their body off and having people attract to their bodies and I just felt like I wanted to hide my body. I wanted to run away from my body. I wanted to get out of my body. I wanted to punish my body. So I had a really difficult relationship with my physical self that dominates your entire existence. If that's how you feel you can't actually get away from your body Everywhere you go there it is. So I'd be sitting in class, I'd be having a meal, I'd be on a date, I'd be with my friends and I'd always just be thinking about how much I hate this fucking body. I got to change it, I got to make it better, I got to do something about it, and that ended up manifesting in some kind of eating behavior down the road down the line.
Speaker 2:Now, when did this start to shift for you?
Speaker 3:So when I figured out I did not want to be pre-med, my sophomore year of college is really when a lot of my purging hit a fever pitch. In fact, a friend wrote a paper about me for her anthropology class or sociology class, because at that point I had vomited in like every building on campus, which was terrible and this wasn't something I'm proud of but all the dorms, so many of the classroom buildings, some of the public buildings and so she just wrote, she interviewed me and started talking about the motivation behind that, and I just looked at myself and I said something has to stop here. I am not on a good trajectory right now and I don't see anything really interrupting that, and so I need to do something to interrupt that. And my junior year, which is when everyone, a lot of people choose to do like a junior year abroad program I decided I would take the leave of absence because I had extra credits and I would go study massage therapy, because it was on my life bucket list, and I would do it in New Zealand because everyone else got to travel. So I wanted to travel too, and it was this incredibly healing six months for me. New Zealand's an incredible country. It's so beautiful, everything is so green, which I think is such a healing color.
Speaker 3:My massage school cohort was all women for the first time in the history of the program. Which I think was really important for me in college is when I really started to well, I guess in high school too, I really started to heal some of that mother wounding. So to be surrounded by women in community was really important and that's where I made my hack to stop purging and, yeah, that was like the big turning point for me going to massage school, so much somatic healing. So I'd done a lot of therapy, which is talk therapy is wonderful. I learned a lot about myself, about my psyche, about my wounding, and I was still really disconnected from my body. That head, body, brain, body disconnect is something you have to really work to overcome.
Speaker 3:And so going to massage school was the somatic element I needed. I was finally having people like touch my body, it was getting more in my body, I was listening to my body, and so I think that was a big part of what springboarded this next step of my evolution too. And then I went back to college and I finished my program and I was definitely eating more healthy. Those last 18 months of college Still some occasional binges, but yeah, there was just something different about it, something really shifted in that time period. Yeah, I think that's about right.
Speaker 2:Okay, and so did you graduate college? I did, and what did you graduate? What did you get your degree in? In philosophy. And now did you pursue massage therapy. Did you go down that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I was a massage therapist. I joke, it was my grad school job, because when I was in New Zealand I saw an acupuncture demonstration, and so what I came to was like oh, I don't want to do Western medicine, drugs and surgery not the tools I want to use, I'll do Chinese medicine needles, herbs, those feel like the tools I do want to use. I finished my philosophy degree, stayed in Philadelphia, traveled the world for about two years, just post-college fun, and then I started at grad school in San Francisco, and so I worked as a massage therapist from the time I graduated college to the time I started my acupuncture practice.
Speaker 2:I'm so curious about acupuncture. Can you explain, like from a basic level, what that is?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a couple different ways we can think about it. I always give my patients the Eastern view and the Western view, since I feel like I kind of have that background in both. From an Eastern perspective, everything is energy. We have all these lines of energy running through our body and we, you know, and we call the energy qi in Chinese medicine, we want to balance yin and yang, which are opposites. We want to make sure the blood and the essence, the jing and the shui, are doing what they need to do. So it's all about balance and it uses, in Chinese medicine, five pillars acupuncture, herbs, body work, diet and qigong, which is like energy meditations or energy movements, in order to find that balance. So acupuncture we use when there's a stagnation in the body, the energy is not moving properly or there's not enough energy, and we use the needles to get that energy moving or to bring energy to an area where there's not enough energy. Energy moving or to bring energy to an area where there's not enough energy.
Speaker 3:From a Western perspective, the nervous system and the endocrine system are really important for our systemic health. The needles really stimulate the nervous system in this really unique way that also causes a cascade of responses in the endocrine system, which is hormones, right, and so you can use the needles and they've done. You know fascinating studies about the way the nervous system changes their signaling, like if you've had chronic pain, that's like a nerve telling your brain over and over, hey, it hurts over here. And after a while the brain is like, well, I don't have any other resources to send you, so I'm just going to put up with this signal and the needle interrupts that pathway. The needle might say, hey, brain over here. And then the brain is like, oh, I've got some you know fun neurotransmitters to send to you that might help with this signal and that might help the back pain too. That's been going on for a long time.
Speaker 3:Honestly, western medicine does not totally understand how acupuncture does what it does. This is one of the theories. My favorite studies on acupuncture from a Western perspective are brain scans that they do while someone is receiving acupuncture. And in one of these there's a point on the toe that's supposed to help the vision. Weird connection, right? How does this work? And again we're going to go back to the nervous system being this long branching web of fibers throughout your whole being, but it's all connected and when they needle that point while someone's getting a brain scan, the visual cortex lights up. So somehow the ancient Chinese figured out this nervous system connection between the small toe and the visual cortex of the brain, which goes on to change your vision. So I think that that's the best way to phrase or to frame it in terms of like a Western perspective is nerves and just like chemicals that are being released based on stimulation in the body.
Speaker 3:I think about both perspectives when I'm treating people. I think when I get too Western, my treatments aren't as good. And so, sticking close to that Chinese medicine theory, there's really something there. I was such a skeptic for such a long time and I really thought like this is just nervous system stimulation. We're getting people out of fight or flight, into rest or digest. Homeostasis, lets the body heal itself. I think there's something to that. But the more powerful treatments I've done are all about this Chinese medicine theory of like, how the meridians are talking to each other, how the body parts relate to the organs, how the emotions relate to the body and the energy. It's beautiful. Chinese medicine is a beautiful system, and I'm sure that that was another part of my healing. You know, going to massage school, you get a lot of massages. Going to acupuncture school, you get a lot of acupuncture, and so I got a chance to work on my own body that way also.
Speaker 2:You explained that really well, thank you. I am fascinated by that brain scan in the toe, in the vision.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was at the University of California, irvine. It was a small sample size, but if anyone's a data nerd, look that up.
Speaker 2:What are some things you've noticed?
Speaker 3:it help your clients with Well the things acupuncture is most studied, for, which you can now get a PhD in one of these two specialties, are pain management and fertility, and so especially pain management. In Europe they've done a ton of really great studies on how acupuncture helps with pain management. I treat a lot of pain. I think we all have bodies, which means we all have pain at some time in some way, and so, whether that's chronic pain or a sports injury or some kind of systemic pain, I just think acupuncture is great for pain, really really great for pain.
Speaker 3:Fertility is an interesting one. I don't do a lot of fertility work in my practice, but I used to work for a woman who does a lot of fertility work. The data, the studies are really compelling. It really helps with someone's doing like an IVF treatment. Doing acupuncture right before and after the embryo transfer has significantly higher rates of success, and so we can theorize. It's getting the body again to relax into that rest and digest state. It's getting a lot of the hormones the endocrine system to secrete the way it needs to.
Speaker 3:Chinese medicine is again all about that balance of yin and yang, and to conceive you need this healthy balance between yin and yang, both in a woman's cycle and between an egg and a sperm, and so it just excels at fertility. So pain management and fertility are very common. But then also, you know, just like Chinese medicine, acupuncture was the primary medicine for an entire continent for like for an entire continent for like two or three thousand years. I mean, the records go way, way back, and so whatever health issue you have, at some point someone has used acupuncture to treat that right. Whether it's indigestion, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, allergies, cancer, you know like all of this has been treated by Chinese medicine Dermatology.
Speaker 3:It's incredible, and especially because Chinese medicine includes acupuncture and herbs. The herbs are, you know, they're chemicals, just like drugs. They're just different chemical formulations that affect the chemistry of your own internal system. So the best thing I could say is, if you have a health issue and you want to try Chinese medicine, find someone who has a lot of experience with your specific thing. You know, if you have a thyroid problem, find someone who does thyroid medicine, because there are so many practitioners now and hopefully it's sort of like there's a key for every lock, and especially in this very global world you know all this online health access that we have find the key to your lock because, I guarantee you, someone has been looking at your problem from these different lenses, these different angles.
Speaker 2:I love that. Find the key to your luck. No, that makes so much sense. I am just now learning more about acupuncture since the podcast, and it's so interesting to me that you said fertility, because I interviewed a fertility mindset coach and it was acupuncture and meditating. That was what her final straw. She had tried basically everything. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and I didn't realize it had been around for that many thousands of years, I think the oldest recordings of acupuncture are actually 5,000 years old.
Speaker 3:I know 3,000. 3,000 is like widely accepted, but I've heard stories of 5,000 years also, which, yeah, it's a long ass time.
Speaker 2:It. Just that surprises me that it's not more used. I guess you know, because that is a long ass time, exactly you know. So I feel like so many people still have a little bit of the skepticism towards that.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and I studied very briefly in Taiwan and I've been to China also to sort of like see what this medicine is like, where it came from, and it's obviously so much more accepted and integrated there. I remember in Taiwan I studied at this great clinic, one of them. We were going out to get massages or something she's like. I just have to stop by 7-Eleven to pick up the herbs I take for my period cramps, which just blew my mind. It's a formula I know really well. It's called Shaoyao San. It's one of the most common formulas we use for women's health. It was in 7-Eleven. This medicine is so integrated and accepted over there.
Speaker 3:I think there's a lot of bigotry in the United States, even subconsciously, against Asian populations and there's this really awful narrative about Asian traditions being kind of gross or smelly or dirty or superstitious behind the times, and so I think a lot of people reject it, thinking it's like voodoo. Basically, why would I do this weird voodoo thing from Asia? No, thank you, and people are obviously coming around. In major urban areas you have people who are more open-minded, but I think that's the hesitation for a lot of folks. When I decided to go to Chinese medicine school, my academic friends at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania were all, pretty much across the board, horrified. Now a lot of them accept it and are into it. But I did have a friend ask me if I was going to learn to do voodoo. My first round of classes I had to take Tai Chi, which was awesome, and I remember my friends just thought this was such a joke. Like what kind of graduate program do you have to take Tai Chi? That's ridiculous. I think with what we know about the nervous system now and nervous system regulation, I wouldn't get that response. You know, I think people understand that your own nervous system regulation is going to affect how you show up both as a healer but also as a student. But yeah, this was in the early 2000s and people just thought I was crazy. People thought I was so nuts for doing this. But you still went for it, I still went for it. You know I'm still friends with a lot of my mom's friends. She was a nurse at Stanford and so I know all these Stanford nurses. They definitely thought I was crazy. And then one of them, her daughter, got Bell's palsy, which is where like half of your face basically is paralyzed, and her doctor at Stanford started using acupuncture on her. And so now, like all the nurses are like, okay, maybe there's something to this. You know, maybe Courtney wasn't totally off her rocker after all.
Speaker 3:It really is a fascinating time for integrative medicine. You know, we are giving all these ancient I mean well empirically studied at least traditions a chance. Well, empirical, with an I bias. It's like Western medicine thinks they are the be all, end all and if they can't understand why something works, then it must not work. Like, let's just reject it.
Speaker 3:It can be expensive.
Speaker 3:Insurance is covering more acupuncture, but it doesn't cover on all plans certainly and I think people don't want to pay out of pocket. I think that's a big part of the resistance. Also, one of my beefs is that I think people are now finally, after like the 70s and what we know about therapy, people are more and more willing to pay out of pocket for therapy. Right, therapists charge a lot of money. Therapists can charge $200 or $300 an hour.
Speaker 3:But people have sort of internalized like I guess that's what you have to do to get through some of your issues, and I am looking forward to some kind of renaissance for somatic work also, like, yeah, you might have to pay out of pocket and it might be expensive, but there is literally nothing more important than your own health and healing. That determines how you experience everything else. If you are not healthy, if you are carrying around these old wounds and these old traumatic patterns, that's going to affect your career, your relationship, your free time, the friendships you make, how you feel about yourself. Health and healing is absolutely the cornerstone of a good life, and so I think I hope eventually people realize that and are willing to spend the money on health and healing to sort of up-level their whole life.
Speaker 2:I completely agree Western culture. A lot of times they're just falling apart at so many things. I feel like there's less and I could totally be wrong on this but I feel like there's less side effects per se of even something like acupuncture. I'm someone who struggled with migraines for a long time and some of the medications I was on were pretty bad One. I was fainting and not even understanding why, and I found more healing in more mindfulness practices.
Speaker 3:Right right. I had a teacher in grad school who said side effects are just effects. Like, stop calling them side effects and just recognize that these are all the effects that this treatment is going to have on you. I thought that was so. On point Acupuncture, the biggest side effects is you might get a bruise or, if the needler is not careful, you might get too close to a nerve and that nerve is going to get irritated for a couple of days or a couple of weeks.
Speaker 3:If you're really not careful, you can puncture a lung, but no one who is licensed should go down that road. We all learn how to avoid that particular potential effect. The herbs have a lot more potential effects because, again, they're chemicals you're putting in your body, and so that's why it's really important If you take herbs, you go to someone who really knows what they're doing. You know this is not the kind of thing to like read online oh, this formula is supposed to be good for headaches, like, really go see someone who's going to do a full assessment of you personally and your own unique biochemistry and figure out what the right match for you is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think that that makes a lot of sense. So I just got to ask I don't know if you know this, if you've done any studies or any clients with this but does acupuncture help with anything in terms of like the food eating, in terms of that?
Speaker 3:That's a great question and you know I so I started. Let me back up. I decided to be an acupuncturist literally the day I saw this acupuncture demonstration in New Zealand in one of my massage classes and I just looked over and she was being very dramatic. She put a bunch of like three inch long needles in this woman's face and I just looked at it and I was like that I want to learn to do that. It was like something just clicked in me. It's a little impulsive, I have some words from a younger self, but that was the moment I just decided.
Speaker 3:And so in that two year gap between college and grad school, I was like you know, I should probably get some acupuncture. Like if, am I going to devote my life to this? I never had a treatment at that point. So I was like I'm going to get some acupuncture and I was like what am I going to get a treatment for? I don't even know what this is good for. And I had really bad skin at the time. I had acne that just wouldn't go away. And so I was like, well, maybe that's it. And this one acupuncturist card came across my desk, like three different times, and so I was like okay, universe, I am picking up what you're putting down, I'll go see this woman. And I was terrified of the expense. I was a broke post college student working in restaurants but I was like no, if this is what I'm going to do with my life, I really need to try it out.
Speaker 3:And the first treatment I was kind of late. I forget why, but I got to the appointment late and so she was like it's okay, we're just going to do like a simple four needle treatment so that you can experience what it's like, and then you can decide what you want to do. So she just does this four needle treatment for the lungs, which the lungs control grief in Chinese medicine. The lungs also control the skin in Chinese medicine. And so she did this treatment and she put on these singing bowl CDs and I just wept for half an hour. It was so bizarre. I just started crying and I wasn't like sad, I wasn't upset, it was just like all these tears just started streaming out of me. I didn't know what was happening. And so she came back in the room and I was like what? What did you just do to me, crazy voodoo lady? You know, I was like maybe this is voodoo and she explained that connection and I was really healing a lot of my grief around my mom then, and so I was just fascinated. I was like I don't know what this is, let's keep going. There is clearly some kind of powerful connection here between my grief.
Speaker 3:I had had pneumonia twice and bronchitis three times. My lungs were really weak and so she started me on some herbs. I went once a week. She gave me a really sweet student discount and of course, like it's all connected in Chinese medicine, you know, and so for me the eating stuff in Chinese medicine the spleen and stomach are the digestive organs. The spleen is very important in Chinese medicine and my spleen was weak. My acupuncturist said she said I had to stop eating raw foods and it was crazy. I would like sneak a salad during the week, like I try to mostly eat cooked foods, but then I'd be like I'm out with my friends, I'm going to have a salad, and I'd go back and every week she would know if I'd had raw food or not. She had 100% batted. My spleen was damaged from all this time and so we had to heal my spleen as well as heal my lungs and the grief and that was the big axis of healing we had to focus on. So I think it was very much related to my eating, both like that. You know we talked about root and branch in Chinese medicine. The root was all that grief and feeling so unloved and so disconnected and the branch was the eating patterns and the way that was affecting my digestive system.
Speaker 3:Ultimately, it was in Chinese medicine school that I started eating meat again because I had this great teacher, denise Su, who said in China we wouldn't eat like a whole hamburger or like a whole pork chop. We'd have a big plate of rice and vegetables with a little bit of meat cut into it. And I remember thinking I could do that, I could try it, and I was so anemic at that point. I was pale, I wasn't eating periods all the time, I was exhausted and I liked the idea of a little meat and some vegetables and rice. But as soon as I cracked that door, my body was like give me the bloodiest, rarest meat you've got. I know it was crazy.
Speaker 3:I started eating like carpaccio and rare burgers and I just wanted like lamb. My body was so like this is what I've wanted for 15 years. Thank you for finally giving it to me. Chinese medicine meat is really important In Chinese medicine. When they look at food, it's the energetics of different foods Chicken is warming, beef is hot, fish is cooling, and so you look at your energetic system and you determine what kind of energetics are needed for both your constitution and for whatever health conditions you have. Going on, I didn't learn this for a long time, but now I do follow that sort of eating pattern and I just feel so much better when I eat that way and I just feel so much better when I eat that way.
Speaker 2:That's so fascinating your spleen. Okay, I wasn't too like what it would have been.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know the spleen really fascinated. All the organs have these emotional components to them. The spleen is about worry and rumination, the liver is about anger, the heart is about joy but also bitterness, and so when you look at eating patterns as an expression of some kind of emotional imbalance, that can be one way that again you try to get to the root, you try to break the cycle where it's growing.
Speaker 2:So do you have any suggestions for anybody if they're feeling disconnected with themselves, like the first step that they could take?
Speaker 3:Well, I like what you said about your own healing and about that woman who had the fertility journey. Mindfulness is absolutely the first step I would recommend to anyone. And it's hard. It can be really hard to sit with yourself and sit with your own mind and your own body if you're not accustomed to that and you've spent a lifetime running away from that, and I also think it is literally the most healing thing we can do. You know, I've had a long yoga practice ever since I started that Bikram practice in my 20s and in some schools of yoga they say all that yoga, all that movement, the asana is just to exhaust your body so that you can finally sit still in meditation, and that's where the real work happens is in meditation. So a mindfulness practice and that can look like a lot of different things. If you cannot sit alone on a cushion and a lot of people can't there's no problems with that. Maybe you can sit with a teacher or with a group. Maybe you can do a moving meditation like yoga or like some kind of walking meditation. Maybe you want to do the Zen thing and sit with a koan. Let that koan really unfold inside of you. But having a mindfulness practice will change your life. It will change your life undoubtedly.
Speaker 3:I do have this bias towards yoga because it was such a huge catalyst for my own healing. I ended up eventually getting into Ashtanga yoga, which I really love, and in the Ashtanga world they say practice once or twice a week to maintain your health. Practice three or four times a week to change your body. Practice five or six times a week to change your life. And I found this to be totally true when I was doing Bikram five days a week. That's when my life totally changed.
Speaker 3:And when I started doing Ashtanga, I did it five days a week and again like major leveling up. And right now I'm practicing. I don't do Ashtanga right now, but I practice maybe three or four times a week and it really is just for my health. It really is just to sort of like keep my body where I want it and keep my head from getting crazy. It really does help with that. So yoga and mindfulness to me are the perfect gateway drugs. They are accessible, they can be inexpensive. You can do them on your own or in community. That is absolutely where I'd recommend anyone start their journey.
Speaker 2:I agree. Now I'm just curious what type of yoga is that Asananga?
Speaker 3:You said Ashtanga. Ashtanga Ashta means eight, so Ashtanga yoga is the eight limbs of yoga. Mysore is a city in India where they do this sort of practice and instead of the teacher leading the class by calling out the poses, the teacher teaches you a sequence and you memorize it and you come in and do that sequence on your own pace whenever you want to have a practice, and preferably every day in the practice, early in the morning, and then the teacher just goes around the room and offers adjustments, maybe hands-on adjustments, maybe suggestions, alignment move your hip back, your shoulders, open your chest.
Speaker 3:I love this style. I had just started the secondary series, but most people just really do that primary series. We all memorize the same series of poses and there's something about doing the same poses every day that I actually really like. There's something about returning to like. What does my body experience in Janusir Sasana today? What is that like for me? What has shifted from yesterday? What changed since that plane ride I took or that breakup I went through? I really love Ashtanga yoga. It's intense. It was originally designed for, like, young boys who are very acrobatic and so there's a lot of injuries and I injured myself doing Ashtanga. I have some hesitations about some of the adjustments people do. They can be too intense and also I got so much out of it when it was appropriate for my body. It was really great when I was in that world.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's awesome. I was just curious because I've done a lot of yoga but I've never heard of that type of yoga before.
Speaker 3:Google Mysore Ashtanga in your area and see if anyone comes up. They're usually there, but they're kind of under the radar.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you so much for speaking with me Now. Have you heard of a man named Jay Shetty? I know that name. I think I've seen his advertisements on YouTube. Yeah, so he's got a podcast, a motivational speaker. He's an author, and I don't know if it's every podcast episode, but most of his podcast episodes. He ends his podcast with two segments and I've started incorporating them into mine. Cool, so the first segment is the many sides to us and there's five questions. What is one word someone who was meeting you for the first time would use to describe you as Poised, poised? Number two what is one word that someone who knows you extremely well would use to describe you as the words that come?
Speaker 3:up are bland descriptor words like amazing or incredible. I also want to say kind, but I'm not sure if that's true. I don't know if that's aspirational, but I'm going to go with kind, okay.
Speaker 2:What is one word you'd use to describe yourself? Complicated word you'd use to describe yourself Complicated. What is one word that, if someone didn't like you or agree with your mindset, would you use to describe yourself? Woo-woo. What is one word that you're trying to embody right now? Confident? Second segment is the final five, and these can be answered in a sentence.
Speaker 3:What is the best advice you've heard or received? My personal motto, which is the advice I give to people, is pack light and say yes, why is that the best?
Speaker 3:The pack light is a metaphor, right. It means that we're traveling, don't take too much luggage. But also on the journey of life, don't take too much luggage, pack light, let go of things you don't need it. And then say yes, because I think life is so fast and really quite short and we really do regret the missed opportunities more than we regret trying things. So I think, say yes to all the opportunities that come your way, Not a weak yes, I mean, like you know, with gusto, see what you can say yes to.
Speaker 2:Okay, what is the worst advice you've heard or received? Eat a low-fat diet what is something you used to value that you no longer value? Keeping the peace in relationships if you could describe what you would want your legacy to be, as if someone were reading it, what would you want it to say?
Speaker 3:She taught people how to be kind.
Speaker 2:If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? And I want to know why.
Speaker 3:I don't like this question because I think freedom is so important, and freedom means making your own laws. I guess what I'll lean into is what I really believe in of the law of karma, which is that everything that you do in the world is going to come back and be done to you in the world. I do think we're all following that, whether we're conscious of it or not. So let's just keep the love karma around, okay.
Speaker 2:I like that Well. Thank you so much for speaking with me.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I hope people get something out of this interview and I wish so much peace and love to anyone who's struggling on this journey.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and where can the listeners connect with you?
Speaker 3:My website is CourtneyMoreWellnesscom and that's my Instagram handle and Facebook handle also, so check those out and see if you feel called to connect further.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thank you so much, and is there any final words you have for the listeners? No pressure, but I just like to leave it to the guest.
Speaker 3:Well, when I said that thing about kindness, I really feel like in this life the greatest growth comes from learning to be kind and compassionate to ourself and others. And it starts with yourself Offer yourself that kindness and recognizing that the way you want kindness and love and safety and peace, everyone else wants that too, and I think we get stuck in so much judgment and criticism and blame and victimness. And the way through that really is kindness, compassion for ourselves and others.
Speaker 2:I completely agree. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really appreciate it. Thank you, amanda. This is great. And thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Amanda's Mindset, in case no one told you today, I'm proud of you, I'm rooting for you and you got this, as always. If you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five-star rating, leave a review and share it with anyone you think would benefit from this. And don't forget you are only one mindset. Shift away from shifting your life. Thanks guys, until next time.
