Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
My Conversation with JJ Flizanes: Conquering Your Life Obstacles
JJ Flizanes has worn a number of hats over the years as actress, physical trainer, and most recently what she calls an “empowerment strategies.” Her most recent focus is to therefore counsel people to identify obstacles to success. Having worked with thousands of clients and a source of prolific advice and learning resources, JJ works to pinpoint why people fail to achieve their goals in health, weight loss, love, careers and other spheres of life.
JJ is host of an impressive five podcasts including People’s Choice Awards nominee Spirit, Purpose & Energy, Fit 2 Love, and Nutrition and Alternative Medicine bringing her unique brand of insight into human behavior in practical, actionable ways. Here, in this episode of the Defiant Health podcast, JJ shares the details of her unique approach to identify, then take down, the common obstacles to success.
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamDavisMD
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Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
JJ Flazaines has worn a number of hats over the years as actress, physical trainer, and most recently what she calls an empowerment strategist. Her most recent focus is to therefore counsel people to identify obstacles to success. Having worked with thousands of clients and a source of prolific advice and learning resources, JJ works to pinpoint why people fail to achieve their goals in health, weight loss, love, career, and other spheres of life. JJ is host of an impressive five podcasts, including People's Choice Awards nominee, Spirit, Purpose and Energy, Fit to Love, and Nutrition and Alternative Medicine, bringing her unique brand of insight into human behavior in practical, actionable ways. Here in this episode of the Defiant Health Podcast, JJ shares the details of her unique approach to identify, then take down the common obstacles to success. Well, thanks for joining me, JJ. I always love having you back because you offer some perspectives that I don't have, and a lot of the people I deal with, or including uh guests on my show, don't provide. And that is, so we do a lot of things in my programs. We talk about diet, of course. We talk about various nutrients that address factors like insulin resistance and inflammation. We, of course, dive deeply into the world of the microbiome. But despite all that, we don't get 100%. We get a lot of success, of course, but we don't get 100% success. And I know, having talked to you over the years, that you bring to light something that I've not addressed very well, and that is the emotional hurdles to success, whether it's in love or weight loss or health or whatever. And I know you've uh got some new projects in that in that vein. You want to tell us about it? Sure.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm liking it to like the missing piece between like for every diet detox and healing plan, because it doesn't really matter what the goal is physically, like this could be about someone who's trying to heal cancer. In fact, to be honest, I was working with a bunch of cancer doctors who were sending me patients of theirs who they put them on these protocols that were so stressful. And even though they were all very good physical things, it was only one in you know, several that would actually heal. And we had to look at, well, why are these people not healing? And I kept thinking all the things besides the expense, it was like they were running around all day long doing all these things. And it was all very good things, but there was a stress level to it that I thought something's off and not right. They're not healing. You're giving them the perfect tool. Why aren't they healing? Well, they're not healing because their body can't receive it because they're in a survival state. And, you know, we've talked about emotion on your show in the past. I I nauseate my audience with talking about emotion. Um, but you know, for the men that are listening, emotion is a word that you kind of shut down. Like your brain goes, nope, not dealing with that. I don't have any tools for that. I can't see it, I can't bottle it. I don't know how to get rid of it. It makes me uncomfortable. I feel like I'm gonna lose control. Emotion is not a word people gravitate towards, especially in the physical world, because it's not tangible and they don't know what to do with it. And no one teaches you how to process emotion or even identify emotion. We're we're emotionally illiterate uh as adults. No one teaches you anything. But when I change the word from emotion to stress, then everyone's like, oh, I have stress. Oh my God, I'm so stressed out. And now that we can admit, but what stress is is emotion. But let's take it to an even more physical, clinical setting. It's the nervous system. Your nervous system is exactly what it says it is. It's it's it's your nervous. Your nervous system is your electrical panel in your body. And we understand that there's a parasympathetic nervous system, right? And then the sympathetic nervous system, our survival state. We have our our brain, our caveman brain. We're looking at how do I walk around this world and how have I evolved? How has man evolved? How has our consciousness expanded? How do we get into the prefrontal cortex a little bit more often so we can be in a parasympathetic state, especially with what you do, the rest and digest. If someone is doing a million wonderful physical things for their body, but they're not seeing results, it's because they're not, they're not in parasympathetic. That's where we have rest and digest and heal. Most of us, I mean, I mean, look at the world today. Not that it, and I'm sure at any point in time that will ring true. Someone can say that at any year. I feel like it's worse right now, but in our, you know, in terms of the survival state, where people are being killed for their belief systems, for speaking out, our our right to freedom of speech, our right for medical freedom is being uh looked at. And those make us afraid. And when we're in that fear state, we're in a survival state. So if it's okay, I'd love to just kind of go over what that means for people and also make sure people know that there's much more information on this than we're going to be able to cover today. I've got tons of exercises for everything I'm talking about. I really feel it's it's imperent that people understand. You have to understand and know how to identify and healthfully process your emotions so that your nervous system and body can feel safe. In fact, there are two. I've had Dr. Bruce Lipton on the show a million times. We've talked, and and he talks about this in terms of quantum physics and epigenetics, right? I'm sure you've talked about epigenetics on the show. And if you haven't, it's the science that above all of the other physical sciences, it says that genetics can load the gun, but epigenetics pulls the trigger. You can have all of the genes for something good or something bad, and we can have them. Most of us have cancer cells, but they may never develop because the epigenetics, which is the container that it's in, the environment that it's in, the soil, right? Liken it to gardening. You have a tree. In fact, we have had, we're on our third avocado tree. Two of our avocado trees we put in the backyard in a very specific place, and they both died. And I thought, okay, we're gonna try one more time. And this time I'm keeping it over here where these trees are flourishing. Where we put it the first two times, there's nothing there but grass. And there's a tree kind of nearby, but not right where it is. It's it's so I thought, well, maybe it's the position, maybe it's the soil. So I moved it over and I put it in a different pot with new soil, and now it's flourishing. When you have a disease, and it doesn't even have to be a disease, it just can be a chronic condition. Think of it as a gardener, you that soil, if it stops producing, there's a reason. There are multiple elements that contribute to the health of what grows there. And when we look at how can I, if I just throw things at my body in the same environment, the same stresses, the same belief systems, the same habits, I'm still activating the same genes, either turning on or turning off the same genes that give me the same results over and over again. I have to take a broader perspective. So epigenetics looks at looks at life and says, you have the ability to change how your blueprint reacts, how your genes react. Uh doctors would say, oh, well, these are, you know, it's it's genetics that says you're going to be uh can't have cancer. No, everyone has the ability to have cancer, and most of us are going to have pre-cancer cells, but most of us won't ever get it. Why? Because of the environment that our body lives in, from food we eat, the stress that we have, the way that we interpret the world, there are multiple factors of what we're gonna call the terrain that create the environment from whatever this is gonna be born, whatever cancer. That's why cutting out cancer is not gonna work. You cut out cancer is gonna show up somewhere else. If you change nothing about your diet lifestyle or stress, most likely it's going to emerge somewhere else. Many people that have breast cancer end up having brain cancer or liver cancer because it moves, because they think they catch it with uh, you know, with chemo and with radiation, and they never change anything about their lives and all of a sudden it shows up in another form because we never change the terrain from which it grew in. So of course it's going to grow again. And there are other emotional reasons I could point to. So epigenetically, we have to look at how if I'm in a stress bubble, just looking at the nervous system, I'm either in rest and digest, parasympathetic, or I'm in a survival state. It's really the only two choices. So if I'm constantly in a survival state, then my my whole body shuts down. When we're in a survival state, blood flow stops, digestion stops, blood ends up going just at the extremities. Because think about us in caveman times, our adrenaline gets pumped up because we're we think we're gonna die. There's somebody chasing us, or we're running out of food, and we're in this state and we're trying, and so the body literally just pumps blood to things it needs. So it stops everything else. Digestion doesn't get attended to because it isn't important for survival, but your limbs are for running away. And we live in a state of constant survival today from the news, from politics, from disease, from whatever, from not having enough money, from not having enough love. We catastrophize everything. And that has become what we're addicted to in this culture is being in catastrophe, being in an all or nothing. And we don't understand what makes up how to rewire this, how to decelerate this, how to come back into balance, how to stop being a part of the momentum that is the conversation of this world of they want it sells, it sells, right? The news, if you don't know, is pot and paid for. The news that they show you that's on repeat is somebody else's point of view to come up with the most ridiculous, scary thing ever. So you get up in the morning and go, what do I need to worry about today? And then you go to the television or you read the paper and it's all bad news. Yes, there is bad news in the world. There will always be bad news in the world. But guess what? There's also good news, but you're not looking at it, and no one's spoon feeding it to you. But it exists at the same time the bad news does. But when we're in a culture of people who are literally afraid, I mean, think of COVID. Most people probably got COVID and got sick because of the fear of getting sick. When you are in when you are afraid, when that when you are afraid and your nervous system's in a survival state, your immune system tanks. It does not do what it's supposed to do because again, blood flows go into the limbs. We need to run, we need to be able to survive, we need to be able to fight. So the four survival states are fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. And I'm gonna go over this a lot more deeply. I've got a free workshop everyone would I'd love everyone to come to on November 19th. I'm happy to give you a free ticket uh as a as a listener of Dr. Davis. Um, I'll give you the link at later, but I'm gonna go into this a lot more and you're gonna take a quiz so that you understand what survival state you're in, and then I'm gonna give you some exercises so you know how to get out of it. Because when you're in survival state, you're not rest and digest, which means you're not healing. So even though someone has an amazing plan, and I've seen it with cancer patients over and over again, they're so white-knuckled, they are not in parasympathetic parasympathetic ever. Maybe when they're sleeping. But when in their awake state, they're worried, they're catastrophizing, they're gonna die, they're afraid of dying. And so, but they're doing all the things, but they're doing all the things with the energy of, I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die, which never gets their body into a healing state. Uh, Dr. Kelly Turner wrote a book, several books, but uh called Radical Remission. And she surveyed 1,500 cancer patients that had a radical remission, where all doctors said to them, There is nothing else we can do for you, you're gonna go home and die now. Like we've run out of things to help you with. And every one of those patients, she studied them all and then took the common denominators out of what they all did and came up with nine in the first book and then added a tenth one in the second book. The tenth one was exercise. But out of all 10 of those, seven are mental, emotional, and spiritual. Seven. Now, the other three are physical, diet, supplements, and exercise, were the other three. But the rest were mental, emotional, and spiritual. But again, that is something that because I'm a if you're a physician or if you don't know how to help somebody do that, then there's nothing you put your hands up and go, I have nothing else. There's no pill I can give you, there's no surgery I can give you, there's no treatment I can give to you. But when it comes down to it, when there's a certain amount of surrender in a cancer patient that says, no one else knows what to do with me, I'm gonna go decide to live out my days happy. I'm gonna go sit on my roof. One of the stories sitting on my roof and playing my guitar and watching the birds and watching the sunrise. What happens? Oh, all of a sudden I'm present. I'm in rest and digest parasympathetic. I have positive emotions. And guess what? They outlive their diagnosis and then they heal and they no longer have cancer. But it's something because you can't package it and sell it. Well, I can, but not in a pill form. Like you actually do some work. Most people are afraid of it and don't know what to do with it. So when it comes to, you know, I know there are definitely physical things that can help with all the things that you're doing in the gut space. Absolutely, we can help our nervous system with the kinds of foods we eat, with the kind of supplements we take. 100% food can make a difference in our ability to get our nervous system to a more calmer state. However, the one thing we don't focus on enough is how our brain interprets the world and all of the wounds and all of the stories and all the ways that we can create our own stress every day, all day long. And that's for me why it's the missing piece. Because I, so I started a program last year called Date Your Body. I did a Date Your Body beta at the end of last year. It was two months. And and my goal was to use all of my, because you know, I've been a personal trainer. I was a personal trainer for 25 years, and I kind of stopped doing it because I love the emotional conversation. I love changing people from the inside out because if they feel good, then they're gonna take care of themselves more. They're gonna do the right things for themselves. But there were enough people that I thought, you know what, they need all of it. They they don't exercise well, they are maybe not eating well, they don't, they're not, their system is sugar burning, they're not in a fat-burning system. Uh, they have too much inflammation in their diets and in their lives, and then they the way they relate to their body is very stressful and it's very negative. And I did a podcast once, it's still on the show for anyone that's interested. It's several of my clients, it's their favorite episode. It's called the energy underneath. And the energy underneath is just that. It's like, what is the motivating factor? What's what's fueling what you're doing? It doesn't even matter what you're doing. I have a friend who was years ago, she got addicted to drugs. And when she came out of that, she and she started bodybuilding. And it's amazing how people praised her. And I thought, oh no, this is not a good addiction. This is this is a similar, this is you just traded one addiction for another one. But because seemingly it looks healthy, I'm like, it's not healthy. It is not healthy to do what you're doing to do what? To get a prize. So someone says that you win, that you look good. That is the most effed up thing I've ever heard in my entire life. It is the it is literally anorexia in reverse. It is being so hyper-focused on that your value is in what you look like that it's nuts to me. But people praised her because it looks healthy. So the energy underneath what she was doing wasn't about her health. It wasn't about self-love. It was about getting attention because she didn't love herself, which is why she got addicted to drugs in the first place. So what I step back and I look at the big picture and I'm like, what's the root of this? What's the energy underneath this? That's when we look at it, like when people say, Well, I'm gonna stop drinking. I said, Great, sure, just stop drinking. Why? Well, because I uh I don't want to feel I don't want it to be, I don't want to be healthy. I'm like, what about balance? And I'm not telling anyone to drink, I make wine. Uh okay, you can don't drink, that's fine. But even like people that go through 12-step programs, if the power is in the alcohol or the power is in the drug, you don't, you're giving the power away. It's you, it's your issues, it's your emotions you're trying to suppress through whatever addiction you have: control, food, alcohol, being on a million screens all the time, never being quiet, being addicted to how you look. There's there's several addictions. But you know, but to me, the conversation is if your physical program, if what you're doing is working, then all the every part of your life really would look better. You would be calmer, you'd be more peaceful, you'd be happier, and you'd get the results that you want. But we're so focused on just the outside stuff of the exercise, the food, the supplements, the hormones, the whatever. And then we get, then our whole nervous system gets crazy. Like we're we create stress and the body is never going to heal. It's not going to release. In exercise in bodybuilding and in resistance training, when you build muscle, you're building muscle when you're resting, not when you're lifting. When you're lifting, you're breaking down the actin mycin protein bonds within the belly of the cell, hopefully, if you're doing it right. Uh, and if you are, and then in rest is when it gets built back together. It's the same for anything that we're doing with the body. If if you're sometimes you can be super knowing that what you're doing is working and you have a positive energy about it and you trust it. If you trust it, then it probably is gonna work. Oh, let me go back to Dr. Bruce Lifton. The two beliefs, the two beliefs you need to have and own and feel in order for you to heal. I am safe and I love myself. And you gotta mean them. And most of us can't say that and mean them. Most of us do not feel safe in this world or safe in our bodies or safe in our relationships or safe at work. So we're constantly in a survival state. And it doesn't mean your body can't change because if you get deep sleep, if you if you're really good at deep sleep, you're gonna get parasympathetic during the hours that you sleep, and your body will heal itself during that time. But if when you wake up in the morning, you look at the world and you feel unsafe and you say nasty things to yourself and you judge yourself and you don't like yourself and you self-loathe, then you're not, you are not gonna get very far with your program of trying to love your body or get it to do things that you want it to do. So to me, I think it's an important conversation that everybody needs to be having in combination with the things, right? It's not that it's only emotions, it it's not only nervous system. Yes, there are physical things, but together they make the best compliment and they're gonna get you the best results that are lasting. The Date Your Body program, I've now done it twice, and everyone has kept their weight off and changed their lifestyle, loves themselves, can look in the mirror and say, I love myself and mean it, and they're calmer and feel safer, and their nervous system isn't on high alert all the time because I took both the physical and the mental emotional and put them together, which probably is what this whole thing's been leading to for, you know, most of the time that I've been doing what I'm doing. So I'm is that resonating? Does that make sense to you?
SPEAKER_00:Well, if I hear you right, JJ, you're talking about two different areas. That is, you're talking about the um hopelessness, the fright, the uh of the of the response you get when you're diagnosed with something scary like a cancer diagnosis, but also the preconceived ideas that you enter before the diagnosis. That I I know you talked in the past about things that factors that obstruct or block your success. So is it really two parts then? The the ideas you bring into a diagnosis and then the panic hopelessness that's generated by the diagnosis?
SPEAKER_01:Well, let's just go without the diagnosis. Let's just look at someone without cancer. In this world, in this climate, it's in this environment, with our core wounds, with our habits, patterns, and past, with our divorces, with our losses, with our struggles, forget any diagnosis. Do most people feel safe in the world and safe in their bodies? They don't. So if I'm running a survival state nervous system output, I am blocking my body from doing what it's built to do, which is to heal itself. It only heals in a state of safety, love, and parasympathetic. And when you take the conscious brain offline and go to bed and you stop thinking, that's when the body can heal itself. So sleep can be very important, which is why, you know, not having sleep is extra detrimental for everybody who's a stress ball anyway. But it's that uphill climb that people have with their, I've known people who have had a bad job, who've gone gone from one job to another job, went super stressed, gained weight, and not didn't even change their diet, ate the same thing, gained 30 pounds in six months, said, F this, I'm stopping this, stopped, quit the job, went back to the former life, lost the 30 pounds, and didn't do anything differently. Cortisol production happens when we're in where when we're stressed. So I'm just gonna, I'm labeling stress differently to say stress is a survival state. We can dumb it down into four different survival states. We can also look at, and if it's okay, can I do like another little teaching thing about emotions? I don't know that you know I've ever done this on your show to help people sort of identify how they can start to help their nervous system feel safer. Okay. But I've been doing this with clients now for a couple of years, and I find it to be really effective because we, because you're not taught about emotions, because you're not taught you have needs. So this is this work comes from Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, who wrote nonviolent communication. And I've been using it for years, and I teach it differently than they do. They teach it in a way for you to like help others identify what their needs are. I'm thinking, well, how can you identify in someone else if you can't identify in yourself? So I start with the self. So this list has a hundred different feeling words on it. For those of you that on a podcast, it's uh who's who are listening only, it's a one-page sheet. The top half has a hundred different feeling words on it. Now, if I was to ask you, Dr. Davis, how many feelings do you think there are? And you might come up with 10, right? There's a hundred. And the reason is because under the anger category is a much different frequency and intensity from irritated to rage, both still under the anger category. But someone needs to know the difference between if I'm irritated, which is, you know, if I was standing next to somebody and I said I'm irritated, they'd say, Oh, what's going on? If I said I'm enraged, they will take a step away from me because rage is violent. Rage is much scarier than irritated. So we have to understand and fine-tune what it is that's going on with me. Now, the second half of the list is what we're going to focus on right now. The bottom half is your needs. Now, when people hear needs, especially sometimes men, they go, Oh, I'm not needy, I'm not dependent. Um, it's not needy or dependent. It's 86 basic human needs. Let me read some of them to you. So we all have a need for acknowledgement, choice, freedom, honesty, compassion, rest, safety, collaboration, consciousness, flow, harmony, fun. Anyway, there's 86 words on here. When I meet with a client now, sometimes, depending on where they are, and I do this in all my groups and all my classes, I'll just have people print this list and I'll say without any context, with no story, with no blaming anybody, your job, your partner, your kids, your mother, just go on this list and circle every need that is currently not being met, that you would like to have met. Like, so for some people, beauty's on here. And I don't know, I mean, I like beauty, but I don't, I wouldn't be like, oh my God, beauty's not being met. Like for me, that's I'm not gonna circle. If you don't care, don't circle it. But what ends up happening is people see that they have most of these needs not being met. So no wonder you don't feel safe in the world because you aren't getting your needs met. And the problem is that we think other people are responsible for getting our needs met. They're not. They may help, you may ask for support, you may ask for contribution from other people, but ultimately it is no one else's job to get your needs met, including safety. Which is gonna sound funny to a lot of you because you're like, are you kidding me? Look at the world, look at the news, look at the politics. We're not safe. I get it. And like I said, there are frequencies at which some of us live. We don't pay attention to that. Therefore, we can't see it. We're not in. Have you ever bought a new car? And then the next thing you know, every everywhere you see your new car. Have you ever noticed that, oh, that person has my car, that person has my car. Well, prior to buying that car, you didn't notice that. But now that you're tuned, you're tuned to your car, and now you see it everywhere, right? Because it's literally in your awareness, it's in your consciousness. So it's the same thing. If I'm constantly worried or talking about something, that's what I'm gonna be tuned to. It's like being on a building of 10 floors, and let's say you're on the first floor and I'm on the 10th floor. Well, you have no idea what I'm what I'm experiencing or the energy on the 10th floor because you're on the first floor. You can't see it, you're not in it. You have to actually be on the same level in order to understand what's happening at that level. So we can find ways to create safety for ourselves when we start to identify what makes us feel unsafe. What am I missing in my life? Do I need to speak up for myself? Do I need to do different things for myself, whatever that may be? But there are ways to get your needs met. And we're not necessarily going to go through that right now, uh, but I just want I'd love everyone to get the sheet. So it's a jjfilzanes.com forward slash feelings list. You will not find it on my podcast or on my, you will not find it on my website without this link. It's a secret link because I don't want people downloading it because you won't know what to do with it. So I have to explain it first. I want to make sure you know what to do with it. So I want you to download this sheet, print it out, or download it, then just make a list of currently in this red hot moment what needs are not being met for you. Because that's where every negative emotion comes from, is a need not being met. So then I'll take it a step further. The third question is how do I, what are some strategies I can take to get my need met that don't require anyone else to be different? And you need to come up with more than one plan because it can't be you say, well, this person is upsetting me and they need to change their behavior. Yeah, good luck with that. Good luck with that. Uh if you think you're gonna control the entire world to act in a way that pleases you, then bravo to you for thinking you have that much power and control over other people. You don't. Uh, everyone is acting on their own behalf for their own reasons, for their own interpretations, and you're never, ever, ever gonna control everybody. The only person you can control is you. So when we look at, you know, it yes, diagnosis, life-threatening thing, of course, makes sense. I'm now in trauma. I've got PTSD. I think I'm gonna die every day. And that makes, and I understand why they're in fight or flight, but most of us are in fight or flight and we don't have a diagnosis. We just we live in a world, we look at the news, we read the the papers, we see people on in social media, you know, people complaining about people. If you take a step back, especially on social media, and you have some compassion for a second and say, Oh, everyone's afraid. I recently did sort of a journey, let's say, uh, myself earlier this year in March before my birthday, and um, and and the revelations that came to me, the very clear message was everyone is afraid of everything. Have compassion. Everyone, doesn't matter what the story is, everyone, let's, you know, COVID, people that are anti versus pro, people everyone's afraid of something. Everyone's afraid of something. Doesn't matter how right or wrong or accurate or whatever you are, it still boils down to everyone's afraid. Everyone's acting from a place of fear, whether it be pro or against or whatever, in every situation. So, to me, this conversation, and again, I hope if you're someone out there who's listening or watching and and you've struggled with your body composition, your relationship with your body, we have to, especially for women. So I can't speak to men, I'm not a man. Um, but uh especially for a woman and you do all the action, you do all the action things, but you haven't changed your relationship with your body. Imagine that your body was separate from your brain, and you could have two versions of yourself sitting on a bench, and your brain would talk to your body as a friend and say all the things you say to it all day long. Most likely they're probably negative, they're probably shaming, abusive, mean. Would someone be your friend if you said all the things that you said to your body all day long? Your body is literally giving you the th the middle finger, saying, I'm not changing. I'm not changing until you accept me. You have to love where you are and learn to make peace with where you are before your nervous system will be in love and parasympathetic, and then do what you want it to do, whether it be build muscle, lose weight, get stronger, release inflammation, right? Get rest so that you can sleep through the night. You rest and digest, your digestion is off. Yes, all these things. You know how long I've been doing the things that you know, but still, if I'm in if I'm in hyper stress mode, I don't give it, it doesn't matter what I'm taking. It's not gonna fix my nervous system. It's not gonna fix the environment, the stress bubble that I'm creating with my mind and my heart. You would just get so much more success if we can tackle this nervous system thing, aka stress, aka emotions. And just so everyone is clear, I'm about stress reduction and not about stress management. That term is the stupidest term I've ever heard. It's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it's going down. Who cares? It's going down. Stress reduction is the name of the game. And part of this sheet is how we're gonna start it is to be able to be responsible and identify what am I feeling, what need is not being met that's creating this feeling. And then how can I get my need met without asking anyone else to be different? And if I do need help in the case of companionship or sometimes intimacy or celebration, like companionship. Someone once said, Well, how do I get companionship on my own? Well, this is where when someone's dating, they're like, Oh, I have to find that one person, that one person's gonna be my everything. How stressful is that? Oh my gosh, you're gonna, you're gonna literally be that clingy person nobody wants to be around, and you're never gonna attract that person because they're gonna feel how needy you are. But if you say, Well, why do I want companionship? Because I want to have fun, because I want to enjoy quality time with people, great. Make a list of 10 or 20 people you love to spend time with and then put them on your schedule every week. And you're gonna have companionship with someone new. And then your nervous system is gonna calm down, you're gonna be in a better, better alignment and you're gonna glow and be happy and then attract people to you. But otherwise, you're needy and desperate, and then you're repelling everybody because we can feel that. Nobody likes that.
SPEAKER_00:So is your sense that things have gotten worse over the last few decades?
SPEAKER_01:I think things have getting gotten worse because even I was interviewing, I have a new podcast called West Coast Women Rising, and it's it's somewhat local, but it'll be sort of um West Coast for women business owners, and we're talking a lot about emotion on it. And um, you know, one of the things that I've realized when in that group is the need for our conversation to go into because like we're looking at business, right? But we still we're all acting out of scarcity or the ability to survive. We're in a survival state all the time, and it repels business. And when I'm looking at you know the state of mind that we're in right now, because no one has taught you these things. We haven't had this conversation. And then also, I was doing an interview for West Coast Wind Rising with a friend of mine that I've known for 20 something years. She's now doing AI stuff, and I kind of glazed over and I got into overwhelm. My co host, who owns Ventura County businesswoman, she's into AI and blockchain and crypto and things like that. And so I'm sitting there and I'm going, I'm so tired. I said, Deborah, when do you rest? It's all this information, the speed at which information comes at us, the speed at which AI works, makes us feel inadequate, as if we're broken and that we're we're never going to be a computer like that. And so it makes when we think we have to keep up with that, now we feel bad about ourselves. Now we're overwhelmed very easily with the world around us. So yes, I think that the as technology speeds up, we get more overwhelmed. And when we get overwhelmed, we shut down or we go into our survival state, whatever one is right for you. And again, we're getting sicker and sicker. We're getting sicker and sicker for multiple reasons. There's plenty of reasons in our, you know, in our air, in our water, in our food that we're getting sick, but we're also getting sick because we're completely disconnected. You know, I wanted to swear there. We're getting completely disconnected from who we really are. We forget who we are. We don't spend time in nature, we don't slow down. And you're all probably laughing because you're thinking, JJ, you talk really fast. I do, um, but I know how to shut off. I have a lot of fire energy. And when I'm on, I'm on, but I know how to rest. I had acupuncture yesterday. My acupuncture came to the house and she said, Are you okay? Do you have the full hour? I said, Yes, I have the full hour. And within half a second, I was in parasympathetic because I know how to, I know how to work my nervous system into a state of calm. I'm not nervous right now. I'm passionate. I'm I'm excited. I want people to know this. I want you to really ask yourself why, if you're still struggling with a chronic disease or pain or issue or weight loss or body shaming or whatever issue with your body and you haven't looked at the nervous system or your emotions, yeah, that's my calling. That's what I'm here to do on the planet is to help you understand who you really are, to remind you of that, and then to make choices based on that that support your healing. So when you do take the probiotics, when you do go to the gym and exercise, when you do meditate, it actually works. And it isn't just checking off a box. And then you, and then you stay in the constant struggle and the hamster wheel of what new product do I take now? What new supplement do I take? What new detox can I do now? It's exhausting and people give up because they try program after program, they don't have lasting results because they think it's supposed to work when their container, their body, their energy field is literally in a survival state. And they can't accept it, they can't receive it, and their body won't take it.
SPEAKER_00:So having all the phases of your career over the years, how has this affected your your what's your life like now? And what was it like in the past?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I've definitely lived in my state of survival for sure, because every new product, every new program, every new iteration of me means stepping out into normally uncharted territories of something that someone else isn't talking about or being new and different. Everyone else is back here. So I'm normally like ahead of the game, and then people will catch up later. Like, I have the ideas, I see it coming, I see what people need on the bell curve I'm at the end in the beginning. Like, but but I love attracting people who are kind of there too. They're like, oh, I I I know this is coming. I feel like the wave of that. For me right now, I mean, I've got so many great things going on and on my plate and things that I want to do. Like I'd love to have a retreat center. I've been working with people doing some plant medicines, and I it changes their life in a day. I mean, like, I have seen some amazing because it deals with the brain and the nervous system. And it's because some people can't get out of their daily habits and beliefs to implement what it truly means to feel relaxed, to feel calm, to believe that to love yourself. That's the one thing I can say people get out of date your body in three months is they come out and they love themselves. If you didn't love yourself, I had a guy who came to my workshop three years ago, and uh he was the boyfriend of one of my clients, and he said, sure, I'll go, I'll go to JJ's event. And uh, he's someone who's been in recovery for 21 years. He's done therapies, he he uh is sponsors people, he goes to meetings. And at the end of my three-day event, we have a big circle every every day, and at the end of the event, he said, I now realize that I don't love myself. And of course, as he passes the mic, I stop him and I say, Stop! Hold on, that's not gonna be the end of the story. Can I help you? And he said, Yes. So then the next year, he did what's called my rewire program. And within six months, he was a changed person. And to this day, I mean, you look and you could see the video, it's amazing. Um, he because he loved, he learned how to love himself. And therapies and 12-step programs don't always do that for you. In fact, most of the time they don't do that for you. So for me, like I take that and I get excited. I'm like, how can more people get this? How, what can I deliver? What in what ways I I create another program this year called Healing the Mother Wound. And it was a five-day in-person event because when I looked at, well, there's a lot of people walking around whose mothers program them with really bad feelings and beliefs about them. We all have that, right? That's what I specialize in. I'm writing a book, it's being shopped around right now, and hopefully you'll have me back when the book is out and I can share. It's called, well, currently it's called Allowing More, but it's learning how to rewire your core wound patterns so you know what that is. We have these. If I can just speak about that real quick, so your core wounds, and I'm sure we've talked about this at some point, but we all, from the time we're born until seven, your brain waves are mostly theta and delta. And the theta brain wave is where hypnosis happens. When you're before you're seven, you don't have consciousness. You can't think about thinking. Your body is in a survival state, it wants connection and safety. And anytime you don't get connection and safety, the brain has to make sense of that and it makes a belief. So if your parents left you crying in your crib for too long, your brain decided that you were abandoned. They left you. You're not important. And these are subconscious programs that we don't choose, but they are the foundation from how we look at the world, how we relate to life, how we interpret information. So for me, I have a core wound of devalued. My parents love me, they showed up to everything, but they don't get me. They don't get me. They all they'll listen to me for hours. They love me, they support me 100%. They have no freaking clue what I do. They have no idea what I do. And right. And so I, and as I grew and expanded and become me more and more, like they can't appreciate really appreciate that because they don't get it. And so there's a, you know, so I, but when I was younger, I was different. And they didn't, you know, and they would kind of try to be like, not everyone's like you. Like they kind of shamed me a little bit to sort of be quieter, be less, don't speak up so much, don't be, you know, you're bossy. You're like, you don't know everything. Um, not everyone's like you. Don't I look at the world and I say, well, if they can do it, I can do it. If you can do it, I can do it. I just have to learn how to do whatever you did. But not everyone thinks like that. And so, me, you know, trying to get my brother or my ex-husband or whoever to be like me, they thought they didn't like that. So when you understand what your core wounds are, you understand the patterns in your life from relationships to self-sabotage, whether it be in programs or with money, why you can't attract more, why you can't do more, why you can't allow in more. And that's sort of been what I've been working on. So this this year I wrote the book and uh and it's being shopped around. And next year, hopefully it'll be published or the year after. Um, but I'm really just passionate about making sure people understand that you have a program, like a computer program. You have a virus, you have several viruses, but you don't know what they are. So, and most and a lot of therapies don't go through this. A lot of therapies, you show up and you say, I'm sad, I'm depressed, I'm mad, this person, blah, blah, blah. The therapist says, Oh, that's so sorry. I feel so that's terrible that you feel that way. Tell me how you feel. And that's about the conversation. That's how it goes. I have a client who just did uh she did my rewire program in two journeys. She is a different person in a year's time, less than a year's time, in nine months, because she's been depressed most of her life. Her dad was an alcoholic, her mom was depressed. That's all she knows. That's her normal, is depressed. And then she's been in therapy for 20 years. And what she said about my program, and I'm not someone she would normally choose. So for those of you like, oh, you're too intense for me. This person would never have chosen me. She met me at an event and I we got to talking and I said, You need this, because I'm very, I believe in what I do. I said, You need this. And she said, and and she would now tell you that yes, she did need this, because never in the therapies that she had did she learn how to appreciate or accept herself for who she was. She's always felt broken or weird or different. And yes, we're all different. But when you under when I can break down for you why you're different and why you're exactly who you're supposed to be and all the things that go into that, it's education. And then when you learn, when you learn that, you love yourself. So what's going on for me? I don't know. I'm I'm a free flower right now. I'm like, I'd love to make a retreat center. I'd love to have that. Any investors out there that want to put a retreat center together, I would has to be here in Ohio, though. Um, a retreat center with maybe eight to ten bedrooms. I can't wait for the book to come out. I can't wait to my programs start next year. I've got several programs starting. The Rewire is one of them, and Date Your Body is one of them. But it's just figuring out how to make a bigger impact, quite honestly, Dr. Davis, in how to relate. If everyone took this sheet, literally, everyone, and learned how to get their own needs met, oh, we'd all be happy. There'd be no war, there'd be no con, like we would, everything, all this survival state crap would go away. Why? Because I wouldn't blame everybody else for how I feel. I wouldn't make it everyone else's responsibility to behave in different ways so that I feel comfortable. When I can, when I know how to make get my own needs met, there's a sense of confidence and ease and power and knowing this that I don't need anyone else to do anything for me. I mean, ultimately, yes, you want love and connection and you want, you want things, but you can't control people. And we've never learned that. Maybe one day it'll be in school systems. Maybe one day I'd love to do that. Teach teach children how to how to feel like sensory-wise, embodiment, like know how your body works, loving your your subconscious is 80% of your 88%, 88% of you, and it lives in your body. Most of us are disconnected from our body. We're in our brains, we're thinking. So when we have, you know, stomach cramps or back pain or like we don't our body's talking to us. There's several books. When the body what's what's the buttons? When the body the body takes score, that's one of the books. The body takes score is one of the books. You know, like if you're actually paying attention, your body's telling you things, but most people aren't paying attention because they're too head down trying to get somewhere, make the money, get the thing, and that can be very useful. Men are men are focused that way, and that's very useful. And we need some balance of being present because we didn't, in my opinion, did not incarnate in this lifetime to have a constant berade of stress. It's supposed to be fun and joyful with a little stress along the way. And here's some tools to make it easier to deal with that. And most people don't have any tools. I just want more people to have tools.
SPEAKER_00:So identifying core wounds sounds like a basic premise. A lot of your programs. So beyond raising self-awareness, what is the process to bring that all alight? What do you what do you do? Core wounds. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, so there the work originates from Imago Therapy, which is a therapy, a couples therapy created by Harville Hendricks and Henley Kelly Hunt. It's my favorite, the only therapy that I recommend. And within, and I did it in my previous marriage. So what that means is I'm very truth-seeking in a logical way. So when I see something, when I learn something, I immediately change. Now that is not true for everybody. Um, but I had seen a pattern in my marriage with my ex, and I even knew it. Like I said to him, he'd say, You know that doesn't work. I said, Oh, I totally know it doesn't work. He's like, Why do you keep doing it? I said, I don't know why I keep doing it. I know it doesn't work, but I keep doing it. I don't know why I can't stop. But some because logically it just made sense to me to do what I was doing until I did this. So it's a mogotherapy, with a 12 weeks when you go to a Mago therapist and there's a certain amount of exercises that you do. It's very structured. And you actually sign an agreement in the first 12 weeks that says you're not gonna bail, you're gonna complete the 12 weeks and the 12 um exercises. One of them is the core wound program, a core wound um core wound exercise. And everyone can go by this. You can go, you can buy the Getting the Love That You Want workbook and you can do this exercise. What I've done over the years is taken this exercise and I've extracted from it data of patterns and habits and created a core wound map. And that's my thing. And I actually got Harville to write the foreword to my book, uh, acknowledging, and he was very excited when I shared it with him because I, you know, I had to get permission. I've created this work based on your work. Like it starts with your work, but then I've fine-tuned it because I'm always looking for the fastest, easiest, easiest path to clarity and behavioral change in anything. I want to understand what it is, I want to understand how it works, so I know how to change it. And that's what I've created with the core wound map. Now, in the book, I have not, nor did I ask permission, but I for people to do the actual eight-page core wound exercise. But in the book, I list, and you anyone can go on ChatGPT or Google and you can say, give me a list of core wounds. Okay. And it won't be as thorough, and you can't really create a map from it, but you can start with what are my core wounds? And then you look at the list of wounds and you could look at see what resonates to you. Some would be abandonment, mine, like I said, devalued. Someone might have been controlled or suppressed, invisible. Yeah, there's there's I there's many. So, but those just come to mind right now. But you just look up core wounds and you'd start there. And that would be that the core wounds, let's say I would choose the top three. And so what I do in the book is I have people create the map, but you're gonna kind of guess at the at the wounds. I would prefer people to do the exercise and then work with someone to really get fine-tuned about this. But let's just say you do abandonment. So let's go over abandonment for a second. If I have a core wound of abandonment, when I get triggered, when I when my brain interprets I'm being abandoned, again, this happens so quickly. It's so instantaneous. So, which is why you have to identify when it's happening. I will immediately have an emotional reaction, I will feel something, and then I will do something. So the beginning of the circuit looks like this. I'm out in the world, my body goes into a trigger, it's interpreting abandoned. I'm again, you can't think it's like it's happening so fast. You trigger abandon, and then I'm gonna feel something, and then I'm gonna do something. So when I understand the pattern and I'm gonna be able to catch it, I'm gonna be like, I'm gonna be able to start to change it. So I'm gonna, oh, that's me feeling abandoned. But then I go a little deeper into so let's say abandonment's the core wound. I ask people because if it was just something that happened to you one time that didn't stick as a belief, then we can kind of move on and get over it. But what happens is it becomes a belief in which and how we treat ourselves. This is the most important part. So if someone has a core wound of abandonment, my question would be for you what are three ways you abandon yourself? And most people that have abandonment wounds abandon themselves because they don't feel worthy enough to be attended to by other people. So they're the ones who that's when someone's texting you and they don't text back and they're they go into a panic because they have a fear of abandonment. They so we're only going to stop this if we can identify it and then start to first take responsibility for how I'm continuing to keep this wound very alive and very active. I have to stop abandoning myself before anyone else, because you can't expect anyone else not to abandon you. And then we move into the stretch. So here's the this is my favorite part. So this is how my rewire program got created. Neuroplasticity. In order to, just like when you're building muscle or training the br training your body to get stronger, in exercise, we, you know, you have muscle fibers, all kinds of muscle fibers all over the body. And someone who's bodybuilding or really trying to hypert get hypertrophy, which is building of the muscle, they're going to be very, it's uh Tony, what's his name? Called it um muscle confusion. Okay. Well, that's not really it's it was a good way to tell a lot of people how to do something differently, but it's actually not accurate. When you do something for the first time that's new, a sport, a dance, an exercise, your body feels a little weird. It's like shaky, right? Because it doesn't know how to do whatever you're trying to do because it has no pathway for it. There is no brain-to-muscle connection yet. That's what you're trying to establish while doing it. Well, then after you do it once or twice or a couple of times, then the brain goes, Okay, this is easy. I know now what you want me to do. That is neuroplasticity, but in the way of muscle recruit recruiting muscle fibers. The brain is the same. You we all have a certain amount of brain activity and neuroplasticity. Well, not neuroplasticity, we have brain circuits that we've created over time, and much of our brain we're not even using at all. When we want to change a belief or an idea or a habit, we have to stretch outside of our comfort zone and create new neural pathways. But just like in personal training for me, if I said to someone, you understand how a personal trainer works, when you hire a trainer, it means they're going to push you into places you're not comfortable beyond what you're willing to do on your own. Yes. And most people say, Yes, I totally understand. Here's my money. What I'm doing with the rewire is the same thing as a personal trainer does, only emotionally. I'm asking you to stretch beyond your comfort zone so that your body has to repattern. Let me give you a very clear example. Two years ago, I took two of my cats. We had five at the time. We had two of my oldest cats on an RV trip. Well, we had we had inherited a fifth one and she was hell on wheels, and which is why we took the two cats to give them a break because their nervous systems were like having PTSD all the time because she was a little devil cat. Loved her, but um, she was she was not uh emotionally stable for the rest of them. She made them all very nervous. So we take our two cats on this RV trip. And when we parked the RV out, and Doug and I had never done anything like this before, we've never been in an RV or driven an RV. We put the cats in the RV, we have it all set up, and they're of course, they're two girls and they're looking around, they're curious, and they're sniffing things and they're jumping on things. The minute we shut the door, turn the engine on, they go into panic mode and they dive right into the bed, into the corner. Their faces are literally in the corner and they're they're frozen stiff because they're so afraid, right? Because their brain said, What the F is happening? I'm going to die. I'm going to die. They didn't know. Their brain just turned on and said, This is this stimulus, things are moving, it's loud. I different smells. Oh my God, what's happening? They went into freeze mode. When we parked the RV, they sawed, they came out, they walked around, they were, they got comfortable, they relaxed. This happened every day for five days, except that every day it got a little better. And by the fifth day, they were literally sitting in my lap while we were driving because their brain registered, oh, I'm not gonna die. Once it got used to the sound and the feeling of what was happening, they could identify it as it's not, it's not unsafe. At first it was unsafe, but we had to do with the unsafe thing a couple of times for the brain to create neural pathways that said, this sound, this feeling doesn't mean I'm gonna die. And that's a very simple way of explaining neuroplasticity. And in humans, when we when we want to change how we feel about ourselves or what we believe or what we're attracting, we have to cross over. If I believe I've been abandoned, then I have to show up for myself in ways that might feel uncomfortable. And without someone holding your feet to the fire a little bit, you're probably not gonna do it. Most of us don't want to be uncomfortable. But when you understand why you're doing it, it's like if all of the women who are listening to this and you had, you know, not a wonderfully ease of childbirth, would you put the baby back in now? No, it was worth having it. You understood you had to do something uncomfortable to get, you know, the love of your life. We go to the gym. Is it, does it feel amazing to work out? Sometimes, if you if you understand what it's doing for your body, but maybe you don't love it, but you love what the results that it produces. In any in other areas of our life, we understand this and we're willing to pay people and we're willing to show up and do it. But when it comes to our emotions and it makes us feel out of control, or it because we feel afraid, or because we don't want to, we don't admit that we don't love ourselves, or because it makes us feel sad or a memory, then we clamp up and we go into survival and survive survival states. But without addressing this, nothing changes. I mean, yes, things can change temporarily, but it doesn't lead to an overall ease and peace and love and and you know, that I think most of us want.
SPEAKER_00:Well, JJ, as always, you're a whirlwind of information. Now, could you tell us once again if somebody wanted to attend some of your programs, download some of your materials, get more of JJ Flazaines? What should they do?
SPEAKER_01:So the class, Why Your Nervous System, Why Your Body Won't Change Until Your Nervous System Feels Safe is happening on Wednesday, November 19th at 4 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Eastern. It's on Zoom. It is recorded, so if you can't make it live, although live will get some bonus stuff that uh because I love when people come live, it's much more fun. Uh, and it's$97, but uh because you're a listener of Dr. Davis, you can put in code Dr. Davis97, all caps, D-R-D-A-V-I-S 97, and you'll get it for free. There will be a replay and it will be available after November 19th if you're hearing this after November 19th. So feel free to take a part of that. Uh jjfulzames.com is where my website is. I have a bunch of podcasts, a bunch of free stuff. Oh, the feelings and needs list is at jjfilzames.com forward slash feelings list, feelings with an S. And then if I've mentioned any of these programs and you feel really called, most people want to get to know me a little bit more, but if you feel really called, you can go to jjfzames.com forward slash apply. And I'm currently taking applications for 2026. Once January starts, January 5th, we're done. Like so, I mean, minus healing the mother wound and maybe something else, a couples retreat that I'll be doing next year, those other programs will be closed. So it's now until the end of the year that you could jump on a call and see if something fits. Maybe you don't know where you want to start. So go to Jigifilzanes.com forward slash apply, and then I can tell you where to go. It's a free call. We just decide if it's a fit and what it entails, and I'll make you an offer or I'll tell you to go listen to the podcast and that you're not ready yet.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, JJ. I'll put uh links to all those uh locations in the show notes, of course. JJ, thank you again. Thanks for your valuable time and your and your endless energy for sharing with us. Thanks, Dr. Davis. Thank you. I appreciate you.
