the theater, and I was very interested in physical approaches to the theater. There was a lot of experimental theater going on, you know, the 70s, which I read about in the 80s, which was kind of my time. And so that physicality in the theater, I did a lot of trainings that were physical. And so then getting into these more integrated modalities, where somatics and the body approach to healing just seemed natural from that, because I’ve always been someone interested in sort of push off, yeah,

 

Manon Bolliger  05:56

and I mean, it makes sense in the sense that that your your patients connect more to their body, right? Otherwise, it’s sort of, they come to you with, what’s what’s wrong with me, it’s like, almost when they’re connected to their bodies. It’s like it’s when they’re saying what’s wrong, and they’re connecting all of their body also, you know, not just their their heads, looking for a diagnosis, and being put in some sort of box and some pharmaceutical, you know, result, it’s sort of saying, Okay, what else you know? And you’re connecting. I think touch is so significant, like Therapeutic Touch, in that connection and in that assessment of your of your patient,

 

Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  06:45

that’s right. And as you had read, you know, I ended up doing my specialty training in physical medicine and rehabilitation, which really is the science and medical practice of adaptation. We as as beings, as as physical beings, know that, how do we adapt to our environment? How do, how does, how do we respond in regards to health? How do we respond to the way that we’re active in the world? And then, even furthermore, I then went on and focused a lot on pain management. And as you know, pain is a bio, psycho, social, spiritual. It’s very rare that, you know, someone comes in with pain that’s just a purely physical pain. And you know, for people like that, it’s an acute pain. It will go away in a week or two weeks or something. And my practice was filled with people that had pain that was going on for a lot longer. And, you know, I it was easy to discern sooner than later that there was more going on and just someone had a physical injury, and that was what was pain so that, and just the challenges of many, many pain patients, really makes you go in, and you have to look outside the box, because one size does not fit.

 

Manon Bolliger  08:02

Fit. Let’s talk. Let’s talk about pain, actually, because that is one of your your big focuses, what? What can you? What can you? Most people sort of see pain, I guess. No, it’s not true. Some people do see it all connected. That is, you know, multi dimensional. But there are people who really think that it’s, it’s not like that, that it’s, if it’s hurts in the body, it’s in the body. It has nothing to do with your emotional state, nothing to do with your mental outlook, nothing to do with anything else. There’s no trigger to it. It’s sort of an isolated incident. Can you sort of take us on what your journey of understanding like, from where you came from to where, how you’re seeing it today?

 

Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  08:56

Sure. Well, like I had said once, I started actually getting more into, like a medical orientation of things, and being with people in the hospital, you it was very easy to see that there are other things going on and just, you know, the physical response to a surgery, or someone’s I’m sorry that, or, you know, someone’s painful response to a chronic illness or things like that, and, you know, just from the most basic level. And today, we’re much more blessed than ever that we can go and look up information with just, you know, in a second, with the drop of a hat, but something that, I think that many people know, and if you don’t know it, you’ll hear this here, but the same neurotransmitters and the same chemical transmitters in the body that are responsible for pain are also the same transmitters neurotransmitters that we’re treating for depression and anxiety and post traumatic stress and all of these other things. So they’re. The same, you know, the same systems, at least, if not all, are partially, you know, involved in such diverse things as, you know, pain versus versus spirituality. You know, when they’re doing, you know, scans and looking at people’s blood chemistry when they’re in meditation, like it’s the same neurotransmitters that are being looked at. So you can see this crossover to many different, you know, types of medical conditions, and also as as we know, you know that people are in pain, and they’re in pain for anything more than a short time, you know that they’ll usually be a psychological component with it that people are unhappy about, and they may be in that state for days or weeks or months or whatever. And the same thing with many medical conditions, you know, we know, like from Parkinson’s disease to stroke or things like that, that these are not just physical manifestations of weakness or tremors or or some kind of, you know, just nervous system that we phenomenon that goes outside of the mind body connection that you know, there’s a very high incidence of depression with Parkinson’s disease that we believe is related directly to the Parkinson’s disease, and not someone being depressed because they have Parkinson’s disease. And these days, we can study those types of things. So even for people who don’t want to see things that way, all you got to do now is go on online and look up research, and you’ll see that there is a lot of high level medical research that supports the fact that the mind, body and even quote, unquote, spirit, depending on how you define it, are interconnected even from a biochemical level, that by treating one, you can improve the other. Now we’re seeing that also, even just with, you know, the more recent topics of like those GLP agonist medicines that people are taking for weight loss or diabetes. You know, like so many people are using those medicines now, because you can lose, you know, 50 pounds in 10 months and things like that. I know people have done that. But even with those, we see just so many effects that they’re starting to notice just how the, you know, people’s level, people’s moods, are affected by it, and all kinds of other systems in the body are affected by these different, you know, chemicals or transmitters that go through them. So we’re really reinforcing more and more that we are an integrated, you know, like said, bio, psychosocial, you know, spiritual beings. And that was much, much more complex than you know, then you know, then, then what we we think, you know, the fact that we think that we have understood everything about the body or everything about the mind, even including things with AI, we have evolved over billions of years to be like this. You know, AI has evolved over, you know, 40 years, 50 years, the most 60 or 70 years. And that, you know, what we know, it took billions of years to get to this space. And so the wisdom of the body, the wisdom of the body, mind, spirit, all these capacities that we have, and just the small amount of those capacities that we use for survival, you know, is just nothing compared to the forces that have shaped this, you know, this miracle of life over billions of years on planet Earth?

 

Manon Bolliger  13:29

Yeah, well, I have a situation I thought I’d bring up, because you’d be the perfect person to ask. And the listeners to this podcast are very aware of it, because it’s actually my my partner, who had shingles and ended up with so called post shingle neuralgia, which happens in 20% of the cases. Usually it stops in a self limiting time and and I share, and he shares, willingly, all of this on the podcast, because, as my background, I’m a naturopathic doctor. I’ve used homeopathy, I’ve used Bowen. We have done everything under the sun. He didn’t. He did take pain pills, which made him extremely sick, very dizzy, like it didn’t last very long he, and he’s not a he hasn’t taken a lot of synthetic drugs. So that would explain, maybe, why he’s so reactive, very tuned in person, you know, meditates, has done all kinds of things, has had trauma in his past, and it’s a year and a half and he’s still in pain. And so we’ve been like, what is this? On all levels, you know, we’ve talked to so many people, and, you know, I have a large community of of who. You know, very gifted, different Italy, abled. We’ve done acupuncture, whatever. What’s your first like thinking of in your Maven, your experience where, what is that link to? What’s an avenue? How would a patient like this or his wife go seek Him, other help, other things like, and you can ask what we’ve done. We’ve done just what everything under the sun and so even weird things, you know, like entities I, you know, I was, I don’t find so weird at all. But we’ve done, you know, many, many different things that could be insightful. Opening, yeah, so any thoughts like this, where you know, because people listening to this program have conditions that they’re looking for answers, and they’re listening to different people and going, where else could I go? Who do I relate to? What’s in alignment with my current understanding of healing and life and everything, right? So I’ve, kind of, I’ve reached my, I don’t know, stage that let the universe unfold, and then you come along.

 

Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  16:18

Well, I’m wishing I could solve your problem. And what can I tell you? I don’t know if that’s totally in the cards today, but what I would say know what’s important to know that any extreme beliefs that we have from you know, whether we’re our beliefs are only in Western medicine and Western modalities, our beliefs and things that are much less, you know, you know, much less accepted. You know, really, the middle way is the way that you have to go. Because one is, you know, science is something that has had spectacular discoveries, and now they’re, they’re happening at a faster and faster, breakneck, you know, pace than they ever had. And then, of course, we have all of this wisdom that people have gathered from different cultures and different types of health modalities over 1000s and 1000s of years they’ve been practice. So it’s really, you know, to me, you don’t want to rule out or write off anything, because unique being and and, you know, I’ve been surprised so many times over the years by what helped people get better or have improvements in different conditions that they have been really shocking to me. And it’s just as I’ve gotten older, I hope I’ve gotten wiser, I’ve certainly become more accepting to things. But what I first recommend, which is what I do myself, is number one is to always make sure that, you know, you rule out any of the big things you know, so that your pain isn’t coming from some source that you know. Maybe there is a hidden, you know, cancer, or there could be some kind of condition that’s really a medical condition that’s easily treatable. So, you know, I always recommend that you go and you get a work up for whatever you have know from the medical doctor or the medical system, whoever your practitioner is, whether it’s a nurse or nurse practitioner or a naturopath or whatever, that to rule out, you know, any any serious things, because that’s really what Western medicine is good at. You know, it’s really about being able to rule out the worst things. And that’s how the doctor’s mind works, is that you want to make sure it’s none of these serious things, and then if it’s not, if it’s something that’s not one of those serious things, or it’s something that or that’s life threatening, is really more than saying serious, because I don’t like make light of it serious, but any of these life threatening things you know that are imminently life threatening, then we can sit back and start to look at, you know, what plan of action to take for people and so, you know, post herpetic neuralgia, or, you know, people who have had shingles, Post shingles neuralgia, it’s a very painful condition, as you know, you know, my mother had it, and she was miserable for a few years now. She had had it near the end of her life. And I’ve had some friends, you know, who are just being tortured by the pain from this. You know, some people, it will just burn out on its own after a couple of years, and all of a sudden they’ll be pain free. But as far as modalities are concerned, you know, it’s really a trial and see what happens.

 

Commercial Break  19:26

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Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  20:36

No, I don’t like trial and error, but again, that each individual person will have their own response I had had, and I’m just gonna go slightly off track from here. But you know, I had had some pain that developed in my abdomen and then into my back in 2013 and it was haunting me for like, five, six years, and I had done everything. The first thing that I did was I ruled out that it wasn’t anything life threatening, and the good news was that it wasn’t. But then secondarily, I was in this miserable pain, and I had tried so many different things, in the frontal diet, in different diets and nutrition, to acupuncture, to not just one acupuncturist, but try different acupuncture, because you may have two of the most brilliant acupuncturists, and they’re both at the top of their field, and their decision making is is, you know, peerless, and one can help you get better, and one may not. It’s not because the one didn’t know what they were doing. Or the one isn’t a good practitioner. It’s really that at a certain point, it’s our own journey, and we have to find it and experiment. So those kind of things where it’s like, Huh? I went to this amazing practitioner in Hawaii, and you know, who has a huge reputation, and their acupuncture didn’t do anything for me. And then I went to this practitioner in San Francisco, and theirs did, and they were, you know, equally good people. So there’s a little bit of luck with it, and there’s a little bit about, you know, how we are such unique individual beings, you know. And I’ve studied so many things and and so many of these things that I’ve studied, I’ve, I’ve taken Ayurveda, which I have, great, great, you know, these, these wisdom, medical traditions that have been around for 1000s of years have so much to offer. But, you know, you give something an amount of time, you know, six months a year, you’re really suffering. Maybe you do a switch after some time like that. But you have to be, you have to be inquisitive and continue to see, you know, what may work for you, because there are so many factors. You know, it’s not like we all came from the same cultural background and, or have, you know, the same genetic background, you know, especially here in the US, where we’re such a mix, you know, we have these medical protocols, things that are set up for everybody, and when something is set up for everybody, it’s rare that it’s going to be able to treat, you know, the 30 or 40% of people who don’t, you know, fit into that general category. You know that that get better from these things. So I wish I could make it sound easier, but I really think that it’s an individual, you know, personal process.

 

Manon Bolliger  23:27

Yeah, no, and I That’s how we’re looking at it. I just wanted to hear your you know, and I agree, you know, first rule out that it’s not something unseen, that it’s not the wrong diagnosis. In other words, that it’s maybe hiding a tumor or something else, you know, that could be causing similar ish symptoms, you know, and then it’s going through. And I totally agree, you know, we’ve tried different acupunctures, different homeopaths, different naturopaths, different body works, different, you know, kind of electric, you know, that type of devices. And, yeah, it’s very interesting. And then you wonder, you know, is this is the pain from a philosophical perspective, its place in your life? Like it’s, you know, it’s like there are no coincidences, you know, like you’re here today on this show, you know, I don’t think that’s a coincidence, you know, I just don’t see coincidences anymore. I just feel like an incredible alignment with how things show up. And so why would it be any different in our own healing journey.

 

Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  24:42

That’s right, that’s right. And you know, with and people’s capacity and perception of pain, you know, is affected by so many things that have happened in their life, it depends on what their their childhood was like, what type of home they came from, how pain is regarded in the torture. That they came from, because different cultures, there’s different perceptions of that. Now, for anybody who’s sitting here right now, you know, if I said, Let’s all focus on our right foot, and if I’m focusing on my right foot, now, it’s like my right foot feels different than my left foot when I’m focusing on my right foot feels different than the rest of my body when I’m focusing on, well, huh, that’s an unusual sensation I’m feeling in my right foot, and someone could interpret that as being pain. And I’m not judging that, and I’m not saying that in any way to be humorous or or to, you know, to question people’s perception of their pain, but something that feels out of the ordinary and unfamiliar to us. We can perceive in a way that, you know, that we that is something that is not good for us, you know. And so just because of that diversity of how people perceive pain. One person’s pain is not someone else’s pain, and that’s the difference between like an acute pain and a chronic pain. Now I have a background, as I had said, in in psychedelic therapies, where I’ve done a lot of formal training through the California Institute of integral studies and ketamine assisted therapy that people do. And one of the amazing things about psychedelics, and this is also in indigenous cultures that practice it, and cultures where, you know, it’s, it’s not necessarily indigenous, but you know, part of the culture, like in Brazil, where there are, you know, medicine, churches and things that are totally legitimate, and hundreds of 1000s of people are participating in them. When that with many of the psychedelic experiences and psychedelic therapies, if you’re doing it for therapy or psychedelic sacraments, if you’re doing it through a church, people’s pain, all of their pain disappears psychedelic. And again, I said that there’s a relationship somewhat between neurotransmitters and things like that, but like, what happens during that situation? What, what is going on in the body? And we’re not sophisticated enough yet to be able to understand, you know, why that neurotransmitter works one way with depression, and what does that neurotransmitter do then it’s related to pain, because they’re often going through similar pathways. And so again, it at least at the moment, it brings up more questions than it does answers. But I’m also, you know, very hopeful for, you know, for the future, because I said research is really both in integrated modalities as well as in, you know, Western metric modalities, it’s going on the breakneck pace.

 

Manon Bolliger  27:46

Yeah, and I mean, the fact that it can change, or that one’s perception of it shifts, it kind of breaks the illusion that it’s, it’s, like, hard and firm and unmovable, you know. And I think that is also the beginning of opening up the possibility that that it can go right. And, you know, it’s like, I know in my practice, I would say, well, even if a symptom would end up coming back or relapse, how I would call it. It’s like, well, your body was able to deal with it. So it knows how to it’s there. We just don’t know the right time, exactly how we’re going to get there, but it can, and that’s the whole thing. That’s the possibility, right? So

 

Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  28:35

that’s right. And like we were talking about when I was telling you about, you know, the pain that I had had, which I still have, about 5% of that pain back when it came on in 20,000 2013 it was very debilitating. I could barely work, and noone had an answer for it, and I had tried so many modalities. And what, what happened about three years in is that one night, I was just in agony, and I had had some Feldon price awareness through tapes in my cabinet. This was like, you know, in 2013 that had been in my cabinet since the 80s, right? And I just said something came to me in like a flash, like, you know, you have a cassette tape in there with those Felton price exercises. Maybe you should try one. I hadn’t done any felt in price, you know, in decades, since massage school and I went and I put in this tape, and did you know this lesson? And at the end, it was like, huh, did my pain go down like 2% because I was just so sensitized to it, and it was just like, This is crazy. Like this Feldenkrais exercise had done something that had brought my pain down, and so I started doing these every night, day after day. At this point, I’ve done, you know, at least 3000 lessons of distance. 2013 you know, because it’s been over, I can’t I bet you I haven’t missed, you know, 10 days a year, and you know, just this continual opening up to awareness. You know, through movement discernment, aware of, you know, how my fascial system degraded through all of my physical being and psychological being, the mind body connection, and I was able to manage that pain, you know, down to about 5% of what it was. And now sometimes I’ll notice that, like, if I, you know, don’t eat right? Like, if I’ll go, I’ll have a bunch of French fries or something, I’ll feel like a little bit of that, it’ll look back, but it’s really mysterious, because still, you know, when I have workups and things like that, nobody’s saying you have a gallbladder problem, you know, or something where it would seem more obvious. And so it’s just been, you know, trial and and finding what happens with those trials.

 

Manon Bolliger  31:02

You remember when it reminds me of a story one of my friends that I treated with bone therapy, and she was on heavy duty pain medication, and really needed to get off it for she had a scoliosis, and we managed to really get her to be almost pain free with doing several bone therapy sessions. And then she she left so the country, and I was in touch with her later, and she ended up with it, another pain that came up, you know, but still the same back, the same curvature, the same everything. And she was able to do it through Feldenkrais. So it’s, you see, it’s interesting, she got out of it. And so sometimes it’s like, different therapies, different moments, different circumstances. It’s, you know, it’s very it’s very interesting. Like, our body wants to heal. I believe, at least. That’s the I think that it’s like we’re, we’re build to heal, and it’s a question of finding or aligning ourselves with the right thing at the right moment.

 

Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  32:13

And like you said, it’s, it’s sometimes Synchronicity or grace. And I don’t mean that in any silly way, but I know that you don’t mean it, you know, it’s that there, there are, you know, connections be among things that that are below the surface of what we pay attention there’s certainly a very powerful subconscious and unconscious that directs a lot of our lives, yes, more, that we can tune In and and drop down and focus in that awareness. You know, the richness of the moment. You know we rise to the surface, and you can get all kinds of movement. We just don’t get get stuck on those layers.

 

Manon Bolliger  32:55

No. Well, Jeff KD Mayers, because you, you you’re branding with the KD. You have a show, or you have a talk show. What is it you’re doing with the KD part? Well, that’s

 

Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  33:09

a long story we can share for another time, but I go, that’s my nickname, is Katie. And what I have a few things like, I do have a website called minute to mastery M, I N, U, T, E, number two, mastery M, A, S, T, E, R, y.com, and that’s where I work a lot, with peak performance. I work with a lot of professionals, doctors, lawyers, healthcare professionals, you know, people who are really interested in exploring, you know, the their their maximum health and and from from a very open perspective, like we’re talking about today, I also have a book that should be that’s coming out this fall, called Secrets from the heart of yoga. I have a long history of yoga practice over the years that has evolved very much, and there’s a website for that that I’m looking at. I think it’s a Jeff KD, Myers, M, E, y, E, R, S, M, D, slash book actually, let me just I’m so sorry I had this written down. And of course, the moment that I’m getting to give my pitch, I can’t find

 

Manon Bolliger  34:20

it listed anyways on your but you go ahead, find it, because some people are just listening. So it’s better, if you that’s

 

Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  34:30

okay. It’ll take me just one second. Okay, yes, it’s yes. Jeff Katie Myers, md.com, forward slash book, and you’ll see that there, and it’s called Secrets from the heart of yoga. And it’s really the book focuses on discernment, and like you and I have talked about today, really our ability to drop down and to be present and to, you know, get to be friend that Inter. Internal awareness that we have that is really a feedback loop that gives us a lot of information about our health. And so it’s not a book of yoga posture, per se. It’s really a book of self inquiry and how to use yoga as a bio, psycho, social, spiritual practice, right? So those are the two main things going on right now. Okay, well,

 

Manon Bolliger  35:21

I think we’re going to be talking again, but thank you very much for sharing your your wisdom and knowledge with us.

 

Dr. Jeff KD Meyers  35:28

My pleasure. It’s been delightful, and you’re delightful. So thanks a lot, and until we meet again.

 

Manon Bolliger  35:33

So from the discussion with Jeff KD Myers, I think for me, the big takeaway is it’s again, connecting to ourselves to be enough present enough, to be able to hear what we’re actually wanting, what direction makes sense. So it’s not so much getting our guidance from outside. It’s really being your your best second opinion and and really toning in, what is it that feels right? And so if you’re in, you know, receiving a treatment that you feel like you’ve given it enough time, and you know, it’s fair to find out what prognosis the therapist believes they will take, they may say, Well, you should see a change like, you know, with bone therapy, we tell people it’s three to five weeks after that, if they haven’t changed at all, even by the third week, they’re probably barking up the wrong Tree. There’s probably a block. It’s probably not right. There’s something else that is needs to be addressed another way. So it’s not that a therapy that works for the right things, which, you know, and bone can be many things, doesn’t mean it works for all people at all times. So, and that’s the truth of many therapies. So with chiropractor, I think they say usually, you know to take at least 10 or 12 treatments, then you’ll know. So if you’re going that route, don’t do 30 of them. You know if it’s not working or not holding or not feeling right to you. Same with physio, physio works well, but maybe it’s not the right time for it. Maybe first you have to kind of re educate the nervous system, and then you can rehabilitate the muscle. So there’s lots of of questions, and that’s why discernment really understanding what you’re doing and understanding what you what you don’t know. And I kind of brought up the situation with my partner, Tony, because we’re at the don’t know stage, which is really the the listening in stage, further listening, obviously we listen to get this far along, but it’s like, what is this journey about, what’s it? What’s it sharing, you know? And obviously, it’s his journey, but being part of this journey, you know, what? What is this? What’s it kind of for? You know? What are we? What are we learning from it? How can we be grateful to it? So there’s lots of angles that that one can take, and I think, I mean, for me, the most important is that change does happen, and with some of the therapies along the way, there has been a brief but nonetheless a shift, which means the body can shift. And anyway, one didn’t need to teach me that. I’ve learned this now, being in practice for so long, you know, shift happens, as they say. All right.

 

ENDING: 

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