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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I am back today with my friend Megan Butler to delve deep on the topic of nervous system regulation and the most impactful modalities for health. And like me, she has a journey of nervous system regulation that impacted her health in many areas of her life. And we both realized how vital this piece is to healing, to health overall, and to really every area of our life. And Meg is a community builder with a deep understanding of this topic and of nervous system regulation. And in fact, the community, the heart center healing center in Austin called Kuya that she runs and directs the vision for really hones in on so many ways that we can support our nervous system and make these improvements. But even if you don’t live in or near Austin and can’t visit Kuya, she shares so many key takeaways today for getting our nervous systems into a more regulated state, learning to how to have more parasympathetic time in our lives, how to become even aware of our nervous system and learn to work with it, and so much more. I dearly value Meg. She’s a friend as well as someone who I really respect. And so without further ado, let’s join her. Megan, welcome back. Thank you so much for having me, Katie.
Katie: I loved our first conversation. I’ll link to that in the show notes. If you guys haven’t listened yet, we talked about the importance of community and how to cultivate it. Also, as a counterpoint, the importance of intentional solitude. And those were perfect springboard, I feel like, into this conversation where we’re going to get to delve into the nervous system aspects of this and just how profoundly it can impact all areas of our life and especially our health. And I know that for me, and I think from knowing you, for you as well, this nervous system component was a massive key in our own health journeys. And I think for you, this one actually started really early. So if you’re willing to share, I would love to hear sort of how you came to understand this and then how you came to work with it in your own healing.
Megan: Yes, thank you. So I didn’t really think much of it until recently. I’ve done quite a lot of work on healing the nervous system as it relates to my entry into the world. So, you know, my mom had a traumatic birth with me. I was in the hospital for 10 days after being born. I didn’t have that skin-to-skin contact, even, you know, the exposure to colostrum prior to breast milk was important. And I didn’t get a lot of that.
And it set up this situation for me to where my nervous system was relatively dysregulated. And I have a lot of memories, even early childhood, of just being quite nervous, right? Things that typically wouldn’t make somebody nervous. I was always in the heightened state, right? So the difference between being in the sympathetic nervous system, right, which is the fight or flight, the racing heart, the constriction of, or the dilated pupils in the eyes, right? You’re ready to face what’s coming at you.
And although many of our stressors now are not the same as what they used to be, it’s not some life-or-death situation, internally, the way that the body functions, you don’t really know that. So the body has a hard time healing when you’re in more of the sympathetic state rather than the parasympathetic state, which is this rest and digest, right? You are able to relax. The body is able to focus on genuine functioning in a way that you can’t when you’re in the sympathetic state more often. And just being able to balance this allows the body to heal.
And now I’m a part of a wellness facility in South Austin that connects through nervous system regulation. So all modalities have to do with regulating the nervous system and allowing people to connect more deeply with themselves in addition to connecting with others. And, you know, it took me until now, you know, 34 years of age to look back and to see all of these, you know, various autoimmune issues that I’ve had, even being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 12. I was able to reverse almost everything. Even my insulin sensitivity has actually gotten much, much better just in understanding how to further connect with myself and how to, you know, regulate my body in a different way. And, you know, there’s not much that’s more powerful than that.
Katie: That’s amazing. And like you, I’ve told the story before, so I won’t go into great detail here, but that nervous system regulation and addressing that trauma piece was the most impactful one for my health because I had been doing a lot of the other modalities for so long and they were so beneficial, but they weren’t able to be maximally beneficial until I addressed that nervous system component. And then so effortlessly, all of those things started becoming so even more beneficial and my health started improving so drastically.
So this is an area now I talk about often, kind of any chance I get, because I just have seen firsthand in my life how vital this is and how it kind of works both ways, where if you are in a nervous system dysregulated state, you can be doing all the things on paper that look perfect and they’re not going to have the greatest impact. Whereas if you can figure out the nervous system piece, you get so much more leeway and all of the things you do actually become much more impactful and you have more resilience against little things that could have made your health so much worse.
And so for me, the autoimmune side was Hashimoto’s, which I no longer have. And it’s helped me to also realize just how incredibly capable our bodies are of healing and how they always want to move toward healing if we support them in the ways they’re asking for. And I feel like this nervous system piece is the piece we don’t talk about enough yet when it comes to supporting our bodies in healing.
I’m curious for you, were there any modalities that were really synergistic with addressing the nervous system side or practices that you rely on? Or I know that you have so many modalities available at Kuya. What do you feel like are the most impactful starting points for someone who’s wanting to address this piece?
Megan: Yeah, that’s a great question. The one for me that has been very impactful is I’ve worked with different like homeopathic remedies to heal underlying root emotional distress, right? So I’ve been on various protocols. I’ve worked with a woman who lives in Portugal, and she has been pretty foundational in a lot of my most recent healing.
Another big piece is just the idea of my body can heal. My body is fully capable. Us as individuals, we’re made up of a collective of various communities of cells and organs and microorganisms. And when they’re not communicating well, when they’re not in regulation together, then everything starts to get thrown off.
And a lot of times those symptoms don’t show up initially. It takes time for that to show up, but continuously balancing the nervous system, being in a state that’s relaxed, right? Doing your best to avoid the coffee first thing in the morning and set your schedule up to where your deadlines aren’t stressing you out. It’s hard to do in today’s day and age, but it makes a huge impact on the body.
And another modality that I participate in often, and this is at Kuya, is our sonico plunge. And this has been widely known. People talk about sonico plunge like crazy nowadays. But as you mentioned, the connection to regulating the nervous system, right? We have this like hormetic stress that is being produced in the body. You are inviting a stressful situation. So when you relieve yourself of that, anything else stressful is actually not as stressful. You’re doing the hard thing to kind of build more of this resilience as a human being.
And the cold plunge specifically, right? It activates the vagus nerve, one of the longest nerves in the body that connects to all the organs. So again, this community of organs, getting them all on the same page together, right? Reducing inflammation, connecting to self, connecting to your breath, regulating your heartbeat. And then similar in the sauna, right? You’re actually elevating your heart rate. You are in an environment that is hot. So initially, the body feels a little dysregulated. But over time, the muscles start to relax. You’re able to detox the body. And then especially when you leave that environment and you have that temperature drop, you have this relaxation that helps with sleep, that helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system. And doing so in a community setting, connecting with others that are also in search for that same regulation is a big part of that healing process as well.
Katie: Yeah, I think this is the perfect dovetail where that community aspect comes into play. And also just knowing from being in proximity of others, there’s actually a beneficial effect on everybody’s nervous system. I know you as a doula as well, you probably know this, but I found it fascinating that babies’ nervous systems are almost entirely co-regulated by their caregivers when they’re really young. And so our nervous system state actually, of course, drastically impacts babies that we’re taking care of, but also has an impact on everyone in our life and vice versa. And so I feel like the community aspect in conjunction with any of these modalities can really increase the effectiveness and how rapidly it can work in your life.
And to your point as well, I think there is, of course, a very personalized aspect to learning nervous system regulation. It’s kind of a journey we each get to go on. It’s not that like an exact blueprint will work exactly the same for each of us, but being aware of this and learning to gauge our responses to things can really help us sort of pinpoint what’s going to be most helpful and make the best use of our resources when it comes to healing.
And so for me, that was learning things like when I was extremely nervous system dysregulated and had been in sympathetic nervous system dominance for 10 years, I needed to actually be gentle with my nervous system for a while and only do like gentle sauna and have lots of kind of restorative time and not do the super high intensity exercises or the really extreme biohacks that kind of like can be hard on your nervous system. I needed to let myself restore first. And then those things became easier and I could increase the intensity. But in that short term, I wish in hindsight there was a place like Kuya at that time because we have access to those things and to be able to sort of like experiment and dose them in the ways and figure out what would have been most helpful, I think would have really sped up that process for me.
Do you have any tips for people in learning even awareness of what their nervous system may be doing and how to start to pay attention to it? Because I think for women, especially sometimes when other people need things, we’re so good at taking care of others that we can ignore our own nervous system demands pretty easily and sort of like learn to tune out that frequency entirely. So any tips for developing an awareness of how our nervous system is doing?
Megan: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought up the co-regulation piece, right? They’re similar to what we talked about in the last episode with mirror neurons. When we’re witnessing someone expressing one way, we mirror that. And if you think about when you’re in a stressful situation, the person that you call to console with is usually one that has more of a calm energy, right? You can feel it very easily when you walk into an environment, or you meet a few people who seem somewhat dysregulated. They are maybe moving a little fast or speaking a little fast, and their energy is all over the place. Similar to when you’re going through something somewhat traumatic, and then you’re invited into a group of people who have a calm presence. Their voice is calm. Their energy is calm. You start to feel that, and you adopt those behaviors.
You can even experiment with this in conversation, right? If you’re talking to someone, and they seem somewhat dysregulated, and that’s hard for you to be around, if you pay attention and you really slow down your mannerisms, that person will likely start to mirror you. And you get to help them regulate their nervous system by co-regulating with them. Yeah.
So, you know, I’d say the biggest thing for people when they’re kind of ramped up and they’re unsure if it has anything to do with their nervous system, it’s an internal feeling, right? So some things are very obvious, like the heart rate that is increased, the breathing rate has increased, maybe your hands are getting a little sweaty, maybe you’re a little jittery, you might have ADHD that feels a little more active, it’s hard to focus, you fidget, you move around a lot.
Thinking about that reflection, what you’re doing externally is also reflection internally. So just taking a few moments to rest and relax, right? A lot of spiritual books talk about to, if you feel like you have a lot to do, and you have no time to do it, take five minutes to do nothing, right? Fully remove yourself from the constant go and the checklists that you have to be fully present in your body. And it’s guaranteed you will be much more efficient in whatever it is that you need to do just by giving yourself some time to relax and regulate.
A lot of this can be done through the breath, right? Slowing the breath, exhaling a lot longer than your inhale, attending certain breathwork classes that are really good for nervous system regulation. There’s various yoga types that are really good for relaxing the body and toning the movement of the body with the movement of the breath. Even swimming, right? Getting in this rhythm, this slow rhythm of breathing and moving the body, going on walks, even barefoot walks, grounding. So you’re feeling the ground touch your feet and you feel the different surface area. It helps the neurons on both sides of the brain kind of cross over and help rewire. All of these things are really good to help regulate.
Another big piece of this is the environment. So thinking about the environments that you spend the most time in, right? Your home environment, making sure that it is clean, right? Tidy. Sometimes that’s more difficult, especially if you have children. But the feng shui of an environment. How the room is set up. Feng shui is all based on safety, right? On the nervous system. So one example of that is you typically in feng shui, you don’t have your back in a chair facing the wall because you can’t see who’s walking in. These are little elements of a heightened nervous system that we can avoid just by setting up our environment in a way that invites this relaxation.
And that too, that goes hand in hand with the healing facility that I work at called Kuya, which is specific to the environment. There’s a lot of time and energy that was put into creating an environment, touching on all five senses in a way that invites peace. So people walk in and they take their shoes off, right? Or you’re invited into kind of like a home space. You feel like you’re in your own living room. There’s a salt wall. There’s plants hanging from the ceiling. It’s emulating nature, right? There’s something that happens within our nervous system. The terpenes from the plants outside when we spend time in nature. So emulating that in an internal environment in a four-wall facility helps people still feel that.
And it’s so fun for me working there to watch people come in and have this expression of, oh, they’re at peace. You can visibly watch their change in state just in being in an environment that is relaxing. And in doing so with other people that also have that experience coming in, everyone is co-regulating. Everyone is relaxing. And then you get to be in that state over longer and longer periods of time. And then you take that with you outside the environment. And soon enough, you know, I reflect on this often, I was, you know, an anxious child. My mannerisms were very different then. And just in naturally regulating my nervous system, the way I express is much different now than it used to be. You know, even if a glass falls off the table, the way in which I would respond to that unknowingly was it was, you know, involuntary, but it was much more heightened than how it is now. And some of it’s just awareness overall.
Katie: Well, having gotten to visit it, I’ll say I think you guys did an amazing job of that at Kuya because it does feel like when you walk into Kuya, it’s like taking a deep breath and just feeling that calm. And then, of course, you have so many modalities that even take you deeper into that calm nervous system state and the community that we’ve talked about. And I love the points you made, especially about sort of like becoming aware of the nervous system and how if you’re in a rush or you’re feeling urgent, that’s a great time to take a pause and just breathe. Because we probably all had that experience where we’re running late or we have so much to do and we’re trying to even like take a shower and everything falls and it takes 10 times longer because we’re trying to rush. And so I think that’s such a valuable tip as well as the breath kind of being the master switch of the nervous system.
And for me in the beginning, I knew like meditation was a hard thing for me to learn at first, but just paying attention to my breath without even trying to like be regimented about the length of the inhale and the exhale or any of that. I started with just witnessing my breath and I noticed that just having awareness of it actually helps it to calm down and helped it to get into a calmer pattern, just by paying attention to it.
I also think the things you mentioned about nature are so important along with sunlight. Anytime I get a chance to talk about the importance of natural light. It’s funny to me that we need studies on this, but the data on this is pretty incredible of how impacted our nervous system is by exposure to the natural rhythms of our planet and the light outside and how easy it is to disconnect from that in the modern world and to just be under fluorescent light all the time and really never get exposure to the natural light that ourselves sort of need to regulate our circadian rhythm, and of course, by default, also our nervous system health.
Building on this nervous system side, and I know that you have access to so many of these tools in being at Kuya every day, I would love to hear what are the ones you feel have been most impactful for you, kind of your 80-20 when it comes to supporting your health and all of the practices you have available.
Megan: Yeah, so goodness, aside from the environment, we have everything from sonico plunge, which is amazing for nervous system regulation. We have sensory deprivation float tanks. So they’re huge tanks filled with water and about 2000 pounds of sodium magnesium that you are in, in complete darkness. You can elect to have a light if you would like one. But what’s essential in that environment is you are weightless. The temperature of your body, the air, and the water are all the same. So you don’t really feel the medium that you’re in. And you get to kind of just be for a while. And this is one that I use quite frequently.
And it was very hard for me at first because, again, similar to meditation, it’s like, okay, now what do I do? And with this stillness of the mind, you almost have to break beyond that wall of like, okay, I’m ready to get out or I’m ready to be done. And the benefit really starts once you break through that. Once you, even if you were to tell yourself, I’m going to stay another 60 seconds beyond when I think is possible. That’s when you start to really feel the internal benefits. You start to feel the connection.
And you brought up meditation, too. It’s funny. I had a pretty regular routine and I’ve gotten away from it. But I did a Vipassana retreat years ago in California, which is like a 10-day retreat where you are in silence, and you meditate 10 hours a day for 10 days. And the thought of doing that alone, right, like taking 10 days off of work and being home alone and not talking and meditating, I don’t think I would have been able to get through it. But in doing that in a group of 80 people all experiencing the same thing, you again, you start to feel everyone’s nervous system co-regulating. You start to sync, you know, heartbeats start to sync. The breath starts to sync, especially over, you know, X number of days. You really start to tap into your own circadian rhythm.
And you brought up sunlight, right? This is a time I was in the middle of nowhere. And naturally, my body would wake up exactly five minutes before I had to be awake for meditation, which started at 4 a.m. I’m not that early of a riser, but my body knew, I was in this circadian rhythm that was really beneficial. So kind of a side tangent with that.
But the meditation in the float tanks are really beneficial because you get to be in complete nothingness, right? And this is a great integration tool just for life in general, but it also is used as integration throughout our ketamine program. So we have a ketamine program at Kuya and people will float the day after, a few days after they have an active session, which is guided by a facilitator.
And similarly with ketamine, it helps regulate the nervous system by reducing inflammation in the body and in the brain and helping neurons reconnect in a way that might not have been there before, right? So it allows for neuroplasticity. It’s like, you know, instead of taking the same route to work every day that’s busy and has a lot of construction, for the first time, you’re able to take this detour. And then as these new neurons start to connect and you become more familiar with them, that detour becomes your new route. So you’re able to expand your perspective based on a modality that helps lessen inflammation and helps specifically with PTSD, with anxiety, with nervous systems that have been highly dysregulated. It’s an added tool to help people tap back into their body. And they are guided entirely by someone who is very regulated in their nervous system.
We also have an IV lounge. So everything from you know, metabolic health to NAD, which is an amazing tool people are talking about a lot these days for anti-aging and mitochondrial health. We also have a few concoctions that are specific to nervous system regulation that goes really well for our ketamine clients.
And then just using the facility overall. So for any of our ketamine clients who do a protocol of six sessions, they have access to the entire facility for two months. So we encourage them to sauna cold plunge every day. We encourage them to float, you know, twice a week, at least. We encourage them to use what’s called a vibroacoustic sound bed. So it’s a meditation device that vibrates and you have sound, you have a guided meditation, and it’s a really immersive experience that helps you regulate your nervous system.
And of course, our events, we have a ton of events that allow like-minded people to connect. So having this understanding of I’m going through a thing and I’m working to heal, and I’m not alone in that process. And the combination of these modalities have allowed for this natural magic to come up that wasn’t thought of when, when the company first opened, it was, you know, we’ll have these modalities and we’ll have, you know, a healing environment. But the ways in which people have formed their own communities and have brought things into the space and have started their own events within the space. There’s a natural magic that has started to progress as people start to find themselves. So that’s been, again, amazing to witness.
Katie: Well, like I said, I wish I lived closer because you guys have, I think, absolutely nailed it with Kuya. It’s amazing there. And I know not everyone listening will be in proximity to Austin. But for those who are, I know you also have a special offer just for listeners of this podcast. And I’ll put it in the show notes as well, of course, as well as the link to Kuya and everything you have available. But can you just let everyone know if they want to come check out Kuya and they live close enough to do so, what they can expect and what that discount is?
Megan: Yeah, absolutely. So even if you’re visiting, if you’re coming into Austin for a weekend or so, we have various day packages. And an offer through Wellness Mama is a $20 all day sauna cold plunge pass. So it’s roughly a 70% discount. For 20 bucks, you can sauna cold plunge, we have showers, we have a tea and tonic bar, all the other modalities are available. And if you do happen to live in Austin and you sign up for a membership, we’ll waive an initiation fee and also give an additional 25% off on the first month.
Katie: Amazing. Well, Megan, I hope we get to have more conversations like this in the future, not just in person, but recorded as well. But for today, thank you so much for everything you’ve built at Kuya, for everything you’ve shared today, and for your passion and how much you really strive to help other people and to make the world a better place. I’m so grateful for you, and I’m grateful you’re here.
Megan: Thank you so much. That means a lot, Katie. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
Katie: And thank you, as always, for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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