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What a traumatic brain injury taught me about fear, intuition & what it actually takes to stay in energetic alignment long-term.'

Photo by Eleni Nikoletsos

Hi beautiful friends,

I’m not really sure how to put this story into words today, but I wanted to try anyway!

You know how most of us have been taught to operate mostly from our left brains?

Going to school, learning, and memorizing facts are pretty much required by law in most of the First World. But art, music, and faith-based practices are not. A lot of places do still value them, thankfully, but they’re often the first to be dropped when there are budget cuts or people get busy or stressed.

I remember first learning yoga when I was in junior high school. There was just one class, an introduction, and I was lying on my back in happy baby pose, raising my legs into the sky as I held onto the soles of my feet, stretching my hips open and releasing all the tension held there.

The teacher then told us we could roll from side to side while in this pose.

Whaaaat? It felt SO good that I couldn’t believe I was getting to do this in school, rolling around like babies as 8th graders or whatever we were! It was so fun and felt so freeing, and it was required, but just for that day. :)

Afterward, I slipped right back into the rest of my school day, which was mostly filled with math, science, physical education, and the left-brain stuff.

(Still important, but not so important that it needs to completely take over our whole lives, yeah?)

All the most magical things happen in our right brain.

Trust, surrender, release, a connection to all that is, feeling like we are not just part of the whole, but we ARE whole.

Channeling, art, music, creativity, LOVE. All so good, right?

Data, details, obsessing over money, trying to control everything… not fun.

(Necessary? Sometimes. But far, far, far less than we think!)

My left-brain healing breakthrough

I’ve been learning more about the brain lately because I recently discovered that what I have been experiencing as mold illness is actually a traumatic brain injury.

It has been teaching me so much - and helping me understand why I even have this in the first place. And this is what I really want to share with you. 🤍

I initially figured I had toxins all over inside my body from mold illness, and I needed to remove them. So, I approached it from the body. Thousands of dollars of tests, tinctures, supplements, drops, detoxes, clinic visits, etc. But I was so allergic to everything I tried, and every attempt often made things much, much worse.

I had recently been certified as a quantum hypnotherapist when this illness appeared in my world, so I knew that our ailments are always about sooo much more than just the body being out of whack. Past lives, ancestral patterns, and stuck emotions are usually the real culprits.

But even with past life regression, the Emotion Code, and other energy healing tools, as well as calling on almost all my energy healer friends (of which there are many! Hiiiii!), I could NOT work it out!

My diet mainly consisted of carrots, broccoli, turkey, plain avocado, hummus, gluten-free oatmeal, and plain almond milk. Every single day for years.

Everything has to be a specific brand. No salt, sugar, tea, caffeine, spices or herbs, nope, nothing else, nadda. Sometimes I would even get a reaction from drinking the wrong water.

And even when I followed this diet perfectly, I could be completely derailed by the smell of laundry detergent or perfume, and my day would be ruined. (Try traveling the world being like this. Ahhh.)

I felt hopeless and in deep, deep despair. My body felt completely out of control, and no one understood. It annoyed and alienated me from everyone around me. I could not understand myself!

But lately, I’ve been learning that mold can cause a neurological disorder in which your brain tells your body to stop sleeping, eating, and breathing…

Not because it can’t actually do it anymore (because of too many toxins inside your gut or bloodstream or something), but because a trauma response got my brain stuck in fight or flight.

When this flares up, it sends the left brain into complete overdrive.

Panicking, worrying, freaking out, not knowing what to do, trying to plan any possible way out, and overthinking every possible little detail, while my gut just completely gives up on digesting anything.

That was never the way I have ever been as a person in my life… until after I walked into my tiny home in Hawaii in 2024 and saw a dusting of black mold covering everything.

Actually, I didn’t even realize what a big deal it was at first. I thought, “Oh, I’ll just clean it up!” It wasn’t a conscious decision to be overly concerned. I was blissfully uneducated, and it didn’t occur to me to worry.

But then the symptoms began - my ability to sleep, eat, breathe - gone.

And I started completely losing my mind, because not only was I physically & mentally impaired beyond what I’d ever experienced, but I now needed to get rid of everything I owned (which was covered in the toxins that were derailing me!), find somewhere else to move, AND in the meantime, immediately get myself to safety while in the state I was in, with no family or friends nearby to help.

Plus, I had my dog who was having some concerning symptoms, too. The absolute WORST feeling. And we were having to leave the most dreamy home we had ever lived in. I mean, just look at the neighborhood:

As soon as I could, I packed a super basic bag and went to Waikiki Beach - where almost all the Airbnbs & hotels are in Honolulu - and thought it would give me an opportunity to at least catch my breath if we stayed somewhere else.

Nope. More black mold. In the AC, the shower, all over the bathroom. I tried to sleep curled up on a little chair in the corner, far away from the mold, but I kept waking up gasping for air, panicking!

Eventually, I called my dad and woke him up in the middle of the night, and arranged to fly to my hometown the next day to get help. This was a pretty big step for me as I had been pretty disconnected from my family for many years.

From there, everywhere I traveled or tried to go… was also riddled with mold.

The next apartment I got in Maui had to be given up, too.

Six months later, all my stuff had to go again. This time, I also left my car behind and gave up on damp, humid Hawaii altogether.

You have no idea how much horror one feels when they are desperately trying to escape from something that seems to be killing them, and it continues to follow you… Final Destination: Mold Edition.

There was mold allll over my grandma’s house, my dad’s house, several Airbnbs, my boyfriend’s house where I had to fly over 30+ hours to Australia while being allergic to all food & smells, and there was also mold in houses where I went to petsit just to have somewhere to be…

I had to rehome my dog with my friend because I kept having to travel to different places and couldn’t care for her properly anymore. 😢

By the way, I don’t mean that these places just had a little bit of mold. I mean there were big problems.

I once stayed overnight in Sydney on my way to Perth, after spending MONTHS trying to arrange to move in with my boyfriend (which didn’t really work out either), and I arrived at an Airbnb to find that the ceiling had literally caved in from water damage. There was a huge bin filled with moldy water beneath it, taking up most of the hallway.

I’m pretty sure I cackled out of sheer insanity when I saw it:

I don’t even know why I bothered to look inside the unit itself. Probably out of total exhaustion from traveling for so long. Of course, the inside was covered in mold, too!

But as I tried to squeeze by the bin of water on my way out, my phone dropped out of my pocket and plunk.

Yep. Right into the MOLDY WATER!

Screeeeeeeeeam.

You guys, at this point I knew the universe was out to get me FOR REAL, and I knew that what was happening was being orchestrated because it was getting beyond ridiculous.

Luckily, I had just called an Uber to take me to a different Airbnb, and I could see on the screen of my phone - that was submerged in the moldy water - that it was coming. So I was going to get out of there alive!

I took a deep breath, bravely plucked my very waterproof phone (yes!) out of the water, and carried on, only to continue on with this same kind of madness for months and months and months… often needing to live in places covered in mold for weeks and months at a time.

Talk about developing some seriously bulletproof resilience levels!!!

I saw a very special energy healer in Perth for a while, an extraordinary woman completely beloved by everyone in her community, and after several sessions, she announced that the illness was all in my head and she didn’t think there was anything she could do for me.

She actually seemed really defeated and felt bad she couldn’t help me because it wasn’t something that happened often. :( I’m sure a lot of healers who have tried to treat me have felt that way, too, but it was never about them… it was all about me healing me!

I respected her so much, but excuse me? It’s all in my head? I had no idea what she meant! I wasn’t trying to be stressed all the time - my body, and all of the mold of the entire world, it seemed - was just ganging up on me.

It’s like when people tell you “everything happens for a reason” or that “your soul chose this” when you are in active crisis mode. You’re like STFU.

The only choice I was left with was to begin housesitting full-time, because I had invested so much money in attempting to treat this illness physically, spiritually, every which way (even talk therapy!), and had missed soooo much work from being sick, that I couldn’t afford to live on my own anymore.

Now I know that the real problem was that I had been traumatized over and over again by toxins and stress, and my brain got stuck in that state. That’s what happens when we do something over and over for too long.

Even though I’m an artist and I channel angels & spirit guides (all right-brain activities), my left brain was overactivated by a chronic fear response, and it was absolutely taking over my life.

I couldn’t even hear my guidance for so long. I thought I had been totally abandoned by my angels and guides. I lost faith. I didn’t even get what the point of being here was anymore. My family was depressed for me.

However, I now believe this was happening to help me experience extreme contrast.

So that I would understand just how integral it is for us to take steps to get out of our heads and into our hearts…

And not just doing a fun little aesthetic practice here and there… I mean a full-body, whole-life commitment.

The tricky thing, I think, is that we are soooo much more out of balance as a society than we can even comprehend because we don’t know any other way to be. We have gotten stuck.

We ALL need so much more help with this than we can possibly realize, and I guess my soul decided to stick her hand up to be made into an example… so I can become a better teacher of these concepts and ways of seeing & living.

This past week, I serendipitously received the news that I will finally be moving into a new home in ONE WEEK FROM TODAY. I’ll finally be able to put my luggage away. Ground. Rebuild. Reroot. Set down my art supplies and exhale.

I KNOW!!!! Can you even?

I would have been so relieved about this…

If it weren’t for the fact that my brain immediately decided to tell my body to have the most epic flare-up in the world because once again, there were so many details to arrange.

Three days of my brain telling my body not to fall asleep, not to eat. And to constantly panic. Again.

I had been improving so much, and in an instant, I was sent straight back to square one.

I should have been excited about my new home, but I literally felt terrified. Not about moving, not about the apartment, or about taking my literal 20th flight of the year trying to get somewhere I can feel safe, but because my brain told me to feel terrified!

I get all sorts of ads about mold illness in my feed, and I’ve already tried every single supplement they try to sell you. But I reeeally started laughing when an ad came up on Facebook saying I could heal mold illness with Jesus. (I don’t have any issue with Jesus, but I was raised Jewish, so I was like, excuse me?)

One of the modules was about acknowledging your sins to heal. Holy moly.

She seemed to have tons of buyers, comments, and success stories, and I realized that even though she was taking a religious approach, what she was actually doing for people was retraining their brains.

When you retrain your brain, your limbic system rebalances, allowing your right brain to come back online and become a more dominant part of your life. 🧠👋🏼

Your fear dissipates, you stop trying to control or plan everything, and the details of your life no longer need to be kept perfect. Therefore, your body relaxes into a state of perpetual healing. You become more creative, too.

Stroke survivors have helped us discover that the right brain is the part of us that lives completely in the present (not the past or future), feels completely connected to the universe, and makes us feel whole and perfect just the way we are now without worrying about how we measure up. Pure bliss.

Almost sounds spiritual (or even religious), doesn’t it? Because it is.

I searched for other brain-retraining methods for mold illness that would resonate more for me & my background, and that’s when I discovered DNRS (Dynamic Neural Retraining System).

It is something that has apparently healed hundreds and hundreds of people with chronic illnesses of all kinds, people who have been through things soooo much worse than I have, who have had their brain impaired by environmental toxins as well as physical or emotional trauma, and even autoimmune diseases and diabetes.

Often, the positive effects are extremely noticeable within a couple of weeks, and sometimes even as early as the same day after a DNRS practice is done.

People who had extreme food allergies for years have reported going out to eat right afterward and getting whatever they wanted!

What I think is SO fascinating about this

DNRS is a combination of several modalities that sound pretty scientific (oh, those left-brainers, at it again!), but when you actually get into the practices, it’s really all about mindfulness, slowing down, envisioning joyful moments, seeing your world as you want to see it, remembering happy times, and living in the present.

In other words, the way to heal is by leaning soooo far into the right brain and doing it consistently (at least one hour every day), that the overactivated left brain unhooks itself from its overbearing “stuck on” position, and finally trusts that you are permanently safe.

Last night, after not sleeping again for the third night in a row (seriously, that’s how much this sucks!), I tried my very first DNRS practice around 5 a.m., and I finally fell asleep in about 3 minutes.

Okay, I did wake up again about 20 minutes later, but I was astounded because nothing else helps me when I’m in that state. I’m allergic to sleeping pills and painkillers as well!

I realized that the guided practice, which was essentially a very carefully crafted visualization exercise, was turning my left brain OFF and my right brain UP.

So, I tried it once more, and once again, I didn’t make it through even 1/4 of the practice before I finally fell asleep for many hours. Phew. 😴

{I don’t even know what all she said, but it was basically just a visualization where you imagined you were 5 years old (inner child healing!!!), it was your birthday, and you got your first bike, which you were learning how to ride for the first time. It was very detailed, full of emotion and imagery, and the quickest, most enjoyable treatment I’ve tried so far!}

We’re not doing enough (of what we love)

The crazy thing about all of this to me is that I do meditation coaching… I teach mindfulness… I love art, music, healing, spirituality… all the right-brain things. Always have! I do guided meditations and visualizations almost daily. Always hated math, went to art school.

It’s not like I’m some scientist in a lab looking at data and doing experiments all day who needs to be taught a lesson about living from the heart. It’s not like I have been divorced from my feelings and emotions for decades. I’m more in tune than most people, as far as I can tell!

But… I also love to learn, study, grow, reach goals, excel, accomplish, strategize, and figure things out.

I was always praised for doing that, so the neurotransmitters in my head have learned to connect those activities with feelings of happiness and satisfaction (and to feel depressed when there is no reward on the other side of my efforts).

And it’s very rarely an even balance between these left & right sides…

Mainly because we live in a world where it seems extremely unnatural to let your right brain be the stronger consciousness you decide to tap into. It’s not modeled to us much, and those who do model it are considered crazy, woo woo, hippies.

We are raised to believe the left brain has to be stronger, and the right brain is just a nice-to-have for our own enjoyment and pleasure…

But left brain = survival. Because left brain = fear, control, over-vigilance, analysis of threats.

But what if the biggest threat to our survival is actually that we are sooo out of balance we can no longer remember what it means to live in the heart, to trust, to have faith, and to make that the dominant force guiding our lives?

Even when we do right-brain activities, it’s often not nearly enough.

Because the neurochemicals are so out of balance, we would need to do 3x the amount of right-brain activities to even begin to reset the balance… something I am prepared to do now that I’m understanding more.

I believe that I chose to have this all happen to me so I could permanently alter the course of my evolution as a human - and - hopefully also help others in the process, as someone who has often publicly shared about my spiritual experiences and journey.

I’m sure there are more learnings to come as I have only just begun exploring this new approach, but I would love to leave you with this video:

If you have some time right now or maybe later tonight, this will bring it all home.

It’s the story of a brain scientist who had a stroke and with it, a very visceral experience of the difference between the left & right sides of the brain. She also pleads that we need to tap into the right-brain consciousness way, way, way more than we are. It’s a tear-jerker, at least for me.

And if you don’t feel called to watch it, it’s okay!

Thank you sooo much for reading my whole story. It’s personal, messy, and still evolving.

I love you, and I hope you can take some time to shut down the tabs on your computer, turn on some relaxing music, maybe do something creative or simply sit and breathe for a while, and we can train our brains alongside each other to naturally step to the right, so our fear, worry, and tension can be left behind.

And I’m not affiliated at all, but if you’re interested, DNRS offers many trainings and guided visualizations for free on their website.

One of the things they teach is to be careful about your language and not to talk about your symptoms anymore or call it “my” illness or things of that nature, so I thought it would be a good time to share the whole story once and for all, so I can finally move forward from this phase of life and still help those who will find this useful. :)

All the best,