213 Shifting the Perception of Health With Amy Arner

Do you feel frustrated by the lack of options available for your health, and constantly feeling like it's too hard to both get help and feel good again?

Today I'm joined by former nurse turned Human Design and trauma informed health and business coach Amy Arner for a deep dive into things we don't usually talk about in healthcare. Spirituality and it's role in healing. How it's all connected. How burnout comes about. And the questions and starting point for listeners to start healing deeply by looking outside the box.

Amy Arner otherwise known as "The Boss Mama" is a seasoned Registered Nurse, wife and boy mom who became a Certified Trauma Informed Life + Business Coach, Hypnotherapist & Human Design guru in order to help other multi passionate women break FREE from the generational patterns, beliefs + habits robbing them of the peace, confidence & SUCCESS they crave in their careers, relationships + Motherhood.

Helpful links from this episode:

Amy's Website: lovelylifetribeco.com

Dr. Alex's Website: www.emergent-women.com

Info on the brand new Emergent Women Circle: www.emergentwomencircle.com

Episode Transcript:

[00:01] Dr. Alex: Today's conversation is one of those that transpires when you find two kindred spirits who have similar but different journeys and have learned a lot of stuff along the way. Today I am joined by Amy Arner, who is otherwise known as the Boss Mama. She's a seasoned registered nurse, wife and boy mom who became a certified trauma, informed life and business coach, hypnotherapist and human design guru in order to help other multipassionate women break free from the generational patterns, beliefs, and habits, robbing them of peace, confidence, and success they crave in their relationships, careers, and motherhood. And I have to say, our conversation is one that I hope serves and inspires you on many levels. We get into things that we don't normally talk about in the healing space, including spirituality and inner work, and how you really start to make that shift away from looking outside yourself to first looking within yourself, which, if you've been listening to the show for long enough, you know, I argue is key to us really, truly healing. So I hope you enjoy and let's dive in.

[01:16] Dr. Alex: Welcome to the Selfless Syndrome Show, where we help women executives and entrepreneurs rise through Adversity, connect to their intuition, transform their hormones, and get their energy back. This is the show where we go beyond asking how do I treat my symptoms? And instead examine how do I truly heal, transform my hormones, and change my life? We are here to bring you outside the box ideas, interviews, and action steps focused in the areas of health, relationships, and our career, all three of which have a huge impact on our hormones. My name is Dr. Alex Swenson Ridley. I'm your host, mentor, speaker, author, entrepreneur, and thought leader on hormones and work life balance for high achieving women. I'm also a wife, mom, and stepmom to four boys and a verbal. And I'm a woman whose own life experience and journey from Adversity and the resulting hormonal chaos to finding hormonal harmony has led to me helping other women break with convention and find the tools they need to not just survive, but thrive. Ready to dive in? Let's go.

[02:18] Dr. Alex: Hello.

[02:19] Amy Arner: Welcome back to the show. Amy.

[02:21] Dr. Alex: I'm so glad you're here.

[02:23] Amy Arner: Thank you. I am so excited. Cannot wait to just dive into this with you. It's going to be fun.

[02:29] Dr. Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So I think I want to start with you have a journey that I've talked about a bit on the show, which is the transition from Western medicine world into not Western medicine world and healing and some of these more what I call integrative modalities and stuff. So I'm curious just to hear what that journey has looked like for you and how you've ended up doing what it is that you do today, if you're open to sharing that.

[02:58] Amy Arner: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So the Cliff Notes of that cliff Note version of that is, I think, just grew up in a world where we just trusted traditional medicine. I think I was from a young age, my mom worked in a hospital, and I remember going to the hospital and just being around that culture and feeling like that was safe. That was what I knew. And we went to the doctor, we did all the vaccinations, all that kind of thing. So I kind of grew up, I think, having Western medicine or my idea of Western medicine kind of on a pedestal. I didn't question it. I didn't think anything different of it until I always have felt this pull. I've always known that whatever I'm here to do on this earth, it's meant to help people in some way. I've always felt very intuitively guided in that, but also was very much what can I do with a career that is going to maybe help me meet both of those needs of me to pay my bills and provide for myself while also being of service. I started out kind of just diving right into whatever I could do with medicine. And I actually began in a PA program, physician assistant program, and not really knowing anything different or not knowing really that that's what I wanted to do, but just that that's what was there. And I I really feel like that's important to share because I feel like it's just like blinded faith. Like I didn't I never it's just that that ignorance of like, we don't really question what's there. We don't really question what we know because it's what we know. And that was very much how I went into the field of medicine. That's very much how I went into my career. So I started out in PA program, and I actually got kicked out my first year because I didn't meet the grade requirements. I got a D in bio and chem my first quarter. They went by a quarter system, which is I've never heard of that any other at many colleges, but I know most colleges traditionally go by semesters. Well, they went by a quarter system, so I had to pivot, and I ended up pivoting. And again, next in line, well, if I can't be a PA, well, what can I be? And so I applied to nursing school, got in, and again, I feel like I had a very misconstrued perception of what medicine was because in nursing school, we were taught the holistic approach. We were taught to treat people by looking at their whole self. And I was in love with that. That spoke very much to what I believe and wanted and what I was actually feeling called to do. I felt like that was taking care of the mind, body and the spirit, taking care of the whole. But that's just not what medicine is. That's not what traditional medicine actually is. It's very much corporate. It's very much fast paced and supply demand. You have a problem, we fix the problem, but it's not really looking anything deeper than the surface level. Very early on in my nursing career, pretty much immediately, I felt that, like, whoa, what am I in here? What did I get myself into? I felt very misaligned from the very beginning and kind of like I was just, like, wearing a costume costume, doing what I had to do. But then I would go home, and I was feeling very much of how I feel like my patients feel. I'm sure your patients feel just like they're kind of running down the treadmill and they never get off, and not really understanding even how that was taking a toll on my own self and my own health and my own energy. But the longer and longer I've been a nurse for ten years now, and it was just like, I think I did what most people do, is we just kind of keep looking for a fix. So I would just change. I change jobs, like, every two years, thinking, oh, maybe it's just not the right place, it's just not the right culture, it's just not the right hospital. And nothing really ever seemed to change. And that's where I more and more just kind of it was like this slow awakening that took many years. But just like I had to be the I was the guinea pig. I was the one that had to go first and experience it myself. And it really did hit home for me just how it didn't really become clear to me that this was my path until I actually became a mom. Because leading up to that point, I was again still very much focused on the surface level type of what I thought health was, which was exercise diet, which of course, diet is very important, exercise movement is very important. But I really was not connecting the dots of understanding the deeper level, the source of where it didn't connect yet, that you can do all you want on the outside, but it's never going to change what's happening on the inside until you switch that approach and you start working from that inside out. So after I became a mom, that's when I really started to kind of crumble, because now it wasn't just me. I was responsible for these others. I was responsible for this other human. And it was just like that overpour from my cup. That really is what made it unavoidable. I could no longer not see that. I just couldn't keep going the way that I was going, that something was wrong, like something was off. What I was doing wasn't working, and it was actually my the way it manifested was, of course, I I really I was really struggling with anxiety, something that I had felt like I had kind of gotten a handle on. I've struggled with it most of my life. I now understand much more clearly why I struggled or why I struggle with anxiety, but that to say it really took a deep dive. I do know and believe I did also experience postpartum. So it was like this huge mess of multiple factors. But one of the physical things that manifested from all that was extreme lower back pain. And I just wasn't able to function. I was getting through my day, but it was a struggle, it was really painful and it was to the point where I did, you know, I I was just like, I need somebody. I need help. And so I ended up finding getting into my local chiropractor office and it was probably a couple of months after going to him that again, he'd adjust me, I'd leave. Literally by the time I got home, the back pain would be back. I'd have that short of relief. And I was just going like, almost weekly. And he finally said to me one day that he didn't think that he's like, I really believe I can adjust you all I want, but you're going to keep having the back pain because this is an emotional issue. This is an emotionally sourced physical ailment. And that was like the lightning bulb moment for me of, oh my God, I've been doing it all wrong. I've been looking at this not that I'm doing it all wrong, but that I've been approaching this in a completely backwards way. And even at that time I went back to so my specialty, my background with nursing is mostly critical care. So mostly like ICU setting. And so we're dealing with the sickest of the sick, the ultimate presentation of compound effect, typically of illness. And it became just, again, so much more apparent. It was like I just broke open and I finally realized, like, the problem here, you know, we can have nurses pump out nurses all we want, but if we don't, we can't slow down. Or if we can't shift the cultural perception of health, then this overflow of patients, this overcrowding of hospitals, this vicious, awful cycle that we find in is never going to stop. And that was when my calling really shifted and I realized that I was really always being pulled more to preventative health and really waking people up to these Eastern medicine practices, these holistic practices, for them to really take back control of their health and livelihood. So that's not a Cliff Note version.

[13:15] Dr. Alex: But no, it was really good. I think our listeners are interested in this too, because we can pull parts of your stories from many directions. And I have my background as a chiropractor where I totally burned out. But I think we all hit those moments where something happens where we're no longer able to tolerate whatever we've been dealing with, right? Like, I had a similar situation with my son being born. He was actually born five weeks early. And the whole reason was because I was in a toxic work environment, like highly toxic. The guy went to jail for 25 years. Kind of toxic. But it was like I was tolerating that until he came into the world, and then I was like, oh, heck no. I can't do this anymore. And for our listeners, you really want to examine and look at in those moments, because we've all had them. It could be a birth of child. It could be an illness, could be the death of somebody. How are you choosing to navigate that? Are you actually making the choice to exit and to pivot or to wake up and do something differently? Or are you burying your head in the sand to keep going the way you've been going?

[14:26] Amy Arner: Yeah, and I really do think it's kind of like why I mentioned what I mentioned in the beginning was that I hate the word ignorance because it makes it it sound like makes it sound like you're ignorant, like you're a bad person, but it's not like rose colored glasses. You don't want to challenge the status quo. I get that. I get not really feeling like you have the energy to challenge what you know because you just feel like you already have so much on your plate. But it really is about, for me at least, it really came down to, like, no, I love myself. I love myself too much to be this version of myself that I can't stand. I think that's that deeper knowing or it's that intuitive knowing that voice within you. It's like, this isn't me. This isn't who I'm here to be. It doesn't have to be this way. I think that's kind of like, always, like, it shouldn't be this way. It shouldn't feel this hard. I shouldn't feel this way. At the time, I was 31, 32 years old, and it was just like, gosh, this just can't be it.

[15:53] Dr. Alex: Yeah. And it's a hard realization to have. Right. I went through the same thing around the same age. I think I was 32, 33, when my whole world blew up. And to your point about the rose colored glasses, there's a saying that I learned early in my 20s when I first started doing kind of like personal development work, but it's like, we know what we know, and we know what we don't know. But that's only a very small piece of the pie. There's this whole world that we don't even know that we don't know, and so it's being willing to step into that. And I think one of the things I was just thinking about, because I know a lot of my listeners tend to have similar backgrounds for me, but I came to Christianity kind of late in life, and then as I was starting to learn a lot of Eastern approaches in my integrative medicine program, it really challenged my worldview and belief system. And what I found really interesting is that in the Western world and Western medicine and Westernized Christianity, we have completely divorced the spiritual from healing, from our overall health and well being. And it's such an integral part, and I think it's why our health looks the way it does and we have overcrowding in hospitals because there's just no space or permission for those conversations. And it doesn't mean you're opening yourself up to Eastern gods or views or any of that. It's like I feel so much more connected to God the way I understand God and the Christian model since I started doing this kind of work on healing, meaning more of the internal. There's a lot that we can do on our own that's not a pill or a diet or medication, not like those things don't matter. But it's not the whole picture.

[17:30] Amy Arner: It's so powerful that you brought that up because yeah, my same here. My whole life, I've never really had a traditional religion, traditional religious relationship. My mom always wanted me to she took me to church. We tried a couple of different churches growing up, and I was the only one in my family willing to go with her. But it's because, again, I think in my soul I've always felt pulled or I've always felt open and that there is something more, there is this other aspect of ourselves and we have that connection. And I always remained open to it. And it was actually, I think, one of the many reasons why I was led to nursing and why all that happened for me. Because when I went to a Methodist college, I went to a Methodist college and I was able to learn about religion from that standpoint. New Testament, old Testament, all that stuff. I was finally able to start building that relationship that I never really had an opportunity to. And again, I think it's one of the many reasons why I look back. I just loved my nursing school experience because I feel like I was having all aspects of myself, like finally coming online a little bit. I was able to express this part of me that does know that there is more, that there is so much more out there, and we are connected when there is a higher power. But I do believe that it comes down to you intuitively, trusting yourself more than you trust anything else with that. I feel like you will open yourself up to creating a relationship, whatever that is for you. Source, God, universe, whatever you want to call it. It's this connection that there is this other part of me that if I'm not in alignment with that as well as everything else, there's always going to be that kink, there's always going to be something off, there's always going to be that resistance within you. Because that's where I feel like that's where we are susceptible to falling into fear and falling into conditioning. Propaganda.

[20:14] Dr. Alex: Well, I think it's where we fall into chasing diets and chasing the next thing that the media is pushing at us. And this is something I've talked about in my programs, and now I'm starting to speak more and kind of do more workshops and stuff. But it's like, where does your truth come from? And really getting grounded in that. And for a lot of us, it's coming from something out here in the world that we can see tangibly. But that's also how do we know to trust that? Is that reality? And the only one who really, truly in my world, this is what works for me. God is who says who I am. And honestly, a lot of us believe a lot of lies about ourselves. That vision of us is much more powerful than we tend to give ourselves credit for.

[21:00] Amy Arner: And I feel like we are in such a powerful time. I mean, we really are in a shift of moving out of this material world paradigm into more of an end. Like, that's literally what's happening. You know, I did, I did, I do. We do am I even have I always been consciously aware of, like, how that's actually happening? No. But I do get that now that it's really like a calling in my eyes. Everything that's happening in our world, in our hospitals, everything I think is pulling us to go inward and pulling us to really pause and evaluate and dig in and really come back to the source, come back to ourselves and understand that we all play a part. Our individual selves affects everything on a larger, grander scale and that the more we can take back that power for ourselves, take back control of our own life, take back control of our health, take control of our mindset, everything we can make a difference. I'm always talking about that with my own clients. I work a lot with moms. I work a lot with mothers. And because what's the word? Nuclear family. Your impact on your nuclear family is so much bigger...