In this episode, Dr. Lara May, a functional medical specialist and light body healing coach, shares discovering the power of alternative approaches. She emphasizes the importance of taking radical responsibility for one’s health, addressing trauma, and embracing forgiveness and self-compassion as essential steps in personal growth and healing.
Discover more at DrLaraMay.com
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Transcript
Hi and welcome to the You World Order Showcase podcast. Today we are speaking with Doctor Lara May. She is a light body healing coach. She is a functional medical specialist who helps people uncover the source of their disease and imbalances and to get to the root of where things are.
Starting to go awry in the body. So welcome, doctor Lara. It is so nice to have you on here. We had a little bit of a rough start, but I'm glad we're up and running now.
Yes, thank you.
So welcome to the.
I'm happy to be here. I appreciate it.
So you know you have kind of an interesting story about how you got into all of this. So you want to share?
That with the audience.
Sure. I'm a clinical pharmacist. I still work part time in hospitals and emergency medicine and critical care. And I came into functional medicine and even energy healing.
Through my own health challenges.
I unfortunately did not find answers in Western medicine and the what would be considered the normal path.
To healing and Wellness. And so I started seeking out alternatives I had suffered with chronic migraines since my late teens. I was diagnosed with IBS in my early 20s, and by the time I got to my 30s, everything was starting to just it felt like Snowball.
In not in the correct in the correct direction and more like the like. Everything's getting worse and it's all getting amplified direction.
So sorry, I just saw some more lightning like, please don't turn the power off again.
So anyway, uh, I found a local functional medicine practitioner and I found a local Reiki master that I started both seeing around the same time ish and I found the healing path was tuning into my body, learning to listen to it.
But also.
So really getting to the root cause with special testing, functional medicine testing specifically, which those level deeper than Western medicine and really using food and lifestyle as medicine. So really like taking a look at what I was doing every day.
In my life that was either creating imbalances or creating Wellness and deciding, you know for myself, OK, and getting honest with myself. Like, what about what I was doing was helping or hurting me.
Because I I'm a lifelong athlete, but I think at the time I was training myself a little hard. So you can over train and hurt your body. Even your immune system in that way create more inflammation than you realized. And then.
I had never.
Ever been taught? You know, when I was diagnosed with IBS. Anything about eat this? Not that it was just not talked about at that time. And so when I when things started to get worse and my heartburn was, you know, out of control and my flares were, you know, causing me to have to call in sick.
As I could not leave the bathroom for a day or two, sometimes I thought, well, there has to be something that I can do that doesn't require a medication because the medications that I have been offered have not helped at all.
So that's gluten free, was just starting to come, you know, into the public eye. And it was still seen as sort of a fad. But I thought, well, you know, I talked about with my practitioner and she actually didn't do any food sensitivity testing with me. I ended up doing that later on my own. So I just started eliminating, you know, first it was gluten. I tried that.
The 30 days starting feeling better, and then I read about dairy and so we tried that for the next.
30 days felt.
A ton better after eliminating dairy.
And then I did.
About 3 months of sugar free living.
And that really helps even more and then probably a year after that is.
When I started doing some of my own testing and turns out I have a casing allergy which is why I felt so much better once I got.
Rid of cows products so.
So just slowly but surely, piercing things together and along the way.
Becoming more in tune with my energetic field and how energy was moving or not moving throughout my body, I started becoming very consistent with my yoga practice and eventually I ended up doing a yoga teacher training. So that's just a little bit about my story.
And how it came?
To culminate and then I realized well.
I can do this.
I can piece all these things together. It really helps me. I think this is something that I could, you know, bring I see a huge need for this. And so now I really focus on helping people with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes learn that reversing those disease states is actually not only possible, but doable.
And it just takes that right combination of food movement and lifestyle change.
You know, for the longest time, people thought, you know, diabetes type 2 diabetes was just like.
It was the sentence that you could never get out from under, and it. It's so interesting to me how many people don't suffer for from insulin imbalances after.
Taking some steps to fix it and it is fixable.
Yes, absolutely. And there's still sort of, you know, and some beating of the drum like once you have this, you'll always have it. But now we know, especially from the natural medicine side, functional medicine side, that it is not a lifetime sentence. And you do have a lot of power because type 2 diabetes.
It is almost 100%.
Caused or manifested because of what we put into our body and or our lifestyle. So our the foods that we eat is just one aspect. But you know your lifestyle, how is your stress management because you know the pathways within our body when we're going through a stressful situation.
Actually releases glucose into the bloodstream, so, and that's part of the cortisol.
All the nephrin norepinephrine pathways and those are the things that get our body ready to fight or flight. So we're gonna run, or we gonna fight. But either way, our body's going to need some energy to do it with. So where does that come from? It comes from the liver. It comes from the muscles, the glycogen stores. And it's those chemical signals that tell our body to release it.
So if you're stressed, you can have insulin resistance, even if again, even if you're an athlete.
You know, if you live in this constant state of.
Of let's even say, like neural inflammation. So you know, this can even be seen with people that have PTSD that are just constantly on alert. Then it could lead to some insulin resistance.
Because your body is just constantly pumping out glucose, so your pancreas is constantly pumping out the insulin and eventually all those cells just can't keep up.
Yeah. And I wonder if it isn't a little bit like the whole pain receptor thing where?
If you have.
If you have certain kinds of pain for a long period of time, like six months or so, even though the symptom went away or the underlying cause went away, you can still have those pain feelings. It's a neuro loop that happens in your brain.
And when.
When you've experienced stress for a long period of time, even if you think that you've managed the stress, I wonder if it doesn't continue on unless you do something to actively reprogram your brain to let it know that the stress is gone. Do you have any thoughts on that?
I think that's a really interesting perspective. I think you're probably not far off and especially now what we know about when we go through any type of trauma, you know now we refer to trauma as the big T or the little T but really.
Any type of trauma is an imprint in our brain, but then that also imprints in our cells and it's like a body memory even if we don't consciously have a memory of whatever the trauma was, our body remembers. So yes, I agree that that you could it again, it could still.
Would be creating this feeding gloop in your body even if let's say it was a broken leg and your leg is now healed.
Then it would stand to reason. Then your pain would go away, but some people continue to have residual pain because whatever that was that caused that broken leg, perhaps they haven't completely processed through and allowed it to be released from the body, from the cells. You know, I was.
Thinking about this earlier today on another show, but if we've ever watched you know what a prey predator chase on like nature channel or something. When the prey gets away and you still have the camera on them, you'll notice that the animal goes through like a full body shake and tremor.
And but then it stops, it subsides. Well, that's the natural sort of that natural loop of processing through that whole chemical process.
But humans don't allow themselves to do that. We have an experience that leaves an imprint. We don't allow ourselves to feel the feelings a lot of times we don't even allow ourselves to acknowledge that we're having the feeling.
And you know that old saying of what you resist, persists. And I think that's a big part of these cycles that we find ourselves in that prevent us from getting better.
It's really interesting so.
You actually have like 1 foot in each of the worlds. The holistic world actually.
If you have three feet, that would be.
A better analogy.
Because you're also on the spiritual energy.
As well as the functional medicine and then the Western medicine.
You kind of combine them all.
To have this unique.
Way of helping people just really interesting to me.
Yeah. Well, and again, the reason I decided to go about it in this way is because my life was changed forever. I grew and changed as an individual.
And I show up in life different than I used to.
And that's because of.
Going through both approaches in parallel and sure you can do one and then do the other and you can choose to do one prior and you know whatever is your personal journey. That's your personal journey for me at the time I was also.
This whole period of my life I consider a dark night of the soul period for me. I.
Was in a pretty toxic work environment, but also working graveyard and muting. You know 2 hours a day, every day for work.
And so for me, it wasn't just the physical things my body was going through. There was also some very.
Dark questioning, like where? Where am I in my life? How did I get here at one point? Yeah. And I was in the throes of a migraine in the middle of the night, laying on the cold hospital pharmacy floor with all the lights on.
Is this going to go on forever?
Off, you know, just like every now and then looking up at my computer to see if there were orders that I needed to evaluate. And you know, I have a technician that overnight that works with me. So she could answer the phones and that sort.
Of thing. But I'm like I.
Can't keep doing this this like it's not good for me. It's not good for the patients in the hospital, you know. And so I was like, something has to give. And so I really started looking at.
Well, what else?
Is creating all of this turmoil in my life, and so I think when we start looking at those types of questions, we.
I think it's almost impossible for us to not look inward. I mean, it's easy to look outward and start and blame things well. Oh, that bad boss over there or that annoying coworker or this stupid commute that I do. You know, whatever it is, the graveyard schedule which we know is not good for people either, but really like.
I was making all those choices, so you know.
You know.
Stepping into that power and now I talk about this concept of radical responsibility and you know well, what is that? Well, that's really taking responsibility for every single thing in your life. The good, the bad, ugly, the amazing, the wonderful. But all of it and saying, OK, what is my role here?
Where how am I showing up? What am I attracting in? And UM, am I reacting? How am I reacting? What could I be doing better? What can I?
Be doing different.
Well, you know all those good questions.
Radical responsibility.
It's a thing. It's another way of saying we create our own realities by the.
Decisions that we make.
You know, again, like I think we've all been through different levels of trauma in our life. But even like deciding that we're not going.
To be victims.
And that that doesn't mean condoning whatever happened. That's not it at all. But there is a level of forgiveness even within this radical responsibility. And I think so much of the time we are all so hard on ourselves. And so it's also like, OK, are you willing to forgive yourself even if you made a decision?
And now you look back on it and you don't like it. Maybe you regret it or whatever. You can't change it, but you can forgive yourself and allow yourself that grace and compassion and then move forward from what you learned.
And so, you know it's I'm definitely not a proponent of, like, beating up on ourselves at all. We do that enough already.
Yeah, that just comes naturally. Yeah. And the whole forgiveness thing, I think if people really understood that forgiveness is for you, it's not for the other person. Because if you forgive somebody, if somebody comes to you and asks for forgiveness.
And they're making an effort to change the situation, then grant them the forgiveness. But for you it it's it has to do with how you feel about the situation. If they come to you and ask for forgiveness or if you feel like you're supposed to forgive them just because.
But they're not making any changes.
Then they're either asking you to.
Excuse the behavior which is different than forgiving it.
Or they don't really care.
And in which case you need to forgive them for yourself. Allow yourself.
The space to accept that this happened, but let them go. It's OK to move your boundaries out a little bit. That person can be way on the outside.
Yes, absolutely, yeah.
Fields away fence up fields away and keeps them out there because they're not good for you and really you're not helping them by allowing them to take advantage of you in that way.
Right. And if we want to take this back to the energetic side of things, you know, we already talked about how experiences traumas are imprinted in ourselves, because everything is energy.
This is science. It's physics. It's metaphysics. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Neither can energy, the law, thermodynamics. So this is one of the things too. I like to, you know, bring the science into the Woo Woo. And So what is that vibrational level that you're holding on to when you're not forgiving?
Because the only people that we hurt when we do that is ourselves. By holding that vibration in our body, in our minds, in ourselves.
And again, it contributes to, even if it's low lying inflammation like indolent, it's still there. And so really to you know, break through those boundaries for your own self healing, then yes, forgiveness is huge and you know again, it's the most wonderful and selfish thing you could possibly do, I think.
Yeah, it really is. But it's so necessary and giving yourself grace and forgiving yourself, recognizing and the same principles apply in my mind, you have to.
Decide that you're not going to behave like that anymore. You forgive yourself for that behavior and you move forward in a different direction. Don't keep doing the same things and wondering why you're getting the same results. I mean, that's just.
Right. And yeah, the first step to any change is awareness. And so even if you know these things are processes, so I.
I don't. I don't bring these concepts forward lightly, and I also don't bring them forward with the expectation that just like, OK, all done on to the next thing, it's a process. It's a learning it's you know we have to learn to be aware of again, our emotions, our behavior, our energy.
How are we showing up? What are we putting out into the world?
And so if we really want to create change within ourselves and in our life and what we you know this life that we create every day, then it's a matter of, OK, slowing down enough to bring that awareness forward so that you can evaluate it.
So like what does that look like?
For me it's.
Creating a little time container every day to meditate and to do what I call a thought download. And so I just take some time. I write down all my thoughts in my head if I want to focus on something.
Creating in my business or bringing in more love into my relationship, then I'll, I you know you can narrow it down to if you want, but and then you just look at those thoughts and you can say, OK, well, which ones of these are true for me, which ones of these are not even mine and where did they come from?
Ends and you know which ones do I want to hold on to? Which ones do I want to let go?
And from the ones I want to let go, what do I want to?
Think instead, because really it's our thoughts that create our feelings and our perceptions, and from there become our actions and results. So if you start to sort of think about it that way, it's very methodical.
And I think that helps a lot of people, gives them a framework, but it also allows you. So it's a very easy thing, but it starts sort of that ball rolling of the introspection of that self evaluation and it gives you options.
It's really helpful to.
Have a.
A. A ritual, we'll call it a ritual for.
Understanding how you're going to interact in the world and it doesn't have to take a lot of time. I love your idea about downloading all your thoughts, you know, journaling for lack of a better.
But and then looking at those thoughts and figuring out which ones are true, that's a really a key thing I think, because so often we just if we thought it, it must be true. But just putting it out on paper. So we can look at it and analyze what.
How is this thought serving me? Is it serving me? Surprised. How many times the things we think really aren't serving?
Us all that well.
Well, and they're not even ours. We've picked them up along the way. They're things that have been told to us that we decided to agree with. But at the time, we were probably.
Young and didn't know that we could even think something else, you know? And so, I mean, if we keep moving forward with this example of, you know, the work environment or your career. So let's say that you're in a place that you're not happy and you do a thought download. OK, look, what are all your thoughts about your job, your career, where you are in this space right now?
Maybe one of them is, you know. Well, I have a job. I have to keep this job in order to pay.
Bills question is, but do you really have to? Aren't there other ways to find another job that could pay as well or more?
That's a possibility.
Or, you know this old concept of, well, you get one job and you stay there 30 years and then you retire and everything's hunky Dory because you have what used to be.
Called a pension.
Well, we know that that's not very true anymore for, you know, very many people. And so it's.
Just I.
It could be really liberating for us to be like.
Oh well, just because my grandfather told me that when?
I was 10.
Say doesn't mean that it's even relevant today. Like I'm sure it was good advice from love. You know, teaching me how to be productive human being. But now things are different. And so if I'm unhappy then.
There are steps I can take to, you know, move out of the situation that I'm in. So again, it still comes down to choice. You're choosing to be there. Yes, we feel like we have to are obligated all these words that we use, but really they're all choices.
Yeah. And you know when you're talking about that there, there used to be a real stigma about being fired from.
Jobs, it was like.
It was like bankruptcy was something you just don't.
Do cause you're all.
Yucky, horrible person.
But really?
Sometimes when you get fired.
From a job, it's.
New beginnings, great possibilities. You just saved me from having to make a decision, which was really obviously going to be painful for me. Otherwise I would have.
Quit a long time ago.
Because it was with the point where you're asking me to leave, it means that I have been miserable for probably.
While yeah.
Take the action.
When I was.
Young in college and you know, I had a job in undergo.
Had and my boyfriend at the time. I remember he would make fun of me. He's like, how many jobs have you had now you know? Because I mean. But when you're waiting tables and bartending, you know, there are plenty of restaurants out there, especially this was in, you know, the Orlando area. There was no shortage of places where if I didn't like the environment and one then.
Why would I stay there and put myself thru?
Yeah, but and then I, you know, I would always have like another job on the side. So I also did like retail clothing sales. So I was always like just doing a little bit here and there and like putting together whatever worked for the time. But I knew that if I if something was not only like financially viable.
Emotionally viable to then.
You know why? Why? Why?
Do we do that to ourselves?
And I'm so glad that we've reached this point in our society where it's just like.
I don't have to keep beating my head against the wall just because I got a job.
Right. Yeah, I got this one. I can get another one.
I do know that.
Yeah, yeah, there's lots of them.
Out there right now, yeah.
That's a great market for that.
Absolutely homeless baby boomers. We're getting old. So big marketplace out there, if you're willing to work, you can.
Find a job.
It wasn't always like that.
So how do people work with you?
And we've talked a lot about.
The kind of work that you.
Yeah. So umm over at my website doctorlaramie.com DRLARAMA y.com. I have a variety of options so I have group coaching options that are monthly memberships. One of them is just show up and receive.
Reiki every month.
If you are looking for something to maybe turn your health around.
I have a monthly membership that provides 30 days worth of recipes, shopping lists and we do a group coaching call twice a month.
And then I.
Have another little level of membership which is really interesting. It's quarterly detoxing, so it's seasonal detoxing. And actually, I'm not sure when this will air, but we're coming up on the fall equinox. I think it's equinox, right? Not this whole thing, but let's get.
Those two confused.
Yep. Now I have question.
It, yeah.
So a new season is coming, so there's a new detox and the thing that's also great about these is it's seasonal to what's in season. If we were, you know, still agrarian. So you know, it's going to be some squash and pumpkin and, you know, some different foods in there. So like, we're going to start moving more into the fall and winter.
Green, so pale and.
Spinach and broccoli and all those good things. So a little bit less fruit. So the summer detox is more fruit involved and this one is less so.
And then when you talk about also like lifestyle things that you can do to embrace the season. So it's very much of really reconnecting with the Earth through.
Starting with the detox, but then also like, well, what are the other things that really connects me with this season? Nervous time pumpkins, you know? UM, different things. Halloween will be coming.
But by the time this airs, it's going to be closer to the winter solstice. So that'll be really exciting too.
Up after that.
Yeah, we'll have a winter one, yeah.
Getting ready for the New Year and.
Yes, and especially to the winter one. You know, a lot of people question too well, why would you want to do one right? Because that's literally right before Christmas. But what I say is that you had a wonderful feast at Thanksgiving. You're going to have a wonderful feast between Christmas and the New Year. So why not give yourself that week or two?
Break to really cleanse, release and reset.
And I think if we all did this on a regular basis, we would feel a lot better come new year time and it would make that those all those new year goals and resolutions that we all create a little bit I think easier to attain and you know to move through those with more flow.
I love that. I love that so.
Much so what's the?
One thing you want to leave the audience with today.
I just want everyone to know that you are your most powerful healer. You have the power to create your health.
And that comes with your choices, and also know that with that comes a lot of resources and help. And so there's a ton of coaches like myself out there. I would love to work with you if you're ready to step in self evaluate, make change, but keep in mind too that just like you know, there's no magic.
Hill and Western medicine, even in functional natural medicine, it requires you to show up to be involved, to make those choices for you.
Yourself. So I think that's the beauty of it is.
You know, I'm a guide. I'm a curator. But.
You people out there, the clients, you are your own best healers. So.
So and it's one of the things I.
Love is, you know.
Diving in deep with my clients, but watching them create that change for themselves.
Yeah, because ultimately it's up to.
Us, we are our own advocates.
Thank you so much for joining me today. It has been great chatting with you and.
Well, yes, thank you so much for having me despite the Lightning.
I think we were having problems on my.
End too so.
OK.