Nasha: Hi, everybody. We have been talking about everything in topics of how best to support our patients, especially in their healing journey with regards to their mental, their emotional health, their spiritual health, their spiritual growth. We’ve even had a few really intense cases in the last few months that have really highlighted the importance of making sure that this part of the patient’s terrain is being dealt with directly. And what we’ve also talked about are the pain spots within our own lives and our own practices and our own sort of lanes that prevent us from working with these pieces with our patients in a way that can really provide a safe space and really transformational growth.

And so, as many of you know, I’m always asking about the story. I want to know where the person came from. I want to get a sense of who they are. We always ask them to create a chronology and tell us what significant events in their life they think led to this moment. And it’s never really about the story. It’s more about what’s not being said. It’s more about patterns and trends and tendencies. And so I’m trying to teach you, as you guys know, about looking deeper than just the obvious, right? And so, what I’m very excited about is I’ve heard from you that this is a place where you feel at a loss, where do you get support for this, and that you recognize that just the typical talk head therapy is likely not enough, especially for the type of patient population we draw in, that we work with. And you also recognize that there are a lot of things that are not conscious that need to be addressed, and we don’t have the hours in the day or the days in the week to handle this as their skilled healthcare provider as well.

So, we need tools, we need resources, and we need vetted colleagues who can help us help our patients meet themselves perhaps for the first time. And so, a person that has really shown me that she has a pretty powerful way of doing this. She has loads of tools in her toolbox. She has lots of personal experiences for her own health adventure, which you’ll learn about, as to where she is working now currently and what her sort of ideal client looks like. I want you guys to learn from this woman who has really inspired me. And first, we came together as a podcast discussion, and have now become fast friends. And she is definitely one of the tribe of like-minded, terrain-centric individuals that realize the importance of addressing the whole in order for us to create really deep healing within the patients we serve. So, JJ Flizanes, welcome to our doctor gathering or doctor tribe. You’re brilliant, and I want you to tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you got sitting across from me today.

JJ: Well, thanks, Dr. Nasha. And thanks, all the doctors who are listening. This is actually probably…I didn’t realize how exciting this is for me until we started this discussion two minutes ago. And what I mean by that is that I have a lot of different messages in populations that I deal with. And the spiritual side, even though I know you guys understand its important role in healing based on Radical Remission and the fact that out of the now 10, seven of them are emotional and spiritual factors for Radical Remission. So, when we look at that, again, minus the law of attraction piece, I started out in this life, well, as a performer, but as a personal trainer. And I did it from a place of caring so much about my health and my body. Maybe at first, it was more how it looked, but quickly, as I learned about the body, I realized how amazing it was.

And as I balanced an entertainment career and a personal training career, I didn’t realize how smart I was. I was a very right-brained individual. I can sing. I dance. I act. I speak on stage. But it wasn’t until I started to learn science in a way that was mechanical for me, like I applied it to the body. Math and science were boring, quite honestly, in grade school. And I didn’t even need to take it in college. But when I learned biomechanics, when I learned physics, when I learned anatomy, and when I could see the body and how it worked together, and how joints worked together, and how the structure and function of a joint would tell you so much about what to do with it when you were wanting to use it to build bone or to build muscle or to change a physique or to increase metabolism. So I became a geeky science body person very early in my personal training career.

So, I’m helping people and I’m asking the question, because I’m also a great problem solver. I feel like MacGyver. Most of you can relate to the MacGyver thing. So, if you have a problem, I will find you a solution, even if I don’t know it. And I will say, “I don’t know, but I will find it for you.” Give me something to go look for and learn, and I will do it, because I’m very interested in learning, always interested in learning and answering questions, sort of those lifelong questions, “Why are we here?” all those questions that I’ve asked my entire life. So, I’m working with patients or clients. As a trainer, you have clients, not patients. And every time I come up against a new problem, if I didn’t know the answer, I’d go solve it. And when I started with the structure, and I was a really crazy structure… I mean, biomechanics. I hate bad form. There is nothing worse than watching even doctor friends I know work out with horrible form. All I keep thinking is “You are wrecking your joints. You are wearing down your cartilage. You are wearing down your brake pads faster than need be for no more benefit. The risk-benefit ratio is way out of whack here.” And again, so this was my point of view as a personal trainer. I was 25 years old, Director of Education for New York Sports Club, and harping about structure and biomechanics and science to other trainers twice my age who didn’t care because they didn’t get excited about where the pectoralis originated from, and where it inserted to, and what joints did it cross, and what joint actions did it have. They didn’t care, but I did because it opened me up to science in an applicable, usable way for me that made it real and personable and personal.

So, it started out with the biomechanics piece, moved into the biochemistry piece, moved into endocrinology, worked at and have been associated with an integrative medicine clinic in Redondo Beach, California with Dr. Allen Peters and Jeanne Peters. And food, sustainability, all of that. Dr. Nasha and I were talking today about Vitamin D. I mean, at one point, yes, people are now talking about it more. I’m like, “We’ve been talking about this for 15 years. I don’t understand why it’s taking a pandemic for people to realize Vitamin D can save your life and help your hormones and keep you healthy.” But anyway, so again, I’m super passionate about all this science stuff, and I learn and I learn and I learn. Well, there are problems along the way when someone is dealing with weight loss or body things or healing a joint or rehabbing something, like back pains and pains. And I would get those clients that had seven injuries because no one else knew what to do with them. Now, at the time, I could manipulate gravity and force and their bodies in order to give them a workout, no matter if they had seven or ten injuries. But what I quickly realized was the mental and emotional piece to all of this, where back pain, no matter if you had a perfectly aligned spine and perfectly activated muscles in your core, and you didn’t do weird things during the day, and your diet was good, and your hormones were all great, why did someone have back pain? And most of you probably know the work of Dr. John Sarno, so understanding that there is repressed emotion.

Now, as an actress and performer, as a Pisces, as an intuitive, emotion is like the most important thing in the world, right? Everything we do in life, we do because we want to feel better. Everything. Every action, everything we do is about how we feel. Even if it’s like “Oh, I need to save money.” Right.“ So I feel safe, or so I feel good.” It’s all about how we feel. And so I’ve been on this emotional conversation when I first started to learn about the emotions and how they played in the body, and how they got stored in the body, for instance. Emotion is energy, right? Energy in emotion. It’s energy. So if we think about it mechanically, when someone has an emotion, just like calories and energy, we have two options. We either use it or we store it. We express it or we store it. Okay.

So, what are most people doing? They’re storing it. So, all these negative emotions live in their body as toxicity. And we all know that when we get nervous, our heart beats, or maybe our face starts to get flushed, or we start to sweat. This is a physical reaction to an emotion. When we get nervous, our stomach ties in knots. Physical reaction to an emotion. So if we have toxic negative thoughts, what happens? Well, a lot of people get cancer, and a lot of people create disease within themselves because they’re holding on to all this toxic emotion, whether it be joint pain in the knee or the back or the neck. I had neck pain today because Doug and I had a fight. I didn’t want to see his point view, and so my neck went… Yep, there’s where that is. It shows up if we’re paying attention.

So, I started out with a science, and I ended up with a different kind of science. I ended up with quantum physics and epigenetics as something that I care more about because I teach law of attraction. Now, that’s relevant because it all, to me, is the same thing. Like I said three minutes ago, the only commonality amongst us all is that literally every action can be broken down in life to wanting to feel better. So, on the whole, when we look at emotions, I have been saying this for 20 years in terms of processing emotions. People will talk about emotions with a sort of like “Oh, emotions.” They’ll give it lip service. But I’m like, “Okay.” We have emotions all day long. And in Chinese medicine, most of you know, in acupuncture, each organ represents a place where we hold an energy of an emotion. And in Chinese medicine, looking at the whole body and saying, “Where’s the energy pulling? Where is it stagnated? Where is it stuck?” One thing to get a treatment and do some herbs. Cool. How about let’s deal with why the emotion is there in the first place? Because we can do all this external stuff to help the energy move, but how we generate emotions is by having (a) a belief, and (b) observing or thinking about something that then we interpret to mean something, which creates our feelings.

Now, most people just think feelings happen by default, like you’re a victim to feelings, like all of a sudden, you catch it. Or something happens, like “I wasn’t unhappy and now I’m mad. It must be your fault.” And actually, I teach a course called “The Anatomy of Emotion,” and this is not true, okay? Because, as I’m sure you’re all aware, you can take five different people, tell them the same story, and they’re going to react very differently. And they’re going to react differently because of the way that they think and interpret, and how it either means something to them personally or not. There is no right or wrong. It’s all in the perception and belief system of the person. But one thing is very clear. Everyone has emotions, and everyone either holds them or expresses them. And most people don’t even process them.

Now, how what I do is different, and I had to work my way out of the trainer into… Because I was doing it anyway with all my clients. I would psychologically take them apart, even if they weren’t even willing, because again, some of them had back pain or they were emotional eaters, and even though they would do the “dieting,” they didn’t get too far because every time they got upset, they drank too much or eat too much. So, again, it all boils down to that all those actions have to do with who you are in your body and your relationship to the world and to life in general, your relationship to your family. The thoughts and feelings that you have, the beliefs that you hold, create your reality, period.

So, when thinking about when Dr. Nasha and I talked, I mean, I’ve had on Drs. Bruce Lipton and Christiane Northrup, all wonderful people who are currently not in practice that I’m not going to get to work with. And besides Jeanne and a couple of other doctors like Eben Alexander who have been on, Dr. Nasha was one of the first people who really gave as much lip service to emotions as I did, and I was like, “Whoa. Wait. You’re with me on this? Yes.” I mean, I know this. I don’t need the validation, but I love knowing that I’m not the only person harping on this, because people can get kind of annoyed by me when I’m like, “It’s about the emotions. It’s about the emotions. It’s about the emotions.” And the reason why I’m so annoying about it is because I think it’s the least looked-at part. Everybody wants to take the pill. Everybody wants to quit their job. “Oh, I got rid of all my stress. I quit my job and got a divorce.” Yeah, but you take you with you, so that does not get rid of how you process emotions. So, looking at addiction as it’s not about the substance. If you don’t heal the energy underneath the addiction, and the reason why you’re repressing emotion in the first place, you will replace it with something that might even look healthy, like control, right?

So, in a nutshell, I’ve literally been talking on my podcast, harping relentlessly about the role that emotions play. I teach the listeners that I have on the show. I work with people individually, with groups, my masterminds. I do workshops. I had a workshop that we did for three years called “Releasing What Weighs You Down,” and it was a mind-body-soul approach to everything from food, exercise, hormones, sleep, all that stuff, the physical stuff, and the emotional stuff, processing. How are you processing? How are you releasing? What are your belief systems? How are they showing up in your life, and how are you manifesting this? So, the idea of working with cancer patients, I’ll just be quite like… I have a couple of books, one called “Messages from the Body.” It is a 700-page book with literally the mental-emotional root cause of everything from every finger to every spine, vertebrae, to every tooth, and what that possibly could be linked to. Now, it, of course, all revolves around some kind of fear or some kind of anger. Everything boils down to some kind of fear or some kind of anger and sort of its tentacles of attachments.

When you look up cancer, no matter what the cancer is, each cancer has a different emotional root, but generally, a lot of cancers are about giving up, sort of like energetically, on a soul level, throwing in the towel, saying “I’m done.”Now, I am an empowerment strategist and I work with people who want to be empowered, who want to live, who want to be healthy, who want to transcend their current circumstance, because they know intuitively, somewhere, even if they don’t know how to do it, how to get to a better place. The bottom line: It doesn’t matter if you have cancer or you were in a car accident or you have a different disease or you have no disease. The bottom line is about empowering a person to connect with who they really are, to be able to understand the terrain of their emotions, where they live in their body, to be connected in their body. Whether they have a spiritual practice or not, I don’t really care. But I teach people on a psychological level, and if they do, it’s even better. But teach people on a psychological level how to deconstruct emotions, how to get out of victim mentality, how to accept responsibility for where they are.

Because here’s the thing. You only have two choices. You’re going to either be a victim of circumstance, in which case, you will never feel empowered. You will always feel like someone is out to get you, and nothing will work in your favor. Promise. It’s not a good path. It doesn’t feel good. Or you can decide, even if you think it’s crazy, to accept responsibility for everything that happens in your life, because then it gives you power to do something about it. So I teach people how to reclaim their power, take responsibility, even when it’s uncomfortable, for everything that they’ve attracted, because it’s information. And I take it from all different levels. So if it’s someone who is a spiritual practice, we can look at why you incarnated in this lifetime, what soul level are you. I use astrology. I find astrology (and I have an astrology course) to be extremely impactful. So, whatever your feeling is of astrology, and I don’t do predictions and things like that. What I look at, and Dr. Nasha knows a little bit of how I work with astrology, I’m looking at patterns, just like you’re looking at behavioral patterns or physical patterns and you’re seeing signs. The information is there. I can read someone’s chart and give them a pretty good understanding of some of the things that go on in their lives that are sort of set in motion by the blueprint, if you will, astrologically that they came in with.

Now, is it for everybody? No. And I don’t have to do it, and I don’t have to share it. I do it for myself. I usually get a birth date and I’ll do the chart, because how you communicate with someone is going to be important if they hear you. If I only ever say things in one way, then I’m going to miss a whole bunch of people. I am a consummate teacher. When I was teaching trainers science, I remember even counting how many times and how many different ways I had to present an idea in order for the majority of the room to get it. And sometimes it was three or four different points of view on how to teach a concept so that everybody could receive that information. So, I have trainers that I’m teaching the tools that I use. I also work with people currently. That won’t always be. But right now, what I’m thinking about for you guys potentially is creating some kind of like intro course because I’d like to prequalify and I’d like you also to understand who is the right fit, because some people who aren’t committed to growth do need to go to someone who could just validate them in every session for psychotherapy and who’s just going to say, “Oh, that’s terrible. Oh, you must feel terrible.” And they’re going to do that for a year, and that person feels good when they leave there.

Nasha: Right. Yep. And let’s take a moment here because what is so wild is, by the time the doctors hear this video or see this video… There’s a floatie. I’ve not lost my ever-loving mind, just so you know.

JJ: You’re feeling energy.

Nasha: Because one of the things I do... So, we’ve got this program, these modules. Module 1 is like the intro to integrative oncology, or to conventional oncology, actually, the very nuts and bolts, right? And then we have Module 2 which is all about tests, Module 3 assess, Module 4 address, Module 5 integrate it all, and then 6 is like “Where do we go from here?” So, in that test, I even break it down into those Terrain 10 bucket drops, and there’s a section where we get down to the mental-emotional and the stress response that really goes into… There’s even ways to physiologically test what’s going on there, like you can actually get a pretty good idea of what’s happening. And we’ve talked about the concepts, like the doctors have learned about ACE scores, using those. That’s a test. That’s a quiz, right? We can use heart rate variability, for instance. The lower the heart rate variability, the less resilient they are to whatever comes their way. We could use psychological questionnaires. We can use enneagrams. We can use the astrology, to your point. It has a lot of information and data points.

So, it’s like the collection of the data to know who we’re dealing with, so we know how to best communicate and connect with them and read them, because to your point exactly, we get nowhere if we keep talking to them in the same way we talk to everybody else. This is where western medicine fails is it treats everybody the same. You have a limited amount of time and resources and scripts, if you will. And so, what folks are starting to realize, we test, so we take a look at the tangible things we can test. And then we assess. We start to look at the patterns. So in Module 3, when the doctors start to take a look at this, I talk about patterns from Chinese medicine, from miasms of homeopathy, from ayurvedic doshas, from even I talk about astrology. In fact, the medical systems of Chinese medicine and its mother, ayurvedic medicine, have used, for thousands of years, the astrology to help determine the physiology of the patient as well as, exactly to your point, to help them understand who is in front of them, what strengths and weaknesses they might have, and how can they better connect with and serve that person.

So, I want to just reframe that because a few doctors will have not reached the Section 3 yet to learn about some of these other ways of looking at patterns of your patients outside of the construct of what we’re taught in medical school, whether it’s conventional medical school or naturopathic or otherwise. And so this pattern recognition you talk about is a very important part of how and why we are more successful with our patient population than just standard of care, or even just alternative medicine. All of those things are focused on the tumor and the tumor cell, and they forget about what’s wrapped around it. And to your point, the most important part and the most neglected part is also the most challenging part, both as the provider as well as the patient going through this. And so, to have someone who has a ton of different tools in their toolbox, who can test and assess the person in front of them to know “What’s going to be my easiest inward doorway into this emotional piece?” most of us don’t have that skill set, JJ. Most of us, we might have two or three really good tools in our back pocket, but it’s like still seeing the world as a nail and using a hammer. Whereas, we’ll come into an example that just came up last night, for instance, here in a moment.

But I just love that you’re kind of pulling back and helping remind us, because the doctors are learning all of this new content and all of these new discussions, and we’re just in it right now. To pull back out and look at it from this global perspective of what is this person’s essence? What is their pattern? Where are they stuck? Where are they excess or overflowing? And that can be looked at from many different angles. And the angle that you come in with is this of dealing with the emotional, behavioral, belief system perspectives. And what I also like about JJ’s background, you guys, that’s different than other therapists that we would typically work with is she has this basic foundation in the sciences, in the medical healthcare field. So she also says, “You know what? When your thyroid is wonky, I can do things until the cows come home, but that still needs to be addressed too.” So, that’s the other part I loved about our conversations, JJ, is you recognize sometimes the obstacle to cure our physical things that are preventing emotional healing. And they feed back and forth, and you cannot be this perfect vessel if you’re not attending to all of them. So, what I love about it is JJ isn’t trying to come in and just say, “Let’s take this person,” and we all know because we’ve seen it over and over again that the emotions really are driving the terrain here, but still there’s obstacles that still need to be addressed. And JJ is really good at seeing those and knowing, “Hey, go back and talk to Dr. So and So on this.”

So, that’s a really unique blend that not many of us have access to. So I wanted to give that shout out to you as well. I love that you gave a background about your exercise physiology background and training and the mechanics of this, and then just your own self-guided curiosity and living laboratory and your own hunger to keep learning all of it. And yet for you, each time, just like for me, I laughed when you said, “Oh, they probably are getting tired of me harping on the emotions.” They get tired of me harping on this. I always say, “Tell me who the patient is, not what the patient has.” That’s really key. So, I love that you’re reinforcing my…to them in this piece. Would you add anything else around that expertise of how you can also recognize the physical implications and how they both dance with each other regularly?

JJ: Absolutely. My last book… I’ve written three books, and the last one is called “The Invisible Fitness Formula: Five Secrets to Release Weight and End Body Shame.” So to cap off the trainer life that I have, to sort of move on from that, I wanted to put everything I had learned together in one last like “Okay, here’s the last fitness book I’m going to do.” And the “Five Secrets to Release Weight and End Body Shame” really start off with digestion. Not calories, not diet, but digestion and looking at our digestion, and how the foods we’re eating are impacting our digestion, what should we expect. So we’re not talking about the diet. We’re talking about how our own bodies digest food. So, getting that out of the way. And I really go on about inflammatory foods.

So, for instance, just to give you one last sort of scientific background and why this is a really great blend for me with you guys, and I hope you feel the same, is that I can have somebody who is an emotional eater... In fact, we did. At the clinic, I remember I was the last person to get everybody because Dr. Allen got them first, did the blood work, looked at everything, Jeanne would get them next, do diet, and then they’d come to me for training. And I remember working with a patient. And at that time, he was their patient. And he was very overweight, maybe by, I would say, somewhere between like 60 and 80 pounds, maybe even 100. He was kind of a tall guy. But when he got to me, I said to him, because I saw what he was eating. And I know Jeanne was doing the food, but again, we all have different points of view, and sometimes she’s looking at nutrients or she’s looking at different things, and I’m kind of taking that broader perspective before I’m getting into this. And I said, “Are you taking a food sensitivity test?” and he said, “No.” And I said, “Well, go back to Jeanne and tell her to give you a lab request form for a food sensitivity test.” Because he was eating popcorn and dairy and yogurt and all these things that he was literally very sensitive to. Because he had himself convinced he was an emotional eater. He was in five different groups. He had a therapist. He had Overeaters Anonymous. He had another support group. He had a meditation. He was so convinced. And he was a Cancer, sun sign, which is another whole thing.So when he had himself convinced “I’m an emotional eater,” I was like, “Dude, you are totally inflamed. Your cravings are biochemical, not emotional.”

Now, that doesn’t mean he’s still not an emotional eater, but first, let’s deal with the system first. So, that’s why in my book, the emotions are number four. Because just like you, I know we can’t go head first into the emotions because most people are like, “I’m not going to deal with that because it’s hard.” So we dealt with digestion. Then the second one was exercise. And then hormones were the third. So in my program, I tell people, “Do it in this order because by the time we get to the hormones, it could be a hormonal imbalance is causing the cravings. It could be a food imbalance causing the cravings and the fatigue. We have to get you into your balanced body before we can even deal with the emotions.”

Nasha: Yeah. Or even deal with just whatever is in our face. It’s like if you’re just all out of sorts, you’re constantly whacking them all and trying to chase the thyroid problem, the hormone problem, the inflammatory problem, all of the things. And this is what western medicine and even functional medicine and integrative medicine does. We’re like, “Take this for that. Take this for that.” And we’re just chasing it. We’re chasing the tail of the dragon. And so, for you, you’re like, “Let’s just move away the veils of distraction. Let’s get us back to the essence of who you are. Let’s recover some of the obvious low-hanging fruit issues, and then let’s see what we’re actually dealing with.” I mean, is that sort of your approach that you can kind of slowly, gently take them right to “Here’s the big mirror of who you are, and now let’s get to work”?

JJ: Well, it depends on the path that they’re on. So I’m pretty direct with my audience. And I’m not saying I would be that way with your patients, but I would want to know. I want to have some kind of an assessment of knowing a little bit of background before working with somebody potentially, from your perspective possibly, or figure out together, maybe some kind of pre-qualification form to see where they are. So that way, I know, going in, where to start with someone. Because I’m not going to bash them over the head with all the things that I think if I know they can’t receive it. And sometimes, of course, just with working with anyone, you have to show them that this stuff works, or that this path is going to work.

So, I have sort of like the starting approach, which is a very, very simple, again, calling it “The Anatomy of Emotion,” and talking about it, and teaching them about emotion, and being able to, a couple of different things. One, know where in the body they feel emotion. So if they’re disconnected, which I’m guessing they are if they’ve got cancer. There’s a certain level of disconnection. So coming back into the body, whether it be through exercise, meditation, visualization, EFT, which I also do. I’m not certified, but we all do tapping. And muscle testing. Anyway, just being able to come back into the body and be present. But also how they’re interpreting things, how they’re working something out in their mind. I work with a lot of healers. Not like me personally. I’ve interviewed them. I’ve worked with people. But the problem with “healers” is that patients and clients will come to a healer, thinking, “You’re going to do all the work for me.” And what a healer can do most of the time is remove some kind of energetic block or change some kind of vibrational situation that you’re dealing with. But eventually, you walk away from that. And if you can’t sustain that, or the patient can’t sustain that, the way they interpret things on a more expansive level, then they’re going to revert back to all of their belief systems.

So, I want to empower people first to see where they’re giving their power away. That is the first thing I would do with anyone, no matter who you are, especially when I don’t know you. Now, there’s the longer term, and I’ve created something that I haven’t put out into the world yet called “The Roadmap to Healing.” And “The Roadmap to Healing” really is my empowerment strategist program because it’s clearly defined, just like your 10 terrains. It’s clearly defined. You know exactly what you’re getting in for. You will learn, and the depth will be created through all of it. And I take some of the tools that people work with for a long time. Let’s say looking at core wounds. I go right there pretty quickly in the first, let’s say, two to five sessions. And that exercise alone can be enough for someone to go, “Oh my god. My entire life has been about rebelling against my dad, which is why I made all these choices.” And all of a sudden, they get their power back.

So, again, each person is going to be different, but these are some of the things that I work with because I find them to be quick in the clarification. And then we work with compassion and looking at beliefs, and how to process their emotion, how to think about it, how to experience it, how to release it, how to let it be and not judge it, because again, the whole repressing. We don’t want to overthink and overanalyze. We want to have it be a bodily thing where they’re actually experiencing this energy. They’re releasing this energy. And then, once they release the energy, we can talk about why did that happen, and what was that about, and where does that go back to? And then, with simple tools, people move further and further away, where things that triggered them, felt bad before, no longer have any power over them. So, when the perspective changes, so does their relationship to it.

Nasha: Huge. And I think that’s just it. Let me give an example. You could be very helpful for us right now because, as a team, a collection of dozens of doctors, one of our doctors is working with a patient who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and knowing that she was going to do a consultation with our group, she gave our doctor literally an 80-page, single-spaced story of her life. And so, as I started to review this person’s history, 16 pages, I was only up to age nine, and I finally skipped ahead to the last 16 pages, which was like the last two years of her life. And when I recognized, and what we talked about last night in our discussion, was this person is so attached to their story that they’re literally torturing all of us with it. They were so connected to it, so identify with it, so woven in and still living and experiencing it. I’m not sure if they will ever be ready to let it go, or to even consider letting go some of it.

And that’s this moment as even the energy, we all started recognizing that the doctor sharing this case, she started to almost justify that she has had a really intense couple of weeks, really overworking, really burned out. She lost a friend to a breast cancer diagnosis. There was all these things, like she was almost trying to justify why she felt so drained and toxic in the midst of this patient. And when I tried to help reframe for her and brought the group in, because I think she thought we were going to talk about the woman’s case, like “Let’s look at her labs.” I’m like, “No.” There is like a wall here that no amount of getting into the physiology, to the biochemistry, to the anatomy, to the tissue assays, to the epigenetics. There is no way for her to receive any of that information. And there may never be a way to receive any information by the depth and breadth of this woman’s actual story, this armor that she carries. And so, our session ended up being more like almost a therapy session for all of us. A couple of the other doctors are like, “Oh, I have patients like this.” And just to realize, because the woman also spent an enormous amount of time in her write-up dissing all the doctors who betrayed her, who wronged her, all the people in her life that left her, who wronged her, like it was always somebody else did something wrong. And of course, red flag, red flag, red flag.

And we talked about that: that as doctors, we tend to feel like it is our absolute duty to help everybody, no matter what. And this is what we’re also trying to reframe in this group because we’re working with a very particular population that are very, very wounded on so many levels. You don’t get to a cancer diagnosis, even as a young person, you may be carrying the epigenetic ancestry of those who have gone before you, completely unconsciously, as well as the other assaults of living on this filthy planet today, or being just an open receptacle sponge to the trauma and drama in your own household. These poor kids aren’t conscious of that, but it’s coming in.

JJ: Right.

Nasha: And so, that’s where we started to really explore what would you do, in a sense, where you’ve just received an 80-page diatribe of this person? And we’re talking deep trauma. And we’re not even sure if it’s true. That’s the other side. It left us all kind of like… I work with a lot of trauma. All of us are like, “This almost doesn’t feel truthful.” Because we always want to believe our patients. That’s also very important. But there were so many elements to this that it was just like, “How do you go about this?” So, I love that you started to pull out… She might have the magic wand, everybody. Good.

JJ: Okay. So, without any other description than how many pages it was, single-spaced.

Nasha: That was enough for you?

JJ: It was enough.

Nasha: Good.

JJ: Okay. So, she lacks trust. Right now, she doesn’t trust God. She doesn’t trust the universe. She doesn’t trust her family. She doesn’t trust anybody. So the only thing we have to come back to, because I think that you had said this on our second Instagram Live after our second interview on my show. You said that if a patient feels disempowered, no treatment works. So this woman currently sounds so angry. So her cancer seems like she is just angry. She’s angry at God. She’s angry at her parents. She’s angry at whoever. Everybody in her life, she’s angry at. Okay. So, when we know that right away, because that means there’s a defensiveness that’s up right now, because there’s something she’s not getting. So I would be asking her a question of “What is it that you need?”

So, the first exercise that I talked about that I would do with most people, just to kind of get them in a reframe of being able to identify it, it’s the three steps to effective communication. I’ll rename it something later, but the three steps are this. First, we identify the feeling. So, what is it that you’re feeling? Now, I clearly can hear her anger. But what’s always beneath anger is a depth of fear. All right? But she’s really angry because someone who’s angry has energy. Someone who is depressed or who is in fear doesn’t have energy. So she still has enough energy that she’s afraid to feel fear. She does not want to break. So she’s writing all this because she’s holding on to her anger. And for a lot of people, especially for men, and women with more masculine energy, anger feels better than depression and fear. So in a good way, that’s kind of a good thing. There’s a desire to feel better. Now, yes, she’s in huge victim mode. But asking the question, and this is also from Radical Remission, talking about the people who survive are the ones who had a reason to live, the ones who had a desire to stay. So I would ask her those two questions: (a) “Do you have a desire to live, and what is it?”and (b) “How is it that you’re feeling, and how is it you’d rather feel?”

Nasha: Love it. And those are really great questions for everyone to be asking all of their patients in this mix, no matter what. Our question for you, now that you’ve given me… I mean, that right there is really powerful. I almost feel like the doctor could go back to her and say, “I’ve read this. A couple of the other doctors in our forum, we’re all looking at this together, and here’s our question. The story, though we appreciate you sharing it, what matters to us, what comes to the surface for us, are these three questions.” And I love it because at that moment, you could probably also get a litmus test of where is she even with that construct. Because part of the question we had last night with this group, and this is where this might even be out of your sort of pay scale and your lane, is that there seems to be some pretty extreme mental illness. And so I’m curious of how well this approach works with someone who may be actually very mentally ill.

JJ: In law of attraction terms, everyone is mentally ill who is out of alignment, so just across the board, right? And in epigenetics terms, when you feel something bad, your body pushes away, and so your body responds to the negative picture that you have in your mind versus the positive. So the chemicals flowing through her are toxic, which are changing her biochemistry both in her brain as well as in her body. I don’t throw in the towel right away with people. And I’m not saying anybody would, unless… Well, I shouldn’t say that too. I’m sure there are instances where, and I would have to think about people that I won’t work with because I can feel where they’re going, and this is about something that just doesn’t feel in alignment at all, like I don’t believe that they really want to heal. Because some people want to die to prove someone wrong. I don’t know what the rest of her story was, but there’s a fact that maybe if you don’t believe her, then there is a possibility, like if a lot of you really got the hit that “I don’t believe this is real,” again, remember that for her, it is real. Or if it isn’t real, she has a real reason to make it real.

Nasha: Right. That’s a good point.

JJ: So, to go back to this “Anatomy of Emotion” understanding, we could all agree to look at something together that one person thinks is horrible and watch the myriad of different responses from everybody, and you could think… That’s how I started out, actually, when I was younger learning about astrology, because I would look at something and feel like “Oh my god. Why is nobody else upset about this? What are you all, crazy?” Right? And so I had to make sense of how people looked at the world differently and why they valued things differently. So, another thing I might ask this woman or I might assess or I might be looking for in her story is looking for how she receives love. Is it that she needs words or she needs attention, or does she feel like people haven’t expressed themselves in gifts? Because if you have someone who is words, then offering words is so easy and fast. Someone like that would respond very well to “Your life seems to be really hard. I’m so sorry about that.” Now, I wouldn’t go on and on about that, and I wouldn’t keep validating or enabling that she gets love and attention by bad things happening. But I might start off for that trust factor of acknowledging with some words, to say, “This is really horrible. I’m so sorry that you’ve had to deal with this. Are you ready for a new chapter?”

Nasha: Ooh, that’s powerful. I love that.

JJ: Because if she’s not, because you can make it clear that this story lives in a frequency in your body emotionally that attracts cancer, that creates negative responses chemically in your body. And if we stay here in this story, you cannot heal.

Nasha: Wow. That is so good. I’m doing a little happy dance. I’m sure the other doctors looking at this would be doing it, because we were traumatized together, like collectively traumatized by going through her case. And that is something. I mean, that, I think, is what we’re also reverberating against the rest of world right now around us. There’s such a collective wound and fear and rage all over this world that it’s hard to even define our own boundaries. Where does it end and we begin, etc.? So, how would you work with even, let’s say… I’m even thinking of a few of the doctors in the group that would probably be like, “Sign me up for JJ.” For their own process of how do they create their own ability to be in other people’s pain without taking it on.

JJ: Great question. So, let’s go over the anatomy of a trigger, okay? So when you are triggered, when you have an emotional response to someone, it’s because something in you resonates with that pain or that belief. So if someone says something disrespectful or says, “Hey, you’re stupid,” (and again, I’m just giving an example), and you take offense to that, and that “hurts” your feelings (by the way, no one can hurt your feelings), it’s because somewhere you believe that. And again, separating. What you guys probably did was do like a really good head dance, like the analytical head dance, right? And so, what I’m wanting to do is to not disconnect because I really hate all the people that are like, “Everyone’s too much in their heads.” Yes, and our heads are attached to our bodies for a reason. So I’d like to connect the two. Because your body is where all your subconscious tells you and talks to you all day long. And you have to be in a state of alignment to even hear your intuition, because otherwise, it’s just you being out of alignment and having the momentum of fear and negativity going on.

And probably this patient has also gotten a lot of attention by her story. That’s how she knows to get love and attention. And if you set it up from the beginning, “But this is a story that keeps you sick. And while I want to help you, and I’m going to be 100% your cheerleader, you have to know that there’s a little co-dependency on…” And I wouldn’t say that right away, but I would eventually want to teach her that the co-dependency of the story is that you have learned in your life, probably from parents, that in order for you to get love and attention, you have to be in pain. And so I would want to educate someone on that. And ask those really important questions about “Are you ready for a shift?” And honestly, if someone can be honest, sometimes they’re not.

Nasha: Exactly.

JJ: And you’ll find that out when you work with them. I worked with someone in my mastermind last year, and again, this wasn’t a huge emotional thing because she was doing business. But she was someone who just got divorced. She hated her boss. She hated her job. She was in tears at my 2020 “Releasing What Weighs You Down,” and she’s like, “I want to be free.” I’m like, “Great. Join the mastermind.” It was my first year. Learned a lot. A lot of negative lessons, but it made it so much better for this year, which is like light years better. But she, by the end, I gave her a guarantee. She sells real estate. And throughout this entire time, we never addressed any of her emotional stuff because she only came to me through her sister. Her sister listens to my show. Her sister has been a fan. She has come to my events. She was a client of mine. Her sister knew that she needed help, and she wanted me to help her. But said person wasn’t really ready for JJ to help. So she showed up and did the things, but she didn’t really do the things. So, by the end, when she didn’t really do the thing, she’s like, “I didn’t make my money.” I’m like, “You just did a real estate deal that’s going to result in a couple hundred thousand dollars. You did make your money.” “No, no, no. You said I was going to make it in just 12 months.” And all of a sudden, I saw this disconnection. She got really wrapped up in her victim story of now I was letting her down, and her boss let her down, and her husband let her down. And I said, “The kind of work you need to do is internal, because no matter what you do externally, it will not result in sustainability because it’s coming from the wrong place.” So, back to said patient, there has to be an agreement. And I know you’ve said this. I’ve heard you say this. I won’t take patients if they’re not ready to heal.

Nasha: Right. And that’s just it. That’s what we were kind of coming at last night together, sort of like creating a contract of sorts, or asking, “Where are we in this? Are you ready to heal? Are you ready to let that go?” We and a lot of clinicians coming in on this saying, “Is this someone who’s very attached to her story and is not ready to let it go, and who can’t heal beyond that?” And to your point, we were all definitely mentally masturbating around the discussion of this. But also, all of us are feeling in our bodies and in our cores and in our own sort of experiences of “This isn’t going to be the first nor the last time we experience this, so how do we start to work that through ourselves?” It’s like, “Great. Now I’m listening and I’m paying attention. Now what? Where do I move that energy as a clinician?” I didn’t even expect to really go here with you today. I’m like excited to be “Hey, here’s a great tool for patients.” But I’m also realizing right now in this conversation, you’re probably a great tool for us. Not probably. You are a great tool for us. And so, as we’re having this talk, I’m like, “This is another interesting spin on this.” Because I am seeing, I mean, first of all, it’s such a burnout rate in medicine in general, and I believe in oncology in particular, because there is so much that we think we have to fix and that we have to carry. And yet where did that idea even come from?

JJ: We have to heal your inner rescuers that you’re still doing. The out-of-balance for the doctors and the trainers is the inner rescuer, which you take it personally if you don’t succeed. Again, this is my marriage. Trust me, I have learned this, okay? This is my marriage. I’m still working on it, but I have moved so far from where I was, taking responsibility. And as a physician, I can only imagine. Heck, I still do it now. I’m like, “I have all this data.” Because you don’t have to suffer. I can help you. But people choose to suffer, and that’s how it is. And that is not your responsibility. But we can clean up where you give your power away of thinking it’s your responsibility. And that is the same work as it would be for the patients. It’s just that you’d be more on board with doing it quicker. And we could get there quicker because some of the stuff… I mean, that’s the only way you can heal your own emotional issues is to recognize when you give your power away, when there’s something inside of you that you believe, a trauma from your past that still has power over you, and it shows up in how you either attract patients, how you work with them, how you personalize what happens versus recognizing it from more of an observer standpoint of “Oh, that’s interesting,” and being able to get to the observer, so that way, if someone is…

I’ve had to make peace with people who don’t like me on my show because I’m direct. But what I know is that it went from not liking me and being mean to me on my YouTube channel, which maybe a couple of times it might have… I’ll share with you guys because this is important for you to know. So, the one time, the most recent which was like three years ago, negative review that got me (I think I’m over it all now) was “JJ is not a therapist.”That stoned because my ex-husband would discredit this, my ability to do this, because I wanted to help fix him and work on him because he had a lot of wounds. And why? Because I wanted him to be happier, so that we could be happier, so that I could grow, because I didn’t feel like I could grow further because he was in scarcity and fear and all that stuff, right? And I took responsibility for that.

But we have to bring it back to when I worked on that, when I was like, “Ugh,” because I’m not a therapist, and everyone needs to know that. I’m a coach. I’m not a therapist. But I also have had therapy, and I’ve worked with therapists, and I also feel like I’m way more effective than therapists. But I’m not for everybody because I’m not going to be the person that says, “We’re going to take five years to talk about the same damn issue, and you keep repeating it over and over again. I’m going to validate you, so that way, so you’re no further along.” That is not me. So, again, if you have a patient who would work better with someone who is just going to tell them how terrible their life is, and “You must feel terrible,” then I am not the right choice, and my trainers will not be the right choice. But when someone can get triggered by me, I know that I’m just a catalyst, and I know that I’ve touched something in you that you believe or you fear. And what you do with that is next on you. It’s not personal. I’m not attacking anybody. I’m literally just calling it like it is. And if it bothers you, that’s something to look at as an observer and say, “If I want to change this, I have to go nowhere but inside of me.”

Nasha: Very good. That’s good. And I think this is a good place because exactly that. There’s been so many times in my career, and I know this is true for my other doctors in the group and everybody I know in practice I’ve ever talked to. It’s like we do tend to bring in a type, right? And watching that type change over my career shows where I’ve grown, where I’ve healed. And so, to that effect, when we still have those moments, it’s like, “Oh, there it is. Thanks for picking that little scab off. It still needs to ooze a little bit. What’s unfinished here?” So these are really good tidbits here, because like I said, I didn’t even expect that this could be a valuable tool for the doctors themselves. I was more looking at this to say, “How do we help so many of our…”

Again, in the very beginnings of this course, we talk about cancer is the ultimate disconnect. That’s what it is. And so it’s disconnect of self, disconnect from God, disconnect from others, disconnect from cell to cell communication. I mean, it’s all the things. And we are totally in alignment and agreement of what’s in that cesspool, helping drive that pattern. And I really love that you pointed out the two main: express or repress. It’s just a very energetic movement, or lack thereof, that gets us stuck. And so you’re such a valuable resource to help people pinpoint and start to illuminate where they’re stuck and where they’re not emoting and where they are trying to hold on to the story or to the victimhood, and give them an invitation to do it differently. And again, like you said, at the end of the day, you’re not even attached to what they do with that. But it certainly would take a load off the doctor to know that they had someone out there helping someone navigate this in a way that it’s also then in sort of relationship, that the patient is still safe because they’re under the physician’s care, so if stuff does get stirred up, you’ve got that resource. But then we have you to help us hit the non-tangible that is so critical. And we can simply go and say, “Oh, just get on that video and do a little tapping,” because we talk about tapping and we talk about EMDR, but even that, it’s like it needs still some structure and guidance and support, and it needs to be, just like us, testing and deciding what’s the appropriate therapy in this moment. You have that same skill set to assess what tools may be best aligned with that patient in this moment, or that client in this moment.

And that’s what I think is really great. You are not a one-stop shop. You’re not just a talk head therapist. You’re not just an energetic. You’re not just a law of attraction. You have so many tools because of your own journey and your own interests and the people. I mean, you guys, when you have a podcaster who has as many podcasts as JJ, she literally gets to speak to all the people that we always want to read and listen to. And she gets to hang out with them in these deep dive discussions. So she’s like a downloader. She’s like in a living matrix of it all coming in and meeting all these people and like, “Ooh, I like this one. I like this one.” And her basket is just so beautiful and overflowing and abundant with all these amazing tools that she starts to recognize patterns to know, “This tool might work much better here than this one did.” Just like when people come to us and they’ve done all the things, they’ve done all the standard of care, they’ve done all the alternative care, and we look at it and go, “You did all the things, but you didn’t do them in the right order and perhaps in the right way at the right time. And perhaps you weren’t ready for it then, but you may be now.” That’s JJ in this realm for us, in that arena. And so, what else would you like to tell? How do they find out how to work with you, how to follow up with you for themselves or for their patients? What’s the best way?

JJ: So, if you’re a doctor and you are interested in more, you can check out one of my podcasts. Now, I will tell you that most of these have the same episodes on them. So, whether you go to “Spirit, Purpose, and Energy” or “Nutrition and Alternative Medicine,” they’re mostly going to have the same. Now, minus “Health and Wealth” and a couple others, I take the same episode. Although, if you go to jjflizanes.com/matc (we’ll put the link in here), which is Metabolic Approach to Cancer, there is more information and there’s a direct link to my page where all the podcasts are. There’s a video of Dr. Nasha and I on our last episode, so you can watch that video if you’d like to. I mean, you would know all about her, but I enter in all the emotional things. “It’s about emotions, about emotions, about emotions.”

Nasha: It was good.

JJ: Well, I understand that things can be just physical sometimes. Sometimes the root is emotional first, because again, energetically, it has to be a thought before it’s a thing. So it has to exist energetically before it becomes manifested in reality. And because, like I said, it’s the most underutilized thing that people… And we move further and further away from this conversation all the time with emotions. And people quite are so control freaks. You’re all control freaks, by the way, in case you didn’t know that, as am I, so I understand it. Yeah, we all are. That’s just the way we are. But understanding that, and then softening that, and balancing that, and entering trust and depth and connection and intuition and guidance, is really the gain for those of us who want to live a more expansive life in all aspects. So you can check out the podcast if you would like to learn more or listen. Again, on that page that I mentioned, there’s a two-session starter pack if you want to try it out. And I do two sessions very specifically because I don’t do free consultations. But when I used to just do one, I’d give somebody like a really great plan and I’d feel like, “Oh, they got a great plan,” and then they wouldn’t do it. And they’d think, “Oh,” and they’d give some excuse. So if I do a plan first and then a follow-up, I get to see what you did and what you didn’t do and why. And I get to establish that you need some support and accountability to get stuff done, because as you’ve said, you can’t heal in the same terrain you got sick in. So you can’t keep doing the same over and over again, thinking life is somehow going to be different. We’re not all insane, even though we may act it sometimes. So, again, that’s the two-session starter pack that I have on that page. Otherwise, check out the podcast. It’s free. And then if you just have any questions, email me. I do have a team that will be facilitating the same work as I’m doing, so don’t worry. I’ve already got some in place that have been working with me for years on this stuff. I work with clients, and within two years of me working with them, I literally feel comfortable past… They end up coaching other people just naturally because they’ve embodied it, and then they do it, and then they see it, and it’s really cool. So, yes, any questions you have?

Nasha: Yeah. I would just say, it’s very similar to this, how the mastermind started with this group of doctors. We’re a handful of doctors who have been working with me directly for years, and finally like, “It’s time to take off your training wheels and go do this.” And now teaching the next generations of it as well. And then we’re getting ready to start the same thing for patients this summer in a patient advocacy program. Same thing. These are people who have been patients of ours. These doctors, for years, they’re like, “This is my path and purpose. I want to help other patients find this way, find this path, get on this path.” And so, that’s what’s so beautiful. So JJ has done it exactly like how we’re doing it. It’s like she has lived it, she has applied it to herself, and she has applied it to others, and then she has had other people apply it to themselves under her guidance for years, who are now like, “I can go out and apply this to others too.” And so it’s just that ongoing evolution. And we need a lot of help in this area, and a lot of people to help in this area. So it’s really nice that you’ve got not just you; that we are cloning yourself. I think we talked about like the mini-me’s that you’re creating, which is really great. But it is really excellent.

So, do check out her links. We’ll have all of her stuff with the video here, so you can look at all of the ways to reach her and check it out. But now I’m kind of like, “This is really exciting for even a doctor’s general support, not just for the support of their patients,” because it can help them get some really good clarity of their own boundaries and their own issues of what they might be bumping up against in their practices. So, this has been excellent. I had no doubt. I’ve been waiting for you for years. I told you that before. It’s like we’ve been looking for someone to fulfill this role with our patient population. It felt really like a fit, and you definitely fit that role. So, JJ, it’s just an absolute pleasure. And thank you for offering your services up to all of us.

JJ: It’s an honor to work with you. I’ve been looking for you too, so I am glad the divine timing kicked in, and it happened when it was supposed to happen. The only last thing I’ll say when it comes to doctors doing the work is that if you… You mentioned about the kinds of patients that you attract, and as you healed yourself, you attract different patients. That is important too. You get to decide who you work with, and that is really important as a boundary for your heart and your soul that you’re feeling effective in life, you’re feeling like you’re contributing and really attracting the right people. Because there are a ton of other doctors who aren’t doing what you’re doing. Let them handle the ones that you don’t want to work with. I think the pre-qualification for everybody to up-level would help everybody, because not only would it help your heart. It would also help elevate what the expectation is to let people know and to signal out that there’s another level. There’s a new way. And this is the way we do it. And if you want to do it a different way, that’s fine. But here’s where I am. Because you never come down and help anybody. You never come to their level. You have to create room and space for them to elevate up to where you are, not the other way around.

Nasha: And I love that you said collectively, like even us as a group learning this together and supporting each other. Let’s all lift together, because then it’s like we’ve created a new bar for our own health and sanity and also our own outcomes. We do better when we do better. There’s that piece. I think that’s really a good note to leave this on. And so, thank you, as always. It’s going to be fun. Thanks, JJ.

JJ: Thanks, Nasha.