Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose. Welcome to another episode of the Conscious Fertility Podcast. I’m here today with Michelle McCosker. She’s a clinical EFT practitioner, evidence-based EFT trainer and mentor, and also a naturopath. And she’s zooming in as I do this interview with her from Australia. Michelle, what part of Australia are you in?
Michelle McCosker:
I’m on the Gold Coast, which is in Queensland
Lorne Brown:
In Queensland Gold Coast, and I love the Australian accent. I was just skiing up at Whistler and actually all of Australia I think is at Whistler working all the people in their teens and twenties. I couldn’t believe how many Australians, and I love the accent.
Michelle McCosker:
Yes, yes, everyone does.
Lorne Brown:
So I want to tell people a little bit about you and then we’re going to talk about tapping for fertility. And because of our you and I connecting in person at conferences, at the energy psychology conferences and our colleague and friend in common, Peter Stapleton, you and I have been talking a lot about tapping for fertility. You’ve offered a online program on this, and we decided to come together and co-facilitate a tapping for fertility online. And so if you stay tuned, we’ll tell you more about it, but it’ll be in the show notes so you can contact me for further details. But a little bit about Michelle. She actually, her background was in banking and finance originally. She did complete a Bachelor of health science and naturopathy way back in 2011, and she’s been in private practice since then and many of us that have gone into healthcare, she found that there was something missing.
And the missing piece of the puzzle was her ability to support her patients on the emotional psychological level because so much of that emotional psychological can make such a difference in people healing mentally, emotionally obviously, but also physically. And she discovered EFT and also known as Emotional Freedom Technique, which helped her guide her patients to achieve optimal health results. That’s her preferred method of treatment as well in her clinic. Why We’re going to talk about tapping or EFT for fertility. I want to let you know that she is a lead facilitator for delivering of psychoeducational and psychological intervention for clinical research trials using EFT for cancer patients, for chronic pain patients, OCD, and also I think more recently musicians pitch accuracy that you did with Dr. Peter Stapleton, who also was on the Conscious Fertility Podcast. And I’m curious because I don’t know really what that even means, musician pitch accuracy. So we’re going to have to talk about that. Anyways, I’m just glad to have you here and have your experience and I’m looking forward to co-facilitating tapping for fertility as well. So welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, Michelle.
Michelle McCosker:
Thank you for that. Lengthy welcome.
Lorne Brown:
You’re welcome. So we’ve had a couple of researchers and experts talk about EFT. It’s one of my favorite modalities that I use in my practice along with the acupuncture and laser. I wanted maybe for those that are being introduced to emotional freedom technique, can you tell them about it? And if you’re okay with it, I may interrupt and ask some more specific questions and I want to know a little bit more about the research that you’ve been involved in as well as we work our way into this for fertility.
Michelle McCosker:
Thanks. So for people that haven’t heard about what tapping is or EFT is, it’s basically a stress reduction technique if you think of it as that if you feel stressed about a certain situation, it can change your perception and how you feel about that situation. That’s just to put it really simply, but it’s much, much more than that. It’s not just for stress, it’s for pretty much any negative emotion or experience that you’ve had. It can help to change that perception because within your body, your body is always looking to associate experiences to something else to determine if it’s a threat or not. And so with EFT, it helps to any of those past experiences that are now sort of running the show of how we show up every day based on that association, it helps to remove those negative experiences and so that when our body’s looking for that association, it’s not there anymore. So you can respond in a healthy, more productive way and move forward in your life instead of being stuck with those associated memories and feelings.
Lorne Brown:
And why would we care then if we have these negative perceptions? So basically your reality is how you perceive what’s going on in your life. You talked about it’s like a threat to the body. So how does this affect our, not only our emotional health but our physical
Michelle McCosker:
Health? So when we feel we’re under threat or there’s something that we need to run away from that fight or flight response, so run, freeze, do something to keep us safe, what happens is the amygdala is affected. And so once that is activated, the amygdala is the stress in the stress center of our brain. It then sends off a whole lot of other like a chain reaction of chemicals and then responses physiologically in our body. So physically what’s going on is it’s pumping out hormones and neurotransmitters, so adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol. And then what we used to do in the Dan the caveman was we would either run from the tiger or fight the tiger or hide or freeze, et cetera. And then all those hormones are being used up and discharged. So what’s sort of now is that we’re not having the chance to discharge or use those hormones or respond in a way that there’s a physical or somatic release. So those hormones and stay sort of circulating in our body. So long-term cortisol is a pro-inflammatory hormone and we know with levels of high cortisol, it affects hormone production inflammation. So now if someone pulls in front of us into the traffic, we don’t know if that’s a tiger we’ve got to run away from or if it’s just literally someone’s pulled in front of us in traffic, our body responds the same way
Lorne Brown:
Even though there’s no survival benefit.
Michelle McCosker:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s right.
Lorne Brown:
The body is responding that it’s threatened like you’re saying, but there is no survival benefit and we have all these hormones. The other one I always think about when you talked about the cortisol and it long-term becomes pro-inflammatory. Also, cortisol impacts our blood sugar levels, which can affect not only your mood but reproductive health as well, right, in cardiovascular health.
Michelle McCosker:
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s also been shown that that stress response influences our immune function. So secretory IGA, it’s another measure that we’ve used in clinical trials that that’s our first line of defense for our immune function. And there’s lots of things that can influence that, but long-term stress or stress that’s not discharged can influence the creary iga. So there’s a whole lot of other things going on physiologically that then in turn that affect our physical health. So if it goes on and on and it’s not processed or discharged, it’s going to show up somewhere else and it shows up in our bodies.
Lorne Brown:
And I always think the analogy I liked is that it’s kind of like a combustion car that every once in a while when you want to pass somebody and the RPMs going to the red, they say it’s actually healthy, good for a car to every once in a while floored and get the engine going. But if you drove for two hours with the RPMs in the red, you’ll damage the engine. And for human beings, we’re okay and we can adapt to a little bit of stress. Stress happens, we either fight or flight and then we recover after the zebra at the drinking hole will shake off the stress or two ducks in a pond after they fight, they’ll fla and shake it out to release the rest of the stress. For some reason in human beings, if we’re constantly thinking about the event, we keep reactivating our body no survival benefit.
And that’s like we’re driving the car with a high engine RPM. And if this happens weeks, months, years, then it starts to create poor health and these inflammatory hormones and gene expression changes and blood sugar changes and blood flow changes and this isn’t great. And so EFT is one of those tools that takes us out of the alarm state sympathetic into that parasympathetic rest and digest breed and feed. And so most people, a lot of people are like, it just sounds so simple and silly. You’re saying these expressions and you’re tapping, but you’re involved in some clinical research. And when I read your bio, which ones are you directly or indirectly involved in? Can you talk about what you guys have seen? I saw the EFT for cancer patients. Do you know what kind of studies have been involved with the cancer patients and what they were looking and measuring and what they saw?
Michelle McCosker:
So with the cancer patients, I was one of the facilitators on that trial. So I worked alongside a psychologist and we both facilitated that the measures were things like quality of life anxiety, so it was all very subjective type measures and questionnaires from those participants, which some people say, oh, well that’s not a big deal. It’s not hard data and it’s too subjective. However, I mean if you ask the people involved in the trial, they felt amazing and that it was worth every session that they attended. So in research it’s still important to have those measures for people and we found that everyone had an improvement in all of those measures.
Lorne Brown:
And then what about chronic pain patients? What kind of research did you guys do in that?
Michelle McCosker:
So with that, there was a few different measures there. Actually, I forgot to mention with the cancer patients, we did measure blood pressure and sali cortisol. So speaking of cortisol, we measured that. So everyone had a reduction in cortisol after every single session. So we measured it. So and then at the end of the session, we measured it again. So everyone had a reduction in cortisol.
Lorne Brown:
I think that’s important because your colleague that you’ve done a lot of research with, and now I know a good friend of yours, Peter Stapleton, I remember in her podcast with us and reading her book, there’s not just these subjective things that you mentioned with the cancer patients where you feel better and people want to feel good, people want to feel good emotionally, physically, when you do feel good emotionally, you can handle the physical stuff much better actually. But you guys have measured stuff like changes in the amygdala, I believe changes in cortisol levels, changes in gene expression, A hippocampus changes like the wiring of the brain. So you are measuring objective data too now with EFT to show that not only the patients are experiencing their perception, the reality has changed and they’re having a different experience of their physical symptoms, but you’re able to objectively measure certain markers to show that something is happening in the body and in the brain, correct?
Michelle McCosker:
Yes, absolutely. So with the chronic pain trial, the things we measured there were heart rate variability and the more variability you have in your heart rate, the healthier that is. And what it demonstrates is your body’s ability to recover from a stressful situation and that directly then feeds into vagal tone. So with the heart rate variability, we were able to check the vagal tone of the participants and some people from Dr. Steven Porges team assess that, analyze that information. So yes, we found that there were improvements in that area. And then the functional MRIs were also done with some participants. So what we found the areas of the brain that were affected by pain, there was a change, a positive change in those areas of the brain. That’s pretty cool. See that we’ve actually got images of those FMRI scans if anyone’s interested. We can provide those to people just to have a look at them because it’s pretty cool to see.
Lorne Brown:
So as we move forward and talk more about EFT, I just wanted to share back when I started in the early two thousands when I got trained in EFT, I was always a little embarrassed or felt silly doing this technique because there wasn’t a lot of data back then. But now we have some really good research and data and so I don’t feel so silly anymore doing this. Nice. When you have something to support at the evidence, you’ve also, I dunno if you have anything added about the pain patients that you did research, but OCD as well. So you saw some results in that as well.
Michelle McCosker:
Yeah, so those results, we haven’t got those because that was quite recent. Same with the musician trial, the OCD trial. I didn’t facilitate that, but I coordinated that. And so Joan Kayla facilitated that. The questionnaires were very similar to the cancer patients, but the feedback that we received from the participants, so we haven’t got the actual data yet to talk about, but the feedback from the participants was that they had seen dramatic changes in their OCD behaviors just after that trial.
Lorne Brown:
So with emotional freedom technique, I have this approach, I call it conscious work in my clinic. It’s a form of energy psychology where I have this approach, notice, accept, choose again, and I really like EFT because it has a notice component exposure therapy where you bring up the issue and then accepting is I love the tapping and leaning into the uncomfortable feelings using tapping to really accept how you feel rather than running away from your feelings. And then we go into choose again. And what I think is happening is when you notice and accept and when we really surrender to how you feel, it drops you into the present moment. And I think from our other podcast guests as well, is we are tapping into consciousness our higher self human potential. There’s your spiritual quantum biology, quantum physics idea, my limited understanding on a materialistic level, you’re taking people out of that sympathetic into that parasympathetic from high beta brainwaves overwhelm into alpha detached relaxation.
And that parasympathetic is the rest and digest, also known as the breed and feed nervous system. And so I believe this is how it helps with the healing and reproduction and other things in life and people feel good. So when we have resistance, we call it cheese stagnation, Chinese medicine, stress friction, we have resistance. We don’t experience flow and receptivity and life feels like a struggle. It’s uncomfortable. And when we lower the resistance, which happens when you’re present, when you’re conscious, fully present, the resistance lowers and allows flow and receptivity and you tap into your higher self. I’m curious how you see EFT and then how you’ve incorporated this into your, because I know you do a lot with reproductive health fertility using tapping.
Michelle McCosker:
Yeah, yeah. So just to speak to that model of your three steps, the choose again, part is people often try and do the choose again before they’ve done the other two steps and which is in tapping, if you’re trying to choose again or you’re trying to positive tap before you’ve done the other steps, it just doesn’t land and it doesn’t stick. So the choosing, again, how that shows up in tapping is once you’ve done the tapping, the client is able to then have that cognitive shift and they’re able to come up with their own reframing of the situation. So it opens up possibilities of what they can do. And that feeds exactly into the choose. Again, it makes it easy and it’s not existence, it’s not hard work to think it’s having a pile of rubbish and spraying air freshener on it, and the air freshener is trying to choose again, the positive affirmation, whereas if you’re not looking at the garbage first and taking the garbage out, it’s never going to stick.
Lorne Brown:
Absolutely. And you know what some people say, you probably have this as well, is they’re like, well, I don’t want to imprint this negative thought or belief anymore. I’m afraid to look at it. And that’s not the case and I have an idea why, but I’m curious your thoughts on this. How do you answer that when somebody says, I don’t want to feel my negative feelings or go to that traumatic, I don’t want, if I think about it more, then I’m going to make it more into my subconscious and printed and I’m trying to clean it up. So how do you see it with EFT, why it’s okay to do that? So
Michelle McCosker:
With really heavy emotional experiences and traumas, there’s, within EFT, there’s 48 different techniques to apply. So as a practitioner, you have to learn all those thoroughly and then with experience which technique to apply to which situation. So if someone has got quite a big trauma, I’m not going to make them sit there and talk to me about it and relive the whole experience. There’s particular techniques to apply so they don’t even have to talk about it, and it helps to their body to process and release on what’s been sort of stuck there for them. So that’s sort of the first way to answer that. Secondly, it might be, I don’t want to talk about this conflict I’ve got with my neighbor or my sister over and over again. I’m done with talking about it. The difference is that if you’re just talking about it, you are going to just create more neural pathways.
You’re just going to keep laying down those neural pathways and you really solidify that. The difference is that if you’re tapping at the same time and you’re focused on the issue by talking about it, and you can even just imagine it, if that fits the client I’m working with, that’s how we’ll go. So by doing that, you’ve affected the area of the brain that that issue is creating problems in. And then by tapping at the same time, it sends the signal to that area and helps to almost unravel that neural pathway so that it’s creating the space for that flow for new neural pathways to be created. So the tapping and talking is the actual key to resolving those issues. It’s the talking alone that is reliving and solidifying it. And there’s been dismantling studies done on that where just talking, just tapping and talking and tapping, and what came out on top was the talking and tapping, which is the process that we use commonly.
Lorne Brown:
I love how you explain that and it kind of is aligned with this metaphor or analogy of you can’t talk your way through these issues. You can’t think your way through to talk your way through it. It’s a felt sense experience. It’s a body-based therapy, which EFT is, and I often understand it this way. So you’ve given us kind of a little bit of a science idea of the neuroplasticity, right? Exposing it and tapping on it so you can change those. You’ve probably heard the expression, many traditional cultures say light can transform the darkness. So if you bring light to the darkness, this is how you transform and transmute it. And I’ve come to interpret it myself. That light is as awareness and darkness are those uncomfortable feelings, those unconscious programs that don’t serve you anymore. And so the difference is when you just think about an issue and you’re at the effect of it and you’re experiencing it and you’re believing in the story, then you are continually laying down those neural pathways.
You’re at the effect of it. You’re the egos eating it because you’re believing in the story. And if you go and talk to somebody about it and you’re like, this is what’s happening to me and you’re believing it and reliving it, then I think you’re imprinting more with tapping. And how I use my notice, except choose again, approach is the light is awareness. So we’re bringing up these old memories again, but we’re witnessing them. There’s a conscious aspect and you have a facilitator to not believe in the story and help you not believe in the story. So we’re actually interrupting the story and we’re using tapping as part of that process. And this is how we interrupt the story. So we interrupt you believing in it, which stops it from being laid down that way. And as we’ve both shared, when the amygdala calms down, cortisol levels are reduced.
I believe you tap into presence your higher self. So resistance is dropped. Now you’re in a place where you can choose again, you remove the garbage and now you get to lay down new neur networks. So it looks similar. You’re still feeling the uncomfortable feelings, but you’re witnessing yourself feel these uncomfortable feelings versus being fully at defect of it. So when you’re fully at defective it, you’re in it, you’re experiencing it, and you’re at the effect of it. When you do something like tapping and you bring light to the darkness, light being the awareness, the difference here is you’re close enough to it that you still feel it, but you’re have enough distance that you can actually come up with a new solution, a new perception to it. That’s my understanding and how I often like to explain it,
Michelle McCosker:
And it brings to mind a point of that it can be really tricky for people to tap on some of these things on their own because the body wants to keep you safe. And so if they start to associate and they haven’t got a skilled practitioner to keep the distance and keep them safe within the techniques they’re applying, it can be really tricky for people to tap on their own to resolve these issues because your body just won’t let you go there. So as I train people to become practitioners as well and mentor them, and we insist that anyone training to be a practitioner does their own personal work using EFT because it makes you a better practitioner, you’re applying it to yourself. But in those circumstances, we want them to be working with either another mentee or with a practitioner or a trainer to work through those things. So even I’ll call up a colleague and go, Hey, you got some time to do some tabbing. There’s something I’m just not getting past. So being able to identify that and to hand it over to someone else to take care of you. So often people are trying to just do things for themselves and there’s a lot of healing can happen when you hand that over to somebody else.
Lorne Brown:
Yeah, well, I love both. There’s this, I love EFT as one of my mod tools to teach. You’re just sharing. You get to use it on yourself. And then yeah, you need to see a facilitator sometimes for some of those issues to help you not get so caught in the story like somebody else not to believe in the story. Here’s another metaphor, sorry, analogy for you is it’s like having a trainer. I can go to the gym three times a week by myself an exercise, but out of those three, it’s nice to have a trainer one of those weeks because sometimes I just don’t feel like exercising and I come up with an excuse and I don’t push myself as hard because yesterday I did this or tomorrow this is happening, or I saw I’m going to cut my workout short. It’s just a little uncomfortable and I just don’t feel like working out that hard.
When I have my trainer, they push me even though I don’t want to do it, they make me do it, and I’m so glad I hate them while they’re training me, but I really grateful when I finished the session and I did it. And so I think sometimes when you’re doing your transformative healing, you totally can use this tool on your own. And it’s nice sometimes to have a facilitator for some of those bigger issues that you just need support with, find a way the ego finds a way, I’m just too tired today or I’m going to be gentler today. So it’s nice to have a facilitator for some of those things.
Michelle McCosker:
And as you mentioned, what I truly love about this is that I don’t tap on my clients, they tap on themselves and they copy off me. So they’re mirroring what I’m doing. And the beauty in that for the client is that they are learning how to use it for themselves so that away from sessions, they can use it in their day-to-day life, it’s kind of a bit of first aid. They can use it with their kids or their family, and it’s really empowering that they know can, hey, I can regulate myself when I’m not sitting in front of Michelle. So that’s what I think is really beautiful about it.
Lorne Brown:
Love it. Yeah, I’m glad I’ve learned it and it’s been fun chatting with you about EFT. Now you have a pretty good sized practice working with people trying to conceive, and I’m curious, how did that happen from your background in getting into the fertility and kind of share a little bit about what you’ve been doing with your clients and how that turned into a little workshop program over six weeks, and then we can talk a little bit about what we’re planning.
Michelle McCosker:
Okay, so as you mentioned before, I was a naturopath prior to being an EFT practitioner. And my area of specialty was fertility, fertility and pregnancy. I
Lorne Brown:
Know that Michelle, I didn’t know that was what you’re doing as a naturopath.
Michelle McCosker:
Yeah, yeah. And so I knew all the tests to order and I knew what to look for and the case history and how to work with this person. We’d have really great changes in numbers and health. The things we could see was getting really good changes in, but then people just still couldn’t fall pregnant. And I’m like, there’s something missing here. And I mean, it wasn’t only fertility I was working with, it was sort of everything I was seeing that in. It was like there’s not complete resolution. The goal was often not being achieved. Part of the goal was being achieved, but maybe not the whole goal. So there were definitely people falling pregnant, but there was still a group that weren’t, was just baffle me and it’s the stuff that we can’t see that makes the biggest difference, which is all of that, the nervous system and all of somebody’s history.
So that’s when I came across EFT and how I started using that with my clients was to be working with their current emotions about not being able to fall pregnant and all the stuff that comes with that. I’m the one having to change my diet. My husband’s not having to do anything different. This is my fault. There’s something wrong with me. I won’t make a good parent because I didn’t have that model to me when I was growing up. So all of those things. So starting to work with the current problems for people and getting through that and then it would lead quite organically to all of the other stuff from the past. So that’s the great thing. We’re tapping too. Our body has the answers and tapping helser, the amygdala and the hippocampus work very closely together. So the hippocampus has got all the memories there and it will provide the answers to us as we tap.
It helps to bring up the places we need to go. So then working with all the past staff, so how they were raised, their views on parenting, all those sorts of things. For some people it was stuff that when they were younger, perhaps they had an accidental pregnancy and decided to terminate. So they were then blaming themselves. It was because I did that now I can’t fall pregnant. So there’s so many different things to consider for people and really understanding who they are and how they got to where they are was a big part of that. And as I started to clear these things for people, there was more people, more success rates. So I was like, how can I reach a bigger group with this?
Lorne Brown:
And then you had your program, which we’ll talk about however, I want to unpack a few things that you said. One of the things is because it’s been my observation as well and experience, people come in with their fertility struggles and organically by the third session, if not before, we’re not working on trying to get pregnant so much as old trauma, old memories, old stuff. And in Chinese medicine where I love EFT to bring it into the acupuncture sessions on a few levels. One is the acupuncture is great at inducing alpha parasympathetic, it’s like training clinical and therapy. It to me, it’s one of the awesome ways to induce that self-hypnosis state where you’re suggestible. In Chinese medicine, fertility is all about flow and receptivity. And if you have cheese stagnation, you don’t have the free flow of qi. And emotions are the number one cause for cheese stagnation, which we would show up as unexplained in fertility.
Oftentimes all my levels look normal. Why am I not getting pregnant? And you have experienced that. You did all the physical, and when you really started to clear these unconscious programs, the resistance in the body, which we call cheese stagnation from the emotions that the issues get trapped in the tissues. When these get cleared and released, there’s flow again. And this can support all health and creativity including reproduction. And as you shared, most people start to bring up old memories and old stories that they get to work on. And so that’s been your experience that after a few sessions, people are working on stuff pre 12 years old, I bet, right?
Michelle McCosker:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And they don’t even realize, and it’s beautiful to watch when people say, I had no idea that that impacted me that way because nobody ever acknowledged that for them at the time what that meant for them and what they might’ve been going through. So yeah, I feel so privileged to be able to work with people in this way and to see all those things come up and to be processed for ’em so they can move forward.
Lorne Brown:
Some of the research that you guys have shared, there’s a research and I’m wondering what’s the ideal treatment dosage do you find once a week if you could choose time and money was an issue once a week or twice a week. And what’s the expectation on average for people is two sessions, do it for four weeks, eight sessions or once a week for 10 sessions. Curious what you have found clinically. And sometimes what we do clinically is not, I see people once a week and I say five to 10 sessions expectations if my schedule’s full, so I can only see people once a week to fit them in. I would rather do twice a week for three weeks or four weeks and then move to once a week. But my schedule doesn’t always allow it. I’m curious, what do you think is the best way to bring this form of natural safe intervention EFT, into a practice?
Michelle McCosker:
Yeah, so some people, clients say, can I come twice a week or two or three times a week? Just people are in a state of desperation sometimes wanting to have a baby, so they just want to get through and it done to that. I say to people, my job is to keep you safe and your body feeling safe. And that’s the problem sometimes in people’s bodies don’t feel safe enough to conceive. So three times a week or two times a week for eef t would be too much. So ideally once a week is absolutely ideal for anyone. However, the timeframe is still something that alludes me because based on somebody’s history and what they’ve been through, that can even be different. If someone’s had a big trauma in their life and someone hasn’t, the person who’s had the big trauma, they might need less sessions than the person who hasn’t.
So it comes down to actual that vagal tone resilience and what they’ve been through in their life and the tools that they feel they have currently. So that part really alludes me. But ideally, once a week is great. And with my program, I made that six weeks because that’s kind of a minimum for most people is six weeks. So I did six weeks and for a program, it’s sort of a good commitment sort of length. But within that program, there’s some people that don’t fall pregnant, but there’s a lot of people that do. So six weeks was a good marker, but some people continue on after that six weeks just doing one-on-one sessions. So yeah, the crystal ball part. Yeah, I know I can’t answer.
Lorne Brown:
Yeah, we don’t know how, just like you said, some big traumas, the big event may not have created so much trauma in the body. So it’s not the situation that determines the trauma, it’s how you experienced it and perceive it and how sensitive you were coming into this world. And people have heard me say this with many guests that I’ve had on for these podcasts. A common thing for people to feel abandoned and traumatized is being picked up late from daycare. So if you’re sensitive, that could be really a traumatic experience, whereas somebody else, it wouldn’t affect them at all. Now there are certain traumas like a physical or sexual abuse, doesn’t matter whether you’re sensitive or more resilient. Most people that’s going to traumatize them regardless. But we don’t usually look at the event to determine how traumatizing is. It’s just as your individual makeup and whatever reason how it gets perceived in your nervous system.
So in your six week program, what do you go over? And I want to share with the audience that we decided to co-facilitate. So we’re running, Michelle and I are going to run this together and I’m going to incorporate some of my notice except choose again in there. And we’re going to bring in diet and lifestyle and lots of tools that we have combined to support people on this journey. But I’d love to hear a little bit about what you’ve done thus far so people can know what the building blocks are. And then as you and I have been discussing, we’re going to add to this.
Michelle McCosker:
So initially it’s all about just learning the technique basically, so that from week one you can go away and apply regardless of what’s going on. And it might not be using any dialogue or any words, it might just be tapping and breathing, but initially it’s just about here’s the tool so that you can, from week one, start using it on your own. Then from there we go through all of the things that common emotions and feelings that people with fertility issues go through. And it’s interesting, the group concept is in this space is I think part of the therapeutic effect being with other women and in that group and being able to share and talk about different experiences and emotions is a really important part of that. And that’s how I’ve been running them. So yeah, just working through those common things, like I mentioned a few before in that they didn’t have a great experience growing up themselves, that there was disarray within the family unit in some way, shape or form.
And now that they’re embarking or creating their own family unit, that association is creating blocks for them. So that’s another experience, things they’ve been told and beliefs that they’ve created through that process. So for some people it’s just not feeling good enough as a general core belief for them. And now they’re limiting belief as an adult is I don’t deserve to have a family. I’m not a good person. Sometimes there’s religious things that come into all of those beliefs as well. Particularly I mentioned before about if someone, for whatever reason, their choice was to terminate a pregnancy, they might’ve been too young or there’s a whole lot of things that come into that. There can be a lot of guilt around that. So guilt is a big one. Guilt, fear and shame are some pretty big emotions. We’ve talked about this,
Lorne Brown:
We’ve talked about this, and just for those, we’re talking about reproductive health, but in my practice I see fertility, but I see people not trying to grow with their family and fear guilt and shame. I’m not a lovable or not good enough. This is just no matter what your ethnicity is, cultural, socioeconomic, when you distill it down as a species, it seems like we are carrying collectively fear, shame, guilt, and not enough.
Michelle McCosker:
And sometimes we’re carrying that without any exposure to those things ourselves because there’s a whole other issue of intergenerational trauma. And so when, well,
Lorne Brown:
You got to elaborate on that, like what So intergenerational trauma, as in your ancestors, some people say up to seven generations, but how can we count this? But you come into this world not with a clean slate, you’re carrying some karmic debt basically. And we know this through research, epigenetic research where they’ve done in mice and they looked at Holocaust survivors that the children, their epigenetics are impacted based on the trauma that parents and grandparents and great grandparents went through. Correct?
Michelle McCosker:
Yes. Yeah. And I suppose physiologically, what’s happening there, and I focus on three generations, most people can handle that when I have used the word ancestors and seven generations, people start to go, oh yeah, righty. I work with the three generations. So when my grandmother was pregnant with my mom, so my mom and my grandmother, that connection and then when my mom was forming in utero, she created, she had all the eggs that she was ever going to have in her lifetime. And that’s part of me.
Lorne Brown:
I want to emphasize that for those people go, this sounds like nonsense. This is really important. So for Michelle, so Michelle was there, the egg part of you was there inside your mother when your mother was a fetus inside your grandmother. So the grandmother is carrying her mother and the mother, she’s female, she has her ovary with her eggs. Which one of them became you? So there is realistically we can say that all three of you were there together at one point in time.
Michelle McCosker:
And if that’s too much for people, we sort of bring it a step away and say, okay, well when my mother was pregnant with me when I was an actual baby, not just an egg, all of the stress hormones cross the placenta and they’re in the bloodstream. So there we know that this has a direct influence or stress. Hormones in pregnancy influence the health outcomes of the babies. So there’s so much there that sometimes we can’t explain. And like I said before, it’s the unseen things that are having the biggest impact.
Lorne Brown:
Have you ever seen this cool little study? And I dunno if it was a study, but they have the ultrasound hooked up and they have a couple kind of screaming, yelling, and they can see the baby react and then they smash plates and the jerking of the baby. And it was showing just to show how the mother’s emotional experience in her environment is impacting the baby in real time.
Michelle McCosker:
And again, it fits into that unseen. The baby’s inside growing. It’s not external. So people can more easily understand that if there’s a child in the room and that’s happening, yes, that’s going to affect that child. But when it’s a growing baby, people don’t really think about that as much and what might be going on.
Lorne Brown:
So in our workshop, we’re going to provide tools for people to help transform their fear, guilt, and shame in these programs. I don’t deserve to have it all or I’m not lovable for enough and transform that into what I call the choose again programs that they, I am worthy and I do deserve to have it all and to feel more free and confident and joyful and gratitude
Michelle McCosker:
And then they’re in flow and then all these things can happen and their body feels safe enough. So it’s that question I can say to someone, do you feel safe enough to have a baby? And they’ll say, yes, I do. I don’t feel under threat, but it’s does your body feel safe enough? And that’s what we’re working with, not just that the things we can see in the person, it’s the body and all the cells.
Lorne Brown:
And when it comes to conscious fertility and our podcasts, the Conscious Fertility podcast, having people like you on my intention has been when we heal, we heal the planet. And I’ve heard from friends and people, Vanessa La Pointe, who’s been a guest on our podcast that if we heal in one generation, if our children get attached through conscious parenting, through attachment parenting, then they get their needs met, that unconditional love, and then they don’t need to use drugs and alcohol or joint gangs or suicide, right? In one generation we can heal. And so to do that, people that are trying to conceive are going to do whatever they can. And conscious fertility is one of those things, or tapping fertility is one of those things to support this process. What I like about tapping for fertility and the conscious work that I like to facilitate is I believe the intention here is you’re going from conscious fertility to conscious conception to conscious pregnancy, to conscious parenting.
So the fertility ends up being your wake up call. It brings you to do the conscious work and you start to heal these old traumas and you get to release these trapped issues in your tissues. So the chief stagnation is dispersed and now you have flown receptivity again and these synchronicities in life happen. And regardless if you have a child, then hopefully you’re in a conscious state and you’re able to attach to your child so his or her needs get met. And if you don’t conceive, you are still okay because you found this way to tap into a part of yourself that you haven’t been before. It feels so good to be in flow and receptivity. It does not feel good to feel stagnant, to feel the resistance in the body when you don’t get what you want. And when you’re able to fill that up inside without needing it from the outside, it feels really good. And so I’m so excited about us doing this together. Whoever comes, I know they’re coming because they’re hoping to conceive and grow their family. My agenda, and we’ve shared this off camera, our agenda is everybody benefits whether you have child or not, you will feel good.
Michelle McCosker:
And I’ve had clients say, because they’ve had such a fear about how they were going to cope in life, if they can’t fall pregnant and to have people say it’s going to be okay, no matter what happens, I’m going to be okay and I’m still going to survive and I’m still going to have a happy life even just to come to that cognitive shift that can open up the possibility to fall pregnant. But if it doesn’t, like you say, they’re still going to be okay. And they really believe that now because of the work that they’ve done.
Lorne Brown:
So I want to just direct people to a few things that we brought up here. First of all, if you’re interested in joining Michelle and I in this workshop that we’re going to run online, so it doesn’t matter where you are, then you can check out the show notes or go to my website Lornebrown.com and I’ll have information for you on that. So just contact us. Michelle’s website will put in the show notes as well. Michelle, can you just say it though so we have it verbally?
Michelle McCosker:
Yes, it’s Nurture Health Solutions,
Lorne Brown:
Nurture Health Solutions, and I mentioned at least your colleague and good friend Peter Stapleton. So she has a podcast on here on EFT. Also, you mentioned the vagal tone and Steven Porges. I want to let our listeners know that there’s a really good episode on the Conscious Fertility Podcast with Steven Porges. Check that out. As well as other EFT guests if you want to learn more about EFT. And also I mentioned a little bit about conscious parenting. I have a few experts of Vanessa, Le Point, Gordon Neufeld, Deborah Mac, Manara on there on unconscious parenting. For those that already have children or want children or whoever been a child, then I think it’s a good listen to that one as well. So I just wanted to give a shout out for those podcasts that you may want to listen to. Michelle, is there anything you wanted to add or share with the audience before we wrap up together today?
Michelle McCosker:
There was one thing you mentioned before about in healing the old traumas and one of those traumas can be their own birth. So the person that’s trying to fall pregnant, they may have had a traumatic birth. And so that’s something else I do in my work with a different process and matrix birth reprinting. But the clients that I do that with, it can change the pattern for them. It’s breaking that cycle and so their next time that they’re giving birth, it can change their whole laboring experience. We tend to have similar laboring experiences to what our mother had or what our experience was being born. So that’s another key one that can change outcomes like birth outcomes for people as well. So yeah, with the listeners, just have a think about if you have had a baby already, how similar was it to your own birth, because we take that on as well.
Lorne Brown:
That is excellent to hear and I’m glad to be able to share that resource with our listeners. So check out Michelle’s website and if you’re interested in the workshop that we’re going to co-facilitate, you can contact me to find out more information. And so Michelle, thank you so much for making time to chat today on camera for our listeners, you and I get the geek out here and there, and it’s nice to just talk to you as well for the podcast. So thanks for joining me today.
Michelle McCosker:
It’s been my pleasure. Thanks so much.
Speaker:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Acubalance.ca. That’s Acubalance.ca.
Lorne Brown:
Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites Lornebrown.com and Acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.