Ep. 30: Lissa Rankin, MD – The Importance of Following Your Inner Light to Recovery

00:00 – excerpt from the episode
01:10 – intro (listen to discover a little more about your host. Martin will tell you a new lesser-known fact about Dr. Maya)

01:48
Dr. Maya Novak:
It takes courage and confidence to trust your intuition when it’s telling you to quit a career you spent years building. And it takes wisdom to know what that inner voice is trying to tell you when it’s time to heal so you can choose the right path.
You might have noticed that I love talking to medical professionals who effortlessly bridge the gap between science-based modern medicine, and non-conventional and traditional approaches to healing. Dr. Lissa Rankin is a great example and truth be told, also one of my favorite authors and a very well-known speaker, who also trains other health professionals in how to connect those different approaches and serve their patients better. She was a part of my Mindful Injury Recovery World Summit in 2019 and I’m glad that I can share this conversation with you on my podcast as well. Please enjoy.

02:47
Dr. Maya Novak:
In this interview, I’m joined by one of my favorite authors, Dr. Lissa Rankin who is a physician, TEDx speaker, founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute and a New York Times best-selling author. Lissa helps people connect to what she calls the Inner Pilot Light, which makes your body really right for miracles. At her institute, she trains physicians and other health professionals on how to connect all the benefits of our western medical system with all of the wisdom of traditional medicines, energy healing, and spirituality to truly offer a whole health approach to their patients. Lissa, thank you so much for being here.

03:31
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
It’s a pleasure. I’m happy to be here.

03:33
Dr. Maya Novak:
Before we really go into the healing and how to heal in the best possible way, could you share a bit about yourself. Why did you become a physician?

03:46
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Well, I grew up in the medical world. My father was a doctor and I was a bit neglected, and so I started going to the hospital with my father when I was very young. It was kind of a way to get my father’s attention. He was very busy in the hospital. And I had that kind of healer archetype early on. By the time I was seven years old I was sort of known in the neighborhood as the squirrel girl because I would – I was the one that people would bring injured baby squirrels to and I would nurse them back to health and then take them to wildlife sanctuaries to let them go when they were healed. So I kind of had done that working with animals until I was old enough to go to medical school. I never really questioned any other field, even though I’m very creative. I’ve been a professional artist and a writer from the time I was very young, but I never really thought about those as careers. I was always on my way to medical school, so I didn’t start to question it until much later.

04:44
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm-mm. What led you then to explore beyond just the conventional approach to disease and healing? Because I read in your book, Mind Over Medicine, about your health struggle and my question here is also do you think that your sort of, say poor health, needed to happen in order for you to then change to find your other calling, to learn, to grow?

05:15
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Well, I was trained in a very conventional way. My father was a very sort of scientific skeptical scientist who didn’t really – who wasn’t open to anything that he called woo-woo. I was also raised in the church with people who were very Christian. So there was no kind of in-between meeting place in the realm of conventional medicine or conventional religion. So I really wasn’t exposed at all to anything outside of those realms of science and religion until much later in my life. So I wasn’t raised with hippy parents or any of that. I went to schools like Duke University and Northwestern, so I was very much steeped in academia and religion. I left the church when I was 18 because the principles of what I was being taught in the church just really didn’t resonate with me. There was a lot of – at least in the way that I was raised – a lot of judgment about things that were outside of the realm of what my family, or what my religion was expressing. For example, that gay people were going to hell, or that Jewish people were going to hell because they hadn’t chosen Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. None of that felt true to me, so I left the church quite early when I went to College. So it wasn’t until – by the time I was 30 I was kind of slowly brainwashed in the academic scientific approach of medicine. By the time I was 33 I was taking seven medications for a whole host of health conditions that my doctors were telling me I was going to be dependent on those medications for life. I didn’t know any better, so I didn’t question that all. It wasn’t until I was pregnant with my daughter when I was 35 years old and I started experiencing what I didn’t have the language for at the time, but which I now call moral injury. Moral injury is a term that was invented to describe the kind of integrity breach that happens with soldiers, for example, who are following orders to do what they’re told to do by their commanding generals, for example. But they know that they’re responsible for killing innocent women and children as part of following the orders. So they return with a kind of trauma that’s kind of a soul-sucking, like really deep desperate pain that comes from knowing that you’re doing the wrong thing and feeling helpless to do anything else. I knew that healing, for example, requires time and presence and love and touch and safety and it’s extremely hard to do healing work when you have 40 patients a day on your schedule. When I started my practice as an OB-GYN I was expected to see 25 patients a day and by the time I left my job when I was 36, I was expected to see 40 patients a day. Which means often I was double booked in 15-minute slots, which means I had seven and a half minutes to do healing work. You can’t do healing work in seven and a half minutes. I could tell from talking to my patients that often the presenting complaints that they were coming to me for were not the root cause of what was going on. Like they’d come in complaining of PMS, for example, but when I’d start to dig into their lives they were in an abusive marriage, they had put aside their dreams to support their partners, or a partner was violating them physically. There were boundary injuries happening right and left and it was manifesting as PMS, but clearly, that was just the thing on the surface. If you started spelunking into the depths of what people were experiencing you just hit trauma after trauma after trauma in my patients. There’s no time to even address the trauma, much less heal it when you have seven and a half minutes.
So the whole sort of biomedical approach that treats the body like a machine of parts that need to be treated biochemically started to fall apart for me when I started to get a sense of how much people’s traumas were linked to their physical symptoms. I started to feel that sense of moral injury when I knew that I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t go there with my patients, and if I did start to go there then I had to leave. To be able to open up people to the place that is actually hurting deep inside and then to have the nurse knocking on the door because you have five patients waiting in the waiting room and getting angry at you for being late was just intolerable to me. I had this sense that it was related in some way to my own illness and my own trauma. It wasn’t until things got bad enough and I was about 24 weeks pregnant and I was actively suicidal. I just couldn’t tolerate the feeling of knowing that there was a different way to practice medicine. Like intuiting – I didn’t know it because nobody had ever taught me. But intuiting that there was a different way to practice medicine and feeling completely helpless to know how to do it. I was – as so many people seem to find their inner truth on the floor of the bathroom or hear revelatory voices from God or such – I was literally on the floor of the bathroom 24 weeks pregnant with my daughter and I heard this voice that said sweetheart, you’re going to have to quit your job. I had no idea where the voice was coming from. I wasn’t raised believing in such things. I felt this sweet tenderness in this voice because my resistance – I was like god, I can’t quit my job. I’m paying the bills for both of us. My husband wasn’t working. I have a baby on the way. I went to school for 12 years to learn how to be a doctor. Doctors don’t just quit. The voice was so gentle. It said you don’t have to do anything about it right now; you just have to make peace with what’s true. I could feel this flood of relief coming through my body because it just had the ring of truth. It felt true. I also felt terrified. So it took me another two years to actually leave the hospital and that began a whole other journey that I wrote in my last book. It was called The Anatomy of a Calling. It’s the story of that very mystical, magical, and challenging journey.

11:44
Dr. Maya Novak:
Beautiful. Well, I can imagine how stressful it was in the office. So would you say – you mentioned moral injuries and how you actually found your second calling. Would you say that injuries – and here at this Summit we are talking mostly about, of course, physical injuries - would you say that they happen for a reason? Not like that someone is being punished, but more as a wake-up call?

12:16
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Well, I think – first of all, I don’t know, right. I mean that’s for each of us to identify individually. I get a little triggered when anybody ever tries to label and tell somebody else what their experience is because it’s so personal. It’s really a kind of an individual journey. But I know in my own life, for example, I was injured a year and a half ago. I was attacked by a pit bull. It took a six-inch chunk out of my inner thigh that was about an inch and a half deep, and I was looking at this big hole in my leg and decided to not go the emergency room because I’m a doctor and I knew how to treat it. I wouldn’t recommend that for everybody, but it was my intuitive knowing that putting an open wound in an emergency room full of antibiotic-resistant bacteria was not really – that was not what my particular body needed. So I know for myself, it’s very empowering to go into inquiry about the injury, to try to ask my own – I call it your Inner Pilot Light – but your inner wisdom, your deep knowing, your inner healer, whatever you want to call it. Why did this happen to me now? I mean it looks like I was just an innocent bystander watching the sunrise next to a very peaceful young man who was holding his dog on a leash, and the dog just struck me like a snake completely out if the blue. So on one level, I’m a victim of an unfortunate circumstance that was unavoidable and not my fault. On another hand, I don’t believe that things are random. So the inquiry for me was why here, why now, what was happening that made me a target? There’s a quote that I like by A.H. Almaas, I’m going to read it to you right now. It helps me to actually believe that this is true for me, but I’m not suggesting that it’s true for other people, so I think it’s very individualized. The quote is: “Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They are specifically yours. Designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going in the right direction unless there is something pricking you in the side telling you to look here, this way. That part of you loves you so much that it doesn’t want you to lose the chance. It will go extreme measures to wake you up and it will make you suffer greatly if you don’t listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose.”

15:03
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes. I love this quote. I completely agree with you that we are all on these journeys and we have to figure things out for ourselves. My injury, I terribly fractured my ankle six years ago, and I took it as a wake-up call, but that’s my journey. But what you said, yes, it’s about discovering and also asking yourself the powerful questions that you shared.

15:36
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
So for example – let me just give you an example from my own situation. When I went into deep inquiry, which for me deep inquiry means spending time in silence with my inner pilot light. Like really tuning in to like why did this happen. We’re meaning-making machines, so our minds will try to make up a story all the time and that’s what minds do. But I didn’t want my mind’s story, I wanted to really prioritize deep listening to my own soul. Like is this part of my soul growth and here we grow again. What am I supposed to learn here? It’s a long story, so I won’t get into the details of it. I’ve been blogging about it on my website lissarankin.com and I wrote a blog specifically about the pit bull injury, so if anybody’s listening who wants to read that story, you can just Google Dr. Lissa Rankin: pit bull, and it’ll probably come up! But for me specifically, that was the beginning of a whole journey that led me to doing weekly trauma therapy around boundary injuries. Like literally I had a boundary injury. Literally, I had my skin violated by an animal. I was prey. I had this sense, like the next day I had a tick on my nipple and I was like oh my god, am I broadcasting I am prey, come eat me? I had many – going back in my history – I was seeing that many times I had been somebody’s prey. I was a victim of domestic violence. I was held up at gunpoint by two masked gunmen. So what is in my system that is broadcasting Lissa is prey?! It scared me. It certainly scared me enough to wake me up. So it motivated me to start weekly trauma healing therapy. I’m using a modality called Advanced Integrative Therapy, which was designed by Asha Clinton, who is my therapist, and who developed the model. She’s a very interesting being. She’s a 30-year Sufi mystic in addition to a former Princeton professor who has a Ph.D. in Jungian Psychology and is also an energy healer. So she’s like fully credentialed in every realm. She’s 75 years old, she’s been doing this a long time and she’s developed this trauma clearing modality – and I say trauma clearing because there are a lot of people that label themselves as trauma therapists, but talking about trauma doesn’t clear it. So cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, can be helpful but it doesn’t clear the trauma. We now know from some of the newer psychological modalities that trauma can be cured. We used to think people who had trauma in their systems were damaged goods and that you could maybe give them some tools to improve their functioning in the world, but they are kind of going to be carrying those traumas for their life. Now we know that’s not actually true. Trauma is actually curable, but as long as we carry those traumas, and they can be small traumas – I’m reading a book right by Mark Epstein called The Trauma of Everyday Life. For me, I didn’t have the like big T traumas until later in adulthood, for example when I was held up at gunpoint. My childhood was really benevolent, but I did have those traumas that were boundary injuring that made me at risk of boundary injuries. So it’s been almost two years now since the pit bull injury that I’ve been in therapy working on clearing those traumas to make myself less vulnerable to injury. So on one level, you could say, well it was an accident, it was unpreventable and unavoidable, and Lissa was just a victim. That may be true, but it feels much more empowering and hopeful to me to believe that it was actually a wake-up call to try to get my attention to the fact that I was carrying these boundary injuring traumas in my system and therefore on some metaphysical level, participating in having my boundaries injured again. So that was my particular point of view for my journey, but I like I said, I can’t translate that somebody else’s journey. That’s my inner pilot light guiding my experience.

19:54
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes. I completely agree with you. Like you said before, it’s a journey and every person has to figure things out for themselves, or discover what is their truth. So we cannot just say copy paste this and you’re going to be completely fine or not, right?

20:14
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Yep, but I want to give you the end story of the pit bull injury too because the doctors had said that the injury would not close without surgery. That I would need multiple skin grafts and possibly transplants and that they would have to sort of prepare the wound beforehand. So it was going to be months and months of different surgeries. When I checked in with my own inner pilot again, which again, for me the process of making that connection and knowing how to interpret guidance is a deep one and it’s the primary thing that I teach. My latest book is called The Daily Flame: 365 Love Letters from Your Inner Pilot Light, which is all about what that means, to connect to your inner pilot light. But when I checked in for myself, my inner pilot light was saying nope, we’re not doing surgery. This is not my path. And again, it might absolutely be somebody else’s path. I really believe that in traumatic injuries or acute illness, like western medicine is sometimes the best medicine on the planet when we have an accident. But in my situation, it was obvious to me when I checked in with myself that my body was going to heal this and it did. So the wound is fully healed and fully closed now. It took about four months and I ended up – my mother was dying – I ended up going to Africa two weeks after having this open wound on my leg to take my mother on safari as part of her bucket list. So people thought I was a bit crazy and it was quite hard to sort of stay in the vibration of trust and faith in my inner pilot light that my body knew how to do this, but it did. So that is for me a lot of what I teach, like in my book Mind Over Medicine and such about how each individual patient needs to make their own intuitive decisions from that deep place without letting other people pressure them into – or even listening to somebody who says well your body can’t do that. Well how do you know, it’s not your body? So I think we just have to continue to reinforce that it’s extremely individualized and the only way any individual who is listening to this is going to know what’s right for them is to be able to deepen that inner trust, that inner connection with what’s right for you now – in the now. In the now – and there’s no rules. It’s really a moment-by-moment journey. And as you said, it’s a process. So if we go into an injury with that intention of okay, this is a process. I feel scared, I feel victimized. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I feel angry. Whatever feelings that you feel, I think we can’t forget that and I’m not into doing the spiritual bypass where something traumatic and horrific happens and we say oh, I’m going grow here, this is so great. Well yes, and it’s so scary. It’s so traumatic. Like they’re both true. So it’s being able to hold that paradox so that we don’t skip the painful feelings. I also was extremely terrified. I had a big hole in my leg. But I’m grateful for what I learned and it certainly has informed my research for what will probably wind up being my seventh book, called Sacred Medicine.

23:18
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes, well it’s definitely really hard in that moment to say oh, this is perfect, this is beautiful, when we are in such physical or emotional pain. It’s much easier to look back and to maybe decide then, oh, that needed to happen. But when we are in that moment, it’s really hard to say, yeah, great, let’s do this, right?

23:44
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Well I think it’s – yes, I think it’s, again, we’re in the realm of paradox because it’s – we can all look back at difficult things that happened in our lives, times of great adversity. I know, for example, the time where I was suicidal and trying to decide whether to quit my job. My father was dying, and my brother was in the ICU in the hospital in acute liver failure as a side effect from an antibiotic he had taken for a sinus infection, and my dog died, and my husband cut two fingers off his left hand with a table saw – all in a very short period of time. I could’ve – at the time it felt like the worst experience of my life and in retrospect, it changed the entire course of my future. So I think – like I think of the Steve Jobs from the Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005 – he said you cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever – because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference. And I’ve been doing this and kind of following the dots moment by moment based on the guidance of my inner pilot light for, I guess it’s been 13 years now. So now I have a kind of confidence that when something that seems horrible happens, in the moment I can actually tune into the gratitude for what I’m going to learn at the same time as I’m feeling all the painful feelings. You can hold them and it becomes a kind of life rope. Like you wouldn’t ever go searching out an experience like getting your leg eaten by a pit bull, but if it happens and you suddenly find yourself with a big hole in your leg you can also - at some point you say all right, there’s something beautiful that’s going to come out of this and it’s a mystery to me. So now I’m on a treasure hunt to try find the treasure in all this. I can say almost two years later I’m so grateful. I found Asha Clinton. I’ve been doing this trauma therapy and so many beautiful things have been happening since I’ve been healing my boundary injuries. So thank you for this gift of my love is one my mantras that a swami gave me once, that if you’re in pain you almost fake it until you make it, and chant – actually my friend, Karen Drucker, who’s a musician wrote me a little tune to go with the mantra so I sing it myself. When I was in the bathtub with this fresh pit bull wound using the shower head to clean my own wound, I was singing “thank you for this gift of love, thank you for this gift of love” over and over and over for like three hours. It literally took away my pain. So it’s a kind of spiritual bypass that allowed me to kind of enter into an altered state that let me get through that acute experience so that I could start doing what needed to get done and calling in the support that I needed to get through this process. But I come back that mantra whenever anything painful happens in my life, not just illness or injury, but relationship stuff or professional disappointments, or car crashes, or whatever. At some point, that part that loves you so much that it will create adversity that you learn what you hear to learn for your kind of earth school curriculum, there’s going to be something in it and it’s an invitation to discover the gift – and without bypassing - without bypassing the pain.

27:32
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm-mm. I have so many follow up questions to everything that you just said! [chuckles]

27:38
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
That was a lot, I know, I’m sorry! [laughs]

27:40
Dr. Maya Novak:
No! That was a lot but it’s perfect. You said that an operation or surgery wasn’t your path. You decided that for yourself that this was not going to happen for you. My question here is, what would suggest or what would you advise someone who is just in fear mode? Something terrible happened to them and now they are in this fear mode and they are just going, okay, the doctor said that I have to do this, so probably that’s the best thing. Would you say to just take a couple of deep breaths maybe and then think? How to go from this fear mode to connecting to your inner pilot light that you so often mention?

28:34
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Well this is why we do spiritual practice, right? We practice so that when we’re in an emergency we already know how to do it. So trying to get out fear in the middle of a crisis, that’s too late. We need to be practicing so that we’re - you know – if you wake up and it’s just an ordinary day and you’re doing your spiritual practice, whatever that is, whether it’s meditation or yoga or dance or tantra or whatever your path – contemplated prayer, whatever your path. This is why we practice, so that when we’re in crisis – because that’s the like Ph.D. level, right. So it’s not time to go to kindergarten when you’re in the middle of a crisis. We practice so that – I’ve already been practicing chanting “thank you for this gift of love” so that when the crisis comes, I’m practiced. I think it’s going to set people up for disappointment if they think that the minute they have an injury they’re going to be a yogi master knowing how to handle a crisis. No, we start in kindergarten, we start practicing, and maybe we just start our spiritual practice for five minutes a day in the beginning so that we’re masters when a crisis comes. Then this is a life path, this changes everything. I’ve written a lot about this. Like I said, my latest book The Daily Flame is really about that practice of tuning into the inner pilot light, of getting familiar with that part so that that’s the part that will comfort the scared part in a crisis. But if you have no relationship with that part of you, that part that’s not apart, then you’re going to feel lost in the moment of the crisis. I wrote another book called The Fear Cure that’s a bit older and less up to date on sort of where I am in my own philosophy and cosmology, but it’s also very practical about the link between and fear and disease and sort part of the path of stepping out of it. It has a lot of actual practices. I also did an online program called Connect To Your Inner Pilot Light, which is very practical – like 30 actionable practices that you can do to start practicing these tools so that when you are in crisis, there is – you have things to call upon. So that’s my long answer to your question, but I would say the sort of short answer is first of all when your doctor says this is what you have to do, you don’t have to do anything. So pause. People will try to rush you into making a decision. For me, if I don’t get a clear yes from my inner pilot light, then the answer is not yet. So I’m thinking, for example, when get diagnosed with cancer and there’s so much anxiety and fear on the part of not just the patient but on the part of the healthcare providers that it’s like pressure. We’ve got to get you into treatment right away before it grows, but that’s the wrong approach. If you’re feeling pressured to make a decision, then you’re not given the space to listen to your guidance. So the first thing I would say is just press the pause button and make a prayer. Like a really sincere prayer of I don’t know what’s best for me. I’m not practiced in connecting to my inner pilot light. Help me. Make it obvious. Make it clear. Show me a sign. Send me some guidance. Send me a dream. Send me a synchronicity. Send me the person who knows how to help me through this. Whatever it is that’s going to support me, please help me. Really humble yourself before that mystery because if we think we can control it with the mind – if we think we can make the outcome that we want to happen by thinking about it we’re completely off base. [chuckles]

32:27
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yeah.

32:28
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Yeah. So just giving yourself the space, just a little space to acknowledge that there might be more than one way to treat any crisis, and your way is the way that’s going to work for you. There’s no – like I said – I have no rules for that. So when my ex-husband, for example, cut two fingers off his left hand with a table saw, that was a very significant scary injury. Thank god Dr. Jonathon Jones is a microsurgeon that was able to put those two fingers back on and sew back on every little artery and nerve and bone and skin. I don’t know any shamans that know how to do that, so to me, that was a very holy kind of sacred medicine for him to get the surgery. Then when it was my turn, it very holy medicine for me to go to an energy healer and go to a conventional doctor who taught me how to use collagen bandages to help my body repair itself. So I used a little bit of everything in my own journey and it was very, very personal.

33:35
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm-mm. Yeah, this is very interesting what just said now. One thing that I would love to discuss with you is when an accident happens we usually go to the doctor, or if a surgery is necessary we have a surgery, and then we are – well, that’s my experience – you are sent home and you wait. Then in six weeks, you have an appointment, but that’s more or less it. So my question here for you is, is it important, in your opinion, to deal with healing from any type of injury with a multidisciplinary approach so that you combine support from doctors, or therapists, or spiritual leaders? And if it is, how can this positively affect the body?

34:37
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Well I think it’s very important for us to understand the different medicines that exist in the medical toolbox, right. So that may be scientific technology from people that are working with the biofield, for example, that’s some interesting medicines that I’ve been studying - working with vibrational healing, for example. Or it may be trauma healing therapy like I’m doing with Asha Clinton and AIT, or Internal Family Systems and IFS. Or it may be conventional medicine working with drugs or surgery or physical therapy or rehabilitation techniques around the sort of more conventional approach. Or it may be working with an energy healer, a shaman, or a spiritual healer, like some of the Balinese healers that I went to work with in Bali, for example. There are all kinds of medicines out there and they’re different. They work differently to treat different situations. So I know, for example, that a lot of people with chronic pain as the result of injury, they respond very well to mind-body and energy healing kinds of modalities without narcotics, right. So that’s really interesting to know that there are certain approaches that are particularly good for chronic pain. Then there are other approaches that seem to work really well for aggressive cancers, and there are other medicines that work really well for autoimmune disorders. Nobody has – from what I can tell – nobody’s really written a lot about which medicines outside of the conventional medical system, which medicines seem to be working best for which kinds of conditions. So that’s – I’m seven years into research a book I haven’t published yet called Sacred Medicine where I’ll be specifically trying to break that down. But I think that’s why, short of any book you can read that will give you guidance on those sorts of things, we have to just trust that there is something that knows what’s best for you and there are hundreds and hundreds of medicines out there that most people aren’t even aware of. So it can be a bit overwhelming. People are constantly sending me this new modality and that new modality, and I just don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with all. So I’m not going to be able to be the sort of curator of every type of medicine on the planet, and many of the medicines that I have come into contact with – there’s a ton of shadow. There are people out there who are total charlatans. There are people that are just – yeah, greedy and corrupt. And there are people that have no mastery, anybody can put up a website and say they’re a healer...

37:15
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm-mm.

37:16
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
… with no credentials and no experience and there’s no way to tell who is effective and who is not. So there are lots of people out there with no mastery, but who are like genuinely good people. They may bring a healing presence, but they may not actually have any experience in the technique that they’re trying to practice. On the other hand, there are other people who are master healers who are completely corrupt. I mean we have people like John of God who has been doing healing work for decades and just got arrested for I think hundred “me too” accusations.

37:50
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm-mm.

37:51
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
So there’s a whole lot of corruption in the field, which is what can make it a bit risky to know where your money is going to be well invested and where you’re going to be safe with people who have good professional medical ethics. Part of when people ask me, and this is certainly not to suggest that there aren’t many amazing traditional and indigenous healers with no academic experience, there are – but it’s very hard to tell who you can trust. So I often will recommend people, like Asha Clinton or Richard Schwartz, who have an MD or a Ph.D. because they’re also amazing healers who happen to have professional licensure. They’re Board certified, somebody is keeping an eye out over them, and if they are abusing their power or practicing unethical medicine then they at least have a Board that clients can turn them into. I can’t tell you how many shamans – I’ve had to like call the shamans and say stop sleeping with your patients.

38:59
Dr. Maya Novak:
Geez.

39:00
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Yeah, it’s been a bit – I almost didn’t write this book because it’s very dodgy to start going into the territory outside of conventional medicine. I think that’s part of why the conventional medical world is a bit hesitant about getting involved with healing modalities that have not been evidence-based and that don’t have any governance. So I’m trying that walk that fine line and create bridges so that we can acknowledge the traditional healing modalities and some of these unconventional modalities and find where they belong in the medicine bag, but not expose patients to corruption or things that just don’t work. So it’s a bit tricky.

39:44
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes. I completely agree. So you mentioned a few times the mind-body connection, and also mind-body medicine. Can you talk a bit about this? What this is for those who have never heard of this term?

40:04
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Well, it’s an entire field so I would just recommend people Google search it if you’re curious about mind-body medicine. I could talk for an entire weeklong workshop on what is mind-body medicine and how do we practice it. But in general, it includes things like the terms psychoneuroimmunology which is a field that – there was a lot of research done by a scientist Candace Pert, who wrote a book called The Molecules of Emotion.

40:32
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm-mm.

40:33
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
So, for example, when I wrote Mind Over Medicine, it kind of offers a general overview of mind-body medicine. For example, we know that the body has healing – built-in healing mechanisms.

40:52
Dr. Maya Novak:
We'll continue in just a moment. I wanted to quickly jump in for two things. First, thank you for tuning in. And second, I’m sure you have at least one friend, colleague, or family member who would very much appreciate this episode. So share it with them and help us spread the word. Now let’s continue…

41:13
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
The body is meant to self-heal. Every day we make cancer cells. Every day we’re exposed to pathogens, viruses, bacteria, fungi, and stuff. The body is meant to be able to repair proteins that get broken and use the immune system to protect you from pathogens and to fight off cancer and to clear the coronary arteries if they start getting blocked and things like that. So we know this, that the things that go wrong in the body are reversible when the body is functioning properly. We also know that the body’s sort of rest and repair state is when the nervous system is in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is kind of that homeostatic state of the autonomic nervous system. Now, we live in a culture that is an insane culture and full of traumatizing factor, which means that the average American is in stress response which is the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight part of the autonomic nervous system and we are in stress response, on average, about 50 times per day. So every time the nervous system is in a threat response, the body’s self-healing mechanisms turn off. So we’re meant to just be like the animals, we want our fear to be here because we need to be alerted if there’s a genuine survival threat, right. If you’re being chased by a tiger or you’re standing on the edge of a cliff about to fall off your sympathetic nervous system is there to help you fight, flee, or freeze. So that’s good, you want that. It’s what I call true fear and that will – people who are born with that true fear disabled don’t survive very long because you’d walk right in front of a car without even being afraid of it. But the problem with our culture is that most of the fears that people are feeling that are firing the stress response and the nervous system are what I call false fears. They’re just stories that we make up in minds. Like I’m running out of money. Well, how much is actually in your bank account? Like if you can’t – if you literally can’t buy food, then that would be a true fear, right, because you need to eat in order to survive. But if you think you need to have $20,000 in the bank and there’s only $1,000 in the bank, you’re not dying. So the nervous system is firing in stress response all the time. I’ve got to make more money, I’ve got to make more money, I’ve got to work harder. I’ve got to – my partner’s cheating on me. I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve kind to find out whether he has a lover. Like our minds just make up all these stories that put us into a stress response. Then, unfortunately, the medical system doesn’t help. So if there’s a crisis or a medical issue, then even just the way diagnoses are given and the way treatment plans are communicated is very stress inducing. It’s very threatening. People are given scary statistics and such. I run a training program for doctors called The Whole Health Medicine Institute and part of what we do is teach people like a healing way to give bad news. Like how do we communicate with our patients in a way that induces healing rather than activating stress responses and turning off the very self-healing mechanisms that the body’s going to need if there’s an illness or an injury? So a lot of the work that I have done in some of my TED talks that have gotten like four or five million views – and in my book Mind Over Medicine I did two PBS specials about this work - is about working with the nervous system to optimize the chance that the nervous system is in the rest and relaxation response, or the parasympathetic nervous system, so that the body’s self-healing mechanism can do its job. What I didn’t write about as much in those older books, but which I’ve written a lot about on my current blog at lissarankin.com is how trauma, how childhood trauma, for example, small traumas, the traumas of everyday life can continue that firing of the nervous system even if nothing’s going wrong in the present time so that we actually become at risk of disease because of things that happened 40 years ago that are still running like a river of anxiety underneath the current of everyday life. Some people notice, for example, that whenever they go on vacation and they’re not covering up that river of trauma with business, that they start feeling really anxious, or they start crying, or they start feeling all these intense emotions because they’re using their workaholism for example, or maybe other numbing additions to cover up this river of anxiety that’s underneath the system. But that river of anxiety will also predispose us to illness and make it more difficult to recover from an injury. So we can be very proactive in lots of ways, not just from doing things like trauma healing work, but also by identifying things from our current lives that are activating the stress responses. So, for example, if you’re in a job where you have moral injury and you’re taking seven drugs like I was, then you might actually need to get out of that career if you want to get off your medications. I’ve been off all of my medications, by the way, for over 10 years now. So I don’t take any medications anymore, but it took giving up the safety and security of my job as a physician and the status, and all of that and it cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars even to have the privilege of quitting my job. I had to borrow lots of money and became quite in debt. So I had to be willing to take a lot of risk, which was stressful of itself. So sometimes, we have to experience stress in order to clear stress so that we can create a life that your body will love. Anyway, like I said, I could talk for a week about mind-body medicine but that’s the gist of it. It’s making lifestyle changes and paying attention to healing trauma so that we can restore the nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system so that the body’s self-healing mechanisms are activated, and then we can make the body right or miracles, right. Now the body has the opportunity to reset to its optimal level and we never know what the outcome is going to be, but at least we’re setting up the body for success.

47:46
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes, and you know, the article that you mentioned, that was one of my questions that I wanted to ask you, about underlying trauma. You discussed in the article that we can’t permanently cure disease without addressing potential underlying trauma. So if understand you correctly, would you say that it’s the same with healing from injuries?

48:15
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Well, again, I don’t know. I’m making hypotheses when I’m saying these things, and these are hypotheses I can’t prove. So, for example, I’ve met some energy healers that say that illness or injury is like a block in the energy system and that if they do their hands on healing work they can unblock that blocked energy and restore flow, and that the illness will get cured. My theory is that that may work temporarily, but that if there’s still trauma running in a river underneath the whole system then they’ll wind up with some different illness or the illness will come back two years later. That maybe that healer can access some sort of universal energy to kind of override whatever’s going on in the system to sort of bring the system back into closer to its blueprint, but if there’s untreated unhealed trauma underneath, my theory is that you’re still going to vulnerable to something else. Now I don’t know. I’ve met other healers who dispute that. They disagree with me. That’s something I can’t prove. But when it comes to injury I would say definitely there is no harm in doing this kind of healing work. When I say healing work – healing your life, healing your trauma, healing your past. It can do nothing but optimize your outcome. It can’t hurt and it could cure you. So I like to make the differentiation between healing and curing, right. Healing is about restoring wholeness. Some people restore wholeness and still are injured or still have a chronic illness. Other people restore wholeness and the illness or the injury disappears. So part of why I started researching my book Sacred Medicine is I wanted to understand answers to questions that were coming up when I was researching Mind Over Medicine. Like how come if two people have an identical illness and they’re both doing everything “right”. They’re both eating well and working out with their personal trainer, their meditating, they’re going to their yoga class, they’re seeing the best doctors, they’re seeing their naturopath, their energy healer, their therapist, and healing their trauma and following their own prescription intuitively, tuning into their inner pilot light and following one step at a time. One of them gets cured and the other stays sick or dies. Why? I don’t know. I mean I could make up more theories about the soul and it’s kind of aligned curriculum and what is here to teach you and maybe some people choose before they’re even born certain types of adversity of the way to learn certain soul lessons. Maybe some people are here to learn humility or compassion or how to receive help from other people and they’re going to need to have a body that isn’t perfectly able in order to learn those lessons. I don’t know. But that certainly is a deep inquiry for me and I know for many people. I think we want to be able to hack healing so that we can answer all of the mysterious questions and try to control the body. I don’t know that it’s ever going to be controllable, but I do think we can influence the outcome. So my point of view is why not embark upon a healing journey without any guarantee of what the outcome is going to be because the healing journey can do nothing more than make your life better. The potential outcomes of the ways that that can influence your life are so huge. I mean it could cure your illness. It could end your permanent disability in some way. You could have some sort of miraculous outcome which includes your relationships get better, you make more money, your dreams are finally coming true, you’re opening yourself to gifts and talents you didn’t even have access to before as you’re running more of that life force through your system because you’re clearing the blocks that might be interrupting it. Who knows what’s possible? And life becomes much more mystical, magical, fun, and playful. So I always have the part that wants to be able to say here’s what you do, step one, step two, step three – because my mind is very analytical that way – but I don’t think it’s black and white and we just sort of have to trust our own journey and engage with the process.

53:04
Dr. Maya Novak:
And it really is a journey. It’s not something that takes two weeks and that’s it. If you, of course, take it as a journey and like you said, who knows why you need it or maybe why this experience came to your life because it can be the biggest blessing in disguise, but when we are in pain it’s really hard to see that something good might come out of it.

53:31
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
It’s really hard to see and again I want to keep coming back to making sure that people aren’t trying to bypass the pain of it. It’s really hard. Like when I was sitting there with a big hole in my leg it was really hard. Part of me didn’t believe the part that was chanting “thank you for this gift of love”! It was like no, this is horrifying, there’s a big hole in my leg, and I’m going to die, right! [chuckles] And that part was really, really scared.

53:55
Dr. Maya Novak:
True. [chuckles]

53:55
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
So I think a lot about the spiritual teach Ram Dass who started off as a Harvard scientist studying LSD and went to India and was given an Indian name and started teaching as Ram Dass. He had a stroke many years after he wrote a book called Be Here Now that got him really famous. After his stroke, he couldn’t speak or hardly move and part of – he called it fierce grace. Fierce grace – I like this term. But of what he discovered was he thought that people valued him and that his offering to the world was his teachings, his words, and now he couldn’t speak or move. He still was holding meditations, sitting on stage without speaking or moving and thousands of people were still coming to sit and meditate with Ram Dass. So part of what he learned from that experience was that he had value just by existing. I mean here he had taught Be Here Now – “be” here now. It wasn’t about doing. But he needed to actually be unable to do anything in order to actually get that life lesson. So I think we don’t really know what the fierce grace is. What is – how are we going to receive our fierce grace – but if we can be curious, all right, and even just label it. It helps me to label it. Like it’s this injury and okay, this is my fierce grace. What is the grace in this, because it feels just fierce, right?

55:40
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm-mm.

55:41
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
But there’s always grace in it if we’re open to going on an exploration to discover the treasure.

55:48
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm-mm. I know that your words are giving so much hope to people, to injured people who are now listening. But I’m also positive that there might be some who are listening who are losing hope about their healing. So my question here is what would you say to someone who is losing hope about their recovery?

56:08
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Mm. Well, first of all, I think this is why I facilitate - when I’m working with people that are sick, injured, or traumatized – I do kind of parts work using Internal Family Systems or IFS. So I would really want to get to know – I would want those people to become intimate with their hopeless parts. We all have a multiplicity of parts, right, and often parts are kind of at war with each other. So somebody might have a hopeful part, and then they also have a hopeless part and then they fight with each other. Part of – people talk about things like self-love, but how do you do self-love, right? The way that I envision it is that I have my inner pilot light, right, and this is the divine essence of me, like the divine spark, like the spark of consciousness or divinity that is me, but that is the essence that can love all of my parts, and a lot of those other parts might not like. So we might have, for example, a cheerleader part that’s like go you on your healing journey. Thank you for this gift of love. This is so hopeful. I’m going to – my soul is going to grow here. Then the hopeless part might hate that cheerleader...

57:31
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm-mm.

57:31
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
… and it’s going we’re going to die, we’re never going to walk again, we’re going to be in chronic pain forever and it might ally with a suicide part that says don’t worry babe, I’m going to get us out of here if things get really bad, we can just check out, I’ve got a plan. In the Internal Family Systems model, one of these parts needs to be demonized. What Dick Schwartz, the founder of IFS, said is that if you’re not scared of a part it can’t hurt you. So when we can become intimate with those parts and found out why they think they’re protecting you - because they almost always think they’re protecting you. Why would a hopeless part think it was protecting you? Maybe, for example, it just doesn’t want you to get disappointed. It doesn’t want you to get your expectations too high and then feel intense disappointment if you try something that doesn’t work and so it’s maybe you’ve tried things that didn’t work in the past and gotten disappointed and the hopeless part just wants you to quit, thinking that there’s hope. Again, that requires kind of deeper one on one work to facilitate, but that’s what I would be curious about. It’s like become intimate with your hopeless part. Like even sit down and let it write you a letter. Let it write your inner pilot light a letter. Dear Inner Pilot Light, Love Your Hopeless Part. You might discover something about why it thinks it’s protecting you or what it’s afraid might happen if it quit showing up to make you feel hopeless. You can use the same model for any part. Like you might have a fear part. In The Fear Cure, I have a lot of exercises like this using the same kind of thing. You can communicate directly with your fear, become intimate with it. Find out why it thinks it’s protecting you. So any painful feeling that maybe you don’t like, it’s here for a reason. All of our emotions are blessings. They’re all here to support us in some way. There’s another wonderful book by Karla McLaren called The Art of Empathy and she has a whole section on the empath’s guide to emotions. You can basically look up any painful emotions like anger, apathy, boredom, guilt, shame, hatred, fear, confusion, jealousy, panic, and terror, sadness, grief, depression. You can look all of these up and each of those emotions have gifts, and then action that they require, and then an internal question that you can ask about that. So her point of view is similar to Internal Family Systems in that all of those emotions are here for a reason. They’re a blessing. They’re here to try to help us and protect us. So hopelessness is just another one of those painful emotions that is here for a reason.

01:00:30
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mm, beautiful. I love this. We’re coming to the end, but I do have two questions that I ask every speaker. First one is, if you were stuck on a desert island – it’s a bit more of a fun question – so if you were stuck on a desert island with an injury and could bring only one thing to help you heal perfectly or completely, what would that be?

01:00:59
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
A magic wand, of course! I have one on my altar. Like, of course, you would bring your magic wand, right, and it’s really good to know how to use it. So the mystical traditions of all of the world’s spiritual traditions all have a mystical branch and the esoteric traditions all teach you how to use your magic wand. So it’s kind of useful to have a magic wand that you know how to use. [laughs]

01:01:26
Dr. Maya Novak:
Perfect. [laughs] So to wrap up, the last question that I have is what is your number one advice that you would give someone who is recovering from a physical injury?

01:01:42
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Well I think, again, deepening this connection with this part that I’m calling your inner pilot light is fundamental, like the foundational step. I teach a wellness model called the Whole Health Caring in Mind Over Medicine and in a couple of my TED talks. It’s 10 aspects of whole health and healing and the foundation stone of this model, like the bottom part, is your inner pilot light. I’ve put together a lot of resources, many of them are free, on innerpilotlight.com, and you can also find things on my blog, that’s lissarankin.com to help support people in deepening that very personal relationship. I put out a free daily email called The Daily Flame. My new book is called the same thing. It’s just a daily love letter to help people to understand what making contact with this aspect of yourself would even sound like. Obviously, it’s me writing The Daily Flame, so it’s not you writing your own daily flame, but one of the exercises people can start doing is start tuning in. Like making it part of your spiritual practice to tune in and ask your inner pilot light what do you want to hear. What do you want me to know today? That’s how – for 10 years I’ve been publishing this daily email and that’s how it started. It was part of my spiritual practice and then I started publishing and discovering that what my inner pilot wanted me to know was apparently helping other people. So just checking in with your own guidance around what does your inner wisdom need you to hear today, and today, and today, and making it a practice. There’s another very important practice that I describe in detail in The Connect to Your Inner Pilot Light program that is a practice of a kind of spiritual surrender - sort of letting go and letting go of thinking that you can control this situation. Really making it a sincere humble prayer to be guided and allow yourself to be guided. A lot of what I teach in many of books, and my blog, and all over, is about how to do that and like I said there’s more specific details about that in the Connect to Your Inner Pilot Light program.

01:04:01
Dr. Maya Novak:
Beautiful. Lissa, I so enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for being here, for sharing this. I know that your words are resonating with so many people. Thank you so much.

01:04:15
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Mm, thank you. It’s an honor to be here and I’m just wanting to send my love and my prayers and my wishes for healing for everybody who’s wrestling with this. We also have a healing soul tribe that I facilitate, it’s like a monthly subscription service, and it’s specifically for people that are on a healing journey who are healing from injury or illness or trauma. Sort of supporting each other in this kind of inner pilot light led life. So I’m just inviting people to find their – find your own community because we can’t – it’s a paradox. I like to say you can heal yourself, but you can’t do it alone. So find your support so that you are with other people that are really committed to whole health and that healing that is about restoring wholeness because I see every one of you that are listening as whole and healed at your essence and the body may follow when we start to resonate with that vibration.

01:05:18
Dr. Maya Novak:
Perfect. Thank you so much.

01:05:20
Dr. Lissa Rankin:
Great. Thank you so much, Maya. I really appreciate it.

01:05:25
Dr. Maya Novak:
This wraps up today’s Mindful Injury Recovery Talk with Dr. Lissa Rankin. If you haven’t done it yet, subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you’re using to tune in, and share it with your loved ones. As you know: sharing is caring. To access show notes, links, and transcript of today’s episode go to mayanovak.com/podcast. And to learn more about The Mindful Injury Recovery Method visit my website mayanovak.com and find my book Heal Beyond Expectations on Amazon. Until next time – keep evolving, blooming, and healing.