Ep. 38: Nathalie Kelly – How to Heal With the Power of Mind When Your Brain Is Broken

00:00 – excerpt from the episode
00:53 – intro (listen to discover a little more about your host. Martin will tell you a new lesser-known fact about Dr. Maya)

01:29
Dr. Maya Novak:
Every injury is challenging in its own way. I know that many people have the tendency to compare their physical traumas or downtalk them and say “Well, I shouldn’t be complaining since so and so has it worse.” There will always be someone who has it worse but that doesn’t mean that your trauma doesn’t matter or that you don’t matter. You do! I love talking with people who have all sorts of injuries because it helps me understand their challenges better, which also makes practicing compassion and understanding way easier.
One of the reasons why I invited Nathalie Kelly to join me on my summit in 2020 was because it’s so necessary for all of us to understand brain injuries better. And the sad part is that they are often undiagnosed and unrecognized so more people (not just the injured ones but their families as well) suffer for way longer. Let this interview help you and your loved ones.

02:35
Dr. Maya Novak:
In this interview, I’m joined by Nathalie Kelly who is a Recovery Coach and Speaker. She had years of experience as a Board Certified Hypnotherapist, helping people through physical, emotional, and mental challenges, and then in 2010 she suffered a traumatic brain injury and was told by doctors that she would never heal. She refused to believe that because she knew that the healing power of the body is virtually limitless. So, she took all the tools she already had at her disposal and started her journey that went even further than mind-body medicine, and led to a miraculous recovery. Natalie, thank you so much for being here.

03:17
Nathalie Kelly:
Oh, thank you so much for having me, Maya. It’s an honor to be here. I’m so happy to be able to share what I’ve learned with others.

03:23
Dr. Maya Novak:
I’m so excited about this interview because I know quite a bit about your story, and I shared it just slightly at the beginning but I know that listeners are going to get so much out of this. So, before we go into the juicy part, can you share a bit about yourself and how did you become a Recovery Coach, and also then a Speaker?

03:47
Nathalie Kelly:
Yes, sure. So, it’s been my lifelong passion to study healing and mind-body healing. My parents, my father was a wellness educator, so I kind of grew up in a family that health was a priority and learned about nutrition, learned about meditation, and learned about all of these things at a young age. I started an integrative medicine practice with several other practitioners and doctors, and I was the hypnotherapist. So, I got to be the one who – the mind-body medicine aspect of the healing practice, and really addressed people's emotional core wounds, trauma, and saw miraculous things happen with people's bodies and their recoveries through addressing the subconscious and what was going on underneath the surface.

04:38
Dr. Maya Novak:
And then you had your injury or your accident.

04:41
Nathalie Kelly:
Oh, and then I was out sailing one day, taking a lesson in fact, and a huge storm came. The storm was gale force winds, it kept capsizing the boat, I was trying to right the boat, and every time the boat would just throw me 30 feet. It just came out of nowhere, you know. These things come in life very unexpectedly sometimes. And eventually, I was flipped over the boat because I was trying to capsize it and the boat and I together did a very fast somersault, which resulted in a brain injury because it twisted my brain as it spun, and then the boat hit me on the head, knocking out my front tooth. Essentially I was rescued by a Coastguard and went to the Emergency Room because I had a cut on my arm. But I had no idea anything was wrong with my head and was sent home, and just, you know, the next day, didn’t feel so good. I was just out of it. I felt like the ground was still undulating. I felt completely drunk and disoriented, and because of my background, I thought it was all emotional. I thought, oh my god that was so traumatic, right. So, I’m trying to clear the emotional aspects, not realizing that I had a concussion, a brain injury, that the dura lining of my brain had a tear in it and was sheared. And so after lying in bed for a week and doing all my tools, I tried to get to a grocery store and couldn’t function. I remember trying to reach a piece of fruit because I was hungry, I hadn’t eaten, and the grocery store was so overstimulating I couldn’t move my hand. I remember telling my hand open up and pick up that peach and get out of here, and I just – I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. And that’s I think when I knew something serious was wrong, and sought medical help.

06:40
Dr. Maya Novak:
Well, this is not the first time that I have heard something like that. I went to the hospital, I went to the doctor, but there was actually nothing diagnosed or anything like that. What I wanted to first ask you what actually traumatic brain injury is? So, how do you actually know that you have this or what are the signs of this?

07:08
Nathalie Kelly:
Yes, I love to talk about traumatic brain injury because I think all of us need to know about it. It affects everybody’s families. It’s so often undiagnosed and unrecognized and I think we all need to be educated on this topic because they actually don’t teach it in medical schools. Doctors do not learn about brain injury other than the acute phase of what happens after a concussion. After that, you’re kind of on your own and they don’t really understand it. So, the science is changing really fast right now, but I think it’s good for us to be armed with the knowledge. That being said, I’m going to talk about it in the beginning, but then I want to talk about the overall picture of healing to really address all of our listeners and what they’re going through and how they can have tools to help their healing process.

07:54
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes.

07:54
Nathalie Kelly:
So, brain injury - it’s usually a bump on the head or something - you get hit. It’s often caused by falls or accidents and it’s really an epidemic. We hear about it with football players and with veterans, but it’s really an epidemic with our entire population. There’s two percent of the population in America alone is permanently disabled due to a brain injury. A lot of these people end up homeless or in jail. Every single year in America alone 2.87 million people go to the Emergency Room for a concussion or a bump on the head and 90 percent of those are sent home with no follow-up.

08:38
Dr. Maya Novak:
Wooh.

08:39
Nathalie Kelly:
I know – I just got the chills on that one too, right. It’s just crazy.

08:44
Dr. Maya Novak:
That’s a lot.

08:46
Nathalie Kelly:
It’s so a lot, and I think what’s so tragic about this is there’s no follow-up and your brain is injured so you can’t do it yourself. It’s a bit like you’re a newborn baby and you can’t take care of yourself and the doctors kind of just go okay, good luck. And there was no information, there were no resources, and that’s actually why I started my YouTube channel because I couldn’t read, and I had to figure all of this out myself about how to get better and how to get my brain back. I’m so grateful I had an array of tools already because there’s no way I could have figured that out afterward.

09:25
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mhm.

09:26
Nathalie Kelly:
But yeah, so I really wanted to give this information out that I so desperately needed that’s not available, and that’s why I started my Brain Recovery Coach YouTube channel, to spread that word. Often with a brain injury, we think of brain injury and we think somebody might be stupid but it doesn’t affect your intelligence necessarily. It affects the connections between the neurons, which might be severed and not communicating with each other. So, it’s harder to access information. It affects people’s memory, their movement, their senses, their vision, their hearing, their smell, their emotions, anxiety, and depression. The brain is the organ that controls everything in our whole body, and so everything in your body, your mind, and your emotions can be affected by a brain injury - your digestion, your temperature regulation. A lot of us – and I think this is my biggest challenge – to have a challenge with sensory integration after a brain injury.

10:33
Dr. Maya Novak:
Can you talk about this? What this is?

10:37
Nathalie Kelly:
Sensory integration, yeah. I didn’t really understand it until I experienced it myself. I had studied it a little bit for my children as a parent. But what it is, it’s the brain’s ability to process and coordinate what you see and what you hear, and all of the input that’s coming in. That’s like millions of bits of information every single second our brain is processing. So, when the brain is injured and it’s slow, you can’t process any of that. It’s like drinking from a fire hose. So, that experience like going to the grocery store where there were so many sights and sounds and movements around me, I just froze because it was – like I said – it’s like drinking from a fire hose and your brain just cannot process all of it. So, a lot of times, that’s what people are left with after a brain injury is a real difficulty with overstimulation. For me, I couldn’t leave my house for years. I just couldn’t tolerate – I couldn’t interpret the information coming at me and visually there was light sensitivity, there was motion sensitivity. I was dizzy and nauseous and feeling dizzy all the time, but just constantly feeling like your drunk, your dizzy, you're nauseous, you feel sick, and you just can’t tolerate any stimulation. A bit like when you have a hangover and you can’t tolerate any stimulation. So, I would compare it a bit to that.

12:11
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mhm.

12:13
Nathalie Kelly:
Feeling somewhere in between being drunk all the time, and having a hangover all the time! [chuckles] And since I’m not a drinker, neither of those are things I enjoy!

12:21
Dr. Maya Novak:
And this happening 24/7, and so it’s not just something, okay, let me just wait for this one day…

12:27
Nathalie Kelly:
Right.

12:28
Dr. Maya Novak:
… it’s 24/7.

12:29
Nathalie Kelly:
Well, you know you’re done, and so it’s hard when there’s no way out and you’re feeling like this all day every day. You can’t sleep at night. At night I felt like I was freefalling through space. It was just absolutely horrifying, and I have to say it’s the kind of hell that I don’t think you could understand unless you’ve gone through it. But really terrifying and really no support, and what little support you get from the doctors is they say you’re going to be like this forever. Because up until very recently, and most of our doctors went to medical school decades ago and didn’t hear this…

13:09
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes.

13:11
Nathalie Kelly:
… they didn’t hear about neuroplasticity. My brain injury was 10 years ago and I was a neuroplasticity professional as a hypnotherapist, and I couldn’t understand why my doctors didn’t know this. I was like how could you be a doctor and not know about the brain’s capacity to keep changing – constantly. Every minute of every day our brain is changing by the input we give it.

13:29
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yeah.

13:29
Nathalie Kelly:
So I knew – I knew we could heal this.

13:37
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes. You bring such an important topic with that because many times when someone is injured, they first hear a diagnosis and then they hear a prognosis. Many times it’s like, well, the doctor said that there’s nothing that I can do about this, but the reality is that so many things are changing. We do have a huge power within us, but the thing is that things that were taught decades ago, they’re two completely different things. So, I love that you brought that up and opening the mind and eyes to people that perhaps what you hear in the doctor’s office is not necessarily what is going to happen with you.

14:33
Nathalie Kelly:
Yes, and the diagnosis can be very helpful because it can give us the understanding of what’s going on, which can calm the anxiety.

14:40
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mhm.

14:40
Nathalie Kelly:
But the prognosis, nobody has the right to tell us what our future lies. We are the only ones in charge of our destiny and our future and our own power. We can either choose to give up or we can choose to be a miracle. There’s miracles out there all the time, and why wouldn’t we want to be one of those miracle stories.

15:00
Dr. Maya Novak:
Exactly.

15:00
Nathalie Kelly:
So, yeah. What I discovered is that it wasn’t as easy as I expected! I never expected it to be taking this long, and it being so hard. And so many of the tools just helped a little bit but not all the way, and then I needed something else. It’s been a long, long hard journey but I keep making recovery step by step and I really wanted that quantum healing, Deepak Chopra experience of a boom, I’m in spontaneous remission but that hasn’t happened. And that’s okay because I think that the journey itself can be such a learning and a teaching.

15:43
Dr. Maya Novak:
Absolutely.

15:46
Nathalie Kelly:
When we have an injury or an illness it’s like starting on a hero's journey. And when we look at the trajectory of a hero’s journey, we know that you’re in your ordinary life and everything’s going along the way you expect, and suddenly there’s something that happens that propels you out of that ordinary life. And you’re faced with challenges that force you to grow and reexamine your beliefs and open your mind and strengthen your resolve. We all have these moments in our life, whatever it might be that propels that, but it’s a hero’s journey that your listeners are on with dealing with their injuries and learning how to live with either limitations or improve upon what they have. We call coming out of the hero’s journey heroic with gifts to share with our community and a stronger sense of self and more wisdom.

16:46
Dr. Maya Novak:
Absolutely, and it’s not just, oh, just give me the end result and I’m going to be happy. Usually, that journey is what really changes you and just shows you how much you’re also capable of.

17:00
Nathalie Kelly:
Exactly. And I do feel like it’s such a growth opportunity for our soul, for our spirits. I have this awareness for myself, and I don’t know if this feels true for you, but I have this awareness that my soul loves to test its limits! [laughs]

17:17
Dr. Maya Novak:
[laughs]

17:19
Nathalie Kelly:
Like my whole life, I’ve been really tested, and I have a feeling this is like this game my soul’s been playing with me of like, okay, you think you’re limited, you think your box is here, well, let’s see what happens, like we have to stretch you this big! [laughs]

17:31
Dr. Maya Novak:
[laughs]

17:33
Nathalie Kelly:
And like this rubber band game that I keep stretching and stretching and stretching. And I tell you, this time with the traumatic brain injury, I was like oh, you have really messed up this time, you are never getting out of this! And I just couldn’t see it for many, many years – maybe eight years. I was really afraid I was stuck there and I was never getting out.

17:55
Dr. Maya Novak:
Things changed, and one thing that you mentioned a few minutes ago, you mentioned that you had so many tools that you were working with, experimenting, so how did your previous experiences – so you being a Board Certified Hypnotherapist – and everything, all the knowledge that you have, how did that knowledge actually help you with healing? Do you think that it was crucial? Or it was just something that as helping you to get along?

18:30
Nathalie Kelly:
Hmm, such a good question. I believe it was crucial because it gave me the foundation of a belief system that knew the body knows how to heal. The body is so wise and it’s so miraculous, and it has its own knowing how to heal and how to put itself in a perfect blueprint, I call it.

18:52
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes.

18:54
Nathalie Kelly:
And if you’re not healing, if the body’s not healing it’s because there’s blockages there. So, these might be emotional blockages, they might be physical blockages, they might be nutritional, they might be viruses, they might be trauma, they might be past-life karma, they might be anything. But our body knows how to heal and if we remove the blockages we heal. So what happened to me is I had this belief system about mind-body healing, and then it was like, oh my goodness, what happens if it’s the mind that’s part of what’s not working? I didn’t have the ability to focus my thoughts. I didn’t have the ability to observe myself talk. I didn’t have the ability to really do meditation because my – I didn’t have a lot of thoughts, first of all, and second of all, they were rambling all over the place when they were there. So, it really was this expansive experience of realizing I needed to go beyond mind-body healing because who we are is so much bigger than our mind, and who we are is so much bigger than our body. I decided that if I didn’t have my mind to rely upon to steer me through life, I would rely upon my heart because I knew that the heart had intelligence. And I knew that the heart had a larger magnetic field than the brain. And I know that the heart actually sends signals to the brain that the brain always listens to. And the brain sends signals to the heart that the heart doesn’t always listen to. So, I do believe our hearts may actually be the source of our wisdom, and I began to kind of meander my way through life and through the world just by navigating with my heart. That actually has led to a really beautiful life, even with the limitations and the challenges. It is just a very different way of being. Dolphins are electro-sensing, and I feel like I became a dolphin, like an electro-sensing machine. I could feel energy. I could feel energy of people. I could feel energy of food. I could know what was good for me and what wasn’t good for me. It just became a different way of navigating through life. But to answer your question about the tools that I had, I needed so much more! Even though I thought I had a lot, I needed so much more, and there were things that I’ve learned since then – sound healing, and light therapy, and color therapy, and things that really affect our brain function. And even using things like weights on my body. But a lot of things that specific to brain injury that I had no idea, and we’re learning – and we’re still learning. Yeah, so.

21:52
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes. Oh, beautiful. I have so many follow-up questions. So, one of them, you said that you went beyond just the mind-body connection and I love how you explained it that you went into your heart. So, is this the type of thing when sometimes with some sorts of meditations, they guide you, especially with guided healing or healing meditations, they guide you through and draw from your head, from your mind to your heart.

22:27
Nathalie Kelly:
Mhm.

22:27
Dr. Maya Novak:
Is this what you are describing here? Or can you share a bit more about this dropping into your heart?

22:35
Nathalie Kelly:
Yes, the Institute of HeartMath has a tremendous amount of information. They’ve been studying the intelligence of the heart for many decades now. Because I knew that before, it was something I could really rely upon, that knowing and just use this practice, this time of healing as a way of practicing that. It’s really about thoughts – we hear with this law of attraction that thoughts create reality and I actually think it’s not necessarily thoughts – it’s feelings, it’s vibrations, and feelings are vibrations that we’re putting out into the world. So, for example, one of the things that I had done after my accident was to put affirmations all over my house. “My body is a beautiful healing mechanism.” “I love my brain”. “My brain is perfectly healed”. I put them all over my house and I repeated them constantly, but what I was feeling inside was this oh, terror and sadness and grief that I had just lost my entire life. I lost my ability to walk, talk, and drive and do my work. There was so much trauma both from the accident and from the partner who left me, and from every day trying to cope with this new body, that that was the vibration I was in. I was in a vibration of fear and all the positive thinking in the world is just not going to do anything if you’re in this frequency of terror and trauma. So, what happened in that situation is I just attracted more traumatic experiences to myself and I didn’t know how to get out of it. So, that’s where things like the EFT really come in handy – the tapping, the energy techniques, the ways to move feelings through our bodies because feelings are just – they’re just energy, right, and energy wants to move. Emotion means energy in motion. So, the ways I had moved my energy in the past, or my emotions, were through exercise and I couldn’t exercise. I used to read inspirational books and I couldn’t read. So, all of the things that I kind of relied upon to shift my emotional state were lost to me. And so it took a long, long time to be able to shift my frequency and my vibration into a joyful place again.

25:14
Dr. Maya Novak:
Oh, I so agree with you. Because you can try to make yourself believe something but if inside of you, you do not feel it, you can do all of the affirmations and all the positive thinking but if there is something that is unresolved or that is stuck in your body, it’s going to be a blockage.

25:42
Nathalie Kelly:
Mhm.

25:42
Dr. Maya Novak:
You can be the most positive and optimistic on the outside, but what actually matters with healing – I don’t know if you agree with this – is what is actually happening inside of you.

25:52
Nathalie Kelly:
Absolutely. That’s exactly right, and it’s so important to just go into that place. Go into that feeling and allow yourself to feel it because what we feel we can heal. What we tend to is push it aside because it’s uncomfortable. We tend to like go, oh, I don’t want to go there, I’m afraid. I’m afraid if I look at that I will never come out of the grief. I afraid I will never come out of the sadness or the fear, so I can’t even open that door.

26:19
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yeah.

26:20
Nathalie Kelly:
But what we find… yes, go ahead.

26:23
Dr. Maya Novak:
How I usually explain this to my clients is like imagine that you are having a child with a tantrum. If you’re going to ignore that child and look away and be like oh, I don’t want to have anything with you right now because you’re having a tantrum, the child is not going to be really happy. You really have to turn to that – whatever is happening – so that you can heal it because otherwise, we’re just like oh, no, everything’s fine and I’m pushing it aside.

26:55
Nathalie Kelly:
Exactly.

26:55
Dr. Maya Novak:
It doesn’t work.

26:57
Nathalie Kelly:
We need empathy and validation for our feelings. Our feelings are powerful. They’re beautiful tools. They’re our guidance system for guiding ourselves through life. But when we just shove them away, we’re dampening down our intuition and our guidance system. What I’ve learned is when you really feel a feeling; the amazing thing is it doesn’t last. What makes it last is resisting it. It’s like what you resist persists, right.

27:23
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes.

27:23
Nathalie Kelly:
So, the more you resist feeling the grief or feeling the sadness or feeling the fear, the more that feeling is just going to stay with you for years until you’re willing to turn around and allow it.

27:37
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mhm.

27:37
Nathalie Kelly:
They just want to be allowed, and when we feel them, then they’re gone.

27:42
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes, exactly. And sometimes – this is how I see injuries – they’re just great opportunities to also heal something from the past and to release something that was stuck and this might be the only way that you push yourself to that limit to actually look into it. Because otherwise, you are just busy with to-do lists, with working, with exercises, with everything, so that you don’t have to feel. Then here it is, an injury that pushes you gently but firmly to that.

28:26
Nathalie Kelly:
Mhm, it’s such an opportunity, isn’t it? It’s such an opportunity to heal the wounds that we’ve been carrying around. I actually think there’s nothing more important for us to do than the inner work because the outer life that we have is going to be reflective of the inner life. So, when we change the inner, the outer is going to change. Yes, so healing the past – there’s a wonderful study called the ACE Study that Kaiser put out - I think it’s 17,000 people they studied - it’s Adverse Childhood Experiences is the name of the study. It’s so fascinating if you look into it. It shows that kids who have adverse childhood experiences and trauma from their childhood, they have more cancer, they have more diabetes, they have more heart disease, they have more injuries, they have more accidents, they have more – like every physical thing you could come up with they have more of. And it’s not necessarily a huge traumatic event. It could be just a constantly not feeling safe in their family, constantly just putting their nervous system on edge. Because then what happens because you’re a little kid is your hypothalamus – I mean the fear center of your brain, your amygdala, and your memory center develops off balance…

29:49
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mhm.

29:50
Nathalie Kelly:
… because you can’t control your fear. So now, you’re constantly in this fight or flight syndrome, which isn’t where we heal, which isn’t where our bodies get into regulation. When we build a system on this fight or flight system, it makes us more susceptible to injuries and illnesses. So, this is probably true of most of the people listening to this that are dealing with physical issues. It’s important to go back do the inner work and the healing of those emotions.

30:21
Dr. Maya Novak:
So true. Do you think that if someone is listening now, and yes, they are hearing that and perhaps they are opening to this idea for the first time – I want to go a bit further and ask you do you think if you didn’t do the inner work that you would heal the way you did?

30:41
Nathalie Kelly:
No, I don’t. Funny, I just got a real – I wasn’t sure how I was going to answer that, but it was very clear. It was like no; it’s that my gut feeling was there would be too much stress in the system. And stress, we know, is what attributes to 90 percent of our physical issues. So when there’s all that stress in the system, we can’t heal. We have to go – there’s two main branches of our nervous system, right. There’s the sympathetic, which is fight, flight or flee, which so many people in our culture are kind of stuck in all the time right now because we’re always so rushed around. There’s so much adrenalin pumping through us. Then the other branch of the nervous system is the parasympathetic, and it’s where we heal, rest and digest. So, if we want to heal, we need more time in that parasympathetic nervous system. We need to do the inner healing. We need to do the meditation. We need to do whatever brings us a relaxed nervous system and greater peace.

31:45
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yeah, and resolving emotions is in that part because perception also matters.

31:51
Nathalie Kelly:
Mhm.

31:51
Dr. Maya Novak:
So, it’s not necessary – especially with serious injuries, yes, you are probably not in your car on a highway being really stressed out, being at work with perhaps a boss that you don’t like or something like that. Even when you are at home, how you are perceiving things, what kind of thoughts you have, what emotions you have, this is also where stress comes in.

32:21
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah. It’s observing our self-talk I think is a really crucial aspect of recovery and of life in general, actually.

32:35
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…

32:57
Nathalie Kelly:
I used to teach a workshop called the Journey into Self Love, and boy, I thought I had this self-love thing down, you know. It took me my entire life to get there! But I grew up with a really perfectionist parent and this brain injury has taught me so much about just really accepting who I am because there’s no way I’m going to be perfect. There’s no way any of us are going to be perfect, and I can’t even try anymore. So, the self-talk is important. What so many of us do when we have an injury or an illness is we are hard on ourselves and we judge ourselves constantly. You know, I’m busy and I stumbled, and I’m clumsy and I broke this dish, and burn everything that I ever cook. The self-talk, it’s so important to observe that. If we spoke to our dogs the way we speak to ourselves, like what would your dog do? It would just like cower under the couch, just like afraid of you, right. Or our children, you know, we would never talk to a child like that if they were having a hard time. We would just encourage them. So, it’s crucial to learn how to speak to ourselves and to say I love you and make “I love you” the most common thing we say to ourselves, like all day long. I love you, I love you, I love you, you’re doing great, you’re doing fine. Talk to yourself the way you would talk to a two-year-old, and that is so healing. One of the things I used to do when my brain would freeze and I would be paralyzed and I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t move, and I’d be stuck in crazy places on sidewalks and dangerous neighborhoods. I just used that as an opportunity, finally when I could focus on it, to send love to my brain. And I would just go, oh brain, I love you. I know you’re having a hard time. You’re going to be fine. You’re okay. You’re doing your job, just keep doing it. We can do that for any part of our body that’s having a hard time. Just send it love, that’s what it really needs. Love is the ultimate healing power.

35:13
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes, absolutely.

35:13
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah.

35:14
Dr. Maya Novak:
I love that you mentioned “I love you”, that you tell this to yourself. I mean I don’t know what your experience is, but in my experience, especially when you do it for the first time, it’s not the easiest thing. It’s something that it does …

35:32
Nathalie Kelly:
No, you feel like a liar! [laughs]

35:35
Dr. Maya Novak:
The first time, it was years and years and years ago, I read one of the Louise Hay books and there was this exercise to stand in front of the mirror and say to yourself that you love yourself. The first time, I could not do it. It was just like I physically could not say it. And then after a few tries, when I finally said it, I cried…

36:07
Nathalie Kelly:
Oh.

36:08
Dr. Maya Novak:
… because probably it was really the first time when I heard – like really saying I love you. So I don’t know, what is your experience saying it to yourself, I love you.

36:16
Nathalie Kelly:
Oh that’s so beautiful. I think you’re absolutely right. It’s not something we’re ever taught to say to ourselves. We’re taught to criticize and judge and be harsh to ourselves, and so the neural pathways related to judging and being critical of ourselves are very firmly established. But we know with neuroplasticity our brain is instantly changing whenever we have a new thought, a new feeling, or a new input. Our brain is literally creating new connections. It says, oh, I want to create that highway. So, if that highway of I love you has never been created before, it’s going to take a little time to pave the road and to repeat it and to just, one stone a time, lay that new highway down. It takes repetition and consistency. And when we make that the most common thing, we say to ourselves all day long, we’re building that new neural pathway, and that new neural pathway of “I love you” becomes our new inner reality and then it gets reflected at our outer reality. So, there’s no out there, out there, right. Everything’s a mirror of what’s happening inside of us. So, the more we love ourselves, the more our life is going to work. People are going to want to be around us. We’re going to have more joy. We’re going to have more friends. We’re going to have more connections, more business success, and more health. It’s just paving the road for all of that to say I love you.

37:53
Dr. Maya Novak:
Because we are changing the vibration that we are putting out, so we are attracting more of the same vibration.

38:02
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah, exactly. It’s quantum physics. That’s how quantum physics works.

38:07
Dr. Maya Novak:
I love that we talked about love, and love you, and all of these positive emotions. Now, when it comes to injuries, to accidents, there are also a lot of negative emotions. Like frustration, fear, or anger and so on. What were your most – when you were recovering or at the beginning – the biggest emotional challenges for you?

38:34
Nathalie Kelly:
There were so many. I had post-traumatic stress disorder. I had a tremendous amount of trauma in my body. There was a lot of anxiety because I couldn’t tolerate stimulation in the world and I didn’t know when my brain was going to just give out on me. And there was incredible depression and just many, many years where I just couldn’t stop crying because I thought how am I going to live, you know. I came to this planet for a beautiful purpose and I want to contribute and make the world a better place, but how do I do this if I can’t get out of my house other than making a YouTube channel! And I can’t even feed myself. Gratitude is crucial, and during those hard, dark years of the hero’s journey, the dark night of the soul, I could not find gratitude for anything and it shocked me because it had been a lifelong practice. I usually had this fall back on gratitude for vision because I love colors and I love sights and I love beauty, and I just always had that as a fallback when I couldn’t find something. It’s just great when it’s just like – to be able to see, what a gift. But my vision was so altered and so distorted and so nauseating I couldn’t even be grateful for vision. I was that depressed. And what I finally learned to be grateful for, with the help of a mentor, was to be in the position of receiving. So, everybody had to take care of me, which I felt terrible about and I really value competence and independence, and it just pushed my boundaries of wow, how do I allow people to just take care of me. It’s hard for all of us. What I learned to be grateful for was to be in the position to expand my capacity to receive. So, I know that the world is a beautiful abundant place when I’m coming from “I love you”, and so if I don’t have what I want in my life it’s my own limitations to receiving. I think we all damp down our ability to receive and we’re not – we’re terrible at it! We’re absolutely terrible. I mean people can’t even receive a compliment. They’re like, no, no, no. Right? [laughs]

41:06
Dr. Maya Novak:
[laughs] Yes, it’s a compliment like you look beautiful today. Oh, no, you know, this dress that I have is just not right or whatever, so.

41:14
Nathalie Kelly:
Exactly, exactly, I know. So, to be in a position because of your injury or your illness where you just to receive is actually a huge gift because you’re expanding that container. You’re expanding your limitations into a greater capacity to receive from the universe through other people. To me, that was really a turning point where I learned from a mentor to focus on being grateful to be in that position.

41:49
Dr. Maya Novak:
Oh, I love this. One of the tools or techniques that you mentioned a few times is the Emotional Freedom Technique, and I would like to ask you, would it be possible – because since we talked about emotions and with injuries there comes so many overwhelming emotions. Can we tap? Can we do a session of tapping on overwhelming feelings and emotions?

42:16
Nathalie Kelly:
Yes, I would love that. I love the Emotional Freedom Technique. It’s such a beautiful way to help us move through these emotions as they come up, move them through our body, heal our nervous system. It works for pain, it works for dizziness, it works for just anything you can tap on, tap on it. I think what I’d like to do like you said, is to just kind of guide through a session.

42:45
Dr. Maya Novak:
And I can be your echo voice repeating after you.

42:48
Nathalie Kelly:
Oh, great. Good, okay. One of the things I like to do before doing the tapping is to just kind of close your eyes and tune into your body. So, if everyone online can just do this. Just notice if there’s uncomfortable – or a feeling that you can access right now related to your injury or your illness. Just notice where it is in your body, and notice on a scale of one to 10 how strong it is. So you’re really kind of measuring what it is in this moment and accessing it because the key the Emotional Freedom Technique, I feel, is to actually allow yourself to feel that feeling. We’re not pushing it away. We’re allowing it. We’re facing it. Then you can open your eyes and everybody’s got a little bit different way of doing it, so I’ll just do it my way. Now, we’re going to start on this karate chop point on the side of your hand, and we’re going to say, “Even though I’m scared to feel these feelings…”

I deeply love and accept myself.
Even though these feelings feel overwhelming…
I love and accept myself.
Even though I’m scared to feel all of these feelings related to my injury or my accident …
I know it’s safe to begin to relax…
and I love and accept myself.
And then we’re going to go to the point inside the eyebrow, and say, All of these emotions…
On the side of your eye. The shock of this new reality in my life…
Under your eye. All of the what-ifs…
that I’m starting to create in my mind around it…
And then under your nose. I feel like my body is betraying me…
And under your mouth. And it’s so unfair.
And then under your collarbone. It’s so overwhelming.
And then under your arms. And I don’t know what to do.
On the top of your head. So I push these feelings down.
Good, and then we’re just going to keep going. So, at the beginning of your eyebrow again just saying all the things you might be feeling right now. “The pressure to keep it all together…”
The side of your eye. I should be able to handle this.
And under your eye. But it’s so hard.
And under your nose. I can feel all my feelings.
And under your mouth. And still be strong.
And under your collarbone. It’s okay to feel scared.
Then under your arm. I honor the way I feel.
On the top of your head. I would never tell a child to just get over it.
Or just keep it all together.
I would honor how they feel.
And I would comfort them.
And I can do that for myself.
And then I’m just going to do more round. On the beginning of your eyebrow. I’m feeling these feelings because something in my life is making me feel this way.
On the side of your eye. I am allowed to feel my feelings.
And under the eye. I’m allowed to let them go…
Then under your nose. so I can feel better…
And under your mouth. and my body can feel better.
And under your collarbone. And I can stay in this present moment…
where I can plant a seed of hope…
and allow that seed to grow.
And under your arm. Allowing the hope to grow.
And then the last one on top of your head. I am so safe.
I am so protected.
I am so loved.

48:41
Nathalie Kelly:
Good, and then you can take a nice deep breath and exhale, and you can do that again, and if there’s any emotion that’s still there, you can take that on the exhale and imagine breaking it up into a thousand little pieces and just blowing it away and letting it go. And breathe into your heart, and tell your heart I love you, and tell your brain I love you and tell whatever part of your body needs healing right now, I love you. Then whenever you’re ready, you can open your eyes.

49:48
Dr. Maya Novak:
That was beautiful. Thank you so much for this. At the beginning, I was looking for what I was feeling, and I was feeling something around my throat. So, now it’s gone. There’s nothing there!

50:01
Nathalie Kelly:
Beautiful. Beautiful, yeah, and that’s just a great tool to know. So we can just - as things come up – to tap on them so you’re not carrying them around. It’s a great way to clear and heal all of those traumas from the past and not keep building new ones.

50:19
Dr. Maya Novak:
Exactly, exactly.

50:21
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah.

50:21
Dr. Maya Novak:
Natalie, what is your number one advice that you give someone who is right now recovering from an injury?

50:30
Nathalie Kelly:
Oh, to just be so gentle with yourselves. To just to be incredibly patient. And like I said earlier, talk to yourself the way you would talk to a two-year-old, encourage yourself, love yourself, and use this, if that’s a hard thing for you, as an opportunity to learn how to do that. For the rest of your life, you will have that capacity when you come out of this hero’s journey. And that would be my number one advice.

51:02
Dr. Maya Novak:
Now, on the flip side, and especially because you have such a powerful story and you went through many dark times in your recovery so you also understand that yes, sometimes people are also losing hope about their healing, about their future. What would you say to someone who perhaps right now is losing hope about their recovery?

51:32
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah, I was there. I really understand that place. The first thing on a practical note is their Bach flower essences or flower essences, in general, are really powerful and really gentle in helping us shift our emotional space. There’s one in particular called Gorse, and it’s a flower essence and it shifts us when it’s specific to despair around medical issues. So, that is a really helpful tool to use that. And I would say to seek out people who have done what you’re seeking to do. I didn’t know anybody who’d healed from a brain injury, now I know a couple but not very many. I think I know two! So, seek people out who have done the healing that you want to do and just like focus on them, and focus on every little increment of improvement that you’ve done. Most injuries are not as slow as a brain injury. So, I sometimes would have to look back a year to see if I’ve improved, and I do improve every year. But if you can just focus on every tiny little piece of improvement you’ve done, the more we focus on something the more we get it back. So that’s a good thing to focus on.

52:55
Dr. Maya Novak:
I love that.

52:56
Nathalie Kelly:
And gratitude.

52:56
Dr. Maya Novak:
And gratitude, yes.

52:58
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah.

53:00
Dr. Maya Novak:
And I love what you shared before about gratitude. So, even if right now you cannot find anything, then focus on receiving all the support and everything.

53:10
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah, and being grateful for that because that’s a gift.

53:13
Dr. Maya Novak:
Exactly.

53:14
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah.

53:17
Dr. Maya Novak:
Another thing that I would like to ask you is in your experience what are potentially the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to their recovery?

53:33
Nathalie Kelly:
I would say there are two things, and they’re kind of flip sides of the same coin. One is to accept the doctor’s prognosis and to just walk out of the doctor’s appointment hearing that things are hopeless and just go home and accept that and not be proactive. Our doctors are human and they have limited knowledge like everybody does. When you seek out other healers, other practitioners, other opinions, you’re going to find things that are going to be helpful, but you have to be proactive. Our medical system these days is not set up to follow through for us. We have to do all of that ourselves. So, being proactive is really crucial. The other mistake I see people do is – I’m thinking of this because it’s a client I’m working with right now who is a fighter and she’s like I’m going to fight my way through this, and I can recognize that because I was the same way of putting this fighting energy into like fighting against something. I just think that puts us in the sympathetic response. It doesn’t put us into a healing place. And even though we want to get better, we can’t fight. We have to accept where we are right here in this moment and just be present and kind to ourselves. The Tao teaches us to go with the flow in life, not to go upstream, but to just flow downstream and to kind of put ourselves in harmony with a higher power and allow that to heal us rather than fighting.

55:11
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yeah. Because otherwise if we are fighting - I’m going to fight this pain, I’m going to fight this adversity, I’m going to fight this – it’s basically we are then also in a way creating more of that. So, if we are fighting, and what you also said…

55:26
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah.

55:26
Dr. Maya Novak:
… making so much stress because we are always fighting something.

55:31
Nathalie Kelly:
And that’s my compulsion, so that was me. It’s kind of like I have to keep catching that for myself. But yes, I would say those two things. There’s a sweet spot between surrender and acceptance. There’s a sweet spot between being proactive and being at peace and accepting.

55:53
Dr. Maya Novak:
Yes, so true.

55:54
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah.

55:58
Dr. Maya Novak:
We slightly touched also on the more spiritual side of healing. So, I would like to touch on the soul, what kind of role our soul has in healing.

56:11
Nathalie Kelly:
To me, I’m a deeply spiritual person – not religious but spiritual. So, the evolution of our soul, I believe, is the most important thing in life. I don’t think – there’s nothing that could have evolved my soul as much as going through this darkness and this injury. And it’s really beautiful to keep that in perspective that this is evolving us on a soul level. One of the teachers and healers that I’ve met along the way is Master Zhi Gang Sha, and he talks about we have entered – we’ve left the mind over matter era in 2003. We have spent the last 100 years or so focusing learning how our mind is our affecting our matter, and we’ve evolved beyond that as the consciousness in the human race, and we’re now what he calls the soul light era. So this era is where we start to recognize there’s something above the mind. There’s something above matter, and that’s our soul. And when we heal our soul at a soul level, that will trickle down to our heart, our mind, our energy field, and ultimately to matter into our body. In his view, which I find so beautiful, we start with healing the soul.

57:32
Dr. Maya Novak:
And this really goes around to what we actually about in the last hour, so then we have emotions and resolving that…

57:40
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah.

57:40
Dr. Maya Novak:
… and dealing with that really healing on the deepest level. I see it as this has a really beautiful ripple effect on the physical body.

57:53
Nathalie Kelly:
That’s right, yeah. Whereas western medicine would just want to address the matter in the body, and eastern medicine – because he’s a Master – he’s a western medical doctor and an eastern medical doctor, and he says the western addresses the matter, and the eastern addresses energy, but where he’s going is addressing the soul, which will trickle down to all of that. It’s a much more all-encompassing model, which I love. I find that really inspiring and exciting that we’re entering – that we are in this new world.

58:25
Dr. Maya Novak:
Mhm. Nathalie, I so enjoyed our conversation. For the end, I do have a bit of a fun question out of the box. This is imagining that you are injured right now. You know that your recovery is going to take you a little while, it’s not going to be like really short, but in this moment while you know that things are not going to be super easy all the time or at all, you have the opportunity to choose one of two gifts, one of two opportunities. Gift number one is that you go through your recovery doing all the necessary work so that you can actually heal in the best possible way, and then at the end, you get a gift of being almost injury-proof so you don’t injure yourself. Or the other option, another gift is that you back in time and prevent this accident so that you don’t have the injury, but then you don’t know what is going to happen in the future. My question here is which one would you choose and why?

59:44
Nathalie Kelly:
As much as I like to say that this injury has propelled my spiritual growth and evolution more than anything could have ever, choosing to go through that, I’m just not that courageous! I don’t think I could ever choose to do that intentionally. If that’s just part of the process, it’s like maybe God had to do it for me, is knock me on the side of the head because I would never have the courage to choose something like that. So, I guess that sort of my answer is just out of lack of courage, I think I would choose the second! But I’m grateful for the first. And really, it comes down that we don’t have control over life. We don’t have control over what happens in our life, but that’s what an injury will teach us. Stuff happens and what we do have control over is how we respond, how we make meaning out of our suffering, how we pay it forward to others, and how we come out of this hero's journey with wisdom and gifts for our community.

1:00:58
Dr. Maya Novak:
Beautifully put. What you said, I don’t have that courage, but just what you achieved in the last 10 years, you absolutely have a lot – a lot of courage inside of you because otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here today and talking.

1:01:17
Nathalie Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

1:01:19
Dr. Maya Novak:
Nathalie, where can people find more about you and your work?

1:01:23
Nathalie Kelly:
So, my website is brainrecoverycoach.com. I work with clients all over the world online coaching them in their recoveries. It’s mostly brain injuries and strokes, but it’s also just anybody who wants to work with me. I’m open to working with people who are going through challenging times. And I have a YouTube channel also by the same name - Brain Recovery Coach - where there’s just so much information that will really be crucial in helping people understand brain injury and how to recover. So, that’s where brainrecoverycoach.com.

1:01:58
Dr. Maya Novak:
Nathalie, thank you so much for being here. I so enjoyed this conservation and I love your knowledge and everything that you shared so selflessly. So, thank you so much for being here.

1:02:11
Nathalie Kelly:
Oh, thank you so much, Maya. It was my pleasure. I love what you’re doing and I wish everybody on the show wellness in their journey and peace with the process.

1:02:24
Dr. Maya Novak:
This wraps up today’s Mindful Injury Recovery Talk with Nathalie Kelly. If you haven’t done it yet, subscribe to the podcast Mindful Injury Recovery Talks on whatever platform you’re using to tune in. Of course, also remember to share this episode with your loved ones and help them out. To access show notes, links, and transcript, of today’s talk go to mayanovak.com/podcast. 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.