The Zen of No More

Root Your Radiance

Discomfort is a compass. That feeling of unease in the body tells us when it’s time to move toward or away from something. But before we can change what’s making us uncomfortable, we have to get right with saying No More.

This episode, I’m inviting you to rejoice in those No More moments. When you’re fed up enough that you just have to make a radical change. Will you join me in honoring yourself, your intuition, and your power to live the life you want?

Learn more about Prosperous Practice and my upcoming mastermind offering at rootyourradiance.com.

Continue the conversation by sending me a DM on Instagram. I'm @thelaurabautista. Let's go!

Transcript: The Zen of No More

LAURA BAUTISTA: I love the title of season one: “From Multiple Sclerosis to Multiple Six Figures.“ What a divine download. Welcome back. Today, we're talking about the Zen of No More. Mm, the juiciness of the sacred No. Ah, feel that in your body. Just like, just say no right now. Just be like no, just say no. No. Just feel that in your body, how that lands. Just fucking no. The Zen of No More.

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Welcome to the prosperous Practice podcast! I'm your host, Laura Bautista, and I am so honored, excited, and happy to have you here with me. Let's get into it.

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I want to start out today by sharing a little bit about something that I believed when I was a little girl. So when I was a kid, when I was a little little, my big sister Lorena told me that I had aliens living instead of my body. And there were these little tiny aliens and they were like thousands if not millions of them. And every day when I lived my life and looked through life through my eyes, they were watching through my eyes, and everything was like a movie for them. So you know, they all had jobs and some of them worked in my belly, some of them worked in like my brain. But they all had jobs. They were all really busy.

And so you know when it was time for them to like watch something, right? We watched tv when we were kids, we’d watch cartoons. So this really landed for me. When it was time for them to watch something like you wanted to make sure that they were getting like a good show. Right? So, essentially, you better make every moment count.

And so I lived my day-to-day life, my day-to-day childhood flow involved conducting an entire universe from inside my head. I would make sure that all my stuffed animals got the same amount of screen time or a similar - a fair amount, I should say, and a fair amount of hugs and you know that everything was equal and all I wanted to do every day - for more reasons than just the alien entertainment, it was just really, you know, made sense to me - was to laugh and to create and to play and it just felt so natural and safe.

Which is why I was so confused when I became aware of horrible pain. Because by age seven, I was already experiencing pretty consciously trauma and drama in my family relationships, symptoms of all kinds all the time. I had chronic digestive issues. I had eczema (rowing up, we called it heat rash), had headaches a lot. I used to have really bad anxiety, allergies, back pain and I got sick a lot. I used to get like really bad infections all the time. Now I can say that I'm not too surprised at ages 21 and 26, respectively, I received two supposedly unrelated autoimmune disease diagnoses that I now see had been clearly brewing since childhood in spite of this atypically high access to health care available to me.

So not only was my dad a medical doctor, but I come from a family of doctors. In my immediate family, I have my dad as a medical doctor, and then in his immediate family, there are two others. And then my aunt also married a physician. So we have like four physicians right there, very close. And so I say this because it's not a matter of access to the Western model that makes a huge difference when it comes to chronic illness. Now it has its place. But even with an extraordinary amount, I always like to just have that hit home. Like all of this stuff was brewing and I had a lot of access and yet it was still, it was still brewing.

So at age 21, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and it hit like a ton of bricks. I talked about that in the last episode. And then at age 26, I was diagnosed with another autoimmune disease called Urticarial Vasculitis, which is essentially chronic hives, and I had these islands of hives all over my body and they were hot and itchy and raised and it like came out of nowhere. It felt like and no one had answers for me. I had a bunch of steroid creams thrown at me a bunch of Prednisone thrown at me, but nobody was talking to me about toxicity, nobody was talking to me about food, nobody was talking to me about stress and the nervous system and all of these things that could be potentially causing issues in my body. I was just being kind of told that I was kind of broken and, you know, I'd have to be on pills forever.

And so I talked about in the last episode too, that I healed my body through holistic means. So, I don't have MS anymore. I don't identify with MS anymore. I kind of never really did, but I don't have the symptoms. I haven't had them in years, many, many years. No Western medication, no regular Western intervention. And I don't say that as a recommendation. I say that it's my story, and I will say also that have having struggled with Multiple Sclerosis, chronic hives, crippling anxiety, digestive issues, you know, for so many years, and then really, really in the trenches with all of it for about seven full years. It wasn't until I had kind of a line in the sand moment, where I had to decide that this was no longer enough for me. And I call this my no more moment. I call this my no more.

It's like sometimes it comes to a point where you're just so frustrated with what's being presented to you with what's, with the options that you're being given, that you really have two choices. You can either just move forward with it because that's what feels safer - and it's okay if that's what feels safer - or you feel totally unsafe? That the unknown is what feels more safe. And that was the case for me. And so I started to learn about my body, how it works, what all of these symptoms mean, what the language of the body is, that symptoms are the language of the body, guiding me to the root of what is going on underneath.

And so after some really intentional self-healing work that honestly didn't even take that long, I was able to restore balance in my body, replenish nutritional deficiencies, detox my life, my gut, my endocrine system, support my hormones, support my immune system. You know, reset my drainage pathways, all of these things that if you're a practitioner you probably know a lot of what I'm talking about and in the end, especially after handling the nervous system and how to keep my body in a parasympathetic state, which is, you know, that's healing mode, when you're calm in parasympathetic mode, your nervous system after giving that really beautiful dedication of time, space and tension. And out of desperation, I mean, I didn't freaking want to do any of that shit, but I was desperate and I went all in, and then once I realized how good I could feel, there was no turning back, there was no more doing it the other way because that way was actually much more difficult.

So my line in the sand moment, the actual moment when people say, “Oh, when did you decide that you were just going to be, you know, go holistic like you come from a western family, you literally have all these medical doctors in your family. And how was that for you and rebelling and all that stuff?” And the truth is it didn't, it didn't land well at first. There were some fearful moments. But I was also pretty well supported, I have to say, because one of the things that my father and I could really agree on was that this was not good enough for me. What I was being offered was not good enough for me.

I remember the moment that I decided that I was going to walk away from the western medicine approach to healing Multiple Sclerosis forever. And it was when I went in to see my new doctor. I had had a lot of issues being compliant with the daily injections, which was the treatment at the time that was available and most effective with the least side effects was the daily injections. But I had had trouble being compliant because that shit hurt. And it also didn't really work. And so I went in to see the doctor fully willing to entertain a new alternative.

First of all, this is the first time I've ever seen her because my doctor somehow disappeared. I don't know, some probably something weird had happened administratively. And so I had got reassigned to a new physician after probably about five or six years with the same physician. Got reassigned to a new physician, went into her office with my dad and we sat down and we talked about my non-compliance with the medication and how the medication was. The only answer was that I would never get any better. There was no way I would ever get any better. My MS Is never going anywhere. It's here to stay. But if I take these daily injections or if I take these medications or these treatments, there is a chance that I might not get worse.

And so I went to go hear out the physician and she came to me with a pill form. She said, “Oh well now you don't have to take injections anymore. There's actually a pill form of the medication that is gonna is good for you. However, this pill form medication has a side effect that it actually slows down your heart rate and so we'll have to put you on some heart monitoring protocols and maybe you have to add some heart monitoring heart medications.” And at that point, I had been through the wringer with this lack of solutions. Like I just intuitively knew this was just not the thing and I was honestly just disappointed.

And disappointed is such an understatement, because having been a patient and an employee at some of the most world-renowned hospitals, I couldn't believe that this is all that was available. Like this is it, this is all you get. And that nobody was talking to me about things that I could potentially do for myself. Because I'll tell you with everything that I have done for myself, I have not had any symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis, like I said, in many, many, many years, and this is something they tell you never goes away, I have more control and more peace than ever. No pharmaceutical drugs: it's pretty hard to get me to take a pharmaceutical drug. In fact, even to take an over-the-counter drug, it takes a lot, and I'm not knocking it. There is a time and place for all of this stuff, but it's not when we're talking about chronic illness.

And so my no more moment was right then and there where I had been studying already, learning about people like Terry Wahls, learning about people who had healed their bodies from unhealable stuff, and I decided to have a no more. I decided that that was just it, no more. I can't do this anymore. And it was one of the best things I ever did and, it created so much peace, excitement, of course there was a little bit of fear of the unknown. But again, what is scarier at that point, staying on a track that is like this is what my life is now and nobody is going to say any different and I'm not being empowered to do anything for myself and come back to my body and learn more about it? That felt so weird to me just intuitively.

As I explore the energy of no more right now with you, I want to invite you to think about, in your life, what was the last radical change that you made, and what was the no more that preceded it? Or maybe what was the last time you were just fed up with something and it caused you to change course? And then what happened next?

When we talk about healing from Multiple Sclerosis or any disease, or we talk about getting to six figures, it requires these no more moments. It requires for you to know that that is exactly the feeling, exactly the thing that needs to happen before you get what you want, there has to be a line in the sand, and I'll give you another example of where this felt totally illogical and irrational. It was one of the best things I ever did.

I worked for a holistic nutritionist, a clinical nutritionist, very successful, very reputable, amazing practitioner. She helped a lot, a lot, a lot of people and taught me a lot, I did many advanced trainings under her under her wing, and just learning from her was incredibly advanced training. It was an invaluable internship, but in the end, the way that she practiced was very different from the way I wanted to be as a practitioner. She had a model where if you've ever studied with Ulan Nutritional Systems, they have a really cool nutrition response testing model, it's about 15-minute visits (actually think they recommend 10), but muscle testing, finding the primary root causes, the primary stressors using this incredible technique that I really, really, really love. But the sessions were really short and I wanted to spend more time with people and ultimately it just didn't feel like me. And this opportunity was so big, such a financial gold mine of an opportunity, where she was basically training me, apprenticing me, showing me how to ultimately take over her practice, that was a multimillion-dollar practice for me.

My no more moment was kind of a series of moments. So it's like when you're working at a job or even you're working for someone, I know a lot of practitioners experience this, when they're like training with someone and they love them and they believe in them and maybe they were their practitioner and you know, that's their mentor. But it comes to a point where you kind of outgrow that mentor or you just, you don't want to do it, like they're doing it and if that person really wants this, it can sometimes be challenging for them to accept that and sometimes there can be a little bit of resentment, a little bit, can feel a little chaotic and get a little bit emotional and what I knew was that I didn't want to run my business in a way that felt like I couldn't take my time with things, that I couldn't do things my way.

That was one of the biggest learning experiences and the biggest things I had to walk away from because literally after that I had signed a non-compete so I couldn't practice in my area. That was really hard because then I, well it was really hard. But then I ended up in another amazing business where I also was supporting someone else's dream, making $17, $18 an hour working my ass off 40-hour weeks at the other place I was working, you know, part-time, but I was making really low wages. I was in a lot of debt. I wasn't making enough money to live in Austin, which was the city that I lived in. Like, and so at the third place, one of my third kind of no more moments where I was really just, again, working to build somebody else's dream feeling the whole time. Like I could totally do this myself. Like I've had the clinical training, I'm so passionate and I started to kind of feel that push again and that this isn't the way I want to do things. I can't hang in this any longer.

And the thing about the no more, sometimes it's in an instant, sometimes you’re in, you know, it's kind of like I said, I was in the doctor's office, I was given this option and it just came over me and I was like, you know what, this, this ain't it? And I flip everything upside down and just go another route. But sometimes it takes some time, right, to get there. And the same thing happened in both of these scenarios because I was ready to build my own thing and then no more was so uncomfortable because I was ready to build my own thing.

And discomfort is a compass. Often if not always it's a compass for us to move toward or away from something, right? So the zen of no more always comes after your body gets online with the decision that you're not doing this anymore. And so if your body isn't online with that, if your body isn't there with that, that no more, then your mind is going to push through, your mind is going to convince you otherwise your mind is going to convince you to be the yes man. Even when it doesn't feel good and when it comes to your business or your healing process, it's not wrong. But it's data, it's data to pay attention to. And sometimes, you know, it might feel wrong and we get to choose differently.

So my invitation, again, is to assess when was the last time in my life that I was really fed up enough with something that I made a big change and what was the no more involved in that. Maybe you're experiencing that right now and if you're a practitioner who's experiencing that right now and you are really ready to spend the next year of your life dedicating to your practice, to growing the practice of your dreams, to not doing things like somebody else's way, to learning a bunch of different styles of how to grow your business, how to have empowered sales conversations, how to truly make the money that you deserve, doing things in a way that feels super authentic and juicy, I'm inviting you to join me over on Instagram @thelaurabautista, get in my DMs and ask me about the Prosperous Purpose mastermind that's launching at the end of the summer.

The process that I show you in this program has helped practitioners hit multiple 10k months within 4-5 months of starting the program. This is for the certified holistic practitioner who knows how to help people and is ready to turn their wounds and their wisdom into a platform for prosperity with structure, practical strategy and fucking magic. So, head over to my Instagram, send me a DM and let's get into a conversation about whether this is the right thing for you.

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Thank you for being here. Thank you for doing everything that you do and remember to enjoy and revel in the zen of no more, much love and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much.

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Thank you again from the bottom of my heart for joining me for this episode of the Prosperous Practice Podcast. To catch all the magic that's being offered here, I want you to subscribe to the show or if you want a weekly dose of wisdom in your email inbox as you evolve your wellness practice, sign up to receive my letters at rootyourradiance.com.

Like all good things, this podcast creates space for a diverse range of voices to be heard. We share the mic and work to lift these voices to create a higher standard of health care for the planet and for the future. To increase the voice of our community, please consider sharing this episode with a friend, a colleague, a loved one or on your social media to keep this conversation going.

And thanks to those who make this Prosperous Practice Podcast so freakin special. Our wonderful music is by James Wilder, and Prosperous Practice is produced by Particulate Media. The ideas and inspiration come from beautiful humans like you that I truly feel so lucky to be in circuit with.

Once again, I'm Laura Bautista. Take good care and be well. Until next time. Bye for now.

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