How to be anxiety free with fun and ease!

How to be anxiety free with fun and ease!
With Myra Espey and Samia Bano

Want to stop anxiety controlling or destroying your life?

The great news is that anxiety is NOT an insurmountable monster.

Listen now to this interview with Myra Espey, #BrainScience Expert, to understand how anxiety is a collection of small habits and thought patterns and how tiny shifts in awareness and action can help you become #anxietyfree with #funandease. :)

Note: If you've been struggling to achieve #AnxietyRelief, it may be because you've been missing the essential key to #overcominganxiety. Learn why #brainintegration is crucial for emotional and #mentalbalance. Understanding how the brain works can unlock new ways to manage anxiety, fear, and #EmotionalWellbeing. A connected mind is a powerful mind!

About Myra:

Myra offers roadmaps for maverick #womenover50 to escape the mundane, defy norms to live extraordinary lives. She has worked with clients with trauma and anxiety for 30 years.

Learn more and connect with Myra at: https://www.myraespey.com/free-anxiety-e-book

To Book your Free HAPPINESS 101 EXPLORATION CALL with Samia, click: https://my.timetrade.com/book/JX9XJ

#emotionalbalance #MindsetMatters #BrainHealth #EmotionalWellness #MentalStrength #HolisticHealing #MindBodyConnection #WellnessJourney #TransformYourLife #MindsetShift #EmpowerYourself #BrainTraining #mindfulliving #anxietycoach #anxietyrelieftips #trainyourbrain #trainyourmind

Here's the audio version of this episode:

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Full Video Transcript

SAMIA: Hello, Salaam, Shalom, Namaste, Sat Sri Akal, Aloha, Holah, Ciao, Bonjour, Buna, Privet, Mabuhay, and Dzień Dobry! It's really, really good to be with you again. And I know you will be so pleased that you have joined us today because we have a very special guest with us, and it's Myra Espey. And I want to say welcome, Myra... So thank you so much for joining us.

MYRA: Thank you. And I'm very impressed with all your hellos. I could never repeat half of them, so thank you. It's an absolute pleasure to be here.

SAMIA: So happy to have you. And, Myra, please tell us more about who you are and what you do.

MYRA: Sure. With my absolute pleasure. I am definitely a change-maker and a rule-breaker, and I like to be known as a maverick. And some people are very afraid of that title because they think that might be a bad thing. But what a maverick is, is really somebody who doesn't accept things as they are, but looks behind things to find the reason and causes for them. So I am definitely that maverick. I'm very unconventional. And as I've gone down my career, I've looked at the way that the traditional world, the traditional medicine, traditional education system, traditional parenting, has resulted in something that I am a little bit not very happy with. So I keep looking at other ways for us to do it. And this is who I am, is that I'm trying to find things like that. My background is psychology. Then I went on to be an educator and became a teacher, became an adult educator. And in the psychology field, I found what I call talking therapy. I call it blah, blah... I notice my psychology friends go, stop saying that, Myra. I was one of those. So I understand. I found that it really didn't get the shifts that I wanted for people that I worked with. And my absolute passion in life is for every human being to find themselves and find their full potential. So it doesn't matter who they are or what they are, but that they are achieving the fullest life for them. That is my goal. And so I've been going down this path. I've then went down alternative therapies. I was one of the first kinesiologists, trained kinesiologists in Australia. I've done reiki. I've done a whole lot of other things, including conflict resolution, family dispute resolution. So my experience is broad because I kept looking for more and more and more to find the answers so that I could help people. So that's a little bit about the background. And then I stumbled across the fact that so many people have anxiety and I thought I didn't really want to work with anxiety because it's a very big field and I'm talking 20 years ago when it wasn't very fashionable so people felt not right and they were often diagnosed with depression. And I looked at this and I thought, you know, knowing what clinical depression is, I knew this wasn't depression. And so I looked at it and thought this is another thing. And eventually, somebody gave it a title. And by the way, I hate titles, I hate labels, I hate anything that puts a stamp on someone to define them and limit them. So I didn't like that. But I did have to look at the symptoms and see what it does. And what I have found is that anxiety, particularly in high-flying professionals and people who are really trying to move and change the world, that often it's anxiety that holds them back. Because what anxiety does, I call it an octopus... It's got all these tentacles and it can rob someone of a lot of things. And one of them, many of them are like relationships, career, financial stability because it eats away at self-esteem, physical wellness, brain wellness. And I'm not going to go into all the symptoms of anxiety because you can Google those and if you have anxiety, you know what they are. But it is debilitating. It can put some people to bed, it can put some people locked up in a house where they can't go out. And these are people that were very senior in their professions that were really going somewhere. So anxiety is a very, very serious, I don't like call it an illness. It's a condition.

SAMIA: Yeah. 

MYRA: So yeah…

SAMIA: ..yeah.

MYRA: That's where I came to it.

SAMIA: Ah, my gosh. First of all, thank you so much for sharing that as those aspects of your journey. And I for one am full of admiration. I have you know, this tendency also to always be so searching and to question. You know, I mean it's actually a little bit weird with me because there's an aspect of me that loves rule following because like, especially when I was younger and I had a lot of anxiety following like first of all learning the rules and then following the rules was one of the way I tried to create some order in my life. But you know, as I moved more and more towards wanting to heal myself and empower myself and you know, it was like, ah, just the anxiety is like too much and you know, I just don't want to have to live like that forever and ever. And so when I started to look for solutions, you do sort of get to this realization that, yeah, there are times when you're going to have to break rules and there are times when you're going to have to navigate through circumstances and situations where you don't even know the rules, there may be no rules. And so what do you do, you know, and so you just have to figure these things out and learn to work with them. So the good news is we know that it's something we can work on and change and improve. But before we start talking about how to make the change, I was wondering if you could share some insight into, like, where does this anxiety come from? Like, what's maybe a common root cause?

MYRA: Okay, this is where I am definitely unconventional. People have searched for the cause of anxiety since it got its label. And yes, the cause and the moment of when anxiety starts is very different for different people. But what anxiety is, and this is where some people say, this is very difficult to believe. According to my theory, my work, my beliefs, my everything, anxiety is purely a whole lot of neurological pathways that have got scrambled up. 

SAMIA: Tell me more…

MYRA: So that is basically what has happened, is that in my work I explained and I've got a lovely series called the Marvels of the Mind, which is a three series thing that I'm about to develop and give away for nothing. But in that, I explain how the brain works, how it should work, what stops it from working, and what causes the anxiety. So all of us, when we are born, have straight neurological pathways. So messages go from one dendrite to another. And if we didn't have any trauma or any conditioned influence in our lives, like parents giving us rules, telling us how to do things, we would all be perfectly fine. But as we navigate through life, you know, it is not straightforward. So different things affect us and those neurological pathways become scrambled. So for example, instead of a message going straight from A to B, it might go via somewhere else before it gets to B. And just to give you an example of how these pathways work and how they attach to our body and to everything else. If, for example, you see a hot stove, and you see the hot stove and you know somewhere in your conditioned response that perhaps you shouldn't put your hand on that hot stove, but it's moving towards it, a message will come to from your brain all the way down your neurological pathways to that hand to say, lift it up. Now, that message happens in a nanosecond. You don't have to wait for the message. To go from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 50 million little neurological pathways. It happens in a nanosecond, and that's what happens to us in 1 nanosecond. We create a response. If the neurological pathways are not working properly, that response could be a problem. So we'll use the hand example. I don't know why. It's probably not the best one I've got. Sometimes I choose some crazy examples. But if, for example, your neurological pathways are really not functioning well and because of a whole range of things that I will have to teach, you might put your hand on that hot stove because the message didn't get to your hand fast enough to say, don't go to that hot stove. So you'll put it on the hot stove before the message got there. And this is the same with anxiety. Instead of the message going from straight from A to B to say, you're safe, you don't have to worry about, you know, Sally around the corner because she said some horrible things to you last time, she might hurt you. You know, we have unreasonable stories we tell ourselves that create. Can create some anxiety. And when those pathways are scrambled up, the message can be very scrambled. And you can. Every time you see Sally, you're going to say, I'm afraid. So then the fear, the whole fear situation will grow. And so it is with anxiety, the tiny little things start becoming bigger things because the pathways are not going from A to B, they're going A to Z to Y to B to... And by the time they get back to where they should be, people are in a very, can be in a very bad state... Is that a bit of a dumb analogy, or does that make any sense to you?

SAMIA: No, no, it makes. It makes sense. So you're… basically anxiety, the emotion, that's produced by how our brain functions. And the brain can sometimes get... You're saying like… Like, the wiring can sort of get messed up. And so then you end up with this… with this emotion. You mentioned the word fear. You know, this is a very... It makes me think about wanting to ask you, is there a distinction that you make between the feeling of anxiety and fear?

MYRA: I think a fear is a symptom or a result of anxiety. So it's a little bit of a circular thing. It can start with fear, and then it turns into something that's very… can create anxiety, or because of one's anxiety, which is purely just scrambled messages, that fear builds up and becomes bigger than it's really real. So fear is one of the side effects of anxiety. Is a symptom, and it's a very, very serious one. Because if we become riddled with fear, we're not able to access the other parts of the brain that will allow us to function properly. So this is where my whole concept of dividing the brain up into bits and pieces. I can tell you more if we have time, but once we know how the brain works and functions, we will see that anxiety is purely just sometimes the communication between the different parts of the brain that are not working.

SAMIA: Yeah.

MYRA: So the optimum thing to be anxiety-free is to have total brain integration... And when I talk about the brain, I'm not ignoring emotional, mental or spiritual at all. I always work with the four pillars and believe all of them have equal importance. So all of those. But when we're talking about… just talking about anxiety, the brain does tend to dominate. The how we can deal with it and how we can make sure that it's, we're okay.

SAMIA: Yeah.

MYRA: Okay, yeah. So the brain is the one that actually dictates to the rest of the body, to the physical, the mental and the emotional about how to cope with all of that. So fear basically sits possibly in the emotional mental side. So that gets driven by how the brain is coping. So when the brain is integrated, we can see the world and accept the world and function in the world as it should be. Let's put it in inverted commas. If there is a normal. I don't know... But we can do it as best we can for who we are and where we are. But when it's not integrated, that's when things start going wrong. And fear is an end result of that. It's just one aspect that can stop people from functioning. So if you talk about high achievers, for example, or even middle achievers or whatever, achievers, people who want to go out there and get things done, very often fear is that very thing that will hold them back. And once we analyze, what is it that you really afraid of? It often is a pattern of brain integration that goes through anxiety or not through anxiety, but creates the state of fear. So fear is. Fear is a pretty big thing, but it is a result of the state of not being brain-integrated.

SAMIA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay... So what does... So just... Can you give an example of what/when you say brain integrated or brain integration, what does that look like? And what are we talking about when we have good brain integration? What does that look like?

MYRA: Okay, I'm going to just very quickly tell you how we break the brain down because it'll make it easier to understand. So we break the brain into a whole lot of bits and pieces. So it's the top brain, the midbrain and the bottom brain. The top brain we divide into left brain, right brain. And I'm sure you've heard people run around and go, I'm left brain, I'm right brain. And I always say to him, oh you poor thing. What about the rest of your brain? You're actually we are, we all are whole-brained but we choose to function in a particular way. So left brain is, you know, your linear, sequential and whatever. Right brain is creative, big picture, etc... So the midbrain is where the emotions live. So you know, we call a mural, midbrain lives in the middle where the emotions are. And this is when you say, what does an integrated brain look like? We found that a lot of people that are in prison do not have access to the midbrain or it's called the limbic system, to be quite honest, they don't have access to that. So their brain's not integrated. And in the midbrain lives conscience, consequences, responsibility, things like that. When people don't have access to that, this is when often the criminal behavior comes in or children tell lies. So in my parenting, when children tell little white lies, I will explain to them that's what's happening and then show them how to get the midbrain engaged again to change that behavior. So that's the midbrain. Then the base of the brain is where you have fight or flight. So very often as you know, you know we can face things and we either take off or we're very aggressive and fight. And if you're stuck in that part of the brain, that's all you have available to you. So that would be called a brain that is not integrated. An integrated brain is using the base stem, the midbrain, the top brain together to find solutions for what's happening. So for example, if you do have a problem.

SAMIA: Yeah. 

MYRA: And you don't have access to your right brain, it means you can't see the big picture. You'll become over-focused. So this is a bit like children with adhd. They over focus, they look down, they can only see what's in front of them because they don't have access to the right brain. When the right hand side of the brain is brought into the picture, then they can start having, seeing the big picture and being able to look up and do something else. So that's very, very, very short and not a very clear explanation. But that does give you a little bit of a picture of what brain integration means. It means all of those parts are available to us to be used for the function that they are designed to do.

SAMIA: Yes, yes. No, no. I thank you for explaining that because it does make things more clear for me. You know, the idea that there are all these different aspects of our brain and how our brain works, but also, you know, that and they're, they're connected and they're meant to be connected to the way we think, the way we feel, the way we act. And so to do that in a way that is integrated, that is actually connected with each other. So our actions are not for, divorced from our emotions or our thinking and emotions are not divorced from, you know, like, each other and so on, so forth. Yeah, that makes sense.

MYRA: Yeah, yeah. And this I believe is the missing link in our lives is when we under... This is very simple. Once I actually teach the whole process, people got why are we not taught this in school? Why aren't parents taught this? Why aren't we taught this in business? Because I do a lot of business coaching too where I'll say teach people. If people have particular behaviors they are working from midbrain, for example, the over emotional, they're in their midbrain. So how do we get them out of the midbrain? So that's the next step. But once we can identify where people are operating from as a dominance, we don't always have one dominance. But I'm sure you know people that are absolutely so meticulous about everything. If you move their pencil, they will be very angry because they stuck in the left hand side of the brain. And everything is linear. It's linear... So if you disrupt the linearness, they don't know what to do because they haven't learned to have access to the big picture. Which says it's not terribly important. If their pencils moved, I can move it back. But we become, they become very fixated on that. So the understanding the parts, learning to use all the parts is even more important because we need everything but at different times.

SAMIA: Yes. So how... So I think you hinted at this earlier in what you were saying earlier. But in terms of how we end up with our brains not being integrated, it has to do with trauma, it has to do with social conditioning and the experiences that we have growing up. Did I get that right?

MYRA: That's the extreme of it. You won't believe how simple it really is. The things that actually affect brain integration are so simple. For example, there are five things that are the most important. The one is hydration.

SAMIA: Ah...

MYRA: If we are not hydrated, those dendrites I spoke about cannot get the messages sent to the next neuron and they get stuck and they get lost. And often when people come to me with a whole lot of things, the first thing I do is say, how much water are you drinking? If they're not drinking enough, I'll send them away and go. You go and drink your eight glasses of water and then we'll talk. For some people, that's all they need. They are dehydrated and the messages don't go as they should... Oxygen to the brain is exactly the same thing. So water is to the body as oxygen is to the brain. We know, you know, if it's only a certain number of seconds you don't have oxygen to your brain, it dies. So sometimes people don't breathe properly and they expect to function properly and wonder why they get really anxious or things are not working because there's not enough oxygen. So simple things like water, oxygen, of course there's a whole lot of dietary things that can throw brain integration and environmental factors, of course, as you mentioned, trauma, conditioning, culture, a whole lot of who we are also affects how our neurological pathways can stay stable or be put out. Like you said, and I hear this a lot from women when you were a beautiful little rule, obeying rules, which is really beautiful. And so lots of women feel they have to do what they're taught. These are the rules and I have to obey them. And part of their souls and their values are not aligned with those. And that causes the conflict, internal conflict, that also affects how these neurological pathways affect the integration of the brain. So as you can see, we starting to get into very complex things. It's not simple, it is in fact quite complex... Then we've got the electromagnetic poisoning, you know, the phones that are going through our brains. We've got dirty air, we've got dirty water. So this is not... And this is why people who say, give me five tips to take this away, I can't do that. I can't do that... Because if I have a promise to all my clients to do the program, that if they do the eight-week program and they do it thoroughly, I guarantee they will be anxiety-free. But the reason I can do that is because I'm working with them and seeing where the gaps are, what's going wrong. Because we're not robots. We're not the same. We're all different... Our backgrounds are different, our cultures, our diets... So it's not a simple answer. This is not a simple concept at all.

SAMIA: Yeah. You know, you're making me think about, you know, some of the traditional health and wellness medical systems that I grew up being familiar with when I lived in India. So, you know, like the one of the primary traditional health and wellness systems in the Indian context, we refer to it as Ayurveda.

MYRA: Yeah.

SAMIA: So in the Ayurvedic approach is actually so holistic. What you are saying makes sense as to why it would need to be holistic and why it is holistic. You know, they like, you have practices to help you with... It's basically like an entire lifestyle, actually. You know, so there's directions and recommendations with pretty much every aspect of how we live our lives. And so much of the emphasis there is on how do you maintain wellness rather than... Or first you get sick and then you try to make things right, but it's like, no, you know, like, how do you maintain wellness? And I remember as a young person, I did not always appreciate, like, a lot of what I was learning in that kind of context because it felt like, you know, because we weren't actually properly educated in the system and the philosophy of it and, you know, the understanding behind why we were being asked to do different things. A lot of times we were just told, do this, don't do that. And, you know, like, for me, at some point, you know, I developed a lot of resistance against being told what to do. And I was like, no, I don't want to be told what to do. I don't want to be constrained. I want to do things as I want to do them, and so on and so forth... And so, you know, there's that rebellious part of me that didn't understand and didn't appreciate why there was such a focus, for example, on posture. It's like, to maintain good posture... Why? Who cares if I slump?

MYRA: Yeah, yeah, yeah…

SAMIA: How does it impact my ability to be a good person or live a good life? But actually in various ways, it does…

MYRA: Yeah.

SAMIA: Turns out... You know, and similarly with other aspects of, like, recommendations that are given of what to eat, how much to drink, when to drink, when to eat, etc... And so like, when you don't have that understanding as to, you know, why you're being told to do something you just feel like it's just unnecessary restrictions and I don't want to deal with it. So, yeah, it's just so amazing how in some ways complex our system is. And it's made more complex by the fact that it's not even just our own bodies that are impacting ourselves, but other people are impacting us. The environment we are in is impacting us. So there's just like so many different, different things that interact with each other and impact each other and impact us.

MYRA: Absolutely, absolutely... I think what you're saying is just is, is very beautiful. And of course your system, your verdic system is certainly one of my absolute favorites. I think it's the most holistic and amazing system and I think that it could benefit the world a lot if we followed that process a lot more. And I do think holistic everything is the most important thing. And when I'm talking about the brain, that's just because that's become what I perceive is the missing link in a society where all these things are happening, this does not mean it's a be all and the end all. However, without the brain integration, that adjustment and settling into a community, a family, a relationship is messed up. And that's why I just really am so passionate about getting people to become brain-integrated. Because then you can move into all of those other systems using your whole brain. So making decisions for yourself. Like you, I was a little bit of a rebel too. And to this day, you know, if my husband tells me to do something, I just look at him anyway. Okay, I'm telling you, I don't like to be told what to do. I don't like it ever at all. I want to get the facts, process it, and make my own decision. And it sounds like that's what made you a little bit of a rebel too. But you see, this is what I've in fact taught some of the teachers here is to say, do not tell people what to do. Do not put people in boxes, do not put labels on people we need to educate. And education, in my view, is what I call my triple-A. All my programs have triple-A. And the first one in the triple-A is to become aware. So when people become aware of the situation, a lot of people go, aha, I didn't know that. I didn't know that... So that's part of first becoming aware. And the second part is acknowledging how that information affects us personally.

SAMIA: Right.

MYRA: So we have to acknowledge that whatever it is we're aware of has an impact on us, nothing is as alone as we know. Everything is interrelated and it's energy. And we can go into another million conversations around that. But the point is, when we are aware of what's going, if we're not aware, we can never, never function holistically or become brain-integrated. And then the second part is when you acknowledge what it does to you or how you can use it, what it means for you, for the world, for your job, your family, then the third thing is action. Then we develop a plan. Then you can say, this is me, this is who I am, this is how I'm going to choose to function. And then I pull in the four pillars and all the four pillars can be addressed through this beautiful process of a total brain-integration and being aware of your own choice and responsibility.

SAMIA: Yes, I love these three A's, you know, it has happened so many times in my own life where I developed awareness of something, but I didn't get around to acknowledging how it was impacting me. And so that becomes sort of like something that prevents you from being able to take appropriate action. I remember like, for example, learning about abuse. So like, you know, I was taking a workshop and they were like teaching about, okay, well what is abuse? How does it impact people? This and that, learning to recognize the signs of abuse in a relationship, etc... And so I developed awareness. But then it, you know, I started to, with that awareness, look at other people and be like, "Oh, look, I'm seeing this sign and symptom of abusive behavior in this person or in that relationship". But I wouldn't look at my own life and my own experiences and acknowledge what was happening with me for time. You know, finally when I did acknowledge my... Actually it was like very interesting. Like I remember this very specifically. I was talking with one of my friends and you know how sometimes you just say something that you didn't really mean to necessarily say or realize you were going to say it or that it really was something that was true. But once you say it, then you're like, "Oh my God, this is true. And I can't believe I never realized this before". And I had one of those moments when I was talking with my friend and I was like, I'm stuck in a cycle of violence with this person in my life. And then my immediate reaction was to try and deny it. And I was like, "No, no, no, I'm being over dramatic. I'm not really stuck in a cycle of violence. No, no, no." But then I had to stop myself and be like, "Oh, no. Oh, no. I think, oh, gosh, the truth just came out of me." I am in a cycle of violence, and now what am I going to do with that? You know, so... And until I made that acknowledgment, I couldn't take the right actions to... Yeah.

MYRA: Exactly, exactly, exactly. That's a beautiful example. And you see, going back a step, I think, what I want, we was talking about this holistic approach in life and you know, first becoming ill, then going to the doctor and getting tablets. Well, part of my absolute dream, as I said, is for people to be empowered and to be whole before the drama happens. So in that situation, for example, I so believe everything is really about communication. So it's definitely the communication within the brain to get the brain integrated. But when we learn to communicate through the brain, which is another thing that I work with, then we don't have to get into these cycles of abuse. Because first of all, when we know how to communicate, let's just talk about an abuser for the moment. When we know how to get our own needs met and we know how to ask and we know how to get help, and we know what part of the brain to use to do that, we can actually resolve some of the issues that would drive these people to the violence. So this is about educating how this all can work and how we communicate. And then, as you say, to recognize when we are totally integrated, we can recognize what's happening. And I do a lot of work around women. The gaslighting... I've done a whole series on gaslighting which is exactly related to what you're saying, because people don't want to accept that their perfect little dream is not actually happening. But when we are brain-integrated, we can look at it a different way. And this is why we become aware of what's happening in my brain here. Why am I accepting this? Why what part of me, and for some people, it does mean a little bit of digging back into the past. But never in my programs do we go and do the whole blah, blah therapy thing. You know, go through your trauma again. You've been through your trauma once, in my view, you don't have to relive it. I don't believe that. So I don't work from that place. I work about being aware. It's there, absolutely. Acknowledging what it did to you. And then later on we go to the forgiveness and all of that stuff. As I say, the work is complex because, you know, forgiveness is definitely a step in that situation. So once you acknowledge that and then you can make action, the action can be, what am I going to do from now on with my whole brain? How can I use my brain to achieve? And we're going back to change makers and people that are really looking to do special things. How am I going to get my brain integrated? What is missing? What's the missing bit that's not working? And then I can show how to get that bit working and it's not a big traumatic thing. When the bit works, you've got your whole brain going, can fly, people fly off because they're not restrained by a little part of the brain that's not working.

SAMIA: Right. Yes, yes. Because you know, our... The way our brain works... I mean again, because we are a whole person, we're a whole being, we, every aspect of us is interconnected and interdependent. And so this is something that I've been learning recently that has been a very eye-opening for me that, you know, the way our brain works, it's wellness is really important. Our physical health and wellness is really important even to our spiritual health and wellness because again, everything is connected. And so when we take better care of our physical health, our mental emotional health, it actually has an impact on our spiritual health as well. And vice versa is also true for sure... But you know, it's like for us, a lot of us, we don't... Like, it's much easier to come to an awareness of what's happening with our bodies, with our minds, with our brains than it is to come to awareness with what's happening with us at a purely energetic and spiritual level. You know, so... And I mean we are in this world and so we, we do... It is important that we learn to appreciate the physical aspect of our lives and learn how to, you know, make it better and better for us.

MYRA: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, you've hit the nail on my absolute pet love about my work is when people start my programs, as I said, I work with the four pillars, I don't work with one. Most people want to do, as you've just said, they want to get the physical stuff sorted. I want to get thin, I want to get fit, I want to do... And they go, what are we going to do about this physical stuff? I go, physical comes last.

Oh, but I want to do physical now. But in terms my world, the spiritual is our umbrella if we do not know what we believe. Some of my first questions in the very first questionnaire they get is what do you believe? What are you talking about? I thought we were coming here to do, you know, menopause, work, or anxiety... Why are you asking me what I believe? And you see, that's the big issue. If we don't know what we believe, we don't have a foundation. We don't have an umbrella to cover every decision we make... We lost. Absolutely lost... So I totally get you that, it's me. It's working that spiritual stuff out first. Yes. We can grow it and develop it later, but we have to know what we believe.

SAMIA: Yeah.

MYRA: We have to know what we believe…

SAMIA: Yes. You know, my sister, who happens to be really wonderful. I mean, I would say, like, her core strength is her understanding of people and complexity in relationships and being able to help navigate people through relational complexities. And she also, you know, she talks a lot about relationship with self. And one of our favorite questions to ask is, what do you have faith in? What do you believe in? What do you trust... What can you trust?

MYRA: Yeah.

SAMIA: Especially when things are like... When you're on shaky ground, when things are going wrong, it's like you have to come back to that first and, you know, ground yourself in, what can I have faith in? What can I have... What do I have trust in? What do I believe?

MYRA: Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. That is, for me, the central, the core of everything. Once we know what we believe, and most people don't know, 90% of people go, I haven't thought about it... So how can we possibly move forward in life when we don't have that foundation? So that definitely is the core in. In my world is what do you believe? And then it's about how do we link that belief to our actions? So let me just go one step back and say it doesn't matter what we believe. That's irrelevant. It's that we believe in something.

SAMIA: Ah. Yes.

MYRA: What we believe in is a personal choice, and it's... We need to be very respectful of everybody. But with no belief and no knowing what it is we believe, we definitely are bobbing around in the ocean with not knowing where we're going.

So I've lost my train of thought because I'm starting to get very passionate about it.

SAMIA: No. I love it…

MYRA: And then I want to give you a whole lot of other information because I'm so passionate about how are the core. The core of everything. So even though this brain stuff is what definitely can sort out anxiety, we have to make sure that those four pillars in my world, spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical. And the brain is part of physical, but it's not the weight loss, gummy bears, you know, having to look in a particular way. It really, the physical is, how do we love ourselves, how do we love our body, how do we treat our body, how do we treat our mind? If we dehydrating ourselves, we're not loving ourselves, we're not looking after ourselves physically, never mind mentally. So, yeah.

SAMIA: Yeah, yeah. And you know, the thing is about beliefs and what you believe in, that not all beliefs are necessarily empowering. I mean, a lot of the beliefs, I mean, everything that we do is actually, whether we realize it or not, is being driven by our beliefs. And so far as what we are doing, what we are feeling, what we are thinking are things that are not very empowering, that are not allowing us to experience the kind of peace and happiness that we desire. It's that there are these beliefs that we are holding that are dragging us down or weighing us down. And so, you know, it's equally important to be aware of our beliefs for that reason that if we change, we may have to actually shift some of those beliefs to be more empowering for us, more healing for us.

MYRA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of my favorite things is when people think, oh, I've got so much to change. I need to change. I need to fix. That's another word.

I go, no, we don't talk about fixing. I mean, we are all born perfect. We do not need to change. Now for some people, they go, oh, that's a lot of rubbish. Of course I need to change. What we need to do is to alter the brain functions, the behaviors, the beliefs that do not support us. So if any of those are not supporting us, then we need to actually find another way of getting changing or altering the belief so that it supports our core value, etc. But when people feel like if I say to you, you need to change, you know, you really need to change that what you feel... Remember that now. But if I say to you, you don't have to change, we just have to think about other ways that might work better for you. You see, the second one is a gentle one. It's the one that can work. People don't put their barriers up because we don't have to change. We just have to figure out what it is that will make things better for us to lead the life we want to do, to be empowered ourselves to empower others. And of course, part of my program ends with, what are you going to give back to the world? Service... So it's a whole continuum of getting it right. And if we Go back to the triple-A. It's so easy. Are you aware that this particular belief, this thought pattern and I deal a lot with language. I drive my clients crazy because the language we use creates our tomorrow. So when we are aware of that language, then we can acknowledge, oh, you know, every time you say to yourself, I can't, for example, what is it doing to me? What is it doing to me neurologically? What is it doing to me belief-wise? How is this holding me back? And then what do I need to do? So maybe I need to find a substitute word or phrase for I can't is a can't or something like that. So it's all minor. Most people to move from where they are... Excuse me. Move from where they are to where they want to be. Tiny little shifts, not big ones, tiny ones... And it's the same with anxiety. The shifts are tiny. And people have built this anxiety thing up like it's the biggest monster in the world. It's not... It's a lot of tiny little things, tiny pathways that aren't working. So we've got to find them, acknowledge, be aware of which ones aren't working. Acknowledge what they're doing to you and what will happen if we change them. And let's take action. It's easy. It's easy when we have a system, understand how it works, and know where we're going. So that's the belief.

SAMIA: Yes. And you know, you made me think about going back to the idea of like, I hate being told what to do. And like, you must change, you need to change. Like being told what to do versus what you are saying. The better approach to say to somebody, well, let's think about what can you do differently that will work better for you. So like for me, that is more empowering. For me, that's like me... I get to think, I get better and I get to choose for myself what I want to do. And that maybe that is actually a subtle shift, but it's a very important one.

MYRA: Yes, yes. But you make it because based on what you want, not what somebody else believes for you. Again, because everybody knows exactly, do this, do this. You shouldn't, you should, you should... That's another word we don't use should. But people tell you because they have a perception to believe you have to do something. But it's our own choice. And I want everybody to stand in their own choice, can choose X and Y, and I'll be aware of that choice. I will acknowledge what each will do for me and then I can take action. Very empowering.

SAMIA: Yes. And you know, because we've been talking about anxiety. You know, I realize and recognize certainly for myself that one of the reasons why I hate being told what to do, or I used to really hate being told what to do, I don't have such a strong reaction to that anymore. But the reason I used to really hate it is because it actually did make me anxious because, you know, I really had a strong need to feel in control of my life and my well-being and you know, and so when I thought someone was taking my power away, it made me very anxious or if I thought I didn't have power in a situation, if I don't have choice in a situation again, that feeling of, "Oh, I cannot control this, I can't be in control, I don't have power in this situation".

That actually is what, that belief or that idea or that perception is what triggered my anxiety because I had a deep need to, you know, feel in control. And…

MYRA: Yeah, well, see, when we talk about control, excuse me, control really lives in a part of the brain. So when we understand the whole brain, again we understand what is that control is an overactive part of the brain. It is a fear of engaging the other parts to become more holistic. So the control is probably one of the biggest issues in relationships in the whole world. And not just relationships, look at our current war. All that is is about control. It's about somebody wanting to control something. So when we learn how to use our whole brain and we can learn, we can in the fight, flight, even if we stuck there there, we can say to ourselves, we can become aware that living in that little base of the the brain, there are two parts, fight or flight. So we can flight if we fight if we choose. But we also have the option of flighting, which means sometimes in an argument or whatever, we can stay there and argue and argue and argue. Or we can say, I'm going to go for a walk and to clear my head and I'll be back in 20 minutes. So it's about choices. When we know how our brain works, we can then move into a different part. Excuse me. I'm drinking so much water because I'm talking too much. We can move into a different part of the brain, access that part and have a different result. So once we learn how to do becomes we start off by doing it very consciously. Oh, I need to engage midbrain. I'm not showing enough empathy in this situation. And I give you movements as well.

So there are lots of lots of things that we have to do to get that brain integrated. Once we then get the, for example, empathy integrated, we can feel sorry for that person and not walk past a beggar and go, you know, they're such idiots, they've messed up their lives. And we know, oops, that means the midbrain, the emotional context. Empathy is not online. I've got my left brain judgment because left brain judgment is left brain. I've got judgment online here. How do I get empathy? And then I teach you how to get that back and you can say, I feel for you, I care for you, I will help you, I will do whatever... A different result by being aware of what part of the brain is overriding the other parts of the brain.

SAMIA: Can you give me an example of like how you... So, like once you identify a gap or, you know, somewhere where the brain is not fully integrated or you have lost access to a certain part of the brain in a situation, how... Just an example of how you gain access to that missing part that you need. Because a lot of times, you know, like, when people think about getting help for like in a mental health context, emotional health context, they're very, they think, oh, I don't know, like, they just don't know what to expect. And so it, I, it holds a lot of people back. And like, you know, for me, like when I actually started to understand and see and experience how beautiful and simple and just normal these things are, it really helped me to be more open to receiving and looking, asking for that, for that help. So if you could give us an example…

MYRA: I'm going to give you a brush stroke and then I'm going to give you a parenting example, because I think it's a good one too. The brush stroke is we do something called Brain Gym, which is a set of movements that you're taught exactly what movement will integrate the other part of the brain. So if you, I will show you and teach you and guide you to know what part of the brain is overactive and what part is not active. And so by doing certainly a little bit of Brain Gym, it can immediately pull the other part in. But an example that I thought about this morning actually was, I see very often I go to the supermarket and you'll see a child screaming their head off. I'm sure we all know this one at the checkout counter, they've got all the lollies, all the sugar, it's all there. The child wants it. And they're screaming and screaming and screaming, and the mother is doing one of two things is either shouting at the child or trying to discuss and negotiate with the two-year-old, you know, "Darling Johnny, na na na...", trying to negotiate with him and the child screaming and screaming and screaming. It doesn't work because whatever you're doing is you're keeping that child stuck in the fight flight or fight. He's fighting, he wants the lollies and that's all he's going to do is scream. Violence, aggression. He's going to keep doing that until he can get out of that. And with mommy just going screaming, screaming or blah blah, blah, he's staying in that. So an example would be I would go to that child and say to the child, would you like to go to Disneyland? In the middle of the screaming, I would say, for example, would you like to go to Disneyland? And I've done this a few times and the mother looks at me like what are you talking about? And the child stops. Now there are two things that happen. Once you ask a question, the right-hand side of the brain is engaged. So read the right brain is engaged, a question engages that. So just by asking that question, the child stops, gets out of the base brain, out of back brain and is immediately thinking, oh maybe I would. But stops crying because we've got another part of the brain engaged. And then if you say what ride would you like to go on first you will see them stop and think about it and think about a ride they'd like to go into. So you're getting the visualization which is very important is to use the visual as well as everything else. So you've got the right brain engaged, you've got the midbrain engaged, you've got visualization engaged, then you can talk to that child. They've stopped screaming. Whatever you want to say to them, they are available because they now have their whole brain on show. They have access to all those other parts. Does that make sense?

SAMIA: Yes, yes, yes. Thank you so much for sharing that example. Yeah, you see, you see it's like what you are describing is like such a simple strategy. It's not like some kind of weird anything that you have to do. It's just…

MYRA: Exactly.

SAMAI: ..that awareness of, okay, this is what's missing in terms of the part of the brain that's not engaged. And here's a question I can ask an action I can take to get that part of the brain engaged.

MYRA: Exactly. It's very simple. I keep saying it's very simple but very, very powerful when we know what is going on. So back to the triple-A... Boring you, be aware in that situation, the child is stuck in back brain, stuck in his reptilian. We're aware of that. To acknowledge that's what he's doing. He's screaming, acknowledge. What do I need to do? I need to get him out of that. What can I do? I can either show him something, ask him a question. There are lots of things you can do, but acknowledge what needs to be, not what I need to do, and then do it. Simple, simple, simple…

SAMIA: Yes. You know, I really also appreciate about this approach that you don't have to get into, that it bypasses... It allows you to transcend actually the whole blaming, judging, shaming mindset, you know... Yeah.

MYRA: Exactly, exactly, exactly. Well, that's something that just is so useless.

That whole victim blame, shame, regret, that whole set of emotions is the most useless thing in the world. And when we realize where it comes from, what part of the brain's holding on to that, that is part of a memory which is stuck in back brain and midbrain. So how do I get out of that? What do I want with that memory? What do I want? So, you know, whether it is forgiveness, sometimes it's a new picture.

Sometimes we have bonfires, the biggest bonfires in the world where we burn all that garbage. We burn it and it's gone. But we have to stand in a clean space almost on a daily basis. You know, that's where meditation, mindfulness and all of that comes in as well. But if we don't, if we start every day with the baggage of yesterday, well, you know, pretty heavy going... We can, you can do what we like. But I certainly know that since I've learned to start a day as a new day, I don't have to carry all that rubbish around with me anymore.

SAMIA: Yes. You know, one of my teachers that I've been working with, he's like, don't worry about letting these things go. Like talking about things that stress us, burden us, etc... It's like, there's plenty more. You can let this one go and this one too. And this one too. Just let it go... There's plenty more. Don't worry.

MYRA: Yeah, yeah, yeah... Absolutely, absolutely.

SAMIA: It's like amazing how we hold on to these things and you know, they make us miserable and they weigh us down and. And yet we're not like sometimes too scared to let them go.

MYRA: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Good…

SAMIA: Oh my gosh, it's been so much fun talking with you. I sort of lost track of time and I was like, oh my gosh, we have been talking for over an hour now... So we'll, I think have to start wrapping up for today. Do you have any last thoughts you would like to share?

MYRA: What I would like to share is that living anxiety-free is easy. And I just want to share, just closing off that, the two myths that are in my book, and if anybody wants, I have a free book and a free five-day workshop that you just have just because it shows what I do... But the two things, two myths are that anxiety cannot, you cannot get rid of anxiety. That's a myth and it's rubbish. I know you can live anxiety free and it can absolutely be got rid of. So I think I've just actually finished with that, that anxiety... You can live anxiety free and it is not difficult. It is not difficult, but it does take a process of putting what you… The habits of the past, altering them to form new neurological pathways. So the new neurological pathways are just… instead of saying, I can't do that because grandma and whatever did it and it's genetic… Nothing's genetic anymore... We've proved that now… epigenetics are saying that's rubbish. You know, only about 1% is genetics. The rest can change. And they've proved that neuroplasticity can change anything. So anxiety can go and it can go easily and simply. So I just wish everybody that's here today just a beautiful festive season and just hope that if this anxiety thing comes along, just remember what I say, it is easy to get rid of it and know that you do not have to be burdened with this for the rest of your life.

SAMIA: Yes, I love that. Thank you so much. And I'm so on board with you on that. And my last reminder to our audience is to please make sure you check the show notes because we will be dropping Myra's links in there, including the link to your book, Myra, because you shared that with me and you said I could share it with our audience. I'm so happy for you sharing that gift with all of us. So please make sure you check the show notes and get in touch with Myra whenever you're ready to get the help and support that you want. And also make sure you download that book.

And until we connect next time, I just wish you lots and lots of peace and joy. :)