WHAT THIS EPISODES ABOUT…
Hello. I’m Shauna Hoffman. I am so glad that you’re joining us today. I am excited to welcome back to our podcast Andra Million.
If you listened to our podcast three weeks ago, you have heard all the fabulous insights Andra gave us into women and our wellness goals. Well today we’re going to speak to this a little more in depth. So get ready to check in on your own commitment to your health. Let me tell you a little bit about Andra. She holds a Masters of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Chinese Herbal Medicine from the top TCM university in the United States. She has used her skillset and acupuncture and or biology working in integrative medicine alongside the pediatric surgeons, anesthesiologist at UCLA Medical Center for Pediatric Pain.
For the past 20 years, Andra has been in private practice in her beloved Austin where she treats the whole person with a focus on chronic ailments and healthy aging. Since 2001 Andra has been the featured acupuncturist for ballet Austin and served on the board as president of Austin herb society.
Listen in…
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONTENT DISCUSSED…
• Guy Free Podcast: https://guyfree.com
• Guy Free Facebook Group: https://guyfreeworkingonme.com
• Shauna’s website: https://www.workingonme.com
WHEN DOES IT AIR…
May 30, 2020
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Shauna:
Hello. I’m Shauna Hoffman. I am so glad that you’re joining us today. I am excited to welcome back to our podcast Andra Million. If you listened to our podcast three weeks ago, you have heard all the fabulous insights Andra gave us into women and our wellness goals. Well today we’re going to speak to this a little more in depth. So get ready to check in on your own commitment to your health. Let me tell you a little bit about Andra. She holds a Masters of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Chinese Herbal Medicine from the top TCM university in the United States. She has used her skillset and acupuncture and or biology working in integrative medicine alongside the pediatric surgeons, anesthesiologist at UCLA Medical Center for Pediatric Pain. For the past 20 years, Andra has been in private practice in her beloved Austin where she treats the whole person with a focus on chronic ailments and healthy aging. Since 2001 Andra has been the featured acupuncturist for ballet Austin and served on the board as president of Austin herb society. Now ladies, here’s our disclaimer for today. This podcast is for information purposes only and is no way intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It’s important to always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare professional with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. There you go, everybody. Welcome back. Andra.
Andra:
Thank you Ms. Shauna. Nice to be here with you.
Shauna:
We had such great feedback from our last podcast. I know that so many women are, are really looking forward to hearing more from you today.
Andra
What are we going to talk about today?
Shauna
Well, I really loved the concept of wellness goals. You know, women, it’s really interesting. Why is it that we’ll come up with workout goals, work goals even. I find that the only time we really look at wellness and is when we need to lose weight or we’re already ill with something.
Andra:
Yeah, I mean even when we’re ill with something because it’s really not taught a lot. If you’re going to a practitioner, some of them will ask their patients, what is your goal for this meeting with me? What do you want to accomplish here? A lot of them won’t. So what I suggest to people for a couple of reasons is get your goals together. It’ll, it’ll help focus you on really the kind of practitioner you need to be seeing at any given time. If it’s just for overall wellness, it’s for if it’s for something nutritional or if you’re really having issues with something and we’ll get into, you know who you might choose for that later in this talk. But if you go in to see someone, why you’re going to see that person and what you hope to accomplish. And if they don’t ask you, you keep a running, you know, a running notes about how well this person and you are teaming up and accomplishing that goal.
Andra:
Because once people get over something like a symptom, if you go in and you’re saying, okay, you know, I’m having terrible PMs every month, I’m just a mess. And you go in to see, for example, somebody like me, you know, uh, somebody who treats PMs in a natural way and things start to go well for you. After a while, it’s like having a baby. You’ll, you’ll get amnesia about why you were in there in the first place, about how you felt before. So some people, especially pain doctors, will do that. Scale of one to 10 on a pain scale, you know, where are you today? Are you 10 jumping out of your skin? Excruciating pain, are you zero? Nothing is happening. And they’ll keep a running tally of that. A lot of times physical therapists do this. Chiropractors might do this, other types of pain doctors so that you’re both on the same page and they can go back and say, look, when you came in here, you were a level six pain every single day. So significant pain and now you’re about hovering at a one or two, maybe a few times a week. So we’re doing a lot better. And in that way they can keep track of their progress with you and you can keep track of your progress with you.
Shauna:
So, what about the person who does not have any pains, does not have any goals though? What? How do you create your wellness goals if you’re actually feeling fine? I think that’s my biggest challenge. It’s when I’m feeling fine that I don’t have wellness goals.
Andra:
So in Chinese medicine they say, I think I said this last time too. Don’t wait until you’re dying of thirst to start drinking out of a well. I mean, you have to ask yourself, are really my wellness goals important to me right now? Obviously, if you’re thinking about it, they are, and if you’re doing it on your own, that’s one thing. Then you have, you know, your, your, your new year’s resolutions that may or may not, you know, be be worthwhile. It really helps to have somebody else, I find doing something with you. Whether that means, okay, I’ve got a buddy and we’re going to do, you know, virtual yoga once a week or we’re to, we’re going to check in with each other to see if, you know, if you get one of those bands that tell you how many steps you take a day, that’s a goal.
Andra:
That’s a goal right there, right? So you have one of those bands or you have a little app on your app and that will set a goal for you. It will tell you this many steps is what you’re going to try and do today. And bravo, you have reached your goal. So it can be as simple as something like that, right? But you want to get something that’s measurable for you so that you can feel good about yourself and say, Hey, you know, I walked up 1500 steps today and I feel so good about myself, or I’m going to call my friend Shauna and we’re going to do five down dogs today together, and that’s our, that’s our thing. It’ll just help you keep on track a lot better. But it’s most important when you’re actually shelling out money in time to go to a specialist or to go to a doctor or to go to a practitioner or a therapist to have a goal.
Shauna:
It’s interesting because for the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked a lot about affirmations, which for me, these are my wellness goals that I try to really help my clients with. I really want them to wake up and every day have a clear mind and be positive and be honoring of themselves and clear thinking and nonjudgmental of anything. Right. How would you combine something? How do you see the mental attitude that you take combined with your wellness goals?
Andra:
Well, in terms of affirmations and things like affirmations are really important and they really work really well for a lot of people. They’re different than setting a goal. They’re more alike. Creating a context, anchoring something that is is now happening. I’m seeing things in a really positive way because of this, this and this, right? I mean, you’re saying like what? Like what’s an example, Shauna?
Shauna:
I honor myself. Therefore, today I take loving care of myself. Today I eat nourishing foods or I exercise or I honor my body.
Andra:
Okay, so if you’re going to do an affirmation, then you can follow it up by one of those things and actually setting the goal of how am I going to do this? I’m going to honor I honor myself. I am loving to myself. I love my body. How? How am I going to eat nourishing food? How am I going to exercise? Put that in place because your brain, it’s like a little mini computer. I, I years and years ago, um, when I was still living in Los Angeles, I worked with a really interesting guy named Nathaniel Brandon who is no longer on the planet and he was sort of the father of the, the self esteem movement. He was quite a character. And what he, what he, one of the takeaways I had from from him was that our brain is sort of like a mini computer.
Andra:
We invented the computer, right? We invented the microchip. It’s all up there. So it’s very, very important that you speak to your brain and ask your brain exactly the right way, which is what affirmations do you ask and you know, in like Buddhism and all that stuff too, it’s like right action, right questions, right? Thinking, how do you do that? So if you’re in a negative space for example, and you’re saying, I feel really kind of yucky, I feel bloated and fat, your brain will, we’ll look for a way to answer that specific question. If you ask yourself why am I so fat, your brain will start working, working, working, working and find 50 million reasons why you are so fat, which is not a very positive place to be. If you ask yourself, how can I honor my body, eat better and feel better about my body, which is the same thing as how can I maybe be less fat?
Andra:
Your brain is going to start looking for that. Your brain is going to start looking for positives instead of you’re fat because you’re fat because your fat.
Shauna
I say the same thing and I have said this many, many times in this podcast, that we are computer chips and we have been programmed from the time we were little and we need to retrain. We need to delete, delete, delete, all of the negative programming and input the positive.
Andra
That’s a great thing. That delete, delete, delete. When I start getting too and we all did and a woman, Oh my gosh, you know, I even heard about women’s stopping sports more than men because they, if they have an injury, women are more inclined to stop the sport that they started because their self esteem goes down around that injury where men don’t have that.
Andra:
They’ll just get right back up and work right through it. So we tell ourselves a lot of really negative things and we need to exercise our brains in a way to train ourselves to ask ourselves the right questions the right way. Absolutely. I, it’s a rephrasing of the questions. Positive affirmations is all about rephrasing them, taking out negative thoughts, assuming that we can achieve the positive. Many people think that once I get this illness, I’m never going to get rid of it again. Yeah. A lot of people have been living with a lot of chronic things for a long time and a lot of people have tried a lot of things for a long time. A lot of people, and I think we spoke about this a little bit last time and especially women are in that fix me mode where they tend to, again, without goals go to whoever and wherever and whatever or that person handing over their power and their autonomy to somebody that they have just met a doctor or therapist or whatever without a goal in mind.
Andra:
Just walking in and saying, fix me. And when that person doesn’t fix them because they don’t have a goal in mind and they’re not tracking their progress and they’re not taking responsibility for their own health, a lot of times they lose track of how well they’ve progressed. They’re in a constant mode, so it’s really important if you at least try. You know, some people do have really, really nagging chronic things, but if they’re, if you’re on a path to wellness, at least try to put that negative thinking aside, even as you remain skeptical. I think being skeptical is a great thing. I’m a natural skeptic so that when you happen upon something that is actually working and your skepticism because of the good questions that you’ve asked and the research that you’ve done and the goals that you’ve set has proven itself to you, you’re, you know you’re going to feel a whole lot better about the whole situation.
Shauna:
I have a client that said, it’s not that I worry. Her husband would always say, you just worry about everything, and she said, “No, I’m planning for either response. I’m planning for the good or the bad. I just need to plan for it. I’m not worrying about it, I’m not claiming it. I just need to think about it and plan for it.” And that is what brought down her anxiety. Wellness. Well, this is a really big word and I know wellness in terms of therapy. I know wellness in terms of psychology and our psychological thinking and our psychological health. Wellness is coming from a non harming place. Wellness is coming from a place where you do not do your own harm to yourself. Wellness comes from knowing that if someone is coming at you in a harmful way, you have proper and healthy defense mechanisms in order to deal with that human being, that person, whether it’s your parent, your child, your ex, your husband, whoever it is, but wellness has to start first with the way you take care of yourself. How would you describe wellness in the big picture medically? What does that look like?
Andra:
Well, I mean wellness is first of all, very subjective, so it’s when you yourself feel good. It doesn’t matter what the fad is, it doesn’t matter if somebody is telling you to get in a particular type of a diet or else the whole world’s going to come to an end. It doesn’t matter if somebody tells you you have to eat everything organic or you’re doing everything wrong. It doesn’t matter if they tell you you have to be a size four and you’re a size 14 and you’re happy being a size 14 it’s a very subjective thing. It’s a body mind spirit thing so that those are the areas that wellness, as a big picture, treats and those things, body, mind, spirit are very subjective. Meaning you’re going to think differently how you feel. How your mom and her generation all generations felt well and how your teenage daughter feels well it’s a very different thing and you’re going to feel different about what makes you feel well when you were 25 as opposed to when you’re 60 something.
Shauna:
It’s so interesting Andra because anybody that listened to my podcast last week, the podcast name was breath, balance lockjaw because I got lockjaw. I am the one that worked so much with my clients on being centered and being self-aware. I think self-aware is such a huge, huge concept in your psychological health and your physical health because I think when we are not self aware we don’t even realize the things that hurt us physically or emotionally. And so I was laughing because here I am teaching this to everybody and yet here we are in the midst of Covid and the stress that I have been under trying to help my clients and be there and do the podcasts and stay safe and keep my family say I had no idea. I was so not self- aware. I had no idea that I was clenching my jaw all the time.
Andra:
You talk a lot for your living. You must speak for your living. And hopefully this podcast will be maybe on the other side of Covid at a certain point. But it’s created a whole new paradigm of stress for everyone and especially caregivers. And you know, that includes parents who have small children at home. That includes people taking care of elders. Or in my case, I can’t even go in the same house with my mom. I have to like wave to her from the bottom of the driveway, but she’s 90. We’ve, you know, stress has taken on a whole new meaning. We’re going to have stress reactions to things, especially you who do it for a living and have to be there for other people. And I and other people in the health fields oftentimes, and you talked about this last time, is you know, we put ourselves last, but also life happens, life happens and things like, you know, there was the Spanish flu and there’s Wars and there’s droughts and there’s your family members getting ill or dying or something. There’s always going to be something stressful because stuff happens in life. Yeah, stress is just part of life. And if you think that if you start beating yourself up because you can’t maintain this perfect balance… balance is like a teeter totter. Nobody’s ever in perfect balance. That’s why we’re all in business trying to help people.
Shauna:
Brilliant. I love that Teeter totter. That’s absolutely right.
Andra:
It’s a, it’s a dynamic state. It’s not static state.
How often can people stay perfectly balanced that creates your status, that is a lack of movement that will kill you. So to keep dynamic movement, it’s, it’s sort of average, an average of more balanced than less balanced. It’s a trying to come back to things faster. It’s trying not to get too far out of balance, but it doesn’t mean you have to be imperfect wellness and perfect balance all the time.
Shauna
Which is interesting because I was reading about the Buddhist monks and the ones that are living sequestered away and how easy it is for them to maintain their focus in their spirituality because they are not being inundated with realities of the world around them. Andra believe it or not, we are out of time. Is it? Is it possible that I keep you hanging on? We end this podcast and we’ll go ahead and start recording another one so that because I have so much more I want to talk to you about.
Andra:
Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it. You know what I want to talk about? I want to talk about a wellness team.
Shauna
That’s perfect. All right everybody. We’re going to end this podcast today with the amazing Andra Millian. We’re going to talk more in next week’s podcast cause I’m going to keep talking to her because I need a wellness team. We’re going to record this and check back next week because we are going to share more of the wisdom of the amazing Andra Millian, ladies. Thank you so much for listening today. Please take care of yourself, be good to yourself, drink lots of water, get lots of sleep, and I look forward to popping into your life again next week.