Episode 263
Title: The Emotional Connection to Thyroid Disease
Host: Dr. Nicole Rivera
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Transcription:
What is up, my friends? Welcome back to another episode of Integrative You Radio. I shamelessly will tell you this is my second go around with recording this because I never turned on my headphones in order to. Make sure that my mic was working properly. So here we are, but we are talking about a topic that is very important, and it's also a topic that is affecting a lot of people, especially women, and we're talking about thyroid conditions and thyroid dysfunction, but we're talking about it from a completely different perspective.
And we're talking about the mental, emotional and energetic reasons as to why we can have thyroid disease or thyroid dysfunction. So if you are more interested in understanding the physical or biochemical reasons for thyroid disease, I highly recommend podcast and typing in the search for thyroid.
Because you can find a variety of different podcasts that are talking more about that aspect, talking about the thyroid's connection to sinuses, tonsils, neurological system, reproductive organs, lymphatic system, et cetera. But today we're shedding light on thyroid dysfunction from the perspective of the mental, emotional, and even energetic layers that can be causing this.
organ to dysfunction. And it's not even just the thyroid, but it's, it's the throat. It's the tonsils. It's the whole area. And I'm going to share some things with you that are personal that I think will help you to understand the bigger picture behind this. But Just to kind of give you a high level overview of, of what we're really diving into today.
When we want to talk about the somatic, mental, emotional components to the throat and the thyroid, this is connected back to speaking up, speaking your truth, knowing Your truth in order to speak up, and that is really rooted in knowing yourself, knowing your values, knowing your character, knowing what lights you up, what energizes you, what would you do for free?
Because you didn't have to earn a living and how can you speak your truth from a perspective of confidence? Being able to exercise your voice without fearing judgment, without fearing not being liked, but then also understanding That there's an aspect of over speaking or speaking up and being extremely opinionated that you might experience or you might observe in others that irritates you and how this can actually also be rooted within In not knowing your truth and not feeling comfortable speaking your authentic truth.
So all in all, my goal and my intention for this is to help you understand things that you might be sweeping under the rug, things that you might not be understanding about what's happening on a day to day basis. That's keeping you feeling really frustrated. It's keeping you feeling stuck. It's keeping you from having.
quality supportive relationships. It's helping you understand what this might look like and to help you know how to use it. How can you flip the script on this and leverage it as a feedback in order to not only understand more about who you are and what is your truth, but how can you humbly and confidently, Speak from a place of truth and master your communication in a way that you are bringing so much abundance and amazing experience to your life.
You're building an inner circle that feels really good. You're making decisions in your life that are aligned and inspired. You don't fear the difficulty of. bold and hard decisions anymore because you know it's exactly what you should be doing. That's my goal and intention for today. So I want to start this with a story because I feel like this always can help with setting a foundation of understanding.
So for myself, one, I haven't personally had thyroid issues, but I have had a variety of issues since childhood when it came to sore throats. Tonsil issues. and losing my voice, you know, just my throat being a weak spot. And of course, you know, as a young child, it's, Oh, you know, you probably needed your tonsils out.
Oh, you had recurring strep. Um, you know, some kids just get that, I also had what are called tonsil stones, which is when you have such significant colonies of bacteria in the crypts of your tonsils that it forms these white stones that smell horrible. For those of you that know what I'm talking about, it's like you're forever scarred if you have this experience because it's absolutely disgusting and it literally makes your breath not great.
It's, uh, it's not fun. But, you know. The quote unquote biochemical root of that is that there are colonies of bacteria in your crypts of your tonsils. And so back in the day when I started getting into this world of integrative medicine, you know, to be really honest, I wasn't, I wasn't in a mental space to even try to understand this aspect of disease and dysfunction.
You know, I was more so. I guess staying in my comfort zone, my comfort zone of science, my comfort zone of biochemistry and physicality. And you know, as I mentioned, I, I found, figured out all the reasons why I had chronic sinusitis and chronic tonsil throat issues. And it was, I had fungus in my sinuses. I had, uh, bacterial colonies in my tonsils.
You know, I had dental issues. I had Uh, impacted and infected wisdom teeth, had all the physical reasons, and of course I worked on those, but it was my weak spot. So anytime I got stressed, I got overwhelmed, I got sick, I would always have significant symptoms in my sinuses and in my throat. And I just thought, you know, well, this is, you know, is what it is for me.
So I started to get more into understanding the bigger picture, and part of this was honestly because of roadblocks that I was hitting in my clinical care of clients and started to see this theme of chronic stress. In people's lives and how that had a lot to do with the onset of their symptoms or their disease or their autoimmune condition and, you know, fast forward, time goes by and I personally hit a point in my life where I just felt really stuck, and I realized that most of my life was about doing.
It was about achievement, and I really didn't know how to live life. I didn't even, I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what was important to me. I, if you asked me who I was, I said, I'm a doctor. It's not who I was. It's what I did. And, um. In working with someone, a mentor, who, you know, was farther along on the journey than me at that time, he just opened my eyes to the fact that I didn't know who I was as a person.
And it was very easy for me to just keep doing, doing, doing, doing, achieving, achieving, achieving. And there was a level of satisfaction that came with that. But then there was also still this lingering emptiness. And so I got into understanding the work of Joe Dispenza, understanding the energy centers of the body, and understanding human behavior work from Dr.
Demartini. I got into meditation. I got into understanding manifestation and the power of the mind. And as I started my meditation and inner work journey, I literally had sinus congestion and inflamed thyroid and inflamed throat for almost two years. And I kept asking, what is this? Like, what is this? And why, like, what is it telling me?
What have I not learned? Why is this not going away? The End. You know, I was asking myself all the questions that I thought were the right questions and you know, I was like, okay, if, if the throat and the thyroid are connected to speaking up and speaking your truth, I don't feel like I've ever had a problem with that, you know, if anything, I've always been opinionated.
Um, as a kid, I got myself in a lot of trouble being a rebel, speaking up and, uh, pushing back, challenging everyone and everything. And, you know, I got into my career and I made an effort to have this podcast for 10 years. And, I was a speaker and I was educating on a one on one basis. And, you know, there were so many things that I felt like I was doing to exercise my truth and exercise my voice.
And when I really, really sat with it and I, I surrendered to the, The meditation process and stop trying to figure it all out. I realized that so much of my life was spent speaking up. But never feeling heard and part of it was because I wasn't speaking from a place of alignment. I was speaking from a place of seeking justice for the world.
a place of everything's a fucking lie and conventional medicine has been killing us. And you know, it was from a, it wasn't from a place of, of empathy or compassion. It was a place of frustration. It was a place of overwhelm. It was a place of honestly, a lot of negatively rooted emotions. And as a kid, I never felt smart.
I didn't feel relevant. I didn't feel, um, worthy. And so I was the kid who was always opinionated, always had something to say, was always the loud one in the room. And so if you're that person or you know that person, those are some of the most least confident people. They are the people that are struggling.
internally and their behavior is a compensation for how irrelevant and small that they actually feel. And so don't be confused by what I just described to you. If you are the person that I speak up, I tell people what I think, I tell people how I feel. I told my boss this, I told my husband or wife this, that doesn't necessarily mean you're speaking your truth.
That doesn't mean you speak from a place of authenticity and vulnerability. That doesn't mean that you don't fear being judged by speaking up. That doesn't mean any of that. So really what it comes down to is you can't speak your truth and you cannot be heard effectively. And compassionately, if you don't even know who the fuck you are, if you don't know what makes up your character, aka your values, you guys have heard me talk about this, if you don't know who you are at your core, aka, what do you consider to be a good person?
What is your moral and ethical compass that you think makes you or someone a good person? That's your character, your character based values, knowing your character based values, who you are in your character. allows you to be so specific on how you curate and design your inner circle, how you curate and design your romantic relationship, your relationship with your kids, your parenting style, the job that you choose, the company culture of that job.
It allows you to know who to spend more time with and who not to spend more time with. Then you have what's called your values. These are the values that dictate what energizes you, what fills you up and what doesn't. It's essentially the things that you would do for free. If you, if you didn't have to earn a living, you would do it because you love it because it energizes you, it excites you, it allows you to tap into your uniqueness, your creativity, your critical thinking.
You know how many people have no fucking clue how to design their day, how to choose their job, how to choose their partner, how to design their weekend, how to design a vacation. They don't know how to do that because they don't even know what they're trying to create. They don't know what they like, what they don't.
They're so consumed with work, do, achieve, to do lists, all the shit they have to do. Listen to your verbiage. If you, your verbiage is filled with, I have to, I need to, I should. I hear it all day, every day. I hear it with clients. I just have the fortunate opportunity to help them be aware and, and choose to speak differently and, and choose differently.
But when you start listening to yourself and you start listening in public settings, most people, that's the place they live. They live in what they need to do, they have to do, they should do. And they think about what I want to do. Is a, is, is a dream, it's a, it's not accessible, it's not attainable, it's not my reality.
Think about that fucked up program that's been embedded in us. Think about the fucked up program that we all should just work for 90 percent of our week, our lives. This bullshit idea that you work your whole fucking life. To pay your bills, to have the overpriced house, not spend time with the people you love, not create memories, not go on vacations, not have experiences, you work, most people in a job they fucking hate, so that you can then retire.
And then enjoy your life while, when you're already old, you're burnt out, your health has gone down the tubes because you haven't spent any time on it. You've lost most of your relationships because you didn't spend time on that either. And you don't even have an identity anymore. You don't know who the fuck you are.
65 years of just working. You don't know who you are. So most people spend their retirement in doctor's offices, partly because they're actually sick and partly they're sick because they don't know who the fuck they are, they don't even know what to do with their time. So they might as well go to a doctor's appointment, not sit in their house and rot.
Like, we need to start challenging this shit that we've been told. And we need to stop distracting ourselves. You know, people, oh, I don't have time, I don't have time, I don't have time. You go on your fucking cell phone right now. And look at how many hours you spent browsing, scrolling social media. Your phone, if you have an iPhone, it tells you that data.
It is alarming. It is alarming. I am consciously not trying to be on my phone. And there are still certain weeks that tell me that I spent eight hours a day on my phone. Like, if we just redirected our time, or were even more conscious of how much fucking time we waste, you could achieve so much. If you start putting 20 percent of your energy into making yourself a better person, getting clarity on your values, getting clarity on your character, understanding your purpose, You can start curating a life that actually feels good.
You can start designing every decision so that every decision that you make is out of inspiration, not desperation. The thing you have to understand is that you can make decisions out of Perseverance that are rooted in voids and you can do that and it will get you to a certain place. What I mean by that is when I was young, I observed everything that I didn't want to be.
I observed people that lived in survival. They did all the things they had to do. They constantly were scraping by financially like Having wealth, having time, freedom, having financial freedom. That was not in the vocabulary. Life is hard. Life is a struggle. Life is about survival. And just do what you gotta do, work the 9 to 5, even if that is a toxic job, a toxic, abusive relationship, stay in it, and just do what you have to do to survive and put food on the table.
Like, that was my reality, and I know that's so many people's reality of what they've been brought up with. And, um, I made the decisions that I made in my life so that I could not be that because that was way fucking scarier than the, the, the fear of making bold and hard decisions or being uncomfortable.
I feared living in survival and becoming my parents and not just them, my grandparents, my great grandparents, I feared that more than anything. So I made a lot of decisions and what I see now is that a lot of those decisions were out of desperation. They weren't inspirational. It wasn't like I was inspired to be this, this and this.
It was, I don't want to be that. I don't want to be that. That's where the decisions came from. So yes, I got a great education. Did I put myself in a boatload of debt? Yes. Then I opened a business. Then I killed myself in the business. I sacrificed everything for the business. I sacrificed everything for helping people and evolving the profession.
Everything was rooted in that. In scarcity, and it was rooted in a void that I was trying to avoid. And so I got to a point that on paper, I achieved X, Y, and Z that a lot of people outside of me. Wow, you've had great success. But I didn't feel okay. I felt empty. I felt like, what the fuck is this life? Like, what is this?
Like, Who am I? What am I doing? Who am I beyond going to work every day? And that Was the point that I had to tap into a completely different skill set. I had to learn things and surpass things that I didn't even know, didn't even know were holding me back in order to start curating a life that was a life, a life worth living, not a life of achievement, not a life of going, going, going, doing, doing, doing.
And so at this point you might be thinking what the fuck does that have to do with my thyroid? It has everything to do with your thyroid because at the foundation of this, our bodies are a feedback mechanism to say, this is something you need to look at. This is something that you need to investigate.
This is a limiting belief. This is a dysfunction due to a stressor. If that stressor is toxic, if that stressor is emotional, et cetera, if the stressor is a combination. So the point is. Is this a multi-tiered process? This is at the foundation of your life. You should know who you are. You should know what you value.
You should know who you are from a character perspective. You should know how to design. Your friendships, how to design your inner circle based on who you are in your character. You should know how to design your life, where to say yes and where to say no. You should know that by knowing your action based values, because if you can have this level of clarity of knowing who you are and understanding your purpose, you can speak from a level of confidence.
You can speak from a level of humbleness. Confidence because understanding your values doesn't mean that you need to convince other people to subscribe to your values. This is about knowing who you are and knowing who you want to surround yourself with because surrounding yourself with people that have different values can be beautiful as long as everyone is open minded and curious.
But the people that want to push their values onto you because it's the holy grail, those are going to be the people that trigger you, those are going to be the people that piss you off. But there is so much beauty in understanding your values and knowing how to bring certain people into your life so you can learn and grow from them and so that you can compliment each other as a friend group.
or as a partnership. And so this is about being confident in who you are, being unapologetic about who you are, but leading with humility and just saying, this is who I am. It's not who you have to be. I'm not going to push this onto you, but I'm going to say yes to this, or I'm going to say no to this because it's in alignment or not in alignment with my values.
Guys, you have to understand most of the time you're talking yourself out of things that are aligned or misaligned. You're, you're going through the analytical mind of the pros and cons list. You know, Oh, this guy, he's got the house and the job and I'm getting older. He does want kids and he's nice. My mom likes him.
And intuitively you're like, fuck this guy. Like this ain't good. This is, this is not aligned. But because you don't know who you are and you don't know your values, you don't feel comfortable making bold decisions because you just are like, Oh, I don't know. Maybe I have a weird gut feeling, but I need to ignore that because I'm going to just use my analytical and logical mind.
And I'm going to look at the pros and cons list. We all know that once you go against that intuitive feeling and you go, you marry the guy, you end up divorced or you end up miserable. And this goes for jobs. This goes for friendships. It goes for everything. So you have to understand that understanding who you are allows you to make decisions that are aligned.
So AKA you make decisions that are out of inspiration and you stop making decisions out of desperation. The decisions out of desperation, like the situation we just talked about, they always blow up in your face. The same time you took the job that you were like, intuitively, this doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel aligned.
It doesn't feel good. I don't want to do it, but the 401k is good and the compensation is good and the location is good and you make the decision and then you're dying inside as you're working the job and then you know, you never get the promotion or you end up quitting anyway or you get fired. When you get fired, when you get rejected from a job, from a person, from a relationship, that's because you are so fucking out of tune with yourself and you don't have the tools, the knowledge, or even the balls to make better decisions for yourself.
So the universe is like, all right, well, I guess I gotta I gotta force this person out. I gotta force them. I gotta do this, you know, ultimate rejection in order for them to get redirected because they're not redirecting themselves. Rejection is one of the most beautiful things that can happen in your life because it's, it's redirecting you.
It doesn't feel good at the moment. Nobody wants to feel rejection, but it is putting you on your path because you didn't have the clarity or you didn't have the balls to put yourself on the path. So trust the process every single time. So. The point of this is that if you can understand your character and your drivers and your motivators, you can master your life.
You can master your communication, your communication so that you can have great friends around you. You can. Get what you want. You can negotiate the better pay at work. You can be heard effectively by your partner and your Children. Like this cascades into everything. But you have to start somewhere and you have to start with understanding who you are at your core and then learning how to fucking use it.
So the journey of growth and the journey of, of designing a beautiful life, like don't look at people on the internet that have what you have or have a good life and think it was easy. It's not easy. It's a daily commitment. It's an hourly commitment. And. It's, it's about removing distractions, you know, it's about a lot less Netflix and chill.
It's a lot less social media browsing. It's a lot less of all of that. It's about staying focused and disciplined when you don't want to, you know, my husband is a constant reminder to me. It's like, sometimes I just want to be mindless and sometimes, but then at the same time, I, it's so easy for me to bitch and moan about, you know, something that's not going well.
And he's like, Okay, you could put your energy into bitching and moaning about something or you can put that energy into actually curating what you want. He's like, Nicole, you have all the tools. You know how to manifest. You know how to meditate. You know how to create your life. So just here to remind you, fucking do it.
So that's what I'm here for, is to help you guys reclaim the power that you all have. Unfortunately, you know, this is a hard journey for us, because we have been so depleted and mind controlled from all of the entertainment distractions around us. We have had our power beaten out of us. We have, most of us have been programmed that life is hard, life is a struggle, you know, it's hard to have things that you want.
It's hard to make money. It's hard to do this. It's hard to do that. It's hard to have a good relationship. It's all a fucking lie. If you believe it, it's your truth, 100%. But isn't it a little more empowering to believe that you can have whatever you want and put your energy into that? And yeah, it might feel like you're lying to yourself for a little while, but that's just because you haven't aligned your mind.
You haven't cleared the shit out. There's a lot of shit we gotta clear out and that's, you know, that's the part of the journey that's not always the most fun is clearing the shit.
