Michal LeBaron Speaking at The Healing Conference in Colorado Springs
“Please give a warm welcome to Michal LeBaron.”
Thank you. Well, I did say he could be sassy. I think you really nailed that one. It’s so good to be here and to share my story. Thank you so much. Before I get started, I’m sure y’all are wondering, ‘What’s with the tape on my glasses?’ I mean, come on, raise your hands. How many of you thought it? Okay, I know, I know. I didn’t break my glasses. I’m actually recovering from a traumatic brain injury I received earlier this year. So, the first piece of education: if you ever see tape like this on somebody’s glasses, you can say, ‘Oh my gosh, what happened? Did you have a brain injury?’ Because that’s what this tape means. So, it’s a miracle to be here. I am truly grateful on so many levels, and I’m here to share my story with you.
Long story short, I had genetic disorders, food allergies, and all sorts of things that stumped medical doctors, specialists, and holistic and alternative practitioners. So, I’ve spent over a decade really seeking answers. How do I heal? I went through many different forms of medicine: energy medicine, spiritual stuff, prayer, functional medicine, Chinese medicine, and all sorts of medicines. And you know, while I went from bedridden to seemingly normal on the surface, what I had to do to maintain my health was kind of crazy. You know, I really ate like a rabbit. I could have like a handful of foods, couldn’t eat out, had to have purified water, had to breathe purified air, you know, had an herb for this, and an herb for that, and a supplement for this, and a supplement for that. And the list goes on of all the things that I had to do to manage my symptoms.
So, I became a functional medicine practitioner and started my practice. I was really helping people. They’d go to the Mayo Clinic, and the Mayo Clinic wouldn’t help them, and then they’d come to us, and we’d figure it out, and we’d help them. But it was starting to dawn on me, about halfway through, about six to seven years into my practice, ‘Is this what healthy looks like?’ Right? I was known as a health guru. I could solve problems nobody else in the nation could and sometimes in the world. And so, I did that through various things, like I actually ran proper testing, and you know, I didn’t give up. I just kept assessing the situation and pulling from a myriad of tools to help people. I wasn’t stuck to a box. I was really willing to explore with each and every person. I believed they could all be well like I had gone from bedridden to having a life again.
As this health guru, I started paying attention to how many supplements I popped a day, you know, and how many times I said, ‘Oh, I can’t eat that,’ or, ‘Oh, maybe I don’t want to go to Thanksgiving this year because I don’t want to have the “I have to eat special food” conversation.’ If you’ve ever had that, I was one of those. So, was that what healthy looked like? That was a very humbling self-discovery because my entire practice was not built on teaching people to be healthy; it was teaching people to stay sick. And so, when I finally admitted to myself, over a couple of years of this knocking, knocking – you know, I didn’t want to look at it – I finally looked at it, and I said, ‘If I am not fully healthy, I do not know how to teach anyone else to be healthy.’ And so, what am I teaching them if I’m not teaching anyone else to be healthy? I’m teaching them to manage symptoms. If you have to manage symptoms through any external tool, modality, remedy, therapy, or what have you, then you are not fully healthy; you are a sick person who has symptoms.
And I really decided that I basically kicked my practice into the trash can and said, ‘I am willing to explore whatever I don’t know. What don’t I know?’ And so, in that journey, I found a woman who said that she had overcome five autoimmune diseases, and I watched her eating real food. That was really the part that got me. She could eat gluten again, and dairy, and all the things, you know. And so, my first thought when I had met her years prior was, ‘Yeah, just wait, that can’t be real.’ And it just went to show me how, you know, in our collective consciousness, how in the paradigm, we’re taught about how our bodies work and how to heal, right? And we need all these external remedies and tools because our bodies can’t heal themselves, even though we’re told they can. You know, that’s not how our society or culture works.
So, you know, after I got over my cynicism and resignation, I watched her over a period of years, and she was healthy, and I was not. So, humbly, I went to her, and I said, ‘Okay, what did you do? You know, you’re healthy, and I’m not. I’m still using my remedies and tools and things, and I’m still flaring up and having symptoms all the time. I’m ready to hear what you have to say.’ So, she said, ‘Well, you know, it was really eye-opening to her when she recognized how she lived life in survival mode.’ We all know this: stress mode, victim consciousness. Thank you very much. You know, everyone’s in fight or flight; everyone’s surviving. And in fact, we have to do breath work, and we have to do all this stuff to feel like we can get out of that. And how long does that last? An hour? A vacation? A day? Maybe two? So, our default mode is sympathetic dominance, fight or flight.
And so, she said, ‘All I did was get out of fight or flight.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re not telling me anything new. All of our patients are in sympathetic dominance. In fact, we have a bunch of tools for that.’ She laughed at me and said, ‘No, Michal, you have to learn to live in the parasympathetic nervous system.’ And I never heard it said quite that way because that’s not how we’re really taught in medicine. We’re kind of taught, you know, we fluctuate between the two all the time. She said, ‘No, you have to learn to live there. If you live in the parasympathetic, your body will self-repair 24/7. You’ll just detox because your detox systems will be on, your immune system will regulate, you will no longer have an autoimmune disease, and your digestion will be at full capacity, which means you can just detox and digest and eliminate GMOs and pesticides and stuff that you’re exposed to in the environment.’
That really confronted a lot of my beliefs because my entire functional medicine practice was built on educating people that all of that was the problem. Our food’s been modified, and our soil is nutrient-deficient. I mean, how many times have you heard right? Personal care products are toxic, so we must focus on all that out here. Well, what about this in here?
So, I decided, you know, it made sense. I didn’t know if I believed it, but it made sense, and I was willing to try it. Right? I’m going into what I don’t know I don’t know. So, this was definitely it. And 12 and a half weeks later, my lab tests were normal. To this day, I have no sign that I’ve ever had an autoimmune disease. Wow. And this is supposed to be permanent, yes? No sign of my genetic disorder that’s shown up in every test since I was a baby. There is no sign that I ever had that. My food allergies, of which I had anaphylactic reactions, very serious reactions, I can eat all of those foods, and I have never had a problem since that time.
And so, I really switched gears. I said, ‘Holy cow,’ and maybe some other expletives. I think we’re onto something here. And that’s where I kept everything I had taught up to that point in the trash, and I decided that this was my passion. That, really, I can share with people, you know, ‘You can heal. Like, completely. There’s not like, “Your body can heal itself, except this, this, this, and this.”‘ The beautiful thing about the parasympathetic nervous system is that, instead of producing cortisol and stress hormones that also shift our blood flow from our rational frontal lobe into just the reflex centers of the brain, our blood stays in a whole-brain state. So, we can stay mindful and do those practices. When we are in the parasympathetic, we produce regenerative hormones. We begin attracting different things. So, very valuable.
I love, thank you for introducing the speech today, um, in the parasympathetic nervous system, our body is in self-repair mode, cellular regeneration, and repair 24/7. And then we can really just get back to a pretty normal lifestyle. So, instead of thinking that my gluten-free diet, my special food, and all my supplements, and all of the things meant that I was this healthy person, I am just back to a boring, normal, healthy person, and my body is resilient and metabolically flexible. It can handle all sorts of stressors in my life because I have the capacity to navigate them from a healthy place. So, the entire journey of living in the parasympathetic is a lot of slowing down and learning to be present. It is also learning to put ourselves first because everyone I know who has a chronic illness has a big heart and serves many others. But we tend to get the short end of the stick and put ourselves last. So, not from selfishness, but truly, it’s me managing my capacity to be of service. I cannot pour from an empty cup. If my tree is not healthy, watered, and nourished, I don’t produce the fruits of the spirit. And so, it’s really about making sure that I am giving from my overflow.
Rumi had a beautiful quote that kicked me in the butt, and it just sunk in, you know, ever since, and it’s, ‘Never give from the depths of your well; always give from your overflow.’ So, when I am on a cup empty, I may be doing all of the things to be a good person and be of service, and serve my family and my community, and show up at my job, and do all the things but the inside is not really there, right? We’re burnt out, stressed, build up resentments, and you know, a little bit of bitterness in there. We feel like we have the short end of the stick; we don’t feel like we have what we need. We are not in a regulated, full-capacity service place. So, it’s not the works; it’s like works without a heart are dead. So, it’s really making sure that when I live my life, it is totally from that inner fulfilled place of peace that communicates to my body.
Another part of this is learning to fill up that cup, learning to keep me in time to check in with me, and all around, you know, how am I doing, what am I feeling? It’s not speeding through life and powering through anymore, which is a thing we learn in this culture. It is actually learning to slow down, reconnect, re-engage, and come from that present place. And some magical things happen when we do that, like all of a sudden, we get these intuitions, or more like we actually just listen and pay attention to them. And so, the decisions that we begin making shift in life from making sped-up, stressed-out, survival-based decisions to making conscious, present, in-tune, spiritually goal-aligned decisions, which kind of happens naturally.
So, it’s almost as though we have, you know, little demon, little angel on our shoulders. Well, there really are two different operating states. In a state of fight or flight, life occurs entirely differently. So, even though the facts of life and the outside world are the same, our experience is entirely different when we view it from survival and fear than when we view it from resilience, love, peace, and truth. We are at the capacity to seek out mentors who can help us spiritually develop and be on a path of enlightenment when we come out of survival mode. So, that’s my job.
One of the most foundational ways I share what I teach is I teach people to live in the parasympathetic. And the beautiful thing is, it does not take years to heal. As I said, it was 12 and a half weeks. For my clients, I’ve seen as much as five months, and that could be from illnesses and conditions that are permanent, that are life-threatening, and that are supposed to be there forever, you know, we’re supposed to manage that forever. Well, the beautiful thing is, you know, the body replaces itself entirely every seven years, and that’s because the bones take the longest. Our digestive system replaces itself every 30 days; most of our body replaces itself in less than a year. So, why do we have ongoing chronic illnesses if we produce billions of brand-new cells every single second? It’s only if we have survival cells that are producing baby survival cells. If we have fully healthy cells in cellular growth and repair mode, which means we can also be in growth mode, those cells produce baby growth and repair cells. And so then, we get an entirely new, healthy, fully functioning body in a very short amount of time.
So, I mean, healing within is an inside job, like all the things we’ve heard. It is actually true. I am a living, breathing embodiment of that, and, you know, every day, I see hundreds of people getting well and stumping their doctors.
You know, like when you get diagnosed with MS, and you have lesions, those aren’t ever supposed to go away. Then they go away, and the doctor does a double-take, a double test, and a triple test. So, you know what? You guys really can heal. Anyone can heal as long as we can uncover what is going on in those unconscious parts of our brain that are causing ongoing signals, without our awareness, that we have to survive. And it doesn’t take years to unwind that. As soon as that becomes conscious, our brain, nervous system, and body process all of that and really help us.
So, what I love to share pisses off the FDA, that’s for sure. Um, it pisses off a lot of health practitioners too. They’re afraid their patients will get better and won’t need them anymore. However, I am willing to gird up my loins and just bust through that system. The more people know, ‘You can actually heal, and yes, you can heal that too, and yes, you can heal that too, and what about this? Yes, you can heal that too.’ The more people know, the more we can change the world. It is truly my heart’s desire that this becomes collective conscious knowledge that is just known in every family, in all the schools, from kindergarten up. We can heal ourselves and use our bodies as a mirror to help us see what is going on in our inner world. Our body is not separate from our mind or our spirit; it’s all connected. When we know how to interpret and understand the language of the body, there’s no more fear. We just get to stay curious, and we get to uncover all of those conscious internal things that might be going on, where we might not be listening to our intuition, where we might be pushing ourselves too hard, where we might not be feeling our feelings, you know because we’re taught to shove all those down too. Our body becomes one of our greatest teachers, and having that skill is so beautiful. Because I no longer go to the medicine cabinet, I no longer go to something outside of me to try to help, fix, and heal me. I stay in that place of peace, and I know how my body talks to me, and I’m able to talk back to it, and I’m able to give it what it needs, and it’s really transformed my whole life.
So, last quick story here, um, as we’re winding down. You know, my husband ended up doing this work. I’m so thankful; you know how family is the hardest, right? So, it was after we had been married for several years, and he was open to it. He worked with one of our coaches and was supposed to be wheelchair-bound in his mid-20s. To this day, he’s almost 40. He is not in a wheelchair. In fact, he has none of his diseases that landed him joint pain and degenerative issues, um, and all these chronic pain problems. It’s beautiful because he has a painting contracting business, which, if any of you know, is hard on your body. Most contractors at his age begin to have degenerative problems just from the nature of their job. And it is amazing to watch him do all that, not be in a wheelchair, and be fully healthy, too.
And so, I asked him because I wasn’t privy to his program details, but in the end, I said, ‘Oh, what can you tell me? I’m so excited to hear how this journey was for you.’ And he said one thing, you know, it’s kind of like a guy to say one thing out of a five-month journey, and he said, ‘You know, I really got that I can handle anything in my life that comes my way. I have it within me to handle that.’ And so, his illness that he uncovered happened three months after a job change, and unconsciously, he made the decision, ‘I am not man enough.’ And unconsciously, he started this survival program called, ‘I’m going to work myself to death to prove it.’ If you ask anybody who knows him, he is the most manly man in the room most times. However, unconscious programming rules our lives, and we think life is just happening to us, right? Carl Jung said, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.’ So, that’s really the journey.
So, if the body is saying anything that we do not understand, it just means there’s something unconscious. And as soon as that becomes conscious, the body says, “Okay, you’ve got it. I no longer need to yell at you. Yes, first of all, thank you so much. Thank you. But second of all, will it take care of my wrinkles?”
“I love it! I love it! Well, on the first one, I absolutely love it. What we would help you do is really embrace the process of aging. However, no, I don’t… What is amazing is that when we do, and our cells are producing regenerative cells, we also produce more collagen. So, you know, it might be worth investigating.”
“She’s it. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate your listening.”
“Thank you.”
[Applause]
