Ever wish you could re-wire your brain to prevent yourself from repeating the behaviors and thoughts that are clearly holding you back? Have you ever struggled with leading yourself through a traumatic event with little support? Do you wish there was a place to go when the western medical system lets you
down? Me too...
And so did today's guest, Rachel Vineyard.
At just 19 years old, Rachel had dealt with more than her fair share of emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual trauma. Nothing that the doctors tried seemed to work. Instead of giving up, Rachel looked for alternate practices.
After years of study, research training, and education… Rachel is now a certified natural health professional, brain rewiring certified coach, energy healer, yoga instructor, and gut health expert. While all of those titles assist her to help others, her ultimate truth is to be a vessel of god's healing love and energy. Connecting people back to their source to ignite the complete healing that is possible for them. She believes her higher calling is shepherding others into deeper intimacy with God, connecting them to their roots in the earth, and walking in freedom from disease and pain.
Rachel talks today about brain rewiring as a way to work through trauma, and the science behind how we can raise our vibrational frequency to attract more of what we desire in life.
Rachel’s story - leading yourself through difficult situations and trauma.
“When it comes to my healing journey, I started developing health issues in middle school. As a little girl, I was always the sick one. I always had belly aches and was on antibiotics and was in and out of the hospital constantly. Most of the time my mom kind of thought I was faking, so she would baby me and let me stay home from school, but also not really pay much attention to it. My whole family comes from the western medical system and so things like antibiotics and medications were just normal.
In eighth grade, I developed mono which is a pretty severe virus. From then I experienced a lot of chronic digestive symptoms. I was at that point diagnosed with celiac disease and IBS. So there I was at thirteen, I was not very healthy, had really bad gut issues, always bloated, hormones were out of whack, my weight was not where it needed to be, but I just went on... because that's what I was taught, that this was just my life. When I graduated high school, rather than going the conventional route, I actually lived out of the country for a year. While my time away why is truly one of the most impactful, wonderful times of my life, I wouldn't trade a single second of it, unfortunately, I did experience abuse. That was physical, mental, emotional, and dare I say even spiritual. The physical abuse didn’t necessarily come from someone else's hand, really it came from the lack of their hand. Meaning I actually starved for about twelve months, where I was getting less than eight hundred calories every day, and I just was very nutritionally depleted. That kind of starvation on the body is a major stressor, and it was the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of igniting all of the genetic predispositions and viruses that had been dormant in my body, it really awakened them.. so when I got home back to Kentucky, I was not only forty pounds less than I was when I left but I was also a shell of a human being. Meaning really everything about me had been stripped away. I had developed a severe eating disorder because for a year I had to be extremely controlling of food in order to survive. On top of that, everything I ate hurt so I didn't want to eat. I also was really afraid to eat, or what ingredients were in foods, because I thought it was going to trigger a reaction. I got home in the summertime and decided in order to heal I needed to go the holistic route. I had to go the natural route because up to this point in my life the conventional western medical system has failed me. I'm not demeaning the W.M.S in any way, they save lives all the time, but when it came to my journey I knew I had to focus on my holistic self. I started seeing natural paths, functional medicine doctors, was working with bodyworkers, and even energy healers.
They diagnosed me with Lymes disease, mold toxicity, heavy metal toxicity, epstein barr virus, Hashimoto's, on the verge of Addison's disease. I had all the gut issues like leaky gut, sibo, candida, parasites. I mean you name it, I had it. It was one thing to get some answers, but it's another to be told that your life would never be the same at nineteen years old. That was definitely not the life that I had envisioned. I was doing the different diets, protocols, supplements, working with energy healers, doing detoxification, really diving deep into it. Yet, I still wasn't getting better. Some symptoms dissipated, I was seeing some relief but I was still sick, I was still broken, and I still had no friggin’ idea who I was because I had been so brainwashed. Who I was, was really stripped from me and so I continued in the cycle for far too long until I realized the only way for me to heal was to take the responsibility myself. I couldn't give my power away to the abuse, and the disease… and I also couldn’t give my power away to the doctors, the natural paths, and energy healers who are trying to help me. I then realized in order to heal I had to go inward.”
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When you finally had the realization that you had to make the decision to go a more holistic route, what did that look like in your life? How did you start leading yourself through that journey?
“I realized I had to put in just as much emphasis on my emotional, mental, and spiritual healing that I did physically. At the end of the day, our meat suit as I call it, it's just a part of us. In order to actually heal you have to look at the mind, body, and spirit because all of that is what makes you, you. For me and that looks like diving into something called brain rewiring, which is actually something that I am certified to lead people through now myself. Brain rewiring is a matter of changing the neural pathways in your brain that are tied into limiting beliefs. By changing those neural pathways in your brain you can physically change the response in your body and your outside world. For me, that was sending signals of disease, fear, and shame to signals of healing, love, and freedom. That was a big shift for me. Another one was doing the deeper soul work, the inner child healing, releasing the trauma, moving those trapped emotions in my body, and then really focusing on my relationship with God. It was in that healing, that deeper side and really taking the power in my own hands through that was where I started to see the most transformation and that's for healing actually came.”
Walk us through the process of what it looks like to rewire our brains, is this something we can practice on our own at home?
“From a scientific standpoint, biologically there are three main parts that correspond with brain rewiring. The neocortex is how you experience the world around you, that’s your sensory, so how you see, feel the temperature in the air, how you really experience life. That's what the neo cortex‘s function is. From the neocortex, you have something called the limbic brain and the limbic brain is responsible for emotions. The thing about emotions is that they are wonderful, they’re sad, emotions are something you feel but at the end of the day they're actually just chemical messages. That is how your brain and your body basically converse, is through the chemicals, which are emotions, that are being output by the limbic brain.
From the limbic brain is the cerebellum, and the cerebellum is the seat of your subconscious and also controls your frequency. Now when I start talking about frequency I'm not talking about any woo woo go bring your sage stuff, I'm actually talking about legitimate science that can be measured. Your frequency is a part of something called the law of resonance. If you know how a magnet works, opposite ends attract, well frequency is the opposite of that. Like attracts like. So if you have a high frequency you'll attract high-frequency experiences, such as healing, financial abundance, good relationships. But the same is also true with the opposite, if you have a low vibrational frequency you will bring in low-frequency experiences. Emotions are measured on frequencies, so fear and shame are really low vibrations. While joy, happiness. and bliss are really high.
The reason that it’s important is because your cerebellum radiates your frequency, your cerebellum is also where subconscious lies. Our subconscious is what shapes the way that we show up in the world. Whether we know that or not. So your subconscious beliefs, the limiting beliefs that are basically brought on by childhood and the events in your life, will shape the way that you perceive the world. That will shape your vibration. The way that those three parts of the brain work, is if you see something in your experience something whatever motion is submitted, maybe its fear or anger that then gets locked in your subconscious brain, the cerebellum, and then you continue that cycle. So you're attracting in those low-frequency experiences, your neocortex is experiencing that, your limbic brain submits the emotion and then round and round it goes.
The beautiful part about brain rewiring is you don't have to know any of that, you don't you know any of the science or any of the big words but what it comes down to is accessing those limiting beliefs, identifying them, reshaping them, and then living a more abundant life, and you can absolutely do that on your own. You don't need a machine or a scalpel, but what is helpful is having someone like myself who is certified actually helping you go through that process because you have to go into your inner child. You have to be willing to go into trauma, and we've all experienced trauma whether it's big or small and so it's super helpful to have someone guide you in that process.”
What is the experience like when someone hires you to rewire their brain?
“The first step to healing is believing that you can, the second step is kicking victim mindset out of the door, and the third step is taking your own responsibility. When somebody works with me, I will not claim to heal you, I am not your healer, I'm just a conduit and a reflector of the answers that you already have. So if somebody is working with me, I do you know ask questions and help them get into these deep parts of themselves, but at the end of the day, I teach you the tools that you need in order to rewire your brain every day of your life. For instance, I do have a specific meditation that people go through for about an hour every day that helps them access those neural pathways in the subconscious mind and they're actually able to change them, but that is on them to do every day. I typically meet with my clients once a week for an hour, during that hour it's really me guiding them into the deeper layers of themselves, and as I said, it's not me doing the work, I'm not your shrink. I'm not trying to make you feel bad or even just expose the roots, no, I give you the tools to help you dig them up and plant a beautiful flower instead of nasty weed.”
What are some action steps that people can take at home by themselves today to help start this process of rewiring our brains?
“The first one is to release the idea that anything has happened TO you. That probably triggered people when I said that. Here's the deal, if you receive the fact that things have happened TO you... maybe the physical abuse you experienced as a child, maybe it’s a chronic illness, maybe you've been laid off, most people would see that as ‘oh man, that happened TO me’ because that's how we've been ingrained. However, if you flip the script and you say ‘this is actually happening FOR me’ you take your power back. When you take your power back, you're no longer a victim.. and that is the first step to rewire your brain, is release victim mindset. The reason is, when you accept the responsibility, you take your power back. When you take that authority back over your life, you get to rewrite your life. As an example, if you're at the grocery store and somebody cuts you off to grab the last box of crackers that you were reaching for, somehow rather than looking at that as ‘well that person did this to me’, you can say ‘that actually happened for me and that's a blessing’. Challenge yourself to figure out how can I be a blessing. Maybe those crackers had mold on them and they would have made you sick, you know like even if it's something silly. But taking your power back in step one.
Another thing that you can do is begin to raise your frequency. The way you do that is by avoiding things that pull your frequency down. For instance, the news and media run on the frequency of fear because that's the easiest way to control people. So when you watch the news and are just absorbing all that ish that is happening in our world today, that is lowering your frequency. So maybe watch a Disney movie with your kids instead. Do things that make you happy, that make you laugh, those are things that really elevate your frequency in such a simple way. Releasing negative relationships, relationships that pull you down. I know can be very challenging, but if you surround yourself with people who are only a low vibrational frequency your vibration is also going to plummet. and that is going to attract low vibrational experiences.
So surround yourself with people who you want to be like, surround yourself with people who make you feel good. This isn't selfish, it's actually the best way to care for the people around you all while you fill up your own cup. Then you can be an outpouring to everyone you love and care for and so those are some really great just quick actionable steps that you can take right now to rewire your brain and really change your life.”
Is there scientific proof behind this concept?
“One hundred percent. I am actually all science-based. You can look up the law resonance, or the shoemaker's response. There are so many scientifically proven things about vibration and frequency that you literally can't deny. Everyone is made up of energy, I mean think about it, what makes up your cells and your mitochondria eventually works their way down to atoms and neurons and protons and electrical charges, negative charge, positive charge... When people talk about energy that's what they're referring to. You can move all of that and make all that solid just like the countertop I'm working on right now, it's solid. But at the end of the day, it's an energetic thing because the atoms, neurons, and protons are holding it together. If you really want to dive into the science behind frequency and vibration and all of that look up quantum physics, that is probably your best way to prove how all of this is actually true.
On the other end of the spectrum, I think part of that problem with just the culture of the west is it has to be proven, you know, there has to be science, it has to fit in a box... where I personally believe that is what has gotten us in trouble. because there is faith, and really if you don't have faith you don't have anything. If you think about it we practice faith all day long, I pick up my water bottle and believing that I'm that water is going to be poured into my mouth and I'm gonna be able to drink it. I can't prove that unless I do it. So at the same time where scientific evidence is great, I challenge the reader, you Sara, and myself to actually live in faith throughout every moment in our life. Whether it be our health, believing that we have the power to heal ourselves, believing in our business as it grows, our leadership capabilities, our ability to raise a family, whatever it may be it comes down to faith.... and if you have don't have faith you don't have anything.”
For more information reach out to Rachel on Instagram, here!
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