You've been to the specialists. You've done the tests. And you still feel like nobody really knows what's wrong — or how to fix it. That's not you failing. That's a gap in medicine that mind-body medicine chronic pain practitioners are finally starting to close.

Dr. Rita Gupta spent almost 20 years as a primary care physician watching her patients get sicker despite everything she offered. The referrals, the labs, the medications. She had access to every record, sat with them through every specialist visit. And she was watching people not get better. That wore on her.

Then she ruptured a disc in her neck and was told surgery was her only option. She didn't take it. She turned inward -> toward integrated medicine, mind-body work, pain reprocessing therapy, mindfulness. And she eventually left conventional medicine entirely to practice the kind of care she couldn't offer inside the system.

In this episode, we get into something that doesn't get talked about enough: self-trust as medicine. Not as a mindset hack or a feel-good concept. As an actual biological process that shifts your nervous system, lowers your threat response, and creates real relief.

Here's what changes when you stop trying to force your body into submission and learn to be with what's there instead: your threshold expands. The loop breaks. Your values become a compass instead of a source of grief.

Dr. Rita says it plainly - every time you can sit with a sensation without collapsing, you're building something. Not ignoring it. Not giving up. Building.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

- Alan Gordon / Pain Reprocessing Therapy

- Ellen Alden's Long COVID community 

- Dr. Rita Gupta's website

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

Most of us never decided to start performing. It just happened, early, quietly, because we needed to belong. And your body has been carrying the weight of every single mask.

This is a solo episode, and it's one Grace has been sitting with for a while. Not about somatic tools or specific nervous system signals — about the deeper question underneath all of it. What does real healing actually require?

Here's what doesn't get said enough in the mind-body space about people pleasing and chronic symptoms: your body isn't malfunctioning. It's been watching you override yourself for years, and at some point, it stopped whispering and started screaming. That's not a breakdown. That's your nervous system saying she has to come back. What you think of as your personality? A lot of the time, it's just the most successful coping strategy you found before you were old enough to choose differently.

The path forward isn't a massive overhaul. You don't have to quit your job tonight or cut everyone off. It's a thousand tiny moments where you choose truth over performance. Every single one of those is a message to your nervous system -> she's back, it's safe to be her.

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

Ashley Novak is a Certified Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), Restorative Wellness Practitioner (RWP), and Holistic Lifestyle Coach with a BS in Biochemistry. As the founder of Seeded Sage Wholeness, she takes a root-cause approach to women's health — specializing in gut health, hormones, fertility, and acne. Ashley's work lives at the intersection of functional medicine, ancestral wisdom, and women's empowerment, helping her clients move from chasing symptoms to truly understanding their bodies. She co-hosts the Yoni University Podcast and is passionate about reclaiming women's health intuition and building a legacy of generational wellness. Follow her journey on Instagram @itsashleynovak.

In Ep 128 we go deep on the bridge between functional medicine and nervous system work. Why you can have the diagnoses, all of them, AND still need to start with your nervous system. Why Ashley calls it the "scab that never heals." What created the wound first, before the parasite, before the H. pylori, before the mold? Almost always stress.

We get into the "yes and" approach. Yes, the parasite is real. AND your body is freaking robust -> something weakened it before the parasite could take hold. We talk about why the women in Grace and Ashley's worlds are so often the highest functioning, the eldest daughters, the recovering perfectionists who do not realize they have been in fight or flight for 15 years.

We also unpack what women's health research gaps mean for fasting, sleep, fueling, and the ADHD reframe. (Women were not included in medical research until 1993. That is recent. That changes everything we have been told about female bodies.)

And we land on the free basics most people are still bypassing -> water, sleep, walking, sunlight, saying no. Not because the supplements are wrong. But because the body cannot use them until the basics are in place.

If you have been to every functional practitioner, gotten every test, taken every supplement, and you are still stuck -> this episode is the missing piece.

Connect with Ashley:

- Ashley Novak, Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner
- Instagram

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

If you have been at this for months. Or years. Doctor after doctor. Protocol after protocol. Nothing fully landing. This is the episode I needed when I was you.

In Ep 127, I am taking you back to the early stages of my own healing. The crying in waiting rooms. The maxed-out credit cards. The functional practitioner who handed me a brain rewiring pamphlet that I dismissed because I was not ready.

There are six things I would do completely differently if I were starting over. These are not protocols. These are the patterns underneath all the protocols. Education first. Stop frantically searching. Build tolerance for discomfort. Chase trust instead of relief. Repair your relationship with your body before it feels better. Stop looking for the perfect approach.

Each of these took me years to learn. Some of them took specific clients of mine in the Mind Body Healing Method to teach me. If I can save you even a fraction of that time, this episode did its job.

If you find yourself constantly switching practitioners every 5 sessions, panic-searching at 2am, or treating your body like the enemy until it "earns" your love -> pin this one. Come back to it the next time you are about to swap programs.

Your body is not broken. You are not broken. You are missing the patterns under the protocols.

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

If you have been told for years that interstitial cystitis or overactive bladder is just something you have to live with, this is the recovery story you need to hear. Callie Krajcir suffered with IC, OAB, IBS, and vulvodynia for 25 years -> and got her life back in 2-3 years through nervous system work. Not the IC diet. Not another supplement. Not another procedure.

Callie is a bladder dietician, the vice chair of the Interstitial Cystitis Association, and runs Road to Remission, the leading recovery program for IC and OAB. Here's the part that catches everyone off guard -> she's a dietician who has stopped prescribing the IC diet to almost all of her clients. In this episode she and Grace get into exactly why, and what they're seeing instead.

They also get real about the OCD piece, which Callie was finally diagnosed with at 28 after two years of trying to figure out what was happening. She talks about relationship OCD, emetophobia, the fear loops most people in the pelvic pain community are stuck in, and why ERP (the gold standard OCD therapy) works on the exact same nervous system mechanism as PRT for chronic pain.

If you have been white-knuckling through every flight, every meal, every plan with friends -> scanning for bathrooms, bailing at the last second, terrified of strawberries and seltzer water -> this one is going to crack something open. Callie's honesty about what "healed" actually means when your symptoms used to be daily is worth the listen on its own.

Resources mentioned:

•  Road to Remission with Callie Krajcir (IC / OAB recovery program) 
• Callie's Instagram + podcast 
• NoCD (OCD-specialized therapy company)

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

If you've been told you need to "regulate your nervous system" and you're still wondering what that actually means, this episode is the one. Today we're walking through how to heal chronic symptoms from the inside out -> the five phases I take every single client through inside the Mind Body Healing Method.

Most of us start this work doing one thing. Maybe a lot of somatic exercises. Maybe a ton of brain training. Maybe just reading book after book about the nervous system. And then we wonder why our symptoms aren't shifting. Here's what I've learned. It's not that any of those tools are wrong. It's that they were never meant to work on their own. Your body can't soften when your brain is still sounding the alarm. And your brain can't update if your body never gets to feel safe. They go together.

I'm walking you through Recognize. Rewire. Regulate. Integrate. Reclaim. Each phase is doing something specific -> changing your relationship to the signal, retraining the thinking brain, expanding what your body can hold, releasing what's been stuck for years, and then building a life you actually want to be in. We talk about why somatic work alone wasn't enough for me, why I waited to add body-based work until after brain training in my program, and why the integration phase is the part most people skip -> the one I think is the secret sauce.

If you've been in this work for a while and you're still stuck, this is the episode that will help you see where the gap actually is.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

- Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) 

- Liana, in-program therapist + coach 

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

If you have been chasing test after test and the doctors keep telling you everything looks fine -> this is the episode where you find out why. Today Grace walks you through the 7 signs of a dysregulated nervous system that almost nobody connects back to chronic symptoms.

You are not making it up. Your pain is real. Your bloating is real. Your fatigue, your dizziness, your reactions to food and smells and weather -> all real. They are also exactly what nervous system dysregulation symptoms look like when your brain has been stuck in danger mode for a long time.

In this episode Grace breaks down what neuroplastic symptoms actually are, why "normal labs" are usually a green light not a dead end, and the checklist she walks every new client through in their first few weeks of working together. She also talks about why the labels you have been carrying around (IBS, MCAS, chronic fatigue, hypermobility flares, IC, OAB, migraines, fibro) are not life sentences, and what shifts when you stop identifying with the diagnosis and start training your brain.

If you have been doing the supplements and the elimination diets and the protocols and the PT and you still feel stuck -> the missing piece is your brain and your nervous system. Real talk: not everything is neuroplastic. But if even a few of these 7 signs land hard, you are in the right place. And there is a path forward.

Grace is hosting a FREE live masterclass on May 13th to take this one step further. 

SIGN UP HERE

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

If you've ever caught yourself thinking "that's just me -> I'm an anxious person," or "I've always been a perfectionist, it's just how I am" -> this one's for you.

In this episode, I'm walking you through the 6 personality traits that show up over and over again in people with chronic symptoms. Anxiousness. Pressure. Perfectionism. People pleasing. Catastrophizing. Black and white thinking. These aren't who you are. They're learned patterns. Which means they can be unlearned.

I'm digging into how each one keeps your nervous system stuck in threat mode, where it actually came from (hint -> it's almost never random), and the small shifts that start to loosen the grip. I'm also sharing the moment my therapist called me out on my own perfectionism in grad school -> and the light bulb that finally went off for me.

If you've been doing the work, listening to podcasts, reading the books, and you still feel like something keeps pulling you back into the loop -> it's probably one of these. Maybe more than one. The good news is, naming it is half the work. Once you can see the pattern, you can step outside of it.

You don't have to fix your personality. You just have to give your nervous system a different message than the one it's been getting for years.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sign up for my FREE Live Masterclass happening May 15th :
How to know if your symptoms are nervous system driven and what to do next

Pain Reprocessing Therapy 

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

If you've been doing all the right things and still putting pressure on yourself to heal faster, this conversation might land deeply.

Grace sits down with Lindsay Vine, an ME/CFS and long COVID recovery coach who spent seven and a half years navigating her own healing journey, including a period of being fully bedbound. Lindsay now works one-on-one with clients and teaches mind-body and neuroplasticity courses within the healthcare system in British Columbia, Canada. She also co-created the CFS Programs Guide, a searchable resource covering 34+ recovery programs to help people find the right fit without the overwhelm.

Together, they explore how the pressure to "get better" can become the very thing keeping the nervous system stuck. They discuss the role of goodism — the deep need to be seen as good — and how it drives people to turn recovery into another achievement to get right. Lindsay shares her own turning point of shifting from valuing achievements to valuing who she is, and they talk through what it looks like when brain retraining feels fake, why positive psychology alone isn't always enough, and how doing less can sometimes be the real healing move. They also break down the three pathways that keep people stuck — worry, pressure, and self-criticism — and what to pivot to instead: gratitude, focusing on wins, and self-compassion.

This episode is for anyone who's ever thought, "I should have figured this out by now."

Find Lindsay: 

Website

Post Viral Podcast

CFS Programs Guide

Listen to Episode 14: Healing ME/CFS Using Brain Training and Nervous System Regulation 

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

In this solo episode, Grace breaks down what it actually means to create safety in the nervous system — moving beyond the vague advice of "just feel safe" and into six specific, practical approaches that listeners can start using right away. She explores why a dysregulated nervous system keeps responding to non-dangerous things as threats, and why safety isn't something you can think your way into — it has to be felt in the body. 

Grace walks through the power of accepting where you are instead of fighting it, how suppressed emotions keep the system stuck in chronic activation, the role of spiritual connection in co-regulation, and why authentic self-expression may be the deepest safety signal of all. 

Drawing from her own healing journey and clinical experience, she gets honest about what it took to stop performing okayness and start actually feeling it. This episode builds on her popular earlier conversation with Vanessa Blackstone in Episode 24, going deeper with concrete examples and practices. An episode to save and return to — each practice builds over time, and different ones will land for different people.

Referenced episode: Ep 24. How to Create Your Own Authentic Message of Safety with Vanessa Blackstone: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2346801/episodes/15170620

Resources from Grace:

• Practitioner Training Founding Cohort Waitlist
• Mind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system now
• Free Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your Symptoms
• Work with us in private mind-body coaching 
• Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to's

Connect with Grace

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website