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The saying ‘Let food be thy medicine’ may be old... but it’s also true.

One of the most common statements that many doctors say to their patients is “Your diet doesn’t play a role in this,” or “No, you don’t have to change your diet because of your condition.”

Nutrition plays a huge role in healing and food played a significant role in my own recovery from my ankle fracture as well. I know for a fact that it can help supercharge your healing powers when you’re adding it to mind-body work – but it’s still one of the things that is so often overlooked by conventional medicine.

So it’s always a pleasure to be talking to a doctor who’s as aware of the power of proper nutrition as Dr. Brooker Goldner, the author of three best-selling books; Goodbye Lupus, Goodbye Autoimmune Disease, and Green Smoothie Recipes to Kick Start Your Health and Healing. For those who are dealing with any kind of autoimmune disease, especially lupus, it’s almost impossible not to be aware of her work.

This interview is full of invaluable knowledge, as well as her own nearly miraculous recovery from a condition that is supposed to be irreversible.

You’ll discover:

• What‘s the difference between diets that are less inflammatory and those that are anti-inflammatory
• About the role of omega-3s in reducing inflammation and what is the best choice as a source for you
• How different approaches to your diet when you are ill or injured help or hinder your recovery
• What else, besides the food that you eat, is inflammatory and affects your healing

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• For accessing show notes, links, and transcript please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep28-brooke-goldner/

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Fighting pain away may not work, but thinking it away might.

We’re always fighting so many things, aren’t we? We fight climate change, we fight diseases, and naturally we fight pain as well. But this is one of the reasons why so many people struggle for so long with it. Because fighting doesn’t work and pain is not something you need to conquer. But that’s exactly how most people approach it, even though there are better ways...

A lot of healing modalities not completely aligned with conventional medicine are often labeled as placebo. But when you think about it, the placebo effect – getting better and feeling less pain just because you believe this should happen – can actually be incredibly powerful.

That’s just one of the topics we touched on with Dr. Bahram Jam, the founder and director of Advanced Physical Therapy Education Institute, who’s also a pain educator with a doctorate in physical therapy. 

And I can tell you that his passion is contagious. When you’re in the company of a person who loves their work it’s hard not to feel it. This is something I vividly remember from the conversation with Dr. Bahram Jam, where we covered the good, the bad, and the ugly things about pain.

In this amazing interview, you’ll discover:

• How to distinguish between good pain and bad pain during recovery.
• When should you be worried about nerve pain.
• How a normally suggested protocol of RICE (rest-ice-compression-elevation) can harm your progress.
• And also, why Dr. Bahram Jam wears different socks, and how this, too, relates to pain

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• For accessing show notes, links, and transcript please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep27-bahram-jam/

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Your body is always, always observing what’s happening in your mind.

You can fool others but you cannot fool yourself or your body. Your mind affects your physical body and your body is always, always observing what’s happening in your mind. And it’s not just visualization that can greatly improve any recovery. At a more basic level, every thought you have can affect your physical body in either a positive, or, unfortunately, negative way. And that’s especially important when healing injuries or disease states.

Dr. Martin Rossman has been practicing medicine for over 50 years, and he’s been using acupuncture in his approach for just as long (in other words, almost since before the American Medical Association began to understand its benefits).

But it’s not just acupuncture – his approach relies heavily on mind-body healing, and guiding it through imagery.

In this interview, you'll discover:

• What is neuroplasticity and why does it matter when it comes to your healing.
• How your thoughts become molecules that then affect your body in a negative or positive way?
• What imagery is and how to use it in your healing process.
• How to change your perception so that you can heal in the most amazing way.

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• For accessing show notes, links, and transcript please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep26-martin-rossman/

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Kindness. It’s true that most people are much better at being kind to others than they are at being kind to themselves.

Sometimes we think that we’re kind to ourselves, but when things get hard, or we don’t do something right, or we gain a bit of weight, when we stand in front of the mirror or sitting with our thoughts, we perhaps notice that we’re kind but only to a degree. Sometimes it’s hard to put what we know we should be doing into practice. And to go even a step further, when dealing with physical trauma (or mental/emotional, for that matter), we so often put ourselves into a sort of fight mode, where we’re actually treating the body (or mind) as an enemy to be beaten into submission.

Of course, even without that, trauma gets stored in the body. But with this approach, it becomes even harder to resolve it.

Cheri Clampett is the founder and director of the Therapeutic Yoga Training Program. For her, it was yoga that brought her back into a place of healing where you work with the body and mind, not against them, and she has been sharing these healing tools with others for over 25 years.

In this interview, you’ll discover:

• Different techniques that help with healing.
• How to soften around pain to reduce it tremendously without pain medication.
• How to help your body through the power of your mind.
• Hands-on work: meditation session for easily reducing (chronic) pain.

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• For accessing show notes, links, and transcript, please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep25-cheri-clampett/

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Your mind (conscious and subconscious) controls your actions. What if it controls your healing, too?

At any moment during the day, you probably have dozens of subconscious processes that are running as much as 95% of your actions. But what if that goes even deeper than your actions? Your beliefs and your subconscious programming don’t just affect the way you act, but also the way you heal (or stay sick or in pain).

And Dr. Bruce Lipton is probably one of the best-known authorities on this connection.

He turned from stem cell biology to epigenetics when he realized that our genes don’t actually control our destiny. Bruce is a pioneer in bridging science and spirit, explaining things in a way that’s easy to understand for anyone, and his best-selling book, The Biology of Belief, is regarded as one of the leading voices of the new biology. And this interview goes deep into how he views the connection between our thoughts and our body, and what it means for your ability to heal.

In this interview, you’ll discover:

• All about the power of your conscious and subconscious mind versus genetic factors in relation to your health and recovery.
• What kind of roles your beliefs play in your healing efforts.
• How body’s natural chemicals that either promote or hinder your progress are produced and released in your body.
• How to create a recovered future for yourself even if you were programmed differently in your past.

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• For accessing show notes, links, and transcript, please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep24-bruce-lipton/

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Different types of vibration can be healing, but they can also be detrimental to your health.

If you saw a device with a note attached that read: “Using this can (among other things) cause irreversible back pain, disc rupture and/or detached retina,” would you use it?

Probably not! And you’d make a very wise decision. However, countless people use such devices every single day without knowing how harmful they can be.

That’s why I think it’s very important to listen to the interview that I did with Dr. Clinton Rubin, who is the most cited researcher in the area of vibration therapy. He’s a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Center for Biotechnology at Stony Brook University, and, in his own words, very opinionated when it comes to vibrations, and what helps and what not.

You’ll not only discover what to avoid, but also how your bones are formed and why, as we age, we can have more problems with bones (e.g. osteoporosis), muscles, and how come that it’s easier to gain more fat as years go by.

In this incredible interview, you’ll discover:  

• What exactly leads to bone loss and osteoporosis as we age.
• The kind of vibration that is bad for your body (and which devices use it) – and the kind that is really, really good.
• Why exercise is really, truly important, throughout your entire life.
• How Dr. Rubin’s research led to an FDA-approved device that can increase bone density.

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• For accessing show notes, links, transcript, and video, please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep23-clinton-rubin/

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There were times, many years ago, when I didn’t completely understand why some injured people struggle and others don’t. I was wondering why sometimes the healing process feels like torture and other times as something that is completely doable. I became really curious how to help people by understanding the state they were in in those moments.

So throughout my years as a healing coach, as I tuned in and listened to countless women and men with physical trauma, I began identifying behavioral patterns that held people back in their healing process.

Based on these observations I created my model, The Mindful Injury Recovery Design. It helps you understand where you are in your healing journey and also what you need to do to arrive at your destination – it’s kind of a clear map of how to get from pain and suffering at point A to abundance and complete recovery at point Z.

My model consists of 4 spaces/rooms and in today’s episode, I explain in detail the characteristics of each space and in what kind of state – mental/emotional/physical – people are in when they’re in each of these spaces. This model has shown to be very helpful not just for individuals, but also medical professionals who want to understand their patients/clients better so that they can help them enhance their healing.  

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• For accessing show notes, links, transcript, and video, please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep22-maya-novak/

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For most people, the go-to method for dealing with pain is taking pain medication. There’s nothing wrong with this approach and sometimes it’s very necessary to take some kind of medicine to ease the suffering.

I mean, I’m still very grateful for the morphine that I got after my ankle surgery where they put 2 screws into my talus bone back in 2012.

However, pain can be treated with many different approaches and before we automatically reach for painkillers it might be a good idea to consider other options as well.

In today’s episode, I talk to Dr. David Schechter, a family practice and sports medicine doctor who’s one of the pioneers in researching the Mind-Body Syndrome in medicine.

We go pretty deep into the process of how the brain and our psyche create not just our perception of pain, but pain itself and the research behind it. And because Dr. Dave is also the author of the Mind-Body Workbook, we also look at the ways that this knowledge can be used to treat the kind of pain that is likely to be neuroplastic (which is most chronic pain).

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• For accessing show notes, links, transcript, and video, please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep21-david-schechter/

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Today I’m sharing another vulnerable episode with you.

At the end of March, I did my first Short and Vulnerable episode. If you tuned into that lucky number 13, you’ll remember how anxious I was about publishing it.

It’s never easy to ‘offer’ my heart on a plate for the whole world to see it with the awareness that it can be crushed. My heart was pounding so fast and loud when pressing that publish button.

I thought “This could be one and done, or at least many months will pass before I do something similar.”

Well… not really.

A part of me really needed to speak to you openly and vulnerably about happiness. Why I am exploring it here and now, what inspired me to open my heart completely again, and how our childhood experiences can actually make us unhappy even though we might not be aware of it.

So this episode (or any future Short and Vulnerable with Dr. Maya – This Too is Healing) is here to offer you a different kind of perspective, give you some aha moments, and encourage you to connect the dots in your life so that healing can continue for you, too.

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• For accessing show notes, links, transcript, and video, please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep20-maya-novak/

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You have to change from the inside out to see the results that you desire.

Many years ago, I came across a type of workout that gave me really fast results in a short period of time.

It was in 2009 when I found Zuzka Light on YouTube (this platform was barely 4 years old and very few people even knew about HIIT.)

And although my own training and ways of movement changed a lot over time (I still do HIIT from time to time, though), I kept track of her as she also grew to become a published author, a movement and mobility specialist, RTT therapist, and I’m happy to be sharing her knowledge on this episode.

In our interview, we covered a lot, including her own personal story of how she finally got rid of chronic pain. After years of dealing with this condition, she was pain-free within a month when applying a different kind of approach to healing.

And as you’ll discover, we touched on everything from movement and motivation, to hypnosis, RTT, the power of the mind over the physical body, and the importance of imagination in adjusting your identity from believing you are someone living in pain, to enjoying your body again.

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• For accessing show notes, links, transcript, and video, please visit: https://www.mayanovak.com/podcast/ep19-zuzka-light/ 

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