Episode 124: The Art of Communicating with Yourself with Karla Rodriguez

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Amanda Elise Love, and I'm a registered holistic nutritionist. And today's guest is Karla. So welcome to theshow.

Thank you so much, Amanda. I'm really happy to be here and excited to see the conversations that we have and whatever questions that may arise.

That's awesome. So I always start the podcast with the question. What is your backstory?

Hmm, interesting. There's so many backstories. So, my backstory? Hmm, I guess it really depends. But based on you know, what we share here. When I was 17, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. And then at 25 or 26, I was then told that I have a genetic disorder. And in that process, I didn't the first time that I got diagnosed with my autoimmune disorder, which would is initials, or ITP. And essentially, what that means is that I have I had very low platelet count. And I thought, oh, it's probably because I'm anemic. Or, you know, it's one of those things that maybe I'm not having enough nutrients and things like that. And what I found out is like, no, no, it's not necessarily having to do with, with you being having anemia and experiencing this thing. It's something else. And I ended up going to doctors, and just different specialty specialists, specialists, I almost said that, and I did. And, you know, what they told me was that, hey, your body at some point, it for some reason started to maybe attack itself, maybe had some kind of something that went went wrong. And then it was so close to what your platelets look like that it your own body started to think that your platelets were that maybe virus or whatever it was, I don't know what I got sick with at the time, to be honest, it was just a kind of a confusing time. But at that age being 17, I was a senior in high school, and I didn't even understand really what was going on. And for from the ages of 17 Till I want to say 20 or almost 21 I was on meds because I thought that the doctors and that they knew best, right? That was how I grew up. Yeah, Hispanic we are we grow up thinking like the authorities know, like we should follow, we should listen to what authorities tell us if the doctor says that's it. And that's what it is. And so we didn't really look for more research, we didn't really go out and be like, alright, what other options are there? And so for those years, I was on prednisone and also steroids to increase. I almost forgot what I was on. But yeah, because I eventually I'll tell you here in a second, I chose not to keep going with that. And

in that time, I was already a heavy girl. I didn't know how to eat food, right? I didn't know what nutritious food was. And maybe I did. But for some reason, it wasn't something that I in took as much as I needed to write my mom in the summer even before that is smaller, like elementary school, middle school, and the summers back in California. Every summer I would go to work with her. And so what would we do? Where would she take me she would take me to McDonald's records Jr. or someplace to have breakfast and I would have a dielectric breakfast if it was for McDonald's and an extra sausage at that. And a sausage McMuffin. So I was that kid that was heavy for a while. And from there like, you know, one day before we moved to Austin in eighth grade in California, where I went to school, we lived in a school that was overpopulated. And kids didn't have a lot of resources, a lot of opportunities. And lucky enough in my world appeared this really cool teacher at the school who said hey, we're all as kids going to take this trip to London. And it's going to be 10 days. And cool is that no parent I mean, some parents of course, but you know, we left we went to London, my mom worked really hard to give me the opportunity to go and travel for the first time being from South Central LA where literally you would find you would hear or drive bys we knew to get on the ground when that was happening. So I come from this place that was literally it was crazy, crazy. In a sense, you would hear about these drive bys, gangsters. I lived in front of a drug dealers house actually for a while until she got arrested. Then my Nate and my my neighbors also over there in California, you know, you would always hear them yelling and just all kinds of stuff would happen. And as a kid you you think that that's the life that you're supposed to live that that's the environment that you're supposed to live in that there's nothing really much more than that. At. And so this opportunity to go to London was like, Whoa, you know, this is amazing. Right over there, I actually lost in the 10 days that I was in that we went on this trip to the UK, I think I lost 22 pounds or 20 pounds, something around there. Being an eighth grade, I was a heavy kid. And so I think an eighth grade, I was maybe four foot 1100, and maybe 35 pounds, 140 pounds at the time. And I lost all that weight before we moved to Austin. So that being said, again, I didn't know what nutritious food was, I didn't understand and correlate the fact I lost weight to the food that we were eating over there in the UK. It was different. We were actually eating good food, we were going to restaurants. It was not fast food all the time, and of course, a lot of activity. And so when I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder here, I needed to quickly figure out what is going on. And those were not the questions that I had until this the Wildwood hematologist. He said, Hey, Carla, I'm gonna lower your dose of the steroid, because if we continue this long term, there may be a possibility that you have issues with your bones in the future, maybe arthritis, maybe something. And I said, why? Like, how is that even, like a possibility? This is supposed to be helping my body. Right? And so he said, Yeah, we're gonna lower it to this. And so he gave me the prescription, I picked up the prescription to a lower dosage. And when I picked up the bottle, I said, No, I'm not taking this anymore. I said, um, I don't know what I have to do. I was really confused at the time. And I didn't take the steroids any longer. I completely stopped them. And I was still being seen by him for a while, but I didn't tell him I wasn't taking the medicine. Following protocols, follow your protocols if you need to, and let your doctors know probably that this is what you're doing. Right? I just did it out of fear. And at the time, once I decided to once I was told by this doctor, like, hey, Carla, this is what's gonna happen. Not long after I met my best friend who now is my husband. And he taught me to change my habits that I because I told him, Hey, I want to lose weight. I didn't know what was really going on with my body. My heaviest that I went to was probably 155 pounds. I'm five foot one now. So not that much. I didn't grow that much from eighth grade to now. But

so but I did get heavy. Yeah. And I when I met him, I just went up to him because I knew he had just gotten out of the Marine Corps. And he was helping my friend workout and stuff. And I would go run to Planet Fitness, like midnight to try to do something right. I knew something had to change. I just didn't know what that was. And so once I met him, he said, Hey, Carla, this is what you're gonna do, you're gonna do this, this, this and this. First of all, that meant no fast food at all. And I was a sophomore at this point in college. And he said, No more fast food, you're gonna eat this, you're gonna eat fruits, you're gonna eat that blah, blah, blah. And I followed it, and that, from the time that I started this two, three months later, I lost 22 pounds. So I went from being 150 to 120 something or whatever, 22 pounds minus 150 years. And I said, Whoa, and people started asking questions. They, Carla, what's the secret sauce? What is the magic pill, so you can do this. And there was no magic thing. It was food and exercise. That was it. And so that was the beginning of changing my lifestyle from using food. And I didn't even know mindset had something to do with it. At the time. I just knew that something needed to change. When I was diagnosed with my genetic disorder, that what I used to have, because now I will tell you this, I don't believe I have this any longer. I haven't had any experiences with this. When I was 2526, around between those those two, my that year, I woke up, or I was woken up, let's just put it that way. And I was so mad because I said why are y'all waking me up? At two, three in the morning? And my husband and my mom said no, no, Carla, you just had a seizure. And I said, why? And I went back to sleep. Nothing else. No questions. I didn't go to the doctor the day later. Again, all of y'all. This is just my experience. Okay. And then there everybody, my husband, my mom was confused, like, what happened? And so I want to say that wasn't August and then to come the next year, February or March. I had another one in my sleep. And they said Nope, this time you're gonna go see somebody and we're gonna figure out what is going on with you. And I was told I had this genetic disorder, and that I had cysts in my brain, apparently a lot of them because we went through a whole bunch of tests and everything. And I was told that I have something called tuberous sclerosis complex. And anybody that has tuberous sclerosis complex technically, I'm a rarity, because technically, I wasn't supposed to graduate from college, I wasn't supposed to be able to learn because people have seizures on a like constant basis on a daily. And for me, I didn't understand it. And again, this neurologist said, Hey, Carl, you're gonna take this medicine, this is what you're going to do. He gave me the prescription. And I didn't go pick it up. And the thing behind this was that between when I was getting better and losing weight, and then this second thing, which I was told, again, my body is doing something to me, that's how I felt at the time. I said, I'm not going to be the victim, I'm not going to be a sick person. I'm not going to live in that way that people feel bad for me. I said, Nope, that's not happening. I'm going to figure out what I need to do. Right. At the time, I was just finding out about the keto diet. And I was just finding out about that. And I started, I had already started this, and I asked him, hey, what do you think about this keto diet thing? Like what do you think? And he said, Yeah, go for it, you know, because the brain loves fat. And I said, Cool. And since then, I've never had, I had one more seizure. And I finally figured out the last one, what that one was based on. And I'll share more about what I do, and in the theories behind what was going on in my life at the time. And I had one more that same year, between February and March and November.

And ever since that year, which would have been 2016. I believe, I haven't had any seizures at all. It's been five or six years since I had the last one. And I've never felt that I was sick. I've never felt that I had this thing. There's this TSC that most people know it as tuberous sclerosis complex. And all of y'all are free from this, by the way, this is just my experience. And eventually, I got into entrepreneurship, found a lot of amazing women. And now I'm doing what I'm doing in being a trainer and a coach of neuro linguistic programming, a master coach of hypnosis, and timeline therapy. Also, you know, I work with something called German new medicine. And it's something that I'm really, really passionate about. So in a long form, that is kind of my I wish I would have just done this shorter. But this is kind of my background.

That's a quite an incredible story. And especially you haven't had a seizure in six years. Five to six years. Yeah. So yeah. So what is did you say German medicine is so it's it's a German

new medicine. What is that? So German medicine is a it's a different approach to medicine, let's put it that way. Or to the health space. It was something that was discovered by His name is Dr. Reich. Hamer, or Yeah, Hamer H A, M er. And so it's a new paradigm of medicine, in which, you know, it's about having this new consciousness around our symptoms that we experience. It's an awareness of how our organism and our symptoms are complete, are pretty much correlated, to the emotional experiences that we have in our life. And it doesn't have to be emotional experiences directly by us. For us, it could be something that we see as well, just in our awareness, in our surroundings, in our environment. And so what this does, is that it's a recognition that every single cell in our body has this ability to have the wisdom to its own healing to be our own full human beings that we are meant to

be. And we all deal with we all have something that we see. But we also all have trauma that we've probably dealt with.

Yes, there's all kinds of trauma. People think that trauma needs to be this big, like, whoa, life changing thing, right? Because we go into this place and space of comparison between between people, right, that's this whole you know, comparison thing and having Is this thing that we're like that I'm not experiencing that maybe I don't have trauma? Do I Do I not. And you know, what I can say about that is that we experience it in different ways. Because two people can be in the same place at the same time, and one person can actually feel like that was traumatic, and the other one probably doesn't feel the same way. And so as a result, with German medicine, what how I approach, the holistic space of coaching, is that I look at the symptoms, I actually based on the symptoms that people have, again, I don't help anybody here, I'm only a coach, I'm a guide, right. So I just want to make this clear that I'm not a doctor, I'm a coach who guides people to find their answers in their own healing, because I found mine, through my coaches, right. And I'll give you an example of something that was like something that I didn't even realize so a little bit later. And what I do is I look at the symptoms, and I ask questions based on those symptoms, right, because there could be emotional things related connected to that sometimes it could be the environment, of course, it's not all just emotional, there's, of course, a blend of things that that go into to that our environment is a huge factor in this. And another, I think a book that people would probably be interested in reading, too, is the Biology of Belief. And, you know, that's another good book that talks about how our, the way that we as humans evolve in our genetics, right? They change not based on our parents, and where we come from based on our environment. And so they adapt to where we are going rather than where we've come from. And there's a lot of things in the past that of course, take into account in ourselves. Anybody who's read, The Body Keeps the Score would you know can can also connect this to that? How our cells are directly connected, or they can be to our past, our ancestors, if you believe in past lives, anything generational generational traumas, generational experiences, right? And for some reason, in our life, we're experiencing things from back then, for example, if a kid, maybe 2345 years old, the saying I'm so angry, or whatever, whatever the feeling would be, yeah. And we as parents would be like, how is this kid angry all the time? It probably has nothing to do with this child. It's probably things from even before then. Yeah. And so a German and medicine, like I said, there's a lot of correlation to emotional stuff that the people don't realize, and they talk about the five biological laws. And there's a whole bunch of things that go into that. And what I'm excited about is that next year in 2023, I'm actually going to be offering a certification as a German new medicine practitioner, which I'm so excited about. That's

really cool. What kind of symptoms do people come to you? They need coaching. It

depends. For example, right now I started working with with a client who has who's experienced anemia, for example, me. And so what anemia has to deal with? It's a soft devaluation conflict. And it's relating to what is it relating to what I'm thinking right now. It's this conflict active phase where the body the blood is constantly running, running, running, right? And so your blood is always you're finding that oxygen, and you're finding all of these things. And so, when it comes to anemia, it could be to start devaluation. And also devaluation means is that it's a primary conflict related to different parts in our brain as well. And so it could be that the person feels something about themselves as a whole, right? And it's not a good feeling, what I mean is like, maybe self doubt or that you are, it could be that you are ugly, or it could be that you just are not worth it, or what is the value in you, right? It could be those as a whole is what anemia would have to do with Take That self devaluation.

And we all like we all have something that we're dealing with some sort of

stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And I was saying, not always I would say it's a little tricky, I guess, in my mind, the way that I connect it to you, because if I were to believe that then I would think people are not okay all the time. And I think that people can be okay. But it's like when it comes to the art of devaluation is how do you speak to yourself, you know, how do you feel about yourself, you know, what is that perception of yourself, right? Like, do you say to yourself, I'm a failure, or I wouldn't never succeed, right? That has a lot to do with how you experience life. When I talk about some symptoms, I'll give you a personal experience. So last year, I lost my voice. I want to say in May April, I literally had a sore throat. And then I turned into like, I can't speak like I couldn't even like see things. I was like, you know, it was there. Yeah. And I it was very connected to a week before that, that I was having a conversation with somebody. And I didn't say what I really truly wanted to say, I kept my mouth shut. And so yeah, it later, I don't have a voice. And I'm like, what happened? And so my coach was like, hey, Carlo. Is there something that you didn't say that you should have said? And I said, uh, Yup, definitely. Because I knew the moment when he asked me that, like, Oh, I remember what happened. And as soon as I said, Yes, I started to do some work around it some inner work. Because at this point, for me to speak to this person was almost like, it's been two weeks, right, I am not going to bring something up. That wasn't as to that person, they probably already forgotten. And so I did some inner work around it. And then maybe two days later, I started to Oh, hey, I haven't always cool I can speak now.

And I think a lot of times we hold back on what we're really feeling and stuff in our body knows, and it might turn into a sore throat or sickness or whatever.

Yeah, and like I said, there's a lot of other factors that come can come into play with with some of these symptoms. But what I do in my word, my favorite part of it is like finding those connections between some of these symptoms and emotions or experiences that you've had, for example, if it has anything to do with, let's say, people have knee pain or some issue with your ankle or something, right? It's maybe not being able to kick someone else or kick someone away and like a defense moment, or it could also be not being able to move forward on something. So sometimes I'll ask what are you not moving on? What do you not like literally doing the thing you're supposed to do that you don't want to do right now in order for you to actually be able to accomplish those things. And then trust me, your your knees or your feet will actually feel better?

That's incredible. And stuff when we don't think about that.

Yeah, and when people think like that, when we feel symptoms. Most people think, Oh, when I feel symptom, I'm sick. But the other way to look at this with German medicine is that when we actually feel a symptom, it's actually in the healing phase.

I would like to know, what does that exactly mean.

So the healing phase would be like, for example, if you get a scratch, and the first thing that the body does is it sends all the cells to that specific place that you've got to scratch. And then what's the next thing that happens? You get a scab, right? And most people, we tend to like maybe, hopefully you don't, but the scab doesn't look pretty, it looks ugly, it's going through through this weird healing phase. Right? And which, you know, it needs to go through that process in order to fully be in a way new, right? Sometimes, yeah, there'll be a scar and things like that. And actually, scars can be actually reduced in color as well, based on inner work. One of my coaches has actually done this process with some people I haven't personally, but she has. And then the other way to think about it, is that when someone has a headache, you know, you could potentially have a tension headache or something. And it could be that a lot of the things that you were worried about, have resolved. So the headache has to kind of pass through your body to then feel light. And feel like Ah, okay, cool. That's interesting. So it's seeing people not as sick but as like, how are you? How is your body trying to heal?

Yeah, and I think a lot of times we think our body, we just want to mask the symptoms of it is

that putting that band aid, we put the band aid, it's the band aid approach and some and that's where you know, of course, the prescription stuff is great. Like it works, it helps last week, I had an allergy and I was like, ah, for the most part I allow my body to to work its way through feeling to feeling like Alright, cool. I'm 100% again. But I needed to get on calls. I needed to do some work and stuff and I took one I only took one because I'm not much of a medicine taker. Nothing against I have nothing against medicine as long as it's true. really, truly necessary. But for me, personally, my own body, I normally don't. But this time I said, Okay, I have to at least do something temporarily, and allow my body to rest because sometimes we do need rest, too. And so I took one, one of the allergy thing, the little allergy pill, I don't even know which kind of was. And I started to literally feel better, I was able to sleep better, it didn't wake up as much. So it allowed my body to actually rush to. So every now and then, you know, if you really truly need it cool, but the way I approach coaching is all right. What is my body trying to not it when it comes to smelling or people having maybe the flu or not being able to have things in your nose and anything like that? It's just stink, stink conflict. So it's this idea around this smells suspicious, this has this weird odor to it, right? Like in when it comes to situations in life?

Oh, okay. That's interesting. So like, if you have the flu, then it's a situation that maybe you're not

dealing with. Sometimes when we do feel these things as things that we probably want to avoid, or like, unconsciously, because if we're conscious about the things that we do need to do, like most of the time, you'll actually be able to tackle these, these situations and symptoms, because you're conscious about what's going on in your life.

And I don't, I don't feel like we're very conscious about what's going on. I mean, we just push, push, push. And we'd all take a breath and be like, what's, what do I really want to be doing?

Yeah, yeah, I think as a society, especially here in the US, we're a gogogo type of society. And we don't take a break.

Yeah. And we're just, yeah, casual scheduled scheduled. Even our weekends are packed.

Yeah.

So we're talking about that before we got on this call. But I mean, like, even taking one day, and we don't have anything going on is doesn't happen, because you're always doing something. Even if it's not work. It's like laundry, or cleaning or shopping or cooking and stuff.

Yeah. Exactly. So it's about slowing down. Of course, because it's it we want to accomplish a lot of things. Yeah. Which, which is amazing, right? Let's do it. Let's, let's get the thing done. And maybe take five minutes to to notice. What you notice, right? How are you breathing? What is it that you're even thinking about? Are you thinking about oh my god, I wonder how this is gonna work? Or I feel great. You know, like, what is that thing that you see about yourself? How is it they feel at the moment? And like, What are you saying to yourself?

That's interesting that you're talking about, like, seeing like, taking five minutes just to slow down and to see what you're actually thinking. And I think, and it was funny, because I was actually in a class and they were talking about just like quieting your mind. And I was like, that's super interesting, because even conflict or something, just quieting your mind before you react and stuff. And I'm like, that's really good. Just to quiet our mind, even if it's like, five minutes a day. Yeah, because like, I feel like personally, I have a mind where it's always going and stuff. Or that's the problem. But I think just quieting our minds and seeing and sometimes we don't even need to think about stuff we just need.

We're just it's interesting, because our mind is meant when it comes to our experience as a human, like we all experience it so many ways, but we take in about and this is an estimate 11 million bits of information per second. 11 million bits per second of information, is what we're normally in taking all of that information, right? Obviously, that color is our brain, right? And so with all of that information, guess how much we actually really keep

a couple percent.

If we keep 2800 That's about 128 bits of information per second. So that's imagine like me giving you one toothpick, another toothpick 1050 100 128 Then I tried to push it to 138. At that point, how much is it really, that you can hold of those toothpicks? Imagine, give you 11 million pieces of toothpicks. That is literally what our, our, our brain and our human human body can really intake. And it's really interesting because we try to take in more, but we just don't have the capacity to do that. And we just get,

we have so much information coming at us all the time. And our phones are going off, it's just so much information and stuff. That's why you have to be super careful. Yeah, was what information is like going into your brain?

Yeah, so basically, what I love about the way we take information is that it gives me information on how and when that information would have taken place, in your, in your mind, or in your life.

Well, thank you for this interview, is there anything else you would like to share? Um,

yeah, I would say I really appreciate Amanda, this, these these interviews and these podcasts and these episodes that you share, because it's really cool to be able to share with people that you can find your way when it comes to your your body and your own healing. Like I said, I don't tell anybody that I heal them. Because I do not do that. I guide that person to find that right. And a lot of it starts with what you truly want what you truly believe. And when it comes to what we truly believe and what we truly want. That is probably true for you. And sometimes I've, I've, you know, I like to talk about the identity and the experience. And so knowing the difference between what you take on what you wear as your identity, and what is more of your experience. And of course, a lot of us we experience certain symptoms, illnesses, challenges, right in our life. And are we really wearing that? Or can we put it to the side, let's say it's a hair, let's put it to the side and say, This is what I'm experiencing. And I know that I'm fit, I'm going to feel better I know that I have this this healthy body, I feel a little challenge. And I know that I will improve in this process. And trust me what you tell your mind, your body will do. And so as you do that, it's a practice, right? I tell my clients, it's practice little by little don't think of this as like, I always put this this this like Modi call is this this metaphor around the matrix, right? When he first gets into into the actual real world, or into the matrix, he tries to make this huge jump, and people are betting like, Oh, he's gonna make it or he's not, he's not. And I think you know what, we don't need to try to take that huge leap, although I will never stop you from it. But know that if you decide to because it's your choice to take those those little leaves those little steps, trust me a little step and a little step unless is an a little step is better than no step at all. And so just continuing those those practices for you. And when you become aware of like what you truly believe about yourself, trust me, a lot of changes start to happen. So you know, if you want to know more about NLP neuro linguistic programming, which, what that is, it's the art and science to human communication behavior and how you model excellence, right? But that has a lot to do with communication. And so how you communicate matters so much. And if you are not aware of how you communicate with yourself, or if you realize that you're not a great communicator to yourself, maybe it's time start time to start, like backing up a little bit and say, Okay, put it on a table and look at it and say, Is this really true about me or not? And then just start to become aware of those things that you say, because once you become aware, the way that you approach things is going to improve, it's going to change, and it's going to feel like you are taking those big leaps in changes. And it feels sometimes challenging, and it's exciting to know that in this process, there's always something new to learn about yourself. So yeah, if you want to know more about that German medicine and that specific course. And definitely if you have questions, reach out to me on Instagram, @coachKarlita, C O A C H K A R L I T A, or you can literally send me a message Karla@metafitmetamind.com. And yeah, I'm really excited. Thank you so much, Amanda, for having me on, for being able to share about German medicine because I don't think it's something that's still well known. And I'm excited to you know, create these changes within people or help you make those changes that you need.