352. Minerals: The Hidden Spark Plugs That Charge Your Mind and Body - Dr. Leland Stillman Pt 2

Kara Goodwin: Welcome to the meditation conversation, the podcast to support your spiritual revolution. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin,

and this is part two of my episode with Dr. Leland Stillman. I was really excited to talk to Dr. Stillman about his expertise in functional and integrative medicine. And in the first part of this episode, we ended up talking a lot about.

The alternative health and coaching and meditation and spirituality spaces and some key watchouts and lessons learned that we've had where we felt that we had been taken advantage of in these spaces. And that was a really important discussion.

I wanted to split the conversation into two because then following that discussion, we talked about Dr. Stillman's core work as an alternative medicine, functional and integrative medicine [00:01:00] doctor.

So in this episode, we talk about what the mind is, where our memories come from, and we talk about minerals. And if you listen to episode one, you've heard me say that I didn't get to a lot of the other questions I had about light therapy and heavy metal detoxing. And so I'm going to book him again, and we'll look forward to having another discussion with him soon.

Dr. Leland Stillman studied biology and environmental health at Connecticut College and received his medical doctorate from the University of Virginia. He then trained in internal medicine at Maine Medical Center. He practiced as a hospitalist for three years training and went on to found his own medical His own practice just before COVID.

He has a longstanding interest in alternative medicine and now focuses on functional and integrative medicine in his practice. So I encourage you to check out karagoodwin. com where you can get a free 10 minute meditation. If you want support [00:02:00] for your meditation practice, I also have a 21 day online program to help you develop your own practice.

There's also the Healing Hearth membership where you can get live online assistance with your questions about meditation and life. And you can also get a personalized recorded meditation slash energy transmission to help you get through whatever challenges are showing up in your life. I also have a recorded , sacred geometry workshop series available.

All of that and more on karagoodwin. com and now enjoy this episode.

 so, um, let's start with minerals and it's funny. My question that I have prepared is, how do minerals affect the mind? Affect the mind and clarify what you mean by mind, the brain, the intellect, the emotions.

Which is funny because in the first part, you did touch on this, but let's talk about what do you mean by the mind and how do minerals fit into that?[00:03:00]

Dr. Leland Stillman: Wow. I am not even sure how to define the mind, but I'm going to try. So the gross reductionist, gross materialist, scientific materialist view of the body is that it is a bunch of different moving pieces that all interrelate and cooperate for survival and reproduction. the idea implicit in that is that these component parts can be reduced to very discreet, small or uncomplicated or simple, maybe. functions, right? Like, for example, you might think that all memory was in the brain. Tom Cowan talks about this in his book. He shares this remarkable anecdote that came out of research on psychology and people who'd had a heart transplant, what they found in patients who'd had a heart transplant. And I'll tell you a story to illustrate this [00:04:00] very specific story.

A white racist factory worker gets a heart transplant and all of a sudden develops a affinity, a friendliness to his. Um, black coworkers. He starts frequenting African American or, or, or, you know, African American dominated places of business, places of recreation. He starts preferring food that they prefer to eat. Uh, the book was not specific as to what that meant by the way. And he started to listen to violin concertos. What an odd combination of behavior changes for someone who's had a heart transplant, right? And they came back to the clinic and they said, we're very perplexed by these changes. You told us there might be profound changes in his behavior and outlook on life after the transplant, but these are really bizarre. Can you explain these? And lo and behold, the gentleman whose heart he had received in the transplant had been a young African American, uh, student who died violently. [00:05:00] And I had been studying to become a professional violinist.

Kara Goodwin: Wow.

Dr. Leland Stillman: Whoa. So if you know that, how can you possibly believe that our memories can be reduced to what's in the brain, right?

They can't be reduced to what's in the brain. There's this connection between the brain and the heart. And we know this from the electrophysiology research that. When you, when there's good coherence between the brain and the heart in terms of their electrical communication. And one of the measures for this is HRV, heart rate variability. When there's good agreement and coherence, people tend to live longer and be healthier. And as that coherence and has that connection is damaged, severed, suppressed, uh, not given room to sort of breathe. HRV drops, generally speaking, and we use that clinically all the time. The point is simply this, the mind is [00:06:00] not in any one part of the body. The mind is everywhere, and the mind is nowhere, and trying to put it in some little box in a neuroanatomy textbook hasn't worked. Because what we've found through studies of people who've had strokes and brain injuries is that there's no part of the brain that's responsible for any one discrete function of consciousness. You might have areas that are responsible for being able to speak, being able to understand what's said to you, being able to see, being able to, you know, um, put a letter in a mailbox. Neuroanatomy and brain damage studies and anecdotes of patients really are remarkable for the strange things that you find when you investigate what's happened to the damaged brain. So the mind is, is like I said, nowhere and everywhere, and that means that any medicine that you're taking, and I mean that very broadly meditation, um, herbs, supplements, light, all of it can touch the [00:07:00] mind. There's a great paper on this that really shaped my thinking on it. It's called, it's the title is something like how light touches the brain through the skin. And I forget the authors, but the way that they said that really made me think, and this came out of my meditations upon the. Uh, the nature of physical reality in the, from the world of quantum mechanics, because if you look at the foundations of quantum mechanics, one of the foundational equations is one of Einstein's greatest. Which is E equals MC squared, which implies that energy, what's energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, the relationship between energy and matter, most physicians, most patients, most people selling you things to make you healthy are fundamentally selling you things. These things have matter. And so most people are myopically obsessed with the matter side of the equation equals MC squared. The energy side of the equation is [00:08:00] just as important and clearly changes to our material being can affect our energetic being. And that's explains a paradox that I've seen in my practice. You know, I've, I've heard people have remarkable changes in their personality, their outlook on life, how positive they are, how negative they are, how anxious they are, how relaxed they are, all these different things. I've seen them, they've told me, I feel better, I feel differently based on say, taking more walks outside, drinking high quality spring water, taking this supplement or that supplement, introducing a mineral dense diet to my life. I've also seen that happen with relationships and with meditation. And so where I think many integrative health space go wrong is that they niche down, so to speak, into one element of it.

And there's nothing wrong with that. We do need people to specialize in things. Because I can't be all things to all people. I'm a generalist by training. And I [00:09:00] sometimes like to joke that subspecialization is for doctors who are not ambitious enough to try to know everything. And that's not my problem.

My problem is that I want to know at least a little bit about everything. And that is, makes me essentially the perfect. Uh, the perfect opening, um, uh, I end up being, uh, some of my patients have described it as the quarterback. And so I'm the one they go to and they say, look, we need to, you know, we need to do this.

This is my, my wellness goal, my health goal. Can you help me? And I say, okay, yeah, listen, here's how we're gonna do it. Here's the play. And I might so to speak, throw the football down the field to a colleague of mine who specializes in whatever, homeopathy, immunotherapy, allergies, um, ozone therapy, high dose vitamin C, integrative cancer therapy, whatever they describe their specialization as. Right? But that's where I, I come in to help a lot of people

in my practice. And it all comes [00:10:00] out of this appreciation for the fact that all of it's connected. It can't be reduced. Below the sum of its parts, you have to have this kind of expansive. View of the body and the mind and the being, because if you don't, you can't explain all of the phenomena that we've clearly documented, you know, I mean, you talk to these people who've done Joe dispense of meditations and seeing incredible improvements in their health.

Right. And they'd say, and they might say, I don't think they, I've never heard them say this, but let's say that they said, oh, well, this proves that it doesn't matter what you eat. Joe doesn't say that again, for the record, but let's say that they said, oh, it doesn't matter what you eat. You just have to meditate. Okay. Well, that's, that's not really fair because I've seen people get these results just by changing what they ate or just by changing their light environment. So that's in a nutshell, my philosophy of medicine and how we treat people in the practice. We're constantly looking for that other cause that may be contributing to their picture.

I often liken it to the roots of a tree. [00:11:00] Most people, this word root cause medicine or root cause. Whatever. It's very, it's becoming very markety, very salesy. It's an easy concept for people to wrap their minds around, but it's funny because most people have never actually taken the time to try and uproot a tree. And if you look at the root structure of a tree, there is a tap root that's going straight down usually to the water table and maybe very long and very dense and very heavy and really anchors that tree into the ground. But there's countless branches off of both that root and then smaller roots. And if we really extend that to our health and wellbeing, you know, people will say things with the root cause of my illness was this or that. Well, maybe that was the tap root. Maybe that was one of the most significant roots. But saying that it, that was the root would be like saying I had a tree that had one root and that's not how trees are built. And so you have to be willing to engage with [00:12:00] all the roots. And when you get to a certain proportion of those roots, right, then the problem can be solved.

Excised, pulled out, removed, right? And that's when you get real profound foundational

healing.

Kara Goodwin: Oh, wow. I love that. Thank you. I, I want to add an anecdote to, uh, support what you were saying with the, um, heart transplant the mind residing, you know, in, in the body and the heart or the, the memories, excuse me. And, uh, because somebody very, very close to me, my step mom had a heart transplant. Um, um.

And I've known my step mom for much of my life and she's never been, had a sweet tooth and to the, you know, I've spent Thanksgivings and, you know, holidays and it's like, oh, it's, you know, and she's this amazing cook, but when it came to dessert, that was something that she was always ready [00:13:00] to hand off.

Cause she's like, oh, I don't care about dessert. So if anybody cares, like you can bring a dessert, but she had this heart transplant a few years ago. I guess it's, oh my gosh, um, seven years ago now. Um, and she has become this amazing baker since her heart transplant. So this woman who never cared about desserts to the extent that like, she's very interested in food, very interested in cooking and, and making amazing dishes, but completely.

Couldn't care less about desserts really like zeroed in on. I want to bake cakes. She was taking classes on baking cakes. She's, you know, the, anytime there's a birthday coming up, it's like, Oh, what cake do you want? You know? And she'll spend hours. Working on people's cakes and she eats them too. So, and it's, and we don't know anything about her donor.

And so we don't [00:14:00] have this, the other side of it to be able to say, well, we confirm that, you know, your donor had a sweet tooth, but there's enough evidence there that I imagine that. That, you know, that the donor had a sweet tooth and this is how it expresses with her. It then bleeds into like, Oh, I'm interested in creation when it in the kitchen.

And so now I've got this new interest in cakes and other desserts and, um, and that is completely post transplant and it happened pretty quickly after the transplant. So. Really interesting. Yeah. So there's

Dr. Leland Stillman: It is

Kara Goodwin: definitely, something there.

Dr. Leland Stillman: definitely.

Kara Goodwin: So can you talk about that, that whole thing with what is the mind, um, began with minerals, because I know that you understand that minerals affect the mind.

So talk about, first of all, you know, what do you mean by [00:15:00] minerals? Some people may not even know what minerals are, but what is the effect that you see on the mind?

Dr. Leland Stillman: So by the way, if people want to learn more about this, because we can really only scratch the surface in the time we have left. I run a course on minerals with my friend Clark Engelbert at stillmanwellness. com. That course is called HTMA secrets, hair tissue, mineral analysis secrets. What people need to realize about minerals is that they are the spark plugs of life and you'll see very clear patterns in people's thinking, their feeling, their behavior, oftentimes their clinical symptomatology based on what the mineral balance is in their diet. It sounds spooky and weird, but I think your audience based on their. Uh, obvious interest in meditation will, will get it. Um, minerals have this almost personality iron is this very brittle, tough, strong mineral. If you look at people who have those personalities [00:16:00] in life, they tend to be hard charging, high achieving, incredibly intense, sometimes, um, abrasive people, right? The prototype would be like the warrior, right? Mars, the god of war, the red planet. Red because it's full of iron, right? So that might be, let's say, uh, a soldier. And what you'll also see with them is exactly what you see with iron in nature. They tend to rust out. They tend to become brittle and then break early in life.

We see the same thing with people who have extremely iron dominant or iron rich diets who don't take steps to balance that mineral with other minerals or to reduce their iron stores, which is something that I write about a lot and that I wrote about in detail in my book, dying to be free. So that's one example, right? Copper we look at as like an electrical mineral. It's very conductive. That's why copper is in the wiring in your walls. Copper has this way of really Speeding [00:17:00] up people's thinking, but it can also sort of detach them from reality. They can become these kind of ivory tower type, um, philosophers, constantly reading papers, constantly reading books, constantly opining about reality, but often not particularly in touch with it. And. I know this sounds weird, but I'm telling you this comes out in people's hair tissue testing. You will see people with these personalities show up with high levels of iron or high levels of copper. You'll see people show up with, um, you know, imbalances between their four macro minerals, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium that correspond with how they feel. And when I first started to, to do this kind of work with the minerals, I was very skeptical of that, but, you know, and, and, you know, people will say, oh, well, this is like, sounds like astrology, you know, you're going to tell me my sign and maybe it's all just confirmation bias. You know, and sort of, uh, [00:18:00]showmanship, shall we say, but darn, if it doesn't correspond very closely to how people actually feel and how they function.

And then you, you give them minerals to try and balance the mineral picture, and you'll see changes come in, corresponding to the mineral that you've given in the proportions that you've given it. So a great example, this would be my case when I was, uh, just getting into this, it was 2 years ago now. And I called my friend Clark Engelbert with whom I run the course now, and I'd been using what I would describe as cutting edge functional medicine protocols for years already.

I'd seen amazing results, had some incredible cases, but I was very curious about this hair tissue mineral analysis and Clark. Came back to me and said, Hey, based on your HTMA, you need a dose of zinc. That's four or five times what I'd been using in my clinical practice. And I said, wow, that's a lot. Are you sure?

And he said, yeah, trust me. And I went with it. I had to try it. And I was astounded by how much more grounded, [00:19:00] focused, relaxed, um, insightful. uh, uh, calm I became on this high dose of zinc. Now, I'm not saying all of you should take a high dose of zinc if you feel that way, because you'll find the opposite is just as true. People can take high doses of minerals that don't respect or balance or understand how these are affected By the other minerals in their body and the proportions in the hair, and that will put them into bad places, lead to bad results. So we created this course in order to help people understand how the whole mineral system works.

And it's just like the system of the body that I've been talking about before. It's a complex hole that cannot be reduced to any one part and any move you make, whether it's with a vitamin or a mineral or a macronutrient or a lifestyle change has to be made. And with respect for how it affects this whole system and with this modality, we've been very encouraged by the results that we've seen in my clinical practice.

And now my coaching business, where we coach [00:20:00] people on this, because we see it really being, I think, foundational to health, because this is the terrain. You know, if we go back to that example of a, of a tree, you know, an illness taking root in the ground, Claude Bernard, who was the father of modern physiology, a French physiologist in the 1800s, he said, Illness is constantly hovering above us like seeds blown by the wind and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's French.

So, you know, I'm translating it. They're constantly hovering in the air above us floating around like seeds being blown by the wind. And if they settle in hospitable terrain, they will take root. And then they will grow. And if the train is not hospitable, they will not grow. And this goes back to the idea of terrain theory, which your listeners may have heard of. And this idea of, are we, should we say, be afraid of germs, microbes? Should we be afraid of them? If our terrain is optimized, right? So we need to focus on the terrain. And if you know anything about soil and soil science, the minerals are the bedrock of the terrain. You can have [00:21:00] soil with tons of, you know, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, um, but if you don't have the right minerals, potassium, calcium, sodium, even magnesium, manganese, iron, copper, zinc, selenium, you may not get the plants that you want, right? And anyone who knows anything about gardening can appreciate this, sometimes one mineral can completely derail. Your gardening plans and that's why we see the profound results we see with hair tissue mineral analysis in people's health and well being and their performance in life. And that's why it's now the bedrock of what I do when it comes to nutritional supplementation and

dietary changes.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. Well, how can people find that, that course that you talk about? Okay.

Dr. Leland Stillman: Stillman wellness dot com. Uh, we have a number of webinars on this on YouTube. Uh, we often live stream them to YouTube so that people can get an idea of what it is and how it works and what we're offering exactly. So if you just go to my YouTube [00:22:00] channel and you watch our mineral videos, you'll get a lot more information on how powerful this is. And then we're actually re enrolling the course as of right now during this recording. I don't know when you're going to release this episode, but we enroll the programs on a quarterly basis in the next enrollment after May. This is May, mid May right now, recording this. We're going to be enrolling the next round in, uh, August.

To start in

September, by the way.

Kara Goodwin: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. I would love to have you on again because I know we've run out of time and I'm so sorry for that. And I have so many more questions for you. So hopefully we'll have you on again soon.

Dr. Leland Stillman: Thank you very much. I appreciate your

time. Thanks for having me on.

Kara Goodwin: Thank you so much. Bye.

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