Security Halt!
Welcome to Security Halt! Podcast, the show dedicated to Veterans, Active Duty Service Members, and First Responders. Hosted by retired Green Beret Deny Caballero, this podcast dives deep into the stories of resilience, triumph, and the unique challenges faced by those who serve.
Through powerful interviews and candid discussions, Security Halt! Podcast highlights vital resources, celebrates success stories, and offers actionable tools to navigate mental health, career transitions, and personal growth.
Join us as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, proving that even after the mission changes, the call to serve and thrive never ends.
Security Halt!
#236 Integrative Healing for Mental Health: Jacqueline Jone’s Journey Through Art Therapy
In this enlightening episode of the Security Halt! Podcast, host Deny Caballero explores the transformative power of integrative health and art therapy with special guest Jacqueline Jones. From her childhood passion for art to becoming a dedicated art therapist, Jackie shares how holistic approaches, such as yoga, meditation, and trauma-informed care, have changed lives—including her own.
This conversation highlights the significance of self-care, mindfulness, and emotional health for caregivers, veterans, and anyone seeking personal growth. Jackie and Deny dive into topics like the power of morning routines, energy healing, and the role of supportive environments in fostering recovery. Jackie also reveals how travel therapy and integrative practices can inspire profound healing and personal transformation.
Don’t forget to follow, share, like, and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts to stay connected to impactful stories that inspire change.
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Chapters
00:00Introduction to Integrative Health and Art Therapy
07:03The Journey into Art Therapy and Personal Health
14:01Trauma-Informed Care and the Evolution of Therapy
21:01Navigating Personal Challenges and Professional Growth
33:09Morning Routines and Self-Care Practices
39:11Integrating Physical and Emotional Health
52:15The Journey of Personal Growth and Travel
01:00:09Integrative Health Practices and Client Experiences
Instagram: @securityhalt
Tik Tok: @security.halt.pod
LinkedIn: Deny Caballero
Follow Jackie on LinkedIn, on social media and check out her website!
Website: flourishmomentum.com
LinkedIn: Jacqueline Jones
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqueline-jones-75b65066/
Instagram: @flourish_momentum
https://www.instagram.com/flourish_momentum
YouTube: @JackieJones
https://www.youtube.com/jackiejones
Facebook: Flourish Momentum
https://www.facebook.com/p/Flourish-Momentum-100082515434696/
Produced by Security Halt Media
security hot podcast.
Speaker 2:Let's go with an expert in guerrilla warfare with a man who's the best with guns, with knives, with his bare hands a man who's been trained to ignore, ignore weather to live off the land. Job was disposed of enemy personnel to kill period With my attrition.
Speaker 1:Jacqueline. Jacqueline, welcome to the Security App Podcast. A pleasure to have you on.
Speaker 2:I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Let's kick it off.
Speaker 1:You're somebody that has been there for our soft professionals, for our service members, for our soft professionals, for our service members.
Speaker 1:We missed each other while I was a patient at the Intrepid Spirit Center, and one of the beautiful things about that center is it's oftentimes the first time we, as patients, are giving tools such as yoga and art therapy, these modalities that to us seem very foreign and at first we can be very turned off by it. But, like I learned in my journey, these things are so powerful and they are often the first resource that can get us to kind of like chill out and take off the armor and then really allow some healing to take place. So today I not only want to dive into your journey, but I want you to be able to speak on everything that you do because right now, integrative health isn't talked about enough. Everything that you do because right now, integrative health isn't talked about enough and, like in my humbling experience I know I was so against it until I had my moment of like wow, like this, this actually has a lot of power in it.
Speaker 1:I'd love to talk all about it. Let's do it. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:So how did you get involved in this world? All right, well, I think art was my main entryway. So when I was little, I always gravitated toward art. So, even as early as I can remember, I was asking for art-related gifts. I'd fall asleep and have art supplies in my bed with me. I would draw before I fell asleep every night. I, in kindergarten, when they said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I already said art teacher, even back then.
Speaker 2:So it was very clear to me from the very beginning that I, I, um, had a pull toward art. And then, as life got difficult, you know, even as a kid, even as a child, or then in middle school, um, I knew that if I didn't feel good about something, if I turned to making art about it, I knew that I would feel better. So, whether it was just um sitting down to draw like a fruit or anything, or if it was, you know, then I, I started to learn. Um, you know, even if someone I felt was wronging me, if I sat down and I did a portrait of them, my feelings about them would totally shift of like spend, I would say like meditative time with them. They're not even there it's just me and a drawing, but I could just tell that it would resolve the negative feelings and allow me to keep going so fast forward.
Speaker 2:A little bit later I was in a used bookstore and followed the art section and the psychology section. I was already interested in these things and they met at one book. That was the art therapy section. It was tiny, it was literally one book, so I got it.
Speaker 1:I read it.
Speaker 2:I learned that it was a thing that that you know, um, no one in my life had heard about. I would talk to people and they'd be like, oh, I have I think I have a second aunt who does that in israel or like something far away, like it was like not something. Yeah, people really knew much about. But, um and I'll, I'll, I'll keep going on the art thread and then I'll introduce the health thread, so I also had a few different health things going on.
Speaker 2:Some that started when I was really little, some that started in high school, and we'll just, we'll say migraines, we'll start with migraines, for instance.
Speaker 2:So I in 10th grade was diagnosed with chronic migraines. We'll start with migraines. For instance. So I in 10th grade was diagnosed with chronic migraines. I would have like three or four a week and the treatment that I was getting for them was all medications that I was getting all the side effects for, and like one medication would be recommended and that would give me side effects. And then when the doctor started to prescribe me with like a second medication to fix the side effects caused by the first, I already was like wait, are you giving me this to solve the thing? That the last one started? And they were like yeah, and I was like no, I don't want to be on anything.
Speaker 2:And I um, even when I was young it was pretty good at advocating for myself toward doctors. And so by the time I was, um, after college, probably a year outside of college, um, I was seeing a doctor and I said I don't want any more prescriptions for my migraines, I don't want to try anymore, I get all the side effects. And she walked back in and she had a notepad and on the notepad were the name of two books and she said don't tell anyone that I'm giving this to you. It was like a prescription note. She was like don't tell anyone that there's not prescriptions on this. Go home, read these books, see if they help. Basically, she was like I'm supposed to be prescribing you with things, but I understand you're frustrated. Go home, read these books, see if they help. And I read those books and I started making holistic changes. What books were they started making holistic changes.
Speaker 1:What books were they?
Speaker 2:Well, one was I'm pretty sure it was called Heal your Headache. The other one's escaping me right now, but I'm pretty sure Heal your Headache is the one that I'm thinking of.
Speaker 2:What it helped me understand was that you know we get migraines from inflammation get migraines from inflammation like um and, and there's all these different things, internal and external, that cause inflammation, and we all have a baseline or we have a threshold. So let's say you have, you know, five different things stacked up before your inflammation is so great. Then you introduce the sixth thing and then you have a migraine. But if you can understand what all of your contributing factor building blocks are that make you reach your threshold, and then take those out of your life if you encounter one, you're not going to be anywhere near the threshold that makes you have a migraine. So it helped me really understand that. And so there was kind of the art helping people thread, my own personal holistic health thread and then when I was working for the military, they kind of finally collided and I was like, okay, these need to come together. So I guess I'll start there and then we can.
Speaker 1:We can kind of dig in where you want to and I can go through my career history.
Speaker 2:When, when you want to.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Dig in. However. You want to cut this pie up and slices, do it up.
Speaker 2:All right, so let's see. So I was going to college torn if I was going to study art education, art therapy or graphic design. I started at an art school for graphic design, but it was too computer based and I knew right away.
Speaker 2:No, I want to be more with people, yeah. So I switched to art education. Art therapy was always my end goal, but there were no jobs in it, like if you I mean there were, but if you looked it didn't seem like there were any. And I always knew that teaching would be an amazing stepping stone. So I started off. I got a master's in art education. I graduated the undergrad part early and I volunteered working with homeless kids and moms in Brazil before the master's portion started and when I was there. That was really powerful and we did make a difference. But I remember when I left really feeling like I wish I had the education of an art therapist here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like I was able to make a certain amount of impact with an art education lens, but I really wish I had the knowledge of an art therapist.
Speaker 1:What part of Brazil were you in?
Speaker 2:I was in Salvador. Oh, wow, salvador. Yeah, I was up in salvador, um, and there was actually a lot of things happened there from, uh, my own experiences with trauma and moral injury, and things that also became a thread for me to be able to understand.
Speaker 1:It's not like a happy-go-lucky place. No, it wasn't. It wasn't.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, not where we were. So anyway, like that, there are a lot of things that I pursued that helped me understand. The beginning of that was already getting my prerequisites, my night school credits, to go back for art therapy. Um, there were certain things that would come up in the, the art from kids that were red flags, we'll call them Um, and I didn't personally like that. Like I created the container where these things were coming up in the artwork but I wasn't allowed to process them. Like if something concerning came up, I had to pass the art directly onto a guidance counselor and then I was left out of the loop. So I didn't like that. I wanted to be more part of the actual processing of what was coming up. And then there were also, you know, certain behavioral things that show up in kids you can address through the kid, but there's also a lot that comes up that you know, like it's not going to get resolved in the kid as long as the parents are still, you know, demonstrating those things, um.
Speaker 2:So it became very clear that you know, if you really want to help kids, a big way to do that is to actually, you know, do therapy with the adults. And then there are other threads as well. So I wound up going to George Washington University for art therapy, which was an incredible program. I chose that program because it was like ahead of its time. We had a whole trauma track that was ahead of its time. We had a trauma clinic that was ahead of its time. We had, um, a trauma clinic that we would run for the community.
Speaker 2:So we got a lot of experience doing that and we also had this whole research arm. So I did like phd level research, uh, while getting my master's um in art therapy, and so I I knew that when I went into art therapy I wanted to be definitely treating trauma. I knew that I definitely wanted to be involved in research because what time period was this?
Speaker 1:this was 2011 to 2013, okay, so trauma-informed, like research and care, like that was. It was already there, it was coming around.
Speaker 2:It was coming around.
Speaker 2:It was coming around. Body Keeps. The Score came out right after that. So like we had it was coming around, like our, the woman at our clinic who directed the trauma program, directed the trauma program, she was, I would say, more of a pioneer, like bringing in the trauma informed, bringing in the yoga and meditation, these more somatic practices, and with the therapy. And she, um, like we read some of the chapters from body keeps a score when I was a student and then looking back I'm like oh, it wasn't even published yet.
Speaker 2:She must've had an in that book is so powerful.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's like the first book I recommend to guys Now. I remember when I started my education. There's like five core books that I already gone through front to back, and it's like you go to these classes and they start teaching from it. I'm like all right sweet, like I've already known this stuff. Guys, if you're listening and you haven't read, the Body Keeps the Score. Like you got to dive into this.
Speaker 1:Like I didn't understand trauma from the point of like everybody lives, everybody thinks that their life is just normal. You go through it. It's God, whatever, I went through some bad stuff. Really dig into that book and you realize and it starts to really help you process and understand the like, the health issues that you suffered through as a kid and maybe your early adulthood. So maybe responses are still linked to the things you went through as a child. Like that blew my mind because you're just like whatever. Yeah, yeah, canker sores are no big deal. It's like I'm always some fight or flight. Well, well, if that's you like, there's a reason for that. It started somewhere. Like do be willing to read the books and do the homework. Like now it's easier to talk about. But like you're saying like back then, like it was just starting to creep in, like that's, that's a good program.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was an amazing program. I even had some friends afterwards never get into art therapy because they wound up becoming stay-at-home moms or something right away, something like that, and they're all like you know what. I don't regret it. The amount of money it costs was totally worth it for the amount of personal development that I did. It was a very intense, very good program. And so my first year-long internship in that program I was at Georgetown Hospital working with pediatric oncology patients, and so a lot came out of that experience. And then my second year-long internship was at the NICO at the Center of Excellence at.
Speaker 2:Walter Reed, the Center of Excellence at Walter Reed, and there were a lot of reasons that I was pulled to that site.
Speaker 2:And then there were a lot of things that I learned in my own analyzing myself and my family and whatnot that it made me feel very passionately about okay, this is the course that I want to be on for a while, passionately about.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is the course that I want to be on for a while. And, um, while I was at the nico, that is the year that the um intrepid fallen heroes fund was able to start breaking ground on some of the satellite centers. And so that year they broke ground on Fort Belvoir and the, the, the team of doctors from Fort Belvoir that came through to a tour the NICO, um, and see kind of which pieces they wanted to implement, which pieces they didn't. They went back and I got word that they weren't planning on having an art therapist, even though when you go to the NICO you see just how big of an impact that program has there. And so I, while I was a student, I wound up going to Fort Belvoir doing presentations there on why the art therapy was such a crucial piece of the program. Art therapy was such a crucial piece of the program, and then I also wrote a grant proposal for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Speaker 2:Oh wow I wound up getting as soon as I graduated. It matched up perfectly with the ribbon cutting for Fort Belvoir, and so I basically convinced Fort Belvoir to give me a chance and give me a room. They gave me a small room, and then I had convinced the National Endowment for the Arts to give me three months worth of funding to pilot inserting art therapy there, and so they both agreed and it went really well. And so in just the first three months, I was able to prove the worth of having art therapy there, and then it immediately turned into a contractor position through the NEA, and then um Belvoir saw the value of it. So much, though, that within a year I was already a GS physician. So from there, I was able to um get a GS, a permanent position, and the program grew. And then we pulled on a music therapist, another art therapist, and then fast forward to 2018. And I wound up leaving there to go to Eglin Air Force Base to help the Air Force start their first NICO satellite help the Air Force start their first NICO satellite. And when I went there, they let me be the art therapist but also the yoga and meditation teacher, and that was incredible, and that's when sounds like a, dismissed you but got to work with a lot of your peers. But got to work with a lot of your peers.
Speaker 2:And in 2020, like the same week that all the shutdowns started happening for the pandemic my mom was diagnosed with a stage four cancer. Like out of the blue, and because I had that experience working in the oncology part of the hospital at Georgetown for a year, I knew the words that she was saying before she did Like I mean, she obviously was saying the words that the doctors were saying, but she didn't really understand what they meant yet and I knew that what she was about to embark on was going to require a lot of caregiving. And so I wound up it was kind of like Jumanji, I had to time, like move it. Like there was, you know, everything shut down. We were working from home, I was living in Shalimar, and then things opened up for a little and I like packed everything up, moved my stuff to New Jersey and then things shut back down again. But yeah, I lived with her for a year.
Speaker 2:I saw the bright side of leaving these jobs that I had created and I mean it was. I had a series of dream jobs I absolutely loved working for the Invisible Wounds Centers for the military, but I knew I needed to go take care of my mom for a bit and at the end of that, you know she felt really guilty having me leave these jobs. She knows how much work I put into creating them and how much I loved them and, um, I was like I've always wanted to have my own practice. It's okay, I'm just going to use this as my stepping stone to like push me into the next thing that I meant to do. So you know already um already client, especially when I started doing the yoga, clients were asking me more questions about health and physical health, but it wasn't my it, it wasn't my role to answer those questions. I kind of direct them to the people who is more appropriate.
Speaker 2:But during the pandemic and I was taking care of my mom, I got um certified in integrative nutrition, health coaching, so I could bring that more in my wheelhouse. And then the things that helped me a lot during, the things that come up from treating trauma 24 7 um and then becoming a caregiver in a really intensive situation, um, or some more of these energy healing practices that I really got into. And so I got certified in Reiki and Theta Healing and Feng Shui and now that I work for myself and I can, you know, co-treat with myself and decide, like, um, what someone needs most in any given session, I can bring it all to the table. So now I can we do art therapy in a session of that, so it's most appropriate. We do yoga and meditation or Ayurveda, that's the most appropriate. We do energy healing, can do feng shui, so I can really address mind, body, soul, space when I work with people.
Speaker 1:Now that's beautiful. It's really important to know that anytime you're having to take a pause, that you can focus on family. That's going through something that takes so much more out of you. Our providers a lot of people I know I certainly did we take you guys for granted. We take everything that you do for us and we don't pause and reflect that, like you guys have emergencies too, you guys have lives and people that depend on you. You guys do so much for us and that's the thing that's like really important when we look at the I like to say the chain of custody.
Speaker 1:When a guy gets hurt, it's never just showing up to interrupt. The spirit, like everybody there is constantly trying to connect you to the next higher level of care if you need to. That's one thing I didn't realize to like the very end, when I was finally like coming back from you know, not just one treatment center, but another one in a down in a down step outpatient treatment center was. They always had all my information and it was always because one awesome member of a team was doing this extra work on their own to connect with another provider to let them know hey, this is the patient you're going to be receiving and this is not like a standard protocol thing that goes down. You're going to be receiving and this is not like a standard protocol thing that goes down. This is how much you guys care about taking care of the soft professional, of the individual that walks in those centers and you take so much on.
Speaker 1:When you were going through that period in your life, taking care of your mother, taking care of her while she needs you, what were some of the things that you were leaning on? Were you leaning on the things you were learning and trying to get better at, just so you could help yourself? Did you lean in your own art therapy? What helped you the most?
Speaker 2:Well, I will connect a few of the things you said in answering that. So one of the first things yes, we do, we care so much. Like we care so much. And I know personally like one of the biggest criticisms I was ever given by a supervisor was you care too much. But like you kind of can't not, like I don't want to be someone who doesn't right, like I'm not going to be in a field where, if I don't care, but what? So even just while I was at, I'll answer your question.
Speaker 2:But kind of go through the phases, yeah, yeah, like when you're in school to be a therapist and you start out in a halftime internship and you get used to the weight of like what it's like to carry other people's weight for like half the week, you know, and you do that for a couple years. Well, the second year you're even more because we're running our trauma clinics. So what it's like, you know to carry other people's weight for like 60% of the week. And then you go full time and you're stepping into like five days a week. You know, being in other people's heads and spaces with them and carrying that amount of weight, spaces with them and carrying that amount of weight. And then you know one thing that was funny at at Belvoir all of us providers were given the opportunity to do. You know the alternate work schedule where you, you know, work nine hour days, get like every other Monday or Friday off. None of the rehab providers took that. Every single mental health provider took that like it.
Speaker 2:we all needed that one day to recoup so well and um, and so that's already something right. And then there's a certain amount of weight you get used to carrying. So initially, yes, art therapy was my main tool. I would do art therapy all the time, especially at the beginning when people were telling me, like the first kinds of stories. Each time, all of those stories would wind up playing on like the forefront of my mind, and so it was really important for me to personally do my own, like personal by myself, art therapist.
Speaker 2:I wasn't sharing it with another therapist. It was just like me in my own journal, um, externalizing those images that just would kind of become like the glasses I was wearing. You know know what I mean. Um, and as soon as I would do that, they would leave me. So it was a really important part of my own process. And then, going through my own personal life things, going through a divorce, um, during that time I would use art therapy in other ways, but to make sure that, like, my own emotions weren't getting in the way of me being able to be present. And then, um, I was the victim of a couple accidents when I was there too, and so had my own tbd and ptsd and things from that and then like, could also understand what so a?
Speaker 2:my clients were the first ones to notice I had a tbi, I had got someone. They diagnosed you one of my um. In 2017 I was stopped at a light in arlington where I lived and um the person behind me just wasn't paying attention.
Speaker 2:She didn't see the light was red and she just hit me. Um, she just wasn't paying attention and so I had a whiplash concussion from that and that was bad. It took me like three months to get back on a bike the next morning. I knew that, like you know, I work in a tbi center.
Speaker 2:I knew like, okay, I think I blacked out for a second, but I still was the one in the accident, like communicating with the cops, like yeah the other people and the person who hit me didn't have insurance and the person that she caused me to hit didn't have insurance and so like everyone kind of fled and it was like so I was there to kind of take care of everything, even though I had just had a. I blacked out when I hit my face on the wheel and stuff and but anyway. So I knew enough to say like I probably shouldn't wake up at five tomorrow morning and I canceled my first few appointments for the day, but I thought that I'd be fine to get to work and like run my group at 10 am. And so I was running my, my 10 am like level three open studio art therapy group at Belvoir, and the open studio group was hilarious.
Speaker 2:It was always like seven people, you know, big characters, like dark humor soaring, like everyone like working on their own really intensive projects, but also jackie, can you help me with this? Jackie can help me with this. So you're kind of like in that setting I was always. You know, one person might be poor painting, another person is sculpting, another person is like wood burning. You're like managing a whole bunch of things, like never missing a beat, and that day you know they were interacting with me like normal. I was like hold on, like I could only handle, like one thing at a time.
Speaker 2:I was like one at a time, yeah and I remember, like these huge guys you know I was used to working with, but they just kind of like surrounded me at my desk and they were staring down at me and they started like doing all the tests on me and they were like jackie, do you have a tvi? What happened? I started to explain and they were, and then they just started chanting one of us, you made it, you made it yeah.
Speaker 2:So then from there, I, you know, had a lot of experience doing certain holistic things. To recover from that I had like as a therapist it was really scary, because one of the things that you build up is the ability to empathize with what someone is saying without absorbing it. And the scariest thing that happened when I had my TBI while being a trauma therapist was my boss was like don't do your deep trauma work right away. And I was like what am I supposed to do? It's what I do. Like there's plenty of guys I'm like in the middle of processing a traumatic event. I can't just tell them to wait three months on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so the first afternoon that I was like back in the middle of one of my like deeper trauma processing things I was doing with someone and you can feel yourself like when you have a TPI, you can feel yourself like I know I'm at 10% of myself. I know I'm operating at 20% of myself, right. And so I was feeling that and I was like is this ethical, is this okay? Like I know I feel like I'm at 30% of myself, but I also don't want to tell him to like just wait a while. We're in the middle of something. So I tried, I like, did my job and then I did the session fine, but after that session I cried six hours incessantly that day. That is not something that I ever do, so I had lost like that.
Speaker 2:I don't know how to describe it, but it's like an internal mesh that would allow me to empathize without absorbing, and so one of the scariest things I had to rebuild up in my tbi healing was like regrowing that mesh which is fine, it's fine, don't worry about me.
Speaker 2:No one should worry about me. But that was like as a trauma therapist going through a TBI. That is something that I experienced. And so, anyway, um, yoga and meditation became a really important part of my healing and, like I had also been an, an endurance athlete, so I had to figure out these ways to move while building myself up instead of tearing myself down. Um, and then, the more and more you're going through your own stuff, plus treating trauma, um, you know, there would just be certain energies, like certain grief, and at a certain point you lose the sense of like, is this mine or is this someone else's?
Speaker 2:And so, from there I got into receiving Reiki, which was extremely helpful for me in releasing some of that energetic stuff that you hold on to, even if you've processed it out psychologically, even if you've moved it out through yoga. And then, anyway, when I was taking care of my mom, yeah, every single day I'd wake up two hours before anyone else in the house, and the first hour was me doing my own transcendental meditation and my own Reiki and my own Theta healing on myself. The whole second hour was my own personal yoga practice, and then I would emerge from my room and be able to take care of everyone else for the rest of the day. And if I ever didn't do that, I just wasn't my best self. So I was like so for me personally, I have to take care of myself first thing in the day before I'm alive to anyone else.
Speaker 1:I'm so glad you brought that up. I cannot stress enough the importance of having your own morning routine. For me, mindfulness and working out that is still like my go-to and if anything happens and I've proven to myself enough times now if you get, if your schedule gets hectic and you've got to front load some things, it never works to put it on the back burner and do it later on in the day.
Speaker 1:And you never get the same energy, the same alert and wakefulness. Never sacrifice that. Even if you have to say no to things, it's okay to say no to things. Do the things that pour into you first. Even if you have to wake up at 4, 4.30, do it. It's worth it. Go to bed early. Let me tell you, I can go to bed at 8 pm these days and I don't care. It is one of the greatest things. I'm 40 years old going to bed at 8 pm these days and I don't care. It is one of the greatest things. I'm 40 years old going to bed at 8 some days. Let me tell you, 7.30?. Oh, wow, chef's kiss it's, I mean to hear pretty soon. That's going to be wishful thinking. I will lose that for a while as we bring our first little one into the world, but I'm going to enjoy being able to go to bed.
Speaker 1:Dude, I've gone to bed at 6 pm some days.
Speaker 1:It's amazing it's, it's, it's just, congratulations yeah just being able to wake up and then, like you wake up super early, like 3 am, like this is fucking awesome, but it's like like you can't get that back. Being able to do that early morning meditation, that mindfulness and get that workout in, that's a key thing. We never prioritize the mind, body and spirit. We always prioritize just the body and then you get out and then maybe you don't work out as much, maybe you stop doing all that great lifting and then, no wonder, everything falls apart because you didn't have the spirit or the mind developed, you didn't have all these pillars fall back on, like get back in there. This comfort's great for the body. I'm so glad that. Are you still doing endurance or like doing any like heavy workouts? Like, is that part of your, your journey or have you put that in the back burner?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a good question. Before, well, before I forget, I just wanted to give a shout out to my the clients that I had at Eglin when I had to leave to take care of my mom, yeah.
Speaker 2:Like when you're a provider and you do care so much about the people you're taking care of, it does, uh, it's hard, it is, it's hard to leave, it's hard to take care of your own stuff. Um, and I had learned, I had learned that the importance of that early on, working with kids with cancer, um, but a lot of my clients were like you've helped us so much, like, go give this same thing to your mom. So everyone I worked with, no one gave me crap about it. Everyone was like you've given us so much, go like your mom needs you know. So that was, um, you know, just a million percent appreciated to not have yeah like guilt.
Speaker 1:That would naturally be there, so yeah, no, you guys do you, every single one of you, go out of your way to help us out in so many ways. It's insane, it's. It's oftentimes you're in so much pain you can't realize what's going on. But I know for a fact on the backside, when things de-escalate, when the pain is managed, when you've been able to get tools for whatever you're dealing with, it hits you just how much these people pour into you. They, literally they are there to be flexible with your schedule.
Speaker 1:I remember I was so hesitant to get help and I was looking for any sort of excuse not to come in there. I'm like, well, I got, I got to do this thing at like seven, 30 in the morning and shout out to Stephanie. Stephanie would be like, okay, I'll be here at seven, I'll get, I'll get them. Or let's do 6, 30, I'll be here early enough and I'm like, fuck, she's got a family, she's got a husband, like they're willing to do, I mean, every single thing they could, and then refer you to the next doctor. And then, before you even get there, the doctor and the nurse, they already know you because like, oh, yeah, no, they called, we know who you are, we know you need to get like they will do everything.
Speaker 1:You guys are so unique in how passionate you are and I think it's definitely because the intrepid spirit is not like any other clinic in the world. It's very specific to who you're treating and the individuals really don't. They don't see you just as a number. They see you as a human being that just needs help to get back to being like functioning adult. So, like you know, things are going to be changed, but we're going to be tools get you back to like you can. You can continue doing your job and that is so powerful Like. I think you guys deserve a lot more credit and a hell of a lot more money.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. Um, yeah, with the, with the endurance question that I mean, in dealing with a lot of this stuff, that was really helpful.
Speaker 2:So for a long time, you know, just after work, running for a long time, biking, for a long time I I did a marathon when I was a teacher but I at the time was really good at, um, you know, mind over body and I you know, would wear the watches and I would be like, just stick to this certain pace, and I, you know, gave myself um a femur stress fracture and then I was like I can't even put my jeans on, but I'm still going to run my race.
Speaker 1:And I then had to learn.
Speaker 2:like that sucked, because now I'm in physical therapy for like almost a year and like so I you know we rub off on you guys, give you bad habits.
Speaker 1:That was me.
Speaker 2:I started at bellabar with my femur stress fracture. So I think that's like I kind of mirrored. And then, um, I had to learn to learn, you know. Then I switched into more biking, um, and then after my it was after my TBI when I was like, oh, I can't even get on a bike right now. And then so I started doing yoga, really hardcore, and I wound up pulling something and then I was like, oh no, I can't even do yoga. So I had to really really pull things back, like everything's going to be okay if you walk instead of running. Like at the time I didn't believe that. Like at the time I did not believe that, and I know it's similar thinking that a lot of you guys go through um. But then I I did get into yoga in a way, um. Initially I got into it just because I heard that it helps you not get overuse injuries from running. So I saw it as purely like a active rest day kind of thing.
Speaker 2:But then I had enough experiences with cry yoga, where, like it's something that we call it, where like you start actually going to yoga and then you just start crying out of nowhere because it's like different emotions are getting locked and you're just lying in shavasana and you're like I think I'm supposed to get divorced and like I can't ignore it, because every time I come to yoga I'm crying in the back of the room and it just helps you really confront things that you may not want to. And so then I started going into it more for like that emotional, really spiritual practice. I knew there was a lot there and then just the deeper and deeper I got into it, I could tell that it was actually replenishing me instead of breaking me down. And I could also tell that like there's not enough hours in the day, like if I'm nine hours treating trauma, and then what I'm going to go for a nine hour run to process it all, and then I'm just left with like an exhausted, broken body that can't rebuild itself.
Speaker 2:So I needed to start finding things where I could totally like clear the energy process, what I needed to, and also bounce back in like really short amounts of time. And so that's what I found. And, um, doing more of the mind body, yeah, connecting art.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:I would say. So now I work out, I would say I'm like on any given day could sign up for a sprint triathlon and would be able to do great, but I'm not, um, I'm not training for anything super long right now, but I work out every day.
Speaker 1:It's an important thing longer look at integrative practices like Reiki or Feng Shui and see it as this weird mystical stuff. It's more accepted, but how do we explain it to those out there that don't understand or don't have any concept? There is efficacy behind this stuff. There is science put into this and it's not witchcraft. How do we begin speaking about it and how do you bring that out to somebody that's sort of on the fence wanting to learn more?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a really good question. So, all right, number one I started including the feng shui and the work that I do with clients one-on-one as a response to the number one complaint we would get at the Intrepid Spirit Centers. So a lot of times the most common complaint that we would get is I make all of these gains when I'm at these intensive treatment programs, but then I go home and I feel like I backslide and it's because my environment didn't change, like everyone around me staying the same, my environment didn't change and so, even though Feng Shui seems like left, like really far out in left field, it is not. Your environment has a huge impact on you and there's like from simple things that people aren't thinking about, like clutter. Even just being surrounded by clutter, research has shown over and over how much it raises your cortisol. So you're in your home, your place that's supposed to be like your nest of relaxation, but your cortisol is spiking because either you're surrounded by clutter or a lot of the things that we'd wind up working with in art therapy.
Speaker 2:I was kind of tapping into feng shui before even knowing it, but I would do these projects and I would invite guys to bring in items that they had at home, because y'all have a lot of items that you have saved because they're really significant but they may be hidden or buried away because there's a lot of negative association with them, but they're too important to throw out. And so there were a lot of the art therapy projects that I'd guide people in and then invite them to bring things in from home. They'd wind up going through bins or things that they'd been surrounded by. They were like I can't believe the energy that I'm just sitting here surrounded by at any given time. But then the process of actually going through those things with intention and then bringing them in to create a piece of artwork with where you're literally like transmuting your emotional connection with that piece. And then now you've created, you've taken something that you essentially tried to bury but was still like every time you pass it it's negatively affecting you because there's negative things associated with it. But now you go through the process of creating something with it. And now it might be that same item might be part of a memorial sculpture or something like that that now you have proudly on display somewhere. And so now you've taken something in your home where you didn't even realize how much it was spiking your cortisol and raising your depression and anxiety. But now you've transmuted it Literally. The same thing might still be in your home, but you associate it with appreciation or gratitude. So there's so many ways that through art therapy, through feng shui, we can actually transmute the energy, that of these items that have an effect on you.
Speaker 2:And then I guess another way to answer your question just with energy in general. I mean, physics shows everything is energy. So I'm energy, you're energy. The cup is energy. I use a lot of singing bowls in my practice. Our chakras all work at their own frequency. All of the organs in our body work at their own frequencies. And so, just like people have service dogs who you know like, if you're getting dysregulated and your anxiety is spiking and you're about to have a panic attack or something, your service dog can sense that They'll come up next to you. They'll like snuggle on you. Their balanced heart rate can regulate yours. All this energy work is the same. So, using different energetic frequencies or sound bowls or tuning forks all that, you're literally tuning just like you would a guitar. You're tuning the frequencies in your body so that they're vibrating at the frequency that they're supposed to and yeah, but there's so many different ways we can explain it. Depends on who we're talking to.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, like during Yoga Nidra is something that I offer and I never start off with how deep it is. We start off with how deep it is, we always start off with. You know, this typically makes people feel more anchored and grounded and centered. It typically helps people sleep better.
Speaker 2:You know, one session of yoga nidra is as restful as four hours of sleep, really, yeah, and actually it gets you into that stage four sleep that people talk about, the delta waves, which are needed, like you need to get to that place for your glymphatic system and your brain to work, for your brain at night when you're sleeping to actually push out the waste so it doesn't turn into plaque that turns into neurodegenerative issues.
Speaker 2:So you can get that through yoga nidra, get that through yoga nidra. And then the people I work with because so many people wear whoops now and stuff like that we can see as we're practicing how much more stage four sleep they're getting at night. Um, but so a lot of people will tune into these like physical body benefits. But then the deeper they get into it, they start to understand the more energetic benefits of it as well, like oh, and I'm really in that transcendent place. You know I've become one with the universe and gain all these new solutions to my problems and feel into bliss and so meeting people where they're at. But I mean a lot of people get into it first with the physical and then feel into the more.
Speaker 1:It's always the first thing we're trying to figure out Either find a new way or a cutting edge to get a little bit more performance out of our body. And that's like the big sexy thing, like how can I get better, just a little bit better, at this? And it's like that's good enough, that's the gateway. Now come in and realize the true benefits of this, like being able to live in the present moment. It's why it's so hard to sell mindfulness to people. It's like, dude, it's not going to give you or shave minutes off your runtime, but it's going to get you to realize what's more important. That's here now, this present moment, no longer focused on your perceived notion of your suffering or how bad you think the world is. Like, just take a moment to breathe, take a moment to just be outside. That's always a hard sell.
Speaker 1:I think, even when I and I always talk about this, it was Interpret. Spirit was the first place that offered me mindfulness and I very loudly told Dr Piazza, very loudly told doc piazza, um f off, no, very in a very disgruntled way. And uh, that's. I needed to figure it out the hard way and I'm I'm very grateful and very humbled that, yeah, eventually I went down my downward spiral and eventually it was mindfulness that finally gave me some sort of like understanding that I had some control again, that I could take control of this journey, that I could be in charge and I could be better. I just had to be able to eat my words and come back to it. Really humble.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and just you know, the first person who recommended Reiki to me. I wasn't ready to hear it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know it's not I do all these. I wasn't ready to hear it. Yeah, I do all of these things, but I am similar. The first time I'd hear about them, I thought yoga was just stretching. For years I didn't start to give it a chance until I thought it would just help me not get injured running, you know.
Speaker 2:And then you have to actually feel. I just feel like with all of this stuff people have to feel it. And once you have a moment feeling it, then you're like, oh well, maybe I should feel that a little bit more, and then maybe I should give it some credit, because it works so it's normal.
Speaker 1:So how do you like having your own practice now? These days You're on your own, doing your own thing. I would imagine it's a little liberating. It's a little bit freeing, right.
Speaker 2:It's freeing, I can juggle things, I can do more things, so I can like, since I'm running my own practice, I had always wanted to, I had always wanted to do the Everest base camp track, but when you're working for the government it's hard to get a month off, you know. So two years ago I went to Nepal and I spent seven days studying with a Nepalese sound healer. So that's where I learned um sound bowl healing and I came home with my set of tibetan sound bowls. And then I spent a few weeks doing the everest base camp trek and then exploring a bit afterwards and, um, you know, people are like, oh, it must be nice to take a month off, but like, I mean, it's all connected right, like the whole time. Yes, that's something I've always wanted to do, but at the same time I learned a new. I came home with a new modality that my clients love and get huge benefit from and the like.
Speaker 2:There's different energies all over the world and sometimes you need to go different places to feel into them, and doing the whole everest base camp track was a huge, uh like meditative spiritual journey the entire time and I um, I advanced a lot in my, my yoga trainings. Last year I went to to Bali for a month and a half. So I spent a month getting my 300 hour and yoga and Ayurveda. So now I have a my 500 hour and yoga teaching but then could explore for a while and really, you know, immerse myself in the energies of Bali and that, um, that did more for my business than arguably like. I've had some business coaches and I've gotten a tremendous amount of kind of strategic things from them, but I needed to be in Bali for a month and a half to like really shift some energies within me that have propelled my business forward. So I love the flexibility for sure, and it also allows me to juggle my one-on-one work with people with being able to.
Speaker 2:I work at different nonprofit like veteran retreats, so I can go do art therapy here for a while and I can go work with this group of you know caregivers for a long weekend and it just kind of gives me freedom to do more of, yeah, to integrate in a different way yeah, I think it's.
Speaker 1:It's vital to be able to travel and go out. This idea that you have to stay in the States and you have to constantly be hustling and grinding no, sometimes the best things you can do is just get out, go explore.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like you. Yeah, I can't recommend that enough, like there's more important things to do than just worry about the nine to five struggle and the work that needs to get done would venture well, and it's, it's, it's empowering, it's therapeutic and it's so unright like I had a lot of.
Speaker 2:I was really shy, I had a lot of anxiety growing up and and um my junior year of high school, I was a foreign exchange student in italy and no way yeah, and that whole experience like when you're 16, going somewhere you don't know anyone, living with a family of people who don't speak your language, like you have to learn the language you have. I mean, everything is on you right, so if you either crumble and go home early or it builds your confidence. So I do have certain clients who I suggest go travel, go travel for a bit. It's incredibly therapeutic, it's incredibly rebuilding and, um, you know, like traveling as a civilian who just wants to explore is a way different experience than when you're doing things in the military oh, abso-freaking-lutely like he, I, I, I married.
Speaker 2:Um, uh, I'm in a sec, I I'm in my second marriage now. But now I'm married to someone who's a retired recon Marine and like I wanted to go scuba diving, he was like I hate scuba diving now and I was like let's go, and so then we like you know, go on like a nice scuba diving adventure and see sharks and pretty fish and stuff, he's like oh, scuba diving is fun again.
Speaker 1:It's like, yeah, like you don't have to let the military ruin everything, everything, yeah, that's. That's one of the biggest things I tell people like, uh, if camping was ruined by the government, go out there and read and find your love of it once more. Like, be willing to explore things that the government soured for you. Uh, travel, go, do things. Be be willing to do what you want government soured for you, uh, travel, go, do things. Be be willing to do what you want to do and don't let a past experience, uh, deter you from it, which is often really difficult because there's so much, especially in the soft community. Like you get to do so many things. And I always talk about this. Like you need to experience all, you need to re-experience awe here in the United States or abroad, somewhere, not in Iraq or Afghanistan. The reason why it's because you have this idea that the greatest things you did were in a far off place, on a ridgeline somewhere, and it was beautiful. There's moments that you were like, oh, I'll never be able to get through that again. Let me tell you go to Utah, go backpacking in the back country of Utah, go to the mountains of Utah, go to Colorado and find awe again and it will change your life. I don't think back to any of those far off places looking for that awe anymore.
Speaker 1:I've had these experiences since I left the military that are just like holy shit. Like I got to lift and hoist the largest flag in the United States and one of the tallest places. Like this is freaking awesome. Like I've gotten to start doing adventures again and that's honestly one of the best therapy modalities out there. Shout out to VedEx. Like veteran exploration therapy in Colorado. What Are you kidding me, dude? You can go over there right now. Link up with them and go explore for free. Have an adventure, live life again. Jackie, thank you so much for being here today To our audience out there that may want to work with you. How do they get ahold of you? How can they start dipping their toes in integrative medicine with somebody like you as their coach?
Speaker 2:All right. So I work primarily virtually now so I can work with people from wherever. My business is called Flourish Momentum Integrative Health and Wellness for Mind, body, soul and Space and I can work with you locally. If you're local, you can come in person. I'm in the Chicagoland area right now, so when people work with me I always have an intro call for free so we can connect and I can learn what you're coming with, what you're looking for, and we can go over the options of packages that I have to offer and then we pick the one that works best for you and then that way we can hit the ground running in our first session and my first session is always a comprehensive integrative health assessment. So we go through all of the different categories of life and I start to connect a lot of dots. We go over your primary goals, you prioritize your goals and then we come up with our essentially our holistic healing journey. It's completely personalized for everyone. Someone might do art therapy the whole time they're working with me, someone else might never do art therapy. It just really depends on what they most need. And then we work together and pulling out either art therapy or yoga or meditation, ayurveda, energy, healing, feng shui, to get where we need to go. I want to say it's incredibly integrative, and so what that means is that we can make so much progress and my business name is Flourish Momentum because we can really attack in a nice way from all angles. So we're really working with your mind, body, soul and space, and the difference we create in one really propels growth and movement in the other spectrums as well.
Speaker 2:So we'll say, like someone that I'm working with, um, it was really distraught by some diagnoses he had received. Um, it started really downward, spiraling into hopelessness, like what's the point got, uh, you know, just really let his, his diet go to crap, like everything that he had been trying to do. He just kind of let go. But then he found himself in this really low point that he did not know how to get out of, and so his anxiety was like out of control for him.
Speaker 2:And we met um. He's like I have all these different things that I want to work on, but I can't even like think straight for a second about any of them because my anxiety is so out of control. So we actually started with Ayurveda because in just making some simple shifts to someone's diet or daily routines, his anxiety that he thought was his baseline dropped tremendously. So now he has things that he could do in his daily life to bring his baseline anxiety way down. And then in sessions we did art therapy for a while, because then he kind of had his daily life managed enough that we could go deeper into the lifelong things that needed to be addressed and processed through.
Speaker 2:And now you know he's dealing with some early onset neurodegenerative things like Parkinson's and other things like that. On top of the TBI boost his mood and give him endorphins and um, feel the dopamine and just he feels so much better than he did before we met, even though quote unquote more time has gone by, so things could have gotten worse, but they haven. They've gotten better because now we're actually doing everything that we can to support his physical and mental health, and so, anyway, yeah, that's what it can look like too.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I can't thank you enough for being here. I can't thank you enough for being here and, of course, for everything you've done for our community at the Interpret Spirit. We need more passionate providers like yourself, helping all of us wayward guys that are just not willing to be able to have you on the show and to tell you. Thank you for all of us for everything you've done. So please check out Jackie's website you'll see it right here and then go to episode description.
Speaker 1:Hit her up, because in today's world, you need every resource. You don't go to deployment with just one weapon system and hope to get the job done now. You take every available asset and resource and you hit the enemy from all angles, and that's what we need to do for our health when we find ourselves breaking down. Trauma is not something that we should approach as just one way to fix it. There's multiple approaches Art, therapy, yoga. All these things are valuable. So please, if you're still in and you're at seventh group, do yourself a favor. Go talk to a nurse practitioner and get yourself some help. Go to Intrepid Spirit. You won't regret it, or any other soft guy out there that knows about the Intrepid Spirit and needs to get help. I highly recommend it. Please go out there, take care of yourself. Thank you all for tuning in and we'll see you all next time. Until then, take care. Thank you so much. If you like what we're doing and you're enjoying the show, don't forget to share us. Like us, subscribe.
