TBI: Traumatic Brain Injuries – How to Heal and Recover
The Primal Pioneer Podcast teaches you how to improve the environment you live, work, and exercise in so you can achieve optimal health. Heathar’s leading-edge teachings and expert interviews with integrative health professions teach you the most effective, simple yet deeply transformative solutions to overcoming and preventing every chronic disease today. You’ll walk away from this podcast feeling invigorated, inspired, and confident about your body’s incredible and natural ability to heal!
TBI: Traumatic Brain Injuries - How to Heal and Recover
If you or a loved one has struggled with a TBI, or a traumatic brain injury, you aren’t alone. I know first-hand how debilitating the side effects can be and how frustrating it can feel to lack clear solutions. That’s why in episode 16 of the Primal Pioneer, I’m sharing strategies and nature-based holistic modalities to help support and expedite recovery from brain injuries.
But before we dive right in, let me introduce myself in case this is your first visit. I am your host, Heather Shepard and I am incredibly passionate about helping people JUST LIKE YOU find the health and happiness they truly deserve.
Besides being an alternative healer and integrative health coach, I’m also a Traumatic Brain Injury survivor who struggled for 10 years until I discovered the MOST important factor for overall health: the environment we live and work in. And in The Primal Pioneer, I share what 98+% of doctors don’t tell you (or don’t even know!) about true health and wellness. You’ll learn about the importance of sunlight, as well as the foods and eating cycles that heal the root causes of chronic disease. And in an age dominated by technology, you’ll discover how EMF mitigation can drastically improve your life.
Everyone has their own healing journey with their own unique struggles...but I’m here to give you all the tools you need to make that healing happen!
So if you’re ready to learn more about how to start recovering from TBI using sunlight and how you can support your brain health despite this debilitating, often medically confusing condition, keep reading the four points shared below! And for even more details, listen to ALL of episode 16 of The Primal Pioneer on your favorite streaming platform.
What You Need to Know About TBI, Point #1: My TBI story and my search for answers...
When I was twenty-three, I experienced a TBI. I was in a car accident and hit a telephone pole. Up until that accident, I was super athletic. There wasn't a day that went by where I wasn't training my body, running, weightlifting, doing cross fit, hiking, biking. And the only injury I’d ever experienced was a pulled hamstring. So when my brain injury occurred and all the scans came back crystal clear, I thought I was going to be back on my feet again after a couple of days of rest.
That was hardly the case. Day after day passed, and I wasn't getting any better. In fact, I was getting worse. And I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't know what to do with my time. I didn't know how to get better.
And not only did I not feel well in my body, but I was also becoming a loner because of the residual effects of my TBI. I was dizzy. I had debilitating anxiety. I struggled with poor sleep, which led to exhaustion. And when we're unable to process and heal TBI and from all the physical and emotional PTSD that comes with it, the more debilitated we feel in our physical body and in our emotional body, and we become more sensitive to our environment. And science finds that this has a lot to do with damage to the hypothalamus. That is the area in the brain where our central nervous system, our immune system and our endocrine system all meet, so this is why people with brain injuries often are sensitive to their environment and have issues with their immune system, endocrine system and central nervous system.
However, if you were just to take a look at me, I looked totally normal. So not many people took my symptoms and my TBI seriously.
And it took me 13 years, thousands of unnecessarily spent dollars and every medical specialist that you could think of to figure out how to heal my TBI...and none of those specialists helped. Because they weren't addressing the root issue.
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What You Need to Know About TBI, Point #2: My “aha” moment with sunlight and TBI.
So after my 13-year journey, this is when things started to shift and not because I magically got better, but because I tried a new approach. And this approach was inspired by a podcast I listened to all about sunlight and its remarkable effects on our physiology.
Up until that point, I hadn't ever considered sunlight as a therapeutic modality. But here's the thing: when it comes to our health, we want the sexy, cutting-edge devices and tools and supplements. We want the cutting-edge diet plan. We want the new trial drug that's going to make all our health struggles disappear. And we want these things to come in and sweep our health struggles away.
However, that almost never happens. So when I first started to increase my sunlight exposure, I was stoked to be outside in nature more. And I knew that if I got up with the sunlight, I was going to be more productive because I was up longer, and I love working. So I thought this was a really great way to start reconnecting with nature and optimizing my days. And one important thing to know is that up until this point, I was spending a lot of time indoors running my online business, and I was avoiding the sun because it gave me migraines due to my TBI.
But I went out into the sunlight, and the most unexpected shifts started to happen after one month of increasing my sunlight exposure. My insomnia and anxiety levels were markedly better. After two months, I no longer had sun sensitivity, and the weight I had gained from my TBI was slowly coming off. After three months, I was having better energy levels than I’d had in years and my headaches went away. So I kept this sunlight thing up and six months later, I was 98 percent free of my TBI symptoms.
So when these health improvements began to occur, honestly, I was floored. And I'm still floored today knowing that the sun - literally, universal health care - was the pillar to my TBI recovery.
But I want you to know that I didn't just spend a few minutes per day in sunlight. My sunlight exposure went from minutes per day to two hours per day when I started to amp up my sunlight exposure. And this breakthrough healing experience around my TBI led me to create the Sunlight RX. And this is an RX that is natural, holistic and practically free because we all have access to the sun!
What You Need to Know About TBI, Point #3: Various ways how and why sunlight has such a powerful effect on TBI and brain health.
So why does sunlight have such a big result on brain health? I’m going to sum it up with a few main points.
First, we have to start with mitochondrial health. Our mitochondria are built-in engines responsible for energy production. So we want our mitochondrial health to be in tip-top shape to support our brain and heart health. And any brain or heart injury - including TBI, concussion, brain cancer - will quickly reduce mitochondrial energy flow. So the main approach to overcoming brain injuries needs to focus on improving mitochondrial health. That’s where my health trifecta and Sunlight RX comes in, because its goal is to improve mitochondrial health, which is something none of the health practitioners I saw along my TBI healing journey even mentioned. But nature designed us and our physiology to interact with sunlight. And when we do so, this allows a hundred thousand biochemical signals to occur throughout each one of our cells.
Now, the sun contains multiple different light frequencies throughout the day, and this varies depending on the time of day, the season, your geographical location, etc. And there are four major spectrums of sunlight that occur throughout the day: sunrise, AM sunlight, afternoon sunlight and sunset.
When it comes to healing TBI, brain diseases and all chronic disease, we need more sunlight in each of the four main spectrums because each spectrum builds on the next. And when your brain has been damaged, brainwave frequencies tend to go from this zen Alpha state to this frantic and ungrounded Delta state. But when we use sunlight to improve our mitochondrial number and function, we naturally begin to improve the brain wave frequency as well.
So what else does sunlight do for the brain? There’s no one clear answer at this time, but we do know that sunlight also allows the water surrounding the mitochondria in your brain to be structured. And in brain injuries, the electrical current that charges your cells and your brain cells has diminished. But the more water your mitochondria pumps out, the more water you're going to have around your mitochondria, and this is what restores that electrical charge and current in your brain. And this is key whether you’re trying to heal from TBI, cancer or chronic disease in general.
Hi, I am Heathar
With over 12 years experience as an alternative healer, integrative health coach and one who has been through severe physical injury trying every remedy under the sun to heal myself with no avail…I’m here to tell you, all of those things are not only attainable but are foundational to achieving optimal health and are core elements to overcoming all chronic and stubborn diseases.
At the age of 23 I suffered a TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) preventing me from the ability to engage in physical activity for over 12 years post my car accident. Today, I know I could have recovered from this injury much quicker if I had known then what I know now! But….the accident lead me down the healing path. A path that I was destined to take to help myself heal and to learn how to help others heal complicated and chronic disorders as well.
During this time, I learned two things: How to harness the healing power of sunlight and how to utilize frequency based medicine to facilitate biological transformations in the body - all the way down to the mitochondrial level.
Today, I lead an active life and you can bet I’m uber passionate about teaching others how they can overcome even the most daunting health experiences that most medical professionals have band-aid solutions for, at best.
And today, my health continues to improve each day and I now lead an active, healthy lifestyle - all of which I thought would never be possible to achieve again. All it took was discovering the most effective path to health and healing to get me there and now, to help my clients get there as well!
What You Need to Know About TBI, Point #4: My protocol for healing from TBI.
There are many tools I use in my daily self-care practice to support my brain health and to support this electrical current returning into my brain. But my main approach is the health trifecta: sunlight RX, EMF mitigation and the jet fuel diet. And this is also the approach I use with my clients that struggle with brain health. Because the biggest piece that was missing in my 13-year journey to brain health was a lack of focus on recovering and building my mitochondrial health.
My mitochondria-focused approach is what has allowed me and my clients to improve mitochondrial health at the brain level, and quite quickly as well. The brain is a resilient beast. We just have to provide it with the right tools and resources to allow for its recovery.
And you can get started with this as soon as the next sunrise by hopping over to my website and grabbing a copy of my Sunlight Rx ebook. It outlines in full detail each step of the Sunlight RX, which is your golden ticket to improving mitochondrial health. This is the exact protocol I followed for years to heal my TBI, and is the same protocol my brain injury clients follow to help expedite and improve their brain healing process as well.
The Bottom Line of TBI or Traumatic Brain Injuries
I hope that this episode has inspired those of you struggling to recover from TBI and brain disorders to seek out ways of healing the brain that supports and revolves around improving mitochondrial health. I know that the quest for long-lasting relief from TBI and brain conditions can seem like an uphill, ongoing battle and an arduous task. However, I want you to know that there's light at the end of the tunnel. I almost threw in the towel after 13 years of struggling with the side effects of my TBI. However, learning how to utilize the sunlight as a therapeutic healing modality in my brain has been absolutely invaluable and has provided me with major breakthroughs. And I know you can have them too.
For help doing exactly that, be sure to check out my website and grab a copy of my Sunlight Rx ebook.
And to hear even MORE about all four points outlined above, be sure to tune in to episode 16 of The Primal Pioneer on your favorite podcast streaming platform! And if you love this episode, don't forget to take a screenshot, share it on your Insta stories and tag me @sunlight_rx so that we can spread this important message to even more people.
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