We want to enter into large decisions in an energy of love, and love is the opposite emotion of fear.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Okay, welcome you guys. Welcome to The Dr. Crockett Show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. I am a minimally invasive GYN surgeon in San Antonio, Texas. If you're just joining us, this is a very special episode. I've got some really cool things to announce for you guys today. Some really fun things for us to talk about.

The first thing I wanted to do is talk with you a little bit about The Dr. Crockett Show and our logo in particular. If you've been with me for any length of time, you probably remember that these seeds, these little seven seeds here, these colors represent topics in our teaching.

Today, we are finally announcing the publishing of our book called The Seven Seeds of the Soul. Isn’t it a pretty book cover? This is the cover art for The Seven Seeds of the Soul. It's a book that we're going to be releasing later this year in 2024. Today, I'm going to give you a little bit of an intro to the seven seeds.

What you can see on the cover logo are six seeds, which are the six foundational seeds. Then the seventh one is kind of the secret sauce in the middle that's not even pictured on the logo.

I chose this logo. It's really kind of cool. I have a fondness for Leonardo da Vinci. I operate on a DaVinci Robot. I have a lot of admiration for him as an artist and Renaissance man and all of that. I took this logo design after one of his drawings, which was actually kind of a fertility symbol and seed symbol. So that's where this comes from. Also I kind of thought it looked like a little embryo, which goes back to my OBGYN training. So that's how the logo came to be.

So I wanted to spend just a little bit of time today and tell you all a little bit about how this book came to be, what the seven seeds are, and give you a brief intro to them. Then we're going to be doing a series the rest of the year delving a little bit deeper, going a little bit deeper on each of the seeds in separate videos. So stay tuned and watch those.

So to start off with, the seven seeds are, starting from left to right, be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. So one of the things you should probably know about why this book came to be is I have a heart for bringing the conversations that I have with my patients in the office to you guys and a broader platform.

There's so much that goes into wellness and taking care of people that has nothing to do with the surgery that I do every day. I love doing the surgery. It’s a ton of fun. But most of what I have conversations about in the office, if it's not directly about surgery, it's about these seven seeds. I found myself talking about them so much that I thought I would put my thoughts together into a book.

One of the things you need to know about this is that all of these are for the purpose of helping you become the best version of yourselves. We are constantly transforming and evolving as human beings. Some of us faster than others. Some of us need more than others.

I'm laughing at myself for that because I've been on a very, very ramped up high speed personal transformation journey for the past 10 years. I'm coming up on the 10th year anniversary of my practice Virtuosa GYN, which was the first minimally invasive GYN practice in south and central Texas. I founded that on May 1st in 2014. We're coming up on that in 2024.

So one of the things you need to know about that practice name the, Virtuosa GYN, that's Virtuosa. We're going to put that down here with a little definition line, V-I-R-T-U-O-S-A. It's a feminized version of the word virtuoso. A virtuoso is a master musician. I was a musician before I was a physician. I played oboe. Fun, trivial question. I played keyboard pianos from the time I was four years old.

So a lot of times I think about surgery and the mastery of surgery in very parallel lines as learning an instrument or becoming a master at an instrument, or sports. A lot of you watch sports figures. I think there's a level of education and learning and skill and coordination over time and repetition that brings out the best in athletes too. So I think all three of those types of things that we do are similar, music, sports, and surgery.

So when I started to name my practice, I called it Virtuosa GYN because I've feminized the virtuoso. It's not that I thought I was the be all end all, greatest ever. It was that I was striving to be, and that's the important part. Is that we continue to want to better ourselves and move forward and become better versions of ourselves, our virtuosa selves. So that's at the very, very core of what the seven seeds are, and what we're teaching and learning about together here on The Dr. Crockett Show.

Be. Okay, the first seed is be. That seems kind of easy be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. What does B really mean? It really means self-care, self-love. We put this as the very first see, because I went for too many decades of my life without adequately taking care of myself and showing myself the self-care and self-love that I was giving to everybody around me, my patients, my husband, my kids, my dog, my friends.

I was always last, and I wasn't even that kind of myself. I would find myself in my head talking to myself in a way that I would never accept my friends being spoken to in such rude terms. It took me a long time. It took me learning to become a life coach and looking at my thoughts to start really questioning about how I wanted to be in a very basic way.

How do I want to show up every day for myself? How do I want to show up for my patients? How do I want to show up for you as my friends on the show?

So I started working on journaling and working on keeping track, and I love keeping metrics. I was initially interested in being less heavy. I wanted to lose weight, and I went on a journey to learn how to eat whole food plant based. Mostly. I say I'm mostly vegan.

I don't use the term vegan so much as whole food plant based because Oreos and Cheetos are mostly vegan too. They're just a bunch of refined crap that nobody needs. So no offense Cheerios and Oreos. I know you're very, very good, but they aren't good for us.

So I went on this journey to change how I was eating because I wanted to be different physically. I realized that how I was thinking I was on the inside and how I wanted to be was not in alignment, was not an attunement. We're going to talk more about that with what I look like on the outside.

I remember telling my weight loss coach, I said I'm out of alignment. I know that how I think and how I am is not what showing up on the outside. He said, “No, what showing up on your outside is exactly who you are on the inside. It's always that way. You just need to learn how to change your thinking and your thoughts and what's going on in the inside, and your outside will follow.”

That was a really challenging thought to me. So I started pushing on that and testing on it and then figuring out more about how I wanted to be do I want to be somebody who exercises? Do I want to be somebody who lives to be 120? Do I want to be somebody who is a wonderful mother and a wonderful wife? Do I want to be somebody who does a skincare regimen in the mornings?

I was really great about brushing my teeth. Taking care of my skin and makeup and all of that, I wasn't always the best at. It kind of got left by the wayside a lot of times, especially during COVID. Like a lot of you, I would just wear my scrubs like pajamas and didn't do my makeup.

I looked at myself in the mirror one day and I said how do I want to be? How do I want to show up? What are the routines that I want to do to take care of myself? How much money do I want to make? How much freedom do I want from my time? How much am I willing to trade my time and my money for the things that I want in life?

How did I want to show up for myself as far as vacation and fun? How did I want to show up as far as planning my business and retirement or not? I actually don't believe in the word retirement. I love what I do and can't imagine retiring to do something different.

So all of you are going to have your own ways of being. But basically be, the be seed, is your self-care. What I'd like you to do, what I'm going to challenge you to do right now is if you don't have a journal, at least pull out a piece of paper and write down kind of a list of your routines. How do you want to be? How do you want to show up in the world? Then start thinking about what it takes to help your brain transform into that person who is so that your outside matches your inside also.

I'm not just talking about your body and your physical size, of course, when I talk about your outside. I'm talking about your environment. You get to create your environment and how you live and how you move in this world. You each have an individual special gift that only you can do. This is my challenge to you is to figure that out.

Heal. Okay, the second seed is the Pepto Bismol pink color. It is heal. So we talked about the first seed being be, how do you want to be for yourself? How do you want to show up? What does your self-care, self-love look like? We build off of that foundation into the next seed, and the next seed, heal, is fix the things that are broken.

That may be physically you need a surgeon like me to fix it, take your fibroids out, or your endometriosis, or do a hysterectomy or bladder lift or whatever you want surgery for or need surgery for that's broken. That's what I do for a living.

But healing goes much, much, much deeper than that. So when I talk about healing, what I'm really getting at is finding the things that are not working well in your life and figuring out how to make them work or eliminate them. So how do you go about searching for things that are broken? That's a really good question. How do you find the things that are broken? Sometimes it's really obvious. Like you hurt really badly and your body tells you that something is broken, and you need to get something fixed.

But sometimes things are broken in our lives that we can't see, like our emotions, deep scars, or wounds. It's important for us to identify those pain points also and to seek out the help that we need to heal those types of brokenness also.

Other types of healing in your life may have to do with healing your finances. Maybe you've had some pain points with your money and figuring out how to manage your finances, your work, and that part of your life. Maybe you need help healing your relationships. Relationships are the foundation of everything that we do in life, and broken relationships caused a lot of stress and strain on ourselves. It's very, very difficult to walk about in the world feeling like you're disconnected and not in good relationship with people, or to have relationships that are harmful or hurtful to you.

So learning to develop boundaries is a way of healing that's actually a big part of healing emotional wounds is to have that strength of self that we're building on from the be seed and carrying it into the healing seed on all levels.

Maybe you need healing in your environment. Maybe you're in an environment that is toxic or not healthy for you. That could be a work environment. It could be a home environment. Maybe your car is not safe. It needs fixing or getting into the shop. So healing encompasses a whole lot more than just coming to see a doctor or surgeon.

I'm going to challenge you in the days ahead to look at what is broken in your life. Start sorting through what you can do to start working on the healing, how you start bringing together your resources into focus, and choosing which pieces you're going to heal first which are most important to you.

Love. The third seed is love. Everybody's favorite topic. Love, love, love, love. So the reason that we put this in as the third seed is it comes at a little deeper level, then how are you going to be, fix what's broken. Now we're moving into a little bit of a more deep, spiritual, emotional side of things.

I want to come at this topic from the point of view of life coach. One of the things that we learned during my life coach certification program was to actually be the watcher of your thoughts, which means that you can sit and pay attention to what your brain is doing as the watcher.

One of the things that we teach is to become aware of your emotions, which are vibrational states of energy within your body. You can feel anxiety. You can feel fear. You can feel sadness within your nerves in your body. You can feel joy. You can feel love. One of the things that we explore during life coaching is becoming more aware of your vibrational energy in your body at any given point, your energy, and about having the ability to choose what vibrational energy you want to be in.

Why is this something that comes into play in my office? Well, as you can imagine, a lot of times when people come to see me, they are meeting me for the first time, and we're talking about surgery. There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of fear based energy, and they come in actually able to feel that fear in various parts of the body. Maybe they feel it like their hair standing on end or pit in their stomach or nausea or headache or anxiety.

One of the things that I talk with them about is making a decision for surgery out of love rather than fear. We want to enter into large decisions in an energy of love, and love is the opposite emotion of fear. So a lot of people think the opposite of love is hate, but it's not. It's fear.

So when we talk about love in our office, we're talking about it in a medical setting of moving forward with what it means to have the best intention for ourselves and our patients and the care and to move forward in a love relationship with each other. Making a decision from that higher level of thinking a higher level of feeling and vibration than the lower level of fear.

Give. So the fourth seed of the seven seeds after be, heal, and love, the fourth seed is give. So we made it green, the color of money, because a lot of times when we think about giving, we think about giving our money. Whether it's to charity or to somebody who's a worker as a tip at a restaurant or giving money as a tithe to the church or to the tax man. A lot of times we associate giving with money.

But give actually has a lot more to do beyond just money. Give is giving of ourselves, giving of our time, giving of our kind thoughts and words. Giving as a state of being as a person. That kind of goes back to the be a little bit, but what we're doing with each of these seeds is building upon the last one.

So if we take the seed of love, and we move forward into giving, now we're taking action, and actually interacting between people with the idea of love. In giving of ourselves and having that vulnerability to connect with one another, we are able to lift each other up and help each other transform to make the world a better place.

So when you think about give, to give, it's not just about The Giving Tree. Remember that book by Shel Silverstein, the childhood book. It's about giving as a way of being, loving, and living life.

Grow. So the fifth seed is grow. What does that mean? We have be, heal, love, give, and grow. Now grow. That's a scary word to a lot of people because not only does growing imply expanding, which some of us are trying to do physically the opposite of, it also kind of takes change. To grow means to change.

There's a saying that we have here on The Dr. Crockett Show and that is TSN, try something new. We want you to try something new every day. We want you to grow and think about expanding your circle of influence, expand your circle experience.

When we're cooking downstairs like we did today where we did this beautiful salad where we had all different colors of the rainbow to eat, we expanded our palate. We also tried some new foods that we hadn't had before.

So the growing part of this, it’s not just a trite little saying like oh go grow up. It really means looking at yourself in your place in this world and figuring out what you want to do to learn. What's the next thing you're going to learn?

What is the next thing that you want to accomplish? What are your five year goals? What are your thoughts about people that you need to change? What are your desires as you think about the unique person that you're supposed to be? What do you have to do to grow into that next version of yourself?

So this seed is really a much deeper level of transformation and challenge than some of the other ones. Now we're building up into thinking about your change. What are you going to do? How are you going to do that?

Pray. Okay, so the sixth seed of the soul. We're getting deeper as we go through be, heal, love, give, grow. Now we're up to pray the sixth one. Prayer. That's a really challenging thing to take on in a format like this, don't you think? Because we talk with people all over the world, from all different cultures, from all different religions, all different nationalities. We love and appreciate each and every one of you.

So when I talk about praying, I'm not going to speak specifically about my particular religion or my way of doing it. What I want you to think about is how do you go inside, into your meditative state, regardless of your spiritual religion. How do you sit in yourself and understand your place in this broader world?

Some of you may consider that in the context of the universe. So I'm a scientist. I'm a surgeon. I have a lot of friends who are agnostic. They think about this type of spiritual process in terms of interacting very literally with the physical energies of the planets in the earth.

I've got friends who are into astrology, and they think of it on kind of a woo-woo level, which is fascinating. I think that's very interesting. I've got friends who think about this type of process, this prayer, on a religious level. Some of them are similar to what I would think of or what I was brought up with in the Christian faith where we have this idea of a God who is outside of us. We have an ability to connect through prayer, both in petition and in receiving with that that is outside of us.

Other people that have other religious beliefs may have many gods. You may have no God at all, and just recognize that you are yourself, and you are sitting as yourself in a broader picture of the universe in life. Whatever your spiritual take may be, this section is about taking the time to connect with that part of yourself.

We recommend that you do meditation or prayer at least 15 minutes a day. This helps center you and ground you and gives you a basis for moving forward into your day. We're going to talk a little bit more on this on the chapter of prayer. We're going to get into some of the medical benefits and actual science behind how prayer changes us.

Attune. All right there, the seventh seed of the soul I know you've all been waiting on with bated breath for the seventh seed. So we've gotten through be, heal, love, give, grow, pray. The seventh seed, of course, is attune. Why do I say a course?

Well, interesting thing is the first six seeds you can all do within yourself, but attunement is specifically about relationship. It’s relational. It's about how you relate to the world around you. So attunement, some people call it alignment. Alignment is coming into similar vibration or similar thought process or similar being with another entity.

So the reason I like attunement rather than alignment is I'm a musician. We talked about this already. There's a thing in music. I was an oboe player. Oboe happens to be the instrument to which the rest of the orchestra tunes. So the oboe plays the A, the A note, and the rest of the orchestra tunes to that.

What they're doing is they're listening for vibrational waves. You can hear it kind of a wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah when you're trying to attune to another instrument. The closer you are to attunement, the closer those waveforms come together, and the shorter, or sorry, the longer, that slower the wah, wah, wah thing becomes.

So if you're really wildly out of tune, in fact, if you listen to somebody sing or listen to an out of tune band, what you'll hear is a whole lot of really raucous stuff. That's because everything's going well wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah , wah, wah, wah because it's not attuned.

Well, we can be like that in our personal lives too. So when we think about attunement, I mentioned earlier when I was talking about, which one was I talking about? Growth or healing, where I was talking about my weight? What my body was looking like on the outside, I was sure it wasn't matching what was on the inside. I was out of attunement or out of alignment.

What actually was going on it was I was out of tune between what I wanted and what I was doing. This is just an age old frustration of people throughout the years. I want to be one way, and I find myself doing the other thing that's out of attunement. So we work on bringing those things closer together, bringing together what we do to match what we want.

That is a key part of becoming a virtuosa, becoming your best virtuosa itself is learning to attune to what you want and not just giving into the whims of your mind for doing your bad habits. Mine too. I'm not looking at you. I'm looking at me.

So the other part of attunement is the tuning with the world around us, and specifically in relationship to other people. So when we think about attuning to a spouse or a partner or a child, what we're doing is we're recognizing what's happening in them, and we're choosing to match that or to be in attunement with them. We can influence them in that way too. We can also choose to be a little bit different and draw them closer into attunement with us.

We're going to talk a lot more about attunement in the last chapter of The Seven Seeds of the Soul book. In fact, we're going to talk about all the seven seeds be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune and move closer to becoming our virtuosa selves.

Thank you for joining me on this transformational journey. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode next Tuesday. Please remember to like, subscribe, and share with others. I'd really appreciate it. That's how we grow, and that's how the show is able to continue moving on. I think my co-host wants to say goodbye. Do you want to come up here? Oh, Ollie. Bye y’all. See you next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.