When we work on our self-care, we work on taking care of ourselves so we can do a better job of attuning to the world around us and within ourselves so that we do what we really want to do and we're not just falling back into our bad habits and all that.

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.

Hey y'all, welcome back to The Dr. Crockett Show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. I'm a board certified OB-GYN in San Antonio, Texas, specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery. That's robotic surgery for women. And at my practice Virtuosa GYN, we've been making surgery easier for women since 2014. That's our whole goal. It's everything we do.

We just recently moved into a brand new office. It is absolutely gorgeous. It is located on Judson next to Northeast Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, which is right on the corner of a really busy corridor that is booming between San Antonio and Austin. In fact, a little bit ago this last week, I saw a documentary on PBS about the Austin San Antonio corridor and how this area is just about to merge into kind of a Dallas Fort Worth type scenario. And they were talking about all of the systems in the cities.

It is very fascinating. But anyway, that's where my office is. It's right on that corner of San Antonio, headed up I-35 to Austin, Texas. And we have got so much going on right now. Methodist HCA has built a brand new hospital outpatient department, which is an outpatient surgery center for robotic surgery. It's right downstairs from my office, and that is opening on September 16th.

Y'all, that's next week. And this has been five years in the making. I am so excited about it. We're going to be showing you footage from that. We'll show you in the upcoming weeks. We're going to show footage from my open house for the office, which was a total blast.

And we have a ribbon cutting for the new robotic surgery center on the 27th of September. So the reason that's so exciting is because Methodist has seen the need for education and in conjunction with Intuitive Surgical and my practice, we have managed to put together an incredible teaching facility with case observations and people coming in to learn how to do surgery like we do it.

We've been designated as an epicenter for GYN surgery by Intuitive Surgical for benign outpatient GYN surgery. It's a huge deal. I think we're still only the third benign GYN epicenter in the country and I'm starting this month to teach on the national faculty for Intuitive Surgical for their benign surgery. So I'll be seeing some of you in Atlanta towards the end of this month and some more of you in Seattle next month.

We're going to be encouraging other surgeons to learn to elevate their surgical skills and mirror what we're doing and taking great care of our patients in San Antonio. So if you're interested in coming and seeing me up as a patient or Dr. Koshy, she was our guest on last week, and she is also starting on September 16th in my office. Also I have another new doctor named Dr. Alsup, very fine, amazing, kind, sweet GYN colleague who has joined us. We are all available. You can find us at virtuosagyn.com, that's virtuosagyn.com, or as always, you can find everything at drcrocket.com, all the links to the podcast, the shows, the new vitamin shop, all the things are there. So let's get into our show today.

I'm super excited because we are talking finally about the seventh seed, which is these little things up here, the seventh seed of the soul. So for those of you just joining us, we've been doing a series over the last couple of months about each of what we call the seven seeds of the soul. And on The Dr. Crockett Show, our motto is we go where the scalpel doesn't reach.

And what we started the show for is I realized there was a need for wellness education and all of the conversations that I have with my patients in the office that have nothing to do with surgery or maybe keep them out of my office for surgery, all of those conversations are what we're bringing here to the channel. So we talk about nutrition, mental health, all that kind of stuff. So the seven seeds, which are kind of our curriculum base are B, which is about self-care, that's first.

Heal, fix the things that are broken. Love, love. Duh, y'all know what love is. Give, which is green. That's service and giving of yourself and money and everything. That's why it's green. Grow is the light blue one, which is constantly changing, growing, transforming. We are transformation experts here and we're all helping you do the same thing. Pray is the teal color. And the last one is attunement. Attunement is a really interesting topic for me.

I was a musician as my first language. I was a musician before I could talk. I was a musician long before I was a physician, and when I was young, I played piano. For about 14 years, I played piano, and I got to the point where my hands were too small to reach an octave, and I was getting into competitive concerto work, and that didn't work so well. So I had a limitation, had to pivot into something else. So I chose the oboe in my school band and ended up doing real well with that.

This is actually an oboe d'amore, which is like an alto oboe sitting on the side. I don't know if you can see that. But music and energy and sound waves all have a whole lot to do with how we interact with the world around us. And the reason the seventh seed is so spectacularly important is attunement. It's a lot like alignment. It's about how we interact with the world around us and how we attune to what we want and what we're doing within our own bodies.

Let me give you an example of that. So, you know, all the time we have these ideas like I'm going to do better at picking up my clothes or putting my dishes away or whatever it is you've decided that you want to do as a habit that you want to change. There's that thing that your upper mind decides it wants to do and then there's that thing that our subconscious lower brain gets to where it's like, oh, heck, I don't feel like doing that today. That's a disalignment. That's a disattunement. I'm going to coin that word today.

It's a disattunement. *That* things are not aligned in the same wavelength of energy and they are not working together. So when we work on our self-care, we work on taking care of ourselves so we can do a better job of attuning to the world around us and within ourselves so that we do what we really want to do and we're not just falling back into our bad habits and all that. So back to the oboe thing. So the oboe is interesting.

So when you listen to sound, sound waves are, sound is actually waves that are made in the air that come to your ear, and then your inner ear, it hits your little hairs on the inside of your ear, and your ear translates the sound waves into a nerve signal that goes to your brain, and then the part of your brain that's the auditory part of your brain tells you that you heard that sound.

That's why the cochlea is so important, that little shell-looking part of our ear, and that's why when people are deaf they sometimes are able to get cochlear implants, because it does that for them. So the oboe, if any of you have ever seen an orchestra, the oboe is the one that tunes the orchestra. So they play the A note. I think the reason the oboe is the one that does that is because it has a very piercing quality of sound where it's easy to hear it through the sound of all the other players playing. So when players are trying to tune to another instrument, the instrument that sets the note is setting up this A, which has a wavelength, a certain wavelength. The other instruments start trying to match that wavelength.

And so you have wavelengths that are kind of interacting and competing until they all get together. And what you can hear when you're listening to two instruments try to tune to each other is that at first there's a lot of dissonance. That means the waves aren't matching up. And so you get this sound that kind of goes wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. And then when they get closer into tune, that noise, that texture that you can feel in your ear slows down till they're perfectly in tune. This is why sometimes when you hear somebody singing, it sounds out of tune to you.

It's because it's dissonant, the waves aren't attuned to each other. And so when we're attuned to the world around us, just like with music, the dissonance stops and we have resolution and we have a, it's a really peaceful, happy feeling. The other thing about live music, which is super interesting to me as a physician, is music notes and chords have notes above them and notes below them. So if you just hear a middle C, which is the middle note on a piano, the C on the piano, you're not just hearing that C, you're hearing all the notes in the overtones and undertones of that.

And as an instrument is played, whether it's a wind instrument or a string instrument or a keyboard, a real instrument that's hitting a string or a note or a wind or a voice that's live, live music, there is a richness of overtones and undertones that ripple through our bodies physically.

Our bodies are all energy. Most of what we're made of is water and space in between the little particles in our atoms. So the sound comes into our body and reverberates, and that's why there is such a different feeling listening to live music than music that has been synthesized by AI for instance, because those sounds don't have the same richness as the slightly imperfect sounds that we get in the world around us. And so as we listen to music, music has the ability to help change the way our neurotransmitters are thinking about the world or seeing the world. Music actually is a language in between people that don't have the same verbal language. So there's another way of attuning to each other there.

And it is very healing, it can stimulate our dopamine. So as musicians, there are a couple of things that we do to make music interesting when we're writing. In fact, I didn't even think about this, but you probably didn't know that I co-wrote the intro music to the show. So about 14 years ago, I got interested in seeing what it took to write an album. And I collaborated with a good friend of mine, Phil Marshall at Yellow Dog Studios in Austin, Texas. And we ended up starting with one song and kind of learning the craft and then created a whole little EP.

It's called Ambergris, and I'll have them put the link to that on iTunes down below if you'd like to see it. It's kind of a pop indie thing, super fun, super blast. But what I learned about writing in that was, you know, if you just play the same sweet, major sounding notes all the way through a song, there's not a whole lot of interest there. So musicians are artists. We build interest with a couple of things. One is we go from dissonance, which is a minor chord that doesn't sound very comfortable.

Our bodies want to resolve that. And so as a minor chord shifts into a major chord, it makes us happy. It gives us a dopamine hit. And you don't even know that's happening half the time when you're listening to music. But particularly if you listen to soundtracks, I love the Star Wars soundtracks. They're incredible.

Orchestra music does that a lot. So that's the first thing it does. It moves from dissonance into resonance. And the same thing goes for attunement with us and the people around us. There are people that you feel like you resonate with and people that you feel like you have dissonance with and it's uncomfortable, or a scenario, or a room, or a movie, or a book. All the time we are subconsciously listening to the sounds and the energy waves that we get from people and seeing whether we resonate with them, are we attuning to them, or are we in dissonance or attunement with them.

So I'm not even saying that the goal is to always be in attunement, becoming aware of that is a big deal. So the first thing musicians do is create tension between dissonance and alignment or attunement. The second thing they do is the element of surprise. So they play with pauses or the spaces of the notes and or the tempo of the music and or the volume of the music and or the different range of instruments or voices that they play within their music. So that's another way that they create interest within music. And we do that within our own lives too, don't we?

We do some things at full speed ahead and we do some things slower. So as we start to listen to the signals in the world around us and pay attention to them, that attunement becomes a much healthier way of living. You can choose to be in alignment and in attunement and to work with the energies and the resonance around you or you can choose not to. Lastly, I wanted to talk with you a little bit about what's been happening with me in the last week or so. If you go back about a month, there was a show that we posted that was actually me doing a talk about the chicken crossing the road.

And we'll put the link to that video in the show notes. Also go back and take a look at that talk that I did. It was a talk that I did for a women's leadership group at the hospital where I work. And in that talk, I was talking about the Bo Burnham song about the chicken crossing the road. That song is all about leaving one place where you've been and crossing to the other side of the road to get to where you want to be. And as we talk about transformation in our lives and an attunement, one of the things I wanted to fill y'all in on was kind of the rest of the story of what happened with me.

So last week I actually closed on a house that I was selling and that house has created the revenue for me to put into my practice. And so that's a really special thing to me to be at this place right now where we're building this incredible medical facility for women, and that I've had this transformation in my own life where I became attuned with what I needed to do financially. I listened to my brain for what I wanted to do, and my heart, which was scared, and managed to get through this by learning to practice self-care and all of the seven seeds of the soul.

So when we talk about attunement and the seven seeds of the soul, the interesting thing, and this is going to be the next video that I do is even though attunement is the seventh of the seeds, it's the one that leads me into the discussion of how all the seeds fit together. And that's going to be our next episode. So I hope you'll stay tuned in and join us next week for that one.

It's called I Don't Live There Anymore. And it's a great one. Oh yeah, I wanted to tell you all about the Pink Party thing. I think I forgot about that. So I'm going to be a speaker at this year's Pink Party in San Antonio, Texas. It's on October 7th.

Here's the website. If you're interested in coming and joining us that would be great and I hope to see you there. I hope to see you online next week. Have a wonderful week and take care. Much love and kisses.

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.